The Regulators - Stephen King [65]
He is also thinking of Mary's father, a professor at the Meermont College of Dentistry in Brooklyn. He has always been rather terrified of Henry Kaepner, of Henry Kaepner's somehow daunting integrity; in his heart Peter has always known that Henry Kaepner considers him unworthy of his daughter (and in his heart this is an opinion with which Peter Jackson has always concurred). And now Peter is standing in the firestorm with his feet in the wet grass, wondering how he'll ever be able to tell Mr Kaepner that his father-in-law's worst unspoken fear has become reality: his unworthy son-in-law has gotten his only child killed.
It's not my fault, though, Peter thinks. Perhaps I can make him see that if I start by saying I just got home from w —
'Jackson.'
The voice wipes out his worries, makes him sway on his feet, makes him feel like screaming. It is as if an alien mouth has opened inside his mind, tearing a hole in it. Mary slips in his arms, trying to slither out of his grip, and Peter hugs her tight against him again, ignoring the ache in his arms. At the same time he comes back to some vague appreciation of reality. Most of the vans are on the move again, but very slowly, still firing. The pink one and the yellow one are now pouring fire into the Reed and Geller residences, shattering birdbaths, blasting away faucet bibs, breaking basement windows, shredding flowers and bushes, slicing through raingutters that drop, slanting, to the lawns below.
One of them, however, is not moving. The black one. It is parked on the other side of the street, blocking most of the Wyler house from view. The turret has slid back, and now a shining figure, all bright gray and dead black, issues from it like a spook from the window of a haunted house. Except, Peter sees, the figure is standing on something. It looks like a floating pillow and seems to be humming.
Is it a man? He can't exactly tell. It appears to be wearing a Nazi uniform, all black, glossy fabric and silver rigging, but there is no human face above the wings of its collar; there is no face of any kind, in fact.
Just blackness.
'Jackson! Get over here, partner.'
He tries to resist, to stand his ground, and when the voice comes again it isn't like a mouth but a fishhook, yanking inside his head, tearing his thoughts open. Now he knows what a hooked trout feels like.
'Get a move-on, pard!'
Peter walks across the rain-washed remains of a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk (Ellen Carver and her friend Mindy from a block over made it that very morning), then steps into the gutter. Rushing water fills one shoe, but he doesn't even feel it. In his mind he is now hearing a very strange thing, a kind of soundtrack. It's being played by a twanging guitar, sort of like an old Duane Eddy instrumental. A tune he knows but can't identify. It is the final maddening touch.
The bright figure on the floating pillow descends to street-level. As Peter draws closer, he expects to see the black cloth (perhaps nylon, perhaps silk) covering the man's face, giving him that spooky look of absence, but he doesn't see it, and as the plate-glass window of the E-Z Stop explodes down the street, he realizes an awful thing: he doesn't see it because it isn't there. The man from the black wagon really has no face.
'Oh God,' he moans in a voice so low he can barely hear it himself. 'Oh my God, please.'
Two other figures are looking down from the turret of the black van. One is a bearded guy wearing the ruins of what looks like a Civil War uniform. The other is a woman with lank black hair and cruel, beautiful features. She's as pale as a comic-book vampire. Her uniform, like that of the faceless man, is black and silver, Gestapo-ish. Some sort of trumpery gem — it's as big as a pigeon's egg — hangs from a chain around her neck, flashing like a remnant of the psychedelic sixties.
She's a cartoon, Peter thinks. Some pubescent boy's first hesitant try at a sex-fantasy.
As he draws closer to the man with no face, he