Needful Things

How many others? How many?

He pulled up on the far side of the Tin Bridge just as a bolt of lightning stroked down from the sky and severed one of the old elms on the other side of Castle Stream. There was a huge electrical crackle and a wild streak of brilliance. Alan threw an arm across his eyes, but an afterimage was still printed on them in stark blue as the radio uttered a loud blurt of static and the elm toppled with ponderous grandeur into the stream.

He dropped his arm, then yelled as thunder bellowed directly overhead, sounding loud enough to crack the world. For a moment his dazzled eyes could make out nothing and he was afraid the tree might have fallen on the bridge, blocking his way into town. Then he saw it lying just upstream of the rusty old structure, buried in a loom of rapids. Alan put the cruiser in gear and made the crossing.

As he did, he could hear the wind, which was now blowing a gale, hooting in the struts and girders of the bridge. It was a creepy, lonely sound.

Rain pelted against the old station wagon’s windshield, turning everything beyond it into a wavering hallucination. As Alan came off the bridge and onto Lower Main Street at its intersection with Watermill Lane, the rain began to come so hard that the wipers, even on fast speed, were entirely useless. He unrolled his window, stuck his head out, and drove that way. He was instantly soaked.

The area around the Municipal Building was loaded with police cars and newsvans, but it also had a weird, deserted look, as if the people who belonged to all these vehicles had suddenly been teleported to the planet Neptune by evil aliens. Alan saw a few newspeople peering out from the shelter of their vans, and one State cop ran down the alley which led to the Municipal Building’s parking lot, rainwater spatting up from his shoes, but that was all.

Three blocks up, toward Castle Hill, an S.P. cruiser shot across Upper Main at high speed, heading west along Laurel Street. A moment later, another cruiser shot across Main. This one was on Birch Street and headed in the opposite direction from the first. It happened so fast-zip, zip-that it was like something you’d see in a comedy movie about bumbling police. Smokey and the Bandit, perhaps. Alan, however, saw nothing fu

He thought he could hear faint cries coming from the direction of Castle Hill. With the rain, thunder, and driving wind it was hard to tell for sure, but he did not think those cries were just imagination.

As if to prove this, a State Police car roared out of the alley next to the Municipal Building, flashing headlights and whirling domelights illuminating silvery streaks of rain, and headed in that direction. It nearly sideswiped an oversized WMTW news-wagon in the process.

Alan remembered feeling, earlier this week, that there was something badly out of joint in his little town-that things he could not see were going wrong and Castle Rock was trembling on the edge of some unthinkable disorder. And now the disorder had come, and it had all been pla

A scream rose in the night, high and drilling. It was followed by the sound of shattering glass… and then, from somewhere else, a gunshot and a burst of cracked, idiot laughter. Thunder banged in the sky like a pile of dropped boards.

But I have time now, Alan thought. Yes. Plenty of time. Mr.

Gaunt, I think we ought to say hello to each other, and I think it’s high time you found out what happens to people who fuck with my town.

Ignoring the faint sounds of chaos and violence he heard through his open window, ignoring the Municipal Building where Henry Payton was presumably coordinating the forces of law and orderor trying to-Alan drove up Main Street toward Needful Things.

As he did, a violent white-purple bolt of lightning flared across the sky like an electric firetree, and while the accompanying ca

2

Deputy Norris Ridgewick, clad in the uniform he kept for parades and other dress occasions, was in the shed attached to the little house he had shared with his mother until she died of a stroke in the fall of 1986, the house where he had lived alone since then.

He was standing on a stool. A heavy length of noosed rope hung down from one of the overhead beams. Norris ran his head into this noose and was pulling it tight against his right ear when lightning flashed and the two electric bulbs which lit the shed winked out.

Still, he could see the Bazun fishing rod leaning against the wall by the door which led into the kitchen. He had wanted that fishing rod so badly and had believed he had gotten it so cheaply, but in the end the price had been high. Too high for Norris to pay.

His house was on the upper arm of Watermill Lane, where the Lane hooks back toward Castle Hill and the View. The wind was right, and he could hear the sounds of the brawl which was still going on there-the screams, the yells, the occasional gunshot.

I’m responsible for that, he thought. Not completely-hell, no-but I’m a part of it. I participated. I’m the reason Henry Beaufort is hurt or dying, maybe even dead over in Oxford. I’m the reason Hugh Priest is on a cooling-board. Me. The fellow who always wanted to be a policeman and help folks, the fellow who wanted that ever since he was a kid. Stupid, fu

“I’m sorry for what I did,” Norris said. “That doesn’t fix it, but for whatever it’s worth, I’m real sorry.”

He prepared to jump off the stool, and suddenly a new voice spoke up inside his head. Then why don’t you try to put it right, you chickenshit coward?

“I can’t,” Norris said. Lightning blazed; his shadow jumped crazily on the shed wall, as if he were already doing the air-dance.

“It’s too late.”

Then at least take a look at what you did i’t FOR, the angry voice insisted. You can do that much, can’t you? Take a look! Take a really GOOD look!

The lightning flashed again. Norris stared at the Bazun rod… and let out a scream of agony and disbelief. He jerked, almost tumbling off the stool and hanging himself by accident.

The sleek Bazun, so limber and strong, was no longer there. It had been replaced by a dirty, splintery bamboo pole, really no more than a stick with a kid’s Zebco reel attached to it by one rusty screw.

“Someone stole it!” Norris cried. All of his bitter jealousy and paranoid covetousness returned in a flash, and he felt that he must rush out into the streets and find the thief He must kill them all, everyone in town, if that was necessary, to get the evil man or woman responsible. “SOMEONE STOLE MY BAZUN!” he wailed again, swaying on the stool.

No, the angry voice replied. This is how it always was. All that’s been stolen is your blinders-the ones you put on yourself, of your own free will.

“No!” Monstrous hands seemed to be clapped against the sides of Norris’s head; now they began to squeeze. “No, no, no!”

But the lightning flashed, again showing him the dirty bamboo rod where the Bazun had been only moments before. He had put it there so it would be the last thing he ever saw when he stepped off the stool.

No one had been in here; no one had moved it; consequently the voice had to be right.

This is how it always was, the angry voice insisted. The only question is this: are you going to do something about it, or are you going to run away into the darkness?