Needful Things: A Novel

by Stephen King

Genres: Media Tie-In; Horror

Synopsis

There was a new shop in town. Run by a stranger.

Needful Things, the sign said. The oddest name. A name that caused some gossip and speculation among the good folks of Castle Rock, Maine, while they waited for opening day.

Eleven-year-old Brian Rusk was the first customer and he got just what he wanted, a very rare 1956 Sandy Koufax baseball card. Signed. Cyndi Rose Martin was next. A Lalique vase. A perfect match for her living room decor.

Something for everyone. Something you really had to have. And always at a price you could just about afford. The cash price that is. Because there was another price. There always is when your heart's most secret, true desire is for sale . . .

(P)2008 Penguin Audiobooks

Release date: January 1, 2016

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 817

Sample

Ladies and gentlemen, attention, please!

  Come in close where everyone can see!

  I got a tale to tell, it isn't gonna cost a dime!

  (And if you believe that,

  we're gonna get along just fine.)

  --Steve Earle "Snake Oil"

  I have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is ...

  --Henry David Thoreau Walden

  YOU'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE.

  Sure you have. Sure. I never forget a face.

  Come on over here, let me shake your hand! Tell you somethin: I recognized you by the way you walk even before I saw your face good. You couldn't have picked a better day to come back to Castle Rock. Ain't she a corker? Hunting season will be starting up soon, fools out in the woods bangin away at anything that moves and don't wear blaze orange, and then comes the snow and sleet, but all that's for later. Right now it's October, and in The Rock we let October stay just as long as she wants to.

  As far as I'm concerned, it's the best time of year. Spring's nice here, but I'll take October over May every time. Western Maine's a part of the state that's mostly forgotten once the summer has run away and all those people with their cottages on the lake and up on the View have gone back to New York and Massachusetts. People here watch them come and go every year--hello, hello, hello; goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. It's good when they come, because they bring their city dollars, but it's good when they go, because they bring their city aggravations, too.

  It's aggravations I mostly want to talk about--can you sit a spell with me? Over here on the steps of the bandstand will be fine. The sun's warm and from here, spang in the middle of the Town Common, we can see just about all of downtown. You want to mind the splinters, that's all. The steps need to be sanded off and then repainted. It's Hugh Priest's job, but Hugh ain't got around to it yet. He drinks, you know. It ain't much of a secret. Secrets can and are kept in Castle Rock, but you have to work mighty hard to do it, and mos

t of us know it's been a long time since Hugh Priest and hard work were on good terms.

  What was that?

  Oh! That! Say, boy--ain't that a piece of work? Them fliers is up all over town! I think Wanda Hemphill (her husband, Don, runs Hemphill's Market) put most of em up all by herself. Pull it off the post and hand it to me. Don't be shy--no one's got any business stickin up fliers on the Town Common bandstand in the first place.

  Hot damn! Just look at this thing, will you? DICE AND THE DEVIL printed right up at the top. In big red letters with smoke comin off em, like these things was mailed special delivery from Tophet! Ha! Someone who didn't know what a sleepy little place this town is would think we're really goin to the dogs, I guess. But you know how things sometimes get blown out of proportion in a town this size. And the Reverend Willie's got a bee under his blanket for sure this time. No question about it. Churches in small towns ... well, I guess I don't have to tell you how that is. They get along with each other--sort of--but they ain't never really happy with each other. Everything will go along peaceful for a while, and then a squabble will break out.

  Pretty big squabble this time, though, and a lot of hard feelings. The Catholics, you see, are planning something they call Casino Nite at the Knights of Columbus Hall on the other side of town. Last Thursday of the month, I understand, with the profits to help pay for repairs on the church roof. That's Our Lady of Serene Waters--you must have passed it on your way into town, if you came by way of Castle View. Pretty little church, ain't it?

  Casino Nite was Father Brigham's idea, but the Daughters of Isabella are the ones who really picked up the ball and ran with it. Betsy Vigue in particular. I think she likes the idea of dollin up in her slinkiest black dress and dealin blackjack or spinnin a roulette wheel and sayin, "Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, please place your bets." Aw, but they all kind of like the idea, I guess. It's only nickel-dime stuff, harmless, but it seems a wee bit wicked to em just the same.

  Except it don't seem harmless to Reverend Willie, and it seems a lot more than a wee bit wicked to him and his congregation. He's actually the Reverend William Rose, and he ain't never liked Father Brigham much, nor does the Father have much use for him. (In fact, it was Father Brigham who started calling Reverend Rose "Steamboat Willie," and the Reverend Willie knows it.)

  Sparks has flown between those two particular witch-doctors before, but this Casino Nite business is a little more than sparks; I guess you could call it a brushfire. When Willie heard that the Catholics meant to spend a night gamblin at the K of C Hall, he just about hit the roof with the top of his pointy little head. He paid for those DICE AND THE DEVIL fliers out of his own pocket, and Wanda Hemphill and her sewing circle buddies put em up everywhere. Since then, the only place the Catholics and the Baptists talk to each other is in the Letters column of our little weekly paper, where they rave and rant and tell each other they're goin to hell.

  Looka down there, you'll see what I mean. That's Nan Roberts who just came out of the bank. She owns Nan's Luncheonette, and I guess she's just about the richest person in town now that old Pop Merrill's gone to that big flea-market in the sky. Also, she's been a Baptist since Hector was a pup. And comin the other way is big Al Gendron. He's so Catholic he makes the Pope look kosher, and his best friend is Irish Johnny Brigham. Now, watch close! See their noses go up? Ha! Ain't that a sketch? I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that the temperature dropped twenty degrees where they passed each other by. It's like my mother used to say--people have more fun than anybody, except for horses, and they can't.

  Now lookit over there. See that Sheriff's cruiser parked by the curb near the video shop? That's John LaPointe inside. He's supposed to be keepin an eye out for speeders--downtown's a go-slow zone, you know, especially when school lets out--but if you shade your eyes and look close, you'll see that what he's really doin is starin at a picture he took out of his wallet. I can't see it from here, but I know what it is just as well as I know my mother's maiden name. That's the snapshot Andy Clutterbuck took of John and Sally Ratcliffe at the Fryeburg State Fair, just about a year ago. John's got his arm around her in that picture, and she's holdin the stuffed bear he won her in the shootin gallery, and they both look so happy they could just about split. But that was then and this is now, as they say; these days Sally is engaged to Lester Pratt, the high school Phys Ed coach. He's a true-blue Baptist, just like herself. John hasn't got over the shock of losin her yet. See him fetch that sigh? He's worked himself into a pretty good case of the blues. Only a man who's still in love (or thinks he is) can fetch a sigh that deep.

  Trouble and aggravation's mostly made up of ordinary things, did you ever notice that? Undramatic things. Let me give you a for-instance. Do you see the fellow just going up the courthouse steps? No, not the man in the suit; that's Dan Keeton, our Head Selectman. I mean the other one--the black guy in the work fatigues. That's Eddie Warburton, the night-shift janitor in the Municipal Building. Keep your eye on him for a few seconds, and watch what he does. There! See him pause on the top step and look upstreet? I'd bet you more dollars to more doughnuts that he's looking at the Sunoco station. The Sunoco's owned and operated by Sonny Jackett, and there's been bad blood between the two of em ever since Eddie took his car there two years ago to get the drive-train looked at.

  I remember that car quite well. It was a Honda Civic, nothing special about it, except it was special to Eddie, because it was the first and only brand-new car he'd ever owned in his life. And Sonny not only did a bad job, he overcharged for it in the bargain. That's Eddie's side of the story. Warburton's just usin his color to see if he can beat me out of the repair-bill--that's Sonny's side of the story. You know how it goes, don't you?

  Well, so Sonny Jackett took Eddie Warburton to small claims court, and there was some shouting first in the courtroom and then in the hall outside. Eddie said Sonny called him a stupid nigger and Sonny said Well, I didn't call him a nigger but the rest is true enough. In the end, neither of them was satisfied. Judge made Eddie cough up fifty bucks, which Eddie said was fifty bucks too much and Sonny said wasn't anywhere near enough. Then, the next thing you know, there was an electrical fire in Eddie's new car and the way it ended was that Eddie's Civic went off to the junkyard out on Town Road #5, and now Eddie's driving an '89 Oldsmobile which blows oil. Eddie has never quite gotten over the idea that Sonny Jackett knows a lot more about that electrical fire than he's ever told.

  Boy, people have more fun than anybody, except horses, and they can't. Ain't it all just about more than you can take on a hot day?

  It's just small-town life, though--call it Peyton Place or Grover's Corners or Castle Rock, it's just folks eatin pie and drinkin coffee and talkin about each other behind their hands. There's Slopey Dodd, all by his lonesome because the other kids make fun of his stutter. There's Myrtle Keeton, and if she looks a little lonely and bewildered, as if she's not really sure where she is or what's goin on, it's because her husband (fella you just saw comin up the courthouse steps behind Eddie) hasn't seemed himself for the last six months or so. See how puffy her eyes are? I think she's been cryin, or not sleepin well, or both, don't you?

  And there goes Lenore Potter, lookin like she just stepped out of a bandbox. Goin to the Western Auto, no doubt, to see if her special organic fertilizer came in yet. That woman has got more kinds of flowers growin around her house than Carter has liver pills. Awful proud of em, she is. She ain't a great favorite with the ladies of this town--they think she's snooty, with her flowers and her mood-beads and her seventy-dollar Boston perms. They think she's snooty, and I'll tell you a secret, since we're just sittin here side by side on this splintery bandstand step. I think they're right.

  All ordinary enough, I guess you'd say, but not all our troubles in Castle Rock are ordinary; I got to set you straight on that. No one has forgotten Frank Dodd, the crossing guard who went crazy here twelve years ago and killed those women, and they haven't forgotten the dog, either, the one that came dow

n with rabies and killed Joe Camber and the old rummy down the road from him. The dog killed good old Sheriff George Bannerman, too. Alan Pangborn is doing that job these days, and he's a good man, but he won't never stack up to Big George in the eyes of the town.

  Wasn't nothing ordinary about what happened to Reginald "Pop" Merrill, either--Pop was the old miser who used to run the town junk shop. The Emporium Galorium, it was called. Stood right where that vacant lot is across the street. The place burned down awhile ago, but there are people in town who saw it (or claim they did, anyway) who'll tell you after a few beers down at The Mellow Tiger that it was a lot more than a simple fire that destroyed the Emporium Galorium and took Pop Merrill's life.

  His nephew Ace says somethin spooky happened to his uncle before that fire--somethin like on The Twilight Zone. Of course, Ace wasn't even around when his uncle bit the dust; he was finishing a four-year stretch in Shawshank Prison for breaking and entering in the nighttime. (People always knew Ace Merrill would come to a bad end; when he was in school he was one of the worst bullies this town has ever seen, and there must have been a hundred kids who crossed to the far side of the street when they saw Ace comin toward em with the buckles and zippers on his motorcycle jacket jingling and the cleats on his engineer boots clockin along the sidewalk.) Yet people believe him, you know; maybe there really was somethin strange about what happened to Pop that day, or maybe it's just more talk in Nan's over those cups of coffee and slabs of apple pie.

  It's the same here as where you grew up, most likely. People gettin het up over religion, people carryin torches, people carryin secrets, people carryin grudges ... and even a spooky story every now and then, like what might or might not have happened on the day Pop died in his junk shop, to liven up the occasional dull day. Castle Rock is still a pretty nice place to live and grow, as the sign you see when you come into town says. The sun shines pretty on the lake and on the leaves of the trees, and on a clear day you can see all the way into Vermont from the top of Castle View. The summer people argue over the Sunday newspapers, and there is the occasional fight in the parkin lot of The Mellow Tiger on Friday or Saturday night (sometimes both), but the summer people always go home and the fights always end. The Rock has always been one of the good places, and when people get scratchy, you know what we say? We say He'll get over it or She'll get over it.

Henry Beaufort, for instance, is sick of Hugh Priest kickin the Rock-Ola when he's drunk ... but Henry will get over it. Wilma Jerzyck and Nettie Cobb are mad at each other ... but Nettie will get over it (probably) and bein mad's just a way of life for Wilma. Sheriff Pangborn's still mourning his wife and younger child, who died untimely, and it was a sure-enough tragedy, but he'll get over it in time. Polly Chalmers's arthritis isn't gettin any better--in fact, it's gettin worse, a little at a time--and she may not get over it, but she'll learn to live with it. Millions have.

  We bump up against each other every now and then, but mostly things go along all right. Or always have, until now. But I have to tell you a real secret, my friend; it's mostly why I called you over once I saw you were back in town. I think trouble--real trouble--is on its way. I smell it, just over the horizon, like an out-of-season storm full of lightning. The argument between the Baptists and the Catholics over Casino Nite, the kids who tease poor Slopey about his stutter, John LaPointe's torch, Sheriff Pangborn's grief ... I think those things are going to look like pretty small potatoes next to what is coming.

  See that building across Main Street? The one three doors up from the vacant lot where the Emporium Galorium used to stand? Got a green canopy in front of it? Yup, that's the one. The windows are all soaped over because it's not quite open yet. NEEDFUL THINGS, the sign says--now just what the dog does that mean? I dunno, either, but that's where the bad feeling seems to come from.

  Right there.

  Look up the street one more time. You see that boy, don't you? The one who's walking his bike and looks like he's havin the sweetest daydream any boy ever had? Keep your eye on him, friend. I think he's the one who's gonna get it started.

  No, I told you, I dunno what ... not exactly. But watch that kid. And stick around town for a little while, would you? Things just feel wrong, and if somethin happens, it might be just as well if there was a witness.

  I know that kid--the one who's pushin his bike. Maybe you do, too. His name's Brian-something. His dad installs siding and doors over in Oxford or South Paris, I think.

  Keep an eye on him, I tell you. Keep an eye on everything. You've been here before, but things are about to change.

  I know it.

  I feel it.

  There's a storm on the way.

  PART ONE

  GRAND OPENING CELEBRATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  In a small town, the opening of a new store is big news.

  It wasn't as big a deal to Brian Rusk as it was to some; his mother, for instance. He had heard her discussing it (he wasn't supposed to call it gossiping, she had told him, because gossiping was a dirty habit and she didn't do it) at some length on the telephone with her best friend, Myra Evans, over the last month or so. The first workmen had arrived at the old building which had last housed Western Maine Realty and Insurance right around the time school let in again, and they had been busily at work ever since. Not that anyone had much idea what they were up to in there; their first act had been to put in a large display window, and their second had been to soap it opaque.

  Two weeks ago a sign had appeared in the doorway, hung on a string over a plastic see-through suction-cup.  the sign read.

 OPENING SOON

  NEEDFUL THINGS

  A NEW KIND OF STORE

  "You won't believe your eyes!"

  "It'll be just another antique shop," Brian's mother said to Myra. Cora Rusk had been reclining on the sofa at the time, holding the telephone with one hand and eating chocolate-covered cherries with the other while she watched Santa Barbara on the TV. "Just another antique shop with a lot of phony early American furniture and moldy old crank telephones. You wait and see."

  That had been shortly after the new display window had been first installed and then soaped over, and his mother spoke with such assurance that Brian should have felt sure the subject was closed. Only with his mother, no subject ever seemed to be completely closed. Her speculations and suppositions seemed as endless as the problems of the characters on Santa Barbara and General Hospital.

  Last week the first line of the sign hanging in the door was changed to read:

  GRAND OPENING OCTOBER 9TH--BRING YOUR FRIENDS!

  Brian was not as interested in the new store as his mother (and some of the teachers; he had heard them talking about it in the teachers' room at Castle Rock Middle School when it was his turn to be Office Mailman), but he was eleven. and a healthy eleven-year-old boy is interested in anything new. Besides, the name of the place fascinated him. Needful Things: what, exactly, did that mean?

  He had read the changed first line last Tuesday, on his way home from school. Tuesday afternoons were his late days. Brian had been born with a harelip, and although it had been surgically corrected when he was seven, he still had to go to speech therapy. He maintained stoutly to everyone who asked that he hated this, but he did not. He was deeply and hopelessly in love with Miss Ratcliffe, and he waited all week for his special ed class to come around. The Tuesday schoolday seemed to last a thousand years, and he always spent the last two hours of it with pleasant butterflies in his stomach.

  There were only four other kids in the class, and none of them came from Brian's end of town. He was glad. After an hour in the same room with Miss Ratcliffe, he felt too exalted for company. He liked to make his way home slowly in the late afternoon, usually pushing his bike instead of riding it, dreaming of her as yellow and gold leaves fell around him in the slanting bars of October sunlight.

  His way took him along the three-block section of Main Street across from the Town Common, and on the day he saw the sign announcing the grand opening, he had pushed his nose up to the glass of the door, hoping to see what had replaced the stodgy desks and industrial yellow walls of the departed Western Maine Realtors and Insurance Agents. His curiosity was defeated. A shade had been installed and was pulled all the way down. Brian saw nothing but his own reflected face and cupped hands.

  On Friday the 4th, there had been an ad for the new store in Castle Rock's weekly newspaper, the Call. It was surrounded by a ruffled border, and below the printed matter was a drawing of angels standing back to back and blowing long trumpets. The ad really said nothing that could not be read on the sign dangling from the suction cup: the name of the store was Needful Things, it would open for business at ten o'clock in the morning on October 9th, and, of course, "You won't believe your eyes." There was not the slightest hint of what goods the proprietor or proprietors of Needful Things intended to dispense.

  This seemed to irritate Cora Rusk a great deal--enough, anyway, for her to put in a rare Saturday-morning call to Myra.

  "I'll believe my eyes, all right," she said. "When I see those spool beds that are supposed to be two hundred years old but have Rochester, New York, stamped on the frames for anybody who cares to bend down their heads and look under the bedspread flounces to see, I'll believe my eyes just fine."

  Myra said something. Cora listened, fishing Planter's Peanuts out of the can by ones and twos and munching them rapidly. Brian and his little brother, Sean, sat on the living-room floor watching cartoons on TV. Sean was completely immersed in the world of the Smurfs, and Brian was not totally uninvolved with that community of small blue people, but he kept one ear cocked toward the conversation.

  "Ri-iiight!" Cora Rusk had exclaimed with even more assurance and emphasis than usual as Myra made some particularly trenchant point. "High prices and moldy antique telephones!"

  Yesterday, Monday, Brian had ridden through downtown right after school with two or three friends. They were across the street from the new shop, and he saw that during the day someone had put up a dark-green awning. Written across the front in white letters were the words NEEDFUL THINGS. Polly Chalmers, the lady who ran the sewing shop, was standing out on the sidewalk, hands on her admirably slim hips, looking at the awning with an expression that seemed to be equally puzzled and admiring.

  Brian, who knew a bit about awnings, admired it himself. It was the only real awning on Main Street, and it gave the new store its own special look. The word "sophisticated" was not a part of his working vocabulary, but he knew at once there was no other shop in Castle Rock which looked like this. The awning made it look like a store you might see in a television show. The Western Auto across the street looked dowdy and countrified by comparison.

  When he got home, his mother was on the sofa, watching Santa Barbara, eating a Little Debbie Creme Pie, and drinking Diet Coke. His mother always drank diet soda while she watched the afternoon shows. Brian was not sure why, considering what she was using it to wash down, but thought it would probably be dangerous to ask. It might even get her shouting at him, and when his mother started shouting, it was wise to seek shelter.

  "Hey, Ma!" he said, throwing his books on the counter and getting the milk out of the refrigerator. "Guess what? There's an awnin on the new store."

  "Who's yawning?" Her voice drifted out of the living room.

  He poured his milk and came into the doorway. "Awning," he said. "On the new store downstreet."

  She sat up, found the remote control, and pushed the mute button. On the screen, Al and Corinne went on talking over their Santa Barbara problems in their favorite Santa Barbara restaurant, but now only a lip-reader could have told exactly what those problems were. "What?" she said. "That Needful Things place?"

  "Uh-huh," he said, and drank some milk.

  "Don't slurp," she said, tucking the rest of her snack into her mouth. "It sounds gruesome. How many times have I told you that?"

  About as many times as you've told me not to talk with my mouth full, Brian thought, but said nothing. He had learned verbal restraint at an early age.

  "Sorry, Mom."

  "What kind of awning?"

  "Green one."

  "Pressed or aluminum?"

  Brian, whose father was a siding salesman for the Dick Perry Siding and Door Company in South Paris, knew exactly what she was talking about, but if it had been that kind of awning, he hardly would have noticed it. Aluminum and pressed-metal awnings were a dime a dozen. Half the homes in The Rock had them sticking out over their windows.

  "Neither one," he said. "It's cloth. Canvas, I think. It sticks out, so there's shade right underneath. And it's round, like this." He curved his hands (carefully, so as not to spill his milk) in a semi-circle. "The name is printed on the end. It's most sincerely awesome."

  "Well, I'll be butched!"

  This was the phrase with which Cora most commonly expressed excitement or exasperation. Brian took a cautious step backward, in case it should be the latter.

  "What do you think it is, Ma? A restaurant, maybe?"

  "I don't know," she said, and reached for the Princess phone on the endtable. She had to move Squeebles the cat, the TV Guide, and a quart of Diet Coke to get it. "But it sounds sneaky."

  "Mom, what does Needful Things mean? Is it like--"

  "Don't bother me now, Brian, Mummy's busy. There are Devil Dogs in the breadbox if you want one. Just one, though, or you'll spoil your supper." She was already dialling Myra, and they were soon discussing the green awning with great enthusiasm.

  Brian, who didn't want a Devil Dog (he loved his Ma a great deal, but sometimes watching her eat took away his appetite), sat down at the kitchen table, opened his math book, and started to do the assigned problems--he was a bright, conscientious boy, and his math was the only homework he hadn't finished at school. As he methodically moved decimal points and then divided, he listened to his mother's end of the conversation. She was again telling Myra that soon they would have another store selling stinky old perfume bottles and pictures of someone's dead relatives, and it was really a shame the way these things came and went. There were just too many people out there, Cora said, whose motto in life was take the money and run. When she spoke of the awning, she sounded as if someone had deliberately set out to offend her, and had succeeded splendidly at the task.

  I think she thinks someone was supposed to tell her, Brian had thought as his pencil moved sturdily along, carrying down and rounding off. Yeah, that was it. She was curious, that was number one. And she was pissed off, that was number two. The combination was just about killing her. Well, she would find out soon enough. When she did, maybe she would let him in on the big secret. And if she was too busy, he could get it just by listening in on one of her afternoon conversations with Myra.

  But as it turned out, Brian found out quite a lot about Needful Things before his mother or Myra or anyone else in Castle Rock.

  2

  He hardly rode his bike at all on his way home from school on the afternoon before Needful Things was scheduled to open; he was lost in a warm daydream (which would not have passed his lips had he been coaxed with hot coals or bristly tarantula spiders) where he asked Miss Ratcliffe to go with him to the Castle County Fair and she agreed.

  "Thank you, Brian," Miss Ratcliffe says, and Brian sees little tears of gratitude in the corners of her blue eyes--eyes so dark in color that they look almost stormy. "I've been ... well, very sad lately. You see, I've lost my love. "

  "I'll help you forget him," Brian says, his voice tough and tender at the same time, "if you'll call me ... Bri."

  "Thank you," she whispers, and then, leaning close enough so he can smell her perfume--a dreamy scent of wildflowers--she says, "Thank you ... Bri. And since, for tonight at least, we will be girl and boy instead of teacher and student, you may call me ... Sally. "

  He takes her hands. Looks into her eyes. "I'm not just a kid," he says. "I can help you forget him ... Sally."

  She seems almost hypnotized by this unexpected understanding, this unexpected manliness; he may only be eleven, she thinks, but he is more of a man than Lester ever was! Her hands tighten on his. Their faces draw closer ... closer ...

  "No," she murmurs, and now her eyes are so wide and so close that he seems almost to drown in them, "you mustn't, Bri ... it's wrong ..."

  "It's right, baby, " he says, and presses his lips to hers.

  She draws away after a few moments and whispers tenderly

  "Hey, kid, watch out where the fuck you're goin!"

  Jerked out of his daydream, Brian saw that he had just walked in front of Hugh Priest's pick-up truck.

  "Sorry, Mr. Priest," he said, blushing madly. Hugh Priest was nobody to get mad at you. He worked for the Public Works Department and was reputed to have the worst temper in Castle Rock. Brian watched him narrowly. If he started to get out of his truck, Brian planned to jump on his bike and be gone down Main Street at roughly the speed of light. He had no interest in spending the next month or so in the hospital just because he'd been daydreaming about going to the County Fair with Miss Ratcliffe.

  But Hugh Priest had a bottle of beer in the fork of his legs, Hank Williams, Jr., was on the radio singing "High and Pressurized," and it was all just a little too comfy for anything so radical as beating the shit out of a little kid on Tuesday afternoon.

  "You want to keep your eyes open," he said, taking a pull from the neck of his bottle and looking at Brian balefully, "because next time I won't bother to stop. I'll just run you down in the road. Make you squeak, little buddy."

  He put the truck in gear and drove off. Brian felt an insane (and mercifully brief) urge to scream Well I'll be butched! after him. He waited until the orange road-crew truck had turned off onto Linden Street and then went on his way. The daydream about Miss Ratcliffe, alas, was spoiled for the day. Hugh Priest had let in reality again. Miss Ratcliffe hadn't had a fight with her fiance, Lester Pratt; she was still wearing her small diamond engagement ring and was still driving his blue Mustang while she waited for her own car to come back from the shop.

  Brian had seen Miss Ratcliffe and Mr. Pratt only last evening, stapling those DICE AND THE DEVIL posters to the telephone poles on Lower Main Street along with a bunch of other people. They had been singing hymns. The only thing was, the Catholics went around as

soon as they were done and took them down again. It was pretty funny in a way ... but if he had been bigger, Brian would have tried his best to protect any posters Miss Ratcliffe put up with her hallowed hands.

  Brian thought of her dark blue eyes, her long dancer's legs, and felt the same glum amazement he always felt when he realized that, come January, she intended to change Sally Ratcliffe, which was lovely, to Sally Pratt, which sounded to Brian like a fat lady falling down a short hard flight of stairs.

  Well, he thought, fetching the other curb and starting slowly down Main Street, maybe she'll change her mind. It's not impossible. Or maybe Lester Pratt will get in a car accident or come down with a brain tumor or something like that. It might even turn out that he's a dope addict. Miss Ratcliffe would never marry a dope addict.

  Such thoughts offered Brian a bizarre sort of comfort, but they did not change the fact that Hugh Priest had aborted the daydream just short of its apogee (kissing Miss Ratcliffe and actually touching her right breast while they were in the Tunnel of Love at the fair). It was a pretty wild idea anyway, an eleven-year-old kid taking a teacher to the County Fair. Miss Ratcliffe was pretty, but she was also old. She had told the speech kids once that she would be twenty-four in November.

  So Brian carefully re-folded his daydream along its creases, as a man will carefully fold a well-read and much-valued document, and tucked it on the shelf at the back of his mind where it belonged. He prepared to mount his bike and pedal the rest of the way home.