them, a rich, electric smell like ozone and blood.
And ... the weird liquid sloshing sounds. He could hear those even over the music in his head. It sounded like an old-fashioned washing machine, except that sound wasn't water, and that sound was wrong, wrong, wrong.
As he stood on his tiptoes to look into the shed, his face as green as the face of a corpse pulled out of quicksand, George Thorogood started to play that slide blues guitar, and Gardener began screaming with pain - and that was when his head exploded and he woke sitting bolt upright in the old double bed in the guestroom, his chest covered with sweat, his hands trembling.
He lay down again, thinking: God! If you're going to have nightmares about it, take a look in tomorrow. Get your mind easy.
He had expected nightmares in the wake of his decision; he lay back down again, thinking that this was only the first. But there were no more dreams. That night. The next day he joined Bobbi on the dig.
BOOK II. TALES OF HAVEN Chapter 1. The Town
BOOK II. TALES OF HAVEN
The terrorist got bombed! The President got hit! Security was tight! The Secret Service got lit! And everybody's drunk, Everybody's wasted, Everybody's stoned, And there's nothin' gonna change it, Cause everybody's drunk, Everybody's wasted, Everybody's drinkin' on the job.
'Drinkin' on the Job'
The Rainmakers
Then he ran all the way to town, screamin' 'It came out of the sky!'
'It Came Out of the Sky'
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Chapter 1. The Town
1
The town had four other names before it became Haven.
It began municipal existence in 1816 as Montville Plantation. It was owned, lock, stock, and barrel by a man named Hugh Crane. Crane purchased it in 1813 from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, of which Maine was then a province. He had been a lieutenant in the Revolutionary War.
The Montville Plantation name was a gibe. Crane's father had never ventured east of Dover in his life, and remained a loyal Tory when the break with the colonies came. He ended life as a peer of the realm, the twelfth Earl of Montville. As his eldest son, Hugh Crane would have been the thirteenth Earl of Montville. Instead, his enraged father disinherited him. Not put out of countenance in the slightest, Crane went about cheerfully calling himself the first Ear) of Central Maine and sometimes the Duke of Nowhere at All.
The tract of land which Crane called Montville Plantation consisted of about twenty-two thousand acres. When Crane petitioned and was granted incorporated status, Montville Plantation became the one hundred and ninety-third town to be so incorporated in the Massachusetts Province of Maine. Crane bought the land because good timber was plentiful, and Derry, where timber could be floated downriver to the sea, was only twenty miles away.
How cheap was the area of land which eventually became Haven?
Hugh Crane had bought the whole shebang for the equivalent of eighteen hundred pounds.
Of course, a pound went a lot further in those days.
2
When Hugh Crane died in 1826, there were a hundred and three residents of Montville Plantation. Loggers swelled the population to twice that for six or seven months of the year, but they didn't really count, because they took their little bit of money into Derry, and it was in Derry that they usually settled when they grew too old to work the woods anymore. In those days, 'too old to work in the woods anymore' usually meant about twenty-five.
Nevertheless, by 1826 the settlement which would eventually become Haven Village had begun to grow up along the muddy road leading north toward Derry and Bangor.
Whatever you called it (and eventually it became, except in the memory of the oldest old-timers, like Dave Rutledge, plain old Route 9), that road was the one the loggers had to take when they went to Derry at the end of each month to spend their pay drinking and whoring. They saved their serious spending for the big town, but most were willing to bide long enough at Cooder's Tavern and Lodging-House to lay the dust with a beer or two on the way. This wasn't much, but it was enough to make the place a successful little business. The General Mercantile across the road (owned and operated by Hiram Cooder's nephew) was less successful but still a marginally profitable business. In 1828, a Barber Shop and Small Surgery (owned and operated by Hiram Cooder's cousin) opened next to the General Mercantile. In those days it was not