The Tommyknockers

5

It was seven-thirty when Gardener finally arrived at Bobbi's - what the locals still called the old Garrick place even after all these years. Gardener came swinging up the road, puffing, his color high and unhealthy. Here was the Rural Free Delivery box, its door slightly ajar, the way both Bobbi and Joe Paulson, the mailman, left it so it would be easier for Peter to paw open. There was the driveway, with Bobbi's blue pickup truck parked in it. The stuff in the truck bed had been covered with a tarp to protect it from the rain. And there was the house itself, with a light shining through the east window, the one where Bobbi kept her rocker and did her reading.

Everything looked all right; not a single sour note. Five years ago - even three -Peter would have barked at the arrival of a stranger outside, but Peter had gotten older. Hell, they all had.

Standing out here, Bobbi's place held the sort of quiet, pastoral loveliness that the western view at the town line had held for him - it represented all the things Gardener wished he had for himself. A sense of peace, or maybe just a sense of place. Certainly he could see nothing odd as he stood here by the mailbox. It looked - felt - like the house of a person who is content with herself. Not completely at rest, exactly, or retired, or checked out from the world's concerns ... but rocking steady. This was the house of a sane, relatively happy woman. It had not been built in the tornado belt.

All the same, something was wrong.

He stood there, the stranger out here in the dark,

(but I'm not a stranger I'm a friend her friend Bobbi's friend ... aren't I?)

and a sudden, frightening impulse rose within him: to leave. Just turn on one bare heel and bug out. Because he suddenly doubted if he wanted to find out what was going on inside that house, what kind of trouble Bobbi had gotten herself into.

(Tommyknockers Gard that's what kind Tommyknockers)

He shivered.

(late last night and the night before Tommyknockers Tommyknockers at Bobbi's door and I don't know if you can)

Stop it.

(because Gard's so afraid of the Tommyknocker man)

He licked his lips, trying to tell himself it was just the fever that made them feel so dry.

Get out, Gard! Blood on the moon!

The fear was now very deep indeed, and if it had been anyone but Bobbi - anyone but his last real friend - he would have split, all right. The farmhouse looked rustic and pleasant, the light spilling from the east window was cozy and all looked well ... but the boards and the glass, the stones in the driveway, the very air pressing against his face ... all these things screamed at him to leave, get out, that things inside that house were bad, dangerous, perhaps even evil.

(Tommyknockers)

But whatever else was in there, Bobbi was too. He hadn't come all these miles, most in the pouring rain, to turn and run at the last second. So, in spite of the dread, he left the mailbox and started up the driveway, moving slowly, wincing as the sharp stones dug at the tender soles of his feet.

Then the front door jerked open, startling his heart up into his throat in a single nimble bound and he thought It's one of them, one of the Tommyknockers, it's going to rush down here and grab me and eat me up! He was barely able to stifle a scream.

The silhouette in the doorway was thin - much too thin, he thought, to be Bobbi Anderson. who had never been beefy but who was solidly built and pleasantly round in all the right places. But the voice, shrill and wavering though it was, was unmistakably Bobbi's ... and Gardener relaxed a little, because Bobbi sounded even more terrified than he felt, standing by the mailbox and looking at the house.

'Who is it? Who's there?'

'It's Gard, Bobbi.'

There was a long pause. There were footfalls on the porch.

Cautiously: 'Gard? Is it really you?'

'Yeah.' He worked his way over the hard, biting stones of the driveway to the lawn. And he asked the question he had come all this way and deferred his own suicide to ask: 'Bobbi, are you all right?'

The quaver left Bobbi's voice, but Gardener could still not see her clearly - the sun had long since gone behind the trees, and the shadows were thick. He wondered where Peter was.

'I'm fine,' Bobbi said, just as if she had always looked so terribly thin, just as though she had always greeted arrivals in her dooryard with a shrill voice full of fear.

She came down the porch steps, and passed out of the shadow of the overhanging porch roof. As she did, Gardener got his first good look at her in the ashy twilight. He was struck by horror and wonder.

Bobbi was coming toward him, smiling, obviously delighted to see him. Her jeans fluttered and flapped on her, and so did her shirt; her face was gaunt, her eyes deep in their sockets, her forehead pale and somehow too wide, the skin taut and shiny. Bobbi's uncombed hair flopped against the nape of her neck and lay over her shoulders like waterweed cast up on a beach. The shirt was buttoned wrong. The fly of her jeans was three-quarters of the way down. She smelled dirty and sweaty and ... well. as if she might have had an accident in her pants and then forgotten to change them.

A picture suddenly flashed into Gardener's mind: a photo of Karen Carpenter taken shortly before her death, which had allegedly resulted from anorexia nervosa. It had seemed to him the picture of a woman already dead but somehow alive, a woman who was all smiling teeth and shrieking feverish eyes. Bobbi looked like that now.

Surely she had lost no more than twenty pounds - that was all she could afford to lose and stay on her feet - but Gard's shocked mind kept insisting it was more like thirty, had to be.

She seemed to be on the last raggedy end of exhaustion. Her eyes, like the eyes of that poor lost woman on the magazine cover, were huge and glittery, her smile the huge brainless grin of a KO'd fighter just before his knees come unhinged.

'Fine!' this shambling, dirty, stumbling skeleton reiterated, and as Bobbi approached, Gardener could hear the waver in her voice again - not fear, as he'd thought, but utter exhaustion. 'Thought you'd given up on me! Good to see you, man!'

'Bobbi ... Bobbi, Jesus Christ, what .

Bobbi was holding out a hand for Gardener to shake. It trembled wildly in the air, and Gardener saw how thin, how woefully, incredibly thin Bobbi Anderson's arm had become.

'A lot of stuff going on,' Bobbi croaked in her wavering voice. 'A lot of work done, a hell of a lot more left to do, but I'm getting there, getting there, wait'll you see - '

'Bobbi, what

'Fine, I'm fine,' Bobbi repeated, and she fell forward, semi-conscious, into Gardener's arms. She tried to say something else but only a loose gargle and a little spit came out. Her br**sts were small, wasted pads against his forearm.

Gardener picked her up, shocked by how light she was. Yes, it was thirty, at least thirty. It was incredible, but not, unfortunately, deniable. He felt recognition that was both shocking and miserable: This isn't Bobbi at all. It's me. Me at the end of a jag.

He carried Bobbi swiftly up the steps and into the house.

Chapter 8. Modifications

1

He put Bobbi on the couch and went quickly to the telephone. He picked it up, meaning to dial 0 and ask the operator what number he should dial to get the nearest rescue unit. Bobbi needed a trip to the Derry Home Hospital and right away. A breakdown, Gardener supposed (although in truth he was so tired and confused that he hardly knew what to think). Some kind of breakdown. Bobbi Anderson seemed like the last person in the world to go over the top, but apparently she had.

Bobbi said something from the couch. Gardener didn't catch it at first; Bobbi's voice was little more than a harsh croak.

'What, Bobbi?'

'Don't call anybody,' Bobbi said. She managed a little more volume this time, but even that much effort seemed to nearly exhaust her. Her cheeks were flushed, the rest of her face waxen, and her eyes were as bright and feverish as blue gemstones -diamonds, or sapphires, perhaps. 'Don't ... Gard, not anybody!'

Anderson fell back against the couch, panting rapidly. Gardener hung up the telephone and went to her, alarmed. Bobbi needed a doctor, that was obvious, and Gardener meant to get her one ... but right now Bobbi's obvious agitation seemed more important.

'I'll stay right with you,' he said, taking her hand, 'if that's what's worrying you. God knows you stuck with me through enough sh - '

But Anderson had been shaking her head with mounting vehemence. 'Just need sleep,' she whispered. 'Sleep ... and food in the morning. Mostly sleep. Haven't had any ... three days. Four, maybe.'

Gardener looked at her, shocked again. He put together what Bobbi had just said with the way she looked.

'What rocket have you been riding?'- and why? his mind added. 'Bennies? Reds?' He thought of coke and then rejected it. Bobbi could undoubtedly afford coke if she wanted it, but Gardener didn't think even 'basing could keep a man or woman awake for three or four days and melt better than thirty pounds off in - Gardener calculated the time since he had last seen Anderson - in no more than three weeks.

'No dope,' Bobbi said. 'No drugs.' Her eyes rolled and glittered. Spit

drizzled helplessly from the corners of her mouth and she sucked it back. For an instant Gardener saw an expression in Bobbi's face he didn't like . . . one that scared him a little. It was an Anne expression. Old and crafty. Then Bobbi's eyes slipped closed, revealing lids stained the delicate purplish color of total exhaustion. When she opened her eyes again it was just Bobbi lying there ... and Bobbi needed help.

'I'm going to phone for the rescue unit,' Gardener said, getting up again. 'You look really unwell, B - '

Bobbi's thin hand reached out and caught his wrist as Gardener turned to the phone. It held him with surprising strength. He looked down at Bobbi, and although she still looked terribly exhausted and almost desperately wasted, that feverish glitter was gone from her eyes. Now her gaze was straight and clear and sane.

'If you call anybody,' she said, her voice still wavering a little but almost normal, 'we're done being friends, Gard. I mean that. Call the rescue unit, or Derry Home, even old Doc Warwick in town, and that's the end of the line for us. You'll never see the inside of my house again. The door will be closed to you.'

Gardener looked at Bobbi with mounting dismay and horror. If he could have persuaded himself in that moment that Bobbi was delirious, he would gladly have done so ... but she obviously wasn't.

'Bobbi you - ' - don't know what you're saying? But she did; that was the horror of it. She was threatening to end their friendship if Gardener didn't do what she wanted, using their friendship as a club for the first time in all the years Gardener had known her. And there was something else in Bobbi Anderson's eyes: the knowledge that her friendship was maybe the last thing on earth that Gardener valued.

Would it make any difference if I told you how much you look like your sister, Bobbi?

No - he saw in her face nothing would make any difference.

' - don't know how bad you look,' he finished lamely.

'No,' Anderson agreed, and a ghost of a smile surfaced on her face. 'I got an idea, though, believe me. Your face ... better than any mirror. But, Gard - sleep is all I need. Sleep and . . .' Her eyes slipped shut again, and she opened them with an obvious effort. 'Breakfast,' she finished. 'Sleep and breakfast.'

'Bobbi, that isn't all you need.'

'No.' Bobbi's hand had not left Gardener's wrist and now it tightened again. 'I need you. I called for you. With my mind. And you heard, didn't you?'

'Yes,' Gardener said uncomfortably. 'I guess I did.'

'Gard . . .' Bobbi's voice slipped off. Gard waited, his mind in a turmoil. Bobbi needed medical help ... but what she had said about ending their friendship if Gardener called anyone ...

The soft kiss she put in the middle of his dirty palm surprised him. He

looked at her, startled, looked at her huge eyes. The fevered glitter had left them; all he saw in them now was pleading.

'Wait until tomorrow,' Bobbi said. 'If I'm not better tomorrow ... a thousand times better ... I'll go. All right?'

'Bobbi - '

'All right?' The hand tightened, demanding Gardener to say it was.

'Well ... I guess .

'Promise me.'

'I promise.' Maybe, Gardener added mentally. If you don't go to sleep and then start to breathe funny. If I don't come over and check you around midnight and see your lips look like you've been eating blueberries. If you don't pitch a fit.

This was silly. Dangerous, cowardly ... but most of all just silly. He had come out of the big black tornado convinced that killing himself would be the best way to end all of his misery and ensure that he caused no more misery in others. He had meant to do it; he knew that was so. He had been on the edge of jumping into that cold water. Then his conviction that Bobbi was in trouble

(I called and you heard didn't you)

had come and he was here. Now, ladies and gentlemen, he seemed to hear Allen Ludden saying in his quick, light, quizmaster's voice, here is your toss-up question. Ten points if you can tell me why Jim Gardener cares about Bobbi Anderson's threat to end their friendship, when Gardener himself means to end it by committing suicide? What? No one? Well, here's a surprise! I don't know, either!

'Okay,' Bobbi was saying. 'Okay, great.'

The agitation which had almost been terror slipped away - the fast gasping for breath slowed and some of the color faded from her cheeks. So the promise had been worth something, at least.

'Sleep, Bobbi.' He would sit up and watch for any change. He was tired, but he could drink coffee (and take one or two of whatever Bobbi'd been taking, if he came across them). He owed Bobbi a night's watching. There were nights when she had watched over him. 'Sleep now.' He gently disengaged his wrist from Bobbi's hand.

Her eyes closed, then slowly opened one last time. She smiled, a smile so sweet that he was in love with her again. She had that power over him. 'Just ... like old times, Gard.'

'Yeah, Bobbi. Like old times.'

'I ... love you .

'I love you too. Sleep.'

Her breathing deepened. Gardener sat beside her for three minutes, then five, watching that madonna smile, becoming more and more convinced she was asleep. Then, very slowly, Bobbi's eyes struggled open again.

'Fabulous,' she whispered.

'What?' Gardener leaned forward. He wasn't sure what she'd said.

'What it is ... what it can do ... what it will do

She's talking in her sleep, Gardener thought, but he felt a recurrence of the chill. That crafty expression was back in Bobbi's face. Not on it but in it, as if it had grown under the skin.

'You should have found it ... I think it was for you, Gard

'What was?'

'Look around the place,' Bobbi said. Her voice was fading. 'You'll see. We'll finish digging it up together. You'll see it solves the ... problems ... all the problems . . .'

Gardener had to lean forward now to hear anything. 'What does, Bobbi?'

'Look around the place,' Bobbi repeated, and the last word drew out, deepening, and became a snore. She was asleep.

2

Gardener almost went to the phone again. It was close. He got up, but halfway across the living room he diverted, going to Bobbi's rocking chair instead. He would watch for a while first, he thought. Watch for a while and try to think what all this might mean.

He swallowed and winced at the pain in his throat. He was feverish, and he suspected the fever was no little one-degree job, either. He felt more than unwell; he felt unreal.

Fabulous ... what it is ... what it can do ...

He would sit here for a while and think some more. Then he would make a pot of strong coffee and dump about six aspirins into it. That would take care of the aches and fever, at least temporarily. Might help keep him awake, too.

... what it will do ...

Gard closed his eyes, dozing himself. That was all right. He might doze, but not for long; he'd never been able to sleep sitting up. And Peter was apt to appear at any time; he would see his old friend Gard, jump into his lap, and get his balls. Always. When it came to jumping into the chair with you and getting your balls, Peter never failed. Hell of an alarm clock, if you happened to be sleeping. Five minutes, that's all. Forty winks. No harm, no foul.

You should have found it. I think it was for you, Gard ...

He drifted, and his doze quickly deepened into sleep so deep it was close to coma.

3

shusshhhhh ...

He's looking down at his skis, plain brown wood strips racing over the snow, hypnotized by their liquid speed. He doesn't realize this state of near hypnosis

until a voice on his left says: 'One thing you bastards never remember to mention at your f**king Communist antipower rallies is just this: in thirty years of peaceful nuclear-power development, we've never been caught once.

Ted is wearing a reindeer sweater over faded jeans. He skis fast and well. Gardener, on the other hand, is completely out of control.

'You're going to crash,' a voice on his right says. He looks over and it is Arglebargle- Arglebargle has begun to rot. His fat face, which had been flushed with alcohol on the night of the party, is now the yellow-gray of old curtains hanging in dirty windows. His flesh has begun to slough downward, pulling and splitting. Arglebargle sees his shock and terror. His gray lips spread in a grin.

'That's right,' he says. 'I'm dead. It really was a heart attack. Not indigestion, not my gall-bladder. I collapsed five minutes after you were gone. They called an ambulance and the kid I hired to tend bar got my heart started again with CPR, but I died for good in the ambulance.'

The grin stretches; becomes as moony as the grin of a dead trout lying on the deserted beach of a poisoned lake.

'I died at a stoplight on Storrow Drive,' Arglebargle says.

'No,' Gardener whispers. This ... this is what he has always feared. The final, irrevocable, drunken act.

'Yes,' the dead man insists as they speed down the hill, drifting closer to the trees. 'I invited you into my house, gave you food and drink, and you repaid me by killing me in a drunken argument.'

'Please ... I. . .'

'You what? You what?' from his left again. The reindeer on Ted's sweater have disappeared. They have been replaced by yellow radiation warning symbols. 'You nothing, that's what! Where do you latter-day Luddites think all that power comes from?'

'You killed me,' Arberg drones from his right, 'but you'll pay. You're going to crash, Gardener.'

'Do you think we get it from the Wizard of Oz?' Ted screams. Weeping sores suddenly erupt on his face. His lips bubble, peel, crack, begin to suppurate. One of his eyes shimmers into the milkiness of cataract. Gardener realizes with mounting horror that he is looking into a face exhibiting symptoms of a man in the last advanced stages of radiation sickness.

The radiation symbols on Ted's shirt are turning black.

'You'll crash, you bet,' Arglebargle drones on. 'Crash.'

He is weeping with terror now, as he wept after shooting his wife, hearing the unbelievable report of the gun in his hand, watching as she staggered backward against the kitchen counter, one hand clapped to her cheek like a woman uttering a shocked 'My land! I NEVER!' And then the blood squirting through her fingers and his mind in a last desperate effort to deny it all had thought Ketchup, relax, that's just ketchup. Then beginning to weep as he was now.

'As far as you guys are concerned, all your responsibility ends at the wall plate where you plug in.' Pus runs and dribbles down Ted's face. His hair has fallen out. The sores cover his skull. His mouth spreads in a grin as moony as Arberg's. Now in a last extremity of terror Gardener realizes he is skiing out of control down Straight Arrow flanked by dead men. 'But you'll never stop us, you know. No one will. The pile is out of control, you see. Has been since ... oh, around 1939, I'd reckon. We reached critical mass along about 1965. It's out of control. The explosion will come soon.'

'No ... no . . .'

'You've been riding high, but those who ride highest fall hardest,' Arberg drones. 'Murder of a host is the foulest murder of all. You're going to crash ... crash ... crash!'

How true it is! He tries to turn but his skis remain stubbornly on course. Now he can see the big, hoary old pine. Arglebargle and Ted the Power Man are gone and he thinks: Were they Tommyknockers, Bobbi?

He can see a red swatch of paint around the pine's gnarly trunk ... and then it begins to flake and split. As he slides helplessly toward the tree he sees that it has come alive, that it has split open to swallow him. The yawning tree grows and swells, seems to rush toward him, grows tentacles and there is a horrible rotten blackness in its center, with red paint around it like the lipstick of some sinister whore, and he can hear dark winds howling in that black, squirming, mouth and