Then her voice, faint, but boosted by Bobby Tremain's mind, came to them.

It was bad news.

“What was it?” Kyle Archinbourg asked Newt. “I didn't catch all of it.”

“Are you fucking deaf?” Andy Baker snarled. “Jesus Christ, people in three counties heard the bang when that bitch blew the roof off. For two cents

He balled his fists.

“Quit it, both of you,” Hazel McCready said. She turned to Kyle. “That girl has done a hell of a job.” She was deliberately projecting as hard as she could, hoping to reach Christina Lindley as well as explain the situation to Kyle Archinbourg… to buck her up. The girl had

(thought)

sounded distraught, nearly hysterical, and she wouldn't do them any good that way. In such a state she would fuck up for sure, and they just didn't have the time for fuckups.

“It's not her fault you can read the clock in the photo.”

“What do you mean?” Kyle asked.

“She's found a color photo with an angle that couldn't be more perfect,” Hazel said. “It'll look exactly right from the church and the cemetery, and only a little distorted from the road. We'll have to keep outsiders from going around to the back for a couple of days, until Chris finds a rough matching angle, but since they're going to be interested in the furnace… and in Ruth

I think we can get away with that. Close some roads?” she looked at Newt.

“Sewer work,” he said promptly. “Easy as pie.”

“I still don't understand the nature of the problem,” Kyle said.

“Might be you, y'fuckin” ijit,” Andy Baker said.

Kyle swung truculently toward the mechanic and Newt said, “Stop it, both of you.” And, to Kyle: “The problem is that Ruth blew the tower off the town hall at 3:05 this afternoon. In the only good picture Christina could find, you can read the clock-face.

It says a quarter to ten.”

Oh,” Kyle said. Sweat suddenly turned his face oily. He took out his handkerchief and mopped it. “Oh shit. What do we do now?”

“Ad-lib,” Hazel said calmly.

“Bitch!” Andy cried. “I'd kill her if she wadn't already dead!”

Everyone in town loved her, and you know it, Andy,” Hazel said.

“Yeah. And I hope the devil's toasting her with a long fork down in hell.” Andy switched the gadget off.

Henry's grandmother disappeared. Hazel was relieved. There was something a little ghastly about seeing that hatchet-faced woman floating in perfect 3-D above Henry's field, with the cows-which should have been stabled long ago-sometimes wandering through her as they grazed, or disappearing casually through the large old-fashioned brooch the woman wore at her high-necked collar.

“It's going to be fine,” Bobbi Anderson said suddenly in the quiet, and everyone -including Christina Lindley back in town-heard, and was relieved.

“Take me to my house,” she said to Bobby Tremain. “Quick. I know what to do.”

“You're there.” He took her arm and began pulling her toward the door.

“Hold it,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Don't you think I better”

bring the photograph? she finished.

Oh shit! Bobby said, and slapped his forehead.

Dick Allison, meanwhile, who was chief of Haven's volunteer fire department, was sitting in his office sweating bullets in spite of the air-conditioning, fielding telephone calls. The first was from the Troy constable, the second from the Unity chief of police, the third from the state police, the fourth from AP.

He probably would have been sweating anyway, but one of the reasons the air-conditioning wasn't doing him any good was his door had been blown off its hinges by the force of the blast. Most of the plaster had fallen off the walls, revealing lathing like decayed ribs. He sat in the middle of the wreckage and told his callers that it sure had been a hell of a bang, and it looked as if they probably had had one fatality, but it was nowhere near as bad as it had probably sounded. While he was rolling out this bullshit for the guy from the Bangor Daily News named John Leandro, a cork ceiling panel fell on his head. Dick slashed it aside with a wolfish snarl, listened, laughed, and said it was just the bulletin board. Goddam thing had fallen over again. lt just had those sucker things on the back, you know, well, if you bought cheap you got cheap, his mother had always told him, and…

it took another five minutes, but he finally bored Leandro off the phone. As he put his own telephone back in the cradle, most of the hallway ceiling outside his door fell with a powdery crrrumpp!

“MOTHERFUCKING-COCKSUCKING-SON-OF-A-FUCKING BITCH!” Dick Allison screamed, and brought his left fist down on his desk as hard as he could. Although he broke all four fingers, he didn't even notice in his raving fury. If, at that moment, anyone had come into his office, Allison would have ripped that person's throat open, filled his mouth with hot blood, and then sprayed it back into the dying person's face. He screamed and swore and even drummed his feet up and down on the floor like a child doing a tantrum because he has been denied an outing.

He looked childish.

He also looked extremely dangerous.

Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers. knocking at the door.

In between phone calls, Dick went into Hazel's office, found the Midol in her drawer, and took six. Then he wrapped his throbbing, swelling hand tightly and forgot it. If he had still been human. this would have been impossible; one does not simply forget four broken fingers. But since then he had “become.” One of the things that included was becoming able to exercise conscious will over pain.

It came in handy.

In between his conversations with the outside-and sometimes during them -Dick spoke to the men and women working furiously at Henry Applegate's. He told them he expected a couple of state cops by four-thirty, five o'clock at the latest. Could they have the slide-projector ready by then? When Hazel explained the problem, Dick began to rave again, this time with fear as well as anger. When Hazel explained what Christina Lindley was up to, he calmed… a little. She had a home darkroom. There she would carefully make a negative of the Yankee picture and enlarge it slightly, not because it needed to be bigger for the slide-projector device to work (and too much enlarging would give their clock-tower illusion an odd, grainy look), but because she needed a slightly bigger image to work with.

She's going to turn a negative, Hazel said in his mind, then airbrush out the hands on the clock-face. Bobby Tremain is going to put them back in with an X-acto knife, so they say 3:05. He's got a steady hand and a little talent. Right now a steady hand seems more important.

I thought if you made a negative from a positive it came out blurry, Dick Allison said. Specially if the positive's color.

She's improved her developing equipment, Hazel said. She didn't need to add that seventeen-year-old Christina Lindley now had what was probably the most advanced darkroom on earth.

So how long?

Midnight, she thinks, Hazel said.

Christ on a pony! Dick shouted, loud enough to make the people in Henry's field wince.

We'll need about thirty D-cells, Bobbi Anderson's voice cut in calmly. Be a love and see to that, Dick. And we understand about the police. Play Hee-Haw for them, you understand?

He paused. Yes, he said. Buck and Roy, Junior Sample.

Exactly, And hold them. It's their radio I'm really worried about, not them-they'll only send one unit, two at most, to start with. But if they see… if they radio it in…

There was a murmur of assent like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell.