As he watched his grampy shuffle away, Hilly's guilt and misery doubled… then trebled. He waited until Ev was gone, then scrambled to his feet and walked back to the platform. He put his foot on the concealed sewing-machine pedal and stepped on it.

Hummmmmmmmm.

He waited for the sheet to plump up in David's shape. He would whip the sheet off him and say, There, ya baby, see? That wasn't NOTHING, was it? He might even swat David a good one for scaring him and making him feel so lousy. Or maybe he'd just

Nothing was happening.

Fear began to swell in Hilly's throat. Began… or had it really been there all the time? All the time, he thought. Only now it was… swelling, yeah that was just the right word. Swelling in there, as if someone had stuck a balloon down his throat and was now inflating it. This new fear made misery look good and guilt absolutely peachy in comparison. He tried to swallow and couldn't get any spit past that swelling.

“David?” he whispered, and pushed the pedal again.

Hummmmmmm.

He decided he wouldn't swat David. He would hug David. When David got back, Hilly would fall down on his knees and hug David and tell David he could have all the G. I. Joe guys (except maybe for Snake-Eyes and Crystal Ball) for a whole week.

Nothing was still happening.

The sheet that had covered David lay crumpled on the one which covered the crate over his machine. It didn't plump up in a David-shape at all. Hilly stood all by himself in his back yard with the hot July sun beating down on him, his heart racing faster and faster in his chest, that balloon swelling in his throat. When it finally gets big enough to pop, he thought, I'll probably scream.

Quit it! He'll come back! Sure he will! The tomato came back, and the radio, and the lawn chair. Also, all the things I experimented on in my room came back. He… he…

“You and David come in and wash up, Hilly!” his mother called.

“Yeah, Mom!” Hilly called back in a wavering, insanely cheerful voice.,Pretty soon!”

And thought: Please God let him come back. I'm sorry God. I'll do anything, he can have all the G. I. Joe guys forever, I swear he can, he can have the MOBAT and even the Terrordome, only God dear God PLEASE LET IT WORK THIS TIME LET HIM COME BACK!

He pressed on the pedal again.

Hummmmmm…

He looked at the crumpled sheet through tear-blurred eyes. For a moment he thought something was happening, but it was only a puff of wind stirring the crumpled sheet.

Panic as bright as metal shavings began to twist through Hilly's mind. Shortly he would begin to scream, drawing his mother from the kitchen and his dripping father, naked except for a towel around his waist and shampoo running down his cheeks, both of them wondering what Hilly had done this time. The panic would be merciful in one way: when it came, it would obliterate thought.

But things had not gone that far yet, unfortunately. Two thoughts occurred to Hilly's bright mind in rapid succession.

The first: I never disappeared anything that was alive. Even the tomato was picked, and Daddy said once you pick something it's not really alive anymore.

The second thought: What if David can't breathe wherever he is? What if he can't BREATHE?

He had wondered very little about what happened to the things he “disappeared” until this moment. But now…

His last coherent thought before the panic descended like a pall-or a mourning veil-was actually a mental image. He saw David lying in the middle of some weird, inimical landscape. It looked like the surface of a harsh, dead world. The gray earth was dry and cold; cracks gaped like dead reptilian mouths. They went zigzagging away in every direction. Overhead was a sky blacker than jewelers” velvet, and a billion stars screamed down-they were brighter than the stars anyone on the surface of the earth had ever seen, because the place Hilly was looking at with the wide, horrified eye of his imagination was almost or totally airless.

And in the middle of this alien desolation lay his chubby four-year-old brother in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt reading THEY CALL ME DR LOVE. David was clutching at his throat, trying to breathe the no-air of a world that was maybe a trillion light-years from home. David was gagging, turning purple. Frost was tracing death-patterns across his lips and fingernails. He

Ah, but then the merciful panic finally took over.

He raked back the sheet he had used to cover David and overturned the crate that had concealed the machine. He stomped the sewing-machine pedal again and again, and began to scream. It was not until his mother reached him that she realized he was not just screaming; there were actually words in all that noise.

“All the G. I. Joes!” Hilly shrieked. “All the G. I. Joes! All the G. I. Joes! Forever and ever! All the G. I. Joes!”

And then, infinitely more chilling:

“Come back, David! Come back, David! Come back!”

“Dear God, what does he mean?” Marie cried.

Bryant took his son by the shoulders and turned him around so they were face-to-face.

“Where's David? Where did he go?”

But Hilly had fainted, and he never really came to. Not long after, over a hundred men and women, Bobbi and Gard among them, were out in the woods across the road, beating the bushes for Hilly's brother David.

If he could have been asked, Hilly would have told them that, in his opinion, they were looking too close to home.

Far too close.

Chapter 4

Bent and Jingles

On the evening of July 24th, a week after the disappearance of David Brown, Trooper Benton Rhodes was driving a state-police cruiser out of Haven around eight o'clock. Peter Gabbons, known to his fellow officers as Jingles, was riding shotgun. Twilight lay in ashes. These were metaphorical ashes, of course, as opposed to the ones on the hands of the two state cops. Those ashes were real. Rhodes's mind kept returning to the severed hand and arm, and to the fact that he had known instantly to whom they had once belonged. Jesus!

Stop thinking about it! he ordered his mind.

Okay, his mind agreed, and went right on thinking about it. “Try the radio again,” he said. “I bet we're getting interference from that damn microwave dish they put up in Troy.”

“All right.” Jingles grabbed the mike. “This is Unit 16 to Base. Do you copy, Tug? Over.”

He let go of the button and they both listened. What they heard was a peculiar screaming static, with ghostly voices buried deep inside it.

“Want me to try again?” Jingles asked.

“No. We'll be clear soon enough.”

Bent was running with the flashers on, doing seventy along Route 3 toward Derry. Where the hell were the backup units? There hadn't been a communications problem to and from Haven Village; radio transmissions so clear they were almost eerie. Nor had the radio been the only eerie thing about Haven tonight.

Right! his mind agreed. And by the way, you recognized the ring right away, didn't you? No mistaking a trooper's ring, even on a woman's hand, is there? And did you see the way her tendons were hanging down in flaps? Looked like a cut of meat in a butcher shop, didn't it? Leg of lamb, or something. Tore her arm right off! It

Stop it, I said! Goddammit, JUST QUIT!

Okay, yeah, right. Forgot for a sec that you didn't want to think about it. Or like a rolled roast, huh? And all that blood!

Stop it, please stop it, he moaned.

Right, okay, I know I'll drive me crazy if I keep thinking about it but I think I'll just keep thinking about it anyway because I just can't seem to stop. Her hand, her arm, they were bad, worse than any traffic accident I ever saw, but what about all those other pieces? The severed heads? The eyes? The feet? Yessir, that must have been a wowser of a furnace explosion, all right!