The Regulators (richard bachman)

by Stephen King

  As the woman carries Seth’s body past the writer and into the kitchen, Tak assaults the boy’s eyes, the ports of entry closest to that wonderful brain, and begins shoving at them like a burly cop shoving at a door being held by a weak man. It knows a moment of utterly uncharacteristic panic when at first nothing happens-it is like pushing against a brick wall. Then the bricks begin to soften and give way. Triumph flashes up in its cold mind. Soon… another moment… two, at most…

  Seth’s Place/Seth’s Time

  Under his hand, two of the switches are moving up. Even when he redoubles his efforts to hold them down, he can feel them straining under his hand like something alive. The telltales are still red, but not for much longer. Tak is right about one thing: however the two of them may stack up in the matter of wits, Seth is no longer a match for Tak’s raw strength. Once, maybe. At the beginning. No more. Still, if he’s right, that may not matter. If he is right, and if he is lucky.

  He glances toward the PlaySkool phone-what Aunt Audrey calls the Tak-phone-longingly for a moment, but of course he doesn’t need a telephone, not really; it was always just a symbol, something concrete to help the telepathy flow more easily between them, as the switches and telltales are simply tools to help him concentrate his will. And telepathy isn’t Seth’s concern here, anyway. If telepathy were all the two of them could share, this would be futile.

  Under his hand, the switches move stubbornly upward, driven by Tak’s primitive force, Tak’s primitive will. For a moment the red telltales beneath them flicker out and the green ones above them flicker on. Seth feels a terrible machine-like buzzing in his head, trying to overwhelm his thoughts; for a moment his inner vision is blurred by swirling crimson light in which embers flick and stutter.

  Seth pushes the switches down with all his strength. The green lights go off. The red ones come back on. For the moment, anyway.

  The time is now, there is only one down-card left in the game, and now Seth Garin turns it up.

  The Wyler House/Johnny’s Time

  In a way it is like being caught in another barrage from the regulators, only this time what Johnny feels cutting past him are thoughts instead of bullets. But weren’t they always thoughts, really?

  The first one goes to Cammie Reed, standing in the kitchen doorway with the gun in her hands:

  –Now! Do it now!

  The second goes to Audrey Wyler, who recoils as if slapped and suddenly stops clawing at the spectral red miasma around Seth’s head:

  –Now, Aunt Audrey! The time is now!

  And the last one, a terrible inhuman roar that fills Johnny’s head and wipes out everything else:

  -NO, YOU LITTLE BASTARD! NO, YOU CAN’T!

  No, Johnny thinks, he can’t. He never could. Then he raises his eyes to Cammie Reed’s

  face. Her eyes bulge from their sockets; her lips are stretched in a dry and terrible smile. But she can.

  Tak’s Place/Tak’s Time

  It has perhaps three seconds, while the woman with the gun calls out, to realize it has been outplayed. How it has been outplayed. A few seconds of incredulity in which to wonder how that could happen after all the millennia it has spent trapped in the dark, thinking and planning. Then, even as it begins to realize that Seth isn’t really inside the body it has been trying to re-enter, the woman in the doorway opens fire.

  The Wyler House/Johnny’s Time

  Cammie is no longer sure that she is acting of her own free will, but it doesn’t matter; if her will was free, this is still what she would do. The Wyler woma n is holding the monstrous brat curled naked in her arms like an oversized baby, its shanks painted with shit instead of blood and afterbirth. Holding it like a shield. Cammie could almost laugh at the idea.

  “Put it down!” Cammie screams, but instead of putting Seth down, Audrey lifts him higher against her breast, as if in defiance. Still smiling her dry, vicious smile, her eyes appearing to start out of their sockets (Johnny will tell himself later that was an optical illusion, surely it was), Cammie centers the rifle on the child.

  “No Cammie don’t!” Johnny cries, and then she fires. The first shot takes eight-year-old Seth Garin, who is still shivering helplessly with bowel cramps, in the temple and blows the top of his head off, spattering his aunt’s weirdly serene face with blood, hair, and bits of scalp. The slug drives all the way through his brain and exits the far side of his skull, where it enters Audrey’s left breast. By then, however, it is too spent to do any further serious damage. It’s the second shot that does that, catching her in the throat as she staggers back under the force of the first one. Her butt hits the overloaded kitchen table. Piled dishes fall off and shatter on the floor.

  She turns to Johnny, the bloody child still in her arms, and Johnny sees an astonishing thing: she looks happy. Cammie screams as Audrey goes down, perhaps in triumph, perhaps in horror at what she has done.

  Audrey somehow keeps her grip on Seth even as she dies. And as she falls, the uneasy red thing rises from the remains of Seth’s face like a caul. It swirls in the air above the filthy linoleum, bright scarlet bits orbiting each other like electrons.

  Johnny and Cammie Reed face each other through this redness for he doesn’t know how long-they are frozen, it seems-until someone screams: “Oh shit! Oh shit, why’d you do that, you numb bitch?”

  Johnny sees Steve and Cynthia come forward through the darkened living room until they’re standing just behind Cammie. Cynthia springs forward, grabs Cammie by the arm, and shakes her. “Bitch! Stupid murdering cunt, what did you think, this would bring your kid back? Didn’t you ever go to fucking SCHOOL?”

  Cammie seems not to hear. She is looking at the spinning red thing with wide, unblinking eyes, as if hypnotized… and it is looking back at her. Johnny doesn’t know how he can know this, but he does. And suddenly it launches itself at her like a comet… or Snake Hunter’s red Tracker Arrow on a Power Wagon assault.

  He had asked Audrey if Tak could jump to someone else. She had said no, she was sure it coudn’t, but what if she had been wrong? What if Tak had fooled her? If it had-

  “Look out!” he shouts at Cynthia. “Get back from her!”

  Little Miss Tu-Tone Hair only stares at him, uncomprehending, from over Cammie’s shoulder. Steve doesn’t look as if he understands, either, but he reacts to the unmistakable panic in Johnny’s voice and yanks Cynthia back.

  The swirling red specks divide in two. For a moment Tak’s exterior form looks to Johnny like the sort of fork they used to toast marshmallows on back when they were teenagers, sitting around driftwood beach fires at Savin Rock. Only the tines of this fork plunge themselves directly into Cammie Reed’s bulging eyes.

  They glow a brilliant red, swell even further outward, then explode from their sockets. The grin on Cammie’s face stretches so wide that her lips split open and begin to stream blood down her chin. The eyeless thing staggers forward, dropping the empty rifle and holding its hands out. They clutch blindly at the air. Johnny thinks he has never seen anything in his life so simultaneously weak and predatory.

  “Tak,” it proclaims in a guttural voice which is nothing like Cammie’s. “Tak ah wan! Tak ah lah! Mi him en tow!” There is a pause. Then, in a grinding, inhuman voice Johnny knows he will hear in nightmares until the end of his life, the eyeless thing says: “I know you all. I’ll find you all. I’ll hunt you down. Tak! Mi him, en tow!”

  Its skull begins to swell outward then; what remains of Cammie’s head begins to look like a monster mushroom cap. Johnny hears a tearing sound like ripping paper and realizes it is the scant flesh over her skull pulling apart. The clotted sockets of her eyes stretch out long, turning into slits; the swelling skull pulls her nose up into a snout with long, lozenge-shaped nostrils.

  So, Johnny thinks, Audrey was right. Only Seth was able to contain it. Seth or someone like Seth. Someone very special. Because-

  As if to finish this thought in the most spectacular fashion imaginable, Cammie Reed’s head explode
s. Hot fragments, some still pulsing with life, pelt Johnny’s face.

  Screaming, revolted to the point of madness, Johnny wipes at the stuff, using his thumbs to try and clear his eyes. Faintly, the way you hear things when someone at the other end of the line temporarily puts the phone down, he can hear Steve and Cynthia, also screaming. Then blinding light fills up the room, as sudden and shocking as an unexpected slap. Johnny thinks at first it’s an explosion of some sort-the end for all of them. But as his eyes (still burning and salty and full of Cammie’s blood) begin to adjust, he sees it’s not an explosion but daylight-the strong, hazy light of a summer afternoon. Thunder rumbles off in the east, a throaty sound with no real threat in it. The storm is over; it has lit up the Hobart place (that much he’s sure of, because he can smell the smoke), then moved on to play hob with someone else’s life. There’s another sound, though, the one they waited for so eagerly and in vain earlier: the tangled wail of sirens. Police, fire engines, ambulances, maybe the fucking National Guard, for all Johnny knows. Or cares. The sound of sirens doesn’t interest him much at this point.

  The storm is over.

  Johnny thinks that regulator time is over, too.

  He sits down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs and looks at the bodies of Audrey and Seth. They remind him of the senseless dead at Jonestown, in Guyana. Her arms are still around him, and his-poor thin wasted arms, unscratched from a single game of tag or follow-the-leader with other boys his own age-are around her neck.

  Johnny wipes blood and bone and lumps of brain from his cheeks with his slick palms and begins to cry.

  From Audrey Wyler’s journal:

  October 31, 1995

  Journal again. Never thought I’d resume, probably never will on a full-time basis, but it can be so comforting.

  Seth came to me this morning amp; managed to ask, with a combination of words amp; grunts, if he could go out trick or treating, like the other kids in the neighborhood. There was no sign of Tak, and when he is just Seth, I find him all but impossible to refuse. It isn’t hard for me to remember that Seth’s not the one, responsible for everything that’s happened; it’s quite easy, in fact. In a way, that’s what makes it all so horrible. It seals off all my exits. I don’t suppose anyone else could understand what I mean. I’m not sure I understand myself. But I feel it. Oh God, do I.

  I told him okay, I’d take him trick or treating, it would be fun. I said I could probably put together a little cowboy outfit for him, if he’d like that, but if he wanted to go as a MotoKop, we’d have to go out to Payless and buy a store outfit.

  He was shaking his head before I’d even finished, big back-and-forth shakes. He didn’t want to go as a cowboy, and not as a MotoKop, either. There was something in the piolence of his headshaking that was close to horror. He might be getting tired of cowboys and police from the future, I think.

  I wonder if the other one knows?

  Anyway, I asked him what he did want to dress as, if not a cowboy or Snake Hunter or Major Pike. He waved one arm amp; jumped around the room. After a little bit of this pantomime, I realized he was pretending to be in a swordfight.

  “A pirate'?” I asked, amp; his whole face lit up in his sweet Seth Garin smile.

  “Pi-ut!” he said, then tried harder and said it right: “Pi-rate!”

  So I found an old silk kerchief to tie over his head, and gave him a clip-on gold hoop to put in his ear, and unearthed an old pair of Herb’s pj’s for pantaloons. I used elastic bands on the bottoms amp; they belled out just right. With a mascara beard, an eyeliner scar, and an old toy sword (borrowed from Cammie Reed next door, a golden oldie from her twins” younger years), he looked quite fierce. And, when I took him out around four o’clock to “do” our block of Poplar Street and two blocks of Hyacinth, he looked no different than all the other goblins and witches and Barneys and pirates. When we got back he spread out all his candy on the living-room floor (he hasn’t been in the den to watch TV all day, Tak must be sleeping deeply, I wish the bastard was dead but that’s too much to hope for) amp; gloated over it as if it really were a pirate’s treasure. Then he hugged me and kissed my neck. So happy.

  Fuck you, Tak. Fuck you.

  Fuck you and I hope you die.

  March 16, 1996

  The last week has been horror, complete horror, Tak in charge almost completely and goosestepping. Dishes everywhere, glasses filmed with chocolate milk, the house a mess. Ants! Christ, ants in March! It looks like a house where lunatics live, and is that so wrong?

  My nipples on fire from all the pinching it’s made me do. I know why, of course; it’s angry because it can’t do what it wants with its version of Cassandra Styles. I feed it, I buy the new MotoKops toys it wants (and the comic books, of course, which I must read to it because Seth doesn’t have that skill for it to draw on), but for that other purpose I am useless.

  As much of the week as I could, I spent with Jan.

  Then, today, while I was trying to clean up a little (mostly I’m too exhausted and dispirited to even try), I broke my mother’s favorite plate, the one with the Currier amp; Ives sledding scene on it. Tak had nothing to do with it; I picked it up off the mantel-shelf in the dining room where I keep it displayed, wanting to give it a little dusting, amp; it simply slipped through my stupid fingers amp; broke on the floor. At first I thought my heart had broken with it. It wasn’t the plate, of course, as much as I have always liked it. All at once it was like it was my life I was looking at instead of an old china plate smashed to shit on the dining-room floor. Cheap symbolism, Peter Jackson from across the street would probably say. Cheap amp; sentimental. Probably true, but when we are in pain we are rarely creative.

  I got a plastic garbage bag from the kitchen amp; began picking up the pieces, sobbing all the while I did it. I didn’t even hear the TV go off-Tak amp; Seth had been having a MotoKofs 2200 festival most of the day-but then a, shadow fell over me and I looked up and there he was.

  At first I thought it was Tak-Seth has been mostly gone this last week, or lying low-but then I saw the eyes. They both use the same set, you’d think they wouldn’t change, couldn’t, but they do. Seth’s are lighter, and have a range of emotion Tak can never manage.

  “I broke my mother’s plate,” I said. “It was all I had of her, and it slipped through my fingers.”

  It came on worse than ever then. I put my arms around my knees, put my face down on them, amp; just cried. Seth came closer, put his own arms around my neck, amp; hugged me. Something wonderful happened when he did. I can’t explain it, exactly, but it was so good that it made visiting with Jan at Mohonk seem ordinary in comparison. Tak can make me feel bad-terrible, in fact, as if the whole world is nothing but a ball of mud squirming with worms just like me. Tak likes it when I feel bad. He licks those bad feelings right off my skin, like a kid with a candy cane. I know he does.

  This was the opposite… and more. My tears stopped, amp; my feelings of sadness were replaced by such a sense of joy and… not ecstasy, exactly, but like that. Serenity amp; optimism all mixed together, as if everything couldn’t help but turn out all right. As if everything was already all right, amp; I just couldn’t see that in my ordinary state of mind. I was filled up, the way good food fills you up when you’re hungry. I was renewed.

  Seth did that. He did it when he hugged me. And he did it, I think (know), in exactly the same way Tak makes me feel the bad things and the sad things. Maroon is what I call it. When Tak wants to, it makes me feel maroon. But it can only do it because it has Seth’s power to draw on. amp; I think that when Seth took away my sadness this afternoon, he was able to do it because he had Tak’s power to draw on. And I don’t think Tak knew he was doing that, or it would have made him stop.

  Here’s something that’s never occurred to me until today: Seth may be stronger than Tak knows.

  Much stronger.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Johnny didn’t know how long he sat in the kitchen chair, head down, body
racked with sobs as strong as shivers, tears pouring out of his eyes, before he felt a soft hand on the back of his neck and looked up to see the girl from the market, the one with the schizo hair. Steve was no longer with her. Johnny looked through the living-room picture window-the angle was just right for him to be able to do that from where he was-and saw him standing on the dispirited grass of the Wyler lawn and looking down the street. Some of the sirens had died as the vehicles they belonged to reached the street and stopped; others were still whooping like Indians as they approached.

  “You okay, Mr Marinville?”

  “Yeah.” He tried to say more, but what came out instead of words was a hitching half-sob. He wiped snot off his nose with the back of his hand and then tried to smile. “Cynthia, isn’t it?”

  “Cynthia, yep.”

  “And I’m Johnny. Just Johnny.”

  “Kay.” She was looking down at the entwined bodies. Audrey’s head was thrown back, her eyes closed, her face as still and serene as a deathniask. And the boy still looked like an infant in his fragile nakedness. One that had died in childbirth.

  “Look at them,” Cynthia said softly. “His arms around her neck like that. He must have loved her such a lot.”

  “He killed her,” Johnny said flatly.

  “That can’t be!”

  He sympathized with the shock on her face, but it didn’t change what he knew. “It is, though. He called Cammie in on her.”

  “Called her in? What do you mean, called her in?”

  He nodded as if she had offered agreement. “He did it the same way COs in the bush used to call in artillery fire on enemy Villes in Vietnam. He called her in on both of them, in fact. I heard him do it.” He tapped his temple.

  “You’re saying Seth told Cammie to kill them?”

  He nodded.