7

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

8

   In the week between the fire at the Paulsons' and Hilly's SECOND GALA MAGIC SHOW, things began to go wrong for Ruth.
   The mail, now. That was one thing.
   She kept on getting bills and circulars and catalogues, but there were no letters. No personal mail of any kind. After three days of this, she took a stroll down to the post office. Nancy Voss only stood behind the counter like a lump, looking at her expressionlessly. By the time Ruth finished speaking, she thought she could actually feel the weight of the Voss woman's stare. It felt like two small dusty black stones were lying on her face.
   In the silence, she could hear something in the office humming and making spiderlike scritching noises. She had no idea what it
   (except it sorts the mail for her)
   might be but she didn't like the sound of it. And she didn't like being here with this woman, because she had been sleeping with Joe Paulson, and she had hated 'Becka, and
   Hot outside. Hotter still in here. Ruth felt sweat break out over her body.
   'Have to fill out a mail complaint form,' Nancy Voss said in a slow, inflectionless voice. She slid a white card across the counter. 'Here you go, Ruth.' Her lips pulled back in a cheerless grin.
   Ruth saw half the woman's teeth were gone.
   From behind them, in the silence: Scratch-scratch, scritchy-scratch, scratchscratch, scritchy-scratch.
   Ruth began to fill out the form. Sweat darkened big circles around the armpits of her dress. Outside, the sun beat steadily down on the postoffice parking lot. It was ninety in the shade, had to be, and not a breath of wind stirring, and Ruth knew the paving in that lot would be so soft that you could tear off a chunk with your fingers if you wanted and begin to chew it …
   State the Nature of Your Problem, the form read.
   I'm going crazy, she thought, that is the nature of my problem. Also, I am having my first menstrual period in three years.
   In a firm hand she began to write that she had gotten no first-class mail for a week and wished for the matter to be looked into.
   Scratch -scratch, scritchy -scratch.
   'What's that noise?' she asked, without looking up from the form. She was afraid to look up.
   'Mail-sorting gadget,' Nancy droned. 'I thought it up.' She paused. 'But you know that, don't you, Ruth?'
   'How could I know a thing like that unless you told me?' Ruth asked, and with a tremendous effort she made her voice pleasant. The pen she was using trembled and blotted the form – not that it mattered; her mail wasn't coming because Nancy Voss was throwing it out. That was part of the knowing, too. But Ruth was tough; her face remained clear and firm. She met Nancy's eyes directly, although she was afraid of that dusty black gaze, afraid of its weight.
   Go on and speak up, Ruth's gaze said. I am not afraid of the likes of YOU. Speak up … but if you expect me to scutter away, squeaking like a mouse, get ready for a surprise.
   Nancy's gaze wavered and dropped. She turned away. 'Call me when you get the card filled out,' she said. 'I've got too much work to do to just stand around shooting the breeze. Since Joe died, the work's piled up out of all season. That's probably why your mail isn't
   (GET OUT OF TOWN YOU BITCH GET OUT WHILE WELL STILL LET YOU GO)
   coming just on time, Missus McCausland.'
   'Do you think so?' Keeping her voice light and pleasant now required a superhuman effort. Nancy's last thought had slammed into her like an uppercut. It had been as bright and clear as a lightning stroke. She looked down at the complaint form and saw a large black
   (tumor)
   blot spreading over it. She crumpled it and threw it away.
   Nancy hadn't answered her question. Was pretending she hadn't heard, Ruth thought. But she had heard, all right.
   Scritch -scritch -scratch.
   The door opened behind her. She turned and saw Bobbi Anderson come in.
   'Hello, Bobbi,' she said.
   'Hello, Ruth.'
   (go on she's right get out while you still can while you're still allowed please Ruth I we most of us bear you no ill will)
   'Are you working on a new novel, Bobbi?' Ruth could now barely keep the tremor out of her voice. Hearing thoughts was bad – it made you think you were insane and hallucinating it. Hearing such a thing from Bobbi Anderson
   (while you're still allowed)
   of all people, Bobbi Anderson who was just about the kindest
   I didn't hear anything like that, she thought, and grasped the idea with a sort of tired eagerness. I was mistaken, that's all.
   Bobbi opened her post-box and took out a bundle of mail. She looked at her and smiled. Ruth saw she had lost a molar on the bottom left and a canine on the top right. 'Better go now, Ruth,' she said gently. 'Just get in your car and go. Don't you think so?'
   Then she felt herself steady – in spite of her fear and her throbbing head, she steadied.
   'Never,' she said. 'This is my town. And if you know what's going on, tell the others that know what's going on not to push me. I have friends outside of Haven, friends that will listen to me seriously no matter how crazy what I'm saying might sound. They would listen for my late husband's sake, if not for my own. As for you, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. This is your town, too. It used to be, anyway.'
   For a moment she thought Bobbi looked confused and a little ashamed. Then she smiled sunnily, and there was something in that girlish, gap-toothed grin that scared Ruth more than anything else. It was no more human than a trout's grin. She saw Bobbi in this woman's eyes, and had certainly felt her in her thoughts … but there was nothing of Bobbi in the grin.
   'Whatever you want, Ruth,' she said. 'Everyone in Haven loves you, you know. I think in a week or two … three, at the outside … you'll stop fighting. I just thought I'd offer you the option. If you decide to stay, though, that's fine. In a little while you'll be … just fine.'

9

   She stopped in Cooder's for Tampax. There were none. No Tampax, no Modess, no Sta-Free maxis or minis, no generic pads or tampons.
   A hand-lettered sign read: NEW SHIPMENT ARRIVES TOMORROW. SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE.

10

   On July 15th, a Friday, she began having problems with her office phone.
   In the morning it was just an annoyingly loud hum which she and the person she was talking to had to shout over. By noon a crackling noise had been added. By two P.m. it had gotten so bad that the phone was useless.
   When she got home she found that the phone there wasn't noisy at all. It was just smoothly and completely dead. She went next door to the Fannins' to call the phone company's repair number. Wendy Fannin was making bread in her kitchen, kneading one batch of dough while her mixer worked a second batch.
   Ruth saw with a weary lack of surprise that the mixer wasn't plugged into the wall but into what looked like an electronic game with its cover off. It was generating a strong glow as Wendy mixed her bread.
   'Sure, go ahead and use the phone,' Wendy said. 'You know
   (get out Ruth get out of Haven)
   where it is, don't you?'
   'Yes,' she said. She started toward the hall, then paused. 'I stopped at Cooder's market. I needed sanitary napkins, but they're all out.'
   'I know.' Wendy smiled, showing three gaps in a smile which had been flawless a week before. 'I got the second-to-last box. It will be over soon. We'll “become” a little more and that part will end.'
   'Is that so?' Ruth asked.
   'Oh, yes,' Wendy said, and turned back to her bread.
   The Fannins' phone was working just fine. Ruth was not surprised. The office girl at New England Contel said they would send a man right out. Ruth thanked her, and on her way out she thanked Wendy Fannin.
   'Sure,' Wendy said, smiling. 'Whatever you want, Ruth. Everyone in Haven loves you, you know.'
   Ruth shuddered in spite of the heat.
   The telephone repair crew came and did something to the connection on the side of Ruth's house. Then they ran a test. The phone worked perfectly. They drove away. An hour later, the phone stopped working again.
   On the street that evening, she felt a rising whisper of voices in her brain -thoughts as light as leaves kicked into a momentary rustle by a breath of October wind.
   (our Ruth we love you all Haven loves)
   (but go if you go or change)
   (if you stay no one wants to hurt you Ruth so get out or stay)
   (yes get out or stay but leave us)
   (yes leave us alone Ruth don't interfere let us be let us)
   (be be 'become' yes let us 'become' let us alone to 'become')
   She walked slowly, head throbbing with voices.
   She glanced into the Haven Lunch. Beach Jernigan, the short-order cook, raised a hand to her. Ruth raised one in return. She saw Beach's mouth move, clearly forming the words There she goes. Several men at the counter turned around and waved. They smiled. She saw empty gaps where teeth had been not long ago. She passed Cooder's market. She passed the United Methodist church. Ahead of her now was the town hall with its square brick clock tower. The hands of the clock stood at 7:15 -7:15 of a summer night, and all over Haven men would be opening cold beers and turning radios to the voice of Joe Costiglione and the sound of Red Sox Warmup. She could see Bobby Tremain and Stephanie Colson walking slowly toward the edge of town along Route 9, hand in hand. They had been going together for four years and it really was a wonder Stephanie wasn't pregnant yet, Ruth thought.
   Just a July evening with twilight coming on – everything normal.
   Nothing was normal.
   Hilly Brown and Barney Applegate came out of the library, Hilly's little brother David trailing behind them like the tail of a kite. She asked to see what books the boys had gotten and they showed her readily enough. Only in little David Brown's eyes had she seen a hesitant acknowledgment of the panic she felt … and felt it in his mind. That she felt his fear and did nothing about it was the main reason she drove herself so hard when the little boy disappeared two days later. Someone else might have justified it, might have said: Look, I had enough on my own plate without worrying about what was dished onto David Brown's. But she wasn't the sort of woman who could find any comfort in such loud defensiveness. She had felt the boy's low terror. Worse, she had felt his resignation – his sureness that nothing could stop events – that they would simply wind along their preordained course from bad to worse. And as if to prove him right, hey, presto! David was gone. And like the boy's grandfather, Ruth shouldered her share of the guilt.
   At the town hall she turned and walked back to her house, keeping her face pleasant in spite of her drilling headache, in spite of her dismay. The thoughts swirled and rustled and danced.
   (love you Ruth)
   (we can wait Ruth)
   (shhhh shhhh go to sleep)
   (yes go to sleep and dream)
   (dream of things dream of ways)
   (to 'become' ways to 'become' ways to)
   She went into her house and locked the door behind her and went upstairs and pressed her face into her pillow.
   Dream of ways to 'become.'
   Oh God she wished she knew exactly what that meant.
   If you go you go if you stay you change.
   She wished she knew because, whatever it meant, whether she wanted it or not, it was happening to her. No matter how much she resisted, she was also 'becoming.'
   (yes Ruth yes)
   (sleep … dream … think. 'become')
   (yes Ruth yes)
   These thoughts, rustling and alien, followed her down into sleep and then funneled away into darkness. She lay crosswise on the big bed, fully dressed, and slept deeply.
   When she woke, her body was stiff but her mind felt clear and refreshed. Her headache had blown away like smoke. Her period, so oddly undignified and shameful after she had thought that was finally over for good, had stopped. For the first time in almost two weeks she felt herself. She would have a long cool shower and then set about getting to the bottom of this. If what it took was outside help, okay. If she had to spend a few days or a few weeks with people thinking she was off her rocker, so be it. She had spent her life building a reputation for sanity and trustworthiness. And what good would such a reputation be if it couldn't convince people to take you seriously when you sounded nuts?
   As she began to take off her sleep-rumpled dress, her fingers suddenly froze on the buttons.
   Her tongue had found an empty place in the line of her bottom teeth – there was a dull, distant pain there. Her eyes dropped to the coverlet of the bed. On it, where her head had been, she saw the tooth that had fallen out in the night. Suddenly nothing seemed simple anymore – nothing at all.
   Ruth was aware that her headache had returned.
   There was even hotter weather in store for Haven – in August there would be a week when temperatures would crack the hundred-degree mark every single day -but in the meantime, the July stretch of hot-and-muggy which ran from the twelfth through the nineteenth was more than enough for everyone in town, thank you very much.
   The streets shimmered. The leaves on the trees hung limp and dusty. Sounds carried in the still air; Bobbi Anderson's old truck, now rebuilt into a digging machine, could be heard clearly in Haven Village five miles away for most of that eight-day hot spell. People knew something important was going on out there at the old Frank Garrick place – important for the whole town – but no one mentioned it out loud, any more than they mentioned the fact that it had driven Justin Hurd, Bobbi's nearest neighbor, quite mad. Justin was building things – it was part of his 'becoming' – but because he had gone crazy, some of the stuff he built was potentially dangerous. One of them was a thing that set up harmonic waves in the earth's crust – waves which could possibly trigger an earthquake big enough to tear the state wide open and send the eastern half sliding into the Atlantic.
   Justin had made this harmonic-wave machine to get the goddam rabbits and woodchucks out of their burrows. They were eating all his fucking lettuces. I'll shake the little bastards out, he thought.
   Beach Jernigan went out to Justin's place one day while Justin was out harrowing up the crops in his west field (he plowed under twelve acres of corn that day, sweating profusely, lips pulled back in a constant maniacal grimace as he worried about saving three rows of lettuces) and dismantled the gadget, which consisted of cannibalized stereo components. When Justin returned, he would find his gadget gone, perhaps assume the goddam chucks and rabbits had stolen it, and maybe set about rebuilding it … in which case Beach or someone else would dismantle it again. Or, maybe, if they were lucky, he would feel called upon to build something less dangerous.
   The sun rose each day in a sky the color of pallid china and then seemed to hang at the roof of the world. Behind the Haven Lunch, a line of dogs lay in the scant shade of the overhanging eave, panting, even too hot to scratch fleas. The streets were mostly deserted. Every now and then someone would travel through Haven on his way up to or back from Derry and Bangor. Not too many, though, because the turnpike was so much quicker.
   Those who did pass through noticed an odd and sudden improvement in radio reception – one startled truck-driver, on Route 9 because he had gotten bored with I-95 had decided a change would be worth the extra hour on the road, tuned in a rock station which turned out to be broadcasting from Chicago. Two old folks bound for Bar Harbor found a classical music station from Florida. This eerie, bell-clear reception faded when they were clear of Haven again.
   Some through travelers experienced more unpleasant side effects: headaches and nausea, mostly – sometimes severe nausea. This was most commonly blamed on road-food gone punky in the heat.
   A little boy from Quebec, headed for Old Orchard Beach with his parents, lost four baby teeth in the ten minutes it took for the family station wagon to pass from one side of Haven to the other. The little boy's mother swore in French that she had never seen anything like it in her life. That night, in an Old Orchard Beach motel, the tooth fairy took them (and only one had been loose, the little boy's mother declared) and replaced them with a dollar.
   A mathematician from MIT, headed up to UMO for a two-day conference on semi-logical numbers, suddenly realized that he was on the verge of grasping an entirely new way of looking at mathematics and mathematical philosophy. His face went gray, his perspiring skin suddenly cold as he grasped with perfect clarity how such a concept could quickly produce proof that every even number over two is the sum of two prime numbers; how the concept could be used to trisect the angle; how it could
   He pulled over, scrambled out of his car, and threw up in the ditch. He stood trembling and weak-kneed over the mess (which contained one of his canines, although he was just then much too excited to realize he'd lost a tooth), his fingers itching to hold a piece of chalk, to cover a blackboard with sines and cosines. Visions of the Nobel Prize jittered in his overheated brain. He threw himself back into his car and began to drive toward Orono again, punching his rusty Subaru up to eighty. But by the time he got to Hampden, his glorious vision had clouded over, and by the time he reached Orono there was nothing left but a glimmer. He supposed it had been a momentary heat-stroke. Only the vomiting had been real; that he could smell on his clothes. During the first day of the conference he was pale and silent, offering little, mourning his glorious, ephemeral vision.
   That was also the morning Mabel Noyes became an unperson while puttering in the basement of the Junque-A-Torium. It would not have been correct to say that she 'killed herself by accident' or 'died by misadventure.' Neither of those phrases exactly explained what had happened to her. Mabel didn't put a bullet in her head while cleaning a gun or stick a finger in an electrical socket; she simply collapsed her own molecules and winked out of existence. It was quick and not a bit messy. There was a flash of blue light and she was gone. Nothing was left but one smoldering bra-strap and a gadget that looked like a silver polisher. That, in fact, was exactly what the gadget was supposed to be. Mabel thought it would make a dirty, tiresome job much easier and wondered why she had never made such a gadget before – or why, for goodness' sake, there weren't places where you could buy them, since it was a perfectly easy thing to make and those gooks over there in Korea could probably turn them out by the ton. God knew the Korea gooks turned enough other things out by the ton, although she supposed she ought to just be grateful, since the Jap gooks had apparently gotten too uppity to do little stuff. She had begun to see all sorts of things she could make from the used appliances in her shop. Wonderful things. She kept looking in the catalogues and kept being amazed to find they weren't there. My God, she thought, I think I am going to be rich! Only she had made some sort of cross-connection on the silver polisher, and quarked off into the Twilight Zone in just under .0006 of a nanosecond.
   She was not, in truth, greatly missed in Haven.
   The town lay limp at the bottom of a stagnant bowl of air. From the woods behind the Garrick place came the sounds of engines as Bobbi and Gardener went on digging.
   Otherwise, the whole town seemed to doze.

12

   Ruth wasn't dozing that afternoon.
   She was thinking about those sounds coming from Bobbi Anderson's place (she, at least, no longer thought of it as the old Garrick farm), and about Bobbi Anderson herself.
   There was a communal well of knowledge in town now, a pool of thought they all shared. A month ago Ruth would have found such an idea insane. Now it was undeniable. Like the rising, whispering voices, the knowledge was there.
   Part of it was knowing that Bobbi had started all this.
   It had been inadvertent, but she had set it in motion. Now she and her friend (the friend was a perfect blank to Ruth; she knew about him only because she had seen him out there, sitting on the porch with Bobbi, evenings) were working twelve and fourteen hours a day, making it worse. She didn't think the friend had any real idea what he was doing. He was somehow outside of the communal net.
   How were they making it worse?
   She didn't know, didn't even know for sure what they were doing. That was also blocked, not just from Ruth but from everyone in Haven. They would know in time; they would not come to knowledge but become to it, as the town-wide menstruation of every female between the ages of about eight and sixty had stopped at about the same time. It had something to do with digging; that was all Ruth could tell. One afternoon she napped lightly and dreamed that Bobbi and her friend from Troy were unearthing a great silver cylinder some two hundred feet across. As they uncovered more and more of it, she could see a much smaller cylinder, this one steel, perhaps ten feet across and five feet high, protruding, nipple-like, from the center of the thing. Etched on this nipple was a ± symbol, and as she awoke, Ruth understood: she had dreamed of a gigantic alkaline battery entombed in the earth and granite of the land behind Bobbi's house, a battery bigger than Frank Spruce's dairy barn.
   Ruth knew that, whatever Bobbi and her friend were digging up in the woods, it certainly wasn't a gigantic EverReady Long-Life D-Cell battery. Except … in a way, she thought that was exactly what it was. Bobbi had discovered some huge power source and had become its prisoner. That same force was simultaneously galvanizing and imprisoning the whole town. And it was growing steadily stronger.
   Her mind whispered: You've got to let it go. You've just got to stand back and let it run its course. They have loved you, Ruth; that much is true. You hear their voices in your head like a rising wind lifting October leaves, now not just puffing them and letting them drop but whipping them into a cyclone; you hear their mind-voices, and although they are sometimes garbled and confused, I don't think they can lie. And when these rising voices say they have loved you, still do love you, they are telling the truth. But if you meddle into what's going on here, I think they'll kill you, Ruth. Not Bobbi's friend – he's immune, somehow. He doesn't hear voices. He doesn't 'become.' Except drunk. That's what Bobbi's voice says: 'Gard becomes drunk.' But as for the rest of them … if you meddle into their business … they'll kill you, Ruth. Gently. With love. So just stand back. Let it happen.
   But if she did, her town would be destroyed … not changed, the way its name had been changed again and again, not hurt, as that sweet-talking preacher had hurt it, but destroyed. And she would be destroyed with it, because the force was already nibbling away at the core of her. She felt it.
   All right, then … what do you do?
   For the time being, nothing. Things might get better on their own. In the meantime, was there any way she could guard her thoughts?
   She began to experiment with tongue-twisters: She sells seashells down by the seashore. Betty Bitter bought some butter. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. With a little practice she found she could keep one of them playing constantly in the back of her mind. She walked downtown to the market, got some ground meat and two ears of fresh corn for her dinner, and spoke pleasantly with Madge Tilletts at the checkout counter and Dave Rutledge, who was sitting in his accustomed place at the front of the store, caning a chair slowly with his old, bunched, and arthritic hands. Except old Dave wasn't looking as old as he used to these days. Nowhere near.
   Both of them looked at her. wary, surprised puzzled.
   They hear me … but not very well. I'm jamming them! I really am!
   She didn't know how successfully, and it wouldn't do to bank on her ability to do it – but it worked. That didn't mean they couldn't read her if several of them linked up and worked together at picking her brain. She sensed that might be possible. But it was something, at least, one arrow in a previously empty quiver.
   That night, Saturday night, she decided she would wait until Tuesday noon -roughly sixty hours. If things continued to deteriorate, she would go to the state-police barracks in Derry, seek out some of her husband's old friends – Monster Dugan for a start – and tell them what was going on forty miles or so downstate on Route 9. It was maybe not the best of plans, but it would have to do. Ruth McCausland fell asleep. And dreamed of batteries in the earth.

Chapter 6. Ruth McCausland, Concluded

1

   The disappearance of David Brown rendered Ruth's plan obsolete. After David disappeared, she found herself unable to leave town. Because David was gone and they all knew it … but they also knew that David was somehow still in Haven.
   Always during the becoming came a time which might have been called 'the dance of untruth.' For Haven, this time commenced with the disappearance of David Brown and unfolded itself during the subsequent search.
   Ruth was just sitting down to the local news when the phone rang. Marie Brown was hysterical, barely coherent.
   'Calm down, Marie,' Ruth said, and thought it was good she had eaten an early supper. She might not get another chance to eat for quite a while. At first the only clear fact she seemed able to get from Marie was that her boy David was in some kind of trouble, trouble that had started at a back yard magic show, and Hilly had gotten hysterical
   'Put Bryant on,' Ruth said.
   'But you'll come, won't you?' Marie wept. 'Please, Ruth, before dark. We can still find him, I know we can.'
   'Of course I'll come,' Ruth said. 'Now put Bryant on.'
   Bryant was dazed but able to give a clearer picture of what had happened. It still sounded crazy, but then, what else was new in Haven these days? After the magic show, the audience had wandered away, leaving Hilly and David to clean up. Now David was gone. Hilly had fainted, and now had no memory of what had happened that afternoon at all. All he knew for sure was that when he saw David, he had to give him all the G.I. Joes. But he didn't remember why.
   'You better come over quick as you can,' Bryant said.
   Going out, she paused for a moment on her way to her Dart and looked at Haven Village's main street with real hate. What have you done now? she thought. Goddam you, what have you done now?

2

   With only two hours of good daylight left, Ruth wasted no time. She gathered Bryant, Ev Hillman, John Golden from just down the road, and Henry Applegate, Barney's father, in the Browns' back yard. Marie wanted to join the search party, but Ruth insisted she stay with Hilly. In her current frame of mind, Marie would be more hindrance than help. They had already searched, of course, but they had gone at it in a distracted, half-assed way. Eventually, as the boy's parents became convinced that David must have wandered across the road and into the woods, they had really ceased to search at all, although they had continued to move aimlessly around.
   Ruth got some from what they said; some from the oddly distracted, oddly frightened way they looked; most from their minds.
   Their two minds: the human one and the alien one. Always there came a point where the becoming might degenerate into madness – the madness of schizophrenia as the target minds tried to fight the alien group mind slowly welding them together … and then eclipsing them. This was the time of necessary acceptance. Thus, it was the time of the dance of untruth.
   Mabel Noyes might have set it going, but she was not loved enough to make people dance. The Hillmans and the Browns were. They went far back in Haven's history, were well-loved and well-respected.
   And, of course, David Brown was only a little boy.
   The human net-mind, its 'Ruth-mind,' one might say, thought: He could have wandered into the high grass of the Browns' back field and fallen asleep. More likely than Marie's idea that he went into the woods – he'd have to cross the road to do that, and he was well-behaved. Marie and Bryant both say so. More important, so do the others. He'd been told again and again and again that he was never to cross the road without a grownup, so the woods don't seem likely.
   'We're going to cover the lawn and back field section by section,' Ruth said. 'And we're not just going to walk around; we're going to look.'
   'But if we don't find him?' Bryant's eyes were scared and pleading. 'If we don't find him, Ruth?'
   She didn't really have to tell him; she only had to think it at him. If they didn't find David quickly, she would begin making calls. There would be a much larger search party – men with lights and bullhorns moving through the woods. If David wasn't found by morning, she would call Orval Davidson up in Unity and have him bring his bloodhounds. This was a familiar enough procedure to most of them. They knew about search parties, and most had been on them before; they were common enough during hunting season, when the woods filled up with out-of-staters carrying their heavy-caliber weapons and wearing their new orange flannel duds from L. L. Bean's. Usually these lost were found alive, suffering from nothing but mild exposure and severe embarrassment.
   But sometimes they found them dead.
   And sometimes they never found them at all.
   They would not find David Brown, and they knew it long before the search began. Their minds had netted together as soon as Ruth arrived. This was an act of instinct as involuntary as a blink. They linked minds and searched for
   David's. Their mental voices united in a chorus so strong that if David had been in a radius of seventy miles, he would have clapped his hands to his head and screamed in pain. He would have heard and known they were looking for him at fives times that distance.
   No, David Brown was not lost. He was just … not-there.
   But because it was the Tommyknocker-mind which knew this, and because they still thought of themselves as 'human beings,' they would begin the dance of untruth.
   The becoming would demand many lies.
   This one, the one they told themselves, the one that insisted they were really the same as ever, was the most important lie of all.
   They all knew that, too. Even Ruth McCausland.

3

   By eight-thirty, with dusk growing too thick to be much different from night, the five searchers had grown to a dozen. The news traveled quickly – a little too quickly to be normal. They covered all the yards and fields on the Browns' side, beginning at Hilly's stage (Ruth herself had crawled under there with a powerful flashlight, thinking that if David Brown was anywhere close by it should be here, fast asleep -but there was only flattened grass and a queer electrical smell that made her wrinkle her nose) and expanding the hunt outward in a beam-shape from there.
   'You think he's in the woods, Ruth?' Casey Tremain asked.
   'He must be,' she answered tiredly. Her head ached again. David was
   (not-there)
   no more in the woods than the President of the United States was. All the same…
   In the back of her mind, tongue-twisters chased each other as restlessly as squirrels running on wire exercise wheels.
   The dusk was not so thick she couldn't see Bryant Brown put a hand to his face and turn away from the others. There was a moment of awkward silence which Ruth finally broke.
   'We need more men.'
   'State cops, Ruth?' Casey asked.
   She saw them all looking at her, their faces still and sober.
   (no Ruth no)
   (outsiders no outsiders we'll take care)
   (take care of this business we don't need outsiders while)
   (while we shed our old skins put on our new skins while)
   (we 'become')
   (if he's in the woods we'll hear him he'll call)
   (call with his mind)
   (no outsiders Ruth shhhh shhhh for your life Ruth we)
   (we all love you but no outsiders)
   These voices, rising in her mind, rising in the still, humid dark: she looked and saw only dark shapes and white faces, shapes and faces that for a moment barely seemed human. How many of you still have your teeth? Ruth McCausland thought hysterically.
   She opened her mouth, thinking she might scream, but her voice sounded – at least to her own ears – normal and natural. In her mind, the tongue-twisters
   (pretty Patsy picked some Betty Bitter bought some)
   turned faster than ever.
   'I don't think we need them just now, Casey, do you?'
   Casey looked at her, a little puzzled.
   'Well, I guess that'd be up to you, Ruth.'
   'Fine,' she said. 'Henry … John … you others. Make some calls. I want fifty woods-wise men and women here before we go in. Everyone who shows up at the Browns' has got to have a flashlight with him or he's not going near those woods. We've got a little boy lost; we don't need to add any grown men or women.'
   As she spoke, authority grew in her voice; the shaky fear lessened. They looked at her respectfully.
   'I'll call Adley McKeen and Dick Allison. Bryant, go back and tell Marie to put on lots of coffee. It's going to be a long night.'
   They moved off in different directions, the men who had calls to make headed in the direction of Henry Applegate's house. The Browns' was nearer, but the situation had become worse and none of them wanted to go there just now. Not while Bryant was telling his wife that Ruth McCausland had decided their four-year-old son was probably lost in the
   (not-there)
   big woods after all.
   Ruth was overwhelmed with weariness. She wished she could believe she was just going mad; if she could believe that, everything would be easier.
   'Ruth?'
   She looked up. Ev Hillman was standing there, his thin white hair flying around his skull. He looked troubled and afraid.
   'Hilly's doped off again. His eyes are open, but -' He shrugged.
   'I'm very sorry,' Ruth said.
   'I'm takin' him to Derry. Bryant 'n' Marie want to stay here, o' course.'
   'Why not Dr Warwick to start with?'
   'Derry seems a better idea, that's all.' Ev looked at Ruth unwinkingly. His eyes were old man's eyes, red-rimmed, rheumy, their blue faded to something which was almost no color at all. Faded but not stupid. And Ruth suddenly realized, with a wallop of excitement that nearly rocked her head back on her neck, that she could barely read him at all! Whatever was happening here in Haven, Ev, like Bobbi's friend, was exempt. It was going on around him, and he knew about it – some – but he was not a part of it.
   She felt an excitement which was followed by bitter envy.
   'I think he'll be better off out of town. Don't you, Ruthie?'
   'Yes,' she said slowly, thinking of those rising voices, thinking for the last time of how David was not-there and then pushing the lunatic idea away forever. Of course he was. Were they not human? They were. Were. But…
   'Yes, I suppose he will.'
   'You could come with us, Ruthie.'
   She looked at him for a long time. 'Did Hilly do something, Ev? I see his name in your head. I can't see anything else – just that. Winking on and off like a neon sign.'
   He looked at her, seemingly unsurprised by her tacit admission that she -sensible Ruth McCausland – was either reading his mind or believed she was.
   'Maybe. He acts like he did. This … this half-swoon he's in … if that's what it is … could be he did something he's sorry for now. If so, it wasn't his fault, Ruthie. Whatever's going on here in Haven … that was what really did it.'
   A screen door banged. She looked over toward the Applegates' and saw several of the men on their way back.
   Ev glanced around and then looked back at Ruth.
   'Come with us, Ruth.'
   'And leave my town? Ev, I can't.'
   'All right. If Hilly should remember .
   'Get in touch with me,' she said.
   'If I can,' Ev muttered. 'They can make it tough, Ruthie.'
   'Yes,' Ruth said. 'I know they can.'
   'They're coming, Ruth,' Henry Applegate said, and fixed Ev Hillman with a cold, appraising look. 'Lots of good folks.'
   'Fine,' Ruth said.
   Ev looked unwinkingly back at Applegate for a moment and then moved away. An hour or so later, while Ruth was organizing the searchers and getting them ready for their first sweep, she saw Ev's old Valiant back down the Browns' driveway and turn toward Bangor. A small, dark shape – Hilly – was propped up in the passenger seat like a department-store mannequin.
   Good luck, you two, Ruth thought. She wished – achingly! – that she was also on her way out of this feverish nightmare.
   When the old man's car disappeared over the first hill, Ruth looked around and saw some twenty-five men and half a dozen women, some on this side of the road, some on the other. They were all standing motionless, simply watching
   (loving)
   her. Again she thought their shapes were changing, twisting, becoming inhuman; they were 'becoming,' all right, they were becoming something she didn't even dare think of … and so was she.
   'What are you gawking at?' she called out, too shrilly. 'Come on! Let's try to find David Brown.!'

4

   They didn't find him that night, nor on Monday, which was a hot white beating silence. Bobbi Anderson and her friend were part of the search; the roar of the digging machinery behind the old Garrick farm had stopped for a while. The friend, Gardener, looked pale and ill and hungover. Ruth doubted if he'd make it through the day when she first saw him. If he showed signs of dropping out of his place in the sweep, leaving a hole which could conceivably have caused them to overlook the lost boy, Ruth would send him back to Bobbi's right away … but he kept up, hungover or not.
   By then, Ruth herself had already suffered a minor collapse, laboring under the double strain of trying to find David and resist the creeping changes in her own mind.
   She had snatched two hours of uneasy sleep before dawn on Monday morning, then went back out, drinking cup after cup of coffee and bumming more and more cigarettes. There was no question in her mind of bringing in outside help. If she did, the outsiders would become aware very quickly – within hours, she thought – that Haven had changed its name to Weirdsville. The Haven lifestyle – so to speak -rather than the missing boy would rapidly become the source of their attention. And then David would be lost for good.
   The heat continued long after sundown. There was distant thunder but no breeze, no rain. Heat lightning flickered. In the thickets and blowdowns and choked second growth, mosquitoes hummed and buzzed. Branches crackled. Men cursed as they stumbled through wet places or clambered over deadfalls. Flashlight beams zigzagged aimlessly. There was a sense of urgency but not of cooperation; there were, in fact, several fistfights before Monday midnight. Mental communication had not fostered a sense of peace and harmony in Haven; in fact, it seemed to have done exactly the opposite. Ruth kept them moving as best she could.
   Then, shortly after midnight – early Tuesday morning, that would have been – the world simply swam away from her. It went fast, like a big fish that looks lazy until it gives a sudden powerful flick of its tail and disappears. She saw the flashlight tumble out of her fingers. It was like watching something happen in a movie. She felt the hot sweat on her cheeks and forehead suddenly turn chilly. The increasingly vicious headache that had racked her all day broke with a sudden painless pop. She heard this, as if, in the center of her brain, someone had pulled the string on a noisemaker. For a moment she could actually see brightly colored crepe streamers drifting down through the twisted gray channels of her cerebellum. Then her knees buckled. Ruth fell forward into a tangle of shrubs. She could see thorns in the slanted glow of her flashlight, long and cruel-looking, but the bushes felt as comfy as goosedown pillows.
   She tried to call out and could not.
   They heard anyway.
   Feet approaching. Beams crissing and crossing. Someone
   (Jud Tarkington)
   bumped into someone else
   (Hank Buck)
   and a momentary hateful exchange flared between them
   (you stay out of my way, strawfoot)
   (I'll thump you with this light Buck swear to God I will)
   then the thoughts focused on her with real and undeniable
   (we all love you Ruth)
   sweetness – but oh, it was a grasping sweetness, and it frightened her. Hands touched her, turned her over, and
   (we all love you and we'll help you 'become'),
   lifted her gently.
   (And I love you, too … now please, find him. Concentrate on that, concentrate on David Brown. Don't fight, don't argue.)
   (we all love you Ruth … )
   She saw that some of them were weeping, just as she saw (although she didn't want to) that others were snarling, lifting and dropping their lips, then lifting them again, like dogs about to fight.

5

   Ad McKeen took her home and Hazel McCready put her to bed. She drifted off into wild, confused dreams. The only one she could remember when she woke up Tuesday morning was an image of David Brown gasping out the last of his life in an almost airless void – he was lying on black earth beneath a black sky filled with glaring stars, earth that was hard and parched and cracked. She saw blood burst from the membranes of his mouth and nose, saw his eyes burst, and that was when she came awake, sitting up in bed, gasping.
   She called the town hall. Hazel answered. Just about every other ablebodied man and woman in town was out in the woods, Hazel said, searching. But if they didn't find him by tomorrow … Hazel didn't finish.
   Ruth rejoined the search, which had now moved ten miles into the woods, at ten o'clock on Tuesday morning.
   Newt Berringer took a look at her and said, 'You got
   (no business being out, Ruth)
   land you know it,' he finished aloud.
   'It is my business, Newt,' she said with uncharacteristic curtness. 'Now leave me alone to get about it.'
   She stayed with it all that long, sweltering afternoon, calling until she was too hoarse to speak. When twilight began to come down again, she allowed Beach Jernigan to ferry her back to town. There was something under a tarp in the back of Beach's truck. She had no idea what it was, and didn't want to know. She wanted desperately to stay in the woods, but her strength was failing and she was afraid that if she collapsed again, they wouldn't let her come back. She would force herself to eat, then sleep six hours or so.
   She made herself a ham sandwich and passed up the coffee she really wanted for a glass of milk. She went up to the schoolroom, sat down, and put her small meal on her desk. She sat looking at her dolls. They looked back at her with their glassy eyes.
   No more laughing, no more fun, she thought. Quaker meeting has begun. If you show your teeth or tongue …
   The thought drifted away.
   She blinked – not awake, precisely, but back to reality – sometime later and looked at her watch. Her eyes widened. She had brought her small meal up here at eight-thirty. There they still were, near at hand, but it was now a quarter past eleven.
   And – and some of the dolls had been moved around.
   The German boy in his alpine shorts and lederhosen was leaning against the Effanbee lady-doll instead of sitting between the Japanese doll in her kimono and the Indian doll in her sari. Ruth got up, her heart beating too fast and too hard. The Hopi kachina doll was sitting on the lap of a burlap Haitian vudun doll with white crosses for eyes. And the Russian moss-man was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, his head wrenched to one side like the head of a gallows-corpse.
   Who's been moving my dolls around? Who's been in here?
   She looked around wildly and for a moment her frightened, confused mind fully expected to see the child-beater Elmer Haney standing in the shadowy space of the big upstairs room that had been Ralph's study, smiling his sunken, stupid grin. I told you, woman: you are nothing but a meddling cunt.
   Nothing. No one.
   Who's been in here? Who's been moving
   We moved ourselves, dear.
   A sly, tittering voice.
   One hand went to her mouth. Her eyes widened. And then she saw the jagged letters sprawling and lurching across the blackboard. They had been made with so much force that the chalk had broken several times; untidy chunks of it lay in the chalk-gutter.
   DAVID BROWN IS ON ALTAIR 4
   What? What? What does that -
   It means he's gone too far, the kachina doll said, and suddenly green light seemed to sweat out of its cottonwood pores. As she looked at it, numb with terror, its wooden face split open in a sinister, yawning grin. A dead cricket fell out of it and struck the floor with a dry desert click. Gone too far, too far, too far …
   No, I don't believe that! Ruth screamed.
   The whole town, Ruth … gone too far … too far … too far …
   No!
   Lost … lost …
   The eyes of the Greiner papier mache doll suddenly filled with that liquid green fire. You're lost, too, it said. You're just as crazy as the rest now. David Brown's just an excuse to stay here …
   No
   But all of her dolls were stirring now, that green fire moving from one to the other until her schoolroom flared with that light. It was waxing and waning, and she thought with sick horror that it was like being inside some ghastly emerald heart.
   They stared at her with their glazey eyes and at last she understood why the dolls had frightened Edwina Thurlow so badly.
   Now it was the voices of her dolls rising in that autumn-leafy swirl, whispering slyly, rattling among themselves, rattling to her … but these were the voices of the town, too, and Ruth McCausland knew it.
   She thought they were perhaps the last of the town's sanity … and of her own.
   Something has to be done, Ruth. It was the china bisque doll, fire dripping from its mouth; it was the voice of Beach Jernigan.
   Have to warn someone. It was the French poupee with its rubbery guttapercha body; it was the voice of Hazel McCready.
   But they'll never let you out now, Ruth. It was the Nixon doll, his stuffed fingers raised in twin Vs, speaking in the voice of John Enders down at the grammar school. They could, but that would be wrong.
   They love you, Ruth, but if you try to leave now they'll kill you. You know that, don't you? Her 1910 Kewpie doll with its rubber head like an inverted teardrop; this voice was Justin Hurd's.
   Have to send a signal.
   Signal, Ruth, yes, and you know how
   Use us, we can show you how, we know
   She took a shambling step backward, her hands going to her ears, as if she could shut out the voices that way. Her mouth twisted. She was terrified, and what frightened her most was how she ever could have mistaken these voices, with their twisted truths, for sanity. All of Haven's concentrated madness was here, right now.
   Signal, use us, we can show you how, we know, and you WANT to know, the town hall, Ruth, the clock tower
   The rustling voices took up the chant: The town hall, Ruth! Yes! Yes, that's it! The town hall! The town hall! Yes!
   Stop it! she screamed. Stop it, stop it, oh please won't you
   And then, for the first time since she was eleven and had passed out after winning the Girls' Mile Race at the Methodist Summer Picnic, Ruth McCausland fainted dead away.