It Came Out of the Sky”, Creedence Clearwater Revival 8 page

“What are you gawking at?” she called out, too shrilly. “Come on! Let's try to find David Brown.!”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 answerRuth, 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.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 513