He had placed a table in the doorway. On it was a Roi-Tan cigar box. He put the money which his customers tendered into this box and made change from it. These patrons approached hesitantly, even fearfully in some cases, but all of them had one thing in common: they were angry people with heavy grudges to tote. A few-not many-turned away before they reached Mr. Gaunt's makeshift counter. Some went running, with the wide eyes of men and women who have glimpsed a frightful fiend licking its chops in the shadows.
Most, however, stayed to do business. And as Mr. Gaunt bantered with them, treating this odd back-door commerce as an amusing diversion at the end of a long day, they relaxed.
Mr. Gaunt had enjoyed his shop, but he never felt so comfortable behind plate-glass and under a roof as he did here, on the edge of the air, with the first breezes of the coming storm stirring his hair. The shop, with its clever display lights on ceiling-mounted tracks, was all right... but this was better. This was always better.
He had begun business many years ago-as a wandering peddler on the blind face of a distant land, a peddler who carried his wares on his back, a peddler who usually came at the fall of darkness and was always gone the next morning, leaving bloodshed, horror, and unhappiness behind him. Years later, in Europe, as the Plague raged and the deadcarts rolled, he had gone from town to town and country to country in a wagon drawn by a slat-thin white horse with terrible burning eyes and a tongue as black as a killer's heart. He had sold his wares from the back of the wagon... and was gone before his customers, who paid with small, ragged coins or even in barter, could discover what they had really bought.
Times changed; methods changed; faces, too. But when the faces were needful they were always the same, the faces of sheep who have lost their shepherd, and it was with this sort of commerce that he felt most at home, most like that wandering peddler of old, standing not behind a fancy counter with a Sweda cash register nearby but behind a plain wooden table, making change out of a cigar-box and selling them the same item over and over and over again.
The goods which had so attracted the residents of Castle Rockthe black pearls, the holy relics, the carnival glass, the pipes, the old comic books, the baseball cards, the antique kaleidoscopeswere all gone. Mr. Gaunt had gotten down to his real business, and at the end of things, the real business was always the same. The ultimate item had changed with the years, just like everything else, but such changes were surface things, frosting of different flavors on the same dark and bitter cake.
At the end, Mr. Gaunt always sold them weapons... and they always bought.
"Why, thank you, Mr. Warburton!" Mr. Gaunt said, taking a five-dollar bill from the black janitor. He handed him back a single and one of the automatic pistols Ace had brought from Boston.
"Thank you, Miss Milliken!" He took ten and gave back eight.
He charged them what they could afford-not a penny more or a penny less. Each according to his means was Mr. Gaunt's motto, and never mind each according to his needs, because they were all needful things, and he had come here to fill their emptiness and end their aches.
"Good to see you, Mr. Emerson!"
Oh, it was always good, so very good, to be doing business in the old way again. And business had never been better.
2
Alan Pangborn wasn't in Castle Rock. While the reporters and the State Police gathered at one end of Main Street and Leland Gaunt conducted his going-out-of-business sale halfway up the hill, Alan was sitting at the nurses' station of the Blumer Wing in Northern Cumberland Hospital in Bridgton.
The Blumer Wing was small-only fourteen patient rooms but what it lacked in size it made up for in color. The walls of the inpatient rooms were painted in bright primary shades. A mobile hung from the ceiling in the nurses' station, the birds depending from it swinging and dipping gracefully around a central spindle.
Alan was sitting in front of a huge mural which depicted a medley of Mother Goose rhymes. One section of the mural showed a man leaning across a table, holding something out to a small boy, obviously a hick, who looked both frightened and fascinated. Something about this particular image had struck Alan, and a snatch of childhood rhyme rose like a whisper in his mind: Simple Simon met a pie-man going to the fair.
"Simple Simon," said the pie-man, "come and taste my wares!"
A ripple of gooseflesh had broken out on Alan's arms-tiny bumps like beads of cold sweat. He couldn't say why, and that seemed perfectly normal. Never in his entire life had he felt as shaken, as scared, as deeply confused as he did right now. Something totally beyond his ability to understand was happening in Castle Rock. it had become clearly apparent only late this afternoon, when everything had seemed to blow sky-high at once, but it had begun days, maybe even a week, ago. He didn't know what it was, but he knew that Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck had been only the first outward signs.
And he was terribly afraid that things were still progressing while he sat here with Simple Simon and the pie-man.