The old pain was back, twisting itself around his aching heart like a dirty rag.
Hurts, doesn't it? the voice of depression-that guilty, self-hating voice-asked with a sympathy Alan (the rest of Alan) suspected was entirely bogus. It hurts too much, like having to live inside a country-and-western song about goodlove gone bad or goodkids gone dead. Nothing that hurts this much can do you any good. Shove it back in the glove compartment, buddy. Forget about it. Next week, when this madness is all over, you can trade the wagon with the fake can of nuts still in i't.
Why not? It's the sort of cheap practical joke that would appeal only to a child, or to a man like Gaunt. Forget it. ForgetAlan cut the voice off in mid-rant. He hadn't known he could do that until this moment, and it was good knowledge to have, knowledge that might be useful in the future... if he had a future, that was. He looked more closely at the can, turning it this way and that, really looking at it for the first time, seeing it not as a sappy memento of his lost son but as an object which was as much a tool of misdirection as his hollow magic wand, his silk top-hat with the false bottom, or the Folding Flower Trick which still nestled beneath his watchband.
Magic-wasn't that what this was all about? It was mean-spirited magic, granted; magic calculated not to make people gasp and laugh but to turn them into angry charging bulls, but it was magic, just the same. And what was the basis of all magic? Misdirection. It was a five-foot-long snake hidden inside a can of nuts... or, he thought, thinking of Polly, it's a disease that looks like a cure.
He opened the car door, and when he got out into the pouring rain, he was still carrying the fake can of nuts in his left hand.
Now that he had drawn back a little from the dangerous lure of sentiment, he remembered his opposition to the purchase of this thing with something like amazement. All his life he had been fascinated with magic, and of course he would have been entranced by the old snake-in-a-can-of-nuts trick as a kid. So why had he spoken to Todd in such an unfriendly way when the boy had wanted to buy it, and then pretended not to see the boy's hurt? Had it been jealousy of Todd's youth and enthusiasm? An inability to remember the wonder of simple things? What?
He didn't know. He only knew it was exactly the sort of trick a Mr. Gaunt would understand, and he wanted it with him now.
Alan bent back into the car, grabbed a flashlight from the small box of jumbled tools sitting on the rear seat, then walked past the nose of Mr. Gaunt's Tucker Talisman (still without noticing it), and passed under the deep-green awning of Needful Things.
8
Well, here I am. Here I am at last.
Alan's heart was pounding hard but steadily in his chest. In his mind, the faces of his son and his wife and Sean Rusk seemed to have combined. He glanced at the sign in the window again and then tried the door. It was locked. Overhead, the canvas awning rippled and snapped in the howling wind.
He had tucked the Tastee-Munch can into his shirt. Now he touched it with his right hand and seemed to draw some indescribable but perfectly real comfort from it.
"Okay," he muttered. "Here I come, ready or not." He reversed the flashlight and used the handle to smash a hole in the glass. He steeled himself for the wail of the burglar alarm, but it didn't come.
Either Gaunt hadn't turned it on or there was no alarm. He reached through the jagged hole and tried the inside knob. It turned, and for the first time, Alan Pangborn stepped into Needful Things.
The smell hit him first; it was deep and still and dusty. it wasn't the smell of a new shop but of a place which had been untenanted for months or even years. Holding his gun in his right hand, he shone the flashlight around with his left. it illuminated a bare floor, bare walls, and a number of glass cases. The cases were empty, the stock was gone. Everything was blanketed by a thick fall of dust, and the dust was undisturbed by any mark.
No one's been here for a long, long time.
But how could that possibly be, when he had seen people going in and out all week long?
Because he's not a man at all. Because the devil's voice is sweet to hear.
He took two more steps, using the flashlight to cover the empty room in zones, breathing the dry museum dust which hung in the air. He looked behind him and saw, in a flash of lightning, the tracks of his own feet in the dust. He shone the light back into the store, ran it from right to left along the case which had also served Mr.
Gaunt as a counter... and stopped.
A video-cassette recorder/player sat there, next to a Sony portable TV-one of the sporty models, round instead of square, with a case as red as a fire-engine. A cord was looped around the television.