The Tommyknockers (47 page)

Ad McKeen took her home and Hazel McCready put her to bed. She drifted off into wild, confused dreams. The only one she could remember when she woke up Tuesday morning was an image of David Brown gasping out the last of his life in an almost airless void—he was lying on black earth beneath a black sky filled with glaring stars, earth that was hard and parched and cracked. She saw blood burst from the membranes of his mouth and nose, saw his eyes burst, and that was when she came awake, sitting up in bed, gasping.

She called the town hall. Hazel answered. Just about every other able-bodied man and woman in town was out in the woods, Hazel said, searching. But if they didn't find him by tomorrow . . . Hazel didn't finish.

Ruth rejoined the search, which had now moved ten miles into the woods, at ten o'clock on Tuesday morning.

Newt Berringer took a look at her and said, “You got

(no business being out, Ruth)

“and you know it,” he finished aloud.

“It
is
my business, Newt,” she said with uncharacteristic curtness. “Now leave me alone to get about it.”

She stayed with it all that long, sweltering afternoon, calling until she was too hoarse to speak. When twilight began to come down again, she allowed Beach Jernigan to ferry her back to town. There was something under a tarp in the back of Beach's truck. She had no idea what it was, and didn't want to know. She wanted desperately to stay in the woods, but her strength was failing and she was afraid that if she collapsed again, they wouldn't let her come back. She would force herself to eat, then sleep six hours or so.

She made herself a ham sandwich and passed up the coffee she really wanted for a glass of milk. She went up to the schoolroom, sat down, and put her small meal on her desk. She sat looking at her dolls. They looked back at her with their glassy eyes.

No more laughing, no more fun,
she thought.
Quaker meeting has begun. If you show your teeth or tongue . . .

The thought drifted away.

She blinked—not awake, precisely, but back to reality—some time later and looked at her watch. Her eyes widened. She had brought her small meal up here at eight-thirty. There they still were, near at hand, but it was now a quarter past eleven.

And—

—and some of the dolls had been moved around.

The German boy in his alpine shorts—
Lederhosen—
was leaning against the Effanbee lady-doll instead of sitting between the Japanese doll in her kimono and the Indian doll in her sari. Ruth got up, her heart beating too fast and too hard. The Hopi kachina doll was sitting on the lap of a burlap Haitian
vudun
doll with white crosses for eyes. And the Russian moss-man was lying on the
floor, staring at the ceiling, his head wrenched to one side like the head of a gallows-corpse.

Who's been moving my dolls around? Who's been in here?

She looked around wildly and for a moment her frightened, confused mind fully expected to see the child-beater Elmer Haney standing in the shadowy space of the big upstairs room that had been Ralph's study, smiling his sunken, stupid grin.
I told you, woman: you are nothing but a meddling cunt.

Nothing. No one.

Who's been in here? Who's been moving—

We move ourselves, dear.

A sly, tittering voice.

One hand went to her mouth. Her eyes widened. And then she saw the jagged letters sprawling and lurching across the blackboard. They had been made with so much force that that chalk had broken several times; untidy chunks of it lay in the chalk-gutter.

What? What? What does that—

It means he's gone too far,
the kachina doll said, and suddenly green light seemed to sweat out of its cottonwood pores. As she looked at it, numb with terror, its wooden face split open in a sinister, yawning grin. A dead cricket fell out of it and struck the floor with a dry desert click.
Gone too far, too far, too far . . .

No, I don't believe that!
Ruth screamed.

The whole town, Ruth . . . gone too far . . . too far . . . too far . . .

No!

Lost . . . lost. . . .

The eyes of the Greiner
papier-mâché doll
suddenly filled with that liquid green fire.
You're lost too,
it said.
You're just as crazy as the rest now. David Brown's just an excuse to stay here . . .

No—

But all of her dolls were stirring now, that green fire moving from one to the other until her schoolroom flared with that light. It was waxing and waning, and she thought
with sick horror that it was like being inside some ghastly emerald heart.

They stared at her with their glazey eyes and at last she understood why the dolls had frightened Edwina Thurlow so badly.

Now it was the voices of her dolls rising in that autumn-leafy swirl, whispering slyly, rattling among themselves, rattling to her . . . but these were the voices of the town, too, and Ruth McCausland knew it.

She thought they were perhaps the last of the town's sanity . . . and of her own.

Something has to be done, Ruth
. It was the china bisque doll, fire dripping from its mouth; it was the voice of Beach Jernigan.

Have to warn someone.
It was the French
poupée
with its rubbery gutta-percha body; it was the voice of Hazel McCready.

But they'll never let you out now, Ruth.
It was the Nixon doll, his stuffed fingers raised in twin V's, speaking in the voice of John Enders down at the grammar school.
They could, but that would be wrong.

They love you, Ruth, but if you try to leave now they'll kill you. You know that, don't you?
Her 1910 Kewpie doll with its rubber head like an inverted teardrop; this voice was Justin Hurd's.

Have to send a signal.

Signal, Ruth, yes, and you know how—

Use us, we can show you how, we know—

She took a shambling step backward, her hands going to her ears, as if she could shut out the voices that way. Her mouth twisted. She was terrified, and what frightened her most was how she ever could have mistaken these voices, with their twisted truths, for sanity. All of Haven's concentrated madness was here, right now.

Signal, use us, we can show you how, we know and you
WANT
to know, the town hall, Ruth, the clock tower—

The rustling voices took up the chant:
The town hall, Ruth! Yes! Yes, that's it! The town hall! The town hall! Yes!

Stop it!
she screamed.
Stop it, stop it, oh please won't you—

And then, for the first time since she was eleven and had passed out after winning the Girls' Mile Race at the Methodist Summer Picnic, Ruth McCausland fainted dead away.

Sometime early during the night she regained a soupy version of consciousness and stumbled downstairs to her bedroom without looking back. She was, in fact, afraid to look back. She was dully aware that her head was throbbing, as it had on the few occasions when she had drunk too much and awakened with a hangover. She was also aware that the old Victorian house was rocking and creaking like an old schooner in heavy weather. While Ruth had lain senseless on the schoolroom floor, terrible thunderstorms racked central and eastern Maine. A cold front from the Midwest had finally bulled its way into New England, pushing out the still sink of heat and humidity that had covered the area for the last week and a half. The change in the weather was accompanied by terrible thunderstorms in some places. Haven was spared the worst of these, but the power was out again and would remain so for several days this time.

But the fact of the power outage wasn't the important thing; Haven had its own unique power sources now. The important thing was simply that the weather had changed. When that happened, Ruth wasn't the only person in Haven to wake up with a horrible hangover sort of headache.

Everyone in town, from the oldest to the youngest, woke up feeling the same way as the strong winds blew the tainted air east, sending it out over the ocean, fragmenting it into harmless tatters.

Ruth slept until one o'clock Wednesday afternoon. She got up with the lingering remains of her headache, but two Anacin took care of that. By five she felt better than she had for a long time. Her body ached and her muscles were stiff, but these were minor matters compared with the things that had troubled her since the beginning of July, and they could not cut into her sense of well-being at all. Even her fear for David Brown couldn't spoil it completely.

On Main Street, everyone she passed had a peculiar dazed look in his or her eye, as though they had all just awakened from a spell cast by a fairy-tale witch.

Ruth went to her office in the town hall, enjoying the way the wind lifted her hair from her temples, the way the clouds moved across a sky that was a deep, crisp blue: a sky that looked almost autumnal. She saw a couple of kids flying a box kite in the big field behind the grammar school and actually laughed aloud.

But there was no laughing later as she spoke to a small group she quickly gathered—Haven's three selectmen, the town manager, and, of course, Bryant and Marie Brown. Ruth began by apologizing for not having called the state police and wardens before now, or even reporting the boy's disappearance. She had believed, she said, that they would find David quickly, probably the first night, certainly the next day. She knew that was no excuse, but it was why she had allowed it to happen. It had been, she said, the worst mistake she had made in her years as Haven's constable, and if David Brown had suffered for it . . . she would never forgive herself.

Bryant just nodded, dazed and distant and ill-looking. Marie, however, reached across the table and took her hand.

“You're not to blame yourself,” she said softly. “There were other circumstances. We all know that.” The others nodded.

I can't hear their minds anymore,
Ruth realized suddenly, and her mind responded:
Could you ever, Ruth? Really? Or was that a hallucination brought on by your worry over David Brown?

Yes. Yes, I could.

It would be easier to believe it had been a hallucination, but that wasn't the truth. And realizing that, she realized something else:
she could still do it.
It was like hearing a faint roaring sound in a conch shell, that sound children mistake for the ocean. She had no idea what their thoughts
were,
but she was still hearing them. Were they hearing her?

ARE YOU STILL THERE?
she shouted as loudly as she could.

Marie Brown's hand went to her temple, as if she had felt a sudden stab of pain. Newt Berringer frowned deeply. Hazel McCready, who had been doodling on the pad in front of her, looked up as if Ruth had spoken aloud.

Oh yes, they still hear me.

“Whatever happened, right or wrong, is done now,” Ruth said. “It's time—and overtime—that I contacted the state police about David. Do I have your approval to take this step?”

Under normal circumstances, it never would have crossed her mind that she should ask them a question like that. After all, they paid her pittance of a salary to
answer
questions, not ask them.

But things were different in Haven now. Fresh breeze and clear air or not, things were still different in Haven now.

They looked at her, surprised and a little shocked.

Now the voices came back to her clearly:
No, Ruth, no . . . no outsiders . . . we'll take care . . . we don't need any outsiders while we “become” . . . shhh . . . for your life, Ruth . . . shhh . . .

Outside, the wind blew a particularly hard gust, rattling the windows of Ruth's office. Adley McKeen looked toward the sound . . . they all did. Then Adley smiled a puzzled, peculiar little smile.

“O' course, Ruth,” he said. “If you think it's time to notify the staties, you got to go ahead. We trust your judgment, don't we?”

The others agreed.

The weather had changed, the wind was blowing, and by Wednesday afternoon, the state police were in charge of the search for David Brown.

By Friday, Ruth McCausland understood that Wednesday and Thursday had been an untrustworthy respite in an ongoing process. She was being driven steadily toward some alien madness.

A dim part of her mind recognized the fact, bemoaned it . . . but was unable to stop it. It could only hope that the voices of her dolls held some truth as well as madness.

Watching as if from outside herself, she saw her hands take her sharpest kitchen knife—the one she used for boning fish—from the drawer. She took it upstairs, into the schoolroom.