The Tommyknockers Read online

  Who's been moving my dolls around? Who's been in here?

  She looked around wildly and for a moment her frightened, confused mind fully expected to see the child-beater Elmer Haney standing in the shadowy space of the big upstairs room that had been Ralph's study, smiling his sunken, stupid grin. I told you, woman: you are nothing but a meddling cunt.

  Nothing. No one.

  Who's been in here? Who's been moving--

  We move ourselves, dear.

  A sly, tittering voice.

  One hand went to her mouth. Her eyes widened. And then she saw the jagged letters sprawling and lurching across the blackboard. They had been made with so much force that that chalk had broken several times; untidy chunks of it lay in the chalk-gutter.

  DAVID BROWN IS ON ALTAIR-4

  What? What? What does that--

  It means he's gone too far, the kachina doll said, and suddenly green light seemed to sweat out of its cottonwood pores. As she looked at it, numb with terror, its wooden face split open in a sinister, yawning grin. A dead cricket fell out of it and struck the floor with a dry desert click. Gone too far, too far, too far ...

  No, I don't believe that! Ruth screamed.

  The whole town, Ruth... gone too far... too far ... too far ...

  No!

  Lost... lost....

  The eyes of the Greiner papier-mache doll suddenly filled with that liquid green fire. You're lost too, it said. You're just as crazy as the rest now. David Brown's just an excuse to stay here ...

  No--

  But all of her dolls were stirring now, that green fire moving from one to the other until her schoolroom flared with that light. It was waxing and waning, and she thought with sick horror that it was like being inside some ghastly emerald heart.

  They stared at her with their glazey eyes and at last she understood why the dolls had frightened Edwina Thurlow so badly.

  Now it was the voices of her dolls rising in that autumn-leafy swirl, whispering slyly, rattling among themselves, rattling to her ... but these were the voices of the town, too, and Ruth McCausland knew it.

  She thought they were perhaps the last of the town's sanity ... and of her own.

  Something has to be done, Ruth. It was the china bisque doll, fire dripping from its mouth; it was the voice of Beach Jernigan.

  Have to warn someone. It was the French poupee with its rubbery gutta-percha body; it was the voice of Hazel McCready.

  But they'll never let you out now, Ruth. It was the Nixon doll, his stuffed fingers raised in twin V's, speaking in the voice of John Enders down at the grammar school. They could, but that would be wrong.

  They love you, Ruth, but if you try to leave now they'll kill you. You know that, don't you? Her 1910 Kewpie doll with its rubber head like an inverted teardrop; this voice was Justin Hurd's.

  Have to send a signal.

  Signal, Ruth, yes, and you know how--

  Use us, we can show you how, we know--

  She took a shambling step backward, her hands going to her ears, as if she could shut out the voices that way. Her mouth twisted. She was terrified, and what frightened her most was how she ever could have mistaken these voices, with their twisted truths, for sanity. All of Haven's concentrated madness was here, right now.

  Signal, use us, we can show you how, we know and you WANT to know, the town hall, Ruth, the clock tower--

  The rustling voices took up the chant: The town hall, Ruth! Yes! Yes, that's it! The town hall! The town hall! Yes!

  Stop it! she screamed. Stop it, stop it, oh please won't you--

  And then, for the first time since she was eleven and had passed out after winning the Girls' Mile Race at the Methodist Summer Picnic, Ruth McCausland fainted dead away.

  6

  Sometime early during the night she regained a soupy version of consciousness and stumbled downstairs to her bedroom without looking back. She was, in fact, afraid to look back. She was dully aware that her head was throbbing, as it had on the few occasions when she had drunk too much and awakened with a hangover. She was also aware that the old Victorian house was rocking and creaking like an old schooner in heavy weather. While Ruth had lain senseless on the schoolroom floor, terrible thunderstorms racked central and eastern Maine. A cold front from the Midwest had finally bulled its way into New England, pushing out the still sink of heat and humidity that had covered the area for the last week and a half. The change in the weather was accompanied by terrible thunderstorms in some places. Haven was spared the worst of these, but the power was out again and would remain so for several days this time.

  But the fact of the power outage wasn't the important thing; Haven had its own unique power sources now. The important thing was simply that the weather had changed. When that happened, Ruth wasn't the only person in Haven to wake up with a horrible hangover sort of headache.

  Everyone in town, from the oldest to the youngest, woke up feeling the same way as the strong winds blew the tainted air east, sending it out over the ocean, fragmenting it into harmless tatters.

  7

  Ruth slept until one o'clock Wednesday afternoon. She got up with the lingering remains of her headache, but two Anacin took care of that. By five she felt better than she had for a long time. Her body ached and her muscles were stiff, but these were minor matters compared with the things that had troubled her since the beginning of July, and they could not cut into her sense of well-being at all. Even her fear for David Brown couldn't spoil it completely.

  On Main Street, everyone she passed had a peculiar dazed look in his or her eye, as though they had all just awakened from a spell cast by a fairy-tale witch.

  Ruth went to her office in the town hall, enjoying the way the wind lifted her hair from her temples, the way the clouds moved across a sky that was a deep, crisp blue: a sky that looked almost autumnal. She saw a couple of kids flying a box kite in the big field behind the grammar school and actually laughed alcud.

  But there was no laughing later as she spoke to a small group she quickly gathered--Haven's three selectmen, the town manager, and, of course, Bryant and Marie Brown. Ruth began by apologizing for not having called the state police and wardens before now, or even reporting the boy's disappearance. She had believed, she said, that they would find David quickly, probably the first night, certainly the next day. She knew that was no excuse, but it was why she had allowed it to happen. It had been, she said, the worst mistake she had made in her years as Haven's constable, and if David Brown had suffered for it ... she would never forgive herself.

  Bryant just nodded, dazed and distant and ill-looking. Marie, however, reached across the table and took her hand.

  "You're not to blame yourself," she said softly. "There were other circumstances. We all know that." The others nodded.

  I can't hear their minds anymore, Ruth realized suddenly, and her mind responded: Could you ever, Ruth? Really? Or was that a hallucination brought on by your worry over David Brown?

  Yes. Yes, I could.

  It would be easier to believe it had been a hallucination, but that wasn't the truth. And realizing that, she realized something else: she could still do it. It was like hearing a faint roaring sound in a conch shell, that sound children mistake for the ocean. She had no idea what their thoughts were, but she was still hearing them. Were they hearing her?

  ARE YOU STILL THERE? she shouted as loudly as she could.

  Marie Brown's hand went to her temple, as if she had felt a sudden stab of pain. Newt Berringer frowned deeply. Hazel McCready, who had been doodling on the pad in front of her, looked up as if Ruth had spoken aloud.

  Oh yes, they still hear me.

  "Whatever happened, right or wrong, is done now," Ruth said. "It's time--and overtime--that I contacted the state police about David. Do I have your approval to take this step?"

  Under normal circumstances, it never would have crossed her mind that she should ask them a question like that. After all, they paid her pittance of a salary to answer
questions, not ask them.

  But things were different in Haven now. Fresh breeze and clear air or not, things were still different in Haven now.

  They looked at her, surprised and a little shocked.

  Now the voices came back to her clearly: No, Ruth, no

  ... no outsiders ... we'll take care ... we don't need any outsiders while we "become" ... shhh ... for your life, Ruth ... shhh ...

  Outside, the wind blew a particularly hard gust, rattling the windows of Ruth's office. Adley McKeen looked toward the sound ... they all did. Then Adley smiled a puzzled, peculiar little smile.

  "O' course, Ruth," he said. "If you think it's time to notify the staties, you got to go ahead. We trust your judgment, don't we?"

  The others agreed.

  The weather had changed, the wind was blowing, and by Wednesday afternoon, the state police were in charge of the search for David Brown.

  8

  By Friday, Ruth McCausland understood that Wednesday and Thursday had been an untrustworthy respite in an ongoing process. She was being driven steadily toward some alien madness.

  A dim part of her mind recognized the fact, bemoaned it ... but was unable to stop it. It could only hope that the voices of her dolls held some truth as well as madness.

  Watching as if from outside herself, she saw her hands take her sharpest kitchen knife--the one she used for boning fish--from the drawer. She took it upstairs, into the schoolroom.

  The schoolroom glowed, rotten with green light. Tommyknocker-light. That was what everyone in town was calling them now, and it was a good name, wasn't it? Yes. As good as any. The Tommyknockers.

  Send a signal. That's all you can do now. They want to get rid of you, Ruth. They love you, but their love has turned homicidal. I suppose you can find a twisted sort of respect in that. Because they're still afraid of you. Even now, now when you're almost as nutty as the rest of them, they're afraid of you. Maybe someone will hear the signal ... hear it ... see it ... understand it.

  9

  Now there was a shaky drawing of the town-hall clock tower on her board ... the scrawled work of a first-grader.

  Ruth could not stand to work on the dolls in the schoolroom ... not in that terrible light that waxed and pulsed. She took them, one by one, into her husband's study, and slit their bellies open like a surgeon--the French madame, the nineteenth-century clown, the Kewpie, all of them--one by one. And into each she put a small gadget made of C-cells, wires, electronic-calculator circuit boards, and the cardboard cores from toilet-paper rolls. She sewed the incisions up quickly, using a coarse black thread. As the line of naked dolls grew longer on her husband's desk, they began to look like dead children, victims of some grisly mass poisoning, perhaps, who had been stripped and robbed after death.

  Each sewn incision parted in the middle so that one of the toilet-paper rolls could poke out like the barrel of some odd telescope. Only cardboard, the rolls would still serve to channel the force when it was generated. She didn't know how she knew this, or how she had known to build the gadgets in the first place ... the knowledge seemed to have come shimmering out of the air. The same air into which David Brown

  (is on Altair-4)

  had disappeared.

  As she plunged the knife into their plump, defenseless bellies, green light puffed out.

  I'm

  (sending a signal)

  murdering the only children I ever had.

  The signal. Think of the signal, not the children.

  She used extension cords to wire the dolls neatly together in a chain. She had stripped the insulation from the last four inches of these cords and slipped the gleaming copper into an M-16 firecracker she had confiscated from Beach Jernigan's fourteen-year-old son Hump (thus known because one shoulder rode slightly higher than the other) about a week before all this madness began. She looked back, doubtful for a moment, into her schoolroom with its empty benches. Enough light fell through the archway for her to be able to see the drawing of the town-hall clock tower. She had done it in one of those blank periods that seemed to be getting longer and longer.

  The hands of the clock in the drawing were set at three.

  Ruth set her work aside and went to bed. She slept, but her sleep was not easy; she twisted and turned and moaned. Even in her sleep the voices ran through her head--thoughts of revenge planned, of cakes to be baked, sexual fantasies, worries about irregularity, ideas for strange gadgets and machines, dreams of power. And below them all, a thin, irrational yammer like a polluted stream, thoughts coming from the heads of her fellow townspeople but not human thoughts, and in her nightmarish sleep, that part of Ruth McCausland which clung stubbornly to sanity knew the truth: these were not the rising voices of the people she had lived with all these years, but those of outsiders. They were the voices of the Tommyknockers.

  10

  Ruth understood by Thursday noon that the change in the weather hadn't solved anything.

  The state police came, but they did not institute a widespread search; Ruth's report, detailed and complete, as always, made it clear that David Brown, four, could hardly have wandered outside their search area unless he'd been abducted--a possibility they would now have to consider. Her report was accompanied by topographical maps. These were annotated in her careful, no-nonsense handwriting, and made it clear she had conducted the search thoroughly.

  "Careful and thorough you were, Ruthie," Monster Dugan told her that evening. His brow was furrowed in a frown so huge each line looked like an earthquake fissure. "You always have been. But I never knew you to pull a John Wayne stunt like this before."

  "Butch, I'm sorry."

  "Yeah, well..." He shrugged. "Done is done, huh?"

  "Yes," she said, and smiled wanly. It had been one of Ralph's favorite sayings.

  Butch asked a lot of questions, but not the one she needed to answer: Ruth, what's wrong in Haven? The high winds had cleansed the town's atmosphere; none of the outsiders sensed anything was wrong.

  But the winds hadn't ended the trouble. The bad magic was still going on. Whatever it was, it seemed to continue by itself after a certain point. Ruth guessed that point had been reached. She wondered what a team of doctors, conducting mass physicals in Haven, might find. Iron shortages in the women? Men with suddenly receding hairlines? Improved visual acuity (especially peripheral vision) matched by a surprisingly high loss of teeth? People who seemed so bright they were spooky, so in tune with you they almost seemed to be--ha-ha--reading your mind?

  Ruth herself had lost two more teeth Wednesday night. One she found on her pillow Thursday morning, a grotesquely middle-aged offering to the tooth fairy. The other was nowhere to be found. She supposed she had swallowed it. Not that it mattered.

  11

  The compulsion to blow up the town hall became maddening mental poison ivy, itching at her brain all the time. The doll-voices whispered and whispered. On Friday she made a final effort to save herself.

  She decided to leave town after all--it was not hers anymore. She guessed that staying even this long had been one of the traps the Tommyknockers had laid for her ... and, like the David Brown trap, she had blundered into it, as confused as a rabbit in a snare.

  She thought her old Dodge wouldn't start. They would have fixed it. But it did.

  Then she thought she would not be allowed out of Haven Village, that they would stop her, smiling like Moonies and sending their endless rustly we-all-love-you-Ruth thoughts. She wasn't.

  She rolled down Main Street and out into the country, Ruth sitting bolt upright and white-knuckled, a graven smile on her face, tongue-twisters

  (she sells pickled peppers bitter butter)

  flying through her head. She felt her gaze being pulled toward the town-hall clock tower

  (a signal Ruth send)

  (yes the explosion the lovely)

  (bang blow it blow it all the way to Altair-4 Ruth)

  and resisted with all her might. This compulsion to blow up the town hall
to call attention to what was going on here was insane. It was like setting your house on fire to roast a chicken.

  She felt better when the brick tower was out of sight.

  Once on Derry Road, she had to resist an urge to get the Dart moving as fast as it would go (which, considering its years, was still surprisingly fast). She felt like a lucky escapee from a den of lions--one who has escaped more by good luck than good sense. As the village dropped behind and those rustling voices fell away, she began to feel that someone must be giving belated chase.

  She glanced again and again into the rearview mirror, expecting to see vehicles chasing after her, wanting to bring her back. They would insist that she come back.

  They loved her too much to let her go.

  But the road had remained clear. No Dick Allison screaming after her in one of the town's three fire engines. No Newt Berringer in his big old mint-green Olds-88. No Bobby Tremain in his yellow Challenger.

  As she approached the Haven-Albion town line, she put the Dart up to fifty. The closer she got to the town line--which she had begun to think of, rightly or not, as the point at which her escape would become irrevocable, the more she found the last two weeks seeming like some black, twisted nightmare.

  Can't go back. Can't.

  Her foot on the Dart's accelerator pedal kept growing heavier.

  At the end, something warned her--perhaps it was something the voices had said and her subconscious had filed away. She was, after all, receiving all sorts of information now, in her sleep as well as when she was awake. As the town-line marker came up--

  --her foot left the Dart's gas pedal and stepped on the brake. It went down mushily and much too far, as it had for the last four years or so. Ruth allowed the car to roll off the tar and onto the shoulder. Dust, as white and dry as bone meal, plumed up behind her. The wind had died. The air of Haven was deadly still again. The dust she had raised, Ruth thought, would hang for a long time.