The Regulators

“Are they getting stronger?” Cammie asked suddenly. “These regulators, are they getting more powerful?”

“Yes,” Audrey said. “And if the thing doing this caught the energy from the people who died out there in the woods, the next run will be the worst yet. I pray that didn’t happen, but I think it probably did.”

She looked around at them, drew in a deep breath, and began.

“The thing inside Seth is named Tak.”

“Is it a demon, Aud?” Old Doc asked. “Some kind of demon?”

“No. It has no… no religion, I suppose you’d say. Unless TV counts. It’s more like a tumor, I think. One that’s conscious and enjoys cruelty and violence. It’s been inside him for almost two years now. I heard a story once about a Vermont woman who found a black widow spider in her sink. It apparently came into the house in an empty box her husband brought home from the supermarket where he worked. The box had been full of bananas from South America. The spider had gotten in with them when they were packed. That’s pretty much how Tak got to Poplar Street, I think. Except we’re talking about a black widow with a voice. It called Seth when he and his family were crossing the desert. Crossing Nevada. It sensed him, someone it could use, passing close by, and called him.”

She looked down at her hands, which were knotted tightly together in her lap. Kim Geller was standing in the living-room doorway now, drawn back by Audrey’s story. Audrey looked up again. She spoke to them all, but it was Johnny her eyes kept returning to.

“I think it was weak at first, but not too weak to understand that Seth’s family posed a threat to it. I don’t know how much they knew or suspected, but I do know that my last phone conversation with my brother was very strange. I think Bill could have told me a lot… if Tak had let him.”

“It can do that?” Steve asked. “Impose control over people like that?”

She gestured at her swollen mouth. “My hand did this,” she said, “but I wasn’t running it.”

“Christ,” Cynthia said. She looked nervously at the knives hanging on their magnetized steel runners over the kitchen counter. “That’s bad. Very.”

“It could be worse, though,” Audrey said. “Tak can only physically control at short range.”

“How short?” Cammie asked.

“Usually no more than twenty or thirty feet. Beyond that, its physical influence runs out in a hurry. Usually. Now, all bets are off. Because it’s never been so loaded with energy.”

“Let her tell her story,” Johnny said. He could feel time almost as a tangible thing, slipping away from them. He didn’t know if he was getting that from Audrey or if it was coming from inside himself, and he didn’t care. Time was short. He had never felt an intuition so strongly in his whole life. Time was short.

“There’s a boy still in there,” she said, speaking slowly and with great emphasis. “A sweet, special child named Seth Garin. And the most despicable thing is that Tak has used what the child loves to do its killing. In the case of my brother and his family, it was Tracker Arrow, one of the MotoKops” Power Wagons. They were in California, at the end of the trip that took them through Nevada, when it happened. I don’t know where Tak got enough energy to summon Tracker Arrow out of Seth’s thoughts and dreams at that stage of its development. Seth is its basic power-supply, but Seth isn’t enough. It needs more in order to really crank up.”

“It’s a vampire, isn’t it?” Johnny said. “Only what it draws off is psychic energy instead of blood.”

She nodded. “And the energy it uses is most abundantly available when someone is in pain. In the case of Bill and the rest of his family, maybe someone in the neighborhood died or was hurt. Or-”

“Or maybe there was someone it could hurt itself,” Steve said. “A handy bum, for instance. Just some old wino pushing a shopping cart. Whoever it was, I bet he died with a smile on his face.”

Audrey looked at him, her face sad and sickened. “You know.”

“Not much, but what I know fits what you’re saying,” Steve told her. “There’s a guy like that back there.” He hooked a thumb in the general direction of the greenbelt. “Entragian recognized him. Said he’d been on the street two or three times before since the start of the summer. He got in your nephew’s hooking range, didn’t he? How?”

“I don’t know,” she said dully. “I must have been away.”

“Where?” Cynthia asked. She’d had the idea that Mrs Wyler was sort of a recluse.

“Never mind,” Audrey said. “Just a place I go. You wouldn’t understand. The point is, Tak killed my brother Bill and the rest of his family. And it used one of the Power Wagons to do it.”

“Maybe he could only manage one lonely trombone then, but he’s got the whole band playing now, doesn’t he?” Johnny asked.

Audrey was looking away from them now, nibbling at lips that looked dry and sore. “Herb and I took him in, and in some ways-in many ways, actually-I was never sorry. We could never have children ourselves. He was a loving boy, a sweetheart of a boy-”

“Somebody probably loved Typhoid Mary, too,” Cammie Reed said in a dry, rasping voice.

Audrey looked at her, still biting at her lips, then looked back at Johnny, appealing with her eyes for understanding. He didn’t want to understand, not after all that had happened, especially not after seeing the terrible distortion in Jim Reed’s face as the bullet slammed into his brain, but he thought maybe he did a little, anyway. Like it or not.

“The first six months or so were the best. Although even then we knew something was wrong, of course.”

“Did you take him to the doctor?” Johnny asked.

“It wouldn’t have done any good. Tak would have hidden. The tests would have shown nothing, I’m almost sure of it. And then… later… when we got home…”

Johnny studied her swollen mouth and said, Tt would have punished you.”

“Yes. Me and-” Her voice thickened, broke, resumed as little more than a whisper. “Me and Herb.”

“Herb didn’t kill himself, did he?” Tom asked. “This Tak-thing murdered him.”

She nodded again. “Herb wanted us to get away from it. Tak sensed that. And it found it couldn’t use Herb for… for something it wanted to do. To have sex… experience sex… with me. Herb wouldn’t let it. That made Tak angry.”

“My God,” Brad said.

“It killed Herb and replenished itself. After that, Seth was its only hostage… but Seth was all it needed to keep me in line.”

“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