Chapter 8. Ev Hillman

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.