The Regulators

something of a genius.

A frightened genius, right now.

“Come on… please, Aunt Audrey, please hear… please answer…”

Because time is short, and the time is now.

Main Street, Desperation/Regulator Time

The telephone in the Carver living room begins to ring, and as if this is some kind of signal aimed directly at his deepest and most delicate neural centers, Johnny Marinville’s unique ability to see and sequence breaks down for the first time in his life. His perspective shivers like the shapes in a kaleidoscope when the tube is twirled, then falls apart in prisms and bright shards. If this is how the rest of the world sees and experiences during times of stress, he thinks, it’s no wonder people make so many bad decisions when the heat is on. He doesn’t like experiencing things this way. It’s like having a high fever and seeing half a dozen people standing around your bed. You know that four of them are actually there… but which four? Susi Geller is crying and screaming her mother’s name. The Carver kids are both awake again, of course; Ellen, her capacity to endure in relative stoicism finally gone, seems to be having a kind of emotional convulsion, screaming at the top of her lungs and pounding Steve’s back as he tries to embrace and comfort her. And Ralphie wants to whale on his big sister! “Stop huggin Margrit!” he storms at Steve as Cynthia attempts to restrain him. “Stop huggin Margrit the Maggot! She shoulda give me all the candybar! She shoulda give me ALLLLL of it'n none a this would happen!” Brad starts for the living room-to answer the phone, presumably-and Audrey grabs his arm. “No,” she says, and then, with a kind of surreal politeness: “It’s for me.” And Susi is on her feet now, Susi is running down the hall toward the front door to see what’s happened to her mother (a very unwise idea, in Johnny’s humble opinion). Dave Reed tries to restrain her again and this time can’t, so he follows her instead, calling her name. Johnny expects the boy’s mother to restrain him, but Cammie lets him go while from out back coyotes that look like no coyotes which ever existed on God’s earth lift their crooked snouts and sing mad love songs to the moon.

All of this at once, swirling like litter caught in a cyclone.

He’s on his feet without even realizing it, following Brad and Belinda into the living room, which looks as if the Green Giant stomped through it in a snit. The kids are still shrieking from the pantry, and Susi is howling from the end of the entry hall. Welcome to the wonderful world of stereophonic hysteria, Johnny thinks.

Audrey, meanwhile, is looking for the phone, which is no longer on its little table beside the couch. The little table itself is no longer beside the couch, in fact; it’s in a far corner, split in half. The phone lies beside it in a strew of broken glass. It’s off the hook, the handset lying as far from the base as the cord will allow, but it’s still ringing.

“Mind the glass, Aud,” Johnny says sharply as she crosses to it.

Tom Billingsley goes to the jagged hole in the west wall where the picture window used to be, stepping over the smoking and exploded ruins of the TV in order to get there. “They’re gone,” he says. “The vans.” He pauses, then adds: “Unfortunately, Poplar Street’s gone, too. It looks like Deadwood, South Dakota out there. Right around the time Jack McCall shot Wild Bill Hickok in the back.”

Audrey picks up the telephone. Behind them, Ralphie Carver is now shrieking: “I hate you, Margrit the Maggot! Make Mummy and Daddy come back or I’ll hate you forever! I hate you, Margrit the Maggot!” Beyond Audrey, Johnny can see Susi’s struggles to get away from Dave Reed subsiding; he is hugging her out of horror and toward tears with a patience that, given the circumstances, Johnny can only admire.

“Hello?” Audrey says. She listens, her pale face tense and solemn. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I will. Right away. I… “She listens some more, and this time her eyes lift to Johnny Marinville’s face. “Yes, all right, just him. Seth? I love you.”

She doesn’t hang the telephone up, simply drops it. Why not? Johnny traces its connection-wire and sees that the concussion which tore apart the table and flung the phone into the corner has also pulled the jack out of the wall.

“Come on,” Audrey says to him. “We’re going across the street, Mr Marinville. Just the two of us. Everyone else stays here.”

“But-” Brad begins.

“No arguments, no time,” she tells him. “We have to go right now. Johnny, are you ready?”

“Should I get the gun they brought from next door? It’s in the kitchen.”

“A gun wouldn’t do any good. Come on.”

She holds out her hand. Her face is set and sure… except for her eyes. They are terrified, pleading with him not to make her do this thing, whatever it is, on her own. Johnny takes the offered hand, his feet shuffling through rubble and broken glass. Her skin is cold, and her knuckles feel slightly swollen under his fingers. It’s the hand the little monster made her hit herself with, he thinks.

They go out the living room’s lower entrance and past the teenagers, who stand silently hugging each other. Johnny pushes open the screen door and lets Audrey precede him out and over the body of Debbie Ross. The front of the house, the stoop, and the dead girl’s back are splattered with the remains of Kim Geller-streaks and daubs and lumps that look black in the light of the moon-but neither of them mentions this. Ahead, beyond the walk and the short section of curb where the Power Wagons no longer stand, is a broad and deeply rutted dirt street. A breath of breeze touches the side of Johnny’s face-it carries a smoky smell with it and a tumbleweed goes bouncing by, as if on a hidden spring. To Johnny it looks straight out of a Max Fleischer cartoon, but that doesn’t surprise him. That is where they are, isn’t it? In a kind of cartoon? Give me a lever and I’ll move the world, Archimedes said; the thing across the street probably would have agreed. Of course, it was only a single block of Poplar Street it had wanted to move, and given the lever of Seth Garin’s fantasies to pry with, it had accomplished that without much trouble.

Whatever may await them, there is a certain relief just in being out of the house and away from the noise.

The stoop of the Wyler house looks about the same, but that’s all. The rest is now a long, low building made of logs. Hitching posts are ranged along the front. Smoke puffs from the stone chimney in spite of the night’s warmth. “Looks like a bunkhouse,” he says.

Audrey nods. “The bunkhouse at the Ponderosa.”

Why did they go away, Audrey? Seth’s regulators and future cops? What made them go away?”

“In at least one way, Tak’s like the villain in a Grimms “fairy-tale,” she says, leading him into the street. Dust puffs up from beneath their shoes. The wheelruts are dry and as hard as iron. “It has an Achilles heel, something you’d never suspect if you hadn’t lived with it as long as I have. It hates to be in Seth when Seth moves his bowels. I don’t know if it’s some weird kind of aesthetic thing or a psychological phobia, or maybe even a physical fact of its existence-the way we can’t help flinching if someone makes like to punch us, for instance-and I don’t care.”

“How sure of this are you?” he asks. They have reached the other side of the broad Main Street now. Johnny looks both ways and sees no vans; just massed, rocky badlands to the right and emptiness-a kind of uncreation-to the left.

“Very,” she says grimly. The cement walk leading up to 247 Poplar has become a flagstone path. Halfway up it, Johnny sees the broken-off rowel of some rangehand’s spur glinting in the moonlight. “Seth has told me-I hear him in my head sometimes.”

“Tele pathy.”

“Uh-huh, I guess. And when Seth talks on that level, he has no mental problems whatever. On that level he’s so bright it’s scary.”

“But are you completely sure it was Seth talking to you? And even if it was, are you sure Tak was letting him tell the truth?”

She stops halfway to the bunkhouse door. She is still holding one of his hands; now she takes the other, turning him to face her.

“Listen, because there’s only time for me to say this once and no time at all for you to ask questions. Sometimes when Seth talks to me, he lets Tak listen in… because, I think, that way Tak believes it hears all our mental conversations. It doesn’t, though.” She sees him start to speak and squeezes his hands to shut him up. “And I know Tak leaves him when he moves his bowels. It doesn’t just go deep, it comes out of him. I’ve seen it happen. It comes out of his eyes.”

“Out of his eyes,” Johnny whispers, fascinated and horrified and a little awed.

“I’m telling you because I want you to know it if you see it,” she says. “Dancing red dots, like embers from a campfire. Okay?”

“Christ,” Johnny mutters, then: “Okay.”

“Seth loves chocolate milk,” Audrey says, pulling him into motion again. “The kind you make with Hershey’s syrup. And Tak loves what Seth loves… to a fault, I guess you could say.”

“You put Ex-Lax in it, didn’t you?” Johnny asks. Tou put Ex-Lax in his chocolate milk.” He almost feels like joining the coyotes in a good howl at the moon. Only he’d be howling with laughter. Life’s more surrealistic possibilities never exhaust themselves, it seems; their one chance to survive this is a summer-camp stunt on a level with snipe hunts and short-sheeting the counsellor’s bed.

“Seth told me what to do and I did it,” she says. “Now come on. While he’s still crapping his brains out. While there’s still time. We’ve got to grab him and just run. Get him out of Tak’s range before it can get back inside him. We can do it, too. Its range is short. We’ll go down the hill. You carry him. And I’ll bet that before we even get to where the store used to be, we’re going to see one big fucking change in our environment. Just remember, the key is to be quick. Once we get started, no hesitation or pulling up allowed.”

She reaches for the door and Johnny restrains her. She stares at him with a mixture of fear and fury.

“Did you hear me say we had to go right now?”

“Yes, but there’s one question you have to answer, Aud.”

They’re being watched anxiously from across the street. Belinda Josephson breaks away from the little cluster doing the watching and goes back into the kitchen to see how Steve and Cynthia are making out with the little kids. Not bad, it appears. Ellen is sniffling but otherwise under control again, and Ralphie seems to have blown himself out, like a hurricane that moves inland. Belinda glances briefly around the empty kitchen, which is now open to the backyard, then turns to go back down the hall to the others. She takes a single step, then pauses. A narrow vertical crease-Bee’s thought- line, her husband calls it-appears in the center of her forehead. It’s not entirely dark down there by the screen door, there’s moonlight… and these are her neighbors, of course. It’s not very hard to tell them apart. Brad is easy to identify because he’s her closest neighbor, so close she’s been able to reach out and nudge him in the night for twenty-five years. Dave and Susi are easy because they’re still hugging. Old Doc is easy because he’s so thin. But Cammie isn’t easy. Cammie isn’t easy because Cammie isn’t there. Not here in the kitchen, either. Has she gone upstairs or stepped outside through the hole in the kitchen wall? Maybe. And-

“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.