Her hands felt like crude ceramic figures baked until they were on the verge of cracking. The pain was both hot and cold, set deep in her flesh like complex networks of poisoned wires. She held her hands up despairingly, scarecrow hands, awful, deformed hands, and downstairs the doorbell chimed again. She uttered a distracted little cry.
She went out onto the landing with her hands held out in front of her like the paws of a dog sitting up to beg a sweet. “Who is it?” she called down. Her voice was hoarse, gummy with sleep.
Her tongue tasted like something which had been used to line a cat-box.
“It’s Nettle!” The voice drifted back up. “Are you okay, Polly?”
Nettle. Good God, what was Nettle doing here before the crack of dawn on Sunday morning?
“I’m fine!” she called back. “I have to put something on! Use your key, dear!”
When she heard Nettle’s key begin to rattle in the lock, Polly hurried back into her bedroom. She glanced at the clock on the table beside her bed and saw that dawn had cracked several hours before. Nor had she come back to put something on; her housecoat would do for Nettle just fine. But she needed a pill. She had never, never in her life, needed a pill as badly as she did now.
She didn’t know how bad her condition really was until she tried to take one. The pills-actually caplets-were in a small glass dish on the mantel of the room’s ornamental fireplace. She was able to get her hand into the dish all right, but found herself completely unable to grasp one of the caplets once it was there. Her fingers were like the pincers of some machine which had frozen solid for lack of oil.
She tried harder, concentrating all of her will on making her fingers close upon one of the gelatine capsules. She was rewarded with slight movement and a great burst of agony. That was all. She made a little muttering sound of pain and frustration.
“Polly?” From the foot of the stairs now, Nettle’s voice was concerned. People in Castle Rock might consider Nettle vague, Polly thought, but when it came to the vicissitudes of Polly’s infirmity, Nettle was not vague at all. She had been around the house too long to be fooled… and had loved her too well. “Polly, are you really all right?”
“Be right down, dear!” she called back, trying to sound bright and lively. And as she took her hand out of the glass dish and bent her head over it, she thought, Please, God. Don’t let her come up now.
Don’t let her see me doing this.
She lowered her face into the dish like a dog about to drink from its bowl and stuck out her tongue. Pain, shame, horror, and most of all a dark depression, all maroons and grays, enfolded her.
She pressed her tongue against one of the caplets until it stuck.
She drew it into her mouth, now not a dog but an anteater ingesting a tasty morsel, and swallowed.
As the pill traced its tiny hard trail down her throat, she thought again: I would give anything to be free of this. Anything.
Anything at all.
4
Hugh Priest rarely dreamed anymore; these days he did not go to sleep so much as fall unconscious. But he’d had a dream last night, a real lulu. The dream had told him everything he had to know, and everything he was supposed to do.
In it he had been sitting at his kitchen table, drinking a beer and watching a game-show called Sale of the Century. All the things they were giving away were things he had seen in that shop, Needful Things. And all of the contestants were bleeding from their ears and the corners of their eyes. They were laughing, but they looked terrified.
All at once a muffled voice began to call, “Hugh! Hugh! Let me out, Hugh!”
It was coming from the closet. He went over and opened it, ready to coldcock whoever was hiding inside. But there was no one; only the usual tangle of boots, scarves, coats, fishing tackle, and his two shotguns.
“Hugh!”
He looked up, because the voice was coming from the shelf.
It was the fox-tail. The fox-tail was talking. And Hugh recognized the voice at once. It was the voice of Leland Gaunt. He had taken the brush down, revelling again in its plushy softness, a texture that was a little like silk, a little like wool, and really like nothing at all but its own secret self.
“Thanks, Hugh,” the fox-tail said. “It’s really stuffy in here.
And you left an old pipe on the shelf. It really stinks. Whew!”
“Did you want to go to another place?” Hugh had asked. He felt a little stupid talking to a fox-tail, even in a dream.
“No-I’m getting used to it. But I have to talk to you. You have to do something, remember? You promised.
“Crazy Nettle,” he agreed. “I have to play a trick on Crazy Nettle.”
“That’s right,” said the fox-tail, “and you have to do it as soon as you wake up. So listen.”
Hugh had listened.
The fox-tail had told him no one would be home at Nettle’s but the dog, but now that Hugh was actually here, he decided it would be wise to knock. He did so. From inside he heard claws come clicking rapidly across a wooden floor, but nothing else. He knocked again, just to be safe. There was a single stern bark from the other side of the door.
“Raider?” Hugh asked. The fox-tail had told him that was the dog’s name. Hugh thought it was a pretty good name, even if the lady who thought it up was nuttier than a fruitcake.
The single bark came again, not quite so stern this time.
Hugh took a key-ring from the breast pocket of the plaid hunting jacket he wore and examined it. He’d had this ring for a long time, and could no longer even remember what some of the keys had gone to.
But four of them were skeleton keys, easily identified by their long barrels, and these were the ones he wanted.
Hugh glanced around once, saw the street was as deserted as it had been when he first arrived, and began to try the keys one by one.
5
When Nettle saw Polly’s white, puffy face and haggard eyes, her own fears, which had gnawed at her like sharp weasel’s teeth as she walked over, were forgotten. She didn’t even have to look at Polly’s hands, still held out at waist level (it hurt dreadfully to let them hang down when it was like this), to know how things were with her.
The lasagna was thrust unceremoniously on a table by the foot of the stairs. If it had gone tumbling to the floor, Nettle wouldn’t have given it a second glance. The nervous woman Castle Rock had grown used to seeing on its streets, the woman who looked as if she were skulking away from some nasty piece of mischief even if she was only on her way to the post office, was not here. This was a different Nettle; Polly Chalmers’s Nettle.
Come on,” she said briskly. “Into the living room. I’ll get the thermal gloves.”
“Nettle, I’m all right,” Polly said weakly. “I just took a pill, and I’m sure that in a few minutes-” But Nettle had an arm around her and was walking her into the living room. “What did you do? Did you sleep on them, do you think?”
“No-that would have woken me. It’s just. She laughed.
It was a weak, bewildered sound. “It’s just pain. I knew today was going to be bad, but I had no idea how bad. And the thermal gloves don’t help.”
“Sometimes they do. You know that sometimes they do. Now just sit there.”
Nettle’s tone brooked no refusal. She stood beside Polly until Polly sat in an overstuffed armchair. Then she went into the downstairs bathroom to get the thermal gloves. Polly had given up on them a year ago, but Nettle, it seemed, held for them a reverence that was almost superstitious. Nettle’s version of chicken soup, Alan had once called them, and they had both laughed.