like crude ceramic figures baked until they were on the verge of cracking. The pain was both hot and cold, set deep in her flesh like complex networks of poisoned wires. She held her hands up despairingly, scarecrow hands, awful, deformed hands, and downstairs the doorbell chimed again. She uttered a distracted little cry.
She went out onto the landing with her hands held out in front of her like the paws of a dog sitting up to beg a sweet. "Who is it?" she called down. Her voice was hoarse, gummy with sleep.
Her tongue tasted like something which had been used to line a cat-box.
"It's Nettle!" The voice drifted back up. "Are you okay, Polly?"
Nettle. Good God, what was Nettle doing here before the crack of dawn on Sunday morning?
"I'm fine!" she called back. "I have to put something on! Use your key, dear!"
When she heard Nettle's key begin to rattle in the lock, Polly hurried back into her bedroom. She glanced at the clock on the table beside her bed and saw that dawn had cracked several hours before. Nor had she come back to put something on; her housecoat would do for Nettle just fine. But she needed a pill. She had never, never in her life, needed a pill as badly as she did now.
She didn't know how bad her condition really was until she tried to take one. The pills-actually caplets-were in a small glass dish on the mantel of the room's ornamental fireplace. She was able to get her hand into the dish all right, but found herself completely unable to grasp one of the caplets once it was there. Her fingers were like the pincers of some machine which had frozen solid for lack of oil.
She tried harder, concentrating all of her will on making her fingers close upon one of the gelatine capsules. She was rewarded with slight movement and a great burst of agony. That was all. She made a little muttering sound of pain and frustration.
"Polly?" From the foot of the stairs now, Nettle's voice was concerned. People in Castle Rock might consider Nettle vague, Polly thought, but when it came to the vicissitudes of Polly's infirmity, Nettle was not vague at all. She had been around the house too long to be fooled... and had loved her too well. "Polly, are you really all right?"
"Be right down, dear!" she called back, trying to sound bright and lively. And as she took her hand out of the glass dish and bent her head over it, she thought, Please, God. Don't let her come up now.
Don't let her see me doing this.
She lowered her face into the dish like a dog about to drink from its bowl and stuck out her tongue. Pain, shame, horror, and most of all a dark depression, all maroons and grays, enfolded her.
She pressed her tongue against one of the caplets until it stuck.
She drew it into her mouth, now not a dog but an anteater ingesting a tasty morsel, and swallowed.
As the pill traced its tiny hard trail down her throat, she thought again: I would give anything to be free of this. Anything.
Anything at all.
4
Hugh Priest rarely dreamed anymore; these days he did not go to sleep so much as fall unconscious. But he'd had a dream last night, a real lulu. The dream had told him everything he had to know, and everything he was supposed to do.
In it he had been sitting at his kitchen table, drinking a beer and watching a game-show called Sale of the Century. All the things they were giving away were things he had seen in that shop, Needful Things. And all of the contestants were bleeding from their ears and the corners of their eyes. They were laughing, but they looked terrified.
All at once a muffled voice began to call, "Hugh! Hugh! Let me out, Hugh!"
It was coming from the closet. He went over and opened it, ready to coldcock whoever was hiding inside. But there was no one; only the usual tangle of boots, scarves, coats, fishing tackle, and his two shotguns.
"Hugh!"
He looked up, because the voice was coming from the shelf.
It was the fox-tail. The fox-tail was talking. And Hugh recognized the voice at once. It was the voice of Leland Gaunt. He had taken the brush down, revelling again in its plushy softness, a texture that was a little like silk, a little like wool, and really like nothing at all but its own