Skeletons in the Closet

I Know What You Need, the dangers of dating, and the morality of mind reading

**For the first time, I have a voiceover of this post, followed by an off the cuff, riff on this story. I hope you enjoy! Note: I could not for the life of me pronounce Necronomicon…even after looking up how to pronounce it. Enjoy my stuttering through it halfway through my reading ;)

Happy Monday, and welcome to The Barrens, Kindling’s Stephen King book club. Today’s story has climbed the list of all time favorites in this short story collection. “I Know What You Need” follows the themes and patterns of other works in Night Shift, touching on the occult and dark forces used for control, but in a very personal way.

It is also the first (and only) story in this collection that was written not for a men’s magazine like Playboy or Cavalier, but for a woman’s: Cosmopolitan. The focus of the story naturally is not on the dangers of cleaning a factory basement infested with rats or alien trucks bent on murder. It follows a young woman trying to keep her college scholarship when she meets a young man who seems to have all the answers. He knows what she needs.

If you would like to join in next week, grab a copy of Night Shift and read “Children of the Corn.” Can’t WAIT for this one.

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Writing Fear

Last night I watched the beginning of Season 2 of Yellowjackets, a show that has scared the shit out of me every night for the past week. The imagery and storyline is deeply disturbing, and it has me reflecting on why some horror is so effective. When you’re a horror writer, you’re writing to get under someone’s skin, to poke at something deep and primal. You want a reaction that is impossible for the audience to control. Fear goes deeper than logic. It transcends the thinking brain.

King wants to do that too and I’ve heard him say, in some interview (that I could not find though I desperately looked for it) that he wants to hurt the reader. That’s his goal.

So when King wrote for men’s magazines, he wrote for the audience. He wrote fears that would grip the men who read them. He wrote about dangerous work places, the dark side of drinking too much, and monsters that kill your children.

When he wrote for Cosmopolitan, he wrote to a woman’s fear, and in an intimate way. “I Know What You Need” asks, what if this guy you think is so great is not who you think he is? What if you’re falling in love with someone against your own will? Being tricked into it?

Women, it is safe to say, are afraid of men. I know that makes good men feel bad sometimes, but I think they understand what we mean. I think about the situations I put myself in, whether it is after dark, or if there will be people around. In those nightmarish corners of my mind, I imagine what if, and the shape of that fear is in the shadow of some strange man, stronger than me and filled with badness.

Some modern stories have covered this from a different perspective, the Netflix show You, and the gazillion Lifetime original movies I grew up watching. King’s approach is supernatural, the power bigger than any stalker or billionaire or psychopath. For some, that makes the story silly. For others, it touches on the fear that we could be manipulated and lied to by the people closest to us, that there may be skeletons in their closets we eventually find, but too late.

Elizabeth Rogan is about to lose her college scholarship.

We meet her in the middle of a cram session for a sociology exam that could end her time at school. She has a late night ahead of her, sixteen chapters to go, when Ed Hamner, Jr. approaches her in the library. He’s thin, dressed in an enormous green fatigue coat and mismatched socks, and he wants to take her out for strawberry ice cream.

“I know what you need.”

…”You know,” she said, “I doubt that.”

“You need a strawberry double-dip cone. Right?”

He is right. Too right. She had just been thinking of ice cream. But she can’t. Of course she can’t. Her future depends on this test, and besides that, she has a boyfriend, Tony, and they’re practically engaged. But Ed has the answers. Literally. He tells her he’s taken the same course, and the exam is always the same every year. Lucky for her, he’s got a photographic memory, so he copies down the multiple choice questions and answers word for word.

Elizabeth heads back to her room, bewildered and in a daze. When she tells her roommate, Alice, she’s incredulous. She urges her not to rely on some random guys’ notes from memory, and to study the text just in case, but Elizabeth knows the papers given to her by Ed are her only chance to keep her scholarship money.

The following day, she takes the test, and leaves knowing that she aced it, and who is there to celebrate but Ed? He takes her out for a burger, he calls her Beth, just the way she likes it. Tony calls her Liz or Lizzie, both nicknames she doesn’t care for. And with that, she’s headed home for the summer.

She fingered the envelope that poked out of her purse. Notice of her scholarship-loan package for her senior year—two thousand dollars. She and Tony would be working together in Boothbay, Maine, this summer, and the money she would earn there would put her over the top. And thanks to Ed Hamner, it was going to be a beautiful summer. Clear sailing all the way.

But it was the most miserable summer of her life.

Enter, Ed Hamner

When summer comes, the tourists stay home, kept away by a gas shortage. The weather is gloomy and wet, and Tony wants Elizabeth to drop out of school and get married. The idea terrifies her. By July, she finds herself weeping in her apartment, feeling that her life is wrong somehow. And then, the nightmare comes.

She was lying in the bottom of an open grave, unable to move. Rain fell from a white sky onto her upturned face. Then Tony was standing over her, wearing his yellow high-impact construction helmet.

“Marry me, Liz,” he said looking down at her expressionlessly. “Marry me or else.”

She lies paralyzed, unable to say yes, an agreement uttered only to escape death. “Or else it is then,” says Tony, and then moves to a bulldozer, ready to bury Beth alive. She tries desperately to move, to speak, to do anything, but her limbs won’t move, and her lips won’t part.

Just when she thinks it’s too late, she hears Ed Hamner’s voice. “Let her go!” our hero cries. She wakes up sobbing, soaked in sweat and shaking. She’s so scared, she sleeps with the light on. And a week later, Tony turns up dead.

Beth finds herself grieving, but relieved.

She didn’t want to get married, but she didn’t want Tony to die either. Ed turns up in town just in time to find her sobbing alone on a rocky outcrop. Beth is shocked, in disbelieve at his showing up in her hometown.

“How did you know?”

“I ran into your roommate…Alice, is that her name?”

He claims he came as soon as he heard that a little red Fiat had run Tony down while he was working repairing culverts. The car had never even slowed. Beth falls apart right there, and Ed holds her.

He gets her a hot meal and talks her into going back to school in the fall. He offers her menthol cigarettes, her favorite, and mentions her long plane ride, despite the fact she never told him about it. And the phrase that he’s said a couple of times to her rings in her memory.

I know what you need.

Like the voice of a submarine captain tolling off fathoms, the words he had greeted her with followed her down to sleep.

Beth finds herself pining for Ed at the airport. She thought he would see her off. She’s disappointed, when suddenly, an announcement comes over the PA. It’s a phone call for her, from Ed. He’s called to ask if he’ll see her at school, to tell her she’s beautiful and strong, and finally, that he loves her.

If this were Jane Austen, we’d be a chapter away from a double wedding.

But since this is horror, we’re left with a twisted gut. We know something’s wrong, just as Beth does. But she is as powerless to stop what happens as we, the readers, are. Beth’s return to school is met with a cooled relationship between her and her roommate Alice. The girls have shared a dorm since freshman year, but now Alice has retreated a bit. Beth assumes it’s due to a difference in ethics around the sociology exam, and puts it out of her mind.

Everything gets on as usual. Beth studies a little less, goes out a little more, and waits for Ed Hamner to call. He doesn’t, not in September. By October she tries to look him up and fails to find any record of him in the phone book. She doesn’t notice the piles of mail from the private detective agency, addressed to Alice. But she wouldn’t. After all, there’s no return address.

Okay, let’s pause here.

If you haven’t caught it, Alice has hired a private detective agency to do a little digging on Ed Hamner. Is it just me, or does this seem like a bit of an overreaction on her part? That said, what a friend ladies. This is the girl you go to the bar with. She’s smart, observant, and she’s looking out for her friend’s best interests.

Ed does finally swing by.

As soon as Beth sees him in his oversized fatigue jacket and mismatched socks, she knows she loves him. And just like that, he sweeps her off her feet and to a movie.

As the days passed it occurred to her that she had never met anyone, male or female, that seemed to understand her moods and needs so completely or so wordlessly.

That’s because Ed seems to know exactly what Beth wants. He takes her to the right movies, suggests the right food. He always knows what she needs. It looks like a match made in heaven, until Alice finally breaks her silence.

“I have to talk to you, Liz. About Ed.”

“What about him?”

It turns out Alice got suspicious after Beth wrote her and said that Ed had turned up just after Tony died. He claimed Alice had told him about it, and he had come right away.

“But I never saw him, Liz. I was never near the Lakewood Theater last summer.”

“But…”

“But how did he know Tony was dead? I have no idea. I only know he didn’t get it from me.”

It turns out Ed has been lying about a lot of things. He never took that sociology class, which means his claims of photographic memory are a lie. He also knew Beth in grade school, and she remembers a feeling of deja vu that she had when first meeting him in the library.

His father, Ed Sr. worked at an ad agency, and was a compulsive gambler who was down on his luck until he started taking little Ed with him to the casinos. It was illegal, but Ed was a good kid and the owners let it slide. Until he started winning big. It turned out Ed was quite the good luck charm, so good in fact that the casinos all up and down the Las Vegas strip, banned him from gambling there.

So Ed Sr. took up the stock market, and his little boy was good at that too. He seemed to know things before they would happen, seemed to know just what his father needed.

“Mrs. Hamner spent the next six years in and out of various mental institutions. Supposedly for nervous disorders, but the operative talked to an orderly who said she was pretty close to psychotic. She claimed her son was the devil’s henchman. She stabbed him with a pair of scissors in 1964. Tried to kill him. She…Liz? Liz, what is it?”

Liz remembers a scar on Ed’s shoulder, a deep dimple he claimed was from falling on a picket fence as a boy.

After his mother was released from the mental hospital, the family took their last vacation to the San Joaquin Valley. While Ed was collecting firewood at a picnic spot off 101, she drove the car right over the edge with his father in the passenger seat. It could have been an attempt to kill him.

Beth can barely stand it anymore, but Alice is determined to make her listen.

“He’s made you love him by knowing every secret thing you want and need, and that’s not love at all. That’s rape.”

Whoa!

Such an interesting thought experiment around psychic abilities used to manipulate people. If you’ve read The Shining, you might recall that little Danny Torrance, the boy with a gift that includes the ability to read minds, makes a point of not doing it with his parents unless he has to. He feels that doing so is too invasive, a violation of some unwritten law.

Here, King’s universe lays out the morality of mind reading plain as day. To use a gift like that in order to know a person’s thoughts so completely, and even worse, to use it to manipulate them into loving you, is a serious violation. A violation against another person’s will.

Elizabeth slams the door and catches a bus into town.

She isn’t sure if she loves him anymore.

Or if she only loves having someone who knows exactly what she wants and provides it. It’s more like ordering from a menu than a real relationship.

The wind clawed at her face as she stepped out on the corner of Main and Mill, and she winced against it as the bus drew away with a smooth diesel growl. Its taillights twinkled briefly in the snowy night for a moment and were gone.

She had never felt so lonely in her life.

She arrives at Ed’s empty apartment, and finds a spare key to let herself in. The place seems desolate without him, like a strange movie set, everything there in its place just for her. She walks past the living room and into his bedroom, feeling like Goldilocks in the bear den (the chair is just right), when she finds that his bedroom closet door is locked.

She feels for the key on top of the door, and unlocks it against that inner voice that tells her to stop. Unlike the rest of the apartment, the closet is a mess, a jumble of clothes and documents and pipe tobacco. Beth picks up one of the books strewn on the floor, and finds these strange titles.

The Golden Bough. Ancient Rites, Modern Mysteries. Haitian Voodoo. Necronomicom.

I got curious about these books, so I asked Chat GPT what they were. Here’s what I found.

The "Necronomicon" is a fictional grimoire (book of magic) that appears in the works of the American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and later writers influenced by his work. Lovecraft first introduced the concept of the Necronomicon in his short stories, and it has since become a popular element in various forms of literature, films, and other media.

The Necronomicon is often depicted as a forbidden and ancient book, associated with dark and occult knowledge. Lovecraft created a sense of mystery around the book, suggesting that its contents could drive readers insane or lead them to encounter otherworldly horrors.

and

"The Golden Bough" is a comprehensive study of mythology, religion, and folklore written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. The book was first published in two volumes in 1890 and later expanded to twelve volumes in the third edition, published between 1906 and 1915. The title refers to a bough (branch) that is believed to possess magical properties and is used in rituals, particularly in the context of ancient fertility rites.

I love the Lovecraftian Easter eggs throughout this collection.

I’ve never read Lovecraft myself, but the homage to past horror authors within his own stories is delightful for some reason. If any of you have any details about The Necronomicon, spill in the comments!

Back to the story…

…she reached for the green fatigue jacket, not admitting to herself that she meant to go through its pockets. But as she lifted it she saw something else. A small tin box…

She opens it and finds a doll on top, an Elizabeth doll, made in her image, dressed in scraps from a red scarf she had lost a few months earlier while at a movie with Ed. The pipe-cleaner arms are draped in Graveyard moss, and fine hair is taped to the doll’s head. Not her hair as it is now, but as it was when she was still a child.

Beneath that she finds the newspaper obituary with his parents’ smiling faces looking back at her, a strange six-sided pattern drawn over their faces. Dolls, fashioned in their images are underneath. A model car falls out, a Fiat, painted red with a piece of Tony’s shirt taped to the front of it. Beth flips it over to find the underside hammered into fragments.

“So you found it, you ungrateful bitch.”

And this the fear at the center of this story.

Not the voodoo or mind rape. At its core, this story is about the fear of manipulation, the ability of a partner to pretend to be something they’re not, and turn on you in the end. It is the story of so many women who ignore the little red flags like Beth did, only to find out that the trail of breadcrumbs was leading to real danger all along.

But Beth stands as a heroine in the end. She doesn’t cower in fear. She doesn’t give in to Ed’s false idea of forced love. She destroys his magical items, throwing them into the river.

When your looks go and men stop trying to give you anything you want, you’ll wish for me!…I know what you need.

But was she so small that she actually needed so little?

Please, dear God, no.

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I loved this story, but I want to hear what you think.

Do I love it because I can relate to the fear? Exploring a possible romantic relationship in the beginning, when you don’t know someone can be a scary time. Online dating has taken that reality to a new level, because you meet someone without the context of social circles and mutual friends. Has this fear grown in a modern context?

How did you like this story in comparison to others in this collection which were written for men’s magazines? I really enjoy getting to see how King writes for a different audience, and I think he does it well. The components are very similar (the occult, psychic powers, a book of magic) to other stories we have read in this collection, but the perspective is altered, and in the end, Beth conquers Ed’s control over her, a very different end than many of the other stories we’ve read.

Let me know what you think, and until next week, Happy Reading!