The Regulators (28 page)

“Sure. And what if it poisons you? Like something from the Congo Basin, something like that?”

Collie shrugged as if to say too late now, pal, and started along the path. It was headed south at this point, toward Hyacinth. With the red-orange sunlight flooding through the trees from the right, it was at least impossible to become disoriented. They started down the hill. As they went, Steve saw more and more of the misshapen cacti in the woods to the east of the path. They were actually crowding out the trees in
places. The underbrush was thinning, and for a very good reason: the topsoil was also thinning, being replaced by a grainy gray sandbed that looked like . . . like . . .

Sweat ran in Steve's eyes, stinging. He wiped it away. So hot, and the light so strong and red. He felt sick to his stomach.

“Look.” Collie pointed. Twenty yards ahead, another clump of cacti guarded a fork in the path. Jutting out from them like the prow of a ship was an overturned shopping cart. In the dying light, the metal basket-rods looked as if they had been dipped in blood.

Collie jogged down to the fork. Steve hurried to keep up, not wanting to get separated from the other even by a few yards. As Collie reached the fork, howls rose in the strange air, sharp and yet somehow sickeningly sweet, like bad barbershop-quartet harmony:
Whoooo! Whoooo! Wh-Wh-Whooooo!
There was a pause and then they came again, more of them this time, mingling and yipping, bringing gooseflesh to every square inch of Steve's skin. My children of the night, he thought, and in his mind's eye saw Bela Lugosi, a spook in black and white, spreading his cloak. Maybe not such a great image, under the circumstances, but sometimes your mind went where it wanted.

“Christ!” Collie said, and Steve thought he meant those howls—coyotes howling somewhere to the east of them, where there were supposed to be houses and stores and five different kinds of McBurger restaurants—but the big cop wasn't looking that way. He
was looking down. Steve followed his gaze and saw a man sitting beside the beached shopping cart. He was propped against a cactus, stuck to its spines like a grotesque human memo which had been left here for them to find.

Wh-Wh-Whoooo . . .

He reached out, not thinking about it, and found the cop's hand. Collie felt his touch and grabbed back. It was a hard grip, but Steve didn't mind.

“Oh shit, I've
seen
this guy,” Collie said.

“How in Christ's name can you tell?” Steve asked.

“His clothes. His cart. He's been on the street two or three times since the start of the summer. If I saw him again, I was going to warn him off. Probably harmless, but—”

“But what?” Steve, who had been on the bum a time or two in his life, didn't know whether to be pissed or amused. “What'd you think he was going to do? Steal someone's favorite velvet Elvis painting? Try to hit that guy Soderson up for a drink?”

Collie shrugged.

The man pinned to the cactus was dressed in patched khaki pants and a tee-shirt even older, dirtier, and more ragged than the one Billingsley had found for Collie. His elderly sneakers were bound together with electrical tape. They were the clothes of a bum, and the possessions which had spilled out of the cart when it overturned suggested the same: an old pair of airtip dress shoes, a length of frayed rope, a Barbie doll, a blue jacket with
BUCKEYE LANES
printed on the
back in gold thread, a bottle of wine, half full, stoppered with what looked like the finger of a lady's evening glove, and a boombox radio which had to be at least ten years old. Its plastic case had been mended with airplane glue. There were also at least a dozen plastic bags, each carefully rolled up and secured with twine.

A dead bum in the woods. But how in God's name had he died? His eyes had popped out of their sockets and hung on his cheeks from dried optic nerves. Both looked deflated, as if the force that had pushed them out had also split them. His nose had bled copiously over his lips and the salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin. The blood didn't obscure his mouth, though—Steve only wished it had. It was distended in a huge, loopy grin that seemed to have dragged the corners of the bum's mouth halfway to his grimy ears. Something—some force—had swatted him into the cactus-grove and killed him hard enough to shove his eyeballs clear out onto his face. Yet the same force had left him grinning.

Collie's hand was gripping harder than ever. Crushing his fingers.

“Can you let up?” Steve asked. “You're breaking my—”

He looked up the east-tending fork of the path, the one that was supposed to lead them out onto Anderson Avenue and help. It ran on for about ten yards and then opened like the mouth of a funnel into a nightmare desert world. That it bore no resemblance to Ohio made no impression on Steven Ames, for the
simple reason that it bore no resemblance to any landscape he had ever seen in his life. Or glimpsed in his dreams.

Beyond the last few sane, green trees was a broad expanse of whitish hardpan running toward a troubled horizon of sawtooth mountain peaks. They had no shading or texture, no folds or outcrops or valleys. They were the dead black Crayola mountains of a child.

The path didn't disappear but widened out, became a kind of cartoon road. There was a half-buried wagon-wheel on the left. Beyond it was a stony ravine filled with shadows. On the right was a sign, black letters on bleached white board.

it said. The signpost was topped with a cow-skull as misshapen as the cacti. Beyond the sign, the road ran straight to the horizon in an artificially diminishing perspective that made Steve think of movie posters for
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
There were already stars in the sky above the mountains, impossible stars that were much too big. They didn't seem to twinkle but to blink on and off like Christmas-tree lights. The howls rose again, this time not a trio or a quartet but a whole choir. Not from the foothills; there
were
no foothills. Just flat white desert, green blobs of cactus, the road, the ravine, and, in the distance, the sharktooth necklace of the mountains.

Collie whispered, “What in God's name is this?”

Before Steve could reply—
Some child's mind,
he would have said, given the chance—a low growl came from the ravine. To Steve it sounded almost like the idle of a powerful boat engine. Then two green eyes opened in the shadows and he took a step back, his mouth drying. He lifted the Mossberg, but his hands felt like blocks of wood and the gun looked puny, useless. The eyes (they floated like comic-strip eyes in a dark room) looked the size of goddam
footballs,
and he didn't think he wanted to see how big the animal that went with them might be. “Can we kill it?” he asked. “If it comes at us, do you think—”

“Look around you!” Collie interrupted. “Look what's happening!”

He did. The green world was retreating from them and the desert was advancing. The foliage under their feet first became pallid, as if something had sucked all the sap out of it, then disappeared as the dark, moist earth bleached and granulated.
Beads.
That was what he had been thinking a few moments ago, that the topsoil had been replaced by this weird round beadlike shit. To his right, one of the scrubby trees suddenly plumped out. This was accompanied by the sound you get when you stick your finger in your cheek and then pop it. The tree's whitish trunk turned green and grew spines. Its branches melted together, the color in the leaves seeming to spread and blur as they became cactus arms.

“You know, I think it might be time to beat a retreat here,” Collie said.

Steve didn't bother to reply; he talked with his feet instead. A moment later and they were both running back along the path toward the place where they had stepped onto it. At first Steve thought only about not getting poked in the eye by a branch, running into a drift of brambles, or going past the discarded double-A batteries, which was where they'd want to turn dead west and head for Billingsley's gate. Then he heard the coughing growl again and everything else faded into insignificance. It was close. The green-eyed creature from the ravine was following them. Hell,
chasing
them. And gaining.

There was a gunshot, and Peter Jackson slowly turned his head toward it. He realized (so far as he was still capable of realizing anything) that he had been standing on the edge of his backyard and looking at (so far as he was still capable of looking at anything) the table on the patio. There was a stack of books and magazines on the table, most bristling with pink marker-slips. He had been working on a scholarly article called “James Dickey and the New Southern Reality,” relishing the thought that it would stir a great deal of controversy in certain ivied bowers of academe. He might be invited to other colleges to be on panel discussions! Panel discussions to which he would travel with all expenses paid! (Within reason, of course.) How he had dreamed of that. Now
it all seemed faraway and unimportant. Like the gunshot from the woods, and the scream that followed it, and the two shots which followed the scream. Even the snarling sounds—like a tiger that had escaped from the zoo and hidden in their greenbelt—seemed faraway and unimportant. All that mattered was . . . was . . .

“Finding my friend,” he said. “Getting to the fork in the path and sitting down with my friend. Best . . . be crawling.”

He crossed the patio on a diagonal, striking the edge of the table with his hip as he walked by. An issue of
Verse Georgia
and several of his research books fell off the stack and landed on the puddly pink brick. Peter ignored them. His fading sight was fixed on the greenbelt which ran behind the houses on the east side of Poplar Street. His almost lifelong interest in footnotes had deserted him.

When it happened, Jan wasn't exactly talking about Ray Soames; she was wondering why God had made a world where you couldn't help wanting to be kissed and touched by a man who often—hell, usually—had dirty ankles and washed his hair maybe four times a month. If it was a good month, that was. So she really was talking about Ray, just omitting the names.

And for the first time since she'd been coming
here,
running
here, Audrey felt a touch of impatience, the soft stroke of friend-weariness. She was finally losing patience with Jan's obsession, it seemed.

Audrey was standing at the entrance to the folly, looking down the meadow to the rock wall, listening to the hum of the bees and wondering what she was doing here, anyway. There were people who needed help, people she knew and, in most cases, liked. There was a part of her—quite persuasive it was, too—that was trying to make her believe that they didn't matter, that they were not only four hundred miles west of here but fourteen years in the future, except that was a lie, persuasive or not.
This
place was the illusion.
This
place was the lie.

But I need to be here, she thought. I really, really do.

Maybe, but Janice's love-hate relationship with Ray Soames suddenly bored her to tears. She felt like whirling on her heels and saying,
Well, why don't you quit whining and drop him? You're young, you're pretty, you've got a good body. I'm sure you can find someone with clean hair and breath to scratch the parts of you that itch the worst.

Saying such an awful thing to Jan was apt to expel her from this place of safety as surely as Adam and Eve had been expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating the wrong apple, but that didn't change how she felt. And if she managed to keep her mouth shut about Jan's love-obsession, what would come next? Jan's hundred and fiftieth assertion that, while Paul might well be the cutest Beatle, John was the only one she would have seriously considered sleeping with?
As though the Beatles had never broken up; as though John had never died.

Then, before she could say or do anything, a new sound intruded in this quiet place where there was usually only the hum of bees, the rickety-rick of crickets in the grass, and the murmuring voices of the two young women. It was a jingling sound, light but somehow demanding, like the handbell of an old-timey schoolmistress, calling the children in from recess and back to their studies.

She turned, realizing that Jan's voice had ceased, and no wonder. Jan was gone. And on the splintery table, with its entwined initials stretching back almost to World War I, the Tak-phone was ringing.

For the first time in all her visits, the Tak-phone was ringing.

She walked toward it slowly—three little steps was all it took—and stared down at it, her heart beating hard. Part of her was screaming at her not to answer, that she knew now and had always known what that phone's ringing would mean: that Seth's demon had found her. But what else was there to do?

Run, a voice (perhaps it was the voice of her own demon) suggested coldly. Run out into this world, Audrey. Down the hill, scattering the butterflies before you, over the rock wall, and to the road on the other side. It goes to New Paltz, that road, and it doesn't matter if you have to walk all day to get there and finish up with blisters on both heels. It's a college town, and somewhere along Main Street there'll be a window with a sign in it—
WAITRESS WANTED
. You can
work your way up from there. Go on. You're young, in your early twenties again, you're healthy, you're not bad-looking, and none of this nightmare has happened yet.