So they could get back to “becoming.”

They rolled down the dirt track-Town Road No. 5 in Albion, which became Fire Road No. 16 here in Haven. Twice logging roads branched off into the woods, and each time one of these came up, Dugan braced himself for an even more bone-wrenching ride. But Hillman didn't take either. He reached Route 9 and swung right. He cranked the Cherokee up to fifty and headed deeper into Haven.

Dugan was skittery. He didn't know exactly why. The old man was crazy, of course; the idea that Haven had turned into a nest of snakes was pure paranoia. All the same, Monster felt a steady, pulsing nervousness growing inside him. It was vague, a low grassfire in his nerves.

“You keep rubbing your forehead,” Hillman said.

“I've got a headache.”

“It'd ache a lot worse if the wind wasn't blowin”, I guess.”

Another lapse into utter nonsense. What in God's name was he doing here? And why did he feel so goddam jumpy?

“I feel like somebody slipped me a couple of bennies in my coffee.”

“Ayuh.”

Dugan looked at him. “But you don't feel that way, do you? You're as cool as a goddam cucumber.”

“I'm scared, but I don't have the jitters, and I don't have a headache, neither.”

“Why would you have a headache?” Dugan asked crossly. The conversation had gotten decidedly Alice in Wonderland-ish. “Headaches aren't catching.”

“If you and six other guys are painting a closed room, you are all apt to end up with headaches. Ain't that a true fact?”

“Yeah, I guess so. But this isn't-”

“No. It ain't. And we got lucky with the weather. Just the same, I guess that thing is putting out a powerful stink, because you feel it. I can see you do.” Hillman paused and then said another Alice in Wonderland thing. “Had any good ideas yet, Trooper?”

“What do you mean?”

Hillman nodded, satisfied. “Good. If you do, tell me. I got something in that sack for you.”

“This is crazy,” Dugan said. His voice wasn't quite steady. “I mean, utterly nuts. Turn this thing around, Hillman. I want to go back.”

Ev suddenly focused a single phrase in his mind, as sharply and as clearly as he could. He knew from his last three days in Haven that Bryant, Marie, Hilly, and David were routinely reading each other's minds. He could sense it even though he couldn't pick it up. By the same token, he had come to realize they couldn't get into his head unless he let them. He had begun to wonder if it had something to do with the steel in his skull, a souvenir of that German grenade. He had seen the potato-masher with dreadful, ineluctable clarity, a gray-black thing spinning in the snow. He'd thought, Well, I'm dead. That's it for me. After, he remembered nothing until he'd awakened in a French hospital. He remembered how his head had hurt; he remembered the nurse who had kissed him, and how her breath had smelled like anise, and how she kept saying, shaping her words as if speaking to a very small child, “Je t'aime, mon amour. La guerre est finie. Je t'aime. Je t'aime les Etats Unis.”

La guerre est finie, he thought now. La guerre est finie.

“What is it?” he asked Dugan sharply.

“What do you m-”

Ev swerved the Cherokee over to the side of the road, kicking up a spume of dust. They were a mile and a half over the town line now; it was another three or four miles to the old Garrick farm.

“Don't think, don't talk, just tell me what I was thinkin”.”

“Tout fini, you're thinking la guerre est finie, but you're crazy, people can't read minds, they c-”

Dugan stopped. He turned his head slowly and stared at Ev. Ev could hear the tendons in the man's neck creak. His eyes were huge.

“La guerre est finie,” he whispered. “That's what you were thinking, and that she smelled like licorice-”

“Anise,” Ev said, and laughed, remembering. Her thighs had been so white, her cunt so tight.

and I saw a grenade in the snow, oh Jesus what's going on?”

Ev pictured a red old-fashioned tractor in his mind. “What now?”

“Tractor,” Dugan husked. “Farmall. But you got the wrong tires on it. My dad had a Farmall Those are Dixie Field-Boss tires. They wouldn't fit a Far-”

Dugan suddenly turned around, grappled for the Cherokee's door handle, leaned out, and threw up.

“Ruth once asked me if I would read the Beatitudes at her funeral if it should fall to me to preside over it,” the Rev. Goohringer was saying in a mellow Methodist voice the Rev. Donald Harley would have completely approved of, “and I have honored her wishes. Yet-”

(la guerre you were thinking la guerre est)

Goohringer paused, a little expression of surprise and concern touching his face. A close observer might have thought a little gas had bubbled up, and he had paused to stifle an unseemly burp.

“-I think there is another set of verses she merits. They”

(tractor Farmall tractor)

There was another small hitch in Goohringer's delivery, and that frown touched his face again.

“-are not the sort of verses, I suppose, that any Christian woman would dare ask for, knowing that a Christian woman must earn them. Listen as I read from the Book of Proverbs and see if you, who knew her, do not agree that this is the case with Ruth McCausland.”

(those are Dixie Field-Boss tires)

Dick Allison glanced to his left and caught Newt's eye across the aisle. Newt looked dismayed. John Harley's mouth had dropped open; his faded blue eyes shifted back and forth in bewilderment.

Goohringer found his place, lost it, almost dropped his Bible. Suddenly he was flustered, no longer the master of ceremonies but a divinity student with stage-fright. As it happened, no one noticed; the outsiders were occupied either with physical distress or with mind-boggling ideas. The people of Haven drew together as an alarm went off, jumping from one mind to the next until their heads rang with it-this was a new carillon, one that jangled with discord.

(someone's looking where they have)

(have no business)

Bobby Tremain took Stephanie Colson's hand and squeezed it. She squeezed back, looking at him with wide brown eyes-the alarmed eyes of a doe who hears the slide and click of the bolt in a hunter's gun.

(out on Route 9)

(too close to the ship)

(one's a cop)

(cop, yes, but a special cop-Ruth's cop, he loved)

Ruth would have known these rising voices. And now even some of the outsiders began to feel them, although they were relatively new to Haven's infection. A few of them looked around like people coming out of thin dozes. One of these was the lady-friend of Representative Brennan's aide. She had been miles from here, it seemed-she was a minor bureaucrat in Washington, but she had just conceived of a filing system that might well get her a fat promotion. Then a random thought, a thought she would have sworn was not her own

(somebody has got to stop them quick!)

slashed across her mind and she looked around to see if someone had actually called out aloud in the church.

But it was quiet except for the preacher, who had found his place again. She looked at Marty, but Marty was sitting in a glassy daze, looking at one of the stained-glass windows with the fixed gaze of one deeply hypnotized. She supposed this to be boredom and went back to her own thoughts.

“Who can find a virtuous woman?” Goohringer read, his voice a trifle uneven. He hesitated in the wrong places and stumbled a few times. “For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, and he shall have no lack of gain. She doeth him good and not evil all the days of her life. She seeketh wool-”

Now another burst of those alien thoughts came to the single sensitized ear in the church:

(sorry about that I just couldn't)