The Stand (Original Edition) Read online

  “Tomorrow. He’ll be out with the Burial Committee, and Nadine has been up at the power station afternoons.” “All right,” she said. “Do you think I should tell Stu about this?”

  “Why don’t we wait? There’s no sense stirring things up unless it’s something. The book might be gone. It might be nothing but a list of things to do. It might be full of perfectly innocent things. Or it might be in code.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. What will we do if there is . . . something?”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to bring it up before the Free Zone Committee. Another reason to get it done quickly. We’re meeting on September second. The committee will handle it.”

  “Will it?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Larry said, but he was also thinking of what Leo had said about the committee.

  She slipped off the edge of the bandshell and onto the ground. “Thanks for being here, Larry.”

  “Where should we meet?”

  “The little park across from Harold’s. What about there, at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Fine,” Larry said. “I’ll see you then.”

  Frannie went home feeling lighter at heart than she had for weeks. As Larry said, the alternatives were now fairly clear. The ledger might prove all of their fears groundless. If it was otherwise, let the committee decide. As Larry had reminded her, they were meeting on the evening of the second, at Nick’s and Ralph’s place, out near the end of Baseline Road.

  The first of September dawned gray and rainy, a dull, forgettable day—but one that no resident of the Free Zone ever forgot. That was the day the power came back on in North Boulder . . . briefly, at least.

  At ten to noon, in the control room of the power station, Brad Kitchner looked at Stu, Nick, Ralph, and Jack Jackson, who were all standing behind him. Brad smiled nervously and said, “Hail Mary, fulla grace.”

  He yanked two big switches down hard. In the huge and cavernous hall below them, two trial generators began to whine. The five men walked over to the wall-to-wall polarized glass window and looked below, to where almost a hundred men and women stood, all of them wearing protective goggles as per Brad’s order.

  “If we did something wrong, I’d rather blow two than fifty-two,” Brad had told them earlier.

  The generators began to whine more loudly.

  Nick elbowed Stu and pointed to the office ceiling. Stu looked up and began to grin. Behind the translucent panels, the fluorescents had begun to glow weakly. The generators cycled up and up, reached a high, steady hum, and leveled off. Down below, the crowd of assembled workers broke into spontaneous applause, some of them wincing as they did so; their hands were raw and flayed from wrapping copper wire hour after drudging hour.

  The fluorescents were shining brightly and normally now.

  For Nick, the feeling was the exact opposite of the dread he had known when the lights went out in Shoyo—not one of entombment now, but of resurrection.

  The two generators supplied power to one small section of North Boulder in the North Street area. There were people in the area who hadn’t known about the test that morning, and many of these people fled as if all the devils of hell were after them.

  TV sets went on in blares of snow. In a house on Spruce Street, a blender whirred into life, trying to blend a cheese-and-egg mixture that had congealed long since. The blender’s motor soon overloaded and blew out. A power saw whined into life in a deserted garage, puffing sawdust out of its guts. Stove burners began to glow. Marvin Gaye began to sing from the loudspeakers of an oldies record shop called the Wax Museum; the words, backed by a steady disco beat, seemed like a dream of the past come to life: “Let's dance . . . let’s shout . . . get funky what it's all about ... lets dance . . . lets shout . . .”

  A power transformer blew on Maple Street and a gaudy spiral of purple sparks drifted down, lit on the wet grass, and went out.

  At the power station, one of the generators began to whine at a higher, more desperate note. It began to smoke. People backed away, poised just below the point of panic. The place began to fill with the sickish-sweet smell of ozone. A buzzer went off stridently.

  “Too high!” Brad roared. “Bastard’s crossing over! Overloading!”

  He scrambled across the room and slammed both switches back up. The whine of the generators began to die, but not before there was a loud pop and screams, deadened by the safety glass, from below.

  “Holy crow,” Ralph said. “One of em’s on fire.”

  Above them, the fluorescents faded to sullen cores of white light then went out completely. Brad jerked open the control room door and came out on the landing. His words echoed flatly in the big open space. “Get the foam to that! Hustle!”

  Several foam extinguishers were turned on the generator, and the fire was doused. The smell of ozone still hung on the air. The others crowded out on the landing beside Brad.

  Stu laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry it turned out the way it did, man,” he said.

  Brad turned toward him, grinning. “Sorry? What for?”

  “Well, it caught afire, didn’t it?” Jack asked.

  “It surely did! And somewhere around North Street there’s a transformer all blown to shit. We forgot, goddammit, we forgot! They got sick, they died, but they didn’t go around turning off their electrical appliances before they did it! There are TVs on, and ovens, and electric blankets, all over Boulder. Hell of a power drain. These generators, they’re built to cross over when the load’s heavy in one place and light in another. That one down there tried to cross, but all the others were shut down, see?”

  “If you say so,” Ralph said doubtfully.

  “Take my word for it,” Brad said. “We’ve got the job to do all over again, but only on that one motor. We’ll be in business. But—” Brad had begun to snap his fingers, an unconscious gesture of excitement. “We don’t dare turn the juice on until we’re sure. Can we get another work-crew? A dozen guys or so?”

  “Sure, I guess so,” Stu said, “What for?”

  “A Turning Off Crew. Just a bunch of guys to go around Boulder and turn off everything that was left on. We don’t dare turn the juice back on until that gets done. We got no fire department, man.” Brad laughed a little crazily.

  “We’re having a Free Zone Committee meeting tomorrow night,” Stu said. “You come on over and explain why you want them, and you’ll get your men. But are you sure that overload won’t happen again?”

  “Pretty damn sure, yeah. It wouldn’t have happened today if there hadn’t been so much stuff left on. Speaking of that, somebody ought to go over to North Boulder and see if it’s burning down.”

  Nobody was sure if Brad was joking or not. As it turned out there were several small fires, mostly from hot appliances. None of them spread in the drizzle that was falling. And what people in the Zone remembered later about the first of September, 1980, was that it was the day the power came back on—if only for thirty seconds or so.

  An hour later, Fran met Larry at the Eben G. Fine Park across from Harold’s.

  “See you rode a bike, too,” Larry said.

  She nodded. “Quieter.”

  “I stowed mine out of sight in that shelter.” He nodded to an open-walled, low-roofed building by the playground.

  Frannie trundled her bike between the swings and the slide and into the shelter. The odor inside was musty and fetid. The place had been a make-out spot for kids too young to drive, she guessed. It was littered with beer bottles and cigarette ends. There was a crumpled pair of panties in the far comer and the remains of a small fire in the near one. She parked her bike next to Larry’s and came back outside quickly. In those shadows, with the scent of that long-dead sex-musk in her nose, it was too easy to imagine the dark man standing just behind her, his twisted coathanger in hand.

  “Regular Holiday Inn, isn’t it?” Larry said dryly.

  “Not my idea of pleasant accommodations,” Fran said with a little shiver. “No
matter what comes of this, Larry, I want to tell Stu everything tonight.”

  Larry nodded. “Yeah, and not just because he’s on the committee. He's also the marshal.”

  Fran looked at him, troubled. Really for the first time she understood that this expedition might end with Harold in jail. They were going to sneak into his house without a warrant or anything and poke around.

  “Oh, bad,” she said.

  “Not too good, is it?” he agreed. “You want to call it off?”

  She thought for a long time and then shook her head.

  “Good. I think we ought to know, one way or the other.”

  “Are you sure they’re both gone?”

  “Yes. I saw Harold driving one of the Burial Committee trucks early this morning. And all the people who were on the Power Committee were invited over for the tryout.”

  “You sure she went?”

  “It would look damn funny if she didn’t, wouldn’t it?”

  Fran thought that over, then nodded. “I guess it would. By the way, Stu said they hope to have most of the town electrified again by the sixth.”

  “That’s going to be a mighty day,” Larry said, and thought how nice it would be to sit down in Shannon’s or The Broken Drum with a big Fender guitar and an even bigger amp and play something— anything, as long as it was simple and had a heavy beat—at full volume. “Gloria,” maybe, or “Walkin’ the Dog.” Just about anything, in fact, except “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”

  “Come on,” Fran said. “Let’s go.”

  Steady hard rapping at first the front and then the back door convinced them that Harold’s house was indeed empty.

  “How did you get in?” Larry asked.

  “The cellar window.”

  They went around to the side of the house and Larry pulled and tugged fruitlessly at the window while Fran kept watch.

  “Maybe you did,” he said, “but it’s locked now.”

  “No, it’s just sticking. Let me try.”

  But she had no better luck. Sometime between her first clandestine trip out here and now, Harold had locked up tight.

  “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “Let’s break it.”

  “Larry, he’ll see it.”

  “Let him. If he doesn’t have anything to hide, he’ll think it was just kids or something. If he does have something to hide, it’ll worry him plenty and he deserves to be worried. Right?”

  She looked doubtful but didn’t stop him as he took off his shirt, wrapped it around his fist and forearm, and crunched the basement window. Glass tinkled inward and he felt around for the catch.

  “Here ’tis.” He released it and the window slid back. Larry slipped through and turned to help her. “Be careful, kiddo. No miscarriages in Harold Lauder’s basement, please.”

  He caught her under the arms and eased her down. They looked around the rumpus room together. The croquet set stood sentinel. The air hockey table was littered with little snips of colored electrical wire.

  “What’s this?” she said, picking up a piece of it. “This wasn’t here before.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe Harold’s building the better mousetrap.”

  There was a box under the table and he fished it out. The cover said DELUXE REALISTIC WALKIE-TALKIE SET. Larry opened the box, but the heft of it had already told him it was empty.

  “Building walkie-talkies instead of mousetraps,” Fran said.

  “No, this wasn’t a kit. You buy this kind ready to go. Maybe he was modifying them somehow. It sounds like Harold. Remember how Stu bitched about the walkie-talkie reception when he and Harold and Ralph were out hunting for Mother Abagail?”

  She nodded, but there was still something about those snips of wire that bothered her.

  They went up the stairs, but this time the door at the top was locked. She looked at him and Larry shrugged. “We’ve come this far, right?”

  Fran nodded.

  Larry bumped his shoulder against the door a few times to get the feel of the bolt on the other side, and then rammed it hard. There was a snapping-metal sound, a clunk, and the door swung open. Larry bent and picked up a bolt assembly from the linoleum kitchen floor. “I can put this back on and he’ll never know the difference. That is, if there’s a screwdriver handy.”

  “Why bother? He’s going to see the broken window.”

  “That’s true. But if the bolt’s back on the door, he’ll. . . what are you smiling about?”

  “Put the bolt back on, by all means. But how are you going to draw it from the cellar side of the door?”

  He thought about it and said, “Jeez, I hate a smartass woman worse than anything.” He tossed the bolt onto the Formica kitchen counter. “Let’s go look under that hearthstone.”

  They went into the shadowy living room, and Fran felt anxiety start to creep up. Last time Nadine hadn’t had a key. This time, if she came back, she would have. And if she did come back, they would be caught red-handed. It would be a bitter joke if Stu’s first job as marshal turned out to be arresting his own woman for breaking and entering.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Larry asked, pointing.

  “Yes. Be as quick as you can.”

  “There’s a good chance he’s moved it, anyway.” And Harold had. It was Nadine who had replaced it under the loose hearthstone. When Larry pulled the loose hearthstone aside, it lay there, the word LEDGER gleaming mellowly up at them in gold-filled letters. They both stared at it. The room seemed suddenly hotter, stuffier, darker. “Well,” Larry said. “Are we going to admire it or read it?”

  “You,” Fran said. “I don’t even want to touch it.”

  Larry picked it out of the hole and automatically wiped the white stone-dust from the cover. He began to flip through it at random. The writing had been done with a felt-tipped marker of the sort that had been marketed under the pugnacious brand name Hardhead. It had allowed Harold to write in a tiny, perfect script—the handwriting of an intensely conscientious man, perhaps a driven man.

  There were no paragraph breaks. There was only an eyelash of a margin to the right and left, but that margin was constant, so straight that it might have been drawn with a ruler.

  “It’d take me three days to read all this,” Larry said.

  “Hold it,” Fran said, and reached over his arm to turn back a couple of pages. Here the steady flow of words was broken by a boldly boxed-off area. What had been enclosed seemed to be some sort of motto:

  To follow one’s star is to concede the power of some greater Force, some Providence; yet is it still not possible that the act of following itself is the taproot of even greater Power? Your GOD, your DEVIL, owns the keys to the lighthouse; I have grappled with that so long and hard in these last two months; but to each of us he has given the responsibility of NAVIGATION.

  HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

  “Sorry,” Larry said. “It’s by me. You get it?”

  Fran shook her head slowly. “I guess it’s Harold’s way of saying following can be as honorable as leading. But as a motto, I don’t think it’s going to put waste not, want not out of business.”

  Larry continued to flip toward the front of the book, coming upon another four or five of the boxed maxims, all of them attributed to Harold in capital letters.

  “Whoo,” Larry said. “Look at this one, Frannie!”

  It is said the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I elect to think of them as the two great virtues. To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To vent them is more noble; that is to say the world must change for the good of you. I am on a great adventure.

  HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

  “That’s the work of a profoundly disturbed mind,” Fran said. She felt cold.

  “It’s the kind of thinking that got us into this mess to start with,” Larry agreed. He flipped rapidly to the start of the book. “Time’s wasting. Let’s see what we can make of this.”

  Neither of them knew exactly
what to expect. They had read nothing of the ledger except the boxed mottos and an occasional phrase or two which, mostly due to Harold’s convoluted style, meant little or nothing.

  What they saw at the ledger’s beginning was therefore a complete shock. They read that first sentence holding the ledger between them like children at a choir practice and Fran said “Oh!” in a small, strangled voice and stepped away, her hand pressed lightly to her mouth.

  “Fran, we have to take the book,” Larry said.

  “Yes—”

  “And show it to Stu. I don’t know if Leo’s right about them being on the dark man’s side, but at the very least, Harold is dangerously disturbed. You can see that.”

  “Yes,” she said again. She felt faint, weak. So this was how the matter of the diaries ended. It was as if she had known, as if she had known it all from the moment she saw that big smudged thumbprint, and she had to keep telling herself not to faint, not to faint.

  “Fran? Frannie? Are you all right?”

  Larry’s voice. From far away.

  The first sentence in Harold’s ledger: My great pleasure this delightful post-Apocalypse summer will be to kill Mr. Stuart Dog-Cock Redman; and just maybe I will kill her, too.

  “Ralph? Ralph Brentner, you home? Hooo-hooo, anybody home?"

  She stood on the steps, looking at the house. No motorcycles in the yard, only a couple of bikes parked around to one side. Ralph would have heard her, but there was the mute to think about. The deafmute. You could holler until you were blue and he wouldn’t answer and still he might be there.

  Shifting her shopping bag from one arm to the other, Nadine tried the door and found it unlocked. She stepped inside. She was in a small foyer. Four steps went up to the kitchen area, and a flight of them went down to the basement area where Harold said Andros had his apartment. Putting her most pleasant expression on her face, Nadine went downstairs, fixing her excuse in her mind if he should be there.

  I came right in because I didn’t think you’d know I was knocking. Some of us wanted to know if there’s going to be a late shift wrapping those two motors that blew. Did Brad say anything to you?

  There were only two rooms down here. One of them was a bedroom as simple as a monk’s cell. The other was a study. There was a desk, a big chair, a wastebasket, a bookcase. The top of the desk was littered with scraps of paper and she looked through them idly. Most of them made little sense to her—she guessed they were Nick’s side of some conversation. Others seemed to be memos to himself, jottings, thoughts. A few of them reminded her of the boxes in Harold’s ledger, what he called his Guideposts to a Better Life with a sarcastic smile.