Four Past Midnight (122 page)

“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 home-work 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 though 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.

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.
”

“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 ...
”

“Hey, kid, watch out where the fuck you're going!”

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 into 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 fiancé, 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 Ratcliff 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.

But he was passing the new shop at just that moment, and the sign in the doorway caught his eye. Something about it had changed. He stopped his bike and looked at it.
at the top was gone. It had been replaced by a small square sign, red letters on a white background.
it said, and
was
all
it said. Brian stood with his bike between his legs, looking at this, and his heart began to beat a little faster.

You're not going in there, are you? he asked himself. I mean, even if it really is opening a day early, you're not going in there, right?

Why not? he answered himself.

Well ... because the window's still soaped over. The shade on the door's still drawn. You go in there, anything could happen to you.
Anything.

Sure. Like the guy who runs it is Norman Bates or something, he dresses up in his mother's clothes and stabs his customers.
Ri-iight.

Well, forget it, the timid part of his mind said, although that part sounded as if it already knew it had lost. There's
something
funny about it.

But then Brian thought of telling his mother. Just saying nonchalantly, “By the way, Ma, you know that new store, Needful Things? Well, it opened a day early. I went in and took a look around.”

She'd push the mute button on the remote control in a hurry then, you better believe it! She'd want to hear all about it!

This thought was too much for Brian. He put down his bike's kickstand and passed slowly into the shade of the awning—it felt at least ten degrees cooler beneath its canopy—and approached the door of Needful Things.

As he put his hand on the big old-fashioned brass doorknob, it occurred to him that the sign must be a mistake. It had probably been sitting there, just inside the door, for tomorrow, and someone had put it up by accident. He couldn't hear a single sound from behind the drawn shade; the place had a deserted feel.

But since he had come this far, he tried the knob ... and it turned easily under his hand. The latch clicked back and the door of Needful Things swung open.

It was dim inside, but not dark. Brian could see that track lighting (a specialty of the Dick Perry Siding and Door Company) had been installed, and a few of the spots mounted on the tracks were lit. They were trained on a number of glass display cases which were arranged around the large room. The cases were, for the most part, empty. The spots highlighted the few objects which
were
in the cases.

The floor, which had been bare wood when this was Western Maine Realty and Insurance, had been covered in a rich wall-to-wall carpet the color of burgundy wine. The walls had been painted eggshell white. A thin light, as white as the walls, filtered in through the soaped display window.

Well, it's a mistake, just the same, Brian thought. He hasn't even got his stock in yet. Whoever put the OPEN sign in the door by mistake left the door unlocked by mistake, too. The polite thing to do in these circumstances would be to close the door again, get on his bike, and ride away.

Yet he was loath to leave. He was, after all, actually seeing the inside of the new store. His mother would talk to him the rest of the afternoon when she heard that. The maddening part was this: he wasn't sure exactly what he was seeing. There were half a dozen
(exhibits)

items in the display cases, and the spotlights were trained on them—a kind of trial run, probably—but he couldn't tell what they were. He could, however, tell what they
weren't:
spool beds and moldy crank telephones.

“Hello?” he asked uncertainly, still standing in the doorway. “Is anybody here?”

He was about to grasp the doorknob and pull the door shut again when a voice replied,
“I'm
here.”

A tall figure—what at first seemed to be an
impossibly
tall figure—came through a doorway behind one of the display cases. The doorway was masked with a dark velvet curtain. Brian felt a momentary and quite monstrous cramp of fear. Then the glow thrown by one of the spots slanted across the man's face, and Brian's fear was allayed. The guy was quite old, and his face was very kind. He looked at Brian with interest and pleasure.

“Your door was unlocked,” Brian began, “so I thought—”

“Of
course
it's unlocked,” the tall man said. “I decided to open for a little while this afternoon as a kind of ... of preview. And you are my very first customer. Come in, my friend. Enter freely, and leave some of the happiness you bring!”