Needful Things

by Stephen King

The town was sleeping now. The shops were dark, the houses were dark, and the only movement on Main Street was the blinker at the intersection of Main and Watermill, flashing on and off in sleepy yellow beats. He looked over the town with a tender loving eye. It wasn’t his town just yet, but it soon would be. He had a lien on it already. They didn’t know that… but they would. They would. The grand opening had gone very, very well. Mr. Gaunt thought of himself as an electrician of the human soul. In a small town like Castle Rock, all the fuse-boxes were lined up neatly side by side. What you had to do was open the boxes… and then start cross-wiring. You hot-wired a Wilma Jerzyck to a Nettie Cobb by using wires from two other fuse-boxes—those of a young fellow like Brian Rusk and a drunk fellow like Hugh Priest, let us say. You hot-wired other people in the same way, a Buster Keeton to a Norris Ridgewick, a Frank Jewett to a George Nelson, a Sally Ratcliffe to a Lester Pratt. At some point you tested one of your fabulous wiring jobs just to make sure everything was working correctly—as he had done today—and then you laid low and sent a charge through the circuits every once in a while to keep things interesting. To keep things hot. But mostly you just laid low until everything was done… and then you turned on the juice. All the juice. All at once. All it took was an understanding of human nature, and—