named John Smith, who had taught in the nearby town of Cleaves Mills for a while. Smith had been in a coma for years, had awakened with some sort of psychic gift. He went nuts a few years ago- had tried to assassinate a fellow named Stillson, who was a U. S. representative from New Hampshire.
“Dunno if there was ever any truth to the psychic part of it or not,” the bartender said, drawing Ev a fresh beer. B'lieve most of that stuff is just eyewash, myself. But if you've got some wild-ass tale to tell -” Ev had hinted he had a story to tell that would make The Amityville Horror look tame-'then Bright at the Bangor Daily News is the guy you ought to tell it to. He wrote up the Smith guy for the paper. He drops in here for a beer every once in a while, and I'll tell you, mister, he believed Smith had the sight.”
Ev had had three beers, rapidly, one after another-just enough, in other words, to believe that simple solutions might be possible. He went to the pay phone, laid out his change on the shelf, and called the Bangor Daily News. David Bright was in, and Ev spoke to him. He didn't tell him the story, not over the phone, but said that he had a tale to tell, and he didn't understand what it all meant, but he thought people ought to know about it, fast.
Bright sounded interested. More, he sounded sympathetic. He asked Ev when he could come up to Bangor (that Bright did not speak of coming to Derry to interview the old man should have tipped Ev to the idea that he might have overestimated both Bright's belief and sympathy), and Ev had asked if that very night would be okay.
“Well, I'll be here another two hours,” Bright said. “Can you be here before midnight, Mr Hillman?”
“Bet your buns,” the old man snapped, and hung up. When he walked out of Wally's Spa on Lower Main, there was fire in his eyes and a spring in his step. He looked twenty years younger than the man who had shuffled in.
But it was twenty-five miles up to Bangor, and the three beers wore off. By the time Ev got to the News building he was sober again. Worse, his head was fuzzy and confused. He was aware of telling the story badly, of circling around again and again to the magic show, to the way Hilly had looked, to his certainty that David Brown had really disappeared.
At last he stopped… only it was not so much a stopping as a drying up of an increasingly sluggish flow.
Bright was tapping a pencil against the side of his desk, not looking at Ev.
“You never actually looked under the platform at the time, Mr Hillman?”
“No… no. But…”
Now Bright did look at him, and he had a kind face, but in it Ev saw the expression which had opened his eyes-the man thought he was just as mad as a March hare.
“Mr Hillman, all of this is very interesting
“Never mind,” Ev said, getting up. The chair he had been sitting in bumped back so rapidly it almost fell over. He was dimly aware of word-processor terminals tapping, phones ringing, people walking back and forth in the city room with papers in their hands. Mostly he was aware that it was midnight, he was tired and sick with fear, and this fellow thought he was crazy. “Never mind, it's late, you'll be wanting to get home to y'family, I guess.”
“Mr Hillman, if you'd just see it from my perspective, you'd understand that-”
“I do see it from your side,” Ev said. “For the first time, I guess. I have to go, too, Mr Bright. I got a long drive ahead of me and visitin” hours start at nine. Sorry to've wasted y'time.”
He got out of there fast, furiously reminding himself what he should have remembered in the first place, that there was no fool like an old fool, and he guessed tonight's work showed him off as just about the biggest fool of all. Well, so much for trying to tell people what was happening in Haven. He was old, but he was damned if he'd ever put up with another look like that.
Ever, in his life.
That resolution lasted exactly fifty-six hours-until he got a look at the headlines on Monday's papers. Looking at them, he found himself wanting to go and see the man in charge of investigating the disappearance of the two state cops. The News said his name was Dugan, and mentioned that he had also known Ruth McCausland well-would, in fact, take time off from an extremely hot case to speak briefly at the lady's funeral. Must have known her pretty damned well, it seemed to Ev.
But when he searched for any of the previous night's fire and excitement, he found only sour dread and hopelessness. The two stories on the front page had taken most of the guts he had left. Haven's turning into a nest of snakes and now they are starting to bite. I have to convince someone of that, and how am I going to do it? How am I going to convince anyone that there's telepathy going on in that town, and Christ knows what else? How, when I can barely remember how I knew things were going on? How, when I never really saw nothing myself? How? Most of all, how'm I supposed to do it when the whole goddam thing is staring them in the face and they don't even see it? There's a whole town going loony just down the road and no one has got the slightest idea it's happening.
He turned to the obituary page again. Ruth's clear eyes looked up at him from one of those strange newsprint pictures that are nothing but densely packed dots. Her eyes, so clear and straightforward and beautiful, looked calmly back at him. Ev guessed that there had been at least five and maybe as many as a dozen men in Haven who had been in love with her, and she had never even known it. Her eyes seemed to deny the very idea of death, to declare it ridiculous. But dead she was.
He remembered taking Hilly out while the search party gathered.
You could come with us, Ruthie.
Ev, I can't… Get in touch with me.
He had tried just once, thinking that if Ruth joined him in Derry, she would be out of danger… and she could backstop his story. In his state of confusion and misery and, yes, even homesickness, Ev wasn't even sure which was more important to him. In the end it didn't matter. He had tried three times to dial Haven direct, the last one after speaking to Bright, and none of the calls took. He tried once with, operator assistance, and she told him there must be lines down. Would he try later? Ev said he would, but hadn't. He had lain down in the dark instead, and listened to the drains chuckle.
Now, less than three days later, Ruth had gotten in touch with him. Via the obituary page.
He looked up at Hilly. Hilly was sleeping. The doctors refused to call it a coma -his brain patterns were not the brain patterns of a comatose patient, they said; they were the brain patterns of a person in deep sleep. Ev didn't care what they called it. He knew Hilly was slipping away, and whether it was into a state called autism-Ev didn't know what the word meant, but he had heard one of the doctors mutter it to another in a low voice he hadn't been meant to overhear-or one called coma didn't make any difference at all. They were just words. Slipping away was what it came down to, and that was quite terrible enough.
On the ride to Derry, the boy had acted like a person in deep shock. Ev had had a vague idea that getting him out of Haven would improve matters, and in their frantic concern over David, neither Bryant nor Marie seemed to notice how odd their older boy seemed.
Getting out of Haven hadn't helped. Hilly's awareness and coherence had continued to decline. The first day in the hospital he had slept eleven hours out of twenty-four. He could answer simple questions, but more complicated ones confused him. He complained of a headache. He didn't remember the magic show at all, and seemed to think his birthday had been only the week before. That night, sleeping deeply, he had spoken one phrase quite clearly: “All the G. I. Joes.” Ev's back had crawled. lt was what he had been screaming over and over when they had all rushed out of the house to find David gone and Hilly in hysterics.
The following day, Hilly had slept for fourteen hours, and seemed even more confused in his mind during the time he spent in a soupy waking state. When the child psychologist detailed to his case asked him his middle name, he responded, “Jonathan.” It was David's middle name.
Now he was sleeping, for all practical purposes, around the clock. Sometimes he opened his eyes, seemed even to be looking at Ev or one of the nurses, but when they spoke, he would only smile his sweet Hilly Brown smile and drift off again.
Slipping away. He lay like an enchanted boy in a fairy-tale castle, only the IV bottle over his head and the occasional P. A. announcements from the hospital corridor spoiling the illusion.
There had been a great deal of excitement on the neurological front at first; a dark, non-specific shadow in the area of Hilly's cerebral cortex had suggested that the boy's strange dopiness might have been caused by a brain tumor. But when they got Hilly down to X-ray again, two days later (his plates had been slow-tracked, the X-ray technician explained to Ev, because no one expects to find a brain tumor in the head of a ten-year-old and there had been no previous symptoms to suggest one), the shadow had been gone. The neurologist had conferred with the X-ray technician, and Ev guessed from the technician's defensiveness that feathers must have flown. The neurologist told him that one more set of plates would be taken, but he believed they would show negative. The first set, he said, must have been defective.
“I suspected something must have been wacky,” he told Ev.
“Why was that?”
The neurologist, a big man with a fierce red beard, smiled. “Because that shadow was huge. To be perfectly blunt, a kid with a brain tumor that big would have been an extremely sick child for an extremely long time… if he was still alive at all.”
“I see. Then you still don't know what's wrong with Hilly.”
“We're working on two or three lines of inquiry,” the neurologist said, but his smile grew vague, his eyes shifted away from Ev's, and the next day the child psychologist showed up again. The child psychologist was a very fat woman with very dark black hair. She wanted to know where Hilly's parents were.
“Trying to find their other son.” Ev expected that would squash her.
It didn't. “Call them up and tell them I'd like some help finding this one.”
They came but were no help. They had changed; they were strange. The child psychologist felt it too, and after her initial run of questions, she started to pull away from them-Ev could actually feel her doing it. Ev himself had to work hard to keep from getting up and leaving the room. He didn't want to feel their strange eyes resting on him: their gaze made him feel as if he had been marked for something. The woman in the plaid blouse and the faded jeans had been his daughter, and she still looked like his daughter, but she wasn't, not anymore. Most of Marie was dead, and what was left was dying rapidly.
The child psychologist hadn't asked for them again.
She had been in to examine Hilly twice since then. The second occasion had been Saturday afternoon, the day before the Haven town hall blew up.
“What were they feeding him?” she asked abruptly.
Ev had been sitting by the window, the hot sun falling on him, almost dozing. The fat woman's question startled him awake. “What?”
“What were they feeding him?”
“Why, just regular food,” he said.
“I doubt that.”
“You needn't,” he said. “I took enough meals with “em to know. Why do you ask?”
“Because ten of his teeth are gone,” she said curtly.
