What if.
What if.
What if what if what if WHAT IF!!!!
WHAT IF all those other people are not talking about this stuff because of what is happening in their own heads!
What if all the stuff other people are seeing is tremendously disturbing and they are even more disturbed because they read what I write and what they see IN THEIR OWN MINDS IS BEYOND DISTURBING AND WHAT I WRITE ABOUT IS MINUSCULE TO THE HORROR IN THEIR MINDS!!!
And I am talking about regular folks. I'm not talking about those meth-addicts who live a life of horror because they are too weak to resist. With some sympathy - I GUESS - I was thinking in recent weeks that drug addiction is the result of defective minds. Their minds were defective to begin with and that is why the addiction became a problem. If their mind functioned normally then illegal narcotics would not be a problem. The legalization of marijuana in the United States just goes to show you how defective human minds are taking too much control over the United States.
Anyway, I just cannot understand why my reports are ignored to such magnitude. And then the problem makes sense. With my sanity I am simply reinforcing your individual horror at what is happening in your own mind.
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http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html
Stephen King
The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition
Chapter 43
That night he dreamed of the man with no face standing on the high roof, his hands stretched out to the east, and then of the corn—corn higher than his head—and the sound of the music. Only this time he knew it was music and this time he knew it was a guitar. He awoke near dawn with a painfully full bladder and her words ringing in his ears: Mother Abagail is what they call me… you come see me anytime.
Late that afternoon, moving east through Comanche County on Highway 160, they sat astride their bikes in amazement, watching a small herd of buffalo—a dozen in all, perhaps—walking calmly back and forth across the road in search of good graze. There had been a barbed wire fence on the north side of the road, but it appeared the buffalo had butted it down.
“What are they?” Tom asked fearfully. “Those ain’t cows!”
And because Nick couldn’t talk and Tom couldn’t read, Nick couldn’t tell him. That day was July 8, 1990, and they slept that night in flat open farm country forty miles west of Deerhead.
It was July 9, and they were eating their lunch in the shade of an old, graceful elm in the front yard of a farmhouse which had partially burned down. Tom was eating sausages from a tin with one hand and driving a car in and out of his service station with the other. And singing the refrain of a popular song over and over again. Nick knew the shape it made on Tom’s lips by heart: “Baby, can you dig your man—he’s a raht-eous ma-yun—baby, can you dig your man?”
Nick was depressed and slightly overawed by the size of the country; never before had he realized how easy it was to stick out your thumb, knowing that sooner or later the law of averages was going to favor you. A car was going to stop, usually with a man driving, and with a can of beer resting comfortably in the fork of his crotch more often than not. He would want to know how far you were going and you would hand him a slip of paper which you’d kept handy in your breast pocket, a slip of paper which read: “Hello, my name is Nick Andros. I’m a deaf-mute. Sorry about that. I’m going to—. Thanks very much for the ride. I can read lips.” And that would be that. Unless the guy had a thing about deaf-mutes (and some people did, although they were a minority), you hopped in and the car took you where you wanted to go, or a good piece in that direction. The car ate road and blew miles out its tailpipe. The car was a form of teleportation. The car defeated the map. But now there was no car, although on many of these roads a car would have been a practical mode of transportation for seventy or eighty miles at a stretch, if you were careful. And when you were finally blocked, you would only have to abandon your vehicle, walk for a while, and then take another. With no car, they were like ants crawling across the chest of a fallen giant, ants trundling endlessly from one nipple to the other. And so Nick half wished, half daydreamed, that when they finally did meet someone else (always assuming that would happen), it would be as it had been in those mostly carefree days of hitchhiking: there would be that familiar twinkle of chrome rising over the top of the next hill, that sunflare which simultaneously dazzled and pleased the eye. It would be some perfectly ordinary American car, a Chevy Biscayne or a Pontiac Tempest, sweet old Detroit rolling iron. In his dreams it was never a Honda or Mazda or Yugo.
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html
Stephen King
The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition
Chapter 27
“Monsters coming!” the faint, hoarse voice cried. The overcast had broken this morning, and the day was bright and hot. A bee cruised past Larry’s nose, circled one of the nearby flowerbeds, and made a three-point landing on a peony. From the menagerie came the soothing, soporific drone of the flies as they landed on the dead animals.
“Monsters coming now!” The monster-shouter was a tall man who looked to be in his middle sixties. Larry had first heard him the night before, which he had spent in the Sherry-Netherland. With night lying over the unnaturally quiet city, the faint, howling voice had seemed sonorous and dark, the voice of a lunatic Jeremiah floating through the streets of Manhattan, echoing, rebounding, distorting. Larry, lying sleepless in a queen-sized double with every light in the suite blazing, had become irrationally convinced that the monster-shouter was coming for him, seeking him out, the way the creatures of his frequent bad dreams sometimes did. For a long time it had seemed that the voice was drawing ever closer—Monsters coming! Monsters on the way! They’re in the suburbs! —and Larry became convinced that the suite’s door, which he had triple-locked, would burst inward and that the monster-shouter would be there… not a human being at all but a gigantic troll-thing with the head of a dog and saucer-sized fly eyes and champing teeth.
But earlier this morning Larry had seen him in the park and he was only a crazy old man wearing corduroy pants and zoris and horn-rimmed glasses with one bow taped. Larry had tried to speak to him and the monster-shouter had run in terror, crying back over his shoulder that the monsters would be in the streets at any moment. He had tripped over an ankle-high wire fence and went sprawling on one of the bikepaths with a loud comic thwap! sound, his glasses flying off but not shattering. Larry had gone to him, but before he could get there, the monster-shouter had scooped up his glasses and was gone toward the mall, crying his endless warning. So Larry’s opinion of him had swung from extreme terror to utter boredom and mild annoyance in the space of twelve hours.
There were other people in the park; Larry had spoken to a few of them. They were all pretty much the same, and Larry supposed that he himself wasn’t much different. They were dazed, their speech disjointed, and they seemed helpless to stop reaching for your sleeve with their hands as they talked. They had stories to tell. All the stories were the same. Their friends and relatives were dead or dying. There had been shooting in the streets, there had been an inferno on Fifth Avenue, was it true that Tiffany’s was gone, could that be true? Who was going to clean up? Who was going to collect the garbage? Should they get out of New York? They had heard that troops were guarding all the places where one could hope to do this. One woman was terrified that the rats were going to rise up out of the subways and inherit the earth
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html
Stephen King
The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition
Chapter 39
“Now you’re a man who must appreciate the value of a good key,” the man said. The dark stone disappeared in his clenched fist and suddenly reappeared in his other hand, where it began to finger-walk again. “I’m sure you are. Because what a key is for is opening doors. Is there anything more important in life than opening doors, Lloyd?”
“Mister, I’m awfully hungry…”
“Sure you are,” the man said. An expression of concern spread over his face, an expression so magnified that it became grotesque. “Jesus Christ, a rat isn’t anything to eat! Why, do you know what I had for lunch? I had a nice rare roast beef sandwich on Vienna bread with a few onions and a lot of Gulden’s Spicy Brown. Sound good?”
Lloyd nodded his head, tears oozing slowly out of his overbright eyes.
“Had some homefries and chocolate milk to go with it, and then for dessert… holy crow, I’m torturing you, ain’t I? Someone ought to take a hosswhip to me, that’s what they ought to do. I’m sorry. I’ll let you right out and then we’ll go get something to eat, okay?”
Lloyd was too stunned to even nod. He had decided that the man with the key was indeed a devil, or even more likely a mirage, and the mirage would stand outside his cell until Lloyd finally dropped dead, talking happily about God and Jesus and Gulden’s Spicy Brown mustard as he made the strange black stone appear and disappear. But now the compassion on the man’s face seemed real enough, and he sounded genuinely disgusted with himself. The black stone disappeared into his clenched fist again. And when the fist opened, Lloyd’s wondering eyes beheld a flat silver key with an ornate grip lying on the stranger’s palm.
“My—dear—God! ” Lloyd croaked.
“You like that?” the dark man asked, pleased. “I learned that trick from a massage parlor honey in Secaucus, New Jersey, Lloyd. Secaucus, home of the world’s greatest pig farms.”
He bent and seated the key in the lock of Lloyd’s cell. And that was strange, because as well as his memory served him (which right now was not very well), these cells had no keyways, because they were all opened and shut electronically. But he had no doubt that the silver key would work.
Just as it rattled home, Flagg stopped and looked at Lloyd, grinning slyly, and Lloyd felt despair wash over him again. It was all just a trick.
“Did I introduce myself? The name is Flagg, with the double g. Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Lloyd croaked.
“And I think, before I open this cell and we go get some dinner, we ought to have a little understanding, Lloyd.”
“Sure thing,” Lloyd croaked, and began to cry again.
“I’m going to make you my righthand man, Lloyd. Going to put you right up there with Saint Peter. When I open this door, I’m going to slip the keys to the kingdom right into your hand. What a deal, right?”
“Yeah,” Lloyd whispered, growing frightened again. It was almost full dark now. Flagg was little more than a dark shape, but his eyes were still perfectly visible. They seemed to glow in the dark like the eyes of a lynx, one to the left of the bar that ended in the lockbox, one to the right. Lloyd felt terror, but something else as well: a kind of religious ecstasy. A pleasure. The pleasure of being chosen. The feeling that he had somehow won through… to something.
“You’d like to get even with the people who left you here, isn’t that right?”
“Boy, that sure is,” Lloyd said, forgetting his terror momentarily. It was swallowed up by a starving, sinewy anger.
“Not just those people, but everyone who would do a thing like that,” Flagg suggested. “It’s a type of person, isn’t it? To a certain type of person, a man like you is nothing but garbage. Because they are high up. They don’t think a person like you has a right to live.”
“That’s just right,” Lloyd said. His great hunger had suddenly been changed into a different kind of hunger. It had changed just as surely as the black stone had changed into the silver key. This man had expressed all the complex things he had felt in just a handful of sentences. It wasn’t just the gate-guard he wanted to get even with—why, here’s the wise-ass pusbag, what’s the story, pusbag, got anything smart to say? —because the gate-guard wasn’t the one. The gate-guard had had THE KEY, all right, but the gate-guard had not made THE KEY. Someone had given it to him. The warden, Lloyd supposed, but the warden hadn’t made THE KEY, either. Lloyd wanted to find the makers and forgers. They would be immune to the flu, and he had business with them. Oh yes, and it was good business.
“You know what the Bible says about people like that?” Flagg asked quietly. “It says the exalted shall be abased and the mighty shall be brought low and the stiffnecked shall be broken. And you know what it says about people like you, Lloyd? It says blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And it says blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.”
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html
Stephen King
The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition
Chapter 27
“As a banker, my husband believed in diamonds. He believed in them the way the Baptists believe in Revelations. I have a great many diamonds, and they are all insured. We not only owned a piece of the rock, my Harry and I, I sometimes believed we held a lien on the whole goddam thing. But if someone should want my diamonds, I would hand them over. After all, they’re only rocks again, aren’t they?”
“I guess that’s right.”
“Of course,” she said, and the tic on the side of her neck jumped again. “And if a stick-up man wanted them, I’d not only hand them over, I would give him the address of Cartier’s. Their selection of rocks is much better than my own.”
“What are you going to do now?” Larry asked her.
“What would you suggest?”
“I just don’t know,” Larry said, and sighed.
“My answer exactly.”
“You know something? I saw a guy this morning who said he was going out to Yankee Stadium and je… and masturbate on home plate.” He could feel himself blushing again.
“What an awful walk for him,” she said. “Why didn’t you suggest something closer?” She sighed, and the sigh turned into a shudder. She opened her purse, took out a bottle of pills, and popped a gel capsule into her mouth.
“What’s that?” Larry asked.
“Vitamin E,” she said with a glittering, false smile. The tic in her neck jumped once or twice and then stopped. She became serene again.
“There’s nobody in the bars,” Larry said suddenly. “I went into Pat’s on Forty-third and it was totally empty. They have that great big mahogany bar and I went behind it and poured myself a water glass full of Johnnie Walker. Then I didn’t even want to be there. So I left it sitting on the bar and got out.”
They sighed together, like a chorus.
“You’re very pleasant to be with,” she said. “I like you very much. And it’s wonderful that you’re not crazy.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Blakemoor.” He was surprised and pleased.
“Rita. I’m Rita.”
“Okay.”
“Are you hungry, Larry?”
“As a matter of fact, I am.”
“Perhaps you’d take the lady to lunch.”
“That would be a pleasure.”
She stood up and offered him her arm with a slightly deprecatory smile. As he linked his through it, he caught a whiff of her sachet, a smell that was at once comforting and disquietingly adult in its associations for him, almost old. His mother had worn sachet on their many trips to the movies together.
Then he forgot about it as they walked out of the park and up Fifth Avenue, away from the dead monkey, the monster-shouter, and the dark sweet treat sitting endlessly inside the comfort station on Transverse Number One. She chattered incessantly, and later he could remember no one thing she had chattered about (yes, just one: she had always dreamed, she said, of strolling up Fifth Avenue on the arm of a handsome young man, a man who was young enough to have been her own son but who wasn’t), but he recalled the walk often just the same, especially after she began to jitter apart like some indifferently made toy. Her beautiful smile, her light, cynical, casual chatter, the whisper of her slacks.
They went into a steak house and Larry cooked, a trifle clumsily, but she applauded each course: the steak
- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 05:30 AM Pacific Time somewhere near Seattle Washington USA Saturday 15 February 2014
