10

   As he watched his grampy shuffle away, Hilly's guilt and misery doubled … then trebled. He waited until Ev was gone, then scrambled to his feet and walked back to the platform. He put his foot on the concealed sewing-machine pedal and stepped on it.
   Hummmmmmmmm.
   He waited for the sheet to plump up in David's shape. He would whip the sheet off him and say, There, ya baby, see? That wasn't NOTHING, was it? He might even swat David a good one for scaring him and making him feel so lousy. Or maybe he'd just
   Nothing was happening.
   Fear began to swell in Hilly's throat. Began … or had it really been there all the time? All the time, he thought. Only now it was … swelling, yeah that was just the right word. Swelling in there, as if someone had stuck a balloon down his throat and was now inflating it. This new fear made misery look good and guilt absolutely peachy in comparison. He tried to swallow and couldn't get any spit past that swelling.
   'David?' he whispered, and pushed the pedal again.
   Hummmmmmm.
   He decided he wouldn't swat David. He would hug David. When David got back, Hilly would fall down on his knees and hug David and tell David he could have all the G.I. Joe guys (except maybe for Snake-Eyes and Crystal Ball) for a whole week.
   Nothing was still happening.
   The sheet that had covered David lay crumpled on the one which covered the crate over his machine. It didn't plump up in a David-shape at all. Hilly stood all by himself in his back yard with the hot July sun beating down on him, his heart racing faster and faster in his chest, that balloon swelling in his throat. When it finally gets big enough to pop, he thought, I'll probably scream.
   Quit it! He'll come back! Sure he will! The tomato came back, and the radio, and the lawn chair. Also, all the things I experimented on in my room came back. He … he …
   'You and David come in and wash up, Hilly!' his mother called.
   'Yeah, Mom!' Hilly called back in a wavering, insanely cheerful voice. ,Pretty soon!'
   And thought: Please God let him come back. I'm sorry God. I'll do anything, he can have all the G. I. Joe guys forever, I swear he can, he can have the MOBAT and even the Terrordome, only God dear God PLEASE LET IT WORK THIS TIME LET HIM COME BACK!
   He pressed on the pedal again.
   Hummmmmm …
   He looked at the crumpled sheet through tear-blurred eyes. For a moment he thought something was happening, but it was only a puff of wind stirring the crumpled sheet.
   Panic as bright as metal shavings began to twist through Hilly's mind. Shortly he would begin to scream, drawing his mother from the kitchen and his dripping father, naked except for a towel around his waist and shampoo running down his cheeks, both of them wondering what Hilly had done this time. The panic would be merciful in one way: when it came, it would obliterate thought.
   But things had not gone that far yet, unfortunately. Two thoughts occurred to Hilly's bright mind in rapid succession.
   The first: I never disappeared anything that was alive. Even the tomato was picked, and Daddy said once you pick something it's not really alive anymore.
   The second thought: What if David can't breathe wherever he is? What if he can't BREATHE?
   He had wondered very little about what happened to the things he 'disappeared' until this moment. But now …
   His last coherent thought before the panic descended like a pall – or a mourning veil – was actually a mental image. He saw David lying in the middle of some weird, inimical landscape. It looked like the surface of a harsh, dead world. The gray earth was dry and cold; cracks gaped like dead reptilian mouths. They went zigzagging away in every direction. Overhead was a sky blacker than jewelers' velvet, and a billion stars screamed down – they were brighter than the stars anyone on the surface of the earth had ever seen, because the place Hilly was looking at with the wide, horrified eye of his imagination was almost or totally airless.
   And in the middle of this alien desolation lay his chubby four-year-old brother in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt reading THEY CALL ME DR LOVE. David was clutching at his throat, trying to breathe the no-air of a world that was maybe a trillion light-years from home. David was gagging, turning purple. Frost was tracing death-patterns across his lips and fingernails. He
   Ah, but then the merciful panic finally took over.
   He raked back the sheet he had used to cover David and overturned the crate that had concealed the machine. He stomped the sewing-machine pedal again and again, and began to scream. It was not until his mother reached him that she realized he was not just screaming; there were actually words in all that noise.
   'All the G.I. Joes!' Hilly shrieked. 'All the G.I. Joes! All the G.I. Joes! Forever and ever! All the G. I. Joes!'
   And then, infinitely more chilling:
   'Come back, David! Come back, David! Come back!'
   'Dear God, what does he mean?' Marie cried.
   Bryant took his son by the shoulders and turned him around so they were face-to-face.
   'Where's David? Where did he go?'
   But Hilly had fainted, and he never really came to. Not long after, over a hundred men and women, Bobbi and Gard among them, were out in the woods across the road, beating the bushes for Hilly's brother David.
   If he could have been asked, Hilly would have told them that, in his opinion, they were looking too close to home.
   Far too close.

Chapter 4. Bent and Jingles

1

   On the evening of July 24th, a week after the disappearance of David Brown, Trooper Benton Rhodes was driving a state-police cruiser out of Haven around eight o'clock. Peter Gabbons, known to his fellow officers as Jingles, was riding shotgun. Twilight lay in ashes. These were metaphorical ashes, of course, as opposed to the ones on the hands of the two state cops. Those ashes were real. Rhodes's mind kept returning to the severed hand and arm, and to the fact that he had known instantly to whom they had once belonged. Jesus!
   Stop thinking about it! he ordered his mind.
   Okay, his mind agreed, and went right on thinking about it. 'Try the radio again,' he said. 'I bet we're getting interference from that damn microwave dish they put up in Troy.'
   'All right.' Jingles grabbed the mike. 'This is Unit 16 to Base. Do you copy, Tug? Over.'
   He let go of the button and they both listened. What they heard was a peculiar screaming static, with ghostly voices buried deep inside it.
   'Want me to try again?' Jingles asked.
   'No. We'll be clear soon enough.'
   Bent was running with the flashers on, doing seventy along Route 3 toward Derry. Where the hell were the backup units? There hadn't been a communications problem to and from Haven Village; radio transmissions so clear they were almost eerie. Nor had the radio been the only eerie thing about Haven tonight.
   Right! his mind agreed. And by the way, you recognized the ring right away, didn't you? No mistaking a trooper's ring, even on a woman's hand, is there? And did you see the way her tendons were hanging down in flaps? Looked like a cut of meat in a butcher shop, didn't it? Leg of lamb, or something. Tore her arm right off! It
   Stop it, I said! Goddammit, JUST QUIT!
   Okay, yeah, right. Forgot for a sec that you didn't want to think about it. Or like a rolled roast, huh? And all that blood!
   Stop it, please stop it, he moaned.
   Right, okay, I know I'll drive me crazy if I keep thinking about it but I think I'll just keep thinking about it anyway because I just can't seem to stop. Her hand, her arm, they were bad, worse than any traffic accident I ever saw, but what about all those other pieces? The severed heads? The eyes? The feet? Yessir, that must have been a wowser of a furnace explosion, all right!
   'Where's our backup?' Jingles asked restlessly.
   'I don't know.'
   But when he saw them, he could really stump them, couldn't he?
   Got a riddle for you, he could say. You'll never get it. How can you have mangled bodies all over the place after an explosion, but only one dead? And just by the way, how come the only real damage a furnace explosion did was to tear off the steeple of the town hall? For that matter, how come the head selectman, that guy Berringer, wasn't able to ID the body, when even I knew who it was? Give up, guys?
   He had covered the arm with a blanket. There was nothing to be done about all the other body parts, and he supposed it didn't matter, anyway. But he had covered Ruth's arm.
   On the sidewalk in Haven Village's town square he had done that. He had done it while that idiotic volunteer fire chief, Allison, stood grinning as if it had been a bean supper instead of an explosion that had killed a fine woman. It was all crazy. Crazy to the max.
   Peter Gabbons was nicknamed Jingles because of his gravelly Andy Devine voice – Jingles was a character Devine had played in an old TV Western series. When Gabbons came up from Georgia, Tug Ellender, the dispatcher, had started calling him that and it had stuck. Now, speaking in a high, strangled voice completely unlike his usual Jingles voice, Gabbons said: 'Pull over, Bent. I'm sick.'
   Rhodes pulled over in a hurry, on the very edge of a skid that almost dumped the cruiser in the ditch. At least Gabbons had been the first to call it; that was something.
   Jingles dove from the cruiser on the right. Bent Rhodes dove out on the left. In the blue strobe of the state police cruiser's lights, they both threw up everything available. Bent staggered back against the side of the car, pawing his mouth with one hand, hearing the retching noises still coming from the weeds beyond the edge of the road. He rolled his head skyward, dimly grateful for the breeze.
   'That's better,' Jingles said at last. 'Thanks, Bent.'
   Benton turned toward his partner. Jingles's eyes were dark, shocked holes in his face. It was the look of a man who is processing all his information and reaching no sane conclusions at all.
   'What happened back there?' Bent asked.
   'You blind, hoss? Town-hall steeple took off like a rocket.'
   'So how did a furnace explosion blow off the steeple?'
   'Dunno.'
   'Spit on that.' Bent tried to spit. He couldn't. 'You believe it? A July furnace explosion that blows the steeple off the town hall?'
   'No. It stinks.'
   'Right, pard. It stinks to high heaven.' Bent paused. 'Jingles, what did you feel? Did you feel anything weird back there?'
   Jingles said cautiously: 'Maybe. Maybe I did feel something.'
   'What?'
   'I don't know,' Jingles said. His voice had begun to climb, to take on the uneven, warbling inflections of a small child near tears. Above them, a galaxy of stars shone down. Crickets sang in fragrant summer silence. 'I'm just so damn glad to be out of there – '
   Then Jingles, who knew he would probably be going back to Haven the next day to assist in the clean-up and investigation, did begin to cry.

2

   After a while they drove on. Any remaining trace of daylight had by then left the sky. Bent was glad. He didn't really want to look at Jingles … and didn't really want Jingles looking at him.
   By the way, Bent, his mind now spoke up, it was pretty goddam startling, wasn't it? Pretty goddam weird. The severed heads and the legs with the little shoes still on most of the little feet? And the torsos! Did you see the torsos? The eye! That one blue eye? Did you see that? Must have! You kicked it into the gutter when you bent over to pick up Ruth McCausland's arm. All those severed arms and legs and heads and torsos, but Ruth was the only person who died. It's a riddle for a champeen riddle contest, all right.
   The body parts had been bad. The shredded remains of the bats – an almighty lot of them – had also been bad. But neither had been as bad as Ruth's arm with her husband's ring on the third finger of the right hand, because Ruth's hand and arm had been real.
   The severed heads and legs and torsos had given him a hell of a shock at first -for a numb instant he had wondered, summer vacation or not, if a class had been touring the town hall when it blew. Then his numbed mind realized that not even kindergarten kids possessed limbs so small, and that no children possessed arms and legs which did not bleed when they were ripped from their bodies.
   He had looked around and seen Jingles holding a small, smoking head in one hand and a partially melted leg in the other.
   'Dolls,' Jingles had said. 'Fucking dolls. Where did all the fucking dolls come from, Bent?'
   He had been about to answer, to say he didn't know (although even then something about those dolls had tugged at him; it would come to him in time), when he noticed that there were people still eating in the Haven Lunch. People still shopping in the market. A deep chill had touched his heart like a finger made of ice. This was a woman most of them had known all their lives – known, respected, and in many cases loved – but they were going on about their business.
   Going on about their business as if nothing at all had happened.
   That was when Bent Rhodes started wanting – seriously wanting – to be out of Haven.
   Now, turning down the radio that was still grinding out nothing but meaningless static, Bent remembered what had tugged at his mind earlier. 'She had dolls. Mrs McCausland.' Ruth, Bent thought. I wish I'd known her well enough to call her Ruth, like Monster does. Did. Everyone liked her, s'far as I know. Which is why it seemed so wrong to see them just going about their business
   'I guess I heard that,' Jingles said. 'Hobby of hers, right? I guess I might've heard that at the Haven Lunch. Or maybe at Cooder's, having a pop with the oldtimers.'
   A beer with the old-timers, more like it, Rhodes thought, but he only nodded. 'Yeah. And that's what they were, I reckon. Her dolls. I was talking about Mrs McCausland one day last spring, I guess it was, with Monster, and
   'Monster?' Jingles asked. 'Monster Dugan knew Mrs McCausland?'
   'Pretty well, I guess. Monster and her husband were partners before her husband died. Anyway, he said she had a hundred dolls, maybe two hundred. He said they were her only hobby, and they were exhibited once in Augusta. He said she was prouder of that exhibit than she was of any of the things she'd done for the town -and I guess she did a lot of things for Haven.'
   I wish I could have called her Ruth, he thought again.
   'Monster said except for her dolls, she worked all the time.' Bent considered, then added: 'The way Monster talked, I got an idea he was … uh, sweet on her.' That sounded as old-fucking-fashioned as a Roy Rogers western, but that was just how Butch 'Monster' Dugan had always seemed about Ruth McCausland. 'Most likely you won't be the one gets stuck breaking the news to him, but if you should, lemme give you some advice: don't crack wise.'
   'Yeah, okay, duly noted. Monster Dugan on my case, that's all I'd need to round the day off, you know?'
   Bent smiled with no humor.
   'Her doll collection,' Jingles said. He nodded. 'Course I knew they were dolls – ' He saw Bent's wry glance, and smiled a little. 'Okay, I had a second or two there when … but soon's I saw the way the sun was shinin' on them, and how there was no blood, I knew what they were. Just couldn't figure out how come there was so many.'
   'You still don't know that. That, or much else. We don't know what they were doing there. Hell, what was she doing there?'
   Jingles looked miserable. 'Who would have killed her, Bent? She was such a nice lady. Goddam!'
   'I think she was murdered,' Bent said. His voice sounded like breaking sticks in his ears. 'Did it look like an accident to you?'
   'No. That wasn't no furnace explosion. And the fumes that kept us from going down in the basement – that smell like oil to you?'
   Bent shook his head. Whatever it was, he'd never before smelled anything like it in his life. Maybe the only thing that nit Berringer had been right about was his opinion that breathing those fumes could be dangerous and it might be best to stay upstairs until the air in the town-hall basement cleared. Now he had to wonder if they'd been kept away on purpose – maybe so they wouldn't see a furnace that was completely unwounded.
   'After we file our reports on this fucker,' Jingles said, ' the local yokels are gonna have a lot of explaining to do. Allison, Berringer, those guys. And they may have to do some of it to Dugan.'
   Bent nodded thoughtfully. 'Whole fucking thing was crazy. The place felt crazy. I mean, I actually started to get dizzy. Did you?'
   'The fumes – ' Jingles began doubtfully.
   'Fuck the fumes. I was dizzy in the street.'
   'Her dolls, Bent. What were her dolls doing there?'
   'I don't know.'
   'Me either. But it's another thing that doesn't fit for shit. Try this on: if somebody hated her enough to murder her, maybe they hated her enough to blow her dolls up with her. You think?'
   'Not really,' Benton Rhodes said.
   'But it could be,' Jingles said, as if saying so proved it. Bent began to understand that Jingles was striving to create sanity out of insanity. He told Jingles to try the radio again.
   Their reception was a little better but still nothing to write home about. Bent couldn't remember ever getting deep interference from the Troy microwave dish this close to Derry before.

3

   According to the witnesses they spoke to, the explosion had occurred at 3:05 P.m., give or take half a minute. The town-hall clock struck three as it always did. Five minutes later, KA-BAM! And now, riding back to Derry in the dark, an oddly persuasive picture occurred to Benton Rhodes, one that brought gooseflesh to attention all over his body. He saw the clock in the town-hall tower standing at four minutes past three on that hot and windless late-July afternoon. And suddenly, a look passes among those in the Haven Lunch; those in Cooder's market; those in Haven Hardware; the ladies in the Junque-A-Torium; the children on the swings or hanging listlessly in the summer heat from the bars of the jungle gym in the play-yard beside the school; it goes from the eyes of one of the overweight ladies playing doubles on the town tennis courts behind the town hall to her partner, and then to their overweight opponents on the other side of the net. The game-ball goes rolling slowly into a far corner of the court as they lie down and put their hands over their ears … and wait. As they wait for the explosion.
   Everyone in town, lying down and waiting for that KA-BLAM to drill into the day like the stroke of a sledgehammer on thick wood.
   Bent suddenly shuddered behind the wheel of the cruiser.
   The checkout girls at Cooder's. The customers in the aisles. The people in the Haven Lunch by the stools or behind the counter. At 3:04 p.m. they laid down, the whole fucking bunch of them. And at 3:06 they got up and went about their business. All of'em except for the Designated Gawkers. Also Allison and Berringer, who told everybody it was a furnace explosion, which it wasn't, and that they didn't know who the victim was, which they fucking well did.
   You don't really believe they all knew it was going to happen, do you?
   A part of him believed just that. Because if the good folks of Haven hadn't known, how come the only casualties had been Ruth McCausland and her dolls? How come there hadn't been so much as a single cut arm when a shower of glass had flown across Main Street at a speed of roughly one hundred and ten miles an hour?
   'I think we ought to be clear of that fucking dish by now,' Bent said. 'Try it again.'
   Jingles took the mike. 'I still don't understand where the goddam backups are.'
   'Maybe something happened somewhere else. It never rains
   'Yeah, it pours. Dolly arms and legs, among other things.' As Jingles depressed the mike button, Bent piloted the cruiser around a curve. The headlights and flashers splashed over a pickup truck that was slewed around diagonally in the middle of the road.
   'Jesus Chr – '
   Then reflexes took over and he hit the brakes. Firestone rubber screamed and smoked, and for a moment Bent thought he was going to lose it. Then the cruiser came to a halt with its nose three yards from the body of the mongrel truck sitting silent in the road.
   'Please pass the toilet paper,' Jingles said in a low, trembling voice.
   They got out, both unsnapping the handles of their guns without thinking. The smell of cooked rubber hung in the summer air.
   'What's this shit?' Jingles cried, and Bent thought, He feels it too. This isn't right, this is part of what was going on back in that creepy little town, and he feels it too.
   The breeze stirred, and Bent heard canvas flap stiffly for a moment, and a tarp slid off something in the bed of the pickup with a dry rattlesnake sound. Bent felt his balls climb north in a hurry. It looked like the barrel of a bazooka. He started to crouch, then realized with bewilderment that the bazooka was only a length of corrugated culvert-pipe in some sort of wooden cradle. Nothing to be afraid of. But he was afraid. He was terrified.
   'I saw that truck back in Haven, Bent. Parked in front of the restaurant.'
   'Who's there?' Bent shouted.
   No answer.
   He looked at Jingles. Jingles, eyes wide and dark in his white face, looked back at him.
   Bent thought suddenly: Microwave interference? Was that really what was keeping us from getting through?
   'If someone's in that truck, you better speak up!' Bent called. 'You – ' A shrill, crazed titter came from the truck-bed, then drifted into silence. 'Oh Christ, I don't like this,' Jingles Gabbons moaned. Bent started forward, raising his gun, and then the world was filled with green light.

Chapter 5. Ruth McCausland

1

   Ruth Arlene Merrill McCausland was fifty but looked ten years younger – fifteen on a good day. Everyone in Haven agreed that, woman or not, she was just about the best damned constable the town had ever had. It was because her husband had been a state trooper, some said. Others said it was simply because Ruth was Ruth. Either way, they agreed Haven was lucky to have her. She was firm but fair. She was able to keep her wits in an emergency. Haven folk said these things about her, and more besides. In a small Maine town run by the men since there had been a town to run, such testimonials were of some note. That was fair enough; she was a noteworthy woman.
   She was born and raised in Haven; she was, in fact, the great-niece of the Rev. Mr Donald Hartley, who had been so cruelly surprised by the town's vote to change its name back in '01. In 1955 she had been granted early admittance to the University of Maine – only the third female student in the history of the university to be granted full-time student status at the tender age of seventeen. She enrolled in the college's pre-law program.
   The following year she fell in love with Ralph McCausland, who was also a pre-law. He was tall; at six-five he was still three inches shorter than his friend Anthony Dugan (known as Butch by his friends, as Monster only by his two or three close friends), but he towered a full foot over Ruth. He was oddly – almost absurdly -graceful for such a big man, and good-natured. He wanted to be a state trooper. When Ruth asked him why, he said it was because his father had been one. He didn't need a law degree to join the fuzz, he explained to her; to become a state trooper he needed only a highschool education, good eyes, good reflexes, and a clean record. But Ralph McCausland had wanted something more than to do his father the honor of following in his footsteps. 'Any man who gets into a job and doesn't plan a way to get ahead is either lazy or crazy,' he told Ruth one night over Cokes in the Bear's Den. What he didn't tell her, because he was shy about his ambition, was that he hoped to be Maine's top cop someday. Ruth knew anyway, of course.
   She accepted Ralph's proposal of marriage the following year on condition that he would wait until she had her own degree. She did not want to practice law, she said, but she did want to help him all she could. Ralph agreed. Any sane man confronted with Ruth Merrill's clear-eyed, intelligent beauty would have agreed. When Ralph married her in 1959, she was a lawyer.
   She came to their marriage bed a virgin. She had been a little worried about this, although only a deep part of her mind – a part over which even she could not exert her usual iron control – dared to wonder in a murky way if that part of him was as big as the rest of him; it felt that way sometimes when they danced, and petted. But he was gentle, and there was only a momentary discomfort that quickly turned to pleasure. 'Make me pregnant,' she whispered in his ear as he began to move above her, in her.
   'My pleasure, lady,' Ralph said a little breathlessly.
   But Ruth never quickened.
   Ruth, the only child of John and Holly Merrill, had inherited a fairish sum of money and a fine old house in Haven Village when her father died in 1962. She and Ralph sold their small postwar tract home in Derry and moved back to Haven in 1963. And although neither of them would admit anything less than perfect happiness to the other, both were aware that there were too many empty rooms in the old Victorian house. Perhaps, Ruth sometimes thought, perfect happiness sometimes occurs only in a context of small discordancies: the shattering crash of an overturned vase or fishbowl, an exultant, laughing yell just as you were drifting into a pleasant late-afternoon doze, the child who gets pregnant with Halloween candy and who must perforce give birth to a nightmare in the early morning hours of November 1st. In her wistful moments (she saw to it that there were damned few of them) Ruth sometimes thought of the Mohammedan rug-makers, who always included a deliberate error in their work to honor the perfect Deity who had made them, more fallible creatures. It occurred to her more than once that, in the tapestry of a full and honestly lived life, a child guaranteed such a respectful error.
   But, for the most part, they were happy. They prepared Ralph's most difficult cases together, and his court testimony was always quiet, respectful, and devastating. It mattered little if you were a drunk driver, an arsonist, or a fellow who'd broken a beer bottle over another fellow's head in a drunken roadhouse argument. If you were arrested by Ralph McCausland, your chances of beating the rap were roughly the chances of a guy standing at ground-zero of a nuclear test-site receiving only minor flesh-wounds.
   During the years when Ralph was making his slow but steady climb up the ladder of the Maine state-police bureaucracy, Ruth began her career of town service – not that she ever thought of it as a 'career,' and certainly she never thought of it in the context of 'politics.' Not town politics but town service. That was a small but crucial difference. She was not as calmly happy about her work as she seemed to the people she was working for. It would have taken a child to completely fulfill her. There was nothing surprising or demanding in this. She was, after all, a child of her own time, and even the very intelligent are not immune to a steady barrage of propaganda. She and Ralph had been to a doctor in Boston, and after extensive tests, he assured them that they were both fertile. His advice was for them to relax. In a way, this was cruel news. If one of them had proved to be sterile, they would have adopted. As it was, they decided to wait a while and take the doctor's advice … or try. And although neither knew or even intuited it, Ralph didn't have long to live by the time they had begun to discuss adoption again.
   In those last years of her marriage, Ruth had performed a sort of adoption of her own – she adopted Haven.
   The library, for instance. The Methodist parsonage had been full of books since time out of mind – some were Detective Book Club and Reader's Digest Condensed Books from which a clear scent of mold arose when you opened them; others had bloated to the size of telephone books when the pipes in the parsonage burst in 1947, but most were in surprisingly good condition. Ruth patiently winnowed them, keeping the good ones, selling the bad ones to be re-pulped, throwing away only those completely beyond salvage. The Haven Community Library had officially opened in the repainted and refurbished Methodist parsonage in December of 1968, with Ruth McCausland as volunteer librarian, a post she held until 1973. On the day she retired, the trustees hung a photograph of her over the mantel in the reading room. Ruth protested, then gave in when she saw they meant to honor her whether she wanted the honor or not. She could hurt their feelings, she saw, but not alter their purpose. They needed to honor her. The library, which she had begun single-handed, sitting on the cold parsonage floor, bundled up in one of Ralph's old red-checked hunting jackets, her breath smoking from her mouth and nose, sorting patiently through boxes of books until her hands went numb, was in 1972 voted Maine's Small Town Library of the Year.
   Ruth would have taken at least some pleasure at this under other circumstances, but she took little pleasure in anything during 1972 and '73. 1972 was the year Ralph McCausland died. In the late spring, he began to complain of bad headaches. In June, a large firespot appeared on his right eye. X-rays revealed a brain tumor. He died in October, two days short of his thirty-seventh birthday.
   In the funeral parlor, Ruth stood looking steadily down into his open coffin for a long time. She had wept almost steadily over the last week, and she suspected that there would be more tears to shed – oceans, perhaps – in the weeks and months ahead. But she would no more have wept in public than she would have appeared there naked. To those watching (which was damned near everyone), she seemed as sweetly composed as always.
   'Goodbye, dear,' she said at last, and kissed the corner of his mouth. She slipped his trooper's ring from the third finger of his right hand and onto the third finger of her own. The next day she drove to G. M. Pollock's in Bangor and had it sized. She wore it until the day she died, and although in the violence of her dying her arm would be ripped from her shoulder, neither Bent or Jingles had any trouble ID'ing that ring.

2

   The library was not Ruth's only service to the town. Each fall she collected for the Cancer Society, and for each of the seven years she did this, she collected the largest total donation in the Maine Cancer Society's small-town category. The secret of her success was simple: Ruth went everywhere. She spoke pleasantly and fearlessly to thick-browed, sunken-eyed backroad dwellers who often looked almost as mongrelized as the snarling dogs they kept in back yards filled with the dead and decaying bodies of old cars and farm implements. And in most cases she got a donation. Perhaps some were surprised into it simply because it had been so long since they'd had company.
   She was dog-bit only once. It was, however, a memorable occasion. The dog itself wasn't big, but it had lots of teeth.
   MORAN, the mailbox said. No one home but the dog. The dog came around the side of the house, growling, as she stood knocking on the unpainted porch door. She held out a hand to it, and Mr Moran's dog immediately bit it and then stepped away from Ruth and piddled on the porch floor in its excitement. Ruth started down the steps, taking a handkerchief from her purse and wrapping it around her bleeding hand. The dog bounded after her and bit her again, this time on the leg. She kicked at it and it shied away, but as she limped on toward her Dart, it came up behind her and bit her a third time. This was the only serious bite. Mr Moran's dog removed a sizable chunk of meat from Ruth's left calf (she was wearing a skirt that day; she never went out collecting for the Cancer Society in a skirt again) and then retired to the center of Mr Moran's weedy front lawn, where it sat snarling and slobbering, Ruth's blood dripping from its lolling tongue. Instead of getting behind the wheel of her car, she opened the Dart's trunk. She did not hurry. She felt if she did, the dog would almost certainly attack her again. She took the Remington .30-06 she'd had ever since she was sixteen. She shot the dog dead just as it began trotting toward her again. She picked up the corpse and laid it on spread newspapers in her trunk and drove it to Dr Daggett, the Augusta vet who had cared for Bobbi's dog Peter before selling the practice and moving to Florida. 'If this bitch was rabid, I am in a good deal of trouble,' she told Daggett. The vet peered from the dog, which had a bullet directly between its glazed eyes and very little left to the back of its skull, to Ruth McCausland, who, although bitten and bleeding, was as pleasant as ever. 'I know I haven't left as much of the brain for examination as you'd probably like, but that was unavoidable. Would you take a look, Dr Daggett?' He told her she needed to see a doctor; the wounds had to be flushed, and she'd need stitches in her calf. Daggett was as close to flustered as Daggett ever got. Ruth told him he was perfectly capable of flushing the wounds. As for what she called 'the crocheting,' she would go to the Emergency Room at Derry Home as soon as she made a few telephone calls. She told him to work on the dog while she made them, and asked if she could use his private office so as not to upset the clientele. A woman had screamed when Ruth came in, which was not really surprising. One of Ruth's legs was bloody and torn open. In her blood-streaked arms she bore the stiffening, blanket-wrapped corpse of Moran's dog. Daggett said she was welcome to use his phone. She did so (being careful to reverse the charges the first time and billing the call to her home telephone the second time; she somehow doubted if Mr Moran would accept a collect call). Ralph was at Monster Dugan's house, going over crime photos for an upcoming manslaughter trial. Monster's wife detected nothing amiss in Ruth's voice and neither did Ralph; he told her later that she would have made a great criminal. She said she had taken a delay while canvassing for the Cancer Society. She told him if he got home before she did, he should warm up the meatloaf and make himself some of those stir-fried vegetables that he liked; there were six or seven packages in the freezer. Also, she said, there was a coffee cake in the breadbox if he fancied something sweet. By now, Daggett had come into the office and was disinfecting her wounds and Ruth was very pale. Ralph wanted to know what kind of delay she had taken. She said she'd tell him all about it when she got home. Ralph said he looked forward to hearing and said he loved her. Ruth said she felt exactly the same way about him. Then, as Daggett finished the bite behind her knee (he'd done her hand while she spoke to Ralph) and went on to the d eep wound in her calf (she could actually feel her stripped and wounded flesh trying to pull away from the alchohol), she called Mr Moran. Ruth told him his dog had bitten her three times and that was one time too many so she had shot and killed it and that she had left his pledge card in his mailbox and the American Cancer Society would be very grateful for any donation he felt he could make. There was a brief silence. Then Mr Moran began to speak. Soon Mr Moran began to shout. Finally Mr Moran began to scream. Mr Moran was so enraged he attained a vulgar fluency of expression that neared not just poetry but Homeric verse. He would never equal it again in his life, although when he sometimes tried and failed, he would remember that conversation with a sad, almost fond nostalgia. She'd brought out the best in him, no denying that. Mr Moran said she could expect to get sued for every town dollar she had, and a few country ones in the bargain. Mr Moran said he was going to law, and he was poker-buddies with the best lawyer in the county. Mr Moran opined that Ruth was going to find the cartridge she had used to kill his good old dog the most expensive one she had ever jacked into a breech. Mr Moran said when he got done with her she would curse her mother for ever having opened her legs to her father. Mr Moran said that even though her mother had been stupid enough to do that, he could tell, just talking to her, that the best part of her had squirted out'n her father's unquestionably substandard pecker and run down the chunk of lard her mother called a thigh. Mr Moran informed her that, while Mrs High and Mighty Ruth McCausland might currently feel she was Queen Turd of Shit Hill, she would shortly find out she was just another little turd floating in the Great Toilet Bowl of Life. Mr Moran added that, in this particular case, he had his hand on the lever of that great disposal unit and fully intended to push it. Mr Moran said a great deal more. Mr Moran did more than speak; Mr Moran sermonized. Preacher Colson (or was it Cooder?) at the height of his powers could not have equaled Moran on that day. Ruth waited patiently until he had at least temporarily run dry. Then, speaking in a low and pleasant voice that did not at all suggest that her calf now felt as if it was burning in a furnace, she told Mr Moran that, while the law was not entirely clear on the point, damages had more often been awarded to the caller, even if uninvited, rather than the owner, in cases of animal assault. The real question was whether or not the owner had taken all reasonable care to ensure …
   'What the fuck are you talking about?' Moran screamed.
   'I'm trying to tell you that the courts take a dim view of a man leaving his dog untied so it can bite a woman soliciting for a charitable organization like the American Cancer Society. Put another way, I'm trying to make you see that, in court, they make you pay for acting like an asshole.'
   Stunned silence from the other end of the line. Mr Moran's muse had fled forever.
   Ruth paused briefly and fought off a wave of faintness as Daggett finished the disinfecting process and put a light sterile bandage on the wound. 'If you took me to court, Mr Moran, could my lawyer find someone to testify that your dog had bitten before?'
   Silence from the other end of the line.
   'Perhaps two someones?'
   More silence.
   'Perhaps three '
   'Fuck you, you highbrow cunt,' Moran said suddenly.
   'Well,' Ruth said, 'I can't say it's been pleasant talking with you, but listening to you air your views has certainly been instructive. A person sometimes believes she's seen all the way to the bottom of the well of human stupidity, and a reminder that that well apparently has no bottom is sometimes useful. I'm afraid I'll have to hang up now. I'd hoped to canvass six more houses today, but I'm afraid I'll have to put them off. I have to go up to Derry Home Hospital and get some stitches, I'm afraid.'
   'I hope they fucking kill you,' Moran said.
   'I understand. But do try to help the Cancer Society if you can. We need all the help we can get if we're going to stop cancer in our lifetime. Even ill-tempered, foul-mouthed, idiotic, misbegotten sons of bitches such as yourself can do their part.'
   Mr Moran did not sue her. A week later she received a Cancer Society pledge envelope from him, however. He had not stamped it, on purpose, she suspected, so it would be delivered postage-due. Inside was a note and a one dollar bill with a large brown stain on it. I WIPED MY ASS ON THIS, YOU BITCH! the note cried triumphantly. It was written in the large straggling letters of a first-grader with motor control problems. Ruth held the bill by the corner and put it in with the rest of the morning wash. When it came out (clean; among the many other things Mr Moran did not seem to know was that shit washes off), she ironed it. Then it was not only clean, it was crisp – it might have come from the bank only yesterday. She put it in the canvas bank bag where she kept all her collection money. In her record book she noted B. Moran, Amount Contributed: $1.00.

3

   The Haven Town Library. The Cancer Society. The New England Conference of Small Towns. Ruth served Haven in all these organizations. She was also active in the Methodist church; it was a rare church supper at which there wasn't a Ruth McCausland casserole or a bake-sale at which there wasn't a Ruth McCausland pie or loaf of raisin bread. She had served on the school board and on the school textbook committee.
   People said they didn't know how she did it all. When asked directly, she would smile and say she believed busy hands were happy hands. With all of this going on in her life, you would have thought she'd have had no time for hobbies … but she did in fact have two. She loved to read (she particularly enjoyed Bobbi Anderson's westerns; she had all of them, each signed) and she collected dolls.
   A psychiatrist would have equated Ruth's doll collection with her unfulfilled wish for children. Ruth, although she did not much hold with psychiatrists, would have agreed. Up to a point, anyway. Whatever the reason, they make me happy, she might have said if this psychiatric viewpoint had been brought to her attention. And I believe that happiness is the exact opposite of sadness, bitterness, and hatred: happiness should remain unexamined as long as possible.
   In the early Haven years she and Ralph shared a study upstairs. The house was big enough so each could have had one to him– or herself, but they liked to be together in the evenings. The big study had been two rooms before Ralph had knocked out the wall between, creating a space even bigger than the living room downstairs. Ralph had his coin and matchbook collections, a wall of bookshelves (all of Ralph's books were nonfiction, most military history), and an old rolltop desk which Ruth had refinished herself.
   For Ruth he made what both came to call 'the schoolroom.'
   About two years before the headaches began, Ralph saw that Ruth was fast running out of space for her dolls (now there was even a row of them atop her own desk, and they sometimes fell off when she typed). They sat on the stool in the corner, they dangled their small legs nonchalantly from the window-ledges, and still visitors usually had to hold three or four on their laps when they took a chair. She had a lot of visitors, too: Ruth was also a notary public, and there was always someone dropping by to have her notarize a bill of sale or frank a promissory note.
   So for Christmas that year, Ralph had constructed a dozen small pewlike benches for her dolls. Ruth was delighted. They reminded her of the one-room schoolhouse she had attended at Crosman Corner. She arranged them in neat rows and set the dolls upon them. Ever after, that part of Ruth's study was called the schoolroom.
   The following Christmas – his last, although at that point he felt fine. the brain tumor that would kill him no more than a microscopic dot in his head – Ralph gave her another four benches, three new dolls, and a blackboard in scale with the benches. It was all that was needed to complete the amiable schoolroom illusion.
   Written on the blackboard were the words
   'Dear Teacher, I love you truly – A SECRET ADMIRER.'
   Adults were charmed by Ruth's schoolroom. Most children were equally charmed, and Ruth was always happy to see the kids – boys as well as girls – play with the dolls, although some were quite valuable and many of the old ones delicate. Some parents became extremely nervous when they realized their children were playing with a doll from pre-Communist China or one that had belonged to the daughter of Chief Justice John Marshall. Ruth was a kind woman; if she sensed that a child's enjoyment of her dolls was making a parent really uncomfortable, she would take out a Barbie and Ken she kept for such occasions. The children played with these, but listlessly, as if they realized the really good dolls had for some reason been put off-limits. If, however, Ruth sensed a parent was saying no because they felt it was somehow impolite for their kids to play with the grownup lady's toys, she would make it clear that she really didn't mind.
   'Ain't you afraid some kid'll break a bunch of them?' Mabel Noyes asked her once. Mabel's Junque-A-Torium was well supplied with signs such as LOVELY TO LOOK AT, DELIGHTFUL TO HOLD, BUT IF YOU BREAK IT, THEN IT'S SOLD. Mabel knew that the doll which had belonged to Justice Marshall's little girl was worth at least six hundred dollars – she had shown a picture of it to a dealer in rare dolls in Boston and he had told her four hundred, so Mabel guessed six as a fair price. Then there was a doll that had belonged to Anna Roosevelt … a genuine Haitian voodoo doll … God knew what else, sitting cheek to cheek and thigh to thigh with such common old things as Raggedy Ann and Andy.
   'Not a bit,' Ruth responded. She found Mabel's attitude as puzzling as Mabel found hers. 'If God means one of these dolls to be broken, He may break it Himself, or He may send a child to do it. But so far, no child has ever broken one. Oh, a few heads have rolled, and Joe Pell did something to the pull-ring in Mrs Beasley's back, and now all she'll say is something like ---Doyou want to have a shower?", but that's about all the damage that's been done.'
   'Well, you'll pardon me if I still think it's an awfully big risk to take with such fragile, irreplaceable things,' Mabel said. She sniffed. 'Sometimes I believe the only thing I've ever learned in my whole life is that children break things.'
   'Well, perhaps I've just been lucky. But they are careful with them, you know. Because they love them, I think.' Ruth paused, frowning slightly. 'Most of them do,' she amended after a moment.
   That not all children wanted to play with 'the kids in the schoolroom'– that some actually, seemed to fear them – was a fact which puzzled and grieved her. Little Edwina Thurlow, for instance. Edwina had burst into a shrill spate of screams when her mother took her by the hand and actually pulled her over to the dolls on their rows of benches, looking attentively at their blackboard. Mrs Thurlow thought Ruth's dolls were just the dearest things, cunning as a cat a-running, sweet as a lick of cream; if there are other country cliches for fascinating, Mrs Thurlow had undoubtedly applied them to Ruth's dolls, and she was totally unable to credit her daughter's fear of them. She thought Edwina was 'just being shy.' Ruth, who had seen the unmistakable flat glitter of fear in the child's eyes, had been unable to dissuade the mother (who, Ruth thought, was a stupid, pig-headed woman) from almost physically pushing the child at the dolls.
   So Norma Thurlow had dragged little Edwina over to the schoolroom and little Edwina's screams had been so loud they had brought Ralph all the way up from the cellar, where he had been caning chairs. It took nearly twenty minutes to coax Edwina out of her hysterics, and of course she had to be brought downstairs, away from the dolls. Norma Thurlow was ill with embarrassment, and every time she threw a black look in Edwina's direction. the child was overcome again by hysterical weeping.
   Later that evening, Ruth went upstairs and looked sorrowfully at her schoolroom full of silent children (the 'children' included such grandmotherly figures as Mrs Beasley and Old Gammar Hood, which, when turned over and slightly rearranged, became The Big Bad Wolf), wondering how they could have scared Edwina so badly. Edwina herself certainly hadn't been able to explain; even the most gentle inquiry brought on fresh shrieks of terror.
   'You made that kid really unhappy,' Ruth said at last, speaking softly to the dolls. 'What did you do to her?'
   The dolls only looked back at her with their glass eyes, their shoebutton eyes, their sewn eyes.
   'And Hilly Brown wouldn't go near them the time his mother came over to have you notarize that bill of sale,' Ralph said from behind her. She looked around, startled, then smiled at him.
   'Yes, Hilly, too,' she said. And there had been others. Not many, but enough to trouble her.
   'Come on,' Ralph said, slipping an arm around her waist. 'Give, you guys. Which one of youse mugs scared the little goil?'
   The dolls looked back silently.
   And for a moment . . . just a moment … Ruth felt a stir of fright uncoil in her stomach and chase up her spine, rattling vertebrae like a bony xylophone … and then it was gone.
   'Don't worry about it, Ruthie,' Ralph said. leaning closer. As always, the smell of him made her feel a bit giddy. He kissed her hard. Nor was his kiss the only thing hard about him at that moment.
   'Please,' she said a little breathlessly, breaking the kiss. 'Not in front of the children.'
   He laughed and swept her into his arms. 'How about in front of the collected works of Henry Steele Commager?'
   'Wonderful,' she gasped, aware that she was already half … no, threequarters … no, four-fifths … out of her dress.
   He made love to her urgently, and with tremendous satisfaction on both their parts. All their parts. The brief chill was forgotten.
   But this year she remembered on the night of July 19th. The picture of Jesus had begun to speak to 'Becka Paulson on July 7th. On July 19th, Ruth McCausland's dolls began to speak to her.

4

   The townsfolk were surprised but pleased when, two years after Ralph McCausland's death in 1972, his widow ran for the position of Haven town constable. A young fellow named Mumphry ran against her. This fellow was foolish, most people agreed, but they also agreed that he probably couldn't help it; he was new in town and did not know how to behave. Those who discussed the matter at the Haven Lunch agreed Mumphry was more to be pitied than disliked. He ran as a partisan Democrat, and the gist of his platform seemed to be that, when it came to a position such as constable, the elected official would have to arrest drunks, speeders, and hooligans; he might even be called upon to arrest a dangerous criminal from time to time and run him up to the county jail. Surely the citizens of Haven weren't going to elect a woman to do such a job, law degree or not, were they?
   They were and did. The vote was McCausland 407, Mumphry 9. Of his nine votes, it would be fair to assume he had gotten those of his wife, his brother, his twenty-three-year-old son, and himself. That left five unaccounted for. No one ever 'fessed up, but Ruth herself always had an idea that Mr Moran out there on the south end of town had had four more friends than she would have credited him with. Three weeks after the election, Mumphry and his wife left Haven. His son, a nice enough fellow named John, elected to stay, and although he was still, after fourteen years, often referred to as 'the new fella,' as in 'That new fella, Mumphry, come by to get his haircut this mawnin'; I member when his daddy ran against Ruth and got whipped s'bad?' And since then, Ruth had never been opposed.
   The townsfolk had rightly seen her candidacy as a public announcement that her period of mourning was over. One of the things (one among many) the unfortunate Mumphry had failed to understand was that the lopsided vote had been, in part, at least, Haven's way of crying: 'Hooray, Ruthie! Welcome back!'
   Ralph's death had been sudden and shocking, and it came close – too very damn close – to killing the part of her which was outward and giving. That part softened and complemented the dominant side of her personality, she felt. The dominant side was smart, canny, logical, and – although she hated to admit this last, she knew it was true – sometimes uncharitable.
   She came to feel that if that outward and giving side of her nature were to lapse, it would be something like killing Ralph a second time. And so she came back to Haven. Came back to service.
   In a small town, even one such person can make a crucial difference in how things are, and in what jargonmeisters are pleased to call 'the quality of life', that person can become, in fact, something very like the heart of the town. Ruth had been well on her way to becoming such a valuable person when her husband died. Two years later – after what seemed in retrospect to be a long, bleak season in hell -she had rediscovered that valuable person, as one might rediscover something moderately wonderful in a dark attic corner – a piece of carnival glass, or a bentwood rocking chair that was still serviceable She held it up to the light, made sure it was unbroken, dusted it, polished it and then returned it to her life. Running for town constable had only been the first step. She could not have said why this seemed so right, but it did – it seemed the perfect way to at the same time remember Ralph and get on with the work of being herself. She thought she would probably find the job both boring and unpleasant … but that had also been true of canvassing for the Cancer Society and serving on the Textbook Selection Committee. Boring and unpleasant did not mean a task was unfruitful, a fact a lot of people seemed not to know, or to willfully ignore. And, she told herself, if she really didn't like it, there was no law to make her stand for re-election. She wanted to serve, not to martyr herself. If she hated it, she would let Mumphry or someone like him have a turn.
   But Ruth discovered she liked the job. Among other things, it gave her a chance to put a stop to some nasty goings-on that old John Harley had allowed to continue … and grow.
   Del Cullum, for instance. The Cullums had been in Haven since time out of mind, and Delbert – a thick-browed mechanic who worked at Elt Barker's Shell – was probably not the first of them to engage in sexual congress with his daughters. The Cullum line was incredibly twisted and interbred; there were at least two cataclysmically retarded Cullums in Pineland that Ruth knew about (according to town gossip, one had been born with webs between its fingers and toes).
   Incest is one of those time-honored country traditions of which the romantic poets rarely write. Its traditional aspect might have been the reason John Harley had never seriously tried to put an end to it, but the idea of 'tradition' in such a grotesque matter cut no ice with Ruth. She went out to the Cullum place. There was shouting. Albion Thurlow heard it clearly, although Albion lived a quarter of a mile down the road and was deaf in one ear. Following the shouting there was the sound of a chainsaw cranking up, followed by a gunshot and a scream. Then the chainsaw stopped and Albion, standing out in the middle of the road now, one hand shading his eyes as he looked toward the Cullum place, heard girls' voices (Delbert had been cursed with girls, six of them, and of course they literally were his curse, and he theirs) raised in cries of distress.
   Later, in the Haven Lunch, recounting his tale to a fascinated audience, old Albion said that he thought about going back into his house and calling the constable … and then he realized the constable had probably been the one fired the shot.
   Albion only stood by his mailbox instead, awaiting developments. About five minutes after the sound of the chainsaw died, Ruth McCausland drove back toward town. Five minutes after that, Del Cullurn drove by in his pickup. His washed-out wife was in the shotgun seat. A mattress and some cardboard boxes filled with clothes and dishes sat in the truck's bed. Delbert and Maggie Cullum were seen no more in Haven. The three Cullurn girls over eighteen went to work in Derry and in Bangor. The three minors were placed in foster homes. Most of Haven was glad to see the Cullum family broken up. They had festered out there at the end of the Ridge Road like a rash of poison toadstools growing in a dark cellar. Folks speculated about what Ruth had done and how she did it, but Ruth never told.
   Nor were the Cullums the only people Ruth McCausland, graying, trim, five feet five, and one hundred and twenty-five pounds, either ran out of town or had jailed over the years. There were the dope-smoking hippies that moved in a mile east of the old Frank Garrick farm, for instance. Those worthless, crab-raddled excuses for human beings came in one month and went out on the toe of Ruth's dainty size five shoe the next. Frank's niece, who wrote those books, probably smoked some rope from time to time, the town thought (the town thought that all writers must smoke dope, drink to excess, or spend their evenings having sex in odd positions), but she didn't sell it, and the hippies a mile down from her had been doing just that.
   Then there were the Jorgensons out on the Miller Bog Road. Benny Jorgenson died of a stroke, and Iva remarried three years later, becoming Iva Haney. Not long after, her seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter started having household mishaps. The boy fell getting out of the tub; the girl burned her arm on the stove. Then the boy slipped on the kitchen floor and broke his arm and the girl stepped on a rake half-buried in fallen leaves and the handle spanged her upside the head. Last but hardly least, the boy stumbled on the basement stairs while going after some kindling and fractured his skull. For a while it looked as if he wasn't going to pull through. It was a real run of bad luck, all right.
   Ruth decided there had been enough bad luck at the Haney place.
   She went out, driving her old Dodge Dart, and found Elmer Haney sitting on the porch, drinking a quart of Miller Lite, picking his nose and reading Soldier of Fortune magazine. Ruth suggested to Elmer Haney that he was bad luck around Iva's place, particularly for Bethie and Richard Jorgenson. She had noticed, she said, that some stepfathers were very bad luck for their stepchildren. She said she thought their luck might improve if Elmer Haney left town. Very soon. Before the end of the week.
   'You are not scaring me,' Elmer Haney said serenely. 'This is my place now. You want to get off it before I brain you with a stick of stovewood, you meddling bitch.'
   'Think it over,' Ruth said, smiling.
   Joe Paulson had been parked out by the mailbox at the time. He heard the whole thing – Elmer Haney's voice had been slightly raised, and there was nothing wrong with Joe's hearing. The way Joe told it down at the Haven Lunch later that day, he had been sorting mail while the two of them argued it up and down, and he couldn't seem to get it sorted just right until that conversation was over
   'Then how'dya know she was smiling?' Elt Barker asked.
   'Heard it in her voice,' Joe replied.
   Later that same day, Ruth had taken a ride up to the Derry state-police barracks and spoke with Butch 'Monster' Dugan. At six-feet-eight and two hundred and eighty pounds, Monster was the largest state cop in New England. Monster would have done anything short of murder (maybe that, too) for Ralph's widow.
   Two days later, they went back to the Haney place. It was Monster's day off and he was in civvies. Iva Haney was at work. Bethie was in school. Richard was, of course, still in the hospital. Elmer Haney, who was of course still unemployed, sat on the porch with a quart of Miller Lite in one hand and the latest issue of Hot Talk in the other. Ruth and Monster Dugan visited with him for an hour or so. During that hour, Elmer Haney had an extraordinary run of bad luck. Those who saw him leaving town that night said he looked like someone ran him through a potato-grader, but the only one with nerve enough to ask just what had happened was old John Harley himself.
   'Well, I swan,' Ruth said, smiling. 'It was the darnedest thing I ever saw. While we were trying to persuade him his stepkids might live luckier if he left, he decided he wanted to take a shower. Right while we were talking to him! And do you know, he fell down in the tub! Then he burned his arm on the stove and -slipped on the linoleum while he was backing away from it! Then he decided he wanted some fresh air and he went outside and stepped on the same rake little Bethie Jorgenson stepped on two months ago, and that was when he decided he ought to just pack up and go. I think he was right to do it, poor man. He'll live luckier himself somewhere else.

5

   She really was the person who came closest to being the heart of the town, and that may have been why she was one of the first to feel the change.
   It began with a headache and bad dreams.
   The headache came in with the month of July. Sometimes it was so faint she barely noticed it. Then, without warning, it would swell to a thick, throbbing beat behind her forehead. It was so bad on the night of July 4th that she called Christina McKeen, with whom she had planned to go see the fireworks in Bangor, and begged off.
   She went to bed that night with light still lingering in the sky outside, but it was dark before she was finally able to drift off to sleep. She supposed the heat and humidity were keeping her awake – they would keep people awake all over New England that night, she reckoned, and this wasn't the first night that had been like this. It had been one of the stillest, hottest summers in her memory.
   She dreamed of fireworks.
   Only these fireworks were not red and white and coruscating orange; they were all a dull and terrible green. They burst across the sky in starbursts of light … only instead of going out, the starfish shapes in the sky oozed together and became huge sores.
   Looking around, she saw people she had lived with all her life – Harleys and Crenshaws and Browns and Duplisseys and Andersons and Clarendons – staring up at the sky, their faces rotted swampfire green. They stood in front of the post office, the drugstore, the Junque-A-Torium, the Haven Lunch, the Northern National Bank; they stood in front of the school and the Shell station, eyes filled with green fire, mouths hanging stupidly agape.
   Their teeth were falling out.
   Justin Hurd turned to her and grinned, lips pulling back to show bare pink gums. In the crazy light of her dream, the saliva streaking those gums looked like snot.
   'Feel'th good,' Justin lisped, and she thought: Get out of here! They all have to get out of here right now! If they don't they are going to die the same way Ralph did!
   Now Justin was walking toward her and she saw with mounting horror that his face was shriveling and changing – it was becoming the bulging, stitched face of Lumpkin, her scarecrow doll. She looked around wildly and saw that they had all become dolls. Mabel Noyes turned and stared at her and Mabel's blue eyes were as calculating and avaricious as ever, but her lips were plumped up in the Cupid's-bow smile of a china doll.
   'Tommyknockerths,' Mabel lisped in a chiming, echoing voice, and Ruth woke up with a gasp, wide-eyed in the dark.
   Her headache was gone, at least for the time being. She came out of the dream directly into wakefulness with the thought: Ruth, you have to leave right now. Don't even take time to pack a bag – just pull on some clothes, get in the Dart, and GO!
   But she could not do that.
   Instead, she lay down again. After a long time, she slept.

6

   When the report came in that the Paulsons' house was burning, the Haven Volunteer Fire Department turned out . . . but they were surprisingly slow about it. Ruth was there ten minutes before the first pumper showed up. She would have torn Dick Allison's head off when he finally showed up, except she had known both of the Paulsons were dead … and, of course, Dick Allison had known, too. That was why he hadn't bothered to hurry, but that did not make Ruth feel a bit better. Quite the opposite.
   That knowing, now. What exactly was that?
   Ruth didn't know what it was.
   Even grasping the fact of the knowing was almost impossible. On the day the Paulsons' house burned, Ruth realized that she had been knowing things she had no right to know for a week or more. But it seemed so natural! It didn't come with trumpets and bells. The knowing was as much a part of her – of everyone in Haven now – as the beat of her heart. She no more thought about it than she thought about her heartbeat thudding softly and steadily in her ears.
   Only she had to think about it, didn't she? Because it was changing Haven … and the changes were not good.