Page 108 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

She knew only what he looked like from the author photo on the dust jacket of his book—a handsome, studious gentleman in a tweed sports coat, whose eyes sparkled with the knowledge of a thousand lifetimes.

What Jacob Cree had known, of course, was the reason he was here, and the giddiness Zarah now felt as that makeshift wagon came to a stop and a man in a tweed sports coat was helped down, was unlike any sensation she had ever felt in her lifetime.

She felt buoyed , as if she might at any moment lift right off the pavement and sail unencumbered into the atmosphere.

Jacob Cree was led up to the dais, where Ted Lomm made a throaty announcement.

The women in the street clapped politely, while the men, farther back from the road, nodded silently in appreciation.

Cree stood there on the dais beside Ted, a suitcase as black as obsidian at his side, surveying the crowd.

For a moment, Zarah thought his eyes settled directly on her, where his stare lingered.

What is he thinking right now? she wondered.

What notions are coming into his brain, as if from the ether, and seeding there?

When Ted was finished with his speech, he urged Cree to stand front and center to address the crowd.

“My official presentation won’t be until tomorrow,” Cree said, and Zarah was delighted to hear that his was a strong, cultured, satisfying voice, “so I will keep this brief. But I wanted to thank you all for inviting me here to meet and speak with you. I hope this proves to be a pleasant experience, and that at the very least, I’ll leave you all with some modicum of peace. You are not alone .”

Again, the women applauded and the men nodded their approval.

A motley assortment of musicians had been culled from the town—a trumpet player, someone with a set of bagpipes, an acoustic guitarist, a snare drum strapped to one man’s chest—and as Jacob Cree was led back down from the dais, they all began to play.

The music was awful—Zarah couldn’t help but laugh a little to herself, as did a number of the other women who had gathered to greet the prophet.

She was still laughing about it as she filed into a queue, and each woman shook Cree’s hand as he walked down the line.

They each had to say a single word of their choosing, so when Cree approached Zarah, she said, “Blessed.”

His smile was a million miles.

Zarah was pleased to find his hand cool and dry, his grip firm but not aggressive. He looked her straight in the eye as he held her hand, and she imagined she could see an entire universe swirling inside the tar-black pupils of his eyes.

She watched Cree move down the line, then vanish into Ted Lomm’s house along with the members of the town council.

It was only then that Zarah looked around at the faces of the men in attendance, and ultimately spotted Benjamin standing among them. Even from such a distance, she could recognize something dark and seething behind the mask of his face, and it was a thing that Zarah Smith didn’t trust.

Not in the least.

4

Jacob was given an entire house to himself for the night, which was rarely the case whenever he would visit these remote villages.

Water was brought in from a well and a tub was filled for him to bathe in.

He was also offered fresh clothes, but he only patted his clamshell suitcase and said that he had everything he needed, but thank you.

After his bath, however, he pulled on the same clothes he’d been wearing all day—with the exception of the tweed sports coat, since it was a nice night out.

He was told that his induction dinner was to be sponsored by a Benjamin Lewis and a Zarah Smith. Yet when he arrived at the house, only the woman was present. He didn’t ask about the man’s whereabouts.

She was young, mildly attractive in a plain-looking way, and with a face that seemed eager to soak up whatever knowledge he might wish to impart.

She smiled at him when she answered the door, and if she thought it odd he carried his suitcase with him, she didn’t say anything about it.

Later, as she leaned over and lit the mismatched collage of candles at the center of the table in preparation for their meal, he noticed she was in the early stages of pregnancy.

“I was told your village has electricity,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. She had just lit the final candle, yet she kept her arm hovering above them as if she’d made some mistake and was considering how to correct it.

“We do. It’s just that I thought the candles would be a nice touch.

They make this feel more ceremonial. Would you prefer I turn the lights on?

I’ve got permission this evening because of your visit. ”

He smiled as he set his linen napkin in his lap. “No, it’s fine. The candles are lovely,” he told her.

“I also have music,” she said. She went over to one corner of the room, where a small record player sat on a console.

A stack of 45s stood in a small tower nearby.

She began to riffle through them, reciting the song titles and artists’ names as she did so: “I’ve got ‘Yellow Submarine’ by the Beatles, and ‘Crying’ by Roy Orbison, and ‘Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?’ by Larry Underwood, and—”

“No music. Please. Come sit. Let’s eat.”

She had baked fresh bread and made a salad and prepared a stew, which was delicious if a bit hot for such a warm summer evening.

She poured him a glass of red wine from a ceramic jug, then poured herself a cup of water.

The wine tasted overly fruity, and Zarah explained that they made their own—that there was a whole garden in the back field where they hollowed out coconuts and filled them with raisins and sugar until they fermented in the ground.

“Sometimes the deer find them and get drunk,” she told him.

“Have you ever seen a drunk deer? They just sort of amble around in the road and sometimes come right up to the houses. You can walk right up and pet one if it’s drunk enough, though I don’t suggest you do that to any of the bucks.

” With her hands, she mimed having an invisible set of antlers rising up from her head.

Then she peered down at the suitcase that stood beside his chair.

“This is a good town. No one is going to steal your things, Mr. Cree. You don’t have to carry that everywhere you go. ”

“Yes, I do,” he said.

“What’s in it?” she asked.

“Humanity’s future.”

“Oh,” she said, and her voice was suddenly very small.

He smiled and nodded, and happened to glimpse his book behind her on the counter. She caught him looking and quickly glanced down at her half-eaten plate, visibly embarrassed.

“Have you read it?” he asked.

“Seven times.”

“Wow. Seven? Really?”

“It’s terribly frightening.”

He got up from the table and went over to the counter. His book, the one that started it all, was covered in plastic film and had a library sticker on the spine. He opened it and looked at the copyright page. “Hey. First edition,” he said. It had a real dollar value, if that meant anything anymore.

“Did you really foresee all of those things? Everything that happened?”

He closed the book and returned to his chair. It was a question he was asked all the time, which he found strange, since the people who always asked it were also true believers.

“It was my first novel,” he said. “I woke up from a nap one afternoon with the sentences burning in my brain. I went to my typewriter and it was like the words were burning through my fingertips, too. I wrote furiously over a few months’ time.

It felt like I was channeling some divine intercept, a language from another world. ”

“From God?”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” he said, and he nodded at the gold cross Zarah wore around her neck on a chain. “I’ve never been a religious man.”

“Not even after all that’s happened?”

He smiled without humor. He was still staring at that gold cross around her neck. “Did you ever think how funny it is, the symbol of the cross?”

Absently, she reached up and fingered the charm at her throat. “How so?”

“It’s the tool by which your supposed savior was brutally murdered. That’s like having a loved one beaten to death with a hammer, only to kneel and pray to the hammer.”

The look on Zarah’s face told him he had once again gone too far.

“I’m sorry,” he quickly amended. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was crass. And you’re correct, Zarah—there are plenty of stories of God speaking in mysterious ways in the Bible, so who’s to say you’re wrong and I’m right?”

“That’s true,” she said. “But the Bible can be left up to interpretation. Your book, however…”

He nodded, blotting the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “Yes,” he said. “My book is pretty specific.”

“You’re a prophet , Mr. Cree. You foresaw everything that happened—the superflu accidentally released in the Mojave Desert, the descriptions of death and dying, the events in Colorado.

There was once even a traveler who came through here who spoke of nuclear destruction in Las Vegas, just like you’d written about.

Your novel even mentions the shared dreams that some people claimed to have had of Abagail Freemantle, the old woman in Nebraska. ”

“Well, some things aren’t that precise. I suppose even prophets can get things wrong from time to time. For example, in my novel—in my visions —the old woman’s name was Arlene Froam, and she was living on a farm in Wyoming.”

“It’s miraculous.”