The Stand

by Stephen King

When asked, “How do you write?” I invariably answer, “One word at a time,” and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That’s all. One stone at a time. But I’ve read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.

There was that acid tongue of hers. When she was opposed, it sometimes got out of control, he had told Frannie once. And when it was out of control, she just might take a notion to cut anyone with it and think of sorry too late to do the wounded much good.

“Sometimes King Laugh knocks and you’re one of those people who can’t keep him out,” Peter said.

“I think abortion’s too clean a name for it,” Peter Goldsmith said. His lips moved slowly over each word, as if they pained him. “I think it’s infanticide, pure and simple. I’m sorry to say so, to be so … inflexible, set, whatever it is I’m being … about something which you now have to consider, if only because the law says you may consider it. I told you I was an old man.”

Life is cheap, abortion makes it cheaper.

If none of the staff happened to be near, they would punch him out. Why? No reason. Except that maybe in the vast white class of victims there is a subclass: the victims of victims.

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.

Jess was just being Jess, trying to protect his image of himself to himself, the way all thinking people do so they can get to sleep at night.

There was a strawberry pie in the fridge. It was covered with Saran Wrap and after looking at it for a long time with dull and bemused eyes, Frannie took it out. She set it on the counter and cut a wedge. A strawberry fell to the counter with a fat plop as she was transferring the piece of pie to a small plate. She picked the berry up and ate it. She wiped up the small splotch of juice on the counter with a dishrag. She put the Saran Wrap back over the remains of the pie and stuck it back in the refrigerator.

He had stayed up all night, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and plowing steadily along, the way a man does when he’s not much used to reading just for the pleasure of it.

But the girl’s face was like an unfolding map of tragic country, and Stu felt bad for her.

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.

But underneath the new image was the belief that he was still a fuckup and always would be. Underneath was the certainty that there was no such thing as a fresh start. He would have reacted the same way to Bateman, or to a twelve-year-old kid. In any triangle situation he was going to see himself as the lowest point.

“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.

As far as worldly goods went, there was now plenty for everybody, because there were precious few everybodies left.

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. Or you don’t.

She found herself wondering if the Lord was going to send her an eagle to fly her those four miles, or send Elijah in his fiery chariot to give her a lift. “Blasphemy,” she told herself complacently. “The Lord provides strength, not taxicabs.”

Her six boys had produced a crop of thirty-two grandchildren for her. Her thirty-two grandchildren had produced ninety-one great-grandchildren that she knew of, and at the time of the superflu, she had had three great-great-grandchildren. Would have had more, if not for the pills the girls took these days to keep the babies away. It seemed like for them, being sexy was just another playground to be in. Abagail felt sorry for them in their modern ways, but she never spoke of it. It was up to God to judge whether or not they were sinning by taking those pills (and not to that baldheaded old fart in Rome—Mother Abagail had been a Methodist all her life, and she was damned proud of not having any truck with those mackerel-snapping Catholics), but Abagail knew what they were missing: the ecstasy which comes when you stand on the lip of the Valley of the Shadow, the ecstasy that comes when you gave yourself up to your man and your God, when you say thy will be done and Thy will be done; the final ecstasy of sex in the sight of the Lord, when a man and a woman relive the old sin of Adam and Eve, only now washed and sanctified in the Blood of the Lamb.

The only thing dumber than a broody hen was a New York Democrat.

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.

Before he’s ready to make his move, I guess he’ll have a lot more. Not just the evil ones that are like him, but the weak ones … the lonely ones … and the ones that have left God out of their hearts.”

“Maybe he’s not real,” Nick wrote. “Maybe he’s just …” He had to nibble at the top of his pen and think. At last he added: “… the scared, bad part of all of us. Maybe we are dreaming of the things we’re afraid we might do.” Ralph frowned over this as he read it aloud, but Abby grasped what Nick meant right off. It wasn’t much different from the talk of the new preachers who had got on the land in the last twenty years or so. There wasn’t really any Satan, that was their gospel. There was evil, and it probably came from original sin, but it was in all of us and getting it out was as impossible as getting an egg out of its shell without cracking it. According to the way these new preachers had it, Satan was like a jigsaw puzzle—and every man, woman, and child on earth added his or her little piece to make up the whole. Yes, all that had a good modern sound to it; the trouble with it was that it wasn’t true. And if Nick was allowed to go on thinking that, the dark man would eat him for dinner.

“He ain’t Satan,” she said, “but he and Satan know of each other and have kept their councils together of old.

“He says …” Ralph cleared his throat; the feather stuck in the band of his hat jiggled. “He says that he don’t believe in God.” The message relayed, he looked unhappily down at his shoes and waited for the explosion. But she only chuckled, got up, and walked across to Nick. She took one of his hands and patted it. “Bless you, Nick, but that don’t matter. He believes in you.”

“Oh, Nick,” Mother Abagail said, “I have harbored hate of the Lord in my heart. Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He’s a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He’s apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy. I do His will, but the human part o me has cursed Him in my heart. ‘Abby,’ the Lord says to me, ‘there’s work for you far up ahead. So I’ll let you live an live, until your flesh is bitter on your bones. I’ll let you see all your children die ahead of you and still you’ll walk the earth. I’ll let you see your daddy’s lan taken away piece by piece. And in the end, your reward will be to go away with strangers from all the things you love best and you’ll die in a strange land with the work not yet finished. That’s My will, Abby,’ says He, and ‘Yes, Lord,’ says I. ‘Thy will be done,’ and in my heart I curse Him and ask, ‘Why, why, why?’ and the only answer I get is ‘Where were you when I made the world?’ ”

The battle had lasted less than a minute. Less than a minute, but she suspected it was going to be held over by popular demand inside her head.

She guessed that behind the conscious evil there was an unconscious blackness. That was what distinguished the earth’s children of darkness; they couldn’t make things but only break them. God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God’s light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted—was able—only to unshape. Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation.

That was not for her to know, either. God worked discreetly, and in the ways that pleased Him. It had pleased Him that the Children of Israel should sweat and strain under the Egyptian yoke for generations. It had pleased Him to send Joseph into slavery, his fine coat of many colors ripped rudely from his back. It had pleased Him to allow the visitation of a hundred plagues on hapless Job, and it had pleased Him to allow His only Son to be hung up on a tree with a bad joke written over His head.

“There used to be a book my mom had, she got it from her grandmother or something. In His Steps, that was the name of it. And there were all these little stories about guys with horrible problems. Ethical problems, most of them. And the guy who wrote the book said that to solve the problems, all you had to do was ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’ It always cleared the trouble right up. You know what I think? It’s a Zen question, not really a question at all but a way to clear your mind, like saying Om and looking at the tip of your nose.” Fran smiled. She knew what her mother would have said about something like that.

“He died in 1937, when I was still in my teens,” he said. “I have missed him ever since. A boy does not need a father unless he is a good father, but a good father is indispensable.

“Then live with it,” the Judge said with great relish. “For God’s sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little applied over all your scruples is an absolute necessity! It is to the soul what a good sun-block is to the skin during the heat of the summer. You can only captain your own soul, and from time to time some smart-ass psychologist will question your ability to even do that. Grow up! Your Lucy is a fine woman. To take responsibility for more than her and your own soul is to ask for too much, and asking for too much is one of humanity’s more popular ways of courting disaster.”

“You sayin she hates men?” Stu asked, looking at Sue closely. Susan shook her head. “She’s bi now.” “Bye now?” Stu said doubtfully.

But he is in Las Vegas, and you must go there, and it is there that you will make your stand. You will go, and you will not falter, because you will have the Everlasting Arm of the Lord God of Hosts to lean on. Yes. With God’s help you will stand.”

“Everything you made here is falling apart, and why not? The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short.

And bask in the love of his friends. That was what was missing back there in Las Vegas, he decided—simple love. They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn’t much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid. 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.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” he recited softly. “I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen.”

Dorgan looked at Larry. “Why is it funny that I should be with him? I was a cop for ten years before Captain Trips. I saw what happens when guys like you are in charge, you see.” “Young man,” Glen said mildly, “your experiences with a few battered babies and drug abusers does not justify your embrace of a monster.”