The Tommyknockers (63 page)

He came back to Adley and Joe.

“We can't wait for the others. We've got to get Bobbi in there right now if there's going to be any chance of saving her at all.”

The cop, he saw, had taken off the mask. It lay, used up, on the seat beside him. That was good. As Adley had said out in the woods, he would think less about escaping without his canned air.

“Keep your gun on the cop,” Kyle said. “Joe, help me with Bobbi.”

“Help you take her into the shed?”

“No, help me take her to the Rumford Zoo so she can see the fucking lion!” Kyle shouted. “Of course, the shed!”

“I don't . . . I don't think I want to go in there. Not just now.” Joe looked from that green light back to Kyle, a shamed, slightly sickened smile on his lips.

“I'll help you,” Adley said softly. “Bobbi's a good old sport. Be a shame if she croaked before we got to the end of it.”

“All right,” Kyle said. “Cover the cop,” he said to Joe. “And if you screw up, I swear to God I'll kill you.”

“I won't, Kyle,” Joe said. That shamed grin still hung on his mouth, but there was no mistaking the relief in his eyes. “I sure won't. I'll watch him good.”

“See that you do,” Bobbi said feebly. It startled them all.

Kyle looked at her, then back to Joe. Joe flinched away from the naked contempt in Kyle's eyes . . . but he didn't look toward the shed, toward that light, those churning, squelching sounds.

“Come on, Adley,” Kyle said at last. “Let's get Bobbi in there. Soonest started, soonest done.”

Adley McKeen, fiftyish, balding, and stocky, flagged for only a moment. “Is it . . .” he licked his lips. “Kyle, is it bad? In there?”

“I don't really remember,” Kyle said. “All I know is I felt wonderful when I came out. Like I knew more. Could
do
more.”

“Oh,” Adley said in an almost nonexistent voice.

“You'll be one of us, Adley,” Bobbi said in that same feeble voice.

Adley's face, although still frightened, firmed up again.

“All right,” he said.

“Let's try not to hurt her,” Kyle said.

They got Bobbi into the shed. Joe Summerfield turned his attention briefly away from Dugan to watch them disappear into that glow—and it seemed to him that they really did disappear rather than just step inside; it was like watching objects disappear into a dazzling corona.

His lapse was brief, but it was all the old Butch Dugan would have needed. Even now he saw the opportunity; he was simply unable to use it. No strength in his legs. Churning nausea in his stomach. His head thudded and pounded.

I don't want to go in there.

Nothing he could do about it if they decided to drag him in, though. He was as weak as a kitten.

He drifted.

After a while he heard voices and raised his head. It took an effort, because it seemed as if someone had poured cement into one of his ears until his head was full of it. The rest of the posse was pushing out of the tangle that was Bobbi Anderson's garden. They were shoving the old man roughly along. Hillman's feet tangled and he fell down. One of them—Tarkington—kicked him to his
feet, and Butch got the run of Tarkington's thoughts clearly: he was outraged at what he thought of as the murder of Beach Jernigan.

Hillman stumbled on toward the Cherokee. The shed door opened then. Kyle Archinbourg and Adley McKeen came out. McKeen no longer looked frightened—his eyes were glowing and a big toothless grin stretched his lips. But that wasn't all. Something else . . .

Then Butch realized.

In the few minutes the two men had been inside there, a large portion of Adley McKeen's hair appeared to have disappeared.

“I'll go in anytime, Kyle,” he was saying. “No problem.”

There was more, but now everything wanted to drift away again. Butch let it.

The world dimmed out until there was nothing left but those churning sounds and the afterimage of green light on his eyelids.

Act III.

They sat in the town library—the name would be changed to the Ruth McCausland Memorial Library, all agreed. They drank coffee, iced tea, Coca-Cola, ginger ale. They drank nothing that was alcoholic. Not at
Ruth's
wake. They ate tiny triangular tuna-fish sandwiches, they ate similar ones containing a paste of cream cheese and olives, they ate sandwiches containing a paste of cream cheese and pimiento. They ate cold cuts and a Jell-O salad with shreds of carrot suspended in it like fossils in amber.

They talked a great deal, but the room was mostly silent—if it had been bugged, the listeners would have been disappointed. The tension that had drawn many faces tight in the church as the situation in the woods teetered on the dangerous verge of careening out of control had now smoothed out. Bobbi was in the shed. That nosey-parker of an old man had also been taken in. Last of all, the nosey-parker policeman had been taken into the shed.

The group mind lost track of these people as they went into the thick, corroded-brass glow of that green light.

They ate and drank and listened and talked and no one said a word and that was all right; the last of the outsiders had left town following Goohringer's graveside benediction, and they had Haven to themselves again.

(will it be all right now)

(yes they'll understand about Dugan)

(are you sure)

(yes they will understand; they will
think
they understand)

The tick of the Seth Thomas on the mantelpiece, donated by the grammar school after last year's spring bottle-and-can drive, was the loudest sound in the room. Occasionally there was the decorous clink of a china cup. Faintly, beyond the open screened windows, the sound of a faraway airplane.

No birdsong.

It was not missed.

They ate and drank, and when Dugan was escorted from Bobbi's shed around one-thirty that afternoon, they knew. People rose, and now talk,
real
talk, began all at once. Tupperware bowls were capped. Uneaten sandwiches were popped into Baggies. Claudette Ruvall, Ashley's mother, put a piece of aluminum foil over the remains of the casserole she had brought. They all went outside and headed toward their homes, smiling and chatting.

Act III was over.

Gardener came to around sundown with a hangover headache and a feeling that things had happened which he could not quite remember.

Finally made it, Gard, he thought. Finally had yourself another blackout. Satisfied?

He managed to get off the porch and to walk shakily around the corner of the house, out of view of the road, before throwing up. He saw blood in the vomit, and wasn't surprised. This wasn't the first time, although there was more blood this time than ever before.

Dreams, Christ, he'd had some weird nightmares, blackout or no. People out here, coming and going, so many people that all they needed was a brass band and the Dallas

(Police, the Dallas Police were out here this morning and you got drunk so you wouldn't see them you fucking coward)

Cowgirls. Nightmares, that was all.

He turned away from the puddle of puke between his feet. The world was wavering in and out of focus with every beat of his heart, and Gardener suddenly knew that he had edged very close to death. He was committing suicide after all . . . just doing it slowly. He put his arm against the side of the house and his forehead on his arm.

“Mr. Gardener, are you all right?”

“Huh!”
he cried, jerking upright. His heart slammed two violent beats, stopped for what seemed forever, and then began to beat so rapidly he could barely distinguish the individual pulses. His headache suddenly cranked up to overload. He whirled.

Bobby Tremain stood there, looking surprised, even a little amused . . . but not really sorry for the scare he had given Gardener.

“Gee, I didn't mean to creep up on you, Mr. Gardener—”

You fucking well did, and I fucking well know it.

The Tremain kid blinked rapidly several times. He had caught some of that, Gardener saw. He found he didn't give a shit.

“Where's Bobbi?” he asked.

“I'm—”

“I know who
you
are. I know
where
you are. Right in front of me. Where's
Bobbi?”

“Well, I'll tell you,” Bobby Tremain said. His face became very open, very wide-eyed, very honest, and Gardener was suddenly, forcibly reminded of his teaching days. This was how students who had spent a long winter weekend skiing, screwing, and drinking looked when they started to explain that they couldn't turn in their research papers today because their mothers had died on Saturday.

“Sure, tell me.” Gardener leaned against the clapboard side of the house, looking at the teenager in the reddish glow of sunset. Over his shoulder he could see the shed, padlocked, its windows boarded up.

The shed had been in the dream, he remembered.

Dream? Or whatever it is you don't want to admit was real?

For a moment the kid looked genuinely disconcerted by Gardener's cynical expression.

“Miss Anderson had a sunstroke. Some of the men found her near the ship and took her to Derry Home Hospital. You were passed out.”

Gardener straightened up quickly. “Is she all right?”

“I don't know. They're still with her. No one has called here. Not since three o'clock or so, anyway. That's when I got out here.”

Gardener pushed away from the building and started around the house, head down, working against the hangover. He had believed the kid was going to lie, and perhaps he
had
lied about the
nature
of what had happened to Bobbi, but Gardener sensed a core of truth in what the kid said: Bobbi was sick, hurt,
something.
It explained those dreamlike comings and goings he remembered. He supposed Bobbi had called them with her mind. Sure. Called them with her mind, neatest trick of the week. Only in Haven, ladies and germs—

“Where are you going?” Tremain asked, his voice suddenly very sharp.

“Derry.” Gardener had reached the head of the driveway. Bobbi's pickup was parked there. The Tremain kid's big yellow Dodge Challenger was pulled in next to it. Gardener turned back toward the kid. The sunset had painted harsh red highlights and black shadows on the boy's face, making him look like an Indian. Gardener took a closer look and realized he wasn't going anywhere. This kid with the fast car and the football-hero shoulders hadn't been put out here just to give Gard the bad news as soon as Gard managed to throw off enough of the booze to rejoin the living.

Am I supposed to believe Bobbi was out there in the woods, excavating away like a madwoman, and she keeled over with a sunstroke while her sometime partner was lying back on the porch drunk as a coot? That it? Well, that's a good trick, because she was supposed to be at the McCausland woman's funeral. She went into the village and I was out here alone and I started thinking about what I saw Sunday . . . I started thinking and then I started drinking, which is mostly the way it works with me. Of course Bobbi could have gone to the funeral, come back here, changed, gone out in the woods to work, and then had a sunstroke . . . except that isn't what happened. The kid's lying. It's written all over his face, and all of a sudden I'm very fucking glad he can't read my thoughts.

“I think Miss Anderson would rather have you stay here and keep on with the work,” Bobby Tremain said evenly.

“You
think?”

“That is, we
all
think.” The kid looked momentarily more disconcerted than ever—wary, a bit rocky on his feet.
Didn't expect Bobbi's pet drunk to have any teeth or claws left, I guess.
That kicked off another, much queerer thought, and he looked at the kid more closely in the light which was now fading into orange and ashy pink. Football-hero shoulders, a handsome cleft-chinned face that might have been drawn by Alex Gordon or Berni Wrightson, deep chest, narrow waist. Bobby Tremain, All-American. No wonder the Colson girl was nuts over him. But that sunken, infirm-looking mouth went oddly with the rest, Gardener thought.
They
were the ones who kept losing teeth, not Gardener.

Okay—what's he here for?

To guard me. To make sure I stay put. No matter what.

“Well, all right,” he said to Tremain in a softer, more conciliatory voice. “If that's what you all think.”

Tremain relaxed a little. “It really is.”

“Well, let's go in and put on the coffee. I could use some. My head aches. And we'll have to get going early in the morning . . .” He stopped and looked at Tremain. “You
are
going to help out, aren't you? That's part of it, isn't it?”

“Uh . . . yessir.”

Gardener nodded. He looked at the shed for a moment, and in the fading light he could see brilliant green tattooed in the small spaces between the boards. For a moment his dream shimmered almost within his grasp—deadly shoemakers hammering away at unknown devices in that green glare. He had never seen the glow as bright as this before, and he noticed that when Tremain glanced in that direction, his eyes skittered away uneasily.

The lyric of an old song floated, not quite randomly, into Gardener's mind and then out again:

Don't know what they're doing, but they laugh a lot behind the green door . . . green door, what's that secret you're keepin'?

And there was a sound. Faint . . . rhythmic . . . not at all identifiable . . . but somehow unpleasant.

The two of them had faltered. Now Gardener moved on toward the house. Tremain followed him gratefully.