Page 96 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

A man called out, “Hello? Anybody home? I have Girl Scout cookies,” and then he laughed to let his audience, both intended and not intended, know he was a jokester. “None of the Thin Mints, though. Man, I’d give my left arm for a box of those.”

Was he supposed to be charming? Jaunty? Nonthreatening? Art feared the Las Vegas enthusiasts were sending the next wave. Still, and as annoyed as Ebenezer Scrooge at his visitations, Art opened the door.

“You’re Art, yeah? Hey, my name is Henry.

It’s very nice to meet you.” The dripping-wet, medium-sized white man held up his empty hands.

“Nothing up my sleeves but rain, I promise.” Could you trust anyone making promises within the first thirty seconds of meeting them?

It took all my self-control to keep from yelling out to Art, to tell him to shut the door in this dude’s face.

“I already told Hilly my answer,” Art said.

Henry tilted his head like the good dog he was, then smiled a bright white smile that launched a ship or two.

“Good. I have no idea who Hilly is,” he said.

“She’s not with us. So she must be with them.

” Could you trust anybody talking about us and them ?

What you should know about Art is that, as a fellow punk music devotee, he judged people as being in one of those two us or them categories, but it was never a binding moral judgment or purity test. Do you know the difference?

Art was way more forgiving or naive—you choose—than I was.

Remember that show Family Ties , with Michael J.

Fox? This Henry guy was the grown-up, full yuppie version of Alex P.

Keaton. He wore a yellow, short-sleeved polo shirt and jeans, and he was ten or so years older than Art.

His skin was unblemished. Art noticed because his own skin was always threatening volcanic acne eruption.

“Hey, um, is it all right if I come in?” Henry asked. “I’m sopping wet.”

Art let him in. It’s worth repeating Art should’ve known better than to invite a stranger into his house. The world is full of all kinds of vampires, blah blah blah.

Nah, don’t worry. You letting me sit by the fire isn’t the same thing as inviting me into your house. I promise.

Art told Henry to stay by the door and he’d get him a towel, but Henry followed him into the mess of a living room.

Henry said he liked Art’s place and it reminded him of his fraternity house (of course) and after spying the Flying V he said, “Hey, cool axe. Can you play that ‘Dig Your Man’ song?” and Art died a little inside.

The more Henry rambled on, the more I wanted to throw myself down the basement stairs, or bury myself in the dirt floor and go to sleep for a year, or a decade or two.

But Art, he played along and answered questions about music and his age and where we went to school.

What you need to know about Art is that he liked to be liked, more than most. I think he cut Henry some slack, too, because the dude was clearly nervous.

After he gave Henry a towel, there was a lull in their conversation, a heavy one. Henry thanked Art and said, “I’d been staying up in Gloucester with some people, but we’re, um, migrating. Do you know why I’m here? Or how I know your name?”

“You want to start a band?” Art said.

Okay, fine, Art didn’t say that. I would’ve said that. Instead, Art did his mumble-answer thing that was not really an answer.

Henry, undeterred, asked, “Did you know I was coming today?”

“No,” Art said.

“Oh, that’s okay, I guess. But I was kind of hoping you might’ve been, like, shown me in—in a dream? Sounds crazy when I say it out loud like that.”

“It does.”

“Well, it can’t be helped. You look like you haven’t been sleeping much. No offense. Can I ask you about your dreams? Have you been dreaming of a cornfield, and, um, a godly woman—”

“Yeah, I have dreams,” Art said, and slung his guitar strap over his shoulder. “Now, what do you want?”

Henry said, “A group of us are heeding the call to go west, to Boulder, Colorado. Fresh mountain air and all that. Hey, did you follow college football at all? I’m a Notre Dame grad and I was down in Miami on New Year’s to watch the Orange Bowl with my fiancée, Patrice.

She was a bigger fan of Notre Dame than I was.

Man, what I wouldn’t give to watch another game with her, just one more game.

” Henry paused to leave room for Art to commiserate, to share his own tale of catastrophic woe, but how he spoke felt more rehearsed than being rooted in grief.

Maybe that wasn’t a fair assessment. Maybe it sounded that way because Henry had to practice keeping from melting down into a screaming, crying fit.

Unlikely, but you never know. Henry continued.

“Notre Dame beat U of Colorado in the Orange Bowl. Pounded them Buffalos, who were up to some shady recruiting, if you ask me. Not as bad as U Miami, though. I guess some cheaters did win in the end, in the before times. Now we’re headed to the same town where U Colorado is.

Life is weird. I don’t know why we’re not being called to go to Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.

But I’m just the messenger, right?” Henry paused again.

Art strummed a G chord. Henry asked Art to kindly not play, as he was getting to his point. Art responded with a D chord.

The rest of Henry’s spiel sounded a lot like Hilly’s pitch.

He said, “There is a coming battle, and everyone has to choose sides. The old, godless ways got us into this whole mess. We couldn’t go on ignoring that anymore.

We had to fight for what could be right and good again in the name of God.

You look like a smart guy. You had the dreams, too.

You know this to be true. And here’s the kicker: the voice in our dreams gave us your name and where to find you.

It said that you, Art, are the fulcrum. Yes, you.

I know it’s a lot. And don’t take this the wrong way.

It’s as hard for me to swallow that we’re headed to Boulder as it is for me to believe that you’re the most important man left alive.

But, I know it to be true because, well, God said so. ”

“God?”

“Yeah. You know, He speaks through the woman in the dreams.” Henry went on another rant that I’ll trim down a bit, saying that the people on the other side were in thrall to evil incarnate, to the devil himself, and that they would destroy us all if Art didn’t help.

Henry didn’t know what the plan was or exactly where Art fit into it, but only that, for now, Art was the plan.

Art would tip the scales in their favor and “eradicate evil from the world once and for all.” Henry was exultant.

Despite the other terrors to come, his rapturous tone scared Art the most.

Art shook his head and said, “None of this should come down to me. It’s all bullshit.”

“The Lord works in mysterious ways, yeah?” Henry said. “Look, I know that you’re scared, Art.”

Art punched out a few more chords, short and sharp. He said, “I’m not scared. I’m angry. You should be, too.”

Art told Henry about how the day after his parents died, his two younger cousins, Erin and Dan, ages thirteen and nine, showed up on his doorstep.

Their parents had died, too, and they didn’t know where else to go or what to do.

Their first night at his house, Art dug out a road map from his mom’s car, and they marked up a route they would take to Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod.

They unanimously decided to live on one of the ends of the world.

The next morning, Erin and Dan were full of phlegm and were too weak to climb out of their shared pullout couch bed in the TV room.

Before she became incoherent with fever, Erin narrated future versions of the Erin and Dan who lived in an alternate universe, one in which the superflu never happened.

She went on for hours, giving an incredibly almost impossibly detailed account of their hectic high school years, romantic partners, colleges attended, friends made and friends lost, one with a career in radio as a production engineer and the other bouncing from one odd job to the next but finding happiness in their freedom, the cities lived in and cities visited, their hopes and dreams, their joys and longings, their successes and failures.

Dan silently listened to his sister, never once objecting to her vision.

When it became too much for Art, he’d retreat to the kitchen and cry, but he still heard her melancholic and beautiful story echoing through his house.

Art paused, seemingly mid-story, wiped his forearm across his eyes, took off his guitar, and said, “I’m not going anywhere with you or anyone else.”

I have to admit, that answer was a complete and total shock to me. And it was a shock to Henry, too. He spluttered and stuttered, eventually saying, “Hey, look, I get it. I do. But you’re not the only one who suffered—”

“That’s exactly my point.”

“You think God made the superflu? Word on the street is that it was man-made.”

“I’m sure it was. But what about all of the suffering in every decade of every century, and it was allowed to happen, which, okay, it was consistent behavior, at least. The problem I have is that God chooses to show up now .”

Henry rubbed his head like it hurt, like the ideas were too big to fit inside. “Hey, man, I’m no theologian, but God has always been around. And we don’t know how often, um, God intervened on our behalf, right? We can’t question—”