It was strong - stronger than it had been the last time he was here. That big piece of cobbled-together equipment
(the transformer)
was glowing brightly. It was cycling, as it had been before, but the cycles were faster now. Thin green fire ran across the silvery road maps of circuit boards.
He looked around. The old man, floating in his green bath, was looking back at Gardener with his one good eye. That gaze was tortured ... but sane.
Use the transformer to save David
'Old man, they are coming for me,' Gardener croaked. 'I'm out of time.'
Corner, far corner.
He looked and saw something that looked a bit like a television antenna, a bit like a large coat-hanger mobile, and a bit like those back-yard devices on which women hang clothes, turning them to do so.
'That?'
Take it out into the dooryard.
Gardener didn't question. There was no time. The thing stood on a small square platform. Gardener supposed its circuits and batteries were in that.
Close-up, he saw that the things which looked like the bent arms of a TV antenna were really narrow steel tubes. He seized the central pole. The thing wasn't heavy, but it was awkward. He was going to have to put some weight on his shattered ankle, like it or not.
He looked back at the tank in which Ev Hillman floated.
You sure about this, old-timer?
But it was the woman who answered. Her eyes opened. Looking into them was like looking into the witches' caldron in Macbeth. For a moment Gard forgot all his pain and weariness and sickness. He was held in thrall by that poisoned gaze. In that instant he understood all the truth and all the power of the fearsome woman Bobbi had called Sissy, and the reason Bobbi had fled from her, as from a fiend. She was a fiend. She was a witch. And even now, in her fearful agony, her hate held.
Take it, you stupid man! I'll run it!
Gardener put his hurt foot down and screamed as a savage hand reached all the way up from his ankle to seize the soft double sac of his testicles.
The old man:
wait wait
It rose on its own. Not far; only an inch or two. The green swamplight brightened even more.
You'll have to guide it, son.
This he was able to manage. It wavered across the green shed like the skeleton of a crazy beach umbrella, nodding and dipping, casting weird elongated shadows on the walls and floor. Gardener hopped clumsily after it, not wanting, not daring, to look back into that insane woman's eyes. Over and over his mind played a single thought: Bobbi Anderson's sister was a witch ... a witch ... a witch . . .
He guided the bobbing umbrella out into the sunlight.
9
Freeman Moss arrived first. He swung the pulp-truck in which Gard had once hitched a ride into Bobbi's dooryard and was out almost before the laboring, farting engine had died. And by Christ, chummy, if the cocksucker wasn't right there, front and center, holding onto something that looked like a woman's clothes whirligig. Man looked like a winded runner. He was holding one of his feet - the left - up, like a dog with a thorn in its paw. That sneaker was bright red, dripping blood.
Looks like Bobbi put at least one good one into you, you snake.
Her murdering pal apparently heard the thought. He looked up and smiled wearily. He was still holding onto the whirligig with the platform stand on the bottom. He was supporting himself on it.
Freeman walked toward him, leaving the driver's door of the old truck hanging open. There was something childlike and winning in the man's grin, and in a moment Freeman understood what it was: with his missing teeth, it was the Halloween punkin grin of a little, boy.
Jesus, I sorta liked you - why'd you have to be such a f**kup?
'What you doing out here, Freeman?' Gardener asked. 'You should have stuck home. Watched the Red Sox. The fence is all whitewashed.'
You sonofawhore!
Moss was wearing a down-filled vest but no shirt beneath; the vest was simply the first thing to come to hand as he rushed out of the house. Now he brushed it aside, revealing not a gimmick or a gadget but a Colt Woodsman, He pulled it out. Gardener stood looking at him, holding the whirligig's post, foot up.
Close your eyes. I'll make it quick. I can do that, at least.
10
(GET DOWN ASSHOLE GET DOWN OR YOU'LL LOSE YOUR HEAD WHEN HE LOSES HIS I DON'T GIVE A TIN SHIT WHO GOES SO GET DOWN IF YOU WANT TO LIVE)
In the tank, Anne Anderson's eyes blazed with stricken hate and fury; her teeth were gone but her bare gums ground together ground together ground together and a trail of small bubbles floated up.
The light pulsed faster and faster, like a carousel speeding up. It became strobelike. The hum rose to a low electric moan, and there was a rich smell of ozone in the shed's air.
On the one lit VDT screen the word
PROGRAM?
was replaced with
DESTROY
It began to flash rapidly, over and over again.
(GET DOWN ASSHOLE OR STAY UP I DON'T CARE WHICH)
11
Gardener ducked. His bad foot hit the ground. Pain leaped up his leg again. He dropped into the dust on his hands and knees.
Over his head, the whirligig began to spin, slowly at first. Moss stared at it, the gun sagging slightly for a moment in his hand. Realization crossed his face during the last instant he still had one. Then the slender pipes spilled green fire into the dooryard. For a moment the beach-umbrella illusion was perfect and complete. It looked exactly like a big green one that has been partially lowered so that its circular hem touches the ground. But this umbrella was made of fire, and Gard crouched below it, eyes squinted, one hand in front of his face, grimacing as if from strong heat ... but there was no heat, at least not here, underneath Sissy's poison toadstool.
Freeman Moss was at the edge of the parasol. His pants blazed up, then the down vest. For a moment the flames were green; then they flared yellow.
He screamed and staggered backward, dropping the gun. Over Gardener's head, the whirligig spun faster. The skeletal metal arms, which had drooped comically downward, were pulled more and more erect by centrifugal force. The parasol's fire-hem bellied outward, and Moss's shoulders and face were enveloped in sheeting flame as he backed away. In Gard's head, that hideous mental wailing began again. He tried to block it out, but there was no way - simply no way. He caught a wavery glimpse of a face running like warm chocolate, then covered his face like a kid at a scary movie.
The flames spun around Bobbi's dooryard in a widening gyre, making a black spiral of dooryard dirt fused into a gritty sort of glass. Moss's pulp-truck and Bobbi's blue pickup were both in the thing's final circumference; the shed was barely beyond it, although its shape danced like a demon in the heat-haze. It was very hot at the edge of the circle, if not where Gard crouched; no doubt of that.
The paint on the hood of Moss's truck and on the sides of the pickup first bubbled, then blackened, then burst into flame, burning down to clean white steel. The litter of bark, sawdust, and woodchips in the back of Moss's truck blazed up like dry kindling in a woodstove. The two big trash-barrels in Bobbi's pickup, made of heavy pressed gypsum, also caught fire and burned like sconces. The dark circle at the edge of the fire-parasol's range became a brand in the shape of a saucer. The army blanket covering the torn seat in the cab of Moss's truck sprang alight, then the seat-covers beneath, then the tindery stuffing; now the entire cab was flickery furnace orange, with the skeletons of springs peering up through the glare.
Freeman Moss staggered backward, twisting and turning, looking like a movie stuntman who has forgotten his flame-suit. He collapsed.
12
Even overmastering Moss's dying screams, Anne Anderson's mental cry:
Eat shit and die! Eat shit and d
Then, suddenly, something let go in whatever remained of her - there was a final brilliant flare of green light, a sustained pulse that lasted nearly two seconds. The heavy hum of the transformer rose a notch, and every board in the shed picked it up and rattled in sympathetic vibration.
Then the hum dropped back to its former sleepy drone; Anne's head slumped forward in the liquid, her hair trailing like that of a drowned woman. On the computer screen,
DESTROY
winked out like a blown candle and became
PROGRAM?
again.
13
The fiery parasol wavered, then disappeared. The whirligig, which had been spinning at a mad rate, began to slow, squeaking rhythmically, like an unlatched gate in a mild breeze. The pipes sank back to their former angle. It squeaked once more, then stopped.
The gas tank of Bobbi's truck suddenly exploded. More yellow flames shouted at the sky. Gard felt a piece of metal whiz by him.
He raised his head and stared stupidly at the blazing truck, thinking: Bobbi and I used to go to the Starlite Drive-In over in Derry in that truck sometimes. I think we even got laid there once during some stupid Ryan O'Neal picture. What happened? Lord, what happened?
In his mind, the old man's voice, almost exhausted, but somehow imperative:
Quick! I can power the transformer when the rest come, but you got to be quick! The boy! David! Quick, man!
Not much time, Gardener thought wearily. Jesus, there never is.
He started back toward the open door of the shed, sweating, cheeks waxy-pale. He paused at that dark burned ring in the dirt, and then hopped clumsily over it. He somehow didn't want to touch it. He tottered on the edge of balance and then managed to hop on. As he made his way back inside the shed, the twin gas tanks of Moss's truck went up with a furious roar. The cab tore free of the body. The truck flipped over on its side like a tiddlywink. Burning chunks of seat-cover and seat-stuffing began to float out of the open passenger window and floated upward like blazing feathers. Most fell back into the dooryard and went out. A few, however, wafted their way over to the porch, and three or four actually floated through the open door on the first faint puff of the easterly wind which would soon come up. One of these burning cotton puffs alighted on a paperback novel which Gardener had left on the table just inside the door a week ago. The cover caught on fire.
In the living room, another burning fragment of seat-stuffing lit up a rag rug which Mrs Anderson had made in her bedroom and sent surreptitiously to Bobbi one day when Anne was gone.
When Jim Gardener came out of the shed again, the entire house was on fire.
14
The light in the shed was at its lowest level ever - a dim and watery green the color of stagnant pond-water.
Gardener looked cautiously toward Anne, afraid of those blazing eyes. But there was nothing to be afraid of. She only floated, head bent forward as if in deep thought, her hair trailing upward.
She's dead, son. If you're going to get the boy, it has to be now. I don't know how long I can provide the power. And I can't be divided, with half of myself looking out for them and half running the transformer.
He stared out at Gardener, and Gard felt deep pity ... and admiration for the old bastard's brute courage. Could he have done half as much, gone half as far, if their positions had been reversed? He doubted it.
You're in a lot of pain, aren't you?
I ain't exactly feeling in the pink, son, if that's what you mean. But I'll get through it ... if you get going, that is.
Get going. Yes. He had dilly-dallied too long, far too long.
His mouth popped open in another wrenching yawn, and then he stepped toward the equipment in and around that orange crate - what the old man called the transformer.
PROGRAM?
the keyless computer screen beckoned.
Hillman could have told Gardener what to do, but Gardener didn't need to be told. He knew. He also remembered the nosebleed and the blast of sound he'd taken as a result of his single experiment with Moss's levitation gadget. This made that thing look like a box of Lincoln Logs. Still, he had gone quite a ways down the path to 'becoming' himself since then, like it or not. He would just have to hope it was enou
Oh shit, son, hold the phone, we got company
Then a louder voice overrode Hillman's, a voice Gard vaguely recognized but could not put a name to.
(BACK OFF BACK OFF HOLD ON ALL OF YOU)
Just 1 think just one or maybe two
That was the old man's exhausted mental voice again. Gardener felt his concentration go out to the whirligig in the dooryard. In the shed, the light began to grow bright once more, and the killing pulses began.