13

   That night he had the dream. It was simple enough. He was standing in darkness outside of the shed between the farmhouse and the garden. To his left, the Tomcat was a dark shape. He was thinking exactly what he had been
   thinking tonight – that he would go over and look in one of the windows. And what would he see? Why, the Tommyknockers, of course. But he wasn't afraid. Instead of fear he felt delighted, relieved joy. Because the Tommyknockers weren't monsters or cannibals; they were like the elves in that story about the good shoemaker. He would look in through the dirty shed window like a delighted child looking out a bedroom window in an illustration from 'The Night Before Christmas' (and what was Santa Claus, that right jolly old elf, but a great big old Tommyknocker in a red suit?), and he would see them, laughing and chattering as they sat at a long table, cobbling together power generators and levitating skateboards and televisions which showed mindmovies instead of regular ones.
   He drifted toward the shed, and suddenly it was lighted by the same glare he had seen coming out of Bobbi's modified typewriter – it was as if the shed had turned into some weird jack-o'-lantern, only this light was not a warm yellow but an awful, rotten green. It spilled out between the boards; it spilled rays through knotholes and tattooed evil cats' eyes on the ground, it filled the windows. And now he was afraid, because no friendly little aliens from space had made that light; if cancer had a color, it would be the one that spilled from every chink and crack and knothole and window of Bobbi Anderson's shed.
   But he drew closer, because in dreams you can't always help yourself. He drew closer, no longer wanting to see, no more than a kid would want to look out his bedroom window on Christmas Eve and see Santa Claus striding along the snow-covered slope of roof across the way with a severed head in each gloved hand, the blood from the ragged necks steaming in the cold.
   Please no, please no
   But he drew closer and as he entered that haze of green, rock music spilled into his head in a paralyzing, mind-splitting flood. It was George Thorogood and the Destroyers, and he knew that when George started to play that slide guitar, his skull would vibrate for a moment with killing harmonics and then simply explode like the water glasses in the house he had once told Bobbi about.
   None of it mattered. The fear mattered, that was all – the fear of the Tommyknockers in Bobbi's shed. He sensed them, could almost smell them, a rich, electric smell like ozone and blood.
   And … the weird liquid sloshing sounds. He could hear those even over the music in his head. It sounded like an old-fashioned washing machine, except that sound wasn't water, and that sound was wrong, wrong, wrong.
   As he stood on his tiptoes to look into the shed, his face as green as the face of a corpse pulled out of quicksand, George Thorogood started to play that slide blues guitar, and Gardener began screaming with pain – and that was when his head exploded and he woke sitting bolt upright in the old double bed in the guestroom, his chest covered with sweat, his hands trembling.
   He lay down again, thinking: God! If you're going to have nightmares about it, take a look in tomorrow. Get your mind easy.
   He had expected nightmares in the wake of his decision; he lay back down again, thinking that this was only the first. But there were no more dreams. That night. The next day he joined Bobbi on the dig.

BOOK II. TALES OF HAVEN

   The terrorist got bombed! The President got hit! Security was tight! The Secret Service got lit! And everybody's drunk, Everybody's wasted, Everybody's stoned, And there's nothin' gonna change it, Cause everybody's drunk, Everybody's wasted, Everybody's drinkin' on the job.
   'Drinkin' on the Job'
   The Rainmakers
   Then he ran all the way to town, screamin' 'It came out of the sky!'
   'It Came Out of the Sky'
   Creedence Clearwater Revival

Chapter 1. The Town

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.

Chapter 2. 'Becka Paulson

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.