by Stephen King
July 19, 1980
Oh Lord. The worst has happened. At least in the books when it happens it’s over, something at least changes, but in real life it just seems to go on and on, like a soap opera where nothing ever comes to a head. Maybe I should move to clear things up, take a chance, but I’m so afraid something might happen between them.
Let me tell you everything, dear diary, even though it’s no great treat to write it down. I even hate to think about it.
Glen and Stu went into town (which happens to be Girard, Ohio, tonight) near dusk to look for some food, hopefully concentrates and freeze-dried stuff. They’re easy to carry and some of the concentrates are really tasty, but as far as I am concerned all the freeze-dried food has the same flavor, namely dried turkey turds. And when have you ever had dried turkey turds to serve as your basis for comparison? Never mind, diary, some things will never be told, ha-ha.
They asked Harold and I if we wanted to come, but I said I’d had enough motorcycling for one day if they could do without me, and Harold said no, he would fetch some water and get it boiled up. Probably already laying his plans. Sorry to make him sound so scheming, but the simple fact is, he is.
When he came back with the water (he’d pretty obviously stayed at the stream long enough to have a bath and wash his hair) he put it on to boil and we were sitting on a log, talking about one thing and another, when he suddenly put his arms around me and tried to kiss me. I say tried but he actually succeeded, at least at first, because I was so surprised. Then I jerked away from him—looking back it seems sorta comic altho I’m still sore—and fell backward right off the log. It rucked up the back of my blouse and scraped about a yard of skin off. I let out a yell. Talk about history repeating; that was too much like the time with Jess out on the breakwater when I bit my tongue ... too much like it for comfort.
In a second Harold’s on one knee beside me, asking if I’m all right, blushing right to the roots of his clean hair.
When he knelt beside me and said, “Are you all right, baby?” I started to giggle. Talk about history repeating itself! But it was more than the humor of the situation, you know. If that had been all, I could have held it in. No, it was more in the line of hysterics. The bad dreams, the worrying about the baby, what to do about my feelings for Stu, the traveling every day, the stiffness, the soreness, losing my parents, everything changed for good ... it came out in giggles at first, then in hysterical laughter I just couldn’t stop.
“What’s so funny?” Harold asked, getting up. I think it was supposed to come out in this terribly righteous voice, but by then I had stopped thinking about Harold and got this crazy image of Donald Duck in my head. Donald Duck waddling through the ruins of Western civilization quacking angrily: What’s so funny, hah? What’s so funny, What’s so fucking funny, I put my hands over my face & just giggled & sobbed & sobbed & giggled until Harold must have thought I’d gone absolutely crackers.
After a little bit I managed to stop. I wiped the tears off my face and wanted to ask Harold to look at my back and see how badly it was scraped. But I didn’t because I was afraid he might take it as a LIBERTY. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Frannie, oh-ho, that’s not so funny.
“Fran,” Harold sez, “I find this very hard to say.”
“Then maybe you better not say it,” I said.
“I have to,” he answers, and I began to see he wasn’t going to take no for an answer unless it was hollered at him. “Frannie,” he says, “I love you.”
I guess I knew all along it was just as bald as that. It would be easier if he only wanted to sleep with me. Love’s more dangerous than just balling, and I was in a spot. How to say no to Harold? I guess there’s only one way, no matter who you have to say it to.
“I don’t love you, Harold,” is what I said.
His face cracked all to pieces. “It’s him, isn’t it?” he said, and his face got an ugly grimace on it. “It’s Stu Redman, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Now I have a temper, which I have not always been able to control—a gift from my mother’s side, I think. But I have struggled womanfully with it as applies to Harold. I could feel it straining its leash, however.
“I know.” His voice had gotten shrill and self-pitying. “I know, all right. The day we met him, I knew it then. I didn’t want him to come with us, because I knew. And he said . . .”
“What did he say?”
“That he didn’t want you! That you could be mine!”
“Just like giving you a new pair of shoes, right, Harold?”
He didn’t answer, maybe realizing he had gone too far.
“No one owns me, Harold,” I said.
He muttered something.
“What?”
“I said, you may have to change that idea.”
A sharp retort came to mind, but I didn’t let it out. Harold’s eyes had gone far away, and his face was very still and open. He said: “I’ve seen that guy before. You better believe it, Frannie. He’s the guy that’s the quarterback on the football team but who just sits there in class throwing spitballs and flipping people the bird because he knows the teacher’s got to pass him with at least a C so he can keep on playing. He’s the guy who goes steady with the prettiest cheerleader and she thinks he’s Jesus Christ with a bullet. The guy who thinks up the initiations for the freshmen. The guy who farts when the English teacher asks you to read your composition because it’s the best one in the class.
“Yeah, I know fuckers like him. Good luck, Fran.”
Then he just walked off. It wasn’t the GRAND, TRAMPLING EXIT that he’d meant to make, I feel quite sure.
Things to Remember: I’m sorry, diary. It must be my state of mind. I can’t remember a single thing.
On July 30 they met the women.
They had only been on the road for an hour and the going was slippery—there had been light rain the night before—when they swept around a curve and came upon three women trying to get a Ford station wagon back on the road while a fourth stood by placidly, deep in her own kind of mental separation.
The other three came slowly around the wagon, which was firmly in the ditch. They stared at Stu, Harold, Fran, and Glen as if they had come down from the skies in a flying saucer.
One of them was wearing a sweatshirt with KENT STATE UNIVERSITY across the front and dark hair spilling down her back in a flood—Susan Stem. The blonde with the scratch across her forehead was Dayna Jurgens. The third, a strawberry blonde of no more than sixteen, was Patty Kroger. The woman off in her own world was the oldest of the quartet; her name, they discovered later, was Shirley Hammett.
It was easy enough to see what had happened. A tractor-trailer rig had jackknifed across the road some weeks back. These women had come around the curve earlier this morning, in the rain, just a little too fast for the conditions. Dayna Jurgens was the only one who had been scratched. They had gotten off lucky.
Stu dismounted his bike and walked toward them. He got no more than four steps when Susan Stem produced a very large pistol and pointed it at him. Frannie caught her breath.
“Which is it?” she asked. “The old woman or the dark man?”
“We’re headed for Nebraska, I guess,” Stu said in his easy way. “You want to hide that thing somewhere, ma’am? I’m partial to my innards the way they are.”
For a moment things hung suspended, and it was only later that Frannie had time to wonder what might have happened if they had been headed further west . . . toward him. The dark-haired girl glanced at the blonde, who shrugged, then nodded.
“Three men,” the blonde said, and then smiled at Stu. “How are your guys at pushing, big fella?”
Stu grinned. “I guess we might be pretty fair,” he said.
Shirley Hammett stood vacantly in the light drizzle, looking at nothing. She made Frannie feel even colder than the damp day warranted.
“Come on then,” the blonde said, “I’m Dayna Jurgens. If you’re headed that way, then we
might as well all go together.”
When Frannie came upon him, Stu was sitting on a rock and smoking a cigar. He had scraped a small round circle of bare earth with his boot heel and was using it for an ashtray. He was facing west, where the sun was just going down. The clouds had rifted enough to allow the red sun to poke its head through. Although they had met the four women and taken them into their party only yesterday, it already seemed distant. They had gotten the station wagon out of the ditch easily enough and now, with the motorcycles, they made quite a caravan.
The smell of his cigar made her think of her father and her father’s pipe. What came with the memory was sorrow that had almost mellowed into nostalgia. I’m getting over losing you, Daddy, she thought. I don’t think you’d mind.
Stu looked around. “Frannie,” he said with real pleasure. “How are you?”
She shrugged. “Up and around.”
“Want to share my rock and watch the sun go down?”
She joined him, her heartbeat quickening a little. But after all, why else had she come out here? She had known which way he left camp, just as she knew that Harold and Glen and two of the girls had gone into Brighton to look for a CB radio (Glen’s idea instead of Harold’s for a change). Patty Kroger was back in camp, babysitting their combat-fatigue patient. Shirley Hammett showed some signs of coming out of her daze, but she had awakened them all around one this morning, shrieking in her sleep, her hands clawing at the air in warding-off gestures.
“It seems like a long way still to go, doesn’t it?” she said.
He didn’t answer for a moment, and then he said: “It’s further than we thought. That old woman, she’s not in Nebraska anymore.”
“I know—” she began, and then bit down on her words.
He glanced at her with a faint grin. “You’ve been skippin your medication, ma’am.”
“My secret’s out,” she said with a lame smile.
“We’re not the only ones,” Stu said, “I was talkin to Dayna this afternoon” (she felt that interior dig of jealousy—and fear—at the familiar way he used her name) “and she said neither she nor Susan wanted to take it.”
Fran nodded. “Why did you stop? Did they drug you ... in that place?”
He tapped ashes into his bare earth ashtray. “Mild sedatives at night, that was all. They didn’t need to drug me. I was locked up nice and tight. No, I stopped three nights ago because I felt . . . out of touch.” He meditated for a moment and then expanded. “Glen and Harold going to get that CB radio, that was a real good idea. What’s a two-way for? To put you in touch. This buddy of mine back in Amette, Tony Leominster, he had one in his Scout. Great gadget. You could talk to folks, or you could holler for help if you got in a jam of trouble. These dreams, they’re almost like having a CB in your head, except the transmit seems to be broken and we’re only receiving.”
“Maybe we are transmitting,” Fran said quietly.
He looked at her, startled.
They sat quiet for a while. The sun peered through the clouds on its way under the earth. Fran could understand why primitive people worshiped it. As the gigantic quiet of the nearly empty country accumulated on you day by day, imprinting its truth on your brain by its very weight, the sun—the moon, too, for that matter—began to seem bigger and more important. More personal. Those bright skyships began to look to you as they had when you were a child.
“Anyway, I stopped,” Stu said. “Last night I dreamed about that black man again. It was the worst yet. He’s setting up somewhere out in the desert. Las Vegas, I think. And Frannie ... I think he’s crucifying people. The ones who give him trouble.”
“He’s doing what?”
“That’s what I dreamed. Lines of crosses along Highway 15 made out of barn-beams and telephone poles. People hanging off them.”
“Just a dream,” she said uneasily.
“Maybe.” He smoked and looked west. “But the other two nights, just before we run on those women, I dreamed about her—the woman who calls herself Mother Abagail. She was sitting in the cab of an old pickup truck parked on the shoulder of Highway 76. I was standing on the ground with one arm leaning on the window, talking to her just as natural as I’m talking to you. And she says, ‘You got to move em along faster still, Stuart; if an old lady like me can do it, a big tough fella from Texas like you should be able to.’ ” Stu laughed, threw down his cigar, and crushed it under his heel. In kind of an absent way, as if not knowing what he was doing, he put an arm around Frannie’s shoulders.
“They’re going to Colorado,” she said.
“Why, yes. I think they are.”
“Has . . . has either Dayna or Susan dreamed of her?”
“Both. And last night Susan dreamed of the crosses. Just like I did.”
“There’s a lot of people with that old woman now.”
Stu agreed. “Twenty, maybe more. You know, we’re passing people nearly every day. They just hunker down and wait for us to go by. They’re scared of us, but her . . . they’ll come to her, I guess. In their own good time.”
“Or to the other one,” Frannie said.
Stu nodded. “Yeah, or to him. Fran, why did you stop taking the Veronal?”
She uttered a trembling sigh and wondered if she should tell him. She wanted to, but she was afraid of what his reaction might be. “There’s no counting on what a woman will do,” she said.
“No,” he agreed. “But there are ways to find out what they’re thinking, maybe.”
“What—” she began, and he stopped her mouth with a kiss.
They lay on the grass in the last of the twilight. Flagrant red had given way to cooler purple as they made love, and now Frannie could see stars shining through the last of the clouds. It would be good riding weather tomorrow. With any luck they would be able to get most of the way across Indiana.
Stu slapped lazily at a mosquito hovering over his chest. His shirt was hung on a nearby bush. Fran’s shirt was on but unbuttoned. Her breasts pushed at the cloth and she thought, I’m getting bigger, just a little right now, but it’s noticeable . . . at least to me.
“I’ve wanted you for a pretty long time now,” Stu said without looking directly at her. “I guess you know that.”
“I wanted to avoid trouble with Harold,” she said. “And there’s something else that—”
“Harold’s got a ways to go,” Stu said, “but he’s got the makings of a fine man somewhere inside him if he’ll toughen up. You like him, don’t you?”
“That’s not the right word. There isn’t a word in English for how I feel about Harold.”
“How do you feel about me?” He asked.
She looked at him and found she couldn’t say she loved him, couldn’t say it right out, although she wanted to.
“No,” he said, as if she’d contradicted him, “I just like to get things straight. I know you’d just as soon not have Harold know anything about this just yet. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” she said gratefully.
“It’s just as well. If we lie low, it may take care of itself. I’ve seen him lookin at Patty. She’s about his age.”
“I don’t know . .
“You feel a debt of gratitude to him, don’t you?”
“I suppose so. We were the only two left in Ogunquit, and—” “That was luck, no more, Frannie.”
“I suppose.”
“I guess I love you,” he said. “That’s not so easy for me to say.”
“I guess I love you, too. But there’s something else . .
“I knew that.”
“You asked me why I stopped taking the pills.” She plucked at her shirt, not daring to look at him. Her lips felt unnaturally dry. “I thought they might be bad for the baby,” she whispered.
“For the.” He stopped. Then he grasped her and turned her to face him. “You’re pregnant?”
She nodded.
“And you didn’t tell anyone?”
“No.”
“Harold.
Does Harold know?”
“No one but you.”
“God-almighty-damn,” he said. He was peering into her face in a concentrated way that scared her. She had imagined one of two things: He would leave her immediately or he would hug her, tell her not to worry, that he would take care of everything. She had never expected this startled, close scrutiny.
“Stu?” she said in a frightened voice.
“You didn’t tell anyone,” he repeated.
“I didn’t know how.” Her tears were close to the surface now. “When are you due?”
“January,” she said, and the tears came.
He held her and made her know it was all right without saying anything. He didn’t tell her not to worry or that he would take care of everything, but he made love to her again and she thought that she had never been so happy. Neither of them saw Harold, as shadowy and as silent as the dark man himself, standing in the bushes and looking at them. Neither of them knew that his eyes squinted down into small, deadly triangles as Fran cried out her pleasure at the end of it, as her good orgasm burst through her.
By the time they had finished, it was full dark.
Harold slipped away silently.
From Fran Goldsmith’s Diary
August 1, 1980
No entry last night, too excited, too happy. Stu and I are together.
Frannie slept heavily and dreamlessly. So did they all, with the exception of Harold Lauder. Sometime shortly after midnight he rose and walked softly to where Frannie lay, and stood looking down at her. He was not smiling now, although he had smiled all day. At times he had felt that the smile would crack his face right up the middle and spill out his whirling brains. That might have been a relief.
He stood looking down at her, listening to the chirr of summer crickets. We’re in dog days now, he thought. Dog days, from July the twenty-fifth to August twenty-eighth, according to Webster’s. So named because rabid dogs were supposed to be the most common then. He looked down at Fran, sleeping so sweetly, using her sweater for a pillow. Her pack was beside her.