The Tommyknockers Page 3

  "Pete," she muttered. "Hey, Pete, cool it."

  She stroked the dog. Peter was shivering and jerked away when Anderson touched him, baring the eroded remains of his teeth. Then his eyes opened--the bad one and the good one--and he seemed to come back to himself. He whined weakly and thumped his tail against the floor.

  "You all right?" Anderson asked.

  Peter licked her hand. "Then lie down again. Stop whining. It's boring. Stop fucking off."

  Peter lay down and closed his eyes. Anderson knelt, looking at him, troubled.

  He's dreaming of that thing.

  Her rational mind rejected that, but the night insisted on its own imperative--it was true, and she knew it.

  She went to bed at last, and sleep came sometime after two in the morning. She had a peculiar dream. In it she was groping in the dark ... not trying to find something but to get away from something. She was in the woods. Branches whipped into her face and poked her arms. Sometimes she stumbled over roots and fallen trees. And then, ahead of her, a terrible green light shone out in a single pencillike ray. In her dream she thought of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," the mad narrator's lantern, muffled up except for one tiny hole, which he used to direct a beam of light onto the evil eye he fancied his elderly benefactor possessed.

  Bobbi Anderson felt her teeth fall out.

  They went painlessly, all of them. The bottom ones tumbled, some outward, some back into her mouth, where they lay on her tongue or under it in hard little lumps. The top ones simply dropped down the front of her blouse. She felt one catch in her bra, which clasped in front, poking her skin.

  The light. The green light. The light--

  5

  --was wrong.

  It wasn't just that it was gray and pearly, that light; it was expected that such a wind as had blown up the night before would bring a change in the weather. But Anderson knew there was something more than that wrong even before she looked at the clock on the nightstand. She picked it up in both hands and drew it close to her face, although her vision was a perfect 20/20. It was quarter past three in the afternoon. She had gone to sleep late, given. But no matter how late she slept, either habit or the need to urinate always woke her up by nine o'clock, ten at the latest. But she had slept a full twelve hours ... and she was ravenous.

  She shuffled out into the living room, still wearing only her socks, and saw that Peter was lying limply on his side, head back, yellow stubs of teeth showing, legs splayed out.

  Dead, she thought with a cold and absolute certainty. Peter's dead. Died in the night.

  She went to her dog, already anticipating the feel of cold flesh and lifeless fur. Then Peter uttered a muzzy, lip-flapping sound--a blurry dog-snore. Anderson felt huge relief course through her. She spoke the dog's name aloud and Peter started up, almost guiltily, as if he was also aware of oversleeping. Anderson supposed he was--dogs seemed to have an acutely developed sense of time.

  "We slept late, fella," she said.

  Peter got up and stretched first one hind leg and then the other. He looked around, almost comically perplexed, and then went to the door. Anderson opened it. Peter stood there for a moment, not liking the rain. Then he went out to do his business.

  Anderson stood in the living room a moment longer, still marveling over her certainty that Peter had been dead. Just what in hell was wrong with her lately? Everything was doom and gloom. Then she headed for the kitchen to fix a meal ... whatever you called breakfast at three in the afternoon.

  On the way she diverted into the bathroom to do her own business. Then she paused in front of her reflection in the toothpaste-spotted mirror. A woman pushing forty. Graying hair, otherwise not too bad--she didn't drink much, didn't smoke much, spent most of her time outside when she wasn't writing. Irish black hair--no romance-novel blaze of red for her--rather too long. Gray-blue eyes. Abruptly she bared her teeth, expecting for just a moment to see only smooth pink gums.

  But her teeth were there--all of them: Thank the fluoridated water in Utica, New York, for that. She touched them, let her fingers prove their bony reality to her brain.

  But something wasn't right.

  Wetness.

  There was wetness on her upper thighs.

  Oh no, oh shit, this is almost a week early, I just put clean sheets on the bed yesterday--

  But after she had showered, put a pad in a fresh pair of cotton panties, and pulled the whole works snug, she checked the sheets and saw them unmarked. Her period was early, but it had at least had the consideration to wait until she was almost awake. And there was no cause for alarm; she was fairly regular, but she had been both early and late from time to time; maybe diet, maybe subconscious stress, maybe some internal clock slipping a cog or two. She had no urge to grow old fast, but she often thought that having the whole inconvenient business of menstruation behind her would be a relief.

  The last of her nightmare slipped away, and Bobbi Anderson went in to fix herself a very late breakfast.

  2.

  ANDERSON DIGS

  1

  It rained steadily for the next three days. Anderson wandered restlessly around the house, made a trip with Peter into Augusta in the pickup for supplies she didn't really need, drank beer, and listened to old Beach Boys tunes while she made repairs around the house. Trouble was, there weren't really that many repairs that needed to be done. By the third day she was circling the typewriter, thinking maybe she would start the new book. She knew what it was supposed to be about: a young schoolmarm and a buffalo-hunter caught up in a range war in Kansas during the early 1850s--a period when everyone in the midsection of the country seemed to be tuning up for the Civil War, whether they knew it or not. It would be a good book, she thought, but she didn't think it was quite "ready" yet, whatever that meant (a sardonic mimic awoke in her mind, doing an Orson Welles voice: We will write no oater before its time). Still, her restlessness dug at her, and the signs were all there: an impatience with books, with the music, with herself. A tendency to drift off ... and then she would be looking at the typewriter, wanting to wake it into some dream.

  Peter also seemed restless, scratching at the door to go out and then scratching at it to come back in five minutes later, wandering around the place, lying down, then getting up again.

  Low barometer, Anderson thought. That's all it is. Makes us both restless, cranky.

  And her damned period. Usually she flowed heavy and then just stopped. Like turning off a faucet. This time she just went on leaking. Bad washer, ha-ha, she thought with no humor at all. She found herself sitting in front of the typewriter just after dark on the second rainy day, a blank sheet rolled into the carriage. She started to type and what came out was a bunch of X's and O's, like a kid's tic-tac-toe game, and then something that looked like a mathematical equation ... which was stupid, since the last math she'd taken was Algebra II in high school. These days, x was for crossing out the wrong word, and that was all. She pulled the blank sheet out and tossed it away.

  After lunch on the third rainy day, she called the English Department at the university. Jim no longer taught there, not for eight years, but he still had friends on the faculty and kept in touch. Muriel in the office usually knew where he was.

  And did this time. Jim Gardener, she told Anderson, was doing a reading in Fall River that night, June 24th, followed by two in Boston over the next three nights followed by readings and lectures in Providence and New Haven--all part of something called the New England Poetry Caravan. Must be Patricia McCardle, Anderson thought, smiling a little.

  "So he'd be back ... when? Fourth of July?"

  "Gee, I don't know when he'll be back, Bobbi," Muriel said. "You know Jim. His last reading's June 30th. That's all I can say for sure."

  Anderson thanked her and hung up. She looked at the phone thoughtfully, calling up Muriel fully in her mind--another Irish colleen (but Muriel had the expected red hair) just now reaching the far edge of her prime, round-faced, green-eyed, full-breasted. Had s
he slept with Jim? Probably. Anderson felt a spark of jealousy--but not much of a spark. Muriel was okay. Just speaking to Muriel made her feel better--someone who knew who she was, who could think of her as a real person, not just as a customer on the other side of the counter in an Augusta hardware store or as someone to say how-do to over the mailbox. She was solitary by nature, but not monastic ... and sometimes simple human contact had a way of fulfilling her when she didn't even know she needed to be fulfilled.

  And she supposed she knew now why she had wanted to get in contact with Jim--talking with Muriel had done that, at least. The thing in the woods had stayed on her mind, and the idea that it was some sort of clandestine coffin had grown to a certainty. It wasn't writing she was restless to do; it was digging. She just hadn't wanted to do it on her own.

  "Looks like I'll have to, though, Pete," she said, sitting down in her rocker by the east window--her reading chair. Peter glanced at her briefly, as if to say, Whatever you want, babe. Anderson sat forward, suddenly looking at Pete--really looking at him. Peter looked back cheerfully enough, tail thumping on the floor. For a moment it seemed there was something different about Peter ... something so obvious she should be seeing it.

  If so, she wasn't.

  She settled back, opening her book--a master's thesis from the University of Nebraska, the most exciting thing about it the title: Range War and Civil War. She remembered thinking a couple of nights ago as her sister Anne would think: You're getting as funny in the head as Uncle Frank, Bobbi. Well ... maybe.

  Shortly she was deep into the thesis, making an occasional note on the legal pad she kept near. Outside, the rain continued to fall.

  2

  The following day dawned clear and bright and flawless: a postcard summer day with just enough breeze to make the bugs keep their distance. Anderson pottered around the house until almost ten o'clock, conscious of the growing pressure her mind was putting on her to get out there and dig it up, already. She could feel herself consciously pushing back against that urge (Orson Welles again--We will dig up no body before its ... oh, shut up, Orson). Her days of simply following the urge of the moment, a lifestyle that had once been catechized by the bald motto "If it feels good, do it," were over. It had never worked well for her, that philosophy--in fact, almost every bad thing that had happened to her had its roots in some impulsive action. She attached no moral stigma to people who did live their lives according to impulse; maybe her intuitions just hadn't been that good.

  She ate a big breakfast, added a scrambled egg to Peter's Gravy Train (Peter ate with more appetite than usual, and Anderson put it down to the end of the rainy spell), and then did the washing-up.

  If her dribbles would just stop, everything would be fine. Forget it; we will stop no period before its time. Right, Orson? You're fucking-A.

  Bobbi went outside, clapped an old straw cowboy hat on her head, and spent the next hour in the garden. Things out there were looking better than they had any right to, given the rain. The peas were coming on and the corn was rearing up good, as Uncle Frank would have said.

  She quit at eleven. Fuck it. She went around the house to the shed, got the spade and shovel, paused, and added a crowbar. She started out of the shed, went back, and took a screwdriver and an adjustable wrench from the toolbox.

  Peter started out with her as he always did, but this time Anderson said, "No, Peter," and pointed back at the house. Peter stopped, looking wounded. He whined and took a tentative step toward Anderson.

  "No, Peter."

  Peter gave in and headed back, head down, tail drooping dispiritedly. Anderson was sorry to see him go that way, but Peter's previous reaction to the plate in the ground had been bad. She stood a moment longer on the path which would lead her to the woods road, spade in one hand, shovel and crowbar in the other, watching as Peter mounted the back steps, nosed open the back door, and went into the house.

  She thought: Something was different about him ... is different about him. What is it? She didn't know. But for a moment, almost subliminally, her dream flickered back to her--that arrow of poisonous green light ... and her teeth all falling painlessly out of her gums.

  Then it was gone and she set off toward the place where it was, that odd thing in the ground, listening to the crickets make their steady ree-ree-ree sound in this small back field which would soon be ready for its first cutting.

  3

  At three that afternoon it was Peter who raised her from the semidaze in which she had been working, making her aware she was two damn-nears: damn-near starving and damn-near exhausted.

  Peter was howling.

  The sound raised gooseflesh on Anderson's back and arms. She dropped the shovel she had been using and backed away from the thing in the earth--the thing that was no plate, no box, not anything she could understand. All she knew for sure was that she had fallen into a strange, thoughtless state she didn't like at all. This time she had done more than lose track of time; she felt as if she had lost track of herself. It was as if someone else had stepped into her head the way a man would step into a bulldozer or a payloader, simply firing her up and starting to yank the right levers.

  Peter howled, nose pointing toward the sky--long, chilling, mournful sounds.

  "Stop it, Peter!" Anderson yelled, and thankfully, Peter did. Any more of that and she might simply have turned and run.

  Instead, she fought for control and got it. She backed up another step and cried out when something flapped loosely against her back. At her cry, Peter uttered one more short, yipping sound and fell silent again.

  Anderson grabbed for whatever had touched her, thinking it might be ... well, she didn't know what she thought it might be, but even before her hand closed on it, she remembered what it was. She had a hazy memory of stopping just long enough to hang her blouse on a bush; here it was.

  She took it and put it on, getting the buttons wrong on the first try so that one tail hung down below the other. She rebuttoned it, looking at the dig she had begun--and now that archaeological word seemed to fit what she was doing exactly. Her memories of the four and a half hours she'd spent digging were like her memory of hanging her blouse on the bush--hazy and broken. They were not memories; they were fragments.

  But now, looking at what she had done, she felt awe as well as fear ... and a mounting sense of excitement.

  Whatever it was, it was huge. Not just big, but huge.

  The spade, shovel, and crowbar lay at intervals along a fifteen-foot trench in the forest floor. She had made neat piles of black earth and chunks of rock at regular intervals. Sticking up from this trench, which was about four feet deep at the point where Anderson had originally stumbled over three inches of protruding gray metal, was the leading edge of some titanic object. Gray metal ... some object ...

  You'd ordinarily have a right to expect something better, more specific, from a writer, she thought, arming sweat from her forehead, but she was no longer sure the metal was steel. She thought now it might be a more exotic alloy, beryllium, magnesium, perhaps--and composition aside, she had absolutely no idea what it was.

  She began to unbutton her jeans so she could tuck in her blouse, then paused.

  The crotch of the faded Levi's was soaked with blood.

  Jesus. Jesus Christ. This isn't a period. This is Niagara Falls.

  She was momentarily frightened, really frightened, then told herself to quit being a ninny. She had gone into some sort of daze and done digging a crew of four husky men could have been proud of ... her, a woman who went one-twenty-five, maybe one-thirty, tops. Of course she was flowing heavily. She was fine--in fact, should be grateful she wasn't cramping as well as gushing.

  My, how poetic we are today, Bobbi, she thought, and uttered a harsh little laugh.

  All she really needed was to clean herself up: a shower and a change would do fine. The jeans had been ready for either the trash or the ragbag anyway. Now there was one less worry in a troubled, confusing world, right? Right. No big dea
l.

  She buttoned her pants again, not tucking the blouse in--no sense ruining that as well, although God knew it wasn't exactly a Dior original. The feel of the sticky wetness down there when she moved made her grimace. God, she wanted to get cleaned up. In a hurry.

  But instead of starting up the slope to the path, she walked back toward the thing in the earth, again driven to it. Peter howled, and the gooseflesh reappeared again. "Peter, will you for Christ's sake shut UP!" She hardly ever shouted at Pete--really shouted at him--but the goddam mutt was starting to make her feel like a behavioral-psychology subject. Gooseflesh when the dog howled instead of saliva at the sound of the bell, but the same principle.

  Standing close to her find, she forgot about Peter and only stared wonderingly at it. After some moments she reached out and gripped it. Again she felt that curious sense of vibration--it sank into her hand and then disappeared. This time she thought of touching a hull beneath which very heavy machinery is hard at work. The metal itself was so smooth that it had an almost greasy texture--you expected some of it to come off on your hands.

  She made a fist and rapped her knuckles on it. It made a dull sound, like a fist rapping on a thick chunk of mahogany. She stood a moment longer, then took the screwdriver from her back pocket, held it indecisively for a moment, and then, feeling oddly guilty--feeling like a vandal--she drew the blade down the exposed metal. It wouldn't scratch.

  Her eyes suggested two further things, but either or both could have been an optical illusion. The first was that the metal seemed to grow slightly thicker as it went from its edge to the point where it disappeared into the earth. The second was that the edge was slightly curved. These two things--if true--suggested an idea that was at once exciting, ludicrous, frightening, impossible ... and possessed of a certain mad logic.

  She ran her palm over the smooth metal, then stepped away. What the hell was she doing, petting this goddam thing while the blood was running down her legs? And her period was the least of her concerns if what she was starting to think just might turn out to be the truth.