DORIS LESSING, The Golden Notebook 14 page

A moment later, the green parasol spread its delicate web over the yard again.

Gard heard the screams—a multitude of them this time—and shut them out as best he could. They didn't matter. Nothing mattered except getting to the last stop on the line.

No sense trying to fly the Tomcat. He threw it into first gear and drove into Bobbi's monstrous useless burning garden.

There came a moment when he began to believe he wasn't going to make it; the fire had caught hold faster in the weeds and overgrown crops than he had believed possible. The heat was baking, tremendous. Soon his lungs would boil.

He heard dull thudding noises, like fat knots of pine exploding in a fireplace, looked, saw pumpkins and gourds exploding like pine knots in a fireplace. The Tomcat's wheel was blistering his hands.

Heat on his head. Gardener reached up. His hair was on fire.

The entire inside of the shed was ablaze now. In the middle of it the transformer waxed and waned, waxed and waned, a pulsating cat's eye in the middle of an inferno.

Peter lay on his side, his legs stilled at last. Ev Hillman was looking at the transformer with exhausted concentration. The fluid encasing him was becoming very, very hot. That was all right; there was no pain, not in the physical sense. The insulation on the main cable connecting him to the transformer was now beginning to melt and fuse. But the connection still held. For the moment, in the burning shed, it held, and Ev Hillman thought:

The last thing. Give him a chance to get away. The last thing

LAST THING

the computer screen flashed.

LAST THING LAST THING LAST THING

Then filled up with 9s.

The destruction in Bobbi Anderson's dooryard was incredible.

Dick and Newt watched it, fascinated, almost unbelieving. As in the woods that day with the old man and the cop, Dick found himself wondering how things could possibly go so wrong. The two of them—them and all the others who hadn't arrived yet—were well outside the parasol's deadly perimeter, but still Dick didn't get up. He wasn't sure he could.

People were burning in the yard like dry scarecrows. Some ran, flapping and cawing and screeching with their voices and their minds. A few—a fortunate few -managed to back away in time. Frank Spruce walked slowly past where Dick and Newt lay, half of his face burned away so his jaw showed on that side in a half-grin. There were flash-explosions as the weapons some of them carried fused and self-destructed.

Dick's eyes met Newt's.

Send them around! Flank him! Got to

Yes I see but oh Christ there must be ten or twenty of us burning

STOP FUCKING WHINING!

Newt recoiled, lips bared in a toothless snarl. Dick ignored him. The mind-net had fallen apart. Now he could make himself heard.

Go around! Go around! Get him! Get the drunk! Go around!

They began to move, slowly at first, their faces dazed, and then with quickening purpose.

The computer screen imploded. There was a coughing explosion, like a giant clearing a throat thick with phlegm, and thick green fluid poured from the shower cabinet in which Ev Hillman had been kept prisoner. It met the fire and produced a deadly green steam. Ev, mercifully dead at last, washed out like a fish from a burst aquarium. A moment later, Peter followed. Anne Anderson came last, her dead hands still hooked into claws.

The fire-parasol died. Now there was no sound but the screams of the dying and Dick's insistent voice. The summer day was an inferno. Bobbi's dooryard was a dirt pond filled with islands of fire. But the Tommyknockers always brought fire in the end, and they got used to it quickly.

Newt joined his voice with Dick's. Kyle was dead, Adley badly burned. Nevertheless, Ad joined his own mortally wounded voice with theirs:

Get him before he can get to the ship! He's still alive! Get him before he can get to the ship! Before he can get to the ship!

The Tommyknockers had taken a mauling. That fifteen of them had been flash-fried in Bobbi's yard was not very important. But Bobbi was dead; Kyle was dead; Adley soon would be; the transformer had been destroyed just when the border-closing had rendered their need for it critical. And Gardener was still alive. Incredibly, Gardener was still alive.

Perhaps worst of all, the wind was freshening.

Get him, and get him quick.

On the net; the Tommyknockers were on the net.

They came across the fields; came toward the spreading fire.

QUICK!

Dick Allison turned toward town and the net turned with him like a radar dish. He sensed Hazel's dumb amazement at the turn of events.

He

(the net)

brushed that aside.

Whatever you got out that way, Hazel: send it at him.

Dick turned toward Newt.

You didn't have to push me so effing hard, Newt said sulkily, and wiped a drip of blood from his chin.

“Fuck you,” Dick said deliberately. “Let's get that sonofawhore.”

The whirligig, dead now, had started a fire that was spreading out from Bobbi's house in a shape which resembled a lady's fan—a fire-fan. Bobbi's house, now only black bones shimmering in a red pillar of fire, was at its point of origination. The wings were spreading through the obscenely overgrown garden, and as the mutated plants burned, the fire glowed green.

Passing between the flames was Jim Gardener, crowned with burning hair. His shirt was smoldering; one of the sleeves squirted smoke and then burst into flames. He slapped them out. He wanted to scream but he seemed too tired, too woozy.

I have been badly used, Gardener thought, and it is no one's fault but my own.

He reached the far edge of the garden. The Tomcat lurched and waddled down a mild slope and into the woods. The low, scrubby bushes on the sides of the trail were on fire, and low runners of flame were already spreading into Big Injun Woods. Gard cared little for them. The feeling that he was going to be microwaved was passing. He whacked repeatedly at his head. His hair smelled dreadful—like food fried by a child.

Green fire sizzled over his right shoulder as the Tomcat entered the woods.

Gard flinched to the left and ducked. He looked back and there was Hank Buck, with his own Zap Gun. Hank had ridden a motorcycle out to the farm, had dumped it in the same field where Nancy Voss had come to ruin, had picked himself up and started to run.

Gardener turned around, held the Sonic Space Blaster out straight in his right hand, and gripped his right wrist with his left hand. He pulled the trigger. The pencil-beam stabbed out, and more by good luck than any sort of shooting skill, he struck Hank high up on the left side of the chest. There was the sound of frying bacon. Green death splashed up onto Hank's face and he fell over.

Gardener turned forward again and saw the Tomcat moving toward a large burning spruce at a complacent five miles an hour. He hauled on the wheel with both blistered hands, barely avoiding a head-on collision. One of the Tomcat's pillow tires scraped the trunk of the tree, and for a moment Gardener found himself shoving away blazing, fragrant spruce boughs like a man fighting his way through burning curtains. The little tractor tilted sickeningly, tottered... then thumped back down again. Gardener pushed the throttle-lever as far as it would go and hung on as the Tomcat made its way up the path into the woods.

They came. The Tommyknockers came. They came along the widening wings of that fiery lady's fan, and Dick Allison began to feel a kind of furious desperation, because they weren't going to catch him. Gardener had been able to use the path; that had made all the difference. Three minutes later—maybe even one—and Gardener really would have been cooked. Four of the Tommyknockers (Mrs Eileen Crenshaw and the Reverend Goohringer among them) tried to follow him that way and were burned alive. Two of the gigantic, flaming corn plants toppled onto the Crenshaw woman, who shrieked and let go of the dune-buggy's steering bar. The dune-buggy promptly drove itself into the depths of the flaming garden. Its tires exploded like bombs. Bare seconds later, fire choked the whole path.

Dick's frustration went deeper than the bone. The “becoming” had been thwarted and choked off before—not often, but it had happened—but always as the result of some natural intervention... as a whole generation of mosquito larvae breeding in a quiet, stagnant pond may be killed by a stroke of lightning from a summer storm. But this was no thunderstorm, no natural happening; this was one man, a man they had all regarded with the kind of wary contempt reserved for a stupid dog which may bite; this was one man who had spent most of his time with Bobbi in a drunken stupor, one man who had somehow tricked Bobbi and killed her and who refused to die no matter what they did.

We will not be stopped by one man, Dick thought frenziedly. We Will NOT! But was there any real way to stop just that from happening? The fire-front was now spreading too fast for them to catch him. Gardener had managed to shoot down the center of an alley of fire, but he would be the only one. Hank Buck had had a shot... but somehow the fucking son of a bitch had managed to shoot Hank dead.

Dick was in a perfect ecstasy of fury (Newt sensed it and kept his distance—Dick was twenty pounds heavier and ten years younger), but at the center of his rage was terror, like a cold curdle of rancid cream in the middle of a poisoned chocolate.

The Tommyknockers, Bobbi had told Gardener, were great sky travelers. This was true. But never, anywhere, had they met anyone quite like this one man, who kept going, even with his shattered ankle, his great loss of blood, and his ingestion of a drug that should have rendered him unconscious fifteen minutes ago, in spite of the great lot he had vomited up.

Impossible—but happening.

Somehow the fire that was supposed to keep Gardener from the ship had become Gardener's shield.

Now there were only the automated monitors—the gadgets.

“They'll get him,” Dick whispered. He and Newt were standing on a knoll to the right of the house like a pair of generals, watching people stream into the woods... but doing so on a pair of infuriatingly oblique angles. Dick's hands opened; snapped closed; opened; closed. Green blood beat in his neck. “They'll get him, they'll stop him, he's not going to get to the ship, he's not, he's not.”

Newt Berringer kept prudently silent.

The smoke-detector, very like a flying saucer itself, whickered silently through the woods with the red sensor light on its underside pulsing erratically. Hazel McCready was controlling this baby herself. She had caught Dick Allison's wave of anger, despair, and fear, and had determined to take care of Gardener herself—by remote control, as it were. First she had put Pauline Goudge, whom she felt most trustworthy, to work on one other matter, and then Hazel had gone down to her office, closed the door, and locked it.

From the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet she brought out a ghetto-blaster a little smaller than the late Hank Buck's disposal unit. She put it on her desk, turned it on, took an earphone from the Out basket of her desk-minder, and put the plug in her ear.

Now she sat with her eyes closed, but she could see trees rush past on either side of the smoke-detector as it whizzed through the woods about six feet above the ground. Gardener would have been forcibly reminded of the sequence in The Return of the Jedi, when the good guys chase the bad guys through a seemingly endless forest at brain-numbing speeds on what appear to be air motorcycles.

Hazel, however, had no time for metaphors—nor ever would, if they got out of this; Tommyknockers weren't much into metaphors, either.

Part of her—the smoke-detector part on the machine side of the cyborg interface she'd made—wanted to fulfill its original function and buzz, because the woods were full of smoke. It was similar to the feeling one has when a sneeze impends like a rainshower.

The smoke-detector banked easily from side to side, slaloming around trees, popping up over knolls and then zooming back down them like the world's smallest crop-duster.

Hazel sat bent forward at her desk, earplug pushed firmly into her ear, concentrating fiercely. She was pushing the little smoke-detector through the woods faster than was safe, but it had been at the Haven-Newport border, fully five miles from the ship. She had to get to Gardener, and time was short.

The smoke-detector flipped onto its side and missed a small pine tree by inches. A close call, that. But... there he was, and there was the ship, throwing back its echoes of light, tattooing its dancing sun-dapples on the trees.

The smoke-detector hovered motionless above the thick mat of fallen needles on the floor of the forest for a moment... and then it arrowed directly at Gardener. Hazel prepared to turn on the ultra-sound attachment that would turn Gardener's bones to smashed fragments in his body.

Hey, Gard! On your left!

The voice was unbelievable. It was also unmistakable. It was Bobbi Anderson's voice. The old, unimproved Bobbi. Gardener had no time to think about that. He looked left and saw something slashing out of the woods at him. It was tan. There was a red light flashing on its underside. That was all he had time to see.

He brought the Sonic Space Blaster up, wondering how he could ever in the world hope to hit that thing, and at the same moment a wild thin shriek, like every mosquito in the world whining in perfect harmony, filled his ears... his head... his body. Yes, it was inside him; everything inside him was beginning to vibrate.

Then it felt as if hands seized his wrist—first seized it, then turned it. He fired. Green fire shot across the daylight. The smoke-detector exploded. Several jagged chunks of plastic flew near Gardener's head, barely missing him.

Hazel screamed and bolted upright in her old swivel chair. A tremendous backflow of energy surged through the earplug. She clawed at it—and missed. The plug was in her left ear. From her right one came a sudden squirt of greenish, soupy liquid. It looked like radioactive oatmeal. For a moment her brains continued to hose out of her head through her ear, and then the pressure became too great. The right side of her skull pushed open like a strange flower and her brains hit her Currier & Ives wall calendar with a liquid smack.

Hazel fell forward limply onto her desk, her hands outstretched, her glazing eyes staring unbelievingly at nothing.

The ghetto-blaster radio buzzed for a while and then stopped.

Bobbi? Gardener thought, looking around wildly.

Fuck you, old hoss, an amused voice returned. That's all the help you get—after all, I'm dead, remember?

I remember, Bobbi.

One piece of advice: watch out for rabid vacuum cleaners.

Then she was gone, if she had ever been there. From behind him came the rending, grinding crash of a tree falling over. The woods between here and the farm had begun to sound like a big open-hearth fireplace. Now he could hear voices from behind him, both mental and shouted aloud. Tommyknocker voices.

But Bobbi was gone.

You imagined it, Gard. The part of you that wants Bobbi—that NEEDS Bobbi—is trying to reinvent her, that's all.

Yeah, and what about the hand? The hand over my hand? Did I make that up? I couldn't have hit that thing all by myself. Annie Oakley couldn't have hit that thing without help.

But the voices—those in the air and those inside his head—were getting closer. So was the fire. Gardener drew in a throatful of smoke, put the Tomcat in gear again, and got going. There was no time for debate right now.

Gard headed for the ship. Five minutes later he came out in the clearing.

“Hazel?” Newt cried in a kind of religious terror. “Hazel? Hazel?”

Yes, Hazel! Dick Allison shouted back at him furiously, and could restrain himself no longer. He threw himself upon Newt. Stupid bastard!

Whoreboy! Newt spat back, and the two of them rolled about on the ground, green eyes glaring, grabbing for each other's throats. This was not at all logical under the circumstances, but any resemblance between the Tommyknockers and the likes of Mr Spock was purely coincidental.

Dick's hands found the wattled folds of Newt's throat and began to squeeze. His fingers punched through the flesh and green blood bubbled up over Dick's fingers. He began to raise Newt up and slam him back down. Newt's struggles lessened... lessened... lessened. Dick choked him until he was quite dead.

With that done, Dick discovered that he felt a little better.

Gard dismounted the Tomcat, staggered, lost his balance, fell down. At that same instant, a buzzing, snarling projectile blasted through the air where he had been a moment before. Gardener stared stupidly at the Electrolux vacuum cleaner which had nearly torn his head off.

It bulleted across the clearing like a torpedo, banked, and came back at him. There was something on one end that distorted the air into a silvery ripple -something like a propeller.

Gardener thought of that round, chewed hole in the bottom of the shed door and all the spittle in his mouth dried up.

Watch out for

It dive-bombed him, the cutter attachment whining and buzzing like the motor of a kid's gas-powered fighter plane. The little wheels, which were supposed to make the weary housewife's work easier as she trundled her faithful vacuum cleaner along behind her from room to room, spun lazily in the air. The hole where one was supposed to clip various attachment hoses gaped like an open mouth.

Gardener made as if to dive to the right, then held position a moment longer—if he jumped too soon, the vacuum cleaner would jog with him and chew through his guts as easily as it had chewed through the shed door when Bobbi called it.

He waited, feinted left this time, then threw himself to the right at the last moment. He thudded painfully into the dirt. The bones in his shattered ankle ground together. Gardener screamed miserably.

The Electrolux crashed. The propeller ate dirt. Then it bounced, like a plane rising into the air again after touching down too hard on a runway. It whistled off toward the great canted dish of the ship and then banked around for another run at Gardener. Now the cable it had used to run the buttons was emerging from the hose attachment hole. The cable whistled in the air—a dry, snakelike sound that Gardener could just hear under the rumble-roar of the fire. The cable whickered, and for a moment Gardener was reminded of a wild west rodeo his mother had taken him to once (in that rootin”, tootin” trail-drive town of Portland, Maine). There had been a cowboy in a tall white hat who had done rope tricks. In one of the tricks, he had floated a big lasso at ankle height, dancing in and out of its circle while playing “My Gal Sal” on a harmonica. The cable whirling out from the attachment hole looked like that rope.

Fucker'll cut your head off just as slick as shit through a goose, if you let it, Gard ole Gard.

The Electrolux whistled at him, shadow tracking beneath.

On his knees, Gardener held out the Sonic Blaster and fired. The vacuum cleaner sheared off as he aimed, but Gardener winged it just the same. A chunk of chrome above a rear wheel blew off. The cable drew a wavering line through the dirt.

get him

yes get him before

before he can hurt the ship

Closer. The voices were closer. He had to end this.

The vacuum cleaner skirted a tree and circled back. It tilted upward, climbed, then dropped in a kamikaze power dive, its chopping blade turning faster and faster.

Gardener steadied himself by thinking of Ted the Power Man.

You oughtta take a look at this shit, Teddy-boy, he thought crazily. You'd go ape for it! Better living through electricity!

He pulled the trigger on the toy gun, saw the green pencil-beam splash off the vacuum cleaner's snout, and then shoved himself forward, digging with both feet, and never mind the shattered ankle. The Electrolux struck the ground beside the Tomcat and buried itself three feet deep in the dirt. Black smoke jetted from the protruding end in a tight, compact little cloud. It made a thick farting noise and died.

Gardener got to his feet, holding onto the Tomcat for support, the Sonic Space Blaster dangling from his right hand. The plastic barrel, he saw, was partially melted. It wasn't going to be any good much longer. The same was undoubtedly true of himself.

The vacuum cleaner was dead—dead and sticking out of the ground like a dud bomb. But there were plenty of other gadgets on their way, some flying, some trundling enthusiastically through the woods on makeshift wheels. He couldn't wait around.

What was it the old man had been thinking at the end? The last thing... and then... Deliverance

“Good word,” Gardener said hoarsely. “Dee-liverance. Great word.”

Also, he realized, the name of a novel. A novel by a poet. James Dickey. A novel about city men who had to get slugged, mugged, and buggered before discovering they were good ole boys after all. But there was a line in that book... one of the men looking at one of the others and telling him calmly, “Machines are gonna fail, Lewis.”

Gardener certainly hoped so.

He hopped over to the lean-to, then pushed the button which started the sling's descent. He was going to have to go down the cable hand over hand. It was stupid, but that was Tommyknocker technology for you. The motor began to whine. The cable began to descend. Gardener hopped over to the cut and stared down. If he could actually work his way down there, he would be safe.

Safe among the Tommyknocker dead.

The motor stopped. He could faintly see the useless sling at the bottom. The voices were closer, the fire was closer, and he sensed a rogue's gallery of gadgets closing in. Didn't matter. He had shot the chutes, climbed the ladders, and somehow got to the finish line before the others.

Congratulations, Mr Gardener! You've won a flying saucer! Do you want to quit or go for the all-expenses-paid vacation in deep space?

“Fuck,” Gardener croaked, tossing the half-melted toy gun aside. “Let's do it.”

That also had reverberations.

He seized the cable and swung out over the cut. As he did, it came to him. Sure. Gary Gilmore. It was what Gary Gilmore said just before stepping in front of the firing squad in Utah.

He was halfway down when he realized the last of his physical strength had run out. If he didn't do something quick, he would fall.

He began to descend more quickly, cursing their thoughtless decision to put the motor controls so far from the trench. Hot, stinging sweat ran into his eyes. His muscles jumped and fluttered. His stomach was beginning to do long, lazy flips again. His hands slipped... held... slipped again. Then, suddenly, the cable was running through his hands like hot butter. He squeezed it, screaming in pain as the friction built. A steel thread which had popped up from one of the cable's steel pigtails punched through his palm.

“God!” Gardener screamed. “Oh dear God!”

He thudded neatly into the descending sling on his bad foot. Pain roared up his leg, through his stomach, through his neck. It seemed to rip off the top of his head. His knee buckled and struck the side of the ship. The kneecap popped like a bottlecap.

Gardener felt himself graying out and fought it. He saw the hatch. It was still open. The air-exchangers were still droning.

His left leg was a frozen wall of pain. He looked down at it and saw it had become magically shorter than his right leg. And it looked... well, it looked croggled, like an old stogie that has been carried around too long in someone's pocket.

“Christ, I'm failing apart,” he whispered, and then, amazing himself, he laughed. It did have this to recommend it: it was a hell of a lot more interesting than just stepping off a breakwater with a hangover would have been.

There was a high, sweet buzzing sound from overhead. Something else had arrived. Gardener didn't wait to see what it was. Instead, he pushed himself into the hatch and began to crawl up the round corridor. The light from the walls glowed softly on the planes of his haggard face, and that light—white, not green—was kind. Someone seeing Gardener in that light might almost have believed he was not dying. Almost.

Late last night and the night before,

(over the hills and through the woods)

Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

(to grandmother's house we go)

They look so quiet, but they ain't quite dead,

(the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh)

You get that Tommyknocker flu inside your head!

(over the frozen fields of snow)

Doggerel chiming in his head, Gardener crawled up the corridor, pausing once to turn his head and vomit. The air in here was still pretty fucking rank. He thought a miner's canary would already be lying at the bottom of its cage, alive but only by an inch or so.

But the machinery, Gard... do you hear it? Do you hear how much louder it's gotten just since you came in?

Yes. Louder, more confident. Nor was it just the air-exchangers. Deeper in the ship, other machinery was humming into life. The lights were brightening. The ship was feeding off whatever was left of him. Let it.

He reached the first interior hatchway. He looked back. Frowned at the hatch giving on the trench. They would be arriving in the clearing very soon now; perhaps already had. They might try to follow him in. Judging by the awed reactions of his “helpers” (even hard-headed Freeman Moss hadn't been completely immune), he didn't think they would... but it wouldn't do to forget how desperate they were. He wanted to be sure the loonies were out of his life once and for all. God knew he hadn't much left; he didn't need those assholes fucking up what little there was.

Fresh pain blossomed in his head, making his eyes water, tugging at his brain like a fishhook. Bad, but nothing compared to the pain in his ankle and leg. He was not surprised to see the main hatchway had irised. Could he open it again, if he wanted to? He somehow doubted it. He was locked in now... locked in with the dead Tommyknockers.

Dead? Are you sure they're dead?

No; to the contrary. He was sure they were not. They had been lively enough to start it all up again. Lively enough to turn Haven into one weird munitions factory. Dead?

“Un-fucking-likely,” Gardener croaked, and pulled himself through another hatchway and into the corridor beyond. Machinery pounded and hummed in the guts of the ship; when he touched the glowing, curved wall, he could feel the vibration.

Dead? Oh, no. You're crawling around inside the oldest haunted house in the universe, Gard ole Gard.

He thought he heard a noise and turned around quickly, heart speeding up, saliva glands squirting bitter juice into his mouth. Nothing there, of course. Except there was. I had a perfectly good reason to raise this fuss; I met the Tommyknockers, and they were us.

“Help me, God,” Gardener said. He flicked his stinking hair out of his eyes. Over him was the spidery-thin ladder with its wide-spaced rungs... each with that deep, disquieting dip in the middle. That ladder would rotate to the vertical when... if... the ship ever heeled over to its proper horizontal flight position.

There's a smell in here now. Air-exchangers or not, a smell, it's the smell of death, I think. Long death. And insanity.

“Please help me, God, just a little help, okay? Just a few breaks for the kid is all I'm asking for, “kay?”

Still conversing to God, Gardener pressed onward. Shortly he reached the control room and lowered himself into it.

The Tommyknockers stood at the edge of the clearing, looking at Dick. More arrived each minute. They arrived—then just stopped, like simple computer devices whose few programmed operations had all been performed.

They stood looking from the canted plane of the ship... to Dick... back to the ship... to Dick again. They were like a crowd of sleepwalkers at a tennis match. Dick could sense the others, who had gone back to the village to run the border defenses, also simply waiting... looking through the eyes of those who were actually here.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 498