Needful Things (64 page)

“No!”
she cried.
“No, don't do that!”

“I'm
not doing it,” Mr. Gaunt had responded with a laugh.
“You're
doing it. You're doing it by being a silly, lazy little cunt. This is America, Myra, where only whores do business in bed. In America respectable people have to get out of bed and
earn
the things they need, or lose them forever. I think you forgot that. Of course, I can always find somebody else to play that little trick on Mr. Beaufort, but as for your beautiful
affaire de coeur
with The King—”

Another crack raced like a silver lightning-bolt across the glass covering the picture. And the face beneath it, she observed with mounting horror, was growing old and wrinkled and raddled as the corrupting air seeped in and went to work on it.

“No! I'll do it! I'll do it right now! I'm getting up right now, see? Only make it stop!
MAKE IT STOP
!”

Myra had leaped to the floor with the speed of a woman who has discovered she is sharing her bed with a nest of scorpions.

“When you keep your promise, Myra,” Mr. Gaunt said. Now he was speaking from some deep sunken hollow in her mind. “You know what to do, don't you?”

“Yes, I know!” Myra looked despairingly at the picture—the image of an old, ill man, his face puffy from years of excess and indulgence. The hand which held the microphone was a vulture's talon.

“When you come back with your mission accomplished,” Mr. Gaunt said, “the picture will be fine. Only don't let anyone see you, Myra. If anyone sees you, you'll never see
him
again.”

“I won't!” she babbled. “I swear I won't!”

And now, as she reached Henry Beaufort's house, she remembered that admonition. She looked around to make sure no one was coming along the road. It was deserted in both directions. A crow cawed somnolently in someone's October-barren field. There was no other sound. The day seemed to throb like a living thing, and the land lay stunned within the slow beat of its unseasonable heart.

Myra walked up the driveway, pulling up the tail of the blue shirt, feeling to make sure of the scabbard and the bayonet inside it. Sweat ran, trickling and itching, down the center of her back and under her bra. Although she didn't know it and wouldn't have believed it if told, she had achieved a momentary beauty in the rural stillness. Her vague, unthoughtful face had filled, at least during these moments, with a deep purpose and determination which had never been there before. Her cheekbones were clearly defined for the first time since high school, when she had decided her mission in life was to eat every Yodel and Ding-Dong and Hoodsie Rocket in the world. During the last four days or so, she had been much too busy having progressively weirder and weirder sex with The King to think much about eating. Her hair, which usually hung around her face in a lank, floppy rug, was tied back in a tight little horsetail, exposing her brow. Perhaps shocked by the sudden overdose of hormones and the equally sudden cutback in sugar consumption after years of daily overdoses, most of the pimples that had flared on her face like uneasy volcanoes ever since she was twelve had gone into remission. Even more remarkable were her eyes—wide, blue, almost feral. They were not the eyes of Myra Evans, but of some jungle beast that might turn vicious at any moment.

She reached Henry's car.
Now
something was coming along 117—an old, rattling farm-truck headed for town. Myra slipped around to the front of the T-Bird and crouched behind its grille until the truck was gone. Then she stood up again. From the breast pocket of her shirt she took a folded sheet of paper. She opened it, smoothed it carefully, and then stuck it under one of the Bird's windshield wipers so the brief message written there showed clearly.

it read.

It was time for the bayonet.

She took another quick glance around, but the only thing moving in the whole hot daylight world was a single crow, perhaps the one which had called before. It flapped down to the top of a telephone pole directly across from the driveway and seemed to watch her.

Myra took the bayonet out, gripped it tightly in both hands, stooped, and rammed it up to the hilt in the whitewall on the driver's-side front. Her face was pulled back in a wincing snarl, anticipating a loud bang, but there was only a sudden breathless
hooooosh!
—the sound a big man might make after a sucker-punch to the gut. The T-Bird settled appreciably to the left. Myra yanked the bayonet, tearing the hole wider, grateful Chuck liked to keep his toys sharp.

When she had cut a ragged rubber smile in the rapidly deflating tire, she went around to the one on the passenger-side front and did it again. She was still anxious to get back to her picture, but she found she was glad she had come, just the same. This was sort of exciting. The thought of Henry's face when he saw what had happened to his precious Thunderbird was actually making her horny. God knew why, but she thought that when she finally got back on board the
Lisa Marie,
she might have a new trick or two to show The King.

She moved on to the rear tires. The bayonet did not cut quite so easily now, but she made up for it with her own enthusiasm, sawing energetically through the side-walls of the tires.

When the job was done, when all four tires were not just punctured but gutted, Myra stepped back to survey her work. She was breathing rapidly, and she armed sweat off her forehead in a quick, mannish gesture. Henry Beaufort's Thunderbird now sat a good six inches lower on the
driveway than it had when she arrived. It rested on its wheelrims with the expensive radials spread out around them in wrinkled rubber puddles. And then, although she had not been asked to do so, Myra decided to add the extra touch that means so much. She raked the tip of the bayonet down the side of the car, splitting the deeply polished surface with a long, jagged scratch.

The bayonet made a small, wailing screech against the metal and Myra looked at the house, suddenly sure that Henry Beaufort must have heard, that the shade in the bedroom window was suddenly going to flap up and he would be looking out at her.

It didn't happen, but she knew it was time to leave. She had overstayed her welcome here, and besides—back in her own bedroom, The King awaited. Myra hurried down the driveway, reseating the bayonet in its scabbard and then dropping the tail of Chuck's shirt over it again. One car passed her before she got back to The Mellow Tiger, but it was going the other way—assuming the driver wasn't ogling her in his rearview mirror, he would have seen only her back.

She slid into her own car, yanked the rubber band out of her hair, allowing her locks to fall around her face in their usual limp fashion, and drove back to town. She did this one-handed. Her other hand had business to take care of below her waist. She let herself into her house and bounded up the stairs by twos. The picture was on the bed, where she had left it. Myra kicked off her shoes, pushed her jeans down, grabbed the picture, and jumped into bed with it. The cracks in the glass were gone; The King had been restored to youth and beauty.

The same could be said for Myra Evans . . . at least temporarily.

Over the door, the silver bell sang its jingly little tune.

“Hello, Mrs. Potter!” Leland Gaunt said cheerily. He made a tick-mark on the sheet by the cash register. “I'd about decided you weren't going to come by.”

“I almost didn't,”
Lenore Potter said. She looked upset, distracted. Her silver hair, usually coiffed to perfection, had been tacked up in an indifferent bun. An inch of her slip was showing beneath the hem of her expensive gray twill skirt, and there were dark circles beneath her eyes. The eyes themselves were restless, shooting from place to place with baleful, angry suspicion.

“It was the Howdy Doody puppet you wanted to look at, wasn't it? I believe you told me you have quite a collection of children's memorab—”

“I really don't believe I can look at such gentle things today, you know,” Lenore said. She was the wife of the richest lawyer in Castle Rock, and she spoke in clipped, lawyerly tones. “I'm in an extremely poor frame of mind. I'm having a magenta day. Not just red, but
magenta!
”

Mr. Gaunt stepped around the main display case and came toward her, his face instantly filled with concern and sympathy. “My dear lady, what's happened? You look dreadful!”

“Of
course
I look dreadful!” she snapped. “The normal flow of my psychic aura has been disrupted—
badly
disrupted! Instead of blue, the color of calm and serenity, my entire
calava
has gone bright magenta! And it's all the fault of that bitch across the street! That high-box
bitch!
”

Mr. Gaunt made peculiar soothing gestures which never quite touched any part of Lenore Potter's body. “What bitch is that, Mrs. Potter?” he asked, knowing perfectly well.

“Bonsaint, of course! Bonsaint! That nasty lying Stephanie Bonsaint! My aura has
never
been magenta before, Mr. Gaunt! Deep pink a few times, yes, and once, after I was almost run down in the street by a drunk in Oxford, I think it might have turned red for a few minutes, but it has
never
been
magenta!
I simply cannot
live
like this!”

“Of course not,” Mr. Gaunt soothed. “No one could
expect
you to, my dear.”

His eyes finally captured hers. This was not easy with Mrs. Potter's gaze darting around in such a distracted manner, but he did finally manage. And when he did, Lenore calmed almost at once. Looking into Mr. Gaunt's eyes, she discovered, was almost like looking into her own aura
when she had been doing all her exercises, eating the right foods (bean-sprouts and tofu, mostly), and maintaining the surfaces of her
calava
with at least an hour of meditation when she arose in the morning and again before she went to bed at night. His eyes were the faded, serene blue of desert skies.

“Come,” he said. “Over here.” He led her to the short row of three high-backed plush velvet chairs where so many citizens of Castle Rock had sat over the last week. And when she was seated, Mr. Gaunt invited: “Tell me all about it.”

“She's always hated me,” Lenore said. “She's always thought that her husband hasn't risen in the Firm as fast as she wanted because
my
husband kept him back. And that
I
put him up to it. She is a woman with a small mind and a big bosom and a dirty-gray aura. You know the type.”

“Indeed,” Mr. Gaunt said.

“But I never knew how
much
she hated me until this morning!” Lenore Potter was growing agitated again in spite of Mr. Gaunt's settling influence. “I got up and my flowerbeds were absolutely ruined!
Ruined!
Everything that was lovely yesterday is dying today! Everything which was soothing to the aura and nourishing to the
calava
has been
murdered!
By that bitch! By that
fucking Bonsaint
BITCH
!”

Lenore's hands closed into fists, hiding the elegantly manicured nails. The fists drummed on the carved arms of the chair.

“Chrysanthemums, cimicifuga, asters, marigolds . . . that bitch came over in the night and tore them all out of the ground! Threw them everywhere! Do you know where my ornamental cabbages are this morning, Mr. Gaunt?”

“No—where?” he asked her tenderly, still making those stroking motions just above her body.

He actually had a good idea of where they were, and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt who was responsible for the
calava
-destroying mess: Melissa Clutterbuck. Lenore Potter did not suspect Deputy Clutterbuck's wife because she didn't
know
Deputy Clutterbuck's wife—nor did Melissa Clutterbuck know Lenore, except to say hello to on the street. There had been no malice on Melissa's part (except, of course,
Mr. Gaunt thought, for the normal malicious pleasure
anyone
feels when tearing hell out of someone else's much-beloved possessions). She had torn up Lenore Potter's flowerbeds in partial payment for a set of Limoges china. When you got right down to the bottom of the thing, it was strictly business. Enjoyable, yes, Mr. Gaunt thought, but whoever said that business always had to be a drag?

“My flowers are in the street!” Lenore shouted. “In the middle of Castle View! She didn't miss a trick! Even the African daisies are gone! All gone!
All
 . . .
gone!
”

“Did you see her?”

“I didn't
need
to see her! She's the only one who hates me enough to do something like that. And the flowerbeds are full of the marks of her high heels. I swear that little trollop wears her heels even to
bed.