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“Right now it looks to me like it’s my country doing me a grave disservice. It’s got me locked up in a hospital room in Georgia with a buttermouth little pissant doctor who doesn’t know shit from Shinola.
How many those forty passed it to is impossible to say—you might as well ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
The New Yorker was Edward M. Norris, lieutenant of police, detective squad, in the Big Apple’s 87th Precinct.
During their wait in Sweeney’s office they communicated the sickness which would soon be known across the disintegrating country as Captain Trips to more than twenty-five people, including a matronly woman who just came in to pay her bill before going on to pass the disease to her entire bridge club.
In the row behind Larry, a man was coughing.
Deitz brought a paper out of an inside pocket. “Victor Palfrey, deceased. Norman Bruett, Robert Bruett, deceased. Thomas Wannamaker, deceased. Ralph Hodges, Bert Hodges, Cheryl Hodges, deceased. Christian Ortega, deceased. Anthony Leominster, deceased.”
The worst part about being deaf-mute was not living in the silent movie world; the worst part was not knowing the names of things. He had not really begun to understand the concept of naming until he was four. He had not known that you called the tall green things trees until he was six. He had wanted to know, but no one had thought to tell him and he had no way to ask: he was INCOMMUNICADO.
He was quite fond of science fiction, picking up falling-apart paperbacks from time to time on the dusty back shelves of antique barns for a nickel or a dime, and he found himself thinking, not for the first time, that it was going to be a great day for the deaf-mutes of the world when the telephone viewscreens the science fiction novels were always predicting finally came into general use.
We love our lives, and so we look for the guiding light as we search for tomorrow.
Randall Flagg, the dark man, strode south on US 51, listening to the nightsounds that pressed close on both sides of this narrow road that would take him sooner or later out of Idaho and into Nevada. From Nevada he might go anywhere. From New Orleans to Nogales, from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, it was his country, and none knew or loved it better.
He walked rapidly, rundown bootheels clocking against the paved surface of the road, and if car lights showed on the horizon he faded back and back, down over the soft shoulder to the high grass where the night bugs made their homes … and the car would pass him, the driver perhaps feeling a slight chill as if he had driven through an air pocket, his sleeping wife and children stirring uneasily, as if all had been touched with a bad dream at the same instant.
He walked south, south on US 51, the worn heels of his sharp-toed cowboy boots clocking on the pavement; a tall man of no age in faded, pegged jeans and a denim jacket. His pockets were stuffed with fifty different kinds of conflicting literature—pamphlets for all seasons, rhetoric for all reasons. When this man handed you a tract you took it no matter what the subject:
There was a dark hilarity in his face, and perhaps in his heart, too, you would think—and you would be right.
It was a face guaranteed to make barroom arguments over batting averages turn bloody.
When it came to the printed word, Flagg was an equal opportunity reader.
He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate—they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.
He hammered along, arms swinging by his sides. He was known, well known, along the highways in hiding that are traveled by the poor and the mad, by the professional revolutionaries and by those who have been taught to hate so well that their hate shows on their faces like harelips and they are unwanted except by others like them, who welcome them to cheap rooms with slogans and posters on the walls, to basements where lengths of sawed-off pipe are held in padded vises while they are stuffed with high explosives, to back rooms where lunatic plans are laid: to kill a Cabinet member, to kidnap
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When he walked into a meeting the hysterical babble ceased—the backbiting, recriminations, accusations, the ideological rhetoric. For a moment there would be dead silence and they would start to turn to him and then turn away, as if he had come to them with some old and terrible engine of destruction cradled in his arms, something a thousand times worse than the plastic explosive made in the basement labs of renegade chemistry students or the black market arms obtained from some greedy army post supply sergeant.
It seemed that he had come to them with a device gone rusty with blood and packed for centuries in the Cosmoline of screams but now ready again, carried to their meeting like some infernal gift, a birthday cake with nitroglycerine candles. And when the talk began again it would be rational and disciplined—as rational and disciplined as madmen can make it—and things would be agreed upon.
He remembered drifting down to New Orleans in 1962, and meeting a demented young man who was handing out tracts urging America to leave Cuba alone. That man had been a certain Mr. Oswald, and he had taken some of Oswald’s tracts and he still had a couple, very old and crumpled, in one of his many pockets. He had sat on a hundred different Committees of Responsibility.
Lee Harvey Oswald? Related to 11.22.63?
And he was happier than he had ever been, because— He stopped. Because something was coming. He could feel it, almost taste it on the night air. He could taste it, a sooty hot taste that came from everywhere, as if God was planning a cook-out and all of civilization was going to be the barbecue. Already the charcoal was hot, white and flaky outside, as red as demons’ eyes inside. A huge thing, a great thing.
His time of transfiguration was at hand. He was going to be born for the second time, he was going to be squeezed out of the laboring cunt of some great sand-colored beast that even now lay in the throes of its contractions, its legs moving slowly as the birthblood gushed, its sun-hot eyes glaring into the emptiness.
My goodness, he was in a state when we got down. He was … we were … in love … very much in love … love is what moves the world, I’ve always thought … it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down … bring them low … and make them crawl … we were … so much in love …”
At five minutes past eleven, the studio ceiling was replaced on home screens by a picture of a cartoon man who was staring glumly at a cartoon TV. On the cartoon TV was a sign that said: SORRY, WE’RE HAVING PROBLEMS! As the evening wound toward its close, that was true of almost everyone.
He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry.”
Like the man on the record said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
Hiyo Silver, away.
Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.
He’s coming for you … he’s out there now, on the highways of the night … the highways in hiding … the dark man
You fixed me, he told the dead man. First my teeth and now my eye. Are you happy? You would have taken both eyes if you could have done it, wouldn’t you? Taken my eyes and left me deaf, dumb, and blind in a world of the dead. How do you like this, home-boy?
Hey, Trashcan, whydja wanta burn up a church? Why dintcha burn up the SCHOOL?
Always remember, Kojak, that control is what separates the higher orders from the lower. Control!”
In the post-flu world, technological know-how is going to replace gold as the most perfect medium of exchange.
After all, the only practical compensation for having a nightmare is waking up and realizing it was all just a dream.”
But oddly, the thing his mind kept returning to was Glen Bateman’s dream, the man with no face on top of the high building—or the cliff-edge—the man with the red eyes, his back to the setting sun, looking restlessly to the east.
No great loss.
And Nick put his hands over his face because he wanted all the things the black manshape had shown him from this high desert place: cities, women, treasure, power. But most of all he wanted to hear the entrancing sound his fingernails made on his shirt, the tick of a clock in an empty house after midnight, and the secret sound of rain.
But more than any of these things he loved the intangible, he loved that moment when the connection would be made, the switch cleared (at least momentarily), the light would go on in the dark room. It didn’t always happen; often the connection eluded him. This time it didn’t.
“I thought of it! Hooray for me! I thought of it myself! Hooray for Tom Cullen!” Nick had to grin. He couldn’t remember when his disability had brought someone so much pleasure.
“Want me to go with you?” Tom asked. A smile of disbelieving delight lit up his face.
If he had been able to hear, he would already have been aware that Tom had discovered his bike. The Klaxon’s hoarse and drawn-out cry of Howww-OOO-Gah! floated up and down the street, punctuated by Tom Cullen’s giggles.
A little wistfully Nick wished he could hear the sound of the horn, just to see if it pleased him as much as it was pleasing to Tom.
I am looking at whatever it is in my worst dreams, Nick thought, and it is not a man at all, although it may sometimes look like a man. What it really is is a tornado. One almighty big black twister ripping out of the west, sucking up anything and everything unlucky enough to be in its path. It’s—
“I never been out of Harper County in my life, laws, no, not Tom Cullen. But once my daddy took me out here and showed me this sign. He told me if he ever caught me t’other side of it, he’d whale the tar out of me. I sure hope he don’t catch us over there in Woods County.
Mother Abagail is what they call me … you come see me anytime.
That was how Nick and Tom met Ralph Brentner.
All those wonderful groups, Larry thought dazedly, give me the sixties and cram the eighties up your ass.
Daytimes, the vision of the dark man would recede. The dark man strictly worked the night shift.
To take life when so much had been lost was the one unpardonable sin.
No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just … come out the other side.
