The Regulators - Stephen King [71]
Anyway, the tract was typical Baptist bullshit. Had a picture on the front of a man in agony, with his tongue sticking out and sweat running down his face and his eyes rolled up. IMAGINE A MILLION YEARS WITHOUT ONE DRINK OF WATER! it says over the face. And under it, WELCOME TO HELL! I checked on the back and sure enough, Zion's Covenant Baptist Church. That bunch from Elder. 'Look,' Herb says, 'it's my dad before he combs his hair in the morning.'
I wanted to laugh — I know it makes him happy when he can make me laugh — but I just couldn't. I could feel Seth all around us, almost crackling on our skin. The way you can sometimes feel a storm building up, you know.
Just then he walked in — stalked in — with that horrible frown he gets on his face when something happens that doesn't fit into his general plan of life. Except it isn't him, it isn't. Seth is the sweetest, kindest, most accepting child I can imagine. But he has this other personality that we see more and more. The stiff-legged one. The one that sniffs the air like a dog.
Herb asked him what was wrong, what was on his mind, and then all at once he — Herb, I mean — reached up and grabbed his own lower lip. Pulled it out like a windowshade and started twisting it. Until it bled. And all the time his poor eyes were watering with pain and bugging out with fear and Seth was staring at him with that hateful frown he gets, the one that says: 'I'll do anything I please, you can't stop me.' And maybe we can't, but I think that — sometimes, at least — Seth can.
'Stop making him do that!' I shouted at him. 'You just stop it right now!'
When the other one, the not-Seth, gets really mad, his eyes seem to go from brown to black. He turned that look on me then, and all at once my hand came up and I slapped myself across the face. So hard my eye watered on that side.
'Make him stop, Seth,' I said. 'It's not fair. Whatever is wrong, we're not responsible for it. We don't even know what it is.'
Nothing at first. Just more of the black look. My hand went up again, and then the hateful way he was looking at me changed a little. Not much, but enough. My hand went down and Seth turned and looked up into the open cabinet over the sink where we keep the glasses. My mother's are on the top shelf, nice Waterford crystal that I only take down for the holidays. They were up there, anyway. They burst when Seth looked at them, one after the other, like ducks in a shooting gallery. When they were gone, the eleven of them that were left, he looked at me with that mean, gloating smile he gets sometimes when you cross him and he hurts you for it. His eyes so black and somehow old in his child's face.
I started to cry. Couldn't help it. Called him a bad boy told him to go away. The smile slipped, at that. He doesn't like to be told anything, but that least of all. I thought he might make me hurt myself again, but then Herb stepped in front of me and told, him the same thing, to go away and calm down and then come back and maybe we could help him fix whatever was wrong.
Seth went off, and I could tell even before he got across the living room to the stairs that the other one was either gone or going. He wasn't walking in that horrible stiff way anymore. (Herb calls it 'Seth's Rooty the Robot walk'.) Then, later, we could hear him crying in his room-Herb helped me clean up the glasses, me bawling like a fool the whole time. He didn't try to comfort me or jolly me out of it with any of his jokes, either. Sometimes he can be very wise. When it was done (neither of us got a single cut, sort of a miracle), he said the obvious, that Seth had lost something. I said no shit Sherlock, what was your first clue? Then felt bad and hugged him and said I was sorry, I didn't mean to be a bitch. Herb said he knew that, then turned over the stupid Baptist tract and wrote on the back on it: 'What are we going to do?'
I shook my head. Lots of times we don't even dare say stuff out loud for fear he's listening — the not-Seth, I mean. Herbie crumpled