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.

Behind them, growing closer, gaining strength, came the fire. Already the clearing had begun to fill with tendrils of smoke. A few people coughed… but no one moved.

Dick looked back at them, puzzled-what, exactly, did they want from him? Then he understood. He was the last of the Shed People. The rest of them were gone, and directly or indirectly, the death of each had been Gardener's fault. It was really inexplicable, and more than a little frightening. Dick became more and more convinced that nothing quite like this had happened in all of the Tommyknockers” long, long experience.

They're looking at me because I'm the last. I'm supposed to tell them what to do next.

But there was nothing they could do. There had been a race, and Gardener should have lost, but somehow he hadn't, and now there was nothing to do but wait. Watch and wait and hope that the ship would kill him somehow before he could do anything. Before

The Tommyknockers

A large hand suddenly reached into Dick Allison's head and squeezed the meat of his brain. His hands flew up to his temples, the fingers splayed into stiff, galvanic spider-shapes. He tried to scream but was unable. Below him, in the clearing, he was vaguely aware that people were falling to their knees in ranks, like pilgrims witnessing a miracle or a divine visitation.

The ship had begun to vibrate-the sound filled the air with a thick, subaural hum.

Dick was aware of this… and then, as his eyes blew out of his head like half-congealed chunks of moldy jelly, he knew no more. Then, or ever.

Little help, God, we got a deal?

He sat in the middle of the canted hexagonal room, his twisted, broken leg stuck out in front of him (croggled, that word wouldn't go away, his leg had been croggled), near where the thick mastercable came out of the gasket in the floor.