The Stand (Original Edition) (36 page)

He plunged down a stopped escalator and into a long dark tunnel lined with tile. At the other end there were more offices, but now the doors were painted dead black. The arrows were bright red. The fluorescents buzzed and flickered. The signs read THIS WAY TO COBALT URNS and LASER ARMORY and SIDEWINDER MISSILES and PLAGUE ROOM. Then, sobbing with relief, he saw an arrow pointing around a right-angled turn, and the single blessed word above it: EXIT.

He went around the corner and the door was standing open. Beyond it was the sweet, fragrant night. He plunged toward the door and then, stepping into it, a man in jeans and a denim jacket. Stu skidded to a stop, a scream locked in his throat like rusty iron. As the man stepped into the glow of the flickering fluorescents, Stu saw that there was only a cold black shadow where his face should have been, a blackness punched by two soulless red eyes. No soul, but a sense of humor. There was that; a kind of dancing, lunatic glee.

The dark man put out his hands, and Stu saw that they were dripping blood.

“Heaven and earth,” the dark man whispered from that empty hole where his face should have been. “All of heaven and earth.”

Stu had awakened.

Now Kojak moaned and growled softly in the hall. His paws twitched in his sleep, and Stu supposed that even dogs dreamed. It was a perfectly natural thing, dreaming, even an occasional nightmare.

But it was. a long time before he could get back to sleep.

Lloyd Henreid was down on his knees. He was humming and grinning. Every now and then he would forget what he had been humming and the grin would fade and he would sob a little bit, and then he would forget he was crying and go on humming. The song he was humming was “Camptown Races.” Every now and then, instead of humming or sobbing, he would whisper “Doo-dah, doo-dah” under his breath. The holding cellblock was utterly quiet except for the humming, the sobbing, the occasional doo-dah, and the soft scrape of the cotleg as Lloyd fumbled with it. He was trying to turn Trask’s body around so he could get at the leg. Please, waiter, bring me some more of that cole slaw and another leg.

Lloyd looked like a man who had embarked upon a radical crash diet. His prison coverall hung on his body like a limp sail. The last meal served in the holding cellblock had been lunch eight days ago. Lloyd’s skin was stretched tightly across his face, limning every curve and angle of the skull beneath. He looked crazy.

“Doo-dah, doo-dah,” Lloyd whispered as he fished with his cotleg. Once upon a time he hadn’t known why he had bothered hurting his fingers to unscrew the damn thing. Once upon a time he had thought he had known what real hunger was. That hunger had been nothing but a slight edge to the appetite when compared with this.

“Ride around all night . . . ride around all day . . . doodah . . .”

The cotleg snagged the cuff of Trask’s pantsleg and then pulled free. Lloyd put his head down and sobbed like a child. Behind him, tossed indifferently in one comer, was the skeleton of the rat he had killed in Trask’s cell on June 29, five days ago. The rat’s long pink tail was still attached to the skeleton. Lloyd had tried repeatedly to eat the tail but it was too tough. Almost all the water in the toilet bowl was gone despite his efforts to conserve it. The cell was filled with the reek of urine; he had been peeing out into the corridor so not to contaminate his water supply.

He had eaten the food he had squirreled away too fast. He knew that now. He had thought someone would come. He hadn’t been able to believe—

He didn’t want to eat Trask. The thought of eating Trask was horrible. Just last night he had managed to slap one of his slippers over a cockroach and had eaten it alive; he had felt it scuttering madly around inside his mouth just before his teeth had crunched it in two. Actually, it hadn’t been half bad, much more tasty than the rat. No, he didn’t want to eat Trask. He didn’t want to be a cannibal. It was like the rat. He would get Trask over within reaching distance . . . but just in case. Just in case. He had heard a man could go a long time without food as long as he had water.

(not much water but I won’t think about that now not just now no not just now
)

He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to starve. He was too full of hate.

The hate had built up at a fairly leisurely pace over the last three days, growing with his hunger. He supposed that, if his long-dead pet rabbit had been capable of thought, it would have hated him in the same way. Lloyd’s hate had coalesced around a simple imagistic concept, and this concept was THE KEY.

He was locked in. Once upon a time it had seemed right that he should be. He was one of the bad guys. Not a
really
bad guy; Poke had been the really bad guy. Small shit was the worst he would have done without Poke. Still, he shared a certain amount of the blame. He supposed he deserved to take a fall, do a little time. It wasn’t something you volunteered for, but when they had you cold they gave you the bullet and you ate it. Like he had told the lawyer, he thought he deserved about twenty for his part in the “tri-state kill-spree.” Not the electric chair, Christ, no. The thought of Lloyd Henreid riding the lightning was just ... it was crazy.

But they had THE KEY, that was the thing. They could lock you up and do what they wanted with you.

In the last three days, Lloyd had vaguely begun to grasp the symbolic, talismanic power of THE KEY. THE KEY was your reward for playing by the rules. If you didn’t, they could lock you up. It was no different than the
Go to Jail
card in Monopoly. And with THE KEY went certain prerogatives. They could take away ten years of your life, or twenty, or forty. They could hire people like Mathers to beat on you. They could even take away your life in the electric chair.

But having THE KEY didn’t give them the right to go away and leave you locked up to starve. It didn’t give them the right to force you into eating a dead rat and to try to eat the dry ticking of your mattress.

There were certain things you just couldn’t do to people. Having THE KEY only took you so far and no further. They had left him here to die a horrible death when they could have let him out, he wasn’t a mad dog killer who was going to waste the first person he saw, in spite of what the papers had said. Small shit was the worst he had ever gotten into before meeting Poke.

So he hated. For a while it had seemed to him that the hate was a useless thing, because all of those who had THE KEY had succumbed to the flu. They were beyond the reach of his vengeance. Then, little by little, as he grew hungrier, he realized that the flu wouldn’t kill
them.
It would kill the losers like him; it would kill Mathers but not that scumbag screw who had hired Mathers because the screw had THE KEY. It wasn’t going to kill the governor or the warden—the guard who said the warden was sick had obviously been a fucking liar. It wasn’t going to kill the POs, the county sheriffs, or the FBI agents. The flu wouldn’t be able to touch those who had THE KEY. But Lloyd would touch them. If he lived long enough to get out of here, he would touch them plenty.

The cotleg snagged in Trask’s cuff again.

“Come on,” Lloyd whispered. “Come on. Come on over here . . . camptown ladies sing dis song ... all doodah day.”

Trask’s body slid slowly, stiffly, along the floor of his cell. No fisherman ever played a bonita more carefully or with greater wile than Lloyd played Trask. Once Trask’s trousers ripped and Lloyd had to hook on in a new place. But at last his foot was close enough so that Lloyd could reach through the bars and grab it ... if he wanted to.

“Nothing personal,” he whispered to Trask. He touched Trask’s leg. He caressed it. “Nothing personal, I ain’t going to eat you, old buddy. Not less I have to.”

He was not even aware that he was salivating.

Lloyd heard someone in the ashy afterglow of dusk, and at first the sound was so far away and so strange—the clash of metal on metal—that he thought he must be dreaming it. The waking and sleeping states had become very similar to him now; he crossed back and forth across that boundary almost without knowing it.

But then the voice came and he snapped upright on his cot, his eyes flaring wide, huge and lambent in his starved face. The voice came floating down the corridors from God knew how far up in the Administration Wing:

“
Hooooo-hoooo! Anybody home?”

And, strangely, Lloyd’s first thought was:
Don’t answer. Maybe he’ll go away.

“Anybody home? Going once, going twice? .
. .
Okay, I’m on my way, just about to shake the dust of Phoenix from my boots
—”

At that, Lloyd’s paralysis broke. He catapulted off the cot, snatched up the cotleg, and began to beat it frantically on the bars; the vibrations raced up the metal and shivered in the bones of his clenched fist.

“No!”
he screamed.
“No! Don’t go! Please don’t go!”

The voice, closer now, coming from the stairway between Administration and this floor: “We’ll eat you up, we love you so . . . and oh, someone sounds
so
. . .
hungry.”
There was a lazy chuckle.

Lloyd dropped the cotleg on the floor and wrapped both hands around the bars of the cell door. Now he could hear the footfalls somewhere up in the shadows, clocking steadily up the hall that led to the holding cellblock. Lloyd wanted to burst into tears of relief . . . but it was not joy but fear he felt in his heart, a growing dread that made him wish he had stayed silent. Stayed silent? My God! What could be worse than starvation?

Of course there was no great hurry, because the barred gates at the head of the cellblock were shut, and with the power off, the pushbuttons wouldn’t work. His rescuer would have to go back and find THE KEY. He would have to—

Lloyd grunted as the electric motor which operated the barred gates whined into life. The silence of the cellblock magnified the sound, which ceased with the familiar
clickslam!
of the gates locking open.

Then the steps were clocking steadily up the cellblock walkway.

Lloyd was standing at his cell door again; now he involuntarily fell back two steps. He dropped his gaze to the floor outside and what he saw first was a pair of dusty cowboy boots with pointed toes and rundown heels and his first thought was that Poke had had a pair like that.

The boots stopped in front of his cell.

His gaze rose slowly, taking in the faded jeans snugged down over the boots, the leather belt with the brass buckle (various astrological signs inside a pair of concentric circles), the jeans jacket with a button pinned to each of the breast pockets—a smile face on one, a dead pig and the words HOW’S YOUR PORK on the other.

At the same instant Lloyd’s eyes reluctantly reached Randall Flagg’s darkly flushed face, Flagg screamed
“Boo!”
The single sound floated down the dead cellblock and then rushed back. Lloyd shrieked, stumbled over his own feet, fell down, and began to cry.

“That’s all right,” Flagg soothed. “‘Hey, man, that’s all right. Everything’s purely all right.”

Lloyd sobbed: “Can you let me out? Please let me out. I don’t want to be like my rabbit, I don’t want to end up like that, it’s not fair, if it wasn’t for Poke I never would have got into anything but small shit, please let me out, mister, I’ll do anything.”

“You poor guy. You look like an advertisement for a summer vacation at Dachau.”

Despite the sympathy in Flagg’s voice, Lloyd could not bring himself to raise his eyes beyond the knees of the newcomer’s jeans. If he looked into that face again, it would kill him. It was the face of a devil.

“Please,” Lloyd mumbled. “Please let me out. I’m starving.”

“How long you been shitcanned, my friend?”

“I don’t know,” Lloyd said, wiping his eyes with thin fingers. “A long time.”

“How come you’re not dead already?”

“I knew what was coming,” Lloyd told the bluejeaned legs as he drew the last tattered shreds of his cunning around him. “I saved up my food. That’s what.”

“How about B’rer Rat? How did he taste?”

Lloyd put his hands over his face.

“What’s your name?”

Lloyd tried to say, but all that came out was a moan.

“What’s your name, soldier?”

“Lloyd Henreid.” He tried to think what to say next, but his mind was a jumble. He had been afraid when his lawyer told him he might go to the electric chair, but not
this
afraid. He had never been
this
afraid in his entire life. “It was all Poke’s idea!” he screamed. “Poke should be here, not me!”

“Look at me, Lloyd.”

“No,” Lloyd whispered. His eyes rolled wildly.

“Why not?”

“Because . .

“Go on.”

“Because I don’t think you’re real,” Lloyd whispered. “And if you are real. . . mister, if you’re real, you’re the devil.”

“Look at me, Lloyd.”

Helplessly, Lloyd turned his eyes up to that dark, grinning face that hung behind an intersection of bars. The right hand held something up beside the right eye. Looking at it made Lloyd feel cold and hot all over. It looked like a black stone, so dark it seemed almost resinous and pitchy. There was a red flaw in the center of it, and to Lloyd it looked like a terrible eye, bloody and half-open, peering at him. Then Flagg turned it slightly between his fingers, and the red flaw in the dark stone looked like ... a key. Flagg turned it back and forth between his fingers. Now it was the eye, now it was the key.

The eye, the key.

He sang: “She brought me coffee ... she brought me tea . . . she brought me . . . damn near everything . . . but the workhouse key. Right, Lloyd?”

“Sure,” Lloyd said huskily. His eyes never left the small dark stone. Flagg began to walk it from one finger to the next like a magician doing a trick.

“Now you’re a man who must appreciate the value of a good key,” the man said. The dark stone disappeared in his clenched fist and suddenly reappeared in his other hand, where it began to finger-walk again. “I’m sure you are. Because what a key is for is opening doors. Is there anything more important in life than opening doors, Lloyd?”