The girl slid open the door in the Caravel’s sidewall. “Get better, understand?” she said. Then, before he could reply, she hugged him and gave him a kiss, her mouth moist, friendly, half-open, and redolent of pot. “Take care, big guy.”
“I’ll try.” On the verge of getting out he suddenly hugged her again, fiercely. “Thank you. Thank you all.”
He stood at the end of the ramp, the rain falling a little harder now, watching as the van’s sidewall door rumbled shut on its track. The girl waved. Gardener waved back and then the van was rolling down the breakdown lane, gathering speed, finally sliding over into the travel lane. Gardener watched them go, one hand still raised in a wave in case they might be looking back. Tears were running freely down his cheeks now, to mix with the rain.
3
He never did get a chance to buy a pair of rubber sandals, but he got to Haven before dark and he didn’t have to walk the last ten or so miles to Bobbi’s house, as he’d thought he might; you’d think people would be more apt to pick up a guy hitching in the rain, but that was just when they were most likely to pass you by. Who needed a human puddle in the passenger seat?
But he got a ride outside of Augusta with a farmer who complained constantly and bitterly about the government all the way up to the China town line, where he let Gard out. Gard walked a couple of miles, thumbing the few cars that passed, wondering if his feet were turning to ice or if it was just his imagination, when a pulp truck pulled to a rackety halt beside him.
Gardener climbed into the cab as fast as he could. It smelled of old woodchips and sour loggers’ sweat . . . but it was warm.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Don’t mention it,” the driver said. “Name’s Freeman Moss.” He stuck out a hand. Gardener, who had no idea that he would meet this man in the not-too-distant future under far less cheery circumstances, took it and shook it.
“Jim Gardener. Thanks again.”
“Shoot a pickle,” Freeman Moss scoffed. He got the truck moving. It shuddered along the edge of the road, picking up speed, Gard thought, not just grudgingly but with actual pain. Everything shook. The universal moaned beneath them like a hag in a chimney corner. The world’s oldest toothbrush, its eroded bristles dark with the grease it had been employed to coax out of some clotted gear-or cog-tooth, chittered along the dashboard, passing an old air freshener of a naked woman with very large breasts on its way. Moss punched the clutch, managed to find second after an endless time spent grinding gears, and wrestled the pulp truck back onto the road. “Y’look half-drownded. Got half a thermos of coffee from the Drunken Donuts in Augusta left over from my dinner ... you want it?”
Gardener drank it gratefully. It was strong, hot, and heavily laced with sugar. He also accepted a cigarette from the driver, dragging deeply and with pleasure, although it hurt his throat, which was getting steadily sorer.
Moss dropped him off just over the Haven town line at quarter to seven. The rain had slacked off, and the sky was lightening up in the west. “Do believe God’s gonna let through some sunset,” Freeman Moss said. “I wish like hell I had a pair of shoes I could give you, mister—I usually carry an old pair behind the seat, but it was so rainy today I never brought nothin but m’gumrubbers.”
“Thanks, but I’ll be fine. My friend is less than a mile up the road.” Actually Bobbi’s place was still three miles away, but if he told Moss that, nothing would do but that he drive Gardener up there. Gardener was tired, increasingly feverish, still damp even after forty-five minutes of the heater’s dry, blasting air . . . but he couldn’t stand any more kindness today. In his present state of mind it could well drive him crazy.
“Okay. Good luck.”
“Thank you.”
He got down and waved as the truck turned off on a side road and rumbled away toward home.
Even after Moss and his museum piece of a truck had disappeared, Gardener stood where he was for a moment longer, his wet totebag in one hand, his bare feet, white as Easter lilies, planted in the dirt of the soft shoulder, looking at the marker some two hundred feet back the way he had come. Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in, Frost had said. But he’d do well to remember he wasn’t home. Maybe the worst mistake a man could make was to get to the idea that his friend’s home was his own, especially when the friend was a woman whose bed you had once shared.
Not home, not at all—but he was in Haven.
He started to walk up the road toward Bobbi’s house.
4
About fifteen minutes later, when the clouds in the west finally broke open to let through the westering sun, something strange happened: a burst of music, clear and brief, went through his head.
He stopped, looking at the sunlight as it spilled across rolling miles of wet woods and hayfields in the west, the rays beaming down like the dramatic sunrays in a DeMille Bible epic. Route 9 began to rise here, and the western view was long and gorgeous and solemn, the evening’s light somehow English and pastoral in its clear beauty. The rain had given the landscape a sleek, washed look, deepening colors, seeming to fulfill the texture of things. Gardener was suddenly very glad he had not committed suicide—not in any corny Art Linkletter way, but because he had been allowed this moment of beauty and perceptual glow. Standing here, now almost at the end of his energy, feverish and sick, he felt a child’s simple wonder.
All was still and silent in the final sunshine of evening. He could see no sign of industry or technology. Humanity, yes; a big red barn attached to a white farmhouse, sheds, a trailer or two, but that was all.
The light. It was the light that struck him so strongly. Its sweet clarity, so old and deep—those rays of sun slanting almost horizontally through the unraveling clouds as this long, confusing, exhausting day neared its end. That ancient light seemed to deny time itself, and Gardener almost expected to hear a huntsman winding his horn, announcing “All Assemble.” He would hear dogs, and horses’ hooves, and—
—and that was when the music, jarring and modern, blasted through his head, scattering all thought. His hands flew to his temples in a startled gesture. The burst lasted at least five seconds, perhaps as long as ten, and what he heard was perfectly identifiable; it was Dr. Hook singing “Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk.”
The lyric was tinny but clear enough—as if he were listening to a small transistor radio, the kind that people used to take to the beach with them before that punk-rock group Walkman and the Ghetto-Blasters had taken over the world. But it wasn’t pouring into his ears, that lyric; it was coming from the front of his head . . . from the place where the doctors had filled a hole in his skull with a piece of metal.
The. queen of all the nightbirds,
A player in the dark,
She don’t say nothing
But baby makes her blue jeans talk.
The volume was so loud it was almost unbearable. It had happened once before, this music in his head, after he’d stuck his finger into a light socket—and was he drunk at the time? My dear, does a dog piss on a fireplug?
He had discovered such musical visitations were neither hallucinatory nor all that rare—people had gotten radio transmissions on the lawn flamingos in their yards; on teeth fillings; on the steel rims of their spectacles. For a week and a half in 1957 a family in Charlotte, North Carolina, had received signals from a classical-music station in Florida. They first heard them coming from the bathroom water-glass. Soon other glasses in the house began to pick up the sound. Before it ended, the whole house was filled with the eerie sound of glassware broadcasting Bach and Beethoven, the music broken only by an occasional time-check. Finally, with a dozen violins holding one long, high note, almost all the glasses in the house shattered spontaneously and the phenomenon ceased.
So Gardener had known he wasn’t alone, and had been sure he wasn’t going crazy—but that wasn’t much comfort, and never had been as loud as this after the light-socket incident.
The sound of Dr. Hook faded as quic
kly as it had come. Gardener stood tensely, waiting for it to come back. It didn’t. What came instead, louder and more urgent than before, was a repetition of what had gotten him going in the first place: Bobbi’s in trouble!
He turned away from the western view and started up Route 9 again. And although he was feverish and very tired, he walked fast—in fact, before long he was almost running.
5
It was seven-thirty when Gardener finally arrived at Bobbi’s—what the locals still called the old Garrick place even after all these years. Gardener came swinging up the road, puffing, his color high and unhealthy. Here was the Rural Free Delivery box, its door slightly ajar, the way both Bobbi and Joe Paulson, the mailman, left it so it would be easier for Peter to paw open. There was the driveway, with Bobbi’s blue pickup truck parked in it. The stuff in the truck bed had been covered with a tarp to protect it from the rain. And there was the house itself, with a light shining through the east window, the one where Bobbi kept her rocker and did her reading.
Everything looked all right; not a single sour note. Five years ago—even three—Peter would have barked at the arrival of a stranger outside, but Peter had gotten older. Hell, they all had.
Standing out here, Bobbi’s place held the sort of quiet, pastoral loveliness that the western view at the town line had held for him—it represented all the things Gardener wished he had for himself. A sense of peace, or maybe just a sense of place. Certainly he could see nothing odd as he stood here by the mailbox. It looked—felt—like the house of a person who is content with herself. Not completely at rest, exactly, or retired, or checked out from the world’s concerns . . . but rocking steady. This was the house of a sane, relatively happy woman. It had not been built in the tornado belt.
All the same, something was wrong.
He stood there, the stranger out here in the dark, (but I’m not a stranger I’m a friend her friend Bobbi’s friend . . . aren’t I?)
and a sudden frightening impulse rose within him: to leave. Just turn on one bare heel and bug out. Because he suddenly doubted if he wanted to find out what was going on inside that house, what kind of trouble Bobbi had gotten herself into.
(Tommyknockers Gard that’s what kind Tommyknockers)
He shivered.
(late last night and the night before Tommyknockers Tommyknockers at Bobbi’s door and I don’t know if you can)
Stop it
(because Gard’s so afraid of the Tommyknocker man)
He licked his lips, trying to tell himself it was just the fever that made them feel so dry.
Get out, Gard! Blood on the moon!
The fear was now very deep indeed, and if it had been anyone but Bobbi—anyone but his last real friend—he would have split, all right. The farmhouse looked rustic and pleasant, the light spilling from the east window was cozy, and all looked well ... but the boards and the glass, the stones in the driveway, the very air pressing against his face . . . all these things screamed at him to leave, get out, that things inside that house were bad, dangerous, perhaps even evil.
(Tommyknockers)
But whatever else was in there, Bobbi was too. He hadn’t come all these miles, most in the pouring rain, to turn and run at the last second. So, in spite of the dread, he left the mailbox and started up the driveway, moving slowly, wincing as the sharp stones dug at the tender soles of his feet.
Then the front door jerked open, startling his heart up into his throat in a single nimble bound and he thought It’s one of them, one of the Tommyknockers, it’s going to rush down here and grab me and eat me up! He was barely able to stifle a scream.
The silhouette in the doorway was thin—much too thin, he thought, to be Bobbi Anderson, who had never been beefy but who was solidly built and pleasantly round in all the right places. But the voice, shrill and wavering though it was, was unmistakably Bobbi’s ... and Gardener relaxed a little, because Bobbi sounded even more terrified than he felt, standing by the mailbox and looking at the house.
“Who is it? Who’s there?”
“It’s Gard, Bobbi.”
There was a long pause. There were footfalls on the porch.
Cautiously: “Gard? Is it really you?”
“Yeah.” He worked his way over the hard, biting stones of the driveway to the lawn. And he asked the question he had come all this way and deferred his own suicide to ask: “Bobbi, are you all right?”
The quaver left Bobbi’s voice, but Gardener could still not see her clearly—the sun had long since gone behind the trees, and the shadows were thick. He wondered where Peter was.
“I’m fine,” Bobbi said, just as if she had always looked so terribly thin, just as though she had always greeted arrivals in her dooryard with a shrill voice full of fear.
She came down the porch steps and passed out of the shadow of the overhanging porch roof. As she did, Gardener got his first good look at her in the ashy twilight. He was struck by horror and wonder.
Bobbi was coming toward him, smiling, obviously delighted to see him. Her jeans fluttered and flapped on her, and so did her shirt; her face was gaunt, her eyes deep in their sockets, her forehead pale and somehow too wide, the skin taut and shiny. Bobbi’s uncombed hair flopped against the nape of her neck and lay over her shoulders like waterweed cast up on a beach. The shirt was buttoned wrong. The fly of her jeans was three-quarters of the way down. She smelled dirty and sweaty and . . . well, as if she might have had an accident in her pants and then forgotten to change them.
A picture suddenly flashed into Gardener’s mind: a photo of Karen Carpenter taken shortly before her death, which had allegedly resulted from anorexia nervosa. It had seemed to him the picture of a woman already dead but somehow alive, a woman who was all smiling teeth and shrieking feverish eyes. Bobbi looked like that now.
Surely she had lost no more than twenty pounds—that was all she could afford to lose and stay on her feet—but Gard’s shocked mind kept insisting it was more like thirty, had to be.
She seemed to be on the last raggedy end of exhaustion. Her eyes, like the eyes of that poor lost woman on the magazine cover, were huge and glittery, her smile the huge brainless grin of a KO’d fighter just before his knees come unhinged.
“Fine!” this shambling, dirty, stumbling skeleton reiterated, and as Bobbi approached, Gardener could hear the waver in her voice again—not fear, as he’d thought, but utter exhaustion. “Thought you’d given up on me! Good to see you, man!”
“Bobbi ... Bobbi, Jesus Christ, what . . .”
Bobbi was holding out a hand for Gardener to take. It trembled wildly in the air, and Gardener saw how thin, how woefully, incredibly thin Bobbi’s arm had become.
“A lot of stuff going on,” Bobbi croaked in her wavering voice. “A lot of work done, a hell of a lot more left to do, but I’m getting there, getting there, wait’ll you see—”
“Bobbi, what—”
“Fine, I’m fine,” Bobbi repeated, and she fell forward, semiconscious, into Gardener’s arms. She tried to say something else but only a loose gargle and a little spit came out. Her breasts were small, wasted pads against his forearm.
Gardener picked her up, shocked by how light she was. Yes, it was thirty, at least thirty. It was incredible, but not, unfortunately, deniable. He felt recognition that was both shocking and miserable: This isn’t Bobbi at all. It’s me. Me at the end of a jag.
He carried Bobbi swiftly up the steps and into the house.
8.
MODIFICATIONS
1
He put Bobbi on the couch and went quickly to the telephone. He picked it up, meaning to dial 0 and ask the operator what number he should dial to get the nearest rescue unit. Bobbi needed a trip to Derry Home Hospital, and right away. A breakdown, Gardener supposed (although in truth he was so tired and confused that he hardly knew what to think). Some kind of breakdown. Bobbi Anderson seemed like the last person in the world to go over the top, but apparently she had.
Bobbi said somethi
ng from the couch. Gardener didn’t catch it at first; Bobbi’s voice was little more than a harsh croak.
“What, Bobbi?”
“Don’t call anybody,” Bobbi said. She managed a little more volume this time, but even that much effort seemed to nearly exhaust her. Her cheeks were flushed, the rest of her face waxen, and her eyes were as bright and feverish as blue gemstones—diamonds, or sapphires, perhaps. “Don’t . . . Gard, not anybody!”
Anderson fell back against the couch, panting rapidly. Gardener hung up the telephone and went to her, alarmed. Bobbi needed a doctor, that was obvious, and Gardener meant to get her one . . . but right now her agitation seemed more important.
“I’ll stay right with you,” he said, taking her hand, “if that’s what’s worrying you. God knows you stuck with me through enough sh—”
But Anderson had been shaking her head with mounting vehemence. “Just need sleep,” she whispered. “Sleep ... and food in the morning. Mostly sleep. Haven’t had any . . . three days. Four, maybe.”
Gardener looked at her, shocked again. He put together what Bobbi had just said with the way she looked.
“What rocket have you been riding?”—and why? his mind added. “Bennies? Reds?” He thought of coke and then rejected it. Bobbi could undoubtedly afford coke if she wanted it, but Gardener didn’t think even ’basing could keep a man or woman awake for three or four days and melt better than thirty pounds off in—Gardener calculated the time since he had last seen Anderson—in three weeks.
“No dope,” Bobbi said. “No drugs.” Her eyes rolled and glittered. Spit drizzled helplessly from the corners of her mouth and she sucked it back. For an instant Gardener saw an expression in Bobbi’s face he didn’t like ... one that scared him a little. It was an Anne expression. Old and crafty. Then Bobbi’s eyes slipped closed, revealing lids stained the delicate purplish color of total exhaustion. When she opened her eyes again it was just Bobbi lying there ... and Bobbi needed help.
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