"Say it!"
"Mr. Gaunt. Brian had to swallow again to make room for the words. "Mr. Gaunt knows best."
"That's right, bush. That's exactly right. And what that means is you're going to do what I say... or else."
Brian summoned all his will and made one final effort.
"What if I say no, anyway? What if I say no because I didn't understand the whatdoyoucallems... the terms?"
Koufax/Gaunt picked the baseball out of his glove and closed his hand over it. Small drops of blood began to sweat out of the stitches.
"You really can't say no, Brian," he said softly. "Not anymore.
Why, this is the seventh game of the World Series. All the chickens have come home to roost, and it's time to shit or git. Take a look around you. Go on and take a good look."
Brian looked around and was horrified to see that Ebbets Field was so full they were standing in the aisles... and he knew them all. He saw his Ma and Pa sitting with his little brother, Sean, in the Commissioner's Box behind home plate. His speech therapy class, flanked by Miss Ratcliffe on one end and her big dumb boyfriend, Lester Pratt, on the other, was ranged along the first-base line, drinking Royal Crown Cola and munching hotdogs. The entire Castle Rock Sheriff's Office was seated in the bleachers, drinking beer from paper cups with pictures of this year's Miss Rheingold contestants on them.
He saw his Sunday School class, the town selectmen, Myra and Chuck Evans, his aunts, his uncles, his cousins.
There, sitting behind third base, was Sonny jackett, and when Koufax/Gaunt threw the bleeding ball and it made that rifleshot crack in the catcher's glove again, Brian saw that the face behind the mask now belonged to Hugh Priest.
"Run you down, little buddy," Hugh said as he threw the ball back.
"Make you squeak."
"You see, bush, it's not just a question of the baseball card anymore," Koufax/Gaunt said from beside him. "You know that, don't you? When you slung that mud at Wilma jerzyck's sheets, you started something. Like a guy who starts an avalanche just by shouting too loud on a warm winter day. Now your choice is simple.
You can keep going... or you can stay where you are and get buried."
In his dream, Brian finally began to cry. He saw, all right. He saw)just fine, now that it was too late to make any difference.
Gaunt squeezed the baseball. More blood poured out, and his fingertips sank deep into its white, fleshy surface. "If you don't want everybody In Castle Rock to know you were the one who started the avalanche, Brian, you had better do what I tell you."
Brian wept harder.
"When you deal with me," Gaunt said, winding up to throw, you want to remember two things: Mr. Gaunt knows best... and the dealing isn't done until Mr. Gaunt sys the dealing's done."
He threw with that sinuous all-of-a-sudden delivery which had made Sandy Koufax so hard to hit (that was, at least, the humble opinion of
Brian's father), and when the ball hit Hugh Priest's glove this time, it exploded. Blood and hair and stringy gobbets of flesh flew up in the bright autumn sun. And Brian had awakened, weeping into his pillow.
8
Now he was off to do what Mr. Gaunt had told him he must do. it had been simple enough to get away; he simply told his mother and father he didn't want to go to church that morning because he felt sick to his stomach (nor was this a lie. Once they were gone, he made his preparations.
It was hard to pedal his bike and even harder to keep it balanced, because of the Playmate picnic cooler in the bike basket. It was very heavy, and he was sweating and out of breath by the time he reached the jerzyck house. There was no hesitation this time, no ringing the doorbell, no preplanned story. No one was here. Sandy Koufax/Leland Gaunt had told him in the dream that the jerzycks would be staying late after the eleven o'clock Mass to discuss the upcoming Casino Nite festivities and would then be going to visit friends. Brian believed him. All he wanted now was to finish with this awful business just as fast as he could. And when it was done, he would go home, park his bike, and spend the rest of the day in bed.
He lifted the picnic cooler out of the bike basket, using both hands, and set it down on the grass. He was behind the hedge, where no one could see him. What he was about to do would be noisy, but Koufax/Gaunt had told him not to worry about that. He said most of the people on Willow Street were Catholics, and almost all of those not attending eleven o'clock Mass would have gone at eight and then left on their various Sunday day-trips. Brian didn't know if that was true or not. He only knew two things for sure: Mr. Gaunt knew best, and the deal wasn't done until Mr. Gaunt said the deal was done.
And this was the deal.
Brian opened the Playmate cooler. There were about a dozen good-sized rocks inside. Wrapped around each and held with a rubber band or two was a sheet of paper from Brian's school notebook. Printed on each sheet in large letters was this simple message: I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME ALONE.
THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING Brian took one of these and walked up the lawn until he was less than ten feet from the jerzycks' big living-room window-what had been called a "picture window" back in the early sixties, when this house had been built. He wound up, hesitated for only a moment, and then let fly like Sandy Koufax facing the lead-off batter in the seventh game of the World Series. There was a huge and unmusical crash, followed by a thud as the rock hit the living-room carpet and rolled across the floor.
The sound had an odd effect on Brian. His fear left him, and his distaste for this further task-which could by no stretch of the imagination be dismissed as something so inconsequential as a Prank-also evaporated. The sound of breaking glass excited him... made him feel, in fact, the way he felt when he had his daydreams about Miss Ratcliffe. Those had been foolish, and he knew that now, but there was nothing foolish about this. This was fear Besides, he found that he now wanted the Sandy Koufax card more than ever. He had discovered another large fact about possessions and the Peculiar Psychological state they induce: the more one has to go through because of something one owns, the more one wants to keep that thing.
Brian took two more rocks and walked over to the broken Picture window. He looked inside and saw the rock he had thrown.
It was lying in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen.
It looked very improbable there-like seeing a rubber boot on a church altar or a rose lying on the engine block of a tractor. One of the rubber bands holding the note to the rock had snapped, but the other was still okay. Brian's gaze shifted to the left and he found himself regarding the Jerzycks' Sony TV.
Brian wound up and threw. The rock hit the Sony dead-on.
There was a hollow bang, a flash of light, and glass showered the carpet. The TV tottered on its stand but did not quite fall over.
"Stee-rike two!" Brian muttered, then gave voice to a strange, strangled laugh.
He threw the other rock at a bunch of ceramic knickknacks standing on a table by the sofa, but missed. It hit the wall with a thump and gouged out a chunk of plaster.
Brian laid hold of the Playmate's handle and lugged it around to the side of the house. He broke two bedroom windows. In back, he pegged a loaf-sized rock through the window in the top half of the kitchen door, then threw several more through the hole. One of these shattered the Cuisinart standing on the counter. Another blasted through the glass front of the RadarRange and landed right inside the microwave. "Stee-rike three! Siddown, bush!" Brian cried, and then laughed so hard he almost wet his pants.
When the throe had passed, he finished his circuit of the house.
The Playmate was lighter now; he found he could carry it with one hand. He used his last three rocks to break the basement windows which showed among Wilma's fall flowers, then ripped up a few handfuls of the blooms for good measure. With that done, he closed the cooler, returned to his bicycle, put the Playmate into the basket, and mounted up for the ride home.
The Mislaburskis lived next door to the jerzycks. As Brian pedaled out of the jerzyck driveway, Mrs. Mislaburski opened her front door and came out on the stoop. She was dressed in a bright green wrapper. Her hair was bound up in a red doo-rag. She looked like an advertisement for Christmas in hell.
"What's going on over there, boy?" she asked sharply.
"I don't know, exactly. I think Mr. and Mrs. jerzyck must be having an argument," Brian said, not stopping. "I just came over to ask if they needed anyone to shovel their driveway this winter, but I decided to come back another time."
Mrs. Mislaburski directed a brief, baleful glance at the Jerzyck house. Because of the hedges, only the second story was visible from where she stood. "If I were you, I wouldn't come back at all," she said. "That woman reminds me of those little fish they have down in South America. The ones that eat the cows whole."
"Piranha-fish," Brian said.
"That's right. Those."
Brian kept on pedaling. He was now drawing away from the woman in the green wrapper and red doo-rag. His heart was hustling right along, but it wasn't hammering or racing or anything like that.
Part of him felt quite sure he was still dreaming. He didn't feel like himself at all-not like the Brian Rusk who got all A's and B's, the Brian Rusk who was a member of the Student Council and the Middle School Good Citizens' League, the Brian Rusk who got nothing but I's in deportment.
"She'll kill somebody one of these days!" Mrs. Mislaburski called indignantly after Brian. "You just mark my words!"