Needful Things

by Stephen King

Miss Ratcliffe was pretty, but she was also old. She had told the speech kids once that she would be twenty-four in November.

Come in, my friend. Enter freely, and leave some of the happiness you bring!”

At twenty to ten, Henry Beaufort, bartender and owner of The Mellow Tiger, had invited Hugh to put an egg in his shoe and beat it, to make like a tree and leave, to imitate an amoeba and split—in

Grownups didn’t think the same as normal people,

“Your chance. Your chance to live your own life. Right how you have the look of a woman who is seeing ghosts. Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?” She had shaken her head slowly. “Men and women who can’t get over the past,” Aunt Evvie said. “That’s what ghosts are. Not them.” She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. “The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay.”