The Stand

for tunnel vision. Thank God for selective perception. Because without it, we might as well all be in a Lovecraft story.

His thoughts became confused. He became suddenly convinced that Harold was peeping at him from between the slats of his blinds, his hands opening and closing in a strangler’s grip, his grin turned into a leer of hatred… Every dog has its day. At the same time he was remembering the night in Bennington, sleeping on the stage of the bandshell, waking up to the horrible feeling that someone was there… and then hearing (or only dreaming it?) the dusty sound of bootheels moving off to the west.

Stop it. Stop freaking yourself out.

Boot Hill, his mind free-associated. Chrissake, just stop it, wish I’d never thought about the dead people, the dead people behind all those closed blinds and pulled drapes and shut curtains, in the dark, like in the tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, Christ, what if they all started to move, to stir around, Holy God, cut it out —

And suddenly he found himself thinking of a trip to the Bronx Zoo with his mother when he had been small. They had gone into the monkey-house and the smell in there had hit him like a physical thing, a fist driven not just at his nose but into it. He had turned to bolt out of there, but his mother had stopped him.

Just breathe normal, Larry, she had said. In five minutes you won’t notice that nasty smell at all.

So he had stayed, not believing her, just fighting not to puke (even at the age of seven, he had hated to puke worse than anything), and it turned out she was right. When he looked down at his watch the next time, he saw that they had been in the monkey-house for half an hour, and he couldn’t understand why the ladies who came in the door were suddenly clapping their hands over their noses and looking disgusted. He said as much to his mother, and Alice Underwood had laughed.

Oh, it still smells bad, all right. Just not to you.

How come, Mommy?

I don’t know. Everybody can do it. Now just say to yourself, “I’m going to smell how the monkey- house REALLY is again,” and take a deep breath.

So he did, and the stink was there, the stink was even bigger and badder than it had been when they first came in, and his hotdogs and cherry pie started to come up on him again in one big sickening whipped bubble, and he had charged for the door and the fresh air beyond it and managed—barely—to hold everything down.

That’s selective perception, he thought now, and she knew what it was even if she didn’t know what it’s called. This thought had no more than completed itself in his mind before he heard his mother’s voice saying, Just say to your self, “I’m going to smell how Boulder REALLY smells again.” And he was smelling it—just like that, he was smelling it. He was smelling what was behind all the closed doors and drawn shades and pulled blinds, he was smelling the slow corruption that was going on even in this place which had died almost empty.

He walked faster, not running but getting closer and closer to it, smelling that fruity, rich reek which he—and everyone else—had stopped consciously smelling because it was everywhere, it was everything, it was coloring their thoughts, and you didn’t pull your shades even if you were making love because the dead lie behind drawn shades and the living still want to look out on the world.

It wanted to come up on him, not hotdogs and cherry pie now but wine and a Payday candy bar. Because this was one monkey-house he was never going to be able to get out of, not unless he moved to an island where no one had ever lived, and even though he still hated to puke worse than anything, he was going to now—

“Larry? Are you okay?”

He was so startled that a little noise—“Yike! ” squeaked out of his throat and he jumped. It was Leo, sitting on the curb about three blocks down from Harold’s. He had a Ping-Pong ball and was bouncing it up and down on the pavement.

“What are you doing here?” Larry asked. His heartbeat was slowly returning to normal.

“I wanted to walk home with you,” Leo said diffidently, “but I didn’t want to go into that guy’s house.”

“Why not?” Larry asked. He sat down on the curb beside Leo.

Leo shrugged and turned his eyes back to the Ping-Pong ball. It made a small whock! whock! sound as it struck the pavement and bounced back up to his hand.

“I don’t know.”

“What.”

“This is very important to me. Because I like Harold… and don’t like him. I feel two ways about him. Have you ever felt two ways about a person?”

“I only feel one way about him.” Whock! Whock!

“How?”

“Scared,” Leo said simply. “Can we go home and see my Nadine-mom and my Lucy-mom?”

“Sure.”

They continued down Arapahoe for a while without speaking, Leo still bouncing the Ping-Pong ball and catching it deftly.

“Sorry you had to wait so long,” Larry said.

“Aw, that’s okay.”

“No, really, if I’d known I would have hurried up.”

“I had something to do. I found this on a guy’s lawn. It’s a Pong-Ping ball.”

“Ping-Pong,” Larry corrected absently. “Why do you think Harold would keep his shades down?”

“So nobody can see in, I guess,” Leo said. “So he can do secret things. It’s like the dead people, isn’t it?” Whock! Whock!

They walked on, reached the corner of Broadway, and turned south. They saw other people on the streets now; women looking in windows at dresses, a man with a pickaxe returning from somewhere, another man casually sorting through fishing tackle in the broken display window of a sporting goods store. Larry saw Dick Vollman from his party biking in the other direction. He waved at Larry and Leo. They waved back.

“Secret things,” Larry mused aloud, not really trying to draw the boy out anymore.

“Maybe he’s praying to the dark man,” Leo said casually, and Larry jerked as if brushed by a live wire. Leo didn’t notice. He was double-bouncing his Ping-Pong ball, first off the sidewalk and then catching it on the rebound from the brick wall they were passing… whock-whap!

“Do you really think so?” Larry asked, making an effort to sound casual.

“I don’t know. But he’s not like us. He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him, making him smile. Big white worms eating up his brain. Like maggots.”

“Joe… Leo, I mean…”

Leo’s eyes—dark, remote, and Chinese—suddenly cleared. He smiled. “Look, there’s Dayna. I like her. Hey, Dayna!” he yelled, waving. “Got any gum?”

Dayna, who had been oiling the sprocket of a spidery-thin ten-speed bike, turned and smiled. She reached into her shirt pocket and spread out five sticks of Juicy Fruit like a poker hand. With a happy laugh, Leo ran toward her, his long hair flying, Ping-Pong ball clutched in one hand, leaving Larry to stare after him. That idea of white worms behind Harold’s smile… where had Joe (no, Leo, he’s Leo, at least I think he is) gotten an idea as sophisticated—and as horrible—as that? The boy had been in a semi-trance. And he wasn’t the only one; how many times in the few days he had been here had Larry seen someone just stop dead on the street, looking blankly at nothing for a moment, and then go on? Things had changed. The whole range of human perception seemed to have stepped up a notch.

It was scary as hell.

Larry got his feet moving and walked over to where Leo and Dayna were sharing out the chewing gum.

That afternoon Stu found Frannie washing clothes in the small yard behind their building. She had filled a low washtub with water, had shaken in nearly half a box of Tide, and had stirred everything with a mop-handle until a sickly suds had resulted. She doubted if she was going about this in the right way, but she was damned if she was going to go to Mother Abagail and expose her ignorance. She dumped their clothes in the water, which was stone-cold, then grimly jumped in and began to stomp and slosh around, like a Sicilian mashing grapes. Your new model Maytag 5000, she thought. The Double-Foot Agitation