The Regulators (44 page)

Yes, Johnny thinks. This is it, this is the end. And maybe that is just as well.

But then a strange thing begins to happen. The shooting doesn't stop, but it begins to
diminish,
as if someone is turning down the volume control. This
isn't just true of the gunshots themselves, but of the screaming sound the shells make as they pass overhead. And it happens fast. Less than ten seconds after he first notices the diminution—and it might be more like five—the sounds are gone entirely. So is the queer, humming beat of the Power Wagons' engines.

They raise their heads and look around at each other. In the pantry, Cynthia sees that she and Steve are both as white as ghosts. She raises her arm and blows. Powder puffs up from her skin.

“Flour,” she says.

Steve rakes through his long hair and holds an unsteady hand out to her. There's a cluster of shiny black things in the palm. “Flour's not so bad,” he says. “I got olives.”

She thinks she'll begin to laugh, but before she can, an amazing and totally unexpected thing happens.

Of all the passages he has dug for himself during the reign of Tak—Tak the Thief, Tak the Cruel, Tak the Despot—this is the longest. He has, in a way, re-created his own version of Rattlesnake Number One. The shaft goes deep into some black earth which he supposes is himself, then rises again toward the surface like a hope. At the end of it is a door of iron bands. He doesn't try to open it, but not for fear he will find it locked. Quite the opposite. This is a door he must not touch until he is completely ready; once through it, there will never be any coming back.

He prays it goes where he thinks it does.

Enough light comes through the cracks between the door's iron lengths to illuminate the place where he stands. There are pictures on the strange, fleshy walls; one a group portrait of his family with him sitting between his brother and sister, one a photo of him standing between Aunt Audrey and Uncle Herb on the lawn of this house. They are smiling. Seth, as always, is solemn, distant, not quite there. There is also a photograph of Allen Symes, standing beside (and dwarfed by) one of Miss Mo's treads. Mr. Symes is wearing his Deep Earth hardhat and grinning. No such photograph as this exists, but that doesn't matter. This is Seth's place, Seth's time, Seth's mind, and he decorates it as he likes. Not so long ago, there would have been pictures of the MotoKops and the characters from
The Regulators
hung, not just here, but all along the length of the tunnel. No longer. They have lost their charm for him.

I outgrew them, he thinks, and that is the truth of it. Autistic or not, only eight or not, he has gotten too old for shoot-em-up Westerns and Saturday-morning cartoons. He suddenly understands that this is almost certainly the bottom truth, and one Tak would never understand: he outgrew them. He has the Cassie Styles figure in his pocket (when he needs a pocket he just imagines one; it's handy) because he still loves her a little, but otherwise? No. The only question is whether or not he can escape them, sweet fantasies which might have been laced with poison all along.

And the time has come to find that out.

Beside the photo of Allen Symes, a little shelf juts out of the wall. Seth has seen and admired the shelves in the Carver hallway, each dedicated to its own Hummel figure,
and this one was created with those in mind. Enough light seeps through the cracks in the door to see what's on it—not a Hummel shepherd or milkmaid but a red PlaySkool telephone.

He picks it up and spins out two-four-eight on the plastic phone's rotary dial. It's the Carvers' house number. In his ear the toy phone rings . . . rings . . . rings. But is it ringing on the other end? Does she hear it? Do any of them hear it?

“Come on,” he whispers. He is entirely aware and alert; in this deep-inside place he's no more autistic than Steve Ames or Belinda Josephson or Johnny Marinville . . . is, in fact, 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.

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 esthetic 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 range-hand's spur glinting in the moonlight. “Seth has told me—I hear him in my head sometimes.”

“Telepathy.”

“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. “You 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.”