Needful Things

by Stephen King

Brian thought of her dark blue eyes, her long dancer’s legs, and felt the same glum amazement he always felt when he realized that, come January, she intended to change Sally Ratcliffe, which was lovely, to Sally Pratt, which sounded to Brian like a fat lady falling down a short hard flight of stairs.

Most of all they wondered what had become of the baby. Had pretty Polly gotten an abortion? Had she given it up for adoption? Had she kept it? If so, had it died? Was it (maddening pronoun, that) alive now, at school somewhere, and writing the occasional letter home to its mother? No one knew these things, either, and in many ways the unanswered questions about “it” were the most galling. The girl who had left on a Greyhound with a bun in her oven was now a woman of almost forty and had been back, living and doing business in town, for four years, and no one even knew the sex of the child that had caused her to leave.

The King stands with his legs apart, his blue eyes blazing, the bell bottoms of his white jumpsuit shaking. Rhinestones glitter and flash in the overhead spotlights. A sheaf of blue-black hair falls across his forehead. The mike is near his mouth, but not so near Myra cannot see the pouty curl of his upper lip. She can see everything. She is in the first row. And suddenly, as the rhythm section blasts off, he is holding a hand out, holding it out to HER, the way Bruce Springsteen (who will never be The King in a million years, no matter how hard he tries) holds his hand out to that girl in his “Dancing in the Dark” video.

The lie neither angered nor worried him. There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them . . . and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth.

Besides, he found that he now wanted the Sandy Koufax card more than ever. He had discovered another large fact about possessions and the peculiar psychological state they induce: the more one has to go through because of something one owns, the more one wants to keep that thing.

To Alan, a criminal case was like a garden surrounded by a high wall. You had to get in, so you looked for the gate. Sometimes there were several, but in his experience there was always at least one; of course there was. If not, how had the gardener entered to sow the seeds in the first place? It might be large, with an arrow pointing to it and a flashing neon sign reading ENTER HERE, or it might be small and covered with so much ivy that you had to hunt for quite a while before you found it, but it was always there, and if you hunted long enough and weren’t afraid of raising a few blisters on your hands from tearing away the overgrowth, you always found it.

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.

“Amen,” Ace said aloud, and tooted up. His head filled with that vague banana-lemon taste that really good cocaine always seemed to have. It was mellow, but it was also powerful. He felt his heart begin to pound. At the same time, his thoughts grew sharply focused and took on a polished chromium edge. He remembered something a guy had told him not long after he fell in love with this stuff: Things have more names when you’re coked up. A lot more names. He hadn’t understood then, but he thought he did now. He offered the straw to Gaunt, but Gaunt shook his head. “Never before five,” he said, “but you enjoy, Ace.” “Thanks,” Ace said.