The Tommyknockers, Page 36

  She sat with her hands curled tightly on the wheel, wondering why she had stopped.

  Wondering. Almost knowing. Beginning

  (to "become")

  to know. Or guess.

  A barrier? Is that what you think? That they've put up a barrier? That they've managed to turn all of Haven into a

  ... an ant-farm, or something under a bowl? Ruth, that's ridiculous!

  And so it was, not only according to logic and experience but also according to the evidence of her senses. As she sat behind the wheel, listening to the radio (soft jazz which was coming from a low-power college station in Bergenfield, New Jersey), a Hillcrest chicken truck, probably bound for Derry, rumbled past her. A few seconds later, a Chevy Vega went by in the other direction. Nancy Voss was behind the wheel. The sticker on the rear bumper read: postal WORKERS DO IT BY EXPRESS MAIL.

  Nancy Voss did not look at Ruth, simply went along her way--which in this case probably meant Augusta.

  See? Nothing stopping them, Ruth thought.

  No, her mind whispered back. Not them, Ruth, just you. It would stop you, and it would stop Bobbi Anderson's friend, maybe one or two others. Go on! Drive right into it at fifty miles an hour or so, if you don't believe it! We all love you, and we would hate to see it happen to you ... but we wouldn't--couldn't--stop it from happening.

  Instead of driving, she got out and walked up to the Haven-Albion line. Her shadow trailed long behind her; the hot July sun beat down on her head. She could hear the dim but steady rumble of machinery from the woods behind Bobbi's place. Digging again. The David Brown vacation was over. And she sensed that they were getting close to ... well, to something. This brought a sense of panic and urgency.

  She approached the marker ... passed it ... kept walking ... and began to feel a wild, rising hope. She was out of Haven! She was in Albion! In a moment she would run, screaming, to the nearest house, the nearest telephone. She--

  --slowed.

  A puzzled look settled upon her face ... and then deepened into a dawning, horrified certainty.

  It was getting hard to walk. The air was becoming tough, springy. She could feel it stretching her cheeks, the skin of her forehead; she could feel it flattening her breasts.

  Ruth lowered her head and continued to walk, her mouth drawn down in a grimace of effort, cords standing out on her neck. She looked like a woman trying to walk into a gale-force wind, although the trees on either side of the road were barely swaying their leaves. The image which came to her now and the one which had come to Gardener when he tried to reach into the bottom of Anderson's customized water heater were exactly the same; they differed only in degree. Ruth felt as if the entire road had been blocked by an invisible nylon stocking, one large enough to fit a female Titan. I've heard about nude-look hose, she thought hysterically, but really, this is ridiculous.

  Her breasts began to ache from the pressure. And suddenly her feet began to slip in the dirt. Panic slapped at her. She had reached, then passed the point where her ability to generate forward motion surpassed the elastic give of the invisible barrier. Now it was shoving her back out.

  She struggled to turn, to get out on her own before that could happen, but she lost her footing and was snapped rudely back the way she had come, her feet scraping, her eyes wide and shocked. It was like being pushed by the expanding side of a large, rubbery balloon.

  For a moment her feet left the ground entirely. Then she landed on her knees, scraping them both badly, tearing her dress. She got up and backed toward her car, crying a little with the pain.

  She sat behind the wheel of her car for almost twenty minutes, waiting for the throbbing in her knees to subside. Cars and trucks passed occasionally along Derry Road in both directions, and once as she sat there, Ashley Ruvall came along on his bike. He had his fishing pole. He saw her and raised a hand to her.

  "Hi, Mitsuths McCauthland!" he cried chirpily, and grinned. The lisp wasn't really surprising, she thought dully, considering that all of the boy's teeth were gone. Not some; all.

  Still, she felt coldness rush through her as Ashley called: "We all love you, Mithuth McCauthland...."

  After a long time she backed the Dart up, U-turned, and went back through the hot silence to Haven Village. As she drove up Main Street to her house, it seemed that a great many people looked at her, their eyes full of a knowledge more sly than wise.

  Ruth looked up into the Dart's rearview mirror and saw the clock tower at the other end of the village's short Main Street.

  The hands were approaching three P.M.

  She pulled to a stop in front of the Fannins', bumping carelessly up over the curb and stalling the engine. She didn't bother to turn off the key. She only sat behind the wheel, red idiot-lights glowing on the instrument panel, looking into the rearview mirror as her mind floated gently away. When she came back to herself, the town-hall clock was chiming six. She had lost three hours ... and another tooth. The hours were nowhere to be found, but the tooth, an incisor, lay on the lap of her dress.

  12

  All that night her dolls talked to her. And she thought that none of what they said was precisely a lie ... that was the most horrible thing of all. She sat in the green, diseased heart of their influence and listened to them tell their lunatic fairy-tales.

  They told her she was right to believe she was going crazy; an X-ray of her brain, they said, one of anyone in Haven, for that matter, would make a neurologist run screaming for cover. Her brain was changing. It was ... "becoming."

  Her brain, her teeth--oh, excuse me, make that ex-teeth--both "becoming." And her eyes ... they were changing color, weren't they? Yes. Their deep brown was fading toward hazel ... and the other day, in the Haven Lunch, hadn't she noticed that Beach Jernigan's bright blue eyes were also changing color? Deepening toward hazel?

  Hazel eyes ... no teeth ... oh dear God what's happening to us?

  The dolls looked at her glassily, and smiled.

  Don't worry, Ruth, it's only the invasion from space they've made cheap movies about for years. You see that, don't you? The Invasion of the Tommyknockers. If you want to see the invaders from space the B movies and the science-fiction stories were always going on about, look in Beach Jernigan's eyes. Or Wendy's. Or your own.

  "What you mean is that I'm being eaten up," she whispered in the summer darkness as Friday night became Saturday morning.

  Why, Ruth! What did you think "becoming" was? The dolls laughed, and Ruth's mind mercifully floated away once again.

  13

  When she woke on Saturday morning the sun was up, the shaky child's drawing of the town-hall clock tower was on the schoolroom blackboard, and there were better than two dozen calculators on Ralph's sheeted study desk. They were in the canvas shoulder-bag she used when she went out collecting for the Cancer Society. There were Dymotapes on some on the calculators. BERRINGER. MCCREADY. SELECTMAN'S OFFICE DO NOT REMOVE. DEPT. OF TAXES. She hadn't gone to sleep after all. Instead, she had drifted into one of those blank periods ... and looted all the town offices' calculators, it looked like.

  Why?

  Yours not to reason why, Ruth, the dolls whispered, and she understood better and better each day, better and better each minute, each second, in fact, what had frightened little Edwina Thurlow so badly. Yours is but to send a signal ... and die.

  How much of that idea is mine? And how much is them, driving me?

  Doesn't matter, Ruth. It's going to happen anyway, so make it happen as fast and hard and soon as you can. Stop thinking. Let it happen . . . because part of you wants it to happen, doesn't it?

  Yes. Most of her, in fact. And not to send a signal to the outside world, or any silly bullshit like that; that was just the sane icing on a rich devil's food cake of irrationality.

  She wanted to be a part of it as it all went up.

  The cardboard tubes would channel the force, send it up into the clock tower in a bright river of destructive power, and the tower would lift off like a rocke
t; the shockwave would hammer the street of this fouled Haven with destruction, and destruction was what she wanted; that want was part of her "becoming."

  14

  That night, Butch Dugan called her to update her on the David Brown case. Some of the developments were unusual. The boy's brother, Hillman, was in the hospital, in a state which closely resembled catatonia. The kid's grandfather wasn't much better. He had begun telling people that David Brown hadn't just gotten lost, but had actually disappeared. That the magic trick, in other words, had been real. And, Butch said, he was telling anyone who would listen that half the people in Haven were going crazy and the rest were already there.

  "He went up to Bangor and talked to a fellow named Bright on the News," Monster said. "They wanted human interest and got nut stuff instead. Old man's turning into a real quasar, Ruth."

  "Better tell him to stay away," Ruth said. "They'll let him in, but he'll never get out again."

  "What?" Monster shouted. His voice was suddenly becoming faint. "This connection's going to hell, Ruth."

  "I said there may be something new tomorrow. I still haven't given up hope." She rubbed her temples steadily and looked at the dolls, in a row on Ralph's desk and wired up like a terrorist's bomb. "Look for a signal tomorrow. "

  "What?" Monster's voice was almost lost in the rising surf of the worsening connection.

  "Goodbye, Butch. You're a hell of a sport. Listen for it. You'll hear it all the way up in Derry, I think. Three on the nose."

  "Ruth I'm losing you ... call back ... soon ..."

  She hung up the useless telephone, looked at her dolls, listened to the rising voices, and waited for it to be time.

  15

  That Sunday was a picture-book summer day in Maine: clear, bright, warm. At a quarter to one, Ruth McCausland, dressed in a pretty blue summer frock, left her house for the last time. She locked the front door, and stood on tiptoe to hang the key on the little hook there. Ralph had argued that any burglar worth his salt would look over the door for a key first thing of all, but Ruth had gone on doing it, and the house had never been burgled. She supposed, at bottom, it came down to trust ... and Haven had never let her down. She had put the dolls in Ralph's old canvas duffel. She dragged it down the porch steps.

  Bobby Tremain was walking by, whistling. "Help you with that, Missus McCausland?"

  "No thank you, Bobby."

  "All right." He smiled at her. A few teeth were left in his smile--not many, but a few, like the last remaining pickets in a fence surrounding a haunted house. "We all love you."

  "Yes," she said, hoisting the duffel into the passenger seat. A bolt of pain ripped through her head. "Oh how well I know it."

  (what are you thinking Ruth where are you going)

  (she sells seashells she sells seashells)

  (tell us Ruth tell us what the dolls told you to do)

  (Betty Bitter bought some butter)

  (give Ruth tell is it what we want or are you holding out)

  (wouldn't you like to know Peter Piper Peter Piper)

  (it's what we want, isn't it? there are no changes, are there?)

  She looked at Bobby for a moment and then smiled. Bobby Tremain's own smile faltered a little.

  (love me? yes ... but you are all still afraid of me. and are right to be)

  "Go on, Bobby," she said softly, and Bobby went. He looked back over his shoulder once, his young face troubled, mistrusting.

  Ruth drove to the town hall.

  It was Sunday-silent, a dusty church of administration. Her footfalls clicked and echoed. The duffel was too heavy to carry so she dragged it along the waxed hall floor. It made a dry snakelike hiss. She hauled it up three flights of stairs, one riser at a time, her hands fisted around the cord that shut the duffel's mouth. Her head pumped and ached. She bit her lip and two teeth heeled over sideways with soft rottenness and she spat them out. Her breath was harsh straw in her throat. Dusty sunlight fell through the high third-floor windows.

  She dragged the bag down the short, explosively hot corridor--there were only two rooms up here, one on each side. All the town's records were stored in them. If the town hall was Haven's brain, then here, in this still attic heat, was its paper memory, stretching back through the times the town had been Ilium, Montgomery, Coodersville, Montville Plantation.

  The voices whispered and rustled around her.

  For a moment she stood looking out of the last window, looking down on the short length of Main Street. There were maybe fifteen cars parked in front of Cooder's market, which was open from noon until six on Sundays--it was doing a brisk business. People sauntering into the Haven Lunch for coffee. A few cars passing back and forth.

  It looks so normal... it all looks so damned normal! She felt a giddy moment of doubt ... and then Moose Richardson looked up and waved, as if he could see her, looking out of this dirty third-floor window.

  And Moose wasn't the only one. Lots of them were looking at her.

  She ducked back, turned, and got the window pole which stood in the far corner, where the hallway dead-ended. She used the pole to hook a ring in the middle of the ceiling and pull down the folding stairs. That done, she set the pole aside and bent back, looking up into the tower. She could hear the mechanical rattle and whir of clockwork, and below that, the dim rustle of sleeping bats. There were a lot of them up there. The town should have cleaned them out years ago, but the fumigation was apt to be nasty ... and expensive. When the clock machinery broke down again, the bats would have to be cleared out before it could be fixed. That would surely be soon enough. As far as the selectmen were concerned, as long as someone else was in office when the clock rang twelve noon some night at three in the morning and then just stopped, all would be well.

  Ruth wound the duffel's cotton cord around her arm three times and began to climb slowly up the ladder, dragging the bag between her legs. It bumped and rose in jerks, like a body in a canvas sack. The cord bit into her arm ever more deeply, and soon her hand had gone purple and numb. She breathed in long, tearing gasps that hurt something deep inside her chest.

  At last, shadows enveloped her. She stepped off the ladder and into the town hall's real attic and pulled the duffel bag up, hand over hand. Ruth was dimly aware that her gums and ears had started to bleed and her mouth was full of the sour, coppery taste of blood.

  All around her she could smell the crypt-stink of old brick fuming in dry, dark, pent-up summer heat. To her left was a vast dim circle: the back side of the clock-face which overlooked Main Street. In a more prosperous town, no doubt all four sides would have had a face; Haven's town-hall tower had only the one. It was twelve feet in diameter. Behind it, dimmer yet, she could see wheels and cogs slowly turning. She could see where the hammer would come down and strike the bell. The dent there was deep and ancient. The clock's works were very loud.

  Working swiftly, jerkily--she was like a clock herself now, a clock that was running down, and her belfry was certainly full of bats, wasn't it?--Ruth unwound the cotton cord from her arm, actually peeling it out of a deep, spiraling groove in her flesh, and opened the mouth of the duffel. She began taking the dolls out one by one, moving as fast as she could. She laid them in a circle, legs out so that the feet maintained contact all around the circle, hands the same way. In the darkness they looked like dolls conducting a seance.

  She attached the M-16 to the center of the dented place on the great bell. When the hour struck and the hammer fell--

  Boom.

  So I will just sit here, she thought. Sit here and wait for the hammer to fall.

  Droning weariness suddenly washed over her. Ruth drifted away.

  16

  She came back slowly. At first she thought she must be in her bed at home with her face pressed into the pillow. She was in bed and all this had just been a terrible nightmare. Except her pillow was not this bristly, this hot; her blankets did not pulse and breathe.

  She brought her hands up and touched a hot, leathery body,
bones covered with scant flesh. The bat had roosted just above her right breast, in the hollow of her shoulder ... she realized suddenly that she had called it ... that somehow she had called all of them. She could hear its rodentine, scabrous mind, its thoughts dark and instinctual and insane. It thought only of blood and bugs and cruising in blind darkness.

  "Oh God no!" she screamed ... the rugose, alien crawl of its thoughts was maddening, not to be borne. "Oh no, oh please God no--"

  She tightened her hands, not meaning to, and the papery bones in its wings snapped under her fingers. It squealed, and she felt sharp, needling pain in her cheek as it bit her.

  Now they were all squealing, all, and she realized that there were dozens of them on her--maybe hundreds. On her other shoulder, on her shoes, in her hair. As she looked, the lap of her dress began to squirm and twist.

  "Oh no!" she shrieked again into the dusty dimness of the clock tower. Bats flew all around her. They squeaked. The whisper of their wings was a soft rising thunder, like the rising whisper of Haven's voices. "Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!"

  A bat fluttered in her hair, caught, squealing.

  Another flew into her face, and its breath was the stink of a dead henhouse.

  The world spun and swung. Somehow she blundered to her feet. She beat her hands about her head, the bats were everywhere, all around her in a black cloud, and now there was no difference between the soft fluttery explosion of their wings and the voices

  (we all love you, Ruth!)

  the voices

  (we hate you Ruth don't you meddle don't you dare meddle) the voices of Haven.

  She had forgotten where she was. She had forgotten the trapdoor which yawned almost at her feet, and as she stumbled toward it she heard the clock strike--but the sound was muffled, not true, because the hammer had struck her detonator and--

  --and nothing was happening.

  She turned, bats flying all about her, and now her incredulous eyes were also bleeding, but through a reddish haze she saw the hammer fall again, and then yet a third time, and still the world remained.