places but did not twinkle.
Joe Paulson's clothes burst into flame.
The living room was filled with the smell of electricity and cooking beer. The 3-D picture of Jesus jittered around and then exploded.
“Becka shrieked, understanding that, like it or not, it had been her all along, her, her, her, and she was murdering her husband.
She ran to him, seized his looping, spasming hand… and was herself galvanized.
Jesus oh Jesus save him, save me, save us both, she thought as the current slammed into her, driving her up on her toes like the world's heftiest ballerina en pointe. And a mad, cackling voice, the voice of her father, rose in her brain: Fooled you, “Becka, didn't I? Fooled you good! Teach you to lie! Teach you for good and all!
The back of the television, which she had screwed back on after she had finished adding her alterations, blew back against the wall with a mighty blue flash of light. “Becka tumbled to the carpet, pulling Joe with her. Joe was already dead.
By the time the smoldering wallpaper behind the TV had ignited the chintz curtains, “Becka Paulson was dead, too.
Chapter 3
Hilly Brown
The day Hillman Brown did the most spectacular trick of his career as an amateur magician-the only spectacular trick of his career as an amateur magician, actually -was Sunday, July 17th, exactly one week before the Haven town hall blew up. That Hillman Brown had never managed a really spectacular trick before was not so surprising. He was only ten, after all.
His given name had been his mother's maiden name. There had been Hillmans in Haven going back to the time when it had been Montgomery, and although Marie Hillman had no regrets about becoming Marie Brown-after all, she loved the guy! -she had wanted to preserve the name, and Bryant had agreed. The new baby wasn't home a week before everyone was calling him Hilly.
Hilly grew up nervous. Marie's father Ev said he had cat whiskers for nerves and would spend his whole life on the jump. It wasn't news Bryant and Marie Brown wanted to hear, but after their first year with Hilly, it wasn't really news at all; just a fact of life. Some babies attempt to comfort themselves by rocking in their cribs or cradles; some by sucking a thumb. Hilly rocked in his crib almost constantly (crying angrily at the same time, more often than not), and sucked both thumbs-sucked them so hard that he had painful blisters on them by the time he was eight months old.
“He'll stop now,” Dr Lester in Derry told them confidently, after examining the nasty blisters that ringed Hilly's thumbs… blisters Marie had wept over as if they had been her own. But Hilly hadn't stopped. His need for comfort was apparently greater than whatever pain his hurt thumbs gave him. Eventually the blisters turned to hard calluses.
“He'll always be on the jump,” the boy's grandfather prophesied whenever anyone asked him (and even when no one did; at sixty-three, Ev Hillman was garrulous-going-on-tiresome). “Cat whiskers for nerves, ayuh! He'll keep his mom “n” dad on the hop, Hilly will.”
Hilly kept them hopping, all right. Lining both sides of the Brown driveway were stumps, placed there by Bryant, at Marie's instigation. Upon each she put a planter, and in each planter was a different sort of plant or bunch of flowers. At age three, Hilly one day climbed out of his crib where he was supposed to be taking a nap ('Why do I have to have a nap, Mom?” Hilly asked. “Because I need the rest, Hilly,” his exhausted mother replied), wriggled out the window, and knocked over all twelve of the planters, stumps and all. When Marie saw what Hilly had done, she wept as inconsolably as she had wept over her boy's poor thumbs. Seeing her cry, Hilly had also burst into tears (around his thumbs; he was attempting to suck both of them at once). He hadn't knocked over the stumps and the planters to be mean; it had just seemed a good idea at the time.
“You don't count the cost, Hilly,” his father said on that occasion. He would say it a good many times before Sunday, July 17th, 1988.
At the age of five, Hilly got on his sled and shot down the ice-coated Brown driveway one December day and out into the road. It never occurred to him, he told his ashy-faced mother later, to wonder if something might be coming down Derry Road; he had gotten up, seen the glaze of ice that had fallen, and had only wondered how fast his Flexible Flyer would go down their driveway. Marie saw him, saw the fuel tanker lumbering down Route 9, and shrieked Hilly's name so loudly that she could barely talk above a whisper for the next two days. That night, trembling in Bryant's arms, she told him she had seen the boy's tombstone in Homeland-had actually seen it: Hillman Richard Brown, 1978-1983, Taken Too Soon.
“Hiiillyyyyyyyy!”
Hilly's head snapped around at the sound of his mother's scream, which sounded to him as loud as a jet plane. As a result, he fell off his sled just before it reached the foot of the driveway. The driveway was asphalted, the glaze of sleet was really quite thin, and Hilly Brown never had that knack with which a kind God blesses most squirmy, active children-the knack of failing lucky. He broke his left arm just above the elbow and fetched his forehead such a dreadful crack that he knocked himself out.
His Flexible Flyer shot into the road. The driver of the Webber Fuel truck reacted before he had a chance to see there was no one on the sled. He spun the wheel and the tanker-truck waltzed into a low embankment of snow with the huge grace of the elephant ballet dancers in Fantasia. It crashed through and landed in the ditch, canted alarmingly to one side. Less than five minutes after the driver wriggled out of the passenger door and ran to Marie Brown, the truck tipped over on its side and lay in the frozen grass like a dead mastodon, expensive No. 2 fuel oil gurgling out of its three overflow vents.
Marie was running down the road with her unconscious child in her arms, screaming. In her terror and confusion she felt sure that Hilly must have been run over, even though she had quite clearly seen him fall off his sled at the bottom of the driveway.
“Is he dead?” the tanker driver screamed. His eyes were wide, his face pale as paper, his hair standing on end. There was a dark spot spreading on the crotch of his pants. “Oh sufferin” Jesus, lady, is he dead?”
I think so,” Marie wept. “I think he is, oh I think he's dead.”
Who's dead?” Hilly asked, opening his eyes.
“Oh, Hilly, thank God!” Marie screamed, and hugged him. Hilly screamed back with great enthusiasm. She was grinding together the splintered ends of the broken bone in his left arm.
Hilly spent the next three days in Derry Home Hospital.
“It'll slow him down, at least,” Bryant Brown said the next evening over a dinner of baked beans and hot dogs.
Ev Hillman happened to be taking dinner with them that evening; since his wife had died, Ev Hillman did that every now and again; about five evenings out of every seven on the average. “Want to bet?” Ev said now, cackling through a mouthful of cornbread.
Bryant cocked a sour eye at his father-in-law and said nothing.
As usual, Ev was right-that was one of the reasons Bryant so often felt sour about him. On his second night in the hospital, long after the other children in Pediatrics were asleep, Hilly decided to go exploring. How he got past the duty nurse was a mystery, but get past he did. He was discovered missing at three in the morning. An initial search of the pediatrics ward did not turn him up. Neither did a floor-wide search. Security was called in. A search of the whole hospital was then mounted-administrators who had at first only been mildly annoyed were now becoming worried-and discovered nothing. Hilly's father and mother were called and came in at once, looking shell-shocked. Marie was weeping, but because of her swollen larynx, she could only do so in a breathy croak.
“We think he may have wandered out of the building somehow,” the Head of Administrative Services told them.
“How the hell could a five-year-old just wander out of the buildings?” Bryant shouted. “What kind of a place you guys running here?”
“Well… well… you understand it's hardly a prison, Mr Brown”
Marie cut them both off. “You've got to find him,” she whispered. “It's only twenty-two degrees out there. Hilly was in his pj's. He could be… be…”
“Oh, Mrs Brown, I really think such worries are premature,” the Head of Administrative Services broke in, smiling sincerely. He did not, in fact, think they were premature at all. The first thing he had done after ascertaining that the boy might have been gone ever since the eleven-o'clock bedcheck was to find out how cold the night had been. The answer had occasioned a call to Dr Elfman, who specialized in cases of hypothermia-there were a lot of those in Maine winters. Dr Elfman's prognosis was grave. “If he got out, he's probably dead,” Elfman said.
Another hospital-wide search, this one augmented by Derry police and firemen, turned up nothing. Marie Brown was given a sedative and put to bed. The only good news was of a negative sort; so far no one had found Hilly's frozen, pajama-clad body. Of course, the Head of Administrative Services thought, the Penobscot River was close to the hospital. Its surface had frozen. It was just possible that the boy had tried to cross the ice and had plunged through. Oh, how he wished the Browns of Haven had taken their little brat to Eastern Maine Medical.
At two that afternoon, Bryant Brown sat numbly in a chair beside his sleeping wife, wondering how he could tell her their only child was dead, if it became necessary to do so. At about that same time, a janitor who was in the basement to check on the laundry boilers saw an amazing sight: a small boy wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and a plaster cast on one arm strolling nonchalantly between two of the hospital's giant furnaces in his bare feet.
“Hey!” the jan;” tor yelled. “Hey, kid!”
“Hi,” Hilly said, coming over. His feet were black with dirt; his pajama bottoms were swatched with grease. “Boy, this is a big place! I think I'm lost.”
The janitor carried Hilly upstairs to the administration office. The Head sat Hilly down in a large wing chair (after prudently putting down a double spread of the Bangor Daily News) and sent his secretary out to fetch back a Pepsi-Cola and a bag of Reese's Pieces for the brat. Under other circumstances the Head would have gone himself, thereby impressing the boy with his grandfatherly kindness. Under other circumstances-by which I mean, the Head thought grimly to himself, with a different boy. He was afraid to leave Hilly alone.
When the secretary came back with the candy and the soft drink, the Head sent her away again… after Bryant Brown this time. Bryant was a strong man, but when he saw Hilly sitting in the Head's wing chair, his dirty feet swinging four inches off the rug and the papers crackling under his butt as he ate candy and drank Pepsi, he was unable to hold back his tears of relief and thanksgiving. This of course made Hilly-who never in his life had ever done anything consciously bad-also burst into tears.
“Christ, Hilly, where you been?”
Hilly told the story as best he could, leaving Bryant and the Head to parse objective truth out of it as best they could. He had gotten lost, wandered into the basement ('I was followin” a pixie,” Hilly told them), and had crawled under one of the furnaces to sleep. It had been very warm there, he told them, so warm he had taken off his pajama shirt, working it carefully over the new cast.
“I like the pups, too,” he said. “Can we have a puppy, Daddy?”
The janitor who had spotted Hilly also found Hilly's shirt. It was under the No. 2 furnace. Getting the shirt out, he saw the “puppies,” too, although they skittered away from his light. He did not mention them to Mr and Mrs Brown, who looked like folks who would just fall apart if faced with one more shock. The janitor, a kindly man, thought they would
