The Tommyknockers

1

For want of a nail the kingdom was lost – that's how the catechism goes when you boil it down. In the end, you can boil everything down to something similar – or so Roberta Anderson thought much later on. It's either all an accident … or all fate. Anderson literally stumbled over her destiny in the small town of Haven, Maine, on June 21st, 1988. That stumble was the root of the matter; all the rest was nothing but history.

2

Anderson was out that afternoon with Peter, an aging beagle who was now blind in one eye. Peter had been given to her by Jim Gardener in 1976. Anderson had left college the year before with her degree only two months away to move onto her uncle's place in Haven. She hadn't realized how lonely she'd been until Gard brought the dog. He'd been a pup then, and Anderson sometimes found it difficult to believe he was now old – eighty-four in dog's years. It was a way of measuring her own age. 1976 had receded. Yes indeed. When you were twenty-five, you could still indulge in the luxury of believing that, in your case, at least, growing up was a clerical error which would eventually be rectified. When you woke up one day and discovered your dog was eighty-four and you yourself were thirty-seven, that was a view that had to be re-examined. Yes indeed.

Anderson was looking for a place to cut some wood. She'd a cord and a half laid by, but wanted at least another three to take her through the winter. She had cut a lot since those early days when Peter had been a pup sharpening his teeth on an old slipper (and wetting all too often on the dining-room rug), but the place was still not short. The property (still, after thirteen years, referred to by the townspeople as Frank Garrick's farm) had only a hundred and eighty feet on Route 9, but the rock walls marking the north and south boundaries marched off at diverging angles. Another rock wall – this one so old it had degenerated into isolated rock middens furred with moss – marked the property's rear boundary about three miles into an unruly forest of firstand second-growth trees. The total acreage of this pie-shaped wedge was huge. Beyond the wall at the western edge of Bobbi Anderson's land were miles of wilderness owned by the New England Paper Company. Burning Woods on the map.

In truth, Anderson didn't really need to hunt a place to do her cutting. The land her mother's brother had left her was valuable because most of the trees on it were good hardwood relatively untouched by the gypsy-moth infestation. But this day was lovely and warm after a rainy spring, the garden was in the ground (where most of it would rot, thanks to the rains), and it wasn't yet time to start the new book. So she had covered the typewriter and here she was with faithful old one-eyed Peter, rambling.

There was an old logging road behind the farm, and she followed this almost a mile before striking off to the left. She was wearing a pack (a sandwich and a book in it for her, dog biscuits for Peter, and lots of orange ribbon to tie around the trunks of the trees she would want to cut as September's heat ebbed toward October) and a canteen. She had a Silva compass in her pocket. She had gotten lost on the property only once, and once was enough to last her forever. She had spent a terrible night in the woods, simultaneously unable to believe she had actually gotten lost on property she for Christ's sweet sake owned and sure she would die out here – a possibility in those days, because only Jim would know she was missing, and Jim only came when you weren't expecting him. In the morning, Peter had led her to a stream, and the stream had led her back to Route 9, where it burbled cheerfully through a culvert under the tar only two miles from home. Nowadays she probably had enough woods savvy to find her way back to the road or to one of the rock walls bounding her land, but the key word was probably. So she carried a compass.

She found a good stand of maple around three o'clock. In fact, she had found several other good stands of wood, but this one was close to a path she knew, a path wide enough to accommodate the Tomcat. Come September 20th or so – if someone didn't blow the world up in the meantime – she would hook her sledge up to the Tomcat, drive in here, and do some cutting. Besides, she had walked enough for one day.

'Look good, Pete?'

Pete barked feebly, and Anderson looked at the beagle with a sadness so deep it surprised and disquieted her. Peter was done up. He seldom took after birds and squirrels and chipmunks and the occasional woodchuck these days; the thought of Peter running a deer was laughable. She would have to take a good many rest stops on the way back for him . . . and there had been a time, not that long ago (or so her mind stubbornly maintained), when Peter would always have been a quarter of a mile ahead of her, belling vollies of barks back through the woods. She thought there might come a day when she would decide enough was enough; she'd pat the seat on the passenger side of the Chevrolet pickup for the last time, and take Peter to the vet down in Augusta. But not this summer, please God. Or this fall or winter, please God. Or ever, please God.

Because without Peter, she would be alone. Except for Jim, and Jim

Gardener had gotten just a trifle wiggy over the last three years or so. Still a friend, but … wiggy.

'Glad you approve, Pete old man,' she said, putting a ribbon or two around the trees, knowing perfectly well she might decide to cut another stand and the ribbons would rot here. 'Your taste is only exceeded by your good looks.'

Peter, knowing what was expected of him (he was old, but not stupid), wagged his scraggy stub of a tail and barked.

'Be a Viet Cong!' Anderson ordered.

Peter obediently fell on his side – a little wheeze escaped him – and rolled on his back, legs splayed out. That almost always amused Anderson, but today the sight of her dog playing Viet Cong (Peter would also play dead at the words 'hooch' or 'My Lai') was too close to what she had been thinking about.

'UP, Pete.'

Pete got up slowly, panting below his muzzle. His white muzzle.

'Let's go back.' She tossed him a dog biscuit. Peter snapped at it and missed. He snuffed for it, missed it, then came back to it. He ate it slowly, without much relish. 'Right,' Anderson said. 'Move out.'

3

For want of a shoe, the kingdom was lost … for the choice of a path, the ship was found.

Anderson had been down here before in the thirteen years that the Garrick Farm hadn't become the Anderson Farm; she recognized the slope of land, a deadfall left by pulpers who had probably all died before the Korean war, a great pine with a split top. She had walked this land before and would have no trouble finding her way back to the path she would use with the Tomcat. She might have passed the spot where she stumbled once or twice or half a dozen times before, perhaps by yards, or feet, or bare inches.

This time she followed Peter as the dog moved slightly to the left, and with the path in sight, one of her elderly hiking boots fetched up against something … fetched up hard.

'Hey!' she yelled, but it was too late, in spite of her pinwheeling arms. She fell to the ground. The branch of a low bush scratched her cheek hard enough to bring blood.

'Shit!' she cried, and a bluejay scolded her.

Peter returned, first sniffing and then licking her nose.

'Christ, don't do that, your breath stinks!'

Peter wagged his tail. Anderson sat up. She rubbed her left cheek and saw blood on her palm and fingers. She grunted.

'Nice going,' she said, and looked to see what she had tripped over – a fallen piece of tree, most likely, or a rock poking out of the ground. Lots of rock in Maine.

What she saw was a gleam of metal.

She touched it, running her finger along it and then blowing off black forest dirt.

'What's this?' she asked Peter.

Peter approached it, sniffed at it, and then did a peculiar thing. The beagle backed off two dog-paces, sat down, and uttered a single low howl.

'Who got on your case?' Anderson asked, but Peter only sat there. Anderson hooked herself closer, still sitting down, sliding on the seat of her jeans. She examined the metal in the ground.

Roughly three inches stuck out of the mulchy earth – just enough to trip over. There was a slight rise here, and perhaps the runoff from the heavy spring rains had freed it. Anderson's first thought was that the skidders who had logged this land in the twenties and thirties must have buried a bunch of their leavings here – the cast-off swill of a three-day cutting, which in those days had been called a 'loggers' weekend.'

A tin can, she thought – B&M Beans or Campbell's soup. She wiggled it the way you'd wiggle a tin can out of the earth. Then it occurred to her that no one except a toddler would be apt to trip over the leading edge of a can. The metal in the earth didn't wiggle. It was as solid as mother-rock. A piece of old logging equipment, maybe?

Intrigued, Anderson examined it more closely, not seeing that Peter had gotten to his feet, backed away another four paces, and sat down again.

The metal was a dull gray – not the bright color of tin or iron at all. And it was thicker than a can, maybe a quarter-inch at its top. Anderson placed the pad of her right index finger on this edge and felt a momentary odd tingling, like a vibration.

She took her finger away and looked at it quizzically.

Put it back.

Nothing. No buzz.

Now she pinched it between her thumb and finger and tried to draw it from the earth like a loose tooth from a gum. It didn't come. She was gripping the protrusion in the rough center. It sank back into the earth – or that was the impression she had then – on either side at a width of less than two inches. She would later tell Jim Gardener that she could have walked past it three times a day for forty years and never stumbled over it.

She brushed away loose soil, exposing a little more of it. She dug a channel along it about two inches deep with her fingers – the soil gave easily enough, as forest soil does … at least until you hit the webwork of roots. It continued smoothly down into the ground. Anderson got up on her knees and dug down along either side. She tried wiggling it again. Still no go.

She scraped away more soil with her fingers and quickly exposed more – now she saw six inches of gray metal, now nine, now a foot.

It's a car or a truck or a skidder, she thought suddenly. Buried out here in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe a Hooverville kind of stove. But why here?

No reason that she could think of; no reason at all. She found things in the woods from time to time – shell casings, beer cans (the oldest not with pop-tops but with triangle-shaped holes made by what they had called a 'churchkey' back in those dim dead days of the 1960s), candy wrappers, other stuff. Haven was not on either of Maine's two major tourist tracks, one of which runs through the take and mountain region to the extreme west of the state and the other of which runs up the coast to the extreme east, but it had not been the forest primeval for a long, long time. Once (she had been over the decayed stone wall at the back of her land and actually trespassing on New England Paper Company's land at the time) she had found the rusted hulk of a late-forties Hudson Hornet standing in what had once been a woods road and what was now, over twenty years after the cutting had stopped, a tangle of second growth – what the locals called shitwood. No reason that hulk of a car should have been there, either … but it was easier to explain than a stove or a refrigerator or any other damn thing actually buried in the ground.

She had dug twin trenches a foot long on either side of the object without finding its end. She got down almost a foot before scraping her fingers on rock. She might have been able to pull the rock out – that at least had some wiggle – but there was no reason to do it. The object in the earth continued down past it.

Peter whined.

Anderson glanced at the dog, then stood up. Both knees popped. Her left foot tingled with pins and needles. She fished her pocket watch out of her pants – old and tarnished, the Simon watch was another part of her legacy from Uncle Frank -and was astonished to see that she had been here a long time – an hour and a quarter at least. It was past four.

'Come on, Pete,' she said. 'Let's bug out.'

Peter whined again but still wouldn't move. And now, with real concern, Anderson saw that her old beagle was shivering all over, as if with ague. She had no idea if dogs could catch ague, but thought old ones might. She did recollect that the only time she had ever seen Peter shiver like that was in the fall of 1975 (or maybe it had been '76). There had been a catamount on the place. Over a series of perhaps nine nights it had screamed and squalled, very likely in unrequited heat. Each night Peter would go to the living-room window and jump up on the old church pew Anderson kept there, by her bookcase. He never barked. He only looked out into the dark toward that unearthly, womanish squealing, nostrils flaring, ears up. And he shivered.

Anderson stepped over her little excavation and went to Peter. She knelt down and ran her hands along the sides of Peter's face, feeling the shiver in her palms.

'What's wrong, boy?' she murmured, but she knew what was wrong. Peter's good eye shifted past her, toward the thing in the earth, and then back to Anderson. The plea in the eye not veiled by the hateful, milky cataract was as clear as speech: Let's get out of here, Bobbi, I like that thing almost as much as I like your sister.

'Okay,' Anderson said uneasily. It suddenly occurred to her that she could

not remember ever having lost track of time as she had today, out here.

Peter doesn't like it. I don't, either.

'Come on.' She started up the slope to the path. Peter followed with alacrity.

They were almost to the path when Anderson, like Lot's wife, looked back. If not for that last glance, she might actually have let the whole thing go. Since leaving college before finals – in spite of her mother's tearful pleas and her sister's furious diatribes and ultimatums – Anderson had gotten good at letting things go.

The look back from this middle distance showed her two things. First, the thing did not sink back into the earth as she had at first thought. The tongue of metal was sticking up in the middle of a fairly fresh declivity, not wide but fairly deep, and surely the result of late winter runoff and the heavy spring rains that had followed it. So the ground to either side of the protruding metal was higher, and the metal simply disappeared back into it. Her first impression, that the thing in the ground was the corner of something, wasn't true after all – or not necessarily true. Second, it looked like a plate – not a plate you'd eat from, but a dull metal plate, like metal siding or

Peter barked.

'Okay,' Anderson said. 'I hear you talking. Let's go.'

Let's go … and let's let it go.

She walked up the center of the path, letting Peter lead them back toward the woods road at his own bumbling pace, enjoying the lush green of high summer … and this was the first day of summer, wasn't it? The solstice. Longest day of the year. She slapped a mosquito and grinned. Summer was a good time in Haven. The best of times. And if Haven wasn't the best of places, parked as it was well above Augusta in that central part of the state most tourists passed by – it was still a good place to come to rest. There had been a time when Anderson had honestly believed she would only be here a few years, long enough to recover from the traumas of adolescence, her sister, and her abrupt. confused withdrawal (surrender, Anne called it) from college, but a few years had become five, five had become ten, ten had become thirteen, and looky 'yere, Huck, Peter's old and you got a pretty good crop of gray coming up in what used to be hair as black as the River Styx (she'd tried cropping it close two years ago, almost a punk do, had been horrified to find it made the gray even more noticeable, and had let it grow ever since).

She now thought she might spend the rest of her life in Haven, with the sole exception of the duty trip she took to visit her publisher in New York every year or two. The town got you. The place got you. The land got you. And that wasn't so bad. It was as good as anything else, maybe.

Like a plate. A metal plate.

She broke off a short limber branch well plumed with fresh green leaves and waved it around her head. The mosquitoes had found her and seemed determined to have their high tea off her. Mosquitoes whirling around her head . . . and thoughts like mosquitoes inside her head. Those she couldn't wave off.

It vibrated under my finger for a second. I felt it. Like a tuning fork. But when I touched it, it stopped. Is it possible for something to vibrate in the earth like that? Surely not. Maybe …

Maybe it had been a psychic vibration. She did not absolutely disbelieve in such things. Maybe her mind had sensed something about that buried object and had told her about it in the only way it could, by giving her a tactile impression: one of vibration. Peter had certainly sensed something about it; the old beagle hadn't wanted to go near it.

Forget it. She did.

For a little while.

4

That night a high, mild wind arose and Anderson went out on her front porch to smoke and listen to the wind walk and talk. At one time – even a year earlier -Peter would have come out with her, but now he remained in the parlor, curled up on his small hooked rug by the stove, nose to tail.

Anderson found her mind replaying that last look back at the plate sticking out of the earth, and she later came to believe that there was a moment perhaps when she flicked the cigarette into the gravel drive – when she decided she would have to dig it up and see what it was … although she didn't consciously recognize the decision then.

Her mind worried restlessly at what it might be, and this time she allowed it to run – she had learned that if your mind insisted on returning to a topic no matter how you tried to divert it, it was best to let it return. Only obsessives worried about obsession.

Part of some building, her mind hazarded, a pre-fab. But no one built Quonset huts out in the woods – why drag all that metal in when three men could throw up a cutter's lean-to with saws, axs, and a two-handed buck-saw in six hours? Not a car, either, or the protruding metal would have been flaked with rust. An engine-block seemed slightly more likely, but why?

And now, with dark drawing down, that memory of vibration returned with unarguable certainty. It must have been a psychic vibration, if she had felt it at all. It

Suddenly a cold and terrible certainty rose in her: someone was buried there. Maybe she had uncovered the leading edge of a car or an old refrigerator or even some sort of steel trunk, but whatever it had been in its aboveground life, it was now a coffin. A murder victim? Who else would be buried in such a way, in such a box? Guys who happened to wander into the woods during hunting season and got lost there and died there didn't carry along metal caskets to pop themselves into when they died … and even given such an idiotic idea, who would shovel the dirt back in? Cut me a break, folks, as we used to say back in the glorious days of our youth.

The vibration. It had been the call of human bones.

Come on, Bobbi – don't be so fucking stupid.

A shudder worked through her nevertheless. The idea had a certain weird persuasiveness, like a Victorian ghost story that had no business working as the world hurtled down Microchip Alley toward the unknown wonders and horrors of the twenty-first century – but somehow produced the gooseflesh just the same. She could hear Anne laughing and saying You're getting as funny in the head as Uncle Frank, Bobbi, and it's just what you deserve, living out there alone with your smelly dog. Sure. Cabin fever. The hermit complex. Call the doctor, call the nurse, Bobbi's bad … and getting worse.

All the same, she suddenly wanted to talk to Jim Gardener – needed to talk to him. She went in to call his place up the road in Unity. She had dialed four numbers when she remembered he was off doing readings – those and the poetry workshops were the way he supported himself. For itinerant artists summer was prime time. All those stupid menopausal matrons have to do something with their summers, she could hear Jim saying ironically, and I have to eat in the winter. One hand washes the other. You ought to thank God you're saved the reading circuit, anyway, Bobbi.

Yes, she was saved that – although she thought Jim liked it more than he let on. Certainly did get laid enough.

Anderson put the phone back in the cradle and looked at the bookcase to the left of the stove. It wasn't a handsome bookcase – she was no one's carpenter, nor ever would be – but it served the purpose. The bottom two shelves were taken up by the Time-Life series of volumes on the old west. The two shelves above were filled with a mixture of fiction and fact on that same subject; Brian Garfield's early westerns jostled for place with Hubert Hampton's massive Western Territories Examined. Louis L'Amour's Sackett saga lay cheek by jowl with Richard Marius's wonderful two novels, The Coming of Rain and Bound for the Promised Land. Jay R. Nash's Bloodletters and Badmen and Richard F. K. Mudgett's Westward Expansion bracketed a riot of paperback westerns by Ray Hogan, Archie Joceylen, Max Brand, Ernest Haycox, and, of course, Zane Grey – Anderson's copy of Riders of the Purple Sage had been read nearly to tatters.

On the top shelf were her own books, thirteen of them. Twelve were westerns, beginning with Hangtown, published in 1975, and ending with The Long Ride Back, published in '87. Massacre Canyon, the new one, would be published in September, as all of her westerns had been since the beginning. It occurred to her now that she had been here, in Haven, when she had received her first copy of Hangtown, although she'd begun the novel in the room of a scuzzy Cleaves Mills apartment, on a thirties-vintage Underwood dying of old age. Still, she'd finished here, and it was here that she'd held the first actual copy of the book in her hands.

Here, in Haven. Her entire career as a publishing writer was here … except for the first book.

She took that down now and looked at it curiously, realizing it had been perhaps five years since she had last held this slim volume in her hands. It was not only depressing to realize how fast time got by; it was depressing to think of how often she thought about that lately.

This volume was a total contrast to the others, with their jackets showing mesas and buttes, riders and cows and dusty trail-drive towns. This jacket was a nineteenth-century woodcut of a clipper-ship quartering toward land. Its uncompromising blacks and whites were startling, almost shocking. Boxing the Compass was the title printed above the woodcut. And below it: Poems

by Roberta Anderson.

She opened the book, paging past the title, musing for a moment over the copyright date, 1968, then pausing at the dedication page. It was as stark as the woodcut. This book is for James Gardener. The man she had been trying to call. The second of the only three men she had ever had sex with, and the only one who had ever been able to bring her to orgasm. Not that she attached any special importance to that. Or not much, anyway. Or so she thought. Or thought she thought. Or something. And it didn't matter anyway; those days were also old days.

She sighed and put the book back on the shelf without looking at the poems. Only one of them was much good. That one had been written in March of 1967, a month after her grandfather died of cancer. The rest of them were crap – the casual reader might have been fooled, because she was a talented writer … but the heart of her talent had been somewhere else. When she had published Hangtown, the circle of writers she had known had all denied her. All except Jim, who had published Boxing the Compass in the first place.

She had dropped Sherry Fenderson a long chatty letter not long after coming to Haven, and had received a curt postcard in return: Please don't write me anymore. I don't know you. Signed with a single slashed S. as curt as the message. She had been sitting on the porch, crying over that card, when Jim showed up. Why are you crying over what that silly woman thinks? he had asked her. Do you really want to trust the judgment of a woman who goes around yelling 'Power to the people' and smelling of Chanel Number Five?

She just happens to be a very good poet, she had sniffed.

Jim gestured impatiently. That doesn't make her any older, he had said, or any more able to recant the cant she's been taught and then taught herself. Get your mind right, Bobbi. If you want to go on doing what you like, get your fucking mind right and stop that fucking crying. That fucking crying makes me sick. That fucking crying makes me want to puke. You're not weak. I know weak when I'm with it. Why do you want to be something you're not? Your sister? Is that why? She's not here, and she's not you, and you don't have to let her in if you don't want to. Don't whine to me about your sister any more. Grow up. Stop bitching.

She'd looked at him, she remembered now, amazed.

There's a big difference between being good at what YOU Do and being smart about what you KNOW, he said. Give Sherry some time to grow up. Give yourself some time to grow up. And stop being your own jury. It's boring. I don't want to listen to you snivel. Snivelling is for jerks. Quit being a jerk.

She had felt herself hating him, loving him, wanting all of him and none of him. Did he say he knew weak when he was with it? Boy, he ought to. He was bent. She knew it even then.

Now, he had said, you want to lay an ex-publisher or do you want to cry all over that stupid postcard?

She had laid him. She didn't know now and hadn't known then if she wanted to lay him, but she had. And screamed when she came.

That had been near the end.

She remembered that, too – how it had been near the end. He had gotten married not long after, but it would have been near the end anyway. He was weak, and he was bent.

Doesn't matter anyway, she thought, and gave herself the old, good advice: Let it go.

Advice easier given than followed. It was a long time before Anderson got over into sleep that night. Old ghosts had stirred when she moved her book of undergraduate poems … or perhaps it was that high, mild wind, hooting the eaves and whistling the trees.

She had almost made it when Peter woke her up. Peter was howling in his sleep.

Anderson got up in a hurry, scared – Peter had made a lot of noises in his sleep before this (not to mention some unbelievably noxious dogfarts), but he had never howled. It was like waking to the sound of a child screaming in the grip of a nightmare.

She went into the living room naked except for her socks and knelt by Peter, who was still on the rug by the stove.

'Pete,' she muttered. 'Hey, Pete, cool it.'

She stroked the dog. Peter was shivering and jerked away when Anderson touched him, baring the eroded remains of his teeth. Then his eyes opened – the bad one and the good one – and he seemed to come back to himself. He whined weakly and thumped his tail against the floor.

'You all right?' Anderson asked.

Peter licked her hand.

'Then lie down again. Stop whining. It's boring. Stop fucking off.'

Peter lay down and closed his eyes. Anderson knelt, looking at him, troubled.

He's dreaming of that thing.

Her rational mind rejected that, but the night insisted on its own imperative – it was true, and she knew it.

She went to bed at last, and sleep came sometime after two in the morning. She had a peculiar dream. In it she was groping in the dark … not trying to find something but to get away from something. She was in the woods. Branches whipped into her face and poked her arms. Sometimes she stumbled over roots and fallen trees. And then, ahead of her, a terrible green light shone out in a single pencil-like ray. In her dream she thought of Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart,' the mad narrator's lantern, muffled up except for one tiny hole, which he used to direct a beam of light onto the evil eye he fancied his elderly benefactor possessed.

Bobbi Anderson felt her teeth fall out.

They went painlessly, all of them. The bottom ones tumbled, some outward, some back into her mouth where they lay on her tongue or under it in hard little lumps. The top ones simply dropped down the front of her blouse. She felt one catch in her bra, which clasped in front, poking her skin.

The light. The green light. The light was wrong.

It wasn't just that it was gray and pearly, that light; it was expected that such a wind as had blown up the night before would bring a change in the weather. But Anderson knew there was something more than that wrong even before she looked at the clock on the nightstand. She picked it up in both hands and drew it close to her face, although her vision was a perfect 20/20. It was quarter past three in the afternoon. She had gone to sleep late, given. But no matter how late she slept, either habit or the need to urinate always woke her up by nine o'clock, ten at the latest. But she had slept a full twelve hours … and she was ravenous.

She shuffled out into the living room, still wearing only her socks, and saw that Peter was lying limply on his side, head back, yellow stubs of teeth showing, legs splayed out.

Dead, she thought with a cold and absolute certainty. Peter's dead. Died in the night.

She went to her dog, already anticipating the feel of cold flesh and lifeless fur. Then Peter uttered a muzzy, lip-flapping sound – a blurry dog-snore. Anderson felt huge relief course through her. She spoke the dog's name aloud and Peter started up, almost guiltily, as if he was also aware of oversleeping. Anderson supposed he was – dogs seemed to have an acutely developed sense of time.

'We slept late, fella,' she said.

Peter got up and stretched first one hind leg and then the other. He looked around, almost comically perplexed, and then went to the door. Anderson opened it. Peter stood there for a moment, not liking the rain. Then he went out to do his business.

Anderson stood in the living room a moment longer, still marveling over her certainty that Peter had been dead. Just what in hell was wrong with her lately? Everything was doom and gloom. Then she headed for the kitchen to fix a meal … whatever you called breakfast at three in the afternoon.

On the way she diverted into the bathroom to do her own business. Then she paused in front of her reflection in the toothpaste-spotted mirror. A woman pushing forty. Graying hair, otherwise not too bad – she didn't drink much, didn't smoke much, spent most of her time outside when she wasn't writing. Irish black hair – no romance-novel blaze of red for her – rather too long. Gray-blue eyes. Abruptly, she bared her teeth, expecting for just a moment to see only smooth pink gums.

But her teeth were there – all of them. Thank the fluoridated water in Utica, New York, for that. She touched them, let her fingers prove their bony reality to her brain.

But something wasn't right.

Wetness.

There was wetness on her upper thighs.

Oh no, oh shit, this is almost a week early, I just put clean sheets on the bed yesterday

But after she had showered, put a pad in a fresh pair of cotton panties and pulled the whole works snug, she checked the sheets and saw them unmarked. Her period was early, but it had at least had the consideration to wait until she was almost awake. And there was no cause for alarm; she was fairly regular, but she had been both early and late from time to time; maybe diet, maybe subconscious stress, maybe some internal clock slipping a cog or two. She had no urge to grow old fast, but she often thought that having the whole inconvenient business of menstruation behind her would be a relief.

The last of her nightmare slipped away. and Bobbi Anderson went in to fix herself a very late breakfast.

1

It rained steadily for the next three days. Anderson wandered restlessly around the house, made a trip with Peter into Augusta in the pickup for supplies she didn't really need, drank beer, and listened to old Beach Boys tunes while she made repairs around the house. Trouble was, there weren't really that many repairs that needed to be done. By the third day she was circling the typewriter, thinking maybe she would start the new book. She knew what it was supposed to be about: a young schoolmarm and a buffalo-hunter caught up in a range-war in Kansas during the early 1850s – a period when everyone in the midsection of the country seemed to be tuning up for the Civil War, whether they knew it or not. It would be a good book, she thought, but she didn't think it was quite 'ready' yet, whatever that meant (a sardonic mimic awoke in her mind, doing an Orson Welles voice: We will write no oater before its time). Still, her restlessness dug at her, and the signs were all there: an impatience with books, with the music, with herself. A tendency to drift off … and then she would be looking at the typewriter, wanting to wake it into some dream.

Peter also seemed restless, scratching at the door to go out and then scratching at it to come back in five minutes later, wandering around the place, lying down, then getting up again.

Low barometer, Anderson thought. That's all it is. Makes us both restless, cranky.

And her damned period. Usually she flowed heavy and then just stopped. Like turning off a faucet. This time she just went on leaking. Bad washer, ha-ha, she thought with no humor at all. She found herself sitting in front of the typewriter just after dark on the second rainy day, a blank sheet rolled into the carriage. She started to type and what came out was a bunch of X's and O's, like a kid's tic-tac-toe game, and then something that looked like a mathematical equation … which was stupid, since the last math she'd taken was Algebra II in high school. These days, x was for crossing out the wrong word, and that was all. She pulled the blank sheet out and tossed it away.

After lunch on the third rainy day, she called the English Department at the university. Jim no longer taught there, not for eight years, but he still had friends on the faculty and kept in touch. Muriel in the office usually knew where he was.

And did this time. Jim Gardener, she told Anderson, was doing a reading in Fall River that night, June 24th, followed by two in Boston over the next three nights, followed by readings and lectures in Providence and New Haven – all part of something called The New England Poetry Caravan. Must be Patricia McCardle, Anderson thought, smiling a little.

'So he'd be back … when? Fourth of July?'

'Gee, I don't know when he'll be back, Bobbi,' Muriel said. 'You know Jim. His last reading's June 30th. That's all I can say for sure.'

Anderson thanked her and hung up. She looked at the phone thoughtfully, calling up Muriel fully in her mind – another Irish colleen (but Muriel had the expected red hair) just now reaching the far edge of her prime, round-faced, green-eyed, full-breasted. Had she slept with Jim? Probably. Anderson felt a spark of jealousy – but not much of a spark. Muriel was okay. Just speaking to Muriel made her feel better – someone who knew who she was, who could think of her as a real person, not just as a customer on the other side of the counter in an Augusta hardware store or as someone to say how-do to over the mailbox. She was solitary by nature, but not monastic … and sometimes simple human contact had a way of fulfilling her when she didn't even know she needed to be fulfilled.

And she supposed she knew now why she had wanted to get in contact with Jim – talking with Muriel had done that, at least. The thing in the woods had stayed on her mind, and the idea that it was some sort of clandestine coffin had grown to a certainty. It wasn't writing she was restless to do; it was digging. She just hadn't wanted to do it on her own.

'Looks like I'll have to, though, Pete,' she said, sitting down in her rocker by the east window – her reading chair. Peter glanced at her briefly, as if to say Whatever you want, babe. Anderson sat forward, suddenly looking at Pete – really looking at him. Peter looked back cheerfully enough, tail thumping on the floor. For a moment it seemed there was something different about Peter … something so obvious she should be seeing it.

If so, she wasn't.

She settled back, opening her book – a master's thesis from the University of Nebraska, the most exciting thing about it the title: Range War and Civil War. She remembered thinking a couple of nights ago as her sister Anne would think: You're getting as funny in the head as Uncle Frank, Bobbi. Well … maybe.

Shortly she was deep into the thesis, making an occasional note on the legal pad she kept near. Outside, the rain continued to fall.

2

The following day dawned clear and bright and flawless: a postcard summer day with just enough breeze to make the bugs keep their distance. Anderson pottered around the house until almost ten o'clock, conscious of the growing pressure her mind was putting on her to get out there and dig it up, already. She could feel herself consciously pushing back against that urge (Orson Welles again We will dig up no body before its … oh, shut up, Orson). Her days of simply following the urge of the moment, a lifestyle that had once been catechized by the bald motto 'If it feels good, do it,' were over. It had never worked well for her, that philosophy – in fact, almost every bad thing that had happened to her had its roots in some impulsive action. She attached no moral stigma to people who did live their lives according to impulse; maybe her intuitions just hadn't been that good.

She ate a big breakfast, added a scrambled egg to Peter's Gravy Train (Peter ate with more appetite than usual, and Anderson put it down to the end of the rainy spell), and then did the washing-up.

If her dribbles would just stop, everything would be fine. Forget it; we will stop no period before its time. Right, Orson? You're fucking-A.

Bobbi went outside, clapped an old straw cowboy hat on her head, and spent the next hour in the garden. Things out there were looking better than they had any right to, given the rain. The peas were coming on and the corn was rearing up good, as Uncle Frank would have said.

She quit at eleven. Fuck it. She went around the house to the barn, got the spade and shovel, paused, and added a crowbar. She started out of the shed, went back, and took a screwdriver and an adjustable wrench from the toolbox.

Peter started out with her as he always did, but this time Anderson said, 'No, Peter,' and pointed back at the house. Peter stopped, looking wounded. He whined and took a tentative step toward Anderson.

'No, Peter.'

Peter gave in and headed back, head down, tail drooping dispiritedly. Anderson was sorry to see him go that way, but Peter's previous reaction to the plate in the ground had been bad. She stood a moment longer on the path which would lead her to the woods road, spade in one hand, shovel and crowbar in the other, watching as Peter mounted the back steps, nosed open the back door, and went into the house.

She thought: Something was different about him … is different about him. What is it? She didn't know. But for a moment, almost subliminally, her dream flickered back to her – that arrow of poisonous green light … and her teeth all falling painlessly out of her gums.

Then it was gone and she set off toward the place where it was, that odd thing in the ground, listening to the crickets make their steady ree-ree-ree sounds in this small back field which would soon be ready for its first cutting.

3

At three that afternoon it was Peter who raised her from the semi-daze in which she had been working, making her aware she was two damn-nears: damn-near starving and damn-near exhausted.

Peter was howling.

The sound raised gooseflesh on Anderson's back and arms. She dropped the shovel she had been using and backed away from the thing in the earth – the thing that was no plate, no box, not anything she could understand. All she knew for sure was that she knew she had fallen into a strange, thoughtless state she didn't like at all. This time she had done more than lose track of time; she felt as if she had lost track of herself as well. It was as if someone else had stepped into her head the way a man would step into a bulldozer or a payloader, simply firing her up and starting to yank the right levers.

Peter howled, nose pointing toward the sky – long, chilling, mournful sounds.

'Stop it, Peter!' Anderson yelled, and thankfully, Peter did. Any more of that and she might simply have turned and run.

Instead, she fought for control and got it. She backed up another step and cried out when something flapped loosely against her back. At her cry, Peter uttered one more short, yipping sound and fell silent again.

Anderson grabbed for whatever had touched her, thinking it might be – well, she didn't know what she thought it might be, but even before her hand closed on it, she remembered what it was. She had a hazy memory of stopping just long enough to hang her blouse on a bush; here it was.

She took it and put it on, getting the buttons wrong on the first try so that one tail hung down below the other. She rebuttoned it, looking at the dig she had begun – and now that archaeological word seemed to fit what she was doing exactly. Her memories of the four hours she'd spent digging were like her memory of hanging her blouse on the bush – hazy and fragmented. They were not memories; they were fragments.

But now, looking at what she had done, she felt awe as well as fear . . . and a mounting sense of excitement.

Whatever it was, it was huge. Not just big, but huge.

The spade, shovel, and crowbar lay at intervals along a fifteen-foot trench in the forest floor. She had made neat piles of black earth and chunks of rock at regular intervals. Sticking up from this trench, which was about four feet deep at the point where Anderson had originally stumbled over three inches of protruding gray metal, was the leading edge of some titanic object. Gray metal … some object …

You'd ordinarily have a right to expect something better, more specific, from a writer, she thought, arming sweat from her forehead, but she was no longer sure the metal was steel. She thought now it might be a more exotic alloy, beryllium, magnesium, perhaps – and composition aside, she had absolutely no idea what it was.

She began to unbutton her jeans so she could tuck in her blouse, then paused.

The crotch of the faded Levis was soaked with blood.

Jesus. Jesus Christ. This isn't a period. This is Niagara Falls.

She was momentarily frightened, really frightened, then told herself to quit being a ninny. She had gone into some sort of daze and done digging a crew of four husky men could have been proud of . . . her, a woman who went one-twenty-five, maybe one-thirty, tops. Of course she was flowing heavily. She was fine – in fact, should be grateful she wasn't cramping as well as gushing.

My, how poetic we are today, Bobbi, she thought, and uttered a harsh little laugh.

All she really needed was to clean herself up: a shower and a change would do fine. The jeans had been ready for either the trash or the rag-bag anyway. Now there was one less choice in a troubled, confusing world, right? Right. No big deal.

She buttoned her pants again, not tucking the blouse in – no sense ruining that as well, although God knew it wasn't exactly a Dior original. The feel of the sticky wetness down there when she moved made her grimace. God, she wanted to get cleaned up. In a hurry.

But instead of starting up the slope to the path, she walked back toward the thing in the earth again, drawn to it. Peter howled, and the gooseflesh reappeared again. 'Peter, will you for Christ's sake shut up!' She hardly ever shouted at Pete really shouted at him – but the goddam mutt was starting to make her feel like a behavioral psychology subject. Gooseflesh when the dog howled instead of saliva at the sound of the bell, but the same principle.

Standing close to her find, she forgot about Peter and only stared wonderingly at it. After some moments she reached out and gripped it. Again she felt that curious sense of vibration – it sank into her hand and then disappeared. This time she thought of touching a hull beneath which very heavy machinery is hard at work. The metal itself was so smooth that it had an almost greasy texture – you expected some of it to come off on your hands.

She made a fist and rapped her knuckles on it. It made a dull sound, like a fist rapping on a thick chunk of mahogany. She stood a moment longer, then took the screwdriver from her back pocket, held it indecisively for a moment, and then, feeling oddly guilty – feeling like a vandal – she drew the screwdriver blade down the exposed metal. It wouldn't scratch.

Her eyes suggested two further things, but either or both could have been an optical illusion. The first was that the metal seemed to grow slightly thicker as it went from its edge to the point where it disappeared into the earth. The second was that the edge was slightly curved. These two things – if true – suggested an idea that was at once exciting, ludicrous, frightening, impossible … and possessed of a certain mad logic.

She ran her palm over the smooth metal, then stepped away. What the hell was she doing, petting this goddam thing while the blood was running down her legs? And her period was the least of her concerns if what she was starting to think just might turn out to be the truth.

You better call somebody, Bobbi. Right now.

I'll call Jim. When he gets back.

Sure. Call a poet. Great idea. Then you can call the Reverend Moon. Maybe Edward Gorey and Gahan Wilson to draw pictures. Then you can hire a few rock bands and have fucking Woodstock 1988 out here. Get serious, Bobbi. Call the state police.

No. I want to talk to Jim first. Want him to see it. Want to talk to him about it. Meantime, I'll dig around it some more.

It could be dangerous.

Yes. Not only could be, probably was – hadn't she felt that? Hadn't Peter felt it? There was something else, too. Coming down the slope from the path this morning, she had found a dead woodchuck – had almost stepped on it. Although the smell when she bent over the animal told her it had been dead two days at least, there had been no buzz of flies to warn her. There were no flies at all around ole Chuck, and Anderson could not remember ever having seen such a thing. There was no obvious sign of what had killed it, either, but believing that thing in the ground had had anything to do with it was boolsheet of the purest ray serene. Ole Chuck had probably gotten some farmer's poison bait and stumbled out here to die.

Go home. Change your pants. You're bloody and you stink.

She backed away from the thing, then turned and climbed the slope to the path, where Peter jumped clumsily on her and began to lick her hand with an eagerness that was a little pathetic. Even a year ago he would have been trying to nose at her crotch, attracted by the smell there, but not now. Now all he could do was shiver.

'Your own damn fault,' Anderson said. 'I told you to stay home.' All the same, she was glad Peter had come. If he hadn't, Anderson might have worked right through until nightfall … and the idea of coming to in the dark, with that thing bulking close by … that idea didn't fetch her.

She looked back from the path. The height gave her a more complete view of the thing. It jutted from the ground at a slight angle, she saw. Her impression that the leading edge had a slight curve recurred.

A plate, that's what I thought when I first dug around it with my fingers. A steel plate, not a dinner-plate, I thought, but maybe even then, with so little of it sticking out of the ground, it was really a dinner-plate I was thinking of. Or a saucer.

A flying fucking saucer.

4

Back at the house, she showered and changed, using one of the Maxi-Pads even though the heavy menstrual flow already appeared to be lessening. Then she fixed herself a huge supper of canned baked beans and knockwurst. But she found herself too tired to do much more than pick at it. She put the remains – more than half – down for Peter and went over to her rocker by the window. The thesis she had been reading was still on the floor beside the chair, her place marked with a torn-off matchbook cover. Her notepad was beside it. She picked it up, turned to a fresh page and began to sketch the thing in the woods as she had seen it when she took that last look back.

She was no great shakes with a pen unless it was words she was making, but she had some small sketching talent. This sketch went very slowly, however, not just because she wanted it to be as exact as she could make it but because she was so tired. To make matters worse, Peter came over and nuzzled her hand, wanting to be patted.

She stroked Peter's head absently, erasing a jag his nose had put into the horizon-line of her sketch. 'Yeah, you're a good dog, great dog, go check the mail, why don't you?'

Peter trotted across the living room and nosed the screen door open. Anderson went back to work on her sketch, glancing up once to see Peter do his world-famous canine mail-retrieval trick. He put his left forepaw up on the mailbox post and then began to swipe at the door of the box. Joe Paulson, the postman, knew about Peter and always left it ajar. He got the door down, then lost his balance before he could hook the mail out with his paw. Anderson winced a little – until this year, Peter had never lost his balance. Getting the mail had been his piece de resistance, better than playing dead Viet Cong and much better than anything mundane like sitting up or 'speaking' for a dog biscuit. It wowed everyone who saw him do it, and Peter knew it … but these days it was a painful ritual to watch. It made Anderson feel the way she imagined she would feel if she saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on TV, trying to do one of their old dance routines.

The dog managed to get up on the post again, and this time Peter hooked the mail – a catalogue and a letter (or a bill – yes, with the end of the month coming it was more likely a bill) – out of the box with the first swipe of his paw. It fluttered to the road, and as Peter picked it up, Anderson dropped her eyes back to her sketch, telling herself to stop banging the goddam funeral bell for Peter every two minutes. The dog actually looked half-alive tonight; there had been nights recently when he'd had to totter up on his hind legs three or four times before he was able to get his mail – which usually came to no more than a free sample from Procter&Gamble or an advertising circular from K-mart.

Anderson stared at her sketch closely, absently shading in the trunk of the big pine tree with the split top. It wasn't a hundred per cent accurate … but it was pretty close. She'd gotten the angle of the thing right, anyway.

She drew a box around it, then turned the box into a cube … as if to isolate the thing. The curve was obvious enough in her sketch, but had it really been there?

Yes. And what she was calling a metal plate – it was really a hull, wasn't it? A glassy-smooth, rivetless hull.

You're losing your mind, Bobbi … you know that, don't you?

Peter scratched on the screen to be let in. Anderson went to the door, still looking at her sketch. Peter came in and dropped the mail on a chair in the hallway. Then he walked slowly down to the kitchen, presumably to see if there was anything he had overlooked on Anderson's plate.

Anderson picked up the two pieces of mail and wiped them on the leg of her jeans with a little grimace of disgust. It was a good trick, granted, but dog-spit on the mail was never going to be one of her favorite things. The catalogue was from Radio Shack – they wanted to sell her a word processor. The bill was from Central Maine Power. That made her think briefly of Jim Gardener again. She tossed both on the table in the hall, went back to her chair, sat down again, flipped to a fresh page, and quickly copied her original sketch.

She frowned at the mild arc, which was probably a bit of extrapolation – as if she had dug down maybe twelve or fourteen feet instead of just four. Well, so what? A little extrapolation didn't bother her; hell, that was part of a fiction writer's business, and people who thought it belonged solely to science-fiction or fantasy writers had never looked through the other end of the telescope, had never been faced with the problem of filling in white spaces that no history could provide – things, for example, like what had happened to the people who had colonized Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast, and then simply disappeared, leaving no mark but the inexplicable word CROATOAN carved on a tree, or the Easter Island monoliths, or why the citizens of a little town in Utah called Blessing had all suddenly gone crazy – or so it seemed – on the same day in the summer of 1884. If you didn't know for sure, it was okay to imagine – until and unless you found out different.

There was a formula by which circumference could be determined from an arc, she was quite sure of it. She had forgotten what the damned thing was, that was the only problem. But she could maybe get a rough idea – always assuming her impression of just how much the thing's edge curved was accurate – by estimating the thing's center point …

Bobbi went back to the hall table and opened its middle drawer, which was a sort of catch-all. She rooted past untidy bundles of canceled checks, dead C, D, and 9-volt batteries (for some reason she had never been able to shitcan old batteries what you did with old batteries was throw them in a drawer, God knew why, it was just the Battery Graveyard instead of the one the elephants were supposed to have), bunches of rubber bands and wide red canning-rubbers, unanswered fan letters (she could no more throw out an unanswered fan letter than a dead battery), and recipes jotted on file-cards. At the very bottom of the drawer was a litter of small tools, and among them she found what she was looking for – a compass with a yellow stub of pencil sleeved into the armature.

Sitting in the rocker again, Anderson turned to a fresh sheet and drew the leading edge of the thing in the earth for the third time. She tried to keep it in scale, but drew it a little bigger this time, not bothering with the surrounding trees and only suggesting the trench for the sake of perspective.

'Okay, guesswork,' she said, and dug the point of the compass into the yellow legal pad below the curved edge. She adjusted the compass's arc so it traced that edge fairly accurately – and then she swept the compass around in a complete circle. She looked at it, then wiped her mouth with the heel of her hand. Her lips suddenly felt too loose and too wet.

'Boolsheet,' she whispered.

But it wasn't boolsheet. Unless her estimate of the edge's curvature and of midpoint were both wildly off the beam, she had unearthed the edge of an object which was at least three hundred yards in circumference.

Anderson dropped the compass and the pad on the floor and looked out the window. Her heart was beating too hard.

5

As the sun went down, Anderson sat on her back porch, staring across her garden toward the woods, and listened to the voices in her head.

In her junior year at college she had taken a Psychology Department seminar on creativity. She had been amazed – and a little relieved – to discover that she was not concealing some private neurosis; almost all imaginative people heard voices. Not just thoughts but actual voices inside their heads, different personae, each as clearly defined as voices on an old-time radio show. They came from the right side of the brain, the teacher explained – the side which is most commonly associated with visions and telepathy and that striking human ability to make images by drawing comparisons and making metaphors.

There are no such things as flying saucers.

Oh yeah? Who says so?

The Air Force, for one. They closed the books on flying saucers twenty years ago. The), were able to explain all but three per cent of all verified sightings, and they said those last three were almost certainly caused by ephemeral atmospheric conditions – stuff like sun-dogs, clear-air turbulence, pockets of clear-air electricity. Hell, the Lubbock Lights were front-page news, and all they turned out to be was … well, there were these packs of traveling packs of moths, see? And the Lubbock streetlights hit their wings and reflected big light-colored moving shapes onto the low cloud masses that a stagnant weather pattern kept over the town for a week. Most of the country spent that week thinking someone dressed like Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still was going to come walking up Lubbock's main drag with his pet robot Gort clanking along beside him, demanding to be taken to our leader. And they were moths. Do you like it? Don't you have to like it?

This voice was so clear it was amusing – it was that of Dr Klingerman, who had taught the seminar. It lectured her with good old Klingy's unfailing – if rather shrill enthusiasm. Anderson smiled and lit a cigarette. Smoking a little too much tonight, but the damned things were going stale, anyway.

In 1947 an Air Force captain named Mantell flew too high while he was chasing a flying saucer – what he thought was a flying saucer. He blacked out.

His plane crashed. Mantell was killed. He died chasing a reflection of Venus on a high scud of clouds – a sun-dog, in other words. So there are reflections of moths, reflections of Venus, and probably reflections in a golden eye as well, Bobbi, but there are no flying saucers.

Then what is that in the ground?

The voice of the lecturer fell still. It didn't know. So in its place came Anne's voice, saying the same thing for the third time, telling her she was getting funny in the head, getting weird like Uncle Frank, telling her they would be measuring her for one of those canvas coats you wear backwards soon enough; they would cart her up to the asylum in Bangor or the one in Juniper Hill, and she could rave about flying saucers buried in the woods while she wove baskets. It was Sissy's voice, all right; she could call her on the phone right now, tell her what had happened, and get that scripture by chapter and by verse. She knew it.

But was it right?

No. It wasn't. Anne would equate her sister's mostly solitary life with madness no matter what Anderson did or said. And yes, the idea that the thing in the earth was some sort of spaceship certainly was mad … but was playing with the possibility, at least until it was disproven, mad? Anne would think so, but Anderson did not. Nothing wrong with keeping an open mind.

Yet the speed with which the possibility had occurred to her …

She got up and went inside. Last time she had fooled with that thing in the woods, she had slept for twelve hours. She wondered if she could expect a similar sleep-marathon tonight. She felt almost tired enough to sleep twelve hours, God knew.

Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.

But she wouldn't, she thought, pulling off her OPUS FOR PRESIDENT T-shirt. Not just yet.

The trouble with living alone, she had discovered – and the reason why most people she knew didn't like to be alone even for a little while – was those voices from the right side of the brain. The longer you lived alone, the louder and more clearly they spoke. As the yardsticks of rationality began to shrink in the silence, those right-brain voices did not Just request attention but demanded it. It was easy to become frightened of them, to think they meant madness after all.

Anne would sure think they did, Bobbi thought, climbing into bed. The lamp cast a clean and comforting circle of light on the counterpane, but she left the thesis she'd been reading on the floor. She kept expecting the doleful cramps that usually accompanied her occasional early and heavy menstrual flow to begin, but so far they hadn't. Not that she was anxious for them to put in an appearance, you should understand.

She crossed her hands behind her head and looked at the ceiling.

No, you're not crazy at all, Bobbi, she thought. You think Gard's getting wiggy but you're perfectly all right – isn't that also a sign that you're wobbling?

There's even a name for it … denial and substitution. 'I'm all right, it's the world that's crazy.'

All true. But she still felt firmly in control of herself, and sure of one thing: she was saner in Haven than she had been in Cleaves Mills, and much saner than she had been in Utica. A few more years in Utica, a few more years around sister Anne, and she would have been as mad as a hatter. Anderson believed Anne actually saw driving her close relatives crazy as part of her – her job? No, nothing so mundane. As part of her sacred mission in life.

She knew what was really troubling her, and it wasn't the speed with which the possibility of what the thing might be had occurred to her. It was the feeling of certainty. She would keep an open mind, but the struggle would be to keep it open in favor of what Anne would call 'sanity.' Because she knew what she had found, and it filled her with fear and awe and a restless, moving excitement.

See, Anne, ole Bobbi didn't move up to Sticksville and go crazy; ole Bobbi moved up here and went sane. Insanity is limiting possibilities, Anne, can you dig it? Insanity is refusing to go down certain paths of speculation even though the logic is there … like a token for the turnstile. See what I mean? No? Of course you don't. You don't and you never did. Then go away, Anne. Stay in Utica and grind your teeth in your sleep until there's nothing left of them, make whoever is mad enough to stay within range of your voice crazy, be my guest, but stay out of my head.

The thing in the earth was a ship from space.

There. It was out. No more bullshit. Never mind Anne, never mind the Lubbock Lights or how the Air Force had closed its file on flying saucers. Never mind the chariots of the gods, or the Bermuda Triangle, or how Elijah was drawn up to heaven in a wheel of fire. Never mind any of it – her heart knew what her heart knew. It was a ship, and it had either landed or crash-landed a long time ago maybe millions of years ago.

God!

She lay in bed, hands behind her head. She was calm enough, but her heart was beating fast, fast, fast.

Then another voice, and this was the voice of her dead grandfather, repeating something Anne's voice had said earlier.

Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.

That momentary vibration. Her earlier premonition, suffocating and positive, that she had found the edge of some weird steel coffin. Peter's reaction. Starting her period early, only spotting here at the farm but bleeding like a stuck pig when she was close to it. Losing track of time, sleeping the clock all the way around. And don't forget ole Chuck the Woodchuck. Chuck had smelled gassy and decomposed, but there were no flies. No flies on Chuck, you might say.

None of that shit adds up to Shinola. I'll buy the possibility of a ship in the earth because no matter how crazy it sounds at first, the logic's still there. But there's no logic to the rest of this stuff. they're loose beads rolling around on

the table. Thread them onto a string and maybe I'll buy it – I'll think about it, anyway. Okay?

Her grandfather's voice again, that slow, authoritative voice, the only one in the house that had always been able to strike Anne silent as a kid.

Those things all happened after you found it, Bobbi. That's your string.

No. Not enough.

Easy enough to talk back to her grandfather now; the man was sixteen years in his grave. But it was her grandfather's voice that followed her down to sleep, nevertheless.

Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.

– and you know that, too.

1

She thought she had seen something different about Peter, but hadn't been able to tell exactly what it was. When Anderson woke up the next morning (at a perfectly normal nine o'clock) she saw it almost at once.

She stood at the counter, pouring Gravy Train into Peter's old red dish. As always, Peter came strolling in at the sound. The Gravy Train was fairly new; up until this year the deal had always been Gaines Meal in the morning, half a can of Rival canned dogfood at night, and everything Pete could catch in the woods in between. Then Peter had stopped eating the Gaines Meal and it had taken Anderson almost a month to catch on – Peter wasn't bored; what remained of his teeth simply couldn't manage to crunch up the nuggets anymore. So now he got Gravy Train … the equivalent, she supposed, of an old man's poached egg for breakfast.

She ran warm water over the Gravy Train nuggets, then stirred them with the old battered spoon she kept for the purpose. Soon the softening nuggets floated in a muddy liquid that actually did look like gravy … either that, Anderson thought, or something out of a backed-up septic tank.

'Here you go,' she said, turning away from the sink. Peter was now in his accustomed spot on the linoleum – a polite distance away so Anderson wouldn't trip over him when she turned around – and thumping his tail. 'Hope you enjoy it. Myself, I think I'd ralph my g – '

That was where she stopped, bent over with Peter's red dish in her right hand, her hair falling over one eye. She brushed it away.

'Pete?' she heard herself say.

Peter looked at her quizzically for a moment, and then padded forward to get his morning kip. A moment later he was slurping it up enthusiastically.

Anderson straightened, looking at her dog, rather glad she could no longer see Peter's face. In her head her grandfather's voice told her again to leave it alone, it was dangerous, and did she need any more string for her beads?

There are about a million people in this country alone who would come running if they got wind of this kind of dangerous, Anderson thought. God knows how many in the rest of the world. And is that all it does? How is it on cancer, do you suppose?

All the strength suddenly ran out of her legs. She felt her way backward until she touched one of the kitchen chairs. She sat down and watched Peter eat.

The milky cataract which had covered his left eye was now half gone.

2

'I don't have the slightest idea,' the vet said that afternoon.

Anderson sat in the examining room's only chair while Peter sat obediently on the examining table. Anderson found herself remembering how she had dreaded the possibility of having to bring Peter to the vet's this summer … only now it didn't look as if Peter would have to be put down after all.

'But it isn't just my imagination?' Anderson asked, and she supposed that what she really wanted was for Dr Etheridge to either confirm or confute the Anne in her head: It's what you deserve, living out there alone with your smelly dog …

'Nope,' Etheridge said, 'although I can understand why you feel flummoxed. I feel a little flummoxed myself. His cataract is in active remission. You can get down, Peter.' Peter climbed down from the table, going first to Etheridge's stool and then to the floor and then to Anderson.

Anderson put her hand on Peter's head and looked closely at Etheridge, thinking: Did you see that? Not quite wanting to say it out loud. For a moment Etheridge met her eyes, and then he looked away. I saw it, yes, but I'm not going to admit that I saw it. Peter had gotten down carefully, in a descent that was miles from the devil-take-the-hindmost bounds of the puppy he had once been, but neither was it the trembling, tentative, wobbly descent Peter would have made even a week ago, cocking his head unnaturally to the right so he could see where he was going, his balance so vague that your heart stopped until he was down with no bones broken. Peter came down with the conservative yet solid confidence of the elder statesman he had been two or three years ago. Some of it, Anderson supposed, was the fact that the vision in his left eye was returning – Etheridge had confirmed that with a few simple perception tests. But the eye wasn't all of it. The rest was overall improved body coordination. Simple as that. Crazy, but simple.

And the shrinking cataract hadn't caused Pete's muzzle to return to saltand-pepper from an almost solid white, had it? Anderson had noticed that in the pickup truck as they headed down to Augusta. She had almost driven off the road.

How much of this was Etheridge seeing and not being prepared to admit he was seeing? Quite a bit, Anderson guessed, but part of it was just that Etheridge wasn't Doc Daggett.

Daggett had seen Peter at least twice a year during the first ten years of Peter's life … and then there were the things that came up, like the time Pete had mixed in with a porcupine, for instance, and Daggett had removed the quills, one by one, whistling the theme music from The Bridge on the

River Kwai as he did so, soothing the trembling year-old dog with one big, kindly hand. On another occasion Peter had come limping home with a backside full of birdshot – a cruel present from a hunter either too stupid to look before he shot or perhaps sadistic enough to inflict misery on a dog because he couldn't find a partridge or pheasant to inflict it on. Dr Daggett would have seen all the changes in Peter, and would not have been able to deny them even if he had wished to. Dr Daggett would have taken off his pink-rimmed glasses, polished them on his white coat, and said something like: We have to find out where he's been and what he's gotten into, Roberta. This is serious. Dogs don't just get younger, and that is what Peter appears to be doing. That would have forced Anderson to reply: I know where he's been, and I've got a pretty good idea of what did it. And that would have taken a lot of the pressure off, wouldn't it? But old Doc Daggett had sold the practice to Etheridge, who seemed nice enough, but who was still something of a stranger, and retired to Florida. Etheridge had seen Peter more often than Daggett had done – four times in the last year, as it happened – because as Peter grew older he had grown steadily more infirm. But he still hadn't seen him as often as his predecessor … and, she suspected, he didn't have his predecessor's clear-eyed perceptions, either. Or his guts.

From the ward behind them, a German Shepherd suddenly exploded a string of heavy barks that sounded like a string of canine curses. Other dogs picked it up. Peter's ears cocked forward and he began to tremble under Anderson's hand. The Benjamin Button routine apparently hadn't done a thing for the beagle's equanimity, Anderson thought; once through his puppyhood storms, Peter had been so laid-back he was damn near paralytic. This high-strung trembling was brand-new.

Etheridge was listening to the dogs with a slight frown now – almost all of them were barking.

'Thanks for seeing us on such short notice,' Anderson said. She had to raise her voice to be heard. A dog in the waiting room also started to bark – the quick, nervous yappings of a very small animal … a Pom or a poodle, most likely. 'It was very – ' Her voice broke momentarily. She felt a vibration under her fingertips and her first thought

(the ship)

was of the thing in the woods. But she knew what this vibration was. Although she had felt it very, very seldom, there was no mystery about it.

This vibration was coming from Peter. Peter was growling, very low and deep in his throat.

' – kind of you, but I think we ought to split. It sounds like you've got a mutiny on your hands.' She meant it as a joke, but it no longer sounded like a joke. Suddenly the entire small complex – the cinderblock square that was Etheridge's waiting room and treatment room, plus the attached cinderblock rectangle that was his ward and operating theater – was in an uproar. All the

dogs out back were barking, and in the waiting room the Pom had been joined by a couple of other dogs … and a feminine, wavering tail that was unmistakably feline.

Mrs Alden popped in, looking distressed. 'Dr Etheridge

'All right,' he said, sounding cross. 'Excuse me, Ms Anderson.'

He left in a hurry, heading for the ward first. When he opened the door, the noise of the dogs seemed to double – they're going bugshit, Anderson thought, and that was all she had time to think, because Peter almost lunged out from under her hand. That idling growl deep in his throat suddenly roughened into a snarl. Etheridge, already hurrying down the ward's central corridor, dogs barking all around him and the door swinging slowly shut on its pneumatic elbow behind him, didn't hear, but Anderson did, and if she hadn't been lucky in her grab for Peter's collar, the beagle would have been across the room like a shot and into the ward after the doctor. The trembling and the deep growl … those hadn't been fear, she realized. They had been rage – it was inexplicable, completely unlike Peter, but that's what it had been.

Peter's snarl turned to a strangled sound – yark! – as Anderson pulled him back by the collar. He turned his head, and in Peter's rolling, red-rimmed right eye Anderson saw what she would later characterize only as fury at being turned from the course he wanted to follow. She could acknowledge the possibility that there was a flying saucer three hundred yards around its outer rim buried on her property; the possibility that some emanation or vibration from this ship had killed a woodchuck that had the bad luck to get a little too close, killed it so completely and unpleasantly that even the flies seemingly wanted no part of it; she could deal with an anomalous menstrual period, a canine cataract in remission, even with the seeming certainty that her dog was somehow growing younger.

All this, yes.

But the idea that she had seen an insane hate for her, for Bobbi Anderson, in her good old dog Peter's eyes … no.

3

That moment was thankfully brief. The door to the ward shut, muffling the cacophony. Some of the tenseness seemed to go out of Peter. He was still trembling, but at least he sat down again.

'Come on, Pete, we're getting out of here,' Anderson said. She was badly shaken much more so than she would later admit to Jim Gardener. For to admit that would have perhaps led back to that furious leer of rage she had seen in Peter's good eye.

She fumbled for the unfamiliar leash which she had taken off Peter as soon as they got into the examination room (that dogs should be leashed when owners brought them in for examination was a requirement Anderson had always found annoying – until now), almost dropping it. At last she managed to attach it to Peter's collar.

She led Peter to the door of the waiting room and pushed it open with her foot. The noise was worse than ever. The yapper was indeed a Pomeranian, the property of a fat woman wearing bright yellow slacks and a yellow top. Fatso was trying to hold the Pom, telling it to 'be a good boy, Eric, be a good boy for Mommy.' Very little save the dog's bright and somehow ratty eyes were visible between Mommy's large and flabby arms.

'Ms Anderson – ' Mrs Alden began. She looked bewildered and a little frightened, a woman trying to conduct business as usual in a place that had suddenly become a madhouse. Anderson understood how she felt.

The Pom spotted Peter – Anderson would later swear that was what set it off and seemed to go crazy. It certainly had no problem choosing a target. It sank its sharp teeth into one of Mommy's arms.

'Cocksucker!' Mommy screamed, and dropped the Pomeranian on the floor. Blood began to run down her arm.

At the same time, Peter lunged forward, barking and snarling, fetching up at the end of the short leash hard enough to jerk Anderson forward. Her right arm flagged out straight. With the clear eye of her writer's mind Anderson saw exactly what was going to happen next. Peter the beagle and Eric the Pom were going to meet in the middle of the room like David and Goliath. But the Pom had no brains, let alone a sling. Peter would tear its head off with one large chomp.

This was averted by a girl of perhaps eleven, who was sitting to Mommy's left. The girl had a Porta-Carry on her lap. Inside was a large blacksnake, its scales glowing with luxuriant good health. The little girl shot out one jeans-clad leg with the unearthly reflexes of the very young and stamped on the trailing end of Eric's leash. Eric did one complete snap-roll. The little girl reeled the Pom in. She was by far the calmest person in the waiting room.

'What if that little fucker gave me the rabies?' Mommy was screaming as she advanced across the room toward Mrs Alden. Blood twinkled between the fingers clapped to her arm. Peter's head turned toward her as she passed, and Anderson pulled him back, heading toward the door. Fuck the little sign in Mrs Alden's cubbyhole reading IT IS CUSTOMARY TO PAY CASH FOR PROFESSIONAL SERVICES UNLESS OTHER ARRANGEMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE IN ADVANCE. She wanted to get out of here and drive the speed limit all the way home and have a drink. Cutty. A double. On second thoughts, make that a triple.

From her left came a long, low, virulent hissing sound. Anderson turned in that direction and saw a cat that might have stepped out of a Halloween decoration. Black except for a single dab of white at the end of its tail, it had backed up as far as its carrying cage would allow. Its back was humped up; its fur stood straight up in hackles; its green eyes, fixed unwaveringly on Peter, glowed fantastically. Its pink mouth was jointed wide, ringed with teeth.

'Get your dog out, lady,' the woman with the cat said in a voice cold as a cocking trigger. 'Blacky don't like 'im.'

Anderson wanted to tell her she didn't care if Blacky farted or blew a tin whistle, but she would not think of this obscure but somehow exquisitely apt expression until later – she rarely did in hot situations. Her characters always knew exactly the right things to say, and she rarely had to deliberate over them – they came easily and naturally. This was almost never the case in real life.

'Hold your water,' was the best she could do, and she spoke in such a craven mutter that she doubted if Blacky's owner had the slightest idea what she had said, or maybe even that she had said anything at all. She really was pulling Peter now, using the leash to yank the dog along in a way she hated to see a dog pulled whenever she observed it being done on the street. Peter was making coughing noises in his throat and his tongue was a saliva-dripping runner hanging askew from one side of his mouth. He stared at a boxer whose right foreleg was in a cast. A big man in a blue mechanic's coverall was holding the boxer's rope leash with both hands; had, in fact, taken a double-twist of the hayrope around one big grease-stained fist and was still having trouble holding his dog, which could have killed Peter as quickly and efficiently as Peter himself could have the Pomeranian. The boxer was pulling mightily in spite of its broken leg, and Anderson had more faith in the mechanic's grip than she did the hayrope leash, which appeared to be fraying.

It seemed to Anderson that she fumbled for the knob of the outer door with her free hand for a hundred years. It was like having a nightmare where your hands are full and your pants start, slowly and inexorably, to slip down.

Peter did this. Somehow.

She turned the knob, then took one final, hasty glance around the waiting room. It had become an absurd little no-man's-land. Mommy was demanding first aid of Mrs Alden (and apparently really did need some; blood was now coursing down her arm in freshets, spotting her yellow slacks and white institutional shoes); Blacky the cat was still hissing; Dr Etheridge's gerbils were going mad in the complicated maze of plastic tubes and towers on the far shelf that made up their home; Eric the Crazed Pomeranian stood at the end of his leash, barking at Peter in a strangled voice. Peter was snarling back.

Anderson's eye fell on the little girl's blacksnake and saw that it had reared up like a cobra inside its Porta-Carry and was also looking at Peter, its fangless mouth yawning, its narrow pink tongue shuttling at the air in stiff little jabs.

Blacksnakes don't do that. I never saw a blacksnake do that in my life.

Now in something very close to real horror, Anderson fled, dragging Peter after her.

4

Pete began to calm down almost as soon as the door sighed shut behind them. He stopped coughing and dragging on the leash and began to walk at Anderson's side, glancing at her occasionally in that way that said I don't like this leash and I'm never going to like it, but okay, okay, if it's what you want.

By the time they were both in the cab of the pickup, Peter was entirely his old self again.

Anderson was not.

Her hands were shaking so badly that she had to try three times before she could get the ignition key into its slot. Then she popped the clutch and stalled the engine. The Chevy pickup gave a mighty jerk and Peter tumbled off the seat onto the floor. He gave Anderson a reproachful beagle look (although all dogs are capable of reproachful looks, only beagles seem to have mastered that long-suffering stare). Where did you say you got your license, Bobbi? that expression seemed to ask. Sears and Roebuck? Then he climbed up on the seat again. Anderson was already finding it hard to believe that only five minutes ago Peter had been growling and snarling, a bad-tempered dog she had never encountered before, apparently ready to bite anything that moved, and that expression, that … but her mind snapped shut on that before it could go any further.

She got the engine going again and then headed out of the parking lot. As she passed the side of the building – AUGUSTA VETERINARY CLINIC, the neat sign read – she rolled her window down. A few barks and yaps. Nothing out of the ordinary.

It had stopped.

And that wasn't all that had stopped, she thought. Although she couldn't be completely sure, she thought her period was over, too. If so, good riddance to bad rubbish.

To coin a phrase.

5

Bobbi didn't want to wait – or couldn't – to get back before having the drink she had promised herself. Just outside the Augusta city limits was a roadhouse that went by the charming name of The Big Lost Weekend Bar and Grille (Whopper Spareribs Our Specialty, The Nashville Kitty-Cats This Fri and Sad).

Anderson pulled in between an old station wagon and a John Deere tractor with a dirty harrow on the back with its blades kicked up. Further down was a big old Buick with a horse-trailer behind. Anderson had kept away from that on purpose.

'Stay,' Anderson said, and Peter, now curled up on the seat, gave her a look as if to say, Why would I want to go anywhere with you? So you can choke me some more with that stupid leash?

The Big Lost Weekend was dark and nearly deserted on a Wednesday afternoon, its dance-floor a cavern which glimmered faintly. The place reeked of sour beer. The bartender cum counterman strolled down and said, 'Howdy, purty lady. The chili's on special. Also -'

'I'd like Cutty Sark,' Anderson said. 'Double. Water back.'

'You always drink like a man?'

Usually from a glass,' Anderson said, a quip which made no sense at all, but she felt very tired … and harrowed to the bone. She went into the ladies' to change her pad and did slip one of the minis from her purse into the crotch of her panties as a precaution … but precaution was all it was, and that was a relief. It seemed that the cardinal had flown off for another month.

She returned to her stool in a better humor than she had left it, and felt better still when she had gotten half the drink inside her.

'Say, I sure didn't mean to offend you,' the bartender said. 'It gets lonely in here, afternoons. When a stranger comes in, my lip gets runny.'

'My fault,' Anderson said. 'I haven't been having the best day of my life.'

She finished her drink and sighed.

'You want another one, miss?'

I think I liked 'purty lady' better, Anderson thought, and shook her head. 'I'll take a glass of milk, though. Otherwise I'll have acid indigestion all afternoon.'

The bartender brought her the milk. Anderson sipped it and thought about what had happened at the vet's. The answer was quick and simple: she didn't know.

But I'll tell you what happened when you brought him in, she thought. Not a thing.

Her mind seized on this. The waiting room had been almost as crowded when she brought Peter in as it had been when she dragged him back out, only there had been no bedlam scene the first time. The place had not been quiet – animals of different types and species, many of them ancient and instinctive antagonists, do not make for a library atmosphere when brought together – but it had been normal. Now, with the booze working in her, she recalled the man in the mechanic's coverall leading the boxer in. The boxer had looked at Peter. Peter had looked mildly back. No big deal.

So?

So drink your milk and get on home and forget it.

Okay. And what about that thing in the woods? Do I forget that, too?

Instead of an answer, her grandfather's voice came: By the way, Bobbi, what's that thing doing to you? Have you thought about that?

She hadn't.

Now that she had, she was tempted to order another drink … except another, even a single, would make her drunk, and did she really want to be sitting in this huge barn in the early afternoon, getting drunk alone, waiting for the inevitable someone (maybe the bartender himself) to cruise up and ask what a pretty place like this was doing around a girl like her?

She left a five on the counter and the bartender saluted her. On her way out she saw a pay phone. The phone-box was dirty and dog-eared and smelled of used bourbon, but at least it was still there. Anderson deposited twenty cents, crooked the handset between shoulder and ear while she hunted through in the Yellow Pages, then called Etheridge's clinic. Mrs Alden sounded quite composed. In the background she could hear one dog barking. One.

'I didn't want you to think I stiffed you,' she said, 'and I'll mail your leash back tomorrow.'

'Not at all, Ms Anderson,' she said. 'After all the years you have done business with us, you're the last person we'd worry about when it comes to deadbeats. As for leashes, we've got a closetful.'

'Things seemed a little crazy there for a while.'

'Boy, were they ever! We had to call Medix for Mrs Perkins. I didn't think it was bad – she'll have needed stitches, of course, but lots of people who need stitches get to the doctor under their own power.' She lowered her voice a little, offering Anderson a confidence that she probably wouldn't have offered a man. 'Thank God it was her own dog bit her. She's the sort of woman who starts shouting lawsuit at the drop of a hat.'

'Any idea what might have caused it?'

'No – neither does Dr Etheridge. The heat after the rain, maybe. Dr Etheridge said he heard of something like it once at a convention. A vet from California said that all the animals in her clinic had what she called “a savage spell” just before the last big quake out there.'

'Is that so?'

'There was an earthquake in Maine last year,' Mrs Alden said. 'I hope there won't be another one. That nuclear plant at Wiscassett is too close for comfort.'

Just ask Gard, Bobbi thought. She said thanks again and hung up.

Anderson went back to the truck. Peter was sleeping. He opened his eyes when Anderson got in, then closed them again. His muzzle lay on his paws. The gray on his muzzle was fading away. No question about that; no question at all.

And by the way, Bobbi, what's that thing doing to you?

Shut up, Granddad.

She drove home. And after fortifying herself with a second Scotch – a weak one she went into the bathroom and stood close to the mirror, first examining her face and then running her fingers through her hair, lifting it and then letting it drop.

The gray was still there – all of it that had so far come in, as far as she could tell.

She never would have thought she would be glad to see gray hair, but she was. Sort of.

6

By early evening, dark clouds had begun to build up in the west, and by dark it had commenced thundering. The rains were going to return, it seemed, at least for a one-night stand. Anderson knew she wouldn't get Peter outside that night to do more than the most pressing doggy business; since his puppyhood, the beagle had been utterly terrified of thunderstorms.

Anderson sat in her rocker by the window, and if someone had been there she supposed it would have looked like she was reading, but what she was really doing was grinding: grinding grimly away at the thesis, Range War and Civil War. It was as dry as dust, but she thought it was going to be extremely useful when she finally got around to the new one … which should be fairly soon now.

Each time the thunder rolled, Peter edged a little closer to the rocker and Anderson, seeming almost to grin shamefacedly. Yeah, it's not going to hurt me, I know, I know, but I'll just get a little closer to you, okay? And if there comes a real blast, I'll just about crowd you out of that fucking rocker, what do you say? You don't mind, do you, Bobbi?

The storm held off until nine o'clock, and by then Anderson was pretty sure they were going to have a good one – what Havenites called 'a real Jeezer.' She went into the kitchen, rummaged in the walk-in closet that served as her pantry, and found her Coleman gas lantern on a high shelf. Peter followed directly behind her, tail between his legs, shamefaced grin on his face. Anderson almost fell over him coming out of the closet with the lantern.

'Do you mind, Peter?'

Peter gave a little ground … and then crowded up to Anderson's ankles again when thunder cannonaded hard enough to rattle the windows. As Anderson got back to her chair, lightning sheeted blue-white and the phone tinged. The wind began to rise, making the trees rustle and sigh.

Peter sat hard by the rocker, looking up at Anderson pleadingly.

'Okay,' she said with a sigh. 'Come on up, jerk.'

Peter didn't have to be asked twice. He sprang into Anderson's lap, getting her crotch a pretty good one with one forepaw. He always seemed to whang her there or on one boob; he didn't aim – it was just one of those mysterious things, like the way elevators invariably stopped at every floor when you were in a hurry. If there was a defense, Bobbi Anderson had yet to find it.

Thunder tore across the sky. Peter crowded against her. His smell – Eau de Beagle – filled Anderson's nose.

'Why don't you just jump down my throat and have done with it, Pete?'

Peter grinned his shamefaced grin, as if to say I know it, I know it, don't rub it in.

The wind rose. The lights began to flicker, a sure sign that Roberta Anderson and Central Maine Power were about to bid each other a fond adieu … at least until three or four in the morning. Anderson laid the thesis aside and put her arm around her dog. She didn't really mind the occasional summer storm, or the winter blizzards, for that matter. She liked their big power. She liked the sight and sound of that power working on the land in its crude and blindly positive way. She sensed insensate compassion in the workings of such storms. She could feel this one working inside her – the hair on her arms and the nape of her neck would stir, and a particularly close shot of lightning left her feeling almost galvanized with energy.

She remembered an odd conversation she'd once had with Jim Gardener. Gard had a steel plate in his skull, a souvenir of a skiing accident that had almost killed him at the age of seventeen. Gardener had told her that once, while changing a light bulb, he had gotten a hell of a shock by inadvertently sticking his forefinger into the socket. This was hardly uncommon; the peculiar part was that, for the next week, he had heard music and announcers and newscasts in his head. He told Anderson he had really believed for a while he was going crazy. On the fourth day of this, Gard had even identified the call letters of the station he was receiving: WZON, one of Bangor's three AM radio stations. He had written down the names of three songs in a row and then called the station to see if they had indeed played those songs – plus ads for Sing's Polynesian Restaurant, Village Subaru, and the Bird Museum in Bar Harbor. They had.

On the fifth day, he said, the signal started to fade, and two days later it was gone entirely.

'It was that damned skull plate,' he had told her, rapping his fist gently on the scar by his left temple. 'No doubt about it. I'm sure thousands would laugh, but in my mind I'm completely sure.'

If someone else had told her the story, Anderson would have believed she was having her leg pulled, but Jim hadn't been kidding – you looked in his eyes and you knew he wasn't.

Big storms had big power.

Lightning flared in a blue sheet, giving Anderson a shutter-click of what she had come to think of – as her neighbors did – as her dooryard. She saw the truck, with the first drops of rain on its windshield; the short dirt driveway; the mailbox with its flag down and tucked securely against its aluminum side; the writhing trees. Thunder exploded a bare moment later, and Peter jumped against her, whining. The lights went out. They didn't bother dimming or flickering or messing around; they went out all at once, completely. They went out with authority.

Anderson reached for the lantern – and then her hand stopped.

There was a green spot on the far wall, just to the right of Uncle Frank's Welsh dresser. It bobbed up two inches, moved left, then right. It disappeared for a moment and then came back. Anderson's dream recurred with all the eerie power of deja vu. She thought again of the lantern in Poe's story, but mixed in this time was another memory: The War of the Worlds. The Martian heat-ray, raining green death on Hammersmith.

She turned toward Peter, hearing the tendons in her neck creak like dirty doorhinges, knowing what she was going to see– The light was coming from Peter's eye. His left eye. It glared with the witchy green light of St Elmo's fire drifting over a swamp after a still, muggy day.

No … not the eye. It was the cataract that was glowing … at least, what remained of the cataract. It had gone back noticeably even from that morning, at the vet's office. That side of Peter's face was lit with a lurid green light, making him look like a comic-book monstrosity.

Her first impulse was to get away from Peter, dive out of the chair and simply run …

… but this was Peter, after all. And Peter was scared to death already. If she deserted him, Peter would be terrified.

Thunder cracked in the black. This time both of them jumped. Then the rain came in a great sighing sheetlike rush. Anderson looked back at the wall across the room again, at the green splotch bobbing and weaving there. She was reminded of times she had lain in bed as a child, using the watchband of her Timex to play a similar spot off the wall by moving her wrist.

And by the way, what's it doing to you, Bobbi?

Green sunken fire in Peter's eye, taking away the cataract. Eating it. She looked again, and had to restrain herself from jerking back when Peter licked her hand.

That night Bobbi Anderson slept hardly at all.

1

When Anderson finally woke up, it was almost ten A.M. and most of the lights in the place were on – Central Maine Power had gotten its shit together again, it seemed. She walked around the place in her socks, turning off lights, and then looked out the front window. Peter was on the porch. Anderson let him in and looked closely at his eye. She could remember her terror of the night before, but in this morning's bright summer daylight, terror had been supplanted by fascination. Anyone would have been scared, she thought, seeing something like that in the dark, with the power out, and a thunderstorm stomping the earth and the sky outside.

Why in hell didn't Etheridge see this?

But that was easy. The dials of radium watches glow in the day as well as in the dark; you just can't see the glow in bright light. She was a little surprised she had missed the green glow in Peter's eye on the previous nights, but hardly flabbergasted … after all, it had taken her a couple of days to even realize the cataract was shrinking. And yet . . . Etheridge had been close, hadn't he? Etheridge had been right in there with the old ophthalmoscope, looking into Peter's eye.

He had agreed with Anderson that the cataract was shrinking … but hadn't mentioned any glow, green or otherwise.

Maybe he saw it and decided to unsee it. The way he saw Peter was looking younger and decided he didn't see that. Because he didn't want to see that.

There was a part of her that didn't like the new vet a whole hell of a lot; she supposed it was because she had liked old Doc Daggett so much and had made that foolish (but apparently unavoidable) assumption that Daggett would be around as long as she and Peter were. But it was a silly reason to feel hostility toward the old man's replacement, and even if Etheridge had failed (or refused) to see Peter's apparent age regression, that didn't change the fact that he seemed a perfectly competent vet.

A cataract that glowed green … she didn't think he would have ignored something like that.

Which led her to the conclusion that the green glow hadn't been there for Etheridge to see.

At least, not right away.

There hadn't been any big hooraw right away, either, had there? Not when they came in. Not during the exam. Only when they were getting ready to go out.

Had Peter's eye started to glow then?

Anderson poured Gravy Train into Peter's dish and stood with her left hand under the tap, waiting for the water to come in warm so she could wet it down. The wait kept getting longer and longer. Her water heater was slow, balky, sadly out of date. Anderson had been meaning to have it replaced – would certainly have to do so before the cold weather – but the only plumber in either Haven or the rural towns to Haven's immediate north and south was a rather unpleasant fellow named Delbert Chiles, who always looked at her as if he knew exactly what she would look like with her clothes off (not much, his eyes said, but I guess it'd do in a pinch) and always wanted to know if Anderson was 'writing any new books lately.' Chiles liked to tell her he could have been a damned good writer himself, but he had too much energy and ,not enough glue on the seat of my pants, get me?' The last time she'd been forced to call him had been when the pipes burst in the minus-twenties cold snap, winter before last. After he set things to rights, he had asked her if she would like 'to go steppin' sometime. Anderson declined politely, and Chiles tipped her a wink that aspired to worldly wisdom and made it almost to informed vacuity. 'You don't know what you're missin', sweetie,' he said. I'm pretty sure I do, which is why I said no had come to her lips, but she said nothing – as little as she liked him, she had known she might need Chiles again sometime. Why was it the really good zingers only came immediately to mind in real life when you didn't dare use them?

You could do something about that hot-water heater, Bobbi, a voice in her mind spoke up, one that she couldn't identify. A stranger's voice in her head? Oh golly, should she call the cops? But you could, the voice insisted. All you'd need to do would be

But then the water started to come in warm – tepid, anyway – and she forgot about the water heater. She stirred the Gravy Train, then set it down and watched Peter eat. He was showing a much better appetite these days.

Ought to check his teeth, she thought, maybe you can go back to Gaines Meal. A penny saved is a penny earned, and the American reading public is not exactly beating a path to your door, babe. And

And exactly when had the uproar in the clinic started?

Anderson thought about this carefully. She couldn't be completely sure, but the more she thought about it the more it seemed that it might have been – not for sure but might have been – right after Dr Etheridge finished examining Peter's cataract and put down the ophthalmoscope.

Attend, Watson, the voice of Sherlock Holmes suddenly spoke up in the quick, almost urgent speech rhythms of Basil Rathbone. The eye glows. No … not the eye; the cataract glows. But Anderson does not observe it, although she should. Etheridge does not observe it, and he definitely should. May we say that the animals at the veterinary clinic do not become upset until Peter's cataract begins to glow … until, we might further theorize, the healing process has resumed? Possibly. That the glow is seen only when being seen is safe? Ah' Watson, that is an assumption as frightening as it is unwarranted. Because that would indicate some sort of

– some sort of intelligence.

Anderson didn't like where this was leading and tried to choke it off with the old reliable advice: Let it go.

This time it worked.

For a while.

2

Anderson wanted to go out and dig some more.

Her forebrain didn't like that idea at all.

Her forebrain thought that idea sucked.

Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.

Right.

And by the way, what's it doing to you?

Nothing she could see. But you couldn't see what cigarette smoke did to your lungs, either; that's why people went on smoking. It could be that her liver was rotting, that the chambers of her heart were silting up with cholesterol, or that she had rendered herself barren. For all she knew her bone marrow might be producing outlaw white cells like mad right this minute. Why settle for an early period when you could have something really interesting like leukemia, Bobbi?

But she wanted to dig it up just the same.

This urge, simple and elemental, had nothing to do with her forebrain. It came baking up from someplace deeper inside. It had all the earmarks of some physical craving – for salt, for some coke or heroin or cigarettes or coffee. Her forebrain supplied logic; this other part supplied an almost incoherent imperative: Dig on it, Bobbi, it's okay, dig on it, dig on it, shit, why not dig on it a while more, you know you want to know what it is, so dig on it till you see what it is, dig dig dig

She was able to turn the voice off by conscious effort and would then realize fifteen minutes later she had been listening to it again, as if to a Delphic oracle.

You've got to tell somebody what you've found.

Who? The police? Huh-uh. No way. Or -

Or who?

She was in her garden, madly weeding . . . a junkie in withdrawal.

– or anyone in authority, her mind finished.

Her right-brain supplied Anne's sarcastic laughter, as she had known it would … but the laughter didn't have as much force as she had feared. Like a good many of her generation, Anderson didn't put a great deal of stock in 'let the authorities handle it.' Her distrust in the way the authorities handled things had begun at the age of twelve, in Utica. She had been sitting on the sofa in their living room with Anne on one side and her mother on the other. She had been eating a hamburger and watching the Dallas police escort Lee Harvey Oswald across an underground parking garage. There were lots of Dallas police. So many, in fact, that the TV announcer was telling the country that someone had shot Oswald before all those police – all those people in authority – seemed to have the slightest inkling something had gone wrong. let alone what it was.

So far as she could tell, the Dallas police had done such a good job protecting John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald that they had been put in charge of the summer race-riots two years later, and then the war in Vietnam. Other assignments followed: handling the oil embargo ten years after the Kennedy assassination, the negotiations to secure the release of the American hostages at the embassy in Tehran, and, when it became clear that the wogs were not going to listen to the voice of reason and authority, Jimmy Carter had sent the Dallas police in to rescue those pore fellers – after all, authorities who had handled that Kent State business with such cool-headed aplomb could surely be counted upon to perform the sort of job those Mission: Impossible guys did every week. Well, the old Dallas police had had a spot of tough luck on that one, but by and large, they had the situation under control. All you had to do was look at how damned orderly the world situation had become in the years since a man in a strappy T-shirt with Vitalis on his thinning hair and fried-chicken grease under his fingernails had blown out a President's brains as he sat in the back seat of a Cadillac rolling down the street of a Texas cow-town.

I'll tell Jim Gardener. When he gets back. Gard'll know what to do, how to handle it. He'll have some ideas, anyway.

Anne's voice: You're going to ask a certified loony for advice. Great.

He's not a loony. Just a little bit weird.

Yeah, arrested at the last Seabrook demonstration with a loaded .45 in his back-pack. That's weird, all right.

Anne, shut up.

She weeded. All that morning in the hot sun she weeded, the back of her T-shirt wet with sweat, last year's scarecrow wearing the hat she usually put on to keep the sun off.

After lunch she lay down to take a nap and couldn't sleep. Everything kept going through her mind, and that stranger's voice never shut up. Dig on it, Bobbi, it's okay, dig on it

Until at last she did get up, grabbed the crowbar, spade, and shovel, and set out for the woods. At the far end of her field she paused, forehead grooved in thought, and came back for her pickax. Peter was on the porch. He looked up briefly but made no move to come with Anderson.

Anderson was not really surprised.

3

So about twenty minutes later she stood above it, looking down the forested slope to the trench she had begun in the ground, freeing what she now believed was a very tiny section of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Its gray hull was as solid as a wrench or a screwdriver, denying dreams and vapors and supposings; it was there. The dirt she had thrown to either side, moist and black and forest-secret, was now a dark brown – still damp from last night's rain.

Going down the slope, her foot crunched on something that sounded like newspaper. It wasn't newspaper; it was a dead sparrow. Twenty feet further down was a dead crow, feet pointed comically skyward like a dead bird in a cartoon. Anderson paused, looked around, and saw the bodies of three other birds – another crow, a bluejay, and a scarlet tanager. No marks. Just dead. And no flies around any of them.

She reached the trench and dropped her tools on the bank. The trench was muddy. She stepped in nevertheless, her workshoes squashing in the mud. She bent down and could see smooth gray metal going into the earth, a puddle standing on one side.

What are you?

She put her hand on it. That vibration sank into her skin and seemed for a moment to go all through her. Then it stopped.

Anderson turned and put her hand on her shovel, feeling its smooth wood, slightly warmed by the sun. She was vaguely aware that she could hear no forest noises, none at all … no birds singing, no animals crashing through the undergrowth and away from the smell of a human being. She was more sharply aware of the smells: peaty earth, pine needles, bark and sap.

A voice inside her – very deep inside, not coming from the right of her brain but perhaps from the very root of her mind – screamed in terror.

Something's happening, Bobbi, something is happening right NOW. Get out of here dead chuck dead birds Bobbi please please PLEASE

Her hand tightened on the shovel's handle and she saw it again as she had sketched it – the gray leading edge of something titanic in the earth.

Her period had started again, but that was all right; she had put a pad in the crotch of her panties even before she went out to weed the garden. A Maxi. And there were half a dozen more in her pack, weren't there? Or was it more like a dozen?

She didn't know, and it didn't matter. Not even discovering some part of her had known she would end up here in spite of whatever foolish conceptions of free will the rest of her mind might possess disturbed her. A shining sort of peace had filled her. Dead animals … periods that stopped and started again … arriving prepared even after you had assured yourself the decision had not yet been taken … these were small things, smaller than small, a whole lot of boolsheet. She would just dig for a while, dig on this sucker, see if there was anything but smooth metal skin to see. Because everything

'Everything's fine,' Bobbi Anderson said in the unnatural stillness, and then she began to dig.

1

While Bobbi Anderson was tracing a titanic shape with a compass and thinking the unthinkable with a brain more numbed with exhaustion than she knew, Jim Gardener was doing the only work he seemed capable of these days. This time he was doing it in Boston. The poetry reading on June 25th was at BU. That went all right. The 26th was an off-day. It was also the day that Gardener stumbled – only stumble didn't really describe what happened, unfortunately. It was no minor matter like snagging your foot under a root while you were walking in the woods. It was a fall that he took, one long fucking fall, like taking a no-expenses-paid bone-smasher of a tumble down a long flight of stairs. Stairs? Shit, he had almost fallen off the face of the earth.

The fall started in his hotel room; it ended on the breakwater at Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire, eight days later.

Bobbi wanted to dig (although she would be at least temporarily diverted by the odd things which were happening to her beagle's cataract); Gard woke up on the morning of the 26th wanting to drink.

He knew there was no such thing as a 'partially arrested alcoholic.' You were either drinking or you weren't. He wasn't drinking now, and that was good, but there had always been long periods when he didn't even think about booze. Months, sometimes. He would drop into a meeting once in a while (if two weeks went by in which Gard didn't attend an AA meeting, he felt uneasy – the way he felt if he spilled the salt and didn't toss some over his shoulder) and stand up and say, 'Hi, my name's Jim and I'm an alcoholic.' But when the urge was absent, it didn't feel like the truth. During these periods, he wasn't actually dry; he could and did drink drink, that was, as opposed to boozing. A couple of cocktails around five, if he was at a faculty function or a faculty dinner party. Just that and no more. Or he could call Bobbi Anderson and ask if she'd like to come over to go out for a couple of cold ones and it was fine. No sweat.

Then there would come a morning like this when he would wake up wanting all the booze in the world. This seemed to be an actual thirst, a physical thing – it made him think of those cartoons Virgil Partch used to do in the Saturday Evening Post, the ones where some funky old prospector is always crawling across the desert, his tongue hanging out, looking for a waterhole.

All he could do when the urge came on him was fight it off – stand it off, try to earn a draw. Sometimes it was actually better to be in a place like Boston when this happened, because you could go to a meeting every night – every four hours, if that was what it took. After three or four days, it would go away.

Usually.

He would, he thought, just wait it out. Sit in his room and watch movies on cable TV and charge them to room service. He had spent the eight years since his divorce and separation from the University of Maine as a Full-Time Poet, which meant he had come to live in an odd little subsociety where barter was usually more important than money.

He had traded poems for food: on one occasion a birthday sonnet for a farmer's wife in exchange for three shopping bags of new potatoes. 'Goddam thing better rhyme, too,' the farmer had said, fixing a stony eye upon Gardener. 'Real poimes rhyme.'

Gardener, who could take a hint (especially when his stomach was concerned), composed a sonnet so filled with exuberant masculine rhymes that he burst into gales of laughter after scanning the second draft. He called Bobbi, read it to her, and they both howled. It was even better out loud. Out loud it sounded like a love-letter from Dr Seuss. But he hadn't needed Bobbi to point out to him that it was still an honest piece of work, jangly but not condescending.

On another occasion, a small press in West Minot agreed to publish a book of his poems (this had been in early 1983 and was, in fact, the last book of poems Gardener had published), and offered half a cord of wood as an advance. Gardener took it.

'You should have held out for three-quarters of a cord,' Bobbi told him that night, as they sat in front of her stove, feet up on the fender, smoking cigarettes as a wind shrieked fresh snow across the fields and into the trees. 'Those're good poems. There's a lot of them, too.'

'I know,' Gardener said, 'but I was cold. Half a cord'll get me through until spring.' He dropped her a wink. 'Besides, the guy's from Connecticut. I don't think he knew most of it was ash.'

She dropped her feet to the floor and stared at him. 'You kidding?'

'Nope.'

She began to giggle and he kissed her soundly and later took her to bed and they slept together like spoons. He remembered waking up once, listening to the wind, thinking of all the dark and rushing cold outside and all the warmth of this bed. filled with their peaceful heat under two quilts, and wishing it could be like this forever – only nothing ever was. He had been raised to believe God was love, but you had to wonder how loving a God could be when He made men and women smart enough to land on the moon but stupid enough to have to learn there was no such thing as forever over and over again.

The next day Bobbi had again offered money and Gardener again refused. He wasn't exactly rolling in dough, but he made out. And he couldn't help the little spark of anger he felt in spite of her matter-of-fact tone. 'Don't you know who's supposed to get the money after a night in bed?' he asked.

She stuck out her chin. 'You calling me a whore?'

He smiled. 'You need a pimp? There's money in it, I hear.'

You want breakfast, Gard, or do you want to piss me off?'

How about both?'

'No,' she said, and he saw she was really mad – Christ, he was getting worse and worse at seeing things like that, and it used to be so easy. He hugged her. I was only kidding, couldn't she see that? he thought. She always used to be able to tell when I was kidding. But of course she hadn't known he was kidding because he hadn't been. If he believed different, the only one getting kidded was himself. He had been trying to hurt her because she'd embarrassed him. And it wasn't her offer that had been stupid; it was his embarrassment. He had more or less chosen the life he was living, hadn't he?

And he didn't want to hurt Bobbi, didn't want to drive Bobbi away. The bed part was fine, but the bed part wasn't the really important part. The really important part was that Bobbi Anderson was a friend, and something scary seemed to be happening just lately. How fast he seemed to be running out of friends. That was pretty scary, all right.

Running out of friends? Or running them out? Which is it, Gard?

At first hugging her was like hugging an ironing board and he was afraid she would try to pull away and he would make the mistake of trying to hold on, but she finally softened.

'I want breakfast,' he said, 'and to say I'm sorry.'

'It's all right,' she said, and turned away before he could see her face – but her voice held that dry briskness that meant she was either crying or near it. 'I keep forgetting it's bad manners to offer money to Yankees.'

Well, he didn't know if it was bad manners or not, but he would not take money from Bobbi. Never had, never would.

The New England Poetry Caravan, however, was a different matter.

Grab that chicken, son, Ron Cummings, who needed money about as much as the Pope needed a new hat, would have said. The bitch is too slow to run and too fat to pass up.

The New England Poetry Caravan paid cash. Coin of the realm for poetry – three hundred up front and three hundred at the end of the tour. The word made flesh, as you might say. But hard cash, it was understood, was only part of the deal.

The rest of the deal was THE TAB.

While you were on tour, you took advantage of every opportunity. You got your meals from room service, your hair cut in the hotel barbershop if there was one, brought your extra pair of shoes (if you had one) and put them out one night instead of your regulars so you could get the extras shined up.

Then there were the in-room movies, movies you never got a chance to see in a theater, because theaters persisted in wanting money for much the same thing poets, even the very good ones, were for some reason supposed to provide for free or next to it – three bags of spuds = one (1) sonnet, for instance. There was a room charge for the movies, of course, but what of that? You didn't even have to put them On THE TAB; some computer did it automatically, and all Gardener had to say on the subject was God bless and keep THE TAB, and bring those fuckers on! He watched everything, from Emmanuelle in New York (finding the part where the girl flogs the guy's doggy under a table at Windows on the World particularly artistic and uplifting; it certainly uplifted part of him, anyway) to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Rainbow Brite and the Star-Stealer.

And that's what I'm going to do now, he thought, rubbing his throat and thinking about the taste of good aged whiskey. EXACTLY what I'm going to do. Just sit here and watch them all over again, even Rainbow Brite. And for lunch I'm going to order three bacon cheeseburgers and eat one cold at three o'clock. Maybe skip Rainbow Brite and take a nap. Stay in tonight. Go to bed early. And stand it off.

Bobbi Anderson tripped over a three-inch tongue of metal protruding from the earth.

Jim Gardener tripped over Ron Cummings.

Different objects, same result.

For want of a nail.

Ron popped in around the same time that, some two hundred and ten miles away, Anderson and Peter were finally getting home from their less-than-normal trip to the vet's. Cummings suggested they go down to the hotel bar and have a drink or ten.

'Or,' Ron continued brightly, 'we could just skip the foreplay and get shitfaced.'

If he had put it more delicately, Gard might have been okay. Instead, he found himself in the bar with Ron Cummings, raising a jolly Jack Daniel's to his lips and telling himself the old one about how he could choke it off when he really wanted to.

Ron Cummings was a good, serious poet who just happened to have money practically falling out of his asshole … or so he often told people. 'I am my own de Medici,' he would say; 'I have money practically falling out of my asshole.' His family had been in textiles for roughly nine hundred years and owned most of southern New Hampshire. They thought Ron was crazy, but because he was the second son, and because the first one was not crazy (i.e., interested in textiles), they let Ron do what he wanted to do, which was write poems, read poems, and drink almost constantly. He was a narrow young man with a TB face. Gardener had never seen him eat anything but beer-nuts and goldfish crackers. To his dubious credit, he had no idea of Gardener's own problem with booze … or the fact that he had come very close to killing his wife while drunk.

'Okay,' Gardener said. 'I'm up for it. Let's get “faced”.'

After a few drinks in the hotel bar, Ron suggested that a couple of smart fellers like them could find a place with entertainment a tad more exciting than the piped-in Muzak drifting down from the overhead speakers. 'I think my heart can take it,' Ron said. 'I mean, I'm not sure, but – '

God hates a coward,' Gardener finished.

Ron cackled, clapped him on the back, and called for THE TAB. He signed it with a flourish and then added a generous tip from his money clip. 'Let's boogie, m'man.' And off they went.

The late-afternoon sun lanced Gardener's eyes like glass spears and it suddenly occurred to him that this might be a bad idea.

'Listen, Ron,' he said, 'I think maybe I'll just – '

Cummings clapped him on the shoulder, his formerly pale cheeks flushed, his formerly watery blue eyes blazing (to Gard, Cummings now looked rather like Toad of Toad Hall after the acquisition of his motor-car), and cajoled: 'Don't crap out on me now, Jim! Boston lies before us, so various and new, glistening like the fresh ejaculate of a young boy's first wetdream

Gardener burst into helpless gales of laughter.

'That's more like the Gardener we've all come to know and love,' Ron said, cackling himself.

'God hates a coward,' Gardener said. 'Hail us a cab, Ronnie.'

He saw it then: the funnel in the sky. Big and black and getting closer. Soon it was going to touch down and carry him away.

Not to Oz, though.

A cab pulled over to the curb. They got in. The driver asked them where they wanted to go.

'Oz,' Gardener muttered.

Ron cackled. 'What he means is someplace where they drink fast and dance faster. Think you can manage that?'

'Oh, I think so,' the driver said, and pulled out.

Gardener draped an arm around Ron's shoulders and cried: 'Let the wild rumpus start!'

'I'll drink to that,' Ron said.

2

Gardener awoke the next morning fully dressed in a tubful of cold water. His best set of clothes – which he'd had the misfortune to be wearing when he and Ron Cummings set sail the day before – were bonding themselves slowly to his skin. He looked at his fingers and saw they were very white and very pruney. Fishfingers. He'd been here for a while, apparently. The water might even have been hot when he climbed in. He didn't remember.

He opened the tub's drain. Saw a bottle of bourbon standing on the toilet seat. It was half-full, its surface bleary with some sort of grease. He picked it up. The grease smelled vaguely of fried chicken. Gardener was more interested in the aroma coming from inside the bottle. Don't do this, he thought, but the neck of the bottle was rapping against his teeth before the thought was even half-finished. He had a drink. Blacked out again.

When he came to, he was standing naked in his bedroom with the phone to his ear and the vague idea that he had just finished dialing a number. Whose? He had no idea until Cummings answered. Cummings sounded even worse than Gardener felt. Gardener would have sworn this was impossible.

'How bad was it?' Gardener heard himself ask. It was always this way when he was in the grip of the cyclone; even when he was conscious, everything seemed to have the gray grainy texture of a tabloid photograph, and he never seemed to exactly be inside of himself. A lot of the time he seemed to be floating above his own head, like a kid's silvery Puffer balloon. 'How much trouble did we get into?'

'Trouble?' Cummings repeated, and then fell silent. At least Gardener thought he was thinking. Hoped he was thinking. Or maybe dreaded the idea. He waited, his hands very cold. 'No trouble,' Cummings said at last, and Gard relaxed a little. 'Except for my head, that is. I got my head in plenty of trouble. Jee-zus!'

'You sure? Nothing? Nothing at all?'

He was thinking of Nora.

Shot your wife, uh? a voice spoke up suddenly in his mind – the voice of the deputy with the comic book. Good fucking deal.

'We-ell . . .' Cummings said reflectively, and then stopped.

Gardener's hand clenched tight on the phone again.

'Well what?' Suddenly the lights in the room were too bright. Like the sun when they had stepped out of the hotel late yesterday afternoon.

You did something. You had another fucking blackout and did another stupid thing. Or crazy thing. Or horrible thing. When are you going to learn to leave it alone? Or can you learn?

An exchange from an old movie clanged stupidly into his mind.

Evil El Comandante: Tomorrow before daybreak, senor, you will be dead! You have seen the sun for the last time!

Brave Americano: Yeah, but you'll be bald for the rest of your life.

'What was it?' he asked Ron. 'What did I do?'

'You got into an argument with some guys at a place called The Stone Country Bar and Grille,' Cummings said. He laughed a little. 'Ow! Christ, when it hurts to laugh, you know you abused yourself. You remember The Stone Country Bar and Grille and them thar good ole boys, James, my dear?'

He said he didn't. By really straining, he could remember a place called Smith Brothers. The sun had just been going down in a kettle of blood, and this being late June, that meant it had been … what? eight-thirty? quarter of nine? about five hours after he and Ron had gotten started, give or take. He could remember the sign outside bore the likeness of the famous cough-drop siblings. He could remember arguing furiously about Wallace Stevens with Cummings, shouting to be heard over the juke, which had been thundering out something by John Fogarty. It was where the last jagged edges of memory came to a halt.

'It was the place with the WAYLON JENNINGS FOR PRESIDENT bumper-sticker over the bar,' Cummings said. 'That refresh the old noggin?'

'No,' Gardener said miserably.

'Well, you got into an argument with a couple of the good ole boys. Words were passed. These words grew first warm and then hot. A punch was thrown.'

'By me?' Gardener's voice was now only dull.

'By you,' Cummings agreed cheerfully. 'At which point we flew through the air with the greatest of ease, landing on the sidewalk. I thought we got off pretty cheap, to tell you the truth. You had them frothing, Jim.'

'Was it about Seabrook or Chernobyl?'

'Shit, you do remember!'

'If I remembered, I wouldn't be asking you which one it was.'

'As a matter of fact, it was both.' Cummings hesitated. 'Are you all right, Gard? You sound real low.'

Yeah? Well, actually, Ron, I'm way up. Up in the cyclone. Going around and around and up and down, and where it ends nobody knows.

'I'm okay.'

'That's good. One hopes you know who you have to thank for it.'

'You, maybe?'

'None other. Man, I landed on that sidewalk like a kid hitting the ground the first time he comes off the end of a slide. I can't quite see my ass in the mirror, but that's probably a good thing. I bet it looks like a Day-Glo Grateful Dead poster from sixty-nine. But you wanted to go back in and talk about how all the kids around Chernobyl were gonna be dead of leukemia in five years. You wanted to talk about how some guys almost blew up Arkansas looking for faulty wiring with a candle in a nuclear-power plant. You said they caught the place on fire. Me, I'd bet my watch -and it's a Rolex – that they were Snopeses from Em-Eye-Double-Ess-Eye-Pee-Pee-Eye. Only way I could get you into a cab was by telling you we'd come back later and bust heads. I sweet-talked you up to your room and started the tub for you. You said you were all right. You said you were going to take a bath and then call some guy named Bobby.'

'The guy's a girl,' Gardener said absently. He was rubbing at his right temple with his free hand.

'Good-looking?'

'Pretty. No knockout.' An errant thought, nonsensical but perfectly concrete – Bobbi's in trouble – kicked across his mind the way an errant billiard ball will roll across the clean green felt of a pool table. Then it was gone.

3

He walked slowly over to a chair and sat down, now massaging both temples. The nukes. Of course it had been the nukes. What else? If it wasn't Chernobyl it was Seabrook, and if it wasn't Seabrook it was Three-Mile Island and if it wasn't Three-Mile Island it was Maine Yankee in Wiscasset or what could have happened at the Hanford Plant in Washington State if someone hadn't happened to notice, just in the nick of time, that their used core rods, stored in an unlined ditch outside, were getting ready to blow sky-high.

How many nicks of time could there be?

Spent fuel rods that were stacking up in big hot piles. They thought the Curse of King Tut was bad? Brother! Wait until some twenty-fifth-century archaeologist dug up a load of this shit! You tried to tell people the whole thing was a lie, nothing but a baldfaced naked lie, that nuclear-generated power was eventually going to kill millions and render huge tracts of land sterile and unlivable. What you got back was a blank stare. You talked to people who had lived through one administration after another in which their elected officials told one lie after another, then lied about the lies, and when those lies were found out the liars said: 'Oh jeez, I forgot, sorry' – and since they forgot, the people who elected them behaved like Christians and forgave. You couldn't believe there were so fucking many of them willing to do that until you remembered what P. T. Barnum said about the extraordinarily high birth rate of suckers. They looked you square in the face when you tried to tell them the truth and informed you that you were full of shit, the American government didn't tell lies, not telling lies was what made America great, Oh dear Father, here's the facts, I did it with my little ax, I can't keep silent for it was I, and come what may, I cannot tell a lie. When you tried to talk to them, they looked at you as if you were babbling in a foreign language. It had been eight years since he had almost killed his wife, and three since he and Bobbi had been arrested at Seabrook, Bobbi on the general charge of illegal demonstration, Gard on a much more specific one -possession of a concealed and unlicensed handgun. The others paid a fine and got out. Gardener did two months. His lawyer told him he was lucky. Gardener asked his lawyer if he knew he was sitting on a time bomb and jerking his meat. His lawyer asked him if he had considered psychiatric help. Gardener asked his lawyer if he had ever considered getting stuffed.

But he had had sense enough not to attend any more demonstrations. That much, anyway. He kept away from them. They were poisoning him. When he got drunk, however, his mind – whatever the booze had left of it – returned obsessively to the subject of the reactors, the core rods, the containments, the inability to slow down a runaway once it really got going.

To the nukes, in other words.

When he got drunk, his heart got hot. The nukes. The goddam nukes. It was symbolic, yeah, okay, you didn't have to be Freud to figure that what he was really protesting against was the reactor in his own heart. When it came to matters of restraint, James Gardener had a bad containment system. There was some technician inside who should have long since been fired. He sat and played with all the wrong switches. That guy wouldn't be really happy until Jim Gardener went China Syndrome.

The goddam fucking nukes.

Forget it.

He tried. For a start, he tried thinking about tonight's reading at Northeastern – a fun-filled frolic that was being co-sponsored by the university and a group that called itself The Friends of Poetry, a name which filled Gardener with fear and trembling. Groups with such names tended to be made up exclusively of women who called themselves ladies (most of said ladies of a decidedly blue-haired persuasion). The ladies of the club tended to be a good deal more familiar with the works of Rod McKuen than those of John Berryman, Hart Crane, Ron Cummings, or that good old drunken blackout brawler and wifeshooter, James Eric Gardener.

Get out of here, Gard. Never mind The New England Poetry Caravan. Never mind Northeastern or The Friends of Poetry or the McCardle bitch. Get out Of here right now before something bad happens. Something really bad. Because if you stay, something really bad will. There's blood on the moon.

But he was damned if he'd go running back to Maine with his tail between his legs. Not him.

Besides, there was the bitch.

Patricia McCardle was her name, and if she wasn't one strutting world-class bitch, Gard had never met one.

She had a contract, and it specified no play, no pay.

'Jesus,' Gardener said, and put a hand over his eyes, trying to shut away the growing headache, knowing there was only one kind of medicine that would do that, and also knowing it was exactly the sort of medicine that could bring that really bad thing on.

And also knowing that knowing would do no good at all. So after a while the booze started to flow and the cyclone started to blow.

Jim Gardener, now in free fall.

4

Patricia McCardle was The New England Poetry Caravan's principal contributor and head ramrod. Her legs were long but skinny, her nose aristocratic but too bladelike to be considered attractive. Gard had once tried to imagine kissing her and had been horrified by the image which had risen, unbidden, in his mind: her nose not just sliding up his cheek but slicing it open like a razor-blade. She had a high forehead, nonexistent breasts, and eyes as gray as a glacier on a cloudy day. She traced her ancestry back to the Mayflower.

Gardener had worked for her before and there had been trouble before. He had become part of the 1988 New England Poetry Caravan in rather grisly fashion . . . but the reason for his abrupt inclusion was no more unheard of in the world of poetry than it was in those of jazz and rock and roll. Patricia McCardle had been left with a last-minute hole in her announced program because one of the six poets who had signed on for this summer's happy cruise had hung himself in his closet with his belt.

'Just like Phil Ochs,' Ron Cummings had said to Gardener as they sat near the back of the bus on the first day of the tour. He said it with a nervous bad-boy-at-the-back-of-the-classroom giggle. 'But then, Bill Claughtsworth always was a derivative son of a bitch.'

Patricia McCardle had gotten twelve reading dates and fairly good advances on a deal which, when stripped of all the high-flown rhetoric, boiled down to six poets for the price of one. Following Claughtsworth's suicide, she found herself with three days to find a publishing poet in a season when most publishing poets were booked solid ('Or on permanent vacation like Silly Billy Claughtsworth,' Cummings said, laughing rather uneasily).

Few if any of the booked groups would balk at paying the stipulated fee just because the Caravan happened to be short one poet – to do such a thing would be in rawther shitty taste, particularly when one considered the reason the Caravan was a poet short. All the same, it put Caravan, Inc. in a position of contractual default, at least technically, and Patricia McCardle was not a woman to brook loopholes.

After trying four poets, each more minor-leaguer than the last, and with less than thirty-six hours before the first reading, she had finally called Jim Gardener.

'Are you still drinking, Jimmy?' she asked bluntly. Jimmy – he hated that. Most people called him Jim. Jim was all right. No one called him Gard except himself … and Bobbi Anderson.

'Drinking a little,' he said. 'Not bingeing at all.'

'I'm dubious,' she said coldly.

'You always have been, Patty,' he replied, knowing she hated that even more than he did Jimmy – her Puritan blood screamed against it. 'Were you asking because you just happened to be short a quart, or did you have a more pressing reason?'

Of course he knew, and of course she knew he knew, and of course she knew he was grinning, and of course she was infuriated, and of course all of this tickled him just about to death, and of course she knew he knew that, too, and that was just the way he liked it.

They sparred a few more minutes, and then came to what was not a marriage of convenience but one of necessity. Jim Gardener wanted to buy a good used wood-furnace for the coming winter; he was tired of living like a slut, bundled up in front of a kitchen stove while the wind rattled the plastic stapled over the windows; Patricia McCardle wanted to buy a poet. There would be no handshake agreement, though, not with Patricia McCardle. She had driven down from Derry that afternoon with a contract (in triplicate) and a notary public. Gard was a little surprised she hadn't brought a second notary, just in case the first one happened to suffer a coronary or something.

Feelings and hunches aside, there was really no way he could leave the tour and get the wood-furnace, because if he left the tour he would never see the second half of his fee. She'd haul him into court and spend a thousand dollars trying to get him to cough up the three hundred Caravan, Inc. had paid up front. She might be able to do it, too. He had done almost all the dates, but the contract he had signed was crystal clear on the subject: if he took off for any reason unacceptable to the Tour Co-Ordinator, any and all fees unpaid shall be declared null and void, and any and all fees pre-paid shall be refundable to Caravan, Inc., within thirty (30) days.

And she would go after him. She might think she was doing it on principle, but it would really be because he had called her Patty in her hour of need.

Nor would that be the end of it. If he left, she would work with unflagging energy to get him blackballed. He would certainly never read again for another poetry tour with which she was associated, and that was a lot of poetry tours. Then there was the delicate matter of grants. Her husband, now dead ten years, had left her a lot of money (although he didn't think you could say, as with Ron Cummings, that she practically had money failing out of her asshole, because Gard didn't believe Patricia McCardle had anything so vulgar as an asshole, or even a rectum – when in need of relief she probably performed an act he thought of as Immaculate Excretion). Patricia McCardle had taken a great deal of this money and had set up a number of grants-in-aid. This made her simultaneously a serious patron of the arts and an extremely smart businesswoman in regard to the nasty business of income taxes: the grants were write-offs. Some of them funded poets for specific time periods. Some funded cash poetry awards and prizes, and some underwrote magazines of modern poetry and fiction. Each grant was administered by committees. Behind each of them moved the hand of Patricia McCardle, making sure that they meshed as neatly as a Chinese puzzle … or the strands of a spider's web.

She could do a lot more to him than get back her lousy six hundred bucks. She could muzzle him. And it was just possible – unlikely, but possible – that he might write a few more good poems before the madmen who had stuffed a shotgun up the asshole of the world decided to pull the trigger.

So get through it, he thought. He had ordered a bottle of Johnny Walker from room service (God bless THE TAB, forever and ever, amen), and now he poured his second drink with a hand that had become remarkably steady. Get through it, that's all.

But as the day wore on, he kept thinking about grabbing a Greyhound bus at the Stuart Street terminal and getting off five hours later in front of the dusty little drugstore in Unity. Thumbing a ride up to Troy from there. Calling Bobbi Anderson on the phone and saying: I almost went up in the cyclone, Bobbi, but I found the storm cellar just in time. Lucky break, uh?

Shit on that. You make your own luck. If you be strong, Gard, you be lucky. Get through it, that's all. That's what's to do.

He scrummed through his totebag, looking for the best clothes he had left, since his reading clothes appeared to be beyond salvage. He tossed a pair of faded jeans, a plain white shirt, a tattered pair of skivvies, and a pair of socks onto the bedspread (thanks, ma'am, but there's no need to make up the room, I slept in the tub). He got dressed, ate some Certs, ate some booze, ate some more Certs, and then went through the bag again, this time looking for the aspirin. He found it and ate some of those. He looked at the bottle. Looked away. The pulse of the headache was getting worse. He sat down by the window with his notebooks, trying to decide what he should read that night.

In this dreadful long afternoon light all his poems looked as if they had been written in Punic. Instead of doing anything positive about his headache, the aspirin seemed to actually be intensifying it: slam, bam, thank you, ma'am. His head whacked with each heartbeat. It was the same old headache, the one that felt like an auger made of dull steel being slowly driven into his head at a point slightly above and to the left of his left eye. He touched the tips of his fingers to the faint scar there and ran his fingers lightly along it. The steel plate buried under the skin there was the result of a skiing accident in his teens. He remembered the doctor saying, You may suffer headaches from time to time, son. When they come, just thank God you can feel anything. You're lucky to be alive.

But at times like this he wondered.

At times like this he wondered a lot.

He put the notebooks aside with a shaking hand and closed his eyes.

I can't get through it.

You can.

I can't. There's blood on the moon, I feel it, I can almost see it.

Don't give me any of your Irish willywags! Just get tough, you weak fucking sister! Tough!

'I'll try,' he muttered, not opening his eyes, and fifteen minutes later, when his nose began to bleed slightly, he didn't notice. He had fallen asleep in the chair.

5

He always got stage-fright before reading, even if the group was a small one (and groups which turned out to hear readings of modern poetry tended to be just that). On the night of June 27th, however, Jim Gardener's stage-fright was intensified by his headache. When he woke from his nap in the hotelroom chair the shakes and the fluttery stomach were gone, but the headache had gotten even worse: it had graduated to a Genuine Class-A Thumper&World-Beater, maybe the worst of all time.

When his turn to read finally came, he seemed to hear himself from a great distance. He felt a little like a man listening to a recording of himself on a shortwave broadcast coming in from Spain or Portugal. Then a wave of lightheadedness coursed through him and for a few moments he could only pretend to be looking for a poem, some special poem, perhaps, that had been temporarily misplaced. He shuffled papers with dim and nerveless fingers, thinking: I'm going to faint, I think. Right up here in front of everyone. Fall

against this lectern and pitch both it and me into the front row. Maybe I can land on that blue-blooded cunt and kill her. That would almost make my whole life seem worthwhile.

Get through it, that implacable inner voice responded. Sometimes that voice sounded like his father's; more often it sounded like the voice of Bobbi Anderson. Get through it, that's all. That's what's to do.

The audience that night was larger than usual, maybe a hundred people squeezed behind the desks of a Northeastern lecture hall. Their eyes seemed too big. What big eyes you have, Gramma! It was as if they would eat him up with their eyes. Suck out his soul, his ka, his whatever you wanted to call it. A snatch of old T. Rex occurred to him: Girl, I'm just a vampire for your love … and I'm gonna SUCK YA!

Of course there was no more T. Rex. Marc Bolan had wrapped his sports-car around a tree and was lucky not to be alive. Bang-a-Gong, Marc, you sure got it on. Or got it off. Or whatever. A group called Power Station is going to cover your tune in 1986 and it's going to be really bad, it … it …

He raised an unsteady hand to his forehead, and a quiet murmur ran through the audience.

Better get going, Gard. Natives are getting restless.

Yeah, that was Bobbi's voice, all right.

The fluorescents, embedded in pebbled rectangles overhead, seemed to be pulsing in cycles which perfectly matched the cycles of pain driving into his head. He could see Patricia McCardle. She was wearing a little black dress that surely hadn't cost a penny more than three hundred dollars – distress-sale stuff from one of those tacky little shops on Newbury Street. Her face was as narrow and pallid and unforgiving as any of her Puritan forebears, those wonderful, fun-loving guys who had been more than happy to stick you in some stinking jail if you had the bad luck to be spied going out on the Sabbath without a snotrag in your pocket. Patricia's dark eyes lay upon him like dusty stones and Gard thought: She sees what's happening and she couldn't be more pleased. Look at her. She's waiting for me to fall down. And when I do, you know what she'll be thinking, don't you?

Of course he did.

That's what you get for calling me Patty, you drunken son of a bitch. That was what she would be thinking. That's what you get for calling me Patty, that's what you get for doing everything but making me get down on my knees and beg. So go on, Gardener. Maybe I'll even let you keep the up-front money. Three hundred dollars seems a cheap enough price to pay for the exquisite pleasure of watching you crack up in front of all these people. Go on. Go on and get it over with.

Some members of the audience were becoming visibly uneasy now – the delay between poems had stretched out far beyond what might be considered normal. The murmur had become a muted buzz. Gardener heard Ron Cummings clear his throat uneasily behind him.

Get tough! Bobbi's voice yelled again, but the voice was fading now. Fading.

Getting ready to highside it. He looked at their faces and saw only pasty-pale blank circles, ciphers, big white holes in the universe.

The buzz was growing. He stood at the podium, swaying noticeably now, wetting his lips, looking at his audience with a kind of numb dismay. And then, suddenly, instead of hearing Bobbi, Gardener actually saw her. This image had all the force of vision.

Bobbi was up there in Haven, up there right now. He saw her sitting in her rocking chair, wearing a pair of shorts and a halter-top over what boobs she had, which wasn't much. There was a pair of battered old mocs on her feet and Peter was curled before them, deeply asleep. She had a book but wasn't reading it. It lay open face-down in her lap (this fragment of vision was so perfect Gardener could even read the book's title – it was Watchers, by Dean Koontz) while Bobbi looked out the window into the dark, thinking her own thoughts – thoughts which would follow one after the other as sanely and rationally as you could want a train of thought to run. No derailments; no late freights; no head-ons. Bobbi knew how to run a railroad.

He even knew what she was thinking about, he discovered. Something in the woods. Something … it was something she had found in the woods. Yes. Bobbi was in Haven, trying to decide what that thing might be and why she felt so tired. She was not thinking about James Eric Gardener, the noted poet, protestor, and Thanksgiving wifeshooter, who was currently standing in a lecture hall at Northeastern University under these lights with five other poets and some fat shit named Arberg or Arglebargle or something like that, and getting ready to faint. Here in this lecture hall stood The Master of Disaster. God bless Bobbi, who had somehow managed to keep her shit together while all about her people were losing theirs, Bobbi was up there in Haven, thinking the way people were supposed to think

No she's not. She's not doing that at all.

Then, for the first time, the thought came through with no soundproofing around it; it came through as loud and urgent as a firebell in the night: Bobbi's in trouble! Bobbi's in REAL TROUBLE!

This surety struck him with the force of a roundhouse slap, and suddenly the lightheadedness was gone. He fell back into himself with such a thud that he almost seemed to feel his teeth rattle. A sickening bolt of pain ripped through his head, but even that was welcome – if he felt pain, then he was back here, here, not drifting around someplace in the ozone.

And for one puzzling moment he saw a new picture, very brief, very clear, and very ominous: it was Bobbi in the cellar of the farmhouse she'd inherited from her uncle. She was hunkered down in front of some piece of machinery, working on it … or was she? It seemed so dark, and Bobbi wasn't much of a hand with mechanical stuff. But she sure was doing something, because ghostly blue fire leaped and flickered between her fingers as she fiddled with tangled wires inside … inside . . . but it was too dark to see what that dark, cylindrical shape was. It was familiar, something he had seen before, but

Then he could hear as well as see, although what he heard was even less comforting than that eldritch blue fire. It was Peter. Peter was howling. Bobbi took no notice, and that was utterly unlike her. She only went on fiddling with the wires, jiggering them so they would do something down there in the root-smelling dark of the cellar …

The vision broke apart on rising voices.

The faces which went with those voices were no longer white holes in the universe but the faces of real people; some were amused (but not many), a few more embarrassed, but most just seemed alarmed or worried. Most looked, in other words, the way he would have looked had his position been reversed with one of them. Had he been afraid of them? Had he? If so, why?

Only Patricia McCardle didn't fit. She was looking at him with a quiet, sure satisfaction that brought him all the way back.

Gardener suddenly spoke to the audience, surprised at how natural and pleasant his voice sounded. 'I'm sorry. Please excuse me. I've got a batch of new poems here, and I went woolgathering among them, I'm afraid.' Pause. Smile. Now he could see some of the worried ones settling back, looking relieved. There was a little laughter, but it was sympathetic. He could, however, see a flush of anger rising in Patricia McCardle's cheeks, and it did his headache a world of good.

'Actually,' he went on, 'even that's not the truth. Fact is, I was trying to decide whether or not to read some of this new stuff to you. After some furious sparring between those two thundering heavyweights, Pride of Authorship and Prudence, Prudence has won a split decision. Pride of Authorship vows to appeal the decision – '

More laughter, heartier. Now old Patty's cheeks looked like his kitchen stove through its little isinglass windows on a cold winter night. Her hands were locked together, the knuckles white. Her teeth weren't quite bared, but almost, friends and neighbors, almost.

'In the meantime, I'm going to finish with a dangerous act: I'm going to read a fairly long poem from my first book, Grimoire.'

He winked in Patricia McCardle's direction, then took them all into his humorous confidence. 'But God hates a coward, right?'

Ron snorted laughter behind him and then they were all laughing, and for a moment he actually did see a glint of her pearly-whites behind those stretched, furious lips, and oh boy howdy, that was just about as good as you'd want, wasn't it?

Watch out for her, Gard. You think you've got your boot on her neck now, and maybe you even do, for the moment, but watch out for her. She won't forget.

Or forgive.

But that was for later. Now he opened the battered copy of his first book of poems. He didn't need to look for 'Leighton Street'; the book fell open to it of its own accord. His eyes found the subscript. For Bobbi, who first smelled sage in New York.

'Leighton Street' had been written the year he met her, the Year Leighton Street was all she could talk about. It was, of course, the street in Utica where she had grown up, the street she'd needed to escape before she could even start being what she wanted to be – a simple writer of simple stories. She could do that; she could do that with flash and ease. Gard had known that almost at once. Later that year he had sensed that she might be able to do more: to surmount the careless, profligate ease with which she wrote and do, if not great work, brave work. But first she had to get away from Leighton Street. Not the real one, but the Leighton Street which she carried with her in her mind, a demon geography populated by haunted tenements and her sick, loved father, her weak, loved mother, and her defiant crone of a sister, who rode over them all like a demon of endless power.

Once, that year, she had fallen asleep in class – Freshman Comp, that had been. He had been gentle with her, because he already loved her a little and he had seen the huge circles under her eyes.

'I've had problems sleeping at night,' she said, when he held her after class for a moment. She had still been half-asleep, or she never would have gone on from there; that was how powerful Anne's hold – which was the hold of Leighton Street -had been over her. But she was like a person who has been drugged, and exists with one leg thrown over each side of the sleep's dark and stony wall. 'I almost fall asleep and then I hear her.'

'Who?' he asked gently.

'Sissy . . . my sister Anne, that is. She grinds her teeth and it sounds like b-b-b – '

Bones, she wanted to say, but then she woke into a fit of hysterical weeping that had frightened him very badly.

Anne.

More than anything else, Anne was Leighton Street.

Anne had been

(knocking at the door)

the gag of Bobbi's needs and ambitions.

Okay, Gard thought. For you, Bobbi. Only for you. And began to read 'Leighton Street' as smoothly as if he had spent the afternoon rehearsing it in his room.

'These streets begin where the cobbles

surface through tar like the heads

of children buried badly in their textures,'

Gardener read.

'What myth is this? we ask, but

the children who play stickball and

Johnny-Jump-My-Pony round here just laugh.

No myth they tell us no myth, just they say hey motherfucker aint nothing but Leighton Street here, aint nothing but all small houses aint only but back porches where our mothers wash there and they're and their.

Where days grow hot and on Leighton Street they listen to the radio while pterodactyls flow between the TV aerials on the roof and they say hey motherfucker they say Hey motherfucker!

No myth they tell us no myth, just they say hey motherfucker aint nothing but Leighton Street round here

This they say is how you be silent in your silence of days, Motherfucker.

When we turned our back on these upstate roads, warehouses with faces of blank brick, when you say "O, but I have reached the end of all I know and still hear her grinding, grinding in the night . .

Because it had been so long since he had read the poem, even to himself, he did not just 'perform' it (something, he had discovered, that was almost impossible not to do at the end of a tour such as this); he rediscovered it. Most of those who came to the reading at Northeastern that night – even those who witnessed the evening's sordid. creepy conclusion, agreed that Gardener's reading of 'Leighton Street' had been the best of the night. A good many of them maintained it was the best they had ever heard.

Since it was the last reading Jim Gardener would ever give in his life, it was maybe not such a bad way to go out.

6

It took him nearly twenty minutes to read all of it, and when he finished he looked up uncertainly into a deep and perfect well of silence. He had time to think he had never read the damned thing at all, that it had just been a vivid hallucination in the moment or two before the faint.

Then someone stood up and began to clap steadily and hard. It was a young man with tears on his cheeks. The girl beside him also stood and began to clap and she was also crying. Then they were all standing and applauding, yeah, they were giving him a fucking standing 0, and in their faces he saw what every poet or would-be poet hopes to see when he or she finishes reading: the faces of people suddenly awakened from a dream brighter than any reality. They looked as dazed as Bobbi had on that day, not quite sure where they were.

But they weren't all standing and applauding, he saw; Patricia McCardle sat stiff and straight in her third-row seat, her hands clasped tightly together in her lap over her small evening bag. Her lips had closed. No sign of the old pearly-whites now; her mouth had become a small bloodless cut. Gard felt a weary amusement. As far as you're concerned, Patty, the real Puritan ethic is no one who's a black sheep should dare rise above his designated level of mediocrity, correct? But there's no mediocrity clause in your contract, is there?

'Thank you,' he muttered into the mike, sweeping his books and papers together into an untidy pile with his shaking hands – and then almost dropping them all over the floor as he stepped away from the podium. He dropped into his seat next to Ron Cummings with a deep sigh.

'My God,' Ron whispered, still applauding. 'My God!'

'Stop clapping, you ass,' Gardener whispered back.

'Damned if I will. I don't care when you wrote it, it was fucking brilliant,' Cummings said. 'And I'll buy you a drink on it later on.'

'I'm not drinking anything stronger than club soda tonight,' Gardener said, and knew it was a lie. His headache was already creeping back. Aspirin wouldn't cure that, Percodan wouldn't, a 'Iude wouldn't. Nothing would fix his head but a great big shot of booze. Fast, fast relief.

The applause was finally beginning to die away. Patricia McCardle looked acidly grateful.

7

The name of the fat shit who had introduced each of the poets was Arberg (although Gardener kept wanting to call him Arglebargle), and he was the assistant professor of English who headed the sponsoring group. He was the sort of man his father had called a 'beefy sonofawhore.'

The beefy sonofawhore threw a party for the Caravan, the Friends of Poetry, and most of the English Department faculty at his house after the reading. It began around eleven o'clock. It was stiffish at first – men and women standing in uncomfortable little groups with glasses and paper plates in their hands, talking your usual brand of cautious academic talk. This sort of bullshit had struck Gard as a stupid waste of time when he was teaching. It still did, but there was also something nostalgic and pleasing – in a melancholy way – about it now.

His Party Monster streak told him that, stiff or not, this was a Party with Possibilities. By midnight the Bach etudes would almost certainly be replaced by the Pretenders, and talk of classes, politics, and literature would be replaced by more interesting fare – the Red Sox, who on the faculty was drinking too much, and that all-time favorite, who was fucking whom.

There was a large buffet for which most of the poets made a beeline, reliably following Gardener's First Rule for Touring Poets: If it's gratis, grab it. As he watched, Ann Delaney, who wrote spare, haunting poems about rural working-class New England, stretched her jaws wide and ripped into the huge sandwich she was holding. Mayonnaise the color and texture of bull semen squirted between her fingers, and Ann licked it off her hand nonchalantly. She tipped Gardener a wink. To her left, last year's winner of Boston University's Hawthorne Prize (for his long poem Harbor Dreams 1650-1980) was cramming green olives into his mouth with blurry speed. This fellow, Jon Evard Symington by name, paused long enough to drop a handful of wrapped mini-wheels of Bonbel cheese into each pocket of his corduroy sport-coat (patched elbows, naturally), and then went back to the olives.

Ron Cummings strolled over to where Gardener was standing. As usual, he wasn't eating. He had a Waterford glass that looked full of straight whiskey in one hand. He nodded toward the buffet. 'Great stuff. If you're a connoisseur of Kirschner's bologna and iceberg lettuce, you're in like Flynn, ho.'

'That Arglebargle really knows how to live,' Gardener said.

Cummings, in the act of drinking, snorted so hard his eyes bulged. 'You're on the hit-line tonight, Jim. Arglebargle. Jesus.' He looked at the glass in Gardener's hand. It was a vodka and tonic – weak, but his second, just the same.

'Tonic water?' Cummings asked slyly. 'Pure tonic water?'

'Well … mostly.'

Cummings laughed again and walked away.

By the time someone pulled Bach and put on B. B. King, Gard was working on his fourth drink – on this one he'd asked the bartender, who had been at the reading, to go a little heavier on the vodka. He had begun to repeat two remarks that seemed wittier as he got drunker: first, that if you were a connoisseur of Kirschner's bologna and iceberg lettuce you were in like Flynn here, bo, and second, that all assistant professors were like T. S. Eliot's Practical Cats in at least one way: they all had secret names. Gardener confided that he had intuited that of their host: Arglebargle. He went back for a fifth drink, and told the bartender just to wave the tonic bottle in that old drink's face – that would be fine. The bartender waggled the bottle of Schweppes solemnly in front of Gardener's glass of vodka. Gardener laughed until tears stood in his eyes and his stomach hurt. He really was feeling fine tonight … and who, sir or madam, deserved it more? He had read better than he had in years, maybe in his whole life.

'You know,' he told the bartender, a needy postgrad hired especially for the occasion, 'all assistant professors are like T. S. Eliot's Practical Cats in one way.'

'Is that so, Mr Gardener?'

'Jim. Just Jim.' But he could see from the look in the kid's eyes that he was never going to be just Jim to this guy. Tonight he had seen Gardener blaze, and men who blazed could never be anything so mundane as just Jim.

'It is,' he told the kid. 'Each of them has a secret name. I have intuited that of our host. It's Arglebargle. Like the sound you make when you use the old Listerine.' He paused, considering. 'Of which the gentleman under discussion could use a good dose, now that I think of it.' Gardener laughed quite loudly. It was a fine addition to the basic thrust. Like adding a tasteful hood ornament to a fine car, he thought, and laughed again. This time a few people glanced around before going back to their conversations.

Too loud, he thought. Turn down your volume control, Gard, old buddy. He grinned widely, thinking he was having one of those magic nights – even his damn thoughts were funny tonight.

The bartender was also smiling, but his smile had a slightly concerned edge to it. 'You ought to be careful what you say about Professor Arberg,' he said, ,or who you say it to. He's … a bit of a bear.'

'Oh is he!' Gardener popped his eyes round and waggled his eyebrows energetically up and down like Groucho Marx. 'Well, he's got the build for it. Beefy sonofawhore, ain't be?' But he was careful to keep the old volume control down when he said it.

'Yeah,' the bartender said. He looked around and then leaned over the makeshift bar toward Gardener. 'There's a story that he happened to be passing by the grad assistants' lounge last year and heard one of them joking about how he'd always wanted to be associated with a school where Moby Dick wasn't just another dry classic but an actual member of the faculty. That guy was one of the most promising English students Northeastern has ever had, I heard, but he was gone before the semester was over. So was everyone who laughed, The ones who didn't laugh stayed.'

'Jesus Christ,' Gardener said. He had heard stories like it before – one or two that were even worse – but still felt disgusted. He followed the bartender's glance and saw Arglebargle at the buffet, standing next to Patricia McCardle. Arglebargle had a stein of beer in one hand and was gesturing with it. His other hand was plowing potato chips through a bowl of clam dip and then conveying them to his mouth, which went right on talking as it slobbered them chips in. Gardener could not remember ever having seen anything so quintessentially disgusting. Yet the McCardle bitch's rapt attention suggested that she might at any moment drop to her knees and give the man a blowjob out of sheer adoration. Gardener thought, and the fat fuck would go right on eating while she did it, dropping potato-chip crumbs and globs of clam dip in her hair.

'Jesus wept,' he said, and slugged back half of his vodka-sans-tonic. It hardly burned at all … what burned was the evening's first real hostility – the first outrider of that mute and inexplicable rage that had plagued him almost since the time he began drinking. 'Freshen this up, would you?'

The bartender dumped in more vodka and said shyly: 'I thought your reading tonight was wonderful, Mr Gardener.'

Gardener was absurdly touched. 'Leighton Street' had been dedicated to Bobbi Anderson, and this boy behind the bar – barely old enough to drink legally himself -reminded Gardener of Bobbi as she had been when she first came to the university.

'Thank you.'

You want to be a little careful of that vodka,' the bartender said. 'It has a way of blindsiding you.'

'I'm in control,' Gardener said, and gave the bartender a reassuring wink. 'Visibility ten miles to unlimited.'

He pushed off from the bar, glancing toward the beefy sonofawhore and McCardle again. She caught him looking at her and gazed back, cool and unsmiling, her blue eyes chips of ice. Bite my bag, you frigid bitch, he thought, and raised his drink to her in a boorish barrelhouse salute, at the same time favoring her with an insultingly wide grin.

'Just tonic, right? Pure tonic.'

He looked around. Ron Cummings had appeared at his side as suddenly as Satan. And his grin was properly satanic.

'Bugger off,' Gardener said, and more people turned around to look.

'Jim, old buddy – '

'I know, I know, turn down the volume control,' he mumbled, but he could feel that pulse in his head getting harder, more insistent. It wasn't like the headaches the doctor had predicted following his accident; it didn't come from the front of his head but rather from someplace deep in the back. And it didn't hurt.

It was, in fact, rather pleasant.

'You got it.' Cummings nodded almost imperceptibly toward McCardle. 'She's got a down on you, Jim. She'd love to dump you off the tour. Don't give her a reason.'

'Fuck her.'

'You fuck her,' Cummings said. 'Cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, and brain damage are all statistically proven results of heavy drinking, so I can reasonably expect any of them in my future, and if one of them were to come down on my head, I'd have no one to blame but myself. Diabetes, glaucoma, and premature senility all run in my family. But hypothermia of the penis? That I can do without. Excuse me.'

Gardener stood still for a moment, puzzled, watching him go. Then he got it and brayed laughter. This time the tears did not just stand in his eyes; this time they actually rolled down his cheeks. For the third time that evening people were looking at him – a big man in rather shabby clothes with a glass full of what looked suspiciously like straight vodka, standing by himself and laughing at the top of his voice.

Put a lid on it, he thought. Turn down the volume, he thought. Hypothermia of the penis, he thought, and sprayed more laughter.

Little by little he managed to regain control. He headed for the stereo in the other room – that was where the most interesting people at a party were usually found. He grabbed a couple of canapes from a tray and swallowed them. He had a strong feeling that Arglebargle and McCarglebargle were looking at him still, and that McCarglebargle was giving the Arglebargle a complete rundown on him in neat phrases, that cool, maddening little smile never leaving her face. You didn't know? It's quite true – he shot her. Right through the face. She told him she wouldn't press charges if he would give her an uncontested divorce. Who knows if it was the right decision or not? He hasn't shot any more women … at least, not yet. But however well he might have read tonight – after that rather eccentric lapse, I mean – he is unstable, and as you can see, he's not able to control his drinking …

Better watch it, Gard, he thought, and for the second time that night a thought came in a voice that was very much like Bobbi's. Your paranoia's showing. They're not talking about you, for Chrissake.

At the doorway he turned and looked back.

They were looking directly at him.

He felt nasty, dismayed shock race through him … and then he forced another big, insulting grin and tipped his glass toward both of them.

Get out of here, Gard. This could be bad. You're drunk.

I'm in control, don't worry. She wants me to leave, that's why she keeps looking at me, that's why she's telling that fat fuck all about me – that I shot my wife, that I was busted at Seabrook with a loaded gun in my packsack – she wants to get rid of me because she doesn't think drunken wifeshooting commiesymp nuclear protestors should get the biggest motherfucking hand of the night. But I can be cool. No problem, baby. I'm just going to hang out, taper off on the firewater, grab some coffee, and go home early. No problem.

And although he didn't grab any coffee, didn't go home early, and most certainly didn't taper off on the firewater, he was okay for the next hour or so. He turned down the volume control every time he heard it start going up, and made himself quit every time he heard himself doing what his wife had called holding forth. 'When you get drunk, Jim,' she had said, 'not the least of your problems is a tendency to stop conversing and start holding forth.'

He stayed mostly in Arberg's living room, where the crowd was younger and not so cautiously pompous. Their conversation was lively, cheerful, and intelligent. The thought of the nukes rose in Gardener's mind – at hours such as this it always did, like a rotting body floating to the surface in response to cannonfire. At hours such as these – and at this stage of drunkenness – the certainty that he must alert these young men and women to the problem always floated up, trailing its heat of anger and irrationality like rotted waterweed. As always. The last eight years of his life had been bad, and the last three had been a nightmare time in which he had become inexplicable to himself and scary to almost all the people who really knew him. When he drank, this rage, this terror, and most of all, this inability to explain whatever had happened to Jimmy Gardener, to explain even to himself – found outlet in the subject of the nukes.

But tonight he had hardly raised the subject when Ron Cummings staggered into the parlor, his narrow, gaunt face glowing with feverish color. Drunk or not, Cummings was still perfectly able to see how the wind was blowing. He adroitly turned the conversation back toward poetry. Gardener was weakly grateful but also angry. It was irrational, but it was there: he had been denied his fix.

So, partly thanks to the tight checkrein he had imposed on himself and partly due to Ron Cummings's timely intervention, Gardener avoided trouble until Arberg's party was almost over. Another half-hour and Gardener might have avoided trouble completely . . . at least, for that night.

But when Ron Cummings began to hold forth on the beat poets with his customary cutting wit, Gardener wandered back into the dining room to get another drink and perhaps something to nosh on from the buffet. What followed might have been arranged by the devil with a particularly malignant sense of humor.

'Once we've got Iroquois on-line, you'll have the equivalent of three dozen full scholarships to give away,' a voice on Gardener's left was saying. Gardener looked around so suddenly that he almost spilled his drink. Surely he must be imagining this conversation – it was too coincidental to be real.

Half a dozen people were grouped at one end of the buffet – three men and three women. One of the couples was that World-Famous Vaudeville Team of Arglebargle and McCarglebargle. The man speaking looked like a car salesman with better taste in clothes than most of the breed. His wife stood next to him. She was pretty in a strained way, her fading blue eyes magnified by thick spectacles. Gardener saw one thing at once. He might be an alky, and obsessive on this one subject, but he had always been a sharp observer and still was. The woman with the thick spectacles was aware that her husband was doing exactly that which Nora had accused Gard himself of doing at parties once he got drunk: holding forth. She wanted to get her husband out, but as yet couldn't see how to do it.

Gardener took a second look and guessed they had been married eight months. Maybe a year, but eight months was a better guess.

The man speaking had to be some sort of wheel with Bay State Electric. Had to be Bay State, because Bay State owned the boondoggle that was the Iroquois plant. The guy was making it sound like the greatest thing since sliced bread, and because he looked as though he really believed it, Gardener decided he must be a wheel of a rather small sort, maybe even a spare tire. He doubted if the big guys were so crazy about Iroquois. Even putting aside the insanity of nuclear power for a moment, there was the fact that Iroquois was five years late coming 'on-line' and the fate of three interconnected New England bank chains depended on what would happen when – and if – it did. They were all standing chest-deep in radioactive quicksand and trading paper. It was like some crazy game of musical chairs.

Of course, the courts had finally given the company permission to begin loading hot rods the month before, and Gardener supposed that had the motherfuckers breathing a little easier.

Arberg was listening with solemn respect. He wasn't a trustee of the college, but anyone above the post of instructor would know enough to butter up an emissary from Bay State Electric, even a spare tire. Big private utilities like Bay State could do a lot for a school if it wanted to.

Was Reddy Kilowatt here a Friend of Poetry? About as much, Gard suspected, as he himself was a Friend of the Neutron Bomb. His wife, however – she of the thick glasses and the strained, pretty face – she looked like a Friend of Poetry.

Knowing it was a terrible mistake, Gardener drifted over. He was wearing a pleasant late-in-the-party-gotta-go-soon smile, but the pulse in his head was faster, centering on the left. The old helpless anger was rising in a red wave. Don't you know what you're talking about? was almost all that his heart could cry. There were logical arguments against nuclear-power plants that he could muster, but at times like this he could only find the inarticulate cry of his heart.

Don't you know what you're talking about? Don't you know what the stakes are? Don't any of you remember what happened in Russia two years ago? They haven't; they can't. They'll be burying the cancer victims far into the next century. Jesus-jumped-up-fiddling-Christ! Stick one of those used core rods up your ass for half an hour or so and tell everyone how safe nuclear-fucking-power is when your turds start to glow in the dark! Jesus! JESUS! You jerks are standing here listening to this man talk as if he was sane!

He stood there, drink in hand, smiling pleasantly, listening to the spare tire spout his deadly nonsense.

The third man in the group was fifty or so and looked like a college dean. He wanted to know about the possibility of further organized protests in the fall. He called the spare tire Ted.

Ted the Power Man said he doubted there was much to worry about. Seabrook had had its vogue, and the Arrowhead installation in Maine – but since the federal judges had started to deal out some stiff sentences for what they saw as merely hell-raising, the protests had slowed down fast. 'These groups go through targets almost as fast as they go through rock groups,' he said. Arberg, McCardle, and the others laughed – all except the wife of Ted the Power Man. Her smile only frayed a little more.

Gardener's pleasant smile remained. It felt flash-frozen onto his face.

Ted the Power Man grew more expansive. He said it was time to show the Arabs once and for all that America and Americans didn't need them. He said that even the most modern coal-fired generators were too dirty to be acceptable by the EPA. He said that solar power was great 'as long as the sun shines.' There was another burst of laughter.

Gardener's head thudded and whipped, whipped and thudded. His ears, tuned to an almost preternatural pitch, heard a faint crackling sound, like ice shifting, and he relaxed his hand a bare moment before it tightened enough to shatter the glass.

He blinked and Arberg had the head of a pig. This hallucination was utterly complete and utterly perfect, right down to the bristles on the fat man's snout. The buffet was in ruins, but Arberg was scavenging, finishing up the last few Triscuits, spearing a final slice of salami and a chunk of cheese on the same plastic toothpick, chasing them with the last potato-chip crumbs. It all went into his snuffling snout, and he went on nodding all the while as Ted the Power Man explained that nuclear was the only alternative, really. 'Thank God the American people are finally getting that Chernobyl business into some kind of perspective,' he said. 'Thirty-two people dead. It's horrible, of course, but there was an airplane crash just a month ago that killed a hundred and ninety-some. You don't hear people yelling for the government to shut down the airlines, though, do you? Thirty-two dead is horrible, but it's far from the Armageddon these nuke-freaks made it sound like.' He lowered his voice a little. 'They're as nuts as the LaRouche people you see in airports, but in a way, they're worse. They sound more rational. But if we gave them what they wanted, they'd turn around a month or so later and start whining about not being able to use their blow-dryers, or found out their Cuisinarts weren't going to work when they wanted to mix up a bunch of macrobiotic food.'

To Gard he didn't look like a man anymore. The shaggy head of a wolf poked out of the collar of his white shirt with the narrow red pinstripes. It looked around, pink tongue lolling, greenish-yellow eyes sparkling. Arberg squealed some sort of approval and stuffed more odd lots into his pink pig's snout. Patricia McCardle now had the smooth sleek head of a whippet. The college dean and his wife were weasels. And the wife of the man from the electric company had become a frightened rabbit, pink eyes rolling behind thick glasses.

Oh, Gard, no, his mind moaned.

He blinked again and they were just people.

'And one thing these protestors never remember to mention at their protest rallies is just this,' Ted the Power Man finished, looking around like a trial lawyer reaching the climax of his summation. 'In thirty years of peaceful nuclear-power development, there has never been one single fatality as the result of nuclear power in the United States of America.' He smiled modestly and tossed off the rest of his Scotch.

'I'm sure we'll all rest easier knowing that,' the man who looked like a college dean said. 'And now I think my wife and I -'

'Did you know that Marie Curie died of radiation poisoning?' Gardener asked conversationally. Heads turned. 'Yeah. Leukemia induced by direct exposure to gamma rays. She was the first casualty along the death march with this guy's power plant at the end. She did a lot of research, and recorded it all.'

Gardener looked around the suddenly silent room.

'Her notebooks are locked up in a vault,' he said. 'A vault in Paris. It's lead-lined. The notebooks are whole, but too radioactive to touch. As for who's died here, we don't really know. The AEC and the EPA keep a lid on it.'

Patricia McCardle was frowning at him. With the dean temporarily forgotten, Arberg went back to scrounging along the denuded buffet table.

'On the fifth of October 1966,' Gardener said, 'there was a partial nuclear meltdown of the Enrico Fermi breeder reactor in Michigan.'

'Nothing happened,' Ted the Power Man said, and spread his hands to the assembled company as if to say, You see? QED.

'No,' Gardener said. 'Nothing did. God may know why, but my guess is no one else does. The chain reaction stopped on its own. No one knows why. One of the engineers the contractors called in took a look, smiled, and said, “You guys almost lost Detroit.” Then he fainted.'

'Oh, but Mr Gardener! That was -'

Gardener held up a hand. 'When you examine the cancer-death stats for the areas surrounding every nuclear-power facility in the country, you find anomalies, deaths that are way out of line with the norm.'

'That is utterly untrue, and – '

' Let me finish, please. I don't think the facts make any difference anymore, but let me finish anyway. Long before Chernobyl, the Russians had an accident at a reactor in a place called Kyshtym. But Khrushchev was Premier then, and the Soviets kept their lips a lot tighter. It looks like maybe they were storing used rods in a shallow ditch. Why not? As Madame Curie might have said, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Our best guess is that the core rods oxydized, only instead of creating ferrous oxide, or rust, the way steel rods do, these rods rusted pure plutonium. It was like building a campfire next to a tank filled with LP gas, but they didn't know that. They assumed it would be all right. They assumed.' He could hear the rage filling his voice and was helpless to stop it. 'They assumed, they played with the lives of living human beings as if they were … well, so many dolls … and guess what happened?'

The room was silent. Patty's mouth was a frozen red slash. Her complexion was milky with rage.

'It rained,' Gardener said. 'It rained hard. And that started a chain reaction that caused an explosion. It was like the eruption of a mud volcano. Thousands were evacuated. Every pregnant woman was given an abortion. There was no choice involved. The Russian equivalent of a turnpike in the Kyshtym area was closed for almost a year. Then, when word started to leak out that a very bad accident had happened on the edge of Siberia, the Russians opened the road again. But they put up some really hilarious signs. I've seen the photos. I don't read Russian, but I've asked four or five different people for a

translation, and they all agree. it sounds like a bad ethnic joke. Imagine yourself driving along an American thruway – I-95 or I-70, maybe – and coming up on a sign that says PLEASE CLOSE ALL WINDOWS, TURN OFF ALL VENTILATION ACCESSORIES, AND DRIVE AS FAST AS YOUR CAR WILL GO FOR THE NEXT TWENTY MILES.'

'Builshit!' Ted the Power Man said loudly.

'Photographs available under the Freedom of Information Act,' Gard said. ,If this guy was only lying, maybe I could live with it. But he and the rest of the people like him are doing something worse. They're like salesmen telling the public +that cigarettes not only don't cause lung cancer, they're full of vitamin C and keep you from having colds.'

'Are you implying -'

'Thirty-two at Chernobyl we can verify. Hell, maybe it is only thirty-two. We've got photos taken by American doctors which suggest there must be well over two hundred already, but say thirty-two. It doesn't change what we've learned about high-rad exposure. The deaths don't all come at once. That's what's so deceiving. The deaths come in three waves. First, the people who get fried in the accident. Second, the leukemia victims, mostly kids. Third, the most lethal wave: cancer in adults forty and over. So much cancer you might as well go on and call it a plague. Bone cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer, and melanoma – skin cancer, in other words – are the most common. But you also got your intestinal cancer, your bladder cancer, your brain tumors, your – '

'Stop, can't you please stop?" Ted's wife cried. Hysteria lent her voice a surprising power.

'I would if I could, dear,' he said gently. 'I can't. In 1964 the AEC commissioned a study on a worst-case scenario if an American reactor one-fifth the size of Chernobyl blew. The results were so scary the AEC buried the report. It suggested -'

'Shut up, Gardener,' Patty said loudly. 'You're drunk.'

He ignored her, fixing his eyes on the power-man's wife. 'It suggested that such an accident in a relatively rural area of the USA – the one they picked was midstate Pennsylvania, where Three-Mile Island is, by the way – would kill 45,000 folks, rad seventy per cent of the state and do seventeen million dollars' worth of damage.'

'Holy fuck!' someone cried. 'Are you shitting?'

'Nope,' Gardener said, never taking his eyes from the woman, who now seemed hypnotized with terror. 'If you multiply by five, you get 225,000 dead and eighty-five million dollars' worth of damage.' He refilled his glass nonchalantly in the silent grave of the room, tipped it at Arberg, and drank two mouthfuls of straight vodka. Uncontaminated vodka, one hoped. 'So!' he finished. 'We're talking almost a quarter of a million people dead by the time the third wave dissipates, around 2040.' He winked at Ted the Power Man, whose lips had pulled back from his teeth. 'Be hard to get that many people even on a 767, wouldn't it?'

'Those figures came directly out of your butt,' Ted the Power Man said angrily.

'Ted – ' the man's wife said nervously. She had gone dead pale except for tiny spots of red burning high up on her cheekbones.

'You expect me to stand here and listen to that … that party-line rhetoric?' he asked, approaching Gardener until they were almost chest to chest. 'Do you?'

'At Chernobyl they killed the kids,' Gardener said. 'Don't you understand that? The ones ten years old, the ones in utero. Most may still be alive, but they are dying right now while we stand here with our drinks in our hands. Some can't even read yet. Most will never kiss a girl in passion. Right now while we're standing here with our drinks in our hands.

'They killed their children.'

He looked at Ted's wife, and now his voice began to shake and to rise slightly, as if in a plea.

'We know from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, from our own tests at Trinity and on Bikini. They killed their own children, do you dig what I'm saying? There are nine-year-olds in Pripyat who are going to die shitting out their own intestines! They killed the children!'

Ted's wife took a step back, eyes wide behind her glasses, mouth twitching.

'We'll acknowledge that Mr Gardener is a fine poet, I think,' Ted the Power Man said, putting an arm around his wife and pulling her to his side again. It was like watching a cowboy rope a calf. 'He's not very well-informed about nuclear power, however. We really have no idea what may or may not have happened at Kyshtym, and the Russian figures on the Chernobyl casualties are – '

'Cut the shit,' Gardener said. 'You know what I'm talking about. Bay State Electric has got all this stuff in its files, along with the elevated cancer rates in the areas surrounding American nuclear-power facilities, the water contaminated by nuclear waste – the water in deep aquifers, the water people wash their clothes and their dishes and themselves in, the water they drink. You know. You and every other private, municipal, state, and federal company in America.'

'Stop it, Gardener,' McCardle warned, stepping forward. She flashed an overbrilliant smile around the group. 'He's a little

'Ted, did you know?' Ted's wife asked suddenly.

'Sure, I've got some stats, but – '

He broke off. His jaw snapped shut so hard you could almost hear it. It wasn't much … but it was enough. Suddenly they knew – all of them – that he had omitted a good deal of scripture from his sermon. Gardener felt a moment of sour, unexpected triumph.

There was a moment of awkward silence and then, quite deliberately, Ted's wife stepped away from him. He flushed. To Gard he looked like a man who has just whanged his thumb with a hammer.

'Oh, we have all kinds of reports,' he said. 'Most are nothing but a tissue

of lies – Russian propaganda. People like this idiot are more than happy to swallow it hook, line, and sinker. For all we know, Chernobyl may have been no accident at all, but an effort to keep us from – '

'Jesus, next you'll be telling us the earth is flat,' Gardener said. 'Did you see the photographs of the Army guys in radiation suits walking around a power plant half an hour's drive from Harrisburg? Do you know how they tried to plug one of the leaks there? They stuffed a basketball wrapped with friction-tape into a busted waste-pipe. It worked for a while, then the pressure spit it out and busted a hole right through the containment wall.'

'You spout some pretty goddam good propaganda.' Ted grinned savagely. 'The Russians love people like you! Do they pay you, or do you do it for free?'

'Who sounds like an airport Moonie now?' Gardener asked, laughing a little. He took a step closer to Ted. 'Nuclear reactors are better built than Jane Fonda, right?'

'As far as I'm concerned, that's about the size of it, yes.'

'Please,' the dean's wife said, distressed. 'We may discuss, but let's not shout, please – after all, we're college people -'

'Somebody better fucking shout about it!' Gardener shouted. She recoiled, blinking, and her husband stared at Gardener with eyes as bright as chips of ice. Stared as if he were marking Gard forever. Gard supposed he was. 'Would you shout if your house was on fire and you were the only one in your family to wake up in the middle of the night and realize what was happening? Or just kinda tiptoe around and whisper, on account of you're a college person?'

'I just believe this has gone far en – '

Gardener dismissed her, turned to Mr Bay State Electric, and winked at him confidentially. 'Tell me, Ted, how close is your house located to this nifty new nuclear facility you guys are building?'

'I don't have to stand here and – '

'Not too close, uh? That's what I thought.' He looked at Mrs Ted. She shrank away from him, clutching at her husband's arm. Gard thought, What is it that she sees to make her shrink away from me like that? What, exactly?

The voice of the booger-hooking, comic-book-reading deputy clanged back in dolorous answer: Shot your wife, uh? Good fucking deal.

'Are you planning to have children?' he asked her gently. 'If so, I would hope for your sake that you and your husband really are located a safe distance from the plant … they keep goofing, you know. Like at Three-Mile Island. Not long before they opened the sucker, someone discovered the plumbers had somehow hooked up a 3,000-gallon tank for liquid radioactive waste to the drinking fountains instead of the scuts. In fact, they found out about a week before the place went on line. You like it?'

She was crying.

She was crying, but he couldn't stop.

The guys investigating wrote in their report that hooking up radioactive waste-coolant pipes to the ones feeding water to the drinking fountains was a generally inadvisable practice. If your hubby here invites you to take the company tour, I'd do the same thing they tell you to do in Mexico: don't drink the water. And it your hubby invites you after you're pregnant – or after you even think you might be – tell him . . .' Gardener smiled, first at her, then at Ted. 'Tell him you've got a headache,' he said.

'Shut up,' Ted said. His wife had begun to moan,

'That's right,' Arberg said. 'I really do think it's time for you to shut up, Mr Gardener.'

Gard looked at them, then at the rest of the partygoers, who were staring at the tableau by the buffet, wide-eyed and silent, the young bartender among them.

'Shut up!' Gardener yelled. Pain drove a gleaming chrome spike into the left side of his head. 'Yeah! Shut up and let the goddam house burn! You can bet these fucking slum-lords will be around to collect the fire-insurance later on, after the ashes cool and they rake out what's left of the bodies! Shut up! That's what all these guys want us to do! And if you don't shut up on your own, maybe you get shut up, like Karen Silkwood – '

'Quit it, Gardener,' Patricia McCardle hissed. There were no sibilants in the words she spoke, making a hiss an impossibility, but she hissed just the same.

He bent toward Ted's wife, whose sallow cheeks were now wet with tears. 'Also, you might cheek the IDS rates – infant-death syndrome, that is. They go way up in plant areas. Birth defects, such as Down's Syndrome – mongoloidism, in other words – and blindness, and …

‘I want you to get out of my house,' Arberg said.

'You've got potato chips on your chin,' Gardener said, and turned back to Mr and Mrs Bay State Electric. His voice was coming from deeper and deeper inside him. It was like listening to a voice coming out of a well. Everything going critical. Red lines showing up all over the control panel.

'Ted here can lie about how vastly overrated it all was, nothing but a little fire and a lot of headline fodder, and all of you can even believe him … but the fact is, what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear plant released more radioactive waste into the atmosphere of this planet than all the A-bombs set off aboveground since Trinity.

'Chernobyl's hot.

'It's going to stay that way for a long time. How long? No one really knows, do they, Ted?'

He tipped his glass toward Ted and then looked around at the partygoers, all of them now standing silent and watching him, many looking just as dismayed as Mrs Ted.

'And it'll happen again. Maybe in Washington State. They were storing core rods in unlined ditches at the Hanford reactors just like they were at Kyshtym. California the next time there's a big quake? France? Poland? Or maybe right here in Massachusetts, if this fellow here has his way and the Iroquois plant goes on-line in the spring. Just let one guy pull the wrong switch at the wrong time, and the next time the Red Sox open at Fenway will be around 2075.'

Patricia McCardle was as white as a wax candle … except for her eyes, which were spitting blue sparks that looked freshly dropped from an arcwelder. Arberg had gone the other route: he was as red and dark as the bricks of his fine-old-family Back Bay home. Mrs Ted was looking from Gardener to her husband and back again as if they were a pair of dogs that might bite. Ted saw the look; felt her trying to back out of his encircling, imprisoning arm. Gardener supposed it was her reaction to what he had been saying which provoked the final escalation. Ted had doubtless been instructed about how to handle hysterics like Gardener; the company taught their Teds to do that as routinely as the airlines taught stewardesses how to demonstrate the emergency oxygen system of the jets in which they flew.

But it was late, Gardener's drunken but eloquent rebuttal had blown up like a pocket thunderstorm … and now his wife was acting as though he might be the Butcher of Riga.

'God, I get tired of you guys and your simpering! There you were tonight, reading your incoherent poems into a microphone that runs on electricity, having your braying voice amplified by speakers that run on electricity, using electric lights to see by … where do you Luddites think that power comes from ? The Wizard of Oz? Jesus!'

'It's late,' McCardle said hurriedly, 'and we all

'Leukemia,' Gardener said, speaking directly to Ted's wide-eyed wife with dreadful confidentiality. 'The children. The children are always the ones to go first after a meltdown. One good thing: if we lose Iroquois, it'll keep the Jimmy Fund busy.'

'Ted?' she whimpered. 'He's wrong, isn't he? I mean – ' She was fumbling for a handkerchief or tissue in her purse and dropped it. There was the brittle sound of something breaking inside.

'Stop it,' Ted said to Gardener. 'We'll talk about it if you want, but stop deliberately upsetting my wife.'

'I want her to be upset.' Gardener said. He had embraced the darkness completely now. He belonged to it and it belonged to him and that was just fine. 'There's so much she doesn't seem to know. Stuff she ought to know. Considering who she's married to, and all.'

He turned the beautiful, wild grin on her. She looked into it without flinching this time, mesmerized like a doe in a pair of oncoming headlights.

'Used core rods, now. Do you know where they go when they're no more good in the pile? Did he tell you that the Core Rod Fairy takes them? Not true. The power folks sort of squirrel them away. There are great big hot piles of core rods here. there, and everywhere, sitting in nasty pools of shallow water. They're really hot, ma'am. And they're going to stay that way for a long time.'

'Gardener, I want you out,' Arberg said again.

Ignoring him, Gardener went on, speaking to Mrs Ted and Mrs Ted only: 'They're already losing track of some of those piles of used rods, did you know that? Like little kids who play all day and go to bed tired and wake up the next day and can't remember where they left their toys. And then there's the stuff that just goes poof. The ultimate Mad Bomber stuff. Enough plutonium has already disappeared to blow up the eastern seaboard of the United States. But I've got to have a mike to read my incoherent poems into. God forbid I should have to raise my v

Arberg grabbed him suddenly. The man was big and flabby but quite powerful. Gardener's shirt pulled out of his pants. His glass tumbled out of his fingers and shattered on the floor. In a rolling, carrying voice – a voice which maybe only an indignant teacher who has spent many years in lecture halls could muster – Arberg announced to everyone present: 'I'm throwing this bum out.'

This declaration was greeted by spontaneous applause. Not everyone in the room applauded – maybe not even half of them did. But the power guy's wife was crying hard now, pressing against her husband, no longer trying to get away; until Arberg grabbed him, Gardener had been hulking over her, seeming to menace her.

Gardener felt his feet skim over the floor, then leave it entirely. He caught a glimpse of Patricia McCardle, her mouth compressed, her eyes glaring, her hands smacking together in the furious approval she had refused to accord him earlier. He saw Ron Cummings standing in the library door, a monstrous drink in one hand, his arm round a pretty blonde girl, his hand pressed firmly against the sideswell of her breast. Cummings looked concerned but not exactly surprised. After all, it was only the argument in the Stone Country Bar and Grille continued to another night, wasn't it?

Are you going to let this swollen bag of shit just put you out on the doorstep like a stray cat?

Gardener decided he wasn't.

He drove his left elbow backward as hard as he could. It slammed into Arberg's chest. Gardener thought that was what it would feel like to drive your elbow into a bowl of extremely firm Jell-O.

Arberg uttered a strangled cry and let go of Gardener. He turned, hands doubling into fists, ready to punch Arberg if Arberg tried to grab him again, tried to so much as touch him again. He rather hoped Arglebargle wanted to fight.

But the beefy sonofawhore showed no signs of wanting to fight. He had also lost interest in putting Gardener out. He was clutching his chest like a hammy actor preparing to sing a bad aria. Most of the brick-color had left his face, although flaring strips stood out on each cheek. Arberg's thick lips flexed into an O; slacked; flexed into an 0 again; slacked again.

' – heart – ' he wheezed.

'What heart?' Gardener asked. 'You mean you have one?' attack – ' Arberg wheezed.

'a cr-'

'Heart attack, bullshit,' Gardener said. 'The only thing getting attacked is your sense of propriety. And you deserve it, you son of a bitch.'

He brushed past Arberg, still standing frozen in his about-to-sing pose, both hands clutched to the left side of his chest, where Gardener had connected with his elbow. The door between the dining room and the hallway had been crowded with people; they stepped back hurriedly as Gardener strode toward them and past them, heading for the front door.

From behind him a woman screamed: 'Get out, do you hear me? Get out, you bastard! Get out of here! I never want to see you again!'

This shrewish, hysterical voice was so unlike Patricia McCardle's usual ladylike purr (steel claws buried somewhere inside pads of velvet) that Gardener stopped. He turned around . . . and was rocked by an eye-watering roundhouse slap. Her face was ill with rage.

'I should have known better,' she breathed. 'You're nothing but a worthless, drunken lout – a contentious, obsessive, bullying, ugly human being. But I'll fix you. I'll do it. You know I can.'

'Why, Patty, I didn't know you cared,' he said. 'How sweet of you. I've been waiting to be fixed by you for years. Shall we go upstairs or give everyone a treat and do it on the rug?'

Ron Cummings, who had moved closer to the action, laughed. Patricia McCardle bared her teeth. Her hand flickered out again, this time connecting with Gardener's ear.

She spoke in a voice which was low but perfectly audible to everyone in the room: 'I shouldn't have expected anything better from a man who would shoot his own wife.'

Gardener looked around, saw Ron, and said: 'Excuse me, would you?' and plucked the drink from Ron's hand. In a single, quick, smooth gesture, he hooked two fingers into the bodice of McCardle's little black dress – it was elastic and pulled out easily – and dumped the whiskey inside.

'Cheers, dear,' he said, and turned for the door. It was, he decided, the best exit line he could hope to manage under the circumstances.

Arberg was still frozen with his fists clutched to his chest, mouth flexing into an 0 and then relaxing.

' – heart – ' he wheezed again to Gardener – Gardener or anyone who would listen to him. In the other room, Patricia McCardle was shrieking: 'I'm all right! Don't touch me! Leave me alone! I'm all right!'

'Hey. You.'

Gardener turned toward the voice and Ted's fist struck him high on one cheek. Gardener stumbled most of the way down the hall, clawing at the wall for balance. He struck the umbrella stand, knocked it over, then hit the front door hard enough to make the glass in the fanlight quiver.

Ted was walking down the hall toward him like a gunfighter.

'My wife's in the bathroom having hysterics because of you, and if you don't get out of here right now, I'm going to beat you silly.'

The blackness exploded like a rotted, gas-filled pocket of guts.

Gardener seized one of the umbrellas. It was long, furled, and black – an English lord's umbrella if there had ever been one. He ran toward Ted, toward this fellow who knew exactly what the stakes were but who was going ahead anyway, why not, there were seven payments left on the Datsun Z and eighteen on the house, so why not, right? Ted who saw a six-hundred-per-cent increase in leukemia merely as a fact which might upset his wife. Ted, good old Ted, and it was just lucky for good old Ted that it had been umbrellas instead of hunting rifles at the end of the hall.

Ted stood looking at Gardener, eyes widening, jaw dropping. The look of flushed anger gave way to uncertainty and fear – the fear that comes when you decide you Ire dealing with an irrational being.

' Hey – !'

'Caramba, you asshole!' Gardener screamed. He waggled the umbrella and then poked Ted the Power Man in the belly with it.

'Hey!' Ted gasped, doubling over. 'Stop it!'

'Andale, andale!' Gardener yelled, now beginning to whack Ted with the umbrella – back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The strap which held the umbrella furled against its handle came loose. The umbrella, still closed but now loose, slopped round the handle. 'Arriba, arriba!'

Ted was now too unnerved to think about renewing his attack or to think about anything but escape. He turned and ran. Gardener chased him, cackling, beating the back of his head and the nape of his neck with the umbrella. He was laughing … but nothing was funny. His head smashed and thudded. What victory was there in getting the best of a man like this in an argument, even temporarily? Or of making his wife cry? Or of beating him with a closed umbrella? Would any of those things keep the Iroquois nuclear-power plant from going on-line next May? Would any of those things save what was left of his own miserable life, or kill those tapeworms inside him that kept digging and munching and growing, eating whatever was left inside that was sane?

No, of course not. But for now, senseless forward motion was all that mattered … because that was all there was left.

'Arriba, you bastard!' he cried, chasing Ted into the dining room.

Ted had his hands up to his head and was waving them about his ears; he looked like a man beset by bats, and the umbrella did look a little batlike as it lashed up and down.

'Help me!' Ted squealed. 'Help me, man's gone crazy!'

But they were all backing away, eyes wide and scared.

Ted's hip struck one corner of the buffet. The table rocked forward and upward, silverware sliding down the inclined plane of the wrinkling tablecloth, plates falling and shattering on the floor. Arberg's Waterford punch-bowl detonated like a bomb. and a woman screamed. The table tottered for a moment and then went over.

'Help? Help? Heellllp!'

'Andale!' Gardener brought the umbrella down on Ted's head in a particularly hard swipe. Its trigger engaged and the umbrella popped open with a

hollow pwushhh! Now Gardener looked like a mad Mary Poppins, chasing Ted the Power Man with an umbrella in one hand. Later it would occur to him that opening an umbrella in the house was supposed to be bad luck.

Hands grabbed him from behind.

He whirled, expecting that Arberg was over his impropriety attack and was back to have another go at giving him the bum's rush.

It wasn't Arberg. It was Ron. He still seemed calm – but there was something in his face, something dreadful. Was it compassion? Yes, Gardener saw, that was what it was.

Suddenly he didn't want the umbrella anymore. He threw it aside. The dining room was perfectly silent for a moment, except for Gardener's rapid breathing and Ted's harsh, sobbing gasps. The overturned buffet table lay in a puddle of linen, broken crockery, shattered crystal. The odor of spilled rum punch rose in an eye-watering fog.

'Patricia McCardle is on the telephone, talking to the cops,' Ron said, 'and when it's Back Bay, they show up in a hurry. You want to bug out of here, Jim.'

Gardener looked around and saw knots of partygoers standing against the walls and in the doorways, looking at him with those wide, frightened eyes. By tomorrow they won't remember if it was about nuclear power or William Carlos Williams or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, he thought. Half of them will tell the other half I made a pass at his wife. Just that good old fun-loving wifeshooting Jim Gardener, going crazy and beating the shit out of a guy with an umbrella. Also dumping about a pint of Chivas between the teeny tits of the woman who gave him a job when he had none. Nuclear power, what did that have to do with it?

'What a Christless mess,' he said hoarsely to Ron.

'Shit, they'll talk about it for years,' Ron said. 'The best reading they ever heard followed by the best party blow-off they ever saw. Now get going. Get your ass up to Maine. I'll call.'

Ted the Power Man, eyes wide and teary, made a lunge for him. Two young men -one was the bartender – held him back.

'Goodbye,' Gardener said to the huddled knots of people. 'Thank you for a lovely time.'

He went to the door, then turned back.

'And if you forget everything else, remember about the leukemia and the children. Remember – '

But what they'd remember was him whacking Ted with an umbrella. He saw it in their faces.

Gardener nodded and went down the hallway past Arberg, who was still standing with his hands clutched to his chest, lips flexing and closing. Gardener did not look back. He kicked aside the litter of umbrellas, opened the door, and stepped out into the night. He wanted a drink more than he ever had in his life, and he supposed he must have found one, because that was when he fell into the belly of the big fish and the blackout swallowed him.

1

Not long after dawn on the morning of July 4th, 1988, Gardener awoke – came to, anyway – near the end of the stone breakwater which extends out into the Atlantic not far from the Arcadia Funworld Amusement Park in Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire. Not that Gardener knew where he was then. He barely knew anything save for his own name, the fact that he was in what seemed to be total physical agony, and the somewhat less important fact that he had apparently almost drowned in the night.

He was lying on his side, his feet trailing in the water. He supposed that he had been high and dry when he had waltzed out here the night before but he had apparently rolled over in his sleep, slid a little way down the breakwater's sloped north side … and now the tide was coming in. If he had been half an hour later in waking up, he thought he very well might have simply floated off the rocks of the breakwater as a grounded ship may float off a sandbar.

One of his loafers was still on, but it was shrivelled and useless. Gardener kicked it off and watched apathetically as it floated down into greeny darkness. Something for the lobsters to shit in, he thought, and sat up.

The bolt of pain which went through his head was so immense he thought for a moment that he was having a stroke; that he had survived his night on the breakwater only to die of an embolism the morning after.

The pain receded a little and the world came back from the gray mist into which it had receded. He was able to appreciate just how miserable he was. It was what Bobbi Anderson would undoubtedly have called 'the whole body trip,' as in Savor the whole body trip, Jim. What can be better than the way you feel after a night in the eye of the cyclone?

A night? One night?

No way, baby. This had been a genuine jag. The real fucking thing.

His stomach felt sour and bloated. His throat and sinuses were caked with elderly puke. He looked to his left and sure enough, there it was, a little above him in what must have been his original position, the drinker's signature – a great big splash of drying vomit.

Christ, his body ached all over.

Gardener wiped a shaking, dirty right hand under his nose and saw flakes of dried blood. He'd had a nosebleed. He'd had them off and on ever since the skiing accident at Sunday River when he was seventeen. He could almost count on the nosebleeds when he had been drinking.

At the end of all his previous binges – and this was the first time he had gone whole hog in almost three years – Gardener had felt what he was feeling now: a sickness that went deeper than the thudding head, the stomach curled up like a living sponge filled with acid, the aches, the quivering muscles. That deep sickness couldn't even be called depression – it was a feeling of utter doom.

This was the worst ever, even worse than the depression that had followed the Famous Thanksgiving Jag of 1980, the one that had ended his teaching career and his marriage. It had also come close to ending Nora's life. He had come to that time in Penobscot County Jail. A deputy was sitting outside his cell, reading a copy of Crazy magazine and picking his nose. Gardener learned later that all police departments are aware that jag-drinkers frequently come off their hinges deeply depressed. So if there happens to be a man available, he keeps an eye on you, just to make sure you don't highside it … at least not until you post bond and get off the county property.

'Where am IT Gardener had asked.

'Where do you think you are?' the deputy asked. He looked at the large green booger he had just scraped out of his nose and then wiped it slowly and with apparent enjoyment onto the sole of his shoe, squashing it down, smearing it along the dark dirt there. Gardener had been unable to take his eyes from this operation; a year later he would write a poem about it.

'What did I do?'

Save for occasional flashes, the previous two days had been totally black. The flashes were unrelated, like cloud-rifts which let through uncertain flickers of sunlight as a storm approaches. Bringing Nora a cup of tea and then starting to harangue her about the nukes. Oh yes, the nukes. Ave Nukea Eterna. When he died, his final word on the whole fucking mess wouldn't be Rosebud but Nukes. He could remember failing down in the driveway beside his house. Getting a pizza and being so drunk great big runny clots of cheese went down inside his shirt, burning his chest. He could remember calling Bobbi. Calling and babbling something to her, something awful, and had Nora been screaming? Screaming?

'What did I do?' he asked, more urgently.

The deputy looked at him for a moment with a perfect clear-eyed contempt. 'Shot your wife. That's what you did. Good fucking deal, uh?'

The deputy had gone back to his Crazy magazine.

That had been bad; this was worse. That depthless feeling of self-contempt, the grisly certainty that you had done bad things you couldn't remember. Not a few too many glasses of champagne at the New Year's Eve party where you put a lampshade on your head and boogied around the room with it slipping down over your eyes, everybody in attendance (with the exception of your wife) thinking it was just the funniest thing they'd ever seen in their lives. . Not knowing you did fun things like punching department heads. Or shooting your wife.

It had been worse this time.

How could it be worse than Nora?

Something. For the time being his head hurt too badly to even try reconstructing the last unknown period of time.

Gardener looked down at the water, the waves bulging smoothly up toward where he sat, forearms on his knees, head sagging. When the troughs passed he could see barnacles and slick green seaweed. No . . . not really seaweed. Green slime. Like boogers.

Shot your wife … good fucking deal, uh?

Gardener closed his eyes against the sickening pulses of pain, then opened them again.

Jump in, a voice cajoled him softly. I mean, what the fuck, you don't really need any more of this shit, do you? Game called in the bottom of the first. Not official. Rainout. To be rescheduled when the Great Wheel of Karma turns into the next life … or the one after that, if I have to spend the next making up for this one by being a dung beetle or something. Hang up your jock, Gard. Jump in. In your current state, both of your legs will cramp and it'll be over quick. Gotta beat a bedsheet in a jail cell, anyway. Go on, jump.

He got up and stood swaying on the rocks, looking at the water. Just one big step, that's all it would take. He could do it in his sleep. Shit, almost had.

Not yet. Want to talk to Bobbi first.

The part of his mind which still wanted a little to live grasped at this idea. Bobbi. Bobbi was the only part of his old life that still seemed somehow whole and good. Bobbi was living down there in Haven, writing her westerns, still sane, still his friend if no longer his lover. His last friend.

Want to talk to Bobbi first, okay?

Why? So you can make a last stab at fucking her up, too? God knows you've tried hard enough. She's got a police record because of you, and undoubtedly her own FBI folder as well. Leave Bobbi out of this. Jump and stop fucking around.

He swayed forward, very close to doing it. The part of him that still wanted to live seemed to have no arguments left, no delaying tactics. It could have said that he had stayed sober – more or less – for the last three years, there had been no blackouts since he and Bobbi had been arrested at Seabrook in 1985. But that was a hollow argument. Except for Bobbi he was now completely alone. His mind was in turmoil almost all of the time, returning again and again – even sober – to the subject of the nukes. He recognized that his original concern and anger had rotted into obsession … but recognition and rehabilitation were not the same things at all. His poetry had deteriorated. His mind had deteriorated. Worst of all, when he wasn't drinking he wished he was. It's just that the hurting's all the time now. I'm like a bomb walking around and looking for a place to go off. Time to defuse.

Okay, then. Okay. He closed his eyes and got ready.

As he did, an odd certainty came to him, an intuition so strong that it was nearly precognitive. He felt that Bobbi needed to talk to him, rather than the other way around. That it was no mind trick. She really was in some kind of trouble. Bad trouble.

He opened his eyes and looked around, like a man coming out of a deep daze. He would find a phone and call her. He wouldn't say 'Hey Bobbi I had another blackout' and he wouldn't say 'I don't know where I am Bobbi but this time there's no nose-picking deputy to stop me.' He would say 'Hey, Bobbi, how you doin'?' and when she told him she was doin' okay, never better, shooting it out with the James gang in Northfield, or lighting out for the territories with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and by the way, Gard, how's your own bad self, Gard would tell her he was fine, writing some good stuff for a change, thinking of going over Vermont way for a bit, see some friends. Then he would go back out to the end of the breakwater and jump off. Nothing fancy; he would just bellyflop into the dead zone. That seemed to fit; after all, it was the way he had mostly gotten through the live one. The ocean had been here for a billion years or so. It would wait another five minutes while he did that.

But no laying it off on her, you hear me? Promise, Gard. No breaking down and blubbering. You're supposed to be her friend, not the male equivalent of her slimebucket sister. None of that shit.

He had broken promises in his life, God knew – a few thousand of them to himself. But this one he would keep.

He climbed clumsily up to the top of the breakwater. It was rough and rocky, a really fine place to break an ankle. He looked around apathetically for his scuffed brown totebag, the one he always took with him when he went off to read, or just to ramble, thinking it might be lodged in one of the holes between the rocks, or maybe just lying there. It wasn't. It was an old campaigner, scuffed and battered, going back to the last troubled years of his marriage, something he had managed to hold onto while all the valuable things got lost. Well, now the tote was finally gone, too. Clothes, toothbrush, bar of soap in a plastic dish, a bunch of jerky meat-sticks (it amused Bobbi to cure jerky in her shed, sometimes), a twenty-dollar bill under the tote's bottom … and all his unpublished poems, of course.

The poems were the least of his worries. The ones he had written over the last couple of years, and to which he had given the wonderfully witty and upbeat title 'The Radiation Cycle', had been submitted to five different publishers and rejected by all five. One anonymous editor had scribbled: 'Poetry and politics rarely mix; poetry and propaganda, never.' This little homily was perfectly true, he knew it … and still hadn't been able to stop.

Well, the tide had administered the Ultimate Blue Pencil to them. Go and do thou likewise, he thought, and lurched slowly along the breakwater toward the beach, thinking that his walk out to where he had awakened must have been better than a death-defying circus act. He walked with the summer sun rising up red and bloated from the Atlantic behind him, his shadow trailing out in front of him, and on the beach a kid in jeans and a T-shirt set off a string of firecrackers.

2

A marvel: his totebag wasn't lost after all. It was lying upside-down on the beach just above the high-tide line, unzipped, looking to Gardener like a big leather mouth biting at the sand. He picked it up and looked inside. Everything was gone. Even his frayed undies. He pulled up the tote's imitation leather bottom. The twenty was gone too. Fond hope, too quickly banish'd.

Gardener dropped the tote. His notebooks, all three of them, lay a little further along the beach. One was resting on its covers in a tent shape, one lay soggily just below the high-tide line, swelled up to the size of a telephone book, and the wind was leafing through the third idly. Don't bother, Gardener thought. Lees of an ass.

The kid with the firecrackers came toward him . but not too close. Wants to be able to take off in a hurry if I turn out to be as weird as I undoubtedly look, Gardener thought. Smart kid.

'That your stuff ?' the kid asked. His T-shirt showed a guy blowing his groceries. SCHOOL LUNCH VICTIM, the shirt said.

'Yeah,' Gardener said. He bent down and picked up the soggy notebook, looked at it for a moment and then tossed it down again.

The kid handed him the other two. What could he say? Don't bother, kid? The poems suck, kid? Poetry and politics rarely mix, kid, poetry and progaganda never?

'Thanks,' he said.

'Sure.' The kid held the bag so Gardener could drop the two dry notebooks back inside. 'Surprised you got anything left at all. This place is full of ripoff artists in the summer. The park, I guess.'

The kid gestured with his thumb and Gardener saw the roller coaster silhouetted against the sky. Gard's first thought was that he had somehow managed to roister all the way north to Old Orchard Beach before collapsing. A second look changed his mind. No pier.

'Where am IT Gardener asked, and his mind harked back with an eerie totality to the jail-cell and the nose-picking deputy. For a moment he was sure the kid would say, Where do you think you are?

'Arcadia Beach.' The kid looked half-amused, half-contemptuous. 'You must have really hung one on last night, mister.'

'Last night, and the night before,' Gardener chanted, his voice a little rusty, a little eerie. 'Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.'

The boy blinked at Gardener in surprise … and then delighted him by unexpectedly adding a couplet Gardener had never heard: 'Wanna go out, dunno if I can, cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.'

Gardener grinned … but the grin turned into a wince of fresh pain. Where'd you hear that, kid?'

'My mom. When I was a baby.'

'I heard about the Tommyknockers from my mother too,' Gardener said, 'but never that part.'

The kid shrugged as if the topic had lost whatever marginal interest it might have had for him. 'She used to make all kinds of stuff up.' He appraised Gardener. 'Don't you ache?'

'Kid,' Gardener said, leaning forward solemnly, 'in the immortal words of Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, I feel like homemade shit.'

'You look like you been drunk a long time.'

'Yeah? How would you know?'

'My mom. With her it was always funny stuff like the Tommyknockers or too hungover to talk.'

'She give it up?'

'Yeah. Car crash,' the kid said.

Gardener was suddenly racked with shivers. The boy appeared not to notice; he studied the sky, tracing the path of a gull. It coursed a morning sky of blue delicately shelled with mackerel scales, turning black for a moment as it flew in front of the sun's rising red eye. It landed on the breakwater, where it began to pick at something which gulls presumably found tasty.

Gardener looked from the gull to the kid, feeling disconcerted and strange. All of this was taking on decidedly omenish tones. The kid knew about the fabled Tommyknockers. How many kids in the world knew about them, and what were the odds that Gardener would happen to stumble on one who both (a) knew about them and (b) had lost his mother because of drink?

The kid reached in his pocket and brought out a small tangle of firecrackers. Sweet bird of youth, Gard thought, and smiled.

'Want to light a couple? Celebrate the Fourth? Might cheer you up.

'The Fourth? The Fourth of July? Is that what this is?'

The kid gave him a dry smile. 'It ain't Arbor Day.'

The twenty-sixth of June had been … he counted backwards. Good Christ. He had eight days which were painted black. Well … not quite. That actually would have been better. Patches of light, not at all welcome, were beginning to illuminate parts of that blackness. The idea that he had hurt someone – again – arose now in his mind as a certainty. Did he want to know who that

(arglebargle)

was, or what he had done to him or her? Probably not. Best to call Bobbi and finish himself before he remembered.

'Mister, how'd you get that scar on your forehead?'

'Ran into a tree while I was skiing.'

'Bet it hurt.'

'Yeah, even worse than this, but not by much. Do you know where there's a pay phone?'

The kid pointed to an eccentric green-roofed manse which stood perhaps a mile down the beach. It topped a crumbling granite headland and looked like the cover of a paperback gothic. It had to be a resort. After a moment's fumbling, Gard came up with the name.

'That's the Alhambra, isn't it?'

'The one and only.'

'Thanks,' he said, and started off.

'Mister?'

He turned.

'Don't you want that last book?' The kid pointed to the wet notebook lying on the high-tide line. 'You could dry it out.'

Gardener shook his head. 'Kid,' he said, 'I can't even dry me out.'

'You sure you don't want to light off some firecrackers?'

Gardener shook his head, smiling. 'Be careful with 'em, okay? People hurt themselves with things that go bang.'

'Okay.' He smiled, a little shyly. 'My mother did for a long time before the, you know -'

'I know. What's your name?'

'Jack. What's yours?'

'Gard.'

'Happy Fourth of July, Gard.'

'Happy Fourth, Jack. And watch out for the Tommyknockers.'

'Knocking at my door,' the kid agreed solemnly, and looked at Gardener with eyes which seemed queerly knowing.

For a moment Gardener seemed to feel a second premonition (whoever would have guessed a hangover was so conducive to the psychic emanations of the universe? a bitterly sarcastic voice inside asked). He didn't know what of, exactly, but it filled him with urgency about Bobbi again. He tipped the kid a wave and set off up the beach. He walked at a fast, steady pace, although the sand drew at his feet, clinging, pulling. Soon his heart was racing and his head was thudding so hard his eyeballs seemed to pulse.

The Alhambra did not seem to be drawing appreciably closer.

Slow down or you'll have a heart attack. Or a stroke. Or both.

He did slow down … and then doing so struck him as palpably absurd. Here he was, planning to drown himself in fifteen minutes or so, but minding his heart in the meantime. It was like the old joke about the condemned man turning down the cigarette offered by the captain of the firing squad. 'I'm trying to quit,' the guy says.

Gardener picked up his pace again, and now the bolts of pain began to beat out steady pulses of jingle-jangle verse:

Late last night and the night before,

Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers,

Knocking at the door.

I was crazy and Bobbi was sane

But that was before the Tommyknockers came.

He stopped. What is this Tommyknockers shit?

instead of an answer, that deep voice, as terrifying and yet as sure as the voice of a loon crying out on an empty lake, came back: Bobbi's in trouble.

He began to walk again, getting up to his former brisk pace … and then moving even faster. Wanna go out, he thought. Dunno if I can, cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.

He was climbing the weather-whitened stairs which led up the side of the granite headland from the beach to the hotel when he wiped his hand across his nose and saw that it was bleeding again.

3

Gardener lasted exactly eleven seconds in the lobby of the Alhambra – long enough for the desk clerk to see he had no shoes on. The clerk nodded to a husky bellman when Gardener began to protest, and the two of them gave him the bum's rush.

They would have booted me even if I had been wearing shoes, Gard reflected. Shit, I would have booted me.

He had gotten a good look at himself in the glass of the lobby door. Too good. He had managed to mop most of the blood off his face with his sleeve, but there were still traces. His eyes were bloodshot and starey. His week's growth of beard made him look like a porcupine about six weeks after a shearing. In the genteel summer world of the Alhambra, where men were men and women wore tennis skirts, he looked like a male bag-lady.

Because only the earliest risers had begun to stir, the bellman took the time to inform him there was a pay phone at the Mobil station.

'Intersection of US 1 and Route 26. Now get the hell out before I call the cops.'

If he had needed to know any more about himself than he already did, it was in the husky bellman's disgusted eyes.

Gardener trudged slowly down the hill toward the gas station. His socks flapped and flailed against the tar. His heart knocked like a wheezy Model T engine that's experienced too much hard traveling and too little maintenance. He could feel the headache moving to the left, where it would eventually center in a brilliant pinpoint … if he'd had plans to live that long, anyway. And suddenly he was seventeen again.

He was seventeen, and his obsession wasn't nukes but nooky. The girl's name was Annmarie and he thought he was going to make it with her pretty soon, maybe, if he didn't lose his nerve. If he kept his cool. Maybe even tonight. But part of keeping his cool was doing okay today. Today, right here, here being Straight Arrow, an intermediate ski trail at Victory Mountain in Vermont. He was looking down at his skis, mentally reviewing the steps necessary to come to your basic snowplow stop, reviewing as he would study for a test, wanting to pass, knowing he was still pretty new at this and Annmarie wasn't, and he somehow didn't think she would be so apt to come across if he ended up looking like Frosty the Snowman his first day off the beginners' slopes; he didn't mind looking a little inexperienced as long as he didn't look downright stupid, so there he had been, looking stupidly down at his feet instead of where he was going, which was directly at a gnarled old pine with the warning red stripe painted on its bark, and the only sounds were the wind in his ears and the snow sliding dryly under his skis, and they were the same soothing hush-a-bye sound: Shhhhhh …

It was the rhyme that broke into the memory, making him stop near the Mobil station. The rhyme came and it stayed, beating in time with his heart and throbbing head. Late last night and the night before, Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

Gard hawked, tasted the coppery, unpleasant flavor of his own blood, and spat a reddish glob of phlegm into the trash-littered dirt of the soft shoulder. He remembered asking his mother who or what Tommyknockers were. He couldn't remember what, if anything, she had replied, but he knew he'd always thought they must be highwaymen, robbers who stole by moonlight, killed in shadow, and buried in the darkest part of the night. And hadn't he spent one tortured, endless half-hour in the darkness of his bedroom before sleep finally decided to be merciful and claim him, thinking they might be cannibals as well as robbers? That instead of burying their victims in the dark of the night, they might have cooked them and … well …

Gardener wrapped his thin arms (there didn't seem to be any restaurants up in the cyclone) around his chest and shuddered.

He crossed to the Mobil station, which was hung with bunting but not yet open. The signs out front read SUPERUNLEADED .89 and GOD BLESS AMERICA and WE LUV WINNEBAGOS! The pay phone was on the side of the building. Gardener was grateful to find it was one of the new ones; you could dial long distance without depositing any money. That at least spared him the indignity of spending part of his last morning on earth panhandling.

He punched zero, then had to stop. His hand was shaking wildly, it was all over the place. He cocked the phone between head and shoulder this time, leaving both hands free. Grasped his right wrist with his left hand to hold the hand steady … as steady as possible, anyway. Now, looking like a shooter on a target range, he used his forefinger to punch the buttons with slow and horrible deliberation. The robot voice told him to either punch in his telephone credit-card number (a task Gard thought he would have been utterly incapable of performing, even if he'd had such a card) or zero for an operator. Gardener hit zero.

'Hi, happy holiday, this is Eileen,' a voice chirruped brightly. 'May I have your billing, please?'

'Hi, Eileen, happy holiday to you, too,' Gard said. 'I'd like to bill the call collect to anyone from Jim Gardener.'

'Thank you, Jim.'

'You're welcome,' he said, and then, suddenly: 'No, change that. Tell her it's Gard calling.'

As Bobbi's telephone began to ring up there in Haven, Gardener turned and looked toward the rising sun. It was even redder than before, rising toward the scud of thickening mackerel-scale clouds like a great round blister in the sky. The sun and the clouds together brought another childhood rhyme to mind: Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky at morning, sailor, take warning. Gard didn't know about red sky at morning, or at night, but he knew those delicate scales of cloud were a reliable harbinger of rain.

Too goddam many rhymes for a man's last morning on earth, he thought irritably, and then: I'm going to wake you up, Bobbi. Going to wake you up, but I promise you I'll never do it again.

But there was no Bobbi to wake up. The phone rang, that was all. Rang … and rang … and rang.

'Your party doesn't answer,' the operator told him, just in case he was deaf or had maybe forgotten what he was doing for a few seconds and had been holding the phone against his asshole instead of his ear. 'Would you like to try again later?'

Yeah, maybe. But it'd have to be by Ouija board, Eileen.

'Okay,' he said. 'You have a good one.'

'Thank you, Gard!'

He pulled the phone away from his ear as if it had bitten him and stared at it. For a moment she had sounded so much like Bobbi … so goddam much …

He put the phone back and got as far as, 'What did you – 'before realizing that cheerful Eileen had clicked off.

Eileen. Eileen, not Bobbi. But

She had called him Gard. Bobbi was the only one who

No, change that. Tell her it's Gard calling.

There. Perfectly reasonable explanation.

Then why didn't it seem that way?

He hung up slowly. He stood at the side of the Mobil station in his wet socks and shrunken pants and untucked shirt, his shadow long and long. A phalanx of motorcycles went by on Route 1, headed for Maine.

Bobbi's in trouble.

Will you please just let that go? It's boolsheet, as Bobbi herself would say. Somebody tell you the only holiday you could go home for was Christmas? She went back to Utica for The Glorious Fourth, that's all.

Yes. Of course. Bobbi was about as likely to go back to Utica for the Fourth as he was to apply as an intern at the new Bay State nuclear plant. Anne would probably celebrate the holiday by ramming a few M-80s up Bobbi's cooze and lighting them off.

Well, maybe she got invited to be parade marshal – or sheriff marshall, ha-ha

– in one of those cow-towns she's always writing about. Deadwood, Abilene, Dodge City, someplace like that. You did what you could. Now finish what you started.

His mind made no effort to argue; he could have dealt with that. Instead it only reiterated its original thesis: Bobbi's in trouble.

Just an excuse, you chickenshit bastard.

He didn't think so. Intuition was solidifying into certainty. And whether it was boolsheet or not, that voice continued to insist that Bobbi was in a jam. Until he knew one way or the other for sure, he supposed he could table his personal business. As he had told himself not long ago, the ocean wasn't going anywhere.

'Maybe the Tommyknockers got her,' he said out loud, and then laughed – a scared, husky little laugh. He was going crazy, all right.

1

Shushhhhh …

He's staring down at his skis, plain brown wood strips racing over the snow. He started looking down just to make sure he was keeping the skis nice and parallel, not wanting to look like a snowbunny with no business here after all. Now he's almost hypnotized by the liquid speed of his skis, by the crystal flicker of snow passing in a steady white strip, six inches wide, between the skis. He doesn't realize his state of semi-hypnosis until Annmarie screams: 'Gard, watch out! Watch out!'

It's like being roused from a light doze. That's when he realizes he's been in a semi-trance, that he has been looking down at that shiny, flowing strip far too long.

Annmarie screams: 'Stem christie! Gard! Stem christie!'

She screams again, and this time is she telling him to fall down, just fall down? Christ, you could break a leg that way!

In these last few seconds before the crunching impact, he still can't comprehend how things got serious so fast.

He has somehow managed to drift far off to the left side of the trail. Pines and spruces, their blue-gray branches heavy with snow, are blurring past less than three yards from him. A rock poking out of the snow blips by; his left ski has missed it by inches. He realizes with cold horror that he has lost all control, has forgotten everything Annmarie has taught him, maneuvers that seemed so easy on the kiddie slopes.

And now he's going … what? Twenty miles an hour? Thirty? Forty? Cold air cuts against his face and he sees the line of trees at the edge of the Straight Arrow trail getting ever closer. His own straight arrow has become a mild diagonal. Mild, but enough to be deadly, just the same. He sees his path will soon take him off the trail completely and then he will stop, you bet, then he will stop very quickly.

She shrieks again and he thinks: Stem christie? Did she really say that? I can't even snowplow for beans and she wants me to do a stem christie?

He tries to turn right but his skis remain stubbornly on course. Now he can see the tree he'll hit, a big, hoary old pine. A red stripe has been painted around its gnarly trunk – a wholly unnecessary danger signal.

He tries again to turn but he's forgotten how to do it.

The tree swells, seeming to rush toward him while he himself remains still; he can see jagged knobs, splintery groping butts of branches on which he may impale himself, he can see nicks in the old bark, he can see drips where the red paint has run.

Annmarie shrieks again and he's aware he himself is screaming.

Shusshhhhhh….

2

'Mister? Mister, are you all right?'

Gardener sat up suddenly, startled, expecting to pay for the movement with a whacking thud of pain through his head. There was none. He experienced a moment of nauseous vertigo that might have come from hunger, but his head was clear. The headache had passed in its sudden way while he slept – perhaps even while he was dreaming of his accident.

'I'm okay,' he said, looking around. His head thudded now – but against a drum. A girl in cutoff denim jeans laughed. 'You're supposed to use sticks on those, man, not your head. You were mumbling in your sleep.'

He saw he was in a van – and now everything fell into place. 'Was I?'

'Yeah. Not good mumbles.'

'It wasn't a good dream,' Gardener said.

'Have a hit off this,' the girl said, and handed him a joint. The roach-clip it was in, he saw, was a golden oldie: Richard Nixon in a blue suit, fingers thrust up in the characteristic double-V gesture that probably not even the oldest of the five other people in this van remembered. 'Guaranteed to cure all bad dreams,' the girl added solemnly.

That's what they told me about the booze, Lady Day. But sometimes they lie. Take it from me. Sometimes they lie.

He took a small hit off the joint for politeness' sake and felt his head begin to swim almost at once. He handed it back to the girl, who was sitting against the van's sliding door, and said: 'I'd rather have something to eat.'

'Got a box of crackers,' the driver said, and handed it back. 'We ate everything else. Beaver even ate the fucking prunes. Sorry.'

'Beaver'd eat anything,' the girl in the cutoffs said.

The kid in the van's shotgun seat looked back. He was a plump boy with a wide, pleasant face. 'Untrue,' he said. 'Untrue. I'd never eat my mother.'

At that they were all laughing wildly, Gardener included. When he was able, he said: 'The crackers are fine. Really.' And they were. He ate slowly at first, tentatively, monitoring his works closely for signs of rebellion. There were none and he began to eat faster and faster, until he was gobbling the crackers in big handfuls, his stomach snarling and yapping.

When had he last eaten? He didn't know. It was lost in the blackout. He did know from previous experience that he never ate much when he was busy trying to drink up the world – and a lot of what he tried to eat either ended up in his lap or down his shirt. That made him think of the big greasy pizza he had eaten – tried to eat – Thanksgiving evening, 1980. The night he had shot Nora through the cheeks.

– or you could have severed one or both optic nerves! Nora's lawyer suddenly shouted furiously at him inside his head. Partial or total blindness! Paralysis! Death! All that bullet had to do was chip one tooth to go flying off in any direction, any damned direction at all! Just one! And don't sit there and try any bullshit like how you didn't mean to kill her, either. You shoot a person in the head, what else are you trying to do?

The depression came rolling back – big, black, and a mile high. Should have killed yourself, Gard. Shouldn't have waited.

Bobbi's in trouble.

Well, maybe so. But getting help from a guy like you is like hiring a pyromaniac to fix the oil-burner.

Shut up.

You're wasted, Gard. Fried. What that kid back there on the beach would undoubtedly call a burnout.

'Mister, you sure you're all right?' the girl asked. Her hair was red, cut punkily short. Her legs went approximately up to her chin.

'Yeah,' he said. 'Did I look not all right?'

'For a minute there you looked terrible,' she answered gravely. That made him grin – not what she'd said but the solemnity with which she'd said it – and she grinned back, relieved.

He looked out the window and saw they were headed north on the Maine Turnpike – only up to mile thirty-six, so he couldn't have slept too long. The feathery mackerel scales of two hours ago were beginning to merge into a toneless gray that promised rain by afternoon – before he got to Haven, it would probably be dark and he would be soaked.

After hanging up the telephone at the Mobil station, he had stripped off his socks and tossed them into the wastecan on one of the gasoline islands. Then he walked over to Route 1 northbound in his bare feet and stood on the shoulder, old totebag in one hand, the thumb of his other out and cocked north.

Twenty minutes later this van had come along – a fairly new Dodge Caravel with Delaware plates. A pair of electric guitars, their necks crossed like swords, were painted on the side, along with the name of the group inside: THE EDDIE PARKER BAND. It pulled over and Gardener ran to it, panting, totebag banging his leg, headache pulsing white-hot pain into the left side of his head. In spite of the pain, he had been amused by the slogan carefully lettered across the van's back doors: IF EDDIE's ROCKIN', DON'T COME KNOCKIN'.

Now, sitting on the floor in back and reminding himself not to turn around quickly and thump the snare drum again, Gardener saw the Old Orchard exit coming up. At the same time, the first drops of rain hit the windshield.

'Listen,' Eddie said, pulling over, 'I hate to leave you off like this. It's starting to rain and you don't even have any fuckin' shoes.'

'I'll be all right.'

'You don't look so all right,' the girl in the cutoffs said softly.

Eddie whipped off his hat (DON'T BLAME ME; I VOTED FOR HOWARD THE DUCK written over the visor) and said: 'Cough up, you guys.' Wallets appeared; change jingled in jeans pockets.

'No! Hey, thanks, but no!' Gardener felt hot blood rush into his cheeks and burn there. Not embarrassment but outright shame. Somewhere inside him he felt a strong painful thud – it didn't rattle his teeth or bones. It was, he thought, his soul taking some final fall. It sounded melodramatic as bell. As for how it felt … well, it just felt real. That was the horrible part about it. Just … real. Okay, he thought. That's what it feels like. All your life you've heard people talk about hitting bottom, this is what it feels like. Here it is. James Gardener, who was going to be the Ezra Pound of his generation, taking spare change from a Delaware bar band.

'Really … no – '

Eddie Parker went on passing the hat just the same. There was a bunch of change and a few one-dollar bills in it. Beaver got the hat last. He tossed in a couple of quarters.

'Look,' Gardener said, 'I appreciate it, but

'C'mon, Beaver,' Eddie said. 'Cough up, you fuckin' Scrooge.'

'Really, I have friends in Portland, I'll just call a few up . . . and I think I might have left my checkbook with this one guy I know in Falmouth,' Gardener added wildly.

'Bea-ver's a Scrooge,' the girl in the cutoffs began to chant gleefully. 'Bea-ver's a Scrooge, Bea-ver's a Scrooge!' The others picked it up until Beaver, laughing and rolling his eyes, added another quarter and a New York Lottery ticket.

'There, I'm tapped,' he said, 'unless you want to wait around for the prunes to work.' The guys in the band and the girl in the cutoffs were laughing wildly again. Looking resignedly at Gardener, as if to say, You see the morons I have to deal with? You dig it?, Beaver handed the hat to Gardener, who had to take it; if he hadn't, the change would have rolled all over the van floor.

'Really,' he said, trying to give the hat back to Beaver. 'I'm perfectly okay – '

'You ain't,' Eddie Parker said. 'So cut the bullshit, what do you say?'

'I guess I say thanks,' Gardener said. 'It's all I can think of right now.'

'Well, it ain't so much you'll have to declare it on your income taxes,' Eddie said. 'But it'?] buy you some burgers and a pair of those rubber sandals.'

The girl slid open the door in the Caravel's sidewall. 'Get better, understand?' she said. Then, before he could reply, she hugged him and gave him a kiss, her mouth moist, friendly, half-open, and redolent of pot. 'Take care, big guy.'

'I'll try.' On the verge of getting out he suddenly hugged her again, fiercely. 'Thank you. Thank you all.'

He stood in the breakdown lane of the ramp, the rain failing a little harder now, watching as the van's sidewall door rumbled shut on its track. The girl waved. Gardener waved back and then the van was rolling down the breakdown lane, gathering speed, finally sliding over into the travel lane. Gardener watched them go, one hand still raised in a wave in case they might be looking back. Tears were running freely down his cheeks now, to mix with the rain.

3

He never did get a chance to buy a pair of rubber sandals, but he got to Haven before dark and he didn't have to walk the last ten or so miles to Bobbi's house, as he'd thought he might; you'd think people would be more apt to pick up a guy hitching in the rain, but that was just when they were most likely to pass you by. Who needed a human puddle in the passenger seat?

But he got a ride outside of Augusta with a farmer who complained constantly and bitterly about the government all the way up to the China town line, where he let Gard out. Gard walked a couple of miles, thumbing the few cars that passed, wondering if his feet were turning to ice or if it was just his imagination, when a pulp-truck pulled to a rackety halt beside him.

Gardener climbed into the cab as fast as he could. It smelled of old woodchips and sour loggers' sweat … but it was warm.

'Thanks,' he said.

'Don't mention it,' the driver said. 'Name's Freeman Moss.' He stuck out a hand. Gardener, who had no idea that he would meet this man in the not-too-distant future under far less cheery circumstances, took it and shook it.

'Jim Gardener. Thanks again.'

'Shoot a pickle,' Freeman Moss scoffed. He got the truck moving. It shuddered along the edge of the road, picking up speed, Gard thought, not just grudgingly but with actual pain. Everything shook. The universal moaned beneath them like a hag in a chimney corner. The world's oldest toothbrush, its eroded bristles dark with the grease it had been employed to coax out of some clotted gear– or cog-tooth, chittered along the dashboard, passing an old air freshener of a naked woman with very large breasts on its way. Moss punched the clutch, managed to find second after an endless time spent grinding gears, and wrestled the pulp-truck back onto the road. 'Y'look half-drowned. Got half a thermos of coffee from the Drunken Donuts in Augusta left over from my dinner … you want it?'

Gardener drank it gratefully. It was strong, hot, and heavily laced with sugar. He also accepted a cigarette from the driver, dragging deeply and with pleasure, although it hurt his throat, which was getting steadily sorer.

Moss dropped him off just over the Haven town line at quarter to seven. The rain had slacked off, and the sky was lightening up in the west. 'Do believe God's gonna let through some sunset,' the driver said. 'I wish like hell I had a pair of shoes I could give you, mister – I usually carry an old pair of sneakers behind the seat, but it was so rainy today I never brought nothin' but m'gumrubbers.'

'Thanks, but I'll be fine. My friend is less than a mile up the road.' Actually Bobbi's place was still three miles away, but if he told Moss that, nothing would do but that he drive Gardener up there. Gardener was tired, increasingly feverish, still damp even after forty-five minutes of the heater's dry, blasting air … but he couldn't stand any more kindness today. In his present state of mind it could well drive him crazy.

'Okay. Good luck.'

'Thank you.'

He got down and waved as the truck turned off on a side-road and rumbled away toward home.

Even after Moss and his museum piece of a truck had disappeared, Gardener stood where he was for a moment longer, his wet totebag in one hand, his bare feet, white as Easter lilies, planted in the dirt of the soft shoulder, looking at the marker some two hundred feet back the way he had come. Home is the place where, when you have got there, they have to take you in, Frost had said. But he'd do well to remember he wasn't home. Maybe the worst mistake a man could make was to get to the idea that his friend's home was his own, especially when the friend was a woman whose bed you had once shared.

Not home, not at all – but he was in Haven.

He started to walk up the road toward Bobbi's house.

4

About fifteen minutes later, when the clouds in the west finally broke open to let through the westering sun, something strange happened: a burst of music, loud, clear, and brief, went through Gardener's head.

He stopped, looking at the sunlight as it spilled across rolling miles of wet woods and hayfields in the west, the rays beaming down like the dramatic sunrays in a DeMille Bible epic. Route 9 began to rise here, and the western view was long and gorgeous and solemn, the evening's light somehow English and pastoral in its clear beauty. The rain had given the landscape a sleek, washed look, deepening colors, seeming to fulfill the texture of things. Gardener was suddenly very glad he had not committed suicide – not in any corny Art Linkletter way, but because he had been allowed this moment of beauty and perceptual glow. Standing here, now almost at the end of his energy, feverish and sick, he felt a child's simple wonder.

All was still and silent in the final sunshine of evening. He could see no sign of industry or technology. Humanity, yes: a big red barn attached to a white farmhouse, sheds, a trailer or two, but that was all.

The light. It was the light that struck him so strongly.

Its sweet clarity, so old and deep – those rays of sun slanting almost horizontally through the unraveling clouds as this long, confusing, exhausting day neared its end. That ancient light seemed to deny time itself, and Gardener almost expected to hear a huntsman winding his horn, announcing 'All Assemble.' He would hear dogs, and horses' hooves, and and that was when the music, jarring and modern, blasted through his head, scattering all thought. His hands flew to his temples in a startled gesture. The burst lasted at least five seconds, perhaps as long as ten, and what he heard was perfectly identifiable; it was Dr Hook singing 'Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk.'

The lyric was tinny but clear enough – as if he were listening to a small transistor radio, the kind that people used to take to the beach with them before that punk-rock group Walkman and the Ghetto-Blasters had taken over the world. But it wasn't pouring into his ears, that lyric; it was coming from the front of his head … from the place where the doctors had filled a hole in his skull with a piece of metal.

'The queen of all the nightbirds,

A player in the dark,

She don't say nothing

But baby makes her blue jeans talk.'

The volume was so loud it was almost unbearable. It had happened to him once before, this music in his head, after he'd stuck his finger into a light socket – and was he drunk at the time? My dear, does a dog piss on a fireplug?

He had discovered such musical visitations were neither hallucinatory nor all that rare – people had gotten radio transmissions on the lawn flamingoes in their yards; on teeth fillings; on the steel rims of their spectacles. For a week and a half in 1957 a family in Charlotte, North Carolina, had received signals from a classical-music station in Florida. They first heard them coming from the bathroom water glass. Soon other glasses in the house began to pick up the sound. Before it ended, the whole house was filled with the eerie sound of glassware broadcasting Bach and Beethoven, the music broken only by an occasional time-check. Finally, with a dozen violins holding one long, high note, almost all the glasses in the house shattered spontaneously and the phenomenon ceased.

So Gardener had known he wasn't alone, and had been sure he wasn't going crazy – but that wasn't much comfort, and it never had been as loud as this after the light-socket incident.

The sound of Dr Hook faded as quickly as it had come. Gardener stood tensely, waiting for it to come back. It didn't. What came instead, louder and more urgent than before, was a repetition of what had gotten him going in the first place: Bobbi's in trouble!

He turned away from the western view and started up Route 9 again. And although he was feverish and very tired, he walked fast – in fact, before long he was almost running.

5

It was seven-thirty when Gardener finally arrived at Bobbi's – what the locals still called the old Garrick place even after all these years. Gardener came swinging up the road, puffing, his color high and unhealthy. Here was the Rural Free Delivery box, its door slightly ajar, the way both Bobbi and Joe Paulson, the mailman, left it so it would be easier for Peter to paw open. There was the driveway, with Bobbi's blue pickup truck parked in it. The stuff in the truck bed had been covered with a tarp to protect it from the rain. And there was the house itself, with a light shining through the east window, the one where Bobbi kept her rocker and did her reading.

Everything looked all right; not a single sour note. Five years ago – even three -Peter would have barked at the arrival of a stranger outside, but Peter had gotten older. Hell, they all had.

Standing out here, Bobbi's place held the sort of quiet, pastoral loveliness that the western view at the town line had held for him – it represented all the things Gardener wished he had for himself. A sense of peace, or maybe just a sense of place. Certainly he could see nothing odd as he stood here by the mailbox. It looked – felt – like the house of a person who is content with herself. Not completely at rest, exactly, or retired, or checked out from the world's concerns … but rocking steady. This was the house of a sane, relatively happy woman. It had not been built in the tornado belt.

All the same, something was wrong.

He stood there, the stranger out here in the dark,

(but I'm not a stranger I'm a friend her friend Bobbi's friend … aren't I?)

and a sudden, frightening impulse rose within him: to leave. Just turn on one bare heel and bug out. Because he suddenly doubted if he wanted to find out what was going on inside that house, what kind of trouble Bobbi had gotten herself into.

(Tommyknockers Gard that's what kind Tommyknockers)

He shivered.

(late last night and the night before Tommyknockers Tommyknockers at Bobbi's door and I don't know if you can)

Stop it.

(because Gard's so afraid of the Tommyknocker man)

He licked his lips, trying to tell himself it was just the fever that made them feel so dry.

Get out, Gard! Blood on the moon!

The fear was now very deep indeed, and if it had been anyone but Bobbi – anyone but his last real friend – he would have split, all right. The farmhouse looked rustic and pleasant, the light spilling from the east window was cozy and all looked well … but the boards and the glass, the stones in the driveway, the very air pressing against his face … all these things screamed at him to leave, get out, that things inside that house were bad, dangerous, perhaps even evil.

(Tommyknockers)

But whatever else was in there, Bobbi was too. He hadn't come all these miles, most in the pouring rain, to turn and run at the last second. So, in spite of the dread, he left the mailbox and started up the driveway, moving slowly, wincing as the sharp stones dug at the tender soles of his feet.

Then the front door jerked open, startling his heart up into his throat in a single nimble bound and he thought It's one of them, one of the Tommyknockers, it's going to rush down here and grab me and eat me up! He was barely able to stifle a scream.

The silhouette in the doorway was thin – much too thin, he thought, to be Bobbi Anderson. who had never been beefy but who was solidly built and pleasantly round in all the right places. But the voice, shrill and wavering though it was, was unmistakably Bobbi's … and Gardener relaxed a little, because Bobbi sounded even more terrified than he felt, standing by the mailbox and looking at the house.

'Who is it? Who's there?'

'It's Gard, Bobbi.'

There was a long pause. There were footfalls on the porch.

Cautiously: 'Gard? Is it really you?'

'Yeah.' He worked his way over the hard, biting stones of the driveway to the lawn. And he asked the question he had come all this way and deferred his own suicide to ask: 'Bobbi, are you all right?'

The quaver left Bobbi's voice, but Gardener could still not see her clearly – the sun had long since gone behind the trees, and the shadows were thick. He wondered where Peter was.

'I'm fine,' Bobbi said, just as if she had always looked so terribly thin, just as though she had always greeted arrivals in her dooryard with a shrill voice full of fear.

She came down the porch steps, and passed out of the shadow of the overhanging porch roof. As she did, Gardener got his first good look at her in the ashy twilight. He was struck by horror and wonder.

Bobbi was coming toward him, smiling, obviously delighted to see him. Her jeans fluttered and flapped on her, and so did her shirt; her face was gaunt, her eyes deep in their sockets, her forehead pale and somehow too wide, the skin taut and shiny. Bobbi's uncombed hair flopped against the nape of her neck and lay over her shoulders like waterweed cast up on a beach. The shirt was buttoned wrong. The fly of her jeans was three-quarters of the way down. She smelled dirty and sweaty and … well. as if she might have had an accident in her pants and then forgotten to change them.

A picture suddenly flashed into Gardener's mind: a photo of Karen Carpenter taken shortly before her death, which had allegedly resulted from anorexia nervosa. It had seemed to him the picture of a woman already dead but somehow alive, a woman who was all smiling teeth and shrieking feverish eyes. Bobbi looked like that now.

Surely she had lost no more than twenty pounds – that was all she could afford to lose and stay on her feet – but Gard's shocked mind kept insisting it was more like thirty, had to be.

She seemed to be on the last raggedy end of exhaustion. Her eyes, like the eyes of that poor lost woman on the magazine cover, were huge and glittery, her smile the huge brainless grin of a KO'd fighter just before his knees come unhinged.

'Fine!' this shambling, dirty, stumbling skeleton reiterated, and as Bobbi approached, Gardener could hear the waver in her voice again – not fear, as he'd thought, but utter exhaustion. 'Thought you'd given up on me! Good to see you, man!'

'Bobbi … Bobbi, Jesus Christ, what .

Bobbi was holding out a hand for Gardener to shake. It trembled wildly in the air, and Gardener saw how thin, how woefully, incredibly thin Bobbi Anderson's arm had become.

'A lot of stuff going on,' Bobbi croaked in her wavering voice. 'A lot of work done, a hell of a lot more left to do, but I'm getting there, getting there, wait'll you see – '

'Bobbi, what

'Fine, I'm fine,' Bobbi repeated, and she fell forward, semi-conscious, into Gardener's arms. She tried to say something else but only a loose gargle and a little spit came out. Her breasts were small, wasted pads against his forearm.

Gardener picked her up, shocked by how light she was. Yes, it was thirty, at least thirty. It was incredible, but not, unfortunately, deniable. He felt recognition that was both shocking and miserable: This isn't Bobbi at all. It's me. Me at the end of a jag.

He carried Bobbi swiftly up the steps and into the house.

1

He put Bobbi on the couch and went quickly to the telephone. He picked it up, meaning to dial 0 and ask the operator what number he should dial to get the nearest rescue unit. Bobbi needed a trip to the Derry Home Hospital and right away. A breakdown, Gardener supposed (although in truth he was so tired and confused that he hardly knew what to think). Some kind of breakdown. Bobbi Anderson seemed like the last person in the world to go over the top, but apparently she had.

Bobbi said something from the couch. Gardener didn't catch it at first; Bobbi's voice was little more than a harsh croak.

'What, Bobbi?'

'Don't call anybody,' Bobbi said. She managed a little more volume this time, but even that much effort seemed to nearly exhaust her. Her cheeks were flushed, the rest of her face waxen, and her eyes were as bright and feverish as blue gemstones -diamonds, or sapphires, perhaps. 'Don't … Gard, not anybody!'

Anderson fell back against the couch, panting rapidly. Gardener hung up the telephone and went to her, alarmed. Bobbi needed a doctor, that was obvious, and Gardener meant to get her one … but right now Bobbi's obvious agitation seemed more important.

'I'll stay right with you,' he said, taking her hand, 'if that's what's worrying you. God knows you stuck with me through enough sh – '

But Anderson had been shaking her head with mounting vehemence. 'Just need sleep,' she whispered. 'Sleep … and food in the morning. Mostly sleep. Haven't had any … three days. Four, maybe.'

Gardener looked at her, shocked again. He put together what Bobbi had just said with the way she looked.

'What rocket have you been riding?'– and why? his mind added. 'Bennies? Reds?' He thought of coke and then rejected it. Bobbi could undoubtedly afford coke if she wanted it, but Gardener didn't think even 'basing could keep a man or woman awake for three or four days and melt better than thirty pounds off in – Gardener calculated the time since he had last seen Anderson – in no more than three weeks.

'No dope,' Bobbi said. 'No drugs.' Her eyes rolled and glittered. Spit

drizzled helplessly from the corners of her mouth and she sucked it back. For an instant Gardener saw an expression in Bobbi's face he didn't like . . . one that scared him a little. It was an Anne expression. Old and crafty. Then Bobbi's eyes slipped closed, revealing lids stained the delicate purplish color of total exhaustion. When she opened her eyes again it was just Bobbi lying there … and Bobbi needed help.

'I'm going to phone for the rescue unit,' Gardener said, getting up again. 'You look really unwell, B – '

Bobbi's thin hand reached out and caught his wrist as Gardener turned to the phone. It held him with surprising strength. He looked down at Bobbi, and although she still looked terribly exhausted and almost desperately wasted, that feverish glitter was gone from her eyes. Now her gaze was straight and clear and sane.

'If you call anybody,' she said, her voice still wavering a little but almost normal, 'we're done being friends, Gard. I mean that. Call the rescue unit, or Derry Home, even old Doc Warwick in town, and that's the end of the line for us. You'll never see the inside of my house again. The door will be closed to you.'

Gardener looked at Bobbi with mounting dismay and horror. If he could have persuaded himself in that moment that Bobbi was delirious, he would gladly have done so … but she obviously wasn't.

'Bobbi you – ' – don't know what you're saying? But she did; that was the horror of it. She was threatening to end their friendship if Gardener didn't do what she wanted, using their friendship as a club for the first time in all the years Gardener had known her. And there was something else in Bobbi Anderson's eyes: the knowledge that her friendship was maybe the last thing on earth that Gardener valued.

Would it make any difference if I told you how much you look like your sister, Bobbi?

No – he saw in her face nothing would make any difference.

' – don't know how bad you look,' he finished lamely.

'No,' Anderson agreed, and a ghost of a smile surfaced on her face. 'I got an idea, though, believe me. Your face … better than any mirror. But, Gard – sleep is all I need. Sleep and . . .' Her eyes slipped shut again, and she opened them with an obvious effort. 'Breakfast,' she finished. 'Sleep and breakfast.'

'Bobbi, that isn't all you need.'

'No.' Bobbi's hand had not left Gardener's wrist and now it tightened again. 'I need you. I called for you. With my mind. And you heard, didn't you?'

'Yes,' Gardener said uncomfortably. 'I guess I did.'

'Gard . . .' Bobbi's voice slipped off. Gard waited, his mind in a turmoil. Bobbi needed medical help … but what she had said about ending their friendship if Gardener called anyone …

The soft kiss she put in the middle of his dirty palm surprised him. He

looked at her, startled, looked at her huge eyes. The fevered glitter had left them; all he saw in them now was pleading.

'Wait until tomorrow,' Bobbi said. 'If I'm not better tomorrow … a thousand times better … I'll go. All right?'

'Bobbi – '

'All right?' The hand tightened, demanding Gardener to say it was.

'Well … I guess .

'Promise me.'

'I promise.' Maybe, Gardener added mentally. If you don't go to sleep and then start to breathe funny. If I don't come over and check you around midnight and see your lips look like you've been eating blueberries. If you don't pitch a fit.

This was silly. Dangerous, cowardly … but most of all just silly. He had come out of the big black tornado convinced that killing himself would be the best way to end all of his misery and ensure that he caused no more misery in others. He had meant to do it; he knew that was so. He had been on the edge of jumping into that cold water. Then his conviction that Bobbi was in trouble

(I called and you heard didn't you)

had come and he was here. Now, ladies and gentlemen, he seemed to hear Allen Ludden saying in his quick, light, quizmaster's voice, here is your toss-up question. Ten points if you can tell me why Jim Gardener cares about Bobbi Anderson's threat to end their friendship, when Gardener himself means to end it by committing suicide? What? No one? Well, here's a surprise! I don't know, either!

'Okay,' Bobbi was saying. 'Okay, great.'

The agitation which had almost been terror slipped away – the fast gasping for breath slowed and some of the color faded from her cheeks. So the promise had been worth something, at least.

'Sleep, Bobbi.' He would sit up and watch for any change. He was tired, but he could drink coffee (and take one or two of whatever Bobbi'd been taking, if he came across them). He owed Bobbi a night's watching. There were nights when she had watched over him. 'Sleep now.' He gently disengaged his wrist from Bobbi's hand.

Her eyes closed, then slowly opened one last time. She smiled, a smile so sweet that he was in love with her again. She had that power over him. 'Just … like old times, Gard.'

'Yeah, Bobbi. Like old times.'

'I … love you .

'I love you too. Sleep.'

Her breathing deepened. Gardener sat beside her for three minutes, then five, watching that madonna smile, becoming more and more convinced she was asleep. Then, very slowly, Bobbi's eyes struggled open again.

'Fabulous,' she whispered.

'What?' Gardener leaned forward. He wasn't sure what she'd said.

'What it is … what it can do … what it will do

She's talking in her sleep, Gardener thought, but he felt a recurrence of the chill. That crafty expression was back in Bobbi's face. Not on it but in it, as if it had grown under the skin.

'You should have found it … I think it was for you, Gard

'What was?'

'Look around the place,' Bobbi said. Her voice was fading. 'You'll see. We'll finish digging it up together. You'll see it solves the … problems … all the problems . . .'

Gardener had to lean forward now to hear anything. 'What does, Bobbi?'

'Look around the place,' Bobbi repeated, and the last word drew out, deepening, and became a snore. She was asleep.

2

Gardener almost went to the phone again. It was close. He got up, but halfway across the living room he diverted, going to Bobbi's rocking chair instead. He would watch for a while first, he thought. Watch for a while and try to think what all this might mean.

He swallowed and winced at the pain in his throat. He was feverish, and he suspected the fever was no little one-degree job, either. He felt more than unwell; he felt unreal.

Fabulous … what it is … what it can do …

He would sit here for a while and think some more. Then he would make a pot of strong coffee and dump about six aspirins into it. That would take care of the aches and fever, at least temporarily. Might help keep him awake, too.

… what it will do …

Gard closed his eyes, dozing himself. That was all right. He might doze, but not for long; he'd never been able to sleep sitting up. And Peter was apt to appear at any time; he would see his old friend Gard, jump into his lap, and get his balls. Always. When it came to jumping into the chair with you and getting your balls, Peter never failed. Hell of an alarm clock, if you happened to be sleeping. Five minutes, that's all. Forty winks. No harm, no foul.

You should have found it. I think it was for you, Gard …

He drifted, and his doze quickly deepened into sleep so deep it was close to coma.

3

shusshhhhh …

He's looking down at his skis, plain brown wood strips racing over the snow, hypnotized by their liquid speed. He doesn't realize this state of near hypnosis

until a voice on his left says: 'One thing you bastards never remember to mention at your fucking Communist antipower rallies is just this: in thirty years of peaceful nuclear-power development, we've never been caught once.

Ted is wearing a reindeer sweater over faded jeans. He skis fast and well. Gardener, on the other hand, is completely out of control.

'You're going to crash,' a voice on his right says. He looks over and it is Arglebargle– Arglebargle has begun to rot. His fat face, which had been flushed with alcohol on the night of the party, is now the yellow-gray of old curtains hanging in dirty windows. His flesh has begun to slough downward, pulling and splitting. Arglebargle sees his shock and terror. His gray lips spread in a grin.

'That's right,' he says. 'I'm dead. It really was a heart attack. Not indigestion, not my gall-bladder. I collapsed five minutes after you were gone. They called an ambulance and the kid I hired to tend bar got my heart started again with CPR, but I died for good in the ambulance.'

The grin stretches; becomes as moony as the grin of a dead trout lying on the deserted beach of a poisoned lake.

'I died at a stoplight on Storrow Drive,' Arglebargle says.

'No,' Gardener whispers. This … this is what he has always feared. The final, irrevocable, drunken act.

'Yes,' the dead man insists as they speed down the hill, drifting closer to the trees. 'I invited you into my house, gave you food and drink, and you repaid me by killing me in a drunken argument.'

'Please … I. . .'

'You what? You what?' from his left again. The reindeer on Ted's sweater have disappeared. They have been replaced by yellow radiation warning symbols. 'You nothing, that's what! Where do you latter-day Luddites think all that power comes from?'

'You killed me,' Arberg drones from his right, 'but you'll pay. You're going to crash, Gardener.'

'Do you think we get it from the Wizard of Oz?' Ted screams. Weeping sores suddenly erupt on his face. His lips bubble, peel, crack, begin to suppurate. One of his eyes shimmers into the milkiness of cataract. Gardener realizes with mounting horror that he is looking into a face exhibiting symptoms of a man in the last advanced stages of radiation sickness.

The radiation symbols on Ted's shirt are turning black.

'You'll crash, you bet,' Arglebargle drones on. 'Crash.'

He is weeping with terror now, as he wept after shooting his wife, hearing the unbelievable report of the gun in his hand, watching as she staggered backward against the kitchen counter, one hand clapped to her cheek like a woman uttering a shocked 'My land! I NEVER!' And then the blood squirting through her fingers and his mind in a last desperate effort to deny it all had thought Ketchup, relax, that's just ketchup. Then beginning to weep as he was now.

'As far as you guys are concerned, all your responsibility ends at the wall plate where you plug in.' Pus runs and dribbles down Ted's face. His hair has fallen out. The sores cover his skull. His mouth spreads in a grin as moony as Arberg's. Now in a last extremity of terror Gardener realizes he is skiing out of control down Straight Arrow flanked by dead men. 'But you'll never stop us, you know. No one will. The pile is out of control, you see. Has been since … oh, around 1939, I'd reckon. We reached critical mass along about 1965. It's out of control. The explosion will come soon.'

'No … no . . .'

'You've been riding high, but those who ride highest fall hardest,' Arberg drones. 'Murder of a host is the foulest murder of all. You're going to crash … crash … crash!'

How true it is! He tries to turn but his skis remain stubbornly on course. Now he can see the big, hoary old pine. Arglebargle and Ted the Power Man are gone and he thinks: Were they Tommyknockers, Bobbi?

He can see a red swatch of paint around the pine's gnarly trunk … and then it begins to flake and split. As he slides helplessly toward the tree he sees that it has come alive, that it has split open to swallow him. The yawning tree grows and swells, seems to rush toward him, grows tentacles and there is a horrible rotten blackness in its center, with red paint around it like the lipstick of some sinister whore, and he can hear dark winds howling in that black, squirming, mouth and

4

he doesn't wake up then, as much as it seems he has – everyone knows that even the most outlandish dreams feel real, that they may even have their own spurious logic, but this is not real, cannot be. He has simply exchanged one dream for another. Happens all the time.

In this dream he has been dreaming about his old skiing accident – for the second time that day, can you believe it? Only this time the tree he struck, the one which almost killed him, grows a rotted mouth like a squirming knothole. He snaps awake and finds himself sitting in Bobbi's rocking chair, too relieved by simple waking to care that he's stiff all over, and that his throat is now so sore that it feels like it's been lined with barbed wire.

He thinks: I'm going to get up and make myself a dose of coffee and aspirin. Wasn't I going to do that before? He starts to get up and that's when Bobbi opens her eyes. That's also when he knows he is dreaming, must be, because green rays of light shoot from Bobbi's eyes – Gardener is reminded of Superman's X-ray vision in the comic-books, the way the artist always drew it in lime-colored beams. But the light which comes from Bobbi's eyes is swamplike and somehow dreadful … there is something rotted about it, like the drifting glow of St Elmo's fire in a swamp on a hot night.

Bobbi sits up slowly and looks around … looks toward Gardener. He tries to tell her no … Please don't put that light on me.

No words come out and as that green light hits him he sees that Bobbi's eyes are blazing with it – at its source it is as green as emeralds, as bright as sun-fire. He cannot look at it, has to avert his eyes. He tries to bring an arm up to shield his face but he can't, his arm is too heavy. It'll burn, he thinks, it'll burn, and then in a few days the first sores will show up, you'll think they're pimples at first because that's what radiation sickness looks like when it starts, just a bunch of pimples, only these pimples never heal, they only get worse … and worse …

He hears Arberg's voice, a disembodied holdover from the previous dream, and now there seems to be triumph in his drone: 'I knew you were going to crash, Gardener!'

The light touches him … washes over him. Even with his eyes squeezed tightly shut it lights the darkness as green as radium watch-dials. But there is no real pain in dreams, and there is none here. The bright green light is neither hot nor cold. It is nothing. Except …

His throat.

His throat is no longer sore.

And he hears this, clearly and unmistakably: '– per cent off! This is the sort of price reduction that may never be repeated! EVERYONE gets credit! Recliners! Waterbeds! Living room s – '

The plate in his skull, talking again. Gone almost before it was fairly begun.

Like his sore throat.

And that green light was gone, too.

Gardener opens his eyes … cautiously.

Bobbi is lying on the couch, eyes shut, deeply asleep … just as she was. What's all this about rays shooting out of eyes? Good God!

He sits in the rocking chair again. Swallows. No pain. The fever has gone down a lot, too.

Coffee and aspirin, he thinks. You were going to get up for coffee and aspirin, remember?

Sure, he thinks, settling more comfortably into the rocking chair and closing his eyes. But no one gets coffee and aspirin in a dream. I'll do it just as soon as I wake up.

Gard, you are awake.

But that, of course, could not be. In the waking world, people don't shoot green beams from their eyes, beams that cure fevers and sore throats. Dreams si, reality no.

He crosses his arms over his chest and drifts away. He knows no more – either sleeping or waking -for the rest of that night.

5

When Gardener woke up, bright light was streaming into his face through the western window. His back hurt like a bastard, and when he stood up his neck gave a wretched, arthritic creak that made him wince. It was quarter of nine. He looked at Bobbi and felt a moment of suffocating fear – in that moment he was sure Bobbi was dead. Then he saw that she was just so deeply, movelessly asleep that she gave a good impression of being dead. It was a mistake anyone might have made. Bobbi's chest rose in slow, steady pulls with long but even pauses in between. Gardener timed her and saw she was breathing no more than six times a minute.

But she looked better this morning – not great, but a lot better than the haggard scarecrow who had reeled out to greet him last night.

Doubt if I looked much better, he thought, and went into Bobbi's bathroom to shave.

The face looking back from the mirror wasn't as bad as he had feared, but he noted with some dismay that his nose had bled again in the night – not a lot, but enough to have covered his philtrum and most of his upper lip. He got a facecloth out of the cupboard to the right of the sink and turned on the hot water to wet it down.

He put the facecloth under the water flowing from the hot tap with all the absentmindedness of long habit – with Bobbi's water heater, you just about had time for a cup of coffee and a smoke before you got a lukewarm stream – and that was on a good d

'Youch!'

He pulled his hand back from water so hot it was steaming. Okay, that was what he got for assuming Bobbi was just going to go clipclopping down the road of life without ever getting her damned water heater fixed.

Gardener put his scalded palm to his mouth and looked at the water coming out of the tap. It had already fogged the lower edge of the shaving mirror on the back of the medicine cabinet. He reached out, found the tap's handle almost too hot to touch, and used the facecloth to turn it off. Then he put in the rubber plug, drew a little more hot water – cautiously! – and added a generous dollop of cold. The pad of flesh below his left thumb had reddened a little.

He opened the medicine cabinet and moved things around until he came to the prescription bottle of Valium with his own name on the label. If that stuff improves with age, it ought to be great, he thought. Still almost full. Well, what did he expect? Whatever Bobbi had been using, it sure as hell had been the opposite of Valium.

Gardener didn't want it, either. He wanted what was behind it, if it was still

Ali! Success!

He pulled out a double-edge razor and a package of blades. He looked a little sadly at the layer of dust on the razor – it had been a long time since he'd shaved in the morning here at Bobbi's – and then rinsed it off. At least she didn't throw it out, he thought. That would have been worse than the dust.

A shave made him feel better. He concentrated on it, drawing it out while his thoughts ran their own course.

He finished, replaced the shaving stuff behind the Valium and cleaned up. Then he looked thoughtfully at the tap with the H on its handle, and decided to go down cellar and see what sort of magnificent water heater Bobbi had put in. The only other thing to do was watch Bobbi sleep, which she seemed to be doing well on her own.

He crossed into the kitchen thinking that he really did feel well, especially now that the aches from a night in Bobbi's rocking chair were starting to work out of his back and neck. You're the guy who's never been able to sleep sitting up, right? he jeered softly at himself. Crashing out on breakwaters is more your style, right? But this ribbing was nothing like the harsh, barely coherent self-mockery of the day before. The one thing he always forgot in the grip of the hangovers and the terrible post-jag depressions was the feeling of regeneration that sometimes came later. You could wake up one day realizing you hadn't put any poison in your system the night before … the week before … maybe the whole month before … and you felt really good.

As for what he had been afraid must be the onset of the flu, maybe even pneumonia – that was gone, too. No sore throat. No plugged nose. No fever. God knew he had been a perfect target for a germ, after eight days drinking, sleeping rough, and finally hitching back to Maine in his bare feet during a rainstorm. But it had passed off in the night. Sometimes God was good.

He paused in the middle of the kitchen, his smile drifting away into a momentary expression that was puzzled and a little disquieted. A fragment of his dream – or dreams – came slipping back

(radio ads in the night … does that have something to do with feeling well this morning?)

and then it faded again. He dismissed it, content with the fact that he felt well and Bobbi looked well – better, anyway. If Bobbi wasn't awake by ten o'clock, ten-thirty at the latest, he would wake her up. If Bobbi felt better and spoke rationally, fine. They could discuss whatever had happened to her (SOMETHING sure did, Gardener thought, and wondered absently if she had gotten some terrible news report from home … a bulletin that would undoubtedly have been served up by Sister Anne). They would go on from there. If she still even slightly resembled the spaced-out and rather creepy Bobbi Anderson who had greeted him the night before, Gardener was going to call a doctor whether Bobbi liked it or not.

He opened the cellar door and fumbled for the old-fashioned toggle switch on the wall. He found it. The switch was the same. The light wasn't. Instead of the feeble flow from two sixty-watt bulbs – the only illumination in Bobbi's cellar since time out of mind – the cellar lit up with a brisk white glare. It looked as bright as a discount department store down there. Gardener started down, hand reaching for the rickety old banister. He found a thick and solid new one instead. It was held firmly against the wall with new brass fittings. Some of the stair treads, which had been definitely queasy, had also been replaced.

Gardener reached the bottom of the steps and stood looking around, his surprise now bordering on some stronger emotion – it was almost shock. That slightly moldy root-cellar smell was gone, too.

She looked like a woman running on empty, no joke. Right out on the ragged edge. She couldn't even remember how many days it had been since she'd gotten any sleep. No wonder. I've heard of home improvement, but this is ridiculous. She couldn't have done it all herself, though. Could she? Of course not.

But Gardener suspected that, somehow, Bobbi had.

If Gardener had awakened here instead of on the breakwater at Arcadia Point, with no memory of the immediate past, he wouldn't have known he was in Bobbi's cellar, although he had been here countless times before. The only reason he was sure of it now was because he had gotten here from Bobbi's kitchen.

That rooty smell wasn't entirely gone, but it was diminished. The cellar's dirt floor had been neatly raked – no, not just raked, Gardener saw. Cellar dirt got old and sour after a while; you had to do something about it if you planned to be spending much time belowground. Anderson had apparently brought in a fresh load of dirt and had spread it around to dry before raking. Gardener supposed that was what had sweetened the atmosphere of the place.

Fluorescents were racked in overhead rows, each hooded fixture hung from the old beams by chains and more brass fittings. They shed an even white glow. All the fixtures were single tubes except for those over the worktable; those each had a pair, so here the glow was so bright that it made Gardener think of operating theaters. He walked over to Bobbi's worktable. Bobbi's new worktable.

Anderson had had an ordinary kitchen table covered with dirty Con-Tact paper before. It had been lit with a gooseneck study-lamp and littered with a few tools, most of them not in very good condition. and a few plastic boxes of nails, screws, bolts, and the like. It was the small-repairs workplace of a woman who is neither very good at nor very interested in small repairs.

The old kitchen table was gone, replaced by three long, light tables, the sort on which bake-sale goods are placed at church sales. They had been placed end to end along the left side of the cellar to make one long table. It was littered with hardware, tools, spools of insulated wire both thin and thick, coffee cans full of brads and staples and fasteners … dozens of other items. Or hundreds.

Then there were the batteries.

There was a carton of them under the table, a huge loose collection of long-life batteries still in their blister-packs: C-cells, D-cells, double-A's, triple-A's, nine-volts. Must be two hundred dollars' worth in there, Gardener thought, and more rolling around on the table. What in the blue hell – ?

Dazed, he walked along the table like a man checking out the merchandise and deciding whether or not to buy. It looked as though Bobbi was making several different things at once . . . and Gardener was not sure what any of them were. Here, standing halfway along the table, was a large square box with its front panel slid aside to reveal eighteen different buttons. Beside each button was the title of a popular song -'Raindrops Keep Fallin'on My Head,' 'New York, New York,' 'Lara's Theme,' and so on. Next to it, an instruction sheet tacked neatly to the table identified it as the one and only SilverChime Digital Doorbell (Made in Taiwan).

Gardener couldn't imagine why Bobbi would want a doorbell with a built-in microchip that would allow the user to program a different song whenever she wanted to – did she think Joe Paulson would dig hearing 'Lara's Theme' when he had to come to the door with a package? But that wasn't all. Gardener could at least have understood the use of the SilverChime Digital Doorbell, if not Bobbi's motivation in installing one. But she seemed to be in the process of modifying the thing somehow – hooking it, in fact, into the workings of a boom-box radio the size of a small suitcase.

Half a dozen wires – four thin, two moderately thick – snaked between the radio (its instruction sheet also tacked neatly to the table) and the opened gut of the SilverChime.

Gardener looked at this for some time and then passed on.

Breakdown. She's had a very odd sort of mental breakdown. The kind Pat Summerall would love.

Here was something else he recognized – a furnace accessory called a rebreather. You attached it to the flue and it was supposed to recirculate some of the heat that ordinarily got wasted. It was the sort of gadget Bobbi would see in a catalogue, or maybe in the Augusta Trustworthy Hardware Store, and talk about buying. She never actually would, though, because if she bought it she would have to install it.

But now she apparently had bought it and installed it.

You can't say she's having a breakdown and 'that's all,' because when someone who's really creative highsides it, it's rarely a case of 'that's all.' Crackups are probably never pretty, but when someone like Bobbi tips over, it can be sort of amazing. Just look at this shit.

Do you believe that?

Yeah, I do. I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns – you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshippers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns. If you don't believe it, I repeat: look at this shit.

Over there was the water heater, a white, cylindrical bulk to the right of the root-cellar door. It looked the same, but …

Gardener went over, wanting to see how Bobbi had souped it up so radically.

She's gone on a mad home-improvement kick. And the nuttiest thing is that she doesn't seem to have differentiated between things like fixing the water heater and customizing doorbells. New banister. Fresh dirt brought in and raked over the floor of the root cellar. Christ knows what else. No wonder she's exhausted. And just by the bye, Gard, exactly where did Bobbi come by the know-how to do all this stuff? If it was a correspondence course from Popular Mechanix, she must have really crammed.

His first dazed surprise at coming on this nutty workshop in Bobbi's basement was becoming deepening unease. It wasn't just the evidences of obsessive behavior that he saw along that table – heaps of equipment too neatly organized, all four corners of the instruction sheets tacked down – that bothered him. Nor was it the evidence of mania in Bobbi's apparent failure to discriminate between worthwhile renovations and nonsensical (apparently nonsensical, Gardener amended) ones.

What gave Gardener the creeps was thinking about – trying to think about – the huge, the profligate amounts of energy that had been expended here. To have done just those things he had seen so far, Bobbi must have blazed like a torch. There were projects like the fluorescent lights which had already been completed. There were the ones still pending. There were the trips to Augusta she must have needed to make to get all the equipment, hardware, and batteries. Plus getting sweet dirt to replace the sour. Don't forget that.

What could have driven her to it?

Gardener didn't know, he didn't like to imagine Bobbi here, racing back and forth, working on two different do-it-yourself projects at once, or five, or ten. The image was too clear. Bobbi with the sleeves of her shirt rolled up and the top three buttons undone, beads of sweat trickling down between her breasts, her hair pulled back in a rough horsetail, eyes burning, face pale except for two hectic red patches, one in each cheek. Bobbi looking like Ms Wizard gone insane, growing more haggard as she screwed screws, bolted bolts, soldered wires, trucked in dirt, and stood on her stepladder, bent backwards like a ballet dancer, sweat running down her face, cords standing out in her neck as she hung up the new lights. Oh, and while you're at it, don't forget Bobbi putting in the new wiring and fixing the hot-water tank.

Gardener touched the tank's enamel side and pulled his hand back fast. It looked the same, but it wasn't. It was hot as hell. He squatted and opened the hatch at the bottom of the tank.

That was when Gardener really sailed off the edge of the world.

6

Before, the water heater had run on LP gas. The small-bore copper tubes which fed gas to the tank's burner ran from tanks in a hook-up behind the house. The delivery truck from Dead River Gas in Derry came once a month and replaced the tanks if they needed replacing – usually they did, because the tank was wasteful as well as inefficient … two things that went together more often than not, now that Gard thought about it. The first thing Gardener noticed was that the copper tubes were no longer hooked into the tank. They hung free behind it, their ends stuffed with cloth.

Holy shit, how's she heating her water? he thought, and then he did look into the hatch, and then for a little while he froze completely.

His mind seemed clear enough, yes, but that disconnected, floating sensation had come back – that feeling of separation. Ole Gard was going up again, up like a child's silver Puffer balloon. He knew he felt afraid, but this knowledge was dim, hardly important, compared to that dismal feeling of coming untethered from himself. No, Gard, Jesus! a mournful voice cried from deep inside him.

He remembered going to the Fryeburg Fair when he was a little kid, no more than ten. He went into the Mirror Maze with his mother, and the two of them had gotten separated. That was the first time he had felt this odd sensation of separation from self, of drifting away, or above, his physical body and his physical (if there was such a thing) mind. He could see his mother, oh yes – five mothers, a dozen, a hundred mothers, some short, some tall, some fat, some scrawny. At the same time he saw five, a dozen, a hundred Gards. Sometimes he'd see one of his reflections join one of hers and he would reach out, almost absently, expecting to touch her slacks. Instead, there was only empty air … or another mirror.

He had wandered for a long time, and he supposed he had panicked, but it hadn't felt like panic, and so far as he could remember, no one had acted like he had been in a panic when he finally floundered his way out – this only after fifteen minutes of twisting, turning, doubling back, and running into barriers of clear glass. His mother's brow had furrowed slightly for a moment, then cleared. That was all. But he had felt panic, just as he was feeling it now: that sensation of feeling your mind coming unbolted from itself, like a piece of machinery falling apart in zero-g.

It comes … but it goes. Wait, Gard. Just wait for it to be over.

So he squatted on his hunkers, looking into the open hatch at the base of Anderson's water tank, and waited for it to be over, as he had once waited for his feet to lead him down the correct passage and out of that terrible Mirror Maze at the Fryeburg Fair.

The removal of the gas ring had left a round hollow area at the base of the tank. This area had been filled with a wild tangle of wires – red, green, blue, yellow. In the center of the tangle was a cardboard egg carton. HILLCREST FARMS, the blue printing read. GRADE A JUMBO. Sitting in each of the egg cradles was an EverReady alkaline D-cell battery, + terminals up. A tiny funnel-shaped gadget capped the terminals, and all of the wires seemed to either start – or end – in these caps. As he looked longer, in a state that did not precisely feel like panic, Gardener saw that his original impression – that the wires were in a wild jumble – was no more true than his original impression that the stuff on Bobbi's worktable was in a litter. No, there was order in the way the wires came out of or went into those twelve funnel-shaped caps – as few as two wires coming in or going out of some, as many as six coming in or going out of others. There was even order in the shape they made – it was a small arch. Some of the wires bent back into the funnels capped over other batteries, but most went to circuit boards propped against the sides of the water tank's heating compartment. They were from electronic toys made in Korea, Gardener surmised -too much cheap, silvery solder on corrugated fiberboard. A weird Gyro Gearloose conglomeration if ever there had been one … but this weird conglomeration of components was doing something. Oh yes. It was heating water fast enough to raise blisters, for one thing.

In the center of the compartment, directly over the egg carton, in the arch formed by the wires, glowed a bright ball of light, no larger than a quarter but seemingly as bright as the sun.

Gardener had automatically put his fist up to block out that savage glow, which shone out of the hatch in a solid white bar of light that cast his shadow long behind him on the dirt floor. He could look at it only by wincing his eyes down to the barest slits and then opening his fingers a little.

As bright as the sun.

Yes – only instead of yellow, it was a dazzling bluish-white, like a sapphire. Its glow pulsated and shifted slightly, then remained constant, then pulsated and shifted again: it was cycling.

But where is the heat? Gardener thought, and that began to bring him back to himself. Where is the heat?

He reached one hand up and laid it on the smooth, enameled side of the tank again – but only for a second. He snatched it away, thinking of the way the water had smoked coming out of the tap in the bathroom. There was hot water in the tank, all right, and plenty of it – by all rights it should boil away to steam and blow Bobbi Anderson's tank all over the basement. It wasn't doing that, obviously, and that was a mystery … but it was a minor mystery compared to the fact that he wasn't feeling any heat coming out of the hatch – none at all. He should have burned his fingers on the little knob you pulled to open the hatch, and when it was open, that coin-sized sun should have burned the skin right off his face. So … ?

Slowly, hesitantly, Gardener reached toward the opening with his left hand, keeping his right fisted before his eyes to block out the worst of the glow. His mouth was pulled down in a wince as he anticipated a burn.

His splayed fingers slipped into the hatchway . . . and then struck something yielding. He thought later it was a little like pushing your fingers into a stretched nylon stocking – only this gave just so much and then stopped. Your fingers never punched through, as they would have punched through a nylon stocking.

But there was no barrier. None, at least, that he could see.

He stopped pressing and the invisible membrane gently pushed his fingers back out of the hatchway. He looked at his fingers and saw they were shaking.

It's a force-field, that's why I'm not getting burned. Some sort of a force-field that damps heat. Dear God, I've walked into a science-fiction story from Startling Stories. Right around 1947, I'd guess. I wonder if I made the cover? If I did, who drew me? Virgil Finlay? Hannes Bok?

His hand was beginning to shake harder. He groped for the little door, missed it, found it again, and slammed it shut, cutting out that dazzling flood of white light. He lowered his right hand slowly but he could still see an afterimage of that tiny sun, the way one can see a flashbulb after it has gone off in one's face. Only what Gardener saw was a large green fist floating in the air, with bright, ectoplasmic blue between the fingers.

The afterimage faded. The shakes didn't.

Gardener had never wanted a drink so badly in his life.

7

He got one in Anderson's kitchen.

Bobbi didn't drink much, but she kept what she called 'the staples' in a cabinet behind the pots and pans: bottle of gin, bottle of Scotch, bottle of bourbon, bottle of vodka. Gardener pulled out the bourbon – some cut-rate brand, but beggars couldn't be choosers – poured an inch into a plastic tumbler, and downed it.

Better watch your step, Gard. You're tempting fate.

Except he wasn't. Right now he almost would have welcomed a jag, but the cyclone had gone somewhere else to blow … at least for the time being. He poured another two inches of bourbon into the glass, contemplated it for a moment, then poured most of it down the sink. He put the bottle back, and added water and ice cubes, converting what had been liquid dynamite into a civilized drink.

He thought the kid on the beach would have approved.

He supposed the dreamlike calm that had surrounded him when he came out of the Mirror Maze, and felt again now, was a defense against just lying down on the floor and screaming until he lost consciousness. The calm was all right. What scared him was how fast his mind had gone to work trying to convince him that none of it was true – that he had hallucinated the whole thing. Incredibly, his mind was suggesting that what he had seen when he opened the hatch in the heater's base was a very bright light bulb – two hundred watts, say.

It wasn't a light bulb and it wasn't hallucination. It was something like a sun, very small and hot and bright, floating in an arch of wires, over an egg carton filled with D-cells. Now you can go crazy if you want, or get Jesus, or get drunk but you saw what you saw and leave us not gild the lily, all right? All right.

He checked on Anderson and saw she was still sleeping like a stone. Gardener had decided to wake Bobbi up by ten-thirty if she hadn't awakened on her own; he looked at his watch now, and was astonished to see it was only twenty minutes past nine. He had been in the cellar much less time than he had thought.

Thinking of the cellar called up the surreal vision of that miniature sun hanging suspended in its arch of wires, glowing like a superhot tennis ball . . . and thinking about that brought back the unpleasant sense that his mind was uncoupling itself. He pushed it away. It didn't want to go. He pushed harder, telling himself he was simply not going to think about it anymore until Bobbi woke up and told him just what was going on around here.

He looked down at his arms and saw that he was sweating.

8

Gardener took his drink out back, where he found more evidence of Bobbi's almost supernatural burst of activity.

Her Tomcat tractor was standing in front of the large shed to the left of the garden – nothing unusual about that, it was where she most commonly left it when the weatherman said it wasn't going to get rained on. But even from twenty feet away Gardener could see that Anderson had done something radical to the Tomcat's motor.

No. No more. Forget this shit, Gard. Go home.

There was nothing dreamy or disconnected about that voice – it was harsh, vital with panic and scared dismay. For a moment Gardener felt himself on the verge of giving in to it … and then he thought what an abysmal betrayal that would be – of Bobbi, of himself. The thought of Bobbi had kept him from killing himself yesterday. And by not killing himself, he thought he had kept her from doing the same thing. The Chinese had a proverb: 'If you save a life, you are responsible for it.' But if Bobbi needed help, how was he supposed to give it? Didn't finding out begin with trying to find out just what had been going on out here?

He knocked back the end of the drink, set the empty glass on the top back step, and walked toward the Tomcat. He was distantly aware of the crickets singing in the high grass. He wasn't drunk, not squiffy, as far as he could tell; the booze seemed to have shot right past his entire nervous system. Gave it a miss, as the British said.

(like the leprechauns that made the shoes tap-tap-tappety-tap while the cobbler slept)

But Bobbi hadn't been sleeping, had she? Bobbi had been driven until she dropped – literally dropped – into Gardener's arms.

(tap-tap-tappety-tap knock-knock-knockety-knock late last night and the night before Tommyknockers Tommyknockers knocking at the door)

Standing by the Tomcat, looking into the open engine compartment, Gardener didn't just shiver – he shuddered like a man dying of cold, his upper teeth biting into his lower lip, his face pale, his temples and forehead covered with sweat.

(they fixed the water heater and the Tomcat. too there's lots of things the Tommyknockers do)

The Tomcat was a small working vehicle which would have been almost useless on a big spread where farming was the main work. It was bigger than a riding lawnmower but smaller than the smallest tractor Deere or Farmall had ever made, but just right for someone who kept a garden that was just a little too big to be called a plot – and that was the case here. Bobbi had a garden of about an acre and a half -beans, cukes, peas, corn, radishes, and potatoes. No carrots, no cabbages, no zucchini, no squash.

'I don't grow what I don't like,' she had told Gardener once. 'Life's too short.'

The Tomcat was fairly versatile; it had to be – even a well-off gentleman farmer would have trouble justifying the purchase of a $2,500 mini-tractor on the basis of a one-acre garden. It could roto-till, mow grass with one attachment and cut hay with another; it could haul stuff over rough terrain (she had used it as a skidder in the fall, and so far as Gardener knew Bobbi had gotten stuck only once), and in the winter she attached a snow-blower unit and cleared her driveway in half an hour. It was powered by a sturdy four-cc engine.

Or had been.

The engine was still in there, but now it was tarted up with the weirdest array of gadgets and attachments imaginable – Gardener found himself thinking of the doorbell/radio thing on the table in Anderson's basement, and wondering if Bobbi meant to put it on the Tomcat soon . . . maybe it was radar, or something. A single bewildered bark of laughter escaped him.

A mayonnaise jar jutted from one side of the engine. It was filled with a fluid too colorless to be gasoline and screwed into a brass fitting on the engine head. Sitting on the cowling was something that would have looked more at home on a Chevy Nova or SuperSport: the air scoop of a supercharger.

The modest carb had been replaced with a scrounged four-barrel. Bobbi had had to cut a hole through the cowling to make room for it.

And there were wires – wires everywhere, snaking in and out and up and down and all around, making connections that made absolutely no sense . . . at least, not as far as Gardener could see.

He looked at the Tomcat's rudimentary instrument panel, started to look away … and then his gaze snapped back, his eyes widening.

The Tomcat had a stick shift, and the gearing pattern had been printed on a square of metal bolted to the dashboard above the oil-pressure gauge. Gardener had seen that square of metal often enough; he had driven the Tomcat frequently over the years. Before it had always been:

3

N 4

2 R

Now, something new had been added – something which was just simple enough to be terrifying:

3

N 4 UP

2 R

You don't believe that, do you?

I don't know.

Come on, Gard -flying tractors? Give me a break!

She's got a miniature sun in her water heater.

Bullshit. I think it might have been a light bulb, a bright one, like a two-hundred-watt

It was not a light bulb!

Okay, all right, calm down. It just sounds like an ad for a really E. T. ripoff, that's all. 'You'll believe a tractor can fly.'

Shut up.

Or 'John Deere, phone home.' How's that?

He stood in Anderson's kitchen again, looking longingly at the cabinet where the booze was. He shifted his eyes away – it was not easy because they felt as if they had gained weight – and walked back into the living room. He saw that Bobbi had changed positions, and that her respiration was moving along a bit more rapidly. First signs of waking up. Gardener glanced at his watch again and saw it was nearly ten o'clock. He went over to the bookcase by Bobbi's desk, wanting to find something to read until she came around, something that would take his mind off this whole business for a little while.

What he saw on Bobbi's desk, beside the battered old typewriter, was in some ways the worst shock of all. Shocking enough, anyway, so that he barely noticed another change: a roll of perforated computer paper hung on the wall above and behind the desk and typewriter like a giant roll of paper towels.

9

THE BUFFALO SOLDIERS

A novel by Roberta Anderson

Gardener put the top sheet aside, face-down, and saw his own name – or rather, the nickname only he and Bobbi used.

For Gard, who's always there when I need him.

Another shudder worked through him. He put the second sheet aside face-down on the first.

In those days, just before Kansas began to bleed, the buffalo were still plentiful on the plains – plentiful enough, anyway, for poor men, white and Indian alike, to be buried in buffalo skins rather than in coffins.

'Once you get a taste of buffaler meat, you'll never want what come off'n a cow again,' the old-timers said, and they must have believed what they said, because these hunters of the plains, these buffalo soldiers, seemed to exist in a world of hairy, humpbacked ghosts – all about them they carried the memory of the buffalo, the smell of the buffalo – the smell, yes, because many of them smeared buff-tallow on their necks and faces and hands to keep the prairie sun from burning them black. They wore buffalo teeth in necklaces and sometimes in their ears; their chaps were of buffalo hide; and more than one of these nomads carried a buffalo penis as a good luck charm or guarantee of continued potency.

Ghosts themselves, following herds that crossed the short-wire grass like the great clouds which cover the prairie with their shadows; the clouds remain but the great herds are gone … and so are the buffalo soldiers, madmen from wastes that had as yet never known a fence, men who came striding out of nowhere and went striding back into that same place, men with buffalo-hide moccasins on their feet and bones clicking about their necks; ghosts out Of time, out of a place that existed just before the whole country began to bleed.

Late in the afternoon of August 24th, 1848, Robert Howell, who would die at Gettysburg not quite fifteen years later, made camp near a small stream far out along the Nebraska panhandle, in that eerie section known as the Sand Hill Country. The stream was small but the water smelled sweet enough …

Gardener was forty pages into the story and utterly absorbed when he heard Bobbi Anderson call sleepily:

'Gard? Gard, are you still around?'

'I'm here, Bobbi,' he said, and stood up, dreading what would come next and already half-believing he had gone insane. That had to be it, of course. There could not be a tiny sun in the bottom of Bobbi's hot-water tank, nor a new gear on her Tomcat which suggested levitation … but it would have been easier for him to believe either of those things than to believe that Bobbi had written a four-hundred-page novel called The Buffalo Soldiers in the three weeks or so since Gard had last seen her – a novel that was, just incidentally, the best thing she had ever written. Impossible, yeah. Easier – hell, saner – to believe he had gone crazy and simply leave it at that.

If only he could.

1

Bobbi was getting off the couch slowly, wincing, like an old woman.

'Bobbi – ' Gardener began.

'Christ, I ache all over,' Anderson said. 'And I've got to change my – never mind. How long did I sleep?'

Gardener glanced at his watch. 'Fourteen hours, I guess. A little more. Bobbi, your new book – '

'Yeah. Hold that thought until I get back.' She walked slowly across the floor toward the bathroom, unbuttoning the shirt she had slept in. As she hobbled toward the bathroom, Gardener got a good look – a much better one than he wanted, actually – of just how much weight Bobbi had lost. This went beyond scrawniness to the point of emaciation.

She stopped, as if aware Gardener was looking at her, and without looking around she said: 'I can explain everything, you know.'

'Can you?' Gardener asked.

2

Anderson was in the bathroom a long time – much longer than it should have taken her to use the toilet and change her pad – Gardener was pretty sure that was what she'd gone to do. Her face just had that I-got-the-curse look. He listened for the shower but it wasn't running, and he began to feel uneasy. Bobbi had seemed perfectly lucid when she woke up, but did that necessarily mean she was? Gardener began to have uncomfortable visions of Bobbi wriggling out the bathroom window and then running off into the woods in nothing but blue jeans, cackling wildly.

He put his right hand to the left side of his forehead, where the scar was. His head had started to throb a little. He let another minute or two slip by, and then he got up and walked toward the bathroom, making an effort to step quietly that was not quite unconscious. Visions of Bobbi escaping through the bathroom window to avoid explanations had been replaced by one of Bobbi serenely cutting her throat with one of Gard's own razor-blades to avoid explanations permanently.

He decided he would just listen. If he heard normal-sounding movements he would go on out to the kitchen and put on coffee, maybe scramble a few eggs. If he didn't hear anything

His worries were needless. The bathroom door hadn't latched when she closed it, and other improvements aside, the unlatched doors in the place apparently still had their old way of swinging open. She'd probably have to shim up the whole north side of the house to do that. Maybe that was next week's project, he thought.

The door had swung open enough for him to see Bobbi standing at the mirror where Gardener had stood himself not long ago. She had her toothbrush in one hand and a tube of toothpaste in the other … but she hadn't uncapped the tube yet. She was looking into the mirror with an intensity that was almost hypnotic. Her lips were pulled back, her teeth bared.

She caught movement in the mirror and turned around, making no particular effort to cover her wasted breasts.

'Gard, do my teeth look all right to you?'

Gardener looked at them. They looked to him about as they always had, although he couldn't remember ever having seen quite this much of them – he was reminded of that terrible photo of Karen Carpenter again.

'Sure.' He kept trying not to look at her stacked ribs, the painful jut of her pelvic bones above the waist of her jeans, which were drooping in spite of a belt cinched so tight it looked like a hobo's length of clothesline. 'I guess so.' He smiled cautiously. 'Look, ma, no cavities.'

Anderson tried to return Gardener's smile with her lips still pulled back to the gums; the result of this experiment was mildly grotesque. She put a forefinger on a molar and pressed.

'Oes it iggle en I ooo at?'

'What?'

'Does it wiggle when I do that?'

'No. Not that I can see, anyway. Why?'

'It's just this dream I keep having. It – ' She looked down at herself. 'Get out of here, Gard, I'm in dishabilly.'

Don't worry, Bobbi. I wasn't going to jump your bones. Mostly because that'd be too close to what I'd really be doing.

'Sorry,' he said. 'Door was open. I thought you'd gone out.'

He closed the door, latching it firmly.

Through it she said clearly: 'I know what you're wondering.'

He said nothing – only stood there. But he had a feeling she knew – knew – he was still there. As if she could see through the door.

'You're wondering if I'm losing my mind.'

'No,' he said then. 'No, Bobbi. But – '

'I'm as sane as you are,' Anderson said through the door. 'I'm so stiff I can hardly walk and I've got an Ace bandage wrapped around my right knee for some reason I can't quite remember and I'm hungry as a bear and I know I've lost too much weight … but I am sane, Gard. I think you may have

times before the day's over when you wonder if you are. The answer is, we both are.'

'Bobbi, what's happening here?' Gardener asked. It came out in a helpless sort of cry.

'I want to unwrap the goddam Ace bandage and see what's under it,' Anderson said through the door. 'Feel like I jobbed my knee pretty good. Out in the woods, probably. Then I want to take a hot shower and put on some clean clothes. While I do that, you could make us some breakfast. And I'll tell you everything.'

'Will you?'

'Yes.'

'Okay, Bobbi.'

'I'm glad to have you here, Gard,' she said. 'I had a bad feeling once or twice. Like maybe you weren't doing so good.'

Gardener felt his vision double, treble, then float away in prisms. He wiped an arm across his face. 'No pain, no strain,' he said. 'I'll make some breakfast.'

'Thanks, Gard.'

He walked away then, but he had to walk slow, because no matter how many times he wiped his eyes, his vision kept trying to break up on him.

3

He stopped just inside the kitchen and went back to the closed bathroom door as a new thought occurred to him. Water was running in there now.

'Where's Peter, Bobbi?'

'What?' she called over the drumming shower.

'I said, where's Peter?' he called, raising his voice.

'Dead,' Bobbi called back over the drumming water. 'I cried, Gard. But he was … you know . . .'

'Old,' Gardener muttered, then remembered and raised his voice again. 'It was old age, then?'

'Yes,' Anderson called back over the drumming water.

Gardener stood there for just a moment before going back to the kitchen, wondering why he believed Bobbi was lying about Peter and how he had died.

4

Gard scrambled eight eggs and fried bacon on Bobbi's grill. He noticed that a microwave oven had been installed over the conventional one since he'd last been here, and there was now track lighting over the main work areas and the kitchen table, where Bobbi was in the habit of eating most of her meals – usually with a book in her free hand.

He made coffee, strong and black, and was just bringing everything to the table when Bobbi came in, wearing a fresh pair of cords and a T-shirt with a picture of a blackfly on it and the legend MAINE STATE BIRD. Her wet hair was wrapped in a towel.

Anderson surveyed the table. 'No toast?' she asked.

'Make your own frigging toast,' Gardener said amiably. 'I didn't hitchhike two hundred miles to buttle your breakfast.'

Anderson stared. 'You did what? Yesterday? In the rain?'

'Yeah.'

'What in God's name happened? Muriel said you were doing a reading tour and your last one was June 30th.'

'You called Muriel?' He was absurdly touched. 'When?'

Anderson flapped a hand as if that didn't matter – probably it didn't. 'What happened?' she asked again.

Gardener thought about telling her – wanted to tell her, he realized, dismayed. Was that what Bobbi was for, then? Was Bobbi Anderson really no more than the wall he wailed to? He hesitated, wanting to tell her … and didn't. There would be time for that later.

Maybe.

'Later,' he said. 'I want to know what happened here.'

'Breakfast first,' Anderson said, 'and that's an order.'

5

Gard gave Bobbi most of the eggs and bacon, and Bobbi didn't waste time – she went to them like a woman who hasn't eaten well for a long time. Watching her eat, Gardener remembered a biography of Thomas Edison he had read when he was quite young – no more than ten or eleven. Edison had gone on wild work-jags in which idea had followed idea, invention had followed invention. During these spurts, he had ignored wife, children, baths, even food. If his wife hadn't brought him his meals on a tray, the man might literally have starved to death between the light bulb and the phonograph. There had been a picture of him, hands plunged into hair that was wildly awry – as if it had been actually trying to get at the brain beneath hair and skull, the brain which would not let him rest – and Gardener remembered thinking that the man looked quite insane.

And, he thought, touching the left side of his forehead, Edison had been subject to migraines. Migraines and deep depressions.

He saw no sign of depression in Bobbi, however. She gobbled eggs, ate seven or eight slices of bacon wrapped in a slice of toast slathered with oleo, and swallowed two large glasses of orange juice. When she had finished, she uttered a resounding belch.

'Gross, Bobbi.'

'In Portugal, a good belch is considered a compliment to the cook.'

'What do they do after a good lay? Fart?'

Anderson threw her head back and roared with laughter. The towel fell off her hair, and all at once Gard wanted to take her to bed, bag of bones or not.

Smiling a little, Gardener said: 'Okay, it was good. Thanks. Some Sunday I'll make you some swell eggs Benedict. Now give.'

Anderson reached behind him and brought down a half-full package of Camels. She lit one and pushed the pack toward Gardener.

'No thanks. It's the only bad habit I ever succeeded in mostly giving up.'

But before Bobbi was done, Gardener had smoked four of them.

6

'You looked around,' Anderson said. 'I remember telling you to do that – just barely -and I know you did. You look like I felt after I found the thing in the woods.'

'What thing?'

'If I told you now you'd think I was crazy. Later on I'll show you, but right now I think we'd better just talk. Tell me what you saw around the place. What changes.'

So Gardener ticked them off: the cellar improvements, the litter of projects, the weird little sun in the water heater. The strange job of customizing on the Tomcat's engine. He hesitated for a moment, thinking of the addition to the shifting diagram, and let that go. He supposed Bobbi knew he had seen it, anyway.

'And somewhere in the middle of all that,' he said, 'you found time to write another book. A long one. I read the first thirty or forty pages while I was waiting for you to wake up, and I think it's good as well as long. The best novel you've ever written, probably . . . and you've written some good ones.'

Anderson was nodding, pleased. 'Thank you. I think it is, too.' She pointed to the last slice of bacon on the platter. 'You want that?'

'No. I

'Sure?'

'Yes.'

She took it and made it gone.

'How long did it take you to write it?'

'I'm not completely sure,' Anderson said. 'Maybe three days. No more than a week, anyway. Did most of it in my sleep.'

Gard smiled.

'I'm not joking, you know,' Anderson said.

Gardener stopped smiling.

'My time sense is pretty fucked up,' she admitted. 'I do know I wasn't working on it the 27th. That's the last day when time – sequential time – seemed completely clear to me. You got here last night, July 4th, and it was done. So … a week, max. But I really don't think it was more than three days.'

Gardener gaped. Anderson looked back calmly, wiping her fingers on a napkin. 'Bobbi, that's impossible,' Gardener said finally.

'If you think so, you missed my typewriter.'

Gardener had glanced at Bobbi's old machine when he sat down, but that was all -his attention had been riveted immediately by the manuscript. He had seen the old black Underwood thousands of times. The manuscript, on the other hand, was new.

'If you'd looked closely, you would have seen the roll of computer paper on the wall behind it and another of those gadgets behind it. Egg crate, heavy-duty batteries, and all. What? These?'

She pushed the cigarettes across to Gardener, who took one.

'I don't know how it works, but then, I don't really know how any of them work -including the one that's running all the juice in this place.' She smiled at Gardener's expression. 'I'm off the Central Maine Power tit, Gard. I had them interrupt service … that's how they put it, as if they know damned well you'll want it back before too long … let's see … four days ago. That I do remember.'

'Bobbi – '

'There's a gadget like the thing in the water heater and the one behind my typewriter in the junction box out back, but that one's the granddaddy of them all.' Anderson laughed – the laugh of a woman in the grip of pleasant reminiscences. 'There's twenty or thirty D-cells in that one. I think Poley Andrews down at Cooder's market thinks I've gone nuts – I bought every battery he had in stock, and then I went to Augusta for more.

'Was that the day I got the dirt for the cellar?' She addressed this last to herself, frowning. Then her face cleared. 'I think so, yeah. The Historic Battery Run of 1988, hit about seven different stores, came back with hundreds of batteries, and then I stopped in Albion and got a truckload of loam to sweeten the cellar. I'm almost positive I did both of those things the same day.'

The troubled frown resurfaced, and for a moment Gardener thought Bobbi looked scared and exhausted again – of course she was still exhausted. Exhaustion of the sort Gardener had seen last night went bone-deep. A single night's sleep, no matter how long and how deep, wouldn't erase it. And then there was this wild, hallucinatory talk – books written in her sleep; all the AC current in the house being run by D-cells, runs to Augusta on crazy errands

Except that the proof was here, all around him. He had seen it.

' – that one,' Anderson said, and laughed.

'What, Bobbi?'

'I said I had a devil of a job setting up the one that generates the juice here in the house, and out at the dig.'

'What dig? Is it the thing in the woods you want to show me?'

'Yes. Soon. Just give me a few more minutes.' Anderson's face again assumed that look of pleasure in telling, and Gardener suddenly thought it must be the expression on the faces of all those who have tales they don't just want to tell but tales they must tell – from the lecture-hall bore who was part of an Antarctic expedition in 1937 and who still has his fading slides to prove it, to Ishmael the Sailor-Man, late of the ill-fated Pequod, who finishes his tale with a sentence that seems a desperate cry only thinly and perfunctorily disguised as information: 'Only I am left to tell you.' Was it desperation and madness that Gardener detected beneath Bobbi's cheerful, disjointed remembrances of Ten Wacky Days in Haven? Gardener thought so … knew so. Who was better equipped to see the signs? Whatever Bobbi had faced here while Gardener was reading poetry to overweight matrons and their bored husbands, it had nearly broken her mind.

Anderson lit another cigarette with a hand that trembled slightly, making the matchflame quiver momentarily. It was the sort of thing you would have seen only if you were looking for it.

'I was out of egg cartons by then, and the thing was going to have too many batteries for just one or two anyway. So I got one of Uncle Frank's cigar boxes -there must be a dozen old wooden ones up in the attic, probably even Mabel Noyes down at Junque-a-Torium would pay a few bucks for them, and you know what a skinflint she is – and I stuffed them with toilet paper and tried to make nests in the paper for the batteries to stand up in. You know … nests?'

Anderson made quick poking gestures with her right index finger and then looked, bright-eyed, at Gard, to see if he got it. Gardener nodded. That feeling of unreality was stealing back, that feeling of his mind getting ready to seep through to the top of his skull and float up to the ceiling. A drink would fix that, he thought, and the pulse in his head sharpened.

'But the batteries kept failing over anyway.' She snuffed her cigarette and immediately lit another one. 'They were wild, just wild. I was wild, too. Then I got an idea.'

They?

'I went down to Chip McCausland's. Down on the Dugout Road?'

Gardener shook his head. He had never been down the Dugout Road.

'Well, he lives out there with this woman – she's his common-law wife, I guess -and about ten kids. Man, you talk about sluts … the dirt on her neck, Gard … you couldn't wash it off unless you used a jackhammer on it first. I guess he was married before, and … doesn't matter … it's just … I haven't had anyone to talk to … I mean, they don't talk, not the way a couple of people do, and I keep mixing up the stuff that's not important with the stuff that is – '

Anderson's words had started to come out quicker and quicker, until now they were almost tripping over each other. She's speed-rapping, Gardener thought with some alarm, and pretty soon she's going to start either yelling or crying. He didn't know which he dreaded more and thought again of Ishmael, Ishmael rambling through the streets of Bedford, Massachusetts, stinking more of madness than whale-oil, finally grabbing some unlucky passerby and screaming: Listen! I'm the only fucking one left to tell you and so you better listen, damn you! You better listen if you don't want to be using this harpoon for a fucking suppository! I got a tale to tell, it's about this white fucking whale and YOU'RE GOING TO LISTEN!

He reached across the table and touched her hand. 'You tell it any old way you want to. I'm here and I'm going to listen. We've got time; like you said, it's your day off. So slow down. If I fall asleep you'll know you got too far from the point. Okay?'

Anderson smiled and relaxed visibly. Gardener wanted to ask again what was going on in the woods. More than that, who they were. But it would be best to wait. All bad things come to him who waits, he thought, and after a pause to collect herself, Bobbi went on.

'Chip McCausland's got three or four henhouses, that's all I started to say. For a couple of bucks I was able to get all the egg cartons I wanted … even a few of the big egg-crate sheets. Those sheets each have ten dozen cradles.'

Anderson laughed cheerfully and added something that brought gooseflesh out on Gardener's skin.

'Haven't used one of those yet, but when I do I guess we'll have enough zap for the whole town of Haven to let go of the CMP tit. With enough left over for Albion and most of Troy, as well.

'So I got the power going here – Jesus, I'm rambling – and I already had the gadget hooked up to the typewriter – and I really did sleep – napped, anyway – and that's about where we came in, isn't it?'

Gardener nodded, still trying to cope with the idea that there might be fact as well as hallucination in Bobbi's casual statement that she could build a ,gadget' which could power three small towns from a source consisting of one hundred and twenty D-cell batteries.

'What the gadget on the typewriter does is…' Anderson frowned. Her head cocked a little, almost as if she were listening to a voice Gardener could not hear. 'It might be easier to show you. Go on over there and roll in a sheet of paper, would you?'

'Okay.' He headed for the door into the living room, then looked back at Anderson. 'Aren't you coming?'

Bobbi smiled. 'I'll stay here,' she said, and then Gardener got it. He got it, and even understood on some mental level where only pure logic was allowed that it might be so – hadn't the immortal Holmes himself said that when you eliminated the impossible, you had to believe whatever was left, no matter how improbable? And there was a new novel sitting in there on the table by what Bobbi sometimes called her word-accordion.

Yeah, except typewriters don't write books by themselves, Gard old buddy. You know what the immortal Holmes probably would say? That the fact that there is a novel sitting next to Bobbi's typewriter, and the added fact that this is a novel you never saw before does not mean it is a new novel. Holmes would say Bobbi wrote that book at some time in the past. Then, while you were gone and Bobbi was losing her marbles, she brought it out and sat it beside the typewriter. She may even believe what she's telling you, but that doesn't make it so.

Gardener walked into the cluttered corner of the living room that served as Bobbi's writing quarters. It was handy enough to the bookshelf so she could simply rock back on the legs of her chair and grab almost anything she wanted. It's too good to be a trunk novel.

He knew what the immortal Holmes would say about that, too: he would agree that The Buffalo Soldiers being a trunk novel was improbable; he would argue, however, that writing a novel in three days – and not at the typewriter but while taking cat-naps between repeated frenzies of activity – was imfucking-possible.

Except that novel hadn't come out of any trunk. Gardener knew it, because he knew Bobbi. Bobbi would have been just as incapable of sticking a novel that good in her trunk as Gard was of remaining rational in a discussion on the subject of nuclear power.

Fuck you, Sherlock, and the hansom cab you and Dr W. rode in on. Christ I want a drink.

The urge – the need – to drink had come back in full, frightening force.

'You there, Gard?' Anderson called.

This time he consciously saw the roll of computer paper. It hung down loosely. He looked behind the typewriter and did indeed see another of Bobbi's 'gadgets.' This one was smaller – half an egg carton with the last two egg-cradles standing empty. D-cells stood in the other four, each neatly capped with one of those little funnels (looking at them more closely, Gard decided they were scraps of tin can carefully cut to shape with tin-snips), each with a wire coming out of the funnel over the + post … one red, one blue, one yellow, one green. These went to another circuit board. This one, which looked as if it might have come from a radio, was held vertical by two short, flat pieces of wood that had been glued to the desk with the board sandwiched in between. Those pieces of wood, each looking a little like the chalk gutter at the foot of a blackboard, were so absurdly familiar to Gardener that for a moment he was unable to identify them. Then it came. They were the tile-holders you put your letters on when you were playing Scrabble.

One single wire, almost as thick as an AC cord, ran from the circuit board into the typewriter.

'Put in some paper!' Anderson called. She laughed. 'That was the part I almost forgot, isn't that stupid? They were no help there and I almost went crazy before I saw the answer. I was sitting on the jakes one day, wishing I'd gotten one of those damned word-crunchers after all, and when I reached for the toilet paper … eureka! Boy, did I feel dumb! Just roll it in, Gard!'

No. I'm getting out of here right now, and then I'm going to hitch a ride up to the Purple Cow in Hampden and get so fucking drunk I'll never remember this stuff. I don't ever want to know who 'they' are.

Instead, he pulled on the roll, slipped the perforated end of the first sheet

under the roller, and turned the knob on the side of the old machine until he could snap the bar down. His heart was beating hard and fast. 'Okay!' he called. 'Do you want me to … uh, turn something on?' He didn't see any switch, and even if he had, he wouldn't have wanted to touch it.

'Don't need to!' she called back, and Gardener heard a click. It was followed by a hum – the sound of a kid's electric train transformer.

Green light began to spill out of Anderson's typewriter.

Gardener took an involuntary, shambling step backward on legs that felt like stilts. That light rayed out between the keys in weird, diverging strokes. There were glass panels set into the Underwood's sides and now they glowed like the walls of an aquarium.

Suddenly the keys of the typewriter began to depress themselves, moving up and down like the keys of a player piano. The carriage moved rapidly and letters spilled across the page:

Full fathom five my father lies

Ding! Bang!

The carriage returned.

No, I'm not seeing this. I don't believe I'm seeing this.

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Sickly green light spilling up through the keyboard and over the words like radium.

Ding! Bang!

My beer is Rhinegold the dry beer

The line appeared in the space of a second, it seemed. The keys were a hammering blur of speed. It was like watching a news ticker.

Think of Rhinegold whenever you buy beer!

Dear God, is she really doing this? Or is it a trick?

With his mind tottering again in the face of this new wonder, he found himself grasping eagerly for Sherlock Holmes – a trick, of course it was a trick, all a part of poor old Bobbi's nervous breakdown … her very creative nervous breakdown.

Ding! Bang! The carriage shot back.

No trick, Gard.

The carriage returned, and the hammering keys typed this before his wide, staring eyes.

You were right the first time. I'm doing it from the kitchen. The gadget behind the typewriter is thought-sensitive, the way a photoelectric cell is light-sensitive. This thing seems to pick up my thoughts clearly up to a distance of five miles. If I'm further away than that, things start to get garbled. Beyond ten or so, it doesn't work at all.

Ding! Bang! The big silver lever to the left of the carriage worked itself twice, cranking the paper – which now held three perfectly typed messages – up a few lines. Then it resumed.

So you see I didn't have to be sitting at the typewriter to work on my novel -look, ma, no hands! This poor old Underwood ran like a bastard for those two or three days, Gard, and all the time it was running I was in the woods, working around the place, or down cellar. But as I say, mostly I was sleeping. It's funny … even if someone could have convinced me such a gadget existed, I wouldn't have believed it would work for me, because I've always been lousy at dictating. I have to write my own letters, I always said, because I have to see the words on paper. It was impossible for me to imagine how someone could dictate a whole novel into a tape recorder, for instance, although some writers apparently do just that. But this isn't like dictating, Gard – it's like a direct tap into the subconscious, more like dreaming than writing … but what comes out is unlike dreams, which are often surreal and disconnected. This really isn't a typewriter at all anymore. It's a dream machine. One that dreams rationally. There's something cosmically funny about them giving it to me, so I could write The Buffalo Soldiers. You're right, it really is the best thing I've ever written, but it's still your basic oat opera. It's like inventing a perpetual-motion machine so your little kid won't pester you any more about changing the batteries in his toy car! But can you imagine what the results might have been if F. Scott Fitzgerald had had one of these gadgets? Or Hemingway? Faulkner? Salinger?

After each question-mark the typewriter fell momentarily silent and then burst out with another name. After Salinger's, it stopped completely. Gardener had read the material as it came out, but in a mechanical, almost uncomprehending way. His eyes went back to the beginning of the passage. I was thinking that it was a trick, that she might have hooked the typewriter up somehow to write those two little snatches of verse. And it wrote

It had written: No trick, Gard.

He thought suddenly: Can you read my mind, Bobbi?

Ding! Bang! The carriage returned suddenly, making him jump and almost cry out.

Yes. But only a little.

What did we do on the 4th July the year I quit teaching?

Drove up to Derry. You said you knew a guy who'd sell us some cherry bombs. He sold us the cherry bombs but they were all duds. You were pretty drunk. You wanted to go back and knock his block off. I couldn't talk you out of it, so we went back, and damned if his house wasn't on fire. He had a lot of real stuff in the basement, and he'd dropped a cigarette butt into a box of it. You saw the fire and the fire-trucks and got laughing so hard you fell down in the street.

That feeling of unreality had never been as strong as it was now. He fought it, keeping it at arm's length while his eyes searched through the previous passage for something else. After a second or two he found it: There's something almost cosmically funny about them giving it to me, you know …

And earlier Bobbi had said: The batteries kept falling over and they were wild, just wild …

His cheeks felt hotly flushed, as if with fever, but his forehead felt as cold as an icepack – even the steady pulse of pain from above his left eye seemed cold … shallow stabs hitting with metronomelike regularity.

Looking at the typewriter, which was filled with that somehow ghastly green light, Gardener thought: Bobbi, who are 'they'?

Ding! Bang!

The keys rattled off a burst, letters forming words, the words forming a child's couplet:

Late last night and the night before

Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

Jim Gardener screamed.

7

At last his hands stopped shaking – enough so he could get the hot coffee to his mouth without slopping it all over himself, thus finishing the morning's lunatic festivities with a few more burns.

Anderson kept watching him from the other side of the kitchen table with concerned eyes. She kept a bottle of very good brandy in the darkest depths of the pantry, far away from the 'alcoholic staples,' and she had offered to spike Gard's coffee with a wallop of it. He had declined, not just with regret but with real pain. He needed that brandy – it would dull the ache in his head, maybe kill it entirely. More important, it would bring his mind back into focus. It would get rid of that I-just-sailed-off-the-edge-of-the-world feeling.

Only problem was, he'd finally gotten to 'that' point, hadn't he? Correct. That point where it wouldn't stop with a single wallop of brandy in his coffee. There had been entirely too much input since he had opened the hatch at the bottom of Bobbi's water heater and then gone upstairs for a belt of whiskey.

It had been safe then; now the air was the unsteady sort that spawned tornadoes.

So: no more drinks. Not so much as an Irish sweetener in his coffee, until he understood what was happening here. Including what was happening to Bobbi. That, most of all.

'I'm sorry that last bit happened,' Anderson said, 'but I'm not sure I could have stopped it. I told you it was a dream machine; it's also a subconscious machine. I'm really not getting much of your thoughts at all, Gard – I've tried this with other people, and in most cases it's as easy as sinking your thumb into fresh dough. You can core all the way down to what I guess you'd call the id … although it's awful down there, full of the most monstrous … you can't even call them ideas … images, I guess you'd say. Simple as a child's scrawl, but they're alive. Like those fish they find down deep in the ocean, the ones that explode if you bring them up.' Bobbi suddenly shuddered. 'They're alive,' she repeated.

For a second there was no sound but the birds singing outside.

'Anyway, all I get from you is surface stuff, and most of that is all broken up and garbled. If you were like anyone else, I'd know what's been going on with you, and why you look so crappy – '

'Thanks, Bobbi. I knew there was a reason I keep coming here, and since it's not the cooking, it must be the flattery.' He grinned, but it was a nervous grin, and he lit another cigarette.

'As it is,' Bobbi went on as if he hadn't spoken, 'I can make some educated guesses on the basis of what's happened to you before, but you'll have to tell me the details … I couldn't snoop even if I wanted to. I'm not sure I could get it clear even if you shoved it all up to the front of your mind and put out a Welcome mat. But when you asked who “they” were, that little rhyme about the Tommyknockers came up like a big bubble. And it ran itself off on the typewriter.'

'All right,' Gardener said, although it wasn't all right … nothing was all right. 'But who are they besides the Tommyknockers? Are they pixies? Leprechauns? Grem – '

'I asked you to look around because I wanted you to get an idea of how big all of this is,' Anderson said. 'How far-reaching the implications could be.'

'I realize that, all right,' Gardener said, and a smile ghosted around the corners of his mouth. 'A few more far-reaching implications and I'll be ready for a strait-waistcoat.'

'Your Tommyknockers came from space,' Anderson said, 'as I think you must have deduced by now.'

Gardener supposed the thought had done more than cross his mind – but his mouth was dry, his hands froze around the coffee cup.

'Are they around?' he asked, and his voice seemed to come from far, far away. He was suddenly afraid to turn around, afraid he might see some gnarled thing with three eyes and a horn where its mouth should have been come waltzing out of the pantry, something that belonged only on a movie-screen, maybe in a Star Wars epic.

'I think they – the actual physical they – have been dead for a long time,' Anderson said calmly. 'They probably died long before men existed on earth. But then … Caruso's dead, but he's still singing on a hell of a lot of records, isn't he?'

'Bobbi,' Gardener said, 'tell me what happened. I want you to begin at the beginning and end by saying, “Then you came up the road just in time to grab me when I passed out.” Can you do that?'

'Not entirely,' she said, and grinned. 'But I'll do my best.'

8

Anderson talked for a long time. When she finished, it was past noon. Gard sat across the kitchen table, smoking, excusing himself only once to go into the bathroom, where he took three more aspirins.

Anderson began with her stumble, told of coming back and digging out more of the ship – enough to realize she had found something utterly unique – and then going back a third time. She did not tell Gardener about Chuck the Woodchuck, who had been dead but not flyblown; nor about Peter's shrinking cataract; nor about the visit to Etheridge, the vet. She passed over those things smoothly, saying only that when she came back from her first whole day of work on the thing, she had found Peter dead on the front porch.

'It was as if he'd gone to sleep,' Anderson said, and there was a note of schmaltz in her voice so unlike the Bobbi he knew that Gardener looked up sharply … and then looked down at his hands quickly. Anderson was crying a little.

After a few moments Gardener asked: 'What then?'

'Then you came up the road just in time to grab me when I passed out,' Anderson said, smiling.

'I don't understand what you mean.'

'Peter died on the 28th of June,' Anderson said. She had never had much practice as a liar, but thought this one came out sounding smooth and natural. 'That's the last day I remember clearly and sequentially. Until you showed up last night, that is.' She smiled openly and guilelessly at Gardener, but this was also a lie – her clear, sequential, unjumbled memories ended the day before, on June 27th, with her standing above, that titanic thing buried in the earth, gripping the handle of the shovel. They ended with her whispering 'Everything's fine,' and then beginning to dig. There was more to the tale, all right, all kinds of more, but she couldn't remember it sequentially and what she could remember would have to be edited . . . carefully edited. For instance, she couldn't really tell Gard about Peter. Not yet. They had told her she couldn't, but on that one she didn't need any telling.

They had also told her Jim Gardener would have to be watched very, very closely. Not for long, of course – soon Gard would be

(part of us)

on the team. Yes. And it would be great to have him on the team, because if there was anyone in the world Anderson loved, it was Jim Gardener.

Bobbi, who are 'they'?

The Tommyknockers. That word, which had risen out of the queer opaqueness in Gard's mind like a silvery bubble, was as good a name as any, wasn't it? Sure. Better than some.

'So what now?' Gardener asked, lighting her last cigarette. He looked both dazed and wary. 'I'm not saying I can swallow all this . . .' He laughed a bit wildly. 'Or maybe it's just that my throat's not big enough for it all to go down at once.'

'I understand,' Anderson said. 'I think the main reason I remember so little about the last week or so is because it's all so … weird. It's like having your mind strapped to a rocket-sled.'

She didn't like lying to Gard; it made her uneasy. But all the lying would be done soon enough. Gard would be … would be …

Well … persuaded.

When he saw the ship. When he felt the ship.

'No matter how much I do or don't believe, I'm forced to believe most of it, I guess.'

When you remove the impossible, whatever remains is the truth, no matter how improbable.-

'You got that too, did you?'

'The shape of it. I might not have even known what it was if I hadn't heard you say it once or twice.'

Gardener nodded. 'Well, I guess it fits the situation we have here. If I don't believe the evidence of my senses, I have to believe I'm crazy. Although God knows there are enough people in the world who would be more than happy to testify that's just what I am.'

'You're not crazy, Gard,' Anderson said quietly, and put her hand over his. He turned his own over and squeezed it.

'Well … you know, a man who shot his wife … there are people who'd say that's pretty persuasive evidence of insanity. You know?'

'Gard, that was eight years ago.'

'Sure. And that guy I elbowed in the tit, that was eight days ago. I also chased a guy down Arberg's hall and across his dining room, with an umbrella, did I tell you that? My behavior over the last few years has been increasingly self-destructive – '

'Hi, folks, and welcome once more to The National Self-Pity Hour!' Bobbi Anderson chirruped brightly. 'Tonight's guest is – '

'I was going to kill myself yesterday morning,' Gardener said quietly. 'If I hadn't gotten these vibrations – really strong ones – that you were in trouble, I'd be fishfood now.'

Anderson looked at him closely. Her hand slowly tightened down on his until it was hurting. 'You mean it, don't you? Christ!'

'Sure. You want to know how bad it's gotten? It seemed like the sanest thing I could do under the circumstances.'

'Come off it.'

'I'm serious. Then this idea came. The idea you were in trouble. So I put it off long enough to call you. But you weren't here.'

'I was probably in the woods,' Anderson said. 'And you came running.' She lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed it gently. 'If this whole crazy business doesn't mean anything else, at least it means you're still alive, you asshole.'

'As always, I'm impressed by the almost Gallic range of your compliments, Bobbi.'

'If you ever do do it, I'll see it's written on your tombstone, Gard. ASSHOLE in letters carved deep enough so they won't wear off for at least a century.'

'Well, thanks,' Gardener said, 'but you don't have to worry about it for a while. Because I still got it.'

'What?'

'That feeling that you're in trouble.'

She tried to look away, tried to take her hand away.

'Look at me, Bobbi, goddammit.'

At last, reluctantly, she did, her lower lip slightly pushed out in that stubborn expression he knew so well – but didn't she also look just the tiniest bit uneasy? He thought so.

'All of this seems so wonderful – house-power from D-cells, books that write themselves, God knows what else – so why should I feel that you're in trouble?'

'I don't know,' she said softly, and got up to do the dishes.

9

'Of course I worked until I damn near dropped, that's one thing,' Anderson said. Her back was to him now, and he had a feeling she liked it that way fine. Dishes rattled in hot, soapy water. 'And I didn't just say “Aliens from space, ho-hum, cheap clean electric power and mental telepathy, big deal,” you know. My mailman's cheating on his wife, I know about it – I don't want to know about it, hell, I'm no snoop, but it was just there, Gard, right there in the front of his head. Not seeing it would be like not seeing a neon sign a hundred feet high. Christ, I've been rocking and reeling.'

'I see,' he said, and thought: She's not telling the truth, at least not all of it, and I don't think she even knows it. 'The question remains: what do we do now?'

'I don't know.' She glanced around, saw Gardener's raised eyebrows, and said, 'Did you think I was going to give you the answer in a neat little essay, five hundred words or less? I can't. I've got some ideas, but that's all. Maybe not even very good ones. I suppose the first thing is to take you out so you can

(be persuaded)

have a look at it. Afterward well .

Gardener looked at her for a long time. Bobbi did not drop her eyes this time; they were open and guileless. But things were wrong here, off-note and off-key. Things like that note of fake schmaltz in Bobbi's voice when she spoke of Peter. Maybe the tears had been real, but that tone it had been all wrong.

'All right. Let's go take a look at your ship in the earth.'

'But let's have lunch first,' Anderson said placidly.

'You're hungry again?'

'Sure. Aren't you?'

'Christ, no!'

'Then I'll eat for both of us,' Anderson said, and she did.

1

,Good God.' Gardener sat down heavily on a fresh stump. It felt like a case of sit down or fall down. Like being punched hard in the stomach. No; it was stranger and more radical than that. It was more like someone had slammed the hose of an industrial vacuum cleaner into his mouth and turned it on, sucking all the wind out of his lungs in a second's time. 'Good God,' he repeated in a tiny breathless voice. It seemed to be all of which he was capable.

'It's something, isn't it?'

They were halfway down the slope, not far from where Anderson had found the dead chuck. Before, the slope had been pretty heavily wooded. Now a lane had been cut through the trees to admit a strange vehicle which Gardener almost recognized. It stood at the edge of Anderson's dig, and it was dwarfed both by the excavation and the thing which was being unearthed.

The trench was now two hundred feet long and twenty feet wide at either end. The cut bulged to thirty feet or so in width for perhaps forty feet of the slit's total length – that bulge made a shape like a woman's hips seen in silhouette. The gray leading edge of the ship, its curvature now triumphantly revealed, rose out of this bulge like the edge of a giant steel tea saucer.

'Good God,' Gardener gasped again. 'Look at that thing.'

'I have been,' Bobbi said, a distant little smile playing over her lips. 'For over a week I've been looking at it. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And it's going to solve a lot of problems, Gard. "There came a man on horseback, riding and riding – "'

That cut through the fog. Gardener looked around at Anderson, who might have been drifting in the dark places from which that incredible thing had come. The look on her face chilled Gardener. Bobbi's eyes were not just far-off. They were vacant windows.

'What do you mean?'

'Hmmm?' Anderson looked around as if coming out of a deep daze.

'What do you mean, a man on horseback?'

'I mean you, Gard. I mean me. But I think … I think I mostly mean you. Come on down here and take a look.'

Anderson started down the slope quickly, with the casual grace of previous experience. She got maybe twenty feet before she realized Gardener wasn't with her. She looked back. He had gotten up from the stump, but that was all.

'It won't bite you,' Anderson said.

'No? What will it do to me, Bobbi?'

'Nothing! They're dead, Gard! Your Tommyknockers were real enough, but they were mortal, and this ship has been here for at least fifty million years. The glacier broke around it! It covered it, but it couldn't move it. Not even all those tons of ice could move it! So the glacier broke around it. You can look into the cut and see it, like a frozen wave. Dr Borns from the university would go batshit over this … but they're dead enough, Gard.'

'Have you been inside?' Gardener asked, not moving.

'No. The hatch – I think, I feel, there is one – is still buried. But that doesn't change what I know. They're dead, Gard. Dead.'

'They're dead, you haven't been in the ship, but you're inventing like Thomas Edison on a speed trip and you can read minds. So I repeat: what's it going to do to me?'

So she told the biggest lie of all – told it calmly, with no regret at all. She said: 'Nothing you don't want it to.' And started down again, without looking back to see if he was following.

Gardener hesitated, his head throbbing miserably, and then he started down after her.

2

The vehicle by the trench was Bobbi's old truck – only before that it had been a Country Squire station wagon. Anderson had driven it from New York to Maine when she came to college. That had been seventeen years ago, and it had not been new then. She had run it on the road until 1984, when even Elt Barker down at the Shell station, Haven's only garage and gas stop, would no longer slap an inspection sticker on it. Then, in one weekend of frenzied work – they had been drunk for most of it, and Gardener still thought it something of a miracle that neither of them had blown themselves up with Frank Garrick's old blowtorch rig – they had cut off the roof of the wagon from above the front seat on back, turning it into a half-assed truck.

'Lookit that, Gard-old-Gard,' Bobbi Anderson had proclaimed solemnly, staring at the remains of the wagon. 'We done made ourselves an honest-to-God fiel'-bomber.' Then she leaned over and threw up. Gardener had picked her up and carried her onto the porch (Peter twining anxiously around his feet the whole way). By the time he got her there, she had passed out. He put her down carefully, and then passed out himself.

The half-assed truck had been a tough old Detroit rod-bucket, but it had finally gone toes-up. Anderson had put it on blocks at one end of the garden, claiming no one would want to buy it even for parts. Gardener thought she just felt sentimental.

Now the truck had been resurrected – although it hardly looked like the same vehicle, except for the blue paint and the remains of fake wood siding that had been one of the Country Squire's trademarks. The driver's door and most of the front end were gone entirely. The latter had been replaced with a weird conglomeration of digging and earth-moving equipment. To Gardener's disturbed eye, Anderson's truck now looked like a deranged child's bulldozer. Something which looked like a giant screwdriver blade protruded from the place where the grille had been. The engine looked like something which had been yanked whole from an old D-9 Caterpillar.

Bobbi, where did you get that engine? How did you move it from where it was then to where it is now? Good Jesus!

Yet all this, remarkable as it was, could hold his eye for only a moment or two. He walked across the ripped earth to where Bobbi was standing, hands in her pockets, looking down into the slash in the earth.

'What do you think, Gard?'

He didn't know what he thought, and was speechless anyway.

The excavation went down to a really surprising depth: thirty or forty feet, he guessed. If the angle of the sun hadn't been exactly right, he wouldn't have been able to see the bottom of the trench at all. There was a space of about three feet between the side of the excavation and the smooth hull of the ship. That hull was utterly unbroken. There were no numbers, symbols, pictures, or hieroglyphs on it.

At the bottom of the cut, the thing disappeared into the earth. Gardener shook his head. Opened his mouth, found he still had no words, and shut it again.

The part of the hull Anderson had first tripped over and then tried to wriggle with her hand – thinking it might be a tin can left over from a loggers' weekend – was now directly in front of Gardener's nose. He could easily have reached across the three-foot space and grasped it as Anderson herself had just two weeks ago … with this difference: when Anderson first grasped the edge of the ship in the earth, she had been on her knees. Gardener was standing. He had vaguely noted the going-over this slope had taken – rough, muddy terrain, trees that had been cut and moved aside, stumps that had been pulled like rotten teeth – but beyond that momentary observation, he had dismissed it. He would have taken a closer look if Anderson had told him how much of the slope she had simply cut away. The hill had made the thing harder to get out … so she had simply removed half the hillside to make it easier.

Flying saucer, Gardener thought faintly, and then: I did jump. This is a death-fantasy. Any second now I'll come to and find myself trying to breathe salt water. Any second now. Just any old second.

Except nothing of the sort did or would happen, because all this was real. It was a flying saucer.

And that, somehow, was the worst. Not a spaceship, or an alien craft, or an extraterrestrial vehicle. It was a flying saucer. They had been debunked by the Air Force, by thinking scientists, by psychologists. No self-respecting science-fiction writer would put one in his story, and if he did, no self-respecting editor would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Flying saucers had gone out of vogue in the genre at roughly the same time as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline. It was the oldest wheeze in the book. Flying saucers were more than passe; the idea itself was a joke, given mental house-room these days only by crackpots, religious eccentrics, and, of course, the tabloid newspapers, where any week's budget of news had to include at least one saucer story, such as SIX-YEAR-OLD PREGNANT BY SAUCER ALIEN, TEARFUL MOTHER REVEALS.

These stories, for some odd reason, all seemed to originate in either Brazil or New Hampshire.

And yet here was such a thing – it had been here all the while, as centuries passed above it like minutes. A line from Genesis suddenly occurred to him, making him shiver as if a cold wind had blown past: There were giants in the earth in those days.

He turned toward Anderson, his eyes almost pleading.

'Is it real?' he could do no more than whisper.

'It's real. Touch it.' She knocked on it, producing that dull fist-on-mahogany sound again. Gardener reached out . . . and then pulled his hand back.

A look of annoyance passed over Anderson's face like a shadow. 'I told you, Gard – it won't bite you.'

'It won't do anything to me I don't want it to.'

'Absolutely not.'

Gardener reflected – as much as he was able to reflect in his current state of roaring confusion – that he had once believed that about booze. Come to think of it, he had heard people – most of them his college students in the early seventies – say the same thing about various drugs. Many of them had ended up in clinics or drug-counselling sessions with severe nose-candy problems.

Tell me, Bobbi, did you want to work until you dropped? Did you want to lose so much weight that you looked like an anorexic? I guess all I really want to know is, Did you drive or was you driven? Why did you lie about Peter? Why don't I hear birds in these woods?

'Go on,' Anderson said patiently. 'We've got some talking to do and some hard decisions to make, and I don't want you breaking in halfway through to say you've decided the whole thing was just a hallucination that came out of a liquor bottle.'

'That's a shitty thing to say.'

'So are most of the things people really have to say. You've had the DTs before. You know it and so do V

Yeah, but the old Bobbi never would have brought it up … or at least not in that way.

'You touch it, you'll believe it. That's all I'm saying.'

'You make it sound important to you.'

Anderson shifted her feet restlessly.

'All right,' Gardener said. 'All right, Bobbi.'

He reached out and grasped the edge of the ship, much as Anderson had grasped it that first day. He was aware – too aware – that an expression of naked eagerness had spread over Bobbi's face. It was the face of someone who is waiting for a firecracker to go off.

Several things happened almost simultaneously.

The first was a sense of vibration settling into his hand – the sort of vibration one might feel when one lays a hand on a power pole carrying high-voltage wires. For a moment it seemed to numb his flesh, as if the vibration was moving at an incredibly high speed. Then the feeling was gone. As it went, Gardener's head filled with music, but it was so loud it was more like a scream than music. It made what he had heard the night before sound like a whisper in comparison – it was like being inside a stereo speaker turned all the way up.

'Daytime turns me off and I don't mean maybe,

Nine-to-five ain't takin' me where I'm bound,

When it's done I come home to s – '

He was opening his mouth to scream when it cut off, all at once. Gardener knew the song, which had been popular when he was in grade school, and later he sang the snatch of lyrics he had heard, looking at his watch as he did so. The sequence seemed to have been a second or two of high-speed vibration; a burst of ear-splitting music which had lasted roughly twelve seconds; then the bloody nose.

Except ear-splitting was wrong. It had been head-splitting. It had never come through his ears at all. It arrowed into his head from that damned piece of steel in his forehead.

He saw Anderson go staggering backward, her hands thrown out in what seemed to be a warding-off gesture. Her look of eagerness became one of surprised fear, bewilderment, and pain.

The last thing was that his headache was gone.

Utterly and completely gone.

But his nose was not just bleeding; it was spouting.

3

'Here, take it. Christ, Gard, are you all right?'

'I'll be fine,' Gardener said, his voice slightly muffled by her handkerchief. He doubled it and settled it over his nose, pressing down firmly on the bridge. He tilted his head up, and the slimy taste of blood began to fill his throat. 'I've had worse ones than this.' So he had … but not for a long time.

They had moved back about ten paces from the edge of the cut and seated themselves on a felled tree. Bobbi was looking at him anxiously.

'Christ, Gard, I didn't know anything like that was going to happen. You believe me, don't you?'

'Yes,' Gardener said. He didn't know precisely what Bobbi had been expecting … but not that. 'Did you hear the music?'

'I didn't exactly hear it,' Anderson said, 'I got it secondhand from your head. It just about ruptured me.'

'Did it?'

'Yeah.' Bobbi laughed, a little shakily. 'When I'm around a lot of people, I turn 'em off – '

'You can do that?' He took the handkerchief off his nose. It was sopping with blood – Gardener could have twisted it between his fingers and wrung blood out of it in a gory little stream. But the flow was finally slowing down … thank God. He dropped the handkerchief and tore the tail off his shirt.

'Yes,' Anderson said. 'Well … not entirely. I can't turn the thoughts completely off, but I can dial them way down, so it's like … well, like a faint whisper at the bottom of my mind.'

'That's incredible.'

'That's necessary,' Anderson said grimly. 'If I couldn't do it, I don't think I'd ever leave this goddam house again. I was in Augusta on Saturday and I opened my mind up to see what it'd be like.'

'And you found out.'

'Yeah, I found out. It was like having a hurricane in your head. And the scary thing was how hard it was to get the door shut again.'

'This door … barrier … whatever … how do you put it up?'

Anderson shook her head. 'Can't explain, any more than a guy who can wiggle his ears can explain how he does it.' She cleared her throat and looked down at her shoes for a moment – muddy workboots, Gardener saw. They looked as if they hadn't been off her feet much in the last couple of weeks.

Bobbi grinned a little. The grin was embarrassed and painfully humorous at the same time – and in that moment she looked completely like the old Bobbi. The one who had been his friend after nobody else wanted to be. It was Bobbi's aw-shucks look – Gardener had seen it the very first time he met her, when Bobbi was a freshman English student and Gardener a freshman English instructor banging apathetically away at a PhD thesis he probably knew even then he was never going to finish. Hungover and feeling rather bilious, Gardener had asked his bunch of new freshmen what the dative case was. No one offered an answer and Gardener had been about to take great pleasure in blowing them all out of the water when Anderson, Roberta, Row 5, Seat 3, raised her hand and took a shot at it. Her answer was diffident … but correct. Not surprisingly, she turned out to be the only one of them who'd had Latin in high school. The same aw-shucks grin he was seeing now had been on Bobbi's face then, and Gard felt a wave of affection sweep over him. Shit, Bobbi had been through a tough time … but this was Bobbi. No question about it.

'I keep the barriers up most of the time anyway,' she was saying. 'Otherwise it's like peeking in windows. You remember me telling you my mailman, Paulson, has got something going on the side?'

Gardener nodded.

'That isn't anything I want to know. Or if some poor slob is a klepto, or if some guy's a secret drinker … how's your nose?'

'Bleeding's stopped.' Gardener put down the bloody piece of shirting beside Anderson's handkerchief. 'So you keep the blocks up, huh?'

'Yes. For whatever reasons – moral, ethical, or just to keep from going batshit with the noise, I keep them up. With you I let them down because I wasn't getting squat even when I tried. I did try a couple of times, and if that makes you mad I understand, but it was only curiosity, because no one else is … blank … like that.'

'No one?'

'Nope. There must be some reason for it, something like having a really rare blood type. Maybe that even is it.'

'Sorry, I'm type O.'

Anderson laughed and got up. 'You feel up to going back, Gard?'

It's the plate in my head, Bobbi. He almost said it, and then, for some reason, decided not to. The plate in my head is keeping you out. I don't know how I know that, but I do.

'Yeah, I'm fine,' he said. 'I could use

(a drink)

a cup of coffee, that's all.'

'You got it. Come on.'

4

While part of her had been reacting to Gard with the warmth and genuine good feeling she had always felt for him, even during the worst times, another part of her (a part that was not, strictly speaking, Bobbi Anderson at all anymore) had stood coldly off to one side, watching everything carefully. Assessing. Questioning. And the first question was whether

(they)

she really wanted Gardener around at all. She

(they)

had thought at first that all her problems would now be solved, Gard would join her on the dig and she would no longer have to do this … well, this first part … all alone. He was right about one thing: trying to do it all by herself had nearly killed her. But the change she had expected in him hadn't happened. Only that distressing nosebleed.

He won't touch it again if it makes his nose bleed like that. He won't touch it and he certainly won't go inside it.

It may not come to that. After all, Peter never touched it. Peter didn't want to go near it, but his eye … and the age reversal …

It's not the same. He's a man, not an old beagle dog. And, face it, Bobbi, except for the nosebleed and that blast of music, there was absolutely no change.

No immediate change.

Is it the steel plate in his skull?

Maybe … but why should something like that make any difference?

That cold part of Bobbi didn't know; she only knew that it could have. The ship itself broadcast some kind of tremendous, almost animate force; whatever had come in it was dead, she was sure she hadn't lied about that, but the ship itself was almost alive, broadcasting that enormous energy-pattern through its metal skin … and, she knew, the broadcast area widened its umbrella a little with every inch of its surface she dug free. That energy had communicated itself to Gard. But then it had -what?

Been converted somehow. First converted and then blown off in a short, ferociously powerful radio transmission.

So what do I do?

She didn't know, but she knew it didn't matter.

They would tell her.

When the time came, they would tell her.

In the meantime, he would bear watching. But if only she could read him! It would be so much simpler if she could fucking read him!

A voice responded coldly: Get him drunk. Then you'll be able to read him. Then you'll be able to read him just fine.

5

They had come out on the Tomcat, which did not fly at all but rolled along the ground just as it always had – but instead of the former racket and roar of its engine, it now rolled in a complete silence that was somehow ghastly.

They came out of the woods and bumped along the edge of the garden. Anderson parked the Tomcat where it had been that morning.

Gardener glanced up at the sky, which was beginning to cloud over again, and said: 'You better put it in the shed, Bobbi.'

'It'll be all right,' she said shortly. She pocketed the key and started toward the house. Gardener glanced toward the shed, started after Bobbi, then looked back. There was a big Kreig padlock on the shed door. Another new addition. The woods, you should pardon the pun, seemed to be full of them.

What have you got in there? A time machine that runs on Penlites? What's the New Improved Bobbi got in there?

6

When he came into the house, Bobbi was rummaging in the fridge. She came up with a couple of beers.

'Were you serious about coffee, or do you want one of these?'

'How about a Coke?' Gardener asked. 'Flying saucers go better with Coke, that's my motto.' He laughed rather wildly.

'Sure,' Bobbi said, then stopped in the act of returning the cans of beer and grabbing two cans of Coke. 'I did, didn't IT

'Huh?'

‘I took you out there and showed it to you. The ship. Didn't I?’

Jesus, Gardener thought. Jesus Christ.

For a moment, standing there with the bottles in her hands, she looked like someone with Alzheimer's disease.

'Yes,' Gardener said, feeling his skin grow cold. 'You did.'

'Good,' Bobbi said, relieved. 'I thought I did.'

'Bobbi? You all right?'

'Sure,' Anderson said, and then added offhandedly, as if it were a thing of little or no importance: 'It's just that I can't remember much from when we left the house until now. But I guess it doesn't really matter, does it? Here's your Coke, Gard. Let's drink to life on other worlds, what do you say?'

7

So they drank to other worlds and then Anderson asked him what they should do with the spaceship she had stumbled over in the woods behind her house.

'We're not going to do anything. You're going to do something.'

'I already am, Gard,' she said gently.

'Of course you are,' he said a little testily, 'but I'm talking about some final disposition. I'll be happy to give you all the advice you want – us drunken, broken-down poets are great at giving advice – but in the end, you're going to do something. Something a little more far-reaching than just digging it up. Because it's yours. It's down on your land and it's yours.'

Anderson looked shocked. 'You don't really think that thing belongs to anyone, do you? Why, because Uncle Frank left me this place in his will? Because he had a clear title going back to part of a crown parcel that King George III swiped from the French after the French had swiped it from the Indians? Good Christ, Gard, that thing was fifty million years old when the forebears of the whole damned human race were squatting on their hunkers in caves and picking their noses!'

'I'm sure that's very true,' Gardener said dryly, 'but it doesn't change the law. And, anyway, are you going to sit there and try to tell me you're not possessive of it?'

Anderson looked both upset and thoughtful.

'Possessive? No – I wouldn't say that. It's responsibility I feel, not possessiveness.'

'Well, whatever. But since you asked my opinion, I'll give it to you. Call Limestone Air Force Base. Tell whoever answers that you've found an unidentified object down on your land that looks like an advanced flying machine of some sort. You might have some trouble at first, but you'll convince them. Then -'

Bobbi Anderson laughed. She laughed long and hard and loud. It was genuine laughter, and there was nothing mean about it, but it made Gardener feel acutely uncomfortable all the same. She laughed until tears streamed down her face. He felt himself stiffening.

'I'm sorry,' she said, seeing his expression. 'It's just that I can't believe I'm hearing this from you, of all people. You know … it's just . . .' She snorted laughter again. 'Well, it's a shock. Like having a Baptist preacher advise drinking as a cure for lust.'

'I don't understand what you mean.'

'Sure you do. I'm listening to the guy who got arrested at Seabrook with a gun in his pack, the guy who thinks the government won't really be happy until we all glow in the dark like radium watches, tell me to just call up the Air Force so they can come down here and take charge of an interstellar spacecraft.'

'It's your land-'

'Shit, Gard! My land is as vulnerable to the US government's right of eminent domain as anyone else's. Eminent domain's what gets turnpikes built.'

'And sometimes nuclear reactors.'

Bobbi sat down again and looked at Gardener in level silence.

'Think about what you're saying,' she said softly. 'Three days after I made a call like that, neither the land nor the ship would be “mine” anymore. Six days after, they'd have barbed wire strung around the whole place and sentries posted every fifty feet. Six weeks after, I think you'd probably find eighty per cent of Haven's population bought out, kicked out … or simply lost. They could do it, Gard. You know they could. What it comes down to is this: you want me to pick up the phone and call the Dallas Police.'

'Bobbi – '

'Yes. That's what it boils down to. I've found an alien spacecraft and you want me to turn it over to the Dallas Police. Do you think they're going to come down here and say, "Please come to Washington with us, Ms Anderson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff are very anxious to hear your ideas on this matter, not only because you own -well, used to own – the land the thing is on, but because the Joint Chiefs always poll western writers before they decide what they should do about such things. Also, the President wants you to pop around to the White House so he can get your thinking. In addition, he wants to tell you how much he liked Rimfire Christmas. "'

Anderson threw back her head and this time the laughter she uttered was wild, hysterical, and quite creepy. Gardener barely noticed. Did he really think they were going to come down here and be polite? With something as potentially enormous as this on the line? The answer was no. They would take the land. They would gag him and Bobbi … but even that might not be enough to make them feel comfortable. Could be they'd wind up someplace like a weird cross between a Russian gulag and a posh Club Med resort. All the beads are free, and the only catch is, you never get out.

Or even that might not be enough … so mourners please omit flowers. Then and only then could the ship's new caretakers sleep easy at night.

After all, it wasn't exactly an artifact, like an Etruscan vase or mine balls dug out of the ground at the site of some long-ago Civil War battle, was it? The woman who had found it had subsequently managed to power her entire house on D-cells … and he was now ready to believe that, even if the new gear on the Tomcat didn't work yet, it soon would.

And, what, exactly, would make it work? Microchips? Semiconductors? No. Bobbi was the extra added ingredient, the New Improved Bobbi Anderson. Bobbi. Or maybe it was anybody who got close to the thing. And a thing like that … well, you couldn't let an ordinary private citizen hold on to it, now could you?

'Whatever else it is,' he muttered, 'the goddam thing must be one hell of a brain booster. It's turned you into a genius.'

'No. An idiot savant,' Anderson said quietly.

'What?'

'Idiot savant. They've got maybe half a dozen of them down at Pineland – that's the state facility for the severely retarded. I worked there for two summers on a work-study program while I was in college. There was a guy who could multiply two six-digit numbers in his head and give you a correct answer in less than five seconds … and he was just as apt to piss in his pants while he was doing it as not. There was a twelve-year-old kid who was hydrocephalic. His head was as big as a prize pumpkin. But he could set perfectly justified type at the rate of a hundred and sixty words a minute. Couldn't talk, couldn't read, couldn't think, but he could set type like a hurricane.'

Anderson pawed a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. Her eyes looked steadily at Gardener out of her thin, haggard face.

'That's what I am. An idiot savant. That's all I am, and they'd know it. Those things – customizing the typewriter, fixing the water heater – I only remember them in bits and pieces. When I'm doing them, everything seems as clear as a bell. But later – ' She looked pleadingly at Gardener. 'Do you get it?'

Gardener nodded.

'It's coming from the ship, like radio transmissions from a broadcast tower.

But just because a radio can pick up transmissions and send them to a human ear, it's not talking. The government would be happy to take me, lock me up somewhere, and then to cut me into little pieces to see if there had been any physical changes … just as soon as my unfortunate accident gave them a reason to do an autopsy, that is.'

'Are you sure you're not reading my mind, Bobbi?'

'No. But do you really think they'd scruple at wasting some people over a thing like this?'

Gardener slowly shook his head.

'So taking your advice would amount to this,' Anderson said. 'First, call the Dallas Police; then get taken into custody by the Dallas Police; then get killed by the Dallas Police.'

Gard looked at her, troubled, and then said, 'All right. I cry uncle. But what's the alternative? You have to do something. Christ, the thing is killing you.'

'What?'

'You've lost thirty pounds, how's that for a start?'

'Thir – 'Anderson looked startled and uneasy. 'No, Gard, no way. Fifteen, maybe, but I was getting love-handles anyway, and – '

'Go weigh yourself,' Gardener said. 'If you can get the needle over ninetyfive, even with your boots on, I'll eat the scale. Lose a few more pounds and you'll get sick. The state you're in, you could go into heartbeat arrhythmia and die in two days.'

'I needed to lose some weight. And I was -'

'– too busy to eat, was that what you were going to say?'

'Well, not exactly in those w – '

'When I saw you last night, you looked like a survivor of the Bataan death march. You knew who I was, and that was all you knew. You're still not tracking. Five minutes after we got back in here from looking at your admittedly amazing find, you were asking me if you'd taken me to see it yet.'

Bobbi's eyes were still on the table, but he could see her expression: it was set and sullen.

He touched her gently. 'All I'm saying is that no matter how wonderful that thing in the woods is, it's done things to your body and mind that have been terrible for you.'

Bobbi drew away from him. 'If you're saying I'm crazy

'No, I'm not saying you're crazy, for God's sake! But you could get crazy if you don't slow down. Do you deny you've been having blackouts?'

'You're cross-examining me, Gard.'

'And for a woman who was asking my advice fifteen minutes ago, you're being a pretty fucking hostile witness.'

They glared at each other across the table for a moment.

Anderson gave first. 'Blackouts isn't the right word. Don't try to equate what happens to you when you drink too much with what's been happening to me. They're not the same.'

'I'm not going to argue semantics with you, Bobbi. That's a sidetrack and you know it. The thing out there is dangerous. That's what seems important to me.'

Anderson looked up at him. Her face was unreadable. 'You think it is,' she said, the words making neither a question nor a declarative sentence – they came out perfectly flat and inflectionless.

'You haven't just been getting or receiving ideas,' Gardener said. 'You've been driven.'

'Driven.' Anderson's expression did not change.

Gardener rubbed at his forehead. 'Driven, yes. Driven the way a bad, stupid man will drive a horse until it drops dead in the traces … then stand over it and whip the carcass because the damned nag had the nerve to die. A man like that is dangerous to horses, and whatever there is in that ship … I think it's dangerous to Bobbi Anderson. If I hadn't shown up.

'What? If you hadn't shown up, what?'

'I think you'd still be at it right now, working day and night, not eating … and that by this weekend you'd have been dead.'

'I think not,' Bobbi said coolly, 'but just for the sake of argument, let's say you're right. I'm on track again now.'

'You're not on track again, and you're not all right.'

That mulish look was back on her face, that look which said Gard was talking trash Bobbi would just as soon not hear.

'Look,' Gardener said, 'I'm with you on at least one thing, all the way. This is the biggest, most important, utterly mind-blowing thing that's ever happened. When it comes out, the headlines in the New York Times are going to make it look like the National Enquirer. People are going to change their fucking religions over this, do you know it?'

'Yes. I

'This isn't a powderkeg; it's an A-bomb. Do you know that?'

'Yes,' Anderson said again.

'Then get that pissed-off look off your face. If we're going to talk about it, let's fucking talk about it.'

Anderson sighed. 'Yeah. Okay. Sorry.'

'I admit I was wrong about calling the Air Force.'

They spoke together, then laughed together, and that was good.

Still smiling, Gard said: 'Something has to be done.'

'I'll buy that,' Anderson said.

'But, Bobbi, Jesus! I flunked chemistry and barely got through funnybook physics. I don't know exactly, but I do know it's got to be … well … damped out, or something.'

'We need some experts.'

'That's right!' Gardener said, seizing on it. 'Experts.'

'Gard, all the experts do forensic work for the Dallas Police.'

Gardener threw his hands up in disgust.

'Now that you're here, I'll be all right. I know it.'

'It's more likely to go the other way. Next thing, I'll start having blackouts.' Anderson said: 'I think the risk might be worth it.'

'You've decided already, haven't you?'

'I've decided what I want to do, yeah. What I want to do is keep quiet about it and finish the dig. Digging it all the way out shouldn't even be necessary. I think that once I – once we, I hope – can free it to a depth of another forty or fifty feet, we could come to a hatchway. If we can get inside . . .' Bobbi's eyes gleamed and Gardener felt an answering excitement rise in his own chest at the thought. All the doubts in the world could not hold back that excitement.

'If we can get inside?' Gardener repeated.

'If we can get inside, we can get at the controls. And if we can do that, I'm going to fly that fucker right out of the ground.'

'You think you can do that?'

'I know I can.'

'And then?'

'Then I don't know,' Bobbi said, shrugging. It was the best, most efficient lie she had told so far … but Gardener thought it was a lie. 'The next thing will happen, that's all I know.'

'But you say it's my decision to make.'

'Yes, I do. As far as the outside world goes, all I can do is continue to not tell. If you decide you will, well, what could I do to stop you? Shoot you with Uncle Frank's shotgun? I couldn't. Maybe a character in one of my books could, but I couldn't. This, unfortunately, is real life, where there are no real answers. I guess in real life I'd just stand here watching you go.

'But whoever you called, Gard – scientists from the university up in Orono, biologists from Jennings Labs, physicists from MIT – whoever you called, it would turn out you'd actually called the Dallas Police. You'd have people coming in here with trucks full of barbed wire and men with guns.' She smiled a little. 'At least I wouldn't have to go to that police-state Club Med alone.'

'No?'

'No. You're in it now too. When they flew me out there, you'd be right beside me in the next seat.' The wan smile broadened, but there still wasn't much humor in it. 'Welcome to the monkey-house, my friend. Aren't you glad you came?'

'Charmed,' Gardener said, and suddenly they were both laughing.

8

When the laughter passed, Gardener found that the atmosphere in Bobbi's kitchen had eased considerably.

Anderson asked: 'What do you think would happen to the ship if the Dallas Police got hold of it?'

'Have you ever heard of Hangar 18?' Gard asked.

'No.

'According to the stories, Hangar 18's supposed to be part of an Air Force base outside of Dayton. Or Dearborn. Or somewhere. Anywhere, USA. It's where they're supposed to have the bodies of about five little men with fishy faces and gills on their necks. Saucerians. It's just one of those stories you hear, like how somebody found a rat head in his fast-food burger, or how there are alligators in the New York sewers. Only now I sort of wonder if it is a fairy tale. But I think that would be the end.'

'Can I tell you one of those modern fairy tales, Gard?'

'Lay it on me.'

'Have you ever beard the one,' she asked, 'about the guy who invented a pill to take the place of gasoline?'

9

The sun was going down in a bright blaze of reds and yellows and purples. Gardener sat on a big stump in Bobbi Anderson's back yard, watching it go. They had talked most of the afternoon, sometimes discussing, sometimes reasoning, sometimes arguing. Bobbi had ended the palaver by declaring herself ravenous again. She made a huge pot of spaghetti and broiled some thick pork chops. Gardener had followed her out into the kitchen, wanting to reopen the discussion -thoughts were rolling around in his mind like balls on a pool table. Anderson wouldn't allow it. She offered Gardener a drink, which Gardener, after a long, thoughtful pause, took. The whiskey went down good, and felt good, but he seemed to have no need for a second – well, no great need. Now, sitting here full of food and drink and looking at the sky, he supposed Bobbi had been right. They'd done all the constructive talking there was to do.

It was decision-time.

Bobbi had eaten a tremendous supper. 'You're gonna puke, Bobbi,' Gardener said. He was serious but still couldn't help laughing.

'Nope,' Bobbi said placidly. 'Never felt better.' She burped. 'In Portugal, that's a compliment to the cook.'

'And after a good lay -'Gard lifted one leg and broke wind. Bobbi laughed gustily.

They did the dishes ('Haven't invented anything to do this yet, Bobbi?' 'It'll come, give me time.') and then they went into the small, drab living room, which hadn't changed much since the time of Bobbi's uncle, to watch the evening news. None of it was very good. The Middle East was smoldering again, with Israel flying air-strikes against Syrian ground forces in Lebanon (and hitting a school by accident -Gardener winced at the pictures of burned, screaming children), the Russians driving against the mountain strongholds of the Afghan rebels, a coup in South America.

In Washington, the NRC had issued a list of ninety nuclear facilities in thirty-seven states with safety problems ranging from 'moderate to serious.'

Moderate to serious, great, Gardener thought, feeling the old impotent rage stir and twist, biting into him like acid. If we lose Topeka, that's moderate. If we lose New York, that's serious.

He became aware that Bobby was looking at him a little sadly. 'The beat goes on, right?' she said.

'Right.'

When the news was over, Anderson told Gardener she was going to bed.

'At seven-thirty?'

'I'm still bushed.' And she looked it.

'Okay. I'll sack out myself pretty soon. I'm tired, too. It's been a crazy couple of days, but I'm not completely sure I'd sleep, the way the stuff is whizzing around in my head.'

'You want a Valium?'

He smiled. 'I saw they were still there. I'll pass. You were the one who could have used a trank or two, last couple of weeks.'

The State of Maine's price for going along with Nora's decision not to press charges was that Gardener should go into a counseling program. The program had lasted six months; the Valium was apparently going to go on forever. Gardener hadn't actually taken any in almost three years, but every now and then – usually when he was going traveling – he filled the prescription. Otherwise, some computer might burp out his name and a psychologist picking up a few extra bucks courtesy of the State of Maine might drop by to make sure his head was staying shrunk to a suitable size.

After she was in bed, Gardener had turned off the TV and sat a while in Bobbi's rocker, reading The Buffalo Soldiers. In a short time, he heard her snoring away. Gardener supposed Bobbi's snores would also be part of a conspiracy to keep him awake, but he didn't really mind – Bobbi had always snored, the price of a deviated septum, and that had always annoyed Gardener, but he had discovered last night that some things were worse. The ghastly silence in which she had slept on the couch, for instance. That was much worse.

Gardener had poked his head in for a moment, had seen Bobbi in a much more typical Bobbi Anderson sleeping posture, naked except pajama bottoms, small breasts bare, blankets kicked into disarray between her legs, one hand curled under her cheek, the other by her face, her thumb almost in her mouth. Bobbi was okay.

So Gardener had come out here to make his decision.

Bobbi's patch of garden was going great guns – the corn was taller than any Gardener had seen on his way north from Arcadia Beach, and her tomatoes were going to be blue ribbon winners. Some of them would have come to the knees of a man walking down the row. In the middle of it all was a cluster of giant sunflowers, ominous as triffids, nodding in the slight breeze.

When Bobbi asked him if he'd ever heard of the so-called 'gasoline pill,' Gardener had smiled and nodded. More twentieth-century fairy tales, all right. She'd then asked him if he believed it. Gardener, still smiling, said no. Bobbi reminded him about Hangar 18.

'Are you saying you do believe there's such a pill? Or was? Something you'd just drop into your gas tank and run on all day?'

'No,' Bobbi said quietly. 'Nothing I've ever read suggests the possibility of such a pill.' She leaned forward, forearms on her thighs. 'But I'll tell you what I do believe: if there was, it wouldn't be on the market. Some big cartel, or maybe the government itself, would buy it … or steal it.'

'Yeah,' Gard said. He had thought more than once about the crazy ironies inherent in every status quo: open the U.S. borders and put all those customs people out of work? Legalize dope and destroy the DEA. You might as well try to shoot the man in the moon with a BB.

Gard burst out laughing.

Bobbi looked at him, puzzled but also smiling a little. 'So? Share.'

'I was just thinking that if there was a pill like that, the Dallas Police would shoot the guy who invented it and then put it next to the green guys in Hangar 18.'

'Not to mention his whole family,' Bobbi agreed.

Gard didn't laugh this time. This time it didn't seem quite so hilarious.

'In that light,' Anderson had said, 'look at what I've done here. I'm not even a good handyman, let alone anyone's scientist, and so the force that worked through me produced a bunch of stuff that looks more like stuff from Boys' Life plans than anything else – built by a fairly incompetent boy, at that.'

'They work,' Gardener replied.

Yes, Anderson had agreed. They did. She even had a vague idea of how they worked – on a principle which could be called 'collapsing-molecule fusion.' It was non-atomic, totally clean. The telepathic typewriter, she said, depended on collapsing-molecule fusion for juice, but the actual principle of that one was much different, and she didn't understand it. There was a power-pack inside that had begun life as a fuzz-buster, but beyond that she was completely blank.

'You get a bunch of scientists in here from the NSA or the Shop, and they'd probably have this stuff down pat in six hours,' Anderson said. 'They'd go around looking like somebody just kicked them in the balls, asking each other how the hell they could have missed such elementary concepts for so long. And do you know what would happen next?'

Gardener thought about it hard, his head down, one hand gripping the can of beer Bobbi had given him, the other gripping his forehead, and suddenly he was back at that terrible party listening to Ted the Power Man defend the Iroquois plant which even now was loading hot rods: If we gave these nuke-freaks what they wanted, they'd turn around a month or so later and start whining about not being able to use their blow-dryers, or found out their Cuisinarts weren't going to work when they wanted to mix up a bunch of macrobiotic food. He saw himself leading Ted the Power Man over to Arberg's buffet – he saw this as clearly as if it had happened … shit, as if it was happening right then. On the table, between the chips and the bowl of raw veggies, was one of Bobbi's contraptions. The batteries were hooked up to a circuit board; that was in turn hooked up to an ordinary wall switch, the sort available in any hardware store for a buck or so. Gardener saw himself turn this switch, and suddenly everything on the table – chips, raw veggies, the lazy susan with its five different kinds of dip, the remains of the cold cuts and the carcass of the chicken, the ashtrays, the drinks – they rose six inches into the air and then simply held there, their shadows pooling decorously beneath them on the white linen. Ted the Power Man looked at this for a moment, mildly annoyed. Then he swept the contraption off the table. The wires snapped. Batteries rolled hither and yon. Everything fell back to the table with a crash, glasses spilling, ashtrays overturning and scattering butts. Ted took off his sport-coat and covered the remains of the gadget, the way you might cover the corpse of an animal hit and killed on the road. That done, he turned back to his small captive audience and resumed speaking. These people think they can go on having their cake and eating it too forever. These people assume that there is always going to be a fallback position. They are wrong. There is no fallback position. It's simple: nukes or nothing. Gardener heard himself screaming in a rage that was, for a change, totally sober: What about the thing you just broke? What about that? Ted bent and picked up his sport-coat as gracefully as a magician waving his cape before a bedazzled audience. The floor beneath was bare except for a few potato chips. No sign of the gadget. No sign at all. What about what thing? Ted the Power Man asked, looking straight at Gardener with an expression of sympathy into which a liberal helping of contempt had been mixed. He turned to his audience. Does anybody here see anything? … No, they were answering in unison, like children reciting: Arberg, Patricia McCardle, all the rest; even the young bartender and Ron Cummings were reciting it. No, we don't see anything, we don't see anything at all, Ted, not a thing, you're right, Ted, it's the nukes or nothing. Ted was smiling. Next thing you know, he'll be telling us that old wheeze about the itty-bitty pill you can put in your gas tank and run your car on all day. Ted the Power Man began to laugh. All the others joined in. All of them were laughing at him.

Gardener raised his head and turned agonized eyes on Bobbi Anderson. 'You think they'd … what? Classify all this?'

'Don't you?' And, after a moment, in a very gentle voice, Anderson prompted: 'Gard?'

'Yes,' Gardener said after a long time, and for a moment he was very close to bursting into tears. 'Yeah, sure. Sure they would.'

10

Now he sat on a stump in Bobbi's back yard without the slightest idea there was a loaded shotgun pointed at the back of his head.

He sat thinking of his mental replay of the party. It was so horrifying and so utterly obvious that he supposed he could be forgiven the time it had taken him to see it and grasp it. The ship in the earth could not be dealt with just on the basis of Bobbi's welfare, or Haven's welfare. Regardless of what it was or what it was doing to Bobbi or anyone else in the immediate area, the ultimate disposition of the ship in the earth would have to be made on the basis of the world's welfare. Gardener had served on dozens of committees whose goals ranged from the possible to the wildly crazed. He had marched; had given more than he could afford to help pay for newspaper ads in two unsuccessful campaigns to close Maine Yankee by referendum; as a college student he had marched against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam; he belonged to Greenpeace; he supported NARAL. In half a dozen muddled ways he had tried to deal with the world's welfare, but his efforts, although growing out of individual thought, had always been expressed as part of a group. Now …

Up to you, Gard-ole-Gard. Just you. He sighed. It was like a sob. Ring those funky changes, white boy … sure. But first ask yourself who wants the world to change? The unfed, the unwell, the unhomed, right? The parents of those kids in Africa with the big bellies and the dying eyes. The blacks in South Africa. The PLO. Does Ted the Power Man want a big helping of funky changes? Bite your tongue! Not Ted, not the Russian Politburo, not the Knesset, not the President of the United States, not the Seven Sisters, not Xerox, not Barry Manilow.

Oh no, not the big boys, not the ones with the real power, the ones who drove the Status Quo Machine. Their motto was 'Get the funk outta my face.'

There was a time when he would not have hesitated for a moment, and that time was not so long past. Bobbi wouldn't have needed any arguments; Gard himself would have been the guy flogging the horse until its heart burst … only he would have been right there in harness too, pulling alongside. Here, at last, was a source of clean power, so abundant and easy to produce it might as well be free. Within six months, every nuclear reactor in the United States could be brought to a cold stop. Within a year, every reactor in the world. Cheap power. Cheap transport. Travel to other planets, even other starsystems seemed possible – after all, Bobbi's ship had not gotten to Haven, Maine, on the good ship Lollypop. It was, in fact – give us a drumroll, please, maestro – THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING.

Are there weapons on board that ship, do you think?

He had started to ask Bobbi that and something had stopped his mouth. Weapons? Maybe. And if Bobbi could receive enough of that residual 'force' to create a telepathic typewriter, could she also create something that would look like a Flash Gordon stun-gun but which might actually work? Or a disintegrator? A tractor-beam? Something which would, instead of just going Brummmmm or Wacka-Wacka-Wacka would actually turn people into piles of smoldering ash? Possibly. And if not, wouldn't some of Bobbi's hypothetical scientists adapt things like the water-heater gadget or the customized Tomcat motor to something that would put a radical hurt on people?

Sure. After all, long before toasters and hair dryers and baseboard heaters were ever thought of, the State of New York was using electricity to fry murderers at Sing-Sing.

What scared Gardener was that the idea of weapons held a certain attractiveness. Part of it, he supposed, was just self-interest. If the order came down to put a sport-coat over the mess, then surely he and Bobbi would be part of what was to be covered. But beyond that were other possibilities. One of them, wild but not unattractive, was the idea that he and Bobbi might be able to kick a lot of asses that deserved kicking. The idea of sending happy-time folks like the Ayatollah into the Phantom Zone was so delightful that it almost made Gardener chuckle. Why wait for the Israelis and the Arabs to sort out their problems? And terrorists of all stripes … goodbye, fellas. Catch you on the flip-flop.

Wonderful, Gard! I love it! We'll put it on network TV! It'll be better than Miami Vice! Instead of two fearless drug-busters, we got Gard and Bobbi, cruising the planet in their flying saucer! Gimme the phone, someone! I got to call CBS!

You're not funny, Gardener thought.

Who's laughing? Isn't that what you're talking about? You and Bobbi playing the Lone Ranger and Tonto?

So what if it is? How long does it take before that option starts looking good? How many suitcase bombs? How many women shot in embassy toilets? How many dead kids? How long do we let it all go on?

Love it, Gard. 'Okay, everyone on Planet Earth, sing along with Gard and Bobbi – just follow the bouncing ball: "The aaanswer, my friend, is blooowin' in the wind. . . "'

You're disgusting.

And you're starting to sound downright dangerous. You remember how scared you were when that state trooper found the pistol in your pack? How scared you were because you didn't even remember putting it in there? This is it all over again. The only difference is that now you're talking about a bigger caliber. Dear Christ, are you ever.

As a younger man, these questions never would have occurred to him … and if they had, he would simply have brushed them aside. Apparently Bobbi already had. She was. after all, the one who had mentioned the man on horseback.

What do you mean, a man on horseback?

I mean us, Gard. But I think … I think I mostly mean you.

Bobbi, when I was twenty-five I burned all the time. When I was thirty, I burned some of the time. But the oxygen in here must be getting thin, because now I only burn when I'm drunk. I'm scared to climb up on that horse, Bobbi. If history ever taught me anything, it taught me that horses like to bolt.

He shifted on the stump again, and the shotgun followed him. Anderson sat in the kitchen on a stool, the barrels swivelling a bit on the window-sill with every move Gardener made. She was getting very little of his thoughts; it was frustrating, maddening. But she was getting enough to know that Gardener was approaching a decision … and when he made it, Anderson thought she would know what it was.

If it was the wrong one, she was going to blow off the back of his head and bury the body in the soft soil at the foot of the garden. She would hate to do that, but if she had to, she would.

Anderson waited calmly for the moment, her mind tuned to the faint run of Gardener's thoughts, making the tenuous connection.

It would not be long now.

What really scares you is the chance to deal from a position of strength for the first time in your miserable, confused life.

He sat up straighter, an expression of dismay on his face. It wasn't true, was it? Surely it wasn't.

Oh, but Gard, it is. You even root for baseball teams that are cataclysmic underdogs. That way you never have to worry about being depressed if one of them blows it in the World Series. It's the same with the candidates and the causes you support, isn't it? Because if your politics never get the chance to be tried out, you never have to worry about finding out that the new boss is the same as the old boss, do you?

I'm not scared. Not of that.

The fuck you're not. A man on horseback? You? Man, that's a laugh. You'd have a heart attack if someone asked you to be a man on a tricycle. Your own personal life has been nothing but a constant effort to destroy every power-base you have. Take marriage. Nora was tough, you finally had to shoot her to get rid of her, but when the chips were down, you didn't stick at it, did you? You're a man who manages to rise to every occasion, I'll give you that. You got yourself fired from your teaching job, thus eliminating another power-base. You've spent twelve years pouring enough booze onto the little spark of talent God gave you to put it out. Now this. You better run, Gard.

That's not fair! Honest to God, it's not!

No? Isn't there enough truth in it to make a comeuppance?

Maybe. Maybe so. Either way, he discovered that the decision had already been made. He would stick with Bobbi, at least for a while, do it her way.

Bobbi's blithe assurances that everything was just ducky didn't jibe very well with her exhaustion and weight-loss. What the ship in the earth could do to Bobbi it would probably do to him. What had happened – or failed to happen – today proved nothing; he would not have expected all the changes to come at once. Yet the ship – and whatever force emanated from it – had a great capacity to do good. That was the main thing, and … well, fuck the Tommyknocker man.

Gardener got up and walked toward the house. The sun had gone down, and the twilight was turning ashy. His back was stiff. He stretched, standing on his toes, and grimaced as his spine crackled. He looked past the dark, silent shape of the Tomcat to the shed door with its new padlock. He thought of going to it, trying to look through one of the dirt-grimed windows … and decided not to. Perhaps he was afraid a white face would pop up inside the dark window, its grin showing a mouthful of filed cannibal teeth in a deadly ring. Hello, Gard, you want to meet some genuine Tommyknockers? Come on in! There's lots of us in here!

Gardener shivered – he could almost hear thin, evil fingers scrabbling on the panes. Too much had happened today and yesterday. His imagination had gotten out. Tonight it would walk and talk. He didn't know if he should hope for sleep or for it to stay away.

12

Once he was back inside, his uneasiness began to fade. With it went some of his craving for drink. He took off his shirt and then peered into Anderson's room. Bobbi lay just as she had lain before, blankets caught between her dreadfully thin legs, one hand thrown out, snoring.

Hasn't even moved. Christ, she must be tired.

He took a long shower, turning the water up as hot as he dared (with Bobbi Anderson's new water heater, that meant barely jogging the knob five degrees west of dead cold). When his skin began to turn red. he stepped out into a bathroom as steamy as London in the grip of a Sherlockian fog. He towelled, brushed his teeth with a finger – got to do something about getting some supplies here, he thought -and went to bed.

Drifting off, he found himself thinking again about the last thing Bobbi had said during their discussion. She believed the ship in the earth had begun to affect the townspeople. When he asked for specifics, she grew vague, then changed the subject. Gardener supposed anything was possible in this crazy business. Although the old Frank Garrick place was in the boonies, it was almost exactly in the geographic center of the township itself. There was a Haven Village, but that was five miles further north.

'You make it sound as if it was throwing off poison gas,' he had said, hoping he didn't sound as uneasy as he felt. 'Paraquat from Space. They Came from Agent Orange.'

'Poison gas?' Bobbi repeated. She had gone off by herself again. Her face, so thin now, was closed and distant. 'No, not poison gas. Call it fumes if you want to call it anything. But it's more than just the vibration when a person touches it.'

Gardener said nothing, not wanting to break her mood.

'Fumes? Not that, either. But like fumes. If EPA came in here with sniffers, I don't think they'd find any pollutants at all. If there's any actual, physical residue from the ship in the air, it's nothing but the tiniest trace.'

'Do you think that's possible, Bobbi?' Gardener asked quietly.

'Yes. I'm not telling you I know that's what's happening, because I don't. I have no inside information. But I think that a very thin layer of the ship's hull – and I mean thin, maybe no more than a single molecule or two in depth – could be oxidizing as I uncover it and the air hits it. That means I'd get the first, heaviest dose . . . and then it would go with the wind, like fallout. The people in town would get most of it … but "most" would really mean---damn little" in this case.'

Bobbi shifted in her rocker and reached down with her right hand. It was a gesture Gardener had seen her make many times before, and his heart went out to his friend when he saw the look of sorrow cross Bobbi's face. Bobbi put her hand back into her lap.

'But I'm not sure that's what's going on at all, you know. There's a novel by a man named Peter Straub called Floating Dragon – have you read it?'

Gardener had shaken his head.

'Well, it postulates something similar to your Agent Orange from Space or Paraquat of the Gods or whatever you called it.'

Gardener smiled.

'In the story, an experimental chemical is sucked out into the atmosphere and falls on a piece of suburban Connecticut. This stuff really is poison – a kind of insanity gas. People get in fights for no reason, some fellow decides to paint his whole house – including the windows – bright pink, a woman jogs until she drops dead of a massive coronary and so on.

'There's another novel – this one is called Brain Wave, and it was written by . . .' Anderson wrinkled her brow, thinking. Her hand stole down to the right of the rocker again, then came back. 'Same name as mine, Anderson. Poul Anderson. In that one, the earth passes through the tail of a comet and some of the fallout makes animals smarter. The book starts with a rabbit literally reasoning its way out of a trap.'

'Smarter,' Gardener echoed.

'Yes. If you had an IQ of 120 before the earth went through the comet, you'd end up with an IQ of 180. Get it?'

'Well-rounded intelligence?'

'Yes.'

'But the term you used before was idiot savant. That's the exact opposite of well-rounded intelligence, isn't it? It's a kind of … of bump.'

Anderson waved this aside. 'Doesn't matter,' she said.

Now, lying here in bed, drifting off to sleep, Gardener wondered.

13

That night he had the dream. It was simple enough. He was standing in darkness outside of the shed between the farmhouse and the garden. To his left, the Tomcat was a dark shape. He was thinking exactly what he had been

thinking tonight – that he would go over and look in one of the windows. And what would he see? Why, the Tommyknockers, of course. But he wasn't afraid. Instead of fear he felt delighted, relieved joy. Because the Tommyknockers weren't monsters or cannibals; they were like the elves in that story about the good shoemaker. He would look in through the dirty shed window like a delighted child looking out a bedroom window in an illustration from 'The Night Before Christmas' (and what was Santa Claus, that right jolly old elf, but a great big old Tommyknocker in a red suit?), and he would see them, laughing and chattering as they sat at a long table, cobbling together power generators and levitating skateboards and televisions which showed mindmovies instead of regular ones.

He drifted toward the shed, and suddenly it was lighted by the same glare he had seen coming out of Bobbi's modified typewriter – it was as if the shed had turned into some weird jack-o'-lantern, only this light was not a warm yellow but an awful, rotten green. It spilled out between the boards; it spilled rays through knotholes and tattooed evil cats' eyes on the ground, it filled the windows. And now he was afraid, because no friendly little aliens from space had made that light; if cancer had a color, it would be the one that spilled from every chink and crack and knothole and window of Bobbi Anderson's shed.

But he drew closer, because in dreams you can't always help yourself. He drew closer, no longer wanting to see, no more than a kid would want to look out his bedroom window on Christmas Eve and see Santa Claus striding along the snow-covered slope of roof across the way with a severed head in each gloved hand, the blood from the ragged necks steaming in the cold.

Please no, please no

But he drew closer and as he entered that haze of green, rock music spilled into his head in a paralyzing, mind-splitting flood. It was George Thorogood and the Destroyers, and he knew that when George started to play that slide guitar, his skull would vibrate for a moment with killing harmonics and then simply explode like the water glasses in the house he had once told Bobbi about.

None of it mattered. The fear mattered, that was all – the fear of the Tommyknockers in Bobbi's shed. He sensed them, could almost smell them, a rich, electric smell like ozone and blood.

And … the weird liquid sloshing sounds. He could hear those even over the music in his head. It sounded like an old-fashioned washing machine, except that sound wasn't water, and that sound was wrong, wrong, wrong.

As he stood on his tiptoes to look into the shed, his face as green as the face of a corpse pulled out of quicksand, George Thorogood started to play that slide blues guitar, and Gardener began screaming with pain – and that was when his head exploded and he woke sitting bolt upright in the old double bed in the guestroom, his chest covered with sweat, his hands trembling.

He lay down again, thinking: God! If you're going to have nightmares about it, take a look in tomorrow. Get your mind easy.

He had expected nightmares in the wake of his decision; he lay back down again, thinking that this was only the first. But there were no more dreams. That night. The next day he joined Bobbi on the dig.