The Tommyknockers Read online

  Do you believe that?

  Yeah, I do. I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns--you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns. If you don't believe it, I repeat: look at this shit.

  Over there was the water heater, a white cylindrical bulk to the right of the root-cellar door. It looked the same, but...

  Gardener went over, wanting to see how Bobbi had souped it up so radically.

  She's gone on a mad home-improvement kick. And the nuttiest thing is that she doesn't seem to have differentiated between things like fixing the water heater and customizing doorbells. New banister. Fresh dirt brought in and raked over the floor of the root cellar. Christ knows what else. No wonder she's exhausted. And just by the bye, Gard, where did Bobbi come by the know-how to do all this stuff? If it was a correspondence course from Popular Mechanix, she must have really crammed.

  His first dazed surprise at coming on this nutty workshop in Bobbi's basement was becoming deepening unease. It wasn't just the evidences of obsessive behavior that he saw along that table--heaps of equipment too neatly organized, all four corners of the instruction sheets tacked down--that bothered him. Nor was it the evidence of mania in Bobbi's apparent failure to discriminate between worthwhile renovations and nonsensical (apparently nonsensical, Gardener amended) ones.

  What gave Gardener the creeps was thinking about--trying to think about--the huge, the profligate amounts of energy that had been expended here. To have done just those things he had seen so far, Bobbi must have blazed like a torch. There were projects like the fluorescent lights which had already been completed. There were the ones still pending. There were the trips to Augusta she must have needed to make to get all the equipment, hardware, and batteries. Plus getting sweet dirt to replace the sour, don't forget that.

  What could have driven her to it?

  Gardener didn't know, but he didn't like to imagine Bobbi here, racing back and forth, working on two different do-it-yourself projects at once, or five, or ten. The image was too clear. Bobbi with the sleeves of her shirt rolled up and the top three buttons undone, beads of sweat trickling down between her small breasts, her hair pulled back in a rough horsetail, eyes burning, face pale except for two hectic red patches, one in each cheek. Bobbi looking like Ms. Wizard gone insane, growing more haggard as she screwed screws, bolted bolts, soldered wires, trucked in dirt, and stood on her stepladder, bent backward like a ballet dancer, sweat running down her face, cords standing out in her neck as she hung up the new lights. Oh, and while you're at it, don't forget Bobbi putting in the new wiring and fixing the hot-water tank.

  Gardener touched the tank's enamel side and pulled his hand back fast. It looked the same, but it wasn't. It was hot as hell. He squatted and opened the hatch at the bottom of the tank.

  That was when Gardener really sailed off the edge of the world.

  6

  Before, the water heater had run on LP gas. The small-bore copper tubes which fed gas to the tank's burner ran from tanks in a hook-up behind the house. The delivery truck from Dead River Gas in Derry came once a month and replaced the tanks if they needed replacing--usually they did, because the tank was wasteful as well as inefficient ... two things that went together more often than not, now that Gard thought about it. The first thing Gardener noticed was that the copper tubes were no longer hooked into the tank. They hung free behind it, their ends stuffed with cloth.

  Holy shit, how's she heating her water? he thought, and then he did look into the hatch, and then for a little while he froze completely.

  His mind seemed clear enough, yes, but that disconnected, floating sensation had come back--that feeling of separation. Ole Gard was going up again, up like a child's silver Puffer balloon. He knew he felt afraid, but this knowledge was dim, hardly important, compared to that dismal feeling of coming untethered from himself. No, Gard, Jesus! a mournful voice cried from deep inside him.

  He remembered going to the Fryeburg Fair when he was a little kid, no more than ten. He went into the Mirror Maze with his mother, and the two of them had gotten separated. That was the first time he had felt this odd sensation of separation from self, of drifting away, or above, his physical body and his physical (if there was such a thing) mind. He could see his mother, oh yes--five mothers, a dozen, a hundred mothers, some short, some tall, some fat, some scrawny. At the same time he saw five, a dozen, a hundred Gards. Sometimes he'd see one of his reflections join one of hers and he would reach out, almost absently, expecting to touch her slacks. Instead, there was only empty air ... or another mirror.

  He had wandered for a long time, and he supposed he had panicked, but it hadn't felt like panic, and so far as he could remember, no one had acted like he had been in a panic when he finally floundered his way out--this only after fifteen minutes of twisting, turning, doubling back, and running into barriers of clear glass. His mother's brow had furrowed slightly for a moment, then cleared. That was all. But he had felt panic, just as he was feeling it now: that sensation of feeling your mind coming unbolted from itself, like a piece of machinery falling apart in zero-g.

  It comes ... but it goes. Wait, Gard. Just wait for it to be over.

  He squatted on his hunkers, looking into the open hatch at the base of Anderson's water tank, and waited for it to be over, as he had once waited for his feet to lead him down the correct passage and out of that terrible Mirror Maze at the Fryeburg Fair.

  The removal of the gas ring had left a round hollow area at the base of the tank. This area had been filled with a wild tangle of wires--red, green, blue, yellow. In the center of the tangle was a cardboard egg carton. HILLCREST FARMS, the blue printing read. GRADE A JUMBO. Sitting in each of the egg cradles was an Eveready alkaline D-cell battery, + terminals up. A tiny funnel-shaped gadget capped the terminals, and all of the wires seemed to either start--or end--in these caps. As he looked longer, in a state that did not precisely feel like panic, Gardener saw that his original impression--that the wires were in a wild jumble--was no more true than his original impression that the stuff on Bobbi's worktable was in a litter. No, there was order in the way the wires came out of or went into those twelve funnel-shaped caps--as few as two wires coming in or going out of some, as many as six coming in or going out of others. There was even order in the shape they made--it was a small arch. Some of the wires bent back into the funnels capped over other batteries, but most went to circuit boards propped against the sides of the water tank's heating compartment. They were from electronic toys made in Korea, Gardener surmised--too much cheap silvery solder on corrugated fiberboard. A weird Gyro Gearloose conglomeration if ever there had been one... but this weird conglomeration of components was doing something. Oh yes. It was heating water fast enough to raise blisters, for one thing.

  In the center of the compartment, directly over the egg carton, in the arch formed by the wires, glowed a bright ball of light, no larger than a quarter but seemingly as bright as the sun.

  Gardener had automatically put his fist up to block out that savage glow, which shone out of the hatch in a solid white bar of light that cast his shadow long behind him on the dirt floor. He could look at it only by wincing his eyes down to the barest slits and then opening his fingers a little.

  As bright as the sun.

  Yes--only instead of yellow, it was a dazzling bluish-white, like a sapphire. Its glow pulsated and shifted slightly, then remained constant, then pulsated and shifted again: it was cycling.

  But where is the heat? Gardener thought, and that began to bring him back to himself. Where is the heat?

  He reached one hand up and laid it on the smooth, enameled side of the tank again--but only for a second. He snatched it away, thinking of the way the water had smoked coming out of the tap in the bathroom. There was hot water in the tank, all right, and plenty of it--by all rights it should boil away to steam and blow
Bobbi Anderson's tank all over the basement. It wasn't doing that, obviously, and that was a mystery... but it was a minor mystery compared to the fact that he wasn't feeling any heat coming out of the hatch--none at all. He should have burned his fingers on the little knob you pulled to open the hatch, and when it was open, that coin-size sun should have burned the skin right off his face. So ... ?

  Slowly, hesitantly, Gardener reached toward the opening with his left hand, keeping his right fisted before his eyes to block out the worst of the glow. His mouth was pulled down in a wince as he anticipated a burn.

  His splayed fingers slipped into the hatchway ... and then struck something yielding. He thought later it was a little like pushing your fingers into a stretched nylon stocking--only this gave just so much and then stopped. Your fingers never punched through, as they would have punched through a nylon stocking.

  But there was no barrier. None, at least, that he could see.

  He stopped pressing and the invisible membrane gently pushed his fingers back out of the hatchway. He looked at his fingers and saw they were shaking.

  It's a force field. Some sort of a force field that damps heat. Dear God, I've walked into a science-fiction story from Startling Stories. Right around 1947, I'd guess. I wonder if I made the cover? If I did, who drew me? Virgil Finlay? Hannes Bok?

  His hand was beginning to shake harder. He groped for the little door, missed it, found it again, and slammed it shut, cutting out that dazzling flood of white light. He lowered his right hand slowly but he could still see an afterimage of that tiny sun, the way one can see a flashbulb after it has gone off in one's face. Only what Gardener saw was a large green fist floating in the air, with bright, ectoplasmic blue between the fingers.

  The afterimage faded. The shakes didn't.

  Gardener had never wanted a drink so badly in his life.

  7

  He got one in Anderson's kitchen.

  Bobbi didn't drink much, but she kept what she called "the staples" in a cabinet behind the pots and pans: bottle of gin, bottle of Scotch, bottle of bourbon, bottle of vodka. Gardener pulled out the bourbon--some cut-rate brand, but beggars couldn't be choosers--poured an inch into a plastic tumbler, and downed it.

  Better watch your step, Gard. You're tempting fate.

  Except he wasn't. Right now he almost would have welcomed a jag, but the cyclone had gone somewhere else to blow... at least for the time being. He poured another two inches of whiskey into the glass, contemplated it for a moment, then poured most of it down the sink. He put the bottle back, and added water and ice cubes, converting what had been liquid dynamite into a civilized drink.

  He thought the kid on the beach would have approved.

  He supposed the dreamlike calm that had surrounded him when he came out of the Mirror Maze, and felt again now, was a defense against just lying down on the floor and screaming until he lost consciousness. The calm was all right. What scared him was how fast his mind had gone to work trying to convince him that none of it was true--that he had hallucinated the whole thing. Incredibly, his mind was suggesting that what he had seen when he opened the hatch in the heater's base was a very bright light bulb--two hundred watts, say.

  It wasn't a light bulb and it wasn't hallucination. It was something like a sun, very small and hot and bright, floating in an arch of wires, over an egg carton filled with D-cells. Now you can go crazy if you want, or get Jesus, or get drunk but you saw what you saw and leave us not gild the lily, all right? All right.

  He checked on Anderson and saw she was still sleeping like a stone. Gardener had decided to wake Bobbi up by ten-thirty if she hadn't awakened on her own; he looked at his watch now, and was astonished to see it was twenty minutes past nine. He had been in the cellar much longer than he had thought.

  Thinking of the cellar called up the surreal vision of that miniature sun hanging suspended in its arch of wires, glowing like a superhot tennis ball... and thinking about that brought back the unpleasant sense that his mind was uncoupling itself. He pushed it away. It didn't want to go. He pushed harder, telling himself he was simply not going to think about it anymore until Bobbi woke up and told him what was going on around here.

  He looked down at his arms and saw that he was sweating.

  8

  Gardener took his drink out back, where he found more evidence of Bobbi's almost supernatural burst of activity.

  Her Tomcat tractor was standing in front of the large shed to the left of the garden--nothing unusual about that, it was where she most commonly left it when the weatherman said it wasn't going to get rained on. But even from twenty feet away Gardener could see that Anderson had done something radical to the Tomcat's motor.

  No. No more. Forget this shit, Gard. Go home.

  There was nothing dreamy or disconnected about that voice--it was harsh, vital with panic and scared dismay. For a moment Gardener felt himself on the verge of giving in to it ... and then he thought what an abysmal betrayal that would be--of Bobbi, of himself. The thought of Bobbi had kept him from killing himself yesterday. And by not killing himself, he thought he had kept her from doing the same thing. The Chinese had a proverb: "If you save a life, you are responsible for it." But if Bobbi needed help, how was he supposed to give it? Didn't finding out begin with trying to find out just what had been going on out here?

  (but you know who did all the work don't you Gard?)

  He knocked back the last of the drink, set the empty glass on the top back step, and walked toward the Tomcat. He was distantly aware of the crickets singing in the high grass. He wasn't drunk, not squiffy, as far as he could tell; the booze seemed to have shot past his entire nervous system. Gave it a miss, as the British said.

  (like the leprechauns that made the shoes tap-tap-tappety-tap while the cobbler slept)

  But Bobbi hadn't been sleeping, had she? Bobbi had been driven until she dropped--literally dropped--into Gardener's arms.

  (tap-tap-tappety-tap knock-knock-knockety-knock late last night and the night before Tommyknockers Tommyknockers knocking at the door)

  Standing by the Tomcat, looking into the open engine compartment, Gardener didn't just shiver--he shuddered like a man dying of cold, his upper teeth biting into his lower lip, his face pale, his temples and forehead covered with sweat.

  (they fixed the water heater and the Tomcat too there's lots of things the Tommyknockers do)

  The Tomcat was a small working vehicle which would have been almost useless on a big spread where farming was the main work. It was bigger than a riding lawnmower, smaller than the smallest tractor Deere or Farmall had ever made, but just right for someone who kept a garden that was a little too big to be called a plot--and that was the case here. Bobbi had a garden of about an acre and a half--beans, cukes, peas, corn, radishes, and potatoes. No carrots, no cabbages, no zucchini, no squash. "I don't grow what I don't like," she had told Gardener once. "Life's too short."

  The Tomcat was fairly versatile; it had to be. Even a well-off gentleman farmer would have trouble justifying the purchase of a $2,500 mini-tractor on the basis of a one-acre garden. It could roto-till, mow grass with one attachment and cut hay with another; it could haul stuff over rough terrain (she used it as a skidder in the fall, and so far as Gardener knew, Bobbi had gotten stuck only once), and in the winter she attached a snow-blower unit and cleared her driveway in half an hour. It was powered by a sturdy four-cc engine.

  Or had been.

  The engine was still in there, but now it was tarted up with the weirdest array of gadgets and attachments imaginable--Gardener found himself thinking of the doorbell/radio thing on the table in Anderson's basement, and wondering if Bobbi meant to put it on the Tomcat soon ... maybe it was radar or something. A single bewildered bark of laughter escaped him.

  A mayonnaise jar jutted from one side of the engine. It was filled with a fluid too colorless to be gasoline and screwed into a brass fitting on the engine head. Sitting on the cowling was something that would have look
ed more at home on a Chevy Nova or SuperSport: the air scoop of a supercharger.

  The modest carb had been replaced with a scrounged four-barrel. Bobbi had had to cut a hole through the cowling to make room for it.

  And there were wires--wires everywhere, snaking in and out and up and down and all around, making connections that made absolutely no sense ... at least, not as far as Gardener could see.

  He looked at the Tomcat's rudimentary instrument panel, started to look away ... and then his gaze snapped back, his eyes widening.

  The Tomcat had a stick shift, and the gearing pattern had been printed on a square of metal bolted to the dashboard above the oil-pressure gauge. Gardener had seen that square of metal often enough; he had driven the Tomcat frequently over the years. Before, it had always been:

  Now, something new had been added--something which was just simple enough to be terrifying:

  You don't believe that, do you?

  I don't know.

  Come on, Gard--flying tractors? Give me a break!

  She's got a miniature sun in her water heater.

  Bullshit. I think it might have been a light bulb, a bright one, like a two-hundred-watt--

  It was not a light bulb!

  Okay, all right, calm down. It just sounds like an ad for a really E.T. ripoff, that's all. "You'll believe a tractor can fly."

  Shut up.

  Or "John Deere, phone home." How's that?

  He stood in Anderson's kitchen again, looking longingly at the cabinet where the booze was. He shifted his eyes away--it was not easy because they felt as if they had gained weight--and walked back into the living room. He saw that Bobbi had changed positions and that her respiration was moving along a bit more rapidly. First signs of waking up. Gardener glanced at his watch again and saw it was nearly ten o'clock. He went over to the bookcase by Bobbi's desk, wanting to find something to read until she came around, something that would take his mind off this whole business for a little while.