The Tommyknockers (51 page)

But now, in the wake of the explosion, there were other things to be built, other things to do . . . and quickly.

They had a meeting. Everyone in town. Not that they gathered, as at a town meeting; that was quite unnecessary. Beach went on frying hamburgers in the Haven Lunch, Nancy Voss went on sorting stamps at the post office (now that Joe was dead, it was at least a place to come to, Sunday or not), Bobby Tremain stayed under his
Challenger,
putting on a backflow rebreather that would allow him to get roughly seventy miles to the gallon. Not Anderson's gasoline pill—not quite—but close. Newt Berringer, who knew goddamned well there was no time to waste, was driving out to the Applegate place as fast as he dared. But no matter what they were doing or where they were, they were together, a network of silent voices—the voices that had frightened Ruth so badly.

Less than forty-five minutes after the explosion, some seventy people had gathered at Henry Applegate's. Henry
had the largest, best-equipped workshop in town now that the Shell station had mostly gone out of the engine-repair and tune-up business. Christina Lindley, who was only seventeen but had still taken second prize in the Fourteenth Annual State O' Maine Photography Competition the year before, arrived back almost two hours later, scared, out of breath (and feeling rather sexy, if the truth was to be told) from riding in from town with Bobby Tremain at speeds which sometimes topped a hundred and ten. When Bobby made the Dodge walk and talk, it was nothing but a yellow streak.

She had been dispatched to take two photographs of the clock-tower. This was delicate work, because, with the tower now reduced to scattered chunks of brick, masonry, and clockwork, it meant taking a photograph of a photograph.

Working fast, Christina had thumbed through a scrapbook of town photographs. Newt had told her mentally where to find this—in Ruth McCausland's own office. She rejected two shots because although both were quite good, both were also in black and white. The intention was to build an illusion—a clock-tower that people could look at . . . but one you could fly a plane through, if it came to that.

In other words, they intended to project a gigantic magic-lantern slide in the sky.

A good trick.

Once upon a time, Hilly Brown would have envied it.

Just as Christina was beginning to lose hope, she found it: a gorgeous photo of the Haven Village town hall with the tower prominently displayed . . . and from an angle that clearly showed two sides. Great. That would give them the depth of field they would need. Ruth's careful notation beneath the photograph said it came from
Yankee
magazine, 5/87.

We gotta go, Chris, Bobby had said, speaking to her without bothering to use his mouth. He was shifting impatiently from foot to foot like a small boy in need of the bathroom.

Yes, all right. This will—

She broke off.

Oh, she said. Oh dear.

Bobby Tremain came forward quickly. What the hell's wrong?

She pointed at the photograph.

“Oh,
SHIT!”
Bobby Tremain yelled out loud, and Christina nodded.

By seven that evening, working fast and silently (except for the occasional ill-tempered snarl of someone who felt someone else was not working fast enough), they had constructed a device that looked like a huge slide-projector on top of an industrial vacuum cleaner.

They tested it, and a woman's face, huge and stony, appeared in Henry's field. The people who had gathered stared at this stereopticon of Henry Applegate's grandmother silently but approvingly. The machine worked. Now, as soon as the girl brought the photograph—
photographs,
actually, because a stereopticon image was of course exactly what they had to create—of the town hall, they could—

Then her voice, faint, but boosted by Bobby Tremain's mind, came to them.

It was bad news.

“What was it?” Kyle Archinbourg asked Newt. “I didn't catch all of it.”

“Are you fucking deaf?” Andy Baker snarled. “Jesus Christ, people in
three counties
heard the bang when that bitch blew the roof off. For two cents—” He balled his fists.

“Quit it, both of you,” Hazel McCready said. She turned to Kyle. “That girl has done a hell of a job.” She was deliberately projecting as hard as she could, hoping to reach Christina Lindley as well as explain the situation to Kyle Archinbourg . . . to buck her up. The girl had

(thought)

sounded distraught, nearly hysterical, and she wouldn't do them any good that way. In such a state she would fuck up for sure, and they just didn't have the time for fuck-ups.

“It's not her fault you can read the clock in the photo.”

“What do you mean?” Kyle asked.

“She's found a color photo with an angle that couldn't be more perfect,” Hazel said. “It'll look exactly right
from the church and the cemetery, and only a little distorted from the road. We'll have to keep outsiders from going around to the back for a couple of days, until Chris finds a rough matching angle, but since they're going to be interested in the furnace . . . and in Ruth . . . I think we can get away with that. Close some roads?” she looked at Newt.

“Sewer work,” he said promptly. “Easy as pie.”

“I still don't understand the nature of the problem,” Kyle said.

“Might be you, y'fuckin ijit,” Andy Baker said.

Kyle swung truculently toward the mechanic and Newt said, “Stop it, both of you.” And, to Kyle: “The
problem
is that Ruth blew the tower off the town hall at 3:05 this afternoon. In the only good picture Christina could find, you can read the clock-face.

“It says a quarter to ten.”

“Oh,” Kyle said. Sweat suddenly turned his face oily. He took out his handkerchief and mopped it. “Oh
shit.
What do we do now?”

“Ad-lib,” Hazel said calmly.

“
Bitch!”
Andy cried. “I'd kill her if she wadn't already dead!”

“Everyone in town loved her, and you know it, Andy,” Hazel said.

“Yeah. And I hope the devil's toasting her with a long fork down in hell.” Andy switched the gadget off.

Henry's grandmother disappeared. Hazel was relieved. There was something a little ghastly about seeing that hatchet-faced woman floating in perfect 3-D above Henry's field, with the cows—which should have been stabled long ago—sometimes wandering through her as they grazed, or disappearing casually through the large old-fashioned brooch the woman wore at her high-necked collar.

“It's going to be fine,” Bobbi Anderson said suddenly in the quiet, and everyone—including Christina Lindley back in town—heard, and was relieved.

“Take me to my house,” she said to Bobby Tremain. “Quick. I know what to do.”

“You're there.” He took her arm and began pulling her toward the door.

“Hold it,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Don't you think I better”

bring the photograph?
she finished.

Oh shit!
Bobby said, and slapped his forehead.

Dick Allison, meanwhile, who was chief of Haven's volunteer fire department, was sitting in his office sweating bullets in spite of the air-conditioning, fielding telephone calls. The first was from the Troy constable, the second from the Unity chief of police, the third from the state police, the fourth from AP.

He probably would have been sweating anyway, but one of the reasons the air-conditioning wasn't doing him any good was his door had been blown off its hinges by the force of the blast. Most of the plaster had fallen off the walls, revealing lathing like decayed ribs. He sat in the middle of the wreckage and told his callers that it sure
had
been a hell of a bang, and it looked as if they probably
had
had one fatality, but it was
nowhere near
as bad as it had probably sounded. While he was rolling out this bullshit for the guy from the Bangor
Daily News
named John Leandro, a cork ceiling panel fell on his head. Dick slashed it aside with a wolfish snarl, listened, laughed, and said it was just the bulletin board. Goddam thing had fallen over again. It just had those sucker things on the back, you know, well, if you bought cheap you got cheap, his mother had always told him, and . . .

It took another five minutes, but he finally bored Leandro off the phone. As he put his own telephone back in the cradle, most of the hallway ceiling outside his door fell with a powdery
crrrumpp!

“MOTHER-FUCKING-COCK-SUCKING-SON-OF-A-FUCKING BITCH!”
Dick Allison screamed, and brought his left fist down on his desk as hard as he could. Although he broke all four fingers, he didn't even notice in his raving fury. If, at that moment, anyone had come into his office, Allison would have ripped that person's throat open, filled his mouth with hot blood, and then sprayed it back into the dying person's face. He screamed and swore and even drummed his feet up and down on the floor like a child doing a tantrum because he has been denied an outing.

He
looked
childish.

He also looked extremely
dangerous.

Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

In between phone calls, Dick went into Hazel's office, found the Midol in her drawer, and took six. Then he wrapped his throbbing, swelling hand tightly and forgot it. If he had still been human, this would have been impossible; one does not simply forget four broken fingers. But since then he had “become.” One of the things that included was becoming able to exercise conscious will over pain.

It came in handy.

In between his conversations with the outside—and sometimes during them—Dick spoke to the men and women working furiously at Henry Applegate's. He told them he expected a couple of state cops by four-thirty, five o'clock at the latest. Could they have the slide-projector ready by then? When Hazel explained the problem, Dick began to rave again, this time with fear as well as anger. When Hazel explained what Christina Lindley was up to, he calmed . . . a little. She had a home darkroom. There she would carefully make a negative of the
Yankee
picture and enlarge it slightly, not because
it
needed to be bigger for the slide-projector device to work (and too much enlarging would give their clock-tower illusion an odd, grainy look), but because
she
needed a slightly bigger image to work with.

She's going to turn a negative, Hazel said in his mind,
then airbrush out the hands on the clock-face. Bobby Tremain is going to put them back in with an X-acto knife, so they say 3:05. He's got a steady hand and a little talent. Right now a steady hand seems more important.

I thought if you made a negative from a positive, it came out blurry, Dick Allison said. Specially if the positive's color.

She's improved her developing equipment, Hazel said. She didn't need to add that seventeen-year-old Christina Lindley now had what was probably the most advanced darkroom on earth.

So how long?

Midnight, she thinks, Hazel said.

Christ on a pony! Dick shouted, loud enough to make the people in Henry's field wince.

We'll need about thirty D-cells, Bobbi Anderson's voice cut in calmly. Be a love and see to that, Dick. And we understand about the police. Play
Hee-Haw
for them, you understand?

He paused. Yes, he said. Buck and Roy, Junior Samples.

Exactly. And
hold
them. It's their radio I'm really worried about, not them—they'll only send one unit, two at most, to start with. But if they see . . . if they radio it in . . .

There was a murmur of assent like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell.

Is there a way you can damp out their transmissions from town? Bobbi asked.

I—

Andy Baker suddenly cut in, gleeful: I got a better idea. Get Buck Peters to shuck his fat ass over to the gas station right now.

Yes! Bobbi overrode him, her thought shrill with excitement. Good! Great! And when they leave town, someone . . . Beach, I think . . .

Beach was honored to be chosen.

Bent Rhodes and Jingles Gabbons of the Maine State Police arrived in Haven at five-fifteen. They came expecting to find the smoky, uninteresting aftermath of a furnace explosion—one
old pumper-truck idling at the curb, twenty or thirty onlookers idling on the sidewalk. Instead, they found the entire Haven town-hall clock-tower blown off like a Roman candle. Bricks littered the street, windows were blown out, there were dismembered dolls everywhere . . . and too damned many people going about their business.

Dick Allison greeted them with weird cordiality, as if this was a Republican bean supper instead of what now looked like a disaster of real magnitude.

“Christ Almighty, man, what happened here?” Bent asked him.

“Well, I guess maybe it was a little worse than I made out over the phone,” Dick said, surveying the brick-littered street and then giving the two troopers an incongruous
ain't-I-a-bad-boy?
smile. “Guess I didn't think anyone would believe it unless they saw it.”

Jingles muttered, “I'm
seeing
it and I don't believe it.” They had both dismissed Dick Allison as a small-town bumbler, probably crazy in the bargain. That was all right. He stood behind them, watching them stare at the wreckage. The smile faded gradually from his face and his expression became cold.

Rhodes spotted the human arm amid all the tiny make-believe limbs. When he turned back to Dick, his face was whiter than it had been, and he looked considerably younger.

“Where's Mrs. McCausland?” he asked. His voice rose uncontrollably and broke on the last syllable.