Текст книги "The Mist"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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But the birds and the buglike things the birds ate weren't the only things out there. There was the tentacled thing that had taken Norm. There was the frayed clothesline to think about. There was the unseen thing that had uttered that low, guttural roar to think about. We had heard sounds like it since-sometimes quite distant but how far was “distant” through the damping effect of the mist? And sometimes they were close enough to shake the building and make it seem as if the ventricles of your heart had suddenly been loaded up with ice water.

Billy started in my lap and moaned. I brushed his hair and he moaned more loudly. Then he seemed to find sleep's less dangerous waters again. My own doze was broken and I was staring wide awake again. Since dark, I had only managed to sleep about ninety minutes, and that had been dream-haunted. In one of the dream fragments it had been the night before again. Billy and Steffy were standing in front of the picture window, looking out at the black and slate-gray waters, out at the silver-spinning waterspout that heralded the storm. I tried to get to them, knowing that a strong enough wind could break the window and throw deadly glass darts all the way across the living room. But no matter how I ran, I seemed to get no closer to them. And then a bird rose out of the waterspout, a gigantic scarlet oiseau de mort whose prehistoric wingspan darkened the entire lake from west to east. Its beak opened, revealing a maw the size of the Holland Tunnel. And as the bird came to gobble up my wife and son, a low, sinister voice began to whisper over and over again: The Arrowhead Project... the Arrowhead Project... the Arrowhead Project...

Not that Billy and I were the only ones sleeping poorly. Others screamed in their sleep, and some went on screaming after they woke up. The beer was disappearing from the cooler at a great rate. Buddy Eagleton had restocked it once from out back with no comment. Mike Hatlen told me the Sominex was gone. Not depleted but totally wiped out. He guessed that some people might have taken six or eight bottles. “There's some Nytol left,” he said. “You want a bottle, David?” I shook my head and thanked him. And in the last aisle down by Register 5, we had our winos. There were about seven of them, all out-of-staters except for Lou Tattinger, who ran the Pine Tree Car Wash. Lou didn't need any excuse to sniff the cork, as the saying was. The wino brigade was pretty well anesthetized. Oh yes-there were also six or seven people who had gone crazy.

Crazy isn't the best word; perhaps I just can't think of the proper one. But there were these people who had lapsed into a complete stupor without benefit of beer, wine, or pills. They stared at you with blank and shiny doorknob eyes. The hard cement of reality had come apart in some unimaginable earthquake, and these poor devils had fallen through. In time, some of them might come back. If there was time. The rest of us had made our own mental compromises, and in some cases I suppose they were fairly odd. Mrs. Reppler, for instance, was convinced the whole thing was a dream-or so she said. And she spoke with some conviction. I looked over at Amanda. I was developing an uncomfortably strong feeling for her-uncomfortable but not exactly unpleasant. Her eyes were an incredible, brilliant green... for a while I had kept an eye on her to see if she was going to take out a pair of contact lenses, but, apparently the color was true. I wanted to make love to her. My wife was at home, maybe alive, more probably dead, alone either way, and I loved her; I wanted to get Billy and me back to her more than anything, but I also wanted to screw this lady named Amanda Dumfries. I tried to tell myself it was just the situation we were in, and maybe it was, but that didn't change the wanting.

I dozed in and out, then jerked awake more fully around three. Amanda had shifted into a sort of fetal position, her knees pulled up toward her chest, hands clasped between her thighs. She seemed to be sleeping deeply. Her sweatshirt had pulled up slightly on one side, showing clean white skin. I looked at it and began to get an extremely useless and uncomfortable erection. I tried to divert my mind to a new track and got thinking about how I had wanted to paint Brent Norton yesterday. No, nothing as important as a painting, but... just sit him on a log with my beer in his hand and sketch his sweaty, tired face and the two wings of his carefully processed hair sticking up untidily in the back. It could have been a good picture. It took me twenty years of living with my father to accept the idea that being good could be good enough.

You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Of if you can paint, maybe you think-I did-that God put you on earth to blow your father away. It turned out I wasn't as good as he was. I kept trying to be for longer than I should have, maybe. I had a show in New York and it did poorly-the art critics beat me over the head with my father. A year later I was supporting myself and Steff with the commercial stuff. She was pregnant and I sat down and talked to myself about it. The result of that conversation was a belief that serious art was always going to be a hobby for me, no more.

I did Golden Girl Shampoo ads-the one where the Girl is standing astride her bike, the one where she's playing Frisbee on the beach, the one where she's standing on the balcony of her apartment with a drink in her hand. I've done short-story illustrations for most of the big slicks, but I broke into that field doing fast illustrations for the stories in the sleazier men's magazines. I've done some movie posters. The money comes in. We keep our heads nicely above water.

I had one final show in Bridgeton, just last summer. I showed nine canvases that I had painted in five years, and I sold six of them. The one I absolutely would not sell showed the Federal market, by some queer coincidence. The perspective was from the far end of the parking lot. In my picture, the parking lot was empty except for a line of Campbell's Beans and Franks cans, each one larger than the last as they marched toward the viewer's eye. The last one appeared to be about eight feet tall. The picture was titled Beans and False Perspective. A man from California who was a top exec in some company that makes tennis balls and rackets and who knows what other sports equipment seemed to want that picture very badly, and would not take no for an answer in spite of the NFS card tucked into the bottom left-hand corner of the spare wooden frame. He began at six hundred dollars and worked his way up to four thousand. He said he wanted it for his study. I would not let him have it, and he went away sorely puzzled. Even so, he didn't quite give up; he left his card in case I changed my mind.

I could have used the money-that was the year we put the addition on the house and bought the four-wheel-drive-but I just couldn't sell it. I couldn't sell it because I felt it was the best painting I had ever done and I wanted it to look at after someone would ask me, with totally unconscious cruelty, when I was going to do something serious.

Then I happened to show it to Ollie Weeks one day last fall. He asked me if he could photograph it and run it as an ad one week, and that was the end of my own false perspective. Ollie had recognized my painting for what it was, and by doing so, he forced me to recognize it, too. A perfectly good piece of slick commercial less. I let him do it, and then I called the exec at his home in San Luis Obispo and told him he could have the painting for twenty-five undred if he still wanted it. He did, and I shipped it UPS to the coast. And since then that voice of

disappointed expectation-that cheated child's voice that can never be satisfied with such a mild superlative as good-has

fallen pretty much silent. And except for a few rumbles-like the sounds of those unseen creatures somewhere out in the

foggy night it has been pretty much silent ever since. Maybe you can tell me-why should the silencing of that childish,

demanding voice seem so much like dying?

Around four o'clock Billy woke up-partially, at leastand looked around wit bleary, uncomprehending eyes. “Are we still here?” “Yeah, honey,” I said. “We are.” He started to cry with a weak helplessness that was horrible. Amanda woke up and looked at us. “Hey, kid,” she said, and pulled him gently to her. “Everything is going to look a little better come morning. “No,” Billy said. “No it won't. It won't. It won't.” “Shh,” she said. Her eyes met mine over his head. “Shh; it's past your bedtime.” “I want my mother!” “Yeah, you do,” Amanda said. “Of course you do.” Billy squirmed around in her lap until he could look at me. Which he did for some time. And then slept again. “Thanks,” I said. “He needed you.” “He doesn't even know me.” “That doesn't change it.” “So what do you think?” she asked. Her green eyes held mine steadily. “What do you really think?” “Ask me in the morning.”

“I'm asking you now.” I opened my mouth to answer and then Ollie Weeks materialized out of the gloom like something from a horror tale. He had a flashlight with one of the ladies' blouses over the lens, and he was pointing it toward the ceiling. It made strange shadows on his haggard face. “David,” he whispered. Amanda looked at him, first startled, then scared again. “Ollie, what is it?” I asked. “David,” he whispered again. Then: “Come on. Please.” “I don't want to leave Billy. He just went to sleep.” “I'll be with him,” Amanda said. “You better go.” Then, in a lower voice: “Jesus, this is never going to end.”

VIII. What Happened to the Soldiers. With Amanda. A Conversation with Dan Miller.

I went with Ollie. He was headed for the storage area. As we passed the cooler, he grabbed a beer. “Ollie, what is it?”

“I want you to see it.” He pushed through the double doors. They slipped shut behind us with a little backwash of air. It was cold. I didn't like this place, not after what had happened to Norm. A part of my mind insisted do reminding me that there was still a small scrap of dead tentacle lying around someplace. Ollie let the blouse drop from the lens of his light. He trained it overhead. At first I had an idea that someone had hung a couple of mannequins from one of the heating pipes below the ceiling. That they had hung them on piano wire or something, a kid's Halloween trick. Then I noticed the feet, dangling about seven inches off the cement floor. There were two piles of kicked-over cartons. I looked up at the faces and a scream began to rise in my throat because they were not the faces of department-store dummies. Both heads were cocked to the side, as if appreciating some horribly funny joke, a joke that had made them laugh until they turned purple. Their shadows. Their shadows thrown long on the wall behind them. Their tongues. Their protruding tongues.

They were both wearing uniforms. They were the kids I had noticed earlier and had lost track of along the way. The army brats from-The scream. I could hear it starting in my throat as a moan, rising like a police siren, and then Ollie gripped my arm just above the elbow. “Don't scream, David. No one knows about this but you and me. And that's how I want to keep it.” Somehow I bit it back. "Those army kids,” I managed. “From the Arrowhead Project,” Ollie said. “Sure.” Something cold was thrust into my hand. The beer can. “Drink this. You need it.” I drained the can completely dry.

Ollie said, “I came back to see if we had any extra cartridges for that gas grill Mr. McVey has been using. I saw these guys. The way I figure, they must have gotten the nooses ready and stood on top of those two piles of cartons. They must have tied their hands for each other and then balanced each other while they stepped through the length of rope between their wrists. So... so that their hands would be behind them, you know. Then-this is the way I figurethey stuck their heads into the nooses and pulled them tight by jerking their heads to one side. Maybe one of them counted to three and they jumped together. I don't know.” “It couldn't be done,” I said through a dry mouth. But their hands were tied behind them, all right. I couldn't seem to take my eyes away from that. “It could. If they wanted to bad enough, David, they could.” “But why?” “I think you know why. Not any of the tourists, the summer people-like that guy Miller-but there are people from around here who could make a pretty decent guess.” “The Arrowhead Project?”

Ollie said, “I stand by one of those registers all day long and I hear a lot. All this spring I've been hearing things about that damned Arrowhead thing, none of it good. The black ice on the lakes-“I thought of Bill Giosti leaning in my window, blowing warm alcohol in my face. Not just atoms, but different atoms. Now these bodies hanging from that overhead pipe. The cocked heads. The dangling shoes. The tongues protruding like summer sausages.

I realized with fresh horror that new doors of perception were opening up inside. New? Not so. Old doors of perception. The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe. Children see everything their eyes happen upon, hear everything in their ears' range. But if life is the rise of consciousness (as a crewel-work sampler my wife made in high school proclaims), then it is also the reduction of input. Terror is the widening of perspective and perception. The horror was in knowing I was swimming down to a place most of us leave when we get out of diapers and into training pants. I could see it on Ollie's face, too. When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.

“I've heard stuff from maybe two dozen people,” Ollie said. “Justine Robards. Nick Tochai. Ben Michaelson. You can't keep secrets in small towns. Things get out. Sometimes it's like a spring-it just bubbles up out of the earth and no one has an idea where it came from. You overhear something at the library and pass it on, or at the marina in Harrison, Christ knows where else, or why. But all spring and summer I've been hearing Arrowhead Project, Arrowhead Project.” “But these two,” I said. “Christ, Ollie, they're just kids.” “There were kids in Nam who used to take ears. I was there. I saw it.” “But... what would drive them to do this?” “I don't know. Maybe they knew something. Maybe they only suspected. They must have known people in here would start asking them questions eventually. If there is an eventually. “ “If you're right,” I said, “it must be something really bad.”

“That storm,” Ollie said in his soft, level voice. “Maybe it knocked something loose up there. Maybe there was an accident. They could have been fooling around with anything. Some people claim they were messing with high-intensity lasers and masers. Sometimes I hear fusion power. And suppose... suppose they ripped a hole straight through into another dimension?” “That's hogwash,” I said. “Are they?” Ollie asked, and pointed at the bodies. “No. The question now is: What do we do?” “I think we ought to cut them down and hide them,” he said promptly. “Put them under a pile of stuff people won't want-dog food, dish detergent, stuff like that. If this gets out, it will only make things worse. That's why I came to you, David. I felt you are the only one I could really trust.”

I muttered, “It's like the Nazi war criminals killing themselves in their cells after the war was lost.” “Yeah. I had that same thought.” We fell silent, and suddenly those soft shuffling noises began outside the steel loading door again-the sound of the tentacles feeling softly across it. We drew together. My flesh was crawling. “Okay,” I said. “We'll make it as quick as we can,” Ollie said. His sapphire ring glowed mutely as he moved his flashlight. “I want to get out of here fast.” I looked up at the ropes. They had used the same sort of clothesline the man in the golf cap had allowed me to tie around his waist. TIC nooses had sunk into the puffed flesh of their necks, and I wondered again what it could have been to make both of them go through with it. I knew what Ollie meant by saying that if the news of the double suicide got out, it would make things worse. For me it already had-and I wouldn't have believed that possible. There was a snicking sound. Ollie had opened his knife, a good heavy job made for slitting open cartons. And, of course, cutting rope. “You or me?” he asked. I swallowed. “One each.” We did it.

When I got back, Amanda was gone and Mrs. Turman was with Billy. They were both sleeping. I walked down one of the aisles and a voice said: “Mr. Drayton. David.” It was Amanda, standing by the stairs to the manager's office, her eyes like emeralds. “What was it?” “Nothing,” I said. She came over to me. I could smell faint perfume. And oh how I wanted her. “You liar,” she said. “It was nothing. A false alarm.” “If that's how you want it.” She took my hand. “I've just been up to the office. It's empty and there's a lock on the door.” Her face was perfectly calm, but her eyes were lambent, almost feral, and a pulse beat steadily in her throat. “I don't—” “I saw the way you looked at me,” she said. “If we need to talk about it, it's no good. The Turman woman, is with your son.” Yes. It came to me that thin was a way-maybe not the best one, but a way, nevertheless-to take the curse off what Ollie and I had just done. Not the beat way, just the only way.

We went up the narrow flight of stairs and into the office. It was empty, as she had said. And there was a lock on the door. I turned it. In the darkness she was nothing but a shape. I put my arms out, touched her, and pulled her to me. She was trembling. We went down on the floor, first kneeling, kissing, and I cupped one firm breast and could feel the quick thudding of her heart through her sweatshirt. I thought of Steffy telling Billy not to touch the live wires. I thought of the bruise that had been on her hip when she took off the brown dress on our wedding night. I thought of the first time I had seen her, biking across the mall of the University of Maine at Orono, me bound for one of Vincent Hartgen's classes with my portfolio under my arm. And my erection was enormous. We lay down then, and she said, “Love me, David. Make me warm.” When she came, she dug into my back with her nails and called me by a name that wasn't mine. I didn't mind. It made us about even.

When we came down, some sort of creeping dawn had begun. The blackness outside the loopholes went reluctantly to dull gray, then to chrome, then to the bright, featureless, and unsparkling white of a drive-in movie screen. Mike Hatlen was asleep in a folding chair he had scrounged somewhere. Dan Miller sat on the floor a little distance away, eating a Hostess donut. The kind that's powdered with white sugar. “Sit down, Mr. Drayton,” he invited. I looked around for Amanda, but she was already halfway up the aisle. She didn't look back. Our act of love in the dark already seemed something out of a fantasy, impossible to believe even in this weird daylight. I sat down. “Have a donut.” He held the box out. I shook my head. “All that white sugar is death. Worse than cigarettes.” That made him laugh a little bit. “In that case, have two.” I was surprised to find a little laughter left inside me-he had surprised it out, and I liked him for it. I did take two of his donuts. They tasted pretty good. I chased them with a cigarette, although it is not normally my habit to smoke in the mornings.

“I ought to get back to my kid,” I said. “He'll be waking up.” Miller nodded. “Those pink bugs,” he said. “They're all gone. So are the birds. Hank Vannerman said the last one hit the windows around four. Apparently the... the wildlife... is a lot more active when it's dark.” “You don't want to tell Brent Norton that,” I said. “Or Norm. “ He nodded again and didn't say anything for a long time. Then he lit a cigarette of his own and looked at me. “We can't stay here, Drayton,” he said. “There's food. Plenty to drink.” “The supplies don't have anything to do with it, and you know it. What do we do if one of the big beasties out there decides to break in instead of just going bump in the night? Do we try to drive it off with broom handles and charcoal lighter fluid?”

Of course he was right. Perhaps the mist was protecting us in a way. Hiding us. But maybe it wouldn't hide us for long, and there was more to it than that. We had been in the Federal for eighteen hours, more or less, and I could feel a kind of lethargy spreading over me, not much different from the lethargy I've felt on one or two occasions when I've tried to swim too far. There was an urge to play it safe, to just stay put, to take care of Billy (and maybe to bang Amanda Dumfries in the middle of the night, a voice murmured), to see if the mist wouldn't just lift, leaving everything as it had been. I could see it on the other faces as well, and it suddenly occurred to me that there were people now in the Federal who probably wouldn't leave under any circumstance. The very thought of going out the door after all that had happened would freeze them.

Miller had been watching these thoughts cross my face, maybe. He said, “There were about eighty people m here when that damn fog came. From that number you subtract the bag-boy, Norton, and the four people that went out With him, and that man Smalley. That leaves seventy-three.” And subtracting the two soldiers, now resting under a stack of Purina Puppy Chow bags, it made seventy-one. Then you subtract the people who have just opted out,” he went on. “There are ten or twelve of those. Say ten. That leaves about sixty-three. But—” He raised one sugar-powdered forger. “Of those sixty-three, we've got twenty or so that just won't leave. You'd have to drag them out kicking and screaming. “

“Which all goes to prove what?” “That we've got to get out, that's all. And I'm going. Around noon, I think. I'm planning to take as many people as will come. I'd like you and your boy to come along. “After what happened to Norton?” “Norton went like a lamb to the slaughter. That doesn't mean I have to, or the people who come with me.” “How can you prevent it? We have exactly one gun.” “And lucky to have that. But if we, could make it across the intersection, maybe we could get down to the Sportsman's Exchange on Main Street. They've got more guns there than you could shake a stick at.” “That's one 'if' and one 'maybe' too many.” “Drayton,” he said, “it's an iffy situation.” That rolled very smoothly off his tongue, but he didn't have a little boy to watch out for. “Look, let it pass for now, okay? I didn't get much sleep last night, but I got a chance to think over a few things. Want to hear them?” “Sure.” He stood up and stretched. “Take a walk over to the window with me.”

We went through the checkout lane nearest the bread racks and stood at one of the loopholes. The man who was keeping watch there said, “The bugs are gone.” Miller slapped him on the back. “Go get yourself a coffee, fella. I'll keep an eye out.” “Okay. Thanks.”

He walked away, and Miller and I stepped up to his loophole. “So tell me what you see out there, he said.

I looked. The litter barrel had been knocked over in the night, probably by one of the swooping bird-things, spilling a trash of papers, cans, and paper shake cups from the Dairy Queen down the road all over the hottop. Beyond that I could see the rank of cars closest to the market fading into whiteness. That was all I could see, and I told him so. “That blue Chevy pickup is mine,” he said., He pointed and I could see just a hint of blue in the mist. But if you think back to when you pulled in yesterday, you'll remember that the parking lot was pretty jammed, right?” I glanced back at my Scout and remembered I had only gotten the space close to the market because someone else had been pulling out. I nodded. ' Miller said, “Now couple something else with that fact, Drayton. Norton and his four... what did you call them?” “Flat-Earthers. “

“Yeah, that's good. Just what they were. They go out, right? Almost the full length of that clothesline. Then we heard those roaring noises, like there was a goddam herd of elephants out there. Right?” “It didn't sound like elephants,” I said. “It sounded like—” Like something from the primordial ooze was the phrase that came to mind, but I didn't want to say that to Miller, not after he had clapped that guy on the back and told him to go get a coffee-and like the coach jerking a player from the big game. I might have said it to Ollie, but not to Miller. “I don't know what it sounded like,” I finished lamely. “But it sounded big.” “Yeah.” It had sounded pretty goddam big. “So how come we didn't hear cars getting bashed around? Screeching metal? Breaking glass?” “Well, because—” I stopped. He had me. “I don't know.” Miller said, “No way they were out of the parking lot when whatever-it-was hit them. I'll tell you what I think. I think we didn't hear any cars getting around because a lot of them might be gone. Just... gone. Fallen into the earth, vaporized, you name it. Strong enough to splinter these beams and twist them out of shape and knock stuff off the shelves. And the town whistle stopped at the same time.” I was trying to visualize half the parking lot gone. Trying to visualize walking out. there and just coming to a brand-new drop in the land where the hottop with its neat yellow-lined parking slots left off. A drop, a slope... or maybe an out-and-out precipice falling away into the featureless white mist...

After a couple of seconds I said, “If you're right, how far do you think you're going to get in your pickup?” “I wasn't thinking of my truck. I was thinking of your four-wheel-drive.” That was something to chew over, but not now. “What else is on your mind?” Miller was eager to go on. “The pharmacy next door, that's on my mind. What about that?” I opened my mouth to say I didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about, and then shut it with a snap. The Bridgton Pharmacy had been doing business when we drove in yesterday. Not the Laundromat, but the drugstore had been wide open, the doors chocked with rubber doorstops to let in a little cool air-the power outage had killed their air conditioning, of course. The door to the pharmacy could be no more than twenty feet from the door of the Federal market. So why—

“Why haven't any of those people turned up over here?” Miller asked for me. “It's been eighteen hours. Aren't they hungry? They're sure not over there eating Dristan and Stayfree Mini-pads.” “There's food,” I said. “They're always selling food items on special. Sometimes it's animal crackers, sometimes it's those toaster pastries, all sorts of things. Plus the candy rack.” “I just don't believe they'd stick with stuff like that when there's all kinds of stuff over here.” “What are you getting at?” “What I'm getting at is that I want to get out but I don't want to be dinner for some refugee from a grade-B horror picture. Four or five of us could go next door and check out the situation in the drugstore. As sort of a trial balloon.” “That's everything?” “No, there's one other thing.” “What's that?” “Her,” Miller said simply, and jerked his thumb toward one of the middle aisles. “That crazy cunt. That witch.”

It was Mrs. Carmody he had jerked his thumb at. She was no longer alone; two women had joined her. From their bright clothes I guessed they were probably tourists or summer people, ladies who had maybe left their families to “just run into town and get a few things” and were now eaten up with worry over their husbands and kids. Ladies eager to grasp at almost any straw. Maybe even the black comfort of a Mrs. Carmody. Her pantsuit shone out with its same baleful resplendence. She was talking, gesturing, her face hard and grim. The two ladies in their bright clothes (but not as bright as Mrs. Carmody's pantsuit, no, and her gigantic satchel of a purse was still tucked firmly under one doughy arm) were listening raptly.

“She's another reason I want to get out, Drayton. By tonight she'll have six people sitting with her. If those pink bugs and the birds come back tonight, she'll have a whole congregation sitting with her by tomorrow morning. Then we can start worrying about who she'll tell them to sacrifice to make it all better. Maybe me, or you, or that guy Hatlen. Maybe your kid.” “That's idiocy,” I'said. But was it? The cold chill crawling up my back said not necessarily. Mrs. Carmody's mouth moved and moved. The eyes of the tourist ladies were fixed on her wrinkled lips. Was it idiocy? J thought of the dusty stuffed animals drinking at their looking-glass stream. Mrs. Carmody had power. Even Steff, normally hardheaded and straight-from-the-shoulder, invoked the old lady's name with unease.

That crazy cunt, Miller had called her. That witch.

“The people in this market are going through a sectioneight experience for sure,” Miller said. He gestured at the red-painted beams framing the show-window segments... twisted and splintered and buckled out of shape. “Their minds probably feel like those beams look. Mine sure as shit does. I spent half of last night thinking I must have flipped out of my gourd, that I was probably in a straitjacket in Danvers, raving my head off about bugs and dinosaur birds and tentacles and that it would all go away just as soon as the nice orderly came along and shot a wad of Thorazine into my arm.” His small face was strained and white. He looked at Mrs. Carmody and then back at me. “I tell you it might happen. As people get flakier, she's going to look better and better to some of them. And I don't want to be around if that happens.”