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By Root 509 0

She would be looking into Jan's laughing face instead (Jan talking about how she sometimes wanted to leap into Ray Soames's arms and suck his face off, and how sometimes — like when she caught him furtively picking his nose — she wished he would just crawl off into a corner and die), and then she would look back at the table and see that the surface was bare, the little red phone gone. That meant Tak was gone, at least for a while, that he was sleeping (dozing, at least) or had withdrawn. On many of these occasions she came back to find Seth perched on the toilet, looking at her with eyes that were dazed and strange but at least recognizably human. Tak apparently didn't like to be around when its host moved his bowels. It was, in Audrey's view, a strange and almost existential fastidiousness in such a relentlessly cruel creature.

She looked down now and saw the phone was gone.

She stood up, and Jan — that young Jan, still with both breasts intact — stopped her chatter at once and looked at Audrey with sad eyes. 'So soon?'

'I'm sorry,' Audrey said, although she had no idea if it was soon or late. She'd know when she got back and looked at a clock, but while she was here, the whole concept of clocks seemed ridiculous. The meadow which lay upland of Mohonk in May of 1982 was a no-clock zone, blessedly tickless.

'Maybe someday you'll be able to get rid of that damned phone for good and stay,' Jan said.

'Maybe. That would be nice.'

But would it? Would it really? She didn't know. And in the meantime, she had a little boy to take care of. And something else: she wasn't quite ready to give up yet, which was what coming to live permanently in May of 1982 would mean. And who knew how she would feel about the upland meadow if she could never leave it? Under those circumstances, her haven might become her hell.

Yet things were changing, and not for the better. For one thing Tak wasn't weakening, as she had perhaps foolishly hoped it would with the passage of time; Tak was, if anything, getting stronger. The TV ran constantly, broadcasting the same tapes and recycled series programs (Bonanza, The Rifleman . . . and MotoKops 2200, of course) over and over. The people on the shows had all begun to sound like lunatic demagogues to her, cruel voices exhorting a restless mob to some unspeakable action. Something was going to happen, and soon. She was almost sure of it. Tak was planning something ... if it could be said to plan, or even to think at all. Perhaps change was too mild a word. It felt like things were going to turn upside down and inside out, the way they did in an earthquake. And if they did, when they did —

'Escape,' Jan said, and her eyes flashed. 'Stop thinking about it and do it, Aud. Open the front door while Seth's sleeping or shitting and run like hell. Get out of the house. Get the fuck away from that thing.'

It was the first time Janice had ever presumed to give her advice, and it shocked her. She had no idea at all how to answer. 'I'll . . . think about it.'

'Better not think long, kiddo — I've got a feeling you're almost out of time.'

'I ought to go.' She took another flustered glance down at the table to make sure the PlaySkool phone was still gone. It was. 'Yes. All right. Bye, Aud.' Jan's voice seemed to come from a great distance now, and she was fading like a ghost. As the colour went out of her, she began to look more like the woman who was waiting for her to catch up, a woman with one breast — Tak was an artist when it came to those — but there was a clear sexual aspect to the nipple-pinching. And there was the way she was dressed ... or undressed. More and more Tak was making her take her clothes off when it was angry with her, or just bored. As if it (or Seth, or both of them) sometimes saw her as its own private gatefold version of the tough but unremittingly wholesome Cassie Styles. Hey, kids, check out the tits on your favorite MotoKop!

She had almost no insight into the relationship between the host and the parasite, and that made her situation even worse. She thought Seth was a lot more interested