Page 139 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

One version of the story Trick Baby had heard went like this:

The kinship flashpoint was rape, mostly prison-style (whatever that meant), but similarly to most saints, Trash had been born to burn.

Often terrorized and beleaguered, Trash experienced a genuine miracle that confirmed his Path, and a savior to consecrate his incipient chosen status as a true Darling of Destiny (per the requisites set forth in the Second Book of Wendell).

According to the narrative, his tormentors died all around him.

Once he arsonized the false horizon of Powtanville, his true horizon revealed itself, and it’s name was Cibola.

The mantra: MyLif4U .

But Paradise has to be earned, and in religious terms that always means misguidance, tests of mettle, obstacles and vexations.

Principal among these were variant interpretations of previous writ; the longer they were told and retold, the more the fellowships and followers doubted them.

Presently the saga of Trash had been divested of a lengthy apocrypha titled the Rebel Yell Epistles 1–17.

True believers denied the authorship of the Epistles (and Trick Baby knew that if you stood still when one of them started talking, they’d never stop until they died or you did).

Trick Baby didn’t believe in destiny. She believed in opportunity.

Yet after so long on the hunt, the activity itself nagged at her with the sense that it had all been done before.

Details were altered every time while the template remained the same shape.

She was water, flowing along a groove that was preordained and immutable from its previous form.

It never changed. Were there more abstract thinkers, this avenue of inquiry might lead to speculation about predictable outcome, but while Trick Baby was capable of experiencing a complex thought, she could not acknowledge it as such.

Trick Baby only wanted to know what came next.

The way you want to with most stories.

She knew the story because she had been told it thousands of times as a child. Her quest was to reach Lewis the Monk, tell what she knew, and then…?

What was most important? The covenant. The quest. The trials. The wolves.

Wolves were good, though, in the telling. Protectors, like Barker. Perhaps there was a Nite Club at the end of the line. Trick Baby wondered what a Nite Club might be. A place where she might sing to the wolves; tell them she was home at last?

“Uncounted were the days until Trash was born…”

Barker sniffed the air and sought the horizon, ears flattening. Bad was incoming.

A lot more bad.

SIGIL

The bad began with the sigil. Found in a bad place, at a bad time.

Midway through a barren tract of rolling hills some called the City of Millionaires (again, a coinage that held no meaning for most), Trick Baby found the sigil carved high up on a rock face, blackened by foul weather. Supposedly, it had always been there.

Barker didn’t notice it, or didn’t care. His snoot was testing the air for threat.

In every tale ever told, seekers sought “a sign.” It was presumed to be obvious, such a sign, a true north swing that Showed the Path.

In the hardscrabble reality of predatory jungle survival there were very few signs that did not involve your own imminent death—like, bleeding out was a sign you didn’t have long and had better hustle, pronto.

Yet here before Trick Baby was a Sign such as she had always heard of.

It was near to a child’s drawing of the sun, a rough circle with spikes coming out of it. Its purpose was to guide her to the Monk. The spikes were squiggles, legendarily “like fire that holds still.”

But subsuming the symbol were other designs, chaotic, layered graffiti that proclaimed this zone to be the turf of the Kids. Infamously tribal, gratuitously violent, and completely psychopathic, the Kids were to be avoided—always. Yet the way to the Monk was through their outlands.

Barker cast a wary glance. You sure?

Trick Baby nodded silently. Sure as sure.

This was the place from which the disavowed Kid Epistles had sprung. Everything around her could be a trap, another falsehood.

Early snowfall had leavened the aspens and evergreens to uniformity. (No one remembered what this foliage was called; it needed new names.) Keep eyes keen and ears keener. Trick Baby stepped heel-to-toe to muffle her own tread.

Suddenly so quiet, so unexpectedly beautiful in its harsh way. Maybe this was the goal of the quest, such calm.

The Kids attacked at civil dusk.

Barker yelped and flew up into the air, clipped by a sharpened stone launched from a sling.

He went down bright with blood and had trouble trying to find his legs.

Another silent stone skinned a flap from Trick Baby’s forehead and she rolled as blood clouded her vision.

A short arrow splintered on a rock next to her head.

It was black; you couldn’t see black arrows incoming.

Halfway through her duck-and-shield roll, Trick Baby had already notched her return shot and let fly.

The vector was a touch and tell thing, not ploddingly logical or strategic, but obvious to her senses.

She was pleased to hear somebody scream.

Dark blood flowered on Barker’s flank. He snapped when Trick Baby met his gaze, teeth clicking. Three more , the clicks told her.

She had already come to her knees and loosed another shot.

Half-visible like that, the fleet risk of exposure to return fire would quickly let her know how heavily armed her assailants were.

Mostly stones meant fewer arrows for them to waste.

Fewer arrows meant they would have to draw closer to her position.

Mostly stones thudded against her outer gear.

Barker was gone, on the hunker. Out of her sight for only a moment when a different voice started hollering as the dog shredded off testicles.

Two more.

One comrade would attempt to kill the dog killing another comrade. He rose to full height with an ugly blade upraised. A dramatic, frightening silhouette; a perfect target. Trick Baby’s next arrow took him right through the skull.

And wham , Trick Baby was tackled and sprawled.

Last one.

He would try to hold her down by the arms and smash her face in, then fuck her while she was still warm, corpse or not.

Trick Baby’s gurkha provided her with more than ten extra inches of reach, and she caught him right across the voice box.

In less than a second his crimson life force began to flood downward, drenching her.

His grip went stupid. Before the full second had elapsed, Barker was back to chomp the gap wide and take the motherfucker to ground.

Trick Baby performed a quick patch-up, first on her dog, then on her own temple. She shredded the Kids’ rags for dressings. Barker ate.

The Kids were darkened with battle ink, a crowded profusion of tattoos that bespoke the madhouse history of each—hierarchies, fables, legends, symbols.

Kill hash. Images of weapons and monsters, virulent splashes of illustrated blood or dismembered adversaries.

Incomprehensible, somehow angry cartoons of vehicles, obsolete firearms, or highway signs (as they were once known).

A blue triangle. “61.” Trick Baby shook her head, mystified.

She wondered more often, these days. Right now she wondered if the dermagraphics spilled across each of the Kids might unify into some sort of larger myth, like chapters of a tale to be told only when fully revealed.

Like the piece of an entirely different story that she carried to the Monk.

If each Kid were a segment, or episode. If that’s what bonded them.

Or if her story and the Kids’ story were the same story, a saga whose linkage could only be divulged by the Monk, who of course would have known all along.

The only surviving Kid of the pack—the first one felled by Trick Baby’s arrow—bore the sigil.

She spun him over and staked him for a better look as night fell.

A fire was too risky out here. He husked air and didn’t whine.

The scraggly little cartoon sun had been embossed on his neck using lampblack and a rose thorn.

They were all out in the open when it began to rain. The rain stung. Trick Baby grabbed Barker and did the huddle-cuddle, tenting him.

Over the next hour, the Kid bled a lot more, but Trick Baby only asked him a single question, over and over.

“Which way?”

DAYSTAR

The beauty of religious mania is that it explains everything.

Nothing is left to chance… or change. Once such incantatory phrases as “we see now through a glass darkly” and “mysterious are the ways She chooses Her wonders to perform” are mastered, logic can happily be tossed out the window.

Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world’s vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. It’s all on purpose.

—From the Second Book of Wolves (recanted)

It was getting cold, portending the most brutal winter the Monk would yet know. He wanted to unfurl the hundreds of pages that were his lifework and wrap himself in them. Maybe burn them.

The story of one long-ago sooth, believed to be fifteen hundred years old, proposed that the Hand of God was not an actual event at all.

Hearsay. Another ancient text known as the Gospel of the Abagailians had stirred up a lot of controversy before the Monk’s time, with its unconventional—some said boastful—claims of supernatural power.

The librarians, monks, and scholars of the Guilded Splendor spent much of their lives in heated debate that would determine religious authority.

Skepticism reigned and every interpretation had its champion, because if a supplicant might be right, they would achieve immortality.

Last week’s true believers were often next week’s unsettled “doubting Frannie.”

The Monk was blessed with larger vision.

Squabbling, quibbling, hairsplitting would win them more mountains of ungraspable vapor.

What was primarily required was to get a string around the entire narrative, to solidify the whole form of the sundered and scattered parts.

Then, then the educated forensics could matter so much more.

The daystar, a spiky yellow puffball that may have started out as a cactus, had come along after the End, when the sky was no longer blue; when the air changed, the light changed, and the plants under their dominion also evolved and changed, some say mutated.

The Order had named the symbolic representation of the daystar the Guilded Splendor.

It reminded the Order to consider all explanations, not merely the easy or fearful ones.

Most of all, the Guilded Splendor represented sanctuary.

And a signpost: The End.

Because once a sooth had decanted their part of the whole to the Monk, they had fulfilled their purpose.

They could repeat the same data to strangers for the rest of time—spreading the word was always good—but their primary covenant in establishing the definitive text had been honored.

The recitation had more value if the book was lost, banned, or burned.

Until the text itself morphed again, and that would not happen within the Monk’s lifetime.

These were his thoughts as Trick Baby was escorted into his presence.

After you’ve served your purpose, what do I tell you to do then?

Dozens of past sooths had stood where Trick Baby stood now.

Your reward for your faith is obsolescence.

Her wounds were somehow more lurid when cleaned up. Her carriage was somehow more pathetic when she was properly fed. A child without a childhood, her stringy ragamuffin persistence only made sense out there in the crazylands. Like so many before her, she had been told to seek out the Monk.

I wish I could actually help you.

Trick Baby began to recite:

“Uncounted were the days until Trash was born in shock-lightning and kerosene, alone as the undisputed master of Powtanville. He knew the voices and the voices spoke true. Fire could not burn him, nor cheery lobster-red explosions. His power and birthright were a glorious blaze of spontaneous combustion, and he laid his hand upon the great axle of his destiny…”

She left out most of the rapey bits.

LOVE

At Trick Baby’s grave under the shadow of the Guilded Splendor, Barker has the watch.

He is fed by monks of the Order when he deigns to eat.

He still has a slight limp, and will have it until he dies.

Now he can close his eyes, but he won’t.

He will not abandon his post, nor drop his guard. MyLife4U.

Thanks to him, Trick Baby is safe at last.

THE VULGATE BOOK

In the accounts told years later about the Kingdom, the following claims were made:

The Received Written Gospel was theorized to have originated from seventy sooths (the number always varied), recorded on every continent in eight separate languages over a span of eleven-hundred years.

The recount and recollect of these assorted laypeople, scholars, commoners, and even nobility has been freely acknowledged to be “spiritually influenced.”

That is, informed by ghosts.

The modern and most up-to-date version of the Vulgate Book is over a thousand pages long.

Among the five deuterocanonical versions of the text are three so-called “eden dates,” or ground-zero genesis markers, with a ten-year spread between them.

Insignificant… until you are told, for example, that you were born that many years earlier or later than you have always believed.

Unless the repetitive, five-year constancy freights new wisdom yet-untranslated.

Scholars and penitents debate the disparities to this day.

Accounting for variant sects, there are between seventy-nine and a hundred thirty-one thus-called “books” that comprise the Kingdom, beginning with Arnett: 1–7 and concluding with Second Bate Mans , or in some editions, the cryptic PayDay .

There are missing books, some removed throughout the years by clashing authorities. First and Second Campions are the most controversial, but other discredited or disallowed sections such as the Book of Trash remain of interest to legitimate deep-dive academics and enthusiasts.

Nowhere in the complex mythos can be found the name of Lewis the Monk.