Needful Things

by Stephen King

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

But the real reason he’d gone was the one most bad decisions have in common: it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

It seemed that his tears had a lot in common with the possessions of his dead loved ones; you never got to the end of them.

At fifty-one you had to keep running just to escape the avalanche of your own past.

She considered telling Mr. Gaunt that her husband might still be alive if he had not smashed a carnival glass lampshade much like this one fourteen years ago, that it had been the last straw, the one which finally drove her over the edge. He had broken many of her bones during their years together, and she had let him live. Finally he had broken something she really needed, and she had taken his life.

“Welcome back! Enter freely, and leave some of the happiness you bring!”

she believed that lies and love rarely went together, and never for long.

Pain and lies; lies and pain.

They had indeed wanted to talk to her, because they had hauled the bodies of a young woman and a small child from the smoky third floor of the apartment building. They had both been burned beyond recognition. They knew who the child was; if Polly wasn’t at work, they would know who the woman was, too.

Love might make the world go round, but she was convinced it was the cries of the badly wounded and deeply afflicted which spun the universe on the great glass pole of its axis.

“I love you, Polly.” Touched, Polly replied: “Why, I love you, too, Nettie.”

Nettie left. It was the last time Polly ever saw her alive.

the more one has to go through because of something one owns, the more one wants to keep that thing.

6

Because in America, you could have anything you wanted, just as long as you could pay for it. If you couldn’t pay, or refused to pay, you would remain needful forever.

Everyone loves something for nothing… even if it costs everything.

It was funny stuff, sanity. When it was taken away, you didn’t know it. You didn’t feel its departure. You only really knew it when it was restored, like some rare wild bird which lived and sang within you not by decree but by choice.

He turned back, quick as a snake himself, so quick he made Alan look slow. His face had changed again; its human aspect was entirely gone. It was the face of a demon now, with long, deeply scored cheeks and drooping eyes that blazed with orange fire.

couldn’t save him this time, because the Folding Flower Trick was used up, it was— His thumb slipped into the loop. The tiny paper packet snapped out. Alan thrust his hand forward, sliding the loop free for the last time as he did so. “ABRACADABRA, YOU LYING FUCK!” he cried, and what suddenly bloomed in his hand was not a bouquet of flowers but a blazing bouquet of light that lit Upper Main Street with a fabulous, shifting radiance. Yet he realized the colors rising from his fist in an incredible fountain were one color, as all the colors translated by a glass prism or a rainbow in the air are one color. He felt a jolt of power run up his arm, and for a moment he was filled with a great and incoherent ecstasy:

Mr. Gaunt gave voice to a long, gibbering wail of pain and fear and scrabbled backward with blue fire dancing in his hair. The long white fingers made one final effort to seize the handles of the valise, and this time it was Alan who stamped on them.