The Regulators - Stephen King [36]
The virus — the vampire — was Tak. A little gift from the Great American Desert. According to Bill, the Garin family had never turned back to Desperation, had never stopped to investigate what was behind the bulwark of earth they had seen from the road, the bulwark that had excited Seth enough for him to briefly transcend his usual gabble and speak in clear English. We really couldn't do that, Aud, Bill had said. I wanted to be sure of getting to Carson City by dark. But Bill had lied. She knew because of a letter she'd gotten from a man named Allen Symes.
Symes, a geologist-engineer for something called the Deep Earth Mining Corporation, had seen the Garin family on July 24th of 1994, the same day Audrey's brother had sent her the exuberant postcard. Symes had assured her that nothing very interesting had happened, that he had simply taken the Garins to the edge of the open-pit mine (actually going in would have been against MSHA regulations, his letter said) and given them a little history lecture before sending them on their way again. It was a good story, both boring and plausible. Audrey wouldn't have questioned a word of it under ordinary circumstances, but she knew something Mr Allen Symes of Desperation, Nevada, had not: that Bill had denied stopping at all. Bill said they had simply hurried on their merry way, because he wanted to be sure of getting to Carson City by dark. And if Bill had lied, wasn't it possible — even likely — that Symes had also lied?
Lied about what? Lied about what?
Stop, Daddy, go back, Seth want to see mountain.
Why did you lie to me, Bill?
That was a question she thought she could answer: Bill had lied because Seth had made him lie. She thought that Seth had probably been standing right there by the phone during her conversation with Bill, watching the creature it no longer regarded as its father with mud-brown eyes that belonged under a log in some swamp. Bill had been allowed to say only what Tak wanted him to say, like a person who speaks with a gun pointed at his head. He had told his clumsy lies and laughed the unnatural cocktail-party laugh, ha-ha-ha.
The thing in Seth had eventually eaten Herb alive and now it was trying to eat her, but she was apparently different from Herb in one crucial way: she had a place to go. She had discovered it perhaps by accident, perhaps with help from Seth — the real Seth — and she could only pray that Tak would never discover what she was doing or where she was going. That the monster would never follow her to her sanctuary.
In May of 1982, when she was twenty-one and still Audrey Garin, she and her roommate (who was also her best friend, then and ever), Janice Goodlin, had spent a wonderful weekend — very likely the most perfect weekend of Audrey's life — at Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York. The trip was a present from Jan's father, who had won some sort of cash award from his company for selling and had been promoted two or three rungs up the corporate ladder into the bargain. If his intention had been to share some of his happiness, he had succeeded splendidly with the two young women.
On the Saturday of that magic weekend they had taken a picnic lunch (packed by the kitchen in a wonderful old-fashioned wicker hamper) and walked for hours, hunting for the perfect spot in which to settle. Usually when you're doing that you don't find it, but they had gotten lucky. It was a beautiful and half-wild upland meadow, rife with buttercups and daisies and wild roses. It hummed with bees; white butterflies danced on the warm air like enchanted confetti which never fell to earth. At one end of this meadow was an eccentric little cupola-shaped thing — Janice said it was called a folly, and they were spotted all over the Mohonk grounds. It was roofed to provide shade and shelter, but open on every side to provide air and view.
The two women had eaten enormously, talked prodigiously, and at three different points laughed so hard that tears ran down their