Needful Things (58 page)

Anything at all.

Ace Merrill crossed the Tobin Bridge and entered Boston at four o'clock that afternoon, but it was well past five before he finally reached what he hoped was his destination. It was in a strange, mostly deserted slum section of Cambridge, near the center of a meandering snarl of streets. Half of them seemed to be posted one-way; the other half were dead ends. The ruined buildings of this decayed area were throwing long shadows over the streets when Ace stopped in front of a stark one-story cinderblock
building on Whipple Street. It stood in the center of a weedy vacant lot.

There was a chainlink fence around the property, but it presented no problem; the gate had been stolen. Only the hinges remained. Ace could see what were probably bolt-cutter scars on them. He eased the Challenger through the gap where the gate had been and drove slowly toward the cinderblock building.

Its walls were blank and windowless. The rutted track he was on led to a closed garage door in the side of the building which faced the River Charles. There were no windows in the garage door, either. The Challenger rocked on its springs and bounced unhappily through holes in what might once have been an asphalt surface. He passed an abandoned baby carriage sitting in a strew of broken glass. A decayed doll with half a face reclined inside, staring at him with one moldy blue eye as he passed. He parked in front of the closed garage door. What the hell was he supposed to do now? The cinderblock building had the look of a place which had been deserted since 1945 or so.

Ace got out of the car. He took a scrap of paper from his breast pocket. Written on it was the address of the place where Gaunt's car was supposed to be stored. He looked doubtfully at it again. The last few numbers he had passed suggested that this was
probably
85 Whipple Street, but who the fuck could tell for sure? Places like this never had street numbers, and there didn't seem to be anyone around he could ask. In fact, this whole section of town had a deserted, creepy feel Ace didn't much like. Vacant lots. Stripped cars which had been looted of every useful part and every centimeter of copper wire. Empty tenements waiting for the politicians to get their kickbacks straight before they fell under the wrecking ball. Twisty side-streets that dead-ended in dirty courtyards and trashy cul-de-sacs. It had taken him an hour to find Whipple Street, and now that he had, he almost wished it had stayed lost. This was the part of town where the cops sometimes found the bodies of infants stuffed into rusty garbage cans and discarded refrigerators.

He walked over to the garage door and looked for a push-bell. There was none. He leaned the side of his head against the rusty metal and listened for the sounds of
someone inside. It could be a chop-shop, he supposed; a dude with a supply of high-tension coke like the stuff Gaunt had laid on him might very well know the sort of people who sold Porsches and Lamborghinis for cash after the sun went down.

He heard nothing but silence.

Probably not even the right place,
he thought, but he had been up and down the goddam street and it was the only place on it big enough—and strong enough—to store a classic car in. Unless he had fucked up royally and come to the wrong part of town. The idea made him nervous.
I want you back by midnight,
Mr. Gaunt had said.
If you're not back by midnight, I will be unhappy. When I'm unhappy, I sometimes lose my temper.

Mellow out, Ace told himself uneasily. He's just some old dude with a bad set of false teeth. Probably a fag.

But he
couldn't
mellow out, and he didn't really think Mr. Leland Gaunt was just some old dude with a bad set of false teeth. He also thought he didn't want to find out for sure one way or the other.

But the current thing was this: it was going to be dark before long, and Ace didn't want to be in this part of town after dark. There was something wrong with it. Something that went beyond the spooky tenements with their blank, staring windows and the cars standing on naked wheelrims in the gutter. He hadn't seen a single person on the sidewalk or sitting on a stoop or looking out a window since he started getting close to Whipple Street . . . but he had had the sensation that he was being watched, just the same. Still had it, in fact: a busy crawling in the short hairs on the back of his neck.

It was almost as though he were not in Boston at all anymore. This place was more like the motherfucking Twilight Zone.

If you're not back by midnight, I will be unhappy.

Ace made a fist and hammered on the rusty, featureless face of the garage door. “Hey! Anybody in there want to look at some Tupperware?”

No answer.

There was a handle at the bottom of the door. He tried it. No joy. The door wouldn't even rattle in its frame, let alone roll up on its tracks.

Ace hissed air out between his teeth and looked around nervously. His Challenger was standing nearby, and he had never in his life wanted so much to just get in and
go
. But he didn't dare.

He walked around the building and there was nothing. Nothing at all. Just expanses of cinderblock, painted an unpleasant snot-green. An odd piece of graffiti had been spray-painted on the back of the garage, and Ace looked at it for some moments, not understanding why it made his skin crawl.

YOG-SOTHOTH RULES
,

it read in faded red letters.

He arrived back at the garage door and thought,
Now what?

Because he could think of nothing else, he got back into the Challenger and just sat there, looking at the garage door. At last, he laid both hands on the horn and honked a long, frustrated blast.

At once the garage door began to roll silently up on its tracks.

Ace sat watching it, gape-mouthed, and his first urge was to simply start the Challenger up and drive away as fast as he could and as far as he could. Mexico City might do for a start. Then he thought of Mr. Gaunt again and got slowly out of his car. He walked over to the garage as the door came to rest below the ceiling inside.

The interior was brightly lit by half a dozen two-hundred-watt bulbs hanging at the ends of thick electrical cords. Each bulb had been shaded with a piece of tin shaped into a cone, so that the lights cast circular pools of brightness on the floor. On the far side of the cement floor was a car covered with a dropcloth. There was a table littered with tools standing against one wall. Three crates were stacked against another wall. On top of them was an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder.

The garage was otherwise empty.

“Who opened the door?” Ace asked in a dry little voice. “Who opened the fucking
door?”

But to this there was no answer.

He drove the Challenger inside and parked it against the rear wall—there was plenty of room. Then he walked back to the doorway. There was a control box mounted on the wall next to it. Ace pushed the
DOWN
button. The waste ground on which this enigmatic blockhouse of a building stood was filling up with shadows, and they made him nervous. He kept thinking he saw things moving out there.

The door rolled down without a single squeak or rattle. While he waited for it to close all the way, Ace looked around for the sonic sensor which had responded to the sound of his horn. He couldn't see it. It had to be here someplace, though—garage doors did not open all by themselves.

Although, he thought, if shit like that happens anywhere in this town, Whipple Street's probably the place.

Ace walked over to the stack of crates with the tape recorder on top. His feet made a hollow gritting sound on the cement.
Yog-Sothoth rules,
he thought randomly, and then shivered. He didn't know who the fuck Yog-Sothoth was, probably some Rastafarian reggae singer with ninety pounds of dreadlocks growing out of his dirty scalp, but Ace still didn't like the sound that name made in his head. Thinking about that name in this place seemed like a bad idea. It seemed like a dangerous idea.

A scrap of paper had been taped to one of the recorder's reels. Two words were written on it in large capital letters:

PLAY ME.

Ace pulled off the note and pushed the
PLAY
button. The reels began to turn, and when he heard that voice, he jumped a little. Still, whose voice had he expected? Richard Nixon's?

“Hello, Ace,” Mr. Gaunt's recorded voice said. “Welcome to Boston. Please remove the tarp from my car and load the crates. They contain rather special merchandise which I expect to need quite soon now. I'm afraid you'll have to put at least one crate in the back seat; the Tucker's trunk leaves something to be desired. Your own
car will be quite safe here, and your ride back will be uneventful. And please remember this—the sooner you get back, the sooner you can begin investigating the locations on your map. Have a pleasant trip.”

The message was followed by the empty hiss of tape and the low whine of the capstan drive.

Ace left the reels turning for almost a minute, nevertheless. This whole situation was weird . . . and getting weirder all the time. Mr. Gaunt had been here during the afternoon—
had
to have been, because he had mentioned the map, and Ace hadn't laid eyes on either the map or Mr. Leland Gaunt until this morning. The old buzzard must have taken a plane down while he, Ace, was driving. But why? What the fuck did it all mean?

He
hasn't
been here, he thought. I don't care if it's impossible or not—he
hasn't
been here. Look at that goddam tape recorder, for instance.
Nobody
uses tape recorders like that anymore. And look at the dust on the reels. The note was dusty, too. This set-up has been waiting for you a long time. Maybe it's been sitting here and catching dust ever since Pangborn sent you to Shawshank.

Oh, but that was crazy.

That was just bullshit.

Nevertheless, there was a deep core-part of him that believed it was true. Mr. Gaunt hadn't been anywhere near Boston this afternoon. Mr. Gaunt had spent the afternoon in Castle Rock—Ace knew it—standing by his window, watching the passersby, perhaps even removing the

CLOSED COLUMBUS DAY

sign every now and then and putting up

OPEN

in its place. If he saw the right person approaching, that was—the sort of person with whom a fellow like Mr. Gaunt might want to do a spot of business.

Just what
was
his business?

Ace wasn't sure he wanted to know. But he wanted to know what was in those crates. If he was going to transport them from here all the way back to Castle Rock, he had a goddam
right
to know.

He pushed the
STOP
button on the tape recorder and
lifted it aside. He took a hammer from the tools on top of the work-table and the crowbar which leaned against the wall next to it. He returned to the crates and slid the crowbar's flat end under the wooden lid of the one on top. He levered it up. The nails let go with a thin shriek. The contents of the crate were covered with a heavy oilcloth square. He lifted it aside and simply gaped at what he saw beneath.

Blasting caps.

Dozens of blasting caps.

Maybe
hundreds
of blasting caps, each resting in its own cozy little nest of excelsior.

Jesus Christ, what's he planning to do? Start World War III?

Heart thumping heavily in his chest, Ace hammered the nails back down and lifted the crate of blasting caps aside. He opened the second crate, expecting to see neat rows of fat red sticks that looked like road-flares.

But it wasn't dynamite. It was guns.

There were maybe two dozen in all—high-powered automatic pistols. The smell of the deep grease in which they had been packed drifted up to him. He didn't know what kind they were—German, maybe—but he knew what they meant: twenty-to-life if he was caught with them in Massachusetts. The Commonwealth took an extremely dim view of guns, especially automatic weapons.

This case he set aside without putting the lid back on. He opened the third crate. It was full of ammo clips for the pistols.

Ace stepped back, rubbing his mouth nervously with the palm of his left hand.

Blasting caps.

Automatic handguns.

Ammunition.

This
was merchandise?

“Not me,” Ace said in a low voice, shaking his head. “Not this kid. Uh-uh, no way.”

Mexico City was looking better and better. Maybe even Rio. Ace didn't know if Gaunt was building a better mousetrap or a better electric chair, but he did know he wanted no part of it, whatever it was. He was leaving, and he was leaving right now.

His eyes fixed on the crate of automatic pistols.

And I'm taking one of those babies with me, he thought. A little something for my trouble. Call it a souvenir.

He started toward the crate, and at that instant the reels of the tape recorder began to turn again, although none of the buttons had been depressed.

“Don't even think about it, Ace,” the voice of Mr. Gaunt advised coldly, and Ace screamed. “You don't want to fuck with me. What I do to you if you even try will make what the Corson Brothers were planning look like a day in the country. You're my boy now. Stick with me and we'll have fun. Stick with me and you'll get back at everyone in Castle Rock who ever did the nasty to you . . . and you'll leave a rich man. Go against me and you'll never stop screaming.”

The tape recorder stopped.

Ace's bulging eyes followed its power cord to the plug. It lay on the floor, covered with a fine spill of dust.

Besides, there wasn't an outlet in sight.

Ace suddenly began to feel a little calmer, and this was not quite so odd as it might have seemed. There were two reasons for the steadying of his emotional barometer.