Needful Things (31 page)

Only horse racing after all,
Keeton thought as he walked down Main Street with his, hands plunged deep into his overcoat pockets. He uttered a strange, wild laugh that would have turned heads if there had been anyone on the street. Myrtle kept her eye on the checking account. The thought that Danforth might have plundered the T-bills which were their life savings never occurred to her. Likewise, the knowledge that Keeton Chevrolet was tottering on the edge of extinction belonged to him alone.

She
balanced the checkbook and the house accounts.

He
was a CPA.

When it comes to embezzlement, a CPA can do a better job than most . . . but in the end the package always comes undone. The string and tape and wrapping paper on Keeton's package had begun to fall apart in the autumn of 1990. He had held things together as well as he could, hoping to recoup at the track. By then he had found a bookie, which enabled him to make bigger bets than the track would handle.

It hadn't changed his luck, however.

And then, this summer, the persecution had begun in earnest. Before, They had only been toying with him. Now They were moving in for the kill, and the Day of Armageddon was less than a week away.

I'll get Them,
Keeton thought.
I'm not done yet. I've still got a trick or two up my sleeve.

He didn't know what those tricks were, though; that was the trouble.

Never mind. There's a way. I know there's a w—

Here his thoughts ceased. He was standing in front of the new store, Needful Things, and what he saw in the window drove everything else slap out of his mind for a moment or two.

It was a rectangular cardboard box, brightly colored, with a picture on the front. A board game, he supposed. But it was a board game about horse racing, and he could have sworn that the painting, which showed two pacers sweeping down on the finish line neck-and-neck, was of the Lewiston Raceway. If that wasn't the main grandstand in the background, he was a monkey.

The name of the game was
WINNING TICKET.

Keeton stood looking at it for almost five minutes, as hypnotized as a kid looking at a display of electric trains. Then, slowly, he walked under the dark-green canopy to see if the place kept Saturday hours. There was a sign hanging inside the door, all right, but it bore only one word, and the word, naturally, was

OPEN.

Keeton looked at it for a moment, thinking—as Brian Rusk had before him—that it must have been left there by mistake. Main Street shops didn't open at seven in Castle Rock, especially not on Saturday morning. All the same, he tried the knob. It turned easily in his hand.

As he opened the door, a small silver bell tinkled overhead.

“It's not really a game,” Leland Gaunt was saying five minutes later, “you're wrong about that.”

Keeton was seated in the plush high-backed chair where Nettie Cobb, Cyndi Rose Martin, Eddie Warburton, Everett Frankel, Myra Evans, and a good many other townsfolk had sat before him that week. He was drinking a cup of good Jamaican coffee. Gaunt, who seemed like one hell of a nice fellow for a flatlander, had insisted that he have one. Now Gaunt was leaning into his show window and carefully removing the box. He was dressed in a wine-colored smoking jacket, just as natty as you please, and not a hair out of place. He had told Keeton that he often opened at odd hours, because he was afflicted with insomnia.

“Ever since I was a young man,” he had said with a rueful chuckle, “and that was many years ago.” He looked fresh as a daisy to Keeton, however, except for his eyes—they were so bloodshot they looked as if red were actually their natural color.

Now he brought the box over and set it on a small table next to Keeton.

“The box was what caught my eye,” Keeton said. “It looks quite a bit like the Lewiston Raceway. I go there once in awhile.”

“You like a flutter, do you?” Gaunt asked with a smile.

Keeton was about to say he never bet, and changed his mind. The smile was not just friendly; it was a smile of commiseration, and he suddenly understood that he was in the presence of a fellow sufferer. Which just went to show how flaky he was getting around the edges, because when he had shaken Gaunt's hand, he'd felt a wave of revulsion so sudden and deep it had been like a muscle spasm. For that one moment he had been convinced that he had found his Chief Persecutor. He would have to watch that sort of thing; there was no sense going overboard.

“I have been known to wager,” he said.

“Sadly, so have I,” Gaunt said. His reddish eyes fixed upon Keeton's, and they shared a moment of perfect understanding . . . or so Keeton felt. “I've bet most of the tracks from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I'm quite sure the one on the box is Longacre Park, in San Diego. Gone, of course; there's a housing development there now.”

“Oh,” Keeton said.

“But let me show you this. I think you'll find it interesting.”

He took the cover off the box, and carefully lifted out a tin raceway on a platform about three feet long and a foot and a half wide. It looked like toys Keeton had had as a child, the cheap ones made in Japan after the war. The track was a replica of a two-mile course. Eight narrow slots were set into it, and eight narrow tin horses stood behind the starting line. Each was mounted on a small tin post that poked out of its slot and was soldered to the horse's belly.

“Wow,” Keeton said, and grinned. It was the first time he'd grinned in weeks, and the expression felt strange and out of place.

“You ain't seen nuthin yet, as the man said,” Gaunt replied, grinning back. “This baby goes back to 1930 or '35, Mr. Keeton—it's a real antique. But it wasn't just a toy to the racing touts of the day.”

“No?”

“No. Do you know what a Ouija board is?”

“Sure. You ask it questions audit's supposed to spell out answer from the spirit world.”

“Exactly. Well, back in the Depression, there were a lot of racing touts who believed that Winning Ticket was the horse-player's Ouija board.”

His eyes met Keeton's again, friendly, smiling, and Keeton was as unable to draw his own eyes away as he had been to leave the track before the last race was run on the one occasion when he had tried.

“Silly, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Keeton said. But it didn't seem silly at all. It seemed perfectly . . . perfectly . . .

Perfectly reasonable.

Gaunt felt around in the box and brought out a little, tin key. “A different, horse wins each time. There's some sort of random mechanism inside, I suppose—crude but effective enough. Now watch.”

He inserted the key in a hole on the side of the tin platform on which, the tin horses stood, and turned it. There were small clicks and clacks and ratchets—winding-up sounds. Gaunt removed the key when it wouldn't turn anymore.

“What's your pick?” he asked.

“The five,” Keeton said. He leaned forward, his heart picking up speed. It was foolish—and the ultimate proof of his compulsion, he supposed—but he could feel all the old excitement sweeping through him.

“Very well, I pick the six-horse. Shall we; have a little wager, just to make it interesting?”

“Sure! How much?”

“Not money,” Gaunt said. “My days of betting for money ended long ago, Mr. Keeton. They are the least interesting wagers of all. Let's say this: if your horse wins, I'll do you a little favor. Your choice. If mine wins, you have to do
me
a favor.”

“And if another one wins, all bets are off?”

“Right. Are you ready?”

“Ayup,” Keeton said tightly, and leaned close to the tin race-course. His hands were clamped together between his large thighs.

There was a small metal lever sticking out of a slot
by the starting line. “And they're off,” Gaunt said softly, and pushed it.

The cogs and gears below the race-course began to grind. The horses moved away from the starting line, sliding along their appointed courses. They went slowly at first, wavering back and forth in the slots and progressing in little jerks as some mainspring—or a whole series of them—expanded inside the board, but as they approached the first turn they began to pick up speed.

The two-horse took the lead, followed by the seven; the others were back in the pack.

“Come on, five!” Keeton cried softly. “Come on five, pull, you bitch!”

As if hearing him, the small tin steed began to draw away from the pack. At the half, it had caught up with the seven. The six-horse—Gaunt's pick—had also begun to show some speed.

Winning Ticket rattled and vibrated on the small table. Keeton's face hung over it like a large, flawed moon. A drop of sweat fell on the tiny tin jockey piloting the three-horse; if he had been a real man, both he and his mount would have been drenched.

At the third turn the seven-horse put on a burst of speed and caught the two, but Keeton's five-horse was hanging on for dear life, and Gaunt's six was at its heels. These four rounded the turn in a bunch well ahead of the others, vibrating wildly in their slots.

“Go you stupid bitch!”
Keeton yelled. He had forgotten that they were merely pieces of tin fashioned into the crude likenesses of horses. He had forgotten he was in the shop of a man he had never met before. The old excitement had him. It shook him the way a terrier shakes a rat.
“Go on and go for it! Pull, you bitch,
PULL
! Pour it
ON!”

Now the five pulled even for the lead . . . and drew ahead. Gaunt's horse was moving up on its flank when Keeton's horse crossed the finish line, a winner.

The mechanism was running down, but most of the horses made it back around to the starting line before the clockwork ceased entirely. Gaunt used his finger to push the laggards up even with the others for another start.

“Whew!” Keeton said, and mopped his brow. He felt
completely wrung out . . . but he also felt better than he had in a long, long time. “That was pretty fine!”

“Fine as paint,” Gaunt agreed

“They knew how to make things in the old days, didn't they?”

“They did,” Gaunt agreed, smiling. “And it looks as though I owe you a favor, Mr. Keeton.”

“Aw, forget it—that, was fun.”

“No, indeed. A gentleman always pays his bets. Just let me know a day or two before you intend to call in your marker, as they say.”

Before you call in your marker.

That brought it all crashing back on him. Markers!
They
held his!
They!
On Thursday They would call those markers home . . . and what then? What then?

Visions of damning newspaper headlines danced in his head.

“Would you like to know how the serious bettors of the thirties used this toy?” Gaunt asked softly.

“Sure,” Keeton said, but he didn't care, not really . . . not until he looked up. Then Gaunt's eyes met his again, captured them again, and the idea of using a child's game to pick winners seemed to make perfect sense again.

“Well,” Gaunt said, “they'd take that day's newspaper or
Racing Form
and run the races, one by one. On this board, you know. They would give each horse in each race a name from the paper—they'd do it by touching one of the tin horses and saying the name at the same time—and then wind the thing up and let it go. They'd ran the whole slate that way—eight, ten, a dozen races. “Then they'd go to the track and bet on the horses that won at home.”

“Did it work?” Keeton asked. His voice seemed to be coming to him from some other place. A far place. He seemed to be floating in Leland Gaunt's eyes. Floating on red foam. The sensation was queer but really quite pleasant.

“It seemed to,” Gaunt said. “Probably just silly superstition, but . . . would you like to buy this toy and try it for yourself?”

“Yes,” Keeton said.

“You're a man who needs a Winning Ticket quite badly, aren't you, Danforth?”

“I need more than one. I need a whole slew of them. How much?”

Leland Gaunt laughed. “Oh no—you don't get me
that
way! Not when I am already in your debt! I'll tell you what—open your wallet and give me the first bill you find in there. I'm sure it will be the right one.”

So Keeton opened his wallet and drew out a bill without looking away from Gaunt's face, and of course it was the one with Thomas Jefferson's face on it—the kind of bill which had gotten him into all this trouble in the first place.

Gaunt made it disappear as neatly as a magician doing a trick and said: “There
is
one more thing.”

“What?”

Gaunt leaned forward. He looked at Keeton earnestly, and touched him on the knee. “Mr. Keeton, do you know about . . . Them?”

Keeton's breath caught, the way the breath of a sleeper will sometimes catch when he finds himself in the throes of a bad dream. “Yes,” he whispered. “God, yes.”

“This town is full of Them,” Gaunt went on in the same low, confidential tone. “Absolutely
infested.
I've been open less than a week, and I know it already. I think They may be after me. In fact, I'm quite sure of it. I may need your help.”

“Yes,” Keeton said. He spoke more strongly now. “By God, you'll have all the help you need!”

“Now, you just met me and you don't owe me a damned thing—”

Keeton, who felt already that Gaunt was the closest friend he had made in the last ten years, opened his mouth to protest. Gaunt held up his hand, and the protests ceased at once.

“—and you don't have the slightest idea if I've sold you something which will really work or just another bag of dreams . . . the
kind that turn into nightmares when you give them a poke and a whistle. I'm sure you believe all this now; I have a great gift of persuasion, if I do say so myself. But I believe in satisfied customers, Mr. Keeton, and
only
satisfied-customers. I have been in business for many years, and I have built my reputation on satisfied customers. So take the toy. If it works for you, fine. If it doesn't, give it to the Salvation Army or throw, it in the town dump. What are you out? Couple of bucks?”