It Came Out of the Sky”, Creedence Clearwater Revival 9 page

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

All over Haven, people were lying down. Some had gone to their cellars with a vague notion that now would be a good time to get preserves, some with just an idea that it would be cooler there. Beach Jernigan lay behind the counter of the Haven Lunch with his hands laced behind his neck. He was thinking of the thing in the back of his truck, the thing under the tarp.

At 3:05 the base of the clock tower burst open, spraying powdered brick everywhere. A huge, explosive bellow chased off across the fields; it broke almost every window in Haven, and a good many in Troy and Albion as well.

Green fire spilled out through the jagged rent in the bricks, and the townhall tower began to rise, a surreal brick missile, a Magritte rocket with a clock in its side. lt rose on a pillar of cold green fire—surely cold, else the dolls would have been consumed, and Ruth McCausland's arm as well... the entire village, for that matter.

The clock tower rose on this green torch, its sides now beginning to bulge outward—yet for an instant the illusion held: a brick rocket rising into the afternoon sky... and through the roar of the explosion, the clock could be heard, belling out hour after hour. On the twelfth stroke—noon? midnight?—it exploded like the ill-fated Challenger. Bricks flew everywhere—Benton Rhodes would later see some of the damage, but the worst of it was quickly covered up.

Flying bricks punched through the sides of houses, cellar windows, board fences. Bricks fell from the sky like bombs. The clock's long hand, lacy wrought-iron, whickered through the air like a deadly boomerang and buried itself in one of the ancient oaks which stood outside the Haven Library.

Masonry and splintered boards rumbled back to earth.

Then, silence.

After a while, people all over Haven began to get cautiously to their feet, to look around... to begin sweeping up glass or examining damage. Destruction had swept the town, but no one had been hurt. And in the entire town only one person had actually seen that brick rocket rising into the air, like a madman's grandiose dream.

That one person was Jim Gardener. Bobbi was taking a little nap—Gardener had coaxed her into it. Neither of them had any business working in the heat of the afternoon—especially not Bobbi. She had come back a little from the terrible state in which Gardener had found her, but she was still pushing herself much too hard, and she had abruptly begun to menstruate heavily again.

I wonder, he thought morbidly, when she's going to need a blood transfusion instead of just a couple of extra iron pills a day? But that was unlikely, he knew. His ex-wife had suffered horrible menstrual problems, possibly because her mother had been given the drug known as DES. So Gardener had gotten a crash course in a body function his own body would never perform, and he knew the layman's idea of menstruation—a monthly flow of blood from the vagina—simply wasn't true. Most of the material which made up the menses wasn't blood at all, but useless tissue. Menstruation was an efficient wasteremoval process on behalf of a woman capable of bearing children but not currently doing so.

No, he doubted if Bobbi would bleed to death... barring a uterine rupture, which was highly unlikely.

Bullshit. You don't know what's likely in this situation and what isn't.

Okay. Fair enough. And he knew that women weren't built to menstruate day after day and week after week, no matter what. At bottom, blood and tissue were both the same thing: the stuff of which Bobbi Anderson was made. lt was like cannibalism, but

No. No it wasn't. lt was as if someone had turned her thermostat all the way to the end of the dial and she was burning herself up. She had nearly keeled over a couple of times during the hot spell of the week before, and Gardener knew that, although it sounded grotesque, the hunt for the little Brown boy had actually been a kind of rest for Bobbi Anderson.

Gardener hadn't really believed he would get her to take a nap. Then, at around a quarter to three, Bobbi had said that she was sorta tired, and that maybe she could use a nap. She asked Gardener if he wasn't going to catch an hour of rack time, as well.

“Yes,” he said. “I'll sit out on the porch and read a few minutes first.” And finish this little drinky-poo, while I'm at it.

“Well, don't hang out too long,” Bobbi said. “A siesta wouldn't hurt you, either.”

But he had hung out long enough, stretching the drink, to still be there when the roar crossed the fields and hills between here and the village—roughly five miles.

“What the fuck—”

The roar grew louder... and suddenly he saw it, something out of a nightmare, it was DTs setting in, had to be, fucking had to be. This was no telepathic typewriter or water heater from space—this was a motherfucking brick rocket taking off from Haven Village, and that was it, everybody out of the pool, friends and neighbors, I have definitely blown my wheels.

Just before it exploded, splashing the sky with green fire, he recognized it and knew it was no hallucination.

There was Bobbi Anderson's power; there was what they were going to use to stop the nukes, the arms race, the bloody tide of worldwide madness; there it was, rising into the sky on a pillar of flame: one of the crazies in town had somehow laid a fuse under the town hall and struck a match to it and had just sent the Haven clock tower into the sky like a fucking Roman candle.

“Holy shit,” Gardener whispered in a tiny, horrified voice.

There it is, Gard! Behold the future! Is it what you want? Because that woman in there is going bughouse, and you know it... the signs are just all too clear. Do you want to put that kind of power into her hands? Do you?

She's not crazy, Gardener responded, scared. Not crazy at all, and do you think what you just saw changes the equation? It doesn't, it only underlines it. If not me and Bobbi, who? The Dallas Police, that's who. It's going to be all right, I'll keep an eye on her, keep a checkrein on her

Oh, you're doing great at that, you fucking lush, just great.

The incredible thing in the sky exploded, splashing green fire everywhere. Gardener shielded his eyes. He had gotten to his feet.

Anderson came out on the run.

“What in hell was that?” she asked, but she knew... she knew, and Gardener, with cold, sudden certainty, knew that she knew.

Gardener threw a barrier across his mind—in the last two weeks he had learned how to do that with complete success. The barrier consisted of nothing more than a random recitation of old addresses, bits of poems, snatches of songs... but it worked. lt was not at all difficult to run such jamming interference, he had discovered; it wasn't much different from the random run of thoughts that went through almost everyone's head most of the time (he might have changed his mind if he had been aware of Ruth McCausland's tortured efforts to hide her thoughts -Gardener had no idea of how much trouble the plate in his head was saving him). He had seen Bobbi looking at him in a queer, puzzled way a couple of times and although she looked away whenever she saw Gardener observing her, he knew that she was trying to read his thoughts... trying hard... and still failing.

He used the barrier to cover his first lie to Bobbi since he had thrown in with her on July 5th, almost three weeks ago.

“I don't know, exactly,” he said. “I dozed off in the chair. I heard an explosion and saw a big flash of light. Looked green. That's all.”

Bobbi's eyes searched his face, and then she nodded. “Well, I guess we better go into the village and see.”

Gardener relaxed slightly. He wasn't sure why he had lied, only that it seemed safer to do so... and she had believed him. Nor did he want to endanger that belief. “Would you mind going alone? I mean, if you want company—”

“No, that's fine,” she said almost eagerly, and went.

Walking back to the porch after seeing the truck down the road, he kicked over his glass. The drinking was getting out of hand, and it was time to stop. Because something really weird was happening here. lt would bear watching, and when you got drunk you went blind.

It was a pledge he had made before. Sometimes it even took for a while. This time it didn't. Gardener was sitting drunk and asleep on the porch that night when Bobbi returned.

Ruth's signal had been received, nevertheless. The receiver was troubled in mind, committed to Bobbi's project, yet uneasy enough about it to be boozing more and more. But it had been received, and at least partially understood: Gardener's lie was an indication of that, if nothing else. But Ruth would perhaps have been happier with her other accomplishment.

Voices or no voices, the lady died sane.

Chapter 7

Beach Jernigan and Dick Allison

No one in Haven was more delighted about the “becoming” than Beach Jernigan. If Gard's Tommyknockers had appeared to Beach in person, carrying nuclear weapons and proposing that he plant one in each of the world's seven largest cities, Beach would have immediately started phoning for plane tickets. Even in Haven, where quiet zealotry was becoming a way of life, Beach's partisanship was extreme. If he had had any idea at all about Gardener's growing doubts, he would have removed him. Permanently. And at once, if not sooner.

There was a good reason for Beach's feelings. In May—not long after Hilly Brown's birthday, in fact—Beach developed a hacking cough that wouldn't go away. lt was worrisome because he didn't have a fever or the sniffles to go with it. lt became more worrisome when he began to cough up a little blood. When you run a restaurant, you don't want to be coughing at all. The customers don't like it. lt makes them nervous. Sooner or later someone tells the Board of Health and maybe they shut you up for a week or so while they wait to see how your tine test comes out. The Haven Lunch was a marginally profitable business at best (Beach put in twelve hours a day short-ordering in order to clear sixty-five dollars a week—if the place hadn't been his free and clear, he would have starved), and Beach couldn't afford to be shut up for a week in the summer. Summer wasn't here yet, but it was coming on apace. So he went to see old Doc Warwick, and Doc Warwick sent him up to Derry Home for a chest X-ray, and when the X-ray came back Doc Warwick studied it for all of twenty seconds and then called Beach and when Beach got there, Doc Warwick said: “I've got hard news for you, Beach. Sit down.”

Beach sat down. He felt that if there hadn't been a chair he would have fallen on the floor. All the strength had run out of his legs. There was no telepathy going on in Haven back in May—no more than the ordinary kind that people use all the time, anyway—but that ordinary kind was all Beach needed. He knew what Doc Warwick was going to say before he said it. Not TB; big C. Lung cancer.

But that was in May. Now, in July, Beach was fit as a fiddle. Doc Warwick had told him he could expect to be in the hospital by July 15th, but here he was, eating like a horse, randy as a bear most of the time, and feeling like he could outrun Bobby Tremain in a footrace. He hadn't been back to the hospital for another chest X-ray. He didn't need one to know the large dark stain on his left lung had disappeared. Far as that went, if he had wanted an X-ray, he would have taken the afternoon off and built an X-ray machine himself. He knew just how it could be done.

But now, in the wake of the explosion, there were other things to be built, other things to do... and quickly.

They had a meeting. Everyone in town. Not that they gathered, as at a town meeting; that was quite unnecessary. Beach went on frying hamburgers in the Haven Lunch, Nancy Voss went on sorting stamps at the post office (now that Joe was dead, it was at least a place to come to, Sunday or not), Bobby Tremain stayed under his Challenger, putting on a backflow rebreather that would allow him to get roughly seventy miles to the gallon. Not Anderson's gasoline pill—not quite -but close. Newt Berringer, who knew goddamned well there was no time to waste, was driving out to the Applegate place as fast as he dared. But no matter what they were doing or where they were, they were together, a network of silent voices—the voices that had frightened Ruth so badly.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 449