Then the front door jerked open, startling his heart up into his throat in a single nimble bound and he thought It's one of them, one of the Tommyknockers, it's going to rush down here and grab me and eat me up! He was barely able to stifle a scream.

The silhouette in the doorway was thin-much too thin, he thought, to be Bobbi Anderson. who had never been beefy but who was solidly built and pleasantly round in all the right places. But the voice, shrill and wavering though it was, was unmistakably Bobbi's… and Gardener relaxed a little, because Bobbi sounded even more terrified than he felt, standing by the mailbox and looking at the house.

“Who is it? Who's there?”

“It's Gard, Bobbi.”

There was a long pause. There were footfalls on the porch.

Cautiously: “Gard? Is it really you?”

“Yeah.” He worked his way over the hard, biting stones of the driveway to the lawn. And he asked the question he had come all this way and deferred his own suicide to ask: “Bobbi, are you all right?”

The quaver left Bobbi's voice, but Gardener could still not see her clearly-the sun had long since gone behind the trees, and the shadows were thick. He wondered where Peter was.

“I'm fine,” Bobbi said, just as if she had always looked so terribly thin, just as though she had always greeted arrivals in her dooryard with a shrill voice full of fear.

She came down the porch steps, and passed out of the shadow of the overhanging porch roof. As she did, Gardener got his first good look at her in the ashy twilight. He was struck by horror and wonder.

Bobbi was coming toward him, smiling, obviously delighted to see him. Her jeans fluttered and flapped on her, and so did her shirt; her face was gaunt, her eyes deep in their sockets, her forehead pale and somehow too wide, the skin taut and shiny. Bobbi's uncombed hair flopped against the nape of her neck and lay over her shoulders like waterweed cast up on a beach. The shirt was buttoned wrong. The fly of her jeans was three-quarters of the way down. She smelled dirty and sweaty and… well. as if she might have had an accident in her pants and then forgotten to change them.

A picture suddenly flashed into Gardener's mind: a photo of Karen Carpenter taken shortly before her death, which had allegedly resulted from anorexia nervosa. It had seemed to him the picture of a woman already dead but somehow alive, a woman who was all smiling teeth and shrieking feverish eyes. Bobbi looked like that now.

Surely she had lost no more than twenty pounds-that was all she could afford to lose and stay on her feet-but Gard's shocked mind kept insisting it was more like thirty, had to be.

She seemed to be on the last raggedy end of exhaustion. Her eyes, like the eyes of that poor lost woman on the magazine cover, were huge and glittery, her smile the huge brainless grin of a KO'd fighter just before his knees come unhinged.

“Fine!” this shambling, dirty, stumbling skeleton reiterated, and as Bobbi approached, Gardener could hear the waver in her voice again-not fear, as he'd thought, but utter exhaustion. “Thought you'd given up on me! Good to see you, man!”

“Bobbi… Bobbi, Jesus Christ, what.

Bobbi was holding out a hand for Gardener to shake. It trembled wildly in the air, and Gardener saw how thin, how woefully, incredibly thin Bobbi Anderson's arm had become.

“A lot of stuff going on,” Bobbi croaked in her wavering voice. “A lot of work done, a hell of a lot more left to do, but I'm getting there, getting there, wait'll you see-”

“Bobbi, what

“Fine, I'm fine,” Bobbi repeated, and she fell forward, semi-conscious, into Gardener's arms. She tried to say something else but only a loose gargle and a little spit came out. Her breasts were small, wasted pads against his forearm.

Gardener picked her up, shocked by how light she was. Yes, it was thirty, at least thirty. It was incredible, but not, unfortunately, deniable. He felt recognition that was both shocking and miserable: This isn't Bobbi at all. It's me. Me at the end of a jag.

He carried Bobbi swiftly up the steps and into the house.

Chapter 8

Modifications

He put Bobbi on the couch and went quickly to the telephone. He picked it up, meaning to dial 0 and ask the operator what number he should dial to get the nearest rescue unit. Bobbi needed a trip to the Derry Home Hospital and right away. A breakdown, Gardener supposed (although in truth he was so tired and confused that he hardly knew what to think). Some kind of breakdown. Bobbi Anderson seemed like the last person in the world to go over the top, but apparently she had.

Bobbi said something from the couch. Gardener didn't catch it at first; Bobbi's voice was little more than a harsh croak.

“What, Bobbi?”

“Don't call anybody,” Bobbi said. She managed a little more volume this time, but even that much effort seemed to nearly exhaust her. Her cheeks were flushed, the rest of her face waxen, and her eyes were as bright and feverish as blue gemstones -diamonds, or sapphires, perhaps. “Don't… Gard, not anybody!”

Anderson fell back against the couch, panting rapidly. Gardener hung up the telephone and went to her, alarmed. Bobbi needed a doctor, that was obvious, and Gardener meant to get her one… but right now Bobbi's obvious agitation seemed more important.

“I'll stay right with you,” he said, taking her hand, “if that's what's worrying you. God knows you stuck with me through enough sh-”

But Anderson had been shaking her head with mounting vehemence. “Just need sleep,” she whispered. “Sleep… and food in the morning. Mostly sleep. Haven't had any… three days. Four, maybe.”

Gardener looked at her, shocked again. He put together what Bobbi had just said with the way she looked.

“What rocket have you been riding?'and why? his mind added. “Bennies? Reds?” He thought of coke and then rejected it. Bobbi could undoubtedly afford coke if she wanted it, but Gardener didn't think even “basing could keep a man or woman awake for three or four days and melt better than thirty pounds off in-Gardener calculated the time since he had last seen Anderson-in no more than three weeks.

“No dope,” Bobbi said. “No drugs.” Her eyes rolled and glittered. Spit

drizzled helplessly from the corners of her mouth and she sucked it back. For an instant Gardener saw an expression in Bobbi's face he didn't like… one that scared him a little. It was an Anne expression. Old and crafty. Then Bobbi's eyes slipped closed, revealing lids stained the delicate purplish color of total exhaustion. When she opened her eyes again it was just Bobbi lying there… and Bobbi needed help.

“I'm going to phone for the rescue unit,” Gardener said, getting up again. “You look really unwell, B-”

Bobbi's thin hand reached out and caught his wrist as Gardener turned to the phone. It held him with surprising strength. He looked down at Bobbi, and although she still looked terribly exhausted and almost desperately wasted, that feverish glitter was gone from her eyes. Now her gaze was straight and clear and sane.

“If you call anybody,” she said, her voice still wavering a little but almost normal, “we're done being friends, Gard. I mean that. Call the rescue unit, or Derry Home, even old Doc Warwick in town, and that's the end of the line for us. You'll never see the inside of my house again. The door will be closed to you.”

Gardener looked at Bobbi with mounting dismay and horror. If he could have persuaded himself in that moment that Bobbi was delirious, he would gladly have done so… but she obviously wasn't.

“Bobbi you-'-don't know what you're saying? But she did; that was the horror of it. She was threatening to end their friendship if Gardener didn't do what she wanted, using their friendship as a club for the first time in all the years Gardener had known her. And there was something else in Bobbi Anderson's eyes: the knowledge that her friendship was maybe the last thing on earth that Gardener valued.