3

   It was there, hanging on its nail with every key neatly labeled. The only catch was the shed key was gone. It had been here; he was quite sure of that. When had he last seen it here? Gard tried to remember and couldn't. Bobbi taking precautions? Maybe.
   He stood in the New and Improved Workshop, sweat on his forehead and sweat on his balls. No key. That was great. So what was he supposed to d… Grab Bobbi's ax and make like Jack Nicholson in The Shining? He could see it. Smash, crash, bash: Heeeeere's GARDENER! Except that might be a bit hard to cover up before the pilgrims got back from The Viewing of the Sac-red Hatch.
   Gardener stood in Bobbi's workshop, feeling time slipping away, feeling Old and Unimproved. How long would they be out there, anyway? No way of telling, was there? No way at all.
   Okay, where do people put keys? Always assuming she really was just taking precautions and not just hiding it from you?
   A thought struck him so hard he actually slapped his forehead. Bobbi hadn't taken the key. Nor had anyone been trying to hide it. The key had disappeared when Bobbi had supposedly been in Derry Home Hospital recovering from sunstroke. He was almost positive of that, and what memory would not or could not supply, logic did.
   Bobbi hadn't been in Derry Home; she had been in the shed. Had one of the others taken the spare key, to tend her when Bobbi needed tending? Did they all have copies? Why bother? No one in Haven was into stealing these days; they were into 'becoming.' The only reason the shed was kept locked was to keep him, Gardener, out. So they could just
   Gardener remembered watching them arrive on one of the occasions after the 'something' had happened to Bobbi … the 'something' that had been a lot more serious than heat prostration.
   He closed his eyes and saw the Caddy. KYLE-1. They get out and …
   … and Archinbourg splits off from the rest for a moment or two. You're up on one elbow, looking out the window at them, and if you think of it at all, you think he must have stepped around there to tap a kidney. But he didn't. He went around to get the key. Sure, that's what he did. Went around to get the key.
   It wasn't much, but it was enough to get him moving. He ran back up the cellar stairs, headed for the door, then doubled back. In the bathroom there was an ancient pair of Foster Grant sunglasses on top of the medicine cabinet – they had come to rest up there with the finality that trivial objects manage to obtain only in a single man or woman's quarters (like the makeup which had belonged to Newt Berringer's wife). Gardener took the sunglasses down, blew a thick coating of dust from the lenses, wiped them carefully, then folded the bows and put them in his breast pocket.
   He went out to the shed.

4

   He stood by the padlocked plank door for a moment, looking out along the path which led to the dig. Dusk had advanced far enough now so that the woods beyond the garden were a massy blue-gray with no detail to them. He saw no bobbing line of returning flashlights.
   But they could turn up. At any time at all, they could turn up and catch you with your arm all the way down in the jam-jar.
   I think they'll spend a pretty good while out there mooning over it. They've got the kleig lights.
   But you don't know for sure.
   No. Not for sure.
   Gardener shifted his gaze back to the plank door. Between the planks he could see that green light, and he could hear a dim, unpleasant noise, like an old-fashioned washing machine with a gutful of clothes and thick suds.
   No – not just one washing machine; more like a whole line of them, not quite in sync.
   That light was pulsing in time to the low slurping sound.
   I don't want to go in there.
   There was a smell. Even that, Gardener thought, was slightly sudsy, bland with a faint hint of rancidity. Old soap. Cakey soap.
   But it's no bunch of washing machines. That sound's alive. It's not telepathic typewriters inside there, not New and Improved water heaters, it's something alive, and I don't want to go in there.
   But he was going to. After all, hadn't he come back from the dead just to look inside Bobbi's shed and catch the Tommyknockers at their strange little benches? He supposed he had.
   Gard went around to the far side of the shed. There, hanging on a rusty nail under the eaves, was the key. He reached up with a hand that trembled and took it down. He tried to swallow. At first he couldn't. His throat felt as if it had been coated with dry, heated flannel.
   A drink. Just one drink. I'll go into the house long enough to get just one, a short peg. Then I'll be ready.
   Fine. Sounded great. Except he wasn't going to do it, and he knew he wasn't. The drinking part was done. So was the delaying part. Holding the key tightly in his damp hand, Gardener went around to the door. He thought: Don't want to go in. Don't even know if I can. Because I'm so afraid
   Stop it. Let that part be over, too. Your Tommyknocker Phase.
   He looked around again, almost hoping to see the line of flashlights coming out of the woods, or to hear their voices.
   But you wouldn't, because they talk in their heads.
   No flashlights. No movements. No crickets. No birdsong. The only sound was the sound of washing machines, the sound of amplified, leaky heartbeats:
   Slisshh-slisshhh-slissshhh …
   Gardener looked at the pulsing green light fingering its way through the cracks between the boards. He reached into his pocket, took out the old sunglasses, and put them on.
   It had been a long time since he had prayed, but he prayed now. It was short, but a prayer for all that.
   'God, please,' Jim Gardener said into the dim summer dusk, and slid the key into the padlock.

5

   He expected a blast of head-radio, but none came. Until it didn't, he hadn't realized that his stomach was tight and sucked in, like a man expecting an electric shock.
   He licked his lips and turned the key.
   A small noise, barely audible over the low slooching noises from the shed: -click!
   The hasp sprang up a little from the body of the lock. He reached for it with an arm that felt like lead. He pulled it free, clicked the hasp down, and put it into his left front pocket with the key still sticking out. He felt like a man in a dream. It was not a good one to be having.
   The air in there had to be good – well, perhaps not okay; perhaps none of the air in Haven was exactly okay anymore. But it was about the same as the air outside, Gard thought, because the shed was a sieve of cracks. If there was such a thing as a pure Tommyknocker biosphere, this couldn't be it. At least, he didn't think so.
   All the same, he would take as few risks as possible. He took a deep breath, held it, and told himself to count his steps: Three. You go in no more than three steps. Just in case. One good look around and then out. In one big hurry.
   You hope.
   Yes, I hope.
   He took a final look along the path, saw nothing, turned back to the shed, and opened the door.
   The green glow, brilliant even through the dark glasses, washed over him like corrupt sunlight.

6

   At first he could see nothing at all. The light was too bright. He knew it had been brighter than this on other occasions, but he had never been so close to it before. Close? God, he was in it. Someone standing just outside the open door looking for him now would hardly be able to see him.
   He slitted his eyes against that brilliant greenness and shuffled forward a step … then another step … then a third. His hands were held out in front of him like those of a groping blind man. Which he was; shit, he even had the dark glasses to prove it.
   The noise was louder. Slissh-slissshh-slisshhh … off to the left. He turned in that direction but didn't go any further. He was afraid to go any further, afraid of what he might touch.
   Now his eyes began to adjust. He saw dark shapes in the green. A bench but no Tommyknockers at it; it had simply been shoved back against the wall, out of the way. And …
   My God, it is a washing machine! It really is!
   It was, all right, one of the old-fashioned kind with wringer-roller at the top, but it wasn't making that weird noise. It had also been pushed back against the wall. It was in the process of being modified somehow; someone was working on it in the best Tommyknocker tradition, but it wasn't running now.
   Next to it was an Electrolux vacuum cleaner … one of the old long ones that ran on wheels, low to the ground, like a mechanical dachshund. A chainsaw mounted on wheels. Stacks of smoke-detectors from Radio Shack, most still in their boxes. A number of kerosene drums, also on wheels, with hoses attached to them, and things like arms …
   Arms, of course they are, they're robots, fucking robots in the making, and none of them looks exactly like the white dove of peace, does it, Gard? And
   Slisshh-slisshh-slisshhh.
   Further left. The source of the glow was here.
   Gard heard a funny, hurt noise escape him. The breath he had been holding ran weakly out like air from a pricked balloon. The strength ran out of his legs in exactly the same way. He reached out blindly, his hand found the bench, and he did not sit but simply plopped down on it. He was unable to take his eyes from the left-rear corner of the shed, where Ev Hillman, Anne Anderson, and Bobbi's good old beagle Peter had somehow been hung up on posts in two old galvanized steel shower cabinets with their doors removed. They hung there like slabs of beef on meathooks. But they were alive, Gard saw … somehow, some way, still alive.
   A thick black cord which looked like a high-voltage line or a very big coaxial cable ran out of the center of Anne Anderson's forehead. A similar cable ran out of the old man's right eye. And the entire top of the dog's skull had been peeled away; dozens of smaller cords ran out of Peter's exposed and pulsing brain.
   Peter's eyes, free of cataracts, turned toward Gard. He whined.
   Jesus … oh my Jesus … oh my Jesus Christ.
   He tried to get up from the bench. He couldn't.
   Portions of the old man's skull and Anne's skull had also been removed, he saw. The doors had been torn off the shower stalls but they were still full of some clear liquid – it was being contained in the same way that tiny sun was contained in Bobbi's water heater, he supposed. If he tried to get into one of those stalls, he would feel a tough springiness. Plenty of give … but no access.
   Want to get in? I only want to get out!
   Then his mind returned to its former scripture:
   Jesus … dear Jesus … oh my Jesus look at them …
   I don't want to look at them.
   No. But he couldn't tear his eyes away.
   The liquid was clear but emerald green. It was moving – making that low, thick sudsy sound. For all its clarity, Gardener thought that liquid must be very gluey indeed, perhaps the consistency of dish detergent.
   How can they breathe in there? How can they be alive? Maybe they're not; maybe it's only the movement of the liquid that makes you think they are. Maybe it's just an illusion, please Jesus let it be an illusion.
   Peter … you heard him whine
   Nope. Part of the illusion. That's all. He's hanging on a hook in a shower stall filled with the interstellar equivalent of Joy dish detergent, he couldn't whine in that, it would come out all soap-bubbles, and you're just freaking out. That's what it is, just a little visit from King Freakout.
   Except he wasn't just freaking, and he knew it. Just as he knew he hadn't heard Peter whine with his ears.
   That hurt, helpless whining sound had come from the same place the radio music came from: the center of his brain.
   Anne Anderson opened her eyes.
   Get me out of here! she screamed. Get me out of here, I'll leave her ah only I can't feel anything except when they make it hurt make it hurt make it hurrrrtt …
   Gardener tried again to get up. He was very faintly aware that he was making a sound. Just some old sound. The sound he was making was probably a lot like the sound a woodchuck run over in the road might make, he thought.
   The greenish, moving liquid gave Sissy's face a gassy, ghastly corpse-hue. The blue of her eyes had bleached out. Her tongue floated like some fleshy undersea plant. Her fingers, wrinkled and pruney, drifted.
   I can't feel anything except when they make it hurrrrrttttt! Anne wailed, and he couldn't shut her voice out, couldn't stick his fingers in his ears to make it go away, because that voice was coming from inside his head.
   Slisshhh-slisshhh-slisshhh.
   Copper tubing running into the tops of the shower stalls, making them look like a hilarious combination of Buck Rogers suspended animation chambers and L'il Abner moonshine stills.
   Peter's fur had fallen out in patches. His hindquarters appeared to be collapsing in on themselves. His legs moved through the liquid in long lazy sweeps, as if in his dreams he was running away.
   When they make it hurrrrrt!
   The old man opened his one eye.
   The boy.
   This thought was utterly clear; unquestionable. Gardener found himself responding to it.
   What boy?
   The answer was immediate, startling for a moment, then unquestionable.
   David. David Brown.
   That one eye stared at him, a ceaseless sapphire with emerald tints.
   Save the boy.
   The boy. David. David Brown. Was he a part of this somehow, the boy they had hunted for so many exhausting hot days? Of course he was. Maybe not directly, but a part of it.
   Where is he? Gardener thought at the old man who floated in his pale green solution.
   Slisshhh-slisshhh-slisshhh.
   Altair-4, the old man returned finally. David's on Altair-4. Save him … and then kill us. This is … it's bad. Real bad. Can't die. I've tried. We all have. Even
   (bitchbitch)
   her. This is being in hell. Use the transformer to save David. Then pull the plugs. Cut the wires. Burn the place. Do you hear?
   For the third time Gardener tried to get up and fell bonelessly back onto the bench. He became aware that thick electrical cords were scattered all over the floor, and that brought back a ghostly memory of the band that had picked him up on the turnpike when he was coming back from New Hampshire. He puzzled at this, and then got the connection. The floor looked like a concert stage just before a rock group started to play. That, or a big-city TV studio. The cables snaked into a huge crate filled with circuit boards and a stack of VCRs. They were wired together. He looked for a DC current converter, saw none, and then thought: Of course not, idiot. Batteries are DC.
   The cassette recorders had been plugged into a mix of home computers – Ataris, Apple II's and III's, TRS-80s, Commodores. Blinking on and off on the one lit screen was the word
   PROGRAM?
   Behind the modified computers were more circuit boards – hundreds of them. The whole thing was uttering a low sleepy hum – a sound he associated with
   (use the transformer)
   big electrical equipment.
   Light spilled out of the crate and the computers placed haphazardly next to it in a green flood – but the light was not quite steady. It was cycling. The pulse of the light and its relation to the sudsing sounds coming from the shower cabinets was very clear.
   That's the center, he thought with an invalid's weak excitement. That's the annex to the ship. They come in the shed to use that. It's a transformer, and they draw their power from there.
   Use the transformer to save David.
   Might as well ask me to fly Air Force One. Ask me something easy, Pop. If I could bring him back from wherever he was by reciting Mark Twain – Poe, even -I'd take a shot. But that thing? It looks like an explosion in an electronics warehouse.
   But – the boy.
   How old? Four? Five?
   And where in God's name had they put him? The sky was, literally, the limit.
   Save the boy … use the transformer.
   There was, of course, not even any time to look closely at the damned mess. The others would be coming back. Still, he stared at the one lighted video terminal with hypnotic intensity.
   PROGRAM ?
   What if I typed Altair-4 on the keyboard? he wondered, and saw there was no keyboard; at the same second the letters on the screen changed.
   ALTAIR-4
   it now read.
   No! his mind screamed, full of intruder's guilt. No, Jesus, no!
   The letters rippled.
   NO JESUS NO
   Sweating, Gardener thought: Cancel! Cancel!
   CANCEL CANCEL
   These letters blinked on and off … on and off. Gardener stared at them, horrified. Then:
   PROGRAM ?
   He made an effort to shield his thoughts and tried again to get to his feet. This time he made it. Other wires came out of the transformer. These were thinner. There were … he counted. Yes. Eight of them. Ending in earplugs.
   Earplugs. Freeman Moss. The animal trainer leading mechanical elephants. Here were more earplugs. In a crazy way it reminded him of a high-school language lab.
   Are they learning another language in here?
   Yes. No. They're learning to 'become.' The machine is teaching them. But where are the batteries? I don't see any. There should be ten or twelve big old Delcos hooked up to that thing. Just a maintenance charge running through it. There should be
   Stunned, he raised his eyes to the shower stalls again.
   He looked at the coaxial cable coming out of the woman's forehead, the old man's eye. He watched Peter's legs moving in those big dreamy strides and wondered just how Bobbi had gotten the dog hairs on her dress – had she been giving Peter the equivalent of an interstellar oil-change? Had she been perhaps overcome by a simple human emotion? Love? Remorse? Guilt? Had she perhaps hugged her dog before filling that cabinet up with liquid again?
   There are the batteries. Organic Delcos and Ever Readies, you might say. They're sucking them dry. Sucking them like vampires.
   A new emotion crept through his fear and bewilderment and revulsion. It was fury, and Gardener welcomed it.
   They make it hurrrt … make it hurrrt … make it hurrrrrr
   Her voice cut off abruptly. The dull hum of the transformer changed pitch; cycled down even lower. The light coming out of the crate faded a little. He thought she had fallen unconscious, thereby lowering the machine's total output by x number of … what? Volts? Dynes? Ohms? Who the fuck knew?
   End it, son. Save my grandson and then end it.
   For a moment the old man's voice filled his head, perfectly clear and perfectly lucid. Then it was gone. The old man's eye slipped closed.
   The green light from the machine grew paler yet.
   They woke up when I came in, he thought feverishly. The anger still pounded and drilled at his mind. He spat out a tooth almost without realizing he had done so. Even Peter woke up a little. Now they've gone back to whatever state they were in … before. Sleeping? No. Not sleeping. Something else. Organic cold storage.
   Do batteries dream of electric sheep? he thought, and uttered a cracked cackle.
   He moved backward, away from the transformer,
   (what exactly is it transforming how why)
   away from the shower stalls, the cables. His eyes turned toward the array of gadgets ranged against the far wall. The wringer washer had something mounted on top of it, something that looked like the boomerang TV antennas you sometimes saw on the back of big limos. Behind the washer and to its left was an old-fashioned treadle sewing machine with a glass funnel mounted on its sidewheel. Kerosene drums with hoses and steel arms … a butcher-knife, he saw had been welded to the end of one of those arms.
   Christ, what is all this? What is it for?
   A voice whispered: Maybe it's protection, Gard. In case the Dallas Police show up early. It's the Tommyknocker Yard-Sale Army – old washing machines with cellular antennas, Electrolux vacuums, chainsaws on wheels. Name it and claim it, baby.
   He felt his sanity tottering. His eyes were drawn relentlessly back to Peter, Peter with most of his skull peeled away, Peter with a bunch of wires plugged into what remained of his head. His brain looked like a pallid veal roast with a bunch of temperature probes stuck into it.
   Peter with his legs racing dreamily through that liquid, as if running away.
   Bobbi, he thought in despair and fury, how could you do it to Peter? Christ! The people were bad, awful – but Peter was somehow worse. It was a curse piled on top of an obscenity. Peter, his legs loping and loping, as if running away in his dreams.
   Batteries. Living batteries.
   He backed into something. There was a dull metallic thump. He turned around and saw another shower cabinet, little blossoms of rust on its sides, its front door gone. Holes had been punched in the back. Wires had been threaded through these; they now hung limply down, large-bore steel plugs at their tips.
   For you, Gard! his brain yammered. This plug's for you, like the beer commercials say! They'll open up the back of your skull, maybe short out your motor-control centers first so you can't move, and then they'll drill – drill for the place where they get their power. This plug's for you, for all you do … all ready and waiting! Wow! Neato-keeno!
   He snatched for his thoughts, which were tightening into a hysterical spiral, and brought them under control. Not for him; at least, not originally. This had already been used. There was that faint smell, bland and sudsy. Streaks of dried gunk on the inner walls – the last traces of that thick green liquid. It looks like the Wizard of Oz's semen, he thought.
   Do you mean Bobbi's got her sister floating in a big sperm bank?
   That weird cackle escaped him again. He pressed the heel of his hand against his mouth, pressed hard, to stifle it.
   He looked down and saw a pair of tan shoes tossed beside the shower cabinet. He picked one up, saw splashes of dried blood on it.
   Bobbi's. Her one pair of good shoes. Her 'going-out' shoes. She was wearing them when she left for the funeral that day.
   The other shoe was also bloody.
   Gard looked behind the shower cabinet and saw the rest of the clothing Bobbi had been wearing that day.
   The blood, all that blood.
   He didn't want to touch the blouse, but the shape under it was too clear. He pinched as small a piece of it as he could between his fingers and peeled it up from Bobbi's good charcoal-coloured skirt.
   Underneath the shirt was a gun. It was the biggest, oldest-looking gun Gardener had ever seen except for pictures in a book. After a moment he picked the gun up and rolled the cylinder. There were still four rounds in it.
   Two gone. Gardener was willing to bet that one of those rounds had gone into Bobbi.
   He pushed the cylinder back into place and stuck it in his belt. At once a voice spoke up in his mind. Shot your wife … good fucking deal.
   Never mind. The gun might come in handy.
   When they see it's gone, it's you they'll come looking for, Gard. I thought you already came to that conclusion.
   No; that was one thing he didn't think he had to worry about. They would have noticed the changed words on the computer screen, but these clothes hadn't been touched since Bobbi took them off (or since they took them off her, which was probably more likely).
   They must be too exalted when they get in here to bother much about housekeeping, he thought. Damn good thing there's no flies.
   He touched the gun again. This time the voice in his head was silent. It had decided, perhaps, that there were no wives here to worry about.
   If you have to shoot Bobbi, will you be able to?
   That was a question he couldn't answer.
   Slisshhh-slisshhh-slisshhh.
   How long had Bobbi and her company been gone? He didn't know; hadn't the slightest idea. Time had no meaning in here; the old man was right. This was hell. And did Peter still respond to his strange mistress's caress when she came in here?
   His stomach was on the edge of revolt.
   He had to get out – get out right now. He felt like a creature in a fairy tale, Bluebeard's wife in the secret room, Jack grubbing in the giant's pile of gold. He felt ripe for discovery. But he held the stiff, bloody garment in front of him as if frozen. Not as if; he was frozen.
   Where's Bobbi?
   She had a sunstroke.
   Hell of a strange sunstroke that had soaked her blouse with blood. Gardener had retained a morbid, sickish interest in guns and the damage they could do to the human body. If she had been shot with the big old gun now in his own belt, he guessed Bobbi had no right to be alive – even if she had been taken quickly to a hospital which specialized in the emergency treatment of gunshot wounds, she probably would have died.
   They brought me in here when I was blown apart, but the Tommyknockers fixed me up right smart.
   Not for him. The old shower stall was not for him. Gardener had a feeling that he would be put out of the way with more finality. The shower stall had been for Bobbi.
   They had brought her in here, and … what?
   Why, hooked her up to their batteries, of course. Not Anne, she had not been here then. But to Peter … and Hillman.
   He dropped the blouse … then forced himself to pick it up again and put it back on top of the skirt. He didn't know how much of the real world they noticed when they got in here (not much, he guessed) but he didn't want to take any extra chances.
   He looked at the holes in the back of the cabinet, the dangling cords with the steel plugs at their tips.
   The green light had begun to pulse brighter and more rapidly again. He turned around. Anne's eyes were open again. Her short hair floated around her head. He could still see that unending hate in her eyes, now mixed with horror and growing strangeness.
   Now there were bubbles.
   They floated up from her mouth in a brief, thick stream.
   Thought/sound exploded in his head.
   She was screaming.
   Gardener fled.

7

   Real terror is the most physically debilitating of all emotions. It saps the endocrines, dumps muscle-tightening organic drugs into the bloodstream, races the heart, exhausts the mind. Jim Gardener staggered away from Bobbi Anderson's shed on rubber legs, his eyes bugging, his mouth hanging stupidly open (the tongue lolled in one corner like a dead thing), his bowels hot and full, his stomach cramped.
   It was hard to think beyond the crude, powerful images which stuttered on and off in his mind like bar-room neon: those bodies hung up on hooks, impaled like bugs impaled on pins by cruel, bored children; Peter's relentlessly moving legs; the bloody blouse with the bullet-hole in it; the plugs; the old-fashioned washing machine topped with the boomerang antenna. Strongest of all was the image of that short, thick stream of bubbles emerging from Anne Anderson's mouth as she screamed inside his head.
   He got into the house, rushed into the bathroom and knelt in front of the toilet bowl only to discover he couldn't puke. He wanted to puke. He thought of maggoty hot-dogs, moldy pizza, pink lemonade with hairballs floating in it; finally he rammed two fingers down his throat. He was able to trip a simple gag reaction by this last, but no more. He couldn't sick it up. Simple as that.
   If I can't, I'll go crazy.
   Fine, go crazy if you have to. But first do what you have to do. Keep it together that long. And just by the way, Gard, do you have any more questions about what you should do?
   Not anymore he didn't. Peter's relentlessly moving legs had convinced him. That stream of bubbles had convinced him. He wondered how he could have hesitated so long in the face of a power that was so obviously corrupting, so obviously dark.
   Because you were mad, he answered himself. Gard nodded. That was it. No more explanation was needed. He had been mad – and not just for the last month or so. It was late to wake up, oh yes, very late, but late was better than never.
   The sound. Slisshhh-slisshhh-slisshhh.
   The smell. Bland yet meaty. A smell his mind insisted on associating with raw veal slowly spoiling in milk.
   His stomach lurched. A burning, acidic burp scorched his throat. Gardener moaned.
   The idea – that glimmer – returned to him, and he clutched at it. It might be possible either to abort all of this . or to at least put it on hold for a long, long time. It just might.
   You got to let the world go to hell in its own way, Gard, two minutes to midnight or not.
   He thought of Ted the Power Man again, thought of mad military organizations trading ever more sophisticated weapons with each other, and that angry, inarticulate, obsessed part of his mind tried to shout down sanity one final time.
   Shut up, Gardener told it.
   He went into the guest bedroom and pulled off his shirt. He looked out the window and now he could see sparks of light coming out of the woods. Dark had come. They were returning. They would go into the shed and maybe have a little seance. A meeting of minds around the shower cabinets. Fellowship in the homey green glow of raped minds.
   Enjoy it, Gardener thought. He put the .45 under the foot of the mattress, then unbuckled his belt. It may be the last time, so
   He looked down at his shirt. Sticking out of the pocket was a bow of metal. It was the padlock, of course. The padlock which belonged on the shed door.

8

   For a moment which probably seemed much longer than it actually was, Gardener was unable to move at all. That feeling of unreal fairy-tale terror stole back into his tired heart. He was reduced to a horrified spectator watching those lights move steadily along the path. Soon they would reach the overgrown garden. They would cut through. They would cross the dooryard. They would reach the shed. They would see the missing padlock. Then they would come into the house and either kill Jim Gardener or send his discorporated atoms to Altair-4, wherever that was.
   His first coherent thought was simple panic yelling at the top of its voice: Run! Get out of here!
   His second thought was the shaky resurfacing of reason. Guard your thoughts. If you ever guarded them before, guard them now.
   He stood with his shirt off, his unbuckled and unzipped jeans sagging around his hips, staring at the padlock in his shirt pocket.
   Get out there right now and put it back. Right NOW!
   No … no time … Christ, there's no time. They're at the garden.
   There might be. There might be just enough if you quit playing pocket-pool and get moving!
   He broke the paralysis with a final harsh effort of will, bent, snatched up the lock with the key still sticking out of the bottom, and ran, zipping his pants as he went. He slipped out the back door, paused for just a moment as the last two flashlights slipped into the garden and disappeared, then ran for the shed.
   Faintly, vaguely, he could hear their voices in his mind – full of awe, wonder, jubilation.
   He closed them out.
   Green light fanning out from the shed door, which stood ajar.
   Christ, Gard, how could you have been so stupid? his cornered mind raved, but he knew how. It was easy to forget such mundane things as relocking doors when you had seen a couple of people hung up on posts with coaxial cables coming out of their heads.
   He could hear them in the garden now – could hear the rustle of the useless giant cornstalks.
   As he reached toward the hasp, lock in hand, he remembered closing it before dropping it into his pocket. His hand jerked at the thought and he dropped the goddam thing. It thumped to the ground. He looked for it, and at first couldn't see it at all.
   No … there it was, there just beyond the narrow fan of pulsing green light. There was the lock, yes, but the key wasn't in it anymore. The key had fallen out when the lock thumped to the ground.
   God my God my God, his mind sobbed. His body was now covered with oozing sweat. His hair hung in his eyes. He thought he must smell like a rancid monkey.
   He could hear cornstalks and leaves rustling louder. Someone laughed quietly -the sound was shockingly near. They would be out of the garden in seconds – he could feel those seconds bustling by, like. self-important businessmen with pot bellies and attache cases. He went down on his knees, snatched up the lock, and began to sweep his hand back and forth in the dirt, trying to find the key.
   Oh you bastard where are you? Oh you bastard where are you? Oh you bastard! Where are you?
   Aware that even now, in this panic, he had thrown a screen around his thoughts. Was it working? He didn't know. And if he couldn't find the key, it didn't matter, did it?
   Oh you bastard where are you?
   He saw a dull glint of silver beyond where he was sweeping his hand – the key had gone much further than he would have believed. His seeing it was only dumb luck … like Bobbi stumbling over that little rim of protruding metal in the earth two months before, he supposed.
   Gardener snatched it and bolted to his feet. He would be hidden from them by the angle of the house for just a moment longer, but that was all he had left. One more screw-up – even a little one – would finish him, and there might not be enough time left even if he performed each of the mundane little operations involved in padlocking a door perfectly.
   The fate of the world may now depend on whether a man can lock a shed door on the first try, he thought dazedly. Modem life is so challenging.
   For a moment he didn't think he was even going to be able to slot the key in the lock. It chattered all the way around the slit without going in, a prisoner of his shaking hand. Then, when he thought it really was all over, it slid home. He turned it. The lock opened. He closed the door, slipped the arm of the padlock through the hasp, and then clicked it shut. He pulled the key out and folded it into his sweating hand. He slid around the corner of the shed like oil. At the exact moment he did, the men and women who had gone out to the ship emerged into the dooryard, moving in single file.
   Gardener reached up to hang the key on the nail where he had found it. For one nightmare moment he thought he was going to drop it again and have to hunt for it in the high weeds growing on this side of the shed. When it slipped onto the nail he let out his breath in a shuddering sigh.
   Part of him wanted not to move, to just freeze here. Then he decided he'd better not take the risk. After all, he didn't know that Bobbi had her key.
   He continued slipping along the side of the shed. His left ankle struck the haft of an old harrow that had been left to rust in the weeds, and he had to clamp his teeth over a cry of pain. He stepped over it and slipped around another corner. Now he was behind the shed.
   That sudsing sound was maddeningly loud back here.
   I'm right behind those goddam showers, he thought. They're floating inches from me … literally inches.
   A rustle of weeds. A minute scrape of metal. Gardener felt simultaneously like laughing and screeching. They hadn't had Bobbi's key. Someone had just come around to the side of the shed and taken the key Gardener had hung up again only seconds before – probably Bobbi herself.
   Still warm from my hand, Bobbi, did you notice?
   He stood in back of the shed, pressed against the rough wood, arms slightly spread, palms tight on the boards.
   Did you notice? And do you hear me? Do any of you hear me? Is someone -Allison or Archinbourg or Berringer – going to suddenly pop his head around here and yell out 'Peek-a-boo, Gard, we seeee you?' Is the shield still working?
   He stood there and waited for them to take him.
   They didn't. On an ordinary summer night he probably would not have been able to hear the metallic rattle as the door was unlocked – it would have been masked by the loud ree-ree-ree of the crickets. But now there were no crickets. He beard the unlocking; heard the creak of the hinges as the door was opened; heard the hinges creak again as the door was pushed shut. They were inside.
   Almost at once the pulses of light failing through the cracks began to speed up and become brighter, and his mind was split by an agonized scream:
   Hurts! It hurrrrr
   He moved away from the shed and went back to the house.

9

   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 maybe that 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.

Chapter 5. The Scoop

1

   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 Olson, 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.

2

   So it was Monday, the 15th 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 Olson 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.

3

   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 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 actually 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 in Derry had 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.
   Something big … strange meat.
   Nor was that all of the weirdness emanating out of Haven these days. A fire, also in July, had killed a couple on the Nista Road. This month a doctor piloting a small plane had crashed and burned. That had happened in Newport, true, but the FAA controller at BIA had confirmed that the unfortunate doc had overflown Haven, and at an illegally low altitude. Phone service in Haven had begun to get oddly glitchy. Sometimes people could get through, sometimes they couldn't. He had sent to the Augusta Bureau of Taxation for a list of Haven voters (paying the required fee of six dollars to get the nine computer sheets), and had managed to trace relatives of nearly sixty of these Havenites – relatives living in Bangor, Derry, and surrounding areas – in his spare time.
   He couldn't find one – not one – who had seen his or her Haven relations since July 10th or so … over a month before. Not one.
   Of course, a lot of those he interviewed didn't find this strange at all. Some of them weren't on good terms with their Haven relations and couldn't care less if they didn't hear from or see them in the next six months … or six years. Others seemed first surprised, then thoughtful when Leandro pointed out the length of the lapse they were talking about. Of course, summer was an active season for most people. Time passed with a light easiness that winter knew nothing about. And, of course, they had spoken to Aunt Mary or Brother Bill a time or two on the phone -sometimes you couldn't get through, but mostly you could.
   There were other suspicious similarities in the testimony of the people
   Leandro interviewed, similarities that had made his nose flare with the smell of something decidedly off:
   Ricky Berringer was a house-painter in Bangor. His older brother, Newt, was a carpenter-contractor who also happened to be a Haven selectman. 'We invited Newt up for dinner near the end of July,' Ricky said, 'but he said he had the flu.'
   Don Blue was a Derry realtor. His Aunt Sylvia, who lived in Haven, had been in the habit of coming up to take dinner with Don and his wife every Sunday or so. The last three Sundays she had begged off – once with the flu (flu seems to be going around in Haven, Leandro thought, nowhere else, you understand – just in Haven), and the other times because it was so hot she just didn't feel like traveling. After further questioning Blue realized it had been more like five Sundays since his aunt had favored them – and maybe as many as six.
   Bill Spruce kept a herd of dairy cows in Cleaves Mills. His brother Frank kept a herd in Haven. They usually got together every week or two, merging two extremely large families for a few hours – the clan Spruce would eat tons of barbecue, drink gallons of beer and Pepsi-Cola, and Frank and Bill would sit either at the picnic table in Frank's back yard or on the front porch of Bill's house and compare notes about what they simply called the Business. Bill admitted it had been a month or more since he'd seen Frank – there had been some problem first with his feed supplier, Frank had told him, then with the milk inspectors. Bill, meanwhile, had had a few problems of his own. Half a dozen of his holsteins had died during this last hot-spell. And, he added as an afterthought, his wife had had a heart attack. He and his brother just hadn't had time to visit much this summer … but the man had still expressed unfeigned surprise when Leandro dragged out his wallet calendar and the two of them figured out just how long it had been: the two brothers hadn't gotten together since June 30th. Spruce whistled and tilted his cap back on his head. 'Gorry, that is a long time,' he had said. 'Guess I'll have to take a ride down Haven and see Frank, now that my Evelyn's on the mend.'
   Leandro said nothing, but some of the other testimony he had gathered over the last couple of weeks made him think that Bill Spruce might find a trip like that hazardous to his health.
   'Felt like I was dine,' Alvin Rutledge told Leandro. Rutledge was a long-haul trucker, currently unemployed, who lived in Bangor. His grandfather was Dave Rutledge, a lifelong Haven resident.
   'What exactly do you mean?' Leandro asked.
   Alvin Rutledge looked at the young reporter shrewdly. 'Another beer'd go down good just about now,' he said. They were sitting in Nan's Tavern in Bangor. 'Talkin's amazin' dusty work, chummy.'
   'Isn't it,' Leandro said, and told the waitress to draw two.
   Rutledge took a deep swallow when it came, wiped foam from his upper lip with the heel of his hand, and said: 'Heart beatin' too fast. Headache. Felt like I was gonna puke my guts out. I did puke, as a matter of fact. Just 'fore I turned around. Rolled down the window and just let her fly into the slipstream, I did.'
   'Wow,' Leandro said, since some remark seemed called for. The image of Rutledge 'letting her fly into the slipstream' flapped briefly in his mind. He dismissed it. At least, he tried.
   'And looka here.'
   He rolled back his upper lip, revealing the remains of his teeth.
   'Ooo see a ho in funt?' Rutledge asked. Leandro saw a good many holes in front, but thought it might not be politic to say so. He simply agreed. Rutledge nodded and let his lip fall back into place. It was something of a relief.
   'Teeth never have been much good,' Rutledge said indifferently. 'When I get workin' again and can afford me a good set of dentures, I'm gonna have all of 'em jerked. Fuck em. Point is, I had my two front teeth there on top before I headed up to Haven week before last to check on Gramp. Hell, they wasn't even loose.'
   'They fell out when you started to get close to Haven?'
   'Didn't fall out,' Rutledge finished his beer. 'I puked 'em out.'
   'Oh,' Leandro had replied faintly.
   'You know, another brew'd go down good. Talkin's
   'Thirsty work, I know,' Leandro said, signaling the waitress. He was over his limit, but he found he could use another one himself.