The Tommyknockers (39 page)

The Disappearing Little Brother.

“And now—”

“Hilly, I'm sorry, but—” his father began.

“—for my
final
trick,” Hilly added quickly, and saw his father settle back reluctantly, “I need a volunteer from the audience. C'mere, David.”

David came forward with an expression in which fear and resignation were perfectly balanced. Although he had not been precisely told, David knew what the final trick was. He knew too well.

“I don't wanna,” he whispered.

“You're
gonna,”
Hilly said grimly.

“Hilly, I'm scared.” David was pleading, his eyes filled with tears. “What if I don't come back?”

“You
will,”
Hilly whispered. “Everything
else
did, didn't it?”

“Yeah, but you didn't disappear nothin that was
alive,”
David said. Now the tears overspilled and ran down his face.

Looking at his brother, whom he had loved so well and so successfully (he'd had more success loving David than he had doing anything else he had set his hand to, including magic), Hilly felt a moment of horrible doubt. It was like waking temporarily from a nightmare before it sucked you back down.
You aren't going to do this, are you? You wouldn't push him out into a busy street just because you thought all the cars would stop in time, would you? You don't even know where those things go when they stop being here!

Then he looked out at the audience—bored and inattentive, the only one who looked half-alive being Barney Applegate, who was carefully picking a scab off his elbow—and the resentment rose up again. He stopped seeing the frightened tears in David's eyes.

“Get up on the platform, David!” Hilly whispered grimly.

David's small face began to quiver all over . . . but he walked toward the platform. He had never disobeyed Hilly, whom he had idolized all the fifteen-hundred-odd days of his life, and he did not disobey him now. Nevertheless, his pudgy legs could barely hold him as he stepped onto the sheet-covered orange crate with the nutty machine underneath.

David faced the audience, a small round boy in blue shorts and a faded T-shirt that said
THEY CALL ME DR. LOVE.
Tears streamed down his face.

“Smile,
dammit,” Hilly hissed, putting his foot on the sewing-machine pedal.

Weeping harder, David nevertheless managed a hideous parody of a smile. Marie Brown did not see her younger son's tears of terror. Mrs. Crenshaw had changed seats (half the aluminum legs of the one she had been in had now submerged in the lawn) and prepared to go. She didn't care if she sold the stupid cunt any Avon or not. This torture wasn't worth it.

“And
NOW!”
Hilly blared at his dazed audience. “The biggest secret the Orient holds! Known to few and practiced by fewer! The Disappearing Human! Watch closely!”

He threw the sheet over David's quivering form. As it billowed down to David's feet, an audible sob came from beneath. Hilly felt another quiver of what might have been fear or sanity struggling feebly to reassert itself.

“Hilly, please
 . . .
please, I'm scared
 . . .” The muffled whisper drifted out.

Hilly hesitated. And suddenly thought:
Off you go! Know that you can! Cause I learned this trick
 . . .
from the Tommyknocker Man!

It was shortly after that when Hilly Brown really and truly lost his mind.

“Presto-majesto!”
he shouted, and waved his hand at the quivering sheet-covered form on the platform, and stomped the pedal.

Hummmmmmmmmmmm.

The sheet puffed down lazily, as a sheet will do when a man or a woman tosses it over a bed and allows it to settle.

Hilly whipped it away.

“Ta
-daaaaa!”
he shrieked. He was half-delirious with a mixture of triumph and fear, the two of them for the moment perfectly balanced, like children of equal weights on a teeter-totter.

David was gone.

For a moment the general apathy was broken. Barney Applegate stopped picking his scab. Bryant Brown sat up in his chair, his mouth open. Marie and Mrs. Crenshaw broke off their whispered conversation, and Ev Hillman frowned and looked worried . . . although this expression
was not exactly new. Ev had looked and felt worried for some days now.

Ahhh,
Hilly thought, and balm flowed over his soul.
Success!

Both the audience's interest and Hilly's triumph were short-lived. Tricks involving
people
are always more interesting than tricks involving things or animals (pulling a rabbit from a hat is all perfectly well, but no magician worth his salt ever decided on that basis that an audience would rather watch a horse be sawed in half than a pretty girl with a generous figure packed into a small costume) . . . but it was still, after all, the same trick. The applause was louder this time (and Barney Applegate let out a hearty
“Yayyyyy, Hilly!”),
but it died quickly. Hilly saw that his mother was whispering with Mrs. Crenshaw again. His father got up.

“Gonna take a shower, Hilly,” he mumbled. “Damn good show.”

“But—”

A horn honked from the driveway.

“That's my mom,” Barney said, jumping up so fast he almost knocked Mrs. Crenshaw over. “Seeya, Hilly! Good trick!”

“But—” Now Hilly felt tears sting his own eyes.

Barney dropped to his knees and waved, as if underneath the platform. “Bye, Davey! Good job!”

“He's not under there, dammit!”
Hilly yelled.

But Barney was already scampering away. Hilly's mother and Mrs. Crenshaw were walking toward the back door, examining an Avon catalogue. It was all happening so
fast.
“Don't swear, Hilly,” his mom called without looking back. “And make David wash his hands when you come into the house. It's dirty under there.”

Only David's grandfather, Ev Hillman, was left. Ev was looking at Hilly with that same worried expression.

“Why don't you go away, too?” Hilly asked with a bitter fierceness that was spoiled only by the blurriness of his voice.

“Hilly, if your brother
isn't
under there,” Ev said in a slow voice that was totally unlike his usual one, “then just where
is
he?”

I don't know,
Hilly thought, and that was when the teeter-totter began to shift. Anger went down. Way down. And fear went way, way up. With fear
came guilt. A snapshot of David's weeping, terrified face. A snapshot of his own (courtesy of a good imagination), looking angry and almost vicious—bullying for sure.
Smile, dammit.
David trying to smile through his tears.

“Oh, he's under there, all right,” Hilly said. He burst into loud sobs and sat down on his stage, pulling his knees up and leaning his hot face against them. “He's under there, yeah, everybody guessed my tricks and nobody liked them, I hate magic, I wish you'd never given me that stupid magic set in the first place—”

“Hilly—” Ev came forward, looking distressed as well as worried now. Something was wrong here . . . here and all over Haven. He
felt
it. “What's wrong?”

“Get out of here!”
Hilly sobbed.
“I hate you! I HATE you!”

Grandfathers are every bit as subject to hurt, shame, and confusion as anyone else. Ev Hillman felt all three now. It hurt to hear Hilly say he hated him—it hurt even though the boy was obviously emotionally exhausted. Ev felt shamed that it was his gift that had provoked Hilly's tears . . . and never mind the fact that his son-in-law had picked out the magic set. Ev had accepted it as his gift when it had pleased Hilly; he supposed he must also accept it now that it was making Hilly weep with his face against his dirty knees. He felt confused because something
else
was going on here . . . but what? He did not know. He did know that he had just begun to get used to the idea that he was becoming senile—oh, the effects were still quite small, but the condition seemed to accelerate a little every year—when this summer came along. And this summer
everybody
seemed to be getting senile . . . but what exactly did he mean by that? A look in the eyes? Odd lapses, gropings for names that should have come quickly and easily? Those things, yes. But there was more. He just couldn't put his finger on what that more might be.

This confusion, so unlike the vacuity which had afflicted the others who had attended the
SECOND GALA MAGIC SHOW,
caused Ev Hillman, who had been the only person there whose
mentis
was really
compos
(he was, in fact, the only person in Haven these days whose
mentis
was really
compos—
Jim Gardener was also relatively unaffected by the ship in the earth, but by the seventeenth, Gardener had begun drinking heavily again), to do something he
regretted bitterly later. Instead of getting down on his arthritis-creaky knees and peering under Hilly's makeshift stage to see if David Brown really
was
under there, he retreated. He retreated as much from the idea that his birthday gift had caused Hilly's present grief as from anything else. He left Hilly alone, thinking he would come back “when the boy got hold of himself.”

As he watched his grampy shuffle away, Hilly's guilt and misery doubled . . . then trebled. He waited until Ev was gone, then scrambled to his feet and walked back to the platform. He put his foot on the concealed sewing-machine pedal and stepped on it.

Hummmmmmmmm
.

He waited for the sheet to plump up in David's shape. He would whip the sheet off him and say,
There, ya baby, see? That wasn't
NOTHING,
was it?
He might even swat David a good one for scaring him and making him feel so lousy. Or maybe he'd just—

Nothing was happening.

Fear began to swell in Hilly's throat. Began . . . or had it really been there all the time? All the time, he thought. Only now it was . . . swelling, yeah, that was just the right word!
Swelling
in there, as if someone had stuck a balloon down his throat and was now inflating it. This new fear made misery look good and guilt absolutely peachy in comparison. He tried to swallow and couldn't get any spit past that swelling.

“David?” he whispered, and pushed the pedal again.

Hummmmmmm
.

He decided he wouldn't swat David. He would
hug
David. When David got back, Hilly would fall down on his knees and hug David and tell David he could have
all
the G.I. Joe guys (except maybe for Snake-Eyes and Crystal Ball) for a whole week.

Nothing was
still
happening.

The sheet that had covered David lay crumpled on the one which covered the crate over his machine. It didn't plump up in a David-shape at all. Hilly stood all by himself in his back yard with the hot July sun beating
down on him, his heart racing faster and faster in his chest, that balloon swelling in his throat.
When it finally gets big enough to pop,
he thought,
I'll probably scream.

Quit it! He'll come back! Sure he will! The tomato came back, and the radio, and the lawn chair. Also, all the things I experimented on in my room came back. He . . . he . . .

“You and David come in and wash up, Hilly!” his mother called.

“Yeah, Mom!” Hilly called back in a wavering, insanely cheerful voice. “Pretty soon!”

And thought:
Please God let him come back, I'm sorry God, I'll do anything, he can have all the G.I. Joe guys forever, I swear he can, he can have the
MOBAT
and even the Terrordome, only God dear God,
PLEASE LET IT WORK THIS TIME LET HIM COME BACK!

He pressed on the pedal again.

Hummmmmm . . .

He looked at the crumpled sheet through tear-blurred eyes. For a moment he thought something was happening, but it was only a puff of wind stirring the crumpled sheet.

Panic as bright as metal shavings began to twist through Hilly's mind. Shortly he
would
begin to scream, drawing his mother from the kitchen and his dripping father, naked except for a towel around his waist and shampoo running down his cheeks, both of them wondering what Hilly had done this time. The panic would be merciful in one way: when it came, it would obliterate thought.

But things had not gone that far yet, unfortunately. Two thoughts occurred to Hilly's bright mind in rapid succession.

The first:
I never disappeared anything that was alive. Even the tomato was picked, and Daddy said once you pick something it's not really alive anymore.

The second thought:
What if David can't breathe wherever he is? What if he can't BREATHE?

He had wondered very little about what happened to the things he “disappeared” until this moment. But now . . .

His last coherent thought before the panic descended like a pall—or a mourning veil—was actually a mental image. He saw David lying in the middle of some weird, inimical landscape. It looked like the surface of a harsh, dead world. The gray earth was dry and cold; cracks
gaped like dead reptilian mouths. They went zigzagging away in every direction. Overhead was a sky blacker than jewelers' velvet, and a billion stars screamed down—they were brighter than the stars anyone on the surface of the earth had ever seen, because the place Hilly was looking at with the wide, horrified eye of his imagination was almost or totally airless.

And in the middle of this alien desolation lay his chubby four-year-old brother in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt reading
THEY CALL ME DR. LOVE.
David was clutching at his throat, trying to breathe the no-air of a world that was maybe a trillion light-years from home. David was gagging, turning purple. Frost was tracing death-patterns across his lips and fingernails. He—