Stephen King - Needful Things

It didn’t happen, but she knew it was time to leave. She had overstayed her welcome here, and besides-back in her own bedroom, The King awaited. Myra hurried down the driveway, reseating the bayonet in its scabbard and then dropping the tail of Chuck’s shirt over it again.

One car passed her before she got back to The Mellow Tiger, but it was going the other way-assuming the driver wasn’t ogling her in his rearview mirror, he would have seen only her back.

She slid into her own car, yanked the rubber band out of her hair, allowing her locks to fall around her face in their usual limp fashion, and drove back to town. She did this one-handed. Her other hand had business to take care of below her waist. She let herself into her house and bounded up the stairs by twos. The picture was on the bed, where she had left it. Myra kicked off her shoes, pushed her jeans down, grabbed the picture, and jumped into bed with it. The cracks in the glass were gone; The King had been restored to youth and beauty.

The same could be said for Myra Evans… at least temporarily.

Over the door, the silver bell sang its ’ingly little tune.

“Hello, Mrs. Potter!” Leland Gaunt said cheerily. He made a tick-mark on the sheet by the cash register. “I’d about decided you weren’t going to come by.”

“I almost didn’t,” Lenore Potter said. She looked upset, distracted. Her silver hair, usually coiffed to perfection, had been tacked up in an indifferent bun. An inch of her slip was showing beneath the hem of her expensive gray twill skirt, and there were dark circles beneath her eyes. The eyes themselves were restless, shooting from place to place with baleful, angry suspicion.

“It was the Howdy Doody puppet you wanted to look at, wasn’t it?

I believe you told me you have quite a collection of children’s memorab-”

“I really don’t believe I can look at such gentle things today, you know,” Lenore said. She was the wife of the richest lawyer in Castle Rock, and she spoke in clipped, lawyerly tones. “I’m in an extremely poor frame of mind. I’m having a magenta day. Not just red, but magenta!”

Mr. Gaunt stepped around the main display case and came toward her, his face instantly filled with concern and sympathy. “My dear lady, what’s happened? You look dreadful!”

“Of course I look dreadful!” she snapped. “The normal flow of my psychic aura has been disrupted-badly disrupted! Instead of blue, the color of calm and serenity, my entire calava has gone bright magenta!

And it’s all the fault of that bitch across the street!

That high-box bitch!”

Mr. Gaunt made peculiar soothing gestures which never quite touched any part of Lenore Potter’s body. “What bitch is that, Mrs.

Potter?” he asked, knowing perfectly well.

“Bonsaint, of course! Bonsaint! That nasty lying Stephanie Bonsaint! My aura has never been magenta before, Mr. Gaunt! Deep pink a few times, yes, and once, after I was almost run down in the street by a drunk in Oxford, I think it might have turned red for a few minutes, but it has never been magenta! I simply cannot live like this!”

“Of course not,” Mr. Gaunt soothed. “No one could expect you to, my dear.”

His eyes finally captured hers. This was not easy with Mrs.

Potter’s gaze darting around in such a distracted manner, but he did finally manage. And when he did, Lenore calmed almost at once.

Looking into Mr. Gaunt’s eyes, she discovered, was almost like looking into her own aura when she had been doing all her exercises, eating the right foods (bean-sprouts and tofu, mostly), and maintaining the surfaces of her calava with at least an hour of meditation when she arose in the morning and again before she went to bed at night. His eyes were the faded, serene blue of desert skies.

“Come,” he said. “Over here.” He led her to the short row of three high-backed plush velvet chairs where so many citizens of Castle Rock had sat over the last week. And when she was seated, Mr. Gaunt invited: “Tell me all about it.”

“She’s always hated me,” Lenore said. “She’s always thought that her husband hasn’t risen in the Firm as fast as she wanted because my husband kept him back. And that I put him up to it. She is a woman with a small mind and a big bosom and a dirty-gray aura.

You know the type.”

“Indeed,” Mr. Gaunt said.

“But I never knew how much she hated me until this morning!”

Lenore Potter was growing agitated again in spite of Mr. Gaunt’s settling influence. “I got up and my flowerbeds were absolutely ruined! Ruined! Everything that was lovely yesterday is dying today!

Everything which was soothing to the aura and nourishing to the calava has been murdered! By that bitch! By that fucking Bonsaint BITCH!”

Lenore’s hands closed into fists, hiding the elegantly manicured nails. The fists drummed on the carved arms of the chair.

“Chrysanthemums, cimicifuga, asters, marigolds… that bitch came over in the night and tore them all out of the ground! Threw them everywhere! Do you know where my ornamental cabbages are this morning, Mr. Gaunt?”

“No-where?” he asked her tenderly, still making those stroking motions just above her body.

He actually had a good idea of where they were, and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt who was responsible for the calavadestroying mess: Melissa Clutterbuck. Lenore Potter did not suspect Deputy Clutterbuck’s wife because she didn’t know Deputy Clutterbuck’s wife-nor did Melissa Clutterbuck know Lenore, except to say hello to on the street. There had been no malice on Melissa’s part (except, of course, Mr. Gaunt thought, for the normal malicious pleasure anyone feels when tearing hell out of someone else’s much-beloved possessions). She had torn up Lenore Potter’s flowerbeds in partial payment for a set of Limoges china. When you got right down to the bottom of the thing, it was strictly business.

Enjoyable, yes, Mr. Gaunt thought, but whoever said that business always had to be a drag?

“My flowers are in the street!” Lenore shouted. “In the middle of Castle View! She didn’t miss a trick! Even the African daisies are gone! All gone! All… gone!”

“Did you see her?”

“I didn’t need to see her! She’s the only one who hates me enough to do something like that. And the flowerbeds are full of the marks of her high heels. I swear that little trollop wears her heels even to bed.

“Oh Mr. Gaunt,” she wailed, “every time I close my eyes everything goes all purple! What am I going to do?”

Mr. Gaunt said nothing for a moment. He only looked at her, fixing her with his eyes until she grew calm and distant.

“Is that better?” he asked finally.

“Yes!” she replied in a faint, relieved voice. “I believe I can see the blue again…”

“But you’re too upset to even think about shopping.”

“Yes.

“Considering what that bitch did to you.”

“Yes…”

“She ought to pay.”

“Yes.”

“If she ever tries anything like that again, she will pay.”

“Yes!”

“I may have just the thing. Sit right there, Mrs. Potter. I’ll be back in a l’iffy- In the meantime, think blue thoughts.”

“Blue,” she agreed dreamily.

When Mr. Gaunt returned, he put one of the automatic pistols Ace had brought back from Cambridge into Lenore Potter’s hands.

It was fully loaded and gleamed a greasy blue-black under the display lights.

Lenore raised the gun to eye level. She looked at it with deep pleasure and even deeper relief “Now, I would never urge anyone to shoot anyone else,” Mr.

Gaunt said. “Not without a very good reason, at least. But you sound like a woman who might have a very good reason, Mrs. Potter.