The Stand

short-sleeved shirt, and I could see he had goosebumps all up and down his arms. His eyes are normally blue but they had gone a slaty color, like the ocean on a gray day.

He pointed up to the third floor and said, “That was my room.”

Harold turned toward him, and I could see him getting ready with one of his patented Harold Lauder Smartass Comments, but then he saw Stu’s face and shut up. I think that was very wise of him, actually.

So after a little while Harold sez, “Well, let’s go in and look around.”

“What would you want to do that for?” Stu answers, and he sounded almost hysterical, but keeping it under a tight rein. It scared me, more so because he is usually as cool as icewater. Witness what little success Harold has had getting under his skin.

“Stuart—” Glen starts, but Stu interrupts with,

“What for? Can’t you see it’s a dead place? No brass bands, no soldiers, no nothing. Believe it,” he says, “if they were here they’d be all over us by now. We’d be up in those white rooms like a bunch of fucking guinea pigs.” Then he looks at me and says, “Sorry, Fran—I didn’t mean to talk that way. I guess I’m upset.”

“Well, I’m going in,” Harold sez, “who’s coming with me?” But I could see that even though Harold was trying to be BIG & BOLD, he was really scared himself.

Glen said he would, and Stu said: “You go in, too, Fran. Have a look. Satisfy yourself.”

I wanted to say I’d stay outside with him, because he looked so uptight (and because I really didn’t want to go in, either, you know), but that would have made more trouble with Harold, so I said okay.

If we—Glen and I—had really had any doubts about Stu’s story, we could have dropped them as soon as we opened the door. It was the smell. You can smell the same thing in any of the fair-sized towns we’ve traveled thru, it’s a smell like decayed tomatoes, and oh God I’m crying again, but is it right for people not just to die but then to stink like

Wait

(later)

There, I’ve had my second GOOD CRY of the day, whatever can be happening to L’il Fran Goldsmith, Our Gal Sal, who used to be able to chew up nails and spit out carpet tacks, ha-ha, as the old saying goes. Well, no more tears tonite, and that’s a promise.

We went inside anyway, morbid curiosity, I guess. I don’t know about the others, but I kind of wanted to see the room where Stu was held prisoner. Anyway, it wasn’t just the smell, you know, but how cool the place was after the outside. A lot of granite and marble and probably really fantastic insulation. It was warmer on the top 2 floors, but down below was that smell… and the cool… it was like a tomb. YUCK.

It was also spooky, like a haunted house—the three of us were all huddled together like sheep, and I was glad I had my rifle, even if it is only a .22. Our footsteps kept echoing back to us as if there was someone creeping along, following us, you know, and I started thinking about that dream again, the one starring the man in the black robe. No wonder Stu didn’t want to come with us.

We wandered around to the elevators at last and went up to the 2nd floor. Nothing there but offices… and several bodies. The 3rd floor was made up like a hospital, but all the rooms had airlock doors (both Harold and Glen said that’s what they were) and special viewing windows. There were lots of bodies up there, in the rooms and in the hallways, too. Very few women. Did they try to evacuate them at the end, I wonder? There’s so much we’ll never know. But then, why would we want to?

Anyway, at the end of the hall leading down from the main corridor where the elevator core was, we found a room with its airlock door open. There was a dead man in there, but he wasn’t a patient (they were all wearing white hospital johnnies) and he sure didn’t die of the flu. He was lying in a big pool of dried blood, and he looked like he’d been trying to crawl out of the room when he died. There was a broken chair, and things were all messed up, as if there’d been a fight.

Glen looked around for a long time and then said, “I don’t think we’d better say anything about this room to Stu. I believe he came very close to dying in here.”

I looked at that sprawled body and felt creepier than ever.

“What do you mean?” Harold asked, and even he sounded hushed. It was one of the few times I ever heard Harold talk as if what he was saying wasn’t going out on a public address system.

“I believe that gentleman came in here to kill Stuart,” Glen said, “and that Stu somehow got the better of him.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why would they want to kill Stu if he was immune? It doesn’t make any sense!”

He looked at me, and his eyes were scary. His eyes looked almost dead, like a mackerel’s eyes.

“That doesn’t matter, Fran,” he said. “Sense didn’t have much to do with this place, from the way it looks. There is a certain mentality that believes in covering up. They believe in it with the sincerity and fanaticism that members of some religious groups believe in the divinity of Jesus. Because, for some people, the necessity to continue covering up even after the damage is done is all-important. It makes me wonder how many immunes they killed in Atlanta and San Francisco and the Topeka Viral Center before the plague finally killed them and made an end to their butchery. This asshole? I’m glad he’s dead. I’m only sorry for Stu, who’ll probably spend the rest of his life having nightmares about him.”

And do you know what Glen Bateman did then? That nice man who paints the horrible pictures? He went over and kicked that dead man in the face. Harold made a muffled sort of grunt, as if he was the one who had been kicked. Then Glen drew his foot back again.

“No!” Harold yells, but Glen kicked the dead man again just the same. Then he turned around and he was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, but at least his eyes had lost that awful dead-fish look.

“Come on,” he sez, “let’s get out of here. Stu was right. It’s a dead place.”

So we went out, and Stu was sitting with his back to the iron gate in the high wall that ran around the place, and I wanted to… oh go ahead, Frannie, if you can’t tell your diary, who can you tell? I wanted to run to him and kiss him and tell him I was ashamed for all of us not believing him. And ashamed of how all of us had gone on about what a hard time we’d had when the plague was on, and him hardly saying anything when all the time that man had almost killed him.

Oh dear, I’m falling in love with him, I think I’ve got the world’s most crushable crush, if only it wasn’t for Harold I’d take my damn chances!

Anyway (there’s always an anyway, even tho by now my fingers are so numb they are just about falling off), that was when Stu told us for the first time that he wanted to go to Nebraska, that he wanted to check out his dream. He had a stubborn, sort of embarrassed look on his face, as if he knew he was going to have to take some more patronizing shit from Harold, but Harold was too unnerved from our “tour” of the Stovington facility to offer more than token resistance. And even that stopped when Glen said, in a very reticent way, that he had also dreamed of the old woman the night before.

“Of course, it might only be because Stu told us about his dream,” he said, kind of red in the face, “but it was remarkably similar.”

Harold said that of course that was it, but Stu said, “Wait a minute, Harold—I’ve got an idea.”

His idea was that we all take a sheet of paper and write down everything we could remember of our dreams over the last week, then compare notes. This was just scientific enough so that Harold couldn’t grumble too much.

Well, the only dream I’ve had is the one I’ve already written down, and I won’t repeat it. I’ll just say I wrote it down, leaving in the part about my father but leaving out the part about the baby and the coathanger he always has.

The results when we compared our papers were rather amazing.

Harold, Stu, and I had all dreamed about “the dark man,” as I call him. Both Stu & I visualized him as a man in a monk’s robe with no visible features—his face is always in a shadow. Harold’s paper said that he was always standing in a dark doorway, beckoning to him “like a pimp.” Sometimes he could just see his feet and the shine of his eyes “like weasel’s eyes” is how he put it.

Stu and Glen’s dreams of the old woman are very similar. The points of similarity are almost too many to go into (which is my “literary” way of saying my fingers are going numb). Anyway, they both agree she is in Polk