Page 129 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

“Neither do I. But when he rouses fully, he will see right through you. You only got to sass-mouth the darkness that lies beneath all things because he is still gathering his strength. His flock. His wonderful, irresistible machines and all they can do. It will all happen again. Because you cannot have that clever, shiny complicated human world without him. Take one, the other rises. He is not yet awake, but when he is, you won’t fool anyone.

And it is too early for his opposite number to protect you.

He will claim you. The seed of him in you will yearn to do terrible things, if it does not already.

And if I know my man, he’ll turn you loose on this world like a pet wolf. And you’ll like it.”

Fern knew the black bird was right. She remembered the towns dying around her. She remembered the cold inside her mind scraping the hills for someone weak. She remembered what the cold wanted. How good it felt.

“At least I won’t be alone,” Fern said hopefully.

The crow cawed horribly, like a dry laugh.

“Yeah. Good luck with that.” His violet-black throat glistened.

“There’s a story, you know. Long ago. Far away.

Before America knew its own name. In the age of kings and vassals, the Devil set upon a noblewoman and got upon her his great and ravenous son come to end the world, who was called Robert.

And this son was a good boy to both his parents.

He loved his mother purely. And he caused death and mayhem wherever he went, as his father taught him.

He delighted in blood and entrails and the burning of grapevines.

In the prime of his strength, Robert, the son of the Devil, went on a crusade with a song in his heart and became the scourge of the East. His father was proud.

But Robert was still a man, if only just, and he missed his mother.

He journeyed home to her, taking his pleasure in the screams of the reddening countryside as he traveled.

But when he came to his mother’s castle and she looked on him, he saw himself reflected in her eyes.

Black with blood and pain and cruelty, a beast with no mind.

She threw herself from a high tower and smashed her brains out on the stones below.

And from that day, Robert turned away from his father.

He took a vow of silence and of peace. The son of the Devil closed himself in a monastery and would not answer his father’s voice.

His virtue grew so great it became as armor, and the Devil could not touch him.

Robert died a-bed many years later, a good and honest man, though every minute of denying his true nature felt to him as a hundred thousand deaths, an agony beyond agonies. ”

Tears poured down Fern’s strange little face. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“I don’t know. You figure it out.” The crow’s black tongue flicked in and out. It hopped around nervously on the dark grain. “He’s coming. He’s almost here. Wake up. Wake up, Fern .”

Winter, 2024

They’re building a church in the Adirondacks.

They’re building churches everywhere now.

Preachers are as plentiful as viral vectors and twice as contagious.

Rumors thread a sour needle from town to town.

Of a man across the sea who still has all his toys.

A man who promises he can fix it. Fix everything.

Of the bad old days come to ride again. Of wheels and how they turn.

There are some things you can’t ever get back. But war isn’t one of them. War is always happy to host a revival. Not today, not next year. It needs time to get everything just right.

But a long time from now, the church will still be there. The statues. The stained glass windows lovingly made by a nice old man named Oliver Bailey, who still remembers when he dreamed of Nebraska in the night and wishes sometimes those dreams still stopped by.

The windows will go up after the snow melts. All the saints. The green mother. The man with the red dog. The singer of songs. The quiet father. The martyr who spoke with his hands. The man in the straw hat.

Even the schoolteacher has her place, just as she had her lesson to teach. Oliver grinds the edge down on the milky blue glass of her baby’s swaddling as the schoolteacher holds her child in her arms, born, and whole, and innocent at last.

Mr. Bailey up there living cozy in someone else’s house never knew any of them, and he doesn’t remember names too well anymore.

But that’s not important. He was old already when all this began, and he’s tired now.

The last bad winter took his wife. This is his last good work.

How he chose to spend the last of his soul.

Oliver looks down at his workbench, at his withered hands.

At a thousand shards of color, half-assembled.

Smashed lampshades and suncatchers and fancy dinner plates and any other glass they could scare up.

Maybe he was too ambitious. Maybe the job was too big for the time he has left.

Sometimes the parts are all there, but it still doesn’t work.

Too many. Too many shards. Too crowded. Too much.

He just wants to do right by them. He just wants to make them shine like the twilit wheat of his dreams.

And he will. Oliver Bailey won’t see the big ships start sailing the seas again, or the wars when they come fast as crows—or when they pass, just as swift. He won’t hear anybody say what pretty windows those are, and that’s okay by him. They’re pretty whether anyone says so or not.

I know because I spent last Christmas in that brand-new church, and you’d never believe how fine those windows turned the light.

Oliver Bailey chose a quiet, pretty thing and cleaved to it.

Everybody gets a choice, and the ones you make at the end pay for all.

But he will do right by the color and the shards. He will do right by the light.

And you will, too, honey. I just know it, whoever you are. You’ll do right by us all.

Fern Ramsey quietly slid Kimberley Lynn McKiver’s pages back into their Ziploc bag, then unzipped the Bullfrog’s orange vinyl bike trailer and lay it gently on top of the stack.

Fern liked Mrs. McKiver. She liked the way she talked about things.

About Lake Keowee and the whale and the elephant and the glassmaker.

She liked how she could tell that lady was someone’s mother, with every word.

As Fern packed everything back where she found it (God knew why she bothered, but she always did), a sharp, shivery shock forked through her belly. There was more, down there under the manuscript. At the bottom of the swampy box. Something just for her.

Kimberley Lynn McKiver had left one last freezer bag, full to straining.

A first-aid kit, blister packs full of - dones and - cillins , antiseptic wipes, water-purification tablets, a bottle of multivitamins, a crisp, folded map, and absurdly, endearingly, a couple of packets of gummy fruit snacks from some long-vanished lunch box.

Fern had snagged a fair number of these boxes, but none like this. The other boxes all said, Remember me . None said, I remembered you . None ever had a care for her, for whoever might come, whenever they might, what they might need to keep going.

Fern thought about that for a long time.

About the McKivers’ peaceful bones in the upstairs bedroom dreaming the centuries down.

About poor Barry burning wisdom. About Petteri’s father and his wing of flame.

About the potato man treating his Yukons so tenderly.

About King Sue on her throne and Tommy Fortunado’s last stand.

About an old man trying so hard to change the color and the angle of light he’d never see.

Of Grandfather Whale in his private hidden universe.

About NEED and WANT .

Everyone gets a choice.

Out on the driveway, under the gold-blue virgin light of dawn, a crow lay crumpled and dead like a shadow.

Fern stood over it for a long time, with no expression on her face.

This Autumn

Two elephants named Layla and Sayang sway woozily in the soft, beanpod-crisp autumn light.

The old corn they gorge on makes them very unserious.

They come up slowly over a rise in the long gray road and look out over the wild wrinkled plain of Missouri.

Layla is so old now. Her knees hurt. And she is one of a long line of Laylas now; her son part of a chain of Sayangs.

She nudges her grown calf’s gaze. Look at the giraffes down there drinking from the thick river. Look at the caracals playing. Look at the lions snoozing under the silver arch. Hippo heads humping up out of the Mississippi.

So many. So many from so many corners and so many mating seasons since the small ones left us to roam back and forth across the cracks and stones of this continent.

So many because others instinctively performed the same behaviors as Amir and Zara.

The small ones were a kind of animal that did that, the way Layla trumpeted.

Not all of them, oh no, certainly not. But a hefty chunk of the herd.

Some creatures got free in lucky places. Some got trapped in places that boiled under the sizzling silvery Great Elephant Bullfather’s foot that years ago came trampling down from the sky to trample the desert, to smash everything it did not burn.

Layla shuddered. Layla tries to forget the stories that have been passed down.

Layla can’t.

Layla tails the memory away like a blackfly.

She bonks her head against her boy’s flank.

Look long, my son. My Sayang. Breathe deep.

You can still smell the horses and the dogs and hogs and mules that are long gone from this place.

Their manure and their bones. The cows that got to be so many they ruined all the earth they devoured and stomped flat and then they were few enough again.

You can still smell the long black broken tusks the small ones used on each other when they could not find food.

You can still find them lying scattered across the new veldt like the skinny dark lines that once made the shape E N C L O S U R E.

But see rhinoceroses chomping sneezeweed in the valley.

Hear the zebras thundering down there, galloping through peach orchards and soybean fields in their vast herds.

The monkeys have gone, too, and more besides.

But so many have taken their places. Beware the tigers in the foothills, uncowarded by our size.

Existence is a season, and soon enough done.

Layla stretches her hind legs, one, then the other.

She nudges her baby, now larger than herself, toward a sturdy stick half-sunk in dark mud.

Sayang curls his soft trunk around it, hesitantly, wanting with all his being to do everything right for Mama.

She shows him how. She shows him the shape of the Otherwhile.

In the high-occupancy lane of Interstate 70 where Illinois becomes Missouri and winds on farther still, an elephant slowly paints a black flower exactly the way a dead woman in Cincinnati once did.

By the time Sayang finishes, there’s a small one standing next to them on the road. Wearing a shirt with shapes that say THE BOSS and pulling a big orange something behind her.

A few inches off the road, which isn’t how small ones are supposed to work. Layla doesn’t know what to make of her smell. Halfway between wild stink and tame.

With a very great effort, Fern Ramsey brings herself back down to earth. She stands with two feet on the ground. It hurts like a hundred thousand deaths. It hurts every single second. It will hurt every single second of her life.

But she stands.

Fern only dreams of the schoolhouse now. She strokes the schoolteacher’s white hair, and it seems to make the woman relax. The bell recedes. She thinks only dully. The pain of every millisecond’s conscious choosing hides her from the other place, from her father.

And when this long road through the plains reaches Colorado, Fern Ramsey will stay on the outskirts of the town.

Just to be safe. Just to be sure. She will build a cabin with her hands.

She will eat fish and apples. And she will stand a watch.

She will look on them, smiling. She will watch them stumble, and struggle, and then she will watch them do okay. So gorgeously okay.

Fern Ramsey will slip away in her sleep, safe and invisible, long before the wheel reaches its next zenith. No one special. No one worth noticing. Not even Fern. Maybe Fiona. Or Flora. Or Frances.

But today she is still Fern. She puts her hand, as light as forgetting, on a baby elephant’s back.

And nothing bad happens. The three of them walk on together. For a little while.

In a thousand years, the innumerable sons and daughters of Sayang that come to occupy the hottest swath of the Great Plains will still paint precisely the same flowers, precisely the same way, whenever they smell the rains coming. Zara’s black sunflowers, blooming all over the breast of the divide.

Everything expires. But that doesn’t always mean it goes bad.