“Take me to my house,” she said to Bobby Tremain. “Quick. I know what to do.”
“You're there.” He took her arm and began pulling her toward the door.
“Hold it,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Don't you think I better”
bring the photograph? she finished.
Oh shit! Bobby said, and slapped his forehead.
Dick Allison, meanwhile, who was chief of Haven's volunteer fire department, was sitting in his office sweating bullets in spite of the air-conditioning, fielding telephone calls. The first was from the Troy constable, the second from the Unity chief of police, the third from the state police, the fourth from AP.
He probably would have been sweating anyway, but one of the reasons the air-conditioning wasn't doing him any good was his door had been blown off its hinges by the force of the blast. Most of the plaster had fallen off the walls, revealing lathing like decayed ribs. He sat in the middle of the wreckage and told his callers that it sure had been a hell of a bang, and it looked as if they probably had had one fatality, but it was nowhere near as bad as it had probably sounded. While he was rolling out this bullshit for the guy from the Bangor Daily News named John Leandro, a cork ceiling panel fell on his head. Dick slashed it aside with a wolfish snarl, listened, laughed, and said it was just the bulletin board. Goddam thing had fallen over again. lt just had those sucker things on the back, you know, well, if you bought cheap you got cheap, his mother had always told him, and…
it took another five minutes, but he finally bored Leandro off the phone. As he put his own telephone back in the cradle, most of the hallway ceiling outside his door fell with a powdery crrrumpp!
“MOTHERFUCKING-COCKSUCKING-SON-OF-A-FUCKING BITCH!” Dick Allison screamed, and brought his left fist down on his desk as hard as he could. Although he broke all four fingers, he didn't even notice in his raving fury. If, at that moment, anyone had come into his office, Allison would have ripped that person's throat open, filled his mouth with hot blood, and then sprayed it back into the dying person's face. He screamed and swore and even drummed his feet up and down on the floor like a child doing a tantrum because he has been denied an outing.
He looked childish.
He also looked extremely dangerous.
Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers. knocking at the door.
In between phone calls, Dick went into Hazel's office, found the Midol in her drawer, and took six. Then he wrapped his throbbing, swelling hand tightly and forgot it. If he had still been human. this would have been impossible; one does not simply forget four broken fingers. But since then he had “become.” One of the things that included was becoming able to exercise conscious will over pain.
It came in handy.
In between his conversations with the outside-and sometimes during them -Dick spoke to the men and women working furiously at Henry Applegate's. He told them he expected a couple of state cops by four-thirty, five o'clock at the latest. Could they have the slide-projector ready by then? When Hazel explained the problem, Dick began to rave again, this time with fear as well as anger. When Hazel explained what Christina Lindley was up to, he calmed… a little. She had a home darkroom. There she would carefully make a negative of the Yankee picture and enlarge it slightly, not because it needed to be bigger for the slide-projector device to work (and too much enlarging would give their clock-tower illusion an odd, grainy look), but because she needed a slightly bigger image to work with.
She's going to turn a negative, Hazel said in his mind, then airbrush out the hands on the clock-face. Bobby Tremain is going to put them back in with an X- acto knife, so they say 3:05. He's got a steady hand and a little talent. Right now a steady hand seems more important.
I thought if you made a negative from a positive it came out blurry, Dick Allison said. Specially if the positive's color.
She's improved her developing equipment, Hazel said. She didn't need to add that seventeen-year-old Christina Lindley now had what was probably the most advanced darkroom on earth.
So how long?
Midnight, she thinks, Hazel said.
Christ on a pony! Dick shouted, loud enough to make the people in Henry's field wince.
We'll need about thirty D-cells, Bobbi Anderson's voice cut in calmly. Be a love and see to that, Dick. And we understand about the police. Play Hee-Haw for them, you understand?
He paused. Yes, he said. Buck and Roy, Junior Sample.
Exactly, And hold them. It's their radio I'm really worried about, not them-they'll only send one unit, two at most, to start with. But if they see… if they radio it in…
There was a murmur of assent like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell.
Is there a way you can damp out their transmissions from town? Bobbi asked.
Andy Baker suddenly cut in, gleeful: I got a better idea. Get Buck Peters to shuck his fat ass over to the gas station right now.
Yes! Bobbi overrode him, her thought shrill with excitement. Good! Great! And when they leave town, someone… Beach, I think…
Beach was honored to be chosen.
Bent Rhodes and Jingles Gabbons of the Maine state police arrived in Haven at five-fifteen. They came expecting to find the smoky, uninteresting aftermath of a furnace explosion-one old pumper-truck idling at the curb, twenty or thirty onlookers idling on the sidewalk. Instead, they found the entire Haven town-hall clock tower blown off like a Roman candle. Bricks littered the street, windows were blown out, there were dismembered dolls everywhere… and too damned many people going about their business.
Dick Allison greeted them with weird cordiality, as if this was a Republican bean supper instead of what now looked like a disaster of real magnitude.
“Christ almighty, man, what happened here?” Bent asked him.
“Well, I guess maybe it was a little worse than I made out over the phone,”
Dick said, surveying the brick-littered street and then giving the two troopers
an incongruous ain't-I-a-bad-boy? smile. “Guess I didn't think anyone would
believe it unless they saw it.”
Jingles muttered, “I'm seeing it and I don't believe it.” They had both dismissed Dick Allison as a small-town bumbler, probably crazy in the bargain. That was all right. He stood behind them, watching them stare at the wreckage. The smile faded gradually from his face and his expression became cold.
Rhodes spotted the human arm amid all the tiny make-believe limbs. When he turned back to Dick, his face was whiter than it had been, and he looked considerably younger.
“Where's Mrs McCausland?” he asked. His voice rose uncontrollably and broke on the last syllable.
“Well, you know, I think that might be part of our problem,” Dick began. “You see…”
Dick did hold them in town as long as he could without being conspicuous about it. lt was a quarter to eight before they left, and by then twilight was drawing down. Also, Dick knew, if they didn't leave soon, they would start wondering how come none of the backup units they had requested were arriving.
They had both talked on their cruiser's radio to Derry Base, and both hung the mike up again looking puzzled and distracted. The responses they were getting from the other end were right; it was the voice that seemed a little off. But neither of them could be bothered with such a minor matter, at least not for the time being. There were too many other things to cope with. The magnitude of the accident, for one thing. The fact that they had known the victim, for another. Trying to lay the groundwork of a potentially big case without committing any of the procedural fuckups that would muddy the waters later on, for a third.
Also, they were beginning to feel the effects of being in Haven.
They were like men applying vinyl seal to a big wooden floor in a room with no ventilation; getting stoned without even knowing it. They weren't hearing thoughts-it was too early for that and they would be gone before it could happen-but they were feeling very strange. lt was slowing them down, making ordinary routine something they had to fight their way through.
Dick Allison got all this from their minds as he sat across the street drinking a cup of coffee in the Haven Lunch. Ayuh, they were too busy and too screwed- up to think about the fact that
(Tug Ellender)
their dispatcher didn't exactly sound like himself tonight. The reason why was very simple. They weren't talking to Tug Ellender. They were talking to Buck Peters; their radio transmissions were not going to and coming from Derry but to and from the garage of Elt Barker's Shell, where Buck Peters was hunched, sweating, over a microphone, with Andy Baker beside him. Buck sent out fresh instructions and information on Andy's radio (a little something he had scrambled together in his spare time, a little something that could have contacted life on Uranus, had there been any goodbuddies up there to send back a big ten-four). Several townspeople were concentrating hard on the minds of Bent Rhodes and Jingles Gabbons. They relayed to Buck everything they were able to pick up about Ellender, from whom the cops just naturally expected to hear. Buck Peters had some natural mimicry (he was a great hit doing whoever happened to be President that year, plus such favorites as Jimmy Cagney and John Wayne, at each year's Grange Stage Spectacular). He was not Rich Little, never would be, but when he “did” somebody, you knew who it was. Usually.
More important, the listeners were able to relay to Buck how he should respond to each transmission, since almost every speaker knows in his own mind
