CHAPTER 53 Excerpts from the Minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee Meeting

CHAPTER 53

Excerpts from the Minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee Meeting August 17, 1990

This meeting was held at the home of Larry Underwood on South Forty-second Street in the Table Mesa area. All members of the committee were present... The first item of business concerned having the ad hoc committee elected as the permanent Boulder Committee. Fran Goldsmith was recognized. Fran: "Both Stu and I agreed that the best, easiest way for us all to get elected would be if Mother Abagail endorsed the whole slate. It would save us the problem of having twenty people nominated by their friends and possibly upsetting the applecart. But now we'll have to do it another way. I'm not going to suggest anything that isn't perfectly demo— cratic, and you all know the plan anyway, but I just want to re-emphasize that each of us has to make sure we have someone who will nominate and second us. We won't do it for each other, obviously-that would look too much like the Mafia. And if you can't find one person to nominate you and another to second you, you might as well give up anyway." Sue: "Wow! That's sneaky, Fran." Fran: "Yes-it is, a little." Glen: "We're edging back into the subject of the committee's morality, and although I'm sure we all find that an endlessly fascinating topic, I'd like to see it tabled for the next few months. I think we just have to agree that we're serving in the Free Zone's best interest and leave it at that." Ralph: "You sound a little pissed, Glen." Glen: "I am a little pissed. I admit it. The very fact that we've spent so much time eating at our own livers on this subject should give a pretty good indication as to where our hearts are." Sue: "The road to hell is paved with—" Glen: "Good intentions, yes, and since we all seem so worried about our intentions, we must surely be on the highway to heaven." Glen then said that he had intended to address the committee on the subject of our scouts or spies or whatever you want to call them, but that he wanted to make a motion instead that we meet to discuss that on the nineteenth. Stu asked him why. Glen: "Because we might not all be here on the nineteenth. Somebody might get voted out. It's a remote possibility, but no one really knows what a large group of people is going to do when they all get together in one place. We ought to be as careful as we can." That was good for a moment of silence, and the committee voted, 7–0, to meet on the nineteenth-as a Permanent Committee-to discuss the question of the scouts... or spies... or whatever. Stu was recognized to put a third item of business before the committee, concerning Mother Abagail. Stu: "As you know, she's gone off for reasons of her own. Her note says she'll `be gone for a while,' which is pretty vague, and that she'll be back `if it's God's will. ' Now, that's not very encouraging. We've had a search-party out for three days now and we haven't found a thing. We don't want to just drag her back, not if she doesn't want to come, but if she's lying up somewhere with a busted leg or if she's unconscious, that's a lot different. Now part of the problem is that there just aren't enough of us to search all the wildlands around here. But another part of it is the same thing that's slowing us down at the power station. There's just no organization. So what I'm looking for is permission to put this search-party on the agenda of the big meeting tomorrow Vht, same as the power station and the burial crew. And 9 like to see Harold Lauder in charge, because it was his idea in the first place." Glen said that he didn't think any search-party was going to find very good news after a week or so. After all, the lady in question is a hundred and eight years old. The committee as a whole agreed with that, and then voted in favor of the motion, 7–0, as Stu had put it. To make this record as honest as possible, I should add there were several expressions of doubt over putting Harold in

352 charge... but as Stu pointed out, it had been his idea to begin with, and not to give him command of the search-party would be a direct slap in the face. Nick: "I withdraw my objection to Harold, but not my basic reservations. I just don't like him very much." Ralph Brentner asked if either Stu or Glen would write out Stu's motion about the search-party so he could add it to the agenda, which he plans to print at the high school tonight. Stu said he'd be glad to. Larry Underwood then moved that we adjourn, Ralph seconded it, and it was voted, 7–0. Frances Goldsmith, Secretary

The turnout for the meeting the next evening was almost total, and for the first time Larry Underwood, who had been in the Zone only a week, got an idea of just how large the community was becoming. It was one thing to see people coming and going on the streets, usually alone or by twos, and quite another thing to see them all gathered together in one place-Chautauqua Auditorium. The place was full, every seat taken and more people sitting in the aisles and standing at the back of the hall. They were a curiously subdued crowd, murmuring but not babbling. For the first time since he had gotten to Boulder it had rained all day long, a soft drizzle that seemed to hang suspended in the air, fogging you rather than wetting you, and even with the assemblage of close to six hundred, you could hear the quiet sound of rain on the roof. The loudest sound inside was the constant riffle of paper as people looked at the mimeographed agendas that had been piled up on two card tables just inside the double doors. This agenda read:

THE BOULDER FREE ZONE Open Meeting Agenda August 18, 1990

1. To see if the Free Zone will agree to read and ratify the Constitution of the United States of America.

2. To see if the Free Zone will agree to read and ratify the Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States of America.

3. To see if the Free Zone will nominate and elect a slate of seven Free Zone representatives to serve as a gov— erning board.

4. To see if the Free Zone will agree to veto power for Abagail Freemantle on any and all matters agreed to by the Free Zone representatives.

5. To see if the Free Zone will approve a Burial Committee of at least twenty persons initially to decently inter those who died of the superflu epidemic in Boulder.

6. To see if the Free Zone will approve a Power Committee of at least sixty persons initially to get the electricity back on before cold weather.

7. To see if the Free Zone will approve a Search Committee of at least fifteen persons, its purpose to find the whereabouts of Abagail Freemantle, if possible.

Larry found that his nervous hands had been busy folding this agenda, which he knew nearly word for word, into a paper airplane. Being on the ad hoc committee was sort of fun, like a game- children playing at parliamentary process in someone's living room, sitting around and drinking Cokes, having a piece of the cake Frannie had made, talking things over. Even the part about sending spies over the mountains and right into the dark man's lap had seemed like a game, partly because it was a thing he couldn't imagine doing himself. You'd have to have lost most of your marbles to face such a living nightmare. But in their closed sessions, with the room comfortably lit with Coleman gas lanterns, it had seemed okay. And if the Judge or Dayna Jurgens or Tom Cullen

353 got caught, it seemed-in those closed sessions, at least—a thing no more important than losing a rook or a queen in a chess game. But now, sitting halfway down the hall with Lucy on one side and Leo on the other (he had not seen Nadine all day, and Leo didn't seem to know where she was, either; "Out" had been his disinterested response), the truth of it came home, and in his guts it felt as if a battering ram was in use. It was no game. There were five hundred and eighty people here and most of them didn't have any idea that Larry Underwood wasn't no nice guy, or that the first person Larry Underwood had attempted to take care of after the epidemic had died of a drug overdose. His hands were damp and chilly. They were trying to fold the agenda into a paper plane again and he stopped them. Lucy took one of them, squeezed it, and smiled at him. He was able to respond only with something that felt like a grimace, and in his heart he heard his mother's voice: There's something left out of you, Larry. Thinking of that made him feel panicky. Was there a way out of this, or had things already gone too far? He didn't want this millstone. He had already made a motion in closed session that could send Judge Farris to his death. If he was voted out and someone else was voted into his seat, they'd have to take another vote on sending the Judge, wouldn't they? Sure they would. And they'd vote to send someone else. When Laurie Constable nominates me, I'll just stand up and say I decline. Sure, nobody can force me, can they? Not if I decide I want out. And who the fuck needs this kind of hassle? Wayne Stukey on that long ago beach saying: There's something in you that's like biting on tinfoil. Quietly, Lucy said: "You'll be fine." He jumped. "Huh?" "I said you'll be fine. Won't he, Leo?" "Oh yes," Leo said, bobbing his head. His eyes never left the audience, as if they had not yet been able to communicate its size to his brain. "Fine." You don't understand, you numb broad, Larry thought. You're holding my hand and you don't understand that I could make a bad decision and wind up killing both of you. I'm well on my way to killing Judge Farris and he's seconding my fucking nomination. What a Polish firedrill this turned out to be. A little sound escaped his throat. "Did you say something?" Lucy asked. Then Stu was walking across the stage to the podium, his red sweater and bluejeans very bright and clear in the harsh glow of the emergency lights, which were running from a Honda generator that Brad Kitchner and part of his crew from the power station had set up. The applause started somewhere in the middle of the hall, Larry was never sure where, and a cynical part of him was always convinced that it had been a plot arranged by Glen Bateman, their resident expert in the art/craft of crowd management. At any rate, it didn't really matter. The first solitary spats swelled to a thunder of applause. On the stage, Stu paused by the podium, looking comically amazed. The applause was joined by cheers and shrill whistles. Then the entire audience rose to its feet, the applause swelling to a sound like heavy rain, and people were shouting, "Bravo! Bravo!" Stu held up his hands, but they wouldn't stop; if anything, the sound redoubled in intensity. Larry glanced sideways at Lucy and saw she was applauding strenuously, her eyes fixed on Stu, her mouth curved in a trembling but triumphant smile. She was crying. On his other side Leo was also applauding, bringing his hands together again and again with so much force that Larry thought they would fall off if Leo kept on much longer. In the extremity of his joy, Leo's carefully won-back vocabulary had deserted him, the way English will sometimes desert a man or woman who has learned it as his or her second tongue. He could only hoot loudly and enthusiastically. Brad and Ralph had also run a PA from the generator and now Stu blew into the mike and then spoke: "Ladies and gentlemen—" But the applause rolled on. "Ladies and gentlemen, if you'll take your seats—" But they were not ready to take their seats. The applause roared on and on, and Larry looked down because his own hands hurt, and he saw that he was applauding as frantically as the rest. "Ladies and gentlemen—" The applause thundered and echoed. Overhead, a family of barnswallows that had taken up residence in this fine and private place after the plague struck now flew about crazily, swooping and diving, mad to get away to someplace where people weren't. 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. "Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd take your seats, please, I sure would appreciate it."

354 The applause began to taper off little by little. Now you could hear ladiesand some men, too- sniffing. Noses were honked. Conversations were whispered. There was that rustling auditorium sound of people taking their seats. "I'm glad you're all here," Stu said. "I'm glad to be here myself." There was a whine of feedback from the PA and Stu muttered, "Goddam thing," which was clearly picked up and broadcast. There was a ripple of laughter and Stu colored. "Guess we're all going to have to get used to this stuff again," he said, and that set off another burst of applause. When that had run itself out, Stu said: "For those of you who don't know me, I'm Stuart Redman, originally from Arnette, Texas, although that seems a far way down the road from where I am now, lemme tell you." He cleared his throat, feedback whined briefly, and he took a wary step back from the mike. "I'm also pretty nervous up here, so bear with me—" "We will, Stu!" Harry Dunbarton yelled exuberantly, and there was appreciative laughter. It's like a camp meeting, Larry thought. Next they'll be singing hymns. If Mother Abagail was here, I bet we would be already. "Last time I had so many people looking at me was when our little consolidated high school made it to the football playoffs, and then they had twenty-one other guys to look at too, not to mention some girls in those little tiny skirts." A hearty burst of laughter. Lucy pulled at Larry's neck and whispered in his ear, "What was he worried about? He's a natural!" Larry nodded. "But if you'll bear with me, I'll get through it somehow," Stu said. More applause. This crowd would applaud Nixon's resignation speech and ask him to encore on the piano, Larry thought. First off, I should explain about the ad hoc committee and how I happen to be up here at all," Stu said. "There are seven of us who got together and planned for this meeting so we could get organized somehow. There's a lot of things to do, and I'd like to introduce each member of our committee to you now, and I hope you saved some applause for them, because they all pitched together to work out the agenda you've got m your hands right now. First, Miss Frances Goldsmith. Stand up, Frannie, and let em see what you look like with a dress on." Fran stood up. She was wearing a pretty kelly-green dress and a modest string of pearls that might have cost two thousand dollars in the old days. She was roundly applauded, the applause accompanied by some good-natured wolf whistles. Fran sat down, blushing furiously, and before the applause could die away entirely, Stu went on. "Mr. Glen Bateman, from Woodsville, New Hampshire." Glen stood, and they applauded him. He flipped a pair of twin Vs from each of his closed fists, and the crowd roared its approval. Stu introduced Larry second-to-last and he stood up, aware that Lucy was smiling up at him, and then that was lost in a warm comber of applause that washed over him. Once, he thought, in another world, there would have been concerts, and this kind of applause would have been reserved for the showcloser, a little nothing tune called "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" This was better. He only stood for a second, but it seemed much longer. He knew he would not decline his nomination. Stu introduced Nick last, and he got the longest, loudest applause. When it died away, Stu said: "This wasn't on the agenda, but I wonder if we could start by singing the National Anthem. I guess you folks remember the words and the tune." There was that ruffling, shuffling sound of people getting to their feet. Another pause as everyone waited for someone else to start. Then a girl's sweet voice rose in the air, solo for only the first three syllables: "Oh, say can—" It was Frannie's voice, but for a moment it seemed to Larry to be underlaid by another voice, his own, and the place was not Boulder but upstate Vermont and the day was July 4, the Republic was two hundred and fourteen years old, and Rita lay dead in the tent behind him, her mouth filled with green puke and a bottle of pills in her stiffening hand. A chill of gooseflesh passed over him and suddenly he felt that they were being watched, watched by something that could, in the words of that old song by The Who, see for miles and miles and miles. Something awful and dark and alien. For just a moment he felt an urge to run from this place, just run and never stop. This was no game they were playing here. This was serious business; killing business. Maybe worse. Then other voices joined in. "-can you see, by the dawn's early light," and Lucy was singing, holding his hand, crying again, and others were crying, most of them were crying, crying for what was lost and bitter, the runaway American dream, chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected, and stepping out over the line, and suddenly his memory was not of Rita, dead in the tent, but of he and his mother at Yankee Stadium-it was September 29, the Yankees were only a game and a half behind the Red Sox, and all things were still possible. There were fifty-five thousand people in the Stadium, all standing, the players in the field with their caps over their hearts, Guidry on the mound, Rickey

355 Henderson was standing in deep left field ("-by the twilight's last gleaming—"), and the lightstandards were on in the purple gloaming, moths and night-fliers banging softly against them, and New York was around them, teeming, city of night and light. Larry joined the singing too, and when it was done and the applause rolled out once more, he was crying a bit himself. Rita was gone. Alice Underwood was gone. New York was gone. America was gone. Even if they could defeat Randall Flagg, whatever they might make would never be the same as that world of dark streets and bright dreams.

Sweating freely under the bright emergency lights, Stu called the first items: reading and ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The singing of the anthem had also affected him deeply, and he wasn't alone. Half the audience, more, was in tears. No one asked for an actual reading of either documentwhich would have been their right under the parliamentary process-for which Stu was profoundly grateful. He wasn't much of a reader. The "reading" section of each item was approved by the Free Zone citizens. Glen Bateman rose and moved that they accept both documents as governing Free Zone law. A voice in the back said, "Second that!" "Moved and seconded," Stu said. "Those in favor say aye." "AYE!" to the rooftops. Kojak, who had been sleeping by Glen's chair, looked up, blinked, and then laid his muzzle on his paws again. A moment later he looked up again as the crowd gave themselves a thunderous round of applause. They like voting, Stu thought. It makes them feel like they're finally in control of something again. God knows they need that feeling. We all need it. That preliminary taken care of, Stu felt tension worm into his muscles. Now, he thought, we'll see if there are any nasty surprises waiting for us. "The third item on your agenda reads," he began, and then he had to clear his throat again. Feedback whined at him, making him sweat even more. Fran was looking calmly up at him, nodding for him to go on. "It reads, `To see if the Free Zone will nominate and elect a slate of seven Free Zone representatives. ' That means—" "Mr. Chairman? Mr. Chairman!" Stu looked up from his jotted notes and felt a real jolt of fear, accompanied by something like a premonition. It was Harold Lauder. Harold was dressed in a suit and a tie, his hair was neatly combed, and he was standing halfway up the middle aisle. Once Glen had said he thought the opposition might coalesce around Harold. But so soon? He hoped not. For just a moment he thought wildly of not recognizing Harold-but both Nick and Glen had warned him of the dangers inherent in making any part of this look like a railroad job. He wondered if he had been wrong about Harold turning over a new leaf. It looked as if he was going to find out right here. "Chair recognizes Harold Lauder." Heads turned, necks craned to see Harold better. "I'd like to move that we accept the slate of ad hoc committee members in toto as the Permanent Committee. If they'll serve, that is." Harold sat down. There was a moment of silence. Stu thought crazily: Toto? Toto? Wasn't that the dog in The Wizard of Oz? Then the applause swelled out again, filling the room, and dozens of cries of "I second!" rang out. Harold was sitting placidly in his seat again, smiling and talking to the people who were thumping him on the back. Stu brought his gavel doyen half a dozen times for order. He planned this, Stu thought. These people are going to elect us, but it's Harold they'll remember. Still, he got to the root of the thing in a way none of us thought of, not even Glen. It was pretty damn near a stroke of genius. So why should he be so upset? Was he jealous, maybe? Were his good resolutions about Harold, made only the day before yesterday, already going by the boards? "There's a motion on the floor," he blared into the mike, ignoring the feedback whine this time. "Motion on the floor, folks!" He pounded the gavel and they quieted to a low babble. "It's been moved and seconded that we accept the ad hoc committee just as it stands as the Permanent Free Zone Committee. Before we go to a discussion of the motion or to a vote, I ought to ask if anyone now serving on the committee has an objection or would like to step down." Silence from the floor. "Very well," Stu said. "Discussion of the motion?" "I don't think we need any, Stu," Dick Ellis said. "It's a grand idea. Let's vote!" Applause greeted this, and Stu needed no further urging. Charlie Impening was waving his hand to be recognized, but Stu ignored him-a good case of selective perception, Glen Bateman would have said-and called the question. "Those in favor of Harold Lauder's motion please signify by saying aye. "Aye!!" they bellowed, sending the barnswallows into another frenzy.

356 "Opposed?" But no one was, not even Charlie Impening-at least, vocally. There was not a nay in the chamber. So Stu pushed on to the next item of business, feeling slightly dazed, as if someone-namely, Harold Lauder-had crept up behind him and clopped him one on the head with a large sledgehammer made out of Silly Putty.

357 Committee came, it was no longer a foregone conclusion that she would win, veto power or not. She had gone away and the community had continued to exist. The community would not forget that, as they had already half forgotten the power the dreams had once briefly held over their lives. After the meeting, more than two dozen people had sat for a while on the lawn behind Chautauqua Hall; the rain had stopped, the clouds were tattering, and the evening was pleasantly cool. Stu and Framie had sat with Larry, Lucy, Leo, and Harold. "You darn near knocked us out of the ballpark this evening," Larry told Harold. He nudged Frannie with an elbow. "I told you he was ace high, didn't I?" Harold had merely smiled and shrugged modestly. "A couple of ideas, that's all. You seven have started things moving again. You should at least have the privilege of seeing it through to the end of the beginning." Now, fifteen minutes after the two of them had left that impromptu gathering and still ten minutes from home, Stu repeated: "You sure you're feeling okay?" "Yes. My legs are a little tired, that's all." "You want to take it easy, Frances." "Don't call me that, you know I hate it." "I'm sorry. I won't do it again. Frances." "All men are bastards." "I'm going to try and improve my act, Frances-honest I am." She showed him her tongue, which came to an interesting point, but he could tell her heart wasn't in the banter, and he dropped it. She looked pale and rather listless, a startling contrast to the Frannie who had sung the National Anthem with such heart a few hours earlier. "Something giving you the blues, honey?" She shook her head no, but he thought he saw tears in her eyes. "What is it? Tell me." "It's nothing. That's what's the matter. Nothing is what's bothering me. It's over, and I finally realized it, that's all. Less than six hundred people singing `The Star-Spangled Banner. ' It just kind of hit me all at once. No hotdog stands. The Ferris wheel isn't going around and around at Coney Island tonight. No one's having a nightcap at the Space Needle in Seattle. Someone finally found a way to clean up the dope in Boston's Combat Zone and the chicken-ranch business in Times Square. Those were terrible things, but I think the cure was a lot worse than the disease. Know what I mean?" "Yeah, I do." "In my diary I had a little section called `Things to Remember. ' So the baby would know... oh, all the things he never will. And it gives me the blues, thinking of that. I should have called it `Things That Are Gone. ' " She did sob a little, stopping her bike so she could put the back of her hand to her mouth and try to keep it in. "It got everybody the same way," Stu said, putting an arm around her. "Lot of people are going to cry themselves to sleep tonight. You better believe it." "I don't see how you can grieve for a whole country," she said, crying harder, "but I guess you can. These... these little things keep shooting through my mind. Car salesmen. Frank Sinatra. Old Orchard Beach in July, all crowded with people, most . of them from Quebec. That stupid guy on MTV-Randy, I think his name was. The times... oh God, I sound lie a fuh-fuh-frigging Rod Muh- McKuen poem!" He held her, patting her back, remembering one time when his Aunt Betty had gotten a crying fit over some bread that didn't rise-she was big with his little cousin Laddie then, seven months or so- and Stu could remember her wiping her eyes with the corner of a dishtowel and telling him to never mind, any pregnant woman was just two doors down from the mental ward because the juices their glands put out were always scrambled up into a stew. After a while Frannie said, "Okay. Okay. Better. Let's go." "Frannie, I love you," he said. They resumed pushing their bikes. She asked him, "What do you remember best? What's the one thing?" "Well, you know—" he said, and then stopped with a little laugh. "No, I don't know, Stuart." "It's crazy." "Tell me." "I don't know if I want to. You'll start looking for the guys with the butterfly nets." "Tell me!" She had seen Stu in many moods, but this curious, embarrassed uneasiness was new to her. "I never told anybody," he said, "but I have been thinking on it the last couple of weeks. Something happened to me back in 1982, I was pumping gas at Bill Hapscomb's gas station then. He used to hire me on, if he could, when I was laid off at the calculator plant in town. He had me on part-time, eleven P. M. to closing, which was three in the morning back in those days. There wasn't

358 much business after the people getting off the three-to-eleven shift at the Dixie Paper factory stopped to get their gas... lots of nights there wasn't a single car stopped between twelve and three. I'd sit there and read a book or a magazine, and lots of night I'd doze off. You know?", "Yes." She did know. In her mind's eye she could see him, the man who would become her man in the fullness of time and the peculiarity of events, a broadshouldered man sleeping in a plastic Woolco chair with a book open and facedown on his lap. She saw him sleeping in an island of white light, an island surrounded by a great inland sea of Texas night. She loved him in this picture, as she loved him in all the pictures her mind drew. "Well, this one night it was about quarter past two, and I was sitting behind Hap's desk with my feet up, reading some Western-Louis L'Amour, Elmore Leonard, someone like that, and in pulls this big old Pontiac with all the windows rolled down and the tape-player going like mad, playing Hank Williams. I even remember the song-it was `Movin' On. ' This guy, not young and not old, is all by himself. He was a goodlookin man, but in a way that was a little scary-I mean, he looked like he might do scary things without thinkin very hard about em. He had bushy, curly dark hair. There was a bottle of wine snugged down between his legs and a pair of Styrofoam dice hanging from the rearview mirror. He says, `High test,' and I said okay, but for a minute I just stood there and looked at him. Because he looked familiar. I was playin place the face." They were on the corner now; their apartment building was across the street. They paused there. Frannie was looking at him closely. "So I said, `Don't I know you? Ain't you from up around Corbett or Maxin?' But it didn't really seem like I knew him from those two towns. And he says, `No, but I passed through Corbett once with my family, when I was just a kid. It seems like I passed through just about everyplace in America when I was a kid. My dad was in the Air Force. ' "So I went back and filled up his car, and all the time I'm thinkin about him, playing place the face, and all at once it came to me. All at once I knew. And I damned near pissed myself, because the man behind the wheel of that Pontiac was supposed to be dead." "Who was he, Stuart? Who was he?" "No, you let me tell it my way, Frannie. Not that it isn't a crazy story no matter what way you tell it. I went back to the window and I says, `That'll be six dollars and thirty cents. ' He gave me two five-dollar bills and told me I could keep the change. And I says, `I think I might have you placed now. ' And he says, `Well, maybe you do,' and he gives me this weird, chilly smile, and all the time Hank Williams is singin about goin to town. I says, `If you are who I think you are, you're supposed to be dead. ' He says, `You don't want to believe everything you read, man. ' I says, `You like Hank Williams all right?' It was all I could think of to say. Because I saw, Frannie, if I didn't say something, he was just going to roll up that power window and go tooling on down the road... and I wanted him to go, but I also didn't want him to go. Not yet. Not until I was sure. I didn't know then that a person is never sure about a lot of things, no matter how much he wants to be. "He says, `Hank Williams is one of the best. I like roadhouse music. ' Then he says, `I'm going to New Orleans, going to drive all night, sleep all day tomorrow, then barrelhouse all night long. Is it the same? New Orleans?' And I say, `As what?' And he says, `Well, you know. ' And I say, `Well, it's all the South, you know, although there are considerable more trees down that way. ' And that makes him laugh. He says, `Maybe I'll see you again. ' But I didn't want to see him again, Frannie. Because he had the eyes of a man who has been trying to look into the dark for a long time and has maybe begun to see what is there. I think, if I ever see that man Flagg, his eyes might look a little like that." Stu shook his head as they pushed their bikes across the road and parked them. "I've been thinking of that. I thought about getting some of his records after that, but I didn't want them. His voice... it's a good voice, but it gives me the creeps." "Stuart, who are you talking about?" "You remember a rock and roll group called The Doors? The man that stopped that night for gas in Arnette was Jim Morrison. I'm sure of it." Her mouth dropped open. "But he died! He died in France! He—"And then she stopped. Because there had been something funny about Morrison's death, hadn't there? Something secret. "Did he?" Stu asked. "I wonder. Maybe he did, and the fellow I saw was just a guy who looked like him, but—" "Do you really think it was?" she asked. They were sitting on the steps of their building now, shoulders touching, like small children waiting for their mother to call them in to supper. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I do. And until this summer, I thought that would always be the strangest thing that ever happened to me. Boy, was I wrong." "And you never told anyone," she marveled. "You saw Jim Morrison years after he supposedly died and you never told anyone. Stuart Redman, God should have given you a combination lock instead of a mouth when He sent you out into the world."

359 Stu smiled. "Well, the years rolled by, as they say in the books, and whenever I thought of that night—as I did, from time to time—I got surer and surer it wasn't him after all. Just someone who looked a little bit like him, you know. I had my mind pretty well at rest on the subject. But in the last few weeks, I've found myself puzzling over it again. And I think more and more that it was. Hell, he might even still be alive now. That'd be a real laugh, wouldn't it?" "If he is," she said, "he's not here." "No," Stu agreed, "I wouldn't expect him to be here. I saw his eyes, you see." She put her hand on his arm. "That's some story." "Yeah, and there's probably twenty million people in this country with one just like it... only about Elvis Presley or Howard Hughes." "Not anymore. ' "No—not anymore. Harold was something tonight, wasn't he?" "I believe that's called changing the subject." "I believe you're right.", "Yes," she said, "he was." He smiled at her worried tone and the slight frown which had puckered her brow. "Bothered you a little, didn't it?" "Yes, but I won't say so. You're in Harold's corner now." "Now, that's not fair, Fran. It bothered me, too. There we had those two advance meetings... hashed everything over to a fare-thee-well... at least we thought so... and along comes Harold. He takes a whack-whack here and a whack-whack there and says, 'Ain't that what you really meant?' And we say, `Yeah, thanks, Harold. It was. ' " Stu shook his head. "Putting everybody up for blanket election, how come we never thought of that, Fran? That was sharp. And we never even discussed it." "Well, none of us knew for sure what kind of mood they'd be in. I thought— especially after Mother Abagail walked off—that they'd be glum, maybe even mean. With that Impening talking to them like some kind of deathcrow—" "I wonder if he should be shut up somehow," Stu said thoughtfully. "But it wasn't like that. They were so... exuberant just to be together. Did you feel that?" "Yeah, I did." "It was like a tent revival, almost. I don't think it was anything Harold had planned. He just seized the moment." "I lust don't know how to feel about him," Stu said. "That night after we hunted for Mother Abagail, I felt real bad for him. When Ralph and Glen turned up, he looked downright horrible, like he was going to faint, or something. But when we were talking out on the lawn just now and everybody was congratulating him, he seemed puffed up like a toad. Like he was smiling on the outside and on the inside he was saying, `There, you see what your committee's worth, you stupid bunch of fools. ' He's like one of those puzzles you could never figure out when you were a kid. The Chinese finger-pullers or those three steel rings that would come apart if you pulled them just the right way." Fran stuck out her feet and looked at them. "Speaking of Harold, do you see anything funny about my feet, Stuart?" Stu looked at them judiciously. "Nope. Just that you're wearing those funnylooking Earth Shoes from up the street. And they're almighty big, o course." She slapped at him. "Earth Shoes are very good for your feet. All the best magazines say so. And I happen to be a size seven, for your information. That's practically petite." "So what have your feet got to do with anything? It's late, honey." He began to push his bike again and she fell in beside him. Nothing, I guess. It's just that Harold kept looking at my feet. After the meeting when we were sitting out on the grass and talking things over." She shook her head, frowning a little. "Now why would Harold Lauder be interested in my feet?" she asked.

When Larry and Lucy got home, they were by themselves, walking hand in hand. Sometime before, Leo had gone into the house where he stayed with "Nadine-mom." Now, as they walked toward the door, Lucy said: "It was quite a meeting. I never thought—" Her words caught in her throat as a dark form unfolded itself from the shadows of their porch. Larry felt hot fear leap up in his throat. It's him, he thought wildly. He's come to get me... I'm going to see his face. But then he wondered how he could have thought that, because it was Nadine Cross, that was all. She was wearing a dress of some soft bluish-gray material, and her hair was loose, flowing over her shoulders and down her back, dark hair shot with skeins of purest white.

360 She sort of makes Lucy look like a used car on a scalper's lot, he thought before he could help himself, and then hated himself for thinking it. That was the old Larry talking... old Larry? You might as well say old Adam. "Nadine," Lucy was saying shakily, with one hand pressed to her chest. "You gave me the fright of my life. I thought... well, I don't know what I thought." She took no notice of Lucy. "Can I talk to you?" she asked Larry. "What? Now?" He looked sideways at Lucy, or thought he did... later he was never able to remember what Lucy had looked like in that moment. It was as if she had been eclipsed, but by a dark star rather than by a bright one. "Now. It has to be now." "In the morning would—" "It has to be now, Larry. Or never." He looked at Lucy again and this time he did see her, saw the resignation on her face as she looked from Larry to Nadine and back again. He saw the hurt. "I'll be right in, Lucy." "No you won't," she said dully. Tears had begun to sparkle in her eyes. "Oh no, I doubt it." "Ten minutes." "Ten minutes, ten years," Lucy said. "She's come to get you. Did you bring your dog collar and your muzzle, Nadine?" For Nadine, Lucy Swann did not exist. Her eyes were fixed only on Larry, those dark, wide eyes. For Larry, they would always be the strangest, most beautiful eyes he had ever seen, the eyes that come back to you, calm and deep, when you're hurt or in bad trouble or maybe just about out of your mind with grief. "I'll be in, Lucy," he said automatically. "She—" "Go on." "Yes, I guess I will. She's come. I'm dismissed." She ran up the steps, stumbling on the top one, regaining her balance, pulling the door open, closing it behind her with a slam, cutting off the sound of her sobs even as they started. Nadine and Larry looked at each other for a long time as if entranced. This is how it happens, he thought. When you catch someone's eyes across a room and never forget them, or see someone at the far end of a crowded subway platform that could have been your double, or hear a laugh on the street that could have been the laugh of the first girl you ever made love to— But something in his mouth tasted so bitter. "Let's walk down to the corner and back," Nadine said in a low voice. "Would you do that much?" "I better go in to her. You picked one hell of a bad time to come here." "Please? Just down to the corner and back? If you want, I'll get down on my knees and beg. If that's what you want. Here. See?" And to his horror she did get down on her knees, pulling her skirt up a little so she could do it, showing him her bare legs, making him curiously certain that everything else was bare as well. Why should he think that? He didn't know. Her eyes were on him, making his head spin, and there was a sickening feeling of power involved here someplace, involved with having her on her knees before him, her mouth on a level with— "Get up!" he said roughly. He took her hands and yanked her to her feet, trying not to see the way the skirt rode up even more before falling back into place; her thighs were the color of cream, that shade of white that is not pale and dead but vigorous and healthy and enticing. "Come on," he said, almost totally unnerved. They walked west, in the direction of the mountains, which were a negative presence far ahead, triangular patches of darkness blotting out the stars that had come out after the rain. Walking toward those mountains at night always made him feel queerly uneasy but somehow adventurous, and now, with Nadine by his side, her hand resting lightly in the crook of his elbow, those feelings seemed heightened. He had always had vivid dreams, and three or four nights ago about those mountains; he had dreamed there were trolls in them, hideous creatures with bright green eyes, the oversized heads of hydrocephalic cretins, and shortfingered, powerful hands. Strangler's hands. Idiot trolls, guarding the passes through the mountains. Waiting until his time came aroundthe time of the dark man. A soft breeze meandered down the street, blowing papers before it. They passed King Sooper's, a few shopping carts standing in the big parking lot like dead sentinels, making him think of the Lincoln Tunnel. There had been trolls in the Lincoln Tunnel. They had been dead, but that didn't mean all the trolls in their new world were dead. "It's hard," Nadine said, her voice still low. "She made it hard because she's right. I want you now. And I'm afraid I'm too late. I want to stay here." "Nadine—"

361 "No!" she said fiercely. "Let me finish. I want to stay here, can't you understand that? And if we're with each other, I'll be able to. You're my last chance," she said, her voice breaking. "Joe's gone now." "No, he hasn't," Larry said, feeling slow and stupid and bewildered. "We dropped him off at your place on the way home. Isn't he there?" "No. There's a boy named Leo Rockway asleep in his bed." "What are you—" "Listen," she said. "Listen to me, can't you listen? As long as I had Joe, I was all right. I could... be as strong as I had to be. But he doesn't need me anymore. And I need to be needed." "He does need you!" "Of course he does," Nadine said, and Larry felt afraid again. She wasn't talking about Leo anymore; he didn't know who she was talking about. "He needs me. That's what I'm afraid of. That's why I came to you." She stepped in front of him and looked up, her chin tilted. He could smell her secret clean scent, and he wanted her. But part of him turned back toward Lucy. That was the part of him he needed if he was going to make it here in Boulder. If he let it go and went with Nadine, they might as well slink out of Boulder tonight. It would be finished with him. The Old Larry triumphant. "I have to go home," he said. "I'm sorry. You'll have to work it out on your own, Nadine." Work it out on your own-weren't they the words he had been using to people in one form or another all his life? Why did they have to rise up this way when he knew he was right and still catch him, and twist in him, and make him doubt himself? "Make love to me," she said, and put her arms around his neck. She pressed her body against his and he knew by its looseness, its warmth and springiness, that he had been right, she was wearing the dress and that was all. Buck naked underneath, he thought, and thinking it excited him blackly. "That's all right, I can feel you," she said, and began to wriggle against him—sideways, up and down, creating a delicious friction. "Make love to me and that will be the end of it. I'll be safe. Safe. I'll be safe." He reached up, and later he never knew how he was able to do that when he could have been inside her warmth in only three quick movements and one thrust, the way she wanted it, but somehow he reached up and unlocked her hands and pushed her away with such force that she stumbled and almost fell. A low moan came from her. "Larry, if you knew—" "Well, I don't. Why don't you try telling me instead of... of raping me?" "Rape!" she repeated, laughing shrilly. "Oh, that's funny! Oh, what you said! Me! Rape you! Oh, Larry!" "Whatever you want from me, you could have had. You could have had it last week, or the week before. The week before that I asked you to take it. I wanted you to have it." "That was too soon," she whispered. "And now it's too late," he said, hating the brutal sound of his voice but unable to control it. He was still shaking all over from wanting her, how was he supposed to sound? "What are you gonna do; huh?" "All right. Goodbye, Larry." She was turning away. In that instant she was more than Nadine, turning her back on him forever. She was the oral hygienist. She was Yvonne, with whom he had shared an apartment in L. A. —she had pissed him off and so he had just slipped into his boogie shoes, leaving her holding the lease. She was Rita Blakemoor. Worst of all, she was his mother. "Nadine?" She didn't turn around. She was a black shape distinguishable from other black shapes only when she crossed the street. Then she disappeared altogether against the black background of the mountains. He called her name once again and she didn't answer. There was something terrifying in the way she had left him, the way she had just melted into that black backdrop. He stood in front of King Sooper's, hands clenched, brow covered with pearls of sweat in spite of the evening cool. His ghosts were with him now, and at last he knew how you pay off for not being no nice guy: never clear about your own motivations, never able to weigh hurt against help except by rule of thumb, never able to get rid of the sour taste of doubt in your mouth and His head jerked up. His eyes widened until they seemed to bulge from his face. The wind had picked up again, it made a strange hooting sound in some empty doorway, and farther away he thought he could hear bootheels pacing off the night, rundown bootheels somewhere in the foothills coming to him on the chilly draft of this early moming breeze. Dirty bootheels clocking their way into the grave of the West.

362 Lucy heard him let himself in and her heart leaped up fiercely. She told it to stop, that he was probably only coming back for his things, but it would not stop. He picked me, was the thought that hammered into her brain, driven there by her heart's triphammer beat. He picked me— In spite of her excitement and hope, which she was helpless to control, she lay stiffly on her back on the bed, waiting and watching nothing but the ceiling. She had only told him the truth when she had said that, for her and for girls like her friend Joline, the only fault was too much need to love. But she had always been faithful. She was no cheater. She hadn't cheated on her husband and she had never cheated on Larry, and if in the years before she had met them she hadn't exactly been a nun... time past was time past. You just couldn't get hold of the things you had done and turn them right again. Such power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to men and women, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens. If you knew that past was out of reach, maybe you could forgive. Tears were stealing down her cheeks. The door clicked open and she saw him in it, just a silhouette. "Lucy? You awake?" "Yes." "Can I put on the lamp?" "If you want." She heard the minute hiss of gas and then the light came on, turned down to a thread of flame, revealing him. He looked pale and shaken. "I have to say something." "No you don't. Just come to bed." "I have to say it. I..." He pressed his hand against his forehead and ran it through his hair. "Larry?" She sat up. "Are you all right?" He spoke as if he hadn't heard her, and he spoke without looking at her. "I love you. If you want me, you got me. But I don't know if you're getting much. I'm never going to be your best bet, Lucy." "I'll take the chance. Come to bed." He did. And they did. And when the love was over she told him she loved him, it was true, God knew that, and it seemed to be what he wanted, needed, to hear, but she didn't think he slept for a long time. Once in the night she came awake (or dreamed she did) and it seemed to her that Larry was at the window, looking out, his head cocked in a listening posture, the lines of light and shadow giving his face the appearance of a haggard mask. But in the light of day she was more sure that it must have been a dream; in the light of day he seemed to be his old self again. It was only three days later that they heard from Ralph Brentner that Nadine had moved in with Harold Lauder. At that, Larry's face seemed to tighten, but it was only for a moment. And although Lucy disliked herself for it, Ralph's news made her breathe a little easier. It seemed it must be over.

She went home only briefly after seeing Larry. She let herself in, went to the living room, and lit the lamp. Carrying it high, she went to the back of the house, pausing for just a moment to let the light spill into the boy's room. She wanted to see if she had told Larry the truth. She had. Leo lay asprawl in a tangle of bedclothes, dressed only in his undershorts... but the cuts and scratches had faded, disappeared altogether in most cases, and the all-over tan he had gotten from going practically naked had also faded. But it was more than that, she thought. Something in his face had changed-she could see the change even though he was asleep. That expression of mute, needful savagery had gone out of it. He was not Joe anymore. This was just a boy sleeping after a busy day. She thought of the night she had been almost asleep and had come awake to find him gone from her side. That had been in North Berwick, Maine—most of the continent away now. She had followed him to the house where Larry lay sleeping on the porch. Larry sleeping inside, Joe standing outside, brandishing his knife with mute savagery, and nothing between them but the thin and sliceable screen. And she had made him come away. Hate pounced on Nadine in a surging flash, striking up brilliant sparks as if from flint and steel. The Coleman lamp trembled in her hand, making wild shadows leap and dance. She should have let him do it! She should have held the door for Joe herself, let him in so he could stab and rip and cut and puncture and gut and destroy. She should have But now the boy turned over, and moaned in his throat, as if waking. His hands came up and batted the air, as if warding off a black shape in a dream. And Nadine withdrew, a pulse beating thickly at her temples. There was still something strange in the boy, and she didn't like the way he had moved just now, as if he had picked up her thoughts. She had to go ahead now. She had to be quick.

363 She went into her own room. There was a rug on the floor. There was a single narrow bed-an old maid's bed. That was all. There was not even a picture. The room was totally devoid of character. She opened the closet door and rummaged behind her hanging clothes. She was on her knees now, sweating. She drew out a brightly colored box with a photograph of laughing adults on the front, adults who were playing a party-game. A party-game that was at least three thousand years old. She had found the planchette in a downtown novelty shop, but she dared not use it in the house, not with the boy here. In fact, she had not dared use it at all... until now. Something' had impelled her into the shop, and when she had seen the planchette in its gay party box, a terrible struggle had gone on inside her-the sort of struggle psychologists call aversion/compulsion. She had been sweating then as now, wanting two things at the same time: to hurry out of that shop without looking back, and to snatch the box, that dreadful gay box, and carry it home with her. The latter wish frightened her the more, because it did not seem to be her own wish. At last, she had taken the box. That had been four days ago. Each night the compulsion had grown stronger until tonight, half insane with fears she didn't understand, she had gone to Larry wearing the bluegray dress with nothing on underneath. She had gone to put an end to the fears for good. Waiting on the porch for them to get back from the meeting, she had been sure she had finally done the right thing. There had been that feeling in her, that lightly drunk, starstruck feeling, that she'd not properly had since she had run across the dew-drenched grass with the boy behind her. Only this time the boy would catch her. She would let him catch her. It would be the end. But when he had caught her, he hadn't wanted her. Nadine stood up, holding the box to her chest, and put out the lamp. He had scorned her, and didn't they say that hell hath no fury-? A scorned woman might well traffic with the devil... or his henchman. She paused only long enough to get the large flashlight from the table in the front hall. From deeper inside the house, the boy cried out in his sleep, freezing her for a moment, making the hair prickle on her scalp. Then she let herself out. Her Vespa was at the curb, the Vespa she had used some days ago to motor up to Harold Lauder's house. Why had she gone there? She hadn't passed a dozen words with Harold since she'd gotten to Boulder. But in her confusion about the planchette, and in her terror of the dreams that continued to come to her even after everyone else's had stopped, it had seemed to her that she must talk about it to Harold. She had been afraid of that impulse, too, she remembered as she put the Vespa's ignition key in its slot. Like the sudden urge to pick up the planchette (Amaze Your Friends! Brighten Up Your Get-togethers! the box said), it had seemed to be an idea that had come to her from outside herself. His thought, maybe. But when she had given in and gone to Harold's, he hadn't been at home. The house was locked, the only locked house she had come upon in Boulder, and the shades were drawn. She had rather liked that and she'd had a moment's bitter disappointment that Harold was not there. If he had been, he could have let her in and then locked the door behind her. They could have gone into the living room and talked, or made love, or have done unspeakable things together, and no one would have known. Harold's was a private place. "What's happening to me?" she whispered to the dark, but the dark had no answer for her. She started the Vespa, and the steady burping pop of its engine seemed to profane the night. She put it in gear and drove away. To the west. Moving, the cool night air on her face, she felt better at last. Blow away the cobwebs, night wind. You know, don't you? When all the choices have been taken away, what do you do? You choose what's left. You choose whatever dark adventure was meant for you. You let Larry have his stupid little twist of tail with her tight pants and her single-syllable vocabulary and her movie-magazine mind. You go beyond them. You risk... whatever there is to be risked. Mostly you risk yourself. The road unrolled before her in the baby spotlight of the Vespa's headlamp. She had to switch to second gear as the road began to climb; she was on Baseline Road now, headed up the black mountain. Let them have their meetings. They were concerned with getting the power back on; her lover was concerned with the world. The Vespa's engine lugged and strained and somehow carried on. A horrible yet sexy kind of fear began to grip her, and the vibrating saddle of the motorbike began to heat her up down there (why, you're horny, Nadine, she thought with shrill good humor, naughty, naughty, NAUGHTY). To her right was a straight dropoff. Nothing but death down there. And up above? Well, she would see. It was too late to turn back, and that thought alone made her feel paradoxically and deliciously free.

An hour later she was in Sunrise Amphitheater-but sunrise was still three or more hours away. The amphitheater was close to the summit of Flagstaff Mountain, and nearly everyone in the Free Zone had made the trip to the camping area at the top before they had been in Boulder very long. On a clear day-which was most days in Boulder, at least during the summer season-you could see

364 Boulder, and I25 stretching away south to Denver and then off into the haze toward New Mexico two hundred miles beyond. Due east were the flatlands, stretching away toward Nebraska, and closer at hand was Boulder Canyon, a knife-gash through foothills that were walled in pine and spruce. In summers gone by, gliders had plied the thermals over Sunrise Amphitheater like birds. Now Nadine saw only what was revealed in the glow of the six-cell flashlight which she put on a picnic table near the dropoff. There was a large artist's sketchpad turned back to a clean sheet, and squatting on it the three-cornered planchette like a triangular spider. Protruding from its belly, like the spider's stinger, was a pencil, lightly touching the pad. Nadine was in a feverish state that was half-euphoria, half-terror. Coming up here on the back of her gamely laboring Vespa, which had most decidedly not been made for mountain climbing, she had felt what Harold had felt in Nederland. She could feel him. But while Harold had felt this in a rather precise and technological way, as a piece of steel attracted by a magnet, a drawing toward, Nadine felt it as a kind of mystic event, a border-crossing. It was as if these mountains, of which she was even now only in the foothills, were a no-man's-land between two spheres of influence-Flagg in the West, the old woman in the East. And here the magic flew both ways, mixing, making its own concoction that belonged neither to God nor to Satan but which was totally pagan. She felt she was in a haunted place. And the planchette... She had tossed the brightly marked box, stamped MADE IN TAIWAN, away indifferently for the wind to take. The planchette itself was only a poorly stamped piece of fiber-board or gypsum. But it didn't matter. It was a tool she would only use once—only dared to use once—and even a poorly made tool can serve its purpose: to break open a door, to close a window, to write a Name. The words on the box recurred: Amaze Your Friends! Brighten Up Your Gettogethers! What was that song Larry sometimes bellowed from the seat of his Honda as they rode along? Hello, Central, what's the matter with your line? I want to talk to Talk to who? But that was the question, wasn't it? She remembered the time she had used the planchette in college. That had been more than a dozen years ago... but it might as well have been yesterday. She had gone upstairs to ask someone on the third floor of the dorm, a girl named Rachel Timms, about the assignment in a remedial reading class they shared. The room had been filled with girls, six or eight of them at least, giggling and laughing. Nadine remembered thinking that they acted as if they were high on something, smoke or maybe even blow. "Stop it!" Rachel said, giggling herself. "How do you expect the spirits to communicate if you're all acting like a bunch of donkeys?" The idea of laughing donkeys struck them as deliciously funny, and a fresh feminine gale blew through the room for a while. The planchette had set then as it sat now, a triangular spider on three stubby legs, pencil pointing down. While they giggled, Nadine picked up a sheaf of oversized pages torn from an artist's sketchbook and shuffled through those "messages from the astral plane" which had already come in. ' Tommy says you have been using that strawberry douche again. — Mother says she's fine. Chunga! Chunga! John says you won't fart so much if you stop eating those CAFETERIA BEANS!!!!! Others, just as silly. Now the giggles had quieted enough so they could start again. Three girls sat on the bed, each with her fingertips placed on a different side of the planchette. For a moment there was nothing. Then the board quivered. "You did that, Sandy!" Rachel accused. "I did not!" "Shhhh!" The board quivered again and the girls hushed. It moved, stopped, moved again. It made the letter F. "Fuh..." the girl named Sandy said. "Fuck you, too," someone else said, and they were off and giggling again. "Shhhh!" Rachel said sternly. The planchette began to move more rapidly, tracing out the letters A, T, H, E, and R. "Father dear, your baby's here," a girl named Patty something-or-other said, and giggled. "It must be my father, he died of a heart attack when I was three." "It's writing some more," Sandy said. S, A, Y, S, the planchette spelled laboriously. "What's going on?" Nadine whispered to a tall, horse-faced girl she didn't know. The horse-faced girl was looking on with her hands in her pockets and a disgusted look on her face.

365 "A bunch of girls playing games with something they don't understand," the horse-faced girl said. "That's what's going on." She spoke in an even lower whisper. "FATHER SAYS PATTY," Sandy quoted. "It's your dear old dad, all right, Pats." Another burst of giggles. The horse-faced girl was wearing spectacles. Now she took her hands out of the pockets of the overalls she was wearing and used them to remove the spectacles from her face. She polished them and explained further to Nadine, still in a whisper. "The planchette is a tool used by psychics and mediums. Kinestheologists—" "What ologists?" "Scientists who study movement, and the interaction of muscles and nerves." "Oh." "They claim that the planchette is actually responding to tiny muscle movements, probably guided by the subconscious rather than the conscious mind. Of course, mediums and psychics claim that the planchette is. moved by entities from the spirit world—" Another burst of hysterical laughter came from the girls clustered around the board. Nadine looked over the horsefaced girl's shoulder and saw the message now read, FATHER SAYS PATTY SHOULD STOP GOING. "—to the bathroom so much," another girl in the circle of spectators suggested, and everyone laughed some more. "Either way, they're just fooling with it," the horse-faced girl said with a disdainful sniff. "It's very unwise. Both mediums and scientists agree that automatic writing can be dangerous." "The spirits are unfriendly tonight, you think?" Nadine asked lightly. "Perhaps the spirits are always unfriendly," the horsefaced girl said, giving her a sharp look. "Or you might get a message from your subconscious mind which you were totally unprepared to receive. There are documented cases of automatic writing getting entirely out of control, you know. People have gone mad." "Oh, that seems awfully farfetched. It's just a game." "Games have a way of turning serious sometimes." The loudest burst of laughter yet tacked a period to the horse-faced girl's comment before Nadine could reply. The girl named Patty something-or-other had fallen off the bed and lay on the floor, holding her stomach and laughing and kicking her feet weakly. The completed message read, FATHER SAYS PATTY SHOULD STOP GOING TO THE SUBMARINE RACES WITH LEONARD KATZ. "You did that!" Patty said to Sandy as she finally sat up again. "I didn't, Patty! Honest!" "It was your father! From the Great Beyond! From Out There!" another girl told Patty in a Boris Karloff voice which Nadine thought was actually quite good. "Just remember that he's watching you the next time you take off your pants in the back seat of Leonard's Dodge." Another loud outburst greeted this sally. As it tapered off, Nadine pushed forward and twitched Rachel's arm. She meant to ask for the assignment and then make a quiet escape. "Nadine!" Rachel cried. Her eyes were sparkling and gay. Her cheeks had bloomed with roses. "Sit down, let's see if the spirits have a message for you!" "No, really, I only came to get the assignment in remedial r—" "Oh, poop on the assignment in remedial reading! This is important, Nadine! This is big-time! You've got to have a try. Here, sit down next to me. Janey, you take the other side." Janey sat down opposite Nadine, and at the repeated urging of Rachel Timms, Nadine found herself with the eight fingers of her hands touching the planchette lightly. For some reason she looked over her shoulder at the horse-faced girl. She shook her head at Nadine once, deliberately, and the overhead fluorescent bounced off the lenses of her spectacles and turned her eyes into a pair of large white flashes of light. She had felt a moment of fear then, she remembered as she stood looking down at another planchette in the glow of a six-cell flashlight, but her remark to the horse-faced girl had recurred-it was just a game, for heaven's sake, and what horrible thing could possibly happen in the middle of a gaggle of giggling girls? If there was a more hostile atmosphere for the production of genuine spirits, hostile or otherwise, Nadine didn't know what it would be. "Now everybody be quiet," Rachel commanded. "Spirits, do you have a message for our sister and Brownie-in-good-standing Nadine Cross?" The planchette didn't move. Nadine felt mildly embarrassed. "Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie," the girl who had done Boris Karloff said in an equally successful Bullwinkle Moose voice. "The spirits are about to speak!" More giggles. "Shhhh!" Rachel commanded.

366 Nadine decided that if one of the other two girls didn't start moving the planchette soon so it would spell out whatever silly message they had for her, she would do it herselfslide it around to spell out something short and sweet, like BOO!, so she could get her assignment and leave. Just as she was about to try doing this, the planchette jerked rudely under her fingers. The pencil left a dark black diagonal slash on the fresh page. "Hey! No fair yanking, spirits," Rachel said in a vaguely uneasy tone of voice. "Did you do that, Nadine?" "Janey." "Uh-uh. Honestly." The planchette jerked again, almost pulling their fingers from it, and skittered to the upper- lefthand corner of the paper. "Wowie," Nadine said. "Did you feel—" They did, all of them did, although neither Rachel nor Jane Fargood would talk to her about it later. And she had never felt particularly welcome in either girl's room after that night. It was as if they were both a little afraid to get too close to her after that. The planchette suddenly began to thrum underneath their fingers; it was like lightly touching the fender of a smoothly idling car. The vibration was steady and disquieting. It was not the sort of movement a person could cause without being fairly obvious about it. The girls had grown quiet. Their faces all wore a peculiar expression, an expression common to thefaces of all people who have attended a seance where something unexpectedly genuine has occurred-when the table begins to rock, when unseen knuckles rap on the wall, or when the medium begins to extrude smoky-gray teleplasm from her nostrils. It is a pallid waiting expression, half wanting whatever it is that has begun to stop, half wanting it to go on. It is an expression of dreadful, distracted excitement .. and when it wears that particular look, the human face looks most like the skull which always rests half an inch below the skin. "Stop it!" the horse-faced girl cried out suddenly. "Stop it right now or you'll be sorry!" And Jane Fargood screamed in a fear-filled voice: "I can't take my fingers off it!" Someone uttered a little burping scream. At the same instant Nadine realized that her own fingers were also glued to the board. The muscles of her arms bunched in an effort to pull the tips of her fingers from the planchette, but they remained where they were. "All right, the joke is over," Rachel said in a tight, scared voice. "Who—" And suddenly the planchette began to write. It moved with lightning speed, dragging their fingers with it, snapping their arms out and back and around in a way which would have been funny if it weren't for the helpless, caught expressions on all three girls' faces. Nadine thought later that it was as if her arms had been caught in an exercise machine. The writing before had been in stilted, draggling letters-messages that looked as if they had been written by a seven-year-old. This writing was smooth and powerful... big, slanting capital letters that slashed across the white page. There was something both relentless and vicious about it. NADINE, NADINE, NADINE, the whirling planchette wrote. HOW I LOVE NADINE TO BE MY TO LOVE MY NADINE TO BE MY QUEEN IF YOU IF YOU IF YOU ARE PURE FOR ME IF YOU ARE CLEAN FOR ME IF YOU ARE IF YOU ARE DEAD FOR ME DEAD YOU ARE The planchette swooped, raced, and began again, lower down. YOU ARE DEAD WITH THE REST OF THEM YOU ARE IN THE DEADBOOK WITH THE REST OF THEM NADINE IS DEAD WITH THEM NADINE IS ROTTEN WITH THEM UNLESS UNLESS It stopped. Thrummed. Nadine thought, hoped-oh how she hoped-that it was over, and then it raced back to the edge of the paper and began again. Jane shrieked miserably. The faces of the other girls were shocked white o's of wonder and dismay. THE WORLD THE WORLD SOON THE WORLD IS DEAD AND WE WE WE NADINE NADINE I I I WE WE WE ARE WE ARE WE Now the letters seemed to scream across the page: WE ARE IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD NADINE The last word howled itself across the page in inch-high capital letters and then the planchette whirled from the tablet, leaving a long streak of graphite behind like a shout. It fell on the floor and snapped in two. There had been an instant of shocked, immobile silence, and then Jane Fargood had burst into high, weeping hysterics. The thing had ended with the housemother coming upstairs to see what was wrong; Nadine remembered, and she had been about to call the infirmary for Jane when the girl had managed to get hold of herself a little. Through the whole thing Rachel Timms had sat on her bed, calm and pale. When the housemother and most of the other girls (including the horse-faced girl, who undoubtedly felt that a

367 prophetess is without much honor in her own land) had left, she had asked Nadine in a flat, strange voice: "Who was it, Nadine?" "I don't know," Nadine had answered truthfully. She hadn't had the slightest idea. Not then. "You didn't recognize the handwriting?" "Well, maybe you just better take that... that note from beyond or whatever it is... and go back to your room." "You asked me to sit down!" Nadine flashed at her. "How was I supposed to know anything like... like that would happen? I did it to be polite, for God's sake!" Rachel had had the good grace to flush at that; she had even offered a little apology. But Nadine had never seen much of the girl after that, and Rachel Timms had been one of the few girls Nadine had ever felt really close to during her first three semesters at college. From then until now she had never touched one of these triangular spiders made of pressed fiberboard. But the time had... well, it had slouched around at last, hadn't it? Yes indeed. Heart beating loudly, Nadine sat down on the picnic bench and pressed her fingers lightly to two of the planchette's three sides. She could feel it begin to move under the balls of her fingers almost immediately, and she thought of a car with its engine idling. But who was the driver? Who was he, really? Who would climb in, and slam the door, and put his sun-blackened hands on the wheel? Whose foot, brutal and heavy, shod in an old and dusty cowboy boot, would come down on the accelerator and take her... where? Driver, where you taking us? — Nadine, beyond help or hope of succor, sat upright on the bench at the crest of Flagstaff Mountain in the black . trench of morning, her eyes wide, that feeling of being on the border stronger than ever. She stared east, but felt his presence coming from behind her, pressing heavy on her, dragging her down like weights tied to the feet of a dead woman: Flagg's dark presence, coming in steady, inexorable waves. Somewhere the dark man was abroad in the night, and she spoke two words like an incantation to all the black spirits that had ever been-incantation and invitation: "Tell me." And beneath her fingers, the planchette began to write.