The Regulators - Stephen King [56]
I don't blame you for trying to run, the voice said. Audrey had a sense of hurry and furtiveness. It was like listening to a kid whisper some vital piece of classroom gossip to his seatmate while the teacher's back is briefly turned. Get to the others, the ones across the street. You have to wait, but it won't be long. Because he's —
No words, but another blurred image that filled her head completely, temporarily driving out all thought. It was Seth. He was dressed in jester's motley and a cap of bells. He was juggling. Not balls: dolls. Little china ones. Hummel figures. But until he dropped one and it shattered and she saw the broken face of Mary Jackson lying beside one of the jester's red-and-white curly-toed caliph's slippers, she did not realize that the dolls were her neighbors. She supposed she was responsible for at least some of that image — she had seen Kirstie Carver's Hummel figures (a tiresome hobby if ever there was one, in Audrey's opinion) a thousand times — but she understood that whatever she might have added didn't in the least change what Seth was trying to convey. Whatever craziness Tak was up to — his building, his making — it was keeping him very busy.
Not too busy to see me when I broke for the door a few minutes ago, she thought. Not too busy to stop me. Not too busy to punish me, either. Maybe next time it'll be salt going down my throat instead of honey.
Or drain-cleaner.
I'll tell you when, the child's voice returned. Listen for me, Aunt Audrey. After the Power Wagons come again. Listen for me. It's important that you get away. Because —
This time many images flickered past. Some came and went too fast for her to identify, but she got a few: an empty Chef Boyardee can lying in the trash, an old broken toilet lying on its side in the dump, a car up on blocks, no wheels, no glass. Things that were broken. Things that were used up.
The last thing she saw before he broke contact was the studio portrait of herself on the table in the front hall. The eyes of the portrait were gone, gouged out.
Seth released her and stood back, watching as she grasped the edge of the counter and struggled to her feet. Her belly, heavy and thick with the honey Tak had made her swallow, felt like a counter-weight. Seth now looked as he usually did — distant and disconnected, with all the emotional gradient of a rock. Yet there were those clean streaks below his eyes. Yes, there were those.
'Ah-oh,' he said in his toneless voice — soundings she and Herb had speculated might mean Audrey, hello — and then walked out of the kitchen. Back to the den, where the climactic shootout was still going on. And when it was done? Why, rewind to the FBI warning and start all over again, most likely.
But he talked to me, she thought. Out loud and inside my head. On his version of the PlaySkool phone. Only his version is so big.
She took the broom from its place in the pantry alcove and began to sweep up spilled flour and macaroni. In the den, Rory Calhoun yelled, 'You ain't goin nowhere, you sowbelly Yankee!'
It doesn't have to be this way, Jeb,' Audrey murmured, sweeping.
'It doesn't have to be this way, Jeb,' Ty Hardin — Deputy Laine in the movie — said, and then bad old Colonel Murdock shot him. His final act of villainy; in another thirty seconds he would be shot dead himself.
Audrey's diaphragm knotted again. Hard. She went to the sink, trailing the broom in one hand, and bent over. She gagged, but nothing came up. A moment later, the clench subsided. She turned on the cold water tap, leaned over, drank directly from the faucet, then gingerly splashed a couple of handfuls on her throbbing forehead. It felt good. Wonderful.
She turned off the tap, went back to the pantry, and got the dustpan. Tak was building, Seth had said. Tak was making. But what? And as she dropped awkwardly to her knees by her pile of sweepings, the broom in one hand and the dustpan in the other, a more urgent question occurred