9
Following that near miss (it never occurred to him that his unseen informant might just have been amusing himself), an odd kind of paralysis settled over Ace. He became afraid to do anything but buy a little coke now and then for his own personal use. He had never experienced such a sensation of dead stop before. He hated it, but didn't know what to do about it. The first thing he did every day was look at the calendar. November seemed to be rushing toward him.
Then, this morning, he had awakened before dawn with a thought blazing in his mind like strange blue light: he had to go home. He had to go back to Castle Rock. That was where the answer was. Going home felt right... but even if it turned out to be wrong, the change of scenery might break the strange vaporlock in his head.
In Mechanic Falls he was just john Merrill, an ex-con who lived in a shack with plastic on the windows and cardboard on the door.
In Castle Rock he had always been Ace Merrill, the ogre who strode through the nightmares of a whole generation of little kids. In Mechanic Falls he was poor-white back-road trash, a guy who had a custom Dodge but no garage to put it in. In Castle Rock he had been, at least for a little while, something like a king.
So he had come back, and here he was, and what now?
Ace didn't know. The town looked smaller, grimier, and emptier than he remembered. He supposed Pangborn was around someplace, and pretty soon old Bill Fullerton would get him on the honker and tell him who was back in town. Then Pangborn would find him and ask him what he thought he was doing here. He would ask if Ace had a job. He didn't, and he couldn't even claim he had come back to visit his unc, because Pop had been in his junkshop when the place burned down. Okay then, Ace, Pangborn would say, why don't you just jump back into your street machine and cruise on out of here?
And what was he going to say to that?
Ace didn't know-he only knew that the flash of dark-blue light with which he had awakened was still glimmering somewhere inside him.
The lot where the Emporium Galorium had stood was still vacant, he saw. Nothing there but weeds, a few charred board-ends, and some road-litter. Broken glass twinkled back the sun in eyewatering shards of hot light. There was nothing there to look at, but Ace wanted to look, anyway. He started across the street. He had almost reached the far side when the green awning two storefronts up caught his eye.
NEEDFUL THINGS,
the side of the awning read. Now what kind of name for a store was that? Ace walked up the street to see. He could look at the vacant lot where his uncle's tourist-trap had stood later on; he didn't think anyone was going to move it.
The first thing to catch his eye was the
HELP WANTED
sign. He paid it little attention. He didn't know what he had come back to Castle Rock for, but a stockboy job wasn't it.
There were a number of rather classy-looking items in the window-the sort of stuff he would have taken away if he were doing a little nightwork in some rich guy's house. A chess set with carved jungle animals for pieces. A necklace of black pearls-it looked valuable to Ace, but he supposed the pearls were probably artificial.
Surely no one in this dipshit burg could afford a string of genuine black pearls. Good job, though; they looked real enough to him.
AndAce looked at the book behind the pearls with narrowed eyes.
It had been set up on its spine so someone looking in the window could easily see the cover, which depicted the silhouettes of two men standing on a ridge at night. One had a pick, the other a shovel.
They appeared to be digging a hole. The title of the book was Lost and Buried Treasures of New England. The author's name was printed below the picture in small white letters.
It was Reginald Merrill.
Ace went to the door and tried the knob. It turned easily. The bell overhead jingled. Ace Merrill entered Needful Things.
"No," Ace said, looking at the book Mr. Gaunt had taken from the window display and put into his hands. "This isn't the one I want.
You must have gotten the wrong one."
"It's the only book in the show window, I assure you," Mr.
Gaunt said in a mildly puzzled voice. "You can look for yourself if you don't believe me."
For a moment Ace did almost that, and then he let out an exasperated little sigh. "No, that's okay," he said.
The book the shopkeeper had handed him was Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. What had happened was clear enoughhe'd had Pop on his mind, and he'd made a mistake. The real mistake, though, had been coming back to Castle Rock in the first place. Why in the f**k had he done it?
"Listen, this is a very interesting place you've got here, but I ought to get a move on. I'll see you another time, Mr.-"
"Gaunt," the shopkeeper said, putting out his hand. "Leland Gaunt."