Needful Things (90 page)

Ace grabbed one side of the table, and they carried it back into the storeroom. Mr. Gaunt bent down and picked up a sign which leaned against the wall.

THIS TIME I'M
REALLY
CLOSED,

it read. He put it on the door and then shut it. He was turning the thumb-lock before Ace realized there had been nothing on the sign to hold it in place—no tack, no tape, no nothing. But it had stayed up just the same.

Then his eye fell upon the crates which had contained the automatic pistols and the clips of ammunition. There were only three guns and three clips left.

“Holy Jesus! Where'd they all go?”

“Business has been good this evening, Ace,” Mr. Gaunt said, rubbing his long-fingered hands together. “Extremely good. And it's going to get even better. I have work for you to do.”

“I
told
you,” Ace said. “The Sheriff stole my—”

Leland Gaunt was upon him before Ace even saw him move. Those long, ugly hands seized him by the front of the shirt and lifted him into the air as if he were made of feathers. A startled cry fell out of his mouth. The hands which held him were like iron. Mr. Gaunt lifted him high, and Ace suddenly found himself looking down into that blazing, hellish face with only the haziest idea of how he had gotten there. Even in the extremity of his sudden terror, he noticed that smoke—or perhaps it was steam—was coming out of Mr. Gaunt's ears and nostrils. He looked like a human dragon.

“You tell me
NOTHING!”
Mr. Gaunt screamed up at him. His tongue licked out between those jostling tombstone teeth, and Ace saw it came to a double point, like the tongue of a snake.
“I tell you
EVERYTHING
! Shut up when you are in the company of your elders and betters, Ace! Shut up and listen! Shut up and listen!
SHUT UP AND LISTEN!”

He whirled Ace twice around his head like a carnival
wrestler giving his opponent an airplane spin, and threw him against the far wall. Ace's head connected with the plaster. A large fireworks display went off in the center of his brain. When his vision cleared, he saw Leland Gaunt bearing down on him. His face was a horror of eyes and teeth and blowing steam.

“No!”
Ace shrieked.
“No, Mr. Gaunt, please!
NO!”

The hands had become talons, the nails grown long and sharp in a moment's time
. . . or were they that way all along?
Ace's mind gibbered.
Maybe they were that way all along and you just didn't see it.

They cut through the fabric of Ace's shirt like razors, and Ace was jerked back up into that fuming face.

“Are you ready to listen, Ace?” Mr. Gaunt asked. Hot blurts of steam stung Ace's cheeks and mouth with each word. “Are you ready, or should I just unzip your worthless guts and have done with it?”

“Yes!” he sobbed. “I mean
no!
I'll listen!”

“Are you going to be a good little errand boy and follow orders?”

“Yes!”

“Do you know what will happen if you don't?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

“You're disgusting, Ace,” Mr. Gaunt said. “I like that in a person.” He slung Ace against the wall. Ace slid down it into a loose kneeling position, gasping and sobbing. He looked down at the floor. He was afraid to gaze directly into the monster's face.

“If you should even think of going against my wishes, Ace, I'll see that you get the grand tour of hell. You'll have the Sheriff, don't worry. For the moment, however, he is out of town. Now. Stand up.”

Ace got slowly to his feet. His head throbbed; his tee-shirt hung in ribbons.

“Let me ask you something.” Mr. Gaunt was urbane and smiling again, not a hair out of place. “Do you like this little town? Do you love it? Do you keep snapshots of it on the walls of your shitty little shack to remind yourself of its rustic charm on those days when the bee stings and the dog bites?”

“Hell, no,” Ace said in an unsteady voice. His voice rose and fell with the pounding of his heart. He made it
to his feet only with the greatest effort. His legs felt as if they were made of spaghetti. He stood with his back to the wall, watching Mr. Gaunt warily.

“Would it appall you if I said I wanted you to blow this shitty little burg right off the face of the map while you wait for the Sheriff to come back?”

“I . . . I don't know what that word means,” Ace said nervously.

“I'm not surprised. But I think you understand what I
mean,
Ace. Don't you?”

Ace thought back. He thought back all the way to a time, many years ago, when four snotnosed kids had cheated him and his friends (Ace had
had
friends back in those days, or at least a reasonable approximation thereof) out of something Ace had wanted. They had caught one of the snotnoses—Gordie LaChance—later on and had beaten the living shit out of him, but it hadn't mattered. These days LaChance was a bigshot writer living in another part of the state, and he probably wiped his ass with ten-dollar bills. Somehow the snotnoses had won, and things had never been the same for Ace after that. That was when his luck had turned bad. Doors that had been open to him had begun to close, one by one. Little by little he had begun to realize that he was not a king and Castle Rock was not his kingdom. If that had ever been true, those days had begun to pass that Labor Day weekend when he was sixteen, when the snots had cheated him and his friends out of what was rightfully theirs. By the time Ace was old enough to drink legally in The Mellow Tiger, he had gone from being a king to being a soldier without a uniform, skulking through enemy territory.

“I
hate
this fucking toilet,” he said to Leland Gaunt.

“Good,” Mr. Gaunt said. “Very good. I have a friend—he's parked just up the street—who is going to help you do something about that, Ace. You'll have the Sheriff . . . and you'll have the whole town, too. Does that sound good?” He had captured Ace's eyes with his own. Ace stood before him in the tattered rags of his tee-shirt and began to grin. His head no longer ached.

“Yeah,” he said. “It sounds absolutely t-fine.”

Mr. Gaunt reached into his coat pocket and brought
out a plastic sandwich bag filled with white powder. He held it out to Ace.

“There's work to do, Ace,” he said.

Ace took the sandwich bag, but it was still Mr. Gaunt's eyes he looked at, and into.

“Good,” he said. “I'm ready.”

Buster watched as the last man he had seen enter the service alley came back out again. The guy's tee-shirt hung in ragged strips now, and he was carrying a crate. Tucked into the waistband of his bluejeans were the butts of two automatic pistols.

Buster drew back in sudden alarm as the man, whom he now recognized as John “Ace” Merrill, walked directly to the van and set the crate down.

Ace tapped on the glass. “Open up the back, Daddy-O,” he said. “We got work to do.”

Buster unrolled his window. “Get out of here,” he said. “Get out, you ruffian! Or I'll call the police!”

“Good fucking luck,” Ace grunted.

He drew one of the pistols from the waistband of his pants. Buster stiffened, and then Ace thrust it through the window at him, butt first. Buster blinked at it.

“Take it,” Ace said impatiently, “and then open the back. If you don't know who sent me, you're even dumber than you look.” He reached out with his other hand and felt the wig. “Love your hair,” he said with a small smile. “Simply marvellous.”

“Stop that,” Buster said, but the anger and outrage had gone out of his voice.
Three good men can do a lot of damage,
Mr. Gaunt had said.
I will send someone to you.

But Ace? Ace
Merrill?
He was a
criminal!

“Look,” Ace said, “if you want to discuss the arrangements with Mr. Gaunt, I think he might still be in there. But as you can see”—he fluttered his hands through the long strips of tee-shirt hanging over his chest and belly—“his mood is a little touchy.”

“You're supposed to help me get rid of Them?” Buster asked.

“That's right,” Ace said. “We're gonna turn this whole town into a Flame-Broiled Whopper.” He picked up the crate. “Although I don't know how we're supposed to do any real damage with just a box of blasting caps. He said you'd know the answer to that one.”

Buster had begun to grin. He got up, crawled into the back of the van, and slid the door open on its track. “I believe I do,” he said. “Climb in, Mr. Merrill. We've got an errand to run.”

“Where?”

“The town motor pool, to start with,” Buster said. He was still grinning.

The Rev. William Rose, who had first stepped into the pulpit of The United Baptist Church of Castle Rock in May of 1983, was a bigot of the first water; no question about it. Unfortunately, he was also energetic, sometimes witty in an odd, cruel way, and extremely popular with his congregation. His first sermon as leader of the Baptist flock had been a sign of things to come. It was called “Why the Catholics are Hellbound.” He had kept up in this vein, which was extremely popular with his congregation, ever since. The Catholics, he informed them, were blasphemous, misguided creatures who worshipped not Jesus but the woman who had been chosen to bear Him. Was it any wonder they were so prone to error on other subjects as well?

He explained to his flock that the Catholics had perfected the science of torture during the Inquisition; that the Inquisitors had burned the
true
faithful at what he called The Smoking-uh Stake right up until the end of the nineteenth century, when heroic Protestants (Baptists, mostly) had made them stop; that forty different Popes through history had known their own mothers and sisters, and even their illegitimate daughters, in-uh unholy sexual congress-uh; that the Vatican was built on the gold of Protestant martyrs and plundered nations.

This sort of ignorant twaddle was hardly news to the Catholic Church, which had had to put up with similar heresies for hundreds of years. Many priests would have
taken it in stride, perhaps even making gentle fun of it. Father John Brigham, however, was not the sort to take things in his stride. Quite the contrary. A bad-tempered, bandy-legged Irishman, Brigham was one of those humorless men who cannot suffer fools, especially strutting fools of Rev. Rose's stripe.

He had borne Rose's strident Catholic-baiting in silence for almost a year before finally cutting loose from his own pulpit. His homily, which pulled no punches at all, was called “The Sins of Reverend Willie.” In it he characterized the Baptist minister as “a psalm-singin jackass of a man who thinks Billy Graham walks on water and Billy Sunday sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.”

Later that Sunday, Rev. Rose and four of his largest deacons had paid a visit on Father Brigham. They were shocked and angered, they said, by the slanderous things Father Brigham had said.

“You've got your nerve tellin
me
to tone down,” Father Brigham said, “after a hard mornin of tellin the faithful that I serve the Whore of Babylon.”

Color rose quickly in Rev. Rose's normally pale cheeks and overspread his mostly bald pate. He had
never
said anything about the Whore of Babylon, he told Father Brigham, although he
had
mentioned the Whore of Rome several times, and if the shoe fit, why, Father Brigham had just better slip his heel in and wear it.

Father Brigham had stepped out of the rectory's front door with his fists bunched. “If you want to discuss this on the front walk, my friend,” he said, “just ask your little Gestapo unit there to stand aside and we'll discuss it all you want.”

Rev. Rose, who was three inches taller than Father Brigham—but perhaps twenty pounds lighter—stepped back with a sneer. “I would not soil-uh my hands,” he said.

One of the deacons was Don Hemphill. He was both taller
and
heavier than the combative priest.
“I'll
discuss it with you if you want,” he said. “I'll wipe the walk with your Pope-loving, bog-trotting
ass.”

Two of the other deacons, who knew Don was capable
of just that, had restrained him in the nick of time . . . but after that, the rumble was on.

Until this October, it had been mostly
sub rosa—
ethnic jokes and malicious chatter in the ladies' and men's groups of the two churches, schoolyard taunting between children of the two factions, and, most of all, rhetorical grenades tossed from pulpit to pulpit on Sundays, that day of peace when, history teaches, most wars actually start. Every now and then there were ugly incidents—eggs were thrown at the Parish Hall during a Baptist Youth Fellowship dance, and once a rock was winged through the living-room window of the rectory—but it had been mostly a war of words.

Like all wars, it had had both its heated moments and its lulls, but a steadily deepening anger had run through it since the day the Daughters of Isabella announced their plans for Casino Nite. By the time Rev. Rose received the infamous “Babtist Rat-Fuck” card, it was probably too late to avoid a confrontation of some sort; the over-the-top crudity of the message only seemed to guarantee that when the confrontation came, it would be a wowser. The kindling had been laid; all that remained was for someone to strike a match and light the bonfire.

If anyone had fatally underestimated the volatility of the situation, it was Father Brigham. He had known his Baptist counterpart would not like the idea of Casino Nite, but he did not understand how deeply the concept of church-supported gaming enraged and offended the Baptist preacher. He did not know that Steamboat Willie's father had been a compulsive gambler who had abandoned the family on many occasions when the gambling fever took him, or that the man had finally shot himself in the back room of a dance-hall after a losing night at craps. And the unlovely truth about Father Brigham was this: it probably would not have made any difference to him even if he had known.