Polly. And here is something else@o as I say and if anyone in Castle Rock finds out that your child burned to death in a San Francisco tenement, they won't find it out from me."
Polly uttered a hoarse, lost cry-the cry of a woman hopelessly ensnarled in a grinding nightmare. Mr. Gaunt smiled. "There are more kinds of hell than one, aren't there, Polly?"
"How do you know about him?" she whispered. "No one knows. Not even Alan. I told Alan-"
"I know because knowing.is my business. And suspicion is his, Polly-Alan never believed what you told him."
"He said-"
"I'm sure he said all kinds of things, but he never believed you. The woman you hired to baby-sit was a drug addict, wasn't she? That wasn't your fault, but of course the things which led to that situation were all a matter of personal choice, Polly, weren't they? Your choice. The young woman you hired to watch Kelton passed out and dropped a cigarette-or maybe it was a joint-into a wastebasket.
Hers was the finger that pulled the trigger, you might say, but the gun was loaded because of your pride, your inability to bend your neck before your parents and the other good people of Castle Rock."
Polly was sobbing harder now.
"Yet is a young woman not entitled to her pride?" Mr. Gaunt asked gently. "When everything else is gone, is she not at least entitled to this, the coin without which her purse is entirely empty?"
Polly raised her streaming, defiant face. "I thought it was my business," she said. "I still do. If that's pride, so what?"
"Yes," he said soothingly. "Spoken like a champion... butthey would have taken you back, wouldn't they? Your mother and father?
It might not have been pleasant-not with the child always there to remind them, not with the way tongues wag in pleasant little backwaters like this one-but it would have been possible."
"Yes, and I would have spent every day trying to stay out from under my mother's thumb!" she burst out in a furious, ugly voice which bore almost no resemblance to her normal tone.
"Yes," Mr. Gaunt said in that same soothing voice. "So you stayed where you were. You had Kelton, and you had your pride. And when Kelton was dead, you still had your pride... didn't you?"
Polly screamed in grief and agony and buried her wet face in her hands.
"It hurts worse than your hands, doesn't it?" Mr. Gaunt asked.
Polly nodded her head without taking her face out of her hands.
Mr. Gaunt put his own ugly, long-fingered hands behind his head and spoke in the tone of one who gives a eulogy: "Humanity! So noble!
So willing to sacrifice the other fellow!"
"Stop!" she moaned. "Can't you stop?"
"It's a secret thing, isn't it, Patricia?"
"Yes."
He touched her forehead. Polly uttered a gagging moan but did not draw away.
"That's one door into hell you'd like to keep locked, isn't it?"
She nodded inside her hands.
"Then do as I say, Polly," he whispered. He took one of her hands away from her face and began caressing it. "Do as I say, and keep your mouth shut." He looked closely at her wet cheeks and her streaming, reddened eyes. A little look of disgust puckered his lips for a moment.
"I don't know which makes me sicker-a crying woman or a laughing man. Wipe your goddamned face, Polly."
Slowly, dreamily, she took a lace-edged handkerchief from her purse and began to do it.
"That's good," he said, and rose. "I'll let you go home now, Polly; you have things to do. But I want you to know it has been a great pleasure doing business with you. I have always so enjoyed ladies who take pride in themselves."
12
"Hey, Brian-want to see a trick?"
The boy on the bicycle looked up fast, the hair flying off his forehead, and Alan saw an unmistakable expression on his face: naked, unadulterated fear.
"Trick?" the boy said in a trembling voice. "What trick?"
Alan didn't know what the boy was afraid of, but he understood one thing-his magic, which he had relied upon often as an icebreaker with children, had for some reason been exactly the wrong thing this time.
Best to get it out of the way as soon as possible and start over again.
He held up his left arm-the one with the watch on it-and smiled into Brian Rusk's pale, watchful, frightened face. "You'll notice that there's nothing up my sleeve and that my arm goes all the way up to my shoulder. But now... presto!"
Alan passed his open right hand slowly down his left arm, snapping the little packet effortlessly out from beneath his watch with his right thumb as he did so. As he closed his fist, he slipped the almost microscopic loop that held the packet closed. He clasped his left hand over his right, and when he spread them apart, a large tissue-paper bouquet of unlikely flowers bloomed where there had been nothing but thin air a moment before.
Alan had done this trick hundreds of times and never better than on this hot October afternoon, but the expected reaction-a moment of stunned surprise followed by a grin that was one part amazement and two parts admiration@idn't dawn on Brian's face.