The Stand

until we get it right. Those who do not learn from history—

But it was Stu. And it was already daylight of a sort; creeping dawn, muffled in early mist like fresh gold wrapped in thin cotton. The others were sleeping humps.

“What is it?” she asked, sitting up. “Is something wrong?”

“I was dreaming again,” he said. “Not the old woman, the… the other one. The dark man. I was scared, so I…”

“Stop it,” she said, frightened by the look on his face. “Say what you mean, please.”

“It’s Perion. The Veronal. She got the Veronal out of Glen’s pack.”

She hissed in breath.

“Oh boy,” Stu said brokenly. “She’s dead, Frannie. Oh Lord, ain’t this some mess.”

She tried to speak and found she could not.

“I guess I’ve got to wake the other two up,” Stu said in an absent sort of way. He rubbed at his cheek, which was sandpapery with beard. Fran could still remember how it had felt against her own cheek yesterday, when she had hugged him. He turned back to her, bewildered. “When does it end?”

She said softly: “I don’t think it ever will.”

Their eyes locked in the early dawn.

From Fran Goldsmith’s Diary

July 12, 1990

We’re camped just west of Guilderland (NY) tonight, have finally made it onto the Big Highway, Route 80/90. The excitement of meeting Mark and Perion (don’t you think that’s a pretty name? I do) yesterday afternoon has more or less abated. They have agreed to throw in with us… in fact, they made the suggestion before any of us could.

Not that I’m sure Harold would have offered. You know how he is. And he was a little put off (I think Glen was, too) by all the hardware they were carrying, including semiautomatic rifles (two). But mostly Harold just had to have his little song and dance… he has to register his presence, you know.

I guess I have filled up pages and pages with THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAROLD, and if you don’t know him by now, you never will. Underneath his swagger and all those pompous pronouncements, there is a very insecure little boy. He can’t really believe that things have changed. Part of him—quite a large part, I think—has to go on believing that all his high school tormentors are going to rise out of their graves one fine day and start shooting spitballs at him again or maybe calling him Whack-Off Lauder, as Amy said they used to do. Sometimes I think it would have been better for him (and maybe me too) if we hadn’t hooked up back in Ogunquit. I’m part of his old life, I was best friends with his sister once upon a time, and so on and so on. What sums up my weird relationship with Harold is this: strange as it may seem, knowing what I know now, I would probably pick Harold to be friends with instead of Amy, who was mostly dizzy about boys with nice cars and clothes from Sweetie’s, and who was (God forgive me for saying Cruddy Things about the Dead but it’s true) a real Ogunquit Snob, the way only a year-round townie can be one. Harold is, in his own weird way, sort of cool. When he’s not concentrating all his mental energies on being an asshole, that is. But, you see, Harold could never believe that anyone could think he was cool. Part of him has such a huge investment in being square. He is determined to carry all of his problems right along with him into this not-so- brave new world. He might as well have them packed right inside his knapsack along with those chocolate Payday candy bars he likes to eat.

Oh Harold, jeez, I just don’t know.

Things to Remember: The Gillette parrot. “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin.” The walking Kool-Aid pitcher that used to say, “Oh… YEAAAAHHH! ” “O.B. Tampons… created by a woman gynecologist.” Converse All-Stars. Night of the Living Dead. Brrrr! That last one hits too close to home. I quit.

July 14, 1990

We had a very long and very sober talk about these dreams today at lunch, stopping much longer than we should have, probably. We’re just north of Batavia, New York, by the way.

Yesterday, Harold very diffidently (for him) suggested we start stocking up on Veronal and hitting ourselves with very light doses to see if we couldn’t “disrupt the dream-cycle,” as he put it. I went along with the idea so no one would start to wonder if something might be wrong with me, but I plan to palm my dose because I don’t know what it might do to the Lone Ranger (I hope he’s Lone; I’m not sure I could face twins).

With the Veronal proposal adopted, Mark had a comment. “You know,” he sez, “things like this really don’t bear too much thinking about. The next thing you know, we’ll all be thinking we’re Moses or Joseph, getting telephone calls from God.”

“That dark man isn’t calling from heaven,” Stu sez. “If it’s a toll-call, I think it’s comin from someplace a lot lower down.”

“Which is Stu’s way of saying Old Scratch is after us,” Frannie pipes up.

“And that’s as good an explanation as any other,” Glen sez. We all looked at him. “Well,” he went on, a little on the defensive, I think, “if you look at it from a theological point of view, it does rather seem as if we’re the knot in a tug-o-war rope between heaven and hell, doesn’t it? If there are any Jesuit survivors of the superflu, they must be going absolutely bananas.”

That made Mark laugh his head off. I didn’t really get it, but kept my mouth shut.

“Well, I think the whole thing is ridiculous,” Harold put in. “You’ll be getting around to Edgar Cayce and the transmigration of souls before we know it.”

He pronounced Cayce Case, and when I corrected him (you say it like the initials for Kansas City), he gave me a really HORRID HAROLD-FROWN. He isn’t the type of guy who swamps you with gratitude when you point out his little flaws, diary!

“Whenever something overtly paranormal occurs,” Glen said, “the only explanation that really fits well and holds its interior logic is the theological one. That’s why psychics and religion have always gone hand in hand, right up to your modern-day faith-healers.”

Harold was grumbling, but Glen went on anyway.

“My own gut feeling is that everyone’s psychic… and it’s so ingrained a part of us that we very rarely notice it. The talent may be largely preventative, and that keeps it from being noticed, too.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s a negative factor, Fran. Have any of you ever read James D.L. Staunton’s 1958 study of train and airplane crashes? It was originally published in a sociology journal, but the tabloid newspapers rake it up every now and again.”

We all shook our heads.

“You ought to,” he said. “James Staunton was what my students of twenty years ago would have called ‘a real good head’—a mild-mannered clinical sociologist who studied the occult as a kind of hobby. He wrote any number of articles on the combined subjects before going over to the other side to do some first-hand research.”

Harold snorted, but Stu and Mark were grinning. I fear I was, too.

“So tell us about the planes and trains,” Peri sez.

“Well, Staunton got the stats on over fifty plane crashes since 1925 and over two hundred train crashes since 1900. He fed all the data into a computer. Basically, he was correlating three factors: those present on any such conveyance that met with disaster, those killed, and the capacity of the vehicle.”

“Don’t see what he was trying to prove,” Stu said.

“To see that, you have to understand that he fed a second series of figures into the computer—this time an equal number of planes and trains which didn’t meet with disaster.”

Mark nodded. “A control group and an experimental group. That seems solid enough.”

“What he found was simple enough, but staggering in its implications. It’s a shame one has to stagger through sixteen tables to get at the underlying statistical fact.”

“What fact?” I asked.

“Full planes and trains rarely crash,” Glen said.

“Oh fucking BULLSHIT! ” Harold just about screams.

“Not at all,” Glen sez calmly. “That was Staunton’s theory, and the computer bore him out. In cases where