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Dataset card Data Studio Files
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“Yes, Nick is here.”
“Ralph Brentner is here, too.”
“Yes, Ralph is, too.”
“We’re your friends.”
“I know.”
“We’d like you to do something, Tom. For the Zone. It’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous…”
Trouble crossed over Tom’s face, like a cloud shadow slowly crossing a midsummer field of corn.
“Will I have to be afraid? Will I have to…” He trailed off, sighing.
Stu looked at Nick, troubled.
Nick mouthed: Yes.
“It’s him,” Tom said, and sighed dreadfully. It was like the sound a bitter November wind makes in a stand of denuded oaks. Stu felt that shudder inside him again. Ralph had gone pale.
“Who, Tom?” Stu asked gently.
“Flagg. His name is Randy Flagg. The dark man. You want me to…” That sick sigh again, bitter and long.
“How do you know him, Tom?” This wasn’t in the script.
“Dreams… I see his face in dreams.”
I see his face in dreams. But none of them had seen his face. It was always hidden.
“You see him?”
“Yes…”
“What does he look like, Tom?”
Tom didn’t speak for a long time. Stu had decided he wasn’t going to answer and he was preparing to go back to the “script” when Tom said: “He looks like anybody you see on the street. But when he grins, birds fall dead off telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine burns...
Tom fell silent.
The three of them stared at each other, pallid as gravestones. Ralph had seized his hat from his head and was kneading it convulsively in his hands. Nick had put one hand over his eyes. Stu’s throat had turned to dry glass.
His name is Legion. He is the king of nowhere.
“Can you say anything else about him?” Stu asked in a low voice.
“Only that I’m afraid of him, too. But I’ll do what you want. But Tom… is so afraid.” That dreadful sigh again.
“Tom,” Ralph said suddenly. “Do you know if Mother Abagail… if she’s still alive?” Ralph’s face was desperately set, the face of a man who has staked everything on one turn of the cards.
“She’s alive.” Ralph leaned against the back of his chair with a great gust of breath. “But she’s not right with God yet,” Tom added.
“Not right with God? Why not, Tommy?”
“She’s in the wilderness, God has lifted her up in the wilderness, she does not fear the terror that flies at noon or the terror that creeps at midnight… neither will the snake bite her nor the bee sting her… but she’s not right with God yet. It was not the hand of Moses that brought water from the rock. It was not the...
“Stop him,” Ralph groaned. “Can’t you stop him?”
“Tom,” Stu said.
“Yes.”
“Are you the same Tom that Nick met in Oklahoma? Are you the same Tom we know when you’re awake?”
“Yes, but I am more than that Tom.”
“I don’t understand.”
He shifted a little, his sleeping face calm.
“I am God’s Tom.”
Completely unnerved now, Stu almost dropped Nick’s notes.
“You say you’ll do what we want.”
“Yes.”
“But do you see… do you think you’ll come back?”
“That’s not for me to see or say. Where shall I go?”
“West, Tom.”
Tom moaned. It was a sound that made the hair on the nape of Stu’s neck stand on end. What are we sending him into? And maybe he knew. Maybe he had been there himself, only in Vermont, in mazes of corridors where the echo made it seem as if footsteps were following him. And gaining.
“West,” Tom said. “West, yes.”
“We’re sending you to look, Tom. To look and see. Then to come back.”
“Come back and tell.”
“Can you do that?”
“Yes. Unless they catch and kill me.”