The Stand (Original Edition) (101 page)

“Yes, I’ll tell you,” she said. “Come closer.”

He took a step toward her, grinning.

“No, a lot closer. I want to whisper it in your ear.”

He came closer still. She could feel baking heat, freezing cold. There was a high, atonal singing in her ears. She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar.

“Closer,” she whispered huskily.

He took another step and she cocked her right wrist in viciously. She heard the spring click. Weight slapped into her hand.

“Here!”
she shrieked hysterically, and brought her arm up in a hard sweep, meaning to gut him, leaving him to blunder around the room with his intestines hanging out in steaming loops. Instead he roared laughter, hands on his hips, flaming face cocked back, squeezing and contorting with great good humor.

“Oh, my
dear!”
he cried, and went off into another gale of laughter.

She looked stupidly down at her hand. It held a firm yellow banana with a blue and white Chiquita sticker on it. She dropped it, horrified, to the carpet, where it became a yellow, sickly grin, miming Flagg’s own.

“You’ll tell,” he whispered. “Oh yes indeed you will.”

And Dayna knew he was right.

She whirled quickly, so quickly that even the dark man was momentarily caught by surprise. One of those blank hands snatched out and caught only the back of her blouse, leaving him with nothing more substantial than a swatch of silk.

Dayna leaped at the window-wall.

“No!”
he screamed. She could feel him after her like a black wind.

She drove with her legs, using them like pistons, hitting the window with the top of her head. There was a dull flat cracking sound, and she saw amazingly thick hunks of glass fall out into the employees’ parking lot. Twisting cracks, like lodes of quicksilver, ran out from her point of impact. Momentum carried her halfway through the hole and it was there that she lodged, bleeding.

She felt
his
hands on her shoulders and wondered how long it would take him to make her tell. An hour? Two? She suspected she was dying now, but that was not good enough.

It
was
Tom I saw, and you can’t feel him or whatever it is you do because he’s different, he’s
—

He was dragging her back in.

She killed herself by simply whipping her head viciously around to the right. A razor-sharp jag of glass plunged deep into her throat. Another slipped into her right eye. Her body went stiff for a moment, and her hands beat against the glass. Then she went limp. What the dark man dragged back into the office was only a bleeding sack.

She had gone, perhaps in triumph.

Bellowing his rage, Flagg kicked her. The yielding, indifferent movement of her body enraged him further. He began to kick her around the room, bellowing, snarling. Sparks began to jump from his hair, as if somewhere inside him a cyclatron had hummed into life, building up an electrical field and turning him into a battery. His eyes blazed with dark fire.

Outside, Lloyd and the others grew pale. They looked at each other. At last it was more than they could stand. Jenny, Ken, Whitney—they drifted away, and their curdled-milk faces were set in the careful expressions of people who hear nothing and want to go right on hearing it.

Only Lloyd waited—not because he wanted to, but because he knew it was expected of him. And at last Flagg called him in.

He was sitting on the wide desk, his legs crossed, his hands on the knees of his jeans. He was looking over Lloyd’s head, out into space. There was a draft, and Lloyd saw that the window-wall was smashed in the middle. The jagged edges of the hole were sticky with blood.

Resting on the floor was a huddled, vaguely human form.

“Get rid of that,” Flagg said.

“Okay.” His voice fell to a husky whisper. “Should I take the head?”

“Take the whole thing out to the east of town and douse it in gasoline and burn it.”

“All right.”

“Yes.” Flagg smiled benignly.

Trembling, cotton-mouthed, nearly groaning with terror, Lloyd struggled to pick up the bulky object. It was sticky. It made a U in his arms, slithered through them, and thumped back to the floor. He threw a terrified glance at Flagg, but he was still in a semi-lotus, looking outward. Lloyd got hold of it again, clutched it, and staggered toward the door.

“Lloyd?”

He stopped and looked back. A little moan escaped him. Flagg was still in the semi-lotus, but now he was floating about ten inches above the desk, still looking serenely across the room.

“W-W-What?”

“Do you still have the key I gave you in Phoenix?”

“Yes.”

“Keep it handy. The time is coming.”

“A-All right.”

He waited, but Flagg did not speak again. He hung in the darkness, a mind-boggling Hindu fakir’s trick, looking outward, smiling gently.

Lloyd left quickly, as always happy to go with his life and his sanity.

Lloyd arrived back in Vegas around 2
p.m.,
smelling of gasoline. The wind had started to rise, and by five o’clock it was howling up and down The Strip and making forlorn hooting noises between the hotels. The palms, which had begun to die without city water in July and August, flapped against the sky like tattered and yellowing battle flags. Clouds in strange shapes scudded overhead.

In the Cub Bar, Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott sat drinking bottled beer and eating egg salad sandwiches. Three old ladies—the Weird Sisters, everyone called them—kept chickens on the outskirts of town, and no one could seem to get enough eggs. Below Whitney and Ken, in the casino, little Dinny McCarthy was crawling happily around on one of the crap tables with an army of plastic soldiers.

“Lookit that little squirt,” Ken said fondly. “Someone asked me if I’d watch him an hour. I’d watch him all week. I wish to God he was mine. My wife only had the one, and he was two months premature. Died in the incubator the third day out.” He looked up as Lloyd came in.

“Hey, Dinny!” Lloyd called.

“Yoyd! Yoyd!” Dinny cried. He ran to the edge of the crap table, jumped down, and ran to him. Lloyd picked him up, swung him, and hugged him hard.

“Got kisses for Lloyd?” he asked.

Dinny smacked him with noisy kisses.

“I got something for you,” Lloyd said, and took a handful of foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses from his breast pocket.

Dinny crowed with delight and clutched them. “Yoyd?”

“What, Dinny?”

“Why do you smell like a gasoline pile?”

Lloyd smiled. “I was burning some trash, honey. You go on and play. Who’s your mom now?”

“Angelina.” He pronounced it
Angeyeena.
“Then Bonnie again. I like Bonnie. But I like Angelina, too.”

“Don’t tell her Lloyd gave you candy. Angelina would spank Lloyd.”

Dinny promised not to tell and ran off giggling at the image of Angelina spanking Lloyd. In a minute or two he was back on the DON’T COME line of the crap table, generaling his army with his mouth crammed full of chocolate. Whitney came over, wearing his white apron. He had two sandwiches for Lloyd and a cold bottle of Hamm’s.

“Thanks,” Lloyd said. “Looks great.”

“That’s homemade Syrian bread,” Whitney said proudly.

Lloyd munched for a while. “Has anybody seen him?” he asked finally.

Ken shook his head. “I think he’s gone again.”

Lloyd thought it over. Outside, a stronger-than-average gust of wind shrieked by, sounding lonely and lost in the desert. Dinny raised his head uneasily for a moment and then bent back to play.

“I think he’s around somewhere,” Lloyd said finally. “I don’t know why, but I do.”

Whitney said in a low voice, “You think he got it out of her?” “No,” Lloyd said, watching Dinny. “I don’t think he did. It went wrong for him somehow. She . . . she got lucky or she outthought him. And that doesn’t happen often.”

“It won’t matter in the long run,” Ken said, but he looked troubled just the same.

“No, it won’t.” Lloyd listened to the wind for a while. “Maybe he’s gone back to L.A. But my guess is that he’s still around. Someplace.” Whitney went back to the kitchen and produced another round of beer. They drank in silence, thinking disquieting thoughts. First the Judge, now the woman. Both dead. And neither had talked. Neither had been unmarked as
he
had ordered. It was as if the old Yankees of Mantle and Maris and Ford had lost the opening two games of the World Series; it was hard for them to believe, and frightening.

The wind blew hard all night.

On the late afternoon of September 10, Dinny was playing in the small city park that lies just north of the city’s hotel and casino district. His “mother” that week, Angelina Hirschfield, was sitting on a park bench and talking with a young girl who had drifted into Las Vegas about five weeks before, ten days or so after Angie herself had come in.

Angie Hirschfield was twenty-seven. The girl was ten years younger, now clad in tight bluejeans shorts and a brief middy blouse which left absolutely nothing to the imagination. There was something obscene about the contrast between the tight allure of her young body and the childish, pouty, and rather vacuous expression on her face. Her conversation was monotonous and seemingly without end: rock stars, sex, her lousy job cleaning Cosmoline preservative off armaments at Indian Springs, sex, her diamond ring, sex, the TV programs that she missed so much, and sex.

Angie wished she would go have sex with someone and leave her alone. And she hoped Dinny would be at least thirty before he worked around to having this girl for a mother.

At that moment Dinny looked up, smiled, and yelled: “Tom! Hey, Tom!”

On the other side of the park, a big man with straw-blond hair was shambling along with a big workman’s lunchbucket slamming against his leg.

“Say, that guy looks drunk,” the girl said to Angie.

Angie smiled. “No, that’s Tom. He’s just—”

But Dinny was off and running, hollering “Tom! Wait up, Tom!” at the top of his lungs. Tom turned, grinning. “Airplane me, Tom! Airplane me!”

Tom grabbed Dinny’s wrists and began to spin him around, faster and faster. Centrifugal force pulled the boy’s body out until his whizzing legs were parallel to the ground. He shrieked with laughter. After two or three spins, Tom set him gently on his feet.

Dinny wobbled around, laughing and trying to get his balance back.

“Do it again, Tom! Do it again some more!”

“No, you’ll puke if I do. And Tom’s got to get to his home. Laws, yes.”

“Kay, Tom. Bye!”

Angie said, “I think Dinny loves Lloyd and Tom more than anyone else in town. Tom Cullen is simple, but—” She looked at the girl and broke off. She was watching Tom, her eyes narrowed and thoughtful.

“Did he come in with another man?” she asked.

“Who? Tom? No, he came in all by himself about a week and a half ago. He was with those other people in their Zone, but they drove him out. Their loss is our gain, that’s what I say.”

“And he didn’t come in with a dummy? A deaf-and-dummy?”

“A deaf-mute? No, he came in alone. Dinny just loves him.”

The girl watched Tom out of sight. She thought of Pepto-Bismol in a bottle. She thought of a scrawled note that said
We don’t need you.
That had been back in Kansas, a thousand years ago. She had shot at them. She wished she had killed them, particularly the dummy. “Julie? Are you all right?”

Julie Lawry didn’t answer. She stared after Tom Cullen. In a little while, she began to smile.

The dying man opened the Permacover notebook, uncapped his pen, paused a moment, and then began to write.

It was strange; where once the pen had flown over the paper, seeming to cover each sheet from top to bottom by a process of benign magic, the words now straggled and draggled, the letters large and tottery, as if he was regressing back to early grammar school days in his own private time machine.

In those days, his mother and father had still had some love left over for him. Amy had not yet blossomed, and his own future as The Amazing Ogunquit Fat Boy and Possible Hommasexshul was not yet decided. He could remember sitting at the sunwashed kitchen table, slowly copying one of the Tom Swift books word for word in a Blue Horse tablet—pulp stock, blue lines—with a glass of Coke beside him. He could hear his mother’s words drifting out of the living room. Sometimes she was talking on the phone, sometimes to a neighbor.

It’s just babyfat, the doctor says so. There’s nothing wrong with his glands, thank God. And he’s so bright!

Watching the words grow, letter by letter. Watching the sentences grow, word by word. Watching the paragraphs grow, each one a brick in the great walled bulwark that was language.

“
It’s to be my greatest invention,” Tom said forcefully. “Watch what happens when I pull out the plate, but for gosh sakes, don’t forget to shield your eyes!”

The bricks of language. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Worlds. Magic. Life and immortality.
Power.

I don’t know where he gets it, Rita. Maybe from his grandfather. He was an ordained minister and they say he gave the most wonderful sermons .
. .

Watching the letters improve as time passed.
Writing
now, mere copying left behind. Assembling thoughts and plots. That was the whole world, after all, nothing but thoughts and plots. He had gotten a typewriter finally (and by then there wasn’t much else left over for him; Amy was in high school, National Honor Society, cheerleader, and all the rest, and her brother’s baby fat had not yet departed although he was thirteen years old) and had mastered the keys quickly. As he improved, he was at last able to keep up with his racing thoughts and snare them all. But he had never stopped his longhand entirely, remembering that
Moby Dick
had been written longhand, and
The Scarlet Letter,
and
Paradise Lost.
Writing longhand was work—terrible, handcramping work—but it was a labor of love. He had used the typewriter willingly and gratefully, but thought he had always saved the best of himself for longhand.