Stephen King

by The Tommyknockers (v5)

  “Look,” Andy said, “we ought to get back to work—”

  “I let her get about four sentences in, then I joined her. Her jaw dropped almost down to her knees. Then she started grinning, and we went through it together, word for word. It wasn’t so strange. We were both shy kids, Bobbi and I. Her sister was the dragon in front of her cave, my mother was the dragon in front of mine. People like that often get this very weird idea that the way to cure a shy kid is to put him into the sort of situation he dreads the most—something like Junior Ex. It wasn’t even much of a coincidence that we’d both gotten that whitewashing thing by heart. The only one more popular for recitation is ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’ ”

  Gardener drew in breath and screamed:

  “Stop, fiends! Dissemble no more! Tear up the floor-boards! Here! Here! ‘Tis the beating of his hideous heart!”

  Andy had uttered a small shriek. He dropped his thermos, and half a cup of cold coffee stained the crotch of his pants.

  “Uh-oh, Bozie,” Gardener said conversationally. “Never get that out of those polyester slacks.

  “Only difference between the two of us was that I didn’t freeze,” Gardener said. “In fact, I won a second-prize ribbon. But it didn’t cure my fear of talking in front of crowds . . . only made it worse. Whenever I stand up in front of a group to read poetry, I look at all those hungry eyes . . . I think of ‘Whitewashing the Fence.’ Also, I think about Bobbi. Sometimes that’s enough to get me through. Anyway, it made us friends.”

  “I don’t see what any of that has to do with getting this work done!” Andy cried in a hectoring voice utterly unlike him. But his heart had been beating too fast. For a moment there, when Gardener had shrieked, he really had believed the man had gone insane.

  “You don’t see what this has to do with whitewashing the fence?” Gardener asked, and laughed. “Then you must be blind, Bozie.”

  He pointed to the ship leaning skyward at its perfect forty-five-degree angle, rising out of the wide trench.

  “We’re digging it up instead of whitewashing it, but that doesn’t change the principle a bit. I have fagged out Bobby Tremain and John Enders, and if you’re back tomorrow I’ll eat your Hush Puppies. Thing is, I never seem to get any prizes for it. You tell whoever comes out tomorrow I want a dead rat and a string to swing it by, Bozie ... or a bully taw, at the very least.” Gardener had stopped halfway to the trench. He looked around at Andy. Andy’s failure to read this big man with the sloping shoulders and the indistinct, oddly broken face had never made Bozeman more uncomfortable than it did then.

  “Better still, Bozie,” Gardener had said in a voice so soft Andy could hardly hear it, “get Bobbi out here tomorrow. I’d like to find out if the New Improved Bobbi still remembers how to recite ‘Whitewashing the Fence’ from Tom Sawyer.”

  Then, without another word, he had gone to the sling and waited for Andy to lower him down.

  If that whole thing hadn’t been left-field, Andy didn’t know what was. And, he added to himself as he turned the winch, that had only been Gardener’s first beer of the day. He’ll put away another five or six at lunch and really get wild and crazy.

  Gardener now came swaying to the top of the trench, and Andy had an urge to let go of the windlass crank. Solve the problem.

  Except he couldn’t—Gardener belonged to Bobbi Anderson, and until Bobbi either died or came out of the shed, things had to go on pretty much as they were.

  “Come on, Bozie. Some of those rocks fly a long way.” He started toward the lean-to. Andy fell in beside him, hurrying to keep up.

  “I told you I don’t like you calling me Bozie,” he said.

  Gardener spared him a curiously flat glance. “I know,” he said.

  They went around the lean-to. About three minutes later another of those loud, crumping roars shuddered out of the trench. A spray of rocks rose into the sky and came down, rattling off the hull of the ship with dull clangs and clongs.

  “Well, let’s—” Bozeman began.

  Gardener grabbed his arm. His head was tilted, his face alert, his eyes dark and lively. “Shhh!”

  Andy wrenched his arm away. “What in the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Don’t you hear it?”

  “I don’t h—”

  Then he did. A hissing sound, like a giant teakettle, was coming from the trench. It was growing. A mad excitement suddenly seized Andy. There was more than a little terror in it.

  “It’s them!” he whispered, and turned toward Gard. His eyes were the size of doorknobs. His lips, shiny with loose spittle, were trembling. “They weren’t dead, we woke them up ... they’re coming out!”

  “Jesus is coming and is He pissed,” Gardener remarked, unimpressed.

  The hissing grew louder. Now there was another crunching thud—this wasn’t an explosion; it was the sound of something heavy collapsing. A moment later something else collapsed: Andy. The strength ran out of his legs and he fell to his knees.

  “It’s them, it’s them, it’s them!” he slobbered.

  Gardener hooked a hand into the man’s armpit, wincing a little at the hot, jungly dampness there, and pulled him to his feet.

  “That’s not the Tommyknockers,” he said. “It’s water.”

  “Huh?” Bozeman looked at him with dazed incomprehension.

  “Water!” Gardener cried, giving Bozeman a brisk little shake. “We just brought in our swimming pool, Bozie!”

  “Wh—”

  The hiss suddenly exploded into a soft, steady roar. Water jetted out of the trench and into the sky in a widening sheet. This was no column of water; it was as if a giant child had just pressed his finger over a giant faucet to watch the water spray everywhere. At the bottom of the trench, water was driving up through a number of fissures in just that way.

  “Water?” Andy asked weakly. He couldn’t get it right in his mind.

  Gardener didn’t reply. Rainbows danced in the water; it ran down the sleek hull of the ship in rivulets, leaving beads behind . . . and as he watched, he saw those drops begin to skitter, the way water flicked into hot fat on a griddle will skitter and hop. Only this was not random. The drops were lining up in obedience to lines of force which ran down the hull of the ship like lines of longitude on a globe.

  I can see it, Gardener thought. I can see the force radiating from the ship’s skin in those drops. My God—

  There was another crunch. Gardener seemed to feel the earth actually drop a bit under his feet. At the bottom of the trench, water pressure was finishing the work the blasting had begun—widening fissures and holes, pulling the friable rock apart. More water began to escape, and more easily. The sheets of spray fell back. A last diffuse rainbow wavered in the air and disappeared.

  Gardener saw the ship shift as the rock weld which had prisoned it so long let go. It moved so slightly it might have been imagination, but it wasn’t. In that brief movement he could see how it would look coming out of the ground—he could see its shadow rippling slowly over the ground as it came up and out, could hear the unearthly wailing of its hull scraping over the bones of bedrock, could sense everyone in Haven looking this way as it rose into the sky, hot and glittering, a monstrous silver coin slowly heeling over to the horizontal for the first time in millennia, floating soundlessly in the sky, floating free . . .

  He wanted that. God! Right or wrong, he wanted that so bad.

  Gardener gave his head a brisk shake, as if to clear it.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

  Without waiting, Gardener walked across to the trench and looked in. He could hear rushing water, but it was hard to see. He attached one of the big kliegs they used for night-work to the stirrup of the sling and lowered it about ten feet. That was plenty; if he had lowered it another ten, it would have been underwater. It had been a lake they had broken into, all right; no joke. The trench was filling rapidly.

  After a moment, Andy joined him. His face was wretched. “All that work!”
he cried.

  “Did you bring your diving board, Bozie? Are we going to have Free Swim on Thursdays or Fr—”

  “Shut up!” Andy Bozeman screamed at him. “Shut up, I hate you!”

  Wild hysteria washed over Gardener. He staggered away to a stump and sat down, wondering if the goddam thing had stayed watertight all these years, wondering what the fair market price was for a flying saucer with water damage. He began to laugh. Even when Andy Bozeman came over and hit him upside the face and knocked him onto the ground, Jim Gardener couldn’t stop laughing.

  8

  Thursday, August 4th:

  When it got to be a quarter to nine and still no one had shown up, Gardener began to wonder if maybe they were quitting. He toyed with the idea as he sat in Bobbi’s rocker on the porch, fingering the big puffy bruise on the side of his face where Bozeman had clouted him.

  A bunch of them had been out in Archinbourg’s Cadillac again, after midnight. Mostly the same bunch. Another Midnight Shed Party. Gardener had hiked himself up on one elbow and watched them through the guestroom window, wondering who brought the chips and dip to these soirees. They were just shadows grouped around the long front end of the Coupe DeVille. They stood there for a moment, then went to the shed. When they opened the door, that viciously brilliant light poured out in a flood that lit the entire yard and the guestroom itself with a sick radium-dial glow. They went inside. The glow faded down to a thick vertical bar but didn’t go out entirely. They had left the door ajar. The folks in this little jerkwater Maine town were now the brightest people on earth, but apparently not even they had been able to figure out how to padlock a door from the outside, and they hadn’t thought to put one on the inside.

  Now, sitting on the porch and looking toward the village, Gardener thought: Maybe when they get inside there, they get too exalted to think of mundane things like padlocks.

  He shaded his eyes with one hand. A truck was coming. A big old pulp truck that was vaguely familiar. There was a tarpaulin over something in the back. It flapped casually in the wind. Gardener knew it was going to turn in. Of course they hadn’t given up.

  Woke up last night in the guestroom bed, saw the folks going into the Tommyknockers’ shed. Could have looked in, but I didn’t quite dare; don’t want to know what goes on in there.

  He didn’t think, somehow, that the judges of the Yale Younger Poets competition would think much of it. But, Gardener thought, This Is Where Jim Gardener Is Now, as they say. Maybe later on they’ll call it my Tommyknocker Phase. Or my Shed Period. Or—

  The truck changed to a lower gear and came groaning into Bobbi’s dooryard. The engine died with a wheeze. The man in the strap-style T-shirt who got out was the man who had given Gard his ride to the Haven town line on July 4th. He recognized the man at once. Coffee, he thought. You gave me coffee with a lot of sugar in it. Tasted good. He looked like an extra from the James Dickey novel about those city boys and their weekend canoe trip down the Cahoolawassee. Gardener didn’t think the man was from Haven, though—hadn’t he said Albion?

  Stuffs spreading, he thought. Well, why not? It’s fallout, isn’t it? And Albion’s downwind.

  “ ’Lo there,” the truck driver said. “Guess you don’t ’member me.” His tone added: Don’t fuck with me, Fred.

  “Guess I do,” Gard said, and the name rose magically in his mind, even after all this—a single month that seemed more like ten years, with all these strange events. “Freeman Moss. Gave me a ride. I was coming to check on Bobbi. But I guess you know that.”

  “Ayuh.”

  Moss went to the back of the truck and began pulling slipknots and yanking rope. “Want to give me a help with this?”

  Gardener started down the steps, then stopped, smiling a little. First Tremain, then Enders, then Bozeman with his somehow pitiful pale yellow polyester pants.

  “Sure,” he said. “Just tell me one thing.”

  “Ayuh?” Moss left off pulling the ropes. He flipped back the tarpaulin, and Gardener saw about what he had expected: a weird conglomeration of equipment: tanks, hoses, three car batteries nailed to a board. A New and Improved Pump. “Will if I can.”

  Gardener grinned without much humor. “Did you bring me a dead rat and a string to swing it with?”

  9

  Friday, August 5th:

  No air traffic had overflown Haven on a regular basis since the late 1960s when Dow Air Force Base in Bangor had closed down. If someone had uncovered the ship in the earth back in those days, there might have been trouble; there had been Air Force fighter planes zooming overhead four and five times a day, rattling windows and sometimes breaking them with sonic booms. The pilots weren’t supposed to boom over the continental United States unless absolutely necessary, but the hotshots who flew the F-4s, most of them with adolescent acne still fading from their cheeks and foreheads, sometimes got a little exuberant. The jets made the Mustangs and Chargers these overgrown boys had been driving only a year before look mighty tame. When Dow closed there were still a few Air National Guard flights, but the patterns were shifted north, toward Loring in Limestone.

  After some dithering, the base was turned into a commercial airfield, named Bangor International Airport. Some thought the name rather grand for an airport that serviced a few wheezy Northeast Airlines flights to Boston each day and a handful of puddle jumper Pipers bound for Augusta and Portland. But the air traffic eventually grew, and by 1983 BIA had become a thriving air terminal. Besides serving two commercial airlines, it was also a refueling point for many international carriers, and so it finally earned its grand name.

  For a while, some commercial airliners did overfly Haven—this was in the early seventies. But pilots and navigators regularly reported radar problems in the area coded Quadrant G-3, a square which took in most of Haven, all of Albion, and the China Lakes region. This cloudy interference, known as “popcorn,” or “echo-haze,” or, even more colorfully, as “ghost-turds,” is also reported regularly over the Bermuda Triangle. Compasses went wacky. Sometimes there were funny cuckoo electrical glitches in the equipment.

  In 1973 a Delta jet southbound from BIA to Boston nearly collided with a TWA jet bound from London to Chicago. Drinks on both planes were spilled; a TWA stewardess was scalded by hot coffee. No one but the flight crews knew how close it had been. The copilot on the Delta plane ran a hot special-delivery into his pants, laughed hysterically all the way to Boston, and quit flying forever two days later.

  In 1974 a Big Sky charter jet loaded with happy gamblers bound for Las Vegas from Bangor and the Canadian Maritimes lost power in one engine over Haven and had to return to Bangor. When the engine was restarted on the ground, it ran fine.

  There was another near-miss in 1975. By 1979, all commercial air traffic had been routed out of the area. If you had asked an FAA controller about it, he only would have shrugged and called it a dragon. It was a word they used. There were such places here and there; no one knew why. It was easier to route planes away and forget it.

  By 1982, private air traffic was also being routinely vectored away from G-3 by controllers in Augusta, Waterville, and Bangor. So no pilot had seen the great shiny object winking up from the exact center of map-square G-3 on FAA Map ECUS-2.

  Not until Peter Bailey saw it on the afternoon of August 5th.

  Bailey was a private pilot with two hundred hours on his own in the air. He flew a Cessna Hawk XP, and he would have been the first to tell you that it had cost him a few banana-skins. This was Peter Bailey’s phrase for money. He found it hilarious. The Hawk cruised at a hundred and fifty miles an hour and had good sky capability; 17,000 feet without breathing hard. The Cessna nav-pack made it hard to get lost (the optional nav antenna had also cost a few banana-skins). In other words it was a good plane, one that could damn near fly itself—only it didn’t have to with a good pilot like him driving.

  If Peter Bailey had a bitch, it was the goddam insurance. It was highway robbery, and he had bored his golfing partne
rs to tears with the outrage the insurance companies had foisted on him.

  He had friends who flew, he assured them grimly, plenty of them. A lot with less hours on their licenses than he had were forking over fewer banana-skins to the insurance heathens than he was. Some were guys he wouldn’t have flown with, he said, if they owned the last plane on earth and his wife was in Denver dying of a brain hemorrhage. And the amount wasn’t the greatest humiliation of all. The greatest humiliation of all was that he, Peter Bailey, he, a respected neurosurgeon who made well over three hundred thousand banana-skins a year, had to accept pool coverage if he wanted to fly. Well, he told his captive audiences (who often wished fervently that they had only played the front nine, or, better, had stayed in the bar and soaked up a few Bloody Marys), pool coverage was assigned-risk coverage, the sort teenagers and convicted drunks had to carry on their cars. Shit! If that wasn’t goddam discrimination he didn’t know what was. If he wasn’t such a busy man he’d slap the bastards with a class action suit and he’d win, too.

  Many of Bailey’s golf companions were lawyers, and most knew it wouldn’t wash. Risk coverage was made on the basis of actuarial tables, and the fact was, Peter Bailey wasn’t just a neurosurgeon; he was a doctor, and doctors have the worst record as private pilots of any professional group in the world.

  After escaping one of these foursomes, one of the players remarked as Bailey headed toward the clubhouse, still fuming: “I wouldn’t even drive to Denver with the long-winded son of a bitch if my wife was dying of a brain hemorrhage.”