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Stephen King

The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition

Chapter 55


“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?”

“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?”

“Yes.”

“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 pat-a-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 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.”



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 5:23 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Tuesday 08 July 2014