Stephen King

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Stephen King Page 54

by The Tommyknockers (v5)


  Moss had used a gadget like a metal-detector to guide each component to its final resting-place—first off the truck, then through the garden, then out along the well-worn path to the dig. The components floated serenely through the warm summer air, their shadows pooled beneath them. Moss carried the thing which had once been a metal-detector in one hand, and something which looked like a walkie-talkie handset in the other. When he raised the curved stainless-steel antenna on the end of the walkie-talkie gadget and moved the dish at the end of the detector, the motor or pump would rise. When he moved them to the left, the piece of equipment went left. Gard, watching this with the bemusement of a veteran drunk (and surely no one sees as many strange things as one of those), thought that Moss looked like a scrofulous animal trainer leading mechanical elephants through the woods to the site of some unimaginable circus.

  Gardener had seen the laborious moving of enough heavy equipment to know that this device could revolutionize construction techniques. Such things were outside his practical knowledge, but he guessed that a single gadget such as the one Moss had used on Thursday with such absent ease could cut the cost of a project the size of the Aswan Dam by twenty-five percent or more.

  In at least one respect, however, it was like the illusion being maintained at the town hall—it required a lot of juice.

  “Here,” Moss said, handing Gard a heavy packsack. “Put this on.”

  Gard winced shouldering the straps. Moss saw it and smiled a little. “It’ll get lighter as the day goes along. Don’t you worry about that.” He plugged the jack of a transistor earphone into the side of the radio-controller and pushed the phone into his ear.

  “What’s in the pack?” Gardener asked.

  “Batteries. Let’s go.”

  Moss had switched the gadget on, seemed to listen, nodded, then pointed the curved antenna at the first motor. It rose in the air and hung there. Holding the controller in one hand and the customized metal-detector in the other, Moss walked toward the motor. For every step he took, the motor retreated a similar distance. Gard brought up the rear.

  Moss walked the motor between the house and the shed, urging it around the Tomcat, and then ahead of him through Bobbi’s garden. A wide path had been worn through this, but on both sides of it the plants continued to grow in rampant splendor. Some of the sunflowers were now twelve feet high. They reminded Gardener of The Day of the Triffids. One night about a week ago he had awakened from a terrible nightmare. In it, the sunflowers in the garden had uprooted themselves and begun to walk, eldritch light shining from their centers and onto the ground like the beams of flashlights with green lenses.

  There were summer squashes in the garden as big as U-boat torpedoes. Tomatoes the size of basketballs. Some of the corn was nearly as high as the sunflowers. Curious, Gardener had picked one of the ears; it was easily two feet long. A single ear, had it been good, would have fed two hungry men. But Gard had spat out the single mouthful of butter-and-sugar kernels he had bitten off, grimacing and wiping his mouth. The taste had been meaty and hideous. Bobbi was growing a garden full of huge plants, but the vegetables were inedible . . . perhaps even poisonous.

  The motor had cruised serenely ahead of them along the path, cornstalks rustling and bending on either side as it pushed its way through. Gardener saw smears and swatches of grease and engine oil on some of the militantly green, swordlike leaves. On the far side of the garden, the motor began to sag. Moss had lowered the antenna, and the motor settled to the earth with a gentle thump.

  “What’s up?” Gardener had asked.

  Moss only grunted and produced a dime. He stuck it in the base of his controller, twisted it, and pulled six double-A Duracells out of the battery compartment. He tossed them indifferently on the ground. “Gimme some more,” he said.

  Gardener unshouldered the knapsack, undid the straps, opened the flap, and saw what looked at first glance like a billion double-A’s; it was as if someone had hit the Grand Jackpot at Atlantic City and the machine had paid off in batteries instead of bucks.

  “Jesus!”

  “I ain’t Him,” Moss said. “Gimme half a dozen of those suckers.”

  For once Gardener didn’t seem to have a wisecrack left in him. He handed six batteries over and watched Moss fit them into the compartment. Then Moss replaced the battery hatch, turned it on, refitted the earplug in his ear, and said, “Let’s go.”

  Forty yards into the woods there was another battery change; sixty yards later, another. Floating the motor sucked less juice when it was going downhill, but by the time Moss had finally settled the big motor-block on the edge of the trench, they had gone through forty-two batteries.

  Back and forth, back and forth; one by one they brought the pieces of pumping machinery from Freeman Moss’s truck to the edge of the trench. The knapsack on Gardener’s back grew steadily lighter.

  On the fourth trip, Gard had asked Moss if he could try. A large industrial pump, whose raison d’être before this odd little side-trip had probably been pumping sewage from clogged septic tanks, was sitting on a tilted angle about a hundred yards from the trench. Moss was once more changing batteries. Dead double-A’s lay all along the path now, reminding Gard with odd poignance of the kid at Arcadia Beach. The kid with the firecrackers. The kid whose mother had given up drinking . . . and everything else. The kid who had known about the Tommyknockers.

  “Well, you can give her a try.” Moss handed over the gadget. “I could use a smidge of help, and I don’t mind sayin so. Wears a man out, liftin all that.” He saw Gardener’s look and said: “Oh, ayuh, I’m doin part of it m’self; that’s what the plug’s for. You can try it, but I don’t think you’ll have much luck. You ain’t like us.”

  “I noticed. I’m the one that isn’t going to have to buy a set of teeth from Sears and Roebuck when all this is over.”

  Moss looked at him sourly and said nothing.

  Gard used his handkerchief to wipe off the brown coating of wax Moss had left on the earplug, then stuck it in his ear. He heard a distant sound like the one you heard when you held a conch shell to your ear. He pointed the antenna at the pump as he had seen Moss do, then cautiously flickered the antenna upward. The quality of the dim seashore rumble in his ear changed. The pump moved the tiniest bit—he was sure it wasn’t just his imagination. But an instant later, two other things happened. He felt warm blood coursing down his face from his nose, and his head was filled with a blaring voice. “CARPET YOUR DEN OR YOUR WHOLE HOME FOR LESS!” screamed some radio announcer, who was suddenly sitting right in the middle of Gardener’s head and apparently yelling into an electric bullhorn. “AND YES WE DO HAVE A NEW SHIPMENT OF THROW-RUGS! THE LAST ONE SOLD OUT FAST, SO BE SURE—”

  “Owww, Jesus, shut up!” Gardener had cried. He dropped the handset and reached for his head. The earphone was dragged out of his ear, and the blaring announcer cut out. He had been left with a nosebleed and a head that was ringing like a bell.

  Freeman Moss, startled out of his taciturnity, stared at Gardener with wide eyes. “What in Christ’s name was that?” he asked.

  “That,” Gardener said weakly, “was WZON, Where It’s Only Rock and Roll Because That’s the Way You Like It. You mind if I sit down for a minute, Moss? Think I just pissed myself.”

  “Your nose is bleedin, too.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Gardener said.

  “Think maybe you better let me use the lifter after this.” Gard had been more than happy to abide by that. It took them the rest of the day to get all the equipment out to the trench, and Moss was so tired when the last piece arrived that Gardener had to practically carry the man back to his truck.

  “Feel like I just chopped two cord of wood and shit m’brains out while I was doin it,” the older man gasped.

  After that, Gard hadn’t really expected the man to come back. But Moss had shown up promptly at seven the next day. He had been driving a beat-up split-grille Pontiac instead of his truck. He got out of the Pontiac bangi
ng a dinner bucket against his leg.

  “Come on. Let’s get to it.”

  Gardener respected Moss more than the other three “helpers” put together . . . in fact, he liked him.

  Moss glanced at him as they walked out to the ship with the morning dew of that Friday morning wetting down the cuffs of their pants. “Caught that one,” he grunted. “You’re okay too, I guess.”

  That was about all Mr. Freeman Moss had to say to him that day.

  They sank a nest of hoses into the trench and rigged more hoses—outflow hoses, this time—to direct the water they pumped out downhill, on a slope that ran a bit southeast of Bobbi’s place. These “dumper hoses,” as Moss called them, were big wide-bore rolls of canvas that Gard supposed had been scavenged from the VFD.

  “Ayuh, got a few there, got a few other places,” Moss said, and would offer no more on that subject.

  Before starting the pumps, he had Gardener pound a number of U-shaped clamps over the dumper hoses. “Else they’ll go whippin around, sprayin water everywhere. If you’ve ever seen a fireman’s hose outta control, you know someone c’n get hurt. And we ain’t got enough men to stand around holdin a bunch of pissin hoses all day.”

  “Not that there’d be any volunteers standing in line. Right?”

  Freeman Moss had looked at him silently, saying nothing for a moment. Then he grunted: “Pound those clamps in good. We’ll still have to stop pretty often to pound ’em back in. They’ll loosen up.”

  “Can’t you control the outflow so you don’t have to bother with all this clamping shit?” Gardener asked.

  Moss rolled his eyes impatiently at his ignorance. “Sure,” he said, “but there’s one fuck of a lot of water down in that hole, and I’d like to get it out before doomsday, if it’s all the same to you.”

  Gardener held out his hands, half-laughing. “Hey, I was just asking,” he said. “Peace.”

  The man had only grunted in his inimitable Freeman Moss style.

  By nine-thirty, water was pouring downhill and away from the ship at a great rate. It was cold and clear and as sweet as water can be—which is sweet indeed, as anyone with a good well could attest. By noon they had created a brand-new stream. It was six feet wide, shallow, but brawling right along, carrying pine needles, loamy black topsoil, and small shrubs away. There was not much for the men to do but to sit around and make sure none of the plump, straining dumper hoses came free and started to fly around spraying water like bombed-out fire hydrants. Moss shut the pumps down regularly, in sequence, so that they could pound in loose clamps or switch them to a new place if the ground was getting loose where they had been.

  By three o‘clock, the stream was rolling larger bushes downstream, and just before five o’clock, Gardener heard the rending rumble of a biggish tree going over. He got up and craned his neck, but it had happened too far down the new stream’s course to see.

  “Sounded like a pine,” Moss said.

  It was Gardener’s turn to look at Moss and say nothing.

  “Might have been a spruce,” Moss said, and although the man’s face remained perfectly straight, Gardener believed Moss might just have made a joke. A very small one, but a joke, just the same.

  “Is this water reaching the road, do you think?”

  “Oh, ayuh, I sh’d suspect.”

  “It’ll wash it out, won’t it?”

  “Nope. Town crew’s already puttin in a new culve’t. Large bore. S‘pose they’ll have to detour traffic couple of days while they tear up the tarvy, but they ain’t’s much traffic out here as there used to be, anyway.”

  “I noticed,” Gardener said.

  “Damn good thing, if you ask me. Summer people’re always a pain in the ass. Looka here, Gardener—I’m gonna cut the outflow on these pumps way down, but they’ll still pump fifteen, maybe seventeen gallons a minute overnight. With four pumps workin, that’s thirty-eight hundred gallons an hour, all night long. Not bad for runnin on automatic. Come on, let’s go. Yon ship’s lovely, but it makes my blood pressure jumpy. I’ll drink one of your beers before I head home to the missus, if you’ll let it be so.”

  Moss had shown up again yesterday, Saturday, in his old Pontiac, and had promptly run the pumps up to capacity—thirty-five gallons per minute each, eighty-four hundred gallons an hour.

  This morning, no Freeman Moss. He had finally played out like the others, leaving Gardener to consider the same old options.

  First option: Business as usual.

  Second option: Run like hell. He had already come to the conclusion that if Bobbi died, he would suffer a fatal accident soon afterward. It might take as long as half an hour for him to have it. If he decided to run, would they know in advance? Gardener didn’t think so. He and the rest of Haven still played poker the old-fashioned way: with all the cards dealt facedown. Oh, and by the way, gang—how far would he have to run to get out of the reach of them and their Buck Rogers gadgetry?

  Actually, Gard didn’t think it would be that far. Derry, Bangor, even Augusta . . . all those might be too close. Portland? Maybe. Probably. Because of what he thought of as the Cigarette Analogy.

  When a kid started to smoke, he was lucky if he could get through half a butt without puking his guts out or almost fainting. After six months’ experience, he might be able to get through five or ten butts a day. Give a kid three years and you had yourself a two-and-a-half-pack-a-day candidate for lung cancer.

  Then turn it over. Tell a kid who has just finished his first butt and who is wandering around green-faced and gagging that he has to quit smoking, and he’ll probably fall down and kiss your ass. Catch him when he’s doing five or ten smokes a day and you’ve got a kid who probably doesn’t care much one way or another . . . although a kid habituated even at that level may find himself eating too many sweets and wishing for a smoke when he’s bored or nervous.

  Ah, Gardener thought, but take your smoking vet. Tell him he’s got to quit the coffin-nails and he clutches his chest like a man who’s having a heart attack . . . only he’s just protecting the smokes in the breast pocket of his shirt. Smoking, Gardener knew from his own mostly successful efforts to either quit the habit or at least damp it down to a less lethal vice, is a physical addiction. In the first week off cigarettes, smokers suffer from jitters, headaches, muscle spasms. Doctors may prescribe B12 to quiet the worst of these symptoms. They know, however, that there are no pills to combat the ex-smoker’s feelings of loss and depression during the six months which begin the instant the smoker crushes out his last butt and starts his or her lonely voyage out of addiction.

  And Haven, Gardener thought now, running the pumps up to full power, is like a smoke-filled room. They were sick here at first . . . they were like a bunch of kids learning to smoke cornshucks out behind the barn. But now they like the air in the room, and why not? They’re the ultimate chainsmokers. It’s in the air they breathe, and God knows what kinds of physiological changes are going on in their brains and bodies. Lung sections show formation of oat cells in the lung tissue of people who have been smoking for only eighteen months. There’s a high incidence of brain tumors in towns where there are high-pollution milling operations or, God save us, nuclear reactors. So what is this doing to them?

  He didn’t know—he had seen no surface, observable changes except for the loss of teeth and the increased shortness of temper. But he didn’t think they’d chase him very far if he split. They might begin by lighting out after him with the fervor of a posse in a Republic western, but he somehow thought they would lose interest very quickly ... as soon as the withdrawal symptoms set in.

  He got all four pumps running at top speed, swelling the creek into a wide stream almost at once. Then he began the day’s work of checking the U-clamps which held the hoses still.

  If he got away, his choices were two: keep his mouth shut or blow the whistle. He knew that, for a variety of reasons, he would probably keep quiet. Which meant simply dealing himself out—writing off the last month o
f back-breaking labor, writing off any chance to change the suicidal course of world politics at a stroke, most of all writing off his good friend and erstwhile lover Bobbi Anderson, who had been in absentia for the best part of two weeks now.

  Third option: Get rid of it. Blow it up. Destroy it. Make it no more than another vague rumor, like the supposed aliens in Hangar 18.

  In spite of his dull fury at the insanity of nuclear power and the energy-swilling technocratic pigs who had created it and underwritten it and refused to see its dangers even in the wake of Chernobyl, in spite of his depression at the AP Wirephoto of the scientists advancing the Black Clock to two minutes before midnight, he fully recognized the possibility that destroying the ship might be the best thing he could possibly do. The oxidation of whatever had been impregnated in the surface of its hull (deliberately, he had no doubt) had created a cornucopia of mind-blowing gadgets out here; God alone knew what wonderful things might be waiting inside. But there was the other stuff, wasn’t there? The neurosurgeon in the crashed plane, that old man and the big state cop, maybe the lady constable, Mrs. McCausland, maybe the two other state cops who had disappeared, maybe even the Brown kid . . . how much of this could be laid at the door of this thing he was staring at, which was jutting out of the ground like the breeching snout of the greatest white whale ever dreamed of? Some? All? None of the above?

  Gardener was sure of one thing—it wasn’t the last.

  That the ship in the earth was a font of creation was undeniable . . . but it was also the wrecked craft of an unknowable species from somewhere far out in the blackness—creatures whose minds might be as different from those of human beings as human minds were from the minds of spiders. It was a marvelous, improbable artifact shining in the hazy sunlight of this Sunday morning ... but it was also a haunted house where demons might still walk between the walls and in the hollow places. There were times when he would look at it and feel his throat fill up with strangeness, as at the sight of flat eyes staring up at him from the earth.

 

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