The Stand (Original Edition)

by Stephen King

  Mark had turned a friendly, gapped grin on Nadine’s strained countenance and said, “If you ain’t had no dreams, how come you woke me up last night talkin in your sleep?”

  Nadine had gone paper white. “Are you calling me a liar?” she nearly screamed. “Because if you are, one of us had better leave right now!” Joe shrank close to her, whimpering.

  Larry had smoothed it over, agreeing with the CB idea. And in the last week or so, they had begun to pick up broadcasts, not from Nebraska (which had been abandoned even before they got there—the dreams had told them that, but even then the dreams had been fading, losing their urgency), but from Boulder, Colorado, six hundred miles further west—signals boosted by Ralph’s powerful transmitter.

  Lucy could still remember the joyous, almost ecstatic faces of the others as Ralph Brentner’s drawling, Oklahoma accent had cut nasally through the static: “This is Ralph Brentner, Boulder Free Zone. If you hear me, reply on Channel 14. Repeat, Channel 14.” They could hear Ralph, but had no transmitter powerful enough to acknowledge, not then. But they had drawn closer, and since that first transmission they had found out that the old woman, Abagail Freemantle by name (but Lucy herself would always think of her as Mother Abagail), and her party had been the first to arrive, but since then people had been straggling in by twos and threes and in groups as large as thirty. There had been two hundred people in Boulder when Brentner first got in contact with them; this evening, as they chattered back and forth—their own CB now in easy reaching distance—there were over three hundred and fifty. Their own group would send that number well on the way to four hundred.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” she said to Larry.

  “I was thinking about that watch and the death of capitalism,” he said, pointing at her Pulsar. “It used to be root, hog, or die—and the hog who rooted the hardest ended up with the red, white, and blue Cadillac and the Pulsar watch. Now, true democracy. Any lady in America can have a Pulsar digital and a blue haze mink.” He laughed.

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I’ll tell you something about this thousand-dollar watch, Larry. It’s no damned good.”

  “No?” He looked at her, surprised and smiling. It was just a little one, but it was genuine. She was glad to see his smile—a smile that was for her. “Why not?”

  “Because no one knows what time it is,” Lucy said pertly. “Four or five days ago I asked Mr. Jackson, and Mark, and you, one right after another. And you all gave me different times and you all said that your watches had stopped at least once . . . remember that place where they kept the world’s time? I read an article about it in a magazine one time when I was in the doctor’s office. It was tremendous. They had it right down to the micro-micro-microsecond. They had pendulums and solar clocks and everything. Now I think about that place sometimes and it just makes me mad. All the clocks there must be stopped and I have a thousand-dollar Pulsar watch that I hawked from a jewelry store and it can’t keep time down to the solar second like it’s supposed to. Because of the flu. The goddamned flu.”

  She fell silent and they sat together awhile without talking. Then Larry pointed at the sky. “See there!”

  She looked but didn’t see what he had pointed at until he pressed his warm hands to the sides of her face and tilted it toward the right quadrant of the sky. Then she did see and her breath caught in her throat. A bright light, starbright, but hard and unwinking. It fled rapidly across the sky on an east-to-west course.

  “My God,” she cried, “it’s a plane, isn’t it, Larry? A plane?”

  “No. An earth satellite. It will be going around and around up there for the next seven hundred years, probably.”

  They sat and watched it until it was out of sight behind the dark bulk of the Rockies.

  “Larry?” she said softly. “Why didn’t Nadine admit it? About the dreams?”

  There was a barely perceptible stiffening in him, making her wish she hadn’t brought it up. But now that she had, she was determined to pursue it. . . unless he cut her off entirely.

  “She does have them, Mark was right. And she talks in her sleep She was so loud one night she woke me up.”

  He was looking at her now. After a long time he asked, “What was she saying?”

  Lucy thought, trying to get it just right. “She was thrashing around in her sleeping bag and she was saying over and over, ‘Don’t, it’s so cold, don’t, I can’t stand it if you do, it’s so cold, so cold.’ And then she started to pull her hair. She started to pull her own hair in her sleep. And moan. It gave me the creeps.”

  “People can have nightmares, Lucy. That doesn’t mean they’re about . . . well, about him .”

  “It’s better not to say much about him after dark, isn’t it?”

  “Better, yes.”

  “She acts as if she’s coming unraveled, Larry. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes.” He knew. In spite of her insistence that she didn’t dream, there had been brown circles under her eyes by the time they reached Hemingford Home. That magnificent cable of heavy hair was noticeably whiter. And if you touched her, she jumped. She flinched.

  Lucy said, “You love her, don’t you?”

  “Oh, Lucy,” he said reproachfully.

  “No, I just want you to know . . .” She shook her head violently at his expression. “I have to say this. I see the way you look at her . . . the way she looks at you sometimes, when you’re busy with something else and it’s . . . it’s safe. She loves you, Larry. But she’s afraid.”

  “Afraid of what? Afraid of what?”

  He was remembering his attempt to make love to her, three days after the Stovington fiasco. Since then she had grown quiet—she was still cheerful on occasion, but now she was quite obviously laboring to be cheerful. Larry had gone to sit beside her, and for a while they had talked, not about their current situation but about the old things, the safe things. Larry had tried to kiss her. She pushed him away, turning her head, but not before he had felt the things Lucy had just told him. He had tried again, being rough and gentle at the same time, wanting her so damn badly. And for just one moment she had given to him, had shown him what it could be like, if . . .

  Then she broke from him and moved away, her face pale, her arms strapped across her breasts, hands cupping elbows, head lowered.

  Don’t do that again, Larry. Please don’t. Or I’ll have to take Joe and leave.

  Why? Why, Nadine? Why does it have to be so complex, such a bummer?

  She hadn’t answered. Simply stood in that head-down posture, the brown bruised places already beginning beneath her eyes.

  If I could tell you I would, she said finally, and walked away without looking back.

  “I had a girlfriend once who acted a little like her,” Lucy said. “My senior year in high school. Her name was Joline Majors. Joline wasn’t in high school. She dropped out to marry her boyfriend. He was in the Navy. She was pregnant when they got married, but she lost the baby. Her man was gone a lot, and Joline ... she liked to party down. She liked that, and her man was a regular jealous bear. He told her if he found out she was doing anything behind his back, he’d break both of her arms and spoil her face.”

  “Are you saying Nadine is afraid of me the way that girl was afraid of her husband?”

  Lucy said: “No. Wherever Nadine’s husband is, he’s not here.”

  He laughed a little uneasily. “We ought to go back to bed. Tomorrow’s going to be a heavy day.”

  “Yes,” she said, thinking that he hadn’t understood a word she’d said. And suddenly she burst into tears.

  MHey,” he said. “Hey.” He tried to put an arm around her.

  She struck it off. “You’re getting what you want from me, you don’t have to do that!”

  There was still enough of the old Larry in him to wonder if her voice would carry back to camp.

  “Lucy, I never twisted your arm,” he said grimly.

  “Oh, you’re so stupid!” She cried, and beat at his leg.
“Why are so many men so stupid, Larry? All you can see is what’s in black and white. No, you never twisted my arm. I ain’t like her. You could twist her arm and she’d still spit in your eye and cross her legs. Men have names for girls like me, they write them on bathroom stalls, I’ve heard. But all it is, is needing someone warm, needing to be warm. Needing to love. Is that so bad?”

  “No. No, it isn’t. But Lucy—”

  “But you don’t believe that,” she said scornfully. “So you just go on chasing Miss Highpockets and in the meantime you got Lucy to do the bump with when the sun goes down.”

  He sat quietly, nodding. It was true, every word of it. He was too tired, too Christless beat, to argue against it. She seemed to see that; her face softened and she put a hand on his arm.

  “If you catch her, Larry, I’ll be the first to throw you a bouquet. I never held a grudge in my life. Just ... try not to be too disappointed.”

  “Lucy—”

  Her voice rose suddenly, rough with unexpected power, and for a moment his arms goosefleshed. “I just happen to think love is very important, only love will get us through this, good connections, it’s hate against us, worse, it’s emptiness.” Her voice dropped. “You’re right. It’s late. I’m going back to bed. Coming?”

  “Yes,” he said, and stood up. He hesitated, looking at her. “I love you as much as I can, Lucy.”

  “I know that,” she said, and gave him a tired smile. “I know that, Larry.”

  This time when he put his arm around her she let it stay. They walked back to camp together, made diffident love, slept.

  Nadine came awake like a cat in the dark, the high iron of terror singing in her veins.

  Someone wants me, she thought, listening as the millrace of her heart slowed. Her eyes, wide and full of darkness, stared up to where the overhanging branches of an elm laced the sky with shadows. There's that. Someone wants me.

  But. . . it’s so cold.

  Her parents and her brother had been killed in a car accident when she was six; she hadn’t gone along that day, staying behind instead to play with a friend from down the street. After the accident she had gone to live with the aunt and uncle, because they were the only two relatives. The White Mountains of eastern New Hampshire. She remembered that they had taken her for a ride on the cog railway up Mount Washington for her eighth birthday and the altitude had caused a bloody nose and they had been angry with her. Aunt and Uncle were too old, they had been in their mid-fifties when she turned sixteen, the year she had run fleetly through the dewy grass under the moon—the night of wine, when dreams condensed out of thin air like the nightmilk of fantasy. A lovenight. And if the boy caught her she would have given him whatever prizes were hers to give, and what did it matter if he caught her? They had run, wasn’t that the important thing?

  But he hadn’t caught her. A cloud had drifted over the moon. The dew began to feel clammy and unpleasant, frightening. The taste of wine in her mouth had somehow changed to the taste of electric spit, slightly sour. A kind of metamorphosis had taken place, a feeling that she should, must wait.

  And where had he been then, her intended, her dark bridegroom? On what streets, what backroads, clocking along in outside suburban darkness while inside the brittle clink of cocktail chatter broke the world into neat and rational sections? What cold winds were his? How many sticks of dynamite in his frayed packsack? Who knew what his name had been when she was sixteen? How ancient was he? Where had been his home? What sort of mother had held him to her breast? She was only sure that he was an orphan as she was, his time still to come. He walked mostly on roads that hadn’t even been laid down yet, while she had but one foot on those same roads. The junction where they would meet was far ahead. He was an American man, she knew that, a man who would have a taste for milk and apple pie, a man who would appreciate the homely beauty of red check and gingham. His home was America, and his ways were the secret ways, the highways in hiding, the underground railways where directions are written in runes. He was the other man, the other face, the hardcase, the dark man, the Walkin Dude, and his rundown bootheels clocked along the perfumed ways of the summer night.

  Who knoweth when the bridegroom comes?

  She had waited for him, the unbroken vessel. At sixteen she had almost fallen, and again in college. Both of them had gone away angry and perplexed, the way Larry was now, sensing the crossroads inside her, the sense of some preordained, mystic junction point.

  Boulder was the place where the roads diverged.

  The time was close. He had called, bid her come.

  After college she had buried herself in her work, had shared a rented house with two other girls. What two girls? Well, they came and went. Only Nadine stayed, and she was pleasant to the young men her changing roommates brought home, but she never had a young man herself. She supposed they talked about her, called her spinster-in-waiting, maybe even conjectured that she might be a carefully circumspect lesbian. It wasn’t true. She was simply—

  Waiting.

  It had seemed to her sometimes that a change was coming. She would be putting toys away in the silent classroom at the end of the day and suddenly she would pause, her eyes lambent and watchful, a jack-in-the-box held forgotten in one hand. And she would think: A change is coming ... a great wind is going to blow. Sometimes, when such a thought came to her, she would find herself looking back over her shoulder like something pursued. Then it would break and she would laugh uneasily.

  Her hair had begun to gray in her sixteenth year, the year she had been chased and not caught—just a few strands at first, startlingly visible in all the black, and not gray, no, that was the wrong word . . . white, it had been white.

  Years later she had attended a party in the basement lounge of a frathouse. The lights had been low and after a while the people had drifted away by twos. Many of the girls—Nadine among them—had signed out for overnight from their dorms. She had fully intended to . . . to go through with it. . . but something that was still buried beneath the months and years had held her back. And the next morning, in the cold light of 7 A.M., she had looked at herself in one of a long line of dormitory bathroom mirrors and saw that the white had advanced again, seemingly overnight—although that, of course, was impossible.

  And so the years had passed and there had been feelings, yes, feelings, and sometimes in the dead grave of night she had awakened both hot and cold, bathed in sweat, deliciously alive and aware in the trench of her bed, thinking of sex in a kind of gutter ecstasy. And the mornings after she would go to the mirror and she would fancy that she saw more white there.

  Now the change had come, and in her dreams she had begun to know her bridegroom, to understand him a little, even though she had never seen his face. He was the one she had been waiting for. She wanted to go to him . . . but she didn’t want to. She was meant for him, but he terrified her.

  Then Joe had come, and after him, Larry. Things had become terribly complicated then. She began to feel like a prize ring in a tug o’ war rope. She knew that her purity, her virginity, was somehow important to the dark man. That if she let Larry have her (or if she let any man have her) the dark enchantment would end. And she was attracted to Larry. She had set out, quite deliberately, to let him have her—again, she had intended to go through with it. Let him have her, let it end, let it all end. She was tired. She had waited too long, through too many dry years.

  She had brushed his initial advances away with a kind of contempt, the way a mare might switch at a fly with her tail. She could remember thinking: If that's all there is to him, who could blame me for rejecting his suit?

  But there was more to him than that, as she had seen—he was like one of those optical illusions (maybe even to himself) where the water looks shallow, only an inch or two deep, but when you put your hand in you’ve suddenly got your arm wet to the shoulder. The way he had gotten to know Joe, that was one thing. The way Joe had taken to him was another, her own jealous reaction to the growing rela
tionship between Joe and Larry was a third. At the motorcycle dealership in Wells, Larry had bet the fingers of both hands on the boy, and he had won.

  Had her judgment been that much wrong about Larry’s character? The nervous, self-serving exterior was a veneer, and it was being worn away by hard use. Just the fact that he had held them all together on this long trip spoke for his determination.

  The conclusion seemed clear. Beneath her decision to let Larry make love to her, a part of her was still committed to the other man . . . and making love to Larry would be like killing that part of herself forever. She wasn’t sure she could do that.

  And she wasn’t the only one who had dreamed of the dark man now.

  That had disturbed her at first, then frightened her. Fright was all it was when she had only Joe and Larry to compare notes with; when they met Lucy Swann and she said she’d had the same sort of dream, fright became a kind of frenzied terror. It was no longer possible to tell herself their dreams only sounded like hers. What if everyone left was having them? What if the dark man’s time had come around at last—not just for her, but for everyone left on the planet?

  This idea more than any other raised the conflicting emotions of utter terror and strong attraction within her. She had held to the idea of Stovington with a nearly panicky grip. It stood, by nature of its function, as a symbol of sanity and rationality against the rising tide of dark magic she felt around her. But Stovington had been deserted, a mockery of the safe haven she had built it up to be in her mind. The symbol of sanity and rationality was a deathhouse.

  As they had moved west, picking up survivors, her hope that it could somehow end for her without confrontation had gradually died. It died as Larry grew in her estimation. He was sleeping with Lucy Swann now, but what did that matter? She was spoken for. The others had been having two opposing dreams: the dark man and the old woman. The old woman seemed to stand for some sort of elemental force, just as the dark man did. The old woman was the nucleus the others were gradually cohering around.