The Regulators (richard bachman) Read online

  “The other one, maybe. You might have heard him… it-”

  Johnny shook his head. “Nope. It was Seth, not Tak. I recognized his voice.” He paused, looking down at the dead child, then looked back up at Cynthia. “Even in my head, he was a mouth-breather.”

  The houses had returned to what they really were, Steve saw, but that didn’t mean they had returned to normal. They had clearly taken one hell of a pasting. The Hobart place was no longer burning, there was that much; the downpour had tamped the fire to a kind of sullen fume, like a volcano after the main eruption. The old veterinarian’s bungalow was more fully involved, with flames leaping from the windows and black, charry patches spreading along the eaves and bubbling the paint. Between them, the house of Peter and Mary Jackson was a tumbled, shot-up ruin.

  There were two fire engines on the street and more coming. Already hoses lay tangled on the lawns over there, looking like fat beige pythons. There were police cars, too. Three were parked in front of Entragian’s place, where the newsboy’s body (and that of Hannibal, couldn’t forget him) lay under plastic which was now puddled with water from the downpour. The cruisers” red lights swung and flashed. Two more cruisers were parked at the top of the street, blocking the Bear Street end off entirely.

  That won’t do any good if they come back, Steve thought. If the regulators come back, boys, they’ll blow your little roadblock right over the nearest ice cap.

  Except they wouldn’t be back. That was what the sunlight meant, what the retreating thunder meant. It had all really happened-Steve only had to look at the burning houses and those that were all shot up to know that-but it had happened in some weird fistula of time that these cops would never know about, or want to know about. He looked down at his watch and wasn’t surprised to see it was running again. 5:18, it said, and he guessed that was as close to the real time as his Timex was ever going to get.

  He looked back down the street at the cops. Some of them had their guns out; some did not. Not one of them looked clear on how he or she was supposed to be behaving. Steve could understand that. They were looking at a shooting gallery, after all, and probably no one on the surrounding blocks had even heard any shots. Thunder, maybe, but shotguns that sounded like mortar shells? Nope.

  They saw him on the lawn, and one of them beckoned. At the same time, two others were gesturing for him to go back into the Wyler house. They looked like a pretty mindfucked posse, all in all, and Steve didn’t blame them. Something had gone on here, they could see that, but what?

  You’ll be a while figuring it out, Steve thought, but you’ll get something you can live with in the end. You guys always do. Whether it’s a crashed flying saucer in Rosewell, New Mexico, an empty ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, or a suburban Ohio street turned into a fire-corridor, you always come up with something. You guys’re never going to catch anyone, I’d bet my far-from-considerable life savings on that, and you won’t believe a single goddam word any of us say (in fact, the less we say the easier it’ll probably be for us), but in the end you’ll find something that will allow you to re-holster your guns… and to sleep at night. And you know what I say to that?

  NO PROBLEM,

  that’s what!

  NO… FUCKING… PROBLEM!

  One of the cops was now pointing a bullhorn at him. Steve wasn’t crazy about that, but better a bullhorn than a gun, he supposed.

  “ARE YOU A HOSTAGE?” Mr Bullhorn boomed. “ARE YOU A HOSTAGE-TAKER?”

  Steve grinned, cupped his hands around his mouth and called back, “I’m a Libra! Friendly with strangers, loves good conversation!”

  A pause. Mr Bullhorn conferred with several of his mates. There was a good deal of head-shaking, then he turned back to Steve and raised the bullhorn again. “WE DIDN’T GET THAT, WILL YOU REPEAT?”

  Steve didn’t. He’d spent most of his life in show-business-well, sort of-and he knew how easy it was to run a joke into the ground. More cops were arriving; whole convoys of black-and-whites with strobing red light-bars. More fire engines. Two ambulances. What looked like an armoured assault vehicle. The cops were only letting the fire trucks through, at least for the time being, although thanks to the rain, neither blaze looked like much shakes to Steve.

  Across from where he stood, Dave Reed and Susi Geller came out of the Carver house, arms around each other. They stepped carefully over the dead girl on the stoop and walked down to the sidewalk. Behind them came Brad and Belinda Josephson, shepherding the Carver children and shielding them from the sight of their father, still lying in his driveway and still as dead as ever. Behind them came Tom Billingsley. He had what looked like a linen tablecloth in his gnarled hands. This he shook out over the dead girl’s corpse, taking no notice of the man down the block who was trying to hail him with the bullhorn.

  Where’s my mom?” Dave called to Steve. His eyes looked simultaneously wild and exhausted. “Have you seen my mom?”

  And Steve Ames, whose life’s motto had been

  NULLO IMPEDIMENTUM,

  hadn’t the slightest idea of what to say.

  Johnny got into the living room, walking on tiptoe and stepping over as much of the mess Cammie had left as he could. Once past that obstacle, he started for the door with more speed and confidence. He had brought his tears under control, at least for the time being, and he supposed that was good. He didn’t know why, but he supposed it was. He looked at the clock standing on the mantel. It said 5:21, and that felt about right.

  Cynthia caught his arm. He turned to her, feeling a bit impatient. Through the picture window he could see the other Poplar Street survivors clustering in the middle of the street. So far they were ignoring the hails from the cops, who didn’t seem to know if they should come up or hold their positions, and Johnny wanted to join his neighbors before they made up their minds one way or the other.

  “Is it gone?” she asked. “Tak-that red thing-whatever it was-is it gone?”

  He looked back into the kitchen. It hurt him almost physically to do this, but he managed. There was plenty of red in there-the walls were painted with it, the ceiling too, for that matter-but no sign of the glowing, embery thing that had tried to find a safe harbor for itself in Cammie Reed’s head after its primary host had been killed.

  “Did it die when she did?” The girl was looking at him with pleading eyes. “Say it did, okay? Make me feel good and say it did.”

  “It must have,” Johnny said. “If it hadn’t, I imagine it would be trying one of us on for size right now.”

  She let out air in a gusty rush. “Yeah. That makes sense.”

  So it did, but Johnny didn’t believe it. Not for a second. I know you all, it had said. I’ll find you all. I’ll hunt you down. Maybe it would. And maybe it would have a slightly more strenuous fight on its hands than it had bargained for, should it try. In any case, there was no sense in worrying about it now.

  Tak ah wan! Tak ah lah! Mi him en tow!

  What is it?” Cynthia asked. What’s wrong?”

  What do you mean?”

  “You’re shivering.”

  Johnny smiled. “I guess a goose just walked over my grave.” He took her hand off his arm and folded his fingers through hers. “Come on. Let’s go out and see how everyone’s doing.”

  They were almost to the street and the others when Cynthia came to a stop. “Oh my God,” she said in a soft, strengthless voice. “Oh my God, look.”

  Johnny turned. The storm had moved on, but there was one isolated thunderhead just west of them. It hung over downtown Columbus, connected to Ohio by a gauzy umbilicus of rain, and it made the shape of a gigantic cowboy galloping on a storm-colored stallion. The horse’s grotesquely elongated snout pointed east, toward the Great Lakes; its tail stretched out long toward the prairies and deserts. The cowboy appeared to have his hat in one hand, perhaps waving it in a hooraw, and as Johnny watched, open-mouthed and transfixed, the man’s head flickered with lightning.

  “A ghost rider,” Brad
said. “Holy shit, a goddam ghost rider in the sky. Do you see it, Bee?”

  Cynthia moaned through the hand she’d pressed to her mouth. Looked up at the cloud-shape, eyes bulging, head shaking from side to side in a useless gesture of negation. The others were looking now, as well-not the firemen and not the cops, who would break out of their indecision soon and come on up here to join the block party, but the Poplar Street folk who had survived the regulators.

  Steve took Cynthia by her thin arms and drew her gently away from Johnny. “Stop it,” he said. “It can’t hurt us. It’s just a cloud and it can’t hurt us. It’s going away already. See?”

  It was true. The flank of the skyhorse was tearing open in some places, melting in others, letting the sun through in long, hazy rays. It was just a summer afternoon again, the very rooftree of summer, all watermelon and Kool-Aid and foul tips off the end of the bat.

  Steve glanced down the street and saw a police car begin rolling, very slowly, up the hill toward them, running over the tangled firehoses as it came. He looked back at Johnny. “Yo.”

  “Yo what?”

  “Did he commit suicide, that kid?”

  “I don’t know what else you’d call it,” Johnny said, but he supposed he knew why the hippie had asked; it hadn’t felt like suicide, somehow.

  The police cruiser stopped. The man who got out was wearing a khaki uniform which came equipped with roughly one ton of gold braid. His eyes, a very sharp blue, were almost lost in a complex webwork of wrinkles. His gun, a big one, was in his hand. He looked like someone Johnny had seen before, and after a moment it came to him: the late Ben Johnson, who had played saintly ranchers (usually with beautiful daughters) and satanic outlaws with equal grace and ability.

  “Someone want to tell me what in the name of Christ Jesus the Redeemer went on here?” he asked.

  No one replied, and after a moment Johnny Marinville realized they were all looking at him. He stepped forward, read the little plaque pinned to the pocket of the man’s crisp uniform blouse, and said: “Outlaws, Captain Richardson.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Outlaws. Regulators. Renegades from the wastes.”

  “My friend, if you see anything funny about this-”

  “I don’t, sir. No indeed. And it’s going to get even further from funny when you look in there.” Johnny pointed toward the Wyler house, and as he did suddenly thought of his guitar. It was like thinking about a glass of iced tea when you were hot and thirsty and tired. He thought of how nice it would be to sit on his porch step and strum and sing “The Ballad of Jesse James” in the key of D. That was the one that went, “Oh, Jesse had a wife to mourn for his life, three children they were brave”. He supposed his old Gibson might have a hole in it, his house looked pretty well trashed (looked as if it was no longer sitting exactly right on its foundations, for that matter), but on the other hand, it might be perfectly fine. Some of them had come through okay, after all.

  Johnny started in that direction, already hearing the song as it would come from under his hand and out of his mouth: “Oh, Robert Ford, Robert Ford, I wonder how you must feel? For you slept in Jesse’s bed, and you ate of Jesse’s bread, and you have laid Jesse James down in his grave.”

  “Hey!” the cop who looked like Ben Johnson called truculently. “Just where in the hell do you think you’re going?”

  “To sing a song about the good guys and the bad guys,” Johnny said. He put his head down and felt the hazy heat of the summer sun on his neck and kept walking.

  Letter from Mrs Patricia Allen to Katherine Anne Goodlowe, of Montpelier, Vermont

  June 19, 1986

  Dear Kathi,

  This is the most beautiful place in the whole world, I’m convinced of it. The honeymoon has been the sweetest nine days of my whole life, and the nights-! I was raised to believe that certain things you don’t talk about, so just let me say that my fears of discovering, too late to do anything about it, that “saving it for marriage” was the worst mistake of my life, have proved unfounded. I feel like a kid living in a candy factory!

  “Enough of that, though; I didn’t write to tell you about the new Mrs Allen’s sex life (superb though it may be), or even about the beauty of the Catskills. I’m writing because Tom’s downstairs for the nonce, shooting pool, and I know how much you love a “spooky story”. Especially if there’s an old hotel in it; you’re the only person I know who’s read not just one copy of The Shining to tatters, but two! If that was all, though, I probably would have just waited until Tom and I got back and then told you my tale face-to-face. But I might actually have some souvenirs of this particular “tale from beyond”, and that has caused me to pickup my pen on this beautiful full-moon evening.

  The Mountain House was opened in 1869, so it certainly qualifies as an old hotel, and although I don’t suppose it’s much like Stephen “King’s Overlook, it has its share of odd nooks and spooky corridors. It has its share of ghost stories, too, but the one I’m writing you about is something of an oddity-not a single turn-of-the-century lady or 1929 Stock Market-crash suicide in it. These two ghosts-that’s right, a pair, two for the price of one-have only been actively haunting for the last four years or so, as far as I have been able to find out, and I’ve been able to find out a fair amount. The staff is very helpful to visitors who want to do a little “ghost-hunting” on the side; adds to the ambience, I suppose!

  Anyway, there are over a hundred little shelters spotted around the grounds, eccentric wooden huts which the guests sometimes call “follies” and the Mohonk brochures call “gazebos”, you find these overlooking the choicest views. There’s one located at the north end of an upland meadow about three miles from the Mountain House itself. On the map this meadow has no name (I actually checked the topographical plans in the office this morning), but the help have a name for it; they call it Mother and Son Meadow.

  The ghosts of the eponymous mother and son were first spotted by guests in the summer of 1982. They are always seen around that particular gazebo, which is located at the top of a hill and looks down toward a rock wall which is pretty much buried in honeysuckle and wild roses. It isn’t the most spectacular place on the resort, but I think it may prove to be my favorite when I think back on my honeymoon in later years. There’s a serenity there which certainly beggars my powers of description. Some of it’s the scent of the flowers, and some is the sound of the bees, I suppose-a steady, sleepy drone. But never mind the bees and flowers and picturesque rock wall; if I know my Kath, it’s the ghosts she’ll be wanting. They aren’t spooky ones at all, so don’t get your hopes up on that score, but they are well-documented, at least. Adrian Givens, the concierge, told me they have been seen by perhaps three dozen guests since the sightings began, always in that same rough, locale. And although, none of the witnesses have known each other, making conspiracy or collusion seem unlikely, the descriptions are remarkably similar. The woman is described as being in her thirties, pretty, long legs, chestnut-brown hair. Her son (several witnesses have remarked, on the physical resemblance between the two) is small and very slim, probably about six. Brown hair, likee the woman, his face has been described as “intelligent”, “lively”, and even “beautiful”. And although they’ve been seen by a variety of people over a course of years, they are always described as wearing the same clothes: white running shorts, sleeveless blouse, and lowtop sneakers for her; basketball shorts, a tank-top, and cowboy boots for him. It’s the cowboy boots that give me the most pause, Kath! How likely is it that all those people would put a kid in such an unlikely combination as shorts and cowboy boots, if they were just making it up? The defense rests.

  Several people have theorized that they are real people, perhaps even a Mohonk employee and her child, because they’ve dropped an awful lot of empirical, lasting evidence for ghosts (who as a rule only leave a swirl of cold air or perhaps a little smear of ectoplasm behind, as I know you know). All sorts of little souvenirs have been found at that partic
ular gazebo. You know the weirdest? Half-eaten plates of Chef Boyardee spaghetti! Yes! I know it sounds crazy, laughable, but stop and think a minute. Aside from hot dogs, is there anything in the world that kids love more than the Chef’s pasta?

  There have been other things, as well-toys, a coloring book, a small silver makeup case that could well belong to a little boy’s pretty mom-but I admit it’s those half-eaten bowls of kid-style spaghetti that get to me. Whoever heard of a spaghetti-eating ghost? Or how “bout this? In the fall of 1984, a group of hikers found a kid’s plastic record-player in that gazebo, with a 45-rpm record on the spindle.-“strawberry Field’s Forever” by the Beatles, fitting, eh?

  My friend at the concierge’s desk, Adrian, smiles and nods when you suggest it’s all a put-up job, that ghosts don’t leave actual physical objects behind (or trample down the grass, or leave footprints in the gazebo). “Not ordinary ones, anyway,” he says, “but maybe these aren’t ordinary ghosts, for one thing, everyone who has seen them says they’re solid. You can’t look through them, like the ones in Ghostbusters. Maybe they’re not ghosts, have you thought of that? They might be real people who are living on a slightly different plane than ours.” I guess you don’t have to be a guest at Mohonk to get a little astral; just working there seems to do the trick.

  Adrian said that on at least three occasions a determined effort had been made to catch the mother and son by people who believed the whole thing was a hoax, and all three efforts had come to nothing (although once the searchers came back with another of those spaghetti-bowls). Also, he said-and I found this much more interesting-the apparitions had been showing up in and around that gazebo for four years. If they were realpeople, floaters or pranksters or both, how could the boy six or seven?

  Okay, this is the point where, in a traditional ghost story, I would reveal that I myself had. seen the ghosts or the “Phantom Rickshaw. Except I didn’t. I’ve still never seen a ghost in my whole life. But I can testify that there’s something very special about that meadow, something hushed and-don’t you dare laugh-almost holy. I didn’t see ghosts, but there is definitely a feeling of presence there. I went without Tom, and will freely grant that probably made me more susceptible, but even so, I knew then and know now that I had come to a very extraordinary place. And there was a pricking along the back of my neck a sensation-very clear and specific-of being watched.