The Stand

part of you was living a second ago.

You stare at your face in the mirror. You stare at it for a long time. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. No fair blinking. You watch with an intellectual sort of horror as your face changes, like the face of Lon Chaney, Jr., in a werewolf epic. You become a stranger to yourself, an olive-skinned Doppelganger, a psychotic Vampira with pale skin and fishslit eyes.

It was really none of those things, but there was a taste-trace of all of them.

The dark man entered her, and he was cold.

When Nadine opened her eyes, her first thought was that she was in hell.

Hell was whiteness, the thesis to the dark man’s antithesis. She saw white, ivory, bleached-out nothingness. White-white-white. It was white hell, and it was everywhere.

She stared at the whiteness (it was impossible to stare into it), fascinated, agonized, for minutes before she realized she could feel the fork of the Vespa between her thighs, and that there was another color—green—at the periphery of her vision.

With a jerk she pulled her eyes out of their blank, locked stare. She gazed around herself. Her mouth was slack, trembling; the eyes themselves dazed and horror-drugged. The dark man had been in her, Flagg had been in her, and when he had come he had driven her away from the windows of her five senses, her loopholes on reality. He had driven her as a man might drive a car or a truck. And he had brought her… where?

She glanced toward the white and saw it was a huge blank drive-in movie screen against a background of white late afternoon rainy sky. Turning around, she saw the snack-bar. It was painted a garish flesh-tone pink. Written across the front was WELCOME TO THE HOLIDAY TWIN! ENJOY ENTERTAINMENT UNDER THE STARS TO-NITE!

The darkness had come on her at the intersection of Baseline and Broadway. Now she was far out on Twenty-eighth Street, almost over the town line to… Longmont, wasn’t it?

There was a taste of him in her still, far back in her mind, like cold slime on a floor.

She was surrounded by poles, steel poles like sentries, each of them five feet high, each bearing a matched set of drive-in speakers. There was gravel underfoot, but grass and dandelions were growing up through it. She guessed the Holiday Twin hadn’t been doing much business since the middle of June or so. You could say that it had been kind of a dead summer for the entertainment biz.

“Why am I here?” she whispered.

It was only talking aloud, talking to herself; she expected no answer. So when she was answered, a shriek of terror pealed from her throat.

All the speakers fell off the speaker poles at once and onto the weed-strewn gravel. The sound they made was a huge, amplified CHUNK! —the sound of a dead body striking gravel.

“NADINE,” the speakers blared, and it was his voice, and how she shrieked then! Her hands flew to her head, her palms clapped themselves over her ears, but it was all the speakers at once and there was no hiding from that giant voice, which was full of fearful hilarity and dreadful comic lust.

“NADINE, NADINE, OH HOW I LOVE TO LOVE NADINE, MY PET, MY PRETTY —”

“Stop it! ” she shrieked back, straining her vocal cords with the force of her cry, and still her voice was so small compared with that giant’s bellow. And yet, for a moment the voice did stop. There was silence. The fallen speakers looked up at her from the gravel like the rugose eyes of giant insects.

Nadine’s hands slowly came down from her ears.

You’ve gone insane, she comforted herself. That’s all it is. The strain of waiting… and Harold’s games… finally planting the explosive… all of it has finally driven you over the edge, dear, and you’ve gone crazy. It’s probably better this way.

But she hadn’t gone crazy, and she knew it.

This was far worse than being crazy.

As if to prove this, the speakers now boomed out in the stern yet almost prissy voice of a principal reprimanding the student body over the high school intercom for some prank they had all played together. “NADINE. THEY KNOW.”

“They know,” she parroted. She wasn’t sure who they were, or what they knew, but she was quite sure it was inevitable.

“YOU’VE BEEN STUPID. GOD MAY LOVE STUPIDITY: I DO NOT.”

The words crackled and rolled away into the late afternoon. Her clothes clung soddenly to her skin, her hair lay lankly against her pallid cheeks, and she began to shiver.

Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid. I know what that word means. I think. I think it means death.

“THEY KNOW EVERYTHING… EXCEPT THE SHOEBOX. THE DYNAMITE.”

Speakers. Speakers everywhere, staring up at her from the white gravel, peeking at her from clusters of dandelions closed against the rain.

“GO TO SUNRISE AMPHITHEATER. STAY THERE. UNTIL TOMORROW NIGHT. UNTIL THEY MEET. AND THEN YOU AND HAROLD MAY COME. COME TO ME.”

Now Nadine began to feel a simple, shining gratitude. They had been stupid… but they had also been granted a second chance. They were important enough to have warranted intervention. And soon, very soon, she would be with him… and then she would go crazy, she was quite sure of it, and all this would cease to matter.

“Sunrise Amphitheater may be too far,” she said. Her vocal cords had been hurt somehow; she could only croak. “It may be too far for the…” For the what? She pondered. Oh! Oh yes! Right! “For the walkie-talkie. The signal.”

No answer.

The speakers lay on the gravel, staring at her, hundreds of them.

She pushed the Vespa’s starter and the little engine coughed to life. The echo made her wince. It sounded like rifle fire. She wanted to get out of this awful place, away from those staring speakers.

Had to get out.

She overbalanced the motor-scooter going around the concession stand. She might have held it if she’d been on a paved surface, but the Vespa’s rear wheel skidded out from under her in the loose gravel and she fell with a thump, biting her lip bloody and cutting her cheek. She got up, her eyes wide and skittish, and drove on. She was trembling all over.

Now she was in the alley the cars drove through to get into the drive-in and the ticket stand, looking like a small toll-booth, was just ahead of her. She was going to get out. She was going to get away. Her mouth softened in gratitude.

Behind her, hundreds of speakers blared into life all at once, and now the voice was singing, a horrid, tuneless singing: “I’LL BE SEEING YOU… IN ALL THE OLD FAMILIAR PLACES… THAT THIS HEART OF MINE EMBRACES… ALL DAY THROOOOO… ”

Nadine screamed in her newly cracked voice.

Huge, monstrous laughter came then, a dark and sterile cackling which seemed to fill the earth.

“DO WELL, NADINE,” the voice boomed. “DO WELL, MY FANCY, MY DEAR ONE.”

Then she gained the road and fled back toward Boulder at the Vespa’s top speed, leaving the disembodied voice and staring speakers behind… but carrying them with her in her heart, for then, for always.

She was waiting for Harold around the corner from the bus station. When he saw her, his face froze and drained of color. “Nadine—” he whispered. The lunch bucket dropped from his hand and clacked on the pavement.

“Harold,” she said. “They know. We’ve got to—”

“Your hair, Nadine, oh my God, your hair —” His face seemed to be all eyes.

“Listen to me! ”

He seemed to gain some of himself back. “A-all right. What?”