All Chapters of Things You Need: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

1.How’d I end up here?    It’s a long story. That’s the thing about life, though. Never can tell how it’s going to go. As Woody Allen once said: “Want to make God laugh?“Tell him your plans.”Anyway, I certainly didn’t figure on this being my life’s work. But it is what it is. If you’re interested, I can share how I got here. To start the story right, though, so you can understand my perspective better, I need to ask: You ever get fed up?Y’know, your job sucks. The spouse is a pain. The kids are sucking your life away. Finally, one day, you blow your fuses and think: Hell with this. I’m out of here.Ever feel that way?Sure you have. Everyone gets fed up eventually. Unless you’re a robot. Or a Vulcan, or a Zen Buddha Hare Krishna Weirdo, and those guys have to get fed up sometime. You show me a Zen-bot who never gets fed up and I’ll show you someone with a few interesting ways of blowing off steam.Me, I was lucky—or at least I told myself so. In my

3.From the outside, Handy’s Pawn and Thrift was like any other second-hand junk store. Random items filled both storefront windows. Old radios, ranging from transistors to stereos with combination eight-track players and tape decks. Rusted old milk cans. An old tricycle next to a plastic Big Wheel. A jumbled assortment of sports equipment—deflated basketballs, footballs, scuffed baseballs and dinged bats. Helmets, a pair of hockey sticks, and a few pairs of old basketball sneakers. Old mason jars filled with marbles, a pile of hammers, saws, another mason jar filled with assorted screwdrivers. A few stacks of old books, and leaning next to them, old records in faded sleeves.Standing on the curb, I saw nothing particularly enticing or remotely interesting. In retrospect, I think it was the sign hanging in the window that sealed it. Maroon with gold trim and gold lettering, it read:Handy’s Pawn and ThriftWe HaveThings You NeedI snorted because from where I stood, Handy’s didn

4.I stared at the reel-to-reel as it fell into a soft hissing click-click-click. After several seconds of listening numbly, I reached out and pressed stop.Silence rushed in, even more oppressive than before. I stuck my hands into my pockets and glanced around the store. No shopkeeper. He must’ve gone, I decided, because there was no way he could still be around and not hear the tape playing.And what had I heard on the tape? At the time I leaned toward an old radio drama of some kind. I’d listened to plenty of those over the years on the road between magazine gigs, on the AM stations. Re-runs of ‘The Shadow,’ ‘Suspense,’ and ‘Inner Sanctum Mysteries.’ They were corny as hell but entertaining. I especially loved how the hosts always shoe-horned their sponsor’s advertisements into the show. “Tonight’s tale about sex, murder, and revenge will give you a delightful chill . . . just like the kind you get from sipping a refreshing Lipton’s Ice Tea on a warm summer da

5.The white polyhedron, suspended in old, milky fluid, jiggled as it revealed: Future is Hazy.“Story of my life,” I whispered. “Story of . . . ”A chill hand gripped my heart.My throat tightened. I had to swallow hard to open it again. A rush of something filled me. Dread, and fear. I felt lightheaded. I dropped the Magic Eight Ball and it bounced off the counter to the floor. It rolled away into the dark. I sagged forward and barely caught the edge of the counter with both hands, leaning on it for support as my stomach clenched and my knees buckled.I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths. “What the hell was that?”An answer wasn’t forthcoming, but honestly, I didn’t want one. What I wanted was to get out and back to my cabin at The Motor Lodge. I didn’t care what I might do with my .38. I wanted out.Bracing myself against the counter, I twisted at the waist and glanced over my shoulder at the door. I blinked several times, trying to clear my

6.The video on the camera’s viewfinder dissolved into snowy static. Remembering how it had looped before I picked it up, I frantically searched for its power button. Found it and switched it off before the person in the video could again start whispering excitedly about something changing his life.The viewfinder fell dark and silent. Like the Magic Eight Ball, I wanted to throw the camera away. Didn’t want to touch the damn thing anymore, much less hold it. Instead, I gently turned it over in my hands, my rational mind slowly kicking into gear. There wasn’t anything strange about the video on the camera. Not at all. Whoever had owned it must have been making some sort of low-budget student film (although I couldn’t imagine anyone filming a whole movie on such a small camera) out at this place called Bassler House. Found footage movies were all the rage these days, right? Maybe they’d uploaded it onto their computer, edited it, added a cheesy horror soundtrack, then uploaded it to Y