Brian? I have some questions to ask you. They’re very serious questions. I’m afraid if you don’t come right down to answer them, I’ll have to come and get you. I’ll have to come in my police car.
Pretty soon your name is going to be in the paper, Brian, and your picture is going to be on TV, and all your friends will see it. Your mother and father will see it, too, and your little brother. And when they show the picture, the man on the news will say, “This is Brian Rusk, the boy who helped murder Wilma jerzyck and Nettle Cobb.”
“Huh-huh-who is it?” he called downstairs in a shrieky little voice.
“I dunno!” Sean had been torn away from The Transformers and sounded irritated. “I think he said his name was Crowfix. Something like that.”
Crowfix?
Brian stood in the doorway, his heart thumping in his chest.
Two big clown-spots of color now burned in his pallid face.
Not Crowfix.
Koufax.
Sandy Koufax had called him on the phone. Except Brian had a pretty good idea of who it really was.
He went down the stairs on leaden feet. The telephone handset seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds.
“Hello, Brian,” Mr. Gaunt said softly.
“Huh-Huh-Hello,” Brian replied in the same shrieky little voice.
“You don’t have a thing to worry about,” Mr. Gaunt said. “If Mrs. Mislaburski had seen you throw those rocks, she wouldn’t have asked you what was going on over there, now would she?”
“How do you know about that?” Brian again felt like throwing up.
“That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you did the right thing, Brian. Exactly the right thing. You said you thought Mr. and Mrs. jerzyck were having an argument. If the police do find you, they’ll just think you heard the person who was throwing the rocks.
They’ll think you didn’t see him because he was behind the house.”
Brian looked through the archway into the TV room to make sure Sean wasn’t snooping. He wasn’t; he was sitting cross-legged in front of the TV with a bag of microwave popcorn in his lap.
“I can’t lie!” he whispered into the telephone. “I always get caught out when I lie!”
“Not this time, Brian,” Mr. Gaunt said. “This time you’re going to do it like a champ.”
And the most horrible thing of all was that Brian thought Mr.
Gaunt knew best about this, too.
2
While her older son was thinking of suicide and then dickering in a desperate, quiet whisper with Mr. Gaunt, Cora Rusk was dancing quietly around her bedroom in her housecoat.
Except it wasn’t her bedroom.
When she put on the sunglasses Mr. Gaunt had sold her, she was in Graceland.
She danced through fabulous rooms which smelled of Pine-Sol and fried food, rooms where the only sounds were the quiet hum of air conditioners (only a few of the windows at Graceland actually opened; many were nailed shut and all were shaded), the whisper of her feet on deep-pile rugs, and the sound of Elvis singing “My Wish Came True” in his haunting, pleading voice. She danced beneath the huge chandelier of French crystal in the dining room and past the trademark stained-glass peacocks. She trailed her hands across the rich blue velvet drapes. The furniture was French Provincial. The walls were blood red.
The scene changed like a slow dissolve in a movie and Cora found herself in the basement den. There were racks of animal horns on one wall and columns of framed gold records on another.
Blank TV screens bulged from a third wall. Behind the long, curved bar were shelves stocked with Gatorade: orange, lime, lemon flavors.
The record-changer on her old portable phonograph with the picture of The King on its vinyl cover clicked. Another forty-five dropped down. Elvis began to sing “Blue Hawaii,” and Cora hulahulaed into the jungle Room with its frowning Tiki gods, the couch with the gargoyle armrests, the mirror with its lacy frame of feathers plucked from the breasts of living pheasants.
She danced. With the sunglasses she had purchased in Needful Things masking her eyes, she danced. She danced at Graceland while her son crept back upstairs and lay down on his bed again and looked at the narrow face of Sandy Koufax and thought about alibis and shotguns.
Castle Rock Middle School was a frowning pile of red brick standing between the Post Office and the Library, a holdover from the time when the town elders didn’t feel entirely comfortable with a school unless it looked like a reformatory. This one had been built in and filled that particular bill admirably. Each year the town got a little closer to deciding to build a new one, one with actual windows instead of loopholes and a playground that didn’t look like a penitentiary exercise yard and classrooms that actually stayed warm in the winter.
Sally Ratcliffe’s speech therapy room was an afterthought in the basement, tucked away between the furnace room and the supply closet with its stacks of paper towels, chalk, Ginn and Company textbooks, and barrels of fragrant red sawdust. With her teacher’s desk and six smaller pupil desks in the room there was barely enough space to turn around, but Sally had tried to make the place as cheery as possible, just the same. She knew that most kids who were tapped for speech therapy-the stutterers, the lispers, the dyslexics, the nasal blocks-found the experience a frightening, unhappy one. They were teased by their peers and closely questioned by their parents. There was no need for the environment to be unnecessarily grim on top of all that.
So there were two mobiles hanging from the dusty ceiling pipes, pictures of TV and rock stars on the walls, and a big Garfield poster on the door. The words in the balloon coming out of Garfield’s mouth said, “If a cool cat like me can talk that trash, so can you!”
Her files were woefully behind even though school had been in session for only five weeks. She had meant to spend the whole day updating them, but at quarter past one Sally gathered them all up, stuck them back into the file-drawer they had come from, slammed it shut, and locked it. She told herself she was quitting early because the day was too nice to spend cooped up in this basement room, even with the furnace mercifully silent for a change.
This wasn’t entirely the truth, however. She had very definite plans for this afternoon.
She wanted to go home, she wanted to sit in her chair by the window with the sun flooding into her lap, and she wanted to meditate upon the fabulous splinter of wood she had bought in Needful Things.
She had become more and more sure that the splinter was an authentic miracle, one of the small, divine treasures God had scattered around the earth for His faithful to find. Holding it was like being refreshed by a dipper of well-water on a hot day. Holding it was like being fed when you were hungry. Holding it was…
Well, holding it was ecstasy.
And something had been nagging at her, as well. She had put the splinter in the bottom drawer of her bedroom dresser, beneath her underwear, and she had been careful to lock her house when she went out, but she had a terrible, nagging feeling that someone might break in and steal the (relic holy relic) splinter. She knew it didn’t make much sense-what robber would want to steal an old gray piece of wood, even if he found it? But if the robber happened to touch it… if those sounds and images filled his head as they filled hers every time she closed the splinter in her small fist… well…
So she’d go home. She’d change into shorts and a halter and spend an hour or so in quiet (exaltation) meditation, feeling the floor beneath her turn into a deck which heaved slowly up and down, listening to the animals moo and low and baa, feeling the light of a different sun, waiting for the magic moment-she was sure it would come if she held the splinter long enough, if she remained very, very quiet and very, very prayerfulwhen the bow of the huge, lumbering boat should come to rest on the mountain top with a low grinding sound. She did not know why God had seen fit to bless her, of all the world’s faithful, with this bright and shining miracle, but since He had, Sally meant to experience it as fully and as completely as she could.