The Stand (Original Edition) (37 page)

“Mister, I’m awful hungry . . .”

“Sure you are,” the man said. An expression of concern spread over his face, an expression so magnified that it became grotesque. “Jesus Christ, a rat isn’t anything to eat! Why, do you know what I had for lunch? I had a nice rare roast beef sandwich on Vienna bread with a few onions and a lot of Gulden’s Spicy Brown. Sound good?”

Lloyd nodded his head, tears oozing slowly out of his overbright eyes.

“Had some homefries and chocolate milk to go with it, and then for dessert. . . holy crow, I’m
torturing
you, ain’t I? Someone ought to take a hosswhip to me, that’s what they ought to do. I’m sorry. I’ll let you right out and then we’ll go get something to eat, okay?”

Lloyd was too stunned to even nod. He had decided that the man with the key was indeed a devil, or even more likely a mirage, and the mirage would stand outside his cell until Lloyd finally dropped dead, talking happily about God and Jesus and Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard as he made the strange black stone appear and disappear. But now the compassion on the man’s face seemed real enough, and he sounded genuinely disgusted with himself. The black stone disappeared into his clenched fist again. And when the fist opened, Lloyd’s wondering eyes beheld a flat silver key with an ornate grip lying on the stranger’s palm.

“My—dear—
God!”
Lloyd croaked.

“You like that?” The dark man asked, pleased. “I learned that trick from a massage parlor honey in Secaucus, New Jersey, Lloyd. Secaucus, home of the world’s greatest pig farms.”

He bent and seated the key in the lock of Lloyd’s cell. And that was strange, because as well as his memory served him (which right now was not very well), these cells
had
no keyways, because they were all opened and shut electronically. But he had no doubt that the silver key would work.

Just as it rattled home, Flagg stopped and looked at Lloyd, grinning slyly, and Lloyd felt despair wash over him again. It was all just a trick.

“Did I introduce myself? The name is Flagg, with the double g. Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Lloyd croaked.

“And I think, before I open this cell and we go get some dinner, we ought to have a little understanding, Lloyd.”

“Sure thing,” Lloyd croaked, and began to cry again.

“I’m going to make you my righthand man, Lloyd. Going to put you right up there with Saint Peter. When I open this door, I’m going to slip the keys to the kingdom right into your hand. That’s not such a bad deal, is it?”

“No,” Lloyd whispered, growing frightened again. It was almost full dark now. Flagg was little more than a dark shape, but his eyes were still perfectly visible. They seemed to glow in the dark like the eyes of a lynx, one to the left of the bar that ended in the lockbox, one to the right. Lloyd felt terror, but something else as well: a kind of religious ecstasy. A pleasure. The pleasure of being
chosen.
The feeling that he had somehow won through ... to something.

“You’d like to get even with the people who left you here, isn’t that right?”

“Boy, that sure is,” Lloyd said, forgetting his terror momentarily. It was swallowed by a starving, sinewy anger.

“Not just those people, but everyone who would do a thing like that,” Flagg suggested. “It’s a type of person, isn’t it? To a certain type of person, a man like you is nothing but garbage. Because they are high up. They don’t think a person like you has a right to live.”

“That’s just right,” Lloyd said. His great hunger had suddenly been changed into a different kind of hunger. It had changed just as surely as the black stone had changed into the silver key. This man had expressed all the complex things he had felt in just a handful of sentences.

“You know what the Bible says about people like that?” Flagg asked quietly. “It says the exalted shall be abased and the mighty shall be brought low and the stiffnecked shall be broken. And you know what it says about people like you, Lloyd? It says blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And it says blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.”

Lloyd was nodding. Nodding and crying. Yes, this man understood.

“Now you aren’t very bright,” Flagg said, “but I have the feeling you might be very loyal. You and I, Lloyd, we’re going to go far. It’s a good time for people like us. Everything is starting up for us. All I need is your word.”

“W-word?”

“That we’re going to stick together, you and me. No denials. No falling asleep on guard duty. There will be others very soon—they’re on their way west already—but for now, there’s just us. I’ll give you the key if you’ll give me your promise.”

“I. . . promise,” Lloyd said, and the words seemed to hang in the air, vibrating strangely. He listened to that vibration, his head cocked to one side, and he could almost see those two words, glowing as darkly as the aurora borealis reflected in a dead man’s eye.

Then he forgot about them as the tumblers made their half-turns inside the lockbox. The next moment the lockbox fell at Flagg’s feet, tendrils of smoke seeping from it.

“You’re free, Lloyd. Come on out.”

Unbelieving, Lloyd touched the bars hesitantly, as if they might bum him; and indeed, they did seem warm. But when he pushed, the door slid back easily and soundlessly. He stared at his savior, those burning eyes.

Something was placed in his hand. The key.

“It’s yours now, Lloyd.”

“Mine?”

Flagg grabbed Lloyd’s fingers and closed them around it. . . and Lloyd felt it move in his hand, felt it
change.
He uttered a hoarse cry and his fingers sprang open. The key was gone and in its place was the black stone with the red flaw. He held it up, wondering, and turned it this way and that. Now the red flaw looked like a key, now like a skull, now like a bloody, half-closed eye again.

“Mine,” Lloyd answered himself. This time he closed his hand with no help, holding the stone savagely tight.

“Shall we get some dinner?” Flagg asked. “We’ve got a lot of driving to do tonight.”

“Dinner,” Lloyd said. “All right.”

“There’s such a lot to do,” Flagg said happily. “And we’re going to move very fast.” They walked toward the stairs together, past the dead men in their cells. When Lloyd stumbled in weakness, Flagg seized his arm above the elbow and bore him up. Lloyd turned and looked into that grinning face with something more than gratitude. He looked at Flagg with something like love.

Nick Andros lay sleeping but not quiet on the bunk in Sheriff Baker’s office. He was naked except for his shorts and his body was lightly oiled with sweat. His last thought before sleep had taken him the night before was that he would be dead by morning; the dark man that had consistently haunted his feverish dreams would somehow break through that last thin barrier of sleep and take him away.

Coming back from burying Jane Baker he had swerved to avoid the corpse of a dog lying in the road and had fallen off the bike he was riding. He had gone sprawling, striking his head on the pavement and blacking out. He had come to a long time later—maybe as much as three hours by the way the sun had westered—and his vision had been doubled. He had been terrified that he had given himself a serious concussion, perhaps even a fracture. It would have been terribly ironic to have survived the beating administered by Ray Booth and his friends, then the superflu, only to die as a result of falling off a kid’s bike.

But by dark his vision had begun to come together again, and by yesterday morning it had been fine. It was the slight and unimportant ladder of scratches on his leg that was going to kill him.

He had gone without disinfecting it. And by noon two days ago the skin around the scrape had gotten red and all the muscles of his leg seemed to ache.

He had limped down to Dr. Soames’s office and had gone through his drug closet that night, looking for penicillin or ampicillin. By then he had been feverish, and badly frightened. He was well aware that he would die if his body reacted strongly against the penicillin, but he thought the alternative might be an even nastier death. The infection was racing, racing.

He found Soames’s penicillin samples, and swallowed two of the pills. It did not kill him, but there was no noticeable improvement, either.

His sleep these last two nights had not seemed like sleep at all. His dreams were a flood. It seemed that everyone he had ever known was coming back for a curtain call. Rudy Sparkman, pointing at the white sheet of paper:
You are this blank page.
His mother, tapping lines and circles she had helped him make on another white page, marring its purity:
It says Nick Andros, honey. That’s you.
Jane Baker, her face turned aside on the pillow, saying
Johnny, my poor Johnny.
Unlike all the other dreams he had had in his life, Nick did not have to lipread these. He could actually hear what people were saying. The dreams were incredibly vivid, then they would fade as the pain in his leg brought him close to waking. Then a new scene would appear as he sank down into sleep again. There were people he had never seen in two of the dreams, and these were the dreams he remembered the most clearly when he woke up.

He was on a high place. The land was spread out below him like a relief map. It was desert land, and the stars above had the mad clarity of altitude. There was a man beside him ... no, not a man but the
shape
of a man. As if the figure had been cut from the fabric of reality and what really stood beside him was a negative man, a black hole in the shape of a man. And the voice of this shape whispered:
Everything you see will be yours if you fall down on your knees and worship me.
Nick shook his head, wanting to step away from that awful drop, afraid the shape would stretch out its black arms and push him over the edge.

Why don’t you speak? Why do you just shake your head?

In the dream Nick made the gesture he had made so many times in the waking world: a laying of his finger over his lips, then the flat of his hand against his throat . . . and then he heard himself say in a perfectly clear, rather beautiful voice: “I can’t talk. I am mute.”

But you can. If you want to, you can.

Nick reached out to touch the shape then, his fear momentarily swept away in a flood of amazement and burning joy. But as his hand neared that figure’s shoulder it turned ice cold, so cold it seemed that he had burned it. He jerked it away with ice crystals forming on the knuckles. And it came to him: He could hear. The dark shape’s voice; the far-off cry of a hunting night-bird; the endless whine of the wind. He was struck mute all over again by the wonder of it. There was a dimension to the world he had never missed because he had never experienced it, and now it had fallen into place. He was hearing
sounds.
He seemed to know what each was without being told. They were pretty. Pretty
sounds.
He ran his fingers back and forth across his shirt and marveled at the swift whisper of his nails on the cotton.

Then the dark man was turning toward him, and Nick was terribly afraid. This creature, whatever it was, performed no free miracles.

—if you fall down on your knees and worship me.

And Nick put his hands over his face because he wanted all the things the black manshape had shown him from this high desert place: cities, women, treasure, power. But most of all he wanted to hear the entrancing sound his fingernails made on his shirt, the tick of a clock in an empty house after midnight, and the secret sound of rain.

But the word he said was
No
and then that freezing cold was on him again and he had been
pushed,
he was falling, end over end, screaming soundlessly as he tumbled through these cloudy depths, tumbled into the smell of—

—
corn?

Yes, corn. This was the other dream, they blended together like this, with hardly a seam to show
^r
the difference. He was in the corn, the green corn, and the smell was summer earth and cow manure and growing things. He got to his feet and began to walk up the row he had found himself in, stopping momentarily as he realized he could hear the soft whicker of the wind flowing between the July corn’s green, swordlike blades . . . and something else.

Music. Some sort of music. And in the dream he thought, “So that’s w-hat they mean.” It was coming from straight ahead and he walked toward it, wanting to see if this particular succession of pretty sounds came from what was called “piano” or “horn” or “cello” or what.

The hot smell of summer in his nostrils, the overarching blue sky above, that lovely sound. In this dream, Nick had never been happier. And as he neared the source, a voice joined the music, an old voice like dark leather, slurring the words a little as if the song was a stew, often reheated, that never lost its old savor. Mesmerized, Nick walked toward it.

“/
come to the garden alone While the dew is still on the roses And the voice 1 hear, falling on my ear

The son
. . .
of God
. . .
disclo-o-ses And he walks with me and he talks with me Tells me I am his own And the joy we share as we tarry there None other . . . has ever
. . .
known"

As the verse ended, Nick pushed through to the head of the row and there in the clearing was a shack, not much more than a shanty, with a rusty trashbarrel to the left and an old tire swing to the right. It hung from an apple tree that was gnarled but still green with lovely life. A porch slanted out from the house, a splintery old thing held up with old, oilclotted jacklifters. The window’s were open, and the kind summer breeze blew' ragged white curtains in and out of them. From the roof a peaked chimney of galvanized tin, dented and smoky, jutted at its own old, odd angle. This house sat in its clearing and the corn stretched away in all four directions as far as the eye could see; it was broken only on the north by a dirt road that dwindled away to a point on the flat horizon. It was ahvays then that Nick knew where he was: Polk County, Nebraska, west of Omaha and a little north of Osceola. Far up that dirt road w
^?
as US 30 and Columbus sitting on the north bank of the Platte.