The Regulators - Stephen King [143]
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