Read Online The Stand (Original Edition) by Stephen King - Free Book Online Page A

like a good little boy, and Dewey will be happy to oblige.” He paused, watching two small children in bright bathing suits run up the beach. A dog ran beside them, rowfing loudly at the blue sky.
    Larry stood up and forced himself to say thanks. The sea breeze slipped in and out of his aging shorts. The word came out of his mouth like a brick,
    “You just go away somewhere and get your shit together,” Wayne said, standing up beside him, still watching the children. “You’ve got a lot of shit to get together. What kind of manager you want, what kind of tour you want, what kind of contract you want after “Pocket Savior” hits. If you give yourself some room, you’ll figure it all out. Guys like you always do.”
    Guys like you always do.
    Guys like me always do.
    Guys like —
    Somebody was tapping a finger on the window.
    Larry jerked, then sat up. A bolt of pain went through his neck and he winced at the dead, cramped feel of the flesh there. He had been asleep, not just dozing. Reliving California. But here and now it was gray New York daylight, and the finger tapped again.
    He turned his head cautiously and painfully and saw his mother, wearing a black net scarf over her hair, peering in.
    For a moment they just stared at each other through the glass and Larry felt curiously naked, like an animal being looked at in the zoo. Then his mouth took over, smiling, and he cranked the window down.
    “Mom?”
    “I knew it was you,” she said in a queerly flat tone. “Come on out and let me see you standing up.”
    Both legs had gone to sleep, and pins and needles tingled up from the balls of his feet as he opened the door and got out. He had never expected to meet her this way, unprepared and exposed. He felt like a sentry who had fallen asleep at his post suddenly called to attention. He had somehow expected his mother to look smaller, less sure of herself, a trick of the years that had matured him and left her just the same.
    But it was almost uncanny, the way she had caught him. When he was ten, she used to wake him up on Saturday mornings after she thought he had slept long enough by tapping one finger on his closed bedroom door. She had wakened him that same way fourteen years later, sleeping in his new car like a tired kid who tried to stay up all night and got caught by the sandman in an undignified position.
    Now he stood before her, his hair corkscrewed, a faint and rather foolish grin on his face. Pins and needles still coursed up his legs, making him shift from foot to foot. He remembered that she always asked him if he had to go to the bathroom when he did that and now he stopped the movement and let the needles prick him at will.
    “Hi, Mom,” he said.
    She looked at him without saying anything, and a dread suddenly roosted in his heart like an evil bird coming back to an old nest. It was a fear that she might turn away from him, deny him, show him the back of her cheap coat, and simply go off to the subway around the comer, leaving him.
    Then she sighed, the way a man will sigh before picking up a heavy bundle. And when she spoke, her voice was so natural and so mildly—rightly—pleased that he forgot his first impression.
    “Hi, Larry,” she said. “Come on upstairs. I knew it was you when I looked out the window. I already called in sick at the building. I got sick time coming.”
    She turned to lead him back up the steps, between the vanished stone dogs. He came three steps behind her, catching up, wincing at the pins and needles. “Mom?”
    She turned back to him and he hugged her. For a moment an expression of fright crossed her features, as if she expected to be mugged rather than hugged. Then it passed and she accepted his embrace and gave back her own. The smell of her sachet slipped up his nose, evoking unexpected nostalgia, fierce, sweet, and bitter. For a moment he thought he was going to cry, and was smugly sure that she would; it was A Touching Moment. Over her sloped right shoulder