The Stand

by Stephen King

She looked down at her dad’s back for a peaceful moment, just loving him. At this time of day the light took on a special quality that she loved, a timeless quality that belonged only to that most fleeting Maine genus, early summer. She could think of that particular tone of light in the middle of January and it would make her heart ache fiercely. The light of an early summer afternoon as it slipped toward dark had so many good things wrapped up in it: baseball at the Little League park, where Fred had always played third and batted clean-up; watermelon; first corn; iced tea in chilled glasses; childhood.

Sometimes, he thought, real love is silent as well as blind.

There’s something in you that’s like biting on tinfoil.

You’re a taker, that’s all. You came home to me because you knew that I have to give. Not to everybody, but to you.”

From the President’s speech, delivered at 9 P.M., EST, not seen in many areas. “… a great nation such as this must do. We cannot afford to jump at shadows like small children in a dark room; but neither can we afford to take this serious outbreak of influenza lightly. My fellow Americans, I urge you to stay at home. If you feel ill, stay in bed, take aspirin, and drink plenty of clear liquids. Be confident that you will feel better in a week at most. Let me repeat what I said at the beginning of my talk to you this evening: There is no truth—no truth—to the rumor that this strain of flu is fatal. In the greatest majority of cases, the person afflicted can expect to be up and around and feeling fine within a week. Further—” [a spasm of coughing]

It was a beautiful warm day and her father was dead.

“To us, Stu. May we have happy days, satisfied minds, and little or no low back pain.”

“Exactly. There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud’s being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more—that 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.”

She gazed at him, troubled. “Well … because it’s the right thing to do,” she said. “People need other people. Didn’t you feel that? When you were alone?” “Yes,” Larry said. “If we don’t have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness. When we get together we build miles of summer cottages and kill each other in the bars on Saturday night.” He laughed. It was a cold and unhappy sound with no humor in it at all. It hung on the deserted air for a long time. “There’s no answer. It’s like being stuck inside an egg. Come on—Joe’ll be way ahead of us.”

All the same, she could feel all of her joints tuning up; tonight there would be a concert.

“I love you as much as I can, Lucy.”

“Amended vote is 7–0. Here’s a hanky, Fran. And I’d like the record to show that I love you.”

But there was worry. That thumbprint in her diary meant there was worry. Because a man who would steal your diary and pilfer your thoughts was a man without much principle or scruple. A man like that might creep up behind someone he hated and give a push off a high place. Or use a rock. Or a knife. Or a gun.

“And the dark man?” Fran asked quietly. Glen shrugged. “Mother Abagail calls him the Devil’s Imp. Maybe he’s just the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology against us. And maybe there’s something more, something much darker. I only know that he is, and I no longer think that sociology or psychology or any other ology will put an end to him. I think only white magic will do that … and our white magician is out there someplace, wandering and alone.” Glen’s voice nearly broke, and he looked down quickly.

There’s something in you that’s like biting on tinfoil.

We’re applauding ourselves, Larry thought. We’re applauding the fact that we’re here, alive, together. Maybe we’re saying hello to the group self again, I don’t know. Hello, Boulder. Finally. Good to be here, great to be alive.

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

That’s what I’m saying. I wonder if this is the right time for gods.” “Do you think she’s dead?” “She’s been gone six days now. The Search Committee hasn’t found a trace of her. Yes, I think she’s dead, but even now I am not completely sure. She was an amazing woman, completely outside any rational frame of reference. Perhaps one of the reasons I’m almost glad to have her gone is because I’m such a rational old curmudgeon. I like to creep

through my daily round, to water my garden—did you see the way I’ve brought the begonias back? I’m quite proud of that—to read my books, to write my notes for my own book about the plague. I like to do all those things and then have a glass of wine at bedtime and fall asleep with an untroubled mind. Yes. None of us want to see portents and omens, no matter how much we like our ghost stories and the spooky films. None of us want to really see a Star in the East or a pillar of fire by night. We want peace and rationality and routine. If we have to see God in the black face of an old woman, it’s bound to remind us that there’s a devil for every god—and our devil may be closer than we like to think.”

It’s hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else’s.”

Birds. She could hear birds. Fran lay in darkness, listening to the birds for a long time before she realized the darkness wasn’t really dark. It was reddish, moving, peaceful. It made her think of her childhood. Saturday morning, no school, no church, the day you got to sleep late. The day you could wake up a little at a time, at your leisure. You lay with your eyes shut, and you saw nothing but a red darkness that was Saturday sunshine being filtered through the delicate screen of capillaries in your eyelids. You listened to the birds in the old oaks outside and maybe smelled sea-salt, because your name was Frances Goldsmith and you were eleven years old on a Saturday morning in Ogunquit— Birds. She could hear birds.

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.

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.

They walked on. Kojak came out of the brush and walked with them for a while, his toenails clicking on the pavement of US 70. Larry reached down and ruffled his fur. “Ole Kojak,” he said. “Did you know you were a battery? Just one great big old Delco battery with a lifetime guarantee?” Kojak didn’t appear to know or care, but he wagged his tail to show he was on Larry’s side.

“I will fear no evil,” he muttered, but he was afraid. He closed his eyes, thought of Lucy. He thought of his mother. Random thoughts. Getting up for school on cold mornings. The time he had thrown up in church. Finding a skin magazine in the gutter and looking at it with Rudy, both of them about nine years old. Watching the World Series his first fall in L.A. with Yvonne Wetterlin. 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.

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.

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