6

   Sometime early during the night she regained some soupy version of consciousness and stumbled downstairs to her bedroom without looking back. She was, in fact, afraid to look back. She was dully aware that her head was throbbing, as it had on the few occasions when she had drunk too much and awakened with a hangover. She was also aware that the old Victorian house was rocking and creaking like an old schooner in heavy weather. While Ruth had lain senseless on the schoolroom floor, terrible thunderstorms racked central and eastern Maine. A cold front from the midwest had finally bulled its way into New England, pushing out the still sink of heat and humidity that had covered the area for the last week and a half. The change in the weather was accompanied by terrible thunderstorms in some places. Haven was spared the worst of these, but the power was out again and would remain so for several days this time.
   But the fact of the power outage wasn't the important thing; Haven had its own unique power sources now. The important thing was simply that the weather had changed. When that happened, Ruth wasn't the only person in Haven to wake up with a horrible hangover sort of headache.
   Everyone in town, from the oldest to the youngest, woke up feeling the same way as the strong winds blew the tainted air east, sending it out over the ocean, fragmenting it into harmless tatters.

7

   Ruth slept until one o'clock Wednesday afternoon. She got up with the lingering remains of her headache, but two Anacin took care of that. By five she felt better than she had for a long time. Her body ached and her muscles were stiff, but these were minor matters compared to the things that had troubled her since the beginning of July, and they could not cut into her sense of well-being at all. Even her fear for David Brown couldn't spoil it completely.
   On Main Street, everyone she passed had a peculiar dazed look in his or her eye, as though they had all just awakened from a spell cast by a fairy-tale witch.
   Ruth went to her office in the town hall, enjoying the way the wind lifted her hair from her temples, the way the clouds moved across a sky that was a deep, crisp blue: a sky that looked almost autumnal. She saw a couple of kids flying a box kite in the big field behind the grammar school and actually laughed aloud.
   But there was no laughing later as she spoke to a small group she quickly gathered – Haven's three selectmen, the town manager, and, of course, Bryant and Marie Brown. Ruth began by apologizing for not having called the state police and wardens before now, or even reporting the boy's disappearance. She had believed, she said, that they would find David quickly, probably the first night, certainly the next day. She knew that was no excuse, but it was why she had allowed it to happen. It had been, she said, the worst mistake she had made in her years as Haven's constable and if David Brown had suffered for it … she would never forgive herself.
   Bryant just nodded, dazed and distant and ill-looking. Marie, however, reached across the table and took her hand.
   'You're not to blame yourself,' she said softly. 'There were other circumstances. We all know that.' The others nodded.
   I can't hear their minds anymore, Ruth realized suddenly, and her mind responded: Could you ever, Ruth? Really? Or was that a hallucination brought on by your worry over David Brown?
   Yes, Yes, I could.
   It would be easier to believe it had been a hallucination, but that wasn't the truth. And realizing that, she realized something else: she could still do it. It was like hearing a faint roaring sound in a conch shell, that sound children mistake for the ocean. She had no idea what their thoughts were, but she was still hearing them. Were they hearing her?
   ARE YOU STILL THERE? she shouted as loudly as she could.
   Marie Brown's hand went to her temple, as if she had felt a sudden stab of pain. Newt Berringer frowned deeply. Hazel McCready, who had been doodling on the pad in front of her, looked up as if Ruth had spoken aloud.
   Oh yes, they still hear me.
   'Whatever happened, right or wrong, is done now,' Ruth said. 'It's time – and overtime – that I contacted the state police about David. Do I have your approval to take this step?'
   Under normal circumstances, it never would have crossed her mind that she should ask them a question like that. After all, they paid her pittance of a salary to answer questions, not ask them.
   But things were different in Haven now. Fresh breeze and clear air or not, things were still different in Haven now.
   They looked at her, surprised and a little shocked.
   Now the voices came back to her clearly: No, Ruth, no … no outsiders … we'll take care … we don't need any outsiders while we 'become' .
   shhh … for your life, Ruth … shhh …
   Outside, the wind blew a particularly hard gust. rattling the windows of Ruth's office. Adley McKeen looked toward the sound … they all did. then Adley smiled a puzzled, peculiar little smile. .
   'O'course, Ruth,' he said. 'If you think it's time to notify the staties, you got to go ahead. We trust your judgment, don't we?'
   The others agreed.
   The weather had changed. the wind was blowing, and by Wednesday afternoon, the state police were in charge of the search for David Brown. That night his picture was shown statewide on the news, with a hot-line number for people to call if they had seen him.

8

   By Friday, Ruth McCausland understood that Wednesday and Thursday had been an untrustworthy respite in an ongoing process. She was being driven steadily toward some alien madness.
   A dim part of her mind recognized the fact, bemoaned it … but was unable to stop it. lt could only hope that the voices of her dolls held some truth as well as madness.
   Watching as if from outside herself, she saw her hands take her sharpest kitchen knife – the one she used for boning fish – from the drawer. She took it upstairs, into the schooIroom.
   The schoolroom glowed, rotten with green light. Tommyknocker-light. That was what everyone in town was calling them now, and it was a good name, wasn't it? Yes. As good as any. The Tommyknockers.
   Send a signal. That's all you can do now. They want to get rid of you, Ruth. They love you, but their love has turned homicidal. I suppose you can find a twisted sort of respect in that. Because they're still afraid of YOU. Even now, now when you're almost as nutty as the rest of them, they're afraid of you. Maybe someone will hear the signal … hear it … see it … understand it.

9

   Now there was a shaky drawing of the town-hall clock tower on her board … the scrawled work of a first-grader.
   Ruth could not stand to work on the dolls in the schoolroom . . . not in that terrible light that waxed and pulsed. She took them, one by one, into her husband's study, and slit their bellies open like a surgeon – the French madame, the nineteenth-century clown, the Kewpie, all of them – one by one. And into each she put a small gadget made of C-cells, wires, electroniccalculator circuit boards, and the cardboard cores from toilet-paper rolls. She sewed the incisions up quickly, using a coarse black thread. As the line of naked dolls grew longer on her husband's desk, they began to look like dead children, victims of some grisly mass poisoning, perhaps, who had been stripped and robbed after death.
   Each sewn incision parted in the middle so that one of the toilet-paper rolls could poke out like the barrel of some odd telescope. Only cardboard, the rolls would still serve to channel the force when it was generated. She didn't know how she knew this, or how she had known to build the gadgets in the first place … the knowledge seemed to have come shimmering out of the air. The same air into which David Brown
   (is on Altair-4)
   had disappeared.
   As she plunged the knife into their plump, defenseless bellies, the green light puffed out of it.
   I'm
   (sending a signal)
   murdering the only children I ever had.
   The signal. Think of the signal, not the children.
   She used extension cords to wire the dolls neatly together in a chain. She had stripped the insulation from the last four inches of these cords and slipped the gleaming copper into an M-16 firecracker she had confiscated from Beach Jernigan's fourteen-year-old son Hump (thus known because one shoulder rode slightly higher than the other) about a week before all this madness began. She looked back, doubtful for a moment, into her schooIroom with its now empty benches. Enough light fell through the archway for her to be able to see the drawing she had done of the town-hall clock tower. She had done it in one of those blank periods that seemed to be getting longer and longer.
   The hands of the clock in the drawing were set at three.
   Ruth set her work aside and went to bed. She fell asleep but her sleep was not easy; she twisted and turned and moaned. Even in her sleep the voices ran through her head – thoughts of revenge planned, of cakes to be baked, sexual fantasies, worries about irregularity, ideas for strange gadgets and machines, dreams of power. And below them all, a thin, irrational yammer like a polluted stream, thoughts coming from the heads of her fellow townspeople but not human thoughts, and in her nightmarish sleep, that part of Ruth McCausland which clung stubbornly to sanity knew the truth: these were not the rising voices of the people she had lived with all these years but those of outsiders. They were the voices of the Tommyknockers.

10

   Ruth understood by Thursday noon that the change in the weather hadn't solved anything.
   The state police came, but they did not institute a widespread search; Ruth's report, detailed and complete as always, made it clear that David Brown, four, could hardly have wandered outside their search area unless he'd been abducted -a possibility they would now have to consider. Her report was accompanied by topographical maps. These were annotated in her careful, no-nonsense handwriting, and made it clear she had conducted the search thoroughly.
   'Careful and thorough you were, Ruthie,' Monster Dugan told her that evening. His brow was furrowed in a frown so huge each line looked like an earthquake fissure. 'You always have been. But I never knew you to pull a John Wayne stunt like this before.'
   'Butch, I'm sorry
   'Yeah, well . . .' He shrugged. 'Done is done, huh?'
   'Yes,' she said, and smiled wanly. lt had been one of Ralph's favorite sayings.
   Butch asked a lot of questions, but not the one she needed to answer* Ruth, what's wrong in Haven? The high winds had cleansed the town's atmosphere; none of the outsiders sensed anything was wrong.
   But the winds hadn't ended the trouble. The bad magic was still going on. Whatever it was, it seemed to continue by itself after a certain point. Ruth guessed that point had been reached. She wondered what a team of doctors, conducting mass physicals in Haven, might find. Iron shortages in the women? Men with suddenly receding hairlines? Improved visual acuity (especially peripheral vision) matched by a surprisingly high loss of teeth? People who seemed so bright they were spooky, so in tune with you they almost seemed to be – ha-ha – reading your mind?
   Ruth herself lost two more teeth Wednesday night. One she found on her pillow Thursday morning, a grotesquely middle-aged offering to the tooth fairy. The other was nowhere to be found. She supposed she had swallowed it. Not that it mattered.
   The compulsion to blow up the town hall became a maddening mental poison ivy, itching at her brain all the time. The doll-voices whispered and whispered. On Friday she made a final effort to save herself.
   She determined to leave town after all – it was not hers anymore. She guessed that staying even this long had been one of the traps the Tommyknockers had laid for her – and, like the David Brown trap, she had blundered into it, as confused as a rabbit in a snare.
   She thought her old Dodge wouldn't start. They would have fixed it. But it did.
   Then she thought she would not be allowed out of Haven Village, that they would stop her, smiling like Moonies and sending their endless rustly we-all-love-you-Ruth thoughts. She wasn't.
   She rolled down Main Street and out into the country, sitting bolt upright and white-knuckled, a graven smile on her face, tongue-twisters
   (she sells pickled peppers bitter butter)
   flying through her head. She felt her gaze being pulled toward the town-hall clock tower
   (a signal Ruth send)
   (yes the explosion the lovely)
   (bang blow it blow it all the way to Altair-4 Ruth)
   and resisted with all her might. This compulsion to blow up the town hall to call attention to what was going on here was insane. lt was like setting your house on fire to roast a chicken.
   She felt better when the brick tower was out of sight.
   once on Derry Road, she had to resist an urge, to get the Dart moving as fast as it would go (which, considering its years, was still surprisingly fast). She felt like a lucky escapee from a den of lions – one who has escaped more by good luck than good sense. As the village dropped behind her and those rustling voices fell away, she began to feel that someone must be giving belated chase.
   She glanced again and again into the rearview mirror, expecting to see vehicles chasing after her, wanting to bring her back. They would insist that she come back.
   They loved her too much to let her go.
   But the road had remained clear. No Dick Allison screaming after her in one of the town's three fire engines. No Newt Berringer in his big old mint-green Olds-88. No Bobby Tremain in his yellow Dodge Challenger.
   As she approached the Haven-Albion town line, she put the Dart up to fifty. The closer she got to the town line – which she had begun to think of, rightly or not, as the point at which her escape would become irrevocable, the more she found the last two weeks seeming like some black, twisted nightmare.
   Can't go back. Can't.
   Her foot on the Dart's accelerator pedal kept growing heavier.
   At the end, something warned her – perhaps it was something the voices had said and her subconscious had filed away. She was, after all, receiving all sorts of information now, in her sleep as well as when she was awake. As the town-line marker came up
   A
   L
   B
   I
   O
   N
   – her foot left the Dart's gas pedal and stepped on the brake. lt went down mushily and much too far, as it had for the last four years or so. Ruth allowed the car to roll off the tar and onto the shoulder. Dust, as white and dry as bone meal, plumed up behind her. The wind had died. The air of Haven was deadly still again. The dust she had raised, Ruth thought, would hang for a long time.
   She sat with her hands curled tightly on the wheel, wondering why she had stopped.
   Wondering. Almost knowing. Beginning
   (to 'become)
   to know. Or guess.
   A barrier? Is that what you think? That they've put up a barrier? That they've managed to turn all of Haven into a . . . an ant-farm, or something under a bowl? Ruth, that's ridiculous!
   And so it was, not only according to logic and experience, but according to the evidence of her senses. As she sat behind the wheel, listening to the radio (soft jazz which was coming from a low-power college station in Bergenfield, New Jersey), a Hillcrest chicken truck, probably bound for Derry, rumbled past her. A few seconds later, a Chevy Vega went by in the other direction. Nancy Voss was behind the wheel. The sticker on the rear bumper read:
   POSTAL WORKERS DO IT BY EXPRESS MAIL.
   Nancy Voss did not look at Ruth, simply went along her way – which this case probably meant Augusta.
   See? Nothing stopping them. Ruth thought.
   No, her mind whispered back. Not them, Ruth. Just you. lt would stop you, and it would stop Bobbi Anderson's friend, maybe one or two others. Go on! Drive right into it at fifty miles an hour or so, if you don't believe it! We all love you, and we would hate to see it happen to you … but we wouldn't – couldn't – stop it from happening.
   Instead of driving, she got out and walked up to the Haven-Albion line. Her shadow trailed long behind her; the hot July sun beat down on her head. She could hear the dim but steady rumble of machinery from the woods behind Bobbi's place. Digging again. The David Brown vacation was over. And she sensed that they were getting close to … well, to something. This brought a dim sense of mingled panic and urgency.
   She approached the marker … passed it … kept walking … and began to feel a wild, rising hope. She was out of Haven. She was in Albion. In a moment she would run, screaming, to the nearest house, the nearest telephone. She
   – slowed.
   A puzzled look settled upon her face … and then deepened into a dawning, horrified certainty.
   It was getting hard to walk. The air was becoming tough, springy. She could feel it stretching her cheeks, the skin of her forehead; she could feel it flattening her breasts.
   Ruth lowered her head and continued to walk, her mouth drawn down in a grimace of effort, cords standing out on her neck. She looked like a woman trying to walk into a gale-force wind, although the trees on either side of the road were barely swaying their leaves. The image which came to her now and the one which had come to Gardener when he tried to reach into the bottom of Anderson's customized water heater were exactly the same; they differed only in degree. Ruth felt as if the entire road had been blocked by an invisible nylon stocking, one large enough to fit a female Titan. I've heard about nude-look hose, she thought hysterically, but really, this is ridiculous.
   Her breasts began to ache from the pressure. And suddenly her feet began to slip in the dirt. Panic slapped at her. She had reached, then passed the point where her ability to generate forward motion surpassed the elastic give of the invisible barrier. Now it was shoving her back out.
   She struggled to turn, to get out on her own before that could happen, but she lost her footing and was snapped rudely back the way she had come, her feet scraping, her eyes wide and shocked. lt was like being pushed by the expanding side of a large, rubbery balloon.
   For a moment her feet left the ground entirely. Then she landed on her knees, scraping them both badly, tearing her dress. She got up and backed toward her car, crying a little with the pain.
   She sat behind the wheel of her car for almost twenty minutes, waiting for the throbbing in her knees to subside. Cars and trucks passed occasionally along Derry Road in both directions, and once as she sat there, Ashley Ruvall came along on his bike. He had his fishing pole. He saw her and raised a hand to her.
   'Hi, Mithuth McCauthland!' he cried chirpily, and grinned. The lisp wasn't really surprising, she thought dully, considering that all of the boy's teeth were gone. Not some; all.
   Still, she felt coldness rush through her as Ashley called: 'We all love you, Mithuth McCauthland . . .'
   After a long time she backed the Dart up, U-turned, and went back through the hot silence to Haven Village. As she drove up Main Street to her house, it seemed that a great many people looked at her, their eyes full of a knowledge more sly than wise.
   Ruth looked up into the Dart's rearview mirror and saw the clock tower at the other end of the village's short Main Street.
   The hands were approaching three P.M.
   She pulled to a stop in front of the Fannins', bumping carelessly up over the curb and stalling the engine. She didn't bother to turn off the key. She only sat behind the wheel, red idiot-lights glowing on the instrument panel, looking into the rearview mirror as her mind floated gently away. When she came back to herself, the town-hall clock was chiming six. She had lost three hours . . . and another tooth. The hours were nowhere to be found, but the tooth, an incisor, lay on the lap of her dress.

12

   All that night her dolls talked to her. And she thought that none of what they said was precisely a lie … that was the most horrible thing of all. She sat in the green, diseased heart of their influence and listened to them tell their lunatic fairy tales.
   They told her she was right to believe she was going crazy; an X-ray of her brain, they said, one of anyone in Haven, for that matter, would make a neurologist run screaming for cover. Her brain was changing. lt was . . . 'becoming.'
   Her brain, her teeth – oh, excuse me, make that ex-teeth – both 'becoming.' And her eyes … they were changing color, weren't they? Yes. Their deep brown was fading toward hazel … and the other day, in the Haven Lunch, hadn't she noticed that Beach Jernigan's bright blue eyes were also changing color? Deepening toward hazel?
   Hazel eyes … no teeth … oh dear God what's happening to us?
   The dolls looked at her glassily, and smiled.
   Don't worry, Ruth, it's only the invasion from space they've made cheap movies about for years. You see that, don't you? The Invasion of the Tommyknockers. If you want to see the invaders from space the B movies and the science-fiction stories were always going on about, look in Beach Jernigan's eyes. Or Wendy's. Or your own.
   'What you mean is that I'm being eaten up,' she whispered in the summer darkness as Friday night became Saturday morning.
   Why, Ruth! What did you think 'becoming' was? the dolls laughed, and Ruth's mind mercifully floated away once again.

13

   When she woke on Saturday morning the sun was up, the shaky child's drawing of the town-hall clock tower was on the schoolroom blackboard, and there were better than two dozen calculators on Ralph's sheeted study desk. They were in the canvas shoulder-bag she used when she went out collecting for the Cancer Society. There were Dymotapes on some of the calculators. BERRINGER. HAZEL MCCREADY. SELECTMAN'S OFFICE DO NOT REMOVE. DEPT. OF TAXES. She hadn't gone to sleep after all. Instead, she had drifted into one of those blank periods. While it was going on, she had looted all the town offices' calculators, it looked like.
   Why?
   Yours not to reason why, Ruth, the dolls whispered, and she understood better and better each day, better and better each minute, each second, in fact, what had frightened little Edwina Thurlow so badly. Yours is but to send a signal … and die.
   How much of that idea is mine? And how much is them, driving me?
   Doesn't matter, Ruth. It's going to happen anyway, so make it happen as fast and hard and soon as you can. Stop thinking. Let it happen … because part of you wants it to happen, doesn't it?
   Yes. Most of her, in fact. And not to send a signal to the outside world, or any silly bullshit like that; that was just the sane icing on a rich devil's food cake of irrationality.
   She wanted to be a part of it as it all went up.
   The cardboard tubes would channel the force, send it up into the clock tower in a bright river of destructive power, and the tower would lift off like a rocket; the shockwave would hammer the street of this fouled Haven with destruction and destruction was what she wanted; that want was part of her 'becoming.'

14

   That night, Butch Dugan called her to update her on the David Brown case. Some of the developments were unusual. The boy's brother, Hillman, was in the hospital, in a state which closely resembled catatonia. The kid's grandfather wasn't much better. He had begun telling people that David Brown hadn't just gotten lost, but had actually disappeared. That the magic trick, in other words, had been real. And, Butch said, he was telling anyone who would listen that half the people in Haven were going crazy and the rest were already there.
   'He went up to Bangor and talked to a fellow named Bright on the News,' Monster said. 'They wanted human interest and got nut stuff instead. Old man's turning into a real quasar, Ruth.'
   'Better tell him to stay away,' Ruth said. 'They'll let him in, but he'll never get out again.'
   'What?' Monster shouted. His voice was suddenly becoming faint. 'This connection's going to hell, Ruth.'
   'I said there may be something new tomorrow. I still haven't given up hope.' She rubbed her temples steadily and looked at the dolls, in a row on Ralph's desk and wired up like a terrorist's bomb. 'Look for a signal tomorrow.'
   'What?' Monster's voice was almost lost in the rising surf of the worsening connection.
   'Goodbye, Butch. You're a hell of a sport. Listen for it. You'll hear it all the way up in Derry, I think. Three on the nose.'
   'Ruth I'm losing you … call back … soon . . .'
   She hung up the useless telephone, looked at her dolls, listened to the rising voices, and waited for it to be time.

15

   That Sunday was a picture-book summer day in Maine: clear, bright, warm. At a quarter to one, Ruth McCausland, dressed in a pretty blue summer frock, left her house for the last time. She locked the front door, and stood on tiptoe to hang the key on the little hook there. Ralph had argued that any burglar worth his salt would look over the door for a key first thing of all, but Ruth had gone on doing it, and the house had never been burgled. She supposed, at bottom, it came down to trust … and Haven had never let her down. She had put the dolls in Ralph's old canvas duffel. She dragged it down the porch steps.
   Bobby Tremain was walking by, whistling. 'Help you with that, Missus McCausland?'
   'No thank you, Bobby.'
   'All right.' He smiled at her. A few teeth were left in his smile – not many, but a few, like the last remaining pickets in a fence surrounding a haunted house. 'We all love you.'
   'Yes,' she said, hoisting the duffel into the passenger seat. A bolt of pain ripped through her head. 'Oh how well I know it.'
   (what are you thinking Ruth where are you going)
   (she sells seashells she sells seashells)
   (tell us Ruth tell us what the dolls told you to do)
   (Betty Bitter bought some butter)
   (give Ruth tell is it what we want or are you holding out)
   (wouldn't you like to know Peter Piper Peter Piper)
   (it's what we want, isn't it? there are no changes, are there?)
   She looked at Bobby for a moment and then smiled. Bobby Tremain's own smile faltered a little.
   (love me? yes … but you are all still afraid of me, and are right to be)
   'Go on, Bobby,' she said softly, and Bobby went. He looked back over his shoulder once, his young face troubled, mistrusting.
   Ruth drove to the town hall.
   It was Sunday-silent, a dusty church of administration. Her footfalls clicked and echoed. The duffel was too heavy to carry so she dragged it along the waxed hall floor. lt made a dry snakelike hiss. She hauled it up three flights of stairs, one riser at a time, her hands fisted around the cord that shut the duffel's mouth. Her head pumped and ached. She bit her lip and two teeth heeled over sideways with soft rottenness and she spat them out. Her breath was harsh straw in her throat. Dusty sunlight fell through the high third-floor windows.
   She dragged the bag down the short, explosively hot corridor … there were only two rooms up here, one on each side. All the town's records were stored in them. If the town hall was Haven's brain, then here, in this still attic heat, was its paper memory, stretching back through the times the town had been Ilium, Montgomery, Coodersville, Montville Plantation.
   The voices whispered and rustled around her.
   For a moment she stood looking out of the last window, looking down on the short length of Main Street. There were maybe fifteen cars parked in front of Cooder's market, which was open from noon until six on Sundays – it was doing a brisk business. People sauntering into the Haven Lunch for coffee. A few cars passing back and forth.
   It looks so normal … it all looks so damned normal!
   She felt a giddy moment of doubt . . . and then Moose Richardson looked up and waved, as if he could see her, looking out of this dirty third-floor window.
   And Moose wasn't the only one. Lots of them were looking at her.
   She ducked back, turned, and got the window pole which stood in the far corner, where the hallway dead-ended. She used the pole to hook a ring in the middle of the ceiling and pull down the folding stairs. That done, she set the pole aside and bent back, looking up into the tower. She could hear the mechanical rattle and whir of clockwork, and below that, the dim rustle of sleeping bats. There were a lot of them up there. The town should have cleaned them out years ago, but the fumigation was apt to be nasty … and expensive. When the clock machinery broke down again, the bats would have to be cleared out before it could be fixed. That would surely be soon enough. As far as the selectmen were concerned, as long as someone else was in office when the clock rang twelve noon some night at three in the morning and then just stopped going, all would be well.
   Ruth wound the duffel's cotton cord around her arm three times and began to climb slowly up the ladder, dragging the bag between her legs. lt bumped and rose in jerks, like a body in a canvas sack. The cord bit into her arm ever more deeply, and soon her hand had gone purple and numb. She breathed in long, tearing gasps that hurt something deep inside her chest.
   At last, shadows enveloped her. She stepped off the ladder and into the town hall's real attic and pulled the duffel up, hand over hand. Ruth was dimly aware that her gums and ears had started to bleed and her mouth was full of the sour, coppery taste of blood.
   All around her she could smell the crypt-stink of old brick fuming in dry, dark, pent-up summer heat. To her left was a vast, dim circle: the back side of the clock-face which overlooked Main Street. In a more prosperous town, no doubt all four sides would have had a face; Haven's town-hall tower had only the one. lt was twelve feet in diameter. Behind it, dimmer yet, she could see wheels and cogs slowly turning. She could see where the hammer would come down and strike the bell. The dent there was deep and ancient. The clock's works were very loud.
   Working swiftly, jerkily – she was like a clock herself, now, a clock that was running down, and her belfry was certainly full of bats, wasn't it? – Ruth unwound the cotton cord from her arm, actually peeling it out of a deep, spiraling groove in her flesh, and opened the mouth of the duffel. She began taking the dolls out one by one, moving as fast as she could. She laid them in a circle, legs out so that the feet maintained contact all around the circle, hands the same way. In the darkness they looked like dolls conducting a seance.
   She attached the M-16 to the center of the dented place on the great bell. When the hour struck and the hammer fell
   Boom.
   So I will just sit here, she thought. Sit here and wait for the hammer to fall.
   Droning weariness suddenly washed over her. Ruth drifted away.

16

   She came back slowly. At first she thought she must be in her bed at home with her face pressed into the pillow. She was in bed and all this had just been a terrible nightmare. Except her pillow was not this bristly, this hot; her blankets did not pulse and breathe.
   She brought her hands up and touched a hot, leathery body, bones covered with scant flesh. The bat had roosted just above her right breast, in the hollow of her shoulder … she realized suddenly that she had called it . . . that somehow she had called all of them. She could hear its rodentine, scabrous mind, its thoughts dark and instinctual and insane. It thought only of blood and bugs and cruising in blind darkness.
   'Oh God no!' she screamed … the rugose, alien crawl of its thoughts was maddening, not to be borne. 'Oh no, oh please God no -'
   She tightened her hands, not meaning to, and the papery bones in its wings snapped under her fingers. lt squealed, and she felt sharp, needling pain in her cheek as it bit her.
   Now they were all squealing, all, and she realized that there were dozens of them on her – maybe hundreds. On her other shoulder, on her shoes, in her hair. As she looked, the lap of her dress began to squirm and twist.
   'Oh no!' she shrieked again into the dusty dimness of the clock tower. Bats flew all around her. They squeaked. The whisper of their wings was a soft rising thunder, like the rising whisper of Haven's voices. 'Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!'
   A bat fluttered in her hair, caught, squealing.
   Another flew into her face, and its breath was the stink of a dead henhouse.
   The world spun and swung. Somehow she blundered to her feet. She beat her hands about her head, the bats were everywhere, all around her in a black cloud, and now there was no difference between the soft fluttery explosion of their wings and the voices
   (we all love you, Ruth!)
   the voices
   (we hate you Ruth don't you meddle don't you dare meddle)
   the voices of Haven.
   She had forgotten where she was. She had forgotten the trapdoor which yawned almost at her feet, and as she stumbled toward it she heard the clock strike – but the sound was muffled, not true, because the hammer had struck her detonator and
   – and nothing was happening.
   She turned, bats flying all about her, and now her incredulous eyes were also bleeding, but through a reddish haze she saw the hammer fall again, and then yet a third time, and still the world remained.
   A dud, Ruth McCausland thought. It was a dud.
   And fell through the trapdoor.
   The bats flew up from her body, her dress flew up from her body, one loafer flew up from her foot. She struck the ladder, half-turned, and landed on her left side with a crunch that broke all her ribs. She struggled to turn over and somehow managed to do it. Most of the bats had found their way back through the trapdoor into the welcoming darkness of the clock tower, but half a dozen or so were still circling, confused, below the roof of the third-floor corridor. The sound of their voices, so alien and insectile, so hivelike and warm with insanity. These were the voices she had been hearing in her head ever since July 4th or so. The town was not just going mad. That would have been bad, but this was worse . . . oh God, it was much, much worse.
   And it had all been for nothing. Hump Jernigan's M-16 had been nothing but a dud after all. She grayed out and came back some four minutes later with a bat roosting on the bridge of her nose, lapping bloody tears from her cheek.
   'No you dirty FUCK!' she screamed, and tore it in two, her revulsion an agony. lt made a sound like thick, tearing paper. Its alien guts dribbled onto her upturned, cobweb-smeared face. She could not open her mouth to scream – Let me die, God, please, don't let me be like them, don't let me 'become' – because it would dribble its dying self into her and then Hump's M-16 exploded under the striker with an undramatic wet bang. Green light lit first the square of the trapdoor … and then the whole world. For one moment Ruth could see the bones of the bats standing out clearly, as if in an X-ray picture.
   Then all the green turned black.
   It was 3:05 P.M.