The Tommyknockers, Page 4

  You better call somebody, Bobbi. Right now.

  I'll call Jim. When he gets back.

  Sure. Call a poet. Great idea. Then you can call the Reverend Moon. Maybe Edward Gorey and Gahan Wilson to draw pictures. Then you can hire a few rock bands and have fucking Woodstock 1988 out here. Get serious, Bobbi. Call the state police.

  No. I want to talk to Jim first. Want him to see it. Want to talk to him about it. Meantime, I'll dig around it some. more.

  It could be dangerous.

  Yes. Not only could be, probably was--hadn't she felt that? Hadn't Peter felt it? There was something else, too. Coming down the slope from the path this morning, she had found a dead woodchuck--had almost stepped on it. Although the smell when she bent over the animal told her it had been dead two days at least, there had been no buzz of flies to warn her. There were no flies at all around ole Chuck, and Anderson could not remember ever having seen such a thing. There was no obvious sign of what had killed it, either, but believing that thing in the ground had had anything to do with it was boolsheet of the purest ray serene. Ole Chuck had probably gotten some farmer's poison bait and stumbled out here to die.

  Go home. Change your pants. You're bloody and you stink.

  She backed away from the thing, then turned and climbed the slope back to the path, where Peter jumped clumsily on her and began to lick her hand with an eagerness that was a little pathetic. Even a year ago he would have been trying to nose at her crotch, attracted by the smell there, but not now. Now all he could do was shiver.

  "Your own damn fault," Anderson said. "I told you to stay home." All the same, she was glad Peter had come. If he hadn't, Anderson might have worked right through until nightfall ... and the idea of coming to in the dark, with that thing bulking close by ... that idea didn't fetch her.

  She looked back from the path. The height gave her a more complete view of the thing. It jutted from the ground at a slight angle, she saw. Her impression that the leading edge had a slight curve recurred.

  A plate, that's what I thought when I first dug around it with my fingers. A steel plate, not a dinner-plate, I thought, but maybe even then, with so little of it sticking out of the ground, it was really a dinner-plate I was thinking of. Or a saucer.

  A flying fucking saucer.

  4

  Back at the house, she showered and changed, using one of the Maxi-Pads even though the heavy menstrual flow already appeared to be lessening. Then she fixed herself a huge supper of canned baked beans and knockwurst. But she found herself too tired to do much more than pick at it. She put the remains-more than half--down for Peter and went over to her rocker by the window. The thesis she had been reading was still on the floor beside the chair, her place marked with a torn-off matchbook cover. Her notepad was beside it. She picked it up, turned to a fresh page, and began to sketch the thing in the woods as she had seen it when she took that last look back.

  She was no great shakes with a pen unless it was words she was making, but she had some small sketching talent. This sketch went very slowly, however, not just because she wanted it to be as exact as she could make it but because she was so tired. To make matters worse, Peter came over and nuzzled her hand, wanting to be patted.

  She stroked Peter's head absently, erasing a jag his nose had put into the horizon-line of her sketch. "Yeah, you're a good dog, great dog, go check the mail, why don't you?"

  Peter trotted across the living room and nosed the screen door open. Anderson went back to work on her sketch, glancing up once to see Peter do his world-famous canine mail-retrieval trick. He put his left forepaw up on the mailbox post and then began to swipe at the door of the box. Joe Paulson, the postman, knew about Peter and always left it ajar. He got the door down, then lost his balance before he could hook the mail out with his paw. Anderson winced a little--until this year, Peter had never lost his balance. Getting the mail had been his piece de resistance, better than playing dead Viet Cong and much better than anything mundane like sitting up or "speaking" for a dog biscuit. It wowed everyone who saw him do it, and Peter knew it ... but these days it was a painful ritual to watch. It made Anderson feel the way she imagined she would feel if she saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as they were now, trying to do one of their old dance routines.

  The dog managed to get up on the post again, and this time Peter hooked the mail-a catalogue and a letter (or a bill--yes, with the end of the month coming, it was more likely a bill)--out of the box with the first swipe of his paw. It fluttered to the road, and as Peter picked it up, Anderson dropped her eyes back to her sketch, telling herself to stop banging the goddam funeral bell for Peter every two minutes. The dog actually looked half-alive tonight; there had been nights recently when he'd had to totter up on his hind legs three or four times before he was able to get his mail--which usually came to no more than a free sample from Procter & Gamble or an advertising circular from K-Mart.

  Anderson stared at her sketch closely, absently shading in the trunk of the big pine-tree with the split top. It wasn't a hundred-percent accurate ... but it was pretty close. She'd gotten the angle of the thing right, anyway.

  She drew a box around it, then turned the box into a cube ... as if to isolate the thing. The curve was obvious enough in her sketch, but had it really been there?

  Yes. And what she was calling a metal plate--it was really a hull, wasn't it? A glassy-smooth, rivetless hull.

  You're losing your mind, Bobbi ... you know that, don't you?

  Peter scratched on the screen to be let in. Anderson went to the door, still looking at her sketch. Peter came in and dropped the mail on a chair in the hallway. Then he walked slowly down to the kitchen, presumably to see if there was anything he had overlooked on Anderson's plate.

  Anderson picked up the two pieces of mail and wiped them on the leg of her jeans with a little grimace of disgust. It was a good trick, granted, but dog-spit on the mail was never going to be one of her favorite things. The catalogue was from Radio Shack--they wanted to sell her a word processor. The bill was from Central Maine Power. That made her think briefly of Jim Gardener again. She tossed both on the table in the hall, went back to her chair, sat down again, flipped to a fresh page, and quickly copied her original sketch.

  She frowned at the mild arc, which was probably a bit of extrapolation--as if she had dug down maybe twelve or fourteen feet instead of just four. Well, so what? A little extrapolation didn't bother her; hell, that was part of a fiction writer's business, and people who thought it belonged solely to science fiction or fantasy writers had never looked through the other end of the telescope, had never been faced with the problem of filling in white spaces that no history could provide--things like what had happened to the people who had colonized Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast, and then simply disappeared, for example, leaving no mark but the inexplicable word CROATOAN carved on a tree, or the Easter Island monoliths, or why the citizens of a little town in Utah called Blessing had all suddenly gone crazy--or so it seemed--on the same day in the summer of 1884. If you didn't know for sure, it was okay to imagine--until and unless you found out different.

  There was a formula by which circumference could be determined from an arc, she was quite sure of it. She had forgotten what the damned thing was, that was the only problem. But she could maybe get a rough idea--always assuming her impression of just how much the thing's edge curved was accurate--by estimating the thing's center point ...

  Bobbi went back to the hall table and opened its middle drawer, which was a sort of catchall. She rooted past untidy bundles of canceled checks, dead C, D, and nine-volt batteries (for some reason she had never been able to shitcan old batteries--what you did with old batteries was throw them in a drawer, God knew why, it was just the Battery Graveyard instead of the one the elephants were supposed to have), bunches of rubber bands and wide red canning-rubbers, unanswered fan letters (she could no more throw out an unanswered fan letter than a dead battery), and recipes jotted on file
-cards. At the very bottom of the drawer was a litter of small tools, and among them she found what she was looking for--a compass with a yellow stub of pencil sleeved into the armature.

  Sitting in the rocker again, Anderson turned to a fresh sheet and drew the leading edge of the thing in the earth for the third time. She tried to keep it in scale, but drew it a little bigger this time, not bothering with the surrounding trees and only suggesting the trench for the sake of perspective.

  "Okay, guesswork," she said, and dug the point of the compass into the yellow legal pad below the curved edge. She adjusted the compass's arc so it traced that edge fairly accurately--and then she swept the compass around in a complete circle. She looked at it, then wiped her mouth with the heel of her hand. Her lips suddenly felt too loose and too wet.

  "Boolsheet," she whispered.

  But it wasn't boolsheet. Unless her estimate of the edge's curvature and of midpoint were both wildly off the beam, she had unearthed the edge of an object which was at least three hundred yards in circumference.

  Anderson dropped the compass and the pad on the floor and looked out the window. Her heart was beating too hard.

  5

  As the sun went down, Anderson sat on her back porch staring across her garden toward the woods, and listened to the voices in her head.

  In her junior year at college she had taken a Psychology Department seminar on creativity. She had been amazed--and a little relieved--to discover that she was not concealing some private neurosis; almost all imaginative people heard voices. Not just thoughts but actual voices inside their heads, different personae, each as clearly defined as voices on an old-time radio show. They came from the right side of the brain, the teacher explained--the side which is most commonly associated with visions and telepathy and that striking human ability to create images by drawing comparisons and making metaphors.

  There are no such things as flying saucers.

  Oh yeah? Who says so?

  The Air Force, for one. They closed the books on flying saucers twenty years ago. They were able to explain all but three percent of all verified sightings, and they said those last three were almost certainly caused by ephemeral atmospheric conditions--stufflike sun-dogs, clear-air turbulence, pockets of clear-air electricity. Hell, the Lubbock Lights were front-page news, and all they turned out to be was ... well, there were these traveling packs of moths, see? And the Lubbock streetlights hit their wings and reflected big light-colored moving shapes onto the low cloud masses that a stagnant weather pattern kept over the town for a week. Most of the country spent that week thinking someone dressed like Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still was going to come walking up Lubbock's main drag with his pet robot Gort clanking along beside him, demanding to be taken to our leader. And they were moths. Do you like it? Don't you have to like it?

  This voice was so clear it was amusing--it was that of Dr. Klingerman, who had taught the seminar. It lectured her with good old Klingy's unfailing--if rather shrill--enthusiasm. Anderson smiled and lit a cigarette. Smoking a little too much tonight, but the damned things were going stale anyway.

  In 1947 an Air Force captain named Mantell flew too high while he was chasing a flying saucer-what he thought was a flying saucer. He blacked out. His plane crashed. Mantell was killed. He died chasing a reflection of Venus on a high scud of clouds--a sun-dog, in other words. So there are reflections of moths, reflections of Venus, and probably reflections in a golden eye as well, Bobbi, but there are no flying saucers.

  Then what is that in the ground?

  The voice of the lecturer fell still. It didn't know. So in its place came Anne's voice, telling her for the third time that she was getting funny in the head, getting weird like Uncle Frank, saying they'd be measuring her for one of those canvas coats you wear backwards soon; they'd cart her up to the asylum in Bangor or the one in Juniper Hill, and she could rave about flying saucers in the woods while she wove baskets. It was Sissy's voice, all right; she could call her on the phone right now, tell her what had happened, and get that scripture by chapter and by verse. She knew it.

  But was it right?

  No. It wasn't. Anne would equate her sister's mostly solitary life with madness no matter what Bobbi did or said. And yes, the idea that the thing in the earth was some sort of spaceship certainly was mad ... but was playing with the possibility, at least until it was disproven, mad? Anne would think so, but Anderson did not. Nothing wrong with keeping an open mind.

  Yet the speed with which the possibility had occurred to her ...

  She got up and went inside. Last time she had fooled with that thing in the woods, she had slept for twelve hours. She wondered if she could expect a similar sleep marathon this time. She felt almost tired enough to sleep twelve hours, God knew.

  Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.

  But she wouldn't, she thought, pulling off her OPUS FOR PRESIDENT T-shirt. Not just yet.

  The trouble with living alone, she had discovered--and the reason why most people she knew didn't like to be alone even for a little white--was that the longer you lived alone, the louder those voices on the right side of your brain got. As the yardsticks of rationality began to shrink in the silence, those voices did not just request attention; they demanded it. It was easy to become frightened of them, to think they meant madness after all.

  Anne would sure think they did, Bobbi thought, climbing into bed. The lamp cast a clean and comforting circle of light on the counterpane, but she left the thesis she'd been reading on the floor. She kept expecting the cramps that usually accompanied her occasional early and heavy menstrual flow, but so far they hadn't come. Not that she was anxious for them to put in an appearance, you should understand.

  She crossed her hands behind her head and looked at the ceiling.

  No, you're not crazy at all, Bobbi, she thought. You think Gard's getting wiggy but you're perfectly all right--isn't that also a sign that you're wobbling? There's even a name for it ... denial and substitution. "I'm all right, it's the world that's crazy. "

  All true. But she still felt firmly in control of herself, and sure of one thing: she was saner in Haven than she had been in Cleaves Mills, and much saner than she had been in Utica. A few more years in Utica, a few more years around Sissy, and she would have been as mad as a hatter. Anderson believed Anne actually saw driving her close relatives crazy as part of her ... her job? No, nothing so mundane. As part of her sacred mission in life.

  She knew what was really troubling her, and it wasn't the speed with which the possibility had occurred. It was the feeling of certainty. She would keep an open mind, but the struggle would be to keep it open in favor of what Anne would call "sanity." Because she knew what she had found, and it filled her with fear and awe and a restless, moving excitement.

  See, Anne, ole Bobbi didn't move up to Sticksville and go crazy; ole Bobbi moved up here and went sane. Insanity is limiting possibilities, Anne, can you dig it? Insanity is refusing to go down certain paths of speculation even though the logic is there... like a toker. for the turnstile. See what I mean? No? Of course you don't. You don't and you never did. Then go away, Anne. Stay in Utica and grind your teeth in your sleep until there's nothing left of them, make whoever is mad enough to stay within range of your voice crazy, be my guest, but stay out of my head.

  The thing in the earth was a ship from space.

  There. It was out. No more bullshit. Never mind Anne, never mind the Lubbock Lights or how the Air Force had closed its file on flying saucers. Never mind the chariots of the gods, or the Bermuda Triangle, or how Elijah was drawn up to heaven in a wheel of fire. Never mind any of it--her heart knew what her heart knew. It was a ship, and it had either landed or crash-landed a long time ago--maybe millions of years ago.

  God!

  She lay in bed, hands behind her head. She was calm enough, but her heart was beating fast, fast, fast.

  Then another voice, and this was the voice of her dead grandfather, repeating som
ething Anne's voice had said earlier.

  Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.

  That momentary vibration. Her first premonition, suffocating and positive, that she had found the edge of some weird steel coffin. Peter's reaction. Starting her period early, only spotting here at the farm but bleeding like a stuck pig when she was close to it. Losing track of time, sleeping the clock all the way around. And don't forget ole Chuck the Woodchuck. Chuck had smelled gassy and decomposed, but there were no flies. No flies on Chuck, you might say.

  None of that shit adds up to Shinola. I'll buy the possibility of a ship in the earth because no matter how crazy it sounds at first, the logic's still there. But there's no logic to the rest of this stuff; they're loose beads rolling around on the table. Thread them onto a string and maybe I'll buy it-I'll think about it, anyway. Okay?

  Her grandfather's voice again, that slow, authoritative voice, the only one in the house that had even been able to strike Anne silent as a kid.

  Those things all happened after you found it, Bobbi. That's your string.

  No. Not enough.

  Easy enough to talk back to her grandfather now; the man was sixteen years in his grave. But it was her grandfather's voice that followed her down to sleep, nevertheless.

  Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous--

  --and you know that, too.

  3.

  PETER SEES THE LIGHT

  1

  She thought she had seen something different about Peter, but hadn't been able to tell exactly what it was. When Anderson woke up the next morning (at a perfectly normal nine o'clock), she saw it almost at once.

  She stood at the counter, pouring Gravy Train into Peter's old red dish. As always, Peter came strolling in at the sound. The Gravy Train was fairly new; up until this year the deal had always been Gaines Meal in the morning, half a can of Rival canned dogfood at night, and everything Pete could catch in the woods in between. Then Peter had stopped eating the Gaines Meal and it had taken Anderson almost a month to catch on--Peter wasn't bored; what remained of his teeth simply couldn't manage to crunch up the nuggets anymore. So now he got Gravy Train ... the equivalent, she supposed, of an old man's poached egg for breakfast.