The Regulators

Chapter Six

Now speaking in the voice of Ben Cartwright, patriarch of the Ponderosa, Tak said: “Ma’am, it looks to me like you were planning on skedaddling.”

“No…”

It was her voice, but weak and distant, like a radio transmission coming in from the West Coast on a rainy night. “No, I was just going to the store. Because we’re out of…” Out of what? What could they possibly be out of that this monster would care about, believe in? And, blessedly, something came to her. “Chocolate syrup! Hershey’s!”

It came toward her from the den doorway, Seth Garin in MotoKops Underoos, only now she saw an amazing, horrid thing: the child’s bare toes were dragging across the living-room carpet, but otherwise it was floating along like a boy-shaped balloon. It was Seth’s body, poignantly grimy at the wrists and ankles, but there was no Seth in the eyes. None at all. Now it was just the thing that looked like it belonged in a swamp.

“Says she was just going to take a mosey down to the general store,” said the voice of Ben Cartwright. Whatever else Tak might be, it was a hellishly good mimic. You had to give it that. “What do you think, Adam?”

“Think she’s lying, Paw,” said the voice of Pernell Roberts, the actor who had played Adam Cartwright. Roberts had lost his hair over the years, but he had gotten the best of the deal, anyway; the actors who had played his father and his brothers had all died in the years since Bonanza had galloped off into the sunset of reruns and cable TV.

Back to the voice of Ben as the thing drifted closer, close enough for her to be able to smell sour sweat and a sweet lingering ghost of No More Tears shampoo. “What do you think, Hoss? Speak up, boy.”

“Lyin, Paw,” Dan Blocker’s voice said… and for a moment the almost-floating child actually looked like Blocker.

“Little Joe?”

“Lyin, Paw.”

“Root-root-root-root!”

“Shut up, Rooty,” said Snake Hunter’s voice. It was as if some invisible ensemble of talented lunatics were putting on a show for her. When the thing in front of her spoke again, Snake Hunter was gone and Ben Cartwright was back, that stern Moses of the Sierra Nevada. We don’t much abide liars on the Ponderosa, ma’am. Skedaddlers, either. Now what do you reckon we should do with you?”

Don’t hurt me, she tried to say, but no words came out, not even a whisper of words. She tried to switch over to some internal circuit, visualizing the little red telephone, only with SETH stamped into the plastic of the handset now. It scared her to try and reach Seth directly, but she had never been in a jam like this. If it decided it wanted her dead…

She saw the phone in her mind, saw herself speaking into it, and what she had to say was painfully simple: Don’t let it hurt me, Seth. You had power over it at the start, I know you did.

Maybe not much, but a little. If you have any left-any power, any influence-please don’t let it hurt me, please don’t let it kill me. I’m miserable, but not miserable enough to want to die. Not yet.

She looked for a flicker of humanity in the floating thing’s eyes, the slightest sign of Seth, and saw nothing.

Suddenly her left hand shot up and then slapped down, whacking her left cheek with a sound like a breaking stick of kindling. Heat flooded her skin; it was as if someone had turned a sunlamp on that side of her face. Her left eye began to water.

Now her right hand rose up in front of her eyes, like a Hindu swami’s snake rising out of its basket. It hung in front of her for a moment, and then slowly folded itself into a fist.

No, she tried to say, please no, please, Seth, don’t let it, but nothing came out this time, either, and the fist plummeted down, knuckles very white in the dim room, and then her nose seemed to explode upward in clouds of white dots like butterflies. They danced frantically in front of her eyes even as blood, warm and loose, began to run down over her lips and chin. She staggered backward.

“This woman is an affront to justice in the twenty-third century!” Colonel Henry said in his stern voice-a voice she found more hateful and self-righteous each time an episode of the fucking cartoon came on. “She must be shown the error of her ways.”

Hoss: “That’s right, Colonel! We got to show this bitch who’s top hand!”

“Root-root-root-root!”

Cassie Styles: “I agree with Rooty! And a little sweetening up is just the way to start!”

She was walking again-being walked, rather. The living room flowed past her eyes like scenery running backward past the windows of a train. Her cheek throbbed. Her nose throbbed. She could taste blood on her teeth. Now she pictured a MotoKops-style phone, the kind where you could actually see the person you were talking to, pictured talking face-to-face with Seth on this phone. Please, Seth, it’s your Aunt Audrey, do you recognize me even though my hair’s a different color now? Tak made me dye it so it would look like Cassie’s, and when I go out I have to wear a blue headband like Cassie does, but it’s still me, still Aunt Audrey, the one who took you in, the one who’s been watching out for you, trying to, anyway, and now you have to watch out for me. Don’t let it hurt me too badly, Seth, please don’t let it.

The lights were off in the kitchen and it was a bowl of gloomy, swarming shadows. As she was propelled across the yellow linoleum (cheery when it was clean, but now dingy and jaundiced-looking), a thought occurred to her, one that was terrible with logic: Why should Seth help her? Even if he was receiving her message and even if he still could help, why should he? To escape Tak meant to abandon Seth to his fate, and that was just what she had been trying to do. If the boy was still there, he must know that as well as Tak.

A sob, as faint and distant as an invalid’s breath, escaped her as the fingers of her bloodstained right hand felt for the light-switch by the stove, found it, and turned it.

“Sweeten her up, Paw!” Little Joe Cartwright yelped. “Sweeten her up, by Jasper!” The voice suddenly slid up, becoming the high-pitched laughter of Rooty the Robot. Audrey found herself wishing for insanity. It would be better than this, wouldn’t it? It would have to be.

Instead she watched, a helpless passenger inside her own body, as Tak turned her, walked her over to the spice rack, and used her hand to open the cabinet above it. The other hand yanked out a yellow Tupperware container that hit the floor and sprayed macaroni across the linoleum in every direction. The flour went next, landing beside her foot and puffing up to coat her legs. The hand darted into the hole it had created and seized the plastic honey bear. The other hand grabbed the top, unscrewed it, tossed it aside. A moment later the bear was hanging upside down over her open, waiting mouth.

The hand wrapped around the bear’s chubby stomach began to squeeze rhythmically, much as she had once squeezed the rubber bulb of the horn that had been mounted on her childhood bicycle. Blood from her ruptured nose slid down her throat. Then honey filled her mouth, thick and gagging-sweet.

“Swallow it!” Tak shouted, now in no one’s voice but its own. “Swallow it, you bitch!”

She swallowed. One mouthful, then two, then three. On the third one her throat seemed to clench shut. She tried to breathe and couldn’t. Her windpipe was blocked by a nightmare of sweet glue. She fell to her knees and began crawling across the kitchen floor, her dark-red hair hanging in her face, barking out great thick wads of blood-laced honey. It was up her nose as well, packing it and dripping from her nostrils.

For another few moments she still couldn’t seem to breathe, and the white specks dancing in front of her eyes turned black. I’m going to drown, she thought. Drown in Sue Bee honey.

Then her windpipe opened up again, a little, anyway, enough, and she was gasping air into her lungs, pulling it down her slick, coated throat, weeping with terror and pain.

Tak dropped on to Seth Garin’s scabby knees in front of her and began screaming into her face. “Don’t you ever try to get away from me! Don’t you ever! Don’t you ever! Do you understand? Nod your head, you stupid cow, show me you understand!”

Its hands-the ones she couldn’t see, the ones that were inside her head-seized her and all at once her head was swooping up and down, her forehead smacking the floor on each downstroke, and Tak was laughing. Laughing. She thought it would keep on pounding her head against the floor until she passed out and just sprawled here in the mess she had made.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. The hands were gone. The feel of its mind was gone, as well. She looked up cautiously, swiping at her nose with the side of her hand, still hitching for breath and letting it out in gasps that were half-retches. Her forehead throbbed. She could feel it swelling already.

The boy was looking at her. And she thought it was the boy. She wasn’t completely sure, but-

“Seth?”

For a moment he only crouched there, not nodding, not shaking his head. Then he reached out with one dirty hand and wiped honey off her chin with fingers she could hardly feel.

“Seth, where did it go? Where’s Tak?”

He struggled. She could see him struggling. With his fear, perhaps, but she wasn’t sure he felt fear. Even if he did, it was more likely his own defective communications equipment he was working against right now. He made a gurgling noise, a sound like air in the bathroom pipes, and she thought that was probably all he’d be able to get out. Then, just as she was about to try for her feet, two choked words came from him.

“Gone. Building.”

She looked at him, still breathing through a film of honey but not noticing it for the moment. She felt her heart begin to beat a little faster at the word gone. She should know better, especially after what had just happened, but-

“Is he in a building, honey? Gone to a building? Is that what you’re saying? What building?”

“Building,” Seth repeated. He struggled, his head shaking from side to side. Finally: “Making.”

Building, yes. But the verb, not the noun. Tak was building. Tak was making. What was he making… besides trouble?

“He,” Seth said. “He. He. He-!”

The boy struck down on his own thigh with a frustration she had never seen in him before. She picked up the fist he had hit himself with and soothed it back into a hand.

“No, Seth.” Her diaphragm pulled in again, trying to retch-the honey was a heavy ball in her stomach-but she controlled it. “Don’t, don’t. Just relax. Tell me if you can. If you can’t, it’s okay.” A lie, but if she wound him up any tighter than he was already, he would never be able to get it out. Worse, he might go away. Go away and leave the warm boy-vacancy that Tak inhabited so easily.

“He-!” Seth reached for her, touched her ears. Then he put the backs of his hands behind his own ears and pushed them forward. She saw that they were also dirty from his long hours in the sandbox-filthy-and her eyes stung with tears. But he was looking at her intently, and she nodded. Yes, she understood. When Seth really tried, he was quite good-as good as he had to be, anyway.

He listens to you, the boy was saying. Tak listens to you with my ears. And of course he did. It did. Tak the Magnificent, creature of a thousand voices, most of which came equipped with Western drawls, and one set of ears.

Tak had dropped down in front of her, but it was Seth that got up, just a skinny little boy in grimy underpants. He started for the door, then turned back. Audrey herself was still on her knees, trying to decide if she could reach out for the counter from where she was or if she should crawl a little closer first.

She cringed when she saw him coming back, thinking that Tak had returned, thinking she saw the hard shine of its intelligence in Seth’s eyes. When he got closer, she saw that she had made a natural enough mistake. Seth was crying. She had never seen him cry before, not even when he came to her with scraped knees or a banged head. Until now she hadn’t been entirely sure that he could cry.

He put his arms around her neck and dropped his forehead against hers. It hurt, but she didn’t draw away. For a moment she had a blurred but very emphatic image of the red telephone, only grown to enormous size. Then it was gone, and she heard Seth’s voice in her head. She’d thought on several occasions that she was hearing him, that he was trying to contact her telepathically. The sensation came most commonly as she was drifting off to sleep or just as she was waking up. It was always distant, like a voice calling through blankets of fog. Now, however, it was shockingly close. It was the voice of a child who sounded bright and not in the least defective.

I don’t blame you for trying to run, the voice said. Audrey had a sense of hurry and furtiveness. It was like listening to a kid whisper some vital piece of classroom gossip to his seatmate while the teacher’s back is briefly turned. Get to the others, the ones across the street. You have to wait, but it won’t be long. Because he’s-

No words, but another blurred image that filled her head completely, temporarily driving out all thought. It was Seth. He was dressed in jester’s motley and a cap of bells. He was juggling. Not balls: dolls. Little china ones. Hummel figures. But until he dropped one and it shattered and she saw the broken face of Mary Jackson lying beside one of the jester’s red-and-white curly-toed caliph’s slippers, she did not realize that the dolls were her neighbors. She supposed she was responsible for at least some of that image-she had seen Kirstie Carver’s Hummel figures (a tiresome hobby if ever there was one, in Audrey’s opinion) a thousand times-but she understood that whatever she might have added didn’t in the least change what Seth was trying to convey. Whatever craziness Tak was up to-his building, his making-it was keeping him very busy.

Not too busy to see me when I broke for the door a few minutes ago, she thought. Not too busy to stop me. Not too busy to punish me, either. Maybe next time it’ll be salt going down my throat instead of honey.

Or drain-cleaner.

I’ll tell you when, the child’s voice returned. Listen for me, Aunt Audrey. After the Power Wagons come again. Listen for me. It’s important that you get away. Because-

This time many images flickered past. Some came and went too fast for her to identify, but she got a few: an empty Chef Boyardee can lying in the trash, an old broken toilet lying on its side in the dump, a car up on blocks, no wheels, no glass. Things that were broken. Things that were used up.

The last thing she saw before he broke contact was the studio portrait of herself on the table in the front hall. The eyes of the portrait were gone, gouged out.

Seth released her and stood back, watching as she grasped the edge of the counter and struggled to her feet. Her belly, heavy and thick with the honey Tak had made her swallow, felt like a counter-weight. Seth now looked as he usually did-distant and disconnected, with all the emotional gradient of a rock. Yet there were those clean streaks below his eyes. Yes, there were those.

“Ah-oh,” he said in his toneless voice-soundings she and Herb had speculated might mean Audrey, hello-and then walked out of the kitchen. Back to the den, where the climactic shootout was still going on. And when it was done? Why, rewind to the FBI warning and start all over again, most likely.

But he talked to me, she thought. Out loud and inside my head. On his version of the PlaySkool phone. Only his version is so big.

She took the broom from its place in the pantry alcove and began to sweep up spilled flour and macaroni. In the den, Rory Calhoun yelled, “You ain’t goin nowhere, you sowbelly Yankee!”

It doesn’t have to be this way, Jeb,” Audrey murmured, sweeping.

“It doesn’t have to be this way, Jeb,” Ty Hardin-Deputy Laine in the movie-said, and then bad old Colonel Murdock shot him. His final act of villainy; in another thirty seconds he would be shot dead himself.

Audrey’s diaphragm knotted again. Hard. She went to the sink, trailing the broom in one hand, and bent over. She gagged, but nothing came up. A moment later, the clench subsided. She turned on the cold water tap, leaned over, drank directly from the faucet, then gingerly splashed a couple of handfuls on her throbbing forehead. It felt good. Wonderful.

She turned off the tap, went back to the pantry, and got the dustpan. Tak was building, Seth had said. Tak was making. But what? And as she dropped awkwardly to her knees by her pile of sweepings, the broom in one hand and the dustpan in the other, a more urgent question occurred to her: If she did get away, what would it do to her nephew? What would it do to Seth?

Belinda Josephson held the kitchen door for her husband, then straightened up and looked around. The overhead light wasn’t on, but the room was still a little brighter than it had been. The storm was slackening, and she supposed that in another hour or two it would be hot and bright again.

She looked at the wall-clock over the kitchen table, and she felt a mild burst of unreality. 4:03? Was it possible so little time had gone by? She took a closer look and saw that the secondhand wasn’t moving. She reached for the light-switch beside the door as Johnny crawled into the kitchen on his hands and knees and then stood up.

“Don’t bother,” Jim Reed said. He was sitting on the floor between the fridge and the stove with Ralphie Carver on his lap. Ralphie’s thumb was in his mouth. His eyes were glazed and apathetic. Belinda had never liked him very much, didn’t know anyone on the street who did (except for his mother and his dad, she supposed), but still her heart went out to him.

“Don’t bother with what?” Johnny asked.

“The light-switch. Power’s off.”

She believed him but snapped the switch a couple of times anyway. Nothing.

There were a lot of people in this room-she made it eleven, counting herself-but the numb silence which had settled over them made it seem like less. Ellie Carver was still giving an occasional watery gasp, but her face was against her mother’s breast, and Belinda thought she might actually be asleep. David Reed had his arm around Susi Geller. Sitting on the girl’s other side, also with an arm around her (lucky girl, all that comfort, Belinda thought), was her mother. Cammie Reed, the twins” mother, was sitting against a door with a sign on it reading YE OLDE PANTRIE. Belinda didn’t think Cammie was quite as out of it as some of the others; her eyes had a cool, thoughtful look.

“You said you heard screaming,” Johnny said to Susi. “I don’t hear any screaming.”

“It’s over,” the girl said dully. “I think maybe it was Mrs Soderson.”

“Sure it was,” Jim said. He shifted Ralphie on his lap, win cing a little as he did. “I recognized it. We’ve been listening to her scream at Gary for most of our lives. Haven’t we, Dave?”

Dave Reed nodded. “Id’ve murdered her by now. Honest.”

“Ah, but you don’t imbibe, my boy,” Johnny said in his best W. C. Fields voice. He took the kitchen phone out of its cradle, listened, bopped the O button a couple of times, then hung it up again.

“Debbie’s dead, isn’t she?” Susi asked Belinda.

“Shhh, baby, don’t,” Kim Geller said, sounding alarmed.

Susi took no notice. “She didn’t go over next door at all. Did she? Don’t lie about it, either.”

Belinda thought about doing just that, but it didn’t seem the right way to go on, somehow. In her experience, even well-intentioned lies usually made things worse. More crazy. Belinda thought things were crazy enough on Poplar Street already.

“Yes, honey,” she said, marvelling at how southern she always sounded-to herself, anyway-when she had to give someone bad news. Perhaps it was part of the black experience that no one had yet gotten around to teaching in a college course. What made it particularly interesting in her case was that she had never been south of the Mason-Dixon line in her whole life. Tes, honey, I’m afraid she is.”

Susi put her hands over her face and began to sob. Dave Reed pulled her to him and Susi put her face against his shoulder. When Kim tried to pull her back, Susi stiffened her body and resisted. Her mother gave Dave Reed a dirty look which the boy missed entirely. She turned her angry face to Belinda instead. “Why did you tell her that?”

“Girl’s lying right out there on the stoop, and with all that red hair, she is kinda hard to miss.”

“Hushnow,” Brad told her. He took her by the wrist and drew her over to the sink. “Don’t you upset her.”

Oh dear, too late, Belinda thought, but prudently said nothing.

There was a screened window behind the sink. Looking through it to the right, she could see the stake fence separating the Carvers” plot from Old Doc’s. She could also see the green roof of the Billingsley house. Above it, the clouds already appeared to be unravelling.

She turned and boosted herself, sitting sidesaddle on the edge of the sink. Then she leaned close to the screen, smelling its metal and all the wet summer straining through its mesh. The combined scents called up a momentary nostalgia for her childhood, a feeling that was both fine and fierce. It was strange, she thought, how it was almost always the smells of things that took you back the hardest.

“Halloo!” she called, cupping her hands around her mouth. Brad grabbed her shoulder, apparently wanting her to stop, and she shook him off emphatically. “Halloo, Billingsley!”

“Don’t do that, Bee,” Cammie Reed said. “It’s not wise.”

And what would be wise? Belinda thought. Just sitting on the kitchen floor and waiting for the cavalry to come?

“Hell, go on,” Johnny said. “What harm can it do? If the people who did the shooting are still around, I imagine that where we are is hardly a big secret to them.” An idea seemed to strike him at that, and he dropped on his hunkers in front of the late postman’s wife. “Kirsten, did David have a gun? A hunting rifle, or maybe-”

“There’s a pistol in his desk,” she said. “Second drawer on the left of the kneehole. That drawer’s locked, but the key’s in the wide drawer at the top. It’s on a piece of green yarn.”

Johnny nodded. “And the desk? Where’s that?”

“Oh. In his little office. Upstairs, the end of the hall.” She said all this while seeming to contemplate her own knees, then raised desperate, distracted eyes to look at him. “He’s out in the rain, Johnny. So is Susi’s friend. We shouldn’t leave them out in the rain.”

“It’s stopping,” Johnny said, and his face suggested he knew how inane that sounded. It seemed to satisfy Pie, though, at least temporarily, and Belinda supposed that was the important thing. Perhaps it was Johnny’s tone. The words might be inane, but Belinda had never heard him sound so gentle. “Just take care of your kids, Kirstie, and don’t concern yourself with the rest of it for the time being.”

He got up and started for the swinging door, walking in a battlefield crouch.

“Mr Marinville?” Jim Reed asked. “Can I come with you?” But when he attempted to set Ralphie aside, a panicked look came into the boy’s eyes. His thumb came out of his mouth with an audible pop and he clung to Jim like a barnacle, muttering, “No, Jim, no, Jim,” under his breath in a way that made Belinda feel like shivering. She thought mad people probably talked that way when they were alone in their cells at night.

“Stay where you are, Jim,” Johnny said. “Brad? What about you? Little trip to higher altitudes? Clear the old sinuses?”

“Sure.” Brad looked at his wife with that expression of love and exasperation that is the sole property of people who have been married over ten years. “You really think it’s okay for this woman of mine to be shooting off her mouth?”

“I repeat, what harm can it do?”

“Be careful,” Belinda said. She smoothed a hand briefly across Brad’s chest. “Keep your head down. Promise me.”

“I promise to keep my head down.”

She looked at Johnny. “Now you.”

“Huh? Oh.” He offered a charming grin, and Belinda had a sudden insight: that was the way Mr John Edward Marinville always grinned when he made promises to women. “I promise.”

They went out, dropping a little self-consciously to their knees as they passed through the swinging door and once more into the Carvers” front hall. Belinda leaned toward the screen again. Besides rain and wet grass, she could smell the old Hobart place burning. She realized she could hear it, too-a crackly, whooshing sound. The downpour would probably keep the fire from spreading, but where were the fire trucks, for Christ’s sake? What did they pay their taxes for? “Halloo, Billingsley’s! Who’s there?”

After a moment, a man’s voice (one she didn’t recognize) called back. “There are seven of us! The couple from up the block-”

That had to be the Sodersons, Belinda thought.

–plus the cop, and the guy married to the dead woman. There’s also Mr Billingsley, and

Cynthia, from the store!”

Who are you?” Belinda called.

“Steve Ames! I’m from New York! I was having trouble with my truck, pulled off the

Interstate, got lost! I stopped at the store down there to use the phone!”

“Poor guy,” Dave Reed said. “Like winning the lottery in hell.”

“What’s going on?” the voice from the other side of the stake fence called. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“No!” Belinda shouted back. She thought furiously. There must be more to say, other things to ask, but she couldn’t think of anything at all.

“Have you looked up the street? Is it clear?” Ames called.

Belinda opened her mouth to reply, and then was distracted momentarily by the spider’s web outside the screen. The window’s overhang had protected it from the worst of the squall, but raindrops hung from the gossamer threads like tiny, quivering diamonds. The owneroperator was at the center of the web. Not moving. Maybe dead.

“Ma’am? I asked-”

“I don’t know!” she called back. “Johnny Marinville and my husband looked, but now they’ve gone upstairs to-” But she didn’t want to mention the gun. Stupid, maybe-rathole thinking-but it didn’t change the way she felt.-to get a better look! What about you?”

“It’s been pretty busy here, ma’am! The woman from up the block-” A pause. “Does your phone work?”

“No!” Belinda called. “No phone, no electric!”

Another pause. Then, lower, barely audible over the diminishing hiss of the rain, she heard him say “Shit”. Then there was another voice, one she knew but couldn’t immediately place. “Belinda, is that you?”

“Yes!” she returned, and looked around at the others for help.

“It’s Mr Jackson,” Jim Reed said, speaking around Ralphie’s shoulder. The little boy had not quite managed to join his sister in the refuge of sleep, but Belinda didn’t think it would be long; his thumb had already begun to sag between his lips.

“I’ve been to the front door!” Peter called. “The street’s deserted all the way down to the corner! Completely deserted! No gawkers or rubberneckers from Hyacinth or the next block of Poplar. Does that make any sense to you?”

Belinda thought, frowning, then looked around. She saw only puzzled eyes and dropped heads. She turned back to the window. “No!”

Peter laughed. The sound chilled her the way that little Ralphie Carver’s distraught muttering had chilled her. “Join the club, Bee! Makes no sense to me, either!”

“Who’d come on the block?” Kim Geller scoffed. “Who in their right minds? With guns going off and people screaming and everything?”

Belinda didn’t know how to respond to that. It was logical, but it still didn’t hold water… because people didn’t behave logically when trouble broke out. They came and they gawked. Usually they did it at what they hoped was a safe distance, but they came.

“Are you sure there aren’t people down below the corner?” she called.

This time the pause was so long she was about to repeat the question when a third voice spoke up. She had no trouble recognizing Old Doc. “None of us sees anyone, but the rain has started a mist off the pavement! Until it clears, we can’t tell for sure!”

“But there are no sirens!” Peter again. “Do you hear any coming from the north?”

“No!” she returned. “It must be the storm!”

“I don’t think so,” Cammie Reed said. She spoke for herself, to herself, not the group; if YE OLDE PANTRIE hadn’t been in close proximity to the sink, Belinda wouldn’t have heard her. “Nope, I don’t think so at all.”

“I’m going out to get my wife!” Peter Jackson called. Other voices were immediately raised in protest against this idea. Belinda couldn’t make out the words, but the emotional tone was unmistakable.

Suddenly the spider-the one she had assumed was dead-scattered from the center of its web and mounting one of the silk strands scrambled up until it had disappeared under the eave. Not dead after all, Belinda thought. Only playing possum.

Then Kirsten Carver was leaning past her, bumping Belinda so hard with her shoulder that Belinda would have gone ass-deep into the sink if she hadn’t managed to grab the corner of an overhead cabinet. Pie’s face was parchment-pale, her eyes blazing with fear.

“Don’t you go out there!” she screamed. “They’ll come back and kill you! They’ll come back and kill us all!”

No answer from the other house for several moments, and then Collie Entragian spoke up in a voice that sounded both apologetic and bemused: “No good, ma’am! He’s gone!”

“You should have stopped him!” Kirsten screamed. Belinda put an arm around the woman’s shoulders and was frightened by the steady high vibration she felt. As if Kirste n was on the verge of exploding. What kind of policeman are you!”

“He’s not,” Kim said. She spoke in a just-what-the-hell-did-you-expect tone. “He got kicked off the force. He was running a hot-car ring.”

Susi raised her head. “I don’t believe it.”

“What do you know about it, a girl your age?” her mother asked.

Belinda was about to slide off the edge of the sink when she saw something on the back lawn that made her freeze. It was caught against one leg of the kids” swing set, and like the spider’s web, jeweled with hanging drops of rain.

“Cammie?”

“What?”

“Come here.”

If anyone would know, Cammie would; she had a garden in her backyard, a jungle of potted plants inside her house, and a library’s worth of books on growing things.

Cammie got up from her place by the pantry door, and came over. Susi and her mother joined her; so did Dave Reed.

“What?” Pie Carver asked, turning a wild gaze on Belinda. Pie’s daughter had her arms wrapped around her mother’s leg as if it were a treetrunk, and was still trying to hide her face against the hip of Pie’s denim shorts. “What is it?”

Belinda ignored her and spoke to Cammie. “Look over there. By the swings. Do you see?”

Cammie started to say she didn’t, then Belinda pointed and she did. Thunder mumbled to the east of them, and the breeze kicked up a brief gust. The spider’s web outside the window shivered and shed tiny droplets of rain. The thing Belinda had seen got free of the swing set and rolled partway across the Carvers” backyard, in the direction of the stake fence.

“That’s impossible,” Cammie said flatly. “Russian thistle doesn’t grow in Ohio. Even if it did… this is summer. They root in summer.”

“What’s Russian thistle, Mom?” Dave asked. His arm was around Susi’s waist. “I never heard of it.”

Tumbleweed,” Cammie said in that same flat voice. “Russian thistle is tumbleweed.”

Brad poked his head through Carver’s office door just in time to see Johnny pull a green-and-white box of cartridges out of a desk drawer. In his other hand, the writer had David Carver’s pistol. He had rolled the cylinder out to make sure the chambers were empty; they were, but he was still holding the gun awkwardly, with all of his fingers outside the trigger-guard. To Brad he looked like one of those guys who sold dubious items on high-channel cable TV:

Folks, this little beauty will ventilate any night-time intruder unwise enough to pick your house, yes, of course it will, but wait, there’s more! It slices! It dices! And do you love scalloped potatoes but just never have time to make them at home?

“Johnny.”

He looked up, and for the first time Brad saw clearly how frightened the man was. It made him like Johnny better. He couldn’t think of a reason why that should be, but it was.

“There’s a fool out on Old Doc’s lawn. Jackson, I guess.”

“Shit. That’s not very bright, is it?”

“No. Don’t shoot yourself with that thing.” Brad started out of the room, then turned back. “Are we crazy? Because it feels that way.”

Johnny raised his hands in front of him, palms up, to indicate he didn’t know.

Johnny looked into the chambers of the pistol one more time-as if a bullet might have grown in one of them while he wasn’t looking-then snapped the cylinder back into place. He stuck the pistol in his belt and tucked the box of cartridges into his shirt pocket.

The front hall was a minefield of Ralphie Carver’s boy-toys; the kid had apparently not yet been introduced by his doting parents to the concept of picking up after himself. Brad went into what had to be the little girl’s bedroom. Johnny followed him. Brad pointed out the window.

Johnny looked down. It was Peter Jackson, all right. He was on Doc’s lawn, kneeling beside his wife. He had gotten her into a sitting position again. One arm was around her back. He was working the other under her cocked knees. Her skirt was well up on her thighs, and Johnny thought again about her missing pants. Well, so what? So fucking what? Johnny could see the man’s back shaking as sobs racked him.

Silver light ran across the top of his vision.

He looked up and saw what looked like an old Airstream trailer-or maybe a lunch-wagon-turning left on to Poplar from Hyacinth. Close behind it was the red van that had taken care of the dog and the paperboy, and behind that was the one with the dark blue metal-flake paint. He looked the other way, up toward Bear Street, and saw the van with the Mary Kay paintjob and the Valentine radar-dish, the yellow one that had first rear-ended Mary and then rode her off the street, and the black one with the turret.

Six of them. Six in two converging lines of three. He had seen American LAC vehicles in the same formation a long time ago, in Vietnam.

They were creating a fire-corridor.

For a moment he couldn’t move. His hands seemed to hang at the ends of his arms like plugs of cement. You can’t, he thought with a kind of sick, unbelieving fury. You can’t come back, you bastards, you can’t keep coming back.

Brad didn’t see them; he was looking at the man on the lawn of the house next door, absorbed in Peter’s effort to get up with his wife’s dead weight in his arms. And Peter…

Johnny got his right hand moving. He wanted it to streak; it seemed to float instead. He got it around the handle of the gun and pulled it out of the waistband of his pants. Couldn’t shoot it; no loads in the chambers. Couldn’t load it, either, not in his current state. So he brought it down butt-first, shattering the glass of Ellen’s bedroom window.

“Get inside!” he screamed at Peter, and his voice came out sounding low and strengthless to his own ears. Dear God, what nightmare was this, and how had they stumbled into it? “Get inside! They’re coming again! They’re back! They’re coming again!”

Drawing found folded into an unfitted notebook which apparently served as Audrey Wyler’s journal. Although unsigned, it is almost certainly the work of Seth Garin. If one assumes that its placement in the journal corresponds to the time it was done, then it was made in the summer of 1995, after the death of Herbert Wyler and the Hobart family’s abrupt departure from Poplar Street.