Leandro looked at the clerk, almost sick with excitement. He felt like a man following arrows deeper and deeper into a frightening but fabulous and totally unexplored cavern.

You rented this mask? Personally?”

Well, it was a flat-pack, actually, but yes. My dad and I run the place. He was delivering oxy bottles down to Augusta. I caught hell from him. I don't know if he'll like me renting another Bell, even, but with the deposit I guess it's okay.”

“Can you describe the man?”

“Mister, do you feel okay? You look a little white around the

“I'm fine. Can you describe the man who rented the flat-pack?”

“Old. Had a tan. He was mostly bald. He was skinny… stringy, I guess you'd say. Like I say, he looked tough.” The clerk thought. “He was driving a Valiant.”

“Could you check the day he rented the flat-pack?”

“You a cop?”

Reporter. Bangor Daily News.” Leandro showed the clerk his press card. Now the clerk also began to look excited.

“He do Somethin” else? Besides rip off our flat-pack, I mean?”

“Could you look up the name and date for me?”

“Sure.”

The clerk flipped back through his rental book. He found the entry and turned the book so Leandro could read it. The date was July 26th. The name was scrawled but still legible. Everett Hillman.

“You never reported the loss of the equipment to the police,” Leandro said. It was not a question. If a complaint of theft had been lodged against the old geezer to complement his landlady's understandable unhappiness at being stiffed for two weeks” rent, the cops might have taken more interest in how or why Hillman had disappeared… or where he had disappeared to.

“No, Dad said not to bother. Our insurance doesn't cover the theft of rented equipment, see, and… well, that's why.”

The clerk shrugged and smiled, but the shrug was slightly embarrassed, the smile slightly uneasy, and taken together they told Leandro a lot. He might be a terminal twerp, as David Bright feared, but he was not a stupid one. If they had reported the theft or disappearance of the flat-pack, the insurance company wouldn't cover the loss. But this fellow's father knew some other way they could stick it to the insurance company. But for now all that was very much a secondary consideration.

“Well, thank you for all your help,” Leandro said, turning the book back around. “Now if we could finish up here-”

“Sure, of course.” The clerk was obviously happy to leave the subject of insurance behind. “And you won't put any of this in the paper until you check with my father, will you?”

“Absolutely not,” Leandro said with a warm sincerity that P. T. Barnum himself would have admired. “Now, if I could just sign the agreement-”

“Right. I'll have to see some ID first, though. I didn't ask the old guy, and I also heard from Dad about that, I can tell you.”

“I just showed you my press card.”

“I know, but maybe I ought to see some real identification.”

Sighing, Leandro pushed his driver's license across the counter.

“Slow down, Johnny,” David Bright said. But Leandro was standing at an outdoor phone kiosk near the edge of a drive-in-restaurant parking lot. He heard the beginnings of excitement in Bright's voice. He believes me. Son of a bitch, I think he finally believes me!

As he had driven away from Maine Med Supplies and back toward Haven, Leandro's excitement and tension had grown until he thought he might explode if he didn't talk to someone else. And he had to; he recognized that as a responsibility that superseded his desire to get his scoop alone. He had to because he was going back, and something could easily happen to him, and if it did, he wanted to be sure somebody knew what he was onto. And Bright, as insufferable as he could be, was at least utterly honest; he wouldn't double-cross him.

Slow down, yeah, I got to.

He switched the phone to his other ear. The afternoon sun was hot on his neck, but it didn't feel bad at all. He started with the ride to Haven: the incredible jam-up of stations on the radio; the violent nausea; the bloody nose; the lost teeth. He told him about his conversation with the old man in the general store, how empty the place had been, how the whole area could have been wearing a big sign that said GONE FISHIN. He didn't mention his mathematical insights, because he could barely remember having them. Something had happened, but it was now all vague and diffuse in his mind.

Instead, he told Bright that he had gotten the idea that the air in Haven had been poisoned, somehow-that there had been a chemical spill or something, or maybe the escape of some natural but deadly gas from inside the earth.

“A gas that improves radio transmissions, Johnny?”

Yes, he knew it was unlikely, he knew all the pieces didn't fit yet, but he had been there and he was sure it was the air that had made him sick. So he had decided to get some portable oxygen and go back.

He related his coincidental discovery that Everett Hillman, whom Bright himself had dismissed as a nutty old man, had been there before him, on exactly the same errand.

“So what do you think?” Leandro said finally.

There was a momentary lag, and then Bright said what Leandro believed to be the sweetest words he had ever heard in his life. “I think you were right all the time, Johnny. Something very weird is happening out there, and I advise you very strongly to stay away.”

Leandro closed his eyes for a moment and leaned his head against the side of the telephone. He was smiling. It was a large and blissful smile. Right. Right all the time. Ah, they were good words; fine words; words of balm and beatitude. Right all the time.

“John? Johnny? Are you still there?”

Eyes still closed, still smiling, Leandro said: “I'm here.” Just relishing it, David, old man, because I think I have been waiting my entire life for someone to tell me I was right all the time. About something. About anything.

“Stay away. Call the state cops.”

“Would you?”

“Fuck, no!”

Leandro laughed. “Well, there you go. I'll be okay. I've got oxygen

“According to the guy at the medical-supply place, Hillman did too. He's just as gone.”

“I'm going,” Leandro repeated. “Whatever's going on in Haven, I'm going to be the first one to see it… and get pictures of it.”

“I don't like it.”

“What time is it?” Leandro's own watch had stopped. Which was funny; he was almost sure he'd wound it when he got up that morning.

“Almost two.”

“Okay. I'll call in by four. Again at six. Et cetera, until I'm home and dry. If you or somebody there doesn't hear from me every two hours, call the cops.”

“Johnny, you sound like a kid playing with matches telling his father if he catches on fire, Dad has permission to put him out.”

“You're not my father,” Leandro said sharply.

Bright sighed. “Look, Johnny. If it makes any difference, I'm sorry I called you fucking Jimmy Olson. You were right, isn't that enough? Stay out of Haven.”

“Two hours. I want two hours, David. I deserve two hours, goddammit.” Leandro hung up the phone.

He started back to his car… then turned and marched defiantly back to the walk-up window and ordered two cheeseburgers with everything on them. It was the first time in his life he had ever ordered food from one of those places his mother called roadside luncheonettes-only when she said the words she made such places sound like the blackest pits of horror, as in It Came from the Roadside Luncheonette, or Earth vs. The Microbe Monsters.

When they came, the cheeseburgers were hot and wrapped in grease-spotted sheets of waxed paper with the marvelous words DERRY BURGER RANCH printed all over them. He had gobbled the first even before he got back to his Dodge.