Before Collie could say anything, there was a final shot from the black van and a sound-he would have sworn it-like the whistle of an artillery shell. Marielle Soderson, who had reached the stoop (Gary had already disappeared inside, no gentleman he), screamed and staggered sideways against the door. Her left arm flew bonelessly upward. Blood splashed Doc’s aluminum siding; the rain began to wash it down the side of the house in membranes. Collie heard the store-girl scream, and felt a little like screaming himself. The slug had taken Marielle in the shoulder and torn her left arm almost entirely off her body. It flopped back down and dangled precariously from a glistening knot of flesh with a mole on it. It was the mole-a flaw Gary might have lovingly kissed in his younger, less pickled days-that made it somehow real. She stood in the doorway, shrieking, her left arm hanging beside her like a door which has been ripped off two of its three hinges. And behind her, the black van now also accelerated down the hill, the turret sliding closed as it went. It disappeared into the rain and the billowing smoke from the empty Hobart house, where the roof was now sharing its gift of fire with the walls.
She had a place to go.
Sometimes that seemed like a blessing, sometimes (because it extended things, kept the hellish game going) like a curse, but either way, it was the only reason she was still herself, at least some of the time; the only reason she hadn’t been eaten alive from the inside out. The way Herb had been. In the end, though, Herb had been able to find himself one more time. Had been able to hold on to himself long enough to go out to the garage and put a bullet in his brain.
Or so she wanted to believe.
Sometimes, however, she believed otherwise. Sometimes she would think of the endless evenings before the gunshot from the garage and she would see Seth in his chair, the one with the horse-and-rider de cals she and Herb had put on when they came to realize just how much the boy loved “Wessurns”. Seth just sitting there, ignoring whatever was on TV (unless it was an oat-opera or a space-show, that was), looking at Herb with his horrible mud-brown eyes, the eyes of a creature that has lived its whole life in a swamp. Sitting there in the chair which his aunt and uncle had decorated so lovingly back in the early days, before the nightmare had started. Before they’d known it had started, at least. Sitting there and looking at Herb, hardly ever at her, at least not then. Looking at him. Thinking at him. Sucking him dry, like a vampire in a horror film. And that was what the thing inside Seth really was, wasn’t it? A vampire. And their lives here together on Poplar Street, that was the film. Poplar Street, for God’s sake, where there was probably still at least one Carpenters album in every home. Nice neighbors, the kind of folks that drop everything when they hear on the radio that the Red Cross is getting low on O, and none of them knew that Audrey Wyler, the quiet widow who lived between the Sodersons and the Reeds, was now starring in her own Hammer film.
On good days she would think that Herb, whose sense of humor had served as both a shield and a goad to the thing inside of Seth, had held on long enough to escape. On bad ones she knew that was bullshit, that Seth had simply used all of Herb there was to use and had then sent him out to the garage with a self-destruct program flashing away in his head like a neon Schlitz sign in a taproom window.
It wasn’t Seth, though, not really; not the Seth who had sometimes (in the early days) hugged them and given them brief open-mouthed kisses that felt like bursting soap-bubbles. “I “owboy,” he would occasionally say while sitting in the special chair, words rising out of his usual unintelligible babble and making them feel, however fleetingly, that they were getting somewhere: I’m a cowboy. That Seth had been sweet; lovable not just in spite of his autism but partly because of it. That Seth had also been a medium, however, like contaminated blood which simultaneously nourishes a virus and transports it.
The virus-the vampire-was Tak. A little gift from the Great American Desert. According to Bill, the Garin family had never turned back to Desperation, had never stopped to investigate what was behind the bulwark of earth they had seen from the road, the bulwark that had excited Seth enough for him to briefly transcend his usual gabble and speak in clear English. We really couldn’t do that, Aud, Bill had said. I wanted to be sure of getting to Carson City by dark. But Bill had lied. She knew because of a letter she’d gotten from a man named Allen Symes.
Symes, a geologist-engineer for something called the Deep Earth Mining Corporation, had seen the Garin family on July 24th of 1994, the same day Audrey’s brother had sent her the exuberant postcard. Symes had assured her that nothing very interesting had happened, that he had simply taken the Garins to the edge of the open-pit mine (actually going in would have been against MSHA regulations, his letter said) and given them a little history lecture before sending them on their way again. It was a good story, both boring and plausible. Audrey wouldn’t have questioned a word of it under ordinary circumstances, but she knew something Mr Allen Symes of Desperation, Nevada, had not: that Bill had denied stopping at all. Bill said they had simply hurried on their merry way, because he wanted to be sure of getting to Carson City by dark. And if Bill had lied, wasn’t it possible-even likely-that Symes had also lied?
Lied about what? Lied about what?
Stop, Daddy, go back, Seth want to see mountain.
Why did you lie to me, Bill?
That was a question she thought she could answer: Bill had lied because Seth had made him
lie. She thought that Seth had probably been standing right there by the phone during her conversation with Bill, watching the creature it no longer regarded as its father with mud-brown eyes that belonged under a log in some swamp. Bill had been allowed to say only what Tak wanted him to say, like a person who speaks with a gun pointed at his head. He had told his clumsy lies and laughed the unnatural cocktail-party laugh, ha-ha-ha.
The thing in Seth had eventually eaten Herb alive and now it was trying to eat her, but she was apparently different from Herb in one crucial way: she had a place to go. She had discovered it perhaps by accident, perhaps with help from Seth-the real Seth-and she could only pray that Tak would never discover what she was doing or where she was going. That the monster would never follow her to her sanctuary.
In May of 1982, when she was twenty-one and still Audrey Garin, she and her roommate (who was also her best friend, then and ever), Janice Goodlin, had spent a wonderful weekend-very likely the most perfect weekend of Audrey’s life-at Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York. The trip was a present from Jan’s father, who had won some sort of cash award from his company for selling and had been promoted two or three rungs up the corporate ladder into the bargain. If his intention had been to share some of his happiness, he had succeeded splendidly with the two young women.
On the Saturday of that magic weekend they had taken a picnic lunch (packed by the kitchen in a wonderful old-fashioned wicker hamper) and walked for hours, hunting for the perfect spot in which to settle. Usually when you’re doing that you don’t find it, but they had gotten lucky. It was a beautiful and half-wild upland meadow, rife with buttercups and daisies and wild roses. It hummed with bees; white butterflies danced on the warm air like enchanted confetti which never fell to earth. At one end of this meadow was an eccentric little cupola-shaped thing-Janice said it was called a folly, and they were spotted all over the Mohonk grounds. It was roofed to provide shade and shelter, but open on every side to provide air and view.
The two women had eaten enormously, talked prodigiously, and at three different points laughed so hard that tears ran down their faces. Audrey didn’t think she had ever laughed with quite that same heartiness since. She never forgot the long, clear summer light of that afternoon, or the dancing white shreds of the butterflies.
This was the place she returned to when Tak was fully out and fully in command of Seth. This was where she hid, with a Janice who was still Goodlin instead of Conroy, a Janice who was still young. Sometimes she would tell Janice about Seth-how he had come to stay, and how neither she nor Herb had seen or suspected (at least at first) what was inside Seth, a thing that was being very still, watching them and husbanding its strength and waiting for the right time to come out. Sometimes on these occasions she would tell Jan how much she missed Herb and how terrified she was… how she felt caught, like a fly in a web or a coyote in a leghold trap.