but his last real friend - he would have split, all right. The farmhouse looked rustic and pleasant, the light spilling from the east window was cozy and all looked well ... but the boards and the glass, the stones in the driveway, the very air pressing against his face ... all these things screamed at him to leave, get out, that things inside that house were bad, dangerous, perhaps even evil.
(Tommyknockers)
But whatever else was in there, Bobbi was too. He hadn't come all these miles, most in the pouring rain, to turn and run at the last second. So, in spite of the dread, he left the mailbox and started up the driveway, moving slowly, wincing as the sharp stones dug at the tender soles of his feet.
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