The Stand Read online

  So he'd sent the motorcycle crashing over the embankment and into a weed-choked gully and then he had peered at it with a kind of cautious terror, as if it could somehow rise up and smite him. Come on, he had thought, come on and stall out, ya sucker. But for a long time, the motorcycle wouldn't. For a long time it raved and bellowed down there in that gully, the rear wheel spinning fruitlessly, the hungry chain gobbling up last fall's leaves and spitting out clouds of brown, bitter-smelling dust. Blue smoke belched from the chromed exhaust-pipe. And even then he had been far enough gone to think there was something supernatural about it, that the cycle would right itself, rise out of its grave, and chew him up ... either that or he would look back one afternoon at the rising sound of an engine and see his cycle, this damned cycle which wouldn't just stall out and die decently, roaring straight down the highway at him, doing eighty, and bent over the handlebars would be that dark man, that hardcase, and riding pillion behind him, with her white silk deckpants rippling in the breeze, would be Rita Blakemoor, her face chalk white, her eyes slitted, her hair as dry and dead as a cornpatch in the wintertime. Then, at last, the cycle began to spit and chug and seizure and misfire, and when it finally stopped he had looked down at it and felt sad, as if it had been some part of himself he had killed. Without the cycle there was no way in which he could mount a serious assault on the silence, and the silence was, in a way, worse than his fears of dying or being seriously hurt in an accident. Since then he had been walking. He had gone through several small towns along Route 9 which had cycle shops, showroom models with the keys hanging right in them, but if he looked at them too long, the visions of himself lying beside the road in a pool of blood would rise up in vivid, unhealthy Technicolor, like something from one of those awful but somehow fascinating Charles Band horror movies, the ones where people kept dying under the wheels of large trucks or as a consequence of large, nameless bugs which had bred and grown in their warm vitals and finally burst free in a gut-busting display of flying flesh, and he would pass by, enduring the silence, pallid, shivering. He would pass by with exquisite little clusters of perspiration growing on his upper lip and in the hollows of his temples.

  He had lost weight--why not? He walked all day long, every day, from sunrise to sunset. He wasn't sleeping. The nightmares would wake him up by four and he would light his Coleman lamp and crouch by it, waiting for the sun to come up enough so he dared to walk. And he would go on walking until it was almost too dark to see and then make camp with the sneaky, urgent speed of a chain-gang fugitive. With camp made he would lie awake late, feeling like a man with about two grams of cocaine chasing itself through his system. Oh baby, shake, rattle, and roll. Also like a heavy coke user, he wasn't eating much; he never felt hungry. Cocaine does not enhance the appetite, and neither does terror. Larry hadn't touched coke since the long-ago party in California, but he was terrified all the time. The squawk of a bird in the woods made him twitch. The deathcry of some small animal as a larger one took it made him almost jump out of his skin. He had passed through slimness and skinniness, had traveled through scrawniness. He was now poised on some metaphoric (or metabolic) fence between scrawniness and emaciation. He had grown a beard and it was actually rather striking, a tawny red-gold two shades lighter than his hair. His eyes were sunken deep in his face; they glittered out of their sockets like small, desperate animals that had been trapped in twin pit-snares.

  "Cracking up," he moaned again. The broken desperation in this splintery whine horrified him. Had it gotten that bad? Once there had been a Larry Underwood who'd had a moderate hit record, who had visions of becoming the Elton John of his time . . . oh my dear, how Jerry Garcia would laugh at that . . . and now that fellow had been transmuted into this broken thing crawling on the black hottop of Route 9 somewhere in southeastern New Hampshire, crawling, just a crawling kingsnake, that was him. That other Larry Underwood could surely bear no relation to this crawling cheapskate . . . this . . .

  He tried to get up and couldn't.

  "Oh this is so ridiculous," he said, half laughing and half weeping.

  Across the road on a hill two hundred yards away, glimmering like a beautiful mirage, was a white and rambling New England farmhouse. It had green siding, green trim, and a green shingled roof. Rolling down from it was a green lawn just beginning to look shaggy. At the foot of the lawn, a small rill of brook ran; he could hear it gurgling and chuckling, an entrancing sound. A rock wall meandered along beside it, probably marking the edge of the property, and leaning over the wall at spaced intervals were big, shady elms. He would just do his World-Famous Crawling Cheapskate Wriggle over there and sit in the shade for a while, that's what he would do. And when he felt a little better about . . . about things in general . . . he would make it to his feet and go down to the brook and have a drink and a wash-up. Probably he smelled bad. Who cared, though? Who was there to smell him now that Rita was dead?

  Was she still lying there in that tent? he wondered morbidly. Swelling up? Gathering flies? Looking more and more like the black sweet treat in the comfort station on Transverse Number One? Where the hell else would she be? Golfing at Palm Springs with Bob Hope?

  "Christ, that's horrible," he whispered, and crawled across the road. Once he was in the shade he felt sure he could get to his feet, but it seemed like too much effort. He did spare enough energy, however, to glance slyly back the way he had come to make sure his cycle wasn't bearing down on him.

  It was at least fifteen degrees cooler in the shade, and Larry let out his breath in a long sigh of pleasure and relief. He put a hand to the back of his neck where the sun had been beating most of the day and pulled it back with a little hiss of pain. Sunburn pain? Get Xylocaine. And all that good shit. Get these men out of the hot sun. Burn, baby, burn. Watts. Remember Watts? Another blast from the past. The whole human race, just one big heavy blast from the past, a great big golden gasser.

  "Man, you're sick," he said, and leaned his head against the rough trunk of the elm tree and closed his eyes. Sun-dappled shade made moving patterns of red and black on the inside of his eyelids. The sound of water, chuckling and gurgling, was sweet and soothing. In a minute he would go down there and get a drink of water and wash up. In just a minute.

  He dozed.

  The minutes flowed by and his doze deepened into his first deep and dreamless sleep in days. His hands rested limply in his lap. His thin chest rose and fell, and his beard made his face look even thinner, the troubled face of a lone refugee who had escaped from a terrible slaughter none would believe. Little by little, the lines carved in his sunbaked face began to smooth out. He spiraled down to the deepest levels of unconsciousness and rested there like a small river creature dreamily estivating the summer away in cool mud. The sun moved lower in the sky.

  Near the creek's edge, the luxuriant screen of bushes rattled a little as something moved stealthily through them, paused, moved again. After a time, a boy emerged. He was perhaps thirteen, perhaps ten and tall for his age. He was naked except for Fruit of the Loom shorts. His body was tanned an even mahogany, except for the startling white band that began just above the waistband of his shorts. His skin was covered with the bumps of mosquito and chigger bites, some new, mostly old. In his right hand he held a butcher knife. The blade was a foot long, the edge serrated. It glittered hotly in the sun.

  Softly, bent forward slightly at the waist, he approached the elm and the rock wall until he stood right behind Larry. His eyes were greenish blue, a seawater color, slightly turned up at the corners, giving him a Chinese look. They were expressionless eyes, mildly savage. He raised the knife.

  A woman's voice, soft but firm, said: "No."

  He turned to her, head cocked and listening, the knife still raised. His attitude was both questioning and disappointed.

  "We'll watch and see," the woman's voice said.

  The boy paused, looking from the knife to Larry and then back to the knife again with a clear expression of longing, and then he retreat
ed back the way he had come.

  Larry slept on.

  When he woke up, the first thing Larry was aware of was that he felt good. The second thing was that he felt hungry. The third thing was that the sun was wrong--it seemed to have traveled backward across the sky. The fourth thing was that he had to, you should pardon the expression, piss like a racehorse.

  Standing and listening to the delicious crackle of his tendons as he stretched, he realized that he had not just napped; he had slept all night. He looked down at his watch and saw why the sun was wrong. It was nine-twenty in the morning. Hungry. There would be food in the big white house. Canned soup, maybe corned beef. His stomach rumbled.

  Before going up he knelt by the stream with his clothes off and splashed water all over himself. He noticed how scrawny he was getting --that was no way to run a railroad. He stood up, dried himself with his shirt, and pulled his trousers back on. A couple of stones poked their wet black backs out of the stream and he used them to cross. On the far side he suddenly froze and gazed toward the thick stand of bushes. The fear, which had been dormant in him ever since waking up, suddenly blazed up like an exploding pine knot and then subsided just as quickly. It had been a squirrel or a woodchuck that he had heard, possibly a fox. Nothing else. He turned away indifferently and began to walk up the lawn toward the big white house.

  Halfway there a thought rose to the surface of his mind like a bubble and popped. It happened casually, with no fanfare, but the implications brought him to a dead halt.

  The thought was: Why haven't you been riding a bicycle?

  He stood in the middle of the lawn, equidistant from the stream and the house, flabbergasted by the simplicity of it. He had been walking ever since he had ditched the Harley. Walking, wearing himself out, finally collapsing with sunstroke or something so close to it that it made no difference. And he could have been pedaling along, doing no more than a fast run if that's what he felt like, and he would probably be on the coast now, picking out his summer house and stocking it.

  He began to laugh, gently at first, a little bit spooked by the sound of it in all the quiet. Laughing when there was no one else around to laugh with was just another sign that you were taking a one-way trip to that fabled land of bananas. But the laughter sounded so real and hearty, so goddamned healthy, and so much like the old Larry Underwood that he just let it come. He stood with his hands on his hips and cocked his head back to the sky and just bellowed with laughter at his own amazing foolishness.

  Behind him, where the screening bushes by the creek were thickest, greenish-blue eyes watched all of this, and they watched as Larry at last continued up the lawn to the house, still laughing a little and shaking his head. They watched as he climbed the porch and tried the front door, and found it open. They watched as he disappeared inside. Then the bushes began to shake and make the rattling sound that Larry had heard and dismissed. The boy forced his way through, still naked except for his shorts, brandishing the butcher knife.

  Another hand appeared and caressed his shoulder. The boy stopped immediately. The woman came out--she was tall and imposing, but seemed not to move the bushes at all. Her hair was a thick, luxuriant black streaked with thick blazes of purest white; attractive, startling hair. It was twisted into a cable that hung over one shoulder and trailed away only as it reached the swell of her breast. When you looked at this woman you first noticed how tall she was, and then your eyes would be dragged away to that hair and you would consider it, you would think how you could almost feel its rough yet oily texture with your eyes. And if you were a man, you would find yourself wondering what she would look like with that hair unpinned, freed, spread over a pillow in a spill of moonlight. You would wonder what she would be like in bed. But she had never taken a man into herself. She was pure. She was waiting. There had been dreams. Once, in college, there had been the Ouija board. And she wondered again if this man might be the one.

  "Wait," she told the boy.

  She turned his agonized face up to her calm one. She knew what the trouble was.

  "The house will be all right. Why would he hurt the house, Joe?"

  He turned back and looked at the house, longingly, worriedly.

  "When he goes, we'll follow him."

  He shook his head viciously.

  "Yes; we have to. I have to." And she felt that strongly. He was not the one, perhaps, but even if he was not, he was a link in a chain she had followed for years, a chain that was now nearing its end.

  Joe--that was not really his name--raised the knife wildly, as if to plunge it into her. She made no move to protect herself or to flee, and he lowered it slowly. He turned toward the house and jabbed the knife at it.

  "No, you won't," she said. "Because he's a human being, and he'll lead us to ..." She fell silent. Other human beings, she had meant to finish. He's a human being, and he'll lead us to other human beings. But she was not sure that was what she meant, or even if it was, that it was all she meant. Already she felt pulled two ways at once, and she began to wish they had never seen Larry. She tried to caress the boy again but he jerked away angrily. He looked up at the big white house and his eyes were burning and jealous. After a while he slipped back into the bushes, glaring at her reproachfully. She followed him to make sure he would be all right. He lay down and curled up in a fetal position, cradling the knife to his chest. He put his thumb in his mouth and closed his eyes.

  Nadine went back to where the brook had made a small pool and knelt down. She drank from cupped hands, then settled in to watch the house. Her eyes were calm, her face very nearly that of a Raphael Madonna.

  Late that afternoon, as Larry biked along a treelined section of Route 9, a green reflectorized sign loomed ahead and he stopped to read it, slightly amazed. The sign said he was entering MAINE, VACATIONLAND. He could hardly believe it; he must have walked an incredible distance in his semidaze of fear. Either that or he had lost a couple of days somewhere. He was about to start riding again when something--a noise in the woods or perhaps only in his head--made him look sharply back over his shoulder. There was nothing, only Route 9 running back into New Hampshire, deserted.

  Since the big white house, where he had breakfasted on dry cereal and cheese spread from an aerosol can squeezed onto slightly stale Ritz crackers, he had several times had the strong feeling that he was being watched and followed. He was hearing things, perhaps even seeing things out of the corners of his eyes. His powers of observation, just starting to come fully to life in this strange situation, kept triggering at stimuli so slight as to be subliminal, nagging his nerve-endings with things so small that even in the aggregate they only formed a vague hunch, a feeling of "watched-ness." This feeling didn't frighten him as the others had. It had no feeling of hallucination or delirium about it. If someone was watching him and just lying back, it was probably because they were scared of him. And if they were scared of poor old skinny Larry Underwood, who was now too chicken even to go putting along on a motorcycle at twenty-five miles an hour, they were probably nothing to worry about.

  Now, standing astride the bike he had taken from a sporting goods shop some four miles east of the big white house, he called out clearly: "If someone's there, why don't you come on out? I won't hurt you."

  There was no answer. He stood on the road by the sign marking the border, watching and waiting. A bird twittered and then swooped across the sky. Nothing else moved. After a while he pushed on.

  By six o'clock that evening he had reached the little town of North Berwick, at the junction of Routes 9 and 4. He decided to camp there and push on to the seacoast in the morning.

  There was a small store at the North Berwick crossroads of 9 and 4, and inside he took a six-pack of beer from the dead cooler. It was Black Label, a brand he had never tried before--a regional beer, presumably. He also took a large bag of Humpty Dumpty Salt 'n Vinegar potato chips, and two cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew. He put these goods in his pack and went back out the door.

  Across
the street was a restaurant, and for just a moment he thought he saw two long shadows trailing back behind it and out of sight. It might have been his eyes playing him tricks, but he didn't think so. He considered running across the highway and seeing if he could surprise them out of hiding: Allee-allee-in-free, game's over, kids. He decided not to. He knew what fear was.

  He walked a little way down the highway instead, pushing his bike with the loaded knapsack swinging from the handlebars. He saw a large brick school with a stand of trees behind it. He gathered enough wood from the grove to make a fire of decent size and built it in the middle of the school's asphalt-paved playground. There was a creek nearby, flowing past a textile mill and under the highway. He cooled his beer in the water and cooked one of the cans of beef stew in its tin. He ate it from his Boy Scout messkit, sitting on one of the playground swings and rocking slowly back and forth with his shadow trailing out long across the faded lines of the basketball court.

  It occurred to him to wonder why he was so little afraid of the people who were following him--because he was sure now that there were people following him, at least two, maybe more. As a corollary, it occurred to him to wonder why he had felt so good all day long, as if some black poison had leaked out of his system during his long sleep the previous afternoon. Was it just that he had needed rest? That, and nothing more? It seemed too simple.