The Stand

His own uneasiness made him take one last look over his shoulder, and what he saw coming froze him coldly in his tracks.

A horrible darkness was coming out of the west. It was not a cloud; it was more like a total absence of light. It was in the shape of a fu

As Nick watched, it touched down about three quarters of a mile away and a long blue building with a roof made of corrugated metal—an auto supply place, or perhaps a lumber storage shed—exploded with a loud bang. He could not hear this, of course, but the vibration struck him, rocking him back on his feet. And the building seemed to explode inward, as if the fu

I am looking at whatever it is in my worst dreams, Nick thought, and it is not a man at all, although it may sometimes look like a man. What it really is is a tornado. One almighty big black twister ripping out of the west, sucking up anything and everything unlucky enough to be in its path. It’s —

Then he was grabbed by both arms and literally jerked off his feet and into the barn. He looked around at Tom Cullen and was momentarily surprised to see him. In his fascination with the storm, he had quite forgotten that Tom Cullen existed.

“Downstairs!” Tom panted. “Quick! Quick! Oh my laws, yes! Tornado! Tornado! ”

At last Nick was fully, consciously afraid, ripped out of the half-entranced state he had been in and aware again of where he was and who he was with. As he let Tom lead him to the stairs going down into the barn’s storm cellar, he became aware of a strange, thrumming vibration. It was the closest thing to sound he had ever experienced. It was like a nagging ache in the center of his brain. Then, as he went down the stairs behind Tom, he saw something he would never forget: the plank siding of the barn being pulled out board by board, pulled out and whirled up into the cloudy air, like rotted brown teeth being pulled out by invisible forceps. The hay littered on the floor began to rise and whirl in a dozen miniature tornado fu

Then Tom was pushing open a heavy wooden door, thrusting him through. Nick smelled wet mold and decay. In the last instant of light he saw they were sharing the storm cellar with a family of rat-gnawed corpses. Then Tom slammed the door shut and they were in perfect darkness. The vibration lessened but did not cease completely even then.

Panic crept up on him with its cloak open and gathered him in. The blackness reduced his senses to touch and smell, and neither of them sent messages which were comforting. He could feel the constant vibration of the boards beneath his feet, and the smell was death.

Tom clutched his hand blindly and Nick drew the retarded man next to him. He could feel Tom trembling, and he wondered if Tom was crying, or perhaps trying to speak to him. The thought eased some of his own fear and he slung an arm about Tom’s shoulders. Tom reciprocated and they stood bolt upright in the dark, clinging to each other.

The vibration grew stronger under Nick’s feet; even the air seemed to be trembling lightly against his face. Tom held him more tightly still. Blind and deaf, he waited for what might happen next and reflected that if Ray Booth had gotten his other eye, all of life would be like this. If that had happened, he believed he would have shot himself in the head days ago and had done with it.

Later he would be almost unable to believe his watch, which insisted that they had spent only fifteen minutes in the darkness of the storm cellar, although logic told him that since the watch was still ru

It was the dark man, the man who came to life in his dreams, the creature whose spirit he had sensed in the black heart of the cyclone.

Somewhere… over in the corner or perhaps right behind them… he was watching them. And waiting. At the right moment he would touch them and they would both… what? Go mad with fear, of course. Just that. He could see them. Nick was sure he could see them. He had eyes which could see in the dark like a cat’s eyes, or those of some weird alien creature. Like the one in that movie, Predator, perhaps. Yes—like that. The dark man could see tones of the spectrum that human eyes could never attain to, and to him everything would look slow and red, as if the whole world had been tie-dyed in a vat of gore.

At first Nick was able to divide this fantasy from reality, but as time passed, he became more and more sure that the fantasy was reality. He fancied he could feel the dark man’s breath on the back of his neck.

He was about to make a lunge at the door, open it and flee upstairs no matter what, when Tom did it for him. The arm around Nick’s shoulders was suddenly gone. The next instant the door of the storm cellar banged open, letting in a flood of dazzling white light that made Nick raise a hand to shield his good eye. He caught just a ghostly, wavering glimpse of Tom Cullen staggering and stumbling up the stairs, and then he followed, groping his way in the dazzle. By the time he got to the top, his eye had adjusted.

He thought that the light hadn’t been so bright when they went down, and saw why immediately. The roof had been torn off the barn. It seemed to have been almost surgically removed; the job was so clean that there were no splinters and hardly any litter lying on the floor it had once sheltered. Three roofbeams hung down from the sides of the loft, and almost all the boards had been stripped off the sides. Standing here was like standing inside the picked skeleton of a prehistoric monster.

Tom had not stopped to inventory the damage. He was fleeing the barn as if the devil himself was at his heels. He looked back just once, his eyes huge and almost comically terrified. Nick could not resist a look back over his shoulder and into the storm cellar. The stairs pitched and yawed downward into shadow, old wood, splintered and sunken in the center of each riser. He could see littered straw on the floor and two sets of hands protruding from the shadow. The fingers had been stripped down to the bone by rats.

If there was anyone else down there, Nick did not see him.

Nor did he want to.

He followed Tom outside.

Tom was standing by his bicycle, shivering. Nick was momentarily bemused by the freaky choosiness of the tornado, which had taken most of the barn but had disdained their bikes, when he saw that Tom was weeping. Nick went over to him and put an arm about his shoulders. Tom was staring, wide-eyed, at the sagging double doors of the barn. Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle. Tom’s eyes dropped to this briefly, but the smile Nick had hoped for did not surface on Tom’s face. He simply went back to staring at the barn. His eyes had a vacant, fixated cast Nick didn’t like at all.