The Stand Read online

  At last, she had taken the box.

  That had been four days ago. Each night the compulsion had grown stronger until tonight, half insane with fears she didn't understand, she had gone to Larry wearing the blue-gray dress with nothing on underneath. She had gone to put an end to the fears for good. Waiting on the porch for them to get back from the meeting, she had been sure she had finally done the right thing. There had been that feeling in her, that lightly drunk, starstruck feeling, that she'd not properly had since she had run across the dew-drenched grass with the boy behind her. Only this time the boy would catch her. She would let him catch her. It would be the end.

  But when he had caught her, he hadn't wanted her.

  Nadine stood up, holding the box to her chest, and put out the lamp. He had scorned her, and didn't they say that hell hath no fury--? A scorned woman might well traffic with the devil ... or his henchman.

  She paused only long enough to get the large flashlight from the table in the front hall. From deeper inside the house, the boy cried out in his sleep, freezing her for a moment, making the hair prickle on her scalp.

  Then she let herself out.

  Her Vespa was at the curb, the Vespa she had used some days ago to motor up to Harold Lauder's house. Why had she gone there? She hadn't passed a dozen words with Harold since she'd gotten to Boulder. But in her confusion about the planchette, and in her terror of the dreams that continued to come to her even after everyone else's had stopped, it had seemed to her that she must talk about it to Harold. She had been afraid of that impulse, too, she remembered as she put the Vespa's ignition key in its slot. Like the sudden urge to pick up the planchette (Amaze Your Friends! Brighten Up Your Get-togethers! the box said), it had seemed to be an idea that had come to her from outside herself. His thought, maybe. But when she had given in and gone to Harold's, he hadn't been at home. The house was locked, the only locked house she had come upon in Boulder, and the shades were drawn. She had rather liked that, and she'd had a moment's bitter disappointment that Harold was not there. If he had been, he could have let her in and then locked the door behind her. They could have gone into the living room and talked, or made love, or have done unspeakable things together, and no one would have known.

  Harold's was a private place.

  "What's happening to me?" she whispered to the dark, but the dark had no answer for her. She started the Vespa, and the steady burping pop of its engine seemed to profane the night. She put it in gear and drove away. To the west.

  Moving, the cool night air on her face, she felt better at last. Blow away the cobwebs, night wind. You know, don't you? When all the choices have been taken away, what do you do? You choose what's left. You choose whatever dark adventure was meant for you. You let Larry have his stupid little twist of tail with her tight pants and her single-syllable vocabulary and her movie-magazine mind. You go beyond them. You risk ... whatever there is to be risked.

  Mostly you risk yourself.

  The road unrolled before her in the baby spotlight of the Vespa's headlamp. She had to switch to second gear as the road began to climb; she was on Baseline Road now, headed up the black mountain. Let them have their meetings. They were concerned with getting the power back on; her lover was concerned with the world.

  The Vespa's engine lugged and strained and somehow carried on. A horrible yet sexy kind of fear began to grip her, and the vibrating saddle of the motorbike began to heat her up down there (why, you're horny, Nadine, she thought with shrill good humor, naughty, naughty, NAUGHTY). To her right was a straight dropoff. Nothing but death down there. And up above? Well, she would see. It was too late to turn back, and that thought alone made her feel paradoxically and deliciously free.

  An hour later she was in Sunrise Amphitheater--but sunrise was still three or more hours away. The amphitheater was close to the summit of Flagstaff Mountain, and nearly everyone in the Free Zone had made the trip to the camping area at the top before they had been in Boulder very long. On a clear day--which was most days in Boulder, at least during the summer season--you could see Boulder, and I-25 stretching away south to Denver and then off into the haze toward New Mexico two hundred miles beyond. Due east were the flatlands, stretching away toward Nebraska, and closer at hand was Boulder Canyon, a knife-gash through foothills that were walled in pine and spruce. In summers gone by, gliders had plied the thermals over Sunrise Amphitheater like birds.

  Now Nadine saw only what was revealed in the glow of the six-cell flashlight which she put on a picnic table near the dropoff. There was a large artist's sketchpad turned back to a clean sheet, and squatting on it the three-cornered planchette like a triangular spider. Protruding from its belly, like the spider's stinger, was a pencil, lightly touching the pad.

  Nadine was in a feverish state that was half-euphoria, half-terror. Coming up here on the back of her gamely laboring Vespa, which had most decidedly not been made for mountain climbing, she had felt what Harold had felt in Nederland. She could feel him. But while Harold had felt this in a rather precise and technological way, as a piece of steel attracted by a magnet, a drawing toward, Nadine felt it as a kind of mystic event, a border-crossing. It was as if these mountains, of which she was even now only in the foothills, were a no-man's-land between two spheres of influence--Flagg in the West, the old woman in the East. And here the magic flew both ways, mixing, making its own concoction that belonged neither to God nor to Satan but which was totally pagan. She felt she was in a haunted place.

  And the planchette ...

  She had tossed the brightly marked box, stamped MADE IN TAIWAN, away indifferently for the wind to take. The planchette itself was only a poorly stamped piece of fiberboard or gypsum. But it didn't matter. It was a tool she would only use once--only dared to use once--and even a poorly made tool can serve its purpose: to break open a door, to close a window, to write a Name.

  The words on the box recurred: Amaze Your Friends! Brighten Up Your Get-togethers!

  What was that song Larry sometimes bellowed from the seat of his Honda as they rode along? Hello, Central, what's the matter with your line? I want to talk to--

  Talk to who? But that was the question, wasn't it?

  She remembered the time she had used the planchette in college. That had been more than a dozen years ago ... but it might as well have been yesterday. She had gone upstairs to ask someone on the third floor of the dorm, a girl named Rachel Timms, about the assignment in a remedial reading class they shared. The room had been filled with girls, six or eight of them at least, giggling and laughing. Nadine remembered thinking that they acted as if they were high on something, smoke or maybe even blow.

  "Stop it!" Rachel said, giggling herself. "How do you expect the spirits to communicate if you're all acting like a bunch of donkeys?"

  The idea of laughing donkeys struck them as deliciously funny, and a fresh feminine gale blew through the room for a while. The planchette had set then as it sat now, a triangular spider on three stubby legs, pencil pointing down. While they giggled, Nadine picked up a sheaf of oversized pages torn from an artist's sketchbook and shuffled through those "messages from the astral plane" which had already come in.

  Tommy says you have been using that strawberry douche again.

  Mother says she's fine.

  Chunga! Chunga!

  John says you won't, fart so much if you stop eating those CAFETERIA BEANS!!!!!

  Others, just as silly.

  Now the giggles had quieted enough so they could start again. Three girls sat on the bed, each with her fingertips placed on a different side of the planchette. For a moment there was nothing. Then the board quivered.

  "You did that, Sandy!" Rachel accused.

  "I did not!"

  "Shhhh!"

  The board quivered again and the girls hushed. It moved, stopped, moved again. It made the letter F.

  "Fuh ..." the girl named Sandy said.

  "Fuck you, too," someone else said, and they were off and giggling agai
n.

  "Shhhh!" Rachel said sternly.

  The planchette began to move more rapidly, tracing out the letters A, T, H, E, and R.

  "Father dear, your baby's here," a girl named Patty something-or-other said, and giggled. "It must be my father, he died of a heart attack when I was three."

  "It's writing some more," Sandy said.

  S, A, Y, S, the planchette spelled laboriously.

  "What's going on?" Nadine whispered to a tall, horse-faced girl she didn't know. The horse-faced girl was looking on with her hands in her pockets and a disgusted look on her face.

  "A bunch of girls playing games with something they don't understand, " the horse-faced girl said. "That's what's going on." She spoke in an even lower whisper.

  "FATHER SAYS PATTY," Sandy quoted. "It's your dear old dad, all right, Pats."

  Another burst of giggles..

  The horse-faced girl was wearing spectacles. Now she took her hands out of the pockets of the overalls she was wearing and used them to remove the spectacles from her face. She polished them and explained further to Nadine, still in a whisper. "The planchette is a tool used by psychics and mediums. Kinestheologists--"

  "What ologists?"

  "Scientists who study movement, and the interaction of muscles and nerves."

  "Oh."

  "They claim that the planchette is actually responding to tiny muscle movements, probably guided by the subconscious rather than the conscious mind. Of course, mediums and psychics claim that the planchette is moved by entities from the spirit world--"

  Another burst of hysterical laughter came from the girls clustered around the board. Nadine looked over the horse-faced girl's shoulder and saw the message now read, FATHER SAYS PATTY SHOULD STOP GOING.

  "--to the bathroom so much," another girl in the circle of spectators suggested, and everyone laughed some more.

  "Either way, they're just fooling with it," the horse-faced girl said with a disdainful sniff. "It's very unwise. Both mediums and scientists agree that automatic writing can be dangerous."

  "The spirits are unfriendly tonight, you think?" Nadine asked lightly.

  "Perhaps the spirits are always unfriendly," the horse-faced girl said, giving her a sharp look. "Or you might get a message from your subconscious mind which you were totally unprepared to receive. There are documented cases of automatic writing getting entirely out of control, you know. People have gone mad."

  "Oh, that seems awfully farfetched. It's just a game."

  "Games have a way of turning serious sometimes."

  The loudest burst of laughter yet tacked a period to the horse-faced girl's comment before Nadine could reply. The girl named Patty something-or-other had fallen off the bed and lay on the floor, holding her stomach and laughing and kicking her feet weakly. The completed message read, FATHER SAYS PATTY SHOULD STOP GOING TO THE SUBMARINE RACES WITH LEONARD KATZ.

  "You did that!" Patty said to Sandy as she finally sat up again.

  "I didn't, Patty! Honest!"

  "It was your father! From the Great Beyond! From Out There!" another girl told Patty in a Boris Karloff voice which Nadine thought was actually quite good. "Just remember that he's watching you the next time you take off your pants in the back seat of Leonard's Dodge."

  Another loud outburst greeted this sally. As it tapered off, Nadine pushed forward and twitched Rachel's arm. She meant to ask for the assignment and then make a quiet escape.

  "Nadine!" Rachel cried. Her eyes were sparkling and gay. Her cheeks had bloomed with roses. "Sit down, let's see if the spirits have a message for you!"

  "No, really, I only came to get the assignment in remedial r--"

  "Oh, poop on the assignment in remedial reading! This is important, Nadine! This is big-time! You've got to have a try. Here, sit down next to me. Janey, you take the other side."

  Janey sat down opposite Nadine, and at the repeated urging of Rachel Timms, Nadine found herself with the eight fingers of her hands touching the planchette lightly. For some reason she looked over her shoulder at the horse-faced girl. She shook her head at Nadine once, deliberately, and the overhead fluorescent bounced off the lenses of her spectacles and turned her eyes into a pair of large white flashes of light.

  She had felt a moment of fear then, she remembered as she stood looking down at another planchette in the glow of a six-cell flashlight, but her remark to the horse-faced girl had recurred--it was just a game, for heaven's sake, and what horrible thing could possibly happen in the middle of a gaggle of giggling girls? If there was a more hostile atmosphere for the production of genuine spirits, hostile or otherwise, Nadine didn't know what it would be.

  "Now everybody be quiet," Rachel commanded. "Spirits, do you have a message for our sister and Brownie-in-good-standing Nadine Cross?"

  The planchette didn't move. Nadine felt mildly embarrassed.

  "Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie," the girl who had done Boris Karloff said in an equally successful Bullwinkle Moose voice. "The spirits are about to speak!"

  More giggles.

  "Shhhh!" Rachel commanded.

  Nadine decided that if one of the other two girls didn't start moving the planchette soon so it would spell out whatever silly message they had for her, she would do it herself--slide it around to spell out something short and sweet, like BOO!, so she could get her assignment and leave.

  Just as she was about to try doing this, the planchette jerked rudely under her fingers. The pencil left a dark black diagonal slash on the fresh page.

  "Hey! No fair yanking, spirits," Rachel said in a vaguely uneasy tone of voice. "Did you do that, Nadine?"

  "No."

  "Janey."

  "Uh-uh. Honestly."

  The planchette jerked again, almost pulling their fingers from it, and skittered to the upper-lefthand corner of the paper..

  "Wowie," Nadine said. "Did you feel--"

  They did, all of them did, although neither Rachel nor Jane Fargood would talk to her about it later. And she had never felt particularly welcome in either girl's room after that night. It was as if they were both a little afraid to get too close to her after that.

  The planchette suddenly began to thrum underneath their fingers; it was like lightly touching the fender of a smoothly idling car. The vibration was steady and disquieting. It was not the sort of movement a person could cause without being fairly obvious about it.

  The girls had grown quiet. Their faces all wore a peculiar expression, an expression common to the faces of all people who have attended a seance where something unexpectedly genuine has occurred--when the table begins to rock, when unseen knuckles rap on the wall, or when the medium begins to extrude smoky-gray teleplasm from her nostrils. It is a pallid waiting expression, half wanting whatever it is that has begun to stop, half wanting it to go on. It is an expression of dreadful, distracted excitement ... and when it wears that particular look, the human face looks most like the skull which always rests half an inch below the skin.

  "Stop it!" the horse-faced girl cried out suddenly. "Stop it right now or you'll be sorry!"

  And Jane Fargood screamed in a fear-filled voice: "I can't take my fingers off it!"

  Someone uttered a little burping scream. At the same instant Nadine realized that her own fingers were also glued to the board. The muscles of her arms bunched in an effort to pull the tips of her fingers from the planchette, but they remained where they were.

  "All right, the joke is over," Rachel said in a tight, scared voice. "Who--"

  And suddenly the planchette began to write.

  It moved with lightning speed, dragging their fingers with it, snapping their arms out and back and around in a way which would have been funny if it weren't for the helpless, caught expressions on all three girls' faces. Nadine thought later that it was as if her arms had been caught in an exercise machine. The writing before had been in stilted, draggling letters--messages that looked as if they had been written by a seven-year-old. This writing was smooth and powerfu
l ... big, slanting capital letters that slashed across the white page. There was something both relentless and vicious about it.

  NADINE, NADINE, NADINE, the whirling planchette wrote. HOW I LOVE NADINE TO BE MY TO LOVE MY NADINE TO BE MY QUEEN IF YOU IF YOU IF YOU ARE PURE FOR ME IF YOU ARE CLEAN FOR ME IF YOU ARE IF YOU ARE DEAD FOR ME DEAD YOU ARE

  The planchette swooped, raced, and began again, lower down.

  YOU ARE DEAD WITH THE REST OF THEM YOU ARE IN THE DEADBOOK WITH THE REST OF THEM NADINE IS DEAD WITH THEM NADINE IS ROTTEN WITH THEM UNLESS UNLESS

  It stopped. Thrummed. Nadine thought, hoped--oh how she hoped --that it was over, and then it raced back to the edge of the paper and began again. Jane shrieked miserably. The faces of the other girls were shocked white o's of wonder and dismay.

  THE WORLD THE WORLD SOON THE WORLD IS DEAD AND WE WE WE NADINE NADINE I I I WE WE WE ARE WE ARE WE

  Now the letters seemed to scream across the page:

  WE ARE IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD NADINE

  The last word howled itself across the page in inch-high capital letters and then the planchette whirled from the tablet, leaving a long streak of graphite behind like a shout. It fell on the floor and snapped in two.

  There had been an instant of shocked, immobile silence, and then Jane Fargood had burst into high, weeping hysterics. The thing had ended with the housemother coming upstairs to see what was wrong, Nadine remembered, and she had been about to call the infirmary for Jane when the girl had managed to get hold of herself a little.

  Through the whole thing Rachel Timms had sat on her bed, calm and pale. When the housemother and most of the other girls (including the horse-faced girl, who undoubtedly felt that a prophetess is without much honor in her own land) had left, she had asked Nadine in a flat, strange voice: "Who was it, Nadine?"

  "I don't know," Nadine had answered truthfully. She hadn't had the slightest idea. Not then.