Lloyd had gone to his cell door again after neatening up Trask; now he involuntarily fell back two steps. He dropped his gaze to the floor outside and what he saw first was a pair of dusty cowboy boots with pointed toes and rundown heels and his first thought was that Poke had had a pair like that.
The boots stopped in front of his cell.
His gaze rose slowly, taking in the faded jeans snugged down over the boots, the leather belt with the brass buckle (various astrological signs inside a pair of concentric circles), the jeans jacket with a button pinned to each of the breast pockets - a smiley-smile face on one, a dead pig and the words HOW'S YOUR PORK on the other.
At the same instant Lloyd's eyes reluctantly reached Randall Flagg's darkly flushed face, Flagg screamed "Boo! " The single sound floated down the dead cellblock and then rushed back. Lloyd shrieked, stumbled over his own feet, fell down, and began to cry.
"That's all right," Flagg soothed. "Hey, man, that's all right. Everything's purely all right."
Lloyd sobbed: "Can you let me out? Please let me out. I don't want to be like my rabbit, I don't want to end up like that, it's not fair, if it wasn't for Poke I never would have got into anything but small shit, please let me out, mister, I'll do anything."
"You poor guy. You look like an advertisement for a summer vacation at Dachau."
Despite the sympathy in Flagg's voice, Lloyd could not bring himself to raise his eyes beyond the knees of the newcomer's jeans. If he looked into that face again, it would kill him. It was the face of a devil.
"Please," Lloyd mumbled. "Please let me out. I'm starving."
"How long you been shitcanned, my friend?"
"I don't know," Lloyd said, wiping his eyes with thin fingers. "A long time."
"How come you're not dead already?"
"I knew what was coming," Lloyd told the bluejeaned legs as he drew the last tattered shreds of his cunning around him. "I saved up my food. That's what."
"Didn't happen to have a chomp on this fine fellow in the next cell, by any chance?"
"What?" Lloyd croaked. "What? No! Christ's sake! What do you think I am? Mister, mister, please - "
"His left leg there looks a little thinner than his right one. That's the only reason I asked, my good friend."
"I don't know nothing about that," Lloyd whispered. He was trembling all over.
"How about Br'er Rat? How did he taste?"
Lloyd put his hands over his face and said nothing.
"What's your name?"
Lloyd tried to say, but all that came out was a moan.
"What's your name, soldier?"
"Lloyd Henreid." He tried to think what to say next, but his mind was a chaotic jumble: He had been afraid when his lawyer told him he might go to the electric chair, but not this afraid. He had never been this afraid in his entire life. "It was all Poke's idea!" he screamed. "Poke should be here, not me!"
"Look at me, Lloyd."
"No," Lloyd whispered. His eyes rolled wildly.
"Why not?"
"Because..."
"Go on."
"Because I don't think you're real," Lloyd whispered. "And if you are real... mister, if you're real, you're the devil."
"Look at me, Lloyd."
Helplessly, Lloyd turned his eyes up to that dark, grinning face that hung behind an intersection of bars. The right hand held something up beside the right eye. Looking at it made Lloyd feel cold and hot all over. It looked like a black stone, so dark it seemed almost resinous and pitchy. There was a red flaw in the center of it, and to Lloyd it looked like a terrible eye, bloody and half-open, peering at him. Then Flagg turned it slightly between his fingers, and the red flaw in the dark stone looked like... a key. Flagg turned it back and forth between his fingers. Now it was the eye, now it was the key.
The eye, the key.
He sang: "She brought me coffee... she brought me tea... she brought me... damn near everything... but the workhouse key. Right, Lloyd?"
"Sure," Lloyd said huskily. His eyes never left the small dark stone. Flagg began to walk it from one finger to the next like a magician doing a trick.
"Now you're a man who must appreciate the value of a good key," the man said. The dark stone disappeared in his clenched fist and suddenly reappeared in his other hand, where it began to finger-walk again. "I'm sure you are. Because what a key is for is opening doors. Is there anything more important in life than opening doors, Lloyd?"
"Mister, I'm awfully hungry..."
"Sure you are," the man said. An expression of concern spread over his face, an expression so magnified that it became grotesque. "Jesus Christ, a rat isn't anything to eat! Why, do you know what I had for lunch? I had a nice rare roast beef sandwich on Vienna bread with a few onions and a lot of Gulden's Spicy Brown. Sound good?"
Lloyd nodded his head, tears oozing slowly out of his overbright eyes.