The Stand Read online

  Say! Her own little house had been better equipped to handle the death of those little switchplates than this one was. Here, someone had to bring her water fetched all the way from Boulder Creek, and it had to be boiled before you could use it, just for safety's sake. Back home she'd had her own handpump. Here, Nick and Ralph had had to truck up an ugly gadget called a Port-O-San; they had put it in the back yard. At home she'd had her own outhouse. She would have traded the Maytag washer-dryer combination in a second for her own washtub, but she had gotten Nick to find her a new one, and Brad Kitchner had found her a scrub-board somewhere and some good old lye soap. They probably thought she was a good old pain in the ass, wanting to do her own washing -- and so much of it -- but cleanly went next to Godly, she had never sent her washing out in her whole life, and she didn't mean to start now. She had her little accidents from time to time, too, as old folks often did, but as long as she could do her own wash, those accidents didn't have to be anybody's business but her own.

  They would get the power back on, of course. It was one of the things God had shown her in her dreams. She knew a goodish number of things about what was to come here -- some from the dreams, some from her own common sense. The two were too intertwined to tell apart.

  Soon all these people would stop running around like chickens with their heads cut off and start pulling together. She was not a sociologist like that Glen Bateman (who always eyed her like a racetrack agent looking at a phony ten), but she knew that people always did pull together after a while. The curse and blessing of the human race was its chumminess. Why, if six people went floating down the Mississippi on a church roof in a flood, they'd start a bingo game as soon as the roof grounded on a sandbar.

  First they'd want to form some sort of government, probably one they'd want to run around her. She couldn't allow that, of course, as much as she would like to; that would not be God's will. Let them run all the things that had to do with this earth--get the power back on? Fine. First thing she was going to do was try out that "trash masher." Get the gas running so they wouldn't freeze their bee-hinds off this winter. Let them pass their resolutions and make their plans, that was fine. She would keep her nose right out of that part. She would insist that Nick have a part in the running of it, and maybe Ralph. That Texan seemed all right, he knew enough to shut off his mouth when his brains weren't running. She supposed they might want that fat boy, that Harold, and she wouldn't stop them, but she didn't like him. Harold made her nervous. All the time grinning, but the grin never touched his eyes. He was pleasant, he said the right things, but his eyes were like two cold flints poking out of the ground.

  She thought that Harold had some kind of secret. Some smelly, nasty thing all wrapped up in a stinking poultice in the middle of his heart. She had no idea what it might be; it was not God's will for her to see that, so it must not matter to His plan for this community. All the same, it troubled her to think that fat boy might be a part of their high councils ... but she would say nothing.

  Her business, she thought rather complacently in her rocker, her place in their councils and deliberations had only to do with the dark man.

  He had no name, although it pleased him to call himself Flagg... at least for the time being. And on the far side of the mountains, his work was already well begun. She did not know his plans; they were as veiled from her eyes as whatever secrets lay in that fat boy Harold's heart. But she did not have to know the specifics. His goal was clear and simple: to destroy all of them.

  Her understanding of him was surprisingly sophisticated. The people who had been drawn to the Free Zone all came to see her in this place, and she received them, although they sometimes made her tired... and they all wanted to tell her that they had dreamed of her and of him. They were terrified of him, and she nodded and comforted and soothed as best she could, but privately she thought that most of them wouldn't know this Flagg if they met him on the street... unless he wanted to be noticed. They might feel him--a cold chill, the kind you got when a goose walked over your grave, a sudden hot feeling like a fever-flash, or a sharp and momentary drilling pain in the ears or the temples. But these people were wrong to think he had two heads, or six eyes, or big spike horns growing out of his temples. He probably didn't look much different than the man who used to bring the milk or the mail.

  She guessed that behind the conscious evil there was an unconscious blackness. That was what distinguished the earth's children of darkness; they couldn't make things but only break them. God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God's light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted -- was able -- only to unshape. AntiChrist? You might as well say anti-creation.

  He would have his followers, of course; that was nothing new. He was a liar, and his father was the Father of Lies. He would be like a big neon sign to them, standing high to the sky, dazzling their sight with fizzing fireworks. They would not be apt to notice, these apprentice unshapers, that like a neon sign, he only made the same simple patterns over and over again. They would not be apt to realize that, if you release the gas which makes the pretty patterns from its complex assortment of tubes, it floats silently away and dissipates, leaving not a taste or so much as a whiff of smell behind.

  Some would make the deduction for themselves in time--his kingdom would never be one of peace. The sentry posts and barbed wire at the frontiers of his land would be there as much to keep the converts in as to keep the invader out.

  Would he win?

  She had no assurance that he would not. She knew he must be as aware of her as she was of him, and nothing would give him more pleasure than to see her scrawny black body hung up to the sky on a cross of telephone poles for the crows to pick. She knew that a few of them besides herself had dreamed of crucifixions, but only a few. Those who did had told her but no one else, she suspected. And none of that answered the question:

  Would he win?

  That was not for her to know, either. God worked discreetly, and in the ways that pleased Him. It had pleased Him that the Children of Israel should sweat and strain under the Egyptian yoke for generations. It had pleased Him to send Joseph into slavery, his fine coat of many colors ripped rudely from his back. It had pleased Him to allow the visitation of a hundred plagues on hapless Job, and it had pleased Him to allow His only Son to be hung up on a tree with a bad joke written over His head.

  God was a gamesman -- if He had been a mortal, He would have been at home hunkering over a checkerboard on the porch of Pop Mann's general store back in Hemingford Home. He played red to black, white to black. She thought that, for Him, the game was more than worth the candle, the game was the candle. He would prevail in His own good time. But not necessarily this year, or in the next thousand... and she would not overestimate the dark man's craft and cozening. If he was neon gas, then she was the tiny dark dust particle a great raincloud forms about over the parched land. Only another private soldier -- long past retirement age, it was true! -- in the service of the Lord.

  "Thy will be done," she said, and reached into her apron pocket for a packet of Planters peanuts. Her last doctor, Dr. Staunton, had told her to steer clear of salty foods, but what did he know? She had outlived both of the doctors who had presumed to advise her on her health since her eighty-sixth birthday, and she would have a few peanuts if she wanted to. They hurt her gums mortal bad, but my! weren't they tasty?

  As she munched, Ralph Brentner came up her walk, his hat with the feather in the band cocked back well on his head. As he tapped on the porch door, he took the hat off.

  "You awake, Mother?"

  "That I am," she said through a mouthful of peanuts. "Step in, Ralph, I ain't chewin these nuts, I'm gummin em to death."

  Ralph laughed and came in. "There's some folk out past the gate that'd like to say howdy, if you ain't too tired. They just got in about an hour ago. A pre
tty good crew, I'd say. The fella in charge is one of these longhairs, but he seems well about it. Name's Underwood."

  "Well, bring em up, Ralph, that's fine," she said.

  "Good enough." He turned to go.

  "Where's Nick?" she asked him. "Haven't seen him today nor yesterday neither. He gettin too good for homefolks?"

  "He's been out at the reservoir," Ralph said. "Him and that electrician, Brad Kitchner, have been looking at the power plant." He rubbed the side of his nose. "I was out this morning. Figured all those chiefs orta have at least one Indian to order around."

  Mother Abagail cackled. She did like Ralph. He was a simple soul, but canny. He had a feel for how things worked. She was not surprised that he had been the one to get what everybody now called Free Zone Radio going. He was the kind of man who wouldn't be afraid to try epoxy on your tractor battery when it started to split open, and if the epoxy did the job, why, he'd just take off his shapeless hat and scratch his balding head and grin that grin, like he was an eleven-year-old kid with the chores done and his fishing pole leaned against his shoulder. He was a good sort to have around when things weren't going just right and the type of man who always somehow ended up on relief when times were flush for just about everyone else. He could put the right sort of valve on your bicycle pump when it wouldn't mate to a tire bigger than the kind that went on a bike and he'd know what was making that funny buzzing noise in your oven just by looking at it, but when he had to deal with a company timeclock, he'd somehow always end up punching in late and punching out early and get fired for it before very long. He'd know you could fertilize corn with pigshit if you mixed it right, and he'd know how to pickle cukes, but he would never be able to understand a car loan agreement, or to figure out how the dealers managed to rook him every time. A job application form filled out by Ralph Brentner would look as if it had been through a Hamilton-Beach blender... misspelled, dog-eared, dotted with blots of ink and greasy fingerprints. His employment history would look like a checkerboard which had been around the world on a tramp steamer. But when the very fabric of the world began to tear open, it was the Ralph Brentners who were not afraid to say, "Let's slap a little epoxy in there and see if that'll hold her." And more often than not, it did.

  "You're a good fella, Ralph, you know it? You're a one."

  "Why, you are too, Mother. Not that you're a fella, but you know what I mean. Anyhow, that fella Redman came by while we were workin. Wanted to talk to Nick about being on some kind of committee. "

  "And what did Nick say?"

  "Aw, he wrote a couple of pages. But what it came down to was fine by me if it's fine by Mother Abagail. Is it?"

  "Well now, what would an old lady like myself have to say about such doings?"

  "A lot," Ralph said in a serious, almost shocked manner. "You're the reason we're here. I guess we'll do whatever you want."

  "What I want is to go on livin free like I always have, like an American. I just want my say when it's time for me to have it. Like an American."

  "Well, you'll have all of that."

  "The rest feel that way, Ralph?"

  "You bet they do."

  "Then that's fine." She rocked serenely. "Time everyone got going. There's people lollygaggin around. Mostly just waitin for somebody to tell em where to squat and lean."

  "Then I can go ahead?"

  "With what?"

  "Well, Nick and Stu ast me if I could find a printing press and maybe get her going, if they got me some electricity to run it. I said I didn't need any electricity, I'd just go down to the high school and find the biggest hand-crank mimeograph I could lay my hands on. They want some fliers." He shook his head. "Do they! Seven hundred. Why, we only got four hundred and some here."

  "And nineteen out by the gate, probably getting heatstroke while you and me chin. You go bring them in."

  "I will." Ralph started away.

  "And Ralph?"

  He turned back.

  "Print a thousand," she said.

  They filed in through the gate that Ralph opened and she felt her sin, the one she thought of as the mother of sin. The father of sin was theft; every one of the Ten Commandments boiled down to "Thou shalt not steal." Murder was the theft of a life, adultery the theft of a wife, covetousness the secret, slinking theft that took place in the cave of the heart. Blasphemy was the theft of God's name, swiped from the House of the Lord and sent out to walk the streets like a strutting whore. She had never been much of a thief; a minor pilferer from time to time at worst.

  The mother of sin was pride.

  Pride was the female side of Satan in the human race, the quiet egg of sin, always fertile. Pride had kept Moses out of Canaan, where the grapes were so big the men had to carry them in slings. Who brought the water from the rock when we were thirsty? the Children of Israel asked, and Moses had answered, I did it.

  She had always been a proud woman. Proud of the floor she washed on her hands and knees (but Who had provided the hands, the knees, the very water she washed with?), proud that all her children had turned out all right -- none in jail ever, none caught by dope or the bottle, none of them frigging around on the wrong side of the sheets -- but the mothers of children were the daughters of God. She was proud of her life, but she had not made her life. Pride was the curse of will, and like a woman, pride had its wiles. At her great age she had not learned all its illusions yet, or mastered its glamours.

  And when they filed through the gate she thought: It's me they've come to see. And on the heels of that sin, a series of blasphemous metaphors, rising unbidden in her mind: how they filed through one by one like communicants, their young leader with his eyes mostly cast down, a light-haired woman by his side, a little boy just behind him with a dark-eyed woman whose black hair was shot with twists of gray. The others behind them in a line.

  The young man climbed the porch steps, but his woman stopped at the foot. His hair was long, as Ralph had said, but it was clean. He had a considerable growth of reddish-gold beard. He had a strong face with freshly etched lines of care in it, around the mouth and across the forehead.

  "You're really real," he said softly.

  "Why, I have always thought so," she said. "I am Abagail Freemantle, but most folks round here just call me Mother Abagail. Welcome to our place."

  "Thank you," he said thickly, and she saw he was struggling with tears. "I'm... we're glad to be here. My name's Larry Underwood."

  She held her hand out and he took it lightly, with awe, and she felt that twinge of pride again, that stiffneckedness. It was as if he thought she had a fire in her that would burn him.

  "I ... dreamed of you," he said awkwardly.

  She smiled and nodded and he turned stiffly, almost stumbling. He went back down the steps, shoulders hunched. He would unwind, she thought. Now that he was here and when he found out he didn't have to take the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. A man who doubts himself shouldn't have to try too hard for too long, not until he's seasoned, and this man Larry Underwood was still a little green and apt to bend. But she liked him.

  His woman, a pretty little thing with eyes like violets, came next. She looked boldly at Mother Abagail, but not scornfully. "I'm Lucy Swann. Pleased to make your acquaintance." And although she was wearing pants, she sketched a little curtsy.

  "Glad you could come by, Lucy."

  "Would you mind if I asked... well..." Now her eyes dropped and she began to blush furiously.

  "A hundred and eight at last count," she said kindly. "Feels more like two hundred and sixteen some days."

  "I dreamed about you," Lucy said, and then retired in some confusion.

  The woman with the dark eyes and the boy came next. The woman looked at her gravely and unflinchingly; the boy's face showed frank wonder. The boy was all right. But something about the woman made her feel grave-cold. He's here, she thought. He's come in the shape of this woman... for behold he comes in more forms than his own... the wolf ... the crow... the snake.


  She was not above feeling fear for herself, and for one instant she felt this strange woman with the white in her hair would reach out, almost casually, and snap her neck. For the one instant the feeling held, Mother Abagail actually fancied that the woman's face was gone and she was looking into a hole in time and space, a hole from which two eyes, dark and damned, stared out at her -- eyes that were lost and haggard and hopeless.

  But it was just a woman, and not him. The dark man would never dare come to her here, even in a shape that was not his own. This was just a woman--a very pretty one, too -- with an expressive, sensitive face and one arm about her little boy's shoulders. She had only been daydreaming for a moment. Surely that was all.

  For Nadine Cross, the moment was a confusion. She had been all right when they came in through the gate. She had been all right until Larry had begun talking to the old lady. Then an almost swooning sense of revulsion and terror had come over her. The old woman could... could what?

  Could see.

  Yes. She was afraid that the old woman could see inside her, to where the darkness was already planted and growing well. She was afraid the old woman would rise from her place on the porch and denounce her, demand that she leave Joe and go to those (to him) for whom she was intended.

  The two of them, each with their own murky fears, looked at each other. They measured each other. The moment was short, but it seemed very long to the two of them.

  He's in her -- the Devil's Imp, Abby Freemantle thought.

  All of their power is right here, Nadine thought in her own turn. She's all they've got, although they may think differently.

  Joe was growing restive beside her, tugging at her hand.

  "Hello," she said in a thin, dead voice. "I'm Nadine Cross."

  The old woman said: "I know who you are."

  The words hung in the air, cutting suddenly through the other chatter. People turned, puzzled, to see if something was happening.

  "Do you?" Nadine said softly. Suddenly it seemed that Joe was her protection, her only one.

  She moved the boy slowly in front of her, like a hostage. Joe's queer seawater eyes looked up at Mother Abagail.