The Stand:BOOK III(33)

Glen laughed heartily. He threw back his head and laughed long and hard. And as he laughed, the pain in his joints began to abate. He felt better, stronger, in control again.

"Oh, you're a card," he said. "I tell you what you do. Why don't you find a nice big sandpile, get yourself a hammer, and pound all that sand right up your ass?"

Flagg's face grew dark. The smile slipped away. His eyes, previously as dark as the jet stone Lloyd wore, now seemed to gleam yellowly. He reached out his hand to the locking mechanism on the door and wrapped his fingers around it. There was an electric buzzing sound. Fire leaped out between his fingers, and there was a hot smell in the air. The lockbox fell to the floor, smoking and black. Lloyd Henreid cried out. The dark man grabbed the bars and threw the cell door back on its track.

"Stop laughing."

Glen laughed harder.

"Stop laughing at me! "

"You're nothing!" Glen said, wiping his streaming eyes and still chuckling. "Oh pardon me …  it's just that we were all so frightened …  we made such a business out of you …  I'm laughing as much at our own foolishness as at your regrettable lack of substance … "

"Shoot him, Lloyd." Flagg had turned to the other man. His face was working horribly. His hands were hooked into predator's claws.

"Oh, kill me yourself if you're going to kill me," Glen said. "Surely you're capable. Touch me with your finger and stop my heart. Make the sign of the inverted cross and give me a massive brain embolism. Bring down the lightning from the overhead socket to cleave me in two. Oh …  oh dear …  oh dear me!"

Glen collapsed onto the cell cot and rocked back and forth, consumed with delicious laughter.

"Shoot him! " the dark man roared at Lloyd.

Pale, shaking with fear, Lloyd fumbled the pistol out of his belt, almost dropped it, then tried to point it at Glen. He had to use both hands.

Glen looked at Lloyd, still smiling. He might have been at a faculty cocktail party back in the Brain Ghetto at Woodsville, New Hampshire, recovering from a good joke, now ready to turn the conversation back into more serious channels of reflection.

"If you have to shoot somebody, Mr. Henreid, shoot him."

"Do it now, Lloyd."

Lloyd blindly pulled the trigger. The gun went off with a tremendous crash in the enclosed space. The echoes bounced furiously back and forth. But the bullet only chipped concrete two inches from Glen's right shoulder, ricocheted, struck something else, and whined off again.

"Can't you do anything right?" Flagg roared. "Shoot him, you moron! Shoot him! He's standing right in front of you!"

"I'm trying-"

Glen's smile had not changed, and he had only flinched a little at the gunshot. "I repeat, if you must shoot somebody, shoot him. He's really not human at all, you know. I once described him to a friend as the last magician of rational thought, Mr. Henreid. That was more correct than I knew. But he's losing his magic now. It's slipping away from him and he knows it. And you know it, too. Shoot him now and save us all God knows how much bloodshed and dying."

Flagg's face had grown very still. "Shoot one of us, anyhow, Lloyd," he said. "I got you out of jail when you were dying of starvation. It's guys like this that you wanted to get back at. Little guys who talk big."

Lloyd said: "Mister, you don't fool me. It's like Randy Flagg says."

"But he lies. You know he lies."

"He told me more of the truth than anyone else bothered to in my whole lousy life," Lloyd said, and shot Glen three times. Glen was driven backward, twisted and turned like a ragdoll. Blood flew in the dim air. He struck the cot, bounced, and rolled onto the floor. He managed to get up on one elbow.

"It's all right, Mr. Henreid," he whispered. "You don't know any better."

"Shut up, you mouthy old bastard! " Lloyd screamed. He fired again and Glen Bateman's face disappeared. He fired again and the body jumped lifelessly. Lloyd shot him yet again. He was crying. The tears rolled down his angry, sunburned cheeks. He was remembering the rabbit he had forgotten and left to eat its own paws. He was remembering Poke, and the people in the white Connie, and Gorgeous George. He was remembering the Phoenix jail, and the rat, and how he hadn't been able to eat the ticking out of his mattress. He was remembering Trask, and how Trask's leg had started to look like a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner after a while. He pulled the trigger again, but the pistol only uttered a sterile click.

"All right," Flagg said softly. "All right. Well done. Well done, Lloyd."

Lloyd dropped the gun on the floor and shrank away from Flagg. "Don't you touch me!" he cried. "I didn't do it for you!"

"Yes, you did," Flagg said tenderly. "You may not think so, but you did." He reached out and fingered the jet stone around Lloyd's neck. He closed his hand over it, and when he opened the hand again, the stone was gone. It had been replaced with a small silver key.

"I promised you this, I think," the dark man said. "In another jail. He was wrong …  I keep my promises, don't I, Lloyd?"

"Yes."

"The others are leaving, or planning to leave. I know who they are. I know all the names. Whitney …  Ken …  Jenny …  oh yes, I know all the names."

"Then why don't you-"

"Put a stop to it? I don't know. Maybe it's better to let them go. But you, Lloyd. You're my good and faithful servant, aren't you?"

"Yeah," Lloyd whispered. The final admission. "Yeah, I guess I am."

"Without me, the best you could have done was small shit, even if you had survived that jail. Correct?"

"Yeah."

"The Lauder boy knew that. He knew I could make him bigger. Taller. That's why he was coming to me. But he was too full of thoughts …  too full of … " He looked suddenly perplexed and old. Then he waved his hand impatiently, and the smile bloomed on his face again. "Perhaps it is going bad, Lloyd. Perhaps it is, for some reason not even I can understand …  but the old magician has a few tricks left in him yet, Lloyd. One or two. Now listen to me. Time is short if we want to stop this …  this crisis in confidence. If we want to nip it in the bud, as it were. We'll want to finish things tomorrow with Underwood and Brentner. Now listen to me very carefully … "

Lloyd didn't get to bed until past midnight, and got no sleep until the small hours of the morning. He talked to the Rat-Man. He talked to Paul Burlson. To Barry Dorgan, who agreed that what the dark man wanted could-and probably should-be done before daylight. Construction began on the front lawn of the MGM Grand around 10 P.M. on the twenty-ninth, a work party of ten men with welding arcs and hammers and bolts and a good supply of long steel pipes. They were assembling the pipes on two flatbed trucks in front of the fountain. The welding arcs soon drew a crowd.

"Look, Angie-mom!" Dinny cried. "It's a fireworks show!"

"Yes, but it's time for all good little boys to be in bed." Angie Hirschfield drew the boy away with a secret fear in her heart, feeling that something bad, something perhaps as evil as the superflu itself, was in the making.

"Wanna see! Wanna see the sparks!" Dinny wailed, but she drew him quickly and firmly away.

Julie Lawry approached the Rat-Man, the only fellow in Vegas she considered too creepy to sleep with …  except maybe in a pinch. His black skin glimmered in the blue-white glare of the welding arcs. He was tricked out like an Ethiopian pirate-wide silk trousers, a red sash, and a necklace of silver dollars around his scrawny neck.

"What is it, Ratty?" she asked.

"The Rat-Man don't know, dear, but the Rat-Man got hisself an idea. Yes indeedy he does. It looks like black work tomorrow, very black. Like to slip away for a quick one with Ratty, my dear?"

"Maybe," Julie said, "but only if you know what all of this is about."

"Tomorrow all of Vegas gonna know," Ratty said. "You bet your sweet and delectable little sugarbuns on that. Come along with the Rat-Man, dear, and he show you the nine thousand names of God."

But Julie, much to the Rat-Man's displeasure, had slipped away.

By the time Lloyd finally went to sleep, the work was done and the crowd had drifted away. Two large cages stood on the back of the two flatbeds. There were squarish holes in the right and left sides of each. Parked close by were four cars, each with a trailer hitch. Attached to each hitch was a heavy steel towing chain. The chains snaked across the lawn of the Grand, and each ended just inside the squarish holes in the cages.

At the end of each chain there dangled a single steel handcuff.

At dawn on the morning of September 30, Larry heard the door at the far end of the cellblock slide back. Footsteps came rapidly down the corridor. Larry was lying on his cot, hands laced at the back of his head. He had not slept the night before. He had been

(thinking? praying?)

It was all the same thing. Whichever it had been, the old wound in himself had finally closed, leaving him at peace. He had felt the two people that he had been all his life-the real one and the ideal one-merge into one living being. His mother would have liked this Larry. And Rita Blakemoor. It was a Larry to whom Wayne Stukey never would have had to tell the facts. It was a Larry that even that long-ago oral hygienist might have liked.