Everett Hillman

Everett Hillman is an elderly Haven resident whose private search for portable air becomes a crucial link in John Leandro’s investigation, and whose late, weakened presence gives Jim Gardener a final direction: use the transformer to save David Brown. Hillman’s story joins two strands of the novel—the effort to understand the danger surrounding the buried spacecraft and the cost of the force acting on Haven’s people—through a rented breathing mask, a painful shared dream, and a gaze that remains sane amid suffering.

Identity and Introduction

Hillman first enters Leandro’s investigation indirectly, through an equipment rental. A clerk recalls that an old man came in asking for air. Assuming he meant air for diving, the clerk began recommending a shop in Bangor; Hillman clarified that he wanted portability on the ground. The clerk rented him a new Bell flat-pack air mask, worth two hundred dollars, and Hillman never returned it. The unusual request distinguishes Hillman from an ordinary customer and establishes that he was seeking protection for a purpose other than diving.

The rental had happened only a couple or three weeks before Leandro’s inquiry. Hillman’s identity was recorded in the rental book beside the date, July 26, giving Leandro a concrete lead. The clerk’s father had advised him not to report the loss: the business’s insurance did not cover rented equipment, and the clerk saw little reason to pursue it. That decision kept Hillman’s disappearance from becoming a police matter and helped explain why the clue had remained unnoticed.

The Mask and Leandro’s Investigation

Leandro had already concluded that the air near the place he visited had made him sick. He decided to obtain portable oxygen and return, a plan that gave Hillman’s earlier errand a sudden, unnerving significance. The clerk’s account showed that Hillman had independently sought the same kind of equipment for the same general purpose before Leandro did. What might have seemed like a minor rental dispute thus became evidence of a pattern: someone else had encountered a reason to carry air into the area.

Leandro relayed this coincidence to David Bright, including the fact that Bright himself had previously dismissed Hillman as a nutty old man. The recognition changed the weight of Hillman’s story. Bright accepted that Leandro had been right about something strange happening and strongly advised him to stay away. Hillman does not appear in this exchange as a witness who can explain the danger; instead, his earlier action makes the danger harder to dismiss. The mask supplies a practical detail that connects separate people’s encounters with the same hazardous place.

A Mind in Pain

Later, Hillman appears in a long, strange dream experienced by Jim Gardener. As Gardener falls and loses consciousness, Hillman feels or sees the fall and clearly hears Gardener’s thought that he should forget everything and go to sleep. The episode presents Hillman not simply as someone being observed, but as a mind capable of perceiving Gardener across an uncanny mental connection. The dream itself is difficult for Hillman: it breaks apart, and the act of dreaming brings pain and exhaustion.

Hillman understands the green light as an inescapable presence within him. Unlike sunlight, which he remembers as something one could avoid by closing one’s eyes, this light is inside, an inner sight that continues to burn. His awareness includes other suffering minds: the woman, whose thoughts can cycle into images of hatred, and the less-mind that had once been Peter, now reduced to howling. Hillman registers their cries for release and the torment of the draining, while also finding sleep easier than enduring the experience. His perceptions reveal a state of shared mental captivity, though they do not make him an active rescuer or explain the force’s full workings.

The Transformer and His Final Direction

In a later encounter, the transformer is cycling faster, with green fire moving across its circuit boards. Hillman is floating in its green bath and looking back at Gardener with one good eye. The description holds two conditions together: Hillman is visibly afflicted and in torment, yet his gaze is sane. The contrast makes his recognition significant; he is not presented as wholly lost to the influence that surrounds him.

Gardener tells Hillman that he is running out of time and that others are coming for him. Hillman’s communicated instruction is direct: use the transformer to save David. The urgency of the exchange turns the earlier clues about Hillman’s search for air into part of a larger trajectory, from an unexplained attempt to protect himself to a final act of guidance about another person’s survival. The evidence establishes the instruction, not whether Hillman can carry out further action or what becomes of him afterward.

Narrative Role and Significance

Hillman’s significance rests on the way his story links evidence to perception. The rented mask translates an obscure danger into an observable practical response; the rental date and name make that response traceable; and Leandro’s recognition of the coincidence turns it into a reason to reconsider Hillman’s earlier reputation. Later, the narrative shifts from the evidence surrounding Hillman to Hillman’s own painful consciousness, where the green light and other minds are not theories but immediate conditions of experience.

His final direction gives that consciousness a limited but consequential purpose. Hillman is not shown solving the mystery or escaping its effects. Instead, at a moment when Gardener believes time is running out, he identifies the transformer as the means to save David Brown. The movement from a missing air mask to a message about rescue makes Hillman both a clue-bearing figure in Leandro’s inquiry and a fragile guide in Gardener’s crisis.