Ace didn’t know. The town looked smaller, grimier, and emptier than he remembered. He supposed Pangborn was around someplace, and pretty soon old Bill Fullerton would get him on the honker and tell him who was back in town. Then Pangborn would find him and ask him what he thought he was doing here. He would ask if Ace had a job. He didn’t, and he couldn’t even claim he had come back to visit his unc, because Pop had been in his junkshop when the place burned down. Okay then, Ace, Pangborn would say, why don’t you just jump back into your street machine and cruise on out of here?
And what was he going to say to that?
Ace didn’t know-he only knew that the flash of dark-blue light with which he had awakened was still glimmering somewhere inside him.
The lot where the Emporium Galorium had stood was still vacant, he saw. Nothing there but weeds, a few charred board-ends, and some road-litter. Broken glass twinkled back the sun in eyewatering shards of hot light. There was nothing there to look at, but Ace wanted to look, anyway. He started across the street. He had almost reached the far side when the green awning two storefronts up caught his eye.
the side of the awning read. Now what kind of name for a store was that? Ace walked up the street to see. He could look at the vacant lot where his uncle’s tourist-trap had stood later on; he didn’t think anyone was going to move it.
The first thing to catch his eye was the
sign. He paid it little attention. He didn’t know what he had come back to Castle Rock for, but a stockboy job wasn’t it.
There were a number of rather classy-looking items in the window-the sort of stuff he would have taken away if he were doing a little nightwork in some rich guy’s house. A chess set with carved jungle animals for pieces. A necklace of black pearls-it looked valuable to Ace, but he supposed the pearls were probably artificial.
Surely no one in this dipshit burg could afford a string of genuine black pearls. Good job, though; they looked real enough to him.
AndAce looked at the book behind the pearls with narrowed eyes.
It had been set up on its spine so someone looking in the window could easily see the cover, which depicted the silhouettes of two men standing on a ridge at night. One had a pick, the other a shovel.
They appeared to be digging a hole. The title of the book was Lost and Buried Treasures of New England. The author’s name was printed below the picture in small white letters.
It was Reginald Merrill.
Ace went to the door and tried the knob. It turned easily. The bell overhead jingled. Ace Merrill entered Needful Things.
“No,” Ace said, looking at the book Mr. Gaunt had taken from the window display and put into his hands. “This isn’t the one I want.
You must have gotten the wrong one.”
“It’s the only book in the show window, I assure you,” Mr.
Gaunt said in a mildly puzzled voice. “You can look for yourself if you don’t believe me.”
For a moment Ace did almost that, and then he let out an exasperated little sigh. “No, that’s okay,” he said.
The book the shopkeeper had handed him was Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. What had happened was clear enoughhe’d had Pop on his mind, and he’d made a mistake. The real mistake, though, had been coming back to Castle Rock in the first place. Why in the fuck had he done it?
“Listen, this is a very interesting place you’ve got here, but I ought to get a move on. I’ll see you another time, Mr.-”
“Gaunt,” the shopkeeper said, putting out his hand. “Leland Gaunt.”
Ace put his own hand out and it was swallowed up. A great, galvanizing power seemed to rush through him at the moment of contact.
His mind was filled with that dark-blue light again: a huge, sheeting flare of it this time.
He took his hand back, dazed and weak-kneed.
“What was that?” he whispered.
“I believe they call it’an attention-getter,’ “Mr. Gaunt said.
He spoke with quiet composure. “You’ll want to pay attention to me, Mr. Merrill.”
“How did you know my name? I didn’t tell you my name.”
“Oh, I know who you are,” Mr. Gaunt said with a little laugh.
“I’ve been expecting you.”
“How could you be expecting me? I didn’t even know I was coming until I got in the damn car.”
“Excuse me for a moment, please.”
Gaunt stepped back toward the window, bent, and picked up a sign which was leaning against the wall. Then he leaned into the window, removed
and put up
in its place.
“Why’d you do that?” Ace felt like a man who has stumbled into a wire fence with a moderate electric charge running through it.
“It’s customary for shopkeepers to remove help-wanted signs when they have filled the vacant position,” Mr. Gaunt said, a little severely. “My business in Castle Rock has grown at a very satisfying rate, and I now find I need a strong back and an extra pair of hands.
I tire so easily these days.”
“Hey, I don’t-”
“I also need a driver,” Mr. Gaunt said. “Driving is, I believe, your main skill. Your first job, Ace, will be to drive to Boston. I have an automobile parked in a garage there. It will amuse you-it’s a Tucker.”
“A Tucker?” For a moment Ace forgot that he hadn’t come to town to take a stockboy’s job… or a chauffeur’s either, for that matter.
“You mean like in that movie?”
“Not exactly,” Mr. Gaunt said. He walked behind the counter where his old-fashioned cash register stood, produced a key, and unlocked the drawer beneath. He took out two small envelopes.
One of them he laid on the counter. The other he held out to Ace.
“It’s been modified in some ways. Here. The keys.”
“Hey, now, wait a minute! I told you-” Mr. Gaunt’s eyes were some strange color Ace could not quite pick up, but when they first darkened and then blazed out at him, Ace felt his knees grow watery again.
“You’re in a jam, Ace, but if you don’t stop behaving like an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand, I believe I am going to lose interest in helping you. Shop assistants are a dime a dozen. I know, believe me. I’ve hired hundreds of them over the years. Perhaps thousands. So stop fucking around and take the keys.”
Ace took the little envelope. As the tips of his fingers touched the tips of Mr. Gaunt’s, that dark, sheeting fire filled his head once more. He moaned.
“You’ll drive your car to the address I give you,” Mr. Gaunt said, “and park it in the space where mine is now stored. I’ll expect you back by midnight at the latest. I think it will actually be a good deal earlier than that.
“My car is much faster than it looks.”
He grinned, revealing all those teeth.
Ace tried again. “Listen, Mr.-”
“Gaunt.”
Ace nodded, his head bobbing up and down like the head of a marionette controlled by a novice puppet-master. “Under other circumstances, I’d take you up on it. You’re… interesting.” It wasn’t the word he wanted, but it was the best one he could wrap his tongue around for the time being. “But you were right-I am in a jackpot, and if I don’t find a large chunk of cash in the next two weeks-”
“Well, what about the book?” Mr. Gaunt asked. His tone was both amused and reproving. “Isn’t that why you came in?”
“It isn’t what I-” He discovered he was still holding it in his hand, and looked down at it again. The picture was the same, but the title had changed back to what he had seen in the show window: Lost and Buried Treasures of New England, by Reginald Merrill.
“What is this?” he asked thickly. But suddenly he knew. He wasn’t in Castle Rock at all; he was at home in Mechanic Falls, lying in his own dirty bed, dreaming all this.