The Regulators

by Stephen King

  I said I understood, and I think she understood that I needed to have a little talk with her man before we picked up our marbles and called it a game. Not that I didn’t need to collect myself some, too! My legs felt like rubber. I went over to the powder magazine and sat down beside Mr. Garin.

  “If we report this, there’s going to be a lot of trouble,” I said. “For the company and also for me. I probably wouldn’t end up fired, but I could.”

  “I’m not going to say a word,” he said, raising his head out of his hands and looking me in the eye. And I don’t think anyone will hold it against him if I add that he was crying. Any father would have cried, I think, after a scare like that. I was near tears myself, and I hadn’t ever set eyes on the lot of them until that day. Every time I thought of the tender way Garin looked, slipping that tiny boot on his boy’s foot, it raised a lump in my throat.

  “I would appreciate that no end,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “I don’t know how to thank you. I don’t even know how to start.”

  I was starting to feel a little embarrassed by then. “Come on, now,” I said. “We did it together, and all’s well that ends well.”

  I helped him to his feet, and we walked back toward the others. We were most of the way there when he put his hand on my arm and stopped me.

  “You shouldn’t let anybody go in there,” he said. “Not even if the engineers say they can shore it up. There’s something wrong in there.”

  “I know there is,” I said. “I felt it.” I thought of the grin on the boy’s face—even now, all these months later, it makes me shiver to think of it—and almost told him that his boy had felt it, too. Then I decided not to. What good would it have done?

  “If it were up to me,” he said, “I’d toss a charge from your powder magazine in there and bring the whole thing down. It’s a grave. Let the dead rest in it.”

  “Not a bad idea,” I said, and God must have thought so, too, because He did it on His own not two weeks later. There was an explosion in there. And, so far as I know, no cause ever assigned.

  Garin kind of laughed and shook his head and said, “Two hours on the road and I won’t even be able to believe this happened.”

  I told him maybe that was just as well.

  “But one thing I won’t forget,” he said, “is that Seth talked today. Not just words or phrases only his family could understand, either. He actually talked. You don’t know how amazing that is, but we do.” He waved at his family, who had got back into the ATV by then. “And if he can do it once, he can do it again.” And maybe he has, I hope so. I’d like to know, too. I’m curious about that boy, and in more ways than one. When I gave him his little action figure woman, he smiled at me and kissed my cheek. A sweet kiss, too, though I seemed to catch a little whiff of the mine on his skin . . . that campfire smell, like ashes and meat and cold coffee.

  We “bid a fond adieu” to the China Pit and I drove them back to the office trailer, where their car was. So far as I could see, no one took much notice of us, even though I drove right down Main Street. Desperation on a Sunday afternoon in the hot weather is like a ghost-town.

  I remember standing there at the bottom of the trailer steps, waving as they drove off toward the awful thing Garin’s sister said was waiting for them at the end of their trip—a senseless drive-by shooting. All of them waved back . . . except for Seth, that is. Whatever was in that mine, I think we were fortunate to get out . . . and for him to then be the only survivor of that shooting in San Jose! It’s almost as if he’s got what they call “a charmed life,” isn’t it?

  As I said, I dreamed about it in Peru—mostly the skull-dream, and of shining my light into that crack—but days I didn’t think of it much until I read Audrey Wyler’s letter, the one that was tacked on the bulletin board when I came back from Peru. Sally lost the envelope, but said it just came addressed to “The Mining Company of Desperation.” Reading it reinforced my belief that something happened out there when Seth was underhill (as we say in the business), something it might be wrong to lie about, but I did lie. How could I not, when I didn’t even know what that something was?

  Still, that grin.

  That grin.

  He was a nice little boy, and I am so glad he wasn’t killed in the Rattlesnake (and he could have been; we all could have been) or with the rest of them in San Jose, but . . .

  The grin didn’t seem to belong to the boy at all. I wish I could say better, but that’s as close as I can come.

  I want to set down one more thing. You may remember me saying that Seth talked about “the old mine,” but that I didn’t connect that with the Rattlesnake shaft because hardly anyone in town knew about it, let alone through-travelers from Ohio. Well, I started thinking about what he d said again while I was standing there, watching the dust from their car settle. That, and how he ran across the office trailer, right to the pictures of the China Pit on the bulletin board, like he’d been there a thousand times before. Like he knew. I had an idea then, and that cold feeling came with it. I went back inside to look at the pictures, knowing it was the only way I could lay that feeling to rest.

  There were six in all, aerial photos the company had commissioned in the spring. I got the little magnifier off my keychain and ran it over them, one after another. My gut was rolling, telling me what I was going to see even before I saw it. The aerials were taken long before the blast-pattern that uncovered the Rattlesnake shaft, so there was no sign of it in them. Except there was. Remember me writing that he tapped his way around the pictures, saying “Here it is, here’s what I want to see, here’s the mine”? We thought he was talking about the pit-mine, because that’s what the pictures were of. But with my magnifying loupe I could see the prints his fingers had left on the shiny surface of the photos. Every one was on the south face, where we uncovered the shaft. That was what he was telling us he wanted to see, not the pit-mine but the shaft-mine the pictures didn’t even show. I know how crazy that must sound, but I have never doubted it. He knew it was there. To me, the marks of his finger on the photographs—not just one photo but all six—prove it. I know it wouldn’t stand up in a court of law, but that doesn’t change what I know. It’s like something in that mine sensed him going past on the highway and called out to him. And of all my questions, there’s maybe only one that really matters: Is Seth Garin all right? I would write Garin’s sister and ask, have once or twice actually picked up a pen to do that, and then I remember that I lied, and a lie is hard for me to admit. Also, do I really want to prod a sleeping dog that might turn out to have big teeth? I don’t think so, but . . .

  There should be more to say, maybe, but there isn’t. It all comes back to the grin.

  I don’t like the way he grinned.

  This is my true statement of what happened; God, if only I knew what it was I saw!

  CHAPTER 11

  1

  Old Doc was the first one over the Carvers’ back fence. He surprised them all (including himself) by going up easily, needing only a single boost in the butt from Johnny to get him started. He paused at the top for a second or two, setting his hands to his liking. To Brad Josephson he looked like a skinny monkey in the moonlight. He dropped. There was a soft grunt from the other side of the stakes.

  “You all right, Doc?” Audrey asked.

  “Yeah,” Billingsley said. “Right as rain. Aren’t I, Susi?”

  “Sure,” Susi Geller agreed nervously. Then, through the fence: “Mrs. Wyler, is that you? Where did you come from?”

  “That doesn’t matter right now. We need to—”

  “What happened out there? Is everyone all right? My mom is having a cow. A large one.”

  Is everyone all right. That was a question Brad didn’t want to answer. No one else did either, from the look.

  “Mrs. Reed?” Johnny asked. “David next, then you?”

  Cammie gave him her dry stare, then turned back to Dave. She murmured in his ear once more, stroking his hair
as she did so. Dave listened with a troubled expression, then murmured back, just loud enough for Brad to hear, “I don’t want to.” She murmured again, more vehemently this time. Brad caught the words your brother near the end. This time Dave reached up, grabbed the top of the fence, and swung himself smoothly over to the other side. He did it, so far as Brad could see, with no expression save that look of faint unease on his face. Cammie went next, Audrey and Cynthia boosting. As she gained the top, Dave’s hands rose to meet her. Cammie slipped into them, making no effort to keep hold of the fence for safety’s sake. Brad had an idea that at this point she might have actually welcomed a fall. Maybe even a broken neck. Why did you send us out here, Ma? the kid had shouted, perhaps intuiting that his own eagerness to go—and Jim’s—would never serve as a mitigating circumstance in her mind. Cammie would always blame herself, and he would probably always be willing to let her.

  “Brad?” That was a voice he was glad to hear, although he rarely heard it sound so soft and worried. “You there, hon?”

  “I’m here, Bee.”

  “You okay?”

  “Fine. Listen, Bee, and don’t lose your cool. Jim Reed is dead. So’s Entragian from down the street.”

  There was a gasp, and then Susi Geller was screaming Jim’s name over and over again. To Brad, who was emotionally as well as physically exhausted, those screams roused annoyance rather than pity . . . and the fear that they might draw something even less pleasant than the big cat or the coyote with the human fingers.

  “Susi?” The alarmed voice of Kim Geller from the house. Then she was screaming, too, the sound seeming to cut the moonlit air like a sharp whirling blade: “Soooooo-zeeeeee! Sooooo-zeeeeee!”

  “Shut up!” Johnny yelled. “Jesus, Kim, SHUT UP!”

  For a wonder she did, but the girl went on and on, shrieking like a misbegotten fifth-act Juliet.

  “Dear God,” Audrey muttered. She put her palms over her ears and ran her fingers into her hair.

  “Bee,” Brad said through the fence, “shut that Chicken Little up. I don’t care how.”

  “JIM!” Susi screamed, “OHHHH GAWWWD, JIM! OH GAWWWD NO! OH—”

  There was a slap. The screams were cut off almost at once. Then:

  “You can’t hit my daughter! You can’t hit my daughter, you bitch, I don’t care what ideas you’ve gotten from . . . from affirmative action! You fat black bitch!”

  “Oh fuck me til I cry,” Cynthia said. She clutched her own double-dyed hair and squeezed her eyes shut like a kid who doesn’t want to watch the final few minutes of a scary movie.

  Brad kept his open and held his breath, waiting for Bee to go nuclear. Instead, Bee ignored the woman, calling softly through the fence: “Are you sending his body over, Bradley?” She sounded completely composed, for which Brad was completely thankful.

  “Yeah. You and his mother and his brother catch hold of him when we do.”

  “We will.” Still cool as a cucumber fresh out of the crock.

  “Kim?” Brad called through the stakes of the fence. “Mrs. Geller? Why don’t you go on in the house, ma’am?”

  “Yes!” Kim said pleasantly. “I think that’s a good idea. We’ll just go in the house, won’t we, Susi? Some cold water on our faces will make us feel better.”

  There were footfalls. The snuffling began to diminish, which was good. Then the coyotes began to howl again, which was bad. Brad looked over his shoulder and saw chips of moving silver light in the tangled darkness of the greenbelt. Eyes.

  “We’ve got to hurry,” Cynthia said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Audrey said.

  Brad thought: That’s what I’m afraid of. He turned and took hold of Jim Reed’s shoulders. He could smell, very faintly, the shampoo and aftershave the kid had used that morning. Probably he’d been thinking about the girls as he applied them. Johnny took a nervous look behind them—at those moving chips of light, Brad assumed—then moved down Jim’s body until he had one arm around the dead boy’s waist and the other supporting his butt. Audrey and Cynthia took his legs.

  “Ready?” Johnny asked.

  They nodded.

  “On three, then. One . . . two . . . three.”

  They raised the body like a quartet doing a team bench-lift. For one horrible moment Brad thought his back, having supported a shamefully large gut for the last ten years or so, was going to lock up on him. Then they had Jim’s body up to the top of the fence. The dead boy’s arms hung out to either side, the posture of a circus acrobat inviting applause at the climax of a fabulous stunt. His open palms were full of moonlight.

  Beside Brad, Johnny sounded on the verge of cardiac arrest. Jim’s head lolled limply backward on his neck. A drop of half-congealed blood fell and struck Brad’s cheek. It made him think of mint jelly, for some mad reason, and his stomach clenched like a hand in a slick glove.

  “Help us!” Cynthia gasped. “For Christ’s sake, someone—”

  Hands appeared, hovered above the blunt fence-stakes for a moment, then broke apart into fingers which grasped Jim’s shirt and the waistband of his shorts. Just as Brad knew he couldn’t hold the body another second (never until now had he really understood the concept of dead weight), it was pulled away from him. There was a meaty thud, and from a little distance away (the Carvers’ back porch was Brad’s guess), Susi Geller voiced another brief scream.

  Johnny looked at him, and Brad was almost convinced the man was smiling. “Sounds like they dropped him,” Johnny said in a low voice. He wiped an arm across his sweaty face, then lowered it. The smile—if it had been there in the first place—was gone.

  “Whoops,” Brad said.

  “Yeah. Whoops-a-fuckin-daisy.”

  “Hey, Doc!” Cynthia cried in a low voice. “Catch! Don’t worry, safety’s on!” She lifted the .30–.06, stock first, standing on her toes in order to tip it over the fence.

  “Got it,” Billingsley said. Then, in a lower voice: “That woman and her idiot daughter finally went in the house.”

  Cynthia climbed the fence and swung easily over the top. Audrey needed a push and a hand on her hip for balance, and then she was over, as well. Steve went next, using Brad’s and Johnny’s interlaced hands as a stirrup and then sitting up top a moment, waiting for the pain in his clawed shoulders to subside a little. When it had, he swung over the fence to the Carvers’ side and pushed off, jumping rather than trying to let himself down.

  “I can’t get over there,” Johnny said. “No way. If there was a ladder in the garage—”

  Wh-wh-whooooo! . . . Wh-wh-whooooooo!

  From almost directly behind them. The two men jumped into each other’s arms as unselfconsciously as small children. Brad turned his head and saw shapes closing in. Each was hulked up behind a pair of those glinting semi-circular moonchips.

  “Cynthia!” Johnny shouted. “Shoot the gun!”

  When her voice came back it sounded scared and uncertain. “You mean come back over the—”

  “No! No! Just shoot it into the sky!”

  She triggered the .30–.06 twice, the blasts whipcracking the air. The bitter tang of gunsmoke seeped through the fence-stakes. The shapes coming toward them through the greenbelt paused. Didn’t draw back, but at least paused.

  “You still pooped, John?” Brad asked softly.

  Johnny was looking back at the shapes in the shadows. There was a strange, shaky smile on his mouth. “Nah,” he said. “Got my second wind. I . . . what do you think you’re doing?”

  “What’s it look like?” Brad asked. He was down on his hands and knees at the base of the fence. “Hurry up, Daddy-O.”

  Johnny stepped onto his back. “Jesus,” he said, “I feel like the President of South Africa.”

  Brad didn’t seem to understand at first. When he did, he began giggling. His back hurt like hell. Johnny Marinville seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds, the man’s heels felt as if they were leaving divots in Brad’s outraged spine, but the giggles pour
ed out of him just the same; he couldn’t help it. Here was a white American intellectual with a prep-school education of excruciating correctness—a writer who had once partied with the Panthers at Lenny Bernstein’s pad—using a black man as a footstool. If it wasn’t a liberal’s idea of hell, Brad had never heard of one. He thought of moaning and crying, “Hurry up, massa, you killin dis po boy!” and his giggles became outright laughter. He was terrified of losing a section of his tender upturned ass to one of the slinkers back there in the woods, but he laughed anyway. I’ll give him a chorus of “Old Black Joe,” he thought, and howled like a coyote himself. Tears poured from his eyes. He pounded his fist on the ground.

  “Brad, what’s wrong?” Johnny whispered from above him.

  “Never mind!” he said, still giggling. “Just get off my back! Holy shit, what you got on those shoes? Cleats?”

  Then, blessedly, the weight was gone. There were grunting sounds as Johnny struggled to get his leg over the fence. Brad got up, rode through a scary moment when his back again seemed about to lock, then got one meaty shoulder planted under Johnny’s ass. A moment later he could hear another grunt of effort and a muffled cry from Johnny as he came down.

  Which left him, all alone and with no footstool.

  Brad eyed the top of the fence and thought it looked about ninety feet high. Then he glanced behind him and saw the shapes on the move again, tightening around him in a collapsing crescent.

  He seized two of the stakes, and as he did, something snarled behind him. Underbrush rattled. He looked back over his shoulder and saw a creature that looked more like a wild boar than a coyote . . . except what it really looked like was a badly made child’s drawing, nothing more than a hurried scribble, really, that had somehow come to life. Its legs were all of different lengths and ended in blunt clubs unlike either paws or fingers. Its tail seemed to jut up from the middle of its back. Its eyes were blank silver circles. Its nose was a pig-pug. Only its teeth seemed really real, huge croggled things which spouted from either side of the beast’s mouth.