My Pandemic of Preference: One

A Lynchline Special, Part 1 of 4: January 23, 2023

In the summer of 1989, faced with the prospect of enriching my body and soul with vigorous exercise in the forests and waters of Northern Minnesota, I did what any sensible 11-year-old would and buried my face in a book for days. That was how I met The Stand.

I spent a lot of my early youth buried in books, but the majority of them were non-fiction, gamebooks (Choose Your Own Adventure, Which Way, some random fantasies that slipped past the school district busybodies during the panics of the 80s) or coffee-table books about all the awesome alien monsters that would kill us in the future. The Stand wasn’t just my introduction to Stephen King— it was the first adult novel I ever read cover to cover without skimming or halting. And that’s clearly why, thirty-three years later, I’m such a completely normal person!

I can best sum up how I feel about The Stand by admitting I have never successfully gotten rid of any copy of it that has fallen into my hands. I believe I now own six of them, including three of the edition I had with me that summer, the Signet paperback with the Don Brautigam cover: blue light glowing behind dark hills, baleful eyes staring out from the mingled shapes of man and crow. I still think about that cover sometimes, when I’m driving on rural roads or I’m out on the highway as the day’s light is sinking. The eerie promise of that blue light remains threaded into my subconscious conception of America— just over the horizon there’s something waiting for us all, something huge, something strange, maybe something terrible.

Here’s the very object, braced with some archival tape but still forever at or near my desk, a third of a century since I first opened it:

I must have picked the book up because the back cover mentioned a plague. I was intrigued by that sort of thing—worlds ending, civilizations falling, normal weird kid stuff— but the plague was actually the least fantastical of the concepts The Stand had to offer. Reading it was like climbing the wall that separated my world from adulthood and taking my first long peek over the edge. Here were grown-ups with jobs and finances and frustrations and relationships, grown-ups interacting with all the systems of being grown up, and not a viewpoint kid in sight to shepherd me along as I tried to grasp it all. Then, while my mind was still reeling from the strangeness of their normality, normality was snatched away. The systems collapsed, the cities and nations died, all the known lines of power and authority dissolved. Ironically, the post-apocalypse was an easier place for my mind to dwell. It was full of concepts I understood— running, hiding, fighting monsters, dreaming of hopes and terrors. The Stand was a story in which the world of my parents’ and teachers’ rules melted into a world where the rules of my imagination had more practical application.

In May of 1994 the last few weeks of my sophomore year of high school were ticking away and CBS aired a four-part adaptation of The Stand. Network TV miniseries were still a big thing in those days, as I suppose coin-operated zoetrope machines and cave wall paintings once were. I grew up on stuff like V, V: The Final Battle, North and South, War and Remembrance, and even the previous big Stephen King adaptation, It. For unguessable reasons, The Stand had not led me to a Stephen King reading habit (I did not become a full-on fan until after high school) but I did have an abiding fixation on that single book, and so I watched the whole miniseries raptly. I’m not ashmed to admit I must have watched it a dozen times over the last thirty years in various formats. It’s an odd duck— some of it is absolutely magnificent, some of it is earnest and awkward, some of it is goofy as hell. It’s full of little treats, starts well, waxes even better in the middle, and all but flies apart at the end. Warts and all, it has gradually become one of my favorite pieces of media of all time.

The reason for this is largely personal. I was a freshly-minted sixteen when this aired, and I was growing comfortable in my own skin again after a couple years of grueling, stumbling adolescence. My freshman year in high school had been an emotional disaster, the tortures of the Inquisition with bonus hormones, but here at the close of year two was a real sense of possibility and movement. I had a fantastic girlfriend, I could finally get a driver’s license, I could get a proper job. I was meeting the world, and the thing about the 1994 The Stand is that I’ve never seen anything else that looks so perfectly of that time. Every car, every building, every stitch of clothing screams middle America in ‘94, so it’s a memento of both a beloved book and a beloved passage in my life. Which is why I’ve been itching to absolutely uncork a massive stream of in-depth yammering about it! Here we go, episode by episode, in a rambling, informal, profoundly fussy recap annotation and dissection of 1994’s The Stand, commencing with:

I. THE PLAGUE

One of the most interesting conceits in King’s world is his nightmare network of dark sites, secret projects, grim laboratories, and government bunkers that pervades the American landscape. Certainly, these things exist in real life but in King’s work they have metastasized to mythic scale. These are the miles and miles of dusty but power-haunted tunnels Roland traverses in the Dark Tower stories, the Arrowhead Project of “The Mist,” the well-manicured lawns and tasteful farmhouses that conceal the goon squads of the Shop. Here we open with Project Blue, a biological warfare lab four hundred feet beneath a drab collection of unassuming government buildings, one of a thousand unsavory little secrets tucked away in the countryside. This just happens to be the one that hatches the end of the world.

The opening of the miniseries is by most measures closely faithful to the events described in the 1990 “complete and uncut” edition of the book (about which I’ll say more later); an accidental release of a deadly pathogen at the aforementioned Secret Underground Fun Lab sets off alarms and causes the token above-ground guard to panic. This scene is exciting, featuring handheld camera work in an unbroken shot that follows this poor bastard as he runs into his house, rouses his family, and hauls them out to the car not realizing that they are already Patients Zero, One, and Two of the coming mess. Budget limitations rear their head in the form of the world’s flimsiest alleged anti-vehicle gate (seriously, you’d be hard pressed to guard a middle school tennis court with that thing, electrified or not— behold as it wobbles into the road on its little bitty wheels of doom:)

but despite this, director Mick Garris and his people send a clear message that they will shake out their full bag of tricks to give this production some energy. This impression continues as the camera drifts into the deserted guard shack, approaches the monitors showing heaps of dead scientists in the lab below, and “enters” a monitor to transition down to that set while a surprisingly kick-ass tune plays over the credits— my first conscious exposure to Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” Sure, you could call this an obvious choice, but the thing to do with obvious choices is execute them with gusto. These first few minutes are a 10/10 for gusto.

As the song continues playing, we take a leisurely journey through labs, offices, and cafeterias and gaze upon the very surprised corpses now filling them. Again, big mood, a gripping opening, but it does raise a pedantic question that has bothered me since the very first time I read the book. Namely, what the hell is meant to have killed all these people so fast?

The cause of the plague is an engineered influenza variant with a 99.4% excess mortality rate in the general population, and while it’s awful and inexorable, its victims take several days to die. Now, exposure to a massive viral load would speed that process up considerably, but still, you’re not going to get immediate knockdown of a live human being with a virus like this. That sort of effect requires a science-fictional pathogen like the Andromeda Strain, total displacement of all atmospheric oxygen, or a potent chemical agent. People are seen piled up against doors, pitched over at their desks, sprawled at tables— and even though some of them have been made up with this adaptation’s visual cues for superflu, the flu didn’t kill these people. Molly Ringwald did.

Well, possibly. I mean, it’s not likely, but in a contest between Molly Ringwald and the flu, only Molly Ringwald actually has the slightest chance of causing multiple rapid deaths, and yet there’s no left-behind axe or gun visible in any of these scenes. So, somehow, our imaginary flu has dropped these people in their tracks before migrating 400 feet up to the surface, where it suddenly needs 36-72 hours to get the job done. Huh?

In my head, I always fixed this by assuming that the release in the lab complex was something very fast-acting, most likely a chemical, and that the escape of the superflu was just a pile-on consequence as people working with flasks and test tubes pitched over at their workstations. An even more elegant retcon I eventually cooked up was that the flu had already been released some hours previously (explaining how the guard and his family caught it despite being up on the surface) but the forces of darkness, who were orchestrating and watching the whole chain of events, needed to ensure that the guard wasn’t reported or pursued when he packed up his family and ran. Thus, an accident with a more virulent agent to set off the alarms, frighten him into leaving, and help him get away without interference.

“Oh Scott,” you might be saying, “you poor silly bitch, this is what you spend your time worrying about, in a world where levitating demons turn knives into bananas?” Listen, I’ve nuked every house I’ve ever lived in on Nukemap multiple times. Of course this is what I spend my time worrying about. Also, there ought to be a formal term of art for when a work of fiction is so broadly satisfying that its audience enthusiastically plugs all the holes in its credibility on their own time rather than sitting around whining. Little errors in good material can be a fun entry point for audience participation, and, uh, obviously, cough, that’s why writers uh, cough, make sure our work contains little errors. Yeah. Anyhow.

As the song nears its conclusion and we see our last few sprawled corpses, we also note that the cafeteria TV is playing an episode of a gameshow called BLACKOUT, a thing that really existed and ran for just one season, in 1988. The fact that somebody recalled that, got the required permissions, and used it as a morbid joke for the opening credits is one of those loving little touches that really polish this thing up. “It is only goodness which gives extras,” said Sherlock Holmes, speaking about a rose, and in the spirit of that speech I say: We have much to hope from these five seconds of BLACKOUT.

Time passes. Our hapless guard, now critically ill, swerves off the road and hits a row of gas pumps in a rainy slice of nowhere called Arnette, Texas. Here we meet Stu Redman as played by Gary Sinise, a casting choice that shoots straight to the top of this production’s asset column. Sinise’s Stu is wary but generous, grounded but not caricatured, reserved but deep. He shows what sort of man he is by holding a dying stranger in his arms, even when the man is obviously slick with mucous and pustules that have nothing to do with any car crash.

Once that poor bastard has given his cryptic utterances, passed the virus on to all of Stu’s buddies, and gone to the great guard shack in the sky, we shift our scene to an ominous military base that looks very much like a local TV station filmed from a clever angle. This is not at all a sneer— immense creativity and improvisation had to be deployed, especially considering the not-vast amount of money available, to weave a truly nationwide visual tapestry out of bits and bobs, and I am delighted by this production’s ingenuity.

Inside the local TV station we meet General Starkey, an uncredited supporting role for Ed Harris. Starkey has exhausted his supply of cope and is working to exhaust his supply of cigarettes and booze. He exposits vigorously for anyone who hasn’t read the book, explaining how thoroughly unlikely a successful containment is, given that the escaped guard must have had human contact to buy food and gas before finally skidding to a halt in Arnette. His subordinate retorts with a great point from an emergency response standpoint— they can’t afford to think like that. They must at least try to quarantine Arnette and the other points of contact. Too often in movies these sorts of scenes are written as an opportunity merely for the guilty heavies to double down on their evil, so I give two thumbs up to the presence of actual logic in this plot development.

In the transition to the next scene we get another neat extra, a full commercial for a fictional pallitative called Flu Buddy, complete with a sneezing businessman who breaks into dance when his symptoms are banished. This thing is an uncanny simulacrum of the schmaltzy energy of a real TV ad, and on first viewing I assumed it was an actual commercial break until the camera cut to a shot of the animated Flu Buddy dancing diegetically on a TV inside a gas station.

Next up we have one of the production’s many sly little random casting miracles. In the role of Texas State Patrol officer Joe Bob Brentwood, we have the one and only motherfuckin’ Joe Bob Briggs! Joe Bob as Joe Bob doesn’t hang around long, but he brings word that military aircraft are landing nearby and military convoys are on the roads.

The Big Green Machine rolls into town like a bunch of goons and starts throwing people into trucks. Ostensibly in charge is fussy scientist Dr. Herbert Denninger, well-embodied by Max Wright in a surreal turn for those of us who remembered him as the dad from ALF. The soldiers are all wearing a budget approximation of protective gear but for some reason they have neglected to wear gloves, one of the most basic components of infection control (look, I had to sit through hazmat operations refresher class literally ten times, this pedantry is bought and paid for), so even if the superflu were less contagious they’d be thoroughly boned. Boy, this shit hits a bit different in 2023, doesn’t it?

Everyone showing symptoms or confirmed to have been near a known case is packed off into a plane, bound for isolation and testing at a lab in Vermont. As he’s being marched to the flight line, Stu nervously says “Arnette’s been canceled.” A decade and a half before Twitter, no less.

This brings us to New York and our first glimpse of Larry Underwood (Adam Storke), a guy who would have fucked himself up to a comical degree if he’d had access to social media. I think Storke absolutely owns this role; everything from Larry’s hung-over nervous tics to his reflexive/defensive sleaziness to his projected sense of being lost and uncentered is perfect, as is the eventual emergence of his vulnerability and sincerity. As in the book, Larry is a chrysalitic pop star with a breakout single steadily climbing the charts (remember radio, and charts?), and he’s fled back home for a few weeks to lie low while his bank account catches up with his premature celebration. Here comes a brief flurry of pop culture nattering relating to the way this material has been stretched across adaptations.

You see, The Stand as originally written is ostensibly set in the heady future of 1985 but its fundamentally unchanged cultural references make it clear it’s really our 1977 wearing a hat and a fake moustache. Larry’s song “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” exists as just a few snippets of lyrics but his mother, when asked for her opinion of it, tells him that he “sounds like a n***er.” To which he replies “That brown sound sure do get around.” I’ve never been able to determine if this was a genuine pop culture aphorism or just a dumbass thing Stephen King made up. At any rate, it’s a half-assed joke, but it’s still somewhat plausible within the context of a 1985-that-is-actually-1977.

Larry’s mother doesn’t indicate that she thinks of all rock music as “black” music; she specifically references his individual sound. I don’t think Larry is meant to be a phenomenon on the Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder level, but he is obviously slick enough to play in the big leagues, so let’s say he could be something like a younger, less polished Luther Vandross. I do note King’s description of Larry’s Pocket Savior album cover makes it clear that he’s being positioned as a soulful loner, possibly in the Springsteen mode. “Vandross voice and Springsteen scruffiness”— probably the best approximation I can conjure of where Larry might fit into the world of music.

Anyhow, anyhow, the point is, if his mom thinks he sounds like a black man in a funk/soul/R&B inflected 70s radio landscape, it’s obvious he doesn’t sound like Andy Gibb or Conway Twitty, right? “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” works just fine in this context. But then… along came 1990, and the complete and uncut edition of The Stand, in which a bunch of expurgated material was restored (much of it really good) and the chronology of the story was pushed from 1985 to 1990. The conversation between Larry and his mom was tweaked, alluding to the differences in connotation between “sounding black” in 1977 and 1990. The exact same dialogue and “brown sound” bits remained, but hip-hop was at least referenced.

We now return to our discussion of the miniseries, already in progress. The miniseries version of Larry’s song isn’t smooth soulful loner music or even hardscrabble R&B, it’s a sort of overproduced adult contemporary, a Lionel Ritchie imitation being imitated over a long-distance phone line, that barely comes from 1994 and never even heard of 1977. And yet in the conversation with Larry’s mom the same old lines (minus the n-word) are back again— “You sound like a black man,” and “that brown sound sure do get around.” I’m not saying that casual racism is unrealistic in a 1990s setting (ha ha, wow, I am absolutely not saying that)— what I am saying is that this casual racism is now 17 years past its plausible pop-culture context, and I would like the waiter to take it back to the kitchen so some appropriate racism can be prepared in its place. Also, come on, lady! Larry’s song makes Billy Ocean sound like Ozzy Osbourne. Get a grip.

None of this, incidentally, should take anything away from the late Mary Ethel Gregory, who uses her brief screen time to powerfully portray a woman whose love is buried under a brittle crust of lifelong disappointment. She and Storke are excellent foils for one another, a miniature working-class drama one-act .

Moving right along… in Vermont, all of Stu’s friends and townfolk are dying while he alone remains completely healthy. Smarmy guys in lab coats are puzzled, and increasingly frustrated by their inability to figure out why their overachieving flu virus won’t touch him.

In Maine, we meet Frannie Goldsmith, played by Molly Ringwald, who might have been better for this role in theory than in practice, at least for this version of the role. In the novel we meet Frannie as she’s breaking the news of her pregnancy to her boyfriend Jess, then struggling with both the ambivalence of his response and the realization that her feelings for him have definitely waned. Jess is cut out of the miniseries, so Frannie is introduced just sort of hanging around her dad’s house. Ringwald, then 26, is five years older than the literary Frannie but playing a version of her that feels five years younger, a big teenager rather than a woman facing the sort of personal crossroads that rapidly ages you beyond your years.

Corin Nemec’s version of Harold Lauder also suffers from his introduction, in which he is sketched broadly and afflicted with pantomime zits. The literary Harold, though a more immediate and obvious creep, is also more deeply drawn and thus both more menacing and more sympathetic. These characters will bloom a bit later, but their first appearance is not promising.

The easy, natural pacing of the first part of this episode is abandoned for a while as we flit across the landscape, piling on new character after new character. Now we meet Nick Andros, played by Rob Lowe with an unflattering blue baseball cap jammed down on his head, concealing what a pretty fellow he is. In fact, all of his clothing seems slightly too large, which could be a canny way to indicate his feelings of isolation and alienation, his desire to conceal himself from a world full of jackasses and would-be tormentors. Nick can neither hear nor speak. I’m not sure what to say about the way he’s strolling down a rural highway in the middle of the night with less situational awareness than any of the deaf people I know in real life. All of them are deeply invested in not getting hit by cars, and are quite skilled at it. Anyhow, Nick has not concealed himself inside his clothes as well as he might have liked, so he gets jumped and beaten unconscious by a serving of locally-sourced artisanal rednecks.

Nick wakes up in an eerie field of corn and realizes that in this place he can hear and talk. He follows the sound of guitar strumming and meets Mother Abigail Freemantle, played by the late great Ruby Dee as a sort of gender-swapped Old Testament Yoda. More, much more, on her later. Mother Abigail semi-explains that this is possibly a dream and possibly not a dream, a sort of shared space, a supernatural bulletin board where the powers of good and evil can coax people along or have little flame wars, as they see fit. One thing to note is that while Nick’s ears and voice have been magically restored, he still has the swollen and bleeding eye his muggers just gave him.

That seems like a pretty shitty deal, and there’s a lot to unpack here! If Nick’s senses are restored because the powers of good in this place give him a “perfected” version of his own body, why can’t they do something about the blood running from his swollen shiner? If this is Nick’s own idealized version of himself, why is he fixated on senses that he has gone without for his entire life rather than the immediate damage to his face? If Mother Abigail is a prophetic power who can speak in thoughts and dreams (she is, and she can) why does Nick have to have a hardware upgrade to converse with her, rather than her simply meeting him where he’s at? A more generous assessment might be that retaining the injury serves as a reminder that Nick’s time in this place is limited and that the harsh physical reality of the waking world still has him in its grip.

Ultimately? I think it’s most likely that he has the injury because someone just thought it would look cool. So it goes.

In Vermont, the men running tests on Stu are treating him with the scientific effectiveness of angry drunken clowns and the social sensitivity of angry drunken clowns. Everyone else from Arnette has died, and the stress in the lab is obviously climbing. Stu is very anxious indeed.

In New York, Larry has a pair of strange run-ins, first with The Rat Man (played by Rick Aviles), who can only be described as a sort of evil video arcade gangster pirate; this is the most normal and restrained we’re ever gonna see this guy:

After that, Larry strolls onto the street, where he is literally seized by a bell-ringing doomsday prophet who somehow knows Larry’s name. In another bit of fabulous stunt casting, this is a cameo from NBA legend, novelist, and airline pilot Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:

In Arizona, we catch our first glimpse of Lloyd Henreid, played by the late and much-missed Miguel Ferrer. I’m going to put my cards on the table and note that I fucking love Ferrer in everything I’ve ever seen him in, and I think he’s outstanding in this miniseries. At first, Lloyd seems very much in the shadow of his loud, domineering, intemperate partner Poke, with whom he’s roaring across the state on a beer-fueled robbery and murder spree. Poke is removed from the stage immediately after taking a bullet during a convenience store hold-up. Lloyd survives, but while being wrestled and handcuffed to the ground he thinks he sees a man sitting on top of a nearby telephone pole, watching him. When one of the police officers handling Lloyd looks up, he sees nothing but a crow in the same place. Good stuff.

At the sinister government local TV station, General Starkey now looks like his guild’s only healer after a three-day World of Warcraft bender. Things in the wider world are definitely souring, and Starkey receives word that reporters have acquired uncensored videotape footage of flu victims and mass body disposal operations, as well as information on government plans. He orders forces dispatched to nip this in the bud. We get a bit of shaky video documentary next, as a TV news crew films their own interception in the middle of Wyoming by hostile soldiers demanding their cameras and tapes. “You don’t seem to understand the situation here, ma’am,” says the officer in charge. “Martial law has been declared— we don’t have to put up with you and your pinko friends anymore!”

When I was a kid, I thought this scene was over the top and anvilicious, but in the last few years I’ve come to believe that I never actually had the luxury of being so naive.

The beshitification of the world grinds on! General Starkey admits that the game is more or less up and recites a bit of Yeats (pronouncing it “yeets”), ruminating on how the center cannot hold. Ed Harris is an absolute champ in this scene (“I didn’t understand that poem when I was in college, but… I must be getting smarter in my old age, because I understand it now…”). Elsewhere, the men who tormented Nick Andros are dying off by assorted means, and Larry Underwood’s mom is in a bad way. The most extensive “final throes” makeup work for flu victims is really something, perhaps not as gross as, say, a David Cronenberg film but still a solid notch or two above expectations for network prime time in 1994.

Times Square is on fire, people are doing random Hollywood looting and Hollywood apocalypse shenanigans. A crowd tips over a police car straight out of Hill Street Blues and dances on top of it. General Starkey invites a friendly bullet to stay in his chest cavity. In Maine, Frannie’s dad (Ken Jenkins, later justly celebrated as Dr. Kelso on Scrubs) is circling the drain while he and Fran listen in horror to a call-in radio host named Ray Flowers (another uncredited cameo, this time from the one and only Kathy Bates), who is defying government attempts to shut down all mention of the true scope of the emergency and inviting callers to tell their gruesome stories. After a few minutes she’s gunned down on the air. Full props to Ringwald and Jenkins for really selling this scene.

In burning NYC, Kareem Abdul-Jabellringer hollers “Bring out your dead! He’s here! The dark man is here!” and yes, at last, the boots of destiny are heard clicking down a quiet desert highway. In… Maricopa County, Arizona? Fuck me, 1994, this stuff’s getting kinda personal, don’t you think?

Out of the darkness comes Randall Flagg, still mostly hidden by shadows, but we can see that he is tall, bedenim’d, and majestically bemulleted. Flagg is one of the things I love the most about The Stand, an antagonist conjured out of the American mythscape, a dark prince of empty highways, a little bit country and a little bit rock-n-roll. Appropriately, he comes from somewhere else, but America with its blood and its greed and its big inviting horizons has made something new of him. He is of a kind with Ray Bradbury’s Mr. Dark: “…where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.”

The dark man points his finger at a deer and kills it with the power of his mullet. Somehow, resonating from thousands of miles away, he hears Abdul-Jabbar’s doomsday prophet trying to warn people about him, so Flagg summons a burst of psychic energy, whispering into Kareem’s ear: “My dad says you don't work hard enough on defense. And he says that lots of times, you don't even run down court. And that you don't really try... except during the playoffs!” Kareem immediately has a heart attack.

Next we see Stu Redman wandering in the dream-corn, following the sound of Mother Abigail’s guitar. They talk as if they already know one another, and Ruby Dee has a great bit where she makes Abigail come down off the metaphorical mountain and ditch the mysterious wizard demeanor. “Stuart… those folks who got you won’t leave you to live much longer. You know that, don’t you?” It’s a quiet moment of humanizing connection, and it’s all the more powerful as a disquieting revelation, because it clarifies that Mother Abigail is not just sending out random or abstract utterances, that she is responding to real events.

Stu wakes in Vermont, just in time to thwart the foretold attempt on his life. He leaves his cell and wanders barefoot around the unfamiliar institute, sanity all but dribbling out of his ears, increasingly desperate to get away from the slumped corpses and locked doors. As he runs down a flight of stairs, a figure lurches out of the darkness beneath and grabs at his ankle. “Come down and eat chicken with me, beautiful,” says a scientist who is clearly hallucinating in the last short while before his death. “It’s so dark.”

(PICTURED BELOW: If you see this man, do not accept his offer to descend and consume poultry products with him.)

I wonder what the original provenance of that line is. Did it come to King in a dream? Did one of the kids mutter it in the grips of a childhood fever? Or was it just random inspiration pulled from what a writer buddy of mine once referred to as “the anal vortex?” This bit is straight out of the novel, and it works in the novel. Maybe it even works here, but it’s still an unfathomably weird line to see delivered onscreen.

Stu finally makes his way out the front door of the beautifully lit building, onto the inviting shadows of the cool lawn, where he is all alone save for the chirping of the crickets. I love this scene, the pure catharsis of seeing him stretched out on the most improbably peaceful stretch of turf, gasping in the night air and gradually recovering from the well-staged run through the gleaming tile halls of the dead. The voice of Mother Abigail echoes in his head, urging him on, and so he wanders barefoot into the night, onto a deserted suburban street, until his shadow stretches far behind him and the episode ends.

Stu, my man, get some fucking shoes, you’re really freaking me out here.

---

NEXT WEEK: Episode 2- The Dreams.

HOUSEKEEPING NOTE: I have been wrestling with Substack to get this up for several hours. I was worried that I had reached an unpublishable length or something, but apparently not. Although the full text will not automatically appear in e-mail inboxes, there ought to be a clickable button to immediately load whatever’s missing. I am still having an issue uploading my bonus audio chat for subscribers, but hopefully things will have settled down after I wake up.