The Stand:BOOK I(58)

"I love you, Daddy," she said. "I love you, Frannie loves you." Her tears fell on his face and gleamed there. She removed his pajamas and dressed him in his best suit, hardly noticing the dull throb in her back, the ache in her neck and arms as she lifted each part of his weight, dressed it, dropped it, and went on to the next part. She propped his head up with two volumes of The Book of Knowledge to get his tie right. In his bottom drawer, under the socks, she found his army medals-Purple Heart, good conduct medals, campaign ribbons …  and the Bronze Star he had won in Korea. She pinned them to his lapel. In the bathroom she found Johnson's Baby Powder and powdered his face and neck and hands. The smell of the powder, sweet and nostalgic, brought the tears on again. Sweat slicked her body. There were pitted dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes.

She folded the tablecloth over him, got her mother's sewing kit, and closed the seam. Then she doubled the seam and sewed again. With a sobbing, whistling grunt, she managed to get his body to the floor without dropping it. Then she rested, half-swooning. When she felt she could go on, she lifted the top half of the corpse, got it to the head of the stairs, and then, as carefully as she could, down to the first floor. She stopped again, her breath coming in quick, whining gasps. Her headache was sharp now, needling into her with quick hard bursts of pain.

She dragged the body down the hall, through the kitchen, and out onto the porch. Down the porch steps. Then she had to rest again. The golden light of early evening was on the land now. She gave way again and sat beside him, her head on her knees, rocking back and forth, weeping. Birds twittered. Eventually she was able to drag him into the garden.

At last it was done. By the time the last sods were back in place (she had fitted them together down on her knees, as if doing a jigsaw puzzle) it was a quarter of nine. She was filthy. Only the flesh around her eyes was white; that area had been washed clean by her tears. She was reeling with exhaustion. Her hair hung against her cheeks in matted strings.

"Please be at peace, Daddy," she muttered. "Please."

She dragged the spade back to her father's workshop and slung it inside indifferently. She had to rest twice as she climbed the six steps to the back porch. She crossed the kitchen without turning on the lights and kicked off her low-topped sneakers as she entered the living room. She dropped to the couch and slept immediately.

In the dream she was climbing the stairs again, going to her father, to do her duty and see him decently under the ground. But when she entered the room the tablecloth was already over the body and her sense of grief and loss changed to something else …  something like fear. She crossed the darkened room, not wanting to, suddenly wanting only to flee, but helpless to stop. The tablecloth glimmered in the shadows, ghostly, ghastly, and it came to her:

It wasn't her father under there. And what was under there was not dead.

Something-someone-filled with dark life and hideous good cheer was under there, and it would be more than her life was worth to pull that tablecloth back, but she …  couldn't …  stop her feet.

Her hand reached out, floated over the tablecloth-and snatched it back.

He was grinning, but she couldn't see his face. A wave of frigid cold blasting up at her from that awful grin. No, she couldn't see his face, but she could see the gift this terrible apparition had brought for her unborn baby: a twisted coathanger.

She fled, fled from the room, from the dream, coming up, surfacing briefly -

The Stand

Surfacing briefly in the three o'clock darkness of the living room, her body floating on a foam of dread, the dream already tattering and unraveling, leaving behind it only a sense of doom like the rancid aftertaste of some rotten meal. She thought, in that moment of half-sleeping and half-waking: Him, it's him, the Walkin Dude, the man with no face.

Then she slept again, this time dreamlessly, and when she woke the next morning she didn't remember the dream at all. But when she thought of the baby in her belly, a feeling of fierce protectiveness swept over her all at once, a feeling that perplexed her and frightened her a little with its depth and strength.

                       
       
           



       Chapter 29

That same evening, as Larry Underwood slept with Rita Blakemoor and as Frannie Goldsmith slept alone, dreaming her peculiarly ominous dream, Stuart Redman was waiting for Elder. He had been waiting for three days-and this evening Elder did not disappoint him.

At just past noon on the twenty-fourth, Elder and two male nurses had come and taken away the television. The nurses had removed it while Elder stood by, holding his revolver (neatly wrapped in a Baggie) on Stu. But by then Stu hadn't wanted or needed the TV-it was just putting out a lot of confused shit anyway. All he had to do was stand at his barred window and look out at the town on the river below. Like the man on the record said, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

Smoke was no longer billowing from the stacks of the textile mill. The gaudy stripes and eddies of dye in the river had dissipated and the water ran clear and clean again. Most of the cars, glittering and toylike from this distance, had left the mill's parking lot and hadn't come back. By yesterday, the twenty-sixth, there had been only a few cars still moving on the turnpike, and those few had to weave between the stalls like skiers in a slalom race. No wreckers had come to remove the abandoned vehicles.

The downtown area was spread out below him like a relief map, and it seemed totally deserted. The town clock, which had chimed off the hours of his imprisonment here, had not tolled since nine this morning, when the little tune that preceded the striking had sounded draggy and weird, like a tune played underwater by a drowned music box. There had been a fire at what looked like a roadside café or maybe a general store just outside of town. It had burned merry hell all this afternoon, black smoke etched against the blue sky, but no fire engines had come to put it out. If the building hadn't been set in the middle of an asphalt parking lot, Stu supposed that half the town might have gone up. Tonight the ruins were still smoldering in spite of an afternoon spat of rain.

Stu supposed that Elder's final orders were to kill him-why not? He would only be one more corpse, and he knew their little secret. They had been unable to find a cure or to discover how his bodily makeup varied from all those who had succumbed. The thought that there would be precious few left he could tell their secret to had probably never even entered their computations. He was a loose thread held hostage by a bunch of tight assholes.

Stu was sure that a hero in a television program or a novel could have thought of a way to escape, hell, even some people in real life, but he wasn't one of them. In the end he had decided with a certain panicky resignation that the only thing to do would be to wait for Elder and just try to be ready.

Elder was the clearest sign that this installation had been breached by what the help sometimes called "Blue" and sometimes the "superflu." The nurses called him Dr. Elder, but he was no doctor. He was in his mid-fifties, hard-eyed and humorless. None of the doctors before Elder had felt a need to hold a gun on him. Elder scared Stu because there would be no reasoning or pleading with such a man. Elder was waiting for orders. When they came, he would carry them out. He was a spear-carrier, the army version of a Mafia button-man, and it would never occur to him to question his orders in the light of ongoing events.

Three years ago Stu had gotten a book called Watership Down to send to a nephew of his in Waco. He had gotten out a box to put the book in, and then, because he hated to wrap presents even more than he hated to read, he had thumbed to the first page, thinking he would scan a little of it to see what it was about. He read that first page, then the second …  and then he was enthralled. He had stayed up all night, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and plowing steadily along, the way a man does when he's not much used to reading just for the pleasure of it. The thing turned out to be about rabbits, for Christ's sake. The stupidest, most cowardly animals of God's earth …  except the guy who wrote that book made them seem different. You really cared about them. It was a pretty damn good story, and Stu, who read at a snail's pace, finished it two days later.

The thing he remembered most from that book was a phrase: "going tharn," or just "tharn." He understood it at once, because he had seen plenty of tharn animals, and run down a few on the highway. An animal which had gone tharn would crouch in the middle of the road, its ears flattened, watching as a car rushed toward it, unable to move from the certain oncoming death. A deer could be driven tharn simply by shining a flashlight in its eyes. Loud music would do it to a raccoon, and constant tapping on its cage would do it to a parrot.

Elder made Stu feel like that. He would look into Elder's flat blue eyes and feel all the will drain out of him. Elder probably wouldn't even need the pistol to dispose of him. Elder probably had had courses in karate, savate, and general dirty tricks. What could he possibly do against a man like that? Just thinking about Elder made his will to even try to want to drain away. Tharn. It was a good word for a bad state of mind.