The Tommyknockers

  "It says a quarter to ten."

  "Oh," Kyle said. Sweat suddenly turned his face oily. He took out his handkerchief and mopped it. "Oh shit. What do we do now?"

  "Ad-lib," Hazel said calmly.

  "Bitch!" Andy cried. "I'd kill her if she wadn't already dead!"

  "Everyone in town loved her, and you know it, Andy," Hazel said.

  "Yeah. And I hope the devil's toasting her with a long fork down in hell." Andy switched the gadget off.

  Henry's grandmother disappeared. Hazel was relieved. There was something a little ghastly about seeing that hatchet-faced woman floating in perfect 3-D above Henry's field, with the cows--which should have been stabled long ago--sometimes wandering through her as they grazed, or disappearing casually through the large old-fashioned brooch the woman wore at her high-necked collar.

  "It's going to be fine," Bobbi Anderson said suddenly in the quiet, and everyone--including Christina Lindley back in town--heard, and was relieved.

  3

  "Take me to my house," she said to Bobby Tremain. "Quick. I know what to do."

  "You're there." He took her arm and began pulling her toward the door.

  "Hold it," she said.

  "Huh?"

  "Don't you think I better"

  bring the photograph? she finished.

  Oh shit!Bobby said, and slapped his forehead.

  4

  Dick Allison, meanwhile, who was chief of Haven's volunteer fire department, was sitting in his office sweating bullets in spite of the air-conditioning, fielding telephone calls. The first was from the Troy constable, the second from the Unity chief of police, the third from the state police, the fourth from AP.

  He probably would have been sweating anyway, but one of the reasons the air-conditioning wasn't doing him any good was his door had been blown off its hinges by the force of the blast. Most of the plaster had fallen off the walls, revealing lathing like decayed ribs. He sat in the middle of the wreckage and told his callers that it sure had been a hell of a bang, and it looked as if they probably had had one fatality, but it was nowhere near as bad as it had probably sounded. While he was rolling out this bullshit for the guy from the Bangor Daily News named John Leandro, a cork ceiling panel fell on his head. Dick slashed it aside with a wolfish snarl, listened, laughed, and said it was just the bulletin board. Goddam thing had fallen over again. It just had those sucker things on the back, you know, well, if you bought cheap you got cheap, his mother had always told him, and ...

  It took another five minutes, but he finally bored Leandro off the phone. As he put his own telephone back in the cradle, most of the hallway ceiling outside his door fell with a powdery crrrumpp!

  "MOTHER-FUCKING-COCK-SUCKING-SON-OF-A-FUCKING BITCH!" Dick Allison screamed, and brought his left fist down on his desk as hard as he could. Although he broke all four fingers, he didn't even notice in his raving fury. If, at that moment, anyone had come into his office, Allison would have ripped that person's throat open, filled his mouth with hot blood, and then sprayed it back into the dying person's face. He screamed and swore and even drummed his feet up and down on the floor like a child doing a tantrum because he has been denied an outing.

  He looked childish.

  He also looked extremely dangerous.

  Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

  5

  In between phone calls, Dick went into Hazel's office, found the Midol in her drawer, and took six. Then he wrapped his throbbing, swelling hand tightly and forgot it. If he had still been human, this would have been impossible; one does not simply forget four broken fingers. But since then he had "become." One of the things that included was becoming able to exercise conscious will over pain.

  It came in handy.

  In between his conversations with the outside--and sometimes during them--Dick spoke to the men and women working furiously at Henry Applegate's. He told them he expected a couple of state cops by four-thirty, five o'clock at the latest. Could they have the slide-projector ready by then? When Hazel explained the problem, Dick began to rave again, this time with fear as well as anger. When Hazel explained what Christina Lindley was up to, he calmed ... a little. She had a home darkroom. There she would carefully make a negative of the Yankee picture and enlarge it slightly, not because it needed to be bigger for the slide-projector device to work (and too much enlarging would give their clock-tower illusion an odd, grainy look), but because she needed a slightly bigger image to work with.

  She's going to turn a negative, Hazel said in his mind, then airbrush out the hands on the clock-face. Bobby Tremain is going to put them back in with an X-acto knife, so they say 3:05. He's got a steady hand and a little talent. Right now a steady hand seems more important.

  I thought if you made a negative from a positive, it came out blurry, Dick Allison said. Specially if the positive's color.

  She's improved her developing equipment, Hazel said. She didn't need to add that seventeen-year-old Christina Lindley now had what was probably the most advanced darkroom on earth.

  So how long?

  Midnight, she thinks, Hazel said.

  Christ on a pony! Dick shouted, loud enough to make the people in Henry's field wince.

  We'll need about thirty D-cells, Bobbi Anderson's voice cut in calmly. Be a love and see to that, Dick. And we understand about the police. Play Hee-Haw for them, you understand?

  He paused. Yes, he said. Buck and Roy, Junior Samples.

  Exactly. And hold them. It's their radio I'm really worried about, not them--they'll only send one unit, two at most, to start with. But if they see ... if they radio it in ...

  There was a murmur of assent like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell.

  Is there a way you can damp out their transmissions from town? Bobbi asked.

  I--

  Andy Baker suddenly cut in, gleeful: I got a better idea. Get Buck Peters to shuck his fat ass over to the gas station right now.

  Yes! Bobbi overrode him, her thought shrill with excitement. Good! Great! And when they leave town, someone ... Beach, I think ...

  Beach was honored to be chosen.

  6

  Bent Rhodes and Jingles Gabbons of the Maine State Police arrived in Haven at five-fifteen. They came expecting to find the smoky, uninteresting aftermath of a furnace explosion--one old pumper-truck idling at the curb, twenty or thirty onlookers idling on the sidewalk. Instead, they found the entire Haven town-hall clock-tower blown off like a Roman candle. Bricks littered the street, windows were blown out, there were dismembered dolls everywhere ... and too damned many people going about their business.

  Dick Allison greeted them with weird cordiality, as if this was a Republican bean supper instead of what now looked like a disaster of real magnitude.

  "Christ Almighty, man, what happened here?" Bent asked him.

  "Well, I guess maybe it was a little worse than I made out over the phone," Dick said, surveying the brick-littered street and then giving the two troopers an incongruous ain't-I-a-bad-boy? smile. "Guess I didn't think anyone would believe it unless they saw it."

  Jingles muttered, "I'm seeing it and I don't believe it." They had both dismissed Dick Allison as a small-town bumbler, probably crazy in the bargain. That was all right. He stood behind them, watching them stare at the wreckage. The smile faded gradually from his face and his expression became cold.

  Rhodes spotted the human arm amid all the tiny make-believe limbs. When he turned back to Dick, his face was whiter than it had been, and he looked considerably younger.

  "Where's Mrs. McCausland?" he asked. His voice rose uncontrollably and broke on the last syllable.

  "Well, you know, I think that might be part of our problem," Dick began. "You see--"

  7

  Dick did hold them in town as long as he could without being conspicuous about it. It was a quarter to eight before they left, and by then twilight was drawing down. Also, Dick knew, if they didn't leave soon, they would start w
ondering how come none of the backup units they had requested were arriving.

  They had both talked on their cruiser's radio to Derry Base, and both hung the mike up again looking puzzled and distracted. The responses they were getting from the other end were right; it was the voice that seemed a little off. But neither of them could be bothered with such a minor matter, at least not for the time being. There were too many other things to cope with. The magnitude of the accident, for one thing. The fact that they had known the victim, for another. Trying to lay the groundwork of a potentially big case without committing any of the procedural fuckups that would muddy the waters later on, for a third.

  Also, they were beginning to feel the effects of being in Haven.

  They were like men applying vinyl seal to a big wooden floor in a room with no ventilation, getting stoned without even knowing it. They weren't healing thoughts--it was too early for that and they would be gone before it could happen--but they were feeling very strange. It was slowing them down, making ordinary routine something they had to fight their way through.

  Dick Allison got all this from their minds as he sat across the street drinking a cup of coffee in the Haven Lunch. Ayuh, they were too busy and too screwed-up to think about the fact that

  (Tug Ellender)

  their dispatcher didn't exactly sound like himself tonight. The reason why was very simple. They weren't talking to Tug Ellender. They were talking to Buck Peters; their radio transmissions were not going to and coming from Derry but to and from the garage of Elt Barker's Shell, where Buck Peters was hunched, sweating, over a microphone, with Andy Baker beside him. Buck sent out fresh instructions and information on Andy's radio (a little something he had scrambled together in his spare time, a little something that could have contacted life on Uranus, had there been any goodbuddies up there to send back a big ten-four). Several townspeople were concentrating hard on the minds of Bent Rhodes and Jingles Gabbons. They relayed to Buck everything they were able to pick up about Ellender, from whom the cops just naturally expected to hear. Buck Peters had some natural mimicry (he was a great hit doing whoever happened to be President that year, plus such favorites as Jimmy Cagney and John Wayne, at each year's Grange Stage Spectacular). He was not Rich Little, never would be, but when he "did" somebody, you knew who it was. Usually.

  More important, the listeners were able to relay to Buck how he should respond to each transmission, since almost every speaker knows in his own mind what response he expects to get from his questions or statements. If Bent and Jingles bought the impersonation--and to a large extent they really did--it wasn't so much due to Buck's talents as to their own fulfilled expectations in "Tug's" replies. Andy had further been able to blur Buck's voice by overlaying some static--not as much as they would hear on their way back to Derry, but enough so that "Tug's" voice grew a little blurred whenever that oddness

  (Jesus that doesn't sound like Tug much at all I wonder does he have a cold)

  surfaced in one of their minds.

  At a quarter past seven, when Beach brought him a fresh cup of coffee. Dick asked: "You all set?"

  "Sure am."

  "And you're sure that gadget will work?"

  "It works fine ... want to see it?" Beach was almost fawning.

  "No. There isn't time. What about the deer? You got that?"

  "Ayuh. Bill Elderly kilt it and Dave Rutledge dressed it out."

  "That's good. Get going."

  "Okay, Dick." Beach took off his apron and hung it on a nail behind the counter. He turned over the sign which hung above the door, from OPEN to CLOSED. Ordinarily it would just have hung there, but tonight, because the glass was broken, it stirred and twisted in the mild breeze.

  Beach paused and looked back at Dick with narrow, sunken anger.

  "She wasn't supposed to do nothing like that," he said.

  Dick shrugged. It didn't matter; it was done. "She's gone. That's the important thing. The kids are doing fine with that picture. As for Ruth ... there's no one else like her in town."

  "There's that fellow out at the old Garrick place."

  "He's drunk all the time. And he wants to dig it up. Go on, Beach. They'll be leaving soon, and we want it to happen as far out of the village as you can make it happen."

  "Okay, Dick. Be careful."

  Dick smiled. "We all got to be careful now. This is touchy. "

  He watched Beach get into his truck and back out of the space in front of the Haven Lunch that had been that old Chevy's home for the last twelve years. As the truck started up the street, Beach driving slowly and weaving to avoid the litters of broken glass, Dick could see the shape under the tarp in the truck's bed, and, near the back, something else, wrapped in a sheet of heavy plastic. The biggest deer Bill Elderly had been able to find on such short notice. Deer hunting was most definitely against the law during July in the State of Maine.

  When Beach's pickup was out of sight (MAKE LOVE NOT WAR BE READY FOR BOTH NRA, the bumper sticker on the tailgate read), Dick turned back to the counter and picked up his coffee cup. As always Beach's coffee was strong and good. He needed that. Dick was more than tired; he was worn out. Although there was still good light left in the sky and although he had always been the sort of person who found it impossible to go to sleep until the National Anthem had played on the last available TV channel, all he wanted now was his own bed. This had been a tense, frightening day, and it wouldn't be over until Beach reported in. Nor would the mess Ruth McCausland had succeeded in making be cleaned up when the two cops were erased. They could hide a lot of things, but not the simple fact that those cops had been on their way back from Haven, where another cop (just a town constable, true, but a cop was a cop, and this one had once been married to a State Bear, just to add to the fun) had been erased from the equation.

  All of which meant that the fun was just beginning.

  "If you call it fun," Dick said sourly to no one in particular. "Be dogfucked if I do." The coffee began to burn with acid indigestion in Dick's stomach. He went on drinking it anyway.

  Outside, a powerful motor roared. Dick swiveled around on his stool and watched the cops drive out of town, the flashers on top of their cruiser swinging blue light and black shadow on the wreckage.

  8

  Christina Lindley and Bobby Tremain stood side by side, watching the blank sheet in the developing bath, neither of them breathing as they waited for the image to come or not come.

  Little by little, it did.

  There was the Haven town-hall clock-tower. In living, true color. And the hands of the clock stood at 3:05.

  Bobby let out his breath in a low, slow exhalation. Perfect, he said.

  Not quite, Christina said. There's one more thing.

  He turned to her, apprehensive. What? What's wrong?

  Nothing. Everything's right. It's just that there's one more thing we have to do.

  She was not ugly, but because she wore glasses and her hair was mouse-brown, she had always considered herself ugly. She was seventeen and had never been on a date. Now none of that seemed to matter. She unzipped her skirt and pushed it, her rayon half-slip, and her cotton panties, both bought at the discount store in Derry, down. She stepped out of them and carefully took the wet photograph from the developing bath. She stood on tiptoe to hang it up, smooth buttocks flexing. Then she turned to him, legs spread.

  I need doing.

  He took her standing up. Against the wall. When her hymen burst, she bit his shoulder hard enough to bring blood from him, as well. And when they came together, they did it snarling and clawing and it was very, very good.

  Just like old times, Bobby thought as he drove them out to the Applegate place, and wondered exactly what he meant by that.

  Then he decided it really didn't matter anyway.

  9

  Beach got his Chevy pickup to a creaky sixty-five--as fast as it would go. One of the few things he hadn't gotten around to overhauling with his fantastic new knowledge was the old bomber
. But he hoped it would get him as far as he needed to go tonight, and Old Betsy came through for him again.

  When he had gotten over the Troy town line without hearing them or seeing any sign of their flashers behind him, he eased the truck back to fifty-five (with some relief; it had been on the edge of overheating), and when he got into Newport he dropped back to forty-five. Dark was coming on hard by then.

  He was over the Derry town line and just starting to worry that the frigging cops had gone back some other way--it seemed unlikely, since this was the quickest way, but Jesus, where were they?--when he heard the low mutter of their thoughts.

  He pulled over and sat quietly for a moment, head cocked, eyes half-closed, listening, making sure. His mouth, oddly infirm and puckered with most of the teeth gone, was the mouth of a much older man. It was something about

  (freckles)

  Ruth. It was them, all right. The thought came clearer

  (you could see the freckles right through the blood)

  and Beach nodded. It was them, all right. They were coming along fast. He'd have time, but only if he hustled.

  Beach drove another quarter of a mile up the road, rounded a curve, and saw the last long stretch of Route 3 between here and Derry. He turned his pickup sideways, blocking the road. Then he removed the tarp from the rifle-thing in back, fingers plucking nervously at hayrope knots as their voices grew stronger, stronger, stronger in his head.

  When their lights splashed the trees on this side of the curve, Beach got his head down. He reached for the train transformers, six of them, that had been nailed to a board (and the board had been bolted to the truckbed so it wouldn't slide around) and turned them on, one after another. He heard the hum as they powered up ... then that sound, every sound, was lost in the shriek of brakes and tires. Now light that was flashbulb-white and shot through with strobing blue flashes filled the bed of the pickup truck and Beach pressed himself against the bottom, hands laced over his head, thinking he had blown it, parked too close to a blind turn, and they were going to crash into his truck, and they might only be injured but he would be killed, and they would find the ruins of his "rifle" and say Well now, what's this? And ... and ...