The Regulators (29 page)

She couldn't do that . . . could she? None of this was
real,
after all. It was just a refuge in her mind.

Ring, ring, ring.

Light but demanding. Pick me up, it said. Pick me up, Audrey. Pick me up, podner. We got to ride on over to the Ponderosa, only this time you ain't never coming back.

Ring, ring, ring.

She bent down suddenly and planted a hand on either side of the little red phone. She felt the dry wood under her palms, she felt the shapes of carved initials under her fingertips and understood that if she took a splinter in this world, she would be bleeding when she arrived back in the other one. Because this
was
real, it
was,
and she knew who had created it. Seth had made this haven for her, she was suddenly sure of it. He'd woven it out of her best memories and sweetest dreams, had given her a place to go when madness threatened, and if the fantasy was getting a little threadbare, like a carpet starting to show strings where the foot-traffic was the heaviest, that wasn't his fault.

And she couldn't leave him to fend for himself.
Wouldn't.

Audrey snatched up the handset of the phone. It was ridiculously small, child-sized, but she hardly noticed that. “Don't you hurt him!” she
shouted. “Don't you hurt him, you monster! If you have to hurt someone, hurt m—”

“Aunt Audrey!” It was Seth's voice, all right, but changed. There was no stuttering, no grasping for words, no lapses into gibberish, and although it was frightened, it did not seem to be in a panic. At least not yet. “Aunt Audrey, listen to me!”

“I
am
! Tell me!”

“Come back! You can get out of the house now! You can run! Tak's in the woods . . . but the Power Wagons will be coming back! You have to get out before they do!”

“What about you?”

“I'll be all right,” the phone-voice said, and Audrey thought she heard a lie in it. Unsureness, at least. “You have to get to the others. But before you go . . .”

She listened to what he wanted her to do, and felt absurdly like laughing—why had she never thought of it herself? It was so simple! But . . .

“Can you hide it from Tak?” she asked.

“Yes. But you have to hurry!”

“What will we do? Even if I get to the others, what
can
we—”

“I can't explain now, there's no time. You have to trust me, Aunt Audrey! Come back now, and trust me!
Come back!
COME BACK
!”

That last shriek was so loud that she tore the telephone away from her ear and took a step backward. There was an instant of perfect, vertiginous disorientation as she fell, and then she hit the floor with the side of her head. The blow was cushioned by the
living-room carpet, but it sent a momentary flock of comets streaming across her vision anyway. She sat up, smelling old hamburger grease and the dank aroma of a house that hadn't had a comprehensive cleaning or top-to-bottom airing in a year or more. She looked first at the chair she had fallen out of, then at the telephone clutched in her right hand. She must have grabbed it off the table at the same moment she had grabbed the Tak-phone in the dream.

Except it had been no dream, no hallucination.

She brought the telephone to her ear (this one was black, and of a size that fit her face) and listened. Nothing, of course. There was electricity in this house if nowhere else on the block—Tak had to have its TV—but at some point it had killed the phone.

Audrey got up, looked at the arch leading into the den, and knew what she would see if she peeked in: Seth in a trance, Tak entirely gone. But not into the movie this time, or not precisely. She heard confused cries and what was almost certainly a gunshot from across the street, and a line from Genesis occurred to her, something about the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters. The spirit of Tak, she had an idea, was also in motion, busy with its own affairs, and if she tried to get away now she probably
would
make it. But if she got to the others and told them what she knew, and if they believed, what might they do in order to escape the glamor in which they had been ensnared? What might they do to Seth in order to escape Tak?

He told me to go, she thought. I better trust him. But first—

First there was the thing he had told her to do before she left. Such a simple thing . . . but it might solve a lot. Everything, if they were very lucky. Audrey hurried into the kitchen, ignoring the cries and babble of voices from across the street. Now that her mind was made up, she was all but overwhelmed by a need to hurry, to get this last chore done before Tak turned its attention back to her.

Or before it sent Colonel Henry and his friends again.

When things went wrong, they went wrong with spectacular suddenness. Johnny asked himself later how much of the blame was his—again and again he asked it—and never got any clear answer. Certainly his attention had lapsed, although that had been before the shit actually hit the fan.

He had followed along behind the Reed twins as they headed through the woods toward the path, and had allowed his mind to drift off because the boys were moving with agonized slowness, trying not to rustle a single bush or snap a single twig. None of them had the slightest idea that they were not alone in the greenbelt; by the time Johnny and the twins entered it, Collie and Steve were on the path and well ahead of them, moving quietly south.

Johnny's mind had gone back to Bill Harris's horrified survey of Poplar Street on the day of his visit back in 1990, Bill at first saying Johnny couldn't be serious, then, seeing he was, asking him what the deal was. And Johnny Marinville, who now chronicled the adventures of a cat who toted a fingerprint kit, had replied:
The deal is I don't want to die yet, and that means doing some personal editorial work. A second-draft Johnny Marinville, if you like. And I can do it. Because I have the desire, which is important, and because I have the tools, which is vital. You could say it's just another version of what I do. I'm rewriting my life. Re-sculpting my life.

It was Terry, his first wife, who had provided him with what might really have been his last chance, although he hadn't said so to Bill. Bill didn't even know that, after almost fifteen years when their only communication had been through lawyers, Johnny and the former Theresa Marinville had commenced a cautious dialogue, sometimes by letter, mostly on the phone. That contact had increased since 1988, when Johnny had finally put the booze and drugs behind him—for good, he hoped. Yet there was still something wrong, and at some point in the spring of 1989 he had found himself telling his first ex-wife, whom he had once tried to stab with a butter-knife, that his sober life felt pointless and goalless. He could not, he said, imagine ever writing another novel. That fire seemed to be out, and he didn't miss waking up in the morning with it burning his brains . . . along with the inevitable hangover. That part seemed to be
done. And he could accept that. The part he didn't think he could accept was how the old life of which his novels had been a part was still everywhere around him, whispering from the corners and murmuring from his old IBM every time he turned it on. I am what you were, the typewriter's hum said to him, and what you'll always be. It was never about self-image, or even ego, but only about what was printed in your genes from the very start. Run to the end of the earth and take a room in the last hotel and go to the end of the final corridor and when you open the door that's there, I'll be sitting on a table inside, humming my same old hum, the one you heard on so many shaky hungover mornings, and there'll be a can of Coors beside your book-notes and a gram of coke in the top drawer left, because in the end that's what you are and all you are. As some wise man or other once said, there is no gravity; the earth just sucks.

“You ought to dig out the kid's book,” she had said, startling him out of this reverie.

“What
kid's book? I never—”

“Don't you remember
Pat the Detective Kitty-Cat
?”

It took him a minute, but then he did. “Terry, that was just a little story I made up for your sister's rug-monkey one night when he wouldn't shut up and I thought she was going to have a nervous—”

“You liked it well enough to write it down, didn't you?”

“I don't remember,” he had said, remembering.

“You
know
you did, and you've got it somewhere
because you never throw anything away. Anal bastard! I always suspected you of saving your goddam
boogers.
In a Sucrets box, maybe, like fishing lures.”

“They'd probably make
good
fishing lures,” he had said, not thinking about what he was saying but wondering instead where that little story—eight or nine handwritten pages—might be. The Marinville Collection at Fordham? Possible. The house in Connecticut he and Terry had once shared, the one she was living in, talking to him from, at that very moment? Quite possible. At the time of the conversation, that house had been less than ten miles away.

“You ought to find that story,” she said. “It was good. You wrote it at a time when you were good in ways you didn't even know about.” There was a pause. “You there?”

“Yeah.”

“I always know when I'm telling you stuff you don't like,” she said brightly, “because it's the only time you ever shut up. You get all broody.”

“I do not get broody.”

“Do so, do so.” And then she had said what might have been the most important thing of all. Over twenty million dollars in royalties had been generated by her casual memory of the story he had once made up to get his rotten nephew to go to sleep, and gazillions of books chronicling Pat's silly adventures had been sold around the world, but the next thing out of her mouth had seemed more important than all the bucks and all the books. Had then, still did. He supposed she'd spoken in her perfectly ordinary
tone of voice, but the words had struck into his heart like those of a prophetess standing in a Delphic grove.

“You need to double back,” the woman who was now Terry Alvey had said.

“Huh?” he had asked when he'd caught his breath. He hadn't wanted her to understand how her words had rocked him. Didn't want her to know she still had that sort of power over him, even after all these years. “What does
that
mean?”

“To the time when you felt good.
Were
good. I remember that guy. He was all right. Not perfect, but all right.”

“You can't go home again, Terr. You must have been sick the week they took up Thomas Wolfe in American Lit.”

“Oh spare me. We've known each other too long for Debate Society games. You were born in Connecticut, raised in Connecticut, a success in Connecticut, and a drunken, narcotized bum in Connecticut. You don't need to go home, you need to
leave
home.”

“That's not doubling back, that's what us A.A. guys call a geographic cure. And it doesn't work.”

“You need to double back in your
head,
” she replied—patient, as if speaking to a child. “And your body needs some new ground to walk on, I think. Besides, you're not drinking anymore. Or drugging, either.” A slight pause. “Are you?”

“No,” he said. “Well, the heroin.”

“Ha-ha.”

“Where would you suggest I go?”

“The place you'd think of last,” she had replied without hesitation. “The unlikeliest place on earth. Akron or Afghanistan, makes no difference.”

That call had made Terry rich, because he had shared his Kitty-Cat income with her, penny for penny. And that call had led him here. Not Akron but Wentworth, Ohio's Good Cheer Community. A place he had never been before. He had picked the area in the first place by shutting his eyes and sticking a pushpin into a wall-map of the United States, and Terry had turned out to be right, Bill Harris's horrified reaction notwithstanding. What he had originally regarded as a kind of sabbatical had—

Lost in his reverie, he walked straight into Jim Reed's back. The boys had stopped on the edge of the path. Jim had raised the gun and was pointing it south, his face pale and grim.

“What's—” Johnny began, and Dave Reed clapped a hand over his mouth before he could say any more.

There was a gunshot, then a scream. As if the scream had been a signal, Marielle Soderson opened her eyes, arched her back, uttered a long, guttural sound that might have been words, and then began to shiver all over. Her feet rattled on the floor.

“Doc!” Cynthia cried, running to Marielle.
“Doc!”

Gary came first. He stumbled in the kitchen doorway and would have knee-dropped onto his wife's
stomach if Cynthia hadn't pushed him backward. The smell of cooking sherry hung around him in a sweet cloud.

“Wass happen?” Gary asked. “Wass wrong my wi?”

Marielle whipped her head from side to side. It thumped against the wall. The picture of Daisy, the Corgi who could count and add, fell off and landed on her chest. Mercifully, the glass in the frame didn't break. Cynthia grabbed it and tossed it aside. As she did, she saw the gauze over the stump of the woman's arm had turned red. The stitches—some of them, at least—had broken.

“
Doc!
” she screamed.

He came hurrying across from the door, where he had been standing and staring out, almost hypnotized by the changes which were still taking place. There were snarling sounds from the greenbelt out back, more screams, more gunshots. At least two. Gary looked in that direction, blinking owlishly. “Wass happen?” he asked again.

Marielle stopped shivering. Her fingers moved, as if she was trying to snap them, and then that stopped, too. Her eyes stared up blankly at the ceiling. A single tear trickled from the corner of the left one. Doc took her wrist and felt for a pulse. He stared at Cynthia with a kind of desperate intensity as he did. “I guess if you want to go on working downstreet, you'll have to turn in that cashier's duster for a dancehall dress,” he said. “The E-Z Stop's a saloon now. The Lady Day.”