by Stephen King
“Well. . .”
“No, you’re not supposed to talk about that. I withdraw the question.”
“You can refuse this. No one is holding a gun to your hea—”
“Are you trying to absolve yourself of your responsibility to me?” the Judge asked sharply.
“Maybe. Maybe I think your chances of getting back are one in ten and your chances of getting back with information we can actually base decisions on are one in twenty. Maybe I’m just trying to say in a nice way that I could have made a mistake. You could be too old.”
“I am too old for adventure,” the Judge said, putting his clippers away, “but I hope I am not too old to do what I feel is right. There is an old woman out there someplace who has probably gone to a miserable death because she felt it was right. Prompted by religious mania, I have no doubt. But people who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad. I’ll go. I’ll be cold. My bowels will not work properly. I’ll be lonely. I’ll miss my begonias. But . . .” He looked up at Larry, and his eyes gleamed in the dark. “I’ll also be clever.”
“I suppose you will,” Larry said, and felt the sting of tears at the corners of his eyes.
“How is Lucy?” the Judge asked, apparently closing the subject of his departure.
“Fine,” Larry said. “We’re both fine.”
“No problems?”
“No,” he said, and thought about Nadine. Something about her desperation the last time he had seen her still troubled him deeply. You’re my last chance, she had said. Strange talk, almost suicidal. And what help was there for her? Psychiatry? That was a laugh, when the best they could do for a GP was a horse doctor. Even Dial-A-Prayer was gone now.
“It’s good that you are with Lucy,” the Judge said, “but you’re worried about the other woman, I suspect.”
“Yes, I am.” What followed was extremely difficult to say, but having it out and confessed to another person made him feel much better. “I think she might be considering, well, suicide.” He rushed on: “It’s not just me, don’t get the idea I think any girl would kill herself just because she can’t have sexy old Larry Underwood. But the boy she was taking care of has come out of his shell, and I think she feels alone, with no one to depend on her.”
“If her depression deepens into a chronic, cyclic thing, she may indeed kill herself,” the Judge said with chilling indifference.
Larry looked at him, shocked.
“But you can only be one man,” the Judge said. “Isn’t that true?” “Yes.”
“And your choice is made?”
“Yes.”
“For good?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Then live with it,” the Judge said with great relish. “For God’s sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little applied over all your scruples is an absolute necessity! You can only captain your own soul, and from time to time some smart-ass psychologist will question our ability to even do that. Grow up! Your Lucy is a fine woman. To ask more or take responsibility for more is to ask for too much, to invite disaster.”
“I like talking to you,” Larry said, and was both startled and amused by the open ingenuousness of the comment.
“Probably because I am telling you exactly what you want to hear,” the Judge said serenely. And then he added: “There are a great many ways to commit suicide, you know.”
And before too much time had passed, Larry had occasion to recall that remark in bitter circumstances.
At quarter past eight the next morning, Harold’s truck was leaving the Greyhound depot to go back to the Table Mesa area. Harold, Weizak, and two others were sitting in the back of the truck. Norman Kellogg and another man were in the cab. They were at the intersection of Arapahoe and Broadway when a brand-new Land-Rover drove slowly toward them.
Weizak waved and shouted, “Where ya headed, Judge?”
The Judge, looking rather comic in a woolen shirt and a vest, pulled over. “I believe I might go to Denver for the day,” he said blandly.
“Will that thing get you there?” Weizak asked.
“Oh, I believe so, if I steer clear of the main-traveled roads.”
“Well, if you go by one of those X-rated bookstores, why don’t you bring back a trunkful?”
This sally was greeted with a burst of laughter from everyone—the Judge included—but Harold. He looked sallow and haggard this morning, as if he had rested ill. In fact, he had hardly slept at all. As she had promised, he had fulfilled quite a few dreams the night before. Dreams of the damp variety, let us say. He was already looking forward to tonight, and Weizak’s sally about pornography was only good for a ghost of a smile. Nadine had been sleeping when he left. Before they dropped off around two, she had told him she wanted to read his ledger. He had told her to go ahead if she wanted to. Perhaps he was putting himself at her mercy, but he was too confused to know for sure.
Now Kellogg was leaning out of the dump truck’s cab toward the Judge. “You be careful, pop. Okay? There’s funny folks on the roads these days.”
“Indeed there are,” the Judge said with a strange smile. “And indeed I will. A good day to you, gentlemen. And you too, Mr. Weizak.”
That brought another burst of laughter, and they parted.
The Judge did not head toward Denver. When he reached Route 36, he proceeded directly across it and out along Route 7. The morning sun was bright and mellow, and on this secondary route, there was not enough stalled traffic to block the road. The town of Brighton was worse; at one point he had to leave the highway and drive across the local high school football field to avoid a colossal traffic jam. He continued east until he reached 1-25. A right turn here would have taken him into Denver. Instead he turned left— north—and headed down the feeder ramp. Halfway down he put the transmission in neutral and looked left again, west, to where the Rockies rose serenely into the blue sky with Boulder lying at their base.
He had told Larry he was too old for adventure, and God save him, but that had been a lie. His heart hadn’t beat with this quick rhythm for twenty years, the air had not tasted this sweet, colors had not seemed this bright. He would follow 1-25 to Cheyenne and then move west toward whatever waited for him beyond the mountains. His skin, dry with age, nonetheless crawled and goosebumped a little at the thought. 1-80 west, into Salt Lake City, then across Nevada to Reno. Then he would head north again, but that hardly mattered. Because somewhere between Salt Lake and Reno, maybe even sooner, he would be stopped, questioned, and probably be sent somewhere else to be questioned again. And at some place or other, an Invitation might be issued.
It was not even impossible to think that he might meet the dark man himself.
“Get moving, old man,” he said softly.
He put the Rover in gear and crept down to the turnpike. There were three lanes northbound, all of them relatively clear. As he had guessed, traffic jams and multiple accidents back in Denver had effectively dammed the flow of traffic. The traffic was heavy across the median strip—the poor fools who had been headed south—but here the going was good. For a while, at least.
Judge Farris drove on. He had slept poorly last night. He would sleep better tonight, under the stars, his old body wrapped firmly in two sleeping bags. He wondered if he would ever see Boulder again and thought the chances were probably against it. And yet his excitement was very great.
It was one of the finest days of his life.
Early that afternoon, Nick, Ralph, and Stu biked out to north Boulder to a small stucco house where Tom Cullen lived by himself. Tom’s house had already become a landmark to Boulder’s “old” residents. Stan Nogotny said it was as if the Catholics, Baptists, and Seventh-day Adventists had gotten together with the Democrats and the Moonies to create a religious-political Disneyland.
The front lawn of the house was a weird tableau of statues. There were a dozen Virgin Marys, some of them apparently in the act of feeding flocks of pink plastic
lawn flamingos. The largest of the flamingos was taller than Tom himself and anchored to the ground on a single leg that ended in a four-foot spike. There was a giant wishing well with a large plastic glow-in-the-dark Jesus sitting in the ornamental bucket. Beside the wishing well was a large plaster cow who was apparently drinking from a birdbath.
The front door screen slammed open and Tom came out to meet them, stripped to the waist. Seen from a distance, Nick thought, you would have supposed he was some fantastically virile writer or painter, with his bright blue eyes and that big reddish-blond beard. As he got closer you might have given up that idea in favor of one not quite so intellectual. . . maybe some sort of craftsman from the counterculture who had substituted kitsch for originality. And when he got very close, smiling and talking away a mile a minute, it was only then that you realized for sure that a goodly chunk of Tom Cullen’s attic insulation was missing.
Nick knew that one of the reasons he felt a strong sense of empathy for Tom was because he himself had been assumed to be mentally retarded, at first because his handicap had held him back from learning to read and write, later because people just assumed that someone who was both deaf and mute must be mentally retarded. He had heard all the slang terms at one time or another. A few bricks short the load. Soft upstairs. Running on three wheels. The guy’s got a hole in his head and his brains done leaked out. This guy ain’t traveling with a full seabag.
“Nicky!” Tom yelled. “Am I glad to see you! Laws, yes! Tom Cullen is so glad!” He threw his arms around Nick’s neck and gave him a hug. “And Ralph too! And that one. You’re . . . let’s see . . .”
Tom went stockstill. The animation died out of his face. His mouth dropped slackly open and now he was the picture of idiocy. Stu stirred uncomfortably and said, “Nick, don’t you think we ought to—
Nick shushed him with a finger at his lips, and at that same instant Tom came alive again.
“Stu!” He said, capering and laughing. “You’re Stu!” He looked at Nick for confirmation, and Nick gave him a V-for-victory.
“M-O-O-N, that spells Stu, Tom Cullen knows that, everybody knows that!”
Nick pointed to the door of Tom’s house.
“Want to come in? Laws, yes! All of us are going to come on in. Tom’s been decorating his house.”
Ralph and Stu exchanged a glance as they followed Nick and Tom up the porch steps. Tom was always “decorating.” He did not “furnish,” because the house had of course been furnished when he moved in. Going inside was like entering a madly jumbled Mother Goose world.
A huge gilded birdcage with a green stuffed parrot carefully wired to the perch hung just inside the front door and Nick had to duck under it. The thing was, he thought, Tom’s decorations were not just random rickrack. That would have made this house into something no more striking than a rummage sale barn. But there was something more here, something that seemed just beyond what the ordinary mind could grasp as a pattern. In a large square block over the mantel in the living room were a number of credit card signs, all of them centered and carefully mounted. YOUR VISA CARD WELCOME HERE. JUST SAY MASTERCHARGE. WE HONOR AMERICAN EXPRESS. DINER’S CLUB. Now the question occurred: How did Tom know that all those signs were part of a fixed set? He couldn’t read, but somehow he had grasped the pattern.
Sitting on the coffee table was a large yellow Styrofoam fire plug. On the windowsill, where it could catch the sunlight and reflect cool fans of blue light onto the wall, was a police car bubble.
Tom toured them through the entire house. The downstairs game room was filled with stuffed birds and animals that Tom had found in a taxidermy shop; the birds had been strung on nearly invisible piano wire and they seemed to cruise, owls and hawks and even a bald eagle with motheaten feathers and one yellow glass eye missing. A woodchuck stood on its hind legs in one comer, a gopher in another, a skunk in another, a weasel in the fourth. In the center of the room was a coyote, somehow seeming to be the focus for all the smaller animals.
The banister leading up the stairs had been wrapped in red and white strips of Con-Tac paper so that it resembled a barber pole. The upper hallway was hung with fighter planes on more piano wire— Fokkers, Spads, Stukas, Spitfires, Zeros, Messerschmitts.
At last Tom took them back downstairs and they sat below the credit card montage and facing a 3-D picture of John and Robert Kennedy against a background of gold-edged clouds. The legend beneath proclaimed BROTHERS TOGETHER IN HEAVEN.
“You like Tom’s decorations? What do you think? Nice?”
“Very nice,” Stu said. “Tell me. Those birds downstairs ... do they ever get on your nerves?”
“Laws, no!” Tom said, astounded. “They’re full of sawdust!”
Nick handed a note to Ralph.
“Tom, Nick wants to know if you’d mind being hypnotized again. Like the time Stan did it. It’s important this time, not just a game. Nick says he’ll explain why afterward.”
“Go ahead,” Tom said. “Youuu ... are getting . . . verrrry sleeeepy . . . right?”
“Yes, that’s it,” Ralph said.
“Do you want me to look at the watch again? I don’t mind. You know, when you swing it back and forth? Verrrry . . . sleeeepy . . Tom looked at them doubtfully. “Except I don’t feel very sleepy. Laws, no. I went to bed early last night. Tom Cullen always goes to bed early because there’s no TV to watch.”
Stu said softly: “Tom, would you like to see an elephant?”
Tom’s eyes closed immediately. His head dropped forward loosely. His respiration deepened to long, slow strokes. Stu watched this with great surprise. Nick had given him the key phrase, but Stu hadn’t known whether or not to believe it would work. And he had never expected that it could happen so fast.
“Just like putting a chicken’s head under its wing,” Ralph marveled.
Nick handed Stu his prepared “script” for this encounter. Stu looked at Nick for a long moment. Nick looked back, then nodded gravely that Stu should go ahead.
“Tom, can you hear me?” Stu asked.
“Yes, I can hear you,” Tom said, and the quality of his voice was different, but in a way he could not quite put his hand to. This voice, coming out of the shadowland of Tom Cullen’s subconscious, seemed to be the voice of the man denied.
“I’m Stu Redman, Tom.”
“Yes. Stu Redman.”
“Nick is here.”
“Yes, Nick is here.”
“Ralph Brentner is here, too.”
“Yes, Ralph is, too.”
“We’re your friends.”
“I know.”
“We’d like you to do something, Tom. For the Zone. It’s dangerous.” •
“Dangerous . .
Trouble crossed over Tom’s face, like a cloud shadow slowly crossing a midsummer field of corn.
“Will I have to be afraid? Will I have to . . .” He trailed off, sighing.
Stu looked at Nick, troubled. Nick mouthed: Yes.
“It’s himTom said, and sighed dreadfully. It was like the sound a bitter November wind makes in a stand of denuded oaks. Stu felt that shudder inside him again. Ralph had gone pale.
“Who, Tom?” Stu asked gently.
“Flagg. His name is Randy Flagg. The dark man. You want me to . . .” That sick sigh again, bitter and long.
“How do you know him, Tom?” This wasn’t in the script.
“Dreams . . . I see his face in dreams.”
I see his face in dreams. But none of them had seen his face. It was always hidden.
“You see him?”
“Yes . . .”
“What does he look like, Tom?”
Tom didn’t speak for a long time. Stu had decided he wasn’t going to answer and he was preparing to go back to the “script” when Tom said:
“He looks like anybody you see on the street. But when he grins, birds fall dead off of telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine bums. The grass yellows up and
dies where he spits. He’s always outside. He came out of time. He doesn’t know himself. He has the name of a thousand demons. His name is Legion. He’s afraid of us. We’re inside. He knows magic. He can call the wolves and live in the crows. But he’s afraid of us. He’s afraid of . . . inside.”
Tom fell silent.
The three of them stared at each other, pallid as gravestones. Ralph had seized his hat from his head and was kneading it convulsively in his hands. Nick had put one hand over his eyes. Stu’s throat had turned to dry glass.
“Can you say anything else about him?” Stu asked in a low voice.
“Only that I’m afraid of him too. But I’ll do what you want But Tom . . . is so afraid.” That dreadful sigh again.
“Tom,” Ralph said suddenly. “Do you know if Mother Abagail ... if she’s still alive?” Ralph’s face was desperately set, the face of a man who has staked everything on one turn of the cards.
“She’s alive,” Tom said, and Ralph leaned against the back of his chair with a great gust of breath. “But she’s not right with God yet,” Tom added.
“Not right with God? Why not, Tommy?”
“She’s in the wilderness, God has lifted her up in the wilderness, she does not fear the terror that flies at noon or the terror that creeps at midnight . . . neither will the snake bite her nor the bee sting her ... but she’s not right with God yet. It was not the hand of Moses that brought water from the rock. She’s to be punished. She will see, but she will see too late. There will be death. His death. She will die on the wrong side of the river. She—”
“Stop him,” Ralph groaned. “Can’t you stop him?”
“Tom,” Stu said.
“Yes.”
“Are you the same Tom Nick met in Oklahoma?”
“I am more than that Tom.”
“I don’t understand.”
He shifted a little, his sleeping face calm.
“I am God’s Tom.”
Completely unnerved now, Stu almost dropped Nick’s notes.
“You say you’ll do what we want.”
“Yes.”