by Stephen King
Ralph got up to get it, and Abby was left looking at Nick. He was wearing a khaki shirt, bluejeans, and a faded drill vest. Looking at him, she felt a quiet sense of knowledge and completion, as if this moment had been simple fate. As if, at one end of her life there had been her father, John Freemantle, tall and black and proud, and this man at the other end, young, white, and mute, with his brilliant eyes looking at her from that careworn face.
“Ma’am?”
She looked back. Ralph was sitting next to Nick now, holding a sheet of notepaper and squinting at it in the lamplight. On his lap, Nick was holding a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen. He was still looking at her closely.
“Nick says . . Ralph cleared his throat, embarrassed.
“Go ahead.”
“His note says it’s hard to read your lips because—”
“I guess I know why,” she said. “No fear.”
She got up and shuffled over to the bureau. On the second shelf above it was a plastic jar, and in it two denture plates floated in cloudy liquid like a medical exhibit.
She fished them out and rinsed them with a dipper of water.
“Lord God I have suffered,” Mother Abagail said balefully, and popped the plates in.
“We got to talk,” she said. “You two are the head ones, and we got some things to sort out.”
“Well,” Ralph said, “it ain’t me. Nick, I guess he’s in charge.”
“Is that right?”
Nick wrote briefly and Ralph read it aloud, as he continued to do. “It was my idea to come up this way, yes. About being in charge, I don’t know.”
“We met June an Olivia about ninety miles south of here,” Ralph said. “We was on our way to you even then, Mother. The women were headed north, too. So was Dick. We all just threw in together.” “Have you seen any other folks?’’ She asked.
“No,” Nick wrote. “But I’ve had a feeling—Ralph has, too—that there are other people hiding, watching us. Afraid, I guess. Still getting over the shock of what’s happened.”
She nodded.
“Dick said that the day before he joined us, he heard a motorcycle somewhere south. So there are other people around.”
“Why did you come here?” Her eyes, caught in their nets of wrinkles, stared at him keenly.
Nick wrote: “I have dreamed of you. Dick Ellis says he has once. And the little girl, Gina, was calling you ‘grammylady’ long before we got here. She described your place. The tire swing.”
“Bless the child,” Mother Abagail said absently. She looked at Ralph. “You?”
“No, ma’am,” Ralph said. He wet his lips. “Just . . . just that other fella.”
“What other fella?”
Nick wrote. Circled what he had written. Handed it to her directly. Her eyes were not much good for close work without her specs or the lighted magnifying glass she’d gotten in Hemingford Center last year, but she could read this. It was writ large, like the writing God had put on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace. Circled, it gave her a cold chill just looking at it. She thought of weasels squirming across the road on their bellies, yanking at her towsack with their needle-sharp killers’ teeth. She thought of a single red eye opening, disclosing itself in the darkness, looking, searching, now not just for an old woman but for three men, one half-man, three women, and a little girl.
The two circled words were: Dark Man.
“I’ve been told,” she said in a low voice as she absently rubbed her fingers—the rain had brought out the full misery of her arthritis.
“We’re to go west. I’ve been told in a dream, by the Lord God. I didn’t want to listen. I’m an old woman, and all I want to do is die on this little piece of land. It’s been my family’s freehold for a hundred and twelve years, but I wasn’t meant to die here any more than Moses was meant to go over into Canaan with the Children of Israel.”
She paused. The two men watched her soberly in the lamplight, and outside the rain continued to fall, slow and ceaseless. There was no more thunder. Lord, she thought, these dentures hurt my mouth. I want to take them out and go to bed.
“I started having dreams two years before this plague ever fell. I’ve always dreamed, and sometimes my dreams have come true. Prophecy is the gift of God and everyone has a smidge of it. My own grandmother used to call it the shining lamp of God, sometimes just the shine. In my dreams I saw myself going west. At first with just a few people, then a few more, then a few more. West, always west, until I could see the Rockies. It got so there was a whole caravan of us, two hundred or more. And there would be signs ... no, not signs from God but regular road-signs, and every one of them saying things like BOULDER, COLORADO, 609 MILES or THIS WAY TO BOULDER.
“Those dreams, they scared me. I never told a soul I was havin em. I was scared. I even tried to pretend they was just dreams, foolish old woman runnin from God the way Jonah did. But if God says to Abby, You got to tell, then tell I must. And I always felt like someone would come to me that I knew, and that’s how I’d be in the way of knowin the time had come.”
She looked at Nick.
“I knew when I saw you. It’s you, Nick. God has put His finger on your heart. But He has more fingers than one, and there’s others out there, still comin on, praise God, and He’s got a finger on them, too. I dream of him, how he’s lookin for us even now, and God forgive my sick spirit, I curse Him in my heart.” She began to weep and got up to have a drink of water and a splash. Her tears were the human part of her, weak and flagging.
When she turned back, Nick was writing. At last he ripped the page off his pad and handed it to Ralph.
“I don’t know about the God part, but I know something is working here. Everyone we’ve met has been moving north. As if you had the answer. Have you dreamed about any of the others? Dick? June or Olivia? Maybe the little girl?”
“Not any of these others. A man who doesn’t talk much. A woman who is with child. A man of about your age who comes to me with a guitar of his own. And you, Nick.”
“And you think going to Boulder is the right thing?”
Mother Abagail said, “It’s what we’re meant to do.”
Nick doodled aimlessly on his pad for a moment and then wrote, “How much do you know about the dark man? Do you know where he is?”
“I know what he’s about but not who he is. He’s the purest evil left in the world. The rest of the bad is little evil. Shoplifters and sexfiends and people who like to use their fists. But he’ll call them. He’s started already. He’s getting them together a lot faster than we are. Not just the evil ones that are like him, but the weak ones . . . the lonely ones . . . and the ones that have left God out of their hearts.”
“Maybe he’s not real,” Nick wrote. “Maybe he’s just. . He had to nibble at the top of his pen and think. At last he added: . . the
scared, bad part of all of us. Maybe we are dreaming of the things we’re afraid we might do.”
Ralph frowned over this as he read it aloud, but Abby grasped what Nick meant right off. It wasn’t much different from the talk of the new preachers who had got on the land in the last twenty years or so. There wasn’t really any Satan, that was their gospel. There was evil, and it probably came from original sin, but it was in all of us and getting it out was as impossible as getting an egg out of its shell without cracking it. Yes, that had a good modem sound to it; the trouble with it was that it wasn’t true. And if Nick was allowed to go on thinking that, the dark man would eat him for dinner.
She said: “You dreamed of me. Ain’t I real?”
Nick nodded.
“And I dreamed you. Ain’t you real? Praise God, you’re sittin right over there with a pad o paper on your knee. This other man, Nick, he’s as real as you are.” Yes, he was real. She thought of the weasels, and of the red eye opening in the darkness. And when she spoke up again, her voice was husky. “He ain’t Satan,” she said, “but he and Satan know of each other and have kept their councils together of old.
&
nbsp; “The Bible, it don’t say what happened to Noah and his family after the flood went down. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some awful tussle for the souls of those few people—for their souls, their bodies, their way of thinking. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that was what was on for us.
“He’s west of the Rockies now. Sooner or later he’ll come east.
Maybe not this year, no, but when he’s ready. And it’s our lot to deal with him.”
Nick was shaking his head, disturbed.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “You’ll see. There’s bitter days ahead. Death and terror, betrayal and tears. And not all of us will be alive to see how it ends.”
“I don’t like any of this,” Ralph muttered. “Aren’t things hard enough without this guy you and Nick are talkin about? Why are we stuck with this?”
“I don’t know. It’s God’s way. He don’t explain to the likes of Abby Freemantle.”
“If this is His way,” Ralph said, “why, I wish He’d retire and let somebody younger take over.”
“If the dark man is west,” Nick wrote, “maybe we ought to pick up stakes and move east.”
She shook her head patiently. “Nick, all things serve the Lord. Don’t you think this black man serves Him, too? He does, no matter how mysterious His purpose may be. The black man will follow you no matter where you run, because he serves the purpose of God, and God wants you to meet him. It don’t matter if you box the compass tryin to get away.”
Nick wrote briefly. Ralph studied the note, rubbed the side of his nose, and wished he didn’t have to read it. Old ladies like this didn’t cotton to stuff like what Nick had just written. She’d likely call it a blasphemy, and shout it loud enough to wake everyone in the place, too.
“What’s he say?” Abagail asked.
“He says ...” Ralph cleared his throat. “He says that he don’t believe in God.” The message relayed, he looked unhappily down at his shoes and waited for the explosion.
But she only chuckled, got up, and walked across to Nick. She took one of his hands. “Bless you, Nick, but that don’t matter. He believes in you”
They stayed at Abby Freemantle’s place the next day, and it was the best day any of them could remember since the coming of the superflu.
Around nine o’clock, Dick Ellis, the vet, came diffidently to Mother Abagail and asked her if anyone in the area had kept pigs.
“Why, the Stoners always had pigs,” she said. She was sitting on the porch in her rocker, chording her guitar and watching Gina at play in the yard, her broken leg in its cast stuck out stiffly in front of her.
“Think they might still be alive?”
“You’d have to go see. Might be. Might be they’ve bust down their pens and gone hogwild.” Her eyes gleamed. “Could be I know me a fella who dreamed about pork chops last night.”
“Could be you do,” Dick said.
“You ever slaughtered a hog?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, grinning broadly now. “I’ve wormed a few but never slaughtered any.”
“Do you think you and Ralph there could stand a woman foreman?”
“Could be,” he said.
Twenty minutes later the three of them were off, Abagail riding between the two men in the Chevy’s cab. At the Stoners’ they found two yearling pigs in the back pen, healthy and full of beans. Ralph set up Reg Stoner’s chainfall in the barn, and at Abagail’s direction, Dick was finally able to get a rope firmly around the back leg of one of the yearlings. Squealing and thrashing, it was yanked into the barn and hung upside down.
Ralph came out of the house with a butcher knife three feet long —that ain’t a knife, that’s a regular bayonet, praise God, Abby thought.
“You know, I don’t know if I can do this,” he said.
“Well, give her here, then,” Abagail said, and then held out her hand. Ralph looked doubtfully at Dick. Dick shrugged. Ralph handed the knife over.
“Lord,” Abagail said, “we thank Thee for the gift we are about to receive from Thy bounty. Bless this pig that it might nourish us, amen. Stand clear, boys, she’s gonna go a gusher.”
She cut the pig’s throat with one practiced sweep of the knife— some things you never forgot, no matter how old you got—and then stepped back as quick as she could.
“You got that fire going under the kettle?” she asked Dick. “Nice hot fire out there in the dooryard?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dick said respectfully, unable to take his eyes from the pig.
“You got those brushes?” She asked Ralph.
Ralph displayed two big scrub brushes with stiff yellow bristles.
“Well then, you want to haul him over and dump him in. After he’s boiled awhile, those bristles will scrub right off. After that you can peel old Mr. Hog just like a banana.”
They both looked a trifle green at the prospect.
“Lively,” she said. “You can’t eat him with his jacket on.”
They were done by three that afternoon, back at Abagail’s by four with a truckload of meat, and there were fresh pork chops for breakfast. Neither of the men ate very well, but Abagail put away two chops all by herself, relishing the way the crisp fat crackled between her dentures. There was nothing like fresh meat you’d seen to yourself.
It was sometime after nine o’clock. Gina was asleep, and Tom Cullen had dozed off in Mother Abagail’s rocker on the porch. Soundless lightning flickered against the sky far to the west. The other adults were gathered in the kitchen, except Nick, who had gone for a walk. Abagail knew what the boy was wrestling with, and her heart went out to him.
The door opened and Nick came in—conversation broke off as if they had all been marking time, waiting for him. She could see in his face that he had made his decision, and she thought she knew what it was. He handed her a note that he had written out on the porch, standing by Tom. She held the note at arm’s length to read it. “We’d better start for Boulder tomorrow,” Nick had written.
She looked from the note to Nick’s face and nodded slowly. She passed the note on to June Brinkmeyer, who passed it to Olivia. “I guess we had,” Abagail said. “I don’t want to any more than you, but I guess we had better. What made up your mind?”
He shrugged almost angrily and pointed at her.
“So be it,” Abagail said. “My faith’s in the Lord.”
Nick thought: I wish mine was.
The next morning, July 26, after a brief conference, Dick and Ralph set off for Columbus in Ralph’s truck. “I hate to trade her in,” Ralph said, “but if it’s the way you say it is, Nick, okay.”
Nick wrote, “Be back as soon as you can.”
Ralph uttered a short laugh and looked around the yard. June and Olivia were washing clothes in a large tub with a scrub board stuck in one end. Tom was in the corn, scaring crows—an occupation he seemed to find endlessly diverting. Gina was playing with his Corgi cars and his garage. The old woman sat dozing in her rocker, dozing and snoring.
“You’re in one tearin hurry to stick your head in the lion’s mouth, Nicky.”
Nick wrote: “Have we got anyplace better to go to?”
“That’s true. It’s no good just wandering around. It makes you feel kind of worthless. A person don’t hardly feel right unless he’s lookin forward, you ever notice that?”
Nick nodded.
“Okay.” Ralph clapped Nick on the shoulder and turned away. “Dick, you ready to take a ride?”
Tom Cullen came running out of the corn, silk clinging to his shirt and pants and long blond hair. “Me too! Tom Cullen wants to go on the ride, too! Laws, yes!”
“Come on, then,” Ralph said. “Here, lookit you, cornsilk from top to bottom and fore to aft. And you ain’t caught a crow yet. Better let me brush you off.”
Grinning vacantly, Tom allowed Ralph to brush off his shirt and pants. For Tom, Nick reflected, these last two weeks had probably been the happiest of his life. He was with people who accepted and wanted him. Why shouldn�
��t they? He might be feeble, but he was still a comparative rarity in this new world, a living human being.
He watched the truck out of sight, then went into the shed and found an old crate and a can of paint. He broke out one of the crate’s panels and nailed a long piece of picket fence to it. He took the sign and the paint out into the yard and carefully daubed on it while Gina looked over his shoulder with interest.
“What does it say?” she asked.
“It says, ‘We have gone to Boulder, Colorado. We are taking secondary roads to avoid traffic jams. Citizen’s Band Channel 14,”* Olivia read.
“What does that mean?” June asked, coming over. She picked Gina up and they both watched as Nick carefully planted the sign so that it faced the area where the dirt road became Mother Abagail’s driveway. That done, he wrote a note and handed it to June.
“One of the things Dick and Ralph are supposed to get in Columbus is a CB radio. Someone will have to monitor Channel 14 all the time.”
“Oh,” Olivia said. “Smart.”
Nick tapped his forehead gravely, then smiled.
The two women went back to hang their clothes. Gina returned to the toy cars, hopping nimbly on one leg. Nick walked across the yard, mounted the porch steps, and sat down next to the dozing old woman. He looked out over the corn and wondered what was going to become of them.
If that's the way you say it is, Nick, okay.
They had turned him into a leader. They had done that and he couldn’t even begin to understand why. You couldn’t take orders from a deafmute; it was like a bad joke. Dick should have been their leader. His own place was as spear-carrier, third from the left, no lines, recognized only by his mother. But from the time they had met Ralph Brentner pottering up the road in his truck, not really going anywhere, that business of saying something and then glancing quickly at Nick, as if for confirmation, had begun. A fog of nostalgia had already begun to creep over those few days between Shoyo and May, before Tom and responsibility. It was easy to forget how lonely he had been, the fear that the constant bad dreams might mean he was going crazy. Easy to remember how there had been only yourself to look out for, a spear-carrier, third from the left, a bit player in this terrible play.