The Tommyknockers, Page 40

  On the ride to Derry, the boy had acted like a person in deep shock. Ev had had a vague idea that getting him out of Haven would improve matters, and in their frantic concern over David, neither Bryant nor Marie seemed to notice how odd their older boy seemed.

  Getting out of Derry hadn't helped. Hilly's awareness and coherence had continued to decline. The first day in the hospital he had slept eleven hours out of twenty-four. He could answer simple questions, but more complicated ones confused him. He complained of a headache. He didn't remember the magic show at all, and seemed to think his birthday had been only the week before. That night, sleeping deeply, he had spoken one phrase quite clearly: "All the G.I. Joes." Ev's back had crawled. It was what he had been screaming over and over when they had all rushed out of the house to find David gone and Hilly in hysterics.

  The following day, Hilly had slept for fourteen hours, and seemed even more confused in his mind during the time he spent in a soupy waking state. When the child psychologist detailed to his case asked him his middle name, he responded, "Jonathan." It was David's middle name.

  Now he was sleeping, for all practical purposes, around the clock. Sometimes he opened his eyes, seemed even to be looking at Ev or one of the nurses, but when they spoke, he would only smile his sweet Hilly Brown smile and drift off again.

  Slipping away. He lay like an enchanted boy in a fairy-tale castle, only the IV bottle over his head and the occasional P.A. announcements from the hospital corridor spoiling the illusion.

  There had been a great deal of excitement on the neurological front at first; a dark, nonspecific shadow in the area of Hilly's cerebral cortex had suggested that the boy's strange dopiness might have been caused by a brain tumor. But when they got Hilly down to X-ray again, two day later (his plates had been slow-tracked, the X-ray technician explained to Ev, because no one expects to find a brain tumor in the head of a ten-year-old and there had been no previous symptoms to suggest one), the shadow had been gone. The neurologist had conferred with the X-ray technician, and Ev guessed from the technician's defensiveness that feathers must have flown. The neurologist told him that one more set of plates would be taken, but he believed they would show negative. The first set, he said, must have been defective.

  "I suspected something must have been wacky," he told Ev.

  "Why was that?"

  The neurologist, a big man with a fierce red beard, smiled. "Because that shadow was huge. To be perfectly blunt, a kid with a brain tumor that big would have been an extremely sick child for an extremely long time ... if he was still alive at all."

  "I see. Then you still don't know what's wrong with Hilly."

  "We're working on two or three lines of inquiry," the neurologist said, but his smile grew vague, his eyes shifted away from Ev's, and the next day the child psychologist showed up again. The child psychologist was a very fat woman with very dark black hair. She wanted to know where Hilly's parents were.

  "Trying to find their other son." Ev expected that would squash her.

  It didn't. "Call them up and tell them I'd like some help finding this one."

  They came but were no help. They had changed; they were strange. The child psychologist felt it too, and after her initial run of questions, she started to pull away from them--Ev could actually feel her doing it. Ev himself had to work hard to keep from getting up and leaving the room. He didn't want to feel their strange eyes resting on him: their gaze made him feel as if he had been marked for something. The woman in the plaid blouse and the faded jeans had been his daughter, and she still looked like his daughter, but she wasn't, not anymore. Most of Marie was dead, and what was left was dying rapidly.

  The child psychologist hadn't asked for them again.

  She had been in to examine Hilly twice since then. The second occasion had been Saturday afternoon, the day before the Haven town hall blew up.

  "What were they feeding him?" she asked abruptly.

  Ev had been sitting by the window, the hot sun falling on him, almost dozing. The fat woman's question startled him awake. "What?"

  "What were they feeding him?"

  "Why, just regular food," he said.

  "I doubt that."

  "You needn't," he said. "I took enough meals with 'em to know. Why do you ask?"

  "Because ten of his teeth are gone," she said curtly.

  7

  Ev clenched a fist tightly in spite of the dull throb of arthritis and brought it down on one leg, hard.

  What are you going to do, old man? David's gone and it would be easier if you could convince yourself he was really dead, wouldn't it?

  Yes. That would make things simpler. Sadder, but simpler. But he couldn't believe that. Part of him was still convinced that David was alive. Perhaps it was only wishful thinking, but somehow Ev didn't think so--he had done plenty of that in his time, and this didn't feel like it. This was a strong, pulsing intuition in his mind: David is alive. He is lost, and he is in danger of dying, oh, most certainly ... but he can still be saved. If. If you can make up your mind to do something. And if what you make up your mind to do is the right thing. Long odds for an old fart like you, who pisses a dark spot on his pants every once in a while these days when he can't get to the john in time. Long, long odds.

  Late Monday evening he had awakened from a dozing sleep, trembling in Hilly's hospital room--the nurses often turned a leniently blind eye to him and allowed him to stay far past regular visiting hours. He'd had a dreadful nightmare. He had dreamed he was in some dark and stony place--needle--tipped mountains sawed at a black sky strewn with cold stars, and a wind as sharp as an icepick whined in narrow, rocky defiles. Below him, by starlight, he could see a huge flat plain. It looked dry and cold and lifeless. Great cracks zigzagged across it, giving it the look of crazy-paving. And from somewhere, he could hear David's thin voice: "Help me, Grandpa, it hurts to breathe! Help me, Grandpa, it hurts to breathe! Help me! I'm scared! I didn't want to do the trick but Hilly made me and now I can't find my way home!"

  He sat looking at Hilly, his body bathed in sweat. It ran down his face like tears.

  He got up, went over to Hilly, and bent close to him. "Hilly," he said, not for the first time. "Where's your brother? Where is David?"

  Only this time Hilly's eyes opened. His watery, unseeing stare chilled Everett--it was the stare of a blind sibyl.

  "Altair-4," Hilly said calmly, and with perfect clarity. "David is on Altair-4 and there's Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door."

  His eyes slipped shut and he slept deeply again.

  Ev stood over him, perfectly motionless, his skin the color of putty.

  After a while, he began to shudder.

  8

  He was the town in exile.

  If Ruth McCausland had been Haven's heart and conscience, then Ev Hillman at seventy-three (and not nearly so senile as he had lately come to fear) was its memory. He had seen much of the town in his long life there, and had heard more; he had always been a good listener.

  Leaving the hospital that Monday evening, he detoured by the Derry Mr. Paperback, where he invested nine dollars in a Maine Atlas--a compendium of large maps which showed the state in neat pieces, six hundred square miles in each piece. Turning to Map 23, he found the town of Haven. He had also bought a compass at the book-and-magazine shop, and now, without wondering why he was doing it, he drew a circle around the town. He did not plant the compass's anchor in Haven Village to do this, of course, because the village was actually on the edge of the township.

  David is on Altair-4.

  David is on Altair-4 and there's Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers knocking at the door.

  Ev sat frowning over the map and the circle he had drawn, wondering if what Hilly had said had any significance.

  Should have gotten a red pencil, old man. Haven ought to be circled in red now. On this map ... on every map.

  He bent closer. His far vision was still so perfect that he could have told a bean from a kernel of
corn if you set both on a fencepost forty yards away, but his near vision was going to hell fast now, and he had left his reading glasses back at Marie and Bryant's--and he had an idea that if he went back to get them, he might find he had more to worry about than reading small print. For the time being it was better--safer--to just get along without them.

  With his nose almost on the page, he examined the place where the compass-point had gone in. It was spang on the Derry Road, just a bit north of Preston Stream, and a bit east of what he and his friends had called Big Injun Woods when they were kids. This map identified them as Burning Woods, and Ev had heard that name once or twice, too.

  He closed the compass to a quarter of the radius he had needed to put a circle around all of Haven and drew a second circle. He saw that Bryant and Marie's house lay just inside that circle. To the west was the short length of Nista Road, which ran from Route 9--Derry Road--to a gravel-pit dead-end on the edge of those same woods--call them Big Injun Woods or Burning Woods, it was the same thing, the same woods.

  Nista Road ... Nista Road ... something about Nista Road, but what? Something that had happened before he himself was born but something that had still been worth talking of for years and years ...

  Ev closed his eyes and looked as if he was asleep sitting up, a skinny old man, mostly bald, in a neat khaki shirt and neat khaki pants with creases up the legs.

  In a moment it came, and when it did he wondered how it could have taken him so long to get it. The Clarendons. The Clarendons, of course. They had lived at the junction of Nista Road and the Old Derry Road. Paul and Faith Clarendon. Faith, who had been so taken with that sweety-sugar preacher, and who had birthed a child with black hair and sweety-sugar blue eyes about nine months after the preacher blew town. Paul Clarendon, who had studied the baby as it lay in its crib, and who had then gotten his straight razor ...

  Some people had shaken their heads and blamed the preacher--Colson, his name was. He said it was, anyway.

  Some people shook their heads and blamed Paul Clarendon; they said he'd always been crazy, and Faith should never have married him.

  Some people had of course blamed Faith. Ev remembered some old man in the barbershop--this was years after, but towns like Haven have long memories--calling her "nothing but a titty-bump hoor born to make trouble."

  And some people had--in low voices, to be sure--blamed the woods.

  Ev's eyes flashed open.

  Yes; yes, they had. His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. It was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.

  "Humpf!" Ev's mother had sniffed--Ev himself had then been nine or so, he recollected now.

  "And I guess it's why your ma there tosses some salt over her shoulder when she spills the cellar," Ev's dad said mildly to Ev.

  "Humpf!" she said again, and went inside to leave her husband smoking on the porch and her son sitting beside him, listening intently as his father yarned. Ev had always been a good listener ... except for that one crucial moment when someone had so badly needed him to listen, that one unregainable moment when he had allowed Hilly's tears to drive him away in confusion.

  Ev listened now. He listened to his memory ... the town's memory.

  9

  They had been called Big Injun Woods because it was there that Chief Atlantic had died. It was the whites who called him Chief Atlantic--his proper Micmac name had been Wahwayvokah, which means "by tall waters." "Chief Atlantic" was a contemptuous translation of this. The tribe had originally covered much of what was now Penobscot County, with large groups centered in Oldtown, Skowhegan, and the Great Woods, which began in Ludtow--it was in Ludlow that they buried their dead when they were decimated by influenza in the 1880s and drifted south with Wahwayvokah, who had presided over their further decline. Wahwayvokah died in 1885, and on his deathbed he declared that the woods to which he had brought his dying people were cursed. That was known and reported by the two white men who had been present when he died--one an anthropologist from Boston College, the other from the Smithsonian Institution--who had come to the area in search of Indian artifacts from the tribes of the Northeast, which were degenerating rapidly and would soon be gone. What was less sure was whether Chief Atlantic was laying the curse himself or only making note of an existing condition.

  Either way, his only monument was the name Big Injun Woods--even the site of his grave was no longer known. The name for that large piece of forest was, so far as Ev knew, still the one most commonly used in Haven and the other towns which were a part of it, but he could understand how the cartographers responsible for the Maine atlas might not have wanted to put a word like "Injun" in their book of maps. People had gotten touchy about such casual slurs.

  Old tales sometimes have a grain of truth, his dad had said....

  Ev, who also crossed himself when black cats crossed his path (and, truth to tell, when one looked likely to, just to be safe), thought that his dad was right, and that grain was usually there. And, cursed or not, Big Injun Woods had never been very lucky.

  Not lucky for Wahwayvokah, not lucky for the Clarendons. It had never been very lucky for the hunters who tried their hand in there, either, he recalled. Over the years there had been two ... no, three ... wait a minute ...

  Ev's eyes widened and he made a silent whistle as he thumbed through a mental card-file labeled HUNTING ACCIDENTS, HAVEN. He could just offhand think of a dozen accidents, most of them shootings, which had taken place in Big Injun Woods, a dozen hunters who had been lugged out bleeding and cursing, bleeding and unconscious, or just plain dead. Some had shot themselves, using loaded guns for crutches to help them climb over fallen trees, or dropping them, or some damn thing. One was a reputed suicide. But Ev now remembered that on two occasions murder had been done during November in Big Injun Woods--it had been done in hot blood both times, once in an argument over a card game at someone's camp, once because of a squabble between two friends over whose bullet had taken down a buck of record-breaking size.

  And hunters got lost there. Christ! Did they ever! Every year it seemed there was at least one search party sent out to find some poor scared slob from Massachusetts or New Jersey or New York, and some years there were two or three. Not all of them were found.

  Most were city people who had no business in the woods to start with, but that wasn't always the case. Veteran hunters said compasses worked poorly or not at all in Big Injun Woods. Ev's dad said he guessed there must be a helluva chunk of magnetic rock buried somewhere out there, and it foozled a compass needle to hell and gone. The difference between city folks and those who were veterans of the woods was that the city folks learned how to read a compass and then put all their trust in it. So when it packed up and said east was north and west was east or just spun around and around like a milk bottle in a kissing game, they were like men stuck in the shithouse with diarrhea and no corncobs. Wiser men just cursed their compasses, put them away, and tried another of the half-dozen ways there were of finding a direction. Lacking all else, you looked for a stream to lead you out. Sooner or later, if you held a straight course, you'd either hit a road or a set of CMP power pylons.

  But Ev had known a few fellows who had lived and hunted all their lives in Maine and who still had to be pulled by a search party or who finally made it out on their own only by dumb luck. Delbert McCready, whom Ev had known since childhood, had been one of these. Del had gone into Big Injun Woods with his twelve-gauge on Tuesday, November 10th, 1947. When forty-eight hours had passed and he still hadn't shown up, Mrs. McCready called Alf Tremain, who in those days had been the constable. A search party of twenty went into the woods where the Nista Road petered out at the Diamond Gravel Pit and by the end of the week it had swelled to two hundred.

  They were just about to give Del--whose daughter was, of course, H
azel McCready--up for lost when he stumbled out of the woods along the course of Preston Stream, pale and dazed and twenty pounds lighter than he had been when he went in.

  Ev visited him in the hospital. "How'd it happen, Del? Night was clear. Stars were out. You can read the stars, can't you?"

  "Ayuh." Del looked deeply ashamed. "Always could, anyway. "

  "And the moss. 'Twas you who told me about how to read north by the moss on the trees when we was kids."

  "Ayuh," Del repeated. Just that. Ev gave him time, then pressed.

  "Well, what happened?"

  For a long time Del still said nothing. Then, in a voice which was almost inaudible, he said: "I got turned around."

  Ev let the silence spin out, as difficult as that was.

  "Everything was all right for a while," Del resumed at last. "I hunted most of the morning but didn't see no fresh sign. I sat down and ate m'dinner and had a bottle of my ma's beer. Made me sleepy and I napped. I had some funny dreams ... can't remember em, but I know they was funny. And, look! This happened while I was sleepin."

  Del McCready raised his upper lip and showed Ev a hole there.

  "Lost a tooth?"

  "Ayuh ... it was layin in the crotch of m'pants when I woke up. Fell out when I was sleepin, I guess, but I ain't hardly ever had any trouble with my teeth, at least not since that one wisdom tooth got impacted and damn near killed me. By then it coming on dark--"

  "Dark!"

  "I know how it sounds, don't you worry," Del said crossly--but it was the crossness of someone who is deeply ashamed. "I just slept all the afternoon away, and when I got up,Ev--"

  His eyes rolled up to meet Ev's for one miserable second and then shifted away, as if he could not bear to look his old friend in the eye for longer than that one second.

  "It was like somethin stole m'brains. The tooth fairy, mayhap."