There was a tension-relieving burst of laughter, and Rich got a hand. Glen grinned easily. He had given Rich his cue and his line half an hour before the meeting, and Rich had delivered admirably. Old baldy had been right as rain about one thing, Stu was discovering: a background in sociology often came in handy at large meetings.
“All right, I’ve outlined what I know about him,” he went on. “My last contribution before throwing the meeting open to discussion is this: I think Stu is right in telling you that we have to deal with Harold and Nadine in a civilized way if they’re caught, but like him, I think that is unlikely. Also like him, I believe they did what they did on this man Flagg’s orders.”
His words rang out strongly in the hall.
“This man has got to be dealt with. George Richardson told you mysticism isn’t his field of study. It isn’t mine, either. But I tell you this: I think that dying old woman somehow represents the forces of good as much as Flagg represents the forces of evil. I think that whatever power controls her used her to bring us together. I don’t think that power intends to forsake us now. Maybe we need to talk it over and let some air into those nightmares. Maybe we need to begin deciding what we’re going to do about him. But he can’t just walk into this Zone next spring and take over, not if you people are standing watch. Now I’ll turn the meeting back to Stu, who’ll chair the discussion.”
His last sentence was lost in a crash of applause, and Glen went back to his seat feeling pleased. He had stirred them with a big stick… or was the phrase played them like a violin? It didn’t really matter. They were more mad than scared, they were ready for a challenge (although they might not be so eager next April, after they’d had a long winter to cool off in)… and most of all, they were ready to talk.
And talk they did, for the next three hours. A few people left as midnight came and went, but not many. As Larry had suspected, no good hard advice came out of it. There were wild suggestions: a bomber and/or a nuclear stockpile of their own, a summit meeting, a trained hit squad. There were few practical ideas.
For the final hour, person after person stood up and recited his or her dream, to the seemingly endless fascination of the others. Stu was once again reminded of the endless bull sessions about sex he had participated in (mostly as a listener) during his teenage years.
Glen was both amazed and heartened by their growing willingness to talk, and by the charged atmosphere of excitement that had taken over the dull blankness with which they had begun the meeting. A large catharsis, long overdue, was going on, and he was also reminded of sex-talk, but in a different way. They talk like people, he thought, who have kept the huddled-up secrets of their guilts and inadequacies to themselves for a long time, only to discover that these things, when verbalized, were only life-sized after all. When the inner terror sowed in sleep was finally harvested in this marathon public discussion, the terror became more manageable… perhaps even conquerable.
The meeting broke up at one-thirty in the morning, and Glen left it with Stu, feeling good for the first time since Nick’s death. He left feeling they had gone the first hard steps out of themselves and toward whatever battleground there would be.
He felt hope.
The power went on at noon on September 5, as Brad had promised.
The air raid siren atop of the County Courthouse went on with a huge, braying whoop, scaring many people into the streets, where they looked wildly up into the blameless blue sky for a glimpse of the dark man’s air force. Some ran for their cellars, where they stayed until Brad found a fused switch and turned the siren off. Then they came up, shamefaced.
There was an electrical fire on Willow Street, and a group of a dozen volunteer firepeople promptly rushed over and put it out. A manhole cover exploded into the air at the Broadway-and-Walnut intersection, went nearly fifty feet, and came down on the roof of the Oz Toyshop like a great rusty tiddledywink.
There was a single fatality on what the Zone came to call Power Day. For some unknown reason, an auto- body shop on outer Pearl Street exploded. Rich Moffat was sitting in a doorway across the street with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his newsboy’s pouch, and a flying panel of corrugated steel siding struck him and killed him instantly. He would break no more plate-glass windows.
Stu was with Fran when the fluorescents buzzed into life in the ceiling of her hospital room. He watched them flicker, flicker, flicker, and finally catch with the old familiar light. He was unable to look away until they had been glowing solidly for nearly three minutes. When he looked at Frannie again, her eyes were shiny with tears.
“Fran? What’s wrong? Is it the pain?”
“It’s Nick,” she said. “It’s so wrong that Nick isn’t alive to see this. Hold me, Stu. I want to pray for him if I can. I want to try.”
He held her, but didn’t know if she prayed or not. He suddenly found himself missing Nick very much, and hating Harold Lauder more than he ever had before. Fran was right. Harold had not just killed Nick and Sue; he had stolen their light.
“Shh,” he said. “Frannie, shh.”
But she cried for a long time. When the tears were finally gone, he used the button to raise her bed and turned on the night table lamp so she could see to read.
Stu was being shaken awake, and it took him a long time to come all the way around. His mind ran over a slow and seemingly endless list of people who might be trying to rob his sleep. It was his mother, telling him it was time to get up and light the stoves and get ready for school. It was Manuel, the bouncer in that sleazy little Nuevo Laredo whorehouse, telling him his twenty dollars was used up and it would be another twenty if he wanted to stay all night. It was a nurse in a white all-over suit who wanted to take his blood pressure and a throat culture. It was Frannie.
It was Randall Flagg.
The last thought brought him up like a dash of cold water in the face. It was none of those people. It was Glen Bateman, with Kojak at his knee.
“You’re a hard man to wake up, East Texas,” Glen said. “Like a stone post.” He was only a vague shape in nearly total darkness.
“Well, you could have turned on the damn light to start with.”
“You know, I clean forgot all about that.”
Stu switched on the lamp, squinted against the sudden bright light, and peered owlishly at the wind-up alarm clock. It was quarter to three in the morning.
“What are you doing here, Glen? I was sleepin, in case you didn’t happen to notice.”
He got his first good look at Glen as he put the clock down. He looked pale, scared… and old. The lines were drawn deeply into his face and he looked haggard.
“What is it?”
“Mother Abagail,” Glen said quietly.
“Dead?”
“God help me, I almost wish she were. She’s awake. She wants us.”
“The two of us?”
“The five of us. She—” His voice roughened, went hoarse. “She knew Nick and Susan were dead, and she knew Fran was in the hospital. I don’t know how, but she did.”
“And she wants the committee?”
“What’s left of it. She’s dying and she says she has to tell us something. And I don’t know if I want to hear it.”
Outside the night was cold—not just chilly but cold. The jacket Stu had pulled from the closet felt good, and he zipped it all the way to the neck. A frosty moon hung overhead, making him think of Tom, who had instructions to come back to them and report when the moon was full. This moon was just a trifle past the first quarter. God knew where that moon was looking down on Tom, on Dayna Jurgens, on Judge Farris. God knew it was looking down on strange doings here.
“I got Ralph up first,” Glen said. “Told him to go over to the hospital and get Fran.”
“If the doctor wanted her up and around, he would have sent her home,” Stu said angrily.
“This is a special case, Stu.”
“For someone who doesn’t want to hear what that old woman has to say, you seem to be in an all-fired hurry to get to her.”
“I’m afraid not to,” Glen said.
