Hearts In Atlantis (33 page)

Adrenaline flooded Bobby and turned on lights in his head he hadn't even known about. He dodged around the stack of boxes, spilling the top two off. His foot struck an empty garbage can and knocked it against the wall. He almost stepped on a hissing furry something—the cat again. Bobby kicked it aside and ran out of the alley. As he turned toward The Corner Pocket he slipped on some sort of greasy goo and went down on one knee. He saw the mortuary clock in its cool blue ring: 9:45. The cab was idling at the curb in front of The Corner Pocket's door. Ted Brautigan was standing beneath the banner reading
COME IN IT'S KOOL INSIDE
, paying the driver. Bent down to the driver's open window like that, Ted looked more like Boris Karloff than ever.

Across from the cab, parked in front of the mortuary, was a huge Oldsmobile as red as Alanna's pants. It hadn't been there earlier, Bobby was sure of that. Its shape wasn't quite solid. Looking at it didn't just make your eyes want to water; it made your
mind
want to water.

Ted!
Bobby tried to yell, but no yell came out—all he could produce was a strawlike whisper.
Why doesn't he feel them?
Bobby thought.
How come he doesn't know?

Maybe because the low men could block him out somehow. Or maybe the people inside The Corner Pocket were doing the blocking. Old Gee and all the rest. The low men had perhaps turned them into human sponges that could soak up the warning signals Ted usually felt.

More lights splashed the street. As Ted straightened and the Checker pulled away, the purple DeSoto sprang around the corner. The cab had to swerve to
avoid it. Beneath the streetlights the DeSoto looked like a huge blood-clot decorated with chrome and glass. Its headlights were moving and shimmering like lights seen underwater . . . and then they
blinked
. They weren't headlights at all. They were eyes.

Ted!
Still nothing but that dry whisper came out, and Bobby couldn't seem to get back on his feet. He was no longer sure he even
wanted
to get back on his feet. A terrible fear, as disorienting as the flu and as debilitating as a cataclysmic case of the squitters, was enveloping him. Passing the blood-clot DeSoto outside the William Penn Grille had been bad; to be caught in its oncoming eyelights was a thousand times worse. No—a
million
times.

He was aware that he had torn his pants and scraped blood out of his knee, he could hear Little Richard howling from someone's upstairs window, and he could still see the blue circle around the mortuary clock like a flashbulb afterimage tattooed on the retina, but none of that seemed real. Nasty Gansett Avenue suddenly seemed no more than a badly painted backdrop. Behind it was some unsuspected reality, and reality was
dark
.

The DeSoto's grille was moving.
Snarling. Those cars ain't real cars
, Juan had said.
They something else
.

They were something else, all right.

“Ted  . . .” A little louder this time . . . and Ted heard. He turned toward Bobby, eyes widening, and then the DeSoto bounced up over the curb behind him, its blazing unsteady headlights pinning Ted and making his shadow grow as Bobby's and the Sigsby girls' shadows had grown when the pole-light came on in Spicer's little parking lot.

Ted wheeled back toward the DeSoto, raising one hand to shield his eyes from the glare. More light swept the street. This time it was a Cadillac coming up from the warehouse district, a snot-green Cadillac that looked at least a mile long, a Cadillac with fins like grins and sides that moved like the lobes of a lung. It thumped up over the curb just behind Bobby, stopping less than a foot from his back. Bobby heard a low panting sound. The Cadillac's motor, he realized, was breathing.

Doors were opening in all three cars. Men were getting out—or things that looked like men at first glance. Bobby counted six, counted eight, stopped counting. Each of them wore a long mustard-colored coat—the kind that was called a duster—and on the right front lapel of each was the staring crimson eye Bobby remembered from his dream. He supposed the red eyes were badges. The creatures wearing them were . . . what? Cops? No. A posse, like in a movie? That was a little closer. Vigilantes? Closer still but still not right. They were—

They're regulators. Like in that movie me and S-J saw at the Empire last year, the one with John Payne and Karen Steele
.

That was it—oh yes. The regulators in the movie had turned out to be just a bunch of bad guys, but at first you thought they were ghosts or monsters or something. Bobby thought that these regulators really
were
monsters.

One of them grasped Bobby under the arm. Bobby cried out—the contact was quite the most horrible thing he had ever experienced in his life. It made being thrown against the wall by his mother
seem like very small change indeed. The low man's touch was like being grasped by a hot-water bottle that had grown fingers . . . only the feel of them kept shifting. It would feel like fingers in his armpit, then like claws. Fingers . . . claws. Fingers . . . claws. That unspeakable touch buzzed into his flesh, reaching both up and down.
It's Jack's stick
, he thought crazily.
The one sharpened at both ends
.

Bobby was pulled toward Ted, who was surrounded by the others. He stumbled along on legs that were too weak to walk. Had he thought he would be able to warn Ted? That they would run away together down Narragansett Avenue, perhaps even skipping a little, the way Carol used to? That was quite funny, wasn't it?

Incredibly, Ted didn't seem afraid. He stood in the semicircle of low men and the only emotion on his face was concern for Bobby. The thing gripping Bobby—now with a hand, now with loathsome pulsing rubber fingers, now with a clutch of talons—suddenly let him go. Bobby staggered, reeled. One of the others uttered a high, barking cry and pushed him in the middle of the back. Bobby flew forward and Ted caught him.

Sobbing with terror, Bobby pressed his face against Ted's shirt. He could smell the comforting aromas of Ted's cigarettes and shaving soap, but they weren't strong enough to cover the stench that was coming from the low men—a meaty, garbagey smell—and a higher smell like burning whiskey that was coming from their cars.

Bobby looked up at Ted. “It was my mother,” he said. “It was my mother who told.”

“This isn't her fault, no matter what you may think,” Ted replied. “I simply stayed too long.”

“But was it a nice vacation, Ted?” one of the low men asked. His voice had a gruesome buzz, as if his vocal cords were packed with bugs—locusts or maybe crickets. He could have been the one Bobby spoke to on the phone, the one who'd said Ted was their dog . . . but maybe they all sounded the same.
If you don't want to be our dog, too, stay away
, the one on the phone had said, but he had come down here anyway, and now . . . oh now  . . .

“Wasn't bad,” Ted replied.

“I hope you at least got laid,” another said, “because you probably won't get another chance.”

Bobby looked around. The low men stood shoulder to shoulder, surrounding them, penning them in their smell of sweat and maggoty meat, blocking off any sight of the street with their yellow coats. They were dark-skinned, deep-eyed, red-lipped (as if they had been eating cherries) . . . but they weren't what they looked like. They weren't what they looked like at all. Their faces wouldn't stay in their faces, for one thing; their cheeks and chins and hair kept trying to spread outside the lines (it was the only way Bobby could interpret what he was seeing). Beneath their dark skins were skins as white as their pointed reet-petite shoes.
But their lips are still red
, Bobby thought,
their lips are always red
. As their eyes were always black, not really eyes at all but caves.
And they are so tall
, he realized.
So tall and so thin. There are no thoughts like our thoughts in their brains, no feelings like our feelings in their hearts
.

From across the street there came a thick slobbering
grunt. Bobby looked in that direction and saw that one of the Oldsmobile's tires had turned into a blackish-gray tentacle. It reached out, snared a cigarette wrapper, and pulled it back. A moment later the tentacle was a tire again, but the cigarette wrapper was sticking out of it like something half swallowed.

“Ready to come back, hoss?” one of the low men asked Ted. He bent toward him, the folds of his yellow coat rustling stiffly, the red eye on the lapel staring. “Ready to come back and do your duty?”

“I'll come,” Ted replied, “but the boy stays here.”

More hands settled on Bobby, and something like a living branch caressed the nape of his neck. It set off that buzzing again, something that was both an alarm and a sickness. It rose into his head and hummed there like a hive. Within that lunatic hum he heard first one bell, tolling rapidly, then many. A world of bells in some terrible black night of hot hurricane winds. He supposed he was sensing wherever the low men had come from, an alien place trillions of miles from Connecticut and his mother. Villages were burning under unknown constellations, people were screaming, and that touch on his neck . . . that awful touch  . . .

Bobby moaned and buried his head against Ted's chest again.

“He wants to be with you,” an unspeakable voice crooned. “I think we'll bring him, Ted. He has no natural ability as a Breaker, but still . . . all things serve the King, you know.” The unspeakable fingers caressed again.

“All things serve the
Beam
,” Ted said in a dry, correcting voice. His teacher's voice.

“Not for much longer,” the low man said, and laughed. The sound of it loosened Bobby's bowels.

“Bring him,” said another voice. It held a note of command. They
did
all sound sort of alike, but this was the one he had spoken to on the phone; Bobby was sure.

“No!” Ted said. His hands tightened on Bobby's back. “He stays here!”

“Who are you to give us orders?” the low man in charge asked. “How proud you have grown during your little time of freedom, Ted! How
haughty!
Yet soon you'll be back in the same room where you have spent so many years, with the others, and if I say the boy
comes
, then the boy
comes
.”

“If you bring him, you'll have to go on taking what you need from me,” Ted said. His voice was very quiet but very strong. Bobby hugged him as tight as he could and shut his eyes. He didn't want to look at the low men, not ever again. The worst thing about them was that their touch was like Ted's, in a way: it opened a window. But who would want to look through such a window? Who would want to see the tall, red-lipped scissor-shapes as they really were? Who would want to see the owner of that red Eye?

“You're a Breaker, Ted. You were made for it, born to it. And if we tell you to break, you'll break, by God.”

“You can force me, I'm not so foolish as to think you can't . . . but if you leave him here, I'll give what I have to you freely. And I have more to give than you could . . . well, perhaps you
could
imagine it.”

“I want the boy,” the low man in charge said, but now he sounded thoughtful. Perhaps even doubtful. “I want him as a pretty, something to give the King.”

“I doubt if the Crimson King will thank you for a meaningless pretty if it interferes with his plans,” Ted said. “There is a gunslinger—”

“Gunslinger, pah!”

“Yet he and his friends have reached the borderland of End-World,” Ted said, and now he was the one who sounded thoughtful. “If I give you what you want instead of forcing you to take it, I may be able to speed things up by fifty years or more. As you say, I'm a Breaker, made for it and born to it. There aren't many of us. You need every one, and most of all you need me. Because I'm the best.”

“You flatter yourself . . . and you overestimate your importance to the King.”

“Do I? I wonder. Until the Beams break, the Dark Tower stands—surely I don't need to remind you of that. Is one boy worth the risk?”

Bobby hadn't the slightest idea what Ted was talking about and didn't care. All he knew was that the course of his life was being decided on the sidewalk outside a Bridgeport billiard parlor. He could hear the rustle of the low men's coats; he could smell them; now that Ted had touched him again he could feel them even more clearly. That horrible itching behind his eyes had begun again, too. In a weird way it harmonized with the buzzing in his head. The black specks drifted across his vision and he was suddenly sure what they meant, what they were for. In Clifford Simak's book
Ring Around the Sun
, it was a top that took you off into other worlds; you followed the rising spirals. In truth, Bobby suspected, it was the specks that did it. The black specks. They were alive  . . .

And they were hungry.

“Let the boy decide,” the leader of the low men said at last. His living branch of a finger caressed the back of Bobby's neck again. “He loves you so much, Teddy. You're his
te-ka
. Aren't you? That means destiny's friend, Bobby-O. Isn't that what this old smoky-smelling Teddy-bear is to you? Your destiny's friend?”

Bobby said nothing, only pressed his cold throbbing face against Ted's shirt. He now repented coming here with all his heart—would have stayed home hiding under his bed if he had known the truth of the low men—but yes, he supposed Ted was his
te-ka
. He didn't know about stuff like destiny, he was only a kid, but Ted was his friend.
Guys like us
, Bobby thought miserably.
Guys like us
.