"I'll survive; I always have. Tell me-did Nettle Cobb happen to drop by?"
"Today?" He frowned. "No; not today. If she had, I would have shown her a new piece of carnival glass that came in yesterday. It's not as nice as the one I sold her last week, but I thought she might be interested. Why do you ask?"
"Oh... no reason," Polly said. "She said she might, but Nettle... Nettle often forgets things."
"She strikes me as a woman who has had a hard life," Mr. Gaunt said gravely.
"Yes. Yes, she has." Polly spoke these words slowly and mechanically. She could not seem to take her eyes from his. Then one of her hands brushed against the edge of a glass display case, and that caused her to break eye-contact. A little gasp of pain escaped her.
"Are you all right?"
"Yes, fine," Polly said, but it was a lie she wasn't even within shouting distance of fine.
Mr. Gaunt clearly understood this. "You're not well," he said decisively. "Therefore I'm going to dispense with the small-talk.
The item which I wrote you about did come in. I'm going to give it to you and send you home."
"Give it to me?"
"Oh, I'm not offering you a present," he said as he went behind the cash register. "We hardly know each other well enough for that, do we?"
She smiled. He was clearly a kind man, a man who, naturally enough, wanted to do something nice for the first person in Castle Rock who had done something nice for him. But she was having a hard time responding-was having a hard time even following the conversation. The pain in her hands was monstrous. She now wished she hadn't come, and, kindness or no kindness, all she wanted to do was get out and go home and take a pain-pill.
"This is the sort of item a vendor has to offer on trial-if he's an ethical man, that is." He produced a ring of keys, selected one, and unlocked the drawer under the cash register. "If you try it for a couple of days and discover it is worthless to you-and I have to tell you that will probably be the case you return it to me. If, on the other hand, you find it provides you with some relief, we can talk price." He smiled at her. "And for you, the price would be rock-bottom, I can assure you."
She looked at him, puzzled. Relief? What was he talking about?
He brought out a small white box and set it on the counter. He took off the lid with his odd, long-fingered hands, and removed a small silver object on a fine chain from the cotton batting inside.
It seemed to be a necklace of some sort, but the thing which hung down when Mr. Gaunt tented his fingers over the chain looked like a tea-ball, or an oversized thimble.
"This is Egyptian, Polly. Very old. Not as old as the Pyramidsgosh, no!-but still very old. There's something inside it.
Some sort of herb, I think, although I'm not sure." He wiggled his fingers up and down. The silver tea-ball (if that was what it was) jounced at the bottom of the chain. Something shifted inside, something which made a dusty, slithery sound. Polly found it vaguely unpleasant.
"It's called an azka, or perhaps an azakah," Mr. Gaunt said.
"Either way, it's an amulet which is supposed to ward off pain."
Polly tried a smile. She wanted to be polite, but really. - she had come all the way down here for this? The thing didn't even have any aesthetic value. It was ugly, not to put too fine a point on it.
"I really don't think.
"I don't, either," he said, "but desperate situations often call for desperate measures. I assure you it is quite genuine... at least in the sense that it wasn't made in Taiwan. It is an authentic Egyptian artifact-not quite a relic, but an artifact most certainly-from the period of the Later Decline. It comes with a certificate of provenance which identifies it as a tool of benka-litis, or white magic. I want you to take it and wear it. I suppose it sounds silly. Probably it is. But there are stranger things in heaven and earth than some of us dream Of, even in our wilder moments of philosophy."
"Do you really believe that?" Polly asked.
"Yes. I've seen things in my time that make a healing medallion or amulet look perfectly ordinary." A fugitive gleam flickered momentarily in his hazel eyes. "Many such things. The world's odd corners are filled with fabulous junk, Polly. But never mind that; you are the issue here.
"Even the other day, when I suspect the pain was not nearly as bad as it is right now, I got a good idea of just how unpleasant your situation had become. I thought this little... item... might be worth a try. After all, what have you to lose? Nothing else you've tried has worked, has it?"
"I appreciate the thought, Mr. Gaunt, really I do, but-"
"Leland.
Please."
"Yes, all right. I appreciate the thought, Leland, but I'm afraid I'm not superstitious."
She looked up and saw his bright hazel eyes were fixed upon her.
"It doesn't matter if you are or not, Polly... because this is."
He wiggled his fingers. The azka bobbed gently at the end of its chain.