CHAPTER 55 The Judge's house overlooked a cemetery.

CHAPTER 55

The Judge's house overlooked a cemetery. He and Larry sat on the back porch after dinner, smoking Roi-Tan cigars and watching sunset fade to pale orange around the mountains. "When I was a boy," the Judge said, "we lived within walking distance of the finest cemetery in Illinois. Its name was Mount Hope. Every night after supper, my father, who was then in his early sixties, would take a walk. Sometimes I would walk with him. And if the walk took us past this perfectly maintained necropolis, he would say, `What do you think, Teddy? Is there any hope?' And I would answer, `There's Mount Hope,' and each time he'd roar with laughter as if it had been the first time. I sometimes think we walked past that boneyard just so he could share that joke with me. He was a wealthy man, but it was the funniest joke he seemed to know." The Judge smoked, his chin low, his shoulders hunched high. "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. No hope but Mount Hope. How he enjoyed that! He was seventy-eight years old when he passed on. He died like a king, Larry. He was seated upon the throne in our home's smallest room, with the newspaper in his lap." Larry, not sure how to respond to this rather bizarre bit of nostalgia, said nothing. The Judge sighed. "This is going to be quite a little operation here before long," he said. "If you can get the power on again, that is. If you can't, people are going to get nervous and start heading south before the bad weather can come and hem them in." "Ralph and Brad say it's going to happen. I trust them." "Then we'll hope that your trust is well founded, won't we? Maybe it is a good thing that the old woman is gone. Perhaps she knew it would be better that way. Maybe people should be free to judge for themselves what the lights m the sky are, and if one tree has a face or if the face was only a trick of the light and shadow. Do you understand me, Larry?" "No, sir," Larry said truthfully. "I'm not sure I do." "I wonder if we need to reinvent that whole tiresome business of gods and saviors and ever- afters before we reinvent the flushing toilet. 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." "That's why I'm here," Larry said awkwardly. He wished mightily that the Judge hadn't just mentioned his garden, his books, his notes, and his glass of wine before bedtime. He had had a two- bit bright idea at a meeting of friends and had made a blithe suggestion. Now he wondered if there was any possible way of going on without sounding like a cruel and opportunistic halfwit. "I know why you're here. I accept." Larry jerked, making the wicker of his chair strain and whisper. "Who told you? This is supposed to be very quiet, Judge. If someone on the committee has been leaking, we're in a hell of a jam." The Judge raised one liverspotted hand, cutting him off. His eyes twinkled in his time-beaten face. "Softly, my boysoftly. No one on your committee has been leaking, not that I know of, and I keep my ear close to the ground. No, I whispered the secret to myself. Why did you come here tonight? Your face is an education in itself, Larry. I hope you don't play poker. When I was talking about my few simple pleasures, I could see your face sag and droop... a rather comic stricken expression appeared on it—" "Is that so funny? What should I do, look happy about... about..." "Sending me west," the Judge said quietly. "To spy out the land. Isn't that about it?" "That's exactly it." "I wondered how long it would be before the idea would surface. It is tremendously important, of course, tremendously necessary if the Free Zone is to be assured its full chance to survive. We have no real idea what he's up to over there. He might as well be on the dark side of the moon."

380 "If he's really there." "Oh, he's there. In one form or another, he is there. Never doubt it." He took a nail-clipper from his pants pocket and went to work on his fingernails, the little snipping sound punctuating his speech. "Tell me, has the committee discussed what might happen if we decided we liked it better over there? If we decided to stay?" Larry was flabbergasted by the idea. He told the Judge that, to the best of his knowledge, it hadn't occurred to anybody. "I imagine he's got the lights on," the Judge said with deceptive idleness. "There's an attraction in that, you know. Obviously this man Impening felt it." "Good riddance to bad rubbish," Larry said grimly, and the Judge laughed long and heartily. When he sobered he said, "I'll go tomorrow. In a LandRover, I think. North to Wyoming, and then west. Thank God I can still drive well enough! I'll travel straight across Idaho and toward Northern California. It may take two weeks going, longer coming back. Coming back, there may be snow." "Yes. We've discussed that possibility." "And I'm old. The old are prone to attacks of heart trouble and stupidity. I presume you are sending backups?" "Well..." "No, you're not supposed to talk about that. I withdraw the question." "Look, you can refuse this," Larry blurted. "No one is holding a gun to your hea—" "Are you trying to absolve yourself of your responsibility to me?" the Judge asked sharply. "Maybe. Maybe I am. Maybe I think your chances of getting back are one in ten and your chances of getting back with information we can actually base decisions on are one in twenty. Maybe I'm just trying to say in a nice way that I could have made a mistake. You could be too old." "I am too old for adventure," the Judge said, putting his clippers away, "but I hope I am not too old to do what I feel is right. There is an old woman out there someplace who has probably gone to a miserable death because she felt it was right. Prompted by religious mania, I have no doubt. But people who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad. I'll go. I'll be cold. My bowels will not work properly. I'll be lonely. I'll miss my begonias. But..." He looked up at Larry, and his eyes gleamed in the dark. "I'll also be clever." "I suppose you will," Larry said, and felt the sting of tears at the corners of his eyes. "How is Lucy?" the Judge asked, apparently closing the subject of his departure. "Fine," Larry said. "We're both fine." "No problems?" "No," he said, and thought about Nadine. Something about her desperation the last time he had seen her still troubled him deeply. You're my last chance, she had said. Strange talk, almost suicidal. And what help was there for her? Psychiatry? That was a laugh, when the best they could do for a GP was a horse doctor. Even Dial-A-Prayer was gone now. "It's good that you are with Lucy," the Judge said, "but you're worried about the other woman, I suspect." "Yes, I am." What followed was extremely difficult to say, but having it out and confessed to another person made him feel much better. "I think she might be considering, well, suicide." He rushed on: "It's not just me, don't get the idea I think any girl would kill herself just because she can't have sexy old Larry Underwood. But the boy she was taking care of has come out of his shell, and I think she feels alone, with no one to depend on her." "If her depression deepens into a chronic, cyclic thing, she may indeed kill herself," the Judge said with chilling indifference. Larry looked at him, shocked. "But you can only be one man," the Judge said. "Isn't that true?" "And your choice is made?" "For good?" "Yes, it is." "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." "I like talking to you," Larry said, and was both startled and amused by the open ingenuousness of the comment.

381 "Probably because I am telling you exactly what you want to hear," the Judge said serenely. And then he added: "There are a great many ways to commit suicide, you know." And before too much time had passed, Larry had occasion to recall that remark in bitter circumstances.

At quarter past eight the next morning, Harold's truck was leaving the Greyhound depot to go back to the Table Mesa area. Harold, Weizak, and two others were sitting in the back of the truck. Norman Kellogg and another man were in the cab. They were at the intersection of Arapahoe and Broadway when a brand-new Land-Rover drove slowly toward them. Weizak waved and shouted, "Where ya headed, Judge?" The Judge, looking rather comic in a woolen shirt and a vest, pulled over. "I believe I might go to Denver for the day," he said blandly. "Will that thing get you there?" Weizak asked. "Oh, I believe so, if I steer clear of the main-traveled roads." "Well, if you go by one of those X-rated bookstores, why don't you bring back a trunkful?" This sally was greeted with a burst of laughter from everyone—the Judge included—but Harold. He looked sallow and haggard this morning, as if he had rested ill. In fact, he had hardly slept at all. Nadine had been as good as her word; he had fulfilled quite a few dreams the night before. Dreams of the damp variety, let us say. He was already looking forward to tonight, and Weizak's sally about pornography was only good for a ghost of a smile now that he had had a little first-hand experience. Nadine had been sleeping when he left. Before they dropped off around two, she had told him she wanted to read his ledger. He had told her to go ahead if she wanted to. Perhaps he was putting himself at her mercy, but he was too confused to know for sure. But it was the best writing he had ever done in his life and the deciding factor was his want no, his need. His need to have someone else read, experience, his good work. Now Kellogg was leaning out of the dump truck's cab toward the Judge. "You be careful, Pop. Okay? There's funny folks on the roads these days." "Indeed there are," the Judge said with a strange smile. "And indeed I will. A good day to you, gentlemen. And you too, Mr. Weizak." That brought another burst of laughter, and they parted.

The Judge did not head toward Denver. When he reached Route 36, he proceeded directly across it and out along Route 7. The morning sun was bright and mellow, and on this secondary route, there was not enough stalled traffic to block the road. The town of Brighton was worse; at one point he had to leave the highway and drive across the local high school football field to avoid a colossal traffic jam. He continued east until he reached I-25. A right turn here would have taken him into Denver. Instead he turned leftnorth-and nosed onto the feeder ramp. Halfway down he put the transmission in neutral and looked left again, west, to where the Rockies rose serenely into the blue sky with Boulder lying at their base. He had told Larry he was too old for adventure, and God save him, but that had been a lie. His heart hadn't beat with this quick rhythm for twenty years, the air had not tasted this sweet, colors had not seemed this bright. He would follow I-25 to Cheyenne and then move west toward whatever waited for him beyond the mountains. His skin, dry with age, nonetheless crawled and goosebumped a little at the thought. I-80 west, into Salt Lake City, then across Nevada to Reno. Then he would head north again, but that hardly mattered. Because somewhere between Salt Lake and Reno, maybe even sooner, he would be stopped, questioned, and probably sent somewhere else to be questioned again. And at some place or other, an invitation might be issued. It was not even impossible to think that he might meet the dark man himself. "Get moving, old man," he said softly.. He put the Rover in gear and crept down to the turnpike. There were three lanes northbound, all of them relatively clear. As he had guessed, traffic jams and multiple accidents back in Denver had effectively dammed the flow of traffic. The traffic was heavy on the other side of the median stripthe poor fools who had been headed south, blindly hoping that south would be better-but here the going was good. For a while at least. Judge Farris drove on, glad to be making his start. He had slept poorly last night. He would sleep better tonight, under the stars, his old body wrapped firmly in two sleeping bags. He wondered if he would ever see Boulder again and thought the chances were probably against it. And yet his excitement was very great. It was one of the finest days of his life.

Early that afternoon, Nick, Ralph, and Stu biked out to North Boulder to a small stucco house where Tom Cullen lived by himself. Tom's house had already become a landmark to Boulder's "old"

382 residents. Stan Nogotny said it was as if the Catholics, Baptists, and Seventh-Day Adventists had gotten together with the Democrats and the Moonies to create a religious-political Disneyland. The front lawn of the house was a weird tableau of statues. There were a dozen Virgin Marys, some of them apparently in the act of feeding flocks of pink plastic lawn flamingos. The largest of the flamingos was taller than Tom himself and anchored to the ground on a single leg that ended in a four-foot spike. There was a giant wishing well with a large plastic glow-in-the-dark Jesus standing in the ornamental bucket with His hands outstretched... apparently to bless the pink flamingos. Beside the wishing well was a large plaster cow who was apparently drinking from a birdbath. The front door screen slammed open and Tom came out to meet them, stripped to the waist. Seen from a distance, Nick thought, you would have supposed he was some fantastically virile writer or painter, with his bright blue eyes and that big reddish-blond beard. As he got closer you might have given up that idea in favor of one not quite so intellectual... maybe some sort of craftsman from the counterculture who had substituted kitsch for originality. And when he got very close, smiling and talking away a mile a minute, you realized for sure that a goodly chunk of Tom Cullen's attic insulation was missing. Nick knew that one of the reasons he felt a strong sense of empathy for Tom was because he himself had been assumed to be mentally retarded, at first because his handicap had held him back from learning to read and write, later because people just assumed that someone who was both deaf and mute must be mentally retarded. He had heard all the slang terms at one time or another. A few bricks short the load. Soft upstairs. Running on three wheels. The guy's got a hole in his head and his brains done leaked out. This guy ain't traveling with a full seabag. He remembered the night he had stopped for a couple of beers in Zack's, the ginmill on the outskirts of Shoyo—the night Ray Booth and his buddies had jumped him. The bartender had stood at the far end of the bar, leaning confidentially over it to speak to a customer. His hand had been half shielding his mouth, so Nick could only make out fragments of what he had been saying. He didn't need to make out any more than that, however. Deaf-mute... probably retarded... almost all those guys're retarded... But among all the ugly terms for mental retardation, there was one term that did fit Tom Cullen. It was one Nick had applied to him often, and with great compassion, in the silence of his own mind. The phrase was: The guys not playing with a full deck. That was what was wrong with Tom. That was what it came down to. And the pity in Tom's case was that so few cards were missing, and low cards at that-a deuce of diamonds, a trey of clubs, something like that. But without those cards, you just couldn't have a good game of anything. You couldn't even win at solitaire with those cards missing from the deck. "Nicky!" Tom yelled. "Am I glad to see you! Laws, yes! Tom Cullen is so glad!" He threw his arms around Nick's neck and gave him a hug. Nick felt his bad eye sting with tears behind the black eyepatch he still wore on bright days like this one. "And Ralph too! And that one. You're... let's see..." "I'm—" Stu began, but Nick silenced him with a brusque chopping gesture of his left hand. He had been practicing mnemonics with Tom, and it seemed to work. If you could associate something you knew with a name you wanted to remember, it often clicked home and stuck. Rudy had turned him on to that, too, all those long years ago. Now he took his pad from his pocket and jotted on it. Then he handed it to Ralph to read aloud. Frowning a little, Ralph did so: "What do you like to eat that comes in a bowl with meat and vegetables and gravy?" Tom went stockstill. The animation died out of his face. His mouth dropped slackly open and he became the picture of idiocy. Stu stirred uncomfortably and said, "Nick, don't you think we ought to—" Nick shushed him with a finger at his lips, and at the same instant Tom came alive again. "Stew!" he said, capering and laughing. "You're Stew!" He looked at Nick for confirmation, and Nick gave him a V-for-victory. "M-O-O-N, that spells Stew, Tom Cullen knows that, everybody knows that!" Nick pointed to the door of Tom's house. "Want to come in? Laws, yes! All of us are going to come in. Tom's been decorating his house." Ralph and Stu exchanged an amused glance as they followed Nick and Tom up the porch steps. Tom was always "decorating." He did not "furnish," because the house had of course been furnished when he moved in. Going inside was like entering a madly jumbled Mother Goose world. A huge gilded birdcage with a green stuffed parrot carefully wired to the perch hung just inside the front door and Nick had to duck under it. The thing was, he thought, Tom's decorations were not just random rickrack. That would have made this house into something no more striking than a rummage sale barn. But there was something more here, something that seemed just beyond what the ordinary mind could grasp as a pattern. In a large square block over the mantel in the living room were a number of credit card signs, all of them centered and carefully mounted. YOUR VISA CARD WELCOME HERE. JUST SAY MASTERCARD. WE HONOR AMERICAN EXPRESS. DINER'S CLUB.

383 Now the question occurred: How did Tom know that all those signs were part of a fixed set? He couldn't read, but somehow he had grasped the pattern. Sitting on the coffee table was a large Styrofoam fire plug. On the windowsill, where it could catch the sunlight and reflect cool fans of blue light onto the wall, was a police car bubble. Tom toured them through the entire house. The downstairs game room was filled with stuffed birds and animals that Tom had found in a taxidermy shop; he had strung the birds on nearly invisible piano wire and they seemed to cruise, owls and hawks and even a bald eagle with motheaten feathers and one yellow glass eye missing. A woodchuck stood on its hind legs in one corner, a gopher in another, a skunk in another, a weasel in the fourth. In the center of the room was a coyote, somehow seeming to be the focus for all the smaller animals. The bannister leading up the stairs had been wrapped in red and white strips of Con-Tact paper so that it resembled a barber pole. The upper hallway was hung with fighter planes on more piano wire-Fokkers, Spads, Stukas, Spitfires, Zeros, Messerschmitts. The floor of the bathroom had been painted a bright electric blue and on it was Tom's extensive collection of toy boats, sailing an enamel sea around four white porcelain islands and one white porcelain continent: the legs of the tub, the base of the toilet. At last Tom took them back downstairs and they sat below the credit card montage and facing a 3-D picture of John and Robert Kennedy against a background of goldedged clouds. The legend beneath proclaimed BROTHERS TOGETHER IN HEAVEN. "You like Tom's decorations? What do you think? Nice?" "Very nice," Stu said. "Tell me. Those birds downstairs... do they ever get on your nerves?" "Laws, no!" Tom said, astounded. "They're full of sawdust!" Nick handed a note to Ralph. "Tom, Nick wants to know if you'd mind being hypnotized again. Like the time Stan did it. It's important this time, not just a game. Nick says he'll explain why afterward." "Go ahead," Tom said. "Youuu... are getting... verrrry sleepy... right?" "Yes, that's it," Ralph said. "Do you want me to look at the watch again? I don't mind. You know, when you swing it back and forth? Verrrry... sleeeepy... " Tom looked at them doubtfully. "Except I don't feel very sleepy. Laws, no. I went to bed early last night. Tom Cullen always goes to bed early because there's no TV to watch." Stu said softly: "Tom, would you like to see an elephant?" Tom's eyes closed immediately. His head dropped forward loosely. His respiration deepened to long, slow strokes. Stu watched this with great surprise. Nick had given him the key phrase, but Stu hadn't known whether or not to believe it would work. And he had never expected that it could happen so fast. "Just like putting a chicken's head under its wing," Ralph marveled. Nick handed Stu his prepared "script" for this encounter. Stu looked at Nick for a long moment. Nick looked back, then nodded gravely that Stu should go ahead. "Tom, can you hear me?" Stu asked. "Yes, I can hear you," Tom said, and the quality of his voice made Stu look up sharply. It was different from Tom's usual voice, but in a way Stu could not quite put his hand to. It reminded him of something which had happened when he was eighteen, and graduating from high school. They had been in the boys' locker room before the ceremony, all the guys he'd been going to school with since... well, since the first day of the first grade in at least four cases, and almost as long in many others. And for just a moment he had seen how much their faces had changed between those old days, those first days, and that moment of insight, standing on the tile floor of the locker room with the black robe in his hands. That vision of change had made him shiver then, and it made him shiver now. The faces he had looked into had no longer been the faces of children... but neither had they yet become the faces of men. They were faces in limbo, faces caught perfectly between two well-defined states of being. This voice, coming out of the shadowland of Tom Cullen's subconscious, seemed like those faces, only infinitely sadder. Stu thought it was the voice of the man forever denied. But they were waiting for him to go on, and go on he must. "I'm Stu Redman, Tom." "Yes. Stu Redman." "Nick is here." "Yes, Nick is here." "Ralph Brentner is here, too." "Yes, Ralph is, too." "We're your friends." "I know." "We'd like you to do something, Tom. For the Zone. It's dangerous."

384 "Dangerous..." Trouble crossed over Tom's face, like a cloud shadow slowly crossing a midsummer field of corn. "Will I have to be afraid? Will I have to..." He trailed off, sighing. Stu looked at Nick, troubled. Nick mouthed: Yes. "It's him," Tom said, and sighed dreadfully. It was like the sound a bitter November wind makes in a stand of denuded oaks. Stu felt that shudder inside him again. Ralph had gone pale. "Who, Tom?" Stu asked gently. "Flagg. His name is Randy Flagg. The dark man. You want me to..." That sick sigh again, bitter and long. "How do you know him, Tom?" This wasn't in the script. "Dreams... I see his face in dreams." I see his face in dreams. But none. of them had seen his face. It was always hidden. ' "You see him?" "Yes ." "What does he look like, Tom?" Tom didn't speak for a long time. Stu had decided he wasn't going to answer and he was preparing to go back to the "script" when Tom said: "He looks like anybody you see on the street. But when he grins, birds fall dead off telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine burns. The grass yellows up and dies where he spits. He's always outside. He came out of time. He doesn't know himself. He has the name of a thousand demons. Jesus knocked him into a herd of pigs once. His name is Legion. He's afraid of us. We're inside. He knows magic. He can call the wolves and live in the crows. He's the king of nowhere. But he's afraid of us. He's afraid of... inside." Tom fell silent. The three of them stared at each other, pallid as gravestones. Ralph had seized his hat from his head and was kneading it convulsively in his hands. Nick had put one hand over his eyes. Stu's throat had turned to dry glass. His name is Legion. He is the king of nowhere. "Can you say anything else about him?" Stu asked in a low voice. "Only that I'm afraid of him, too. But I'll do what you want. But Tom... is so afraid." That dreadful sigh again. "Tom," Ralph said suddenly. "Do you know if Mother Abagail... if she's still alive?" Ralph's face was desperately set, the face of a man who has staked everything on one turn of the cards. "She's alive." Ralph leaned against the back of his chair with a great gust of breath. "But she's not right with God yet," Tom added. "Not right with God? Why not, Tommy?" "She's in the wilderness, God has lifted her up in the wilderness, she does not fear the terror that flies at noon or the terror that creeps at midnight... neither will the snake bite her nor the bee sting her... but she's not right with God yet. It was not the hand of Moses that brought water from the rock. It was not the hand of Abagail that turned the weasels back with their bellies empty. She's to be pitied. She will see, but she will see too late. There will be death. His death. She will die on the wrong side of the river. She—" "Stop him," Ralph groaned. "Can't you stop him?" "Tom," Stu said. "Are you the same Tom that Nick met in Oklahoma? Are you the same Tom we know when you're awake?" "Yes, but I am more than that Tom." "I don't understand." He shifted a little, his sleeping face calm. "I am God's Tom." Completely unnerved now, Stu almost dropped Nick's notes. "You say you'll do what we want." "But do you see... do you think you'll come back?" "That's not for me to see or say. Where shall I go?" "West, Tom." Tom moaned. It was a sound that made the hair on the nape of Stu's neck stand on end. What are we sending him into? And maybe he knew. Maybe he had been there himself, only in Vermont, in mazes of corridors where the echo made it seem as if footsteps were following him. And gaining. "West," Tom said. "West, yes." "We're sending you to look, Tom. To look and see. Then to come back."

385 "Come back and tell." "Can you do that?" "Yes. Unless they catch and kill me." Stu winced; they all winced. "You go by yourself, Tom. Always west. Can you find west?" "Where the sun goes down." "Yes. And if anyone asks why you're there, this is what you'll say: They drove you out of the Free Zone—" "Drove me out. Drove Tom out. Put him on the road." "—because you were feebleminded." "They drove Tom out because Tom is feebleminded." "—and because you might have a woman and the woman might have idiot children." "Idiot children like Tom." Stu's stomach was rolling back and forth helplessly. His head felt like iron that had learned how to sweat. It was as if he was suffering from a terrible, debilitating hangover. "Now repeat what you'll say if someone asks why you're in the west." "They drove Tom out because he was feebleminded. Laws, yes. They were afraid I night have a woman the way you have them with your prick in bed. Make her pregnant with idiots." "That's right, Tom. That's—" "Drove me out," he said in a soft, grieving voice. "Drove Tom out of his nice house and put his feet on the road." Stu passed a shaking hand over his eyes. He looked at Nick. Nick seemed to double, then treble, in his vision. "Nick, I don't know as I can finish," he said helplessly. Nick looked at Ralph. Ralph, pale as cheese, could only shake his head. "Finish," Tom said unexpectedly. "Don't leave me out here in the dark." Forcing himself, Stu went on. "Tom, do you know what the full moon looks like?" "Yes... big and round." "Not the half-moon, or even most of the moon." "No," Tom said. "When you see that big round moon, you'll come back east. Back to us. Back to your house, Tom." "Yes, when I see it, I'll come back," Tom agreed. "I'll come back home." "And when you come back, you'll walk in the night and sleep in the day." "Walk at night, sleep in the day." "Right. And you won't let anybody see you if you can help it." "No." "But, Tom, someone might see you." "Yes, someone might." "If it's one person that sees you, Tom, kill him." "Kill him," Tom said doubtfully. "If it's more than one, run." "Run," Tom said, with more certainty. "But try not to be seen at all. Can you repeat all that back?" "Yes. Come back when the moon is full. Not the halfmoon, not the fingernail moon. Walk at night, sleep in the day. Don't let anybody see me. If one person sees me, kill him. If more than one person sees me, run away. But try not to let anyone see me." "That's very good. I want you to wake up in a few seconds. Okay?" "Okay." "When I ask about the elephant, you'll wake up, okay?" "Okay." Stu sat back with a long, shuddery sigh. "Thank God that's over." Nick agreed with his eyes. "Did you know that might happen, Nick?" Nick shook his head. "How could he know those things?" Stu muttered. Nick was motioning for his pad. Stu gave it to him, glad to be rid of it. His fingers had sweated the page with Nick's script written on it almost to transparency. Nick wrote and handed it to Ralph. Ralph read it, lips moving slowly, and then handed it to Stu. "Some people through history have considered the insane and the retarded to be close to divine. I don't think he told us anything that can be of practical use to us, but I know he scared the hell out of me. Magic, he said. How do you fight magic?"

386 "It's over my head, that's all," Ralph muttered. "Those things he said about Mother Abagail, I don't even want to think about them. Wake him up, Stu, and let's get out of here as quick as we can." Ralph was close to tears. Stu leaned forward again. "Tom?" "Would you like to see an elephant?" Tom's eyes opened at once and he looked around at them. "I told you it wouldn't work," he said. "Laws, no. Tom doesn't get sleepy in the middle of the day." Nick handed a sheet to Stu, who glanced at it and then spoke to Tom. "Nick says you did just fine." "I did? Did I stand on my head like before?" With a twinge of bitter shame, Nick thought: No, Tom, you did a bunch of even better tricks this time. "No," Stu said. "Tom, we came to ask if you could help us." "Me? Help? Sure! I love to help!" "This is dangerous, Tom. We want you to go west, and then come back and tell us what you saw." "Okay, sure," Tom said without the slightest hesitation, but Stu thought he saw a momentary shadow cross Tom's face... and linger behind his guileless blue eyes. "When?" Stu put a gentle hand on Tom's neck and wondered just what in the hell he was doing here. How were you supposed to figure these things out if you weren't Mother Abagail and didn't have a hot line to heaven? "Pretty soon now," he said gently. "Pretty soon."

When Stu got back to the apartment, Frannie was fixing supper. "Harold was over," she said. "I asked him to stay to dinner, but he begged off." "Oh." She looked more closely at him. "Stuart Redman, what dog bit you?" "A dog named Tom Cullen, I guess." And he told her everything. They sat down to dinner. "What does it all mean?" Fran asked. Her face was pale, and she was not really eating, only pushing her food from one side of her plate to the other. "Damned if I know," Stu said. "It's a kind of... of seeing, I guess. I don't know why we should balk at the idea of Tom Cullen having visions while he's under hypnosis, not after the dreams we all had on our way here. If they weren't a kind of seeing, I don't know what they were." "But they seem so long ago now... or at least they do to me." "Yeah, to me, too," Stu agreed, and realized he was pushing his own food around. "Look, Stu—I know we agreed not to talk about committee business outside the committee's meetings if we could help it. You said we'd be wrangling all the time, and you were probably right. I haven't said word one about you turning into Marshal Dillon after the twenty-fifth, have I?" He smiled briefly. "No, you haven't, Frannie." "But I have to ask if you still think sending Tom Cullen west is a good idea. After what happened this afternoon." "I don't know," Stu said. He pushed his plate away. Most of the food on it was untouched. He got up, went to the hall dresser, and found a pack of cigarettes. He had cut his consumption to three or four a day. He lit this one, drew harsh, stale tobacco smoke deep into his lungs, and blew it out. "On the positive side, his story is simple enough and believable enough. We drove him out because he's a halfwit. Nobody is going to be able to shake him from that. And if he gets back okay, we can hypnotize him-he goes under in the time it takes you to snap your fingers, for the Lord's sake-and he'll tell us everything he's seen, the important things and the unimportant things. It's possible that he'll turn out to be a better eyewitness than either of the others. I don't doubt that." "If he gets back okay." "Yeah, if. We gave him an instruction to travel east only at night and to hide up in the day. If he sees more than one person, to run. But if he was seen by one person only, to kill him." "Stu, you didn't!" "Of course we did!" he said angrily, wheeling on her. "We're not playing pata-cake here, Frannie! You must know what's going to happen to him... or the Judge... or Dayna... if they get caught over there! Why else were you so set against the idea in the first place?" "Okay," she said quietly. "Okay, Stu." "No, it's not okay!" he said, and slammed the freshly lit cigarette down into a pottery ashtray, sending up a little cloud of sparks. Several of them landed on the back of his hand and he brushed them off with a quick, savage gesture. "It's not okay to send a feeble kid out to fight our battles, and it's not okay to push people around like pawns on a fuckin chessboard and it's not okay giving orders to kill like a Mafia boss. But I don't know what else we can do. I just don't know. If we don't

387 find out what he's up to, there's a damn fine chance that someday next spring he may turn the whole Free Zone into one big mushroom cloud." "Okay. Hey. Okay." He clenched his fists slowly. "I was shouting at you. I'm sorry. I had no right to do that, Frannie." "It's all right. You weren't the one who opened Pandora's box." "We're all opening it, I guess," he said dully, and got another cigarette from the pack in the dresser. "Anyhow, when I gave him that... what do you call it? When I said he should kill any one person that got in his way, a kind of frown came over his face. It was gone right away. I don't even know if Ralph or Nick saw it. But I did. It was like he was thinking, `Okay, I understand what you mean, but I'll make up m'own mind on that when the time comes. '" "I've read that you can't hypnotize someone into doing something they wouldn't do when they were awake. A person won't go against his own moral code just because they're told to do it when they're under." Stu nodded. "Yeah, I was thinking of that. But what if this fellow Flagg has got a line of pickets strung down the whole eastern length of his border? I would, if I were him. If Tom runs into that picket line going west, he's got his story to cover him. But if he's coming back east and runs into them, it's going to be kill or get killed. And if Tom won't kill, he's apt to be a dead duck." "You may be too worried about that one part of it," Frannie said. "I mean, if there is a picket line, wouldn't it have to be strung pretty thin?" "Yeah. One man every fifty miles, something like that. Unless he's got five times the people we do." "So unless they've got some pretty sophisticated equipment already set up and running, radar and infrared and all that stuff you see in the spy movies, wouldn't Tom be apt to walk right through them?" "That's what we're hoping. But—" "But you've got a bad attack of conscience," she said softly. "Is that what it comes down to? Well... maybe so. What did Harold want; honey?" "He left a bunch of those survey maps. Areas where his Search Committee has looked for Mother Abagail. Anyhow, Harold's been working on that burial detail as well as supervising the Search Committee. He looked very tired, but his Free Zone duties aren't the only reason. He's been working on something else as well, it seems." "What's that?" "Harold's got a woman." Stu raised his eyebrows. "Anyway, that's why he begged off on dinner. Can you guess who she is?" Stu squinted up at the ceiling. "Now who could Harold be shackin with? Let me see—" "Well, that's a hell of a way to put it! What do you think we're doing?" She threw a mock-slap at him, and he. drew back, grinning. "Fun, ain't it? I give up. Who is it?" "Nadine Cross." "That woman with the white in her hair?" "That's her." "Gosh, she must be twice his age." "I doubt," Frannie said, "that it's a concern to Harold at this point in his relationship." "Does Larry know?" "I don't know and care less. The Cross woman isn't Larry's girl now. If she ever was." "Yeah," Stu said. He was glad Harold had found himself a little love-interest, but not terribly interested in the subject. "How does Harold feel about the Search Committee, anyway? Did he give you any idea?" "Well, you know Harold. He smiles a lot, but... not very hopeful. I guess that's why he's putting in most of his time on the burial detail. They call him Hawk now, did you know that?" "Really?" "I heard it today. I didn't know who they were talking about until I asked." She mused for a moment, then laughed. "What's funny?" Stu asked. She stuck out her feet, which were clad in low-topped sneakers. On the soles were patterns of circles and lines. "He complimented me on my sneakers," she said. "Isn't that dippy?" "You're dippy," Stu said, grinning.

Harold woke up just before dawn with a dull but not entirely unpleasant ache in his groin. He shivered a little as he got up. It was getting noticeably colder in the early mornings, although it was only August 22 and fall was still a calendar month away.

388 But there was heat below his waist, oh yes. Just looking at the delectable curve of her buttocks in those tiny see-through underpants as she slept was warming him up considerably. She wouldn't mind if he woke her up... well, maybe she would mind, but she wouldn't object. He still had no real idea of what might lie behind those dark eyes, and he was a little afraid of her. Instead of waking her up, he dressed quietly. He didn't want to mess around with Nadine, as much as he would have liked to. What he needed to do was go someplace alone and think. He paused at the door, fully dressed, carrying his boots in his left hand. Between the slight chilliness of the room and the prosy act of getting dressed, his desire had left him. He could smell the room now, and the smell was not terribly appealing. It was just a little thing, she had said, a thing they could do without. Perhaps it was true. She could do things with her mouth and hands that were nearly beyond belief. But if it was such a small thing, why did this room have that stale and slightly sour odor that he associated with the solitary pleasure of all his bad years? Maybe you want it to be bad. Disturbing thought. He went out, closing the door softly behind him. Nadine's eyes opened the moment the door was closed. She sat up, looked thoughtfully at the door, and then lay down again. Her body ached in a slow and unrelieved cycle of desire. It felt almost like menstrual cramps. If it was such a small thing, she thought (with no idea of how close to Harold's her own thoughts were), why did she feel this way? At one point last night she'd had to bite her lips together to stifle the cries: Stop that fooling around and STICK me with that thing! Do you hear me? STICK me with it, cram me FULL of it! Do you think what you're doing is doing anything for me? Stick me with it and let's for Christ's sake-or mine, at least-end this crazy game! He had been lying with his head between her legs, making strange noises of lust, noises that might have been comic had they not been so honestly urgent, so nearly savage. And she had looked up, those words trembling behind her lips, and had seen (or only thought she had?) a face at the window. In an instant the fire of her own lust had been damped down to cold ash. It had been his face, grinning savagely in at her. A scream had risen m her throat... and then the face was gone, the face was nothing but a moving pattern of shadows on the darkened glass mingled with smudges of dust. No more than the boogeyman a child imagines he sees in the closet, or curled up slyly behind the chest of toys in the corner. No more than that. Except it was more, and not even now, in the first cold rational light of dawn, could she pretend otherwise. It would be dangerous to pretend otherwise. It had been him, and he had been warning her. The husband-to-be was watching over his intended. And the bride defiled would be the bride unaccepted. Staring at the ceiling, she thought: I suck his cock, but that's not defilement. I let him stick himself up my ass, but that isn't defilement, either. I dress for him like a cheap streetwalking slut, but that's perfectly okay. It was enough to make you wonder what sort of man your fiancй really was. Nadine stared up at the ceiling for a long, long time.

Harold made instant coffee, drank it with a grimace, and then took a couple of cold Pop-Tarts out onto the front step. He sat down and ate them while dawn crept across the land. In retrospect, the last couple of days seemed like a mad carnival ride to him. It was a blur of orange trucks, of Weizak clapping him on the shoulder and calling him Hawk (they all called him that now), of dead bodies, a neverending moldy stream of them, and then coming home from all that death to a never-ending flow of kinky sex. Enough to blur your head. But now, sitting here on a front step as cold as a marble headstone, a horrible cup of instant coffee sloshing in his guts, he could munch these sawdust-tasting cold Pop-Tarts and think. He felt clear-headed, sane after a season of insanity. It occurred to him that, for a person who had always considered himself to be a Cro-Magnon man amid a herd of thundering Neanderthals, he had been doing precious little thinking lately. He had been led, not by the nose, but by the penis. He turned his mind to Frannie Goldsmith even as he turned his gaze out to the Flatirons. It was Frannie who had been at his house that day, he knew it for sure now. He had gone over to the place where she lived with Redman on a pretext, really hoping to get a look at her footgear. As it turned out, she had been wearing the sneakers that matched the print he had found on his cellar floor. Circles and lines instead of the usual waffle or zigzag tread. No question, baby. He thought he could put it together without too much trouble. Somehow she had found out he had read her diary. He must have left a smudge or mark on one of the pages... maybe more than one. So she had come to his house looking for some indication of how he felt about what he had read. Something written down.

389 There was, of course, his ledger. But she hadn't found it, he could feel positive of that. His ledger said flat-out that he planned to kill Stuart Redman. If she had found something like that, she would have told Stu. Even if she hadn't, he didn't believe she could have been as easy and as natural with him as she had been yesterday. He finished his last Pop-Tart, grimacing at the taste of its cold frosting and colder jelly center. He decided he would walk to the bus station instead of taking his cycle; Teddy Weizak or Norris could drop him off on the way home. He set off, zipping his light jacket all the way to his chin against the chill that would be gone in an hour or so. He walked past the empty houses with their shades drawn, and about six blocks down Arapahoe, he began to see an x-mark chalked boldly on door after door. Again, his idea. The Burial Committee had checked all those houses where the mark appeared, and had hauled away whatever bodies there were to be hauled away. X, a crossing-out. The people who had lived in those houses where the mark appeared were gone for all time. In another month that x- mark would be all over Boulder, signifying the end of an age. It was time to think, and to think carefully. It seemed that, since he had met Nadine, he really had stopped thinking... but maybe he had really stopped even before that. I read her diary because I was hurt and jealous, he thought. Then she broke into my house, probably looking for my own diary, but she didn't find it. But just the shock of someone breaking in had maybe been revenge enough. It had certainly bent him out of shape. Maybe they were even and it could be quits. He didn't really want Frannie anymore, did he?... Did he? He felt the sullen coal of resentment glow in his chest. Maybe not. But that didn't change the fact that they had excluded him. Although Nadine had said little about her reasons for coming to him, Harold had an idea that she had been excluded in some way too, rebuffed, turned back. They were a couple of outsiders, and outsiders hatch plots. It's perhaps the only thing that keeps them sane. (Remember to put that in the ledger, Harold thought... he was almost downtown now.) There was a whole company of outsiders on the other side of the mountains. And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside. Inside where it's warm. Just a little thing, being inside where it's warm, but really such a big thing. About the most important thing in the world. Maybe he didn't want to be quits and even. Maybe he didn't want to settle for a draw, for a career of riding in a twentieth-century deadcart and getting meaningless letters of thanks for his ideas, and waiting five years for Bateman to retire from their precious committee so he could be on it... and what if they decided to pass over him again? They might, too, because it wasn't just a question of age. They had taken the goddam deaf-mute, and he was only a few vears older than Harold himself. The coal of resentment was burning brightly now. Think, sure, think-that was easy to say, and sometimes itwas even easy even to do... but what good was thinking whenall it got you from the Neanderthals who ran the world was a horselaugh, or even worse, a thank-you letter? He reached the bus station. It was still early, and no one was there yet. There was a poster on the door saying there was going to be another public meeting on the twenty-fifth. Public meeting? Public circle jerk. The waiting room was festooned with travel posters and ads for the Greyhound Ameripass and pictures of big motherhumping Scenicruisers rolling through Atlanta, New Orleans, San Francisco, Nashville, wherever. He sat down and stared with a cold morning eye at the darkened pinball machines, the Coke machine, the coffee machine that would also dispense a Lipton Cup-a-Soup that smelled vaguely like a dead fish. He lit a cigarette and threw the matchstub on the floor. They had adopted the Constitution. Whooppee. How veryvery and too-too. They had even sung The Star-Speckled Banana, for Christ's sweet sake. But suppose Harold Lauder had gotten up, not to make a few constructive suggestions, but to tell them the facts of life in this first year after the plague? Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Harold Emery Lauder and I am here to tell you that, in the words of the old song, the fundamental things apply as time goes by. Like Darwin. The next time you stand and sing the National Anthem, friends and neighbors, chew on this: America is dead, dead as a doornail, dead as Jacob Marley and Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper and Harry S Truman, but the principles just propounded by Mr. Darwin are still very much alive-as alive as Jacob Marley's ghost was to Ebenezer Scrooge. While you are meditating on the beauties of constitutional rule, spare a little time to meditate on Randall Flagg, Man of the West. I doubt very much if he has any time to spare for such fripperies as public meetings and ratifications and discussions on the true meaning of a peach in the best liberal mode. Instead he has been concentrating on the basics, on his Darwin, preparing to wipe the great Formica counter of the universe with your dead bodies: Ladies and gentlemen, let me modestly suggest that while we are trying to get the lights on and waiting for a doctor to find our happy little hive, he may be searching eagerly for someone with a pilot's credentials so he can start overflights of Boulder in the best Francis Gary Powers tradition. While we debate the burning question of who will be on the Street Cleaning Committee, he has

390 probably already seen to the creation of a Gun Cleaning Committee, not to mention mortars, missile sites, and possibly even germ warfare centers. Of course we know this country doesn't have any germ or biological warfare centers, that's one of the things that makes this country great-what country, ha-habut you should realize that while we're busy getting all the wagons in a circle, he's— "Hey, Hawk, you pullin overtime?" Harold looked up, smiling. "Yeah, I thought I'd get some," he told Weizak. "I clocked you when I came m. You made six bucks already." Weizak laughed. "You're a card, Hawk, you know that?" "I am," Harold agreed, still smiling. He began to relace his boots. "A wild card."