The Tommyknockers Read online

  You fucked up, Beach, they saved your life and you fucked up ... oh, damn you ... damn you ... damn you ...

  Then the shrieking tires stopped. The smell of cooked rubber was strong and sickening, but the crash for which he had been braced hadn't come. Blue lights strobed. A microphone crackled static.

  Dimly he heard the hoarse-voiced cop say, "What's this shit?"

  Shakily Beach did a girly-pushup and peered over the edge of the truckbed with just his eyes. He saw their cruiser halted at the end of a long pair of black skid-marks. Even by starlight those marks were clearly visible. The cruiser was sitting at a cockeyed angle not nine feet away. If they had been going just five miles an hour faster ...

  Yeah, but they weren't.

  Sounds. The double-clunk of their doors closing as they got out of their car. The faint, dull hum of the transformers which powered his gadget--a gadget that was not all that different from the ones Ruth had planted in the bellies of her dolls. And a low buzzing sound. Flies. They smelled the blood under the plastic sheet but couldn't get at the deer's carcass.

  You'll get your chance soon enough, Beach thought, and grinned. Too bad you won't get a taste of those old boys out there.

  "I saw that truck back in Haven, Bent," the hoarse-voiced one said. "Parked in front of the restaurant."

  Beach swiveled the culvert pipe slightly in its cradle. Looking through it, he could see them both. And if one of them moved out of the actual power axis of the gadget, that was okay; there was a slight flare effect.

  Get away from the car, boys, Beach thought, picking up the doorbell from Western Auto and settling a thumb on it. His grin showed pink gums. Don't want to get none of the car. Move away, all right?

  "Who's there?" the other cop shouted.

  Tommyknockers here, knocking at your door, you meddling shithead, he thought, and began to giggle. He couldn't help it. He tried to stifle it as best he could.

  "If someone's in that truck, you better speak up!"

  He began to giggle louder; just couldn't help it. And maybe that was just as well, because they took a look at each other and then began to move toward the truck, unholstering their guns. Toward the truck and away from their cruiser.

  Beach waited until he was sure the cruiser wouldn't be touched by the flare--they had told him not to harm the police car, and he intended not to take so much as a layer of chrome off the bumper. When the cops were clear, Beach pushed the doorbell. Avon calling, shitheads, he thought, and this time he didn't just giggle; he whooped. A thick branch of green fire shot out in the dark, catching both of the policemen and enveloping them. Beach saw several bright yellow sparks inside that green glare, and understood that one of the cops was triggering his pistol off again and again.

  Beach could smell the thick aroma of cooking train transformers. There was a sudden pop! and a twisting skyrocket of sparks from one of them. Some of the sparks landed on his arm, stinging, and he brushed them off. The green fire coming from the end of the culvert winked out. The policemen were gone. Well ... almost gone.

  Beach jumped over the tailgate of the truck, moving just as fast as he could. This wasn't the turnpike, God knew, and no one from the country headed into Derry to go shopping this late, but someone would be along sooner or later. He should--

  Sitting on the pavement was a single smoking shoe. He picked it up, almost dropped it. He hadn't expected it to be so heavy. Looking inside, he saw why. A sock-encased foot was still inside it.

  Beach carried it back to his truck and tossed it into the cab. When he got back to town he would get rid of it. No need to bury it; there were more efficient ways of getting rid of things in Haven. If the Mayfia knew what us Yankee hicks got up here, I guess they'd want to buy them the franchise, Beach thought, and tittered again.

  He pulled the pins on the tailgate. It fell flat open with a rusty crash. He grabbed the plastic-wrapped carcass of the deer. Whose idea had this been? he wondered. Old Dave's? Didn't really matter. In Haven all ideas were now becoming one.

  The plastic-wrapped bundle was heavy and awkward. Beach got his arms around the buck's rear legs and pulled. It came out of the truck, its head thudding onto the tarvy. Beach looked around again for brightening headlights on either horizon, saw none, and dragged the deer across the road as fast as he could. He put it down with a grunt and flipped the carcass over so he could free the plastic. Now he got the deer, which had been neatly gutted and cleaned, in both arms and picked it up. Cords stood out in his neck like cables; his skinned-back lips would have shown his teeth, had any been left in his gums. The deer's head with its half-grown antlers hung down below his right forearm. Its dusty eyes stared off into the night.

  Beach staggered three steps down the sloping soft shoulder and threw the deer's body into the ditch, where it landed with a thud. He stepped away and picked up the plastic. He carried it back to the truck and bundled it into the passenger side of the cab. He would have liked it better in back--it stank--but there was always a chance it would blow out and be found. He hurried around to the driver's side of the truck, plucking his blood-dampened shirt away from his chest with a little grimace as he did. He'd change as soon as he got home.

  He got in and started Betsy's motor. He backed and filled until he was pointed back toward Haven and then paused for just a moment, surveying the scene, trying to see if the story it told was the one it was supposed to tell. He thought it did. Here was a Bearmobile sitting dead-empty in the middle of the road at the end of a long skid. Engine off, flashers going. There was the gutted carcass of a good-size buck in the ditch. That wouldn't go unnoticed long, not in July.

  Was there anything in this story that whispered Haven?

  Beach didn't think so. This story was about two cops returning to barracks after investigating a single-fatality accident. They just happened to run on a gang of men jacklighting deer. What happened to the cops? Ah, that was the question, wasn't it? And the possible answers would look more and more ominous as the days passed. There were jacklighters in the story, jacklighters who'd perhaps panicked, shot a couple of cops, and then buried them in the woods. But Haven? Beach really believed they would think that was a completely different story, one nowhere near as interesting.

  Now, in his rearview mirror, he could see approaching headlights. He put his truck in low and skirted the police cruiser. Its flashers bathed him in half a dozen blue pulsebeats, and then it was behind him. Beach glanced to his right, saw the regulation-issue black shoe with its runner of regulation-blue sock poking out like the tail of a kite, and cackled. Bet when you put that shoe on this mornin, Mr. Smartass State Bear, you didn't have no idea where it would finish up tonight.

  Beach Jernigan cackled again and fetched second gear with a ram and a jerk. He was headed home and he had never felt doodly-damn better in his whole life.

  8.

  EV HILLMAN

  1

  Lead story, Bangor Daily News, July 25th, 1988: TWO STATE POLICE DISAPPEAR IN DERRY

  Area-wide Manhunt Begins

  by David Bright

  The discovery of an abandoned state-police cruiser in Derry last night shortly after 9:30 has touched off the second major search of the summer in eastern and central Maine. The first was for four-year-old David Brown of Haven, who is still missing. Ironically, the officers, Benton Rhodes and Peter Gabbons, were returning from that same town at the time of their disappearance, having just completed their preliminary investigation of a furnace fire which took one life (see related story this page).

  In a late development which one police insider described as "the worst possible news we could have at this time," the body of a deer which had been shot, gutted, and cleaned was found near the cruiser, leading to speculations that ...

  2

  "There, looka that," Beach said to Dick Allison and Newt Berringer over coffee the next morning. They were in the Haven Lunch, looking at the paper, which had just come in. "We all thought nobody would make a connection. Damn!"

 
; "Relax," Newt said, and Dick nodded. "No one is going to connect the disappearance of a four-year-old boy who prob'ly just wandered off into the woods or got picked up and driven away by a sex pervert with the disappearance of two big strong State Bears. Right, Dick?"

  "As rain."

  3

  Wrong.

  4

  Page one, Bangor Daily News, below the fold: HAVEN CONSTABLE KILLED IN FREAK ACCIDENT

  WAS COMMUNITY LEADER

  by John Leandro

  Ruth McCausland, one of only three women constables in Maine, died yesterday in her home town of Haven. She was fifty. Richard Allison, head of Haven's volunteer fire department, says that Mrs. McCausland appears to have been killed when oil fumes which had collected in the town-hall basement as the result of a faulty valve ignited. Allison said that the lighting in the basement, where a lot of town records are stored, is not very good. "She may have struck a match," Allison said. "At least, that is the theory we are going on now."

  Asked if any evidence of arson had been found, Allison said there had not, but admitted that the disappearance of the two state troopers sent to investigate the mishap (see story above) made that more difficult to determine. "Since neither of the investigating officers has been able to file a report, I imagine we'll have the state fire inspectors up here. Right now I'm more concerned that the investigating officers turn up safe and sound."

  Newton Barringer, Haven's head selectman, said that the entire town was in deep mourning for Mrs. McCausland. "She was a great woman," Berringer said, "and we all loved her." Other Haven townspeople echoed the sentiment, not a few of them in tears as they spoke of Mrs. McCausland.

  Her public service in the small town of Haven began in ...

  5

  It was, of course, Hilly's grandfather, Ev, who made the connection. Ev Hillman, who could have rightly been called the town in exile, Ev Hillman, who had come back from Big II with two small steel plates in his head as a result of a German potato-masher which had exploded near him during the Battle of the Bulge.

  He spent the Monday morning after Haven's explosive Sunday where he had been spending all of his mornings--in Room 371 of the Derry Home Hospital, watching over Hilly. He had taken a furnished room down on Lower Main Street, and spent his nights--his largely sleepless nights--there after the nurses finally turned him out.

  Sometimes he would lie in the dark and think he heard chuckling noises coming from the drains and he would think: You're going nuts, old-timer. Except he wasn't. Sometimes he wished he were.

  He had tried to talk to some of the nurses about what he believed had happened to David--what he knew had happened to David. They pitied him. He did not see their pity at first; his eyes were only opened after he had made the mistake of talking to the reporter. That had opened his eyes. He thought the nurses admired him for his loyalty to Hilly, and felt sorry for him because Hilly seemed to be slipping away ... but they also thought him mad. Little boys did not disappear during tricks performed in back yard magic shows. You didn't even have to go to nursing school to know that.

  After a while in Derry alone, half out of his mind with worry for Hilly and David and contempt for what he now saw as cowardice on his part and fear for Ruth McCausland and the others in Haven, Ev had done some drinking at the little bar halfway down Lower Main. In the course of a conversation with the bartender, he heard the story of a fellow named John Smith, who had taught in the nearby town of Cleaves Mills for a while. Smith had been in a coma for years, had awakened with some sort of psychic gift. He went nuts a few years ago--had tried to assassinate a fellow named Stillson, who was a U.S. representative from New Hampshire.

  "Dunno if there was ever any truth to the psychic part of it or not," the bartender said, drawing Ev a fresh beer. "B'lieve most of that stuff is just eyewash, myself. But if you've got some wild-ass tale to tell"--Ev had hinted he had a story to tell that would make The Amityville Horror look tame--"then Bright at the Bangor Daily News is the guy you ought to tell it to. He wrote up the Smith guy for the paper. He drops in here for a beer every once in a while, and I'll tell you, mister, he believed Smith had the sight."

  Ev had had three beers, rapidly, one after another--just enough, in other words, to believe that simple solutions might be possible. He went to the pay phone, laid out his change on the shelf, and called the Bangor Daily News. David Bright was in, and Ev spoke to him. He didn't tell him the story, not over the phone, but said that he had a tale to tell, and he didn't understand what it all meant, but he thought people ought to know about it, fast.

  Bright sounded interested. More, he sounded sympathetic. He asked Ev when he could come up to Bangor (that Bright did not speak of coming to Derry to interview the old man should have tipped Ev to the idea that he might have overestimated both Bright's belief and his sympathy), and Ev had asked if that very night would be okay.

  "Well, I'll be here another two hours," Bright said. "Can you be here before midnight, Mr. Hillman?"

  "Bet your buns," the old man snapped, and hung up. When he walked out of Wally's Spa on Lower Main, there was fire in his eye and a spring in his step. He looked twenty years younger than the man who had shuffled in.

  But it was twenty-five miles up to Bangor, and the three beers wore off. By the time Ev got to the News building he was sober again. Worse, his head was fuzzy and confused. He was aware of telling the story badly, of circling around again and again to the magic show, to the way Hilly had looked, to his certainty that David Brown had really disappeared.

  At last he stopped ... only it was not so much a stopping as a drying up of an increasingly sluggish flow.

  Bright was tapping a pencil against the side of his desk, not looking at Ev.

  "You never actually looked under the platform at the time, Mr. Hillman?"

  "No ... no. But ..."

  Now Bright did look at him, and he had a kind face, but in it Ev saw the expression which had opened his eyes--the man thought he was just as mad as a March hare.

  "Mr. Hillman, all of this is very interesting--"

  "Never mind," Ev said, getting up. The chair he had been sitting in bumped back so rapidly it almost fell over. He was dimly aware of word-processer terminals tapping, phones ringing, people walking back and forth in the city room with papers in their hands. Mostly he was aware that it was midnight, he was tired and sick with fear, and this fellow thought he was crazy. "Never mind, it's late, you'll be wanting to get home to y'family, I guess."

  "Mr. Hillman, if you'd just see it from my perspective, you'd understand that--"

  "I do see it from your side," Ev said. "For the first time, I guess. I have to go too, Mr. Bright. I got a long drive ahead of me and visitin hours start at nine. Sorry to've wasted y'time."

  He got out of there fast, furiously reminding himself what he should have remembered in the first place, that there was no fool like an old fool, and he guessed tonight's work showed him off as just about the biggest old fool of all. Well, so much for trying to tell people what was happening in Haven. He was old, but he was damned if he'd ever put up with another look like that.

  Ever, in his life.

  6

  That resolution lasted exactly fifty-six hours--until he got a look at the headlines on Monday's papers. Looking at them, he found himself wanting to go and see the man in charge of investigating the disappearance of the two state cops. The News said his name was Dugan, and mentioned that he had also known Ruth McCausland well--would, in fact, take time off from an extremely hot case to speak briefly at the lady's funeral. Must have known her pretty damned well, it seemed to Ev.

  But when he searched for any of the previous night's fire and excitement, he found only sour dread and hopelessness. The two stories on the front page had taken most of the guts he had left. Haven's turning into a nest of snakes and now they are starting to bite. I have to convince someone of that, and how am I going to do it? How am I going to convince anyone that there's telepathy going on in that town, and Christ
knows what else? How, when I can barely remember how I knew things were going on? How, when I never really saw nothing myself? How? Most of all, how'm I supposed to do it when the whole goddam thing is staring them in the face and they don't even see it? There's a whole town going loony just down the road and no one has got the slightest idea it's happening.

  He turned to the obituary page again. Ruth's clear eyes looked up at him from one of those strange newsprint pictures that are nothing but densely packed dots. Her eyes, so clear and straightforward and beautiful, looked calmly back at him. Ev guessed that there had been at least five and maybe as many as a dozen men in Haven who had been in love with her, and she had never even known it. Her eyes seemed to deny the very idea of death, to declare it ridiculous. But dead she was.

  He remembered taking Hilly out while the search party gathered.

  You could come with us, Ruthie.

  Ev, I can't ... Get in touch with me.

  He had tried just once, thinking that if Ruth joined him in Derry, she would be out of danger ... and she could backstop his story. In his state of confusion and misery and, yes, even homesickness, Ev wasn't even sure which was more important to him. In the end it didn't matter. He had tried three times to dial Haven direct, the last one after speaking to Bright, and none of the calls took. He tried once with operator assistance, and she told him there must be lines down. Would he try later? Ev said he would, but hadn't. He had lain down in the dark instead, and listened to the drains chuckle.

  Now, less than three days later, Ruth had gotten in touch with him. Via the obituary page.

  He looked up at Hilly. Hilly was sleeping. The doctors refused to call it a coma--his brain patterns were not the brain patterns of a comatose patient, they said; they were the brain patterns of a person in deep sleep. Ev didn't care what they called it. He knew Hilly was slipping away, and whether it was into a state called autism--Ev didn't know what the word meant, but he had heard one of the doctors mutter it to another in a low voice he hadn't been meant to overhear--or one called coma didn't make any difference at all. They were just words. Slipping away was what it came down to, and that was quite terrible enough.