“What?”
“Dr. Fu Manchu. If you see Nayland Smith hanging around, I think you’ve got the story of the century.” Bright leaned forward and whispered hoarsely: “White slavery. Remember who you heard it from when you get the call from the New York Times.”
“I don’t think that’s very funny, David.”
An eighty-four-year-old twerp, Bright thought again. Imagine it.
“Or, here’s one,” Bright said. “Little green men. The invasion of earth is already under way, see, only no one knows it. And—TA-DA! No One Will Believe This Heroic Young News-Hawk! Robert Redford Stars as John Leandro in This Nail-Biting Saga of—”
The bartender wandered down and said, “You want to turn it down?”
Leandro got up, his face stiff. He dropped three dollar bills on the bar. “Your sense of humor is adolescent, David.”
“Or try this,” Bright said dreamily. “It’s both Fu Manchu and green men from space. An alliance formed in hell. And no one knows but you, Johnny. Klaatu barada nictu!”
“Well, I don’t care if Reynault lets me follow it up or not,” Leandro said, and Bright saw that he might have twanged Johnny’s strings just a little too hard; the twerp was furious. “My vacation starts next Friday. I may just go down to Haven. Follow it up on my own time.”
“Sure,” Bright said, excited. He knew he should let up—pretty soon Leandro was probably going to try to punch him in the mouth—but the guy just kept giving him openings. “Sure, that’s gotta be part of it! Redford wouldn’t take the part unless he could go it alone. The Lone Wolf! Klaatu barada nictu! Wow! Just remember to wear your special watch when you go down there.”
“What watch?” Leandro asked, his face still angry. Oh, he was pissed, all right, but he kept leading with his chin just the same.
“You know, the one that sends out an ultrasonic signal that only Superman can hear when you pull out the stem,” Bright said, demonstrating with his own watch (and spilling a fair amount of beer into his crotch). “It goes zeeeeeeeee—”
“I don’t care what Peter Reynault thinks, and I don’t care how many stupid jokes you make,” Leandro said. “You both just might get a big surprise.”
He started out, then turned back.
“And for the record, I think you’re a cynical shithead with no imagination.”
Having delivered this valedictory, Johnny Leandro turned on his heel and stalked grandly out.
Bright lifted his glass and tipped it toward the bartender. “Let’s drink to the cynical shitheads of the world,” he said. “We have no imagination, but we’re remarkably resistant to twerpism.”
“Whatever you say,” the bartender said. He believed he had seen it all before . . . but then, he had never tended bar in Haven.
6
Tuesday, August 2nd:
There were six of them who met late that afternoon in Newt Berringer’s office. It was going on five P.M., but the clock in the tower—a tower that looked real but which a bird could easily have flown through, if there had been any birds left in Haven Village—still read five past three. All six had spent some time in Bobbi’s shed; Adley McKeen was the most recent addition to their number. The others included Newt, Dick Allison, Kyle, Hazel, and Frank Spruce.
They discussed the few things they had to discuss without talking aloud.
Frank Spruce asked how Bobbi was.
Still alive, Newt responded; no one knew any more. She might come out of the shed again. More likely she would not. Either way, they would know when it happened.
Discussion turned briefly to what Hank Buck had done the day before, and what Hank said he’d heard coming from that other world. None of them were much concerned with the late and not-so-great Pits Barfield. Perhaps the punishment had suited the crime; perhaps it had been a little too extreme. It didn’t matter. It was over. Nothing had happened to Hank as a result of what he had done; he had given Randy Kroger a personal check for the broken display window and the goods that had been sucked through the hole Hank had spiked into reality. Kroger called Northern National in Bangor to verify the check. He found it was good, and that was all he cared about.
There was little they could have done about Hank even if they’d had a mind to; the town’s one jail cell was in the town hall’s basement, a converted storeroom where Ruth had jugged a few weekend drunks, and it might hold Hank Buck for all of ten minutes. A strong fourteen-year-old could have broken out of it. And they couldn’t very well have sent Hank up to county jail. The charge would have looked pretty odd. The alternatives available to them were simple—let him alone or pack him off to Altair-4. Luckily, they were able to look closely into Hank’s mind and motivations. They saw that his anger and confusion were subsiding, as they were all over town. He was not apt to do anything radical again, so they took away his converted radio, asked him not to make another, and moved on to what concerned them a bit more . . . the voice he claimed to have heard.
It was David Brown, all right, Frank Spruce said now. Anybody doubt it?
No one did.
David Brown was on Altair-4.
No one knew exactly where Altair-4 was, or what it was, and they didn’t much care. The words themselves came from some old movie and meant no more than the name Tommyknockers, which came from some old rhyme. What mattered (and even this didn’t, much) was that Altair-4 was a kind of cosmic warehouse, a place where all sorts of things were stored. Hank had sent Pits there, but first he had put the smelly old son of a bitch through some half-assed sort of disintegration process.
This had apparently not been the case with David Brown.
Long, thoughtful silence.
(yes probably yes)
This last was not ascribable to any one person; it was group-think, hivelike, and complete in itself.
(but why why bother)
They looked at each other with no emotion. They could feel emotion, but not over such a minor matter as this.
Bring him back, Hazel said indifferently. It’ll please Bryant and Marie. And Ruth. She would have wanted it. And we all did love her, you know. Her thought had the tone of a woman suggesting that a friend buy her son a soft drink as a treat for being good.
No, Adley said, and they all looked toward him. It was the first time he had entered their conversation. He looked embarrassed but pushed on anyway. Every paper and TV station in the state’d be down here to get a story on the “miracle return.” They think he must be dead, only four and gone over two weeks now. If he shows up, it’ll make too much whoop-de-doo.
They were nodding now.
And what would he say? Newt put in. When they asked him where he’d been, what would he say?
We could blank his memories, Hazel said. That would be no problem at all, and the press people would accept amnesia as perfectly natural. Under the circumstances.
(yes but that’s not the problem)
It was the many voices again, as one voice. They came together in a strange combination of words and images. The problem was that things had now gone too far to allow anyone in town except for the most transient through-travelers . . . and even most of them could be discouraged with fake road construction and detour signs. The last people they wanted in Haven were a bunch of reporters and TV camera crews. And the clock-tower wouldn’t show up on film; it was a mind-slide, really no more than a hallucination. No, David Brown was best left alone, all things considered. He would be all right for yet a while. They knew little about Altair-4, but they did know that time ran at a different speed there—on Altair-4, less than a year had passed since earth had been flung out of the sun. So David Brown had in fact just gotten there. Of course he still might die; strange microbes might invade his system, some strange Altair-4 warehouse-rat might gobble him up, or he might die of simple shock. But he probably wouldn’t, and if he did, it really wasn’t very important.
I’ve a feeling the boy might come in handy, Kyle said. (how)
As a diversion.
(what do you mean)<
br />
Kyle didn’t know exactly what he meant. It was only a feeling that if a spotlight were to be trained on Haven again—the way Ruth had tried to train one on the town with her damned exploding dolls, which had worked ever so much better than they were supposed to work—perhaps they could bring David Brown back and set him down somewhere else. If that was done in the right way, they might gain a little more time here. Time was always a problem. Time to “become.”
Kyle expressed these ideas in no coherent way, but the others nodded at the drift of his thoughts. It would be well to keep David Brown waiting in the wings, so to speak, awhile longer.
(don’t let Marie know—shehasn’t gone far enough in the “becoming”—youmust hide this from Marie yet awhile)
All six looked around, eyes widening. That voice, weak but clear, belonged to none of them. It had come from Bobbi Anderson.
Bobbi! Hazel cried, half-rising from her seat. Bobbi, are you all right? How you doing?
No answer.
Bobbi was gone—there was not even a feel of her left in the air. They looked at each other cautiously, testing each other’s impressions of that thought, confirming that it had been Bobbi. Each knew that if he or she had been alone, with no confirmation available, he or she would have dismissed it as an incredibly powerful hallucination.
How are we going to keep it from Marie? Dick Allison asked, almost angrily. We can’t hide nothing from anybody else!
Yes, Newt returned. We can. Not good enough yet, maybe, but we can dim out our thoughts a little. Make them hard to see. Because—
(because we’ve been)
(been out there)
(been in the shed)
(Bobbi’s shed)
(we wore the headphones in Bobbi’s shed)
(and ate ate to “become”)
(take ye eat do this in remembrance of me)
A sigh ran gently through them.
We’ll have to go back, Adley McKeen said. Won’t we?
“Yes,” Kyle said. “We will.” It was the only time anyone spoke aloud during the entire meeting, and it marked its end.
7
Wednesday, August 3rd:
Andy Bozeman, who had been Haven’s only realtor up until three weeks ago, when he simply closed his office, had discovered that mind-reading was something a fellow got used to very quickly. He didn’t realize how quickly, or how much he had come to depend on it, until it was his turn to go on out to Bobbi’s place to help and to keep an eye on the drunk.
Part of his problem—he knew it was going to be a problem after talking to Enders and the Tremain lad—was being this close to the ship. It was like standing next to the biggest power generator in the world; constant eddies and flows of its weird force ran over his skin like skirling sand-devils in the desert. Sometimes large ideas would float dreamily into his mind, making it impossible to concentrate on what he was doing. Sometimes the exact opposite would occur: thought would break up completely, like a microwave transmission interrupted by a burst of ultraviolet rays. But most of it was just the physical fact of the ship, looming there like something out of a dream. It was exhilarating, awe-inspiring, frightening, wonderful. Bozeman thought he now understood how the Israelites must have felt carrying the Ark of the Covenant through the desert. In one of his sermons, the Rev. Goohringer said that some fellow had ventured to stick his head in there, just to see what all the shouting was about, and he had dropped dead on the spot.
Because it had been God in there.
There might be a kind of God in that ship, too, Andy thought. And even if that God had fled, It had left some residue . . . some of Itself . . . and thinking about it made it hard to keep your mind on the business at hand.
Then there was Gardener’s unsettling blankness. You kept running into it like a closed door that should have been open. You’d yell at him to hand you something, and he would go right on with what he was doing.
Just . . . no response. Or you’d go to tune in on him—just sort of fall into the run of his thoughts, like picking up a telephone on a party line to see who was talking, and there would be no one there. No one at all. Nothing but a dead line.
There was a buzz from the intercom nailed to the inside wall of the lean-to. Its wire ran across the muddy, churned ground and into the trench from which the ship jutted.
Bozeman flipped the toggle over to Talk. “I’m here.”
“The charge is set,” Gardener said. “Haul me up.” He sounded very, very tired. He had thrown himself a pretty fair country drunk last night, Bozeman thought, judging by the sound of the puking he had heard from the back porch around midnight. And when he glanced into Gardener’s room this morning, he had seen blood on his pillow.
“Right away.” The episode with Enders had taught them all that when Gardener asked to be brought up, you didn’t waste time.
He went to the windlass and began to crank. It was a pain in the ass, having to do this by hand, but there was a temporary shortage of batteries again. Give them another week and everything out here would be running like clockwork . . . except Bozeman doubted if he would be here to see it. Being near the ship was exhausting. Being near Gardener was exhausting in a different way—it was like being near a loaded gun that had a hair trigger. The way he had sucker-punched poor John Enders, now—the only reason John hadn’t known it was coming was because Gardener was such an infuriating blank. Every now and then a bubble of thought—partial or complete—would rise to the surface of his mind, as readable as a newspaper headline, but that was all. Maybe Enders had it coming—Bozeman knew that he wouldn’t be too nuts about being stuck at the bottom of a trench with one of those explosive radios. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Johnny hadn’t been able to see it coming. Gardener could do anything, at any time, and no one could stop him, because no one could see it coming.
Andy Bozeman almost wished Bobbi would die so they could get rid of him. It would be tougher with just Havenites working on the project, true, it would slow them down, but it would almost be worth it.
The way he could come out of left field at you was so fucking unsettling.
This morning, for instance. Coffee break. Bozeman sitting on a stump eating some of those little peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches and drinking iced coffee from his thermos. He had always preferred hot coffee to cold even in warm weather, but since he’d lost his teeth, really hot drinks seemed to bother him.
Gardener had been sitting cross-legged like one of those Yoga masters on a dirty swatch of tarpaulin, eating an apple and drinking a beer. Bozeman didn’t see how anyone could eat an apple and drink a beer at the same time, especially in the morning, but Gardener was doing it. From here, Bozeman could see the scar an inch or so above Gardener’s left eyebrow. The steel plate would be under that scar. It—
Gardener had turned his head and caught Bozeman looking at him. Bozeman flushed, wondering if Gardener was going to start to yell and rant. If maybe he was going to come over here and try to sucker-punch him the way he had Johnny Enders. If he tries that, Bozeman thought, curling his hands into fists, he’s going to find that I’m no sucker.
Instead, Gard had begun to speak in a clear, carrying voice—there was a small, cynical smile on his mouth as he did it. After a moment, Bozeman realized he wasn’t just speaking, he was reciting. The man was sitting out here in the woods cross-legged on a dirty tarp, hung-over out of his mind, the glittering body of the ship in the earth casting moving ripples of reflection on his cheek, and reciting like a schoolboy—the man was un-fucking-stable, Bozeman would tell the world. He sincerely wanted Gardener dead.
“ ‘Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart,’ ” Gardener said, eyes half-closed, face turned up toward the warm morning sun. That little smile never left his lips. “ ‘And while the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents.�
�� ”
“What—” Andy began, but Gardener, his smile now spreading into a genuine—if nonetheless cynical—grin, overrode him.
“ ‘There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but they remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat, and a string to swing it with . . .’ ”
Gardener drank the rest of his beer, belched, and stretched.
“You never brought me a dead rat and a string to swing it with, but I got an intercom, Bozie, and I guess that’s a start, huh?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bozeman said slowly. He had only gotten two years of college, business admin, before having to drop out and go to work. His father had a heart condition and chronic high blood pressure. High-flown fellows like this made him nervous and angry. Lording it over ordinary folks, as if being able to quote from something written by someone who had died a long time ago made their shit smell sweeter than other people’s.
Gardener said, “That’s okay. It’s from chapter two of Tom Sawyer. When Bobbi was a kid back in Utica, seventh grade, they had this thing called Junior Exhibition. It was a recitation competition. She didn’t want to be in it, but her sister Anne decided she ought to be, that it would be good for her, or something, and when sister Anne decided something, brother, it was decided. Anne was a real tartar then, Bozie, and she’s a real tartar now. At least I guess she is. I haven’t seen her in a long time, and that’s the way, oh-ho, uh-huh, I like it. But I think it’s fair to say she’s still the same. People like her very rarely change.”
“Don’t call me Bozie,” Andy said, hoping he sounded more dangerous than he felt. “I don’t like it.”
“When I had Bobbi in freshman comp, she wrote once about how she froze trying to recite Tom Sawyer. I just about cracked up.” Gardener got to his feet and started walking toward Andy, a development the ex-realtor viewed with active alarm. “I saw her after class the next day and asked her if she still remembered how ‘Whitewashing the Fence’ went. She did. I wasn’t surprised. There are some things you never forget, like when your sister or your mother bulldozed you into some horror-show like Junior Ex. You may forget the piece when you’re standing up there in front of all those people. Otherwise, you could recite it on your deathbed.”
Stephen King Page 51
