The Stand

going to eat you, old buddy. Not less I have to.”

He was not even aware that he was salivating.

Lloyd heard someone in the ashy afterglow of dusk, and at first the sound was so far away and so strange—the clash of metal on metal—that he thought he must be dreaming it. The waking and sleeping states had become very similar to him now; he crossed back and forth across that boundary almost without knowing it.

But then the voice came and he snapped upright on his cot, his eyes flaring wide, huge and lambent in his starved face. The voice came floating down the corridors from God knew how far up in the Administration Wing and then down the stairwell to the hallways which connected the visiting areas to the central cellblock, where Lloyd was. It bobbed serenely through the twice-barred doors and finally reached Lloyd’s ears:

“Hooooo-hoooo! Anybody home? ”

And strangely, Lloyd’s first thought was: Don’t answer. Maybe he’ll go away.

“Anybody home? Going once, going twice?… Okay, I’m on my way, just about to shake the dust of Phoenix from my boots —”

At that, Lloyd’s paralysis broke. He catapulted off the cot, snatched up the cotleg, and began to beat it frantically on the bars; the vibrations raced up the metal and shivered in the bones of his clenched fist.

“No! ” he screamed. “No! Don’t go! Please don’t go! ”

The voice, closer now, coming from the stairway between the Administration and this floor: “We’ll eat you up, we love you so… and oh, someone sounds so… hungry.” This was followed by a lazy chuckle.

Lloyd dropped the cotleg on the floor and wrapped both hands around the bars of the cell door. Now he could hear the footfalls somewhere up in the shadows, clocking steadily down the hall that led to the holding cellblock. Lloyd wanted to burst into tears of relief… after all, he was saved… yet it was not joy but fear he felt in his heart, a growing dread that made him wish he had stayed silent. Stayed silent? My God! What could be worse than starvation?

Starvation made him think of Trask. Trask lay sprawled on his back in the ashy afterglow of dusk, one leg stretched stiffly into Lloyd’s cell, and an essential subtraction had occurred in the region of that leg’s calf. The fleshy part of that leg’s calf. There were teeth-marks there. Lloyd knew whose teeth had made those marks, but he had only the vaguest memory of lunching on filet of Trask. All the same, powerful feelings of revulsion, guilt, and horror filled him. He rushed across to the bars and pushed Trask’s leg back into his own cell. Then, looking over his shoulder to make sure the owner of the voice was not yet in sight, he reached through, and with the dividing bars pressed against his face, he pulled Trask’s pantsleg down, hiding what he had done.

Of course there was no great hurry, because the barred gates at the head of the cellblock were shut, and with the power off, the pushbutton wouldn’t work. His rescuer would have to go back and find THE KEY. He would have to—

Lloyd grunted as the electric motor which operated the barred gates, whined into life. The silence of the cellblock magnified the sound, which ceased with the familiar click-slam! of the gates locking open.

Then the steps were clocking steadily up the cellblock walkway.

Lloyd had gone to his cell door again after neatening up Trask; now he involuntarily fell back two steps. He dropped his gaze to the floor outside and what he saw first was a pair of dusty cowboy boots with pointed toes and rundown heels and his first thought was that Poke had had a pair like that.

The boots stopped in front of his cell.

His gaze rose slowly, taking in the faded jeans snugged down over the boots, the leather belt with the brass buckle (various astrological signs inside a pair of concentric circles), the jeans jacket with a button pinned to each of the breast pockets—a smiley-smile face on one, a dead pig and the words HOW’S YOUR PORK on the other.

At the same instant Lloyd’s eyes reluctantly reached Randall Flagg’s darkly flushed face, Flagg screamed “Boo! ” The single sound floated down the dead cellblock and then rushed back. Lloyd shrieked, stumbled over his own feet, fell down, and began to cry.

“That’s all right,” Flagg soothed. “Hey, man, that’s all right. Everything’s purely all right.”

Lloyd sobbed: “Can you let me out? Please let me out. I don’t want to be like my rabbit, I don’t want to end up like that, it’s not fair, if it wasn’t for Poke I never would have got into anything but small shit, please let me out, mister, I’ll do anything.”

“You poor guy. You look like an advertisement for a summer vacation at Dachau.”

Despite the sympathy in Flagg’s voice, Lloyd could not bring himself to raise his eyes beyond the knees of the newcomer’s jeans. If he looked into that face again, it would kill him. It was the face of a devil.

“Please,” Lloyd mumbled. “Please let me out. I’m starving.”

“How long you been shitcanned, my friend?”

“I don’t know,” Lloyd said, wiping his eyes with thin fingers. “A long time.”

“How come you’re not dead already?”

“I knew what was coming,” Lloyd told the bluejeaned legs as he drew the last tattered shreds of his cunning around him. “I saved up my food. That’s what.”

“Didn’t happen to have a chomp on this fine fellow in the next cell, by any chance?”

“What?” Lloyd croaked. “What? No! Christ’s sake! What do you think I am? Mister, mister, please—”

“His left leg there looks a little thinner than his right one. That’s the only reason I asked, my good friend.”

“I don’t know nothing about that,” Lloyd whispered. He was trembling all over.

“How about Br’er Rat? How did he taste?”

Lloyd put his hands over his face and said nothing.

“What’s your name?”

Lloyd tried to say, but all that came out was a moan.

“What’s your name, soldier?”

“Lloyd Henreid.” He tried to think what to say next, but his mind was a chaotic jumble: He had been afraid when his lawyer told him he might go to the electric chair, but not this afraid. He had never been this afraid in his entire life. “It was all Poke’s idea!” he screamed. “Poke should be here, not me!”

“Look at me, Lloyd.”

“No,” Lloyd whispered. His eyes rolled wildly.

“Why not?”

“Because…”

“Go on.”

“Because I don’t think you’re real,” Lloyd whispered. “And if you are real… mister, if you’re real, you’re the devil.”

“Look at me, Lloyd.”

Helplessly, Lloyd turned his eyes up to that dark, grinning face that hung behind an intersection of bars. The right hand held something up beside the right eye. Looking at it made Lloyd feel cold and hot all over. It looked like a black stone, so dark it seemed almost resinous and pitchy. There was a red flaw in the center of it, and to Lloyd it looked like a terrible eye, bloody and half-open, peering at him. Then Flagg turned it slightly between his fingers, and the red flaw in the dark stone looked like… a key. Flagg turned it back and forth between his fingers. Now it was the eye, now it was the key.

The eye, the key.

He sang: “She brought me coffee… she brought me tea… she brought me… damn near everything… but the workhouse key. Right, Lloyd?”

“Sure,” Lloyd said huskily. His eyes never left the small dark stone. Flagg began to walk it from one finger to the next like a magician doing a trick.

“Now you’re a man who must appreciate the value of a good key,” the man said. The dark stone disappeared in his clenched fist and suddenly reappeared in his other hand, where it began to finger-walk again. “I’m sure you