The Stand, Page 89

  It was ten to seven now. He could waste them both by seven-thirty. Fran would not raise the alarm until ten-thirty or later, and by then he could be well away, working his way west on his Honda, with his ledger in his knapsack. But it wouldn't happen if he just sat here on his bike, letting time pass.

  The Honda started on the second kick. It was a good bike. Harold smiled. Harold grinned. Harold positively radiated good cheer. He drove off toward Chautauqua Park.

  Dusk was starting to close down when Stu heard Harold's bike coming into the park. A moment later he saw the Honda's headlamp flashing in and out between the trees that lined the climbing sweep of the drive. Then he could see Harold's helmeted head turning right and left, looking for him.

  Stu, who was sitting on the edge of a rock barbecue pit, waved and shouted. After a minute Harold saw him, waved back, and began to putt over in second gear.

  After the afternoon the three of them had put in, Stu felt considerably better about Harold ... better than he ever had, in fact. Harold's idea had been a damn good one even if it hadn't panned out. And Harold had insisted on taking the Nederland road ... must have been pretty cold in spite of his heavy jacket. As he pulled up, Stu saw that Harold's perpetual grin looked more like a grimace; his face was strained and too white. Disappointed that things hadn't worked out better, Stu guessed. He felt a sudden flush of guilt at the way he and Frannie had treated Harold, as if his constant grin and his overfriendly way with people was some kind of camouflage. Had they ever really considered the idea that the guy might just be trying to turn over a new leaf, that he might be going at it a little strangely just because he had never tried to do such a thing before? Stu didn't guess they had.

  "Nothing at all, huh?" he asked Harold, jumping nimbly down from the top of the barbecue pit.

  "De nada, " Harold said. The grin reappeared, but it was automatic, without strength, like a rictus. His face still looked strange and deadly pale. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his jacket.

  "Never mind. It was a good idea. For all we know, she's back in her house right now. If not, we can look again tomorrow."

  "That might be like looking for a body."

  Stu sighed. "Maybe ... yeah, maybe. Why don't you come back to supper with me, Harold?"

  "What?" Harold seemed to flinch back in the gathering gloom under the trees. His grin looked more strained than ever.

  "Supper," Stu said patiently. "Look, Frannie'd be glad to see you, too. That's no shit. She really would."

  "Well, maybe," Harold said, still looking uncomfortable. "But I'm ... well, I had a thing for her, you know. Maybe it's best if we ... just let it go for now. Nothing personal. The two of you go well together. I know that." His smile shone forth with renewed sincerity. It was infectious; Stu answered it.

  "Your choice, Harold. But the door's open, anytime."

  "Thanks."

  "No, I got to thank you," Stu said seriously.

  Harold blinked. "Me?"

  "For helping us hunt when everybody else decided to let nature take her course. Even if it didn't come to nothing. Will you shake with me?" Stu put his hand out. Harold stared at it blankly for a moment, and Stu didn't think his gesture was going to be accepted. Then Harold took his right hand out of his jacket pocket--it seemed to catch on something, the zipper, maybe--and shook Stu's hand briefly. Harold's hand was warm and a little sweaty.

  Stu stepped in front of him, looking down the drive. "Ralph should be here by now. I hope he didn't have an accident coming down that frigging mountain. He ... there he is now."

  Stu walked out to the side of the road; a second headlamp was now flashing up the drive and playing hide-and-seek through the screening trees.

  "Yes, that's him," Harold said in an odd flat voice behind Stu.

  "Someone with him, too."

  "Wh-what?"

  "There." Stu pointed to a second motorcycle headlamp behind the first.

  "Oh." That queerly flat voice again. It caused Stu to turn around.

  "You okay, Harold?"

  "Just tired."

  The second vehicle belonged to Glen Bateman; it was a low-power moped, the closest to a motorcycle that he would come, and it made Nadine's Vespa look like a Harley. Behind Ralph, Nick Andros was riding pillion. Nick had an invitation for all of them to come back to the house he and Ralph shared to have coffee and/or brandy. Stu agreed but Harold begged off, still looking strained and tired.

  He's so goddam disappointed, Stu thought, and reflected that it was not only the first sympathy he had probably ever felt for Harold, but also that it was long overdue. He renewed Nick's invitation himself, but Harold only shook his head and told Stu he was shot for the day. He guessed he would go home and get some sleep.

  By the time he got home, Harold was shaking so badly he could barely get his key in the front door. When he did get the door open, he darted in as if he suspected a maniac might be creeping up the walk behind him. He slammed the door, turned the lock, shot the bolt. Then he leaned against the door for a moment with his head back and his eyes shut, feeling on the verge of hysterical tears. When he had a grip on himself again, he felt his way down the hall to the living room and lit all three gas lanterns. The room became bright, and bright was better.

  He sat down in his favorite chair and closed his eyes. When his heartbeat had slowed a little he went to the hearth, removed the loose stone, and removed his LEDGER. It soothed him. A ledger was where you kept track of debts owed, bills outstanding, accumulating interest. It was where you finally put paid to all accounts.

  He sat back down, flipped to the place where he had stopped, hesitated, then wrote: "August 14, 1990. " He wrote for nearly an hour and a half, his pen dashing back and forth line after line, page after page. His face as he wrote was by turns savagely amused and dully righteous, terrified and joyous, hurt and grinning. When he was finished, he read what he had written ("These are my letters to the world/which never wrote to me ...") while he absently massaged his aching right hand.

  He replaced the ledger and the covering stone. He was calm; he had written it all out of him; he had translated his terror and his fury to the page and his resolve remained strong. That was good. Sometimes the act of writing things down made him feel more jittery, and those were the times he knew he had written falsely, or without the effort required to hone the dull edge of truth to an edge where it would cut--where it would bring blood. But tonight he could put the book back with a calm and serene mind. The rage and fear and frustration had been safely transferred into the book, with a rock to hold it down while he slept.

  Harold ran up one of his shades and looked out into the silent street. Looking up at the Flatirons he thought calmly about how close he had come to just going ahead anyway, just hauling out the .38 and trying to mow down all four of them. That would have fixed their reeking sanctimonious ad hoc committee. When he had finished with them they wouldn't even have had a fucking quorum left.

  But at the last moment some fraying cord of sanity had held instead of giving way. He had been able to let go of the gun and shake the betraying cracker's hand. How, he would never know, but thank God he had. The mark of genius is its ability to bide--and so he would.

  He was sleepy now; it had been a long and eventful day.

  Unbuttoning his shirt, Harold turned out two of the three gaslamps, and picked up the last to take into his bedroom. As he went through into the kitchen he stopped, frozen.

  The door to the basement was standing open.

  He went to it, holding the lamp aloft, and went down the first three steps. Fear came into his heart, driving the calmness out.

  "Who's here?" he called. No answer. He could see the air-hockey table. The posters. In the far corner, a set of gaily striped croquet mallets sat in their rack.

  He went down another three steps. "Is someone here?"

  No; he felt there was not. But that did not allay his fear.

  He went the rest of the way down and held the lamp high above his he
ad; across the room a monstrous shadow-Harold, as huge and black as the ape in the Rue Morgue, did likewise.

  Was there something on the floor over there? Yes. There was.

  He crossed behind the slotcar track to beneath the window where Fran had entered. On the floor was a spill of light brown grit. Harold set the light down beside the spill. In the center of it, as clear as a fingerprint, was the track of a sneaker or tennis shoe ... not a waffle or zigzag pattern, but groups of circles and lines. He stared at it, burning it into his mind, and then kicked the dust into a light cloud, destroying the mark. His face was the face of a living waxwork in the light of the Coleman lamp.

  "You'll pay!" Harold cried softly. "Whichever one of you it was, you'll pay! Yes you will! Yes you will!"

  He climbed the stairs again and went through his house from end to end, looking for any other signs of defilation. He found none. He ended in the living room, not sleepy at all now. He was just concluding that someone--a kid, maybe--had broken in out of curiosity, when the thought of his LEDGER exploded in his mind like a flare in a midnight sky. The breakin motive was so clear, so awful, that he had nearly overlooked it completely.

  He ran to the hearth, pulled up the stone, and ripped the LEDGER from its place. For the first time it came completely home to him how dangerous the book was. If someone found it, everything was over. He of all people should know that; hadn't all of this begun because of Fran's diary?

  The LEDGER. The footprint. Did the latter mean the former had been discovered? Of course not. But how to be sure? There was no way, that was the pure and hellish truth of the matter.

  He replaced the hearthstone and took the LEDGER into his bedroom with him. He put it under his pillow along with his Smith & Wesson revolver, thinking he should burn it, knowing he never could. The best writing he had ever done in his life was between its covers, the only writing that had ever come as a result of belief and personal commitment.

  He lay down, resigned to a sleepless night, his mind running restlessly over possible hiding places. Under a loose board? In the back of a cupboard? Could he perhaps pull the old purloined letter trick, and leave it boldly on one of the bookshelves, a volume among many other volumes, flanked by a Reader's Digest Condensed Book on one side and a copy of The Total Woman on the other? No--that was too bold; he would never be able to leave the house and have peace. What about a safety-deposit box at the bank? No, that wouldn't do--he wanted it with him, where he could look at it.

  At last he did begin to drift off, and his mind, freed by oncoming sleep, drifted along with no conscious guidance, a pinball in slow motion. He thought: It's got to be hidden, that's the thing... if Frannie had hidden hers better... if I hadn't read what she really thought of me ... her hypocrisy... if she had ...

  Harold sat bolt upright in bed, a little cry in his mouth, his eyes wide.

  He sat like that for a long time, and after a while he began to shiver. Did she know? Had it been Fran's footprint? Diaries ... journals ... ledgers ...

  At last he lay down again, but it was a long time before he slept. He kept wondering if Fran Goldsmith regularly wore a pair of tennis shoes or sneakers. And if she did, what did the pattern on their soles look like?

  Patterns of soles, patterns of souls. When he did sleep, his dreams were uneasy and more than once he cried out miserably in the dark, as if to ward off things that had already been let in forever.

  Stu let himself in at quarter past nine. Fran was curled up on the double bed, wearing one of his shirts--it came almost to her knees--and reading a book titled Fifty Friendly Plants. She got up when he came in.

  "Where have you been? I was worried!"

  Stu explained Harold's idea that they hunt for Mother Abagail so they could at least keep an eye on her. He didn't mention Sacred Cows. Unbuttoning his shirt, he finished: "We would have taken you along, kiddo, but you were nowhere to be found."

  "I was at the library," she said, watching as he took off his shirt and slipped it into the net laundry bag hanging from the back of the door. He was quite hairy, chest and back, and she found herself thinking that, until she met Stu, she had always found hairy men mildly repulsive. She supposed her relief at having him back was making her a little silly in the head.

  Harold had read her diary, she knew that now. She had been terribly afraid that Harold might connive to get Stu alone and ... well, do something to him. But why now, today, just when she had found out? If Harold had let the sleeping dog lie this long, wasn't it more logical to assume that he didn't want to wake the dog up at all? And wasn't it just as possible that by reading her diary Harold had seen the futility of his constant chase after her? Coming on top of the news that Mother Abagail had disappeared, she had been in a ripe mood to see ill omens in chicken entrails, but the fact was, it had simply been her diary Harold had read, not a confession to the crimes of the world. And if she told Stu what she had found out, she would succeed only in looking silly and maybe getting him pissed at Harold ... and probably at herself as well for being so silly in the first place.

  "No sign of her at all, Stu?"

  "Nope."

  "How did Harold seem?"

  Stu was taking off his pants. "Pretty well racked. Sorry his idea didn't pan out better. I invited him to supper whenever he wanted to come. I hope that's okay by you. You know, I really think I could get to like that sucker. You never could have convinced me of that the day I met you two in New Hampshire. Was it wrong to invite him?"

  "No," she said, after a considering pause. "No, I'd like to be on good terms with Harold." I'm sitting home thinking that Harold might be planning to blow his head off, she thought, and Stu's inviting him to dinner. Talk about your cases of the pregnant-woman vapors!

  Stu said, "If Mother Abagail doesn't show up by daylight, I thought I'd ask Harold if he wanted to go out again with me."

  "I'd like to go, too," Fran said quickly. "And there are a few others around here who aren't totally convinced that she's being fed by the ravens. Dick Vollman's one. Larry Underwood's another."

  "Okay, fine," he said, and joined her on the bed. "Say, what are you wearing under that shirt?"

  "A big strong man like yourself should be able to find that out without my help," Fran said primly.

  It turned out to be nothing.

  The next day's search-party started out modestly at eight o'clock with half a dozen searchers--Stu, Fran, Harold, Dick Vollman, Larry Underwood, and Lucy Swann. By noon the party had swelled to twenty, and by dusk (accompanied by the usual brief spat of rain and lightning in the foothills) there were better than fifty people combing the brush west of Boulder, splashing through streams, hunting up and down canyons, and stepping all over each other's CB transmissions.

  A strange mood of resigned dread had gradually replaced yesterday's acceptance. Despite the powerful force of the dreams that accorded Mother Abagail a semidivine status in the Zone, most of the people had been through enough to be realists about survival: The old woman was well past a hundred, and she had been out all night on her own. And now a second night was coming on.

  The fellow who had struggled across the country from Louisiana to Boulder with a party of twelve summed it up perfectly. He had come in with his people at noon the day before. When told that Mother Abagail was gone, this man, Norman Kellogg by name, threw his Astros baseball cap on the ground and said, "Ain't that my fucking luck ... who you got hunting her up?"

  Charlie Impening, who had more or less become the Zone's resident doomcrier (he had been the one to pass the cheerful news about snow in September), began to suggest to people that if Mother Abagail had bugged out, maybe that was a sign for all of them to bug out. After all, Boulder was just too damn close. Too close to what? Never mind, you know what it's too close to, and New York or Boston would make Mavis Impening's boy Charlie feel a whole hell of a lot safer. He had no takers. People were tired and ready to sit. If it got cold and there was no heat, they might move, but not before. They were healing. Impening was aske
d politely if he planned to go alone. Impening said he believed he would wait until a few more people had seen the daylight. Glen Bateman was heard to opine that Charlie Impening would make a hell of a poor Moses.

  "Resigned dread" was as far as the community's feelings went, Glen Bateman believed, because they were still rationally minded people in spite of all the dreams, in spite of their deep-seated dread concerning whatever might be going on west of the Rockies. Superstition, like true love, needs time to grow and reflect upon itself. When you finish a barn, he told Nick and Stu and Fran after darkness had put an end to the search for the night, you hang a horseshoe ends up over the door to keep the luck in. But if one of the nails falls out and the horseshoe swings points down, you don't abandon the barn.

  "The day may come when we or our children may abandon the barn if the horseshoe spills the luck out, but that's years away. Right now all we feel is a little strange and lost. And that will pass, I think. If Mother Abagail is dead--and God knows I hope she isn't--it probably couldn't have come at a better time for the mental health of this community."

  Nick wrote, "But if she was meant as a check for our Adversary, his opposite number, someone put here to keep the scales in balance ..."

  "Yes, I know," Glen said gloomily. "I know. The days when the horseshoe didn't matter may really be passing ... or already gone. Believe me, I know."

  Frannie said: "You don't really think our grandchildren are going to be superstitious natives, do you, Glen? Burning witches and spitting through their fingers for luck?"

  "I can't read the future, Fran," Glen said, and in the lamplight his face looked old and worn--the face, perhaps, of a failed magician. "I couldn't even properly see the effect Mother Abagail was having on the community until Stu pointed it out to me that night on Flagstaff Mountain. But I do know this: We're all in this town because of two events. The superflu we can charge off to the stupidity of the human race. It doesn't matter if we did it or the Russians, or the Latvians. Who emptied the beaker loses importance beside the general truth: At the end of all rationalism, the mass grave. The laws of physics, the laws of biology, the axioms of mathematics, they're all part of the deathtrip, because we are what we are. If it hadn't been Captain Trips, it would have been something else. The fashion was to blame it on 'technology,' but 'technology' is the trunk of the tree, not the roots. The roots are rationalism, and I would define that word so: 'Rationalism is the idea we can ever understand anything about the state of being.' It's a deathtrip. It always has been. So you can charge the superflu off to rationalism if you want. But the other reason we're here is the dreams, and the dreams are irrational. We've agreed not to talk about that simple fact while we're in committee, but we're not in committee now. So I'll say what we all know is true: We're here under the fiat of powers we don't understand. For me, that means we may be beginning to accept--only subconsciously now, and with plenty of slips backward due to culture lag--a different definition of existence. The idea that we can never understand anything about the state of being. And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then irrationalism might very well be a lifetrip ... at least unless it proves otherwise."