The Tommyknockers Read online

  They'll kill you anyway. Might as well go out like John Wayne. Shit, they're all crazy.

  "No," Bobbi said. She was leaning against the Jeep's hood now. Blood trickled steadily from her mouth. The back of her shirt was soaking. "We're not crazy. We're not going to kill you. Check me."

  Dugan probed clumsily toward Bobbi Anderson's mind and saw that she meant it ... but there was a catch somewhere, something he might have caught on to if he hadn't been so new at this eerie mind-reading trick. It was like the fine print in some slick car salesman's contract. He would think about it later. These guys were amateurs, and there might still be a chance to get away clean. If ...

  Suddenly Adley McKeen ripped the gold mask off his face. Butch felt a wave of dizziness almost at once.

  "I like you better this way," Adley said. "You won't think s'much about excapin with your goddam canned air turned off."

  Butch fought the dizziness and looked back at Bobbi Anderson. I think she's going to die. think what you want

  He straightened and took a step backward as that unexpected thought filled his head. He looked at her more closely.

  "What about the old man?" he asked flatly.

  "Not--" Bobbi coughed, spraying more blood. Bubbles formed on her nostrils. Kyle and Newt started toward her. Bobbi waved them back. "Not your business. You and me are going to get in the front of the Jeep. You drive. There'll be three men with guns in the back, if you think of trying anything funny."

  "I want to know what's going to happen to the old man," Butch repeated.

  Bobbi raised her gun with a great effort. She brushed her sweaty hair away from her eyes with her left hand. Her right dangled uselessly by her side. It was as if she wanted Dugan to see her very clearly, to measure her. Butch did. The coldness he saw in her eyes was real.

  "I don't want to kill you," she said softly. "You know that. But if you say one more word, I'll have these men execute you right here. We'll bury you next to Beach and take our chances."

  Ev Hillman was struggling to his feet. He looked dazed, not sure where he was. He armed blood off his forehead like sweat.

  Another wave of dizziness washed through Butch, and a thought of infinite comfort came to him: This is a dream. All just a dream.

  Bobbi smiled without humor. "Think that if you want," she said. "Just get in the Jeep."

  Butch got in and slid across behind the wheel. Bobbi started around to the passenger side. She began coughing again, spraying blood, and her knees buckled. Two of the others had to help her.

  Never mind the "think." I know she's going to die.

  Bobbi turned her head and looked at him. That clear mental voice

  (think what you want)

  filled his head again.

  Archinbourg, Summerfield, and McKeen crammed into the back seat of the Cherokee.

  "Drive," Bobbi whispered. "Slow."

  Butch began to back up. He would see Everett Hillman once more but would not remember--later, most of Butch's mind would have been rubbed away like chalk from a blackboard. The old man stood there in the sunlight, that stupendous saucer-shape behind him. He was surrounded by big men, and five feet to his left, there was something on the ground that looked like a charred log.

  You didn't do too bad, old man. In your day you must have been quite a high rider... and you sure as hell weren't crazy.

  Hillman looked up and shrugged, as if to say: Well, we tried.

  More dizziness. Butch's sight wavered.

  "I'm not sure I can drive," he said, his voice seeming to boom into his ears from a great distance. "That thing ... it makes me sick."

  "Is there any air left in his little kit, Adley?" Bobbi whispered. Her face was ashy pale. The blood on her lips seemed very red by comparison.

  "Face mask's hissin a little."

  "Put it on him."

  A moment after it was jammed firmly over Butch's mouth and nose again, he began to improve.

  "Enjoy it while you can," Bobbi whispered, and then passed out.

  20

  "Ashes to ashes... dust to dust. Thus we commit the body of our friend Ruth McCausland to the ground, and her soul to a loving God."

  The mourners had moved on to the pretty little graveyard on the hill west of the village. They stood loosely gathered around an open grave. Ruth's casket was suspended over it on runners. There were far fewer mourners here than there had been in the church; many of the out-of-towners, either headachy and nauseated or glowing feverishly with strange new ideas, had taken the chance afforded by the intermission between acts to slip away.

  The flowers at the head of the grave ruffled gently in a fresh summer breeze. As the Rev. Goohringer raised his head, he saw a bright yellow rose go twirling down the grassy hill. Beyond and below Homeland's weatherbeaten white fence, he could see the town-hall clock-tower. It wavered slightly in the bright air, like something seen through a heat-haze. Still, Goohringer thought, it was a damned good illusion. These strangers in town had seen the best magic-lantern slide in history and didn't even know it.

  His eyes met Frank Spruce's for just an instant--he read relief clearly in Frank's eyes, and he supposed Frank could see it just as clearly in his own. Many of the outsiders would go back to wherever they came from and tell their friends that Ruth's death had rocked the little community to its foundations; they had hardly seemed to be there at all. What none of them knew, Goohringer reflected, was that they had been following the events near the ship with most of their attention. For a while things out there had gone very badly. Now they were under control again, but Bobbi Anderson might die if they couldn't get her back to the shed in time, and that was bad.

  Still, things were under control. The "becoming" would continue. That was the only important consideration.

  Goohringer held his Bible open in one hand. Its pages fluttered a little in the wind. Now he raised the other hand in the air. The mourners standing around Ruth's grave lowered their heads.

  "May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord lift up His face and make it shine upon you and give you peace. Amen."

  The mourners raised their heads. Goohringer smiled. "There'll be refreshments in the library, for those of you who'd care to stop by for a while and remember Ruth," he said.

  Act II was over.

  21

  Kyle reached gently into Bobbi's pants pocket and probed until he found her keyring. He worked it out, picked through the keys, and found the one that opened the padlock on the shed door. He inserted the key in the lock but didn't turn it.

  Adley and Joe Summerfield were covering Dugan, who was still behind the wheel of the Jeep. Butch was finding it harder and harder to pull air from the mask. The needle on the supply dial had been in the red for five minutes now. Kyle rejoined them.

  "Go check the drunk," Kyle said to Joe Summerfield. "Looks like he's still passed out, but I don't trust the fucker. "

  Joe crossed the side yard, climbed the porch, and examined Gardener carefully, wincing at his sour breath. This time there really was no sham; Gardener had gotten a fresh bottle of Scotch and had drunk himself into oblivion.

  As the two other men stood waiting for Joe to come back, Kyle said: "Bobbi is most likely going to die. If she does, I'm going to get rid of that lush first thing."

  Joe came back. "He's out."

  Kyle nodded and turned the key in the shed's padlock as Joe joined Adley in keeping the cop covered. Kyle pulled the lock free and opened the door partway. Brilliant green light poured out--it was so bright it seemed to dim the sunlight. There was an odd liquid churning sound. It was almost (but not quite) the sound of machinery.

  Kyle took an involuntary step backward, his face tightening momentarily into an expression of fright, revulsion, and awe. The smell alone--thick and fetid and organic--was damn near enough to knock a man over. Kyle understood--they all did--that the two-hearted nature of the Tommyknockers was now growing together. The dance of deception was nearly done.

  Liquid churning sounds, that sme
ll... and then another sound. Something like the feeble, bubbly yap of a drowning dog.

  Kyle had been in the shed twice before, but remembered little about it. He knew, of course, that it was an important place, a fine place, and that it had speeded his own "becoming." But the human part of him was still almost superstitiously afraid of it.

  He came back to Adley and Joe.

  "We can't wait for the others. We've got to get Bobbi in there right now if there's going to be any chance of saving her at all."

  The cop, he saw, had taken off the mask. It lay, used up, on the seat beside him. That was good. As Adley had said out in the woods, he would think less about escaping without his canned air.

  "Keep your gun on the cop," Kyle said. "Joe, help me with Bobbi."

  "Help you take her into the shed?"

  "No, help me take her to the Rumford Zoo so she can see the fucking lion!" Kyle shouted. "Of course, the shed!"

  "I don't... I don't think I want to go in there. Not just now." Joe looked from that green light back to Kyle, a shamed, slightly sickened smile on his lips.

  "I'll help you," Adley said softly. "Bobbi's a good old sport. Be a shame if she croaked before we got to the end of it."

  "All right," Kyle said. "Cover the cop," he said to Joe. "And if you screw up, I swear to God I'll kill you."

  "I won't, Kyle," Joe said. That shamed grin still hung on his mouth, but there was no mistaking the relief in his eyes. "I sure won't. I'll watch him good."

  "See that you do," Bobbi said feebly. It startled them all.

  Kyle looked at her, then back to Joe. Joe flinched away from the naked contempt in Kyle's eyes... but he didn't look toward the shed, toward that light, those churning, squelching sounds.

  "Come on, Adley," Kyle said at last. "Let's get Bobbi in there. Soonest started, soonest done."

  Adley McKeen, fiftyish, balding, and stocky, flagged for only a moment. "Is it ..." he licked his lips. "Kyle, is it bad? In there?"

  "I don't really remember," Kyle said. "All I know is I felt wonderful when I came out. Like I knew more. Could do more."

  "Oh," Adley said in an almost nonexistent voice.

  "You'll be one of us, Adley," Bobbi said in that same feeble voice.

  Adley's face, although still frightened, firmed up again.

  "All right," he said.

  "Let's try not to hurt her," Kyle said.

  They got Bobbi into the shed. Joe Summerfield turned his attention briefly away from Dugan to watch them disappear into that glow--and it seemed to him that they really did disappear rather than just step inside; it was like watching objects disappear into a dazzling corona.

  His lapse was brief, but it was all the old Butch Dugan would have needed. Even now he saw the opportunity; he was simply unable to use it. No strength in his legs. Churning nausea in his stomach. His head thudded and pounded.

  I don't want to go in there.

  Nothing he could do about it if they decided to drag him in, though. He was as weak as a kitten.

  He drifted.

  After a while he heard voices and raised his head. It took an effort, because it seemed as if someone had poured cement into one of his ears until his head was full of it. The rest of the posse was pushing out of the tangle that was Bobbi Anderson's garden. They were shoving the old man roughly along. Hillman's feet tangled and he fell down. One of them--Tarkington--kicked him to his feet, and Butch got the run of Tarkington's thoughts clearly: he was outraged at what he thought of as the murder of Beach Jernigan.

  Hillman stumbled on toward the Cherokee. The shed door opened then. Kyle Archinbourg and Adley McKeen came out. McKeen no longer looked frightened--his eyes were glowing and a big toothless grin stretched his lips. But that wasn't all. Something else...

  Then Butch realized.

  In the few minutes the two men had been inside there, a large portion of Adley McKeen's hair appeared to have disappeared.

  "I'll go in anytime, Kyle," he was saying. "No problem." There was more, but now everything wanted to drift away again. Butch let it.

  The world dimmed out until there was nothing left but those churning sounds and the afterimage of green light on his eyelids.

  22

  Act III.

  They sat in the town library--the name would be changed to the Ruth McCausland Memorial Library, all agreed. They drank coffee, iced tea, Coca-Cola, ginger ale. They drank nothing that was alcoholic. Not at Ruth's wake. They ate tiny triangular tuna-fish sandwiches, they ate similar ones containing a paste of cream cheese and olives, they ate sandwiches containing a paste of cream cheese and pimiento. They ate cold cuts and a Jell-O salad with shreds of carrot suspended in it like fossils in amber.

  They talked a great deal, but the room was mostly silent--if it had been bugged, the listeners would have been disappointed. The tension that had drawn many faces tight in the church as the situation in the woods teetered on the dangerous verge of careening out of control had now smoothed out. Bobbi was in the shed. That nosey-parker of an old man had also been taken in. Last of all, the nosey-parker policeman had been taken into the shed.

  The group mind lost track of these people as they went into the thick, corroded-brass glow of that green light.

  They ate and drank and listened and talked and no one said a word and that was all right; the last of the outsiders had left town following Goohringer's graveside benediction, and they had Haven to themselves again.

  (will it be all right now)

  (yes they'll understand about Dugan)

  (are you sure)

  (yes they will understand; they will think they understand)

  The tick of the Seth Thomas on the mantelpiece, donated by the grammar school after last year's spring bottle-and-can drive, was the loudest sound in the room. Occasionally there was the decorous clink of a china cup. Faintly, beyond the open screened windows, the sound of a faraway airplane.

  No birdsong.

  It was not missed.

  They ate and drank, and when Dugan was escorted from Bobbi's shed around one-thirty that afternoon, they knew. People rose, and now talk, real talk, began all at once. Tupperware bowls were capped. Uneaten sandwiches were popped into Baggies. Claudette Ruvall, Ashley's mother, put a piece of aluminum foil over the remains of the casserole she had brought. They all went outside and headed toward their homes, smiling and chatting.

  Act III was over.

  23

  Gardener came to around sundown with a hangover headache and a feeling that things had happened which he could not quite remember.

  Finally made it, Gard, he thought. Finally had yourself another blackout. Satisfied?

  He managed to get off the porch and to walk shakily around the corner of the house, out of view of the road, before throwing up. He saw blood in the vomit, and wasn't surprised. This wasn't the first time, although there was more blood this time than ever before.

  Dreams, Christ, he'd had some weird nightmares, blackout or no. People out here, coming and going, so many people that all they needed was a brass band and the Dallas

  (Police, the Dallas Police were out here this morning and you got drunk so you wouldn't see them you fucking coward)

  Cowgirls. Nightmares, that was all.

  He turned away from the puddle of puke between his feet. The world was wavering in and out of focus with every beat of his heart, and Gardener suddenly knew that he had edged very close to death. He was committing suicide after all ... just doing it slowly. He put his arm against the side of the house and his forehead on his arm.

  "Mr. Gardener, are you all right?"

  "Huh!" he cried, jerking upright. His heart slammed two violent beats, stopped for what seemed forever, and then began to beat so rapidly he could barely distinguish the individual pulses. His headache suddenly cranked up to overload. He whirled.

  Bobby Tremain stood there, looking surprised, even a little amused... but not really sorry for the scare he had given Gardener.

  "Gee, I didn't mean t
o creep up on you, Mr. Gardener--" You fucking well did, and I fucking well know it.

  The Tremain kid blinked rapidly several times. He had caught some of that, Gardener saw. He found he didn't give a shit.

  "Where's Bobbi?" he asked.

  "I'm--"

  "I know who you are. I know where you are. Right in front of me. Where's Bobbi?"

  "Well, I'll tell you," Bobby Tremain said. His face became very open, very wide-eyed, very honest, and Gardener was suddenly, forcibly reminded of his teaching days. This was how students who had spent a long winter weekend skiing, screwing, and drinking looked when they started to explain that they couldn't turn in their research papers today because their mothers had died on Saturday.

  "Sure, tell me." Gardener leaned against the clapboard side of the house, looking at the teenager in the reddish glow of sunset. Over his shoulder he could see the shed, padlocked, its windows boarded up.

  The shed had been in the dream, he remembered.

  Dream? Or whatever it is you don't want to admit was real?

  For a moment the kid looked genuinely disconcerted by Gardener's cynical expression.

  "Miss Anderson had a sunstroke. Some of the men found her near the ship and took her to Derry Home Hospital. You were passed out."

  Gardener straightened up quickly. "Is she all right?"

  "I don't know. They're still with her. No one has called here. Not since three o'clock or so, anyway. That's when I got out here."

  Gardener pushed away from the building and started around the house, head down, working against the hangover. He had believed the kid was going to lie, and perhaps he had lied about the nature of what had happened to Bobbi, but Gardener sensed a core of truth in what the kid said: Bobbi was sick, hurt, something. It explained those dreamlike comings and goings he remembered. He supposed Bobbi had called them with her mind. Sure. Called them with her mind, neatest trick of the week. Only in Haven, ladies and germs--

  "Where are you going?" Tremain asked, his voice suddenly very sharp.

  "Derry." Gardener had reached the head of the driveway. Bobbi's pickup was parked there. The Tremain kid's big yellow Dodge Challenger was pulled in next to it. Gardener turned back toward the kid. The sunset had painted harsh red highlights and black shadows on the boy's face, making him look like an Indian. Gardener took a closer look and realized he wasn't going anywhere. This kid with the fast car and the football-hero shoulders hadn't been put out here just to give Gard the bad news as soon as Gard managed to throw off enough of the booze to rejoin the living.