way, she thought that was exactly what it was. Bobbi had discovered some huge power source and had become its prisoner. That same force was simultaneously galvanizing and imprisoning the whole town. And it was growing steadily stronger.
Her mind whispered: You've got to let it go. You've just got to stand back and let it run its course. They have loved you, Ruth; that much is true. You hear their voices in your head like a rising wind lifting October leaves, now not just puffing them and letting them drop but whipping them into a cyclone; you hear their mind-voices, and although they are sometimes garbled and confused, I don't think they can lie. And when these rising voices say they have loved you, still do love you, they are telling the truth. But if you meddle into what's going on here, I think they'll kill you, Ruth. Not Bobbi's friend-he's immune, somehow. He doesn't hear voices. He doesn't “become.” Except drunk. That's what Bobbi's voice says: “Gard becomes drunk.” But as for the rest of them… if you meddle into their business… they'll kill you, Ruth. Gently. With love. So just stand back. Let it happen.
But if she did, her town would be destroyed… not changed, the way its name had been changed again and again, not hurt, as that sweet-talking preacher had hurt it, but destroyed. And she would be destroyed with it, because the force was already nibbling away at the core of her. She felt it.
All right, then… what do you do?
For the time being, nothing. Things might get better on their own. In the meantime, was there any way she could guard her thoughts?
She began to experiment with tongue-twisters: She sells seashells down by the seashore. Betty Bitter bought some butter. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. With a little practice she found she could keep one of them playing constantly in the back of her mind. She walked downtown to the market, got some ground meat and two ears of fresh corn for her dinner, and spoke pleasantly with Madge Tilletts at the checkout counter and Dave Rutledge, who was sitting in his accustomed place at the front of the store, caning a chair slowly with his old, bunched, and arthritic hands. Except old Dave wasn't looking as old as he used to these days. Nowhere near.
Both of them looked at her. wary, surprised puzzled.
They hear me… but not very well. I'm jamming them! I really am!
She didn't know how successfully, and it wouldn't do to bank on her ability to do it-but it worked. That didn't mean they couldn't read her if several of them linked up and worked together at picking her brain. She sensed that might be possible. But it was something, at least, one arrow in a previously empty quiver.
That night, Saturday night, she decided she would wait until Tuesday noon -roughly sixty hours. If things continued to deteriorate, she would go to the state-police barracks in Derry, seek out some of her husband's old friends-Monster Dugan for a start-and tell them what was going on forty miles or so downstate on Route 9. It was maybe not the best of plans, but it would have to do. Ruth McCausland fell asleep. And dreamed of batteries in the earth.
Chapter 6
Ruth McCausland, Concluded
The disappearance of David Brown rendered Ruth's plan obsolete. After David disappeared, she found herself unable to leave town. Because David was gone and they all knew it… but they also knew that David was somehow still in Haven.
Always during the becoming came a time which might have been called “the dance of untruth.” For Haven, this time commenced with the disappearance of David Brown and unfolded itself during the subsequent search.
Ruth was just sitting down to the local news when the phone rang. Marie Brown was hysterical, barely coherent.
“Calm down, Marie,” Ruth said, and thought it was good she had eaten an early supper. She might not get another chance to eat for quite a while. At first the only clear fact she seemed able to get from Marie was that her boy David was in some kind of trouble, trouble that had started at a back yard magic show, and Hilly had gotten hysterical
“Put Bryant on,” Ruth said.
“But you'll come, won't you?” Marie wept. “Please, Ruth, before dark. We can still find him, I know we can.”
“Of course I'll come,” Ruth said. “Now put Bryant on.”
Bryant was dazed but able to give a clearer picture of what had happened. It still sounded crazy, but then, what else was new in Haven these days? After the magic show, the audience had wandered away, leaving Hilly and David to clean up. Now David was gone. Hilly had fainted, and now had no memory of what had happened that afternoon at all. All he knew for sure was that when he saw David, he had to give him all the G. I. Joes. But he didn't remember why.
“You better come over quick as you can,” Bryant said.
Going out, she paused for a moment on her way to her Dart and looked at Haven Village's main street with real hate. What have you done now? she thought. Goddam you, what have you done now?
With only two hours of good daylight left, Ruth wasted no time. She gathered Bryant, Ev Hillman, John Golden from just down the road, and Henry Applegate, Barney's father, in the Browns” back yard. Marie wanted to join the search party, but Ruth insisted she stay with Hilly. In her current frame of mind, Marie would be more hindrance than help. They had already searched, of course, but they had gone at it in a distracted, half-assed way. Eventually, as the boy's parents became convinced that David must have wandered across the road and into the woods, they had really ceased to search at all, although they had continued to move aimlessly around.
Ruth got some from what they said; some from the oddly distracted, oddly frightened way they looked; most from their minds.
Their two minds: the human one and the alien one. Always there came a point where the becoming might degenerate into madness-the madness of schizophrenia as the target minds tried to fight the alien group mind slowly welding them together… and then eclipsing them. This was the time of necessary acceptance. Thus, it was the time of the dance of untruth.
Mabel Noyes might have set it going, but she was not loved enough to make people dance. The Hillmans and the Browns were. They went far back in Haven's history, were well-loved and well-respected.
And, of course, David Brown was only a little boy.
The human net-mind, its “Ruth-mind,” one might say, thought: He could have wandered into the high grass of the Browns” back field and fallen asleep. More likely than Marie's idea that he went into the woods-he'd have to cross the road to do that, and he was well-behaved. Marie and Bryant both say so. More important, so do the others. He'd been told again and again and again that he was never to cross the road without a grownup, so the woods don't seem likely.
“We're going to cover the lawn and back field section by section,” Ruth said. “And we're not just going to walk around; we're going to look.”
“But if we don't find him?” Bryant's eyes were scared and pleading. “If we don't find him, Ruth?”
She didn't really have to tell him; she only had to think it at him. If they didn't find David quickly, she would begin making calls. There would be a much larger search party-men with lights and bullhorns moving through the woods. If David wasn't found by morning, she would call Orval Davidson up in Unity and have him bring his bloodhounds. This was a familiar enough procedure to most of them. They knew about search parties, and most had been on them before; they were common enough during hunting season, when the woods filled up with out-of-staters carrying their heavy-caliber weapons and wearing their new orange flannel duds from L. L. Bean's. Usually these lost were found alive, suffering from nothing but mild exposure and severe embarrassment.
But sometimes they found them dead.
And sometimes they never found them at all.
They would not find David Brown, and they knew it long before the search began. Their minds had netted together as soon as Ruth arrived. This was an act of instinct as involuntary as a blink. They linked minds and searched for
David's. Their mental voices united in a chorus so strong that if David had been in a radius of seventy miles, he would have clapped his hands to his head and screamed in pain. He would have heard and known they were looking for him at fives times that distance.
No, David Brown was not lost. He was just… not-there.
But because it was the Tommyknocker-mind which knew this, and because they still thought of themselves as “human beings,” they would begin the dance of untruth.
The becoming would demand many lies.
This one, the one they told themselves, the one that insisted they were really the same as ever, was the most important lie of all.
They all knew that, too. Even Ruth McCausland.
By eight-thirty, with dusk growing too thick to be much different from night, the five searchers had grown to a dozen. The news traveled quickly-a little too quickly to be normal. They covered all the yards and fields on the Browns” side, beginning at Hilly's stage (Ruth herself had crawled under there with a powerful flashlight, thinking that if David Brown was anywhere close by it should be here, fast asleep -but there was only flattened grass and a queer electrical smell that made her wrinkle her nose) and expanding the hunt outward in a beam- shape from there.
“You think he's in the woods, Ruth?” Casey Tremain asked.
“He must be,” she answered tiredly. Her head ached again. David was
(not-there)
no more in the woods than the President of the United States was. All the same…
In the back of her mind, tongue-twisters chased each other as restlessly as squirrels running on wire exercise wheels.
The dusk was not so thick she couldn't see Bryant Brown put a hand to his face and turn away from the others. There was a moment of awkward silence which Ruth finally broke.
“We need more men.”
“State cops, Ruth?” Casey asked.
