Saying such an awful thing to Jan was apt to expel her from this place of safety as surely as Adam and Eve had been expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating the wrong apple, but that didn’t change how she felt. And if she managed to keep her mouth shut about Jan’s love-obsession, what would come next? Jan’s hundred and fiftieth assertion that, while Paul might well be the cutest Beatle, John was the only one she would seriously consider sleeping with? As though the Beatles had never broken up; as though John had never died.
Then, before she could say or do anything, a new sound intruded in this quiet place where there was usually only the hum of bees, the rickety-rick of crickets in the grass, and the murmuring voices of the two young women. It was a jingling sound, light but somehow demanding, like the handbell of an old-timey schoolmistress, calling the children in from recess and back to their studies.
She turned, realizing that Jan’s voice had ceased, and no wonder. Jan was gone. And on the splintery table, with its entwined initials stretching back almost to World War I, the Takphone was ringing.
For the first time in all her visits, the Tak-phone was ringing.
She walked toward it slowly-three little steps was all it took-and stared down at it, her heart beating hard. Part of her was screaming at her not to answer, that she knew now and had always known what that phone’s ringing would mean: that Seth’s demon had found her. But what else was there to do?
Run, a voice (perhaps it was the voice of her own demon) suggested coldly. Run out into this world, Audrey. Down the hill, scattering the butterflies before you, over the rock wall, and to the road on the other side. It goes to New Paltz, that road, and it doesn’t matter if you have to walk all day to get there and finish up with blisters on both heels. It’s a college town, and somewhere along Main Street there’ll be a window with a sign in it-WAITRESS WANTED. You can work your way up from there. Go on. You’re young, in your early-twenties again, you’re healthy, you’re not bad-looking, and none of this nightmare has happened yet.
She couldn’t do that… could she? None of this was real, after all. It was just a refuge in her mind.
Ring, ring, ring.
Light but demanding. Pick me up, it said. Pick me up, Audrey. Pick me up, podner. We got to ride on over to the Ponderosa, only this time you ain’t never coming back.
Ring, ring, ring.
She bent down suddenly and planted a hand on either side of the little red phone. She felt the dry wood under her palms, she felt the shapes of carved initials under her fingertips and understood that if she took a splinter in this world, she would be bleeding when she arrived back in the other one. Because this was real, it was, and she knew who had created it. Seth had made this haven for her, she was suddenly sure of it. He’d woven it out of her best memories and sweetest dreams, had given her a place to go when madness threatened, and if the fantasy was getting a little threadbare, like a carpet starting to show strings where the foot-traffic was the heaviest, that wasn’t his fault.
And she couldn’t leave him to fend for himself. Wouldn’t.
Audrey snatched up the handset of the phone. It was ridiculously small, child-sized, but she hardly noticed that. “Don’t you hurt him!” she shouted. “Don’t you hurt him, you monster! If you have to hurt someone, hurt m-”
“Aunt Audrey!” It was Seth’s voice, all right, but changed. There was no stuttering, no grasping for words, no lapses into gibberish, and although it was frightened, it did not seem to be in a panic. At least not yet. “Aunt Audrey, listen to me!”
“I am! Tell me!”
“Come back! You can get out of the house now! You can run! Tak’s in the woods… but the Power Wagons will be coming back! You have to get out before they do!”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be all right,” the phone-voice said, and Audrey thought she heard a lie in it. Unsureness, at least. You have to get to the others. But before you go…”
She listened to what he wanted her to do, and felt absurdly like laughing-why had she never thought of it herself? It was so simple! But…
“Can you hide it from Tak?” she asked.
“Yes. But you have to hurry!”
“What will we do? Even if I get to the others, what can we-”
“I can’t explain now, there’s no time. You have to trust me, Aunt Audrey! Come back now, and trust me! Come back! COME BACK!”
That last shriek was so loud that she tore the telephone away from her ear and took a step backward. There was an instant of perfect, vertiginous disorientation as she fell, and then she hit the floor with the side of her head. The blow was cushioned by the living-room carpet, but it sent a momentary flock of comets streaming across her vision anyway. She sat up, smelling old hamburger grease and the dank aroma of a house that hadn’t had a comprehensive cleaning or top-to-bottom airing in a year or more. She looked first at the chair she had fallen out of, then at the telephone clutched in her right hand. She must have grabbed it off the table at the same moment she had grabbed the Tak-phone in the dream.
Except it had been no dream, no hallucination.
She brought the telephone to her ear (this one was black, and of a size that fit her face) and listened. Nothing, of course. There was electricity in this house if nowhere else on the block-Tak had to have its TV-but at some point it had killed the phone.
Audrey got up, looked at the arch leading into the den, and knew what she would see if she peeked in: Seth in a trance, Tak entirely gone. But not into the movie this time, or not precisely. She heard confused cries and what was almost certainly a gunshot from across the street, and a line from Genesis occurred to her, something about the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters. The spirit of Tak, she had an idea, was also in motion, busy with its own affairs, and if she tried to get away now she probably would make it. But if she got to the others and told them what she knew, and if they believed, what might they do in order to escape the glamor in which they had been ensnared? What might they do to Seth in order to escape Tak?
He told me to go, she thought. I better trust him. But first-
First there was the thing he had told her to do before she left. Such a simple thing… but it might solve a lot. Everything, if they were very lucky. Audrey hurried into the kitchen, ignoring the cries and babble of voices from across the street. Now that her mind was made up, she was all but overwhelmed by a need to hurry, to get this last chore done before Tak turned its attention back to her.
Or before it sent Colonel Henry and his friends again.
When things went wrong, they went wrong with spectacular suddenness. Johnny asked himself later how much of the blame was his-again and again he asked it-and never got any clear answer. Certainly his attention had lapsed, although that had been before the shit actually hit the fan.
He had followed along behind the Reed twins as they headed through the woods toward the path, and had allowed his mind to drift off because the boys were moving with agonized slowness, trying not to rustle a single bush or snap a single twig. None of them had the slightest idea that they were not alone in the greenbelt; by the time Johnny and the twins entered it, Collie and Steve were on the path and well ahead of them, moving quietly south.
Johnny’s mind had gone back to Bill Harris’s horrified survey of Poplar Street on the day of his visit back in 1990, Bill at first saying Johnny couldn’t be serious, then, seeing he was, asking him what the deal was. And Johnny Marinville, who now chronicled the adventures of a cat who toted a fingerprint kit, had replied: The deal is I don’t want to die yet, and that means doing some personal editorial work. A second-draft Johnny Marinville, if you like. And I can do it. Because I have the desire, which is important, and because I have the tools, which is vital. You could say it’s just another version of what I do. I’m rewriting my life. Re-sculpting my life.