Flagg manipulates technology

Flagg's voice by itself can cause microphones to malfunction.

He had sat on a hundred different Committees of Responsibility. He had walked in demonstrations against the same dozen companies on a hundred different college campuses. He wrote the questions that most discomfited those in power when they came to lecture, but he never asked the questions himself; those power merchants might have seen his grinning, burning face as some cause for alarm and fled from the podium. Likewise he never spoke at rallies because the microphones would scream with hysterical feedback and circuits would blow. But he had written speeches for those who did speak, and on several occasions those speeches had ended in riots, overturned cars, student strike votes, and violent demonstrations.

___

She was surrounded by poles, steel poles like sentries, each of them five feet high, each bearing a matched set of drive-in speakers. There was gravel underfoot, but grass and dandelions were growing up through it. She guessed the Holiday Twin hadn’t been doing much business since the middle of June or so. You could say that it had been kind of a dead summer for the entertainment biz.

“Why am I here?” she whispered.

It was only talking aloud, talking to herself; she expected no answer. So when she was answered, a shriek of terror pealed from her throat.

All the speakers fell off the speaker poles at once and onto the weed-strewn gravel. The sound they made was a huge, amplified CHUNK!— the sound of a dead body striking gravel.

“NADINE,” the speakers blared, and it was his voice, and how she shrieked then! Her hands flew to her head, her palms clapped themselves over her ears, but it was all the speakers at once and there was no hiding from that giant voice, which was full of fearful hilarity and dreadful comic lust.

“NADINE, NADINE, OH HOW I LOVE TO LOVE NADINE, MY PET, MY PRETTY—”

“Stop it!” she shrieked back, straining her vocal cords with the force of her cry, and still her voice was so small compared with that giant’s bellow. And yet, for a moment the voice did stop. There was silence. The fallen speakers looked up at her from the gravel like the rugose eyes of giant insects.

Nadine’s hands slowly came down from her ears.
You’ve gone insane, she comforted herself. That’s all it is. The strain of waiting... and Harold’s games ... finally planting the explosive ... all of it has finally driven you over the edge, dear, and you’ve gone crazy. It’s probably better this way.

But she hadn’t gone crazy, and she knew it.

This was far worse than being crazy.

As if to prove this, the speakers now boomed out in the stern yet almost prissy voice of a principal reprimanding the student body over the high school intercom for some prank they had all played together. “NADINE. THEY KNOW.”

“They know,” she parroted. She wasn’t sure who they were, or what they knew, but she was quite sure it was inevitable.

“YOU’VE BEEN STUPID. GOD MAY LOVE STUPIDITY; I DO NOT.”

The words crackled and rolled away into the late afternoon. Her clothes clung soddenly to her skin, her hair lay lankly against her pallid cheeks, and she began to shiver.

Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid. I know what that word means. I think. I think it means death.

“THEY KNOW EVERYTHING ... EXCEPT THE SHOEBOX. THE DYNAMITE. ”

Speakers. Speakers everywhere, staring up at her from the white gravel, peeking at her from clusters of dandelions closed against the rain.

“GO TO SUNRISE AMPHITHEATER. STAY THERE. UNTIL TOMORROW NIGHT. UNTIL THEY MEET. AND THEN YOU AND HAROLD MAY COME. COME TO ME.”

______

Now she was in the alley the cars drove through to get into the drive-in and the ticket stand, looking like a small toll-booth, was just ahead of her. She was going to get out. She was going to get away. Her mouth softened in gratitude.

Behind her, hundreds of speakers blared into life all at once, and now the voice was singing, a horrid, tuneless singing: “I’LL BE SEEING YOU ... IN ALL THE OLD FAMILIAR PLACES... THAT THIS HEART OF MINE EMBRACES ... ALL DAY THROOOOO ... ”

Nadine screamed in her newly cracked voice.

Huge, monstrous laughter came then, a dark and sterile cackling which seemed to fill the earth.

“DO WELL, NADINE,” the voice boomed. “DO WELL, MY FANCY, MY DEAR ONE.”

Then she gained the road and fled back toward Boulder at the Vespa’s top speed, leaving the disembodied voice and staring speakers behind ... but carrying them with her in her heart, for then, for always.

______

The black stone disappeared into his clenched fist again. And when the fist opened, Lloyd’s wondering eyes beheld a flat silver key with an ornate grip lying on the stranger’s palm.

“My—dear—God!” Lloyd croaked.

“You like that?” the dark man asked, pleased. “I learned that trick from a massage parlor honey in Secaucus, New Jersey, Lloyd. Secaucus, home of the world’s greatest pig farms.”

He bent and seated the key in the lock of Lloyd’s cell. And that was strange, because as well as his memory served him (which right now was not very well), these cells had no keyways, because they were all opened and shut electronically. But he had no doubt that the silver key would work.

Just as it rattled home, Flagg stopped and looked at Lloyd, grinning slyly, and Lloyd felt despair wash over him again. It was all just a trick.

_____

“Now you aren’t very bright,” Flagg said, “but you are the first. And I have the feeling you might be very loyal. You and I, Lloyd, we’re going to go far. It’s a good time for people like us. Everything is starting up for us. All I need is your word.”

“W-word?”

“That we’re going to stick together, you and me. No denials. No falling asleep on guard duty. There will be others very soon—they’re on their way west already—but for now, there’s just us. I’ll give you the key if you give me your promise.”

“I ... promise,” Lloyd said, and the words seemed to hang in the air, vibrating strangely. He listened to that vibration, his head cocked to one side, and he could almost see those two words, glowing as darkly as the aurora borealis reflected in a dead man’s eye.

Then he forgot about them as the tumblers made their half-turns inside the lockbox. The next moment the lockbox fell at Flagg’s feet, tendrils of smoke seeping from it.

“You’re free, Lloyd. Come on out.”

Unbelieving, Lloyd touched the bars hesitantly, as if they might burn him; and indeed, they did seem warm. But when he pushed, the door slid back easily and soundlessly. He stared at his savior, those burning eyes.

Something was placed in his hand. The key.

“It’s yours now, Lloyd.”