it was something the voices had said and her subconscious had filed away. She was, after all, receiving all sorts of information now, in her sleep as well as when she was awake. As the town-line marker came up
A
L
B
I
O
N
- her foot left the Dart's gas pedal and stepped on the brake. lt went down mushily and much too far, as it had for the last four years or so. Ruth allowed the car to roll off the tar and onto the shoulder. Dust, as white and dry as bone meal, plumed up behind her. The wind had died. The air of Haven was deadly still again. The dust she had raised, Ruth thought, would hang for a long time.
She sat with her hands curled tightly on the wheel, wondering why she had stopped.
Wondering. Almost knowing. Beginning
(to 'become)
to know. Or guess.
A barrier? Is that what you think? That they've put up a barrier? That they've managed to turn all of Haven into a . . . an ant-farm, or something under a bowl? Ruth, that's ridiculous!
And so it was, not only according to logic and experience, but according to the evidence of her senses. As she sat behind the wheel, listening to the radio (soft jazz which was coming from a low-power college station in Bergenfield, New Jersey), a Hillcrest chicken truck, probably bound for Derry, rumbled past her. A few seconds later, a Chevy Vega went by in the other direction. Nancy Voss was behind the wheel. The sticker on the rear bumper read:
POSTAL WORKERS DO IT BY EXPRESS MAIL.
Nancy Voss did not look at Ruth, simply went along her way - which this case probably meant Augusta.
See? Nothing stopping them. Ruth thought.
No, her mind whispered back. Not them, Ruth. Just you. lt would stop you, and it would stop Bobbi Anderson's friend, maybe one or two others. Go on! Drive right into it at fifty miles an hour or so, if you don't believe it! We all love you, and we would hate to see it happen to you ... but we wouldn't - couldn't - stop it from happening.
Instead of driving, she got out and walked up to the Haven-Albion line. Her shadow trailed long behind her; the hot July sun beat down on her head. She could hear the dim but steady rumble of machinery from the woods behind Bobbi's place. Digging again. The David Brown vacation was over. And she sensed that they were getting close to ... well, to something. This brought a dim sense of mingled panic and urgency.
She approached the marker ... passed it ... kept walking ... and began to feel a wild, rising hope. She was out of Haven. She was in Albion. In a moment she would run, screaming, to the nearest house, the nearest telephone. She
- slowed.
A puzzled look settled upon her face ... and then deepened into a dawning, horrified certainty.
It was getting hard to walk. The air was becoming tough, springy. She could feel it stretching her cheeks, the skin of her forehead; she could feel it flattening her breasts.
Ruth lowered her head and continued to walk, her mouth drawn down in a grimace of effort, cords standing out on her neck. She looked like a woman trying to walk into a gale-force wind, although the trees on either side of the road were barely swaying their leaves. The image which came to her now and the one which had come to Gardener when he tried to reach into the bottom of Anderson's customized water heater were exactly the same; they differed only in degree. Ruth felt as if the entire road had been blocked by an invisible nylon stocking, one large enough to fit a female Titan. I've heard about nude-look hose, she thought hysterically, but really, this is ridiculous.
Her breasts began to ache from the pressure. And suddenly her feet began to slip in the dirt. Panic slapped at her. She had reached, then passed the point where her ability to generate forward motion surpassed the elastic give of the invisible barrier. Now it was shoving her back out.
She struggled to turn, to get out on her own before that could happen, but she lost her footing and was snapped rudely back the way she had come, her feet scraping, her eyes wide and shocked. lt was like being pushed by the expanding side of a large, rubbery balloon.
For a moment her feet left the ground entirely. Then she landed on her knees, scraping them