The Regulators

It was the Tak-phone, and it never rang. At least not yet. Audrey had an idea that if it ever did, it would be because Tak had found her safe and secret place. If it did, she was sure it would be the end of her. She might go on breathing and eating for a little while, as Herb had, but it would be the end of her, nevertheless.

She occasionally tried to make the Tak-phone disappear. It had occurred to her that if she could dispose of it, get rid of the damned thing, she could perhaps escape the creature on the Poplar Street end of her life for good. Yet she couldn’t alter the phone’s reality, no matter how hard she tried. It did disappear sometimes, but never while she was looking at it or thinking about it. She would be looking into Jan’s laughing face instead (Jan talking about how she sometimes wanted to leap into Ray Soames’s arms and suck his face off, and how sometimes-like when she caught him furtively picking his nose-she wished he would just crawl off into a corner and die), and then she would look back at the table and see that the surface was bare, the little red phone gone. That meant Tak was gone, at least for a while, that he was sleeping (dozing, at least) or had withdrawn. On many of these occasions she came back to find Seth perched on the toilet, looking at her with eyes that were dazed and strange but at least recognizably human. Tak apparently didn’t like to be around when its host moved his bowels. It was, in Audrey’s view, a strange and almost existential fastidiousness in such a relentlessly cruel creature.

She looked down now and saw the phone was gone.

She stood up, and Jan-that young Jan, still with both breasts intact-stopped her chatter at once and looked at Audrey with sad eyes. “So soon?”

“I’m sorry,” Audrey said, although she had no idea if it was soon or late. She’d know when she got back and looked at a clock, but while she was here, the whole concept of clocks seemed ridiculous. The meadow which lay upland of Mohonk in May of 1982 was a no-clock zone, blessedly tickless.

“Maybe someday you’ll be able to get rid of that damned phone for good and stay,” Jan said.

“Maybe. That would be nice.”

But would it? Would it really? She didn’t know. And in the meantime, she had a little boy to take care of. And something else: she wasn’t quite ready to give up yet, which was what coming to live permanently in May of 1982 would mean. And who knew how she would feel about the upland meadow if she could never leave it? Under those circumstances, her haven might become her hell.

Yet things were changing, and not for the better. For one thing Tak wasn’t weakening, as she had perhaps foolishly hoped it would with the passage of time; Tak was, if anything, getting stronger. The TV ran constantly, broadcasting the same tapes and recycled series programs (Bonanza, The Rifleman… and MotoKops 2200, of course) over and over. The people on the shows had all begun to sound like lunatic demagogues to her, cruel voices exhorting a restless mob to some unspeakable action. Something was going to happen, and soon. She was almost sure of it. Tak was pla

“Escape,” Jan said, and her eyes flashed. “Stop thinking about it and do it, Aud. Open the front door while Seth’s sleeping or shitting and run like hell. Get out of the house. Get the fuck away from that thing.”

It was the first time Janice had ever presumed to give her advice, and it shocked her. She had no idea at all how to answer. “I’ll… think about it.” “Better not think long, kiddo-I’ve got a feeling you’re almost out of time.” “I ought to go.” She took another flustered glance down at the table to make sure the PlaySkool phone was still gone. It was. “Yes. All right. Bye, Aud.” Jan’s voice seemed to come from a great distance now, and she was fading like a ghost. As the colour went out of her, she began to look more like the woman who was waiting for her to catch up, a woman with one breast-Tak was an artist when it came to those-but there was a clear sexual aspect to the nipple-pinching. And there was the way she was dressed… or undressed. More and more Tak was making her take her clothes off when it was angry with her, or just bored. As if it (or Seth, or both of them) sometimes saw her as its own private gatefold version of the tough but unremittingly wholesome Cassie Styles. Hey, kids, check out the tits on your favorite MotoKop!

She had almost no insight into the relationship between the host and the parasite, and that made her situation even worse. She thought Seth was a lot more interested in buckaroos than in breasts; he was only eight, after all. But how old was the thing inside him? And what did it want? There were possibilities, things far beyond pinching, that she didn’t want to consider. Although, not long before Herb died-

No. She wouldn’t think about that.

She slipped the blouse on and did up the buttons, glancing at the clock on the mantel as she did so. Only 4.15; Jan had been right to say so soon. But the weather had certainly changed, Catskills or no Catskills. Thunder rolled, lightning flashed, and rain pelted so furiously against the living room’s picture window that it looked like smoke.

The TV was playing in the den. The movie, of course. The horrible, hateful movie. They were on their fourth copy of The Regulators. Herb had brought the first one home from The Video Clip at the mall about a month before his suicide. And that old film had been, in some way she still didn’t understand, the final piece in the puzzle, the final number in the combination. It had freed Tak in some way… or focused it, the way a magnifying lens can focus light and turn it into fire. But how could Herb have known that would happen? How could either of them have known? At that time they had barely suspected Tak’s existence. It had been working on Herb, yes, she knew that now, but it had been doing so almost as silently as a leech that battens on a person below the waterline.

“You want to try me, Sheriff?” Rory Calhoun was gritting.

Murmuring under her breath, unaware she was doing it, Audrey said, “Why don’t we just stand down? Think this thing over?”

“Why don’t we just stand down?” John Payne said from the TV. Audrey could see light from the screen nickering against the curved arch between the two rooms. “Think this thing over?”

She tiptoed to the arch, tucking the blouse into the waistband of her blue shorts (one of roughly a dozen pairs, all dark blue with white piping on the side-seams, there was certainly no shortage of blue shorts here at casa Wyler), and looked in. Seth was on the couch, naked except for a grimy pair of MotoKops Underoos. The walls, which Herb had panelled himself in first-quality finished pine, had been stippled with spikes Seth had found in Herb’s garage workshop. Many of the pine boards had split vertically. Poked on to these badly pounded nails were pictures which Seth had cut from various magazines. They were mostly of cowboys, spacemen, and-of course-MotoKops. Interspersed among them was a scattering of Seth’s own drawings, mostly landscapes done with black felt-tip pens. On the coffee table in front of him were glasses scummed with the residue of Hershey’s chocolate milk, which was all Seth/Tak would drink, and jostling plates with half-eaten meals on them. All the meals were Seth’s favor ites: Chef Boyardee spaghetti and hamburger, Chef Boyardee Noodle-O’s and hamburger, and tomato soup with big chunks of hamburger rising out of the gelling liquid like baked Pacific atolls where generations of atomic bombs had been tested.

Seth’s eyes were open but blank-both he and Tak were gone, all right, maybe recharging the batteries, maybe sleeping open-eyed like a lizard on a hot rock, maybe just digging the goddamned movie in some deep and elemental way Audrey would never be able to comprehend. Or want to. The simple truth was that she didn’t give a shit where he-it-was.