The Regulators Read online

  Symes, a geologist-engineer for something called the Deep Earth Mining Corporation, had seen the Garin family on July 24th of 1994, the same day Audrey’s brother had sent her the exuberant postcard. Symes had assured her that nothing very interesting had happened, that he had simply taken the Garins to the edge of the open-pit mine (actually going in would have been against MSHA regulations, his letter said) and given them a little history lecture before sending them on their way again. It was a good story, both boring and plausible. Audrey wouldn’t have questioned a word of it under ordinary circumstances, but she knew something Mr. Allen Symes of Desperation, Nevada, had not: that Bill had denied stopping at all. Bill said they had simply hurried on their merry way, because he wanted to be sure of getting to Carson City by dark. And if Bill had lied, wasn’t it possible—even likely—that Symes had also lied?

  Lied about what? Lied about what?

  Stop, Daddy, go back, Seth want to see mountain.

  Why did you lie to me, Bill?

  That was a question she thought she could answer: Bill had lied because Seth had made him lie. She thought that Seth had probably been standing right there by the phone during her conversation with Bill, watching the creature it no longer regarded as its father with mud-brown eyes that belonged under a log in some swamp. Bill had been allowed to say only what Tak wanted him to say, like a person who speaks with a gun pointed at his head. He had told his clumsy lies and laughed the unnatural cocktail-party laugh, ha-ha-ha.

  The thing in Seth had eventually eaten Herb alive and now it was trying to eat her, but she was apparently different from Herb in one crucial way: she had a place to go. She had discovered it perhaps by accident, perhaps with help from Seth—the real Seth—and she could only pray that Tak would never discover what she was doing or where she was going. That the monster would never follow her to her sanctuary.

  In May of 1982, when she was twenty-one and still Audrey Garin, she and her roommate (who was also her best friend, then and ever), Janice Goodlin, had spent a wonderful weekend—very likely the most perfect weekend of Audrey’s life—at Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York. The trip was a present from Jan’s father, who had won some sort of cash award from his company for selling and had been promoted two or three rungs up the corporate ladder in the bargain. If his intention had been to share some of his happiness, he had succeeded splendidly with the two young women.

  On the Saturday of that magic weekend they had taken a picnic lunch (packed by the kitchen in a wonderful old-fashioned wicker hamper) and walked for hours, hunting for the perfect spot in which to settle. Usually when you’re doing that you don’t find it, but they had gotten lucky. It was a beautiful and half-wild upland meadow, rife with buttercups and daisies and wild roses. It hummed with bees; white butterflies danced on the warm air like enchanted confetti which never fell to earth. At one end of this meadow was an eccentric little cupola-shaped thing—Janice said it was called a folly, and they were spotted all over the Mohonk grounds. It was roofed to provide shade and shelter, but open on every side to provide air and view.

  The two women had eaten enormously, talked prodigiously, and at three different points laughed so hard that tears ran down their faces. Audrey didn’t think she had ever laughed with quite that same heartiness since. She never forgot the long, clear summer light of that afternoon, or the dancing white shreds of the butterflies.

  This was the place she returned to when Tak was fully out and fully in command of Seth. This was where she hid, with a Janice who was still Goodlin instead of Conroy, a Janice who was still young. Sometimes she would tell Janice about Seth—how he had come to stay, and how neither she nor Herb had seen or suspected (at least at first) what was inside Seth, a thing that was being very still, watching them and husbanding its strength and waiting for the right time to come out. Sometimes on these occasions she would tell Jan how much she missed Herb and how terrified she was . . . how she felt caught, like a fly in a web or a coyote in a leghold trap.

  But that kind of talk felt dangerous, and she tried to stay away from it. Mostly she just replayed the sweet inconsequentialities of that long-ago day when Reagan had still been in his first term and there had been real vinyl records in the record stores. Stuff like whether or not Ray Soames, Jan’s current boyfriend, would be a considerate lover (pig-selfish, Jan had reported matter-of-factly three weeks later, just before bidding adieu to Ray’s sultry good looks forever), and what sorts of jobs they would have, and how many kids they would have, and who, in their circle of friends, would be the most successful.

  Running through it all, large but unspoken—perhaps they hadn’t dared to speak of it, for fear of ruining it—was their joy in the day, in the unremarkable good health of young women, and their love for one another. It was these things and not her current troubles that Audrey concentrated on when she felt Tak digging into her with its unseen but exquisitely painful teeth, trying to batten on her and feed from her. It was to that day’s love and brightness that she fled, and so far it had given her succor and shelter.

  So far, she was alive.

  More important, so far she was still she.

  In the meadow, the confusion and darkness melted away and everything stood clear: the splintery gray poles which held up the folly’s roof, each casting its thin precise shadow; the table (equally splintered) at which they sat on opposing wooden benches, a table that was deeply carved with initials, mostly those of lovers; the picnic basket, now set aside on the board floor, still open but really finished for the day, the utensils and plastic food-containers neatly packed for the trip back to the hotel. She could see the golden highlights in Jan’s hair, and a loose thread on the left shoulder of her blouse. She heard every cry of every bird.

  Only one thing was different from the way it had really been. On the table where the picnic hamper had rested until they had repacked it and set it aside, there was a red plastic telephone. Audrey had had one exactly like it at the age of five, using it to hold long and deliriously nonsensical chats with an invisible playmate named Melissa Sweetheart.

  On some visits to the folly in the meadow, the word PLAYSKOOL was stamped on the phone’s handset. At other times (usually on days that had been particularly horrible, and there were a lot more of those lately), she would see a shorter and much more ominous word stamped there: the name of the vampire.

  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 awhile, 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 the 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 planning something . . . if it could be said to plan, or even to think at all. Perhaps change was too mild a word. It felt like things were going to turn upside down and inside out, the way they did in an earthquake. And if they did, when they did—

  “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 color 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 and a narrow, often ungenerous point of view. “Come again soon. We’ll talk about Sergeant Pepper, maybe.”

  “All right.”

  Audrey stepped out of the folly, looking downhill toward the rock wall with the wild pink roses growing along it, watching the white butterflies pirouette. Thunder rumbled across a hazy blue sky. God was sending a shower in from the Catskills, and no surprise; nothing as perfect as this afternoon could be allowed to last for long. Nothing gold can stay . . . which poet had said that? Frost? It didn’t matter. Janice Goodlin Conroy had found out it was true as well as poetic. So, in time, had Audrey Garin.

  She turned back to look for the stormclouds, but instead of spring thunderheads over the Catskills she saw her own living room, dingy and in need of cleaning, dust under every piece of furniture, every glass surface bleared with fingerprints, cooking grease, spilled soda, or all three. The air smelled of sweat and heat, but mostly it smelled of canned spaghetti and old fried hamburger, which was all her strange boarder seemed to want to eat.

  She was back.

  She was cold, too. She looked down at herself and saw she was wearing nothing but shorts and a pair of sneakers. Blue shorts, of course, because blue shorts were what Cassandra Styles wore most of the time, and Cassie was Seth’s favorite MotoKop. Her hands, wrists, ankles, and calves were all filthy. The plain white sleeveless blouse she had put on that morning (before it took control of her; she had been in and out since then, but mostly Tak had been in charge, running her like his private electric train set) was now tossed indifferently on the couch. Her nipples throbbed.

  He’s been making me pinch myself again, she thought as she walked across to the sofa and picked up the blouse. Why? Because Cary Ripton, the kid who delivered the Shopper, had seen her without her top on? Yes, maybe. Probably. It was hazy, as always, but she was pretty sure that was it. Tak had been angry . . . the punishment had started . . . and away she had gone, to those fabulous days of old. As soon as he’d gone back into the den to watch his goddam movie again.

  The pinching scared her a lot. The pain had been worse on other occasions, not to mention the crappy little humiliations—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 flickering 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 were split vertically. Poked onto 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 favorites: 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—bo
th 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. Maybe she could get a meal in peace; that was enough for her. The Regulators had about twenty minutes left to run in this, its nine-billionth showing at casa Wyler, and Audrey thought she could count on at least that long. Time for a sandwich and maybe a few lines in the journal Tak might well kill her for keeping—if Tak ever found out about it, that was.

  Escape. Stop thinking about it and do it, Aud.

  She stopped halfway back across the living room, the salami and lettuce in the fridge temporarily forgotten. That voice was so clear that for a moment it didn’t seem to be coming from her mind at all. For one moment she was convinced that Janice had somehow followed her back from 1982, was actually in the room with her. But when she turned, wide-eyed, there was no one. Only the voices from the TV, Rory Calhoun telling John Payne that the time for talking was done, John Payne saying “Well now, if that’s the way you want it.” Very soon Karen Steele would run between them, screaming at them to stop it, just stop it. She would be killed by a bullet from Rory Calhoun’s gun, one meant for John Payne, and then the final shootout would begin. KA-POW and KA-BAM all the way home.

  No one here but her and her dead friends on the TV.

  Open the front door and just run like hell.

  How many times had she considered it? But there was Seth to think about; he was as much a hostage as she was, and maybe more. Autistic he might be, but he was still a human being. She didn’t like to think what Tak might do to him, if it was crossed. And Seth was still there, all of him—she knew that. Parasites feed on their hosts but don’t kill them . . . unless it’s on purpose. Because they’re pissed off, maybe.