The Tommyknockers

  Ted is wearing a reindeer sweater and faded jeans. He skis fast and well. Gardener, on the other hand, is completely out of control.

  "You're going to crash," a voice on his right says. He looks over and it is Arglebargle. Arglebargle has begun to rot. His fat face, which had been flushed with alcohol on the night of the party, is now the yellow-gray of old curtains hanging in dirty windows. His flesh has begun to slough downward, pulling and splitting. Arglebargle sees his shock and terror. His gray lips spread in a grin.

  "That's right," he says. "I'm dead. It really was a heart attack. Not indigestion, not my gall-bladder. I collapsed five minutes after you were gone. They called an ambulance and the kid I hired to tend bar got my heart started again with CPR, but I died for good in the ambulance."

  The grin stretches; becomes as moony as the grin of a dead trout lying on the deserted beach of a poisoned lake.

  "I died at a stoplight on Storrow Drive," Arglebargle says.

  "No," Gardener whispers. This... this is what he has always feared. The final, irrevocable drunken act.

  "Yes," the dead man insists as they speed down the hill, drifting closer to the trees. "I invited you into my house, gave you food and drink, and you repaid me by killing me in a drunken argument."

  "Please . . . I . . ."

  "You what? You what?" from his left again. The reindeer on Ted's sweater have disappeared. They have been replaced by yellow radiation warning symbols. "You nothing, that's what! Where do you latter-day Luddites think all that power comes from?"

  "You killed me," Arberg drones from his right, "but you'll pay. You're going to crash, Gardener."

  "Do you think we get it from the Wizard of Oz?" Ted screams. Weeping sores suddenly erupt on his face. His lips bubble, peel, crack, begin to suppurate. One of his eyes shimmers into the milkiness of cataract. Gardener realizes with mounting horror that he is looking into a face exhibiting symptoms of a man in the last, advanced stages of radiation sickness.

  The radiation symbols on Ted's shirt are turning black.

  "You'll crash, you bet, " Arglebargle drones on. "Crash. "

  He is weeping with terror now, as he wept after shooting his wife, hearing the unbelievable report of the gun in his hand, watching as she staggered backward against the kitchen counter, one hand clapped to her cheek like a woman uttering a shocked "My land! I NEVER!" And then the blood squirting through her fingers and his mind in a last desperate effort to deny it all had thought Ketchup, relax, that's just ketchup. Then beginning to weep as he was now.

  "As far as you guys are concerned, all your responsibility ends at the wall plate where you plug in." Pus runs and dribbles down Ted's face. His hair has fallen out. The sores cover his skull. His mouth spreads in a grin as moony as Arberg's. Now in a last extremity of terror Gardener realizes he is skiing out of control down Straight Arrow flanked by dead men. "But you'll never stop us, you know. No one will. The pile is out of control, you see. Has been since... oh, around 1939, I'd reckon. We reached critical mass along about 1965. It's out of control. The explosion will come soon."

  "No . . . no. . ."

  "You've been riding high, but those who ride highest fall hardest," Arberg drones. "Murder of a host is the foulest murder of all. You're going to crash . . . crash . . . crash!"

  How true it is! He tries to turn but his skis remain stubbornly on course. Now he can see the hoary old pine. Arglebargle and Ted the Power Man are gone and he thinks: Were they Tommyknockers, Bobbi?

  He can see a red swatch of paint around the pine's gnarly trunk . . . and then it begins to flake and split. As he slides helplessly toward the tree he sees that it has come alive, that it has split open to swallow him. The yawning tree grows and swells, seems to rush toward him, grows tentacles, and there is a horrible rotten blackness in its center, with red paint around it like the lipstick of some sinister whore, and he can hear dark winds howling in that black, squirming mouth and

  4

  he doesn't wake up then, as much as it seems he has--everyone knows that even the most outlandish dreams feel real, that they may even have their own spurious logic, but this is not real, cannot be. He has simply exchanged one dream for another. Happens all the time.

  In this dream he has been dreaming about his old skiing accident--for the second time that day, can you believe it? Only this time the tree he struck, the one which almost killed him, grows a rotted mouth like a squirming knothole. He snaps awake and finds himself sitting in Bobbi's rocking chair, too relieved by simple waking to care that he's stiff all over and that his throat is now so sore that it feels like it's been lined with barbed wire.

  He thinks: I'm going to get up and make myself a dose of coffee and aspirin. Wasn't I going to do that before? He starts to get up, and that's when Bobbi opens her eyes. That's also when he knows he is dreaming, must be, because green rays of light shoot from Bobbi's eyes--Gardener is reminded of Superman's X-ray vision in the comic-books, the way the artist drew it in lime-colored beams. But the light which comes from Bobbi's eyes is swamplike and somehow dreadful ... there is something rotted about it, like the drifting glow of St. Elmo's fire in a swamp on a hot night.

  Bobbi sits up slowly and looks around... looks toward Gardener. He tries to tell her no ... Please don't put that light on me.

  No words come out and as that green light hits him he sees that Bobbi's eyes are blazing with it--at its source it is as green as emeralds, as bright as sun-fire. He cannot look at it, has to avert his eyes. He tries to bring an arm up to shield his face but he can't, his arm is too heavy. It'll burn, he thinks, it'll burn, and then in a few days the first sores will show up, you'll think they're pimples at first because that's what radiation sickness looks like when it starts, just a bunch of pimples, only these pimples never heal, they only get worse... and worse...

  He hears Arberg's voice, a disembodied holdover from the previous dream, and now there seems to be triumph in his drone: "I knew you were going to crash, Gardener!"

  The light touches him... washes over him. Even with his eyes squeezed shut it lights the darkness as green as radium watch-dials. But there's no real pain in dreams, and there is none here. The bright green light is neither hot nor cold. It is nothing. Except...

  His throat.

  His throat is no longer sore.

  And he hears this, clearly and unmistakably: "--percent off! This is the sort of price reduction that may never be repeated! EVERYONE gets credit! Recliners! Waterbeds! Living-room s--"

  The plate in his skull, talking again. Gone almost before it was fairly begun.

  Like his sore throat.

  And that green light was gone too.

  Gardener opens his eyes . . . cautiously.

  Bobbi is lying on the couch, eyes shut, deeply asleep ... just as she was. What's all this about rays shooting out of eyes? Good God!

  He sits in the rocking chair again. Swallows. No pain. The fever has gone down a lot, too.

  Coffee and aspirin, he thinks. You were going to get up for coffee and aspirin, remember?

  Sure, he thinks, settling more comfortably into the rocking chair and closing his eyes. But no one gets coffee and aspirin in a dream. I'll do it just as soon as I wake up.

  Gard, you are awake.

  But that, of course, could not be. In the waking world, people don't shoot green beams from their eyes, beams that cure fevers and sore throats. Dreams si, reality no.

  He crosses his arms over his chest and drifts away. He knows no more--eithersleeping or waking--forthe rest of that night.

  5

  When Gardener woke up, bright light was streaming into his face through the western window. His back hurt like a bastard, and when he stood up his neck gave a wretched arthritic creak that made him wince. It was quarter of nine.

  He looked at Bobbi and felt a moment of suffocating fear--in that moment he was sure Bobbi was dead. Then he saw she was just so deeply, movelessly asleep that she gave a good impression of being dead. It was a mistake anyone
might have made. Bobbi's chest rose in slow, steady pulls with long but even pauses in between. Gardener timed her and saw she was breathing no more than six times a minute.

  But she looked better this morning--not great, but better than the haggard scarecrow who had reeled out to greet him last night.

  Doubt if I looked much better, he thought, and went into Bobbi's bathroom to shave.

  The face looking back from the mirror wasn't as bad as he had feared, but he noted with some dismay that his nose had bled again in the night--not a lot, but enough to have covered his philtrum and most of his upper lip. He got a facecloth out of the cupboard to the right of the sink and turned on the hot water to wet it down.

  He put the facecloth under the water flowing from the hot tap with all the absentmindedness of long habit--with Bobbi's water heater, you just about had time for a cup of coffee and a smoke before you got a lukewarm stream--and that was on a good d--

  "Youch!"

  He pulled his hand back from water so hot it was steaming. Okay, that was what he got for assuming Bobbi was just going to go clipclopping down the road of life without ever getting her damned water heater fixed.

  Gardener put his scalded palm to his mouth and looked at the water coming out of the tap. It had already fogged the lower edge of the shaving mirror on the back of the medicine cabinet. He reached out, found the tap's handle almost too hot to touch, and used the facecloth to turn it off. Then he put in the rubber plug, drew a little more hot water--cautiously!--and added a generous dollop of cold. The pad of flesh below his left thumb had reddened a little.

  He opened the medicine cabinet and moved things around until he came to the prescription bottle of Valium with his own name on the label. If that stuff improves with age, it ought to be great, he thought. Still almost full. Well, what did he expect? Whatever Bobbi had been using, it sure as hell had been the opposite of Valium.

  Gardener didn't want it either. He wanted what was behind it, if it was stilt--

  Ah! Success!

  He pulled out a double-edge razor and a package of blades. He looked a little sadly at the layer of dust on the razor--it had been a long time since he'd shaved in the morning here at Bobbi's--and then rinsed it off. At least she didn't throw it out, he thought. That would have been worse than the dust.

  A shave made him feel better. He concentrated on it, drawing it out while his thoughts ran their own course.

  He finished, replaced the shaving stuff behind the Valium, and cleaned up. Then he looked thoughtfully at the tap with the H on its handle, and decided to go down cellar and see what sort of magnificent water heater Bobbi had put in. The only other thing to do was watch Bobbi sleep, which she seemed to be doing well on her own.

  He crossed into the kitchen thinking that he really did feel well, especially now that the aches from a night in Bobbi's rocking chair were starting to work out of his back and neck. You're the guy who's never been able to sleep sitting up, right? he jeered softly at himself. Crashing out on breakwaters is more your style, right? But this ribbing was nothing like the harsh, barely coherent self-mockery of the day before. The one thing he always forgot in the grip of the hangovers and the terrible post-jag depressions was the feeling of regeneration that sometimes came later. You could wake up one day realizing you hadn't put any poison in your system the night before ... the week before... maybe the whole month before... and you felt really good.

  As for what he had been afraid must be the onset of the flu, maybe even pneumonia--that was gone too. No sore throat. No plugged nose. No fever. God knew he had been a perfect target for a germ, after eight days drinking, sleeping rough, and finally hitching back to Maine in his bare feet during a rainstorm. But it had passed off in the night. Sometimes God was good.

  He paused in the middle of the kitchen, his smile drifting away into a momentary expression that was puzzled and a little disquieted. A fragment of his dream--or dreams--came slipping back

  (radio ads in the night . . . does that have something to do with feeling well this morning?)

  and then it faded again. He dismissed it, content with the fact that he felt well and Bobbi looked well--better, anyway. If Bobbi wasn't awake by ten o'clock, ten-thirty at the latest, he would wake her up. If Bobbi felt better and spoke rationally, fine. They could discuss whatever had happened to her (SOMETHING sure did, Gardener thought, and wondered absently if she had gotten some terrible news report from home... a bulletin that would undoubtedly have been served up by Sister Anne). They would go on from there. If she still even slightly resembled the spaced-out and rather creepy Bobbi Anderson who had greeted him the night before, Gardener was going to call a doctor whether Bobbi liked it or not.

  He opened the cellar door and fumbled for the old-fashioned toggle switch on the wall. He found it. The switch was the same. The light wasn't. Instead of the feeble flow from two sixty-watt bulbs--the only illumination in Bobbi's cellar since time out of mind--the cellar lit up with a brisk white glare. It looked as bright as a discount department store down there. Gardener started down, hand reaching for the rickety old banister. He found a thick and solid new one instead. It was held firmly against the wall with new brass fittings. Some of the stair treads, which had been definitely queasy, had also been replaced.

  Gardener reached the bottom of the steps and stood looking around, his surprise now bordering on some stronger emotion--it was almost shock. That slightly moldy root-cellar smell was gone, too.

  She looked like a woman running on empty, no joke. Right out on the ragged edge. She couldn't even remember how many days it had been since she'd gotten any sleep. No wonder. I've heard of home improvement, but this is ridiculous. She couldn't have done it all herself, though. Could she? Of course not.

  But Gardener suspected that, somehow, Bobbi had.

  If Gardener had awakened here instead of on the breakwater at Arcadia Point, with no memory of the immediate past, he wouldn't have known he was in Bobbi's cellar, although he had been here countless times before. The only reason he was sure of it now was because he had gotten here from Bobbi's kitchen.

  That rooty smell wasn't entirely gone, but it was diminished. The cellar's dirt floor had been neatly raked--no, not just raked, Gardener saw. Cellar dirt got old and sour after a while; you had to do something about it if you planned to be spending much time belowground. Anderson had apparently brought in a fresh load of dirt and had spread it around to dry before raking. Gardener supposed that was what had sweetened the atmosphere of the place.

  Fluorescents were racked in overhead rows, each hooded fixture hung from the old beams by chains and more brass fittings. They shed an even white glow. All the fixtures were single tubes except for those over the worktable; those each had a pair, so here the glow was so bright that it made Gardener think of operating theaters. He walked over to Bobbi's worktable. Bobbi's new worktable.

  Anderson had had an ordinary kitchen table covered with dirty Con-Tact paper before. It had been lit with a gooseneck study lamp and littered with a few tools, most of them not in very good condition, and a few plastic boxes of nails, screws, bolts, and the like. It was the small-repairs workplace of a woman who is neither very good nor very interested in small repairs.

  The old kitchen table was gone, replaced by three long, light tables, the sort on which bake-sale goods are placed at church sales. They had been placed end to end along the left side of the cellar to make one long table. It was littered with hardware, tools, spools of insulated wire both thin and thick, coffee cans full of brads and staples and fasteners... dozens of other items. Or hundreds.

  Then there were the batteries.

  There was a carton of them under the table, a huge loose collection of long-life batteries still in their blister-packs : C-cells, D-cells, double-A's, triple-A's, nine-volts. Must be two hundred dollars' worth in there, Gardener thought, and more rolling around on the table. What in the blue hell--?

  Dazed, he walked along the table like a man checking out the merchandis
e and deciding whether or not to buy. It looked as though Bobbi was making several different things at once... and Gardener was not sure what any of them were. Here, standing halfway along the table, was a large square box with its front panel slid aside to reveal eighteen different buttons. Beside each button was the title of a popular song--"Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," "New York, New York," "Lara's Theme," and so on. Next to it, an instruction sheet tacked neatly to the table identified it as the one-and-only SilverChime Digital Doorbell (Made in Taiwan).

  Gardener couldn't imagine why Bobbi would want a doorbell with a built-in microchip that would allow the user to program a different song whenever she wanted to--did she think Joe Paulson would dig hearing "Lara's Theme" when he had to come to the door with a package? But that wasn't all. Gardener could at least have understood the use of the SilverChime Digital Doorbell, if not Bobbi's motivation in installing one. But she seemed to be in the process of modifying the thing somehow--hooking it, in fact, into the workings of a boom-box radio the size of a small suitcase.

  Half a dozen wires--four thin, two moderately thick--snaked between the radio (its instruction sheet also tacked neatly to the table) and the opened gut of the SilverChime.

  Gardener looked at this for some time and then passed on.

  Breakdown. She's had a very odd sort of mental breakdown. The kind Pat Summerall would love.

  Here was something else he recognized--a furnace accessory called a rebreather. You attached it to the flue and it was supposed to recirculate some of the heat that ordinarily got wasted. It was the sort of gadget Bobbi would see in a catalogue, or maybe in the Augusta Trustworthy Hardware Store, and talk about buying. She never actually would, though, because if she bought it she would have to install it.

  But now she apparently had bought it... and installed it.

  You can't say she's having a breakdown and "that's all, " because when someone who's really creative highsides it, it's rarely a case of "that's all." Crackups are never pretty, but when someone like Bobbi tips over, it can be sort of amazing. Just look at this shit.