The Stand

“No, really, I only came to get the assignment in remedial r—”

“Oh, poop on the assignment in remedial reading! This is important, Nadine! This is big-time! You’ve got to have a try. Here, sit down next to me. Janey, you take the other side.”

Janey sat down opposite Nadine, and at the repeated urging of Rachel Timms, Nadine found herself with the eight fingers of her hands touching the planchette lightly. For some reason she looked over her shoulder at the horse-faced girl. She shook her head at Nadine once, deliberately, and the overhead fluorescent bounced off the lenses of her spectacles and turned her eyes into a pair of large white flashes of light.

She had felt a moment of fear then, she remembered as she stood looking down at another planchette in the glow of a six-cell flashlight, but her remark to the horse-faced girl had recurred—it was just a game, for heaven’s sake, and what horrible thing could possibly happen in the middle of a gaggle of giggling girls? If there was a more hostile atmosphere for the production of genuine spirits, hostile or otherwise, Nadine didn’t know what it would be.

“Now everybody be quiet,” Rachel commanded. “Spirits, do you have a message for our sister and Brownie- in-good-standing Nadine Cross?”

The planchette didn’t move. Nadine felt mildly embarrassed.

“Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie,” the girl who had done Boris Karloff said in an equally successful Bullwinkle Moose voice. “The spirits are about to speak!”

More giggles.

“Shhhh!” Rachel commanded.

Nadine decided that if one of the other two girls didn’t start moving the planchette soon so it would spell out whatever silly message they had for her, she would do it herself—slide it around to spell out something short and sweet, like BOO!, so she could get her assignment and leave.

Just as she was about to try doing this, the planchette jerked rudely under her fingers. The pencil left a dark black diagonal slash on the fresh page.

“Hey! No fair yanking, spirits,” Rachel said in a vaguely uneasy tone of voice. “Did you do that, Nadine?”

“No.”

“Janey.”

“Uh-uh. Honestly.”

The planchette jerked again, almost pulling their fingers from it, and skittered to the upper-lefthand corner of the paper.

“Wowie,” Nadine said. “Did you feel—”

They did, all of them did, although neither Rachel nor Jane Fargood would talk to her about it later. And she had never felt particularly welcome in either girl’s room after that night. It was as if they were both a little afraid to get too close to her after that.

The planchette suddenly began to thrum underneath their fingers; it was like lightly touching the fender of a smoothly idling car. The vibration was steady and disquieting. It was not the sort of movement a person could cause without being fairly obvious about it.

The girls had grown quiet. Their faces all wore a peculiar expression, an expression common to the faces of all people who have attended a seance where something unexpectedly genuine has occurred—when the table begins to rock, when unseen knuckles rap on the wall, or when the medium begins to extrude smoky-gray teleplasm from her nostrils. It is a pallid waiting expression, half wanting whatever it is that has begun to stop, half wanting it to go on. It is an expression of dreadful, distracted excitement… and when it wears that particular look, the human face looks most like the skull which always rests half an inch below the skin.

“Stop it!” the horse-faced girl cried out suddenly. “Stop it right now or you’ll be sorry!”

And Jane Fargood screamed in a fear-filled voice: “I can’t take my fingers off it! ”

Someone uttered a little burping scream. At the same instant Nadine realized that her own fingers were also glued to the board. The muscles of her arms bunched in an effort to pull the tips of her fingers from the planchette, but they remained where they were.

“All right, the joke is over,” Rachel said in a tight, scared voice. “Who—”

And suddenly the planchette began to write.

It moved with lightning speed, dragging their fingers with it, snapping their arms out and back and around in a way which would have been funny if it weren’t for the helpless, caught expressions on all three girls’ faces. Nadine thought later that it was as if her arms had been caught in an exercise machine. The writing before had been in stilted, draggling letters—messages that looked as if they had been written by a seven-year-old. This writing was smooth and powerful… big, slanting capital letters that slashed across the white page. There was something both relentless and vicious about it.

NADINE, NADINE, NADINE, the whirling planchette wrote. HOW I LOVE NADINE TO BE MY TO LOVE MY NADINE TO BE MY QUEEN IF YOU IF YOU IF YOU ARE PURE FOR ME IF YOU ARE CLEAN FOR ME IF YOU ARE IF YOU ARE DEAD FOR ME DEAD YOU ARE

The planchette swooped, raced, and began again, lower down.

YOU ARE DEAD WITH THE REST OF THEM YOU ARE IN THE DEADBOOK WITH THE REST OF THEM NADINE IS DEAD WITH THEM NADINE IS ROTTEN WITH THEM UNLESS UNLESS

It stopped. Thrummed. Nadine thought, hoped—oh how she hoped—that it was over, and then it raced back to the edge of the paper and began again. Jane shrieked miserably. The faces of the other girls were shocked white o ’s of wonder and dismay.

THE WORLD THE WORLD SOON THE WORLD IS DEAD AND WE WE WE NADINE NADINE I I I WE WE WE ARE WE ARE WE

Now the letters seemed to scream across the page:

WE ARE IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD NADINE

The last word howled itself across the page in inch-high capital letters and then the planchette whirled from the tablet, leaving a long streak of graphite behind like a shout. It fell on the floor and snapped in two.

There had been an instant of shocked, immobile silence, and then Jane Fargood had burst into high, weeping hysterics. The thing had ended with the housemother coming upstairs to see what was wrong; Nadine remembered, and she had been about to call the infirmary for Jane when the girl had managed to get hold of herself a little.

Through the whole thing Rachel Timms had sat on her bed, calm and pale. When the housemother and most of the other girls (including the horse-faced girl, who undoubtedly felt that a prophetess is without much honor in her own land) had left, she had asked Nadine in a flat, strange voice: “Who was it, Nadine?”

“I don’t know,” Nadine had answered truthfully. She hadn’t had the slightest idea. Not then.

“You didn’t recognize the handwriting?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe you just better take that… that note from beyond or whatever it is… and go back to your room.”

“You asked me to sit down!” Nadine flashed at her. “How was I supposed to know anything like… like that would happen? I did it to be polite, for God’s sake!”

Rachel had had the good grace to flush at that; she had even offered a little apology. But Nadine had never seen much of the girl after that, and Rachel Timms had been one of the few girls Nadine had ever felt really close to during her first three semesters at college.

From then until now she had never touched one of these triangular spiders made of pressed fiberboard.

But the time had… well, it had slouched around at last, hadn’t it?

Yes indeed.

Heart beating loudly, Nadine sat down on the picnic bench and pressed her fingers lightly to two of the planchette’s three sides. She could feel it begin to move under the balls of her fingers almost immediately, and she thought of a car with its engine idling. But who was the driver? Who was he, really? Who would climb in, and slam the door, and put his sun-blackened hands on the wheel? Whose foot, brutal and heavy, shod in an old and dusty cowboy boot, would come down on the accelerator and take her… where?