The Regulators - Stephen King [54]
The lights were off in the kitchen and it was a bowl of gloomy, swarming shadows. As she was propelled across the yellow linoleum (cheery when it was clean, but now dingy and jaundiced-looking), a thought occurred to her, one that was terrible with logic: Why should Seth help her? Even if he was receiving her message and even if he still could help, why should he? To escape Tak meant to abandon Seth to his fate, and that was just what she had been trying to do. If the boy was still there, he must know that as well as Tak.
A sob, as faint and distant as an invalid's breath, escaped her as the fingers of her bloodstained right hand felt for the light-switch by the stove, found it, and turned it.
'Sweeten her up, Paw!' Little Joe Cartwright yelped. 'Sweeten her up, by Jasper!' The voice suddenly slid up, becoming the high-pitched laughter of Rooty the Robot. Audrey found herself wishing for insanity. It would be better than this, wouldn't it? It would have to be.
Instead she watched, a helpless passenger inside her own body, as Tak turned her, walked her over to the spice rack, and used her hand to open the cabinet above it. The other hand yanked out a yellow Tupperware container that hit the floor and sprayed macaroni across the linoleum in every direction. The flour went next, landing beside her foot and puffing up to coat her legs. The hand darted into the hole it had created and seized the plastic honey bear. The other hand grabbed the top, unscrewed it, tossed it aside. A moment later the bear was hanging upside down over her open, waiting mouth.
The hand wrapped around the bear's chubby stomach began to squeeze rhythmically, much as she had once squeezed the rubber bulb of the horn that had been mounted on her childhood bicycle. Blood from her ruptured nose slid down her throat. Then honey filled her mouth, thick and gagging-sweet.
'Swallow it!' Tak shouted, now in no one's voice but its own. 'Swallow it, you bitch!'
She swallowed. One mouthful, then two, then three. On the third one her throat seemed to clench shut. She tried to breathe and couldn't. Her windpipe was blocked by a nightmare of sweet glue. She fell to her knees and began crawling across the kitchen floor, her dark-red hair hanging in her face, barking out great thick wads of blood-laced honey. It was up her nose as well, packing it and dripping from her nostrils.
For another few moments she still couldn't seem to breathe, and the white specks dancing in front of her eyes turned black. I'm going to drown, she thought. Drown in Sue Bee honey.
Then her windpipe opened up again, a little, anyway, enough, and she was gasping air into her lungs, pulling it down her slick, coated throat, weeping with terror and pain.
Tak dropped on to Seth Garin's scabby knees in front of her and began screaming into her face. 'Don't you ever try to get away from me! Don't you ever! Don't you ever!Do you understand? Nod your head, you stupid cow, show me you understand!'
Its hands — the ones she couldn't see, the ones that were inside her head — seized her and all at once her head was swooping up and down, her forehead smacking the floor on each downstroke, and Tak was laughing. Laughing. She thought it would keep on pounding her head against the floor until she passed out and just sprawled here in the mess she had made.
Then,