The Stand, Page 77

  "Yeah, that's not so great."

  "So after a while she met this guy," Lucy said. "He was the assistant phys ed coach at Burlington High. They snuck around, always looking over their shoulders, and I don't know if her husband had set someone up to spy on them, but after a while it didn't matter. After a while Joline got really flaky. She'd think that some guy waiting for a bus on the corner was one of her husband's friends. Or the salesman checking in behind her and Herb at some fleabag motel was. She'd think that even if the motel was somewhere way down in New York State. Or even the cop who gave them directions to a picnic spot when they were together. It got so bad that she'd give a little scream if a door slammed in the wind, and she'd jump every time someone came up her stairs. And since she was living in a place that was split up into seven little apartments, someone was almost always coming up the stairs. Herb got scared and left her. He didn't get scared of Joline's husband -- he got scared of her. And just before her husband came back on leave, Joline had a nervous breakdown. All because she liked to love a little too much... and because he was crazy jealous. Nadine reminds me of that girl, Larry. I'm sorry for her. I don't like her that much, I guess, but I sure am sorry for her. She looks terrible."

  "Are you saying Nadine is afraid of me the way that girl was afraid of her husband?"

  Lucy said: "Maybe. I'll tell you this -- wherever Nadine's husband is, he's not here."

  He laughed a little uneasily. "We ought to go back to bed. Tomorrow's going to be a heavy day."

  "Yes," she said, thinking he hadn't understood a word she said. And suddenly she burst into tears.

  "Hey," he said. "Hey." He tried to put an arm around her.

  She struck it off. "You're getting what you want from me; you don't have to do that!"

  There was still enough of the old Larry in him to wonder if her voice would carry back to camp.

  "Lucy, I never twisted your arm," he said grimly.

  "Oh, you're so stupid!" she cried, and beat at his leg. "Why are men so stupid, Larry? All you can see is what's in black and white. No, you never twisted my arm. I ain't like her. You could twist her arm and she'd still spit in your eye and cross her legs. Men have names for girls like me; they write them on bathroom stalls, I've heard. But all it is, is needing someone warm, needing to be warm. Needing to love. Is that so bad?"

  "No. No, it isn't. But Lucy--"

  "But you don't believe that," she said scornfully. "So you go on chasing Miss Highpockets and in the meantime you got Lucy to do the horizontal bop with when the sun goes down."

  He sat quietly, nodding. It was true, every word of it. He was too tired, too Christless beat, to argue against it. She seemed to see that; her face softened and she put a hand on his arm.

  "If you catch her, Larry, I'll be the first to throw you a bouquet. I never held a grudge in my life. Just... try not to be too disappointed. "

  "Lucy--"

  Her voice rose suddenly, rough with unexpected power, and for a moment his arms goosefleshed. "I just happen to think love is very important, only love will get us through this, good connections; it's hate against us, worse, it's emptiness." Her voice dropped. "You're right. It's late. I'm going back to bed. Coming?"

  "Yes," he said, and as they stood up, he took her in his arms with no calculation at all and kissed her firmly. "I love you as much as I can, Lucy."

  "I know that," she said, and gave him a tired smile. "I know that, Larry."

  This time when he put his arm around her she let it stay. They walked back to camp together, made diffident love, slept.

  Nadine came awake like a cat in the dark some twenty minutes after Larry Underwood and Lucy Swann had come back to camp, ten minutes after they had finished their act of love and drifted off to sleep.

  The high iron of terror sang in her veins.

  Someone wants me, she thought, listening as the millrace of her heart slowed. Her eyes, wide and full of darkness, stared up to where the overhanging branches of an elm laced the sky with shadows. There's that. Someone wants me. It's true.

  But... it's so cold.

  Her parents and her brother had been killed in a car accident when she was six; she hadn't gone along that day to see her aunt and uncle, staying behind instead to play with a friend from down the street. They had liked brother best anyway, she could remember that. Brother hadn't been like her, little halfling stolen from an orphanage cradle at the age of four and a half months. Brother's origins had been clear. Brother had been -- trumpets, please -- Their Own. But Nadine had always and forever belonged only to Nadine. She was the earth's child.

  After the accident she had gone to live with the aunt and uncle, because they were the only two relatives. The White Mountains of eastern New Hampshire. She remembered that they had taken her for a ride on the Cog Railway up Mount Washington for her eighth birthday and the altitude had caused a bloody nose and they had been angry with her. Aunt and Uncle were too old, they had been in their mid-fifties when she turned sixteen, the year she had run fleetly through the dewy grass under the moon -- the night of wine, when dreams condensed out of thin air like the nightmilk of fantasy. A lovenight. And if the boy caught her she would have given him whatever prizes were hers to give, and what did it matter if he caught her? They had run, wasn't that the important thing?

  But he hadn't caught her. A cloud had drifted over the moon. The dew began to feel clammy and unpleasant, frightening. The taste of wine in her mouth had somehow changed to the taste of electric spit, slightly sour. A kind of metamorphosis had taken place, a feeling that she should, must wait.

  And where had he been then, her intended, her dark bridegroom? On what streets, what back roads, clocking along in outside suburban darkness while inside the brittle clink of cocktail chatter broke the world into neat and rational sections? What cold winds were his? How many sticks of dynamite in his frayed packsack? Who knew what his name had been when she was sixteen? How ancient was he? Where had been his home? What sort of mother had held him to her breast? She was only sure that he was an orphan as she was, his time still to come. He walked mostly on roads that hadn't even been laid down yet, while she had but one foot on those same roads. The junction where they would meet was far ahead. He was an American man, she knew that, a man who would have a taste for milk and apple pie, a man who would appreciate the homely beauty of red check and gingham. His home was America, and his ways were the secret ways, the highways in hiding, the underground railways where directions are written in runes. He was the other man, the other face, the hardcase, the dark man, the Walkin Dude, and his rundown bootheels clocked along the perfumed ways of the summer night.

  Who knoweth when the bridegroom comes?

  She had waited for him, the unbroken vessel. At sixteen she had almost fallen, and again in college. Both of them had gone away angry and perplexed, the way Larry was now, sensing the crossroads inside her, the sense of some preordained, mystic junction point.

  Boulder was the place where the roads diverged.

  The time was close. He had called, bid her come.

  After college she had buried herself in her work, had shared a rented house with two other girls. What two girls? Well, they came and went. Only Nadine stayed, and she was pleasant to the young men her changing roommates brought home, but she never had a young man herself. She supposed they talked about her, called her spinster-in-waiting, maybe even conjectured that she might be a carefully circumspect lesbian. It wasn't true. She was simply--

  Unbroken.

  Waiting.

  It had seemed to her sometimes that a change was coming. She would be putting toys away in the silent classroom at the end of the day and suddenly she would pause, her eyes lambent and watchful, a jack-in-the-box held forgotten in one hand. And she would think: A change is coming ... a great wind is going to blow. Sometimes, when such a thought came to her, she would find herself looking back over her shoulder like something pursued. Then it would break and she would laugh uneasily.

  Her hair
had begun to gray in her sixteenth year, the year she had been chased and not caught -- just a few strands at first, startlingly visible in all the black, and not gray, no, that was the wrong word... white, it had been white.

  Years later she had attended a party in the basement lounge of a frathouse. The lights had been low and after a while the people had drifted away by twos. Many of the girls--Nadine among them--had signed out for overnight from their dorms. She had fully intended to go through with it ... but something that was still buried beneath the months and years had held her back. And the next morning, in the cold light of 7 A.M., she had looked at herself in one of a long line of dormitory bathroom mirrors and saw that the white had advanced again, seemingly overnight -- although that, of course, was impossible.

  And so the years had passed, ticking away like seasons in a dry age, and there had been feelings, yes, feelings, and sometimes in the dead grave of night she had awakened both hot and cold, bathed in sweat, deliciously alive and aware in the trench of her bed, thinking of weird dark sex in a kind of gutter ecstasy. Rolling in hot liquid. Coming and biting at the same time. And the mornings after she would go to the mirror and she would fancy that she saw more white there.

  Through those years she was, outwardly, only Nadine Cross: sweet, good with the children, good at her job, single. Once such a woman would have caused comment and curiosity in the community, but times had changed. And her beauty was so singular that it somehow seemed perfectly right for her to be just as she was.

  Now times were going to change again.

  Now the change was coming, and in her dreams she had begun to know her bridegroom, to understand him a little, even though she had never seen his face. He was the one she had been waiting for. She wanted to go to him... but she didn't want to. She was meant for him, but he terrified her.

  Then Joe had come, and after him, Larry. Things had become terribly complicated then. She began to feel like a prize ring in a tug-of-war rope. She knew that her purity, her virginity, was somehow important to the dark man. That if she let Larry have her (or if she let any man have her), the dark enchantment would end. And she was attracted to Larry. She had set out, quite deliberately, to let him have her -- again, she had intended to go through with it. Let him have her, let it end, let it all end. She was tired, and Larry was right. She had waited too long for the other one, through too many dry years.

  But Larry was not right... or so it had seemed at first. She had brushed his initial advances away with a kind of contempt, the way a mare might switch at a fly with her tail. She could remember thinking: If that's all there is to him, who could blame me for rejecting his suit?

  She had followed him, though. That was a fact. But she had been frantic to reach other people, not just because of Joe but because she had come almost to the point of deserting the boy and striking west on her own to find the man. Only years of ingrained responsibility to the children who had been placed under her care had kept her from doing that ... and her knowledge that, left on his own, Joe would die.

  In a world where so many have died, to parcel out more death is surely the gravest sin.

  So she had gone with Larry, who was, after all, better than nothing or no one.

  But it had turned out that there was a great deal more to Larry Underwood than nothing or no one -- he was like one of those optical illusions (maybe even to himself) where the water looks shallow, only an inch or two deep, but when you put your hand in you've suddenly got your arm wet to the shoulder. The way he had gotten to know Joe, that was one thing. The way Joe had taken to him was another, her own jealous reaction to the growing relationship between Joe and Larry was a third. At the motorcycle dealership in Wells, Larry had bet the fingers of both hands on the boy, and he had won.

  If they had not been concentrating their full attention on the lid covering the gasoline tank, they would have seen her mouth drop open in a slack o of surprise. She had stood watching them, unable to move, her gaze concentrated on the bright metal line of the crowbar, waiting for it to first jitter and then fall away. She only realized after it was over that she had been waiting for the screams to begin.

  Then the lid was up and over and she was faced with her own error in judgment, an error so deep it was fundamental. In that case he had known Joe better than she, and without any special training, and on much shorter notice. Only hindsight allowed her to understand how important the guitar episode had been, how quickly and fundamentally it had defined Larry's relationship with Joe. And what was at the center of that relationship?

  Why, dependence, of course -- what else could have caused that sudden jangle of jealousy all through her system? If Joe had depended on Larry, that would have been one thing, normal and acceptable. What had upset her was that Larry also depended on Joe, needed Joe in a way she didn't ... and Joe knew it.

  Had her judgment been that wrong about Larry's character? She thought now that the answer was yes. That nervous, self-serving exterior was a veneer, and it was being worn away by hard use. Just the fact that he had held them all together on this long trip spoke for his determination.

  The conclusion seemed clear. Beneath her decision to let Larry make love to her, a part of her was still committed to the other man ... and making love to Larry would be like killing that part of herself forever. She wasn't sure she could do that.

  And she wasn't the only one who had dreamed of the dark man now.

  That had disturbed her at first, then frightened her. Fright was all it was when she had only Joe and Larry to compare notes with; when they met Lucy Swann and she said she'd had the same sort of dream, fright became a kind of frenzied terror. It was no longer possible to tell herself their dreams only sounded like hers. What if everyone left was having them? What if the dark man's time had come around at last--not just for her, but for everyone left on the planet?

  This idea more than any other raised the conflicting emotions of utter terror and strong attraction within her. She had held to the idea of Stovington with a nearly panicky grip. It stood, by nature of its function, as a symbol of sanity and rationality against the rising tide of dark magic she felt around her. But Stovington had been deserted, a mockery of the safe haven she had built it up to be in her mind. The symbol of sanity and rationality was a deathhouse.

  As they moved west, picking up survivors, her hope that it could somehow end for her without confrontation had gradually died. It died as Larry grew in her estimation. He was sleeping with Lucy Swann now, but what did that matter? She was spoken for. The others had been having two opposing dreams: the dark man and the old woman. The old woman seemed to stand for some sort of elemental force, just as the dark man did. The old woman was the nucleus the others were gradually cohering around.

  Nadine had never dreamed of her.

  Only of the dark man. And when the dreams of the others had suddenly faded away as inexplicably as they had come, her own dreams had seemed to grow in power and in clarity.

  She knew many things which they did not. The dark man's name was Randall Flagg. Those in the West who opposed him or went against his way of doing things had either been crucified or driven mad somehow and set free to wander in the boiling sink of Death Valley. There were small groups of technical people in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but they were only temporary; very soon they would be moving to Las Vegas, where the main concentration of people was growing. For him there was no hurry. Summer was on the downside now. Soon the Rocky Mountain passes would be filling with snow, and while there were plows to clear them, they would not be able to spare enough warm bodies to man the plows. There would be a long winter in which to consolidate. And next April... or May...

  Nadine lay in the dark, looking up at the sky.

  Boulder was her last hope. The old woman was her last hope. The sanity and rationality she had hoped to find at Stovington had begun to form in Boulder. They were good, she thought, the good guys, and if only it could be that simple for her, caught in her crazy web of conflicting desires. />
  Played over and over again, like a dominant chord, was her own firm belief that murder in this decimated world was the gravest sin, and her heart told her firmly and without question that death was Randall Flagg's business. But oh how she wanted his cold kiss -- more than she had wanted the kisses of the high school boy, or the college boy... even more, she feared, than Larry Underwood's kiss and embrace.

  We'll be in Boulder tomorrow, she thought. Maybe I'll know then if the trip is over or...

  A shooting star scratched its fire across the sky, and like a child, she wished on it.

  CHAPTER 50

  Dawn was coming up, painting the eastern sky a delicate rose color. Stu Redman and Glen Bateman were about halfway up Flagstaff Mountain in West Boulder, where the first foothills of the Rockies rise up out of the flat plains like a vision of prehistory. In the dawnlight Stu thought that the pines crawling between the naked and nearly perpendicular stone faces looked like the veins ridging some giant's hand that had poked out of the earth. Somewhere to the east, Nadine Cross was at last falling into a thin, unsatisfactory sleep.

  "I'm going to have a headache this afternoon," Glen said. "I don't believe I've stayed up drinking all night since I was an undergrad."

  "Sunrise is worth it," Stu said.

  "Yes, it is. Beautiful. Have you ever been in the Rockies before?"

  "Nope," Stu said. "But I'm glad I came." He hoisted the jug of wine and had a swallow. "I got quite a buzz on myself." He looked out over the view in silence for a few moments and then turned to Glen with a slanted smile. "What's going to happen now?"

  "Happen?" Glen raised his eyebrows.

  "Sure. That's why I got you up here. Told Frannie, 'I'm gonna get him good n drunk and then pick his brains.' She said fine."

  Glen grinned. "There are no tea leaves in the bottom of a wine bottle."

  "No, but she explained to me just what it is you used to be. Sociology. The study of group interaction. So make some educated guesses."