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
–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.
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.
