The Tommyknockers, Page 33

  10

  On July 15th, a Friday, she began having problems with her office phone.

  In the morning it was just an annoyingly loud hum which she and the person she was talking to had to shout over. By noon a crackling noise had been added. By two P.M. it had gotten so bad that the phone was useless..

  When she got home she found that the phone there wasn't noisy at all. It was just smoothly and completely dead. She went next door to the Fannins' to call the phone company's repair number. Wendy Fannin was making bread in her kitchen, kneading one batch of dough while her mixer worked a second batch.

  Ruth saw with a weary lack of surprise that the mixer wasn't plugged into the wall but into what looked like an electronic game with its cover off. It was generating a strong glow as Wendy mixed her bread.

  "Sure, go ahead and use the phone," Wendy said. "You know

  (get out Ruth get out of Haven)

  where it is, don't you?"

  "Yes," she said. She started toward the hall, then paused. "I stopped at Cooder's market. I needed sanitary napkins, but they're all out."

  "I know." Wendy smiled, showing three gaps in a smile which had been flawless a week before. "I got the second-to-last box. It will be over soon. We'll 'become' a little more and that part will end."

  "Is that so?" Ruth said.

  "Oh, yes," Wendy said, and turned back to her bread.

  The Fannins' phone was working just fine. Ruth was not surprised. The office girl at New England Contel said they would send a man right out. Ruth thanked her, and on her way out she thanked Wendy Fannin.

  "Sure," Wendy said, smiling. "Whatever you want, Ruth. Everyone in Haven loves you, you know."

  Ruth shuddered in spite of the heat.

  The telephone repair crew came and did something to the connection on the side of Ruth's house. Then they ran a test. The phone worked perfectly. They drove away. An hour later, the phone stopped working again.

  On the street that evening, she felt a rising whisper of voices in her brain--thoughts as light as leaves kicked into a momentary rustle by a breath of October wind.

  (our Ruth we love you all Haven loves)

  (but go if you go or change)

  (if you stay no one wants to hurt you Ruth so get out or stay)

  (yes get out or stay but leave us)

  (yes leave us alone Ruth don't interfere let us be let us)

  (be be "become" yes let us "become" let us alone to "become")

  She walked slowly, head throbbing with voices.

  She glanced into the Haven Lunch. Beach Jernigan, the short-order cook, raised a hand to her. Ruth raised one in return. She saw Beach's mouth move, clearly forming the words There she goes. Several men at the counter turned around and waved. They smiled. She saw empty gaps where teeth had been not long ago. She passed Cooder's market. She passed the United Methodist Church. Ahead of her now was the town hall with its square brick clock tower. The hands of the clock stood at 7:15--7:15 of a summer night, and all over Haven men would be opening cold beers and turning radios to the voice of Ned Martin and the sound of Red Sox Warmup. She could see Bobby Tremain and Stephanie Colson walking slowly toward the edge of town along Route 9, hand in hand. They had been going together for four years and it really was a wonder Stephanie wasn't pregnant yet, Ruth thought.

  Just a July evening with twilight coming on--everything normal.

  Nothing was normal.

  Hilly Brown and Barney Applegate came out of the library, Hilly's little brother David trailing behind them like the tail of a kite. She asked to see what books the boys had gotten and they showed her readily enough. Only in little David Brown's eyes had she seen a hesitant acknowledgment of the panic she felt ... and felt it in his mind. That she felt his fear and did nothing about it was the main reason she drove herself so hard when the little boy disappeared two days later. Someone else might have justified it, might have said: Look, I had enough on my own plate without worrying about what was dished onto David Brown's. But she wasn't the sort of woman who could find any comfort in such loud defensiveness. She had felt that boy's low terror. Worse, she had felt his resignation--his sureness that nothing could stop events--that they would simply wind along their preordained course from bad to worse. And as if to prove him right, hey, presto! David was gone. And like the boy's grandfather, Ruth shouldered her share of the guilt.

  At the town hall she turned and walked back to her house, keeping her face pleasant in spite of her drilling headache, in spite of her dismay. The thoughts swirled and rustled and danced.

  (love you Ruth)

  (we can wait Ruth)

  (shhhh shhhh go to sleep)

  (yes go to sleep and dream)

  (dream of things dream of ways)

  (to "become" ways to "become" ways to)

  She went into her house and locked the door behind her and went upstairs and pressed her face into her pillow.

  Dream of ways to "become."

  Oh God she wished she knew exactly what that meant.

  If you go you go if you stay you change.

  She wished she knew because, whatever it meant, whether she wanted it or not, it was happening to her. No matter how much she resisted, she was also "becoming."

  (yes Ruth yes)

  (sleep ... dream . . . think . . . "become")

  (yes Ruth yes)

  These thoughts, rustling and alien, followed her down into sleep and then funneled away into darkness. She lay crosswise on the big bed, fully dressed, and slept deeply.

  When she woke, her body was stiff but her mind felt clear and refreshed. Her headache had blown away like smoke. Her period, so oddly undignified and shameful after she had thought that was finally over for good, had stopped. For the first time in almost two weeks she felt herself. She would have a long cool shower and then set about getting to the bottom of this. If what it took was outside help, okay. If she had to spend a few days or a few weeks with people thinking she was off her rocker, so be it. She had spent her life building a reputation for sanity and trustworthiness. And what good would such a reputation be if it couldn't convince people to take you seriously when you sounded nuts?

  As she began to take off her sleep-rumpled dress, her fingers suddenly froze on the buttons.

  Her tongue had found an empty place in the line of her bottom teeth--there was a dull, distant pain there. Her eyes dropped to the coverlet of the bed. On it, where her head had been, she saw the tooth that had fallen out in the night. Suddenly nothing seemed simple anymore--nothing at all.

  Ruth was aware that her headache had returned.

  11

  There was even hotter weather in store for Haven--in August there would be a week when temperatures would crack the hundred-degree mark every single day--but in the meantime, the July stretch of hot-and-muggy which ran from the twelfth through the nineteenth was more than enough for everyone in town, thank you very much.

  The streets shimmered. The leaves on the trees hung limp and dusty. Sounds carried in the still air; Bobbi Anderson's old truck, now rebuilt into a digging machine, could be heard clearly in Haven Village for most of that eight-day hot spell. People knew something important was going on out there at the old Frank Garrick place--important for the whole town--but no one mentioned it out loud, any more than they mentioned the fact that it had driven Justin Hurd, Bobbi's nearest neighbor, quite mad. Justin was building things--it was part of his "becoming"--but because he had gone crazy, some of the stuff he built was potentially dangerous. One of them was a thing that set up harmonic waves in the earth's crust--waves which could possibly trigger an earthquake big enough to tear the state wide open and send the eastern half sliding into the Atlantic.

  Justin had made this harmonic-wave machine to get the goddam rabbits and woodchucks out of their burrows. They were eating all his fucking lettuces. I'll shake the little bastards out, he thought.

  Beach Jernigan went out to Justin's place one day while Justin was out harrowing up the crops in his west
field (he plowed under twelve acres of corn that day, sweating profusely, lips pulled back in a constant maniacal grimace as he worried about saving three rows of lettuces) and dismantled the gadget, which consisted of cannibalized stereo components. When Justin returned, he would find his gadget gone, perhaps assume the goddam chucks and rabbits had stolen it, and maybe set about rebuilding it ... in which case Beach or someone else would dismantle it again. Or, maybe, if they were lucky, he would feel called upon to build something less dangerous.

  The sun rose each day in a sky the color of pallid china and then seemed to hang at the roof of the world. Behind the Haven Lunch, a line of dogs lay in the scant shade of the overhanging eave, panting, even too hot to scratch fleas. The streets were mostly deserted. Every now and then someone would travel through Haven on his way up to or back from Derry and Bangor. Not too many, though, because the turnpike was so much quicker.

  Those who did pass through noticed an odd and sudden improvement in radio reception--one startled truck-driver, on Route 9 because he had gotten bored with 1-95, tuned in a rock station which turned out to be broadcasting from Chicago. Two old folks bound for Bar Harbor found a classical-music station from Florida. This eerie, bell-clear reception faded when they were clear of Haven again.

  Some through travelers experienced more unpleasant side effects: headaches and nausea, mostly--sometimes severe nausea. This was most commonly blamed on road-food gone punky in the heat.

  A little boy from Quebec, headed for Old Orchard Beach with his parents, lost four baby teeth in the ten minutes it took for the family station wagon to pass from one side of Haven to the other. The little boy's mother swore in French that she had never seen anything like it in her life. That night, in an Old Orchard Beach motel, the tooth fairy took them (and only one had been loose, the little boy's mother declared) and replaced them with a dollar.

  A mathematician from MIT, headed up to UMO for a two-day conference on semilogical numbers, suddenly realized that he was on the verge of grasping an entirely new way of looking at mathematics and mathematical philosophy. His face went gray, his perspiring skin suddenly cold as he grasped with perfect clarity how such a concept could quickly produce proof that every even number over two is the sum of two prime numbers; how the concept could be used to trisect the angle; how it could--

  He pulled over, scrambled out of his car, and threw up in the ditch. He stood trembling and weak-kneed over the mess (which contained one of his canines, although he was just then much too excited to realize he'd lost a tooth), his fingers itching to hold a piece of chalk, to cover a blackboard with sines and cosines. Visions of the Nobel Prize jittered in his overheated brain. He threw himself back into his car and began to drive toward Orono again, punching his rusty Subaru up to eighty. But by the time he got to Hampden, his glorious vision had clouded over, and by the time he reached Orono there was nothing left but a glimmer. He supposed it had been a momentary heat-stroke. Only the vomiting had been real; that he could smell on his clothes. During the first day of the conference he was pale and silent, offering little, mourning his glorious ephemeral vision.

  That was also the morning Mabel Noyes became an unperson while puttering in the basement of the Junque-A-Torium. It would not have been correct to say that she "killed herself by accident" or "died by misadventure." Neither of those phrases exactly explained what had happened to her. Mabel didn't put a bullet in her head while cleaning a gun or stick a finger in an electrical socket; she simply collapsed her own molecules and winked out of existence. It was quick and not a bit messy. There was a flash of blue light and she was gone. Nothing was left but one smoldering bra strap and a gadget that looked like a silver polisher. That, in fact, was exactly what the gadget was supposed to be. Mabel thought it would make a dirty, tiresome job much easier and wondered why she had never made such a gadget before--or why, for goodness' sake, there weren't places where you could buy them, since it was a perfectly easy thing to make and those gooks over there in Korea could probably turn them out by the ton. God knew the Korea gooks turned enough other things out by the ton, although she supposed she ought to just be grateful, since the Jap gooks had apparently gotten too uppity to do the little stuff. She had begun to see all sorts of things she could make from the used appliances in her shop. Wonderful things. She kept looking in the catalogues and kept being amazed to find they weren't there. My God, she thought, I think I am going to be rich! Only she had made some sort of cross-connection on the silver polisher, and quarked off into the Twilight Zone in just under .0006 of a nanosecond.

  She was not, in truth, greatly missed in Haven.

  The town lay limp at the bottom of a stagnant bowl of air. From the woods behind the Garrick place came the sounds of engines as Bobbi and Gardener went on digging.

  Otherwise, the whole town seemed to doze.

  12

  Ruth wasn't dozing that afternoon.

  She was thinking about those sounds coming from Bobbi Anderson's place (she, at least, no longer thought of it as the old Garrick farm), and about Bobbi Anderson herself.

  There was a communal well of knowledge in town now, a pool of thought they all shared. A month ago Ruth would have found such an idea insane. Now it was undeniable. Like the rising, whispering voices, the knowledge was there.

  Part of it was knowing that Bobbi had started all this.

  It had been inadvertent, but she had set it in motion. Now she and her friend (the friend was a perfect blank to Ruth; she knew about him only because she had seen him out there, sitting on the porch with Bobbi, evenings) were working twelve and fourteen hours a day, making it worse. She didn't think the friend had any real idea what he was doing. He was somehow outside of the communal net.

  How were they making it worse?

  She didn't know, didn't even know for sure what they were doing. That was also blocked, not just from Ruth but from everyone in Haven. They would know in time; they would not come to knowledge but become to it, as the town-wide menstruation of every female between the ages of about eight and sixty had stopped at about the same time. It had something to do with digging; that was all Ruth could tell. One afternoon she napped lightly and dreamed Bobbi and her friend from Troy were unearthing a great silver cylinder some two hundred feet across. As they uncovered more and more of it, she could see a much smaller cylinder, this one steel, perhaps ten feet across and five feet high, protruding, nipplelike, from the center of the thing. Etched on this nipple was a + symbol, and as she awoke, Ruth understood: she had dreamed of a gigantic alkaline battery entombed in the earth and granite of the land behind Bobbi's house, a battery bigger than Frank Spruce's dairy barn.

  Ruth knew that, whatever Bobbi and her friend were digging up in the woods, it certainly wasn't a gigantic Eveready Long-Life D-cell battery. Except ... in a way, she thought that was exactly what it was. Bobbi had discovered some huge power source and had become its prisoner. That same force was simultaneously galvanizing and imprisoning the whole town. And it was growing steadily stronger.

  Her mind whispered: You've got to let it go. You've just got to stand back and let it run its course. They have loved you, Ruth; that much is true. You hear their voices in your head like a rising wind lifting October leaves, now not just puffing them and letting them drop but whipping them into a cyclone; you hear their mind-voices, and although they are sometimes garbled and confused, I don't think they can lie. And when these rising voices say they have loved you, still do love you, they are telling the truth. But if you meddle into what's going on here, I think they'll kill you, Ruth. Not Bobbi's friend--he's immune, somehow. He doesn't hear voices. He doesn't "become." Except drunk. That's what Bobbi's voice says: "Gard becomes drunk." But as for the rest of them . . . if you meddle into their business . . . they'll kill you, Ruth. Gently. With love. So just stand back. Let it happen.

  But if she did, her town would be destroyed ... not changed, the way its name had been changed again and again, not hurt, as that sweet-talking preacher h
ad hurt it, but destroyed. And she would be destroyed with it, because the force was already nibbling away at the core of her. She felt it.

  All right, then ... what do you do?

  For the time being, nothing. Things might get better on their own. In the meantime, was there any way she could guard her thoughts?

  She began to experiment with tongue-twisters: She sells seashells down by the seashore. Betty Bitter bought some butter. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. With a little practice she found she could keep one of them playing constantly in the back of her mind. She walked downtown to the market, got some ground meat and two ears of fresh corn for her dinner, and spoke pleasantly with Madge Tilletts at the checkout counter and Dave Rutledge, who was sitting in his accustomed place at the front of the store, caning a chair slowly with his old, bunched, and arthritic hands. Except old Dave wasn't looking as old as he used to these days. Nowhere near.

  Both of them looked at her, wary, surprised ... puzzled.

  They hear me ... but not very well. I'm jamming them! I really am!

  She didn't know how successfully, and it wouldn't do to bank on her ability to do it--but it worked. That didn't mean they couldn't read her if several of them linked up and worked together at picking her brain. She sensed that might be possible. But it was something, at least, one arrow in a previously empty quiver.

  That night, Saturday night, she decided she would wait until Tuesday noon--roughly sixty hours. If things continued to deteriorate, she would go to the state-police barracks in Derry, seek out some of her husband's old friends--Monster Dugan for a start--and tell them what was going on forty miles or so downstate on Route 9.

  It was maybe not the best of plans, but it would have to do.

  Ruth McCausland fell asleep.

  And dreamed of batteries in the earth.

  6.

  RUTH McCAUSLAND CONCLUDED

  1

  The disappearance of David Brown rendered Ruth's plan obsolete. After David disappeared, she found herself unable to leave town. Because David was gone and they all knew it ... but they also knew that David was somehow still in Haven.