The Tommyknockers

6

Before, the water heater had run on LP gas. The small-bore copper tubes which fed gas to the tank's burner ran from tanks in a hook-up behind the house. The delivery truck from Dead River Gas in Derry came once a month and replaced the tanks if they needed replacing - usually they did, because the tank was wasteful as well as inefficient ... two things that went together more often than not, now that Gard thought about it. The first thing Gardener noticed was that the copper tubes were no longer hooked into the tank. They hung free behind it, their ends stuffed with cloth.

Holy shit, how's she heating her water? he thought, and then he did look into the hatch, and then for a little while he froze completely.

His mind seemed clear enough, yes, but that disconnected, floating sensation had come back - that feeling of separation. Ole Gard was going up again, up like a child's silver Puffer balloon. He knew he felt afraid, but this knowledge was dim, hardly important, compared to that dismal feeling of coming untethered from himself. No, Gard, Jesus! a mournful voice cried from deep inside him.

He remembered going to the Fryeburg Fair when he was a little kid, no more than ten. He went into the Mirror Maze with his mother, and the two of them had gotten separated. That was the first time he had felt this odd sensation of separation from self, of drifting away, or above, his physical body and his physical (if there was such a thing) mind. He could see his mother, oh yes - five mothers, a dozen, a hundred mothers, some short, some tall, some fat, some scrawny. At the same time he saw five, a dozen, a hundred Gards. Sometimes he'd see one of his reflections join one of hers and he would reach out, almost absently, expecting to touch her slacks. Instead, there was only empty air ... or another mirror.

He had wandered for a long time, and he supposed he had panicked, but it hadn't felt like panic, and so far as he could remember, no one had acted like he had been in a panic when he finally floundered his way out - this only after fifteen minutes of twisting, turning, doubling back, and running into barriers of clear glass. His mother's brow had furrowed slightly for a moment, then cleared. That was all. But he had felt panic, just as he was feeling it now: that sensation of feeling your mind coming unbolted from itself, like a piece of machinery falling apart in zero-g.

It comes ... but it goes. Wait, Gard. Just wait for it to be over.

So he squatted on his hunkers, looking into the open hatch at the base of Anderson's water tank, and waited for it to be over, as he had once waited for his feet to lead him down the correct passage and out of that terrible Mirror Maze at the Fryeburg Fair.

The removal of the gas ring had left a round hollow area at the base of the tank. This area had been filled with a wild tangle of wires - red, green, blue, yellow. In the center of the tangle was a cardboard egg carton. HILLCREST FARMS, the blue printing read. GRADE A JUMBO. Sitting in each of the egg cradles was an EverReady alkaline D-cell battery, + terminals up. A tiny funnel-shaped gadget capped the terminals, and all of the wires seemed to either start - or end - in these caps. As he looked longer, in a state that did not precisely feel like panic, Gardener saw that his original impression - that the wires were in a wild jumble - was no more true than his original impression that the stuff on Bobbi's worktable was in a litter. No, there was order in the way the wires came out of or went into those twelve funnel-shaped caps - as few as two wires coming in or going out of some, as many as six coming in or going out of others. There was even order in the shape they made - it was a small arch. Some of the wires bent back into the funnels capped over other batteries, but most went to circuit boards propped against the sides of the water tank's heating compartment. They were from electronic toys made in Korea, Gardener surmised -too much cheap, silvery solder on corrugated fiberboard. A weird Gyro Gearloose conglomeration if ever there had been one ... but this weird conglomeration of components was doing something. Oh yes. It was heating water fast enough to raise blisters, for one thing.

In the center of the compartment, directly over the egg carton, in the arch formed by the wires, glowed a bright ball of light, no larger than a quarter but seemingly as bright as the sun.

Gardener had automatically put his fist up to block out that savage glow, which shone out of the hatch in a solid white bar of light that cast his shadow long behind him on the dirt floor. He could look at it only by wincing his eyes down to the barest slits and then opening his fingers a little.

As bright as the sun.

Yes - only instead of yellow, it was a dazzling bluish-white, like a sapphire. Its glow pulsated and shifted slightly, then remained constant, then pulsated and shifted again: it was cycling.

But where is the heat? Gardener thought, and that began to bring him back to himself. Where is the heat?

He reached one hand up and laid it on the smooth, enameled side of the tank again - but only for a second. He snatched it away, thinking of the way the water had smoked coming out of the tap in the bathroom. There was hot water in the tank, all right, and plenty of it - by all rights it should boil away to steam and blow Bobbi Anderson's tank all over the basement. It wasn't doing that, obviously, and that was a mystery ... but it was a minor mystery compared to the fact that he wasn't feeling any heat coming out of the hatch - none at all. He should have burned his fingers on the little knob you pulled to open the hatch, and when it was open, that coin-sized sun should have burned the skin right off his face. So ... ?

Slowly, hesitantly, Gardener reached toward the opening with his left hand, keeping his right fisted before his eyes to block out the worst of the glow. His mouth was pulled down in a wince as he anticipated a burn.

His splayed fingers slipped into the hatchway . . . and then struck something yielding. He thought later it was a little like pushing your fingers into a stretched nylon stocking - only this gave just so much and then stopped. Your fingers never punched through, as they would have punched through a nylon stocking.

But there was no barrier. None, at least, that he could see.

He stopped pressing and the invisible membrane gently pushed his fingers back out of the hatchway. He looked at his fingers and saw they were shaking.

It's a force-field, that's why I'm not getting burned. Some sort of a force-field that damps heat. Dear God, I've walked into a science-fiction story from Startling Stories. Right around 1947, I'd guess. I wonder if I made the cover? If I did, who drew me? Virgil Finlay? Hannes Bok?

His hand was beginning to shake harder. He groped for the little door, missed it, found it again, and slammed it shut, cutting out that dazzling flood of white light. He lowered his right hand slowly but he could still see an afterimage of that tiny sun, the way one can see a flashbulb after it has gone off in one's face. Only what Gardener saw was a large green fist floating in the air, with bright, ectoplasmic blue between the fingers.

The afterimage faded. The shakes didn't.

Gardener had never wanted a drink so badly in his life.

7

He got one in Anderson's kitchen.

Bobbi didn't drink much, but she kept what she called 'the staples' in a cabinet behind the pots and pans: bottle of gin, bottle of Scotch, bottle of bourbon, bottle of vodka. Gardener pulled out the bourbon - some cut-rate brand, but beggars couldn't be choosers - poured an inch into a plastic tumbler, and downed it.

Better watch your step, Gard. You're tempting fate.

Except he wasn't. Right now he almost would have welcomed a jag, but the cyclone had gone somewhere else to blow ... at least for the time being. He poured another two inches of bourbon into the glass, contemplated it for a moment, then poured most of it down the sink. He put the bottle back, and added water and ice cubes, converting what had been liquid dy***ite into a civilized drink.

He thought the kid on the beach would have approved.

He supposed the dreamlike calm that had surrounded him when he came out of the Mirror Maze, and felt again now, was a defense against just lying down on the floor and screaming until he lost consciousness. The calm was all right. What scared him was how fast his mind had gone to work trying to convince him that none of it was true - that he had hallucinated the whole thing. Incredibly, his mind was suggesting that what he had seen when he opened the hatch in the heater's base was a very bright light bulb - two hundred watts, say.

It wasn't a light bulb and it wasn't hallucination. It was something like a sun, very small and hot and bright, floating in an arch of wires, over an egg carton filled with D-cells. Now you can go crazy if you want, or get Jesus, or get drunk but you saw what you saw and leave us not gild the lily, all right? All right.

He checked on Anderson and saw she was still sleeping like a stone. Gardener had decided to wake Bobbi up by ten-thirty if she hadn't awakened on her own; he looked at his watch now, and was astonished to see it was only twenty minutes past nine. He had been in the cellar much less time than he had thought.

Thinking of the cellar called up the surreal vision of that miniature sun hanging suspended in its arch of wires, glowing like a superhot tennis ball . . . and thinking about that brought back the unpleasant sense that his mind was uncoupling itself. He pushed it away. It didn't want to go. He pushed harder, telling himself he was simply not going to think about it anymore until Bobbi woke up and told him just what was going on around here.

He looked down at his arms and saw that he was sweating.

8

Gardener took his drink out back, where he found more evidence of Bobbi's almost supernatural burst of activity.

Her Tomcat tractor was standing in front of the large shed to the left of the garden - nothing unusual about that, it was where she most commonly left it when the weatherman said it wasn't going to get rained on. But even from twenty feet away Gardener could see that Anderson had done something radical to the Tomcat's motor.

No. No more. Forget this shit, Gard. Go home.

There was nothing dreamy or disconnected about that voice - it was harsh, vital with panic and scared dismay. For a moment Gardener felt himself on the verge of giving in to it ... and then he thought what an abysmal betrayal that would be - of Bobbi, of himself. The thought of Bobbi had kept him from killing himself yesterday. And by not killing himself, he thought he had kept her from doing the same thing. The Chinese had a proverb: 'If you save a life, you are responsible for it.' But if Bobbi needed help, how was he supposed to give it? Didn't finding out begin with trying to find out just what had been going on out here?

He knocked back the end of the drink, set the empty glass on the top back step, and walked toward the Tomcat. He was distantly aware of the crickets singing in the high grass. He wasn't drunk, not squiffy, as far as he could tell; the booze seemed to have shot right past his entire nervous system. Gave it a miss, as the British said.

(like the leprechauns that made the shoes tap-tap-tappety-tap while the cobbler slept)

But Bobbi hadn't been sleeping, had she? Bobbi had been driven until she dropped - literally dropped - into Gardener's arms.

(tap-tap-tappety-tap knock-knock-knockety-knock late last night and the night before Tommyknockers Tommyknockers knocking at the door)

Standing by the Tomcat, looking into the open engine compartment, Gardener didn't just shiver - he shuddered like a man dying of cold, his upper teeth biting into his lower lip, his face pale, his temples and forehead covered with sweat.

(they fixed the water heater and the Tomcat. too there's lots of things the Tommyknockers do)

The Tomcat was a small working vehicle which would have been almost useless on a big spread where farming was the main work. It was bigger than a riding lawnmower but smaller than the smallest tractor Deere or Farmall had ever made, but just right for someone who kept a garden that was just a little too big to be called a plot - and that was the case here. Bobbi had a garden of about an acre and a half -beans, cukes, peas, corn, radishes, and potatoes. No carrots, no cabbages, no zucchini, no squash.

'I don't grow what I don't like,' she had told Gardener once. 'Life's too short.'

The Tomcat was fairly versatile; it had to be - even a well-off gentleman farmer would have trouble justifying the purchase of a $2,500 mini-tractor on the basis of a one-acre garden. It could roto-till, mow grass with one attachment and cut hay with another; it could haul stuff over rough terrain (she had used it as a skidder in the fall, and so far as Gardener knew Bobbi had gotten stuck only once), and in the winter she attached a snow-blower unit and cleared her driveway in half an hour. It was powered by a sturdy four-cc engine.

Or had been.

The engine was still in there, but now it was tarted up with the weirdest array of gadgets and attachments imaginable - Gardener found himself thinking of the doorbell/radio thing on the table in Anderson's basement, and wondering if Bobbi meant to put it on the Tomcat soon . . . maybe it was radar, or something. A single bewildered bark of laughter escaped him.

A mayonnaise jar jutted from one side of the engine. It was filled with a fluid too colorless to be gasoline and screwed into a brass fitting on the engine head. Sitting on the cowling was something that would have looked more at home on a Chevy Nova or SuperSport: the air scoop of a supercharger.

The modest carb had been replaced with a scrounged four-barrel. Bobbi had had to cut a hole through the cowling to make room for it.

And there were wires - wires everywhere, snaking in and out and up and down and all around, making connections that made absolutely no sense . . . at least, not as far as Gardener could see.

He looked at the Tomcat's rudimentary instrument panel, started to look away ... and then his gaze snapped back, his eyes widening.

The Tomcat had a stick shift, and the gearing pattern had been printed on a square of metal bolted to the dashboard above the oil-pressure gauge. Gardener had seen that square of metal often enough; he had driven the Tomcat frequently over the years. Before it had always been:

3

N 4

2 R

Now, something new had been added - something which was just simple enough to be terrifying:

3

N 4 UP

2 R

You don't believe that, do you?

I don't know.

Come on, Gard -flying tractors? Give me a break!

She's got a miniature sun in her water heater.

Bullshit. I think it might have been a light bulb, a bright one, like a two-hundred-watt

It was not a light bulb!

Okay, all right, calm down. It just sounds like an ad for a really E. T. ripoff, that's all. 'You'll believe a tractor can fly.'

Shut up.

Or 'John Deere, phone home.' How's that?

He stood in Anderson's kitchen again, looking longingly at the cabinet where the booze was. He shifted his eyes away - it was not easy because they felt as if they had gained weight - and walked back into the living room. He saw that Bobbi had changed positions, and that her respiration was moving along a bit more rapidly. First signs of waking up. Gardener glanced at his watch again and saw it was nearly ten o'clock. He went over to the bookcase by Bobbi's desk, wanting to find something to read until she came around, something that would take his mind off this whole business for a little while.

What he saw on Bobbi's desk, beside the battered old typewriter, was in some ways the worst shock of all. Shocking enough, anyway, so that he barely noticed another change: a roll of perforated computer paper hung on the wall above and behind the desk and typewriter like a giant roll of paper towels.

9

THE BUFFALO SOLDIERS

A novel by Roberta Anderson

Gardener put the top sheet aside, face-down, and saw his own name - or rather, the nickname only he and Bobbi used.

For Gard, who's always there when I need him.

Another shudder worked through him. He put the second sheet aside face-down on the first.

In those days, just before Kansas began to bleed, the buffalo were still plentiful on the plains - plentiful enough, anyway, for poor men, white and Indian alike, to be buried in buffalo skins rather than in coffins.

'Once you get a taste of buffaler meat, you'll never want what come off'n a cow again,' the old-timers said, and they must have believed what they said, because these hunters of the plains, these buffalo soldiers, seemed to exist in a world of hairy, humpbacked ghosts - all about them they carried the memory of the buffalo, the smell of the buffalo - the smell, yes, because many of them smeared buff-tallow on their necks and faces and hands to keep the prairie sun from burning them black. They wore buffalo teeth in necklaces and sometimes in their ears; their chaps were of buffalo hide; and more than one of these nomads carried a buffalo penis as a good luck charm or guarantee of continued potency.

Ghosts themselves, following herds that crossed the short-wire grass like the great clouds which cover the prairie with their shadows; the clouds remain but the great herds are gone ... and so are the buffalo soldiers, madmen from wastes that had as yet never known a fence, men who came striding out of nowhere and went striding back into that same place, men with buffalo-hide moccasins on their feet and bones clicking about their necks; ghosts out Of time, out of a place that existed just before the whole country began to bleed.

Late in the afternoon of August 24th, 1848, Robert Howell, who would die at Gettysburg not quite fifteen years later, made camp near a small stream far out along the Nebraska panhandle, in that eerie section known as the Sand Hill Country. The stream was small but the water smelled sweet enough ...

Gardener was forty pages into the story and utterly absorbed when he heard Bobbi Anderson call sleepily:

'Gard? Gard, are you still around?'

'I'm here, Bobbi,' he said, and stood up, dreading what would come next and already half-believing he had gone insane. That had to be it, of course. There could not be a tiny sun in the bottom of Bobbi's hot-water tank, nor a new gear on her Tomcat which suggested levitation ... but it would have been easier for him to believe either of those things than to believe that Bobbi had written a four-hundred-page novel called The Buffalo Soldiers in the three weeks or so since Gard had last seen her - a novel that was, just incidentally, the best thing she had ever written. Impossible, yeah. Easier - hell, saner - to believe he had gone crazy and simply leave it at that.

If only he could.

Chapter 9. Anderson Spins a Tale

1

Bobbi was getting off the couch slowly, wincing, like an old woman.

'Bobbi - ' Gardener began.

'Christ, I ache all over,' Anderson said. 'And I've got to change my - never mind. How long did I sleep?'

Gardener glanced at his watch. 'Fourteen hours, I guess. A little more. Bobbi, your new book - '

'Yeah. Hold that thought until I get back.' She walked slowly across the floor toward the bathroom, unbuttoning the shirt she had slept in. As she hobbled toward the bathroom, Gardener got a good look - a much better one than he wanted, actually - of just how much weight Bobbi had lost. This went beyond scrawniness to the point of emaciation.

She stopped, as if aware Gardener was looking at her, and without looking around she said: 'I can explain everything, you know.'

'Can you?' Gardener asked.

2

Anderson was in the bathroom a long time - much longer than it should have taken her to use the toilet and change her pad - Gardener was pretty sure that was what she'd gone to do. Her face just had that I-got-the-curse look. He listened for the shower but it wasn't running, and he began to feel uneasy. Bobbi had seemed perfectly lucid when she woke up, but did that necessarily mean she was? Gardener began to have uncomfortable visions of Bobbi wriggling out the bathroom window and then running off into the woods in nothing but blue jeans, cackling wildly.

He put his right hand to the left side of his forehead, where the scar was. His head had started to throb a little. He let another minute or two slip by, and then he got up and walked toward the bathroom, making an effort to step quietly that was not quite unconscious. Visions of Bobbi escaping through the bathroom window to avoid explanations had been replaced by one of Bobbi serenely cutting her throat with one of Gard's own razor-blades to avoid explanations permanently.

He decided he would just listen. If he heard normal-sounding movements he would go on out to the kitchen and put on coffee, maybe scramble a few eggs. If he didn't hear anything

His worries were needless. The bathroom door hadn't latched when she closed it, and other improvements aside, the unlatched doors in the place apparently still had their old way of swinging open. She'd probably have to shim up the whole north side of the house to do that. Maybe that was next week's project, he thought.

The door had swung open enough for him to see Bobbi standing at the mirror where Gardener had stood himself not long ago. She had her toothbrush in one hand and a tube of toothpaste in the other ... but she hadn't uncapped the tube yet. She was looking into the mirror with an intensity that was almost hypnotic. Her lips were pulled back, her teeth bared.

She caught movement in the mirror and turned around, making no particular effort to cover her wasted br**sts.

'Gard, do my teeth look all right to you?'

Gardener looked at them. They looked to him about as they always had, although he couldn't remember ever having seen quite this much of them - he was reminded of that terrible photo of Karen Carpenter again.

'Sure.' He kept trying not to look at her stacked ribs, the painful jut of her pelvic bones above the waist of her jeans, which were drooping in spite of a belt cinched so tight it looked like a hobo's length of clothesline. 'I guess so.' He smiled cautiously. 'Look, ma, no cavities.'

Anderson tried to return Gardener's smile with her lips still pulled back to the gums; the result of this experiment was mildly grotesque. She put a forefinger on a molar and pressed.

'Oes it iggle en I ooo at?'

'What?'

'Does it wiggle when I do that?'

'No. Not that I can see, anyway. Why?'

'It's just this dream I keep having. It - ' She looked down at herself. 'Get out of here, Gard, I'm in dishabilly.'

Don't worry, Bobbi. I wasn't going to jump your bones. Mostly because that'd be too close to what I'd really be doing.

'Sorry,' he said. 'Door was open. I thought you'd gone out.'

He closed the door, latching it firmly.

Through it she said clearly: 'I know what you're wondering.'

He said nothing - only stood there. But he had a feeling she knew - knew - he was still there. As if she could see through the door.

'You're wondering if I'm losing my mind.'

'No,' he said then. 'No, Bobbi. But - '

'I'm as sane as you are,' Anderson said through the door. 'I'm so stiff I can hardly walk and I've got an Ace bandage wrapped around my right knee for some reason I can't quite remember and I'm hungry as a bear and I know I've lost too much weight ... but I am sane, Gard. I think you may have

times before the day's over when you wonder if you are. The answer is, we both are.'

'Bobbi, what's happening here?' Gardener asked. It came out in a helpless sort of cry.

'I want to unwrap the goddam Ace bandage and see what's under it,' Anderson said through the door. 'Feel like I jobbed my knee pretty good. Out in the woods, probably. Then I want to take a hot shower and put on some clean clothes. While I do that, you could make us some breakfast. And I'll tell you everything.'

'Will you?'

'Yes.'

'Okay, Bobbi.'

'I'm glad to have you here, Gard,' she said. 'I had a bad feeling once or twice. Like maybe you weren't doing so good.'

Gardener felt his vision double, treble, then float away in prisms. He wiped an arm across his face. 'No pain, no strain,' he said. 'I'll make some breakfast.'

'Thanks, Gard.'

He walked away then, but he had to walk slow, because no matter how many times he wiped his eyes, his vision kept trying to break up on him.

3

He stopped just inside the kitchen and went back to the closed bathroom door as a new thought occurred to him. Water was running in there now.

'Where's Peter, Bobbi?'

'What?' she called over the drumming shower.

'I said, where's Peter?' he called, raising his voice.

'Dead,' Bobbi called back over the drumming water. 'I cried, Gard. But he was ... you know . . .'

'Old,' Gardener muttered, then remembered and raised his voice again. 'It was old age, then?'

'Yes,' Anderson called back over the drumming water.

Gardener stood there for just a moment before going back to the kitchen, wondering why he believed Bobbi was lying about Peter and how he had died.

4

Gard scrambled eight eggs and fried bacon on Bobbi's grill. He noticed that a microwave oven had been installed over the conventional one since he'd last been here, and there was now track lighting over the main work areas and the kitchen table, where Bobbi was in the habit of eating most of her meals - usually with a book in her free hand.

He made coffee, strong and black, and was just bringing everything to the table when Bobbi came in, wearing a fresh pair of cords and a T-shirt with a picture of a blackfly on it and the legend MAINE STATE BIRD. Her wet hair was wrapped in a towel.

Anderson surveyed the table. 'No toast?' she asked.

'Make your own frigging toast,' Gardener said amiably. 'I didn't hitchhike two hundred miles to buttle your breakfast.'

Anderson stared. 'You did what? Yesterday? In the rain?'

'Yeah.'

'What in God's name happened? Muriel said you were doing a reading tour and your last one was June 30th.'

'You called Muriel?' He was absurdly touched. 'When?'

Anderson flapped a hand as if that didn't matter - probably it didn't. 'What happened?' she asked again.

Gardener thought about telling her - wanted to tell her, he realized, dismayed. Was that what Bobbi was for, then? Was Bobbi Anderson really no more than the wall he wailed to? He hesitated, wanting to tell her ... and didn't. There would be time for that later.

Maybe.

'Later,' he said. 'I want to know what happened here.'

'Breakfast first,' Anderson said, 'and that's an order.'

5

Gard gave Bobbi most of the eggs and bacon, and Bobbi didn't waste time - she went to them like a woman who hasn't eaten well for a long time. Watching her eat, Gardener remembered a biography of Thomas Edison he had read when he was quite young - no more than ten or eleven. Edison had gone on wild work-jags in which idea had followed idea, invention had followed invention. During these spurts, he had ignored wife, children, baths, even food. If his wife hadn't brought him his meals on a tray, the man might literally have starved to death between the light bulb and the phonograph. There had been a picture of him, hands plunged into hair that was wildly awry - as if it had been actually trying to get at the brain beneath hair and skull, the brain which would not let him rest - and Gardener remembered thinking that the man looked quite insane.

And, he thought, touching the left side of his forehead, Edison had been subject to migraines. Migraines and deep depressions.

He saw no sign of depression in Bobbi, however. She gobbled eggs, ate seven or eight slices of bacon wrapped in a slice of toast slathered with oleo, and swallowed two large glasses of orange juice. When she had finished, she uttered a resounding belch.

'Gross, Bobbi.'

'In Portugal, a good belch is considered a compliment to the cook.'

'What do they do after a good lay? Fart?'

Anderson threw her head back and roared with laughter. The towel fell off her hair, and all at once Gard wanted to take her to bed, bag of bones or not.

Smiling a little, Gardener said: 'Okay, it was good. Thanks. Some Sunday I'll make you some swell eggs Benedict. Now give.'

Anderson reached behind him and brought down a half-full package of Camels. She lit one and pushed the pack toward Gardener.

'No thanks. It's the only bad habit I ever succeeded in mostly giving up.'

But before Bobbi was done, Gardener had smoked four of them.

6

'You looked around,' Anderson said. 'I remember telling you to do that - just barely -and I know you did. You look like I felt after I found the thing in the woods.'

'What thing?'

'If I told you now you'd think I was crazy. Later on I'll show you, but right now I think we'd better just talk. Tell me what you saw around the place. What changes.'

So Gardener ticked them off: the cellar improvements, the litter of projects, the weird little sun in the water heater. The strange job of customizing on the Tomcat's engine. He hesitated for a moment, thinking of the addition to the shifting diagram, and let that go. He supposed Bobbi knew he had seen it, anyway.

'And somewhere in the middle of all that,' he said, 'you found time to write another book. A long one. I read the first thirty or forty pages while I was waiting for you to wake up, and I think it's good as well as long. The best novel you've ever written, probably . . . and you've written some good ones.'

Anderson was nodding, pleased. 'Thank you. I think it is, too.' She pointed to the last slice of bacon on the platter. 'You want that?'

'No. I

'Sure?'

'Yes.'

She took it and made it gone.

'How long did it take you to write it?'

'I'm not completely sure,' Anderson said. 'Maybe three days. No more than a week, anyway. Did most of it in my sleep.'

Gard smiled.

'I'm not joking, you know,' Anderson said.

Gardener stopped smiling.

'My time sense is pretty f**ked up,' she admitted. 'I do know I wasn't working on it the 27th. That's the last day when time - sequential time - seemed completely clear to me. You got here last night, July 4th, and it was done. So ... a week, max. But I really don't think it was more than three days.'

Gardener gaped. Anderson looked back calmly, wiping her fingers on a napkin. 'Bobbi, that's impossible,' Gardener said finally.

'If you think so, you missed my typewriter.'

Gardener had glanced at Bobbi's old machine when he sat down, but that was all -his attention had been riveted immediately by the manuscript. He had seen the old black Underwood thousands of times. The manuscript, on the other hand, was new.

'If you'd looked closely, you would have seen the roll of computer paper on the wall behind it and another of those gadgets behind it. Egg crate, heavy-duty batteries, and all. What? These?'

She pushed the cigarettes across to Gardener, who took one.

'I don't know how it works, but then, I don't really know how any of them work -including the one that's running all the juice in this place.' She smiled at Gardener's expression. 'I'm off the Central Maine Power tit, Gard. I had them interrupt service ... that's how they put it, as if they know damned well you'll want it back before too long ... let's see ... four days ago. That I do remember.'

'Bobbi - '

'There's a gadget like the thing in the water heater and the one behind my typewriter in the junction box out back, but that one's the granddaddy of them all.' Anderson laughed - the laugh of a woman in the grip of pleasant reminiscences. 'There's twenty or thirty D-cells in that one. I think Poley Andrews down at Cooder's market thinks I've gone nuts - I bought every battery he had in stock, and then I went to Augusta for more.

'Was that the day I got the dirt for the cellar?' She addressed this last to herself, frowning. Then her face cleared. 'I think so, yeah. The Historic Battery Run of 1988, hit about seven different stores, came back with hundreds of batteries, and then I stopped in Albion and got a truckload of loam to sweeten the cellar. I'm almost positive I did both of those things the same day.'

The troubled frown resurfaced, and for a moment Gardener thought Bobbi looked scared and exhausted again - of course she was still exhausted. Exhaustion of the sort Gardener had seen last night went bone-deep. A single night's sleep, no matter how long and how deep, wouldn't erase it. And then there was this wild, hallucinatory talk - books written in her sleep; all the AC current in the house being run by D-cells, runs to Augusta on crazy errands

Except that the proof was here, all around him. He had seen it.

' - that one,' Anderson said, and laughed.

'What, Bobbi?'

'I said I had a devil of a job setting up the one that generates the juice here in the house, and out at the dig.'

'What dig? Is it the thing in the woods you want to show me?'

'Yes. Soon. Just give me a few more minutes.' Anderson's face again assumed that look of pleasure in telling, and Gardener suddenly thought it must be the expression on the faces of all those who have tales they don't just want to tell but tales they must tell - from the lecture-hall bore who was part of an Antarctic expedition in 1937 and who still has his fading slides to prove it, to Ishmael the Sailor-Man, late of the ill-fated Pequod, who finishes his tale with a sentence that seems a desperate cry only thinly and perfunctorily disguised as information: 'Only I am left to tell you.' Was it desperation and madness that Gardener detected beneath Bobbi's cheerful, disjointed remembrances of Ten Wacky Days in Haven? Gardener thought so ... knew so. Who was better equipped to see the signs? Whatever Bobbi had faced here while Gardener was reading poetry to overweight matrons and their bored husbands, it had nearly broken her mind.

Anderson lit another cigarette with a hand that trembled slightly, making the matchflame quiver momentarily. It was the sort of thing you would have seen only if you were looking for it.

'I was out of egg cartons by then, and the thing was going to have too many batteries for just one or two anyway. So I got one of Uncle Frank's cigar boxes -there must be a dozen old wooden ones up in the attic, probably even Mabel Noyes down at Junque-a-Torium would pay a few bucks for them, and you know what a skinflint she is - and I stuffed them with toilet paper and tried to make nests in the paper for the batteries to stand up in. You know ... nests?'

Anderson made quick poking gestures with her right index finger and then looked, bright-eyed, at Gard, to see if he got it. Gardener nodded. That feeling of unreality was stealing back, that feeling of his mind getting ready to seep through to the top of his skull and float up to the ceiling. A drink would fix that, he thought, and the pulse in his head sharpened.

'But the batteries kept failing over anyway.' She snuffed her cigarette and immediately lit another one. 'They were wild, just wild. I was wild, too. Then I got an idea.'

They?

'I went down to Chip McCausland's. Down on the Dugout Road?'

Gardener shook his head. He had never been down the Dugout Road.

'Well, he lives out there with this woman - she's his common-law wife, I guess -and about ten kids. Man, you talk about sluts ... the dirt on her neck, Gard ... you couldn't wash it off unless you used a jackhammer on it first. I guess he was married before, and ... doesn't matter ... it's just ... I haven't had anyone to talk to ... I mean, they don't talk, not the way a couple of people do, and I keep mixing up the stuff that's not important with the stuff that is - '

Anderson's words had started to come out quicker and quicker, until now they were almost tripping over each other. She's speed-rapping, Gardener thought with some alarm, and pretty soon she's going to start either yelling or crying. He didn't know which he dreaded more and thought again of Ishmael, Ishmael rambling through the streets of Bedford, Massachusetts, stinking more of madness than whale-oil, finally grabbing some unlucky passerby and screaming: Listen! I'm the only f**king one left to tell you and so you better listen, damn you! You better listen if you don't want to be using this harpoon for a f**king suppository! I got a tale to tell, it's about this white f**king whale and YOU'RE GOING TO LISTEN!

He reached across the table and touched her hand. 'You tell it any old way you want to. I'm here and I'm going to listen. We've got time; like you said, it's your day off. So slow down. If I fall asleep you'll know you got too far from the point. Okay?'

Anderson smiled and relaxed visibly. Gardener wanted to ask again what was going on in the woods. More than that, who they were. But it would be best to wait. All bad things come to him who waits, he thought, and after a pause to collect herself, Bobbi went on.

'Chip McCausland's got three or four henhouses, that's all I started to say. For a couple of bucks I was able to get all the egg cartons I wanted ... even a few of the big egg-crate sheets. Those sheets each have ten dozen cradles.'

Anderson laughed cheerfully and added something that brought gooseflesh out on Gardener's skin.

'Haven't used one of those yet, but when I do I guess we'll have enough zap for the whole town of Haven to let go of the CMP tit. With enough left over for Albion and most of Troy, as well.

'So I got the power going here - Jesus, I'm rambling - and I already had the gadget hooked up to the typewriter - and I really did sleep - napped, anyway - and that's about where we came in, isn't it?'

Gardener nodded, still trying to cope with the idea that there might be fact as well as hallucination in Bobbi's casual statement that she could build a ,gadget' which could power three small towns from a source consisting of one hundred and twenty D-cell batteries.

'What the gadget on the typewriter does is...' Anderson frowned. Her head cocked a little, almost as if she were listening to a voice Gardener could not hear. 'It might be easier to show you. Go on over there and roll in a sheet of paper, would you?'

'Okay.' He headed for the door into the living room, then looked back at Anderson. 'Aren't you coming?'

Bobbi smiled. 'I'll stay here,' she said, and then Gardener got it. He got it, and even understood on some mental level where only pure logic was allowed that it might be so - hadn't the immortal Holmes himself said that when you eliminated the impossible, you had to believe whatever was left, no matter how improbable? And there was a new novel sitting in there on the table by what Bobbi sometimes called her word-accordion.

Yeah, except typewriters don't write books by themselves, Gard old buddy. You know what the immortal Holmes probably would say? That the fact that there is a novel sitting next to Bobbi's typewriter, and the added fact that this is a novel you never saw before does not mean it is a new novel. Holmes would say Bobbi wrote that book at some time in the past. Then, while you were gone and Bobbi was losing her marbles, she brought it out and sat it beside the typewriter. She may even believe what she's telling you, but that doesn't make it so.