“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 on to 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.
2
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 green-belt-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 puddled 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.
3
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 seriously consider 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 Takphone 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.
She couldn’t do that… could she? None of this was real, after all. It was just a refuge in her mind.
Ring, ring, ring.
Light but demanding. Pick me up, it said. Pick me up, Audrey. Pick me up, podner. We got to ride on over to the Ponderosa, only this time you ain’t never coming back.
Ring, ring, ring.
She bent down suddenly and planted a hand on either side of the little red phone. She felt the dry wood under her palms, she felt the shapes of carved initials under her fingertips and understood that if she took a splinter in this world, she would be bleeding when she arrived back in the other one. Because this was real, it was, and she knew who had created it. Seth had made this haven for her, she was suddenly sure of it. He’d woven it out of her best memories and sweetest dreams, had given her a place to go when madness threatened, and if the fantasy was getting a little threadbare, like a carpet starting to show strings where the foot-traffic was the heaviest, that wasn’t his fault.
And she couldn’t leave him to fend for himself. Wouldn’t.
Audrey snatched up the handset of the phone. It was ridiculously small, child-sized, but she hardly noticed that. “Don’t you hurt him!” she shouted. “Don’t you hurt him, you monster! If you have to hurt someone, hurt m-”
“Aunt Audrey!” It was Seth’s voice, all right, but changed. There was no stuttering, no grasping for words, no lapses into gibberish, and although it was frightened, it did not seem to be in a panic. At least not yet. “Aunt Audrey, listen to me!”
“I am! Tell me!”
“Come back! You can get out of the house now! You can run! Tak’s in the woods… but the Power Wagons will be coming back! You have to get out before they do!”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be all right,” the phone-voice said, and Audrey thought she heard a lie in it. Unsureness, at least. You have to get to the others. But before you go…”
She listened to what he wanted her to do, and felt absurdly like laughing-why had she never thought of it herself? It was so simple! But…
“Can you hide it from Tak?” she asked.
“Yes. But you have to hurry!”
“What will we do? Even if I get to the others, what can we-”
“I can’t explain now, there’s no time. You have to trust me, Aunt Audrey! Come back now, and trust me! Come back! COME BACK!”
That last shriek was so loud that she tore the telephone away from her ear and took a step backward. There was an instant of perfect, vertiginous disorientation as she fell, and then she hit the floor with the side of her head. The blow was cushioned by the living-room carpet, but it sent a momentary flock of comets streaming across her vision anyway. She sat up, smelling old hamburger grease and the dank aroma of a house that hadn’t had a comprehensive cleaning or top-to-bottom airing in a year or more. She looked first at the chair she had fallen out of, then at the telephone clutched in her right hand. She must have grabbed it off the table at the same moment she had grabbed the Tak-phone in the dream.