The Stand

“Lord God I have suffered,” Mother Abagail said balefully, and popped the plates in.

“We got to talk,” she said. “You two are the head ones, and we got some things to sort out.”

“Well,” Ralph said, “it ain’t me. I was never much more than a full-time factory worker and a part-time farmer. I’ve raised a helluva lot more calluses than idears in my time. Nick, I guess he’s in charge.”

“Is that right?” she asked, looking at Nick.

Nick wrote briefly and Ralph read it aloud, as he continued to do.

“It was my idea to come up this way, yes. About being in charge, I don’t know.”

“We met June and Olivia about ninety miles south of here,” Ralph said. “Day before yesterday, wasn’t it, Nick?”

Nick nodded.

“We was on our way to you even then, Mother. The women were headed north, too. So was Dick. We all just threw in together.”

“Have you seen any other folks?” she asked.

“No,” Nick wrote. “But I’ve had a feeling—Ralph has, too—that there are other people hiding, watching us. Afraid, I guess. Still getting over the shock of what’s happened.”

She nodded.

“Dick said that the day before he joined us, he heard a motorcycle somewhere south. So there are other people around. I think what scares them is seeing a fairly big group all together.”

“Why did you come here?” Her eyes, caught in their nets of wrinkles, stared at him keenly.

Nick wrote: “I have dreamed of you. Dick Ellis says he has once. And the little girl, Gina, was calling you ‘grammylady’ long before we got here. She described your place. The tire swing.”

“Bless the child,” Mother Abagail said absently. She looked at Ralph. “You?”

“Once or twice, ma’am,” Ralph said. He wet his lips. “Mostly what I dreamed about was just… just that other fella.”

“What other fella?”

Nick wrote. Circled what he had written. Handed it to her directly. Her eyes were not much good for close work without her specs or the lighted magnifying glass she’d gotten in Hemingford Center last year, but she could read this. It was writ large, like the writing God had put on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace. Circled, it gave her a cold chill just looking at it. She thought of weasels squirming across the road on their bellies, yanking at her towsack with their needle-sharp killers’ teeth. She thought of a single red eye opening, disclosing itself in the darkness, looking, searching, now not just for an old woman but a whole party of men and women… and one little girl.

The two circled words were: dark man.

“I’ve been told,” she said, folding the paper, straightening it, then folding it again, for the time being unmindful of the misery of her arthritis, “that we’re to go west. I’ve been told in a dream, by the Lord God. I didn’t want to listen. I’m an old woman, and all I want to do is die on this little piece of land. It’s been my family’s freehold for a hundred and twelve years, but I wasn’t meant to die here any more than Moses was meant to go over into Canaan with the Children of Israel.”

She paused. The two men watched her soberly in the lamplight, and outside the rain continued to fall, slow and ceaseless. There was no more thunder. Lord, she thought, these dentures hurt my mouth. I want to take them out and go to bed.

“I started having dreams two years before this plague ever fell. I’ve always dreamed, and sometimes my dreams have come true. Prophecy is the gift of God and everyone has a smidge of it. My own grandmother used to call it the shining lamp of God, sometimes just the shine. In my dreams I saw myself going west. At first with just a few people, then a few more, then a few more. West, always west, until I could see the Rocky Mountains. It got so there was a whole caravan of us, two hundred or more. And there would be signs… no, not signs from God but regular road-signs, and every one of them saying things like BOULDER, COLORADO, 609 MILES or THIS WAY TO BOULDER.”

She paused.

“Those dreams, they scared me. I never told a soul I was havin em, that’s how scared I was. I felt the way I guess Job must have felt when God spoke to him out of the whirlwind. I even tried to pretend they was just dreams, foolish old woman runnin from God the way Jonah did. But the big fish has swallowed us up just the same, you see! And if God says to Abby, You got to tell, then tell I must. And I always felt like someone would come to me, someone special, and that’s how I’d be in the way of knowin the time had come.”

She looked at Nick, who sat at the table and regarded her solemnly with his good eye through the haze of Ralph Brentner’s cigarette smoke.

“I knew when I saw you,” she said. “It’s you, Nick. God has put His finger on your heart. But he has more fingers than one, and there’s others out there, still comin on, praise God, and He’s got a finger on them, too. I dream of him, how he’s lookin for us even now, and God forgive my sick spirit, I curse him in my heart.” She began to weep and got up to have a drink of water and a splash. Her tears were the human part of her, weak and flagging.

When she turned back, Nick was writing. At last he ripped the page off his pad and handed it to Ralph.

“I don’t know about the God part, but I know something is working here. Everyone we’ve met has been moving north. As if you had the answer. Have you dreamed about any of the others? Dick? June or Olivia? Maybe the little girl?”

“Not any of these others. A man who doesn’t talk much. A woman who is with child. A man of about your age who comes to me with a guitar of his own. And you, Nick.”

“And you think going to Boulder is the right thing?”

Mother Abagail said, “It’s what we’re meant to do.”

Nick doodled aimlessly on his pad for a moment and then wrote, “How much do you know about the dark man? Do you know who he is?”

“I know what he’s about but not who he is. He’s the purest evil left in the world. The rest of the bad is little evil. Shoplifters and sexfiends and people who like to use their fists. But he’ll call them. He’s started already. He’s getting them together a lot faster than we are. Before he’s ready to make his move, I guess he’ll have a lot more. Not just the evil ones that are like him, but the weak ones… the lonely ones… and the ones that have left God out of their hearts.”

“Maybe he’s not real,” Nick wrote. “Maybe he’s just…” He had to nibble at the top of his pen and think. At last he added: “… the scared, bad part of all of us. Maybe we are dreaming of the things we’re afraid we might do.”

Ralph frowned over this as he read it aloud, but Abby grasped what Nick meant right off. It wasn’t much different from the talk of the new preachers who had got on the land in the last twenty years or so. There wasn’t really any Satan, that was their gospel. There was evil, and it probably came from original sin, but it was in all of us and getting it out was as impossible as getting an egg out of its shell without cracking it. According to the way these new preachers had it, Satan was like a jigsaw puzzle—and every man, woman, and child on earth added his or her little piece to make up the whole. Yes, all that had a good modern sound to it; the trouble with it was that it wasn’t true. And if Nick was allowed to go on thinking that, the dark man would eat him for dinner.

She said: “You dreamed of me. Ain’t I real?”

Nick nodded.

“And I dreamed you. Ain’t you real? Praise God, you’re sittin right over there with a pad o paper on your knee. This other man, Nick, he’s as real as you are.” Yes, he was real. She thought of the weasels, and of the red eye opening in the darkness. And when she spoke up again, her voice was husky. “He ain’t Satan,” she said, “but he and Satan know of each other and have kept their councils together of old.

“The Bible, it don’t say what happened to Noah and his family after the flood went down. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some awful tussle for the souls of those few people—for their souls, their bodies, their way of thinking. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that was what was on for us.

“He’s west of the Rockies now. Sooner or later he’ll come east. Maybe not this year, no, but when he’s ready. And it’s our lot to deal with him.”

Nick was shaking his head, disturbed.