by Stephen King
One read: Talk to Glen about trade. Do any of us know how trade starts? Scarcity of goods, isn’t it? Or a modified corner on some market? Skills. That may be a key word. What if Brad Kitchner decides to sell instead of giving away? Or the doc? What would we pay with? Hmmm.
Another: Community protection is a two-way street.
Another: Every time we talk about the law I spend the night having nightmares about Shoyo. Watching them die. Watching Childress throw his supper around the cell. The law, the law, what do we do about the goddamned law? Capital punishment. Now there’s a smiley thought. When Brad gets the power on, how long before someone asks him to rig an electric chair up?
She turned away from the scraps—reluctantly. It was fascinating to look through papers left by a man who could think wholly only by writing (one of her college profs had been fond of saying that the thought process can never be complete without articulation), but her purpose was already completed. Nick was not here, no one was here. To linger overlong would be to press her luck unnecessarily.
She went back upstairs. Harold had told her they would probably meet in the living room. It was a huge room, carpeted with a thick wine-colored shag rug, dominated by a freestanding fireplace that went up through the roof in a column of rock. The entire west wall was glass, giving on a magnificent view of the Flatirons. It made her feel as exposed as a bug on a wall. She knew that the outer surface of the glass was iodized so that anyone outside would only see a mirrorlike reflection, but the psychological feeling was still one of utter exposure. She wanted to finish quickly.
On the southern side of the room she found what she was looking for, a deep closet that Ralph hadn’t cleaned out. Coats hung far back inside, and in the rear comer there was a tangle of boots and mittens and winter woolens about three feet deep.
Working quickly, she took the groceries out of her shopping bag. They were camouflage, and there was only a single layer of them. Beneath the cans of tomato paste and sardines was the Hush Puppies shoebox.
“If I put it in a closet, will it still work?” she had asked. “Won’t the extra wall muffle the blast?”
“Nadine,” Harold had responded, “if that device works, and I have no reason whatever to believe it won’t, it will take the house and most of the surrounding hillside. Put it anywhere you think it will be unobserved until their meeting. A closet will be fine. The extra wall will blow out and become shrapnel. I trust your judgment, dear. It’s going to be just like the old fairy tale about the tailor and the flies. Seven at a blow.”
Nadine pushed aside boots and scarves, made a hole, and slipped the shoebox into it. She covered it over again and then worked her way out of the closet. There. Done. For better or worse.
She left the house quickly, not looking back, trying to ignore the voice that wouldn’t stay dead, the voice that was now telling her to go back in there and pull the wires that ran between the blasting caps and the walkie-talkie, telling her to give this up before it drove her mad. Because wasn’t that what was really lying somewhere up ahead, now maybe less than two weeks ahead? Wasn’t madness the final logical conclusion?
She slipped the bag of groceries into the Vespa’s carrier and kicked the machine into life. And all the time she was driving away, that voice went on: You're not going to leave that there, are you? You’re not going to leave that bomb in there, are you?
In a world where so many have died—
She leaned into a turn, barely able to see where she was going. Tears had begun to blur her eyes.
—the one great sin is to take a human life.
Seven lives here. No, more than that, because the committee was going to hear reports from the heads of several subcommittees.
She stopped at the comer of Baseline and Broadway, thinking she would turn around and go back. She was shuddering all over.
And later she would never be able to explain to Harold precisely what had happened—in truth, she never even tried. It was a foretaste of the horrors to come.
She felt a blackness creeping over her vision.
It came like a dark curtain slowly drawn, flipping and flapping in a mild breeze. Every now and then the breeze would gust, the curtain would flap more vigorously, and she would see a bit of daylight under its hem, a little bit of this deserted intersection.
But the curtain came over her vision in steady blackout drifts and soon she was lost in it. She was blind, she was deaf, she was without the sense of touch. The thinking creature, the Nadine-ego, drifted in a warm black cocoon like seawater, like amniotic fluid.
And she felt him creep inside her. A shriek built up within her, but she had no mouth with which to scream. It was like nothing she had ever felt before. Later, similes occurred to describe it, and she rejected them, one by one:
You’re swimming and suddenly, in the midst of the warm water, you’re treading water in a pocket of deep, numbing cold.
You’ve been given Novocain and the dentist pulls a tooth. It comes out with a painless tug. You spit blood into the white enamel basin. There’s a hole in you; you’ve been gouged. You can slip your tongue into the hole where part of you was living a second ago.
You stare at your face in the mirror. You stare at it for a long time. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. No fair blinking. You watch with an intellectual sort of horror as your face changes, like the face of Lon Chaney, Jr., in a werewolf epic. You become a stranger to yourself, an olive-skinned Doppleganger, a psychotic Vampira with pale skin and fishslit eyes.
It was really none of those things, but there was a taste-trace of all of them.
The dark man entered her, and he was cold.
She was waiting for Harold around the comer from the bus station. When he saw her, his face froze and drained of color. “Nadine—” He whispered. The lunch bucket dropped from his hand and clacked on the pavement.
“Harold,” she said. “They know. We’ve got to—”
“Your hair, Nadine, oh my God, your hair—”
“Listen to me!”
He seemed to gain some of himself back. “A-all right. What?”
“They went up to your house and found your book. They took it away.”
Emotions at war on Harold’s face: anger, horror, shame. Little by little they drained away and then, like some terrible corpse coming up from deep water, a frozen grin resurfaced on Harold’s face. “Who?”
“I’m not sure. Fran Goldsmith was one of them, I’m sure of that. Maybe Bateman or Underwood. I don’t know. But they’ll come for you, Harold.”
“How do you know?” He grabbed her roughly by the shoulders, remembering that she had put the ledger back under the hearthstone. He shook her like a ragdoll, but Nadine faced him without fear. She had been face to face with more terrible things than Harold Lauder on this long, long day. "You bitch, how do you know?”
"He told me.”
Harold’s hands dropped away.
“Flagg?” A whisper. “He told you what to do? He spoke to you? And it did that?” Harold’s grin was ghastly, the grin of the Reaper on horseback.
“What are you talking about?”
They were standing next to an appliance store. Taking her by the shoulders again, Harold turned her to face the glass. Nadine looked at her reflection for a long time.
Her hair had gone white. Entirely white. There was not a single black strand left.
“Come on,” she said. “We have to leave town.”
“Now?”
“After dark. We’ll hide until then, and pick up what camping gear we need on the way out.”
“West?”
“Not yet. Not until tomorrow night.”
“Maybe I don’t want to anymore,” Harold whispered. He was still looking at her hair.
She put his hand on it. “Too late, Harold,” she said.
Chapter 48
Fran and Larry sat at the kitchen table of Stu and Fran’s place, sipping coffee. Downstairs, Leo was stretching out on his guitar, one that Larry had helped him pick out
at Earthly Sounds. It was a nice $600 Gibson with a hand-rubbed cherry finish. As an afterthought he had gotten the boy a battery-powered phonograph and about a dozen folk/blues albums. Now Lucy was with him, and a startlingly good imitation of Dave van Ronk’s “Backwater Blues” drifted up to them.
Through the arch that gave on the living room, Fran and Larry could see Stu, sitting in his favorite easy chair, Harold’s ledger open on his lap. He had been sitting that way since four in the afternoon. It was now nine, and full dark. He had refused supper. As Frannie watched him, he turned another page.
Down below, Leo finished “Backwater Blues” and there was a pause.
“He plays well, doesn’t he?” Fran said.
“Better than I do,” Larry said. He sipped his coffee.
From below there suddenly came a familiar chop, a swift running down the frets to a not-quite-standard blues progression that made Larry’s coffee cup pause. And then Leo’s voice, low and insinuating, adding the vocal to the slow, driving beat:
“Hey baby I come down here tonight
And I didn’t come to get in no fight,
I just want you to say if you can,
Tell me once and I’ll understand,
Baby, can you dig your man?
He’s a righteous man,
Baby, can you dig your man?”
Larry spilled his coffee.
“Whoops,” Fran said, and got up to get a dishcloth.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “Jiggled when I should have joggled, I guess.” “No, sit still.” She got the dishcloth and wiped up the stain quickly. “I remember that one. It was big just before the flu. He must have picked up the single downtown.”
“Sure.”
“What was that guy’s name? The guy that did it?”
“I can’t remember,” Larry said.
“Something familiar,” she said, wringing the dishcloth out at the sink. “It’s funny how you get something like that on the tip of your tongue, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Larry said.
Stu closed the ledger with a soft snap, and Larry was relieved to see her look at him as he came into the kitchen. Her eyes went first to the gun on his hip. He had been wearing it since his election as marshal, and he made a lot of jokes about shooting himself in the foot. Fran didn’t think the jokes were all that funny.
“Well?” Larry asked.
Stu’s face was deeply troubled. He put the ledger on the table and sat down. Fran started to get him a cup of coffee and he shook his head and put a hand on her forearm. “No thanks, honey.” He looked at Larry in an absent, distracted sort of way. “I read it all, and now I’ve got a damn headache. Not used to reading so much. Last book I just sat down and read all the way through like that was this rabbit story, Watership Down. I got it for a nephew of mine and just started to read it . . .”
He trailed off for a moment, thinking.
“I read that one,” Larry said. “Great book.”
‘‘There was this one bunch of rabbits,” Stu said, “and they had it soft. They were big and well fed and they always lived in one place. There was something wrong there, but nobody knew what it was. Seemed like they didn’t want to know. Only . . . only, see, there was this farmer . . .”
Larry said, “He left the warren alone so he could take a rabbit for the stewpot whenever he wanted one. A little rabbit farm.”
“Yeah. And there was this one rabbit, Silverweed, and he made up poems about the shining wire—the snare the farmer caught the rabbits in, I guess. The snare the farmer used to catch them and strangle them. Silverweed made up poems about that.” He shook his head in slow, tired incredulity. “And that’s what Harold reminds me of. Silverweed the rabbit.”
“Harold’s ill,” Fran said.
“Yeah.” Stu lit a cigarette. “And dangerous.”
“What should we do? Arrest him?”
Stu tapped the ledger. “He and the Cross woman are planning to do something so they’ll be made to feel welcome when they go West. But this book doesn’t say what.”
“It mentions a lot of people he’s not too crazy about,” Larry said. “Are we going to arrest him?” Fran asked again.
“I just don’t know. I want to talk it over with the rest of the committee first. What’s on for tomorrow night, Larry?”
“Well, the meeting’s going to be in two halves, public business and then private business. Brad wants to talk about his Turning Off Crew. A1 Bundell wants to present a preliminary report from the Law Committee. Let’s see . . . George Richardson on clinic hours at Dakota Ridge, then Chad Norris. After that, they leave and it’s just us.”
“If we get Al Bundell to stay after and fill him in on this Harold business, can we be sure he’ll keep his lip zipped?”
“I’m sure we can,” Fran said.
Stu said fretfully, “I wish the Judge was here. I cottoned to that man. But if it’s got to be Al, it’s gotta be. I only see two choices anyway. We have to take the pair of them out of circulation. But I don’t want to put them in jail, goddammit.”
“What does that leave?” Larry asked.
It was Fran who answered. “Exile.”
Larry turned to her. Stu was nodding slowly, looking at his cigarette.
“Just drive him out?” Larry asked.
“Him and her both,” Stu said.
“But will Flagg take them like that?” Frannie asked.
Stu looked up at her then. “Fran, that ain’t our problem.”
She nodded and thought: Oh, Harold, I didn’t want it to come out like this. Never in a million years did I want it to come out this way. “Any idea what they might be planning?” Stu asked.
Larry shrugged. “I can think of some things.”
“Such as?”
“Maybe sabotage at the power plant. Maybe some sort of assassination attempt on you or Frannie. Although he doesn’t come right out and say it, I think he went hunting for Mother Abagail with you and Ralph that time in hopes of getting you alone and killing you.” Stu said, “He had his chance.”
“Maybe he chickened.”
“Stop it, can’t you?” Fran asked dully. “Please.”
Stu got up and went back into the living room. There was a CB in there hooked up to a Die-Hard battery. After some tinkering, he got Brad Kitchner.
“Brad, you dog! Stu Redman. Listen. Can you round up some guys to stand watch at the power station tonight?”
“Sure,” Brad’s voice came, “but what in God’s name for?”
“Well, this is kind of delicate, Bradley. I heard one way and another that somebody might try doing some mischief up there.”
Brad’s reply was blue with profanity.
Stu nodded at the mike, smiling a little. “I know how you feel. This is just for tonight and maybe tomorrow night, so far as I know. Then I guess things be ironed out.”
Brad told him he could muster twelve men without going two blocks. “This something Rich Moffat’s up to?”
“No, it ain’t Rich. Listen, I’ll be talking to you, okay?”
“Fine, Stu. I’ll have them on watch.”
Stu turned off the CB and walked back to the kitchen. “People let you be just as secret as you want to be. It scares me, you know? The old bald-headed sociologist is right. We could set ourselves up like kings here if we wanted to.”
Fran put her hand over his. “I want you to promise me something. Both of you Promise me we’ll settle this once and for all at the meeting tomorrow night. I just want it to be over.”
Larry was nodding. “Exile. Yeah. It never even crossed my mind, but it might be the best solution. Well, I’m going to collect Lucy and Leo and get home.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Stu said.
“Yeah.” He went out.
In the hour before dawn on September 2, Harold stood on the edge of Sunrise Amphitheater, looking down. The town was in a ditch of blackness. Nadine slept behind him in the small two-man tent they had picked up along with a few other camping s
upplies as they crept out of town.
We'll come back, though. Driving chariots.
But in his secret heart, Harold doubted that. The darkness was upon him in more ways than one. The vile bastards had stolen everything from him—Frannie, his self-respect, then his ledger, now his hope. He felt that he was going down.
Behind him, Nadine moaned in her sleep. It was a scary sound. Harold thought she was as lost as he was, maybe worse. The sounds she made in her sleep were not the sounds of a person having happy dreams.
But I can keep sane. I can do that. If I can go down to whatever’s waiting for me with my mind intact, that will be something. Yes, something.
He wondered if they had surrounded his little house, if they were waiting for him to come home so they could arrest him and throw him in the cooler. Welcome to hard times. HAWK CAGED, wuxtry, wuxtry, read all about it. Well, they would wait a long time. He was on his adventure, and he remembered all too clearly Nadine putting his hand on her white hair and saying Too late, Harold. How like a corpse’s her eyes had been.
“All right,” Harold whispered. “We’re going through with it.” Around and above him, the dark September wind drummed through the trees.
The Free Zone Committee meeting was rapped to order some fourteen hours later in the living room of Ralph Brentner’s house. Stu was sitting in an easy chair, tapping an endtable with the rim of his beer can. “Okay, folks, we better get started here.”
Glen sat with Larry on the curving lip of the freestanding fireplace, their backs to the modest fire Ralph had kindled there. Nick, Susan Stern, and Ralph himself sat on the couch, Nick with the inevitable pen and pad of notepaper. Brad Kitchner was standing just inside the doorway with a can of Coors in his hand, talking to A1 Bundell, who was working a scotch and soda. George Richardson and Chad Norris were sitting by the large window-wall, watching the sunset over the Flatirons.