She sat behind the wheel of her car for almost twenty minutes, waiting for the throbbing in her knees to subside. Cars and trucks passed occasionally along Derry Road in both directions, and once as she sat there, Ashley Ruvall came along on his bike. He had his fishing pole. He saw her and raised a hand to her.

“Hi, Mithuth McCauthland!” he cried chirpily, and grinned. The lisp wasn't really surprising, she thought dully, considering that all of the boy's teeth were gone. Not some; all.

Still, she felt coldness rush through her as Ashley called: “We all love you, Mithuth McCauthland…”

After a long time she backed the Dart up, U-turned, and went back through the hot silence to Haven Village. As she drove up Main Street to her house, it seemed that a great many people looked at her, their eyes full of a knowledge more sly than wise.

Ruth looked up into the Dart's rearview mirror and saw the clock tower at the other end of the village's short Main Street.

The hands were approaching three P. M.

She pulled to a stop in front of the Fannins”, bumping carelessly up over the curb and stalling the engine. She didn't bother to turn off the key. She only sat behind the wheel, red idiot-lights glowing on the instrument panel, looking into the rearview mirror as her mind floated gently away. When she came back to herself, the town-hall clock was chiming six. She had lost three hours… and another tooth. The hours were nowhere to be found, but the tooth, an incisor, lay on the lap of her dress.

All that night her dolls talked to her. And she thought that none of what they said was precisely a lie… that was the most horrible thing of all. She sat in the green, diseased heart of their influence and listened to them tell their lunatic fairy tales.

They told her she was right to believe she was going crazy; an X-ray of her brain, they said, one of anyone in Haven, for that matter, would make a neurologist run screaming for cover. Her brain was changing. lt was… “becoming.”

Her brain, her teeth-oh, excuse me, make that ex-teeth-both “becoming.” And her eyes… they were changing color, weren't they? Yes. Their deep brown was fading toward hazel… and the other day, in the Haven Lunch, hadn't she noticed that Beach Jernigan's bright blue eyes were also changing color? Deepening toward hazel?

Hazel eyes… no teeth… oh dear God what's happening to us?

The dolls looked at her glassily, and smiled.

Don't worry, Ruth, it's only the invasion from space they've made cheap movies about for years. You see that, don't you? The Invasion of the Tommyknockers. If you want to see the invaders from space the B movies and the science-fiction stories were always going on about, look in Beach Jernigan's eyes. Or Wendy's. Or your own.

“What you mean is that I'm being eaten up,” she whispered in the summer darkness as Friday night became Saturday morning.

Why, Ruth! What did you think “becoming” was? the dolls laughed, and Ruth's mind mercifully floated away once again.

When she woke on Saturday morning the sun was up, the shaky child's drawing of the town-hall clock tower was on the schoolroom blackboard, and there were better than two dozen calculators on Ralph's sheeted study desk. They were in the canvas shoulder-bag she used when she went out collecting for the Cancer Society. There were Dymotapes on some of the calculators. BERRINGER. HAZEL MCCREADY. SELECTMAN'S OFFICE DO NOT REMOVE. DEPT. OF TAXES. She hadn't gone to sleep after all. Instead, she had drifted into one of those blank periods. While it was going on, she had looted all the town offices” calculators, it looked like.

Why?

Yours not to reason why, Ruth, the dolls whispered, and she understood better and better each day, better and better each minute, each second, in fact, what had frightened little Edwina Thurlow so badly. Yours is but to send a signal… and die.

How much of that idea is mine? And how much is them, driving me?

Doesn't matter, Ruth. It's going to happen anyway, so make it happen as fast and hard and soon as you can. Stop thinking. Let it happen… because part of you wants it to happen, doesn't it?

Yes. Most of her, in fact. And not to send a signal to the outside world, or any silly bullshit like that; that was just the sane icing on a rich devil's food cake of irrationality.

She wanted to be a part of it as it all went up.

The cardboard tubes would channel the force, send it up into the clock tower in a bright river of destructive power, and the tower would lift off like a rocket; the shockwave would hammer the street of this fouled Haven with destruction and destruction was what she wanted; that want was part of her “becoming.”

That night, Butch Dugan called her to update her on the David Brown case. Some of the developments were unusual. The boy's brother, Hillman, was in the hospital, in a state which closely resembled catatonia. The kid's grandfather wasn't much better. He had begun telling people that David Brown hadn't just gotten lost, but had actually disappeared. That the magic trick, in other words, had been real. And, Butch said, he was telling anyone who would listen that half the people in Haven were going crazy and the rest were already there.

“He went up to Bangor and talked to a fellow named Bright on the News,” Monster said. “They wanted human interest and got nut stuff instead. Old man's turning into a real quasar, Ruth.”

“Better tell him to stay away,” Ruth said. “They'll let him in, but he'll never get out again.”

“What?” Monster shouted. His voice was suddenly becoming faint. “This connection's going to hell, Ruth.”

“I said there may be something new tomorrow. I still haven't given up hope.” She rubbed her temples steadily and looked at the dolls, in a row on Ralph's desk and wired up like a terrorist's bomb. “Look for a signal tomorrow.”

“What?” Monster's voice was almost lost in the rising surf of the worsening connection.

“Goodbye, Butch. You're a hell of a sport. Listen for it. You'll hear it all the way up in Derry, I think. Three on the nose.”

“Ruth I'm losing you… call back… soon…”

She hung up the useless telephone, looked at her dolls, listened to the rising voices, and waited for it to be time.

That Sunday was a picture-book summer day in Maine: clear, bright, warm. At a quarter to one, Ruth McCausland, dressed in a pretty blue summer frock, left her house for the last time. She locked the front door, and stood on tiptoe to hang the key on the little hook there. Ralph had argued that any burglar worth his salt would look over the door for a key first thing of all, but Ruth had gone on doing it, and the house had never been burgled. She supposed, at bottom, it came down to trust… and Haven had never let her down. She had put the dolls in Ralph's old canvas duffel. She dragged it down the porch steps.

Bobby Tremain was walking by, whistling. “Help you with that, Missus McCausland?”

“No thank you, Bobby.”

“All right.” He smiled at her. A few teeth were left in his smile-not many, but a few, like the last remaining pickets in a fence surrounding a haunted house. “We all love you.”

“Yes,” she said, hoisting the duffel into the passenger seat. A bolt of pain ripped through her head. “Oh how well I know it.”

(what are you thinking Ruth where are you going)

(she sells seashells she sells seashells)

(tell us Ruth tell us what the dolls told you to do)

(Betty Bitter bought some butter)