The Tommyknockers Read online

  But there it was: R. ANDERSON. And behind it, a place she had seen only in photographs. Uncle Frank's place. The old Garrick farm. There was a blue truck parked in the driveway. The place was right, yes, but the light was wrong. She realized this clearly for the first time as she approached the driveway. Instead of feeling the triumph she had expected at this moment--the triumph of a predator that has finally succeeded in running its prey to earth--she felt confusion, uncertainty, and, although she did not even really realize it for what it was because it was so unfamiliar, the first faint trickle of fear.

  The light.

  The light was wrong.

  This realization brought others in quick succession. Her stiff neck. The circles of sweat darkening her dress under her arms. And--

  Her hand flew to her crotch. There was a faint dampness there, drying now, and she isolated a dim ammoniac smell in the car. It had been there for some time, but her conscious mind had just now tumbled to it.

  I pissed myself, I pissed myself and I've been in this fucking car almost long enough for it to dry--

  (and the light, Anne)

  The light was wrong. It was sunset light.

  Oh no--it's nine-thirty in the--

  But it was sunset light. There was no denying it. She had felt better after vomiting, yes ... and she suddenly understood why. The knowledge had been there all along, really, just waiting to be noticed, like the patches of sweat under the arms of her dress, or that faint smell of drying urine. She had felt better because the period between closing the door and actually starting the car again hadn't been seconds or minutes, but hours--she had spent all that brutally hot summer day in the oven of the car. She had lain in a deathlike stupor, and if she had been using the Cutlass's air-conditioning with all the windows rolled up when she stopped the car, she would have cooked like a Thanksgiving turkey. But her sinuses were nearly as bad as her teeth, and the canned air manufactured by automobile air conditioners irritated them. This physical problem, she realized suddenly, staring at the old farm with wide, bloodshot eyes, had probably saved her life. She had been running with all four windows open. Otherwise--

  This led to another thought. She had spent the day in a deathlike stupor, parked by the side of the road, and no one had stopped to check on her. That no one had come along a main road like Route 9 in all those hours since nine-thirty was something she just couldn't accept. Not even out in the sticks. And when they did see you in trouble in Sticksville, they didn't just put the pedal to the metal and keep on going, like New Yorkers stepping over a wino.

  What kind of town is this, anyway?

  That unaccustomed trickle again, like hot acid in her stomach.

  This time she recognized the feeling as fear, seized it, wrung its neck ... and killed it. Its brother might show up later on, and if so, she would kill it too, and all the sibs that might follow.

  She drove into the yard.

  16

  Anne had met Jim Gardener only twice before, but she never forgot a face. Even so, she barely recognized the Great Poet, although she believed she could have smelled him at forty yards if she had been downwind on even a moderately breezy day. He was sitting on the porch in a strappy T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, an open bottle of Scotch in one hand. He had a three-or four-day beard-stubble, much of it gray. His eyes were bloodshot. Although Anne didn't know this--and wouldn't have cared--Gardener had been in this state, more or less, for the last two days. All his noble resolves had gone by the boards since finding the dog hairs on Bobbi's jacket.

  He watched the car pull into the dooryard (missing the mailbox by bare inches) with a drunk's bleary lack of surprise. He watched the woman get out, stagger, and hold on to the open door for a minute.

  Oh wow, Gardener thought. It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Superbitch. Faster than a speeding hate-letter, able to leap cringing family members at a single bound.

  Anne shoved the car door closed. She stood there for a moment, throwing a long shadow, and Gardener felt an eerie sense of familiarity. She looked like Ron Cummings when Ron had a skinful and was trying to decide if he could walk across the room.

  Anne made her way across the dooryard, trailing a steadying hand along the side of Bobbi's truck. When she had passed the truck, she reached at once for the porch railing. She looked up, and in the slanting light of seven o'clock, Gardener thought the woman looked both aged and ageless. She also looked evil, he thought--jaundiced and yellowish-black with a heavy freight of evil that was simultaneously wearing her out and eating her up.

  He raised the Scotch, drank, gagged on the rank burn. Then he tipped the neck of it at her. "Hello, Sissy. Welcome to Haven. Having said that much, I now urge you to leave as fast as you can."

  17

  She got up the first two steps okay, then stumbled and went to one knee. Gardener held out a hand. She ignored it.

  "Where's Bobbi?"

  "You don't look so good," Gard said. "Haven has that effect on people these days."

  "I'm fine," she said, at last gaining the porch. She stood over him, panting. "Where is she?"

  Gardener inclined his head toward the house. The steady hiss of water came from one of the open windows. "Shower. We've been working in the woods all day and it was esh ... extremely hot. Bobbi believes in showering to remove dirt." Gardener raised the bottle again. "I believe in simply disinfecting. Shorter and pleasanter."

  "You smell like a dead pig," Anne remarked, and started past him toward the house.

  "While my own nose is undoubtedly not as keen as your own, dear heart, you have a delicate but noticeable odor of your own," Gard said. "What do the French call that particular perfume? Eau de Piss?"

  She turned on him, startled into a snarl. People--people in Utica, at least--didn't speak to her that way. Never. But of course, they knew her. The Great Poet had undoubtedly judged her on the basis of his jizz receptacle: Haven's resident celebrity. And he was drunk.

  "Well," Gardener said, amused but also a trifle uneasy under her smoking gaze, "it was you who brought up the subject of aroma."

  "So I did," she said slowly.

  "Maybe we ought to start again," he said with drunken courtesy.

  "Start what again? You're the Great Poet. You're the drunk who shot his wife. I have nothing to say to you. I came for Bobbi."

  Good shot, the thing about the wife. She saw his face freeze, saw his hand tighten on the neck of the bottle. He stood there as if he had at least temporarily forgotten where he was. She offered him a sweet smile. That smart-ass crack about Eau de Piss had gotten through, but sick or not, she thought she was still ahead on points.

  Inside, the shower shut off. And--perhaps it was only a hunch--Gardener had a clear sense of Bobbi listening.

  "You always did like to operate without anesthetic. I guess I never got anything but exploratory surgery before this, huh?"

  "Maybe."

  "Why now? After all these years, why did you have to pick now?"

  "None of your business."

  "Bobbi's my business."

  They faced each other. She drilled him with her gaze. She waited for his eyes to drop. They didn't. It suddenly occurred to her that if she started into the house without saying more, he might attempt to restrain her. It wouldn't do him any good, but it might be simpler to answer his question. What difference did it make?

  "I've come to take her home."

  Silence again.

  There are no crickets.

  "Let me give you a piece of advice, sister Anne."

  "Spare me. No candy from strangers, no advice from drunks."

  "Do exactly what I told you when you got out of the car. Leave. Now. Just go. This is not a good place to be right now."

  There was something in his eyes, something desperately honest, that brought on a recurrence of her earlier chill and that unaccustomed confusion. She had been left all day in her car at the side of the road as she lay in a swoon. What sort of people did that?

  Then every bit of her Ann
e-ness rose up and crushed these little doubts. If she wanted a thing to be, if she meant a thing to be, that thing would be; so it had been, was, and ever would be, alleluia, amen.

  "Okay, Chumly," she said. "You gave me yours, I'll give you mine. I'm going inside that shack, and about two minutes later a very large chunk of shit is going to hit the fan. I suggest you go for a walk if you don't want to get splattered. Sit on a rock somewhere and watch the sun go down and jerk off or think up rhymes or do whatever it is Great Poets do when they watch the sunset. But you want to keep out of what goes on in the house, no matter what. It's between Bobbi and me. If you get in my way, I'll rip you up."

  "In Haven, you're more likely to be the rippee than the ripper."

  "Well, that's something I'll have to see for myself, even though I'm not from Missouri," Anne said, and started for the door.

  Gardener tried once more.

  "Anne ... Sissy ... Bobbi's not the same. She ..."

  "Take a walk, little man," Anne said, and went inside.

  18

  The windows were open but for some reason the shades were drawn. Every now and then a puff of faint breeze would stir, sucking the shades into the openings a little way. When it happened, they looked like the sails of a becalmed ship doing their best and failing. Anne sniffed and wrinkled her nose. Bluh. The place smelled like a monkey-house. From the Great Poet she would have expected it, but her sister had been raised better. This place was a pigsty.

  "Hello, Sissy."

  She turned. For a moment Bobbi was just a shadow, and Anne felt her heart go into her throat because there was something odd about that shape, something all wrong--

  Then she saw the white blur of her sister's robe, heard the patter of water, and understood that Bobbi had just come from the shower. She was all but naked. Good. But her pleasure was not as great as it should have been. Her unease remained, her feeling that there was something wrong about the shape in the dooorway.

  This is not a good place to be right now.

  "Daddy's dead," she said, straining her eyes to see better. For all her straining, Bobbi remained only a dim figure in the door which communicated between living room and--she assumed--bathroom.

  "I know. Newt Berringer called and told me."

  Something about her voice. Something even more basically different in the vague suggestiveness of her shape. Then it came to her. The realization brought a nasty shock and stronger fear. She didn't sound afraid. For the first time in her life, Bobbi didn't sound afraid of her.

  "We buried him without you. Your mother died a little when you didn't come home, Bobbi."

  She waited for Bobbi to defend herself. There was only silence.

  For Christ's sake, come out where I can see you, you little coward!

  Anne ... Bobbi's not the same ...

  "She fell downstairs four days ago and broke her hip."

  "Did she?" Bobbi asked indifferently.

  "You're coming home with me, Bobbi." She meant to convey force and was appalled by the weak shrillness of her voice.

  "It was your teeth that let you get in," Bobbi said. "Of course! I should have thought of that!"

  "Bobbi, get out here where I can see you!"

  "Do you want me to?" Her voice had taken on a strange teasing lilt. "I wonder if you do."

  "Stop fucking with me, Bobbi!" Her voice rose unevenly.

  "Oh, listen!" Bobbi said. "I never thought I'd hear anything like that from you, Anne. After all the years you fucked with me ... with all of us. But okay. If you insist. If you insist, that's fine. Just fine."

  She didn't want to see. Suddenly Anne didn't want anything but to run, and keep running until she was far from this shadowy place and this town where they left you fainting all day at the side of the road. But it was too late. She saw the blurred movement of her younger sister's hand, and the lights went on at the same moment the robe dropped with a soft rustle.

  The shower had washed off the makeup. Bobbi's entire head and neck were transparent and jellylike. Her breasts had swelled bulbously outward and seemed to be merging into one single nippleless outcropping of flesh. Anne could see dim organs in Bobbi's stomach that looked nothing at all like human organs--there was fluid circulating in there but it looked green.

  Behind Bobbi's forehead she could see the quivering sac of mind.

  Bobbi grinned toothlessly.

  "Welcome to Haven, Anne," she said.

  She felt herself stepping backward in a spongy dream. She was trying to scream but there was no air.

  At Bobbi's crotch, a grotesque thatch of tentacles like sea-grass wavered from her vagina ... the place where her vagina had been, anyway. Anne had no idea if it was still there or not, and didn't care. The sunken valley which had replaced her crotch was enough. That ... and the way the tentacles seemed to be pointing toward her ... reaching for her.

  Naked, Bobbi began walking toward her. Anne tried to back away and stumbled over a footstool.

  "No," she whispered, trying to crawl away. "No ... Bobbi ... no ..."

  "Good to have you here," Bobbi said, still smiling. "I hadn't counted on you ... not at all ... but I think we can find a job for you. Positions, as they say, are still open."

  "Bobbi ..." She managed this one final terrified whisper, and then she felt the tentacles moving lightly on her body. She jerked, tried to move away ... and they slithered around her wrists. Bobbi's hips thrust out in a movement that was like an obscene parody of copulation.

  2.

  GARDENER TAKES A WALK

  1

  Gardener took Anne's advice and went for a walk. He went, in fact, all the way out to the ship in the woods. This was the first time he had been out here by himself, he realized, and it would soon be full dark. He felt vaguely afraid, as a child might passing near a haunted house. Are there ghosts in there? The ghosts of Tommyknockers past? Or are the real Tommyknockers themselves still in there, maybe in suspended animation, beings like freeze-dried coffee, waiting to be thawed out? And just what were they, anyhow?

  He sat on the ground by the lean-to, looking at the ship. After a while the moon rose and lit its surface an even more ghostly silver. It was strange and yet very beautiful.

  What's going on around here?

  I don't want to know.

  What it is ain't exactly clear ...

  I don't want to know.

  Hey, stop, what's that sound, everybody look what's going down ...

  He tipped the bottle up and drank deep. He put it aside, rolled over, and rested his throbbing head on his arms. He fell asleep that way, in the woods near the graceful circular jut of the ship.

  He slept there all night.

  In the morning there were two teeth on the ground.

  It's what I get for sleeping so close to it, he thought dully, but there was at least one compensation--he had no headache at all, although he had put away nearly a fifth of Scotch. He had noticed before that, all its other attributes aside, the ship--or the change in the atmosphere the ship had generated--seemed, at very close range, to provide hangover protection.

  He didn't want to leave his teeth just lying there. Heeding an obscure urge, he kicked dirt over them. As he did it he thought again: Playing Hamlet is a luxury you can no longer afford, Gard. If you don't commit to one course or the other very soon--in the next day or so, I think--you're not going to be able to do anything but march along with the rest of them.

  He looked at the ship, thought of the deep ravine which extended down its smooth, unmarked side, and thought again: We'll be down to the hatchway soon, if there is a hatchway.... What then?

  Rather than trying to answer, he struck off for home.

  2

  The Cutlass was gone.

  "Where were you last night?" Bobbi asked Gardener.

  "I slept in the woods."

  "Did you get really drunk?" Bobbi asked with surprising gentleness. Her face was dark with makeup again. And Bobbi had been wearing shirts which seemed oddly loose and baggy the
last few days; this morning he thought he could see why. Her chest was thickening. Her breasts had begun to look like a single unit instead of two separate things. It made Gardener think of guys who pumped iron.

  "Not very. One or two nips and I passed out. No hangover this morning. And no bug bites." He raised his arms, darkly tanned on top, white and strangely vulnerable beneath. "Any other summer, you'd wake up the next morning so bug-bit you couldn't open your eyes. But now they're gone. Along with the birds. And the beasts. In fact, Roberta, it seems to repel everything but fools like us."

  "Have you changed your mind, Gard?"

  "You keep asking me that, have you noticed?"

  Bobbi didn't reply.

  "Did you hear the news on the radio yesterday?" He knew she hadn't. Bobbi didn't see, hear, or think about anything now but the ship. Her headshake was no surprise. "Troops massing in Libya. More fighting in Lebanon. American troop movements. The Russians getting louder and louder about SDI. We're all still sitting on the powderkeg. That hasn't changed a bit since 1945 or so. Then you discover a deus ex machina in your back yard, and now you keep wanting to know if I've changed my mind about using it."

  "Have you?"

  "No," Gardener said, not sure if he was lying or not--but he was very glad Bobbi couldn't read him.

  Oh, can't she? I think she can. Not much, but more than she could a month ago ... more and more each day. Because you're "becoming" now, too. Changed your mind? That's a laugh; you can't fucking make up your mind!

  Bobbi dismissed it, or appeared to do so. She turned toward the pile of hand-tools stacked on the corner of the porch. She had missed making up a spot just below her right ear, Gardener saw--it was the same spot many men miss when they are shaving. He realized with a sickish lack of surprise that he could see into Bobbi--her skin had changed, had become kind of semi-transparent jelly. Bobbi had grown thicker, shorter over the last few days--and the changes were accelerating.