The Stand

by Stephen King

Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.

Mother Abagail is what they call me. I’m the oldest woman in eastern Nebraska, I guess, and I still make my own biscuits. You come see me as quick as you can. We got to go before he gets wind of us.

That black man. That servant of the devil. We got the Rockies between us n him, praise God, but they won’t keep him back. That’s why we got to knit together.

I got to keep her around a goodish time. She’s got work in 1990, on the other side of a whole heap of calendar pages.

John Freemantle pretended not to hear these things, and at home he would quote from the Bible—“A soft answer turneth away wrath” and “Brethren, as ye reap so shalt ye surely sow” and his favorite, spoken not in humility but in grim expectation: “The meek shall inherit the earth.”

I’m Abagail Freemantle Trotts, I play well and I sing well; I do not know these things because anyone told me.

Now if you want to throw your tomatas or whatever, you go on and do it. I played and sang my best, and I was real fine.

She shuffled over to the tire swing and set it to moving. It was an old tractor tire that her brother Lucas had hung here in 1922.

1922?

I knew when I saw you. It’s you, Nick. God has put His finger on your heart …

I’m busier’n a one-legged man in an ass-kickin contest. Catch you later.”

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance … or change. Once such incantatory phrases as “we see now through a glass darkly” and “mysterious are the ways He chooses His wonders to perform” are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window. Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world’s vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it’s all on purpose.

In a world where so many have died, to parcel out more death is surely the gravest sin.

“Oh, I can’t believe that. There are college graduates here, lawyers, political activists—” “Maybe they used to be. Now they’re just a bunch of tired, scared people who don’t know what’s going to happen to them.

It is said that the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I elect to think of them as the two great virtues. To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To embrace them, to vent them, is more noble; that is to say that the world must change for the good of you. I am on a great adventure.

Leo kind of sees into people. He’s not the only one, either. Maybe there were always people like that, but there seems to be a little bit more of it around since the flu.

Leo has the shine?

All members of the ad hoc committee were present, those being: Stuart Redman, Frances Goldsmith, Nick Andros, Glen Bateman, Ralph Brentner, Susan Stern, and Larry Underwood …

She believes we are all a part of a chess game between God and Satan; that Satan’s chief agent in this game is the Adversary, whose name she says is Randall Flagg (‘the name he’s using this time,’ is how she puts it); that for reasons best known to Himself, God has chosen her as His agent in this matter. She believes, and in this I happen to agree with her, that a struggle is coming and it’s going to be us or him.

Patterns of soles, patterns of souls.

Superstition, like true love, needs time to grow and reflect upon itself.

Lazarus,

Pet Sematary?

“That damn dog came back to me. I wish to Christ I hadn’t left him behind to come on his own, Stu. That makes me feel so friggin bad.”

A dog was a good thing to have, and so far as he knew, Kojak was the only dog in Boulder.

A boy does not need a father unless he is a good father, but a good father is indispensable.

But among all the ugly terms for mental retardation, there was one term that did fit Tom Cullen. It was one Nick had applied to him often, and with great compassion, in the silence of his own mind. The phrase was: The guy’s not playing with a full deck. That was what was wrong with Tom.

“M-O-O-N, that spells Stew, Tom Cullen knows that, everybody knows that!”

“Yes. Come back when the moon is full. Not the half-moon, not the fingernail moon. Walk at night, sleep in the day. Don’t let anybody see me. If one person sees me, kill him. If more than one person sees me, run away. But try not to let anyone see me.”

Yes, Leo knew things … or intuited them. He hadn’t wanted to go in Harold’s house and had said something about Nadine … he couldn’t remember exactly what … but Larry had recalled that discussion and had felt very uneasy when he heard that Nadine had moved in with Harold. It had been as if the boy was in a trance, as if—

The first sentence in Harold’s ledger: My great pleasure this delightful post-Apocalypse summer will be to kill Mr. Stuart Dog-Cock Redman; and just maybe I will kill her, too.

Hell was whiteness, the thesis to the dark man’s antithesis.

“Stu, please, we have to get Nick out of there!” Fran screamed. That was when the house blew up behind them.

Inspector Underwood was great at ferreting out candy wrappers, but not so great when it came to dynamite. In point of fact, Inspector Underwood was a bloody asshole.

It made him feel the way he’d felt when he had been trying to find his way out of the Stovington Plague Center—a fly caught and struggling in an invisible spider’s web.

He knew the way stories got around, growing between the mouth that spoke and the ear that listened. And how happy the dark man would be to encourage stories like that.

When will I find out the things they need to know, back in the Free Zone that seems so far away? Nevermore. Will I get any idea what chinks there might be in the dark man’s armor? Nevermore.

It’s us or you people; that’s what he says. And I believe him.”

She thought: My name is Dayna Roberta Jurgens, and I am afraid, but I have been afraid before. All he can take from me is what I would have to give up someday anyhow—my life. I will not let him break me down. I will not let him make me less than I am, if I can possibly help it. I want to die well … and I am going to have what I want.

“M-O-O-N, that spells moon,” he whispered. “Laws, yes. Tom Cullen knows what that means.”

“Everything you made here is falling apart, and why not? The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short. People are whispering about you. They’re saying you let Tom Cullen get away, just a simple retarded boy but smart enough to outwit Randall Flagg.”

Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.

When you bit the hand that fed you, you expected that extended hand to curl into a fist. That wasn’t only the way life went; that was justice.

“My life for you,” he whispered in the darkness, and began to climb the stairs again.

A madman or a person on her deathbed is a human being with a drastically changed psyche. A healthy person might be apt to filter the divine message, to alter it with his or her own personality. In other words, a healthy person might make a shitty prophet.”

“Starvation is a great hallucinogenic.”

“It’s not right, man. When somebody falls down and breaks his leg, you don’t … you can’t just walk off and let that person die. Don’t you know that? Hey, man …” He touched Stu’s face. “Please. Think.”

“Goodbye, East Texas. It’s been pretty goddam good to know you.”

“I know who gives your orders. He murdered my friend Nick.

Silent white light filled the world. And the righteous and unrighteous alike were consumed in that holy fire.

“Well, it’s Tom Cullen, that’s who, my laws, yes. M-O-O-N, that spells Tom Cullen. Who’s that?”

“Yes he was, M-O-O-N, that spells my main man. I miss him awful. But I’m going to see him in heaven. Tom Cullen will see him there. And he’ll be able to talk and I’ll be able to think. Isn’t that right?”

Kojak barked and wagged his tail. In his previous life, the life before Captain Trips when he had been Big Steve, he had ridden often in his master’s car. It was nice to be riding again, with his new masters.