4 1is that what you really thought?"
"Yes, sir."
Alan sighed. "Well, you know what it was now. And you know it was a bad thing to do. Throwing rocks through somebody's windows is a pretty serious business, even if nothing else comes of it."
"Yes, sir."
"But this time, something else did come of it. You know that, don't you, Brian?"
"Yes, sir."
Those eyes, looking up at him from that calm, pallid face. Alan began to understand two things: this boy did want to tell him what had happened, but he was almost certainly not going to do so.
"You look very unhappy, Brian."
"Yes, sir?"
"'Yes, sir'. does that mean you are unhappy?"
Brian nodded, and two more tears spilled from his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. Alan felt two strong, conflicting emotions: deep pity and wild exasperation.
"What are you unhappy about, Brian? Tell me."
"I used to have this really nice dream," Brian said in a voice which was almost too low to hear. "It was stupid, but it was nice, just the same. It was about Miss Ratcliffe, my speech teacher. Now I know it's stupid. I didn't used to know, and that was better. But guess what? I know more than that now."
Those dark, terribly unhappy eyes rose to meet Alan's again.
"The dream I have... the one about the monster who throws the rocks... it scares me, Sheriff Pangborn... but what makes me unhappy are the things I know now. It's like knowing how the magician does his tricks."
He nodded his head a little, and Alan could have sworn Brian was looking at the band of his watch.
"Sometimes it's better to be dumb. I know that now."
Alan put a hand on the boy's shoulder. "Brian, let's cut through the bullshit, all right? Tell me what happened. Tell me what you saw and what you did."
"I came to see if they wanted their driveway shovelled this winter," the boy said in a mechanical rote voice that frightened Alan badly. The kid looked like almost any American child of eleven or twelve-Converse sneakers, jeans, a tee-shirt with Bart Simpson on it-but he sounded like a robot which has been badly programmed and is now in danger of overloading. For the first time, Alan wondered if Brian Rusk had maybe seen one of his own parents throwing rocks at the jerzyck house.
"I heard noises," the boy was continuing. He spoke in simple declarative sentences, talking as police detectives are trained to talk in court. "They were scary noises. Bangs and crashes and things breaking. So I rode away as fast as I could. The lady from next door was out on her stoop. She asked me what was going on. I think she was scared, too."
"Yes," Alan said. "Jillian Mislaburski. I talked to her." He touched the Playmate cooler sitting crookedly in the basket of Brian's bike. He was not unaware of the way Brian's lips tightened when he did this. "Did you have this cooler with you on Sunday morning, Brian?"
"Yes, sir," Brian said. He wiped his cheeks with the backs of his hands and watched Alan's face warily.
"What was in it?"
Brian said nothing, but Alan thought his lips were trembling.
"What was in it, Brian?"
Brian said a little more nothing.
"Was it full of rocks?"
Slowly and deliberately, Brian shook his head-no.
For the third time, Alan asked: "What was in it?"
"Same thing that's in it now," Brian whispered.
"May I open it and see?"
"Yes, sir," Brian said in his listless voice. "I guess so."
Alan rotated the cover to one side and looked into the cooler.
It was full of baseball cards: Topps, Fleer, Donruss.
"These are my traders. I carry them with me almost everywhere," Brian said.
"You... carry them with you."
"Yes, sir."
"Why, Brian? Why do you cart a cooler filled with baseball cards around with you?"
"I told you-they're traders. You never know when you'll get a chance to make a boss trade with someone. I'm still looking for a Joe Foy-he was on the Impossible Dream team in '67-and a Mike Greenwell rookie card. The Gator's my favorite player." And now Alan thought he saw a faint, fugitive gleam of amusement in the boy's eyes; could almost hear a telepathic voice chanting Fooled ya! Fooledya! But surely that was only him; only his own frustration mocking the boy's voice.
Wasn't it?
Well, what did you expect to find inside that cooler, anyway?
A pile of rocks with notes tied around them? Did you actually think he was on his way to do the same thing to someone else's house?
Yes, he admitted. Part of him had thought exactly that. Brian Rusk, The Pint-Sized Terror of Castle Rock. The Mad Rocker. And the worst part was this: he was pretty sure Brian Rusk knew what was going through his head.
Fooledya! Fooledya, Sheriff.' "Brian, please tell me what's going on around here. If you know, please tell me."
Brian closed the lid of the Playmate cooler and said nothing. It made a soft little snick! in the drowsy autumn afternoon.
"Can't say?"
Brian nodded slowly-meaning, Alan thought, that he was right: he couldn't say.
"Tell me this, at least: are you scared? Are you scared, Brian?"
Brian nodded again, just as slowly.
"Tell me what you're scared of, son. Maybe I can make it go away." He tapped one finger lightly against the badge he wore on the left side of his uniform shirt. "I think that's why they pay me to lug this star around. Because sometimes I can make the scary stuff go away."
"I-" Brian began, and then the police radio Alan had installed beneath the dash of the Town and Country wagon three or four years ago squawked to life.
"Unit One, Unit One, this is base. Do you copy? Over?"
Brian's eyes broke away from Alan's. They turned toward the station wagon and the sound of Sheila Brigham's voice-the voice of authority, the voice of the police. Alan saw that, if the boy had been on the verge of telling him something (and it might only be wishful thinking to believe he had been), he wasn't anymore. His face had closed up like a clamshell.
"You go on home now, Brian. We're going to talk about this... this dream of yours... more later on. Okay?"
"Yes, sir," Brian said. "I guess so."
"In the meantime, think about what I said: most of what being Sheriff's about is making the scary stuff go away."
"I have to go home now, Sheriff. If I don't get home pretty soon, my mom's gonna be mad at me."
Alan nodded. "Well, we don't want that. Go on, Brian."
He watched the boy go. Brian's head was down, and once again he did not seem to be riding the bike so much as trudging along with it between his legs. Something was wrong there, so wrong that Alan's finding out what had happened to Wilma and Nettle seemed secondary to finding out what had put the tired, haunted expression on that kid's face.
The women, after all, were dead and buried. Brian Rusk was still alive.
He went to the tired old station wagon he should have traded a year ago, leaned in, grabbed the Radio Shack mike, and depressed the transmit button. "Yeah, Sheila, this is Unit One. I copy-come on back."
"Henry Payton called for you, Alan," Sheila said. "He told me to tell you it's urgent. He wants me to patch you through to him.
Ten-four?"
"Go for it," Alan said. He felt his pulse pick up.
"It may take a couple of minutes, ten-four?"
"That's fine. I'll be right here. Unit One clear."
He leaned against the side of the car in the dappled shade, mike in hand, waiting to see what was urgent in Henry Payton's life.
13
By the time Polly reached home, it was twenty minutes past three, and she felt torn in two completely different directions. On one hand, she felt a deep, drumming need to be about the errand Mr.
Gaunt had given her (she didn't like to think of it in his terms, as a prank-Polly Chalmers was not much of a prankster), to get it done so that the azka would finally belong to her. The concept that the dealing wasn't done until Mr. Gaunt said the dealing was done had not so much as crossed her mind.
On the other hand, she felt a deep, drumming need to get in touch with Alan, to tell him exactly what had happened... or as much of it as she could remember. One thing she could rememberit filled her with shame and a low sort of horror, but she could remember it, all right-was this: Mr. Leland Gaunt hated the man Polly loved, and Mr.
Gaunt was doing something-something-that was very wrong. Alan should know. Even if the azka stopped working, he should know.
You don't mean that.
But yes-part of her meant exactly that. The part that was terrified of Leland Gaunt even though she couldn't remember what, exactly, he had done to induce that feeling of terror.
Do you want to go back to the way things were, Polly? Do you want to go back to owning a pair of hands that feel full of shrapnel?
No... but neither did she want Alan hurt. Neither did she want Mr. Gaunt to do whatever he was planning to do, if it was something (she suspected it was) that would hurt the town. Nor did she want to be a part of that something, by going out to the old deserted Camber place at the end of Town Road #3 and playing some sort of trick she didn't even understand.
So these conflicting wants, each championed by its own hectoring voice, pulled at her as she walked slowly home. If Mr. Gaunt had hypnotized her in some way (she had been positive of this when she left the store, but she became less and less sure as time passed), the effects had worn off now. (Polly really believed this.) And she had never in her life found herself so incapable of deciding what to do next. It was as if her whole supply of some vital decisionmaking chemical had been stolen from her brain.