The Tommyknockers (40 page)

Ah, but then the merciful panic finally took over.

He raked back the sheet he had used to cover David and overturned the crate that had concealed the machine. He stomped the sewing-machine pedal again and again, and began to scream. It was not until his mother reached him that she realized he was not
just
screaming; there were actually
words
in all that noise.

“All
the G.I. Joes!” Hilly shrieked. “All the G.I. Joes!
All
the G.I. Joes! Forever and ever!
All
the G.I. Joes!”

And then, infinitely more chilling:

“Come back, David! Come back, David! Come back!”

“Dear God, what does he mean?” Marie cried.

Bryant took his son by the shoulders and turned him around so they were face-to-face.

“Where's David? Where did he go?”

But Hilly had fainted, and he never really came to. Not long after, over a hundred men and women, Bobbi and Gard among them, were in the woods across the road, beating the bushes for Hilly's brother David.

If he could have been asked, Hilly would have told them that, in his opinion, they were looking too close to home.

Far
too close.

On the evening of July 24th, a week after the disappearance of David Brown, Trooper Benton Rhodes was driving a state police cruiser out of Haven around eight o'clock. Peter Gabbons, known to his fellow officers as Jingles, was riding shotgun. Twilight lay in ashes. These were
metaphorical
ashes, of course, as opposed to the ones on the hands and faces of the two state cops.
Those
ashes were real. Rhodes's mind kept returning to the severed hand and arm, and to the fact that he had known instantly to whom they had once belonged. Jesus!

Stop thinking about it!
he ordered his mind.

Okay,
his mind agreed, and went right on thinking about it. “Try the radio again,” he said. “I bet we're getting interference from that damn microwave dish they put up in Troy.”

“All right.” Jingles grabbed the mike. “This is Unit 16 to Base. Do you copy, Tug? Over.”

He let go of the button and they both listened. What they heard was a peculiar screaming static, with ghostly voices buried deep inside it.

“Want me to try again?” Jingles asked.

“No. We'll be clear soon enough.”

Bent was running with the flashers on, doing seventy along Route 3 toward Derry. Where the hell were the backup units? There hadn't been a communications problem to and from Haven Village; radio transmissions
so clear they were almost eerie. Nor had the radio been the only eerie thing about Haven tonight.

Right!
his mind agreed.
And by the way, you recognized the ring right away, didn't you? No mistaking a trooper's ring, even on a woman's hand, is there? And did you see the way her tendons were hanging down in flaps? Looked like a cut of meat in a butcher shop, didn't it? Leg of lamb, or something. Tore her arm right off! It
—

Stop it, I said! Goddammit,
JUST QUIT!

Okay, yeah, right. Forgot for a sec that you didn't want to think about it. Or like a rolled roast, huh? And all that blood!

Stop it, please stop it,
he moaned.

Right, okay, I know I'll drive me crazy if I keep thinking about it but I think I'll just keep thinking about it anyway because I just can't seem to stop. Her hand, her arm, they were bad, worse than any traffic accident I ever saw, but what about all those other pieces? The severed heads? The eyes? The feet? Yessir, that must have been a wowser of a furnace explosion, all right!

“Where's our backup?” Jingles asked restlessly.

“I don't know.”

But when he saw them, he could really stump them, couldn't he?

Got a riddle for you,
he could say.
You'll never get it. How can you have mangled bodies all over the place after an explosion, but only one dead? And just by the way, how come the only real damage a
furnace
explosion did was to tear off the
steeple
of the town hall? For that matter, how come the head selectman, that guy Berringer, wasn't able to ID the body, when even
I
knew who it was? Give up, guys?

He had covered the arm with a blanket. There was nothing to be done about all the other body parts, and he supposed it didn't matter anyway. But he had covered Ruth's arm.

On the sidewalk in Haven Village's town square he had done that. He had done it while that idiot volunteer fire chief, Allison, stood grinning as if it was a bean supper instead of an explosion that had killed a fine woman. It was all crazy. Crazy to the max.

Peter Gabbons was nicknamed Jingles because of his gravelly Andy Devine voice—Jingles was a character Devine had played in an old TV western series. When
Gabbons came up from Georgia, Tug Ellender, the dispatcher, had started calling him that and it had stuck. Now, speaking in a high, strangled voice completely unlike his usual Jingles voice, Gabbons said: “Pull over, Bent. I'm sick.”

Rhodes pulled over in a hurry, on the very edge of a skid that almost dumped the cruiser in the ditch. At least Gabbons had been the first to call it; that was something.

Jingles dove from the cruiser on the right. Bent Rhodes dove out on the left. In the blue strobe of the state police cruiser's lights, they both threw up everything available. Bent staggered back against the side of the car, pawing his mouth with one hand, hearing the retching noises still coming from the weeds beyond the edge of the road. He rolled his head skyward, dimly grateful for the breeze.

“That's better,” Jingles said at last. “Thanks, Bent.”

Benton turned toward his partner. Jingles' eyes were dark, shocked holes in his face. It was the look of a man who is processing all his information and reaching no sane conclusions at all.

“What happened back there?” Bent asked.

“You blind, hoss? Town-hall steeple took off like a rocket.”

“So how did a furnace explosion blow off the steeple?”

“Dunno.”

“Spit on that.” Bent tried to spit. He couldn't. “You believe it? A July furnace explosion that blows the
steeple
off the town hall?”

“No. It stinks.”

“Right, pard. It stinks to high heaven.” Bent paused. “Jingles, what did you
feel?
Did you feel anything weird back there?”

Jingles said cautiously: “Maybe. Maybe I did feel something.”

“What?”

“I don't
know,
” Jingles said. His voice had begun to climb, to take on the uneven, warbling inflections of a small child near tears. Above them, a galaxy of stars shone down. Crickets sang in fragrant summer silence. “I'm just so damn glad to be out of there—”

Then Jingles, who knew he would be going back to Haven the next day to assist in the cleanup and investigation,
did
begin to cry.

After a while they drove on. Any remaining trace of daylight had by then left the sky. Bent was glad. He didn't really want to look at Jingles . . . and didn't really want Jingles looking at him.

By the way, Bent,
his mind now spoke up,
it was pretty goddam startling, wasn't it? Pretty goddam weird. The severed heads and the legs with the little shoes still on most of the little feet? And the torsos! Did you see the torsos? The eye! That one blue eye? Did you see that? Must have! You kicked it into the gutter when you bent over to pick up Ruth McCausland's arm. All those severed arms and legs and heads and torsos, but Ruth was the only person who died. It's a riddle for a champeen riddle contest, all right.

The body parts had been bad. The shredded remains of the bats—an almighty lot of them—had
also
been bad. But neither had been as bad as Ruth's arm with her husband's ring on the third finger of the right hand, because Ruth's hand and arm had been
real.

The severed heads and legs and torsos had given him a hell of a shock at first—for a numb instant he had wondered, summer vacation or not, if a class had been touring the town hall when it blew. Then his numbed mind realized that not even kindergarten kids possessed limbs so small, and that
no
children possessed arms and legs which did not bleed when they were ripped from their bodies.

He had looked around and seen Jingles holding a small, smoking head in one hand and a partially melted leg in the other.

“Dolls,” Jingles had said. “Fucking
dolls.
Where did all the fucking dolls come from, Bent?”

He had been about to answer, to say he didn't know (although even then something about those dolls had tugged at him; it would come to him in time), when he noticed that there were people still eating in the Haven Lunch. People still shopping in the market. A deep chill had touched his heart like a finger made of ice. This was a woman most of them had known all their lives—known,
respected, and in many cases loved—but they were going on about their business.

Going on about their business as if nothing at all had happened.

That was when Bent Rhodes started wanting—
seriously
wanting—to be out of Haven.

Now, turning down the radio that was still grinding out nothing but meaningless static, Bent remembered what had tugged at his mind earlier.
“She
had dolls. Mrs. McCausland.”
Ruth,
Bent thought.
I wish I'd known her well enough to call her Ruth, like Monster does. Did. Everyone liked her, s'far as I know. Which is why it seemed so wrong to see them just going about their business
—

“I guess I heard that,” Jingles said. “Hobby of hers, right? I guess I might've heard that at the Haven Lunch. Or maybe at Cooder's, having a pop with the oldtimers.”

A beer with the oldtimers, more like it,
Rhodes thought, but he only nodded. “Yeah. And that's what they were, I reckon. Her dolls. I was talking about Mrs. McCausland one day last spring, I guess it was, with Monster, and—”

“Monster?”
Jingles asked. “Monster Dugan knew Mrs. McCausland?”

“Pretty well, I guess. Monster and her husband were partners before her husband died. Anyway, he said she had a hundred dolls, maybe two hundred. He said they were her only hobby, and they were exhibited once in Augusta. He said she was prouder of that exhibit than she was of any of the things she'd done for the town—and I guess she did a lot of things for Haven.”

I wish I could have called her Ruth,
he thought again.

“Monster said except for her dolls, she worked all the time.” Bent considered, then added: “The way Monster talked, I got an idea he was . . . uh, sweet on her.” That sounded as old-fucking-fashioned as a Roy Rogers western, but that was just how Butch “Monster” Dugan had always seemed about Ruth McCausland. “Most likely you won't be the one gets stuck breaking the news to him, but if you should, lemme give you some advice: don't crack wise.”

“Yeah, okay, duly noted. Monster Dugan on my case, that's all I'd need to round the day off, you know?”

Bent smiled with no humor.

“Her doll collection,” Jingles said. He nodded. “Course
I knew they were dolls—” He saw Bent's wry glance, and smiled a little. “Okay, I had a second or two there when . . . but soon's I saw the way the sun was shinin on them, and how there was no blood, I knew what they were. Just couldn't figure out how come there was so many.”

“You
still
don't know that. That, or much else. We don't know what they were doing there. Hell, what was
she
doing there?”

Jingles looked miserable. “Who would have killed her, Bent? She was such a nice lady. Goddam!”

“I think she was murdered,” Bent said. His voice sounded like breaking sticks in his ears. “Did it look like an accident to you?”

“No. That wasn't no furnace explosion. And the fumes that kept us from going down in the basement—that smell like oil to you?”

Bent shook his head. Whatever it was, he'd never before smelled anything like it in his life. Maybe the only thing that nit Berringer had been right about was his opinion that breathing those fumes could be dangerous and it might be best to stay upstairs until the air in the town-hall basement cleared. Now he had to wonder if they'd been kept away on purpose—maybe so they wouldn't see a furnace that was completely unwounded.

“After we file our reports on this fucker,” Jingles said, “the local yokels are gonna have a lot of explaining to do. Allison, Berringer, those guys. And they may have to do some of it to Dugan.”

Bent nodded thoughtfully. “Whole fucking thing was crazy. The place
felt
crazy. I mean, I actually started to get dizzy. Did you?”

“The fumes—” Jingles began doubtfully.

“Fuck the fumes. I was dizzy in the
street.”

“Her dolls, Bent. What were her dolls doing there?”

“I don't know.”

“Me either. But it's another thing that doesn't fit for shit. Try this on: if somebody hated her enough to murder her, maybe they hated her enough to blow her dolls up with her. You think?”

“Not really,” Benton Rhodes said.

“But it
could
be,” Jingles said, as if saying so proved it. Bent began to understand that Jingles was striving to create sanity out of insanity. He told Jingles to try the radio again.

Their reception was a little better but still nothing to write home about. Bent couldn't remember ever getting deep interference from the Troy microwave dish this close to Derry before.