But he hadn't felt any better. As the day drew on, he just went on feeling (cloudier) worse and worse. He thought of Mr. Gaunt. He thought of Sandy Koufax. He thought of that glaring newspaper headlineMURDEROUS SPAT LEAVES TWO WOMEN DEAD IN CASTLE ROCK. He thought of those pictures, familiar faces swimming up from clumps of black dots.
Once he almost fell asleep, and then the little record player started up in his mother and father's bedroom. Mom was playing her scratchy Elvis 45s again. She had been doing it almost all weekend.
Thoughts went whirling and rocking through Brian's head like bits of clutter caught up in a cyclone.
MURDEROUS SPAT.
"You know they said you was high-class... but that was just a lie... "It was a duel.
MURDEROus: Nettle Cobb, the lady with the dog.
"You ain't never caught a rabbit... "When you deal with me, you want to remember two things, SPA T: Wilma jerzyck, the lady with the sheets.
Mr. Gaunt knows hest...
"... and you ain't no friend of mine... and the duelling isn't done until Mr. Gaunt SAYS it's done.
Around and around these thoughts went, a jumble of terror, guilt, and misery set to the beat of Elvis Presley's golden hits. By noon, Brian's stomach had begun to roil and knot. He hurried down to the bathroom at the end of the hall in his stocking feet, closed the door, and vomited into the toilet bowl as quietly as he could.
His mother didn't hear. She was still in her room, where Elvis was now telling her he wanted to be her teddy bear.
As Brian walked slowly back to his room, feeling more miserable than ever, a horrible, haunting certainty came to him: his Sandy Koufax card was gone. Someone had stolen it last night while he slept. He had participated in a murder because of that card, and now it was gone.
He broke into a run, almost slipped on the rug in the middle of his bedroom floor, and snatched his baseball-card book from the top of the dresser. He turned through the pages with such terrified speed that he tore several loose from the ring-binders. But the card-the card-was still there: that narrow face looking out at him from beneath its plastic covering on the last page. Still there, and Brian felt a great, miserable relief sweep through him.
He slipped the card from its pocket, went over to the bed, and lay down with it in his hands. He didn't see how he could ever let go of it again. It was all he had gotten out of this nightmare. The only thing. He didn't like it anymore, but it was his. If he could have brought Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck back to life by burning it up, he would have been hunting for matches at once (or so he really believed), but he couldn't bring them back, and since he couldn't, the thought of losing the card and having nothing at all was insupportable.
So he held it in his hands and looked at the ceiling and listened to the dim sound of Elvis, who had moved on to "Wooden Heart."
It was not surprising that Sean had told him he looked bad; his face was white, his eyes huge and dark and listless. And his own heart felt pretty wooden, now that he thought about it.
Suddenly a new thought, a really horrible thought, cut across the darkness inside his head with the affrighted, speeding brilliance of a comet: He had been seen!
He sat bolt upright on his bed, staring at himself in the mirror on his closet door with horror. Bright green wrapper! Bright red kerchief over a bunch of hair-rollers! Mrs. Mislaburski!
What's going on over there, boy?
I don't know, exactly. I think Mr. and Mrs. jerzyck must be having an argument.
Brian got off his bed and went over to the window, half expecting to see Sheriff Pangborn turning into the driveway in his police cruiser right this minute. He wasn't, but he would be coming soon. Because when two women killed each other in a murderous spat, there was an investigation. Mrs. Mislaburski would be questioned. And she would say that she had seen a boy at the jerzycks' house. That boy, she would tell the Sheriff, had been Brian Rusk.
Downstairs, the telephone began to ring. His mother didn't pick it up, even though there was an extension in the bedroom. She)just went on singing along with the music. At last he heard Sean answer.
"Who is it please?"
Brian thought calmly: He'll get it out of me. I can't lie, not to a policeman. I couldn't even lie to Mrs. Leroux about who broke the vase on her desk when she had to go down to the office that time.
He'll get it out of me and I'll go to jailfor murder.
That was when Brian Rusk first began to think of suicide. These thoughts were not lurid, not romantic; they were very calm, very rational. His father kept a shotgun in the garage, and at that moment the shotgun seemed to make perfect sense. The shotgun seemed to be the answer to everything.
"Bri-unnn! Telephone!"
"I don't want to talk to Stan!" he yelled. "Tell him to call back tomorrow!"
"It's not Stan," Sean called back. "It's a guy. A grown-up."
Large icy hands seized Brian's heart and squeezed it. This was it-Sheriff Pangborn was on the phone.