The Regulators

She looked down now and saw the phone was gone.

She stood up, and Jan-that young Jan, still with both breasts intact-stopped her chatter at once and looked at Audrey with sad eyes. “So soon?”

“I’m sorry,” Audrey said, although she had no idea if it was soon or late. She’d know when she got back and looked at a clock, but while she was here, the whole concept of clocks seemed ridiculous. The meadow which lay upland of Mohonk in May of 1982 was a no-clock zone, blessedly tickless.

“Maybe someday you’ll be able to get rid of that damned phone for good and stay,” Jan said.

“Maybe. That would be nice.”

But would it? Would it really? She didn’t know. And in the meantime, she had a little boy to take care of. And something else: she wasn’t quite ready to give up yet, which was what coming to live permanently in May of 1982 would mean. And who knew how she would feel about the upland meadow if she could never leave it? Under those circumstances, her haven might become her hell.

Yet things were changing, and not for the better. For one thing Tak wasn’t weakening, as she had perhaps foolishly hoped it would with the passage of time; Tak was, if anything, getting stronger. The TV ran constantly, broadcasting the same tapes and recycled series programs (Bonanza, The Rifleman… and MotoKops 2200, of course) over and over. The people on the shows had all begun to sound like lunatic demagogues to her, cruel voices exhorting a restless mob to some unspeakable action. Something was going to happen, and soon. She was almost sure of it. Tak was planning something… if it could be said to plan, or even to think at all. Perhaps change was too mild a word. It felt like things were going to turn upside down and inside out, the way they did in an earthquake. And if they did, when they did-

“Escape,” Jan said, and her eyes flashed. “Stop thinking about it and do it, Aud. Open the front door while Seth’s sleeping or shitting and run like hell. Get out of the house. Get the fuck away from that thing.”

It was the first time Janice had ever presumed to give her advice, and it shocked her. She had no idea at all how to answer. “I’ll… think about it.” “Better not think long, kiddo-I’ve got a feeling you’re almost out of time.” “I ought to go.” She took another flustered glance down at the table to make sure the PlaySkool phone was still gone. It was. “Yes. All right. Bye, Aud.” Jan’s voice seemed to come from a great distance now, and she was fading like a ghost. As the colour went out of her, she began to look more like the woman who was waiting for her to catch up, a woman with one breast-Tak was an artist when it came to those-but there was a clear sexual aspect to the nipple-pinching. And there was the way she was dressed… or undressed. More and more Tak was making her take her clothes off when it was angry with her, or just bored. As if it (or Seth, or both of them) sometimes saw her as its own private gatefold version of the tough but unremittingly wholesome Cassie Styles. Hey, kids, check out the tits on your favorite MotoKop!

She had almost no insight into the relationship between the host and the parasite, and that made her situation even worse. She thought Seth was a lot more interested in buckaroos than in breasts; he was only eight, after all. But how old was the thing inside him? And what did it want? There were possibilities, things far beyond pinching, that she didn’t want to consider. Although, not long before Herb died-

No. She wouldn’t think about that.

She slipped the blouse on and did up the buttons, glancing at the clock on the mantel as she did so. Only 4.15; Jan had been right to say so soon. But the weather had certainly changed, Catskills or no Catskills. Thunder rolled, lightning flashed, and rain pelted so furiously against the living room’s picture window that it looked like smoke.

The TV was playing in the den. The movie, of course. The horrible, hateful movie. They were on their fourth copy of The Regulators. Herb had brought the first one home from The Video Clip at the mall about a month before his suicide. And that old film had been, in some way she still didn’t understand, the final piece in the puzzle, the final number in the combination. It had freed Tak in some way… or focused it, the way a magnifying lens can focus light and turn it into fire. But how could Herb have known that would happen? How could either of them have known? At that time they had barely suspected Tak’s existence. It had been working on Herb, yes, she knew that now, but it had been doing so almost as silently as a leech that battens on a person below the waterline.

“You want to try me, Sheriff?” Rory Calhoun was gritting.

Murmuring under her breath, unaware she was doing it, Audrey said, “Why don’t we just stand down? Think this thing over?”

“Why don’t we just stand down?” John Payne said from the TV. Audrey could see light from the screen nickering against the curved arch between the two rooms. “Think this thing over?”

She tiptoed to the arch, tucking the blouse into the waistband of her blue shorts (one of roughly a dozen pairs, all dark blue with white piping on the side-seams, there was certainly no shortage of blue shorts here at casa Wyler), and looked in. Seth was on the couch, naked except for a grimy pair of MotoKops Underoos. The walls, which Herb had panelled himself in first-quality finished pine, had been stippled with spikes Seth had found in Herb’s garage workshop. Many of the pine boards had split vertically. Poked on to these badly pounded nails were pictures which Seth had cut from various magazines. They were mostly of cowboys, spacemen, and-of course-MotoKops. Interspersed among them was a scattering of Seth’s own drawings, mostly landscapes done with black felt-tip pens. On the coffee table in front of him were glasses scummed with the residue of Hershey’s chocolate milk, which was all Seth/Tak would drink, and jostling plates with half- eaten meals on them. All the meals were Seth’s favor ites: Chef Boyardee spaghetti and hamburger, Chef Boyardee Noodle-O’s and hamburger, and tomato soup with big chunks of hamburger rising out of the gelling liquid like baked Pacific atolls where generations of atomic bombs had been tested.

Seth’s eyes were open but blank-both he and Tak were gone, all right, maybe recharging the batteries, maybe sleeping open-eyed like a lizard on a hot rock, maybe just digging the goddamned movie in some deep and elemental way Audrey would never be able to comprehend. Or want to. The simple truth was that she didn’t give a shit where he-it-was.

Maybe she could get a meal in peace; that was enough for her. The Regulators had about twenty minutes left to run in this, its nine billionth showing at casa Wyler, and Audrey thought she could count on at least that long. Time for a sandwich and maybe a few lines in the journal Tak might well kill her for keeping-if Tak ever found out about it, that was.

Escape. Stop thinking about it and do it, Aud.

She stopped halfway back across the living room, the salami and lettuce in the fridge temporarily forgotten. That voice was so clear that for a moment it didn’t seem to be coming from her mind at all. For one moment she was convinced that Janice had somehow followed her back from 1982, was actually in the room with her. But when she turned, wide-eyed, there was no one. Only the voices from the TV, Rory Calhoun telling John Payne that the time for talking was done, John Payne saying, “Well now, if that’s the way you want it.” Very soon Karen Steele would run between them, screaming at them to stop it, just stop it. She would be killed by a bullet from Rory Calhoun’s gun, one meant for John Payne, and then the final shootout would begin. KA-POW and KA-BAM all the way home.

No one here but her and her dead friends on the TV.

Open the front door and just run like hell.

How many times had she considered it? But there was Seth to think about; he was as much a hostage as she was, and maybe more. Autistic he might be, but he was still a human being. She didn’t like to think what Tak might do to him, if it was crossed. And Seth was still there, all of him-she knew that. Parasites feed on their hosts but don’t kill them… unless it’s on purpose. Because they’re pissed off, maybe.

She had herself to think about, too. Janice could talk about escape, just opening the door and running like hell, but what Janice perhaps didn’t understand was that if Tak caught her before she was able to get away, it would almost certainly kill her. And if she did get out of the house, how far would she have to go before she was safe? Across the street? To the bottom of the block? Terre Haute? New Hampshire? Micronesia? And even in Micronesia, she didn’t think she would be able to hide. Because there was a mental link between them. The little red PlaySkool phone-the Tak-phone-proved that.

Yes, she wanted to get away. Oh yes, so much. But sometimes the devil you knew was better than the devil you didn’t.

She started for the kitchen again, then stopped again, this time staring at the big window with its view of the street. She had thought the rain was pelting the glass hard enough to look like smoke, but actually the first fury of the storm was already passing. What she was seeing didn’t just look like smoke; it was smoke.

She hurried to the window, looked down the street, and saw that the Hobart place was burning in the rain, sending big white clouds up into the gray sky. She saw no vehicles or people around it (and the smoke itself obscured her view of the dead boy and dog), so she looked up toward Bear Street. Where were the police cars? The fire engines? She didn’t see them, but she saw enough to make her cry out softly through hands-she didn’t know how they had gotten there-that were cupped to her mouth.

A car, Mary Jackson’s, she was quite sure, was on the grass between the Jackson house and Old Doc’s place, its nose almost up against the stake fence between the two properties. The trunk-lid had popped open, and the rear end looked trashed. The car wasn’t what had made her cry out, though. Beyond it, sprawled on Doc’s lawn like a fallen piece of statuary, was a woman’s body. Audrey’s mind made a brief attempt to persuade her it was something else-a department store mannequin, perhaps, dumped for some reason on Billingsley’s lawn-then gave it up. It was a body, all right. It was Mary Jackson, and she was as dead as… well, as dead as Audrey’s own late husband.

Tak, she thought. Was it Tak? Has it been out?

You knew it’s been getting ready for something, she thought coldly. You knew that. You’ve felt it gathering its forces, always in the sandbox playing with those damned vans or in front of the TV, eating hamburger meals, drinking chocolate milk, and watching, watching, watching. You’ve felt it, like a thunderstorm building up on a hot afternoon-

Beyond the woman, at the Carvers” house, were two more bodies. David Carver, who had sometimes played poker with Herb and Herb’s friends on Thursday nights, lay on his front walk like a beached whale. There was an enormous hole in his stomach above the bathing suit he always wore when he washed the car. And, lying face-down on the Carver stoop, there was a woman in white shorts. Yards of red hair spilled out around her head in a frizzy corona. Rain glistened on her bare back.

But she’s not a woman, Audrey thought. She felt cold all over, as if her skin had been briskly rubbed with ice. That’s just a girl, probably no more than seventeen. The one who was visiting over at the Reeds” this afternoon. Before I went away to 1982 for a little while. That was Susi Geller’s friend.

Audrey glanced down the block, suddenly sure she was imagining the whole thing, and that reality would snap back into place like a released elastic as soon as she saw the Hobart place standing intact. But the Hobart place was still burning, still sending huge white clouds of cedar-fumed smoke into the air, and when she looked back up the street, she still saw bodies. The corpses of her neighbors.

“It’s started,” she whispered, and from the den behind her, like a horribly prescient curse, Rory Calhoun screamed: “We’re gonna wipe this town off the map!”

Escape! Jan screamed back, a voice inside her head instead of from the TV, but just as urgent. You’re not just about out of time, not anymore, you are out of it! Escape, Audi Escape! Run! Escape!

Okay. She’d let go of her concern for Seth and run. That might come back to haunt her later-if there was a later-but for now…

She started for the front door and was reaching for the knob when a voice spoke up from behind her. It sounded like the voice of a child, but only because it was coming to her through a child’s vocal cords. Otherwise it was toneless, loveless, hideous.

Worst of all, it was not entirely without a sense of humor.

“Hold on, there, ma’am,” Tak said, the voice of Seth Garin imitating the voice of John Payne. Why don’t we just stand down, think this thing over?”

She tried to turn the doorknob, meaning to chance it anyway-she had gone too far to turn back now. She would hurl herself out into the pelting rain and just run. Where? Anywhere.

But instead of turning the knob, her hand fell back to her side, swinging like a nearly exhausted pendulum. Then she was turning around, resisting with all her will but turning anyway, to face the thing in the archway leading into the den… and she thought, considering what spent most of its time in there, den was exactly the right word for what the room had become.

She was back from her safe place. God help her, she was back from her safe place, and the demon hiding inside her dead brother’s autistic little boy had caught her trying to escape. She felt Tak crawling inside her head, taking control, and although she saw it all and felt it all, she couldn’t even scream.

Johnny lunged past the sprawled, face-down body of Susi Geller’s redheaded friend, his head ringing from a slug which had screamed past his left ear… and it really had seemed to scream. His heart was running like a rabbit in his chest. He had moved far enough in the direction of the Carvers” house to be caught in a kind of no-man’s-land when the two