DORIS LESSING, The Golden Notebook 5 page

His first coherent thought was simple panic yelling at the top of its voice: Run! Get out of here!

His second thought was the shaky resurfacing of reason. Guard your thoughts. If you ever guarded them before, guard them now.

He stood with his shirt off, his unbuckled and unzipped jeans sagging around his hips, staring at the padlock in his shirt pocket.

Get out there right now and put it back. Right NOW!

No... no time... Christ, there's no time. They're at the garden.

There might be. There might be just enough if you quit playing pocket-pool and get moving!

He broke the paralysis with a final harsh effort of will, bent, snatched up the lock with the key still sticking out of the bottom, and ran, zipping his pants as he went. He slipped out the back door, paused for just a moment as the last two flashlights slipped into the garden and disappeared, then ran for the shed.

Faintly, vaguely, he could hear their voices in his mind—full of awe, wonder, jubilation.

He closed them out.

Green light fanning out from the shed door, which stood ajar.

Christ, Gard, how could you have been so stupid? his cornered mind raved, but he knew how. It was easy to forget such mundane things as relocking doors when you had seen a couple of people hung up on posts with coaxial cables coming out of their heads.

He could hear them in the garden now—could hear the rustle of the useless giant cornstalks.

As he reached toward the hasp, lock in hand, he remembered closing it before dropping it into his pocket. His hand jerked at the thought and he dropped the goddam thing. It thumped to the ground. He looked for it, and at first couldn't see it at all.

No... there it was, there just beyond the narrow fan of pulsing green light. There was the lock, yes, but the key wasn't in it anymore. The key had fallen out when the lock thumped to the ground.

God my God my God, his mind sobbed. His body was now covered with oozing sweat. His hair hung in his eyes. He thought he must smell like a rancid monkey.

He could hear cornstalks and leaves rustling louder. Someone laughed quietly -the sound was shockingly near. They would be out of the garden in seconds—he could feel those seconds bustling by, like. self-important businessmen with pot bellies and attache cases. He went down on his knees, snatched up the lock, and began to sweep his hand back and forth in the dirt, trying to find the key.

Oh you bastard where are you? Oh you bastard where are you? Oh you bastard! Where are you?

Aware that even now, in this panic, he had thrown a screen around his thoughts. Was it working? He didn't know. And if he couldn't find the key, it didn't matter, did it?

Oh you bastard where are you?

He saw a dull glint of silver beyond where he was sweeping his hand—the key had gone much further than he would have believed. His seeing it was only dumb luck... like Bobbi stumbling over that little rim of protruding metal in the earth two months before, he supposed.

Gardener snatched it and bolted to his feet. He would be hidden from them by the angle of the house for just a moment longer, but that was all he had left. One more screw-up—even a little one—would finish him, and there might not be enough time left even if he performed each of the mundane little operations involved in padlocking a door perfectly.

The fate of the world may now depend on whether a man can lock a shed door on the first try, he thought dazedly. Modem life is so challenging.

For a moment he didn't think he was even going to be able to slot the key in the lock. It chattered all the way around the slit without going in, a prisoner of his shaking hand. Then, when he thought it really was all over, it slid home. He turned it. The lock opened. He closed the door, slipped the arm of the padlock through the hasp, and then clicked it shut. He pulled the key out and folded it into his sweating hand. He slid around the corner of the shed like oil. At the exact moment he did, the men and women who had gone out to the ship emerged into the dooryard, moving in single file.

Gardener reached up to hang the key on the nail where he had found it. For one nightmare moment he thought he was going to drop it again and have to hunt for it in the high weeds growing on this side of the shed. When it slipped onto the nail he let out his breath in a shuddering sigh.

Part of him wanted not to move, to just freeze here. Then he decided he'd better not take the risk. After all, he didn't know that Bobbi had her key.

He continued slipping along the side of the shed. His left ankle struck the haft of an old harrow that had been left to rust in the weeds, and he had to clamp his teeth over a cry of pain. He stepped over it and slipped around another corner. Now he was behind the shed.

That sudsing sound was maddeningly loud back here.

I'm right behind those goddam showers, he thought. They're floating inches from me... literally inches.

A rustle of weeds. A minute scrape of metal. Gardener felt simultaneously like laughing and screeching. They hadn't had Bobbi's key. Someone had just come around to the side of the shed and taken the key Gardener had hung up again only seconds before—probably Bobbi herself.

Still warm from my hand, Bobbi, did you notice?

He stood in back of the shed, pressed against the rough wood, arms slightly spread, palms tight on the boards.

Did you notice? And do you hear me? Do any of you hear me? Is someone -Allison or Archinbourg or Berringer—going to suddenly pop his head around here and yell out “Peek-a-boo, Gard, we seeee you?” Is the shield still working?

He stood there and waited for them to take him.

They didn't. On an ordinary summer night he probably would not have been able to hear the metallic rattle as the door was unlocked—it would have been masked by the loud ree-ree-ree of the crickets. But now there were no crickets. He beard the unlocking; heard the creak of the hinges as the door was opened; heard the hinges creak again as the door was pushed shut. They were inside.

Almost at once the pulses of light failing through the cracks began to speed up and become brighter, and his mind was split by an agonized scream:

Hurts! It hurrrrr

He moved away from the shed and went back to the house.

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

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

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

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

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

Have to try, Gard.

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

Gard, he's probably dead anyway.

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

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

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

The kid matters or nothing matters.

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

Long odds, Gard ole Gard.

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

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

Chapter 5

The Scoop

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

But oh shit it hurt.

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

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

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

Sundays always left him feeling exalted. And exhausted.

So it was Monday, the 15th of August before Leandro finally tossed his yellow legal pads, his Sony tape recorder, his Nikon and a gadget-bag filled with film and various lenses, into the front seat of his used Dodge and prepared to set out for Haven... and what he hoped would be journalistic glory. He would not have been appalled if he had known he was approaching ground-zero of what was shortly to become the biggest story since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Microbes,” she said ominously, leaning forward.

“Ma, I got to g—”

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

“Yes, Mom,” Leandro said, resigned.

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

“Mom—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I promise, Mom.”

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

“You'll be home for supper?”

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

“At six?” she persisted.

“Yes! Yes!”

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

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

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

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

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

A chunk of what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something big... strange meat.

Nor was that all of the weirdness emanating out of Haven these days. A fire, also in July, had killed a couple on the Nista Road. This month a doctor piloting a small plane had crashed and burned. That had happened in Newport, true, but the FAA controller at BIA had confirmed that the unfortunate doc had overflown Haven, and at an illegally low altitude. Phone service in Haven had begun to get oddly glitchy. Sometimes people could get through, sometimes they couldn't. He had sent to the Augusta Bureau of Taxation for a list of Haven voters (paying the required fee of six dollars to get the nine computer sheets), and had managed to trace relatives of nearly sixty of these Havenites—relatives living in Bangor, Derry, and surrounding areas—in his spare time.

He couldn't find one—not one—who had seen his or her Haven relations since July 10th or so... over a month before. Not one.

Of course, a lot of those he interviewed didn't find this strange at all. Some of them weren't on good terms with their Haven relations and couldn't care less if they didn't hear from or see them in the next six months... or six years. Others seemed first surprised, then thoughtful when Leandro pointed out the length of the lapse they were talking about. Of course, summer was an active season for most people. Time passed with a light easiness that winter knew nothing about. And, of course, they had spoken to Aunt Mary or Brother Bill a time or two on the phone -sometimes you couldn't get through, but mostly you could.

There were other suspicious similarities in the testimony of the people

Leandro interviewed, similarities that had made his nose flare with the smell of something decidedly off:

Ricky Berringer was a house-painter in Bangor. His older brother, Newt, was a carpenter-contractor who also happened to be a Haven selectman. “We invited Newt up for dinner near the end of July,” Ricky said, “but he said he had the flu.”

Don Blue was a Derry realtor. His Aunt Sylvia, who lived in Haven, had been in the habit of coming up to take dinner with Don and his wife every Sunday or so. The last three Sundays she had begged off—once with the flu (flu seems to be going around in Haven, Leandro thought, nowhere else, you understand—just in Haven), and the other times because it was so hot she just didn't feel like traveling. After further questioning Blue realized it had been more like five Sundays since his aunt had favored them—and maybe as many as six.

Bill Spruce kept a herd of dairy cows in Cleaves Mills. His brother Frank kept a herd in Haven. They usually got together every week or two, merging two extremely large families for a few hours—the clan Spruce would eat tons of barbecue, drink gallons of beer and Pepsi-Cola, and Frank and Bill would sit either at the picnic table in Frank's back yard or on the front porch of Bill's house and compare notes about what they simply called the Business. Bill admitted it had been a month or more since he'd seen Frank—there had been some problem first with his feed supplier, Frank had told him, then with the milk inspectors. Bill, meanwhile, had had a few problems of his own. Half a dozen of his holsteins had died during this last hot-spell. And, he added as an afterthought, his wife had had a heart attack. He and his brother just hadn't had time to visit much this summer... but the man had still expressed unfeigned surprise when Leandro dragged out his wallet calendar and the two of them figured out just how long it had been: the two brothers hadn't gotten together since June 30th. Spruce whistled and tilted his cap back on his head. “Gorry, that is a long time,” he had said. “Guess I'll have to take a ride down Haven and see Frank, now that my Evelyn's on the mend.”

Leandro said nothing, but some of the other testimony he had gathered over the last couple of weeks made him think that Bill Spruce might find a trip like that hazardous to his health.

“Felt like I was dine,” Alvin Rutledge told Leandro. Rutledge was a long-haul trucker, currently unemployed, who lived in Bangor. His grandfather was Dave Rutledge, a lifelong Haven resident.

“What exactly do you mean?” Leandro asked.

Alvin Rutledge looked at the young reporter shrewdly. “Another beer'd go down good just about now,” he said. They were sitting in Nan's Tavern in Bangor. “Talkin's amazin” dusty work, chummy.”

“Isn't it,” Leandro said, and told the waitress to draw two.

Rutledge took a deep swallow when it came, wiped foam from his upper lip with the heel of his hand, and said: “Heart beatin” too fast. Headache. Felt like I was gonna puke my guts out. I did puke, as a matter of fact. Just “fore I turned around. Rolled down the window and just let her fly into the slipstream, I did.”

“Wow,” Leandro said, since some remark seemed called for. The image of Rutledge “letting her fly into the slipstream” flapped briefly in his mind. He dismissed it. At least, he tried.

“And looka here.”

He rolled back his upper lip, revealing the remains of his teeth.

“Ooo see a ho in funt?” Rutledge asked. Leandro saw a good many holes in front, but thought it might not be politic to say so. He simply agreed. Rutledge nodded and let his lip fall back into place. It was something of a relief.

“Teeth never have been much good,” Rutledge said indifferently. “When I get workin” again and can afford me a good set of dentures, I'm gonna have all of “em jerked. Fuck em. Point is, I had my two front teeth there on top before I headed up to Haven week before last to check on Gramp. Hell, they wasn't even loose.”

“They fell out when you started to get close to Haven?”

“Didn't fall out,” Rutledge finished his beer. “I puked “em out.”

“Oh,” Leandro had replied faintly.

“You know, another brew'd go down good. Talkin's

“Thirsty work, I know,” Leandro said, signaling the waitress. He was over his limit, but he found he could use another one himself.

Alvin Rutledge wasn't the only person who had tried to visit a friend or relative in Haven during July, nor the only one to become ill and turn back. Using the voting lists and area phone books as a starting point, Leandro turned up three people who told stories similar to Rutledge's. He uncovered a fourth incident through pure coincidence—or almost pure. His mother knew he was “following up” some aspect of his “big story,” and happened to mention that her friend Eileen Pulsifer had a friend who lived down in Haven.

Eileen was fifteen years older than Leandro's mother, which put her close to seventy. Over tea and cloyingly sweet gingersnaps, she told Leandro a story similar to those he had already heard.

Mrs Pulsifer's friend was Mary Jacklin (whose grandson was Tommy Jacklin). They had visited back and forth for more than forty years, and often played in local bridge tournaments. This summer she hadn't seen Mary at all. Not even once. She'd spoken to her on the phone, and she seemed fine; her excuses always sounded believable... but all the same, something about them—a bad headache, too much baking to do, the family had decided on the spur of the moment to go down to Kennebunk and visit the Trolley Museum—wasn't quite right.

“They were fine by the one-by-one, but they seemed odd to me in the whole bunch, if you see what I mean.” She offered the cookies. “More “snaps?”

“No thank you,” Leandro said.

“Oh, go ahead! I know you boys! Your mother taught you to be polite, but no boy ever born could turn down a gingersnap! Now you just go on and take what you hanker for!”

Smiling dutifully, Leandro took another gingersnap.

Settling back and folding her hands on her tight round belly, Mrs Pulsifer went on: “I begun to think something might be wrong... I still think that maybe something's wrong, truth to tell. First thing to cross my mind was that maybe Mary didn't want to be my friend anymore... that maybe I did or said something to offend her. But no, says I to myself, if I'd done something “ I guess she'd tell me. After forty years of friendship I guess she would. Besides, she didn't really sound cool to me, you know

“But she did sound different.”

Eileen Pulsifer nodded decisively. “Ayuh. And that got me thinking that maybe she was sick, that maybe, God save us, her doctor had found a cancer or something inside her, and she didn't want any of her old friends to know. So I called up Vera and I said, “We're going to go down to Haven, Vera, and see Mary. We ain't going to tell her we're coming, and that way she can't call us off. You get ready, Vera,” I says, “because I'm coming by your house at ten o'clock, and if you ain't ready, I'm going to go without you. —

“Vera is—”

“Vera Anderson, in Derry. Just about my best friend in the whole world, John, except for Mary and your mother. And your mother was down in Monmouth, Visiting her sister that week.”

Leandro remembered it well: a week of such peace and quiet was a week to be treasured.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 521