Disclaimer: The Stand and all its characters belong to Stephen King.

Part Two: July 1990

Chapter Nine: Part Two

"...that okay Maggie?" she heard someone say, and immediately perked her head up to find Olivia looking at her with worry.

"Pardon?" Maggie asked, clearing her throat as she tried to act naturally. She saw that everyone was back in the room now, staring at her. Nick's hand was on her knee, she looked over at him, his eye also fixed on her in concern.

"I was just asking if you were okay sleeping on a mattress next to me and Gina? In the living room?" Olivia asked slowly. Maggie looked as though she'd seen a ghost.

"Um, sure. That'd be great," Maggie said, running a hand through her hair and looking back at Olivia.

"Okay, well. Gina, let's get to bed," Olivia said, scooping the small girl into her arms. Gina's eyes were large and glassy.

"Tom Cullen's tired," Tom said, yawning. "M-O-O-N, that spells tired."

"Let's go out to the barn," Dick said. "A good night's sleep will do us all some good."

There was a chorus of agreeing noises, and everyone started getting up to go to their separate spaces. Mother Abagail's splitting of the women in the house and the men in the barn was not an accident.

"I wonder," Mother Abagail said from her rocker and pointed to Ralph, "if you, Nick, and Maggie would stay a bit, Ralph."

The three of them nodded, sitting back in their former seats. Once the others in the room had cleared away, a momentary silence fell among them. Mother Abagail was looking across the room at Nick and Maggie. To her, their faces seemed far too careworn for ones so young. For a man who couldn't talk, Mother Abagail saw that Nick had quite the presence in a crowded room. He sat there quietly, following the conversation. His face reacted to everything that was said, that one brilliant, expressive eye darting to whoever was speaking. Then there was Maggie, who seemed to be the opposite of Nick somehow. During the conversation, she'd seen Maggie look out the dark window several times, her expression troubled. As she looked at them, she felt a quiet sense of knowledge and completion, as if this moment had been simple fate. As if, at one end of her life there had been her parents, John and Denise Freemantle, strong, tough, proud. And these two at the other end. Young. White. One mute, the other scarred. Both looking anxiously from those careworn faces.

She looked out the window towards the barn, her vision lit faintly by the three Coleman battery lamps scattered around the kitchen. She could see her reflection in the glass, old and dried and used up. And still my work is not done, she thought spitefully.

"M'am?" she heard Maggie say and looked back. Ralph was leaning against the doorframe, next to him in a wobbly kitchen sat Nick Andros. He was looking at her closely, with a pad and ballpoint pen in one hand. Maggie sat in the chair on Nick's other side, the her tired face illuminated by those eyes. Those warm, kind eyes.

"Nick says…" Maggie began, clearing her throat with a note in her hand. A faint blush stained her cheeks.

"Go ahead."

"He says it's hard to read your lips because-"

"I guess I know why," Mother Abagail said. "No fear."

She got up and hobbled over to the stove, there was a cabinet to the side of it. Inside, her dentures floated in a plastic jar, she'd taken them out earlier when they'd eaten. She fished them out and popped them in with a grimace.

"Lord God, I have suffered," she said balefully, shuffling back over to the rocker and plopping down into it.

"We got to talk," she said. "You three are the head ones, and we got some things to sort out."

"Well," Ralph said with a slight grin, "it ain't me. I was never much more than a full-time factory worker and a part-time farmer. I've raised a helluva lot more calluses than idears in my time. I was just the driver because I had the car. Nick and Maggie, I guess they're in charge."

"Is that right?" she asked, looking to Nick and Maggie with raised eyebrows.

"Um, I'm not so sure about that, m'am," Maggie said with a small smile.

Nick scrawled for a minute on his pad and handed a note to Maggie, who read it aloud: "It was our idea to come up here, yes. But about being in charge, I don't know."

"We met Olivia about ninety miles south of here," Ralph said. "Three days ago, wasn't it?"

Nick nodded.

"We was on our way to you even then, Mother. Olivia was headed North, too. So was Dick. We all just threw in together," Ralph continued.

"But sometimes I get the feeling," Maggie said, "I think Nick does too, that people are watching us. Maybe they're hiding from us. I think everyone is still a little in shock from everything that's happened. If there was only a couple of us, I think it would be different. Groups sort of scare people off, I guess."

Mother Abagail nodded. "Why did you come here?" she asked, staring at Nick and Maggie keenly.

"I've dreamed of you," Maggie said. "Many times. Nick has too." She paused and Nick nodded. "Dick said he has once. Gina was calling you 'grammylady' as soon as we mentioned our plans to meet you. And that was miles from here. She even described this place. The tire swing was what she remembered the most."

"In the dreams, you told us to come here. You told Nick and I in our dreams to bring all our friends. So that's what we did," Maggie recounted with a faint smile, remembering that first dream back when neither Sean nor Finn was dead.

That was over a month ago, but it seemed like it had been a hundred years since she had last seen either of their faces. One of the nights they had stayed up together, Maggie didn't remember which one, they discovered how similar their dreams had been. Of course, neither of them went into the most personal details, but the general themes were almost always similar. Especially the Mother Abagail dreams.

Mother Abagail looked to Ralph, "You?"

"Once or twice m'am," Ralph said, shifting his weight from foot to foot and licking his lips impatiently, "Mostly what I dreamed about was just...just that other fella."

Maggie swallowed dryly, thinking once again of the red eye. She figured that was probably similar to what the soldier's eye had looked like after she shot him. She wondered vaguely if his body was still lying in that same spot on the floor of the convenience store. A pool would have dried under him, it would have darkened with age and have almost a black color now. The uncomfortable tension in the room was broken by Mother Abagail.

"What other fella?" she asked gravely. She already knew the answer but was afraid to hear somebody else say it. She had had nightmares of her own.

Maggie was about to answer when Nick put a hand on her leg. She looked over at him and he squeezed her knee gently. He looked back to his pad and quickly, in large scrawling letters, wrote another note. He circled the words three times and then underlined them. He got up and walked over to Mother Abagail's rocker, handing the note to her himself before solemnly walking back to the kitchen chair.

Mother Abagail felt a chill go up her spine as she read the crudely written note over and over again. She thought of the single red eye she'd seen one night, opening and closing by itself. The creature behind the eye, searching in a world of darkness now not just for one old woman, but for a whole party of men and women. And one little girl. She looked at it one last time before folding up and out of her sight, at those two words written hard and large: dark man.

She absentmindedly folded the note over and over again, unfolding and refolding countless times, despite the swollen joints caused by her arthritis.

"I've been told," she said, "that we're to go West. I've been told in a dream, by the Lord God. I didn't want to listen. I'm an old woman, and all I want to do is die on this little piece of land. It's been my family's freehold for a hundred and twelve years, but I wasn't meant to die here any more than Moses was meant to go over into Canaan with the Children of Israel."

Ralph nodded slowly in sober understanding. Maggie dimly recognized the Bible reference from her churchgoing times as a child many years before, but she still wasn't exactly sure what it meant. It went over Nick's head completely.

"I started havin' dreams two years before this plague ever fell," Mother Abagail continued gingerly, the dentures were beginning to make her jaw ache. "I've always dreamed. And sometimes my dreams have come true. Prophecy is the gift of God and everyone has a smidge of it. My own grandmother used to call it the shining lamp of God, sometimes just the shining. In my dreams I saw myself going West. At first with just a few people, then a few more, then a few more. West, always west, until I could see the Rocky Mountains. It got so there was a whole caravan of us, two hundred, maybe more. And there would be signs….not signs from God but regular road signs, and ever one of them had something to say about Boulder, Colorado. So I'm supposin' that's where we ought to go.

"Those dreams, they scared me. I never told a soul I was havin em, that's how scared I was. I felt the way I guess Job must have felt when God spoke to him out of the whirlwind. I even tried to pretend they was just dreams, foolish old woman runnin' from God the way Jonah. But the big fish has swallowed us up just the same, you see! And if God says to Abby, You got to tell, then tell I must. And I always felt like someone would come to me, someone special, and that's how I'd be in the way of knowin' the time had come."

She paused, staring to Nick and Maggie. Nick regarded her solemnly, staring soberly with his good eye. Maggie sat likewise solemn, restlessly rubbing circles on the back of Nick's hand with her thumb as she held it. She's a nervous one, Mother Abagail thought to herself, But she knows when to fight. And there's something about her...

"I knew when I saw you two," Mother Abagail said. "It's you. God has put His fingers on your hearts. But He has more fingers than two, and there's others out there, still comin' on, praise God, and He's got a finger on them, too. I dream of him, how he's lookin' for us even now, and God forgive my sick spirit, I curse him in my heart." She put her head in her hands, tears springing from her eyes and rolling down her face. When she looked up again after collecting herself, Nick was writing. Maggie sat with her legs crossed, her elbows on her thighs. She held up her head with her hands, watching Nick's hand move nimbly as he wrote. He handed it to her.

"I don't know about the God part, but some force is definitely working here. Everyone we've met has been going North. Have you dreamed of anyone besides Maggie and I? Dick? Maybe Gina?" the note read.

Mother Abagail shook her head a little and sniffed, feeling a little more stable now. "Not any of the others here. But a few. A man who doesn't talk much. A woman who is with child. A man who comes to me with a guitar of his own. And, not to mention, you two."

"And going to Boulder is our next move?" Maggie asked.

"It's what we're meant to do," Mother Abagail said kindly. Maggie smiled a little at her with a small nod, Mother Abagail smiled a little back. It was odd for Maggie to hear things she had been told in dreams being said in real life. Nick caught the smiles and nods between them, and thought of the peculiar way in which Maggie reminded him of Mother Abagail. They both seemed to exude feelings of niceness and kindness.

"How much do you know about the dark man?" Maggie asked, now feeling a little more comfortable. "Do you know who or what he might be?"

Mother Abagail sighed. "I know what he's about but not who he is. He's the purest evil left in the world. The rest of the bad is little evil. Shoplifters and sexfiends and people who like to use their fists. But he'll call them. He's started already. And he's getting them together a lot faster than we are. Before he's ready to make his move, I guess he'll have a lot more. Not just the evil ones that are like him, but the weak ones...the lonely ones...and the ones that have left God out of their hearts."

"Maybe he's not real." Nick wrote, though Maggie shook her head a little as she read it aloud. It was like how she knew Mother Abagail was real. Randall Flagg was real; she just knew. "Maybe he's just the scared, bad part of all of us. Maybe we're dreaming of the things we're afraid we might do. People do plenty bad things after something like a plague."

Maggie glanced over at Nick doubtfully after she read it, but then looked back to Mother Abagail. She didn't know if Nick truly believed that the dark man wasn't real, or if he was just in denial. She suspected the latter of the two. She figured Nick was just tired. They had finally got to Mother Abagail, and Nick probably wanted to get to Boulder and go about getting things back to the way they used to be. But were the old ways really the right ways? Look where the old ways have got us, Maggie thought. She thought back to the crows on the telephone pole and shuddered a little. He was real, alright, and she was afraid if they didn't deal with him.

"You dreamed of me," Mother Abagail said in her raspy voice. "Ain't I real?"

Nick nodded, a slight flush staining his cheeks.

"And I dreamed you. Ain't you real? Praise God, you're sittin' right over there with that pad o paper on your knee and your lady right beside ya. This other man, Nick, he's as real as you are," she said, straightening a little in her chair. Maggie grimaced at the comment, she wasn't anyone's lady. No one owned her. It brought back memories of the soldier and those fools who tried to kidnap her back in Kansas. (Can you still call it kidnapping if the legal system doesn't really exist anymore? she wondered.) But, she shook the thought away. Mother Abagail was over a hundred years old, so things had been different in her generation. And there were more important things to be thinking about now.

"He ain't Satan," Mother Abagail continued. "But he and Satan know of each other and have kept their councils together of old.

"The Bible, it don't say what happened to Noah and his family after the flood went down. But I wouldn't be surprised if there was some awful tussle for the souls of these few people-for their souls, their bodies, their way of thinking. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's what we're in for.

"He's west of the Rockies now. Sooner or later he'll come East. Maybe not this year, no, but when he's ready. And it's our lot to deal with him."

Nick rocked back in his chair, his head up against the wall. He didn't know what to do. He had told himself that once they got to Mother Abagail things would be better, and everything would be worked out. But, now they had a problem that was maybe even bigger than the plague on their hands. He hadn't felt angry, exactly, after the plague. More just depressed and irritated. Now, he was angry. He had all these people with him, great people, who had already been through the storm. And that storm was one hell of a big one. They thought they were finally past it, but it turns out they're only in the eye. The second half was still coming, and it would be worse than the last. He longed for the days of drifting, the days when there was no one else he was attached to. He felt a large sense of responsibility for the people he was with now. And it was too late to employ his old strategy of never getting close to anybody. If you don't love anybody, nothing could touch you.

But things were so much more complicated now. They had Raph, and Dick, and Olivia. Not to mention the fact that they were now travelling with a child. One so tough she had gotten through the plague. There was Tom, who in a way he felt the closest with. Tom had been the first person to join him on this long, strange journey to Mother Abagail. Tom trusted Nick like he didn't trust anyone else, and Nick trusted Tom the same way. Then, of course, there was Maggie. He didn't even want to think about the possibility that something bad could happen to Maggie, but he knew it was there. Perhaps more so than all the others, because like Nick she had turned into one of their leaders. It had started around the time Ralph picked them up, people looking to Nick or Maggie for approval after they said something heavy. He was glad she was like him in that way, he didn't know if he could deal with all of that pressure on his own.

But, for the most part, he wished she was just another one of the lost travelers. He wished when they'd found her she didn't know where she was going, just aimlessly travelling North like the rest. And in a guilty way, he wished he hadn't met her at all. She was too good to be part of this mess, he didn't want to have to lose someone like her. No, he told himself. That's the old Nick talking. You can't afford to be the old Nick right now; maybe not ever again.

He thought of all these things over the course of a few seconds, and the room was still silent when Nick finally looked back at them.

"You'll see," Mother Abagail said. She'd waited to make sure Nick would be able to see her say this. "There's bitter days ahead. Death and terror, betrayal and tears. And not all of us will be alive to see how it ends."

"I don't like any of this," Ralph piped in. "Aren't things hard enough without this guy y'all are talkin' about? Ain't we got enough problems, with no doctors or electricity or nothin'? Why did we have to get stuck with this damn door prize?"

"I don't know," Mother Abagail said defeatedly. "It's God's way. He don't explain to the likes of Abby Freemantle."

"If it's His way," Ralph said in irritation, "why, I wish He'd retire and let somebody younger take over."

Nick ripped a note off the pad and handed it to Maggie. "If the dark man is west, maybe we ought to pick up stakes and move east."

Maggie shook her head patiently after she read it. "I don't think that's a good idea, Nick. He'll follow us, and then the people are comin' North to find us will get there and see nothing."

"Nick, all things serve the Lord," Mother Abagail chimed. "Don't you think this dark man serves Him, too? He does, never mind how mysterious His purpose may be. The dark man will follow you no matter where you run, because he serves the purpose of God. And God wants you to deal with him. It don't do no good to run from the will of the Lord God of Hosts. A man or woman who tries that only ends up in the belly of the beast."

"I think we're all pretty well into the belly of the beast anyway," Ralph said with a scoff as Nick wrote quickly on his pad.

He handed it to Maggie, she read it and hesitated. She didn't want to upset Mother Abagail, and she'd likely call it blasphemy, but Maggie decided to just rip off the band-aid and read it aloud anyway.

"What's he say?" Mother Abagail asked. Only then did Maggie discover she'd taken a few too many seconds while deciding whether to read it.

"He says…" Maggie began, then cleared her throat. Her pale cheeks burned red. "Nick says he doesn't believe in God."

Ralph's eye widened at this, waiting for an explosion from Mother Abagail. Old God-loving ladies didn't often take well to atheists.

Nick, meanwhile, sat calmly. He looked to Mother Abagail with a serene but expectant expression. He was angrier now, mostly at himself. What had he suggested? He'd suggested that they run. Wait to go, Nicky on not being the old you, he said to himself. What does Nick Andros do? He runs.

Mother Abagail only chuckled, her dark brown eyes twinkling. She got out of the rocker and walked over to Nick. She took one of his larges hands in her own, patting it. "Bless you, Nick, but that don't matter. He believes in you."