The Stand

“Shut up. Go downstairs.”

“I’ll go down,” she said, approaching him, and now it was she who smiled—a smile that filled him with dread. The furious color faded from his cheeks, and his strange, hot vitality seemed to go with it. For a moment he seemed old and frail. “I’ll go down… and so will you.”

“Get out.”

“We’ll go down,” she sang, smiling… it was horrible. “Down, doowwwn …”

“They’re in Boulder!”

“They’re almost here.”

“Get downstairs! ”

“Everything you made here is falling apart, and why not? The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short. People are whispering about you. They’re saying you let Tom Cullen get away, just a simple retarded boy but smart enough to outwit Randall Flagg.” Her words came faster and faster, now tumbling through a jeering smile. “They’re saying your weapons expert has gone crazy and you didn’t know it was going to happen. They’re afraid that what he brings back from the desert next time may be for them instead of for the people in the East. And they’re leaving. Did you know that?”

“You lie,” he whispered. His face was parchment white, his eyes bulging. “They wouldn’t dare. And if they were, I’d know.”

Her eyes gazed blankly over his shoulder to the east. “I see them,” she whispered. “They’re leaving their posts in the dead of night, and your Eye doesn’t see them. They’re leaving their posts and sneaking away. A work-crew goes out with twenty people and comes back with eighteen. The border guards are defecting. They’re afraid the balance of power is shifting op its arm. They’re leaving you, leaving you, and the ones that are left won’t lift a finger when the men from the East come to finish you once and for all—”

It snapped. Whatever there was inside him, it snapped.

“YOU LIE! ” he screamed at her. His hands slammed down on her shoulders, snapping both collarbones like pencils. He lifted her body high over his head into the faded blue desert sky, and as he pivoted on his heels he threw her, up and out, as he had thrown the glass. He saw the great smile of relief and triumph on her face, the sudden sanity in her eyes, and understood. She had baited him into doing it, understanding somehow that only he could set her free—

And she was carrying his child.

He leaned over the low parapet, almost overbalancing, trying to call back the irrevocable. Her nightgown fluttered. His hand closed on the gauzy material and he felt it rip, leaving him only a scrap of cloth so diaphanous that he could see his fingers through it—the stuff of dreams on waking.

Then she was gone, plummeting straight down with her toes pointed toward the earth, her gown pillowing up her neck and over her face in drifts. She didn’t scream.

She went down as silently as a defective skyrocket.

When he heard the indescribable thud of her hard landing, Flagg threw his head back to the sky and howled.

It made no difference, it made no difference.

It was still all in the palm of his hand.

He leaned over the parapet again and watched them come running, like iron filings drawn to a magnet. Or maggots to a piece of offal.

They looked so small, and he was so high above them.

He would levitate, he decided, and regain his state of calm.

But it was a long, long time before his bootheels would leave the sundeck, and when they did they would only hover a quarter of an inch above the concrete. They would go no higher.

Tom awoke that night at eight o’clock, but there was still too much light to move. He waited. Nick had come to him again in his sleep, and they had talked. It was so good to talk to Nick.

He lay in the shade of the big rock and watched the sky darken. The stars began to peep out. He thought about Pringle’s Potato Chips and wished he had some. When he got back to the Zone—if he did get back to the Zone—he would have all of them he wanted. He would gorge on Pringle’s chips. And bask in the love of his friends. That was what was missing back there in Las Vegas, he decided—simple love. They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn’t much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.

Only mushrooms and toadstools grew big and fat in the dark, even he knew that, laws, yes.

“I love Nick and Frannie and Dick Ellis and Lucy,” Tom whispered. It was his prayer. “I love Larry Underwood and Glen Bateman, too. I love Stan and Rona. I love Ralph. I love Stu. I love—”

It was odd, how easily their names came to him. Why, back in the Zone he was lucky if he could remember Stu’s name when he came to visit. His thoughts turned to his toys. His garage, his cars, his model trains. He had played with them by the hour. But he wondered if he would want to play with them so much when he got back from this… if he got back. It wouldn’t be the same. That was sad, but maybe it was also good.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” he recited softly. “I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen.”

It was dark enough now, and he pushed on. By eleven-thirty that night he had reached God’s Finger, and he paused there for a little lunch. The ground was high here, and looking back the way he had come, he could see moving lights. On the turnpike, he thought. They’re looking for me.

Tom looked northeast again. Far ahead, barely visible in the dark (the moon, now two nights past full, had already begun to sink), he saw a huge rounded granite dome. He was supposed to go there next.

“Tom’s got sore feet,” he whispered to himself, but not without some cheeriness. Things could have been much worse than a case of sore feet. “M-O-O-N, that spells sore feet.”

He walked on, and the night things skittered away from him, and when he laid himself down at dawn, he had come almost forty miles. The Nevada-Utah border was not far to the east of him.

By eight that morning he was hard asleep, his head pillowed on his jacket. His eyes began to move rapidly back and forth behind his closed lids.

Nick had come, and Tom talked with him.

A frown creased Tom’s sleeping brow. He had told Nick how much he was looking forward to seeing him again.

But for some reason he could not understand, Nick had turned away.

Chapter 68

Oh, how history repeats itself: Trashcan Man was once again being broiled alive in the devils frying pan—but this time there was no hope of Cibola’s cooling fountains to sustain him.

It’s what I deserve, no more than what I deserve.

His skin had burned, peeled, burned, peeled again, and finally it had not tanned but blackened. He was walking proof that a man finally takes on the look of what he is. Trash looked as if someone had doused him in #2 kerosene and struck a match to him. The blue of his eyes had faded in the constant desert glare, and looking into them was like looking into weird, extra-dimensional holes in space. He was dressed in a strange imitation of the dark man—an open-throated red-checked shirt, faded jeans, and desert boots that were already scratched and mashed and folded and sprung. But he had thrown away his red-flawed amulet. He didn’t deserve to wear it. He had proved unworthy. And like all imperfect devils, he had been cast out.

He paused in the broiling sun and passed a thin and shaking hand across his brow. He had been meant for this place and time—all his life had been preparation. He had passed through the burning corridors of hell to get here. He had endured the father-killing sheriff, he had endured that place at Terre Haute, he had endured Carley Yates. After all his strange and lonely life, he had found friends. Lloyd. Ken. Whitney Horgan.

And ah God, he had fucked it all up. He deserved to burn out here in the devil’s frying pan. Could there be redemption for him? The dark man might know. Trashcan did not.

He could barely remember now what had happened—perhaps because his tortured mind did not want to remember. He had been in the desert for over a week before his last disastrous return to Indian Springs. A scorpion had stung him on the middle finger of his left hand (his fuckfinger, that long-