the news, with a hot-line number for people to call if they had seen him.
8
By Friday, Ruth McCausland understood that Wednesday and Thursday had been an untrustworthy respite in an ongoing process. She was being driven steadily toward some alien madness.
A dim part of her mind recognized the fact, bemoaned it ... but was unable to stop it. lt could only hope that the voices of her dolls held some truth as well as madness.
Watching as if from outside herself, she saw her hands take her sharpest kitchen knife - the one she used for boning fish - from the drawer. She took it upstairs, into the schooIroom.
The schoolroom glowed, rotten with green light. Tommyknocker-light. That was what everyone in town was calling them now, and it was a good name, wasn't it? Yes. As good as any. The Tommyknockers.
Send a signal. That's all you can do now. They want to get rid of you, Ruth. They love you, but their love has turned homicidal. I suppose you can find a twisted sort of respect in that. Because they're still afraid of YOU. Even now, now when you're almost as nutty as the rest of them, they're afraid of you. Maybe someone will hear the signal ... hear it ... see it ... understand it.
9
Now there was a shaky drawing of the town-hall clock tower on her board ... the scrawled work of a first-grader.
Ruth could not stand to work on the dolls in the schoolroom . . . not in that terrible light that waxed and pulsed. She took them, one by one, into her husband's study, and slit their bellies open like a surgeon - the French madame, the nineteenth-century clown, the Kewpie, all of them - one by one. And into each she put a small gadget made of C-cells, wires, electroniccalculator circuit boards, and the cardboard cores from toilet-paper rolls. She sewed the incisions up quickly, using a coarse black thread. As the line of naked dolls grew longer on her husband's desk, they began to look like dead children, victims of some grisly mass poisoning, perhaps, who had been stripped and robbed after death.
Each sewn incision parted in the middle so that one of the toilet-paper rolls could poke out like the barrel of some odd telescope. Only cardboard, the rolls would still serve to channel the force when it was generated. She didn't know how she knew this, or how she had known to build the gadgets in the first place ... the knowledge seemed to have come shimmering out of the air. The same air into which David Brown
(is on Altair-4)
had disappeared.
As she plunged the knife into their plump, defenseless bellies, the green light puffed out of it.
I'm
(sending a signal)
murdering the only children I ever had.
The signal. Think of the signal, not the children.
She used extension cords to wire the dolls neatly together in a chain. She had stripped the insulation from the last four inches of these cords and slipped the gleaming copper into an M-16 firecracker she had confiscated from Beach Jernigan's fourteen-year-old son Hump (thus known because one shoulder rode slightly higher than the other) about a week before all this madness began. She looked back, doubtful for a moment, into her schooIroom with its now empty benches. Enough light fell through the archway for her to be able to see the drawing she had done of the town-hall clock tower. She had done it in one of those blank periods that seemed to be getting longer and longer.
The hands of the clock in the drawing were set at three.
Ruth set her work aside and went to bed. She fell asleep but her sleep was not easy; she twisted and turned and moaned. Even in her sleep the voices ran through her head - thoughts of revenge planned, of cakes to be baked, sexual fantasies, worries about irregularity, ideas for strange gadgets and machines, dreams of power. And below them all, a thin, irrational yammer like a polluted stream, thoughts coming from the heads of her fellow townspeople but not human thoughts, and in her nightmarish sleep, that part of Ruth McCausland which clung stubbornly to sanity knew the truth: these were not the rising voices of the people she had lived with all these years but those of outsiders. They were the voices of the Tommyknockers.
10
Ruth understood by Thursday noon that the change in the weather hadn't solved anything.
The state police came, but they did not institute a widespread