His horrible hands stretched out farther toward Alan.
“I’m warning you, Sheriff-don’t fuck with me. I’m not a man you want to fuck with. That hag is mine, I say!”
“I don’t think so, Mr. Gaunt. I have an idea that what’s in there is stolen property. I think you’d better-” Ace had been staring at Gaunt’s subtle but steady transformation from businessman to monster, his mouth agape. The arm around Polly’s throat had relaxed a little, and she saw her chance. She twisted her head and buried her teeth up to the gumline in Ace Merrill’s wrist. Ace shoved her away without thinking, and Polly went sprawling into the street. Ace levelled the gun at her.
“Bitch!” he cried.
15
“There,” Norris Ridgewick murmured gratefully.
He had rested the barrel of his service revolver along one of the flasher-bars. Now he held his breath, caught his lower lip in his teeth, and squeezed the trigger. Ace Merrill was suddenly hurled over the woman in the street-it was Polly Chalmers, and Norris had time to think he should have known-with the back of his head spreading and flying outward in clumps and clots.
Suddenly Norris felt very faint.
But he also felt very, very blessed.
16
Alan took no notice of Ace Merrill’s end.
Neither did Leland Gaunt.
They faced each other, Gaunt on the sidewalk, Alan standing by his station wagon in the street with the horrible, breathing valise between his feet.
Gaunt took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Something passed over his face-a kind of shimmer. When he opened his eyes again, a semblance of the Leland Gaunt who had fooled so many people in The Rock was back-charming, urbane Mr. Gaunt. He glanced down at the paper snake lying on the sidewalk, grimaced with distaste, and kicked it into the gutter. Then he looked back at Alan and held out one hand.
“Please, Sheriff-let’s not argue. The hour is late and I’m tired.
You want me out of your town, and I want to go. I will go… as soon as you give me what’s mine. And it is mine, I assure you.”
“Assure and be damned. I don’t believe you, my friend.”
Gaunt stared at Alan with impatience and anger. “That bag and its contents belong to me! Don’t you believe in free trade, Sheriff Pangborn? What are you, some sort of Communist? I dickered for each and every one of the things in that valise! I got them fair and square. If it’s a reward you want, an emolument, a commission, a finder’s fee, a dip out of the old gravy-boat, whatever you want to call it, that I can understand and that I will gladly pay. But you must see that this is a business matter, not a legal m-”
“You cheated!”
Polly screamed. “You cheated and you lied and you cozened!”
Gaunt shot her a pained glance, then looked back at Alan. “I didn’t, you know. I dealt as I always do. I show people what I have to sell… and let them make up their own minds. So… if you please…”
“I think I’ll keep it,” Alan said evenly. A small smile, as thin and sharp as a rind of November ice, touched his mouth. “Let’s just call it evidence, okay?”
“I’m afraid you can’t do that, Sheriff.” Gaunt stepped off the sidewalk and into the street. Small red pits of light glowed in his eyes. “You can die, but you can’t keep my property. Not if I mean to take it. And I do.” He began to walk toward Alan, the red pinpricks in his eyes deepening. He left a boot-track in an oatmealcolored lump of Ace’s brains as he came.
Alan felt his belly try to fold in on itself, but he didn’t move.
Instead, prompted by some instinct he made no effort to understand, he put his hands together in front of the station wagon’s left headlight. He crossed them, made a bird-shape, and began to bend his wrists rapidly back and forth.
The sparrows are flying again, Mr. Gaunt, he thought.
A large projected shadow-bird-more hawk than sparrow and unsettlingly realistic for an insubstantial shade-suddenly flapped across the false front of Needful Things. Gaunt saw it from the corner of his eye, whirled toward it, gasped, and retreated again.
“Get out of town, my friend,” Alan said. He rearranged his hands and now a large shadow-dog-perhaps a Saint Bernardslouched across the front of You Sew and Sew in the spotlight thrown by the station wagon’s headlights. And somewhere nearperhaps coincidentally, perhaps not-a dog began to bark. A large one, by the sound.
Gaunt turned in that direction. He was looking slightly harried now, and definitely off-balance.
“You’re lucky I’m cutting you loose,” Alan went on. “But what would I charge you with, come to that? The theft of souls may be covered in the legal code Brigham and Rose deal with, but I don’t think I’d find it in mine. Still, I’d advise you to go while you still can.”
“Give me my bag!”
Alan stared at him, trying to look unbelieving and contemptuous while his heart hammered away wildly in his chest. “Don’t you understand yet? Don’t you get it? You lose, Have you forgotten how to deal with that?”
Gaunt stood looking at Alan for a long second, and then he nodded"I knew I was wise to avoid you,” he said. He almost seemed to be speaking to himself. “I knew it very well. All right. You win.” He began to turn away; Alan relaxed slightly. “I’ll go-” He turned back, quick as a snake himself, so quick he made Alan look slow. His face had changed again; its human aspect was entirely gone. it was the face of a demon now, with long, deeply scored cheeks and drooping eyes that blazed with orange fire! But NOT WITHOUT MY PROPERTY!” he screamed, and leaped for the bag.
Somewhere-close by or a thousand miles away-Polly shrieked, “Look out, Alan!” but there was no time to look out; the demon, smelling like a mixture of sulphur and fried shoeleather, was upon him. There was only time to act or time to die.
Alan passed his right hand down the inside of his left wrist, groping for the tiny elastic loop protruding from his watchband.
Part of him was announcing that this would never work, even another miracle of transmutation couldn’t save him this time, because the Folding Flower Trick was used up, it wasHis thumb slipped into the loop.
The tiny paper packet snapped out. Alan thrust his hand forward, sliding the loop free for the last time as he did so.
“ABRACADABRA, YOU LYING FUCK!” he cried, and what suddenly bloomed in his hand was not a bouquet of ’ flowers but a blazing bouquet of light that lit Upper Main Street with a fabulous, shifting radiance. Yet he realized the colors rising from his fist in an incredible fountain were one color, as all the colors translated by a glass prism or a rainbow in the air are one color. He felt a jolt of power run up his arm, and for a moment he was filled with a great and incoherent ecstasy: The white! The coming of the white!
Gaunt howled with pain and rage and fear… but did not back away. Perhaps it was as Alan had suggested: it had been so long since he had lost the game that he had forgotten how. He tried to dive in below the bouquet of light shiminering over Alan’s closed hand, and for just a moment his fingers actually touched the handles of the valise between Alan’s feet.
Suddenly a foot clad in a bedroom slipper appeared-Polly’s foot.
She stamped down on Gaunt’s hand. “Leave it alone!” she screamed.
He looked up, snarling… and Alan)jammed the fistful of radiance into his face. Mr. Gaunt gave voice to a long, gibbering wail of pain and fear and scrabbled backward with blue fire dancing in his hair. The long white fingers made one final effort to seize the handles of the valise, and this time it was Alan who stamped on them.
“I’m telling you for the last time to get out,” he said in a voice he did not recognize as his own. It was too strong, too sure, too full of power. He understood he probably could not put an end to the thing which crouched before him with one cringing hand raised to shield its face from the shifting spectrum of light, but he could make it be gone.