Stephen King

by The Tommyknockers (v5)

  Anne bought her plane tickets angrily but confidently—one from upstate New York to Bangor ... and two returns.

  12

  She would have flown to Bangor the following day—that was when the ticket was for—but her idiotic mother fell down the back stairs and broke her hip. Sean O’Casey had once said that when you lived with the Irish you marched in a fool’s parade, and oh how right he had been. Her mother’s screams brought Anne in from the back yard, where she had been lying on a chaise longue soaking up some sun and going over her strategy for keeping Bobbi in Utica once she had gotten her here. Her mother was sprawled at the bottom of the narrow staircase, bent at a hideous angle, and Anne’s first thought was that for a row of pins she would gladly have left the stupid old bitch there until the anesthetic effects of the claret began to wear off. The new widow smelled like a winery.

  In that angry, dismayed moment Anne knew that all of her plans would have to be changed, and she thought that their mother might actually have done it on purpose— gotten drunk to nerve herself up and then not just fallen but jumped downstairs. Why? To keep her from Bobbi, of course.

  But you won’t, she had thought, going to the phone. You won’t; if I want a thing to be, if I mean a thing to be, that thing will be; I am going to Haven and I am going to cut a wide swath there. I’m going to bring Bobbi back, and they’re going to remember me for a long time. Especially the hayseed dork who hung up on me.

  She picked up the phone and punched the Medix number—it had been pasted to the phone ever since her father’s first stroke—with quick, angry stabs of her forefinger. She was grinding her teeth.

  13

  Thus it was the ninth of August before she could finally get away. In the caesura, there was no call from Bobbi, and Anne didn’t try to get her again, or the hick town manager, or Bobbi’s drunk fuck in Troy. He had apparently moved in so he could poke her full-time. Okay. Let them both fall into a lull. That would be very fine.

  Now she was here, in Bangor’s Cityscape Hotel, sleeping badly ... and grinding her teeth.

  She had always ground her teeth. Sometimes it was so loud it awoke her mother in the night ... on a few occasions even her father, who slept like a brick. Her mother mentioned it to the family doctor when Anne was three. That fellow, a venerable upstate New York G.P. whom Doc Warwick would have felt right at home with, looked surprised. He considered a moment, then said: “I think you must be imagining that, Mrs. Anderson.”

  “If I am, it must be catching,” Paula had said. “My husband’s heard it too.”

  They looked toward Anne, who was building a shaky tower of blocks, one on top of the other. She worked with grim, unsmiling concentration. As she added a sixth block, the tower fell down ... and as she started to rebuild it, they both heard the grim, skeletal sound of Anne grinding her baby teeth together.

  “She also does that in her sleep?” the doctor asked.

  Paula Anderson nodded.

  “Well, it’ll probably go away,” the doctor said. “It’s harmless.” But of course it didn’t go away and it wasn’t harmless; it was bruxism, a malady which, along with heart attacks, strokes, and ulcers, often afflicts driven, self-assertive people. The first of Anne’s baby teeth to fall out was noticeably eroded. Her parents commented on it ... then forgot it. By then Anne’s personality had begun to assert itself in more gaudy and startling ways. By six and a half she was already ruling the Anderson family in some strange way you could never quite put your finger on. And they had all gotten used to the thin, slightly gruesome whisper of Anne’s teeth grinding together in the night.

  The family dentist had noticed the problem wasn’t going away but getting worse by the time Anne was nine, but it wasn’t treated until she was fifteen, when it began to cause her actual pain. By then she had worn her teeth down to the live nerves. The dentist fitted her with a rubber mouth-splint taken from a mold of her teeth, then an acrylic one. She wore these appliances, which are called “night-guards,” to bed every night. At eighteen she was fitted with all-metal crowns on most of her top and bottom teeth. The Andersons couldn’t afford it, but Anne insisted. They had allowed the problem to slide, and she was not going to allow her skinflint father to turn around when she was twenty-one and say, “You’re a grownup now, Anne; it’s your problem. If you want crowns, you pay the bill.”

  She had wanted gold, but that really was beyond their means.

  For several years thereafter, Anne’s infrequent smiles had a glittery, mechanized look that was extremely startling. People often actually recoiled from that grin. She took a grim enjoyment from these reactions, and when she had seen the villain Jaws in one of the later James Bond movies, she had laughed until she thought her sides would split—this unaccustomed burst of amusement had left her feeling dizzy and ill. But she had understood exactly why, when that huge man first bared his stainless-steel teeth in a sharklike grin, people had recoiled from her, and she almost wished she hadn’t finally had porcelain fused over the metal. Yet, she thought, it was perhaps better not to show oneself so clearly—it could be as unwise to wear your personality on your sleeve as it was to wear your heart there. Maybe you didn’t have to look as though you could chew your way through a door made of oak planks to get what you wanted as long as you knew you could.

  Bruxism aside, Anne also had had a lot of cavities both as a child and as an adult, in spite of Utica’s fluoridated water and her own strictly observed regimen of oral hygiene (she often flossed her teeth until her gums bled). This was also due in large part to her personality rather than her physiology. Drive and the urge to dominate afflict both the softest parts of the human body—stomach and vitals—and the hardest, the teeth. Anne had a chronic case of dry-mouth. Her tongue was nearly white. Her teeth were dry little islands. Without a steady flow of saliva to wash away crumbs of food, cavities began quickly. By this night when she lay sleeping uneasily in Bangor, Anne had better than twelve ounces of silver-amalgam fillings in her mouth—on infrequent occasions she had set off airport metal detectors.

  In the last two years she had begun to lose teeth in spite of her fanatic efforts to save them: two on the top right, three on the bottom left. In both cases she had opted for the most expensive dental bridgework available—she had to travel to New York City to have the work done. The dental surgeon removed the rotting husks, flayed her gums to the dull white of the jawbone, and implanted tiny titanium screws. The gums were sewn back together and healed nicely—some people reject metal implants in the bone, but Anne Anderson had no trouble at all accepting them—leaving two little titanium posts sticking out of the flesh. The bridgework was placed over the metal anchors after the flesh around them had healed.

  She didn’t have as much metal in her head as Gard did (Gard’s plate always set off airport metal detectors), but she had a lot.

  So she slept without knowing that she was a member of an extremely exclusive club: those people who could enter Haven as it was now with a bare chance of surviving.

  14

  She left for Haven in her rental car at eight the following morning. She made one wrong turn, but still arrived at the Troy-Haven town line by nine-thirty.

  She had awakened feeling as nervous and randy-dandy as a thoroughbred dancing her way into the starting gate. But somewhere, in the last fifteen or twenty miles before she reached the Haven town line—the land around her nearly empty, dreamingly ripe in the breathless summer heat-hush—that fine feeling of anticipation and wire-thin nervy readiness had bled away. Her head began to ache. At first it was just a minor throb, but it quickly escalated into the familiar pounding of one of her near-migraines.

  She drove past the town line into Haven.

  By the time she got to Haven Village, she was hanging on to herself by force of will and not much more. The headache came and went in sickish waves. Once she thought she had heard a burst of hideously distorted music coming out of her mouth, but that must have been imagination, something brought on by the headache. She was f
aintly aware of people on the streets in the little village, but not of the way they all turned to look at her ... her, then each other.

  She could hear machinery throbbing in the woods somewhere—the sound was distant and dreamlike.

  The Cutlass began to weave back and forth on the deserted road. Images doubled, trebled, came reluctantly back together, then began doubling and trebling again.

  Blood trickled from the corners of her mouth unnoticed. She held hard to one thought: It’s on this road, Route 9, and her name will be on the mailbox. It’s on this road, Route 9, and her name will be on the mailbox. It’s on this road—

  The road was mercifully deserted. Haven slept in the morning sun. Ninety percent of out-of-town traffic had been rerouted now, and this was a good thing for Anne, whose car pitched and yawed wildly, left-hand wheels now spuming dust from one shoulder, right-hand wheels spuming dust from the other a few moments later. She knocked down a turn sign without being aware of it.

  Young Ashley Ruvall saw her coming and pulled his bike a prudent distance off the road and stood astride it in Justin Hurd’s north pasture until she was gone.

  (a lady there’s a lady and I can’t hear her except her pain)

  A hundred voices answered him, soothing him.

  (we know Ashley it’s all right ... shhh ... shhh)

  Ashley grinned, exposing his pink, baby-smooth gums.

  15

  Her stomach revolted.

  Somehow she was able to pull over and shut off the engine before her breakfast bolted up and out a moment after she managed to claw the driver’s door open. For a moment she just hung there with her forearms propped un the open window of the half-open door, bent awkwardly outward, consciousness no more than a single spark which she maintained by her determination that it should not go out. At last she was able to straighten up and pull the door closed.

  She thought in a dim and confused way that it must have been breakfast—headaches she was used to, but she almost never threw up. Breakfast in the restaurant of that fleabag that was supposed to be Bangor’s best hotel. The bastards had poisoned her.

  I may be dying... oh God yes, it really feels as if I might be dying. But if I’m not, I am going to sue them from here to the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. If I live, I’ll make them wish their mothers never met their fathers.

  Perhaps it was the bracing quality of this thought which made Anne feel strong enough to get the car moving again. She crept along at thirty-five, looking for a mailbox with ANDERSON written on it. A terrible idea came to her. Suppose Bobbi had painted out her name on the mailbox? It wasn’t so crazy when you really thought about it. She might well suspect Sissy would turn up, and the spineless little twat had always been afraid of her. She was in no shape to stop at every farm along the way, inquiring after Bobbi (not that she’d get much help from Bobbi’s hayseed neighbors if the donkey she’d spoken to on the phone was any indication), and—

  But there it was: R. ANDERSON. And behind it, a place she had seen only in photographs. Uncle Frank’s place. The old Garrick farm. There was a blue truck parked in the driveway. The place was right, yes, but the light was wrong. She realized this clearly for the first time as she approached the driveway. Instead of feeling the triumph she had expected at this moment—the triumph of a predator that has finally succeeded in running its prey to earth—she felt confusion, uncertainty, and, although she did not even really realize it for what it was because it was so unfamiliar, the first faint trickle of fear.

  The light.

  The light was wrong.

  This realization brought others in quick succession. Her stiff neck. The circles of sweat darkening her dress under her arms. And—

  Her hand flew to her crotch. There was a faint dampness there, drying now, and she isolated a dim ammoniac smell in the car. It had been there for some time, but her conscious mind had just now tumbled to it.

  I pissed myself, I pissed myself and I’ve been in this fucking car almost long enough for it to dry—

  (and the light, Anne)

  The light was wrong. It was sunset light.

  Oh no—it’s nine-thirty in the—

  But it was sunset light. There was no denying it. She had felt better after vomiting, yes ... and she suddenly understood why. The knowledge had been there all along, really, just waiting to be noticed, like the patches of sweat under the arms of her dress, or that faint smell of drying urine. She had felt better because the period between closing the door and actually starting the car again hadn’t been seconds or minutes, but hours—she had spent all that brutally hot summer day in the oven of the car. She had lain in a deathlike stupor, and if she had been using the Cutlass’s air-conditioning with all the windows rolled up when she stopped the car, she would have cooked like a Thanksgiving turkey. But her sinuses were nearly as bad as her teeth, and the canned air manufactured by automobile air conditioners irritated them. This physical problem, she realized suddenly, staring at the old farm with wide, bloodshot eyes, had probably saved her life. She had been running with all four windows open. Otherwise—

  This led to another thought. She had spent the day in a deathlike stupor, parked by the side of the road, and no one had stopped to check on her. That no one had come along a main road like Route 9 in all those hours since nine-thirty was something she just couldn’t accept. Not even out in the sticks. And when they did see you in trouble in Sticksville, they didn’t just put the pedal to the metal and keep on going, like New Yorkers stepping over a wino.

  What kind of town is this, anyway?

  That unaccustomed trickle again, like hot acid in her stomach.

  This time she recognized the feeling as fear, seized it, wrung its neck ... and killed it. Its brother might show up later on, and if so, she would kill it too, and all the sibs that might follow.

  She drove into the yard.

  16

  Anne had met Jim Gardener only twice before, but she never forgot a face. Even so, she barely recognized the Great Poet, although she believed she could have smelled him at forty yards if she had been downwind on even a moderately breezy day. He was sitting on the porch in a strappy T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, an open bottle of Scotch in one hand. He had a three- or four-day beard-stubble, much of it gray. His eyes were bloodshot. Although Anne didn’t know this—and wouldn’t have cared—Gardener had been in this state, more or less, for the last two days. All his noble resolves had gone by the boards since finding the dog hairs on Bobbi’s jacket.

  He watched the car pull into the dooryard (missing the mailbox by bare inches) with a drunk’s bleary lack of surprise. He watched the woman get out, stagger, and hold on to the open door for a minute.

  Oh wow, Gardener thought. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superbitch. Faster than a speeding hate-letter, able to leap cringing family members at a single bound.

  Anne shoved the car door closed. She stood there for a moment, throwing a long shadow, and Gardener felt an eerie sense of familiarity. She looked like Ron Cummings when Ron had a skinful and was trying to decide if he could walk across the room.

  Anne made her way across the dooryard, trailing a steadying hand along the side of Bobbi’s truck. When she had passed the truck, she reached at once for the porch railing. She looked up, and in the slanting light of seven o’clock, Gardener thought the woman looked both aged and ageless. She also looked evil, he thought—jaundiced and yellowish-black with a heavy freight of evil that was simultaneously wearing her out and eating her up.

  He raised the Scotch, drank, gagged on the rank burn. Then he tipped the neck of it at her. “Hello, Sissy. Welcome to Haven. Having said that much, I now urge you to leave as fast as you can.”

  17

  She got up the first two steps okay, then stumbled and went to one knee. Gardener held out a hand. She ignored it.

  “Where’s Bobbi?”

  “You don’t look so good,” Gard said. “Haven has that effect on people these days.”

  “I’m
fine,” she said, at last gaining the porch. She stood over him, panting. “Where is she?”

  Gardener inclined his head toward the house. The steady hiss of water came from one of the open windows. “Shower. We’ve been working in the woods all day and it was esh ... extremely hot. Bobbi believes in showering to remove dirt.” Gardener raised the bottle again. “I believe in simply disinfecting. Shorter and pleasanter.”

  “You smell like a dead pig,” Anne remarked, and started past him toward the house.

  “While my own nose is undoubtedly not as keen as your own, dear heart, you have a delicate but noticeable odor of your own,” Gard said. “What do the French call that particular perfume? Eau de Piss?”

  She turned on him, startled into a snarl. People—people in Utica, at least—didn’t speak to her that way. Never. But of course, they knew her. The Great Poet had undoubtedly judged her on the basis of his jizz receptacle: Haven’s resident celebrity. And he was drunk.

  “Well,” Gardener said, amused but also a trifle uneasy under her smoking gaze, “it was you who brought up the subject of aroma.”

  “So I did,” she said slowly.

  “Maybe we ought to start again,” he said with drunken courtesy.

  “Start what again? You’re the Great Poet. You’re the drunk who shot his wife. I have nothing to say to you. I came for Bobbi.”

  Good shot, the thing about the wife. She saw his face freeze, saw his hand tighten on the neck of the bottle. He stood there as if he had at least temporarily forgotten where he was. She offered him a sweet smile. That smart-ass crack about Eau de Piss had gotten through, but sick or not, she thought she was still ahead on points.

  Inside, the shower shut off. And—perhaps it was only a hunch—Gardener had a clear sense of Bobbi listening.