Looking at the typewriter, which was filled with that somehow ghastly green light, Gardener thought: Bobbi, who are 'they'?
Ding! Bang!
The keys rattled off a burst, letters forming words, the words forming a child's couplet:
Late last night and the night before
Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.
Jim Gardener screamed.
7
At last his hands stopped shaking - enough so he could get the hot coffee to his mouth without slopping it all over himself, thus finishing the morning's lunatic festivities with a few more burns.
Anderson kept watching him from the other side of the kitchen table with concerned eyes. She kept a bottle of very good brandy in the darkest depths of the pantry, far away from the 'alcoholic staples,' and she had offered to spike Gard's coffee with a wallop of it. He had declined, not just with regret but with real pain. He needed that brandy - it would dull the ache in his head, maybe kill it entirely. More important, it would bring his mind back into focus. It would get rid of that I-just-sailed-off-the-edge-of-the-world feeling.
Only problem was, he'd finally gotten to 'that' point, hadn't he? Correct. That point where it wouldn't stop with a single wallop of brandy in his coffee. There had been entirely too much input since he had opened the hatch at the bottom of Bobbi's water heater and then gone upstairs for a belt of whiskey.
It had been safe then; now the air was the unsteady sort that spawned tornadoes.
So: no more drinks. Not so much as an Irish sweetener in his coffee, until he understood what was happening here. Including what was happening to Bobbi. That, most of all.
'I'm sorry that last bit happened,' Anderson said, 'but I'm not sure I could have stopped it. I told you it was a dream machine; it's also a subconscious machine. I'm really not getting much of your thoughts at all, Gard - I've tried this with other people, and in most cases it's as easy as sinking your thumb into fresh dough. You can core all the way down to what I guess you'd call the id ... although it's awful down there, full of the most monstrous ... you can't even call them ideas ... images, I guess you'd say. Simple as a child's scrawl, but they're alive. Like those fish they find down deep in the ocean, the ones that explode if you bring them up.' Bobbi suddenly shuddered. 'They're alive,' she repeated.
For a second there was no sound but the birds singing outside.
'Anyway, all I get from you is surface stuff, and most of that is all broken up and garbled. If you were like anyone else, I'd know what's been going on with you, and why you look so crappy - '
'Thanks, Bobbi. I knew there was a reason I keep coming here, and since it's not the cooking, it must be the flattery.' He grinned, but it was a nervous grin, and he lit another cigarette.
'As it is,' Bobbi went on as if he hadn't spoken, 'I can make some educated guesses on the basis of what's happened to you before, but you'll have to tell me the details ... I couldn't snoop even if I wanted to. I'm not sure I could get it clear even if you shoved it all up to the front of your mind and put out a Welcome mat. But when you asked who "they" were, that little rhyme about the Tommyknockers came up like a big bubble. And it ran itself off on the typewriter.'
'All right,' Gardener said, although it wasn't all right ... nothing was all right. 'But who are they besides the Tommyknockers? Are they pixies? Leprechauns? Grem - '
'I asked you to look around because I wanted you to get an idea of how big all of this is,' Anderson said. 'How far-reaching the implications could be.'
'I realize that, all right,' Gardener said, and a smile ghosted around the corners of his mouth. 'A few more far-reaching implications and I'll be ready for a strait-waistcoat.'
'Your Tommyknockers came from space,' Anderson said, 'as I think you must have deduced by now.'
Gardener supposed the thought had done more than cross his mind - but his mouth was dry, his hands froze around the coffee cup.
'Are they around?' he asked, and his voice seemed to come from far, far away. He was suddenly afraid to turn around, afraid he might see some gnarled thing with three eyes and a horn where its mouth