began to pick at something which gulls presumably found tasty.
Gardener looked from the gull to the kid, feeling disconcerted and strange. All of this was taking on decidedly omenish tones. The kid knew about the fabled Tommyknockers. How many kids in the world knew about them, and what were the odds that Gardener would happen to stumble on one who both (a) knew about them and (b) had lost his mother because of drink?
The kid reached in his pocket and brought out a small tangle of firecrackers. Sweet bird of youth, Gard thought, and smiled.
'Want to light a couple? Celebrate the Fourth? Might cheer you up.
'The Fourth? The Fourth of July? Is that what this is?'
The kid gave him a dry smile. 'It ain't Arbor Day.'
The twenty-sixth of June had been ... he counted backwards. Good Christ. He had eight days which were painted black. Well ... not quite. That actually would have been better. Patches of light, not at all welcome, were beginning to illuminate parts of that blackness. The idea that he had hurt someone - again - arose now in his mind as a certainty. Did he want to know who that
(arglebargle)
was, or what he had done to him or her? Probably not. Best to call Bobbi and finish himself before he remembered.
'Mister, how'd you get that scar on your forehead?'
'Ran into a tree while I was skiing.'
'Bet it hurt.'
'Yeah, even worse than this, but not by much. Do you know where there's a pay phone?'
The kid pointed to an eccentric green-roofed manse which stood perhaps a mile down the beach. It topped a crumbling granite headland and looked like the cover of a paperback gothic. It had to be a resort. After a moment's fumbling, Gard came up with the name.
'That's the Alhambra, isn't it?'
'The one and only.'
'Thanks,' he said, and started off.
'Mister?'
He turned.
'Don't you want that last book?' The kid pointed to the wet notebook lying on the high-tide line. 'You could dry it out.'
Gardener shook his head. 'Kid,' he said, 'I can't even dry me out.'
'You sure you don't want to light off some firecrackers?'
Gardener shook his head, smiling. 'Be careful with 'em, okay? People hurt themselves with things that go bang.'
'Okay.' He smiled, a little shyly. 'My mother did for a long time before the, you know -'
'I know. What's your name?'
'Jack. What's yours?'
'Gard.'
'Happy Fourth of July, Gard.'
'Happy Fourth, Jack. And watch out for the Tommyknockers.'
'Knocking at my door,' the kid agreed solemnly, and looked at Gardener with eyes which seemed queerly knowing.
For a moment Gardener seemed to feel a second premonition (whoever would have guessed a hangover was so conducive to the psychic emanations of the universe? a bitterly sarcastic voice inside asked). He didn't know what of, exactly, but it filled him with urgency about Bobbi again. He tipped the kid a wave and set off up the beach. He walked at a fast, steady pace, although the sand drew at his feet, clinging, pulling. Soon his heart was racing and his head was thudding so hard his eyeballs seemed to pulse.
The Alhambra did not seem to be drawing appreciably closer.
Slow down or you'll have a heart attack. Or a stroke. Or both.
He did slow down ... and then doing so struck him as palpably absurd. Here he was, planning to drown himself in fifteen minutes or so, but minding his heart in the meantime. It was like the old joke about the condemned man turning down the cigarette offered by the captain of the firing squad. 'I'm trying to quit,' the guy says.
Gardener picked up his pace again, and now the bolts of pain began to beat out steady pulses of jingle-jangle verse:
Late last night and the night before,
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.
3
Gardener lasted exactly eleven seconds in the lobby of the Alhambra -