She had undoubtedly deserved it, but They wouldn't see it that way.
They would happily throw him in the deepest, darkest Shawshank Penitentiary cell they could find and throw away the key.
He saw that he had left large bloody smears on the box-top, and he looked down at himself. For the first time he noticed that he was covered with blood. His meaty forearms looked as though they belonged to a Chicago hog-butcher. Depression folded over him again in a soft, black wave. They had beaten him... okay. Yet he would escape Them.
He would escape Them just the same.
He got up, weary to his very center, and plodded slowly upstairs.
He undressed as he went, kicking off his shoes in the living room, dropping his pants at the foot of the stairs, then sitting down halfway up to peel off his socks. Even they were bloody. The shirt gave him the hardest time; pulling off a shirt while you were wearing a handcuff was the devil's own job.
Almost Twenty minutes passed between the murder of Mrs.
Keeton and Buster's trudge to and through the shower. He might have been taken into custody without a problem at almost any time during that period... but on Lower Main Street a transition of authority was going on, the Sheriff's Office was in almost total disarray, and the whereabouts of Danforth "Buster" Keeton simply did not seem very important.
Once he had towelled dry, he put on a clean pair of pants and a tee-shirt-he didn't have the energy to tussle again with long sleeves-and went back down to his study. Buster sat in his chair and looked at Winning Ticket again, hoping that his depression might prove to be just an ephemeral thing, that some of his earlier joy might return. But the picture on the box seemed to have faded, dulled. The brightest color in evidence was a smear of Myrtle's blood across the flanks of the two-horse.
He took the top off and looked inside. He was shocked to see that the little tin horses were leaning sadly every whichway. Their colors had also faded. A broken bit of spring poked through the hole where you inserted the key to wind the machinery.
Someone's been in here! his mind cried. Someone's been at it!
One of Them! Ruining me wasn't enough! They had to ruin my game, too!
But a deeper voice, perhaps the fading voice of sanity, whispered that this was not true. This is how i't was from the very start, the voice whispered. You just didn't see it.
He went back to the closet, meaning to take down the gun after all. It was time to use it. He was feeling around for it when the telephone rang. Buster picked it up very slowly, knowing who was on the other end.
Nor was he disappointed.
2
"Hello, Dan," said Mr. Gaunt. "How are you this fine evening?"
"Terrible," Buster said in a glum, draggy voice. "The world has turned to boogers. I'm going to kill myself."
"Oh?" Mr. Gaunt sounded a trifle disappointed, nothing more.
"Nothing's any good. Even the game you sold me is no good."
"Oh, I doubt that very much," Mr. Gaunt replied with a touch of asperity. "I check all my merchandise very carefully, Mr. Keeton.
Very carefully indeed. Why don't you look again?"
Buster did, and what he saw astounded him. The horses stood up straight in their slots. Each coat looked freshly painted and glistening. Even their eyes seemed to spark fire. The tin race-course was all bright greens and dusty summer browns. The track looks fast, he thought dreamily, and his eyes shifted to the box-top.
Either his eyes, dulled by his deep depression, had tricked him or the colors there had deepened in some amazing way in the few seconds since the telephone had rung. Now it was Myrtle's blood he could barely see. It was drying to a drab maroon.
"My God!" he whispered.
"Well?" Mr. Gaunt asked. "Well, Dan? Am I wrong? Because if I am, you must defer your suicide at least long enough to return your purchase to me for a full refund. I stand behind my merchandise. I have to, you know. I have my reputation to protect, and that's a proposition I take very seriously in a world where there's billions of Them and only one of me."
"No... no!" Buster said. "It's... it's beautiful!"
"Then you were in error?" Mr. Gaunt persisted.
"I... I guess I must have been."
"You admit you were in error?"
"I... yes."
"Good," Mr. Gaunt said. His voice lost its edge. "Then by all means, go ahead and kill yourself Although I must admit I am disappointed. I thought I had finally met a man who had guts enough to help me kick Their asses. I guess you're just a talker, like all the rest." Mr. Gaunt sighed. It was the sigh of a man who realizes he has not glimpsed light at the end of the tunnel after all.
A strange thing was happening to Buster Keeton. He felt his vitality and purpose surging back. His own interior colors seemed to be brightening, intensifying again.
"You mean it's not too late?"
"You must have skipped Poetry IO 1. 'Tis never too late to seek a newer world. Not if you're a man with some spine. Why, I had everything all set up for you, Mr. Keeton. I was counting on you, you see."
"I like plain old Dan a lot better," Buster said, almost shyly.
"All right. Dan. Are you really set on making such a cowardly exit from life?"
"No!" Buster cried. "It's just... I thought, what's the use?
There's too many of Them."
"Three good men can do a lot of damage, Dan."
"Three? Did you say three?"
"Yes... there's another of us. Someone else who sees the danger, who understands what They are up to."
"Who?" Buster asked eagerly. "Who?"
"In time," Mr. Gaunt said, "but for now, time is in short supply.
They'll be coming for you."
Buster looked out the study window with the narrowed eyes of a ferret which smells danger on the wind. The street was empty, but only for the time being. He could feel Them, sense Them massing against him.
"What should I do?"
"Then you're on my team?" Mr. Gaunt asked. "I can count on you after all?"
"Yes!"
"All the way?"
"'Til hell freezes over or you say different!"
"Very good," Mr. Gaunt said. "Listen carefully, Dan." And as Mr. Gaunt talked and Buster listened, gradually sinking into that hypnotic state which Mr. Gaunt seemed to induce at will, the first rumbles of the approaching storm had begun to shake the air outside.
3
Five minutes later, Buster left his house. He had put a light jacket on over his tee-shirt and stuffed the hand with the cuff still on ' it deep into one of his pockets. Halfway down the block he found a van parked against the curb just where Mr. Gaunt had told him he would find it. It was bright yellow, a guarantee most passersby would look at the paint instead of the driver. It was almost windowless, and both sides were marked with the logo of a Portland TV station.
Buster took a quick but careful look in both directions, then got in. Mr. Gaunt had told him the keys would be under the seat.
They were. Sitting on the passenger seat was a paper shopping bag.
In it Buster found a blonde wig, a pair of yuppie wire-rimmed glasses, and a small glass bottle.
He put the wig on with some misgivings-long and shaggy, it looked like the scalp of a dead rock singer-but when he looked at himself in the van's rearview mirror, he was astounded by how well it fit. It made him look younger. Much younger. The lenses of the yuppie spectacles were clear glass, and they changed his appearance (at least in Buster's opinion) even more than the wig. They made him look smart, like Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast.
He stared at himself in fascination. All at once he looked thirtysomething instead of fifty-two, like a man who might very well work for a TV station. Not as a news correspondent, nothing glamorous like that, but perhaps as a cameraman or even a producer.
He unscrewed the top of the bottle and grimaced-the stuff inside smelled like a melting tractor battery. Tendrils of smoke rose from the mouth of the bottle. Got to be careful with this stuff, Buster thought. Got to be real careful.
He put the empty cuff under his right thigh and pulled the chain taut. Then he poured some of the bottle's contents on the chain just below the cuff on his wrist, being careful not to drip any of the dark, viscous liquid on his skin. The steel immediately began to smoke and bubble. A few drops struck the rubber floormat and it also began to bubble. Smoke and a horrid frying smell rose from it. After a few moments Buster pulled the empty cuff out from under his thigh, hooked his fingers through it, and yanked briskly.
The chain parted like paper and he threw it on the floor. He was still wearing a bracelet, but he could live with that; the chain and the swinging empty cuff had been the real pain in the keister- He slotted the key in the ignition, started the engine, and drove away.
Not three minutes later, a Castle County Sheriff's car driven by Seaton Thomas turned into the driveway of the Keeton home, I and old Seat discovered Myrtle Keeton sprawled half in and half out of the doorway between the garage and the kitchen. Not long after, his car was joined by four State Police units. The cops tossed the house from top to bottom, looking for either Buster or some sign of where he might have gone. No one gave the game sitting on his study desk a second glance. It was old, dirty, and obviously broken. It looked like something that might have come out of a poor relation's attic.
4
Eddie Warburton, the janitor at the Municipal Building, had been pissed off at Sonny jackett for more than two years. Over the last couple of days, this anger had built into a red rage.