"I can't, man," Larry said. "Put yourself in my place."
Dorgan shook his head. "I can't do that, because I'm not nuts. Why are you guys here? What good do you think it's going to do you? He's going to kill you dead as dogshit tomorrow or the next day. And if he wants you to talk, you will. If he wants you to tapdance and jerk off at the same time, you'll do that, too. You must be crazy."
"We were told to come by the old woman. Mother Abagail. Probably you dreamed about her."
Dorgan shook his head, but suddenly his eyes wouldn't meet Larry's. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Then let's leave it at that."
"Sure you don't want to talk to me? Get that shower?"
Larry laughed. "I don't work that cheap. Send your own spy over to our side. If you can find one that doesn't look like a weasel the second Mother Abagail's name gets mentioned, that is."
"Any way you want it," Dorgan said. He walked back down the hallway under the mesh-enclosed lights. At the far end he stepped past a steel-barred gate that rolled shut behind him with a hollow crash.
Larry looked around. Like Ralph, he had been in jail on a couple of occasions - public intoxication once, possession of an ounce of marijuana on another. Flaming youth.
"It's not the Ritz," he muttered.
The mattress on the bunk looked decidedly moldy, and he wondered a little morbidly if someone had died on it back in June or early July. The toilet worked but filled with rusty water the first time he flushed it, a reliable sign that it hadn't been used for a long time. Someone had left a paperback Western. Larry picked it up and then put it down again. He sat on the bunk and listened to the silence. He had always hated to be alone - but in a way, he always had been... until he had arrived in the Free Zone. And now it wasn't so bad as he had been afraid it would be. Bad enough, but he could cope.
He's going to kill you dead as dogshit tomorrow or the next day.
Except Larry didn't believe it. It just wasn't going to happen that way.
"I will fear no evil," he said into the dead silence of the cellblock wing, and he liked the way it sounded. He said it again.
He lay down, and the thought occurred that he had finally made it most of the way back to the West Coast. But the trip had been longer and stranger than anyone ever could have imagined. And the trip wasn't quite over yet.
"I will fear no evil," he said again. He fell asleep, his face calm, and he slept in dreamless peace.
At ten o'clock the next day, twenty-four hours after they had first seen the roadblock in the distance, Randall Flagg and Lloyd Henreid came to see Glen Bateman.
He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of his cell. He had found a piece of charcoal under his bunk, and had just finished writing this legend on the wall amid the intaglio of male and female genitals, names, phone numbers, and obscene little poems: I am not the potter, not the potter's wheel, but the potter's clay; is not the value of the shape attained as dependent upon the intrinsic worth of the clay as upon the wheel and the Master's skill? Glen was admiring this proverb - or was it an aphorism? - when the temperature in the deserted cellblock suddenly seemed to drop ten degrees. The door at the end of the corridor rumbled open. The saliva in Glen's mouth was suddenly all gone, and the charcoal snapped between his fingers.
Bootheels clocked up the hallway toward him.
Other footfalls, smaller and insignificant, pattered along in counterpoint, trying to keep up.
Why, it's him. I'm going to see his face.
Suddenly his arthritis was worse. Terrible, in fact. It seemed that his bones had suddenly been hollowed out and filled with ground glass. And still, he turned with an interested, expectant smile on his face as the bootheels stopped in front of his cell.
"Well, there you are," Glen said. "And you're not half the boogeyman we thought you must be."
Standing on the other side of the bars were two men. Flagg was on Glen's right. He was wearing bluejeans and a white silk shirt that gleamed mellowly in the dim lights. He was grinning in at Glen. Behind him was a shorter man who was not smiling at all. He had an undershot chin and eyes that seemed too big for his face. His complexion was one that the desert climate was never going to be kind to; he had burned, peeled, and burned again. Around his neck he wore a black stone flawed with red. It had a greasy, resinous look.
"I'd like you to meet my associate," Flagg said with a giggle. "Lloyd Henreid, meet Glen Bateman, sociologist, Free Zone Committee member, and single existing member of the Free Zone think tank now that Nick Andros is dead."
"Meetcha," Lloyd mumbled.
"How's your arthritis, Glen?" Flagg asked. His tone was commiserating, but his eyes sparkled with high glee and secret knowledge.
Glen opened and closed his hands rapidly, smiling back at Flagg. No one would ever know what an effort it took to maintain that gentle smile.
The intrinsic worth of the clay!