The Stand

over each other’s CB transmissions.

A strange mood of resigned dread had gradually replaced yesterday’s acceptance. Despite the powerful force of the dreams that accorded Mother Abagail a semidivine status in the Zone, most of the people had been through enough to be realists about survival: The old woman was well past a hundred, and she had been out all night on her own. And now a second night was coming on.

The fellow who had struggled across the country from Louisiana to Boulder with a party of twelve summed it up perfectly. He had come in with his people at noon the day before. When told that Mother Abagail was gone, this man, Norman Kellogg by name, threw his Astros baseball cap on the ground and said, “Ain’t that my fucking luck… who you got hunting her up?”

Charlie Impening, who had more or less become the Zone’s resident doomcrier (he had been the one to pass the cheerful news about snow in September), began to suggest to people that if Mother Abagail had bugged out, maybe that was a sign for all of them to bug out. After all, Boulder was just too damn close. Too close to what? Never mind, you know what it’s too close to, and New York or Boston would make Mavis Impening’s boy Charlie feel a whole hell of a lot safer. He had no takers. People were tired and ready to sit. If it got cold and there was no heat, they might move, but not before. They were healing. Impening was asked politely if he planned to go alone. Impening said he believed he would wait until a few more people had seen the daylight. Glen Bateman was heard to opine that Charlie Impening would make a hell of a poor Moses.

“Resigned dread” was as far as the community’s feelings went, Glen Bateman believed, because they were still rationally minded people in spite of all the dreams, in spite of their deep-seated dread concerning whatever might be going on west of the Rockies. Superstition, like true love, needs time to grow and reflect upon itself. When you finish a barn, he told Nick and Stu and Fran after darkness had put an end to the search for the night, you hang a horseshoe ends up over the door to keep the luck in. But if one of the nails falls out and the horseshoe swings points down, you don’t abandon the barn.

“The day may come when we or our children may abandon the barn if the horseshoe spills the luck out, but that’s years away. Right now all we feel is a little strange and lost. And that will pass, I think. If Mother Abagail is dead—and God knows I hope she isn’t—it probably couldn’t have come at a better time for the mental health of this community.”

Nick wrote, “But if she was meant as a check for our Adversary, his opposite number, someone put here to keep the scales in balance…”

“Yes, I know,” Glen said gloomily. “I know. The days when the horseshoe didn’t matter may really be passing… or already gone. Believe me, I know.”

Frannie said: “You don’t really think our grandchildren are going to be superstitious natives, do you, Glen? Burning witches and spitting through their fingers for luck?”

“I can’t read the future, Fran,” Glen said, and in the lamplight his face looked old and worn—the face, perhaps, of a failed magician. “I couldn’t even properly see the effect Mother Abagail was having on the community until Stu pointed it out to me that night on Flagstaff Mountain. But I do know this: We’re all in this town because of two events. The superflu we can charge off to the stupidity of the human race. It doesn’t matter if we did it or the Russians, or the Latvians. Who emptied the beaker loses importance beside the general truth: At the end of all rationalism, the mass grave. The laws of physics, the laws of biology, the axioms of mathematics, they’re all part of the deathtrip, because we are what we are. If it hadn’t been Captain Trips, it would have been something else. The fashion was to blame it on ‘technology,’ but ‘technology’ is the trunk of the tree, not the roots. The roots are rationalism, and I would define that word so: ‘Rationalism is the idea we can ever understand anything about the state of being.’ It’s a deathtrip. It always has been. So you can charge the superflu off to rationalism if you want. But the other reason we’re here is the dreams, and the dreams are irrational. We’ve agreed not to talk about that simple fact while we’re in committee, but we’re not in committee now. So I’ll say what we all know is true: We’re here under the fiat of powers we don’t understand. For me, that means we may be beginning to accept—only subconsciously now, and with plenty of slips backward due to culture lag—a different definition of existence. The idea that we can never understand anything about the state of being. And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then ir rationalism might very well be a lifetrip… at least unless it proves otherwise.”

Speaking very slowly, Stu said: “Well, I got my superstitions. I been laughed at for it, but I got em. I know it don’t make any difference if a guy lights two cigarettes on a match or three, but two don’t make me nervous and three does. I don’t walk under ladders and I never care to see a black cat cross my path. But to live with no science… worshipping the sun, maybe… thinking monsters are rolling bowling balls across the sky when it thunders… I can’t say any of that turns me on very much, baldy. Why, it seems like a kind of slavery to me.”

“But suppose those things were true?” Glen said quietly.

“What?”

“Assume that the age of rationalism has passed. I myself am almost positive that it has. It’s come and gone before, you know; it almost left us in the 1960s, the so-called Age of Aquarius, and it took a damn near permanent vacation during the Middle Ages. And suppose… suppose that when rationalism does go, it’s as if a bright dazzle has gone for a while and we could see…” He trailed off, his eyes looking inward.

“See what?” Fran asked.

He raised his eyes to hers; they were gray and strange, seeming to glow with their own inner light.

“Dark magic,” he said softly. “A universe of marvels where water flows uphill and trolls live in the deepest woods and dragons live under the mountains. Bright wonders, white power. ‘Lazarus, come forth.’ Water into wine. And… and just maybe… the casting out of devils.”

He paused, then smiled.

“The lifetrip.”

“And the dark man?” Fran asked quietly.

Glen shrugged. “Mother Abagail calls him the Devil’s Imp. Maybe he’s just the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology against us. And maybe there’s something more, something much darker. I only know that he is, and I no longer think that sociology or psychology or any other ology will put an end to him. I think only white magic will do that… and our white magician is out there someplace, wandering and alone.” Glen’s voice nearly broke, and he looked down quickly.

Outside there was only dark, and a breeze coming down from the mountains threw a fresh spatter of rain against the glass of Stu and Fran’s living room. Glen was lighting his pipe. Stu had taken a random handful of change from his pocket and was shaking the coins up and down, then opening his hands to see how many had come up heads, how many tails. Nick was making elaborate doodles on the top sheet of his pad, and in his mind he saw the empty streets of Shoyo and heard—yes, heard—a voice whisper: He’s coming for you, mutie. He’s closer now.

After a while Glen and Stu kindled a blaze in the fireplace and they all watched the flames without saying much.

After they were gone, Fran felt low and unhappy. Stu was also in a brown study. He looks tired, she thought. We ought to stay home tomorrow, just stay home and talk to each other and have a nap in the afternoon. We ought to take it easy. She looked at the Coleman gaslamp and wished for electric light instead, bright electric light you got by just flicking a wall switch.

She felt her eyes sting with tears. She told herself angrily not to start, not to add that to their problems, but the part of herself which controlled the waterworks did not seem inclined to listen.

Then, suddenly, Stu brightened. “By golly! I damn near forgot, didn’t I?”

“Forgot what?”

“I’ll show you! Stay right here!” He went out the door and clattered down the hall stairs. She went to the doorway and in a moment she could hear him coming back up. He had something in his hand and it was a… a…

“Stuart Redman, where did you get that?” she asked, happily surprised.

“Folk Arts Music,” he said, grinning.

She picked up the washboard and tilted it this way and that. The gleam of light spilled off its bluing. “Folk —?”

“Down Walnut Street aways.”