“Because you love him,” Johnny said.
“Yes, that’s right, because I love him.” It wasn’t defiance Johnny heard in her voice but a weird and awful shame. Cynthia handed her a paper towel, but Audrey only held it in her hand, as if she had no idea what to use it for. “So in a way, I suppose my love’s responsible for all that’s happened. It’s terrible, but it’s probably true.” She turned her streaming eyes toward
Cammie Reed, who sat on the floor with her arm around her remaining son. “I never believed it would come to this. You have to believe that. Even after it drove the Hobarts away and killed Herb, I had no idea of its powers. What its powers could be.”
Cammie looked at her, saying nothing and giving nothing out of her stone of a face.
“Since Herb died, Seth and I have lived a quiet life,” Audrey said. Johnny thought this was the first outright lie she had told them, although she had perhaps skirted the truth a time or two on her way to it. “Seth’s eight, but school’s not a problem. I fulfil certain home-education requirements and send in a form once a month to the Ohio Board of Education. It’s a joke, really. Seth watches his movies and his TV shows over and over. That’s his real education.
He plays in the sandbox. He eats-hamburgers and Franco-American spaghetti, mostly-and drinks all the chocolate milk I’ll make him. Mostly it was Seth.” She looked at them pleadingly. “Mostly it was. Except… all that time… Tak was inside. Growing. Pushing its roots deeper and deeper. Invading him.”
“And you didn’t know any of this was going on?” Kim asked from the doorway. “Oh, wait, I forgot. It killed your husband. But you just passed that off, didn’t you? Probably as an acci-”
“You don’t understand!” Audrey nearly screamed. “You don’t know what it was to live with him, and with it inside him! It would be Seth, and then I might have a thought that I didn’t shield well enough and I’d find myself running into a wall over and over again, as if I were a wind-up toy and the kid who owned me wanted to smash me apart. Or I’d punch myself in the face, or twist my… my skin…”
Now she used the paper towel, not to wipe her eyes but to blot perspiration from her forehead.
“It made me fall downstairs once,” she said. “It was around Christmas, last year. All I did was tell him to stop shaking the packages under the tree. I thought it was Seth I was talking to, you see, that Tak was gone deep inside. Sleeping. Hibernating. Whatever it does. Then I saw his eyes were too dark, not Seth’s eyes at all, but by then it was too late. I got out of my chair and walked up the stairs. I can’t tell you what it’s like, how horrible it is… like being a passenger in a car that’s being driven by a maniac. I turned around at the top and then just… stepped off the landing. Like stepping off a diving board. I didn’t break anything, because it cushioned the fall at the very last second. Or maybe it was Seth who did that. Either way, it was still a miracle I didn’t break an arm or leg.”
“Or your neck,” Belinda said.
“Uh-huh, or my neck. All I’m trying to say was that, yes, I loved him-him-but I was terrified of it.”
“Seth was the carrot and Tak was the stick,” Johnny said.
“Right. And I had my place to go, too. When things got too crazy. Seth did help with that, I know he did. So the time just… passed. The way it does, maybe, for people who have cancer. You go on because there’s no other choice. You get used to a certain level of pain and fear and you think that’s where it’s going to stop, where it must stop. I never knew it was planning this. You have to believe that. Most times I was able to shield my thoughts from it. It never occurred to me that Tak might have thoughts-plans-it was hiding from me. It waited… and then I suppose that bum showed up at the house while I was away… visiting with my friend, Jan… and then…”
She stopped, almost visibly catching hold of herself, settling herself down.
“This nightmare we’re in is a combination of The Regulators, his favorite Western movie, and MotoKops 2200, his favorite cartoon show. One episode in particular, the one about the Force Corridor. I’ve seen it lots of times; Seth’s got it on not just one but three of his compilation tapes. It’s very, very scary for a cartoon show. Very intense. Seth was terrified of it-he wet the bed three nights in a row after seeing it for the first time-but he was also exhilarated by it. Mostly because of the way the show’s continuing characters, both good and bad, band together in order to destroy the scary aliens hiding in the Force Corridor. These aliens are in cocoons Colonel Henry first mistakes for power-generators, and the part where they come bursting out and attack the MotoKops would scare just about anybody. Only I think that in this telling of “The Force Corridor”, the cocoons are our houses. And we…”
“We’re the scary aliens,” Johnny said. He nodded. It all made horridly perfect sense. “And I suppose what appeals most to both parts of him-or it-is the idea of forced co-operation. Get along, or else. Kids like the concept because it absolves them of judging functions, which most of them aren’t very good at to begin with.”
Audrey was nodding, too. “Yes, that sounds right. Like how the characters from The
Regulators, both good and bad, have always gotten along with the MotoKops in Seth’s sandbox play-fantasies. In his fantasies, even Sheriff Streeter and Jeb Murdock get along, although they’re deadly enemies in the movie.”
“Is what’s happening now still a play-fantasy to Seth?” Johnny asked. “What do you think, Aud?”
“I can’t really tell,” she said, “because it’s hard to know where Tak leaves off and Seth begins… you have to kind of feel for that point. I mean, on some level he probably knows better, the way a kid knows better than to believe in Santa Claus once he gets to be eight or nine… but we hate to give up some of those make-believes, don’t we? There’s a-” She broke off for a moment. Her lower lip trembled, then firmed again. “There’s a sweetness to the best of them, something that helps get us over the rough spots. Tak has allowed Seth to play out his fantasies on a wider screen than most of us get, that’s all.”
“Hell, he’s getting to play them out in virtual reality,” Steve said. “That’s what you’re describing-the ultimate virtual reality game.”
“There’s another possibility,” Audrey said. “Seth may not be able to stop Tak anymore, or even put a brake on it. Tak may have tied Seth up, gagged him, and thrown him in a closet.”
“If Seth could stop Tak, would he?” Johnny asked. “What do you think? What do you feel?”
“I’m sure he would,” Audrey said at once. “I’m sure that, somewhere inside, he’s terrified. Like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, when the brooms got out of control?”
“Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say Tak is driving this thing that’s happening to us all by himself now. Why is he driving it? What does he get out of it? What’s the payback?”
“It,” she said, her mouth drawing down in what Johnny thought was an entirely unconscious moue of disgust. “It, not he.”
“All right, it. To Seth, Poplar Street is the Force Corridor, the houses are cocoons, and we’re the evil aliens that live inside them. It’s a shootout at the OK Corral, interstellar version. But what does Tak get out of it?”
“Something all its own,” Audrey said, and Johnny suddenly thought of an old Beatles lyric: What do you see when you turn out the light? I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine. “The fantasies were always strictly for Seth, I think-they’re the way Tak taps into Seth’s powers, which complement its own. Tak… I think Tak just likes what happens to us.”
Silence in the room.
“Likes it,” Belinda said at last. She spoke in a low, considering tone. “What do you mean, likes it?”
When we hurt. We give something off when we hurt, some thing it… it licks up, like ice-cream. And when we die, that’s even better. It doesn’t have to lick then. It can just gobble the stuff down whole.”
“So we’re dinner,” Cynthia said. “That’s what you’re saying, right? To Seth we’re a video game and to this Tak… we’re dinner.”
We’re more,” Audrey said. “Think what food is to us: the source of energy. Tak is making, that’s what Seth told me. Making and building. I don’t think the desert where Seth picked it up was its home; I think that was its prison. Its home is what it may ultimately try to re-create here.”