Page 137 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

“You kept muttering in your sleep,” she explains as they walk over, “and it was creeping me out, so I started pacing around. Found myself over here, looking at all this crap, thinking about how useless all this was with no one around to buy it, but maybe that makes it more useful than ever because it’s a snapshot of how things used to be—and then I looked up and—”

She points a finger to one side of the room, next to some sweatshirts that read UTAH . Her finger is trembling.

There’s a door there.

A dark, rich, mahogany door. Completely out of place.

If his throat weren’t already dry…

“Do you see it?” She asks. Begs. “Do you really see it?”

“0-385-12991-2,” he reads aloud. Not the same numbers on his drawing… but the same format. “What does that mean?”

She says she doesn’t know. Her voice shakes.

The earth does, too. Faintly. Tremors beginning again? Or maybe that’s just his legs.

“What do we do?” She whispers. “Do I… open it?”

No , he wants to scream. Don’t you dare!

Instead, quietly: “You sure this wasn’t already here?”

“I’m not sure of anything.”

He wills himself to be bold. “I’ll try,” he says, then marches over and yanks on the shining brass knob.

It doesn’t open.

“Fake,” he says. Satisfied and relieved. “Probably just some extra door somebody left here. Or—”

He notices etchings in the knob’s surface. A hand covered in eyeballs. He recoils.

“What?” She asks, coming closer.

“Nothing.” Wiping his own hand on his pants leg.

“Do you feel that, though? It’s like… warmth?” She reaches out, stirs the air in front of the door. “Almost feels like there’s a fire on the other side or something. And do you smell—”

Before he can stop her, she touches the wood.

The door swings inward with great force. Like an airplane door midflight.

For the briefest of instants, Ezra sees what looks like a beach on the other side. A bonfire. The smell of meat burning. Then Susie is sucked through without even time enough to scream, and the door slams shut.

Just like that. She’s gone.

Ezra screams for her.

“No! NO!”

He yanks on the door. It’s cold to the touch. Solid as rock.

Don’t leave me here alone with the crazies. No!

He continues shouting apologies, pleas for her to come back, but soon his voice is overtaken by the sound of cracking wood and concrete.

The earthquakes have begun again. With a vengeance.

He runs, narrowly avoiding falling light fixtures and crumbling walls. The building is collapsing in on itself.

Next thing he knows, he’s outside in the moonlight. Running through the park. The trees, the natural splendor, all of it bucking and churning, glistening with the recent rain, spotlit by a giant moon that’s almost as bright as the sun.

“No,” he keeps repeating. “No, no, no. Stop this!”

A door , he understands with sudden and horrible clarity. That’s my only way out of here. There must be a door for me somewhere, too. Otherwise—

A massive line of trees snaps and buckles. Fall into what appears to be a widening mouth in the ground somewhere behind him.

“NO!” he shouts, running deeper into the park. Uphill. Using other trees to propel him as fast as he can move through darkness and unsteady terrain.

Hard to breathe. Throat tight and swollen. He has to spit to keep his mouth from filling up with salty mucous.

And that mystery noise. So loud out here in the parklands. So loud he can make out defining details within it. Beeping. Wheezing. So loud he can finally hear where it’s coming from.

It’s coming from the moon. That awful, unnaturally bright moon.

At last, he comes upon a granite cliffside. He scrambles up as high as he can, shirt pulling out of his pants, clothes smearing with mud, until he finds a stable-feeling nook that can hold him.

He looks down at the parklands.

About two football fields away, there’s a jagged slash running through all he can see. On the opposite side of that slash…

He gasps, horrified.

Nothing.

No trees. No earth. No stars. Unquestionable, capital- N Nothingness. Pure. Awful in its lack. Reverent in its completeness.

Just the night, that’s all! It’s just dark over there! I’ve survived. I’VE SURVIVED.

“Why exactly are you running?”

His head whips up and to the right.

Tom Bombadil—the not–Tom Bombadil—sits astride a fly the size of a Shetland pony hovering in the night air. Its wings whir. Its many eyes observe Ezra with disinterest. Ezra notices its round, loathsome body is covered in black crow feathers. Tom strokes the fly’s head.

“I told you,” Bombadil continues. “You can’t fight this. It’s beyond your control and you’re just making it harder on yourself. There’s been a revision. A rewrite. You simply didn’t make the cut. It’s nothing personal.”

“None of that makes any sense!” Ezra is gasping. “This isn’t right!”

“Look up at the moon if you really want answers, friend.”

Those excruciating noises. Beeping. Coughing. Screaming. Wailing.

Ezra makes sure to not look. He keeps his eyes on Tom. Awful Tom. His yellow trench coat like a smear of irradiated French’s mustard against the night.

“Where’s my door?” Ezra moans. “Please?! Don’t I get one, too?”

“Not everyone gets a door. Not everyone’s canonical.”

The sky begins to change colors. Checkerboard patterns of bright, impossible neon.

Down below, untouched by the bright, the splintering, shattering Nothingness creeps closer.

Bombadil continues, arms spreading wide.

“Not every tower stands! Most crumble unnoticed! There’s no shame in being erased! There’s no shame in being Another Corpse! Anonymous Creation! Accidental Character!”

The earth bucks harder and harder. Rocks separate from their granite perch and skitter down the cliff.

“It’s never fair!” Bobmadil proclaims. “Oh, Discordia! To which Discordia replies, ‘No great loss!’?”

The garish multicolor of the sky is as bright as fireworks, affording Ezra the ability to watch as Tom’s skin glistens and inflates.

His neck loses definition under a glottal bulge.

Purulent sores erupt and leak white, curdling spray.

No, not spray. Maggots. Squirming out of his wounds, squeezing out of his eyes and wriggling down his cheeks.

He smiles widely and more maggots spill out over his teeth like wormy porridge.

The fly’s wings drill into the air—joining the cacophony of the earth collapsing below, the sounds coming from the moon.

“No great loss! The clock is red! This is nine! Nine! All of your friends are dead!”

He’s not the real Tom Bombadil , Ezra realizes. It feels like his own skin is on fire. Tom was kind. Ambivalent, but kind. This is some mad demon tormenting a dying world. He won’t help me.

Not-Tom’s flesh continues to slough and liquify. Maggots, centipedes, thick and greedy leeches pour out of widening fistulas.

“Oh, Discordia! The clock is red!”

All I’ve got is myself. Myself and… and SuperLawyer!

Ezra begins to laugh dementedly. Yes! We can litigate anything! Even the end of the world!

Tom joins him in the mad laughter. “Ezra’s ensō is donezo! There’s been a rewrite! The King is in his counting house! He found enough glue, but not for you!”

“I’m not going to be erased,” Ezra manages. Even though his voice is barely audible under all the other thundering noises. “I’m going to live!”

“Say hellogoodbye to the Beast!” Tom shrieks. “He got the write-out, too! You say why and I say I don’t know, oh no!”

Ezra throws himself onto the ground and, in the mud and dirt, draws a door with his finger. It’s been a long time since he’s drawn anything and the world is bucking and shivering, so it’s not the best-looking door, but it gets the job done. It tells the story.

“I have a door now, okay?! Let me out of here!”

Tears streaking down his cheeks, he finally steals a look at the moon. It’s a bright light. Like the kind that hangs over a surgery table. A gigantic faceless figure leans into the light, observing him. Electronic beeping and wheezing drown the world. The light swells, like his throat.

No time!

The world crumbles all around him. Swallowed into the Nothingness eating through the base of his granite safehold.

He closes his eyes and tries to grip the door handle he sketched in the ground.

Perhaps it’s the final wish of a doomed man, but he swears he feels something in his hand. He twists… pulls…

It won’t open. The door won’t open!

Then he remembers his father’s voice.

A second chance.

He kneels down, pulls the folded drawing from his jacket pocket, and, refusing to let the earth shake him loose, writes the numbers from his dream onto the door.

978-1-66805-7551

“I OBJECT TO THIS MADNESS!” he screams in triumph once he’s finished. “YOU HEAR ME?! I OBJECT ! I WILL LIVE!” He grabs hold of the knob once more. “I AM LIFE ITSELF AND I OBJ—”

With an all-too-familiar wet rattle, the patient on the gurney spasmed and stilled.

Dr. Alvin Carhart barely noticed the deaths by this point. There were so many, happening so quickly, even in this small hospital in Green River, Utah. And yet, for some reason, this one caught his attention. This patient really had seemed to rally for a moment there.

Under the harsh fluorescent lights, Dr. Carhart stared down at the swollen, mucus-encrusted body and wondered: What goes through the mind as it dies?

This was followed by a much more unpleasant thought: Probably find out myself soon enough.

Dr. Carhart folded that thought and tucked it away with a professional’s economy.

There were ten other bodies, hacking and gasping, in this room alone. Ventilators (for the few who’d had time to be hooked up) wheezing. Heart monitors beeping erratically. They all needed tending to. Even if it felt like trying to fight a forest fire with a squirt gun.

Still, he stood and regarded the just-expired patient for a moment longer.

Due to the constant stream of bodies—and he felt horrible reprimanding that ambulance driver for stopping to pick this hopeless case off the side of the highway—they’d taken to writing the patients’ initials on the backs of their hands for ease of identification.

Dr. Carhart noticed with a grimace that the patient had the same initials as his own.

Despite the sweltering fever-heat of the room, he shivered. Elsewhere in the room, a fly buzzed.

Apocalyptic Conditions , he thought. All Cadavers .

That’s just stupid thinking. Going against his training.

Keep your head down.

Ignore the scratch in your throat.

Ignore the swelling in your lymph nodes.

It’s just stress.

You’re just stressed.

Keep going.

You can survive this .

The doctor cleared his throat, wiped at his clammy brow, and moved onto the next patient, hoping this one might be a different story.

[ Author’s note: in the original published edition of The Stand , Stu, Tom, and Kojak find rescue in a Plymouth with a key chain bearing the initials “SL.” Stu muses about what might’ve happened to the driver, but there are no answers.

The same thing happens in the unabridged edition, except that key chain now reads “AC.” Despite all the additions and restorations of The Stand: Complete and Uncut, poor SL was removed from the narrative.

We must assume, then, it was no great loss. Oh, Discordia. ]