Page 120 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

For a few minutes no one spoke. Val studied her friend’s drawn, tired face, the two dull spots under his eyes where the few seconds of exposure this morning had given him frostbite. They all had it. She said, “I didn’t dream of her. I dreamt about hunting. A big stag with blue eyes.”

It was not as if a dam broke then, but the dreams did trickle out, with great reluctance. Ethan had dreamt of being chased by wolves, strange ones, glossy blue-black like magpie feathers.

Lois spoke in a weepy murmur, as if ashamed: the child atop a mountain, but the mountain wasn’t insensible stone.

It was alive and obedient to her every word, waiting only for her to speak.

And the child’s father stood behind her, smiling with beautiful white teeth, the only thing visible in a face not shadowed but made of shadow.

Val twitched; Bashir gave her a curious look, and she pretended she hadn’t seen it. “Anybody else?” she croaked.

Willa said she hadn’t dreamt of the child at all, and Val believed her; Martin said he hadn’t either, but she didn’t believe him, and that was strange.

She had known Martin for years, worked side by side with him at the plant till he had been transferred out of her team.

She had never seen anything that rang the smallest alarm bell in her head.

Was one ringing now? She hated the idea that the dreams were scrambling her gut feelings.

“It’s nothing,” Val said, since everyone was looking at her. “It’s just… brains, it’s just dreams. If we had come across a whale washed up from the lake, we’d all be dreaming about whales.”

That got a few weak laughs. No one spoke of the search party again, or a serial killer; no one asked what they would do with Dean Monahan’s body. It was not something Willa should hear even with a full Valium under her belt. That would be for tomorrow, in the daylight.

Val checked on the little girl, whispered some reassurances, and wrapped herself in her last, most threadbare blanket on the floor next to the cot.

Now there was no trusting dreams, there was no distinguishing the dream from the real.

Someone was telling Val about faces , and how the word did not mean simply the material that covered the front of a skull.

Faces were something else, came from somewhere else, and no one could see a true face here, not here.

Why not here? she asked, disliking that she could not see the speaker.

She woke abruptly, and lay in the darkness for several heart-racing minutes, deciding whether she was awake or not. Eventually her eyes adjusted and she decided something had woken her, and it had not been the dream. The house was quiet and cold below her, the only sound that of the sleepers.

And the cot at her side was empty.

She was up with a speed she did not believe possible, scrambling down the ladder, half falling the last three rungs.

No light in the bathroom, lumps on the floor still asleep, the correct number.

Had the child crawled in with one of the others?

Check the rest of the house first, panic after that. Maybe it was for nothing.

Something moved in the gap under the office door; Val thought she would pass out from relief. Okay. Kid went back to the first place she had slept in, that was all. Maybe it felt safer down here. Okay, okay. The sound of the girl climbing out of her cot must have woken her, the creak of the floor.

Val opened the door and stopped dead.

The child did not notice her right away, or perhaps Val was meant to believe she was beneath notice. The girl knelt on the desk, staring out the unshuttered window, humming softly to herself, her dark hair loosed from the braid Lois had put it in.

Outside, not ten yards from the house, the animals were back—the predators, the low and crawling things, and they had not torn someone apart but were still tearing as the body thrashed and struggled, one hand rising pale in the moonlight, then going slack, falling to the snow.

And it was not the creatures doing the carving, no.

Only the killing. Mixed among them, low and crawling themselves, even lower, were other children—naked in the murderous cold, hair straggling over their backs like manes, knives of stone in their tiny hands.

Val backed away, unthinking, as if the terrible tableau outside would suddenly break apart like a flock of birds and attack the window—she had a clear and sickening vision of their bodies hitting the glass, tumbling inside, bouncing up to hamstring her or slice her heel—and the child turned at last, and smiled at her with tiny, even teeth.

Val screamed then, and fled, and slammed the door behind her, running back to the living room, where the lights were turning on and voices rose in response to her own.

“Why in the hell did Willa go outside?” Ethan’s voice was weak and small, as if he were imitating someone else. He looked the same way he sounded, Val thought—deflated, like someone who had lost a hundred pounds overnight and still wore the extra skin. “I don’t understand . I just…”

“Well, what the hell was Dean doing outside?” Val said, trying to stamp out the quaver in her voice. “And both of them naked… You answered your own question. They didn’t go because they wanted to. They went because someone told them to. And—”

“Don’t say someone!” Lois broke in, at a pitch so high they all turned to stare at her. “Why are we saying someone ? We all know only one man has the power to do… things like that. Everybody knows that. That’s known .”

“The dark man is dead,” Val said. “That’s known, too.

Him and anyone he gave… any little sliver of his power.

People went down there to look, Lois. Take measurements, photos, prove it all happened the way it was written.

They’re all dead.” She held up a hand before the older woman could state the obvious.

“I know, I know. Some people thought he couldn’t die.

Those people were all proved wrong. It’s been twenty-one years.

It’s not him. I… Something else has to be happening. ”

“How is that better ?” Ethan burst out.

“Calm down,” Val said. She glanced at Bashir, returning from the kitchen and drying his hands on a dish towel. “Bash, did Willa say anything to you last night?”

He shook his head, then sagged at the knees and sat on the couch next to Martin. “Obviously she was upset,” he said. “What happened to her husband… But she didn’t present any indications that she intended to end her own life.”

Martin said, “Well, the next question is what are we going to do about th—”

“I don’t care about the nuclear bomb !” Lois snapped, thrashing out of her chair, stumbling over the blankets still pooled on the rug; Ethan caught her before she could fall, then let go, startled, as she flailed at his face.

“I don’t care what they said they found!

I saw it in my dream, Valerie, and I think the rest of you are liars if you say you didn’t—you lied to yourselves last night and you lied to the rest of us, and that child is the spawn of him !

The dark man! Did he die without leaving any part of himself in this world?

Do you truly think that? Then you’re more fools than anyone who followed him to the desert, you are , you are liars and imbeciles ! ”

Frozen in shock, Valerie could think only of that movie with the Devil and the priests and the little girl, of the voices —the thick, vomit-clotted sounds of hell coming from that little girl’s body.

They had sounded nothing like her. Lois still sounded like Lois, but Val had never heard this harsh, braying screech from her—not even a raised voice.

This wasn’t possession, it was just the sound of insanity, Lois had simply cracked in some deep and fundamental way. They could treat it, and—

Lois peeled past Ethan, the big man swiping ineffectually at her with one slow-moving paw, and vanished down the hallway toward the office. The cabin wasn’t that big; Val caught up in moments, but it was still almost too late.

She and Bashir wrestled Lois to the floor, shocked by her strength, the snakelike power of her.

Val was ashamed of herself even as she slammed Lois’s thin hand against the desk till the letter opener she had been brandishing fell to the carpet, only half-aware that the child had fled the office at a run.

“Stay here,” she gasped to Bashir. “I don’t know if you can—I don’t know, tie her up or something—I have to—”

“Go, see if she’s all right.”

“Jesus Christ, this motherfucking day,” Val muttered under her breath, returning to the living room.

The little girl was all right, thank God; in retrospect, Val thought Lois’s surest sign of insanity was assuming that even with the element of surprise she could kill a kid with a letter opener.

Martin and Ethan flanked her, awkwardly, both with an air of fretful self-consciousness, as if they had been invited to touch something fragile and they would really rather not.

Didn’t see it before , Val thought with light surprise. We’ve forgotten how to parent; we’ve forgotten what it looks like, what we’re supposed to do. “Everyone okay?”

“I nearly peed myself when Lois smacked me,” Ethan said. “Is she all right?”

“Don’t think so,” Val said. “We’re all under a lot of stress right now, with the murders and the… animals and the… everything. Bash has her, though. She’ll be fine.”

“Glad she didn’t hurt anyone,” Ethan said.

“Yes,” Martin said, and there it was in the single syllable, there was the thing Val had been thinking about for that single moment, looking into Lois’s eyes and hearing Lois’s voice, and now she looked into Martin’s eyes and heard a different voice.

The child gazed up at him, blinking. There was another in the room, unseen, only heard.

No. Imagining it. I just said we were all under a lot of stress. I just said it. “Well,” Val said. “Let’s—”