The Stand

V-for-victory.

“M-O-O-N, that spells Stew, Tom Cullen knows that, everybody knows that!”

Nick pointed to the door of Tom’s house.

“Want to come in? Laws, yes! All of us are going to come in. Tom’s been decorating his house.”

Ralph and Stu exchanged an amused glance as they followed Nick and Tom up the porch steps. Tom was always “decorating.” He did not “furnish,” because the house had of course been furnished when he moved in. Going inside was like entering a madly jumbled Mother Goose world.

A huge gilded birdcage with a green stuffed parrot carefully wired to the perch hung just inside the front door and Nick had to duck under it. The thing was, he thought, Tom’s decorations were not just random rickrack. That would have made this house into something no more striking than a rummage sale barn. But there was something more here, something that seemed just beyond what the ordinary mind could grasp as a pattern. In a large square block over the mantel in the living room were a number of credit card signs, all of them centered and carefully mounted. YOUR VISA CARD WELCOME HERE. JUST SAY MASTERCARD. WE HONOR AMERICAN EXPRESS. DINER’S CLUB. Now the question occurred: How did Tom know that all those signs were part of a fixed set? He couldn’t read, but somehow he had grasped the pattern.

Sitting on the coffee table was a large Styrofoam fireplug. On the windowsill, where it could catch the sunlight and reflect cool fans of blue light onto the wall, was a police car bubble.

Tom toured them through the entire house. The downstairs game room was filled with stuffed birds and animals that Tom had found in a taxidermy shop; he had strung the birds on nearly invisible piano wire and they seemed to cruise, owls and hawks and even a bald eagle with moth-eaten feathers and one yellow glass eye missing. A woodchuck stood on its hind legs in one corner, a gopher in another, a skunk in another, a weasel in the fourth. In the center of the room was a coyote, somehow seeming to be the focus for all the smaller animals.

The banister leading up the stairs had been wrapped in red and white strips of Con-Tact paper so that it resembled a barber pole. The upper hallway was hung with fighter planes on more piano wire—Fokkers, Spads, Stukas, Spitfires, Zeros, Messerschmitts. The floor of the bathroom had been painted a bright electric blue and on it was Tom’s extensive collection of toy boats, sailing an enamel sea around four white porcelain islands and one white porcelain continent: the legs of the tub, the base of the toilet.

At last Tom took them back downstairs and they sat below the credit card montage and facing a 3-D picture of John and Robert Kennedy against a background of gold-edged clouds. The legend beneath proclaimed BROTHERS TOGETHER IN HEAVEN.

“You like Tom’s decorations? What do you think? Nice?”

“Very nice,” Stu said. “Tell me. Those birds downstairs… do they ever get on your nerves?”

“Laws, no!” Tom said, astounded. “They’re full of sawdust!”

Nick handed a note to Ralph.

“Tom, Nick wants to know if you’d mind being hypnotized again. Like the time Stan did it. It’s important this time, not just a game. Nick says he’ll explain why afterward.”

“Go ahead,” Tom said. “Youuu… are getting… verrrry sleepy… right?”

“Yes, that’s it,” Ralph said.

“Do you want me to look at the watch again? I don’t mind. You know, when you swing it back and forth? Verrrry… sleeeepy… ” Tom looked at them doubtfully. “Except I don’t feel very sleepy. Laws, no. I went to bed early last night. Tom Cullen always goes to bed early because there’s no TV to watch.”

Stu said softly: “Tom, would you like to see an elephant?”

Tom’s eyes closed immediately. His head dropped forward loosely. His respiration deepened to long, slow strokes. Stu watched this with great surprise. Nick had given him the key phrase, but Stu hadn’t known whether or not to believe it would work. And he had never expected that it could happen so fast.

“Just like putting a chicken’s head under its wing,” Ralph marveled.

Nick handed Stu his prepared “script” for this encounter. Stu looked at Nick for a long moment. Nick looked back, then nodded gravely that Stu should go ahead.

“Tom, can you hear me?” Stu asked.

“Yes, I can hear you,” Tom said, and the quality of his voice made Stu look up sharply.

It was different from Tom’s usual voice, but in a way Stu could not quite put his hand to. It reminded him of something which had happened when he was eighteen, and graduating from high school. They had been in the boys’ locker room before the ceremony, all the guys he’d been going to school with since… well, since the first day of the first grade in at least four cases, and almost as long in many others. And for just a moment he had seen how much their faces had changed between those old days, those first days, and that moment of insight, standing on the tile floor of the locker room with the black robe in his hands. That vision of change had made him shiver then, and it made him shiver now. The faces he had looked into had no longer been the faces of children… but neither had they yet become the faces of men. They were faces in limbo, faces caught perfectly between two well-defined states of being. This voice, coming out of the shadowland of Tom Cullen’s subconscious, seemed like those faces, only infinitely sadder. Stu thought it was the voice of the man forever denied.

But they were waiting for him to go on, and go on he must.

“I’m Stu Redman, Tom.”

“Yes. Stu Redman.”

“Nick is here.”

“Yes, Nick is here.”

“Ralph Brentner is here, too.”

“Yes, Ralph is, too.”

“We’re your friends.”

“I know.”

“We’d like you to do something, Tom. For the Zone. It’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous…”

Trouble crossed over Tom’s face, like a cloud shadow slowly crossing a midsummer field of corn.

“Will I have to be afraid? Will I have to…” He trailed off, sighing.

Stu looked at Nick, troubled.

Nick mouthed: Yes.

“It’s him,” Tom said, and sighed dreadfully. It was like the sound a bitter November wind makes in a stand of denuded oaks. Stu felt that shudder inside him again. Ralph had gone pale.

“Who, Tom?” Stu asked gently.

“Flagg. His name is Randy Flagg. The dark man. You want me to…” That sick sigh again, bitter and long.

“How do you know him, Tom?” This wasn’t in the script.

“Dreams… I see his face in dreams.”

I see his face in dreams. But none of them had seen his face. It was always hidden.

“You see him?”

“Yes…”

“What does he look like, Tom?”

Tom didn’t speak for a long time. Stu had decided he wasn’t going to answer and he was preparing to go back to the “script” when Tom said: “He looks like anybody you see on the street. But when he grins, birds fall dead off telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine burns. The grass yellows up and dies where he spits. He’s always outside. He came out of time. He doesn’t know himself. He has the name of a thousand demons. Jesus knocked him into a herd of pigs once. His name is Legion. He’s afraid of us. We’re inside. He knows magic. He can call the wolves and live in the crows. He’s the king of nowhere. But he’s afraid of us. He’s afraid of… inside.”

Tom fell silent.

The three of them stared at each other, pallid as gravestones. Ralph had seized his hat from his head and was kneading it convulsively in his hands. Nick had put one hand over his eyes. Stu’s throat had turned to dry glass.