The Tommyknockers (59 page)

“I'll ask you again,” Dugan said with what he thought was extraordinary patience. “What are we looking
for?”

“I don't rightly know.” The Cherokee passed the town-line marker. They had left Albion now and entered Haven. Ev had a sudden sickening premonition that in spite of all his precautions and care, he was never going to leave it again. “We'll know it when we see it.”

Dugan didn't reply, only held on for dear life and wondered again how he had gotten into this—he had to be as crazy as the old fart he was riding with, and then some. He raised one hand to his forehead and began rubbing, just above the eyebrows.

A headache was forming there.

There were sniffles, red eyes, and some sobbing as the Rev. Goohringer, his bald head gleaming mellowly and in a soft variety of colors courtesy of the summer sunshine falling through the stained-glass windows, launched into his funeral eulogy following a hymn, a prayer, another hymn, a reading of Ruth's favorite Scripture (the Beatitudes), and yet another hymn. Below him, foaming around the lectern in a semicircle, were great bunches of summer flowers. Even with the upper windows of the church thrown open and a good breeze blowing through, their smell was suffocatingly sweet.

“We have come here to praise Ruth McCausland and to celebrate her passing,” Goohringer began.

The townsfolk sat with hands either folded or gripping handkerchiefs; their eyes—most wet—regarded Goohringer with sober, studious attention. They looked healthy, these folk—their color was good, their skin for the most part unblemished. And even someone who had never been in Haven before could have seen that the congregation here fell naturally into two groups. The outsiders
didn't
look healthy. They were pale. Their eyes were dazed. Twice during the eulogy, people left hurriedly, dashed around the corner of the church, and were quietly sick. For others, the nausea was a lower complaint—an uneasy rolling in the bowels not quite serious enough to cause an exit but simply going on and on.

Several outsiders would lose teeth before that day was over.

Several developed headaches which would dissolve almost as soon as they left town—the aspirin finally working, they would surmise.

And more than a few of them had the most
amazing
ideas as they sat on the hard pews and listened to Goohringer preach Ruth McCausland's eulogy. In some cases these ideas came so suddenly and seemed so huge, so
fundamental,
that the persons to whom they occurred would feel as if they had been shot in the head. Such persons had to fight down an urge to bolt out of their pews and run into the street screaming
“Eureka!”
at full volume.

The people of Haven saw this happening and were amused.
All of a sudden the apathetic, puddinglike expression on someone's face would be shocked away. The eyes would widen, the mouth flop open, and the Havenites would recognize the expression of a person in the throes of a Grand Idea.

Eddie Stampnell of the Derry barracks, for instance, conceived of a nationwide police band on which every cop in the land could communicate. And he saw how a cloak could easily be thrown over such a band; all those nosy civilians with their police-band radios would be shit out of luck. Ramifications and modifications poured into his mind faster than he could deal with them; if ideas had been water, he would have drowned.
I'm gonna be famous for this,
he thought feverishly. Rev. Goohringer was forgotten; Andy Rideout, his partner, was forgotten; his dislike of this goofy little town was forgotten; Ruth was forgotten. The idea had swallowed his mind.
I'm gonna be famous, and I'm gonna revolutionize policework in America
 . . .
maybe in the whole world. Holy shit! Hoooly SHIT!

The Havenites, who knew Eddie's great idea would be foggy by noon and gone by three, smiled and listened and waited. Waited for it to be over, so they could get back to their real business.

So they could get back to “becoming.”

They rolled down a dirt track—Town Road # 5 in Albion, which became Fire Road # 16 here in Haven. Twice logging roads branched off into the woods, and each time one of these came up, Dugan braced himself for an even more bone-wrenching ride. But Hillman didn't take either. He reached Route 9 and swung right. He cranked the Cherokee up to fifty and headed deeper into Haven.

Dugan was skittery. He didn't know exactly why. The old man was crazy, of course; the idea that Haven had turned into a nest of snakes was pure paranoia. All the same, Monster felt a steady, pulsing nervousness growing inside him. It was vague, a low grassfire in his nerves.

“You keep rubbing your forehead,” Hillman said.

“I've got a headache.”

“It'd ache a lot worse if the wind wasn't blowin, I guess.”

Another lapse into utter nonsense. What in God's name was he doing here? And why did he feel so goddam jumpy?

“I feel like somebody slipped me a couple of sleeping pills.”

“Ayuh.”

Dugan looked at him. “But you don't feel that way, do you? You're as cool as a goddam cucumber.”

“I'm scared, but I don't have the jitters, and I don't have a headache, neither.”

“Why
would
you have a headache?” Dugan asked crossly. The conversation had gotten decidedly
Alice in Wonderland
-ish. “Headaches aren't catching.”

“If you and six other guys are painting a closed room, you are all apt to end up with headaches. Ain't that a true fact?”

“Yeah, I guess so. But this isn't—”

“No. It ain't. And we got lucky with the weather. Just the same, I guess that thing is putting out a powerful stink, because you feel it. I can see you do.” Hillman paused and then said another
Alice in Wonderland
thing. “Had any good ideas yet, Trooper?”

“What do you mean?”

Hillman nodded, satisfied. “Good. If you do, tell me. I got something in that sack for you.”

“This is crazy,” Dugan said. His voice wasn't quite steady. “I mean, utterly nuts. Turn this thing around, Hillman. I want to go back.”

Ev suddenly focused a single phrase in his mind, as sharply and as clearly as he could. He knew from his last three days in Haven that Bryant, Marie, Hilly, and David were routinely reading each other's minds. He could sense it even though he couldn't pick it up. By the same token, he had come to realize they couldn't get into
his
head unless he let them. He had begun to wonder if it had something to do with the steel in his skull, a souvenir of that German grenade. He had seen the potato-masher with dreadful, ineluctable clarity, a gray-black thing spinning in the snow. He'd thought,
Well, I'm dead. That's it for me.
After, he remembered nothing until he'd awakened in a French hospital. He remembered how his head had hurt; he remembered the nurse who had kissed him,
and how her breath had smelled like anise, and how she kept saying, shaping her words as if speaking to a very small child,
“Je t'aime, mon amour. La guerre est fini. Je t'aime. Je t'aime les Etats-Unis
.”

La guerre est fini,
he thought now.
La guerre est fini.

“What is it?” he asked Dugan sharply.

“What do you m—”

Ev swerved the Cherokee over to the side of the road, kicking up a spume of dust. They were a mile and a half over the town line now; it was another three or four miles to the old Garrick farm.

“Don't
think,
don't
talk, just tell me what I was thinkin!”

“Tout fini,
you're thinking
la guerre est fini,
but you're crazy, people can't read minds, they c—”

Dugan stopped. He turned his head slowly and stared at Ev. Ev could hear the tendons in the man's neck creak. His eyes were huge.

“La guerre est fini,”
he whispered. “That's what you were thinking, and that she smelled like licorice—”

“Anise,” Ev said, and smiled. Her thighs had been white, her cunt so tight.

“—and I saw a grenade in the snow, oh Jesus, what's going on?”

Ev pictured a red old-fashioned tractor in his mind. “What now?”

“Tractor,” Dugan husked. “Farmall. But you got the wrong tires on it. My dad had a Farmall. Those are Dixie Field-Boss tires. They wouldn't fit a Far—”

Dugan suddenly turned around, grappled for the Cherokee's door handle, leaned out, and threw up.

“Ruth once asked me if I would read the Beatitudes at her funeral if it should fall to me to preside over it,” the Rev. Goohringer was saying in a mellow Methodist voice the Rev. Donald Hartley would have completely approved of, “and I have honored her wishes. Yet—”

(la guerre you were thinking la guerre est)

Goohringer paused, a little expression of surprise and concern touching his face. A close observer might have thought a little gas had bubbled up, and he had paused to stifle an unseemly burp.

“—I think there is another set of verses she merits. They—”

(tractor Farmall tractor)

There was another small hitch in Goohringer's delivery, and that frown touched his face again.

“—are not the sort of verses, I suppose, that any Christian woman would dare ask for, knowing that a Christian woman must earn them. Listen as I read from the Book of Proverbs and see if you, who knew her, do not agree that this is the case with Ruth McCausland.”

(those are Dixie Field-Boss tires)

Dick Allison glanced to his left and caught Newt's eye across the aisle. Newt looked dismayed. John Harley's mouth had dropped open; his faded blue eyes shifted back and forth in bewilderment.

Goohringer found his place, lost it, almost dropped his Bible. Suddenly he was flustered, no longer the master of ceremonies but a divinity student with stage-fright. As it happened, no one noticed; the outsiders were occupied either with physical distress or with mind-boggling ideas. The people of Haven drew together as an alarm went off, jumping from one mind to the next until their heads rang with it—this was a new carillon, one that jangled with discord.

(someone's looking where they have)

(have no business)

Bobby Tremain took Stephanie Colson's hand and squeezed it. She squeezed back, looking at him with wide brown eyes—the alarmed eyes of a doe who hears the slide and click of the bolt in a hunter's gun.

(out on Route 9)

(too close to the ship)

(one's a cop)

(cop, yes, but a special cop—Ruth's cop, he loved)

Ruth would have known these rising voices. And now even some of the outsiders began to feel them, although they were relatively new to Haven's infection. A few of them looked around like people coming out of thin dozes. One of these was the lady-friend of Representative Brennan's aide. She had been miles from here, it seemed—she was a minor bureaucrat in Washington, but she had just conceived of a filing system that might well get her a fat promotion. Then a random thought, a thought she would have sworn was not her own

(somebody has got to stop them quick!)

slashed across her mind and she looked around to see if someone had actually called out aloud in the church.

But it was quiet except for the preacher, who had found his place again. She looked at Marty, but Marty was sitting in a glassy daze, looking at one of the stained-glass windows with the fixed gaze of one deeply hypnotized. She supposed this to be boredom and went back to her own thoughts.

“ ‘Who can find a virtuous woman?' ” Goohringer read, his voice a trifle uneven. He hesitated in the wrong places and stumbled a few times. “ ‘For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, and he shall have no lack of gain. She doeth him good and not evil all the days of her life. She seeketh wool—' ”

Now another burst of those alien thoughts came to the single sensitized ear in the church:

(sorry about that I just couldn't)

(. . .)

(what?)

(. . .)

(holy Christ that's Wheeling! how—)

(. . .)

There are two voices speaking but we are only hearing one,
the mind-net thought, and eyes began to focus on Bobbi. There was only one person in Haven who could make his mind opaque to them, and that person wasn't here now.
Two voices—is the one we don't hear the voice of your drunken friend?

Bobbi got up suddenly and worked her way along the pew, horribly aware that people were looking at her. Goohringer, the ass, had paused again.

“Excuse me,” Bobbi muttered. “Excuse me . . . excuse me.”

At last she escaped into the vestibule and the street. Others—Bobby Tremain, Newt, Dick, and Bryant Brown among them—began to follow. None of the outsiders noticed. They had lapsed back into their strange dreams.

“Sorry about that,” Butch Dugan said. He pulled the door closed, got a handkerchief out of his back pocket, and began
to rub his mouth. “I couldn't seem to help it. I feel better now.”

Ev nodded. “I ain't going to explain. There isn't time. But I want you to listen to something.”

“What?”

Ev snapped on the Cherokee's radio and dialed across the band. Dugan started. He had never heard so many stations, not even at night when they jumped all over each other, wavering in and out in a sea of voices. Nothing wavery about these; most were bellclear.

Ev stopped at a C&W station. A song by the Judds was just ending. When it did, there was a station ID. Butch Dugan could hardly believe what he was hearing:
“Doubleya-Doubleya-Vee-AYYYY!”
a perky girl group sang, to an accompaniment of fiddles and banjos.