The Regulators

Chapter Nine

There was no need for Steve and Collie to hop the fence at the far end of Doc’s yard; there was a gate, although they had to tear out a fair amount of well-entrenched ivy befor e they could use it. They exchanged words only twice before reaching the path. The first time it was Steve who spoke. He looked around at the trees-scrubby, weedy-looking things, for the most part, now mysterious with the rustle of rainwater dripping off the leaves-and then asked: “Are these poplars?”

Collie, who had been working his way around a particularly vicious clump of thornbushes, looked back at him. “Say what?”

“I asked if these trees are poplars. Since Poplar Street is where we came from, I just wondered.”

“Oh.” Collie looked around doubtfully, swapping the.30-.06 from one hand to the other and then running an arm across his forehead. It was very hot in the greenbelt. “I don’t know if they’re poplars or pines or goddam eucalyptuses, to tell you the truth. Botany was never my thing. That one over there is a skinny-ass birch, and that’s about all I know on the subject.” With that, he started off again.

Five minutes later (Steve wondering by now if there really was a path back here, or only wishful thinking), Collie stopped. He looked back past Steve, his eyes so intense that Steve turned himself to see what he was looking at. He saw nothing but the tangled greenery through which they had already made their way. No sign of Old Doc’s house; the Jacksons”, either. He could see a tiny wedge of red that he thought might be the chimney atop the Carver house, but that was all. They almost could have been a hundred miles from the nearest human habitation. Thinking that-and realizing it was a true thought-gave Steve a chill.

“What?” he asked, thinking the cop would ask him why they couldn’t hear any cars, not even some kid’s glasspack-equipped low-rider, or a single bass-powered sound-system, or a motorcycle, or a horn, or a shout, or anything.

Instead, Collie said: “We’re losing the light.”

“We can’t be. It’s only-” Steve looked at his watch, but it had stopped. The battery had given out, probably; he’d never replaced it since his sister had given it to him for Christmas a couple of years ago. It was odd, though, that it should have stopped just past four o’clock, which had to be not long after the time he had first wheeled into this marvellous little neighborhood.

“Only what?”

“I can’t say exactly, my watch has stopped, but just think about it. It can’t be much more than five-thirty, five forty-five. Maybe even earlier. Don’t they say you overestimate elapsed time when you’re in a crisis situation?”

“I don’t even know who “they” are, never have,” Collie said. “But look at the light. The quality of the light.”

Steve did, and yes, the cop had a point. Steve didn’t like to admit it, but he did. The light slanted through the tangle (and that was the proper word for it, not greenbelt) in hot red shafts. Red sun at night, sailor’s delight, he thought, and suddenly, as if that was a trigger, it all tried to crash in on him, all the things that were wrong, and he couldn’t stand it. He raised his hands and clapped them over his eyes, whacking himself a damned good one on the side of the head with the butt of the.22 he was carrying, feeling his bladder go loose, knowing he was close to watering his underwear and not caring. He staggered backward and-from a distance, it seemed-heard Collie Entragian asking if he was okay. With what felt like the greatest effort of his life, Steve said that he was and forced himself to lower his hands, to look into that delirious red light again.

“Let me ask you a very personal question,” Steve said. He thought his voice did not sound even remotely like his own. “How scared are you?”

“Very.” The big guy armed more sweat off his forehead. It was very hot in here, but in spite of the dripping, rustling leaves, the heat felt strangely dry to Steve, not in the least greenhouse-ish. The smells were that way, too. Not unpleasant, but dry. Egyptian, almost. “Don’t lose hope, though. I see the path, I think.”

It was indeed the path, they stepped on to it less than a minute after getting moving again, and Steve saw signs-comforting ones, under the circumstances-of the animals which had used this particular game-trail: a potato-chip bag, the wrapper from a pack of baseball cards, a couple of double-A batteries which had maybe been pried out of some kid’s Walkman after they went dead, initials carved on a tree.

He saw something far less comforting on the other side of the track: a misshapen growth, prickly and virulent green, among the sumach and scrub trees. Two more stood behind it, their lumpy arms sticking stiffly up like the arms of alien traffic cops.

“Holy shit, do you see those?” Steve asked.

Collie nodded. “They look like cactuses. Or cacti. Or whatever you say for more than one.”

Yes, Steve thought, but only in the way that women painted by Picasso during his Cubist phase looked like real women. The simplicity of the cactuses and their lack of symmetry-like the bird with the mismatched wings-gave them a surreal aspect that hurt his head. It was like looking at something that wouldn’t quite come into focus.

It does look a little like a buzzard, Old Doc had said. As a child might draw it.

Things were starting to group together in his mind. Not fit together, at least not yet, but forming themselves naturally into what they had been taught to call a set back in Algebra I. The vans, which looked like props from a kids” Saturday matinee. The bird. Now these violent green cactuses, like something you’d see in an energetic first grader’s picture.

Collie approached the one closest to the path and stuck out a tentative finger.

“Man, don’t do that, you’re nuts!” Steve said.

Collie ignored him. Reached the finger further. Closer. And closer yet, until-

“Ouch! You mother!”

Steve jumped. Collie yanked his hand back and peered at it like a kid with an interesting new scrape. Then he turned to Steve and held it out. A bead of blood, small and dark and perfect, was forming on the pad of his index finger. “They’re real enough to poke,” he said. “This one is, anyway.”

“Sure. And what if it poisons you? Like something from the Congo Basin, something like that?”

Collie shrugged as if to say too late now, pal, and started along the path. It was headed south at this point, toward Hyacinth. With the red-orange sunlight flooding through the trees from the right, it was at least impossible to become disoriented. They started down the hill. As they went, Steve saw more and more of the misshapen cacti in the woods to the east of the path. They were actually crowding out the trees in places. The underbrush was thinning, and for a very good reason: the topsoil was also thinning, being replaced by a grainy gray sandbed that looked like… like…

Sweat ran in Steve’s eyes, stinging. He wiped it away. So hot, and the light so strong and red. He felt sick to his stomach.

“Look.” Collie pointed. Twenty yards ahead, another clump of cacti guarded a fork in the path. Jutting out from them like the prow of a ship was an overturned shopping cart. In the dying light, the metal basket-rods looked as if they had been dipped in blood.

Collie jogged down to the fork. Steve hurried to keep up, not wanting to get separated from the other even by a few yards. As Collie reached the fork, howls rose in the strange air, sharp and yet somehow sickeningly sweet, like bad barbershop-quartet harmony: Whoooo! Whoooo! Wh-Wh-Whooooo! There was a pause and then they came again, more of them this time, mingling and yipping, bringing gooseflesh to every square inch of Steve’s skin. My children of the night, he thought, and in his mind’s eye saw Bela Lugosi, a spook in black and white, spreading his cloak. MayBe not such a great image, under the circumstances, but sometimes your mind went where it wanted.

“Christ!” Collie said, and Steve thought he meant those howls-coyotes howling somewhere to the east of them, where there were supposed to be houses and stores and five different kinds of McBurger restaurants-but the big cop wasn’t looking that way. He was looking down. Steve followed his gaze and saw a man sitting beside the beached shopping cart. He was propped against a cactus, stuck to its spines like a grotesque human memo which had been left here for them to find.

Wh-Wh-Whoooo…

He reached out, not thinking about it, and found the cop’s hand. Collie felt his touch and grabbed back. It was a hard grip, but Steve didn’t mind.

“Oh, shit, I’ve seen this guy,” Collie said.

“How in Christ’s name can you tell?” Steve asked.

“His clothes. His cart. He’s been on the street two or three times since the start of the summer. If I saw him again, I was going to warn him off. Probably harmless, but-”

“But what?” Steve, who had been on the bum a time or two in his life, didn’t know whether to be pissed or amused. “What’d you think he was going to do? Steal someone’s favorite velvet Elvis painting? Try to hit that guy Soderson up for a drink?”

Collie shrugged.

The man pinned to the cactus was dressed in patched khaki pants and a tee-shirt even older, dirtier, and more ragged than the one Billingsley had found for Collie. His elderly sneakers were bound together with electrical tape. They were the clothes of a bum, and the possessions which had spilled out of the cart when it overturned suggested the same: an old pair of airtip dress shoes, a length of frayed rope, a Barbie doll, a blue jacket with BUCKEYE LANES printed on the back in gold thread, a bottle of wine, half-full, stoppered with what looked like the finger of a lady’s evening glove, and a boombox radio which had to be at least ten years old. Its plastic case had been mended with airplane glue. There were also at least a dozen plastic bags, each carefully rolled up and secured with twine.

A dead bum in the woods. But how in God’s name had he died? His eyes had popped out of their sockets and hung on his cheeks from dried optic nerves. Both looked deflated, as if the force that had pushed them out had also split them. His nose had bled copiously over his lips and the salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin. The blood didn’t obscure his mouth, though-Steve only wished it had. It was distended in a huge, loopy grin that seemed to have dragged the corners of the bum’s mouth halfway to his grimy ears. Something-some force-had swatted him into the cactus-grove and killed him hard enough to shove his eyeballs clear out on to his face. Yet the same force had left him grinning.

Collie’s hand was gripping harder than ever. Crushing his fingers.

“Can you let up?” Steve asked. “You’re breaking my-”

He looked up the east-tending fork of the path, the one that was supposed to lead them out on to Anderson Avenue and help. It ran on for about ten yards and then opened like the mouth of a funnel into a nightmare desert world. That it bore no resemblance to Ohio made no impression on Steven Ames, for the simple reason that it bore no resemblance to any landscape he had ever seen in his life. Or glimpsed in his dreams.

Beyond the last few sane, green trees was a broad expanse of whitish hardpan running toward a troubled horizon of saw-toothed mountain peaks. They had no shading or texture, no folds or outcrops or valleys. They were the dead black Crayola mountains of a child.

The path didn’t disappear but widened out, became a kind of cartoon road. There was a half-buried wagon-wheel on the left. Beyond it was a stony ravine filled with shadows. On

it said. The signpost was topped with a cow-skull as misshapen as the cacti. Beyond the sign, the road ran straight to the horizon in an artificially diminishing perspective that made Steve think of movie posters for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There were already stars in the sky above the mountains, impossible stars that were much too big. They didn’t seem to twinkle but to blink on and off like Christmas-tree lights. The howls rose again, this time not a trio or a quartet but a whole choir. Not from the foothills; there were no foothills. Just flat white desert, green blobs of cactus, the road, the ravine, and, in the distance, the sharktooth necklace of the mountains.

Collie whispered, “What in God’s name is this?”

Before Steve could reply-Some child’s mind, he would have said, given the chance-a low growl came from the ravine. To Steve it sounded almost like the idle of a powerful boat engine. Then two green eyes opened in the shadows and he took a step back, his mouth drying. He lifted the Mossberg, but his hands felt like blocks of wood and the gun looked puny, useless. The eyes (they floated like comic-strip eyes in a dark room) looked the size of goddam footballs, and he didn’t think he wanted to see how big the animal that went with them might be. “Can we kill it?” he asked. “If it comes at us, do you think-”

“Look around you!” Collie interrupted. “Look what’s happening!”

He did. The green world was retreating from them and the desert was advancing. The foliage under their feet first became pallid, as if something had sucked all the sap out of it, then disappeared as the dark, moist earth bleached and granulated. Beads. That was what he had been thinking a few moments ago, that the topsoil had been replaced by this weird round beadlike shit. To his right, one of the scrubby trees suddenly plumped out. This was accompanied by the sound you get when you stick your finger in your cheek and then pop it. The tree’s whitish trunk turned green and grew spines. Its branches melted together, the color in the leaves seeming to spread and blur as they became cactus arms.

“You know, I think it might be time to beat a retreat here,” Collie said.

Steve didn’t bother to reply; he talked with his feet instead. A moment later and they were both running back along the path toward the place where they had stepped on to it. At first Steve thought only about not getting poked in the eye by a branch, running into a drift of brambles, or going past the discarded double-A batteries, which was where they’d want to turn dead west and head for Billingsley’s gate. Then he heard the coughing growl again and everything else faded into insignificance. It was close. The green-eyed creature from the ravine was following them. Hell, chasing them. And gaining.

There was a gunshot, and Peter Jackson slowly turned his head toward it. He realized (so far as he was still capable of realizing anything) that he had been standing on the edge of his backyard and looking at (so far as he was still capable of looking at anything) the table on the patio. There was a stack of books and magazines on the table, most bristling with pink marker-slips. He had been working on a scholarly article called “James Dickey and the New Southern Reality”, relishing the thought that it would stir a great deal of controversy in certain ivied bowers of academe. He might be invited to other colleges to be on panel discussions! Panel discussions to which he would travel with all expenses paid! (Within reason, of course.) How he had dreamed of that. Now it all seemed faraway and unimportant. Like the gunshot from the woods, and the scream that followed it, and the two shots which followed the scream. Even the snarling sounds-like a tiger that had escaped from the zoo and hidden in their green-belt-seemed faraway and unimportant. All that mattered was… was…

“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.

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 Takphone 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 your early-twenties again, you’re healthy, you’re not bad-looking, and none of this nightmare has happened yet.

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 escape the glamor in which they had been ensnared? What might they do to Seth in order to escape Tak?

He told me to go, she thought. I better trust him. But first-

First there was the thing he had told her to do before she left. Such a simple thing… but it might solve a lot. Everything, if they were very lucky. Audrey hurried into the kitchen, ignoring the cries and babble of voices from across the street. Now that her mind was made up, she was all but overwhelmed by a need to hurry, to get this last chore done before Tak turned its attention back to her.

Or before it sent Colonel Henry and his friends again.

When things went wrong, they went wrong with spectacular suddenness. Johnny asked himself later how much of the blame was his-again and again he asked it-and never got any clear answer. Certainly his attention had lapsed, although that had been before the shit actually hit the fan.

He had followed along behind the Reed twins as they headed through the woods toward the path, and had allowed his mind to drift off because the boys were moving with agonized slowness, trying not to rustle a single bush or snap a single twig. None of them had the slightest idea that they were not alone in the greenbelt; by the time Johnny and the twins entered it, Collie and Steve were on the path and well ahead of them, moving quietly south.

Johnny’s mind had gone back to Bill Harris’s horrified survey of Poplar Street on the day of his visit back in 1990, Bill at first saying Johnny couldn’t be serious, then, seeing he was, asking him what the deal was. And Johnny Marinville, who now chronicled the adventures of a cat who toted a fingerprint kit, had replied: The deal is I don’t want to die yet, and that means doing some personal editorial work. A second-draft Johnny Marinville, if you like. And I can do it. Because I have the desire, which is important, and because I have the tools, which is vital. You could say it’s just another version of what I do. I’m rewriting my life. Re-sculpting my life.

It was Terry, his first wife, who had provided him with what might really have been his last chance, although he hadn’t said so to Bill. Bill didn’t even know that, after almost fifteen years when their only communication had been through lawyers, Johnny and the former Theresa Marinville had commenced a cautious dialogue, sometimes by letter, mostly on the phone. That contact had increased since 1988, when Johnny had finally put the booze and drugs behind him-for good, he hoped. Yet there was still something wrong, and at some point in the spring of 1989 he had found himself telling his first ex-wife, whom he had once tried to stab with a butter-knife, that his sober life felt pointless and goalless. He could not, he said, imagine ever writing another novel. That fire seemed to be out, and he didn’t miss waking up in the morning with it burning his brains… along with the inevitable hangover. That part seemed to be done. And he could accept that. The part he didn’t think he could accept was how the old life of which his novels had been a part was still everywhere around him, whispering from the corners and murmuring from his old IBM every time he turned it on. I am what you were, the typewriter’s hum said to him, and what you’ll always be. It was never about self-image, or even ego, but only about what was printed in your genes from the very start. Run to the end of the earth and take a room in the last hotel and go to the end of the final corridor and when you open the door that’s there, I’ll be sitting on a table inside, humming my same old hum, the one you heard on so many shaky hungover mornings, and there’ll be a can of Coors beside your book-notes and a gram of coke in the top drawer left, because in the end that’s what you are and all you are. As some wise man or other once said, there is no gravity; the earth just sucks.

“You ought to dig out the kids” book,” she had said, startling him out of this reverie.

“What kids” book? I never-”

“Don’t you remember Pat the Detective Kitty-Cat?”

It took him a minute, but then he did. “Terry, that was just a little story I made up for your sister’s rugmonkey one night when he wouldn’t shut up and I thought she was going to have a nervous-”

“You liked it well enough to write it down, didn’t you?”

“I don’t remember,” he had said, remembering.

“You know you did, and you’ve got it somewhere because you never throw anything away.

Anal bastard! I always suspected you of saving your goddam boogers. In a Sucrets box, maybe, like fishing lures.”

“They’d probably make good fishing lures,” he had said, not thinking about what he was saying but wondering instead where that little story-eight or nine handwritten pages-might be. The Marinville Collection at Fordham? Possible. The house in Connecticut he and Terry had once shared, the one she was living in, talking to him from, at that very moment? Quite possible. At the time of the conversation, that house had been less than ten miles away.

“You ought to find that story,” she said. “It was good. You wrote it at a time when you were good in ways you didn’t even know about.” There was a pause. “You there?”

“Yeah.”

“I always know when I’m telling you stuff you don’t like,” she said brightly, “because it’s the only time you ever shut up. You get all broody.”

“I do not get broody.”

“Do so, do so.” And then she had said what might have been the most important thing of all. Over twenty million dollars in royalties had been generated by her casual memory of the story he had once made up to get his rotten nephew to go to sleep, and gazillions of books chronicling Pat’s silly adventures had been sold around the world, but the next thing out of her mouth had seemed more important than all the bucks and all the books. Had then, still did. He supposed she’d spoken in her perfectly ordinary tone of voice, but the words had struck into his heart like those of a prophetess standing in a delphic grove.

“You need to double back,” the woman who was now Terry Alvey had said.

“Huh?” he had asked when he’d caught his breath. He hadn’t wanted her to understand how her words had rocked him. Didn’t want her to know she still had that sort of power over him, even after all these years. What does that mean?”

“To the time when you felt good. Were good. I remember that guy. He was all right. Not perfect, but all right.”

“You can’t go home again, Terr. You must have been sick the week they took up Thomas Wolfe in American Lit.”

“Oh, spare me. We’ve known each other too long for Debate Society games. You were born in Connecticut, raised in Connecticut, a success in Connecticut, and a drunken, narcotized bum in Connecticut. You don’t need to go home, you need to leave home.”

“That’s not doubling back, that’s what us AA guys call a geographic cure. And it doesn’t work.”

“You need to double back in your head,” she replied-patient, as if speaking to a child. “And your body needs some new ground to walk on, I think. Besides, you” re not drinking anymore. Or drugging, either.” A slight pause. “Are you?”

“No,” he said. “Well, the heroin.”

“Ha-ha.”

“Where would you suggest I go?”

“The place you’d think of last,” she had replied without hesitation. “The unlikeliest pla ce on earth. Akron or Afghanistan, makes no difference.”

That call had made Terry rich, because he had shared his Kitty-Cat income with her, penny for penny. And that call had led him here. Not Akron but Wentworth, Ohio’s Good Cheer Community. A place he had never been before. He had picked the area in the first place by shutting his eyes and sticking a pushpin into a wall-map of the United States, and Terry had turned out to be right, Bill Harris’s horrified reaction notwithstanding. What he had originally regarded as a kind of sabbatical had-

Lost in his reverie, he walked straight into Jim Reed’s back. The boys had stopped on the edge of the path. Jim had raised the gun and was pointing it south, his face pale and grim.

“What’s-” Johnny be gan, and Dave Reed clapped a hand over his mouth before he could say anymore.

There was a gunshot, then a scream. As if the scream had been a signal, Marielle Soderson opened her eyes, arched her back, uttered a long, guttural sound that might have been words, and then began to shiver all over. Her feet rattled on the floor.

“Doc!” Cynthia cried, running to Marielle. “Doc!”

Gary came first. He stumbled in the kitchen doorway and would have knee-dropped on to his wife’s stomach if Cynthia hadn’t pushed him backward. The smell of cooking sherry hung around him in a sweet cloud.

“Wass happen?” Gary asked. “Wass wrong my wi?”

Marielle whipped her head from side to side. It thumped against the wall. The picture of Daisy, the Corgi who could count and add, fell off and landed on her chest. Mercifully, the glass in the frame didn’t break. Cynthia grabbed it and tossed it aside. As she did, she saw the gauze over the stump of the woman’s arm had turned red. The stitches-some of them, at least-had broken.

“Doc!” she screamed.

He came hurrying across from the door, where he had been standing and staring out, almost hypnotized by the changes which were still taking place. There were snarling sounds from the greenbelt out back, more screams, more gunshots. At least two. Gary looked in that direction, blinking owlishly. “Wass happen?” he asked again.

Marielle stopped shivering. Her fingers moved, as if she was trying to snap them, and then that stopped, too. Her eyes stared up blankly at the ceiling. A single tear trickled from the corner of the left one. Doc took her wrist and felt for a pulse. He stared at Cynthia with a kind of desperate intensity as he did. “I guess if you want to go on working downstreet, you’ll have to turn in that cashier’s duster for a dancehall dress,” he said. “The E-Z Stop’s a saloon now. The Lady Day.”

“Is she dead?” Cynthia asked.

“Yuh,” Old Doc said, lowering Marielle’s hand. “For whatever it’s worth, I think she ran out of chances fifteen minutes ago. She needed a trauma unit, not an old veterinarian with shaky hands.”

More screams. Shouts. Someone was crying out there, crying and shouting you should have stopped him, you should have stopped him. A sudden surety came to Cynthia: Steve, a guy she’d already come to like, was dead. The shooters were out there, and they’d killed him.

“Wass happen?” Gary asked for the third time. Neither the old man nor the girl answered him. Although he had been right there, kneeling in the kitchen doorway beside her when Billingsley pronounced his wife dead, Gary didn’t seem to realize what had happened until Old Doc pulled the brown corduroy cover off his couch and spread it over her. Then it got through to Gary, drunk or not. His face began to shiver. He groped under the couch cover, found his wife’s hand, brought it out, kissed it. Then he held it against his cheek and began to cry.

When Jim Reed saw rapidly approaching shapes coming up the path toward him, his excitement vanished. Terror filled the space where it had been. For the first time it occurred to him that coming out here might not have been a very intelligent idea.

If you see strangers in the woods, come right back. That was what his mom had said. But he couldn’t even move. He was frozen. Then there was a horrible growling sound in the undergrowth, the sound of an animal, and he panicked. He did not see Collie Entragian and Steve Ames when they burst into view; he saw killers who had left their vans to infiltrate the woods. He didn’t hear Johnny’s muffled yell, or see Johnny struggling to free himself from Dave’s clutching hands.

“Shoot, Jimmy!” Dave shrieked. His voice was a trembling, freaked-out falsetto. “Shoot, Jeezum Crow, it’s them!”

Jim fired and the one on the left went down, clutching for the top of his head, which blew back in a red film of scalp and hair and bone. The rifle the man had been carrying tumbled to the side of the path. Blood poured through his fingers and sheeted down over his face.

“Get the other one!” Dave cried. “Get him, Jimmy, get him before he gets us!”

“No, don’t shoot!” the other guy said, holding out his hands. There was a rifle in one of them. “Please, man, don’t shoot me!”

He was going to, though, going to shoot him dead. Jim pointed the gun at him, hardly aware that he was yelling at the guy, calling him names: cocksucker, bastard, fuckwad. All he wanted to do was kill the guy and get back to his mother. Him and Dave both. Coming out here had been a terrible mistake.

Johnny rammed both elbows back into Dave Reed’s stomach, which was trim and hard but unprepared. Dave let out a surprised Ooof! and Johnny tore out of his grasp. Before Jim could fire again, Johnny had seized his arm and twisted it savagely. The boy screamed in pain. His hand opened and David Carver’s pistol thumped to the path.

“What are you doing?” Dave yelled. “He’ll kill us, are you crazy?”

“Your brother just shot Collie Entragian from down the block, how’s that for crazy?” Johnny said. Yes, that was what the boy had done, but whose fault was it? He was the adult here. He should have taken the gun as soon as they were safely away from Cammie Reed’s fanatic eyes and dry orders. He could have done it; why hadn’t he?

“No,” Jim whispered, turning to him, shaking his head. “No!” But his eyes already knew; they were huge, and filling with tears.

“Why would he be out here?” Dave asked. “Why didn’t he warn us, for God’s-”

The growl, which had never really stopped, reasserted itself in the hot red air, quickly rising to a snarl. The man who was still on his feet-the guy from the rental truck-turned toward it, instinctively raising his hands. The rifle in them was a very small one, and the guy might be right to use it that way, shielding his neck with it rather than pointing it.

Then the creature which had chased them up the path sprang out of the woods. Johnny’s ability to think consciously and coherently ceased when he saw it-all he could do was see. That clear sight-more curse than blessing-had never failed him before, nor did it now.

The thing was a nightmare with a tawny brown coat, crooked green eyes, and a mouthful of jagged orange teeth. Not a cat but a misbegotten feline freak. It leaped, splintering the upheld Mossberg rifle with its enormous claws and tearing it away from the clenched hands which had held it. Then, still snarling, it went for Steve’s throat.

From Audrey Wyler’s journal June 12, 1995

It happened again-the daydream thing. If that’s what it is. 3rd or 4th time, but the first (I think) since I’ve been keeping this journal, amp; by far the most vivid. It always seems to happen when things around here aren’t going well, amp; oh God are things around here ever not going well!

Herb got up with Seth this morning, ran through the shower with him (saves lots of time), and when they came down Seth was sulking amp; Herb had. the start of a black eye. I didn’t have to ask him about it. Seth made him punch himself, of course, the same way he made him twist his lip when we got back from the ice cream parlor and Seth discovered his damned Power Wagon was gone. I looked at Herb amp; he gave me a little head-shake, telling me to keep quiet. Which I did. I’ve discovered you can always find something to be grateful for, in this case that making Herb punch himself was all Seth did (although it’s not really Seth who does the bad stuff but the other one, the Stalky Little Boy). Seth likes to stand by the bathroom sink and watch Herb shave in the mornings. The SLB could have popped out and made him cut his throat with his own Bic disposable, I suppose. Frightens me to write such a thing, but sometimes it’s better to have it out on the page. Like squeezing infected material out of a cut.

The Stalky Little Boy started in before I even had breakfast on the table-I always know when it’s him instead of Seth because his eyes aren’t dark brown but almost black. “Where my Dweem Fwoatah?” he asked.

“We haven’t found Dream Floater yet,” I said, “but I’m sure we will.”

1want my Dweem Fwoatah! he screamed, at the top of his lungs, and Herb kind of winced. I didn’t. At least when he’s screaming he’s not throwing things. “I want my fucking DWEEM FWOATAH!”

“Don’t you swear like that in front of your Aunt Audrey,” Herb said, and I was afraid at the look the SLB threw at him then, very afraid, but Herb’s look back never wavered. He is so brave. So simply, up-front no-bullshit brave. And it was the SLB who finally looked down.

“I want my Dweem Fwoatah,” he muttered in the sulky voice I hate most of all. “I want my Dweem Fwoatah, you find it.”

I made him French toast, usually his favorite, but he wouldn’t eat. Just walked off (sorry, stalked off) to the den. Pretty soon I heard the VCR, then one of his MotoKops tapes started. He’s got four or five, each with a dozen episodes on it. I have really gotten to hate those stupid cartoon voices, especially Cassie’s. Sometimes I wish No Face would kill her and dump her decapitated body in a ditch somewhere. God help me, I wish I was joking but I’m not.

When they were cackling away in there (he always turns up the volume, which is sometimes good) I asked Herb how he was going to explain his black eye when he got to work. He put his voice up to the falsetto range amp; batted his eyes and said, “I’ll just tell the boys I ran into a door, honey.” Trying to make a joke of it. It didn’t work.

The worst part of today hasn’t been Seth throwing things like he did when Herb suggested we could buy a replacement Dream Floater. He didn’t do that today. I almost wish he would. He simply goes from room to room, stalking, glaring, lower lip poached out, still looking for the missing P. W. Sometimes he goes into the den to watch TV, but not even Bonanza held him long today. I tried to get him to talk but he wouldn’t amp; the thing is… oh, I wish I could write better, express it so someone reading this (not that anyone ever will, I imagine) could understand. It’s like he-the SLB-generates a kind of poison electricity when he’s pissed. He seems to spin it right out of his body, like a spider spinning electric silk or thunderheads putting out lightning. It builds up and up until you feel like just running from room to room, screaming and beating your head against things. It’s real, not just a feeling but a physical thing. It makes you sweat ( amp; it’s stinky sweat, like when you have a high fever), amp; your muscles tremble, amp; your mouth gets dry. I’ll write something in here I’ve never told Herb. Sometimes, when it gets like that, I go in the bathroom, lock the door amp; masturbate like mad.

It’s the only thing that seems to take a little of the pressure off. The orgasms are so hard they’re frightening. Like bombs going off!

I’ve felt all this before when the Stalky Little Boy inside Seth is pissed about something, but it’s never gone on so long or revved up so high. By mid-afternoon it was like the whole house was full of natural gas, just waiting for a match to set it off. I was in the kitchen, walking aimlessly around, my head aching so badly that I could feel my eyeballs throbbing, amp; I kept wanting to grin. I don’t know why, there’s nothing funny about any of it, but the more my head ached and the more my eyes throbbed and the more I felt the atmosphere of the house pressing in on me, the more I wanted to grin. Christ!

I went to the sink amp; looked out the window into the back yard. Seth was sitting in the sandbox, playing with his other Power Wagons. Only if anyone but me had seen how he was playing, I’m sure he would have been in some sort of special installation by nightfall, some place where the government studies exceptional children.

The P.W.’s have pop-out wings, but they don’t really fly, of course. Except sometimes Seth’s do. He was sitting in the sand with his hands in his lap, and around and around his head they went, Tracker Arrow and Rooty-Toot and the Meatwagon and the rest, dipping and diving under each other, swooping and doing rolls, coming in for touch-and-go’s on a landing-strip Seth has made for them in the sandbox, sometimes doing formation flights down the yard to his swing, going under the seat like stunt pilots in a movie, then banking around and coming back. Kids” toys, all bright colors, flying missions in the back yard. I know I must sound like a raving madwoman, but I swear in the name of God that it’s true. Sometimes he dive-bombs Hannibal, the neighbors” dog, with them amp; H. runs away with his tail between his legs. Herb has seen this, too.

Any other kid seeing the MotoKops” Power Wagons doing tricks like that would be laughing amp; clapping amp; cheering, but not the Stalky Little Boy. He just sits there in the sand with his lip shoved out amp; glares.

Seth watching the wagons and me watching him, feeling whatever is inside him coming out in waves, filling the air with a hum that’s mostly in a person’s head. I felt ready to come out of my skin, ready to flip out right there in front of the sink, amp; then, all at once, the daydream came. It is the most wonderful thing, and although I call it a daydream, that isn’t how it feels; it feels real. In it I am reliving a weekend afternoon I spent at Mohonk Mountain House with my friend Jan. Back in 1982, this was, before either of us was married. We sat and talked for I don’t know how long-her mostly about this goofy, greasy guy she was so crazy about back then, me about how I’d love to take three months off after graduation and see some of the country.

It’s so beautiful there at Mohonk, so peaceful. We have a picnic lunch. The air is warm. Jan looks as gorgeous as I feel. I know it’s not real, amp; that I’ve got all this mess to come back to, but for the time I’m there, none of that matters. Jan amp; I talk, I feel the sun on my face, I smell the flowers. It’s wonderful. I don’t know what it is or why it happens, but as an antidote to the SLB’s rages, it beats rubbing off in the bathroom eight ways to Sunday. Does Seth have anything to do with it, I wonder?

I wish Herbie had a place to go, but I don’t think he does. His silly jokes are as close as he can come, poor man. I wish I could tell him about my place, maybe even take him there, but it wouldn’t be wise. I think the SLB can find things out from Herb that he can’t from me, amp; Herb looks so tired. It’s unfair to both of us that this should be happening, but it’s horribly unfair to Herbie.

June 13, 1995

“Dweem Fwoatah” is back. Just now. I don’t know whether to feel scared or relieved.

I mean of course I’m relieved, anyone would be, this place has been like a concentration camp since Saturday, but what happens next? How will the SLB react? Thank God he was napping when the doorbell rang, amp; thank God Herb’s at work, because the SLB eavesdrops on Herb’s mind sometimes, I know he does. I don’t think he can do it to me unless I let him in, or unless I’m unprepared.

Boy. I just read this over and it’s absolutely crazed. Let me take a deep breath and start from the beginning. I should have time. Seth hasn’t slept well since Friday night, and if I’m lucky he might nap until 4:30. That gives me at least an hour.

Around 3:00, while I was vacuuming, there was a knock on the kitchen door. I opened it amp; there stood Mr Hobart from down the street, and his son, who is a pudgy red-haired boy with thick glasses and pasty skin. Sort of repulsive-looking, if you want to know the truth. The kid had a Dream Floater van in his arms. There was no question it was Seth’s. I didn’t have to see the broken tail-light and the scratch up the driver’s side to know that, but as a matter of fact I could see both. You could have knocked me over with a broom-straw. I tried to say something amp; couldn’t, my throat was locked up. I don’t know what would have come out if I had been able to talk!

It’s hot today, mid 80s, but Wm. Hobart was dressed like a church deacon (which I’m sure he is) in a black suit amp; shoes. His kid was wearing the junior version of the same getup, amp; was snivelling. Had a pretty good bruise on one cheek, too. I’d bet my bank account his old man put it there.

It didn’t matter that I couldn’t talk, because Hobart had the whole thing scripted. “My son has something to say to you, Mrs Wyler,” he said, then looked down at the boy as if to say you’re on, don’t fuck it up. “Hugh?”

Snivelling harder than ever, Hugh said he’d given in to the Tempting Voice of Satan (I guess that’s the TVS, just like the Stalky Little Boy is the SLB) amp; stolen Seth’s toy. He talked real fast, crying harder amp; harder as he went along. The kid finished by saying, “You can go to the police and I will make a full confession. You can spank me, or my Dad will spank me.” Listening to that pan was like when you call the weather amp; the recording says, “For current conditions, press one. For the current forecast, press two. For road conditions, press three.” I guess it was a blessing I was so stunned. If I hadn’t been, I might’ve laughed, and there was nothing funny about the two of them, standing there so holy amp; ashamed. I was more scared of them-of the father, especially-than I am on most days of Seth.

Scared for them, too.

“I am very sorry,” the kid says, still rapping it out as if it was on cue-cards in front of him. “I have asked my Dad for forgiveness, I have asked Lord Jesus for forgiveness, and now I am asking you for forgiveness.”

I got my act together enough then to take the wagon from him-I was so wrought-up I almost dropped it on my toes-and told him that no spankings would be required.

“The boy also has to apologize to your son,” Mr Hobart said. He looks like Moses with a clean-shaven face and a good haircut, if you can imagine Moses in a double-vented three-piece from Sears. After the things that have been going around here for the last few months, I have no problem imagining anything. That’s part of my trouble. “If you’ll just lead us to him, Mrs Wyler-”

I’ll be damned if the self-righteous SOB didn’t start trying to push his way right in! I pushed him right back, I can tell you. (Almost dropped Dream Floater again in the process, too.) The last thing I wanted was that fat little thief standing in front of the Stalky Little Boy.

What I wanted was for them to be out of my house, and quick. Before either their voices or their emotional vibes (and tho he wasn’t crying, Hob art was at least as upset as his kid, maybe more) could wake him up.

“Seth’s not my son, he’s my nephew,” I said, “and he’s taking a nap right now.”

“Very good,” Hobart says, giving a stiff little nod. “We will come back later. Is tonight convenient? If not, I can bring Hugh back tomorrow afternoon. I can ill afford to take off a second afternoon-I work at the stamping mill in Ten Mile, you know-but God’s business must always take precedence over man’s.”

His voice kept getting louder while he was talking, the way the voices of guys like him always seem to, it’s like they can’t tell you they’ve got to take a shit without turning it into a sermon. I started to feel really scared about Seth waking up, amp; all this time, I swear it’s true, the kid’s looking around like he wants to see if there’s anything else worth hawking. I’d say the day is going to come when Hughie winds up on some shrinky-dink’s couch, except that people like the Hobarts don’t believe in shrinks, do they?

I herded them out the door amp; kept them going right down the walk, I mean I was on a roll. The kid, meanwhile, is asking, “Do you forgive me? Do you forgive me?” over amp; over again, like a broken record. By the time I got them down to the sidewalk, I realized I was furious with both of them. Not just because of the hell we’ve been through but because they both acted like I was somehow responsible for the thieving little fart’s immortal soul. Plus I kept remembering the way his eyes were going everywhere, seeing what we had in our house that he didn’t have in his.

I’m pretty sure-almost positive, actually-that a lot of Seth’s “strange powers” have a very short range, like the radio transmitters they used to have at the drive-ins, the ones that piped the movie sound directly into your car radio. So when I got them down to the street, I felt safe (relatively safe, anyway) to ask how Hugh Hobart had come to lift Seth’s Power Wagon in the first place.

Pere and fils exchanged a glance at that. It was a funny, uneasy glance, and I realized neither of them much minded the idea of a spanking or even a visit from the cops, but they didn’t like the idea of talking about the actual theft itself. Not one little bit. No wonder the fundamentalists hate the Catholics so much. The idea of going to confession must make their balls shrivel.

Still, I had “em in a corner, amp; finally it came out. William did most of the talking; by then the kid had decided he didn’t like me. His eyes had gotten narrow, and they’d quit leaking, too.

Most of it I could’ve figured out myself. The Hobarts belong to the Zion’s Covenant Baptist Church, and one of the things they do as good church members is to “spread the Gospel”. This means leaving tracts like the one Herb found sticking out of our milkbox, the one about a million years in hell amp; not one drink of water. William and Hugh do this together, a father-and-son type of thing, I guess, a holy substitute for Little League or touch football. They stick mostly to houses that look temporarily empty, wanting “to spread the word amp; plant the seed, not engage in debate” (William Hobart’s words), or they put their little love-notes under the windshields of cars on the street.

They must’ve hit our place right after we left for Milly’s. Hugh ran up the driveway and stuck the tract under the milkbox, and of course he saw Dream Floater wherever Seth put it down. Later, after his father had declared him off-duty for the rest of the day but before we got back from the mall, Hugh wandered back up the street… amp; gave in to the ever-popular TVS (Tempting Voice of Satan). His mother found the PW yesterday, Monday, while Hugh was at school amp;she was cleaning in his room. Last night they had a “family conference” about it, then called their minister for his advice, had a little over-the-phone prayer, and now here they were.

Once the story was out, the kid started in on “Do you forgive me” again. The second time through, I said, “Quit saying that.”

He looked like I’d slapped him and his father’s face got all stiff. I didn’t give a crap. I squatted down so I could look directly into Hugh’s piggy little eyes. It wasn’t all that easy to see them, either, because of the dandruff flakes and grease-smears on his glasses.

“Forgiveness is between you and your God,” I said. “As for me, I’m going to keep quiet about what you did, and I’d advise the Hobarts to do the same.” They will, I’m pretty sure. I only had to look at the bruise on Hugh’s cheek, really, to know that. I don’t know about the creep’s mother, but what he did is absolutely killing his father.

Hugh backed a step away from me, and I could see in his face that this wasn’t going the way it was supposed to, amp; he hated me for it. That’s okay. I hate him a little, too. Not surprising, is it, after the weekend we put in because of his light fingers'?

“We’ll leave you now, Mrs Wyler, if you’re finished,” Hobart said. “Hugh has got a lot of meditation to do. In his room. On his knees.”

“But I’m not finished,” I said. “Not quite.” I didn’t look at him. It was the boy I looked at. I think I was trying to look past the hate amp; shame amp; self-righteousness, to see if there was a real boy left inside anywhere. And did I see one? I truly don’t know.

“Hugh,” I said, “you know that people only have to ask forgiveness if they do something wrong, don’t you?”

He nodded cautiously… like he was testifying in a trial amp; thought one of the lawyers was laying a trap.

“So you know that stealing Seth’s toy was wrong.”

He nodded again, more reluctantly than ever. By then he was practically hiding behind his father’s leg, as if he were three instead of eight or nine.

“Mrs Wyler, I hardly think it’s necessary to browbeat the boy,” his old man said. Unbelievable prig! He’s willing to let me turn the kid over my knee amp; whale on his ass like it was a snare drum, but when I want the kid to say out loud that he did wrong, all at once it’s abuse. There’s a lesson in this, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.

“I’m not browbeating him, but I want you to know that the last few days have been very difficult around here,” I said. It was the adult I was answering but still the kid I was really talking to. “Seth loves his Power Wagons very much. So here is what I want, Hugh. I want you to tell me that what you did was wrong, and it was bad, and you’re sorry. Then we’ll be done.”

Hugh glared at me, amp; if looks could kill, I wouldn’t be writing in this book now. But was I scared? Please. When it comes to pissed-off kids, I live with the champ of champs.

“Mrs Wyler, do you think that’s really necessary?” Hobart asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “More for your son than for me.”

“Dad, do I have to?” he whines. He’s still giving me the Death-ray look from behind his smeary glasses.

“Go on and tell her what she wants to hear,” Hobart said. “Bitter medicine is best swallowed in a single gulp.” Then he patted the kid on the shoulder, as if to say yes, she’s being mean, a real bitch, but we have to put up with it.

“It-was-wrong-it-was-bad-I’m-sorry,” the kid says, like he’s back on the cue-cards. Glaring at me the whole time-no more tears or snivelling. I looked up amp; saw the same stare coming from the father. The two of them never looked more alike than they did right then. People are amazing. They came up the street, scared but sort of exalted at the idea of getting crucified, just like their boss did. Instead I made the kid admit what he was, amp; it hurt, amp; they both hate me for it.

The important things, though, are these: 1) D.F. is back, and 2) the Hobarts won’t talk about it. Sometimes shame is the only gag that works on people. I must think up a yarn to tell Seth, then tell the same one to Herb. The truth just isn’t safe.

Feet upstairs, going down to the bathroom. He’s up. Please God I hope I’m right about him not being able to see into my thoughts.

Later

Big sigh of relief. And maybe a self-administered pat on the back, as well. I think The Dream Floater Crisis is past, with no harm done (except for some broken dishes amp; my beautiful Waterford glasses, that is). Seth amp;Herb both sleeping. I intend to go up myself as soon as I’ve written a little in this book (keeping a journal under these circumstances may be dangerous, but God, it can be so soothing), then put it back on top of the kitchen cabinet where I keep it.

Seth getting up when he did, before I had much of a chance to think what I was going to tell him, turned out to be a blessing in disguise. When he came downstairs, still with his eyes mostly puffed shut, I just held D.F. out to him. What happened to his face-the way it opened up in surprise amp; delight, like a flower in the sun-was almost worth the whole damned horror show. I saw both of them in that glad look, Seth and the SLB. The SLB just glad to have his Power Wagon back. Seth, I think, glad for other reasons. Maybe I’m wrong, giving him too much credit, but I don’t think so. I think Seth was glad because he knows the SLB will let up on us now. For a little while, anyway.

There was a time when I thought, good college girl that I am, that the SLB was just another aspect of Seth’s personality-the amoral part Freudians call the id-but I’m no longer sure. I keep thinking about the trip the Garins took across the country just before Bill amp; June

amp; the two oilier kids were killed. Then I think about how our father talked to us when we were teenagers, and going for our drivers” licenses, Bill first, then me. He told us there were three things we were never supposed to do: drive with our tire-pressure low, drive drunk, or pick up hitchhikers.

Could it be that Bill picked up a hitchhiker in the desert without even knowing it? That it’s still riding around inside of Seth? Crazy idea, maybe, but I’ve noticed that this is when most of the crazy ideas come, late at night when the house is quiet amp; the others are asleep. And crazy does not always mean wrong.

Anyhow, with no time to lie fancy, I lied plain. I found it in the cellar, I said, when I went down to see if there were any more vacuum cleaner bags. We’d already poked around down there, of course, but I said it was way back under the stairs. Seth accepted it with no questions (I’m not sure he even cared, he was so happy to have “Dweem Fwoatah” back, but it was really the SLB I was talking to, anyway). Herb only had one question: how did the PW get down there in the first place? Seth never goes in the cellar, thinks it’s spooky, and H. knows that. I said I didn’t know, and-miracle of miracles-that seems to have closed the subject.

All night Seth sat in the den in his favorite chair, holding Dream Floater on his lap like a little girl might hold her favorite doll, watching the TV. Herb brought home a movie from the Video Clip. Just some old black-and-white thing from the Bargain Bin, but Seth really likes it. It’s a Western (of course) from the late “50s. He’s watched it twice already.

Rory Calhoun’s in it. It’s called The Regulators.

June 29, 1995

I think we’re in trouble.

William Hobart over this morning, in a rage. Herb had left for work about twenty minutes before he showed up, thank God, and Seth was out back in the yard.

“I want to ask you a question, Mrs Wyler,” he said. “Did you or your husband have anything to do with what happened to my car last night? A simple yes or no will suffice. If you did, it would be best to say so now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and I must have sounded convincing, because he calmed down a little bit.

He led me down the front walk (I was happy to go, the further away from Seth in the back yard, the better), amp; pointed, down at his house. He drives one of those four-wheel things, an Explorer, maybe, something like that. It was standing on four flat tires, and all the windows had been broken. Including the windshield and the big one in back.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” I said. I was, too, although maybe not for the reasons he thought.

“I apologize for my accusation,” he says, just as stiff as starch. “I suppose I thought… the toy Hugh took… if you were still angry… “A vehicle for a vehicle, I think he meant, like an eye for an eye.

“I’ve put the whole thing behind me, Mr Hobart,” I said. “And I’m not what you’d call a vengeance-minded person under any circumstances.”

“Vengeance is mine saith the Lord, I will repay,” he says.

“Right!” I said. I don’t know if it is or not, but by then I only wanted to get rid of him. He’s creepy.

“

“It must have been vandals, he said. “Drunkards. Surely no one on the street would do such a thing.”

I hope it was vandals. I hope it was. And how could it have been Seth-or the Stalky Little Boy, if you prefer-if I’m right about his powers having a short range? Unless his abilities are growing. His range widening.

I don’t dare tell Herb about this.

June 24, 2995

When I came downstairs this morning to start breakfast, I saw the Reeds out on their walk, still in their robes. I went out. It’s been hot, but it rained in the middle of the night-hard- amp; the air was cooler this morning, with that sweet wet smell it gets after summer rain. Early Saturday morning, or the whole street would have turned out, I think. There was a police car parked in front of the Hobart house, where there was broken glass everywhere, in the driveway amp; on the lawn, twinkling in the sun. William and his wife (Irene) were standing on their front stoop in their pj’s, talking to the cops. The little thief was standing on the stoop behind them, sucking his thumb. A little old for that, but it must have been a bad morning at chez Hobart. Every window in the house was out, it looked like, upstairs as well as down.

Cammie said it happened around quarter to six, she was just waking up amp; heard it. “Not as loud as you would’ve expected, all that glass, but loud enough so you could tell what it was,” she said. “Weird, huh?”

“Very,” I said. My voice sounded normal enough, but I didn’t dare say any more in case it started to get shaky.

Cammie said she looked out almost as soon as she heard the noises, but the people who threw the rocks were gone already (if the police actually find any rocks, I’ll eat them with spaghetti sauce). “Whoever it was, they must have moved very fast.” She threw an elbow at Charlie. “The big lug here slept through the whole thing.”

“First his car, now this,” Charlie said. “Vandals, my butt. Someone’s got it in for Will Hobart.”

“Yes,” I said. “Someone must.”

Later Found Seth’s “wascally wabbit” slippers pushed way back under his bed. Just by accident.

Was looking for a stray sock. Slippers wet, pink fur all matted, pieces of grass stuck to the bottoms. He was out in the night, then. Or early this morning. And I know where he went. Don’t I?

Bad… but thank God his range isn’t widening as I suspected it might be. That would be even worse.

June 26, 1995

Waited until Herb was at work-I didn’t want him to go, he looked so pale and ill, but he said he had an important report to finish and a big presentation this afternoon-then went out back to talk to Seth.

He was sitting in the sandbox, playing quietly with his MotoKops guys, the HQ Crisis Center, and what Herb jokingly calls “the Ponderosa”. This is a ranch-and-corral set-up that Herb saw at a yard-sale on his way home from work one day in March or April. He made a U-turn to go back amp; get it. It’s not really the Ponderosa Ranch from Bonanza, of course, but the main house with its log sides does look a little like it. There is also a bunkhouse (part of the roof broken in but it’s otherwise in good shape) and a number of plastic horses (a couple with only three legs) for the corral. Herb paid two bucks for it, amp; it’s been one of Seth’s favorite toys ever since. What’s funny ( amp; a little weird) is how quickly amp; effortlessly he incorporated the ranch into his MotoKops play-fantasies. I suppose all kids are that way, arbitrary boundaries don’t interest “em, especially when they’re playing, but it’s still a dizzy blending of genres to see Cassie or No Face riding a three-legged plastic nag around the old corral.

Not that I was thinking about any of that this morning, I can tell you. I was scared, heart pounding like a drum in my chest, but when he looked up at me, I felt a little better. It was Seth, not the other one. Every time I see Seth’s pale, sweet little face, I love him more. It’s crazy, maybe, but it’s true. I want to protect him more, and I hate the other one more.

I asked him what was happening to the Hobarts-no sense kidding myself any longer that he’s in the dark about what happened to Dream Floater- amp; he didn’t answer. Just sat looking at me. I asked him if he’d snuck out on Saturday morning and gone down there to break their windows. Still no answer. Then I asked him what he wanted, what had to happen before he would stop. I didn’t think he was going to answer that, either. Then he said, very clearly for Seth: “They should move. They should move soon. I can’t hold it back much longer.”

“Hold what back?” I asked him, but he wouldn’t say anything else, just went away to wherever it is he goes. Later on, while he was eating his lunch (the usual, Chef Boyardee amp; choco milk), I came upstairs amp; sat on the bed amp; thought. After my brother and his family were killed, the witnesses talked about a red van that maybe had a radar-dish or some other form of telecommunications equipment on the roof. A mystery-van, the paper called it. Tracker Arrow is red. And it has a dish on the roof.

I told myself I was completely crazy, and then I thought about the Dream Floater Herb amp; I saw in the back yard. It wasn’t real, of course, but it was full-sized… and Seth was asleep when we saw it. Maybe not operating at full power.

Suppose the SLB gets tired of just breaking windows'? Suppose he sends Tracker Arrow (or Dream Floater, the Justice Wagon, or Freedom) to do a little drive-by at the Hobarts'?

I can’t hold it back much longer, Seth said.

June 27, 1995 Spent most of the day at Mohonk with Jan Goodlin. 1 know I shouldn’t-it’s as much a retreat as drugs or alcohol would be-but it’s hard to resist. We talked about our folks, and embarrassing things that happened to us in high school, all the usual. Trivial and wonderful. Until the very end. I saw the little phone was gone, which means it’s time to go back, amp;Jan said to me: ⁽Tou know where he’s getting the energy to work on the Hobarts, don’t you, Aud?”

Sure I do: from Herb. He’s stealing it like a vampire steals blood. And I think that Herb knows it, too.

June 28, 1995

Late this morning I was sitting at the kitchen table, making up a shopping list, when I heard the whoop-whoop-whoop of an ambulance siren. I went out front in time to see it pull up in front of the Hobarts” with its lights flashing. The EMTs got out amp; hurried inside. I went inside my own house-ran, actually-and looked out into the back yard, from the kitchen. Seth was gone. Power Wagons lined up in the sandbox, slant-parked the way he always puts them when he’s done for a while, the Ponderosa all neat with the plastic horses in their corral, the HQ Crisis Center down near the swing… but no Seth. If I told you I was surprised, I’d be lying.

By the time I got back to the front, people were standing out on their sidewalks all up and down the street, looking at the Hobart place. Dave and Jim Reed were in their driveway, and I asked them if they had seen Seth.

“There he is, Mrs Wyler,” Dave says, and points down to the store. Seth was standing by the bike rack, looking across the street, just like the rest of us. “He must have gone for a candybar.”

“Yes,” I reply, knowing that a) Seth has no money; b) Seth can hardly talk to Herb and me, let alone to store-clerks he doesn’t know; c) Seth never leaves the back yard.

Seth doesn’t, but sometimes the Stalky Little Boy does, it seems. To get into operating range, I think.

About five minutes later, the EMTs helped Irene Hobart out the door. Hugh, the son, was holding her hand amp; crying. I hated that kid, absolutely did, but I don’t anymore. Now I only pity him amp; fear for him. There was blood all down the front of her dress. She was holding a compress on her nose, amp; one of the EMTs was pressing the top of her neck in the back. They got her into the ambulance-Hugh got in right behind her- amp; drove away.

She was back less than two hours later (by then Seth was safely tucked away in the den, watching old Westerns on cable). Kim Getter dropped by for coffee amp; told me she went down to see if she could do anything for Irene. She’s the only one on the block who is what you could call friendly with the Hobarts. She said everything is under control, but that Irene had a scare. She has bad hypertension. Takes medication for it, but it’s still barely controlled. She’s had nosebleeds before, but never one as bad as this. She told Kim it went all at once, blood just spraying out of her nostrils, and it wouldn’t stop even when she cold-packed it. Hugh got scared amp; called 911. The EMTs insisted on taking her to the hospital to see if she needed to have the inside of her nose cauterized, even tho the bleeding had mostly stopped by the time the ambulance got to the house.

I got Seth inside and started shaking him. Told him he had to stop. He only looked at me, his mouth trembling. I was the one who stopped, angry amp; ashamed of myself. I was shaking the wrong one.

I could see the other one, though. I swear I could. Hiding behind Seth’s eyes and laughing at me. I think the most terrible thing of all is how the SLB knows to leave Hugh Hobart alone. To let him just watch.

June 29, 1995

Woke up this morning around 3 a.m. and the other half of the bed was empty. The bathroom, too. I went downstairs, scared. No one in the living room, den, or kitchen. I went out to the garage amp; found Herb sitting at his workbench, wearing nothing but the Jockeys he sleeps in, amp; crying. He put in hi-intensity lighting out there two years ago-metal-hooded lamps that look like the kinds you see in pool-parlors- amp; in their glow I could see how much weight he’s lost. He looks horrible. Like he has anorexia nervosa. I took him in my arms amp; he wept like a baby. Kept saying he was tired, so tired all the time. I said something about taking him to see Dr Evers first thing in the morning. He just laughed, said I knew what was wrong with him.

I do, of course.

July 1, 1995

Another ambulance at the Hobart house late this afternoon. As soon as I saw it I raced upstairs to check on Seth, who was supposedly napping. No Seth. Window open-second-floor window- amp; no Seth. When I went outside, I saw him across the street, holding old Tom Billingsley’s hand. I ran across amp; grabbed him.

“No fear, he’s all right, Aud,” Tom said. “Just went wanderin” a little, didn’t you, Sethieboy?”

“Don’t you ever cross the street on your own!” I told him. “Don’t you ever\” Shook him again in spite of myself. Stupid; might as well shake a lump of wax.

This time when the EMTs came out, they were using their stretcher. Wm. Hobart was on it. “Seems like just lately if it wasn’t for bad luck, those Hobarts wouldn’t have any luck at all,” Tom said.

This is supposed to be Mr Hobart’s vacation week, but he will be spending at least some of it in County General. He fell downstairs, broke his leg amp; hip. Kim told me later that he drinks, church deacon at Zion’s Covenant or not. Maybe he does drink, but I don’t think that’s why he fell downstairs.

July 3, 1995

There’s no Stalky Little Boy. Never was. There’s a thirty inside of Seth-not an id, not another manifestation of his personality, not a hitchhiker, but something lik e a tapeworm. It can think. And talk. It talked to me today.

It calls itself Tak.

July 6, 1995

Someone shot the Hobarts” pet Angora cat last night. Apparently nothing left but blood amp; fur. Kim says Irene H. is hysterical, thinks everyone on the street is out to get them because they know the Hobarts are going to heaven amp; the rest of us are going to hell. “So they are making this hell on earth for us” is what she told Kim. She begged Kim to tell her who did it, said

Hugh was devastated, wouldn’t come out of his room, just lay there on his bed, crying amp; saying it was all his fault cause he was a sinner. When Kim said she didn’t know and didn’t think anyone on Poplar Street would shoot the Hobarts” cat, Mrs Hobart said Kim was just like the rest amp; told her they weren’t friends anymore. Kim very upset, but not as upset as I am.

What in God’s name should I do? It hasn’t hurt anyone too badly yet, but-July 8, 1995

Oh God, thank you. A Mayflower van turned on to the street at just past nine this morning amp; stopped in front of the Hobarts”. They are moving out.

July 16, 1995

Oh you fucking little bastard you shit. Oh how could you. Oh you bastard if I could get at you. If you let Seth go amp; I could get at you. Oh God God God. My fault? Yes. HOW MUCH my fault is the question. Dear Jesus how can I live without him? How go on with this? I didn’t know there could be this much pain in the whole wide world amp; how much my fault HOW MUCH? You bastard Tak you bastard. I’m done writing in this book. What good did I ever think it could do anyway?

Oh Herb, I’m so sorry, I love you, I’m sorry.

October 19, 1995

Got an answer to my letter today, ages after I’d given up expecting one. My respondent was a mining engineer named Allen Symes. He works at a place called the China Pit, in the town of Desperation, Nevada. Says he saw Bill and his family, but nothing happened, he just showed them the mine and they went on, nothing happened.

He’s lying. I’ll probably never know why, or what happened out there, but I know that much. He’s lying.

God help me.