Needful Things

  Brian slipped into his chair and poured milk on his corn flakes.

  "Hey Bri!" Sean said cheerfully. "You wanna go downtown today? Play some video games?"

  "Maybe," Brian said. "I guess--" Then he saw the headline on the front page of the paper and stopped talking.

  MURDEROUS SPAT LEAVES TWO WOMEN

  DEAD IN CASTLE ROCK

  "It was a duel," State Police Source Claims

  There were photographs of two women, side by side. Brian recognized both of them. One was Nettie Cobb, who lived around the comer on Ford Street. His mom said she was a nut, but she had always seemed okay to Brian. He had stopped a couple of times to pet her dog when she was walking him, and she seemed pretty much like anyone else.

  The other woman was Wilma Jerzyck.

  He poked at his cereal but didn't actually eat any of it. After his father left for work, Brian dumped the soggy corn flakes into the garbage pail and then crept upstairs to his room. He expected his mother to come cawing after him, asking how come he was throwing away good food while children were starving in Africa (she seemed to believe the thought of starving kids could improve your appetite), but she didn't; she seemed lost in a world of her own this morning.

  Sean was right there, however, bugging him just like always.

  "So what do you say, Bri? You want to go downtown? Do you?" He was almost dancing from one foot to the other in his excitement. "We could play some video games, maybe check out that new store with all the neat stuff in the window--"

  "You stay out of there!" Brian shouted, and his little brother recoiled, a look of shock and dismay spreading over his face.

  "Hey." Brian said, "I'm sorry. But you don't want to go in there, Sean-O. That place sucks."

  Sean's lower lip was trembling. "Kevin Pelkey says--"

  "Who are you going to believe? That wet end or your own brother? It's no good, Sean. It's ..." He wet his lips and then said what he understood as the bottom of the truth: "It's bad."

  "What's the matter with you?" Sean asked. His voice was fierce and teary. "You've been acting like a dope all weekend! Mom, too!"

  "I don't feel so good, that's all."

  "Well ..." Sean considered. Then he brightened. "Maybe some video games would make you feel better. We can play Air Raid, Bri! They got Air Raid! The one where you sit right inside, and it tilts back and forth! It's awesome!"

  Brian considered it briefly. No. He couldn't imagine going down to the video arcade, not today, maybe not ever again. All the other kids would be there--today you'd have to wait in line to get at the good games like Air Raid--but he was different from them now, and he might always be different.

  After all, he had a 1956 Sandy Koufax card.

  Still, he wanted to do something nice for Sean, for anyone--something that would make up a little for the monstrous thing he had done to Wilma Jerzyck. So he told Sean he might want to play some video games that afternoon, but to take some quarters in the meantime. Brian shook them out of his big plastic Coke bottle bank.

  "Jeepers!" Sean said, his eyes round. "There's eight ... nine ... ten quarters here! You really must be sick!"

  "Yeah, I guess I must be. Have fun, Sean-O. And don't tell Mom, or she'll make you put them back."

  "She's in her room, moonin around in those dark glasses," Sean said. "She doesn't even know we're alive." He paused for a moment and then added: "I hate those dark glasses. They're totally creepy." He looked more closely at his big brother. "You really don't look so great, Bri."

  "I don't feel so great," Brian said truthfully. "I think I'll lie down."

  "Well ... I'll wait for you awhile. See if you feel any better. I'll be watchin cartoons on channel fifty-six. Come on down if you feel better." Sean shook the quarters in his cupped hands.

  "I will," Brian said, and closed his door softly as his little brother walked away.

  But he hadn't felt any better. As the day drew on, he just went on feeling

  (cloudier)

  worse and worse. He thought of Mr. Gaunt. He thought of Sandy Koufax. He thought of that glaring newspaper headline--MURDEROUS SPAT LEAVES TWO WOMEN DEAD IN CASTLE ROCK. He thought of those pictures, familiar faces swimming up from clumps of black dots.

  Once he almost fell asleep, and then the little record player started up in his mother and father's bedroom. Mom was playing her scratchy Elvis 45s again. She had been doing it almost all weekend.

  Thoughts went whirling and rocking through Brian's head like bits of clutter caught up in a cyclone.

  MURDEROUS SPAT.

  "You know they said you was high-class ... but that was just a lie ..."

  It was a duel.

  MURDEROUS: Nettie Cobb, the lady with the dog.

  "You ain't never caught a rabbit ..."

  When you deal with me, you want to remember two things.

  SPAT: Wilma Jerzyck, the lady with the sheets.

  Mr. Gaunt knows best ...

  "... and you ain't no friend of mine."

  ... and the duelling isn't done until Mr. Gaunt SAYS it's done.

  Around and around these thoughts went, a jumble of terror, guilt, and misery set to the beat of Elvis Presley's golden hits. By noon, Brian's stomach had begun to roil and knot. He hurried down to the bathroom at the end of the hall in his stocking feet, closed the door, and vomited into the toilet bowl as quietly as he could. His mother didn't hear. She was still in her room, where Elvis was now telling her he wanted to be her teddy bear.

  As Brian walked slowly back to his room, feeling more miserable than ever, a horrible, haunting certainty came to him: his Sandy Koufax card was gone. Someone had stolen it last night while he slept. He had participated in a murder because of that card, and now it was gone.

  He broke into a run, almost slipped on the rug in the middle of his bedroom floor, and snatched his baseball-card book from the top of the dresser. He turned through the pages with such terrified speed that he tore several loose from the ring-binders. But the card--the card--was still there: that narrow face looking out at him from beneath its plastic covering on the last page. Still there, and Brian felt a great, miserable relief sweep through him.

  He slipped the card from its pocket, went over to the bed. and lay down with it in his hands. He didn't see how he could ever let go of it again. It was all he had gotten out of this nightmare. The only thing. He didn't like it anymore, but it was his. If he could have brought Nettie Cobb and Wilma Jerzyck back to life by burning it up, he would have been hunting for matches at once (or so he really believed), but he couldn't bring them back, and since he couldn't, the thought of losing the card and having nothing at all was insupportable.

  So he held it in his hands and looked at the ceiling and listened to the dim sound of Elvis, who had moved on to "Wooden Heart." It was not surprising that Sean had told him he looked bad; his face was white, his eyes huge and dark and listless. And his own heart felt pretty wooden, now that he thought about it.

  Suddenly a new thought, a really horrible thought, cut across the darkness inside his head with the affrighted, speeding brilliance of a comet: He had been seen!

  He sat bolt upright on his bed. staring at himself in the mirror on his closet door with horror. Bright green wrapper! Bright red kerchief over a bunch of hair-rollers! Mrs. Mislaburski!

  What's going on over there, boy?

  I don't know, exactly. I think Mr. and Mrs. Jerzyck must be having an argument.

  Brian got off his bed and went over to the window, half-expecting to see Sheriff Pangborn turning into the driveway in his police cruiser right this minute. He wasn't, but he would be coming soon. Because when two women killed each other in a murderous spat, there was an investigation. Mrs. Mislaburski would be questioned. And she would say that she had seen a boy at the Jerzycks' house. That boy, she would tell the Sheriff, had been Brian Rusk.

  Downstairs, the telephone began to ring. His mother didn't pick it up, even though there was an extension in the bedroom. She just went on singing alon
g with the music. At last he heard Sean answer. "Who is it please?"

  Brian thought calmly: He'll get it out of me. I can't lie, not to a policeman. I couldn't even lie to Mrs. Leroux about who broke the vase on her desk when she had to go down to the office that time. He'll get it out of me and I'll go to jail for murder.

  That was when Brian Rusk first began to think of suicide. These thoughts were not lurid, not romantic; they were very calm, very rational. His father kept a shotgun in the garage, and at that moment the shotgun seemed to make perfect sense. The shotgun seemed to be the answer to everything.

  "Bri-unnn! Telephone!"

  "I don't want to talk to Stan!" he yelled. "Tell him to call back tomorrow!"

  "It's not Stan," Sean called back. "It's a guy. A grown-up."

  Large icy hands seized Brian's heart and squeezed it. This was it--Sheriff Pangborn was on the phone.

  Brian? I have some questions to ask you. They're very serious questions. I'm afraid if you don't come right down to answer them, I'll have to come and get you. I'll have to come in my police car. Pretty soon your name is going to be in the paper, Brian, and your picture is going to be on TV, and all your friends will see it. Your mother and father will see it, too, and your little brother. And when they show the picture, the man on the news will say, "This is Brian Rusk, the boy who helped murder Wilma Jerzyck and Nettie Cobb."

  "Huh-huh-who is it?" he called downstairs in a shrieky little voice.

  "I dunno!" Sean had been torn away from The Transformers and sounded irritated. "I think he said his name was Crowfix. Something like that."

  Crowfix?

  Brian stood in the doorway, his heart thumping in his chest. Two big clown-spots of color now burned in his pallid face.

  Not Crowfix.

  Koufax.

  Sandy Koufax had called him on the phone. Except Brian had a pretty good idea of who it really was.

  He went down the stairs on leaden feet. The telephone handset seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds.

  "Hello, Brian," Mr. Gaunt said softly.

  "Huh-Huh-Hello," Brian replied in the same shrieky little voice.

  "You don't have a thing to worry about," Mr. Gaunt said. "If Mrs. Mislaburski had seen you throw those rocks, she wouldn't have asked you what was going on over there, now would she?"

  "How do you know about that?" Brian again felt like throwing up.

  "That doesn't matter. What matters is that you did the right thing, Brian. Exactly the right thing. You said you thought Mr. and Mrs. Jerzyck were having an argument. If the police do find you, they'll just think you heard the person who was throwing the rocks. They'll think you didn't see him because he was behind the house."

  Brian looked through the archway into the TV room to make sure Sean wasn't snooping. He wasn't; he was sitting cross-legged in front of the TV with a bag of microwave popcorn in his lap.

  "I can't lie!" he whispered into the telephone. "I always get caught out when I lie!"

  "Not this time, Brian," Mr. Gaunt said. "This time you're going to do it like a champ."

  And the most horrible thing of all was that Brian thought Mr. Gaunt knew best about this, too.

  2

  While her older son was thinking of suicide and then dickering in a desperate, quiet whisper with Mr. Gaunt, Cora Rusk was dancing quietly around her bedroom in her housecoat.

  Except it wasn't her bedroom.

  When she put on the sunglasses Mr. Gaunt had sold her, she was in Graceland.

  She danced through fabulous rooms which smelled of Pine-Sol and fried food, rooms where the only sounds were the quiet hum of air conditioners (only a few of the windows at Graceland actually opened; many were nailed shut and all were shaded), the whisper of her feet on deep-pile rugs, and the sound of Elvis singing "My Wish Came True" in his haunting, pleading voice. She danced beneath the huge chandelier of French crystal in the dining room and past the trademark stained-glass peacocks. She trailed her hands across the rich blue velvet drapes. The furniture was French Provincial. The walls were blood red.

  The scene changed like a slow dissolve in a movie and Cora found herself in the basement den. There were racks of animal horns on one wall and columns of framed gold records on another. Blank TV screens bulged from a third wall. Behind the long, curved bar were shelves stocked with Gatorade: orange, lime, lemon flavors.

  The record-changer on her old portable phonograph with the picture of The King on its vinyl cover clicked. Another forty-five dropped down. Elvis began to sing "Blue Hawaii," and Cora hula-hulaed into the Jungle Room with its frowning Tiki gods, the couch with the gargoyle armrests, the mirror with its lacy frame of feathers plucked from the breasts of living pheasants.

  She danced. With the sunglasses she had purchased in Needful Things masking her eyes, she danced. She danced at Graceland while her son crept back upstairs and lay down on his bed again and looked at the narrow face of Sandy Koufax and thought about alibis and shotguns.

  3

  Castle Rock Middle School was a frowning pile of red brick standing between the Post Office and the Library, a hold-over from the time when the town elders didn't feel entirely comfortable with a school unless it looked like a reformatory. This one had been built in 1926 and filled that particular bill admirably. Each year the town got a little closer to deciding to build a new one, one with actual windows instead of loopholes and a playground that didn't look like a penitentiary exercise yard and classrooms that actually stayed warm in the winter.

  Sally Ratcliffe's speech therapy room was an afterthought in the basement, tucked away between the furnace room and the supply closet with its stacks of paper towels, chalk, Ginn and Company textbooks, and barrels of fragrant red sawdust. With her teacher's desk and six smaller pupil desks in the room there was barely enough space to turn around, but Sally had tried to make the place as cheery as possible, just the same. She knew that most kids who were tapped for speech therapy--the stutterers, the lispers, the dyslexics, the nasal blocks--found the experience a frightening, unhappy one. They were teased by their peers and closely questioned by their parents. There was no need for the environment to be unnecessarily grim on top of all that.

  So there were two mobiles hanging from the dusty ceiling pipes, pictures of TV and rock stars on the walls, and a big Garfield poster on the door. The words in the balloon coming out of Garfield's mouth said, "If a cool cat like me can talk that trash, so can you!"

  Her files were woefully behind even though school had been in session for only five weeks. She had meant to spend the whole day updating them, but at quarter past one Sally gathered them all up, stuck them back into the file-drawer they had come from, slammed it shut, and locked it. She told herself she was quitting early because the day was too nice to spend cooped up in this basement room, even with the furnace mercifully silent for a change. This wasn't entirely the truth, however. She had very definite plans for this afternoon.

  She wanted to go home, she wanted to sit in her chair by the window with the sun flooding into her lap, and she wanted to meditate upon the fabulous splinter of wood she had bought in Needful Things.

  She had become more and more sure that the splinter was an authentic miracle, one of the small, divine treasures God had scattered around the earth for His faithful to find. Holding it was like being refreshed by a dipper of well-water on a hot day. Holding it was like being fed when you were hungry. Holding it was ...

  Well, holding it was ecstasy.

  And something had been nagging at her, as well. She had put the splinter in the bottom drawer of her bedroom dresser, beneath her underwear, and she had been careful to lock her house when she went out, but she had a terrible, nagging feeling that someone might break in and steal the

  (relic holy relic)

  splinter. She knew it didn't make much sense--what robber would want to steal an old gray piece of wood, even if he found it? But if the robber happened to touch it ... if those sounds and images filled his head as they filled her
s every time she closed the splinter in her small fist ... well ...

  So she'd go home. She'd change into shorts and a halter and spend an hour or so in quiet

  (exaltation)

  meditation, feeling the floor beneath her turn into a deck which heaved slowly up and down, listening to the animals moo and low and baa, feeling the light of a different sun, waiting for the magic moment--she was sure it would come if she held the splinter long enough, if she remained very, very quiet and very, very prayerful--when the bow of the huge, lumbering boat should come to rest on the mountain top with a low grinding sound. She did not know why God had seen fit to bless her, of all the world's faithful, with this bright and shining miracle, but since He had, Sally meant to experience it as fully and as completely as she could.

  She went out the side door and crossed the playground to the faculty parking lot, a tall, pretty young woman with darkish blonde hair and long legs. There was a good deal of talk about those legs in the barber shop when Sally Ratcliffe went strolling by in her sensible low heels, usually with her purse in one hand and her Bible--stuffed with tracts--in the other.

  "Christ, that woman's got legs right up to her chin," Bobby Dugas said once.

  "Don't let em worry you," Charlie Fortin replied. "You ain't never gonna feel em wrapped around your ass. She belongs to Jesus and Lester Pratt. In that order."

  The barber shop had exploded into hearty male laughter on the day when Charlie had gotten that one--a genuine Knee-Slapper--off. And outside, Sally Ratcliffe had walked along on her way to Rev. Rose's Thursday Evening Bible Study for Young Adults, unknowing, uncaring, wrapped securely in her own cheerful innocence and virtue.

  No jokes were made about Sally's legs or Sally's anything if Lester Pratt happened to be in The Clip Joint (and he went there at least once every three weeks to have the bristles of his crewcut sharpened). It was clear to most of those in town who cared about such things that he believed Sally farted perfume and shit petunias, and you didn't argue about such things with a man who was put together like Lester. He was an amiable enough guy, but on the subjects of God and Sally Ratcliffe he was always dead serious. And a man like Lester could pull off your arms and legs before putting them back on in new and interesting ways, if he wanted to.