The Tommyknockers (84 page)

He lay awake a long time, waiting for them to come out again, waiting to see if he had been discovered.

All right, I can try to put a stop to the “becoming,”
he thought.
But it won't work unless I actually can go inside the ship. Can I do that?

He didn't know. Bobbi seemed to have no worries, but Bobbi and the others were different now. Oh, he himself was also “becoming”; the lost teeth proved that; the ability to hear thoughts did too. He had changed the words on the computer screen just by thinking them. But there was no use kidding himself: he was far behind the competition. If Bobbi survived the entry into the ship and her old buddy Gard dropped dead, would any of them, even Bobbi herself, spare a tear? He didn't think so.

Maybe that's what they all want. Bobbi included. For you to go into the ship and just fall over with your brains exploding in one big harmonic radio transmission. It would save Bobbi the moral pain of taking care of you herself, for one thing. Murder without tears.

That they intended to get rid of him, he no longer doubted. But he thought that maybe Bobbi—the old Bobbi—would let him live long enough to see the interior of the strange thing they had worked so long to dig up. That at least
felt
right. And in the end, it didn't matter. If murder was what Bobbi was planning, there was no real defense, was there? He
had
to go into the ship. Unless he did that, his idea, crazy as it undoubtedly was, had no chance to work at all.

Have to try, Gard.

He had intended to try as soon as they were inside, and that would probably be tomorrow morning. Now he thought that maybe he ought to press his luck a little further. If he went according to the rag and a bone he supposed he had to call his “original plan,” there would be no way he could do anything about that little boy. The kid would have to come first.

Gard, he's probably dead anyway.

Maybe. But the old man didn't think so; the old man thought there was still a little boy left to save.

One kid doesn't matter—not in the face of all this. You know it, too—Haven is like a great big nuclear reactor that's ready to go red-line. The containment is melting. To coin a phrase.

It was logical, but it was a croupier's logic. Ultimately, killer logic. Ted the Power Man logic. If he wanted to play the game that way, why even bother?

The kid matters or nothing matters.

And maybe this way he could even save Bobbi. He didn't think so; he thought Bobbi had gone too far for salvation. But he could try.

Long odds, Gard ole Gard.

Sure. The clock's at a minute to midnight . . . we're down to counting seconds.

Thinking that, he slipped into the blankness of sleep. This was followed by nightmares where he floated in a clear green bath, tethered by thick coaxial cables. He was trying to scream but he couldn't, because the cables were coming out of his mouth.

Entombed in the overdecorated confines of the Bounty Tavern—drinking buck-a-bottle Heinekens and laughed at by David Bright, who had sunk to vulgar depths of humor, who had even ended up comparing John Leandro to Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen—Leandro had wavered. No use telling himself otherwise. He
had,
indeed, wavered. But men of vision have always had to endure barbs of ridicule, and not a few have been burned or crucified or had their height artificially extended by five or six inches on the Inquisitorial rack of pain for their visions. Having David Bright ask him over beers in the Bounty if his Secret Wristwatch was in good working order was hardly the worst thing that could have befallen him.

But oh shit it hurt.

John Leandro determined that David Bright, and anyone else to whom Bright had related Crazy Johnny's ideas that Something Big Was Going on in Haven, would end up laughing on the other side of his or her face. Because something big
was
going on there. He felt it in every bone in his body. There were days, when the wind was blowing from the southeast, that he almost imagined he could
smell
it.

His vacation had begun the previous Friday. He had hoped to go down to Haven that very day. But he lived with his widowed mother, and she had been counting
so
on him running her up to Nova Scotia to see her sister,
she said, but if John had commitments, why, she understood; after all, she was old and probably not much fun anymore; just someone to cook his meals and wash his underwear, and that was fine, you go on, Johnny, go on and hunt up your
scoop,
I'll just call Megan on the telephone, maybe in a week or two your cousin Alfie will bring
her
down here to see
me,
Alfie's so good to his mother,
et cetera, et cetera, ibid., ibid., ad infinitum, ad infinitum.

On Friday, Leandro took his mother to Nova Scotia. Of course they stayed over, and by the time they got back to Bangor, Saturday was shot. Sunday was a bad day to begin anything, what with his Sunday-school class of first-and second-graders at nine, full worship services at ten, and Young Men for Christ in the Methodist rectory at five
P.M.
At the YMC meeting, a special speaker gave them a slide show on Armageddon. As he explained to them how unrepenting sinners would be inflicted with boils and running sores and ailments of the bowels and the intestines, Georgina Leandro and the other members of the Ladies' Aid passed out paper cups of Za-Rex and oatmeal cookies. And during the evening there was always a songfest for Christ in the church basement.

Sundays always left him feeling exalted. And exhausted.

So it was Monday, the fifteenth of August, before Leandro finally tossed his yellow legal pads, his Sony tape recorder, his Nikon, and a gadget-bag filled with film and various lenses into the front seat of his used Dodge and prepared to set out for Haven . . . and what he hoped would be journalistic glory. He would not have been appalled if he had known he was approaching ground-zero of what was shortly to become the biggest story since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The day was calm and blue and mellow—very warm but not so savagely hot and humid as the last few days had been. It was a day everyone on earth would mark forever in his memory. Johnny Leandro had wanted a story, but he had never heard the old proverb that goes, “God says take what you want . . . and pay for it.”

He only knew that he had stumbled onto the edge of something, and when he tried to wiggle it, it remained firm . . . which meant it was maybe bigger than one might at first think. There was no way he was going to walk away from this; he intended to excavate. All the David Brights in the world with their smart cracks about Jimmy Olsen wristwatches and Fu Manchu could not stop him.

He put the Dodge in drive and began to roll away from the curb.

“Don't forget your lunch, Johnny!” his mother called. She came puffing down the walk with a brown-paper sack in one hand. Large grease spots were already forming on the brown paper; since grade school, Leandro's favorite sandwich had been bologna, slices of Bermuda onion, and Wesson Oil.

“Thanks, Mom,” he said, leaning over to take the bag and put it down on the floor. “You didn't have to do that, though. I could have picked up a hamburger—”

“If I've told you once I've told you a thousand times,” she said, “you have no business going into those roadside luncheonettes, Johnny. You never know if the kitchen's dirty or clean.

“
Microbes,”
she said ominously, leaning forward.

“Ma, I got to g—”

“You can't see
microbes
at all,” Mrs. Leandro went on. She was not to be turned from her subject until she had had her say on it.

“Yes, Mom,” Leandro said, resigned.

“Some of those places are just havens for
microbes
,” she said. “The cooks may not be clean, you know. They may not wash their hands after leaving the lavatory. They may have dirt or even excrement under their nails. This isn't anything I want to discuss, you understand, but sometimes a mother has to instruct her son. Food in places like that can make a person very, very sick.”

“Mom—”

She uttered a long-suffering laugh and dabbed momentarily at the corner of one eye with her apron. “Oh, I know, your mother is silly, just a silly old woman with a lot of funny old ideas, and she probably ought to just learn to shut up.”

Leandro recognized this for the manipulative trick it
was, but it still always made him feel squirmy, guilty, about eight years old.

“No, Mom,” he said. “I don't think that at all.”

“I mean, you are the big newsman, I just sit home and make your bed and wash your clothes and air out your bedroom if you get the farts from drinking too much beer.”

Leandro bent his head, said nothing, and waited to be released.

“But do this for me. Stay out of roadside luncheonettes, Johnny, because you can get sick. From
microbes
.”

“I promise, Mom.”

Satisfied that she had extracted a promise from him, she was now willing to let him go.

“You'll be home for supper?”

“Yes,” Leandro said, not knowing any better.

“At six?” she persisted.

“Yes! Yes!”

“I know, I know, I'm just a silly old—”

“Bye, Mom!” he said hastily, and pulled away from the curb.

He looked in the rearview mirror and saw her standing at the end of the walk, waving. He waved back, then dropped his hand, hoping she would go back into the house . . . and knowing better. When he made a right turn two blocks down and his mother was finally gone, Leandro felt a faint but unmistakable lightening of his heart. Rightly or wrongly, he always felt this way when his mom finally dropped out of sight.

In Haven, Bobbi Anderson was showing Jim Gardener some modified breathing apparatus. Ev Hillman would have recognized it; the respirators looked very similar to the one he had picked up for the cop, Butch Dugan. But that one had been to protect Dugan from the Haven air; the respirators Bobbi was demonstrating drew on reserves of just that—Haven air was what they were used to, and Haven air was what the two of them would breathe if they got inside the Tommyknockers' ship. It was nine-thirty.

At that same time, in Derry, John Leandro had pulled
over to the side of the road not far from the place where the gutted deer and the cruiser requisitioned to officers Rhodes and Gabbons had been found. He thumbed open the glove compartment to check on the Smith & Wesson .38 he had picked up in Bangor the week before. He took it out for a moment, not putting his forefinger anywhere near the trigger even though he knew it was unloaded. He liked the compact way the gun fitted his palm, its weight, the feeling of simple power it somehow conveyed. But it also made him feel a trifle skittery, as if he might have torn off a chunk of something that was far too big for the likes of him to chew.

A chunk of what?

He wasn't quite sure. Some sort of strange meat.

Microbes,
his mother's voice spoke up in his mind.
Food in places like that can make a person very, very sick.

He checked to make sure the carton of bullets was still in the glove compartment, then put the gun back. He guessed that transporting a handgun in the glove compartment of a motor vehicle was probably against the law (he thought again of his mother, this time without even realizing he was doing so). He could imagine a cop pulling him over for something routine, asking to see his registration, and getting a glimpse of the .38 when Leandro opened the glove compartment. That was the way the murderers always got caught on
Alfred Hitchcock Presents,
which he and his mother watched every Saturday night on the cable station that showed it. It would
also
be a scoop of a different sort:
BANGOR “DAILY NEWS” REPORTER ARRESTED ON ILLEGAL-WEAPONS CHARGE.

Well then, take your registration out of the glove compartment and put it in your wallet, if you're so worried.

But he wouldn't do that. The idea made perfect sense, but it also seemed like buying trouble . . . and that voice of reason sounded altogether too much like the voice of his mother warning him about
microbes
or instructing him (as she had when he was a boy) on the horrors which might result if he forgot to put paper all over the ring of a public toilet before sitting on it.

Leandro drove on instead, aware that his heart was beating a little too fast, and that he felt just a little sweatier than the heat of the day could explain.

Something big . . . some days I can almost smell it.

Yes. Something was out there, all right. The death of
the McCausland woman (a furnace explosion in July? oh
really?);
the disappearance of the investigating troopers; the suicide of the cop who had supposedly been in love with her. And before any of those things, there had been the disappearance of the little boy. David Bright had said David Brown's grandfather had been spouting a lot of crazy nonsense about telepathy and magic tricks that really worked.

I only wish you'd come to me instead of Bright, Mr. Hillman,
Leandro thought for perhaps the fiftieth time.

Except now
Hillman
had disappeared. Hadn't been back to his rooming house in over two weeks. Hadn't been back to Derry Home Hospital to visit his grandson, although the nurses had had to boot him out nights before. The official state-police line was that Ev Hillman
hadn't
disappeared, but that was catch-22, because a legal adult
couldn't
disappear in the eyes of the law until
another
legal adult so reported that person, filling out the proper forms in consequence. So all was jake in the eyes of the law. All was
far
from jake in the eyes of John Leandro. Hillman's landlady told him that the old man had stiffed her for sixty bucks—as far as Leandro had been able to find out, it was the first unpaid bill the old guy had left in his life.