The Tommyknockers

1

The town had four other names before it became Haven.

It began municipal existence in 1816 as Montville Plantation. It was owned, lock, stock, and barrel by a man named Hugh Crane. Crane purchased it in 1813 from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, of which Maine was then a province. He had been a lieutenant in the Revolutionary War.

The Montville Plantation name was a gibe. Crane's father had never ventured east of Dover in his life, and remained a loyal Tory when the break with the colonies came. He ended life as a peer of the realm, the twelfth Earl of Montville. As his eldest son, Hugh Crane would have been the thirteenth Earl of Montville. Instead, his enraged father disinherited him. Not put out of countenance in the slightest, Crane went about cheerfully calling himself the first Ear) of Central Maine and sometimes the Duke of Nowhere at All.

The tract of land which Crane called Montville Plantation consisted of about twenty-two thousand acres. When Crane petitioned and was granted incorporated status, Montville Plantation became the one hundred and ninety-third town to be so incorporated in the Massachusetts Province of Maine. Crane bought the land because good timber was plentiful, and Derry, where timber could be floated downriver to the sea, was only twenty miles away.

How cheap was the area of land which eventually became Haven?

Hugh Crane had bought the whole shebang for the equivalent of eighteen hundred pounds.

Of course, a pound went a lot further in those days.

2

When Hugh Crane died in 1826, there were a hundred and three residents of Montville Plantation. Loggers swelled the population to twice that for six or seven months of the year, but they didn't really count, because they took their little bit of money into Derry, and it was in Derry that they usually settled when they grew too old to work the woods anymore. In those days, 'too old to work in the woods anymore' usually meant about twenty-five.

Nevertheless, by 1826 the settlement which would eventually become Haven Village had begun to grow up along the muddy road leading north toward Derry and Bangor.

Whatever you called it (and eventually it became, except in the memory of the oldest old-timers, like Dave Rutledge, plain old Route 9), that road was the one the loggers had to take when they went to Derry at the end of each month to spend their pay drinking and whoring. They saved their serious spending for the big town, but most were willing to bide long enough at Cooder's Tavern and Lodging-House to lay the dust with a beer or two on the way. This wasn't much, but it was enough to make the place a successful little business. The General Mercantile across the road (owned and operated by Hiram Cooder's nephew) was less successful but still a marginally profitable business. In 1828, a Barber Shop and Small Surgery (owned and operated by Hiram Cooder's cousin) opened next to the General Mercantile. In those days it was not unusual to stroll into this lively, growing establishment and see a logger reclining in one of the three chairs, having the hair on his head cut, the cut in his arm stitched, and a couple of large bloodsuckers from the jar by the cigar-box reposing above each closed eye, turning from gray to red as they swelled, simultaneously protecting against any infection from the cut and taking away that malady which was then known as 'achin' brains.' In 1830, a hostelry and feed store (owned by Hiram Cooder's brother George) opened at the south end of the village.

In 1831, Montville Plantation became Coodersville.

No one was very surprised.

Coodersville it remained until 1864, when the name was changed to Montgomery, in honor of Ellis Montgomery, a local boy who had fallen at Gettysburg, where, some say, the 20th Maine preserved the Union all by itself. The change seemed a fine idea. After all, the town's one remaining Cooder, crazy old Albion, had gone bankrupt and committed suicide two years before.

In the years following the Civil War, a craze, as inexplicable as most crazes, swept the state. This craze was not for hoop skirts or sideburns; it was a craze for giving small towns classical names. Hence, there is a Sparta, Maine; a Carthage; an Athens; and, of course, there was Troy right next door. In 1878, the residents of the town voted to change the town's name yet again, this time from Montgomery to Ilium. This provoked a tearful tirade at town meeting from the mother of Ellis Montgomery. In truth, the tirade was more senile than ringing, the hero's mother being by then full of years – seventy-five of them, to be exact. Town legend has it that the townsfolk listened patiently, a little guiltily, and that the decision might even have been recanted (Mrs Montgomery was surely right, some thought, when she said that fourteen years was hardly the 'immortal memory' her dead son had been promised at the name-changing ceremonies which had taken place on July 4th, 1864) if the good lady's bladder hadn't picked that particular moment to let go. She

was helped from the town meeting hall, still ranting about ungrateful Philistines who would rue the day.

Montgomery became Ilium, just the same.

Twenty-two years passed.

3

Came a fast-talking revival preacher who for some reason bypassed Derry and elected instead to spread his tent in Ilium. He went by the name of Colson, but Myrtle Duplissey, Haven's self-appointed historian, eventually became convinced that Colson's real name was Cooder, and that he was the illegitimate son of Albion Cooder.

Whoever he was, he won most of the Christians in town over to his own lively version of the faith by the time the corn was ready for picking – much to the despair of Mr Hartley, who ministered to the Methodists of Ilium and Troy, and Mr Crowell, who looked after the spiritual welfare of Baptists in Ilium, Troy, Etna, and Unity (the joke in those days was that Emory Crowell's parsonage belonged to the town of Troy, but his piles belonged to God). Nevertheless, their exhortations were voices crying in the wilderness. Preacher Colson's congregation continued to grow as that well-nigh perfect summer of 1900 drew to its conclusion. To call the crops of that year 'bumpers' was to poor-mouth them; the thin northern New England earth, usually as stingy as Scrooge, that year poured forth a bounty which seemed never-ending. Mr Crowell, the Baptist whose piles belonged to God, grew depressed and silent and, three years later, hanged himself in the cellar of the Troy parsonage.

Mr Hartley, the Methodist minister, grew ever more alarmed by the evangelical fervor which was sweeping Ilium like a cholera epidemic. Perhaps this was because Methodists are, under ordinary circumstances, the most undemonstrative worshippers of God; they listen not to sermons but to ‘messages,' pray mostly in decorous silence, and consider the only proper places for congregation-spoken amens to be at the end of the Lord's Prayer and those few hymns not sung by the choir. But now these previously undemonstrative people were doing everything from speaking in tongues to holy rolling. Next, Mr Hartley sometimes said, they will be handling snakes. The Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday meetings in the revival tent beside Derry Road became steadily louder, wilder, and more emotionally explosive. 'If it was happening in a carnival tent, they'd call it hysteria,' he told Fred Perry, a church deacon and his only close friend, one night over glasses of sherry in the church rectory. 'Because it's happening in a revival tent, they can get away with calling it Pentecostal Fire.'

Rev. Hartley's suspicions of Colson were amply justified in the course of time, but before then Colson fled, having harvested a goodly crop of cold cash and warm women instead of pumpkins and taters. And before then he put his lasting stamp on the town by changing its name for the final time.

His sermon on that hot August night began with the subject of the harvest as a symbol of God's great reward, and then moved on to the subject of this very town. By this time, Colson had stripped off his frock coat. His sweatsoaked hair had tumbled in his eyes. The sisters had commenced getting down in the amen corner, although it would be yet a while before the speaking in tongues and the holy rolling got going.

'I consider this town sanctified,' Colson told his audience, gripping the sides of his pulpit with his big hands – he might have considered it sanctified for some reason other than the fact that his honored self had chosen it in which to spread his tent (not to mention his seed), but if so, he didn't say so. 'I consider it a haven. Yes! I have found a haven here that reminds me of my haven-home, a lovely land maybe not so different from the one Adam and Eve knew before they went picking fruit from that tree they should have left alone. Sanctified!' Preacher Colson bellowed. Years after, there were members of his congregation who still spoke admiringly of how that man could shout for Jesus, scoundrel or not.

'Amen!' the congregation cried back. The night, though warm, was perhaps not quite warm enough to completely explain the blushes on so many feminine cheeks and brows; such flushes had become common since Preacher Colson came to town.

'This town is nothing short of a glory to God!'

'Hallelujah!' the congregation yelled jubilantly. Breasts heaved. Eyes sparkled. Tongues slipped out and wetted lips.

'This town has got a promise!' Preacher Colson shouted, now striding rapidly back and forth, occasionally flicking his black locks back from his forehead with a quick snap that showed his cleanly corded neck to good advantage. 'This town has got a promise and that promise is the fullness of the harvest, and that promise shall be fulfilled!'

'Praise Jesus!'

Colson came back to the pulpit, grasped it, and looked out at them forbiddingly. 'So why you want to have a town which promises the harvest of God and the haven of God – why you want to have a town that speaks of those things named after some dago is more than I can figure out, brethern. Must have been the devil working somewhere in the last generation is all I can figure.'

Talk about changing the town's name from Ilium to Haven began the very next day. The Rev. Mr Crowell protested the change listlessly, the Rev. Mr Hartley much more strongly. Ilium's selectmen were neutral, except to point out that it would cost the town twenty dollars to change the Papers of Incorporation on file in Augusta, and probably another twenty to change the municipal road signs with the town's name on them, not to mention the letterheads on town documents and stationery.

Long before the March town meeting at which Article 14, 'To see if the town will approve changing the name of Incorporated Maine Town No. 193 from ILIUM to HAVEN,' was discussed and voted on, Preacher Colson had literally folded his tent and stolen into the night. Said folding and stealing took place on the night of September 7th, following what Colson had for weeks been calling the great Harvest Home Revival of 1900. He'd been making it clear for at least a month that he considered it the most important meeting he would hold in town this year; perhaps the most important meeting he ever held, even if he should settle here, something he felt more and more often that God was calling him to do – and didn't that news just make the ladies' hearts go pitty-pat! It was, he said, to be a great love-offering to a loving God who had provided the town with such a wonderful growing season and harvest.

Colson did some harvesting of his own. He began by cajoling the attendees to give the largest 'love-offering' of his stay, and finished by plowing and planting not two, not four, but six young maidens in the field behind the tent after the meeting.

'Men love to talk big, but I guess most of 'em pack derringers in their pants no matter how big they talk,' old Duke Barfield said in the barbershop one evening. If there had been a Stinkiest Man in Town contest, old Duke would have won hands down. He smelled like a pickled egg that has spent a month in a mud puddle. He was listened to, but at a distance, and upwind, if there was a wind to make this possible. 'I heerd o' men with double-barrel shotguns in their pants, and I reckon it's so every once 'n' agin, and once't I even heerd tell o' some fella had him a three-shot pistol, but that fucker Colson's only man I ever heerd of who come packin' a six-shooter.'

Three of Preacher Colson's conquests were virgins before the invasion of the Pentecostal pecker.

The love-offering that night in the late summer of 1900 was indeed generous, although the barbershop gossips differed on just how generous the monetary part of it had been. All agreed that, even before the great Harvest Home Revival, where the preaching had gone on until ten, the gospel-singing until midnight, and the field-fucking until well past two, there had been a great outpouring of hard cash. Some also pointed out that Colson hadn't had many expenses during his stay, either. The women damn near fought for the privilege of bringing him his meals, the fellow who now owned the hostelry made him the long-term loan of a buggy … and, of course, no one at all charged him for his nightly entertainments.

On the morning of September 8th, tent and preacher were gone. He had harvested well … and seeded with equal success. Between January 1st and town meeting in late March 1901, nine illegitimate children, three girls and six boys, were born in the area. All nine of these 'love-children' bore a remarkable resemblance each to the other – six had blue eyes, and all were born with lusty crops of black hair. The barbershop gossips (and no group of men on earth can so successfully marry logic and prurience as these idlers farting into wicker chairs as they roll cigarettes or drive brown bullets of tobacco-juice into tin spittoons) also pointed out that it was hard telling just how many young girls had left 'to visit relatives' downstate, in New Hampshire, or even all the way down to Massachusetts. It was also pointed out that quite a few married women in the area had given birth between January and March. About those women, who knew for sure? But the barbershop gossips of course knew what had happened on March 29th, after Faith Clarendon gave birth to a bouncing eight-pound baby boy. A wild wet norther was whooping around the eaves of the Clarendon house, dropping 1901's last large budget of snow until November. Cora Simard, the midwife who had delivered the baby, was in a half-daze by the kitchen stove, waiting for her husband Irwin to finally make his way through the storm and take her home. She saw Paul Clarendon approach the crib where his new son lay – it was on the other side of the stove, in the corner which was warmest – and stand looking fixedly down at the new baby for over an hour. Cora made the dreadful error of mistaking Paul Clarendon's fixed stare for wonder and love. Her eyes drifted closed. When she awoke from her doze, Paul Clarendon was standing over the crib with his straight-razor in his hand. He seized the baby by its thick crop of blue-black hair, and before Cora could unlock her throat to scream, he had cut its throat. He left the room without a word. A moment later she heard wet gargling sounds coming from the bedroom. When a terrified Irwin Simard finally found the courage to enter the Clarendon bedroom, he found man and wife on the bed, hands joined. Clarendon had cut his wife's throat, lain down beside her, grasped her right hand with his left, and then cut his own. All this happened two days after the town had voted to change its name.

4

The Rev. Mr Hartley was dead-set against changing the town's name to one suggested by a man who had proved to be a thief, fornicator, false prophet, and all-round snake in the grass. He had said as much from his pulpit and had noted the agreeing nods from his parishioners with a grim, almost vindictive pleasure that was really not much like him. He came to the town meeting held on March 27th, 1901 confident that Article 14 would be resoundingly voted down. He was not even troubled by the brevity of discussion between the Town Clerk's reading of the article and Head Selectman Luther Ruvall's laconic, 'What's y'pleasure, people?' If he had had the slightest inkling, Hartley would have spoken vehemently, even furiously, for perhaps the only time in his life. But he never had so much as an inkling.

'Those in favor signify by sayin' aye,' Luther Ruvall said, and at the solid – if not very passionate – Aye! that shook the roof-rafters, Hartley felt as if he had been punched in the gut. He stared around wildly, but it was too late. The strength of the Aye! had taken him so totally by surprise that he had no idea how many from his own congregation had turned on him and voted the other way.

'Wait – ' he said aloud in a strangled voice that nobody heard.

'Those opposed?'

A scattered straggle of Nays. Hartley tried to scream his, but the only sound to escape his throat was a nonsense syllable – Nik!

'Motion's carried,' Luther Ruvall said. 'Now, Article 15

The Rev. Hartley suddenly felt warm – much too warm. He felt, in fact, as though he might faint. He pushed his way through standing throngs of men in red-and-black checked shirts and muddy flannel pants, through clouds of acrid smoke puffed from corncob pipes and cheap cigars. He still felt faint, but now he felt that he might also vomit before he fainted. A week later he would not be able to understand the depth of his shock so deep it was really horror. A year later he would not even acknowledge that he had felt such an emotion.

He stood on the top town-hall step, snatching great swoops of forty-degree air, clutching the handrail in a death-grip, and looked out across fields of melting snow. In places it had now drawn back enough to show the muddy earth beneath, and he thought with vicious crudity that was also unlike him that the fields looked like splotches of shit on the tail of a nightshirt. For the first and only time, he felt a bitter envy for Bradley Colson – or Cooder, if that was his real name. Colson had run away from Ilium … oh, beg your pardon, from Haven. He had run, and now Donald Hartley found himself wishing he could do the same. Why did they do that? Why? They knew what he was, they knew! So why did they

A strong, warm hand fell on his back. He turned and saw his good friend Fred Perry. Fred's long, homely face looked distressed and concerned, and Hartley felt a smile cross his face.

'Don, are you all right?' Fred Perry asked.

'Yes. I had a moment in there when I felt lightheaded. It was the vote. I didn't expect it.'

'Nor I,' Fred replied.

'My parishioners were part of it,' Hartley said. 'They had to have been. It was so loud, they had to have been, don't you think?'

'Well . . .'

The Rev. Mr Hartley smiled a little. 'I apparently do not know as much about human nature as I thought I did.'

'Come back in, Don. They're going to take up paving Ridge Road.'

'I think I'll stay out a while longer,' Hartley said, 'and think about human nature.' He paused, and just as Fred Perry was turning to go back, the Rev. Mr Donald Hartley asked, almost appealed: 'Do you understand, Fred? Do you understand why they did it? You're almost ten years older than I. Do you understand it?'

And Fred Perry, who had shouted out his own Aye! from behind a curled fist, shook his head and said no; he didn't understand at all. He did like the Rev. Mr Hartley. He did respect the Rev. Mr Hartley. But in spite of those things (or maybe – just maybe – because of them), he had taken a mean and spiteful pleasure in voting for a name suggested by Colson: Colson the false prophet, Colson the confidence man, Colson the thief, Colson the seducer. No, Fred Perry did not understand human nature at all.

1

Rebecca Bouchard Paulson was married to Joe Paulson, one of Haven's two mail-carriers and one-third of Haven's postal staff. Joe was cheating on his wife, something Bobbi Anderson knew already. Now 'Becka Paulson knew it, as well. She had known it for the last three days. Jesus told her. In the last three days or so, Jesus had told her the most amazing, terrible, distressing things imaginable. They sickened her, they destroyed her sleep, they were destroying her sanity … but weren't they also sort of wonderful? Boy howdy! And would she stop listening, maybe just tip Jesus over on His face, or scream at Him to shut up? Absolutely not. For one thing, there was a grisly sort of compulsion in knowing the things Jesus told her. For another, He was the Savior.

Jesus was on top of the Paulsons' Sony TV. He had been there for just six years. Before that, He had rested atop two Zeniths. 'Becka estimated that Jesus had been in roughly the same spot for about sixteen years. Jesus was represented in lifelike 3-D. This was a picture of Him that 'Becka's older sister, Corinne, who lived in Portsmouth, had given them as a wedding present. When Joe commented that 'Becka's sister was a little on the cheap side, wa'ant she, 'Becka told him to hush up. Not that she was terribly surprised; you couldn't expect a man like Joe to understand the fact that you couldn't put a price-tag on true Beauty.

In the picture, Jesus was dressed in a simple white robe and holding a shepherd's staff. The Christ on 'Becka's TV combed His hair a little bit like Elvis after Elvis got out of the Army. Yes; he looked quite a bit like Elvis in G. I. Blues. His eyes were brown and mild. Behind Him, in perfect perspective, sheep as white as the linens in TV soap commercials trailed off and over the horizon. 'Becka and Corinne had grown up on a sheep farm in New Gloucester, and 'Becka knew from personal experience that sheep were never that white and uniformly woolly, like little fair-weather clouds fallen to earth. But, she reasoned, if Jesus could turn water into wine and bring the dead back to life, there was no reason at all why He couldn't make the shit caked around a bunch of lambs' rumps disappear if He wanted to.

A couple of times Joe had tried to move that picture off the TV, and she supposed that now she knew why, oh yessirree! Boy howdy! Joe, of course, had his trumped-up tales. 'It doesn't seem right to have Jesus on top of the television while we're watching Magnum or Miami Vice,' he'd say. 'Why not put it up on your bureau, 'Becka? Or … I'll tell you what! Why not put it up on your bureau until Sunday, then you can bring it down and put it back while you watch Jimmy Swaggart and Jack van Impe? I'll bet Jesus likes Jimmy Swaggart a helluva lot better than He likes Miami Vice.'

She refused.

Another time he said, 'When it's my turn to have the Thursday-night poker game, the guys don't like it. No one wants to have Jesus Christ looking at him while he tries to draw to an inside straight.'

'Maybe they feel uncomfortable because they know gambling's the devil's work,' 'Becka said.

Joe, a good poker player, bridled. 'Then it was the devil's work bought you your blow-dryer and that garnet ring you like s'well,' he said. 'Better take ,em back for refunds and give the money to the Salvation Army. I think I got the receipts in my den.'

So she allowed Joe to turn the 3-D picture of Jesus around on the one Thursday night a month that he had his dirty-talking, beer-swilling friends in to play poker … but that was all.

And now she knew the real reason he had wanted to get rid of that picture. He must have had the idea all along that that picture might be a magic picture. Oh, she supposed sacred was a better word, magic was for pagans, headhunters and cannibals and Catholics and people like that, but they almost came to the same thing, didn't they? Anyway, Joe must have sensed that picture was special, that it would be the means by which his sin would be found out.

Oh, she supposed she had known something was going on. He was never after her at night anymore, and while that was something of a relief (sex was just as her mother had told her it would be, nasty, brutish, sometimes painful, always humiliating) she had also smelled perfume on his collar from time to time, and that was not a relief at all. She supposed she could have ignored the connection – the fact that the pawings had stopped at the same time that occasional smell of perfume started showing up in his collars – indefinitely if the picture of Jesus on top of the Sony hadn't begun to speak on July 7th. She could even have ignored a third factor: at about the same time the pawings had stopped and the perfume smells had begun, old Charlie Estabrooke had retired from the post office and a woman named Nancy Voss had come up from the Augusta post office to take his place. She guessed that the Voss woman (whom 'Becka now thought of simply as The Hussy) was perhaps five years older than she and Joe, which would make her around fifty, but she was a trim, well-kept, handsome fifty. 'Becka was willing to admit she herself had put on a little weight during her marriage, going from one hundred and twenty-six to two hundred and three, most of that since Byron, their only chick, had left home.

She could have ignored it, would have ignored it, perhaps even have come to tolerate it with relief; if The Hussy enjoyed the animalism of sexual congress, with its gruntings and thrustings and that final squirt of sticky stuff that smelled faintly like codfish and looked like cheap dish detergent, then it only proved The Hussy was little more than an animal herself. Also, it freed 'Becka of a tiresome, if ever-more-occasional, obligation. She could have ignored it, that was, if the picture of Jesus hadn't spoken up.

It happened for the first time at just past three in the afternoon on Thursday. 'Becka was coming back into the living room from the kitchen with a little snack (half a coffee-cake and a beer stein filled with cherry Za-Rex) to watch General Hospital. She could no longer really believe that Luke and Laura would ever come back, but she was not able to completely give up hope.

She was bending down to turn on the TV when Jesus said,---Becka,Joe is putting it to that Hussy down at the pee-oh just about every lunch-hour and sometimes after quitting time, too. Once he was so randy he put it to her while he was supposed to be helping her sort the mail. And do you know what? She never even said, “At least wait until I get the first-class took care of.”

'And that's not all,' Jesus said. He walked halfway across the picture, His robe fluttering around His ankles, and sat down on a rock that jutted from the ground. He held His staff between His knees and looked at her grimly. 'There's a lot going on in Haven. You won't believe the half of it.'

'Becka screamed and fell on her knees. 'My Lord!' she shrieked. One of her knees landed squarely on her piece of coffee-cake (which was roughly the size and thickness of the family Bible), squirting raspberry filling into the face of Ozzie, the cat, who had crept out from under the stove to see what was going on. 'My Lord! My Lord!' 'Becka continued to shriek. Ozzie ran, hissing, for the kitchen, where he crawled under the stove again with red goo dripping from his whiskers. He stayed there the rest of the day.

'Well, none of the Paulsons was ever good for much,' Jesus said. A sheep wandered toward Him and He whacked it away, using His staff with an absentminded impatience that reminded 'Becka, even in her current frozen state, of her late father. The sheep went, rippling slightly because of the 3-D effect. It disappeared, actually seeming to curve as it went off the edge of the picture … but that was just an optical illusion, she felt sure. 'Nossir!' Jesus declared. 'Joe's great-uncle was a murderer, as you well know, 'Becka. Murdered his son, his wife, and then himself. And when he came up here, do you know what We said?---Noroom!" that's what We said.' Jesus leaned forward, propped on His staff.---Gosee Mr Splitfoot down below," We said. "You'll find your Haven-home, all right. But you may find your new landlord asks a hell of a high rent and never turns down the heat," We said.' Incredibly, Jesus winked at her … and that was when 'Becka fled, shrieking, from the house.

2

She stopped in the back yard, panting, her mousy blonde hair hanging in her face, her heart beating so fast that it frightened her. No one had heard her shriekings and carryings-on, thank the Lord; she and Joe lived far out on the Nista Road, and their nearest neighbors were the Brodskys, who lived in that slutty trailer. The Brodskys were half a mile away. That was good. Anyone had heard her would have thought there was a crazywoman down at the Paulsons'.

Well there is, isn't there? If you think that picture started to talk, why, you must be crazy. Daddy'd beat you three shades of blue for saying such a thing – one for lying, another for believing it, and a third for raising your voice. 'Becka, pictures don't talk.

No … nor did it, another voice spoke up suddenly. That voice came out of your own head. 'Becka, I don't know how it could be … how you could know such things … but that's what happened. You made that picture of Jesus talk your own self, like Edgar Bergen used to make Charlie McCarthy talk on the Ed Sullivan Show.

But somehow that idea seemed more frightening, more downright crazy, than the idea that the picture itself had spoken, and she refused to allow it mental house-room. After all, miracles happened every day. There was that Mexican fellow who had found a picture of the Virgin Mary baked into an enchilada, or something. There were those miracles at Lourdes. Not to mention those children that had made the headlines of one of the tabloids – they had cried rocks. These were bona fide miracles (the children who wept rocks was, admittedly, a rather gritty one), as uplifting as a Pat Robertson sermon. Hearing voices was just nuts.

But that's what happened. And you've been hearing voices for quite a while now, haven't you? You've been hearing his voice. Joe's. And that's where it came from. Not from Jesus but from Joe

'No,' 'Becka whimpered. 'I ain't heard any voices in my head.'

She stood by her clothesline in the back yard, looking blankly off toward the woods on the other side of the Nista Road. They were hazy in the heat. Less than half a mile into those woods, as the crow flew, Bobbi Anderson and Jim Gardener were steadily unearthing more and more of a titanic fossil in the earth.

Crazy, her dead father's implacable voice tolled in her head. Crazy with the heat. You come on over here, 'Becka Bouchard, I'm gonna beat you three shades of blister-blue for that crazy talk.

'I ain't heard no voices in my head,' 'Becka moaned. 'That picture really did talk, I swear, I can't do ventriloquism!'

Better the picture. If it was the picture, it was a miracle, and miracles came from God. A miracle could drive you nuts – and dear God knew she felt like she was going nuts right now – but it didn't mean you were crazy to start with. Hearing voices in your head, however, or believing that you could hear other people's thoughts …

'Becka looked down, and saw blood gushing from her left knee. She shrieked again and ran back into the house to call the doctor, Medix, somebody, anybody. She was in the living room again, pawing at the dial with the phone to her ear, when Jesus said:

'That's just raspberry filling from your coffee-cake, 'Becka. Why don't you just cool it before you have a heart attack?'

She looked at the Sony, the telephone receiver falling to the table with a clunk. Jesus was still sitting on the rock outcropping. It looked as though He had crossed His legs. It was really surprising, how much He looked like her father … only He didn't seem forbidding, ready to be angry at a moment's notice. He was looking at her with a kind of exasperated patience.

'Try it and see if I'm not right,' Jesus said.

She touched her knee gently, wincing, anticipating pain. There was none. She saw the seeds in the red stuff and relaxed. She licked the raspberry filling off her fingers.

'Also,' Jesus said, 'you have got to get these ideas about hearing voices and going crazy out of your head. It's just Me, and I can talk to anyone I want to, any way I want to.'

'Because you're the Savior,' 'Becka whispered.

'Right,' Jesus said. He looked down. Below Him, on the screen, a couple of animated salad-bowls were dancing in appreciation of the Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing which they were about to receive. 'And I'd like you to please turn that crap off, if you don't mind. We can't talk with that thing running. Also, it makes My feet tingle.'

'Becka approached the Sony and turned it off.

'My Lord,' she whispered.

3

The following Sunday afternoon, Joe Paulson was lying fast asleep in the back-yard hammock with Ozzie the cat zonked out on Joe's ample stomach. 'Becka stood in the living room, holding the curtain back and looking out at Joe. Sleeping in the hammock. Dreaming of his Hussy, no doubt – dreaming of throwing her down in a great big pile of catalogues and Woolco circulars and then – how would Joe and his piggy poker buddies put it? -'putting the shoes to her.'

She was holding the curtain with her left hand because she had a handful of square nine-volt batteries in her right. She took the batteries into the kitchen, where she was assembling something on the kitchen table. Jesus had told her to make it. She told Jesus she couldn't make things. She was clumsy. Her daddy had always told her so. She thought of adding how he sometimes told her he was surprised she could wipe her own butt without an instruction manual, and then decided that wasn't the sort of thing you told the Savior.

Jesus told her not to be a fool; if she could follow a recipe, she could build this little thing. She was delighted to find that He was absolutely right. It was not only easy, it was fun! More fun than cooking, certainly; she had never really had the knack for that, either. Her cakes fell and her breads never rose. She had begun this little thing yesterday, working with the toaster, the motor from her old Hamilton Beach blender, and a funny board full of electronics things which had come from the back of an old radio in the shed. She thought she would be done long before Joe woke up and came in to watch the Red Sox game on TV at two o'clock.

She picked up his little blowtorch and lit it deftly with a kitchen match. She would have laughed a week ago if you'd told her she would be working with a propane torch now. But it was easy. Jesus told her exactly how and where to solder the wires to the electronics board from the old radio.

That wasn't all Jesus had told her during the last three days. He had told her things that murdered her sleep, things that made her afraid to go into the village and do her shopping Friday evening, lest her guilty knowledge show on her face (I'll always know when you done something wrong, 'Becka, her father had told her, because you ain't got the kind of face can keep a secret); that had, for the first time in her life, made her lose her appetite. Joe, totally bound up in his work, the Red Sox, and his Hussy, noticed hardly anything amiss … although he had seen 'Becka gnawing her fingernails the other night as they watched Hill Street Blues, and nail-biting was something she had never done before – was, in fact, one of the things she nagged him about. Joe Paulson considered this for all of twelve seconds before looking back at the Sony TV and losing himself in dreams of Nancy Voss's heaving white breasts.

Among others, these were a few of the things Jesus told her, causing 'Becka to sleep poorly and to begin biting her fingernails at the advanced age of forty-five:

In 1973, Moss Harlingen, one of Joe's poker buddies, had murdered his father. They had been hunting deer up in Greenville and it had supposedly been one of those tragic accidents, but the shooting of Abel Harlingen had been no accident. Moss simply laid up behind a fallen tree with his rifle and waited until his father splashed across a small stream about fifty yards down the hill from where Moss was. Moss potted his father as easily as a clay duck in a shooting gallery. He thought he had killed his father for money. Moss's business, Big Ditch Construction, had two notes falling due with two different banks within six weeks' time, and neither would extend because of the other. Moss went to Abel, but his dad refused to help, although he could afford to. So Moss shot his father and inherited a pot of money after the county coroner handed down a verdict of death by misadventure. The notes were paid and Moss Harlingen really believed (except perhaps in his deepest dreams) that he had committed murder for gain. The real motive had been something else. Far in the past, when Moss was ten and his brother Emory seven, Abel's wife went south to Rhode Island for one whole winter. Her brother had died suddenly, and his wife needed help getting on her feet. While their mother was gone, there were several incidents of buggery at the Harlingen place. The buggery stopped when the boys' mother came back, and the incidents were never repeated. Moss had forgotten all about them. He never remembered lying awake in the dark anymore, lying awake in mortal terror and watching the doorway for the shadow of his father. He had absolutely no recollection of lying with his mouth pressed against his forearm, salty tears of shame and rage squeezing out of his hot eyes and coursing down his cold face to his mouth as Abel Harlingen slathered lard onto his cock and then slid it up his son's back door with a grunt and a sigh. It had all made so little impression on Moss that he could not remember biting his arm until it bled to keep from crying out, and he certainly could not remember Emory's breathless bird-cries from the next bed -'Please, Daddy, no, Daddy, please not me tonight, please, Daddy.' Children, of course, forget very easily. But some memory might have lingered, because when Moss Harlingen actually pulled the trigger on the buggering son of a whore, as the echoes first rolled away and then rolled back, finally disappearing into the great forested silence of the up-Maine wilderness, Moss whispered: 'Not you, Em, not tonight.'

Alice Kimball, who taught at the Haven Grammar School, was a lesbian. Jesus told 'Becka this on Friday, not long after the lady herself, looking large and solid and respectable in a green pants suit, had stopped by, collecting for the American Cancer Society.

Darla Gaines, the pretty seventeen-year-old girl who brought the Sunday paper, had half an ounce of 'bitchin' reefer' between the mattress and box spring of her bed. Jesus told 'Becka this right after Darla had come on Saturday to collect for the last five weeks (three dollars plus a fifty-cent tip 'Becka now wished she had withheld), and that she and her boyfriend smoked the reefer in Darla's bed before having intercourse, only they called having intercourse 'doing the horizontal bop.' They smoked reefer and 'did the horizontal bop' almost every weekday afternoon from two-thirty until three or so. Darla's parents both worked at Splendid Shoe in Derry and they didn't get home until well past four.

Hank Buck, another of Joe's poker cronies, worked at a large supermarket in Bangor and hated his boss so much that a year ago he had put half a box of Ex-Lax in the man's chocolate shake when the boss had sent Hank out to get his lunch at McDonald's one day. The boss had had something rather more spectacular than a bowel movement; at three-fifteen that day, he had done something in his pants that was the equivalent of a shit A-bomb. The A-bomb – or S-bomb, if you preferred -had gone off as he was slicing lunchmeat in the deli of Paul's Down-East SuperMart. Hank managed to keep a straight face until quitting time, but by the time he got into his car to go home, he was laughing so hard he almost shit his own pants. Twice he had to pull off the road, he got laughing so hard.

'Laughed,' Jesus told 'Becka. 'What do you think of that?'

'Becka thought it was a low-down mean trick. And such things were only the beginning, it seemed. Jesus knew something unpleasant or upsetting about everyone 'Becka came in contact with, it seemed.

She couldn't live with such an awful outpouring.

She couldn't live without it, either.

One thing was certain: she had to do something about it.

'You are,' Jesus said. He spoke from behind her, from the picture on top of the Sony. Of course He did. The idea that His voice was coming from inside her own head – that she was somehow … well … somehow reading people's thoughts … that was only a dreadful passing illusion. It must be. The alternative was horrifying.

Satan. Witchcraft.

'In fact,' Jesus said, confirming His existence with that dry, no-nonsense voice so like her father's, 'you're almost done with this part. Just solder that red wire to that point to the left of the long doohickey . . . no, not there … there. Good girl! Not too much solder, mind! It's like Brylcreem, 'Becka . A little dab'll do ya.'

Strange, hearing Jesus Christ talk about Brylcreem.

4

Joe woke up at quarter to two, tossed Ozzie off his lap, strolled to the back of his lawn, brushing cat-hairs off his T-shirt, and had a comfortable whiz into the poison ivy back there. Then he headed into the house. Yankees and Red Sox. Great. He opened the fridge, glancing briefly at the snippets of wire on the counter and wondering just what in hell that dimbulb 'Becka had been up to. But mostly he dismissed it. He was thinking of Nancy Voss. He was wondering what it would feel like to squirt off between Nancy's tits. He thought maybe Monday he'd find out. He squabbled with her; Christ, sometimes they squabbled like a couple of dogs in August. Seemed like it wasn't just them; everyone seemed short-fused lately. But when it came to fucking … son of a bitch! He hadn't been so randy since he was eighteen, and she was the same way. Seemed like neither of them could get enough. He'd even squirted in the night a couple of times. It was like he was sixteen again. He grabbed a quart of Bud and headed toward the living room. Boston was almost certainly going to win today. He had the odds figured at 8-5. Lately he seemed to have an amazing head for odds. There was a guy down in Augusta who'd take bets, and Joe had made almost five hundred bucks in the last three weeks … not that 'Becka knew. He'd ratholed it. It was funny; he'd know exactly who was going to win and why, and then he'd get down to Augusta and forget the why and only remember the who. But that was the important thing, wasn't it? Last time the guy in Augusta had grumbled, paying off at three to one on a twenty-dollar bet. Mets against the Pirates, Gooden on the mound, looked like a cinch for the Mets, but Joe had taken the Pirates and they'd won, 5-2. Joe didn't know how much longer the guy in Augusta would take his bets, but if he stopped, so what? There was always Portland. There were two or three books there. It seemed like lately he got a headache whenever he left Haven – needed glasses, maybe – but when you were rolling hot, a headache was a small price to pay. Enough money and the two of them could go away. Leave 'Becka with Jesus. That was who 'Becka wanted to be married to anyway.

Cold as ice, she was. But that Nancy? One hot ticket! And smart! Why, just today she'd taken him out back at the P.O. to show him something. 'Look! Look what I thought of! I think I ought to patent it, Joe! I really do!'

'What idear?' Joe asked. The truth was, he felt a little mad with her. The truth was, he was more interested in her tits than her idears, and mad or not, he was already getting a blue-steeler. It really was like being a kid again. But what she showed him was enough to make him forget all about his blue-steeler. For at least four minutes, anyway.

Nancy Voss had taken a kid's Lionel train transformer and hooked it somehow to a bunch of D-cell batteries. This gadget was wired to seven flour-sifters with their screens knocked out. The sifters were lying on their sides. When Nancy turned on the transformer, a number of filament-thin wires hooked to something that looked like a blender began to scoop first-class mail from a pile on the floor into the sifters, seemingly at random.

'What's it doing?' Joe asked.

'Sorting the first-class,' she said. She pointed at one sifter after another. 'That one's Haven Village … that's RFD 1, Derry Road, you know . . . that one's Ridge Road … that one's Nista Road . . . that one's . . .'

He didn't believe it at first. He thought it was a joke, and he wondered how she'd like a slap upside the head. Why'd you do that? she'd whine. Some men can take a joke, he'd answer like Sylvester Stallone in that movie Cobra, but I ain't one of 'em. Except then he saw it was really working. It was quite a gadget, all right, but the sound of the wires scraping across the floor was a little creepy. Harsh and whispery, like big old spiders' legs. It was working, all right; damned if he knew how, but it was. He saw one of the wires snag a letter for Roscoe Thibault and push it into the correct sifter – RFD 2, which was the Hammer Cut road – even though it had been misaddressed to Haven Village.

He wanted to ask her how it worked, but he didn't want to look like a goddam dummy, so he asked her where she got the wires instead.

'Out of these telephones I bought at Radio Shack,' she said. 'The one at the Bangor Mall. They were on sale! There's some other stuff from the phones in it, too. I had to change everything around, but it was easy. It just … you know … come to me. You know?'

'Yeah,' Joe said slowly, thinking about the bookie's face when Joe had come in to collect his sixty bucks after the Pirates beat Gooden and the Mets. 'Not bad. For a woman.'

For a moment her brow darkened and he thought: You want to say something? You want to fight? Come on. That's okay. That's just about as okay as the other.

Then her brow cleared and she smiled. 'Now we can do it even longer.' Her fingers slid down the hard ridge in his pants. 'You do want to do it, don't you, Joe?'

And Joe did. They slipped to the floor and he forgot all about being mad at her, and how all of a sudden he seemed to be able to figure the odds on everything from baseball games to horse races to golf matches in the wink of an eye. He slid into her and she moaned and Joe even forgot the tenebrous whispering sound those wires made as they sifted the first-class mail into the row of flour-sifters.

5

When Joe entered the living room, 'Becka was sitting in her rocker, pretending to read the latest issue of The Upper Room. Just ten minutes before Joe came in, she had finished wiring the gadget Jesus had shown her how to make into the back of the Sony TV. She followed His instructions to the letter, because He said you had to be careful when you were fooling around inside the back of a television.

'You could fry yourself,' Jesus advised. 'More juice back there than there is in a Bird's Eye warehouse, even when it's turned off.'

The TV was off now and Joe said ill-temperedly, 'I thought you'd have this all wa'amed up for me.'

'I guess you know how to turn on the damned TV,' 'Becka said, speaking to her husband for the last time.

Joe raised his eyebrows. Damned anything was damned odd, coming from 'Becka. He thought about calling her on it, and decided to let it ride. Could be there was one fat old mare who'd find herself keeping house by herself before much of a longer went by.

'Guess I do,' Joe said, speaking to his wife for the last time.

He pushed the button that turned the Sony on, and better than two thousand volts of current slammed into him, AC which had been boosted, switched over to lethal DC, and then boosted again. His eyes popped wide open, bulged, and then burst like grapes in a microwave. He had started to set the quart of beer on top of the TV next to Jesus. When the electricity hit, his hand clenched tightly enough to break the bottle. Spears of brown glass drove into his fingers and palm. Beer foamed and ran. It hit the top of the TV (its plastic casing already blistering) and turned to steam that smelled like yeast.

'EEEEEOOOOOOARRRRHMMMMMMM!'Joe Paulson screamed. His face began to turn black. Blue smoke poured out of his hair and his ears. His finger was nailed to the Sony's On button.

A picture popped on the TV. It was Dwight Gooden throwing the wild pitch that let in two runs and chased him, making Joe Paulson forty dollars richer. It flipped and showed him and Nancy Voss screwing on the post office floor in a litter of catalogues and Congressional Newsletters and ads from insurance companies saying you could get all the coverage you needed even if you were over sixty-five, no salesman would call at your door, no physical examination would be required, your loved ones would be protected at a cost of pennies a day.

'No!' 'Becka screamed, and the picture flipped again. Now she saw Moss Harlingen behind a fallen pine, notching his father in the sight of his .30-.30 and murmuring Not you, Em, not tonight. It flipped and she saw a man and a woman digging in the woods, the woman behind the controls of something that looked a little bit like a payloader and a little bit like something out of a Rube Goldberg cartoon, the man looping a chain around a stump. Beyond them, a vast dish-shaped object jutted out of the earth. It was silvery, but dull; the sun struck it in places but did not twinkle.

Joe Paulson's clothes burst into flame.

The living room was filled with the smell of electricity and cooking beer. The 3-D picture of Jesus jittered around and then exploded.

'Becka shrieked, understanding that, like it or not, it had been her all along, her, her, her, and she was murdering her husband.

She ran to him, seized his looping, spasming hand … and was herself galvanized.

Jesus oh Jesus save him, save me, save us both, she thought as the current slammed into her, driving her up on her toes like the world's heftiest ballerina en pointe. And a mad, cackling voice, the voice of her father, rose in her brain: Fooled you, 'Becka, didn't I? Fooled you good! Teach you to lie! Teach you for good and all!

The back of the television, which she had screwed back on after she had finished adding her alterations, blew back against the wall with a mighty blue flash of light. 'Becka tumbled to the carpet, pulling Joe with her. Joe was already dead.

By the time the smoldering wallpaper behind the TV had ignited the chintz curtains, 'Becka Paulson was dead, too.

1

The day Hillman Brown did the most spectacular trick of his career as an amateur magician – the only spectacular trick of his career as an amateur magician, actually -was Sunday, July 17th, exactly one week before the Haven town hall blew up. That Hillman Brown had never managed a really spectacular trick before was not so surprising. He was only ten, after all.

His given name had been his mother's maiden name. There had been Hillmans in Haven going back to the time when it had been Montgomery, and although Marie Hillman had no regrets about becoming Marie Brown – after all, she loved the guy! -she had wanted to preserve the name, and Bryant had agreed. The new baby wasn't home a week before everyone was calling him Hilly.

Hilly grew up nervous. Marie's father Ev said he had cat whiskers for nerves and would spend his whole life on the jump. It wasn't news Bryant and Marie Brown wanted to hear, but after their first year with Hilly, it wasn't really news at all; just a fact of life. Some babies attempt to comfort themselves by rocking in their cribs or cradles; some by sucking a thumb. Hilly rocked in his crib almost constantly (crying angrily at the same time, more often than not), and sucked both thumbs – sucked them so hard that he had painful blisters on them by the time he was eight months old.

'He'll stop now,' Dr Lester in Derry told them confidently, after examining the nasty blisters that ringed Hilly's thumbs … blisters Marie had wept over as if they had been her own. But Hilly hadn't stopped. His need for comfort was apparently greater than whatever pain his hurt thumbs gave him. Eventually the blisters turned to hard calluses.

'He'll always be on the jump,' the boy's grandfather prophesied whenever anyone asked him (and even when no one did; at sixty-three, Ev Hillman was garrulous-going-on-tiresome). 'Cat whiskers for nerves, ayuh! He'll keep his mom 'n' dad on the hop, Hilly will.'

Hilly kept them hopping, all right. Lining both sides of the Brown driveway were stumps, placed there by Bryant, at Marie's instigation. Upon each she put a planter, and in each planter was a different sort of plant or bunch of flowers. At age three, Hilly one day climbed out of his crib where he was supposed to be taking a nap ('Why do I have to have a nap, Mom?' Hilly asked. 'Because I need the rest, Hilly,' his exhausted mother replied), wriggled out the window, and knocked over all twelve of the planters, stumps and all. When Marie saw what Hilly had done, she wept as inconsolably as she had wept over her boy's poor thumbs. Seeing her cry, Hilly had also burst into tears (around his thumbs; he was attempting to suck both of them at once). He hadn't knocked over the stumps and the planters to be mean; it had just seemed a good idea at the time.

'You don't count the cost, Hilly,' his father said on that occasion. He would say it a good many times before Sunday, July 17th, 1988.

At the age of five, Hilly got on his sled and shot down the ice-coated Brown driveway one December day and out into the road. It never occurred to him, he told his ashy-faced mother later, to wonder if something might be coming down Derry Road; he had gotten up, seen the glaze of ice that had fallen, and had only wondered how fast his Flexible Flyer would go down their driveway. Marie saw him, saw the fuel tanker lumbering down Route 9, and shrieked Hilly's name so loudly that she could barely talk above a whisper for the next two days. That night, trembling in Bryant's arms, she told him she had seen the boy's tombstone in Homeland – had actually seen it: Hillman Richard Brown, 1978-1983, Taken Too Soon.

'Hiiillyyyyyyyy!'

Hilly's head snapped around at the sound of his mother's scream, which sounded to him as loud as a jet plane. As a result, he fell off his sled just before it reached the foot of the driveway. The driveway was asphalted, the glaze of sleet was really quite thin, and Hilly Brown never had that knack with which a kind God blesses most squirmy, active children – the knack of failing lucky. He broke his left arm just above the elbow and fetched his forehead such a dreadful crack that he knocked himself out.

His Flexible Flyer shot into the road. The driver of the Webber Fuel truck reacted before he had a chance to see there was no one on the sled. He spun the wheel and the tanker-truck waltzed into a low embankment of snow with the huge grace of the elephant ballet dancers in Fantasia. It crashed through and landed in the ditch, canted alarmingly to one side. Less than five minutes after the driver wriggled out of the passenger door and ran to Marie Brown, the truck tipped over on its side and lay in the frozen grass like a dead mastodon, expensive No. 2 fuel oil gurgling out of its three overflow vents.

Marie was running down the road with her unconscious child in her arms, screaming. In her terror and confusion she felt sure that Hilly must have been run over, even though she had quite clearly seen him fall off his sled at the bottom of the driveway.

'Is he dead?' the tanker driver screamed. His eyes were wide, his face pale as paper, his hair standing on end. There was a dark spot spreading on the crotch of his pants. 'Oh sufferin' Jesus, lady, is he dead?'

I think so,' Marie wept. 'I think he is, oh I think he's dead.'

Who's dead?' Hilly asked, opening his eyes.

'Oh, Hilly, thank God!' Marie screamed, and hugged him. Hilly screamed back with great enthusiasm. She was grinding together the splintered ends of the broken bone in his left arm.

Hilly spent the next three days in Derry Home Hospital.

'It'll slow him down, at least,' Bryant Brown said the next evening over a dinner of baked beans and hot dogs.

Ev Hillman happened to be taking dinner with them that evening; since his wife had died, Ev Hillman did that every now and again; about five evenings out of every seven on the average. 'Want to bet?' Ev said now, cackling through a mouthful of cornbread.

Bryant cocked a sour eye at his father-in-law and said nothing.

As usual, Ev was right – that was one of the reasons Bryant so often felt sour about him. On his second night in the hospital, long after the other children in Pediatrics were asleep, Hilly decided to go exploring. How he got past the duty nurse was a mystery, but get past he did. He was discovered missing at three in the morning. An initial search of the pediatrics ward did not turn him up. Neither did a floor-wide search. Security was called in. A search of the whole hospital was then mounted – administrators who had at first only been mildly annoyed were now becoming worried – and discovered nothing. Hilly's father and mother were called and came in at once, looking shell-shocked. Marie was weeping, but because of her swollen larynx, she could only do so in a breathy croak.

'We think he may have wandered out of the building somehow,' the Head of Administrative Services told them.

'How the hell could a five-year-old just wander out of the buildings?' Bryant shouted. 'What kind of a place you guys running here?'

'Well … well … you understand it's hardly a prison, Mr Brown '

Marie cut them both off. 'You've got to find him,' she whispered. 'It's only twenty-two degrees out there. Hilly was in his pj's. He could be . . . be . . .'

'Oh, Mrs Brown, I really think such worries are premature,' the Head of Administrative Services broke in, smiling sincerely. He did not, in fact, think they were premature at all. The first thing he had done after ascertaining that the boy might have been gone ever since the eleven-o'clock bedcheck was to find out how cold the night had been. The answer had occasioned a call to Dr Elfman, who specialized in cases of hypothermia – there were a lot of those in Maine winters. Dr Elfman's prognosis was grave. 'If he got out, he's probably dead,' Elfman said.

Another hospital-wide search, this one augmented by Derry police and firemen, turned up nothing. Marie Brown was given a sedative and put to bed. The only good news was of a negative sort; so far no one had found Hilly's frozen, pajama-clad body. Of course, the Head of Administrative Services thought, the Penobscot River was close to the hospital. Its surface had frozen. It was just possible that the boy had tried to cross the ice and had plunged through. Oh, how he wished the Browns of Haven had taken their little brat to Eastern Maine Medical.

At two that afternoon, Bryant Brown sat numbly in a chair beside his sleeping wife, wondering how he could tell her their only child was dead, if it became necessary to do so. At about that same time, a janitor who was in the basement to check on the laundry boilers saw an amazing sight: a small boy wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and a plaster cast on one arm strolling nonchalantly between two of the hospital's giant furnaces in his bare feet.

'Hey!' the jan;' tor yelled. 'Hey, kid!'

'Hi,' Hilly said, coming over. His feet were black with dirt; his pajama bottoms were swatched with grease. 'Boy, this is a big place! I think I'm lost.'

The janitor carried Hilly upstairs to the administration office. The Head sat Hilly down in a large wing chair (after prudently putting down a double spread of the Bangor Daily News) and sent his secretary out to fetch back a Pepsi-Cola and a bag of Reese's Pieces for the brat. Under other circumstances the Head would have gone himself, thereby impressing the boy with his grandfatherly kindness. Under other circumstances – by which I mean, the Head thought grimly to himself, with a different boy. He was afraid to leave Hilly alone.

When the secretary came back with the candy and the soft drink, the Head sent her away again … after Bryant Brown this time. Bryant was a strong man, but when he saw Hilly sitting in the Head's wing chair, his dirty feet swinging four inches off the rug and the papers crackling under his butt as he ate candy and drank Pepsi, he was unable to hold back his tears of relief and thanksgiving. This of course made Hilly – who never in his life had ever done anything consciously bad – also burst into tears.

'Christ, Hilly, where you been?'

Hilly told the story as best he could, leaving Bryant and the Head to parse objective truth out of it as best they could. He had gotten lost, wandered into the basement ('I was followin' a pixie,' Hilly told them), and had crawled under one of the furnaces to sleep. It had been very warm there, he told them, so warm he had taken off his pajama shirt, working it carefully over the new cast.

'I like the pups, too,' he said. 'Can we have a puppy, Daddy?'

The janitor who had spotted Hilly also found Hilly's shirt. It was under the No. 2 furnace. Getting the shirt out, he saw the 'puppies,' too, although they skittered away from his light. He did not mention them to Mr and Mrs Brown, who looked like folks who would just fall apart if faced with one more shock. The janitor, a kindly man, thought they would do just as well not knowing that their son had spent the night with a pack of basement rats, some of which had indeed looked as large as puppies as they fled from his flashlight beam.

2

Asked for his perceptions of these things – and the similar (if less spectacular) incidents that occurred over the next five years of his life – Hilly would have shrugged and said, 'I'm always getting in trouble, I guess.' Hilly meant he was accident-prone, but no one had taught him this valuable phrase yet.

When he was eight – two years after David was born – he brought home a note from Mrs Underhill, his third-grade teacher, asking if Mr and Mrs Brown could come in for a brief conference. The Browns went, not without some trepidation. They knew that during the previous week, Haven's third-graders had been given IQ tests. Bryant was secretly convinced that Mrs Underhill was going to tell them Hilly had tested far below normal, and would have to be put in remedial classes. Marie was convinced (and just as secretly) that Hilly was dyslexic. Neither had slept very well the night before.

What Mrs Underhill told them was that Hilly was completely off the scale -bluntly put, the lad was a genius. 'You'll have to take him to Bangor and have him take the WechsIer Test if you want to know how high his IQ actually is,' Mrs Underhill told them. 'Giving Hilly the Tompall IQ Test is like trying to determine a human's IQ by giving him an intelligence test designed for goats.'

Marie and Bryant discussed it … and decided against pursuing the matter any further. They didn't really want to know how bright Hilly was. It was enough to know he was not disadvantaged … and, as Marie said that night in bed, it explained so much: Hilly's restlessness, his apparent inability to sleep much more than six hours a night, his fierce interests which blew in like hurricanes, then blew out again with the same rapidity. One day when Hilly was almost nine she had come back from the post office with baby David to find the kitchen, which had been spotless when she left only fifteen minutes before, a complete shambles. The sink was full of flour-clotted bowls. There was a puddle of melting butter on the counter. And something was cooking in the oven. Marie popped David quickly in his playpen and had pulled the oven open, expecting to be greeted by billows of smoke and the smell of burning. Instead, she found a tray of Bisquick rolls which, while misshapen, were quite tasty. They had had them for supper that night … but before then, Marie had paddled Hilly's bottom and sent him, wailing apologies, to his room. Then she had sat down at the kitchen table and cried until she laughed, while David – a placid, happy-go-lucky baby who was a sunny Tahiti to Hilly's Cape of Storms – stood holding the bars of the playpen, staring at her comically.

One mark very much in Hilly's favor was his frank love for his brother. And although Marie and Bryant hesitated to let Hilly hold the new baby, or even to leave him alone in the same room with David for more than, say, thirty seconds at a time, they gradually relaxed.

'Hell, you could send Hilly and David off for two-weeks campin' up in the Allagash together and they'd come back fine,' Ev Hillman said. 'He loves that kid. And he's good with him.'

This proved to be so. Most – if not quite all – of Hilly's 'in-troubles' stemmed from either an honest desire to help his parents or to better himself. They simply went wrong, that was all. But with David, who worshipped the ground on which his older brother walked, Hilly always seemed to go right …

Until the I7th of July, that was, when Hilly did the trick.

3

Mr Robertson Davies (may his death be postponed a thousand years) has suggested in his Deptford Trilogy that our attitude toward magic and magicians in a large part indicates our attitude toward reality, and that our attitudes on the matter of reality indicate our attitudes toward the whole world of wonders in which we find ourselves – nothing but babes in the woods, even the oldest of us (even Mr Davies himself, one must believe), where some of the trees bite and some confer great mystic favors – a property in their bark, no doubt.

Hilly Brown very much felt he did exist in a world of wonders. This had always been his attitude, and it never changed no matter how many 'introubles' he had. The world was as mystically beautiful as the glass balls his mother and father hung on the Christmas tree each year (Hilly longed to hang some too, but experience had taught him – as it had his parents – that to hand a glass ball to Hilly was to issue that glass ball's death-warrant). To Hilly the world was as gorgeously perplexing as the Rubik's Cube he had gotten for his ninth birthday (the Cube was gorgeously perplexing for two weeks, anyway, and then Hilly began to solve it routinely). His attitude toward magic was thus predictable – he loved it. Magic was made for Hilly Brown. Unfortunately, Hilly Brown, like Dunstable Ramsey in Davies' Deptford Trilogy, was not made for magic.

On the occasion of Hilly's tenth birthday, Bryant Brown had to stop at the Derry Mall to pick another present up for his son. Marie had called him on his coffee break. 'My dad forgot to get Hilly anything, Bryant. He wanted to know if you'd stop at the Mall and buy him a toy or something. He'll pay you when his check comes in.'

'Sure,' Bryant said, thinking: And pigs will ride broomsticks.

'Thanks, honey,' she said gratefully. She knew perfectly well that her father – who now took dinner with them six and seven nights a week instead of the previous five -was the sandpaper on her husband's soul. But he had never complained, and for this Marie loved him dearly.

'What did he think Hilly might like?'

'He said he'd trust your judgment,' she said.

Typical, Bryant thought. So he had found himself in one of the Mall's two toy-stores that afternoon, looking at games, dolls (the dolls for boys going under the euphemism 'action-figures'), models, and kits (Bryant saw a large chemistry set, thought of Hilly mixing things up in test-tubes, and shuddered). Nothing seemed quite right; at ten his eldest son had reached an age when he was too old for baby-toys and too young for such sophisticated items as box kites or gas-powered model planes. Nothing seemed quite right, and he was pressed for time. Hilly's birthday party was scheduled for five, and it was a quarter past four now. That barely left him time to get home.

He grabbed the magic set almost at random. Thirty New Tricks!, the box said. Good. Hours of Fun for the Young Prestidigitator!, the box said. Also good. Ages 8-12, the box said. Fine. Safety– Tested for the Young Conjurer, the box said, and that was best of all. Bryant bought it and smuggled it

the house under his jacket while Ev Hillman was leading Hilly, David, and three of Hilly's friends in a rousing off-key chorus of 'Sweet Betsy from Pike.'

'You're just in time for birthday cake,' Marie said, kissing him.

'Wrap this first, will you?' He handed her the magic kit. She gave it a quick glance and nodded. 'How's it going?'

'Fine,' she said. 'When it was Hilly's turn to pin the tail on the donkey, he tripped on a table leg and stuck the pin into Stanley Jernigan's arm, but that's all so far.'

Bryant cheered up at once. Things really were going well. The year before, while wriggling into Hilly's 'neatest all-time hiding place' during a game of hide-and-go-seek, Eddie Golden had torn his leg open on a strand of rusty barbed wire Hilly had always managed to miss (Hilly had, in fact, never even seen that old piece of sticker-wire at all). Eddie had to go to the doctor, who treated him to three stitches and a tetanus shot. Poor Eddie had had a bad reaction to the shot and had spent the two days following Hilly's ninth birthday in the hospital.

Now Marie smiled and kissed Bryant again. 'Dad thanks you,' she said. 'And so do L'

Hilly opened all his presents with pleasure, but when he opened the magic set, he was transported with joy. He rushed to his grandfather (who had by that time managed to wolf down half of Hilly's chocolate devil's food birthday cake and was even then cutting himself another slice) and hugged him fiercely.

'Thanks, Grampy! Thanks! Just what I wanted! How did you know?'

Ev Hillman smiled warmly at his grandson. 'I guess I ain't forgot everythin' about being a boy,' he said.

'It's boss, Grampy! Wow! Look. Stanley! Thirty-four tricks! Look, Barney – '

Whirling to show Barney Applegate, he whacked the corner of the box into Marie's coffee-cup, breaking it. Coffee sprayed and scalded Barney's arm. Barney screamed.

'Sorry, Barney,' Hilly said, still dancing. His eyes were so bright they seemed almost afire. 'But look! Neat-o, huh? Awesome!'

With the three or four gifts for which Bryant and Marie had saved and then ordered far in advance from an FAO Schwartz catalogue to make sure they would arrive in time thus relegated to the status of spear-carriers in a jungle epic, Bryant and Marie exchanged a telepathic glance.

Gee, honey, I'm sorry, her eyes said.

Well, what the hell … that's life with Hilly, his replied.

They both burst out laughing.

The partygoers turned to look at them for a moment – Marie never forgot David's round, solemn eyes – and then turned back to watch Hilly open his magic set.

'I wonder if there's any of that maple-walnut ice cream left,' Ev wondered aloud. And Hilly, who that afternoon believed his grandfather to be the greatest man on earth, ran to get it.

4

Mr Robertson Davies has also suggested in his Deptford Trilogy that the same great truism which applies to writing, painting, picking horses at the track, and telling lies in a sincerely believable way, also applies to magic: some people got it, and some people don't.

Hilly didn't.

In Davies's Fifth Business, the first of the Deptford books, the narrator, enchanted by magic (he is a boy of about Hilly's age), does any number of tricks -badly – for an approving, uncritical audience of one (a much younger boy of about David's age), with this ironic result: the older boy discovers the younger has the great natural talent for prestidigitation he himself lacks. This younger boy puts the narrator completely to shame, in fact, the first time he ever tries to palm a shilling.

On this last point, the similarity broke down; David Brown had no more talent for magic than Hilly Brown did. But David adored his brother, and would have sat in patient, attentive, and loving silence if, instead of trying to make the Jacks run from the burning house or to make Victor, the family cat, pop out of his magician's hat (said hat was thrown out in June, when Victor shat in it), he had lectured to David on the thermodynamics of steam or read him all the begats from the Gospel According to Matthew.

Not that Hilly was an utter failure as a magician; he wasn't. In fact, HILLY BROWN'S FIRST GALA MAGIC SHOW, which was held on the Browns' back lawn on the day Jim Gardener left Troy to join The New England Poetry Caravan, was considered a huge success. A dozen children – mostly Hilly's friends, but with a few of David's from nursery school thrown in for good measure – and four or five adults showed up and watched Hilly do almost a dozen tricks, give or take. Most of these tricks worked, not because of any talent or real flair, but because of the sheer determination with which Hilly had rehearsed. All the intelligence and determination in the world cannot create art without a bit of talent, but intelligence and determination can create some great forgeries.

Besides, there was this to be said for the magic set Bryant had picked up almost at random: its creators, knowing that most of the aspiring magicians into whose hands their creation would fall were apt to be clumsy and untalented, had relied mostly upon mechanical devices. You had to work to screw up the Multiplying Coins, for instance. The same went for the Magic Guillotine, a tiny model (with MADE IN TAIWAN stamped discreetly on its plastic base) loaded with a razor-blade. When a nervous member of the audience (or a perfectly blase David) put his finger into the guillotine's cradle, above a hole which held a cigarette, Hilly would slam the blade down, cut the cigarette in two … but leave the finger miraculously whole.

Not all of the tricks depended on mechanical devices for their effect. Hilly spent hours practicing a two-handed shuffle which allowed him to 'float' a card on the bottom of the deck to the top. He actually got quite good at it, not knowing that a good float is much more useful to a card-weasel like 'Pits' Barfield than to a magician. In an audience of more than twenty, the atmosphere of living-room intimacy is lost, and even the most spectacular card-tricks usually fall flat. Hilly's audience was small enough, however, so he was able to charm them – adults as well as children – by nonchalantly peeling cards that had been stuck into the middle of the deck from the top, by causing Rosalie Skehan to find a card which she had looked at and then pushed back into the deck residing in her purse, and, of course, by making the Jacks run from the burning house, which may be the best card-trick ever invented.

There were failures, of course. Hilly without screw-ups, Bryant said that night in bed, would be like McDonald's without hamburgers. When he attempted to pour a pitcher of water into a handkerchief he had borrowed from Joe Paulson, the postman who would be electrocuted about a month later, he succeeded in doing no more than wetting both the handkerchief and the front of his pants. Victor refused to pop out of the hat. Most embarrassing, the Disappearing Coins, a trick Hilly had sweated blood to master, went wrong. He palmed the coins (actually cartwheel-sized rounds of chocolate wrapped in gold foil and marketed under the trade name Munchie Money) with no trouble, but as he was turning around, they all fell out of his sleeve, to the general hilarity and wild applause of his friends.

Still, the round of applause at the end of Hilly's show was genuine. Everyone agreed that Hilly Brown was quite a magician, 'for only ten.' Only three people disagreed with this judgment: Marie Brown, Bryant Brown, and Hilly himself.

'He still hasn't found it, has he?' Marie asked her husband that night in bed. Both of them understood that it was whatever God had for Hilly to do with the searchlight He had put in Hilly's brain.

'No,' Bryant said after a long, thinking pause. 'I don't think so. But he worked hard, didn't he? Worked like a carthorse.'

'Yes,' she said. 'I was glad to see him do it. It's good to know he can, instead of just jumping from pillar to post. But it made me a little sad, too. He worked at those tricks the way a college kid studies for his finals.'

'I know.'

Marie sighed. 'He's had his show. I suppose now he'll drop it and go on to something else. He'll find it eventually.'

5

At first it seemed that Marie was right: that Hilly's interest in magic would go the way of Hilly's interest in ant farms, moon rocks, and ventriloquism. The magic set had moved from under his bed, where it was handy in case Hilly woke up in the middle of the night with an idea, to the top of his cluttered desk. Marie recognized this as the opening scene in an old play. The denouement would come when the magic set was finally relegated to the dusty recesses of the attic.

But Hilly's mind hadn't moved on – it was nothing as simple as that. The two weeks following his magic show were periods of fairly deep depression for Hilly. This was something his parents didn't sense and never knew. David knew, but at four there was nothing he could do about it, other than to hope Hilly would cheer up.

Hilly Brown was trying to cope with the idea that, for the first time in his life, he had failed at something he really wanted to do. He had been pleased with the applause and congratulations, and he was not so self-deprecating as to mistake honest praise for politeness . . . but there was a stony part of him – the part which, under other circumstances, might have made him a great artist – which was not satisfied with honest praise. Honest praise, this stony part insisted, was what the bunglers of the world heaped on the heads of the barely competent.

In short, honest praise was not enough.

Hilly did not think all this in such adult terms, of course … but he did think it. If his mother had known his thoughts, she would have been very angry with him for his pride … which, her Bible taught her, went before a fall. Certainly she would have been angrier with him than she'd been the time he nearly slid into the road in front of the Webber Fuel truck, or the time he tried to give Victor a bubble bath in the toilet bowl. What do you want, Hilly? she would have cried, throwing up her hands. Dishonest praise?

Ev, who saw much, and David, who saw more, could have told her.

He wanted to make their eyes get so big they looked like they were going to fall out. He wanted to make the girls scream and the boys yell. He wanted to make everyone laugh when Victor came out of the hat with a ribbon in his tail and a chocolate coin in his mouth. He would have traded all the honest praise and genuine applause in the world for just one scream, one belly-laugh, one woman fainting dead away like the booklet says they did when Harry Houdini did his famous milk-can escape. Because honest praise means you only got good. When they scream and laugh and faint, that means you got great.

But he suspected – no, he knew – that he was never going to get great, and all the want in the world would not change that fact. It was a bitter blow. Not the failure itself so much as the knowing it couldn't be changed. It was like the end of Santa Claus, in a way.

So, while his parents believed his lapse of interest to be just another shift in the capricious spring wind that blows through most childhoods, it was, in fact, the result of Hilly's first adult conclusion: If he was never going to get great at magic, he ought to put the set away. He couldn't leave it around and just do a trick now and then as a hobby. His failure hurt too badly for that. It was a bad equation. Best to erase it and try a new one.

If adults could put aside their obsessions with such firmness, the world would undoubtedly be a better place. Robertson Davies does not say that in his Deptford Trilogy … but he strongly hints at it.

6

It was on the 4th of July that David came into Hilly's room and saw Hilly had gotten the magic kit out again. He had a lot of the tricks spread out in front of him … and something else, as well. Batteries. The batteries from Daddy's big radio, David thought.

'Watcha doon, Hilly?' David asked, companionably enough.

Hilly's brow darkened. He sprang to his feet and shoved David out of the room so hard that David fell to the carpet. This behavior was so unusual that David was too surprised to cry.

'Get out!' Hilly shouted. 'Can't look at new tricks! The Medici princes used to have people executed if they caught them looking at tricks that belonged to their favorite magicians!'

Having uttered this pronouncement, Hilly slammed the door in David's face. David howled for admittance, but to no avail. This unaccustomed stoniness in his harum-scarum but usually sweet-natured brother was so unusual that David went downstairs, turned on the TV, and cried himself to sleep in front of Sesame Street.

7

Hilly's interest in magic had abruptly been rekindled at about the same time the picture of Jesus had begun speaking to 'Becka Paulson.

A single powerful thought had seized his mind: if mechanical tricks like the Multiplying Coins were the best he could do, he would invent his own mechanical tricks. The best anyone had ever seen! Better than Thurston's clockwork or Blackstone's hinged mirrors! If what it took to elicit gasps and screams and belly-laughs was invention rather than manipulation, so be it.

Lately he felt very capable of inventing things.

Lately his mind seemed almost stuffed with ideas for inventions.

This was not the first time the idea of inventing had crossed his mind, but his previous ideas had been vague, powered by daydreams rather than scientific principles – rocket-ships made out of cardboard boxes, ray-guns that looked suspiciously like small tree-branches with pieces of Styrofoam packing pushed onto the barrels, things like that. He had had good ideas from time to time, ideas that were almost practical, but he had always dropped them before because he had no idea how to proceed with them – he could pound a nail straight and saw a board, but that was all.

Now, however, the methods seemed as clear as crystal.

Great tricks, he thought, wiring and bolting and screwing things together. When his mother told him, on July 8th, that she was going to Augusta to shop (she spoke in a distracted sort of way; for the last week or so Marie had had a headache, and the news that Joe and 'Becka Paulson had both been killed in a housefire had not helped it one little bit), Hilly asked her if she would stop at Radio Shack in the Capitol Mall and pick him up a couple of things. He gave her his list and the eight surviving dollars of his birthday money and asked her if she could 'kinda loan him' the rest.

Ten (10) spring-type contact points @ $. 70 ea (No. 133456 7)

Three (3) 'T' contacts (spring-type) @ $1. 00 ea (No. 1334709)

One (1) coaxial cable 'barrier' plug @ $2.40 ea (No. 19776-C)

If it hadn't been for her headache and general feeling of listlessness, Marie would have doubtless wondered what this stuff was for. She would have doubtless wondered how Hilly could have gotten his information so exactly – right down to the inventory numbers – without making a long-distance call to the Augusta Radio Shack. She might even have suspected that Hilly had finally found it.

In a terrible sense, this was exactly what had happened.

Instead, she simply agreed to pick the stuff up and 'kinda loan him' the extra four dollars or so.

By the time she and David came back from Augusta, some of these questions had occurred to her. The trip had made her feel much better; her headache had blown completely away. And David, who had been silent and introspective – not at all his usual bouncy, babbly, bubbly self – ever since Hilly had pushed him out of his room, also seemed to cheer up. He talked her ear off, and it was from David that she learned Hilly had scheduled his SECOND GALA MAGIC SHOW for the back yard nine days hence.

'He's gonna do lots of new tricks,' David said, looking glum.

'Is he?'

'Yes,' David said.

'Do you think they'll be good?'

'I don't know,' David said, thinking of the way Hilly had pushed him from the room. He was on the verge of tears, but Marie didn't notice. Ten minutes before they had passed from Albion back into Haven, and her headache was coming back … and with it, that previous sense – now a little stronger – that her thoughts were somehow not under control the way they should be. There seemed to be too many, for one thing. For another, she couldn't even tell what a lot of them were. They were like – she thought carefully, and finally came up with it. In high school she had been in the dramatics society (she thought Hilly must get much of his love of dramatics from her), and the thoughts in her mind now were like the murmur of an audience heard through the curtain before the show started. You didn't know what they were saying, but you knew they were there.

'I don't think they'll be so hot,' David finally said. He was looking out through the window, and his eyes were suddenly prisoner's eyes, lonely and trapped. David saw Justin Hurd out in his field, chugging along on his tractor, harrowing. Harrowing even though it was already the second week of July. For a moment forty-two-year-old Justin Hurd's mind was totally open to four-year-old David Brown's, and David understood that Justin was ripping his entire garden to pieces, plowing the unripened corn back under, tearing up the pea-patch, squashing the new melons to pulp under the wheels of his tractor. Justin Hurd thought it was May. May of 1951, in fact. Justin Hurd had gone crazy.

'I don't think they'll be good at all,' David said.

8

There had been roughly twenty people at Hilly's FIRST GALA MAGIC SHOW.

There were only seven at the second: his mother, his father, his grandfather, David, Barney Applegate (who was, like Hilly, ten), Mrs Crenshaw from the village (Mrs Crenshaw had dropped by in hopes of selling Marie some Avon), and Hilly himself. This drastic drop in attendance was not the only contrast with the first show.

The audience at that first one had been lively – even a little cheeky (the sarcastic applause which greeted the Munchie Money when it fell from Hilly's sleeve, for instance). The audience at the second was glum and listless, sitting like department-store mannequins on the camp chairs that Hilly and his ‘assistant' (a pale and silent David) had set up. Hilly's dad, who had laughed and applauded and raised hell at the first show, interrupted Hilly's opening speech about 'the mysteries of the Orient' by saying that he couldn't spare a whole lot of time for those mysteries, if Hilly didn't mind; he had just finished mowing the lawn and weeding the garden, and he wanted a shower and a beer.

The weather had changed, too. The day Of THE FIRST GALA MAGIC SHOW had been clear and warm and green, the most gorgeous sort of late spring day northern New England can offer. This day in July was hot and sullenly humid, with hazy sun beating down from a sky the color of chrome. Mrs Crenshaw sat fanning herself with one of her own Avon catalogues and waited for this to be over. A person could faint, sitting out here in the hot sun. And that little kid up there on a stage made of orange-crates, wearing a black suit and a shoepolish moustache … spoiled … showing off … Mrs Crenshaw suddenly felt like killing him.

The magic this time was much better – startling, really – but Hilly was stunned and infuriated to find he was nonetheless boring his audience to tears. He could see his father shifting around, getting ready to leave, and this made Hilly feel frantic, because he wanted to impress his father above all others.

Well what do they want? he asked himself angrily, sweating just as freely as Mrs Crenshaw under his black wool Sunday suit. I'm doing great – better than Houdini, even – but they're not screaming or laughing or gasping. Why not? What the heck's wrong?

At the center of Hilly's orange-crate stage was a small platform (another orange-crate, this one covered with a sheet). Hidden inside this was a device that Hilly had invented, using the batteries David had seen in his room and the guts of an old Texas Instruments calculator that he had stolen (with no compunction at all) from the bottom of his mother's desk in the front hall. The sheet covering the orange-crate was pooled around its edges, and concealed in one of these pools of cloth was another of Hilly's out-of-character thefts – the foot-pedal of his mother's Singer sewing machine. Hilly had connected the pedal to his gadget. He used two of the spring-connectors his mother had bought at the Radio Shack in Augusta to do it.

The device he had invented first made things disappear, then brought them back again.

Hilly found this spectacular, mind-boggling. The reaction of his audience, however, started low and went downhill from there.

'For my first trick, the Disappearing Tomato!' Hilly trumpteted. He pulled a tomato out of his box of 'magic supplies' and held it up. 'I would like a volunteer from the audience to verify this is a real tomato and not just a fake or something. You, sir! Thanks!' He pointed at his father, who just waved wearily and said, 'It's a tomato, Hilly, I can see that.'

'Okay! Now watch as the Mysteries of the Orient . . . take hold!'

Hilly stooped, put the tomato in the center of the white sheet covering the crate, and then covered it with one of his mother's silk scarves. He waved his magic wand over the circular hump in the blue scarf. 'Presto-majesto!' he yelled, and stepped surreptitiously on the concealed sewing-machine pedal. There was a brief low hum.

The hump in the scarf disappeared. The scarf itself settled flat. He removed the scarf to show them the top of the platform was bare, and then waited complacently for the gasps and shouts of amazement. What he got was applause.

Polite applause, no more.

Clearly, from Mrs Crenshaw's mind, this came: A trapdoor. Nothing to that. I can't believe I'm sitting out here in the sun, watching this spoiled brat put tomatoes through trapdoors just so I can sell a bottle of perfume to his mother. Really!

Hilly began to get mad.

'Now another Mystery of the Orient! The Return of the Disappearing Tomato!' He looked formidably at Mrs Crenshaw. 'And for those of you who're thinking anything stupid like trapdoors, well, I guess even stupid people must know that a person could make a tomato go down through a trapdoor, but he'd have a pretty hard time trying to make it come back up, wouldn't he?'

Mrs Crenshaw just sat there, buttocks shlomping over the edges of the lawn chair she was slowly driving into the sod, smiling pleasantly. Her thoughts had faded from Hilly's head like a bad radio signal.

He put the scarf on top of the platform again. Waved his wand. Stepped on the pedal. The blue scarf pushed up in a sphere. Hilly whipped it triumphantly off to reveal the tomato again.

'Ta-daaa!' he shouted. Now the gasps and shouts would come.

More polite applause.

Barney Applegate yawned.

Hilly could have cheerfully shot him.

Hilly had planned to work his way up from the tomato trick to his Grand Finale, and it was a good plan, as far as it went. It just didn't go far enough. In his forgivable excitement at having invented a machine that actually made things disappear (he thought he might give it to the Pentagon or something after he had gotten his picture on the cover of Newsweek as the greatest magician in history), Hilly overlooked two things. First, that no one but infants and morons at any magic show believe the tricks are real, and second, he was doing essentially the same trick over and over again. Each fresh instance differed from the last only in degree.

From the Disappearing Tomato and the Return of the Disappearing Tomato, Hilly pushed grimly on to the Disappearing Radio (his father's, considerably lighter with its eight D-cell batteries now in the guts of the gadget under the platform) and the Return of Same.

Polite applause.

The Disappearing Lawn Chair, followed by the Return of the YouGuessed-It.

His audience sat lumpishly, as if sun-stunned . . . or perhaps stunned by whatever was now in the air of Haven. If anything was oxidizing from the ship's hull and entering the atmosphere, it was surely heavy that day, which was without even a slight stir of wind.

Got to do something, Hilly thought, panicked.

He decided on the spur of the moment to skip the Disappearing Bookcase, the Disappearing Exer-Cycle (Mom's), and the Disappearing Motorcycle (Dad's, and in his dad's present mood, Hilly doubted if he would volunteer to drive it up onto the platform anyway). He would go right to the Grand Finale:

The Disappearing Little Brother.

'And now -'

'Hilly, I'm sorry, but – ' his father began.

' – for my final trick,' Hilly added quickly, and saw his father settle back reluctantly into his chair, 'I need a volunteer from the audience. C'mere, David.'

David came forward with an expression in which fear and resignation were perfectly balanced. Although he had not been precisely told, David knew what the final trick was. He knew too well.

'I don't wanna,' he said to Hilly.

'You're gonna,' Hilly said grimly.

'Hilly, I'm scared.' David was pleading, his eyes filled with tears. 'What if I don't come back?'

'You will,' Hilly whispered. 'Everything else did, didn't it?'

'Yeah, but you didn't disappear nothin' that was alive,' David said. Now the tears overspilled and ran down his face.

Looking at his brother, whom he had loved so well and so successfully (he'd had more success in loving David than he had doing anything else he had set his hand to, including magic), Hilly felt a moment of horrible doubt. It was like waking temporarily from a nightmare before it sucked you back down. You aren't going to do this, are you? You wouldn't push him out into a busy street just because you thought all the cars would stop in time, would you? You don't even know where those things go when they stop being here!

Then he looked out at the audience – bored and inattentive, the only one who looked half-alive being Barney Applegate who was carefully picking a scab off his elbow – and the resentment rose up again. He stopped seeing the frightened tears in David's eyes.

'Get up on the platform, David!' Hilly whispered grimly.

David's small face began to quiver all over . . . but he walked toward the platform. He had never disobeyed Hilly, whom he had idolized all the fifteen hundred-odd days of his life, and he did not disobey him now. Nevertheless, ,his pudgy legs could barely hold him as he stepped onto the sheet-covered orange-crate with the nutty machine underneath.

David faced the audience, a small round boy in blue shorts and a faded T-shirt that said THEY CALL ME DR LOVE. Tears streamed down his face.

'Smile, dammit,' Hilly hissed, putting his foot on the sewing-machine pedal.

Weeping harder, David nevertheless managed a hideous parody of a smile. Marie Brown did not see her younger son's tears or terror. Mrs Crenshaw had changed seats (half the aluminum legs of the one she had been in had now submerged in the lawn) and prepared to go. She didn't care if she sold the stupid cunt any Avon or not. This torture wasn't worth it.

'And NOW!' Hilly blared at his dazed audience. 'The biggest secret tile Orient holds! Known to few and practiced by fewer! The Disappearing Human! Watch closely!'

He threw the sheet over David's quivering form. As it billowed down to David's feet, an audible sob came from beneath. Hilly felt another quiver of what might have been fear or sanity struggling feebly to reassert itself.

'Hilly, please … please, I'm scared .'The muffled whisper drifted out. Hilly hesitated. And suddenly thought: Off you go! Know that you can! Cause I learned this trick … from the Tommyknocker Man!

It was shortly after that when Hilly Brown really and truly lost his mind.

'Presto-majesto!' he shouted, waved his wand at the quivering sheet-covered form on the platform that was David, and stomped on the pedal.

Hummmmmmmmmmmm.

The sheet puffed down lazily, as a sheet will do when a man or woman tosses it over a bed and allows it to settle.

Hilly whipped it away.

'TA-daaaaa!' he shrieked. He was half-delirious with a mixture of triumph and fear, the two of them for the moment perfectly balanced, like children of equal weights on a teeter-totter.

David was gone.

9

For a moment the general apathy was broken. Barney Applegate stopped picking his scab. Bryant Brown sat up in his chair, his mouth open. Marie and Mrs Crenshaw broke off their whispered conversation, and Ev Hillman frowned and looked worried … although this expression was not exactly new. Ev had looked and felt worried for some days now.

Ahhh, Hilly thought, and balm flowed over his soul. Success!

Both the audience's interest and Hilly's triumph were short-lived. Tricks involving people are always more interesting than tricks involving things or animals (pulling a rabbit from a hat is all perfectly well, but no magician worth his salt ever decided on that basis that an audience would rather watch a horse be sawed in half than a pretty girl with a generous figure packed into a small costume) … but it was still, after all, the same trick. The applause was louder this time (and Barney Applegate let out a hearty 'Yayyyyy, Hilly!'), but it died quickly. Hilly saw that his mother was whispering with Mrs Crenshaw again. His father got up.

'Gonna take a shower, Hilly,' he mumbled. 'Damn good show.'

'But – '

A horn honked from the driveway.

'That's my mom,' Barney said, jumping up so fast he almost knocked Mrs Crenshaw over. 'Seeya, Hilly! Good trick!'

'But – ' Now Hilly felt tears sting his own eyes.

Barney dropped to his knees and waved, as if underneath the platform. 'Bye, Davey! Good job!'

'He's not under there, dammit!' Hilly yelled.

But Barney was already scampering away. Hilly's mother and Mrs Crenshaw were walking toward the back door, examining an Avon catalogue. It was all happening so fast. 'Don't swear, Hilly,' his mom called without looking back.

'And make David wash his hands when you come into the house. It's dirty under there.'

Only David's grandfather, Ev Hillman, was left. Ev was looking at Hilly with that same worried expression.

'Why don't you go away, too?' Hilly asked with a bitter fierceness that was spoiled only by the blurriness of his voice.

'Hilly, if your brother isn't under there,' Ev said in a serious voice that was totally unlike his usual one, 'then just where is he?'

I don't know, Hilly thought, and that was when the teeter-totter began to shift. Anger went down. Way down. And fear went way, way up. With fear came guilt. A snapshot of David's weeping, terrified face. A snapshot of his own (courtesy of a good imagination), looking angry and almost vicious – bullying for sure. Smile, dammit. David trying to smile through his tears.

'Oh, he's under there, all right,' Hilly said. He burst into loud sobs and sat down on his stage, pulling his knees up and leaning his hot face against them. 'He's under there, yeah, everybody guessed my tricks and nobody liked them, I hate magic, I wish you'd never given me that stupid magic set in the first place – '

'Hilly – ' Ev came forward, looking distressed as well as worried now. Something was wrong here … here and all over Haven. He felt it. 'What's wrong?'

'Get out of here!' Hilly sobbed. 'I hate you! I HATE you!'

Grandfathers are every bit as subject to hurt, shame and confusion as anyone else. Ev Hillman felt all three now. It hurt to hear Hilly say he hated him – it hurt even though the boy was obviously emotionally exhausted. Ev felt shamed that it was his gift that had provoked Hilly's tears … and never mind the fact that his son-in-law had picked out the magic set. Ev had accepted it as his gift when it had pleased Hilly; he supposed he must also accept it now that it was making Hilly weep with his face against his dirty knees. He felt confused because something else was going on here … but what? He did not know. He did know that he had just begun to get used to the idea that he was becoming senile – oh, the effects were still quite small, but the condition seemed to accelerate a little every year – when this summer came along. And this summer everybody seemed to be getting senile . . . but what exactly did he mean by that? A look in the eyes? Odd lapses, gropings for names that should have come quickly and easily? Those things, yes. But there was more. He just couldn't put his finger on what that more might be.

This confusion, so unlike the vacuity which had afflicted the others who had attended the SECOND GALA MAGIC SHOW, caused Ev Hillman, who had been the only person there whose mentis was really compos (he was, in fact, the only person in Haven these days whose mentis was really compos – Jim Gardener was also relatively unaffected by the ship in the earth, but by the 17th, Gardener had begun drinking heavily again), to do something he regretted bitterly later. Instead of getting down on his arthritis-creaky knees and peering under Hilly's makeshift stage to see if David Brown really was under there, he retreated. He retreated as much from the idea that his birthday gift had caused Hilly's present grief as from anything else. He left Hilly alone, thinking he would come back 'when the boy got hold of himself.'

10

As he watched his grampy shuffle away, Hilly's guilt and misery doubled … then trebled. He waited until Ev was gone, then scrambled to his feet and walked back to the platform. He put his foot on the concealed sewing-machine pedal and stepped on it.

Hummmmmmmmm.

He waited for the sheet to plump up in David's shape. He would whip the sheet off him and say, There, ya baby, see? That wasn't NOTHING, was it? He might even swat David a good one for scaring him and making him feel so lousy. Or maybe he'd just

Nothing was happening.

Fear began to swell in Hilly's throat. Began … or had it really been there all the time? All the time, he thought. Only now it was … swelling, yeah that was just the right word. Swelling in there, as if someone had stuck a balloon down his throat and was now inflating it. This new fear made misery look good and guilt absolutely peachy in comparison. He tried to swallow and couldn't get any spit past that swelling.

'David?' he whispered, and pushed the pedal again.

Hummmmmmm.

He decided he wouldn't swat David. He would hug David. When David got back, Hilly would fall down on his knees and hug David and tell David he could have all the G.I. Joe guys (except maybe for Snake-Eyes and Crystal Ball) for a whole week.

Nothing was still happening.

The sheet that had covered David lay crumpled on the one which covered the crate over his machine. It didn't plump up in a David-shape at all. Hilly stood all by himself in his back yard with the hot July sun beating down on him, his heart racing faster and faster in his chest, that balloon swelling in his throat. When it finally gets big enough to pop, he thought, I'll probably scream.

Quit it! He'll come back! Sure he will! The tomato came back, and the radio, and the lawn chair. Also, all the things I experimented on in my room came back. He … he …

'You and David come in and wash up, Hilly!' his mother called.

'Yeah, Mom!' Hilly called back in a wavering, insanely cheerful voice. ,Pretty soon!'

And thought: Please God let him come back. I'm sorry God. I'll do anything, he can have all the G. I. Joe guys forever, I swear he can, he can have the MOBAT and even the Terrordome, only God dear God PLEASE LET IT WORK THIS TIME LET HIM COME BACK!

He pressed on the pedal again.

Hummmmmm …

He looked at the crumpled sheet through tear-blurred eyes. For a moment he thought something was happening, but it was only a puff of wind stirring the crumpled sheet.

Panic as bright as metal shavings began to twist through Hilly's mind. Shortly he would begin to scream, drawing his mother from the kitchen and his dripping father, naked except for a towel around his waist and shampoo running down his cheeks, both of them wondering what Hilly had done this time. The panic would be merciful in one way: when it came, it would obliterate thought.

But things had not gone that far yet, unfortunately. Two thoughts occurred to Hilly's bright mind in rapid succession.

The first: I never disappeared anything that was alive. Even the tomato was picked, and Daddy said once you pick something it's not really alive anymore.

The second thought: What if David can't breathe wherever he is? What if he can't BREATHE?

He had wondered very little about what happened to the things he 'disappeared' until this moment. But now …

His last coherent thought before the panic descended like a pall – or a mourning veil – was actually a mental image. He saw David lying in the middle of some weird, inimical landscape. It looked like the surface of a harsh, dead world. The gray earth was dry and cold; cracks gaped like dead reptilian mouths. They went zigzagging away in every direction. Overhead was a sky blacker than jewelers' velvet, and a billion stars screamed down – they were brighter than the stars anyone on the surface of the earth had ever seen, because the place Hilly was looking at with the wide, horrified eye of his imagination was almost or totally airless.

And in the middle of this alien desolation lay his chubby four-year-old brother in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt reading THEY CALL ME DR LOVE. David was clutching at his throat, trying to breathe the no-air of a world that was maybe a trillion light-years from home. David was gagging, turning purple. Frost was tracing death-patterns across his lips and fingernails. He

Ah, but then the merciful panic finally took over.

He raked back the sheet he had used to cover David and overturned the crate that had concealed the machine. He stomped the sewing-machine pedal again and again, and began to scream. It was not until his mother reached him that she realized he was not just screaming; there were actually words in all that noise.

'All the G.I. Joes!' Hilly shrieked. 'All the G.I. Joes! All the G.I. Joes! Forever and ever! All the G. I. Joes!'

And then, infinitely more chilling:

'Come back, David! Come back, David! Come back!'

'Dear God, what does he mean?' Marie cried.

Bryant took his son by the shoulders and turned him around so they were face-to-face.

'Where's David? Where did he go?'

But Hilly had fainted, and he never really came to. Not long after, over a hundred men and women, Bobbi and Gard among them, were out in the woods across the road, beating the bushes for Hilly's brother David.

If he could have been asked, Hilly would have told them that, in his opinion, they were looking too close to home.

Far too close.

1

On the evening of July 24th, a week after the disappearance of David Brown, Trooper Benton Rhodes was driving a state-police cruiser out of Haven around eight o'clock. Peter Gabbons, known to his fellow officers as Jingles, was riding shotgun. Twilight lay in ashes. These were metaphorical ashes, of course, as opposed to the ones on the hands of the two state cops. Those ashes were real. Rhodes's mind kept returning to the severed hand and arm, and to the fact that he had known instantly to whom they had once belonged. Jesus!

Stop thinking about it! he ordered his mind.

Okay, his mind agreed, and went right on thinking about it. 'Try the radio again,' he said. 'I bet we're getting interference from that damn microwave dish they put up in Troy.'

'All right.' Jingles grabbed the mike. 'This is Unit 16 to Base. Do you copy, Tug? Over.'

He let go of the button and they both listened. What they heard was a peculiar screaming static, with ghostly voices buried deep inside it.

'Want me to try again?' Jingles asked.

'No. We'll be clear soon enough.'

Bent was running with the flashers on, doing seventy along Route 3 toward Derry. Where the hell were the backup units? There hadn't been a communications problem to and from Haven Village; radio transmissions so clear they were almost eerie. Nor had the radio been the only eerie thing about Haven tonight.

Right! his mind agreed. And by the way, you recognized the ring right away, didn't you? No mistaking a trooper's ring, even on a woman's hand, is there? And did you see the way her tendons were hanging down in flaps? Looked like a cut of meat in a butcher shop, didn't it? Leg of lamb, or something. Tore her arm right off! It

Stop it, I said! Goddammit, JUST QUIT!

Okay, yeah, right. Forgot for a sec that you didn't want to think about it. Or like a rolled roast, huh? And all that blood!

Stop it, please stop it, he moaned.

Right, okay, I know I'll drive me crazy if I keep thinking about it but I think I'll just keep thinking about it anyway because I just can't seem to stop. Her hand, her arm, they were bad, worse than any traffic accident I ever saw, but what about all those other pieces? The severed heads? The eyes? The feet? Yessir, that must have been a wowser of a furnace explosion, all right!

'Where's our backup?' Jingles asked restlessly.

'I don't know.'

But when he saw them, he could really stump them, couldn't he?

Got a riddle for you, he could say. You'll never get it. How can you have mangled bodies all over the place after an explosion, but only one dead? And just by the way, how come the only real damage a furnace explosion did was to tear off the steeple of the town hall? For that matter, how come the head selectman, that guy Berringer, wasn't able to ID the body, when even I knew who it was? Give up, guys?

He had covered the arm with a blanket. There was nothing to be done about all the other body parts, and he supposed it didn't matter, anyway. But he had covered Ruth's arm.

On the sidewalk in Haven Village's town square he had done that. He had done it while that idiotic volunteer fire chief, Allison, stood grinning as if it had been a bean supper instead of an explosion that had killed a fine woman. It was all crazy. Crazy to the max.

Peter Gabbons was nicknamed Jingles because of his gravelly Andy Devine voice – Jingles was a character Devine had played in an old TV Western series. When Gabbons came up from Georgia, Tug Ellender, the dispatcher, had started calling him that and it had stuck. Now, speaking in a high, strangled voice completely unlike his usual Jingles voice, Gabbons said: 'Pull over, Bent. I'm sick.'

Rhodes pulled over in a hurry, on the very edge of a skid that almost dumped the cruiser in the ditch. At least Gabbons had been the first to call it; that was something.

Jingles dove from the cruiser on the right. Bent Rhodes dove out on the left. In the blue strobe of the state police cruiser's lights, they both threw up everything available. Bent staggered back against the side of the car, pawing his mouth with one hand, hearing the retching noises still coming from the weeds beyond the edge of the road. He rolled his head skyward, dimly grateful for the breeze.

'That's better,' Jingles said at last. 'Thanks, Bent.'

Benton turned toward his partner. Jingles's eyes were dark, shocked holes in his face. It was the look of a man who is processing all his information and reaching no sane conclusions at all.

'What happened back there?' Bent asked.

'You blind, hoss? Town-hall steeple took off like a rocket.'

'So how did a furnace explosion blow off the steeple?'

'Dunno.'

'Spit on that.' Bent tried to spit. He couldn't. 'You believe it? A July furnace explosion that blows the steeple off the town hall?'

'No. It stinks.'

'Right, pard. It stinks to high heaven.' Bent paused. 'Jingles, what did you feel? Did you feel anything weird back there?'

Jingles said cautiously: 'Maybe. Maybe I did feel something.'

'What?'

'I don't know,' Jingles said. His voice had begun to climb, to take on the uneven, warbling inflections of a small child near tears. Above them, a galaxy of stars shone down. Crickets sang in fragrant summer silence. 'I'm just so damn glad to be out of there – '

Then Jingles, who knew he would probably be going back to Haven the next day to assist in the clean-up and investigation, did begin to cry.

2

After a while they drove on. Any remaining trace of daylight had by then left the sky. Bent was glad. He didn't really want to look at Jingles … and didn't really want Jingles looking at him.

By the way, Bent, his mind now spoke up, it was pretty goddam startling, wasn't it? Pretty goddam weird. The severed heads and the legs with the little shoes still on most of the little feet? And the torsos! Did you see the torsos? The eye! That one blue eye? Did you see that? Must have! You kicked it into the gutter when you bent over to pick up Ruth McCausland's arm. All those severed arms and legs and heads and torsos, but Ruth was the only person who died. It's a riddle for a champeen riddle contest, all right.

The body parts had been bad. The shredded remains of the bats – an almighty lot of them – had also been bad. But neither had been as bad as Ruth's arm with her husband's ring on the third finger of the right hand, because Ruth's hand and arm had been real.

The severed heads and legs and torsos had given him a hell of a shock at first -for a numb instant he had wondered, summer vacation or not, if a class had been touring the town hall when it blew. Then his numbed mind realized that not even kindergarten kids possessed limbs so small, and that no children possessed arms and legs which did not bleed when they were ripped from their bodies.

He had looked around and seen Jingles holding a small, smoking head in one hand and a partially melted leg in the other.

'Dolls,' Jingles had said. 'Fucking dolls. Where did all the fucking dolls come from, Bent?'

He had been about to answer, to say he didn't know (although even then something about those dolls had tugged at him; it would come to him in time), when he noticed that there were people still eating in the Haven Lunch. People still shopping in the market. A deep chill had touched his heart like a finger made of ice. This was a woman most of them had known all their lives – known, respected, and in many cases loved – but they were going on about their business.

Going on about their business as if nothing at all had happened.

That was when Bent Rhodes started wanting – seriously wanting – to be out of Haven.

Now, turning down the radio that was still grinding out nothing but meaningless static, Bent remembered what had tugged at his mind earlier. 'She had dolls. Mrs McCausland.' Ruth, Bent thought. I wish I'd known her well enough to call her Ruth, like Monster does. Did. Everyone liked her, s'far as I know. Which is why it seemed so wrong to see them just going about their business

'I guess I heard that,' Jingles said. 'Hobby of hers, right? I guess I might've heard that at the Haven Lunch. Or maybe at Cooder's, having a pop with the oldtimers.'

A beer with the old-timers, more like it, Rhodes thought, but he only nodded. 'Yeah. And that's what they were, I reckon. Her dolls. I was talking about Mrs McCausland one day last spring, I guess it was, with Monster, and

'Monster?' Jingles asked. 'Monster Dugan knew Mrs McCausland?'

'Pretty well, I guess. Monster and her husband were partners before her husband died. Anyway, he said she had a hundred dolls, maybe two hundred. He said they were her only hobby, and they were exhibited once in Augusta. He said she was prouder of that exhibit than she was of any of the things she'd done for the town -and I guess she did a lot of things for Haven.'

I wish I could have called her Ruth, he thought again.

'Monster said except for her dolls, she worked all the time.' Bent considered, then added: 'The way Monster talked, I got an idea he was … uh, sweet on her.' That sounded as old-fucking-fashioned as a Roy Rogers western, but that was just how Butch 'Monster' Dugan had always seemed about Ruth McCausland. 'Most likely you won't be the one gets stuck breaking the news to him, but if you should, lemme give you some advice: don't crack wise.'

'Yeah, okay, duly noted. Monster Dugan on my case, that's all I'd need to round the day off, you know?'

Bent smiled with no humor.

'Her doll collection,' Jingles said. He nodded. 'Course I knew they were dolls – ' He saw Bent's wry glance, and smiled a little. 'Okay, I had a second or two there when … but soon's I saw the way the sun was shinin' on them, and how there was no blood, I knew what they were. Just couldn't figure out how come there was so many.'

'You still don't know that. That, or much else. We don't know what they were doing there. Hell, what was she doing there?'

Jingles looked miserable. 'Who would have killed her, Bent? She was such a nice lady. Goddam!'

'I think she was murdered,' Bent said. His voice sounded like breaking sticks in his ears. 'Did it look like an accident to you?'

'No. That wasn't no furnace explosion. And the fumes that kept us from going down in the basement – that smell like oil to you?'

Bent shook his head. Whatever it was, he'd never before smelled anything like it in his life. Maybe the only thing that nit Berringer had been right about was his opinion that breathing those fumes could be dangerous and it might be best to stay upstairs until the air in the town-hall basement cleared. Now he had to wonder if they'd been kept away on purpose – maybe so they wouldn't see a furnace that was completely unwounded.

'After we file our reports on this fucker,' Jingles said, ' the local yokels are gonna have a lot of explaining to do. Allison, Berringer, those guys. And they may have to do some of it to Dugan.'

Bent nodded thoughtfully. 'Whole fucking thing was crazy. The place felt crazy. I mean, I actually started to get dizzy. Did you?'

'The fumes – ' Jingles began doubtfully.

'Fuck the fumes. I was dizzy in the street.'

'Her dolls, Bent. What were her dolls doing there?'

'I don't know.'

'Me either. But it's another thing that doesn't fit for shit. Try this on: if somebody hated her enough to murder her, maybe they hated her enough to blow her dolls up with her. You think?'

'Not really,' Benton Rhodes said.

'But it could be,' Jingles said, as if saying so proved it. Bent began to understand that Jingles was striving to create sanity out of insanity. He told Jingles to try the radio again.

Their reception was a little better but still nothing to write home about. Bent couldn't remember ever getting deep interference from the Troy microwave dish this close to Derry before.

3

According to the witnesses they spoke to, the explosion had occurred at 3:05 P.m., give or take half a minute. The town-hall clock struck three as it always did. Five minutes later, KA-BAM! And now, riding back to Derry in the dark, an oddly persuasive picture occurred to Benton Rhodes, one that brought gooseflesh to attention all over his body. He saw the clock in the town-hall tower standing at four minutes past three on that hot and windless late-July afternoon. And suddenly, a look passes among those in the Haven Lunch; those in Cooder's market; those in Haven Hardware; the ladies in the Junque-A-Torium; the children on the swings or hanging listlessly in the summer heat from the bars of the jungle gym in the play-yard beside the school; it goes from the eyes of one of the overweight ladies playing doubles on the town tennis courts behind the town hall to her partner, and then to their overweight opponents on the other side of the net. The game-ball goes rolling slowly into a far corner of the court as they lie down and put their hands over their ears … and wait. As they wait for the explosion.

Everyone in town, lying down and waiting for that KA-BLAM to drill into the day like the stroke of a sledgehammer on thick wood.

Bent suddenly shuddered behind the wheel of the cruiser.

The checkout girls at Cooder's. The customers in the aisles. The people in the Haven Lunch by the stools or behind the counter. At 3:04 p.m. they laid down, the whole fucking bunch of them. And at 3:06 they got up and went about their business. All of'em except for the Designated Gawkers. Also Allison and Berringer, who told everybody it was a furnace explosion, which it wasn't, and that they didn't know who the victim was, which they fucking well did.

You don't really believe they all knew it was going to happen, do you?

A part of him believed just that. Because if the good folks of Haven hadn't known, how come the only casualties had been Ruth McCausland and her dolls? How come there hadn't been so much as a single cut arm when a shower of glass had flown across Main Street at a speed of roughly one hundred and ten miles an hour?

'I think we ought to be clear of that fucking dish by now,' Bent said. 'Try it again.'

Jingles took the mike. 'I still don't understand where the goddam backups are.'

'Maybe something happened somewhere else. It never rains

'Yeah, it pours. Dolly arms and legs, among other things.' As Jingles depressed the mike button, Bent piloted the cruiser around a curve. The headlights and flashers splashed over a pickup truck that was slewed around diagonally in the middle of the road.

'Jesus Chr – '

Then reflexes took over and he hit the brakes. Firestone rubber screamed and smoked, and for a moment Bent thought he was going to lose it. Then the cruiser came to a halt with its nose three yards from the body of the mongrel truck sitting silent in the road.

'Please pass the toilet paper,' Jingles said in a low, trembling voice.

They got out, both unsnapping the handles of their guns without thinking. The smell of cooked rubber hung in the summer air.

'What's this shit?' Jingles cried, and Bent thought, He feels it too. This isn't right, this is part of what was going on back in that creepy little town, and he feels it too.

The breeze stirred, and Bent heard canvas flap stiffly for a moment, and a tarp slid off something in the bed of the pickup with a dry rattlesnake sound. Bent felt his balls climb north in a hurry. It looked like the barrel of a bazooka. He started to crouch, then realized with bewilderment that the bazooka was only a length of corrugated culvert-pipe in some sort of wooden cradle. Nothing to be afraid of. But he was afraid. He was terrified.

'I saw that truck back in Haven, Bent. Parked in front of the restaurant.'

'Who's there?' Bent shouted.

No answer.

He looked at Jingles. Jingles, eyes wide and dark in his white face, looked back at him.

Bent thought suddenly: Microwave interference? Was that really what was keeping us from getting through?

'If someone's in that truck, you better speak up!' Bent called. 'You – ' A shrill, crazed titter came from the truck-bed, then drifted into silence. 'Oh Christ, I don't like this,' Jingles Gabbons moaned. Bent started forward, raising his gun, and then the world was filled with green light.

1

Ruth Arlene Merrill McCausland was fifty but looked ten years younger – fifteen on a good day. Everyone in Haven agreed that, woman or not, she was just about the best damned constable the town had ever had. It was because her husband had been a state trooper, some said. Others said it was simply because Ruth was Ruth. Either way, they agreed Haven was lucky to have her. She was firm but fair. She was able to keep her wits in an emergency. Haven folk said these things about her, and more besides. In a small Maine town run by the men since there had been a town to run, such testimonials were of some note. That was fair enough; she was a noteworthy woman.

She was born and raised in Haven; she was, in fact, the great-niece of the Rev. Mr Donald Hartley, who had been so cruelly surprised by the town's vote to change its name back in '01. In 1955 she had been granted early admittance to the University of Maine – only the third female student in the history of the university to be granted full-time student status at the tender age of seventeen. She enrolled in the college's pre-law program.

The following year she fell in love with Ralph McCausland, who was also a pre-law. He was tall; at six-five he was still three inches shorter than his friend Anthony Dugan (known as Butch by his friends, as Monster only by his two or three close friends), but he towered a full foot over Ruth. He was oddly – almost absurdly -graceful for such a big man, and good-natured. He wanted to be a state trooper. When Ruth asked him why, he said it was because his father had been one. He didn't need a law degree to join the fuzz, he explained to her; to become a state trooper he needed only a highschool education, good eyes, good reflexes, and a clean record. But Ralph McCausland had wanted something more than to do his father the honor of following in his footsteps. 'Any man who gets into a job and doesn't plan a way to get ahead is either lazy or crazy,' he told Ruth one night over Cokes in the Bear's Den. What he didn't tell her, because he was shy about his ambition, was that he hoped to be Maine's top cop someday. Ruth knew anyway, of course.

She accepted Ralph's proposal of marriage the following year on condition that he would wait until she had her own degree. She did not want to practice law, she said, but she did want to help him all she could. Ralph agreed. Any sane man confronted with Ruth Merrill's clear-eyed, intelligent beauty would have agreed. When Ralph married her in 1959, she was a lawyer.

She came to their marriage bed a virgin. She had been a little worried about this, although only a deep part of her mind – a part over which even she could not exert her usual iron control – dared to wonder in a murky way if that part of him was as big as the rest of him; it felt that way sometimes when they danced, and petted. But he was gentle, and there was only a momentary discomfort that quickly turned to pleasure. 'Make me pregnant,' she whispered in his ear as he began to move above her, in her.

'My pleasure, lady,' Ralph said a little breathlessly.

But Ruth never quickened.

Ruth, the only child of John and Holly Merrill, had inherited a fairish sum of money and a fine old house in Haven Village when her father died in 1962. She and Ralph sold their small postwar tract home in Derry and moved back to Haven in 1963. And although neither of them would admit anything less than perfect happiness to the other, both were aware that there were too many empty rooms in the old Victorian house. Perhaps, Ruth sometimes thought, perfect happiness sometimes occurs only in a context of small discordancies: the shattering crash of an overturned vase or fishbowl, an exultant, laughing yell just as you were drifting into a pleasant late-afternoon doze, the child who gets pregnant with Halloween candy and who must perforce give birth to a nightmare in the early morning hours of November 1st. In her wistful moments (she saw to it that there were damned few of them) Ruth sometimes thought of the Mohammedan rug-makers, who always included a deliberate error in their work to honor the perfect Deity who had made them, more fallible creatures. It occurred to her more than once that, in the tapestry of a full and honestly lived life, a child guaranteed such a respectful error.

But, for the most part, they were happy. They prepared Ralph's most difficult cases together, and his court testimony was always quiet, respectful, and devastating. It mattered little if you were a drunk driver, an arsonist, or a fellow who'd broken a beer bottle over another fellow's head in a drunken roadhouse argument. If you were arrested by Ralph McCausland, your chances of beating the rap were roughly the chances of a guy standing at ground-zero of a nuclear test-site receiving only minor flesh-wounds.

During the years when Ralph was making his slow but steady climb up the ladder of the Maine state-police bureaucracy, Ruth began her career of town service – not that she ever thought of it as a 'career,' and certainly she never thought of it in the context of 'politics.' Not town politics but town service. That was a small but crucial difference. She was not as calmly happy about her work as she seemed to the people she was working for. It would have taken a child to completely fulfill her. There was nothing surprising or demanding in this. She was, after all, a child of her own time, and even the very intelligent are not immune to a steady barrage of propaganda. She and Ralph had been to a doctor in Boston, and after extensive tests, he assured them that they were both fertile. His advice was for them to relax. In a way, this was cruel news. If one of them had proved to be sterile, they would have adopted. As it was, they decided to wait a while and take the doctor's advice … or try. And although neither knew or even intuited it, Ralph didn't have long to live by the time they had begun to discuss adoption again.

In those last years of her marriage, Ruth had performed a sort of adoption of her own – she adopted Haven.

The library, for instance. The Methodist parsonage had been full of books since time out of mind – some were Detective Book Club and Reader's Digest Condensed Books from which a clear scent of mold arose when you opened them; others had bloated to the size of telephone books when the pipes in the parsonage burst in 1947, but most were in surprisingly good condition. Ruth patiently winnowed them, keeping the good ones, selling the bad ones to be re-pulped, throwing away only those completely beyond salvage. The Haven Community Library had officially opened in the repainted and refurbished Methodist parsonage in December of 1968, with Ruth McCausland as volunteer librarian, a post she held until 1973. On the day she retired, the trustees hung a photograph of her over the mantel in the reading room. Ruth protested, then gave in when she saw they meant to honor her whether she wanted the honor or not. She could hurt their feelings, she saw, but not alter their purpose. They needed to honor her. The library, which she had begun single-handed, sitting on the cold parsonage floor, bundled up in one of Ralph's old red-checked hunting jackets, her breath smoking from her mouth and nose, sorting patiently through boxes of books until her hands went numb, was in 1972 voted Maine's Small Town Library of the Year.

Ruth would have taken at least some pleasure at this under other circumstances, but she took little pleasure in anything during 1972 and '73. 1972 was the year Ralph McCausland died. In the late spring, he began to complain of bad headaches. In June, a large firespot appeared on his right eye. X-rays revealed a brain tumor. He died in October, two days short of his thirty-seventh birthday.

In the funeral parlor, Ruth stood looking steadily down into his open coffin for a long time. She had wept almost steadily over the last week, and she suspected that there would be more tears to shed – oceans, perhaps – in the weeks and months ahead. But she would no more have wept in public than she would have appeared there naked. To those watching (which was damned near everyone), she seemed as sweetly composed as always.

'Goodbye, dear,' she said at last, and kissed the corner of his mouth. She slipped his trooper's ring from the third finger of his right hand and onto the third finger of her own. The next day she drove to G. M. Pollock's in Bangor and had it sized. She wore it until the day she died, and although in the violence of her dying her arm would be ripped from her shoulder, neither Bent or Jingles had any trouble ID'ing that ring.

2

The library was not Ruth's only service to the town. Each fall she collected for the Cancer Society, and for each of the seven years she did this, she collected the largest total donation in the Maine Cancer Society's small-town category. The secret of her success was simple: Ruth went everywhere. She spoke pleasantly and fearlessly to thick-browed, sunken-eyed backroad dwellers who often looked almost as mongrelized as the snarling dogs they kept in back yards filled with the dead and decaying bodies of old cars and farm implements. And in most cases she got a donation. Perhaps some were surprised into it simply because it had been so long since they'd had company.

She was dog-bit only once. It was, however, a memorable occasion. The dog itself wasn't big, but it had lots of teeth.

MORAN, the mailbox said. No one home but the dog. The dog came around the side of the house, growling, as she stood knocking on the unpainted porch door. She held out a hand to it, and Mr Moran's dog immediately bit it and then stepped away from Ruth and piddled on the porch floor in its excitement. Ruth started down the steps, taking a handkerchief from her purse and wrapping it around her bleeding hand. The dog bounded after her and bit her again, this time on the leg. She kicked at it and it shied away, but as she limped on toward her Dart, it came up behind her and bit her a third time. This was the only serious bite. Mr Moran's dog removed a sizable chunk of meat from Ruth's left calf (she was wearing a skirt that day; she never went out collecting for the Cancer Society in a skirt again) and then retired to the center of Mr Moran's weedy front lawn, where it sat snarling and slobbering, Ruth's blood dripping from its lolling tongue. Instead of getting behind the wheel of her car, she opened the Dart's trunk. She did not hurry. She felt if she did, the dog would almost certainly attack her again. She took the Remington .30-06 she'd had ever since she was sixteen. She shot the dog dead just as it began trotting toward her again. She picked up the corpse and laid it on spread newspapers in her trunk and drove it to Dr Daggett, the Augusta vet who had cared for Bobbi's dog Peter before selling the practice and moving to Florida. 'If this bitch was rabid, I am in a good deal of trouble,' she told Daggett. The vet peered from the dog, which had a bullet directly between its glazed eyes and very little left to the back of its skull, to Ruth McCausland, who, although bitten and bleeding, was as pleasant as ever. 'I know I haven't left as much of the brain for examination as you'd probably like, but that was unavoidable. Would you take a look, Dr Daggett?' He told her she needed to see a doctor; the wounds had to be flushed, and she'd need stitches in her calf. Daggett was as close to flustered as Daggett ever got. Ruth told him he was perfectly capable of flushing the wounds. As for what she called 'the crocheting,' she would go to the Emergency Room at Derry Home as soon as she made a few telephone calls. She told him to work on the dog while she made them, and asked if she could use his private office so as not to upset the clientele. A woman had screamed when Ruth came in, which was not really surprising. One of Ruth's legs was bloody and torn open. In her blood-streaked arms she bore the stiffening, blanket-wrapped corpse of Moran's dog. Daggett said she was welcome to use his phone. She did so (being careful to reverse the charges the first time and billing the call to her home telephone the second time; she somehow doubted if Mr Moran would accept a collect call). Ralph was at Monster Dugan's house, going over crime photos for an upcoming manslaughter trial. Monster's wife detected nothing amiss in Ruth's voice and neither did Ralph; he told her later that she would have made a great criminal. She said she had taken a delay while canvassing for the Cancer Society. She told him if he got home before she did, he should warm up the meatloaf and make himself some of those stir-fried vegetables that he liked; there were six or seven packages in the freezer. Also, she said, there was a coffee cake in the breadbox if he fancied something sweet. By now, Daggett had come into the office and was disinfecting her wounds and Ruth was very pale. Ralph wanted to know what kind of delay she had taken. She said she'd tell him all about it when she got home. Ralph said he looked forward to hearing and said he loved her. Ruth said she felt exactly the same way about him. Then, as Daggett finished the bite behind her knee (he'd done her hand while she spoke to Ralph) and went on to the d eep wound in her calf (she could actually feel her stripped and wounded flesh trying to pull away from the alchohol), she called Mr Moran. Ruth told him his dog had bitten her three times and that was one time too many so she had shot and killed it and that she had left his pledge card in his mailbox and the American Cancer Society would be very grateful for any donation he felt he could make. There was a brief silence. Then Mr Moran began to speak. Soon Mr Moran began to shout. Finally Mr Moran began to scream. Mr Moran was so enraged he attained a vulgar fluency of expression that neared not just poetry but Homeric verse. He would never equal it again in his life, although when he sometimes tried and failed, he would remember that conversation with a sad, almost fond nostalgia. She'd brought out the best in him, no denying that. Mr Moran said she could expect to get sued for every town dollar she had, and a few country ones in the bargain. Mr Moran said he was going to law, and he was poker-buddies with the best lawyer in the county. Mr Moran opined that Ruth was going to find the cartridge she had used to kill his good old dog the most expensive one she had ever jacked into a breech. Mr Moran said when he got done with her she would curse her mother for ever having opened her legs to her father. Mr Moran said that even though her mother had been stupid enough to do that, he could tell, just talking to her, that the best part of her had squirted out'n her father's unquestionably substandard pecker and run down the chunk of lard her mother called a thigh. Mr Moran informed her that, while Mrs High and Mighty Ruth McCausland might currently feel she was Queen Turd of Shit Hill, she would shortly find out she was just another little turd floating in the Great Toilet Bowl of Life. Mr Moran added that, in this particular case, he had his hand on the lever of that great disposal unit and fully intended to push it. Mr Moran said a great deal more. Mr Moran did more than speak; Mr Moran sermonized. Preacher Colson (or was it Cooder?) at the height of his powers could not have equaled Moran on that day. Ruth waited patiently until he had at least temporarily run dry. Then, speaking in a low and pleasant voice that did not at all suggest that her calf now felt as if it was burning in a furnace, she told Mr Moran that, while the law was not entirely clear on the point, damages had more often been awarded to the caller, even if uninvited, rather than the owner, in cases of animal assault. The real question was whether or not the owner had taken all reasonable care to ensure …

'What the fuck are you talking about?' Moran screamed.

'I'm trying to tell you that the courts take a dim view of a man leaving his dog untied so it can bite a woman soliciting for a charitable organization like the American Cancer Society. Put another way, I'm trying to make you see that, in court, they make you pay for acting like an asshole.'

Stunned silence from the other end of the line. Mr Moran's muse had fled forever.

Ruth paused briefly and fought off a wave of faintness as Daggett finished the disinfecting process and put a light sterile bandage on the wound. 'If you took me to court, Mr Moran, could my lawyer find someone to testify that your dog had bitten before?'

Silence from the other end of the line.

'Perhaps two someones?'

More silence.

'Perhaps three '

'Fuck you, you highbrow cunt,' Moran said suddenly.

'Well,' Ruth said, 'I can't say it's been pleasant talking with you, but listening to you air your views has certainly been instructive. A person sometimes believes she's seen all the way to the bottom of the well of human stupidity, and a reminder that that well apparently has no bottom is sometimes useful. I'm afraid I'll have to hang up now. I'd hoped to canvass six more houses today, but I'm afraid I'll have to put them off. I have to go up to Derry Home Hospital and get some stitches, I'm afraid.'

'I hope they fucking kill you,' Moran said.

'I understand. But do try to help the Cancer Society if you can. We need all the help we can get if we're going to stop cancer in our lifetime. Even ill-tempered, foul-mouthed, idiotic, misbegotten sons of bitches such as yourself can do their part.'

Mr Moran did not sue her. A week later she received a Cancer Society pledge envelope from him, however. He had not stamped it, on purpose, she suspected, so it would be delivered postage-due. Inside was a note and a one dollar bill with a large brown stain on it. I WIPED MY ASS ON THIS, YOU BITCH! the note cried triumphantly. It was written in the large straggling letters of a first-grader with motor control problems. Ruth held the bill by the corner and put it in with the rest of the morning wash. When it came out (clean; among the many other things Mr Moran did not seem to know was that shit washes off), she ironed it. Then it was not only clean, it was crisp – it might have come from the bank only yesterday. She put it in the canvas bank bag where she kept all her collection money. In her record book she noted B. Moran, Amount Contributed: $1.00.

3

The Haven Town Library. The Cancer Society. The New England Conference of Small Towns. Ruth served Haven in all these organizations. She was also active in the Methodist church; it was a rare church supper at which there wasn't a Ruth McCausland casserole or a bake-sale at which there wasn't a Ruth McCausland pie or loaf of raisin bread. She had served on the school board and on the school textbook committee.

People said they didn't know how she did it all. When asked directly, she would smile and say she believed busy hands were happy hands. With all of this going on in her life, you would have thought she'd have had no time for hobbies … but she did in fact have two. She loved to read (she particularly enjoyed Bobbi Anderson's westerns; she had all of them, each signed) and she collected dolls.

A psychiatrist would have equated Ruth's doll collection with her unfulfilled wish for children. Ruth, although she did not much hold with psychiatrists, would have agreed. Up to a point, anyway. Whatever the reason, they make me happy, she might have said if this psychiatric viewpoint had been brought to her attention. And I believe that happiness is the exact opposite of sadness, bitterness, and hatred: happiness should remain unexamined as long as possible.

In the early Haven years she and Ralph shared a study upstairs. The house was big enough so each could have had one to him– or herself, but they liked to be together in the evenings. The big study had been two rooms before Ralph had knocked out the wall between, creating a space even bigger than the living room downstairs. Ralph had his coin and matchbook collections, a wall of bookshelves (all of Ralph's books were nonfiction, most military history), and an old rolltop desk which Ruth had refinished herself.

For Ruth he made what both came to call 'the schoolroom.'

About two years before the headaches began, Ralph saw that Ruth was fast running out of space for her dolls (now there was even a row of them atop her own desk, and they sometimes fell off when she typed). They sat on the stool in the corner, they dangled their small legs nonchalantly from the window-ledges, and still visitors usually had to hold three or four on their laps when they took a chair. She had a lot of visitors, too: Ruth was also a notary public, and there was always someone dropping by to have her notarize a bill of sale or frank a promissory note.

So for Christmas that year, Ralph had constructed a dozen small pewlike benches for her dolls. Ruth was delighted. They reminded her of the one-room schoolhouse she had attended at Crosman Corner. She arranged them in neat rows and set the dolls upon them. Ever after, that part of Ruth's study was called the schoolroom.

The following Christmas – his last, although at that point he felt fine. the brain tumor that would kill him no more than a microscopic dot in his head – Ralph gave her another four benches, three new dolls, and a blackboard in scale with the benches. It was all that was needed to complete the amiable schoolroom illusion.

Written on the blackboard were the words

'Dear Teacher, I love you truly – A SECRET ADMIRER.'

Adults were charmed by Ruth's schoolroom. Most children were equally charmed, and Ruth was always happy to see the kids – boys as well as girls – play with the dolls, although some were quite valuable and many of the old ones delicate. Some parents became extremely nervous when they realized their children were playing with a doll from pre-Communist China or one that had belonged to the daughter of Chief Justice John Marshall. Ruth was a kind woman; if she sensed that a child's enjoyment of her dolls was making a parent really uncomfortable, she would take out a Barbie and Ken she kept for such occasions. The children played with these, but listlessly, as if they realized the really good dolls had for some reason been put off-limits. If, however, Ruth sensed a parent was saying no because they felt it was somehow impolite for their kids to play with the grownup lady's toys, she would make it clear that she really didn't mind.

'Ain't you afraid some kid'll break a bunch of them?' Mabel Noyes asked her once. Mabel's Junque-A-Torium was well supplied with signs such as LOVELY TO LOOK AT, DELIGHTFUL TO HOLD, BUT IF YOU BREAK IT, THEN IT'S SOLD. Mabel knew that the doll which had belonged to Justice Marshall's little girl was worth at least six hundred dollars – she had shown a picture of it to a dealer in rare dolls in Boston and he had told her four hundred, so Mabel guessed six as a fair price. Then there was a doll that had belonged to Anna Roosevelt … a genuine Haitian voodoo doll … God knew what else, sitting cheek to cheek and thigh to thigh with such common old things as Raggedy Ann and Andy.

'Not a bit,' Ruth responded. She found Mabel's attitude as puzzling as Mabel found hers. 'If God means one of these dolls to be broken, He may break it Himself, or He may send a child to do it. But so far, no child has ever broken one. Oh, a few heads have rolled, and Joe Pell did something to the pull-ring in Mrs Beasley's back, and now all she'll say is something like ---Doyou want to have a shower?", but that's about all the damage that's been done.'

'Well, you'll pardon me if I still think it's an awfully big risk to take with such fragile, irreplaceable things,' Mabel said. She sniffed. 'Sometimes I believe the only thing I've ever learned in my whole life is that children break things.'

'Well, perhaps I've just been lucky. But they are careful with them, you know. Because they love them, I think.' Ruth paused, frowning slightly. 'Most of them do,' she amended after a moment.

That not all children wanted to play with 'the kids in the schoolroom'– that some actually, seemed to fear them – was a fact which puzzled and grieved her. Little Edwina Thurlow, for instance. Edwina had burst into a shrill spate of screams when her mother took her by the hand and actually pulled her over to the dolls on their rows of benches, looking attentively at their blackboard. Mrs Thurlow thought Ruth's dolls were just the dearest things, cunning as a cat a-running, sweet as a lick of cream; if there are other country cliches for fascinating, Mrs Thurlow had undoubtedly applied them to Ruth's dolls, and she was totally unable to credit her daughter's fear of them. She thought Edwina was 'just being shy.' Ruth, who had seen the unmistakable flat glitter of fear in the child's eyes, had been unable to dissuade the mother (who, Ruth thought, was a stupid, pig-headed woman) from almost physically pushing the child at the dolls.

So Norma Thurlow had dragged little Edwina over to the schoolroom and little Edwina's screams had been so loud they had brought Ralph all the way up from the cellar, where he had been caning chairs. It took nearly twenty minutes to coax Edwina out of her hysterics, and of course she had to be brought downstairs, away from the dolls. Norma Thurlow was ill with embarrassment, and every time she threw a black look in Edwina's direction. the child was overcome again by hysterical weeping.

Later that evening, Ruth went upstairs and looked sorrowfully at her schoolroom full of silent children (the 'children' included such grandmotherly figures as Mrs Beasley and Old Gammar Hood, which, when turned over and slightly rearranged, became The Big Bad Wolf), wondering how they could have scared Edwina so badly. Edwina herself certainly hadn't been able to explain; even the most gentle inquiry brought on fresh shrieks of terror.

'You made that kid really unhappy,' Ruth said at last, speaking softly to the dolls. 'What did you do to her?'

The dolls only looked back at her with their glass eyes, their shoebutton eyes, their sewn eyes.

'And Hilly Brown wouldn't go near them the time his mother came over to have you notarize that bill of sale,' Ralph said from behind her. She looked around, startled, then smiled at him.

'Yes, Hilly, too,' she said. And there had been others. Not many, but enough to trouble her.

'Come on,' Ralph said, slipping an arm around her waist. 'Give, you guys. Which one of youse mugs scared the little goil?'

The dolls looked back silently.

And for a moment . . . just a moment … Ruth felt a stir of fright uncoil in her stomach and chase up her spine, rattling vertebrae like a bony xylophone … and then it was gone.

'Don't worry about it, Ruthie,' Ralph said. leaning closer. As always, the smell of him made her feel a bit giddy. He kissed her hard. Nor was his kiss the only thing hard about him at that moment.

'Please,' she said a little breathlessly, breaking the kiss. 'Not in front of the children.'

He laughed and swept her into his arms. 'How about in front of the collected works of Henry Steele Commager?'

'Wonderful,' she gasped, aware that she was already half … no, threequarters … no, four-fifths … out of her dress.

He made love to her urgently, and with tremendous satisfaction on both their parts. All their parts. The brief chill was forgotten.

But this year she remembered on the night of July 19th. The picture of Jesus had begun to speak to 'Becka Paulson on July 7th. On July 19th, Ruth McCausland's dolls began to speak to her.

4

The townsfolk were surprised but pleased when, two years after Ralph McCausland's death in 1972, his widow ran for the position of Haven town constable. A young fellow named Mumphry ran against her. This fellow was foolish, most people agreed, but they also agreed that he probably couldn't help it; he was new in town and did not know how to behave. Those who discussed the matter at the Haven Lunch agreed Mumphry was more to be pitied than disliked. He ran as a partisan Democrat, and the gist of his platform seemed to be that, when it came to a position such as constable, the elected official would have to arrest drunks, speeders, and hooligans; he might even be called upon to arrest a dangerous criminal from time to time and run him up to the county jail. Surely the citizens of Haven weren't going to elect a woman to do such a job, law degree or not, were they?

They were and did. The vote was McCausland 407, Mumphry 9. Of his nine votes, it would be fair to assume he had gotten those of his wife, his brother, his twenty-three-year-old son, and himself. That left five unaccounted for. No one ever 'fessed up, but Ruth herself always had an idea that Mr Moran out there on the south end of town had had four more friends than she would have credited him with. Three weeks after the election, Mumphry and his wife left Haven. His son, a nice enough fellow named John, elected to stay, and although he was still, after fourteen years, often referred to as 'the new fella,' as in 'That new fella, Mumphry, come by to get his haircut this mawnin'; I member when his daddy ran against Ruth and got whipped s'bad?' And since then, Ruth had never been opposed.

The townsfolk had rightly seen her candidacy as a public announcement that her period of mourning was over. One of the things (one among many) the unfortunate Mumphry had failed to understand was that the lopsided vote had been, in part, at least, Haven's way of crying: 'Hooray, Ruthie! Welcome back!'

Ralph's death had been sudden and shocking, and it came close – too very damn close – to killing the part of her which was outward and giving. That part softened and complemented the dominant side of her personality, she felt. The dominant side was smart, canny, logical, and – although she hated to admit this last, she knew it was true – sometimes uncharitable.

She came to feel that if that outward and giving side of her nature were to lapse, it would be something like killing Ralph a second time. And so she came back to Haven. Came back to service.

In a small town, even one such person can make a crucial difference in how things are, and in what jargonmeisters are pleased to call 'the quality of life', that person can become, in fact, something very like the heart of the town. Ruth had been well on her way to becoming such a valuable person when her husband died. Two years later – after what seemed in retrospect to be a long, bleak season in hell -she had rediscovered that valuable person, as one might rediscover something moderately wonderful in a dark attic corner – a piece of carnival glass, or a bentwood rocking chair that was still serviceable She held it up to the light, made sure it was unbroken, dusted it, polished it and then returned it to her life. Running for town constable had only been the first step. She could not have said why this seemed so right, but it did – it seemed the perfect way to at the same time remember Ralph and get on with the work of being herself. She thought she would probably find the job both boring and unpleasant … but that had also been true of canvassing for the Cancer Society and serving on the Textbook Selection Committee. Boring and unpleasant did not mean a task was unfruitful, a fact a lot of people seemed not to know, or to willfully ignore. And, she told herself, if she really didn't like it, there was no law to make her stand for re-election. She wanted to serve, not to martyr herself. If she hated it, she would let Mumphry or someone like him have a turn.

But Ruth discovered she liked the job. Among other things, it gave her a chance to put a stop to some nasty goings-on that old John Harley had allowed to continue … and grow.

Del Cullum, for instance. The Cullums had been in Haven since time out of mind, and Delbert – a thick-browed mechanic who worked at Elt Barker's Shell – was probably not the first of them to engage in sexual congress with his daughters. The Cullum line was incredibly twisted and interbred; there were at least two cataclysmically retarded Cullums in Pineland that Ruth knew about (according to town gossip, one had been born with webs between its fingers and toes).

Incest is one of those time-honored country traditions of which the romantic poets rarely write. Its traditional aspect might have been the reason John Harley had never seriously tried to put an end to it, but the idea of 'tradition' in such a grotesque matter cut no ice with Ruth. She went out to the Cullum place. There was shouting. Albion Thurlow heard it clearly, although Albion lived a quarter of a mile down the road and was deaf in one ear. Following the shouting there was the sound of a chainsaw cranking up, followed by a gunshot and a scream. Then the chainsaw stopped and Albion, standing out in the middle of the road now, one hand shading his eyes as he looked toward the Cullum place, heard girls' voices (Delbert had been cursed with girls, six of them, and of course they literally were his curse, and he theirs) raised in cries of distress.

Later, in the Haven Lunch, recounting his tale to a fascinated audience, old Albion said that he thought about going back into his house and calling the constable … and then he realized the constable had probably been the one fired the shot.

Albion only stood by his mailbox instead, awaiting developments. About five minutes after the sound of the chainsaw died, Ruth McCausland drove back toward town. Five minutes after that, Del Cullurn drove by in his pickup. His washed-out wife was in the shotgun seat. A mattress and some cardboard boxes filled with clothes and dishes sat in the truck's bed. Delbert and Maggie Cullum were seen no more in Haven. The three Cullurn girls over eighteen went to work in Derry and in Bangor. The three minors were placed in foster homes. Most of Haven was glad to see the Cullum family broken up. They had festered out there at the end of the Ridge Road like a rash of poison toadstools growing in a dark cellar. Folks speculated about what Ruth had done and how she did it, but Ruth never told.

Nor were the Cullums the only people Ruth McCausland, graying, trim, five feet five, and one hundred and twenty-five pounds, either ran out of town or had jailed over the years. There were the dope-smoking hippies that moved in a mile east of the old Frank Garrick farm, for instance. Those worthless, crab-raddled excuses for human beings came in one month and went out on the toe of Ruth's dainty size five shoe the next. Frank's niece, who wrote those books, probably smoked some rope from time to time, the town thought (the town thought that all writers must smoke dope, drink to excess, or spend their evenings having sex in odd positions), but she didn't sell it, and the hippies a mile down from her had been doing just that.

Then there were the Jorgensons out on the Miller Bog Road. Benny Jorgenson died of a stroke, and Iva remarried three years later, becoming Iva Haney. Not long after, her seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter started having household mishaps. The boy fell getting out of the tub; the girl burned her arm on the stove. Then the boy slipped on the kitchen floor and broke his arm and the girl stepped on a rake half-buried in fallen leaves and the handle spanged her upside the head. Last but hardly least, the boy stumbled on the basement stairs while going after some kindling and fractured his skull. For a while it looked as if he wasn't going to pull through. It was a real run of bad luck, all right.

Ruth decided there had been enough bad luck at the Haney place.

She went out, driving her old Dodge Dart, and found Elmer Haney sitting on the porch, drinking a quart of Miller Lite, picking his nose and reading Soldier of Fortune magazine. Ruth suggested to Elmer Haney that he was bad luck around Iva's place, particularly for Bethie and Richard Jorgenson. She had noticed, she said, that some stepfathers were very bad luck for their stepchildren. She said she thought their luck might improve if Elmer Haney left town. Very soon. Before the end of the week.

'You are not scaring me,' Elmer Haney said serenely. 'This is my place now. You want to get off it before I brain you with a stick of stovewood, you meddling bitch.'

'Think it over,' Ruth said, smiling.

Joe Paulson had been parked out by the mailbox at the time. He heard the whole thing – Elmer Haney's voice had been slightly raised, and there was nothing wrong with Joe's hearing. The way Joe told it down at the Haven Lunch later that day, he had been sorting mail while the two of them argued it up and down, and he couldn't seem to get it sorted just right until that conversation was over

'Then how'dya know she was smiling?' Elt Barker asked.

'Heard it in her voice,' Joe replied.

Later that same day, Ruth had taken a ride up to the Derry state-police barracks and spoke with Butch 'Monster' Dugan. At six-feet-eight and two hundred and eighty pounds, Monster was the largest state cop in New England. Monster would have done anything short of murder (maybe that, too) for Ralph's widow.

Two days later, they went back to the Haney place. It was Monster's day off and he was in civvies. Iva Haney was at work. Bethie was in school. Richard was, of course, still in the hospital. Elmer Haney, who was of course still unemployed, sat on the porch with a quart of Miller Lite in one hand and the latest issue of Hot Talk in the other. Ruth and Monster Dugan visited with him for an hour or so. During that hour, Elmer Haney had an extraordinary run of bad luck. Those who saw him leaving town that night said he looked like someone ran him through a potato-grader, but the only one with nerve enough to ask just what had happened was old John Harley himself.

'Well, I swan,' Ruth said, smiling. 'It was the darnedest thing I ever saw. While we were trying to persuade him his stepkids might live luckier if he left, he decided he wanted to take a shower. Right while we were talking to him! And do you know, he fell down in the tub! Then he burned his arm on the stove and -slipped on the linoleum while he was backing away from it! Then he decided he wanted some fresh air and he went outside and stepped on the same rake little Bethie Jorgenson stepped on two months ago, and that was when he decided he ought to just pack up and go. I think he was right to do it, poor man. He'll live luckier himself somewhere else.'

5

She really was the person who came closest to being the heart of the town, and that may have been why she was one of the first to feel the change.

It began with a headache and bad dreams.

The headache came in with the month of July. Sometimes it was so faint she barely noticed it. Then, without warning, it would swell to a thick, throbbing beat behind her forehead. It was so bad on the night of July 4th that she called Christina McKeen, with whom she had planned to go see the fireworks in Bangor, and begged off.

She went to bed that night with light still lingering in the sky outside, but it was dark before she was finally able to drift off to sleep. She supposed the heat and humidity were keeping her awake – they would keep people awake all over New England that night, she reckoned, and this wasn't the first night that had been like this. It had been one of the stillest, hottest summers in her memory.

She dreamed of fireworks.

Only these fireworks were not red and white and coruscating orange; they were all a dull and terrible green. They burst across the sky in starbursts of light … only instead of going out, the starfish shapes in the sky oozed together and became huge sores.

Looking around, she saw people she had lived with all her life – Harleys and Crenshaws and Browns and Duplisseys and Andersons and Clarendons – staring up at the sky, their faces rotted swampfire green. They stood in front of the post office, the drugstore, the Junque-A-Torium, the Haven Lunch, the Northern National Bank; they stood in front of the school and the Shell station, eyes filled with green fire, mouths hanging stupidly agape.

Their teeth were falling out.

Justin Hurd turned to her and grinned, lips pulling back to show bare pink gums. In the crazy light of her dream, the saliva streaking those gums looked like snot.

'Feel'th good,' Justin lisped, and she thought: Get out of here! They all have to get out of here right now! If they don't they are going to die the same way Ralph did!

Now Justin was walking toward her and she saw with mounting horror that his face was shriveling and changing – it was becoming the bulging, stitched face of Lumpkin, her scarecrow doll. She looked around wildly and saw that they had all become dolls. Mabel Noyes turned and stared at her and Mabel's blue eyes were as calculating and avaricious as ever, but her lips were plumped up in the Cupid's-bow smile of a china doll.

'Tommyknockerths,' Mabel lisped in a chiming, echoing voice, and Ruth woke up with a gasp, wide-eyed in the dark.

Her headache was gone, at least for the time being. She came out of the dream directly into wakefulness with the thought: Ruth, you have to leave right now. Don't even take time to pack a bag – just pull on some clothes, get in the Dart, and GO!

But she could not do that.

Instead, she lay down again. After a long time, she slept.

6

When the report came in that the Paulsons' house was burning, the Haven Volunteer Fire Department turned out . . . but they were surprisingly slow about it. Ruth was there ten minutes before the first pumper showed up. She would have torn Dick Allison's head off when he finally showed up, except she had known both of the Paulsons were dead … and, of course, Dick Allison had known, too. That was why he hadn't bothered to hurry, but that did not make Ruth feel a bit better. Quite the opposite.

That knowing, now. What exactly was that?

Ruth didn't know what it was.

Even grasping the fact of the knowing was almost impossible. On the day the Paulsons' house burned, Ruth realized that she had been knowing things she had no right to know for a week or more. But it seemed so natural! It didn't come with trumpets and bells. The knowing was as much a part of her – of everyone in Haven now – as the beat of her heart. She no more thought about it than she thought about her heartbeat thudding softly and steadily in her ears.

Only she had to think about it, didn't she? Because it was changing Haven … and the changes were not good.

7

Some few days before David Brown disappeared, Ruth realized with dull, dawning dismay that she had been ostracized by the town. No one spat at her when she walked down the street in the morning from her house to her office in the town hall … no one threw stones … she sensed much of the old kindness in their thoughts … but she knew people were turning to follow her progress as she walked. She did this with her head up, her face serene, just as if her head wasn't throbbing and pounding like a rotted tooth, just as if she hadn't spent the previous night (and the one before that, and the one before that, and … ) tossing and turning, dozing into horrible, half-remembered dreams and then clawing her way out of them again.

They were watching her … watching and waiting for …

For what?

But she knew: they were waiting for her to 'become.'

8

In the week between the fire at the Paulsons' and Hilly's SECOND GALA MAGIC SHOW, things began to go wrong for Ruth.

The mail, now. That was one thing.

She kept on getting bills and circulars and catalogues, but there were no letters. No personal mail of any kind. After three days of this, she took a stroll down to the post office. Nancy Voss only stood behind the counter like a lump, looking at her expressionlessly. By the time Ruth finished speaking, she thought she could actually feel the weight of the Voss woman's stare. It felt like two small dusty black stones were lying on her face.

In the silence, she could hear something in the office humming and making spiderlike scritching noises. She had no idea what it

(except it sorts the mail for her)

might be but she didn't like the sound of it. And she didn't like being here with this woman, because she had been sleeping with Joe Paulson, and she had hated 'Becka, and

Hot outside. Hotter still in here. Ruth felt sweat break out over her body.

'Have to fill out a mail complaint form,' Nancy Voss said in a slow, inflectionless voice. She slid a white card across the counter. 'Here you go, Ruth.' Her lips pulled back in a cheerless grin.

Ruth saw half the woman's teeth were gone.

From behind them, in the silence: Scratch-scratch, scritchy-scratch, scratchscratch, scritchy-scratch.

Ruth began to fill out the form. Sweat darkened big circles around the armpits of her dress. Outside, the sun beat steadily down on the postoffice parking lot. It was ninety in the shade, had to be, and not a breath of wind stirring, and Ruth knew the paving in that lot would be so soft that you could tear off a chunk with your fingers if you wanted and begin to chew it …

State the Nature of Your Problem, the form read.

I'm going crazy, she thought, that is the nature of my problem. Also, I am having my first menstrual period in three years.

In a firm hand she began to write that she had gotten no first-class mail for a week and wished for the matter to be looked into.

Scratch -scratch, scritchy -scratch.

'What's that noise?' she asked, without looking up from the form. She was afraid to look up.

'Mail-sorting gadget,' Nancy droned. 'I thought it up.' She paused. 'But you know that, don't you, Ruth?'

'How could I know a thing like that unless you told me?' Ruth asked, and with a tremendous effort she made her voice pleasant. The pen she was using trembled and blotted the form – not that it mattered; her mail wasn't coming because Nancy Voss was throwing it out. That was part of the knowing, too. But Ruth was tough; her face remained clear and firm. She met Nancy's eyes directly, although she was afraid of that dusty black gaze, afraid of its weight.

Go on and speak up, Ruth's gaze said. I am not afraid of the likes of YOU. Speak up … but if you expect me to scutter away, squeaking like a mouse, get ready for a surprise.

Nancy's gaze wavered and dropped. She turned away. 'Call me when you get the card filled out,' she said. 'I've got too much work to do to just stand around shooting the breeze. Since Joe died, the work's piled up out of all season. That's probably why your mail isn't

(GET OUT OF TOWN YOU BITCH GET OUT WHILE WELL STILL LET YOU GO)

coming just on time, Missus McCausland.'

'Do you think so?' Keeping her voice light and pleasant now required a superhuman effort. Nancy's last thought had slammed into her like an uppercut. It had been as bright and clear as a lightning stroke. She looked down at the complaint form and saw a large black

(tumor)

blot spreading over it. She crumpled it and threw it away.

Nancy hadn't answered her question. Was pretending she hadn't heard, Ruth thought. But she had heard, all right.

Scritch -scritch -scratch.

The door opened behind her. She turned and saw Bobbi Anderson come in.

'Hello, Bobbi,' she said.

'Hello, Ruth.'

(go on she's right get out while you still can while you're still allowed please Ruth I we most of us bear you no ill will)

'Are you working on a new novel, Bobbi?' Ruth could now barely keep the tremor out of her voice. Hearing thoughts was bad – it made you think you were insane and hallucinating it. Hearing such a thing from Bobbi Anderson

(while you're still allowed)

of all people, Bobbi Anderson who was just about the kindest

I didn't hear anything like that, she thought, and grasped the idea with a sort of tired eagerness. I was mistaken, that's all.

Bobbi opened her post-box and took out a bundle of mail. She looked at her and smiled. Ruth saw she had lost a molar on the bottom left and a canine on the top right. 'Better go now, Ruth,' she said gently. 'Just get in your car and go. Don't you think so?'

Then she felt herself steady – in spite of her fear and her throbbing head, she steadied.

'Never,' she said. 'This is my town. And if you know what's going on, tell the others that know what's going on not to push me. I have friends outside of Haven, friends that will listen to me seriously no matter how crazy what I'm saying might sound. They would listen for my late husband's sake, if not for my own. As for you, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. This is your town, too. It used to be, anyway.'

For a moment she thought Bobbi looked confused and a little ashamed. Then she smiled sunnily, and there was something in that girlish, gap-toothed grin that scared Ruth more than anything else. It was no more human than a trout's grin. She saw Bobbi in this woman's eyes, and had certainly felt her in her thoughts … but there was nothing of Bobbi in the grin.

'Whatever you want, Ruth,' she said. 'Everyone in Haven loves you, you know. I think in a week or two … three, at the outside … you'll stop fighting. I just thought I'd offer you the option. If you decide to stay, though, that's fine. In a little while you'll be … just fine.'

9

She stopped in Cooder's for Tampax. There were none. No Tampax, no Modess, no Sta-Free maxis or minis, no generic pads or tampons.

A hand-lettered sign read: NEW SHIPMENT ARRIVES TOMORROW. SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE.

10

On July 15th, a Friday, she began having problems with her office phone.

In the morning it was just an annoyingly loud hum which she and the person she was talking to had to shout over. By noon a crackling noise had been added. By two P.m. it had gotten so bad that the phone was useless.

When she got home she found that the phone there wasn't noisy at all. It was just smoothly and completely dead. She went next door to the Fannins' to call the phone company's repair number. Wendy Fannin was making bread in her kitchen, kneading one batch of dough while her mixer worked a second batch.

Ruth saw with a weary lack of surprise that the mixer wasn't plugged into the wall but into what looked like an electronic game with its cover off. It was generating a strong glow as Wendy mixed her bread.

'Sure, go ahead and use the phone,' Wendy said. 'You know

(get out Ruth get out of Haven)

where it is, don't you?'

'Yes,' she said. She started toward the hall, then paused. 'I stopped at Cooder's market. I needed sanitary napkins, but they're all out.'

'I know.' Wendy smiled, showing three gaps in a smile which had been flawless a week before. 'I got the second-to-last box. It will be over soon. We'll “become” a little more and that part will end.'

'Is that so?' Ruth asked.

'Oh, yes,' Wendy said, and turned back to her bread.

The Fannins' phone was working just fine. Ruth was not surprised. The office girl at New England Contel said they would send a man right out. Ruth thanked her, and on her way out she thanked Wendy Fannin.

'Sure,' Wendy said, smiling. 'Whatever you want, Ruth. Everyone in Haven loves you, you know.'

Ruth shuddered in spite of the heat.

The telephone repair crew came and did something to the connection on the side of Ruth's house. Then they ran a test. The phone worked perfectly. They drove away. An hour later, the phone stopped working again.

On the street that evening, she felt a rising whisper of voices in her brain -thoughts as light as leaves kicked into a momentary rustle by a breath of October wind.

(our Ruth we love you all Haven loves)

(but go if you go or change)

(if you stay no one wants to hurt you Ruth so get out or stay)

(yes get out or stay but leave us)

(yes leave us alone Ruth don't interfere let us be let us)

(be be 'become' yes let us 'become' let us alone to 'become')

She walked slowly, head throbbing with voices.

She glanced into the Haven Lunch. Beach Jernigan, the short-order cook, raised a hand to her. Ruth raised one in return. She saw Beach's mouth move, clearly forming the words There she goes. Several men at the counter turned around and waved. They smiled. She saw empty gaps where teeth had been not long ago. She passed Cooder's market. She passed the United Methodist church. Ahead of her now was the town hall with its square brick clock tower. The hands of the clock stood at 7:15 -7:15 of a summer night, and all over Haven men would be opening cold beers and turning radios to the voice of Joe Costiglione and the sound of Red Sox Warmup. She could see Bobby Tremain and Stephanie Colson walking slowly toward the edge of town along Route 9, hand in hand. They had been going together for four years and it really was a wonder Stephanie wasn't pregnant yet, Ruth thought.

Just a July evening with twilight coming on – everything normal.

Nothing was normal.

Hilly Brown and Barney Applegate came out of the library, Hilly's little brother David trailing behind them like the tail of a kite. She asked to see what books the boys had gotten and they showed her readily enough. Only in little David Brown's eyes had she seen a hesitant acknowledgment of the panic she felt … and felt it in his mind. That she felt his fear and did nothing about it was the main reason she drove herself so hard when the little boy disappeared two days later. Someone else might have justified it, might have said: Look, I had enough on my own plate without worrying about what was dished onto David Brown's. But she wasn't the sort of woman who could find any comfort in such loud defensiveness. She had felt the boy's low terror. Worse, she had felt his resignation – his sureness that nothing could stop events – that they would simply wind along their preordained course from bad to worse. And as if to prove him right, hey, presto! David was gone. And like the boy's grandfather, Ruth shouldered her share of the guilt.

At the town hall she turned and walked back to her house, keeping her face pleasant in spite of her drilling headache, in spite of her dismay. The thoughts swirled and rustled and danced.

(love you Ruth)

(we can wait Ruth)

(shhhh shhhh go to sleep)

(yes go to sleep and dream)

(dream of things dream of ways)

(to 'become' ways to 'become' ways to)

She went into her house and locked the door behind her and went upstairs and pressed her face into her pillow.

Dream of ways to 'become.'

Oh God she wished she knew exactly what that meant.

If you go you go if you stay you change.

She wished she knew because, whatever it meant, whether she wanted it or not, it was happening to her. No matter how much she resisted, she was also 'becoming.'

(yes Ruth yes)

(sleep … dream … think. 'become')

(yes Ruth yes)

These thoughts, rustling and alien, followed her down into sleep and then funneled away into darkness. She lay crosswise on the big bed, fully dressed, and slept deeply.

When she woke, her body was stiff but her mind felt clear and refreshed. Her headache had blown away like smoke. Her period, so oddly undignified and shameful after she had thought that was finally over for good, had stopped. For the first time in almost two weeks she felt herself. She would have a long cool shower and then set about getting to the bottom of this. If what it took was outside help, okay. If she had to spend a few days or a few weeks with people thinking she was off her rocker, so be it. She had spent her life building a reputation for sanity and trustworthiness. And what good would such a reputation be if it couldn't convince people to take you seriously when you sounded nuts?

As she began to take off her sleep-rumpled dress, her fingers suddenly froze on the buttons.

Her tongue had found an empty place in the line of her bottom teeth – there was a dull, distant pain there. Her eyes dropped to the coverlet of the bed. On it, where her head had been, she saw the tooth that had fallen out in the night. Suddenly nothing seemed simple anymore – nothing at all.

Ruth was aware that her headache had returned.

There was even hotter weather in store for Haven – in August there would be a week when temperatures would crack the hundred-degree mark every single day -but in the meantime, the July stretch of hot-and-muggy which ran from the twelfth through the nineteenth was more than enough for everyone in town, thank you very much.

The streets shimmered. The leaves on the trees hung limp and dusty. Sounds carried in the still air; Bobbi Anderson's old truck, now rebuilt into a digging machine, could be heard clearly in Haven Village five miles away for most of that eight-day hot spell. People knew something important was going on out there at the old Frank Garrick place – important for the whole town – but no one mentioned it out loud, any more than they mentioned the fact that it had driven Justin Hurd, Bobbi's nearest neighbor, quite mad. Justin was building things – it was part of his 'becoming' – but because he had gone crazy, some of the stuff he built was potentially dangerous. One of them was a thing that set up harmonic waves in the earth's crust – waves which could possibly trigger an earthquake big enough to tear the state wide open and send the eastern half sliding into the Atlantic.

Justin had made this harmonic-wave machine to get the goddam rabbits and woodchucks out of their burrows. They were eating all his fucking lettuces. I'll shake the little bastards out, he thought.

Beach Jernigan went out to Justin's place one day while Justin was out harrowing up the crops in his west field (he plowed under twelve acres of corn that day, sweating profusely, lips pulled back in a constant maniacal grimace as he worried about saving three rows of lettuces) and dismantled the gadget, which consisted of cannibalized stereo components. When Justin returned, he would find his gadget gone, perhaps assume the goddam chucks and rabbits had stolen it, and maybe set about rebuilding it … in which case Beach or someone else would dismantle it again. Or, maybe, if they were lucky, he would feel called upon to build something less dangerous.

The sun rose each day in a sky the color of pallid china and then seemed to hang at the roof of the world. Behind the Haven Lunch, a line of dogs lay in the scant shade of the overhanging eave, panting, even too hot to scratch fleas. The streets were mostly deserted. Every now and then someone would travel through Haven on his way up to or back from Derry and Bangor. Not too many, though, because the turnpike was so much quicker.

Those who did pass through noticed an odd and sudden improvement in radio reception – one startled truck-driver, on Route 9 because he had gotten bored with I-95 had decided a change would be worth the extra hour on the road, tuned in a rock station which turned out to be broadcasting from Chicago. Two old folks bound for Bar Harbor found a classical music station from Florida. This eerie, bell-clear reception faded when they were clear of Haven again.

Some through travelers experienced more unpleasant side effects: headaches and nausea, mostly – sometimes severe nausea. This was most commonly blamed on road-food gone punky in the heat.

A little boy from Quebec, headed for Old Orchard Beach with his parents, lost four baby teeth in the ten minutes it took for the family station wagon to pass from one side of Haven to the other. The little boy's mother swore in French that she had never seen anything like it in her life. That night, in an Old Orchard Beach motel, the tooth fairy took them (and only one had been loose, the little boy's mother declared) and replaced them with a dollar.

A mathematician from MIT, headed up to UMO for a two-day conference on semi-logical numbers, suddenly realized that he was on the verge of grasping an entirely new way of looking at mathematics and mathematical philosophy. His face went gray, his perspiring skin suddenly cold as he grasped with perfect clarity how such a concept could quickly produce proof that every even number over two is the sum of two prime numbers; how the concept could be used to trisect the angle; how it could

He pulled over, scrambled out of his car, and threw up in the ditch. He stood trembling and weak-kneed over the mess (which contained one of his canines, although he was just then much too excited to realize he'd lost a tooth), his fingers itching to hold a piece of chalk, to cover a blackboard with sines and cosines. Visions of the Nobel Prize jittered in his overheated brain. He threw himself back into his car and began to drive toward Orono again, punching his rusty Subaru up to eighty. But by the time he got to Hampden, his glorious vision had clouded over, and by the time he reached Orono there was nothing left but a glimmer. He supposed it had been a momentary heat-stroke. Only the vomiting had been real; that he could smell on his clothes. During the first day of the conference he was pale and silent, offering little, mourning his glorious, ephemeral vision.

That was also the morning Mabel Noyes became an unperson while puttering in the basement of the Junque-A-Torium. It would not have been correct to say that she 'killed herself by accident' or 'died by misadventure.' Neither of those phrases exactly explained what had happened to her. Mabel didn't put a bullet in her head while cleaning a gun or stick a finger in an electrical socket; she simply collapsed her own molecules and winked out of existence. It was quick and not a bit messy. There was a flash of blue light and she was gone. Nothing was left but one smoldering bra-strap and a gadget that looked like a silver polisher. That, in fact, was exactly what the gadget was supposed to be. Mabel thought it would make a dirty, tiresome job much easier and wondered why she had never made such a gadget before – or why, for goodness' sake, there weren't places where you could buy them, since it was a perfectly easy thing to make and those gooks over there in Korea could probably turn them out by the ton. God knew the Korea gooks turned enough other things out by the ton, although she supposed she ought to just be grateful, since the Jap gooks had apparently gotten too uppity to do little stuff. She had begun to see all sorts of things she could make from the used appliances in her shop. Wonderful things. She kept looking in the catalogues and kept being amazed to find they weren't there. My God, she thought, I think I am going to be rich! Only she had made some sort of cross-connection on the silver polisher, and quarked off into the Twilight Zone in just under .0006 of a nanosecond.

She was not, in truth, greatly missed in Haven.

The town lay limp at the bottom of a stagnant bowl of air. From the woods behind the Garrick place came the sounds of engines as Bobbi and Gardener went on digging.

Otherwise, the whole town seemed to doze.

12

Ruth wasn't dozing that afternoon.

She was thinking about those sounds coming from Bobbi Anderson's place (she, at least, no longer thought of it as the old Garrick farm), and about Bobbi Anderson herself.

There was a communal well of knowledge in town now, a pool of thought they all shared. A month ago Ruth would have found such an idea insane. Now it was undeniable. Like the rising, whispering voices, the knowledge was there.

Part of it was knowing that Bobbi had started all this.

It had been inadvertent, but she had set it in motion. Now she and her friend (the friend was a perfect blank to Ruth; she knew about him only because she had seen him out there, sitting on the porch with Bobbi, evenings) were working twelve and fourteen hours a day, making it worse. She didn't think the friend had any real idea what he was doing. He was somehow outside of the communal net.

How were they making it worse?

She didn't know, didn't even know for sure what they were doing. That was also blocked, not just from Ruth but from everyone in Haven. They would know in time; they would not come to knowledge but become to it, as the town-wide menstruation of every female between the ages of about eight and sixty had stopped at about the same time. It had something to do with digging; that was all Ruth could tell. One afternoon she napped lightly and dreamed that Bobbi and her friend from Troy were unearthing a great silver cylinder some two hundred feet across. As they uncovered more and more of it, she could see a much smaller cylinder, this one steel, perhaps ten feet across and five feet high, protruding, nipple-like, from the center of the thing. Etched on this nipple was a ± symbol, and as she awoke, Ruth understood: she had dreamed of a gigantic alkaline battery entombed in the earth and granite of the land behind Bobbi's house, a battery bigger than Frank Spruce's dairy barn.

Ruth knew that, whatever Bobbi and her friend were digging up in the woods, it certainly wasn't a gigantic EverReady Long-Life D-Cell battery. Except … in a way, she thought that was exactly what it was. Bobbi had discovered some huge power source and had become its prisoner. That same force was simultaneously galvanizing and imprisoning the whole town. And it was growing steadily stronger.

Her mind whispered: You've got to let it go. You've just got to stand back and let it run its course. They have loved you, Ruth; that much is true. You hear their voices in your head like a rising wind lifting October leaves, now not just puffing them and letting them drop but whipping them into a cyclone; you hear their mind-voices, and although they are sometimes garbled and confused, I don't think they can lie. And when these rising voices say they have loved you, still do love you, they are telling the truth. But if you meddle into what's going on here, I think they'll kill you, Ruth. Not Bobbi's friend – he's immune, somehow. He doesn't hear voices. He doesn't 'become.' Except drunk. That's what Bobbi's voice says: 'Gard becomes drunk.' But as for the rest of them … if you meddle into their business … they'll kill you, Ruth. Gently. With love. So just stand back. Let it happen.

But if she did, her town would be destroyed … not changed, the way its name had been changed again and again, not hurt, as that sweet-talking preacher had hurt it, but destroyed. And she would be destroyed with it, because the force was already nibbling away at the core of her. She felt it.

All right, then … what do you do?

For the time being, nothing. Things might get better on their own. In the meantime, was there any way she could guard her thoughts?

She began to experiment with tongue-twisters: She sells seashells down by the seashore. Betty Bitter bought some butter. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. With a little practice she found she could keep one of them playing constantly in the back of her mind. She walked downtown to the market, got some ground meat and two ears of fresh corn for her dinner, and spoke pleasantly with Madge Tilletts at the checkout counter and Dave Rutledge, who was sitting in his accustomed place at the front of the store, caning a chair slowly with his old, bunched, and arthritic hands. Except old Dave wasn't looking as old as he used to these days. Nowhere near.

Both of them looked at her. wary, surprised puzzled.

They hear me … but not very well. I'm jamming them! I really am!

She didn't know how successfully, and it wouldn't do to bank on her ability to do it – but it worked. That didn't mean they couldn't read her if several of them linked up and worked together at picking her brain. She sensed that might be possible. But it was something, at least, one arrow in a previously empty quiver.

That night, Saturday night, she decided she would wait until Tuesday noon -roughly sixty hours. If things continued to deteriorate, she would go to the state-police barracks in Derry, seek out some of her husband's old friends – Monster Dugan for a start – and tell them what was going on forty miles or so downstate on Route 9. It was maybe not the best of plans, but it would have to do. Ruth McCausland fell asleep. And dreamed of batteries in the earth.

1

The disappearance of David Brown rendered Ruth's plan obsolete. After David disappeared, she found herself unable to leave town. Because David was gone and they all knew it … but they also knew that David was somehow still in Haven.

Always during the becoming came a time which might have been called 'the dance of untruth.' For Haven, this time commenced with the disappearance of David Brown and unfolded itself during the subsequent search.

Ruth was just sitting down to the local news when the phone rang. Marie Brown was hysterical, barely coherent.

'Calm down, Marie,' Ruth said, and thought it was good she had eaten an early supper. She might not get another chance to eat for quite a while. At first the only clear fact she seemed able to get from Marie was that her boy David was in some kind of trouble, trouble that had started at a back yard magic show, and Hilly had gotten hysterical

'Put Bryant on,' Ruth said.

'But you'll come, won't you?' Marie wept. 'Please, Ruth, before dark. We can still find him, I know we can.'

'Of course I'll come,' Ruth said. 'Now put Bryant on.'

Bryant was dazed but able to give a clearer picture of what had happened. It still sounded crazy, but then, what else was new in Haven these days? After the magic show, the audience had wandered away, leaving Hilly and David to clean up. Now David was gone. Hilly had fainted, and now had no memory of what had happened that afternoon at all. All he knew for sure was that when he saw David, he had to give him all the G.I. Joes. But he didn't remember why.

'You better come over quick as you can,' Bryant said.

Going out, she paused for a moment on her way to her Dart and looked at Haven Village's main street with real hate. What have you done now? she thought. Goddam you, what have you done now?

2

With only two hours of good daylight left, Ruth wasted no time. She gathered Bryant, Ev Hillman, John Golden from just down the road, and Henry Applegate, Barney's father, in the Browns' back yard. Marie wanted to join the search party, but Ruth insisted she stay with Hilly. In her current frame of mind, Marie would be more hindrance than help. They had already searched, of course, but they had gone at it in a distracted, half-assed way. Eventually, as the boy's parents became convinced that David must have wandered across the road and into the woods, they had really ceased to search at all, although they had continued to move aimlessly around.

Ruth got some from what they said; some from the oddly distracted, oddly frightened way they looked; most from their minds.

Their two minds: the human one and the alien one. Always there came a point where the becoming might degenerate into madness – the madness of schizophrenia as the target minds tried to fight the alien group mind slowly welding them together … and then eclipsing them. This was the time of necessary acceptance. Thus, it was the time of the dance of untruth.

Mabel Noyes might have set it going, but she was not loved enough to make people dance. The Hillmans and the Browns were. They went far back in Haven's history, were well-loved and well-respected.

And, of course, David Brown was only a little boy.

The human net-mind, its 'Ruth-mind,' one might say, thought: He could have wandered into the high grass of the Browns' back field and fallen asleep. More likely than Marie's idea that he went into the woods – he'd have to cross the road to do that, and he was well-behaved. Marie and Bryant both say so. More important, so do the others. He'd been told again and again and again that he was never to cross the road without a grownup, so the woods don't seem likely.

'We're going to cover the lawn and back field section by section,' Ruth said. 'And we're not just going to walk around; we're going to look.'

'But if we don't find him?' Bryant's eyes were scared and pleading. 'If we don't find him, Ruth?'

She didn't really have to tell him; she only had to think it at him. If they didn't find David quickly, she would begin making calls. There would be a much larger search party – men with lights and bullhorns moving through the woods. If David wasn't found by morning, she would call Orval Davidson up in Unity and have him bring his bloodhounds. This was a familiar enough procedure to most of them. They knew about search parties, and most had been on them before; they were common enough during hunting season, when the woods filled up with out-of-staters carrying their heavy-caliber weapons and wearing their new orange flannel duds from L. L. Bean's. Usually these lost were found alive, suffering from nothing but mild exposure and severe embarrassment.

But sometimes they found them dead.

And sometimes they never found them at all.

They would not find David Brown, and they knew it long before the search began. Their minds had netted together as soon as Ruth arrived. This was an act of instinct as involuntary as a blink. They linked minds and searched for

David's. Their mental voices united in a chorus so strong that if David had been in a radius of seventy miles, he would have clapped his hands to his head and screamed in pain. He would have heard and known they were looking for him at fives times that distance.

No, David Brown was not lost. He was just … not-there.

But because it was the Tommyknocker-mind which knew this, and because they still thought of themselves as 'human beings,' they would begin the dance of untruth.

The becoming would demand many lies.

This one, the one they told themselves, the one that insisted they were really the same as ever, was the most important lie of all.

They all knew that, too. Even Ruth McCausland.

3

By eight-thirty, with dusk growing too thick to be much different from night, the five searchers had grown to a dozen. The news traveled quickly – a little too quickly to be normal. They covered all the yards and fields on the Browns' side, beginning at Hilly's stage (Ruth herself had crawled under there with a powerful flashlight, thinking that if David Brown was anywhere close by it should be here, fast asleep -but there was only flattened grass and a queer electrical smell that made her wrinkle her nose) and expanding the hunt outward in a beam-shape from there.

'You think he's in the woods, Ruth?' Casey Tremain asked.

'He must be,' she answered tiredly. Her head ached again. David was

(not-there)

no more in the woods than the President of the United States was. All the same…

In the back of her mind, tongue-twisters chased each other as restlessly as squirrels running on wire exercise wheels.

The dusk was not so thick she couldn't see Bryant Brown put a hand to his face and turn away from the others. There was a moment of awkward silence which Ruth finally broke.

'We need more men.'

'State cops, Ruth?' Casey asked.

She saw them all looking at her, their faces still and sober.

(no Ruth no)

(outsiders no outsiders we'll take care)

(take care of this business we don't need outsiders while)

(while we shed our old skins put on our new skins while)

(we 'become')

(if he's in the woods we'll hear him he'll call)

(call with his mind)

(no outsiders Ruth shhhh shhhh for your life Ruth we)

(we all love you but no outsiders)

These voices, rising in her mind, rising in the still, humid dark: she looked and saw only dark shapes and white faces, shapes and faces that for a moment barely seemed human. How many of you still have your teeth? Ruth McCausland thought hysterically.

She opened her mouth, thinking she might scream, but her voice sounded – at least to her own ears – normal and natural. In her mind, the tongue-twisters

(pretty Patsy picked some Betty Bitter bought some)

turned faster than ever.

'I don't think we need them just now, Casey, do you?'

Casey looked at her, a little puzzled.

'Well, I guess that'd be up to you, Ruth.'

'Fine,' she said. 'Henry … John … you others. Make some calls. I want fifty woods-wise men and women here before we go in. Everyone who shows up at the Browns' has got to have a flashlight with him or he's not going near those woods. We've got a little boy lost; we don't need to add any grown men or women.'

As she spoke, authority grew in her voice; the shaky fear lessened. They looked at her respectfully.

'I'll call Adley McKeen and Dick Allison. Bryant, go back and tell Marie to put on lots of coffee. It's going to be a long night.'

They moved off in different directions, the men who had calls to make headed in the direction of Henry Applegate's house. The Browns' was nearer, but the situation had become worse and none of them wanted to go there just now. Not while Bryant was telling his wife that Ruth McCausland had decided their four-year-old son was probably lost in the

(not-there)

big woods after all.

Ruth was overwhelmed with weariness. She wished she could believe she was just going mad; if she could believe that, everything would be easier.

'Ruth?'

She looked up. Ev Hillman was standing there, his thin white hair flying around his skull. He looked troubled and afraid.

'Hilly's doped off again. His eyes are open, but -' He shrugged.

'I'm very sorry,' Ruth said.

'I'm takin' him to Derry. Bryant 'n' Marie want to stay here, o' course.'

'Why not Dr Warwick to start with?'

'Derry seems a better idea, that's all.' Ev looked at Ruth unwinkingly. His eyes were old man's eyes, red-rimmed, rheumy, their blue faded to something which was almost no color at all. Faded but not stupid. And Ruth suddenly realized, with a wallop of excitement that nearly rocked her head back on her neck, that she could barely read him at all! Whatever was happening here in Haven, Ev, like Bobbi's friend, was exempt. It was going on around him, and he knew about it – some – but he was not a part of it.

She felt an excitement which was followed by bitter envy.

'I think he'll be better off out of town. Don't you, Ruthie?'

'Yes,' she said slowly, thinking of those rising voices, thinking for the last time of how David was not-there and then pushing the lunatic idea away forever. Of course he was. Were they not human? They were. Were. But…

'Yes, I suppose he will.'

'You could come with us, Ruthie.'

She looked at him for a long time. 'Did Hilly do something, Ev? I see his name in your head. I can't see anything else – just that. Winking on and off like a neon sign.'

He looked at her, seemingly unsurprised by her tacit admission that she -sensible Ruth McCausland – was either reading his mind or believed she was.

'Maybe. He acts like he did. This … this half-swoon he's in … if that's what it is … could be he did something he's sorry for now. If so, it wasn't his fault, Ruthie. Whatever's going on here in Haven … that was what really did it.'

A screen door banged. She looked over toward the Applegates' and saw several of the men on their way back.

Ev glanced around and then looked back at Ruth.

'Come with us, Ruth.'

'And leave my town? Ev, I can't.'

'All right. If Hilly should remember .

'Get in touch with me,' she said.

'If I can,' Ev muttered. 'They can make it tough, Ruthie.'

'Yes,' Ruth said. 'I know they can.'

'They're coming, Ruth,' Henry Applegate said, and fixed Ev Hillman with a cold, appraising look. 'Lots of good folks.'

'Fine,' Ruth said.

Ev looked unwinkingly back at Applegate for a moment and then moved away. An hour or so later, while Ruth was organizing the searchers and getting them ready for their first sweep, she saw Ev's old Valiant back down the Browns' driveway and turn toward Bangor. A small, dark shape – Hilly – was propped up in the passenger seat like a department-store mannequin.

Good luck, you two, Ruth thought. She wished – achingly! – that she was also on her way out of this feverish nightmare.

When the old man's car disappeared over the first hill, Ruth looked around and saw some twenty-five men and half a dozen women, some on this side of the road, some on the other. They were all standing motionless, simply watching

(loving)

her. Again she thought their shapes were changing, twisting, becoming inhuman; they were 'becoming,' all right, they were becoming something she didn't even dare think of … and so was she.

'What are you gawking at?' she called out, too shrilly. 'Come on! Let's try to find David Brown.!'

4

They didn't find him that night, nor on Monday, which was a hot white beating silence. Bobbi Anderson and her friend were part of the search; the roar of the digging machinery behind the old Garrick farm had stopped for a while. The friend, Gardener, looked pale and ill and hungover. Ruth doubted if he'd make it through the day when she first saw him. If he showed signs of dropping out of his place in the sweep, leaving a hole which could conceivably have caused them to overlook the lost boy, Ruth would send him back to Bobbi's right away … but he kept up, hungover or not.

By then, Ruth herself had already suffered a minor collapse, laboring under the double strain of trying to find David and resist the creeping changes in her own mind.

She had snatched two hours of uneasy sleep before dawn on Monday morning, then went back out, drinking cup after cup of coffee and bumming more and more cigarettes. There was no question in her mind of bringing in outside help. If she did, the outsiders would become aware very quickly – within hours, she thought – that Haven had changed its name to Weirdsville. The Haven lifestyle – so to speak -rather than the missing boy would rapidly become the source of their attention. And then David would be lost for good.

The heat continued long after sundown. There was distant thunder but no breeze, no rain. Heat lightning flickered. In the thickets and blowdowns and choked second growth, mosquitoes hummed and buzzed. Branches crackled. Men cursed as they stumbled through wet places or clambered over deadfalls. Flashlight beams zigzagged aimlessly. There was a sense of urgency but not of cooperation; there were, in fact, several fistfights before Monday midnight. Mental communication had not fostered a sense of peace and harmony in Haven; in fact, it seemed to have done exactly the opposite. Ruth kept them moving as best she could.

Then, shortly after midnight – early Tuesday morning, that would have been – the world simply swam away from her. It went fast, like a big fish that looks lazy until it gives a sudden powerful flick of its tail and disappears. She saw the flashlight tumble out of her fingers. It was like watching something happen in a movie. She felt the hot sweat on her cheeks and forehead suddenly turn chilly. The increasingly vicious headache that had racked her all day broke with a sudden painless pop. She heard this, as if, in the center of her brain, someone had pulled the string on a noisemaker. For a moment she could actually see brightly colored crepe streamers drifting down through the twisted gray channels of her cerebellum. Then her knees buckled. Ruth fell forward into a tangle of shrubs. She could see thorns in the slanted glow of her flashlight, long and cruel-looking, but the bushes felt as comfy as goosedown pillows.

She tried to call out and could not.

They heard anyway.

Feet approaching. Beams crissing and crossing. Someone

(Jud Tarkington)

bumped into someone else

(Hank Buck)

and a momentary hateful exchange flared between them

(you stay out of my way, strawfoot)

(I'll thump you with this light Buck swear to God I will)

then the thoughts focused on her with real and undeniable

(we all love you Ruth)

sweetness – but oh, it was a grasping sweetness, and it frightened her. Hands touched her, turned her over, and

(we all love you and we'll help you 'become'),

lifted her gently.

(And I love you, too … now please, find him. Concentrate on that, concentrate on David Brown. Don't fight, don't argue.)

(we all love you Ruth … )

She saw that some of them were weeping, just as she saw (although she didn't want to) that others were snarling, lifting and dropping their lips, then lifting them again, like dogs about to fight.

5

Ad McKeen took her home and Hazel McCready put her to bed. She drifted off into wild, confused dreams. The only one she could remember when she woke up Tuesday morning was an image of David Brown gasping out the last of his life in an almost airless void – he was lying on black earth beneath a black sky filled with glaring stars, earth that was hard and parched and cracked. She saw blood burst from the membranes of his mouth and nose, saw his eyes burst, and that was when she came awake, sitting up in bed, gasping.

She called the town hall. Hazel answered. Just about every other ablebodied man and woman in town was out in the woods, Hazel said, searching. But if they didn't find him by tomorrow … Hazel didn't finish.

Ruth rejoined the search, which had now moved ten miles into the woods, at ten o'clock on Tuesday morning.

Newt Berringer took a look at her and said, 'You got

(no business being out, Ruth)

land you know it,' he finished aloud.

'It is my business, Newt,' she said with uncharacteristic curtness. 'Now leave me alone to get about it.'

She stayed with it all that long, sweltering afternoon, calling until she was too hoarse to speak. When twilight began to come down again, she allowed Beach Jernigan to ferry her back to town. There was something under a tarp in the back of Beach's truck. She had no idea what it was, and didn't want to know. She wanted desperately to stay in the woods, but her strength was failing and she was afraid that if she collapsed again, they wouldn't let her come back. She would force herself to eat, then sleep six hours or so.

She made herself a ham sandwich and passed up the coffee she really wanted for a glass of milk. She went up to the schoolroom, sat down, and put her small meal on her desk. She sat looking at her dolls. They looked back at her with their glassy eyes.

No more laughing, no more fun, she thought. Quaker meeting has begun. If you show your teeth or tongue …

The thought drifted away.

She blinked – not awake, precisely, but back to reality – sometime later and looked at her watch. Her eyes widened. She had brought her small meal up here at eight-thirty. There they still were, near at hand, but it was now a quarter past eleven.

And – and some of the dolls had been moved around.

The German boy in his alpine shorts and lederhosen was leaning against the Effanbee lady-doll instead of sitting between the Japanese doll in her kimono and the Indian doll in her sari. Ruth got up, her heart beating too fast and too hard. The Hopi kachina doll was sitting on the lap of a burlap Haitian vudun doll with white crosses for eyes. And the Russian moss-man was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, his head wrenched to one side like the head of a gallows-corpse.

Who's been moving my dolls around? Who's been in here?

She looked around wildly and for a moment her frightened, confused mind fully expected to see the child-beater Elmer Haney standing in the shadowy space of the big upstairs room that had been Ralph's study, smiling his sunken, stupid grin. I told you, woman: you are nothing but a meddling cunt.

Nothing. No one.

Who's been in here? Who's been moving

We moved ourselves, dear.

A sly, tittering voice.

One hand went to her mouth. Her eyes widened. And then she saw the jagged letters sprawling and lurching across the blackboard. They had been made with so much force that the chalk had broken several times; untidy chunks of it lay in the chalk-gutter.

DAVID BROWN IS ON ALTAIR 4

What? What? What does that -

It means he's gone too far, the kachina doll said, and suddenly green light seemed to sweat out of its cottonwood pores. As she looked at it, numb with terror, its wooden face split open in a sinister, yawning grin. A dead cricket fell out of it and struck the floor with a dry desert click. Gone too far, too far, too far …

No, I don't believe that! Ruth screamed.

The whole town, Ruth … gone too far … too far … too far …

No!

Lost … lost …

The eyes of the Greiner papier mache doll suddenly filled with that liquid green fire. You're lost, too, it said. You're just as crazy as the rest now. David Brown's just an excuse to stay here …

No

But all of her dolls were stirring now, that green fire moving from one to the other until her schoolroom flared with that light. It was waxing and waning, and she thought with sick horror that it was like being inside some ghastly emerald heart.

They stared at her with their glazey eyes and at last she understood why the dolls had frightened Edwina Thurlow so badly.

Now it was the voices of her dolls rising in that autumn-leafy swirl, whispering slyly, rattling among themselves, rattling to her … but these were the voices of the town, too, and Ruth McCausland knew it.

She thought they were perhaps the last of the town's sanity … and of her own.

Something has to be done, Ruth. It was the china bisque doll, fire dripping from its mouth; it was the voice of Beach Jernigan.

Have to warn someone. It was the French poupee with its rubbery guttapercha body; it was the voice of Hazel McCready.

But they'll never let you out now, Ruth. It was the Nixon doll, his stuffed fingers raised in twin Vs, speaking in the voice of John Enders down at the grammar school. They could, but that would be wrong.

They love you, Ruth, but if you try to leave now they'll kill you. You know that, don't you? Her 1910 Kewpie doll with its rubber head like an inverted teardrop; this voice was Justin Hurd's.

Have to send a signal.

Signal, Ruth, yes, and you know how

Use us, we can show you how, we know

She took a shambling step backward, her hands going to her ears, as if she could shut out the voices that way. Her mouth twisted. She was terrified, and what frightened her most was how she ever could have mistaken these voices, with their twisted truths, for sanity. All of Haven's concentrated madness was here, right now.

Signal, use us, we can show you how, we know, and you WANT to know, the town hall, Ruth, the clock tower

The rustling voices took up the chant: The town hall, Ruth! Yes! Yes, that's it! The town hall! The town hall! Yes!

Stop it! she screamed. Stop it, stop it, oh please won't you

And then, for the first time since she was eleven and had passed out after winning the Girls' Mile Race at the Methodist Summer Picnic, Ruth McCausland fainted dead away.

6

Sometime early during the night she regained some soupy version of consciousness and stumbled downstairs to her bedroom without looking back. She was, in fact, afraid to look back. She was dully aware that her head was throbbing, as it had on the few occasions when she had drunk too much and awakened with a hangover. She was also aware that the old Victorian house was rocking and creaking like an old schooner in heavy weather. While Ruth had lain senseless on the schoolroom floor, terrible thunderstorms racked central and eastern Maine. A cold front from the midwest had finally bulled its way into New England, pushing out the still sink of heat and humidity that had covered the area for the last week and a half. The change in the weather was accompanied by terrible thunderstorms in some places. Haven was spared the worst of these, but the power was out again and would remain so for several days this time.

But the fact of the power outage wasn't the important thing; Haven had its own unique power sources now. The important thing was simply that the weather had changed. When that happened, Ruth wasn't the only person in Haven to wake up with a horrible hangover sort of headache.

Everyone in town, from the oldest to the youngest, woke up feeling the same way as the strong winds blew the tainted air east, sending it out over the ocean, fragmenting it into harmless tatters.

7

Ruth slept until one o'clock Wednesday afternoon. She got up with the lingering remains of her headache, but two Anacin took care of that. By five she felt better than she had for a long time. Her body ached and her muscles were stiff, but these were minor matters compared to the things that had troubled her since the beginning of July, and they could not cut into her sense of well-being at all. Even her fear for David Brown couldn't spoil it completely.

On Main Street, everyone she passed had a peculiar dazed look in his or her eye, as though they had all just awakened from a spell cast by a fairy-tale witch.

Ruth went to her office in the town hall, enjoying the way the wind lifted her hair from her temples, the way the clouds moved across a sky that was a deep, crisp blue: a sky that looked almost autumnal. She saw a couple of kids flying a box kite in the big field behind the grammar school and actually laughed aloud.

But there was no laughing later as she spoke to a small group she quickly gathered – Haven's three selectmen, the town manager, and, of course, Bryant and Marie Brown. Ruth began by apologizing for not having called the state police and wardens before now, or even reporting the boy's disappearance. She had believed, she said, that they would find David quickly, probably the first night, certainly the next day. She knew that was no excuse, but it was why she had allowed it to happen. It had been, she said, the worst mistake she had made in her years as Haven's constable and if David Brown had suffered for it … she would never forgive herself.

Bryant just nodded, dazed and distant and ill-looking. Marie, however, reached across the table and took her hand.

'You're not to blame yourself,' she said softly. 'There were other circumstances. We all know that.' The others nodded.

I can't hear their minds anymore, Ruth realized suddenly, and her mind responded: Could you ever, Ruth? Really? Or was that a hallucination brought on by your worry over David Brown?

Yes, Yes, I could.

It would be easier to believe it had been a hallucination, but that wasn't the truth. And realizing that, she realized something else: she could still do it. It was like hearing a faint roaring sound in a conch shell, that sound children mistake for the ocean. She had no idea what their thoughts were, but she was still hearing them. Were they hearing her?

ARE YOU STILL THERE? she shouted as loudly as she could.

Marie Brown's hand went to her temple, as if she had felt a sudden stab of pain. Newt Berringer frowned deeply. Hazel McCready, who had been doodling on the pad in front of her, looked up as if Ruth had spoken aloud.

Oh yes, they still hear me.

'Whatever happened, right or wrong, is done now,' Ruth said. 'It's time – and overtime – that I contacted the state police about David. Do I have your approval to take this step?'

Under normal circumstances, it never would have crossed her mind that she should ask them a question like that. After all, they paid her pittance of a salary to answer questions, not ask them.

But things were different in Haven now. Fresh breeze and clear air or not, things were still different in Haven now.

They looked at her, surprised and a little shocked.

Now the voices came back to her clearly: No, Ruth, no … no outsiders … we'll take care … we don't need any outsiders while we 'become' .

shhh … for your life, Ruth … shhh …

Outside, the wind blew a particularly hard gust. rattling the windows of Ruth's office. Adley McKeen looked toward the sound … they all did. then Adley smiled a puzzled, peculiar little smile. .

'O'course, Ruth,' he said. 'If you think it's time to notify the staties, you got to go ahead. We trust your judgment, don't we?'

The others agreed.

The weather had changed. the wind was blowing, and by Wednesday afternoon, the state police were in charge of the search for David Brown. That night his picture was shown statewide on 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 search; Ruth's report, detailed and complete as always, made it clear that David Brown, four, could hardly have wandered outside their search area unless he'd been abducted -a possibility they would now have to consider. Her report was accompanied by topographical maps. These were annotated in her careful, no-nonsense handwriting, and made it clear she had conducted the search thoroughly.

'Careful and thorough you were, Ruthie,' Monster Dugan told her that evening. His brow was furrowed in a frown so huge each line looked like an earthquake fissure. 'You always have been. But I never knew you to pull a John Wayne stunt like this before.'

'Butch, I'm sorry

'Yeah, well . . .' He shrugged. 'Done is done, huh?'

'Yes,' she said, and smiled wanly. lt had been one of Ralph's favorite sayings.

Butch asked a lot of questions, but not the one she needed to answer* Ruth, what's wrong in Haven? The high winds had cleansed the town's atmosphere; none of the outsiders sensed anything was wrong.

But the winds hadn't ended the trouble. The bad magic was still going on. Whatever it was, it seemed to continue by itself after a certain point. Ruth guessed that point had been reached. She wondered what a team of doctors, conducting mass physicals in Haven, might find. Iron shortages in the women? Men with suddenly receding hairlines? Improved visual acuity (especially peripheral vision) matched by a surprisingly high loss of teeth? People who seemed so bright they were spooky, so in tune with you they almost seemed to be – ha-ha – reading your mind?

Ruth herself lost two more teeth Wednesday night. One she found on her pillow Thursday morning, a grotesquely middle-aged offering to the tooth fairy. The other was nowhere to be found. She supposed she had swallowed it. Not that it mattered.

The compulsion to blow up the town hall became a maddening mental poison ivy, itching at her brain all the time. The doll-voices whispered and whispered. On Friday she made a final effort to save herself.

She determined to leave town after all – it was not hers anymore. She guessed that staying even this long had been one of the traps the Tommyknockers had laid for her – and, like the David Brown trap, she had blundered into it, as confused as a rabbit in a snare.

She thought her old Dodge wouldn't start. They would have fixed it. But it did.

Then she thought she would not be allowed out of Haven Village, that they would stop her, smiling like Moonies and sending their endless rustly we-all-love-you-Ruth thoughts. She wasn't.

She rolled down Main Street and out into the country, sitting bolt upright and white-knuckled, a graven smile on her face, tongue-twisters

(she sells pickled peppers bitter butter)

flying through her head. She felt her gaze being pulled toward the town-hall clock tower

(a signal Ruth send)

(yes the explosion the lovely)

(bang blow it blow it all the way to Altair-4 Ruth)

and resisted with all her might. This compulsion to blow up the town hall to call attention to what was going on here was insane. lt was like setting your house on fire to roast a chicken.

She felt better when the brick tower was out of sight.

once on Derry Road, she had to resist an urge, to get the Dart moving as fast as it would go (which, considering its years, was still surprisingly fast). She felt like a lucky escapee from a den of lions – one who has escaped more by good luck than good sense. As the village dropped behind her and those rustling voices fell away, she began to feel that someone must be giving belated chase.

She glanced again and again into the rearview mirror, expecting to see vehicles chasing after her, wanting to bring her back. They would insist that she come back.

They loved her too much to let her go.

But the road had remained clear. No Dick Allison screaming after her in one of the town's three fire engines. No Newt Berringer in his big old mint-green Olds-88. No Bobby Tremain in his yellow Dodge Challenger.

As she approached the Haven-Albion town line, she put the Dart up to fifty. The closer she got to the town line – which she had begun to think of, rightly or not, as the point at which her escape would become irrevocable, the more she found the last two weeks seeming like some black, twisted nightmare.

Can't go back. Can't.

Her foot on the Dart's accelerator pedal kept growing heavier.

At the end, something warned her – perhaps it was something the voices had said and her subconscious had filed away. She was, after all, receiving all sorts of information now, in her sleep as well as when she was awake. As the town-line marker came up

A

L

B

I

O

N

– her foot left the Dart's gas pedal and stepped on the brake. lt went down mushily and much too far, as it had for the last four years or so. Ruth allowed the car to roll off the tar and onto the shoulder. Dust, as white and dry as bone meal, plumed up behind her. The wind had died. The air of Haven was deadly still again. The dust she had raised, Ruth thought, would hang for a long time.

She sat with her hands curled tightly on the wheel, wondering why she had stopped.

Wondering. Almost knowing. Beginning

(to 'become)

to know. Or guess.

A barrier? Is that what you think? That they've put up a barrier? That they've managed to turn all of Haven into a . . . an ant-farm, or something under a bowl? Ruth, that's ridiculous!

And so it was, not only according to logic and experience, but according to the evidence of her senses. As she sat behind the wheel, listening to the radio (soft jazz which was coming from a low-power college station in Bergenfield, New Jersey), a Hillcrest chicken truck, probably bound for Derry, rumbled past her. A few seconds later, a Chevy Vega went by in the other direction. Nancy Voss was behind the wheel. The sticker on the rear bumper read:

POSTAL WORKERS DO IT BY EXPRESS MAIL.

Nancy Voss did not look at Ruth, simply went along her way – which this case probably meant Augusta.

See? Nothing stopping them. Ruth thought.

No, her mind whispered back. Not them, Ruth. Just you. lt would stop you, and it would stop Bobbi Anderson's friend, maybe one or two others. Go on! Drive right into it at fifty miles an hour or so, if you don't believe it! We all love you, and we would hate to see it happen to you … but we wouldn't – couldn't – stop it from happening.

Instead of driving, she got out and walked up to the Haven-Albion line. Her shadow trailed long behind her; the hot July sun beat down on her head. She could hear the dim but steady rumble of machinery from the woods behind Bobbi's place. Digging again. The David Brown vacation was over. And she sensed that they were getting close to … well, to something. This brought a dim sense of mingled panic and urgency.

She approached the marker … passed it … kept walking … and began to feel a wild, rising hope. She was out of Haven. She was in Albion. In a moment she would run, screaming, to the nearest house, the nearest telephone. She

– slowed.

A puzzled look settled upon her face … and then deepened into a dawning, horrified certainty.

It was getting hard to walk. The air was becoming tough, springy. She could feel it stretching her cheeks, the skin of her forehead; she could feel it flattening her breasts.

Ruth lowered her head and continued to walk, her mouth drawn down in a grimace of effort, cords standing out on her neck. She looked like a woman trying to walk into a gale-force wind, although the trees on either side of the road were barely swaying their leaves. The image which came to her now and the one which had come to Gardener when he tried to reach into the bottom of Anderson's customized water heater were exactly the same; they differed only in degree. Ruth felt as if the entire road had been blocked by an invisible nylon stocking, one large enough to fit a female Titan. I've heard about nude-look hose, she thought hysterically, but really, this is ridiculous.

Her breasts began to ache from the pressure. And suddenly her feet began to slip in the dirt. Panic slapped at her. She had reached, then passed the point where her ability to generate forward motion surpassed the elastic give of the invisible barrier. Now it was shoving her back out.

She struggled to turn, to get out on her own before that could happen, but she lost her footing and was snapped rudely back the way she had come, her feet scraping, her eyes wide and shocked. lt was like being pushed by the expanding side of a large, rubbery balloon.

For a moment her feet left the ground entirely. Then she landed on her knees, scraping them both badly, tearing her dress. She got up and backed toward her car, crying a little with the pain.

She sat behind the wheel of her car for almost twenty minutes, waiting for the throbbing in her knees to subside. Cars and trucks passed occasionally along Derry Road in both directions, and once as she sat there, Ashley Ruvall came along on his bike. He had his fishing pole. He saw her and raised a hand to her.

'Hi, Mithuth McCauthland!' he cried chirpily, and grinned. The lisp wasn't really surprising, she thought dully, considering that all of the boy's teeth were gone. Not some; all.

Still, she felt coldness rush through her as Ashley called: 'We all love you, Mithuth McCauthland . . .'

After a long time she backed the Dart up, U-turned, and went back through the hot silence to Haven Village. As she drove up Main Street to her house, it seemed that a great many people looked at her, their eyes full of a knowledge more sly than wise.

Ruth looked up into the Dart's rearview mirror and saw the clock tower at the other end of the village's short Main Street.

The hands were approaching three P.M.

She pulled to a stop in front of the Fannins', bumping carelessly up over the curb and stalling the engine. She didn't bother to turn off the key. She only sat behind the wheel, red idiot-lights glowing on the instrument panel, looking into the rearview mirror as her mind floated gently away. When she came back to herself, the town-hall clock was chiming six. She had lost three hours . . . and another tooth. The hours were nowhere to be found, but the tooth, an incisor, lay on the lap of her dress.

12

All that night her dolls talked to her. And she thought that none of what they said was precisely a lie … that was the most horrible thing of all. She sat in the green, diseased heart of their influence and listened to them tell their lunatic fairy tales.

They told her she was right to believe she was going crazy; an X-ray of her brain, they said, one of anyone in Haven, for that matter, would make a neurologist run screaming for cover. Her brain was changing. lt was . . . 'becoming.'

Her brain, her teeth – oh, excuse me, make that ex-teeth – both 'becoming.' And her eyes … they were changing color, weren't they? Yes. Their deep brown was fading toward hazel … and the other day, in the Haven Lunch, hadn't she noticed that Beach Jernigan's bright blue eyes were also changing color? Deepening toward hazel?

Hazel eyes … no teeth … oh dear God what's happening to us?

The dolls looked at her glassily, and smiled.

Don't worry, Ruth, it's only the invasion from space they've made cheap movies about for years. You see that, don't you? The Invasion of the Tommyknockers. If you want to see the invaders from space the B movies and the science-fiction stories were always going on about, look in Beach Jernigan's eyes. Or Wendy's. Or your own.

'What you mean is that I'm being eaten up,' she whispered in the summer darkness as Friday night became Saturday morning.

Why, Ruth! What did you think 'becoming' was? the dolls laughed, and Ruth's mind mercifully floated away once again.

13

When she woke on Saturday morning the sun was up, the shaky child's drawing of the town-hall clock tower was on the schoolroom blackboard, and there were better than two dozen calculators on Ralph's sheeted study desk. They were in the canvas shoulder-bag she used when she went out collecting for the Cancer Society. There were Dymotapes on some of the calculators. BERRINGER. HAZEL MCCREADY. SELECTMAN'S OFFICE DO NOT REMOVE. DEPT. OF TAXES. She hadn't gone to sleep after all. Instead, she had drifted into one of those blank periods. While it was going on, she had looted all the town offices' calculators, it looked like.

Why?

Yours not to reason why, Ruth, the dolls whispered, and she understood better and better each day, better and better each minute, each second, in fact, what had frightened little Edwina Thurlow so badly. Yours is but to send a signal … and die.

How much of that idea is mine? And how much is them, driving me?

Doesn't matter, Ruth. It's going to happen anyway, so make it happen as fast and hard and soon as you can. Stop thinking. Let it happen … because part of you wants it to happen, doesn't it?

Yes. Most of her, in fact. And not to send a signal to the outside world, or any silly bullshit like that; that was just the sane icing on a rich devil's food cake of irrationality.

She wanted to be a part of it as it all went up.

The cardboard tubes would channel the force, send it up into the clock tower in a bright river of destructive power, and the tower would lift off like a rocket; the shockwave would hammer the street of this fouled Haven with destruction and destruction was what she wanted; that want was part of her 'becoming.'

14

That night, Butch Dugan called her to update her on the David Brown case. Some of the developments were unusual. The boy's brother, Hillman, was in the hospital, in a state which closely resembled catatonia. The kid's grandfather wasn't much better. He had begun telling people that David Brown hadn't just gotten lost, but had actually disappeared. That the magic trick, in other words, had been real. And, Butch said, he was telling anyone who would listen that half the people in Haven were going crazy and the rest were already there.

'He went up to Bangor and talked to a fellow named Bright on the News,' Monster said. 'They wanted human interest and got nut stuff instead. Old man's turning into a real quasar, Ruth.'

'Better tell him to stay away,' Ruth said. 'They'll let him in, but he'll never get out again.'

'What?' Monster shouted. His voice was suddenly becoming faint. 'This connection's going to hell, Ruth.'

'I said there may be something new tomorrow. I still haven't given up hope.' She rubbed her temples steadily and looked at the dolls, in a row on Ralph's desk and wired up like a terrorist's bomb. 'Look for a signal tomorrow.'

'What?' Monster's voice was almost lost in the rising surf of the worsening connection.

'Goodbye, Butch. You're a hell of a sport. Listen for it. You'll hear it all the way up in Derry, I think. Three on the nose.'

'Ruth I'm losing you … call back … soon . . .'

She hung up the useless telephone, looked at her dolls, listened to the rising voices, and waited for it to be time.

15

That Sunday was a picture-book summer day in Maine: clear, bright, warm. At a quarter to one, Ruth McCausland, dressed in a pretty blue summer frock, left her house for the last time. She locked the front door, and stood on tiptoe to hang the key on the little hook there. Ralph had argued that any burglar worth his salt would look over the door for a key first thing of all, but Ruth had gone on doing it, and the house had never been burgled. She supposed, at bottom, it came down to trust … and Haven had never let her down. She had put the dolls in Ralph's old canvas duffel. She dragged it down the porch steps.

Bobby Tremain was walking by, whistling. 'Help you with that, Missus McCausland?'

'No thank you, Bobby.'

'All right.' He smiled at her. A few teeth were left in his smile – not many, but a few, like the last remaining pickets in a fence surrounding a haunted house. 'We all love you.'

'Yes,' she said, hoisting the duffel into the passenger seat. A bolt of pain ripped through her head. 'Oh how well I know it.'

(what are you thinking Ruth where are you going)

(she sells seashells she sells seashells)

(tell us Ruth tell us what the dolls told you to do)

(Betty Bitter bought some butter)

(give Ruth tell is it what we want or are you holding out)

(wouldn't you like to know Peter Piper Peter Piper)

(it's what we want, isn't it? there are no changes, are there?)

She looked at Bobby for a moment and then smiled. Bobby Tremain's own smile faltered a little.

(love me? yes … but you are all still afraid of me, and are right to be)

'Go on, Bobby,' she said softly, and Bobby went. He looked back over his shoulder once, his young face troubled, mistrusting.

Ruth drove to the town hall.

It was Sunday-silent, a dusty church of administration. Her footfalls clicked and echoed. The duffel was too heavy to carry so she dragged it along the waxed hall floor. lt made a dry snakelike hiss. She hauled it up three flights of stairs, one riser at a time, her hands fisted around the cord that shut the duffel's mouth. Her head pumped and ached. She bit her lip and two teeth heeled over sideways with soft rottenness and she spat them out. Her breath was harsh straw in her throat. Dusty sunlight fell through the high third-floor windows.

She dragged the bag down the short, explosively hot corridor … there were only two rooms up here, one on each side. All the town's records were stored in them. If the town hall was Haven's brain, then here, in this still attic heat, was its paper memory, stretching back through the times the town had been Ilium, Montgomery, Coodersville, Montville Plantation.

The voices whispered and rustled around her.

For a moment she stood looking out of the last window, looking down on the short length of Main Street. There were maybe fifteen cars parked in front of Cooder's market, which was open from noon until six on Sundays – it was doing a brisk business. People sauntering into the Haven Lunch for coffee. A few cars passing back and forth.

It looks so normal … it all looks so damned normal!

She felt a giddy moment of doubt . . . and then Moose Richardson looked up and waved, as if he could see her, looking out of this dirty third-floor window.

And Moose wasn't the only one. Lots of them were looking at her.

She ducked back, turned, and got the window pole which stood in the far corner, where the hallway dead-ended. She used the pole to hook a ring in the middle of the ceiling and pull down the folding stairs. That done, she set the pole aside and bent back, looking up into the tower. She could hear the mechanical rattle and whir of clockwork, and below that, the dim rustle of sleeping bats. There were a lot of them up there. The town should have cleaned them out years ago, but the fumigation was apt to be nasty … and expensive. When the clock machinery broke down again, the bats would have to be cleared out before it could be fixed. That would surely be soon enough. As far as the selectmen were concerned, as long as someone else was in office when the clock rang twelve noon some night at three in the morning and then just stopped going, all would be well.

Ruth wound the duffel's cotton cord around her arm three times and began to climb slowly up the ladder, dragging the bag between her legs. lt bumped and rose in jerks, like a body in a canvas sack. The cord bit into her arm ever more deeply, and soon her hand had gone purple and numb. She breathed in long, tearing gasps that hurt something deep inside her chest.

At last, shadows enveloped her. She stepped off the ladder and into the town hall's real attic and pulled the duffel up, hand over hand. Ruth was dimly aware that her gums and ears had started to bleed and her mouth was full of the sour, coppery taste of blood.

All around her she could smell the crypt-stink of old brick fuming in dry, dark, pent-up summer heat. To her left was a vast, dim circle: the back side of the clock-face which overlooked Main Street. In a more prosperous town, no doubt all four sides would have had a face; Haven's town-hall tower had only the one. lt was twelve feet in diameter. Behind it, dimmer yet, she could see wheels and cogs slowly turning. She could see where the hammer would come down and strike the bell. The dent there was deep and ancient. The clock's works were very loud.

Working swiftly, jerkily – she was like a clock herself, now, a clock that was running down, and her belfry was certainly full of bats, wasn't it? – Ruth unwound the cotton cord from her arm, actually peeling it out of a deep, spiraling groove in her flesh, and opened the mouth of the duffel. She began taking the dolls out one by one, moving as fast as she could. She laid them in a circle, legs out so that the feet maintained contact all around the circle, hands the same way. In the darkness they looked like dolls conducting a seance.

She attached the M-16 to the center of the dented place on the great bell. When the hour struck and the hammer fell

Boom.

So I will just sit here, she thought. Sit here and wait for the hammer to fall.

Droning weariness suddenly washed over her. Ruth drifted away.

16

She came back slowly. At first she thought she must be in her bed at home with her face pressed into the pillow. She was in bed and all this had just been a terrible nightmare. Except her pillow was not this bristly, this hot; her blankets did not pulse and breathe.

She brought her hands up and touched a hot, leathery body, bones covered with scant flesh. The bat had roosted just above her right breast, in the hollow of her shoulder … she realized suddenly that she had called it . . . that somehow she had called all of them. She could hear its rodentine, scabrous mind, its thoughts dark and instinctual and insane. It thought only of blood and bugs and cruising in blind darkness.

'Oh God no!' she screamed … the rugose, alien crawl of its thoughts was maddening, not to be borne. 'Oh no, oh please God no -'

She tightened her hands, not meaning to, and the papery bones in its wings snapped under her fingers. lt squealed, and she felt sharp, needling pain in her cheek as it bit her.

Now they were all squealing, all, and she realized that there were dozens of them on her – maybe hundreds. On her other shoulder, on her shoes, in her hair. As she looked, the lap of her dress began to squirm and twist.

'Oh no!' she shrieked again into the dusty dimness of the clock tower. Bats flew all around her. They squeaked. The whisper of their wings was a soft rising thunder, like the rising whisper of Haven's voices. 'Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!'

A bat fluttered in her hair, caught, squealing.

Another flew into her face, and its breath was the stink of a dead henhouse.

The world spun and swung. Somehow she blundered to her feet. She beat her hands about her head, the bats were everywhere, all around her in a black cloud, and now there was no difference between the soft fluttery explosion of their wings and the voices

(we all love you, Ruth!)

the voices

(we hate you Ruth don't you meddle don't you dare meddle)

the voices of Haven.

She had forgotten where she was. She had forgotten the trapdoor which yawned almost at her feet, and as she stumbled toward it she heard the clock strike – but the sound was muffled, not true, because the hammer had struck her detonator and

– and nothing was happening.

She turned, bats flying all about her, and now her incredulous eyes were also bleeding, but through a reddish haze she saw the hammer fall again, and then yet a third time, and still the world remained.

A dud, Ruth McCausland thought. It was a dud.

And fell through the trapdoor.

The bats flew up from her body, her dress flew up from her body, one loafer flew up from her foot. She struck the ladder, half-turned, and landed on her left side with a crunch that broke all her ribs. She struggled to turn over and somehow managed to do it. Most of the bats had found their way back through the trapdoor into the welcoming darkness of the clock tower, but half a dozen or so were still circling, confused, below the roof of the third-floor corridor. The sound of their voices, so alien and insectile, so hivelike and warm with insanity. These were the voices she had been hearing in her head ever since July 4th or so. The town was not just going mad. That would have been bad, but this was worse . . . oh God, it was much, much worse.

And it had all been for nothing. Hump Jernigan's M-16 had been nothing but a dud after all. She grayed out and came back some four minutes later with a bat roosting on the bridge of her nose, lapping bloody tears from her cheek.

'No you dirty FUCK!' she screamed, and tore it in two, her revulsion an agony. lt made a sound like thick, tearing paper. Its alien guts dribbled onto her upturned, cobweb-smeared face. She could not open her mouth to scream – Let me die, God, please, don't let me be like them, don't let me 'become' – because it would dribble its dying self into her and then Hump's M-16 exploded under the striker with an undramatic wet bang. Green light lit first the square of the trapdoor … and then the whole world. For one moment Ruth could see the bones of the bats standing out clearly, as if in an X-ray picture.

Then all the green turned black.

It was 3:05 P.M.

17

All over Haven, people were lying down. Some had gone to their cellars with a vague notion that now would be a good time to get preserves, some with just an idea that it would be cooler there. Beach Jernigan lay behind the counter of the Haven Lunch with his hands laced behind his neck. He was thinking of the thing in the back of his truck, the thing under the tarp.

At 3:05 the base of the clock tower burst open, spraying powdered brick everywhere. A huge, explosive bellow chased off across the fields; it broke almost every window in Haven, and a good many in Troy and Albion as well.

Green fire spilled out through the jagged rent in the bricks, and the townhall tower began to rise, a surreal brick missile, a Magritte rocket with a clock in its side. lt rose on a pillar of cold green fire – surely cold, else the dolls would have been consumed, and Ruth McCausland's arm as well … the entire village, for that matter.

The clock tower rose on this green torch, its sides now beginning to bulge outward – yet for an instant the illusion held: a brick rocket rising into the afternoon sky … and through the roar of the explosion, the clock could be heard, belling out hour after hour. On the twelfth stroke – noon? midnight? – it exploded like the ill-fated Challenger. Bricks flew everywhere – Benton Rhodes would later see some of the damage, but the worst of it was quickly covered up.

Flying bricks punched through the sides of houses, cellar windows, board fences. Bricks fell from the sky like bombs. The clock's long hand, lacy wrought-iron, whickered through the air like a deadly boomerang and buried itself in one of the ancient oaks which stood outside the Haven Library.

Masonry and splintered boards rumbled back to earth.

Then, silence.

After a while, people all over Haven began to get cautiously to their feet, to look around … to begin sweeping up glass or examining damage. Destruction had swept the town, but no one had been hurt. And in the entire town only one person had actually seen that brick rocket rising into the air, like a madman's grandiose dream.

That one person was Jim Gardener. Bobbi was taking a little nap – Gardener had coaxed her into it. Neither of them had any business working in the heat of the afternoon – especially not Bobbi. She had come back a little from the terrible state in which Gardener had found her, but she was still pushing herself much too hard, and she had abruptly begun to menstruate heavily again.

I wonder, he thought morbidly, when she's going to need a blood transfusion instead of just a couple of extra iron pills a day? But that was unlikely, he knew. His ex-wife had suffered horrible menstrual problems, possibly because her mother had been given the drug known as DES. So Gardener had gotten a crash course in a body function his own body would never perform, and he knew the layman's idea of menstruation – a monthly flow of blood from the vagina – simply wasn't true. Most of the material which made up the menses wasn't blood at all, but useless tissue. Menstruation was an efficient wasteremoval process on behalf of a woman capable of bearing children but not currently doing so.

No, he doubted if Bobbi would bleed to death … barring a uterine rupture, which was highly unlikely.

Bullshit. You don't know what's likely in this situation and what isn't.

Okay. Fair enough. And he knew that women weren't built to menstruate day after day and week after week, no matter what. At bottom, blood and tissue were both the same thing: the stuff of which Bobbi Anderson was made. lt was like cannibalism, but

No. No it wasn't. lt was as if someone had turned her thermostat all the way to the end of the dial and she was burning herself up. She had nearly keeled over a couple of times during the hot spell of the week before, and Gardener knew that, although it sounded grotesque, the hunt for the little Brown boy had actually been a kind of rest for Bobbi Anderson.

Gardener hadn't really believed he would get her to take a nap. Then, at around a quarter to three, Bobbi had said that she was sorta tired, and that maybe she could use a nap. She asked Gardener if he wasn't going to catch an hour of rack time, as well.

'Yes,' he said. 'I'll sit out on the porch and read a few minutes first.' And finish this little drinky-poo, while I'm at it.

'Well, don't hang out too long,' Bobbi said. 'A siesta wouldn't hurt you, either.'

But he had hung out long enough, stretching the drink, to still be there when the roar crossed the fields and hills between here and the village – roughly five miles.

'What the fuck -'

The roar grew louder … and suddenly he saw it, something out of a nightmare, it was DTs setting in, had to be, fucking had to be. This was no telepathic typewriter or water heater from space – this was a motherfucking brick rocket taking off from Haven Village, and that was it, everybody out of the pool, friends and neighbors, I have definitely blown my wheels.

Just before it exploded, splashing the sky with green fire, he recognized it and knew it was no hallucination.

There was Bobbi Anderson's power; there was what they were going to use to stop the nukes, the arms race, the bloody tide of worldwide madness; there it was, rising into the sky on a pillar of flame: one of the crazies in town had somehow laid a fuse under the town hall and struck a match to it and had just sent the Haven clock tower into the sky like a fucking Roman candle.

'Holy shit,' Gardener whispered in a tiny, horrified voice.

There it is, Gard! Behold the future! Is it what you want? Because that woman in there is going bughouse, and you know it … the signs are just all too clear. Do you want to put that kind of power into her hands? Do you?

She's not crazy, Gardener responded, scared. Not crazy at all, and do you think what you just saw changes the equation? It doesn't, it only underlines it. If not me and Bobbi, who? The Dallas Police, that's who. It's going to be all right, I'll keep an eye on her, keep a checkrein on her

Oh, you're doing great at that, you fucking lush, just great.

The incredible thing in the sky exploded, splashing green fire everywhere. Gardener shielded his eyes. He had gotten to his feet.

Anderson came out on the run.

'What in hell was that?' she asked, but she knew … she knew, and Gardener, with cold, sudden certainty, knew that she knew.

Gardener threw a barrier across his mind – in the last two weeks he had learned how to do that with complete success. The barrier consisted of nothing more than a random recitation of old addresses, bits of poems, snatches of songs … but it worked. lt was not at all difficult to run such jamming interference, he had discovered; it wasn't much different from the random run of thoughts that went through almost everyone's head most of the time (he might have changed his mind if he had been aware of Ruth McCausland's tortured efforts to hide her thoughts -Gardener had no idea of how much trouble the plate in his head was saving him). He had seen Bobbi looking at him in a queer, puzzled way a couple of times and although she looked away whenever she saw Gardener observing her, he knew that she was trying to read his thoughts … trying hard . . . and still failing.

He used the barrier to cover his first lie to Bobbi since he had thrown in with her on July 5th, almost three weeks ago.

'I don't know, exactly,' he said. 'I dozed off in the chair. I heard an explosion and saw a big flash of light. Looked green. That's all.'

Bobbi's eyes searched his face, and then she nodded. 'Well, I guess we better go into the village and see.'

Gardener relaxed slightly. He wasn't sure why he had lied, only that it seemed safer to do so … and she had believed him. Nor did he want to endanger that belief. 'Would you mind going alone? I mean, if you want company – '

'No, that's fine,' she said almost eagerly, and went.

Walking back to the porch after seeing the truck down the road, he kicked over his glass. The drinking was getting out of hand, and it was time to stop. Because something really weird was happening here. lt would bear watching, and when you got drunk you went blind.

It was a pledge he had made before. Sometimes it even took for a while. This time it didn't. Gardener was sitting drunk and asleep on the porch that night when Bobbi returned.

Ruth's signal had been received, nevertheless. The receiver was troubled in mind, committed to Bobbi's project, yet uneasy enough about it to be boozing more and more. But it had been received, and at least partially understood: Gardener's lie was an indication of that, if nothing else. But Ruth would perhaps have been happier with her other accomplishment.

Voices or no voices, the lady died sane.

1

No one in Haven was more delighted about the 'becoming' than Beach Jernigan. If Gard's Tommyknockers had appeared to Beach in person, carrying nuclear weapons and proposing that he plant one in each of the world's seven largest cities, Beach would have immediately started phoning for plane tickets. Even in Haven, where quiet zealotry was becoming a way of life, Beach's partisanship was extreme. If he had had any idea at all about Gardener's growing doubts, he would have removed him. Permanently. And at once, if not sooner.

There was a good reason for Beach's feelings. In May – not long after Hilly Brown's birthday, in fact – Beach developed a hacking cough that wouldn't go away. lt was worrisome because he didn't have a fever or the sniffles to go with it. lt became more worrisome when he began to cough up a little blood. When you run a restaurant, you don't want to be coughing at all. The customers don't like it. lt makes them nervous. Sooner or later someone tells the Board of Health and maybe they shut you up for a week or so while they wait to see how your tine test comes out. The Haven Lunch was a marginally profitable business at best (Beach put in twelve hours a day short-ordering in order to clear sixty-five dollars a week – if the place hadn't been his free and clear, he would have starved), and Beach couldn't afford to be shut up for a week in the summer. Summer wasn't here yet, but it was coming on apace. So he went to see old Doc Warwick, and Doc Warwick sent him up to Derry Home for a chest X-ray, and when the X-ray came back Doc Warwick studied it for all of twenty seconds and then called Beach and when Beach got there, Doc Warwick said: 'I've got hard news for you, Beach. Sit down.'

Beach sat down. He felt that if there hadn't been a chair he would have fallen on the floor. All the strength had run out of his legs. There was no telepathy going on in Haven back in May – no more than the ordinary kind that people use all the time, anyway – but that ordinary kind was all Beach needed. He knew what Doc Warwick was going to say before he said it. Not TB; big C. Lung cancer.

But that was in May. Now, in July, Beach was fit as a fiddle. Doc Warwick had told him he could expect to be in the hospital by July 15th, but here he was, eating like a horse, randy as a bear most of the time, and feeling like he could outrun Bobby Tremain in a footrace. He hadn't been back to the hospital for another chest X-ray. He didn't need one to know the large dark stain on his left lung had disappeared. Far as that went, if he had wanted an X-ray, he would have taken the afternoon off and built an X-ray machine himself. He knew just how it could be done.

But now, in the wake of the explosion, there were other things to be built, other things to do . . . and quickly.

They had a meeting. Everyone in town. Not that they gathered, as at a town meeting; that was quite unnecessary. Beach went on frying hamburgers in the Haven Lunch, Nancy Voss went on sorting stamps at the post office (now that Joe was dead, it was at least a place to come to, Sunday or not), Bobby Tremain stayed under his Challenger, putting on a backflow rebreather that would allow him to get roughly seventy miles to the gallon. Not Anderson's gasoline pill – not quite -but close. Newt Berringer, who knew goddamned well there was no time to waste, was driving out to the Applegate place as fast as he dared. But no matter what they were doing or where they were, they were together, a network of silent voices – the voices that had frightened Ruth so badly.

Less than forty-five minutes after the explosion, some seventy people had gathered at Henry Applegate's. Henry had the largest, best-equipped workshop in town now that the Shell station had mostly gone out of the engine-repair and tune-up business. Christina Lindley, who was only seventeen but had still taken second prize in the Fourteenth Annual State 0' Maine Photography Competition the year before, arrived back almost two hours later, scared, out of breath (and feeling rather sexy, if the truth was to be told) from riding in from town with Bobby Tremain at speeds which sometimes topped a hundred and ten. When Bobby made the Dodge walk and talk, it was nothing but a yellow streak.

She had been dispatched to take two photographs of the clock tower. This was delicate work, because, with the tower now reduced to scattered chunks of brick, masonry, and clockwork, it meant taking a photograph of a photograph.

Working fast, Christina had thumbed through a scrapbook of town photographs. Newt had told her mentally where to find this – in Ruth McCausland's own office. She rejected two shots because although both were quite good, both were also in black and white. The intention was to build an illusion – a clock tower that people could look at … but one you could fly a plane through, if it came to that.

In other words, they intended to project a gigantic magic-lantern slide in the sky.

A good trick.

Once upon a time, Hilly Brown would have envied it.

Just as Christina was beginning to lose hope, she found it: a gorgeous photo of the Haven Village town hall with the tower prominently displayed … and from an angle that clearly showed two sides. Great. That would give them the depth of field they would need. Ruth's careful notation beneath the photograph said it came from Yankee magazine, 5/87.

We gotta go, Chris, Bobby had said, speaking to her without bothering to use his mouth. He was shifting impatiently from foot to foot like a small boy in need of the bathroom.

Yes, all right. That will -

She broke off.

Oh, she said. Oh dear.

Bobby Tremain came forward quickly. What the hell's wrong?

She pointed at the photograph.

'Oh, SHIT!' Bobby Tremain yelled out loud, and Christina nodded.

2

By seven that evening, working fast and silently (except for the occasional ill-tempered snarl of someone who felt someone else was not working fast enough), they had constructed a device that looked like a huge slide-projector on top of an industrial vacuum cleaner.

They tested it, and a woman's face, huge and stony, appeared in Henry's field. The people who had gathered stared at this stereopticon of Henry Applegate's grandmother silently but approvingly. The machine worked. Now, as soon as the girl brought the photograph – photographs, actually, because a stereopticon image was of course exactly what they had to create – of the town hall, they could…

Then her voice, faint, but boosted by Bobby Tremain's mind, came to them.

It was bad news.

'What was it?' Kyle Archinbourg asked Newt. 'I didn't catch all of it.'

'Are you fucking deaf?' Andy Baker snarled. 'Jesus Christ, people in three counties heard the bang when that bitch blew the roof off. For two cents

He balled his fists.

'Quit it, both of you,' Hazel McCready said. She turned to Kyle. 'That girl has done a hell of a job.' She was deliberately projecting as hard as she could, hoping to reach Christina Lindley as well as explain the situation to Kyle Archinbourg . . . to buck her up. The girl had

(thought)

sounded distraught, nearly hysterical, and she wouldn't do them any good that way. In such a state she would fuck up for sure, and they just didn't have the time for fuckups.

'It's not her fault you can read the clock in the photo.'

'What do you mean?' Kyle asked.

'She's found a color photo with an angle that couldn't be more perfect,' Hazel said. 'It'll look exactly right from the church and the cemetery, and only a little distorted from the road. We'll have to keep outsiders from going around to the back for a couple of days, until Chris finds a rough matching angle, but since they're going to be interested in the furnace … and in Ruth

I think we can get away with that. Close some roads?' she looked at Newt.

'Sewer work,' he said promptly. 'Easy as pie.'

'I still don't understand the nature of the problem,' Kyle said.

'Might be you, y'fuckin' ijit,' Andy Baker said.

Kyle swung truculently toward the mechanic and Newt said, 'Stop it, both of you.' And, to Kyle: 'The problem is that Ruth blew the tower off the town hall at 3:05 this afternoon. In the only good picture Christina could find, you can read the clock-face.

It says a quarter to ten.'

Oh,' Kyle said. Sweat suddenly turned his face oily. He took out his handkerchief and mopped it. 'Oh shit. What do we do now?'

'Ad-lib,' Hazel said calmly.

'Bitch!' Andy cried. 'I'd kill her if she wadn't already dead!'

Everyone in town loved her, and you know it, Andy,' Hazel said.

'Yeah. And I hope the devil's toasting her with a long fork down in hell.' Andy switched the gadget off.

Henry's grandmother disappeared. Hazel was relieved. There was something a little ghastly about seeing that hatchet-faced woman floating in perfect 3-D above Henry's field, with the cows – which should have been stabled long ago – sometimes wandering through her as they grazed, or disappearing casually through the large old-fashioned brooch the woman wore at her high-necked collar.

'It's going to be fine,' Bobbi Anderson said suddenly in the quiet, and everyone -including Christina Lindley back in town – heard, and was relieved.

3

'Take me to my house,' she said to Bobby Tremain. 'Quick. I know what to do.'

'You're there.' He took her arm and began pulling her toward the door.

'Hold it,' she said.

'Huh?'

'Don't you think I better'

bring the photograph? she finished.

Oh shit! Bobby said, and slapped his forehead.

4

Dick Allison, meanwhile, who was chief of Haven's volunteer fire department, was sitting in his office sweating bullets in spite of the air-conditioning, fielding telephone calls. The first was from the Troy constable, the second from the Unity chief of police, the third from the state police, the fourth from AP.

He probably would have been sweating anyway, but one of the reasons the air-conditioning wasn't doing him any good was his door had been blown off its hinges by the force of the blast. Most of the plaster had fallen off the walls, revealing lathing like decayed ribs. He sat in the middle of the wreckage and told his callers that it sure had been a hell of a bang, and it looked as if they probably had had one fatality, but it was nowhere near as bad as it had probably sounded. While he was rolling out this bullshit for the guy from the Bangor Daily News named John Leandro, a cork ceiling panel fell on his head. Dick slashed it aside with a wolfish snarl, listened, laughed, and said it was just the bulletin board. Goddam thing had fallen over again. lt just had those sucker things on the back, you know, well, if you bought cheap you got cheap, his mother had always told him, and …

it took another five minutes, but he finally bored Leandro off the phone. As he put his own telephone back in the cradle, most of the hallway ceiling outside his door fell with a powdery crrrumpp!

'MOTHERFUCKING-COCKSUCKING-SON-OF-A-FUCKING BITCH!' Dick Allison screamed, and brought his left fist down on his desk as hard as he could. Although he broke all four fingers, he didn't even notice in his raving fury. If, at that moment, anyone had come into his office, Allison would have ripped that person's throat open, filled his mouth with hot blood, and then sprayed it back into the dying person's face. He screamed and swore and even drummed his feet up and down on the floor like a child doing a tantrum because he has been denied an outing.

He looked childish.

He also looked extremely dangerous.

Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers. knocking at the door.

5

In between phone calls, Dick went into Hazel's office, found the Midol in her drawer, and took six. Then he wrapped his throbbing, swelling hand tightly and forgot it. If he had still been human. this would have been impossible; one does not simply forget four broken fingers. But since then he had 'become.' One of the things that included was becoming able to exercise conscious will over pain.

It came in handy.

In between his conversations with the outside – and sometimes during them -Dick spoke to the men and women working furiously at Henry Applegate's. He told them he expected a couple of state cops by four-thirty, five o'clock at the latest. Could they have the slide-projector ready by then? When Hazel explained the problem, Dick began to rave again, this time with fear as well as anger. When Hazel explained what Christina Lindley was up to, he calmed … a little. She had a home darkroom. There she would carefully make a negative of the Yankee picture and enlarge it slightly, not because it needed to be bigger for the slide-projector device to work (and too much enlarging would give their clock-tower illusion an odd, grainy look), but because she needed a slightly bigger image to work with.

She's going to turn a negative, Hazel said in his mind, then airbrush out the hands on the clock-face. Bobby Tremain is going to put them back in with an X-acto knife, so they say 3:05. He's got a steady hand and a little talent. Right now a steady hand seems more important.

I thought if you made a negative from a positive it came out blurry, Dick Allison said. Specially if the positive's color.

She's improved her developing equipment, Hazel said. She didn't need to add that seventeen-year-old Christina Lindley now had what was probably the most advanced darkroom on earth.

So how long?

Midnight, she thinks, Hazel said.

Christ on a pony! Dick shouted, loud enough to make the people in Henry's field wince.

We'll need about thirty D-cells, Bobbi Anderson's voice cut in calmly. Be a love and see to that, Dick. And we understand about the police. Play Hee-Haw for them, you understand?

He paused. Yes, he said. Buck and Roy, Junior Sample.

Exactly, And hold them. It's their radio I'm really worried about, not them – they'll only send one unit, two at most, to start with. But if they see … if they radio it in …

There was a murmur of assent like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell.

Is there a way you can damp out their transmissions from town? Bobbi asked.

Andy Baker suddenly cut in, gleeful: I got a better idea. Get Buck Peters to shuck his fat ass over to the gas station right now.

Yes! Bobbi overrode him, her thought shrill with excitement. Good! Great! And when they leave town, someone . . . Beach, I think …

Beach was honored to be chosen.

6

Bent Rhodes and Jingles Gabbons of the Maine state police arrived in Haven at five-fifteen. They came expecting to find the smoky, uninteresting aftermath of a furnace explosion – one old pumper-truck idling at the curb, twenty or thirty onlookers idling on the sidewalk. Instead, they found the entire Haven town-hall clock tower blown off like a Roman candle. Bricks littered the street, windows were blown out, there were dismembered dolls everywhere … and too damned many people going about their business.

Dick Allison greeted them with weird cordiality, as if this was a Republican bean supper instead of what now looked like a disaster of real magnitude.

'Christ almighty, man, what happened here?' Bent asked him.

'Well, I guess maybe it was a little worse than I made out over the phone,'

Dick said, surveying the brick-littered street and then giving the two troopers

an incongruous ain't-I-a-bad-boy? smile. 'Guess I didn't think anyone would

believe it unless they saw it.'

Jingles muttered, 'I'm seeing it and I don't believe it.' They had both dismissed Dick Allison as a small-town bumbler, probably crazy in the bargain. That was all right. He stood behind them, watching them stare at the wreckage. The smile faded gradually from his face and his expression became cold.

Rhodes spotted the human arm amid all the tiny make-believe limbs. When he turned back to Dick, his face was whiter than it had been, and he looked considerably younger.

'Where's Mrs McCausland?' he asked. His voice rose uncontrollably and broke on the last syllable.

'Well, you know, I think that might be part of our problem,' Dick began. 'You see…'

7

Dick did hold them in town as long as he could without being conspicuous about it. lt was a quarter to eight before they left, and by then twilight was drawing down. Also, Dick knew, if they didn't leave soon, they would start wondering how come none of the backup units they had requested were arriving.

They had both talked on their cruiser's radio to Derry Base, and both hung the mike up again looking puzzled and distracted. The responses they were getting from the other end were right; it was the voice that seemed a little off. But neither of them could be bothered with such a minor matter, at least not for the time being. There were too many other things to cope with. The magnitude of the accident, for one thing. The fact that they had known the victim, for another. Trying to lay the groundwork of a potentially big case without committing any of the procedural fuckups that would muddy the waters later on, for a third.

Also, they were beginning to feel the effects of being in Haven.

They were like men applying vinyl seal to a big wooden floor in a room with no ventilation; getting stoned without even knowing it. They weren't hearing thoughts – it was too early for that and they would be gone before it could happen – but they were feeling very strange. lt was slowing them down, making ordinary routine something they had to fight their way through.

Dick Allison got all this from their minds as he sat across the street drinking a cup of coffee in the Haven Lunch. Ayuh, they were too busy and too screwed-up to think about the fact that

(Tug Ellender)

their dispatcher didn't exactly sound like himself tonight. The reason why was very simple. They weren't talking to Tug Ellender. They were talking to Buck Peters; their radio transmissions were not going to and coming from Derry but to and from the garage of Elt Barker's Shell, where Buck Peters was hunched, sweating, over a microphone, with Andy Baker beside him. Buck sent out fresh instructions and information on Andy's radio (a little something he had scrambled together in his spare time, a little something that could have contacted life on Uranus, had there been any goodbuddies up there to send back a big ten-four). Several townspeople were concentrating hard on the minds of Bent Rhodes and Jingles Gabbons. They relayed to Buck everything they were able to pick up about Ellender, from whom the cops just naturally expected to hear. Buck Peters had some natural mimicry (he was a great hit doing whoever happened to be President that year, plus such favorites as Jimmy Cagney and John Wayne, at each year's Grange Stage Spectacular). He was not Rich Little, never would be, but when he 'did' somebody, you knew who it was. Usually.

More important, the listeners were able to relay to Buck how he should respond to each transmission, since almost every speaker knows in his own mind what response he expects to get from his questions or statements. If Bent and Jingles bought the impersonation – and to a large extent they really did – it wasn't so much due to Buck's talents as to their own fulfilled expectations in 'Tug's' replies. Andy had further been able to blur Buck's voice by overlaying some static – not as much as they would hear on their way back to Derry, but enough so that 'Tug's' voice grew a little blurred whenever that oddness

(Jesus that doesn't sound like Tug much at all I wonder does he have a cold) surfaced in one of their minds.

At a quarter past seven, when Beach brought him a fresh cup of coffee, Dick asked: 'You all set?'

'Sure am.'

'And you're sure that gadget will work?'

'It works fine … want to see it?' Beach was almost fawning.

'No. There isn't time. What about the deer? You got that?'

'Ayuh. Bill Elderly kilt it and Dave Rutledge dressed it out.'

'That's good. Get going.'

'Okay, Dick.' Beach took off his apron and hung it on a nail behind the counter. He turned over the sign which hung above the door from OPEN to CLOSED. Ordinarily it would just have hung there, but tonight, because the glass was broken, it stirred and twisted in the mild breeze.

Beach paused and looked back at Dick with narrow, sunken anger.

'She wasn't supposed to do nothing like that,' he said.

Dick shrugged. lt didn't matter; it was done. 'She's gone. That's the important thing. The kids are doing fine with that picture. As for Ruth . . . there's no one else like her in town.'

'There's that fellow out at the old Garrick place.'

'He's drunk all the time. And he wants to dig it up. Go on, Beach. They'll

be leaving soon, and we want it to happen as far out of the village as you can make it happen.'

'Okay, Dick. Be careful.'

Dick smiled. 'We all got to be careful now. This is touchy.'

He watched Beach get into his truck and back out of the space in front of the Haven Lunch that had been that old Chevy's home for the last twelve years. As the truck started up the street, Beach driving slowly and weaving to avoid the litters of broken glass, Dick could see the shape under the tarp in the truck's bed, and, near the back, something else, wrapped in a sheet of heavy plastic. The biggest deer Bill Elderly had been able to find on such short notice. Deer hunting was most definitely against the law during July in the State of Maine.

When Beach's pickup was out of sight (MAKE LOVE NOT WAR BE READY FOR BOTH NRA, the bumper sticker on the tailgate read), Dick turned back to the counter and picked up his coffee cup. As always, Beach's coffee was strong and good. He needed that. Dick was more than tired; he was worn out. Although there was still good light left in the sky and although he had always been the sort of person who found it impossible to go to sleep until the National Anthem had played on the last available TV channel, all he wanted now was his own bed. This had been a tense, frightening day, and it wouldn't be over until Beach reported in. Nor would the mess Ruth McCausland had succeeded in making be cleaned up when the two cops were erased. They could hide a lot of things, but not the simple fact that those cops had been on their way back from Haven where another cop (just a town constable, true, but a cop was a cop, and this one had just happened to be married to a State Bear, just to add to the fun) had been erased from the equation.

All of which meant that the fun was just beginning.

'If you call it fun,' Dick said sourly to no one in particular. 'Be dog-fucked if I do.' The coffee began to burn with acid indigestion in Dick's stomach. He went on drinking it anyway.

Outside, a powerful motor roared. Dick swiveled around on his stool and watched the cops drive out of town, the flashers on top of their cruiser swinging blue light and black shadow on the wreckage.

8

Christina Lindley and Bobby Tremain stood side by side, watching the blank sheet in the developing bath, neither of them breathing as they waited for the image to come or not come.

Little by little, it did.

There was the Haven town-hall clock tower. In living, true color. And the hands of the clock stood at 3:05.

Bobby let out his breath in a low, slow exhalation. Perfect, he said.

Not quite, Christina said. There's one more thing.

He turned to her, apprehensive. What? What's wrong?

Nothing. Everything's right. It's just that there's one more thing we have to do.

She was not ugly, but because she wore glasses and her hair was mousebrown, she had always considered herself ugly. She was seventeen and had never been on a date. Now none of that seemed to matter. She unzipped her skirt and pushed it, her rayon half-slip, and her cotton panties, both bought at the discount store in Derry, down. She stepped out of them and carefully took the wet photograph from the developing bath. She stood on tiptoe to hang it up, smooth buttocks flexing. Then she turned to him, legs spread.

I need doing.

He took her standing up. Against the wall. When her hymen burst, she bit his shoulder hard enough to bring blood from him, as well. And when they came together, they did it snarling and clawing and it was very, very good.

Just like old times, Bobby thought as he drove them out to the Applegate place, and wondered exactly what he meant by that.

Then he decided it really didn't matter anyway.

9

Beach got his Chevy pickup to a creaky sixty-five – as fast as it would go. One of the few things he hadn't gotten around to overhauling with his fantastic new knowledge was the old bomber. But he hoped it would get him as far as he needed to go tonight, and Old Betsy came through for him again.

When he had gotten over the Troy town line without hearing them or seeing any sign of their flashers behind him, he eased the truck back to fifty-five (with some relief; it had been on the edge of overheating), and when he got into Newport he dropped back to forty-five. Dark was coming on hard by then.

He was over the Derry town line and just starting to worry that the frigging cops had gone back some other way – it seemed unlikely, since this was the quickest way, but Jesus, where were they? – when he heard the low mutter of their thoughts.

He pulled over and sat quietly for a moment, head cocked, eyes half-closed, listening, making sure. His mouth, oddly infirm and puckered with most of the teeth gone, was the mouth of a much older man. lt was something about

(freckles)

Ruth. lt was them, all right. The thought came clearer

(you could see the freckles right through the blood)

and Beach nodded. lt was them, all right. They were coming along fast now. He'd have time, but only if he hustled.

Beach drove another quarter of a mile up the road, rounded a curve, and saw the last long stretch of Route 3 between here and Derry. He turned his pickup sideways, blocking the road. Then he removed the tarp from the rifle-thing in back, fingers plucking nervously at hayrope knots as their voices grew stronger, stronger, stronger in his head.

When their lights splashed the trees on this side of the curve, Beach got his head down. He reached for the train transformers, six of them, that had been nailed to a board (and the board had been bolted to the truck-bed so it wouldn't slide around) and turned them on, one after another. He heard the hum as they powered up … then that sound, every sound, was lost in the shriek of brakes and tires. Now light that was flashbulb-white and shot through with strobing blue flashes filled the bed of the pickup truck and Beach pressed himself against the bottom, hands laced over his head, thinking he had blown it, parked too close to a blind turn and they were going to crash into his truck, and they might only be injured but he would be killed, and they would find the ruins of his 'rifle' and say Well now, what's this? And … and …

You fucked up, Beach, they saved your life and you fucked up … oh, damn you … damn you … damn you …

Then the shrieking tires stopped. The smell of cooked rubber was strong and sickening, but the crash for which he had been braced hadn't come. Blue lights strobed. A microphone crackled static.

Dimly he heard the hoarse-voiced cop say, 'What's this shit?'

Shakily, Beach did a girly-pushup and peered over the edge of the truck-bed with just his eyes. He saw their cruiser halted at the end of a long pair of black skid-marks. Even by starlight those marks were clearly visible. The cruiser was sitting at a cockeyed angle not nine feet away. If they had been going just five miles an hour faster …

Yeah, but they weren't.

Sounds. The double-clunk of their doors closing as they got out of their car. The faint, dull hum of the transformers which powered his gadget – a gadget that was not all that different from the ones Ruth had planted in the bellies of her dolls. And a low buzzing sound. Flies. They smelled the blood under the plastic sheet but couldn't get at the deer's carcass.

You'll get your chance soon enough, Beach thought, and grinned. Too bad you won't get a taste of those old boys out there.

'I saw that truck back in Haven, Bent,' the hoarse-voiced one said. 'Parked in front of the restaurant.'

Beach swiveled the culvert pipe slightly in its cradle. Looking through it, he could see them both. And if one of them moved out of the actual power-axis of the gadget, that was okay; there was a slight flare effect.

Get away from the car, boys, Beach thought, picking up the doorbell from Western Auto and settling a thumb on it. His grin showed pink gums. Don't want to get none of the car. Move away, all right?

'Who's there?' the other cop shouted.

Tommyknockers here, knocking at your door, you meddling shithead, he thought, and began to giggle. He couldn't help it. He tried to stifle it as best he could.

'If someone's in that truck, you better speak up!'

He began to giggle louder; just couldn't help it. And maybe that was just as well, because they took a look at each other and then began to move toward the truck, unholstering their guns. Toward the truck and away from their cruiser.

Beach waited until he was sure the cruiser wouldn't be touched by the flare – they had told him not to harm the police car, and he intended not to take so much as a strip of chrome off the bumper. When the cops were clear, Beach pushed the doorbell. Avon calling, shitheads, he thought, and this time he didn't just giggle; he whooped. A thick branch of green fire shot out in the dark, catching both of the policemen and enveloping them. Beach saw several bright yellow sparks inside that green glare, and understood that one of the cops was triggering his pistol off again and again.

Beach could smell the thick aroma of cooking train transformers. There was a sudden pop! and a twisting skyrocket of sparks from one of them. Some of the sparks landed on his arm, stinging, and he brushed them off. The green fire coming from the end of the culvert winked out. The policemen were gone. Well … almost gone.

Beach jumped over the tailgate of the truck, moving just as fast as he could. This wasn't the turnpike, God knew, and no one from the country headed into Derry to go shopping this late, but someone would be along sooner or later. He should

Sitting on the pavement was a single smoking shoe. He picked it up, almost dropped it. He hadn't expected it to be so heavy. Looking inside, he saw why. A sock-encased foot was still inside of it.

Beach carried it back to his truck and tossed it into the cab. When he got back to town he would get rid of it. No need to bury it; there were more efficient ways of getting rid of things in Haven. If the Mayfia knew what us Yankee hicks got up here, I guess they'd want to buy them the franchise, Beach thought, and tittered again.

He pulled the pins on the tailgate. lt fell flat open with a rusty crash. He grabbed the plastic-wrapped carcass of the deer. Whose idea had this been? he wondered. Old Dave's? Didn't really matter. In Haven all ideas were now becoming one.

The plastic-wrapped bundle was heavy and awkward. Beach got his arms around the buck's rear legs and pulled. It came out of the truck, its head thudding onto the tarvy. Beach looked around again for brightening headlights on either horizon, saw none, and dragged the deer across the road as fast as he could. He put it down with a grunt and flipped the carcass over so he could free the plastic. Now he got the deer, which had been neatly gutted and cleaned, in both arms and picked it up. Cords stood out in his neck like cables; his skinned-back lips would have shown his teeth, had any been left in his gums. The deer's head with its half-grown antlers hung down below his right forearm. Its dusty eyes stared off into the night.

Beach staggered three steps down the sloping soft shoulder and threw the deer's body into the ditch, where it landed with a thud. He stepped away and picked up the plastic. He carried it back to the truck and bundled it into the passenger side of the cab. He would have liked it better in back – it stank but there was always a chance it would blow out and be found. He hurried around to the driver's side of the truck, plucking his blood-dampened shirt away from his chest with a little grimace as he did. He'd change as soon as he got home.

He got in and started Betsy's motor. He backed and filled until he was pointed back toward Haven and then paused for just a moment, surveying the scene, trying to see if the story it told was the one it was supposed to tell. He thought it did. Here was a Bearmobile sitting dead-empty in the middle of the road at the end of a long skid. Engine off, flashers going. There was the gutted carcass of a good-sized buck in the ditch. That wouldn't go unnoticed long, not in July.

Was there anything in this story that whispered Haven?

Beach didn't think so. This story was about two cops returning to barracks after investigating a single-fatality accident. They just happened to run on a gang of men jacklighting deer. What happened to the cops? Ah, that was the question, wasn't it? And the possible answers would look more and more ominous as the days passed. There were jacklighters in the story, jacklighters who'd perhaps panicked, shot a couple of cops, and then buried them in the woods. But Haven? Beach really believed they would think that was a completely different story, one nowhere near as interesting.

Now, in his rearview mirror, he could see approaching headlights. He put his truck in low and skirted the police cruiser. Its flashers bathed him in half a dozen blue pulsebeats, and then it was behind him. Beach glanced to his right, saw the regulation-issue black shoe with its runner of regulation blue sock poking out like the tail of a kite, and cackled. Bet when you put that shoe on this mornin', Mr Smartass State Bear, you didn't have no idea where it would finish up tonight.

Beach Jernigan cackled again and fetched second gear with a ram and a jerk. He was headed home and he had never felt doodly-damn better in his whole life.

1

Lead Story, Bangor Daily News, July 25th, 1988:

TWO STATE POLICE DISAPPEAR IN DERRY

Area-wide Manhunt Begins

by David Bright

The discovery of an abandoned state-police cruiser in Derry last night shortly after 9:30 has touched off the second major search of the summer in eastern and central Maine. The first was for four-year-old David Brown of Haven, who is still missing. Ironically, the officers, Benton Rhodes and Peter Gabbons, were returning from that same town at the time of their disappearance, having just completed their preliminary investigation of a furnace fire which took one life (see related story this page).

In a late development which one police insider described as 'the worst possible news we could have at this time,' the body of a deer which had been shot, gutted, and cleaned was found near the cruiser, leading to speculations that …

2

'There, looka that,' Beach said to Dick Allison and Newt Berringer over coffee the next morning. They were in the Haven Lunch, looking at the paper, which had just come in. 'We all thought nobody would make a connection. Damn!'

'Relax,' Newt said, and Dick nodded. 'No one is going to connect the disappearance of a four-year-old boy who prob'ly just wandered off into the woods or got picked up and driven away by a sex pervert with the disappearance of two big strong State Bears. Right, Dick?'

'As rain.'

3

Wrong.

4

Page one, Bangor Daily News, below the fold:

HAVEN CONSTABLE KILLED IN FREAK ACCIDENT

Was Community Leader

by John Leandro

Ruth McCausland, one of only three women constables in Maine, died yesterday in her home town of Haven. She was fifty. Richard Allison, head of Haven's volunteer fire department, says that Mrs McCausland appears to have been killed when oil fumes which had collected in the town-hall basement as the result of a faulty valve ignited. Allison said that the lighting in the basement, where a lot of town records are stored, is not very good. 'She may have struck a match,' Allison said. 'At least, that is the theory we are going on now.,

Asked if any evidence of arson had been found, Allison said there had not, but admitted that the disappearance of the two state troopers sent to investigate the mishap (see story above) made that more difficult to determine. 'Since neither of the investigating officers has been able to file a report, I imagine we'll have the state fire inspector up here. Right now I'm more concerned that the investigating officers turn up safe and sound.'

Newton Berringer, Haven's head Selectman, said that the entire town was in deep mourning for Mrs McCausland. 'She was a great woman,' Berringer said, 'and we all loved her.' Other Haven townspeople echoed the sentiment, not a few of them in tears as they spoke of Mrs McCausland.

Her public service in the small town of Haven began in …

5

It was, of course, Hilly's grandfather, Ev, who made the connection. Ev Hillman, who could have rightly been called the town in exile, Ev Hillman, who had come back from Big II with two small steel plates in his head as a result of a German potato-masher which had exploded near him during the Battle of the Bulge.

He spent the Monday morning after Haven's explosive Sunday where he had been spending all of his mornings – in room 371 of the Derry Home Hospital, watching over Hilly. He had taken a furnished room down on Lower Main Street, and spent his nights – his largely sleepless nights – there after the nurses finally turned him out.

Sometimes he would lie in the dark and think he heard chuckling noises coming from the drains and he would think You're going nuts, old-timer. Except he wasn't. Sometimes he wished he were.

He had tried to talk to some of the nurses about what he believed had happened to David – what he knew had happened to David. They pitied him. He did not see their pity at first; his eyes were only opened after he had made the mistake of talking to the reporter. That had opened his eyes. He thought the nurses admired him for his loyalty to Hilly, and felt sorry for him because Hilly seemed to be slipping away … but they also thought him mad. Little boys did not disappear during tricks performed in back-yard magic shows. You didn't even have to go to nursing school to know that.

After a while in Derry alone, half out of his mind with worry for Hilly and David and contempt for what he now saw as cowardice on his part and fear for Ruth McCausland and the others in Haven, Ev had done some drinking at the little bar halfway down Lower Main. In the course of a conversation with the bartender, he heard the story of a fellow named John Smith, who had taught in the nearby town of Cleaves Mills for a while. Smith had been in a coma for years, had awakened with some sort of psychic gift. He went nuts a few years ago – had tried to assassinate a fellow named Stillson, who was a U.S. representative from New Hampshire.

'Dunno if there was ever any truth to the psychic part of it or not,' the bartender said, drawing Ev a fresh beer. B'lieve most of that stuff is just eyewash, myself. But if you've got some wild-ass tale to tell -' Ev had hinted he had a story to tell that would make The Amityville Horror look tame – 'then Bright at the Bangor Daily News is the guy you ought to tell it to. He wrote up the Smith guy for the paper. He drops in here for a beer every once in a while, and I'll tell you, mister, he believed Smith had the sight.'

Ev had had three beers, rapidly, one after another – just enough, in other words, to believe that simple solutions might be possible. He went to the pay phone, laid out his change on the shelf, and called the Bangor Daily News. David Bright was in, and Ev spoke to him. He didn't tell him the story, not over the phone, but said that he had a tale to tell, and he didn't understand what it all meant, but he thought people ought to know about it, fast.

Bright sounded interested. More, he sounded sympathetic. He asked Ev when he could come up to Bangor (that Bright did not speak of coming to Derry to interview the old man should have tipped Ev to the idea that he might have overestimated both Bright's belief and sympathy), and Ev had asked if that very night would be okay.

'Well, I'll be here another two hours,' Bright said. 'Can you be here before midnight, Mr Hillman?'

'Bet your buns,' the old man snapped, and hung up. When he walked out of Wally's Spa on Lower Main, there was fire in his eyes and a spring in his step. He looked twenty years younger than the man who had shuffled in.

But it was twenty-five miles up to Bangor, and the three beers wore off. By the time Ev got to the News building he was sober again. Worse, his head was fuzzy and confused. He was aware of telling the story badly, of circling around again and again to the magic show, to the way Hilly had looked, to his certainty that David Brown had really disappeared.

At last he stopped … only it was not so much a stopping as a drying up of an increasingly sluggish flow.

Bright was tapping a pencil against the side of his desk, not looking at Ev.

'You never actually looked under the platform at the time, Mr Hillman?'

'No … no. But . . .'

Now Bright did look at him, and he had a kind face, but in it Ev saw the expression which had opened his eyes – the man thought he was just as mad as a March hare.

'Mr Hillman, all of this is very interesting

'Never mind,' Ev said, getting up. The chair he had been sitting in bumped back so rapidly it almost fell over. He was dimly aware of word-processor terminals tapping, phones ringing, people walking back and forth in the city room with papers in their hands. Mostly he was aware that it was midnight, he was tired and sick with fear, and this fellow thought he was crazy. 'Never mind, it's late, you'll be wanting to get home to y'family, I guess.'

'Mr Hillman, if you'd just see it from my perspective, you'd understand that – '

'I do see it from your side,' Ev said. 'For the first time, I guess. I have to go, too, Mr Bright. I got a long drive ahead of me and visitin' hours start at nine. Sorry to've wasted y'time.'

He got out of there fast, furiously reminding himself what he should have remembered in the first place, that there was no fool like an old fool, and he guessed tonight's work showed him off as just about the biggest fool of all. Well, so much for trying to tell people what was happening in Haven. He was old, but he was damned if he'd ever put up with another look like that.

Ever, in his life.

6

That resolution lasted exactly fifty-six hours – until he got a look at the headlines on Monday's papers. Looking at them, he found himself wanting to go and see the man in charge of investigating the disappearance of the two state cops. The News said his name was Dugan, and mentioned that he had also known Ruth McCausland well – would, in fact, take time off from an extremely hot case to speak briefly at the lady's funeral. Must have known her pretty damned well, it seemed to Ev.

But when he searched for any of the previous night's fire and excitement, he found only sour dread and hopelessness. The two stories on the front page had taken most of the guts he had left. Haven's turning into a nest of snakes and now they are starting to bite. I have to convince someone of that, and how am I going to do it? How am I going to convince anyone that there's telepathy going on in that town, and Christ knows what else? How, when I can barely remember how I knew things were going on? How, when I never really saw nothing myself? How? Most of all, how'm I supposed to do it when the whole goddam thing is staring them in the face and they don't even see it? There's a whole town going loony just down the road and no one has got the slightest idea it's happening.

He turned to the obituary page again. Ruth's clear eyes looked up at him from one of those strange newsprint pictures that are nothing but densely packed dots. Her eyes, so clear and straightforward and beautiful, looked calmly back at him. Ev guessed that there had been at least five and maybe as many as a dozen men in Haven who had been in love with her, and she had never even known it. Her eyes seemed to deny the very idea of death, to declare it ridiculous. But dead she was.

He remembered taking Hilly out while the search party gathered.

You could come with us, Ruthie.

Ev, I can't . . . Get in touch with me.

He had tried just once, thinking that if Ruth joined him in Derry, she would be out of danger … and she could backstop his story. In his state of confusion and misery and, yes, even homesickness, Ev wasn't even sure which was more important to him. In the end it didn't matter. He had tried three times to dial Haven direct, the last one after speaking to Bright, and none of the calls took. He tried once with, operator assistance, and she told him there must be lines down. Would he try later? Ev said he would, but hadn't. He had lain down in the dark instead, and listened to the drains chuckle.

Now, less than three days later, Ruth had gotten in touch with him. Via the obituary page.

He looked up at Hilly. Hilly was sleeping. The doctors refused to call it a coma -his brain patterns were not the brain patterns of a comatose patient, they said; they were the brain patterns of a person in deep sleep. Ev didn't care what they called it. He knew Hilly was slipping away, and whether it was into a state called autism – Ev didn't know what the word meant, but he had heard one of the doctors mutter it to another in a low voice he hadn't been meant to overhear – or one called coma didn't make any difference at all. They were just words. Slipping away was what it came down to, and that was quite terrible enough.

On the ride to Derry, the boy had acted like a person in deep shock. Ev had had a vague idea that getting him out of Haven would improve matters, and in their frantic concern over David, neither Bryant nor Marie seemed to notice how odd their older boy seemed.

Getting out of Haven hadn't helped. Hilly's awareness and coherence had continued to decline. The first day in the hospital he had slept eleven hours out of twenty-four. He could answer simple questions, but more complicated ones confused him. He complained of a headache. He didn't remember the magic show at all, and seemed to think his birthday had been only the week before. That night, sleeping deeply, he had spoken one phrase quite clearly: 'All the G.I. Joes.' Ev's back had crawled. lt was what he had been screaming over and over when they had all rushed out of the house to find David gone and Hilly in hysterics.

The following day, Hilly had slept for fourteen hours, and seemed even more confused in his mind during the time he spent in a soupy waking state. When the child psychologist detailed to his case asked him his middle name, he responded, 'Jonathan.' It was David's middle name.

Now he was sleeping, for all practical purposes, around the clock. Sometimes he opened his eyes, seemed even to be looking at Ev or one of the nurses, but when they spoke, he would only smile his sweet Hilly Brown smile and drift off again.

Slipping away. He lay like an enchanted boy in a fairy-tale castle, only the IV bottle over his head and the occasional P.A. announcements from the hospital corridor spoiling the illusion.

There had been a great deal of excitement on the neurological front at first; a dark, non-specific shadow in the area of Hilly's cerebral cortex had suggested that the boy's strange dopiness might have been caused by a brain tumor. But when they got Hilly down to X-ray again, two days later (his plates had been slow-tracked, the X-ray technician explained to Ev, because no one expects to find a brain tumor in the head of a ten-year-old and there had been no previous symptoms to suggest one), the shadow had been gone. The neurologist had conferred with the X-ray technician, and Ev guessed from the technician's defensiveness that feathers must have flown. The neurologist told him that one more set of plates would be taken, but he believed they would show negative. The first set, he said, must have been defective.

'I suspected something must have been wacky,' he told Ev.

'Why was that?'

The neurologist, a big man with a fierce red beard, smiled. 'Because that shadow was huge. To be perfectly blunt, a kid with a brain tumor that big would have been an extremely sick child for an extremely long time … if he was still alive at all.'

'I see. Then you still don't know what's wrong with Hilly.'

'We're working on two or three lines of inquiry,' the neurologist said, but his smile grew vague, his eyes shifted away from Ev's, and the next day the child psychologist showed up again. The child psychologist was a very fat woman with very dark black hair. She wanted to know where Hilly's parents were.

'Trying to find their other son.' Ev expected that would squash her.

It didn't. 'Call them up and tell them I'd like some help finding this one.'

They came but were no help. They had changed; they were strange. The child psychologist felt it too, and after her initial run of questions, she started to pull away from them – Ev could actually feel her doing it. Ev himself had to work hard to keep from getting up and leaving the room. He didn't want to feel their strange eyes resting on him: their gaze made him feel as if he had been marked for something. The woman in the plaid blouse and the faded jeans had been his daughter, and she still looked like his daughter, but she wasn't, not anymore. Most of Marie was dead, and what was left was dying rapidly.

The child psychologist hadn't asked for them again.

She had been in to examine Hilly twice since then. The second occasion had been Saturday afternoon, the day before the Haven town hall blew up.

'What were they feeding him?' she asked abruptly.

Ev had been sitting by the window, the hot sun falling on him, almost dozing. The fat woman's question startled him awake. 'What?'

'What were they feeding him?'

'Why, just regular food,' he said.

‘I doubt that.'

'You needn't,' he said. 'I took enough meals with 'em to know. Why do you ask?'

'Because ten of his teeth are gone,' she said curtly.

7

Ev clenched a fist tightly in spite of the dull throb of arthritis and brought it down on one leg, hard.

What are you going to do, old man? David's gone and it would be easier if you could convince yourself he was really dead, wouldn't it?

Yes. That would make things simpler. Sadder, but simpler. But he couldn't believe that. Part of him was still convinced that David was alive. Perhaps it was only wishful thinking, but somehow Ev didn't think so – he had done plenty of that in his time, and this didn't feel like it. This was a strong, pulsing intuition in his mind: David is alive. He is lost, and he is in danger of dying, oh, most certainly … but he can still be saved. If. If you can make up your mind to do something. And if what you make up your mind to do is the right thing. Long odds for an old fart like you, who pisses a dark spot on his pants every once in a while these days when he can't get to the john in time. Long, long odds.

Late Monday evening he had awakened, from a dozing sleep, trembling in Hilly's hospital room – the nurses often turned a leniently blind eye to him and allowed him to stay far past regular visiting hours. He'd had a dreadful nightmare. He had dreamed he was in some dark and stony place – needletipped mountains sawed at a black sky strewn with cold stars, and a wind as sharp as an icepick whined in narrow, rocky defiles. Below him, by starlight, he could see a huge flat plain. It looked dry and cold and lifeless. Great cracks zigzagged across it, giving it the look of crazy-paving. And from somewhere, he could hear David's thin voice: 'Help me, Grandpa, it hurts to breathe! Help me, Grandpa, it hurts to breathe! Help me! I'm scared! I didn't want to do the trick but Hilly made me and now I can't find my way home!'

He sat looking at Hilly, his body bathed in sweat. lt ran down his face like tears.

He got up, went over to Hilly, and bent close to him. 'Hilly,' he said, not for the first time. 'Where's your brother? Where is David?'

Only this time Hilly's eyes opened. His watery, unseeing stare chilled Everett – it was the stare of a blind sibyl.

'Altair-4,' Hilly said calmly, and with perfect clarity. 'David is on Altair-4 and there's Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.'

His eyes slipped shut and he slept deeply again.

Ev stood over him, perfectly motionless, his skin the color of putty.

After a while, he began to shudder.

8

He was the town in exile.

If Ruth McCausland had been Haven's heart and conscience, then Ev Hillman at seventy-three (and not nearly so senile as he had lately come to fear) was its memory. He had seen much of the town in his long life there, and had heard more; he had always been a good listener.

Leaving the hospital that Monday evening, he detoured by the Derry Mr Paperback where he invested nine dollars in a Maine Atlas – a compendium of large maps which showed the state in neat pieces, 600 square miles in each piece. Turning to map 23, he found the town of Haven. He had also bought a compass at the book-and-magazine shop, and now, without wondering why he was doing it, he drew a circle around the town. He did not plant the compass's anchor in Haven Village to do this, of course, because the village was actually on the edge of the township.

David is on Altair-4

David is on Altair-4 and there's Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

Ev sat frowning over the map and the circle he had drawn, wondering if what Hilly had said had any significance.

Should have gotten a red pencil, old man. Haven ought to be circled in red now. On this map … on every map.

He bent closer. His far vision was still so perfect that he could have told a bean from a kernel of corn if you set both on a fencepost forty yards away, but his near vision was going to hell fast, now, and he had left his reading glasses back at Marie and Bryant's – and he had an idea that if he went back to get them, he might find he had more to worry about than reading small print. For the time being it was better -safer – to just get along without them.

With his nose almost on the page, he examined the place where the compass needle had gone in. lt was spang on the Derry Road, just a bit north of Preston Stream, and a bit east of what he and his friends had called Big Injun Woods when they were kids. This map identified them as Burning Woods, and Ev had heard that name once or twice, too.

He closed the compass to a quarter of the radius he had needed to put a circle around all of Haven and drew a second circle. He saw that Bryant and Marie's house lay just inside that circle. To the west was the short length of Nista Road, which ran from Route 9 – Derry Road – to a gravel-pit dead-end on the edge of those same woods – call them Big Injun Woods or Burning Woods, it was the same thing, the same woods.

Nista Road … Nista Road … something about Nista Road, but what? Something that had happened before he himself was born but something that had still been worth talking of for years and years …

Ev closed his eyes and looked as if he was asleep sitting up, a skinny old man, mostly bald, in a neat khaki shirt and neat khaki pants with creases up the legs.

In a moment it came, and when it did he wondered how it could have taken him so long to get it. The Clarendons. The Clarendons, of course. They had lived at the junction of Nista Road and the Old Derry Road. Paul and Faith Clarendon. Faith, who had been so taken with that sweety-sugar preacher, and who had birthed a child with black hair and sweety-sugar blue eyes about nine months after the preacher blew town. Paul Clarendon, who had studied the baby as it lay in its crib, and who had then gotten his straightrazor.

Some people had shaken their heads and blamed the preacher – Colson, his name was. He said it was, anyway.

Some people shook their heads and blamed Paul Clarendon; they said he'd always been crazy, and Faith should never have married him.

Some people had of course blamed Faith. Ev remembered some old man in the barbershop – this was years after, but towns like Haven have long memories -calling her 'nothing but a titty-bump hoor born to make trouble.'

And some people had – in low voices, to be sure – blamed the woods.

Ev's eyes flashed open.

Yes; yes, they had. His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. lt was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.

'Humpf!' Ev's mother had sniffed – Ev himself had then been nine or so, he recollected now.

'And I guess it's why your ma there tosses some salt over her shoulder when she spills the cellar,' Ev's dad said mildly to Ev.

'Humpf!' she said again, and went inside to leave her husband smoking on the porch and her son sitting beside him, listening intently as his father yarned. Ev had always been a good listener … except for that one crucial moment when someone had so badly needed him to listen, that one unregainable moment when he had allowed Hilly's tears to drive him away in confusion.

Ev listened now. He listened to his memory … the town's memory.

9

They had been called Big Injun Woods because it was there that Chief Atlantic had died. lt was the whites who called him Chief Atlantic – his proper Micmac name had been Wahwayvokah, which means 'by tall waters.' Chief Atlantic was a contemptuous translation of this. The tribe had originally covered– much of what was now Penobscot County, with large tribes centered in Oldtown, Skowhegan, and the Great Woods, which began in Ludlow – it was in Ludlow that they buried their dead when they were decimated by influenza in the 1880s and drifted south with WalIwayvokah, who had presided over their further decline. Waliwayvokah died in 1885, and on his deathbed he declared that the woods to which he had brought his dying people were cursed. That was known and reported by the two white men who had been present when he died – one an anthropologist from Boston College, the other from the Smithsonian Institute – who had come to the area in search of Indian artifacts from the tribes of the Northeast, which were degenerating rapidly and would soon be gone. What was less sure was whether Chief Atlantic was laying the curse himself or only making an observation of an existing condition.

Either way, his only monument was the name Big Injun Woods – even the site of his grave was no longer known. The name for that large piece of forest was, so far as Ev knew, still the one most commonly used in Haven and the other towns which were a part of it, but he could understand how the cartographers responsible for the Maine Atlas might not have wanted to put a word like 'Injun' in their book of maps. People had gotten touchy about such casual slurs.

Old tales sometimes have a grain of truth in them, his dad had said …

Ev, who also crossed himself when black cats crossed his path (and, truth to tell, when one looked likely to, just to be safe), thought that his dad was right, and that grain was usually there. And, cursed or not, Big Injun Woods had never been very lucky.

Not lucky for Wahwayvokah, not lucky for the Clarendons. lt had never been very lucky for the hunters who tried their hand in there, either, he recalled. Over the years there had been two … no, three … wait a minute …

Ev's eyes widened and he made a silent whistle as he thumbed through a mental card-file labeled HUNTING ACCIDENTS, HAVEN. He could just offhand think of a dozen accidents, most of them shootings, which had taken place in Big Injun Woods, a dozen hunters who had been lugged out bleeding and cursing, bleeding and unconscious, or just plain dead. Some had shot themselves, using loaded guns for crutches to help them climb over fallen trees, or dropping them, or some damn thing. One was a reputed suicide. But Ev now remembered that on two occasions murder had been done during November in Big Injun Woods – it had been done in hot blood both times, once in an argument over a card game at someone's camp, once because of a squabble between two friends over whose bullet had taken down a buck of recordbreaking size.

And hunters got lost in there. Christ! Did they ever! Every year it seemed there was at least one search party sent out to find some poor scared slob from Massachusetts or New Jersey or New York City, and some years there were two or three. Not all of them were found.

Most were city people who had no business in the woods to start with, but that wasn't always the case. Veteran hunters said compasses worked poorly or not at all in Big Injun Woods. Ev's dad said he guessed there must be a helluva chunk of magnetic rock buried somewhere out there, and it foozled a compass needle to hell and gone. The difference between city folks and those who were veterans of the woods was that the city folks learned how to read a compass out of a book and then put all their trust in it. So when it packed up and said east was north and west was east or just spun around and around like a milk bottle in a kissing game, they were like men stuck in the shithouse with diarrhoea and no corncobs. Wiser men just cursed their compasses, put them away, and tried another of the half-dozen ways there were of finding a direction. Lacking all else, you looked for a stream to lead you out. Sooner or later, if you held a straight course, you'd either hit a road or a set of CMP power pylons.

But Ev had known a few fellows who had lived and hunted all their lives in Maine and who still had to be pulled by a search party or who finally made it out on their own only by dumb luck. Delbert McCready, whom Ev had known since childhood, had been none of these. Del had gone into Big Injun Woods with his twelve-gauge on Tuesday, November 10th, 1947. When forty-eight hours had passed and he still hadn't shown up, Mrs McCready called Alf Tremain, who in those days had been the constable. A search party of twenty went into the woods where the Nista Road petered out at the Diamond Gravel Pit, and by the end of the week it had swelled to two hundred.

They were just about to give Del – whose daughter was, of course, Hazel McCready – up for lost when he stumbled out of the woods along the course of Preston Stream, pale and dazed and twenty pounds lighter than he had been when he went in.

Ev visited him in the hospital. 'How'd it happen, Del? Night was clear. Stars were out. You can read the stars, can't you?'

'Ayuh.' Del looked deeply ashamed. 'Always could, anyway.'

'And the moss. 'Twas you who told me about how to read north by the moss on the trees when we was kids.'

'Ayuh,' Del repeated. Just that. Ev gave him time, then pressed.

'Well, what happened?'

For a long time Del still said nothing. Then, in a voice which was almost inaudible, he said: 'I got turned around.'

Ev let the silence spin out, as difficult as that was.

'Everything was all right for a while,' Del resumed at last. 'I hunted most of the morning but didn't see no fresh sign. I sat down and ate m'dinner and had a bottle of my ma's beer. Made me sleepy and I napped. I had some funny dreams … can't remember 'em, but I know they was funny. And, look! This happened while I was sleepin'.'

Del McCready raised his upper lip and showed Ev a hole there.

'Lost a tooth?'

'Ayuh … it was layin in the crotch of m'pants when I woke up. Fell out when I was sleepin', I guess, but I ain't hardly ever had any trouble with my teeth, at least not since that one wisdom tooth got impacted and damn near killed me. By then it coming on dark

'Dark!'

'I know how it sounds, don't you worry,' Del said crossly – but it was the crossness of someone who is deeply ashamed. 'I just slept all the afternoon away, and when I got up, Ev -'

His eyes rolled up to meet Ev's for one miserable second and then shifted away, as if he could not bear to look his old friend in the eye for longer than that one second.

'It was like somethin' stole m'brains. The tooth fairy, mayhap.'

Del laughed, but there hadn't been much humor in the sound. 'I wandered around for a while, thinking I was following the polestar, and when I still hadn't come out on the Hammer Cut Road by nine o'clock or so, I kinda rubbed my eyes and saw it wasn't Polaris at all, but one of the planets – Mars or Sat'n, I guess. I laid down to sleep, and until I came out along Preston Stream a week later, I don't remember nothing but little bits and pieces.'

'Well . . .' Ev halted. lt sounded entirely unlike Del, whose head was as level as a carpenter's plane. 'Well, was you panicked, Del?'

Del's eyes rolled up to meet Ev's, and they were still ashamed, but there was also a leaven of real humor in them now. 'A man can't stay in a panic for a whole week, I don't b'lieve,' he said dryly. 'It's awful tirin'.'

'So you just . . .'

'I just,' Del agreed, 'but just what, I don't know. I know that when I woke up from that nap my feet and my ass was both asleep and all numb, and I know that in one of those dreams it seemed like I heard somethin' hummin' – the way you can hear power lines hum on a still day, you know – and that's all. I forgot all m'woodcraft and wandered around in the woods like somebody who'd never even seen the woods before. When I hit Preston Stream I knew enough to follow it out, and I woke up in here, and I guess I'm a laughingstock in town, but I'm grateful to be alive. It's God's mercy that I am.'

'You ain't a laughingstock, Del,' Ev said, and of course that was a lie, because that was exactly what Del was. He worked at overcoming it for nearly five years, and when he saw for sure that the barbershop wits were never going to let him live it down, he moved up to East Eddington and opened a combination garage and small engine-repair shop. Ev still got up to see him once in a while, but Del didn't come down to Haven much anymore. Ev guessed he knew why.

10

Sitting in his rented room, Ev closed the compass up as tight as it would go and drew the tiniest circle yet, the smallest the compass would make. There was only one house inside this marble-sized circle, and he thought: That house is the closest one there is to the center of Haven. Funny I never thought about it before.

It was the old Garrick place, sitting there on Derry Road with Big Injun Woods widening out behind it.

Should have drawn this last circle in red, if no other.,

Frank's niece, Bobbi Anderson, lived on the Garrick place now – not that she farmed, of course; she wrote books. Ev hadn't passed many words with Bobbi, but she had a good reputation in town. She paid her bills on time, folks said, and didn't gossip. Also, she wrote good old western stories that you could really sink your teeth into, not all full of make-believe monsters and a bunch of dirty words, like the books that fellow who lived up Bangor way wrote. Goddam good westerns, people said.

Especially for a girl.

People in Haven felt good about Bobbi Anderson, but of course she'd just been in town for thirteen years and people would have to wait and see. Garrick, most agreed, had been as crazy as a shithouse rat. He always brought in a good garden, but that didn't change his mental state. He was always trying to tell someone about his dreams. They were usually about the Second Coming. After a while it got so that even Arlene Cullum, who sold Amway with the zeal of a Christian martyr, would make herself scarce when she saw Frank Garrick's truck (plastered with bumper stickers which said things like IF THE RAPTURE'S TODAY SOMEBODY GRAB MY STEERING WHEEL) driving down the village's Main Street.

In the late sixties, the old man had gotten a bee in his bonnet about flying saucers. Something about Elijah seeing a wheel within a wheel, and being taken up to heaven by angels driving chariots of fire powered by electromagnetism. He had been crazy, and he had died of a heart attack in 1975.

But before he died, Ev thought with rising coldness, he lost all his teeth. I noticed it, and I remember Justin Hurd just down the road commenting on it and … and now Justin's the closest, except for Bobbi herself, that is, and Justin also wasn't what you'd call a model of sanity and reason. Few times I saw him before I left, he even reminded me of old Frank.

It was odd, he thought at first, that he had never put together the run of peculiar things that had happened within those two inner circles before, that no one had. Further reflection made him decide it really wasn't so strange, after all. A life -particularly a long one – was composed of millions of events; they made a crowded tapestry with many patterns woven into it. Such a pattern as this – the deaths, the murders, the lost hunters, crazy Frank Garrick, maybe even that queer fire at the Paulsons' – only showed up if you were looking for it. Once seen, you wondered how you could have missed it. But if you weren't …

And now a new thought dawned on him: Bobbi Anderson was perhaps not all right. He remembered that since the beginning of July, perhaps even before, there had been sounds of heavy machinery coming from Big Injun Woods. Ev had heard the sounds and dismissed them – Maine was heavily forested, and the sounds were all too familiar. New England Paper doing a spot of logging on its land, most likely.

Except, now that he thought about it – now that he had seen the pattern

Ev realized that the sounds weren't deep enough in the woods to be on NEP's land -those sounds were coming from the Garrick place. And he also realized that the earlier sounds – the cycling, waspy whine of a chainsaw, the crackle-crunch of failing trees, the coughing roar of a gas-powered chipper – had given way to sounds he didn't associate with woods work at all. The later sounds had been … what? Earth-moving machinery, perhaps.

Once you saw the pattern, things fell into place like the last dozen pieces going effortlessly into a big jigsaw puzzle.

Ev sat looking down at the map and the circles. A dark, numbing horror seemed to be filling his veins, freezing him from the inside out.

Once you saw the pattern, you couldn't help seeing it.

Ev slammed the atlas shut and went to bed.

Where he was unable to sleep.

What are they doing down there tonight? Building things? Making people disappear? What?

Every time he drifted near sleep, an image came: of everyone in Haven Village standing in Main Street with drugged, dreamy expressions on their faces, all of them looking southwest, toward those sounds, like Muslims facing Mecca to pray.

Heavy machinery … earth-moving machinery.

As the pieces went into the puzzle, you began to see what it was, even if there was no picture on the box to help you. Lying in this narrow bed not far from where Hilly lay in his coma, Ev Hillman thought he saw the picture pretty well. Not all of it, mind you, but a lot. He saw it and knew perfectly well no one would believe him. Not without proof. And he dared not go back, dared not put himself in their reach. They would not let him go a second time.

Something. Something out in Big Injun Woods. Something in the ground, something on the land Frank Garrick had willed to his niece, who wrote those western books. Something that knocked compasses and human minds galley-west if you got too close. For all Ev knew, there might be such strange deposits all over the earth. If it did nothing else, it might explain why people in some places seemed so goddam pissed off all the time. Something bad. Haunted. Maybe even accursed.

Ev stirred restlessly, rolled over, looked at the ceiling.

Something had been in the earth. Bobbi Anderson had found it and she was digging it up, her and that fellow who was staying out at the farm with her. That fellow's name was … was …

Ev groped, but couldn't come up with it. He remembered the way Beach Jernigan's mouth had thinned down when the subject of Bobbi's friend came up one day in the Haven Lunch. The regulars on coffee break had just observed the man coming out of the market with a bag of groceries. He had a place over in Troy, Beach said; a shacky little place with a woodstove and plastic over the windows.

Someone said he'd heard the fella was educated.

Beach said an education never kept anyone from being no-account.

No one in the Lunch had argued the point, Ev remembered.

Nancy Voss had been equally disapproving. She said Bobbi's friend had shot his wife but had been let off because he was a college professor. 'If you got a sheepskin written in Latin words in this country, you can get away with anything,' she had said.

They had watched the fellow get into Bobbi's truck and drive back toward the old Garrick place.

'I heard he done majored in drinkin',' old Dave Rutledge said from the end stool that was his special place. 'Everyone goes out there says he's most allus drunk as a coon on stump-likker.'

There had been a burst of mean, gossipy country laughter at that. They hadn't liked Bobbi's friend; none had. Why? Because he had shot his wife? Because he drank? Because he was living with a woman he wasn't married to? Ev knew better. There had been men in the Lunch that day who had not just beaten their wives but beaten them into entirely new shapes. Out here it was part of the code: you were obligated to put one upside the old woman's head if she 'got sma'at.' Out here were men who lived on beer from eleven in the morning until six at night and cheap greenfront whiskey from six to midnight and would drink Old Woodsman flydope strained through a snotrag if they couldn't afford whiskey. Men who had the sex lives of rabbits, jumping from hole to hole. And what had his name been?

Ev drifted toward sleep. Saw them standing on the sidewalks, on the lawn of the public library, over by the little park, staring dreamily toward those sounds. Snapped awake again.

What did you find out, Ruth? Why did they murder you?

He tossed onto his left side.

David's alive … but to bring him back I have to start in Haven.

He tossed onto his right side.

They'll kill me if I go back. There was once a time when I was almost as well-liked there as Ruth herself … least, I always liked to think so. Now they hate me. I saw it in their eyes the night they started looking for David. I took

Hilly out because he was sick and needed a doctor, yes … but it was damned good to have a reason to go. Maybe they only let me go because David distracted them. Maybe they just wanted to be rid of me. Either way, I was lucky to get out. I'd never get out again. So how can I go back? I can't.

Ev tossed and turned, caught on the horns of two imperatives – he would have to go back to Haven if he wanted to rescue David before David died, but if he went back to Haven he would be killed and buried quickly in someone's back field.

Sometime shortly before midnight, he fell into a troubled doze which quickly deepened into the dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion.

12

He slept later than he had in years, awakening on Tuesday morning at a quarter past ten. He felt refreshed and whole for the first time in a long while. The sleep had done him a power of good, too: during it he had thought of how he could maybe get back into Haven and out again. Maybe. For David's sake, and Hilly's, that was a risk he would take.

He thought he could get in and out of Haven on the day of Ruth McCausland's funeral.

13

Butch 'Monster' Dugan was the biggest man Ev had ever seen. Ev believed that Justin Hurd's father Henry might have been within a shout – Henry had stood six-six, weighed three hundred and eighty pounds, and had shoulders so broad he had to go through most doors sideways – but Ev thought this fellow was a tad bigger. Twenty or thirty pounds lighter, maybe, but that was all.

When Ev shook his hand, he saw that word on him had been getting around. lt was in Dugan's face.

'Sit down, Mr Hillman,' Dugan said, and seated himself in a swivel chair that looked as if it might have been rammed out of a huge oak. 'What can I do for you?'

He expects me to start raving, Ev thought calmly, just the way we always expected Frank Garrick to start when he caught up to one of us on the street. And I guess I ain't going to disappoint him. But if you step careful, Ev, you may still get your way. You know now where you want to go, anyway.

'Well, maybe you could do something, at that,' Ev said. At least he hadn't been drinking; trying to talk to that reporter after those beers had been a bad mistake. 'Paper says you'll be going to Ruth McCausland's funeral tomorrow.'

Dugan nodded. 'I'm going. Ruth was a personal friend.'

'And there are others from Derry barracks that'll be going? Paper said her husband was a trooper, and she was in the line of policework herself – oh bein a town constable's no great shakes, I know, but you get what I mean. There will be others, won't there?'

Dugan was frowning now, and he had a lot of face to frown with.

'Mr Hillman, if you have a point to make, I'm not getting it.' And I'm a busy man this morning, in case you didn't know it, his face added. I've got two cops missing, it's starting to look more and more like they ran into some guys jacking deer and the jackers panicked and shot them; I'm in the hot-seat on that one, and on top of it all my old friend Ruth McCausland has died, and I don't have either the time or the patience for bullshit.

'I know you're not. But you will. Did she have other friends who'll be going?'

'Yes. Half a dozen or more. I'm going by myself, starting a little early, so I can talk to some people about a related case.'

Ev nodded. 'I know about the related case,' he said, 'and I guess you know about me. Or think you do.'

'Mr Hillman -'

'I have talked foolishly, and to the wrong people, and at the wrong times,' Ev said in that same calm voice. 'Under other circumstances I would known better, but I've been upset. One of my grandsons is missing. The other is in a sort of coma.'

'Yes. I know.'

'I've been so confused I haven't really known if I was comin' or goin'. So I blabbed to some of the nurses, and then I went up to Bangor and talked to a reporter. Bright. I kind of got the idea you'd heard most of the things I had to say to him.'

'I understand you believe there was some sort of … of conspiracy in the matter of David Brown's disappearance – '

Ev had to struggle to keep from laughing. The word was both bizarre and apt. He never would have thought of it himself. Oh, there was a conspiracy going on, all right. One hell of a conspiracy.

'Yessir. I believe there was a conspiracy, and I think you've got three cases that are a lot more related than you understand – the disappearance of my grandson, the disappearance of those two troopers, and the death of Ruth McCausland – my friend as well as yours.'

Dugan looked a bit startled … and for the first time that dismissive look went out of his eyes. For the first time Ev felt that Dugan was really seeing him. Everett Hillman, instead of just some crazy old rip who had blown in to fart away part of his morning.

'Perhaps you'd better give me the gist of what you believe,' Dugan said, and took out a pad of paper.

'No. You can just put that pad away.'

Dugan looked at him silently for a moment. He didn't put the pad away, but he put down the pencil.

'Bright thought I was crazy, and I didn't tell him half of what I thought,'

Ev said, 'so I ain't going to tell you any. But here's the thing – I think David's still alive. I don't think he's in Haven anymore, but I think if I went back there I might be able to get an idea on where he is. Now, I have reasons – pretty good ones, I think – to believe that I'm not wanted in Haven. I have reasons to think that if I went back there under most circumstances, I'd most likely disappear like David Brown. Or have an accident like Ruth.'

Butch Dugan's face changed. 'I think,' he said, 'I got to ask you to explain that, Mr Hillman.'

'I ain't going to. I can't. I know what I know, and believe what I believe, but I ain't got a speck of proof. I know how crazy I must sound, but if you look into my face, you'll know one thing, at least: I believe what I'm saying.'

Dugan sighed. 'Mr Hillman, if you were in this business, you'd know how sincere most liars look.' Ev started to say something and Dugan shook his head. 'Forget that. Cheap shot. I've only had about six hours' sleep since Sunday night. I'm getting too old for these marathons. Fact is, I do believe you're sincere. But you're only making ominous sounds, talking around the edges of things. Sometimes people do that when they're scared, but mostly they do it when edges are all they have. Either way, I haven't got time to woo you. I answered your questions; maybe you'd better state your business.'

'Glad to. I came here for two reasons, Trooper Dugan. First one was to make sure there was going to be a lot of cops in Haven tomorrow. Things are less likely to happen when there are a lot of cops around, don't you agree?'

Dugan said nothing, only looked at Ev expressionlessly.

'Second was to tell you I'll be in Haven tomorrow too. I won't be at Ruth's funeral, though. I'm going to have a Very pistol with me, and if, during that funeral, you or any of your men should see a big old star-shell go off in the sky, you'll know I have run afoul of some of that craziness no one will believe. Do you follow me?'

'You said going back to Haven might be … uh, unhealthy for you.' Dugan's face was still blank, but that didn't matter; Ev knew he had gone back to his original idea: Ev was crazy, after all.

'Under most circumstances, I said. Under these circumstances, I think I can get away with it. Ruth was loved in Haven, which is a fact I don't think I have to tell you. Most of the town will turn out to see her into the ground. I don't know if they still loved her when she died, but that don't matter – they'll turn out anyway.'

'How do you figure that?' Dugan asked. 'Or is that another one of those things you don't want to talk about?'

'No, I don't mind. lt would look wrong if they didn't turn out.'

'To who?'

'To you. To the other policemen who were friends to her and her husband. To the pols from the Penobscot County Democratic Committee. Why, 'twouldn't surprise me if Congressman Brennan sent someone up from Augusta – she worked awful hard for him when he run for office in Washington. She wasn't just local, y'see, and that's part of what they got to deal with.

They're like people who don't want to throw a party but who are stuck doing it just the same. I'm hoping they'll be so busy making things look right – with putting on a good show – that they'll not even know I've been in Haven until I'm gone.'

Butch Dugan crossed his arms over his chest. Ev had been close to the truth – at first Dugan had indulged himself in the fancy that David Bright, who was usually an extremely accurate interpreter of human behavior, had been wrong this time; Hillman was as sane as he was. Now he was mildly disturbed, not because Hillman had turned out to be crazy after all, but because he had turned out to be really crazy. And yet … there was something oddly persuasive in the old man's calm, reasonable voice and his steady gaze.

'You speak as if everyone in Haven was in on something,' Dugan said, land I think that's impossible. I want you to know that.'

'Yes, any normal person would say that. That's how they've been able to get away with it this long. Fifty years ago, people felt like the atomic, bomb was impossible, and they would have laughed at the idea of TV, let alone a video recorder. Not much changes, Trooper Dugan. Most people see as far as the horizon, and that's all. If someone says there's something over it, people don't listen.'

Ev stood up and extended his hand over Dugan's desk, as if he had every right in the world to expect Dugan to shake it. Which surprised Butch into doing just that.

'Well, I knew when I looked at you that you thought I was nuts,' Ev said with a rueful little smile, 'and I guess I have said enough to double the idea. But I've found out what I needed to know, and said what I needed to say. Do an old man a favor, and peek at the sky once in a while. If you see a purple star-shell . . .'

'The woods are dry this summer,' Dugan said, and even as the words came out of his mouth they seemed helpless and oddly unimportant; almost frivolous. And he realized he was being drawn helplessly toward belief again.

Dugan cleared his throat and pushed on.

'If you've really got a flare-gun, using it could start a hell of a forest fire. If you don't have a permit to use such a thing – and I know goddam well you don't – it could get you thrown into jail.'

Ev's grin widened a little, but there was still no humor in it. 'If you see the star-shell,' he said, 'I got a feeling that being thrown into the pokey up to Bangor is gonna be the least of my worries. Good day to you, Trooper Dugan. '

Ev stepped out and closed the door neatly behind him. Dugan stood for a moment, as perplexed and uneasy as he had ever been in his life. Let him go, he thought, and then got moving.

Something had been troubling Butch Dugan. The disappearance of the two troopers, both of whom he had known and liked, had temporarily driven it out of his mind. Hillman's visit had brought it back, and that was what sent him after the old man.

It was the memory of his last conversation with Ruth. He had been worried about her even before then; her handling of the David Brown search hadn't been like the Ruth McCausland he knew at all. For the only time he could remember, she had been unprofessional.

Then, the night before she died, he had called her about the investigation, to get information and to give it; to kibbitz, in short. He knew neither of them had anything, but sometimes you could spin something out of plain speculation, like straw into gold. In the course of that conversation, the subject of the boy's grandfather had come up. By then Butch had spoken to David Bright of the News -had had a beer with him, in fact – and he passed on to Ruth Ev's idea that the whole town had gone crazy in some strange way.

Ruth hadn't laughed at the story, or clucked over the failure of Ev Hillman's mind, as he had expected she would do. He wasn't sure just what she had said, because just about then the connection had begun to get bad – not that there was anything very unusual in that; most of the lines going into small towns like Haven were still on poles, and the connections regularly went to hell – all it took was a high wind to make you feel like you and the other person were holding tomato soup cans connected by a length of waxed string.

Better tell him to stay away, Ruth had said – he was sure of that much. And then, just before he lost her altogether, it seemed to him that she had said something about – of all things – nylon stockings. He must have heard her wrong, but there was no mistaking the tone – sadness and great weariness, as if her failure to find David Brown had taken all the heart out of her. A moment later the connection had broken down completely. He hadn't bothered to call her back because he had given her all the information he had … precious little, really.

The next day she was dead.

Better tell him to stay away. That much he was sure of.

Now, I have reasons … to believe that I'm not wanted in Haven.

Tell him to stay away.

I might disappear like David Brown.

Stay away.

Or have an accident like Ruth McCausland.

Away.

He caught up to the old man in the parking lot.

14

Hillman had an old purple Valiant with badly rusted rocker panels. He looked up, driver's-side door open, as Dugan loomed over him.

'I'm coming with you tomorrow.'

Ev's eyes widened. 'You don't even know where I'm going!'

'No. But if I'm with you I won't have to worry that you're going to set half the woods in eastern Maine on fire trying to send me a message like Double-O-Seven.'

Ev looked at him consideringly, and then shook his head. 'I'd feel better having someone with me,' he said, 'especially a guy as big as Gorilla Monsoon who packs a gun. But they ain't stupid in Haven, Officer Dugan. They never were, and I got a feeling that they're a lot less stupid just lately. They expect to see you at her funeral. If they don't, they're going to be suspicious.'

'Christ! I'd like to know how the hell you can stand there babbling all that crazy shit and sound so fucking sane!'

'Maybe because you know too,' Ev said. 'How funny it is. How funny all of these things started in Haven.' Then with a prescience that was startling, he added: 'Or maybe you knew Ruth well enough yourself to sense she'd gotten off-kilter.'

The two men stood looking at each other in the graveled parking lot of the Derry barracks, the sun beating down on them, their shadows, clear and black, slanting out neatly at two o'clock.

'I'll let on tonight that I'm sick,' Dugan said. 'That I've got stomach flu. It's been going around the barracks. What do you think?'

Ev nodded with sudden relief – that relief was so great it was startling. The idea of sneaking back into Haven had frightened him more than he had been willing to let on, especially to himself. He had half-convinced this big cop that something might be going on there; he could see it in his face. Half-convinced wasn't much, maybe, but it was still a giant step forward from where he had been. And of course, he hadn't done it alone; Ruth McCausland had helped.

'All right,' he said, 'but listen to me, Trooper Dugan, and listen good, because our lives could depend on it tomorrow. Don't you call up any of the men who'll be going to the funeral tomorrow and tell them the reason you're not going to be there is just a gag you're running. Call up a few people tonight and tell them you really are just as sick as a dog, that you hope you are going to be able to make it, but you doubt it.'

Dugan frowned. 'Why would you want me to say – 'But suddenly he knew, and his mouth dropped open. The old man stared back at him calmly enough.

'Christ Jesus, are you telling me that you think the people in Haven are mind-readers? That if my men knew I really wasn't sick, the people in town could pick the news right out of their heads?'

'I ain't telling you a thing, Trooper Dugan,' Ev said. 'You are telling me.'

Mr Hillman, I really think that you must be imagining -'

I never expected you'd want to come with me when I came to see you. I wasn't angling for it, either. The most I hoped for was that you'd keep an eye out and see my flare if I got in trouble, and that would at least keep the heat on that nest of snakes down there a while longer. But if you offer a man more, he wants more. Trust me a little further. Please. For Ruth's sake … if that's what it takes to convince you to come with me, I'm willing to use it. Something else: no matter what, you're going to feel some peculiar things tomorrow.'

I've felt some pretty peculiar ones today,' Dugan said.

Ayuh,' Ev said, and waited for Dugan to decide.

'Do you have some actual place to go in mind?' Dugan asked after a moment. 'Or are you just going to ramble around the town until you get tired of it?'

'I've got a place in mind,' Ev said quietly. He thought: Oh yes. Yessirree Bob. Up behind the old Garrick place, on the outskirts of Big Injun Woods, where compasses have never worked worth a tin shit in a goldmine. And I believe we'll strike on a pretty good path through the woods to it – whatever 'it' is – because equipment like the stuff Bobbi Anderson and her friend have been using leaves a backtrail as wide as a freeway. No, I don't believe there will be any trouble finding it at all.

'Okay. Give me the address of the place you're staying in Derry, and I'll pick you up at nine in my personal car. We'll get to Haven just about the time the service starts.'

'The car's my treat,' Ev said quietly. 'Not this one; it's known in Haven. I'll have a rental. And you'll want to show up at eight, because we'll be doing a bit of backroading.'

'I can get us into Haven and still keep clear of the village,' Dugan said. 'You don't have to worry about that.'

'I ain't. But I want us to skirt the whole town and come in from the Albion side, and I think I know just the way to do it.'

'Why the hell does it have to be that end of town?'

'Because it's the furthest from where they'll be, and that's where I want to come back into Haven. As far from 'em as I can get.'

'You're really scared, aren't you?'

Ev nodded.

'Why a rental car?'

'Criminy, don't you ask a lot of questions!' And Ev rolled his eyes in such a comical way that Butch Dugan grinned.

'It's my job,' he said. 'Why do you want to go in a rental? No one in Haven is going to know my personal car.' He paused, thinking. 'At least, not now that Ruth's dead.'

'Because it's my obsession,' Ev Hillman said. His face suddenly cracked into a smile of startling sweetness. 'And a person ought to pay the freight on his own obsession.'

'All right,' Butch said. 'I give up. Eight o'clock. Your route, your car, your obsession. I must be crazy. I really must be.'

'By tomorrow at this time, I think you're going to have a much better idea of what crazy is,' Ev said, and climbed into his old purple Valiant before Dugan could ask him any more questions.

Butch, in fact. had no more questions to ask. He felt glum, as if he had 'bought the Brooklyn Bridge his first day in New York City, shelling out even though he knew a thing that big probably couldn't be for sale. No one gets taken who doesn't want to get taken, he thought. He had worked Fraud and Bunco out of Augusta for three years, and that was the first thing they taught you. The old man had been queerly persuasive, but Butch Dugan knew that he had not been persuaded into this; he had jumped. Because he had loved Ruth McCausland, and in another year or so he probably would have plucked up sufficient nerve to propose to her. Because when someone you love dies, it leaves a black hole in the middle of your heart, and one way to plug such a hole is to refuse to admit that he or she was taken away by a stupid mischance. Better if you can believe – even for a little while – that someone or something you can get hold of was responsible. It makes the hole a little smaller. Even a rube knows that much.

Sighing, suddenly feeling much older than his age, Dugan trudged back to the barracks.

Ev went to the hospital and sat for most of that day's remainder with Hilly. Around three o'clock, he wrote two notes. One he put on Hilly's night table, anchored against the breeze that pawed with occasional playfulness through the open window with a little pot of flowers. The other note was longer, and when he was done with it, he folded it and put it in his pocket. Then he left the hospital.

He drove to a small building in the Derry Industrial Park. MAINE MED SUPPLIES, the sign over the door read. And below that: Specializing in Respiration Supplies and Respiration Therapy Since 1946.

He told the man inside what he wanted. The man told him it sounded as if he really ought to take a ride up to Bangor and talk to the folks at Downeast ScubaDive. Ev explained that a scuba tank was the last thing he wanted; he was interested in as much dry-land portability as he could get. He and the fellow talked a while longer, and Ev left after signing a thirty-six-hour rental agreement, with a rather specialized piece of equipment. The fellow at Maine Med Supplies stood at the door watching him go, scratching his head.

15

The nurse read the note by Hilly's bed.

Hilly -

I may not see you for a while now, but I just wanted to tell you I think you'll get over this bad patch, and if I can help you do it, I guess I will be just about the happiest grampa in the world. I believe David is still alive, and I don't think it's your fault that he got lost in the first place. I love you, Hilly, and I hope to see you soon.

Gramp

But he never saw Hilly Brown again.

1

From nine o'clock on, out-of-towners who had known or worked with Ruth McCausland began to come into Haven Village. Soon almost every parking space along Main Street was taken. The Haven Lunch did a brisk business. Beach kept busy short-ordering eggs, bacon, sausages, and home-fries. He brewed pot after pot of coffee. Representative Brennan hadn't come, but he had sent a close aide. Should have come y'self, Joe, Beach thought with a little sunken smile. Might have got a whole slew of new ideas 'bout how to run the gov'mint.

The day dawned brisk and clear, more like late September than late July. The sky was bright blue, the temperature a moderate sixty-eight degrees, the wind out of the west at about twenty miles an hour. Once more there were outsiders in Haven, and once more Haven had gotten lucky weather for them. And soon it wouldn't matter whether they were lucky or not, the townsfolk told each other without speaking; soon they would be in charge of their own luck.

A good day, you would have said; the best kind of New England summer's day, the sort the tourists come for. A day to prick the appetite fully alive. Those who came to Haven from out of town ordered hearty breakfasts, as people with lively appetites are apt to do, but Beach noted that most of those breakfasts came back only half-eaten. The newcomers lost their appetites quickly; the light went out of their eyes, and they began to look, for the most part, sallow and a little sick.

The Lunch was crowded, but conversation lagged.

Must be that the air here in our little town don't quite agree with you folks, Beach thought. He imagined going into the storeroom, where the device he had used to get rid of the two nosy cops was hidden under a pile of tablecloths. He imagined bringing it out here, a great big deadly bazooka, and just washing his lunchroom clean of all these outsiders with a purifying blast of green fire.

No; not now. Not yet. Soon it wouldn't matter. Next month. But for now …

He looked down at the plate he was scraping and saw a tooth in someone's scrambled eggs.

Tommyknockers coming, my friends, Beach thought. Only when they finally get here, I don't think they'll even bother knocking; I think they'll just blow the fucking door right down.

Beach's grin widened. He scraped the tooth off the plate with the rest of the garbage.

2

Dugan could be silent when he wanted, and this morning that was what he wanted. Apparently it was what the old man wanted, too. Dugan had gotten to Ev Hillman's apartment building on Lower Main promptly at eight, and had found a Jeep Cherokee standing at the curb behind the old party's Valiant. There was a big gunnysack in the back, its top tied with hayrope.

'Did you rent this in Bangor?'

'Leased it at Derry AMC,' Ev said.

'Must have been expensive.'

"Twasn't too dear.'

That ended the conversation. They arrived somewhere near the AlbionHaven town line an hour and forty minutes later. We'll be doing a bit Of backroading, the old man had said, and if that wasn't a classic understatement, Butch didn't know what was. He had been driving in this part of Maine for almost twenty years, and before today had thought he knew it like the back of his hand. Now he knew better. Hillman knew it like the back of his hand; by comparison, Butch Dugan had a general working knowledge of the area, no more.

They went from the turnpike to Route 69; from 69 to two-lane blacktop; then to gravel in western Troy; then to hardpan; then to rutted dirt with grass growing up the middle; finally to an overgrown logging track that looked as if it might have last been seriously used around 1950.

'Do you know where the fuck you're going?' Butch shouted as the Cherokee crashed through rotted corduroy, then hauled itself out, engine howling, all four wheels spinning up mud and chewed splinters.

Ev only nodded. He clung to the Cherokee's big wheel like an old, balding monkey.

One woods road led into another, and finally they crashed out of a scree of foliage and onto a dirt road Butch recognized as Albion Town Road No. 5. Butch had thought it impossible, but the old man had done exactly what he promised: brought them all the way around Haven without ever once going in.

Now Ev brought the Cherokee to a stop just a hundred feet short of the marker announcing the Haven town line. He turned off the engine and unrolled his window. There was no sound but the tick of the engine. There was no birdsong, and Butch thought this odd.

'What's in that gunnysack back there?' Butch asked.

'All kinds of things. No need to worry about it now.'

'What are you waiting for?'

'Churchbells,' Ev said.

3

It was not the Methodist churchbells that Ev had grown up with and expected which rang out at a quarter to ten, calling Ruth's mourners – both the real ones and those prepared to shed copious floods of crocodile tears – to the Methodist church, where the first act of the three-act festivities was to be played out (Act II: Graveside Ceremonies; Act Ill: Refreshments in the Town Library).

Reverend Goohringer, a shy man who usually had not the fortitude to say boo to a goose, had gone around town a few weeks ago telling people he was getting damned tired of all that gonging.

'Then why don't you do something about it, Gooey?' Pamela Sargent asked him.

Rev. Lester Goohringer had never been called 'Gooey' in his entire life, but in his current state of rancor he barely noticed.

'Maybe I will,' he said, looking at her through his thick glasses grimly. 'Just maybe I will.'

'Got any ideas?'

'I might,' he said slyly. 'Time'll tell, won't it?'

'It always does, Gooey,' she said. 'Always does.'

The Reverend Goohringer in fact had a fine idea about those bells – he could hardly believe it had never occurred to him before, it was so simple and beautiful. And the best thing about it was that he wouldn't have to take it up with the deacons, or with the Ladies' Aid (an organization which apparently only attracted two types of women – fat slobs with boobs the size of barrels and skinny-assed, flat-chested sluts like Pamela Sargent, with her fake ivory cigarette holder and her raspy smoker's cough), or with the few well-to-do members of his congregation … going to them always gave him a week's worth of acid indigestion. He did not like to beg. No, this was something the Rev. Lester Goohringer could do all by himself, and so he did it. Fuck 'em all if they couldn't take a joke.

'And if you ever call me Gooey again, Pam,' he had whispered as he rewired the fuse box in the church basement so it could handle the heavy voltage his idea would require, 'I'll jam the plumber's friend in the parsonage pissoir up your twat and plunge out your brains … if you haven't pissed 'em all away.'

He cackled and went on rewiring. Rev. Lester Goohringer had never had such blunt thoughts or said such blunt things in his life, and he found the experience liberating and exhilarating. He was, in fact, prepared to tell anyone in Haven who didn't like his new carillon that they could take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

But everyone in town had thought the change nothing short of magnificent. It was, too. And today the Rev. Goohringer felt a real heart-swell of pride as he flicked the new switch in the vestry and the sound of the bells floated out over Haven, playing a medley of hymns. The carillon was programmable, and today Lester Goohringer plugged in the hymns which had been particular favorites of Ruth's. They included such old Methodist and Baptist standbys as 'What a Friend We Have in Jesus' and 'This is My Father's World.'

The Rev. Goohringer stood back, rubbing his hands together, and watched as people began to move toward the church in groups and twos and threes, drawn by the bells, the bells, the calling of the bells.

'Hot damn!' the Rev. Goohringer exclaimed. He had never felt better in his life, and he meant to send Ruth McCausland off in style. He intended to preach one pie-cutter of a eulogy.

After all, they had all loved her.

4

The bells.

Dave Rutledge, Haven's oldest citizen, tipped an ear toward them and smiled toothlessly – even if the bells had jangled discordantly he would have smiled, because he could hear them. Until early July, Dave had been almost completely deaf, and his lower limbs were always cold and white as his circulation steadily failed. He was, after all, ninety, and that made him an old dog. But this month, his hearing and circulation had magically improved. People told him he looked ten years younger, and by Christ, he felt twenty years younger. And my, wasn't the sound of those bells playing just the sweetest thing? Dave got up and started toward the church.

5

The calling of the bells.

In January, the aide U.S. Representative Brennan had sent to Haven had been in D.C., and there he had met a beautiful young woman named Annabelle. This summer she had come to Maine to be with him, and had come to Haven with him this morning to keep him company. He had promised her they would overnight in Bar Harbor before going back to Augusta. At first she thought it had been a bad idea, because she began to feel a little nauseated in the restaurant and hadn't been able to finish her breakfast. For one thing, the short-order cook looked like an older, fatter version of Charles Manson. He kept smiling the strangest, slyest little smile when he thought no one was looking – it was enough to make you wonder if he had powdered the scrambled eggs with arsenic. But the sound of the bells chiming out hymns she had not heard since her Nebraska childhood charmed her with wonder.

'My God, Marty, how can a little wide-place-in-the-road town like this one afford a gorgeous carillon like that?'

'Maybe some rich summer tourist died and left it to them,' Marty said vaguely. He had no interest in the carillon. He'd had a headache ever since they got here, and it was getting worse. Also, one of his gums was bleeding. Pyorrhoea ran in his family; he hoped to God it wasn't that. 'Come on, let's go over to the church.' So we can get it done and go up to Bar Harbor and screw our brains out, he thought. Christ, this is one creepy little town.

They started across the street together, she in a black suit (but, she had told him archly on their way up, her underwear was all white silk … what little of it there was), he in a governmental charcoal gray. The people of Haven, dressed in their soberest finery, walked with them. Marty saw a surprising number of powder-blue state-police uniforms.

'Look, Marty! The clock!'

She was pointing at the tower of the town hall. It was good solid red brick, but for a moment it seemed to swim and waver before Marty's eyes. His headache was instantly worse. Maybe it was eyestrain. He'd had a checkup three months ago and the guy had said his vision was good enough to fly a jet fighter, but maybe he had been wrong. Half the professional people in America were on coke these days. He had read all about it in Time … and why was his mind wandering like this, anyway? It was the bells. They seemed to be echoing and multiplying in his head. Ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million, all playing 'When We Meet at Jesus' Feet.'

'What about the clock?' he asked irritably.

'The hands are funny,' she said. 'They look almost … drawn on.'

6

The calling of the bells.

Eddie Stampnell of the Derry barracks crossed the street with Andy Rideout from Orono – both of them had known Ruth, liked her.

'Pretty, ain't it?' Eddie asked dubiously.

'Maybe,' Andy said. 'I just keep thinking of Bent and Jingles getting blown away by a couple of numbmit rubes out here, probably buried in some farmer's potato field, and it just sounds like a bone-phone to me. Seems like Haven's bad luck now. I know that's stupid, but that's how I feel.'

'It's bad luck for my head,' Eddie replied. 'It aches like a bastard.'

'Well, let's get it over and get out,' Andy said. 'She was a good woman, but she's gone. And between you and me, I don't care if I never spend another fifteen minutes in Haven now that she is.'

They stepped into the Methodist church together, neither of them looking at Rev. Lester Goohringer, who stood beside the switch which controlled his lovely carillon, smiling and rubbing his dry hands together and accepting the compliments of all and sundry.

7

The crying of the bells.

Bobbi Anderson got out of her blue Chevrolet truck, slamming the door, smoothing her dark blue dress over her hips and checking her makeup in the truck's outside mirror before walking slowly down the sidewalk to the church. She walked with her head down and her shoulders slumped. She was trying hard to get the rest she needed to go on, and Gard had helped to put a brake on her obsession

(and that's what it is, an obsession, no use kidding yourself)

but Gard was a brake that was slowly wearing out. He wasn't at the funeral because he was sleeping off a monumental drunk out at the farm, his grizzled, worn face pillowed on one arm, his breath a sour cloud around him. Anderson was tired, all right, but it was more than tiredness – a great unfocused grief seemed to fill her this morning. It was partly for Ruth, partly for David Brown, partly for the whole town. Yet mostly, she suspected, it was for herself. The 'becoming' continued – for everyone in Haven except Gard, that was – and it was good, but she mourned her own unique identity, which was now fading like a morning mist. She knew now that The Buffalo Soldiers was her last book … and the irony was that she now suspected the Tommyknockers had written most of that, as well.

8

The bells, bells, bells.

Haven answered them. It was Act I of a charade titled The Burial of Ruth McCausland, or, How We Loved That Woman. Nancy Voss had closed the post office to come. The government would not have approved, but what the government didn't know wouldn't hurt them. They would know plenty soon enough, she thought. They would get a big old express-mail delivery from Haven very soon. Them and every other government on this flying mudball.

Frank Spruce, Haven's biggest dairy farmer, answered the bells. John Mumphry, whose father had run against Ruth for the position of town constable, answered them. Ashley Ruvall, who had passed her out by the town line two days before her death, answered them with his parents. Ashley was crying. Doc Warwick was there, and Jud Tarkington; Adley McKeen came with Hazel McCready on his arm; Newt Berringer and Dick Allison answered them, walking slowly and supporting Ruth's predecessor, John Harley, between them. John was feeble and nearly transparent. Maggie, his wife, was not well enough to attend.

They came, answering the summons of the bells – Tremains and Thurlows, Applegates and Goldmans, Duplisseys and Archinbourgs. Good Maine people, you would have said, drawn from a healthy stockpot that was mostly French, Irish, Scots, and Canadian. But they were different now; as they drew together at the church, so did their minds draw together and become one mind, watching the outsiders, listening for the slightest wrong note in their thoughts … they came together, they listened, and the bells rang in their strange blood.

9

Ev Hillman sat up behind the wheel of the Cherokee, eyes opening wide at the dim sound of the carillon. 'What in the hell – '

'Churchbells, what else?' Butch Dugan said. 'It sounds very pretty. They're getting ready to start the funeral, I suppose.' They're burying Ruth over in the village … what in God's name am I doing out here by the town line with this crazy old man?

He wasn't sure, but it was too late to change his course now.

'The bells in the Methodist church never made a sound like that before in my time,' Ev said. 'Someone's changed them over.'

'So what?'

'So nothing. So everything. I dunno. Come on, Trooper Dugan.' He turned the key, and the Cherokee's engine roared.

'I'll ask you again,' Dugan said with what he thought was extraordinary patience. 'What are we looking for?'

'I don't rightly know.' The Cherokee passed the town-line marker. They had left Albion now and entered Haven. Ev had a sudden sickening premonition that in spite of all his precautions and care, he was never going to leave it again. 'We'll know it when we see it.'

Dugan didn't reply, only held on for dear life and wondered again how he had gotten into this – he had to be as crazy as the old fart he was riding with, and then some. He raised one hand to his forehead and began rubbing, just above the eyebrows.

A headache was forming there.

10

There were sniffles, red eyes, and some sobbing as the Rev. Goohringer, his bald head gleaming mellowly and in a soft variety of colors courtesy of the summer sunshine falling through the stained-glass windows, launched into his funeral eulogy following a hymn, a prayer, another hymn, a reading of Ruth's favorite scripture (the Beatitudes), and yet another hymn. Below him, foaming around the lectern in a semi-circle, were great bunches of summer flowers.

Even with the upper windows of the church thrown open and a good breeze blowing through, their smell was suffocatingly sweet.

'We have come here to praise Ruth McCausland and to celebrate her passing,' Goohringer began.

The townsfolk sat with hands either folded or gripping handkerchiefs; their eyes -most wet – regarded Goohringer with sober, studious attention. They looked healthy, these folk – their color was good, their skin for the most part unblemished. And even someone who had never been in Haven before could have seen that the congregation here fell naturally into two groups. The outsiders didn't look healthy. They were pale. Their eyes were dazed. Twice during the eulogy, people left hurriedly, dashed around the corner of the church, and were quietly sick. For others, the nausea was a lower complaint – an uneasy rolling in the bowels not quite serious enough to cause an exit but simply going on and on.

Several outsiders would lose teeth before that day was over.

Several developed headaches which would dissolve almost as soon as they left town – the aspirin finally working, they would surmise.

And more than a few of them had the most amazing ideas as they sat on the hard pews and listened to Goohringer preach Ruth McCausland's eulogy. In some cases these ideas came so suddenly and seemed so huge, so fundamental, that the persons to whom they occurred would feel as if they had been shot in the head. Such persons had to fight down an urge to bolt out of their pews and run into the street screaming 'Eureka!' at full volume.

The people of Haven saw this happening and were amused. All of a sudden the apathetic, puddinglike expression on someone's face would be shocked away. The eyes would widen, the mouth flop open, and the Havenites would recognize the expression of a person in the throes of a Grand Idea.

Eddie Stampnell of the Derry barracks, for instance, conceived of a nationwide police band on which every cop in the land could communicate. And he saw how a cloak could easily be thrown over such a band; all those nosy civilians with their police-band radios would be shit out of luck. Ramifications and modifications poured into his mind faster than he could deal with them; if ideas had been water, he would have drowned. I'm gonna be famous for this, he thought feverishly. Rev. Goohringer was forgotten; Andy Rideout, his partner, was forgotten; his dislike of this goofy little town was forgotten; Ruth was forgotten. The idea had swallowed his mind. I'm gonna be famous, and I'm gonna revolutionize policework in America … maybe in the whole world. Holy shit! Hoo-oly SHIP

The Havenites, who knew Eddie's great idea would be foggy by noon and gone by three, smiled and listened and waited. Waited for it to be over, so they could get back to their real business.

So they could get back to 'becoming.'

They rolled down the dirt track – Town Road No. 5 in Albion, which became Fire Road No. 16 here in Haven. Twice logging roads branched off into the woods, and each time one of these came up, Dugan braced himself for an even more bone-wrenching ride. But Hillman didn't take either. He reached Route 9 and swung right. He cranked the Cherokee up to fifty and headed deeper into Haven.

Dugan was skittery. He didn't know exactly why. The old man was crazy, of course; the idea that Haven had turned into a nest of snakes was pure paranoia. All the same, Monster felt a steady, pulsing nervousness growing inside him. It was vague, a low grassfire in his nerves.

'You keep rubbing your forehead,' Hillman said.

'I've got a headache.'

'It'd ache a lot worse if the wind wasn't blowin', I guess.'

Another lapse into utter nonsense. What in God's name was he doing here? And why did he feel so goddam jumpy?

'I feel like somebody slipped me a couple of bennies in my coffee.'

'Ayuh.'

Dugan looked at him. 'But you don't feel that way, do you? You're as cool as a goddam cucumber.'

'I'm scared, but I don't have the jitters, and I don't have a headache, neither.'

'Why would you have a headache?' Dugan asked crossly. The conversation had gotten decidedly Alice in Wonderland-ish. 'Headaches aren't catching.'

'If you and six other guys are painting a closed room, you are all apt to end up with headaches. Ain't that a true fact?'

'Yeah, I guess so. But this isn't – '

'No. It ain't. And we got lucky with the weather. Just the same, I guess that thing is putting out a powerful stink, because you feel it. I can see you do.' Hillman paused and then said another Alice in Wonderland thing. 'Had any good ideas yet, Trooper?'

'What do you mean?'

Hillman nodded, satisfied. 'Good. If you do, tell me. I got something in that sack for you.'

'This is crazy,' Dugan said. His voice wasn't quite steady. 'I mean, utterly nuts. Turn this thing around, Hillman. I want to go back.'

Ev suddenly focused a single phrase in his mind, as sharply and as clearly as he could. He knew from his last three days in Haven that Bryant, Marie, Hilly, and David were routinely reading each other's minds. He could sense it even though he couldn't pick it up. By the same token, he had come to realize they couldn't get into his head unless he let them. He had begun to wonder if it had something to do with the steel in his skull, a souvenir of that German grenade. He had seen the potato-masher with dreadful, ineluctable clarity, a gray-black thing spinning in the snow. He'd thought, Well, I'm dead. That's it for me. After, he remembered nothing until he'd awakened in a French hospital. He remembered how his head had hurt; he remembered the nurse who had kissed him, and how her breath had smelled like anise, and how she kept saying, shaping her words as if speaking to a very small child, 'Je t'aime, mon amour. La guerre est finie. Je t'aime. Je t'aime les Etats Unis.'

La guerre est finie, he thought now. La guerre est finie.

'What is it?' he asked Dugan sharply.

'What do you m -'

Ev swerved the Cherokee over to the side of the road, kicking up a spume of dust. They were a mile and a half over the town line now; it was another three or four miles to the old Garrick farm.

'Don't think, don't talk, just tell me what I was thinkin'.'

'Tout fini, you're thinking la guerre est finie, but you're crazy, people can't read minds, they c – '

Dugan stopped. He turned his head slowly and stared at Ev. Ev could hear the tendons in the man's neck creak. His eyes were huge.

'La guerre est finie,' he whispered. 'That's what you were thinking, and that she smelled like licorice – '

'Anise,' Ev said, and laughed, remembering. Her thighs had been so white, her cunt so tight.

and I saw a grenade in the snow, oh Jesus what's going on?'

Ev pictured a red old-fashioned tractor in his mind. 'What now?'

'Tractor,' Dugan husked. 'Farmall. But you got the wrong tires on it. My dad had a Farmall Those are Dixie Field-Boss tires. They wouldn't fit a Far – '

Dugan suddenly turned around, grappled for the Cherokee's door handle, leaned out, and threw up.

12

'Ruth once asked me if I would read the Beatitudes at her funeral if it should fall to me to preside over it,' the Rev. Goohringer was saying in a mellow Methodist voice the Rev. Donald Harley would have completely approved of, 'and I have honored her wishes. Yet – '

(la guerre you were thinking la guerre est)

Goohringer paused, a little expression of surprise and concern touching his face. A close observer might have thought a little gas had bubbled up, and he had paused to stifle an unseemly burp.

' – I think there is another set of verses she merits. They ‘

(tractor Farmall tractor)

There was another small hitch in Goohringer's delivery, and that frown touched his face again.

‘ – are not the sort of verses, I suppose, that any Christian woman would dare ask for, knowing that a Christian woman must earn them. Listen as I read from the Book of Proverbs and see if you, who knew her, do not agree that this is the case with Ruth McCausland.'

(those are Dixie Field-Boss tires)

Dick Allison glanced to his left and caught Newt's eye across the aisle. Newt looked dismayed. John Harley's mouth had dropped open; his faded blue eyes shifted back and forth in bewilderment.

Goohringer found his place, lost it, almost dropped his Bible. Suddenly he was flustered, no longer the master of ceremonies but a divinity student with stage-fright. As it happened, no one noticed; the outsiders were occupied either with physical distress or with mind-boggling ideas. The people of Haven drew together as an alarm went off, jumping from one mind to the next until their heads rang with it – this was a new carillon, one that jangled with discord.

(someone's looking where they have)

(have no business)

Bobby Tremain took Stephanie Colson's hand and squeezed it. She squeezed back, looking at him with wide brown eyes – the alarmed eyes of a doe who hears the slide and click of the bolt in a hunter's gun.

(out on Route 9)

(too close to the ship)

(one's a cop)

(cop, yes, but a special cop – Ruth's cop, he loved)

Ruth would have known these rising voices. And now even some of the outsiders began to feel them, although they were relatively new to Haven's infection. A few of them looked around like people coming out of thin dozes. One of these was the lady-friend of Representative Brennan's aide. She had been miles from here, it seemed – she was a minor bureaucrat in Washington, but she had just conceived of a filing system that might well get her a fat promotion. Then a random thought, a thought she would have sworn was not her own

(somebody has got to stop them quick!)

slashed across her mind and she looked around to see if someone had actually called out aloud in the church.

But it was quiet except for the preacher, who had found his place again. She looked at Marty, but Marty was sitting in a glassy daze, looking at one of the stained-glass windows with the fixed gaze of one deeply hypnotized. She supposed this to be boredom and went back to her own thoughts.

'Who can find a virtuous woman?' Goohringer read, his voice a trifle uneven. He hesitated in the wrong places and stumbled a few times. 'For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, and he shall have no lack of gain. She doeth him good and not evil all the days of her life. She seeketh wool – '

Now another burst of those alien thoughts came to the single sensitized ear in the church:

(sorry about that I just couldn't)

(what?)

(holy Christ that's Wheeling! how -

There are two voices speaking but we are only hearing one, the mind-net thought, and eyes began to focus on Bobbi. There was only one person in Haven who could make his mind opaque to them, and that person wasn't here now. Two voices – is the one we don't hear the voice of your drunken friend?

Bobbi got up suddenly and worked her way along the pew, horribly aware that people were looking at her. Goohringer, the ass, had paused again.

'Excuse me,' Bobbi muttered. 'Excuse me … excuse me.'

At last she escaped into the vestibule and the street. Others – Bobby Tremain, Newt, Dick, and Bryant Brown among them – began to follow. None of the outsiders noticed. They had lapsed back into their strange dreams.

13

'Sorry about that,' Butch Dugan said. He pulled the door closed, got a handkerchief out of his back pocket and began to rub his mouth. 'I couldn't seem to help it. I feel better now.'

Ev nodded. 'I ain't going to explain. There isn't time. But I want you to listen to something.'

'What?'

Ev snapped on the Cherokee's radio and dialed across the band. Dugan stared. He had never heard so many stations, not even at night when they jumped all over each other, wavering in and out in a sea of voices. Nothing wavery about these; most were bell-clear.

Ev stopped at a C&W station. A song by the Judds was just ending. When it did, there was a station ID. Butch Dugan could hardly believe what he was hearing: "Doubleya-Doubleya-Vee-AYYY!' a perky girl group sang, to an accompaniment of fiddles and banjos.

Holy Christ, that's Wheeling!' Dugan cried. 'How -

Ev snapped off the radio. 'Now I want you to listen to my head.'

Dugan stared at him for a moment, utterly flummoxed. Not even Alice in Wonderland had been this mad.

'What in the name of God are you talking about?'

Don't argue with me, just do it.' Ev turned his face away from Dugan, presenting him with the back of his head. 'I got two pieces of steel plate in, my head. War souvenir. Bigger one's back there. See the place where the hair don't grow?'

'Yes, but

'Time is short! Put your ear up close to that scar and listen!'

He did … and felt unreality wash over him. The back of the old man's head was playing music. It was tinny and distant but perfectly identifiable. It was Frank Sinatra singing 'New York, New York.'

Butch Dugan began to giggle. Soon he was laughing. Then he was roaring, arms wrapped around his stomach. He was out here in the back of the beyond with an old man whose head had just turned into a music-box. By God, this was better than Ripley's Believe It or Not.

Butch laughed and gasped and wept and roared and

The old man's callused palm slammed across his face. The shock of being slapped like a small child surprised Butch out of his hysteria as much as the pain had done. He blinked at Ev, one hand going to his cheek.

'It started a week and a half before I left town,' Ev said grimly. 'Blasts of music in my head. They were stronger when I got out this way, and I should have thought about that before now, but I didn't. They're stronger now. Everything is. So I got no time for you to get the screaming yaw-haws. Are you going to be all right?'

The flush spreading over Dugan's face mostly hid the red mark Ev's hand had made. The screaming yaw-haws. That pretty well described it. First he had puked, and then he had had a fit of hysterics like a teenage girl. This old man wasn't just showing him up; he was pulling past him in second gear.

'I'll be fine,' he said.

'You believe now that something's going on here? That something in Haven has changed?'

'Yes. I . . .'He swallowed. 'Yes,' he repeated.

'Good.' Ev stepped on the gas and roared back onto the road. 'This … thing … it's changing everyone in town, Trooper Dugan. Everyone but me. I get music in my head, but that's all. I don't read minds … and I don't get ideas.'

'What do you mean, “ideas”? What kind of ideas?'

'All kinds.' The Cherokee's speedometer touched sixty, then began to edge past it. 'Thing is, I have no proof of what's going on. None at all. You thought I was right off 'n my head, didn't you?'

Dugan nodded. He was holding on tight to the dashboard in front of him. He felt sick to his stomach again. The sun was too bright, dazzling on the windshield and the chrome.

'The reporter and the nurses did, too. But there's something in the woods, and I'm going to find it, and I'm going to take some pitchers of it, and I'm going to take you out, and we're going to do some loud talking, and maybe we'll find a way to get my grandson David back and maybe we won't, but either way we ought to be able to shut down whatever's going on here before it's too late. Ought to? We got to.'

Now the speedometer needle hung just below seventy.

'How far?' Dugan managed through closed teeth. He was going to puke again, and soon; he just hoped he could hold on until they got to wherever they were going.

'The old Garrick farm,' Ev said. 'Less than a mile.'

Thank God, Dugan thought.

14

'It's not Gard,' Bobbi said. 'Gard's passed out on the porch of the house.'

'How do you know?' Adley McKeen asked. 'You can't read him.'

'I can, though,' Bobbi said. 'A little more every day. He's still on the porch, I tell you. He's dreaming about skiing.'

They looked at Bobbi silently for a moment – about a dozen men standing across the street from the Methodist church, in front of the Haven Lunch.

'Who is it, then?' Joe Summerfield asked at last.

'I don't know,' Bobbi said. 'Only that it's not Gard.' Bobbi was swaying mildly on her feet. Her face was that of a woman who was fifty, not thirtyseven. There were brown circles of exhaustion under her eyes. The men seemed not to notice.

From the church, voices were raised in 'Holy, Holy, We Adore Thee.'

'I know who it is,' Dick Allison said suddenly. His eyes had gone strange and dull with hate. 'Only one other person it could be. Only one other person I know of in town with metal in his head.'

'Ev Hillman!' Newt cried. 'Christ!'

'We've got to get moving,' Jud Tarkington said. 'The bastards are getting close. Adley, get some guns from the hardware store.'

'Okay.'

'Get 'em, but don't use 'em,' Bobbi said. Her eyes swept the men. 'Not on Hillman, if it's him, and not on the cop. Particularly not on the cop. We can't afford another mess in Haven. Not before

(the 'becoming')

it's all finished.'

'I'll get my tube,' Beach said. His face was vacant with eagerness.

Bobbi grabbed his shoulder. 'No, you won't,' she said. 'No more messes includes no more cops disappearing.'

She looked at them all again, then at Dick Allison, who nodded.

'Hillman's got to disappear,' he said. 'No way around it. But that's maybe all right. Ev's crazy. A crazy old man might decide to do just about anything. A crazy old man might just decide to haul stakes and drive off to Zion, Utah, or Grand Forks, Idaho, to wait for the end of the world. The cop's going to make a mess, but he's going to make it in Derry, and it's going to be a mess everyone understands. No one else is going to shit in our nest. Go on, Jud * Get the guns. Bobbi, you pull in back of the Lunch with your pickup truck. Newt, Adley, Joe, you ride with me. You go with Bobbi, Jud. Rest of you go in Kyle's Caddy. Come on, hoss y'freight!'

They got moving.

15

Shushhhhh …

Same old dream, a few new wrinkles. Damned strange ones. The snow had gone pink. It was soaked with blood. Was it coming from him? Holy hell! Who would have believed how much blood the old tosspot had in him?

They are skiing the intermediate slope. He knows that he should have stayed on the beginners' slopes for at least one more session, this is too fast for him, and furthermore, all this bloody snow is very distracting, particularly when it's all your blood.

Now he looks up, sending a rip of pain through his head – and his eyes widen. There's a Jeep on the goddam slope!

Annmarie screams: 'Stem Bobbi, Gard! STEM BOBBI!'

But he doesn't need to stem Bobbi because this is just a dream, it's become an old friend in the last few weeks, like the erratic bursts of music in his head; this is a dream and that isn't a Jeep and this isn't the Straight Arrow slope, it's – turning into Bobbi's driveway.

Is this a dream? Or is it real?

No, he realized; that was the wrong question. A better question would have been How much of this is real?

The chrome winked blinding arrows of light into Gardener's eyes. He winced and groped for

(ski poles? no, not a dream, it's summer you're in Haven)

the porch railing. He could remember almost everything. It was hazy, but he could remember. No blackouts since he had come back to Bobbi's. Music in his head but no blackouts. Bobbi had gone to a funeral. Later on, she'd come back and they would start digging again. He remembered it all, just as he remembered the town-hall clock tower lifting off into the afternoon sky like a big-ass bird. All present and accounted for, sir. Except this.

He stood with his hands on the railing, bleary, bloodshot eyes watching the Jeep in spite of the glare. He was aware that he must look like a refugee from the Bowery. Thank God there's still some truth in advertising – that's what I feel like.

Then the man in the passenger seat turned his head and saw Gard. The man was so huge that he looked like a creature from a fairy tale. He was wearing sunglasses, so Gardener couldn't tell for sure if their eyes actually met or not. He thought they did; it felt that way. Either way, it didn't matter. He knew the look. As a veteran of half a hundred picket lines, he knew it well. He also knew it as a drunk who had awakened in the tank on more than one occasion.

The Dallas Police have arrived at last, he thought. The thought carried feelings of anger and regret … but what he felt mostly was relief. At least, for the moment.

He's a cop . . . but what's he doing in a Jeep? God, the size of his face . . . he's as big as a fucking house! Must be a dream. Must be.

The Jeep didn't stop; it rolled up the driveway and out of sight. Now Gardener could only hear its roaring motor.

Headed out back. Going up there in the woods. They knew, all right. Oh Christ, if the government gets it

All of his earlier dismay rose in him like bile; his dazed relief blew away like smoke. He saw Ted the Power Man throwing his jacket over the littered remains of the levitation machine and saying, What gadget?

Dismay was replaced by the old, sick fury.

HEY BOBBI GET YOUR ASS OUT HERE! he shrieked in his mind as loudly and clearly as he could.

Fresh blood burst from his nose and he staggered weakly back, grimacing in disgust and groping for his handkerchief. What does it matter, anyway? Let them have it. It's the devil on either hand, and you know it. So what if the Dallas Police get it? It's turning Bobbi and everyone in town into the Dallas Police. Particularly her company. The ones she brings out late at night, when she thinks I'm asleep. The ones she takes into the shed.

This had happened twice, both times around three in the morning. Bobbi thought Gardener was sleeping heavily – a combination of hard work, too much booze, and Valium. The level of pills in the Valium bottle was going steadily down, that was true, but not because Gardener was swallowing them. Each night's pill was actually going down the toilet.

Why this stealth? He didn't know, any more than he knew why he had lied to Bobbi about what he had seen on Sunday afternoon. Flushing a Valium tablet every night wasn't really lying, because Bobbi hadn't asked him outright if he was taking them; she had simply looked at the decreasing level of the tablets and drawn an erroneous conclusion Gardener hadn't bothered to correct.

Just as he had not bothered to correct her idea that he was sleeping heavily. In fact, he had been plagued by insomnia. No amount of drink seemed to put him under for long. The result was a kind of constant, muddled consciousness across which thin gray veils of sleep were sometimes drawn, like unwashed stockings.

The first time he had seen lights splash across the wall of the guestroom in the early hours of the morning, he had looked out to see a large Cadillac pulling into the driveway. He had looked at his watch and thought: Must be the Mafia … who else would show up at a farm way out in the woods in a Caddy at three in the morning?

But when the porch light went on, he had seen the vanity plate, KYLE-1, and doubted if even the Mafia went for vanity plates.

Bobbi had joined the four men and one woman who had gotten out. Bobbi was dressed but barefoot. Gardener knew two of the men – Dick Allison, head of the local volunteer fire department, and Kyle Archinbourg, a local realtor who drove a fat-ass Cadillac. The two others were vaguely familiar. The woman was Hazel McCready.

After a few moments, Bobbi had led them to her back shed. The one with the big Kreig lock on the door.

Gardener thought: Maybe I ought to go out there. See what's going on. Instead, he'd lain down again. He didn't want to go near the shed. He was afraid of it. Of what might be in there.

He had dozed off again.

The next morning there had been no Caddy, no sign of Bobbi's company. Bobbi had in fact seemed more cheerful, more her old self on that morning than at any time since Gardener had returned. He had convinced himself it was a dream, or perhaps something – not the DTs, exactly, but close – that had crawled out of a bottle. Then, not four nights ago, KYLE-1 had arrived again. Those same people had gotten out, met with Bobbi, and gone around to the shed.

Gard collapsed into Bobbi's rocking chair and felt for the bottle of Scotch he had brought out here this morning. The bottle was there. Gardener raised it slowly, drank, and felt liquid fire hit his belly and spread. The sound of the Jeep was fading now, like something in a dream. Perhaps that was all it had been. Everything seemed that way now. What was that line in the Paul Simon song? Michigan seems like a dream to me now. Yes, sir. Michigan, weird ships buried in the ground, Jeep Cherokees, and Cadillacs in the middle of the night. Drink enough and it all faded into a dream.

Except it's no dream. They're the take-charge people, those people who come in the Cadillac with the KYLE-1 plates. Just like the Dallas Police. Just like good old Ted, with his reactors. What kind of shot are you giving them, Bobbi? How are you souping them up even more than the rest of the resident geniuses? The old Bobbi wouldn't have pulled that kind of shit, but the New Improved Bobbi does, and what's the answer to all of this? Is there one?’

'Devils on every side!' Gardener cried out grandly. He slugged back the last of the Scotch and threw the bottle over the porch railing and into the bushes. 'Devils on every side!' he repeated, and passed out.

16

'That guy saw us,' Butch said as the Jeep bulled across Anderson's garden on a diagonal, knocking over huge cornstalks and sunflowers that towered high over the Cherokee's roof.

'I don't care,' Ev said, wrestling the wheel. They emerged from the garden on the far side. The Cherokee's wheels rolled over a number of pumpkins that were coming to full growth amazingly early. Their hides were strangely pale, and when they burst they disclosed unpleasant, fleshy-pink interiors. 'If they don't know we're in town by now, then I'm wrong about everything … look! Didn't I tell you?'

A wide, rutted track wound into the woods. Ev bounced onto it.

'There was blood on his face.' Dugan swallowed. It was hard. His head ached very badly now, and all the fillings in his teeth seemed to be vibrating very fast. His guts were churning again. 'And his shirt. Looked like somebody popped him one in the n

'Pull over, I'm going to be sick again.'

Ev jammed on the brakes. Dugan opened his door and leaned out, vomited a thin yellow stream onto the dirt and then closed his eyes for a moment. The world was swooping and turning.

Voices rustled in his head. A great many voices.

(Gard saw them he's yelling for help)

(how many)

(two two in a Cherokee they were headed)

'Look,' Butch heard himself say, as if from a great distance, 'I don't want to spoil the party, Hillman, but I'm sick. Seriously sick.'

'Thought you might be.' Hillman's voice came down a long, echoing hall. Somehow Butch managed to haul himself up again in the passenger seat, but he didn't even have strength enough to pull the door closed. He felt as weak as a new kitten. 'You ain't had time to build up any resistance, and we're right where it's strongest. Hold on a second. I got something that'll fix you up. Least, I think I do.'

Ev pushed the switch that lowered the Cherokee's electric rear window, got out, lowered the tailgate, and pulled out the gunnysack. He dragged it back to the Jeep and then hoisted it onto the seat. He glanced at Dugan, and didn't like what he saw. The trooper's face was the color of candlewax. His eyes were shut, the lids purplish. His mouth was half open and he was breathing in quick, shallow gasps. Ev found a moment to wonder how whatever-it-was could be doing that to Dugan when he himself felt nothing, absolutely nothing.

'Hang on, friend,' he said, and used his pocketknife to cut the rope holding the neck of the bag.

'. . . sick . . .' Dugan wheezed, and retched brownish fluid. Ev saw that there were three teeth in the mess.

He got out a light plastic oxygen-supply tank – what the clerk at Maine Med Supplies had called a flat-pack. He stripped the gold-foil circle from the end of the hose leading out of the flat-pack, revealing a stainless-steel female connector. Now he brought out a gold-colored plastic cup – the sort jet airliners come equipped with. A segmented white plastic tube was attached to this, and at the end there was a white plastic male connector – a valve.

If this don't work the way that guy said it would, I do believe this big fella's going to die on me.

He slammed the male connector of the mask into the female connector on the oxygen supply – violent intercourse which he hoped would result in – keeping Dugan going. He heard oxygen sighing gently inside the gold cup. All right. So far, so good.

He leaned over and put the cup over Dugan's mouth and nose, using the plastic straps. Then he waited anxiously to see what would happen. If Dugan didn't come out of his tailspin in thirty or forty seconds, he would haul ass. David was missing and Hilly was sick, but neither thing gave him a right to murder Dugan, who hadn't known what sort of a mess he was getting into.

Twenty seconds passed. Then thirty.

Ev dropped the Cherokee into reverse, meaning to turn around on the edge of Anderson's garden, when Dugan suddenly gasped, jerked, and opened his eyes. They looked very wide and blue and bewildered above the rim of the gold cup. Some color had come back into his cheeks.

'What the hell – ' His hands groped for the cup.

'Leave it on,' Ev said, putting one of his big, arthritis-warped old hands over one of Butch's. 'It was the outside air poisoning you. You in a hurry for another dose?'

Butch stopped reaching for the cup. It bobbed on his face as he said, 'How long will this stuff last?'

'Twenty-five minutes or so, the guy told me. It's a demand valve, though. Every now and then you can pull it down. When you start feeling woozy again, put it back on. I want to go on in, if you think you can. It can't be far, and … and I feel like I got to know.'

Butch Dugan nodded.

The Cherokee lurched forward again. Dugan stared out at the woods around them. Silent. No birds. No animals. No nothing. This was very wrong. Very bad and very damned wrong.

Faintly, far back in his mind, he could hear thoughts like a whisper of shortwave transmissions.

He looked at Ev. 'What the blue fuck is going on here, anyway?'

'That's to find out.' Without taking his eyes off the rough track, Ev rummaged in the gunnysack. Dugan winced as the Cherokee's undercarriage screamed over a stump sawed off a little higher than the others.

Ev brought out a big .45. It looked old enough for its original owner to have carried it in World War I.

'Yours?' Dugan asked. It was amazing how fast the oxygen was bringing him around.

'Yeah. They teach you to use these things, don't they?'

'Yes.' Although the one Hillman had looked like an antique.

'You might have to use it today,' Ev said, and handed it over.

'What -'

'Have a care. It's loaded.'

Up ahead, the land suddenly sloped downward. Through the trees came a giant reflection: sunshine bouncing off a huge metal object.

Ev stamped on the brake, suddenly terrified to the depths of his heart.

'What the hell?' he heard Dugan mutter beside him.

Ev opened the door and got out. As his feet touched the ground, he became aware that the earth was crisscrossed with small dusty cracks and that it was vibrating very rapidly. At the next moment music so loud that it was deafening blew through his head at gale force. It went on for perhaps thirty seconds, but the pain was excruciating and it seemed forever. At last, it simply winked out.

He saw Dugan standing in front of the Cherokee, the cup now hooked under his chin. He held the flat-pack by the strap in one hand, the .45 in the other. He was looking at Ev apprehensively.

'I'm all right,' Ev said.

'Yeah? Your nose is bleeding. Just like that guy back at the farm we passed.'

Ev wiped his nose with his finger and looked at the smear of blood. He wiped his finger on his pants and nodded toward Dugan. 'Remember to put the mask back on when you start to feel woozy.'

'Oh, don't worry.'

Ev leaned back into the Cherokee and rummaged in his bag of tricks again. He brought out a Kodak disc camera and something that looked like a cross between a pistol and a blow-dryer.

'Your flare-gun?' Dugan asked, smiling a little.

'Ayuh. Get on the gas again, Trooper. You're losin y'color.'

Dugan pulled it up, and the two men started toward that glittering thing in the woods. Fifty feet from the Cherokee, Ev stopped. It was more than huge; it was titanic, a thing that would perhaps be large enough to dwarf an ocean liner when completely uncovered.

'Gimme your hand,' he said roughly to Dugan.

Dugan did as Ev asked, but wanted to know why.

'Because I'm scared shitless,' Ev said. Dugan squeezed his hand. Ev's arthritis flared, but he squeezed back anyway. After a moment, the two men started forward again.

17

Bobbi and Jud got the guns from the hardware store and put them in the back of the pickup. The side trip hadn't taken long but Dick and the others had gotten a good start and Bobbi pushed the pickup as fast as she dared to catch up. The truck's shadow, shortening as the day approached noon, ran beside them.

Bobbi suddenly stiffened a little behind the wheel.

'Did you hear it?'

'Heard something,' Jud said. 'It was your friend, wasn't it?'

Bobbi nodded. 'Gard saw them. He's yelling for help.'

'How many?'

'Two. In a Jeep. They were headed out to where the ship is.'

Jud brought a fist down on one leg. 'The fuckers! The dirty snooping fuckers!'

'We'll catch them,' Bobbi said. 'Don't worry.'

They were at the farm fifteen minutes later. Bobbi pulled her truck in behind Allison's Nova and Archinbourg's Cadillac. She looked at the group of men and thought how much like the nights they had met out here this was … the ones who were to be made

(to 'become' first)

especially strong. But Hazel wasn't here and Beach was; Joe Summerfield and Adley McKeen had never been inside the shed either.

'Get the guns,' she told Jud. 'Joe, you help. Remember – no shooting unless you have to, and don't shoot the cop, no matter what.'

She looked toward the porch and saw Gard lying there on his back. Gard's mouth was open and he was breathing in slow, rusty snores. Bobbi's eyes softened. There were plenty of people in Haven – Dick Allison and Newt Berringer probably chief among them – who thought she should long since have gotten rid of Gard. Nothing had been said out loud, but in Haven you no longer had to say things out loud. Bobbi knew if she put a bullet through Gard's head, there would be a whole platoon of willing workers out here an hour later to help bury him. They didn't like Gard because the plate in his head made him immune to the 'becoming.' And it made him hard to read. But he was her brake. And even that was crap. The truth was simpler yet: she still loved him. She was still human enough for that.

And they would all have to admit that, drunk or not, when they had needed a warning, Gard had given it.

Jud and Joe Summerfield came back with the rifles. There were six of them, varied calibers. Bobbi saw that five went to people she could trust completely. She gave the sixth, a .22, to Beach, who would complain if he didn't get a shooting iron.

Occupied with the ritual of guns, none of them saw that Gardener had half-opened his bloodshot eyes and was looking at them. No one heard his thoughts; he had learned how to seal them off.

'Let's go,' Bobbi said. 'And remember: I want that cop.'

They moved out in a group.

18

Ev and Butch stood well back from the edge of what was now a ragged slash running better than three hundred yards from right to left and yawning sixty feet across at its widest point. Anderson's old mongrel of a truck stood off to one side, looking tired and used. Next to it was the souped-up payloader with its giant screwdriver snout. There were other tools in a lean-to of peeled logs. Ev saw a chainfall on one side, a chipper on the other. There was a big pile of sodden sawdust below the mouth of the chipper's exhaust-vent. There were cans of gasoline in the lean-to, and a black drum labeled DIESEL. When Ev had first heard those noises in the woods, he had thought New England Paper must be doing some logging, but this was no logging operation. This was an excavation.

That dish. That monstrous dish glittering in the sun.

The eye could not stay away; it was drawn back again and again. Gardener and Bobbi had removed a lot more hillside. Ninety feet of polished silver-gray metal now jutted out of the earth and into the green-gold sunlight. If they had looked into the slash, they would have seen another forty feet or better.

Neither of them went close enough to look.

'Holy Jesus,' Dugan said hoarsely. The gold cup bobbed on his face, and above its rim his blue eyes bulged wildly. 'Holy Jesus, it's a spaceship. Is it ours or is it Russian, do you think? Holy Jesus Christ, it's as big as the Queen Mary, that ain't Russian, that ain't … ain't . . .'

He fell silent again. In spite of the oxygen, his headache was coming back.

Ev raised the disc camera and clicked off seven shots as fast as his finger could push the camera's button. Then he moved twenty feet to the left and took another five, standing by the chipper.

'Move to the right!' he said to Dugan.

'Huh?'

'Your right! I want you in these last three, for perspective.'

'Forget it, Pop!' Even muffled by the cup, there was a shrill note of hysteria in Dugan's voice.

'Four steps will do it.'

Dugan moved four very small steps to the right. Ev raised the disc camera again -a Father's Day present from Bryant and Marie – and clicked off the final three shots. Dugan was a very big man, but that ship in the earth reduced him to the size of a pygmy.

'Okay,' Ev said, and Dugan stepped quickly back to where he had been. He walked with mincing, tentative steps, looking at the great round object as he went.

Ev wondered if the pictures would turn out. His hands had been shaking. And the ship – for it certainly was some sort of spaceship – might be putting out radiation that would fog the film.

Even if it does come out, who's gonna believe it? Who, in a world where kids go off to the movies every damn Saturday and see things like Star Wars?

'I want to get out of here,' Dugan said.

Ev looked at the ship a moment longer, wondering if David was in there, imprisoned, wandering through unknowable corridors or passing through doorways cut for no human shape, starving in the darkness. No … if he was in there, he would have starved a long time ago. Starved, or died of thirst.

Then he slipped the small camera in his pants pocket, walked back to Dugan, and picked up the flare gun. 'Ayuh, I guess – '

He broke off, looking in the direction of the Cherokee. There was a line of men -and one woman – standing in the trees, some armed. Ev recognized all of them … and none of them.

19

Bobbi started down the slope toward the two men. The others followed.

'Hello, Ev,' Bobbi said pleasantly enough.

Dugan raised the .45, wishing bitterly for the familiar feel of his service .357. 'Stop,' he said. He didn't like the way the gold cup muffled the word, robbed it of authority. He pulled the air mask down. 'All of you. Those of you with rifles, put them down. You're all under arrest.'

'You're outgunned, Butch,' Newt Berringer said pleasantly.

'Damned tooting!' Beach growled. Dick Allison frowned at him.

'You better put y'mask on again, Butch,' Adley McKeen said with a lazy, mocking smile. 'I think you're losing it.'

Butch had begun to feel woozy as soon as he pulled the mask off. Hearing the steady whisper of their thoughts made it worse. He pulled it up, wondering how much air could be left in the flat-pack.

'Put it down,' Bobbi said. 'And you put down the flare-gun, Ev. No one wants to hurt you two.'

'Where's David?' Ev asked roughly. 'I want him, you bitch.'

'He's on Altair-4 with Robby the Robot and Dr Mobius,' Kyle Archinbourg said with a titter. 'He's picknicking amid the Krell memory-banks.'

'Shut up,' Bobbi said. She suddenly felt confused, ashamed of herself, unsure. Bitch? Was that what the old man had called her? A bitch? She found herself wanting to tell him that he was confused – she wasn't the bitch. That was her sister Anne.

A sudden, confused image came to her – the old man's distress, Gard's distress, even her own, all mingled. She was distracted. While she was, Ev Hillman raised the flare-pistol and fired. If Dugan had done it, they would have read his intention before he could have acted, but the old man was different.

There was a hollow fuddd! and a whoosh. Beach Jernigan exploded into white flame and staggered backward, the .22 flying out of his hands. His eyes filmed, simmered, then burst as they filled with burning phosphorus. His cheeks began to run. He opened his mouth and began to claw at his chest as the superheated air he drew in expanded and ruptured his lungs. This all happened in a space of seconds.

The line of men wavered and lost coherency as they stumbled backward, their faces blank with terror. They were hearing Beach Jernigan die inside their heads.

'Come on!' Ev shrieked at Dugan, and ran for the Cherokee. Jud Tarkington moved sluggishly to stop him. Ev swept the hot barrel of the flare-gun across his face, branding his cheek and breaking his nose. Jud went flailing backward, stumbled over his own feet, went sprawling.

Beach was burning on the muddy, churned ground. He clawed weakly at his throat with one twisted, tallowy hand, shuddered, and then stilled.

Dugan got moving, running after the old man, who was clawing at the driver's-side door of the Cherokee.

Bobbi heard Beach's thoughts fade away, wink out, and turned to see that the old man and the cop were on the verge of getting away.

'Jesus Christ you guys stop them!'

That broke their paralysis, but Bobbi moved first. She got to Ev and slammed the butt of the shotgun she was carrying into the nape of the old man's neck. Ev's face whacked the top of the Jeep's door. Blood sprayed from his nose and he dropped to his knees, dazed. Bobbi raised the shotgun butt to hit him again, when Dugan, standing on the other side of the Cherokee, fired the old man's .45 through the passenger window.

Bobbi felt a large hot hammer suddenly slam into her lower right shoulder. Her arm was driven powerfully upward, and she lost her grip on the shotgun. The hammer numbed her flesh for a moment and then the heat was back, an expanding furnace glow that was baking her from the inside out.

She was thrown backward, her left hand going for the place the hammer had hit her, expecting to find blood, finding none – at least, not yet – only a hole in her shirt and in the flesh beneath. The hole had hard edges that felt hot and throbby. Blood was running down her back, a lot of it, but shock had numbed her and she felt little pain yet. Her left hand had found the small entrance wound; the exit wound was as big as a kid's fist.

She saw Dick Allison, his face white and slack with panic.

This isn't going right Christ not right at all get him before he gets us oh you fucking snoop fucking snoop FUCKING SNOOP

‘Don't shoot him!' Bobbi screamed. Pain exploded through her. Blood flew from her mouth in a scrawny spray. The bullet had torn her right lung open.

Allison hesitated. Before Dugan could raise the gun again, Newt and Joe Summerfield had stepped in. Dugan turned toward them, and Newt clubbed the barrel of his rifle down on the hand holding the .45 as he did. Dugan's second shot went into the dirt.

'Hold it, Trooper, hold it or you're dead!' John Enders, the grammar-school principal, screamed. 'Four guns on you right now!'

Dugan looked around. He saw four men with rifles. And Allison, still wall-eyed and only one small step from unglued, looked ready to shoot the moment a squirrel farted.

They'll kill you anyway. Might as well go out like John Wayne. Shit, they're all crazy.

'No,' Bobbi said. She was leaning against the Jeep's hood now. Blood trickled steadily from her mouth. The back of her shirt was soaking. 'We're not crazy. We're not going to kill you. Check me.'

Dugan probed clumsily toward Bobbi Anderson's mind and saw that she meant it … but there was a catch somewhere, something he might have caught on to if he hadn't been so new at this eerie mind-reading trick. It was like the fine print in some slick car salesman's contract. He would think about it later. These guys were amateurs, and there might still be a chance to get away clean. If . . .

Suddenly Adley McKeen ripped the gold mask off his face. Butch felt a wave of dizziness almost at once.

'I like you better this way,' Adley said. 'You won't think s'much about excapin' with your goddam canned air turned off.'

Butch fought the dizziness and looked back at Bobbi Anderson. I think she's going to die.

think what you want

He straightened and took a step backward as that unexpected thought filled his head. He looked at her more closely.

'What about the old man?' he asked flatly.

'Not – ' Bobbi coughed, spraying more blood. Bubbles formed on her nostrils. Kyle and Newt started toward her. Bobbi waved them back. 'Not your business. You and me are going to get in the front of the Jeep. You drive. There'll be three men with guns in the back, if you think of trying anything funny.'

'I want to know what's going to happen to the old man,' Butch repeated.

Bobbi raised her gun with a great effort. She brushed her sweaty hair away from her eyes with her left hand. Her right dangled uselessly by her side. It was as if she wanted Dugan to see her very clearly, to measure her. Butch did. The coldness he saw in her eyes was real.

'I don't want to kill you,' she said softly. 'You know that. But if you say one more word, I'll have these men execute you right here. We'll bury you next to Beach and take our chances.'

Ev Hillman was struggling to his feet. He looked dazed, not sure where he was. He armed blood off his forehead like sweat.

Another wave of dizziness washed through Butch, and a thought of infinite comfort came to him: This is a dream. All just a dream.

Bobbi smiled without humor. 'Think that if you want,' she said. 'Just get in the Jeep.'

Butch got in and slid across behind the wheel. Bobbi started around to the passenger side. She began coughing again, spraying blood, and her knees buckled. Two of the others had to help her.

Never mind the 'think.' I know she's going to die.

Bobbi turned her head and looked at him. That clear mental voice

(think what you want)

filled his head again.

Archinbourg, Summerfield, and McKeen crammed into the back seat of the Cherokee.

'Drive,' Bobbi whispered. 'Slow.'

Butch began to back up. He would see Everett Hillman once more but would not remember – later, most of Butch's mind would have been rubbed away like chalk from a blackboard. The old man stood there in the sunlight, that stupendous saucer-shape behind him. He was surrounded by big men, and five feet to his left there was something on the ground that looked like a charred log.

You didn't do too bad, old man. In your day you must have been quite a high rider … and you sure as hell weren't crazy.

Hillman looked up and shrugged, as if to say: Well, we tried.

More dizziness. Butch's sight wavered.

'I'm not sure I can drive,' he said, his voice seeming to boom into his ears

from a great distance. 'That thing … it makes me sick.'

'Is there any air left in his little kit, Adley?' Bobbi whispered. Her face was ashy pale. The blood on her lips seemed very red by comparison.

'Face-mask's hissin' a little.'

'Put it on him.'

A moment after it was jammed firmly over Butch's mouth and nose again, he began to improve.

'Enjoy it while you can,' Bobbi whispered, and then passed out.

20

'Ashes to ashes … dust to dust. Thus we commit the body of our friend Ruth McCausland to the ground, and her soul to a loving God.'

The mourners had moved on to the pretty little graveyard on the hill west of the village. They stood loosely gathered around an open grave. Ruth's casket was suspended over it on runners. There were far fewer mourners here than there had been in the church; many of the out-of-towners, either headachey and nauseated or glowing feverishly with strange new ideas, had taken the chance afforded by the intermission between the acts to slip away.

The flowers at the head of the grave ruffled gently in a fresh summer breeze. As the Rev. Goohringer raised his head, he saw a bright yellow rose go twirling down the grassy hill. Beyond and below Homeland's weatherbeaten white fence, he could see the town-hall clock tower. It wavered slightly in the bright air, like something seen through a heat-haze. Still, Goohringer thought, it was a damned good illusion. These strangers in town had seen the best magic-lantern slide in history and didn't even know it.

His eyes met Frank Spruce's for just an instant – he read relief clearly in Frank's eyes, and he supposed Frank could see it just as clearly in his own. Many of the outsiders would go back to wherever they came from and tell their friends that Ruth's death had rocked the little community to its foundations; they had hardly seemed to be there at all. What none of them knew, Goohringer reflected, was that they had been following the events near the ship with most of their attention. For a while things out there had gone very badly. Now they were under control again, but Bobbi Anderson might die if they couldn't get her back to the shed in time, and that was bad.

Still, things were under control. The 'becoming' would continue. That was the only important consideration.

Goohringer held his Bible open in one hand. Its pages fluttered a little in the wind. Now he raised the other hand in the air. The mourners standing around Ruth's grave lowered their heads.

'May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord lift up His face and make it shine upon you and give you peace. Amen.'

The mourners raised their heads. Goohringer smiled. 'There'll be refreshments in the library, for those of you who'd care to stop by for a while and remember Ruth,' he said.

Act II was over.

21

Kyle reached gently into Bobbi's pants pocket and probed until he found her keyring. He worked it out, picked through the keys, and found the one that opened the padlock on the shed door. He inserted the key in the lock but didn't turn it.

Adley and Joe Summerfield were covering Dugan, who was still behind the wheel of the Jeep. Butch was finding it harder and harder to pull air from the mask. The needle on the supply dial had been in the red for five minutes now. Kyle rejoined them.

'Go check the drunk,' Kyle said to Joe Summerfield. 'Looks like he's still passed out, but I don't trust the fucker.'

Joe crossed the side yard, climbed the porch, and examined Gardener carefully, wincing at his sour breath. This time there really was no sham; Gardener had gotten a fresh bottle of Scotch and had drunk himself into oblivion.

As the two other men stood waiting for Joe to come back, Kyle said: 'Bobbi is most likely going to die. If she does, I'm going to get rid of that lush first thing.'

Joe came back. 'He's out.'

Kyle nodded and turned the key in the shed's padlock as Joe joined Adley in keeping the cop covered. Kyle pulled the lock free and opened the door partway. Brilliant green light poured out – it was so bright it seemed to dim the sunlight. There was an odd liquid churning sound. It was almost (but not quite) the sound of machinery.

Kyle took an involuntary step backward, his face tightening momentarily into an expression of fright, revulsion and awe. The smell alone – thick and fetid and organic – was damn near enough to knock a man over. Kyle understood – they all did – that the two-hearted nature of the Tommyknockers was now growing together. The dance of deception was nearly done

Liquid churning sounds, that smell … and then another sound. Something like the feeble, bubbly yap of a drowning dog.

Kyle had been in the shed twice before, but remembered little about it. He knew, of course, that it was an important place, a fine place, and that it had speeded his own 'becoming.' But the human part of him was still almost superstitiously afraid of it.

He came back to Adley and Joe.

'We can't wait for the others. We've got to get Bobbi in there right now if there's going to be any chance of saving her at all.'

The cop, he saw, had taken off the mask. It lay, used up, on the seat beside him. That was good. As Adley had said out in the woods, he would think less about escaping without his canned air.

'Keep your gun on the cop,' Kyle said. 'Joe, help me with Bobbi.'

'Help you take her into the shed?'

'No, help me take her to the Rumford Zoo so she can see the fucking lion!' Kyle shouted. 'Of course, the shed!'

'I don't … I don't think I want to go in there. Not just now.' Joe looked from that green light back to Kyle, a shamed, slightly sickened smile on his lips.

'I'll help you,' Adley said softly. 'Bobbi's a good old sport. Be a shame if she croaked before we got to the end of it.'

'All right,' Kyle said. 'Cover the cop,' he said to Joe. 'And if you screw up, I swear to God I'll kill you.'

'I won't, Kyle,' Joe said. That shamed grin still hung on his mouth, but there was no mistaking the relief in his eyes. 'I sure won't. I'll watch him good.'

'See that you do,' Bobbi said feebly. It startled them all.

Kyle looked at her, then back at Joe. Joe flinched away from the naked contempt in Kyle's eyes … but he didn't look toward the shed, toward that light, those churning, squelching sounds.

'Come on, Adley,' Kyle said at last. 'Let's get Bobbi in there. Soonest started, soonest done.'

Adley McKeen, fiftyish, balding, and stocky, flagged for only a moment. 'Is it . . .' he licked his lips. 'Kyle, is it bad? In there?'

'I don't really remember,' Kyle said. 'All I know is I felt wonderful when I came out. Like I knew more. Could do more.'

'Oh,' Adley said in an almost nonexistent voice.

'You'll be one of us, Adley,' Bobbi said in that same feeble voice.

Adley's face, although still frightened, firmed up again.

'All right,' he said.

'Let's try not to hurt her,' Kyle said.

They got Bobbi into the shed. Joe Summerfield turned his attention briefly away from Dugan to watch them disappear into that glow – and it seemed to him that they really did disappear rather than just step inside; it was like watching objects disappear into a dazzling corona.

His lapse was brief, but it was all the old Butch Dugan would have needed. Even now he saw the opportunity; he was simply unable use it. No strength in his legs. Churning nausea in his stomach. His head thudded and pounded.

I don't want to go in there.

Nothing he could do about it if they decided to drag him in, though. He was as weak as a kitten.

He drifted.

After a while he heard voices and raised his head. It took an effort, because it seemed as if someone had poured cement into one of his ears until his head was full of it. The rest of the posse was pushing out of the tangle that was Bobbi Anderson's garden. They were shoving the old man roughly along. Hillman's feet tangled and he fell down. One of them – Tarkington – kicked him to his feet, and Butch got the run of Tarkington's thoughts clearly: he was outraged at what he thought of as the murder of Beach Jernigan.

Hillman stumbled on toward the Cherokee. The shed door opened then. Kyle Archinbourg and Adley McKeen came out. McKeen no longer looked frightened -his eyes were glowing and a big toothless grin stretched his lips. But that wasn't all. Something else …

Then Butch realized.

In the few minutes the two men had been inside there, a large portion of Adley McKeen's hair appeared to have disappeared.

'I'll go in anytime, Kyle,' he was saying. 'No problem.'

There was more, but now everything wanted to drift away again. Butch let it.

The world dimmed out until there was nothing left but those unpleasant churning sounds and the afterimage of green light on his eyelids.

22 Act III.

They sat in the town library – the name would be changed to the Ruth McCausland Memorial Library, all agreed. They drank coffee, iced tea, Coca-Cola, ginger ale. They drank nothing that was alcoholic. Not at Ruth's wake. They ate tiny triangular tuna-fish sandwiches, they ate similar ones containing a paste of cream cheese and olives, they ate sandwiches containing a paste of cream cheese and pimento. They ate cold cuts and a Jell-O salad with shreds of carrot suspended in it like fossils in amber.

They talked a great deal, but the room was mostly silent – if it had been bugged, the listeners would have been disappointed. The tension that had drawn many faces tight in the church as the situation in the woods teetered on the dangerous verge of careening out of control had now smoothed out. Bobbi was in the shed. That nosey-parker of an old man had also been taken in. Last of all, the nosey-parker policeman had been taken into the shed.

The group mind lost track of these people as they went into the thick, corroded-brass glow of that green light.

They ate and drank and listened and talked and no one said a word and that was all right; the last of the outsiders had left town following Goohringer's graveside benediction, and they had Haven to themselves again.

(will it be all right now)

(yes they'll understand about Dugan)

(are you sure)

(yes they will understand; they will think they understand)

The tick of the Seth Thomas on the mantelpiece donated by the grammar school after last year's spring bottle-and-can drive was the loudest sound in the room. Occasionally there was the decorous clink of a china cup. Faintly, beyond the open, screened windows, the sound of a faraway airplane.

No birdsong.

It was not missed.

They ate and drank, and when Dugan was escorted from Bobbi's shed around one-thirty that afternoon, they knew. People rose, and now talk, real talk, began all at once. Tupperware bowls were capped. Uneaten sandwiches were popped into Baggies. Claudette Ruvall, Ashley's mother, put a piece of aluminum foil over the remains of the casserole she had brought. They all went outside and headed toward their homes, smiling and chatting.

Act III was over.

23

Gardener came to around sundown with a hangover headache and a feeling that things had happened which he could not quite remember.

Finally made it, Gard, he thought. Finally had yourself another blackout. Satisfied?

He managed to get off the porch and to walk shakily around the corner of the house, out of view of the road, before throwing up. He saw blood in the vomit, and wasn't surprised. This wasn't the first time, although there was more blood this time than ever before.

Dreams, Christ, he'd had some weird nightmares, blackout or no. People out here, coming and going, so many people that all they needed was a brass band and the Dallas

(Police, the Dallas Police were out here this morning and you got drunk so you wouldn't see them you fucking coward)

Cowgirls. Nightmares, that was all.

He turned away from the puddle of puke between his feet. The world was wavering in and out of focus with every beat of his heart, and Gardener suddenly knew that he had edged very close to death. He was committing suicide after all … just doing it slowly. He put his arm against the side of the house and his forehead in his arm.

'Mr Gardener, are you all right?'

'Huh!' he cried, jerking upright. His heart slammed two violent beats, stopped for what seemed forever, and then began to beat so rapidly he could barely distinguish the individual pulses. His headache suddenly cranked up to overload. He whirled.

Bobby Tremain stood there, looking surprised, even a little amused … but not really sorry for the scare he had given Gardener.

'Gee, I didn't mean to creep up on you, Mr Gardener

You fucking well did, and I fucking well know it.

The Tremain kid blinked rapidly several times. He had caught some of that, Gardener saw. He found he didn't give a shit.

'Where's Bobbi?' he asked.

'I'M – ‘

'I know who you are. I know where you are. Right in front of me. Where's Bobbi?'

'Well, I'll tell you,' Bobby Tremain said. His face became very open, very wide-eyed, very honest, and Gardener was suddenly, forcibly reminded of his teaching days. This was how students who had spent a long winter weekend skiing, screwing, and drinking looked when they started to explain that they couldn't turn in their research papers today because their mothers had died on Saturday.

'Sure, tell me,' Gardener said. He leaned against the clapboard side of the house, looking at the teenager in the reddish glow of the sunset. Over his shoulder he could see the shed, padlocked, its windows boarded up.

The shed had been in the dream, he remembered.

Dream? Or whatever it is you don't want to admit was real?

For a moment the kid looked genuinely disconcerted by Gardener's cynical expression.

'Miss Anderson had a sunstroke. Some of the men found her near the ship and took her to Derry Home Hospital. You were passed out.'

Gardener straightened up quickly. 'Is she all right?'

'I don't know. They're still with her. No one has called here. Not since three o'clock or so, anyway. That's when I got out here.'

Gardener pushed away from the building and started around the house, head down, working against the hangover. He had believed the kid was going to lie, and perhaps he had lied about the nature of what had happened to Bobbi, but Gardener sensed a core of truth in what the kid said: Bobbi was sick, hurt, something. It explained those dreamlike comings and goings he remembered. He supposed Bobbi had called them with her mind. Sure. Called them with her mind, neatest trick of the week. Only in Haven, ladies and germs

'Where are you going?' Tremain asked, his voice suddenly very sharp.

'Derry.' Gardener had reached the head of the driveway. Bobbi's pickup was parked there. The Tremain kid's big yellow Dodge Challenger was pulled in next to it. Gardener turned back toward the kid. The sunset had painted harsh red highlights and black shadows on the boy's face, making him look like an Indian. Gardener took a closer look and realized he wasn't going anywhere. This kid with the fast car and the football-hero shoulders hadn't been put out here just to give Gard the bad news as soon as Gard managed to throw off enough of the booze to rejoin the living.

Am I supposed to believe Bobbi was out there in the woods, excavating away like a madwoman, and she keeled over with a sunstroke while her sometime partner was lying back on the porch, drunk as a coot? That it? Well, that's a good trick, because she was supposed to be at the McCausland woman's funeral. She went into the village and I was out here alone and I started thinking about what I saw Sunday … I started thinking and then I started drinking, which is mostly the way it works with me. Of course Bobbi could have gone to the funeral, come back here, changed, gone out in the woods to work, and then had a sunstroke … except that isn't what happened. The kid's lying. It's written all over his face, and all of a sudden I'm very fucking glad he can't read my thoughts.

'I think Miss Anderson would rather have you stay here and keep on with the work,' Bobby Tremain said evenly.

'You think?'

'That is, we all think.' The kid looked momentarily more disconcerted than ever -wary, a bit rocky on his feet. Didn't expect Bobbi's pet drunk to have any teeth or claws left, I guess. That kicked off another, much queerer thought, and he looked at the kid more closely in the light which was now fading into orange and ashy pink. Football-hero shoulders, a handsome, cleft-chinned face that might have been drawn by Alex Gordon or Berni Wrightson, deep chest, narrow waist. Bobby Tremain, All-American. No wonder the Colson girl was nuts over him. But that sunken, infirm-looking mouth went oddly with the rest, Gardener thought. They were the ones who kept losing teeth, not Gardener.

Okay – what's he here for?

To guard me. To make sure I stay put. No matter what.

'Well, all right,' he said to Tremain in a softer, more conciliatory voice. 'If that's what you all think.'

Tremain relaxed a little. 'It really is.'

'Well, let's go in and put on the coffee. I could use some. My head aches. And we'll have to get going early in the morning . . .'He stopped and looked at Tremain. 'You are going to help out, aren't you? That's part of it, isn't it?'

'Uh … yessir.'

Gardener nodded. He looked at the shed for a moment, and in the fading light he could see brilliant green tattooed in the small spaces between the boards. For a moment his dream shimmered almost within his grasp – deadly shoemakers hammering away at unknown devices in that green glare. He had never seen the glow as bright as this before, and he noticed that when Tremain glanced in that direction, his eyes skittered away uneasily.

The lyric of an old song floated, not quite randomly, into Gardener's mind and then out again:

Don't know what they're doing, but they laugh a lot behind the green door … green door, what's that secret you're keepin'?

And there was a sound. Faint … rhythmic … not at all identifiable … but somehow unpleasant.

The two of them had faltered. Now Gardener moved on toward the house. Tremain followed him gratefully.

'Good,' Gardener said, as if the conversation had never lagged. 'I can use some help. Bobbi figured we'd get down to some sort of hatchway in about two weeks … that we'd be able to get inside.'

'Yes, I know,' Tremain said without hesitation.

'But that was with two of us working.'

'Oh, there'll always be someone else with you,' Tremain said, and smiled openly. A chill rippled up Gardener's back.

'Oh?'

'Yes! You bet!'

'Until Bobbi comes back.'

'Until then,' Tremain agreed.

Except he doesn't think Bobbi's going to be back. Ever.

'Come on,' he said. 'Coffee. Then maybe some chow.'

'Sounds good to me.'

They went inside, leaving the shed to churn and mutter to itself in the growing dark. As the sun disappeared, the stitching of green at the cracks grew brighter and brighter and brighter. A cricket hopped into the luminous pencil-mark one of these cracks printed onto the ground and fell dead.

1

Thursday, July 28th:

Butch Dugan woke up in his own bed in Derry at exactly 3:05 A.M. He pushed back the covers and swung his feet out onto the floor. His eyes were wide and dazed, his face puffy with sleep. The clothes he had worn on his trip to Haven with the old man the day before were on the chair by his small desk. There was a pen in the breast pocket of the shirt. He wanted that pen. This seemed to be the only thought his mind would clearly admit.

He got up, went to the chair, took the pen, tossed the shirt on the floor, sat down, and then just sat for several moments, looking out into the darkness, waiting for the next thought.

Butch had gone into Anderson's shed, but very little of him had come out. He seemed shrunken, lessened. He had no clear memories of anything. He could not have told a questioner his own middle name, and he did not at all remember being driven to the Haven-Troy town line in the Cherokee Hillman had rented, or sliding behind the wheel after Adley McKeen got out and walked back to Kyle Archinbourg's Cadillac. He likewise did not remember driving back to Derry. Yet all these things had happened.

He had parked the Cherokee in front of the old man's apartment building, locked it, then got into his own car. Two blocks away, he had stopped long enough to drop the Jeep keys into a sewer.

He went directly to bed, and had slept until the alarm clock planted in his mind woke him up.

Now some new switch clicked over. Butch blinked once or twice, opened a drawer, and drew out a pad of paper. He wrote:

I told people Tues. night I couldn't go to her funeral because I was sick. That was true. But it was not my stomach. I was going to ask her to marry me but kept putting it off. Afraid she'd say no. If I hadn't been scared, she might be alive now. With her dead there doesn't seem to be anything to look forward to. I am sorry about this mess.

He looked the note over for a moment and then signed his name at the bottom: Anthony F. Dugan.

He laid the pen and note aside and went back to sitting bolt upright and looking out the window.

At last another relay kicked over.

The last relay.

He got up and went to the closet. He ran the combination of the wall-safe at the back and removed his .357 Mag. He put the belt over his shoulder, went back to the desk, and sat down.

He thought for a moment, frowning, then got up, turned off the light in the closet, shut the closet door, went back to the desk, sat down again, took the .357 from its holster, put the muzzle of the gun firmly against his left eyelid, and pulled the trigger. The chair toppled and hit the floor with a flat, undramatic wooden clap – the sound of a gallows trapdoor springing open.

2

Front page, Bangor Daily News, Friday, July 29th:

DERRY STATE POLICEMAN APPARENT SUICIDE

Was in Charge of Trooper Disappearance Investigation

by John Leandro

Cpl. Anthony 'Butch' Dugan of the Derry state police barracks apparently shot himself with his service revolver early Thursday morning. His death hit the Derry barracks, which was rocked last week by the disappearance of two troopers, hard indeed …

3

Saturday, July 30th:

Gardener sat on a stump in the woods, his shirt off, eating a tuna-and-egg sandwich and drinking iced coffee laced with brandy. Across from him, sitting on another stump, was John Enders, the school principal. Enders was not built for hard work, and although it was only noon, he looked hot and tired and almost fagged out.

Gardener nodded toward him. 'Not bad,' he said. 'Better than Tremain, anyway. Tremain'd burn water trying to boil it.'

Enders smiled wanly. 'Thank you.'

Gardener looked beyond him to the great circular shape jutting from the ground. The ditch kept widening, and they had to keep using more and more of that silvery netting which somehow kept it from caving in (he had no idea how they had made it, only knew that the large supply in the cellar had been almost depleted and then, yesterday, a couple of women from town had come out in a van with a fresh supply, neatly folded like freshly ironed curtains). They needed more because they kept taking away more and more of the hillside … and still the thing continued down. Bobbi's whole house could now have fit into its shadow.

He looked at Enders again. Enders was looking at it with an expression of adoring, religious awe – as if he were a rube Druid and this was his first trip from the boonies to see Stonehenge.

Gardener got up, staggering slightly. 'Come on,' he said. 'Let's do a little blasting.'

He and Bobbi had reached a point weeks earlier where the ship was as tightly embedded in dour bedrock as a piece of steel in cement. The bedrock hadn't hurt the ship; hadn't put so much as a scratch on its pearl-gray hull, let alone dented or crushed it. But it was tightly plugged. The plug had to be blasted away. It would have been a job for a construction crew who understood how to use dynamite – a lot of dynamite – under other circumstances.

But there was explosive available in Haven these days that made dynamite obsolete. Gardener still wasn't clear on what the explosion in Haven Village had been, and wasn't sure he ever wanted to be clear on it. It was a moot point anyway, because no one was talking. Whatever it had been, he was sure that some huge piece of brickwork had taken off like a rocket, and some of those New and Improved Explosives had been involved. There had been a time, he remembered, when he had actually wasted time speculating on whether or not the super brain-food Bobbi's artifact was putting into the air could produce weapons. That time now seemed incredibly distant, that Jim Gardener incredibly naive.

'Can you make it, Johnny?' he asked the school principal.

Enders got up, wincing, putting his hands in the small of his back. He looked desperately tired, but he managed a small smile just the same. Looking at the ship seemed to refresh him. Blood was trickling from the corner of one eye, however – a single red tear. Something in there had ruptured. It's being this close to the ship, Gard thought. On the first of the two days Bobby Tremain had spent 'helping' him, he had spit out his last few teeth like machinegun bullets almost as soon as they got here.

He thought of telling Enders that something behind his right eye was leaking, then decided to let him discover it on his own. The guy would be all right. Probably. Even if he wasn't, Gardener wasn't sure he cared … this more than anything else shocked him.

Why should it? Are you kidding yourself that these cats are human anymore? If you are, you better wise up, Gard ole Gard.

He headed down the slope, stopping at the last stump before rocky soil gave way to chipped and runnelled bedrock. He picked up a cheap transistor radio made of yellow high-impact plastic. It looked like Snoopy. Attached to it was the board from a Sharp calculator. And, of course, batteries.

Humming, Gardener made his way down to the edge of the trench. There the music dried up and he was quiet, only staring at the titanic gray flank of the ship. The view did not refresh him, but it did inspire a deep awe which had overtones of steadily darkening fear.

But you still hope, too. You'd be a liar if you said you didn't. The key could still be here … somewhere.

As the fear darkened, however, that hope did too. Soon he thought it would be gone.

The hillside excavation now made the ship's flank too far away to touch – not that he wanted to; he didn't enjoy the sensation of having his head turning into a very large speaker. It hurt. He rarely bled now when he did touch it (and touching it was sometimes inevitable), but the blast of radio always came, and on occasion his nose or ears could still spray a hell of a lot more blood than he cared to look at. Gardener wondered briefly just how much borrowed time he was now living on, but that question was also moot. From the morning he had awakened on that New Hampshire breakwater, it had all been borrowed time. He was a sick man and he knew it, but not too sick to appreciate the irony of the situation in which he found himself: after busting his hump to dig this fucker up with a variety of tools which looked as if they might have come out of The Hugo Gernsback Whole Universe Catalogue, after doing what the rest of them probably couldn't have done without working themselves to death in a kind of hypnotic trance, he might not be able to go inside when and if they came to the hatch Bobbi believed was there. But he meant to try. You could bet your watch and chain on that.

Now he set his boot into a rope stirrup, slid the knot tight, and put the Snoopy radio in his shirt. 'Let me down easy, Johnny.'

Enders began to turn a windlass and Gardener began to slide downward. Beside him the smooth gray hull slid up and up and up.

If they wanted to get rid of him, this would be as easy a way as any, he supposed. Just send a telepathic order to Enders: Let go of the wheel, John. We're through with him. And down he would plunge, forty feet to the solid bedrock at the bottom, slack rope trailing up behind him. Crunch.

But of course he was at their mercy anyhow … and he supposed they recognized his usefulness, however reluctantly. The Tremain kid was young, strong as a bull, but he had fagged out in two days. Enders was going to last out today – maybe -but Gardener would have bet his watch and chain (what watch and chain, ha-ha?) that there would be somebody else out here tomorrow to keep tabs on him.

Bobbi was okay.

Bullshit she was – if you hadn't come back, she would've killed herself.

But she hung in there better than Enders or the Tremain kid

His mind returned inexorably: Bobbi went into the shed with the others. Tremain and Enders never did … at least, not that you ever saw. Maybe that's the difference.

So what's in there? Ten thousand angels dancing on the head of a pin? The ghost of James Dean? The Shroud of Turin? What?

He didn't know.

His foot touched down at the bottom.

'I'm down!' he yelled.

Enders's face, looking very small, appeared at the edge of the cut. Beyond, Gardener could see a tiny wedge of blue sky. Too tiny. Claustrophobia whispered in his ear – a voice as rough as sandpaper.

The space between the side of the ship and the wall covered with that silvery netting was very narrow down here. Gardener had to move with great care to avoid touching the ship's side and setting off one of those brainbursts.

The bedrock was very dark. He squatted and ran his fingers over it. They came away wet. They had come away a little wetter each day for the last week.

That morning he had cut a small square four inches on a side and a foot into the floor of the bedrock using a gadget that had once been a blow-dryer. Now he opened his toolkit, removed a flashlight, and shone the light into it.

Water down there.

He got to his feet and screamed: 'Send down the hose!'

'. . . what? . . .' drifted down. Enders sounded apologetic. Gardener sighed, wondering just how much longer he himself could hold out against the steady drag of exhaustion. All this Hugo Gernsback Whole Universe equipment, and no one thought to rig an intercom between up there and down here. Instead, they were screaming their throats out.

Oh, but none of their bright ideas run in that direction, and you know it Why would they think about intercoms when they can read thoughts? You ' re the horse-and-buggy human here, not them.

'The hose!' he shrieked. 'Send down the motherfucking hose, tripehead!'

'. . . oh … kay . . .'

Gardener stood waiting for the hose to come down, wishing miserably that he was anywhere else in the world than here, wishing he could convince himself all of it was only a nightmare.

It was no good. The ship was madly exotic, but this reality was also too prosy to be a dream: the acrid smell of John Enders's sweat, the slightly boozy smell of his own, the dig of the rope loop into his instep as he went down into the cut, the feel of rough, moist bedrock under his fingers.

Where's Bobbi, Gard? Is she dead?

No. He didn't think she was dead, but he had become convinced that she was desperately ill. Something had happened to her on Wednesday. Something had happened to all of them on Wednesday. Gardener could not quite bring his memories into focus, but he knew there had been no real blackout or DT nightmare. It would have been better for him if there had been. There had been some sort of cover-up last Wednesday – a frantic cut-and-paste. And in the course of it, he believed that Bobbi had been hurt … taken ill … something.

But they're not talking about it.

Bobby Tremain: Bobbi? Heck, Mr Gardener, nothing wrong with Bobbi just a li'l ole heatstroke. She'll be back in no time. She can use the rest! You know that better'n anyone, I guess!

It sounded great. So great you'd almost think the Tremain kid believed it himself until you looked closely at his odd eyes.

He could see himself going to those he was coming to think of as the Shed People, demanding to know what had happened to her.

Newt Berringer: Next thing you know, he'll be trying to tell us that we're the Dallas Police.

And oh boy, they'd sure all start to laugh then, wouldn't they? Them, the Dallas Police? Oh, that was pretty funny. In fact, that was a scream.

Maybe, Gard thought, that's why I feel so much like doing it. Screaming, I mean.

Now he stood deep in this man-made crack in the earth, a crack that contained a titanic, alien flying ship, waiting for the hose to come down. And suddenly the final, horrible passage of George Orwell's Animal Farm clanged in his head like a death-cry. It was strange, the things you discovered you'd gotten by heart. 'Clover's old eyes flitted from one face to another. And as the animals outside looked from pig to man, and man to pig, and pig to man again, it seemed that some strange thing was happening. It was impossible to say which was which.'

Jesus, Gard, cut it out!

Here came the hose at last, a seventy-footer from the volunteer fire department. It was of course meant to spray water, not suck it up, but a vacuum pump had neatly reversed its function.

Enders paid it out jerkily. The end swung back and forth, sometimes striking the hull of the ship. Each time this happened there was a cludding sound that was dull yet curiously penetrating. Gardener didn't like it and quickly came to anticipate each clud.

Christ, I wish he hadn't got that thing swinging.

Clud … clud … clud. Why can't it just clink? Why does it have to keep making that other sound, like dirt being shoveled on top of a coffin?

Clud … clud … clud.

Christ, I should have jumped when I had the chance. Just stepped off that fucking breakwater at Arcadia Beach. July 4th, wasn't it? Shit, I could have been a Yankee Doodle Deader.

Well, go on, then. When you go back to the house tonight, gobble all the Valium in the medicine cabinet. Kill yourself if you haven't got the guts to either see this thing through or put a stop to it. The good people of Haven will probably throw a party over your body. You think they want you here? If there wasn't some of the Old, Unimproved Bobbi still around, I think you'd be gone already. If she wasn't standing between you and them …

Clud … clud … clud.

Was Bobbi still standing between him and the rest of Haven? Yeah. But if she died, how long would it be before he himself was scrubbed from the equation?

Not long, buddy. Not long at all. Like maybe fifteen minutes.

Clud … clud … cl

Wincing, teeth set against that dull dead sound, Gard leaped up and caught the brass nozzle of the hose before it could rap against the side of the ship again. He pulled it down, knelt over the hole, and craned his head up at Enders's small face.

'Start the pump!' he yelled.

'. . . what? . . .'

Jesus wept, Gardener thought.

'Start the motherfucking pump!' he shrieked, and this time he felt, actually felt his head fall apart in two ragged pieces. He closed his eyes.

'. . . oh … kay . . .'

When he looked up, Enders was gone.

Gardener plunged the end of the hose into the glory-hole he had cut out from rock that morning. The water began to bubble slowly, almost contemplatively. It was frigid at first, but his hands quickly became numb. Although the trench he was in was only forty feet deep, they had removed a whole hillside in the process of cutting a base level, with the result that the place where Gardener now crouched had probably been, until late June, ninety feet under the earth. Measuring the freeboard surface of the ship would have given an exact figure, but Gardener didn't give a shit. The simple fact was that they seemed to have nearly reached the aquifer -spongy rock filled with water. Apparently the bottom half or two thirds of the ship was floating in a large underground lake.

His hands were now so numb they had forgotten what they were.

'Come on, asshole,' he muttered.

As if in answer, the hose began to vibrate and wriggle. He couldn't hear the pump's motor from here, but he didn't have to. As the water-level in the glory-hole dropped, Gardener was able to see his reddened, dripping hands again. He watched as the water-level continued to drop.

If we hit the aquifer, it's going to slow us down.

Yeah. We might lose a whole day while they figure out some sort of superpump. There might be a delay, but nothing's going to stop them, Gard. Don't you know that?

The hose began to emit the sound of a giant soda straw in a giant Coke glass. The glory-hole was empty.

'Turn it off!' he shouted. Enders just went on looking down at him. Gardener sighed and yanked hard on the hose. Enders looked startled, then made a thumb-and-forefinger circle at Gardener. He disappeared. A few seconds later the hose stopped vibrating. Then it began to rise as Enders wound it up.

Gardener made sure that the end of it was perfectly still and wouldn't pendulum before he let it go.

He now took the radio out of his shirt and turned it on. There was a built-in ten-minute delay. He put the radio on the bottom of the glory-hole, then covered it with loose chunks of rock. A lot of the explosion's force would be channeled upward anyway, but this was powerful stuff, whatever it was – enough would be left to tear perhaps three vertical feet of bedrock into chunks which they could quickly load into a sling and power-winch up. And the ship would not be hurt. Apparently nothing could do that.

Gardener slid his foot into the sling and shouted: 'Pull me up!'

Nothing happened.

‘PULL ME UP, JOHNNY!' he screamed. Once again there was that feeling that his head was splitting along some rotted midseam.

Still nothing.

His wrist-deep plunge into the icy water had dropped Gardener's body temperature perhaps two whole degrees. Nonetheless, a damp and slickly unpleasant sweat suddenly sprang out on his forehead. He looked at his wristwatch. Two minutes had passed since he had turned on the Snoopy radio. From his watch, his eyes moved to the loose pile of chunked granite in the glory-hole. Plenty of time to yank the rocks out and turn off the radio.

Except turning off the radio wouldn't stop whatever was going on inside the radio. He knew that somehow.

He looked up for Enders and Enders wasn't there.

This is how they're getting rid of you, Gard.

A drop of sweat ran into his eye. He brushed it away with the back of his hand.

‘ENDERS! HEY, JOHNNY!'

Shinny up the rope, Gard.

Forty feet? Dream on. Maybe in college. Maybe not even then.

He looked at his watch. Three minutes.

Yeah, this is how. Poof. All gone. A sacrifice to the Great Ship. A little something to propitiate the Tommyknockers.

‘… start it going yet?'

He looked up so quickly his neck popped, his growing fear turning immediately to rage.

'I started it almost five minutes ago you fucking shit-for-brains! Get me out of here before it goes off and blows me sky-high!'

Enders's mouth dropped into an 0 that was almost comical. He disappeared again and Gardener was left looking at his watch through what was becoming a blur of sweat.

Then the loop around his foot jerked and a moment later he began to rise. Gardener closed his eyes and clung to the rope. Apparently he wasn't quite as ready to sniff the pipe as he thought he was. Maybe that wasn't such a bad thing to know, either.

He reached the top of the cut, stepped out, loosened the loop around his foot, and walked over to where Enders stood.

'Sorry,' Enders said, smiling fussily. 'I thought we'd agreed that you'd give me a shout before – '

Gardener hit him. The thing was done and Enders was on the ground, his glasses hanging from one ear and his mouth bloody, before Gardener was even wholly aware of what he meant to do. And although he was not telepathic, he thought he could feel every head in Haven suddenly turn toward this place, alert and listening.

'You left me down there with that thing going, asshole,' he said. 'If you – or anyone else in this town – ever does it again, you better just leave me down there. Do you hear me?'

Rage dawned in Enders's eyes. He fixed his glasses back in place as well as he could and got to his feet. There was dirt on his bald head. 'I don't think you know who you're talking to.'

'I know more than you think,' Gardener said. 'Listen, Johnny. And the rest of you, if you're hearing this, and I think you are, you listen, too. I want an intercom down there. I want some ordinary fucking consideration. I've played square with you; I'm the only one in this town that didn't have to have his brains scrambled to do it, either. I want some fucking consideration. Do you hear me?'

Enders looked at him, but Gardener thought he was listening, too. Listening to other voices. Gardener waited for their decision. He was too angry to really care much.

'All right,' Enders said softly, pressing the back of his hand against his bloody mouth. 'You may have a point. We'll put in an intercom, and we'll see that you have a bit more … what did you call it?' A contemptuous flick of smile touched his lips. It was a smile with which Gardener was extremely familiar. It was the way the Arbergs and McCardles of the world smiled. it was the way the guys who ran the nukes smiled when they talked about atomicpower facilities.

'The word was consideration. You want to remember it. But smart guys can learn, yeah, Johnny? There's a dictionary back at the house. You need it, asshole?' He took a step toward Enders and had the distinct satisfaction of seeing the man fall back two steps, the contemptuous little smile disappearing. It was replaced with a look of nervy apprehension. 'Consideration, Johnny. You remember. All of you remember. If not for me, then for Bobbi.'

They were standing by the equipment lean-to now, Enders's eyes small and nervous, Gardener's large and bloodshot and still angry.

And if Bobbi dies, your idea of consideration may extend all the way to a quick and painless death. That's about the size of it, am I right? Would you say that just about describes the topography of this situation, you bald-headed little fuck?

'I – we – appreciate your plain speaking,' Enders said. His lips, with no teeth to back them up, pooched in and out nervously.

'I bet you do.'

'Perhaps a little plain speaking of our own is in order.' He took off his glasses, began to wipe them on the sweaty front of his shirt (an action which Gardener thought would only leave them more smeared than before), and Gardener saw a dirty, furious gleam in his eyes. 'You don't want to … to strike out like that, Jim. I advise you – we all advise you – never to do it

again. There are … uh … changes … yes, changes … going on in Haven – '

'No shit.'

'And some of these changes have made people … uh … short-tempered. So striking out like that could be … well, a bad mistake.'

'Do sudden noises bother you?' Gardener inquired.

Enders looked wary. 'I don't understand your p – '

'Because if the timer in that radio is jake, you're about to hear one.'

He stepped behind the lean-to, not quite running, but by no means lingering. Enders threw a startled glance toward the ship, and then ran after him. He tripped over a shovel and went sprawling in the dirt, grabbing at his shin and grimacing. A moment later a loud, crumping roar shook the earth. There was a series of those dull yet penetrating cludding sounds as chunks of rock flew against the ship's hull. Others sprayed into the air, then fell onto the edge of the cut or rattled back into it. Gardener saw one rebound from the ship's hull and bounce an amazing distance.

'You small-minded, practical joking son of a bitch!' Enders shouted. He was still lying on the ground, still clutching his shin.

'Small-minded, hell,' Gardener said. 'You left me down there.'

Enders glared at him.

Gardener stood where he was for a moment, then walked over to him and held out his hand. 'Come on, Johnny. Time to let bygones be bygones. If Stalin and Roosevelt could cooperate long enough to fight Hitler, I guess we ought to be able to cooperate long enough to unglue this sucker from the ground. What do you say?'

Enders would say nothing, but after a moment he took Gardener's hand and got up. He brushed sullenly at his clothes, occasionally favoring Gardener with an almost catlike expression of dislike.

'Want to go see if we brought in our well yet?' Gardener asked. He felt better than he had in days – months, actually, maybe even years. Blowing up at Enders had done him a world of good.

'What do you mean?'

'Never mind,' Gardener said, and went over to the cut alone. He peered down, looking for water, listening for gurgles and splashes. He saw nothing, heard nothing. It seemed they had lucked out again.

It suddenly occurred to him that he was standing here with his hands planted on his upper thighs, bent over a forty-foot drop with a man somewhere behind him to whom he had just administered a punch in the mouth. If Enders wanted to, he could run up behind me and tumble me into this hole with one hard push, he thought, and heard Enders saying: Striking out like that could be a very bad mistake.

But he didn't look around, and that sense of well-being, absurdly out of place or not, held. He was in a fix, and strapping a rearview mirror onto his head so he could see who was coming up behind him wasn't going to get him out of it.

When he turned around at last, Enders was still standing by the lean-to, looking at him with that sulky kicked-cat expression. Gardener suspected he had been on the party-line again with his fellow mutations.

'What do you say?' Gardener called over to him. There was an edged pleasantness in his voice. 'There's a lot of broken rock down there. Do we go back to work, or do we air a few more grievances?'

Enders went into the shed, grabbed the levitation-pack they used to move the bigger rocks, and started toward Gardener with it. He held it out. Gardener shouldered the pack. He started back toward the sling, then looked back at Enders.

'Don't forget to hoist me up when I yell.'

'I won't.' Enders's eyes – or perhaps that was only the lenses of his spectacles

were murky. Gardener discovered he didn't really care which. He put his foot into the rope sling and tightened it as Enders went back to the winch.

'Remember, Johnny. Consideration. That's the word for today.'

John Enders lowered him down without saying anything.

4

Sunday, July 31st:

Henry Buck, known to his friends as Hank, committed the last act of outright irrational craziness to take place in Haven at a quarter past eleven on that Sunday morning.

People in Haven are short-tempered, Enders had told Gard. Ruth McCausland had seen evidences of this short temper during the search for David Brown: hot words, scuffles, a thrown punch or two. Ironically, it had always been Ruth herself -Ruth and the clear moral imperative she had always represented in these people's lives – who had prevented the search from turning into a free-for-all.

Short-tempered? 'Crazy' was probably a better word.

In the shock of the 'becoming,' the entire town had been like a gas-filled room, waiting only for someone to light a match … or to do something even more accidental but just as deadly, as an explosion in a gas-filled room may be set off by an innocent delivery-boy pushing a doorbell and creating a spark.

That spark never came. Part of it was Ruth's doing. Part of it was Bobbi's doing. Then, after the visits to the shed, a group of half a dozen men and one woman began to work like the hippie LSD-trip-guides of the sixties, helping Haven through to the end of the first difficult stage of 'becoming.'

It was well for the people of Haven that the big bang never did come, well for the people of Maine, New England, perhaps for the whole continent or the whole planet. I would not be the one to tell you there are no planets anywhere in the universe that are not large dead cinders floating in space because a war over who was or was not hogging too many dryers in the local Laundromat escalated into Doomsville. No one ever really knows where things will end – or if they will. And there had been a time in late June when the entire world might well have awakened to discover a terrible, world-ripping conflict was going on in an obscure Maine town – an exchange which had begun over something as deeply important as whose turn it had been to pick up the coffee-break check at the Haven Lunch.

Of course we may blow up our world someday with no outside help at all, for reasons which look every bit as trivial from a standpoint of light-years; from where we rotate far out on one spoke of the Milky Way in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, whether or not the Russians invade the Iranian oilfields or whether NATO decides to install American-made Cruise missiles in West Germany may seem every bit as important as whose turn it is to pick up the tab for five coffees and a like number of Danish. Maybe it all comes down to the same thing, when viewed from a galactic perspective.

However that may be, the tense period in Haven really ended with the month of July – by this time, almost everyone in town had lost his teeth, and a number of other, stranger mutations had begun. Those seven people who had visited Bobbi's shed, communing with what waited in the green glow, had begun to experience these mutations some ten days earlier, but had kept them secret.

Considering the nature of the changes, that was probably wise.

Because Hank Buck's revenge on Albert 'Pits' Barfield was really the last act of outrageous craziness in Haven, and in that light it probably deserves a brief mention.

Hank and Pits Barfield were part of the Thursday-night poker circle to which Joe Paulson had also belonged. By July 31st the poker games had ended, and not because that bitch 'Becka Paulson had gone crazy and roasted her husband. They had stopped because you can't bluff at poker when all the players are telepaths.

Still, Hank held a grudge against Pits Barfield, and the more he thought about it, the more it grew in his mind. All these years, Pits had been bottom-dealing. Several of them suspected it – Hank could remember a night in the back room of Kyle Archinbourg's place, seven years ago it must have been, playing pool with Moss Harlingen, and Moss had said: 'He's bottom-dealing just as sure as you're born, Hank. Six-ball in the side.' Whack! The six-ball shot into the side pocket as if on a string. 'Thing is, bastid's good at it. If he was just a little slower, I could catch him at it.'

'If that's what you think, y'ought to get out'n the game.'

'Shit! Everyone else in that game is as honest as the day is long. And the truth is, I can outplay most of 'em. Nine-ball. Corner.' Whap! 'Suckardly little prick is fast, and he never overuses it – just does a little if he really starts to go in the hole. You notice how he comes out every Thursday night? 'Bout even?'

Hank had. All the same, he had thought the whole thing was just a little buggyboo in Moss's head – Moss was a good poker player, and he resented anyone whose money he couldn't take. But others had voiced a similar suspicion over the intervening years, and more than a few of them – some of them damned nice fellows, too, fellows Hank had really enjoyed pulling a few beers and dealing a few hands with – had dropped out of the game. They did this quietly, with no fuss or bother, and the possibility that Pits Barfield might be responsible was never hinted at. It was that they had finally gotten into the Monday-night bowling league up to Bangor and their wives didn't want them out late two nights a week. It was that their work schedules had changed and they couldn't take that late night anymore. It was that winter was coming (even if it was only May) and they had to do a little work on their snowmobiles.

So they dropped out, leaving the little core of three or four that had -been there all along, and somehow that made it worse, knowing those outsiders had either picked it up or smelled it as clearly as you could smell the jungle-juice aroma which arose from Barfield's unwashed body most of the time. They got it. Him and Kyle and Joe Paulson had been snookered. All these years they had been snookered.

After the 'becoming' got rolling really well, Hank discovered the truth once and for all. Not only had Pits been doing a little basement dealing, he had also, from time to time, indulged in a little discreet card-marking. He had picked these skills up in the long, monotonous hours of duty at a Berlin repple-depple in the months after the end of World War II. Some of those hot, muggy July nights Hank would lie awake in bed, head aching, and imagine Pits sitting in a nice warm farmhouse, shirt and shoes off, stinking to high heaven and grinning a great big shit-eating grin as he practiced cheating and dreamed of the suckers he would fleece when he got back home.

Hank endured these dreams and headaches for two weeks … and then, one night, the answer came. He would just send old Pits back to the repple-depple, that's what he would do. Some repple-depple, anyway. A repple-depple maybe fifty light-years away, or maybe five hundred, or five million. A repple-depple in the Phantom Zone. And Hank knew just how to do it. He sat bolt upright in bed, grinning a huge grin. His headache was gone at last.

'Just what the hell is a repple-depple, anyway?' he muttered, and then decided that was the least of his problems. He got out of bed and set to work right then, at three in the morning.

He caught up to Pits a week after the idea had struck him. Pits was sitting in front of Cooder's market, tipped back in a chair and looking at the pictures in a Gallery magazine. Looking at pictures of naked women, bottom-dealing, and stinking up repple-depples – these were the specialties of Pits Barfield, Hank decided.

It was Sunday, overcast and hot. People saw Hank walking toward where Albert 'Pits' Barfield sat tipped back in his chair, workboots curled around the front rungs, checking out all those Girls Next Door; they felt-heard the one thought beating steadily

(reppledepplereppledepplereppledepple)

in Hank's mind, they saw the great big ghetto-blaster radio he was carrying

by the handle, saw the pistol jammed into the front of his pants, and they stepped away quickly.

Pits was deeply absorbed in the Gallery gatefold. It showed a great deal of a girl named Candi (whose hobbies, the magazine said, included 'sailing and men with hands both strong and gentle'), and he looked up far too late to do anything constructive on his own behalf. Considering the size of the pistol Hank was carrying, people opined (usually without even opening their mouths, except to shovel in more food) over supper that night, it had probably been too late for poor old Pits when he got up that Sunday morning.

Pits's chair came down with a bang.

'Hey, Hank! What -'

Hank pulled the gun – it was a souvenir of his own Army service. He had done his time in Korea, and not in any repple-depple, either.

'You just want to sit right there,' Hank said, 'or they're gonna be washing your guts off that store window, you cheating son of a bitch.'

'Hank … Hank … what …

Hank reached inside his shirt and brought out a small pair of Borg earphones. He jacked them into the big radio, turned it on, and tossed the phones toward Pits.

'Put em on, Pits. Let's see you deal your way out of this one.'

'Hank … please . . .'

'I ain't going to treat with you on this, Pits,' Hank said with great sincerity. 'I'll give you a five-count to put on those earphones, and then I'm gonna give you a sinus operation.'

'Christ, Hank, it was a fucking quarter-limit poker game!' Pits screamed. Sweat poured down his face, stained his khaki shirt. The smell of him was large, vinegary, and amazingly repugnant.

'One … two . . .'

Pits looked around wildly. There was no one there. The street had cleared magically. There wasn't so much as a car to be seen moving on Main Street, although there were plenty slant-parked in front of the market. Complete silence had fallen. In it, both he and Hank could hear the music coming from the earphones -Los Lobos wondering if the wolf would survive.

'It was a lousy three-raise quarter-limit poker game and I hardly ever did it anyway!' Pits shrieked. 'Somebody for Chrissake put a halter over this guy!'

'. . . three . . .'

And with a final, ludicrous defiance, Pits screamed: 'And he's a sore fucking loser!'

'Four,' Hank said, and raised his service pistol.

Pits, his entire shirt now stained nearly black with sweat, his eyes rolling, smelling like a manure pile which had just been napalmed, gave in. 'Okay! Okay! Okay!' He screamed, and picked up the earphones. 'I'm doin' it, see? I'm doin' it!'

He put the phones on. Still holding the pistol on him, Hank bent over the ghetto-blaster, which could play cassette tapes as well as receive AM and FM stations. The Play button below the cassette holder had been taped over. Written on the tape was this one rather ominous word: Send.

Hank pushed it.

Pits started to scream. Then the screams began to fade, as if someone inside were turning down his volume. At the same time someone seemed to be turning down his vividness, his physical coherence … his there-ness. Pits Barfield faded like a photograph. Now his mouth was moving soundlessly, his skin was milk.

A little piece of reality – a piece of reality roughly the size of a Dutch door's lower half – seemed to open behind him. There was a feeling that reality – Haven reality -had rotated on some unknowable axis, like a trick bookcase in a haunted-house spoof. Behind Pits now was an eerie purple-black landscape.

Hank's hair began to flutter about his ears; his collar stuttered with a sound like a silenced automatic weapon; the litter on the asphalt – candy wrappers, flattened cigarette packages, a couple of Humpty Dumpty potato chip bags – zoomed across the pavement and into that hole. They were drawn on the river of air which flowed into that nearly airless other place. Some of that litter went between Pits's legs. And some, Hank thought, seemed to pass right through them.

Then, suddenly, as if he himself had become as light as the litter which had been on the market's paved apron, Pits was vacuumed into that hole. His Gallery magazine went after him, pages flapping like batwings. Good for you, fuckface, Hank thought, now you got something to read in the repple-depple. Pits's chair toppled over, scraped across the asphalt, and lodged half-in, half-out of that opening. A wind-tunnel of air was now rushing around Hank. He bent over his radio, finger coming to rest on the Stop button.

Just before he pushed it, he heard a high, thin cry coming from that other place. He looked up, thinking: That ain't Pits.

It came again.

'. . . hilly . . .'

Hank frowned. It was a kid's voice. A kid's voice, and there was something familiar about it. Something

'. . . over yet? I want to come ho-oome .

There was a bright, toneless jingle as the window in Cooder's market, which had blown inward in the town-hall explosion the previous Sunday, was now sucked outward. A glass-storm flew all around Hank, leaving him miraculously untouched.

'. . . please, it's hard to breeeeeeathe .

Now the B&M Beans on special which had been pyramided in the market's front window began to fly around Hank as they were sucked through the doorway in reality he had somehow opened. Five-pound bags of lawn food and ten-pound bags of charcoal slithered across the pavement with dry, papery sounds.

Gotta shut the sucker up, Hank thought, and as if to confirm this judgement, a can of beans slammed into the back of his head, bounced high in the air, then zoomed into that purple-black bruise.

'Hilleeeeee -'

Hank hit the Stop button. The doorway disappeared at once. There was a woody crunch as the chair lodged in the opening was cut in two, on an almost perfect diagonal. Half of the chair lay on the asphalt. The other half was nowhere to be seen.

Randy Kroger, the German who had owned Cooder's since the late fifties, grabbed Hank and turned him around. 'You're payin for that display window, Buck,' he said.

'Sure, Randy, whatever you say,' Hank agreed, dazedly rubbing the lump that was rising on the back of his head.

Kroger pointed at the strange, slanting half-chair lying on the asphalt. 'You're paying for the chair, too,' he announced, and strode back inside.

That was how July ended.

5

Monday, August 1st:

John Leandro finished talking, knocked back the rest of his beer, and asked David Bright: 'So what do you think he'll say?'

Bright thought for a moment. He and Leandro were in the Bounty Tavern, a wildly overdecorated Bangor pub with only two real marks in its favor – it was almost directly across the street from the editorial offices of the Bangor Daily News, and on Mondays you could get Heineken for a buck and a quarter a bottle.

'I think he'll start by telling you to hurry over to Derry and finish getting the rest of the Community Calendar,' Bright said. 'Then I think he might ask you if you've thought about psychiatric help.'

Leandro looked absurdly crushed. He was only twenty-four, and the last two stories he had covered – the disappearance (read: presumed murder) of the two state troopers, and the suicide of a third – had whetted his appetite for the high-voltage stuff. When stacked up against being in on a grim midnight hunt for the bodies of two state troopers, reporting on the Derry Amvets' covered-dish supper wasn't much. He didn't want the heavy stuff to end. Bright felt almost sorry for the little twerp – trouble was, that was what Leandro was. Being a twerp at twenty-four was acceptable. He was pretty sure, however, that Johnny Leandro was still going to be a twerp at forty-four … sixty-four … at eighty-four, if he lived that long.

A twerp of eighty-four was a slightly awesome and wholly frightening idea. Bright decided to order another beer after all.

'I was just joking,' Bright said.

'Then you think he will let me follow it up?'

'No.'

'But you just said

'I was joking about the psychiatric-help part,' Bright said patiently. 'That's what I was joking about.'

'He' was Peter Reynault, the city editor. Bright had learned a good many years ago that city editors had one thing in common with God Himself, and he suspected that Johnny Leandro was about to learn it himself very soon now. Reporters might propose, but it was city editors like Peter Reynault who eventually disposed.

'But – '

'You have nothing to follow up,' Bright said.

If Haven's inner circle – those who had made the trip into Bobbi Anderson's shed -could have heard what Leandro said next, his life expectancy might well have sunk to days … maybe mere hours.

'I've got Haven to follow up,' was what he said, and quaffed the rest of his Heineken Dark in three long swallows. 'Everything starts there. The kid disappears in Haven, the woman dies in Haven, Rhodes and Gabbons are coming back from Haven. Dugan commits suicide. Why? Because he loved the McCausland woman, he says. The McCausland woman from Haven.'

'Don't forget lovable old Gramps,' Bright said. 'He's running around saying his grandson's disappearance was a conspiracy. I kept expecting him to start whispering about Fu Manchu and white slavery.'

'So what is it?' Leandro asked dramatically. 'What's going on in Haven?'

'It is the insidious doctor,' Bright said. His beer arrived. He no longer wanted it. He only wanted to get out of here. Bringing up loveable old Gramps had been a mistake. Thinking about loveable old Gramps made him feel a trifle uneasy. Gramps was obviously off his rocker, but there had been something about his eyes …

'What?'

Dr Fu Manchu. If you see Nayland Smith hanging around, I think you've got the story of the century.' Bright leaned forward and whispered hoarsely: 'White slavery. Remember who you heard it from when you get the call from the New York Times.'

‘I don't think that's very funny, David.'

An eighty-four-year-old twerp, Bright thought again. Imagine it.

'Or, here's one,' Bright said. 'Little green men. The invasion of earth is already underway, see, only no one knows it. And – TA-DA! No One Will Believe This Heroic Young News-Hawk! Robert Redford Stars as John Leandro in This Nail-Biting Saga of – '

The bartender wandered down and said, 'You want to turn it down?'

Leandro got up, his face stiff. He dropped three dollar bills on the bar. 'Your sense of humor is adolescent, David.'

'Or try this,' Bright said dreamily. 'It's both Fu Manchu and green men from space. An alliance formed in hell. And no one knows but you, Johnny. Klaatu barada nictu!'

'Well, I don't care if Reynault lets me follow it up or not,' Leandro said, and Bright saw that he might have twanged Johnny's strings just a little too hard; the twerp was furious. 'My vacation starts next Friday. I may just go down to Haven. Follow it up on my own time.'

'Sure,' Bright said, excited. He knew he should let up– pretty soon Leandro was probably going to try to punch him in the mouth – but the guy just kept giving him openings. 'Sure, that's gotta be part of it! Redford wouldn't take the part unless he could go it alone. The Lone Wolf! Klaatu barada nictu! Wow! Just remember to wear your special watch when you go down there.'

'What watch?' Leandro asked, his face still angry. Oh, he was pissed, all right, but he kept leading with his chin just the same.

'You know, the one that sends out an ultrasonic signal that only Superman can hear when you pull out the stem,' Bright said, demonstrating with his own watch (and spilling a fair amount of beer into his crotch). 'It goes zeeeeeeeee – '

'I don't care what Peter Reynault thinks, and I don't care how many stupid jokes you make,' Leandro said. 'You both just might get a big surprise.'

He started out, then turned back.

'And for the record, I think you're a cynical shithead with no imagination.'

Having delivered this valedictory, Johnny Leandro turned on his heel and stalked grandly out.

Bright lifted his glass and tipped it toward the bartender. 'Let's drink to the cynical shitheads of the world,' he said. 'We have no imagination, but we're remarkably resistant to twerpism.'

'Whatever you say,' the bartender said. He believed he had seen it all before … but then, he had never tended bar in Haven.

6

Tuesday, August 2nd:

There were six of them who met late that afternoon in Newt Berringer's office. It was going on five P.m., but the clock in the tower – a tower that looked real but which a bird could easily have flown through, if there had been any birds left in Haven Village – still read five past three. All six had spent some time in Bobbi's shed; Adley McKeen was the most recent addition to their number. The others included Newt, Dick Allison, Kyle, Hazel, and Frank Spruce.

They discussed the few things they had to discuss without talking aloud.

Frank Spruce asked how Bobbi was.

Still alive, Newt responded; no one knew any more. She might come out of the shed again. More likely she would not. Either way, they would know when it happened.

Discussion turned briefly to what Hank Buck had done the day before, and what Hank said he'd heard coming from that other world. None of them was much concerned with the late and not so great Pits Barfield. Perhaps the punishment had suited the crime; perhaps it had been a little too extreme. It didn't matter. It was over. Nothing had happened to Hank as a result of what he had done; he had given Randy Kroger a personal check for the broken display window and the goods that had been sucked through the hole Hank had spiked into reality. Kroger called Northern National in Bangor to verify the check. He found it was good, and that was all he cared about.

There was little they could have done about Hank even if they'd had a mind to; the town's one jail cell was in the town hall's basement, a converted storeroom where Ruth had jugged a few weekend drunks, and it might hold Hank Buck for all of ten minutes. A strong fourteen-year-old could, have broken out of it. And they couldn't very well have sent Hank up to county jail. The charge would have looked pretty odd. The alternatives available to them were simple – let him alone or pack him off to Altair-4. Luckily, they were able to look closely into Hank's mind and motivations. They saw that his anger and confusion were subsiding, as they were all over town. He was not apt to do anything radical again, so they took away his converted radio, asked him not to make another, and moved on to what concerned them a bit more … the voice he claimed to have heard.

It was David Brown, all right, Frank Spruce said now. Anybody doubt it?

No one did.

David Brown was on Altair-4.

No one knew exactly where Altair-4 was, or what it was, and they didn't much care. The words themselves came from some old movie and meant no more than the name Tommyknockers, which came from some old rhyme. What mattered (and even this didn't, much) was that Altair-4 was a kind of cosmic warehouse, a place where all sorts of things were stored. Hank had sent Pits there, but first he had put the smelly old son of a bitch through some half-assed sort of disintegration process.

This had apparently not been the case with David Brown.

Hazel asked if they could get him back.

Long, thoughtful silence.

(yes probably yes)

Ike

This last was not ascribable to any one person; it was group-think, hive. and complete in itself.

(but why why bother)

They looked at each other with no emotion. They could feel emotion, but not over such a minor matter as this.

Bring him back, Hazel said indifferently. It'll please Bryant and Marie. And Ruth. She would have wanted it. And we all did love her, you know. Her thought had the tone of a woman suggesting that a friend buy her son a soft drink as a treat for being good.

No, Adley said, and they all looked toward him. It was the first time he had entered their conversation. He looked embarrassed but pushed on anyway. Every paper and TV station in the state'd be down here to get a story on the 'miracle return.' They think he must be dead, only four and gone over two weeks now. If he shows up, it'll make too much whoop-de-doo.

They were nodding now.

And what would he say? Newt put in. When they asked him where he'd been, what would he say?

We could blank his memories, Hazel said. That would be no problem at all, and the press people would accept amnesia as perfectly natural. Under the circumstances.

(yes but that's not the problem)

It was the many voices again, as one voice. They came together in a strange combination of words and images. The problem was that things had now gone too far to allow anyone in town except for the most transient through-travelers … and even most of them could be discouraged with fake road construction and detour signs. The last people they wanted in Haven was a bunch of reporters and TV camera crews. And the clock tower wouldn't show up on film; it was a mind-slide, really no more than a hallucination. No, David Brown was best left alone, all things considered. He would be all right for yet a while. They knew little about Altair-4, but they did know that time ran at a different speed there – on Altair-4, less than a year had passed since earth had been flung out of the sun. So David Brown had in fact just gotten there. Of course he still might die; strange microbes might invade his system, some strange Altair-4 warehouse-rat might gobble him up, or he might die of simple shock. But he probably wouldn't, and if he did, it really wasn't very important.

I've a feeling the boy might come in handy, Kyle said.

(how)

As a diversion.

(what do you mean)

Kyle didn't know exactly what he meant. It was only a feeling that if a spotlight were to be trained on Haven again – the way Ruth had tried to train one on the town with her damned exploding dolls, which had worked ever so much better than they were supposed to work – perhaps they could bring David Brown back and set him down somewhere else. If that was done in the right way, they might gain a little more time here. Time was always a problem. Time to 'become.'

Kyle expressed these ideas in no coherent way, but the others nodded at the drift of his thoughts. It would be well to keep David Brown waiting in the wings, so to speak, a while longer.

(don't let Marie know – she hasn't gone far enough in the 'becoming' – you must hide this from Marie yet a while)

All six looked around, eyes widening. That voice, weak but clear, belonged to none of them. It had come from Bobbi Anderson.

Bobbi! Hazel cried, half-rising from her seat. Bobbi, are you all right? How you doing?

No answer.

Bobbi was gone – there was not even a feel of her left in the air. They looked at each other cautiously, testing each other's impression of that

thought, confirming that it had been Bobbi. Each knew that if he or she had been alone, with no confirmation available, he or she would have dismissed it as an incredibly powerful hallucination.

How are we going to keep it from Marie? Dick Allison asked, almost angrily. We can't hide nothing from anybody else!

Yes, Newt returned. We can. Not good enough yet, maybe, but we can dim out our thoughts a little. Make them hard to see. Because

(because we've been)

(been out there)

(been in the shed)

(Bobbi's shed)

(we wore the headphones in Bobbi's shed)

(and ate ate to 'become')

(take ye eat do this in remembrance of me)

A sigh ran gently through them.

We'll have to go back, Adley McKeen said. Won't we?

'Yes,' Kyle said. 'We will.' It was the only time anyone spoke aloud during the entire meeting, and it marked its end.

7

Wednesday, August 3rd:

Andy Bozeman, who had been Haven's only realtor up until three weeks ago, when he simply closed his office, had discovered that mind-reading was something a fellow got used to very quickly. He didn't realize how quickly, or how much he had come to depend on it, until it was his turn to go on out to Bobbi's place to help and to keep an eye on the drunk.

Part of his problem – he knew it was going to be a problem after talking to Enders and the Tremain lad – was being this close to the ship. It was like standing next to the biggest power generator in the world; constant eddies and flows of its weird force ran over his skin like skirling sand-devils in the desert. Sometimes large ideas would float dreamily into his mind, making it impossible to concentrate on what he was doing. Sometimes the exact opposite would occur: thought would break up completely, like a microwave transmission interrupted by a burst of ultraviolet rays. But most of it was just the physical fact of the ship, looming there like something out of a dream. It was exhilarating, awe-inspiring, frightening, wonderful. Bozeman thought he now understood how the Israelites must have felt carrying the Ark of the Covenant through the desert. In one of his sermons, the Rev. Goohringer said that some fellow had ventured to stick his head in there, just to see what all the shouting was about, and he had dropped dead on the spot.

Because it had been God in there.

There might be a kind of God in that ship, too, Andy thought. And even if that God had fled, It had left some residue … some of Itself … and thinking about all that made it hard to keep your mind on the business at hand.

Then there was Gardener's unsettling blankness. You kept running into it like a closed door that should have been open. You'd yell at him to hand you something, and he would go right on with what he was doing.

Just … no response. Or you'd go to tune in on him – just sort of fall into the run of his thoughts, like picking up a telephone on a party-line to see who was talking, and there would be no one there. No one at all. Nothing but a dead line.

There was a buzz from the intercom nailed to the inside wall of the lean-to. Its wire ran across the muddy, churned ground and into the trench from which the ship jutted.

Bozeman flipped the toggle over to Talk. 'I'm here.'

'The charge is set,' Gardener said. 'Haul me up.' He sounded very, very tired. He had thrown himself a pretty fair country drunk last night, Bozeman thought, judging by the sound of the puking he had heard from the back porch around midnight. And when he glanced into Gardener's room this morning, he had seen blood on his pillow.

'Right away.' The episode with Enders had taught them all that when Gardener asked to be brought up, you didn't waste time.

He went to the windlass and began to crank. It was a pain in the ass, having to do this by hand, but there was a temporary shortage of batteries again. Give them another week and everything out here would be running like clockwork … except Bozeman doubted if he would be here to see it. Being near the ship was exhausting. Being near Gardener was exhausting in a different way – it was like being near a loaded gun that had a hair trigger. The way he had sucker-punched poor John Enders, now – the only reason John hadn't known it was coming was because Gardener was such an infuriating blank. Every now and then a bubble of thought partial or complete – would rise to the surface of his mind, as readable as a newspaper headline, but that was all. Maybe Enders had it coming – Bozeman knew that he wouldn't be too nuts about being stuck at the bottom of a trench with one of those explosive radios. But that wasn't the point. The point was that Johnny hadn't been able to see it coming. Gardener could do anything, at any time, and no one could stop him, because no one could see it coming.

Andy Bozeman almost wished Bobbi would die so they could get rid of him. It would be tougher with just Havenites working on the project, true, it would slow them down, but it would almost be worth it.

The way he could come out of left field at you was so fucking unsettling.

This morning, for instance. Coffee break. Bozeman sitting on a stump, eating some of those little peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches and drinking iced coffee from his Thermos. He had always preferred hot coffee to cold even in warm weather, but since he'd lost his teeth, really hot drinks seemed to bother him.

Gardener had been sitting cross-legged like one of those Yoga masters on a dirty swatch of tarpaulin, eating an apple and drinking a beer. Bozeman didn't see how anyone could eat an apple and drink a beer at the same time, especially in the morning, but Gardener was doing it. From here, Bozeman could see the scar an inch or so above Gardener's left eyebrow. The steel plate would be under that scar. it

Gardener had turned his head and caught Bozeman looking at him. Bozeman flushed, wondering if Gardener was going to start to yell and rant. If maybe he was going to come over here and try to sucker-punch him the way he had Johnny Enders. If he tries that, Bozeman thought, curling his hands into fists, he's going to find that I'm no sucker.

Instead, Gardener had begun to speak in a clear, carrying voice – there was a small, cynical smile on his mouth as he did it. After a moment, Bozeman realized he wasn't just speaking, he was reciting. The man was sitting out here in the woods cross-legged on a dirty tarp, hungover out of his mind, the glittering body of the ship in the earth casting moving ripples of reflection on his cheek, and reciting like a schoolboy – the man was unfucking-stable, Bozeman would tell the world. He sincerely wanted Gardener dead.

Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart,"' Gardener said, eyes half-closed, face turned up toward the warm morning sun. That little smile never left his lips.---Andwhile the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents.

'What – ' Andy began, but Gardener, his smile now spreading into a genuine – if nonetheless cynical – grin, overrode him.

There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but they remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat, and a string to swing it with . . . "'

Gardener drank the rest of his beer, belched, and stretched.

'You never brought me a dead rat and a string to swing it with, but I got an intercom, Bozie, and I guess that's a start, huh?'

'I don't know what you're talking about,' Andy Bozeman said slowly. He had only gotten two years of college, business admin, before having to drop out and go to work. His father had a heart condition and chronic high blood pressure. High-flown fellows like this made him nervous and angry. Lording it over ordinary folks, as if being able to quote from something written by someone who had died a long time ago made their shit smell sweeter than other people's.

Gardener said, 'That's okay. It's from chapter two of Tom Sawyer. When Bobbi was a kid back in Utica, seventh grade, they had this thing called Junior Exhibition. It was a recitation competition. She didn't want to be in it, but her sister Anne decided she ought to be, that it would be good for her, or something, and when sister Anne decided something, brother, it was decided. Anne was a real tartar then, Bozie, and she's a real tartar now. At least I guess she is. I haven't seen her in a long time, and that's the way, oh-ho, uh-huh, I like it. But I think it's fair to say she's still the same. People like her very rarely change.'

'Don't call me Bozie,' Andy said, hoping he sounded more dangerous than he felt. 'I don't like it.'

'When I had Bobbi in freshman comp, she wrote once about how she froze trying to recite Tom Sawyer. I just about cracked up.' Gardener got to his feet and started walking toward Andy, a development the ex-realtor viewed with active alarm. 'I saw her after class the next day and asked her if she still remembered how "Whitewashing the Fence'' went. She did. I wasn't surprised. There are some things you never forget, like when your sister or your mother bulldozed you into some horror-show like Junior Ex. You may forget the piece when you're standing up there in front of all those people. Otherwise, you could recite it on your deathbed.'

'Look,' Andy said, 'we ought to get back to work

'I let her get about four sentences in, and then I joined her. Her jaw dropped almost down to her knees. Then she started grinning, and we went through it together, word for word. It wasn't so strange. We were both shy kids, Bobbi and I. Her sister was the dragon in front of her cave, my mother was the dragon in front of mine. People like that often get this very weird idea that the way to cure a shy kid is to put him into the sort of situation he dreads the most – something like Junior Ex. It wasn't even much of a coincidence that we'd both gotten that whitewashing thing by heart. The only one more popular for recitation is "The Tell-Tale Heart.

Gardener drew in breath and screamed:

'Stop, fiends! Dissemble no more! Tear up the floor-boards! Here! Here! 'Tis the beating of his hideous heart!'

Andy had uttered a small shriek. He dropped his Thermos, and half a cup of cold coffee stained the crotch of his pants.

'Uh-oh, Bozie,' Gardener said conversationally. 'Never get that out of those polyester slacks.

'Only difference between the two of us was that I didn't freeze,' he went on. 'In fact, I won a second-prize ribbon. But it didn't cure my fear of talking in front of crowds . . . only made it worse. Whenever I stand up in front of a group to read poetry, I look at all those hungry eyes . . . I think of “Whitewashing the Fence” Also, I think about Bobbi. Sometimes that's enough to get me through. Anyway, it made us friends.'

'I don't see what any of that has to do with getting this work done!' Andy cried in a hectoring voice utterly unlike him. But his heart had been beating too fast. For a moment there, when Gardener had shrieked, he really had believed the man had gone insane.

'You don't see what this has to do with whitewashing the fence?' Gardener asked, and laughed. 'Then you must be blind, Bozie.'

He pointed to the ship leaning skyward at its perfect forty-five-degree angle, rising out of the wide trench.

'We're digging it up instead of whitewashing it, but that doesn't change the principle a bit. I have fagged out Bobby Tremain and John Enders, and if you're back tomorrow I'll eat your Hush Puppies. Thing is, I never seem to get any prizes for it. You tell whoever comes out tomorrow I want a dead rat and a string to swing it by, Bozie … or a bully taw, at the very least.' Gardener had stopped halfway to the trench. He looked around at Andy. Andy's failure to read this big man with the sloping shoulders and the indistinct, oddly broken face had never made Bozeman more uncomfortable than it did then.

'Better still, Bozie,' Gardener had said in a voice so soft Andy could hardly hear it, 'get Bobbi out here tomorrow. I'd like to find out if the New Improved Bobbi still remembers how to recite “Whitewashing the Fence” from Tom Sawyer.'

Then, without another word, he had gone to the sling and waited for Andy to lower him down.

If that whole thing hadn't been Ieft-field, Andy didn't know what was. And, he added to himself as he turned the winch, that had only been Gardener's first beer of the day. He'll put away another five or six at lunch and really get wild and crazy.

Gardener now came swaying to the top of the trench, and Andy had an urge to let go of the windlass crank. Solve the problem himself.

Except he couldn't – Gardener belonged to Bobbi Anderson, and until Bobbi either died or came out of the shed, things had to go on pretty much as they were.

'Come on, Bozie. Some of those rocks fly a long way.' He started toward the lean-to. Andy fell in beside him, hurrying to keep up.

'I told you I don't like you calling me Bozie,' he said.

Gardener spared him a curiously flat glance. 'I know,' he said.

They went around the lean-to. About three minutes later another of those loud, crumping roars shuddered out of the trench. A spray of rocks rose into the sky and came down, rattling off the hull of the ship with dull clangs and clongs.

'Well, let's – 'Bozeman began.

Gardener grabbed his arm. His head was tilted, his face alert, his eyes Clark and lively. 'Shhh!'

Andy wrenched his arm away. 'What in the hell's wrong with you?'

'Don't you hear it?'

'I don't h – '

Then he did. A hissing sound, like a giant tea-kettle, was coming from the trench. It was growing. A mad excitement suddenly seized Andy. There was more than a little terror in it.

'It's them!' he whispered, and turned toward Gard. His eyes were the size of doorknobs, his lips, shiny with loose spittle, were trembling. 'They weren't dead, we woke them up … they're coming out!'

'Jesus is coming and is He pissed,' Gardener remarked, unimpressed.

The hissing grew louder. Now there was another crunching thud – this wasn't an explosion; it was the sound of something heavy collapsing. A moment later something else collapsed: Andy. The strength ran out of his legs and he fell to his knees.

'It's them, it'– them, it's them!' he slobbered.

Gardener hooked a hand into the man's armpit, wincing a little at the hot, jungly dampness there, and pulled him to his feet.

'That's not the Tommyknockers,' he said. 'It's water.'

'Huh?' Bozeman looked at him with dazed incomprehension.

'Water!' Gardener cried, giving Bozeman a brisk little shake. 'We just brought in our swimming pool, Bozie!'

'Wh – ‘

The hiss suddenly exploded into a soft, steady roar. Water jetted out of the trench and into the sky in a widening sheet. This was no column of water; it was as if a giant child had just pressed his finger over a giant faucet to watch the water spray everywhere. At the bottom of the trench, water was driving up through a number of fissures in just that way.

'Water?' Andy asked weakly. He couldn't get it right in his mind.

Gardener didn't reply. Rainbows danced in the water; it ran down the sleek hull of the ship in rivulets, leaving beads behind . . . and as he watched, he saw those drops begin to skitter, the way water flicked into hot fat on a griddle will skitter and hop. Only this was not random. The drops were lining up in obedience to lines of force which ran down the hull of the ship like lines of longitude on a globe.

I can see it, Gardener thought. I can see the force radiating from the ship's skin in those drops. My God

There was another crunch. Gardener seemed to feel the earth actually drop a bit under his feet. At the bottom of the trench, water pressure was finishing the work the blasting had begun – widening fissures and holes, pulling the friable rock apart. More water began to escape, and more easily. The sheets of spray fell back. A last diffuse rainbow wavered in the air and disappeared.

Gardener saw the ship shift as the rock weld which had prisoned it so long let go. It moved so slightly it might have been imagination, but it wasn't. In that brief movement he could see how it would look coming out of the ground – he could see its shadow rippling slowly over the ground as it came up and out, could hear the unearthly wailing of its hull scraping over the bones of bedrock, could sense everyone in Haven looking this way as it rose into the sky, hot and glittering, a monstrous silver coin slowly heeling over to the horizontal for the first time in millennia, floating soundlessly in the sky, floating free …

He wanted that. God! Right or wrong, he wanted that so bad.

Gardener gave his head a brisk shake, as if to clear it.

'Come on,' he said. 'Let's take a look.'

Without waiting, Gardener walked across to the trench and looked in. He could hear rushing water, but it was hard to see. He attached one of the big kleig lights they used for night-work to the stirrup of the sling and lowered it about ten feet. That was plenty; if he had lowered it another ten, it would have been underwater. It had been a lake they had broken into, all right; no joke. The trench was filling rapidly.

After a moment, Andy joined him. His face was wretched. 'All that work!' he cried.

'Did you bring your diving board, Bozie? Are we going to have Free Swim on Thursdays or Fr – '

'Shut up!' Andy Bozeman screamed at him. 'Shut up, I hate you!'

Wild hysteria washed over Gardener. He staggered away to a stump and sat down, wondering if the goddam thing had stayed watertight all these years, wondering what the fair market price was for a flying saucer with water damage. He began to laugh. Even when Andy Bozeman came over and hit him upside the face and knocked him onto the ground, Jim Gardener couldn't stop laughing.

8

Thursday, August 4th:

When it got to be quarter to nine and still no one had shown up, Gardener began to wonder if maybe they were quitting. He toyed with the idea as he sat in Bobbi's rocker on the porch, fingering the big, puffy bruise on the side of his face where Bozeman had clouted him.

A bunch of them had been out in Archinbourg's Cadillac again, after midnight. Mostly the same bunch. Another Midnight Shed Party. Gardener had hiked himself up on one elbow and had watched them through the guestroom window, wondering who brought the chips and dip to these soirees. They were just shadows grouped around the long front end of the Coupe DeVille. They stood there for a moment, then went to the shed. When they opened the door, that viciously brilliant light poured out in a flood that lit the entire yard and the guestroom itself with a sick radium-dial glow. They went inside. The glow faded down to a thick vertical bar but didn't go out entirely. They had left the door ajar. The folks in this little jerkwater Maine town were now the brightest people on earth, but apparently not even they had been able to figure out how to padlock a door from the outside, and they hadn't thought to put one on the inside.

Now, sitting on the porch and looking toward the village, Gardener thought: Maybe when they get inside there, they get too exalted to think of mundane things like padlocks.

He shaded his eyes with one hand. A truck was coming. A big old pulp truck that was vaguely familiar. There was a tarpaulin over something in the back. It flapped casually in the wind. Gardener knew it was going to turn in. Of course they hadn't given up.

Woke up last night in the guestroom bed, saw the folks going into the Tommyknockers' shed. Could have looked in, but I didn't quite dare; don't want to know what goes on in there.

He didn't think, somehow, that the judges of the Yale Younger Poets competition would think much of it. But, Gardener thought, This Is Where Jim Gardener Is Now, as they say. Maybe later on they'll call it my Tommyknocker Phase. Or my Shed Period. Or

The truck changed to a lower gear and came groaning into Bobbi's dooryard. The engine died with a wheeze. The man in the strap-style T-shirt who got out was the man who had given Gard his ride to the Haven town line on July 4th. He recognized the man at once. Coffee, he thought. You gave me coffee with a lot of sugar in it. Tasted good. He looked like an extra from the James Dickey novel about those city boys and their weekend canoeing trip down the Cahoola-wassee. Gardener didn't think the man was from Haven, though – hadn't he said Albion?

Stuff's spreading, he thought. Well, why not? It's fallout, isn't it? And Albion's downwind.

"Lo there,' the truck driver said. 'Guess you don't 'member me.' His tone added: Don't fuck with me, Fred.

'Guess I do,' Gard said, and the name rose magically in his mind, even after all this – a single month that seemed more like ten years, with all these strange events. 'Freeman, Moss. Gave me a ride. I was coming to cheek on Bobbi. But I guess you know that.'

Moss went to the back of the truck and began pulling slipknots and yanking rope. 'Want to give me a help with this?'

Gardener started down the steps, then stopped, smiling a little. First Tremain, then Enders, then Bozeman with his somehow pitiful pale yellow polyester pants.

'Sure,' he said. 'Just tell me one thing.'

'Ayuh?' Moss left off pulling the ropes. He flipped back the tarpaulin, and Gardener saw about what he had expected: a weird conglomeration of equipment: tanks, hoses, three car batteries nailed to a board. A New and Improved Pump. 'Will if I can.'

Gardener grinned without much humor. 'Did you bring me a dead rat and a string to swing it with?'

9

Friday, August 5th:

No air traffic had overflown Haven on a regular basis since the late 1960s when Dow Air Force Base in Bangor had closed down. If someone had uncovered the ship in the earth back in those days, there might have been trouble; there had been Air Force fighter planes zooming overhead four and five times a day, rattling windows and sometimes breaking them with sonic booms. The pilots weren't supposed to boom over the continental United States unless absolutely necessary, but the hotshots who flew the F-4s, most of them with adolescent acne still fading from their cheeks and foreheads, sometimes got a little exuberant. The jets made the Mustangs and Chargers these overgrown boys had been driving only a year before look mighty tame. When Dow closed there were still a few Air National Guard flights, but the patterns were shifted north, toward the Loring in Limestone.

After some dithering, the base was turned into a commercial airfield, named Bangor International Airport. Some thought the name rather grand for an airport that serviced a few wheezy Northeast Airlines flights to Boston each day and a handful of puddle-jumper Pipers bound for Augusta and Portland. But the air traffic eventually grew, and by 1983 BIA had become a thriving air terminal. Besides serving two commercial airlines, it was also a refueling point for many international carriers, and so it finally earned its grand name.

For a while, some commercial airliners did overfly Haven – this was in the early seventies. But pilots and navigators regularly reported radar problems in the area coded Quadrant G-3, a square which took in most of Haven, all of Albion, and the China Lakes region. This cloudy interference, known as ,popcorn,' 'echo-haze,' or, even more colorfully, as 'ghost-turds,' is also reported regularly over the Bermuda Triangle. Compasses went wacky. Sometimes there were funny cuckoo electrical glitches in the equipment.

In 1973, a Delta jet southbound from BIA to Boston nearly collided with a TWA jet bound from London to Chicago. Drinks on both planes were spilled; a TWA stewardess was scalded by hot coffee. No one but the flightcrews knew how close it had been. The co-pilot on the Delta plane ran a hot special-delivery into his pants, laughed hysterically all the way to Boston, and quit flying forever two days later.

In 1974 a Big Sky charter jet loaded with happy gamblers bound for Las Vegas from Bangor and the Canadian Maritimes lost power in one engine over Haven and had to return to Bangor. When the engine was restarted on the ground, it ran fine.

There was another near-miss in 1975. By 1979, all commercial air traffic had been routed out of the area. If you had asked an FAA controller about it, he only would have shrugged and called it a dragon. It was a word they used. There were such places here and there; no one knew why. It was easier to route planes away and forget it.

By 1982, private air traffic was also being routinely vectored away from G-3 by controllers in Augusta, Waterville, and Bangor. So no pilot had seen the great shiny object winking up from the exact center of map-square G-3 on FAA Map ECUS-2.

Not until Peter Bailey saw it on the afternoon of August 5th.

Bailey was a private pilot with two hundred hours on his own in the air. He flew a Cessna Hawk XP, and he would have been the first to tell you that it had cost him a few banana-skins. This was Peter Bailey's phrase for money. He found it hilarious. The Hawk cruised at a hundred and fifty miles an hour and had good sky capability; 17,000 feet without breathing hard. The Cessna nav-pack made it hard to get lost (the optional nav antenna had also cost a few banana-skins). In other words it was a good plane, one that could damn near fly itself – only it didn't have to with a good pilot like him driving.

If Peter Bailey had a bitch, it was the goddam insurance. It was highway robbery, and he had bored his golfing partners to tears with the outrage the insurance companies had foisted on him.

He had friends who flew, he assured them grimly, plenty of them. A lot with less hours on their licenses than he had were forking over fewer banana-skins to the insurance heathens than he was. Some were guys he wouldn't have flown with, he said, if they owned the last plane on earth and his wife was in Denver dying of a brain hemorrhage. And the amount wasn't the greatest humiliation of all. The greatest humiliation of all was that he, Peter Bailey, he, a respected neurosurgeon who made well over three hundred thousand banana-skins a year, had to accept pool coverage if he wanted to fly. Well, he told his captive audiences (who often wished fervently that they had only played the front nine, or, better, had stayed in the bar and soaked up a few Bloody Marys), pool coverage was assigned-risk coverage, the sort teenagers and convicted drunks had to carry on their cars. Shit! If that wasn't goddam discrimination he didn't know what was. If he wasn't such a busy man he'd slap the bastards with a class action suit and he'd win, too.

Many of Bailey's golf companions were lawyers, and most knew it wouldn't wash. Risk coverage was made on the basis of actuarial tables, and the fact was, Peter Bailey wasn't just a neurosurgeon; he was a doctor, and doctors have the worst record as private pilots of any professional group in the world.

After escaping one of these foursomes, one of the players remarked as Bailey headed toward the clubhouse, still fuming: 'I wouldn't even drive to Denver with the long-winded son of a bitch if my wife was dying of a brain hemorrhage.'

Peter Bailey was exactly the sort of flier for whom the tables had been invented. There were undoubtedly doctors all over America who were exemplary pilots. Bailey wasn't one of them. Quick and decisive in the operating theater when a patient lay before him with a window of skull cut away to reveal the pinkish-gray brain tissue, as delicate as a dancer with scalpel and laser knife, he was a ham-fisted pilot who constantly violated assigned altitudes, FAA safety rules, and his own flight patterns. He was a bold pilot, but with only two hundred hours on his license, he could by no stretch of the imagination be called an old pilot. His status as an assigned risk only confirmed the old saw: a pilot may be one or the other, but no pilot is both.

He was flying alone that day from Teeterboro outside New York to Bangor. At Bangor he would rent a car and drive to Derry Home Hospital. He had been asked to consult in the case of young Hillman Brown. Because the case was interesting and the price right (and because he had heard good things about the golf course in Orono), he had agreed.

The weather had been clear the whole way, the air smooth. Bailey had enjoyed the trip tremendously. As usual, his logbook was botched, he had missed one VOR beacon entirely and had decided another must be on the blink (he had hit the frequency dial with his elbow), he had wandered from his assigned altitude of 11,000 feet as high as 15,000 and as low as 6,000, and had once again avoided killing anyone . . . a blessing he was unfortunately too stupid to count.

He also wandered well off his flight-path, and so happened to overfly Haven, where a great blink of light suddenly flicked into his eye; it was as if someone had just flashed the lid of the world's biggest Crisco can up at him.

'What in the Sam Hill – '

He looked down and saw a tantalizing glimmer of that brightness. He might have dismissed it, might have gone on and survived to fight yet another day (or perhaps to collide with a fully loaded airliner), but he was early and intrigued. He banked the Hawk and went back.

'Now where -'

It flashed again, bright enough to dazzle a blue crescent of afterimage onto his eyes. Ripples of light ran across the top of the pilot's cabin.

'Jee-zus!'

There, below him in a clearing in the gray-green woods, was a huge silver object. He could tell little about it before it was gone again under the port wing.

At 6,000 feet for the second time that day, Bailey banked back again. His head had begun to ache – he noticed this and dismissed it as excitement. His first thought had been that it was a water-tower, but no one would locate a water-tower that big in the woods.

He overflew the object again, this time at 4,000. He had the Hawk throttled back as far as he dared (which was a good deal further than a more experienced pilot would have dared do, but the Hawk was a good plane and it forgave him).

Artifact, he thought this time, almost sick with excitement. A great dishshaped artifact in the earth . . . or some government thing? But if it was government, how come it wasn't covered with a camouflage net? And the ground around it had been excavated – from up here, the trench cut into the earth was perfectly clear.

Bailey determined to overfly it again – hell, he'd buzz it! – and then his eye fell on his gauges and his heart took an unsteady leap. His compass was winding itself around in big stupid circles, the tank indicators were flashing red. The altimeter suddenly ran up to 22,000 feet, stopped briefly, and then dropped back to dead zero.

The Hawk's husky 195-horsepower motor gave a terrifying hitch. The nose dipped. Bailey's heart did the same. His head throbbed. In front of his bulging eyes needles were whirling, lights flashed from green to red like pygmy traffic signals, and the altitude warning beeper, which was supposed to tell a bemused pilot Wake up, dummy, you are about to run into a large immovable object

called Mother Earth, began to sound, even though it wasn't supposed to go off until the plane passed through five hundred and Bailey's own eyes told him the Hawk was still at four thousand feet, perhaps a bit more. He looked at the digital thermometer which recorded the outside air temperature. It blinked from 47 to 58, then to 5. It paused there for a moment, then showed 999. The red numerals held there, pulsing distractedly, and then the thermometer shorted out.

'What in Christ's name is going on here?' Bailey screamed, and was stupidly amazed to see one of his front teeth fly out of his mouth, bounce off his airspeed indicator and fall on the floor.

The engine hitched again.

'Fuck,' he whispered. He was now sick with fright. Blood from the socket where his tooth had been trickled down his chin. A drop splashed on his Lacoste shirt.

The gleaming thing in the earth passed under his wings again.

The Hawk's engine ran choppily and stalled. It began to lose altitude. Forgetting all his training, Bailey hauled up on the wheel as hard as he could, but the silent plane didn't, couldn't, answer. Bailey's head pounded and thudded. The Cessna dropped to 4,000 feet … 3,500 … 3,000. Bailey groped out with one hand like a blind man and thumbed the button marked EMERGENCY RESTART. Hi-test av-gas boomed hollowly in the Hawk's carbs. The propeller jerked, then stopped again. Now the Cessna had slid down to 2,500 feet. It passed over the Old Derry Road close enough for Bailey to be able to see the service board in front of the Methodist church.

'Motherfuck,' he whispered. 'I'm gonna die.'

He pulled the choke all the way out and hit the restart button again. The engine coughed, ran for a while, then began to stutter.

'No!' Bailey screamed. One eye ruptured and filled up with blood. The blood sheeted thinly down his left cheek. In his panicky, terrorized state, he didn't even notice. He slammed the choke in again. 'No, don't you stall, you ratshit plane!'

The engine roared; the propeller blurred into invisibility with a wedge of reflected sunshine in it. Bailey hauled up on the wheel. The overburdened Hawk began to lug again.

'Ratshit plane! Ratshit plane! Ratshit plane!' he screamed. His left eye was now full of blood and he was on some level aware that the world seemed to have taken on a strange pinkish aspect, but if he'd had the time or inclination to think about this at all, he would have thought it no more than rage at this idiotic situation.

He let off on the wheel; the Hawk, allowed to climb at an angle which was almost sane, began to buckle down to its job again. Haven Village passed beneath it, and Bailey was dimly aware of people looking up at him. He was low enough so someone could take his number if they thought of it.

Go ahead! he thought grimly. Go ahead, take it, because when I finish with Cessna Corporation, every goddam stockholder they have is gonna be standing in his underwear! I'm going to sue those negligent sons of bitches for every banana-skin they've got!

The Hawk was rising smoothly now, its engine smooth and sweet. Bailey's head was trying to tear itself right off his shoulders, but an idea suddenly came to him -an idea of such stupefying simplicity and such staggering ramifications that everything else was driven from his mind. He understood nothing less than the physiological basis of bicamerality in the human brain. This led to an instant understanding of race memory, not as a hazy Jungian concept but as a function of recombinant DNA and biological imprinting. And with this came an understanding of what the increased millierg generating capacity of the corpus callosum during periods of increased ductless gland activity, which had puzzled students of the human brain for thirty years, actually meant.

Peter Bailey suddenly understood that time travel – actual time travel -was in his grasp.

At the same instant, a large portion of his own brain exploded.

White light flashed in his head – white light exactly like the huge reflection that had winked at him from that object in the woods.

If he had collapsed forward, pushing the wheel in, the people of Haven would have had another mess on their hands. But instead he fell backward, head lolling on his neck, blood running from his ears. He stared up at the ceiling of the pilot's compartment with an expression of stupendous, terminal surprise printed on his face.

If the Cessna's autopilot had been engaged, it would almost certainly have flown serenely on until it ran out of fuel. Weather conditions were optimum, and such things have happened before. As it was, it flew along almost dead level at 5,500 feet for five minutes anyway. The radio squawked at the dead neurosurgeon, telling him to get his ass up to his assigned altitude right now.

Over Derry a wind current threw the plane into a gentle bank. It flew in a long, looping arc toward Newport. The bank grew steeper, turned into a spiral. The spiral became a spin. A kid fishing off a bridge on Route 7 looked up and saw a plane falling out of the sky, and whirling like a screw-auger as it did. He stared, open-mouthed, as it crashed in Ezra Dockery's north field and exploded in a pillar of flame.

'Holy jeezum!' the kid yelled. He dropped his fishing-pole and ran for the Newport Mobil up the road to call the fire department. Shortly after he left, a bass snatched his worm and pulled his pole into the water. The kid never found the pole, but in the excitement of fighting the grassfire in Dockery's field and pulling the crispy pilot out of the remains of the Cessna, he barely noticed.

10

Saturday, August 6th:

Newt and Dick were sitting in the Haven Lunch. The newspaper was between them. The lead story was another outbreak of hostilities in the Mideast; the story that most concerned them that morning was below the fold. NEUROSURGEON KILLED IN LIGHT PLANE CRASH, the headline read. There was a photo of the plane. Nothing recognizable remained of the once beautiful Cessna Hawk except its tail.

Their breakfasts were pushed to one side, mostly untouched. Molly Fenderson, Beach's niece, was cooking now that Beach was dead. Molly was a helluva nice girl, but her fried eggs looked like broiled assholes. Dick thought they tasted that way, too, although he'd never actually eaten an asshole, broiled or any other way.

Might have, Newt said.

Dick looked at him, eyebrows raised.

They put damn near anything in hot dogs. Least, that's what I read once.

Dick's gut rolled over. He told Newt to shut his fucking gob.

Newt paused, then said: Must have been twenty, thirty people see that ijit come low acrost the village.

All from town? Dick asked.

Yes.

Then we have no problem, do we?

No, I don't think so, Newt replied, sipping coffee. At least, not unless it happens again.

Dick shook his head. Shouldn't do. Paper says he was off-course.

Yeah. So it said. You ready?

Sure.

They left without paying. Money had ceased to hold much interest to the residents of Haven. There were several large cardboard cartons of cash in Dick Allison's basement, carelessly tucked into the old coal-hold – twenties, tens, and ones, mostly. Haven was a small town. When someone needed cash for something, they came and got some. The house was unlocked. Besides telepathic typewriters and water heaters that ran on the power of collapsing molecules, Haven had discovered a nearly perfect form of collectivism.

On the sidewalk in front of the Lunch, they stared toward the town hall. The brick clock tower was flickering uneasily. One moment it was there, as solid as the Taj Mahal, if not so beautiful. The next, there was only blue sky above the jagged ruin of the tower's base. Then it would come back. Its long morning shadow fluttered like the shadow of a window-shade blown by an intermittent wind. Newt found the fact that sometimes the shadow of the clock tower was there when the tower itself was not particularly disturbing.

Christ! If I looked at that sucker too long, I'd go batshit, Dick said.

Newt asked if someone was taking care of the deterioration.

Tommy Jacklin and Hester Brookline have had to go up to Derry, Dick said. They're supposed to go to about five different service stations, plus both auto-parts stores. I sent damn near seven hundred bucks with them, told them to come back with as many as twenty car batteries, if they could. But they're supposed to spread the buy around. There's people in some of the towns around here that think folks have gone battery-crazy in Haven.

Tommy Jacklin and Hester Brookline? Newt asked dubiously. Christ,

they're just kids! Has Tommy got a driver's license, Dick? ‘

No, Dick said reluctantly. But he's fifteen and he's got a permit and he drives real safe. Besides, he's big. Looks older than he really is. They'll be okay.

Christ, it's so fucking risky!

It is, but

They communed in thoughts that were more images than words; this was happening more and more in Haven, as the people in town learned this strange new thought-language. For all of his misgivings, Newt understood the basic problem that had caused Dick to send a couple of underage kids to Derry in the Fannins' pickup truck. They needed batteries, needed them, but it was getting harder and harder for the people who lived in Haven to leave Haven. If a codger like Dave Rutledge or an old coot like John Harley tried it, they would be dead – and probably rotting – before they got to the Derry city line. It would take younger men like Newt and Dick a slightly longer time, but they would also go … and probably in agony, because of the physical changes that had begun in Bobbi's shed. It didn't surprise either man that Hilly Brown was in a coma, and he had left when things were just starting to really roll. Tommy Jacklin was fifteen, Hester Brookline a well-developed thirteen. They at least had youth on their side, and could hope to leave and come back alive without the equivalent of NASA spacesuits to protect them from what was now an alien and inimical atmosphere. Such equipment would have been out of the question even if they'd had it. They probably could have cobbled something together, but if a couple of folks showed up at the Napa auto-parts store in Derry wearing moonsuits, there might be a few questions. Or more than a few.

I don't like it, Newt said at last.

Hell, I don't either, Dick replied. I'm not going to have a minute's peace until they get back, and I've got ole Doc Warwick parked out by the HavenTroy line to take care of 'em just as soon as they do

I they do.

Ayuh … if. I think they will, but they'll be hurting.

What kind of problems do you expect?

Dick shook his head. He didn't know, and Doc Warwick refused to even guess … except to ask Dick in a cross mental voice what he, Dick, thought would happen to a salmon if it decided to ride a bike upstream to the spawning grounds instead of swimming.

Well … Newt said doubtfully.

Well, nothing, Dick returned. We can't leave that thing – he nodded toward the oscillating clock tower – the way it is.

Newt returned: We're almost down to the hatchway now. I think we could leave it.

Maybe. Maybe not. But we need batteries for other things, and you know it. And we need to keep being careful. You know that, too.

Don't teach your grammy to suck eggs, Dick.

(Fu)

Fuck that, asshole, was what Newt had been about to say, but he squashed it, although he found more to dislike about Dick Allison with every passing day. The truth was, Haven ran on batteries now, just like a kid's toy car from FAO Schwarz. And they kept needing more, and bigger ones, and mail-order was not only too slow, it was the sort of thing that might send up a warning flag to someone somewhere. You could never tell.

All in all, Newt Berringer was a troubled man. They had survived the plane crash; if something happened to Tommy and Hester, could they survive that?

He didn't know. He only knew he wouldn't have much peace until the kids were back in Haven, where they belonged.

11

Sunday, August 7th:

Gardener was at the ship, looking at it, trying to decide again – if any good could be turned from this weird mess … and if not, if there was any way out of it. He had heard the light plane two days before, although he had been in the house and had come out a moment too late to see it on its third pass. Three passes was just about two too many; he had been pretty sure the pilot had spotted the ship and the excavation. The thought had afforded Gardener a strange, bitter relief. Then, yesterday, he had seen the story in the paper. You didn't have to be a college graduate to see the connection. Poor old Dr Bailey had wandered off-course, and that leftover from the space armada of Ming the Merciless had stripped his gears.

Did that make him, Jim Gardener, an accessory to murder? It might, and, wifeshooter or not, Gard didn't care for the thought.

Freeman Moss, the dour woodsman from Albion, hadn't shown up this morning -Gard supposed the ship had blown his fuses as it had those of the others before him. Gard was alone for the first time since Bobbi had disappeared. On the surface, that seemed to open things up some. But when you looked deeper, the same old conundrums remained.

The story of the dead neurosurgeon and the crashed plane had been bad, but to Gard's mind, the story above the fold – the one Newt and Dick had ignored – was much worse. The Mideast was getting ready to explode again, and if there was shooting this time, some of it might be nuclear. The Union of Concerned Scientists, those happy folks who kept the Black Clock, had advanced the hands two minutes to nuclear midnight yesterday, the paper reported. Happy days were here again, all right. The ship could maybe pull the pin on all that … but was that what Freeman Moss and Kyle Archinbourg and old Bozie and all the rest of them wanted? Sometimes Gard felt a sickening surety that cooling out the powderkeg the planet was sitting on was the last thing which the New and Improved Haven was concerned with. And so?

He didn't know. Sometimes being a telepathic zero was a pain in the ass.

His eye moved to the pumping machinery squashed into the mud at the edge of the trench. Working at the ship had previously been a matter of dust and dirt and rocks and stumps that wouldn't come up until you were just about half-crazy with frustration. Now it was wet work – very wet work indeed. The last couple of nights he had gone home with wet clay in his hair, between his toes, and in the crack of his ass. Mud was bad, but clay was worse. Clay stuck.

The pumping equipment was the strangest, ugliest conglomeration yet, but it worked. It also weighed tons, but the mostly silent Freeman Moss had transported it from Bobbi's dooryard all by himself … it had taken him most of Thursday and about five hundred batteries to do it, but he had done it, something which would have taken an ordinary construction crew a week or more to accomplish.

Moss had used a gadget like a metal-detector to guide each component to its final resting-place – first off the truck, then through the garden, then out along the well-worn path to the dig. The components floated serenely through the warm summer air, their shadows pooled beneath them. Moss carried the thing which had once been a metal-detector in one hand, and something which looked like a walkie-talkie handset in the other. When he raised the curved stainless-steel antenna on the end of the walkie-talkie gadget and moved the dish at the end of the detector, the motor or pump would rise. When he moved them to the left, the piece of equipment went left. Gard, watching this with the bemusement of a veteran drunk (and surely no one sees as many strange things as one of those), thought that Moss looked like a scrofulous animal trainer leading mechanical elephants through the woods to the site of some unimaginable circus.

Gardener had seen the laborious moving of enough heavy equipment to know that this device could revolutionize construction techniques. Such things were outside his practical knowledge, but he guessed that a single gadget such as the one Moss had used on Thursday with such absent ease could cut the cost of a project the size of the Aswan Dam by twenty-five per cent or more.

In at least one respect, however, it was like the illusion being maintained at the town hall – it required a lot of juice.

'Here,' Moss said, handing Gard a heavy packsack. 'Put this on.'

Gard winced shouldering the straps. Moss saw it and smiled a little. 'It'll

get lighter as the day goes along,' he said. 'Don't you worry about that.' He plugged the jack of a transistor earphone into the side of the radio-controller and pushed the phone into his ear.

'What's in the pack?' Gardener asked.

'Batt'ries. Let's go.'

Moss had switched the gadget on, seemed to listen, nodded, then pointed the curved antenna at the first motor. It rose in the air an hung there. Holding the controller in one hand and the customized metal-detector in the other, Moss walked toward the motor. For every step he took, the motor retreated a similar distance. Gard brought up the rear.

Moss walked the motor between the house and the shed, urging it around the Tomcat, and then ahead of him through Bobbi's garden. A wide path had been worn through this, but on both sides of it the plants continued to grow in rampant splendor. Some of the sunflowers were now twelve feet high. They reminded Gardener of a science-fiction novel called The Day of the Triffids he had read as a boy. One night about a week ago he had awakened from a terrible nightmare. In it, the sunflowers in the garden had uprooted themselves and begun to walk, eldritch light shining from their centers and onto the ground like the beams of flashlights with green lenses.

There were summer squashes in the garden as big as U-boat torpedoes. Tomatoes the size of basketballs. Some of the corn was nearly as high as the sunflowers. Curious, Gardener had picked one of the ears; it was easily two feet long. A single ear, had it been good, would have fed two hungry men. But Gard had spat out the single mouthful of butter-and-sugar kernels he had bitten off, grimacing and wiping his mouth. The taste had been meaty and hideous. Bobbi was growing a garden full of huge plants, but the vegetables were inedible … perhaps even poisonous.

The motor had cruised serenely ahead of them along the path, cornstalks rustling and bending on either side as it pushed its way through. Gardener saw smears and swatches of grease and engine oil on some of the militantly green, swordlike leaves. On the far side of the garden, the motor began to sag. Moss had lowered the antenna, and the motor settled to the earth with a gentle thump.

'What's up?' Gardener had asked.

Moss only grunted and produced a dime. He stuck it in the base of his controller, twisted it, and pulled six double-A Duracells out of the battery compartment. Tossed them indifferently on the ground. 'Gimme some more,' he said.

Gardener unshouldered the knapsack, undid the straps, opened the flap, and saw what looked at first glance like a billion double-A's; it was as if someone had hit the Grand Jackpot at Atlantic City and the machine had paid off in batteries instead of bucks.

'Jesus!'

'I ain't Him,' Moss said. 'Gimme half a dozen of those suckers.'

For once Gardener didn't seem to have a wisecrack left in him. He handed six batteries over and watched Moss fit them into the compartment. Then Moss replaced the battery hatch, turned it on, refitted the earplug in his ear, and said, 'Let's go.'

Forty yards into the woods there was another battery change; sixty yards after that, another. Floating the motor sucked less juice when it was going downhill, but by the time Moss had finally settled the big motor-block on the edge of the trench, they had gone through forty-two batteries.

Back and forth, back and forth; one by one they brought the pieces of pumping machinery from Freeman Moss's truck to the edge of the trench. The knapsack on Gardener's back grew steadily lighter.

On the fourth trip, Gard had asked Moss if he could try it. A large industrial pump, whose raison d'etre before this odd little side-trip had probably been pumping sewage from clogged septic tanks, was sitting on a tilted angle about a hundred yards from the trench. Moss was once more changing batteries. Dead double-A's lay all along the path now, reminding Gard with odd poignance of the kid on the beach at Arcadia Beach. The kid with the firecrackers. The kid whose mother had given up drinking … and everything else. The kid who had known about the Tommyknockers.

'Well, you can give her a try.' Moss handed over the gadget. 'I could use a smidge of help, and I don't mind sayin' so. Wears a man out, liftin' all that.' He saw Gardener's look and said: 'Oh, ayuh, I'm doin' part of it m'self; that's what the plug's for. You can try it, but I don't think you'll have much luck. You ain't like us.'

'I noticed. I'm the one that isn't going to have to buy a set of teeth from Sears and Roebuck when all this is over.'

Moss looked at him sourly and said nothing.

Gard used his handkerchief to wipe off the brown coating of wax Moss had left on the earplug, then stuck it in his ear. He heard a distant sound like the one you heard when you held a conch shell to your ear. He pointed the antenna at the pump as he had seen Moss do, then cautiously flickered the antenna upward. The quality of the dim seashore rumble in his ear changed. The pump moved the tiniest bit – he was sure it wasn't just his imagination. But a instant later, two other things happened. He felt warm blood coursing down his face from his nose, and his head was filled with a blaring voice. I CARPET YOUR DEN OR YOUR WHOLE HOME FOR LESS!' screamed some radio announcer, who was suddenly sitting right in the middle of Gardener's head and apparently yelling into an electric bullhorn. 'AND YES WE DO HAVE A NEW SHIPMENT OF THROW-RUGS! THE LAST SHIPMENT SOLD OUT FAST, SO BE SURE -'

'Oww, Jesus, shut up!' Gardener had cried. He dropped the handset and reached for his head. The earphone was dragged out of his ear, and the blaring announcer cut out. He had been left with a nosebleed and a head that was ringing like a bell.

Freeman Moss, startled out of his taciturnity, stared at Gardener with wide eyes. 'What in Christ's name was that?' he asked.

'That,' Gardener said weakly, 'was WZON, Where It's Only Rock and Roll

Because That's the Way You Like lt. You mind if I sit down for a minute, Moss? Think I just pissed myself.'

'Your nose is bleedin', too.'

'No shit, Sherlock,' Gardener said.

'Think maybe you better let me use the lifter after this.' Gard had been more than happy to abide by that. It took them the rest of the day to get all the equipment out to the trench, and Moss was so tired when the last piece arrived that Gardener had to practically carry the man back to his truck.

'Feel like I just chopped two cord of wood and shit m'brains out while I was doin' it,' the older man gasped.

After that, Gardener hadn't really expected the man to come back. But Moss had shown up promptly at seven the next day. He had been driving a beat-up split-grille Pontiac instead of his truck. He got out of the Pontiac banging a dinner bucket against his leg.

'Come on. Let's get to it.'

Gardener respected Moss more than the other three 'helpers' put together … in fact, he liked him.

Moss glanced at him as they walked out to the ship with the morning dew of that Friday morning wetting down the cuffs of their pants. 'Caught that one,' he grunted. 'You're okay too, I guess.'

That was about all Mr Freeman Moss had to say to him that day.

They sunk a nest of hoses into the trench and rigged more hoses – outflow hoses, this time – to direct the water they pumped out downhill, on a slope that ran a bit southeast of Bobbi's place. These 'dumper hoses,' as Moss called them, were big, wide-bore rolls of canvas that Gardener supposed had been scavenged from the VFD.

'Ayuh, got a few there, got a few other places,' Moss said, and would offer no more on that subject.

Before starting the pumps, he had Gardener pound a number of U-shaped clamps over the dumper hoses. 'Else they'll go whippin' around, sprayin' water everywhere. If you've ever seen a fireman's hose outta control, you know someone c'n get hurt. And we ain't got enough men to stand around holdin' a bunch of pissin' hoses all day.'

'Not that there'd be any volunteers standing in line. Right?'

Freeman Moss had looked at him silently, saying nothing for a moment. Then he grunted: 'Pound those clamps in good. We'll still have to stop pretty often to pound 'em back in. They'll loosen up.'

'Can't you control the outflow so you don't have to bother with all this clamping shit?' Gardener asked.

Moss rolled his eyes impatiently at his ignorance. 'Sure,' he said, 'but there's one fuck of a lot of water down in that hole, and I'd like to get it out before doomsday, if it's all the same to you.'

Gardener held out his hands, half-laughing. 'Hey, I was just asking,' he said. 'Peace.'

The man had only grunted in his inimitable Freeman Moss style.

By nine-thirty, water was pouring downhill and away from the ship at a great rate. It was cold and clear and as sweet as water can be – which is sweet indeed, as anyone with a good well could attest. By noon they had created a brand-new stream. It was six feet wide, shallow, but brawling right along, carrying pine needles, loamy black topsoil, and small shrubs away. There was not much for the men to do but to sit around and make sure none of the plump, straining dumper hoses came free and started to fly around, spraying water like bombed-out fire hydrants. Moss shut the pumps down regularly, in sequence, so that they could pound in loose clamps or switch them to a new place along the hose if the ground was getting loose where they had been.

By three o'clock, the stream was rolling larger bushes downstream, and just before five o'clock, Gardener heard the rending rumble of a biggish tree going over. He got up and craned his neck, but it had happened too far down the new stream's course to see.

'Sounded like a pine,' Moss said.

It was Gardener's turn to look at Moss and say nothing.

'Might have been a spruce,' Moss said, and although the man's face remained perfectly straight, Gardener believed Moss might just have made a joke. A very small one, but a joke, just the same.

'Is this water reaching the road, do you think?'

'Oh, ayuh, I sh'd suspect.'

'It'll wash it out, won't it?'

'Nope. Town crew's already putting in a new culve't. Large bore. S'pose they'll have to detour traffic for a couple of days while they tear up the tarvy, but there ain't's much traffic out this way as there used to be, anyway.'

'I noticed,' Gardener said.

'Damn good thing, if you ask me. Summer people're always a pain in the ass. Looka here, Gardener – I'm gonna cut the outflow on these pumps way down, but they'll still pump fifteen, maybe seventeen gallons a minute overnight. With four pumps workin', that's thirty-eight hundred gallons an hour, all night long. Not bad for runnin' on automatic. Come on, let's go. Yon ship's lovely, but it makes my blood pressure jumpy. I'll drink one of your beers before I head home to the missus, if you'll let it be so.'

Moss had shown up again yesterday, Saturday, in his old Pontiac, and had promptly run the pumps up to capacity – thirty-five gallons per minute each, eighty-four hundred gallons an hour.

This morning, no Freeman Moss. He had finally played out like the others, leaving Gardener to consider the same old options.

First option: Business as usual.

Second option: Run like hell. He had already come to the conclusion that if Bobbi died, he would suffer a fatal accident soon afterward. It might take as long as half an hour for him to have it. If he decided to run, would they know in advance? Gardener didn't think so. He and the rest of Haven still played poker the old-fashioned way: with all the cards dealt face down. Oh, and by the way, gang – how far would he have to run to get out of the reach of them and their Buck Rogers gadgetry?

Actually, Gard didn't think it would be all that far. Derry, Bangor, even Augusta … all those might be too close. But Portland? Maybe. Probably. Because of what he thought of as the Cigarette Analogy.

When a kid started to smoke, he was lucky if he could get through half a butt without puking his guts out or almost fainting. After six months' experience, he might be able to get through five or ten butts a day. Give a kid three years and you had yourself a two-and-a-half-pack-a-day candidate for lung cancer.

Then turn it over. Tell a kid who has just finished his first butt and who is wandering around green-faced and gagging that he has to quit smoking, and he'll probably fall down and kiss your ass. Catch him when he's doing five or ten smokes a day and you've got a kid who probably doesn't care much one way or another … although a kid habituated even at that level may find himself eating too many sweets, and wishing for a smoke when he's bored or nervous.

Ah, Gardener thought, but take your smoking vet. Tell him he's got to quit the coffin-nails and he clutches his chest like a man who's having a heart attack … only he's just protecting the smokes in the breast pocket of his shirt. Smoking, Gardener knew from his own mostly successful efforts to either quit the habit or at least damp it down to a less lethal vice, is a physical addiction. In the first week off cigarettes, smokers suffer from jitters, headaches, musclespasms. Doctors may prescribe B-12 to quiet the worst of these symptoms. They know, however, that there are no pills to combat the ex-smoker's feelings of loss and depression during the six months which begin the instant the smoker crushes out his last butt and starts his or her lonely voyage out of addiction.

And Haven, Gardener thought now, running the pumps up to full power, is like a smoke-filled room. They were sick here at first … they were like a bunch of kids learning to smoke cornshucks out behind the barn. But now they like the air in the room, and why not? They're the ultimate chainsmokers. It's in the air they breathe, and God knows what kinds of physiological changes are going on in their brains and bodies. Lung sections show formation of oat cells in the lung tissue of people who have only been smoking for eighteen months. There's a high incidence of brain tumors in towns where there are high-pollution milling operations or, God save us, nuclear reactors. So what is this doing to them?

He didn't know – he had seen no surface, observable changes except for the loss of teeth and the increased shortness of temper. But he didn't think they'd chase him very far if he split. They might begin by lighting out after him with the fervor of a posse in a Republic western, but he somehow thought they would lose interest very quickly . . . as soon as the withdrawal symptoms set in.

He got all four pumps running at top speed, swelling the creek into a wide stream almost at once. Then he began the day's work of checking the U-clamps which held the hoses still.

If he got away, his choices were two: keep his mouth shut or blow the whistle. He knew that, for a variety of reasons, he would probably keep quiet. Which meant simply dealing himself – writing off the last month of back-breaking labor, writing off any chance to change the suicidal course of world politics at a stroke, most of all writing off his good friend and erstwhile lover Bobbi Anderson, who had been in absentia for the best part of two weeks now.

Third option: Get rid of it. Blow it up. Destroy it. Make it no more than another vague rumor, like the supposed aliens in Hangar 18.

In spite of his dull fury at the insanity of nuclear power and the energyswilling technocratic pigs who had created it and underwritten it and refused to see its dangers even in the wake of Chernobyl, in spite of his depression at the AP wirephoto of the scientists advancing the Black Clock to two minutes before midnight, he fully recognized the possibility that destroying the ship might be the best thing he could possibly do. The oxidation of whatever had been impregnated in the surface of its hull (deliberately, he had no doubt) had created a cornucopia of mind-blowing gadgets out here; God alone knew what wonderful things might be waiting inside. But there was the other stuff, wasn't there? The neurosurgeon in the crashed plane, that old man and the big state cop, maybe the lady constable, Mrs McCausland, maybe the two other state cops who had disappeared, maybe even the Brown kid … how much of this could be laid at the door of this thing he was staring at, which was jutting out of the ground like the breeching snout of the greatest white whale ever dreamed of? Some? All? None of the above?

Gardener was sure of one thing – it wasn't the last.

That the ship in the earth was a font of creation was undeniable … but it was also the wrecked craft of an unknowable species from somewhere far out in the blackness – creatures whose minds might be as different from those of human beings as human minds were from the minds of spiders. It was a marvelous, improbable artifact shining in the hazy sunlight of this Sunday morning … but it was also a haunted house where demons might still walk between the walls and in the hollow places. There were times when he would look at it and feel his throat fill up with strangeness, as at the sight of flat eyes staring up at him from the earth.

But get rid of it how? Blow it up how? Even supposing he wanted to, how would he do it? The packet charges they had used to chop up the bedrock holding the ship fast were more powerful than dynamite, but they didn't even scratch the hull of the thing. Was he supposed to trot off to Limestone Air Force Base, steal an A-bomb, moving with the silky, unbelievable smoothness of Dirk Pitt in a Clive Cussler novel? And wouldn't it be funny, wouldn't it really be the last laugh, if he actually did manage to get a nuke and set it off, only to discover that all he'd really managed to do was to set the ship, still uncannily unharmed and unscratched, free at a stroke?

Those were his options, the third of which was not an option at all … and apparently his hands had known more than his brain, for while he went on turning them over in his mind for the umptieth time, he had gone calmly about the morning's work – driving the pumps up to full blast and making sure that the dumper hoses were solidly planted. Now he was back at the trench, checking the sucker hoses, and the level of the water. He was happy to find he needed a powerful flashlight to see the water – it was falling rapidly. He guessed that blasting and excavation could begin again by Wednesday, Thursday at the latest … and once they got going again, the work would go fast. The rock of an aquifer was spongy and large-pored. They wouldn't need to waste time digging glory-holes for explosives, because there would be enough natural spots for not just exploding radios but satchel charges. The next phase would be like moving from a dense, gluey batter to a freshly risen dough.

Gard stood bent over the cut in the earth for some time, shining the big light into the black depths. Then he clicked it off, meaning to inspect the clamps again. Here it was, only eight-thirty in the morning, and already he wanted a drink.

He turned around.

Bobbi was standing there.

Gardener's mouth dropped open. He closed it with a snap after a moment of gaping and started toward her, fully expecting this hallucination to grow transparent, then be gone. But Bobbi stayed solid, and Gard saw that she had lost a great deal of hair – her brow, a pale and shining white, extended back nearly to the middle of her skull, leaving the world's biggest widow's peak in the center. Nor were these newly exposed sections of skull the only pale things about her; she looked like someone who had been through a terrible debilitating illness. Her right arm was in a sling. And

– and she's wearing makeup. Pan-Cake makeup. I'm pretty sure that's what it is she's laid it on heavy the way a lady does when she wants to cover up a bruise. But it's her … Bobbi . . . no dream …

His eyes suddenly filled with tears. Bobbi doubled, then trebled. It wasn't until then – that moment – that he realized just how scared he had been. And how lonely.

'Bobbi?' he asked hoarsely. 'Is it really you?'

Bobbi smiled, that old sweet smile he loved so well, the one that had saved him from his own idiot self so often. It was Bobbi. It was Bobbi and he loved her.

He went to her, put his arms around her, laid his tired face against her neck. He had done this before, too.

'Hello, Gard,' she said, and began to cry.

He was crying too. He kissed her. Kissed her. Kissed her.

His hands were suddenly all over her; her free one was on him.

No, he said, still kissing her. No, you can't

Shh. I have to. It's my last chance, Gard. Our last chance.

Kissed. They kissed. Oh they kissed and now her shirt was unbuttoned and this was not the body of a sex-goddess, it was white and sickish, the muscles flabby, the breasts saggy, but he loved it and he kissed her and kissed her and their tears were all over each other's faces.

Gard my dear, my dear, always my

shhhh

Oh please I love you

Bobbi I love

love

kiss me

kiss

yes

Pine needles under them. Sweetness. Her tears. His tears. They kissed, kissed, kissed. And as he entered her, Gard realized two things at once: how much he had missed her, and that not a single bird was singing. The woods were dead.

Kissed.

12

Gard used his shirt, which wasn't very clean anyway, to wipe swatches of brown makeup from his naked body. Had she come out here expecting to make love to him? Something it might be just as well not to think about. Now, anyway.

Although they both should have been Thanksgiving dinner for the mosquitoes and noseeums and moose-flies, spouting sweat as they had been doing, he hadn't a single bite. He didn't think Bobbi had any, either. It's not only an IQ booster, he thought, looking at the ship, it's got every insect repellent on the market beat hollow.

He tossed his shirt aside and touched Bobbi's face, running a finger down her cheek, picking up a little more of the makeup. Most of it, however, had either been sweated off … or washed away by her tears.

'I hurt you,' he said.

You loved me, she answered.

'What?'

You hear me, Gard. I know you do.

'Are you angry?' he asked, aware that the barriers were going up again, aware that he was acting again, aware that it was over, all the things they'd had were finally over. These were sorry things to be aware of. 'Is that why you won't talk to me?' He paused. 'I wouldn't blame you. You've put up with a lot of shit from me over the years, woman.'

'I was talking to you,' she said, and, sorry as he was to be lying to her after loving her, he was glad to sense her doubt. 'With my mind.'

'I didn't hear.'

'You did before. You heard … and you answered. We talked, Gard.'

We were closer to … that.' He flagged an arm at the ship.

She smiled wanly up at him and put her cheek against his shoulder. With most of the makeup scrubbed away, her flesh had an unsettling translucence even her illness, whatever it had been, could not account for.

'Did I? Hurt you?'

'No. Yes. A little.' She smiled. It was that old Bobbi Anderson go-to-hell grin, but a final tear ran slowly down her cheek nonetheless. 'It was worth it. We saved the best for last, Gard.'

He kissed her gently, but now her lips were different. The lips of the New and Improved Roberta Anderson.

'First, last, or in the middle, I didn't have any business making love to you, and you don't have any business out here.'

'I look tired, I know,' Bobbi said, 'and I'm wearing a lot of goop, as you already found out. You were right – I let myself get overtired and I had something like a complete physical breakdown.'

Bullshit, Gardener thought, but he covered this thought with white noise so Bobbi couldn't read it – he did this with barely a conscious thought. Such hiding was becoming second nature to him now.

'The treatment was … radical. It's resulted in some superficial skin problems and some hair loss. But it'll all grow back.'

'Oh,' Gardener said, thinking: You still can't lie for shit, Bobbi. 'Well, I'm glad you're all right. But you maybe ought to take a couple of days off, put your feet up -'

'No,' Bobbi said quietly. 'This is the time for the final push, Gard. We're almost there. We started this, you and me – '

'No,' Gardener said. 'You started it, Bobbi. You literally stumbled over it. Back when Peter was alive. Remember?'

Gard saw pain in Bobbi's eyes at the mention of Peter. Then it was gone. She shrugged Gardener's qualification off. 'You were here soon enough. You saved my life. I wouldn't be here without you. So let's do it together, Gard. I bet it's no more than another twenty-five feet down to that hatchway.'

Gardener had a strong hunch she was right, but he suddenly didn't feel like admitting it. There was a spike turning and turning in his heart, and the pain was worse than any hangover headache he'd ever had.

'If you think so, I'll take your word for it.'

'What do you say, Gard? One more mile. You and me.'

He sat thoughtfully, looking at Bobbi, noticing again how still, how almost malignant the woods seemed with no birdsong in them.

This is how it would be – this is how it will be – if one of their asshole power plants ever does melt down. The people will have smarts enough to get out – if they're warned in time, that is, and if the power plant in question and the NRC have balls enough to tell them – but you can't tell an owl or woodpecker to clear the area. You can't tell a scarlet tanager not to look at the fireball. So their eyes will melt and they'll just go flapping around, blind as bats, running into trees and the sides of buildings until they starve to death or break their necks. Is this a spaceship, Bobbi? Or is it a great big containment housing that's already leaking? It has, hasn't it? That's why these woods are so quiet, and that's why the Polyester-Clad Neurologist Bird fell out of the sky on Friday, isn't it?

'What do you say, Gard? One more mile?'

So where's the good solution? Where's peace with honor? Do you run? Do you turn it over to the American Dallas Police so they can use it on the Soviet Dallas Police? What? Any new ideas, Gard?

And suddenly he did have an idea … or the glimmer of one.

But a glimmer was better than nothing.

He hugged Bobbi with a lying arm. 'Okay. One more mile.'

Bobbi's grin started to widen … and then it became a look of curious surprise. 'How much did he leave you, Gard?'

'How much did who leave me?'

'The Tooth Fairy,' Bobbi said. 'You finally lost one. Right there in the front.'

Startled and a little afraid, Gard raised his hand to his mouth. Sure enough, there was a gap where one of his incisors had been yesterday.

It had started, then. After a month working in the shadow of this thing., he had foolishly assumed immunity, but it wasn't so. It had started; he was on his way to becoming New and Improved.

On his way to 'becoming.'

He forced an answering smile. 'I hadn't noticed,' he said.

'Do you feel any different?'

'No,' Gard said truthfully. 'Not yet, anyway. What do you say, you want to do some work?'

'I'll do what I can,' Bobbi said. 'With this arm

'You can check the hoses and tell me if any of them are starting to come loose. And talk to me.' He looked at Bobbi with an awkward smile. 'None of those other guys knew how to talk, man. I mean, they were sincere, but . . .' He shrugged. 'You know?'

Bobbi smiled back, and Gardener saw another brilliant, unalloyed flash of the old Bobbi, the woman he had loved. He remembered the safe dark harbor of her neck and that screw in his heart turned again. 'I think I do,' she said, 'and I'll talk your ear off, if that's what you want. I've been lonely, too.'

They stood together, smiling at each other, and it was almost the old way, but the woods were silent with no birdsong to fill them up.

The love's over, he thought. Now it's the same old poker game, except the Tooth Fairy came last night and I guess the bastard will be back tonight. Probably along with his cousin and his brother-in-law. And when they start seeing my cards, maybe exposing that glimmer of an idea like an ace in the hole, it'll be all over. In a way, it's funny. We always assumed the aliens would have to at least be alive to invade. Not even H. G. Wells expected an invasion of ghosts.

'I want to have a look into the trench,' Bobbi said.

'Okay. You'll like the way it's draining, I think.'

Together they walked into the shadow cast by the ship.

13

Monday, August 8th:

The heat was back.

The temperature outside of Newt Berringer's kitchen window was seventynine at a quarter past seven that Monday morning, but Newt wasn't in the kitchen to read it; he was standing in the bathroom in his pajama bottoms, inexpertly applying his late wife's makeup to his face and cursing the way the sweat made the Pan-Cake clump up. He had always thought makeup a lot of harmless ladies' foofraw, but now, trying to use it according to its original purpose – not to accent the good but to conceal the bad (or, at least, the startling) – he was discovering that putting on makeup was like giving someone a haircut. It was a fuck of a lot harder than it looked.

He was trying to cover up the fact that, over the last week or so, the skin of his cheeks and forehead had begun to fade. He knew, of course, that it had something to do with the trips he and the others had made into Bobbi's shed – trips he could not remember afterwards; only that they had been frightening but even more exhilarating, and that he had come out all three times feeling ten feet tall and ready to have sex in the mud with a platoon of lady wrestlers. He knew enough to associate what was happening with the shed, but at first he had thought it was simply a matter of losing his usual summer tan. In the years before an icy winter afternoon and a skidding bread truck had taken her, his wife Elinor liked to joke that all you needed to do was to put Newt under one ray of sun after the first of May and he turned as brown as an Indian.

By last Friday afternoon, however, he was no longer able to fool himself about what was going on. He could see the veins, arteries, and capillaries in his cheeks, exactly as you could see them in that model he'd gotten his nephew Michael two Christmases ago – The Amazing Visible Man, it was called. It was damned unsettling. It wasn't just being able to see into himself, either; when he pressed his fingers against his cheeks, the cheekbones felt definitely squashy. It was as if they were … well . . . dissolving.

I can't go out like this, he thought. Jesus, no.

But on Saturday, when he had looked in the mirror and realized after some thought and a lot of squinting that the gray shadow he was seeing through the side of his face was his own tongue, he had almost flown over to Dick Allison's.

Dick answered the door looking so normal that for a few terrible moments Newt believed this was happening to him and him alone. Then Dick's firm, clear thought filled his head, making him weak with relief: Christ, you can't go around looking like that, Newt. You'll scare people. Come in here. I'm going to call Haze].

(The phone, of course, was really not necessary, but old habits died hard.)

In Dick's kitchen, under the fluorescent ring in the ceiling, Newt had seen clearly enough that Dick was wearing makeup – Hazel, Dick said, had shown him how to put it on. Yes, it had happened to all the others except Adley, who had gone into the shed for the first time only two weeks ago.

Where does it all end, Dick? Newt had asked uneasily. The mirror in Dick's hallway drew him like a magnet and he stared at himself, seeing his tongue behind and through his pallid lips, seeing a tangled undergrowth of small, pulsing capillaries in his forehead. He pressed the tips of his fingers against the shelf of bone over his eyebrows, hard, and saw faint finger indentations when he took them away again – they were like fingermarks in hard wax, right down to the discernible loops and sworls of his fingerprints sunk into the livid skin. Looking at that had made him feel sick.

I don't know, Dick had answered. He was talking on the phone with Hazel at the same time. But it doesn't really matter. It's going to happen to everyone eventually. Like everything else. You know what I mean.

He knew, all right. The first changes, Newt thought, looking into the mirror on this hot Monday morning, had in many ways been even worse, even more shocking, because they had been so … well, intimate.

But he had gone a ways toward getting used to it, which only went to show, he supposed, that a person could get used to anything, given world enough and time.

Now he stood by the mirror, dimly hearing the deejay on the radio informing his listening audience that an influx of hot southern air coming into the area meant they could look forward to at least three days and maybe a week of muggy weather and temps in the upper eighties and low nineties. Newt cursed the coming humid weather – it would make his hemorrhoids itch and burn, it always did – and went on trying to cover his increasingly transparent cheeks, forehead, nose and neck with Elinor's Max Factor Pan-Cake. He finished cursing the weather and went fluently on to the makeup with never a break

in his monologue, having no idea that makeup grew old and cakey after a long enough period of time (and this particular lot had been in the back of a bathroom drawer since long before Elinor's death in February 1984).

But he supposed he would get used to putting the crap on … until such time as it was no longer necessary, anyhow. A person could get used to damn near anything. A tentacle, white at its tip, then shading to rose and finally to a dark blood-red as it thickened toward its unseen base, fell out through the fly of his pajama bottoms. Almost as if to prove his thesis, Newt Berringer only tucked it absently back in and went on trying to get his dead wife's makeup to spread evenly on his disappearing face.

14

Tuesday, August 9th:

Old Doc Warwick slowly pulled the sheet up over Tommy Jacklin and let it drop. It billowed slightly, then settled. The shape of Tommy's nose was clearly defined. He'd been a handsome kid, but he'd had a big nose, just like his dad.

His dad, Bobbi Anderson thought sickly. Someone's going to have to tell his dad, and guess who's going to be elected? Such things shouldn't bother her anymore, she knew – things like the Jacklin boy's death, things like knowing she would have to get rid of Gard when they reached the ship's hatchway – but they sometimes still did.

She supposed that would burn away in time.

A few more trips to the shed. That was all it would take.

She brushed aimlessly at her shirt and sneezed.

Except for the sound of the sneeze and the stertorous breathing of Hester Brookline in the other bed of the makeshift little clinic the doc had set up in his sitting-cum-examination room, there was only shocked silence for a moment.

Kyle: He's really dead?

No, I just like to cover 'em up that way sometimes for a joke, Warwick said crossly. Shit, man! I knew he was going at four o'clock. That's why I called you all here. After all, you're the town fathers now, ain't you?

His eyes fixed for a moment on Hazel and Bobbi.

Excuse me. And two town mothers.

Bobbi smiled with no humor. Soon there was going to be only one sex in Haven. No mothers; no fathers. Just another Burma-Shave sign, you might say, on the Great Road of 'Becoming.'

She looked from Kyle to Dick to Newt to Hazel and saw that the others looked as shocked as she felt. Thank God she was not alone, then. Tommy and Hester had gotten back all right – ahead of schedule, actually, because when Tommy started to feel really ill only three hours after they had driven out of the Haven-Troy area, he had begun to push it, moving as fast as he could.

The damn kid was really a hero, Bobbi thought. I guess the best we can do for him is a plot in Homeland, but he was still a hero.

She looked toward where Hester lay, pallid as a wax cameo, breathing dryly, eyes closed. They could have – maybe should have – come back when they felt the headaches coming on, when their gums began to bleed, but they hadn't even discussed it. And it wasn't only their gums. Hester, who had been menstruating lightly all during the 'becoming' (unlike older women, teenage girls didn't ever seem to stop … or hadn't yet, anyway), made Tommy stop at the Troy General Store so she could buy heavier sanitary napkins. She had begun to flow copiously. By the time they had bought three car batteries and a good used truck battery in the NewportDerry Town Line Auto Supply on Route 7, she had soaked four Stayfree Maxi-pads.

Their heads began to ache, Tommy's worse than Hester's. By the time they had gotten half a dozen Allstate batteries at the Sears store and well over a hundred C, D, and double– and triple-A cells at the Derry Tru-Value Hardware

(which had just gotten a new shipment in), they both knew they had to get back … quick. Tommy had begun to hallucinate; as he drove up Wentworth Street, he thought he saw a clown grinning up at him from an open sewer manhole – a clown with shiny silver dollars for eyes and a clenched white glove filled with balloons.

Eight miles or so out of Derry, headed back toward Haven on Route 9, Tommy's rectum began to bleed.

He pulled over, and, face flaming with embarrassment, asked Hester if he could have some of her pads. He was able to explain why when she asked, but not to look at her while he did so. She gave him a handful and he went into the bushes for a minute. He came back to the car weaving like a drunk, one hand outstretched.

'You got to drive, Hester,' he said. 'I'm not seeing so hot.'

By the time they got back to the town line, the front seat of the car was splashed with gore and Tommy was unconscious. By then Hester herself was able to see only through a dark curtain; she knew it was four of a bright summer's afternoon, but Doc Warwick seemed to come to her out of a thundery purple twilight. She knew he was opening the door, touching her hands, saying It's all right, my darling, you are back, you can let go of the wheel now, you are back in Haven. She was able to give a more or less coherent account of their afternoon as she lay in the protective circle of Hazel McCready's arms, but she had joined Tommy in unconsciousness long before they got to the doc's, even though Doc was doing an unheard-of sixty-five, his white hair flying in the wind.

Adley McKeen whispered: What about the girl?

Well, her blood pressure's dropping, Warwick said. The bleeding's stopped. She is young and tough. Good country stock. I knew her parents and her grandparents. She'll pull through. He looked around at them grimly, his watery old blue eyes not deceived by their makeup, which in this light made them look like half a dozen ghastly suntanned clowns.

But I don't think she'll ever regain her sight.

There was a numb silence. Bobbi broke it:

That's not so.

Doc Warwick turned to look at her.

She'll see again, Bobbi said. When the 'becoming' is finished, she'll see. We'll all see with one eye then.

Warwick met her gaze for a moment, and then his own eyes dropped. Yes, he said. I guess. But it's a damned shame, anyway.

Bobbi agreed without heat. Bad for her. Worse for Tommy. No bed of roses for their folks. I have to go and see them. I could use company.

She looked at them, but their eyes dropped away from hers a pair at a time and their thoughts dulled into a smooth hum.

All right, Bobbi said, I'll manage. I guess.

Adley McKeen spoke up humbly. I guess I'll come with you if you want, Bobbi. Keep you company.

Bobbi gave him a tired yet somehow brilliant smile and squeezed his shoulder. Thank you, Ad. For the second time, thank you.

The two of them went out. The others watched them, and when they heard Bobbi's truck start, they turned toward where Hester Brookline lay unconscious, hooked up to a sophisticated life-support machine whose component parts had come from two radios, a turntable record-changer, the auto-tuning device from Doc's new Sony TV …

… and, of course, lots of batteries.

15

Wednesday, August 10th:

In spite of his tiredness, his confusion, his inability to stop playing Hamlet, and -worst of all – the persistent feeling that things in Haven were going wronger all the time, Jim Gardener had managed the booze pretty well since the day Bobbi had come back and they had lain together on the fragrant pine needles. Part of the reason was pure self-interest. Too many bloody noses, too many headaches. Some of this was undoubtedly the influence of the ship, he thought – he hadn't forgotten that he'd had one after Bobbi had repeatedly urged him to touch her find, and he had seized the leading edge of the ship and felt that rapid, numbing vibration – but he was wise enough to know that his steady drinking was doing its part, as well. There had been no blackouts per se, but there had been days when his nose had bled three and four times. He had always tended toward hypertension, and he had been told more than once that steady drinking could worsen what was a borderline condition.

So he was doing fairly well until he heard Bobbi sneezing.

That sound, so terribly familiar, called up a set of memories and a sudden terrible idea exploded in his mind like a bomb.

He went into the kitchen, opened the hamper and looked at a dress – the one she'd been wearing yesterday evening. Bobbi did not see this inspection; she was asleep. She had sneezed in her sleep.

Bobbi had gone out the previous evening with no explanation – she had seemed nervous and upset to Gardener, and although both of them had worked hard all day, Bobbi had eaten almost no supper. Then, near sundown, she had bathed, changed into the dress, and driven off into the hot, still, muggy evening. Gardener had heard her come back around midnight, had seen the brilliant flare of light as Bobbi went into the shed. He thought she came back in around first light, but wasn't sure.

All day today she had been morose, speaking only when spoken to, and then only in monosyllables. Gardener's clumsy efforts to cheer her up met with no success. Bobbi skipped supper again tonight, and just shook her head when Gardener suggested a few cribbage hands on the porch, just like in the old days.

Bobbi's eyes, looking out of that weird coating of flesh-colored makeup, had looked somber and wet. Even as Gardener noticed this, Bobbi yanked a handful of Kleenex from the table behind her and sneezed into them two or three times, rapidly.

'Summer cold, I guess. I'm just going to hit the rack, Gard. I'm sorry to be such a party-pooper, but I'm whipped.'

'Okay,' Gard said.

Something – some remembered familiarity – had been gnawing at him, and now he stood here with her dress in his hands, a light sleeveless summer cotton. In the old days it would have been washed this morning, hung on the line out back to dry, ironed after supper, and popped neatly back in the closet again long before bed. But these weren't the old days, these were the New and Improved Days, and they washed clothes only when they absolutely had to; after all, there were more important things to do, weren't there?

As if to confirm his idea, Bobbi sneezed twice, in her sleep.

'No,' Gard whispered. 'Please.' He dropped the dress back into the hamper, no longer wanting to touch it. He slammed the lid and then stood stiffly, waiting to see if the sound would wake Bobbi.

She took the truck. Went to do something she didn't want to do. Something that upset her. Something formal enough to need a dress. She came back late and went right into the shed. Didn't come into the house to change. Went in like she needed to go in. Right away. Why?

But the answer, coupled with the sneezes and what he had found on her dress, seemed inevitable.

Comfort.

And when Bobbi, who lived alone, needed comfort, who had always been there to give it? Gard? Don't make me laugh, folks. Gard only showed up to take comfort, not give it.

He wanted to be drunk. He wanted that more than at any time since this crazy business had begun.

Forget it. As he turned to leave the kitchen, where Bobbi kept the alcoholic staples as well as the clothes hamper, something clitter-clicked to the boards.

He bent over, picked it up, examined it, bounced it thoughtfully on his hand. It was a tooth, of course. Big Number Two. He put a finger into his mouth, felt the new socket, looked at the smear of blood on his fingerpad He went to the kitchen doorway and listened. Bobbi was snoring gustily in her bedroom. Sounded as if her sinuses were closed up as tight as timelocks.

A summer cold, she said. Maybe so. Maybe that's what it is.

But he remembered the way Peter would sometimes leap up into her lap when Bobbi sat in her old rocker by the windows to read, or when she sat out on the porch. Bobbi said Peter was most apt to make one of his boob destroying leaps when the weather was unsettled, just as he was more apt to bring on one of her allergy attacks when the weather was hot and unsettled. It's like he knows. she'd said once, and ruffled the beagle's ears. DO you, Pete? Do you know? Do you LIKE to make me sneeze? Misery loves company, is that it? And Pete had seemed to laugh up at her in that way of his.

in that way of his.

Gardener remembered, when Bobbi's return had briefly wakened him last night (Bobbi's return and that flare of green light), hearing distant and meaningless heatwave thunder.

Now he remembered that sometimes Pete needed a little comfort, too.

Especially when it thundered. Pete was deathly afraid of that sound. The sound of thunder.

Dear Christ, has she got Peter out in that shed? And if she does, in God's name WHY?

There had been smears of some funny green goo on Bobbi's dress.

And hairs.

Very familiar short brown and white hairs. Peter was in the shed, and had been all this time. Bobbi had lied about Peter being dead. God alone knew how many other things she had lied about … but why this?

Why?

Gardener didn't know.

He changed direction, went to the cupboard to the right and beneath the sink, bent, pulled out a fresh bottle of Scotch, and broke the seal. He held the bottle up and said, 'To man's best friend.' He drank from the neck, gargled viciously, and swallowed.

First swallow.

Peter. What the fuck did you do to Peter, Bobbi?

He meant to get drunk.

Very drunk.

Fast.