“Go hence, demon! You are cast out from this place!”

The declaration “Go hence, demon! You are cast out from this place!” is Alan Pangborn’s climactic act of expulsion against Leland Gaunt. Spoken in a voice that seems larger than Alan himself, it turns a confrontation into a command with immediate supernatural force: Gaunt’s presence is driven back, Needful Things is damaged, and the voices imprisoned in Gaunt’s valise are freed.

The declaration as an act

Alan backs into the street with Polly Chalmers beside him, carrying the bag and raising the fountain of light-flowers so that its revolving radiance falls on Gaunt and the Tucker Talisman. After drawing in an astonishing amount of air, Alan speaks the words in a vast voice that does not seem to be his own. The sentence does not merely describe what should happen; it performs the expulsion it announces.

Immediate effects

The Gaunt-thing screams as though scalded. The green awning of Needful Things catches fire, and the show window blows inward, its glass reduced to bright fragments. Colored rays burst from Alan’s closed hand, briefly making it seem as if a tiny star rests there. The declaration’s force is rendered through a chain of visible destruction, turning the shop’s familiar storefront into evidence that Gaunt’s power has been challenged.

Release and significance

The hyena-hide valise bursts open, and the trapped, wailing voices escape as an unseen vapor felt by Alan, Polly, Norris Ridgewick, and Seaton Thomas. The expulsion also brings bodily relief: the poison-like heat in Polly’s arms and chest disappears, and the heat gathering around Norris’s heart dissipates. The words therefore reverse the scene’s terms—confinement gives way to release, and Gaunt’s hold gives way to resistance—while freeing those whom his supernatural power had kept imprisoned.