The Regulators - Stephen King [91]
She couldn't do that . . . could she? None of this was real, after all. It was just a refuge in her mind.
Ring, ring, ring.
Light but demanding. Pick me up, it said. Pick me up, Audrey. Pick me up, podner. We got to ride on over to the Ponderosa, only this time you ain't never coming back.
Ring, ring, ring.
She bent down suddenly and planted a hand on either side of the little red phone. She felt the dry wood under her palms, she felt the shapes of carved initials under her fingertips and understood that if she took a splinter in this world, she would be bleeding when she arrived back in the other one. Because this was real, it was, and she knew who had created it. Seth had made this haven for her, she was suddenly sure of it. He'd woven it out of her best memories and sweetest dreams, had given her a place to go when madness threatened, and if the fantasy was getting a little threadbare, like a carpet starting to show strings where the foot-traffic was the heaviest, that wasn't his fault.
And she couldn't leave him to fend for himself. Wouldn't.
Audrey snatched up the handset of the phone. It was ridiculously small, child-sized, but she hardly noticed that. 'Don't you hurt him!' she shouted. 'Don't you hurt him, you monster! If you have to hurt someone, hurt m — '
'Aunt Audrey!' It was Seth's voice, all right, but changed. There was no stuttering, no grasping for words, no lapses into gibberish, and although it was frightened, it did not seem to be in a panic. At least not yet. 'Aunt Audrey, listen to me!'
'I am! Tell me!'
'Come back! You can get out of the house now! You can run! Tak's in the woods . . . but the Power Wagons will be coming back! You have to get out before they do!'
'What about you?'
'I'll be all right,' the phone-voice said, and Audrey thought she heard a lie in it. Unsureness, at least. You have to get to the others. But before you go . . . '
She listened to what he wanted her to do, and felt absurdly like laughing — why had she never thought of it herself? It was so simple! But . . .
'Can you hide it from Tak?' she asked.
'Yes. But you have to hurry!'
'What will we do? Even if I get to the others, what can we — '
'I can't explain now, there's no time. You have to trust me, Aunt Audrey! Come back now, and trust me! Come back! COME BACK!'
That last shriek was so loud that she tore the telephone away from her ear and took a step backward. There was an instant of perfect, vertiginous disorientation as she fell, and then she hit the floor with the side of her head. The blow was cushioned by the living-room carpet, but it sent a momentary flock of comets streaming across her vision anyway. She sat up, smelling old hamburger grease and the dank aroma of a house that hadn't had a comprehensive cleaning or top-to-bottom airing in a year or more. She looked first at the chair she had fallen out of, then at the telephone clutched in her right hand. She must have grabbed it off the table at the same moment she had grabbed the Tak-phone in the dream.
Except it had been no dream, no hallucination.
She brought the telephone to her ear (this one was black, and of a size that fit her face) and listened. Nothing, of course. There was electricity in this house if nowhere else on the block — Tak had to have its TV — but at some point it had killed the phone.
Audrey got up, looked at the arch leading into the den, and knew what she would see if she peeked in: Seth in a trance, Tak entirely gone. But not into the movie this time, or not precisely. She heard confused cries and what was almost certainly a gunshot from across the street, and a line from Genesis occurred to her, something about the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters. The spirit of Tak, she had an idea, was also in motion, busy with its own affairs, and if she tried to get away now she probably would make it. But if she got to the others and told them what she knew, and if they believed, what might they do in order to