“You always did like to operate without anesthetic. I guess I never got anything but exploratory surgery before this, huh?”
“Maybe.”
“Why now? After all these years, why did you have to pick now?”
“None of your business.”
“Bobbi’s my business.”
They faced each other. She drilled him with her gaze. She waited for his eyes to drop. They didn’t. It suddenly occurred to her that if she started into the house without saying more, he might attempt to restrain her. It wouldn’t do him any good, but it might be simpler to answer his question. What difference did it make?
“I’ve come to take her home.”
Silence again.
There are no crickets.
“Let me give you a piece of advice, sister Anne.”
“Spare me. No candy from strangers, no advice from drunks.”
“Do exactly what I told you when you got out of the car. Leave. Now. Just go. This is not a good place to be right now.”
There was something in his eyes, something desperately honest, that brought on a recurrence of her earlier chill and that unaccustomed confusion. She had been left all day in her car at the side of the road as she lay in a swoon. What sort of people did that?
Then every bit of her Anne-ness rose up and crushed these little doubts. If she wanted a thing to be, if she meant a thing to be, that thing would be; so it had been, was, and ever would be, alleluia, amen.
“Okay, Chumly,” she said. “You gave me yours, I’ll give you mine. I’m going inside that shack, and about two minutes later a very large chunk of shit is going to hit the fan. I suggest you go for a walk if you don’t want to get splattered. Sit on a rock somewhere and watch the sun go down and jerk off or think up rhymes or do whatever it is Great Poets do when they watch the sunset. But you want to keep out of what goes on in the house, no matter what. It’s between Bobbi and me. If you get in my way, I’ll rip you up.”
“In Haven, you’re more likely to be the rippee than the ripper.”
“Well, that’s something I’ll have to see for myself, even though I’m not from Missouri,” Anne said, and started for the door.
Gardener tried once more.
“Anne ... Sissy ... Bobbi’s not the same. She ...”
“Take a walk, little man,” Anne said, and went inside.
18
The windows were open but for some reason the shades were drawn. Every now and then a puff of faint breeze would stir, sucking the shades into the openings a little way. When it happened, they looked like the sails of a becalmed ship doing their best and failing. Anne sniffed and wrinkled her nose. Bluh. The place smelled like a monkey-house. From the Great Poet she would have expected it, but her sister had been raised better. This place was a pigsty.
“Hello, Sissy.”
She turned. For a moment Bobbi was just a shadow, and Anne felt her heart go into her throat because there was something odd about that shape, something all wrong—
Then she saw the white blur of her sister’s robe, heard the patter of water, and understood that Bobbi had just come from the shower. She was all but naked. Good. But her pleasure was not as great as it should have been. Her unease remained, her feeling that there was something wrong about the shape in the dooorway.
This is not a good place to be right now.
“Daddy’s dead,” she said, straining her eyes to see better. For all her straining, Bobbi remained only a dim figure in the door which communicated between living room and—she assumed—bathroom.
“I know. Newt Berringer called and told me.”
Something about her voice. Something even more basically different in the vague suggestiveness of her shape. Then it came to her. The realization brought a nasty shock and stronger fear. She didn’t sound afraid. For the first time in her life, Bobbi didn’t sound afraid of her.
“We buried him without you. Your mother died a little when you didn’t come home, Bobbi.”
She waited for Bobbi to defend herself. There was only silence.
For Christ’s sake, come out where I can see you, you little coward!
Anne ... Bobbi’s not the same ...
“She fell downstairs four days ago and broke her hip.”
“Did she?” Bobbi asked indifferently.
“You’re coming home with me, Bobbi.” She meant to convey force and was appalled by the weak shrillness of her voice.
“It was your teeth that let you get in,” Bobbi said. “Of course! I should have thought of that!”
“Bobbi, get out here where I can see you!”
“Do you want me to?” Her voice had taken on a strange teasing lilt. “I wonder if you do.”
“Stop fucking with me, Bobbi!” Her voice rose unevenly.
“Oh, listen!” Bobbi said. “I never thought I’d hear anything like that from you, Anne. After all the years you fucked with me ... with all of us. But okay. If you insist. If you insist, that’s fine. Just fine.”
She didn’t want to see. Suddenly Anne didn’t want anything but to run, and keep running until she was far from this shadowy place and this town where they left you fainting all day at the side of the road. But it was too late. She saw the blurred movement of her younger sister’s hand, and the lights went on at the same moment the robe dropped with a soft rustle.
The shower had washed off the makeup. Bobbi’s entire head and neck were transparent and jellylike. Her breasts had swelled bulbously outward and seemed to be merging into one single nippleless outcropping of flesh. Anne could see dim organs in Bobbi’s stomach that looked nothing at all like human organs—there was fluid circulating in there but it looked green.
Behind Bobbi’s forehead she could see the quivering sac of mind.
Bobbi grinned toothlessly.
“Welcome to Haven, Anne,” she said.
She felt herself stepping backward in a spongy dream. She was trying to scream but there was no air.
At Bobbi’s crotch, a grotesque thatch of tentacles like sea-grass wavered from her vagina ... the place where her vagina had been, anyway. Anne had no idea if it was still there or not, and didn’t care. The sunken valley which had replaced her crotch was enough. That ... and the way the tentacles seemed to be pointing toward her ... reaching for her.
Naked, Bobbi began walking toward her. Anne tried to back away and stumbled over a footstool.
“No,” she whispered, trying to crawl away. “No ... Bobbi ... no ...”
“Good to have you here,” Bobbi said, still smiling. “I hadn’t counted on you ... not at all ... but I think we can find a job for you. Positions, as they say, are still open.”
“Bobbi ...” She managed this one final terrified whisper, and then she felt the tentacles moving lightly on her body. She jerked, tried to move away ... and they slithered around her wrists. Bobbi’s hips thrust out in a movement that was like an obscene parody of copulation.
2.
GARDENER TAKES A WALK
1
Gardener took Anne’s advice and went for a walk. He went, in fact, all the way out to the ship in the woods. This was the first time he had been out here by himself, he realized, and it would soon be full dark. He felt vaguely afraid, as a child might passing near a haunted house. Are there ghosts in there? The ghosts of Tommyknockers past? Or are the real Tommyknockers themselves still in there, maybe in suspended animation, beings like freeze-dried coffee, waiting to be thawed out? And just what were they, anyhow?
He sat on the ground by the lean-to, looking at the ship. After a while the moon rose and lit its surface an even more ghostly silver. It was strange and yet very beautiful.
What’s going on around here?
I don’t want to know.
What it is ain’t exactly clear ...
I don’t want to know.
Hey, stop, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down ...
He tipped the bottle up and drank deep. He put it aside, rolled over, and rested his
throbbing head on his arms. He fell asleep that way, in the woods near the graceful circular jut of the ship.
He slept there all night.
In the morning there were two teeth on the ground.
It’s what I get for sleeping so close to it, he thought dully, but there was at least one compensation—he had no headache at all, although he had put away nearly a fifth of Scotch. He had noticed before that, all its other attributes aside, the ship—or the change in the atmosphere the ship had generated—seemed, at very close range, to provide hangover protection.
He didn’t want to leave his teeth just lying there. Heeding an obscure urge, he kicked dirt over them. As he did it he thought again: Playing Hamlet is a luxury you can no longer afford, Gard. If you don’t commit to one course or the other very soon—in the next day or so, I think—you’re not going to be able to do anything but march along with the rest of them.
He looked at the ship, thought of the deep ravine which extended down its smooth, unmarked side, and thought again: We’ll be down to the hatchway soon, if there is a hatchway.... What then?
Rather than trying to answer, he struck off for home.
2
The Cutlass was gone.
“Where were you last night?” Bobbi asked Gardener.
“I slept in the woods.”
“Did you get really drunk?” Bobbi asked with surprising gentleness. Her face was dark with makeup again. And Bobbi had been wearing shirts which seemed oddly loose and baggy the last few days; this morning he thought he could see why. Her chest was thickening. Her breasts had begun to look like a single unit instead of two separate things. It made Gardener think of guys who pumped iron.
“Not very. One or two nips and I passed out. No hangover this morning. And no bug bites.” He raised his arms, darkly tanned on top, white and strangely vulnerable beneath. “Any other summer, you’d wake up the next morning so bug-bit you couldn’t open your eyes. But now they’re gone. Along with the birds. And the beasts. In fact, Roberta, it seems to repel everything but fools like us.”
“Have you changed your mind, Gard?”
“You keep asking me that, have you noticed?”
Bobbi didn’t reply.
“Did you hear the news on the radio yesterday?” He knew she hadn’t. Bobbi didn’t see, hear, or think about anything now but the ship. Her headshake was no surprise. “Troops massing in Libya. More fighting in Lebanon. American troop movements. The Russians getting louder and louder about SDI. We’re all still sitting on the powderkeg. That hasn’t changed a bit since 1945 or so. Then you discover a deus ex machina in your back yard, and now you keep wanting to know if I’ve changed my mind about using it.”
“Have you?”
“No,” Gardener said, not sure if he was lying or not—but he was very glad Bobbi couldn’t read him.
Oh, can’t she? I think she can. Not much, but more than she could a month ago ... more and more each day. Because you’re “becoming” now, too. Changed your mind? That’s a laugh; you can’t fucking make up your mind!
Bobbi dismissed it, or appeared to do so. She turned toward the pile of hand-tools stacked on the corner of the porch. She had missed making up a spot just below her right ear, Gardener saw—it was the same spot many men miss when they are shaving. He realized with a sickish lack of surprise that he could see into Bobbi—her skin had changed, had become kind of semi-transparent jelly. Bobbi had grown thicker, shorter over the last few days—and the changes were accelerating.
God, he thought, horrified and bitterly amused, is that what happens when you turn into a Tommyknocker? You start looking like someone who got caught in a great big messy atomic meltdown?
Bobbi, who had been bending over the tools and gathering them up in her arms, turned quickly to look at Gardener, her face wary.
“What?”
I said let’s get moving, you lazy juggins, Gardener sent clearly, and that wary, puzzled expression became a reluctant smile.
“Okay. Help me with these, then.”
No, of course victims of high-gamma radiation didn’t turn transparent, like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man. They didn’t start to lose inches as their bodies twisted and thickened. But, yes, they were apt to lose teeth, their hair was apt to fall out—in other words, there was a kind of physical “becoming” in both cases.
He thought again: Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
Bobbi was looking narrowly at him again.
I’m running out of maneuvering room, all right. And fast.
“What did you say, Gard?”
“I said, ‘Let’s go, boss.’ ”
After a long moment, Bobbi nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Daylight’s wasting.”
3
They rode out to the dig on the Tomcat. It did not fly the way the little boy’s bike had flown in E.T. ; Bobbi’s tractor would never soar cinematically in front of the moon, hundreds of feet above the rooftops. But it did cruise silently and handily eighteen inches above the ground, large wheels spinning slowly like dying propellers. It smoothed the ride out a whole hell of a lot. Gard was driving, Bobbi standing behind him on the yoke.
“Your sister left?” Gard said. There was no need to yell. The Tomcat’s engine was a faint, distant purr.
“That’s right,” Bobbi said. “She left.”
You still can’t lie worth shit, Bobbi. And I think—I really do—that I heard her scream. Just before I hit the patch going into the woods, I think I heard her scream. How much would it take to make a high-stepping, pure-d, ball-cutting bitch like Sissy let out a howl? How bad would it have to be?
The answer to that one was easy. Very bad.
“She was never the type to exit gracefully,” Bobbi said. “Or to let anyone be graceful, if she could help it. She came to bring me home, you know ... watch that stump, Gard, it’s a high one.”
Gardener shoved the gear lever all the way up. The Tomcat rose another three inches, skimming over the top of the high stump. Once past, he relaxed his hand and the Tomcat sank back to its previous altitude, eighteen inches above the ground.
“Yes, she just came up with her bit and her hackamore,” Bobbi said, sounding faintly amazed. “There was a time when she might have taken me, too. As things are now, she never had a chance.”
Gardener felt cold. There were a lot of ways a person could interpret a remark like that, weren’t there?
“I’m still surprised that it took you only one evening to convince her,” Gardener said. “I thought Patricia McCardle was bad, but your sister made ole Patty look like Annette Funicello.”
“I just wiped off some of this makeup. When she saw what was underneath, she screamed and left so fast you would have thought there were rockets in her heels. It was actually pretty funny.”
It was plausible. It was so plausible that the temptation to believe it was almost insuperable. Unless you ignored the simple fact that the lady under discussion couldn’t have gone anywhere in a hurry without help. The lady could barely walk without help.
No, Gardener thought. She never left. The only question is whether you killed her or if she’s out in the goddam shed with Peter.
“How long do the physical changes go on, Bobbi?” Gardener asked.
“Not much longer,” Bobbi said, and Gardener thought again that Bobbi had never been able to lie worth shit. “Here we are. Park it over by the lean-to.”
4
The following evening they knocked off early—the heat was still holding, and neither of them felt capable of going on until the last light died. They returned to the house, pushed food around on their plates, even ate some of it. With the dishes washed, Gardener said he thought he would go for a walk.
“Oh?” Bobbi was looking at him with that wary expression which had become one of her main stocks in trade. “I would have thought you’d gotten enough exercise today for anyone.”
“Sun’s down now,” Gard said easily. “It’s cooler. No bugs. And ...” He looked clear-eyed at Bobbi.
“If I go out on the porch, I’m going to take a bottle. If I take a bottle, I’m going to get drunk. If I go for a long walk and come back tired, maybe I can fall into bed sober for one night.”
All of this was true enough ... but there was another truth nested inside it, like one Chinese box inside another. Gardener looked at Bobbi and waited to see if she would go hunting for that inner box.
She didn’t.
“All right,” she said, “but you know I don’t care how much you drink, Gard. I’m your friend, not your wife.”
No, you don’t care how much I drink—you’ve made it very easy for me to drink all I want. Because it neutralizes me.
He walked along Route 9 past Justin Hurd’s place, and when he struck the Nista Road he turned left and moved along at a good pace, his arms swinging easily. The last month’s labor had toughened him more than he would have believed—not so long ago even a two-mile walk such as this would have left him rubber-legged and winded.
Still, it was eerie. No whippoorwills greeted the encroaching twilight; no dog barked at him. Most of the houses were dark. No TVs flickered inside the few lighted windows he passed.
Who needs Barney Miller reruns when you can “become” instead? Gardener thought.
By the time he reached the sign reading ROAD ENDS 200 YARDS, it was almost full dark, but the moon was rising and the night was very bright. At the end of the road he reached a heavy chain strung between two posts. A rusty, bullet-holed NO TRESPASSING sign hung from it. Gard stepped over the chain, kept walking, and was soon standing in an abandoned gravel pit. The moonlight on its weedy sides was white as bone. The silence made Gardener’s scalp prickle.
What had brought him here? His own “becoming,” he supposed—something he had picked out of Bobbi’s mind without even knowing he’d done it. It must have been that, because whatever had brought him out here had been a lot stronger than just a hunch.
To the left there was a thick triangular scar against the whiteness of the undisturbed gravel. This stuff had been moved around. Gardener walked over, shoes crunching. He dug into the fresher gravel, found nothing, moved, dug another hole, found nothing, moved, dug a third, found nothing—
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