by Stephen King
I knew when I saw you. It’s you, Nick. God has put His finger on your heart. . .
No, I don’t accept that. I don’t accept God either, for that matter. Let the old woman have her God, he would concentrate on one thing at a time, planting one foot ahead of the other. Get them to Boulder, then see what came next. The old woman said the dark man was a real man, not just a psychological symbol, and he didn’t want to believe that, either . . . but in his heart he did. In his heart he believed everything she had said, and it scared him. He didn’t want to be their leader.
It’s you, Nick.
A hand squeezed his shoulder and he jumped with surprise, then turned around. If she had been dozing, she wasn’t anymore. She was smiling down at him"from her armless rocker.
“I was just sittin here and thinkin on the Great Depression,” she said. “Do you know my daddy once owned all this land for miles around? It’s true. No small trick for a black man. And I played my guitar and sang down at the Grange Hall in eighteen and ninety-five. Long ago, Nick. Long, long ago.”
Nick nodded.
“My daddy died, and the land was split between his sons with a piece for my first husband, sixty acres, not much. This house stands on part o that sixty, you know. Four acres, that’s all that’s left now. Oh, I guess now I could lay claim to all of it again, but t’wouldn’t be the same, somehow.”
Nick patted her scrawny hand and she sighed deeply.
“Brothers don’t always work so well together, and they got to squabblin. Everyone wanted to be a foreman and nobody wanted to be a fieldhand! Comes 1931, and the bank called its paper home. Then they all pulled together but by then it was most too late. By 1945 everything was gone but my sixty and forty or fifty more where the Goodell place is now.”
She fumbled her handkerchief from her dress pocket and wiped her eyes with it, slowly and thoughtfully.
“Finally there was only me left, with no money nor nothing. And each year when tax-time came round, they’d take a little more to pay it off, and I’d come out here to look at the part that wasn’t my own anymore, and I’d cry over it like I’m crying now. A little more each year for taxes, that’s how it happened. A whack here, a whack there. I rented out what was left, but it was never enough to cover what they had to have for their cussed taxes. Then, when I got to be a hundred years old, they remanded the taxes in perpetuity. Yes, they give it over after they’d taken everything but this little piece o scratch that’s here. Big o them, wa’n’t it?”
He squeezed her hand lightly and looked at her.
“Oh, Nick,” Mother Abagail said, “I have harbored hate of the Lord in my heart. Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He’s a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He’s apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy. I do His will, but the human part o me has cursed Him in my heart. ‘Abby,’ the Lord says to me, ‘there’s work for you far up ahead. So I’ll let you live an live, until your flesh is bitter on your bones. I’ll let you see all your children die ahead of you and still you’ll walk the earth. I’ll let you see your daddy’s lan taken away piece by piece. And in the end, your reward will be to go away with strangers from all the things you love the best and you’ll die in a strange land with the work not yet finished. That’s My will, Abby,’ says He, and ‘Yes, Lord,’ says I, ‘Thy will be done,’ and in my heart I curse Him and ask, ‘Why, why, why?’ and the only answer I get is ‘Where were you when I made the world?’ ”
Now her tears came in a bitter flood, running down her cheeks and wetting the bodice of her dress, and Nick marveled that there could be so many tears in such an old woman, who seemed as dry and thin as a dead twig.
“Help me along, Nick,” she said, “I only want to do what’s right.” He held her hands tightly. Behind them Gina giggled and held one of the toy cars up to the sky for the sun to shine and sparkle on.
Dick and Ralph came back at noon, Dick behind the wheel of a new Dodge van and Ralph driving a red wrecker truck with a push-board on the front and the crane and hook dangling from the back. Tom stood in the rear, waving grandly. They pulled up by the porch and Dick got out of the van.
“There’s a helluva nice CB in that wrecker,” he told Nick. “Forty channel job. I think Ralph’s in love with it.”
Nick grinned. The women had come over and were looking at the trucks. Abagail’s eyes noted the way Ralph escorted June over to the wrecker so she could look at the radio equipment, and approved. The woman had a good set of hips on her, there would be a fine porch door down there between them. She could have just about as many little ones as she wanted.
“So when do we go?” Ralph asked.
Nick scribbled, “Soon as we eat. Did you try the CB?”
‘‘Yeah,” Ralph said. “I had it on all the way back. And you know, I could swear I did hear something. Far off. Might not have been voices at all. But I’ll say the truth, Nicky, I didn’t care for it much. It scared me a little. Like those dreams.”
A silence fell among them.
“Well,” Olivia said, breaking it. “I’ll get something cooking. Hope nobody minds pork two days in a row.”
No one did. And by one o’clock the camping things, Abagail’s rocker and guitar, had been stowed in the van and they were off, the wrecker now lumbering ahead to move anything blocking the road. Abagail sat up front in the van as they drove toward westbound Route 30. She did not cry. Her cane was planted between her legs. Crying was done. She was set in the center of the Lord’s will and His will would be done. The Lord’s will would be done, but she thought of that red eye opening in the dark heart of the night and she was afraid.
Chapter 37
It was late evening, July 27. They were camped on what the sign, now half-demolished by summer storms, proclaimed to be the Kunkle Fairgrounds. Kunkle itself, Kunkle, Ohio, was south of them. There had been some sort of fire there, and most of Kunkle was gone. Stu said it had probably been lightning. Harold had of course disputed that. These days if Stu Redman said a firetruck was red, Harold Lauder would produce facts and figures proving that most of them these days were green.
She sighed and rolled over. Couldn’t sleep. She was afraid of the dreams.
To her left the three motorcycles stood in a row, heeled over on their kickstands, moonlight twinkling along their chromed exhaust pipes and fittings. As if a band of Hell’s Angels had picked this particular spot to crash for the night. Not that the Angels ever would have ridden such a pussycat bunch of bikes as these Hondas and Yamahas, she supposed. They had driven “hogs” ... or was that just something she had picked up from the old American-International bike epics? The Wild Angels. The Devil’s Angels. Hell’s Angels on Wheels. The bike pictures had been very big at the drive-ins when she had been in high school. Wells Drive-In, Sanford Drive-In, South Portland Twin, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Now kaput, all the drive-ins were kaput, not to mention the Hell’s Angels and good old American-International Pictures.
Put it in your diary, Frannie, she told herself, and rolled over on her other side. Not tonight. Tonight she was going to sleep, dreams or no dreams.
Twenty paces from where she was lying, she could see the others, zonked out in their sleeping bags. Harold, Stu, Glen Bateman. Take Sominex tonight and sleeep . . .
It wasn’t Sominex they were on but half a grain of Veronal apiece. It had been Stu’s idea when the dreams got really bad and they all began to get flaky and hard to live with. He had taken Harold aside before mentioning it to the rest of them because the way to flatter Harold was to soberly ask his opinion and also because Harold knew things. It was good that he did, but it was also rather spooky, as if they had a fifth-rate god traveling with them—more or less omniscient, but emotionally unstable and likely to fragment at any time. Harold had picked up a second gun in Albany, and now he wore the two pistols crisscrossed like a latterday Johnny Ringo. S
he felt badly for Harold, but Harold had also begun to frighten her.
She knew just how Stu would have put it to him, very quietly, almost conspiratorially: Harold, these dreams are a problem. I’ve got an idea, but I don’t know exactly how to carry it out. . .a mild sedative . . . but it would have to be just the right dose. Too much and nobody would wake up if there was trouble. What do you suggest?
Harold had suggested they try a whole grain of Veronal, available at any drugstore, and if that interrupted the dream-cycle, that they cut back to three quarters of a grain, and if that worked to a half. Stu had gone privately to Glen, had gotten a concurring opinion, and the experiment had been tried. At a quarter grain the dreams had begun to creep back in, so they held the dosage at a half.
At least for the others.
Frannie accepted her drug each night, but palmed it. She didn’t know if the Veronal would hurt the baby or not, but she was taking no chances. They said that even aspirin could break the chromosome chain. So she suffered the dreams—suffered, that was the right word. One of them predominated; if the others were different, they would sooner or later blend into this one. She was in her Ogunquit house, and the dark man was chasing her. Up and down shadowy corridors, through her mother’s parlor where the clock continued to tick off seasons in a dry age . . . she could get away from him, she knew, if she didn’t have to carry the body. It was her father’s body, wrapped in a bedsheet, and if she dropped it the dark man would do something to it, perform some awful desecration on it. So she ran, knowing that he was getting closer and closer, and at last his hand would fall on her shoulder, his hot and sickening hand. She would go boneless and weak, her father’s shrouded corpse would slither out of her arms, she would turn, ready to say: Take him, do anything, I don’t care, just don’t chase me anymore.
And there he would be, dressed in some dark stuff like a hooded monk’s robe, nothing visible of his features save his huge and happy grin. And in one hand he held the bent and twisted coathanger. That was when the horror struck her like a padded fist and she struggled up from sleep, her skin clammy with sweat, her heart thudding, wanting never to sleep again.
Because it wasn’t the dead body of her father that he wanted; it was the living child in her womb.
She rolled over again. If she didn’t go to sleep soon she really would take her diary out and write in it. She had been keeping the journal since July 5. In a way she was keeping it for the baby. It was an act of faith—faith that the baby would live. She wanted it to know what it had been like. How the plague had come to a place called Ogunquit, how she and Harold had escaped, what became of them. She wanted the child to know how things had been.
If she had to exist in a world like this, with a biological clock inside her set to go off in six months, she wanted someone like Stu Redman to be her man—no, not someone like. She wanted him. There it was, stated with complete baldness.
With civilization gone, all the chrome and geegaws had been stripped from the engine of human society. Glen Bateman held forth on this theme often, and it always seemed to please Harold inordinately.
Women’s lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn’t get with child, but a woman could—every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath. And the Women’s Credo, which should have been hung in the offices of Ms. magazine, preferably in needlepoint: Thank you, Men, for the railroads. Thank you, Men, for inventing the automobile and killing the red Indians who thought it might be nice to hold onto America for a while longer, since they were here first. Thank you, Men, for the hospitals, the police, the schools. Now I’d like to vote, please, and the right to set my own course and make my own destiny. Once I was chattel, but now that is obsolete. Thank you, Men.
And what was there to say? Nothing. The rednecks could grunt about burning bras, the reactionaries could play intellectual little games, but the truth only smiles. Now all that had changed, in a matter of weeks it had changed—how much only time would tell. But lying here in the night, she knew that she needed a man. Oh God, she badly needed a man.
Nor was it all a matter of preserving herself and her baby. Stu attracted her, especially after Jess Rider. Stu was calm, capable, and most of all he was not what her father would have called “twenty pounds of bullshit in a ten-pound bag.”
He was attracted to her as well. She knew that perfectly well, had known it since that first lunch together on the Fourth of July in that deserted restaurant. For a moment—just one moment—their eyes had met and there had been that instant of heat, like a power surge when all the needles swing over to overload. She guessed Stu knew how things were, too, but he was waiting on her, letting her make her decision in her own time. She had been with Harold first, therefore she was Harold’s chattel. A stinking macho idea, but she was afraid this was going to be a stinking macho world again, at least for a while.
If only there was someone else, someone for Harold, but there wasn’t, and she was afraid she could not wait long. She thought of the day Harold, in his clumsy way, had tried to make love to her. How long ago? Two weeks? It seemed longer. All the past seemed longer now. It had pulled out like warm Bonomo’s Turkish taffy. Between her worry of what to do about Harold—and what he might do if she did go to Stuart—and her fear of the dreams, she would never get to sleep.
So thinking, she drifted off.
From Fran Goldsmith’s Diary
July 6, 1980
After some persuasion Mr. Bateman has agreed to come along with us. So tomorrow we’re off for Stovington and I know Stu doesn’t like the idea much. He’s scared of that place. I like Stu very much, only wish Harold liked him more. Harold is making everything very hard, but I suppose he can’t help his nature.
G.B. has decided to leave Kojak behind. He is sorry to have to do that, even though Kojak will have no trouble finding forage. Still there is nothing else for it unless we could find a motorcycle with a sidecar, and even then poor Kojak might get scared and jump out. Hurt or kill himself.
Anyway tomorrow we’ll be going.
Things to Remember: The California Angels (baseball team) had a pitcher named Nolan Ryan who pitched all kinds of no-hitters and things with his famous fastball, and a no-hitter is very good. There were TV comedies with laugh-tracks, and a laugh-track was people on tape laughing at the funny parts, and they were supposed to make you have a better time watching. You used to be able to get frozen cakes and pies at the supermarket and just thaw them out and eat them. Sara Lee strawberry cheesecake was my personal favorite.
July 7,1980
Can’t write long. Cycled all day. My fanny feels like hamburger & my back feels like there’s a rock in it. I had that bad dream again last night. Harold has also been dreaming about that—?man?—and it upsets the hell out of him because he can’t explain how both of us can be having what is essentially the same dream.
Stu sez he is still having that dream about Nebraska and the old black woman there. She keeps saying he should come and see her anytime. Stu thinks she lives in a town called Holland Home or Hometown or something like that. Sez he thinks he could find it. Harold sneered at him and went into a long spiel about how dreams were psycho-Freudian manifestations of things we didn’t dare think about when we were awake. Stu was angry, I think, but kept his temper. I’m so afraid that the bad feeling between them may break out into the open, I WISH IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!
Anyway, Stu said “So how come you and Frannie are having the same dream?” Harold muttered something about coincidence and just stalked off.
Stu told Glen and I that he would like us to go to Nebraska after Stovington. Glen shrugged and said, “Why not? We have to go somewhere.”
Things to Remember: There were gasoline shortages because we had used up most of our oil
supplies and the Arabs had us by the short hairs. The Arabs had so much money they literally couldn’t spend it. There was a rock and roll group called The Who that sometimes used to finish their live performances by smashing their guitars and amplifiers. This was known as “conspicuous consumption.”
July 8,1980
Harold finished his sign about an hour ago (with much bad grace I must say) and put it on the front lawn of the Stovington installation. Stu helped him put it up and held his peace in spite of all Harold’s mean little jibes.
I had tried to prepare myself for the disappointment. I never believed Stu was lying, and I really don’t think Harold believed he was, either. So I was sure everyone was dead, but still it was an upsetting experience and I cried. I couldn’t help myself.
After we went in and looked around a little (Stu wouldn’t come in —he won’t talk about it much, but I’m sure something really bad happened to him in there, diary), Stu told us again that he wanted to go to Nebraska. He had a stubborn, sort of embarrassed look on his face, as if he knew he was going to have to take some more patronizing shit from Harold, but Harold was too unnerved from our “tour” of the Stovington facility to offer much more than token resistance. And even that stopped when Glen said, in a very reticent way, that he had dreamed of the old woman the night before.
Stu and Glen’s dreams of the old woman are very similar. The points of similarity are almost too many to go into (which is my “literary” way of saying my fingers are going numb). Anyway, they both agree she is in Polk County, Nebraska, altho they couldn’t get together on the actual name of the town—Stu says Hollingford Home, Glen says Hemingway Home. Close either way. They both seemed to feel they could find it. (Note Well, diary: My guess is “Hemingford Home.”)
Glen said, “This is really remarkable. We all seem to be sharing an authentic psychic experience.” Harold pooh-poohed, of course, but he looked like he’d been given lots of food for thought. He would only agree to go on the basis of “we have to go somewhere.” We leave in the morning. I’m scared, excited, and mostly happy to be leaving Stovington, which is a death-place.