The Tommyknockers

2

She stopped in the back yard, panting, her mousy blonde hair hanging in her face, her heart beating so fast that it frightened her. No one had heard her shriekings and carryings-on, thank the Lord; she and Joe lived far out on the Nista Road, and their nearest neighbors were the Brodskys, who lived in that slutty trailer. The Brodskys were half a mile away. That was good. Anyone had heard her would have thought there was a crazywoman down at the Paulsons'.

Well there is, isn't there? If you think that picture started to talk, why, you must be crazy. Daddy'd beat you three shades of blue for saying such a thing - one for lying, another for believing it, and a third for raising your voice. 'Becka, pictures don't talk.

No ... nor did it, another voice spoke up suddenly. That voice came out of your own head. 'Becka, I don't know how it could be ... how you could know such things ... but that's what happened. You made that picture of Jesus talk your own self, like Edgar Bergen used to make Charlie McCarthy talk on the Ed Sullivan Show.

But somehow that idea seemed more frightening, more downright crazy, than the idea that the picture itself had spoken, and she refused to allow it mental house-room. After all, miracles happened every day. There was that Mexican fellow who had found a picture of the Virgin Mary baked into an enchilada, or something. There were those miracles at Lourdes. Not to mention those children that had made the headlines of one of the tabloids - they had cried rocks. These were bona fide miracles (the children who wept rocks was, admittedly, a rather gritty one), as uplifting as a Pat Robertson sermon. Hearing voices was just nuts.

But that's what happened. And you've been hearing voices for quite a while now, haven't you? You've been hearing his voice. Joe's. And that's where it came from. Not from Jesus but from Joe

'No,' 'Becka whimpered. 'I ain't heard any voices in my head.'

She stood by her clothesline in the back yard, looking blankly off toward the woods on the other side of the Nista Road. They were hazy in the heat. Less than half a mile into those woods, as the crow flew, Bobbi Anderson and Jim Gardener were steadily unearthing more and more of a titanic fossil in the earth.

Crazy, her dead father's implacable voice tolled in her head. Crazy with the heat. You come on over here, 'Becka Bouchard, I'm gonna beat you three shades of blister-blue for that crazy talk.

'I ain't heard no voices in my head,' 'Becka moaned. 'That picture really did talk, I swear, I can't do ventriloquism!'

Better the picture. If it was the picture, it was a miracle, and miracles came from God. A miracle could drive you nuts - and dear God knew she felt like she was going nuts right now - but it didn't mean you were crazy to start with. Hearing voices in your head, however, or believing that you could hear other people's thoughts ...

'Becka looked down, and saw blood gushing from her left knee. She shrieked again and ran back into the house to call the doctor, Medix, somebody, anybody. She was in the living room again, pawing at the dial with the phone to her ear, when Jesus said:

'That's just raspberry filling from your coffee-cake, 'Becka. Why don't you just cool it before you have a heart attack?'

She looked at the Sony, the telephone receiver falling to the table with a clunk. Jesus was still sitting on the rock outcropping. It looked as though He had crossed His legs. It was really surprising, how much He looked like her father ... only He didn't seem forbidding, ready to be angry at a moment's notice. He was looking at her with a kind of exasperated patience.

'Try it and see if I'm not right,' Jesus said.

She touched her knee gently, wincing, anticipating pain. There was none. She saw the seeds in the red stuff and relaxed. She licked the raspberry filling off her fingers.

'Also,' Jesus said, 'you have got to get these ideas about hearing voices and going crazy out of your head. It's just Me, and I can talk to anyone I want to, any way I want to.'

'Because you're the Savior,' 'Becka whispered.

'Right,' Jesus said. He looked down. Below Him, on the screen, a couple of animated salad-bowls were dancing in appreciation of the Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing which they were about to receive. 'And I'd like you to please turn that crap off, if you don't mind. We can't talk with that thing running. Also, it makes My feet tingle.'

'Becka approached the Sony and turned it off.

'My Lord,' she whispered.

3

The following Sunday afternoon, Joe Paulson was lying fast asleep in the back-yard hammock with Ozzie the cat zonked out on Joe's ample stomach. 'Becka stood in the living room, holding the curtain back and looking out at Joe. Sleeping in the hammock. Dreaming of his Hussy, no doubt - dreaming of throwing her down in a great big pile of catalogues and Woolco circulars and then - how would Joe and his piggy poker buddies put it? -'putting the shoes to her.'

She was holding the curtain with her left hand because she had a handful of square nine-volt batteries in her right. She took the batteries into the kitchen, where she was assembling something on the kitchen table. Jesus had told her to make it. She told Jesus she couldn't make things. She was clumsy. Her daddy had always told her so. She thought of adding how he sometimes told her he was surprised she could wipe her own butt without an instruction manual, and then decided that wasn't the sort of thing you told the Savior.

Jesus told her not to be a fool; if she could follow a recipe, she could build this little thing. She was delighted to find that He was absolutely right. It was not only easy, it was fun! More fun than cooking, certainly; she had never really had the knack for that, either. Her cakes fell and her breads never rose. She had begun this little thing yesterday, working with the toaster, the motor from her old Hamilton Beach blender, and a funny board full of electronics things which had come from the back of an old radio in the shed. She thought she would be done long before Joe woke up and came in to watch the Red Sox game on TV at two o'clock.

She picked up his little blowtorch and lit it deftly with a kitchen match. She would have laughed a week ago if you'd told her she would be working with a propane torch now. But it was easy. Jesus told her exactly how and where to solder the wires to the electronics board from the old radio.

That wasn't all Jesus had told her during the last three days. He had told her things that murdered her sleep, things that made her afraid to go into the village and do her shopping Friday evening, lest her guilty knowledge show on her face (I'll always know when you done something wrong, 'Becka, her father had told her, because you ain't got the kind of face can keep a secret); that had, for the first time in her life, made her lose her appetite. Joe, totally bound up in his work, the Red Sox, and his Hussy, noticed hardly anything amiss ... although he had seen 'Becka gnawing her fingernails the other night as they watched Hill Street Blues, and nail-biting was something she had never done before - was, in fact, one of the things she nagged him about. Joe Paulson considered this for all of twelve seconds before looking back at the Sony TV and losing himself in dreams of Nancy Voss's heaving white br**sts.

Among others, these were a few of the things Jesus told her, causing 'Becka to sleep poorly and to begin biting her fingernails at the advanced age of forty-five:

In 1973, Moss Harlingen, one of Joe's poker buddies, had murdered his father. They had been hunting deer up in Greenville and it had supposedly been one of those tragic accidents, but the shooting of Abel Harlingen had been no accident. Moss simply laid up behind a fallen tree with his rifle and waited until his father splashed across a small stream about fifty yards down the hill from where Moss was. Moss potted his father as easily as a clay duck in a shooting gallery. He thought he had killed his father for money. Moss's business, Big Ditch Construction, had two notes falling due with two different banks within six weeks' time, and neither would extend because of the other. Moss went to Abel, but his dad refused to help, although he could afford to. So Moss shot his father and inherited a pot of money after the county coroner handed down a verdict of death by misadventure. The notes were paid and Moss Harlingen really believed (except perhaps in his deepest dreams) that he had committed murder for gain. The real motive had been something else. Far in the past, when Moss was ten and his brother Emory seven, Abel's wife went south to Rhode Island for one whole winter. Her brother had died suddenly, and his wife needed help getting on her feet. While their mother was gone, there were several incidents of buggery at the Harlingen place. The buggery stopped when the boys' mother came back, and the incidents were never repeated. Moss had forgotten all about them. He never remembered lying awake in the dark anymore, lying awake in mortal terror and watching the doorway for the shadow of his father. He had absolutely no recollection of lying with his mouth pressed against his forearm, salty tears of shame and rage squeezing out of his hot eyes and coursing down his cold face to his mouth as Abel Harlingen slathered lard onto his c**k and then slid it up his son's back door with a grunt and a sigh. It had all made so little impression on Moss that he could not remember biting his arm until it bled to keep from crying out, and he certainly could not remember Emory's breathless bird-cries from the next bed -'Please, Daddy, no, Daddy, please not me tonight, please, Daddy.' Children, of course, forget very easily. But some memory might have lingered, because when Moss Harlingen actually pulled the trigger on the buggering son of a whore, as the echoes first rolled away and then rolled back, finally disappearing into the great forested silence of the up-Maine wilderness, Moss whispered: 'Not you, Em, not tonight.'

Alice Kimball, who taught at the Haven Grammar School, was a lesbian. Jesus told 'Becka this on Friday, not long after the lady herself, looking large and solid and respectable in a green pants suit, had stopped by, collecting for the American Cancer Society.

Darla Gaines, the pretty seventeen-year-old girl who brought the Sunday paper, had half an ounce of 'bitchin' reefer' between the mattress and box spring of her bed. Jesus told 'Becka this right after Darla had come on Saturday to collect for the last five weeks (three dollars plus a fifty-cent tip 'Becka now wished she had withheld), and that she and her boyfriend smoked the reefer in Darla's bed before having intercourse, only they called having intercourse 'doing the horizontal bop.' They smoked reefer and 'did the horizontal bop' almost every weekday afternoon from two-thirty until three or so. Darla's parents both worked at Splendid Shoe in Derry and they didn't get home until well past four.

Hank Buck, another of Joe's poker cronies, worked at a large supermarket in Bangor and hated his boss so much that a year ago he had put half a box of Ex-Lax in the man's chocolate shake when the boss had sent Hank out to get his lunch at McDonald's one day. The boss had had something rather more spectacular than a bowel movement; at three-fifteen that day, he had done something in his pants that was the equivalent of a shit A-bomb. The A-bomb - or S-bomb, if you preferred -had gone off as he was slicing lunchmeat in the deli of Paul's Down-East SuperMart. Hank managed to keep a straight face until quitting time, but by the time he got into his car to go home, he was laughing so hard he almost shit his own pants. Twice he had to pull off the road, he got laughing so hard.

'Laughed,' Jesus told 'Becka. 'What do you think of that?'

'Becka thought it was a low-down mean trick. And such things were only the beginning, it seemed. Jesus knew something unpleasant or upsetting about everyone 'Becka came in contact with, it seemed.

She couldn't live with such an awful outpouring.

She couldn't live without it, either.

One thing was certain: she had to do something about it.

'You are,' Jesus said. He spoke from behind her, from the picture on top of the Sony. Of course He did. The idea that His voice was coming from inside her own head - that she was somehow ... well ... somehow reading people's thoughts ... that was only a dreadful passing illusion. It must be. The alternative was horrifying.

Satan. Witchcraft.

'In fact,' Jesus said, confirming His existence with that dry, no-nonsense voice so like her father's, 'you're almost done with this part. Just solder that red wire to that point to the left of the long doohickey . . . no, not there ... there. Good girl! Not too much solder, mind! It's like Brylcreem, 'Becka . A little dab'll do ya.'

Strange, hearing Jesus Christ talk about Brylcreem.

4

Joe woke up at quarter to two, tossed Ozzie off his lap, strolled to the back of his lawn, brushing cat-hairs off his T-shirt, and had a comfortable whiz into the poison ivy back there. Then he headed into the house. Yankees and Red Sox. Great. He opened the fridge, glancing briefly at the snippets of wire on the counter and wondering just what in hell that dimbulb 'Becka had been up to. But mostly he dismissed it. He was thinking of Nancy Voss. He was wondering what it would feel like to squirt off between Nancy's tits. He thought maybe Monday he'd find out. He squabbled with her; Christ, sometimes they squabbled like a couple of dogs in August. Seemed like it wasn't just them; everyone seemed short-fused lately. But when it came to f**king ... son of a bitch! He hadn't been so randy since he was eighteen, and she was the same way. Seemed like neither of them could get enough. He'd even squirted in the night a couple of times. It was like he was sixteen again. He grabbed a quart of Bud and headed toward the living room. Boston was almost certainly going to win today. He had the odds figured at 8-5. Lately he seemed to have an amazing head for odds. There was a guy down in Augusta who'd take bets, and Joe had made almost five hundred bucks in the last three weeks ... not that 'Becka knew. He'd ratholed it. It was funny; he'd know exactly who was going to win and why, and then he'd get down to Augusta and forget the why and only remember the who. But that was the important thing, wasn't it? Last time the guy in Augusta had grumbled, paying off at three to one on a twenty-dollar bet. Mets against the Pirates, Gooden on the mound, looked like a cinch for the Mets, but Joe had taken the Pirates and they'd won, 5-2. Joe didn't know how much longer the guy in Augusta would take his bets, but if he stopped, so what? There was always Portland. There were two or three books there. It seemed like lately he got a headache whenever he left Haven - needed glasses, maybe - but when you were rolling hot, a headache was a small price to pay. Enough money and the two of them could go away. Leave 'Becka with Jesus. That was who 'Becka wanted to be married to anyway.

Cold as ice, she was. But that Nancy? One hot ticket! And smart! Why, just today she'd taken him out back at the P.O. to show him something. 'Look! Look what I thought of! I think I ought to patent it, Joe! I really do!'

'What idear?' Joe asked. The truth was, he felt a little mad with her. The truth was, he was more interested in her tits than her idears, and mad or not, he was already getting a blue-steeler. It really was like being a kid again. But what she showed him was enough to make him forget all about his blue-steeler. For at least four minutes, anyway.

Nancy Voss had taken a kid's Lionel train transformer and hooked it somehow to a bunch of D-cell batteries. This gadget was wired to seven flour-sifters with their screens knocked out. The sifters were lying on their sides. When Nancy turned on the transformer, a number of filament-thin wires hooked to something that looked like a blender began to scoop first-class mail from a pile on the floor into the sifters, seemingly at random.

'What's it doing?' Joe asked.

'Sorting the first-class,' she said. She pointed at one sifter after another. 'That one's Haven Village ... that's RFD 1, Derry Road, you know . . . that one's Ridge Road ... that one's Nista Road . . . that one's . . .'

He didn't believe it at first. He thought it was a joke, and he wondered how she'd like a slap upside the head. Why'd you do that? she'd whine. Some men can take a joke, he'd answer like Sylvester Stallone in that movie Cobra, but I ain't one of 'em. Except then he saw it was really working. It was quite a gadget, all right, but the sound of the wires scraping across the floor was a little creepy. Harsh and whispery, like big old spiders' legs. It was working, all right; damned if he knew how, but it was. He saw one of the wires snag a letter for Roscoe Thibault and push it into the correct sifter - RFD 2, which was the Hammer Cut road - even though it had been misaddressed to Haven Village.

He wanted to ask her how it worked, but he didn't want to look like a goddam dummy, so he asked her where she got the wires instead.

'Out of these telephones I bought at Radio Shack,' she said. 'The one at the Bangor Mall. They were on sale! There's some other stuff from the phones in it, too. I had to change everything around, but it was easy. It just ... you know ... come to me. You know?'

'Yeah,' Joe said slowly, thinking about the bookie's face when Joe had come in to collect his sixty bucks after the Pirates beat Gooden and the Mets. 'Not bad. For a woman.'

For a moment her brow darkened and he thought: You want to say something? You want to fight? Come on. That's okay. That's just about as okay as the other.

Then her brow cleared and she smiled. 'Now we can do it even longer.' Her fingers slid down the hard ridge in his pants. 'You do want to do it, don't you, Joe?'

And Joe did. They slipped to the floor and he forgot all about being mad at her, and how all of a sudden he seemed to be able to figure the odds on everything from baseball games to horse races to golf matches in the wink of an eye. He slid into her and she moaned and Joe even forgot the tenebrous whispering sound those wires made as they sifted the first-class mail into the row of flour-sifters.

5

When Joe entered the living room, 'Becka was sitting in her rocker, pretending to read the latest issue of The Upper Room. Just ten minutes before Joe came in, she had finished wiring the gadget Jesus had shown her how to make into the back of the Sony TV. She followed His instructions to the letter, because He said you had to be careful when you were fooling around inside the back of a television.

'You could fry yourself,' Jesus advised. 'More juice back there than there is in a Bird's Eye warehouse, even when it's turned off.'

The TV was off now and Joe said ill-temperedly, 'I thought you'd have this all wa'amed up for me.'

'I guess you know how to turn on the damned TV,' 'Becka said, speaking to her husband for the last time.

Joe raised his eyebrows. Damned anything was damned odd, coming from 'Becka. He thought about calling her on it, and decided to let it ride. Could be there was one fat old mare who'd find herself keeping house by herself before much of a longer went by.

'Guess I do,' Joe said, speaking to his wife for the last time.

He pushed the button that turned the Sony on, and better than two thousand volts of current slammed into him, AC which had been boosted, switched over to lethal DC, and then boosted again. His eyes popped wide open, bulged, and then burst like grapes in a microwave. He had started to set the quart of beer on top of the TV next to Jesus. When the electricity hit, his hand clenched tightly enough to break the bottle. Spears of brown glass drove into his fingers and palm. Beer foamed and ran. It hit the top of the TV (its plastic casing already blistering) and turned to steam that smelled like yeast.

'EEEEEOOOOOOARRRRHMMMMMMM!'Joe Paulson screamed. His face began to turn black. Blue smoke poured out of his hair and his ears. His finger was nailed to the Sony's On button.

A picture popped on the TV. It was Dwight Gooden throwing the wild pitch that let in two runs and chased him, making Joe Paulson forty dollars richer. It flipped and showed him and Nancy Voss screwing on the post office floor in a litter of catalogues and Congressional Newsletters and ads from insurance companies saying you could get all the coverage you needed even if you were over sixty-five, no salesman would call at your door, no physical examination would be required, your loved ones would be protected at a cost of pennies a day.

'No!' 'Becka screamed, and the picture flipped again. Now she saw Moss Harlingen behind a fallen pine, notching his father in the sight of his .30-.30 and murmuring Not you, Em, not tonight. It flipped and she saw a man and a woman digging in the woods, the woman behind the controls of something that looked a little bit like a payloader and a little bit like something out of a Rube Goldberg cartoon, the man looping a chain around a stump. Beyond them, a vast dish-shaped object jutted out of the earth. It was silvery, but dull; the sun struck it in places but did not twinkle.

Joe Paulson's clothes burst into flame.

The living room was filled with the smell of electricity and cooking beer. The 3-D picture of Jesus jittered around and then exploded.

'Becka shrieked, understanding that, like it or not, it had been her all along, her, her, her, and she was murdering her husband.

She ran to him, seized his looping, spasming hand ... and was herself galvanized.

Jesus oh Jesus save him, save me, save us both, she thought as the current slammed into her, driving her up on her toes like the world's heftiest ballerina en pointe. And a mad, cackling voice, the voice of her father, rose in her brain: Fooled you, 'Becka, didn't I? Fooled you good! Teach you to lie! Teach you for good and all!

The back of the television, which she had screwed back on after she had finished adding her alterations, blew back against the wall with a mighty blue flash of light. 'Becka tumbled to the carpet, pulling Joe with her. Joe was already dead.

By the time the smoldering wallpaper behind the TV had ignited the chintz curtains, 'Becka Paulson was dead, too.

Chapter 3. Hilly Brown

1

The day Hillman Brown did the most spectacular trick of his career as an amateur magician - the only spectacular trick of his career as an amateur magician, actually -was Sunday, July 17th, exactly one week before the Haven town hall blew up. That Hillman Brown had never managed a really spectacular trick before was not so surprising. He was only ten, after all.

His given name had been his mother's maiden name. There had been Hillmans in Haven going back to the time when it had been Montgomery, and although Marie Hillman had no regrets about becoming Marie Brown - after all, she loved the guy! -she had wanted to preserve the name, and Bryant had agreed. The new baby wasn't home a week before everyone was calling him Hilly.

Hilly grew up nervous. Marie's father Ev said he had cat whiskers for nerves and would spend his whole life on the jump. It wasn't news Bryant and Marie Brown wanted to hear, but after their first year with Hilly, it wasn't really news at all; just a fact of life. Some babies attempt to comfort themselves by rocking in their cribs or cradles; some by sucking a thumb. Hilly rocked in his crib almost constantly (crying angrily at the same time, more often than not), and sucked both thumbs - sucked them so hard that he had painful blisters on them by the time he was eight months old.

'He'll stop now,' Dr Lester in Derry told them confidently, after examining the nasty blisters that ringed Hilly's thumbs ... blisters Marie had wept over as if they had been her own. But Hilly hadn't stopped. His need for comfort was apparently greater than whatever pain his hurt thumbs gave him. Eventually the blisters turned to hard calluses.

'He'll always be on the jump,' the boy's grandfather prophesied whenever anyone asked him (and even when no one did; at sixty-three, Ev Hillman was garrulous-going-on-tiresome). 'Cat whiskers for nerves, ayuh! He'll keep his mom 'n' dad on the hop, Hilly will.'

Hilly kept them hopping, all right. Lining both sides of the Brown driveway were stumps, placed there by Bryant, at Marie's instigation. Upon each she put a planter, and in each planter was a different sort of plant or bunch of flowers. At age three, Hilly one day climbed out of his crib where he was supposed to be taking a nap ('Why do I have to have a nap, Mom?' Hilly asked. 'Because I need the rest, Hilly,' his exhausted mother replied), wriggled out the window, and knocked over all twelve of the planters, stumps and all. When Marie saw what Hilly had done, she wept as inconsolably as she had wept over her boy's poor thumbs. Seeing her cry, Hilly had also burst into tears (around his thumbs; he was attempting to suck both of them at once). He hadn't knocked over the stumps and the planters to be mean; it had just seemed a good idea at the time.

'You don't count the cost, Hilly,' his father said on that occasion. He would say it a good many times before Sunday, July 17th, 1988.

At the age of five, Hilly got on his sled and shot down the ice-coated Brown driveway one December day and out into the road. It never occurred to him, he told his ashy-faced mother later, to wonder if something might be coming down Derry Road; he had gotten up, seen the glaze of ice that had fallen, and had only wondered how fast his Flexible Flyer would go down their driveway. Marie saw him, saw the fuel tanker lumbering down Route 9, and shrieked Hilly's name so loudly that she could barely talk above a whisper for the next two days. That night, trembling in Bryant's arms, she told him she had seen the boy's tombstone in Homeland - had actually seen it: Hillman Richard Brown, 1978-1983, Taken Too Soon.

'Hiiillyyyyyyyy!'

Hilly's head snapped around at the sound of his mother's scream, which sounded to him as loud as a jet plane. As a result, he fell off his sled just before it reached the foot of the driveway. The driveway was asphalted, the glaze of sleet was really quite thin, and Hilly Brown never had that knack with which a kind God blesses most squirmy, active children - the knack of failing lucky. He broke his left arm just above the elbow and fetched his forehead such a dreadful crack that he knocked himself out.

His Flexible Flyer shot into the road. The driver of the Webber Fuel truck reacted before he had a chance to see there was no one on the sled. He spun the wheel and the tanker-truck waltzed into a low embankment of snow with the huge grace of the elephant ballet dancers in Fantasia. It crashed through and landed in the ditch, canted alarmingly to one side. Less than five minutes after the driver wriggled out of the passenger door and ran to Marie Brown, the truck tipped over on its side and lay in the frozen grass like a dead mastodon, expensive No. 2 fuel oil gurgling out of its three overflow vents.

Marie was running down the road with her unconscious child in her arms, screaming. In her terror and confusion she felt sure that Hilly must have been run over, even though she had quite clearly seen him fall off his sled at the bottom of the driveway.

'Is he dead?' the tanker driver screamed. His eyes were wide, his face pale as paper, his hair standing on end. There was a dark spot spreading on the crotch of his pants. 'Oh sufferin' Jesus, lady, is he dead?'

I think so,' Marie wept. 'I think he is, oh I think he's dead.'

Who's dead?' Hilly asked, opening his eyes.

'Oh, Hilly, thank God!' Marie screamed, and hugged him. Hilly screamed back with great enthusiasm. She was grinding together the splintered ends of the broken bone in his left arm.

Hilly spent the next three days in Derry Home Hospital.

'It'll slow him down, at least,' Bryant Brown said the next evening over a dinner of baked beans and hot dogs.

Ev Hillman happened to be taking dinner with them that evening; since his wife had died, Ev Hillman did that every now and again; about five evenings out of every seven on the average. 'Want to bet?' Ev said now, cackling through a mouthful of cornbread.

Bryant cocked a sour eye at his father-in-law and said nothing.

As usual, Ev was right - that was one of the reasons Bryant so often felt sour about him. On his second night in the hospital, long after the other children in Pediatrics were asleep, Hilly decided to go exploring. How he got past the duty nurse was a mystery, but get past he did. He was discovered missing at three in the morning. An initial search of the pediatrics ward did not turn him up. Neither did a floor-wide search. Security was called in. A search of the whole hospital was then mounted - administrators who had at first only been mildly annoyed were now becoming worried - and discovered nothing. Hilly's father and mother were called and came in at once, looking shell-shocked. Marie was weeping, but because of her swollen larynx, she could only do so in a breathy croak.

'We think he may have wandered out of the building somehow,' the Head of Administrative Services told them.

'How the hell could a five-year-old just wander out of the buildings?' Bryant shouted. 'What kind of a place you guys running here?'

'Well ... well ... you understand it's hardly a prison, Mr Brown '

Marie cut them both off. 'You've got to find him,' she whispered. 'It's only twenty-two degrees out there. Hilly was in his pj's. He could be . . . be . . .'

'Oh, Mrs Brown, I really think such worries are premature,' the Head of Administrative Services broke in, smiling sincerely. He did not, in fact, think they were premature at all. The first thing he had done after ascertaining that the boy might have been gone ever since the eleven-o'clock bedcheck was to find out how cold the night had been. The answer had occasioned a call to Dr Elfman, who specialized in cases of hypothermia - there were a lot of those in Maine winters. Dr Elfman's prognosis was grave. 'If he got out, he's probably dead,' Elfman said.

Another hospital-wide search, this one augmented by Derry police and firemen, turned up nothing. Marie Brown was given a sedative and put to bed. The only good news was of a negative sort; so far no one had found Hilly's frozen, pajama-clad body. Of course, the Head of Administrative Services thought, the Penobscot River was close to the hospital. Its surface had frozen. It was just possible that the boy had tried to cross the ice and had plunged through. Oh, how he wished the Browns of Haven had taken their little brat to Eastern Maine Medical.

At two that afternoon, Bryant Brown sat numbly in a chair beside his sleeping wife, wondering how he could tell her their only child was dead, if it became necessary to do so. At about that same time, a janitor who was in the basement to check on the laundry boilers saw an amazing sight: a small boy wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and a plaster cast on one arm strolling nonchalantly between two of the hospital's giant furnaces in his bare feet.

'Hey!' the jan;' tor yelled. 'Hey, kid!'

'Hi,' Hilly said, coming over. His feet were black with dirt; his pajama bottoms were swatched with grease. 'Boy, this is a big place! I think I'm lost.'

The janitor carried Hilly upstairs to the administration office. The Head sat Hilly down in a large wing chair (after prudently putting down a double spread of the Bangor Daily News) and sent his secretary out to fetch back a Pepsi-Cola and a bag of Reese's Pieces for the brat. Under other circumstances the Head would have gone himself, thereby impressing the boy with his grandfatherly kindness. Under other circumstances - by which I mean, the Head thought grimly to himself, with a different boy. He was afraid to leave Hilly alone.

When the secretary came back with the candy and the soft drink, the Head sent her away again ... after Bryant Brown this time. Bryant was a strong man, but when he saw Hilly sitting in the Head's wing chair, his dirty feet swinging four inches off the rug and the papers crackling under his butt as he ate candy and drank Pepsi, he was unable to hold back his tears of relief and thanksgiving. This of course made Hilly - who never in his life had ever done anything consciously bad - also burst into tears.

'Christ, Hilly, where you been?'

Hilly told the story as best he could, leaving Bryant and the Head to parse objective truth out of it as best they could. He had gotten lost, wandered into the basement ('I was followin' a pixie,' Hilly told them), and had crawled under one of the furnaces to sleep. It had been very warm there, he told them, so warm he had taken off his pajama shirt, working it carefully over the new cast.

'I like the pups, too,' he said. 'Can we have a puppy, Daddy?'

The janitor who had spotted Hilly also found Hilly's shirt. It was under the No. 2 furnace. Getting the shirt out, he saw the 'puppies,' too, although they skittered away from his light. He did not mention them to Mr and Mrs Brown, who looked like folks who would just fall apart if faced with one more shock. The janitor, a kindly man, thought they would do just as well not knowing that their son had spent the night with a pack of basement rats, some of which had indeed looked as large as puppies as they fled from his flashlight beam.

2

Asked for his perceptions of these things - and the similar (if less spectacular) incidents that occurred over the next five years of his life - Hilly would have shrugged and said, 'I'm always getting in trouble, I guess.' Hilly meant he was accident-prone, but no one had taught him this valuable phrase yet.

When he was eight - two years after David was born - he brought home a note from Mrs Underhill, his third-grade teacher, asking if Mr and Mrs Brown could come in for a brief conference. The Browns went, not without some trepidation. They knew that during the previous week, Haven's third-graders had been given IQ tests. Bryant was secretly convinced that Mrs Underhill was going to tell them Hilly had tested far below normal, and would have to be put in remedial classes. Marie was convinced (and just as secretly) that Hilly was dyslexic. Neither had slept very well the night before.

What Mrs Underhill told them was that Hilly was completely off the scale -bluntly put, the lad was a genius. 'You'll have to take him to Bangor and have him take the WechsIer Test if you want to know how high his IQ actually is,' Mrs Underhill told them. 'Giving Hilly the Tompall IQ Test is like trying to determine a human's IQ by giving him an intelligence test designed for goats.'

Marie and Bryant discussed it ... and decided against pursuing the matter any further. They didn't really want to know how bright Hilly was. It was enough to know he was not disadvantaged ... and, as Marie said that night in bed, it explained so much: Hilly's restlessness, his apparent inability to sleep much more than six hours a night, his fierce interests which blew in like hurricanes, then blew out again with the same rapidity. One day when Hilly was almost nine she had come back from the post office with baby David to find the kitchen, which had been spotless when she left only fifteen minutes before, a complete shambles. The sink was full of flour-clotted bowls. There was a puddle of melting butter on the counter. And something was cooking in the oven. Marie popped David quickly in his playpen and had pulled the oven open, expecting to be greeted by billows of smoke and the smell of burning. Instead, she found a tray of Bisquick rolls which, while misshapen, were quite tasty. They had had them for supper that night ... but before then, Marie had paddled Hilly's bottom and sent him, wailing apologies, to his room. Then she had sat down at the kitchen table and cried until she laughed, while David - a placid, happy-go-lucky baby who was a sunny Tahiti to Hilly's Cape of Storms - stood holding the bars of the playpen, staring at her comically.

One mark very much in Hilly's favor was his frank love for his brother. And although Marie and Bryant hesitated to let Hilly hold the new baby, or even to leave him alone in the same room with David for more than, say, thirty seconds at a time, they gradually relaxed.

'Hell, you could send Hilly and David off for two-weeks campin' up in the Allagash together and they'd come back fine,' Ev Hillman said. 'He loves that kid. And he's good with him.'

This proved to be so. Most - if not quite all - of Hilly's 'in-troubles' stemmed from either an honest desire to help his parents or to better himself. They simply went wrong, that was all. But with David, who worshipped the ground on which his older brother walked, Hilly always seemed to go right ...

Until the I7th of July, that was, when Hilly did the trick.