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By Root 434 0

backyard, then turns to go back down the hall to the others. She takes a single step, then pauses. A narrow vertical crease — Bee's thought-line, her husband calls it — appears in the center of her forehead. It's not entirely dark down there by the screen door, there's moonlight . . . and these are her neighbors, of course. It's not very hard to tell them apart. Brad is easy to identify because he's her closest neighbor, so close she's been able to reach out and nudge him in the night for twenty-five years. Dave and Susi are easy because they're still hugging. Old Doc is easy because he's so thin. But Cammie isn't easy. Cammie isn't easy because Cammie isn't there. Not here in the kitchen, either. Has she gone upstairs or stepped outside through the hole in the kitchen wall? Maybe. And —

'You two!' she calls into the pantry, suddenly afraid.

What?' Steve asks, sounding a bit impatient. In truth he feels a little impatient. They're finally getting the kids soothed down, and if this woman screws that up, he thinks he will brain her with the first pot or pan he can lay grip to.

'Mrs Reed's gone,' Bee says. 'And she took that rifle with her. Was it empty? Come on, make me happy. Say it was empty.'

'I don't think so,' Steve says reluctantly.

'Shit-fire and save matches,' Belinda says.

Cynthia is looking at her from around one of Ralphie's slumped shoulders, her eyes widening in alarm. 'Have we got a problem here?' she asks.

'We might,' Bee says.

Tak's Place/Tak's Time

In the den where it has spent so many happy hours — at the breast of Seth Garin's captive imagination, one might say — Tak waits and listens. On the Zenith's screen, black-and-white cowboys dressed in ghostly gear ride across a desert landscape. Their passage is silent. Discorporeal now that it is out of Seth, Tak has muted the TV with the best remote control of all — its own mind.

In the bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, it can hear the boy. The boy is making the low, piggy grunting sounds Tak has come to associate with its elimination function. For Tak, even the sounds are revolting, and the act itself, with its cramping and its sensations of sliding, helpless exit, is hideous. Even vomiting is better — it's quick, at least, up the throat and gone.

Now it knows what the woman did to him: drugged the milk with something to bring on not just a single act of elimination but shivering convulsions of it. How much did she give him? A huge wallop, from the way Seth felt just before Tak fled, and now it understands everything.

It flickers in a dark upper corner of the room — Tak the Cruel, Tak the Despot — like a little cluster of disembodied bicycle taillights that pulse and revolve around each other. It can't hear Aunt Audrey and Marinville even with the TV sound off, but it knows they're there, outside the front door. When they finally stop talking and come in, it will kill them — the man first, and simply to replenish the energy it has expended (being out of the boy's body is particularly depleting), Seth's aunt for what she has tried to do. It will feed on her as well, and she will die slowly, by her own hand.

The boy's punishment for trying to stand against Tak will be to watch it happen.

Yet Tak respects Seth; he has been a worthy opponent. (How could any vessel capable of containing Tak not be?) Since the wino came yesterday, Tak and the boy have been playing a nervy game of stud poker, just like Laura and Jeb Murdoch in The Regulators. Now everything is in the pot and all but the final hole cards are face-up on the table. When they are flipped, Tak knows it will win. Of course it will win. Its opponent is only a child, after all, no matter how brilliant the lower courses of his intellect may be, and in the end the child has believed just a little more than is healthy for him. It knew Seth had planned to drive it temporarily out of his body, and although the exact method was a surprise (a very unpleasant one), even that much knowledge is more than Seth knew it had. But there is something else, as well.

Seth doesn't believe Tak can re-enter