“Hell, he’s getting to play them out in virtual reality,” Steve said. “That’s what you’re describing-the ultimate virtual reality game.”

“There’s another possibility,” Audrey said. “Seth may not be able to stop Tak anymore, or even put a brake on it. Tak may have tied Seth up, gagged him, and thrown him in a closet.”

“If Seth could stop Tak, would he?” Johnny asked. “What do you think? What do you feel?”

“I’m sure he would,” Audrey said at once. “I’m sure that, somewhere inside, he’s terrified. Like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, when the brooms got out of control?”

“Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say Tak is driving this thing that’s happening to us all by himself now. Why is he driving it? What does he get out of it? What’s the payback?”

“It,” she said, her mouth drawing down in what Johnny thought was an entirely unconscious moue of disgust. “It, not he.”

“All right, it. To Seth, Poplar Street is the Force Corridor, the houses are cocoons, and we’re the evil aliens that live inside them. It’s a shootout at the OK Corral, interstellar version. But what does Tak get out of it?”

“Something all its own,” Audrey said, and Johnny suddenly thought of an old Beatles lyric: What do you see when you turn out the light? I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine. “The fantasies were always strictly for Seth, I think-they’re the way Tak taps into Seth’s powers, which complement its own. Tak… I think Tak just likes what happens to us.”

Silence in the room.

“Likes it,” Belinda said at last. She spoke in a low, considering tone. “What do you mean, likes it?”

When we hurt. We give something off when we hurt, some thing it… it licks up, like ice-cream. And when we die, that’s even better. It doesn’t have to lick then. It can just gobble the stuff down whole.”

“So we’re dinner,” Cynthia said. “That’s what you’re saying, right? To Seth we’re a video game and to this Tak… we’re dinner.”

We’re more,” Audrey said. “Think what food is to us: the source of energy. Tak is making, that’s what Seth told me. Making and building. I don’t think the desert where Seth picked it up was its home; I think that was its prison. Its home is what it may ultimately try to re-create here.”

“On the basis of what I’ve seen so far, I don’t even want to visit its neighborhood, let alone live there,” Steve said. “In fact-”

“Quit it,” Cammie said. Her voice was harsh and impatient. “How do we kill him? You said there might be a way.”

Audrey looked at her, shocked. “You’re not killing Seth,” she said. “No one is killing Seth. You can get that thought right out of your mind. He’s just a harmless little boy-”

Cammie leaped at her and grabbed her shoulders. It was done before Johnny could even think of moving. Her thumbs sank deeply into the tops of Audrey’s breasts. “Tell it to Jimmy!” she shouted into Audrey’s stunned face. “He’s dead, my son is dead, so don’t you go crying to me about how harmless your nephew is! Don’t you dare! That thing is in him like a tapeworm in a horse’s belly! In him! And if it won’t come out-”

“But it will!” Audrey said. She began to regain control of herself, and her voice grew calm again. “It will.”

Cammie relaxed her grip slowly, and her look was not trusting. “How? When?”

Before Audrey could reply, Kim said: “I hear a humming sound. Like electric motors.” Her voice rose, trembling. “Oh God, they’re coming back.”

Now Johnny could hear it, too. It was the same electric humming he had heard before, only it was louder now. Somehow more vital. More threatening. He looked toward the cellar door and decided it was probably too late to try for the basement, especially with two sleeping children in the pantry.

“Down,” he said. “Everyone down on the floor.” He saw Cynthia take Steve’s hand and point through the open pantry door with a finger which wasn’t quite steady. Steve nodded and they went in to cover the children’s bodies with their own.

The humming swelled.

“Pray,” Belinda said suddenly. “Everybody pray.”

Johnny was too frightened to pray.

From Audrey Wyler’s journal February 7, 1996

Have noticed something interesting, what may be a key way of deciding which of them is in charge, at any given time, of the body they share. They both care a great deal for the Cassandra Styles action figure, but Tak’s caring is almost completely sexual. It strokes her plastic breasts amp; rubs her plastic legs. Two days ago I saw it sitting on the stairs amp; licking the crotch of her blue shorts amp; sporting an erection (hard to miss, when all it wears most days are underpants). And, of course, the fact that it wants me to wear Cassie-type clothes and has gotten me to dye my hair Cassie Styles red (horrible shade, too) has not escaped me.

Seth, on the other hand… when it’s Seth, sometimes he just hugs the figure of Cassie, or strokes its stiff red hair, or kisses its cheek. He is pretending it’s his mother. I don’t know how I know that, but I do.

Must stop now. Crying again.

As on their previous run, the vans appear like phantoms, only this time it’s not mist from which they appear but blowing desert dust that shines like lame in the glow of Old Mr Cowpoke Moon.

Cassie’s pink Dream Floater comes first, with Candy behind the wheel in his pinned-back cavalry hat and Cassie herself sitting beside him. On the roof, the Valentine-heart radar dish is turning briskly. Like a sign on a whorehouse roof, Johnny Marinville might have said had he seen it, but he does not; he is lying on the floor of the Carvers” kitchen next to Old Doc with his hands laced together over the top of his head and his eyes squeezed tightly shut; on his face is the expression of a man who expects Armageddon, and soon.

Dream Floater does not swing on to Desperation’s dusty Main Street from Hyacinth; Hyacinth is gone. Where it once ran there is now nothing but hardpan desert, almost featureless… as the sky overhead in this direction is almost completely starless. It’s as if, when His eye turned south to the wastes beyond this tiny huddle of buildings, the Creator had lost most of His divine inspiration.

Dream Floater’s stubby wings are extended, its wheels partially retracted; it cuts through the air about three feet above the wheel-ruts of the street. Its engine pulses steadily. As it passes The Lady Day on the corner, its firing port irises open. Laura DeMott from The Regulators leans out. In her delicate white hands is not her Derringer but a shotgun. Just a double-barrelled shotgun, but when she fires it, the report is as loud as a detonating backpack missile. The report is followed by a short, high-pitched wail, and then the front of the saloon explodes. The batwing doors fly up, for a moment fluttering madly and looking like real wings. There’s an instant of flicker across what remains of the saloon’s front, almost like a heatwave, and for that one instant, anyone who had been looking would have seen the E-Z Stop behind the burning Lady Day like a ghost-building or a double exposure, the convenience store also half-demolished and also burning.

Behind Dream Floater comes Tracker Arrow, and behind Tracker Arrow comes Freedom. Freedom’s polarized windshield slides down again. Major Pike, a good Canopalean gone bad, is currently behind the wheel of Bounty’s van, but the Confederate uniform and pinned-back hat are gone (Candy has the hat on now; the regulators are always trading accessories and bits of uniform back and forth, it’s part of the fun). The Major is wearing his iridescent MotoKops uniform again, and without a hat, his blond Mohawk “do shows to good advantage. Sitting beside him in the nav-pit is the grizzled trapper type Johnny spotted earlier: Sergeant Mathis, Jeb Murdock’s chief aide after the beating and capture of Captain Candell.