The Tommyknockers Read online

  Am I supposed to believe Bobbi was out there in the woods, excavating away like a madwoman, and she keeled over with a sunstroke while her sometime partner was lying back on the porch drunk as a coot? That it? Well, that's a good trick, because she was supposed to be at the McCausland woman's funeral. She went into the village and I was out here alone and I started thinking about what I saw Sunday... I started thinking and then I started drinking, which is mostly the way it works with me. Of course Bobbi could have gone to the funeral, come back here, changed, gone out in the woods to work, and then had a sunstroke... except that isn't what happened. The kid's lying. It's written all over his face, and all of a sudden I'm very fucking glad he can't read my thoughts.

  "I think Miss Anderson would rather have you stay here and keep on with the work," Bobby Tremain said evenly.

  "You think?"

  "That is, we all think." The kid looked momentarily more disconcerted than ever--wary, a bit rocky on his feet. Didn't expect Bobbi's pet drunk to have any teeth or claws left, I guess. That kicked off another, much queerer thought, and he looked at the kid more closely in the light which was now fading into orange and ashy pink. Football-hero shoulders, a handsome cleft-chinned face that might have been drawn by Alex Gordon or Berni Wrightson, deep chest, narrow waist. Bobby Tremain, All-American. No wonder the Colson girl was nuts over him. But that sunken, infirm-looking mouth went oddly with the rest, Gardener thought. They were the ones who kept losing teeth, not Gardener.

  Okay--what's he here for?

  To guard me. To make sure I stay put. No matter what.

  "Well, all right," he said to Tremain in a softer, more conciliatory voice. "If that's what you all think."

  Tremain relaxed a little. "It really is."

  "Well, let's go in and put on the coffee. I could use some. My head aches. And we'll have to get going early in the morning ..." He stopped and looked at Tremain. "You are going to help out, aren't you? That's part of it, isn't it?"

  "Uh ... yessir."

  Gardener nodded. He looked at the shed for a moment, and in the fading light he could see brilliant green tattooed in the small spaces between the boards. For a moment his dream shimmered almost within his grasp--deadly shoemakers hammering away at unknown devices in that green glare. He had never seen the glow as bright as this before, and he noticed that when Tremain glanced in that direction, his eyes skittered away uneasily.

  The lyric of an old song floated, not quite randomly, into Gardener's mind and then out again:

  Don't know what they're doing, but they laugh a lot behind the green door ... green door, what's that secret you're keepin'?

  And there was a sound. Faint... rhythmic... not at all identifiable ... but somehow unpleasant.

  The two of them had faltered. Now Gardener moved on toward the house. Tremain followed him gratefully.

  "Good," Gardener said, as if the conversation had never lagged. "I can use some help. Bobbi figured we'd get down to some sort of hatchway in about two weeks ... that we'd be able to get inside." "Yes, I know," Tremain said without hesitation.

  "But that was with two of us working."

  "Oh, there'll always be someone else with you," Tremain said, and smiled openly. A chill rippled up Gardener's back.

  "Oh?"

  "Yes! You bet!"

  "Until Bobbi comes back."

  "Until then," Tremain agreed.

  Except he doesn't think Bobbi's going to be back. Ever.

  "Come on," he said. "Coffee. Then maybe some chow."

  "Sounds good to me."

  They went inside, leaving the shed to churn and mutter to itself in the growing dark. As the sun disappeared, the stitching of green at the cracks grew brighter and brighter and brighter. A cricket hopped into the luminous pencil-mark one of these cracks printed onto the ground, and fell dead.

  10.

  A BOOK OF DAYS--THE TOWN, CONCLUDED

  1

  Thursday, July 28th:

  Butch Dugan woke up in his own bed in Derry at exactly 3:05 A.M. He pushed back the covers and swung his feet out onto the floor. His eyes were wide and dazed, his face puffy with sleep. The clothes he had worn on his trip to Haven with the old man the day before were on the chair by his small desk. There was a pen in the breast pocket of the shirt. He wanted that pen. This seemed to be the only thought his mind would clearly admit.

  He got up, went to the chair, took the pen, tossed the shirt on the floor, sat down, and then just sat for several moments looking out into the darkness, waiting for the next thought.

  Butch had gone into Anderson's shed, but very little of him had come out. He seemed shrunken, lessened. He had no clear memories of anything. He could not have told a questioner his own middle name, and he did not at all remember being driven to the Haven-Troy town line in the Cherokee Hillman had rented, or sliding behind the wheel after Adley McKeen got out and walked back to Kyle Archinbourg's Cadillac. He likewise did not remember driving back to Derry. Yet all these things had happened.

  He had parked the Cherokee in front of the old man's apartment building, locked it, then got into his own car. Two blocks away, he had stopped long enough to drop the Jeep keys into a sewer.

  He went directly to bed, and had slept until the alarm clock planted in his mind woke him up.

  Now some new switch clicked over. Butch blinked once or twice, opened a drawer, and drew out a pad of paper. He wrote: I told people Tues. night I couldn't go to her funeral because I was sick. That was true. But it was not my stomach. I was going to ask her to marry me but kept putting it off. Afraid she'd say no. If I hadn't been scared, she might be alive now. With her dead there doesn't seem to be anything to look forward to.

  I am sorry about this mess.

  He looked the note over for a moment and then signed his name at the bottom: Anthony F. Dugan.

  He laid the pen and note aside and went back to sitting bolt upright and looking out the window.

  At last another relay kicked over.

  The last relay.

  He got up and went to the closet. He ran the combination of the wall safe at the back and removed his .357 Mag. He put the belt over his shoulder, went back to the desk, and sat down.

  He thought for a moment, frowning, then got up, turned off the light in the closet, shut the closet door, went back to the desk, sat down again, took the .357 from its holster, put the muzzle of the gun firmly against his left eyelid, and pulled the trigger. The chair toppled and hit the floor with a flat, undramatic wooden clap--the sound of a gallows trapdoor springing open.

  2

  Front page, Bangor Daily News, Friday, July 29th:

  DERRY STATE POLICEMAN APPARENT SUICIDE

  Was in Charge of Trooper Disappearance Investigation

  by John Leandro

  Cpt. Anthony "Butch" Dugan of the Derry state police barracks apparently shot himself with his service revolver early Thursday morning. His death hit the Derry barracks, which was rocked last week by the disappearance of two troopers, hard indeed...

  3

  Saturday, July 30th:

  Gardener sat on a stump in the woods, his shirt off, eating a tuna-and-egg sandwich and drinking iced coffee laced with brandy. Across from him, sitting on another stump, was John Enders, the school principal. Enders was not built for hard work, and although it was only noon, he looked hot and tired and almost fagged out.

  Gardener nodded toward him. "Not bad," he said. "Better than Tremain, anyway. Tremain'd burn water trying to boil it."

  Enders smiled wanly. "Thank you."

  Gardener looked beyond him to the great circular shape jutting from the ground. The ditch kept widening, and they had to keep using more and more of that silvery netting which somehow kept it from caving in (he had no idea how they made it, only knew that the large supply in the cellar had been almost depleted and then, yesterday, a couple of women from town had come out in a van with a fresh supply, neatly folded like freshly ironed curtains). They needed more because they kept taki
ng away more and more of the hillside ... and still the thing continued down. Bobbi's whole house could now have fit into its shadow.

  He looked at Enders again. Enders was looking at it with an expression of adoring, religious awe--as if he were a rube druid and this was his first trip from the boonies to see Stonehenge.

  Gardener got up, staggering slightly. "Come on," he said. "Let's do a little blasting."

  He and Bobbi had reached a point weeks earlier where the ship was as tightly embedded in dour bedrock as a piece of steel in concrete. The bedrock hadn't hurt the ship; hadn't put so much as a scratch on its pearl-gray hull, let alone dented or crushed it. But it was tightly plugged. The plug had to be blasted away. It would have been a job for a construction crew who understood how to use dynamite--a lot of dynamite--under other circumstances.

  But there was explosive available in Haven these days that made dynamite obsolete. Gardener still wasn't clear on what the explosion in Haven Village had been, and wasn't sure he ever wanted to be clear on it. It was a moot point anyway, because no one was talking. Whatever. it had been, he was sure that some huge piece of brickwork had taken off like a rocket, and some of those New and Improved Explosives had been involved. There had been a time, he remembered, when he had actually wasted time speculating on whether or not the super brain-food Bobbi's artifact was putting into the air could produce weapons. That time now seemed incredibly distant, that Jim Gardener incredibly naive.

  "Can you make it, Johnny?" he asked the school principal.

  Enders got up, wincing, putting his hands in the small of his back. He looked desperately tired, but he managed a small smile just the same. Looking at the ship seemed to refresh him. Blood was trickling from the corner of one eye, however--a single red tear. Something in there had ruptured. It's being this close to the ship, Gard thought. On the first of the two days Bobby Tremain had spent "helping" him, he had spit out his last few teeth like machine-gun bullets almost as soon as they got here.

  He thought of telling Enders that something behind his right eye was leaking, then decided to let him discover it on his own. The guy would be all right. Probably. Even if he wasn't, Gardener wasn't sure he cared... this more than anything else shocked him.

  Why should it? Are you kidding yourself that these cats are human anymore? If you are, you better wise up, Gard ole Gard.

  He headed down the slope, stopping at the last stump before rocky soil gave way to chipped and runneled bedrock. He picked up a cheap transistor radio made of yellow high-impact plastic. It looked like Snoopy. Attached to it was the board from a Sharp calculator. And, of course, batteries.

  Humming, Gardener made his way down to the edge of the trench. There the music dried up and he was quiet, only staring at the titanic gray flank of the ship. The view did not refresh him, but it did inspire a deep awe which had overtones of steadily darkening fear.

  But you still hope, too. You'd be a liar if you said you didn't. The key could still be here... somewhere.

  As the fear darkened, however, the hope did too. Soon he thought it would be gone.

  The hillside excavation now made the ship's flank too far away to touch--not that he wanted to; he didn't enjoy the sensation of having his head turning into a very large speaker. It hurt. He rarely bled now when he did touch it (and touching it was sometimes inevitable), but the blast of radio always came, and on occasion his nose or ears could still spray a hell of a lot more blood than he cared to look at. Gardener wondered briefly just how much borrowed time he was now living on, but that question was also moot. From the morning he had awakened on that New Hampshire breakwater, it had all been borrowed time. He was a sick man and he knew it, but not too sick to appreciate the irony of the situation in which he found himself: after busting his hump to dig this fucker up with a variety of tools which looked as if they might have come out of the Hugo Gernsback Whole Universe Catalogue, after doing what the rest of them probably couldn't have done without working themselves to death in a kind of hypnotic trance, he might not be able to go inside when and if they came to the hatch Bobbi believed was there. But he meant to try. You could bet your watch and chain on that.

  Now he set his boot into a rope stirrup, slid the knot tight, and put the Snoopy radio in his shirt. "Let me down easy, Johnny."

  Enders began to turn a windlass and Gardener began to slide downward. Beside him the smooth gray hull slid up and up and up.

  If they wanted to get rid of him, this would be as easy a way as any, he supposed. Just send a telepathic order to Enders: Let go of the wheel, John. We're through with him. And down he would plunge, forty feet to the solid bedrock at the bottom, slack rope trailing up behind him. Crunch.

  But of course he was at their mercy anyhow ... and he supposed they recognized his usefulness, however reluctantly. The Tremain kid was young, strong as a bull, but he had fagged out in two days. Enders was going to last out today--maybe--but Gardener would have bet his watch and chain (what watch and chain, ha-ha?) that there would be somebody else out here tomorrow to keep tabs on him.

  Bobbi was okay.

  Bullshit she was--if you hadn't come back, she would've killed herself.

  But she hung in there better than Enders or the Tremain kid--

  His mind returned inexorably: Bobbi went into the shed with the others. Tremain and Enders never did... at least, not that you ever saw. Maybe that's the difference.

  So what's in there? Ten thousand angels dancing on the head of a pin? The ghost of James Dean? The Shroud of Turin? What?

  He didn't know.

  His foot touched down at the bottom.

  "I'm down!" he yelled.

  Enders' face, looking very small, appeared at the edge of the cut. Beyond, Gardener could see a tiny wedge of blue sky. Too tiny. Claustrophobia whispered in his ear--a voice as rough as sandpaper.

  The space between the side of the ship and the wall covered with that silvery netting was very narrow down here. Gardener had to move with great care to avoid touching the ship's side and setting off one of those brainbursts.

  The bedrock was very dark. He squatted and ran his fingers over it. They came away wet. They had come away a little wetter each day for the last week.

  That morning he had cut a small square four inches on a side and a foot into the floor of the bedrock using a gadget that had once been a blowdryer. Now he opened his toolkit, removed a flashlight, and shone the light into it.

  Water down there.

  He got to his feet and screamed: "Send down the hose!"

  "... what? ..." drifted down. Enders sounded apologetic. Gardener sighed, wondering just how much longer he himself could hold out against the steady drag of exhaustion. All this Hugo Gernsback Whole Universe equipment, and no one thought to rig an intercom between up there and down here. Instead, they were screaming their throats out.

  Oh, but none of their bright ideas run in that direction, and you know it. Why would they think about intercoms when they can read thoughts? You're the horse-and-buggy human here, not them.

  "The hose!" he shrieked. "Send down the motherfucking hose, tripehead!"

  "... oh ... kay ..."

  Gardener stood waiting for the hose to come down, wishing miserably that he was anywhere else in the world than here, wishing he could convince himself all of it was only a nightmare.

  It was no good. The ship was madly exotic, but this reality was also too prosy to be a dream: the acrid smell of John Enders' sweat, the slightly boozy smell of his own, the dig of the rope loop into his instep as he went down into the cut, the feel of rough, moist bedrock under his fingers.

  Where's Bobbi, Gard? Is she dead?

  No. He didn't think she was dead, but he had become convinced that she was desperately ill. Something had happened to her on Wednesday. Something had happened to all of them on Wednesday. Gardener could not quite bring his memories into focus, but he knew there had been no real blackout or DT nightmare. It would have been better for him if there had been. There had been s
ome sort of cover-up last Wednesday--a frantic cut-and-paste. And in the course of it, he believed that Bobbi had been hurt... taken ill ... something.

  But they're not talking about it.

  Bobby Tremain: Bobbi? Heck, Mr. Gardener, nothing wrong with Bobbi--just a li'l ole heatstroke. She'll be back in no time. She can use the rest! You know that better'n anyone, I guess!

  It sounded great. So great you'd almost think the Tremain kid believed it himself until you looked closely at his odd eyes.

  He could see himself going to those he was coming to think of as the Shed People, demanding to know what had happened to her.

  Newt Berringer: Next thing you know, he'll be trying to tell us that we're the Dallas Police.

  And boy, they'd sure all start to laugh then, wouldn't they? Them, the Dallas Police? That was pretty funny. That was a scream.

  Maybe, Gard thought, that's why I feel so much like doing it. Screaming, I mean.

  Now he stood deep in this manmade crack in the earth, a crack that contained a titanic alien flying ship, waiting for the hose to come down. And suddenly the final, horrible passage of George Orwell's Animal Farm clanged in his head like a death-cry. It was strange, the things you discovered you'd gotten by heart. "Clover's old eyes flitted from one face to another. And as the animals outside looked from pig to man, and man to pig, and pig to man again, it seemed that some strange thing was happening. It was impossible to say which was which."

  Jesus, Gard, cut it out!

  Here came the hose at last, a seventy-footer from the volunteer fire department. It was of course meant to spray water, not suck it up, but a vacuum pump had neatly reversed its function.

  Enders paid it out jerkily. The end swung back and forth, sometimes striking the hull of the ship. Each time this happened there was a cludding sound that was dull yet curiously penetrating. Gardener didn't like it and quickly came to anticipate each clud.

  Christ, I wish he hadn't got that thing swinging.