He had wondered very little about what happened to the things he 'disappeared' until this moment. But now ...
His last coherent thought before the panic descended like a pall - or a mourning veil - was actually a mental image. He saw David lying in the middle of some weird, inimical landscape. It looked like the surface of a harsh, dead world. The gray earth was dry and cold; cracks gaped like dead reptilian mouths. They went zigzagging away in every direction. Overhead was a sky blacker than jewelers' velvet, and a billion stars screamed down - they were brighter than the stars anyone on the surface of the earth had ever seen, because the place Hilly was looking at with the wide, horrified eye of his imagination was almost or totally airless.
And in the middle of this alien desolation lay his chubby four-year-old brother in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt reading THEY CALL ME DR LOVE. David was clutching at his throat, trying to breathe the no-air of a world that was maybe a trillion light-years from home. David was gagging, turning purple. Frost was tracing death-patterns across his lips and fingernails. He
Ah, but then the merciful panic finally took over.
He raked back the sheet he had used to cover David and overturned the crate that had concealed the machine. He stomped the sewing-machine pedal again and again, and began to scream. It was not until his mother reached him that she realized he was not just screaming; there were actually words in all that noise.
'All the G.I. Joes!' Hilly shrieked. 'All the G.I. Joes! All the G.I. Joes! Forever and ever! All the G. I. Joes!'
And then, infinitely more chilling:
'Come back, David! Come back, David! Come back!'
'Dear God, what does he mean?' Marie cried.
Bryant took his son by the shoulders and turned him around so they were face-to-face.
'Where's David? Where did he go?'
But Hilly had fainted, and he never really came to. Not long after, over a hundred men and women, Bobbi and Gard among them, were out in the woods across the road, beating the bushes for Hilly's brother David.
If he could have been asked, Hilly would have told them that, in his opinion, they were looking too close to home.
Far too close.
BOOK II. TALES OF HAVEN Chapter 4. Bent and Jingles
1
On the evening of July 24th, a week after the disappearance of David Brown, Trooper Benton Rhodes was driving a state-police cruiser out of Haven around eight o'clock. Peter Gabbons, known to his fellow officers as Jingles, was riding shotgun. Twilight lay in ashes. These were metaphorical ashes, of course, as opposed to the ones on the hands of the two state cops. Those ashes were real. Rhodes's mind kept returning to the severed hand and arm, and to the fact that he had known instantly to whom they had once belonged. Jesus!
Stop thinking about it! he ordered his mind.
Okay, his mind agreed, and went right on thinking about it. 'Try the radio again,' he said. 'I bet we're getting interference from that damn microwave dish they put up in Troy.'
'All right.' Jingles grabbed the mike. 'This is Unit 16 to Base. Do you copy, Tug? Over.'
He let go of the button and they both listened. What they heard was a peculiar screaming static, with ghostly voices buried deep inside it.
'Want me to try again?' Jingles asked.
'No. We'll be clear soon enough.'
Bent was running with the flashers on, doing seventy along Route 3 toward Derry. Where the hell were the backup units? There hadn't been a communications problem to and from Haven Village; radio transmissions so clear they were almost eerie. Nor had the radio been the only eerie thing about Haven tonight.
Right! his mind agreed. And by the way, you recognized the ring right away, didn't you? No mistaking a trooper's ring, even on a woman's hand, is there? And did you see the way her tendons were hanging down in flaps? Looked like a cut of meat in a butcher shop, didn't it? Leg of lamb, or something. Tore her arm right off! It
Stop it, I said! Goddammit, JUST QUIT!
Okay, yeah, right. Forgot for a sec that you didn't want to think about it. Or like a rolled roast, huh? And all that blood!
Stop it, please stop it, he moaned.
Right, okay, I know I'll drive me crazy if I keep thinking about it but I think I'll just keep thinking about it anyway because I just can't seem to stop.