"I don't know," she said. He held the door for her and she went past him into the shop. "I suppose someone's been hurt and needs to go to the hospital. Medical Assistance in Norway is awfully slow on the weekends. Although why the dispatcher would send two cruisers..."
Mr. Gaunt closed the door behind them. The bell tinkled. The shade on the door was down, and with the sun now going the other way, the interior of Needful Things was gloomy... but, Polly thought, if gloom could ever be pleasant, this gloom was. A small reading lamp shed a golden circle on the counter by Mr. Gaunt's old-fashioned cash register. A book lay open there. It was Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Mr. Gaunt was looking at her closely, and Polly had to smile again at the expression of concern in his eyes.
"My hands have been kicking up the very dickens these last few days," she said. "I guess I don't exactly look like Demi Moore."
"You look like a woman who is very tired and in quite a lot of discomfort," he said.
The smile on her face wavered. There was understanding and deep compassion in his voice, and for a moment Polly was afraid she might burst into tears. The thought which kept the tears at bay was an odd one: His hands. If I cry, he'll try to comfort me. He'll put his hands on me.
She buttressed the smile.
"I'll survive; I always have. Tell me-did Nettle Cobb happen to drop by?"
"Today?" He frowned. "No; not today. If she had, I would have shown her a new piece of carnival glass that came in yesterday. It's not as nice as the one I sold her last week, but I thought she might be interested. Why do you ask?"
"Oh... no reason," Polly said. "She said she might, but Nettle... Nettle often forgets things."
"She strikes me as a woman who has had a hard life," Mr. Gaunt said gravely.
"Yes. Yes, she has." Polly spoke these words slowly and mechanically. She could not seem to take her eyes from his. Then one of her hands brushed against the edge of a glass display case, and that caused her to break eye-contact. A little gasp of pain escaped her.
"Are you all right?"
"Yes, fine," Polly said, but it was a lie she wasn't even within shouting distance of fine.
Mr. Gaunt clearly understood this. "You're not well," he said decisively. "Therefore I'm going to dispense with the small-talk.
The item which I wrote you about did come in. I'm going to give it to you and send you home."
"Give it to me?"
"Oh, I'm not offering you a present," he said as he went behind the cash register. "We hardly know each other well enough for that, do we?"
She smiled. He was clearly a kind man, a man who, naturally enough, wanted to do something nice for the first person in Castle Rock who had done something nice for him. But she was having a hard time responding-was having a hard time even following the conversation. The pain in her hands was monstrous. She now wished she hadn't come, and, kindness or no kindness, all she wanted to do was get out and go home and take a pain-pill.
"This is the sort of item a vendor has to offer on trial-if he's an ethical man, that is." He produced a ring of keys, selected one, and unlocked the drawer under the cash register. "If you try it for a couple of days and discover it is worthless to you-and I have to tell you that will probably be the case you return it to me. If, on the other hand, you find it provides you with some relief, we can talk price." He smiled at her. "And for you, the price would be rock-bottom, I can assure you."
She looked at him, puzzled. Relief? What was he talking about?
He brought out a small white box and set it on the counter. He took off the lid with his odd, long-fingered hands, and removed a small silver object on a fine chain from the cotton batting inside.
It seemed to be a necklace of some sort, but the thing which hung down when Mr. Gaunt tented his fingers over the chain looked like a tea-ball, or an oversized thimble.
"This is Egyptian, Polly. Very old. Not as old as the Pyramidsgosh, no!-but still very old. There's something inside it.
Some sort of herb, I think, although I'm not sure." He wiggled his fingers up and down. The silver tea-ball (if that was what it was) jounced at the bottom of the chain. Something shifted inside, something which made a dusty, slithery sound. Polly found it vaguely unpleasant.
"It's called an azka, or perhaps an azakah," Mr. Gaunt said.
"Either way, it's an amulet which is supposed to ward off pain."
Polly tried a smile. She wanted to be polite, but really. - she had come all the way down here for this? The thing didn't even have any aesthetic value. It was ugly, not to put too fine a point on it.
"I really don't think.
"I don't, either," he said, "but desperate situations often call for desperate measures. I assure you it is quite genuine... at least in the sense that it wasn't made in Taiwan. It is an authentic Egyptian artifact-not quite a relic, but an artifact most certainly-from the period of the Later Decline. It comes with a certificate of provenance which identifies it as a tool of benka-litis, or white magic. I want you to take it and wear it. I suppose it sounds silly. Probably it is. But there are stranger things in heaven and earth than some of us dream Of, even in our wilder moments of philosophy."
"Do you really believe that?" Polly asked.
"Yes. I've seen things in my time that make a healing medallion or amulet look perfectly ordinary." A fugitive gleam flickered momentarily in his hazel eyes. "Many such things. The world's odd corners are filled with fabulous junk, Polly. But never mind that; you are the issue here.
"Even the other day, when I suspect the pain was not nearly as bad as it is right now, I got a good idea of just how unpleasant your situation had become. I thought this little... item... might be worth a try. After all, what have you to lose? Nothing else you've tried has worked, has it?"
"I appreciate the thought, Mr. Gaunt, really I do, but-"
"Leland.
Please."
"Yes, all right. I appreciate the thought, Leland, but I'm afraid I'm not superstitious."
She looked up and saw his bright hazel eyes were fixed upon her.
"It doesn't matter if you are or not, Polly... because this is."
He wiggled his fingers. The azka bobbed gently at the end of its chain.
She opened her mouth again, but this time no words came out.
She found herself remembering a day last spring. Nettle had forgotten her copy of Inside View when she went home. Leafing through it idly, glancing at stories about werewolf babies in Cleveland and a geological formation on the moon that looked like the face of JFK, Polly had come upon an ad for something called The Prayer Dial of the Ancients. It was supposed to cure headaches, stomach aches, and arthritis.
The ad was dominated by a black-and-white drawing. It showed a fellow with a long beard and a wizard's hat (either Nostradamus or Gandalf, Polly assumed) holding something that looked like a child's pinwheel over the body of a man in a wheelchair. The pinwheel gadget was casting a cone of radiance over the invalid, and although the ad did not come right out and say so, the implication seemed to be that the guy would be dancing up a storm at the Copa in a night or two. It was ridiculous, of course, superstitious pap for people whose minds had wavered or perhaps even broken under a steady onslaught of pain and disability, but still...
She had sat looking at that ad for a long time, and, ridiculous as it was, she had almost called the 800 number for phone orders given at the bottom of the page. Because sooner or later"Sooner or later a person in pain should explore even the more questionable paths, if it's possible those paths might lead to relief," Mr. Gaunt said. "Isn't that so?"
"I... I don't."
"Cold therapy... thermal gloves... even the radiation treatments... none of them have worked for you, have they?"
"How do you know about all that?"
"A good tradesman makes it his business to know the needs of his customers," Mr. Gaunt said in his soft, hypnotic voice. He moved toward her, holding the silver chain out in a wide ring with the azka hanging at the bottom. She shrank from the long hands with their leathery nails.
"Fear not, dear lady. I'll not touch the least hair upon your head.
Not if you're calm... and remain quite still..."
And Polly did become calm. She did become still. She stood with her hands (still encased in the woolly mittens) crossed demurely in front of her, and allowed Mr. Gaunt to drop the silver chain over her head. He did it with the gentleness of a father turning down his daughter's bridal veil. She felt far away from Mr. Gaunt, from Needful Things, from Castle Rock, even from herself. She felt like a woman standing high on some dusty plain and under an endless sky, hundreds of miles from any other human being.
The azka dropped against the zipper of her leather car-coat with a small clink.
"Put it inside your jacket. And when you get home, put it inside your blouse, as well. It must be worn next to the skin for maximum effect."
"I can't put it in my jacket," Polly said in slow, dreaming tones.
"The zipper... I can't pull down the zipper."
"No? Try."
So Polly stripped off one of the mittens and tried. To her great surprise, she found she was able to flex the thumb and first finger of her right hand just enough to grasp the zipper's tab and pull it down.