The Stand (Original Edition) (83 page)

“Okay.”    .

Stu sat back with a long, shuddery sigh. “Thank God that’s over.” Nick agreed with his eyes.

“Did you know that might happen, Nick?”

Nick shook his head.

“How could he know those things?” Stu muttered.

Nick was motioning for his pad. Stu gave it to him, glad to be rid of it. Nick wrote and handed it to Ralph. Ralph read it, lips moving slowly, and then handed it to Stu.

“Some people through history have considered the insane and the retarded to be close to divine. I don’t think he told us anything that can be of practical use to us, but I know he scared the hell out of me. Magic, he said. How do you fight magic?”

“It’s over my head, that’s all,” Ralph muttered. “Those things he said about Mother Abagail, I don’t even want to think about them. Wake him up, Stu, and let’s get out of here as quick as we can.” Ralph was close to tears.

Stu leaned forward again. “Tom?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to see an elephant?”

Tom’s eyes opened and he looked around at them. “I told you it wouldn’t work,” he said. “Laws, no. Tom doesn’t get sleepy in the middle of the day.”

Nick handed a sheet to Stu, who glanced at it and then spoke to Tom. “Nick says you did just fine.”

“I did? Did I stand on my head like before?”

With a twinge of bitter shame, Nick thought: No, Tom, you did a bunch of even better tricks this time.

“No,” Stu said. “Tom, we came to ask if you could help us.” “Me? Help? Sure! I love to help.”

“This is dangerous, Tom. We want you to go west, and then come back and tell us what you saw.”

“Okay, sure. When?”

Stu put a gentle hand on Tom’s neck. “Pretty soon now,” he said gently. “Pretty soon.”

When Stu got back to the apartment, Frannie was fixing supper. “Harold was over,” she said.

“Harold? What did he want?”

“He left a bunch of those survey maps. Areas where his Search Committee has looked for Mother Abagail. And not found her. Stuart, you look lousy. What dog bit you?”

He sat down at the table and told her everything that had happened at Tom’s house. He told her without looking at her. When she sat down across from him, her face was almost as pale as he remembered Ralph’s as being. And she was pushing her food around on her plate rather than eating it.

“What does it all mean, Stu?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what do you think it means?”

“It’s a kind of prophecy, I guess. I don’t know why we should balk at that. After the dreams.”

“But they were so long ago . .

“Yeah. Delicious dinner, Frannie,” he added, and they looked at each other ruefully.

“Does it still seem like a good idea to you, after this afternoon? Sending Tom west, I mean.”

“I don’t know.” He pushed his plate away almost untouched, got up, and found a pack of cigarettes on the hall dresser. He had cut his consumption down to three or four a day. This one tasted good even if the tobacco was stale. “His cover story is simple enough and believable enough. No one is going to be able to shake him from it. And if he gets back we can hypnotize him again—he goes under in the time it takes you to snap your fingers—and he’ll tell us everything he’s seen. Chapter and verse. I don’t doubt that.”

“
If
he gets back.”

“Yes. We gave him an instruction to travel only at night. If he was seen by more than one person, to run. He accepted that okay. But if he was seen by one person only, to kill him.”

“Stu, you didn’t!”

“Of course we did! We’re not playing pattycake here, Frannie! You must know what’s going to happen to him or the others if they get caught over there! Why else were you so set against the idea in the first place?”

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay, Stu.”

“No, it’s
not
okay!” he said, and slammed the just-lit cigarette down into a pottery ashtray, sending up a little cloud of sparks. Several of them landed on the back of his hand and he brushed them off in a quick, savage gesture. “It’s not okay to send a feeble kid out to fight our battles, and it’s not okay to push people around like pawns on a fuckin chessboard and it’s not okay giving orders to kill like a Mafia boss. But I don’t know what else we can do. I just don’t know. If we don’t find out what he’s up to, there’s a damn fine chance that someday next spring he may turn the whole Free Zone into one big mushroom cloud.”

“Okay. Hey. Okay.”

He unclenched his fists slowly. “I was shouting at you. I’m sorry. I had no right to do that, Frannie.”

“It’s okay.”

“Anyhow, when I gave him that . . . what do you call it? When I said he should kill any one person that got in his way, a kind of frown came over his face. It was gone right away, I don’t even know if Ralph or Nick saw it. But I did. It was like he was thinking, ‘Okay, I understand what you mean, but I’ll make up m’own mind on that when the time comes.’ ”

“I’ve read that you can’t hypnotize someone into doing something they wouldn’t do when they were awake. A person won’t go against his own moral code just because they’re told to do it when they’re under.”

Stu nodded. “Yeah, I was thinking of that. What if this fellow Flagg has got a line of pickets strung down the whole eastern length of his border? I would, if I were him. If Tom runs into that picket line going west, he’s got his story to cover him. But if he’s coming back east and runs into them, it’s going to be kill or get killed. And if Tom won’t kill, he’s apt to be a dead duck.”

“You may be too worried about that one part of it,” Frannie said. “I mean, if there
is
a picket line, wouldn’t it have to be strung pretty thin?”

“Yeah. One man every fifty miles, something like that. Unless he’s got five times the people we do.”

“So unless they’ve got some pretty sophisticated equipment already

set up and running, radar and infrared and all that stuff you see in the spy movies, wouldn’t Tom be apt to walk right through them?” “That’s what we’re hoping. But—”

“But you’ve got a bad attack of conscience,” she said softly.

“Is that what it comes to? Maybe so.”

“Harold’s got a woman,” Fran said. “You’d never guess who.”

He looked up and smiled. “I believe that’s called changing the subject.”

“ ‘Is that what it comes down to? Maybe so.’ Anyhow, Harold’s been working on that burial detail as well as supervising the Search Committee. He looked very tired. Can you guess who?”

“Who what?”

“Who Harold’s ladyfriend is, stupid.”

Stu squinted up at the ceiling. “Now who could Harold be shackin with? Let me see—”

“Well, that’s a hell of a way to put it! What do you think we’re doing?” She threw a mock-slap at him, and he drew back, grinning. “Fun, ain’t it? I give up. Who is it?”

“Nadine Cross.”

“That woman with the white in her hair?”

“That’s her.”

“Gosh, she must be twice his age.”

“I doubt,” Frannie said, “that it’s a concern to Harold at this point in his relationship.”

“Does Larry know?”

“I don’t know and care less. The Cross woman isn’t Larry’s girl now. If she ever was.”

“Yeah,” Stu said. “How does Harold feel about the Search Committee, anyway?”

“Well, you know Harold. He smiles a lot, but . . . not very hopeful. I guess that’s why he’s putting in most of his time on the burial detail. They call him Hawk now, did you know that?”

“Really?”

“I heard it today. I didn’t know who they were talking about until I asked.” She mused for a moment, then laughed.

“What’s funny?” Stu asked.

She stuck out her feet, which were clad in low-topped sneakers On the soles were patterns of circles and lines. “He complimented me on my sneakers,” she said. “Isn’t that dippy?”

“
You’re
dippy,” Stu said, grinning.

Harold woke up just before dawn, and shivered a little bit as he got up. It was getting noticeably colder in the early mornings, although it was only August 22 and fall was still a calendar month away.

But there was heat below his waist, oh yes. Just looking at the delectable curve of her buttocks in those tiny see-through underpants as she slept was warming him up considerably. She wouldn’t mind if he woke her up . . . well, maybe she would mind, but she wouldn’t
object.
He still had no real idea of what might lie behind those dark eyes, and he was a little afraid of her.

Instead of waking her up, he dressed quietly. He didn’t want to mess around with Nadine, as much as he would have liked to.

What he needed to do was go someplace alone and think.

He paused at the door, fully dressed, carrying his boots in his left hand. Between the slight chilliness of the room and the prosy act of getting dressed, his desire had left him. He could smell the room now, and the smell was not that appealing.

It was just a little thing, she had said, a thing they could do without. Perhaps it was true. She could do things with her mouth and hands that were nearly beyond belief. But if it was such a small thing, why did this room have that stale and slightly sour odor that he associated with the solitary pleasure of all his bad years?

Maybe you want it to be bad.

He went out, closing the door softly behind him.

Harold made instant coffee, drank it with a grimace, and then took a couple of cold Pop-Tarts out onto the front step. He sat down and ate them while dawn crept across the land.

The last couple of days seemed like a mad carnival ride. It was a blur of orange trucks, of Weizak clapping him on the shoulder and calling him Hawk (they all called him that now), of dead bodies, a never-ending moldy stream of them, and then coming home from all that death to a never-ending flow of kinky sex. Enough to blur your head.

But now, sitting here on a front step as cold as a marble headstone, a horrible cup of instant coffee sloshing in his guts, he could munch these sawdust-tasting cold Pop-Tarts and think. He felt clearheaded, sane after a season of insanity. It occurred to him that, for a person who had always considered himself to be a Cro-Magnon man amid a herd of thundering Neanderthals, he had been doing precious little
thinkin
g lately. He had been led, not by the nose, but by the penis.

He turned his mind to Frannie Goldsmith even as he turned his gaze out to the Flatirons. It was Frannie who had been at his house that day, he knew it for sure now. He had gone over on a pretext, really hoping to get a look at her footgear. As it turned out, she had been wearing the sneakers that matched the print he had found on his cellar floor. Circles and lines instead of the usual waffle or zigzag tread. No question, baby.

He thought he could put it together without too much trouble. Somehow she had found out he had read her diary. He must have left a smudge or mark on one of the pages . . . maybe more than one. So she had come to his house looking for some indication of how he felt about what he had read. Something written down.

There was, of course, his ledger. But she hadn’t found it, he could feel positive of that. His ledger said flat-out that he planned to kill Stuart Redman. If she had found something like that, she would have told Stu. Even if she hadn’t, he didn’t believe she could have been as easy and as natural with him as she had been yesterday.

He got up, finishing his breakfast. He decided he would walk to the bus station instead of taking his cycle; Teddy Weizak or Norris could drop him off on the way home. He set off, zipping his light jacket all the way to his chin against the chill that would be gone in an hour or so. He walked past the empty houses with their shades drawn, and about six blocks down Arapahoe, he began to see an X-mark chalked boldly on door after door. Again, his idea. The Burial Committee had checked all those houses where the mark appeared, and had hauled away whatever bodies there were to be hauled away. X, a crossing-out. The people who had lived in those houses where the mark appeared were gone for all time. In another month that X-mark would be all over Boulder, signifying the end of an age.

I read her diary because I was hurt and jealous, he thought. Then she broke into my house, probably looking for my own diary, but she didn’t find it. But just the shock of someone breaking in had maybe been revenge enough. It had certainly bent him out of shape. Maybe they were even and it could be quits.

He didn’t really want Frannie anymore, did he? . . .
Did
he?

He felt the sullen coal of resentment glow in his chest. Maybe not. But that didn’t change the fact that they had excluded him. Although Nadine had said little about her reasons for coming to him, Harold had an idea that she had been excluded in some way too, rebuffed, turned back. They were a couple of outsiders, and outsiders hatch plots. It’s perhaps the only thing that keeps them sane (
Remember to put that in the ledger,
Harold thought ... he was almost downtown now).

There was a whole company of outsiders on the other side of the mountains. And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you’re inside. Inside where it’s warm. Just a little thing, being inside where it’s warm, but really such a big thing. About the most important thing in the world.

Maybe he didn’t want to be quits and even. Maybe he didn’t want to settle for a draw, for a career of riding in a twentieth-century deadcart and getting meaningless letters of thanks for his ideas, and waiting five years for Bateman to retire from their precious committee so he could be on it . . . and what if they decided to pass over
him
again?

The coal of resentment was burning brightly now.

He reached the bus station. It was still early, and no one was there yet. There was a poster on the door saying there was going to be another public meeting on the twenty-fifth. Public meeting? Public circle jerk.

The waiting room was festooned with travel posters and ads for the Greyhound Ameripass and pictures of big motherhumping Sceni-cruisers cruising through Atlanta, New Orleans, San Francisco, Nashville, wherever. He sat down and stared with a cold morning eye at the darkened pinball machines, the Coke machine, the coffee machine that would also dispense a Lipton Cup O’ Soup that smelled vaguely like a dead fish. He lit a cigarette and threw the matchstub on the floor.