The Stand

  "You sure she went?"

  "It would look damn funny if she didn't, wouldn't it?"

  Fran thought that over, then nodded. "I guess it would. By the way, Stu said they hope to have most of the town electrified again by the sixth."

  "That's going to be a mighty day," Larry said, and thought how nice it would be to sit down in Shannon's or the Broken Drum with a big Fender guitar and an even bigger amp and play something--anything, as long as it was simple and had a heavy beat--at full volume. "Gloria," maybe, or "Walkin' the Dog." Just about anything, in fact, except "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?"

  "Maybe," Fran said, "we ought to have a cover story, though. Just in case".

  Larry grinned crookedly. "Want to say we're selling magazine subscriptions if one of them comes back?"

  "Har-har, Larry."

  "Well, we could say we came to tell her what you just told me about getting the juice turned on again. If she's there."

  Fran nodded. "Yes, that might be okay."

  "Don't kid yourself, Fran. She'd be suspicious if we told her we'd come up because Jesus Christ just appeared and is walking back and forth on top of the City Reservoir."

  "If she's guilty of something."

  "Yes. If she's guilty of something."

  "Come on," Fran said after a moment's thought. "Let's go."

  There was no need for the cover story. Steady hard rapping at first the front and then the back door convinced them that Harold's house was indeed empty. It was just as well, Fran thought--the more she thought about the cover they'd worked out, the thinner it seemed.

  "How did you get in?" Larry asked.

  "The cellar window."

  They went around to the side of the house and Larry pulled and tugged fruitlessly at the window while Fran kept watch.

  "Maybe you did," he said, "but it's locked now."

  "No, it's just sticking. Let me try."

  But she had no better luck. Sometime between her first clandestine trip out here and now, Harold had locked up tight.

  "What do we do now?" she asked him.

  "Let's break it."

  "Larry, he'll see it."

  "Let him. If he doesn't have anything to hide, he'll think it was just a couple of kids, breaking windows in empty houses. It sure looks empty, with all the shades pulled down. And if he does have something to hide, it'll worry him plenty and he deserves to be worried. Right?"

  She looked doubtful but didn't stop him as he took off his shirt, wrapped it around his fist and forearm, and crunched the basement window. Glass tinkled inward and he felt around for the catch.

  "Here tis." He released it and the window slid back. Larry slipped through and turned to help her. "Be careful, kiddo. No miscarriages in Harold Lauder's basement, please."

  He caught her under the arms and eased her down. They looked around the rumpus room together. The croquet set stood sentinel. The air hockey table was littered with little snips of colored electrical wire.

  "What's this?" she said, picking up a piece of it. "This wasn't here before."

  He shrugged. "Maybe Harold's building a better mousetrap."

  There was a box under the table and he fished it out. The cover said: DELUXE REALISTIC WALKIE-TALKIE SET, BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. Larry opened the box, but the heft of it had already told him it was empty.

  "Building walkie-talkies instead of mousetraps," Fran said.

  "No, this wasn't a kit. You buy this kind ready to go. Maybe he was modifying them somehow. It sounds like Harold. Remember how Stu bitched about the walkie-talkie reception when he and Harold and Ralph were out hunting for Mother Abagail?"

  She nodded, but there was still something about those snips of wire that bothered her.

  Larry dropped the box back onto the floor and made what he would later think of as the most wildly erroneous statement of his entire life. "It doesn't matter," he said. "Let's go."

  They went up the stairs, but this time the door at the top was locked. She looked at him and Larry shrugged. "We've come this far, right?"

  Fran nodded.

  Larry bumped his shoulder against the door a few times to get the feel of the bolt on the other side, and then rammed it hard. There was a snapping-metal sound, a clunk, and the door swung open. Larry bent and picked up a bolt assembly from the linoleum kitchen floor. "I can put this back on and he'll never know the difference. That is, if there's a screwdriver handy."

  "Why bother? He's going to see the broken window."

  "That's true. But if the bolt's back on the door, he'll... what are you smiling about?"

  "Put the bolt back on, by all means. But how are you going to draw it from the cellar side of the door?"

  He thought about it and said, "Jeez, I hate a smartass woman worse than anything." He tossed the bolt onto the Formica kitchen counter. "Let's go look under that hearthstone."

  They went into the shadowy living room, and Fran felt anxiety start to creep up. Last time Nadine hadn't had a key. This time, if she came back, she would. And if she did come back, they would be caught red-handed. It would be a bitter joke if Stu's first job as marshal turned out to be arresting his own woman for breaking and entering.

  "That's it, isn't it?" Larry asked, pointing.

  "Yes. Be as quick as you can."

  "There's a good chance he's moved it, anyway." And Harold had. It was Nadine who had replaced it under the loose hearthstone. Larry and Fran knew nothing of that, only that when Larry pulled the loose hearthstone aside, the book lay there in the hollow beneath, the word LEDGER gleaming mellowly up at them in gold-filled letters. They both stared at it. The room seemed suddenly hotter, stuffier, darker.

  "Well," Larry said, "are we going to admire it or read it?"

  "You," Fran said. "I don't even want to touch it."

  Larry picked it out of the hole and automatically wiped the white stone-dust from the cover. He began to flip through it at random. The writing had been done with a felt-tipped marker of the sort that had been marketed under the pugnacious brand name Hardhead. It had allowed Harold to write in a tiny, perfect script--the handwriting of an intensely conscientious man, perhaps a driven man. There were no paragraph breaks. There was only an eyelash of a margin to the right and left, but that margin was constant, so straight that it might have been drawn with a ruler.

  "It'd take me three days to read all this," Larry said, and went on flipping toward the front of the book.

  "Hold it," Fran said, and reached over his arm to turn back a couple of pages. Here the steady flow of words was broken by a boldly boxed-off area. What had been enclosed seemed to be some sort of motto:

  * * *

  To follow one's star is to concede the power of some greater Force, some Providence; yet is it still not possible that the act of following itself is the taproot of even greater Power? Your GOD, your DEVIL, owns the keys to the lighthouse; I have grappled with that so long and hard in these last two months; but to each of us he has given the responsibility of NAVIGATION.

  HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

  * * *

  "Sorry," Larry said. "It's by me. You get it?"

  Fran shook her head slowly. "I guess it's Harold's way of saying following can be as honorable as leading. But as a motto, I don't think it's going to put 'Waste not, want not' out of business."

  Larry continued to flip toward the front of the book, coming upon another four or five of the boxed maxims, all of them attributed to Harold in capital letters.

  "Whoo," Larry said. "Look at this one, Frannie!"

  * * *

  It is said that the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I elect to think of them as the two great virtues. To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To vent them is more noble; that is to say the world must change for the good of you. I am on a great adventure.

  HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

  * * *

  "That's the work of a profoundly disturbed mind," Fran said. She felt cold.

  "It's
the kind of thinking that got us into this mess to start with," Larry agreed. He flipped rapidly to the start of the book. "Time's wasting. Let's see what we can make of this."

  Neither of them knew exactly what to expect. They had read nothing of the ledger except the boxed mottos and an occasional phrase or two which, mostly owing to Harold's convoluted style (the compound-complex sentence seemed to have been invented with Harold Lauder in mind), meant little or nothing.

  What they saw at the ledger's beginning was therefore a complete shock.

  The diary began at the top of the first facing page. It was neatly marked with a 1 in a circle. There was an indent here, the only indent in the whole book, as far as Frannie could tell, excepting those which began each boxed motto. They read that first sentence holding the ledger between them like children at a choir practice and Fran said "Oh!" in a small, strangled voice and stepped away, her hand pressed lightly to her mouth.

  "Fran, we have to take the book," Larry said.

  "Yes--"

  "And show it to Stu. I don't know if Leo's right about them being on the dark man's side, but at the very least, Harold is dangerously disturbed. You can see that."

  "Yes," she said again. She felt faint, weak. So this was how the matter of the diaries ended. It was as if she had known, as if she had known it all from the moment she saw that big smudged thumbprint, and she had to keep telling herself not to faint, not to faint.

  "Fran? Frannie? Are you all right?"

  Larry's voice. From far away.

  The first sentence in Harold's ledger: My great pleasure this delightful post-Apocalypse summer will be to kill Mr. Stuart Dog-Cock Redman; and just maybe I will kill her, too.

  "Ralph? Ralph Brentner, you home? Hooo-hooo, anybody home?"

  She stood on the steps, looking at the house. No motorcycles in the yard, only a couple of bikes parked around to one side. Ralph would have heard her, but there was the mute to think about. The deaf-mute. You could holler until you were blue and he wouldn't answer and still he might be there.

  Shifting her shopping bag from one arm to the other, Nadine tried the door and found it unlocked. She stepped inside out of the fine mist which was falling. She was in a small foyer. Four steps went up to the kitchen, and a flight of them went down to the basement area where Harold said Andros had his apartment. Putting her most pleasant expression on her face, Nadine went downstairs, fixing her excuse in her mind if he should be there.

  I came right in because I didn't think you'd know I was knocking. Some of us wanted to know if there's going to be a late shift wrapping those two motors that blew. Did Brad say anything to you?

  There were only two rooms down here. One of them was a bedroom as simple as a monk's cell. The other was a study. There was a desk, a big chair, a wastebasket, a bookcase. The top of the desk was littered with scraps of paper and she looked through them idly. Most of them made little sense to her--she guessed they were Nick's side of some conversation (I guess so, but shouldn't we ask him if it can be done in some simpler way? one of them read). Others seemed to be memos to himself, jottings, thoughts. A few of them reminded her of the boxes in Harold's ledger, what he called his "Guideposts to a Better Life" with a sarcastic smile.

  One read: Talk to Glen about trade. Do any of us know how trade starts? Scarcity of goods, isn't it? Or a modified corner on some market? Skills. That may be a key word. What if Brad Kitchner decides to sell instead of giving away? Or the doc? What would we pay with? Hmmm.

  Another: Community protection is a two-way street.

  Another: Every time we talk about the law I spend the night having nightmares about Shoyo. Watching them die. Watching Childress throw his supper around the cell. The law, the law, what do we do about the goddamned law? Capital punishment. Now there's a smiley thought. When Brad gets the power on, how long before someone asks him to rig up an electric chair?

  She turned away from the scraps--reluctantly. It was fascinating to look through papers left by a man who could think wholly only by writing (one of her college profs had been fond of saying that the thought process can never be complete without articulation), but her purpose down here was already completed. Nick was not here, no one was here. To linger overlong would be to press her luck unnecessarily.

  She went back upstairs. Harold had told her they would probably meet in the living room. It was a huge room, carpeted with a thick wine-colored shag rug, dominated by a freestanding fireplace that went up through the roof in a column of rock. The entire west wall was glass, giving on a magnificent view of the Flatirons. It made her feel as exposed as a bug on a wall. She knew that the outer surface of the thermoplex was iodized so that anyone outside would only see a mirrorlike reflection, but the psychological feeling was still one of utter exposure. She wanted to finish quickly.

  On the southern side of the room she found what she was looking for, a deep closet that Ralph hadn't cleaned out. Coats hung far back inside, and in the rear comer there was a tangle of boots and mittens and winter woolens about three feet deep.

  Working quickly, she took the groceries out of her shopping bag. They were camouflage, and there was only a single layer of them. Beneath the cans of tomato paste and sardines was the Hush Puppies shoebox with the dynamite and the walkie-talkie inside.

  "If I put it in a closet, will it still work?" she had asked. "Won't the extra wall muffle the blast?"

  "Nadine," Harold had responded, "if that device works, and I have no reason whatever to believe it won't, it will take the house and most of the surrounding hillside. Put it anywhere you think it will be unobserved until their meeting. A closet will be fine. The extra wall will blow out and become shrapnel. I trust your judgment, dear. It's going to be just like the old fairy tale about the tailor and the flies. Seven at a blow. Only in this case, we're dealing with a bunch of political cockroaches."

  Nadine pushed aside boots and scarves, made a hole, and slipped the shoebox into it. She covered it over again and then worked her way out of the closet. There. Done. For better or worse.

  She left the house quickly, not looking back, trying to ignore the voice that wouldn't stay dead, the voice that was now telling her to go back in there and pull the wires that ran between the blasting caps and the walkie-talkie, telling her to give this up before it drove her mad. Because wasn't that what was really lying somewhere up ahead, now maybe less than two weeks ahead? Wasn't madness the final logical conclusion?

  She slipped the bag of groceries into the Vespa's carrier and kicked the machine into life. And all the time she was driving away, that voice went on: You're not going to leave that there, are you? You're not going to leave that bomb in there, are you?

  In a world where so many have died--

  She leaned into a turn, barely able to see where she was going. Tears had begun to blur her eyes.

  --the one great sin is to take a human life.

  Seven lives here. No, more than that, because the committee was going to hear reports from the heads of several subcommittees.

  She stopped at the corner of Baseline and Broadway, thinking she would turn around and go back. She was shuddering all over.

  And later she would never be able to explain to Harold precisely what had happened--in truth, she never even tried. It was a foretaste of the horrors to come.

  She felt a blackness creeping over her vision.

  It came like a dark curtain slowly drawn, flipping and flapping in a mild breeze. Every now and then the breeze would gust, the curtain would flap more vigorously, and she would see a bit of daylight under its hem, a little bit of this deserted intersection.

  But the curtain came over her vision in steady blackout drifts and soon she was lost in it. She was blind, she was deaf, she was without the sense of touch. The thinking creature, the Nadine-ego, drifted in a warm black cocoon like seawater, like amniotic fluid.

  And she felt him creep into her.

  A shriek built up within her, but she had no mouth with which to scream.


  Penetration: entropy.

  She didn't know what those words meant, put together like that; she only knew that they were right.

  It was like nothing she had ever felt before. Later, metaphors occurred to her to describe it, and she rejected them, one by one:

  You're swimming and suddenly, in the midst of the warm water, you're treading water in a pocket of deep, numbing cold.

  You've been given Novocain and the dentist pulls a tooth. It comes out with a painless tug. You spit blood into the white enamel basin. There's a hole in you; you've been gouged. You can slip your tongue into the hole where 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 TONITE!