The Stand:BOOK I(61)

Then murkiness, faces and voices that he didn't remember, and at last he had surfaced here, in the small house he had built with his own hands on the outskirts of Mountain City. Because now was now, and the great wave of revolt which had engulfed the country had long since withdrawn, the young Turks were now mostly old lags with gray in their beards and big coke-burned holes where their septa used to be, and this was the wreckage, baby. The boy in the yellow briefs had been long ago, and in Boulder Kit Bradenton had been little more than a boy himself.

My God, am I dying?

He beat at the thought with agonized horror, the heat rolling and billowing in his head like a sandstorm. And suddenly his short, quick respiration stopped as a sound began to rise from somewhere beyond and below the closed bedroom door.

At first Bradenton thought it was a fire-siren, or a police-car siren. It rose and grew louder as it grew closer; beneath it he could hear the jagged pounding of footfalls clocking along his downstairs hall and then through his living room and then battering up the stairs in a Goth's stampede.

He pushed himself back against his pillow, his face drawing down in a rictus of terror even as his eyes widened to circles in his puffy, blackish face and the sound neared. Not a siren any more but a scream, high and ululating, a scream that no human throat could make or sustain, surely the scream of a banshee or of some black Charon, come to take him across the river that separates the land of the living from that of the dead.

Now the running footsteps clattered straight toward him along the upstairs hall, boards groaning and creaking and protesting under the weight of those merciless rundown bootheels and suddenly Kit Bradenton knew who it was and he shrieked as the door burst inward and the man in the faded jeans jacket ran in, his murderer's grin flashing on his face like a whirring white circle of knives, his face as jolly as that of a lunatic Santa Claus, carrying a galvanized steel bucket high over his right shoulder.

"HEEEEEEEOOOOOOWWWWWWWW! "

"No!" Bradenton screamed, crossing his arms weakly across his face. "No! Noo-! "

The bucket tipped forward and the water flew out, all of it seeming to hang suspended for a moment in the yellow lamplight like the largest uncut diamond in the universe, and he saw the dark man's face through it, reflected and refracted into the face of a supremely grinning troll who had just made its way up from hell's darkest shit-impacted bowels to rampage on the earth; then the water fell on him, so cold that his swelled throat sprang momentarily open again, squeezing blood from its walls in big beads, shocking breath into him and making him kick the covers all the way over the foot of the bed in one convulsive spasm so that his body would be free to jackknife and sunfish as bitter cramps from these involuntary struggles whipped through him like greyhounds biting on the run.

He screamed. He screamed again. Then lay trembling, his feverish body soaked from toe to crown, his head thumping, his eyes bulging. His throat closed to a raw slit and he began to struggle for breath miserably again. His body began to shake and shiver.

"I knew that'd cool you off!" the man he knew as Richard Fry cried cheerily. He set the bucket down with a clang. "Ah say, Ah say Ah knew dat wuz goan do de trick, Kingfish! Thanks are in order, my good man, thanks from you tendered to me. Do you thank me? Can't talk? No? Yet in your heart I know you do."

"Yeee-GAAAHHH! "

He sprang into the air like Bruce Lee in a Run Run Shaw kung-fu epic, knees spread, for a moment seeming to hang suspended directly over Kit Bradenton as the water had done, his shadow a blob on the chest of Bradenton's soaked pajamas, and Bradenton screamed weakly. Then one knee came down on either side of his ribcage and Richard Fry's bluejeaned groin was the crotch of a fork suspended above his chest by inches, and his face burned down at Bradenton's like a cellar torch in a gothic novel.

"Had to wake you up, man," Fry said. "I didn't want you to boogie off without a chance for us to talk a bit."

" …  off …  off …  off me … "

"I'm not on you, man, come on. I'm just hanging suspended above you. Like the great invisible world."

Bradenton, in an agony of fear, could only pant and shake and roll his trapped eyeballs away from that jolly, fuming face.

"We got to talk about ships and seals and sailing wax, and whether bees have stings. Also about the papers you're supposed to have for me, and the car, and the keys to the car. Now all I see in your gay-radge is a Chevy pickup, and I know that's yours, Kitty-Kitty, so how bout it?"

" …  they …  papers …  can't …  can't talk … " He gasped harshly for air. His teeth chittered together like small birds in a tree.

"You better be able to talk," Fry said, and stuck out his thumbs. They were both double-jointed (as were all his fingers), and he wiggled them back and forth at angles that seemed to deny biology and physics. "Cause if you aren't, I'm going to have your baby blues for my keychain and you're going to have to trot around hell with a seeing-eye dog." He jammed his thumbs at Bradenton's eyes and Bradenton jerked back against the pillow helplessly.

"You tell me," Fry said, "and I'll leave you the right pills. In fact, I'll hold you up so you can swallow them. Make you well, man. Pills to take care of everything."

Bradenton, now trembling with fear as much as with cold, forced the words out through his clacking teeth. "Papers …  in the name of Randall Flagg. Welsh dresser downstairs. Under the …  contact paper."

"Car?"

Bradenton tried desperately to think. Had he gotten this man a car? It was so far away, all the flames of delirium were in between, and the delirium seemed to have done something to his thought processes, burned out whole banks of memory. Whole sections of his past were scorched cabinets filled with smoldering wires and blackened relays. Instead of the car this awful man wanted to know about, an image of the first car he'd ever owned drifted up, a 1953 Studebaker with a bullet nose that he had painted pink.

Gently, Fry put one hand over Bradenton's mouth and pinched his nostrils shut with the other. Bradenton began to buck beneath him. Furry moans escaped around Fry's hand. Fry took both hands away and said, "Does that help you remember?"

Strangely, it did.

"Car … " he said, and then panted like a dog. The world swirled, steadied, and he was able to go on. "Car's parked …  behind the Conoco station …  just outside of town. Route 51."

"North or south of town?"

"Suh …  suh … "

"Yes suh! I got it. Go on."

"Covered with a tarp. Byoo …  Byoo …  Buick. Registration's on the steering post. Made out …  Randall Flagg." He collapsed into panting again, unable to say more or do anything except look at Fry with dumb hope.

"Keys?"

"Floormat. Under … "

Fry's backside cut off any further words by settling on Bradenton's chest. He settled there the way he might have settled on a comfortable hassock in a friend's apartment and suddenly Bradenton couldn't even get a small breath.

He expelled the last of his tidal breath on a single word: " … please … "

"And thank you," Richard Fry/Randall Flagg said with a prim grin. "Say goodnight, Kit."

Unable to speak, Kit Bradenton could only roll his eyes whitely in their puffed sockets.

"Don't think unkindly of me," the dark man said softly, looking down at him. "It's just that we have to hurry now. The carnival is opening early. They're opening all the rides, and the Pitch-til-U-Win, and the Wheel of Fortune. And it's my lucky night, Kit. I feel that. I feel that very strongly. So we have to hurry."

It was a mile and a half to the Conoco station, and by the time he got there it was quarter past three in the morning. The wind had picked up, whining along the street, and on his way here he had seen the corpses of three dead dogs and one dead man. The man had been wearing some sort of uniform. Above, the stars shone hard and bright, sparks struck off the dark skin of the universe.

The tarp which covered the Buick had been pegged tautly to the ground, and the wind made the canvas flap. When Flagg pulled the pegs the tarpaulin went cartwheeling off into the night like a large brown ghost, moving east. The question was, in which direction was he heading?

He stood beside the Buick, which was a well-preserved 1975 model (cars did well out here: there was little moisture and rust had a hard time starting), scenting the summer night sir like a coyote. There was desert perfume on it, the kind you can only smell clearly at night. The Buick stood whole in an automobile mortuary of dismembered parts, Easter Island monoliths in the windy silence. An engine block. An axle looking like some muscle-boy's dumbbell. A pile of tires for the wind to make hooting sound effects in. A cracked windshield. More.

He thought best in scenes like these. In scenes like these, any man could be Iago.

He walked past the Buick and ran his hand across the dented hood of what might once have been a Mustang. "Hey, little Cobra, don't ya know ya gonna shut em down … " he sang softly. He kicked over a stove-in radiator with one dusty boot and disclosed a nest of jewels, winking back at him with dim fire. Rubies, emeralds, pearls the size of goose eggs, diamonds to rival the stars. Snapped his finger at them. They were gone. Where was he to go?