The Stand:BOOK I(83)

At the same instant Lloyd's eyes reluctantly reached Randall Flagg's darkly flushed face, Flagg screamed "Boo! " The single sound floated down the dead cellblock and then rushed back. Lloyd shrieked, stumbled over his own feet, fell down, and began to cry.

"That's all right," Flagg soothed. "Hey, man, that's all right. Everything's purely all right."

Lloyd sobbed: "Can you let me out? Please let me out. I don't want to be like my rabbit, I don't want to end up like that, it's not fair, if it wasn't for Poke I never would have got into anything but small shit, please let me out, mister, I'll do anything."

"You poor guy. You look like an advertisement for a summer vacation at Dachau."

Despite the sympathy in Flagg's voice, Lloyd could not bring himself to raise his eyes beyond the knees of the newcomer's jeans. If he looked into that face again, it would kill him. It was the face of a devil.

"Please," Lloyd mumbled. "Please let me out. I'm starving."

"How long you been shitcanned, my friend?"

"I don't know," Lloyd said, wiping his eyes with thin fingers. "A long time."

"How come you're not dead already?"

"I knew what was coming," Lloyd told the bluejeaned legs as he drew the last tattered shreds of his cunning around him. "I saved up my food. That's what."

"Didn't happen to have a chomp on this fine fellow in the next cell, by any chance?"

"What?" Lloyd croaked. "What? No! Christ's sake! What do you think I am? Mister, mister, please-"

"His left leg there looks a little thinner than his right one. That's the only reason I asked, my good friend."

"I don't know nothing about that," Lloyd whispered. He was trembling all over.

"How about Br'er Rat? How did he taste?"

Lloyd put his hands over his face and said nothing.

"What's your name?"

Lloyd tried to say, but all that came out was a moan.

"What's your name, soldier?"

"Lloyd Henreid." He tried to think what to say next, but his mind was a chaotic jumble: He had been afraid when his lawyer told him he might go to the electric chair, but not this afraid. He had never been this afraid in his entire life. "It was all Poke's idea!" he screamed. "Poke should be here, not me!"

"Look at me, Lloyd."

"No," Lloyd whispered. His eyes rolled wildly.

"Why not?"

"Because … "

"Go on."

"Because I don't think you're real," Lloyd whispered. "And if you are real …  mister, if you're real, you're the devil."

"Look at me, Lloyd."

Helplessly, Lloyd turned his eyes up to that dark, grinning face that hung behind an intersection of bars. The right hand held something up beside the right eye. Looking at it made Lloyd feel cold and hot all over. It looked like a black stone, so dark it seemed almost resinous and pitchy. There was a red flaw in the center of it, and to Lloyd it looked like a terrible eye, bloody and half-open, peering at him. Then Flagg turned it slightly between his fingers, and the red flaw in the dark stone looked like …  a key. Flagg turned it back and forth between his fingers. Now it was the eye, now it was the key.

The eye, the key.

He sang: "She brought me coffee …  she brought me tea …  she brought me …  damn near everything …  but the workhouse key. Right, Lloyd?"

"Sure," Lloyd said huskily. His eyes never left the small dark stone. Flagg began to walk it from one finger to the next like a magician doing a trick.

"Now you're a man who must appreciate the value of a good key," the man said. The dark stone disappeared in his clenched fist and suddenly reappeared in his other hand, where it began to finger-walk again. "I'm sure you are. Because what a key is for is opening doors. Is there anything more important in life than opening doors, Lloyd?"

"Mister, I'm awfully hungry … "

"Sure you are," the man said. An expression of concern spread over his face, an expression so magnified that it became grotesque. "Jesus Christ, a rat isn't anything to eat! Why, do you know what I had for lunch? I had a nice rare roast beef sandwich on Vienna bread with a few onions and a lot of Gulden's Spicy Brown. Sound good?"

Lloyd nodded his head, tears oozing slowly out of his overbright eyes.

"Had some homefries and chocolate milk to go with it, and then for dessert …  holy crow, I'm torturing you, ain't I? Someone ought to take a hosswhip to me, that's what they ought to do. I'm sorry. I'll let you right out and then we'll go get something to eat, okay?"

Lloyd was too stunned to even nod. He had decided that the man with the key was indeed a devil, or even more likely a mirage, and the mirage would stand outside his cell until Lloyd finally dropped dead, talking happily about God and Jesus and Gulden's Spicy Brown mustard as he made the strange black stone appear and disappear. But now the compassion on the man's face seemed real enough, and he sounded genuinely disgusted with himself. The black stone disappeared into his clenched fist again. And when the fist opened, Lloyd's wondering eyes beheld a flat silver key with an ornate grip lying on the stranger's palm.

"My-dear-God! " Lloyd croaked.

"You like that?" the dark man asked, pleased. "I learned that trick from a massage parlor honey in Secaucus, New Jersey, Lloyd. Secaucus, home of the world's greatest pig farms."

He bent and seated the key in the lock of Lloyd's cell. And that was strange, because as well as his memory served him (which right now was not very well), these cells had no keyways, because they were all opened and shut electronically. But he had no doubt that the silver key would work.

Just as it rattled home, Flagg stopped and looked at Lloyd, grinning slyly, and Lloyd felt despair wash over him again. It was all just a trick.

"Did I introduce myself? The name is Flagg, with the double g. Pleased to meet you."

"Likewise," Lloyd croaked.

"And I think, before I open this cell and we go get some dinner, we ought to have a little understanding, Lloyd."

"Sure thing," Lloyd croaked, and began to cry again.

"I'm going to make you my righthand man, Lloyd. Going to put you right up there with Saint Peter. When I open this door, I'm going to slip the keys to the kingdom right into your hand. What a deal, right?"

"Yeah," Lloyd whispered, growing frightened again. It was almost full dark now. Flagg was little more than a dark shape, but his eyes were still perfectly visible. They seemed to glow in the dark like the eyes of a lynx, one to the left of the bar that ended in the lockbox, one to the right. Lloyd felt terror, but something else as well: a kind of religious ecstasy. A pleasure. The pleasure of being chosen. The feeling that he had somehow won through …  to something.

"You'd like to get even with the people who left you here, isn't that right?"

"Boy, that sure is," Lloyd said, forgetting his terror momentarily. It was swallowed up by a starving, sinewy anger.

"Not just those people, but everyone who would do a thing like that," Flagg suggested. "It's a type of person, isn't it? To a certain type of person, a man like you is nothing but garbage. Because they are high up. They don't think a person like you has a right to live."

"That's just right," Lloyd said. His great hunger had suddenly been changed into a different kind of hunger. It had changed just as surely as the black stone had changed into the silver key. This man had expressed all the complex things he had felt in just a handful of sentences. It wasn't just the gate-guard he wanted to get even with-why, here's the wise-ass pusbag, what's the story, pusbag, got anything smart to say? -because the gate-guard wasn't the one. The gate-guard had had THE KEY, all right, but the gate-guard had not made THE KEY. Someone had given it to him. The warden, Lloyd supposed, but the warden hadn't made THE KEY, either. Lloyd wanted to find the makers and forgers. They would be immune to the flu, and he had business with them. Oh yes, and it was good business.

"You know what the Bible says about people like that?" Flagg asked quietly. "It says the exalted shall be abased and the mighty shall be brought low and the stiffnecked shall be broken. And you know what it says about people like you, Lloyd? It says blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And it says blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God."

Lloyd was nodding. Nodding and crying. For a moment it seemed that a blazing corona had formed around Flagg's head, a light so bright that if Lloyd looked at it for long it would burn his eyes to cinders. Then it was gone …  if it had ever been there at all, and it must not have been, because Lloyd had not even lost his night vision.

"Now you aren't very bright," Flagg said, "but you are the first. And I have the feeling you might be very loyal. You and I, Lloyd, we're going to go far. It's a good time for people like us. Everything is starting up for us. All I need is your word."

"W-word?"

"That we're going to stick together, you and me. No denials. No falling asleep on guard duty. There will be others very soon-they're on their way west already-but for now, there's just us. I'll give you the key if you give me your promise."

"I …  promise," Lloyd said, and the words seemed to hang in the air, vibrating strangely. He listened to that vibration, his head cocked to one side, and he could almost see those two words, glowing as darkly as the aurora borealis reflected in a dead man's eye.