The Stand

Denver and then off into the haze toward New Mexico two hundred miles beyond. Due east were the flatlands, stretching away toward Nebraska, and closer at hand was Boulder Canyon, a knife-gash through foothills that were walled in pine and spruce. In summers gone by, gliders had plied the thermals over Sunrise Amphitheater like birds.

Now Nadine saw only what was revealed in the glow of the six-cell flashlight which she put on a picnic table near the dropoff. There was a large artist’s sketchpad turned back to a clean sheet, and squatting on it the three- cornered planchette like a triangular spider. Protruding from its belly, like the spider’s stinger, was a pencil, lightly touching the pad.

Nadine was in a feverish state that was half-euphoria, half-terror. Coming up here on the back of her gamely laboring Vespa, which had most decidedly not been made for mountain climbing, she had felt what Harold had felt in Nederland. She could feel him. But while Harold had felt this in a rather precise and technological way, as a piece of steel attracted by a magnet, a drawing toward, Nadine felt it as a kind of mystic event, a border-crossing. It was as if these mountains, of which she was even now only in the foothills, were a no-man’s-land between two spheres of influence—Flagg in the West, the old woman in the East. And here the magic flew both ways, mixing, making its own concoction that belonged neither to God nor to Satan but which was totally pagan. She felt she was in a haunted place.

And the planchette…

She had tossed the brightly marked box, stamped MADE IN TAIWAN, away indifferently for the wind to take. The planchette itself was only a poorly stamped piece of fiberboard or gypsum. But it didn’t matter. It was a tool she would only use once—only dared to use once—and even a poorly made tool can serve its purpose: to break open a door, to close a window, to write a Name.

The words on the box recurred: Amaze Your Friends! Brighten Up Your Get-togethers!

What was that song Larry sometimes bellowed from the seat of his Honda as they rode along? Hello, Central, what’s the matter with your line? I want to talk to —

Talk to who? But that was the question, wasn’t it?

She remembered the time she had used the planchette in college. That had been more than a dozen years ago… but it might as well have been yesterday. She had gone upstairs to ask someone on the third floor of the dorm, a girl named Rachel Timms, about the assignment in a remedial reading class they shared. The room had been filled with girls, six or eight of them at least, giggling and laughing. Nadine remembered thinking that they acted as if they were high on something, smoke or maybe even blow.

“Stop it!” Rachel said, giggling herself. “How do you expect the spirits to communicate if you’re all acting like a bunch of donkeys?”

The idea of laughing donkeys struck them as deliciously funny, and a fresh feminine gale blew through the room for a while. The planchette had set then as it sat now, a triangular spider on three stubby legs, pencil pointing down. While they giggled, Nadine picked up a sheaf of oversized pages torn from an artist’s sketchbook and shuffled through those “messages from the astral plane” which had already come in.

Tommy says you have been using that strawberry douche again.

Mother says she’s fine.

Chunga! Chunga!

John says you won’t fart so much if you stop eating those CAFETERIA BEANS!!!!!

Others, just as silly.

Now the giggles had quieted enough so they could start again. Three girls sat on the bed, each with her fingertips placed on a different side of the planchette. For a moment there was nothing. Then the board quivered.

“You did that, Sandy!” Rachel accused.

“I did not!”

“Shhhh! ”

The board quivered again and the girls hushed. It moved, stopped, moved again. It made the letter F.

“Fuh…” the girl named Sandy said.

“Fuck you, too,” someone else said, and they were off and giggling again.

“Shhhh!” Rachel said sternly.

The planchette began to move more rapidly, tracing out the letters A, T, H, E, and R.

“Father dear, your baby’s here,” a girl named Patty something-or-other said, and giggled. “It must be my father, he died of a heart attack when I was three.”

“It’s writing some more,” Sandy said.

S, A, Y, S, the planchette spelled laboriously.

“What’s going on?” Nadine whispered to a tall, horse-faced girl she didn’t know. The horse-faced girl was looking on with her hands in her pockets and a disgusted look on her face.

“A bunch of girls playing games with something they don’t understand,” the horse-faced girl said. “That’s what’s going on.” She spoke in an even lower whisper.

“FATHER SAYS PATTY,” Sandy quoted. “It’s your dear old dad, all right, Pats.”

Another burst of giggles.

The horse-faced girl was wearing spectacles. Now she took her hands out of the pockets of the overalls she was wearing and used them to remove the spectacles from her face. She polished them and explained further to Nadine, still in a whisper. “The planchette is a tool used by psychics and mediums. Kinestheologists—”

“What ologists?”

“Scientists who study movement, and the interaction of muscles and nerves.”

“Oh.”

“They claim that the planchette is actually responding to tiny muscle movements, probably guided by the subconscious rather than the conscious mind. Of course, mediums and psychics claim that the planchette is moved by entities from the spirit world—”

Another burst of hysterical laughter came from the girls clustered around the board. Nadine looked over the horse-faced girl’s shoulder and saw the message now read, FATHER SAYS PATTY SHOULD STOP GOING.

“—to the bathroom so much,” another girl in the circle of spectators suggested, and everyone laughed some more.

“Either way, they’re just fooling with it,” the horse-faced girl said with a disdainful sniff. “It’s very unwise. Both mediums and scientists agree that automatic writing can be dangerous.”

“The spirits are unfriendly tonight, you think?” Nadine asked lightly.

“Perhaps the spirits are always unfriendly,” the horse-faced girl said, giving her a sharp look. “Or you might get a message from your subconscious mind which you were totally unprepared to receive. There are documented cases of automatic writing getting entirely out of control, you know. People have gone mad.”

“Oh, that seems awfully farfetched. It’s just a game.”

“Games have a way of turning serious sometimes.”

The loudest burst of laughter yet tacked a period to the horse-faced girl’s comment before Nadine could reply. The girl named Patty something-or-other had fallen off the bed and lay on the floor, holding her stomach and laughing and kicking her feet weakly. The completed message read, FATHER SAYS PATTY SHOULD STOP GOING TO THE SUBMARINE RACES WITH LEONARD KATZ.

“You did that!” Patty said to Sandy as she finally sat up again.

“I didn’t, Patty! Honest!”

“It was your father! From the Great Beyond! From Out There!” another girl told Patty in a Boris Karloff voice which Nadine thought was actually quite good. “Just remember that he’s watching you the next time you take off your pants in the back seat of Leonard’s Dodge.”

Another loud outburst greeted this sally. As it tapered off, Nadine pushed forward and twitched Rachel’s arm. She meant to ask for the assignment and then make a quiet escape.

“Nadine!” Rachel cried. Her eyes were sparkling and gay. Her cheeks had bloomed with roses. “Sit down, let’s see if the spirits have a message for you!”