David is on Altair-4
David is on Altair-4 and there's Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.
Ev sat frowning over the map and the circle he had drawn, wondering if what Hilly had said had any significance.
Should have gotten a red pencil, old man. Haven ought to be circled in red now. On this map… on every map.
He bent closer. His far vision was still so perfect that he could have told a bean from a kernel of corn if you set both on a fencepost forty yards away, but his near vision was going to hell fast, now, and he had left his reading glasses back at Marie and Bryant's-and he had an idea that if he went back to get them, he might find he had more to worry about than reading small print. For the time being it was better -safer-to just get along without them.
With his nose almost on the page, he examined the place where the compass needle had gone in. lt was spang on the Derry Road, just a bit north of Preston Stream, and a bit east of what he and his friends had called Big Injun Woods when they were kids. This map identified them as Burning Woods, and Ev had heard that name once or twice, too.
He closed the compass to a quarter of the radius he had needed to put a circle around all of Haven and drew a second circle. He saw that Bryant and Marie's house lay just inside that circle. To the west was the short length of Nista Road, which ran from Route 9-Derry Road-to a gravel-pit dead-end on the edge of those same woods-call them Big Injun Woods or Burning Woods, it was the same thing, the same woods.
Nista Road… Nista Road… something about Nista Road, but what? Something that had happened before he himself was born but something that had still been worth talking of for years and years…
Ev closed his eyes and looked as if he was asleep sitting up, a skinny old man, mostly bald, in a neat khaki shirt and neat khaki pants with creases up the legs.
In a moment it came, and when it did he wondered how it could have taken him so long to get it. The Clarendons. The Clarendons, of course. They had lived at the junction of Nista Road and the Old Derry Road. Paul and Faith Clarendon. Faith, who had been so taken with that sweety-sugar preacher, and who had birthed a child with black hair and sweety-sugar blue eyes about nine months after the preacher blew town. Paul Clarendon, who had studied the baby as it lay in its crib, and who had then gotten his straightrazor.
Some people had shaken their heads and blamed the preacher-Colson, his name was. He said it was, anyway.
Some people shook their heads and blamed Paul Clarendon; they said he'd always been crazy, and Faith should never have married him.
Some people had of course blamed Faith. Ev remembered some old man in the barbershop-this was years after, but towns like Haven have long memories -calling her “nothing but a titty-bump hoor born to make trouble.”
And some people had-in low voices, to be sure-blamed the woods.
Ev's eyes flashed open.
Yes; yes, they had. His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. lt was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.
“Humpf!” Ev's mother had sniffed-Ev himself had then been nine or so, he recollected now.
“And I guess it's why your ma there tosses some salt over her shoulder when she spills the cellar,” Ev's dad said mildly to Ev.
“Humpf!” she said again, and went inside to leave her husband smoking on the porch and her son sitting beside him, listening intently as his father yarned. Ev had always been a good listener… except for that one crucial moment when someone had so badly needed him to listen, that one unregainable moment when he had allowed Hilly's tears to drive him away in confusion.
Ev listened now. He listened to his memory… the town's memory.
They had been called Big Injun Woods because it was there that Chief Atlantic had died. lt was the whites who called him Chief Atlantic-his proper Micmac name had been Wahwayvokah, which means “by tall waters.” Chief Atlantic was a contemptuous translation of this. The tribe had originally coveredmuch of what was now Penobscot County, with large tribes centered in Oldtown, Skowhegan, and the Great Woods, which began in Ludlow-it was in Ludlow that they buried their dead when they were decimated by influenza in the 1880s and drifted south with WalIwayvokah, who had presided over their further decline. Waliwayvokah died in 1885, and on his deathbed he declared that the woods to which he had brought his dying people were cursed. That was known and reported by the two white men who had been present when he died-one an anthropologist from Boston College, the other from the Smithsonian Institute-who had come to the area in search of Indian artifacts from the tribes of the Northeast, which were degenerating rapidly and would soon be gone. What was less sure was whether Chief Atlantic was laying the curse himself or only making an observation of an existing condition.
Either way, his only monument was the name Big Injun Woods-even the site of his grave was no longer known. The name for that large piece of forest was, so far as Ev knew, still the one most commonly used in Haven and the other towns which were a part of it, but he could understand how the cartographers responsible for the Maine Atlas might not have wanted to put a word like “Injun” in their book of maps. People had gotten touchy about such casual slurs.
Old tales sometimes have a grain of truth in them, his dad had said…
Ev, who also crossed himself when black cats crossed his path (and, truth to tell, when one looked likely to, just to be safe), thought that his dad was right, and that grain was usually there. And, cursed or not, Big Injun Woods had never been very lucky.
Not lucky for Wahwayvokah, not lucky for the Clarendons. lt had never been very lucky for the hunters who tried their hand in there, either, he recalled. Over the years there had been two… no, three… wait a minute…
Ev's eyes widened and he made a silent whistle as he thumbed through a mental card-file labeled HUNTING ACCIDENTS, HAVEN. He could just offhand think of a dozen accidents, most of them shootings, which had taken place in Big Injun Woods, a dozen hunters who had been lugged out bleeding and cursing, bleeding and unconscious, or just plain dead. Some had shot themselves, using loaded guns for crutches to help them climb over fallen trees, or dropping them, or some damn thing. One was a reputed suicide. But Ev now remembered that on two occasions murder had been done during November in Big Injun Woods-it had been done in hot blood both times, once in an argument over a card game at someone's camp, once because of a squabble between two friends over whose bullet had taken down a buck of recordbreaking size.
And hunters got lost in there. Christ! Did they ever! Every year it seemed there was at least one search party sent out to find some poor scared slob from Massachusetts or New Jersey or New York City, and some years there were two or three. Not all of them were found.
Most were city people who had no business in the woods to start with, but that wasn't always the case. Veteran hunters said compasses worked poorly or not at all in Big Injun Woods. Ev's dad said he guessed there must be a helluva chunk of magnetic rock buried somewhere out there, and it foozled a compass needle to hell and gone. The difference between city folks and those who were veterans of the woods was that the city folks learned how to read a compass out of a book and then put all their trust in it. So when it packed up and said east was north and west was east or just spun around and around like a milk bottle in a kissing game, they were like men stuck in the shithouse with diarrhoea and no corncobs. Wiser men just cursed their compasses, put them away, and tried another of the half-dozen ways there were of finding a direction. Lacking all else, you looked for a stream to lead you out. Sooner or later, if you held a straight course, you'd either hit a road or a set of CMP power pylons.