by Stephen King
“Well, maybe,” Harold said. “But I’m . . . well, I had a thing for her, you know. Maybe it’s best if we . . . just let it go for now. Nothing personal. The two of you go well together. I know that.” His smile shone forth with renewed sincerity. It was infectious; Stu answered it.
“Your choice, Harold. But the door’s open, anytime.”
“Thanks.”
“No, I got to thank you,” Stu said seriously.
Harold blinked. “Me?”
“For helping us hunt when everybody else decided to let nature take her course. Even if it didn’t come to nothing. Will you shake with me?” Stu put his hand out. Harold stared at it blankly for a moment, and Stu didn’t think his gesture was going to be accepted.
Then Harold took his right hand out of his jacket pocket—it seemed to catch on something, the zipper, maybe—and shook Stu’s hand briefly. Harold’s hand was warm and a little sweaty.
Stu stepped in front of him, looking down the drive. “Ralph should be here by now. I hope he didn’t have an accident coming down that frigging mountain. He . . . there he is now.”
Stu walked out to the side of the road; a second headlamp was now flashing up the drive and playing hide-and-seek through the screening trees.
“Yes, that’s him,” Harold said in an odd flat voice behind Stu.
“Someone with him, too.”
“Wh-what?”
“There.” Stu pointed to a second motorcycle head lamp behind the first.
“Oh.” That queerly flat voice again. It caused Stu to turn around.
“You okay, Harold?”
“Just tired.”
The second vehicle belonged to Glen Bateman; it was a low-power moped, the closest to a motorcycle that he would come. And behind Ralph, Nick Andros was riding pillion. Nick had an invitation for all of them to come back to the house he and Ralph shared to have coffee and/or brandy. Stu agreed but Harold begged off, still looking strained and tired.
He’s so goddam disappointed, Stu thought, and reflected that it was not only the first sympathy he had probably ever felt for Harold, but also that it was probably long overdue. He renewed Nick’s invitation himself, but Harold only shook his head and told Stu he’d had it for the day. He guessed he would go home and get some sleep.
By the time he got home, Harold was shaking so badly he could barely get his key in the front door. When he did get the door open, he darted in as if he suspected a maniac might be creeping up the walk behind him. He slammed the door, turned the lock, shot the bolt. Then he leaned against the door for a moment with his head back and his eyes shut, feeling on the verge of hysterical tears. When he had a grip on himself again, he felt his way down the hall to the living room and lit all three gas lanterns.
He sat in his favorite chair and closed his eyes. When his heart had slowed a little he went to the hearth, removed the loose stone, and removed his LEDGER. It soothed him. A ledger was where you kept track of debts owed, bills outstanding, accumulating interest. It was where you finally put paid to all accounts.
He sat back down, flipped to the place where he had stopped, hesitated, then wrote: August 14,1980. He wrote for nearly an hour and a half, his pen dashing back and forth line after line, page after page. When he was finished he read what he had written while he absently massaged his aching right hand.
He replaced the ledger and the covering stone. He was calm; he had written it all out of him; his resolve remained strong. That was good. The rage and fear and frustration had been safely transferred into the book, with a rock to hold it down while he slept.
Harold ran up one of his shades and looked out into the silent street. Looking up at the Flatirons he thought calmly about how close he had come to just going ahead anyway, just hauling out the .38 and trying to mow down all four of them. That would have fixed their reeking sanctimonious ad hoc committee. When he had finished with them they wouldn’t even have a fucking quorum left.
But at the last moment some fraying cord of sanity had held instead of giving way. He had been able? to let go of the gun and shake the betraying cracker’s hand. How, he would never know, but thank God he had. The mark of genius is its ability to bide—and so he would.
He was sleepy now; it had been a long and eventful day.
Unbuttoning his shirt, Harold turned out two of the three gaslamps, and picked up the last to take into his bedroom. As he went through into the kitchen he stopped, frozen.
The door to the basement was standing open.
He went to it, holding the lamp aloft, and went down the first three steps. Fear came into his heart, driving the calmness out.
“Who’s here?” he called. No answer. He could see the air-hockey table. The posters. In the far corner, a set of gaily striped croquet mallets sat in their rack.
He went down another three steps. “Is someone here?”
No; he felt there was not. But that did not allay his fear.
He went the rest of the way down and held the lamp high above his head; across the room a monstrous shadow-Harold, as huge and black as the ape in the Rue Morgue, did likewise.
Was there something on the floor over there? Yes. There was.
He crossed behind the slotcar track to beneath the window where Fran had entered. On the floor was a spill of light brown grit. Harold set the light down beside the spill. In the center of it, as clear as a fingerprint, was the track of a sneaker or tennis shoe . . . not a waffle or zigzag pattern, but groups of circles and lines. He stared at it, burning it into his mind, and then kicked the dust into a light cloud, destroying the mark. His face was the face of a living waxwork in the light of the Coleman lamp.
“You’ll pay!” Harold cried softly. “Whichever one of you it was, you’ll pay! Yes you will! Yes you will!”
He went back upstairs and went through his house from end to end, looking for any other signs of the prowler. He found none. He ended in the living room, not sleepy at all now. He was just concluding that someone—a kid, maybe—had broken in out of curiosity, when the thought of his LEDGER exploded in his mind like a flare in a midnight sky. The breakin motive was so clear, so awful, that he had nearly overlooked it completely.
He ran to the hearth, pulled up the stone, and ripped the LEDGER from its place. For the first time it came completely home to him how dangerous the book was. If someone found it, everything was over. He of all people should know that; hadn’t all of this begun because of Fran’s diary?
The LEDGER. The footprint. Did the latter mean the former had been discovered? Of course not. But how to be sure? There was no way, that was the pure and hellish truth of the matter.
He replaced the hearthstone and took the LEDGER into his bedroom with him. He put it under his pillow along with his Smith & Wesson, thinking he should bum it, knowing he never could. The best writing he had ever done in his life was between its covers, the only writing that had ever come as a result of belief and personal commitment.
He lay down, resigned to a sleepless night, his mind running restlessly over possible hiding places. Under a loose board? In the back of a cupboard? What about a safety deposit box at the bank? No, that wouldn’t do—he wanted it with him, where he could look at it.
At last he did begin to drift off, and his mind, freed by oncoming sleep, drifted along with no conscious guidance, a pinball in slow motion. He thought: It’s got to be hidden, that’s the thing ... if Frannie had hidden hers better ... if I hadn’t read what she really thought of me . . . her hypocrisy ... if she had . . .
Harold sat bolt upright in bed, his eyes wide.
After a little time, he began to shiver. Did she know? Had that been Fran’s footprint? Diaries . . . journals . . . ledgers . . .
At last he lay down again, but it was a long time before he slept— and when he did, his dreams were uneasy and more than once he cried out miserably in the dark, as if to ward off things that had already been let in forever.
Stu let himself in at quarter past nine. Fran was curled up on
the double bed, wearing one of his shirts—it came almost to her knees— and reading a book titled Fifty Friendly Plants. She got up when he came in.
“Where have you been? I was worried!”
Stu explained Harold’s idea that they hunt for Mother Abagail so they could at least keep an eye on her. He didn’t mention Sacred Cows. Unbuttoning his shirt, he finished: “We would have taken you along, kiddo, but you were nowhere to be found.”
“I was at the library,” she said, watching as he took off his shirt and slipped it into the net laundry bag hanging from the back of the door.
Harold had read her diary, she knew that now. She had been terribly afraid that Harold might connive to get Stu alone and . . . well, do something to him. But why now, today, just when she had found out? If Harold had let the sleeping dog lie this long, wasn’t it more logical to assume that he didn’t want to wake the dog up? And wasn’t it just as possible that by reading her diary Harold had seen the futility of his constant chase after her? Coming on top of the news that Mother Abagail had disappeared, she had been in a ripe mood to see ill omens in chicken entrails, but the fact was, it had simply been her diary Harold had read, not a confession to the crimes of the world. And if she told Stu what she had found out, she would only succeed in looking silly and maybe getting him pissed at Harold . . . and probably at herself as well for being so silly in the first place.
“How did Harold seem?” She asked.
Stu was taking off his pants. “Pretty well racked. Sorry his idea didn’t pan out better. I invited him to supper whenever he wanted to come. I hope that’s okay by you. You know, I really think I could get to like that sucker. You never could have convinced me of that the day I met you two in New Hampshire. Was it wrong to invite him?”
“No,” she said, after a considering pause. “No, I’d like to be on good terms with Harold.” Vm sitting home thinking that Harold might be planning to blow his head off, she thought, and Stu’s inviting him to dinner. Talk about your cases of the pregnant-woman vapors!
Stu said, “If Mother Abagail doesn’t show up by daylight, I thought I’d ask Harold if he wanted to go out again with me.”
“I’d like to go, too,” Fran said. “And there are a few others around here who aren’t totally convinced that she’s being fed by the ravens. Larry Underwood’s one of them.”
“Okay, fine,” he said, and joined her on the bed. “Say, what you wearing under that shirt?”
“A big strong man like yourself should be able to find that out without my help,” Fran said primly.
It turned out to be nothing.
The next day’s search-party started out modestly at eight o’clock with half a dozen searchers, but by noon the party had swelled to twenty, and by dusk there were better than fifty people combing the brush west of Boulder, stepping all over each other’s CB transmissions and generally confusing the issue. A strange mood of resigned dread had gradually replaced yesterday’s acceptance. Despite the powerful force of the dreams that had accorded Mother Abagail a semidivine status in the Zone, most of the people had been through enough to be realists about survival: The old woman was well past a hundred, and she had been out all night on her own. And now a second night was coming on.
The fellow who had struggled across the country from Louisiana to Boulder with a party of twelve summed it up perfectly. He had come in with his people at noon the day before. When told that Mother Abagail was gone, this man, Norman Kellogg by name, threw his Houston Astros baseball cap on the ground and said, “Ain’t that my fucking luck . . . who you got hunting her up?” Charlie Impening, who had more or less become the Zone’s resident doomcrier (he had been the one to pass the cheerful news about snow in September), began to suggest to people that if Mother Abagail had bugged out, maybe that was a sign for all of them to bug out. After all, Boulder was just too damn close. Too close to what? Never mind, you know what it’s too close to, and New York or Boston would make Mavis Impening’s boy Charlie feel a whole hell of a lot safer. He had no takers. People were tired and ready to sit, at least until after the mass meeting.
“Resigned dread” was as far as the community’s feelings went,
Glen Bateman believed, because these were still rationally minded people in spite of all the dreams, in spite of their deep-seated dread concerning whatever might be going on west of the Rockies. Superstition, like true love, needs time to grow and reflect upon itself. When you finish a barn, he told Nick and Stu and Fran after darkness had put an end to the search for the night, you hang a horseshoe ends up over the door to keep the luck in. But if one of the nails falls out and the horseshoe swings points down, you don’t abandon the barn.
“The day may come when we or our children may abandon the barn if the horseshoe spills the luck out, but that’s years away. Right now all we feel is a little strange and lost. And that will pass, I think.”
Frannie said: “You don’t really think our grandchildren are going to be superstitious natives, do you, Glen? Burning witches and spitting through their fingers for luck?”
“I can’t read the future, Fran,” Glen said, and in the lamplight his face looked old and worn—the face, perhaps, of a failed magician. “I couldn’t even properly see the effect Mother Abagail was having on the community until Stu pointed it out to me that night on Flagstaff Mountain. But I do know this: We’re all together in this town because of two events. The superflu we can charge off to the stupidity of the human race. It doesn’t matter if we did it, or the Russians, or the Latvians. Who emptied the beaker loses importance beside the general truth: At the end of all rationalism, the mass grave. The laws of physics, the laws of biology, the axioms of mathematics, they’re all part of the deathtrip, because we are what we are. If it hadn’t been Captain Trips, it would have been something else. The fashion was to blame it on ‘technology,’ but ‘technology’ is the trunk of the tree, not the roots. The roots are rationalism, and I would define that word so: ‘Rationalism is the idea we can ever understand anything about the state of being.’ It’s a deathtrip. It always has been. So you can charge the superflu off to rationalism if you want. But the other reason we’re here is the dreams, and the dreams are irrational. We’ve agreed not to talk about that simple fact while we’re in committee, but we’re not in committee now. So I’ll say what we all know is true: We’re here under the fiat of powers we don’t understand. For me, that means we may be beginning to accept—only subconsciously now, and with plenty of slips backward due to culture lag—a different definition of existence. The idea that we can never understand anything about the state of being. And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then irrationalism might very well be a lifetrip ... at least unless it proves otherwise.”
Speaking very slowly, Stu said: “Well, I got my superstitions. I know it don’t make any difference if a guy lights two cigarettes on a match or three, but two don’t make nervous and three does. I don’t walk under ladders and I never care to see a black cat cross my path. But to live with no science . . . worshiping the sun, maybe . . . thinking monsters are rolling bowling balls across the sky when it thunders ... I can’t say any of that turns me on very much, baldy.”
“But suppose those things were true?” Glen said quietly.
“What?”
“Assume that the age of rationalism has passed. I myself am almost positive that it has. It’s come and gone before, you know. And suppose . . . suppose that when rationalism does go, it’s as if a bright dazzle has gone for a while and we could see . . .” He trailed off.
“See what?” Fran asked.
He raised his eyes to hers; they were gray and strange, seeming to glow with their own inner light.
“Dark magic,” he said softly. “A universe of marvels where water flows uphill and trolls live in the deepest woods and dragons live under the mountains. Bright wonders, white power. ‘Lazarus, come forth.’ Water into wine. And . . . and just maybe ... the casting out of devils.”
He paused, then smiled. “The li
fetrip,” he said.
“And the dark man?” Fran asked quietly.
Glen shrugged. “Mother Abagail calls him the Devil’s Imp. Maybe he’s just the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology against us. And maybe there’s something more, something much darker. I only know that he is, and I no longer think that sociology or psychology or any other ology will put an end to him. I think only white magic will do that . . . and our white magician is out there someplace, wandering and alone.” Glen’s voice nearly broke, and he looked down quickly.
Outside there was only dark, and a breeze coming down from the mountains threw a fresh spatter of rain against the glass of Stu and Fran’s living room. After a while Glen and Stu kindled a blaze in the fireplace and they all watched the flames without saying much.
After they were gone, Fran felt low and unhappy. Stu was also in a brown study. He looks tired, she thought. We ought to stay home tomorrow, just stay home and talk to each other and have a nap in the afternoon. We ought to take it easy. She looked at the Coleman gaslamp and wished for electric light instead, bright electric light you got by just flicking a wall switch.
She felt her eyes sting with tears.
Then, suddenly, Stu brightened. “By golly! I damn near forgot, didn’t I?”
“Forgot what?”
“I’ll show you! Stay right here!” He went out the door and clattered down the hall stairs. She went to the doorway and in a moment she could hear him coming back up. He had something in his hand and it was a . . .
“Stuart Redman, where did you get that?” she asked, happily surprised.
“Folk Arts Music,” he said, grinning.
She picked up the washboard and tilted it this way and that. The gleam of light spilled off its bluing. “Folk—?”
“Down Walnut Street aways.”
“A washboard in a music store?”
“Yeah. There was a helluva good washtub, too, but somebody had already poked a hole through it and turned it into a bass.”
She began to laugh. She put the washboard down on the sofa, came to him, and hugged him tight. His hands came up to her breasts and she hugged him tighter still. “The doctor said give him jug band music,” she whispered.