They’re regulators. Like in that movie me and S-J saw at the Empire last year, the one with John Payne and Karen Steele.
That was it — oh yes. The regulators in the movie had turned out to be just a bunch of bad guys, but at first you thought they were ghosts or monsters or something. Bobby thought that these regulators really were monsters.
One of them grasped Bobby under the arm. Bobby cried out — the contact was quite the most horrible thing he had ever experienced in his life. It made being thrown against the wall by his mother seem like very small change indeed. The low man’s touch was like being grasped by a hot-water bottle that had grown fingers . . . only the feel of them kept shifting. It would feel like fingers in his armpit, then like claws. Fingers . . . claws. Fingers . . . claws.
That unspeakable touch buzzed into his flesh, reaching both up and down. It’s Jack’s stick, he thought crazily. The one sharpened at both ends.
Bobby was pulled toward Ted, who was surrounded by the others. He stumbled along on legs that were too weak to walk. Had he thought he would be able to warn Ted? That they would run away together down Narragansett Avenue, perhaps even skipping a little, the way Carol used to? That was quite funny, wasn’t it?
Incredibly, Ted didn’t seem afraid. He stood in the semicircle of low men and the only emotion on his face was concern for Bobby. The thing gripping Bobby — now with a hand, now with loathsome pulsing rubber fingers, now with a clutch of talons — suddenly let him go. Bobby staggered, reeled. One of the others uttered a high, barking cry and pushed him in the middle of the back. Bobby flew forward and Ted caught him.
Sobbing with terror, Bobby pressed his face against Ted’s shirt. He could smell the comforting aromas of Ted’s cigarettes and shaving soap, but they weren’t strong enough to cover the stench that was coming from the low men — a meaty, garbagey smell — and a higher smell like burning whiskey that was coming from their cars.
Bobby looked up at Ted. ‘It was my mother,’ he said. ‘It was my mother who told.’
‘This isn’t her fault, no matter what you may think,’ Ted replied. ‘I simply stayed too long.’
‘But was it a nice vacation, Ted?’ one of the low men asked. His voice had a gruesome buzz, as if his vocal cords were packed with bugs — locusts or maybe crickets. He could have been the one Bobby spoke to on the phone, the one who’d said Ted was their dog . . . but maybe they all sounded the same. If you don’t want to be our dog, too, stay away, the one on the phone had said, but he had come down here anyway, and now . . . oh now . . .
‘Wasn’t bad,’ Ted replied.
‘I hope you at least got laid,’ another said, ‘because you probably won’t get another chance.’
Bobby looked around. The low men stood shoulder to shoulder, surrounding them, penning them in their smell of sweat and maggoty meat, blocking off any sight of the street with their yellow coats. They were dark-skinned, deep-eyed, red-lipped (as if they had been eating cherries) . . . but they weren’t what they looked like. They weren’t what they looked like at all.
Their faces wouldn’t stay in their faces, for one thing; their cheeks and chins and hair kept trying to spread outside the lines (it was the only way Bobby could interpret what he was seeing). Beneath their dark skins were skins as white as their pointed reet-petite shoes. But their lips are still red, Bobby thought, their lips are always red. As their eyes were always black, not really eyes at all but caves. And they are so tall, he realized. So tall and so thin.
There are no thoughts like our thoughts in their brains, no feelings like our feelings in their
hearts.
From across the street there came a thick slobbering grunt. Bobby looked in that direction and saw that one of the Oldsmobile’s tires had turned into a blackish-gray tentacle. It reached out, snared a cigarette wrapper, and pulled it back. A moment later the tentacle was a tire again, but the cigarette wrapper was sticking out of it like something half swallowed.