The Regulators

by Stephen King

  Beyond the fridge is a half-open door, casting its own wedge of light out onto the filthy linoleum. The door’s angle isn’t too severe for Johnny to be able to read the sign on it:

  EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS

  AFTER USING THE LAVATORY

  (AND CUSTOMERS SHOULD)

  “Seth!” Audrey stage-whispers, dropping Johnny’s hand and rushing for the bathroom door. Johnny follows her.

  From behind them, spots of dancing red light stream out of the den’s arched doorway like meteor debris; they flash across the dark living room toward the kitchen. Even as they do, Cammie Reed steps through the door from outside. She has the gun in both hands now, and as she stands looking around the dim living room, she slips her right index finger inside the trigger-guard and nestles it against the trigger. She is hesitant, not sure where to go next. Her eye is drawn to the flicker of reflected TV-light from the den, her ear by the sound of people moving in the kitchen. The voice in her head, the one demanding revenge for Jimmy, has fallen silent, and she isn’t sure which way to go. Her eye registers a brief strobe of red light, but her mind does nothing with the input; it is totally preoccupied with the question of how she should go on. Marinville and Wyler are in the kitchen, she’s sure of that, but is the killer brat in there with them? She glances doubtfully toward the TV flicker again. No sound, but maybe autistic children watch it with the sound off.

  She has to be sure, that’s the thing. There are probably just a couple of rounds left in the .30–06 . . . and they likely won’t give her a chance to pull the trigger more than once or twice, anyway. She wishes the voice would speak up again, tell her what to do.

  And then it does.

  Across the street, on the cement path between the Carvers’ front door and the sidewalk, Cynthia has seen Cammie go into the Wyler house. Her eyes widen. Before she can say anything, Steve nudges her sharply. She looks at him and sees he’s got a finger to his lips. In his other hand he’s got a knife from the Carvers’ kitchen rack.

  “Come on,” he murmurs.

  “You’re not going to use that, are you?”

  “I hope I don’t have to,” he says. “Are you coming?”

  She nods and follows. As they step off the curb and into Tak’s version of the Old West, a confusion of shrieks and shouts commences from inside the Wyler house. Get out of him, Cynthia hears, something like that, anyway, then more stuff she can’t even begin to decipher. Most or all of it seems to be coming from the Wyler woman, although she hears a scream from Cammie Reed (“Put it down”? Is that what she’s screaming?) and a hoarse cry that likely comes from Marinville. Then, two whipcracking rifle shots and a scream of either agony or extreme horror. Cynthia can’t tell which, isn’t sure she wants to know.

  Nevertheless, by the time she and Steve reach the far side of Desperation’s Main Street, both of them are running.

  Seth’s Place / Seth’s Time

  Now. It all comes down to now.

  He turns away from the shelf with the PlaySkool phone on it. Built into the other side of the passage’s wall is a small control panel, very similar to the ones built into the nav-pits of the Power Wagons. Jutting from it is a row of seven switches, each turned up to the position marked ON. Above each switch, a small green telltale glows in the gloom. This panel wasn’t here when Seth reached the end of the passage, only the pictures of his two families, the picture of Mr. Symes, and the telephone. But this is Seth’s place, Seth’s time, and it’s like the pockets in his shorts: he can add pretty much whatever he wants to add, and whenever he wants to do it.

  Seth reaches toward the panel with a hand that trembles slightly. In the movies and on TV, the characters never seem afraid, and when Paw Cartwright has to act to save the Ponderosa, he always knows just what to do. Lucas McCain, Rowdy Yates, and Sheriff Streeter are never unsure of themselves. But Seth is. Plenty unsure. The end of the game is now, and he’s terrified of making an irrevocable mistake. For now he still knows what’s going on upstairs (this is how he thinks of Tak’s world now, as upstairs), but if he turns these switches—

  There’s no time to reconsider, though. Audrey is in the bathroom. Audrey is rushing for the little boy sitting on the toilet with his underpants dangling from one grimy ankle, the little boy who is—for the time being, at least—just a wax dummy with lungs that breathe and a heart that beats, a human machine deserted by both its ghosts. She kneels before him and sweeps him into her arms. She begins to cover his face with kisses, unmindful of anything else—the room, the circumstances, Marinville standing behind her in the doorway.

  And now Seth senses the red swarm that is Tak flashing across the kitchen like a stream of supernatural bees, and it has to be now, yes, has to be.

  His hand reaches the panel and he begins snapping the switches down. The green telltales above them wink out; red telltales below them wink on. With each flicked switch, his knowledge of what’s going on upstairs dims out more. He is not turning off the senses of the wax dummy his aunt is now covering with kisses, he’s not sure he could do that if he wanted to, but he can block them off . . . and he is.

  Finally there’s nothing left but his mind. It will have to be enough. With his hand pressing down on the switches he has just turned so they cannot fly back up, Seth reaches out to Aunt Audrey, praying he can still find her in all this dark.

  The Wyler House / Regulator Time

  At the instant Audrey sweeps the boy off the toilet and into her arms, something blasts by Johnny Marinville, something which feels simultaneously as hot as a fever and as cold as frog-jelly. His head fills with a swirl of garish red light that makes him think of honkytonk neon and country music. When it clears, his ability to see everything and sequence even overlapping events has been restored. It’s as if the thing that passed him administered some sort of electroshock. That, and a sickly flush across his thoughts that feels like slime.

  As Audrey rises with Seth in her arms (the Underoos slip off his foot and he is entirely naked now), Johnny sees that swirl of avid light swing around the boy’s head like a corona around the head of baby Jesus in an old painting. Then, like a swarm of termites, it settles, coating his cheeks, his ears, his sweaty hair. It crams into his open glazed eyes and lights his teeth scarlet.

  “No!” Audrey shrieks. “Get out of him! Get OUT, you bastard!”

  She leaps for the bathroom door with the boy in her arms. Seth’s head seems to be burning. Johnny reaches out—for her? Seth? both? He doesn’t know and it doesn’t matter because she bursts past him into the filthy kitchen, shrieking and clawing at the dancing swarm of light around Seth’s head. Her hand slides uselessly through the red stuff. As she and the boy pass him, Johnny’s head is filled with a horrible machinelike buzzing sound. He screams, clapping his hands to his ears. It is only for a moment, as Audrey bolts by, but it is a moment which seems all but eternal, just the same. How can there be any boy left under that sound? he wonders. How in God’s name can there be anything left under that sound?

  “Let him GO!” she shrieks. “Let him GO, cocksucker, let him GO!”

  Then the kitchen doorway is no longer empty. Cammie Reed is standing there with the .30–.06 in her hands.

  Tak’s Place / Tak’s Time

  When it reaches Seth and finds all its usual ways in blocked, its rather indulgent respect for the boy’s abilities breaks down for the first time since it sensed Seth’s extraordinary mind passing by and called out to that mind with all of its strength. What replaces the indulgence first is realization; anger follows on in its wake.

  It has been wrong, it seems—Seth has known all along that Tak can re-enter, even during evacuation. Has known and has successfully hidden that knowledge, the way a clever gambler will hide an extra ace up his sleeve. In the end, though, not even that matters; it will get in anyway. There is no way the boy can keep it out. There will be no siege here; Seth Garin is his home now, and he will not be held out of his home.

  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 showing 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 machinelike 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:

  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 woman 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 couldn’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 explodes. 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.