Harris Avenue Extension
The Harris Avenue Extension is the western continuation of Harris Avenue in Derry, Maine, a treeless, sun-exposed road that runs from the west side of town to the Derry County Airport. It is the site of Ralph Roberts’s long, punishing walks during his wife Carolyn’s final illness, the location of the picnic area where the Harris Avenue Old Crocks gather, and the scene of Ed Deepneau’s violent road-rage incident in July 1992, which first revealed his madness to Ralph. The Extension functions as a liminal space between the ordinary world of Harris Avenue and the airport, a threshold where Ralph’s insomnia-driven hyper-reality begins to intersect with the supernatural forces gathering in Derry.
Geography and Character
The Harris Avenue Extension is a treeless, fully exposed road connecting Harris Avenue to the Derry County Airport. During the summer of 1992, Ralph Roberts walked it frequently, often until his legs threatened to give way, relishing the heat because it made his ears ring and temporarily drowned out the ticking of the deathwatch he heard inside his dying wife Carolyn. The road’s exposure to the pitiless sun made these walks a form of self-punishment and escape. At its far end, near the airport’s service entrance, a shady picnic area served as the daytime gathering place for a group Ralph’s friend Bill McGovern called the Harris Avenue Old Crocks—elderly men who played chess, gin, or simply talked. Ralph had known many of them for years, including Stan Eberly, whom he had attended grammar school with. The Old Crocks were mostly old-school Yankees, raised to believe that what a man does not choose to talk about is no one’s business but his own.
The Road-Rage Incident
On one of his walks in July 1992, Ralph first became aware that something had gone very wrong with his neighbor Ed Deepneau. Ralph had walked farther than usual, falling into a trance, when a United Airlines flight from Boston startled him back to awareness. He saw Ed’s brown Datsun racing from the General Aviation terminal toward the service gate, moving so fast that Ralph’s hands curled into anxious fists. At the last moment, the car screeched to a stop, and an arm emerged from the driver’s window, waving up and down, apparently haranguing the gate to hurry. The wind carried Ed’s screaming voice, cursing with obscene fury. Ralph initially refused to believe it was Ed, whom he knew as a kind, civil research chemist at Hawking Laboratories. But when the Datsun shot through the gate and collided with a blue Ford Ranger, Ralph got a clear look at the driver: it was Ed, all right. Ed leaped out, his slim shoulders squared, wearing a tee-shirt and a long white silk scarf embroidered with Chinese figures in red. He walked with a stiff-legged, high-shouldered strut, his eyes wide and unblinking, and Ralph saw murder in them. Ed slapped the heavyset driver across the jowls and accused him of killing babies, ranting about the Crimson King and the Centurions. Ralph intervened, grabbing Ed’s shoulders—which felt unnervingly hot, like an oven—and managed to calm him down, though Ed’s eyes remained troubled. The incident ended with Ed apologizing and the two drivers exchanging names and phone numbers, but Ralph was left deeply uneasy.
The Picnic Area and the Old Crocks
The picnic area near the Extension’s end, by Runway 3, was the domain of the Harris Avenue Old Crocks. It was here that Ralph often paused to catch his second wind, and here that he later returned to play chess or cribbage. The area was also where Dorrance Marstellar, the oldest of the Old Crocks, could often be found, holding a book of poetry and watching planes take off and land. It was at this picnic area that Faye Chapin organized the annual Runway 3 Classic chess tournament, and where Ralph learned of Jimmy Vandermeer’s terminal cancer. The Extension and its picnic area served as a social hub for the elderly men of the west side, a place where they could touch base, report in, and confirm they were still living some kind of life. It was also a place where the tensions of the outside world intruded, as when a heated argument about abortion nearly led to a fistfight between Faye Chapin and Harley Pedersen.
Connection to the Supernatural
The Extension was the site of Ralph’s first clear encounter with the supernatural forces that would come to dominate his life. Ed’s road-rage incident, with its talk of the Crimson King and dead babies, was the first sign of the madness that had taken hold of him. The scarf Ed wore, with its Japanese characters meaning “kamikaze,” was later identified by Trigger Vachon as a symbol of the Divine Wind, foreshadowing Ed’s ultimate suicide mission. The Extension also led to the old oak tree that served as the entrance to Atropos’s underground den, where Ralph and Lois later retrieved Ed’s wedding ring and Lois’s earrings. The road itself, with its exposure to the sun and its proximity to the airport, became a threshold between the ordinary world of Harris Avenue and the hidden, hyper-real world of auras, little bald doctors, and the forces of the Purpose and the Random. It was a place where Ralph’s insomnia-driven perceptions first began to crack open, revealing the secret city that existed just beyond the reach of ordinary sight.
