On the ride to Derry, the boy had acted like a person in deep shock. Ev had had a vague idea that getting him out of Haven would improve matters, and in their frantic concern over David, neither Bryant nor Marie seemed to notice how odd their older boy seemed.

Getting out of Haven hadn't helped. Hilly's awareness and coherence had continued to decline. The first day in the hospital he had slept eleven hours out of twenty-four. He could answer simple questions, but more complicated ones confused him. He complained of a headache. He didn't remember the magic show at all, and seemed to think his birthday had been only the week before. That night, sleeping deeply, he had spoken one phrase quite clearly: “All the G. I. Joes.” Ev's back had crawled. lt was what he had been screaming over and over when they had all rushed out of the house to find David gone and Hilly in hysterics.

The following day, Hilly had slept for fourteen hours, and seemed even more confused in his mind during the time he spent in a soupy waking state. When the child psychologist detailed to his case asked him his middle name, he responded, “Jonathan.” It was David's middle name.

Now he was sleeping, for all practical purposes, around the clock. Sometimes he opened his eyes, seemed even to be looking at Ev or one of the nurses, but when they spoke, he would only smile his sweet Hilly Brown smile and drift off again.

Slipping away. He lay like an enchanted boy in a fairy-tale castle, only the IV bottle over his head and the occasional P. A. announcements from the hospital corridor spoiling the illusion.

There had been a great deal of excitement on the neurological front at first; a dark, non-specific shadow in the area of Hilly's cerebral cortex had suggested that the boy's strange dopiness might have been caused by a brain tumor. But when they got Hilly down to X-ray again, two days later (his plates had been slow-tracked, the X-ray technician explained to Ev, because no one expects to find a brain tumor in the head of a ten-year-old and there had been no previous symptoms to suggest one), the shadow had been gone. The neurologist had conferred with the X-ray technician, and Ev guessed from the technician's defensiveness that feathers must have flown. The neurologist told him that one more set of plates would be taken, but he believed they would show negative. The first set, he said, must have been defective.

“I suspected something must have been wacky,” he told Ev.

“Why was that?”

The neurologist, a big man with a fierce red beard, smiled. “Because that shadow was huge. To be perfectly blunt, a kid with a brain tumor that big would have been an extremely sick child for an extremely long time… if he was still alive at all.”

“I see. Then you still don't know what's wrong with Hilly.”

“We're working on two or three lines of inquiry,” the neurologist said, but his smile grew vague, his eyes shifted away from Ev's, and the next day the child psychologist showed up again. The child psychologist was a very fat woman with very dark black hair. She wanted to know where Hilly's parents were.

“Trying to find their other son.” Ev expected that would squash her.

It didn't. “Call them up and tell them I'd like some help finding this one.”

They came but were no help. They had changed; they were strange. The child psychologist felt it too, and after her initial run of questions, she started to pull away from them-Ev could actually feel her doing it. Ev himself had to work hard to keep from getting up and leaving the room. He didn't want to feel their strange eyes resting on him: their gaze made him feel as if he had been marked for something. The woman in the plaid blouse and the faded jeans had been his daughter, and she still looked like his daughter, but she wasn't, not anymore. Most of Marie was dead, and what was left was dying rapidly.

The child psychologist hadn't asked for them again.

She had been in to examine Hilly twice since then. The second occasion had been Saturday afternoon, the day before the Haven town hall blew up.

“What were they feeding him?” she asked abruptly.

Ev had been sitting by the window, the hot sun falling on him, almost dozing. The fat woman's question startled him awake. “What?”

“What were they feeding him?”

“Why, just regular food,” he said.

“I doubt that.”

“You needn't,” he said. “I took enough meals with “em to know. Why do you ask?”

“Because ten of his teeth are gone,” she said curtly.

Ev clenched a fist tightly in spite of the dull throb of arthritis and brought it down on one leg, hard.

What are you going to do, old man? David's gone and it would be easier if you could convince yourself he was really dead, wouldn't it?

Yes. That would make things simpler. Sadder, but simpler. But he couldn't believe that. Part of him was still convinced that David was alive. Perhaps it was only wishful thinking, but somehow Ev didn't think so-he had done plenty of that in his time, and this didn't feel like it. This was a strong, pulsing intuition in his mind: David is alive. He is lost, and he is in danger of dying, oh, most certainly… but he can still be saved. If. If you can make up your mind to do something. And if what you make up your mind to do is the right thing. Long odds for an old fart like you, who pisses a dark spot on his pants every once in a while these days when he can't get to the john in time. Long, long odds.

Late Monday evening he had awakened, from a dozing sleep, trembling in Hilly's hospital room-the nurses often turned a leniently blind eye to him and allowed him to stay far past regular visiting hours. He'd had a dreadful nightmare. He had dreamed he was in some dark and stony place-needletipped mountains sawed at a black sky strewn with cold stars, and a wind as sharp as an icepick whined in narrow, rocky defiles. Below him, by starlight, he could see a huge flat plain. It looked dry and cold and lifeless. Great cracks zigzagged across it, giving it the look of crazy-paving. And from somewhere, he could hear David's thin voice: “Help me, Grandpa, it hurts to breathe! Help me, Grandpa, it hurts to breathe! Help me! I'm scared! I didn't want to do the trick but Hilly made me and now I can't find my way home!”

He sat looking at Hilly, his body bathed in sweat. lt ran down his face like tears.

He got up, went over to Hilly, and bent close to him. “Hilly,” he said, not for the first time. “Where's your brother? Where is David?”

Only this time Hilly's eyes opened. His watery, unseeing stare chilled Everett-it was the stare of a blind sibyl.

“Altair-4,” Hilly said calmly, and with perfect clarity. “David is on Altair-4 and there's Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.”

His eyes slipped shut and he slept deeply again.

Ev stood over him, perfectly motionless, his skin the color of putty.

After a while, he began to shudder.

He was the town in exile.

If Ruth McCausland had been Haven's heart and conscience, then Ev Hillman at seventy-three (and not nearly so senile as he had lately come to fear) was its memory. He had seen much of the town in his long life there, and had heard more; he had always been a good listener.

Leaving the hospital that Monday evening, he detoured by the Derry Mr Paperback where he invested nine dollars in a Maine Atlas-a compendium of large maps which showed the state in neat pieces, 600 square miles in each piece. Turning to map 23, he found the town of Haven. He had also bought a compass at the book-and-magazine shop, and now, without wondering why he was doing it, he drew a circle around the town. He did not plant the compass's anchor in Haven Village to do this, of course, because the village was actually on the edge of the township.