She didn't have as much metal in her head as Gard did (Gard's plate always set off airport metal-detectors), but she had a lot.

So she slept without knowing that she was a member of an extremely exclusive club: those people who could enter Haven as it was now with a bare chance of surviving.

She left for Haven in her rental car at eight the following morning. She made one wrong turn, but still arrived at the Troy-Haven town line by nine-thirty.

She had awakened feeling as nervous and randy-dandy as a thoroughbred dancing her way into the starting gate. But somewhere, in the last fifteen or twenty miles before she reached the Haven town line-the land around her nearly empty, dreamingly ripe in the breathless summer heat-hush-that fine feeling of anticipation and wire-thin nervy readiness had bled away. Her head began to ache. At first it was just a minor throb, but it quickly escalated into the familiar pounding of one of her near-migraines.

She drove past the town line into Haven.

By the time she got to Haven Village, she was hanging on to herself by force of will and not much more. The headache came and went in sickish waves. Once she thought she had heard a burst of hideously distorted music coming out of her mouth, but that must have been imagination, something brought on by the headache. She was faintly aware of people on the streets in the little village, but not of the way they all turned to look at her… her, then each other.

She could hear machinery throbbing in the woods somewhere-the sound was distant and dreamlike.

The Cutlass began to weave back and forth on the deserted road. Images doubled, trebled, came reluctantly back together, then began doubling and trebling again.

Blood trickled from the corners of her mouth unnoticed.

She held hard to one thought: It's on this road, Route 9, and her name will be on the mailbox. It's on this road, Route 9, and her name will be on the mailbox. It's on this road

The road was mercifully deserted. Haven slept in the morning sun. Ninety per cent of out-of-town traffic had been rerouted now, and this was a good thing for Anne, whose car pitched and yawed wildly, left-hand wheels now spuming dust from one shoulder, right-hand wheels spuming dust from the other a few moments later. She knocked down a turn sign without being aware of it.

Young Ashley Ruvall saw her coming and pulled his bike a prudent distance off the road and stood astride it in Justin Hurd's north pasture until she was gone.

(a lady there's a lady and I can't hear her except her pain)

A hundred voices answered him, soothing him.

(we know Ashley it's all right… shhh… shhh)

Ashley grinned, exposing his pink, baby-smooth gums.

Her stomach revolted.

Somehow she was able to pull over and shut off the engine before her breakfast bolted up and out a moment after she managed to claw the driver's door open. For a moment she just hung there with her forearms propped on the open window of the half-open door, bent awkwardly outward, consciousness no more than a single spark which she maintained by her determination that it should not go out. At last she was able to straighten up and pull the door closed.

She thought in a dim and confused way that it must have been breakfast -headaches she was used to, but she almost never threw up. Breakfast in the restaurant of that fleabag that was supposed to be Bangor's best hotel. The bastards had poisoned her.

I may be dying… oh God yes, it really feels as if I might be dying. But if I'm not, I am going to sue them from here to the steps of the U. S. Supreme Court. If I live, I'll make them wish their mothers never met their fathers.

Perhaps it was the bracing quality of this thought which made Anne feel strong enough to get the car moving again. She crept along at thirty-five, looking for a mailbox with ANDERSON written on it. A terrible idea came to her. Suppose Bobbi had painted out her name on the mailbox? It wasn't so crazy when you really thought about it. She might well suspect Sissy would turn up, and the spineless little twat had always been afraid of her. She was in no shape to stop at every farm along the way, inquiring after Bobbi (not that she'd get much help from Bobbi's hayseed neighbors if the donkey she'd spoken to on the phone was any indication), and

But there it was: R. ANDERSON. And behind it, a place she had seen only in photographs. Uncle Frank's place. The old Garrick farm. There was a blue truck parked in the driveway. The place was right, yes, but the light was wrong. She realized this clearly for the first time as she approached the driveway. Instead of feeling the triumph she had expected at this moment-the triumph of a predator that has finally succeeded in running its prey to earth-she felt confusion, uncertainty, and, although she did not even really realize it for what it was because it was so unfamiliar, the first faint trickle of fear.

The light.

The light was wrong.

This realization brought others in quick succession. Her stiff neck. The circles of sweat darkening her dress under her arms. And

Her hand flew to her crotch. There was a faint dampness there, drying now, and she isolated a dim ammoniac smell in the car. It had been there for some time, but her conscious mind had just now tumbled to it.

I Pissed myself. I pissed myself and I've been in this fucking car almost long enough for it to dry

(and the light, Anne)

The light was wrong. It was sunset light.

Oh no-it's nine-thirty in the

But it was sunset light. There was no denying it. She had felt better after vomiting, yes… and she suddenly understood why. The knowledge had been there all along, really, just waiting to be noticed, like the patches of sweat under the arms of her dress, or that faint smell of drying urine. She had felt better because the period between closing the door and actually starting the car again hadn't been seconds or minutes but hours-she had spent all that brutally hot summer day in the oven of the car. She had lain in a deathlike stupor, and if she had been using the Cutlass's air-conditioning with all the windows rolled up when she stopped the car, she would have cooked like a Thanksgiving turkey. But her sinuses were nearly as bad as her teeth, and the canned air manufactured by automobile air-conditioners irritated them. This physical problem, she realized suddenly, staring at the old farm with wide, bloodshot eyes, had probably saved her life. She had been running with all four windows open. Otherwise

This led to another thought. She had spent the day in a deathlike stupor, parked by the side of the road, and no one had stopped to check on her. That no one had come along a main road like Route 9 in all those hours since nine-thirty was something she just couldn't accept. Not even out in the sticks. And when they did see you in trouble in Sticksville, they didn't just put the pedal to the metal and keep on going, like New Yorkers stepping over a wino.

What kind of town is this, anyway?

That unaccustomed trickle again, like hot acid in her stomach.

This time she recognized the feeling as fear, seized it, wrung its neck… and killed it. Its brother might show up later on, and if so, she would kill it too, and all the sibs that might follow.

She drove into the yard.

Anne had met Jim Gardener twice before, but she never forgot a face. Even so, she barely recognized the Great Poet, although she believed she could have smelled him at forty yards, if she had been downwind on even a moderately breezy day. He was sitting on the porch in a strappy T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, an open bottle of Scotch in one hand. He had a threeor four-day beard-stubble, much of it gray. His eyes were bloodshot. Although Anne didn't know this-and wouldn't have cared-Gardener had been in this state, more or less, for the last two days. All his noble resolves had gone by the board since finding the dog hairs on Bobbi's dress.