The Regulators - Stephen King [16]
3
Johnny Marinville, who had once won the National Book Award for a novel of sexual obsession called Delight and who now wrote children's books about a feline private detective named Pat the Kitty-Kat, stood looking down at his living-room telephone and feeling afraid. Something was going on here. He was trying not to be paranoid about it, but yeah, something was going on here.
'Maybe,' he said in a low voice.
Yeah, okay. Maybe. But the phone —
He had come in, propped his guitar in the corner, and punched 911. There had been an uncommonly long pause, so long he had been about to break the connection (What connection, ha-ha?) and try again when what might have been a child's voice came on the line. The sound of that voice, both lilting and empty, had surprised Johnny and frightened him badly — he hadn't even tried to kid himself that his fright was only a startled reflex.
'Little bitty baby Smitty,' the voice had lilted. 'I seen you bite your mommy's titty. Don't you fret and don't you pout, don't you spit that titty out.'
There had been a click followed by the hum of an open line. Frowning, Johnny had redialled. Again the long pause, then a click, then a sound Johnny thought he recognized: a mouth-breather. The sound of a kid with a cold, maybe. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that the phone-lines had gotten crossed somewhere in the neighborhood, and now instead of getting through to the cops —
'Who's there?' he had asked sharply.
No answer. Just the mouth-breathing. And was that sound familiar? That was pretty ridiculous, wasn't it? How in God's name could the sound of breathing on the telephone be familiar? It couldn't, of course, but all the same —
'Whoever you are, get the hell off the line,' Johnny said. 'I have to call the police.'
The breath caught, stopped. Johnny was reaching to break the connection again when the voice returned. Mocking this time. He was sure it was. 'Little bitty baby Smitty, stuck his prick in Mommy's slitty. Don't you fret and don't you pout, she won't make you take it out.' Then, in a voice that was flat and somehow terrible: 'Don't you call here no more, you old fool. Tak!'
Another click as the line went dead, but this time there was no open-line hum. This time there was just stillness.
Johnny hit the phone's cutoff switch, stuttering lightly with the tip of a finger. Nothing happened. The line remained blank. Thunder boomed, still to the west but closing in, making him jump.
He dropped the phone into the cradle and went into the kitchen, noting how rapidly the light was fading out of the sky and reminding himself to close the upstairs windows if it started to rain . . . when it started to rain, judging from the way things looked now.
Out here the phone was on the wall by the kitchen table, where all he had to do was rock back in his chair and snag it if he happened to be eating a meal when it rang. Not that there were many calls; his ex-wife sometimes, that was all. His people in New York knew enough to leave their money-machine alone.
He unracked the phone, listened, and got a second helping of silence. No dial-tone, no staticky crackle when lightning flashed blue in the kitchen window, no wah-wah-wah signalling that the line was out of service. Just nothing. He tried 911 anyway, and there weren't even any tone-beeps in his ear as he pushed the keypads. He hung the telephone up and looked at it in the darkening kitchen. 'Little bitty baby Smitty,' he murmured, and suddenly shivered in a way that would have been taken for theatrical if he hadn't been alone: a big backward-and-forward snapping of the shoulders. An ugly little jingle, and one he'd never heard before.
Never mind the jingle, he thought. What about the voice? You've heard that before . . . haven't you?
'No,' he said out loud. 'At least . . . I don't know.'
Right. But the breathing . . .
'Fuck a duck, you don't recognize a person's breathing,' he