The Regulators (richard bachman)

by Stephen King

  “Mrs Reed’s gone,” Bee says. “And she took that rifle with her. Was it empty? Come on, make me happy. Say it was empty.”

  “I don’t think so,” Steve says reluctantly.

  “Shit-fire and save matches,” Belinda says.

  Cynthia is looking at her from around one of Ralphie’s slumped should ers, her eyes widening in alarm. “Have we got a problem here?” she asks.

  “We might,” Bee says.

  Tak’s Place/Tak’s Time

  In the den where it has spent so many happy hours-at the breast of Seth Garin’s captive imagination, one might say-Tak waits and listens. On the Zenith’s screen, black-and-white cowboys dressed in ghostly gear ride across a desert landscape. Their passage is silent. Discorporeal now that it is out of Seth, Tak has muted the TV with the best remote control of all-its own mind.

  In the bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, it can hear the boy. The boy is making the low, piggy grunting sounds Tak has come to associate with its elimination function. For Tak, even the sounds are revolting, and the act itself, with its cramping and its sensations of sliding, helpless exit, is hideous. Even vomiting is better-it’s quick, at least, up the throat and gone.

  Now it knows what the woman did to him: drugged the milk with something to bring on not just a single act of elimination but shivering convulsions of it. How much did she give him? A huge wallop, from the way Seth felt just before Tak fled, and now it understands everything.

  It flickers in a dark upper corner of the room-Tak the Cruel, Tak the Despot-like a little cluster of disembodied bicycle taillights that pulse and revolve around each other. It can’t hear Aunt Audrey and Marinville even with the TV sound off, but it knows they’re there, outside the front door. When they finally stop talking and come in, it will kill them-the man first, and simply to replenish the energy it has expended (being out of the boy’s body is particularly depleting), Seth’s aunt for what she has tried to do. It will feed on her as well, and she will die slowly, by her own hand.

  The boy’s punishment for trying to stand against Tak will be to watch it happen.

  Yet Tak respects Seth; he has been a worthy opponent. (How could any vessel capable of containing Tak not be?) Since the wino came yesterday, Tak and the boy have been playing a nervy game of stud poker, just like Laura and Jeb Murdoch in The Regulators. Now everything is in the pot and all but the final hole cards are face-up on the table. When they are flipped, Tak knows it will win. Of course it will win. Its opponent is only a child, after all, no matter how brilliant the lower courses of his intellect may be, and in the end the child has believed just a little more than is healthy for him. It knew Seth had planned to drive it temporarily out of his body, and although the exact method was a surprise (a very unpleasant one), even that much knowledge is more than Seth knew it had. But there is something else, as well.

  Seth doesn’t believe Tak can re-enter him while he is performing the disgusting act for which the little room adjacent to the kitchen has been set aside.

  Seth is wrong. Tak can re-enter. It will be unpleasant-painful, even-but it can reenter. And how does it know that Seth hasn’t seen this final card, as he has seen some of the others Tak has held, even in spite of its best efforts to hide them?

  Because he has called his beloved auntie back to the house to help him get away.

  And when his beloved auntie finally stops hesitating out there on the stoop and comes in, she’ll be… well…

  Regulated.

  Completely regulated.

  The red lights in the shadows swirl faster, excited by the idea.

  Main Street, Desperation/Regulator Time

  “Did you hear me say we had to go right now?”

  Johnny nods. Neither of them sees Cammie Reed cross the street from the adobe church that used to be Johnny Marinville’s suburban retreat to the remains of the wattle-and-daub that used to be Brad and Belinda’s house. She’s got her head down and the.30-.06 in one hand.

  “Yes, but there’s still that one question I have, Aud.”

  “What?” she nearly screams. “For God’s sake, what?”

  “Can it jump to someone else? To you or me, for instance?”

  A look of what might be relief appears briefly on her face.

  “No.”

  “How can you be sure? Did Seth tell you?”

  He thinks for a moment she won’t answer this, and not simply because she wants to get to the boy while he’s still on the jakes. He at first mistakes her look for embarrassment, then sees it’s deeper; not embarrassment but shame.

  “Seth didn’t tell me,” she says. “I know because it tried to get into Herb. So it could… you know… have me.”

  “It wanted to make love to you,” he says.

  “Love?” she says, her voice barely under control. “No. Oh, no. Tak understands nothing about love, cares nothing about love. It wanted to fuck me, that’s all. When it discovered it couldn’t use Herb to do that, it killed him.” Tears are running down her face now. “It doesn’t give up easily when it wants something, you know. What it did to him… well, imagine what would happen to one of little Ralphie Carver’s shoes if you tried to get it on your big grownup’s foot. If you just kept jamming it and shoving it, harder and harder, oblivious of the pain, oblivious of what you were doing to it in your obsession to wear it, walk in it…”

  “All right,” he says. He looks down toward the bottom of the hill, almost expecting to see the vans coming back, but there is nothing. He looks up the street and sees more nothing; Cammie is standing out of sight in the shadow of the precariously leaning Cattlemen’s Hotel. “I get the message.”

  “Then can we go in? Or do you even intend to go in? Have you lost your nerve?”

  “No,” he says, and sighs.

  There’s an old-fashioned iron thumb-latch on the bunkhouse door, but when he tries to grasp it, his thumb goes straight through. Below it, appearing like something floating up through dirty water, is a plain old suburban doorknob. When Johnny grasps it, a suburban door forms around it, first overlying the planks and iron bands, then replacing them. The knob turns and the door opens on a dark room that smells as stale as dirty laundry. The moonlight floods in, and what Johnny sees makes him think of stories he’s read in the papers from time to time, the ones about elderly recluse millionaires who spend the last years of their lives in single rooms, stacking up books and magazines, collecting pets, shooting Demerol, eating meals out of cans.

  “Quick, hurry,” she says. “He’ll be in the downstairs bathroom. It’s off the kitchen.”

  She moves past him, taking his hand as she does, and leads him into the living room. There are no stacked books and magazines, but the sense of reclusion and insanity grows rather than lessens as they advance. The floor is tacky with spilled food and soda; there is an underlying sour smell of clabbered milk; the walls have been scribbled over with crayon drawings that are frightening in their primitive preoccupation with bloodshed and death. They remind him of a novel he read not so long ago, a book called Blood Meridian.

  Movement flickers to his left. He turns that way, heart speeding up, adrenaline dumping into his bloodstream, but there are no gun-toting cowboys or sinister aliens, not even an attacking little kid with a knife. It’s only a shimmer of reflected light. From the TV, he assumes, although there’s no sound.

  “No,” she whispers, “don’t go in there.”

  She leads him toward the doorway straight ahead. Light shines through it, printing a bright oblong on to the food-encrusted carpet. Electricity may not yet have been invented along the rest of what used to be Poplar Street, but there’s still plenty here.

  Now Johnny can hear grunting sounds, interspersed with mildly labored breathing. Sounds as human-and as instantly recognizable-as snoring, sneezing, wheezing, whistling. Someone going to the toilet. Doing number two, as they used to say when they were kids. A grade-school couplet comes to mind: Mother gives me lemonade, around the corner fudge is made. Whoa, Johnny thi
nks, that one’s right up there with little bitty baby Smitty.

  As they enter the kitchen and he looks around, it occurs to Johnny that perhaps the good folk of Poplar Street deserve what’s happening to them. She’s been living like this for God knows how long and we never knew, he thinks. We’re her neighbors, we all sent her flowers when her husband ate the end of his gun, most of us went to his funeral (Johnny himself had been in California, talking to a convention of children’s librarians), but we never knew.

  The counter jostles with jars, discarded packaging, empty glasses, and soft-drink cans. Many of the latter have become antfarms. He sees the Tupperware pitcher with the remains of the doctored chocolate milk in it, and the crust of Tak’s bologna-and-cheese sandwich beside it. The sink is stacked with dirty dishes. Beside the dish drainer, a plastic bottle of detergent which might have been purchased when Herb Wyler was still alive lies overturned. Around its nozzle is a long-congealed puddle of green dishgoo. On the table are more stacks of dirty dishes, a squeeze-bottle of mustard, sprays of crumbs (there’s a Van Halen cassette lying in one of these), an aerosol can of whipped cream, two bottles of catsup, one mostly empty and one mostly full, open pizza boxes littered with crusts, bread-wrappers, Twinkies wrappers, and a Doritos bag pulled down over an empty Pepsi bottle like a weird condom. There are also piles and piles of comic books. All those that Johnny can see are issues of Marvel’s MotoKops 2200 serie s. Spilled Sugar Pops are scattered across the cover of an issue which shows Cassie Styles and Snake Hunter standing hip-deep in a swamp and firing their stun-pistols at Countess Lili Marsh, who is attacking on what could be a jet-powered motorscooter. BAYOU BLAST! the title screams. In the far corner of the room is a heap of bulging plastic garbage bags, none secured with ties, most oozing ant-infested swill. All the cans seem to bear the smiling face of Chef Boyardee. The stove is covered with pots encrusted with the Chefs orange sauce. On top of the fridge, a bizarre crowning touch, is an old plastic statuette of Roy Rogers mounted on the faithful Trigger. Johnny knows without having to ask that it was a present to Seth from his uncle, something perhaps remembered from the days of Herb Wyler’s own youth and patiently hunted out of a dust-covered attic carton.

  Beyond the fridge is a half-open door, casting its own wedge of light out on to the filthy linoleum. The door’s angle isn’t too severe for Johnny to be able to read the sign on it:

  EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS AFTER USING THE LAVATORY (AND CUSTOMERS SHOULD)

  “Seth!” Audrey stage-whispers, dropping Johnny’s hand and rushing for the bathroom door. Johnny follows her.

  From behind them, spots of dancing red light stream out of the den’s arched doorway like meteor debris; they flash across the dark living room toward the kitchen. Even as they do, Cammie Reed steps through the door from outside. She has the gun in both hands now, and as she stands looking around the dim living room, she slips her right index finger inside the trigger-guard and nestles it against the trigger. She is hesitant, not sure where to go next. Her eye is drawn to the flicker of reflected TV-light from the den, her ear by the sound of people moving in the kitchen. The voice in her head, the one demanding revenge for Jimmy, has fallen silent, and she isn’t sure which way to go. Her eye registers a brief strobe of red light, but her mind does nothing with the input; it is totally preoccupied with the question of how she should go on. Marinville and Wyler are in the kitchen, she’s sure of that, but is the killer brat in there with them? She glances doubtfully toward the TV flicker again. No sound, but maybe autistic children watch it with the sound off.

  She has to be sure, that’s the thing. There are probably just a couple of rounds left in the.30-.06… and they likely won’t give her a chance to pull the trigger more than once or twice, anyway. She wishes the voice would speak up again, tell her what to do.

  And then it does.

  Across the street, on the cement path between the Carvers” front door and the sidewalk,

  Cynthia has seen Cammie go into the Wyler house. Her eyes widen. Before she can say anything, Steve nudges her sharply. She looks at him and sees he’s got a finger to his lips. In his other hand he’s got a knife from the Carvers” kitchen rack.

  “Come on,” he murmurs.

  “You’re not going to use that, are you?”

  “I hope I don’t have to,” he says. “Are you coming?”

  She nods and follows. As they step off the curb and into Tak’s version of the Old West, a confusion of shrieks and shouts commences from inside the Wyler house. Get out of him, Cynthia hears, something like that, anyway, then more stuff she can’t even begin to decipher. Most or all of it seems to be coming from the Wyler woman, although she hears a scream from Cammie Reed (“Put it down'? Is that what she’s screaming?) and a hoarse cry that likely comes from Marinville. Then, two whipcracking rifle shots and a scream of either agony or extreme horror. Cynthia can’t tell which, isn’t sure she wants to know.

  Nevertheless, by the time she and Steve reach the far side of Desperation’s Main Street, both of them are running.

  Seth’s Place/Seth’s Time

  Now. It all comes down to now.

  He turns away from the shelf with the PlaySkool phone on it. Built into the other side of the passage’s wall is a small control panel, very similar to the ones built into the nav-pits of the Power Wagons. Jutting from it is a row of seven switches, each turned up to the position marked ON. Above each switch, a small green telltale glows in the gloom. This panel wasn’t here when Seth reached the end of the passage, only the pictures of his two families, the picture of Mr Symes, and the telephone. But this is Seth’s place, Seth’s time, and it’s like the pockets in his shorts: he can add pretty much whatever he wants to add, and whenever he wants to do it.

  Seth reaches toward the panel with a hand that trembles slightly. In the movies and on TV, the characters never seem afraid, and when Paw Cartwright has to act to save the Ponderosa, he always knows just what to do. Lucas McCain, Rowdy Yates, and Sheriff Streeter are never unsure of themselves. But Seth is. Plenty unsure. The end of the game is now, and he’s terrified of making an irrevocable mistake. For now he still knows what’s going on upstairs (this is how he thinks of Tak’s world now, as upstairs), but if he turns these switches-

  There’s no time to reconsider, though. Audrey is in the bath room. Audrey is rushing for the little boy sitting on the toilet with his underpants dangling from one grimy ankle, the little boy who is-for the time being, at least-just a wax dummy with lungs that breathe and a heart that beats, a human machine deserted by both its ghosts. She kneels before him and sweeps him into her arms. She begins to cover his face with kisses, unmindful of anything else-the room, the circumstances, Marinville standing behind her in the doorway.

  And now Seth senses the red swarm that is Tak flashing across the kitchen like a stream of supernatural bees, and it has to be now, yes, has to be.

  His hand reaches the panel and he begins snapping the switches down. The green telltales above them wink out; red telltales below them wink on. With each flicked switch, his knowledge of what’s going on upstairs dims out more. He is not turning off the senses of the wax dummy his aunt is now covering with kisses, he’s not sure he could do that if he wanted to, but he can block them off… and he is.

  Finally there’s nothing left but his mind. It will have to be enough. With his hand pressing down on the switches he has just turned so they cannot fly back up, Seth reaches out to Aunt Audrey, praying he can still find her in all this dark.

  The Wyler House/Regulator Time

  At the instant Audrey sweeps the boy off the toilet and into her arms, something blasts by Johnny Marinville, something which feels simultaneously as hot as a fever and as cold as frog-jelly. His head fills with a swirl of garish red light that makes him think of honkytonk neon and country music. When it clears, his ability to see everything and sequence even overlapping events has been restored. It’s as if the thing that passed him administered some sort of electroshock. That, and
a sickly flush across his thoughts that feels like slime.

  As Audrey rises with Seth in her arms (the Underoos slip off his foot and he is entirely naked now), Johnny sees that swirl of avid light swing around the boy’s head like a corona around the head of baby Jesus in an old painting. Then, like a swarm of termites, it settles, coating his cheeks, his ears, his sweaty hair. It crams into his open glazed eyes and lights his teeth scarlet.

  “No!” Audrey shrieks. “Get out of him! Get OUT, you bastard!”

  She leaps for the bathroom door with the boy in her arms. Seth’s head seems to be burning. Johnny reaches out-for her? Seth? both? He doesn’t know and it doesn’t matter because she bursts past him into the filthy kitchen, shrieking and clawing at the dancing swarm of light around Seth’s head. Her hand slides uselessly through the red stuff. As she and the boy pass him, Johnny’s head is filled with a horrible machine-like buzzing sound. He screams, clapping his hands to his ears. It is only for a moment, as Audrey bolts by, but it is a moment which seems all but eternal, just the same. How can there be any boy left under that sound? he wonders. How in God’s name can there be anything left under that sound?

  “Let him GO!” she shrieks. “Let him GO, cocksucker, let him GO!”

  Then the kitchen doorway is no longer empty. Cammie Reed is standing there with the.30-.06 in her hands.

  Tak’s Place/Tak’s Time

  When it reaches Seth and finds all its usual ways in blocked, its rather indulgent respect for the boy’s abilities breaks down for the first time since it sensed Seth’s extraordinary mind passing by and called out to that mind with all of its strength. What replaces the indulgence first is realization; anger follows in its wake.

  It has been wrong, it seems-Seth has known all along that Tak can re-enter, even during evacuation. Has known and has successfully hidden that knowledge, the way a clever gambler will hide an extra ace up his sleeve. In the end, though, not even that matters; it will get in anyway. There is no way the boy can keep it out. There will be no seige here; Seth Garin is his home now, and he will not be held out of his home.