Stephen King - Needful Things

“Mr. Gaunt always knows best.”

“mr. Gaunt always knows best.”

“Right! just like Father,” Mr. Gaunt said, and then laughed hideously. It was a sound like plates of rock moving deep in the earth, and the color of his eyes shifted rapidly from b!ue to green to brown to black when he did it. “Now, Nettle listen carefully.

You have this one little errand to do for me and then you can go home. Do you understand?”

Nettle understood.

And she listened very carefully.

South Paris is a small and squalid milltown eighteen miles northeast of Castle Rock. It is not the only jerkwater Maine town named after a European city or country; there is a Madrid (the natives pronounce it Mad-drid), a Sweden, an Etna, a Calais (pronounced so it rhymes with Dallas), a Cambridge, and a Frankfort. Someone may know how or why so many wide places in the road ended up with such an exotic variety of names, but I do not.

What I do know is that about twenty years ago a very good French chef decided to move out of New York and open his own restaurant in Maine’s Lakes Region, and that he further decided there could be no better place for such a venture than a town named South Paris. Not even the stench of the tanning mills could dissuade him. The result was an eating establishment called Maurice.

It is still there to this day, on Route 117 by the railroad tracks and just across the road from McDonald’s. And it was to Maurice that Danforth “Buster” Keeton took his wife for lunch on Sunday, October 13th.

Myrtle spent a good deal of that Sunday in an ecstatic daze, and the fine food at Maurice was not the reason. For the last few months-almost a year, really-life with Danforth had been extremely unpleasant. He ignored her almost completely… except when he yelled at her. Her self-esteem, which had never been very high, plummeted to new depths. She knew as well as any woman ever has that abuse does not have to be administered with the fists to be effective. Men as well as women can wound with their tongues, and Danforth Keeton knew how to use his very well; he had inflicted a thousand invisible cuts on her with its sharp sides over the last year.

She did not know about the gambling-she really believed he went to the track mostly to watch. She didn’t know about the embezzlement, either. She did know that several members of Danforth’s family had been unstable, but she did not connect this behavior with Danforth himself. He didn’t drink to excess, didn’t forget to put on his clothes before going out in the morning, didn’t talk to people who weren’t there, and so she assumed he was all right. She assumed, in other words, that something was wrong with her. That at some point this something had simply caused Danforth to stop loving her.

She had spent the last six months or so trying to face the bleak prospect of the thirty or even forty loveless years which lay ahead of her as this man’s mate, this man who had become by turns angry, coldly sarcastic, and unmindful of her. She had become just another piece of furniture as far as Danforth was concerned… unless, of course, she got in his way. If she did that-if his supper wasn’t ready for him when he was ready for it, if the floor in his study looked dirty to him, even if the sections of the newspaper were in the wrong order when he came to the breakfast table he called her dumb. He told her that if her ass fell off, she wouldn’t know where to find it. He said that if brains were black powder, she wouldn’t be able to blow her nose without a blasting cap. At first she had tried to defend herself from these tirades, but he cut her defenses apart as if they were the walls of a child’s cardboard castle.

If she grew angry in turn, he overtopped her into white rages that terrified her. So she had given anger up and had descended into dooms of bewilderment instead. These days she only smiled helplessly in the face of his anger, promised to do better, and went to their room, where she lay on the bed and wept and wondered whatever was to become of her and wished-wished-wished that she had a friend she could talk to.

She talked to her dolls instead. She’d started collecting them during the first few years of her marriage, and had always kept them in boxes in the attic. During the last year, though, she had brought them down to the sewing room, and sometimes, after her tears were shed, she crept into the sewing room and played with them. They never shouted. They never ignored. They never asked her how she got so stupid, did it come naturally or did she take lessons.

She had found the most wonderful doll of all yesterday, in the new shop.

And today everything had changed.

This morning, to be exact.

Her hand crept under the table and she pinched herself (not for the first time) just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. But after the pinch she was still here in Maurice, sitting in a bar of bright October sunshine, and Danforth was still there, across the table from her, eating with hearty good appetite, his face wreathed in a smile that looked almost alien to her, because she hadn’t seen one there in such a long time.

She didn’t know what had caused the change and was afraid to ask.

She knew he had gone off to Lewiston Raceway last night, just as he almost always did during the evening (presumably because the people he met there were more interesting than the people he met every day in Castle Rock-his wife, for instance), and when she woke up this morning, she expected to find his half of the bed empty (or not slept in at all, which would mean that he had spent the rest of the night dozing in his study chair) and to hear him downstairs, muttering to himself in his bad-tempered way.

Instead, he had been in bed beside her, wearing the striped red pajamas she had given him for Christmas last year. This was the first time she had ever seen him wear them-the first time they’d been out of the box, as far as she knew. He was awake. He rolled over on his side to face her, already smiling. At first the smile frightened her. She thought it might mean he was getting ready to kill her.

Then he touched her breast and winked. “Want to, Myrt? Or is it too early in the day for you?”

So they had made love, for the first time in over five months they had made love, and he had been absolutely magnificent, and now here they were, lunching at Maurice on an early Sunday afternoon like a pair of young lovers. She didn’t know what had happened to work this wondrous change in her husband, and didn’t care. She only wanted to enjoy it, and to hope it would last.

“Everything okay, Myrt?” Keeton asked, looking up from his plate and scrubbing vigorously at his face with his napkin.

She reached shyly across the table and touched his hand.

“Everything’s fine. Everything is just… just wonderful.”

She had to take her hand away so she could dab hastily at her eyes with her napkin.

Keeton went on chowing into his hoof borgnine, or whatever it was the Froggies called it, with great appetite. The reason for his happiness was simple. Every horse he had picked yesterday afternoon with the help of Winning Ticket had come in for him last night. Even Malabar, the thirty-to-one shot in the tenth race. He had come back to Castle Rock not so much driving as floating on air, with better than eighteen thousand dollars stuffed into his overcoat pockets. His bookie was probably still wondering where the money went. Keeton knew; it was safely tucked away in the back of his study closet. It was in an envelope. The envelope was in the Winning Ticket box, along with the precious game itself.

He had slept well for the first time in months, and when he woke up, he had a glimmering of an idea about the audit. A glimmering wasn’t much, of course, but it was better than the confused darkness that had been roaring through his head since that awful letter came.