into his ears, that lyric; it was coming from the front of his head ... from the place where the doctors had filled a hole in his skull with a piece of metal.
'The queen of all the nightbirds,
A player in the dark,
She don't say nothing
But baby makes her blue jeans talk.'
The volume was so loud it was almost unbearable. It had happened to him once before, this music in his head, after he'd stuck his finger into a light socket - and was he drunk at the time? My dear, does a dog piss on a fireplug?
He had discovered such musical visitations were neither hallucinatory nor all that rare - people had gotten radio transmissions on the lawn flamingoes in their yards; on teeth fillings; on the steel rims of their spectacles. For a week and a half in 1957 a family in Charlotte, North Carolina, had received signals from a classical-music station in Florida. They first heard them coming from the bathroom water glass. Soon other glasses in the house began to pick up the sound. Before it ended, the whole house was filled with the eerie sound of glassware broadcasting Bach and Beethoven, the music broken only by an occasional time-check. Finally, with a dozen violins holding one long, high note, almost all the glasses in the house shattered spontaneously and the phenomenon ceased.
So Gardener had known he wasn't alone, and had been sure he wasn't going crazy - but that wasn't much comfort, and it never had been as loud as this after the light-socket incident.
The sound of Dr Hook faded as quickly as it had come. Gardener stood tensely, waiting for it to come back. It didn't. What came instead, louder and more urgent than before, was a repetition of what had gotten him going in the first place: Bobbi's in trouble!
He turned away from the western view and started up Route 9 again. And although he was feverish and very tired, he walked fast - in fact, before long he was almost running.
5
It was seven-thirty when Gardener finally arrived at Bobbi's - what the locals still called the old Garrick place even after all these years. Gardener came swinging up the road, puffing, his color high and unhealthy. Here was the Rural Free Delivery box, its door slightly ajar, the way both Bobbi and Joe Paulson, the mailman, left it so it would be easier for Peter to paw open. There was the driveway, with Bobbi's blue pickup truck parked in it. The stuff in the truck bed had been covered with a tarp to protect it from the rain. And there was the house itself, with a light shining through the east window, the one where Bobbi kept her rocker and did her reading.
Everything looked all right; not a single sour note. Five years ago - even three -Peter would have barked at the arrival of a stranger outside, but Peter had gotten older. Hell, they all had.
Standing out here, Bobbi's place held the sort of quiet, pastoral loveliness that the western view at the town line had held for him - it represented all the things Gardener wished he had for himself. A sense of peace, or maybe just a sense of place. Certainly he could see nothing odd as he stood here by the mailbox. It looked - felt - like the house of a person who is content with herself. Not completely at rest, exactly, or retired, or checked out from the world's concerns ... but rocking steady. This was the house of a sane, relatively happy woman. It had not been built in the tornado belt.
All the same, something was wrong.
He stood there, the stranger out here in the dark,
(but I'm not a stranger I'm a friend her friend Bobbi's friend ... aren't I?)
and a sudden, frightening impulse rose within him: to leave. Just turn on one bare heel and bug out. Because he suddenly doubted if he wanted to find out what was going on inside that house, what kind of trouble Bobbi had gotten herself into.
(Tommyknockers Gard that's what kind Tommyknockers)
He shivered.
(late last night and the night before Tommyknockers Tommyknockers at Bobbi's door and I don't know if you can)
Stop it.
(because Gard's so afraid of the Tommyknocker man)
He licked his lips, trying to tell himself it was just the fever that made them feel so dry.
Get out, Gard! Blood on the moon!
The fear was now very deep indeed, and if it had been anyone but Bobbi - anyone