Act II was over.
Kyle reached gently into Bobbi's pants pocket and probed until he found her keyring. He worked it out, picked through the keys, and found the one that opened the padlock on the shed door. He inserted the key in the lock but didn't turn it.
Adley and Joe Summerfield were covering Dugan, who was still behind the wheel of the Jeep. Butch was finding it harder and harder to pull air from the mask. The needle on the supply dial had been in the red for five minutes now. Kyle rejoined them.
“Go check the drunk,” Kyle said to Joe Summerfield. “Looks like he's still passed out, but I don't trust the fucker.”
Joe crossed the side yard, climbed the porch, and examined Gardener carefully, wincing at his sour breath. This time there really was no sham; Gardener had gotten a fresh bottle of Scotch and had drunk himself into oblivion.
As the two other men stood waiting for Joe to come back, Kyle said: “Bobbi is most likely going to die. If she does, I'm going to get rid of that lush first thing.”
Joe came back. “He's out.”
Kyle nodded and turned the key in the shed's padlock as Joe joined Adley in keeping the cop covered. Kyle pulled the lock free and opened the door partway. Brilliant green light poured out-it was so bright it seemed to dim the sunlight. There was an odd liquid churning sound. It was almost (but not quite) the sound of machinery.
Kyle took an involuntary step backward, his face tightening momentarily into an expression of fright, revulsion and awe. The smell alone-thick and fetid and organic-was damn near enough to knock a man over. Kyle understood-they all did-that the two-hearted nature of the Tommyknockers was now growing together. The dance of deception was nearly done
Liquid churning sounds, that smell… and then another sound. Something like the feeble, bubbly yap of a drowning dog.
Kyle had been in the shed twice before, but remembered little about it. He knew, of course, that it was an important place, a fine place, and that it had speeded his own “becoming.” But the human part of him was still almost superstitiously afraid of it.
He came back to Adley and Joe.
“We can't wait for the others. We've got to get Bobbi in there right now if there's going to be any chance of saving her at all.”
The cop, he saw, had taken off the mask. It lay, used up, on the seat beside him. That was good. As Adley had said out in the woods, he would think less about escaping without his canned air.
“Keep your gun on the cop,” Kyle said. “Joe, help me with Bobbi.”
“Help you take her into the shed?”
“No, help me take her to the Rumford Zoo so she can see the fucking lion!” Kyle shouted. “Of course, the shed!”
“I don't… I don't think I want to go in there. Not just now.” Joe looked from that green light back to Kyle, a shamed, slightly sickened smile on his lips.
“I'll help you,” Adley said softly. “Bobbi's a good old sport. Be a shame if she croaked before we got to the end of it.”
“All right,” Kyle said. “Cover the cop,” he said to Joe. “And if you screw up, I swear to God I'll kill you.”
“I won't, Kyle,” Joe said. That shamed grin still hung on his mouth, but there was no mistaking the relief in his eyes. “I sure won't. I'll watch him good.”
“See that you do,” Bobbi said feebly. It startled them all.
Kyle looked at her, then back at Joe. Joe flinched away from the naked contempt in Kyle's eyes… but he didn't look toward the shed, toward that light, those churning, squelching sounds.
“Come on, Adley,” Kyle said at last. “Let's get Bobbi in there. Soonest started, soonest done.”
Adley McKeen, fiftyish, balding, and stocky, flagged for only a moment. “Is it…” he licked his lips. “Kyle, is it bad? In there?”
“I don't really remember,” Kyle said. “All I know is I felt wonderful when I came out. Like I knew more. Could do more.”
“Oh,” Adley said in an almost nonexistent voice.
“You'll be one of us, Adley,” Bobbi said in that same feeble voice.
Adley's face, although still frightened, firmed up again.
“All right,” he said.
“Let's try not to hurt her,” Kyle said.
They got Bobbi into the shed. Joe Summerfield turned his attention briefly away from Dugan to watch them disappear into that glow-and it seemed to him that they really did disappear rather than just step inside; it was like watching objects disappear into a dazzling corona.
His lapse was brief, but it was all the old Butch Dugan would have needed. Even now he saw the opportunity; he was simply unable use it. No strength in his legs. Churning nausea in his stomach. His head thudded and pounded.
I don't want to go in there.
Nothing he could do about it if they decided to drag him in, though. He was as weak as a kitten.
He drifted.
After a while he heard voices and raised his head. It took an effort, because it seemed as if someone had poured cement into one of his ears until his head was full of it. The rest of the posse was pushing out of the tangle that was Bobbi Anderson's garden. They were shoving the old man roughly along. Hillman's feet tangled and he fell down. One of them-Tarkington-kicked him to his feet, and Butch got the run of Tarkington's thoughts clearly: he was outraged at what he thought of as the murder of Beach Jernigan.
Hillman stumbled on toward the Cherokee. The shed door opened then. Kyle Archinbourg and Adley McKeen came out. McKeen no longer looked frightened -his eyes were glowing and a big toothless grin stretched his lips. But that wasn't all. Something else…
Then Butch realized.
In the few minutes the two men had been inside there, a large portion of Adley McKeen's hair appeared to have disappeared.
“I'll go in anytime, Kyle,” he was saying. “No problem.”
There was more, but now everything wanted to drift away again. Butch let it.
The world dimmed out until there was nothing left but those unpleasant churning sounds and the afterimage of green light on his eyelids.
Act III.
They sat in the town library-the name would be changed to the Ruth McCausland Memorial Library, all agreed. They drank coffee, iced tea, Coca-Cola, ginger ale. They drank nothing that was alcoholic. Not at Ruth's wake. They ate tiny triangular tuna-fish sandwiches, they ate similar ones containing a paste of cream cheese and olives, they ate sandwiches containing a paste of cream cheese and pimento. They ate cold cuts and a Jell-O salad with shreds of carrot suspended in it like fossils in amber.
They talked a great deal, but the room was mostly silent-if it had been bugged, the listeners would have been disappointed. The tension that had drawn many faces tight in the church as the situation in the woods teetered on the dangerous verge of careening out of control had now smoothed out. Bobbi was in the shed. That nosey-parker of an old man had also been taken in. Last of all, the nosey-parker policeman had been taken into the shed.
The group mind lost track of these people as they went into the thick, corroded-brass glow of that green light.
They ate and drank and listened and talked and no one said a word and that was all right; the last of the outsiders had left town following Goohringer's graveside benediction, and they had Haven to themselves again.
(will it be all right now)
(yes they'll understand about Dugan)
(are you sure)
(yes they will understand; they will think they understand)
The tick of the Seth Thomas on the mantelpiece donated by the grammar school after last year's spring bottle-and-can drive was the loudest sound in the room. Occasionally there was the decorous clink of a china cup. Faintly, beyond the open, screened windows, the sound of a faraway airplane.
No birdsong.
It was not missed.
They ate and drank, and when Dugan was escorted from Bobbi's shed around one-thirty that afternoon, they knew. People rose, and now talk, real talk, began all at once. Tupperware bowls were capped. Uneaten sandwiches were popped into Baggies. Claudette Ruvall, Ashley's mother, put a piece of aluminum foil over the remains of the casserole she had brought. They all went outside and headed toward their homes, smiling and chatting.
Act III was over.
Gardener came to around sundown with a hangover headache and a feeling that things had happened which he could not quite remember.
Finally made it, Gard, he thought. Finally had yourself another blackout. Satisfied?
He managed to get off the porch and to walk shakily around the corner of the house, out of view of the road, before throwing up. He saw blood in the vomit, and wasn't surprised. This wasn't the first time, although there was more blood this time than ever before.
Dreams, Christ, he'd had some weird nightmares, blackout or no. People out here, coming and going, so many people that all they needed was a brass band and the Dallas
(Police, the Dallas Police were out here this morning and you got drunk so you wouldn't see them you fucking coward)
Cowgirls. Nightmares, that was all.
He turned away from the puddle of puke between his feet. The world was wavering in and out of focus with every beat of his heart, and Gardener suddenly knew that he had edged very close to death. He was committing suicide after all… just doing it slowly. He put his arm against the side of the house and his forehead in his arm.
