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But she had still been there, and although he had only succeeded in gaining twenty-five feet or so, the expression on her face was hellishly clear. It was one of grieving sorrow, but her eyes were flat and far away.
Her eyes were with him.
That was when he began to hate her, and he felt for the shoulder holster. The Colt was still there, held in during his tumbling fall by the strap across the butt. He snapped the strap off, hunching his body craftily so she wouldn’t see.
“Nadine—”
“It’s better this way, Harold. Better for you, because his way would be so much worse. You see that, don’t you? You wouldn’t want to meet him face-to-face, Harold. He feels that someone who would betray one side would probably betray the other. He’d kill you, but he’d drive you mad first. He has that power. He let me c...
He checked the loads in the pistol for the first of hundreds (maybe thousands) of times, keeping the gun in the shadowed hollow of one lacerated and shredded elbow.
“What about you?” he called up. “Aren’t you a betrayer, too?”
Her voice was sad. “I never betrayed him in my heart.”
“I believe that’s exactly where you did betray him,” Harold called up to her. He tried to put a large expression of sincerity on his face, but he was actually calculating the distance. He would have two shots at the most. And a pistol was a notoriously chancy weapon. “I believe he knows it, too.”
“He needs me,” she said, “and I need him. You were never in it, Harold. And if we’d gone on together, I might have… might have let you do something to me. That small thing. And that would have destroyed everything. I couldn’t take the smallest chance that might happen after all the sacrifice and blood and nastiness. We...
“I’ll give you full value,” Harold said, and managed to get up on his knees. The sun was dazzling. Vertigo seized him in rough hands, whirling the gyroscope balance inside his head. He seemed to hear voices—a voice —roaring in surprised protest. He pulled the trigger. The shot echoed, bounced back, was thrown from clif...
Harold thought in a drunken kind of triumph: She didn’t think I had it in me! Her mouth hung open in a shocked, round O. Her eyes were wide. The fingers of her hands tensed and flew up, as if she were about to play some abnormal tune on the piano. The moment was so sweet that he lost a second or two savoring it and not...
“Harold! No! You can’t! ”
Can’t I? It’s such a little thing, squeezing a trigger. Sure I can.
She seemed too shocked to move, and as the pistol’s front sight came to rest in the hollow of her throat, he felt a sudden cold certainty that this was how it had been meant to end, in a short and meaningless spate of violence.
He had her, dead in his sights.
But as he started to pull the trigger, two things happened. Sweat ran into his eyes, doubling his vision. And he began to slide. He later told himself that the loose gravel had given way, or that his mangled leg had buckled, or both. It might even have been true. But it felt… it felt like a push, and in the long nights...
He had struck the tree and passed out. When he came to again, it was just past dusk and the moon, three quarters full, was riding solemnly over the gorge. Nadine was gone.
He spent the first night in a delirium of terror, sure that he would be unable to crawl back up to the road, sure he would die in the ravine. When morning came he began to crawl upward again nevertheless, sweating and racked with pain.
He began around seven o’clock, just about the time the big orange Burial Committee trucks would be leaving the bus depot back in Boulder. He finally wrapped one raw and blistered hand around the guardrail cable at five o’clock that afternoon. His motorcycle was still there, and he nearly wept with relief. He dug some c...
He began to understand the irrefutable fact of his coming death then, and he lay beside the Triumph and wept, his twisted leg under him. After that he was able to sleep a little.
The following day he was drenched by a pounding rainshower that left him soaked and shivering. His leg had begun to smell of gangrene, and he took pains to keep the Cold Woodsman sheltered from the wet with his body. That evening he had begun to write in the Permacover notebook and discovered for the first time that hi...
He wrote in his notebook, the words emerging slowly from the straggling letters:
Are they all dead, I wonder? The committee? If so, I am sorry. I was misled. That is a poor excuse for my actions, but I swear out of all I know that it is the only excuse that ever matters. The dark man is as real as the superflu itself, as real as the atomic bombs that still sit somewhere in their leadlined closets. ...
Harold read what he had written and passed a thin and trembling hand over his brow. It wasn’t a good excuse; it was a bad one. Pretty it up however you would, it still smelled. Someone who read that paragraph after reading his ledger would see him as a total hypocrite. He had seen himself as the king of anarchy, but th...
Dying, he felt as if he had gained a little sanity and maybe even a little dignity. He did not want to demean that with small excuses that would come limping off the page on crutches.
“I could have been something in Boulder,” he said quietly, and the simple, awful truth of that might have brought tears if he hadn’t been so tired and so dehydrated. He looked at the straggling letters on the page, and from there to the Colt. Suddenly he wanted it over, and he tried to think how to put a finish to his ...
He gripped the pen. Thought. Wrote:
I apologize for the destructive things I have done, but do not deny that I did them of my own free will. On my school papers, I always signed my name Harold Emery Lauder. I signed my manuscripts—poor things that they were—the same way. God help me, I once wrote it on the roof of a barn in letters three feet high. I wan...
I am going to die in my right mind.
Writing neatly at the bottom, he affixed his signature: Hawk.
He put the Permacover notebook into the Triumph’s saddlebag. He capped the pen and clipped it in his pocket. He put the muzzle of the Colt into his mouth and looked up at the blue sky. He thought of a game they had played when they were children, a game the others had teased him about because he never quite dared to go...
All except Harold. Harold would stand on the lip of the drop and chant, One… Two… Three! just like the others, but the talisman never worked. His legs remained locked. He could not bring himself to jump. And the others sometimes chased him home, shouting at him, calling him Harold the Pansy.
He thought: If I could have brought myself to jump once… just once… I might not be here. Well, last time pays for all.
He thought: One… Two… THREE!
He pulled the trigger.
The gun went off.
Harold jumped.
Chapter 65
North of Las Vegas is Emigrant Valley, and that night a small spark of fire glowed in its tumbled wilderness. Randall Flagg sat beside it, moodily cooking the carcass of a small rabbit. He turned it steadily on the crude rotisserie he had made, watching it sizzle and spit grease into the fire. There was a light breeze,...
But the wolves bored him now.
He wore his jeans and his tattered walking boots and his sheepskin jacket with its two buttons on the breast pockets: smiley-smile and HOW’S YOUR PORK? The night wind flapped fitfully at his collar.
He didn’t like the way things were going.
There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn. The old woman had died and at first he had thought that was good. In spite of everything, he had been afraid of the old woman. She had died, and he had told Dayna Jurgens that she had died in a coma… but was it tru...
Had she talked, at the end? And if so, what had she said?
What were they planning?
He had developed a sort of third eye. It was like the levitating ability; something he had and accepted but which he didn’t really understand. He was able to send it out, to see… almost always. But sometimes the eye fell mysteriously blind. He had been able to look into the old woman’s death chamber, had seen them gath...
But he no longer trusted the voice.
There was the troubling matter of the spies.