“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 should ers, her eyes widening in alarm. “Have we got a problem here?” she asks.
“We might,” Bee says.
Tak’s Place/Tak’s Time
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 Murdoch 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 reenter. 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.
Main Street, Desperation/Regulator Time
“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 grownup’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 on to 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.