The Tommyknockers, Page 54

  And suddenly he did have an idea ... or the glimmer of one.

  But a glimmer was better than nothing.

  He hugged Bobbi with a lying arm. "Okay. One more mile."

  Bobbi's grin started to widen ... and then it became a look of curious surprise. "How much did he leave you, Gard?"

  "How much did who leave me?"

  "The Tooth Fairy," Bobbi said. "You finally lost one.

  Right there in the front."

  Startled and a little afraid, Gard raised his hand to his mouth. Sure enough, there was a gap where one of his incisors had been yesterday.

  It had started, then. After a month working in the shadow of this thing, he had foolishly assumed immunity, but it wasn't so. It had started; he was on his way to becoming New and Improved.

  On his way to "becoming."

  He forced an answering smile. "I hadn't noticed," he said.

  "Do you feel any different?"

  "No," Gard said truthfully. "Not yet, anyway. What do you say, you want to do some work?"

  "I'll do what I can," Bobbi said. "With this arm--"

  "You can check the hoses and tell me if any of them are starting to come loose. And talk to me." He looked at Bobbi with an awkward smile. "None of those other guys knew how to talk, man. I mean, they were sincere, but ..." He shrugged. "You know?"

  Bobbi smiled back, and Gardener saw another brilliant, unalloyed flash of the old Bobbi, the woman he had loved. He remembered the safe dark harbor of her neck and that screw in his heart turned again. "I think I do," she said, "and I'll talk your ear off, if that's what you want. I've been lonely, too."

  They stood together, smiling at each other, and it was almost the same, but the woods were silent with no birdsong to fill them up.

  The love's over, he thought. Now it's the same old poker game, except the Tooth Fairy came last night and I guess the bastard will be back tonight. Probably along with his cousin and his brother-in-law. And when they start seeing my cards, maybe exposing that glimmer of an idea like an ace in the hole, it'll be all over. In a way, it's funny. We always assumed the aliens would have to at least be alive to invade. Not even H. G. Wells expected an invasion of ghosts.

  "I want to have a look into the trench," Bobbi said.

  "Okay. You'll like the way it's draining, I think."

  Together they walked into the shadow cast by the ship.

  13

  Monday, August 8th:

  The heat was back.

  The temperature outside of Newt Berringer's kitchen window was seventy-nine at a quarter past seven that Monday morning, but Newt wasn't in the kitchen to read it; he was standing in the bathroom in his pajama bottoms, inexpertly applying his late wife's makeup to his face and cursing the way the sweat made the Pan-Cake clump up. He had always thought makeup a lot of harmless ladies' foofraw, but now, trying to use it according to its original purpose--not to accent the good but to conceal the bad (or, at least, the startling)--he was discovering that putting on makeup was like giving someone a haircut. It was a fuck of a lot harder than it looked.

  He was trying to cover up the fact that, over the last week or so, the skin of his cheeks and forehead had begun to fade. He knew, of course, that it had something to do with the trips he and the others had made into Bobbi's shed--trips he could not remember afterward; only that they had been frightening but even more exhilarating, and that he had come out all three times feeling ten feet tall and ready to have sex in the mud with a platoon of lady wrestlers. He knew enough to associate what was happening with the shed, but at first he had thought it was simply a matter of losing his usual summer tan. In the years before an icy winter afternoon and a skidding bread truck had taken her, his wife Elinor liked to joke that all you needed to do was to put Newt under one ray of sun after the first of May and he turned as brown as an Indian.

  By last Friday afternoon, however, he was no longer able to fool himself about what was going on. He could see the veins, arteries, and capillaries in his cheeks, exactly as you could see them in that model he'd gotten his nephew Michael two Christmases ago--the Amazing Visible Man, it was called. It was damned unsettling. It wasn't just being able to see into himself, either; when he pressed his fingers against his cheeks, the cheekbones felt definitely squashy. It was as if they were ... well ... dissolving.

  I can't go out like this, he thought. Jesus, no.

  But on Saturday, when he had looked in the mirror and realized after some thought and a lot of squinting that the gray shadow he was seeing through the side of his face was his own tongue, he had almost flown over to Dick Allison's.

  Dick answered the door looking so normal that for a few terrible moments Newt believed this was happening to him and him alone. Then Dick's firm, clear thought filled his head, making him weak with relief: Christ, you can't go around looking like that, Newt. You'll scare people. Come in here. I'm going to call Hazel.

  (The phone, of course, was really not necessary, but old habits died hard.)

  In Dick's kitchen, under the fluorescent ring in the ceiling, Newt had seen clearly enough that Dick was wearing makeup--Hazel, Dick said, had shown him how to put it on. Yes, it had happened to all the others except Adley, who had gone into the shed for the first time only two weeks ago.

  Where does it all end, Dick? Newt had asked uneasily. The mirror in Dick's hallway drew him like a magnet and he stared at himself, seeing his tongue behind and through his pallid lips, seeing a tangled undergrowth of small pulsing capillaries in his forehead. He pressed the tips of his fingers against the shelf of bone over his eyebrows and saw faint finger indentations when he took them away. They were like fingermarks in hard wax, right down to the discernible loops and sworls of his fingertips sunk into the livid skin. Looking at that had made him feel sick.

  I don't know, Dick had answered. He was talking on the phone with Hazel at the same time. But it doesn't really matter. It's going to happen to everyone eventually. Like everything else. You know what I mean.

  He knew, all right. The first changes, Newt thought, looking into the mirror on this hot Monday morning, had in many ways been even worse, more shocking, because they had been so ... well, intimate.

  But he had gone a ways toward getting used to it, which only went to show, he supposed, that a person could get used to anything, given world enough and time.

  Now he stood by the mirror, dimly hearing the deejay on the radio informing his listening audience that an influx of hot southern air coming into the area meant they could look forward to at least three days and maybe a week of muggy weather and temps in the upper eighties and low nineties. Newt cursed the coming humid weather --it would make his hemorrhoids itch and burn, it always did--and went on trying to cover his increasingly transparent cheeks, forehead, nose, and neck with Elinor's Max Factor Pan-Cake. He finished cursing the weather and went fluently on to the makeup with never a break in his monologue, having no idea that makeup grew old and cakey after a long period of time (and this particular lot had been in the back of a bathroom drawer since long before Elinor's death in February 1984).

  But he supposed he would get used to putting the crap on ... until such time as it was no longer necessary, anyhow. A person could get used to damn near anything. A tentacle, white at its tip, then shading to rose and finally to a dark blood-red as it thickened toward its unseen base, fell out through the fly of his pajama bottoms. Almost as if to prove his thesis, Newt Berringer only tucked it absently back in and went on trying to get his dead wife's makeup to spread evenly on his disappearing face.

  14

  Tuesday, August 9th:

  Old Doc Warwick slowly pulled the sheet up over Tommy Jacklin and let it drop. It billowed slightly, then settled. The shape of Tommy's nose was clearly defined. He'd been a handsome kid, but he'd had a big nose, just like his dad.

  His dad, Bobbi Anderson thought sickly. Someone's going to have to tell his dad, and guess who's going to be elected? Such things shouldn't bother her anymore, she knew--thin
gs like the Jacklin boy's death, things like knowing she would have to get rid of Gard when they reached the ship's hatchway--but they sometimes still did.

  She supposed that would burn away in time.

  A few more trips to the shed. That was all it would take.

  She brushed aimlessly at her shirt and sneezed.

  Except for the sound of the sneeze and the stertorous breathing of Hester Brookline in the other bed of the makeshift little clinic the Doc had set up in his sitting-cum -examination room, there was only shocked silence for a moment.

  Kyle: He's really dead?

  No, I just like to cover em up that way sometimes for a joke, Warwick said crossly. Shit, man! I knew he was going at four o'clock. That's why I called you all here. After all, you're the town fathers now, ain't you?

  His eyes fixed for a moment on Hazel and Bobbi.

  Excuse me. And two town mothers.

  Bobbi smiled with no humor. Soon there was going to be only one sex in Haven. No mothers; no fathers. Just another Burma-Shave sign, you might say, on the Great Road of "Becoming."

  She looked from Kyle to Dick to Newt to Hazel and saw that the others looked as shocked as she felt. Thank God she was not alone, then. Tommy and Hester had gotten back all right--ahead of schedule, actually, because when Tommy started to feel really ill only three hours after they had driven out of the Haven-Troy area, he had begun to push it, moving as fast as he could.

  The damn kid was really a hero, Bobbi thought. I guess the best we can do for him is a plot in Homeland, but he was still a hero.

  She looked toward where Hester lay, pallid as a wax cameo, breathing dryly, eyes closed. They could have--maybe should have--come back when they felt the headaches coming on, when their gums began to bleed, but they hadn't even discussed it. And it wasn't only their gums. Hester, who had been menstruating lightly all during the "becoming" (unlike older women, teenage girls didn't ever seem to stop ... or hadn't yet, anyway), made Tommy stop at the Troy General Store so she could buy heavier sanitary napkins. She had begun to flow copiously. By the time they had bought three car batteries and a good used truck battery in the Newport-Derry Town Line Auto Supply on Route 7, she had soaked four Stayfree Maxi-Pads.

  Their heads began to ache, Tommy's worse than Hester's. By the time they had gotten half a dozen Allstate batteries at the Sears store and well over a hundred C, D, and double-and triple-A cells at the Derry Tru-Value Hardware (which had just gotten a new shipment in), they both knew they had to get back ... quick. Tommy had begun to hallucinate; as he drove up Wentworth Street, he thought he saw a clown grinning up at him from an open sewer manhole--a clown with shiny silver dollars for eyes and a clenched white glove filled with balloons.

  Eight miles or so out of Derry, headed back toward Haven on Route 9, Tommy's rectum began to bleed.

  He pulled over, and, face flaming with embarrassment, asked Hester if he could have some of her pads. He was able to explain why when she asked, but not to look at her while he did so. She gave him a handful and he went into the bushes for a minute. He came back to the car weaving like a drunk, one hand outstretched.

  "You got to drive, Hester," he said. "I'm not seeing so hot."

  By the time they got back to the town line, the front seat of the car was splashed with gore and Tommy was unconscious. By then Hester herself was able to see only through a dark curtain; she knew it was four of a bright summer's afternoon, but Doc Warwick seemed to come to her out of a thundery purple twilight. She knew he was opening the door, touching her hands, saying: It's all right, my darling, you are back, you can let go of the wheel now, you are back in Haven. She was able to give a more or less coherent account of their afternoon as she lay in the protective circle of Hazel McCready's arms, but she had joined Tommy in unconsciousness long before they got to the Doc's, even though Doc was doing an unheard-of sixty-five, his white hair flying in the wind.

  Adley McKeen whispered: What about the girl? Well, her blood pressure's dropping, Warwick said. The bleeding's stopped. She is young and tough. Good country stock. I knew her parents and her grandparents. She'll pull through. He looked around at them grimly, his watery old blue eyes not deceived by their makeup, which in this light made them look like half a dozen ghastly suntanned clowns.

  But I don't think she'll ever regain her sight.

  There was a numb silence. Bobbi broke it:

  That's not so.

  Doc Warwick turned to look at her.

  She'll see again, Bobbi said. When the "becoming" is finished, she'll see. We'll all see with one eye then.

  Warwick met her gaze for a moment, and then his own eyes dropped. Yes, he said. I guess. But it's a damned shame, anyway.

  Bobbi agreed without heat. Bad for her. Worse for Tommy. No bed of roses for their folks. I have to go see them. I could use company.

  She looked at them, but their eyes dropped away from hers a pair at a time and their thoughts dulled into a smooth hum.

  All right, Bobbi said. I'll manage. I guess.

  Adley McKeen spoke up humbly. I guess I'll come with you if you want, Bobbi. Keep you company.

  Bobbi gave him a tired yet somehow brilliant smile and squeezed his shoulder. Thank you, Ad. For the second time, thank you.

  The two of them went out. The others watched them, and when they heard Bobbi's truck start, they turned toward where Hester Brookline lay unconscious, hooked up to a sophisticated life-support machine whose component parts had come from two radios, a turntable record-changer, the auto-tuning device from Doc's new Sony TV ...

  ... and, of course, lots of batteries.

  15

  Wednesday, August 10th:

  In spite of his tiredness, his confusion, his inability to stop playing Hamlet, and--worst of all--the persistent feeling that things in Haven were going wronger all the time, Jim Gardener had managed the booze pretty well since the day Bobbi had come back and they had lain together on the fragrant pine needles. Part of the reason was pure self-interest. Too many bloody noses, too many headaches. Some of this was undoubtedly the influence of the ship, he thought--he hadn't forgotten that he'd had one after Bobbi had repeatedly urged him to touch her find, and he had seized the leading edge of the ship and felt that rapid, numbing vibration--but he was wise enough to know that his steady drinking was doing its part, as well. There had been no blackouts per se, but there had been days when his nose had bled three and four times. He had always tended toward hypertension, and he had been told more than once that steady drinking could worsen what was a borderline condition.

  So he was doing fairly well until he heard Bobbi sneezing.

  That sound, so terribly familiar, called up a set of memories and a sudden terrible idea exploded in his mind like a bomb.

  He went into the kitchen, opened the hamper, and looked at a dress--the one she'd been wearing yesterday evening. Bobbi did not see this inspection; she was asleep. She had sneezed in her sleep.

  Bobbi had gone out the previous evening with no explanation--she had seemed nervous and upset to Gardener, and although both of them had worked hard all day, Bobbi had eaten almost no supper. Then, near sundown, she had bathed, changed into the dress, and driven off into the hot, still, muggy evening. Gardener had heard her come back around midnight, had seen the brilliant flare of light as Bobbi went into the shed. He thought she came back in around first light, but wasn't sure.

  All day today she had been morose, speaking only when spoken to, and only then in monosyllables. Gardener's clumsy efforts to cheer her up met with no success. Bobbi skipped supper again tonight, and just shook her head when Gardener suggested a few cribbage hands on the porch, just like in the old days.

  Bobbi's eyes, looking out of that weird coating of flesh-colored makeup, had looked somber and wet. Even as Gardener noticed this, Bobbi yanked a handful of Kleenex from the table behind her and sneezed into them two or three times, rapidly.

  "Summer cold, I guess. I'm going to hit the rack, Gard. I'm sorry to be such a part
y-pooper, but I'm whipped."

  "Okay," Gard said.

  Something--some remembered familiarity--had been gnawing at him, and now he stood here with her dress in his hands, a light sleeveless summer cotton. In the old days it would have been washed this morning, hung on the line out back to dry, ironed after supper, and back in the closet again long before bed. But these weren't the old days, these were the New and Improved Days, and they washed clothes only when they absolutely had to; after all, there were more important things to do, weren't there?

  As if to confirm his idea, Bobbi sneezed twice in her sleep.

  "No," Gard whispered. "Please." He dropped the dress back into the hamper, no longer wanting to touch it. He slammed the lid and then stood stiffly, waiting to see if the sound would wake Bobbi.

  She took the truck. Went to do something she didn't want to do. Something that upset her. Something formal enough to need a dress. She came back late and went into the shed. Didn't come into the house to change. Went in like she needed to go in. Right away. Why?

  But the answer, coupled with the sneezes and what he had found on her dress, seemed inevitable.

  Comfort.

  And when Bobbi, who lived alone, needed comfort, who had always been there to give it? Gard? Don't make me laugh, folks. Gard only showed up to take comfort, not give it.

  He wanted to be drunk. He wanted that more than at any time since this crazy business had begun.

  Forget it. As he turned to leave the kitchen, where Bobbi kept the alcoholic staples as well as the clothes hamper, something clitter-clicked to the boards.

  He bent over, picked it up, examined it, bounced it thoughtfully on his hand. It was a tooth, of course. Big Number Two. He put a finger into his mouth, felt the new socket, looked at the smear of blood on his fingerpad. He went to the kitchen doorway and listened. Bobbi was snoring gustily in her bedroom. Sounded as if her sinuses were closed up as tight as timelocks.

  A summer cold, she said. Maybe so. Maybe that's what it is.

  But he remembered the way Peter would sometimes leap up into her lap when Bobbi sat in her old rocker by the windows to read, or when she sat out on the porch. Bobbi said Peter was most apt to make one of his boob-destroying leaps when the weather was unsettled, just as he was more apt to bring on one of her allergy attacks when the weather was hot and unsettled. It's like he knows, she'd said once, and ruffled the beagle's ears. DO you, Pete? Do you know? Do you LIKE to make me sneeze? Misery loves company, is that it? And Pete had seemed to laugh up at her in that way of his.