Needful Things

“You cheated!”

Polly screamed. “You cheated and you lied and you cozened!”

Gaunt shot her a pained glance, then looked back at Alan. “I didn’t, you know. I dealt as I always do. I show people what I have to sell… and let them make up their own minds. So… if you please…”

“I think I’ll keep it,” Alan said evenly. A small smile, as thin and sharp as a rind of November ice, touched his mouth. “Let’s just call it evidence, okay?”

“I’m afraid you can’t do that, Sheriff.” Gaunt stepped off the sidewalk and into the street. Small red pits of light glowed in his eyes. “You can die, but you can’t keep my property. Not if I mean to take it. And I do.” He began to walk toward Alan, the red pinpricks in his eyes deepening. He left a boot-track in an oatmealcolored lump of Ace’s brains as he came.

Alan felt his belly try to fold in on itself, but he didn’t move.

Instead, prompted by some instinct he made no effort to understand, he put his hands together in front of the station wagon’s left headlight. He crossed them, made a bird-shape, and began to bend his wrists rapidly back and forth.

The sparrows are flying again, Mr. Gaunt, he thought.

A large projected shadow-bird-more hawk than sparrow and unsettlingly realistic for an insubstantial shade-suddenly flapped across the false front of Needful Things. Gaunt saw it from the corner of his eye, whirled toward it, gasped, and retreated again.

“Get out of town, my friend,” Alan said. He rearranged his hands and now a large shadow-dog-perhaps a Saint Bernardslouched across the front of You Sew and Sew in the spotlight thrown by the station wagon’s headlights. And somewhere nearperhaps coincidentally, perhaps not-a dog began to bark. A large one, by the sound.

Gaunt turned in that direction. He was looking slightly harried now, and definitely off-balance.

“You’re lucky I’m cutting you loose,” Alan went on. “But what would I charge you with, come to that? The theft of souls may be covered in the legal code Brigham and Rose deal with, but I don’t think I’d find it in mine. Still, I’d advise you to go while you still can.”

“Give me my bag!”

Alan stared at him, trying to look unbelieving and contemptuous while his heart hammered away wildly in his chest. “Don’t you understand yet? Don’t you get it? You lose, Have you forgotten how to deal with that?”

Gaunt stood looking at Alan for a long second, and then he nodded"I knew I was wise to avoid you,” he said. He almost seemed to be speaking to himself. “I knew it very well. All right. You win.” He began to turn away; Alan relaxed slightly. “I’ll go-” 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! But NOT WITHOUT MY PROPERTY!” he screamed, and leaped for the bag.

Somewhere-close by or a thousand miles away-Polly shrieked, “Look out, Alan!” but there was no time to look out; the demon, smelling like a mixture of sulphur and fried shoeleather, was upon him. There was only time to act or time to die.

Alan passed his right hand down the inside of his left wrist, groping for the tiny elastic loop protruding from his watchband.

Part of him was a

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: The white! The coming of the white!

Gaunt howled with pain and rage and fear… but did not back away. Perhaps it was as Alan had suggested: it had been so long since he had lost the game that he had forgotten how. He tried to dive in below the bouquet of light shiminering over Alan’s closed hand, and for just a moment his fingers actually touched the handles of the valise between Alan’s feet.

Suddenly a foot clad in a bedroom slipper appeared-Polly’s foot.

She stamped down on Gaunt’s hand. “Leave it alone!” she screamed.

He looked up, snarling… and Alan)jammed the fistful of radiance into his face. 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.

“I’m telling you for the last time to get out,” he said in a voice he did not recognize as his own. It was too strong, too sure, too full of power. He understood he probably could not put an end to the thing which crouched before him with one cringing hand raised to shield its face from the shifting spectrum of light, but he could make it be gone.

Tonight that power was his… if he dared to use it. If he dared to stand and be true. “And I’m telling you for the last time that you’re going without this.”

“They’ll die without me!” the Gaunt-thing moaned. Now its hands hung between its legs; long claws clicked and clittered in the scattered debris which lay ir, the street. “Every single one of them will die without me, like plants without water in the desert. Is that what you want? Is it?”

Polly was with Alan then, pressed against his side. “Yes,” she said coldly. “Better that they die here and now, if that’s what has to happen, than that they go with you and live. They-we-did some lousy things, but that price is much too high.” The Gaunt-thing hissed and shook its claws at them. Alan picked up the bag and backed slowly into the street with

Polly by his side. He raised the fountain of light-flowers so that they cast an amazing, revolving glow upon Mr. Gaunt and his Tucker Talisman. He pulled air into his chest-more air than his body had ever contained before, it seemed. And when he spoke, the words roared from him in a vast voice which was not his own.

"GO HENCE, DEMON! YOU ARE CAST OUT FROM THIS PLACE!”

The Gaunt-thing screamed as if burned by scalding water.

The green awning of Needful Things burst into flame and the showwindow blew inward, its glass pulverized to diamonds. From above Alan’s closed hand, bright rays of radiance blue, red, green, orange, deep-hued violet-struck out in every direction. For a moment a tiny, exploding star seemed balanced on his fist.

The hyena-hide valise burst open with a rotted pop, and the trapped, wailing voices escaped in a vapor which was not seen but felt by all of them-Alan, Polly, Norris, Seaton.

Polly felt the hot, sinking poison in her arms and chest disappear.

The heat slowly gathering around Norris’s heart dissipated.

All over Castle Rock, guns and clubs were cast down; people looked at each other with the wondering eyes of those who have awakened from a dreadful dream.

And the rain stopped.