The Tommyknockers

9

He lay awake a long time, waiting for them to come out again, waiting to see if he had been discovered.

All right, I can try to put a stop to the 'becoming,' he thought. But it won't work unless I actually can go inside the ship. Can I do that?

He didn't know. Bobbi seemed to have no worries, but Bobbi and the others were different now. Oh, he himself was also 'becoming'; the lost teeth proved that, the ability to hear thoughts did, too. He had changed the words on the computer screen just by thinking them. But there was no use kidding himself: he was far behind the competition. If Bobbi survived the entry into the ship and her old buddy Gard dropped dead, would any of them, even Bobbi herself, spare a tear? He didn't think so.

Maybe that's what they all want. Bobbi included. For you to go into the ship and just fall over with your brains exploding in one big harmonic radio transmission. It would save Bobbi the moral pain of taking care of you herself, for one thing. Murder without tears.

That they intended to get rid of him, he no longer doubted. But he thought maybe that Bobbi - the old Bobbi - would let him live long enough to see the interior of the strange thing they had worked so long to dig up. That at least felt right. And in the end, it didn't matter. If murder was what Bobbi was planning, there was no real defense, was there? He had to go into the ship. Unless he did that, his idea, crazy as it undoubtedly was, had no chance to work at all.

Have to try, Gard.

He had intended to try as soon as they were inside, and that would probably be tomorrow morning. Now he thought that maybe he ought to press his luck a little further. If he went according to the rag and a bone he supposed he had to call his 'original plan,' there would be no way he could do anything about that little boy. The kid would have to come first.

Gard, he's probably dead anyway.

Maybe. But the old man didn't think so; the old man thought there was still a little boy left to save.

One kid doesn't matter - not in the face of all this. You know it, too - Haven is like a great big nuclear reactor that's ready to go red-line. The containment is melting. To coin a phrase.

It was logical, but it was a croupier's logic. Ultimately, killer logic. Ted the Power Man Logic. If he wanted to play the game that way, why even bother?

The kid matters or nothing matters.

And maybe this way he could even save Bobbi. He didn't think so; he thought Bobbi had gone too far for salvation. But he could try.

Long odds, Gard ole Gard.

Sure. The clock's at a minute to midnight ... we're down to counting seconds.

Thinking that, he slipped into the blankness of sleep. This was followed by nightmares where he floated in a clear green bath, tethered by thick coaxial cables. He was trying to scream but he couldn't, because the cables were coming out of his mouth.
Chapter 5. The Scoop

1

Entombed in the overdecorated confines of the Bounty Tavern, drinking buck-a-bottle Heinekens and laughed at by David Bright, who had sunk to vulgar depths of humor - who had even ended up comparing John Leandro to Superman's pal Jimmy Olson, Leandro had wavered. No use telling himself otherwise. He had, indeed, wavered. But men of vision have always had to endure barbs of ridicule, and not a few have been burned or crucified or had their height artificially extended by five or six inches on the Inquisitorial rack of pain for their visions. Having David Bright ask him over beers in the Bounty if his Secret Wristwatch was in good working order was hardly the worst thing that could have befallen him.

But oh shit it hurt.

John Leandro determined that David Bright, and anyone else to whom Bright had related Crazy Johnny's ideas that Something Big Was Going on in Haven, would end up laughing on the other side of his or her face. Because something big was going on there. He felt it in every bone in his body. There were days, when the wind was blowing from the southeast, that he almost imagined he could smell it.

His vacation had begun the previous Friday. He had hoped to go down to Haven that very day. But he lived with his widowed mother, and she had been counting so on him running her up to Nova Scotia to see her sister, she said, but if John had commitments, why, she understood; after all, she was old and probably not much fun anymore; just someone to cook his meals and wash his underwear, and that was fine, you go on, Johnny, go on and hunt up your scoop, I'll just call Megan on the telephone, maybe in a week or two your cousin Alfie will bring her down here to see me, Alfie's so good to his mother, et cetera, et cetera, ibid., ibid., ad infinitum, ad infinitum.

On Friday, Leandro took his mother to Nova Scotia. Of course they stayed over, and by the time they got back to Bangor, Saturday was shot. Sunday was a bad day to begin anything, what with his Sunday-school class of first-and-second graders at nine, full worship services at ten, and Young Men for Christ in the Methodist rectory at five P.m. At the YMC meeting, a special speaker gave them a slide-show on Armageddon. As he explained to them how unrepenting sinners would be inflicted with boils and running sores and ailments of the bowels and the intestines, Georgina Leandro and the other members of the Ladies' Aid passed out paper cups of Za-Rex and oatmeal cookies. And during the evening there was always a songfest for Christ in the church basement.

Sundays always left him feeling exalted. And exhausted.

2

So it was Monday, the 15th of August before Leandro finally tossed his yellow legal pads, his Sony tape recorder, his Nikon and a gadget-bag filled with film and various lenses, into the front seat of his used Dodge and prepared to set out for Haven ... and what he hoped would be journalistic glory. He would not have been appalled if he had known he was approaching ground-zero of what was shortly to become the biggest story since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The day was calm and blue and mellow - very warm but not so savagely hot and humid as the last few days had been. It was a day everyone on earth would mark forever in his memory. Johnny Leandro had wanted a story, but he had never heard the old proverb that goes, 'God says take what you want ... and pay for it.'

He only knew that he had stumbled onto the edge of something, and when he tried to wiggle it, it remained firm ... which meant it was maybe bigger than one might at first think. There was no way he was going to walk away from this; he intended to excavate. All the David Brights in the world with their smart cracks about Jimmy Olson wristwatches and Fu Manchu could not stop him.

He put the Dodge in drive and began to roll away from the curb.

'Don't forget your lunch, Johnny!' his mother called. She came puffing down the walk with a brown-paper sack in one hand. Large grease spots were already forming on the brown paper; since grade school, Leandro's favorite sandwich had been bologna, slices of Bermuda onion, and Wesson Oil.

'Thanks, Mom,' he said, leaning over to take the bag and put it down on the floor. 'You didn't have to do that, though. I could have picked up a hamburger - '

'If I've told you once I've told you a thousand times,' she said, 'you have no business going into those roadside luncheonettes, Johnny. You never know if the kitchen's dirty or clean.

'Microbes,' she said ominously, leaning forward.

'Ma, I got to g - '

'You can't see microbes at all,' Mrs Leandro went on. She was not to be turned from her subject until she had had her say on it.

'Yes, Mom,' Leandro said, resigned.

'Some of those places are just havens for microbes,' she said. 'The cooks may not be clean, you know. They may not wash their hands after leaving the lavatory. They may have dirt or even excrement under their nails. This isn't anything I want to discuss, you understand, but sometimes a mother has to instruct her son. Food in places like that can make a person very, very sick.'

'Mom - '

She uttered a long-suffering laugh and dabbed momentarily at the corner of one eye with her apron. 'Oh, I know, your mother is silly, just a silly old woman with a lot of funny old ideas, and she probably ought to just learn to shut up.'

Leandro recognized this for the manipulative trick it was, but it still always made him feel squirmy, guilty, about eight years old.

'No, Mom,' he said. 'I don't think that at all.'

'I mean, you are the big newsman, I just sit home and make your bed and wash your clothes and air out your bedroom if you get the farts from drinking too much beer.'

Leandro bent his head, said nothing, and waited to be released.

'But do this for me. Stay out of roadside luncheonettes, Johnny, because you can get sick. From microbes.'

'I promise, Mom.'

Satisfied that she had extracted a promise from him, she was now willing to let him go.

'You'll be home for supper?'

'Yes,' Leandro said, not knowing any better.

'At six?' she persisted.

'Yes! Yes!'

'I know, I know, I'm just a silly old ...'

'Bye, Mom!' he said hastily, and pulled away from the curb.

He looked in the rearview mirror and saw her standing at the end of the walk, waving. He waved back, then dropped his hand, hoping she would go back into the house ... and knowing better. When he made a right turn two blocks down and his mother was finally gone, Leandro felt a faint but unmistakable lightening of his heart. Rightly or wrongly, he always felt this way when his mom finally dropped out of sight.

3

In Haven, Bobbi Anderson was showing Jim Gardener some modified breathing apparatus. Ev Hillman would have recognized it; the respirators looked very similar to the one he had picked up for the cop, Butch Dugan. But that one had been to protect Dugan from the Haven air; the respirators Bobbi was demonstrating drew on reserves of just that - Haven air was what they were used to, and Haven air was what the two of them would breathe if they got inside the Tommyknockers' ship. It was nine-thirty.

At that same time, in Derry, John Leandro had pulled over to the side of the road not far from the place where the gutted deer and the cruiser requisitioned to officers Rhodes and Gabbons had been found. He thumbed open the glove compartment to check on the Smith&Wesson .38 he had picked up in Bangor the week before. He took it out for a moment, not putting his forefinger anywhere near the trigger even though he knew it was unloaded. He liked the compact way the gun fitted his palm, its weight, the feeling of simple power it somehow conveyed. But it also made him feel a trifle skittery, as if he might have torn off a chunk of something that was far too big for the likes of him to chew.

A chunk of what?

He wasn't quite sure. Some sort of strange meat.

Microbes, his mother's voice spoke up in his mind. Food in places like that can make a person very, very sick.

He checked to make sure the carton of bullets was still in the glove compartment, then put the gun back. He guessed that transporting a handgun in the glove compartment of a motor vehicle was probably against the law (he thought again of his mother, this time without even realizing he was doing so). He could imagine a cop pulling him over for something routine, asking to see his registration, and getting a glimpse of the .38 when Leandro opened the glove compartment. That was the way the murderers always got caught on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which he and his mother watched every Saturday night on the cable station that showed it. It would also be a scoop of a different sort: BANGOR 'DAILY NEWS' REPORTER ARRESTED ON ILLEGAL WEAPONS CHARGE.

Well then, take your registration out of the glove compartment and put it in your wallet, if you're so worried.

But he wouldn't do that. The idea made perfect sense, but it also seemed like buying trouble ... and that voice of reason sounded altogether too much like the voice of Mother, warning him about microbes or instructing him (as she had when he was a boy) on the horrors which might result if he forgot to put paper all over the ring of a public toilet before sitting on it.

Leandro drove on instead, aware that his heart was beating a little too fast, and that he felt just a little sweatier than the heat of the day could explain.

Something big ... some days I can almost smell it.

Yes. Something was out there, all right. The death of the McCausland woman (a furnace explosion in July? oh really?); the disappearance of the investigating troopers; the suicide of the cop who had supposedly been in love with her. And before any of those things, there had been the disappearance of the little boy. David Bright had said David Brown's grandfather had been spouting a lot of crazy nonsense about telepathy and magic tricks that really worked.

I only wish you'd come to me instead of Bright, Mr Hillman, Leandro thought for perhaps the fiftieth time.

Except now Hillman had disappeared. Hadn't been back to his rooming house in over two weeks. Hadn't been back to Derry Home Hospital to visit his grandson, although the nurses had had to boot him out nights before. The official state-police line was that Ev Hillman hadn't disappeared, but that was catch-22 because a legal adult couldn't disappear in the eyes of the law until another legal adult actually so reported that person, filling out the proper forms in consequence. So all was jake in the eyes of the law. All was far from jake in the eyes of John Leandro. Hillman's landlady in Derry had told him that the old man had stiffed her for sixty bucks - as far as Leandro had been able to find out, it was the first unpaid bill the old guy had left in his life.

Something big ... strange meat.

Nor was that all of the weirdness emanating out of Haven these days. A fire, also in July, had killed a couple on the Nista Road. This month a doctor piloting a small plane had crashed and burned. That had happened in Newport, true, but the FAA controller at BIA had confirmed that the unfortunate doc had overflown Haven, and at an illegally low altitude. Phone service in Haven had begun to get oddly glitchy. Sometimes people could get through, sometimes they couldn't. He had sent to the Augusta Bureau of Taxation for a list of Haven voters (paying the required fee of six dollars to get the nine computer sheets), and had managed to trace relatives of nearly sixty of these Havenites - relatives living in Bangor, Derry, and surrounding areas - in his spare time.

He couldn't find one - not one - who had seen his or her Haven relations since July 10th or so ... over a month before. Not one.

Of course, a lot of those he interviewed didn't find this strange at all. Some of them weren't on good terms with their Haven relations and couldn't care less if they didn't hear from or see them in the next six months ... or six years. Others seemed first surprised, then thoughtful when Leandro pointed out the length of the lapse they were talking about. Of course, summer was an active season for most people. Time passed with a light easiness that winter knew nothing about. And, of course, they had spoken to Aunt Mary or Brother Bill a time or two on the phone -sometimes you couldn't get through, but mostly you could.

There were other suspicious similarities in the testimony of the people

Leandro interviewed, similarities that had made his nose flare with the smell of something decidedly off:

Ricky Berringer was a house-painter in Bangor. His older brother, Newt, was a carpenter-contractor who also happened to be a Haven selectman. 'We invited Newt up for dinner near the end of July,' Ricky said, 'but he said he had the flu.'

Don Blue was a Derry realtor. His Aunt Sylvia, who lived in Haven, had been in the habit of coming up to take dinner with Don and his wife every Sunday or so. The last three Sundays she had begged off - once with the flu (flu seems to be going around in Haven, Leandro thought, nowhere else, you understand - just in Haven), and the other times because it was so hot she just didn't feel like traveling. After further questioning Blue realized it had been more like five Sundays since his aunt had favored them - and maybe as many as six.

Bill Spruce kept a herd of dairy cows in Cleaves Mills. His brother Frank kept a herd in Haven. They usually got together every week or two, merging two extremely large families for a few hours - the clan Spruce would eat tons of barbecue, drink gallons of beer and Pepsi-Cola, and Frank and Bill would sit either at the picnic table in Frank's back yard or on the front porch of Bill's house and compare notes about what they simply called the Business. Bill admitted it had been a month or more since he'd seen Frank - there had been some problem first with his feed supplier, Frank had told him, then with the milk inspectors. Bill, meanwhile, had had a few problems of his own. Half a dozen of his holsteins had died during this last hot-spell. And, he added as an afterthought, his wife had had a heart attack. He and his brother just hadn't had time to visit much this summer ... but the man had still expressed unfeigned surprise when Leandro dragged out his wallet calendar and the two of them figured out just how long it had been: the two brothers hadn't gotten together since June 30th. Spruce whistled and tilted his cap back on his head. 'Gorry, that is a long time,' he had said. 'Guess I'll have to take a ride down Haven and see Frank, now that my Evelyn's on the mend.'

Leandro said nothing, but some of the other testimony he had gathered over the last couple of weeks made him think that Bill Spruce might find a trip like that hazardous to his health.

'Felt like I was dine,' Alvin Rutledge told Leandro. Rutledge was a long-haul trucker, currently unemployed, who lived in Bangor. His grandfather was Dave Rutledge, a lifelong Haven resident.

'What exactly do you mean?' Leandro asked.

Alvin Rutledge looked at the young reporter shrewdly. 'Another beer'd go down good just about now,' he said. They were sitting in Nan's Tavern in Bangor. 'Talkin's amazin' dusty work, chummy.'

'Isn't it,' Leandro said, and told the waitress to draw two.

Rutledge took a deep swallow when it came, wiped foam from his upper lip with the heel of his hand, and said: 'Heart beatin' too fast. Headache. Felt like I was gonna puke my guts out. I did puke, as a matter of fact. Just 'fore I turned around. Rolled down the window and just let her fly into the slipstream, I did.'

'Wow,' Leandro said, since some remark seemed called for. The image of Rutledge 'letting her fly into the slipstream' flapped briefly in his mind. He dismissed it. At least, he tried.

'And looka here.'

He rolled back his upper lip, revealing the remains of his teeth.

'Ooo see a ho in funt?' Rutledge asked. Leandro saw a good many holes in front, but thought it might not be politic to say so. He simply agreed. Rutledge nodded and let his lip fall back into place. It was something of a relief.

'Teeth never have been much good,' Rutledge said indifferently. 'When I get workin' again and can afford me a good set of dentures, I'm gonna have all of 'em jerked. Fuck em. Point is, I had my two front teeth there on top before I headed up to Haven week before last to check on Gramp. Hell, they wasn't even loose.'

'They fell out when you started to get close to Haven?'

'Didn't fall out,' Rutledge finished his beer. 'I puked 'em out.'

'Oh,' Leandro had replied faintly.

'You know, another brew'd go down good. Talkin's

'Thirsty work, I know,' Leandro said, signaling the waitress. He was over his limit, but he found he could use another one himself.