They talked a great deal, but the room was mostly silent—if it had been bugged, the listeners would have been disappointed. The tension that had drawn many faces tight in the church as the situation in the woods teetered on the dangerous verge of careening out of control had now smoothed out. Bobbi was in the shed. That nosey-parker of an old man had also been taken in. Last of all, the nosey-parker policeman had been taken into the shed.
The group mind lost track of these people as they went into the thick, corroded-brass glow of that green light.
They ate and drank and listened and talked and no one said a word and that was all right; the last of the outsiders had left town following Goohringer’s graveside benediction, and they had Haven to themselves again.
(will it be all right now)
(yes they’ll understand about Dugan)
(are you sure)
(yes they will understand; they will think they understand)
The tick of the Seth Thomas on the mantelpiece, donated by the grammar school after last year’s spring bottle-and-can drive, was the loudest sound in the room. Occasionally there was the decorous clink of a china cup. Faintly, beyond the open screened windows, the sound of a faraway airplane.
No birdsong.
It was not missed.
They ate and drank, and when Dugan was escorted from Bobbi’s shed around one-thirty that afternoon, they knew. People rose, and now talk, real talk, began all at once. Tupperware bowls were capped. Uneaten sandwiches were popped into Baggies. Claudette Ruvall, Ashley’s mother, put a piece of aluminum foil over the remains of the casserole she had brought. They all went outside and headed toward their homes, smiling and chatting.
Act III was over.
23
Gardener came to around sundown with a hangover headache and a feeling that things had happened which he could not quite remember.
Finally made it, Gard, he thought. Finally had yourself another blackout. Satisfied?
He managed to get off the porch and to walk shakily around the corner of the house, out of view of the road, before throwing up. He saw blood in the vomit, and wasn’t surprised. This wasn’t the first time, although there was more blood this time than ever before.
Dreams, Christ, he’d had some weird nightmares, blackout or no. People out here, coming and going, so many people that all they needed was a brass band and the Dallas
(Police, the Dallas Police were out here this morning and you got drunk so you wouldn’t see them you fucking coward)
Cowgirls. Nightmares, that was all.
He turned away from the puddle of puke between his feet. The world was wavering in and out of focus with every beat of his heart, and Gardener suddenly knew that he had edged very close to death. He was committing suicide after all ... just doing it slowly. He put his arm against the side of the house and his forehead on his arm.
“Mr. Gardener, are you all right?”
“Huh!” he cried, jerking upright. His heart slammed two violent beats, stopped for what seemed forever, and then began to beat so rapidly he could barely distinguish the individual pulses. His headache suddenly cranked up to overload. He whirled.
Bobby Tremain stood there, looking surprised, even a little amused... but not really sorry for the scare he had given Gardener.
“Gee, I didn’t mean to creep up on you, Mr. Gardener—” You fucking well did, and I fucking well know it.
The Tremain kid blinked rapidly several times. He had caught some of that, Gardener saw. He found he didn’t give a shit.
“Where’s Bobbi?” he asked.
“I’m—”
“I know who you are. I know where you are. Right in front of me. Where’s Bobbi?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Bobby Tremain said. His face became very open, very wide-eyed, very honest, and Gardener was suddenly, forcibly reminded of his teaching days. This was how students who had spent a long winter weekend skiing, screwing, and drinking looked when they started to explain that they couldn’t turn in their research papers today because their mothers had died on Saturday.
“Sure, tell me.” Gardener leaned against the clapboard side of the house, looking at the teenager in the reddish glow of sunset. Over his shoulder he could see the shed, padlocked, its windows boarded up.
The shed had been in the dream, he remembered.
Dream? Or whatever it is you don’t want to admit was real?
For a moment the kid looked genuinely disconcerted by Gardener’s cynical expression.
“Miss Anderson had a sunstroke. Some of the men found her near the ship and took her to Derry Home Hospital. You were passed out.”
Gardener straightened up quickly. “Is she all right?”
“I don’t know. They’re still with her. No one has called here. Not since three o’clock or so, anyway. That’s when I got out here.”
Gardener pushed away from the building and started around the house, head down, working against the hangover. He had believed the kid was going to lie, and perhaps he had lied about the nature of what had happened to Bobbi, but Gardener sensed a core of truth in what the kid said: Bobbi was sick, hurt, something. It explained those dreamlike comings and goings he remembered. He supposed Bobbi had called them with her mind. Sure. Called them with her mind, neatest trick of the week. Only in Haven, ladies and germs—
“Where are you going?” Tremain asked, his voice suddenly very sharp.
“Derry.” Gardener had reached the head of the driveway. Bobbi’s pickup was parked there. The Tremain kid’s big yellow Dodge Challenger was pulled in next to it. Gardener turned back toward the kid. The sunset had painted harsh red highlights and black shadows on the boy’s face, making him look like an Indian. Gardener took a closer look and realized he wasn’t going anywhere. This kid with the fast car and the football-hero shoulders hadn’t been put out here just to give Gard the bad news as soon as Gard managed to throw off enough of the booze to rejoin the living.
Am I supposed to believe Bobbi was out there in the woods, excavating away like a madwoman, and she keeled over with a sunstroke while her sometime partner was lying back on the porch drunk as a coot? That it? Well, that’s a good trick, because she was supposed to be at the McCausland woman’s funeral. She went into the village and I was out here alone and I started thinking about what I saw Sunday... I started thinking and then I started drinking, which is mostly the way it works with me. Of course Bobbi could have gone to the funeral, come back here, changed, gone out in the woods to work, and then had a sunstroke... except that isn’t what happened. The kid’s lying. It’s written all over his face, and all of a sudden I’m very fucking glad he can’t read my thoughts.
“I think Miss Anderson would rather have you stay here and keep on with the work,” Bobby Tremain said evenly.
“You think?”
“That is, we all think.” The kid looked momentarily more disconcerted than ever—wary, a bit rocky on his feet. Didn’t expect Bobbi’s pet drunk to have any teeth or claws left, I guess. That kicked off another, much queerer thought, and he looked at the kid more closely in the light which was now fading into orange and ashy pink. Football-hero shoulders, a handsome cleft-chinned face that might have been drawn by Alex Gordon or Berni Wrightson, deep chest, narrow waist. Bobby Tremain, All-American. No wonder the Colson girl was nuts over him. But that sunken, infirm-looking mouth went oddly with the rest, Gardener thought. They were the ones who kept losing teeth, not Gardener.
Okay—what’s he here for?
To guard me. To make sure I stay put. No matter what.
“Well, all right,” he said to Tremain in a softer, more conciliatory voice. “If that’s what you all think.”
Tremain relaxed a little. “It really is.”
“Well, let’s go in and put on the coffee. I could use some. My head aches. And we’ll have to get going early in the morning ...” He stopped and looked at Tremain. “You are going to help out, aren’t you? That’s part of it, isn’t it?”
�
�Uh ... yessir.”
Gardener nodded. He looked at the shed for a moment, and in the fading light he could see brilliant green tattooed in the small spaces between the boards. For a moment his dream shimmered almost within his grasp—deadly shoemakers hammering away at unknown devices in that green glare. He had never seen the glow as bright as this before, and he noticed that when Tremain glanced in that direction, his eyes skittered away uneasily.
The lyric of an old song floated, not quite randomly, into Gardener’s mind and then out again:
Don’t know what they’re doing, but they laugh a lot behind the green door ... green door, what’s that secret you’re keepin’?
And there was a sound. Faint... rhythmic... not at all identifiable ... but somehow unpleasant.
The two of them had faltered. Now Gardener moved on toward the house. Tremain followed him gratefully.
“Good,” Gardener said, as if the conversation had never lagged. “I can use some help. Bobbi figured we’d get down to some sort of hatchway in about two weeks ... that we’d be able to get inside.” “Yes, I know,” Tremain said without hesitation.
“But that was with two of us working.”
“Oh, there’ll always be someone else with you,” Tremain said, and smiled openly. A chill rippled up Gardener’s back.
“Oh?”
“Yes! You bet!”
“Until Bobbi comes back.”
“Until then,” Tremain agreed.
Except he doesn’t think Bobbi’s going to be back. Ever.
“Come on,” he said. “Coffee. Then maybe some chow.”
“Sounds good to me.”
They went inside, leaving the shed to churn and mutter to itself in the growing dark. As the sun disappeared, the stitching of green at the cracks grew brighter and brighter and brighter. A cricket hopped into the luminous pencil-mark one of these cracks printed onto the ground, and fell dead.
10.
A BOOK OF DAYS—THE TOWN, CONCLUDED
1
Thursday, July 28th:
Butch Dugan woke up in his own bed in Derry at exactly 3:05 A.M. He pushed back the covers and swung his feet out onto the floor. His eyes were wide and dazed, his face puffy with sleep. The clothes he had worn on his trip to Haven with the old man the day before were on the chair by his small desk. There was a pen in the breast pocket of the shirt. He wanted that pen. This seemed to be the only thought his mind would clearly admit.
He got up, went to the chair, took the pen, tossed the shirt on the floor, sat down, and then just sat for several moments looking out into the darkness, waiting for the next thought.
Butch had gone into Anderson’s shed, but very little of him had come out. He seemed shrunken, lessened. He had no clear memories of anything. He could not have told a questioner his own middle name, and he did not at all remember being driven to the Haven-Troy town line in the Cherokee Hillman had rented, or sliding behind the wheel after Adley McKeen got out and walked back to Kyle Archinbourg’s Cadillac. He likewise did not remember driving back to Derry. Yet all these things had happened.
He had parked the Cherokee in front of the old man’s apartment building, locked it, then got into his own car. Two blocks away, he had stopped long enough to drop the Jeep keys into a sewer.
He went directly to bed, and had slept until the alarm clock planted in his mind woke him up.
Now some new switch clicked over. Butch blinked once or twice, opened a drawer, and drew out a pad of paper. He wrote:
I told people Tues. night I couldn’t go to her funeral because I was sick. That was true. But it was not my stomach. I was going to ask her to marry me but kept putting it off. Afraid she’d say no. If I hadn’t been scared, she might be alive now. With her dead there doesn’t seem to be anything to look forward to.
I am sorry about this mess.
He looked the note over for a moment and then signed his name at the bottom: Anthony F. Dugan.
He laid the pen and note aside and went back to sitting bolt upright and looking out the window.
At last another relay kicked over.
The last relay.
He got up and went to the closet. He ran the combination of the wall safe at the back and removed his .357 Mag. He put the belt over his shoulder, went back to the desk, and sat down.
He thought for a moment, frowning, then got up, turned off the light in the closet, shut the closet door, went back to the desk, sat down again, took the .357 from its holster, put the muzzle of the gun firmly against his left eyelid, and pulled the trigger. The chair toppled and hit the floor with a flat, undramatic wooden clap—the sound of a gallows trapdoor springing open.
2
Front page, Bangor Daily News, Friday, July 29th:
DERRY STATE POLICEMAN APPARENT SUICIDE
Was in Charge of Trooper Disappearance Investigation
by John Leandro
Cpt. Anthony “Butch” Dugan of the Derry state police barracks apparently shot himself with his service revolver early Thursday morning. His death hit the Derry barracks, which was rocked last week by the disappearance of two troopers, hard indeed...
3
Saturday, July 30th:
Gardener sat on a stump in the woods, his shirt off, eating a tuna-and-egg sandwich and drinking iced coffee laced with brandy. Across from him, sitting on another stump, was John Enders, the school principal. Enders was not built for hard work, and although it was only noon, he looked hot and tired and almost fagged out.
Gardener nodded toward him. “Not bad,” he said. “Better than Tremain, anyway. Tremain’d burn water trying to boil it.”
Enders smiled wanly. “Thank you.”
Gardener looked beyond him to the great circular shape jutting from the ground. The ditch kept widening, and they had to keep using more and more of that silvery netting which somehow kept it from caving in (he had no idea how they made it, only knew that the large supply in the cellar had been almost depleted and then, yesterday, a couple of women from town had come out in a van with a fresh supply, neatly folded like freshly ironed curtains). They needed more because they kept taking away more and more of the hillside ... and still the thing continued down. Bobbi’s whole house could now have fit into its shadow.
He looked at Enders again. Enders was looking at it with an expression of adoring, religious awe—as if he were a rube druid and this was his first trip from the boonies to see Stonehenge.
Gardener got up, staggering slightly. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s do a little blasting.”
He and Bobbi had reached a point weeks earlier where the ship was as tightly embedded in dour bedrock as a piece of steel in concrete. The bedrock hadn’t hurt the ship; hadn’t put so much as a scratch on its pearl-gray hull, let alone dented or crushed it. But it was tightly plugged. The plug had to be blasted away. It would have been a job for a construction crew who understood how to use dynamite—a lot of dynamite—under other circumstances.
But there was explosive available in Haven these days that made dynamite obsolete. Gardener still wasn’t clear on what the explosion in Haven Village had been, and wasn’t sure he ever wanted to be clear on it. It was a moot point anyway, because no one was talking. Whatever. it had been, he was sure that some huge piece of brickwork had taken off like a rocket, and some of those New and Improved Explosives had been involved. There had been a time, he remembered, when he had actually wasted time speculating on whether or not the super brain-food Bobbi’s artifact was putting into the air could produce weapons. That time now seemed incredibly distant, that Jim Gardener incredibly naive.
“Can you make it, Johnny?” he asked the school principal.
Enders got up, wincing, putting his hands in the small of his back. He looked desperately tired, but he managed a small smile just the same. Looking at the ship seemed to refresh him. Blood was trickling from the corner of one eye, however—a single red tear. Something in there had ruptured. It’s being this close to the ship, Gard thought. On the first o
f the two days Bobby Tremain had spent “helping” him, he had spit out his last few teeth like machine-gun bullets almost as soon as they got here.
He thought of telling Enders that something behind his right eye was leaking, then decided to let him discover it on his own. The guy would be all right. Probably. Even if he wasn’t, Gardener wasn’t sure he cared... this more than anything else shocked him.
Why should it? Are you kidding yourself that these cats are human anymore? If you are, you better wise up, Gard ole Gard.
He headed down the slope, stopping at the last stump before rocky soil gave way to chipped and runneled bedrock. He picked up a cheap transistor radio made of yellow high-impact plastic. It looked like Snoopy. Attached to it was the board from a Sharp calculator. And, of course, batteries.
Humming, Gardener made his way down to the edge of the trench. There the music dried up and he was quiet, only staring at the titanic gray flank of the ship. The view did not refresh him, but it did inspire a deep awe which had overtones of steadily darkening fear.
But you still hope, too. You’d be a liar if you said you didn’t. The key could still be here... somewhere.
As the fear darkened, however, the hope did too. Soon he thought it would be gone.
The hillside excavation now made the ship’s flank too far away to touch—not that he wanted to; he didn’t enjoy the sensation of having his head turning into a very large speaker. It hurt. He rarely bled now when he did touch it (and touching it was sometimes inevitable), but the blast of radio always came, and on occasion his nose or ears could still spray a hell of a lot more blood than he cared to look at. Gardener wondered briefly just how much borrowed time he was now living on, but that question was also moot. From the morning he had awakened on that New Hampshire breakwater, it had all been borrowed time. He was a sick man and he knew it, but not too sick to appreciate the irony of the situation in which he found himself: after busting his hump to dig this fucker up with a variety of tools which looked as if they might have come out of the Hugo Gernsback Whole Universe Catalogue, after doing what the rest of them probably couldn’t have done without working themselves to death in a kind of hypnotic trance, he might not be able to go inside when and if they came to the hatch Bobbi believed was there. But he meant to try. You could bet your watch and chain on that.
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