The Regulators (45 page)

She reaches for the door and Johnny restrains her. She stares at him with a mixture of fear and fury.

“Did you hear me say we had to go
right now
?”

“Yes, but there's one question you
have
to answer, Aud.”

They're being watched anxiously from across the street. Belinda Josephson breaks away from the little cluster doing the watching and goes back into the kitchen to see how Steve and Cynthia are making out with the little kids. Not bad, it appears. Ellen is sniffling but otherwise under control again, and Ralphie seems to have blown himself out, like a hurricane that moves inland. Belinda glances briefly around the empty kitchen, which is now open to the backyard, then turns to go back down the hall to the others. She takes a single step, then pauses. A narrow vertical crease—Bee's thought-line, her husband calls it—appears in the center of her forehead. It's not entirely dark down there by the screen door, there's moonlight . . . and these are her neighbors, of course. It's not very hard to tell them apart. Brad is easy to identify because he's her closest neighbor, so close she's been able to reach out and nudge him in the night for twenty-five years. Dave and Susi are easy because they're still hugging. Old Doc is easy because he's so thin. But Cammie isn't easy. Cammie isn't easy because Cammie isn't there. Not here in the kitchen, either. Has she gone upstairs
or stepped outside through the hole in the kitchen wall? Maybe. And—

“You two!” she calls into the pantry, suddenly afraid.

“What?” Steve asks, sounding a bit impatient. In truth he feels a little impatient. They're finally getting the kids soothed down, and if this woman screws that up, he thinks he will brain her with the first pot or pan he can lay grip to.

“Mrs. Reed's gone,” Bee says. “And she took that rifle with her. Was it empty? Come on, make me happy. Say it was empty.”

“I don't think so,” Steve says reluctantly.

“Shit-fire and save matches,” Belinda says.

Cynthia is looking at her from around one of Ralphie's slumped shoulders, her eyes widening in alarm. “Have we got a problem here?” she asks.

“We might,” Bee says.

In the den where it has spent so many happy hours—at the breast of Seth Garin's captive imagination, one might say—Tak waits and listens. On the Zenith's screen, black-and-white cowboys dressed in ghostly gear ride across a desert landscape. Their passage is silent. Discorporeal now that it is out of Seth, Tak has muted the TV with the best remote control of all—its own mind
.

In the bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, it can hear the boy. The boy is making the low, piggy grunting sounds Tak
has come to associate with its elimination function. For Tak, even the sounds are revolting, and the act itself, with its cramping and its sensations of sliding, helpless exit, is hideous. Even vomiting is better—it's quick, at least, up the throat and gone.

Now it knows what the woman did to him: drugged the milk with something to bring on not just a single act of elimination but shivering convulsions of it. How much did she give him? A huge wallop, from the way Seth felt just before Tak fled, and now it understands everything.

It flickers in a dark upper corner of the room—Tak the Cruel, Tak the Despot—like a little cluster of disembodied bicycle taillights that pulse and revolve around each other. It can't hear Aunt Audrey and Marinville even with the TV sound off, but it knows they're there, outside the front door. When they finally stop talking and come in, it will kill them—the man first, and simply to replenish the energy it has expended (being out of the boy's body is particularly depleting), Seth's aunt for what she has tried to do. It will feed on her as well, and she will die slowly, by her own hand.

The boy's punishment for trying to stand against Tak will be to watch it happen.

Yet Tak respects Seth; he has been a worthy opponent. (How could any vessel capable of containing Tak not be?) Since the wino came yesterday, Tak and the boy have been playing a nervy game of stud poker, just like Laura and Jeb Murdock in
The Regulators
. Now everything is in the pot and all but the final hole cards are face-up on the table. When they are flipped, Tak knows it will win. Of course it will win. Its opponent is only a child, after all, no matter
how brilliant the lower courses of his intellect may be, and in the end the child has believed just a little more than is healthy for him. It knew Seth had planned to drive it temporarily out of his body, and although the exact method was a surprise (a very unpleasant one), even that much knowledge is more than Seth knew it had. But there is something else, as well.

Seth doesn't believe Tak can re-enter him while he is performing the disgusting act for which the little room adjacent to the kitchen has been set aside.

Seth is wrong. Tak
can
re-enter. It will be unpleasant—painful, even—but it
can
re-enter. And how does it know that Seth hasn't seen this final card, as he has seen some of the others Tak has held, even in spite of its best efforts to hide them?

Because he has called his beloved auntie back to the house to help him get away.

And when his beloved auntie finally stops hesitating out there on the stoop and comes in, she'll be . . . well . . .

Regulated.

Completely regulated.

The red lights in the shadows swirl faster, excited by the idea.

“Did you hear me say we had to go
right now
?”

Johnny nods. Neither of them sees Cammie Reed cross the street from the adobe church that used to be Johnny Marinville's suburban retreat to the remains of the
wattle-and-daub that used to be Brad and Belinda's house. She's got her head down and the .30–.06 in one hand.

“Yes, but there's still that one question I have, Aud.”

“What?” she nearly screams. “For God's sake,
what
?”

“Can it jump to someone else? To you or me, for instance?”

A look of what might be relief appears briefly on her face. “No.”

“How can you be sure? Did Seth tell you?”

He thinks for a moment she won't answer this, and not simply because she wants to get to the boy while he's still on the jakes. He at first mistakes her look for embarrassment, then sees it's deeper; not embarrassment but shame.

“Seth didn't tell me,” she says. “I know because it tried to get into Herb. So it could . . . you know . . . have me.”

“It wanted to make love to you,” he says.

“Love?” she says, her voice barely under control “No. Oh, no. Tak understands nothing about love, cares nothing about love. It wanted to fuck me, that's all. When it discovered it couldn't use Herb to do that, it killed him.” Tears are running down her face now. “It doesn't give up easily when it wants something, you know. What it did to him . . . well, imagine what would happen to one of little Ralphie Carver's shoes if you tried to get it on your big grown-up's foot. If you just kept jamming it and shoving it,
harder and harder, oblivious of the pain, oblivious of what you were doing to it in your obsession to wear it, walk in it . . .”

“All right,” he says. He looks down toward the bottom of the hill, almost expecting to see the vans coming back, but there is nothing. He looks up the street and sees more nothing; Cammie is standing out of sight in the shadow of the precariously leaning Cattlemen's Hotel. “I get the message.”

“Then can we go in? Or do you even
intend
to go in? Have you lost your nerve?”

“No,” he says, and sighs.

There's an old-fashioned iron thumb-latch on the bunkhouse door, but when he tries to grasp it, his thumb goes straight through. Below it, appearing like something floating up through dirty water, is a plain old suburban doorknob. When Johnny grasps it, a suburban door forms around it, first overlying the planks and iron bands, then replacing them. The knob turns and the door opens on a dark room that smells as stale as dirty laundry. The moonlight floods in, and what Johnny sees makes him think of stories he's read in the papers from time to time, the ones about elderly recluse millionaires who spend the last years of their lives in single rooms, stacking up books and magazines, collecting pets, shooting Demerol, eating meals out of cans.

“Quick, hurry,” she says. “He'll be in the downstairs bathroom. It's off the kitchen.”

She moves past him, taking his hand as she does, and leads him into the living room. There are no
stacked books and magazines, but the sense of reclusion and insanity grows rather than lessens as they advance. The floor is tacky with spilled food and soda; there is an underlying sour smell of clabbered milk; the walls have been scribbled over with crayon drawings that are frightening in their primitive preoccupation with bloodshed and death. They remind him of a novel he read not so long ago, a book called
Blood Meridian.

Movement flickers to his left. He turns that way, heart speeding up, adrenaline dumping into his bloodstream, but there are no gun-toting cowboys or sinister aliens, not even an attacking little kid with a knife. It's only a shimmer of reflected light. From the TV, he assumes, although there's no sound.

“No,” she whispers, “don't go in there.”

She leads him toward the doorway straight ahead. Light shines through it, printing a bright oblong onto the food-encrusted carpet. Electricity may not yet have been invented along the rest of what used to be Poplar Street, but there's still plenty here.

Now Johnny can hear grunting sounds, interspersed with mildly labored breathing. Sounds as human—and as instantly recognizable—as snoring, sneezing, wheezing, whistling. Someone going to the toilet. Doing number two, as they used to say when they were kids. A grade-school couplet comes to mind:
Mother gives me lemonade, around the corner fudge is made.
Whoa, Johnny thinks, that one's right up there with little bitty baby Smitty.

As they enter the kitchen and he looks around, it
occurs to Johnny that perhaps the good folk of Poplar Street deserve what's happening to them. She's been living like this for God knows how long and we never knew, he thinks. We're her neighbors, we all sent her flowers when her husband ate the end of his gun, most of us went to his funeral (Johnny himself had been in California, talking to a convention of children's librarians), but we never knew.

The counter jostles with jars, discarded packaging, empty glasses, and soft-drink cans. Many of the latter have become antfarms. He sees the Tupperware pitcher with the remains of the doctored chocolate milk in it, and the crust of Tak's bologna-and-cheese sandwich beside it. The sink is stacked with dirty dishes. Beside the dish drainer, a plastic bottle of detergent which might have been purchased when Herb Wyler was still alive lies overturned. Around its nozzle is a long-congealed puddle of green dishgoo. On the table are more stacks of dirty dishes, a squeeze-bottle of mustard, sprays of crumbs (there's a Van Halen cassette lying in one of these), an aerosol can of whipped cream, two bottles of catsup, one mostly empty and one mostly full, open pizza boxes littered with crusts, bread-wrappers, Twinkies wrappers, and a Doritos bag pulled down over an empty Pepsi bottle like a weird condom. There are also piles and piles of comic books. All those that Johnny can see are issues of Marvel's
MotoKops 2200
series. Spilled Sugar Pops are scattered across the cover of an issue which shows Cassie Styles and Snake Hunter standing hip-deep in a swamp and firing their
stun-pistols at Countess Lili Marsh, who is attacking on what could be a jet-powered motorscooter.
BAYOU BLAST
! the title screams. In the far corner of the room is a heap of bulging plastic garbage bags, none secured with ties, most oozing ant-infested swill. All the cans seem to bear the smiling face of Chef Boyardee. The stove is covered with pots encrusted with the Chef's orange sauce. On top of the fridge, a bizarre crowning touch, is an old plastic statuette of Roy Rogers mounted on the faithful Trigger. Johnny knows without having to ask that it was a present to Seth from his uncle, something perhaps remembered from the days of Herb Wyler's own youth and patiently hunted out of a dust-covered attic carton.

Beyond the fridge is a half-open door, casting its own wedge of light out onto the filthy linoleum. The door's angle isn't too severe for Johnny to be able to read the sign on it:

EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS

AFTER USING THE LAVATORY

(
AND CUSTOMERS SHOULD
)

“Seth!”
Audrey stage-whispers, dropping Johnny's hand and rushing for the bathroom door. Johnny follows her.

From behind them, spots of dancing red light stream out of the den's arched doorway like meteor debris; they flash across the dark living room toward the kitchen. Even as they do, Cammie Reed steps through the door from outside. She has the gun in
both hands now, and as she stands looking around the dim living room, she slips her right index finger inside the trigger-guard and nestles it against the trigger. She is hesitant, not sure where to go next. Her eye is drawn to the flicker of reflected TV-light from the den, her ear by the sound of people moving in the kitchen. The voice in her head, the one demanding revenge for Jimmy, has fallen silent, and she isn't sure which way to go. Her eye registers a brief strobe of red light, but her mind does nothing with the input; it is totally preoccupied with the question of how she should go on. Marinville and Wyler are in the kitchen, she's sure of that, but is the killer brat in there with them? She glances doubtfully toward the TV flicker again. No sound, but maybe autistic children watch it with the sound off.