Stephen King - Needful Things

While Henry Beaufort was starting up the road to The Mellow Tiger on the other side of the Tin Bridge, almost five miles away, Lenny was guiding his rusty Bel-Air over the top of Castle Hill.

There was a man standing in the middle of the road with his arms held up in an imperial stop gesture. The man was bare-chested and barefooted. He wore only a pair of khaki pants with the fly unzipped, and, around his neck, a moth-eaten runner of fur.

Lenny’s heart took a large wheezy leap in his scrawny chest and he slammed both of his feet, clad in a pair of slowly disintegrating high-tops, down on the brake pedal. It sank almost to the floor with an unearthly moan and the Bel-Air finally stopped less than three feet from the man in the road, whom Lenny now recognized as Hugh Priest.

Hugh had not so much as flinched. When the car stopped, he strode rapidly around to where Lenny was sitting, hands pressed against the front of his thermal undershirt, trying to catch his breath and wondering if this was the final cardiac arrest.

“Hugh!” he gasped. “Why, what in the tarnal hell are you doin?

I almost run you down! I-” Hugh opened the driver’s door and leaned in. T@e fur stole he was wearing around his neck swung forward and Lenny flinched back from it. It looked like a half-rotten fox-tail with great hunks of fur missing from the hide. It smelled bad.

Hugh seized him by the straps of his overalls and hauled him out of the car. Lenny uttered a squawk of terror and outrage.

“Sorry, oldtimer,” Hugh said in the absent voice of a man who has much greater problems than this one on his mind. “I need your car.

Mine’s a little under the weather.”

“You can’t-” But Hugh most definitely could. He tossed Lenny across the road as if the old fellow were no more than a bag of rags.

When Lenny came down, there was a clear snapping sound and his squawks turned to mournful, hooting cries of pain. He had broken one collarbone and two ribs.

Ignoring him, Hugh got behind the wheel of the Chevy, pulled the door shut, and floored the accelerator. The engine let out a scream of surprise and a blue fog of oilsmoke rolled out of the sagging tailpipe.

He was rolling down the hill at better than fifty miles an hour before Lenny Partridge could even manage to thrash his way over onto his back.

Andy Clutterbuck swung onto Castle Hill Road at approximately 3:35 p.m. He passed Lenny Partridge’s old oil-guzzler going the other way and didn’t give it a thought; Clut’s mind was totally occupied with Hugh Priest, and the rusty old Bel-Air was just another part of the scenery.

Clut didn’t have the slightest idea of why or how Hugh might have been involved in the deaths of Wilma and Nettle, but that was all right; he was a footsoldier and that was all. The whys and hows were someone else’s job, and this was one of those days when he was damned glad of it. He did know that Hugh was a nasty drunk whom the years had not sweetened. A man like that might do anything… especially when he was deep in his cups.

He’s probably at work, anyway, Clut thought, but as he approached the ramshackle house which Hugh called home, he unsnapped the strap on his service revolver just the same. A moment later he saw the sun twinkling off glass and chrome in Hugh’s driveway and his nerves cranked up until they were humming like telephone wires in a gale.

Hugh’s car was here, and when a man’s car was at home, the man usually was, too. It was just a fact of country life.

When Hugh had left his driveway on foot, he had turned right, away from town and toward the top of Castle Hill. If Clut had looked in that direction, he would have seen Lenny Partridge lying on the soft shoulder of the road and flopping around like a chicken taking a dusthath, but he didn’t look that way. All of Clut’s attention was focused on Hugh’s house. Lenny’s thin, birdlike cries went in one of Clut’s ears, directly across his brain without raising the slightest alarm, and out the other.

Clut drew his gun before getting out of the cruiser.

William Tupper was only nineteen and he was never going to be a Rhodes Scholar, but he was smart enough to be terrified by Henry’s behavior when Henry came into the Tiger at twenty minutes to four on the last real day of Castle Rock’s existence. He was also smart enough to know trying to refuse Henry the keys to his Pontiac would do no good; in his present mood, Henry (who was, under ordinary circumstances, the best boss Billy had ever had) would just knock him down and take them.

So for the first-and perhaps the only-time in his life, Billy tried guile. “Henry,” he said timidly, “you look like you could use a drink. I know I could. Why don’t you let me pour us both a short one before you go?”

Henry had disappeared behind the bar. Billy could hear him back there, rummaging around and cursing under his breath. Finally he stood up again, holding a rectangular wooden box with a small padlock on it.

He put the box on the bar and then began to pick through the ring of keys he wore at his belt.

He considered what Billy had said, began to shake his head, then reconsidered. A drink really wasn’t such a bad idea; it would settle both his hands and his nerves. He found the right key, popped the lock on the box, and laid the lock aside on the bar. “Okay,” he said. “But if we’re gonna do it, let’s do it right. Chivas. Single for you, double for me.” He pointed his finger at Billy. Billy flinchedhe was suddenly sure Henry was going to add: But you’re coming with me. “And don’t you tell your mother I let you have hard liquor in here, do you understand me?”

“Yessir,” Billy said, relieved. He went quickly to get the bottle before Henry could change his mind. “I understand you piprfect.”

Deke Bradford, the man who ran Castle Rock’s biggest and most expensive operation-Public Works-was utterly disgusted.

“Nope, he’s not here,” he told Alan. “Hasn’t been in all day.

But if you see him before I do, do me a favor and tell him he’s fired.”

“Why have you held onto him as long as you have, Deke?”

They were standing in the hot afternoon sunlight outside Town Garage #I. Off to the left, a Case Construction and Supply truck was backed up to a shed. Three men were offloading small but heavy wooden cases. A red diamond shape the symbol for high explosives-was stencilled on each of these. From inside the shed, Alan could hear the whisper of air conditioning. It seemed very odd to hear an air conditioner running this late in the year, but in Castle Rock, this had been an extremely odd week.

“I kept him on longer than I should,” Deke admitted, and ran his hands through his short, graying hair. “I did it because I thought there was a good man hidin somewhere inside of him.” Deke was one of those short, stocky men-fireplugs with legs-who always looked ready to take a large chomp out of someone’s ass. He was, however, one of the sweetest, kindest men Alan had ever met.

“When he wasn’t drunk or too hung over, wasn’t nobody in this town’d work harder for you than Hugh would. And there was something in his face made me think he might not be one of those men who just has to go on drinkin until the devil knocks em down.

I thought maybe with a steady job, he’d straighten up and fly right.

But this last week…

“What about this last week?”

“Man’s been going to hell in a handbasket. Looked like he was all the time on something, and I don’t necessarily mean booze. It seemed like his eyes sank way back in his head, and he was always lookin over your shoulder when you talked to him, never right at you. Also, he started talking to himself “About what?”