Never mind, There's a way. I know there's a uHere his thoughts ceased. He was standing in front of the new store, Needful Things, and what he saw in the window drove everything else slap out of his mind for a moment or two.
It was a rectangular cardboard box, brightly colored, with a picture on the front. A board game, he supposed. But it was a board game about horse racing, and he could have sworn that the painting, which showed two pacers sweeping down on the finish line neckand-neck, was of the Lewiston Raceway. If that wasn't the main grandstand in the background, he was a monkey.
The name of the game was WINNING TICKET.
Keeton stood looking at it for almost five minutes, as hypnotized as a kid looking at a display of electric trains. Then, slowly, he walked under the dark-green canopy to see if the place kept Saturday hours. There was a sign hanging inside the door, all right, but it bore only one word, and the word, naturally, was
OPEN.
Keeton looked at it for a moment, thinking-as Brian Rusk had before him-that it must have been left there by mistake. Main Street shops didn't open at seven in Castle Rock, especially not on Saturday morning. All the same, he tried the knob. It turned easily in his hand.
As he opened the door, a small silver bell tinkled overhead.
4
"It's not really a game," Leland Gaunt was saying five minutes later, "you're wrong about that."
Keeton was seated in the plush high-backed chair where Nettle Cobb, Cyndi Rose Martin, Eddie Warburton, Everett Frankel, Myra Evans, and a good many other townsfolk had sat before him that week. He was drinking a cup of good Jamaican coffee. Gaunt, who seemed like one hell of a nice fellow for a flatlander, had insisted that he have one.
Now Gaunt was leaning into his show window and carefully removing the box. He was dressed in a wine-colored smoking jacket, just as natty as you please, and not a hair out of place. He had told Keeton that he often opened at odd hours, because he was afflicted with insomnia.
"Ever since I was a young man," he had said with a rueful chuckle, "and that was many years ago." He looked fresh as a daisy to Keeton, however, except for his eyes-they were so bloodshot they looked as if red were actually their natural color.
Now he brought the box over and set it on a small table next to Keeton.
"The box was what caught my eye," Keeton said. "It looks quite a bit like the Lewiston Raceway. I go there once in awhile."
"You like a flutter, do you?" Gaunt asked with a smile.
Keeton was about to say he never bet, and changed his mind.
The smile was not just friendly; it was a smile of commiseration, and he suddenly understood that he was in the presence of a fellow sufferer. Which just went to show how flaky he was getting around the edges, because when he had shaken Gaunt's hand, he'd felt a wave of revulsion so sudden and deep it had been like a muscle spasm. For that one moment he had been convinced that he had found his Chief Persecutor. He would have to watch that sort of thing; there was no sense going overboard.
"I have been known to wager," he said.
"Sadly, so have I," Gaunt said. His reddish eyes fixed upon Keeton's, and they shared a moment of perfect understanding... or so Keeton felt. "I've bet most of the tracks from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I'm quite sure the one on the box is Longacre Park, in San Diego. Gone, of course; there's a housing development there now."
"Oh," Keeton said.
"But let me show you this. I think you'll find it interesting."
He took the cover off the box, and carefully lifted out a tin raceway on a platform about three feet long and a foot and a half wide.
It looked like toys Keeton had had as a child, the cheap ones made in japan after the war. The track was a replica of a two-mile course.
Eight narrow slots were set into it, and eight narrow tin horses stood behind the starting line. Each was mounted on a small tin post that poked out of its slot and was soldered to the horse's belly.
"Wow," Keeton said, and grinned. it was the first time he'd grinned in weeks, and the expression felt strange and out of place.
"You ain't seen nuthin yet, as the man said," Gaunt replied, grinning back. "This baby goes back to 1930 or '35, Mr. Keeton-it's a real antique. But it wasn't just a toy to the racing touts of the day."
"No?"
"No. Do you know what a Ouija board is?"
"Sure. You ask it questions and it's supposed to spell out answers from the spirit world."
"Exactly. Well, back in the Depression, there were a lot of racing touts who believed that Winning Ticket was the horse-player's Ouija board."
His eyes met Keeton's again, friendly, smiling, and Keeton was as unable to draw his own eyes away as he had been to leave the track before the last race was run on the one occasion when he had tried.
"Silly, isn't it?"
"Yes," Keeton said. But it didn't seem silly at all. It seemed perfectly... perfectly...
Perfectly reasonable.
Gaunt felt around in the box and brought out a little tin key.