tried again. "Listen, Mr.-"
"Gaunt."
Ace nodded, his head bobbing up and down like the head of a marionette controlled by a novice puppet-master. "Under other circumstances, I'd take you up on it. You're... interesting." It wasn't the word he wanted, but it was the best one he could wrap his tongue around for the time being. "But you were right-I am in a jackpot, and if I don't find a large chunk of cash in the next two weeks-"
"Well, what about the book?" Mr. Gaunt asked. His tone was both amused and reproving. "Isn't that why you came in?"
"It isn't what I-" He discovered he was still holding it in his hand, and looked down at it again. The picture was the same, but the title had changed back to what he had seen in the show window: Lost and Buried Treasures of New England, by Reginald Merrill.
"What is this?" he asked thickly. But suddenly he knew. He wasn't in Castle Rock at all; he was at home in Mechanic Falls, lying in his own dirty bed, dreaming all this.
"It looks like a book to me," Mr. Gaunt said. "And wasn't your late uncle's name Reginald Merrill? What a coincidence."
"My uncle never wrote anything but receipts and IOUs in his whole life," Ace said in that same thick, sleepy voice. He looked up at Gaunt again, and found he could not pull his eyes away.
Gaunt's eyes kept changing color. Blue gray... hazel... brown... black.
"Well," Mr. Gaunt admitted, "perhaps the name on the book is a pseudonym. Perhaps I wrote that particular tome myself."
"You?"
Mr. Gaunt steepled his fingers under his chin. "Perhaps it isn't even a book at all. Perhaps all the really special things I sell aren't what they appear to be. Perhaps they are actually gray things with only one remarkable property-the ability to take the shapes of those things which haunt the dreams of men and women." He paused, then added thoughtfully: "Perhaps they are dreams themselves."
"I don't get any of this."
Mr. Gaunt smiled. "I know. It doesn't matter. If your uncle had written a book, Ace, mightn't it have been about buried treasure?
Wouldn't you say that treasure-whether buried in the ground or in the pockets of his fellow men-was a subject which greatly interested him?"
"He liked money, all right," Ace said grimly.
"Well, what happened to it?" Mr. Gaunt cried. "Did he leave any of it to you? Surely he did; are you not his only surviving relative?"
"He didn't leave me a red fucking cent!" Ace yelled back furiously. "Everyone in town said that old bastard had the first dime he ever made, but there was less than four thousand dollars in his bank accounts when he died. That went to bury him and clean up that mess he left downstreet. And when they opened his safe deposit box, do you know what they found?"
"Yes," Mr. Gaunt said, and although his mouth was SERIOUS-EVEN sympathetic-his eyes were laughing. "Trading stamps. Six books of Plaid Stamps and fourteen of Gold Bond Stamps."
"That's right!" Ace said. He looked balefully down at Lost and Buried Treasures of New England. His disquiet and his sense of dreamy disorientation had been swallowed, at least for the time being, by his rage. "And you know what? You can't even redeem Gold Bond Stamps anymore. The company went out of business.
Everyone in Castle Rock was afraid of him-even I was a little afraid of him-and everyone thought he was as rich as Scrooge McFucking Duck, but he died broke."
"Maybe he "Maybe he didn't trust banks," Mr. Gaunt said. Buried his treasure.
"Do you think that's possible, Ace?"
Ace opened his mouth. Closed it again. Opened it. Closed it.
"Stop that," said Mr. Gaunt. "You look like a fish in an aquarium."
Ace looked at the book in his hand. He put it on the counter and riffled through the pages, which were crammed tight with small print.
And something breezed out. It was a large and ragged chunk of brown paper, unevenly folded, and he recognized it at once it had been torn from a Hemphill's Market shopping bag. How often, as a little boy, had he watched his uncle tear off a piece of brown paper just like this one from one of the bags he kept under his ancient Tokeheim cash register? How many times had he watched him add up figures on such a scrap... or write an IOU on it?
He unfolded it with shaking hands.
It was a map, that much was clear, but at first he could