Whatever may await them, there is a certain relief just in being out of the house and away from the noise.
The stoop of the Wyler house looks about the same, but that’s all. The rest is now a long, low building made of logs. Hitching posts are ranged along the front. Smoke puffs from the stone chimney in spite of the night’s warmth. “Looks like a bunkhouse,” he says.
Audrey nods. “The bunkhouse at the Ponderosa.”
Why did they go away, Audrey? Seth’s regulators and future cops? What made them go away?”
“In at least one way, Tak’s like the villain in a Grimms “fairy-tale,” she says, leading him into the street. Dust puffs up from beneath their shoes. The wheelruts are dry and as hard as iron. “It has an Achilles heel, something you’d never suspect if you hadn’t lived with it as long as I have. It hates to be in Seth when Seth moves his bowels. I don’t know if it’s some weird kind of aesthetic thing or a psychological phobia, or maybe even a physical fact of its existence-the way we can’t help flinching if someone makes like to punch us, for instance-and I don’t care.”
“How sure of this are you?” he asks. They have reached the other side of the broad Main Street now. Johnny looks both ways and sees no vans; just massed, rocky badlands to the right and emptiness-a kind of uncreation-to the left.
“Very,” she says grimly. The cement walk leading up to 247 Poplar has become a flagstone path. Halfway up it, Johnny sees the broken-off rowel of some rangehand’s spur glinting in the moonlight. “Seth has told me-I hear him in my head sometimes.”
“Tele pathy.”
“Uh-huh, I guess. And when Seth talks on that level, he has no mental problems whatever. On that level he’s so bright it’s scary.”
“But are you completely sure it was Seth talking to you? And even if it was, are you sure Tak was letting him tell the truth?”
She stops halfway to the bunkhouse door. She is still holding one of his hands; now she takes the other, turning him to face her.
“Listen, because there’s only time for me to say this once and no time at all for you to ask questions. Sometimes when Seth talks to me, he lets Tak listen in… because, I think, that way Tak believes it hears all our mental conversations. It doesn’t, though.” She sees him start to speak and squeezes his hands to shut him up. “And I know Tak leaves him when he moves his bowels. It doesn’t just go deep, it comes out of him. I’ve seen it happen. It comes out of his eyes.”
“Out of his eyes,” Johnny whispers, fascinated and horrified and a little awed.
“I’m telling you because I want you to know it if you see it,” she says. “Dancing red dots, like embers from a campfire. Okay?”
“Christ,” Johnny mutters, then: “Okay.”
“Seth loves chocolate milk,” Audrey says, pulling him into motion again. “The kind you make with Hershey’s syrup. And Tak loves what Seth loves… to a fault, I guess you could say.”
“You put Ex-Lax in it, didn’t you?” Johnny asks. Tou put Ex-Lax in his chocolate milk.” He almost feels like joining the coyotes in a good howl at the moon. Only he’d be howling with laughter. Life’s more surrealistic possibilities never exhaust themselves, it seems; their one chance to survive this is a summer-camp stunt on a level with snipe hunts and short-sheeting the counsellor’s bed.
“Seth told me what to do and I did it,” she says. “Now come on. While he’s still crapping his brains out. While there’s still time. We’ve got to grab him and just run. Get him out of Tak’s range before it can get back inside him. We can do it, too. Its range is short. We’ll go down the hill. You carry him. And I’ll bet that before we even get to where the store used to be, we’re going to see one big fucking change in our environment. Just remember, the key is to be quick. Once we get started, no hesitation or pulling up allowed.”
She reaches for the door and Johnny restrains her. She stares at him with a mixture of fear and fury.
“Did you hear me say we had to go right now?”
“Yes, but there’s one question you have to answer, Aud.”
They’re being watched anxiously from across the street. Belinda Josephson breaks away from the little cluster doing the watching and goes back into the kitchen to see how Steve and Cynthia are making out with the little kids. Not bad, it appears. Ellen is sniffling but otherwise under control again, and Ralphie seems to have blown himself out, like a hurricane that moves inland. Belinda glances briefly around the empty kitchen, which is now open to the backyard, then turns to go back down the hall to the others. She takes a single step, then pauses. A narrow vertical crease-Bee’s thought-line, her husband calls it-appears in the center of her forehead. It’s not entirely dark down there by the screen door, there’s moonlight… and these are her neighbors, of course. It’s not very hard to tell them apart. Brad is easy to identify because he’s her closest neighbor, so close she’s been able to reach out and nudge him in the night for twenty-five years. Dave and Susi are easy because they’re still hugging. Old Doc is easy because he’s so thin. But Cammie isn’t easy. Cammie isn’t easy because Cammie isn’t there. Not here in the kitchen, either. Has she gone upstairs or stepped outside through the hole in the kitchen wall? Maybe. And-
“You two!” she calls into the pantry, suddenly afraid.
What?” Steve asks, sounding a bit impatient. In truth he feels a little impatient. They’re finally getting the kids soothed down, and if this woman screws that up, he thinks he will brain her with the first pot or pan he can lay grip to.
“Mrs Reed’s gone,” Bee says. “And she took that rifle with her. Was it empty? Come on, make me happy. Say it was empty.”
“I don’t think so,” Steve says reluctantly.
“Shit-fire and save matches,” Belinda says.
Cynthia is looking at her from around one of Ralphie’s slumped should ers, her eyes widening in alarm. “Have we got a problem here?” she asks.
“We might,” Bee says.
Tak’s Place/Tak’s Time
In the den where it has spent so many happy hours-at the breast of Seth Garin’s captive imagination, one might say-Tak waits and listens. On the Zenith’s screen, black-and-white cowboys dressed in ghostly gear ride across a desert landscape. Their passage is silent. Discorporeal now that it is out of Seth, Tak has muted the TV with the best remote control of all-its own mind.
In the bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, it can hear the boy. The boy is making the low, piggy grunting sounds Tak has come to associate with its elimination function. For Tak, even the sounds are revolting, and the act itself, with its cramping and its sensations of sliding, helpless exit, is hideous. Even vomiting is better-it’s quick, at least, up the throat and gone.
Now it knows what the woman did to him: drugged the milk with something to bring on not just a single act of elimination but shivering convulsions of it. How much did she give him? A huge wallop, from the way Seth felt just before Tak fled, and now it understands everything.
It flickers in a dark upper corner of the room-Tak the Cruel, Tak the Despot-like a little cluster of disembodied bicycle taillights that pulse and revolve around each other. It can’t hear Aunt Audrey and Marinville even with the TV sound off, but it knows they’re there, outside the front door. When they finally stop talking and come in, it will kill them-the man first, and simply to replenish the energy it has expended (being out of the boy’s body is particularly depleting), Seth’s aunt for what she has tried to do. It will feed on her as well, and she will die slowly, by her own hand.
The boy’s punishment for trying to stand against Tak will be to watch it happen.
Yet Tak respects Seth; he has been a worthy opponent. (How could any vessel capable of containing Tak not be?) Since the wino came yesterday, Tak and the boy have been playing a nervy game of stud poker, just like Laura and Jeb Murdoch in The Regulators. Now everything is in the pot and all but the final hole cards are face-up on the table. When they are flipped, Tak knows it will win. Of course it will win. Its opponent is only a child, after all, no matter how brilliant the lower courses of his intellect may be, and in the end the child has believed just a little more than is healthy for him. It knew Seth had planned to drive it temporarily out of his body, and although the exact method was a surprise (a very unpleasant one), even that much knowledge is more than Seth knew it had. But there is something else, as well.