The Stand

by Stephen King

“All right, Nick. All right, I’ll try to be a man. I’ll try to remember. But I wish you was here, laws, yes, I do!”

“Laws, everything’s a chance, isn’t it?”

Tom looked indignantly at Stu. “Tom Cullen knows there’s no Santa Claus! Laws, no! They’re from you!”

“Tom,” he said. “You gave me my Christmas present early.”

“No, sir, I never did. I forgot. Tom Cullen’s nothing but a dummy, M-O-O-N, that spells dummy.” “But you did, you know. The best one of all. I’m still alive. I wouldn’t be, if it wasn’t for you.”

“He never dies,” Tom said. “He’s in the wolves, laws, yes. The crows. The rattlesnake. The shadow of the owl at midnight and the scorpion at high noon. He roosts upside down with the bats. He’s blind like them.”

Y’see? We made it, Tom! We made it! Kojak! Come here!”

“We’re in Boulder again,” Tom murmured softly. “We really are. C-I-T-Y-L-I-M-I-T-S, that spells Boulder, laws, yes.”

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there … and still on your feet.

“Yun-nah!” the chief sobbed in joy and terror. And as he kissed Russell Faraday’s feet, the dark man began to laugh. He laughed and laughed and laughed. Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.