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!”
