The Tommyknockers Read online

  "I was out of egg cartons by then, and the thing was going to have too many batteries for just one or two anyway. So I got one of Uncle Frank's cigar boxes--there must be a dozen old wooden ones up in the attic, probably even Mabel Noyes down at Junque-a-Torium would pay a few bucks for them, and you know what a skinflint she is--and I stuffed them with toilet paper and tried to make nests in the paper for the batteries to stand up in. You know ... nests?"

  Anderson made quick poking gestures with her right index finger and then looked, bright-eyed, at Gard, to see if he got it. Gardener nodded. That feeling of unreality was stealing back, that feeling of his mind getting ready to seep through the top of his skull and float up to the ceiling. A drunk would fix that, he thought, and the pulse in his head sharpened.

  "But the batteries kept falling over anyway." She snuffed her cigarette and immediately lit another one. "They were wild, just wild. I was wild, too. Then I got an idea."

  They?

  "I went down to Chip McCausland's. Down on the Dugout Road?"

  Gardener shook his head. He had never been down the Dugout Road.

  "Well, he lives out there with this woman--she's his common-law wife, I guess--and about ten kids. Man, you talk about sluts ... the dirt on her neck, Gard ... you couldn't wash it off unless you used a jackhammer on it first. I guess he was married before, and ... doesn't matter ... it's just ... I haven't had anyone to talk to ... I mean, they don't talk, not the way a couple of people do, and I keep mixing up the stuff that's not important with the stuff that is--"

  Anderson's words had started to come out quicker and quicker, until now they were almost tripping over each other. She's speed-rapping, Gardener thought with some alarm, and pretty soon she's going to start either yelling or crying. He didn't know which he dreaded more and thought again of Ishmael, Ishmael rambling through the streets of Bedford, Massachusetts, stinking more of madness than whale oil, finally grabbing some unlucky passerby and screaming: Listen! I'm the only fucking one left to tell you and so you better listen, damn you! You better listen if you don't want to be using this harpoon for a fucking suppository! I got a tale to tell, it's about this white fucking whale and YOU'RE GOING TO LISTEN!

  He reached across the table and touched her hand. "You tell it any old way you want to. I'm here and I'm going to listen. We've got time; like you said, it's your day off. So slow down. If I fall asleep, you'll know you got too far from the point. Okay?"

  Anderson smiled and relaxed visibly. Gardener wanted to ask again what was going on in the woods. More than that, who they were. But it would be best to wait. All bad things come to him who waits, he thought, and after a pause to collect herself, Bobbi went on.

  "Chip McCausland's got three or four henhouses, that's all I started to say. For a couple of bucks I was able to get all the egg cartons I wanted ... even a few of the big egg-crate sheets. Those sheets each have ten dozen cradles."

  Anderson laughed cheerfully and added something that brought gooseflesh out on Gardener's skin.

  "Haven't used one of those yet, but when I do I guess we'll have enough zap for the whole town of Haven to let go of the CMP tit. With enough left over for Albion and most of Troy as well.

  "So I got the power going here--Jesus, I'm rambling--and I already had the gadget hooked up to the typewriter--and I really did sleep--napped, anyway--and that's about where we came in, isn't it?"

  Gardener nodded, still trying to cope with the idea that there might be fact as well as hallucination in Bobbi's casual statement that she could build a "gadget" which could power three small towns from a source consisting of one hundred and twenty D-cell batteries.

  "What the gadget on the typewriter does is ..." Anderson frowned. Her head cocked a little, as if she were listening to a voice Gardener could not hear. "It might be easier to show you. Go on over there and roll in a sheet of paper, would you?"

  "Okay." He headed for the door into the living room, then looked back at Anderson. "Aren't you coming?"

  Bobbi smiled. "I'll stay here," she said, and then Gardener got it. He got it, and even understood on some mental level where only pure logic was allowed that it might be so--hadn't the immortal Holmes himself said that when you eliminated the impossible, you had to believe whatever was left, no matter how improbable? And there was a new novel sitting in there on the table by what Bobbi sometimes called her word-accordion.

  Yeah, except typewriters don't write books by themselves, Gard old buddy. You know what the immortal Holmes probably would say? That the fact that there is a novel sitting next to Bobbi's typewriter, and the added fact that this is a novel you never saw before does not mean it is a new novel. Holmes would say Bobbi wrote that book at some time in the past. Then, while you were gone and Bobbi was losing her marbles, she brought it out and set it beside the typewriter. She may believe what she's telling you, but that doesn't make it so.

  Gardener walked into the cluttered corner of the living room that served as Bobbi's writing quarters. It was handy enough to the bookshelf so she could simply rock back on the legs of her chair and grab almost anything she wanted. It's too good to be a trunk novel.

  He knew what the immortal Holmes would say about that too: he would agree that The Buffalo Soldiers' being a trunk novel was improbable; he would argue, however, that writing a novel in three days--and not at the typewriter but while taking catnaps between repeated frenzies of activity--was im-fucking-possible.

  Except that novel hadn't come out of any trunk. Gardener knew it, because he knew Bobbi. Bobbi would have been just as incapable of sticking a novel that good in her trunk as Gard was of remaining rational in a discussion on the subject of nuclear power.

  Fuck you, Sherlock, and the hansom cab you and Dr. W. rode in on. Christ I want a drink.

  The urge--the need--to drink had come back in full, frightening force.

  "You there, Gard?" Anderson called.

  "Yes."

  This time he consciously saw the roll of computer paper. It hung down loosely. He looked behind the typewriter and did indeed see another of Bobbi's "gadgets." This one was smaller--half an egg carton with the last two egg cradles standing empty. D-cells stood in the other four, each neatly capped with one of those little funnels (looking at them more closely, Gard decided they were scraps of tin can carefully cut to shape with tin snips), each with a wire coming out of the funnel over the + post ... one red, one blue, one yellow, one green. These went to another circuit board. This one, which looked as if it might have come from a radio, was held vertical by two short flat pieces of wood that had been glued to the desk with the board sandwiched in between. Those pieces of wood, each looking a little like the chalk gutter at the foot of a blackboard, were so absurdly familiar to Gardener that for a moment he was unable to identify them. Then it came. They were the tile-holders you put your letters on when you were playing Scrabble.

  One single wire, almost as thick as an AC cord, ran from the circuit board into the typewriter.

  "Put in some paper!" Anderson called. She laughed. "That was the part I almost forgot, isn't that stupid? They were no help there and I almost went crazy before I saw the answer. I was sitting on the jakes one day, wishing I'd gotten one of those damned word-crunchers after all, and when I reached for the toilet paper ... eureka! Boy, did I feel dumb! Just roll it in, Gard!"

  No. I'm getting out of here right now, and then I'm going to hitch a ride up to the Purple Cow in Hampden and get so fucking drunk I'll never remember this stuff. I don't ever want to know who "they" are.

  Instead, he pulled on the roll, slipped the perforated end of the first sheet under the roller, and turned the knob on the side of the old machine until he could snap the bar down. His heart was beating hard and fast. "Okay!" he called. "Do you want me to ... uh, turn something on?" He didn't see any switch, and even if he had, he wouldn't have wanted to touch it.

  "Don't need to!" she called back. Gard heard a click. It was followed by a hum--the sound of a kid's electric train transfor
mer.

  Green light began to spill out of Anderson's typewriter. Gardener took an involuntary, shambling step backward on legs that felt like stilts. That light rayed out between the keys in weird, diverging strokes. There were glass panels set into the Underwood's sides and now they glowed like the walls of an aquarium.

  Suddenly the keys of the typewriter began to depress themselves, moving up and down like the keys of a player piano. The carriage moved rapidly and letters spilled across the page: Full fathom five my father lies

  Ding! Bang!

  The carriage returned.

  No. I'm not seeing this. I don't believe I'm seeing this.

  These are the pearls that were his eyes.

  Sickly green light spilling up through the keyboard and over the words like radium.

  Ding! Bang!

  My beer is Rheingold the dry beer

  The line appeared in the space of a second, it seemed. The keys were a hammering blur of speed. It was like watching a news ticker.

  Think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer!

  Dear God, is she really doing this? Or is it a trick?

  With his mind tottering again in the face of this new wonder, he found himself grasping eagerly for Sherlock Holmes--a trick, of course it was a trick, all a part of poor old Bobbi's nervous breakdown ... her very creative nervous breakdown.

  Ding! Bang! The carriage shot back.

  No trick, Gard.

  The carriage returned, and the hammering keys typed this before his wide, staring eyes.

  You were right the first time. I'm doing it from the kitchen. The gadget behind the typewriter is thought-sensitive, the way a photoelectric cell is light-sensitive. This thing seems to pick up my thoughts clearly up to a distance of five miles. If I'm further away than that, things start to get garbled. Beyond ten or so, it doesn't work at all.

  Ding! Bang! The big silver lever to the left of the carriage worked itself twice, cranking the paper--which now held three perfectly typed messages--up a few lines. Then it resumed.

  So you see I didn't have to be sitting at the typewriter to work on my novel-look, ma, no hands! This poor old Underwood ran like a bastard for those two or three days, Gard, and all the time it was running I was in the woods, working around the place, or down cellar. But as I say, mostly I was sleeping. It's funny ... even if someone could have convinced me such a gadget existed, I wouldn't have believed it would work for me, because I've always been lousy at dictating. I have to write my own letters, I always said, because I have to see the words on paper. It was impossible for me to imagine how someone could dictate a whole novel into a tape recorder, for instance, although some writers apparently do just that. But this isn't like dictating, Gard--it's like a direct tap into the subconscious, more like dreaming than writing ... but what comes out is unlike dreams, which are often surreal and disconnected. This really isn't a typewriter at all anymore. It's a dream machine. One that dreams rationally. There's something cosmically funny about them giving it to me, so I could write The Buffalo Soldiers. You're right, it really is the best thing I've ever written, but it's still your basic oat opera. It's like inventing a perpetual-motion machine so your little kid won't pester you anymore about changing the batteries in his toy car! But can you imagine what the results might have been if F. Scott Fitzgerald had had one of these gadgets? Or Hemingway? Faulkner? Salinger?

  After each question mark the typewriter fell momentarily silent and then burst out with another name. After Salinger's, it stopped completely. Gardener had read the material as it came out, but in a mechanical, almost uncomprehending way. His eyes went back to the beginning of the passage. I was thinking that it was a trick, that she might have hoked the typewriter up somehow to write those two little snatches of verse. And it wrote--

  It had written: No trick, Gard.

  He thought suddenly: Can you read my mind, Bobbi?

  Ding! Bang! The carriage returned suddenly, making him jump and almost cry out.

  Yes. But only a little.

  What did we do on the fourth of July the year I quit teaching?

  Drove up to Derry. You said you knew a guy who'd sell us some cherry bombs. He sold us the cherry bombs but they were all duds. You were pretty drunk. You wanted to go back and knock his block off. I couldn't talk you out of it, so we went back, and damned if his house wasn't on fire. He had a lot of real stuff in the basement, and he'd dropped a cigarette butt into a box of it. You saw the fire and the fire-trucks and got laughing so hard you fell down in the street.

  That feeling of unreality had never been as strong as it was now. He fought it, keeping it at arm's length while his eyes searched through the previous passage for something else. After a second or two he found it: There's something almost cosmically funny about them giving it to me, you know ...

  And earlier Bobbi had said: The batteries kept falling over and they were wild, just wild ...

  His cheeks felt hotly flushed, as if with fever, but his forehead felt as cold as an icepack--even the steady pulse of pain from above his left eye seemed cold ... shallow stabs hitting with metronomelike regularity.

  Looking at the typewriter, which was filled with that somehow ghastly green light, Gardener thought: Bobbi, who are "they"?

  Ding! Bang!

  The keys rattled off a burst, letters forming words, the words forming a child's couplet: Late last night and the night before

  Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

  Jim Gardener screamed.

  7

  At last his hands stopped shaking--enough so he could get the hot coffee to his mouth without slopping it all over himself, thus finishing the morning's lunatic festivities with a few more burns.

  Anderson kept watching him from the other side of the kitchen table with concerned eyes. She kept a bottle of very good brandy in the darkest depths of the pantry, far away from the "alcoholic staples," and she had offered to spike Gard's coffee with a wallop of it. He had declined, not just with regret but with real pain. He needed that brandy--it woulld dull the ache in his head, maybe kill it entirely. More important, it would bring his mind back into focus. It would get rid of that I-just-sailed-off-the-edge-of-the-world feeling.

  Only problem was, he'd finally gotten to "that" point, hadn't he? Correct. The point where it wouldn't stop with a single wallop of brandy in his coffee. There had been entirely too much input since he had opened the hatch at the bottom of Bobbi's water heater and then gone upstairs for a belt of whiskey. It had been safe then; now the air was the unsteady sort that spawned tornadoes.

  So: no more drinks. Not so much as an Irish sweetener in his coffee until he understood what was happening here. Including what was happening to Bobbi. That, most of all.

  "I'm sorry that last bit happened," Anderson said, "but I'm not sure I could have stopped it. I told you it was a dream machine; it's also a 'subconscious machine.' I'm really not getting much of your thoughts at all, Gard--I've tried this with other people, and in most cases it's as easy as sinking your thumb into fresh dough. You can core all the way down to what I guess you'd call the id ... although it's awful down there, full of the most monstrous ... you can't even call them ideas ... images, I guess you'd say. Simple as a child's scrawl, but they're alive. Like those fish they find down deep in the ocean, the ones that explode if you bring them up." Bobbi suddenly shuddered. "They're alive," she repeated.

  For a second there was no sound but the birds singing outside.

  "Anyway, all I get from you is surface stuff, and most of that is all broken up and garbled. If you were like anyone else, I'd know what's been going on with you, and why you look so crappy--"

  "Thanks, Bobbi. I knew there was a reason I keep coming here, and since it's not the cooking, it must be the flattery." He grinned, but it was a nervous grin, and he lit another cigarette.

  "As it is," Bobbi went on as if he hadn't spoken, "I can make some educated guesses on the basis of what's happened to you before, but you'd have to tell me the
details ... I couldn't snoop even if I wanted to. I'm not sure I could get it clear even if you shoved it all up to the front of your mind and put out a Welcome mat. But when you asked who 'they' were, that little rhyme about the Tommyknockers came up like a big bubble. And it ran itself off on the typewriter."

  "All right," Gardener said, although it wasn't all right ... nothing was all right. "But who are they besides the Tommyknockers? Are they pixies? Leprechauns? Grem--"

  "I asked you to look around because I wanted you to get an idea of how big all of this is," Anderson said. "How far-reaching the implications could be."

  "I realize that, all right," Gardener said, and a smile ghosted around the corners of his mouth. "A few more far-reaching implications and I'll be ready for a straitwaistcoat."

  "Your Tommyknockers came from space," Anderson said, "as I think you must have deduced by now."

  Gardener supposed the thought had done more than cross his mind--but his mouth was dry, his hands frozen around the coffee cup.

  "Are they around?" he asked, and his voice seemed to come from far, far away. He was suddenly afraid to turn around, afraid he might see some gnarled thing with three eyes and a horn where its mouth should have been come waltzing out of the pantry, something that belonged only on a movie screen, maybe in a Star Wars epic.

  "I think they--the actual physical they--have been dead for a long time," Anderson said calmly. "They probably died long before men existed on earth. But then ... Caruso's dead, but he's still singing on a hell of a lot of records, isn't he?"

  "Bobbi," Gardener said, "tell me what happened. I want you to begin at the beginning and end by saying, 'Then you came up the road just in time to grab me when I passed out.' Can you do that?"

  "Not entirely," she said, and grinned. "But I'll do my best."

  8

  Anderson talked for a long time. When she finished, it was past noon. Gard sat across the kitchen table, smoking, excusing himself only once to go into the bathroom, where he took three more aspirin.