Under the Dome: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

color almost daily and according to location. In those days you could start out by canoe in Tarker’s running on green water, and be on bright yellow by the time you crossed out of Chester’s Mill andinto Motton. Plus, if your canoe was made of wood, the paint might be gone below the waterline.
    But the last of those profitable pollution factories had closed in 1979. The weird colors had left the Prestile and the fish had returned, although whether or not they were fit for human consumption remained a matter of debate. (The
Democrat
voted “Aye!”)
    The town’s population was seasonal. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, it was close to fifteen thousand. The rest of the year it was just a tad over or under two, depending on the balance of births and deaths at Catherine Russell, which was considered to be the best hospital north of Lewiston.
    If you asked the summer people how many roads led in and out of The Mill, most would say there were two: Route 117, which led to Norway–South Paris, and Route 119, which went through downtown Castle Rock on its way to Lewiston.
    Residents of ten years or so could have named at least eight more, all twolane blacktop, from the Black Ridge and Deep Cut Roads that went into Harlow, to the Pretty Valley Road (yes, just as pretty as its name) that wound north into TR-90.
    Residents of thirty years or more, if given time to mull it over (perhaps in the back room of Brownie’s Store, where there was still a woodstove), could have named another dozen, with names both sacred (God Creek Road) and profane (Little Bitch Road, noted on local survey maps with nothing but a number).
    The oldest resident of Chester’s Mill on what came to be known as Dome Day was Clayton Brassey. He was also the oldest resident of Castle County, and thus holder of the
Boston Post
Cane. Unfortunately, he no longer knew what a
Boston Post
Cane was, or even precisely who
he
was. He sometimes mistook his great-great-granddaughter Nell for his wife, who was forty years dead, and the
Democrat
had stopped doing its yearly “oldest resident” interview with him three years previous. (On the last occasion, when asked for the secret of his longevity, Clayton had responded, “Where’s my Christing dinner?”) Senility had begun to creep up shortly after his hundredth birthday; on this October twenty-first, he was a hundred and five. He had oncebeen a fine finish carpenter specializing in dressers, banisters, and moldings. His specialties in these latter days included eating Jell-O pudding without getting it up his nose and occasionally making it to the toilet before releasing half a dozen blood-streaked pebbles into the commode.
    But in his prime—around the age of eighty-five, say—he could have named almost all the roads leading in and out of Chester’s Mill, and the total would have been thirty-four. Most were dirt, many were forgotten, and almost all of the forgotten ones wound through deep tangles of second-growth forest owned by Diamond Match, Continental Paper Company, and American Timber.
    And shortly before noon on Dome Day, every one of them snapped closed.
    2

    On most of these roads, there was nothing so spectacular as the explosion of the Seneca V and the ensuing pulp-truck disaster, but there was trouble. Of course there was. If the equivalent of an invisible stone wall suddenly goes up around an entire town, there is bound to be trouble.
    At the exact same moment the woodchuck fell in two pieces, a scarecrow did the same in Eddie Chalmers’s pumpkin field, not far from Pretty Valley Road. The scarecrow stood directly on the town line dividing The Mill from TR-90. Its divided stance had always amused Eddie, who called his bird-frightener the Scarecrow Without A Country—Mr. SWAC for short. Half of Mr. SWAC fell in The Mill; the other half fell “on the TR,” as the locals would have put it.
    Seconds later, a flight of crows bound for Eddie’s pumpkins (the crows had never been afraid of Mr. SWAC)