Stephen King

by The Tommyknockers (v5)

  Oh, but Gard, it is. You even root for baseball teams that are cataclysmic underdogs. That way you never have to worry about being depressed if one of them blows it in the World Series. It’s the same with the candidates and the causes you support, isn’t it? Because if your politics never get the chance to be tried out, you never have to worry about finding out that the new boss is the same as the old boss, do you?

  I’m not scared. Not of that.

  The fuck you’re not. A man on horseback? You? Man, that’s a laugh. You’d have a heart attack if someone asked you to be a man on a tricycle. Your own personal life has been nothing but a constant effort to destroy every power base you have. Take marriage. Nora was tough, you finally had to shoot her to get rid of her, but when the chips were down, you didn’t stick at it, did you? You’re a man who manages to rise to every occasion, I’ll give you that. You got yourself fired from your teaching job, thus eliminating another power base. You’ve spent twelve years pouring enough booze onto the little spark of talent God gave you to put it out. Now this. You better run, Gard.

  That’s not fair! Honest to God, it’s not!

  No? Isn’t there enough truth in it to make a comeuppance?

  Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, he discovered that the decision had already been made. He would stick with Bobbi, at least for a while, do it her way.

  Bobbi’s blithe assurance that everything was just ducky didn’t jibe very well with her exhaustion and weight loss. What the ship in the earth could do to Bobbi it would probably do to him. What had happened—or failed to happen—today proved nothing; he would not have expected all the changes to come at once. Yet the ship—and whatever force emanated from it—had a great capacity to do good. That was the main thing, and ... well, fuck the Tommyknocker man.

  Gardener got up and walked toward the house. The sun had gone down, and the twilight was turning ashy. His back was stiff. He stretched, standing on his toes, and grimaced as his spine crackled. He looked past the dark, silent shape of the Tomcat to the shed door with its new padlock. He thought of going to it, trying to look through one of the dirt-grimed windows ... and decided not to. Perhaps he was afraid a white face would pop up inside the dark window, its grin showing a mouthful of filed cannibal teeth in a deadly ring. Hello, Gard, you want to meet some genuine Tommyknockers? Come on in! There’s lots of us in here!

  Gardener shivered—he could almost hear thin, evil fingers scrabbling on the panes. Too much had happened today and yesterday. His imagination had gotten out. Tonight it would walk and talk. He didn’t know if he should hope for sleep or for it to stay away.

  12

  Once he was back inside, his uneasiness began to fade. With it went some of his craving for drink. He took off his shirt and then peered into Anderson’s room. Bobbi lay just as she had lain before, blankets caught between her dreadfully thin legs, one hand thrown out, snoring.

  Hasn’t even moved. Christ, she must be tired.

  He took a long shower, turning the water up as hot as he dared (with Bobbi Anderson’s new water heater, that meant barely jogging the knob five degrees west of dead cold). When his skin began to turn red, he stepped out into a bathroom as steamy as London in the grip of a late-Victorian-era fog. He toweled, brushed his teeth with a finger—got to do something about getting some supplies here, he thought—and went to bed.

  Drifting off, he found himself thinking again about the last thing Bobbi had said during their discussion. She believed the ship in the earth had begun to affect the townspeople. When he asked for specifics, she grew vague, then changed the subject. Gardener supposed anything was possible in this crazy business. Although the old Frank Garrick place was in the boonies, it was almost exactly in the geographic center of the township itself. There was a Haven Village, but that was five miles further north.

  “You make it sound as if it was throwing off poison gas,” he had said, hoping he didn’t sound as uneasy as he felt. “Paraquat from Space. They Came from Agent Orange.”

  “Poison gas?” Bobbi repeated. She had gone off by herself again. Her face, so thin now, was closed and distant. “No, not poison gas. Call it fumes if you want to call it anything. But it’s more than just the vibration when a person touches it.”

  Gardener said nothing, not wanting to break her mood.

  “Fumes? Not that either. But like fumes. If EPA came in here with sniffers, I don’t think they’d find any pollutants at all. If there’s any actual, physical residue in the air, it’s nothing but the tiniest trace.”

  “Do you think that’s possible, Bobbi?” Gardener asked quietly.

  “Yes. I’m not telling you I know that’s what’s happening, because I don’t. I have no inside information. But I think that a very thin layer of the ship’s hull—and I mean thin, maybe no more than a single molecule or two in depth—could be oxidizing as I uncover it and the air hits it. That means I’d get the first, heaviest dose ... and then it would go with the wind, like fallout. The people in town would get most of it ... but ‘most’ would really mean ‘damn little’ in this case.”

  Bobbi shifted in her rocker and reached down with her right hand. It was a gesture Gardener had seen her make many times before, and his heart went out to his friend when he saw the look of sorrow cross Bobbi’s face. Bobbi put her hand back into her lap.

  “But I’m not sure that’s what’s going on at all, you know. There’s a novel by a man named Peter Straub called Floating Dragon—have you read it?”

  Gardener had shaken his head.

  “Well, it postulates something similar to your Agent Orange from Space or Paraquat of the Gods or whatever you called it.”

  Gardener smiled.

  “In the story, an experimental chemical is sucked out into the atmosphere and falls on a piece of suburban Connecticut. This stuff really is poison—a kind of insanity gas. People get in fights for no reason, some fellow decides to paint his whole house—including the windows—bright pink, a woman jogs until she drops dead of a massive coronary, and so on.

  “There’s another novel—this one is called Brain Wave, and it was written by ...” Anderson wrinkled her brow, thinking. Her hand stole down to the right of the rocker again, then came back. “Same name as mine. Anderson. Poul Anderson. In that one, the earth passes through the tail of a comet and some of the fallout makes animals smarter. The book starts with a rabbit literally reasoning its way out of a trap.”

  “Smarter,” Gardener echoed.

  “Yes. If you had an IQ of 120 before the earth went through the comet, you’d end up with an IQ of 180. Get it?”

  “Well-rounded intelligence?”

  “Yes.”

  “But the term you used before was idiot savant. That’s the exact opposite of well-rounded intelligence, isn’t it? It’s a kind of ... of bump.”

  Anderson waved this aside. “Doesn’t matter,” she said.

  Now, lying here in bed, drifting off to sleep, Gardener wondered.

  13

  That night he had a dream. It was simple enough. He was standing in darkness outside of the shed between the farmhouse and the garden. To his left, the Tomcat was a dark shape. He was thinking exactly what he had been thinking tonight—that he would go over and look in one of the windows. And what would he see? Why, the Tommyknockers, of course. But he wasn’t afraid. Instead of fear he felt delighted, relieved joy. Because the Tommyknockers weren’t monsters or cannibals; they were like the elves in that story about the good shoemaker. He would look in through the dirty shed window like a delighted child looking out a bedroom window in an illustration from “The Night Before Christmas” (and what was Santa Claus, that right jolly old elf, but a big old Tommyknocker in a red suit?), and he would see them, laughing and chattering as they sat at a long table, cobbling together power generators and levitating skateboards and televisions which showed mind-movies instead of regular ones.

  He drifted toward the shed, and suddenly it was lighted by the same glare he had seen coming out of Bobbi’s m
odified typewriter—it was as if the shed had turned into some weird jack-o’-lantern, only this light was not a warm yellow but an awful, rotten green. It spilled out between the boards; it spilled rays through knotholes and tattooed evil cats’ eyes on the ground, it filled the windows. And now he was afraid, because no friendly little aliens from space made that light; if cancer had a color, it would be the one that spilled from every chink and crack and knothole and window of Bobbi Anderson’s shed.

  But he drew closer, because in dreams you can’t always help yourself. He drew closer, no longer wanting to see, no more than a kid would want to look out his bedroom window on Christmas Eve and see Santa Claus striding along the snow-covered slope of roof across the way with a severed head in each gloved hand, the blood from the ragged necks steaming in the cold.

  Please no, please no—

  But he drew closer and as he entered that haze of green, rock music spilled into his head in a paralyzing, mind-splitting flood. It was George Thorogood and the Destroyers, and he knew that when George started to play that slide guitar, his skull would vibrate for a moment with killing harmonics and then simply explode like the water glasses in the house he had once told Bobbi about.

  None of it mattered. The fear mattered, that was all—the fear of the Tommyknockers in Bobbi’s shed. He sensed them, could almost smell them, a rich, electric smell like ozone and blood.

  And ... the weird liquid sloshing sounds. He could hear those even over the music in his head. It sounded like an old-fashioned washing machine, except that sound wasn’t water, and that sound was wrong, wrong, wrong.

  As he stood on his tiptoes to look into the shed, his face as green as the face of a corpse pulled out of quicksand, George Thorogood started to play that slide blues guitar, and Gardener began screaming with pain—and that was when his head exploded and he woke sitting bolt upright in the old double bed in the guestroom, his chest covered with sweat, his hands trembling.

  He lay down again, thinking: God! If you’re going to have nightmares about it, take a look in tomorrow. Get your mind easy.

  He had expected nightmares in the wake of his decision; he lay back down again, thinking that this was only the first. But there were no more dreams.

  That night.

  The next day he joined Bobbi on the dig.

  BOOK II

  Tales of Haven

  The terrorist got bombed!

  The President got hit!

  Security was tight!

  The Secret Service got lit!

  And everybody’s drunk,

  Everybody’s wasted,

  Everybody’s stoned,

  And there’s nothin gonna change it,

  Cause everybody’s drunk,

  Everybody’s wasted,

  Everybody’s drinkin on the job.

  —THE RAINMAKERS, “Drinkin’ on the Job”

  Then he ran all the way to town, screamin “It came out of the sky!”

  —CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL, “It Came Out of the Sky”

  1.

  THE TOWN

  1

  The town had four other names before it became Haven.

  It began municipal existence in 1816 as Montville Plantation. It was owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by a man named Hugh Crane. Crane purchased it in 1813 from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, of which Maine was then a province. He had been a lieutenant in the Revolutionary War.

  The Montville Plantation name was a gibe. Crane’s father had never ventured east of Dover in his life, and remained a loyal Tory when the break with the colonies came. He ended life as a peer of the realm, the twelfth Earl of Montville. As his eldest son, Hugh Crane would have been the thirteenth Earl of Montville. Instead, his enraged father disinherited him. Not put out of countenance in the slightest, Crane went about cheerfully calling himself the first earl of Central Maine and sometimes the Duke of Nowhere at All.

  The tract of land which Crane called Montville Plantation consisted of about twenty-two thousand acres. When Crane petitioned and was granted incorporated status, Montville Plantation became the one hundred and ninety-third town to be so incorporated in the Massachusetts Province of Maine. Crane bought the land because good timber was plentiful, and Derry, where timber could be floated downriver to the sea, was only twenty miles away.

  How cheap was the area of land which eventually became Haven?

  Hugh Crane had bought the whole shebang for the equivalent of eighteen hundred pounds.

  Of course, a pound went a lot further in those days.

  2

  When Hugh Crane died in 1826, there were a hundred and three residents of Montville Plantation. Loggers swelled the population to twice that for six or seven months of the year, but they didn’t really count, because they took their little bit of money into Derry, and it was in Derry that they usually settled when they grew too old to work the woods anymore. In those days, “too old to work the woods anymore” usually meant about twenty-five.

  Nevertheless, by 1826 the settlement which would eventually become Haven Village had begun to grow up along the muddy road leading north toward Derry and Bangor.

  Whatever you called it (and eventually it became, except in the memory of the oldest old-timers, like Dave Rutledge, plain old Route 9), that road was the one the loggers had to take when they went to Derry at the end of each month to spend their pay drinking and whoring. They saved their serious spending for the big town, but most were willing to bide long enough at Cooder’s Tavern and Lodging-House to lay the dust with a beer or two on the way. This wasn’t much, but it was enough to make the place a successful little business. The General Mercantile across the road (owned and operated by Hiram Cooder’s nephew) was less successful but still a marginally profitable business. In 1828, a Barber Shop and Small Surgery (owned and operated by Hiram Cooder’s cousin) opened next to the General Mercantile. In those days it was not unusual to stroll into this lively, growing establishment and see a logger reclining in one of the three chairs, having the hair on his head cut, the cut in his arm stitched, and a couple of large bloodsuckers from the jar by the cigar-box reposing above each closed eye, turning from gray to red as they swelled, simultaneously protecting against any infection from the cut and taking away that malady which was then known as “achin’ brains.” In 1830, a hostelry and feed store (owned by Hiram Cooder’s brother George) opened at the south end of the village.

  In 1831, Montville Plantation became Coodersville.

  No one was very surprised.

  Coodersville it remained until 1864, when the name was changed to Montgomery, in honor of Ellis Montgomery, a local boy who had fallen at Gettysburg, where, some say, the 20th Maine preserved the Union all by itself. The change seemed a fine idea. After all, the town’s one remaining Cooder, crazy old Albion, had gone bankrupt and committed suicide two years before.

  In the years following the end of the Civil War, a craze, as inexplicable as most crazes, swept the state. This craze was not for hoop skirts or sideburns; it was a craze for giving small towns classical names. Hence, there is a Sparta, Maine; a Carthage; an Athens; and, of course, there was Troy right next door. In 1878, the residents of the town voted to change the town’s name yet again, this time from Montgomery to Ilium. This provoked a tearful tirade at town meeting from the mother of Ellis Montgomery. In truth, the tirade was more senile than ringing, the hero’s mother being by then full of years—seventy—five of them, to be exact. Town legend has it that the townsfolk listened patiently, a little guiltily, and that the decision might even have been recanted (Mrs. Montgomery was surely right, some thought, when she said that fourteen years was hardly the “immortal memory” her dead son had been promised at the name-changing ceremonies which had taken place on July 4th, 1864) if the good lady’s bladder hadn’t picked that particular moment to let go. She was helped from the town-meeting hall, still ranting about ungrateful Philistines who would rue the day.

  Montgomery became Ilium, just the same.

  Twe
nty-two years passed.

  3

  Came a fast-talking revival preacher who for some reason bypassed Derry and elected instead to spread his tent in Ilium. He went by the name of Colson, but Myrtle Duplissey, Haven’s self-appointed historian, eventually became convinced that Colson’s real name was Cooder, and that he was the illegitimate son of Albion Cooder.

  Whoever he was, he won most of the Christians in town over to his own lively version of the faith by the time the corn was ready for picking—much to the despair of Mr. Hartley, who ministered to the Methodists of Ilium and Troy, and Mr. Crowell, who looked after the spiritual welfare of Baptists in Ilium, Troy, Etna, and Unity (the joke in those days was that Emory Crowell’s parsonage belonged to the town of Troy, but his piles belonged to God). Nevertheless, their exhortations were voices crying in the wilderness. Preacher Colson’s congregation continued to grow as that well-nigh perfect summer of 1900 drew toward its conclusion. To call the crops of that year “bumpers” was to poor-mouth them; the thin northern New England earth, usually as stingy as Scrooge, that year poured forth a bounty which seemed never-ending. Mr. Crowell, the Baptist whose piles belonged to God, grew depressed and silent and, three years later, hung himself in the cellar of the Troy parsonage.

  Mr. Hartley, the Methodist minister, grew ever more alarmed by the evangelical fervor which was sweeping Ilium like a cholera epidemic. Perhaps this was because Methodists are, under ordinary circumstances, the most undemonstrative worshipers of God; they listen not to sermons but to “messages,” pray mostly in decorous silence, and consider the only proper places for congregation-spoken amens to be at the end of the Lord’s Prayer and those few hymns not sung by the choir. But now these previously undemonstrative people were doing everything from speaking in tongues to holy rolling. Next, Mr. Hartley sometimes said, they will be handling snakes. The Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday meetings in the revival tent beside Derry Road became steadily louder, wilder, and more emotionally explosive. “If it was happening in a carnival tent, they’d call it hysteria,” he told Fred Perry, a church deacon and his only close friend, one night over glasses of sherry in the church rectory. “Because it’s happening in a revival tent, they can get away with calling it Pentecostal Fire.”