It was as close as Norris dared go. He tapped Seat’s leg with his foot. Seat brought the cruiser to a gentle halt in the brick-and rubble-littered street.
Move, Norris prayed. One of you please mov I don’t care which one, and it only has to be a little, but please, please move.
He did not notice the door of Needful Things open; his concentration was too fiercely focused on the man with the gun and the hostage. Nor did he see Mr. Leland Gaunt walk out of his shop and stand beneath the green awning.
13
“That money was mine, you bastard!” Ace shouted at Alan, “and if you want this bitch back with all her original equipment, you better tell me what the hell you did with it!”
Alan had stepped out of the station wagon. “Ace, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Wrong answer!” Ace screamed. “You know exactly what I’m talking about! POP’s money! In the cans! If you want the bitch, tell me what you did with it! This offer is good for a limited time only, you cocksucker!”
From the tail of his eye, Alan caught movement from below them on Main Street- It was a cruiser, and he thought it was a County unit, but he did not dare take a closer look. If Ace knew he was being blindsided, he would take polly’s life. He would do it in less time than it took to blink.
So instead he fixed his sight-line upon her face. Her dark eyes were weary and filled with pain… but they were not afraid.
Alan felt sanity begin to fill him again- It was funny stuff, sanity.
When it was taken away, you didn’t know it. You didn’t feel its departure. You only really knew it when it was restored like some rare wild bird which lived and sang within you not by decree but by choice.
“He got it wrong,” he said quietly to Polly. “Gaunt got it wrong on the tape.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Ace’s voice was Jagged, coked-up. He dug the muzzle of the automatic into Polly’s temple.
Of all of them, only Alan saw the door of Needful Things open stealthily, and he would not have seen it if he had not directed his gaze so stringently away from the cruiser which was creeping up the street. Only Alan saw-ghostly, at the very edge of vision-the tall figure that came out, a figure dressed not in a sport-coat or a smoking jacket but in a black broadcloth coat.
A travelling coat.
In one hand Mr. Gaunt held an old-fashioned valise, the sort in which a drummer or a travelling salesman might have carried his goods and samples in days of old. It was made of hyena-hide, and it was not still. It puffed and bulged, puffed and bulged below the long white fingers which gripped its handle. And from inside, like the sound of a distant wind or the ghostly cry one hears in hightension wires, came the faint sound of screams. Alan did not hear this horrid and unsettling sound with his ears; he seemed to hear it with his heart and in his mind.
Gaunt stood beneath the canopy where he could see both the approaching cruiser and the tableau by the station wagon, and in his eyes there was an expression of dawning irritation. perhaps even concern.
Alan thought: And he doesn’t know that I’ve seen him. I’m almost sure of that. Please, God, let me be right.
14
Alan didn’t answer Ace. He spoke to Polly instead, tightening his hands on the Tastee-Munch can as he did. Ace hadn’t even noticed the can, it seemed, very likely because Alan had made absolutely no attempt to hide it.
“Annie wasn’t wearing her seatbelt that day,” Alan said to Polly.
“Did I ever tell you that?”
“I… I don’t remember, Alan.”
Behind Ace, Norris Ridgewick was pulling himself laboriously out of the cruiser’s window.
“That’s why she went through the windshield.” In just a moment I’m going to have to go for one of them, he thought. Ace or Mr.
Gaunt? Which way? Which one? “That’s what I always wondered about-why her belt wasn’t buckled. She didn’t even think about it, the habit was so deeply ingrained. But she didn’t do it that day.”
“Last chance, cop!” Ace shrieked. “I’ll take my money or this bitch!
You choose!”
Alan went on ignoring him. “But on the tape, her belt was still buckled,” Alan said, and suddenly he knew. Knowing rose in the middle of his mind like a clear silver column of flame. “It was still buckled AND YOU FUCKED UP, MR. GAUNT!”
Alan wheeled toward the tall figure standing beneath the green canopy eight feet away. He grasped the top of the Tastee-Munch can as he took a single large step toward Castle Rock’s newest entrepreneur, and before Gaunt could do anything-before his eyes could do more than begin to widen-Alan had spun the lid off Todd’s last joke, the one Annie had said to let him have because he would only be young once.
The snake sprang out, and this time it was no joke.
This time it was real.
It was only real for a few seconds, and Alan never knew if anyone else had seen it, but Gaunt did; of that he was absolutely sure. It was long-much longer than the crepe-paper snake that had flown out a week or so ago when he had removed the can’s top in the Municipal Building parking lot after his long, solitary ride back from Portland.
Its skin glowed with a shifting iridescence and its body was mottled with diamonds of red and black, like the skin of some fabulous rattler. its jaws opened as it struck the shoulder of Leland Gaunt’s broadcloth coat, and Alan squinted against the dazzling, chromic gleam of its fangs. He saw the deadly triangular head draw back, then dart down toward Gaunt’s neck. He saw Gaunt grab for it and seize it… but before he did, the snake’s fangs sank into his flesh, not once but several times. The triangular head blurred up and down like the bobbin of a sewing machine.
Gaunt screamed-although with pain, fury, or both, Alan could not tell-and dropped the valise in order to seize the snake with both hands. Alan saw his chance and leaped forward as Gaunt held the whipping snake away from him, then hurled it to the sidewalk at his booted feet. When it landed, it was again what it had been before-nothing but a cheap novelty, five feet of spring wrapped in faded green crepe-paper, the sort of trick only a kid like Todd could truly love and only a creature like Gaunt could truly appreciate.
Blood was trickling from Gaunt’s neck in tiny threads from three pairs of holes. He wiped it away absently with one of his strange, long-fingered hands as he bent to pick up his valise… and stopped suddenly. Bent over like that, long legs cocked, long arm reaching, he looked like a woodcut of Ichabod Crane. But what he was reaching for was no longer there. The hyena-hide valise with its gruesome, respiring sides now sat on the pavement between Alan’s feet.
He had taken it while Mr. Gaunt had been occupied with the snake, and he had done it with his customary speed and dexterity.
There was no doubt about Gaunt’s expression now; a thunderous combination of rage, hate, and unbelieving surprise contorted his features. His upper lip curled back like a dog’s muzzle, exposing the rows of jostling teeth. Now all of those teeth came to points, as if filed for the occasion.
He held his splayed hands out and hissed: “Give it to me-it’s mine!”
Alan didn’t know that Leland Gaunt had assured dozens of Castle Rock residents, from Hugh Priest to Slopey Dodd, that he hadn’t the slightest interest in human souls-poor, wrinkled, diminished things that they were. If he had known, Alan would have laughed and pointed out that lies were Mr. Gaunt’s chief stock in trade. Oh, he knew what was in the bag, all right-what was in there, screaming like powerlines in a high wind and breathing like a frightened old man on his deathbed.
He knew very well.
Mr. Gaunt’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a macabre grin.