No, of course victims of high-gamma radiation didn't turn transparent, like Claude Raines in The Invisible Man. They didn't start to lose inches as their bodies twisted and thickened. But, yes, they were apt to lose teeth, their hair was apt to fall out-in other words, there was a kind of physical “becoming” in both cases.
He thought again: Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
Bobbi was looking narrowly at him again.
I'm running out of maneuvering room, all right. And fast.
“What did you say, Gard?”
“I said “let's go, boss. '”
After a long moment, Bobbi nodded. “Yeah,” she said, “daylight's wasting.”
They rode out to the dig on the Tomcat. It did not fly the way the little boy's bike had flown in E. T.; Bobbi's tractor would never soar cinematically in front of the moon, hundreds of feet above the rooftops. But it did cruise silently and handily eighteen inches above the ground, large wheels spinning slowly like dying propellers. It smoothed the ride out a whole hell of a lot. Gard was driving, Bobbi standing behind him on the yoke.
“Your sister left?” Gard said. There was no need to yell. The Tomcat's engine was a faint, distant purr.
“That's right,” Bobbi said. “She left.”
You still can't lie worth shit, Bobbi. And I think-I really do-that I heard her scream. Just before I hit the patch going into the woods, I think I heard her scream. How much would it take to make a high-stepping, pure-d, ball-cutting bitch like Sissy let out a howl? How bad would it have to be?
The answer to that one was easy. Very bad.
“She was never the type to exit gracefully,” Bobbi said. “Or to let anyone be graceful, if she could help it. She came to bring me home, you know… watch that stump, Gard, it's a high one.”
Gardener shoved the gear lever all the way up. The Tomcat rose another three inches, skimming over the top of the high stump. Once past, he relaxed his hand and the Tomcat sank back to its previous altitude, eighteen inches above the ground.
“Yes, she just came up with her bit and her hackamore,” Bobbi said, sounding faintly amazed. “There was a time when she might have taken me, too. As things are now, she never had a chance.”
Gardener felt cold. There were a lot of ways a person could interpret a remark like that, weren't there?
“I'm still surprised that it took you only one evening to convince her,” Gardener said. “I thought Patricia McCardle was bad, but your sister made ole Patty look like Annette Funicello.”
“I just wiped off some of this makeup. When she saw what was underneath, she screamed and left so fast you would have thought there were rockets in her heels. It was actually pretty funny.”
It was plausible. It was so plausible that the temptation to believe it was almost insuperable. Unless you ignored the simple fact that the lady under discussion couldn't have gone anywhere in a hurry without help. The lady could barely walk without help.
No, Gardener thought. She never left. The only question is whether you killed her or if she's out in the goddam shed with Peter.
“How long do the physical changes go on, Bobbi?” Gardener asked.
“Not much longer,” Bobbi said, and Gardener thought again that Bobbi had never been able to lie worth shit. “Here we are. Park it over by the lean-to.”
The following evening they knocked off early-the heat was still holding, and neither of them felt capable of going on until the last light died. They returned to the house, pushed food around on their plates, even ate some of it. With the dishes washed, Gardener said he thought he would go for a walk.
“Oh?” Bobbi was looking at him with that wary expression which had become one of her main stocks in trade. “I would have thought you'd gotten enough exercise today for anyone.”
“Sun's down now,” Gard said easily. “It's cooler. No bugs. And. He looked clear-eyed at Bobbi. “If I go out on the porch, I'm going to take a bottle. If I take a bottle, I'm going to get drunk. If I go for a long walk and come back tired, maybe I can fall into bed sober for one night.”
All of this was true enough… but there was another truth nested inside it, like one Chinese box inside another. Gardener looked at Bobbi and waited to see if she would go hunting for that inner box.
She didn't.
“All right,” she said, “but you know I don't care how much you drink, Gard. I'm your friend, not your wife.”
No, you don't care how much I drink-you've made it very easy for me to drink all I want. Because it neutralizes me.
He walked along Route 9 past Justin Hurd's place, and when he struck the Nista Road, he turned left and moved along at a good pace, his arms swinging easily. The last month's labor had toughened him more than he would have believed-not so long ago even a two-mile walk such as this would have left him rubber-legged and winded.
Still, it was eerie. No whippoorwills greeted the encroaching twilight; no dog barked at him. Most of the houses were dark. No TVs flickered inside the few lighted windows he passed.
Who needs Barney Miller reruns when you can “become” instead? Gardener thought.
By the time he reached the sign reading ROAD ENDS 200 YARDS, it was almost full dark, but the moon was rising and the night was very bright. At the end of the road he reached a heavy chain strung between two posts. A rusty, bullet-holed NO TRESPASSING sign hung from it. Gard stepped over the chain, kept walking, and was soon standing in an abandoned gravel pit. The moonlight on its weedy sides was white as bone. The silence made Gardener's scalp prickle.
What had brought him here? His own “becoming” he supposed-something he had picked out of Bobbi's mind without even knowing he'd done it. It must have been that, because whatever had brought him out here had been a lot stronger than just a hunch.
To the left there was a thick triangular scar against the whiteness of the undisturbed gravel. This stuff had been moved around. Gardener walked over, shoes crunching. He dug into the fresher gravel, found nothing, moved, dug another hole, found nothing, moved, dug a third, found nothing
Oh, hey, wait a minute.
His fingers skimmed across something much too smooth to be a stone. He leaned over, heart thudding, but could see nothing. He wished he had brought a flashlight, but that probably would have made Bobbi even more suspicious. He dug wider, letting the dirt run and rattle down the inclined slope.
He saw he had uncovered a car headlight.
Gardener looked at it, filled with an eerie, skeletal amusement. THIS is what it's like to find something in the earth, he thought. To find some strange artifact. Only I didn't have to stumble over it, did I? I knew where to look.
He dug faster, climbing the slope and throwing dirt back between his legs like a mutt digging for a bone, ignoring his pounding head, ignoring his hands, which first scraped, then chafed, then began to bleed.
He was able to clear a level place on the Cutlass's hood just above the right-side headlights where he could stand, and then the work went faster. Bobbi and her buddies had done a casual burial job at best. Gardener pulled loose gravel down by the armload, then kicked it off the car. Pebbles shrieked and squealed on the metalwork. His mouth was dry. He was working his way up to the windshield, and he honestly didn't know which would be better-to see something, or nothing.
His fingers brushed slick smoothness again. Without allowing himself to stop and think-the silent creepiness of the place might have gotten to him then; he might have just turned and run-he dug a clear place on the windshield and peered in, cupping his hands to the glass to cut the glare from the moon.
Nothing.
Anne Anderson's rented Cutlass was empty.
They could have put her in the trunk. The fact is, you still don't know anything for sure.
He thought he did, however. Logic told him that Anne's body wasn't in the trunk. Why would they bother? Anyone who found a brand-new car buried out here in a deserted gravel pit was going to find it suspicious enough to investigate the trunk… or to call the police, who would do it.
No one in Haven would give a rip one way or another. They have concerns more pressing than cars buried in gravel pits right now. And if someone from town did happen to find it, calling the police is the last thing they'd do. That would mean outsiders, and we don't want any outsiders in Haven this summer, do we? Perish the thought!
So she wasn't in the trunk. Simple logic. QED.
Maybe the people who did this didn't have your sterling powers of logic, Gard.
That was a crock of shit, too. If he could see a thing from three angles, the Haven Quiz-Kids could see it from twenty-three. They didn't miss a trick.
Gardener backed to the edge of the hood on his knees and jumped down. Now he was aware of his scraped, burning hands. He would have to take a couple of aspirin when he got back and try to conceal the damage from Bobbi in the morning-work-gloves were going to be the order of the day. All day.
Anne wasn't in the car. Where was Anne? In the shed, of course; in the shed. Gardener suddenly understood why he had come out here-not just to confirm a thought he had plucked from Bobbi's head (if that was what he had done; his subconscious mind might simply have fixed on this as the handiest place to get rid of a big car quick), but because he had needed to make sure it was the shed. Needed to. Because he had a decision to make, and he knew now that not even seeing Bobbi change into something which was not human was enough to force him into that decision-so much of him still wanted to dig the ship out, dig it out and put it to use-so much, so very much.
Before he could make the decision, he had to see what was in Bobbi's shed.
Halfway back he stopped in the cold, slippery moonlight, struck by a question -why had they bothered to hide the car? Because the rental people would report it missing and more police would turn up in Haven? No. The Hertz or Avis people might not even know it was missing for days, and it would be longer still before the cops traced Anne's family connection here. At least a week, more like two. And Gardener thought by then Haven would be done worrying about outside interference, one way or another, for good.
So who had the car been hidden from?
From you, Gard. They hid it from you. They still don't want you to know what they're capable of when it comes to protecting themselves. They hid it and
