The Tommyknockers Read online

  "You speak as if everyone in Haven was in on something," Dugan said, "and I think that's impossible. I want you to know that."

  "Yes, any normal person would say that. That's how they've been able to get away with it this long. Fifty years ago, people felt like the atomic bomb was impossible, and they would have laughed at the idea of TV, let alone a video recorder. Not much changes, Trooper Dugan. Most people see as far as the horizon, and that's all. If someone says there's something over it, people don't listen."

  Ev stood up and extended his hand over Dugan's desk, as if he had every right in the world to expect Dugan to shake it. Which surprised Butch into doing just that.

  "Well, I knew when I looked at you that you thought I was nuts," Ev said with a rueful little smile, "and I guess I've said enough to double the idear. But I've found out what I needed to know, and said what I needed to say. Do an old man a favor, and peek at the sky once in a while. If you see a purple star-shell ..."

  "The woods are dry this summer," Dugan said, and even as the words came out of his mouth they seemed helpless and oddly unimportant; almost frivolous. He realized he was being drawn helplessly toward belief again.

  Dugan cleared his throat and pushed on.

  "If you've really got a flare-gun, using it could start a hell of a forest fire. If you don't have a permit to use such a thing--and I know goddam well you don't--it could get you thrown into jail."

  Ev's grin widened a little, but there was still no humor in it. "If you see the star-shell," he said, "I got a feeling that being thrown into the pokey up to Bangor is gonna be the least of my worries. Good day to you, Trooper Dugan."

  Ev stepped out and closed the door neatly behind him. Dugan stood for a moment, as perplexed and uneasy as he had ever been in his life. Let him go, he thought, and then got moving.

  Something had been troubling Butch Dugan. The disappearance of the two troopers, both of whom he had known and liked, had temporarily driven it out of his mind. Hillman's visit had brought it back, and that was what sent him after the old man.

  It was the memory of his last conversation with Ruth. He had been worried about her even before then; her handling of the David Brown search hadn't been like the Ruth McCausland he knew at all. For the only time he could remember, she had been unprofessional.

  Then, the night before she died, he had called her about the investigation, to get information and to give it; to kibitz, in short. He knew neither of them had anything, but sometimes you could spin something out of plain speculation, like straw into gold. In the course of that conversation, the subject of the boy's grandfather had come up. By then Butch had spoken to David Bright of the News--had had a beer with him, in fact--and he passed on to Ruth Ev's idea that the whole town had gone crazy in some strange way.

  Ruth hadn't laughed at the story, or clucked over the failure of Ev Hillman's mind, as he had expected she would do. He wasn't sure just what she had said, because just about then the connection had begun to get bad--not that there was anything very unusual in that; most of the lines going into small towns like Haven were still on poles, and the connections regularly went to hell--all it took was a high wind to make you feel like you and the other person were holding tomato-soup cans connected by a length of waxed string.

  Better tell him to stay away, Ruth had said--he was sure of that much. And then, just before he lost her altogether, it seemed to him that she had said something about--of all things--nyton stockings. He must have heard her wrong, but there was no mistaking the tone--sadness and great weariness, as if her failure to find David Brown had taken all the heart out of her. A moment later the connection had broken down completely. He hadn't bothered to call her back because he had given her all the information he had ... precious little, really.

  The next day she was dead.

  Better tell him to stay away. That much he was sure of.

  Now, I have reasons ... to believe that I'm not wanted in Haven.

  Tell him to stay away.

  I might disappear like David Brown.

  Stay away.

  Or have an accident like Ruth McCausland.

  Away.

  He caught up to the old man in the parking lot.

  14

  Hillman had an old purple Valiant with badly rusted rocker panels. He looked up, driver's-side door open, as Dugan loomed over him.

  "I'm coming with you tomorrow."

  Ev's eyes widened. "You don't even know where I'm going!"

  "No. But if I'm with you I won't have to worry that you're going to set half the woods in eastern Maine on fire trying to send me a message like Double-O-Seven."

  Ev looked at him consideringly and then shook his head. "I'd feel better having someone with me," he said, "especially a guy as big as Gorilla Monsoon who packs a gun. But they ain't stupid in Haven, Officer Dugan. They never were, and I got a feeling that they're a lot less stupid just lately. They expect to see you at her funeral. If they don't, they're going to be suspicious."

  "Christ! I'd like to know how the hell you can stand there babbling all that crazy shit and sound so fucking sane!"

  "Maybe because you know too," Ev said. "How funny it is. How funny all of these things started in Haven." Then with a prescience that was startling, he added: "Or maybe you knew Ruth well enough yourself to sense she'd gotten off-kilter."

  The two men stood looking at each other in the graveled parking lot of the Derry barracks, the sun beating down on them, their shadows, clear and black, slanting out neatly at two o'clock.

  "I'll let on tonight that I'm sick," Dugan said. "That I've got stomach flu. It's been going around the barracks. What do you think?"

  Ev nodded with sudden relief--that relief was so great it was startling. The idea of sneaking back into Haven had frightened him more than he had been willing to let on, especially to himself. He had half-convinced this big cop that something might be going on there; he could see it in his face. Half-convinced wasn't much, maybe, but it was still a giant step forward from where he had been. And of course, he hadn't done it alone; Ruth McCausland had helped.

  "All right," he said, "but listen to me, Trooper Dugan, and listen good, because our lives could depend on it tomorrow. Don't you call up any of the men who'll be going to the funeral tomorrow and tell them the reason you're not going to be there is just a gag you're running. Call up a few people tonight and tell them you really are just as sick as a dog, that you hope you are going to be able to make it, but you doubt it."

  Dugan frowned. "Why would you want me to say--" But suddenly he knew, and his mouth dropped open. The old man stared back at him calmly enough.

  "Christ Jesus, are you telling me that you think the people in Haven are mind-readers? That if my men knew I really wasn't sick, the people in town could pick the news right out of their heads?"

  "I ain't telling you a thing, Trooper Dugan," Ev said. "You are telling me."

  "Mr. Hillman, I really think that you must be imagining--"

  "I never expected you'd want to come with me when I came to see you. I wasn't angling for it, either. The most I hoped for was that you'd keep an eye out and see my flare if I got in trouble, and that would at least keep the heat on that nest of snakes down there awhile longer. But if you offer a man more, he wants more. Trust me a little further. Please. For Ruth's sake ... if that's what it takes to convince you to come with me, I'm willing to use it. Something else: no matter what, you're going to feel some peculiar things tomorrow."

  "I've felt some pretty peculiar ones today," Dugan said.

  "Ayuh," Ev said, and waited for Dugan to decide.

  "Do you have some actual place to go in mind?" Dugan asked after a moment. "Or are you just going to ramble around the town until you get tired of it?"

  "I've got a place in mind," Ev said quietly. He thought: Oh yes. Yessirree Bob. Up behind the old Garrick place, on the outskirts of Big Injun Woods, where compasses have never worked worth a tin shit in a goldmine. And I believe we'll strike on a pretty good
path through the woods to it--whatever "it" is--because equipment like the stuff Bobbi Anderson and her friend have been using leaves a backtrail as wide as a freeway. No, I don't believe there will be any trouble finding it at all.

  "Okay. Give me the address of the place you're staying in Derry, and I'll pick you up at nine in my personal car. We'll get to Haven just about the time the service starts."

  "The car's my treat," Ev said quietly. "Not this one; it's known in Haven. I'll have a rental. And you'll want to show up at eight, because we'll be doing a bit of backroading."

  "I can get us into Haven and still keep clear of the village," Dugan said. "You don't have to worry about that."

  "I ain't. But I want us to skirt the whole town and come in from the Albion side, and I think I know just the way to do it."

  "Why the hell does it have to be that end of town?"

  "Because it's the furthest from where they'll be, and that's where I want to come back into Haven. As far from em as I can get."

  "You're really scared, aren't you?"

  Ev nodded.

  "Why a rental car?"

  "Criminy, don't you ask a lot of questions!" And Ev rolled his eyes in such a comical way that Butch Dugan grinned.

  "It's my job," he said. "Why do you want to go in a rental? No one in Haven is going to know my personal car." He paused, thinking. "At least, not now that Ruth's dead. "

  "Because it's my obsession," Ev Hillman said. His face suddenly cracked into a smile of startling sweetness. "And a person ought to pay the freight on his own obsession."

  "All right," Butch said. "I give up. Eight o'clock. Your route, your car, your obsession. I must be crazy. I really must be."

  "By tomorrow at this time, I think you're going to have a much better idea of what crazy is," Ev said, and climbed into his old purple Valiant before Dugan could ask him any more questions.

  Butch, in fact, had no more questions to ask. He felt glum, as if he had bought the Brooklyn Bridge his first day in New York City, shelling out even though he knew a thing that big probably couldn't be for sale. No one gets taken who doesn't want to get taken, he thought. He had worked Fraud and Bunco out of Augusta for three years, and that was the first thing they taught you. The old man had been queerly persuasive, but Butch Dugan knew that he had not been persuaded into this; he had jumped. Because he had loved Ruth McCausland, and in another year or so he probably would have plucked up sufficient nerve to propose to her. Because when someone you love dies, it leaves a black hole in the middle of your heart, and one way to plug such a hole is to refuse to admit that he or she was taken away by a stupid mischance. Better if you can believe--even for a little while--that someone or something you can get hold of was responsible. It makes the hole a little smaller. Even a rube knows that much.

  Sighing, suddenly feeling much older than his age, Dugan trudged back to the barracks.

  Ev went to the hospital and sat for most of that day's remainder with Hilly. Around three o'clock, he wrote two notes. One he put on Hilly's night table, anchored against the breeze that pawed with occasional playfulness through the open window with a little pot of flowers. The other note was longer, and when he was done with it, he folded it and put it in his pocket. Then he left the hospital.

  He drove to a small building in the Derry Industrial Park. MAINE MED SUPPLIES, the sign over the door read. And below that: Specializing in Respiration Supplies and Respiration Therapy Since 1946.

  He told the man inside what he wanted. The man told him it sounded as if he really ought to take a ride up to Bangor and talk to the folks at Downeast ScubaDive. Ev explained that a scuba tank was the last thing he wanted; he was interested in as much dry-land portability as he could get. He and the fellow talked awhile longer, and Ev left, after signing a thirty-six-hour rental agreement, with a rather specialized piece of equipment. The fellow at Maine Med Supplies stood at the door watching him go, scratching his head.

  15

  The nurse read the note by Hilly's bed.

  Hilly--

  I may not see you for a while now, but I just wanted to tell you I think you'll get over this bad patch, and if I can help you do it, I guess I will be just about the happiest grampa in the world. I believe David is still alive and I don't think it's your fault that he got lost in the first place. I love you. Hilly, and I hope to see you soon.

  Gramp

  But he never saw Hilly Brown again.

  9.

  THE FUNERAL

  1

  From nine o'clock on, out-of-towners who had known or worked with Ruth McCausland began to come into Haven Village. Soon almost every parking space along Main Street was taken. The Haven Lunch did a brisk business. Beach kept busy short-ordering eggs, bacon, sausages, and home-fries. He brewed pot after pot of coffee. Representative Brennan hadn't come, but he had sent a close aide. Should have come y'self, Joe, Beach thought with a little sunken smile. Might have got a whole slew of new ideas 'bout how to run the gov'mint.

  The day dawned brisk and clear, more like late September than late July. The sky was bright blue, the temperature a moderate sixty-eight degrees, the wind out of the west at about twenty miles an hour. Once more there were outsiders in Haven, and once more Haven had gotten lucky weather for them. And soon it wouldn't matter whether they were lucky or not, the townsfolk told each other without speaking; soon they would be in charge of their own luck.

  A good day, you would have said; the best kind of New England summer's day, the sort the tourists come for. A day to prick the appetite fully alive. Those who came to Haven from out of town ordered hearty breakfasts, as people with lively appetites are apt to do, but Beach noted that most of those breakfasts came back only half-eaten. The newcomers lost their appetites quickly; the light went out of their eyes, and they began to look, for the most part, shallow and a little sick.

  The Lunch was crowded, but conversation lagged.

  Must be that the air here in our little town don't quite agree with you folks, Beach thought. He imagined going into the storeroom, where the device he had used to get rid of the two nosy cops was hidden under a pile of tablecloths. He imagined bringing it out here, a great big deadly bazooka, and just washing his lunchroom clean of all these outsiders with a purifying blast of green fire.

  No; not now. Not yet. Soon it wouldn't matter. Next month. But for now ...

  He looked down at the plate he was scraping and saw a tooth in someone's scrambled eggs.

  Tommyknockers coming, my friends, Beach thought. Only when they finally get here, I don't think they'll even bother knocking; I think they'll just blow the fucking door right down.

  Beach's grin widened. He scraped the tooth off the plate with the rest of the garbage.

  2

  Dugan could be silent when he wanted, and this morning that was what he wanted. Apparently it was what the old man wanted, too. Dugan had gotten to Ev Hillman's apartment building on Lower Main promptly at eight, and had found a Jeep Cherokee standing at the curb behind the old party's Valiant. There was a big gunnysack in the back, its top tied with hayrope.

  "Did you rent this in Bangor?"

  "Leased it at Derry AMC," Ev said.

  "Must have been expensive."

  " 'Twasn't too dear."

  That ended the conversation. They arrived somewhere near the Albion-Haven town line an hour and forty minutes later. We'll be doing a bit of backroading, the old man had said, and if that wasn't a classic understatement, Butch didn't know what was. He had been driving in this part of Maine for almost twenty years, and before today had thought he knew it like the back of his hand. Now he knew better. Hillman knew it like the back of his hand; by comparison, Butch Dugan had a general working knowledge of the area, no more.

  They went from the turnpike to Route 69; from 69 to two-lane blacktop; then to gravel in western Troy; then to hardpan; then to rutted dirt with grass growing up the middle; finally to an overgrown logging track that looked as if it might have last been seriously used aroun
d 1950.

  "Do you know where the fuck you're going?" Butch shouted as the Cherokee crashed through rotted corduroy, then hauled itself out, engine howling, all four wheels spinning up mud and chewed splinters.

  Ev only nodded. He clung to the Cherokee's big wheel like an old balding monkey.

  One woods road led into another, and finally they crashed out of a scree of foliage and onto a dirt road Butch recognized as Albion Town Road # 5. Butch had thought it impossible, but the old man had done exactly what he promised: brought them all the way around Haven without ever once going in.

  Now Ev brought the Cherokee to a stop just a hundred feet short of the marker announcing the Haven town line. He turned off the engine and unrolled his window. There was no sound but the tick of the engine. There was no birdsong, and Butch thought this odd.

  "What's in that gunnysack back there?" Butch asked.

  "All kinds of things. No need to worry about it now."

  "What are you waiting for?"

  "Churchbells," Ev said.

  3

  It was not the Methodist churchbells that Ev had grown up with and expected which rang out at a quarter to ten, calling Ruth's mourners--both the real ones and those prepared to shed copious floods of crocodile tears--to the Methodist church, where the first act of the three-act festivities was to be played out (Act II: Graveside Ceremonies; Act III: Refreshments in the Town Library).

  Reverend Goohringer, a shy man who usually had not the fortitude to say boo to a goose, had gone around town a few weeks ago telling people he was getting damned tired of all that gonging.

  "Then why don't you do something about it, Gooey?" Pamela Sargent asked him.

  Rev. Lester Goohringer had never been called "Gooey" in his entire life, but in his current state of rancor he barely noticed.

  "Maybe I will," he said, looking at her through his thick glasses grimly. "Just maybe I will."