Castle Rock Middle School was a frowning pile of red brick standing between the Post Office and the Library, a holdover from the time when the town elders didn't feel entirely comfortable with a school unless it looked like a reformatory. This one had been built in and filled that particular bill admirably. Each year the town got a little closer to deciding to build a new one, one with actual windows instead of loopholes and a playground that didn't look like a penitentiary exercise yard and classrooms that actually stayed warm in the winter.
Sally Ratcliffe's speech therapy room was an afterthought in the basement, tucked away between the furnace room and the supply closet with its stacks of paper towels, chalk, Ginn and Company textbooks, and barrels of fragrant red sawdust. With her teacher's desk and six smaller pupil desks in the room there was barely enough space to turn around, but Sally had tried to make the place as cheery as possible, just the same. She knew that most kids who were tapped for speech therapy-the stutterers, the lispers, the dyslexics, the nasal blocks-found the experience a frightening, unhappy one. They were teased by their peers and closely questioned by their parents. There was no need for the environment to be unnecessarily grim on top of all that.
So there were two mobiles hanging from the dusty ceiling pipes, pictures of TV and rock stars on the walls, and a big Garfield poster on the door. The words in the balloon coming out of Garfield's mouth said, "If a cool cat like me can talk that trash, so can you!"
Her files were woefully behind even though school had been in session for only five weeks. She had meant to spend the whole day updating them, but at quarter past one Sally gathered them all up, stuck them back into the file-drawer they had come from, slammed it shut, and locked it. She told herself she was quitting early because the day was too nice to spend cooped up in this basement room, even with the furnace mercifully silent for a change.
This wasn't entirely the truth, however. She had very definite plans for this afternoon.
She wanted to go home, she wanted to sit in her chair by the window with the sun flooding into her lap, and she wanted to meditate upon the fabulous splinter of wood she had bought in Needful Things.
She had become more and more sure that the splinter was an authentic miracle, one of the small, divine treasures God had scattered around the earth for His faithful to find. Holding it was like being refreshed by a dipper of well-water on a hot day. Holding it was like being fed when you were hungry. Holding it was...
Well, holding it was ecstasy.
And something had been nagging at her, as well. She had put the splinter in the bottom drawer of her bedroom dresser, beneath her underwear, and she had been careful to lock her house when she went out, but she had a terrible, nagging feeling that someone might break in and steal the (relic holy relic) splinter. She knew it didn't make much sense-what robber would want to steal an old gray piece of wood, even if he found it? But if the robber happened to touch it... if those sounds and images filled his head as they filled hers every time she closed the splinter in her small fist... well...
So she'd go home. She'd change into shorts and a halter and spend an hour or so in quiet (exaltation) meditation, feeling the floor beneath her turn into a deck which heaved slowly up and down, listening to the animals moo and low and baa, feeling the light of a different sun, waiting for the magic moment-she was sure it would come if she held the splinter long enough, if she remained very, very quiet and very, very prayerfulwhen the bow of the huge, lumbering boat should come to rest on the mountain top with a low grinding sound. She did not know why God had seen fit to bless her, of all the world's faithful, with this bright and shining miracle, but since He had, Sally meant to experience it as fully and as completely as she could.
She went out the side door and crossed the playground to the faculty parking lot, a tall, pretty young woman with darkish blonde hair and long legs. There was a good deal of talk about those legs in the barber shop when Sally Ratcliffe went strolling by in her sensible low heels, usually with her purse in one hand and her Bible-stuffed with tracts-in the other.
"Christ, that woman's got legs right up to her chin," Bobby Dugas said once.
"Don't let em worry you," Charlie Fortin replied. "You ain't never gonna feel em-wrapped around your ass. She belongs to Jesus and Lester Pratt. In that order."
The barber shop had exploded into hearty male laughter on the day when Charlie had gotten that one-a genuine Knee-Slapperoff. And outside, Sally Ratcliffe had walked along on her way to Rev. Rose's Thursday Evening Bible Study for Young Adults, unknowing, uncaring, wrapped securely in her own cheerful innocence and virtue.