Except, now that he thought about it-now that he had seen the pattern

Ev realized that the sounds weren't deep enough in the woods to be on NEP's land -those sounds were coming from the Garrick place. And he also realized that the earlier sounds-the cycling, waspy whine of a chainsaw, the crackle-crunch of failing trees, the coughing roar of a gas-powered chipper-had given way to sounds he didn't associate with woods work at all. The later sounds had been… what? Earth-moving machinery, perhaps.

Once you saw the pattern, things fell into place like the last dozen pieces going effortlessly into a big jigsaw puzzle.

Ev sat looking down at the map and the circles. A dark, numbing horror seemed to be filling his veins, freezing him from the inside out.

Once you saw the pattern, you couldn't help seeing it.

Ev slammed the atlas shut and went to bed.

Where he was unable to sleep.

What are they doing down there tonight? Building things? Making people disappear? What?

Every time he drifted near sleep, an image came: of everyone in Haven Village standing in Main Street with drugged, dreamy expressions on their faces, all of them looking southwest, toward those sounds, like Muslims facing Mecca to pray.

Heavy machinery… earth-moving machinery.

As the pieces went into the puzzle, you began to see what it was, even if there was no picture on the box to help you. Lying in this narrow bed not far from where Hilly lay in his coma, Ev Hillman thought he saw the picture pretty well. Not all of it, mind you, but a lot. He saw it and knew perfectly well no one would believe him. Not without proof. And he dared not go back, dared not put himself in their reach. They would not let him go a second time.

Something. Something out in Big Injun Woods. Something in the ground, something on the land Frank Garrick had willed to his niece, who wrote those western books. Something that knocked compasses and human minds galley-west if you got too close. For all Ev knew, there might be such strange deposits all over the earth. If it did nothing else, it might explain why people in some places seemed so goddam pissed off all the time. Something bad. Haunted. Maybe even accursed.

Ev stirred restlessly, rolled over, looked at the ceiling.

Something had been in the earth. Bobbi Anderson had found it and she was digging it up, her and that fellow who was staying out at the farm with her. That fellow's name was… was…

Ev groped, but couldn't come up with it. He remembered the way Beach Jernigan's mouth had thinned down when the subject of Bobbi's friend came up one day in the Haven Lunch. The regulars on coffee break had just observed the man coming out of the market with a bag of groceries. He had a place over in Troy, Beach said; a shacky little place with a woodstove and plastic over the windows.

Someone said he'd heard the fella was educated.

Beach said an education never kept anyone from being no-account.

No one in the Lunch had argued the point, Ev remembered.

Nancy Voss had been equally disapproving. She said Bobbi's friend had shot his wife but had been let off because he was a college professor. “If you got a sheepskin written in Latin words in this country, you can get away with anything,” she had said.

They had watched the fellow get into Bobbi's truck and drive back toward the old Garrick place.

“I heard he done majored in drinkin',” old Dave Rutledge said from the end stool that was his special place. “Everyone goes out there says he's most allus drunk as a coon on stump-likker.”

There had been a burst of mean, gossipy country laughter at that. They hadn't liked Bobbi's friend; none had. Why? Because he had shot his wife? Because he drank? Because he was living with a woman he wasn't married to? Ev knew better. There had been men in the Lunch that day who had not just beaten their wives but beaten them into entirely new shapes. Out here it was part of the code: you were obligated to put one upside the old woman's head if she “got sma'at.” Out here were men who lived on beer from eleven in the morning until six at night and cheap greenfront whiskey from six to midnight and would drink Old Woodsman flydope strained through a snotrag if they couldn't afford whiskey. Men who had the sex lives of rabbits, jumping from hole to hole. And what had his name been?

Ev drifted toward sleep. Saw them standing on the sidewalks, on the lawn of the public library, over by the little park, staring dreamily toward those sounds. Snapped awake again.

What did you find out, Ruth? Why did they murder you?

He tossed onto his left side.

David's alive… but to bring him back I have to start in Haven.

He tossed onto his right side.

They'll kill me if I go back. There was once a time when I was almost as well-liked there as Ruth herself… least, I always liked to think so. Now they hate me. I saw it in their eyes the night they started looking for David. I took

Hilly out because he was sick and needed a doctor, yes… but it was damned good to have a reason to go. Maybe they only let me go because David distracted them. Maybe they just wanted to be rid of me. Either way, I was lucky to get out. I'd never get out again. So how can I go back? I can't.

Ev tossed and turned, caught on the horns of two imperatives-he would have to go back to Haven if he wanted to rescue David before David died, but if he went back to Haven he would be killed and buried quickly in someone's back field.

Sometime shortly before midnight, he fell into a troubled doze which quickly deepened into the dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion.

He slept later than he had in years, awakening on Tuesday morning at a quarter past ten. He felt refreshed and whole for the first time in a long while. The sleep had done him a power of good, too: during it he had thought of how he could maybe get back into Haven and out again. Maybe. For David's sake, and Hilly's, that was a risk he would take.

He thought he could get in and out of Haven on the day of Ruth McCausland's funeral.

Butch “Monster” Dugan was the biggest man Ev had ever seen. Ev believed that Justin Hurd's father Henry might have been within a shout-Henry had stood six-six, weighed three hundred and eighty pounds, and had shoulders so broad he had to go through most doors sideways-but Ev thought this fellow was a tad bigger. Twenty or thirty pounds lighter, maybe, but that was all.

When Ev shook his hand, he saw that word on him had been getting around. lt was in Dugan's face.

“Sit down, Mr Hillman,” Dugan said, and seated himself in a swivel chair that looked as if it might have been rammed out of a huge oak. “What can I do for you?”

He expects me to start raving, Ev thought calmly, just the way we always expected Frank Garrick to start when he caught up to one of us on the street. And I guess I ain't going to disappoint him. But if you step careful, Ev, you may still get your way. You know now where you want to go, anyway.

“Well, maybe you could do something, at that,” Ev said. At least he hadn't been drinking; trying to talk to that reporter after those beers had been a bad mistake. “Paper says you'll be going to Ruth McCausland's funeral tomorrow.”

Dugan nodded. “I'm going. Ruth was a personal friend.”

“And there are others from Derry barracks that'll be going? Paper said her husband was a trooper, and she was in the line of policework herself-oh bein a town constable's no great shakes, I know, but you get what I mean. There will be others, won't there?”

Dugan was frowning now, and he had a lot of face to frown with.

“Mr Hillman, if you have a point to make, I'm not getting it.” And I'm a busy man this morning, in case you didn't know it, his face added. I've got two cops missing, it's starting to look more and more like they ran into some guys jacking deer and the jackers panicked and shot them; I'm in the hot-seat on that one, and on top of it all my old friend Ruth McCausland has died, and I don't have either the time or the patience for bullshit.