The Regulators - Stephen King [144]
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.'
'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. 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