They glow a brilliant red, swell even further outward, then explode from their sockets. The grin on Cammie’s face stretches so wide that her lips split open and begin to stream blood down her chin. The eyeless thing staggers forward, dropping the empty rifle and holding its hands out. They clutch blindly at the air. Johnny thinks he has never seen anything in his life so simultaneously weak and predatory.
“Tak,” it proclaims in a guttural voice which is nothing like Cammie’s. “Tak ah wan! Tak ah lah! Mi him en tow!” There is a pause. Then, in a grinding, inhuman voice Johnny knows he will hear in nightmares until the end of his life, the eyeless thing says: “I know you all. I’ll find you all. I’ll hunt you down. Tak! Mi him, en tow!”
Its skull begins to swell outward then; what remains of Cammie’s head begins to look like a monster mushroom cap. Johnny hears a tearing sound like ripping paper and realizes it is the scant flesh over her skull pulling apart. The clotted sockets of her eyes stretch out long, turning into slits; the swelling skull pulls her nose up into a snout with long, lozenge-shaped nostrils.
So, Johnny thinks, Audrey was right. Only Seth was able to contain it. Seth or someone like Seth. Someone very special. Because-
As if to finish this thought in the most spectacular fashion imaginable, Cammie Reed’s head explodes. Hot fragments, some still pulsing with life, pelt Johnny’s face.
Screaming, revolted to the point of madness, Johnny wipes at the stuff, using his thumbs to try and clear his eyes. Faintly, the way you hear things when someone at the other end of the line temporarily puts the phone down, he can hear Steve and Cynthia, also screaming. Then blinding light fills up the room, as sudden and shocking as an unexpected slap. Johnny thinks at first it’s an explosion of some sort-the end for all of them. But as his eyes (still burning and salty and full of Cammie’s blood) begin to adjust, he sees it’s not an explosion but daylight-the strong, hazy light of a summer afternoon. Thunder rumbles off in the east, a throaty sound with no real threat in it. The storm is over; it has lit up the Hobart place (that much he’s sure of, because he can smell the smoke), then moved on to play hob with someone else’s life. There’s another sound, though, the one they waited for so eagerly and in vain earlier: the tangled wail of sirens. Police, fire engines, ambulances, maybe the fucking National Guard, for all Johnny knows. Or cares. The sound of sirens doesn’t interest him much at this point.
The storm is over.
Johnny thinks that regulator time is over, too.
He sits down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs and looks at the bodies of Audrey and Seth. They remind him of the senseless dead at Jonestown, in Guyana. Her arms are still around him, and his-poor thin wasted arms, unscratched from a single game of tag or follow-the-leader with other boys his own age-are around her neck.
Johnny wipes blood and bone and lumps of brain from his cheeks with his slick palms and begins to cry.
From Audrey Wyler’s journal:
October 31, 1995
Journal again. Never thought I’d resume, probably never will on a full-time basis, but it can be so comforting.
Seth came to me this morning amp; managed to ask, with a combination of words amp; grunts, if he could go out trick or treating, like the other kids in the neighborhood. There was no sign of Tak, and when he is just Seth, I find him all but impossible to refuse. It isn’t hard for me to remember that Seth’s not the one, responsible for everything that’s happened; it’s quite easy, in fact. In a way, that’s what makes it all so horrible. It seals off all my exits. I don’t suppose anyone else could understand what I mean. I’m not sure I understand myself. But I feel it. Oh God, do I.
I told him okay, I’d take him trick or treating, it would be fun. I said I could probably put together a little cowboy outfit for him, if he’d like that, but if he wanted to go as a MotoKop, we’d have to go out to Payless and buy a store outfit.
He was shaking his head before I’d even finished, big back-and-forth shakes. He didn’t want to go as a cowboy, and not as a MotoKop, either. There was something in the piolence of his headshaking that was close to horror. He might be getting tired of cowboys and police from the future, I think.
I wonder if the other one knows?
Anyway, I asked him what he did want to dress as, if not a cowboy or Snake Hunter or Major Pike. He waved one arm amp; jumped around the room. After a little bit of this pantomime, I realized he was pretending to be in a swordfight.
“A pirate’?” I asked, amp; his whole face lit up in his sweet Seth Garin smile.
“Pi-ut!” he said, then tried harder and said it right: “Pi-rate!”
So I found an old silk kerchief to tie over his head, and gave him a clip-on gold hoop to put in his ear, and unearthed an old pair of Herb’s pj’s for pantaloons. I used elastic bands on the bottoms amp; they belled out just right. With a mascara beard, an eyeliner scar, and an old toy sword (borrowed from Cammie Reed next door, a golden oldie from her twins” younger years), he looked quite fierce. And, when I took him out around four o’clock to “do” our block of Poplar Street and two blocks of Hyacinth, he looked no different than all the other goblins and witches and Barneys and pirates. When we got back he spread out all his candy on the living-room floor (he hasn’t been in the den to watch TV all day, Tak must be sleeping deeply, I wish the bastard was dead but that’s too much to hope for) amp; gloated over it as if it really were a pirate’s treasure. Then he hugged me and kissed my neck. So happy.
Fuck you, Tak. Fuck you.
Fuck you and I hope you die.
March 16, 1996
The last week has been horror, complete horror, Tak in charge almost completely and goosestepping. Dishes everywhere, glasses filmed with chocolate milk, the house a mess. Ants! Christ, ants in March! It looks like a house where lunatics live, and is that so wrong?
My nipples on fire from all the pinching it’s made me do. I know why, of course; it’s angry because it can’t do what it wants with its version of Cassandra Styles. I feed it, I buy the new MotoKops toys it wants (and the comic books, of course, which I must read to it because Seth doesn’t have that skill for it to draw on), but for that other purpose I am useless.
As much of the week as I could, I spent with Jan.
Then, today, while I was trying to clean up a little (mostly I’m too exhausted and dispirited to even try), I broke my mother’s favorite plate, the one with the Currier amp; Ives sledding scene on it. Tak had nothing to do with it; I picked it up off the mantel-shelf in the dining room where I keep it displayed, wanting to give it a little dusting, amp; it simply slipped through my stupid fingers amp; broke on the floor. At first I thought my heart had broken with it. It wasn’t the plate, of course, as much as I have always liked it. All at once it was like it was my life I was looking at instead of an old china plate smashed to shit on the dining-room floor. Cheap symbolism, Peter Jackson from across the street would probably say. Cheap amp; sentimental. Probably true, but when we are in pain we are rarely creative.
I got a plastic garbage bag from the kitchen amp; began picking up the pieces, sobbing all the while I did it. I didn’t even hear the TV go off-Tak amp; Seth had been having a MotoKofs 2200 festival most of the day-but then a, shadow fell over me and I looked up and there he was.
At first I thought it was Tak-Seth has been mostly gone this last week, or lying low-but then I saw the eyes. They both use the same set, you’d think they wouldn’t change, couldn’t, but they do. Seth’s are lighter, and have a range of emotion Tak can never manage.
“I broke my mother’s plate,” I said. “It was all I had of her, and it slipped through my fingers.”
It came on worse than ever then. I put my arms around my knees, put my face down on them, amp; just cried. Seth came closer, put his own arms around my neck, amp; hugged me. Something wonderful happened when he did. I can’t explain it, exactly, but it was so good that it made visiting with Jan at Mohonk seem ordinary in comparison. Tak can make me feel bad-terrible, in fact, as if the whole world is nothing but a ball of mud squirming with worms just like me. Tak likes it when I feel bad. He licks those bad feelings right off my skin, like a kid with a candy cane. I know he does.