Stephen King

by The Tommyknockers (v5)

  Better watch your step, Gard. You’re tempting fate.

  Except he wasn’t. Right now he almost would have welcomed a jag, but the cyclone had gone somewhere else to blow... at least for the time being. He poured another two inches of whiskey into the glass, contemplated it for a moment, then poured most of it down the sink. He put the bottle back, and added water and ice cubes, converting what had been liquid dynamite into a civilized drink.

  He thought the kid on the beach would have approved.

  He supposed the dreamlike calm that had surrounded him when he came out of the Mirror Maze, and felt again now, was a defense against just lying down on the floor and screaming until he lost consciousness. The calm was all right. What scared him was how fast his mind had gone to work trying to convince him that none of it was true—that he had hallucinated the whole thing. Incredibly, his mind was suggesting that what he had seen when he opened the hatch in the heater’s base was a very bright light bulb—two hundred watts, say.

  It wasn’t a light bulb and it wasn’t hallucination. It was something like a sun, very small and hot and bright, floating in an arch of wires, over an egg carton filled with D-cells. Now you can go crazy if you want, or get Jesus, or get drunk but you saw what you saw and leave us not gild the lily, all right? All right.

  He checked on Anderson and saw she was still sleeping like a stone. Gardener had decided to wake Bobbi up by ten-thirty if she hadn’t awakened on her own; he looked at his watch now, and was astonished to see it was twenty minutes past nine. He had been in the cellar much longer than he had thought.

  Thinking of the cellar called up the surreal vision of that miniature sun hanging suspended in its arch of wires, glowing like a superhot tennis ball... and thinking about that brought back the unpleasant sense that his mind was uncoupling itself. He pushed it away. It didn’t want to go. He pushed harder, telling himself he was simply not going to think about it anymore until Bobbi woke up and told him what was going on around here.

  He looked down at his arms and saw that he was sweating.

  8

  Gardener took his drink out back, where he found more evidence of Bobbi’s almost supernatural burst of activity.

  Her Tomcat tractor was standing in front of the large shed to the left of the garden—nothing unusual about that, it was where she most commonly left it when the weatherman said it wasn’t going to get rained on. But even from twenty feet away Gardener could see that Anderson had done something radical to the Tomcat’s motor.

  No. No more. Forget this shit, Gard. Go home.

  There was nothing dreamy or disconnected about that voice—it was harsh, vital with panic and scared dismay. For a moment Gardener felt himself on the verge of giving in to it ... and then he thought what an abysmal betrayal that would be—of Bobbi, of himself. The thought of Bobbi had kept him from killing himself yesterday. And by not killing himself, he thought he had kept her from doing the same thing. The Chinese had a proverb: “If you save a life, you are responsible for it.” But if Bobbi needed help, how was he supposed to give it? Didn’t finding out begin with trying to find out just what had been going on out here?

  (but you know who did all the work don’t you Gard?)

  He knocked back the last of the drink, set the empty glass on the top back step, and walked toward the Tomcat. He was distantly aware of the crickets singing in the high grass. He wasn’t drunk, not squiffy, as far as he could tell; the booze seemed to have shot past his entire nervous system. Gave it a miss, as the British said.

  (like the leprechauns that made the shoes tap-tap-tappety-tap while the cobbler slept)

  But Bobbi hadn’t been sleeping, had she? Bobbi had been driven until she dropped—literally dropped—into Gardener’s arms.

  (tap-tap-tappety-tap knock-knock-knockety-knock late last night and the night before Tommyknockers Tommyknockers knocking at the door)

  Standing by the Tomcat, looking into the open engine compartment, Gardener didn’t just shiver—he shuddered like a man dying of cold, his upper teeth biting into his lower lip, his face pale, his temples and forehead covered with sweat.

  (they fixed the water heater and the Tomcat too there’s lots of things the Tommyknockers do)

  The Tomcat was a small working vehicle which would have been almost useless on a big spread where farming was the main work. It was bigger than a riding lawnmower, smaller than the smallest tractor Deere or Farmall had ever made, but just right for someone who kept a garden that was a little too big to be called a plot—and that was the case here. Bobbi had a garden of about an acre and a half—beans, cukes, peas, corn, radishes, and potatoes. No carrots, no cabbages, no zucchini, no squash. “I don’t grow what I don’t like,” she had told Gardener once. “Life’s too short.”

  The Tomcat was fairly versatile; it had to be. Even a well-off gentleman farmer would have trouble justifying the purchase of a $2,500 mini-tractor on the basis of a one-acre garden. It could roto-till, mow grass with one attachment and cut hay with another; it could haul stuff over rough terrain (she used it as a skidder in the fall, and so far as Gardener knew, Bobbi had gotten stuck only once), and in the winter she attached a snow-blower unit and cleared her driveway in half an hour. It was powered by a sturdy four-cc engine.

  Or had been.

  The engine was still in there, but now it was tarted up with the weirdest array of gadgets and attachments imaginable—Gardener found himself thinking of the doorbell/radio thing on the table in Anderson’s basement, and wondering if Bobbi meant to put it on the Tomcat soon ... maybe it was radar or something. A single bewildered bark of laughter escaped him.

  A mayonnaise jar jutted from one side of the engine. It was filled with a fluid too colorless to be gasoline and screwed into a brass fitting on the engine head. Sitting on the cowling was something that would have looked more at home on a Chevy Nova or SuperSport: the air scoop of a supercharger.

  The modest carb had been replaced with a scrounged four-barrel. Bobbi had had to cut a hole through the cowling to make room for it.

  And there were wires—wires everywhere, snaking in and out and up and down and all around, making connections that made absolutely no sense ... at least, not as far as Gardener could see.

  He looked at the Tomcat’s rudimentary instrument panel, started to look away ... and then his gaze snapped back, his eyes widening.

  The Tomcat had a stick shift, and the gearing pattern had been printed on a square of metal bolted to the dashboard above the oil-pressure gauge. Gardener had seen that square of metal often enough; he had driven the Tomcat frequently over the years. Before, it had always been:

  Now, something new had been added—something which was just simple enough to be terrifying:

  You don’t believe that, do you?

  I don’t know.

  Come on, Gard—flying tractors? Give me a break!

  She’s got a miniature sun in her water heater.

  Bullshit. I think it might have been a light bulb, a bright one, like a two-hundred-watt—

  It was not a light bulb!

  Okay, all right, calm down. It just sounds like an ad for a really E.T. ripoff, that’s all. “You’ll believe a tractor can fly.”

  Shut up.

  Or “John Deere, phone home.” How’s that?

  He stood in Anderson’s kitchen again, looking longingly at the cabinet where the booze was. He shifted his eyes away—it was not easy because they felt as if they had gained weight—and walked back into the living room. He saw that Bobbi had changed positions and that her respiration was moving along a bit more rapidly. First signs of waking up. Gardener glanced at his watch again and saw it was nearly ten o’clock. He went over to the bookcase by Bobbi’s desk, wanting to find something to read until she came around, something that would take his mind off this whole business for a little while.

  What he saw on Bobbi’s desk, beside the battered old typewriter, was in some ways the worst shock of all. Shocking enough, anyway, so that he barely
noticed another change: a roll of perforated computer paper hung on the wall above and behind the desk and typewriter like a giant roll of paper towels.

  9

  THE BUFFALO SOLDIERS

  a novel by Roberta Anderson

  Gardener put the top sheet aside, facedown, and saw his own name—or rather, the nickname only he and Bobbi used.

  For Gard, who’s always there when I need him.

  Another shudder worked through him. He put the second sheet aside facedown on the first.

  1

  In those days, just before Kansas began to bleed, the buffalo were still plentiful on the plains—plentiful enough, anyway, for poor men, white and Indian alike, to be buried in buffalo skins rather than in coffins.

  “Once you get a taste of buffaler meat, you’ll never want what come off’n a cow again,” the old-timers said, and they must have believed what they said, because these hunters of the plains, these buffalo soldiers, seemed to exist in a world of hairy, humpbacked ghosts—all about them they carried the memory of the buffalo, the smell of the buffalo—the smell, yes, because many of them smeared buff-tallow on their necks and faces and hands to keep the prairie sun from burning them black. They wore buffalo teeth in necklaces and sometimes in their ears; their chaps were of buffalo hide; and more than one of these nomads carried a buffalo penis as a good-luck charm or guarantee of continued potency.

  Ghosts themselves, following herds that crossed the short-wire grass like the great clouds which cover the prairie with their shadows; the clouds remain but the great herds are gone ... and so are the buffalo soldiers, madmen from wastes that had as yet never known a fence, men who came striding out of nowhere and went striding back into that same place, men with buffalo-hide moccasins on their feet and bones clicking about their necks; ghosts out of time, out of a place that existed just before the whole country began to bleed.

  Late in the afternoon, of August 24th, 1848, Robert Howell, who would die at Gettysburg not quite fifteen years later, made camp near a small stream far out along the Nebraska panhandle, in that eerie section known as the Sand Hill Country. The stream was small but the water smelled sweet enough ...

  Gardener was forty pages into the story and utterly absorbed when he heard Bobbi Anderson call sleepily:

  “Gard? Gard, are you still around?”

  “I’m here, Bobbi,” he said, and stood up, dreading what would come next and already half-believing he had gone insane. That had to be it, of course. There could not be a tiny sun in the bottom of Bobbi’s hot-water tank, nor a new gear on her Tomcat which suggested levitation ... but it would have been easier for him to believe either of those things than to believe that Bobbi had written a four-hundred-page novel called The Buffalo Soldiers in the three weeks or so since Gard had last seen her—a novel that was, just incidentally, the best thing she had ever written. Impossible, yeah. Easier—hell, saner—to believe he had gone crazy and simply leave it at that.

  If only he could.

  9.

  ANDERSON SPINS A TALE

  1

  Bobbi was getting off the couch slowly, wincing like an old woman.

  “Bobbi—” Gardener began.

  “Christ, I ache all over,” Anderson said. “And I’ve got to change my—never mind. How long did I sleep?”

  Gardener glanced at his watch. “Fourteen hours, I guess. A little more. Bobbi, your new book—”

  “Yeah. Hold that until I get back.” She walked slowly across the floor toward the bathroom, unbuttoning the shirt she’d slept in. As she hobbled toward the bathroom, Gardener got a good look—a better one than he wanted, actually—of just how much weight Bobbi had lost. This went beyond scrawniness to the point of emaciation.

  She stopped, as if aware Gardener was looking at her, and without looking around she said: “I can explain everything, you know.”

  “Can you?” Gardener asked.

  2

  Anderson was in the bathroom a long time—much longer than it should have taken her to use the toilet and change her pad—Gardener was pretty sure that was what she’d gone to do. Her face just had that I-got-the-curse look. He listened for the shower but it wasn’t running, and he began to feel uneasy. Bobbi had seemed perfectly lucid when she woke up, but did that necessarily mean she was? Gardener began to have uncomfortable visions of Bobbi wriggling out the bathroom window and then running off into the woods in nothing but blue jeans, cackling wildly.

  He put his right hand to the left side of his forehead, where the scar was. His head had started to throb a little. He let another minute or two slip by, and then he got up and walked toward the bathroom, making an effort to step quietly that was not quite unconscious. Visions of Bobbi escaping through the bathroom window to avoid explanations had been replaced by one of Bobbi serenely cutting her throat with one of Gard’s own razor blades to avoid explanations permanently.

  He decided he would just listen. If he heard normal-sounding movements, he would go on out to the kitchen and put on coffee, maybe scramble a few eggs. If he didn’t hear anything—

  His worries were needless. The bathroom door hadn’t latched when she closed it, and other improvements aside, the unlatched doors in the place apparently still had their old way of swinging open. She’d probably have to shim up the whole north side of the house to do that. Maybe that was next week’s project, he thought.

  The door had swung open enough for him to see Bobbi standing at the mirror where Gardener had stood himself not long ago. She had her toothbrush in one hand and a tube of toothpaste in the other ... but she hadn’t uncapped the tube yet. She was looking into the mirror with an intensity that was almost hypnotic. Her lips were pulled back, her teeth bared.

  She caught movement in the mirror and turned around, making no particular effort to cover her wasted breasts.

  “Gard, do my teeth look all right to you?”

  Gardener looked at them. They looked to him about as they always had, although he couldn’t remember ever having seen quite this much of them—he was reminded of that terrible photo of Karen Carpenter again.

  “Sure.” He kept trying not to look at her stacked ribs, the painful jut of her pelvic bones above the waist of her jeans, which were drooping in spite of a belt cinched so tight it looked like a hobo’s length of clothesline. “I guess so.” He smiled cautiously. “Look, ma, no cavities.”

  Anderson tried to return Gardener’s smile with her lips still pulled back to the gums; the result of this experiment was mildly grotesque. She put a forefinger on a molar and pressed.

  “Oes it iggle en I ooo at?”

  “What?”

  “Does it wiggle when I do that?”

  “No. Not that I can see, anyway. Why?”

  “It’s just this dream I keep having. It—” She looked down at herself. “Get out of here, Gard, I’m in dishabilly.”

  Don’t worry, Bobbi. I wasn’t going to jump your bones. Mostly because that’d be too close to what I’d really be doing.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Door was open. I thought you’d gone out.”

  He closed the door, latching it firmly.

  Through it she said clearly: “I know what you’re wondering.”

  He said nothing—only stood there. But he had a feeling she knew—knew—he was still there. As if she could see through the door.

  “You’re wondering if I’m losing my mind.”

  “No,” he said then. “No, Bobbi. But—”

  “I’m as sane as you are,” Anderson said through the door. “I’m so stiff I can hardly walk and I’ve got an Ace bandage wrapped around my right knee for some reason I can’t quite remember and I’m hungry as a bear and I know I’ve lost too much weight ... but I am sane, Gard. I think you may have times before the day’s over when you wonder if you are. The answer is, we both are.”

  “Bobbi, what’s happening here?” Gardener asked. It came out in a helpless sort of cry.

  “I want to unwrap the goddam Ace bandage and see what’s u
nder it,” Anderson said through the door. “Feels like I jobbed my knee pretty good. Out in the woods, probably. Then I want to take a hot shower and put on some clean clothes. While I do that, you could make us some breakfast. And I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, Bobbi.”

  “I’m glad to have you here, Gard,” she said. “I had a bad feeling once or twice. Like maybe you weren’t doing so good.”

  Gardener felt his vision double, treble, then float away in prisms. He wiped an arm across his face. “No pain, no strain,” he said. “I’ll make some breakfast.”

  “Thanks, Gard.”

  He walked away, but he had to walk slow, because no matter how often he wiped his eyes, his vision kept trying to break up on him.

  3

  He stopped just inside the kitchen and went back to the closed bathroom door as a new thought occurred to him. Water was running in there now.

  “Where’s Peter?”

  “What?” she called over the drumming shower.

  “I said, where’s Peter?” he called, raising his voice.

  “Dead,” Bobbi called back over the drumming water. “I cried, Gard. But he was ... you know ...”

  “Old,” Gardener muttered, then remembered and raised his voice again. “It was old age, then?”

  “Yes,” Anderson called back over the drumming water.

  Gardener stood there for just a moment before going back to the kitchen, wondering why he believed Bobbi was lying about Peter and how he had died.