The Tommyknockers, Page 37

  A dud, Ruth McCausland thought. It was a dud.

  And fell through the trapdoor.

  The bats flew up from her body, her dress flew up from her body, one loafer flew up from her foot. She struck the ladder, half-turned, and landed on her left side with a crunch that broke all her ribs. She struggled to turn over and somehow managed to do it. Most of the bats had found their way back through the trapdoor into the welcoming darkness of the clock-tower, but half a dozen or so were still circling, confused, below the roof of the third-floor corridor. The sound of their voices so alien and insectile, so hivelike and warm with insanity. These were the voices she had been hearing in her head ever since July 4th or so. The town was not just going mad. That would have been bad, but this was worse ... oh God, it was much, much worse.

  And it had all been for nothing. Hump Jernigan's M-16 had been nothing but a dud after all. She grayed out and came back some four minutes later with a bat roosting on the bridge of her nose, lapping bloody tears from her cheek.

  "No you dirty FUCK!" she screamed, and tore it in two, her revulsion an agony. It made a sound like thick, tearing paper. Its alien guts dribbled onto her upturned, cobweb-smeared face. She could not open her mouth to scream--Let me die, God, please, don't let me be like them, don't let me "become"--because it would dribble its dying self into her and then Hump's M-16 exploded under the striker with an undramatic wet bang. Green light lit first the square of the trapdoor ... and then the whole world. For one moment Ruth could see the bones of the bats standing out clearly, as if in an X-ray picture.

  Then all the green turned black.

  It was 3:05 P.M.

  17

  All over Haven, people were lying down. Some had gone to their cellars with a vague notion that now would be a good time to get preserves, some with just an idea that it would be cooler there. Beach Jernigan lay behind the counter of the Haven Lunch with his hands laced behind his neck. He was thinking of the thing in the back of his truck, the thing under the tarp.

  At 3:05 the base of the clock-tower burst open, spraying powdered brick everywhere. A huge, explosive bellow chased off across the fields; it broke almost every window in Haven, and a good many in Troy and Albion as well.

  Green fire spilled out through the jagged rent in the bricks, and the town-hall tower began to rise, a surreal brick missile, a Magritte rocket with a clock in its side. It rose on a pillar of cold green fire--surety cold, else the dolls would have been consumed, and Ruth McCausland's arm as well ... the entire village, for that matter.

  The clock-tower rose on this green torch, its sides now beginning to bulge outward--yet for an instant the illusion held: a brick rocket rising into the afternoon sky ... and through the roar of the explosion, the clock could be heard, belling out hour after hour. On the twelfth stroke--noon? midnight?--it exploded like the ill-fated Challenger. Bricks flew everywhere--Benton Rhodes would later see some of the damage, but the worst of it was quickly covered up.

  Flying bricks punched through the sides of houses, cellar windows, board fences. Bricks fell from the sky like bombs. The clock's long hand, lacy wrought iron, whickered through the air like a deadly boomerang and buried itself in one of the ancient oaks which stood outside the Haven Library.

  Masonry and splintered boards rumbled back to earth.

  Then, silence.

  After a while, people all over Haven began to get cautiously to their feet, to look around ... to begin sweeping up glass or examining damage. Destruction had swept the town, but no one had been hurt. And in the entire town, only one person had actually seen that brick rocket rising into the air, like a madman's grandiose dream.

  That one person was Jim Gardener. Bobbi was taking a little nap--Gardener had coaxed her into it. Neither of them had any business working in the heat of the afternoon--especially not Bobbi. She had come back a little from the terrible state in which Gardener had found her, but she was still pushing herself much too hard, and she had abruptly begun to menstruate heavily again.

  I wonder, he thought morbidly, when she's going to need a blood transfusion instead of just a couple of extra iron pills a day? But that was unlikely, he knew. His ex-wife had suffered horrible menstrual problems, possibly because her mother had been given the drug known as DES. So Gardener had gotten a crash course in a body function his own body would never perform, and he knew the layman's idea of menstruation--a monthly flow of blood from the vagina--simply wasn't true. Most of the material which made up the menses wasn't blood at all, but useless tissue. Menstruation was an efficient waste-removal process on behalf of a woman capable of bearing children but not currently doing so.

  No, he doubted if Bobbi would bleed to death ... barring a uterine rupture, which was highly unlikely.

  Bullshit. You don't know what's likely in this situation and what isn't.

  Okay. Fair enough. And he knew that women weren't built to menstruate day after day and week after week, no matter what. At bottom, blood and tissue were both the same thing: the stuff of which Bobbi Anderson was made. It was like cannibalism, but--

  No. No it wasn't. It was as if someone had turned her thermostat all the way to the end of the dial and she was burning herself up. She had nearly keeled over a couple of times during the hot spell of the week before, and Gardener knew that, although it sounded grotesque, the hunt for the little Brown boy had actually been a kind of rest for Bobbi.

  Gardener hadn't really believed he would get her to take a nap. Then, at around a quarter to three, Bobbi had said that she was sorta tired, and that maybe she could use a nap. She asked Gardener if he wasn't going to catch an hour of rack time as well.

  "Yes," he said. "I'll sit out on the porch and read a few minutes first." And finish this little drinky-poo, while I'm at it.

  "Well, don't hang out too long," Bobbi said. "A siesta wouldn't hurt you, either."

  But he had hung out long enough, stretching the drink, to still be there when the roar crossed the fields and hills between here and the village--roughly five miles.

  "What the fuck--"

  The roar grew louder ... and suddenly he saw it, something out of a nightmare, it was DTs setting in, had to be, fucking had to be. This was no telepathic typewriter or water heater from space--this was a motherfucking brick rocket taking off from Haven Village, and that was it, everybody out of the pool, friends and neighbors, I have definitely blown my wheels.

  Just before it exploded, splashing the sky with green fire, he recognized it and knew it was no hallucination.

  There was Bobbi Anderson's power; there was what they were going to use to stop the nukes, the arms race, the bloody tide of worldwide madness; there it was, rising into the sky on a pillar of flame: one of the crazies in town had somehow laid a fuse under the town hall and struck a match to it and had just sent the Haven clock-tower into the sky like a fucking Roman candle.

  "Holy shit," Gardener whispered in a tiny, horrified voice.

  There it is, Gard! Behold the future! Is it what you want? Because that woman in there is going bughouse, and you know it ... the signs are just all too clear. Do you want to put that kind of power in her hands? Do you?

  She's not crazy, Gardener responded, scared. Not crazy at all, and do you think what you just saw changes the equation? It doesn't, it only underlines it. If not me and Bobbi, who? The Dallas Police, that's who. It's going to be all right, I'll keep an eye on her, keep a checkrein on her--

  Oh, you're doing great at that, you fucking lush, just great.

  The incredible thing in the sky exploded, splashing green fire everywhere. Gardener shielded his eyes. He had gotten to his feet.

  Anderson came out on the run.

  "What in hell was that?" she asked, but she knew ... she knew, and Gardener, with cold, sudden certainty, knew that she knew.

  Gardener threw a barrier across his mind--in the last two weeks he had learned how to do that with complete success. The barrier consisted of nothing more than a random recitation of old addresses, b
its of poems, snatches of songs ... but it worked. It was not at all difficult to run such jamming interference, he had discovered; it wasn't much different from the random run of thoughts that went through almost everyone's head most of the time (he might have changed his mind if he had been aware of Ruth McCausland's tortured efforts to hide her thoughts--Gardener had no idea of how much trouble the plate in his head was saving him). He had seen Bobbi looking at him in a queer, puzzled way a couple of times, and although she looked away whenever she saw Gardener observing her, he knew that she was trying to read his thoughts ... trying hard ... and still failing.

  He used the barrier to cover his first lie to Bobbi since he had thrown in with her on July 5th, almost three weeks ago.

  "I don't know, exactly," he said. "I dozed off in the chair. I heard an explosion and saw a big flash of light. Looked green. That's all."

  Bobbi's eyes searched his face, and then she nodded. "Well, I guess we better go into the village and see."

  Gardener relaxed slightly. He wasn't sure why he had lied, only that it seemed safer to do so ... and she had believed him. Nor did he want to endanger that belief.

  "Would you mind going alone? I mean, if you want company--"

  "No, that's fine," she said almost eagerly, and went.

  Walking back to the porch after seeing the truck down the road, he kicked over his glass. The drinking was getting out of hand, and it was time to stop. Because something really weird was happening here. It would bear watching, and when you got drunk you went blind.

  It was a pledge he had made before. Sometimes it even took for a while. This time it didn't. Gardener was sitting drunk and asleep on the porch that night when Bobbi returned.

  Ruth's signal had been received, nevertheless. The receiver was troubled in mind, still committed to Bobbi's project, yet uneasy enough about it to be boozing more and more. But it had been received, and at least partially understood: Gardener's lie was an indication of that, if nothing else. But Ruth would perhaps have been happier with her other accomplishment.

  Voices or no voices, the lady died sane.

  7.

  BEACH JERNIGAN AND DICK ALLISON

  1

  No one in Haven was more delighted about the "becoming" than Beach Jernigan. If Gard's Tommyknockers had appeared to Beach in person, carrying nuclear weapons and proposing that he plant one in each of the world's seven largest cities, Beach would have immediately started phoning for plane tickets. Even in Haven, where quiet zealotry was becoming a way of life, Beach's partisanship was extreme. If he had had any idea at all about Gardener's growing doubts, he would have removed him. Permanently. And at once, if not sooner.

  There was a good reason for Beach's feelings. In May--not long after Hilly Brown's birthday, in fact--Beach developed a hacking cough that wouldn't go away. It was worrisome because he didn't have a fever or the sniffles to go with it. It became more worrisome when he began to cough up a little blood. When you run a restaurant, you don't want to be coughing at all. The customers don't like it. It makes them nervous. Sooner or later someone tells the Board of Health and maybe they shut you up for a week or so while they wait to see how your tine test comes out. The Haven Lunch was a marginally profitable business at best (Beach put in twelve hours a day short-ordering so he could clear sixty-five dollars a week--if the place hadn't been his free and clear, he would have starved), and Beach couldn't afford to be shut up for a week in the summer. Summer wasn't here yet, but it was coming on apace. So he went to see old Doc Warwick, and Doc Warwick sent him up to Derry Home for a chest X-ray, and when the X-ray came back Doc Warwick studied it for all of twenty seconds and then called Beach and when Beach got there, Doc Warwick said: "I've got hard news for you, Beach. Sit down."

  Beach sat down. He felt that if there hadn't been a chair, he would have fallen on the floor. All the strength had run out of his legs. There was no telepathy going on in Haven back in May--no more than the ordinary kind that people use all the time, anyway--but that ordinary kind was all Beach needed. He knew what Doc Warwick was going to say before he said it. Not TB; big C. Lung cancer.

  But that was in May. Now, in July, Beach was fit as a fiddle. Doc Warwick had told him he could expect to be in the hospital by July 15th, but here he was, eating like a horse, randy as a bear most of the time, and feeling like he could outrun Bobby Tremain in a footrace. He hadn't been back to the hospital for another chest X-ray. He didn't need one to know the large dark stain on his left lung had disappeared. Far as that went, if he had wanted an X-ray, he would have taken the afternoon off and built an X-ray machine himself. He knew just how it could be done.

  But now, in the wake of the explosion, there were other things to be built, other things to do ... and quickly.

  They had a meeting. Everyone in town. Not that they gathered, as at a town meeting; that was quite unnecessary. Beach went on frying hamburgers in the Haven Lunch, Nancy Voss went on sorting stamps at the post office (now that Joe was dead, it was at least a place to come to, Sunday or not), Bobby Tremain stayed under his Challenger, putting on a backflow rebreather that would allow him to get roughly seventy miles to the gallon. Not Anderson's gasoline pill--not quite--but close. Newt Berringer, who knew goddamned well there was no time to waste, was driving out to the Applegate place as fast as he dared. But no matter what they were doing or where they were, they were together, a network of silent voices--the voices that had frightened Ruth so badly.

  Less than forty-five minutes after the explosion, some seventy people had gathered at Henry Applegate's. Henry had the largest, best-equipped workshop in town now that the Shell station had mostly gone out of the engine-repair and tune-up business. Christina Lindley, who was only seventeen but had still taken second prize in the Fourteenth Annual State O' Maine Photography Competition the year before, arrived back almost two hours later, scared, out of breath (and feeling rather sexy, if the truth was to be told) from riding in from town with Bobby Tremain at speeds which sometimes topped a hundred and ten. When Bobby made the Dodge walk and talk, it was nothing but a yellow streak.

  She had been dispatched to take two photographs of the clock-tower. This was delicate work, because, with the tower now reduced to scattered chunks of brick, masonry, and clockwork, it meant taking a photograph of a photograph.

  Working fast, Christina had thumbed through a scrap-book of town photographs. Newt had told her mentally where to find this--in Ruth McCausland's own office. She rejected two shots because although both were quite good, both were also in black and white. The intention was to build an illusion--a clock-tower that people could look at ... but one you could fly a plane through, if it came to that.

  In other words, they intended to project a gigantic magic-lantern slide in the sky.

  A good trick.

  Once upon a time, Hilly Brown would have envied it.

  Just as Christina was beginning to lose hope, she found it: a gorgeous photo of the Haven Village town hall with the tower prominently displayed ... and from an angle that clearly showed two sides. Great. That would give them the depth of field they would need. Ruth's careful notation beneath the photograph said it came from Yankee magazine, 5/87.

  We gotta go, Chris, Bobby had said, speaking to her without bothering to use his mouth. He was shifting impatiently from foot to foot like a small boy in need of the bathroom.

  Yes, all right. This will--

  She broke off.

  Oh, she said. Oh dear.

  Bobby Tremain came forward quickly. What the hell's wrong?

  She pointed at the photograph.

  "Oh, SHIT!" Bobby Tremain yelled out loud, and Christina nodded.

  2

  By seven that evening, working fast and silently (except for the occasional ill-tempered snarl of someone who felt someone else was not working fast enough), they had constructed a device that looked like a huge slide-projector on top of an industrial vacuum cleaner.

  They tested it, and a woman's face, huge and stony, appeared
in Henry's field. The people who had gathered stared at this stereopticon of Henry Applegate's grandmother silently but approvingly. The machine worked. Now, as soon as the girl brought the photograph--photographs, actually, because a stereopticon image was of course exactly what they had to create--of the town hall, they could--

  Then her voice, faint, but boosted by Bobby Tremain's mind, came to them.

  It was bad news.

  "What was it?" Kyle Archinbourg asked Newt. "I didn't catch all of it."

  "Are you fucking deaf?" Andy Baker snarled. "Jesus Christ, people in three counties heard the bang when that bitch blew the roof off. For two cents--" He balled his fists.

  "Quit it, both of you," Hazel McCready said. She turned to Kyle. "That girl has done a hell of a job." She was deliberately projecting as hard as she could, hoping to reach Christina Lindley as well as explain the situation to Kyle Archinbourg ... to buck her up. The girl had

  (thought)

  sounded distraught, nearly hysterical, and she wouldn't do them any good that way. In such a state she would fuck up for sure, and they just didn't have the time for fuckups.

  "It's not her fault you can read the clock in the photo."

  "What do you mean?" Kyle asked.

  "She's found a color photo with an angle that couldn't be more perfect," Hazel said. "It'll look exactly right from the church and the cemetery, and only a little distorted from the road. We'll have to keep outsiders from going around to the back for a couple of days, until Chris finds a rough matching angle, but since they're going to be interested in the furnace ... and in Ruth ... I think we can get away with that. Close some roads?" she looked at Newt.

  "Sewer work," he said promptly. "Easy as pie."

  "I still don't understand the nature of the problem," Kyle said.

  "Might be you, y'fuckin ijit," Andy Baker said.

  Kyle swung truculently toward the mechanic and Newt said, "Stop it, both of you." And, to Kyle: "The problem is that Ruth blew the tower off the town hall at 3:05 this afternoon. In the only good picture Christina could find, you can read the clock-face.