The Stand (Original Edition) (87 page)

Larry didn’t answer, but he thought Lucy’s judgment was probably

a true one. That night up by King Sooper’s she had been like a crazy woman.

“And have you noticed how white her hair is getting?”

Larry nodded. He had. Now, half an hour after that discussion, he drank his Hamm’s and watched Leo bounce the Ping-Pong ball he had found the day the two of them had walked up to Harold’s, where Nadine now lived. The small white ball was smudged but still not dented.
Thok-thok-thok
against the pavement. Bouncy-bouncy-bally, look-at-the-way-we-play.

“You want to go fishing, kiddo?” Larry offered suddenly.

“No fish,” Leo said. “Do you know Mr. Ellis?”

“Sure.”

“He says we can drink the water when the fish come back. Drink it without—” He made a hooting noise and waved his fingers in front of his eyes. His seawater green eyes were fixed on Larry’s.

“Without boiling it?”

“Yes.”

Thok-thok-thok.

“I like Dick. Him and Laurie. Always give me something to eat. He’s afraid they won’t be able to, but I think they will.”

“Will what?”

“Be able to make a baby. Dick thinks he may be too old. But I guess he’s not.”

Larry started to ask how Leo and Dick had gotten on
that
subject, and then didn’t. The answer, of course, was that they hadn’t. Dick wouldn’t talk to a small boy about something so personal as making a baby. Leo had just. . . had just known.

Thok-thok-thok.

Yes, Leo knew things ... or intuited them. He hadn’t wanted to go in Harold’s house and had said something about Nadine ... he couldn’t remember exactly what... but Larry had recalled that discussion and had felt very uneasy when he heard that Nadine had moved in with Harold. It had been as if the boy was in a trance, as if—

(—
thok-thok-thok
—)

Larry watched the Ping-Pong ball bounce up and down, and suddenly he looked into Leo’s face. The boy’s eyes were dark and faraway. The sound of the lawnmower was a faroff, soporific drone. The daylight was smooth and warm. And Leo was in a trance again, as if he had read Larry’s thought and simply responded to it.

Very casually Larry said: “Yes, I think they can make a baby.

Dick can’t be any more than fifty-five at the outside. Cary Grant made one when he was almost seventy, I believe.”

“Who’s Cary Grant?” Leo asked. The ball went up and down, up and down.

(
Notorious
.
North by Northwest.)

“Don’t you know?” he asked Leo.

“He was that actor,” Leo said. “He was in
Notorious.
And
Northwest."

(North by Northwest.)

“North by Northwest,
I mean,” Leo said in a tone of agreement. His eyes never left the Ping-Pong ball’s bouncing course and Larry was reminded eerily of Tom Cullen and his elephant.

“That’s right,” he said. “How’s Nadine-mom, Leo?”

“She calls me Joe. I’m Joe to her.”

“Oh.”

“It’s bad now. It’s bad with both of them.”

“Nadine and—”

(Harold?)

“Yes, him.”

“They’re not happy?”

“He’s got them fooled. They think he wants them.”

“He?”

“Him"
The word hung on the still summer air.

Thok-thok-thok.

“They’re going to go west,” Leo said.

“Jesus,” Larry muttered. He suddenly felt the old fear sweep him. Did he really want to hear any more of this? It was like watching a tomb door swing slowly open in a silent graveyard, seeing a hand emerge—

Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to know it.
“Nadine-mom wants to think it’s your fault,” Leo said. “She wants to think you drove her to Harold. But she waited on purpose. She waited until you loved Lucy-mom too much. She waited until she was sure. It’s like
he’s
rubbing away the part of her brain that knows right from wrong. Little by little he’s rubbing that part away. And when it’s gone she’ll be as crazy as everyone else in the west. Crazier, maybe.”

“Leo—” Larry whispered, and Leo answered immediately:

“She calls me Joe. I’m Joe to her.”

“Shall I call you Joe?” Larry asked doubtfully.

“No.” There was a note of pleading in the boy’s voice. “No, please don’t.” “You miss your Nadine-mom, don’t you, Leo?”

“She’s dead,” Leo said with chilling simplicity.

“Is that why you wouldn’t talk after she came here? Did you know she was here that day we tried the fishing?”

“Yes.” It seemed to answer both questions.

“But you’re talking now.”

“I have you and Lucy-mom to talk to.”

“Yes, of course—”

“But not for always!” the boy said fiercely. “Not for always, unless you talk to Frannie! Talk to Frannie!
Talk to Frannie!”

“About Nadine?”

“No!”

“About what? About you?”

Leo’s voice rose, became even more shrill. “It’s all written down! You know! Frannie knows!
Talk to Frannie!”

“The committee—”

“Not the committee! The committee won’t help you, it won’t help anyone, the committee is the old way,
he
laughs at your committee because it’s the old way and the old ways are his ways, you know, Frannie knows, if you talk together you can—”

Leo brought the ball down hard—
THOK
!—and it rose higher than his head and came down and rolled away. Larry watched it, his mouth dry, his heart thudding nastily in his chest.

“I dropped my ball,” Leo said, and ran to get it.

Larry sat watching him.

Frannie,
he thought.

The two of them sat on the edge of the bandshell stage, their feet dangling. It was an hour before dark, and a few people were walking through the park, some of them holding hands. The children’s hour is also the lovers’ hour, Fran thought disjointedly. Larry had just finished telling her everything Leo had said in his trance, and her mind was whirling with it.

“So what do you think?” Larry asked.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said softly, “except I don’t like any of the things that have been happening. Visionary dreams. An old woman who’s the voice of God for a while and then walks off into the wilderness. Now a little boy who seems to be a telepath. It’s like life in a fairy tale. Sometimes I think the superflu left us alive but drove us all mad.”

“He said I should talk to you. So I am.”

“Written down,” Fran said. “He was right, that kid. It’s the whole root of the problem, I think. If I hadn’t been so stupid, so conceited, as to write it all down ... oh, goddam me!”

Larry stared at her, amazed. “What are you talking about?”

So she told him, beginning with the day in June that Harold had driven into the driveway of her Ogunquit home in Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac. As she talked, the last bright daylight changed to a bluish shade. The lovers in the park began to drift away. A thin rind of moon rose. In the high-rise condominium on the far side of Canyon Boulevard, a few Coleman gaslamps had come on. She told him about the sign on the barn roof and how she had been sleeping when Harold risked his life to put her name on the bottom. About meeting Stu in Fabyan, and about Harold’s shrill get-away-from-my-bone reaction to Stu. She told him about her diary, and about the thumbprint in it. By the time she finished, it was past nine o’clock and the crickets were singing. A silence fell between them and Fran waited apprehensively for Larry to break it. But he seemed lost in thought.

At last he said, “How sure are you about that fingerprint? In your own mind are you
positive
it was Harold’s?”

“I knew it was Harold’s print the first time I saw it.”

“That barn he put the sign on,” Larry said. “You remember the night I met you I said I’d been up in it? And that Harold had carved his initials on a beam in the loft?”

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t just his initials. It was yours, too. In a heart. The kind of thing a lovesick little boy would do on his school desk.”

She put her hands over her eyes and wiped them. “What a mess,” she said huskily.

“You’re not responsible for Harold Lauder’s actions, keed.” He took her hand in both of his and held it tightly. He looked at her. “Take it from me, the original dipstick, oilslick, and drippy dick. You can’t hold it against yourself. Because if you do . . His grip tightened to a degree where it became painful, but his voice remained soft. “If you do, you really will go mad. It’s hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else’s.”

He took his hand away and they were quiet for a time.

“You think Harold bears Stu a killing grudge?” he said at last. “You really think it’s that deep?”

“Yes,” she said. “Maybe the whole committee. But I don’t know what—”

His hand fell on her shoulder, stilling her. In the darkness his posture had changed, his eyes had widened. His lips moved soundlessly.

“Larry? What—”

“When he went downstairs,” Larry muttered. “He went down to get a corkscrew or something.”

“What?”

He turned toward her slowly, as if his head was on a rusty hinge. “You know,” he said, “there just might be a way to resolve all this. I don’t guarantee it, because I didn’t look in the book, but ... it makes such beautiful sense . . . Harold reads your diary and not only gets an earful but an idea ... all the best writers kept journals, didn’t they?”

“Are you saying
Harold’s
got a diary?”

“When he went down to the basement, the day I brought the wine, I was looking around his living room. He said he was going to put in some chrome and leather, and I was trying to figure out how it would look. And I noticed this loose stone on the hearth—”

“YES!”
she bellowed, so loudly that he jumped. “The day I snuck in . . . and Nadine Cross came . . . I
sat
on the hearth ... I remember that loose stone.” She looked at Larry again. “There it is again. As if something had us by the nose, was leading us to it. . “Coincidence,” he said, but he sounded uneasy.

“Is it? We were both in Harold’s house. We both noticed the loose stone. And we’re both here now. Is it coincidence?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was under that stone?”

“A ledger,” he said slowly. “I didn’t look in it. At the time I thought it could just as easily have belonged to the previous owner of the house as to Harold. But if it did, wouldn’t Harold have found it? We both noticed the loose stone. So let’s say he finds it. Even if the guy who lived there before the flu had filled it up with little secrets— the amount he cheated on his taxes, his sex fantasies about his daughter, I don’t know what all—those secrets wouldn’t have been
Harold’s
secrets. Do you see that?”

“Yes, but—”

“Don’t interrupt while Inspector Underwood is elucidating, you slip of a girl. So if the secrets weren’t Harold’s secrets, why would he have put the ledger back under the stone? Harold’s
journal.”

“Do you think it’s still there?”

“Maybe. I think we’d better look and see.”

“Now?”

“Tomorrow. He’ll be out with the Burial Committee, and Nadine has been up at the power station afternoons.” “All right,” she said. “Do you think I should tell Stu about this?”

“Why don’t we wait? There’s no sense stirring things up unless it’s something. The book might be gone. It might be nothing but a list of things to do. It might be full of perfectly innocent things. Or it might be in code.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. What will we do if there is . . . something?”

“Then I guess we’ll have to bring it up before the Free Zone Committee. Another reason to get it done quickly. We’re meeting on September second. The committee will handle it.”

“Will it?”

“Yes, I think so,” Larry said, but he was also thinking of what Leo had said about the committee.

She slipped off the edge of the bandshell and onto the ground. “Thanks for being here, Larry.”

“Where should we meet?”

“The little park across from Harold’s. What about there, at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”

“Fine,” Larry said. “I’ll see you then.”

Frannie went home feeling lighter at heart than she had for weeks. As Larry said, the alternatives were now fairly clear. The ledger might prove all of their fears groundless. If it was otherwise, let the committee decide. As Larry had reminded her, they were meeting on the evening of the second, at Nick’s and Ralph’s place, out near the end of Baseline Road.

The first of September dawned gray and rainy, a dull, forgettable day—but one that no resident of the Free Zone ever forgot. That was the day the power came back on in North Boulder . . . briefly, at least.

At ten to noon, in the control room of the power station, Brad Kitchner looked at Stu, Nick, Ralph, and Jack Jackson, who were all standing behind him. Brad smiled nervously and said, “Hail Mary, fulla grace.”

He yanked two big switches down hard. In the huge and cavernous hall below them, two trial generators began to whine. The five men walked over to the wall-to-wall polarized glass window and looked below, to where almost a hundred men and women stood, all of them wearing protective goggles as per Brad’s order.

“If we did something wrong, I’d rather blow two than fifty-two,” Brad had told them earlier.

The generators began to whine more loudly.

Nick elbowed Stu and pointed to the office ceiling. Stu looked up and began to grin. Behind the translucent panels, the fluorescents had begun to glow weakly. The generators cycled up and up, reached a high, steady hum, and leveled off. Down below, the crowd of assembled workers broke into spontaneous applause, some of them wincing as they did so; their hands were raw and flayed from wrapping copper wire hour after drudging hour.

The fluorescents were shining brightly and normally now.

For Nick, the feeling was the exact opposite of the dread he had known when the lights went out in Shoyo—not one of entombment now, but of resurrection.

The two generators supplied power to one small section of North Boulder in the North Street area. There were people in the area who hadn’t known about the test that morning, and many of these people fled as if all the devils of hell were after them.