The Tommyknockers (78 page)

“Let me give you a piece of advice, sister Anne.”

“Spare me. No candy from strangers, no advice from drunks.”

“Do exactly what I told you when you got out of the car. Leave. Now. Just
go.
This is not a good place to be right now.”

There was something in his eyes, something desperately honest, that brought on a recurrence of her earlier chill and that unaccustomed confusion. She had been left all
day in her car at the side of the road as she lay in a swoon. What sort of people did that?

Then every bit of her Anne-ness rose up and crushed these little doubts. If she
wanted
a thing to be, if she
meant
a thing to be, that thing
would
be; so it had been, was, and ever would be, alleluia, amen.

“Okay, Chumly,” she said. “You gave me yours, I'll give you mine. I'm going inside that shack, and about two minutes later a very large chunk of shit is going to hit the fan. I suggest you go for a walk if you don't want to get splattered. Sit on a rock somewhere and watch the sun go down and jerk off or think up rhymes or do whatever it is Great Poets do when they watch the sunset. But you want to keep out of what goes on in the house, no matter what. It's between Bobbi and me. If you get in my way, I'll rip you up.”

“In Haven, you're more likely to be the ripp
ee
than the ripper.”

“Well, that's something I'll have to see for myself, even though I'm
not
from Missouri,” Anne said, and started for the door.

Gardener tried once more.

“Anne . . . Sissy . . . Bobbi's not the same. She . . .”

“Take a walk, little man,” Anne said, and went inside.

The windows were open but for some reason the shades were drawn. Every now and then a puff of faint breeze would stir, sucking the shades into the openings a little way. When it happened, they looked like the sails of a becalmed ship doing their best and failing. Anne sniffed and wrinkled her nose. Bluh. The place smelled like a monkey-house. From the Great Poet she would have expected it, but her sister had been raised better. This place was a pigsty.

“Hello, Sissy.”

She turned. For a moment Bobbi was just a shadow, and Anne felt her heart go into her throat because there was something odd about that shape, something all
wrong
—

Then she saw the white blur of her sister's robe, heard
the patter of water, and understood that Bobbi had just come from the shower. She was all but naked. Good. But her pleasure was not as great as it should have been. Her unease remained, her feeling that there was something
wrong
about the shape in the dooorway.

This is not a good place to be right now.

“Daddy's dead,” she said, straining her eyes to see better. For all her straining, Bobbi remained only a dim figure in the door which communicated between living room and—she assumed—bathroom.

“I know. Newt Berringer called and told me.”

Something about her voice. Something even more basically different in the vague suggestiveness of her shape. Then it came to her. The realization brought a nasty shock and stronger fear. She didn't sound afraid. For the first time in her life, Bobbi didn't sound afraid of her.

“We buried him without you. Your mother died a little when you didn't come home, Bobbi.”

She waited for Bobbi to defend herself. There was only silence.

For Christ's sake, come out where I can see you, you little coward!

Anne . . . Bobbi's not the same . . .

“She fell downstairs four days ago and broke her hip.”

“Did she?” Bobbi asked indifferently.

“You're coming home with me, Bobbi.” She meant to convey force and was appalled by the weak shrillness of her voice.

“It was your teeth that let you get in,” Bobbi said. “Of course! I should have thought of that!”

“Bobbi, get out here where I can see you!”

“Do you want me to?” Her voice had taken on a strange teasing lilt. “I wonder if you do.”

“Stop fucking with me, Bobbi!” Her voice rose unevenly.

“Oh, listen!” Bobbi said. “I never thought I'd hear anything like that from
you,
Anne. After all the years you fucked with me . . . with
all
of us. But okay. If you insist. If you insist, that's fine. Just fine.”

She didn't want to see. Suddenly Anne didn't want anything but to run, and keep running until she was far from this shadowy place and this town where they left you fainting all day at the side of the road. But it was too late. She saw the blurred movement of her younger sister's
hand, and the lights went on at the same moment the robe dropped with a soft rustle.

The shower had washed off the makeup. Bobbi's entire head and neck were transparent and jellylike. Her breasts had swelled bulbously outward and seemed to be merging into one single nippleless outcropping of flesh. Anne could see dim organs in Bobbi's stomach that looked nothing at all like human organs—there was fluid circulating in there but it looked green.

Behind Bobbi's forehead she could see the quivering sac of mind.

Bobbi grinned toothlessly.

“Welcome to Haven, Anne,” she said.

She felt herself stepping backward in a spongy dream. She was trying to scream but there was no air.

At Bobbi's crotch, a grotesque thatch of tentacles like sea-grass wavered from her vagina . . . the place where her vagina had been, anyway. Anne had no idea if it was still there or not, and didn't care. The sunken valley which had replaced her crotch was enough. That . . . and the way the tentacles seemed to be pointing toward her . . .
reaching
for her.

Naked, Bobbi began walking toward her. Anne tried to back away and stumbled over a footstool.

“No,” she whispered, trying to crawl away. “No . . . Bobbi . . . no . . .”

“Good to have you here,” Bobbi said, still smiling. “I hadn't counted on you . . . not at all . . . but I think we can find a job for you. Positions, as they say, are still open.”

“Bobbi . . .” She managed this one final terrified whisper, and then she felt the tentacles moving lightly on her body. She jerked, tried to move away . . . and they slithered around her wrists. Bobbi's hips thrust out in a movement that was like an obscene parody of copulation.

Gardener took Anne's advice and went for a walk. He went, in fact, all the way out to the ship in the woods. This was the first time he had been out here by himself, he realized, and it would soon be full dark. He felt vaguely afraid, as a child might passing near a haunted house.
Are there ghosts in there? The ghosts of Tommyknockers past? Or are the real Tommyknockers themselves still in there, maybe in suspended animation, beings like freeze-dried coffee, waiting to be thawed out? And just what were they, anyhow?

He sat on the ground by the lean-to, looking at the ship. After a while the moon rose and lit its surface an even more ghostly silver. It was strange and yet very beautiful.

What's going on around here?

I don't want to know.

What it is ain't exactly clear . . .

I don't want to know.

Hey, stop, what's that sound, everybody look what's going down . . .

He tipped the bottle up and drank deep. He put it aside, rolled over, and rested his throbbing head on his arms. He fell asleep that way, in the woods near the graceful circular jut of the ship.

He slept there all night.

In the morning there were two teeth on the ground.

It's what I get for sleeping so close to it,
he thought dully, but there was at least one compensation—he had no headache at all, although he had put away nearly a fifth of Scotch. He had noticed before that, all its other attributes aside, the ship—or the change in the atmosphere the ship had generated—seemed, at very close range, to provide hangover protection.

He didn't want to leave his teeth just lying there. Heeding an obscure urge, he kicked dirt over them. As he did it he thought again:
Playing Hamlet is a luxury you can no longer afford, Gard. If you don't commit to one course or the other very soon—in the next day or so, I think—you're not going to be able to do anything but march along with the rest of them.

He looked at the ship, thought of the deep ravine which extended down its smooth, unmarked side, and thought again:
We'll be down to the hatchway soon, if there
is
a hatchway. . . . What then?

Rather than trying to answer, he struck off for home.

The Cutlass was gone.

“Where were you last night?” Bobbi asked Gardener.

“I slept in the woods.”

“Did you get really drunk?” Bobbi asked with surprising gentleness. Her face was dark with makeup again. And Bobbi had been wearing shirts which seemed oddly loose and baggy the last few days; this morning he thought he could see why. Her chest was thickening. Her breasts had begun to look like a single unit instead of two separate things. It made Gardener think of guys who pumped iron.

“Not very. One or two nips and I passed out. No hangover this morning. And no bug bites.” He raised his arms, darkly tanned on top, white and strangely vulnerable beneath. “Any other summer, you'd wake up the next morning so bug-bit you couldn't open your eyes. But now they're gone. Along with the birds. And the beasts. In fact, Roberta, it seems to repel everything but fools like us.”

“Have you changed your mind, Gard?”

“You keep asking me that, have you noticed?”

Bobbi didn't reply.

“Did you hear the news on the radio yesterday?” He knew she hadn't. Bobbi didn't see, hear, or think about anything now but the ship. Her headshake was no surprise. “Troops massing in Libya. More fighting in Lebanon. American troop movements. The Russians getting louder and louder about SDI. We're all still sitting on the powderkeg. That hasn't changed a bit since 1945 or so. Then you discover a
deus ex machina
in your back yard, and now you keep wanting to know if I've changed my mind about using it.”

“Have
you?”

“No,” Gardener said, not sure if he was lying or not—but he was
very
glad Bobbi couldn't read him.

Oh, can't she? I think she can. Not much, but more than she could a month ago . . . more and more each day. Because you're “becoming” now, too.
Changed
your mind? That's a laugh; you can't fucking
make up
your mind!

Bobbi dismissed it, or appeared to do so. She turned toward the pile of hand-tools stacked on the corner of the porch. She had missed making up a spot just below her right ear, Gardener saw—it was the same spot many men miss when they are shaving. He realized with a sickish lack of surprise that he could see
into
Bobbi—her skin had changed, had become kind of semi-transparent jelly. Bobbi had grown thicker, shorter over the last few days—and the changes were accelerating.

God, he thought, horrified and bitterly amused,
is that what happens when you turn into a Tommyknocker? You start looking like someone who got caught in a great big messy atomic meltdown?

Bobbi, who had been bending over the tools and gathering them up in her arms, turned quickly to look at Gardener, her face wary.

“What?”

I said let's get moving, you lazy juggins, Gardener sent clearly, and that wary, puzzled expression became a reluctant smile.

“Okay. Help me with these, then.”

No, of course victims of high-gamma radiation didn't turn transparent, like Claude Rains in
The Invisible Man.
They didn't start to lose inches as their bodies twisted and thickened. But, yes, they were apt to lose teeth,
their hair was apt to fall out—in other words, there was a kind of physical “becoming” in both cases.

He thought again:
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Bobbi was looking narrowly at him again.

I'm running out of maneuvering room, all right. And fast.

“What
did you say, Gard?”

“I said, ‘Let's go, boss.' ”

After a long moment, Bobbi nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Daylight's wasting.”

They rode out to the dig on the Tomcat. It did not fly the way the little boy's bike had flown in
E.T.;
Bobbi's tractor would never soar cinematically in front of the moon, hundreds of feet above the rooftops. But it did cruise silently and handily eighteen inches above the ground, large wheels spinning slowly like dying propellers. It smoothed the ride out a whole hell of a lot. Gard was driving, Bobbi standing behind him on the yoke.

“Your sister left?” Gard said. There was no need to yell. The Tomcat's engine was a faint, distant purr.

“That's right,” Bobbi said. “She left.”

You still can't lie worth shit, Bobbi. And I think—I really do—that I heard her scream. Just before I hit the patch going into the woods, I think I heard her scream. How much would it take to make a high-stepping, pure-d, ball-cutting bitch like Sissy let out a howl? How bad would it have to be?

The answer to that one was easy. Very bad.

“She was never the type to exit gracefully,” Bobbi said. “Or to let anyone
be
graceful, if she could help it. She came to bring me home, you know . . . watch that stump, Gard, it's a high one.”

Gardener shoved the gear lever all the way up. The Tomcat rose another three inches, skimming over the top of the high stump. Once past, he relaxed his hand and the Tomcat sank back to its previous altitude, eighteen inches above the ground.