The Regulators - Stephen King [82]
'Want some Doritos, Pete?' Tak said. Now it spoke in the voice of Lucas McCain, who rode the cable-TV range in The Rifleman.
Peter Jackson, seated in the La-Z-Boy in front of the TV, didn't reply. He was grinning broadly. Moving shadows played across his face, occasionally making the grin look like a silent scream, but it was a grin, all right.
'He should have some, all right, Paw,' Tak said, now in the almost-adolescent voice of Johnny Crawford, who had played Lucas's son. 'They're the good ones. Cool Ranch. Come on, Mr Jackson, over the teeth and over the gums, look out guts, 'cause here they come.'
The boy held chips out in one grimy hand and waved them up and down in front of Peter Jackson's face. Peter took no notice. He stared at the TV, through the TV, with eyes that bulged out of his head like those of some exotic deep-dwelling fish that has undergone explosive decompression. And he grinned.
'Don't appear he's hongry, Paw.'
'I think he is, son. Hongry as hell. You're hongry, ain't you, Pete? Just need a little help, that's all. So take the damn chips!'
There was a kind of humming in the room. A line of static appeared briefly on the TV, where Rory Calhoun was now trying to kiss Karen Steele. She slapped his face and knocked off his hat. That wiped away his leering, teasing grin. Folks — even womenfolks — didn't knock off Jeb Murdock's hat with impunity.
Peter slowly raised the chips. He bypassed his relentlessly grinning mouth and began poking them against his nose instead, crumbling them, catching some of the smaller pieces in his nostrils. His unnaturally bulging eyes never left the TV.
'Little too high, Mr Jackson.' Now it was the earnest voice of Hoss Cartwright. Hoss had been one of Seth's favorites before Tak came to stay inside him, and so now he was one of Tak's favorites, too. They rolled that way, like a wheel. 'Let's try again, what do you say?'
The hand went down slowly and jerkily, like a freight elevator. This time the chips went into Peter's mouth, and he began to chew mechanically. Tak smiled at him with Seth's mouth. It hoped — in its strange way it did have emotions, although none of them was precisely human — that Peter was enjoying the Doritos, because they were going to be his last meal. It had sucked a great deal of life-force out of Peter, first replenishing the gaudy amounts of energy it had expended this afternoon, then taking in more. Getting ready for the next step.
Getting ready for the night.
Peter chewed and chewed, Dorito fragments spilling out of his grin and tumbling down the front of his tee-shirt, the one with happy old Mr Smiley-Smile on the front. His eyeballs, bulging so far out of their sockets that they seemed to be lying on his cheeks, quivered with the motion of his jaw. The left one had split like a squeezed grape when Tak invaded his mind and stole most of it — the useful part — but he could still see a little out of the right one. Enough so he'd be able to do the next part mostly on his own. Once, that was, his motor was running again.
'Peter? I say, Peter, can you hear me, old boy?' Tak now spoke in the clipped British tones of Andrew Case, Peter's department head. Like all of Tak's imitations, it was quite good. Not as good as its Western movie and TV show imitations (at which it had had much more practice), but still not bad.
And the voice of authority did wonders, it had found, even for the terminally brain-damaged. A vague flicker of life came into Peter's face. He turned and saw Andrew Case in a spiffy houndstooth jacket instead of Seth Garin in a pair of MotoKops Underoos decorated with reddish-orange blobs of Chef Boyardee sauce.
'I'll want you to go across the street now, old boy. Into the woods, eh? But you needn't toddle all the way to grandmother's house. Just to the path. Do you know the path in the woods?'
Peter shook his head. His protruding eyeballs trembled above the stretched clown rictus of his lips.
'No matter, you'll find it. Hard to miss, old top. When you get to the fork, you can sit down with your . . . friend.'