The Stand (Original Edition) (82 page)

Judge Farris drove on. He had slept poorly last night. He would sleep better tonight, under the stars, his old body wrapped firmly in two sleeping bags. He wondered if he would ever see Boulder again and thought the chances were probably against it. And yet his excitement was very great.

It was one of the finest days of his life.

Early that afternoon, Nick, Ralph, and Stu biked out to north Boulder to a small stucco house where Tom Cullen lived by himself. Tom’s house had already become a landmark to Boulder’s “old” residents. Stan Nogotny said it was as if the Catholics, Baptists, and Seventh-day Adventists had gotten together with the Democrats and the Moonies to create a religious-political Disneyland.

The front lawn of the house was a weird tableau of statues. There were a dozen Virgin Marys, some of them apparently in the act of feeding flocks of pink plastic lawn flamingos. The largest of the flamingos was taller than Tom himself and anchored to the ground on a single leg that ended in a four-foot spike. There was a giant wishing well with a large plastic glow-in-the-dark Jesus sitting in the ornamental bucket. Beside the wishing well was a large plaster cow who was apparently drinking from a birdbath.

The front door screen slammed open and Tom came out to meet them, stripped to the waist. Seen from a distance, Nick thought, you would have supposed he was some fantastically virile writer or painter, with his bright blue eyes and that big reddish-blond beard. As he got closer you might have given up that idea in favor of one not quite so intellectual. . . maybe some sort of craftsman from the counterculture who had substituted
kitsch
for originality. And when he got very close, smiling and talking away a mile a minute, it was only then that you realized for sure that a goodly chunk of Tom Cullen’s attic insulation was missing.

Nick knew that one of the reasons he felt a strong sense of empathy for Tom was because he himself had been assumed to be mentally retarded, at first because his handicap had held him back from learning to read and write, later because people just assumed that someone who was both deaf and mute must be mentally retarded. He had heard all the slang terms at one time or another. A few bricks short the load. Soft upstairs. Running on three wheels. The guy’s got a hole in his head and his brains done leaked out. This guy ain’t traveling with a full seabag.

“Nicky!” Tom yelled. “Am I glad to see you! Laws, yes! Tom Cullen is
so
glad!” He threw his arms around Nick’s neck and gave him a hug. “And Ralph too! And that one. You’re . . . let’s see . . .”

Tom went stockstill. The animation died out of his face. His mouth dropped slackly open and now he was the picture of idiocy. Stu stirred uncomfortably and said, “Nick, don’t you think we ought to—

Nick shushed him with a finger at his lips, and at that same instant Tom came alive again.

“Stu!” He said, capering and laughing. “You’re Stu!” He looked at Nick for confirmation, and Nick gave him a V-for-victory.

“M-O-O-N, that spells Stu, Tom Cullen knows that,
everybody
knows that!”

Nick pointed to the door of Tom’s house.

“Want to come in? Laws, yes! All of us are going to come on in. Tom’s been decorating his house.”

Ralph and Stu exchanged a glance as they followed Nick and Tom up the porch steps. Tom was always “decorating.” He did not “furnish,” because the house had of course been furnished when he moved in. Going inside was like entering a madly jumbled Mother Goose world.

A huge gilded birdcage with a green stuffed parrot carefully wired to the perch hung just inside the front door and Nick had to duck under it. The thing was, he thought, Tom’s decorations were not just random rickrack. That would have made this house into something no more striking than a rummage sale barn. But there was something more here, something that seemed just beyond what the ordinary mind could grasp as a pattern. In a large square block over the mantel in the living room were a number of credit card signs, all of them centered and carefully mounted. YOUR VISA CARD WELCOME HERE. JUST SAY MASTERCHARGE. WE HONOR AMERICAN EXPRESS. DINER’S CLUB. Now the question occurred: How did Tom know that all those signs were part of a fixed set? He couldn’t read, but somehow he had grasped the pattern.

Sitting on the coffee table was a large yellow Styrofoam fire plug. On the windowsill, where it could catch the sunlight and reflect cool fans of blue light onto the wall, was a police car bubble.

Tom toured them through the entire house. The downstairs game room was filled with stuffed birds and animals that Tom had found in a taxidermy shop; the birds had been strung on nearly invisible piano wire and they seemed to cruise, owls and hawks and even a bald eagle with motheaten feathers and one yellow glass eye missing. A woodchuck stood on its hind legs in one comer, a gopher in another, a skunk in another, a weasel in the fourth. In the center of the room was a coyote, somehow seeming to be the focus for all the smaller animals.

The banister leading up the stairs had been wrapped in red and white strips of Con-Tac paper so that it resembled a barber pole. The upper hallway was hung with fighter planes on more piano wire— Fokkers, Spads, Stukas, Spitfires, Zeros, Messerschmitts.

At last Tom took them back downstairs and they sat below the credit card montage and facing a 3-D picture of John and Robert Kennedy against a background of gold-edged clouds. The legend beneath proclaimed BROTHERS TOGETHER IN HEAVEN.

“You like Tom’s decorations? What do you think? Nice?”

“Very nice,” Stu said. “Tell me. Those birds downstairs ... do they ever get on your nerves?”

“Laws, no!” Tom said, astounded. “They’re full of sawdust!”

Nick handed a note to Ralph.

“Tom, Nick wants to know if you’d mind being hypnotized again. Like the time Stan did it. It’s important this time, not just a game. Nick says he’ll explain why afterward.”

“Go ahead,” Tom said.
“Youuu ... are getting
. . .
verrrry sleeeepy
. . . right?”

“Yes, that’s it,” Ralph said.

“Do you want me to look at the watch again? I don’t mind. You know, when you swing it back and forth?
Verrrry
. . .
sleeeepy
. . Tom looked at them doubtfully. “Except I don’t feel very sleepy. Laws, no. I went to bed early last night. Tom Cullen always goes to bed early because there’s no TV to watch.”

Stu said softly: “Tom, would you like to see an elephant?”

Tom’s eyes closed immediately. His head dropped forward loosely. His respiration deepened to long, slow strokes. Stu watched this with great surprise. Nick had given him the key phrase, but Stu hadn’t known whether or not to believe it would work. And he had never expected that it could happen so fast.

“Just like putting a chicken’s head under its wing,” Ralph marveled.

Nick handed Stu his prepared “script” for this encounter. Stu looked at Nick for a long moment. Nick looked back, then nodded gravely that Stu should go ahead.

“Tom, can you hear me?” Stu asked.

“Yes, I can hear you,” Tom said, and the quality of his voice was different, but in a way he could not quite put his hand to. This voice, coming out of the shadowland of Tom Cullen’s subconscious, seemed to be the voice of the man denied.

“I’m Stu Redman, Tom.”

“Yes. Stu Redman.”

“Nick is here.”

“Yes, Nick is here.”

“Ralph Brentner is here, too.”

“Yes, Ralph is, too.”

“We’re your friends.”

“I know.”

“We’d like you to do something, Tom. For the Zone. It’s dangerous.”    •

“Dangerous . .

Trouble crossed over Tom’s face, like a cloud shadow slowly crossing a midsummer field of corn.

“Will I have to be afraid? Will I have to . . .” He trailed off, sighing.

Stu looked at Nick, troubled. Nick mouthed:
Yes.

“It’s
him
Tom said, and sighed dreadfully. It was like the sound a bitter November wind makes in a stand of denuded oaks. Stu felt that shudder inside him again. Ralph had gone pale.

“Who, Tom?” Stu asked gently.

“Flagg. His name is Randy Flagg. The dark man. You want me to . . .” That sick sigh again, bitter and long.

“How do you know him, Tom?” This wasn’t in the script.

“Dreams . . . I see his face in dreams.”

I see his face in dreams.
But none of them had seen his face. It was always hidden.

“You see him?”

“Yes . . .”

“What does he look like, Tom?”

Tom didn’t speak for a long time. Stu had decided he wasn’t going to answer and he was preparing to go back to the “script” when Tom said:

“He looks like anybody you see on the street. But when he grins, birds fall dead off of telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine bums. The grass yellows up and dies where he spits. He’s always outside. He came out of time. He doesn’t know himself. He has the name of a thousand demons. His name is Legion. He’s afraid of us. We’re inside. He knows magic. He can call the wolves and live in the crows. But he’s afraid of us. He’s afraid of . . . inside.”

Tom fell silent.

The three of them stared at each other, pallid as gravestones. Ralph had seized his hat from his head and was kneading it convulsively in his hands. Nick had put one hand over his eyes. Stu’s throat had turned to dry glass.

“Can you say anything else about him?” Stu asked in a low voice.

“Only that I’m afraid of him too. But I’ll do what you want But Tom . . . is so afraid.” That dreadful sigh again.

“Tom,” Ralph said suddenly. “Do you know if Mother Abagail ... if she’s still alive?” Ralph’s face was desperately set, the face of a man who has staked everything on one turn of the cards.

“She’s alive,” Tom said, and Ralph leaned against the back of his chair with a great gust of breath. “But she’s not right with God yet,” Tom added.

“Not right with God? Why not, Tommy?”

“She’s in the wilderness, God has lifted her up in the wilderness, she does not fear the terror that flies at noon or the terror that creeps at midnight . . . neither will the snake bite her nor the bee sting her ... but she’s not right with God yet. It was not the hand of Moses that brought water from the rock. She’s to be punished. She will see, but she will see too late. There will be death.
His
death. She will die on the wrong side of the river. She—”

“Stop him,” Ralph groaned. “Can’t you stop him?”

“Tom,” Stu said.

“Yes.”

“Are you the same Tom Nick met in Oklahoma?”

“I am more than that Tom.”

“I don’t understand.”

He shifted a little, his sleeping face calm.

“I am God’s Tom.”

Completely unnerved now, Stu almost dropped Nick’s notes.

“You say you’ll do what we want.”

“Yes.”

“But do you see . . . do you think you’ll come back?”

“That’s not for me to see or say. Where shall I go?”

“West, Tom.”

Tom moaned. It was a sound that made the hair on the nape of Stu’s neck stand on end.
What are we sending him into?
And maybe he knew. Maybe he had been there himself, only in Vermont, in mazes of corridors where the echo made it seem as if footsteps were following him. And gaining.

“West,” Tom said. “West, yes.”

“We’re sending you to look, Tom. To look and see. Then to come back.”

“Come back and tell.”

“Can you do that?”

“Yes. Unless they catch me and kill me.”

Stu winced; they all winced.

“You go by yourself, Tom. Always west. Can you find west?” “Where the sun goes down.”

“Yes. And if anyone asks why you’re there, this is what you’ll say: they drove you out of the Free Zone—”

“Drove me out. Put me on the road.”

“—because you were feebleminded—”

“They drove Tom out because Tom is feebleminded.”

“—and because you might have a woman and the woman might have idiot children.”

“Idiot children like Tom.”

Stu’s stomach was rolling back and forth helplessly. His head felt like iron that had learned how to sweat. It was as if he was suffering from a terrible, debilitating hangover.

“Now repeat what you’ll say if someone asks why you’re in the west.”

“They drove Tom out because he was feebleminded. Laws, yes. They were afraid I might have a woman the way you have them with your prick in bed. Make her pregnant with idiots.”

“That’s right, Tom. That’s—”

“Drove me out,” he said in a soft, grieving voice. “Drove Tom out of his nice house and put his feet on the road.”

Stu passed a shaking hand over his eyes. He looked at Nick. Nick seemed to double, then treble in his vision. “Nick, I don’t know as I can finish,” he said helplessly.

“Finish,” Tom said unexpectedly. “Don’t leave me out here in the dark.”

Forcing himself, Stu went on.

“Tom, do you know what the full moon looks like?”

“Yes ... big and round.”

“Not the half-moon, or even most of the moon.”

“No,” Tom said.

“When you see that big round moon, you’ll come back east. Back to us.”

“Yes, when I see it, I’ll come back,” Tom agreed.

“And when you come back, you’ll walk in the night and sleep in the day.”

“Walk at night. Sleep in the day.”

“You won’t let anybody see you if you can help it.”

“No.”

“But Tom, someone might see you.”

“Yes, someone might.”

“If it’s one person that sees you, Tom, kill him.” “Kill him,” Tom said doubtfully.

“If it’s more than one, run.”

“Pain,” Tom said, with more certainty.

“But try not to be seen at all. Can you repeat all that back?”

“Yes. Come back when the moon is full. Not the half-moon, not the fingernail moon. Walk at night, sleep in the day. Don’t let anybody see me. If one person sees me, kill him. If more than one person sees me, run away. But try not to let anyone see me.”

“That’s very good. I want you to wake up in a few seconds. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“When I ask about the elephant, you’ll wake up, okay?”