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Dataset card Data Studio Files
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“I want it.” But he no longer thought he was going to get it.
“How many of you over there?”
“Twenty-five thousand, but four thousand are under twelve and get in free at the drive-in. Economically speaking, it’s a bummer.”
Dorgan snapped his notebook shut and looked at him.
“I can’t, man,” Larry said. “Put yourself in my place.”
Dorgan shook his head. “I can’t do that, because I’m not nuts. Why are you guys here? What good do you think it’s going to do you? He’s going to kill you dead as dogshit tomorrow or the next day. And if he wants you to talk, you will. If he wants you to tapdance and jerk off at the same time, you’ll do that, too. You m...
“We were told to come by the old woman. Mother Abagail. Probably you dreamed about her.”
Dorgan shook his head, but suddenly his eyes wouldn’t meet Larry’s. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then let’s leave it at that.”
“Sure you don’t want to talk to me? Get that shower?”
Larry laughed. “I don’t work that cheap. Send your own spy over to our side. If you can find one that doesn’t look like a weasel the second Mother Abagail’s name gets mentioned, that is.”
“Any way you want it,” Dorgan said. He walked back down the hallway under the mesh-enclosed lights. At the far end he stepped past a steel-barred gate that rolled shut behind him with a hollow crash.
Larry looked around. Like Ralph, he had been in jail on a couple of occasions—public intoxication once, possession of an ounce of marijuana on another. Flaming youth.
“It’s not the Ritz,” he muttered.
The mattress on the bunk looked decidedly moldy, and he wondered a little morbidly if someone had died on it back in June or early July. The toilet worked but filled with rusty water the first time he flushed it, a reliable sign that it hadn’t been used for a long time. Someone had left a paperback Western. Larry picke...
He’s going to kill you dead as dogshit tomorrow or the next day.
Except Larry didn’t believe it. It just wasn’t going to happen that way.
“I will fear no evil,” he said into the dead silence of the cellblock wing, and he liked the way it sounded. He said it again.
He lay down, and the thought occurred that he had finally made it most of the way back to the West Coast. But the trip had been longer and stranger than anyone ever could have imagined. And the trip wasn’t quite over yet.
“I will fear no evil,” he said again. He fell asleep, his face calm, and he slept in dreamless peace.
At ten o’clock the next day, twenty-four hours after they had first seen the roadblock in the distance, Randall Flagg and Lloyd Henreid came to see Glen Bateman.
He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of his cell. He had found a piece of charcoal under his bunk, and had just finished writing this legend on the wall amid the intaglio of male and female genitals, names, phone numbers, and obscene little poems: I am not the potter, not the potter’s wheel, but the potter’s clay; ...
Bootheels clocked up the hallway toward him.
Other footfalls, smaller and insignificant, pattered along in counterpoint, trying to keep up.
Why, it’s him. I’m going to see his face.
Suddenly his arthritis was worse. Terrible, in fact. It seemed that his bones had suddenly been hollowed out and filled with ground glass. And still, he turned with an interested, expectant smile on his face as the bootheels stopped in front of his cell.
“Well, there you are,” Glen said. “And you’re not half the boogeyman we thought you must be.”
Standing on the other side of the bars were two men. Flagg was on Glen’s right. He was wearing bluejeans and a white silk shirt that gleamed mellowly in the dim lights. He was grinning in at Glen. Behind him was a shorter man who was not smiling at all. He had an undershot chin and eyes that seemed too big for his face...
“I’d like you to meet my associate,” Flagg said with a giggle. “Lloyd Henreid, meet Glen Bateman, sociologist, Free Zone Committee member, and single existing member of the Free Zone think tank now that Nick Andros is dead.”
“Meetcha,” Lloyd mumbled.
“How’s your arthritis, Glen?” Flagg asked. His tone was commiserating, but his eyes sparkled with high glee and secret knowledge.
Glen opened and closed his hands rapidly, smiling back at Flagg. No one would ever know what an effort it took to maintain that gentle smile.
The intrinsic worth of the clay!
“Fine,” he said. “Much better for sleeping indoors, thank you.”
Flagg’s smile faltered a bit. Glen caught just a glimpse of narrow surprise and anger. Of fear?
“I’ve decided to let you go,” he said briskly. His smile sprang forth again, radiant and vulpine. Lloyd uttered a little gasp of surprise, and Flagg turned to him. “Haven’t I, Lloyd?”
“Uh… sure,” Lloyd said. “Sure nuff.”
“Well, fine,” Glen said easily. He could feel the arthritis sinking deeper and deeper into his joints, numbing them like ice, swelling them like fire.
“You’ll be given a small motorbike and you may drive back at your leisure.”
“Of course I couldn’t go without my friends.”
“Of course not. And all you have to do is ask. Get down on your knees and ask me.”
Glen laughed heartily. He threw back his head and laughed long and hard. And as he laughed, the pain in his joints began to abate. He felt better, stronger, in control again.
“Oh, you’re a card,” he said. “I tell you what you do. Why don’t you find a nice big sandpile, get yourself a hammer, and pound all that sand right up your ass?”
Flagg’s face grew dark. The smile slipped away. His eyes, previously as dark as the jet stone Lloyd wore, now seemed to gleam yellowly. He reached out his hand to the locking mechanism on the door and wrapped his fingers around it. There was an electric buzzing sound. Fire leaped out between his fingers, and there was ...
“Stop laughing.”
Glen laughed harder.
“Stop laughing at me! ”
“You’re nothing!” Glen said, wiping his streaming eyes and still chuckling. “Oh pardon me… it’s just that we were all so frightened… we made such a business out of you… I’m laughing as much at our own foolishness as at your regrettable lack of substance…”
“Shoot him, Lloyd.” Flagg had turned to the other man. His face was working horribly. His hands were hooked into predator’s claws.
“Oh, kill me yourself if you’re going to kill me,” Glen said. “Surely you’re capable. Touch me with your finger and stop my heart. Make the sign of the inverted cross and give me a massive brain embolism. Bring down the lightning from the overhead socket to cleave me in two. Oh… oh dear… oh dear me!”