http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html
Stephen King
The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
Tom was making for a barn with an attached silo which stood at the end of a dirt road about a quarter of a mile long. Nick, still feeling nervous, pedaled his own bike up the highway, lifted it over the cattle-gate, and then pedaled up the dirt feeder road to the barn. Tom’s bike lay on the dirt fill outside. He hadn’t even bothered to put the kickstand down. Nick would have chalked this up to simple forgetfulness if he hadn’t seen Tom use the kickstand several times before. He’s scared right out of what little mind he has, Nick thought.
His own uneasiness made him take one last look over his shoulder, and what he saw coming froze him coldly in his tracks.
A horrible darkness was coming out of the west. It was not a cloud; it was more like a total absence of light. It was in the shape of a funnel, and at first glance it looked a thousand feet high. It was wider at the top than at the bottom; the bottom was not quite touching the earth. At its summit, the very clouds seemed to be fleeing from it, as if it possessed some mysterious power of repulsion.
As Nick watched, it touched down about three quarters of a mile away and a long blue building with a roof made of corrugated metal—an auto supply place, or perhaps a lumber storage shed—exploded with a loud bang. He could not hear this, of course, but the vibration struck him, rocking him back on his feet. And the building seemed to explode inward, as if the funnel had sucked all the air out of it. The next moment the tin roof broke in two. The sections whirled upward, spinning and spinning like a top gone insane. Fascinated, Nick craned his neck to follow their progress.
I am looking at whatever it is in my worst dreams, Nick thought, and it is not a man at all, although it may sometimes look like a man. What it really is is a tornado. One almighty big black twister ripping out of the west, sucking up anything and everything unlucky enough to be in its path. It’s —
Then he was grabbed by both arms and literally jerked off his feet and into the barn. He looked around at Tom Cullen and was momentarily surprised to see him. In his fascination with the storm, he had quite forgotten that Tom Cullen existed.
“Downstairs!” Tom panted. “Quick! Quick! Oh my laws, yes! Tornado! Tornado! ”
At last Nick was fully, consciously afraid, ripped out of the half-entranced state he had been in and aware again of where he was and who he was with. As he let Tom lead him to the stairs going down into the barn’s storm cellar, he became aware of a strange, thrumming vibration. It was the closest thing to sound he had ever experienced. It was like a nagging ache in the center of his brain. Then, as he went down the stairs behind Tom, he saw something he would never forget: the plank siding of the barn being pulled out board by board, pulled out and whirled up into the cloudy air, like rotted brown teeth being pulled out by invisible forceps. The hay littered on the floor began to rise and whirl in a dozen miniature tornado funnels, nodding and dipping and skipping. That thrumming vibration grew ever more persistent.
Then Tom was pushing open a heavy wooden door, thrusting him through. Nick smelled wet mold and decay. In the last instant of light he saw they were sharing the storm cellar with a family of rat-gnawed corpses. Then Tom slammed the door shut and they were in perfect darkness. The vibration lessened but did not cease completely even then.
Panic crept up on him with its cloak open and gathered him in. The blackness reduced his senses to touch and smell, and neither of them sent messages which were comforting. He could feel the constant vibration of the boards beneath his feet, and the smell was death.
Tom clutched his hand blindly and Nick drew the retarded man next to him. He could feel Tom trembling, and he wondered if Tom was crying, or perhaps trying to speak to him. The thought eased some of his own fear and he slung an arm about Tom’s shoulders. Tom reciprocated and they stood bolt upright in the dark, clinging to each other.
The vibration grew stronger under Nick’s feet; even the air seemed to be trembling lightly against his face. Tom held him more tightly still. Blind and deaf, he waited for what might happen next and reflected that if Ray Booth had gotten his other eye, all of life would be like this. If that had happened, he believed he would have shot himself in the head days ago and had done with it.
Later he would be almost unable to believe his watch, which insisted that they had spent only fifteen minutes in the darkness of the storm cellar, although logic told him that since the watch was still running, it must be so. Never before in his life had he understood how subjective, how plastic, time really is. It seemed that it must have been at least an hour, probably two or three. And as the time passed, he became convinced that he and Tom were not alone in the storm cellar. Oh, there were the bodies—some poor guy had brought his family down here near the end, perhaps on the fevered assumption that, since they had weathered other natural disasters down here, they could weather this here one, too—but it wasn’t the bodies that he meant. To Nick’s mind, a corpse was just a thing, no different than a chair or a typewriter or a rug. A corpse was just an inanimate thing which filled space. What he felt was the presence of another being, and he became more and more convinced who—or what—it was.
It was the dark man, the man who came to life in his dreams, the creature whose spirit he had sensed in the black heart of the cyclone.
Somewhere… over in the corner or perhaps right behind them… he was watching them. And waiting. At the right moment he would touch them and they would both… what? Go mad with fear, of course. Just that. He could see them. Nick was sure he could see them. He had eyes which could see in the dark like a cat’s eyes, or those of some weird alien creature. Like the one in that movie, Predator, perhaps. Yes—like that. The dark man could see tones of the spectrum that human eyes could never attain to, and to him everything would look slow and red, as if the whole world had been tie-dyed in a vat of gore.
At first Nick was able to divide this fantasy from reality, but as time passed, he became more and more sure that the fantasy was reality.
- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 4:44 PM Pacific Time USA Sunday 06 May 2012
