“No!” Audrey shrieks. “Get out of him! Get OUT, you bastard!”
She leaps for the bathroom door with the boy in her arms. Seth’s head seems to be burning. Johnny reaches out-for her? Seth? both? He doesn’t know and it doesn’t matter because she bursts past him into the filthy kitchen, shrieking and clawing at the dancing swarm of light around Seth’s head. Her hand slides uselessly through the red stuff. As she and the boy pass him, Johnny’s head is filled with a horrible machine-like buzzing sound. He screams, clapping his hands to his ears. It is only for a moment, as Audrey bolts by, but it is a moment which seems all but eternal, just the same. How can there be any boy left under that sound? he wonders. How in God’s name can there be anything left under that sound?
“Let him GO!” she shrieks. “Let him GO, cocksucker, let him GO!”
Then the kitchen doorway is no longer empty. Cammie Reed is standing there with the.30-.06 in her hands.
Tak’s Place/Tak’s Time
When it reaches Seth and finds all its usual ways in blocked, its rather indulgent respect for the boy’s abilities breaks down for the first time since it sensed Seth’s extraordinary mind passing by and called out to that mind with all of its strength. What replaces the indulgence first is realization; anger follows in its wake.
It has been wrong, it seems-Seth has known all along that Tak can re-enter, even during evacuation. Has known and has successfully hidden that knowledge, the way a clever gambler will hide an extra ace up his sleeve. In the end, though, not even that matters; it will get in anyway. There is no way the boy can keep it out. There will be no seige here; Seth Garin is his home now, and he will not be held out of his home.
As the woman carries Seth’s body past the writer and into the kitchen, Tak assaults the boy’s eyes, the ports of entry closest to that wonderful brain, and begins shoving at them like a burly cop shoving at a door being held by a weak man. It knows a moment of utterly uncharacteristic panic when at first nothing happens-it is like pushing against a brick wall. Then the bricks begin to soften and give way. Triumph flashes up in its cold mind. Soon… another moment… two, at most…
Seth’s Place/Seth’s Time
Under his hand, two of the switches are moving up. Even when he redoubles his efforts to hold them down, he can feel them straining under his hand like something alive. The telltales are still red, but not for much longer. Tak is right about one thing: however the two of them may stack up in the matter of wits, Seth is no longer a match for Tak’s raw strength. Once, maybe. At the beginning. No more. Still, if he’s right, that may not matter. If he is right, and if he is lucky.
He glances toward the PlaySkool phone-what Aunt Audrey calls the Tak-phone-longingly for a moment, but of course he doesn’t need a telephone, not really; it was always just a symbol, something concrete to help the telepathy flow more easily between them, as the switches and telltales are simply tools to help him concentrate his will. And telepathy isn’t Seth’s concern here, anyway. If telepathy were all the two of them could share, this would be futile.
Under his hand, the switches move stubbornly upward, driven by Tak’s primitive force, Tak’s primitive will. For a moment the red telltales beneath them flicker out and the green ones above them flicker on. Seth feels a terrible machine-like buzzing in his head, trying to overwhelm his thoughts; for a moment his inner vision is blurred by swirling crimson light in which embers flick and stutter.
Seth pushes the switches down with all his strength. The green lights go off. The red ones come back on. For the moment, anyway.
The time is now, there is only one down-card left in the game, and now Seth Garin turns it up.
The Wyler House/Johnny’s Time
In a way it is like being caught in another barrage from the regulators, only this time what Johnny feels cutting past him are thoughts instead of bullets. But weren’t they always thoughts, really?
The first one goes to Cammie Reed, standing in the kitchen doorway with the gun in her hands:
–Now! Do it now!
The second goes to Audrey Wyler, who recoils as if slapped and suddenly stops clawing at the spectral red miasma around Seth’s head:
–Now, Aunt Audrey! The time is now!
And the last one, a terrible inhuman roar that fills Johnny’s head and wipes out everything else:
-NO, YOU LITTLE BASTARD! NO, YOU CAN’T!
No, Johnny thinks, he can’t. He never could. Then he raises his eyes to Cammie Reed’s
face. Her eyes bulge from their sockets; her lips are stretched in a dry and terrible smile. But she can.
Tak’s Place/Tak’s Time
It has perhaps three seconds, while the woman with the gun calls out, to realize it has been outplayed. How it has been outplayed. A few seconds of incredulity in which to wonder how that could happen after all the millennia it has spent trapped in the dark, thinking and planning. Then, even as it begins to realize that Seth isn’t really inside the body it has been trying to re-enter, the woman in the doorway opens fire.
The Wyler House/Johnny’s Time
Cammie is no longer sure that she is acting of her own free will, but it doesn’t matter; if her will was free, this is still what she would do. The Wyler woma n is holding the monstrous brat curled naked in her arms like an oversized baby, its shanks painted with shit instead of blood and afterbirth. Holding it like a shield. Cammie could almost laugh at the idea.
“Put it down!” Cammie screams, but instead of putting Seth down, Audrey lifts him higher against her breast, as if in defiance. Still smiling her dry, vicious smile, her eyes appearing to start out of their sockets (Johnny will tell himself later that was an optical illusion, surely it was), Cammie centers the rifle on the child.
“No Cammie don’t!” Johnny cries, and then she fires. The first shot takes eight-year-old Seth Garin, who is still shivering helplessly with bowel cramps, in the temple and blows the top of his head off, spattering his aunt’s weirdly serene face with blood, hair, and bits of scalp. The slug drives all the way through his brain and exits the far side of his skull, where it enters Audrey’s left breast. By then, however, it is too spent to do any further serious damage. It’s the second shot that does that, catching her in the throat as she staggers back under the force of the first one. Her butt hits the overloaded kitchen table. Piled dishes fall off and shatter on the floor.
She turns to Johnny, the bloody child still in her arms, and Johnny sees an astonishing thing: she looks happy. Cammie screams as Audrey goes down, perhaps in triumph, perhaps in horror at what she has done.
Audrey somehow keeps her grip on Seth even as she dies. And as she falls, the uneasy red thing rises from the remains of Seth’s face like a caul. It swirls in the air above the filthy linoleum, bright scarlet bits orbiting each other like electrons.
Johnny and Cammie Reed face each other through this redness for he doesn’t know how long-they are frozen, it seems-until someone screams: “Oh shit! Oh shit, why’d you do that, you numb bitch?”
Johnny sees Steve and Cynthia come forward through the darkened living room until they’re standing just behind Cammie. Cynthia springs forward, grabs Cammie by the arm, and shakes her. “Bitch! Stupid murdering cunt, what did you think, this would bring your kid back? Didn’t you ever go to fucking SCHOOL?”
Cammie seems not to hear. She is looking at the spinning red thing with wide, unblinking eyes, as if hypnotized… and it is looking back at her. Johnny doesn’t know how he can know this, but he does. And suddenly it launches itself at her like a comet… or Snake Hunter’s red Tracker Arrow on a Power Wagon assault.
He had asked Audrey if Tak could jump to someone else. She had said no, she was sure it coudn’t, but what if she had been wrong? What if Tak had fooled her? If it had-
“Look out!” he shouts at Cynthia. “Get back from her!”
Little Miss Tu-Tone Hair only stares at him, uncomprehending, from over Cammie’s shoulder. Steve doesn’t look as if he understands, either, but he reacts to the unmistakable panic in Johnny’s voice and yanks Cynthia back.
The swirling red specks divide in two. For a moment Tak’s exterior form looks to Johnny like the sort of fork they used to toast marshmallows on back when they were teenagers, sitting around driftwood beach fires at Savin Rock. Only the tines of this fork plunge themselves directly into Cammie Reed’s bulging eyes.