The Regulators - Stephen King [90]
'Finding my friend,' he said. 'Getting to the fork in the path and sitting down with my friend. Best . . . be crawling.'
He crossed the patio on a diagonal, striking the edge of the table with his hip as he walked by. An issue of Verse Georgia and several of his research books fell off the stack and landed on the puddled pink brick. Peter ignored them. His fading sight was fixed on the greenbelt which ran behind the houses on the east side of Poplar Street. His almost lifelong interest in footnotes had deserted him.
3
When it happened, Jan wasn't exactly talking about Ray Soames; she was wondering why God had made a world where you couldn't help wanting to be kissed and touched by a man who often — hell, usually — had dirty ankles and washed his hair maybe four times a month. If it was a good month, that was. So she really was talking about Ray, just omitting the names.
And for the first time since she'd been coming here, running here, Audrey felt a touch of impatience, the soft stroke of friend-weariness. She was finally losing patience with Jan's obsession, it seemed.
Audrey was standing at the entrance to the folly, looking down the meadow to the rock wall, listening to the hum of the bees and wondering what she was doing here, anyway. There were people who needed help, people she knew and, in most cases, liked. There was a part of her — quite persuasive it was, too — that was trying to make her believe that they didn't matter, that they were not only four hundred miles west of here but fourteen years in the future, except that was a lie, persuasive or not. This place was the illusion. This place was the lie.
But I need to be here, she thought. I really, really do.
Maybe, but Janice's love-hate relationship with Ray Soames suddenly bored her to tears. She felt like whirling on her heels and saying, Well, why don't you quit whining and drop him? You're young, you're pretty, you've got a good body. I'm sure you can find someone with clean hair and breath to scratch the parts of you that itch the worst.
Saying such an awful thing to Jan was apt to expel her from this place of safety as surely as Adam and Eve had been expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating the wrong apple, but that didn't change how she felt. And if she managed to keep her mouth shut about Jan's love-obsession, what would come next? Jan's hundred and fiftieth assertion that, while Paul might well be the cutest Beatle, John was the only one she would seriously consider sleeping with? As though the Beatles had never broken up; as though John had never died.
Then, before she could say or do anything, a new sound intruded in this quiet place where there was usually only the hum of bees, the rickety-rick of crickets in the grass, and the murmuring voices of the two young women. It was a jingling sound, light but somehow demanding, like the handbell of an old-timey schoolmistress, calling the children in from recess and back to their studies.
She turned, realizing that Jan's voice had ceased, and no wonder. Jan was gone. And on the splintery table, with its entwined initials stretching back almost to World War I, the Tak-phone was ringing.
For the first time in all her visits, the Tak-phone was ringing.
She walked toward it slowly — three little steps was all it took — and stared down at it, her heart beating hard. Part of her was screaming at her not to answer, that she knew now and had always known what that phone's ringing would mean: that Seth's demon had found her. But what else was there to do?
Run, a voice (perhaps it was the voice of her own demon) suggested coldly. Run out into this world, Audrey. Down the hill, scattering the butterflies before you, over the rock wall, and to the road on the other side. It goes to New Paltz, that road, and it doesn't matter if you have to walk all day to get there and finish up with blisters on both heels. It's a college town, and somewhere along Main Street there'll be a window with a sign in it — WAITRESS WANTED. You can work your way up from there. Go on. You're young, in