The Regulators - Stephen King [53]
It came toward her from the den doorway, Seth Garin in MotoKops Underoos, only now she saw an amazing, horrid thing: the child's bare toes were dragging across the living-room carpet, but otherwise it was floating along like a boy-shaped balloon. It was Seth's body, poignantly grimy at the wrists and ankles, but there was no Seth in the eyes. None at all. Now it was just the thing that looked like it belonged in a swamp.
'Says she was just going to take a mosey down to the general store,' said the voice of Ben Cartwright. Whatever else Tak might be, it was a hellishly good mimic. You had to give it that. 'What do you think, Adam?'
'Think she's lying, Paw,' said the voice of Pernell Roberts, the actor who had played Adam Cartwright. Roberts had lost his hair over the years, but he had gotten the best of the deal, anyway; the actors who had played his father and his brothers had all died in the years since Bonanza had galloped off into the sunset of reruns and cable TV.
Back to the voice of Ben as the thing drifted closer, close enough for her to be able to smell sour sweat and a sweet lingering ghost of No More Tears shampoo. 'What do you think, Hoss? Speak up, boy.'
'Lyin, Paw,' Dan Blocker's voice said . . . and for a moment the almost-floating child actually looked like Blocker.
'Little Joe?'
'Lyin, Paw.'
'Root-root-root-root!'
'Shut up, Rooty,' said Snake Hunter's voice. It was as if some invisible ensemble of talented lunatics were putting on a show for her. When the thing in front of her spoke again, Snake Hunter was gone and Ben Cartwright was back, that stern Moses of the Sierra Nevada. We don't much abide liars on the Ponderosa, ma'am. Skedaddlers, either. Now what do you reckon we should do with you?'
Don't hurt me, she tried to say, but no words came out, not even a whisper of words. She tried to switch over to some internal circuit, visualizing the little red telephone, only with SETH stamped into the plastic of the handset now. It scared her to try and reach Seth directly, but she had never been in a jam like this. If it decided it wanted her dead . . .
She saw the phone in her mind, saw herself speaking into it, and what she had to say was painfully simple: Don't let it hurt me, Seth. You had power over it at the start, I know you did. Maybe not much, but a little. If you have any left — any power, any influence — please don't let it hurt me, please don't let it kill me. I'm miserable, but not miserable enough to want to die. Not yet.
She looked for a flicker of humanity in the floating thing's eyes, the slightest sign of Seth, and saw nothing.
Suddenly her left hand shot up and then slapped down, whacking her left cheek with a sound like a breaking stick of kindling. Heat flooded her skin; it was as if someone had turned a sunlamp on that side of her face. Her left eye began to water.
Now her right hand rose up in front of her eyes, like a Hindu swami's snake rising out of its basket. It hung in front of her for a moment, and then slowly folded itself into a fist.
No, she tried to say, please no, please, Seth, don't let it, but nothing came out this time, either, and the fist plummeted down, knuckles very white in the dim room, and then her nose seemed to explode upward in clouds of white dots like butterflies. They danced frantically in front of her eyes even as blood, warm and loose, began to run down over her lips and chin. She staggered backward.
'This woman is an affront to justice in the twenty-third century!' Colonel Henry said in his stern voice — a voice she found more hateful and self-righteous each time an episode of the fucking cartoon came on. 'She must be shown the error of her ways.'
Hoss: 'That's right, Colonel! We got to show this bitch who's top hand!'
'Root-root-root-root!'
Cassie Styles: 'I agree with Rooty! And a little sweetening up is just the way to start!'
She was walking again — being walked, rather. The living room flowed