The Stand

by Stephen King

He felt his fear twisting and turning inside him beneath his poker face. Sometimes it was big and panicky, trampling everything: the elephant. Sometimes it was small and gnawing, ripping with sharp teeth: the rat. It was always with him.

Under the California desert and subsidized by the taxpayers’ money, someone had finally invented a chain letter that really worked. A very lethal chain letter.

“The beast is on its way,” Starkey said, turning around. He was weeping and grinning. “It’s on its way, and it’s a good deal rougher than that fellow Yeets ever could have imagined. Things are falling apart. The job is to hold as much as we can for as long as we can.”

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.

He had been born when times changed, and the times were going to change again. It was in the wind, in the wind of this soft Idaho evening. It was almost time to be reborn. He knew. Why else could he suddenly do magic?

If he was to go on, he would have to … well … he would have to walk over them. Behind him, in the darkness, something moved.

dreams are the psyche’s way of taking a good dump every now and then. And that people who don’t dream—or don’t dream in a way they can often remember when they wake up—are mentally constipated in some way. After all, the only practical compensation for having a nightmare is waking up and realizing it was all just a dream.”

Harold glared sullenly at him again, the eyes those of a piggy little boy who wants the whole cookie jar to himself. Ain’t he going to be surprised, Stu thought, when he finds out a girl isn’t a jar of cookies.

Prophecy is the gift of God and everyone has a smidge of it. My own grandmother used to call it the shining lamp of God, sometimes just the shine.

He went into the bathroom, set his Coleman lamp on the sink so that it illuminated the mirror, and for the next fifteen minutes he practiced smiling. He was getting very good at it.

Patterns of soles, patterns of souls. When he did sleep, his dreams were uneasy and more than once he cried out miserably in the dark, as if to ward off things that had already been let in forever.

His name is Legion. He’s afraid of us. We’re inside. He knows magic. He can call the wolves and live in the crows. He’s the king of nowhere. But he’s afraid of us. He’s afraid of … inside.”

I don’t know if it’s God’s will for you to defeat him. I don’t know if it’s God’s will for you to ever see Boulder again. Those things are not for me to see. But he is in Las Vegas, and you must go there, and it is there that you will make your stand.

There were worse things than crucifixion. There were teeth.

He had sent the Eye out over and over again, and it afforded him with nothing but the cryptic, idiotic face of the moon. M-O-O-N, that spells moon.

He didn’t want to die, he was afraid to die, but he had made his peace with it as best he could. The choice, after all, had never been his to make, and he had come to believe that death was just a staging-area, a place to wait, the way you waited in a green-room before going on to play. He rested as easily as he could, trying to make himself ready.

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.