“Stop it, Frannie.”

“No problem. I’m done. I want to leave. Take me home, Stu. Not to the hospital but back home.”

“We’ll listen to what she has to say.”

“Fine. You listen for both of us. I’m leaving.”

“Little girl.”

“Don’t call me that! ”

Her hand shot out and closed around Frannie’s wrist. Fran went rigid. Her eyes closed. Her head snapped back.

“Don’t D-D-Don’t… OH MY GOD—STU—”

“Here! Here!” Stu roared. “What are you doing to her?”

Mother Abagail didn’t answer. The moment spun out, seemed to stretch into a pocket of eternity, and then the old woman let go.

Slowly, dazedly, Fran began to massage the wrist Mother Abagail had taken, although there was no red ring or dent in the flesh to show that pressure had been applied. Frannie’s eyes suddenly widened.

“Hon?” Stu asked anxiously.

“Gone,” Fran muttered.

“What… what’s she talking about?” Stu looked around at the others in shaken appeal. Glen only shook his head. His face was white and strained but not disbelieving.

“The pain… the whiplash. The pain in my back. It’s gone.” She looked at Stu, dazed. “It’s all gone. Look.” She bent and touched her toes lightly: once, then twice. Then she bent a third time and placed her palms flat on the floor without unlocking her knees.

She stood up again and met Mother Abagail’s eyes.

“Is this a bribe from your God? Because if it is, He can take His cure back. I’d rather have the pain if Stu comes with it.”

“God don’t lay on no bribes, child,” Mother Abagail whispered. “He just makes a sign and lets people take it as they will.”

“Stu isn’t going west,” Fran said, but now she seemed bewildered as well as frightened.

“Sit down,” Stu said. “We’ll listen to what she has to say.”

Fran sat down, shocked, unbelieving, lost at sea. Her hands kept stealing around to the small of her back.

“You are to go west,” Mother Abagail whispered. “You are to take no food, no water. You are to go this very day, and in the clothes you stand up in. You are to go on foot. I am in the way of knowing that one of you will not reach your destination, but I don’t know which will be the one to fall. I am in the way of knowing that the rest will be taken before this man Flagg, who is not a man at all but a supernatural being. I don’t know if it’s God’s will for you to defeat him. I don’t know if it’s God’s will for you to ever see Boulder again. Those things are not for me to see. But he is in Las Vegas, and you must go there, and it is there that you will make your stand. You will go, and you will not falter, because you will have the Everlasting Arm of the Lord God of Hosts to lean on. Yes. With God’s help you will stand.”

She nodded.

“That’s all. I’ve said m’piece.”

“No,” Fran whispered. “It can’t be.”

“Mother,” Glen said in a kind of croak. He cleared his throat. “Mother, we’re not ‘in the way of understanding,’ if you see what I mean. We’re… we’re not blessed with your closeness to whatever is controlling this. It just isn’t our way. Fran’s right. If we go over there we’ll be slaughtered, probably by the first pickets we come to.”

“Have you no eyes? You’ve just seen Fran healed of her affliction by God, through me. Do you think His plan for you is to let you be shot and killed by the Dark Prince’s least minion?”

“But, Mother—”

“No.” She raised her hand and waved his words away. “It’s not my place to argue with you, or convince, but only to put you in the way of understanding God’s plan for you. Listen, Glen.”

And suddenly, from Mother Abagail’s mouth, the voice of Glen Bateman issued, frightening them all and making Fran shrink back against Stu with a little cry.

“Mother Abagail calls him the devil’s pawn,” this strong, masculine voice said, originating somehow in the old woman’s wasted chest and emerging from her toothless mouth. “Maybe he’s just the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology against us. Maybe he’s something more, something darker. I only know that he is. And I no longer think that sociology or psychology or any other ology will put a stop to him. I think only white magic will do that.”

Glen’s mouth hung open.

“Is that a true thing, or are those the words of a liar?” Mother Abagail said.

“I don’t know if it’s true or not, but they’re my words,” Glen said shakily.

“Trust. All of you, trust. Larry… Ralph… Stu… Glen… Frannie. You most patic’ly, Frannie. Trust… and obey the word of God.”

“Do we have a choice?” Larry asked bitterly.

She turned to look at him, surprised. “A choice? There’s always a choice. That’s God’s way, always will be. Your will is still free. Do as you will. There’s no set of leg-irons on you. But… this is what God wants of you.”

That silence again, like deep snow. At last, Ralph broke it. “Says in the Bible that David did the job on Goliath,” he said. “I’ll be going along if you say it’s right, Mother.”

She took his hand.

“Me,” Larry said. “Me too. Okay.” He sighed and put his hands on his forehead as if it ached. Glen opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, there was a heavy, tired sigh from the corner and a thud.

It was Lucy, whom they had all forgotten. She had fainted.

Dawn touched the edge of the world.

They sat around Larry’s kitchen table, drinking coffee. It was ten to five when Fran came up the hall and stood in the doorway. Her face was puffy from crying, but there was no limp as she walked. She was, indeed, cured. “She’s going, I think,” Fran said.

They went in, Larry with his arm around Lucy.

Mother Abagail’s breathing had taken on a heavy, hollow rattle that was horribly reminiscent of the superflu. They gathered around the bed without speaking, deep in awe and afraid. Ralph was sure that something would happen at the end that would cause the wonder of God to stand before all of them, naked and revealed. She would be gone in a flash of light, taken. Or they would see her spirit, transfigured in radiance, leaving by the window and going up into the sky.

But in the end, she simply died.

There was a single final breath, the last of millions. It was drawn in, held, and finally let out. Her chest just didn’t rise again.

“She’s done,” Stu muttered.

“God have mercy on her soul,” Ralph said, no longer afraid. He crossed her hands on her thin bosom, and his tears fell on them.

“I’ll go,” Glen said suddenly. “She was right. White magic. That’s all that’s left.”

“Stu,” Frannie whispered. “Please, Stu, say no.”

They looked at him—all of them.

Now you must lead, Stuart.

He thought of Arnette, of the old car carrying Charles D. Campion and his load of death, crashing into Bill Hapscomb’s pumps like some wicked Pandora. He thought of Denninger and Deitz, and how he had begun to associate them in his mind with the smiling doctors who had lied and lied and lied to him and to his wife about her condition—and maybe they had lied to themselves, as well. Most of all, he thought of Frannie. And of Mother Abagail saying, This is what God wants of you.

“Frannie,” he said. “I have to go.”

“And die.” She looked at him bitterly, almost hatefully, and then to Lucy, as if for support. But Lucy was stunned and far-off, no help.

“If we don’t go, we’ll die,” Stu said, feeling his way along the words. “She was right. If we wait, then spring comes. Then what? How are we going to stop him? We don’t know. We don’t have a clue. We never did. We had our heads in the sand, too. We can’t stop him except like Glen says. White magic. Or the power of God.”

She began to weep bitterly.

“Frannie, don’t do that,” he said, and tried to take her hand.

“Don’t touch me!” she cried at him. “You’re a dead man, you’re a corpse, so don’t touch me! ”