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He stood there a moment, watching as Polly Chalmers walked down the street, smoothing her gloves over her hands, so misshapen and in such startling contrast to the rest of her, which was trim and pretty, if not terribly remarkable. Gaunt’s smile grew. As his lips drew back, exposing his uneven teeth, it became unpleasantly predatory. “You’ll do,” he said softly in the empty shop. “You’ll do just fine.”
“He’s got the most beautiful green eyes,” Francie Pelletier said, a little dreamily. “Were they green?” Cyndi Rose asked, a little startled. She herself had thought they were gray. “I didn’t notice.”
First they were blue, then hazel, then green, then grey. Interesting
But the real reason he’d gone was the one most bad decisions have in common: it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
The only thing that struck Hugh about the man in that confused moment was his eyes—they were as black as an Indian’s.
The idea that her frightened mouse of a husband might have drugged her never crossed Wilma’s mind. Nevertheless, that was just what Pete Jerzyck had done, and not for the first time, either.
Pangborn looked into the window Gaunt was looking out of for some time before approaching the door; he even cupped his hands and pressed his nose against the glass for a few seconds. Although Gaunt was standing right in front of him with his arms folded, the Sheriff did not see him.
He rolled his hand into a fist around Alan’s business card, first bending and then crumpling it. When it was completely hidden, a lick of blue fire squirted out from between his second and third fingers. He opened his hand again, and although little tendrils of smoke drifted up from the palm, there was no sign of the card—not even a smear of ash.
She found herself surprised by love, that simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.
Her loneliness had been so intense that she was half-mad with it, so deep and complete that she hadn’t even been aware of how badly she was suffering.
On the rare occasions when Nettie smiled, she did it with her whole face; it was like watching the sun break through the clouds on an overcast morning. “I love you, Polly.” Touched, Polly replied: “Why, I love you, too, Nettie.” Nettie left. It was the last time Polly ever saw her alive.
Oh noooo I like Nettie
Hugh held the corkscrew with the note pinned to it over the white bib on Raider’s breast. “And do you know what else? I’m gonna keep it!” He brought his right hand down hard. The left, which had been scratching Raider, now pinned the dog as he gave the corkscrew three hard twists. Warm blood jetted up, dousing both of his hands. The dog rattled briefly on the floor and then lay still. He would utter his stern and harmless bark no more.
Im gonna cry
Nettie ran at her, lifting the cleaver as she came. Her lips peeled back from her teeth and a long howl tore out of her throat. Wilma crouched, holding her knife out like a giant switchblade. As Nettie closed with her, Wilma drove it forward. It thrust deep into Nettie’s bowels and then rose, slitting her stomach open and letting out a spurt of stinking gruel. Wilma felt a moment’s horror at what she had done—could it really be Wilma Jerzyck on the other end of the steel buried in Nettie?—and her arm muscles relaxed. The knife’s upward momentum died before the blade could reach Nettie’s
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Oh my goodness
She grunted through a mouthful of blood, raised the cleaver, and brought it down. It buried itself in the top of Wilma Jerzyck’s head with a single dull sound—chonk! Wilma began to convulse, her body bucking and sunfishing under Nettie’s. Each buck and thrash drove the carving knife in deeper.
The little silver ball fell against the front of her blouse. It seemed very heavy to her, and the feel of it was not precisely comfortable. She wondered vaguely what was inside it, what had made that dusty slithery sound. Some sort of herb, he had said, but it hadn’t sounded like leaves or even powder to Polly. It had seemed to her that something in there had shifted on its own.
People always thought in terms of souls, and of course he would take as many of those as he could when he closed up shop; they were to Leland Gaunt what trophies were to the hunter, what stuffed fish were to the fisherman. They were worth little to him these days in any practical sense, but he still bagged his limit if he possibly could, no matter what he might say to the contrary; to do any less would not be playing the game. Yet it was mostly amusement, not souls, that kept him going. Simple amusement. It was the only reason that mattered after a while, because when the years were long, you
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Castle Rock’s Head Selectman was oiling his Colt revolver for the third time. At some point this morning he meant to load it. Then he meant to kill his wife. Then he meant to go down to the Municipal Building, find that son of a bitch Ridgewick (he had no idea that it was Norris’s day off) and kill him.
He looked up at Gaunt again, and found he could not pull his eyes away. Gaunt’s eyes kept changing color. Blue… gray… hazel… brown… black.
Mr. Gaunt steepled his fingers under his chin. “Perhaps it isn’t even a book at all. Perhaps all the really special things I sell aren’t what they appear to be. Perhaps they are actually gray things with only one remarkable property—the ability to take the shapes of those things which haunt the dreams of men and women.” He paused, then added thoughtfully: “Perhaps they are dreams themselves.”
Mr. Gaunt held out his hand. Ace began to reach for it… and then saw there was already something in it. It was the brown rat from the trap in the storeroom. Ace pulled back with a little grunt of disgust. He hadn’t the slightest idea when Mr. Gaunt had picked up the dead rat. Or perhaps it was a different one? Ace decided he didn’t care, one way or another. All he knew was that he had no plans to shake hands with a dead rat, no matter how cool a dude Mr. Gaunt was. Smiling, Mr. Gaunt said: “Excuse me. Every year I grow a little more forgetful. I believe I just tried to give you my dinner,
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In the place of these wonderful things was Mr. Gaunt’s face… only he no longer looked as he did in his shop. The skin on his face looked blistered, seared with some fabulous secret heat. It pulsed and writhed, as if there were things beneath, struggling to get out. And when he smiled, his big square teeth had become a double row of fangs.
“Oh Mr. Jewett! What a naughty boy you are!” There was a stack of digest-sized magazines inside the drawer, and Naughty Boy was, in fact, the name of the one on top. The blurry picture on the cover showed a boy of about nine. He was wearing a ’50’s-style motorcycle cap and nothing else. Sally reached into the drawer and pulled out the magazines—there were a dozen of them, maybe more. Happy Kids. Nude Cuties. Blowing in the Wind. Bobby’s Farm World. She looked into one and could barely believe what she was seeing. Where did things like this come from?
Ok this guy deserves whatever Mr. Gaunt has in store for him
Nor did she want to be a part of that something, by going out to the old deserted Camber place at the end of Town Road #3 and playing some sort of trick she didn’t even understand.
Then she brought it around in a hard, smooth swing. Lester turned his head at the last moment, just in time to catch the gun’s steel-edged walnut stock between his eyes. There was a nasty crunch as the gunstock smashed a hole into Lester’s skull and turned his forebrain to jelly. It sounded as if someone had stepped very hard on a full box of popcorn. Lester Pratt was dead before he hit the floor. Sheila Brigham looked at him and began to scream.
He didn’t have the slightest idea why Brian cared about it so much; it was old, dirty, dog-eared, and faded. Also, the player was somebody Sean had never heard of—a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers named Sammy Koberg, lifetime record one win, three losses. The guy had never even spent a whole year in the majors. Why would Brian care about a worthless card like that?
Gaunt has the power to make all of them see what they want to see. So cool
“Never go there,” he said. “Needful Things is a poison place, and Mr. Gaunt is a poison man. Only he’s really not a man, Sean. He’s not a man at all. Swear to me you’ll never buy any of the poison things Mr. Gaunt sells.”
“I love you, baby brother.” He looked down at the baseball card for a moment. “Sandy Koufax sucks,” Brian Rusk remarked, and pulled the trigger with his toe. Sean’s drilling shriek of horror rose over the blast, which was flat and loud in the hot dark garage.
Holy shit
There was something inside the small silver charm. Something that was alive. If she did not live up to her side of the bargain she had made with Leland Gaunt, it would die. She didn’t know if she could stand to be tumbled back down into the horrible, grinding pain to which she had awakened on Sunday morning. If she had to face a lifetime of such pain, she thought she would kill herself.
She looked into the can and saw what Mr. Gaunt had told her she would see: a bundle of Gold Bond trading stamps and several fading photographs of a woman having sexual intercourse with a collie dog.
Excuse me
Mr. Gaunt had gotten down to his real business, and at the end of things, the real business was always the same. The ultimate item had changed with the years, just like everything else, but such changes were surface things, frosting of different flavors on the same dark and bitter cake. At the end, Mr. Gaunt always sold them weapons… and they always bought.
“They’ve got the gun Hugh used to shoot Henry, but David Friedman from State Police Ballistics says he doesn’t know what it is. An automatic pistol of some kind, but the guy said he’s never seen one quite like it.”
“Dead!” Van Allen shouted through a break in the static. “He died in the ambulance, but we do not believe it was gunshot trauma which killed him. Do you understand? We do not believe this patient died of gunshot trauma. His brain first underwent atypical edema and then ruptured. The most likely diagnosis is that some toxic substance, some extremely toxic substance, was introduced into his blood when he was shot. This same substance appears to have literally burst his heart open. Please acknowledge.”
“The toxin was very likely on the bullets in the gun that shot him. The infection appears to spread slowly at first, then to pick up speed. We have two clear, fan-shaped areas of introduction here—the cheek-wound and the chest-wound. It’s very important to—”
Someone’s been in here! his mind cried. Someone’s been at it! One of Them! Ruining me wasn’t enough! They had to ruin my game, too! But a deeper voice, perhaps the fading voice of sanity, whispered that this was not true. This is how it was from the very start, the voice whispered. You just didn’t see it.
“I wished he didn’t,” Sean said. His voice was strangely matter-of-fact, but now a tear rose in each of his eyes, grew, and spilled down his smooth cheeks. “We won’t get to see Young Guns II together when they put it out for VCRs. I’ll have to watch it by myself, and it won’t be any fun without Brian making all his stupid jokes. I know it won’t.”
Poor kid omg :(
“It wasn’t just blood, Mr. Sheriff. It was other stuff. Yellow stuff.”
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.
