She read the sign in the window of Needful Things, paused for a moment, thinking, and then walked around to the service alley. She brushed by Francine Pelletier, who was on her way out of the alley, putting something into her purse. Cora hardly even looked at her.

Halfway down the alley she saw Mr. Gaunt standing behind a wooden table which lay across the open back door of his shop like a barricade.

“Ah, Cora!” he exclaimed. “I was wondering when you’d drop by.”

“That bitch!” Cora spat. “That double-crossing little slut-bitch!”

“Pardon me, Cora,” Mr. Gaunt said with urbane politeness, “but you seem to have missed a button or two.” He pointed one of his odd, long fingers at the front of her dress.

Cora had slipped the first thing she’d found in the closet on over her nakedness, and had managed to do only the top button.

Below that one, the dress gaped open to the curls of her pubic hair. Her belly, swelled by a great many Ring-Dings, Yodels, and chocolate-covered cherries during Santa Barbara (and all her other shows), curved smoothly out.

“Who gives a shit?” Cora snapped.

“Not I,” Mr. Gaunt agreed serenely. “How may I help you?”

“That bitch is fucking The King. She broke my sunglasses. I want to kill her.”

“Do you,” Mr. Gaunt said, raising his eyebrows. “Well, I can’t say that I don’t sympathize, Cora, because I do. It may be that a woman who would steal another woman’s man deserves to live. I wouldn’t care to say on that subject one way or the other-I’ve been a businessman all my life, and know very little about matters of the heart. But a woman who deliberately breaks another woman’s most treasured possession well, that is a much more serious thing. Do you agree?”

She began to smile. It was a hard smile. It was a merciless smile.

It was a smile utterly devoid of sanity. “Too fucking right,” said Cora Rusk.

Mr. Gaunt turned around for a moment. When he faced Cora again, he was holding an automatic pistol in one hand.

“Might you be looking for something like this?” he asked.

After Buster finished with Myrtle, he fell into a deep fugue state.

All sense of purpose seemed to desert him. He thought of them-the whole town was crawling with Them-but instead of the clear, righteous anger the idea had brought only minutes before, he now felt only weariness and depression. He had a pounding headache.

His arm and back ached from wielding the hammer.

He looked down and saw that he was still holding it. He opened his hand and it fell to the kitchen linoleum, making a bloody splatter there. He stood looking at this splatter for almost a full minute with a kind of idiot attention. It looked to him like a sketch of his father’s face drawn in blood.

He plodded through the living room and into his study, rubbing his shoulder and upper arm as he went. The handcuff chain jingled maddeningly. He opened the closet door, dropped to his knees, crawled beneath the clothes which hung at the front, and dug out the box with the pacers on the front. He backed clumsily out of the closet again (the handcuff caught in one of Myrtle’s shoes and he threw it to the back of the closet with a sulky curse), took the box over to his desk, and sat down with it in front of him. Instead of excitement, he felt only sadness. Winning Ticket was wonderful, all right, but what good could it possibly do him now? It didn’t matter if he put the money back or not. He had murdered his wife.

She had undoubtedly deserved it, but They wouldn’t see it that way.

They would happily throw him in the deepest, darkest Shawshank Penitentiary cell they could find and throw away the key.

He saw that he had left large bloody smears on the box-top, and he looked down at himself. For the first time he noticed that he was covered with blood. His meaty forearms looked as though they belonged to a Chicago hog-butcher. Depression folded over him again in a soft, black wave. They had beaten him… okay. Yet he would escape Them.

He would escape Them just the same.

He got up, weary to his very center, and plodded slowly upstairs.

He undressed as he went, kicking off his shoes in the living room, dropping his pants at the foot of the stairs, then sitting down halfway up to peel off his socks. Even they were bloody. The shirt gave him the hardest time; pulling off a shirt while you were wearing a handcuff was the devil’s own job.

Almost Twenty minutes passed between the murder of Mrs.

Keeton and Buster’s trudge to and through the shower. He might have been taken into custody without a problem at almost any time during that period… but on Lower Main Street a transition of authority was going on, the Sheriff’s Office was in almost total disarray, and the whereabouts of Danforth “Buster” Keeton simply did not seem very important.

Once he had towelled dry, he put on a clean pair of pants and a tee-shirt-he didn’t have the energy to tussle again with long sleeves-and went back down to his study. Buster sat in his chair and looked at Winning Ticket again, hoping that his depression might prove to be just an ephemeral thing, that some of his earlier joy might return. But the picture on the box seemed to have faded, dulled. The brightest color in evidence was a smear of Myrtle’s blood across the flanks of the two-horse.

He took the top off and looked inside. He was shocked to see that the little tin horses were leaning sadly every whichway. Their colors had also faded. A broken bit of spring poked through the hole where you inserted the key to wind the machinery.

Someone’s been in here! his mind cried. Someone’s been at it!

One of Them! Ruining me wasn’t enough! They had to ruin my game, too!

But a deeper voice, perhaps the fading voice of sanity, whispered that this was not true. This is how i’t was from the very start, the voice whispered. You just didn’t see it.

He went back to the closet, meaning to take down the gun after all. It was time to use it. He was feeling around for it when the telephone rang. Buster picked it up very slowly, knowing who was on the other end.

Nor was he disappointed.

“Hello, Dan,” said Mr. Gaunt. “How are you this fine evening?”

“Terrible,” Buster said in a glum, draggy voice. “The world has turned to boogers. I’m going to kill myself.”

“Oh?” Mr. Gaunt sounded a trifle disappointed, nothing more.

“Nothing’s any good. Even the game you sold me is no good.”

“Oh, I doubt that very much,” Mr. Gaunt replied with a touch of asperity. “I check all my merchandise very carefully, Mr. Keeton.

Very carefully indeed. Why don’t you look again?”

Buster did, and what he saw astounded him. The horses stood up straight in their slots. Each coat looked freshly painted and glistening. Even their eyes seemed to spark fire. The tin race-course was all bright greens and dusty summer browns. The track looks fast, he thought dreamily, and his eyes shifted to the box-top.

Either his eyes, dulled by his deep depression, had tricked him or the colors there had deepened in some amazing way in the few seconds since the telephone had rung. Now it was Myrtle’s blood he could barely see. It was drying to a drab maroon.

“My God!” he whispered.

“Well?” Mr. Gaunt asked. “Well, Dan? Am I wrong? Because if I am, you must defer your suicide at least long enough to return your purchase to me for a full refund. I stand behind my merchandise. I have to, you know. I have my reputation to protect, and that’s a proposition I take very seriously in a world where there’s billions of Them and only one of me.”