The Stand Read online

  The Triumph had slid into the guardrail, and Harold had been flicked over the side like a bug. There had been an excruciating pain in his right leg. He had heard the wet snap as it broke. He screamed. Then hardscrabble was coming up to meet him, hardscrabble that was falling away at a steep, sickening angle toward the gorge below. He could hear fast-flowing water somewhere down there.

  He hit the ground, cartwheeled high into the air, screamed again, came down on his right leg once more, heard it break someplace else, went flying into the air again, came down, rolled, and suddenly fetched up against a dead tree that had heeled over in some years-ago thunderstorm. If it hadn't been there, he would have gone into the gorge and the mountain trout could have snacked on him instead of the buzzards.

  He wrote in his notebook, still marveling at the straggling, child-size letters: I don't blame Nadine. That was true. But he had blamed her then.

  Shocked, shaken, scraped raw, his right leg a bolt of agony, he had picked himself up and had crawled a little way up the slope. Far above him, he saw Nadine looking over the guardrail. Her face was white and tiny, a doll's face.

  "Nadine!" he cried. His voice came out in a hard croak. "The rope! It's in the left saddlebag!"

  She only looked down at him. He had begun to think she hadn't heard him and he was preparing to repeat when he saw her head move to the left, to the right, to the left again. Very slowly. She was shaking her head.

  "Nadine! I can't get up without the rope! My leg's broken!"

  She didn't answer. She was only looking down at him, not even shaking her head now. He began to have the feeling he was down in a deep hole, and she was looking at him over the rim of it.

  "Nadine, toss me the rope!"

  That slow headshaking again, as terrible as the door of a crypt swinging slowly shut on a man not yet dead but rather in the grip of some terrible catalepsy.

  "NADINE! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!"

  At last her voice drifted down to him, small but perfectly audible in the great mountain stillness. "All of this was arranged, Harold. I have to go on. I'm very sorry."

  But she made no move to go; she remained at the guardrail, watching him where he lay some two hundred feet below. Already there were flies, busily sampling his blood on the various rocks where he had hit and scraped off some of himself.

  Harold began to crawl upward, dragging his shattered leg behind him. At first there was no hate, no need to put a bullet in her. It only seemed vital that he get close enough to read her expression.

  It was a little past noon. It was hot. Sweat dripped from his face and onto the sharp pebbles and rocks he was climbing over. He moved by dragging himself upward on his elbows and pushing with his left leg, like a crippled insect. His breath rasped in and out of his throat, a hot file. He had no idea how long it went on, but once or twice he bumped his bad leg against a stone outcropping, and the giant burst of pain had caused him to gray out. Several times he had slipped backward, moaning helplessly.

  At last he became stupidly aware that he could go no farther. The shadows had changed. Three hours had passed. He could not remember the last time he had looked up toward the guardrail and the road; over an hour ago, surely. In his pain, he had been completely absorbed in whatever minute progress he was making. Nadine had probably left long ago.

  But she had still been there, and although he had only succeeded in gaining twenty-five feet or so, the expression on her face was hellishly clear. It was one of grieving sorrow, but her eyes were flat and far away.

  Her eyes were with him.

  That was when he began to hate her, and he felt for the shoulder holster. The Colt was still there, held in during his tumbling fall by the strap across the butt. He snapped the strap off, hunching his body craftily so she wouldn't see.

  "Nadine--"

  "It's better this way, Harold. Better for you, because his way would be so much worse. You see that, don't you? You wouldn't want to meet him face-to-face, Harold. He feels that someone who would betray one side would probably betray the other. He'd kill you, but he'd drive you mad first. He has that power. He let me choose. This way ... or his way. I chose this. You can end it quickly if you're brave. You know what I mean."

  He checked the loads in the pistol for the first of hundreds (maybe thousands) of times, keeping the gun in the shadowed hollow of one lacerated and shredded elbow.

  "What about you?" he called up. "Aren't you a betrayer, too?"

  Her voice was sad. "I never betrayed him in my heart."

  "I believe that's exactly where you did betray him," Harold called up to her. He tried to put a large expression of sincerity on his face, but he was actually calculating the distance. He would have two shots at the most. And a pistol was a notoriously chancy weapon. "I believe he knows it, too."

  "He needs me," she said, "and I need him. You were never in it, Harold. And if we'd gone on together, I might have ... might have let you do something to me. That small thing. And that would have destroyed everything. I couldn't take the smallest chance that might happen after all the sacrifice and blood and nastiness. We sold our souls together, Harold, but there's enough of me left to want full value for mine."

  "I'll give you full value," Harold said, and managed to get up on his knees. The sun was dazzling. Vertigo seized him in rough hands, whirling the gyroscope balance inside his head. He seemed to hear voices--a voice --roaring in surprised protest. He pulled the trigger. The shot echoed, bounced back, was thrown from cliff-face to cliff-face, cracking and whacking and fading. Comical surprise spread over Nadine's face.

  Harold thought in a drunken kind of triumph: She didn't think I had it in me! Her mouth hung open in a shocked, round o. Her eyes were wide. The fingers of her hands tensed and flew up, as if she were about to play some abnormal tune on the piano. The moment was so sweet that he lost a second or two savoring it and not realizing that he had missed. When he did realize, he brought the pistol back down, trying to aim it, locking his right wrist with his left hand.

  "Harold! No! You can't!"

  Can't I? It's such a little thing, squeezing a trigger. Sure I can.

  She seemed too shocked to move, and as the pistol's front sight came to rest in the hollow of her throat, he felt a sudden cold certainty that this was how it had been meant to end, in a short and meaningless spate of violence.

  He had her, dead in his sights.

  But as he started to pull the trigger, two things happened. Sweat ran into his eyes, doubling his vision. And he began to slide. He later told himself that the loose gravel had given way, or that his mangled leg had buckled, or both. It might even have been true. But it felt ... it felt like a push, and in the long nights between then and now, he had not been able to convince himself otherwise. The daytime Harold was stubbornly rational to the end, but in the night the hideous certainty stole over him that in the end it was the dark man himself who had stepped in to thwart him. The shot he had meant to put smack into the hollow of her throat went wild: high, wide, and handsome into the indifferent blue sky. Harold went rolling and tumbling back down to the dead tree, his right leg twisting and buckling, a huge sheet of agony from ankle to groin.

  He had struck the tree and passed out. When he came to again, it was just past dusk and the moon, three quarters full, was riding solemnly over the gorge. Nadine was gone.

  He spent the first night in a delirium of terror, sure that he would be unable to crawl back up to the road, sure he would die in the ravine. When morning came he began to crawl upward again nevertheless, sweating and racked with pain.

  He began around seven o'clock, just about the time the big orange Burial Committee trucks would be leaving the bus depot back in Boulder. He finally wrapped one raw and blistered hand around the guardrail cable at five o'clock that afternoon. His motorcycle was still there, and he nearly wept with relief. He dug some cans and the opener out of one of the saddlebags with frantic haste, opened one of the cans, and crammed cold corned beef hash into his mouth in double handful
s. But it tasted bad, and after a long struggle he threw it up.

  He began to understand the irrefutable fact of his coming death then, and he lay beside the Triumph and wept, his twisted leg under him. After that he was able to sleep a little.

  The following day he was drenched by a pounding rainshower that left him soaked and shivering. His leg had begun to smell of gangrene, and he took pains to keep the Cold Woodsman sheltered from the wet with his body. That evening he had begun to write in the Permacover notebook and discovered for the first time that his handwriting was beginning to regress. He found himself thinking of a story by Daniel Keyes--"Flowers for Algernon," it had been called. In it, a bunch of scientists had somehow turned a mentally retarded janitor into a genius ... for a while. And then the poor guy began to lose it. What was the guy's name? Charley something, right? Sure, because that was the name of the movie they made out of it. Charly. A pretty good movie. Not as good as the story, full of sixties psychedelic shit as he remembered, but still pretty good. Harold had gone to the movies a lot in the old days, and he had watched a lot more on the family VCR. Back in the days when the world had been what the Pentagon would have called a quote viable alternative unquote. He had watched most of them alone.

  He wrote in his notebook, the words emerging slowly from the straggling letters:

  Are they all dead, I wonder? The committee? If so, I am sorry. I was misled. That is a poor excuse for my actions, but I swear out of all I know that it is the only excuse that ever matters. The dark man is as real as the superflu itself, as real as the atomic bombs that still sit somewhere in their leadlined closets. And when the end comes, and when it is as horrible as good men always knew it would be, there is only one thing to say as all those good men approach the Throne of Judgment: I was misled.

  Harold read what he had written and passed a thin and trembling hand over his brow. It wasn't a good excuse; it was a bad one. Pretty it up however you would, it still smelled. Someone who read that paragraph after reading his ledger would see him as a total hypocrite. He had seen himself as the king of anarchy, but the dark man had seen through him and had reduced him effortlessly to a shivering bag of bones dying badly by the highway. His leg had swelled up like an innertube, it smelled like gassy, overripe bananas, and he sat here with buzzards swooping and diving on the thermals overhead, trying to rationalize the unspeakable. He had fallen victim to his own protracted adolescence, it was as simple as that. He had been poisoned by his own lethal visions.

  Dying, he felt as if he had gained a little sanity and maybe even a little dignity. He did not want to demean that with small excuses that would come limping off the page on crutches.

  "I could have been something in Boulder," he said quietly, and the simple, awful truth of that might have brought tears if he hadn't been so tired and so dehydrated. He looked at the straggling letters on the page, and from there to the Colt. Suddenly he wanted it over, and he tried to think how to put a finish to his life in the truest, simplest way he could. It seemed more necessary than ever to write it and leave it for whoever might find him, in one year or in ten.

  He gripped the pen. Thought. Wrote:

  I apologize for the destructive things I have done, but do not deny that I did them of my own free will. On my school papers, I always signed my name Harold Emery Lauder. I signed my manuscripts--poor things that they were--the same way. God help me, I once wrote it on the roof of a barn in letters three feet high. I want to sign this by a name given me in Boulder. I could not accept it then, but I take it now freely.

  I am going to die in my right mind.

  Writing neatly at the bottom, he affixed his signature: Hawk.

  He put the Permacover notebook into the Triumph's saddlebag. He capped the pen and clipped it in his pocket. He put the muzzle of the Colt into his mouth and looked up at the blue sky. He thought of a game they had played when they were children, a game the others had teased him about because he never quite dared to go through with it. There was a gravel pit out on one of the back roads, and you could jump off the edge and fall a heartstopping distance before hitting the sand, rolling over and over, and finally climbing up to do it all over again.

  All except Harold. Harold would stand on the lip of the drop and chant, One ... Two ... Three! just like the others, but the talisman never worked. His legs remained locked. He could not bring himself to jump. And the others sometimes chased him home, shouting at him, calling him Harold the Pansy.

  He thought: If I could have brought myself to jump once ... just once ... I might not be here. Well, last time pays for all.

  He thought: One ... Two ... THREE!

  He pulled the trigger.

  The gun went off.

  Harold jumped.

  CHAPTER 65

  North of Las Vegas is Emigrant Valley, and that night a small spark of fire glowed in its tumbled wilderness. Randall Flagg sat beside it, moodily cooking the carcass of a small rabbit. He turned it steadily on the crude rotisserie he had made, watching it sizzle and spit grease into the fire. There was a light breeze, blowing the savory smell out into the desert, and the wolves had come. They sat two rises over from his fire, howling at the nearly full moon and at the smell of cooking meat. Every now and then he would glance at them and two or three would begin to fight, biting and snapping and kicking with their powerful back legs until the weakest was banished. Then the others would begin to howl again, their snouts pointed at the bloated, reddish moon.

  But the wolves bored him now.

  He wore his jeans and his tattered walking boots and his sheepskin jacket with its two buttons on the breast pockets: smiley-smile and HOW'S YOUR PORK? The night wind flapped fitfully at his collar.

  He didn't like the way things were going.

  There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn. The old woman had died and at first he had thought that was good. In spite of everything, he had been afraid of the old woman. She had died, and he had told Dayna Jurgens that she had died in a coma ... but was it true? He was no longer quite so sure.

  Had she talked, at the end? And if so, what had she said?

  What were they planning?

  He had developed a sort of third eye. It was like the levitating ability; something he had and accepted but which he didn't really understand. He was able to send it out, to see ... almost always. But sometimes the eye fell mysteriously blind. He had been able to look into the old woman's death chamber, had seen them gathered around her, their tailfeathers still singed from Harold and Nadine's little surprise ... but then the vision had faded away and he had been back in the desert, wrapped in his bedroll, looking up and seeing nothing but Cassiopeia in her starry rocking chair. And there had been a voice inside him that said: She's gone. They waited for her to talk but she never did.

  But he no longer trusted the voice.

  There was the troubling matter of the spies.

  The Judge, with his head blown off.

  The girl, who had eluded him at the last second. And she had known, Goddammit! She had known!

  He threw a sudden furious stare at the wolves and nearly half a dozen fell to fighting, their guttural sounds like ripping cloth in the stillness.

  He knew all their secrets except ... the third. Who was the third? He had sent the Eye out over and over again, and it afforded him with nothing but the cryptic, idiotic face of the moon. M-O-O-N, that spells moon.

  Who was the third?

  How had the girl been able to escape him? He had been taken utterly by surprise, left with nothing but a handful of her blouse. He had known about her knife, that had been child's play, but not about that sudden leap at the window-wall. And the coldblooded way she had taken her own life, without a moment's hesitation. A mere space of seconds and she had been gone.

  His thoughts chased each other like weasels in the dark.

  Things were getting just a trifle flaky around the edges. He didn't like it.

  Lauder, for inst
ance. There was Lauder.

  He had performed so excellently, like one of those little windup toys with a key sticking out of its back. Go here. Go there. Do this. Do that. But the dynamite bomb had only gotten two of them--all that planning, all that effort spoiled by that dying old nigger woman's return. And then ... after Harold had been disposed of ... he had nearly killed Nadine! He still felt a burst of amazed anger when he thought about it. And the dumb cunt had stood there with her mouth hanging open, waiting for him to do it again, almost as if she wanted to be killed. And who was going to end up with all this, if Nadine died?

  Who, if not his son?

  The rabbit was done. He slipped it off the spit and onto his tin plate.

  "All right, all you asshole gyrenes, chow down!"

  That made him grin right out loud. Had he been a Marine once? He thought so. Strictly the Parris Island variety, though. There had been a kid, a defective, name of Boo Dinkway. They had ...

  What?

  Flagg frowned down at his messkit. Had they beaten ole Boo into the ground with those padded poles? Scragged him somehow? He seemed to remember something about gasoline. But what?

  In a sudden rage, he almost slung the freshly cooked rabbit into the fire. He should be able to remember that, goddammit!

  "Chow down, grunts," he whispered, but this time there was only a whiff of memory lane.

  He was losing himself. Once he had been able to look back over the sixties, seventies, and eighties like a man looking down a double flight of stairs leading into a darkened room. Now he could only clearly remember the events since the superflu. Beyond that there was nothing but a haze that would sometimes lift a tiny bit, just enough to afford a glimpse of some enigmatic object or memory (Boo Dinkway, for instance ... if there ever had been such a person) before closing down again.

  The earliest memory he could now be sure of was of walking south on US 51, heading toward Mountain City and the home of Kit Bradenton.

  Of being born. Born again.

  He was no longer strictly a man, if he had ever been one. He was like an onion, slowly peeling away one layer at a time, only it was the trappings of humanity that seemed to be peeling away: organized reflection, memory, possibly even free will ... if there ever had been such a thing.