The Tommyknockers (21 page)

(I called and you heard didn't you)

had come and he was here.
Now, ladies and gentlemen,
he seemed to hear Allen Ludden saying in his quick light quizmaster's voice,
here is your toss-up question. Ten points if you can tell me why Jim Gardener cares about Bobbi Anderson's threat to end their friendship, when Gardener himself means to end it by committing suicide? What? No one? Well, here's a surprise! I don't know, either!

“Okay,” Bobbi was saying. “Okay, great.”

The agitation which was nearly terror slipped away—the fast gasping for breath slowed and some of the color faded from her cheeks. So the promise had been worth something, at least.

“Sleep, Bobbi.” He would sit up and watch for any change. He was tired, but he could drink coffee (and maybe take one or two of whatever Bobbi'd been taking, if he came across them). He owed Bobbi a night's watching. There were nights when she had watched over him. “Sleep now.” He gently disengaged his wrist from Bobbi's hand.

Her eyes closed, then slowly opened one last time. She smiled, a smile so sweet that he was in love with her again. She had that power over him. “Just . . . like old times, Gard.”

“Yeah, Bobbi. Like old times.”

“. . . love you . . .”

“I love you too. Sleep.”

Her breathing deepened. Gard sat beside her for three minutes, then five, watching that Madonna smile, becoming more and more convinced she was asleep. Then, very slowly, Bobbi's eyes struggled open again.

“
Fabulous,”
she whispered.

“What?” Gardener leaned forward. He wasn't sure what she'd said.

“What it
is . . .
what it can
do . . .
what it
will
do . . .”

She's talking in her sleep,
Gard thought, but he felt a recurrence of the chill. That crafty expression was back in Bobbi's face. Not on it but
in
it, as if it had grown under the skin.

“You should have found it . . . I think it was for you, Gard . . .”

“What was?”

“Look around the place,” Bobbi said. Her voice was fading. “You'll see. We'll finish digging it up together. You'll see it solves the . . . problems . . . all the problems . . .”

Gardener had to lean forward now to hear anything. “What does, Bobbi?”

“Look around the place,” Bobbi repeated, and the last word drew out, deepening, and became a snore. She was asleep.

Gardener almost went to the phone again. It was close. He got up, but halfway across the living room he diverted, going to Bobbi's rocking chair instead. He would watch for a while first, he thought. Watch for a while and try to think what all this might mean.

He swallowed and winced at the pain in his throat. He was feverish, and he suspected the fever was no little one-degree job, either. He felt more than unwell; he felt
unreal.

Fabulous . . . what it
is . . .
what it can
do . . .

He would sit here for a while and think some more. Then he would make a pot of strong coffee and dump about six aspirin into it. That would take care of the aches and fever, at least temporarily. Might help keep him awake too.

. . . what it
will
do
 . . .

Gard closed his eyes, dozing himself. That was okay. He might doze, but not for long; he'd never been able to sleep sitting up. And Peter was apt to appear at any time; he would see his old friend Gard, jump into his lap, and get his balls.
Always.
When it came to jumping into the
chair with you and getting your balls, Peter never failed. Hell of an alarm clock, if you happened to be sleeping. Five minutes, that's all. Forty winks. No harm, no foul.

You should have found it. I think it was for you, Gard . . .

He drifted, and his doze quickly deepened into sleep so deep it was close to coma.

shusshhhhh . . .

He's looking down at his skis, plain brown wood strips racing over the snow, hypnotized by their liquid speed. He doesn't realize this state of near-hypnosis until a voice on his left says: “One thing you bastards never remember to mention at your fucking Communist antipower rallies is just this:
in thirty years of peaceful nuclear-power development, we've never been caught once.”

Ted is wearing a reindeer sweater and faded jeans. He skis fast and well. Gardener, on the other hand, is completely out of control.

“You're going to crash,” a voice on his right says. He looks over and it is Arglebargle. Arglebargle has begun to rot. His fat face, which had been flushed with alcohol on the night of the party, is now the yellow-gray of old curtains hanging in dirty windows. His flesh has begun to slough downward, pulling and splitting. Arglebargle sees his shock and terror. His gray lips spread in a grin.

“That's right,” he says. “I'm dead. It really was a heart attack. Not indigestion, not my gall-bladder. I collapsed five minutes after you were gone. They called an ambulance and the kid I hired to tend bar got my heart started again with CPR, but I died for good in the ambulance.”

The grin stretches; becomes as moony as the grin of a dead trout lying on the deserted beach of a poisoned lake.

“I died at a stoplight on Storrow Drive,” Arglebargle says.

“No,” Gardener whispers. This . . . this is what he has always feared. The final, irrevocable drunken act.

“Yes,” the dead man insists as they speed down the hill, drifting closer to the trees. “I invited you into my house,
gave you food and drink, and you repaid me by killing me in a drunken argument.”

“Please . . . I . . .”

“You
what?
You
what?
” from his left again. The reindeer on Ted's sweater have disappeared. They have been replaced by yellow radiation warning symbols. “You
nothing
, that's what! Where do you latter-day Luddites think all that power comes from?”

“You killed me,” Arberg drones from his right, “but you'll pay. You're going to crash, Gardener.”

“Do you think we get it from the Wizard of Oz?” Ted screams. Weeping sores suddenly erupt on his face. His lips bubble, peel, crack, begin to suppurate. One of his eyes shimmers into the milkiness of cataract. Gardener realizes with mounting horror that he is looking into a face exhibiting symptoms of a man in the last, advanced stages of radiation sickness.

The radiation symbols on Ted's shirt are turning black.

“You'll crash, you bet,” Arglebargle drones on. “Crash.”

He is weeping with terror now, as he wept after shooting his wife, hearing the unbelievable report of the gun in his hand, watching as she staggered backward against the kitchen counter, one hand clapped to her cheek like a woman uttering a shocked
“My land! I
NEVER!”
And then the blood squirting through her fingers and his mind in a last desperate effort to deny it all had thought
Ketchup, relax, that's just ketchup.
Then beginning to weep as he was now.

“As far as you guys are concerned, all your responsibility ends at the wall plate where you plug in.” Pus runs and dribbles down Ted's face. His hair has fallen out. The sores cover his skull. His mouth spreads in a grin as moony as Arberg's. Now in a last extremity of terror Gardener realizes he is skiing out of control down Straight Arrow flanked by dead men. “But you'll never stop us, you know. No one will. The pile is out of control, you see. Has been since . . . oh, around 1939, I'd reckon. We reached critical mass along about 1965. It's out of control. The explosion will come soon.”

“No . . . no . . .”

“You've been riding high, but those who ride highest fall hardest,” Arberg drones. “Murder of a host is the foulest murder of all. You're going to crash . . . crash . . .
crash!”

How true it is! He tries to turn but his skis remain stubbornly on course. Now he can see the hoary old pine. Arglebargle and Ted the Power Man are gone and he thinks:
Were they Tommyknockers, Bobbi?

He can see a red swatch of paint around the pine's gnarly trunk . . . and then it begins to flake and split. As he slides helplessly toward the tree he sees that it has come alive, that it has split open to swallow him. The yawning tree grows and swells, seems to rush toward him, grows tentacles, and there is a horrible rotten blackness in its center, with red paint around it like the lipstick of some sinister whore, and he can hear dark winds howling in that black, squirming mouth and

he doesn't wake up then, as much as it seems he has—everyone knows that even the most outlandish dreams
feel
real, that they may even have their own spurious logic, but this is not real, cannot be. He has simply exchanged one dream for another. Happens all the time.

In this dream he has been dreaming about his old skiing accident—for the second time that day, can you believe it? Only this time the tree he struck, the one which almost killed him, grows a rotted mouth like a squirming knothole. He snaps awake and finds himself sitting in Bobbi's rocking chair, too relieved by simple waking to care that he's stiff all over and that his throat is now so sore that it feels like it's been lined with barbed wire.

He thinks: I'm going to get up and make myself a dose of coffee and aspirin. Wasn't I going to do that before? He starts to get up, and that's when Bobbi opens her eyes. That's also when he knows he is dreaming, must be, because green rays of light shoot from Bobbi's eyes—Gardener is reminded of Superman's X-ray vision in the comic-books, the way the artist drew it in lime-colored beams. But the light which comes from Bobbi's eyes is swamplike and somehow dreadful . . . there is something rotted about it, like the drifting glow of St. Elmo's fire in a swamp on a hot night.

Bobbi sits up slowly and looks around . . . looks toward
Gardener. He tries to tell her no . . . Please don't put that light on me.

No words come out and as that green light hits him he sees that Bobbi's eyes are blazing with it—at its source it is as green as emeralds, as bright as sun-fire. He cannot look at it, has to avert his eyes. He tries to bring an arm up to shield his face but he can't, his arm is too heavy.
It'll burn,
he thinks
, it'll burn, and then in a few days the first sores will show up, you'll think they're pimples at first because that's what radiation sickness looks like when it starts, just a bunch of pimples, only
these
pimples never heal, they only get worse . . . and worse . . .

He hears Arberg's voice, a disembodied holdover from the previous dream, and now there seems to be triumph in his drone: “I
knew
you were going to crash, Gardener!”

The light touches him . . . washes over him. Even with his eyes squeezed shut it lights the darkness as green as radium watch-dials. But there's no real pain in dreams, and there is none here. The bright green light is neither hot nor cold. It is nothing. Except . . .

His throat.

His throat is no longer sore.

And he hears this, clearly and unmistakably:
“—percent off! This is the sort of price reduction that may never be repeated!
EVERYONE
gets credit! Recliners! Waterbeds! Living-room s—”

The plate in his skull, talking again. Gone almost before it was fairly begun.

Like his sore throat.

And that green light was gone too.

Gardener opens his eyes . . . cautiously.

Bobbi is lying on the couch, eyes shut, deeply asleep . . . just as she was. What's all this about rays shooting out of eyes? Good God!

He sits in the rocking chair again. Swallows. No pain. The fever has gone down a lot, too.

Coffee and aspirin,
he thinks.
You were going to get up for coffee and aspirin, remember?

Sure,
he thinks, settling more comfortably into the rocking chair and closing his eyes.
But no one gets coffee and aspirin in a dream. I'll do it just as soon as I wake up.

Gard, you are awake.

But that, of course, could not be. In the waking world,
people don't shoot green beams from their eyes, beams that cure fevers and sore throats. Dreams
sí
, reality
no.

He crosses his arms over his chest and drifts away. He knows no more—either sleeping or waking—for the rest of that night.

When Gardener woke up, bright light was streaming into his face through the western window. His back hurt like a bastard, and when he stood up his neck gave a wretched arthritic creak that made him wince. It was quarter of nine.

He looked at Bobbi and felt a moment of suffocating fear—in that moment he was sure Bobbi was dead. Then he saw she was just so deeply, movelessly asleep that she gave a good impression of being dead. It was a mistake anyone might have made. Bobbi's chest rose in slow, steady pulls with long but even pauses in between. Gardener timed her and saw she was breathing no more than six times a minute.

But she looked better this morning—not great, but better than the haggard scarecrow who had reeled out to greet him last night.

Doubt if I looked much better,
he thought, and went into Bobbi's bathroom to shave.