Needful Things (Page 42)

He put his face against it, ignoring the reflection of his pallid skin and bloodshot eyes. He cupped a hand to either cheek, cutting off the glare, narrowing his eyes, looking for a camera on the other side.

Looking for Them.

He saw nothing.

After a long moment he stepped away, swabbed indifferently at the smeared glass with the sleeve of his overcoat, and left the office. Nothing yet, anyway. That didn’t mean They wouldn’t come in tonight, pull out his mirror, and replace it with one-way glass.

Spying was just another tool of the trade for the Persecutors. He would have to check the mirror every day now.

"But I can," he said to the empty upstairs hallway. "I can do that. Believe me."

Eddie Warburton was mopping the lobby floor and didn’t look up as Keeton stepped out onto the street.

His car was parked around back, but he didn’t feel like driving.

He felt too confused to drive; he would probably put the Caddy through someone’s store window if he tried. Nor was he aware, in I the depths of his confused mind, that he was walking away from his house rather than toward it. It was seven-fifteen on Saturday morning, and he was the only person out in Castle Rock’s small business district.

His mind went briefly back to that first night at Lewiston Raceway. He couldn’t do anything wrong, it seemed. Steve Frazier had lost thirty dollars and said he was leaving after the ninth race.

Keeton said he thought he would stay awhile longer. He barely looked at Frazier, and barely noticed when Frazier was gone. He did remember thinking it was nice not to have someone at his elbow saying Buster This and Buster That all the time. He hated the nickname, and of course Steve knew it-that was why he used it.

The next week he had come back again, alone this time, and had lost sixty dollars’ worth of previous winnings. He hardly cared.

Although he thought often of those huge stacks of banded currency, it wasn’t the money, not really; the money was just the symbol you took away with you, something that said you had been there, that you had been, however briefly, part of the big show. What he really cared about was the tremendous, walloping excitement that went through the crowd when the starter’s bell rang, the gates opened with their heavy, crunching thud, and the announcer yelled, "Theyyy’rrre OFF!" What he cared about was the roar of the crowd as the pack rounded the third turn and went hell-for-election down the backstretch, the hysterical camp-meeting exhortations from the stands as they rounded the fourth turn and poured on the coal down the homestretch. It was alive, oh, it was so alive. It was so alive that-that it was dangerous.

Keeton decided he’d better stay away. He had the course of his life neatly planned. He intended to become Castle Rock’s Head Selectman when Steve Frazier finally pulled the pin, and after six or seven years of that, he intended to stand for the State House of Representatives. After that, who knew? National office was not out of reach for a man who was ambitious, capable… and sane.

That was the real trouble with the track. He hadn’t recognized it at first, but he had recognized it soon enough. The track was a place where people paid their money, took a ticket… and gave up their sanity for a little while. Keeton had seen too much insanity in his own family to feel comfortable with the attraction Lewiston Raceway held for him. It was a pit with greasy sides, a snare with hidden teeth, a loaded gun with the safety removed. When he went, he was unable to leave until the last race of the evening had been run. He knew. He had tried. Once he had made it almost all the way to the exit turnstiles before something in the back of his brain, something powerful, enigmatic, and reptilian, had arisen, taken control, and turned his feet around. Keeton was terrified of fully waking that reptile. Better to let it sleep.

For three years he had done just that. Then, in 1984, Steve Frazier had retired, and Keeton had been elected Head Selectman.

That was when his real troubles began.

He had gone to the track to celebrate his victory, and since he was celebrating, he decided to go whole hog. He bypassed the two- and five-dollar windows, and went straight to the ten-dollar window. He had lost a hundred and sixty dollars that night, more than he felt comfortable losing (he told his wife the next day that it had been forty), but not more than he could afford to lose. Absolutely not.

He returned a week later, meaning to win back what he had lost so he could quit evens. And he had almost made it. Almost-that was the key word. The way he had almost made it to the exit turnstiles. The week after, he had lost two hundred and ten dollars.

That left a hole in the checking account Myrtle would notice, and so he had borrowed a little bit from the town’s petty-cash fund to cover the worst of the shortfall. A hundred dollars. Peanuts, really.

Past that point, it all began to blur together. The pit had greased sides, all right, and once you started sliding you were doomed.

You could expend your energy clawing at the sides and succeed in slowing your fall… but that, of course, only drew out the agony.

If there had been a point of no return, it had been the summer of 1989. The pacers ran nightly during the summer, and Keeton was in attendance constantly through the second half of July and all of August. Myrtle had thought for awhile that he was using the racetrack as an excuse, that he was actually seeing another woman, and that was a laugh-it really was. Keeton couldn’t have got a hardon if Diana herself had driven down from the moon in her chariot with her toga open and a FUCK ME DANFORTH Sign hung around her neck. The thought of how deep he’d dipped into the town treasury had caused his poor dick to shrivel to the size of a pencil eraser.

When Myrtle finally became convinced of the truth, that it was only horse racing after all, she had been relieved. it kept him out of the house, where he tended to be something of a tyrant, and he couldn’t be losing too badly, she had reasoned, because the checkbook balance didn’t fluctuate that much. It was just that Danforth had found a hobby to keep him amused in his middle age.

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 [email protected] though; that was the trouble.

Never mind, There’s a way. I know there’s a uHere 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 neckand-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.

4

"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 Nettle 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.