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.
BOOK II. TALES OF HAVEN 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