Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers,

Knocking at the door.

I was crazy and Bobbi was sane

But that was before the Tommyknockers came.

He stopped. What is this Tommyknockers shit?

instead of an answer, that deep voice, as terrifying and yet as sure as the voice of a loon crying out on an empty lake, came back: Bobbi's in trouble.

He began to walk again, getting up to his former brisk pace… and then moving even faster. Wanna go out, he thought. Dunno if I can, cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.

He was climbing the weather-whitened stairs which led up the side of the granite headland from the beach to the hotel when he wiped his hand across his nose and saw that it was bleeding again.

Gardener lasted exactly eleven seconds in the lobby of the Alhambra-long enough for the desk clerk to see he had no shoes on. The clerk nodded to a husky bellman when Gardener began to protest, and the two of them gave him the bum's rush.

They would have booted me even if I had been wearing shoes, Gard reflected. Shit, I would have booted me.

He had gotten a good look at himself in the glass of the lobby door. Too good. He had managed to mop most of the blood off his face with his sleeve, but there were still traces. His eyes were bloodshot and starey. His week's growth of beard made him look like a porcupine about six weeks after a shearing. In the genteel summer world of the Alhambra, where men were men and women wore tennis skirts, he looked like a male bag-lady.

Because only the earliest risers had begun to stir, the bellman took the time to inform him there was a pay phone at the Mobil station.

“Intersection of US 1 and Route 26. Now get the hell out before I call the cops.”

If he had needed to know any more about himself than he already did, it was in the husky bellman's disgusted eyes.

Gardener trudged slowly down the hill toward the gas station. His socks flapped and flailed against the tar. His heart knocked like a wheezy Model T engine that's experienced too much hard traveling and too little maintenance. He could feel the headache moving to the left, where it would eventually center in a brilliant pinpoint… if he'd had plans to live that long, anyway. And suddenly he was seventeen again.

He was seventeen, and his obsession wasn't nukes but nooky. The girl's name was Annmarie and he thought he was going to make it with her pretty soon, maybe, if he didn't lose his nerve. If he kept his cool. Maybe even tonight. But part of keeping his cool was doing okay today. Today, right here, here being Straight Arrow, an intermediate ski trail at Victory Mountain in Vermont. He was looking down at his skis, mentally reviewing the steps necessary to come to your basic snowplow stop, reviewing as he would study for a test, wanting to pass, knowing he was still pretty new at this and Annmarie wasn't, and he somehow didn't think she would be so apt to come across if he ended up looking like Frosty the Snowman his first day off the beginners” slopes; he didn't mind looking a little inexperienced as long as he didn't look downright stupid, so there he had been, looking stupidly down at his feet instead of where he was going, which was directly at a gnarled old pine with the warning red stripe painted on its bark, and the only sounds were the wind in his ears and the snow sliding dryly under his skis, and they were the same soothing hush-a-bye sound: Shhhhhh…

It was the rhyme that broke into the memory, making him stop near the Mobil station. The rhyme came and it stayed, beating in time with his heart and throbbing head. Late last night and the night before, Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

Gard hawked, tasted the coppery, unpleasant flavor of his own blood, and spat a reddish glob of phlegm into the trash-littered dirt of the soft shoulder. He remembered asking his mother who or what Tommyknockers were. He couldn't remember what, if anything, she had replied, but he knew he'd always thought they must be highwaymen, robbers who stole by moonlight, killed in shadow, and buried in the darkest part of the night. And hadn't he spent one tortured, endless half-hour in the darkness of his bedroom before sleep finally decided to be merciful and claim him, thinking they might be cannibals as well as robbers? That instead of burying their victims in the dark of the night, they might have cooked them and… well…

Gardener wrapped his thin arms (there didn't seem to be any restaurants up in the cyclone) around his chest and shuddered.

He crossed to the Mobil station, which was hung with bunting but not yet open. The signs out front read SUPERUNLEADED. 89 and GOD BLESS AMERICA and WE LUV WINNEBAGOS! The pay phone was on the side of the building. Gardener was grateful to find it was one of the new ones; you could dial long distance without depositing any money. That at least spared him the indignity of spending part of his last morning on earth panhandling.

He punched zero, then had to stop. His hand was shaking wildly, it was all over the place. He cocked the phone between head and shoulder this time, leaving both hands free. Grasped his right wrist with his left hand to hold the hand steady… as steady as possible, anyway. Now, looking like a shooter on a target range, he used his forefinger to punch the buttons with slow and horrible deliberation. The robot voice told him to either punch in his telephone credit-card number (a task Gard thought he would have been utterly incapable of performing, even if he'd had such a card) or zero for an operator. Gardener hit zero.

“Hi, happy holiday, this is Eileen,” a voice chirruped brightly. “May I have your billing, please?”

“Hi, Eileen, happy holiday to you, too,” Gard said. “I'd like to bill the call collect to anyone from Jim Gardener.”

“Thank you, Jim.”

“You're welcome,” he said, and then, suddenly: “No, change that. Tell her it's Gard calling.”

As Bobbi's telephone began to ring up there in Haven, Gardener turned and looked toward the rising sun. It was even redder than before, rising toward the scud of thickening mackerel-scale clouds like a great round blister in the sky. The sun and the clouds together brought another childhood rhyme to mind: Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky at morning, sailor, take warning. Gard didn't know about red sky at morning, or at night, but he knew those delicate scales of cloud were a reliable harbinger of rain.

Too goddam many rhymes for a man's last morning on earth, he thought irritably, and then: I'm going to wake you up, Bobbi. Going to wake you up, but I promise you I'll never do it again.

But there was no Bobbi to wake up. The phone rang, that was all. Rang… and rang… and rang.

“Your party doesn't answer,” the operator told him, just in case he was deaf or had maybe forgotten what he was doing for a few seconds and had been holding the phone against his asshole instead of his ear. “Would you like to try again later?”

Yeah, maybe. But it'd have to be by Ouija board, Eileen.

“Okay,” he said. “You have a good one.”

“Thank you, Gard!”

He pulled the phone away from his ear as if it had bitten him and stared at it. For a moment she had sounded so much like Bobbi… so goddam much…

He put the phone back and got as far as, “What did you-'before realizing that cheerful Eileen had clicked off.

Eileen. Eileen, not Bobbi. But

She had called him Gard. Bobbi was the only one who

No, change that. Tell her it's Gard calling.

There. Perfectly reasonable explanation.

Then why didn't it seem that way?

He hung up slowly. He stood at the side of the Mobil station in his wet socks and shrunken pants and untucked shirt, his shadow long and long. A phalanx of motorcycles went by on Route 1, headed for Maine.