Needful Things (69 page)

“Alan?” Suddenly she was as alarmed as a woods-rabbit which gets a dry whiff of fire on a hot summer afternoon. “Do you mean
Alan?”

“I most certainly do
not
,” he said. “Asking you to play a trick on someone you
know,
let alone someone you think you
love,
would be unethical, my dear.”

“It would?”

“Yes . . . although I believe you really ought to think carefully about your relationship with the Sheriff, Polly. You may find that it all comes down to a fairly simple choice: a little pain now to save a great deal of pain later. Put another way, those who marry in haste often live to repent in leisure.”

“I don't understand you.”

“I know you don't. You'll understand me better, Polly, after you check your mail. You see, I'm not the only one who has attracted his snooping, sniffy nose. For now, let us discuss the small prank I want you to play. The butt of this joke is a fellow whom I have just recently employed. His name is Merrill.”

“Ace
Merrill?”

His smile faded. “Don't interrupt me, Polly. Don't ever interrupt me when I am speaking. Not unless you want your hands to swell up like innertubes filled with poison gas.”

She shrank away from him, her dreamy, dreaming eyes wide. “I . . . I'm sorry.”

“All right. Your apology is accepted . . . this time. Now listen to me. Listen very carefully.”

Frank Jewett and Brion McGinley, the Middle School's geography teacher and basketball coach, walked from Room 6 into the outer office just behind Alice Tanner.
Frank was grinning and telling Brion a joke he'd heard earlier that day from a textbook salesman. It had to do with a doctor who was finding it difficult to diagnose a woman's illness. He had narrowed it down to two possibles—AIDS or Alzheimer's—but that was as far as he could go.

“So the gal's husband takes the doctor aside,” Frank went on as they walked into the outer office. Alice was bending over her desk, thumbing through a little pile of messages there, and Frank lowered his voice. Alice could be quite the stick when it came to jokes which were even slightly off-color.

“Yeah?” Now Brion was also beginning to grin.

“Yeah. He's real upset. He says, ‘Jeez, Doc—is that the best you can do? Isn't there some way we can figure out which one she has?' ”

Alice selected two of the pink message forms and started into the inner office with them. She got as far as the doorway and then stopped short, as if she'd walked into an invisible stone wall. Neither of the grinning middle-aged small-town white guys noticed.

“ ‘Sure, it's easy,' the doc says. ‘Take her about twenty-five miles into the woods and leave her there. If she finds her way back, don't fuck her.' ”

Brion McGinley gaped foolishly at his boss for a moment, then exploded into hearty guffaws of laughter. Principal Jewett joined him. They were laughing so hard that neither of them heard Alice the first time she called Frank's name. There was no problem the second time. The second time she nearly shrieked it.

Frank hurried over to her. “Alice? What—” Then he
saw
what, and a terrible, glassy fright filled him. His words dried up. He felt the flesh of his testicles crawling madly; his balls seemed to be trying to pull themselves back to where they had come from.

It was the magazines.

The secret magazines from the bottom drawer.

They had been spread all over the office like nightmare confetti: boys in uniforms, boys in haylofts, boys in straw hats, boys riding hobby-horses.

“What in God's name?” The voice, hoarse with horror and fascination, came from Frank's left. He turned his
head in that direction (the tendons in his neck creaking like rusty screen-door springs) and saw Brion McGinley staring at the wild strew of magazines. His eyes were all but falling out of his face.

A prank,
he tried to say.
A stupid prank, that's all, those magazines are not mine. You only have to look at me to know that magazines like that would hold no . . . hold no interest for a man . . . a man of my . . .
my . . .

His what?

He didn't know, and it didn't really matter, anyway, because he had lost his ability to speak. Entirely lost it.

The three adults stood in shocked silence, staring into the office of Middle School Principal Frank Jewett. A magazine which had been precariously balanced on the edge of the visitor's chair riffled its pages in response to a puff of hot air through the half-open window and then fell to the floor.
Saucy Young Guys,
the cover promised.

A prank, yes, I'll say it was a prank, but will they believe me? Suppose the desk drawer was forced? Will they believe me if it was?

“Mrs. Tanner?” a girl's voice asked from behind them.

All three of them—Jewett, Tanner, McGinley—whirled around guiltily. Two girls in red-and-white cheerleading outfits, eighth-graders, stood there. Alice Tanner and Brion McGinley moved almost simultaneously to block the view into Frank's office (Frank Jewett himself seemed rooted to the spot, turned to stone), but they moved just a little too late. The cheerleaders' eyes widened. One of them—Darlene Vickery—clapped her hands to her small rosebud mouth and stared at Frank Jewett unbelievingly.

Frank thought: Oh good. By noon tomorrow, every student in this school will know. By supper tomorrow night, everyone in town will know.

“You girls leave,” Mrs. Tanner said. “Someone has played a nasty joke on Mr. Jewett—a
very
nasty joke—and you are not to say one word. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mrs. Tanner,” Erin McAvoy said; three minutes later she would be telling her best friend, Donna Beaulieu, that Mr. Jewett's office had been decorated with
pictures of boys wearing heavy metal bracelets and little else.

“Yes, Mrs. Tanner,” Darlene Vickery said; five minutes later she would be telling
her
best friend, Natalie Priest.

“Go on,” Brion McGinley said. He was trying to sound brisk, but his voice was still thick with shock. “Off you go.”

The two girls fled, cheerleader skirts flipping about their sturdy knees.

Brion turned slowly to Frank. “I think—” he began, but Frank paid no notice. He walked into his office, moving slowly, like a man in a dream. He closed the door with the word
PRINCIPAL
lettered on it in neat black strokes, and slowly began picking up the magazines.

Why don't you just give them a written confession? part of his mind screamed.

He ignored the voice. A deeper part of him, the primitive voice of survival, was also speaking, and this part told him that right now he was at his most vulnerable. If he talked to Alice or Brion now, if he tried to explain this, he would hang himself as high as Haman.

Alice was knocking on the door. Frank ignored her and continued his dream-walk around the office, picking up the magazines he had accumulated over the last nine years, writing away for them one by one and picking them up at the post office in Gates Falls, sure each time that the State Police or a team of Postal Inspectors would fall on him like a ton of bricks. None ever had. But now . . . this.

They won't believe they belong to you, the primitive voice said. They won't
allow
themselves to believe it—to do that would upset too many of their comfy small-town conceptions of life. Once you get yourself under control, you should be able to put it over. But . . . who would have done something like this? Who
could
have done something like this? (It never occurred to Frank to ask himself what mad compulsion had caused him to bring the magazines here—
here,
of all places—in the first place.)

There was only one person Frank Jewett could think of—the one person from The Rock with whom he'd shared his secret life. George T. Nelson, the high school wood shop teacher. George T. Nelson, who, under his bluff,
macho exterior, was just as gay as old dad's hatband. George T. Nelson, with whom Frank Jewett had once attended a sort of party in Boston, the sort of party where there were a great many middle-aged men and a small group of undressed boys. The sort of party that could land you in jail for the rest of your life. The sort of party—

There was a manila envelope sitting on his desk blotter. His name was written on the center of it. Frank Jewett felt a horrible sinking sensation in the pit of his belly. It felt like an elevator out of control. He looked up and saw Alice and Brion peering in at him, almost cheek to cheek. Their eyes were wide, their mouths open, and Frank thought: Now I know what it feels like to be a fish in an aquarium.

He waved at them—
go away!
They didn't go, and this somehow did not surprise him. This was a nightmare, and in nightmares, things never went the way you wanted them to. That was why they were nightmares. He felt a terrible sense of loss and disorientation . . . but somewhere beneath it, like a living spark beneath a heap of wet kindling, was a little blue flame of anger.

He sat behind his desk and put the stack of magazines on the floor. He saw that the drawer they'd been in had been forced, just as he had feared. He ripped open the envelope and spilled out the contents. Most of them were glossy photographs. Photographs of him and George T. Nelson at that party in Boston. They were cavorting with a number of nice young fellows (the oldest of the nice young fellows might have been twelve), and in each picture George T. Nelson's face was obscured but Frank Jewett's was crystal clear.

This didn't much surprise Frank, either.

There was a note in the envelope. He took it out and read it.

Frank old Buddy,

Sorry to do this, but I have to leave town and have no time to fuck around. I want $2,000. Bring it to my house tonight at 7:00 p.m. So far you can wiggle out of this thing, it will be tough but no real problem for a slippery bastard like you, but ask yourself how you're going to like seeing
copies of these pix nailed up on every phone pole in town, right under those Casino Nite posters. They will run you out of town on a rail, old Buddy. Remember, $2,000 at my house by 7:15 at the latest or you will wish you were born without a dick.

Your friend,

George

Your friend.

Your
friend!

His eyes kept returning to that closing line with a kind of incredulous, wondering horror.

Your motherfucking backstabbing Judas-kissing
FRIEND!

Brion McGinley was still hammering on the door, but when Frank Jewett finally looked up from whatever it was on his desk which had taken his attention, Brion's fist paused in mid-stroke. The principal's face was waxy white except for two bright clown-spots of flush on his cheeks. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in a narrow smile.

He didn't look in the least like Mr. Weatherbee.

My
friend,
Frank thought. He crumpled the note with one hand as he shoved the glossy photographs back into the envelope with the other. Now the blue spark of anger had turned orange. The wet kindling was catching fire.
I'll be there, all right. I'll be there to discuss this matter with my friend George T Nelson.

“Yes indeed,” Frank Jewett said. “Yes
indeed.”
He began to smile.

It was going on quarter past three and Alan had decided Brian Rusk must have taken a different route; the flood of home-going students had almost dried up. Then, just as he was reaching into his pocket for his car-keys, he saw a lone figure biking down School Street toward him. The boy was riding slowly, seeming almost to trudge over the
handlebars, and his head was bent so low Alan couldn't see his face.

But he could see what was in the carrier basket of the boy's bike: a Playmate cooler.

“Do you understand?” Gaunt asked Polly, who was now holding the envelope.

“Yes, I . . . I understand. I do.” But her dreaming face was troubled.

“You don't look happy.”

“Well . . . I . . .”

“Things like the
azka
don't always work very well for people who aren't happy,” Mr. Gaunt said. He pointed at the tiny bulge where the silver ball lay against her skin, and again she seemed to feel something shift strangely inside. At the same moment, horrible cramps of pain invaded her hands, spreading like a network of cruel steel hooks. Polly moaned loudly.

Mr. Gaunt crooked the finger he had pointed in a come-along gesture. She felt that shift in the silver ball again, more clearly this time, and the pain was gone.

“You don't want to go back to the way things were, do you, Polly?” Mr. Gaunt asked in a silky voice.

“No!” she cried. Her breast was moving rapidly up and down. Her hands began to make frantic washing gestures, one against the other, and her wide eyes never left his. “Please, no!”

“Because things could go from bad to worse, couldn't they?”

“Yes! Yes, they could!”

“And nobody understands, do they? Not even the Sheriff.
He
doesn't know what it's like to wake up at two in the morning with hell in his hands, does he?”

She shook her head and began to weep.

“Do as I say and you'll never have to wake up that way again, Polly. And here is something else—do as I say and if anyone in Castle Rock finds out that your child
burned to death in a San Francisco tenement, they won't find it out from
me.
”

Polly uttered a hoarse, lost cry—the cry of a woman hopelessly ensnarled in a grinding nightmare.

Mr. Gaunt smiled.

“There are more kinds of hell than one, aren't there, Polly?”

“How do you know about him?” she whispered. “No one knows. Not even Alan. I told Alan—”