The Regulators - Stephen King [152]
The storm is over.
Johnny thinks that regulator time is over, too.
He sits down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs and looks at the bodies of Audrey and Seth. They remind him of the senseless dead at Jonestown, in Guyana. Her arms are still around him, and his — poor thin wasted arms, unscratched from a single game of tag or follow-the-leader with other boys his own age — are around her neck.
Johnny wipes blood and bone and lumps of brain from his cheeks with his slick palms and begins to cry.
From Audrey Wyler's journal:
October 31, 1995
Journal again. Never thought I'd resume, probably never will on a full-time basis, but it can be so comforting.
Seth came to me this morning managed to ask, with a combination of words grunts, if he could go out trick or treating, like the other kids in the neighborhood. There was no sign of Tak, and when he is just Seth, I find him all but impossible to refuse. It isn't hard for me to remember that Seth's not the one , responsible for everything that's happened; it's quite easy, in fact. In a way, that's what makes it all so horrible. It seals off all my exits. I don't suppose anyone else could understand what I mean. I'm not sure I understand myself. But I feel it. Oh God, do I.
I told him okay, I'd take him trick or treating, it would be fun. I said I could probably put together a little cowboy outfit for him, if he'd like that, but if he wanted to go as a MotoKop, we'd have to go out to Payless and buy a store outfit.
He was shaking his head before I'd even finished, big back-and-forth shakes. He didn't want to go as a cowboy, and not as a MotoKop, either. There was something in the piolence of his headshaking that was close to horror. He might be getting tired of cowboys and police from the future, I think.
I wonder if the other one knows?
Anyway, I asked him what he did want to dress as, if not a cowboy or Snake Hunter or Major Pike. He waved one arm jumped around the room. After a little bit of this pantomime, I realized he was pretending to be in a swordfight.
'A pirate'?' I asked, his whole face lit up in his sweet Seth Garin smile.
'Pi-ut!' he said, then tried harder and said it right: 'Pi-rate!'
So I found an old silk kerchief to tie over his head, and gave him a clip-on gold hoop to put in his ear, and unearthed an old pair of Herb's pj's for pantaloons. I used elastic bands on the bottoms they belled out just right. With a mascara beard, an eyeliner scar, and an old toy sword (borrowed from Cammie Reed next door, a golden oldie from her twins' younger years), he looked quite fierce. And, when I took him out around four o'clock to 'do' our block of Poplar Street and two blocks of Hyacinth, he looked no different than all the other goblins and witches and Barneys and pirates. When we got back he spread out all his candy on the living-room floor (he hasn't been in the den to watch TV all day, Tak must be sleeping deeply, I wish the bastard was dead but that's too much to hope for) gloated over it as if it really were a pirate's treasure. Then he hugged me and kissed my neck. So happy.
Fuck you, Tak. Fuck you.
Fuck you and I hope you die.
March 16, 1996
The last week has been horror, complete horror, Tak in charge almost completely and goosestepping. Dishes everywhere, glasses filmed with chocolate milk, the house a mess. Ants! Christ, ants in March! It looks like a house where lunatics live, and is that so wrong?
My nipples on fire from