Needful Things

I think you’re still around, Alan thought. I think you want to watch all the fun. Don’t you, you son of a bitch?

He sat quite still, looking at the shop with the green awning, trying to fathom the mind of a man who would set such a complex and mean-spirited set of events in motion. He was concentrating far too deeply to notice that the car parked on his left was quite old, although smoothly, almost aerodynamically, designed. It was Mr.

Gaunt’s Tucker Talisman, in fact.

How did you do it? There’s a lot I want to know, but just that one thing will suffice for tonight. How could you do it? How could you learn so much about us so fast?

Brian said Mr. Gaunt wasn’t really a man at all.

In daylight Alan would have scoffed at this idea, as he had scoffed at the idea that Polly’s charm might have some supernatural healing power. But tonight, cupped in the crazy palm of the gale, staring at the display window which had become a blank dead eye, the idea had its own undeniable, gloomy power. He remembered the day he had come to Needful Things with the specific intention of meeting and talking to Mr. Gaunt, and he remembered the odd sensation that had crept over him as he peered in through the window with his hands cupped at the sides of his face to reduce the glare. He had felt he was being watched, although the shop was clearly empty.

And not only that; he’d felt the watcher was malign, hateful. The feeling had been so strong that for a moment he had actually mistaken his own reflection for the unpleasant (and half-transparent) face of someone else.

How strong that feeling had been… how very strong.

Alan found himself remembering something else-something his grandmother used to tell him when he was small: The devil’s voice is sweet to hear.

Brian said How had Mr. Gaunt come by his knowledge? And why in God’s name would he bother with a wide place in the road like Castle Rock?-Mr. Gaunt wasn’t really a man at all.

Alan suddenly leaned over and groped on the floor of the station wagon’s passenger side. For a moment he thought that what he was feeling around for was gone-that it had fallen out of the car at some point during the day when the passenger door was openand then his fingers happened on the metal curve. It had rolled underneath the seat, that was all. He fumbled it out, held it up… and the voice of depression, absent since he had left Sean Rusk’s hospital room (or maybe it was just that things had been too busy since then for Alan to hear it), spoke up in its loud and unsettlingly merry voice.

Hi, Alan! Hello! I’ve been away, sorry about that, but I’m back now, okay? What you got there? Can of nuts? Nop@that’s what i’t looks like, but that’s not what i’t is, I’s it? It’s the last Joke Todd ever boughtat the auburn Novelty Shop, correct? A fake can of Tastee-Munch Mixed Nuts with a green snake insid@repe-paper wrapped around a spring. And when he brought it to you with his eyes glowing and a hig, goofy smile on his face, you told him to put that silly thing back, didn’t you? And when his face fell, you pretended not to notice-you told him… let me see. What DID you tell him?

“That the fool and his money soon parted,” Alan said dully. He turned the can around and around in his hands, looking at it, remembering Todd’s face. “That’s what I told him.”

Ohhhh, riiiiight, the voice agreed. How could I have forgotten a thing like that? You want to talk about mean-spirited? jeer, Louise!

Good thing you reminded me! Good thing you reminded us BOTH, right? Only A

“She said it was sort of fu

He had begun to cry again, and why not? just why the fucking hell not?

The old pain was back, twisting itself around his aching heart like a dirty rag.

Hurts, doesn’t it? the voice of depression-that guilty, self-hating voice-asked with a sympathy Alan (the rest of Alan) suspected was entirely bogus. It hurts too much, like having to live inside a country-and-western song about goodlove gone bad or goodkids gone dead. Nothing that hurts this much can do you any good. Shove it back in the glove compartment, buddy. Forget about it. Next week, when this madness is all over, you can trade the wagon with the fake can of nuts still in i’t.

Why not? It’s the sort of cheap practical joke that would appeal only to a child, or to a man like Gaunt. Forget it. ForgetAlan cut the voice off in mid-rant. He hadn’t known he could do that until this moment, and it was good knowledge to have, knowledge that might be useful in the future… if he had a future, that was. He looked more closely at the can, turning it this way and that, really looking at it for the first time, seeing it not as a sappy memento of his lost son but as an object which was as much a tool of misdirection as his hollow magic wand, his silk top-hat with the false bottom, or the Folding Flower Trick which still nestled beneath his watchband.

Magic-wasn’t that what this was all about? It was mean-spirited magic, granted; magic calculated not to make people gasp and laugh but to turn them into angry charging bulls, but it was magic, just the same. And what was the basis of all magic? Misdirection. It was a five-foot-long snake hidden inside a can of nuts… or, he thought, thinking of Polly, it’s a disease that looks like a cure.

He opened the car door, and when he got out into the pouring rain, he was still carrying the fake can of nuts in his left hand.

Now that he had drawn back a little from the dangerous lure of sentiment, he remembered his opposition to the purchase of this thing with something like amazement. All his life he had been fascinated with magic, and of course he would have been entranced by the old snake-in-a-can-of-nuts trick as a kid. So why had he spoken to Todd in such an unfriendly way when the boy had wanted to buy it, and then pretended not to see the boy’s hurt? Had it been jealousy of Todd’s youth and enthusiasm? An inability to remember the wonder of simple things? What?

He didn’t know. He only knew it was exactly the sort of trick a Mr. Gaunt would understand, and he wanted it with him now.

Alan bent back into the car, grabbed a flashlight from the small box of jumbled tools sitting on the rear seat, then walked past the nose of Mr. Gaunt’s Tucker Talisman (still without noticing it), and passed under the deep-green awning of Needful Things.

8

Well, here I am. Here I am at last.

Alan’s heart was pounding hard but steadily in his chest. In his mind, the faces of his son and his wife and Sean Rusk seemed to have combined. He glanced at the sign in the window again and then tried the door. It was locked. Overhead, the canvas awning rippled and snapped in the howling wind.

He had tucked the Tastee-Munch can into his shirt. Now he touched it with his right hand and seemed to draw some indescribable but perfectly real comfort from it.

“Okay,” he muttered. “Here I come, ready or not.” He reversed the flashlight and used the handle to smash a hole in the glass. He steeled himself for the wail of the burglar alarm, but it didn’t come.

Either Gaunt hadn’t turned it on or there was no alarm. He reached through the jagged hole and tried the inside knob. It turned, and for the first time, Alan Pangborn stepped into Needful Things.

The smell hit him first; it was deep and still and dusty. it wasn’t the smell of a new shop but of a place which had been untenanted for months or even years. Holding his gun in his right hand, he shone the flashlight around with his left. it illuminated a bare floor, bare walls, and a number of glass cases. The cases were empty, the stock was gone. Everything was blanketed by a thick fall of dust, and the dust was undisturbed by any mark.