The Stand Read online

  "I've wanted you for a pretty long time now," Stu said without looking directly at her. "I guess you know that."

  "I wanted to avoid trouble with Harold," she said. "And there's something else that--"

  "Harold's got a ways to go," Stu said, "but he's got the makings of a fine man somewhere inside him if he'll toughen up. You like him, don't you?"

  "That's not the right word. There isn't a word in English for how I feel about Harold."

  "How do you feel about me?" he asked.

  She looked at him and found she couldn't say she loved him, couldn't say it right out, although she wanted to.

  "No," he said, as if she'd contradicted him, "I just like to get things straight. I guess you'd just as soon not have Harold know anything about this yet. Isn't that right?"

  "Yes," she said gratefully.

  "It's just as well. If we lie low, it may take care of itself. I've seen him lookin at Patty. She's about his age."

  "I don't know ..."

  "You feel a debt of gratitude to him, don't you?"

  "I suppose so. We were the only two left in Ogunquit, and--"

  "That was luck, no more, Frannie. You don't want to let anyone put you in a headhold over something that was pure luck."

  "I suppose."

  "I guess I love you," he said. "That's not so easy for me to say."

  "I guess I love you, too. But there's something else ..."

  "I knew that."

  "You asked me why I stopped taking the pills." She plucked at her shirt, not daring to look at him. Her lips felt unnaturally dry. "I thought they might be bad for the baby," she whispered.

  "For the." He stopped. Then he grasped her and turned her to face him. "You're pregnant?"

  She nodded.

  "And you didn't tell anyone?"

  "No."

  "Harold. Does Harold know?"

  "No one but you."

  "God-almighty-damn," he said. He was peering into her face in a concentrated way that scared her. She had imagined one of two things: he would leave her immediately (as Jess undoubtedly would have done if he had discovered she was pregnant with another man's child) or he would hug her, tell her not to worry, that he would take care of everything. She had never expected this startled, close scrutiny, and she found herself remembering the night she had told her father in the garden. His look had been very much like this one. She wished she had told Stu what her situation was before they had made love. Maybe then they wouldn't have made love at all, but at least he wouldn't have been able to feel he had somehow been taken advantage of, that she was ... what was the old phrase? Damaged goods. Was he thinking that? She simply could not tell.

  "Stu?" she said in a frightened voice.

  "You didn't tell anyone," he repeated.

  "I didn't know how." Her tears were close to the surface now.

  "When are you due?"

  "January," she said, and the tears came.

  He held her and made her know it was all right without saying anything. He didn't tell her not to worry or that he would take care of everything, but he made love to her again and she thought that she had never been so happy.

  Neither of them saw Harold, as shadowy and as silent as the dark man himself, standing in the bushes and looking at them. Neither of them knew that his eyes squinted down into small, deadly triangles as Fran cried out her pleasure at the end of it, as her good orgasm burst through her.

  By the time they had finished, it was full dark.

  Harold slipped away silently.

  From Fran Goldsmith's Diary

  August 1, 1990

  No entry last night, too excited, too happy. Stu and I are together.

  He has agreed that I'd better keep the secret of my Lone Ranger as long as possible, hopefully until we are settled. If it's to be Colorado, that's okay with me. The way I feel tonight, the mountains of the moon would be okay with me. Do I sound like a dizzy schoolgirl? Well--if a lady can't sound like a dizzy schoolgirl in her diary, where can she sound like one?

  But I must say one other thing before I drop the subject of the Lone Ranger. It has to do with my "maternal instinct." Is there such a thing? I think yes. Probably hormonal. I have not felt my old self for some weeks now, but it's very hard to separate the changes caused by my pregnancy from the changes caused by the terrible disaster which has overtaken the world. But there IS a certain jealous feeling ("jealousy" isn't really the right word, but it's the closest I can seem to come to the right word tonight), a feeling that you have moved a little closer to the center of the universe and must protect your position there. That's why the Veronal seems a greater risk than the bad dreams, although my rational mind believes that Veronal would not hurt the baby at all--not, at least, at the low levels the others have been maintaining. And I suppose that jealous feeling is also a part of the love I feel for Stu Redman. I feel I am loving, as well as eating, for two.

  Otherwise, I must be quick. I need my sleep, no matter what dreams may come. We haven't made it all the way across Indiana as quickly as we had hoped--a horrible clog of vehicles near the Elkhart interchange slowed us down. A good many of the vehicles were army. There were dead soldiers. Glen, Susan Stem, Dayna, and Stu took as much firepower as they could find--about 2 dozen rifles, some grenades, and--yes, folks, it's true--a rocket launcher. As I write now, Harold and Stu are trying to figure out the rocket launcher, for which there are 17 or 18 rockets. Please God they don't blow themselves up.

  Speaking of Harold, I must tell you, dear diary, that he doesn't SUSPECT A THING (sounds like a line from an old Bette Davis movie, doesn't it). When we catch up with Mother Abigail's party I suppose he will have to be told; it would not be fair to hide it any longer, come what may.

  But today he was brighter & more cheerful than I have ever seen him. He grinned so much I thought his face would crack! He was the one who suggested Stu help him with that dangerous rocket launcher, and

  But here they come back now. Will finish later.

  Frannie slept heavily and dreamlessly. So did they all, with the exception of Harold Lauder. Sometime shortly after midnight he rose and walked softly to where Frannie lay, and stood looking down at her. He was not smiling now, although he had smiled all day. At times he had felt that the smile would crack his face right up the middle and spill out his whirling brains. That might have been a relief.

  He stood looking down at her, listening to the chirr of summer crickets. We're in dog days now, he thought. Dog days, from July the twenty-fifth to August twenty-eighth, according to Webster's. So named because rabid dogs were supposed to be the most common then. He looked down at Fran, sleeping so sweetly, using her sweater for a pillow. Her pack was beside her.

  Every dog has his day, Frannie.

  He knelt, freezing at the gunshots of his bending knees, but no one stirred. He unbuckled her pack, untied the drawstring, and reached inside. He trained a small pencil flash on the pack's contents. Frannie muttered from deep down in sleep, stirred, and Harold held his breath. He found what he wanted way at the bottom, behind three clean blouses and a lap-eared pocket road atlas. A Spiral notebook. He pulled it out, opened to the first page, and shone his light on Frannie's close but extremely legible handwriting.

  July 6, 1990--After some persuasion, Mr. Bateman has agreed to come along with us ...

  Harold shut the book and crept back to his sleeping bag with it. He was feeling like the little boy he had once been, the boy with few friends (he had enjoyed a brief period of babyhood beauty until about age three, had been a fat and ugly joke ever since) but many enemies, the boy who had been more or less taken for granted by his parents--their eyes had been trained on Amy as she began her long walk down the Miss America/Atlantic City runway of her life--the boy who had turned to books for solace, the boy who had escaped never being picked for baseball or always being passed over for School Patrol Boy by becoming Long John Silver or Tarzan or Philip Kent... the boy who had become these people late at night under his covers with a fl
ashlight trained on the printed page, his eyes wide with excitement, barely smelling his own bedfarts; this boy now crawled upside down to the bottom of his sleeping bag with Frannie's diary and his flashlight.

  As he trained its beam on the front cover of the Spiral, there was a moment of sanity. For just a moment part of his mind cried out Harold! Stop! so strongly that he was shaken to his heels. And stop he almost did. For just a moment it seemed possible to stop, to put the diary back where he had found it, to give her up, to let them go their own way before something terrible and irrevocable happened. For that moment it seemed he could put the bitter drink away, pour it out of the cup, and refill it with whatever there was for him in this world. Give it over, Harold, this sane voice begged, but maybe it was already too late.

  At age sixteen he had given up Burroughs and Stevenson and Robert Howard in favor of other fantasies, fantasies that were both well loved and much hated--not of rockets or pirates but of girls in silk see-through pajamas kneeling before him on satin pillows while Harold the Great lolled naked on his throne, ready to chastise them with small leather whips, with silver-headed canes. They were bitter fantasies through which every pretty girl at Ogunquit High School had strolled at one time or another. These daydreams always ended with a gathering expletive in his loins, an explosion of seminal fluid that was more curse than pleasure. And then he would sleep, the sperm drying to a scale on his belly. Every doggy has his day.

  And now it was those bitter fantasies, the old hurts, that he gathered around him like yellowed sheets, the old friends who never died, whose teeth never dulled, whose deadly affection never wavered.

  He turned to that first page, trained his flashlight on the words, and began to read.

  In the hour before dawn, he replaced the diary in Fran's pack and secured the buckles. He took no special precautions. If she woke, he thought coldly, he would kill her and then run. Run where? West. But he would not stop in Nebraska or even in Colorado, oh no.

  She didn't wake.

  He went back to his sleeping bag. He masturbated bitterly. When sleep came, it was thin. He dreamed he was dying halfway down a steep grade of tumbled rocks and moonscape boulders. High above, riding the night thermals, were cruising buzzards, waiting for him to make them a meal. There was no moon, no stars--

  And then a frightful red Eye opened in the dark: vulpine, eldritch. The Eye terrified him yet held him.

  The Eye beckoned him.

  To the west, where the shadows were even now gathering, in their twilight dance of death.

  When they made camp at sundown that evening, they were west of Joliet, Illinois. There was a case of beer, good talk, laughter. They felt they had put the rain behind them with Indiana. Everyone remarked specially on Harold, who had never been so cheerful.

  "You know, Harold," Frannie said later that evening, as the party began to break up, "I don't think I've ever seen you feeling so good. What is it?"

  He gave her a jolly wink. "Every dog has his day, Fran."

  She smiled back at him, a little puzzled. But she supposed it was just Harold, being elliptical. It didn't matter. What mattered was that things were finally coming right.

  That night Harold began his own journal.

  CHAPTER 48

  He came staggering and flapping up a long upgrade, the heat of the sun stewing his stomach and baking his brains. The interstate shimmered with reflected radiant heat. He had been Donald Merwin Elbert once, now he was Trashcan Man forever and ever, and he beheld the fabled City, Seven-in-One, Cibola.

  How long had he been traveling west? How long since The Kid? God might know; Trashcan Man did not. It had been days. Nights. Oh, he remembered the nights!

  He stood, swaying in his rags, looking down at Cibola, the City that is Promised, the City of Dreams. He was a wreck. The wrist that he had broken when he leaped the railing of the stairway bolted to the Cheery Oil tank had not healed right, and that wrist was a grotesque lump wrapped in a dirty, unraveling Ace bandage. All the bones in the fingers of that hand had pulled up somehow, turning the hand into a Quasimodo claw. His left arm was a slowly healing mass of burn tissue from elbow to shoulder. It no longer smelled bad and suppurated, but the new flesh was hairless and pink, like the skin of a cheap doll. His grinning, mad face was sunburned, peeling, scruffy-bearded, and covered with scabs from the header he had taken when the front wheel of his bike had parted company from the frame. He wore a faded blue J. C. Penney workshirt that was marked with expanding rings of sweatstain and a dirty pair of corduroy trousers. His pack, which had been new not so long ago, had now taken on the style and substance of its owner--one strap had broken, Trash had knotted it as best he could, and the pack now hung askew on his back like a shutter on a haunted house. It was dusty, its creases filled with desert sand. On his feet were Keds now bound together with hanks of twine, and from them his scratched and sand-chafed ankles rose innocent of socks.

  He stared at the city far ahead and below. He turned his face up to the savage gunmetal sky and to the sun that blared down, coating him with furnace heat. He screamed. It was a savage, triumphant scream, very much like the one Susan Stern had uttered when she split Roger Rabbit's skull with the butt of his own shotgun.

  He began to do a shuffling, victorious dance on the hot, shimmering surface of Interstate 15 while the desert sirocco blew sand across the highway and the blue peaks of the Pahranagat and Spotted ranges sawed their teeth indifferently at the brilliant sky as they had done for millennia. Off the other side of the highway, a Lincoln Continental and a T-Bird were now almost buried in sand, their occupants mummified behind safety glass. Up ahead on Trashcan's side was an overturned pickup, everything covered but the wheels and the rocker panels.

  He danced. His feet, clad in the lashed and bulging Keds, bumped up and down on the highway in a drunken sort of hornpipe. The tattered tail of his shirt flapped. His canteen clunked against his pack. The unraveling ends of the Ace bandage fluttered in the hot breath of the wind. Pink, smooth burn tissue gleamed rawly. Clocksprings of veins bulged at his temples. He had been in God's frying pan for a week now, moving southwest across Utah, the tip of Arizona, and then into Nevada, and he was just as mad as a hatter.

  As he danced, he sang monotonously, the same words over and over, to a tune that had been popular when he was in the Terre Haute institution, a song called "Down to the Nightclub" that had been done by a black group called Tower of Power. But the words were his own. He sang:

  "Ci-a-bola, Ci-a-bola, bump-ty, bump-ty, bump! Ci-a-bola, Ci-a-bola, bump-ty, bump-ty, bump!" Each final "bump!" was followed by a little skipping leap until the heat made everything swim and the harsh bright sky went twilight gray and he collapsed on the road, half fainting, his taxed heart thundering crazily in his arid chest. With the last of his strength, blubbering and grinning, he pulled himself over the overturned pickup truck and lay in its diminishing shade, shivering in the heat and panting.

  "Cibola!" He croaked. "Bumpty-bumpty-bump!"

  He fumbled his canteen off his shoulder with his claw hand and shook it. The canteen was nearly empty. Didn't matter. He would drink every single drop and lay up here until the sun went down, and then he would walk down the highway and into Cibola, fabled City, Seven-in-One. Tonight he would drink from ever-springing fountains faced in gold. But not until the killer sun went down. God was the greatest firebug of them all. A long time ago a boy named Donald Merwin Elbert had burned up old lady Semple's pension check. That same boy had torched the Methodist Church in Powtanville, and if there had been anything left of Donald Merwin Elbert in this shell, it had surely been cremated with the oiltanks in Gary, Indiana. Over nine dozen of them, and they had gone up like a walloping string of firecrackers. Just in time for the Fourth of July, too. Nice. And in the wake of that conflagration, only the Trashcan Man had been left, his left arm a cracked and boiling stew, a fire inside his body that was never going to go out ... at least not until his body was so much blackened charcoal.

  And
tonight he would drink the water of Cibola, yes, and it would taste like wine.

  He upended the canteen and his throat worked as the last of his water, pisswarm, gurgled down into his belly. When it was gone, he threw the canteen out into the desert. Sweat had broken on his forehead like dew. He lay shivering deliciously with water cramps.

  "Cibola!" He muttered. "Cibola! I'm coming! I'm coming! I'll do whatever you want! My life for you! Bumpty-bumpty-bump!"

  Drowsiness began to steal over him now that his thirst was a little slaked. He was nearly asleep when a polar thought slipped up through the floor of his mind like an icy stiletto blade:

  What if Cibola had been a mirage?

  "No," he muttered. "No, uh-uh, no."

  But simple denial would not drive the thought off. The blade probed and poked, keeping sleep at arm's length. What if he had drunk the last of his water in celebration of a mirage? In his own way he recognized his madness, and that was the sort of thing mad people did, right enough. If it had been a mirage, he would die here in the desert and the buzzards would dine on him.

  At last, unable to bear the hideous possibility any longer, he staggered to his feet and made his way back to the road, fighting off the waves of faintness and nausea that wanted to take him down. At the breast of the hill he stared out anxiously into the long flat plain below, studded with yucca and tumbleweed and devil's mantilla. His breath caught in his throat and unraveled into a sigh, like a sleeve of fabric on a spike.

  It was there!

  Cibola, fabled of old, searched for by many, found by the Trashcan Man!

  Far down in the desert, surrounded by blue mountains, blue itself in the haze of distance, its towers and avenues gleamed in the desert day. There were palm trees ... he could see palm trees ... and movement ... and water!

  "Oh, Cibola ..." he crooned, and staggered back to the shade of the pickup. It was farther than it looked, he knew that. Tonight, after God's torch had left the sky, he would walk as he never had before. He would reach Cibola and his first act would be to plunge headlong into the first fountain he came to. Then he would find him, the man who had bade him come here. The man who had drawn him across the plains and the mountains and finally into the desert, all in a month's time and despite his horribly burned arm.