“Mr Gardener, are you all right?”
“Huh!” he cried, jerking upright. His heart slammed two violent beats, stopped for what seemed forever, and then began to beat so rapidly he could barely distinguish the individual pulses. His headache suddenly cranked up to overload. He whirled.
Bobby Tremain stood there, looking surprised, even a little amused… but not really sorry for the scare he had given Gardener.
“Gee, I didn't mean to creep up on you, Mr Gardener
You fucking well did, and I fucking well know it.
The Tremain kid blinked rapidly several times. He had caught some of that, Gardener saw. He found he didn't give a shit.
“Where's Bobbi?” he asked.
“I'M-”
“I know who you are. I know where you are. Right in front of me. Where's Bobbi?”
“Well, I'll tell you,” Bobby Tremain said. His face became very open, very wide-eyed, very honest, and Gardener was suddenly, forcibly reminded of his teaching days. This was how students who had spent a long winter weekend skiing, screwing, and drinking looked when they started to explain that they couldn't turn in their research papers today because their mothers had died on Saturday.
“Sure, tell me,” Gardener said. He leaned against the clapboard side of the house, looking at the teenager in the reddish glow of the sunset. Over his shoulder he could see the shed, padlocked, its windows boarded up.
The shed had been in the dream, he remembered.
Dream? Or whatever it is you don't want to admit was real?
For a moment the kid looked genuinely disconcerted by Gardener's cynical expression.
“Miss Anderson had a sunstroke. Some of the men found her near the ship and took her to Derry Home Hospital. You were passed out.”
Gardener straightened up quickly. “Is she all right?”
“I don't know. They're still with her. No one has called here. Not since three o'clock or so, anyway. That's when I got out here.”
Gardener pushed away from the building and started around the house, head down, working against the hangover. He had believed the kid was going to lie, and perhaps he had lied about the nature of what had happened to Bobbi, but Gardener sensed a core of truth in what the kid said: Bobbi was sick, hurt, something. It explained those dreamlike comings and goings he remembered. He supposed Bobbi had called them with her mind. Sure. Called them with her mind, neatest trick of the week. Only in Haven, ladies and germs
“Where are you going?” Tremain asked, his voice suddenly very sharp.
“Derry.” Gardener had reached the head of the driveway. Bobbi's pickup was parked there. The Tremain kid's big yellow Dodge Challenger was pulled in next to it. Gardener turned back toward the kid. The sunset had painted harsh red highlights and black shadows on the boy's face, making him look like an Indian. Gardener took a closer look and realized he wasn't going anywhere. This kid with the fast car and the football-hero shoulders hadn't been put out here just to give Gard the bad news as soon as Gard managed to throw off enough of the booze to rejoin the living.
Am I supposed to believe Bobbi was out there in the woods, excavating away like a madwoman, and she keeled over with a sunstroke while her sometime partner was lying back on the porch, drunk as a coot? That it? Well, that's a good trick, because she was supposed to be at the McCausland woman's funeral. She went into the village and I was out here alone and I started thinking about what I saw Sunday… I started thinking and then I started drinking, which is mostly the way it works with me. Of course Bobbi could have gone to the funeral, come back here, changed, gone out in the woods to work, and then had a sunstroke… except that isn't what happened. The kid's lying. It's written all over his face, and all of a sudden I'm very fucking glad he can't read my thoughts.
“I think Miss Anderson would rather have you stay here and keep on with the work,” Bobby Tremain said evenly.
“You think?”
“That is, we all think.” The kid looked momentarily more disconcerted than ever -wary, a bit rocky on his feet. Didn't expect Bobbi's pet drunk to have any teeth or claws left, I guess. That kicked off another, much queerer thought, and he looked at the kid more closely in the light which was now fading into orange and ashy pink. Football-hero shoulders, a handsome, cleft-chinned face that might have been drawn by Alex Gordon or Berni Wrightson, deep chest, narrow waist. Bobby Tremain, All-American. No wonder the Colson girl was nuts over him. But that sunken, infirm-looking mouth went oddly with the rest, Gardener thought. They were the ones who kept losing teeth, not Gardener.
Okay-what's he here for?
To guard me. To make sure I stay put. No matter what.
“Well, all right,” he said to Tremain in a softer, more conciliatory voice. “If that's what you all think.”
Tremain relaxed a little. “It really is.”
“Well, let's go in and put on the coffee. I could use some. My head aches. And we'll have to get going early in the morning… “He stopped and looked at Tremain. “You are going to help out, aren't you? That's part of it, isn't it?”
“Uh… yessir.”
Gardener nodded. He looked at the shed for a moment, and in the fading light he could see brilliant green tattooed in the small spaces between the boards. For a moment his dream shimmered almost within his grasp-deadly shoemakers hammering away at unknown devices in that green glare. He had never seen the glow as bright as this before, and he noticed that when Tremain glanced in that direction, his eyes skittered away uneasily.
The lyric of an old song floated, not quite randomly, into Gardener's mind and then out again:
Don't know what they're doing, but they laugh a lot behind the green door… green door, what's that secret you're keepin”?
And there was a sound. Faint… rhythmic… not at all identifiable… but somehow unpleasant.
The two of them had faltered. Now Gardener moved on toward the house. Tremain followed him gratefully.
“Good,” Gardener said, as if the conversation had never lagged. “I can use some help. Bobbi figured we'd get down to some sort of hatchway in about two weeks… that we'd be able to get inside.”
“Yes, I know,” Tremain said without hesitation.
“But that was with two of us working.”
“Oh, there'll always be someone else with you,” Tremain said, and smiled openly. A chill rippled up Gardener's back.
“Oh?”
“Yes! You bet!”
“Until Bobbi comes back.”
“Until then,” Tremain agreed.
Except he doesn't think Bobbi's going to be back. Ever.
“Come on,” he said. “Coffee. Then maybe some chow.”
“Sounds good to me.”
They went inside, leaving the shed to churn and mutter to itself in the growing dark. As the sun disappeared, the stitching of green at the cracks grew brighter and brighter and brighter. A cricket hopped into the luminous pencil-mark one of these cracks printed onto the ground and fell dead.
Chapter 10
A Book of Days-The Town, Concluded
Thursday, July 28th:
Butch Dugan woke up in his own bed in Derry at exactly 3:05 A. M. He pushed back the covers and swung his feet out onto the floor. His eyes were wide and dazed, his face puffy with sleep. The clothes he had worn on his trip to Haven with the old man the day before were on the chair by his small desk. There was a pen in the breast pocket of the shirt. He wanted that pen. This seemed to be the only thought his mind would clearly admit.
He got up, went to the chair, took the pen, tossed the shirt on the floor, sat down, and then just sat for several moments, looking out into the darkness, waiting for the next thought.
Butch had gone into Anderson's shed, but very little of him had come out. He seemed shrunken, lessened. He had no clear memories of anything. He could not have told a questioner his own middle name, and he did not at all remember being driven to the Haven-Troy town line in the Cherokee Hillman had rented, or sliding behind the wheel after Adley McKeen got out and walked back to Kyle Archinbourg's Cadillac. He likewise did not remember driving back to Derry. Yet all these things had happened.
He had parked the Cherokee in front of the old man's apartment building, locked it, then got into his own car. Two blocks away, he had stopped long enough to drop the Jeep keys into a sewer.
He went directly to bed, and had slept until the alarm clock planted in his mind woke him up.
Now some new switch clicked over. Butch blinked once or twice, opened a drawer, and drew out a pad of paper. He wrote:
I told people Tues. night I couldn't go to her funeral because I was sick. That was true. But it was not my stomach. I was going to ask her to marry me but kept putting it off. Afraid she'd say no. If I hadn't been scared, she might be alive now. With her dead there doesn't seem to be anything to look forward to. I am sorry about this mess.
He looked the note over for a moment and then signed his name at the bottom: Anthony F. Dugan.
He laid the pen and note aside and went back to sitting bolt upright and looking out the window.
At last another relay kicked over.
The last relay.
He got up and went to the closet. He ran the combination of the wall-safe at the back and removed his. 357 Mag. He put the belt over his shoulder, went back to the desk, and sat down.
He thought for a moment, frowning, then got up, turned off the light in the closet, shut the closet door, went back to the desk, sat down again, took the. 357 from its holster, put the muzzle of the gun firmly against his left eyelid, and pulled the trigger. The chair toppled and hit the floor with a flat, undramatic wooden clap-the sound of a gallows trapdoor
