It Came Out of the Sky”, Creedence Clearwater Revival 11 страница

He got in and started Betsy's motor. He backed and filled until he was pointed back toward Haven and then paused for just a moment, surveying the scene, trying to see if the story it told was the one it was supposed to tell. He thought it did. Here was a Bearmobile sitting dead-empty in the middle of the road at the end of a long skid. Engine off, flashers going. There was the gutted carcass of a good-sized buck in the ditch. That wouldn't go unnoticed long, not in July.

Was there anything in this story that whispered Haven?

Beach didn't think so. This story was about two cops returning to barracks after investigating a single-fatality accident. They just happened to run on a gang of men jacklighting deer. What happened to the cops? Ah, that was the question, wasn't it? And the possible answers would look more and more ominous as the days passed. There were jacklighters in the story, jacklighters who'd perhaps panicked, shot a couple of cops, and then buried them in the woods. But Haven? Beach really believed they would think that was a completely different story, one nowhere near as interesting.

Now, in his rearview mirror, he could see approaching headlights. He put his truck in low and skirted the police cruiser. Its flashers bathed him in half a dozen blue pulsebeats, and then it was behind him. Beach glanced to his right, saw the regulation-issue black shoe with its runner of regulation blue sock poking out like the tail of a kite, and cackled. Bet when you put that shoe on this mornin”, Mr Smartass State Bear, you didn't have no idea where it would finish up tonight.

Beach Jernigan cackled again and fetched second gear with a ram and a jerk. He was headed home and he had never felt doodly-damn better in his whole life.

Chapter 8

Ev Hillman

Lead Story, Bangor Daily News, July 25th, 1988:

TWO STATE POLICE DISAPPEAR IN DERRY

Area-wide Manhunt Begins

by David Bright

The discovery of an abandoned state-police cruiser in Derry last night shortly after 9:30 has touched off the second major search of the summer in eastern and central Maine. The first was for four-year-old David Brown of Haven, who is still missing. Ironically, the officers, Benton Rhodes and Peter Gabbons, were returning from that same town at the time of their disappearance, having just completed their preliminary investigation of a furnace fire which took one life (see related story this page).

In a late development which one police insider described as “the worst possible news we could have at this time,” the body of a deer which had been shot, gutted, and cleaned was found near the cruiser, leading to speculations that...

“There, looka that,” Beach said to Dick Allison and Newt Berringer over coffee the next morning. They were in the Haven Lunch, looking at the paper, which had just come in. “We all thought nobody would make a connection. Damn!”

“Relax,” Newt said, and Dick nodded. “No one is going to connect the disappearance of a four-year-old boy who prob'ly just wandered off into the woods or got picked up and driven away by a sex pervert with the disappearance of two big strong State Bears. Right, Dick?”

“As rain.”

Wrong.

Page one, Bangor Daily News, below the fold:

HAVEN CONSTABLE KILLED IN FREAK ACCIDENT

Was Community Leader

by John Leandro

Ruth McCausland, one of only three women constables in Maine, died yesterday in her home town of Haven. She was fifty. Richard Allison, head of Haven's volunteer fire department, says that Mrs McCausland appears to have been killed when oil fumes which had collected in the town-hall basement as the result of a faulty valve ignited. Allison said that the lighting in the basement, where a lot of town records are stored, is not very good. “She may have struck a match,” Allison said. “At least, that is the theory we are going on now.,

Asked if any evidence of arson had been found, Allison said there had not, but admitted that the disappearance of the two state troopers sent to investigate the mishap (see story above) made that more difficult to determine. “Since neither of the investigating officers has been able to file a report, I imagine we'll have the state fire inspector up here. Right now I'm more concerned that the investigating officers turn up safe and sound.”

Newton Berringer, Haven's head Selectman, said that the entire town was in deep mourning for Mrs McCausland. “She was a great woman,” Berringer said, “and we all loved her.” Other Haven townspeople echoed the sentiment, not a few of them in tears as they spoke of Mrs McCausland.

Her public service in the small town of Haven began in...

It was, of course, Hilly's grandfather, Ev, who made the connection. Ev Hillman, who could have rightly been called the town in exile, Ev Hillman, who had come back from Big II with two small steel plates in his head as a result of a German potato-masher which had exploded near him during the Battle of the Bulge.

He spent the Monday morning after Haven's explosive Sunday where he had been spending all of his mornings—in room 371 of the Derry Home Hospital, watching over Hilly. He had taken a furnished room down on Lower Main Street, and spent his nights—his largely sleepless nights—there after the nurses finally turned him out.

Sometimes he would lie in the dark and think he heard chuckling noises coming from the drains and he would think You're going nuts, old-timer. Except he wasn't. Sometimes he wished he were.

He had tried to talk to some of the nurses about what he believed had happened to David—what he knew had happened to David. They pitied him. He did not see their pity at first; his eyes were only opened after he had made the mistake of talking to the reporter. That had opened his eyes. He thought the nurses admired him for his loyalty to Hilly, and felt sorry for him because Hilly seemed to be slipping away... but they also thought him mad. Little boys did not disappear during tricks performed in back-yard magic shows. You didn't even have to go to nursing school to know that.

After a while in Derry alone, half out of his mind with worry for Hilly and David and contempt for what he now saw as cowardice on his part and fear for Ruth McCausland and the others in Haven, Ev had done some drinking at the little bar halfway down Lower Main. In the course of a conversation with the bartender, he heard the story of a fellow named John Smith, who had taught in the nearby town of Cleaves Mills for a while. Smith had been in a coma for years, had awakened with some sort of psychic gift. He went nuts a few years ago—had tried to assassinate a fellow named Stillson, who was a U. S. representative from New Hampshire.

“Dunno if there was ever any truth to the psychic part of it or not,” the bartender said, drawing Ev a fresh beer. B'lieve most of that stuff is just eyewash, myself. But if you've got some wild-ass tale to tell -” Ev had hinted he had a story to tell that would make The Amityville Horror look tame—'then Bright at the Bangor Daily News is the guy you ought to tell it to. He wrote up the Smith guy for the paper. He drops in here for a beer every once in a while, and I'll tell you, mister, he believed Smith had the sight.”

Ev had had three beers, rapidly, one after another—just enough, in other words, to believe that simple solutions might be possible. He went to the pay phone, laid out his change on the shelf, and called the Bangor Daily News. David Bright was in, and Ev spoke to him. He didn't tell him the story, not over the phone, but said that he had a tale to tell, and he didn't understand what it all meant, but he thought people ought to know about it, fast.

Bright sounded interested. More, he sounded sympathetic. He asked Ev when he could come up to Bangor (that Bright did not speak of coming to Derry to interview the old man should have tipped Ev to the idea that he might have overestimated both Bright's belief and sympathy), and Ev had asked if that very night would be okay.

“Well, I'll be here another two hours,” Bright said. “Can you be here before midnight, Mr Hillman?”

“Bet your buns,” the old man snapped, and hung up. When he walked out of Wally's Spa on Lower Main, there was fire in his eyes and a spring in his step. He looked twenty years younger than the man who had shuffled in.

But it was twenty-five miles up to Bangor, and the three beers wore off. By the time Ev got to the News building he was sober again. Worse, his head was fuzzy and confused. He was aware of telling the story badly, of circling around again and again to the magic show, to the way Hilly had looked, to his certainty that David Brown had really disappeared.

At last he stopped... only it was not so much a stopping as a drying up of an increasingly sluggish flow.

Bright was tapping a pencil against the side of his desk, not looking at Ev.

“You never actually looked under the platform at the time, Mr Hillman?”

“No... no. But...”

Now Bright did look at him, and he had a kind face, but in it Ev saw the expression which had opened his eyes—the man thought he was just as mad as a March hare.

“Mr Hillman, all of this is very interesting

“Never mind,” Ev said, getting up. The chair he had been sitting in bumped back so rapidly it almost fell over. He was dimly aware of word-processor terminals tapping, phones ringing, people walking back and forth in the city room with papers in their hands. Mostly he was aware that it was midnight, he was tired and sick with fear, and this fellow thought he was crazy. “Never mind, it's late, you'll be wanting to get home to y'family, I guess.”

“Mr Hillman, if you'd just see it from my perspective, you'd understand that—”

“I do see it from your side,” Ev said. “For the first time, I guess. I have to go, too, Mr Bright. I got a long drive ahead of me and visitin” hours start at nine. Sorry to've wasted y'time.”

He got out of there fast, furiously reminding himself what he should have remembered in the first place, that there was no fool like an old fool, and he guessed tonight's work showed him off as just about the biggest fool of all. Well, so much for trying to tell people what was happening in Haven. He was old, but he was damned if he'd ever put up with another look like that.

Ever, in his life.

That resolution lasted exactly fifty-six hours—until he got a look at the headlines on Monday's papers. Looking at them, he found himself wanting to go and see the man in charge of investigating the disappearance of the two state cops. The News said his name was Dugan, and mentioned that he had also known Ruth McCausland well—would, in fact, take time off from an extremely hot case to speak briefly at the lady's funeral. Must have known her pretty damned well, it seemed to Ev.

But when he searched for any of the previous night's fire and excitement, he found only sour dread and hopelessness. The two stories on the front page had taken most of the guts he had left. Haven's turning into a nest of snakes and now they are starting to bite. I have to convince someone of that, and how am I going to do it? How am I going to convince anyone that there's telepathy going on in that town, and Christ knows what else? How, when I can barely remember how I knew things were going on? How, when I never really saw nothing myself? How? Most of all, how'm I supposed to do it when the whole goddam thing is staring them in the face and they don't even see it? There's a whole town going loony just down the road and no one has got the slightest idea it's happening.

He turned to the obituary page again. Ruth's clear eyes looked up at him from one of those strange newsprint pictures that are nothing but densely packed dots. Her eyes, so clear and straightforward and beautiful, looked calmly back at him. Ev guessed that there had been at least five and maybe as many as a dozen men in Haven who had been in love with her, and she had never even known it. Her eyes seemed to deny the very idea of death, to declare it ridiculous. But dead she was.

He remembered taking Hilly out while the search party gathered.

You could come with us, Ruthie.

Ev, I can't... Get in touch with me.

He had tried just once, thinking that if Ruth joined him in Derry, she would be out of danger... and she could backstop his story. In his state of confusion and misery and, yes, even homesickness, Ev wasn't even sure which was more important to him. In the end it didn't matter. He had tried three times to dial Haven direct, the last one after speaking to Bright, and none of the calls took. He tried once with, operator assistance, and she told him there must be lines down. Would he try later? Ev said he would, but hadn't. He had lain down in the dark instead, and listened to the drains chuckle.

Now, less than three days later, Ruth had gotten in touch with him. Via the obituary page.

He looked up at Hilly. Hilly was sleeping. The doctors refused to call it a coma -his brain patterns were not the brain patterns of a comatose patient, they said; they were the brain patterns of a person in deep sleep. Ev didn't care what they called it. He knew Hilly was slipping away, and whether it was into a state called autism—Ev didn't know what the word meant, but he had heard one of the doctors mutter it to another in a low voice he hadn't been meant to overhear—or one called coma didn't make any difference at all. They were just words. Slipping away was what it came down to, and that was quite terrible enough.

On the ride to Derry, the boy had acted like a person in deep shock. Ev had had a vague idea that getting him out of Haven would improve matters, and in their frantic concern over David, neither Bryant nor Marie seemed to notice how odd their older boy seemed.

Getting out of Haven hadn't helped. Hilly's awareness and coherence had continued to decline. The first day in the hospital he had slept eleven hours out of twenty-four. He could answer simple questions, but more complicated ones confused him. He complained of a headache. He didn't remember the magic show at all, and seemed to think his birthday had been only the week before. That night, sleeping deeply, he had spoken one phrase quite clearly: “All the G. I. Joes.” Ev's back had crawled. lt was what he had been screaming over and over when they had all rushed out of the house to find David gone and Hilly in hysterics.

The following day, Hilly had slept for fourteen hours, and seemed even more confused in his mind during the time he spent in a soupy waking state. When the child psychologist detailed to his case asked him his middle name, he responded, “Jonathan.” It was David's middle name.

Now he was sleeping, for all practical purposes, around the clock. Sometimes he opened his eyes, seemed even to be looking at Ev or one of the nurses, but when they spoke, he would only smile his sweet Hilly Brown smile and drift off again.

Slipping away. He lay like an enchanted boy in a fairy-tale castle, only the IV bottle over his head and the occasional P. A. announcements from the hospital corridor spoiling the illusion.

There had been a great deal of excitement on the neurological front at first; a dark, non-specific shadow in the area of Hilly's cerebral cortex had suggested that the boy's strange dopiness might have been caused by a brain tumor. But when they got Hilly down to X-ray again, two days later (his plates had been slow-tracked, the X-ray technician explained to Ev, because no one expects to find a brain tumor in the head of a ten-year-old and there had been no previous symptoms to suggest one), the shadow had been gone. The neurologist had conferred with the X-ray technician, and Ev guessed from the technician's defensiveness that feathers must have flown. The neurologist told him that one more set of plates would be taken, but he believed they would show negative. The first set, he said, must have been defective.

“I suspected something must have been wacky,” he told Ev.

“Why was that?”

The neurologist, a big man with a fierce red beard, smiled. “Because that shadow was huge. To be perfectly blunt, a kid with a brain tumor that big would have been an extremely sick child for an extremely long time... if he was still alive at all.”

“I see. Then you still don't know what's wrong with Hilly.”

“We're working on two or three lines of inquiry,” the neurologist said, but his smile grew vague, his eyes shifted away from Ev's, and the next day the child psychologist showed up again. The child psychologist was a very fat woman with very dark black hair. She wanted to know where Hilly's parents were.

“Trying to find their other son.” Ev expected that would squash her.

It didn't. “Call them up and tell them I'd like some help finding this one.”

They came but were no help. They had changed; they were strange. The child psychologist felt it too, and after her initial run of questions, she started to pull away from them—Ev could actually feel her doing it. Ev himself had to work hard to keep from getting up and leaving the room. He didn't want to feel their strange eyes resting on him: their gaze made him feel as if he had been marked for something. The woman in the plaid blouse and the faded jeans had been his daughter, and she still looked like his daughter, but she wasn't, not anymore. Most of Marie was dead, and what was left was dying rapidly.

The child psychologist hadn't asked for them again.

She had been in to examine Hilly twice since then. The second occasion had been Saturday afternoon, the day before the Haven town hall blew up.

“What were they feeding him?” she asked abruptly.

Ev had been sitting by the window, the hot sun falling on him, almost dozing. The fat woman's question startled him awake. “What?”

“What were they feeding him?”

“Why, just regular food,” he said.

“I doubt that.”

“You needn't,” he said. “I took enough meals with “em to know. Why do you ask?”

“Because ten of his teeth are gone,” she said curtly.

Ev clenched a fist tightly in spite of the dull throb of arthritis and brought it down on one leg, hard.

What are you going to do, old man? David's gone and it would be easier if you could convince yourself he was really dead, wouldn't it?

Yes. That would make things simpler. Sadder, but simpler. But he couldn't believe that. Part of him was still convinced that David was alive. Perhaps it was only wishful thinking, but somehow Ev didn't think so—he had done plenty of that in his time, and this didn't feel like it. This was a strong, pulsing intuition in his mind: David is alive. He is lost, and he is in danger of dying, oh, most certainly... but he can still be saved. If. If you can make up your mind to do something. And if what you make up your mind to do is the right thing. Long odds for an old fart like you, who pisses a dark spot on his pants every once in a while these days when he can't get to the john in time. Long, long odds.

Late Monday evening he had awakened, from a dozing sleep, trembling in Hilly's hospital room—the nurses often turned a leniently blind eye to him and allowed him to stay far past regular visiting hours. He'd had a dreadful nightmare. He had dreamed he was in some dark and stony place—needletipped mountains sawed at a black sky strewn with cold stars, and a wind as sharp as an icepick whined in narrow, rocky defiles. Below him, by starlight, he could see a huge flat plain. It looked dry and cold and lifeless. Great cracks zigzagged across it, giving it the look of crazy-paving. And from somewhere, he could hear David's thin voice: “Help me, Grandpa, it hurts to breathe! Help me, Grandpa, it hurts to breathe! Help me! I'm scared! I didn't want to do the trick but Hilly made me and now I can't find my way home!”

He sat looking at Hilly, his body bathed in sweat. lt ran down his face like tears.

He got up, went over to Hilly, and bent close to him. “Hilly,” he said, not for the first time. “Where's your brother? Where is David?”

Only this time Hilly's eyes opened. His watery, unseeing stare chilled Everett—it was the stare of a blind sibyl.

“Altair-4,” Hilly said calmly, and with perfect clarity. “David is on Altair-4 and there's Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.”

His eyes slipped shut and he slept deeply again.

Ev stood over him, perfectly motionless, his skin the color of putty.

After a while, he began to shudder.

He was the town in exile.

If Ruth McCausland had been Haven's heart and conscience, then Ev Hillman at seventy-three (and not nearly so senile as he had lately come to fear) was its memory. He had seen much of the town in his long life there, and had heard more; he had always been a good listener.

Leaving the hospital that Monday evening, he detoured by the Derry Mr Paperback where he invested nine dollars in a Maine Atlas—a compendium of large maps which showed the state in neat pieces, 600 square miles in each piece. Turning to map 23, he found the town of Haven. He had also bought a compass at the book-and-magazine shop, and now, without wondering why he was doing it, he drew a circle around the town. He did not plant the compass's anchor in Haven Village to do this, of course, because the village was actually on the edge of the township.

David is on Altair-4

David is on Altair-4 and there's Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

Ev sat frowning over the map and the circle he had drawn, wondering if what Hilly had said had any significance.

Should have gotten a red pencil, old man. Haven ought to be circled in red now. On this map... on every map.

He bent closer. His far vision was still so perfect that he could have told a bean from a kernel of corn if you set both on a fencepost forty yards away, but his near vision was going to hell fast, now, and he had left his reading glasses back at Marie and Bryant's—and he had an idea that if he went back to get them, he might find he had more to worry about than reading small print. For the time being it was better -safer—to just get along without them.

With his nose almost on the page, he examined the place where the compass needle had gone in. lt was spang on the Derry Road, just a bit north of Preston Stream, and a bit east of what he and his friends had called Big Injun Woods when they were kids. This map identified them as Burning Woods, and Ev had heard that name once or twice, too.

He closed the compass to a quarter of the radius he had needed to put a circle around all of Haven and drew a second circle. He saw that Bryant and Marie's house lay just inside that circle. To the west was the short length of Nista Road, which ran from Route 9—Derry Road—to a gravel-pit dead-end on the edge of those same woods—call them Big Injun Woods or Burning Woods, it was the same thing, the same woods.

Nista Road... Nista Road... something about Nista Road, but what? Something that had happened before he himself was born but something that had still been worth talking of for years and years...

Ev closed his eyes and looked as if he was asleep sitting up, a skinny old man, mostly bald, in a neat khaki shirt and neat khaki pants with creases up the legs.

In a moment it came, and when it did he wondered how it could have taken him so long to get it. The Clarendons. The Clarendons, of course. They had lived at the junction of Nista Road and the Old Derry Road. Paul and Faith Clarendon. Faith, who had been so taken with that sweety-sugar preacher, and who had birthed a child with black hair and sweety-sugar blue eyes about nine months after the preacher blew town. Paul Clarendon, who had studied the baby as it lay in its crib, and who had then gotten his straightrazor.

Some people had shaken their heads and blamed the preacher—Colson, his name was. He said it was, anyway.

Some people shook their heads and blamed Paul Clarendon; they said he'd always been crazy, and Faith should never have married him.

Some people had of course blamed Faith. Ev remembered some old man in the barbershop—this was years after, but towns like Haven have long memories -calling her “nothing but a titty-bump hoor born to make trouble.”

And some people had—in low voices, to be sure—blamed the woods.

Ev's eyes flashed open.

Yes; yes, they had. His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. lt was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.

“Humpf!” Ev's mother had sniffed—Ev himself had then been nine or so, he recollected now.

“And I guess it's why your ma there tosses some salt over her shoulder when she spills the cellar,” Ev's dad said mildly to Ev.

“Humpf!” she said again, and went inside to leave her husband smoking on the porch and her son sitting beside him, listening intently as his father yarned. Ev had always been a good listener... except for that one crucial moment when someone had so badly needed him to listen, that one unregainable moment when he had allowed Hilly's tears to drive him away in confusion.

Ev listened now. He listened to his memory... the town's memory.

They had been called Big Injun Woods because it was there that Chief Atlantic had died. lt was the whites who called him Chief Atlantic—his proper Micmac name had been Wahwayvokah, which means “by tall waters.” Chief Atlantic was a contemptuous translation of this. The tribe had originally coveredmuch of what was now Penobscot County, with large tribes centered in Oldtown, Skowhegan, and the Great Woods, which began in Ludlow—it was in Ludlow that they buried their dead when they were decimated by influenza in the 1880s and drifted south with WalIwayvokah, who had presided over their further decline. Waliwayvokah died in 1885, and on his deathbed he declared that the woods to which he had brought his dying people were cursed. That was known and reported by the two white men who had been present when he died—one an anthropologist from Boston College, the other from the Smithsonian Institute—who had come to the area in search of Indian artifacts from the tribes of the Northeast, which were degenerating rapidly and would soon be gone. What was less sure was whether Chief Atlantic was laying the curse himself or only making an observation of an existing condition.

Either way, his only monument was the name Big Injun Woods—even the site of his grave was no longer known. The name for that large piece of forest was, so far as Ev knew, still the one most commonly used in Haven and the other towns which were a part of it, but he could understand how the cartographers responsible for the Maine Atlas might not have wanted to put a word like “Injun” in their book of maps. People had gotten touchy about such casual slurs.

Old tales sometimes have a grain of truth in them, his dad had said...

Ev, who also crossed himself when black cats crossed his path (and, truth to tell, when one looked likely to, just to be safe), thought that his dad was right, and that grain was usually there. And, cursed or not, Big Injun Woods had never been very lucky.

Not lucky for Wahwayvokah, not lucky for the Clarendons. lt had never been very lucky for the hunters who tried their hand in there, either, he recalled. Over the years there had been two... no, three... wait a minute...

Ev's eyes widened and he made a silent whistle as he thumbed through a mental card-file labeled HUNTING ACCIDENTS, HAVEN. He could just offhand think of a dozen accidents, most of them shootings, which had taken place in Big Injun Woods, a dozen hunters who had been lugged out bleeding and cursing, bleeding and unconscious, or just plain dead. Some had shot themselves, using loaded guns for crutches to help them climb over fallen trees, or dropping them, or some damn thing. One was a reputed suicide. But Ev now remembered that on two occasions murder had been done during November in Big Injun Woods—it had been done in hot blood both times, once in an argument over a card game at someone's camp, once because of a squabble between two friends over whose bullet had taken down a buck of recordbreaking size.

And hunters got lost in there. Christ! Did they ever! Every year it seemed there was at least one search party sent out to find some poor scared slob from Massachusetts or New Jersey or New York City, and some years there were two or three. Not all of them were found.

Most were city people who had no business in the woods to start with, but that wasn't always the case. Veteran hunters said compasses worked poorly or not at all in Big Injun Woods. Ev's dad said he guessed there must be a helluva chunk of magnetic rock buried somewhere out there, and it foozled a compass needle to hell and gone. The difference between city folks and those who were veterans of the woods was that the city folks learned how to read a compass out of a book and then put all their trust in it. So when it packed up and said east was north and west was east or just spun around and around like a milk bottle in a kissing game, they were like men stuck in the shithouse with diarrhoea and no corncobs. Wiser men just cursed their compasses, put them away, and tried another of the half-dozen ways there were of finding a direction. Lacking all else, you looked for a stream to lead you out. Sooner or later, if you held a straight course, you'd either hit a road or a set of CMP power pylons.

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