The Tommyknockers

12

Gard used his shirt, which wasn't very clean anyway, to wipe swatches of brown makeup from his naked body. Had she come out here expecting to make love to him? Something it might be just as well not to think about. Now, anyway.

Although they both should have been Thanksgiving dinner for the mosquitoes and noseeums and moose-flies, spouting sweat as they had been doing, he hadn't a single bite. He didn't think Bobbi had any, either. It's not only an IQ booster, he thought, looking at the ship, it's got every insect repellent on the market beat hollow.

He tossed his shirt aside and touched Bobbi's face, running a finger down her cheek, picking up a little more of the makeup. Most of it, however, had either been sweated off ... or washed away by her tears.

'I hurt you,' he said.

You loved me, she answered.

'What?'

You hear me, Gard. I know you do.

'Are you angry?' he asked, aware that the barriers were going up again, aware that he was acting again, aware that it was over, all the things they'd had were finally over. These were sorry things to be aware of. 'Is that why you won't talk to me?' He paused. 'I wouldn't blame you. You've put up with a lot of shit from me over the years, woman.'

'I was talking to you,' she said, and, sorry as he was to be lying to her after loving her, he was glad to sense her doubt. 'With my mind.'

'I didn't hear.'

'You did before. You heard ... and you answered. We talked, Gard.'

We were closer to ... that.' He flagged an arm at the ship.

She smiled wanly up at him and put her cheek against his shoulder. With most of the makeup scrubbed away, her flesh had an unsettling translucence even her illness, whatever it had been, could not account for.

'Did I? Hurt you?'

'No. Yes. A little.' She smiled. It was that old Bobbi Anderson go-to-hell grin, but a final tear ran slowly down her cheek nonetheless. 'It was worth it. We saved the best for last, Gard.'

He kissed her gently, but now her lips were different. The lips of the New and Improved Roberta Anderson.

'First, last, or in the middle, I didn't have any business making love to you, and you don't have any business out here.'

'I look tired, I know,' Bobbi said, 'and I'm wearing a lot of goop, as you already found out. You were right - I let myself get overtired and I had something like a complete physical breakdown.'

Bullshit, Gardener thought, but he covered this thought with white noise so Bobbi couldn't read it - he did this with barely a conscious thought. Such hiding was becoming second nature to him now.

'The treatment was ... radical. It's resulted in some superficial skin problems and some hair loss. But it'll all grow back.'

'Oh,' Gardener said, thinking: You still can't lie for shit, Bobbi. 'Well, I'm glad you're all right. But you maybe ought to take a couple of days off, put your feet up -'

'No,' Bobbi said quietly. 'This is the time for the final push, Gard. We're almost there. We started this, you and me - '

'No,' Gardener said. 'You started it, Bobbi. You literally stumbled over it. Back when Peter was alive. Remember?'

Gard saw pain in Bobbi's eyes at the mention of Peter. Then it was gone. She shrugged Gardener's qualification off. 'You were here soon enough. You saved my life. I wouldn't be here without you. So let's do it together, Gard. I bet it's no more than another twenty-five feet down to that hatchway.'

Gardener had a strong hunch she was right, but he suddenly didn't feel like admitting it. There was a spike turning and turning in his heart, and the pain was worse than any hangover headache he'd ever had.

'If you think so, I'll take your word for it.'

'What do you say, Gard? One more mile. You and me.'

He sat thoughtfully, looking at Bobbi, noticing again how still, how almost malignant the woods seemed with no birdsong in them.

This is how it would be - this is how it will be - if one of their ass**le power plants ever does melt down. The people will have smarts enough to get out - if they're warned in time, that is, and if the power plant in question and the NRC have balls enough to tell them - but you can't tell an owl or woodpecker to clear the area. You can't tell a scarlet tanager not to look at the fireball. So their eyes will melt and they'll just go flapping around, blind as bats, running into trees and the sides of buildings until they starve to death or break their necks. Is this a spaceship, Bobbi? Or is it a great big containment housing that's already leaking? It has, hasn't it? That's why these woods are so quiet, and that's why the Polyester-Clad Neurologist Bird fell out of the sky on Friday, isn't it?

'What do you say, Gard? One more mile?'

So where's the good solution? Where's peace with honor? Do you run? Do you turn it over to the American Dallas Police so they can use it on the Soviet Dallas Police? What? Any new ideas, Gard?

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 old way, 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 seventynine 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 f**k 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 afterwards; 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 Haze].

(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, hard, and saw faint finger indentations when he took them away again - they were like fingermarks in hard wax, right down to the discernible loops and sworls of his fingerprints 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, even 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 enough 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 - things 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 NewportDerry 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 and 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 then only 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 just going to hit the rack, Gard. I'm sorry to be such a party-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 popped neatly 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 right 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.

in that way of his.

Gardener remembered, when Bobbi's return had briefly wakened him last night (Bobbi's return and that flare of green light), hearing distant and meaningless heatwave thunder.

Now he remembered that sometimes Pete needed a little comfort, too.

Especially when it thundered. Pete was deathly afraid of that sound. The sound of thunder.

Dear Christ, has she got Peter out in that shed? And if she does, in God's name WHY?

There had been smears of some funny green goo on Bobbi's dress.

And hairs.

Very familiar short brown and white hairs. Peter was in the shed, and had been all this time. Bobbi had lied about Peter being dead. God alone knew how many other things she had lied about ... but why this?

Why?

Gardener didn't know.

He changed direction, went to the cupboard to the right and beneath the sink, bent, pulled out a fresh bottle of Scotch, and broke the seal. He held the bottle up and said, 'To man's best friend.' He drank from the neck, gargled viciously, and swallowed.

First swallow.

Peter. What the f**k did you do to Peter, Bobbi?

He meant to get drunk.

Very drunk.

Fast.

BOOK III. THE TOMMYKNOCKERS

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

'Won't Get Fooled Again'

The Who

Over on the mountain: thunder, magic foam, let the people know my wisdom, fill the land with smoke. Run through the jungle ... Don't look back to see.

'Run Through the Jungle'

Creedence Clearwater Revival

I slept and I dreamed the dream. This time there was no disguise anywhere. I was the malicious male-female dwarf figure, the principle of joy-in-destruction; and Saul was my counterpart, malefemale, my brother and my sister, and we were dancing in some open place, under enormous white buildings, which were filled with hideous, menacing, black machinery which held destruction. But in the dream, he and I, or she and I, were friendly, we were not hostile, we were together in spiteful malice. There was a terrible yearning nostalgia in the dream, the longing for death. We came together and kissed, in love. It was terrible, and even in the dream I knew it. Because I recognised in the dream those other dreams we all have, when the essence of love, of tenderness, is concentrated into a kiss or a caress, but now it was the caress of two half-human creatures, celebrating destruction.

- DORIS LESSING, The Golden Notebook

Chapter 1. Sissy

1

'I hope you enjoyed the flight,' the stewardess by the hatch told the fortyish woman who left Delta's flight 230 with a trickle of other passengers who had stuck it out all the way to Bangor, 230's terminating point.

Bobbi Anderson's sister Anne, who was only forty but who thought fifty as well as looking it (Bobbi would say - during those infrequent times she was in her cups - that sister Anne had thought like a woman of fifty since she was thirteen or so), halted and fixed the stew with a gaze that might have stopped a clock.

'Well, I'll tell you, babe,' she said. 'I'm hot. My pits stink because the plane was late leaving La Garbage and even later leaving Logan. The air was bumpy and I hate to fly. The trainee they sent back to Livestock Class spilled someone's screwdriver all over me and I've got orange juice drying to a fine crack-glaze all over my arm. My panties are sticking in the crack of my ass and this little town looks like a pimple on the c**k of New England. Other questions?'

'No,' the stew managed. Her eyes had gone glassy, and she felt as if she had suddenly gone about three quick rounds with Boom-Boom Mancini on a day when Mancini was pissed at the world. This was an effect Anne Anderson often had on people.

'Good for you, dear.' Anne marched past the attendant and up the jetway, swinging a large, screamingly purple totebag in one hand. The attendant never even had time to wish her a pleasant stay in the Bangor area. She decided it would have been a wasted effort anyway. The lady looked as if she had never had a pleasant stay anywhere. She walked straight, but she looked like a woman who did it in spite of pain somewhere -like the little mermaid, who went on walking even though every step was like knives in her feet.

Only, the flight attendant thought, if that babe has got a True Love stashed anywhere, I hope to God he knows about the mating habits of the trapdoor spider.

2

The Avis clerk told Anne she had no cars to rent; that if Anne hadn't made a reservation in advance, she was out of luck, so sorry. It was summer in Maine, and rental cars were at a premium.

This was a mistake on the part of the clerk. A bad one.

Anne smiled grimly, mentally spat on her hands, and went to work. Situations like this were meat and drink to sister Anne, who had nursed her father until he had died a miserable death on the first of August, eight days ago. She had refused to have him removed to an I.C. facility, preferring instead to wash him, medicate his bedsores, change his continence pants, and give him his pills in the middle of the night, by herself. Of course she had driven him to the final stroke, worrying at him constantly about selling the house on Leighton Street (he didn't want to; she was determined that he would; the final monster stroke, which occurred after three smaller ones at two-year intervals, came three days after the house was put up for sale), but she would no more admit that she knew this than she would admit the fact that, although she had attended St Bart's in Utica ever since earliest childhood and was one of the leading lay-women in that fine church, she believed the concept of God was a crock of shit. By the time she was eighteen she had bent her mother to her will, and now she had destroyed her father and watched dirt shoveled over his coffin. No slip of an Avis clerk could stand against Sissy. It took her about ten minutes to break the clerk down, but she brushed aside the offer of the compact car which Avis held in reserve for the occasional - very occasional - celebrity passing through Bangor and pressed on, scenting the young clerk's increasing fear of her as clearly as a hungry carnivore scents blood. Twenty minutes after the offer of the compact, Anne drove serenely away from Bangor International behind the wheel of a Cutlass Supreme reserved for a businessman scheduled to deplane at 6:15 P.m. By that time the clerk would be off-duty - and besides, she had been so unnerved by Anne's steady flailing that she wouldn't have cared if the Cutlass had been earmarked for the President of the United States. She went tremblingly into the inner office, shut the door, locked it, put a chair under the knob, and smoked a joint one of the mechanics had laid on her. Then she burst into tears.

Anne Anderson had a similar effect on many people.

3

By the time the clerk had been eaten, it was going on three o'clock. Anne could have driven straight to Haven - the map she'd picked tip at the Avis counter put the mileage at less than fifty - but she wanted to be absolutely fresh for her confrontation with Roberta.

There was a cop at the X-shaped intersection of Hammond and Union Streets - a streetlight was out, which she thought typical of this little running sore of a town -and she stopped halfway across to ask him for directions to the best hotel or motel in town. The cop intended to remonstrate with her for holding up traffic in order to ask for directions, and then the look in her eyes - the warm look of a fire in the brain which has been well-banked and might flare at any time - decided it might be less trouble to give her the directions and get rid of her. This lady looked like a dog the cop had known when he was a kid, a dog who had thought it fine fun to tear the seats from the pants of kids passing on the way to school. That kind of hassle on a day when both the temperature and his ulcer were too hot, he didn't need. He directed her to Cityscape Hotel out on Route 7 and was glad to see the ass end of her, going away.

4

Cityscape Hotel was full.

That was no trouble for sister Anne.

She got herself a double, then bullied the harried manager into giving her another because the air-conditioner in the first rattled and because the color on the TV was so bad, she said, that all the actors looked like they had just eaten shit and would soon die.

She unpacked, masturbated to a grim and cheerless climax with a vibrator nearly the size of one of the mutant carrots in Bobbi's garden (the only climaxes she had were of the grim and cheerless type; she'd never been with a man in bed and never intended to), showered, napped, then went to dinner. She scanned the menu with a darkening frown, then bared her teeth in a spitless grin at the waiter who came to take her order.

'Bring me a bunch of vegetables. Raw, leafy vegetables.'

'Madame wants a sal - '

'Madame wants a bunch of raw, leafy vegetables. I don't give a shit what you call them. Just wash them first to get the bugpiss off. And bring me a sombrero right now.'

'Yes, madame,' the waiter said, licking his lips. People were looking at them. A few smiled ... but those who got a look at Anne Anderson's eyes soon stopped. The waiter started away and she called him back, her voice loud and even and undeniable.

'A sombrero,' she said, 'has Kahlua and cream in it. Cream. If you bring me a sombrero with milk in it, chum, you're going to be shampooing with the motherfucker.'

The waiter's Adam's apple went up and down like a monkey on a stick. He tried to summon the sort of aristocratic, pitying smile which is a good waiter's chief weapon against vulgar customers. To do him full credit, he got a pretty good start on that smile - then Anne's lips curved up in a grin that froze it dead. There was no good nature in that grin. There was something like murder in it.

'I mean it, chum,' sister Anne said softly. The waiter believed her.

5

She was back in her room at seven-thirty. She undressed, put on a robe, and sat looking out the fourth-story window. In spite of its name, Cityscape Hotel was actually far out on Bangor's outskirts. The view Anne looked out on was, except for the lights in the small parking lot, one of almost unalloyed darkness. That was exactly the sort of view she liked.

There were amphetamine capsules in her purse. Anne took one of them out, opened it, poured the white powder onto the mirror of her compact, made a line with one sensibly short nail, and snorted half of it. Her heart immediately began to jackrabbit in her narrow chest. A flush of color bloomed in her pallid face. She left the rest for the morning. She had begun to use yellowjackets this way shortly after her father's first stroke. Now she found she could not sleep without a snort of this stuff, which was the diametric opposite of a sedative. When she had been a little girl - a very little girl - her mother had once cried at Anne in utter exasperation, 'You're so contrary cheese'd physic ya!'

Anne supposed it had been true then, and that it was true now ... not that her mother would ever dare say it now, of course.

Anne glanced at the phone and then away. Just looking at it made her think of Bobbi, of the way she had refused to come to Father's funeral - not in words but in a cowardly way that was typical of her, by simply refusing to respond to Anne's increasingly urgent efforts to communicate with her * She had called twice during the twenty-four hours following the old bastard's stroke, when it became obvious he was going to snuff it. The phone had not been answered either time.

She called again after her father died - this time at 1:04 on the morning of August 2nd. Some drunk had answered the telephone.

'I'd like Roberta Anderson, please,' Anne said. She stood stiffly at the pay phone in the lobby of Utica Soldiers' Hospital. Her mother sat in a nearby plastic chair, surrounded by endless brothers and endless sisters with their endless Irish potato faces, weeping and weeping and weeping. 'Right now.'

'Bobbi?' the drunk voice at the other end said. 'You want the old boss or the New and Improved Boss?'

'Spare me the bullshit, Gardener. Her father has

'Can't talk to Bobbi now,' the drunk - it was Gardener, all right, she recognized the voice now - broke in. Anne closed her eyes. There was only one piece of phone-related bad manners she hated worse than being broken in upon. 'She's out in the shed with the Dallas Police. They're all getting even Newer and more Improved.'

'You tell her her sister Anne -

Click!

Dry rage turned the sides of her throat to heated flannel. She held the telephone handset away from her and looked at it the way a woman might look at a snake that has bitten her. Her fingernails were white-going-on-purple.

The piece of phone-related bad manners she hated most was being hung up on.

6

She had dialed back at once, but this time, after a long pause, the telephone began to make a weird sirening noise in her ear. She hung up and went over to her weeping mother and her harp relatives.

'Did you get her, Sissy?' her mother asked Anne.

'Yes.'

'What did she say?' Her eyes begged Anne for good news. 'Did she say she'd come home for the funeral?'

'I couldn't get a commitment one way or another,' Anne said, and suddenly all of her fury at Roberta, Roberta who had had the temerity to try and escape, suddenly burst out of her heart - but not in shrillness. Anne would never be still or shrill. That sharklike grin surfaced on her face. The murmuring relatives grew silent and looked at Anne uneasily. Two of the old ladies gripped their rosaries. 'She did say that she was glad the old bastard was dead. Then she laughed. Then she hung up.'

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Paula Anderson clapped her hands to her ears and began to shriek.

7

Anne had had no doubt - at least at first - that Bobbi would be at the funeral. Anne meant for her to be there, and so she would be. Anne always got what she wanted; that made the world nice for her, and that was the way things should be. When Roberta did come, she would be confronted with the lie Anne had told - probably not by their mother, who would be too pathetically glad to see her to mention it (or probably even to remember it), but surely by one of the harp uncles. Bobbi would deny it, so the harp uncle would probably let it go - unless the harp uncle happened to be very drunk which was always a good possibility with Mama's brothers - but they would all remember Anne's statement, not Bobbi's denial.

That was good. Fine, in fact. But not enough. It was time - overtime - that Roberta came home. Not just for the funeral; for good.

She would see to it. Leave it to Sissy.

8

Sleep did not come easy to Anne that night in the Cityscape. Part of it was being in a strange bed; part of it was the dim gabble of TVs from other rooms and the sense of being surrounded by other people, just another bee trying to sleep in just another chamber of this hive where the chambers were square instead of hexagonal; part of it was knowing that tomorrow would be an extremely busy day; most of it, however, was her continuing dull fury at being balked. It was the thing which she hated above all others - it reduced such annoyances as being hung up on to minor piffles. Bobbi had balked her. So far she had balked her utterly and completely, necessitating this stupid trip during what the weather forecasters were calling the worst heatwave to hit New England since 1974.

An hour after her lie about Bobbi to her mother and the harp aunts and uncles, she had tried the phone again, this time from the undertaker's (her mother had long since tottered home, where Anne supposed she would be sitting up with her cunt of a sister Betty, the two of them drinking that shitty claret they liked, wailing over the dead man while they got slopped). She got nothing but that sirening sound again. She called the operator and reported trouble on the line.

'I want you to check it, locate the trouble, and see that it's corrected,' Anne said. 'There's been a death in the family, and I need to reach my sister as soon as possible.'

'Yes, ma'am. If you'll give me the number you're calling from

'I'm calling from the undertaker's,' Anne said. 'I'm going to pick out a coffin for my father and then go to bed. I'll call in the morning. Just make sure my call goes through then, honey.'

She hung up and turned to the undertaker.

'Pine box,' she said. 'Cheapest one you've got.'

'But, Ms Anderson, I'm sure you'll want to think about

'I don't want to think about anything,' Anne barked. She could feel the warning pulses which signaled the onset of one of her frequent migraine headaches. 'Just sell me the cheapest pine box you've got so I can get the f**k out of here. It smells dead.'

'But . . .' The undertaker was entirely flabbergasted now. 'But won't you want to see . . .'

'I'll see it when he's wearing it,' Anne said, drawing her checkbook out of her purse. 'How much?'