The Regulators - Stephen King [146]
Seth is wrong. Tak can re-enter. It will be unpleasant — painful, even — but it can re-enter. And how does it know that Seth hasn't seen this final card, as he has seen some of the others Tak has held, even in spite of its best efforts to hide them?
Because he has called his beloved auntie back to the house to help him get away.
And when his beloved auntie finally stops hesitating out there on the stoop and comes in, she'll be . . . well . . .
Regulated.
Completely regulated.
The red lights in the shadows swirl faster, excited by the idea.
Main Street, Desperation/Regulator Time
'Did you hear me say we had to go right now?'
Johnny nods. Neither of them sees Cammie Reed cross the street from the adobe church that used to be Johnny Marinville's suburban retreat to the remains of the wattle-and-daub that used to be Brad and Belinda's house. She's got her head down and the .30-.06 in one hand.
'Yes, but there's still that one question I have, Aud.'
'What?' she nearly screams. 'For God's sake, what?'
'Can it jump to someone else? To you or me, for instance?'
A look of what might be relief appears briefly on her face.
'No.'
'How can you be sure? Did Seth tell you?'
He thinks for a moment she won't answer this, and not simply because she wants to get to the boy while he's still on the jakes. He at first mistakes her look for embarrassment, then sees it's deeper; not embarrassment but shame.
'Seth didn't tell me,' she says. 'I know because it tried to get into Herb. So it could . . . you know . . . have me.'
'It wanted to make love to you,' he says.
'Love?' she says, her voice barely under control. 'No. Oh, no. Tak understands nothing about love, cares nothing about love. It wanted to fuck me, that's all. When it discovered it couldn't use Herb to do that, it killed him.' Tears are running down her face now. 'It doesn't give up easily when it wants something, you know. What it did to him . . . well, imagine what would happen to one of little Ralphie Carver's shoes if you tried to get it on your big grownup's foot. If you just kept jamming it and shoving it, harder and harder, oblivious of the pain, oblivious of what you were doing to it in your obsession to wear it, walk in it . . . '
'All right,' he says. He looks down toward the bottom of the hill, almost expecting to see the vans coming back, but there is nothing. He looks up the street and sees more nothing; Cammie is standing out of sight in the shadow of the precariously leaning Cattlemen's Hotel. 'I get the message.'
'Then can we go in? Or do you even intend to go in? Have you lost your nerve?'
'No,' he says, and sighs.
There's an old-fashioned iron thumb-latch on the bunkhouse door, but when he tries to grasp it, his thumb goes straight through. Below it, appearing like something floating up through dirty water, is a plain old suburban doorknob. When Johnny grasps it, a suburban door forms around it, first overlying the planks and iron bands, then replacing them. The knob turns and the door opens on a dark room that smells as stale as dirty laundry. The moonlight floods in, and what Johnny sees makes him think of stories he's read in the papers from time to time, the ones about elderly recluse millionaires who spend the last years of their lives in single rooms, stacking up books and magazines, collecting pets, shooting Demerol, eating meals out of cans.
'Quick, hurry,' she says. 'He'll be in the downstairs bathroom. It's off the kitchen.'
She moves past him, taking his hand as she does, and leads him into the living room. There are no stacked books and magazines, but the sense of reclusion and insanity grows rather than lessens as they advance. The floor is tacky with spilled food and soda; there is an underlying sour smell of clabbered milk; the walls have been scribbled over with crayon drawings that are frightening in their primitive preoccupation with bloodshed and death. They remind him of a novel he read not so long ago,