The Derry Public Library/1:15 A. M.
When Ben Hanscom finished the story of the silver slugs, they wanted to talk, but Mike told them he wanted them all to get some sleep. “You’ve had enough for now, ” he said, but Mike was the one who looked as if he had had enough; his face was tired and drawn, and Beverly thought he looked physically ill.
“But we’re not done, ” Eddie said. “What about the rest of it? I still don’t remember—”
“Mike’s r-r-right, ” Bill said. “Either we’ll remember or we w-won’t. I think we w-will. We’ve remembered all that we nuh-need to. ”
“Maybe all that’s good for us? ” Richie suggested.
Mike nodded. “We’ll meet tomorrow. ” Then he glanced at the clock. “Later today, I mean. ”
“Here? ” Beverly asked.
Mike shook his head slowly. “I suggest we meet on Kansas Street. Where Bill used to hide his bike. ”
“We’re going down into the Barrens, ” Eddie said, and suddenly shivered.
Mike nodded again.
There was a moment of quiet while they looked around at each other.
Then Bill got to his feet, and the others rose with him.
“I want you all to be careful for the rest of the night, ” Mike said. “It’s been here; It can be wherever you are. But this meeting has made me feel
better. ” He looked at Bill. “I’d say it still can be done, wouldn’t you, Bill? ” Bill nodded slowly. “Yes. I think it still can be done. ”
“It will know that, too, ” Mike said, “and It will do whatever It can to slug the odds in Its favor. ”
“What do we do if It shows up? ” Richie asked. “Hold our noses, shut our eyes, turn around three times, and think good thoughts? Puff some magic dust in Its face? Sing old Elvis Presley songs? What? ”
Mike shook his head. “If I could tell you that, there would be no problem, would there? All I know is that there’s another force—at least there was when we were kids—that wanted us to stay alive and to do the job. Maybe it’s still there. ” He shrugged. It was a weary gesture. “I thought two, maybe as many as three of you would be gone by the time we started our meeting tonight. Missing or dead. Just seeing you turn up gave me reason to hope. ”
Richie looked at his watch. “Quarter past one. How the time flies when you’re having fun, right, Haystack? ”
“Beep-beep, Richie, ” Ben said, and smiled wanly.
“You want to walk back to the Tuh-Tuh-Town House with me, Beverly? ” Bill asked.
“All right. ” She was putting on her coat. The library seemed very silent now, shadowy, frightening. Bill felt the last two days catching up with him all at once, piling up on his back. If it had just been weariness, that would have been okay, but it was more: a feeling that he was cracking up, dreaming, having delusions of paranoia. A sensation of being watched.
Maybe I’m really not here at all, he thought. Maybe I’m in Dr. Seward’s lunatic asylum, with the Count’s crumbling townhouse next door and Renfield just across the hall, him with his flies and me with my monsters,
both of us sure the party is really going on and dressed to the nines for it, not in tuxedos but in strait-waistcoats.
“What about you, R-Richie? ”
Richie shook his head. “I’m going to let Haystack and Kaspbrak lead me home, ” he said. “Right, fellers? ”
“Sure, ” Ben said. He looked briefly at Beverly, who was standing close to Bill, and felt a pain he had almost forgotten. A new memory trembled, almost within his grasp, then floated away.
“What about you, M-M-Mike? ” Bill asked. “Want to walk with Bev and m-me? ”
Mike shook his head. “I’ve got to—”
That was when Beverly screamed, a high-pitched sound in the stillness.
The vaulted dome overhead picked it up, and the echoes were like the laughter of banshees, flying and flapping around them.
Bill turned toward her; Richie dropped his sportcoat as he was taking it off the back of his chair; there was a crash of glass as Eddie’s arm swept an empty gin bottle onto the floor.
Beverly was backing away from them, her hands held out, her face as
white as good bond paper. Her eyes, deep in dusky-purple sockets, bulged. “My hands!” She screamed. “My hands!”
“What—” Bill began, and then he saw the blood dripping slowly between her shaking fingers. He started forward and felt sudden lines of painful warmth cross his own hands. The pain was not sharp; it was more like the pain one sometimes feels in an old healed wound.
The old scars on his palm, the ones which had reappeared in England, had broken open and were bleeding. He looked sideways and saw Eddie Kaspbrak peering stupidly down at his own hands. They were also bleeding. So were Mike’s. And Richie’s. And Ben’s.
“We’re in it to the end, aren’t we? ” Beverly said. She had begun to cry. This sound was also magnified in the library’s still emptiness; the building itself seemed to be weeping with her. Bill thought that if he had to listen to
that sound for long, he would go mad. “God help us, we’re in it to the end. ” She sobbed, and a runner of snot depended from one of her nostrils. She wiped it off with the back of one shaking hand, and more blood dripped on
the floor.
“Quh-Quh-Quick!” Bill said, and seized Eddie’s hand. “What—”
“Quick!”
He held out his other hand, and after a moment Beverly took it. She was still crying.
“Yes, ” Mike said. He looked dazed—almost drugged. “Yes, that’s right, isn’t it? It’s starting again, isn’t it, Bill? It’s all starting to happen again. ”
“Y-Y-Yes, I th-think—”
Mike took Eddie’s hand and Richie took Beverly’s other hand. For a moment Ben only looked at them, and then, like a man in a dream, he raised
his bloody hands to either side and stepped between Mike and Richie. He grasped their hands. The circle closed.
(Ah Chüd this is the Ritual of Chüd and the Turtle cannot help us)
Bill tried to scream but no sound came out. He saw Eddie’s head tilt back, the cords on his neck standing out. Bev’s hips bucked twice, fiercely, as if in an orgasm as short and sharp as the crack of a . 22 pistol. Mike’s mouth moved strangely, seeming to laugh and grimace at the same time. In the silence of the library, doors banged open and shut, the sound rolling like bowling balls. In the Periodicals Room, magazines flew in a windless hurricane. In Carole Danner’s office, the library’s IBM typewriter whirred into life and typed:
hethrusts hisfistsagainst
thepostsandstillinsistsheseestheghosts hethrustshisfistsagainstthe
The type-ball jammed. The typewriter sizzled and uttered a thick
electronic belch as everything inside overloaded. In Stack Two, the shelf of occult books suddenly tipped over, spilling Edgar Cayce, Nostradamus,
Charles Fort, and the Apocrypha everywhere.
Bill felt an exalting sense of power. He was dimly aware that he had an erection, and that every hair on his head was standing up straight. The sense of force in the completed circle was incredible.
All the doors in the library slammed shut in unison.
The grandfather clock behind the checkout desk chimed once. Then it was gone, as if someone had flicked off a switch.
They dropped their hands, looking at each other, dazed. No one said anything. As the sense of power ebbed, Bill felt a terrible sense of doom creep over him. He looked at their white, strained faces, and then down at his hands. Blood was smeared there, but the wounds which Stan Uris had made with a jagged piece of Coke bottle in August 1958 had closed up
again, leaving only crooked white lines like knotted twine. He thought: That was the last time the seven of us were together . . . the day Stan made those cuts in the Barrens. Stan’s not here; he’s dead. And this is the last time the
six of us are going to be together. I know it, I feel it.
Beverly was pressed against him, trembling. Bill put an arm around her. They all looked at him, their eyes huge and bright in the dimness, the long
table where they had sat, littered with empty bottles, glasses, and overflowing ashtrays, a little island of light.
“That’s enough, ” Bill said huskily. “Enough entertainment for one evening. We’ll save the ballroom dancing for another time. ”
“I remembered, ” Beverly said. She looked up at Bill, her eyes huge, her pale cheeks wet. “I remembered everything. My father finding out about you guys. Running. Bowers and Criss and Huggins. How I ran. The tunnel .
. . the birds . . . It . . . I remember everything. ” “Yeah, ” Richie said. “I do, too. ”
Eddie nodded. “The pumping-station—” Bill said, “And how Eddie—”
“Go back now, ” Mike said. “Get some rest. It’s late. ” “Walk with us, Mike, ” Beverly said.
“No. I have to lock up. And I have to write a few things down . . . the minutes of the meeting, if you like. I won’t be long. Go ahead. ”
They moved toward the door, not talking much. Bill and Beverly were together, Eddie, Richie, and Ben behind them. Bill held the door for her and she murmured thanks. As she went out onto the wide granite steps, Bill thought how young she looked, how vulnerable. He was dismally aware
that he might be falling in love with her again. He tried to think of Audra, but Audra seemed far away. She would be sleeping in their house in Fleet now as the sun came up and the milkman began his rounds.
Derry’s sky had clouded over again, and a low groundfog lay across the empty street in thick runners. Farther up the street, the Derry Community House, narrow, tall, Victorian, brooded in blackness. Bill thought And
whatever walked in Community House, walked alone. He had to stifle a wild cackle. Their footfalls seemed very loud. Beverly’s hand touched his and Bill took it gratefully.
“It started before we were ready, ” she said. “Would we eh-eh-ever have been r-ready? ” “You would have been, Big Bill. ”
The touch of her hand was suddenly both wonderful and necessary. He wondered what it would be like to touch her breasts for the second time in his life, and suspected that before this long night was over he would know. Fuller now, mature and his hand would find hair when he cupped the
swelling of her mons veneris. He thought: I loved you, Beverly I love
you. Ben loved you . . . he loves you. We loved you then . . . we love you now. We better, because it’s starting. No way out now.
He glanced behind and saw the library half a block away. Richie and
Eddie were on the top step; Ben was standing at the bottom, looking after them. His hands were stuffed in his pockets, his shoulders were slumped, and seen through the drifting lens of the low fog, he might almost have been eleven again. If he had been able to send Ben a thought, Bill would have sent this one: It doesn’t matter, Ben. The love is what matters, the caring . . . it’s always the desire, never the time. Maybe that’s all we get to take with us when we go out of the blue and into the black. Cold comfort, maybe, but
better than no comfort at all.
“My father knew, ” Beverly said suddenly. “I came home one day from the Barrens and he just knew. Did I ever tell you what he used to say to me when he was mad? ”
“What? ”
“ ‘I worry about you, Bevvie. ’ That’s what he used to say. ‘I worry a lot.
’ ” She laughed and shivered at the same time. “I think he meant to hurt me,
Bill. I mean . . . he’d hurt me before, but that last time was different. He
was . . . well, in many ways he was a strange man. I loved him. I loved him very much, but—”
She looked at him, perhaps wanting him to say it for her. He wouldn’t; it was something she was going to have to say for herself, sooner or later. Lies and self-deceptions had become a ballast they could not afford.
“I hated him, too, ” she said, and her hand bore down convulsively upon Bill’s for a long second. “I never told that to anyone in my life before. I thought God would strike me dead if I ever said it out loud. ”
“Say it again, then. ” “No, I—”
“Go on. It’ll hurt, but maybe it’s festered in there long enough. Say it. ” “I hated my dad, ” she said, and began to sob helplessly. “I hated him, I
was scared of him, I hated him, I could never be a good enough girl to suit him and I hated him, I did, but I loved him, too.
He stopped and held her tight. Her arms went around him in a panicky grip. Her tears wet the side of his neck. He was very conscious of her body, ripe and firm. He moved his torso away from hers slightly, not wanting her to feel the erection he was getting . . . but she moved against him again.
“We’d spent the morning down there, ” she said, “playing tag or something like that. Something harmless. We hadn’t even talked about It that day, at least not then . . . we usually talked about It every day, at some point, though. Remember? ”
“Yes, ” he said. “At some p-p-point. I remember. ”
“It was overcast . . . hot. We played most of the morning. I went home around eleven-thirty. I thought I’d have a sandwich and a bowl of soup after I took a shower. And then I’d go back and play some more. My parents
were both working. But he was there. He was home. He
2
Lower Main Street/11:30 A. M.
threw her across the room before she had even gotten all the way through the door. A startled scream was jerked out of her and then cut off as she hit the wall with shoulder-numbing force. She collapsed onto their sagging sofa, looking around wildly. The door to the front hall banged shut. Her father had been standing behind it.
“I worry about you, Bevvie, ” he said. “Sometimes I worry a lot. You know that. I tell you that, don’t I? You bet I do. ”
“Daddy, what—”
He was walking slowly toward her across the living room, his face thoughtful, sad, deadly. She didn’t want to see that last, but it was there, like the blind shine of dirt on still water. He was nibbling reflectively on a
knuckle of his right hand. He was dressed in his khakis, and when she glanced down she saw that his high-topped shoes were leaving tracks on her mother’s carpet. I’ll have to get the vacuum out, she thought incoherently.
Vacuum that up. If he leaves me able to vacuum. If he—
It was mud. Black mud. Her mind sideslipped alarmingly. She was back in the Barrens with Bill, Richie, Eddie, and the others. There was black,
viscous mud like the kind on Daddy’s shoes down there in the Barrens, in the swampy place where the stuff Richie called bamboo stood in a skeletal
white grove. When the wind blew the stalks rattled together hollowly, producing a sound like voodoo drums, and had her father been down in the Barrens? Had her father—
WHAP!
His hand rocketed down in a wide sweeping orbit and struck her face. Her head thudded back against the wall. He hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked at her with that expression of deadly disconnected curiosity. She felt a trickle of blood running warmly from the left corner of her lower lip.
“I have seen you getting big, ” he said, and she thought he would say something more, but for the time being that seemed to be all.
“Daddy, what are you talking about? ” she asked in a low trembling voice.
“If you lie to me, I’ll beat you within an inch of your life, Bevvie, ” he said, and she realized with horror that he wasn’t looking at her; he was looking at the Currier and Ives picture over her head, on the wall above the sofa. Her mind sideslipped crazily again and she was four, sitting in the bathtub with her blue plastic boat and her Popeye soap; her father, so big and so well loved, was kneeling beside her, dressed in gray twill pants and a strappy tee-shirt, a washcloth in one hand and a glass of orange soda in the other, soaping her back and saying, Lemme see those ears, Bevvie; your ma needs taters for supper. And she could hear her small self giggling, looking up at his slightly grizzled face, which she had then believed must be eternal.
“I . . . I won’t lie, Daddy, ” she said. “What’s wrong? ” Her view of him was gradually shivering apart as the tears came.
“You been down there in the Bar’ns with a gang of boys? ”
Her heart leaped; her eyes dropped to his mud-caked shoes again. That black, clingy mud. If you stepped into it too deep it would suck your sneaker or your loafer right off . . . and both Richie and Bill believed that, if you went in all the way, it turned to quickmud.
“I play down there somet—”
Whap! the hand, covered with hard calluses, rocketing down again. She cried out, hurt, afraid. That look on his face scared her, and the way he wouldn’t look at her scared her, too. There was something wrong with him. He had been getting worse. What if he meant to kill her? What if
(oh stop it Beverly he’s your FATHER and FATHERS don’t kill DAUGHTERS) he lost control, then? What if—
“What have you let them do to you? ”
“Do? What—” She had no idea what he meant. “Take your pants off. ”
Her confusion increased. Nothing he said seemed connected to anything else. Trying to follow him made her feel ill . . . seasick, almost.
“What . . . why . . . ? ”
His hand rose; she flinched back. “Take them off, Bevvie. I want to see if you are intact. ”
Now there was a new image, crazier than the rest: she saw herself pulling her jeans off, and one of her legs coming off with them. Her father belting her around the room as she tried to hop away from him on her one good leg, Daddy shouting: I knew you wasn’t intact! I knew it! I knew it!
“Daddy, I don’t know what—”
His hand came down, not slapping this time but clutching. It bit into her shoulder with furious strength. She screamed. He pulled her up, and for the first time looked directly into her eyes. She screamed again at what she saw there. It was . . . nothing. Her father was gone. And Beverly suddenly understood that she was alone in the apartment with It, alone with It on this dozey August morning. There was not the thick sense of power and untinctured evil she had felt in the house on Neibolt Street a week and a half ago—It had been diluted somehow by her father’s essential humanity
—but It was here, working through him.
He threw her aside. She struck the coffee table, tripped over it, and went sprawling on the floor with a cry. This is how it happens, she thought. I’ll tell Bill so he understands. It’s everywhere in Derry. It just . . . It just fills
the hollow places, that’s all.
She rolled over. Her father was walking toward her. She skidded away from him on the seat of her jeans, her hair in her eyes.
“I know you been down there, ” he said. “I was told. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe my Bevvie would be hanging around with a gang of boys.
Then I seen you myself this morning. My Bevvie with a bunch of boys. Not even twelve and hanging around with a bunch of boys!” This latter thought seemed to send him into a fresh rage; it trembled through his scrawny frame like volts. “Not even twelve years old!” he shouted, and fetched a kick at her thigh that made her scream. His jaws snapped over this fact or concept
or whatever it was to him like the jaws of a hungry dog worrying a piece of meat. “Not even twelve! Not even twelve! Not even TWELVE!”
He kicked. Beverly scrambled away. They had worked their way into the kitchen area of the apartment now. His workboot struck the drawer under
the stove, making the pots and pans inside jangle.
“Don’t you run from me, Bevvie, ” he said. “You don’t want to do that or it’ll be the worse for you. Believe me, now. Believe your dad. This is serious. Hanging around with the boys, letting them do God knows what to you—not even twelve—that’s serious, Christ knows. ” He grabbed her and jerked her to her feet by her shoulder.
“You’re a pretty girl, ” he said. “There’s plenty of people happy to roon a pretty girl. Plenty of pretty girls willing to be roont. You been a slutchild to them boys, Bevvie? ”
At last she understood what It had put in his head . . . except part of her knew the thought might almost have been there all along; that It might only have used the tools that had been there just lying around, waiting to be picked up.
“No Daddy. No Daddy—”
“I seen you smoking!” he bellowed. This time he struck her with the palm of his hand, hard enough to send her reeling back in drunken strides to the kitchen table, where she sprawled, a flare of agony in the small of her back. The salt and pepper shakers fell to the floor. The pepper shaker broke. Black flowers bloomed and disappeared before her eyes. Sounds seemed too deep. She saw his face. Something in his face. He was looking at her chest. She was suddenly aware that her blouse had come untucked, and that she wasn’t wearing a bra—as of yet she owned only one, a training bra. Her mind sideslipped back to the house at Neibolt Street, when Bill had given her his shirt. She had been aware of the way her breasts poked at the thin cotton material, but their occasional, skittering glances had not bothered her; these had seemed perfectly natural. And Bill’s look had seemed more than natural—it had seemed warm and wanted, if deeply dangerous.
Now she felt guilt mix with her terror. Was her father so wrong? Hadn’t she had
(you been a slutchild to them)
thoughts? Bad thoughts? Thoughts of whatever it was that he was talking about?
It’s not the same thing! It’s not the same thing as the way (you been a slutchild)
he’s looking at me now! Not the same!
She tucked her blouse back in. “Bevvie? ”
“Daddy, we just play. That’s all. We play . . . we . . . we don’t do anything like . . . anything bad. We—”
“I seen you smoking, ” he said again, walking toward her. His eyes moved across her chest and her narrow uncurved hips. He chanted suddenly, in a high schoolboy’s voice that frightened her even more: “A girl who will chew gum will smoke! A girl who will smoke will drink! And a girl who will drink, everyone knows what a girl like that will do!”
“I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING!” she screamed at him as his hands descended on her shoulders. He was not pinching or hurting now. His hands were gentle. And that was somehow scariest of all.
“Beverly, ” he said with the inarguable, mad logic of the totally obsessed, “I seen you with boys. Now you want to tell me what a girl does with boys down in all that trashwood if it ain’t what a girl does on her back? ”
“Let me alone!” she cried at him. The anger flashed up from a deep well she had never suspected. The anger made a bluish-yellow flame in her head. It threatened her thoughts. All the times he had scared her; all the times he had shamed her; all the times he had hurt her. “You just let me alone!”
“Don’t talk to your daddy like that, ” he said, sounding startled.
“I didn’t do what you’re saying! I never did!”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m going to check and make sure. I know how.
Take your pants off. ”
“No. ”
His eyes widened, showing yellowed cornea all the way around the deep- blue irises. “What did you say? ”
“I said no. ” His eyes were fixed on hers and perhaps he saw the blazing anger there, the bright upsurge of rebellion. “Who told you? ”
“Bevvie—”
“Who told you we play down there? Was it a stranger? Was it a man dressed in orange and silver? Did he wear gloves? Did he look like a clown even if he wasn’t a clown? What was his name? ”
“Bevvie, you want to stop—”
“No: you want to stop, ” she told him.
He swung his hand again, not open but this time closed in a fist meant to break something. Beverly ducked. His fist whistled over her head and crashed into the wall. He howled and let go of her, putting the fist to his mouth. She backed away from him in quick mincing steps.
“You come back here!”
“No, ” she said. “You want to hurt me. I love you, Daddy, but I hate you when you’re like this. You can’t do it anymore. It’s making you do it, but you let It in. ”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, ” he said, “but you better get over here to me. I am not going to ask you no more. ”
“No, ” she said, beginning to cry again.
“Don’t make me come over there and collect you, Bevvie. You’re going to be one sorry little girl if I have to do that. Come to me. ”
“Tell me who told you, ” she said, “and I will. ”
He leaped at her with such scrawny catlike agility that, although she suspected such a leap was coming, she was almost caught. She fumbled for the kitchen doorknob, pulled the door open just wide enough so she could slip though, and then she was running down the hall toward the front door, running in a dream of panic, as she would run from Mrs. Kersh twenty- seven years later. Behind her, Al Marsh crashed against the door, slamming it shut again, cracking it down the center.
“YOU GET BACK HERE RIGHT NOW BEVVIE!” he howled, yanking it open and coming after her.
The front door was on the latch; she had come home the back way. One of her trembling hands worked at the lock while the other yanked fruitlessly at the knob. Behind, her father howled again; the sound of an
(take those pants off slutchild)
animal. She turned the lock-knob and the front door finally swept open.
Hot breath plunged up and down in her throat. She looked over her shoulder and saw him right behind her, reaching for her, grinning and grimacing, his yellow horsey teeth a beartrap in his mouth.
Beverly bolted out through the screen door and felt his fingers skid down the back of her blouse without catching hold. She flew down the steps, overbalanced, and went sprawling on the concrete walkway, erasing the skin from both knees.
“YOU GET BACK HERE NOW BEVVIE OR BEFORE GOD I’LL WHIP THE SKIN OFF YOU!”
He came down the steps and she scrambled to her feet, holes in the legs of her jeans,
(your pants off)
her kneecaps sizzling blood, exposed nerve-endings singing “Onward Christian Soldiers. ” She looked back and here he came again, A1 Marsh, janitor and custodian, a gray man dressed in khaki pants and a khaki shirt with two flap pockets, a keyring attached to his belt by a chain, his hair flying. But he wasn’t in his eyes—the essential he who had washed her back and punched her in the gut and had done both because he worried about her, worried a lot, the he who had once tried to braid her hair when
she was seven, made a botch of it, and then got giggling with her about the way it stuck out everyway, the he who knew how to make cinnamon
eggnogs on Sunday that tasted better than anything you could buy for a quarter at the Derry Ice Cream Bar, the father-he, maleman of her life, delivering a mixed post from that other s*xual state. None of that was in his eyes now. She saw blank murder there. She saw It there.
She ran. She ran from It.
Mr. Pasquale looked up, startled, from where he was watering his crab- grassy lawn and listening to the Red Sox game on a portable radio sitting on his porch rail. The Zinnerman kids stood back from the old Hudson Hornet which they had bought for twenty-five dollars and washed almost every day. One of them was holding a hose, the other a bucket of soapsuds. Both were slack-jawed. Mrs. Denton looked out of her second-floor apartment,
one of her six daughters’ dresses in her lap, more mending in a basket on the floor, her mouth full of pins. Little Lars Theramenius pulled his Red Ball Flyer wagon quickly off the cracked sidewalk and stood on Bucky Pasquale’s dying lawn. He burst into tears as Bevvie, who had spent a patient morning that spring showing him how to tie his sneakers so they
would stay tied, flashed by him, screaming, her eyes wide. A moment later her father passed, hollering at her, and Lars, who was then three and who would die twelve years later in a motorcycle accident, saw something
terrible and inhuman in Mr. Marsh’s face. He had nightmares for three weeks after. In them he saw Mr. Marsh turning into a spider inside his clothes.
Beverly ran. She was perfectly aware that she might be running for her life. If her father caught her now, it wouldn’t matter that they were on the street. People did crazy things in Derry sometimes; she didn’t have to read
the newspapers or know the town’s peculiar history to understand that. If he caught her he would choke her, or beat her, or kick her. And when it was over, someone would come and collect him and he would sit in a cell the way Eddie Corcoran’s stepfather was sitting in a cell, dazed and uncomprehending.
She ran toward downtown, passing more and more people as she went.
They stared—first at her, then at her pursuing father—and they looked surprised, some of them even amazed. But what was on their faces went no further. They looked and then they went on toward wherever they had been going. The air circulating in her lungs was growing heavier now.
She crossed the Canal, feet pounding on cement while cars rumbled over the heavy wooden slats of the bridge to her right. To her left she could see
the stone semicircle where the Canal went under the downtown area. She cut suddenly across Main Street, oblivious to the honking horns and squealing brakes. She went right because the Barrens lay in that direction. It was still almost a mile away, and if she was to get there she would
somehow have to outdistance her father on the gruelling slope of Up-Mile Hill (or one of the even steeper side-streets). But that was all there was.
“COME BACK YOU LITTLE BITCH I’M WARNING YOU!”
As she gained the sidewalk on the far side of the street she snatched another glance behind her, the heavy weight of her red hair shifting over her shoulder as she did. Her father was crossing the street, as heedless of the traffic as she had been, his face a bright sweaty red.
She ducked down an alley that ran behind Warehouse Row. This was the rear of the buildings which fronted on Up-Mile Hill: Star Beef, Armour Meatpacking, Hemphill Storage & Warehousing, Eagle Beef & Kosher Meats. The alley was narrow and cobbled, made narrower still by the
bunches of fuming garbage cans and bins set out here. The cobbles were slimy with God knew what offal and ordure. There was a mixture of smells, some bland, some sharp, some simply titanic . . . but all spoke of meat and slaughter. Flies buzzed in clouds. From inside some of the buildings she could hear the blood-curdling whine of bone-saws. Her feet stuttered unevenly on the slick cobbles. One hip struck a galvanized garbage can and
packages of tripe wrapped in newspaper fell out like great meaty jungle blossoms.
“YOU GET RIGHT THE HELL BACK HERE BEVVIE! I MEAN IT NOW! DON’T MAKE IT ANY WORSE THAN IT ALREADY IS GIRL!”
Two men lounged in the loading doorway of the Kirshner Packing Works, munching thick sandwiches, open dinner-buckets near at hand. “You in a woeful place, girl, ” one of them said mildly. “Looks like you goin in
the woodshed with your pa. ” The other laughed.
He was gaining. She could hear his thundering footfalls and heavy respiration almost behind her now; looking to her right she could see the black wing of his shadow flying along the high board fence there.
Then he yelled in surprise and fury as his feet slipped out from under him and he thumped to the cobblestones. He was up a moment later, no longer bellowing words but only shrieking out his incoherent fury while the men in the doorway laughed and slapped each other on the back.
The alley zigged to the left . . . and Beverly came to a skittering halt, her mouth opening in dismay. A city dumpster was parked across the alley’s mouth. There was not even nine inches of clearance on either side. Its motor was idling. Under that sound, barely audible, she could hear the murmur of conversation from the dumpster’s cab. More men on lunch-break. It lacked no more than three or four minutes of noon; soon the courthouse clock would begin to chime the hour.
She could hear him coming again, closing in. She threw herself down and hooked her way under the dumpster, using her elbows and wounded knees. The stink of exhaust and diesel fuel mixed with the smell of ripe meat and made her feel a kind of giddy nausea. In a way, the ease of her progress was worse: she was skidding greasily over a coating of slime and garbagey crud. She kept moving, once rising too high off the cobbles so that her back came in contact with the dumpster’s hot exhaust-pipe. She had to bite back a scream.
“Beverly? You under there? ” Each word separated from the last by an out-of-breath gasp for air. She looked back and met his eyes as he bent and peered under the truck.
“Leave . . . me alone!” she managed.
“You bitch, ” he replied in a thick, spit-choked voice. He threw himself flat, keys jingling, and began to crawl after her, using a grotesque
swimming stroke to pull himself along.
Beverly clawed her way from under the truck’s cab, grabbed one of the huge tires—her fingers hooked their way into a tread up to the second
knuckle—and yanked herself up. She banged her tailbone on the dumpster’s front bumper and then she was running again, heading up Up-Mile Hill
now, her blouse and jeans smeared with goop and stinking to high heaven. She looked back and saw her father’s hands and freckled arms shoot out from under the dumpster’s cab like the claws of some imagined childhood monster from under the bed.
Quickly, hardly thinking at all, she darted between Feldman’s Storage and the Tracker Brothers’ Annex. This covert, too narrow even to be called an alley, was filled with broken crates, weeds, sunflowers, and, of course, more garbage. Beverly dived behind a pile of crates and crouched there. A few moments later she saw her father pound by the mouth of the covert and on up the hill.
Beverly got up and hurried to the far end of the covert. There was a chainlink fence here. She monkeyed to the top, got over, and worked her way down the far side. She was now on Derry Theological Seminary property. She ran up the manicured back lawn and around the side of the building. She could hear someone inside playing something classical on an organ. The notes seemed to engrave their pleasant, calm selves on the still air.
There was a tall hedge between the seminary and Kansas Street. She peered through it and saw her father on the far side of the street, breathing hard, patches of sweat darkening his work-shirt under the arms. He was peering around, hands on hips. His keyring twinkled brightly in the sun.
Beverly watched him, also breathing hard, her heart beating rabbit-fast in her throat. She was very thirsty, and her simmering smell disgusted her. If I was drawn in a comic strip, she thought distractedly, there’d be all those
wavy stink-lines coming up from me.
Her father crossed slowly to the seminary side. Beverly’s breath stopped.
Please God, I can’t run anymore. Help me, God. Don’t let him find me.
Al Marsh walked slowly down the sidewalk, directly past where his daughter crouched on the far side of the hedge.
Dear God, don’t let him smell me!
He didn’t—perhaps because, after a tumble in the alley-way and crawling under the dumpster himself, Al smelled as bad as she did. He walked on.
She watched him go back down Up-Mile Hill until he was out of sight.
Beverly picked herself up slowly. Her clothes were covered with garbage, her face was dirty, her back hurt where she had burned it on the exhaust-
pipe of the dumpster. These physical things paled before the confused swirl of her thoughts—she felt that she had sailed off the edge of the world, and none of the normal patterns of behavior seemed to apply. She could not
imagine going home; but she could not imagine not going home. She had defied her father, defied him—
She had to push that thought away because it made her feel weak and trembly, sick to her stomach. She loved her father. Wasn’t one of the Ten Commandments “Honor thy mother and father that thy days may be long upon the earth”? Yes. But he hadn’t been himself. Hadn’t been her father. Had, in fact, been someone completely different. An impostor. It—
Suddenly she went cold as a terrible question occurred to her: Was this happening to the others? Or something like it? She ought to warn them.
They had hurt It, and perhaps now It was taking steps to assure Itself they would never hurt It again. And, really, where else was there to go? They
were the only friends she had. Bill. Bill would know what to do. Bill would tell her what to do, Bill would supply the what next.
She stopped where the seminary walk joined the Kansas Street sidewalk and peered around the hedge. Her father was truly gone. She turned right and began to walk along Kansas Street toward the Barrens. Probably none of them would be there right now; they would be at home, eating their lunches. But they would be back. Meantime, she could go down into the cool clubhouse and try to get herself under some kind of control. She would leave the little window wide open so she could have some sunshine, and
perhaps she would even be able to sleep. Her tired body and overstrained mind grasped eagerly at the thought. Sleep, yes, that would be good.
Her head drooped as she plodded past the last bunch of houses before the land grew too steep for houses and plunged down into the Barrens—the
Barrens where, as incredible as it seemed to her, her father had been lurking and spying.
She certainly did not hear footfalls behind her. The boys there were at great pains to be quiet. They had been outrun before; they did not intend to
be outrun again. They drew closer and closer to her, walking cat-soft. Belch and Victor were grinning, but Henry’s face was both vacant and serious. His hair was uncombed and snarly. His eyes were as unfocused as Al Marsh’s had been in the apartment. He held one dirty finger pressed over his lips in a shhh gesture as they closed the distance from seventy feet to fifty to thirty.
Through that summer Henry had been edging steadily out over some mental abyss, walking on a bridge that had grown relentlessly more and
more narrow. On the day when he had allowed Patrick Hockstetter to caress him, that bridge had narrowed to a tightrope. The tightrope had snapped this morning. He had gone out into the yard, naked except for his ragged, yellowing undershorts, and looked up into the sky. The ghost of last night’s moon still lingered there, and as he looked at it the moon had suddenly changed into a skeletal grinning face. Henry had fallen on his knees before
this face, exalted with terror and joy. Ghost-voices came from the moon. The voices changed, sometimes seemed to merge together in a soft babble that was barely understandable . . . but he sensed the truth, which was
simply that all these voices were one voice, one intelligence. The voice told him to hunt up Belch and Victor and be at the corner of Kansas Street and Costello Avenue around noon. The voice told him he would know what to do then. Sure enough, the cunt had come bopping along. He waited to hear what the voice would tell him to do next. The answer came as they continued to close the distance. The voice came not from the moon, but from the sewer-grating they were passing. The voice was low but clear.
Belch and Victor glanced toward the grating in a dazed, almost hypnotized way, then back at Beverly.
Kill her, the voice from the sewer said.
Henry Bowers reached into the pocket of his jeans and brought out a slim nine-inch-long instrument with imitation-ivory inlays along its sides. A small chromium button glittered at one end of this dubious objet d’art.
Henry pushed it. A six-inch blade popped out of the slit at the end of the handle. He bounced the switchblade on his palm. He began to walk a little faster. Victor and Belch, still looking dazed, increased their own walking speed to keep up with him.
Beverly did not hear them, precisely; that was not what made her turn her head as Henry Bowers closed the distance. Bent-kneed, shuffling, a
frozen grin on his face, Henry was as silent as an Indian. No; it was simply a feeling, too clear and direct and powerful to be denied, of
3
The Derry Public Library /1:55 A. M.
being watched.
Mike Hanlon laid his pen aside and looked across the shadowy inverted bowl of the library’s main room. He saw islands of light thrown by the hanging globes; he saw books fading into dimness; he saw the iron
staircases making their graceful trellised spirals up to the stacks. He saw nothing out of place.
All the same, he did not believe he was alone in here. Not anymore.
After the others were gone, Mike had cleaned up with a care that was only habit. He was on autopilot, his mind a million miles—and twenty- seven years—away. He dumped ashtrays, threw away the empty liquor bottles (putting a layer of waste over them so that Carole wouldn’t be
shocked), and the returnable cans in a box behind his desk. Then he got the broom and swept up the remains of the gin bottle Eddie had broken.
When the table was clean, he went into the Periodicals Room and picked up the scattered magazines. As he did these simple chores, his mind sifted the stories they had told—concentrating the most, perhaps, on what they had left out. They believed they remembered everything; he thought that
Bill and Beverly almost did. But there was more. It would come to them . . . if It allowed them the time. In 1958 there had been no chance for preparation. They had talked endlessly—their talk interrupted only by the rockfight and that one act of group heroism at 29 Neibolt Street—and might, in the end, have done no more than talk. Then August 14th had come, and Henry and his friends had simply chased them into the sewers.
Maybe I should have told them, he thought, putting the last of the
magazines back in their places. But something spoke strongly against the
idea—the voice of the Turtle, he supposed. Perhaps that was part of it, and
perhaps that sense of circularity was part of it, too. Maybe that last act was going to repeat itself, in some updated fashion, as well. He had put
flashlights and miner’s helmets carefully by against tomorrow; he had the blueprints of the Derry sewer and drain systems neatly rolled up and held with rubber bands in that same closet. But, when they were kids, all their talk and all their plans, half-baked or otherwise, had come to nothing in the end; in the end they had simply been chased into the drains, hurled into the confrontation which had followed. Was that going to happen again? Faith and power, he had come to believe, were interchangeable. Was the final truth even simpler? That no act of faith was possible until you were rudely pushed out into the screaming middle of things like a newborn child skydiving chutelessly out of his mother’s womb? Once you were falling,
you were forced to believe in the chute, into existence, weren’t you? Pulling the ring as you fell became your final statement on the subject, one way or
the other.
Jesus Christ, it’s Fulton Sheen in blackface, Mike thought, and laughed a little.
Mike cleaned, neatened, and thought his thoughts, while another part of his brain expected that he would finish and find himself tired enough to go home and sleep for a few hours. But when he finally did finish, he found himself as wide awake as ever. So he went to the single closed stack behind his office, unlocking the wire gate with a key from his ring and letting himself in. This stack, supposedly fireproof when the vault-type door was closed and locked, contained the library’s valuable first editions, books signed by writers long since dead (among the signed editions were Moby
Dick and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass), historical matter relating to the town, and the personal papers of a few of the few writers who had lived and worked in Derry. Mike hoped, if all of this ended well, to persuade Bill to
leave his manuscripts to the Derry Public Library. Walking down the third
aisle of the stack beneath tin-shaded lightbulbs, smelling the familiar library scents of must and dust and cinnamony, aging paper, he thought: When I die, I guess I’ll go with a library card in one hand and an OVERDUE stamp in the other. Well, maybe there’s worse ways.
He stopped halfway down this third aisle. His dog-eared steno notebook, which contained the jotted tales of Derry and his own troubled wanderings, was tucked between Fricke’s Old Derry-Town and Michaud’s History of
Derry. He had pushed the notebook so far back it was nearly invisible. No one would stumble across it unless he was looking for it.
Mike took it and went back to the table where they had held their meeting, pausing to turn off the lights in the closed stack and to relock the wire mesh. He sat down and flipped through the pages he had written, thinking what a strange, crippled affidavit it was: part history, part scandal, part diary, part confessional. He had not logged an entry since April 6th.
Have to get a new book soon, he thought, thumbing the few blank pages that were left. He thought bemusedly for a moment of Margaret Mitchell’s first draft of Gone with the Wind, written in longhand in stacks and stacks and stacks of school composition books. Then he uncapped his pen and
wrote May 31st two lines below the end of his last entry. He paused, looking vaguely across the empty library, and then began to write about everything that had happened during the last three days, beginning with his telephone call to Stanley Uris.
He wrote quietly for fifteen minutes, and then his concentration began to come unravelled. He paused more and more frequently. The image of Stan Uris’s severed head in the refrigerator tried to intrude, Stan’s bloody head, the mouth open and full of feathers, falling out of the refrigerator and rolling across the floor toward him. He banished it with an effort and went on writing. Five minutes later he jerked upright and looked around, convinced he would see that head rolling across the old black-and-red tiles of the main floor, eyes as glassy and avid as those in the mounted head of a deer.
There was nothing. No head, no sound except the muffled drum of his own heart.
Got to get ahold of yourself, Mikey. It’s the jim-jams, that’s all. Nothing else to it.
But it was no use. The words began to get away from him, the thoughts seemed to dangle just out of reach. There was a pressure on the back of his neck, and it seemed to grow heavier.
Being watched.
He put his pen down and got up from the table. “Is anyone here? ” he called, and his voice echoed back from the rotunda, giving him a jolt. He licked his lips and tried again. “Bill? . . . Ben? ”
Bill-ill-ill . . . Ben-en-en . . .
Suddenly Mike decided he wanted to be home. He would simply take the notebook with him. He reached for it . . . and heard a faint, sliding footstep.
He looked up again. Pools of light surrounded by deepening lagoons of shadow. Nothing else . . . at least nothing he could see. He waited, heart beating hard.
The footstep came again, and this time he pinpointed the location. The glassed-in passageway that connected the adult library to the Children’s Library. In there. Someone. Something.
Moving quietly, Mike walked across to the checkout desk. The double doors leading into the passageway were held open by wooden chocks, and he could see a little way in. He could see what looked like feet, and with sudden swooning horror he wondered if maybe Stan had come after all, if
maybe Stan was going to step out of the shadows with his bird encyclopedia in one hand, his face white, his lips purple, his wrists and forearms cut open. I finally came, Stan would say. It took me awhile because I had to pull myself out of a hole in the ground, but I finally came. . . .
There was another footstep and now Mike could see shoes for sure— shoes and ragged denim pantlegs. Faded blue strings hung down against
sockless ankles. And in the darkness almost six feet above those ankles, he could see glittering eyes.
He groped over the surface of the semicircular checkout desk and felt along the other side without taking his gaze from those eyes. His fingers felt one wooden corner of a small box—the overdue cards. A smaller box— paper clips and rubber bands. They happened on something that was metal and seized it. It was a letter-opener with the words JESUS SAVES stamped on the handle. A flimsy thing that had come in the mail from the Grace Baptist Church as part of a fund-raising drive. Mike had not attended
services in fifteen years, but Grace Baptist had been his mother’s church and he had sent them five dollars he could not really afford. He had meant to throw the letter-opener out but it had stayed here, amid the clutter on his side of the desk (Carole’s side was always spotlessly clean) until now.
He clutched it tightly and stared into the shadowy hallway.
There was another step . . . another. Now the ragged denim pants were
visible up to the knees. He could see the shape these lower legs belonged to: it was big, hulking. The shoulders were rounded. There was a suggestion of ragged hair. The figure was apelike.
“Who are you? ”
The shape merely stood there, contemplating him.
Although still afraid, Mike had gotten over the debilitating idea that it might be Stan Uris, returned from the grave, called back by the scars on his palms, some eldritch magnetism which had brought him back like a zombie in a Hammer horror film. Whoever this was, it wasn’t Stan Uris, who had finished at five-seven when he had his full growth.
The shape took another step, and now the light from the globe closest to the passageway fell across the beltless loops of the jeans around the shape’s waist.
Suddenly Mike knew. Even before the shape spoke, he knew.
“Hello, nigger, ” the shape said. “Been throwing rocks at anyone? Want to know who poisoned your fucking dog? ”
The shape took another step forward and the light fell on the face of Henry Bowers. It had grown fat and sagging; the skin had an unhealthy tallowy hue; the cheeks had become hanging jowls that were specked with stubble, almost as much white in that stubble as black. Wavy lines—three of them—were engraved in the shelf of the forehead above the bushy brows.
Other lines formed parentheses at the corners of the full-lipped mouth. The eyes were small and mean inside discolored pouches of flesh—bloodshot and thoughtless. It was the face of a man being pushed into a premature age, a man who was thirty-nine going on seventy-three. But it was also the face of a twelve-year-old boy. Henry’s clothes were still green with whatever bushes he had spent the day hiding in.
“Ain’t you gonna say howdy, nigger? ” Henry asked.
“Hello, Henry. ” It occurred to him dimly that he had not listened to the radio for the last two days, and he had not even read the paper, which was a ritual with him. Too much going on. Too busy.
Too bad.
Henry emerged from the corridor between the Children’s Library and the adult library and stood there, peering at Mike with his piggy eyes. His lips parted in an unspeakable grin, revealing rotted back-Maine teeth.
“Voices, ” he said. “You ever hear voices, nigger? ”
“Which voices are those, Henry? ” He put both hands behind his back,
like a schoolboy called upon to recite, and transferred the letter-opener from
his left hand to his right. The grandfather clock, given by Horst Mueller in 1923, ticked solemn seconds into the smooth pond of library silence.
“From the moon, ” Henry said. He put a hand in his pocket. “Came from the moon. Lots of voices. ” He paused, frowned slightly, then shook his head. “Lots but really only one. Its voice. ”
“Did you see It, Henry? ”
“Yep, ” Henry said. “Frankenstein. Tore off Victor’s head. You should have heard it. Made a sound like a great big zipper going down. Then It went after Belch. Belch fought It. ”
“Did he? ”
“Yep. That’s how I got away. ” “You left him to die. ”
“Don’t you say that!” Henry’s cheeks flushed a dull red. He took two steps forward. The farther he walked from the umbilicus connecting the
Children’s Library to the adult library, the younger he looked to Mike. He saw the same old meanness in Henry’s face, but he saw something else as well: the child who had been brought up by crazy Butch Bowers on a good farm that had gone to shitshack shambles over the years. “Don’t you say that! It would have killed me, too!”
“It didn’t kill us. ”
Henry’s eyes gleamed with rancid humor. “Not yet. But It will. ‘Less I don’t leave any of you for It to get. ” He pulled his hand out of his pocket. In it was a slim nine-inch-long instrument with imitation-ivory inlays along its sides. A small chromium button glittered at one end of this dubious objet d’art. Henry pushed it. A six-inch steel blade popped out of the slit at the end of the handle. He bounced the switchblade on his palm and began to walk toward the checkout desk a little faster.
“Look what I found, ” he said. “I knew where to look. ” Obscenely, one red-rimmed eyelid drooped in a wink. “The man in the moon told me. ” Henry revealed his teeth again. “Hid today. Hitchhiked a ride tonight. Old man. Hit him. Killed him, I think. Ditched the car over in Newport. Just over the Derry town line, I heard that voice. I looked in a drain. There was these clothes. And the knife. My old knife. ”
“You’re forgetting something, Henry. ” Henry, grinning, only shook his head.
“We got away and you got away. If It wants us, It wants you, too. ”
“No. ”
“I think yes. Maybe you yo-yos did Its work, but It didn’t exactly play favorites, did It? It got both of your friends, and while Belch was fighting It, you got away. But now you’re back. I think you’re part of Its unfinished business, Henry. I really do. ”
“No!”
“Maybe Frankenstein’s what you’ll see. Or the Werewolf? A Vampire? The Clown? Or, Henry! Maybe you’ll really see what It looks like, Henry. We did. Want me to tell you? Want me to—”
“You shut up!” Henry screamed, and launched himself at Mike.
Mike stepped aside and stuck out one foot. Henry tripped over it and went skidding over the footworn tiles like a shuffleboard weight. His head struck a leg of the table where the Losers had sat earlier that night, telling their tales. For a moment he was stunned; the knife hung loose in his hand.
Mike went after him, went after the knife. In that moment he could have finished Henry; it would have been possible to plant the JESUS SAVES letter-opener which had come in the mail from his mother’s old church in
the back of Henry’s neck and then called the police. There would have been a certain amount of official nonsense, but not too much of it—not in Derry, where such weird and violent events were not entirely exceptional.
What stopped him was a realization, almost too lightning-like to be conscious, that if he killed Henry he would be doing Its work as surely as Henry would be doing Its work by killing Mike. And something else: that other look he had seen on Henry’s face, the tired bewildered look of the badly used child who has been set on a poisonous path for some unknown purpose. Henry had grown up within the contaminated radius of Butch Bowers’s mind; surely he had belonged to It even before he suspected It existed.
So instead of planting the letter-opener in Henry’s vulnerable neck, he dropped to his knees and snatched at the knife. It twisted in his hand— seemingly of its own volition—and his fingers closed on the blade. There was no immediate pain; only red blood flowing down the first three fingers of his right hand and into his scarred palm.
He pulled back. Henry rolled away and grabbed the knife again. Mike got to his knees and the two of them faced each other that way, each bleeding:
Mike’s fingers, Henry’s nose. Henry shook his head and droplets flew away into the darkness.
“Thought you were so smart!” he cried hoarsely. “Fucking sissies is all you were! We could have beat you in a fair fight!”
“Put the knife down, Henry, ” Mike said quietly. “I’ll call the police.
They’ll come and get you and take you back to Juniper Hill. You’ll be out of Derry. You’ll be safe. ”
Henry tried to talk and couldn’t. He couldn’t tell this hateful jig that he wouldn’t be safe in Juniper Hill, or Los Angeles, or the rainforests of Timbuktu. Sooner or later the moon would rise, bone-white and snow-cold, and the ghost-voices would start, and the face of the moon would change into Its face, babbling and laughing and ordering. He swallowed slick-slimy blood.
“You never fought fair!” “Did you? ” Mike asked.
“You niggerboogienightfighterjunglebunnyapemancoon!” Henry screamed, and leaped at Mike again.
Mike leaned back to avoid his blundering, awkward rush, overbalanced, and went sprawling on his back. Henry struck the table again, rebounded, turned, and clutched Mike’s arm. Mike swept the letter-opener around and felt it go deep into Henry’s forearm. Henry screamed, but instead of letting go, he tightened his grip. He pulled himself toward Mike, his hair in his eyes, blood flowing from his ruptured nose over his thick lips.
Mike tried to get a foot in Henry’s side and push him away. Henry swung the switchblade in a glittering arc. All six inches of it went into Mike’s thigh. It went in effortlessly, as if into a warm cake of butter. Henry pulled it out, dripping, and with a scream of combined pain and effort, Mike shoved him away.
He struggled to his feet but Henry was up more quickly, and Mike was barely able to avoid Henry’s next blundering rush. He could feel blood pouring down his leg in an alarming flood, filling his loafer. He got my femoral artery, I think. Jesus, he got me bad. Blood everywhere. Blood on the floor. Shoes won’t be any good, shit, just bought em two months ago—
Henry came again, panting and puffing like a bull in heat. Mike staggered aside and swept the letter-opener at him again. It tore through Henry’s
ragged shirt and pulled a deep cut across his ribs. Henry grunted as Mike shoved him away again.
“You dirty-fighting nigger!” He wailed. “Look what you done!”
“Drop the knife, Henry, ” Mike said.
There was a titter from behind them. Henry looked . . . and then screamed in utter horror, clapping his hands to his cheeks like an offended old maid. Mike’s gaze jerked toward the circulation desk. There was a loud, vibrating ka-spanggg! sound, and Stan Uris’s head popped up from behind the desk. A spring corkscrewed up and into his severed, dripping neck. His face was livid with greasepaint. There was a fever-spot of rouge on each cheek. Great orange pom-poms flowered where the eyes had been. This
grotesque Stan-in-the-box head nodded back and forth at the end of its spring like one of the giant sunflowers beside the house on Neibolt Street.
Its mouth opened and a squealing, laughing voice began to chant: “Kill him, Henry! Kill the nigger, kill the coon, kill him, kill him, KILL HIM!”
Mike wheeled back toward Henry, dismally aware that he had been tricked, wondering faintly whose head Henry had seen at the end of that spring. Stan’s? Victor Criss’s? His father’s, perhaps?
Henry shrieked and rushed at Mike, the switchblade plunging up and down like the needle of a sewing machine. “Gaaaah, nigger!” Henry was screaming. “Gaaaah, nigger! Gaaaah, nigger!”
Mike back-pedaled, and the leg Henry had stabbed buckled under him almost at once, spilling him to the floor. There was hardly any feeling at all left in that leg. It felt cold and distant. Looking down, he saw that his cream-colored slacks were now bright red.
Henry’s blade flashed by in front of his nose.
Mike stabbed out with the JESUS SAVES letter-opener as Henry turned back for another go. Henry ran into it like a bug onto a pin. Warm blood doused Mike’s hand. There was a snap, and when he drew his hand back, he only had the haft of the letter-opener. The rest was sticking out of Henry’s stomach.
“Gaaah! Nigger!” Henry screamed, clapping a hand over the protruding jag of blade. Blood poured through his fingers. He looked at it with bulging, unbelieving eyes. The head at the end of the creaking, dipping jack-in-the- box squealed and laughed. Mike, feeling sick and dizzy now, looked back at it and saw Belch Huggins’s head, a human champagne cork wearing a New
York Yankees baseball cap turned backward. He groaned aloud, and the sound was far away, echoey in his own ears. He was aware that he was sitting in a pool of warm blood. If I don’t get a tourniquet on my leg, I’m going to die.
“Gaaaaaaaaaah! Neeeeeeegaaaa!” Henry screamed. Still holding his bleeding belly with one hand and the switchblade with the other, he staggered away from Mike and toward the library doors. He wove drunkenly from side to side, progressing across the echoing main room like a pinball in an electronic game. He struck one of the easy chairs and knocked it over. His groping hand spilled a rack of newspapers onto the floor. He reached the doors, straight-armed one of them, and plunged out into the night.
Mike’s consciousness was fading now. He worked at the buckle of his belt with fingers he could barely feel. At last he got it unhooked and managed to pull it free of its loops. He put it around his bleeding leg just
below the groin and cinched it tight. Holding it with one hand, he began to crawl toward the circulation desk. The phone was there. He wasn’t sure
how he was going to reach it, but for now that didn’t matter. The trick was just to get there. The world wavered, blurred, grew faint behind waves of gray. He stuck his tongue out and bit down on it savagely. The pain was
immediate and exquisite. The world swam back into focus. He became
aware that he was still holding the ragged haft of the letter-opener, and he tossed it away. Here, at last, was the circulation desk, looking as tall as Everest.
Mike got his good leg under him and pushed himself up, clutching at the edge of the desk with the hand that wasn’t holding the belt tight. His mouth was drawn down in a trembling grimace, his eyes slitted. At last he managed to get all the way up. He stood there, storklike, and hooked the
phone over to him. Taped to the side were three numbers: fire, police, and hospital. With one shaking finger that looked at least ten miles away, Mike dialed the hospital: 555-3711. He closed his eyes as the phone began to ring
. . . and then they opened wide as the voice of Pennywise the Clown answered.
“Howdy nigger!” Pennywise cried, and then screamed laughter as sharp as broken glass into Mike’s ear. “What do you say? How you doon? I think
you’re dead, what do you think? I think Henry did the job on you! Want a balloon, Mikey? Want a balloon? How you doon? Hello there!”
Mike’s eyes turned up to the face of the grandfather clock, the Mueller clock, and saw with no surprise at all that its face had been replaced by his father’s face, gray and raddled with cancer. The eyes were turned up to
show only bulging whites. Suddenly his father popped his tongue out and the clock began to strike.
Mike lost his grip on the circulation desk. He swayed for a moment on his good leg and then he fell down again. The phone swung before him at the end of its cord like a mesmerist’s amulet. It was becoming very hard to hold onto the belt now.
“Hello dere, Amos!” Pennywise cried brightly from the swinging
telephone handset. “Dis here’s de Kingfish! I is de Kingfish in Derry, anyhow, and dat’s de troof. Wouldn’t you say so, boy? ”
“If there’s anyone there, ” Mike croaked, “a real voice behind the one I am hearing, please help me. My name is Michael Hanlon and I’m at the Derry Public Library. I am bleeding to death. If you’re there, I can’t hear you. I’m not being allowed to hear you. If you’re there, please hurry. ”
He lay on his side, drawing his legs up until he was in a fetal position. He took two turns around his right hand with the belt and concentrated on holding it as the world drifted away in those cottony, balloon-like clouds of gray.
“Hello dere, howyadoon? ” Pennywise screamed from the dangling, swinging phone. “Howyadoon, you dirty coon? Hello
4
Kansas Street l 12:20 P. M.
. . . there, ” Henry Bowers said. “Howyadoon, you little cunt? ”
Beverly reacted instantly, turning to run. It was a quicker reaction than any of them had expected. She might actually have gotten a running start . .
. but for her hair. Henry snatched, caught part of its long flow, and pulled
her back. He grinned into her face. His breath was thick and warm and stinking.
“Howyadoon? ” Henry Bowers asked her. “Where ya goin? Back to play with your asshole friends some more? I think I’ll cut off your nose and
make you eat it. You like that? ”
She struggled to get free. Henry laughed and shook her head back and forth by the hair. The knife flashed dangerously in the hazy August sunshine.
Abruptly a car-horn honked—a long blast.
“Here! Here! What are you boys doing? Let that girl go!”
It was an old lady behind the wheel of a well-preserved 1950 Ford. She had pulled up to the curb and was leaning across the blanket-covered seat to peer out the passenger-side window. At the sight of her angry honest face,
the dazed look left Victor Criss’s eyes for the first time and he looked nervously at Henry. “What—”
“Please!” Bev cried shrilly. “He’s got a knife! A knife!”
The old lady’s anger now became concern, surprise, and fear as well. “What are you boys doing? Let her alone!”
Across the street—Bev saw this quite clearly—Herbert Ross got out of
the lawn-chair on his porch, approached the porch rail, and looked over. His face was as blank as Belch Huggins’s. He folded his paper, turned, and went quietly into the house.
“Let her be!” the old lady cried shrilly.
Henry bared his teeth and suddenly ran at her car, dragging Beverly after him by the hair. She stumbled, went to one knee, was dragged. The pain in her scalp was excruciating, monstrous. She felt some of her hair rip out.
The old lady screamed and cranked the passenger-side window frantically. Henry stabbed down and the switchblade skated across glass. The woman’s foot came off the old Ford’s clutch-pedal and it went down
Kansas Street in three big jerks, bouncing up over the curb, where it stalled. Henry went after it, still pulling Beverly along. Victor licked his lips and looked around. Belch pushed the New York Yankees baseball cap he was wearing up on his forehead and then dug at his ear in a puzzled gesture.
Bev saw the old woman’s white frightened face for one moment and then saw her pawing at the door-locks, first on the passenger side, then on her
own. The Ford’s engine ground and caught. Henry lifted one booted foot and kicked out a taillight.
“Get outta here, you dried-up old bitch!”
The tires screamed as the old lady pulled back out in the street. An oncoming pick-up truck swerved to avoid her; its horn blatted. Henry turned back toward Bev, beginning to smile again, and she hiked one sneakered foot directly into his balls.
The smile on Henry’s face turned into a grimace of agony. The
switchknife dropped from his hand and clattered onto the sidewalk. His other hand left its nesting-place in the tangle of her hair (pulling once more, terribly, as it went) and then he sank to his knees, trying to scream, holding his crotch. She could see strands of her own coppery hair in one of his hands, and in that instant all of her terror turned to bright hate. She drew in a great, hitching breath and hocked a remarkably large looey onto the top of his head.
Then she turned and ran.
Belch lumbered three steps after her and stopped. He and Victor went to Henry, who threw them aside and staggered to his feet, both hands still cupping his balls; it was not the first time that summer that he had been kicked there.
He leaned over and picked up the switchblade. “ . . . on, ” he wheezed. “What, Henry? ” Belch said anxiously.
Henry turned a face toward him that was so full of sweating pain and sick, blazing hate that Belch fell back a step. “I said . . . come . . . on!” he managed, and began to stagger and lurch up the street after Beverly, holding his crotch.
“We can’t catch her now, Henry, ” Victor said uneasily. “Hell, you can hardly walk. ”
“We’ll catch her, ” Henry panted. His upper lip was rising and falling in an unconscious doglike sneer. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and ran down his hectic cheeks. “We’ll catch her, all right. Because I know
where she’s going. She’s going down into the Barrens to be with her asshole
5
The Derry Town House/2:00 A. M.
friends, ” Beverly said.
“Hmmm? ” Bill looked at her. His thoughts had been far away. They had been walking hand-in-hand, the silence between them companionable, and slightly charged with mutual attraction. He had caught only the last word of what she had said. A block ahead, the lights of the Town House shone through the low groundfog.
“I said, you were my best friends. The only friends I ever had back then. ” She smiled. “Making friends has never been my strong suit, I guess, although I’ve got a good one back in Chicago. A woman named Kay McCall. I think you’d like her, Bill. ”
“Probably would. I’ve never been real fast to make friends myself. ” He smiled. “Back then, we were all we nuh-nuh-needed. ” He saw beads of
moisture in her hair, appreciated the way the lights made a nimbus around her head. Her eyes were turned gravely up to his.
“I need something now, ” she said. “W-What’s that? ”
“I need you to kiss me, ” she said.
He thought of Audra, and for the first time it occurred to him that she looked like Beverly. He wondered if maybe that had been the attraction all along, the reason he had been able to find guts enough to ask Audra out near the end of the Hollywood party where they had met. He felt a pang of unhappy guilt . . . and then he took Beverly, his childhood friend, in his arms.
Her kiss was firm and warm and sweet. Her breasts pushed against his open coat and her hips moved against him . . . away . . . and then against him again. When her hips moved away a second time, he plunged both of his hands into her hair and moved against her. When she felt him growing hard, she uttered a little gasp and put her face against the side of his neck. He felt her tears on his skin, warm and secret.
“Come on, ” she said. “Quick. ”
He took her hand and they walked the rest of the way to the Town House.
The lobby was old, festooned with plants, and still possessed of a certain fading charm. The decor was very much Nineteenth Century Lumberman. It
was deserted at this hour except for the desk clerk, who could be dimly seen in the inner office, his feet cocked up on the desk, watching TV. Bill pushed the third-floor button with a finger that trembled just slightly—excitement? nervousness? guilt? all of the above? Oh yeah, sure, and a kind of almost
insane joy and fear as well. These feelings did not mix pleasantly, but they seemed necessary. He led her down the hallway toward his room, deciding in some confused way that if he were to be unfaithful, it should be a
complete act of infidelity, consummated in his place and not hers. He found himself thinking of Susan Browne, his first book-agent and, when he was not quite twenty, his first lover.
Cheating. Cheating on my wife. He tried to get this through his head, but it seemed both real and unreal at the same time. What seemed strongest was an unhappy sense of home-sickness: an oldfashioned feeling of falling away. Audra would be up by now, making coffee, sitting at the kitchen table in her robe, perhaps studying lines, perhaps reading a Dick Francis novel.
His key rattled in the lock of room 311. If they had gone to Beverly’s room on the fifth floor, they would have seen the message-light on her phone blinking; the TV-watching desk clerk would have given her a
message to call her friend Kay in Chicago (after Kay’s third frantic call, he had finally remembered to post the message), things might have taken a different course: the five of them might not have been fugitives from the Derry police when that day’s light finally broke. But they went to his—as things had perhaps been arranged.
The door opened. They were inside. She looked at him, eyes bright,
cheeks flushed, her breast rising and falling rapidly. He took her in his arms and was overwhelmed by the feeling of rightness—the feeling of the circle between past and present closing with a triumphant seamlessness. He kicked the door shut clumsily with one foot and she laughed her warm breath into his mouth.
“My heart—” she said, and put his hand on her left breast. He could feel it below that firm, almost maddening softness, racing like an engine.
“Your h-h-heart—” “My heart. ”
They were on the bed, still dressed, kissing. Her hand slipped inside his shirt, then out again. She traced a finger down the row of buttons, paused at his waist . . . and then that same finger slipped lower, tracing down the
stony thickness of his cock. Muscles he hadn’t been aware of jumped and fluttered in his groin. He broke the kiss and moved his body away from hers on the bed.
“Bill? ”
“Got to stuh-stuh-stop for a m-m-minute, ” he said. “Or else I’m going to shoot in my p-p-pants like a k-kid. ”
She laughed again, softly, and looked at him. “Is it that? Or are you having second thoughts? ”
“Second thoughts, ” Bill said. “I a-a-always have those. ” “I don’t. I hate him, ” she said.
He looked at her, the smile fading.
“I didn’t know it all the way to the top of my mind until two nights ago, ” she said. “Oh, I knew it—somewhere—all along, I guess. He hits and he hurts. I married him because . . . because my father always worried about me, I guess. No matter how hard I tried, he worried. And I guess I knew he’d approve of Tom. Because Tom always worried, too. He worried a lot.
And as long as someone was worrying about me, I’d be safe. More than safe. Real. ” She looked at him solemnly. Her blouse had pulled out of the waistband of her slacks, revealing a white stripe of stomach. He wanted to kiss it. “But it wasn’t real. It was a nightmare. Being married to Tom was
like going back into the nightmare. Why would a person do that, Bill? Why would a person go back into the nightmare of her own accord? ”
Bill said, “The o-o-only reason I can f-figure is that p-people go back to f-f-find thems-s-selves. ”
“The nightmare’s here, ” Bev said. “The nightmare is Derry. Tom looks small compared to that. I can see him better now. I loathe myself for the
years I spent with him. . . . You don’t know . . . the things he made me do, and oh, I was happy enough to do them, you know, because he worried about me. I’d cry . . . but sometimes there’s too much shame. You know? ”
“Don’t, ” he said quietly, and put his hand over hers. She held it tightly.
Her eyes were overbright, but the tears didn’t fall. “Everybody g-g-goofs it. But it’s not an eh-eh-exam. You just go through it the b-b-best you can. ”
“What I mean, ” she said, “is that I’m not cheating on Tom, or trying to use you to get my own back on him, or anything like that. For me, it would be like something . . . sane and normal and sweet. But I don’t want to hurt you, Bill. Or trick you into something you’ll be sorry for later. ”
He thought about this, thought about it with a real and deep seriousness.
But the odd little mnemonic—he thrusts his fists, and so on—began to
circle back, breaking into his thoughts. It had been a long day. Mike’s call and the invitation to lunch at Jade of the Orient seemed a hundred years ago. So many stories since then. So many memories, like photographs from George’s album.
“Friends don’t t-t-trick each o-other, ” he said, and leaned toward her on the bed. Their lips touched and he began to unbutton her blouse. One of her hands went to the back of his neck and held him closer while the other first unzipped her slacks and then pushed them down. For a moment his hand
was on her stomach, warm; then her panties were gone in a whisper; then he nudged and she guided.
As he entered her, she arched her back gently toward the thrust of his s*x and muttered, “Be my friend . . . I love you, Bill. ”
“I love you too, ” he said, smiling against her bare shoulder. They began slowly and he felt sweat begin to flow out of his skin as she quickened beneath him. His consciousness began to drain downward, becoming focused more and more strongly on their connection. Her pores had opened, releasing a lovely musky odor.
Beverly felt her climax coming. She moved toward it, working for it, never doubting it would come. Her body suddenly stuttered and seemed to leap upward, not orgasming but reaching a plateau far above any she had reached with Tom or the two lovers she had had before Tom. She became aware that this wasn’t going to be just a come; it was going to be a tactical nuke. She became a little afraid . . . but her body picked up the rhythm again. She felt Bill’s long length stiffen against her, his whole body suddenly becoming as hard as the part of him inside herself, and at that
same moment she climaxed—began to climax; pleasure so great it was nearly agony spilled out of unsuspected floodgates, and she bit down on his shoulder to stifle her cries.
“Oh my God, ” Bill gasped, and although she was never sure later, she believed he was crying. He pulled back and she thought he was going to withdraw from her—she tried to prepare for that moment, which always
brought a fleeting, inexplicable sense of loss and emptiness, something like a footprint—and then he thrust forward strongly again. Right away she had a second orgasm, something she hadn’t known was possible for her, and the
window of memory opened again and she saw birds, thousands of birds, descending onto every roofpeak and telephone line and RFD mailbox in Derry, spring birds against a white April sky, and there was pain mixed with pleasure—but mostly it was low, as a white spring sky seems low. Low physical pain mixed with low physical pleasure and some crazy sense of affirmation. She had bled . . . she had . . . had . . .
“All of you? ” she cried suddenly, her eyes widening, stunned.
He did pull back and out of her this time, but in the sudden shock of the revelation, she barely felt him go.
“What? Beverly? A-Are you all r—”
“All of you? I made love to all of you? ”
She saw shocked surprise on Bill’s face, the drop of his jaw . . . and sudden understanding. But it was not her revelation; even in her own shock she saw that. It was his own.
“We—”
“Bill? What is it? ”
“That was y-y-your way to get us o-out, ” he said, and now his eyes blazed so brightly they frightened her. “Beverly, duh-duh-don’t you uh- understand? That was y-y-your way to get us out! We all . . . but we were . .
. ” Suddenly he looked frightened, unsure.
“Do you remember the rest now? ” she asked.
He shook his head slowly. “Not the spuh-spuh-specifics. But . . . ” He looked at her, and she saw he was badly frightened. “What it really c-c-
came down to was, we wuh-wuh-wished our way out. And I’m not sh-sure .
. . Beverly, I’m not sure that grownups can do that. ”
She looked at him without speaking for a long moment, then sat on the
edge of the bed with no particular self-consciousness. Her body was smooth and lovely, the line of her backbone barely discernible in the dimness as she bent to take off the knee-high nylon stockings she had been wearing. Her hair was a sheaf coiled over one shoulder. He thought he would want her again before morning, and that feeling of guilt came again, tempered only by the shameful comfort of knowing that Audra was an ocean away. Put
another nickel in the juke-box, he thought. This tune is called “What She Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Her. ” But it hurts somewhere. In the spaces between people, maybe.
Beverly got up and turned the bed down. “Come to bed. We need sleep.
Both of us. ”
“A-A-All right. ” Because that was right, that was a big ten-four. More than anything else he wanted to sleep . . . but not alone, not tonight. The latest shock was wearing off—too quickly, perhaps, but he felt so tired now, so used-up. Second-to-second reality had the quality of a dream, and in
spite of his guilt he felt that this was a safe place. It would be possible to lie here for a little while, to sleep in her arms. He wanted her warmth and her friendliness. Both were s*xually charged, but that could hurt neither of them now.
He stripped off his socks and shirt and got in next to her. She pressed against him, her breasts warm, her long legs cool. Bill held her, aware of the differences—her body was longer than Audra’s, and fuller at the breast and the hip. But it was a welcome body.
It should have been Ben with you, dear, he thought drowsily. I think that was the way it was really supposed to be. Why wasn’t it Ben?
Because it was you then and it’s you now, that’s all. Because what goes around always comes around. I think Bob Dylan said that. . . or maybe it was Ronald Reagan. And maybe it’s me now because Ben’s the one who’s supposed to see the lady home.
Beverly wriggled against him, not in a s*xual way (although, even as he fled toward sleep, she felt him stir again against her leg and was glad), but only wanting his warmth. She was already half-asleep herself. Her
happiness here with him, after all these years, was real. She knew that
because of its bitter undertaste. There was tonight, and perhaps there would be another time for them tomorrow morning. Then they would go down in
the sewers as they had before, and they would find their It. The circle would close ever tighter, their present lives would merge smoothly with their own childhoods; they would become like creatures on some crazy Moebius strip.
Either that, or they would die down there.
She turned over. He slipped an arm between her side and her arm and cupped one breast gently. She did not have to lie awake, wondering if the hand might suddenly clamp down in a hard pinch.
Her thoughts began to break up as sleep slid into her. As always, she saw brilliant wildflower patterns as she crossed over—masses and masses of them nodding brightly under a blue sky. These faded and there was a falling
sensation—the sort of sensation that had sometimes snapped her awake and sweating as a child, a scream on the other side of her face. Childhood
dreams of falling, she had read in her college psychology text, were common.
But she didn’t snap back this time; she could feel the warm and comforting weight of Bill’s arm, his hand cradling her breast. She thought that if she was falling, at least she wasn’t falling alone.
Then she touched down and was running: this dream, whatever it was, moved fast. She ran after it, pursuing sleep, silence, maybe just time. The years moved fast. The years ran. If you turned around and ran after your own childhood, you had to really let out your stride and bust your buns.
Twenty-nine, the year she had streaked her hair (faster). Twenty-two, the year she had fallen in love with a football player named Greg Mallory who had damn near raped her after a fraternity party (faster, faster). Sixteen, getting drunk with two of her girlfriends on the Bluebird Hill Overlook in Portland. Fourteen . . . twelve . . .
. . . faster, faster, faster . . .
She ran into sleep, chasing twelve, catching it, running through the barrier of memory that It had cast over all of them (it tasted like cold fog in her laboring dreamlungs), running back into her eleventh year, running, running like hell, running to beat the devil, looking back now, looking back
6
The Barrens/12:40 P. M.
over her shoulder for any sign of them as she slipped and scrambled her way down the embankment. No sign, at least not yet. She had “really fetched it to him, ” as her father sometimes said . . . and just thinking of her father brought another wave of guilt and despondency washing over her.
She looked under the rickety bridge, hoping to see Silver heeled over on his side, but Silver was gone. There was a cache of toy guns which they no longer bothered to take home, and that was all. She started down the path,
looked back . . . and there they were, Belch and Victor supporting Henry between them, standing on the edge of the embankment like Indian sentries in a Randolph Scott movie. Henry was horribly pale. He pointed at her.
Victor and Belch began to help him down the slope. Dirt and gravel spilled from beneath their heels.
Beverly looked at them for a long moment, almost hypnotized. Then she turned and sprinted through the trickle of brook-water that ran out from under the bridge, ignoring Ben’s stepping-stones, her sneakers spraying out flat sheets of water. She ran down the path, the breath hot in her throat. She could feel the muscles in her legs trembling. She didn’t have much left now. The clubhouse. If she could get there, she might still be safe.
She ran along the path, branches whipping even more color into her cheeks, one striking her eye and making it water. She cut to the right, blundered through tangles of underbrush, and came out into the clearing. Both the camouflaged trapdoor and the slit window stood open; rock n roll drifted up. At the sound of her approach, Ben Hanscom popped up. He had a box of Junior Mints in one hand and an Archie comic book in the other.
He got a good look at Bev and his mouth fell open. Under other
circumstances it would have been almost funny. “Bev, what the hell—”
She didn’t bother replying. Behind her, and not too far behind, either, she could hear branches snapping and whipping; there was a muffled shouted curse. It sounded as if Henry was getting livelier. So she just ran at the
square trapdoor opening, her hair, tangled now with green leaves and twigs as well as the crud from her scramble under the garbage truck, streaming out behind her.
Ben saw she was coming in like the 101st Airborne and disappeared as quickly as he had come out. Beverly jumped and he caught her clumsily.
“Shut everything, ” she panted. “Hurry up, Ben, for heaven’s sake!
They’re coming!” “Who? ”
“Henry and his friends! Henry’s gone crazy, he’s got a knife—”
That was enough for Ben. He dropped his Junior Mints and funnybook. He pulled the trapdoor shut with a grunt. The top was covered with sods; the Tangle-Track was still holding them remarkably well. A few blocks of sod had gotten loose, but that was all. Beverly stood on tiptoe and closed the window. They were in darkness.
She felt for Ben, found him, and hugged him with panicky tightness.
After a moment he hugged her back. They were both on their knees. With sudden horror Beverly realized that Richie’s transistor radio was still playing somewhere in the blackness: Little Richard singing “The Girl Can’t Help It. ”
“Ben . . . the radio . . . they’ll hear . . . ” “Oh God!”
He bunted her with one meaty hip and almost knocked her sprawling in the dark. She heard the radio fall to the floor. “The girl can’t help it if the
menfolks stop and stare, ” Little Richard informed them with his customary hoarse enthusiasm. “Can’t help it!” the back-up group testified, “The girl can’t help it!” Ben was panting now, too. They sounded like a couple of steam-engines. Suddenly there was a crunch . . . and silence.
“Oh shit, ” Ben said. “I just squashed it. Richie’s gonna have a bird. ” He reached for her in the dark. She felt his hand touch one of her breasts, then jerk away, as if burned. She groped for him, got hold of his shirt, and drew him close.
“Beverly, what—” “Shhh!”
He quieted. They sat together, arms around each other, looking up. The darkness was not quite perfect; there was a narrow line of light down one
side of the trapdoor, and three others outlined the slit window. One of these three was wide enough to let a slanted ray of sunlight fall into the clubhouse. She could only pray they wouldn’t see it.
She could hear them approaching. At first she couldn’t make out the words . . . and then she could. Her grip on Ben tightened.
“If she went into the bamboo, we can pick up her trail easy, ” Victor was saying.
“They play around here, ” Henry replied. His voice was strained, his words emerging in little puffs, as if with great effort. “Boogers Taliendo
said so. And the day we had that rockfight, they were coming from here. ” “Yeah, they play guns and stuff, ” Belch said.
Suddenly there were thudding footfalls right above them; the sod-covered cap vibrated up and down. Dirt sifted onto Beverly’s upturned face. One, two, maybe even all three of them were standing on top of the clubhouse. A cramp laced her belly; she had to bite down against a cry. Ben put one big
hand on the side of her face and pressed it against his arm as he looked up, waiting to see if they would guess . . . or if they knew already and were just playing games.
“They got a place, ” Henry was saying. “That’s what Boogers told me.
Some kind of a treehouse or something. They call it their club. ” “I’ll club em, if they want a club, ” Victor said. Belch uttered a
thunderous heehaw of laughter at this.
Thump, thump, thump, overhead. The cap moved up and down a little more this time. Surely they would notice it; ordinary ground just didn’t have that kind of give.
“Let’s look down by the river, ” Henry said. “I bet she’s down there. ” “Okay, ” Victor said.
Thump, thump. They were moving off. Bev let a little sigh of relief trickle through her clamped teeth . . . and then Henry said: “You stay here and guard the path, Belch. ”
“Okay, ” Belch said, and he began to march back and forth, sometimes leaving the cap, sometimes coming back across it. More dirt sifted down.
Ben and Beverly looked at each other with strained, dirty faces. Bev
became aware that there was more than the smell of smoke in the clubhouse
—a sweaty, garbagey stink was rising as well. That’s me, she thought dismally. In spite of the smell, she hugged Ben even tighter. His bulk seemed suddenly very welcome, very comforting, and she was glad there
was a lot of him to hug. He might have been nothing but a frightened fatboy when school let out for the summer, but he was more than that now; like all of them, he had changed. If Belch discovered them down here, Ben just might give him a surprise.
“I’ll club em if they want a club, ” Belch said, and chuckled. A Belch
Huggins chuckle was a low, troll-like sound. “Club em if they want a club. That’s good. That’s pretty much okey-dokey. ”
She became aware that Ben’s upper body was heaving up and down in short, sharp movements; he was pulling air into his lungs and letting it out in little bursts. For one alarmed moment she thought he was starting to cry, and then she got a closer look at his face and realized he was struggling against laughter. His eyes, leaking tears, caught hers, rolled madly, and looked away. In the faint light which struggled in through the cracks around
the closed trapdoor and the window, she could see his face was nearly purple with the strain of holding it in.
“Club em if they want an ole clubby-dubby, ” Belch said, and sat down heavily right in the center of the cap. This time the roof trembled more alarmingly, and Bev heard a low but ominous crrrack from one of the supports. The cap had been meant to support the chunks of camouflaging sod laid on top of it . . . but not the added one hundred and sixty pounds of Belch Huggins’s weight.
If he doesn’t get up he’s going to land in our laps, Bev thought, and she began to catch Ben’s hysteria. It was trying to boil out of her in rancid
whoops and brays. In her mind’s eye she suddenly saw herself pushing the window up enough on its hinges for her hand to creep out and administer a really good goose to Belch Huggins’s backside as he sat there in the hazy afternoon sunshine, muttering and giggling. She buried her face against Ben’s chest in a last-ditch effort to keep it inside.
“Shhh, ” Ben whispered. “For Christ’s sake, Bev—” Crrrrackk. Louder this time.
“Will it hold? ” she whispered back.
“It might, if he doesn’t fart, ” Ben said, and a moment later Belch did cut one—a loud and fruity trumpet-blast that seemed to go on for at least three seconds. They held each other even tighter, muffling each other’s frantic giggles. Beverly’s head hurt so badly that she thought she might soon have a stroke.
Then, faintly, she heard Henry yelling Belch’s name.
“What? ” Belch bellowed, getting up with a thump and a thud that sifted more dirt down on Ben and Beverly. “What, Henry? ”
Henry yelled something back; Beverly could only make out the words
bank and bushes.
“Okay!” Belch bawled, and his feet crossed the cap for the last time. There was a final cracking noise, this one much louder, and a splinter of wood landed in Bev’s lap. She picked it up wonderingly.
“Five more minutes, ” Ben said in a low whisper. “That’s all it would have taken. ”
“Did you hear him when he let go? ” Beverly asked, beginning to giggle again.
“Sounded like World War III, ” Ben said, also beginning to laugh.
It was a relief to be able to let it out, and they laughed wildly, trying to do it in whispers.
Finally, unaware she was going to say it at all (and certainly not because it had any discernible bearing on this situation), Beverly said: “Thank you for the poem, Ben. ”
Ben stopped laughing all at once and regarded her gravely, cautiously. He took a dirty handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face with it slowly. “Poem? ”
“The haiku. The haiku on the postcard. You sent it, didn’t you? ”
“No, ” Ben said. “I didn’t send you any haiku. Cause if a kid like me—a fat kid like me—did something like that, the girl would probably laugh at him. ”
“I didn’t laugh. I thought it was beautiful. ”
“I could never write anything beautiful. Bill, maybe. Not me. ”
“Bill will write, ” she agreed. “But he’ll never write anything as nice as that. May I use your handkerchief? ”
He gave it to her and she began to clean her face as best she could. “How did you know it was me? ” he asked finally.
“I don’t know, ” she said. “I just did. ”
Ben’s throat worked convulsively. He looked down at his hands. “I didn’t mean anything by it. ”
She looked at him gravely. “You better not mean that, ” she said. “If you do, it’s really going to spoil my day, and I’ll tell you, it’s going downhill already. ”
He continued to look down at his hands and spoke at last in a voice she could barely hear. “Well, I mean I love you, Beverly, but I don’t want that to spoil anything. ”
“It won’t, ” she said, and hugged him. “I need all the love I can get right now. ”
“But you specially like Bill. ”
“Maybe I do, ” she said, “but that doesn’t matter. If we were grownups, maybe it would, a little. But I like you all specially. You’re the only friends I have. I love you too, Ben. ”
“Thank you, ” he said. He paused, trying, and brought it out. He was even able to look at her as he said it. “I wrote the poem. ”
They sat without saying anything for a little while. Beverly felt safe.
Protected. The images of her father’s face and Henry’s knife seemed less vivid and threatening when they sat close like this. That sense of protection was hard to define and she didn’t try, although much later she would
recognize the source of its strength: she was in the arms of a male who would die for her with no hesitation at all. It was a fact that she simply knew: it was in the scent that came from his pores, something utterly primitive that her own glands could respond to.
“The others were coming back, ” Ben said suddenly. “What if they get caught out? ”
She straightened up, aware that she had almost been dozing. Bill, she remembered, had invited Mike Hanlon home to lunch with him. Richie was going to go home with Stan and have sandwiches. And Eddie had promised to bring back his Parcheesi board. They would be arriving soon, totally
unaware that Henry and his friends were in the Barrens.
“We’ve got to get to them, ” Beverly said. “Henry’s not just after me. ” “If we come out and they come back—”
“Yes, but at least we know they’re here. Bill and the other guys don’t.
Eddie can’t even run, they already broke his arm. ”
“Jeezum-crow, ” Ben said. “I guess we’ll have to chance it. ”
“Yeah. ” She swallowed and looked at her Timex. It was hard to read in the dimness, but she thought it was a little past one. “Ben. . . ”
“What? ”
“Henry’s really gone crazy. He’s like that kid in The Blackboard Jungle.
He was going to kill me and the other two were going to help him. ”
“Aw, no, ” Ben said. “Henry’s crazy, but not that crazy. He’s just . . . ” “Just what? ” Beverly said. She thought of Henry and Patrick in the
automobile graveyard in the thick sunshine. Henry’s blank eyes.
Ben didn’t answer. He was thinking. Things had changed, hadn’t they?
When you were inside the changes, they were harder to see. You had to step back to see them . . . you had to try, anyway. When school let out he’d been afraid of Henry, but only because Henry was bigger, and because he was a bully—the kind of kid who would grab a firstgrader, Indian-rub his arm, and send him away crying. That was about all. Then he had engraved Ben’s belly. Then there had been the rockfight, and Henry had been chucking M- 80s at people’s heads. You could kill somebody with one of those things.
You could kill somebody easy. He had started to look different . . . haunted, almost. It seemed that you always had to be on watch for him, the way you’d always have to be on watch for tigers or poisonous snakes if you
were in the jungle. But you got used to it; so used to it that it didn’t even seem unusual, just the way things were. But Henry was crazy, wasn’t he? Yes. Ben had known that on the day school ended, and had willfully refused to believe it, or remember it. It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to
believe or remember. And suddenly a thought—a thought so strong it was almost a certainty—crept into his mind full-blown, as cold as October mud. It’s using Henry. Maybe the others too, but It’s using them through Henry.
And if that’s the truth, then she’s probably right. It’s not just Indian rubs or rabbit-punches in the back of the neck during study-time near the end of the schoolday while Mrs. Douglas reads her book at her desk, not just a push on the playground so that you fall down and skin your knee. If It’s using him, then Henry will use the knife.
“An old lady saw them trying to beat me up, ” Beverly was saying. “Henry went after her. He kicked her taillight out. ”
This alarmed Ben more than anything else. He understood instinctively, as most kids did, that they lived below the sight-lines, and hence the thought-lines, of most adults. When a grownup was ditty-bopping down the street, thinking his grownup thoughts about work and appointments and buying cars and whatever else grownups thought about, he never noticed
kids playing hopscotch or guns or kick-the-can or ring-a-levio or hide-and- go-seek. Bullies like Henry could get away with hurting other kids quite a lot if they were careful to stay below that sight-line. At the very most, a passing adult was apt to say something like “Why don’t you quit that? ” and then just continue ditty-bopping along without waiting to see if the bully stopped or not. So the bully would wait until the grownup had turned the corner . . . and then go back to business as usual. It was like adults thought that real life only started when a person was five feet tall.
If Henry had gone after some old lady, he had gone above that sight-line. And that more than anything else suggested to Ben that he really was crazy.
Beverly saw the belief in Ben’s face and felt relief sweep over her. She would not have to tell him about how Mr. Ross had simply folded his paper and walked into his house. She didn’t want to tell him about that. It was too scary.
“Let’s go up to Kansas Street, ” Ben said, and abruptly pushed open the trapdoor. “Get ready to run. ”
He stood up in the opening and looked around. The clearing was silent. He could hear the chuckling voice of the Kenduskeag close by, birdsong, the thum-thud-thum-thud of a diesel engine snorting its way into the
trainyards. He heard nothing else and that made him uneasy. He would have felt much better if he’d heard Henry, Victor, and Belch cursing their way through the heavy undergrowth down by the stream. But he couldn’t hear them at all.
“Come on, ” he said, and helped Beverly up. She also looked around uneasily, brushing her hair back with her hands and grimacing at its greasy feel.
He took her hand and they pushed through a screen of bushes toward Kansas Street. “We’d better stay off the path. ”
“No, ” she said, “we’ve got to hurry. ” He nodded. “All right. ”
They got to the path and started toward Kansas Street. Once she stumbled over a rock in the path and
7
The Seminary Grounds/12:17 A. M.
fell heavily on the moon-silvered sidewalk. A grunt was forced out of him, and a runner of blood came with the grunt, splatting onto the cracked concrete. In the moonlight it looked as black as beetle-blood. Henry looked at it for a long dazed moment, then raised his head to look around.
Kansas Street was early-morning silent, the houses shut up and dark except for a scatter of nightlights.
Ah. Here was a sewer-grate.
A balloon with a smiley-smile face was tied to one of its iron bars. The balloon bobbed and dipped in the faint breeze.
Henry got to his feet again, one sticky hand pressed to his belly. The nigger had stuck him pretty good, but Henry had gone him one better. Yessir. As far as the nigger was concerned, Henry felt like he was pretty much okey-dokey.
“Kid’s a gone goose, ” Henry muttered, and made his shaky staggering way past the floating balloon. Fresh blood glimmered on his hand as it continued to flow from his stomach. “Kid’s all done. Greased the sucker. Gonna grease them all. Teach them to throw rocks. ”
The world was coming in slow-rolling waves, big combers like the ones they used to show at the beginning of every Hawaii Five-O episode on the ward TV
(book em Danno, ha-ha Jack Fuckin Lord okay. Jack Fuckin Lord was
pretty much okey-dokey) and Henry could Henry could Henry could almost
(hear the sound those Oahu big boys make as they rise curl and shake (shakeshakeshake
(the reality of the world. “Pipeline. ” Chantays. Remember “Pipeline”? “Pipeline” was pretty much okey-dokey. “Wipe-Out.” Crazy laugh there at the start. Sounded like Patrick Hockstetter. Fucking queerboy. Got greased himself, and as far as I)
he was concerned that was a
(fuck of a lot better than okey-dokey, that was just FINE, that was JUST AS FINE AS PAINT
(okay Pipeline shoot the line don’t back down not my boys catch a wave and
(shoot (shootshootshoot
(a wave and go sidewalk surfin with me shoot (the line shoot the world but keep)
an ear inside his head: it kept hearing that ka-spanggg sound; an eye
inside his head: it kept seeing Victor’s head rising on the end of that spring, eyelids and cheeks and forehead tattooed with rosettes of blood.
Henry looked blearily to his left and saw that the houses had been replaced with a tall black stand of hedge. Looming above it was the narrow, gloomily Victorian pile of the Theological Seminary. Not a window shone light. The seminary had graduated its last class in June of 1974. It had closed its doors that summer, and now whatever walked there walked alone
. . . and only by permission of the chattering women’s club that called itself the Derry Historical Society.
He came to the walk which led up to the front door. It was barred by a heavy chain from which a metal sign hung: NO TRESPASSING THIS ORDER ENFORCED BY DERRY POLICE DEPT.
Henry’s feet tangled on this track and he fell heavily again—whap!—to the sidewalk. Up ahead, a car turned onto Kansas Street from Hawthorne.
Its headlights washed down the street. Henry fought the dazzle long enough to see the lights on top: it was a fuzzmobile.
He crawled under the chain and crabbed his way to the left so he was behind the hedge. The night-dew on his hot face was wonderful. He lay face-down, turning his head from side to side, wetting his cheeks, drinking what he could drink.
The police car floated by without slowing.
Then, suddenly, its bubble-lights came on, washing the darkness with
erratic blue pulses of light. There was no need for the siren on the deserted streets, but Henry heard its mill suddenly crank up to full revs. Rubber blistered a startled scream from the pavement.
Caught, I’m caught, his mind gibbered . . . and then he realized that the police car was heading away from him, up Kansas Street. A moment later a hellish warbling sound filled the night, heading toward him from the south.
He imagined some huge silky black cat loping through the dark, all green eyes and flexing pelt, It in a new shape, coming for him, coming to gobble him up.
Little by little (and only as the warbling began to veer away) he realized it was an ambulance, heading in the direction the fuzzmobile had gone. He lay shuddering on the wet grass, too cold now, struggling
(fuzzit cousin buzzit cousin rock it roll it we got chicken in the barn what barn whose barn my)
not to vomit. He was afraid that if he vomited, all of his guts would come up . . . and there were five of them still to get.
Ambulance and police car. Where are they heading? The library, of course. The nigger. But they’re too late. I greased him. Might as well turn off your sireen, boys. He ain’t gonna hear it. He’s just as dead as a fencepost. He—
But was he?
Henry licked his peeling lips with his arid tongue. If he was dead, there would be no warbling siren in the night. Not unless the nigger had called them. So maybe—just maybe—the nigger wasn’t dead.
“No, ” Henry breathed. He rolled over on his back and stared up at the sky, at the billions of stars up there. It had come from there, he knew. From somewhere up in that sky.
. . . It
(came from outer space with a lust for Earthwomen came to rob all the women and rape all the men say Frank don’t you mean rob all the men and rape all the women whoth running this show, thilly man, you or Jesse?
Victor used to tell that one and that was pretty much)
came from the spaces between the stars. Looking up at that starry sky gave him the creeps: it was too big, too black. It was all too possible to
imagine it turning blood-red, all too possible to imagine a Face forming in lines of fire. . . .
He closed his eyes, shivering and holding his arms crossed on his belly, and he thought: The nigger is dead. Someone heard us fighting and sent the cops to investigate, that’s all.
Then why the ambulance?
“Shut up, shut up, ” Henry groaned. He felt the old baffled rage again; he remembered how they had beaten him again and again in the old days—old days that seemed so close and so vital now—how every time he believed he had them they had somehow slipped through his fingers. It had been like that on the last day, after Belch saw the cooze running down Kansas Street toward the Barrens. He remembered that, oh yes, he remembered that clearly enough. When you got kicked in the balls, you remembered it. It had happened to him again and again that summer.
Henry struggled to a sitting position, wincing at the deep dagger of pain in his guts.
Victor and Belch had helped him down into the Barrens. He had walked as fast as he could in spite of the agony that griped and pulled at his groin and the root of his belly. The time had come to finish it. They had followed the path to a clearing from which five or six paths radiated like strands of a spiderweb. Yes, there had been kids playing around there; you didn’t have to be Tonto to see that. There were scraps of candy-wrapper, the curled tail
of a shot-off roll of Bang caps, red and black. A few boards and a fluffy scatter of sawdust, as if something had been built there.
He remembered standing in the center of the clearing and scanning the trees, looking for their baby treehouse. He would spot it and then he would climb up and the girl would be cowering there, and he would use the knife to cut her throat and feel her titties nice and easy until they stopped moving.
But he hadn’t been able to see any treehouse; neither had Belch or Victor.
The old familiar frustration rose in his throat. He and Victor left Belch to guard the clearing while they went down the river. But there had been no sign of her there, either. He remembered bending over and picking up a rock and
8
The Barrens/12:55 P. M.
heaving it far down the stream, furious and bewildered. “Where the fuck did she go? ” he demanded, wheeling toward Victor.
Victor shook his head slowly. “Don’t know, ” he said. “You’re bleeding. ”
Henry looked down and saw a dark spot, the size of a quarter, on the crotch of his jeans. The pain had withdrawn to a low, throbbing ache, but his underpants felt too small and too tight. His balls were swelling. He felt
that anger inside him again, something like a knotted rope around his heart.
She had done this.
“Where is she? ” he hissed at Victor.
“Don’t know, ” Victor said again in that same dull voice. He seemed hypnotized, sunstruck, not really there at all. “Ran away, I guess. She could be all the way over to the Old Cape by now. ”
“She’s not, ” Henry said. “She’s hiding. They’ve got a place and she’s hiding there. Maybe it’s not a treehouse. Maybe it’s something else. ”
“What? ”
“I . . . don’t . . . know!” Henry shouted, and Victor flinched back.
Henry stood in the Kenduskeag, the cold water boiling over the tops of
his sneakers, looking around. His eyes fixed on a cylinder poking out of the embankment about twenty feet downstream—a pumping-station. He climbed out of the water and walked down to it, feeling a sort of necessary dread settle into him. His skin seemed to be tightening, his eyes widening so that they were able to see more and more; it seemed he could feel the tiny hairs in his ears stirring and moving like kelp in an underwater tidal
flow.
Low humming came from the pumping-station, and beyond it he could see a pipe jutting out of the embankment over the Kenduskeag. A steady flow of sludge pulsed out of the pipe and ran into the water.
He leaned over the cylinder’s round iron top.
“Henry? ” Victor called nervously. “Henry? What you doing? ”
Henry paid no attention. He put his eye to one of the round holes in the iron and saw nothing but blackness. He exchanged eye for ear.
“Wait . . . ”
The voice drifted up to him from the blackness inside, and Henry felt his interior temperature plummet to zero, his veins and arteries freezing into crystal tubes of ice. But with these sensations came an almost unknown feeling: love. His eyes widened. A clownish smile spread his lips in a large nerveless arc. It was the voice from the moon. Now It was down in the pumping-station . . . down in the drains.
“Wait . . . watch . . . ”
He waited, but there was no more: only the steady soporific drone of the pumping machinery. He walked back down to where Victor stood on the bank, watching him cautiously. Henry ignored him and hollered for Belch. In a little while Belch came.
“Come on, ” he said.
“What are we gonna do, Henry? ” Belch asked. “Wait. Watch. ”
They crept back toward the clearing and sat down. Henry tried to pull his underpants away from his aching balls, but it hurt too much.
“Henry, what—” Belch began. “Shhh!”
Belch fell obligingly silent. Henry had Camels but he didn’t share them out. He didn’t want the bitch to smell cigarette smoke if she was around. He
could have explained, but there was no need. The voice had spoken only two words to him, but these seemed to explain everything. They played down here. Soon the others would come back. Why settle for just the bitch when they could have all seven of the little shitepokes?
They waited and watched. Victor and Belch seemed to have gone to sleep with their eyes open. It was not a long wait, but there was time for Henry to think of a good many things. How he had found the switchblade this morning, for instance. It wasn’t the same one he’d had on the last day of school; he’d lost that one somewhere. This one looked a lot cooler.
It came in the mail.
Sort of.
He had stood on the porch, looking at their battered leaning RFD box, trying to grasp what he was seeing. The box was decked with balloons. Two were tied to the metal hook where the postman sometimes hung packages;
others were tied to the flag. Red, yellow, blue, green. It was as if some weird circus had crept by on Witcham Road in the dead of night, leaving this sign.
As he approached the mailbox, he saw there were faces on the balloons— the faces of the kids who had deviled him all this summer, the kids who seemed to mock him at every turn.
He had stared at these apparitions, gape-mouthed, and then the balloons popped, one by one. That had been good; it was as if he were making them pop just by thinking about it, killing them with his mind.
The front of the mailbox suddenly swung down. Henry walked toward it and peered in. Although the mailman didn’t get this far out until the middle of the afternoon, Henry felt no surprise when he saw a flat rectangular
package inside. He pulled it out. MR. HENRY BOWERS, RFD #2,
DERRY, MAINE, the address read. There was even a return-address of sorts: MR. ROBERT GRAY, DERRY, MAINE.
He opened the package, letting the brown paper drift down heedlessly by his feet. There was a white box inside. He opened it. Lying on a bed of
white cotton had been the switchknife. He took it into the house.
His father was lying on his pallet in the bedroom they shared, surrounded by empty beer cans, his belly bulging over the top of his yellow underpants. Henry knelt beside him, listening to the snort and flutter of his father’s
breathing, watching his father’s horsey lips purse and pucker with each breath.
Henry placed the business-end of the switchknife against his father’s scrawny neck. His father moved a little and then settled back into beery sleep again. Henry kept the knife like that for almost five minutes, his eyes distant and thoughtful, the ball of his left thumb caressing the silver button set into the switchblade’s neck. The voice from the moon spoke to him—it whispered like the spring wind which is warm with a cold blade buried
somewhere in its middle, it buzzed like a paper nest full of roused hornets, it huckstered like a hoarse politician.
Everything the voice said seemed pretty much okey-dokey to Henry and so he pushed the silver button. There was a click inside the knife as the suicide-spring let go, and six inches of steel drove through Butch Bowers’s neck. It went in as easily as the tines of a meat-fork into the breast of a well-roasted chicken. The tip of the blade popped out on the other side, dripping.
Butch’s eyes flew open. He stared at the ceiling. His mouth dropped open. Blood ran from the corners of it and down his cheeks toward the
lobes of his ears. He began to gurgle. A large blood-bubble formed between his slack lips and popped. One of his hands crept to Henry’s knee and squeezed convulsively. Henry didn’t mind. Presently the hand fell away.
The gurgling noises stopped a moment later. Butch Bowers was dead.
Henry pulled the knife out, wiped it on the dirty sheet that covered his father’s pallet, and pushed the blade back in until the spring clicked again. He looked at his father without much interest. The voice had told him about the day’s work while he knelt beside Butch with the knife against Butch’s neck. The voice had explained everything. So he went into the other room to call Belch and Victor.
Now here they were, all three, and although his balls still ached horribly, the knife made a comforting bulge in his left front pants pocket. He felt that the cutting would begin soon. The others would come back down to resume whatever baby game they had been playing, and then the cutting would begin. The voice from the moon had laid it out for him as he knelt by his father, and on his way into town he had been unable to take his eyes from that pale ghost-disc in the sky. He saw that there was indeed a man in the
moon—a grisly, glimmering ghost-face with cratered holes for eyes and a glabrous grin that seemed to reach halfway up its cheekbones. It talked
(we float down here Henry we all float you’ll float too)
all the way to town. Kill them all, Henry, the ghost-voice from the moon said, and Henry could dig it; Henry felt he could second that emotion. He would kill them all, his tormentors, and then those feelings—that he was losing his grip, that he was coming inexorably to a larger world he would not be able to dominate as he had dominated the playyard at Derry Elementary, that in the wider world the fatboy and the nigger and the stuttering freak might somehow grow larger while he somehow only grew older—would be gone.
He would kill them all, and the voices—those inside and the one which spoke to him from the moon—would leave him alone. He would kill them and then go back to the house and sit on the back porch with his father’s souvenir Jap sword across his lap. He would drink one of his father’s
Rheingolds. He would listen to the radio, too, but no baseball. Baseball was strictly Squaresville. He would listen to rock and roll instead. Although Henry didn’t know it (and wouldn’t have cared if he did), on this one subject he and the Losers agreed: rock and roll was pretty much okeydokey. We got chicken in the barn, whose barn, what barn, my barn. Everything would be good then; everything would be the ginchiest then; everything would be okeyfine then, and anything which might come next would not matter. The voice would take care of him—he sensed that. If you took care of It, It would take care of you. That was how things had always been in Derry.
But the kids had to be stopped, stopped soon, stopped today. The voice had told him so.
Henry took his new knife out of his pocket, looked at it, turned it this way and that, admiring the way the sun winked and slid off the chrome facing. Then Belch was grabbing his arm and hissing: “Looka that, Henry! Jeezly-old-crow! Looka that!”
Henry looked and felt the clear light of understanding burst over him. A square section of the clearing was rising as if by magic, revealing a growing slice of darkness beneath. For just a moment he felt a jolt of terror as it occurred to him that this might be the owner of the voice . . . for surely It
lived somewhere under the city. Then he heard the gritty squall of dirt in the
hinges and understood. They hadn’t been able to see the treehouse because there was none.
“By God, we was standin right on top of em, ” Victor grunted, and as Ben’s head and shoulders appeared in the square hatchway in the center of the clearing, he made as if to charge forward. Henry grabbed him and held him back.
“Ain’t we gonna get em, Henry? ” Victor asked as Ben boosted himself up.
“We’ll get em, ” Henry said, never taking his eyes from the hated fatboy.
Another ball-kicker. I’ll kick your balls so high up you can wear them for earrings, you fat fuck. Wait and see if I don’t. “Don’t worry. ”
The fatboy was helping the bitch out of the hole. She looked around doubtfully, and for a moment Henry believed she looked right at him. Then her eyes passed on. The two of them murmured together and then they pushed their way into the thick undergrowth and were gone.
“Come on, ” Henry said, when the sound of snapping branches and rustling leaves had faded almost to inaudibility. “We’ll follow em. But keep back and keep quiet. I want em all together. ”
The three of them crossed the clearing like soldiers on patrol, bent low, their eyes wide and moving. Belch paused to look down into the clubhouse and shook his head in admiring wonder. “Sittin right over their heads, I was, ” he said.
Henry motioned him forward impatiently.
They took the path, because it was quieter. They were halfway back to
Kansas Street when the bitch and the fatboy, holding hands (Isn’t that cute? Henry thought in a kind of ecstasy), emerged almost directly in front of them.
Luckily, their backs were to Henry’s group, and neither of them looked around. Henry, Victor, and Belch froze, then drew into the shadows at the side of the path. Soon Ben and Beverly were just two shirts seen through a tangle of shrubs and bushes. The three of them began to pursue again . . . cautiously. Henry took the knife out again and
9
Henry Gets a Lift/2:30 A. M.
pressed the chrome button in the handle. The blade popped out. He looked at it dreamily in the moonlight. He liked the way the starlight ran along the blade. He had no idea exactly what time it was. He was drifting in and out of reality now.
A sound impinged on his consciousness and began to grow. It was a car engine. It drew closer. Henry’s eyes widened in the dark. He held the knife more tightly, waiting for the car to pass by.
It didn’t. It drew up at the curb beyond the seminary hedge and simply stopped there, engine idling. Grimacing (his belly was stiffening now; it had gone board-hard, and the blood seeping sluggishly between his fingers had
the consistency of sap just before you took the taps out of the maples in late March or early April), he got on his knees and pushed aside the stiff hedge- branches. He could see headlights and the shape of a car. Cops? His hand squeezed the knife and relaxed, squeezed and relaxed, squeezed and relaxed.
I sent you a ride, Henry, the voice whispered. Sort of a taxi, if you can dig that. After all, we have to get you over there to the Town House pretty soon. The night’s getting old.
The voice uttered one thin bonelike chuckle and fell silent. Now the only sounds were the crickets and the steady rumble of the idling car. Sounds like cherry-bomb mufflers, Henry thought distractedly.
He got awkwardly to his feet and worked his way back to the seminary walk. He peeked around at the car. Not a fuzzmobile: no bubbles on the roof, and the shape was all wrong. The shape was . . . old.
Henry heard that giggle again . . . or perhaps it was only the wind.
He emerged from the shadow of the hedge, crawled under the chain, got to his feet again, and began to walk toward the idling car, which existed in a black-and-white Polaroid-snapshot world of bright moonlight and
impenetrable shadow. Henry was a mess: his shirt was black with blood, and it had soaked through his jeans almost to the knees. His face was a white blotch under an institutional crewcut.
He reached the intersection of the seminary path and the sidewalk and peered at the car, trying to make sense out of the hulk behind the wheel. But
it was the car he recognized first—it was the one his father always swore he would own someday, a 1958 Plymouth Fury. It was red and white and Henry knew (hadn’t his father told him often enough? ) that the engine rumbling under the hood was a V-8 327. Available horsepower of 255, able to hit seventy from the git-go in just about nine seconds, gobbling hi-test through its four-barrel carb. I’m gonna get that car and then when I die they can bury me in it, Butch had been fond of saying . . . except, of course, he had never gotten the car and the state had buried him after Henry had been taken away, raving and screaming of monsters, to the funny farm.
If that’s him inside I don’t think I can take it, Henry thought, squeezing down on the knife, swaying drunkenly back and forth, looking at the shape behind the wheel.
Then the passenger door of the Fury swung open, the domelight came on, and the driver turned to look at him. It was Belch Huggins. His face was a hanging ruin. One of his eyes was gone, and a rotted hole in one parchment cheek revealed blackened teeth. Perched on Belch’s head was the New York Yankees baseball cap he had been wearing the day he died. It was turned around backward. Gray-green mold oozed along the bill.
“Belch!” Henry cried, and agony ripped its way up from his belly, making him cry out again, wordlessly.
Belch’s dead lips stretched in a grin, splitting open in whitish-gray bloodless folds. He held one twisted hand out toward the open door in invitation.
Henry hesitated, then shuffled around the Fury’s grille, allowing one hand to touch the V-shaped emblem there, just as he had always touched it when his father took him into the Bangor showroom when he was a kid to look at this same car. As he reached the passenger side, grayness overwhelmed him in a soft wave and he had to grab the open door to keep his feet. He stood there, head down, breathing in snuffling gasps. At last the world came back—partway, anyhow—and he was able to work his way around the door and fall into the seat. Pain skewered his guts again, and fresh blood squirted out into his hand. It felt like warm jelly. He put his head back and gritted his teeth, the cords on his neck standing out. At last
the pain began to subside a little.
The door swung shut by itself. The domelight went out. Henry saw one of Belch’s rotted hands close over the transmission lever and drop it into
drive. The bunched white knots of Belch’s knuckles glimmered through the decaying flesh of his fingers.
The Fury began to move down Kansas Street toward Up-Mile Hill. “How you doin, Belch? ” Henry heard himself say. It was stupid, of
course—Belch couldn’t be here, dead people couldn’t drive cars—but it was all he could think of.
Belch didn’t reply. His one sunken eye stared at the road. His teeth glared sickly at Henry through the hole in his cheek. Henry became vaguely aware that ole Belch smelled pretty ripe. Ole Belch smelled, in fact, like a bushel- basket of tomatoes that had gone bad and watery.
The glove compartment flopped open, banging Henry’s knees, and in the light of the small bulb inside he saw a bottle of Texas Driver, half-full. He took it out, opened it, and had himself a good shot. It went down like cool silk and hit his stomach like an explosion of lava. He shuddered all over, moaning . . . and then began to feel a little better, a little more connected to the world.
“Thanks, ” he said.
Belch’s head turned toward him. Henry could hear the tendons in Belch’s neck; the sound was like the scream of rusty screen-door hinges. Belch regarded him for a moment with a dead one-eyed stare, and Henry realized for the first time that most of Belch’s nose was gone. It looked like something had been at the ole Belcher’s nose. Dog, maybe. Or maybe rats. Rats seemed more likely. The tunnels they had chased the little kids into that day had been full of rats.
Moving just as slowly, Belch’s head turned toward the road again. Henry was glad. Ole Belch staring at him that way, well, Henry hadn’t been able to dig it too much. There had been something in Belch’s single sunken eye.
Reproach? Anger? What?
There is a dead boy behind the wheel of this car.
Henry looked down at his arm and saw that huge goose-bumps had formed there. He quickly had another snort from the bottle. This one hit a little easier and spread its warmth farther.
The Plymouth rolled down Up-Mile Hill and made its way around the counter-clockwise traffic circle . . . except at this time of night there was no traffic; all the traffic-lights had changed to yellow blinkers splashing the empty streets and closed buildings with steady pulses of light. It was so
quiet that Henry could hear the relays clicking inside each light . . . or was that his imagination?
“Never meant to leave you behind that day, Belcher, ” Henry said. “I mean, if that was, you know, on your mind. ”
That scream of dried tendons again. Belch looking at him again with his one sunken eye. And his lips stretched in a terrible grin that revealed gray- black gums which were growing their own garden of mold. What sort of a grin is that? Henry asked himself as the car purred silkily up Main Street, past Freese’s on the one side, Nan’s Luncheonette and the Aladdin Theater on the other. Is it a forgiving grin? An old-pals grin? Or is it the kind of grin that says I’m going to get you, Henry, I’m going to get you for running out on me and Vic? What kind of grin?
“You have to understand how it was, ” Henry said, and then stopped.
How had it been? It was all confused in his mind, the pieces jumbled up
like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had just been dumped out on one of the shitty cardtables in the rec room at Juniper Hill. How had it been,
exactly? They had followed the fatboy and the bitch back to Kansas Street and had waited back in the bushes, watching them climb up the embankment to the top. If they had disappeared from view, he and Victor and Belch would have dropped the stalking game and simply gone after them; two of them were better than none at all, and the rest would be along in time.
But they hadn’t disappeared. They had simply leaned against the fence, talking and watching the street. Every now and then they would check down the slope into the Barrens, but Henry kept his two troops well out of sight.
The sky, Henry remembered, had become overcast, clouds moving in from the east, the air thickening. There would be rain that afternoon.
What had happened next? What—
A bony, leathery hand closed over his forearm and Henry screamed. He had been drifting away again into that cottony grayness, but Belch’s dreadful touch and the dagger of pain in his stomach from the scream brought him back. He looked around and Belch’s face was less than two
inches from Henry’s; he gasped in breath and wished he hadn’t. The ole Belcher really had gone to seed. Henry was again reminded of tomatoes going quietly putrescent in some shadowy shed corner. His stomach roiled.
He remembered the end suddenly—the end for Belch and Vic, anyway.
How something had come out of the darkness as they stood in a shaft with a sewer-grating at the top, wondering which way to go next. Something. . .
Henry hadn’t been able to tell what. Until Victor shrieked, “Frankenstein!
It’s Frankenstein!” And so it was, it was the Frankenstein monster, with bolts coming out of its neck and a deep stitched scar across its forehead, lurching along in shoes like a child’s blocks.
“Frankenstein!” Vic had screamed, “Fr—”And then Vic’s head was gone, Vic’s head was flying across the shaftway to strike the stonework of the far side with a sour sticky thud. The monster’s watery yellow eyes had fallen on Henry, and Henry had frozen. His bladder let go and he felt warmth flood down his legs.
The creature lurched toward him, and Belch . . . Belch had. . .
“Listen, I know I ran, ” Henry said. “I shouldn’t have done that. But . . . but . . . ”
Belch only stared.
“I got lost, ” Henry whispered, as if to tell the ole Belcher that he had paid, too. It sounded weak, like saying Yeah, I know you got killed, Belch, but I got one fuck of a splinter under my thumbnail. But it had been bad . . . really bad. He had wandered around in a world of stinking darkness for hours, and finally, he remembered, he had started to scream. At some point he had fallen—a long, dizzying fall, in which he had time to think Oh good in a minute I’ll be dead, I’ll be out of this—and then he had been in fast- running water. Under the Canal, he supposed. He had come out into fading sunlight, had flailed his way toward the bank, and had finally climbed out of the Kenduskeag less than fifty yards from the place where Adrian Mellon would drown twenty-six years later. He slipped, fell, bashed his head, blacked out. When he woke up it was after dark. He had somehow found
his way out to Route 2 and had hooked a ride to the home place. And there the cops had been waiting for him.
But that was then and this was now. Belch had stepped in front of Frankenstein’s monster and it had peeled the left side of his face down to the skull—so much Henry had seen before fleeing. But now Belch was back, and Belch was pointing at something.
Henry saw that they had pulled up in front of the Derry Town House, and suddenly he understood perfectly. The Town House was the only real hotel
left in Derry. Back in’58 there had also been the Eastern Star at the end of Exchange Street, and the Traveller’s Rest on Torrault Street. Both had disappeared during urban renewal (Henry knew all about this; he had read the Derry News faithfully every day in Juniper Hill). Only the Town House was left, and a bunch of ticky-tacky little motels out by the Interstate.
That’s where they’ll be, he thought. Right in there. All of them that are left. Asleep in their beds, with visions of sugarplums—or sewers, maybe— dancing in their heads. And I’ll get them. One by one, I’ll get them.
He took the bottle of Texas Driver out again and bit off a snort. He could feel fresh blood trickling into his lap, and the seat was tacky beneath him, but the wine made it better; the wine seemed to make it not matter. He could have done with some good bourbon, but the Driver was better than nothing.
“Look, ” he said to Belch, “I’m sorry I ran. I don’t know why I ran.
Please . . . don’t be mad. ”
Belch spoke for the first and only time, but the voice wasn’t his voice. The voice that came from Belch’s rotting mouth was deep and powerful, terrifying. Henry whimpered at the sound of it. It was the voice from the
moon, the voice of the clown, the voice he had heard in his dreams of drains and sewers where water rushed on and on.
“Just shut up and get them, ” the voice said.
“Sure, ” Henry whined. “Sure, okay, I want to, no problem—”
He put the bottle back in the glove compartment. Its neck chattered briefly like teeth. And he saw a paper where the bottle had been. He took it out and unfolded it, leaving bloody fingerprints on the corners. Embossed across the top was this logo, in bright scarlet:
 |
Below this, carefully printed in capital letters:
 |
Their room numbers. That was good. That saved time. “Thanks, Be—” But Belch was gone. The driver’s seat was empty. There was only the
New York Yankees baseball cap lying there, mold crusted on its bill. And some slimy stuff on the knob of the gearshift.
Henry stared, his heart beating painfully in his throat . . . and then he seemed to hear something move and shift in the back seat. He got out quickly, opening the door and almost falling to the pavement in his haste.
He gave the Fury, which still burbled softly through its dual cherry-bomb mufflers (cherry-bombs had been outlawed in the State of Maine in 1962), a wide berth.
It was hard to walk; each step pulled and tore at his belly. But he gained the sidewalk and stood there, looking at the eight-floor brick building which, along with the library and the Aladdin Theater and the seminary,
was one of the few he remembered clearly from the old days. Most of the lights on the upper floors were out now, but the frosted-glass globes which flanked the main doorway blazed softly in the darkness, haloed with
moisture from the lingering groundfog.
Henry made his laborious way toward and between them, shouldering open one of the doors.
The lobby was wee-hours silent. There was a faded Turkish rug on the floor. The ceiling was a huge mural, executed in rectangular panels, which showed scenes from Derry’s logging days. There were overstuffed sofas and wing chairs and a great fireplace which was now dead and silent, a birch log thrown across the andirons—a real log, no gas; the fireplace in the Town House was not just a piece of lobby stage dressing. Plants spilled out of low pots. The glass double doors leading to the bar and the restaurant
were closed. From some inner office, Henry could hear the gabble of a TV, turned low.
He lurched across the lobby, his pants and shirt streaked with blood.
Blood was grimed into the folds of his hands; it ran down his cheeks and slashed his forehead like warpaint. His eyes bulged from their sockets.
Anyone in the lobby who had seen him would have run, screaming, in terror. But there was no one.
The elevator doors opened as soon as he pushed the UP button. He looked at the paper in his hand, then at the floor buttons. After a moment of deliberation, he pushed 6 and the doors closed. There was a faint hum of machinery as the elevator began to rise.
Might as well start at the top and work my way down.
He slumped against the rear wall of the car, eyes half-closed. The hum of the elevator was soothing. Like the hum of the machinery in the pumping- stations of the drainage system. That day: it kept coming back to him. How everything seemed almost prearranged, as if all of them were just playing parts. How Vic and the ole Belcher had seemed . . . well, almost drugged.
He remembered—
The car came to a stop, jolting him and sending another wave of griping pain into his stomach. The doors slid open. Henry stepped out into the silent hallway (more plants here, hanging ones, spiderplants, he didn’t want to touch any of them, not those oozy green runners, they reminded him too much of the things that had been hanging down there in the dark). He rechecked the paper. Kaspbrak was in 609. Henry started down that way, running one hand along the wall for support, leaving a faint bloody track on the wallpaper as he went (ah, but he stepped away whenever he came close to one of the hanging spiderplants; he wanted no truck with those). His breathing was harsh and dry.
Here it was. Henry pulled the switchblade from his pocket, swashed his dry lips with his tongue, and knocked on the door. Nothing. He knocked again, louder this time.
“Whozit? ” Sleepy. Good. He’d be in his ’jammies, only half-awake. And when he opened the door, Henry would drive the switchblade directly into
the hollow at the base of his neck, the vulnerable hollow just below the adam’s apple.
“Bellboy, sir, ” Henry said. “Message from your wife. ” Did Kaspbrak have a wife? Maybe that had been a stupid thing to say. He waited, coldly alert. He heard footsteps—the shuffle of slippers.
“From Myra? ” He sounded alarmed. Good. He would be more alarmed in a few seconds. A pulse beat steadily in Henry’s right temple.
“I guess so, sir. There’s no name. It just says your wife. ”
There was a pause, then a metallic rattle as Kaspbrak fumbled with the chain. Grinning, Henry pushed the button on the switchblade’s handle.
Click. He held the blade up by his cheek, ready. He heard the thumb-bolt turn. In just a moment he would plunge the blade into the skinny little creep’s throat. He waited. The door opened and Eddie
10
The Losers All Together/1:20 P. M.
saw Stan and Richie just coming out of the Costello Avenue Market, each of them eating a Rocket on a push-up stick. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, wait up!”
They turned around and Stan waved. Eddie ran to join them as quickly as he could, which was not, in truth, very quickly. One arm was immured in a plaster-of-Paris cast and he had his Parcheesi board under the other.
“Whatchoo say, Eddie? Whatchoo say, boy? ” Richie asked in his grandly rolling Southern Gentleman Voice (the one that sounded more like Foghorn Leghorn in the Warner Brothers cartoons than anything else). “Ah say . . .
Ah say . . . the boy’s got a broken ahm! Lookit that, Stan, the boy’s got a broken ahm! Ah say . . . be a good spote and carreh the boy’s Pawcheeseh bo-wud for him!”
“I can carry it, ” Eddie said, a little out of breath. “How about a lick on your Rocket? ” “Your mom wouldn’t approve, Eddie, ” Richie said sadly. He began to eat faster. He had just gotten to the chocolate stuff in the middle, his favorite part. “Germs, boy! Ah say . . . Ah say you kin get
germs eatin after someone else!” “I’ll chance it, ” Eddie said.
Reluctantly, Richie held his Rocket up to Eddie’s mouth . . . and snatched it away quickly as soon as Eddie had gotten in a couple of moderately
serious licks.
“You can have the rest of mine, if you want, ” Stan said. “I’m still full from lunch. ”
“Jews don’t eat much, ” Richie instructed. “It’s part of their religion. ”
The three of them were walking along companionably enough now, headed up toward Kansas Street and the Barrens. Derry seemed lost in a deep hazy afternoon doze. The blinds of most of the houses they passed were pulled down. Toys stood abandoned on lawns, as if their owners had been hastily called in from play or put down for naps. Thunder rumbled thickly in the west.
“Is it? ” Eddie asked Stan.
“No, Richie’s just pulling your leg, ” Stan said. “Jews eat as much as normal people. ” He pointed at Richie. “Like him. ”
“You know, you’re pretty fucking mean to Stan, ” Eddie told Richie.
“How would you like somebody to say all that made-up shit about you, just because you’re a Catholic? ”
“Oh, Catholics do plenty, ” Richie said. “My dad told me once that Hitler was a Catholic, and Hitler killed billions of Jews. Right, Stan? ”
“Yeah, I guess so, ” Stan said. He looked embarrassed.
“My mom was furious when my dad told me that, ” Richie went on. A
little reminiscent grin had surfaced on his face. “Absolutely fyoo-rious. Us Catholics also had the Inquisition, that was the little dealie with the rack and the thumbscrews and all that stuff. I figure all religions are pretty weird. ”
“Me too, ” Stan said quietly. “We’re not Orthodox, or anything like that. I mean, we eat ham and bacon. I hardly even know what being a Jew is. I was born in Derry, and sometimes we go up to synagogue in Bangor for stuff
like Yom Kippur, but—” He shrugged.
“Ham? Bacon? ” Eddie was mystified. He and his mom were Methodists. “Orthodox Jews don’t eat stuff like that, ” Stan said. “It says something
in the Torah about not eating anything that creeps through the mud or walks on the bottom of the ocean. I don’t know exactly how it goes. But pigs are supposed to be out, also lobster. But my folks eat them. I do too. ”
“That’s weird, ” Eddie said, and burst out laughing. “I never heard of a religion that told you what you could eat. Next thing, they’ll be telling you what kind of gas you can buy. ”
“Kosher gas, ” Stan said, and laughed by himself. Neither Richie nor Eddie understood what he was laughing about.
“You gotta admit, Stanny, it is pretty weird, ” Richie said. “I mean, not being able to eat a sausage just because you happen to be Jewish. ”
“Yeah? ” Stan said. “You eat meat on Fridays? ”
“Jeez, no!” Richie said, shocked. “You can’t eat meat on Friday, because
—” He began to grin a little. “Oh, okay, I see what you mean. ”
“Do Catholics really go to hell if they eat meat on Fridays?” Eddie asked, fascinated, totally unaware that, until two generations before, his own
people had been devout Polish Catholics who would no more have eaten meat on Friday than they would have gone outside with no clothes on.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, Eddie, ” Richie said. “I don’t really think God would send me down to the Hot Place just for forgetting and having a baloney sandwich for lunch on a Friday, but why take a chance? Right? ”
“I guess not, ” Eddie said. “But it seems so—” So stupid, he was going to say, and then he remembered a story Mrs. Portleigh had told the Sunday- school class when he was just a little kid—a first grader in Little Worshippers. According to Mrs. Portleigh, a bad boy had once stolen some of the communion-bread when the tray was passed and put it in his pocket. He took it home and threw it into the toilet-bowl just to see what would happen. At once—or so Mrs. Portleigh reported to her rapt Little
Worshippers—the water in the toilet-bowl had turned a bright red. It was
the Blood of Christ, she said, and it had appeared to that little boy because he had done a very bad act called a BLASPHEMY. It had appeared to warn him that, by throwing the flesh of Jesus into the toilet, he had put his immortal soul in danger of Hell.
Up until then, Eddie had rather enjoyed the act of communion, which he had only been allowed to take since the previous year. The Methodists used Welch’s grape juice instead of wine, and the Body of Christ was represented by cut-up cubes of fresh, springy Wonder Bread. He liked the idea of taking in food and drink as a religious rite. But following Mrs. Portleigh’s story,
his awe of the ritual darkened into something more potent, something rather dreadful. Simply reaching for the cubes of bread became an act which required courage, and he always feared an electrical shock . . . or worse, that the bread would suddenly change color in his hand, become a blood- clot, and a disembodied Voice would begin to thunder in the church: Not worthy! Not worthy! Damned to Hell! Damned to Hell! Often, after he had taken communion, his throat would close up, his breath would begin to
wheeze in and out, and he would wait with panicky impatience for the benediction to be over so he could hurry into the vestibule and use his aspirator.
You don’t want to be so silly, he told himself as he grew older. That was nothing but a story, and Mrs. Portleigh sure wasn’t any saint—Mamma said she was divorced down in Kittery and that she plays Bingo at Saint Mary’s in Bangor, and that real Christians don’t gamble, real Christians leave gambling for pagans and Catholics.
All that made perfect sense, but it didn’t relieve his mind. The story of the communion bread that turned the water in the toilet-bowl to blood worried at him, gnawed at him, even caused him to lose sleep. It came to
him one night that the way to get this behind him once and for all would be to take a piece of the bread himself, toss it in the toilet, and see what happened.
But such an experiment was far beyond his courage; his rational mind could not stand against that sinister image of the blood spreading its cloud of accusation and potential damnation in the water. It could not stand against that talismanic magical incantation: This is my body, take, eat; this is my blood, shed for you and for many.
No, he had never made the experiment.
“I guess all religions are weird, ” Eddie said now. But powerful, his mind added, almost magical . . . or was that BLASPHEMY? He began to think about the thing they had seen on Neibolt Street, and for the first time he saw a crazy parallel—the Werewolf had, after all, come out of the toilet.
“Boy, I guess everybody’s asleep, ” Richie said, tossing his empty
Rocket-tube nonchalantly into the gutter. “You ever see it so quiet? What, did everbody go to Bar Harbor for the day? ”
“H-H-H-Hey you guh-guh-guys!” Bill Denbrough shouted from behind them. “Wuh-Wuh-hait up!”
Eddie turned, delighted as always to hear Big Bill’s voice. He was wheeling Silver around the corner of Costello Avenue, outdistancing Mike, although Mike’s Schwinn was almost brand-new.
“Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYYY!” Bill yelled. He rolled up to them doing
perhaps twenty miles an hour, the playing cards clothespinned to the fender- struts roaring. Then he back-pedalled, locked the brakes, and produced an admirably long skid-mark.
“Stuttering Bill!” Richie said. “Howaya, boy? Ah say . . . Ah say . . . how
aw you, boy? ”
“I’m o-o-okay, ” Bill said. “Seen Ben or Buh-Buh-heverly? ”
Mike rode up and joined them. Sweat stood out on his face in little drops. “How fast does that bike go, anyway? ”
Bill laughed. “I d-d-don’t nuh-know, e-exactly. Pretty f-f-fast. ”
“I haven’t seen them, ” Richie said. “They’re probably down there, hanging out. Singing two-part harmony. ‘Sh-boom, sh-boom . . . ya-da-da- da-da-da-da . . . you look like a dream, shweetheart. ’”
Stan Uris made throwing-up noises.
“He’s just jealous, ” Richie said to Mike. “Jews can’t sing. ” “Buh-buh-buh—”
“ ‘Beep-beep, Richie, ’ ” Richie said for him, and they all laughed.
They started toward the Barrens again, Mike and Bill pushing their bikes.
Conversation was brisk at first, but then it lagged. Looking at Bill, Eddie saw an uneasy look on his face, and he thought that maybe the quiet was
getting to him, too. He knew Richie had meant it as a joke, but it really did
seem that everyone in Derry had gone to Bar Harbor for the day . . . to
somewhere. Not a car moved on the street; there wasn’t a single old lady pushing a carrier full of groceries back to her house or apartment.
“Sure is quiet, isn’t it? ” Eddie ventured, but Bill only nodded.
They crossed to the Barrens side of Kansas Street, and then they saw Ben and Beverly, running toward them, shouting. Eddie was shocked by Beverly’s appearance; she was usually so neat and clean, her hair always washed and tied back in a pony-tail. Now she was streaked with what looked like every kind of gluck in the universe. Her eyes were wide and wild. There was a scratch on one cheek. Her jeans were caked with crap and her blouse was torn.
Ben fell behind her, puffing, his stomach wobbling.
“Can’t go down in the Barrens, ” Beverly was panting. “The boys . . .
Henry . . . Victor . . . they’re down there somewhere . . . the knife . . . he has a knife. ”
“Sluh-slow down, ” Bill said, taking charge at once in that effortless, almost unconscious way of his. He glanced at Ben as he ran up, his cheeks flushed bright, his considerable chest heaving.
“She says Henry’s gone crazy, Big Bill, ” Ben said.
“Shit, you mean he used to be sane? ” Richie asked, and spat between his teeth.
“Sh-Shut uh-up, Ruh-Richie, ” Bill said, and then looked back at Beverly. “Teh-Tell, ” he said. Eddie’s hand crept into his pocket and touched his aspirator. He didn’t know what all this was, but he already knew it wasn’t good.
Forcing herself to speak as calmly as possible, Beverly managed to get out an edited version of the story—a version that began with Henry, Victor, and Belch catching up to her on the street. She didn’t tell them about her
father—she was desperately ashamed of that.
When she was finished Bill stood silent for a moment, hands in his pockets, chin down, Silver’s handlebars leaning against his chest. The
others waited, throwing frequent glances at the railing that ran along the edge of the dropoff. Bill thought for a long time, and no one interrupted
him. Eddie became aware, suddenly and effortlessly, that this might be the final act. That was how the day’s silence felt, wasn’t it? The feeling that the whole town had up and left, leaving only the deserted husks of buildings behind.
Richie was thinking about the picture in George’s album that had suddenly come to life.
Beverly was thinking about her father, how pale his eyes had been. Mike was thinking about the bird.
Ben was thinking about the mummy, and a smell like dead cinnamon.
Stan Uris was thinking of bluejeans, black and dripping, and hands as white as wrinkled paper, also dripping.
“Cuh-Cuh-Come oh-oh-on, ” Bill said at last. “W-We’re going d-d-down.
”
“Bill—” Ben said. His face was troubled. “Beverly said Henry was really
crazy. That he meant to kill—”
“Ih-It’s nuh-not theirs, ” Bill said, gesturing at the green dagger-shaped slash of the Barrens to their right and below them—the underbrush, the choked groves of trees, the bamboo, the glint of water. “Ih-Ih-It’s not their pruh-pruh-hopperty. ” He looked around at them, his face grim. “I’m t-t- tired of b-being scuh-schuh-hared by them. We b-b-beat them in the ruh- rockfight, and if we h-h-have to beat them a-a-again, we’ll duh-duh-do it. ”
“But Bill, ” Eddie said, “what if it’s not just them? ”
Bill turned to Eddie, and with real shock Eddie saw how tired and drawn Bill’s face was—there was something frightening about that face, but it wasn’t until much, much later, as an adult drifting toward sleep after the meeting at the library, that he understood what that frightening thing was: it was the face of a boy driven close to the brink of madness, a boy who was perhaps ultimately no more sane or in control of his own decisions than Henry was. Yet the essential Bill was still there, looking out of those haunted scarified eyes . . . an angry, determined Bill.
“Well, ” he said, “whuh-whuh-what if it’s nuh-nuh-not? ”
No one answered him. Thunder boomed, closer now. Eddie looked at the sky and saw the stormclouds moving in from the west in black thunderheads. It was going to rain a bitch, as his mother sometimes said.
“Nuh-nuh-how I’ll t-t-tell you what, ” Bill said, looking at them. “None of you have to guh-guh-go w-with me if you d-don’t want to. That’s uh-uh- up to you. ”
“I’ll go along, Big Bill, ” Richie said quietly. “Me too, ” Ben said.
“Sure, ” Mike said with a shrug. Beverly and Stan agreed, and Eddie last.
“I don’t think so, Eddie, ” Richie said. “Your arm’s not, you know, looking too cool. ”
Eddie looked at Bill.
“I w-w-want h-him, ” Bill said. “You w-w-walk with muh-muh-me, Eh- Eh-Eddie. I’ll keep an eye on yuh-you. ”
“Thanks, Bill, ” Eddie said. Bill’s tired, half-crazy face seemed suddenly lovely to him—lovely and well loved. He felt a dim sense of amazement.
I’d die for him, I guess, if he told me to. What kind of power is that? If it makes you look like Bill looks now, it’s maybe not such a good power to have.
“Yeah, Bill’s got the ultimate weapon, ” Richie said. “B. O. bombs. ” He raised his left arm and fluttered his right hand under the exposed armpit.
Ben and Mike laughed a little, and Eddie smiled.
Thunder boomed again, close and loud enough this time to make them jump and huddle closer together. The wind was picking up, rattling trash around in the gutter. The first of the dark clouds sailed over the hazy ringed
disc of the sun, and their shadows melted away. The wind was cold, chilling the sweat on Eddie’s uncovered arm. He shivered.
Bill looked at Stan and said a peculiar thing then. “You got your b-b-bird-book, Stan? ”
Stan tapped his hip pocket.
Bill looked at them again. “Let’s g-g-go down, ” he said.
They went down the embankment single-file except for Bill, who stayed with Eddie as he had promised. He allowed Richie to push Silver down, and when they had reached the bottom, Bill put his bike in its accustomed place under the bridge. Then they stood together, looking around.
The coming storm did not produce a darkness; not even, precisely, a dimness. But the quality of the light had changed, and things stood out in a kind of dreamlike steely relief: shadowless, clear, chiselled. Eddie felt a sinking of horror and apprehension in his guts as he realized why the quality of this light seemed so familiar—it was the same sort of light he remembered from the house at 29 Neibolt Street.
A streak of lightning tattooed the clouds, bright enough to make him wince. He put a hand up to his face and found himself counting: One . . . two . . . three . . . And then the thunder came in a single coughing bark, an explosive sound, a sound like an M-80 firecracker, and they drew even closer together.
“Wasn’t any rain forecast this morning, ” Ben said uneasily. “The paper said hot and hazy. ”
Mike was scanning the sky. The clouds up there were black-bottomed keelboats, high and heavy, swiftly overrunning the blue haze that had covered the sky from horizon to horizon when he and Bill came out of the Denbrough house after lunch. “It’s comin fast, ” he said. “Never saw a storm come so fast. ” And as if in confirmation, thunder whacked again.
“C-C-Come on, ” Bill said. “L-Let’s put Eh-Eh-Eddie’s Parchee-hee-si board in the cluh-cluh-clubhouse. ”
They started along the path they had beaten in the weeks since the incident of the dam. Bill and Eddie were at the head of the line, their
shoulders brushing the broad green leaves of the shrubs, the others behind them. The wind gusted again, making the leaves on the trees and bushes whisper together. Farther ahead, the bamboo rattled eerily, like drums in a jungle tale.
“Bill? ” Eddie said in a low voice. “What? ”
“I thought this was just in the movies, but . . . ” Eddie laughed a little. “I feel like somebody’s watching me. ”
“Oh, they’re th-th-there, all r-r-right, ” Bill said.
Eddie looked around nervously and held his Parcheesi board a little tighter. He
11
Eddie’s Room/3:05 A. M.
opened the door on a monster from a horror comic.
A gore-streaked apparition stood there and it could only be Henry Bowers. Henry looked like a corpse which has returned from the grave. Henry’s face was a frozen witch-doctor’s mask of hate and murder. His right hand was cocked at cheek-level, and even as Eddie’s eyes widened and he began to draw in his first shocked breath, the hand pistoned forward, the switchblade glittering like silk.
With no thought—there was no time; if he had stopped to think he would have died—Eddie slammed the door closed. It struck Henry’s forearm, deflecting the knife’s course so that it swung in a savage side-to-side arc
less than an inch from Eddie’s neck.
There was a crunch as the door pinched Henry’s arm against the jamb. Henry uttered a muffled cry. His hand opened. The knife clattered to the floor. Eddie kicked it. It skittered under the TV.
Henry threw his weight against the door. He outweighed Eddie by over a hundred pounds and Eddie was driven back like a doll; his knees struck the bed and he fell on it. Henry came into the room and swept the door shut behind him. He twisted the thumb-bolt as Eddie sat up, wide-eyed, his throat already starting to whistle.
“Okay, fag, ” Henry said. His eyes dropped momentarily to the floor, hunting for the knife. He didn’t see it. Eddie groped on the nighttable and
found one of the two bottles of Perrier water he had ordered earlier that day.
This was the full one; he had drunk the other before going to the library because his nerves were shot and he had a bad case of acid-burn. Perrier was very good for the digestion.
As Henry dismissed the knife and started toward him, Eddie gripped the green pear-shaped bottle by the neck and smashed it on the edge of the nighttable. Perrier foamed and fizzed across it, flooding out most of the pill- bottles that stood there.
Henry’s shirt and pants were heavy with blood, both fresh and semi- dried. His right hand now hung at a strange angle.
“Babyfag, ” Henry said, “teach you to throw rocks. ”
He made it to the bed and reached for Eddie, who still hardly realized what was happening. No more than forty seconds had elapsed since he had opened the door. Henry grabbed for him. Eddie thrust the ragged base of the Perrier bottle at him. It ripped into Henry’s face, pulling open his right cheek in a twisted flap and puncturing Henry’s right eye.
Henry uttered a breathless scream and staggered backward. His slit eye, leaking whitish-yellow fluid, hung loosely from its socket. His cheek sprayed blood in a gaudy fountain. Eddie’s own cry was louder. He got off
the bed and went toward Henry—to help him, perhaps, he wasn’t really sure
—and Henry lurched at him again. Eddie thrust with the Perrier bottle as if with a fencing sword, and this time the jagged points of green glass punched deep into Henry’s left hand and sawed at his fingers. Fresh blood flowed. Henry made a thick grunting noise, the sound, almost, of a man clearing his throat, and shoved Eddie with his right hand.
Eddie flew back and struck the writing-desk. His left arm twisted behind him somehow and he fell on it heavily. The pain was a sudden sickening flare. He felt the bone go along the fault-line of that old break, and he had to clench his teeth against a scream of agony.
A shadow blotted out the light.
Henry Bowers was standing over him, swaying back and forth. His knees buckled. His left hand was dripping blood on the front of Eddie’s robe.
Eddie had held onto the stump of the Perrier bottle and now, as Henry’s knees came completely unhinged, he got it in front of him, jagged base
pointing upward, the cap braced against his sternum. Henry came down like a tree, impaling himself on the bottle. Eddie felt it shatter in his hand and a
fresh bolt of grinding agony shuddered through his left arm, which was still trapped under his body. Fresh warmth cascaded over him. He wasn’t sure if this batch was Henry’s blood or his.
Henry twitched like a landed trout. His shoes rattled an almost syncopated beat on the carpet. Eddie could smell his rotten breath. Then Henry stiffened and rolled over. The bottle protruded grotesquely from his midsection, capped end pointing toward the ceiling, as if it had grown there.
“Gug, ” Henry said, and said no more. He looked up at the ceiling. Eddie thought he might be dead.
Eddie fought off the waves of faintness that wanted to cover him over and drag him down. He got to his knees, and finally to his feet. There was fresh pain as his broken arm swung out in front of him and that cleared his head a little. Wheezing, fighting for breath, he made it to the nighttable. He picked his aspirator out of a puddle of carbonated water, stuck it in his mouth, and triggered it off. He shuddered at the taste, then gave himself another blast. He looked around at the body on the carpet—could that be
Henry? could it possibly be? It was. Grown old, his crewcut more gray than black, his body now fat and white and sluglike, it was still Henry. And Henry was dead. At long last, Henry was—
“Gug, ”Henry said, and sat up. His hands clawed at the air, as if for
holds which only Henry could see. His gouged eye leaked and dribbled; its bottom arc now bulged pregnantly down onto his cheek. He looked around, saw Eddie shrinking back against the wall, and tried to get up.
He opened his mouth and a stream of blood gushed out. Henry collapsed again.
Heart racing, Eddie fumbled for the telephone and succeeded only in knocking it off the table and onto the bed. He snatched it up and dialed 0. The phone rang again and again and again.
Come on, Eddie thought, what are you doing down there, jacking off?
Come on, please, answer the frigging phone!
It rang again and again. Eddie kept his eyes on Henry, expecting him to start trying to gain his feet again at any moment. Blood. Dear God, so much blood.
“Desk, ” a fuzzy, resentful voice said at last.
“Ring Mr. Denbrough’s room, ” Eddie said. “Quick as you can. ” With his other ear he was now listening to the rooms around him. How loud had
they been? Was someone going to pound on the door and ask if everything was all right in there?
“You sure you want me to ring? ” the clerk asked. “It’s ten after three. ” “Yes, do it!” Eddie nearly screamed. The hand holding the phone was
trembling in convulsive little bursts. There was a nest of waspy, rotten-ugly singing in his other arm. Had Henry moved again? No; surely not.
“Okay, okay, ” the clerk said. “Cool your jets, my friend. ”
There was a click, and then the hoarse burr of a room-phone ringing.
Come on, Bill, come on, c—
A sudden thought, gruesomely plausible, occurred to him. Suppose Henry had visited Bill’s room first? Or Richie’s? Ben’s? Bev’s? Or had Henry perhaps paid a visit to the library? Surely he had been somewhere else first; if someone hadn’t softened Henry up, it would have been Eddie
lying dead on the floor, with a switchblade growing out of his chest the way the neck of the Perrier bottle was growing out of Henry’s gut. Or suppose Henry had visited all the others first, catching them bleary and half-asleep, as Henry had caught him? Suppose they were all dead? And that thought
was so awful Eddie believed he would soon begin screaming if someone didn’t answer the phone in Bill’s room.
“Please, Big Bill, ” Eddie whispered. “Please be there, man. ”
The phone was picked up and Bill’s voice, uncharacteristically cautious, said: “H-H-Hello? ”
“Bill, ” Eddie said . . . almost babbled. “Bill, thank God. ”
“Eddie? ” Bill’s voice grew momentarily fainter, speaking to someone else, telling the someone who it was. Then he was back strong. “W-What’s the muh-hatter, Eddie? ”
“It’s Henry Bowers, ” Eddie said. He looked at the body on the floor again. Had it changed position? This time it was not so easy to persuade himself it hadn’t. “Bill, he came here . . . and I killed him. He had a knife. I think . . . ” He lowered his voice. “I think it was the same knife he had that day. When we went into the sewers. Do you remember? ”
“I r-r-remember, ” Bill said grimly. “Eddie, listen to me. I want you to
12
The Barrens/1:55 P. M.
g-g-go back and tell B-B-Ben to c-come up h-h-here. ”
“Okay, ” Eddie said, and dropped back at once. They were approaching the clearing now. Thunder rumbled in the overcast sky, and the bushes sighed in the rising breeze.
Ben joined him as they came into the clearing. The trapdoor to the
clubhouse stood open, an improbable square of blackness in the green. The sound of the river was very clear, and Bill was suddenly struck by a crazy certainty: that he was experiencing that sound, and this place, for the last
time in his childhood. He drew a deep breath, smelling earth and air and the distant sooty dump, fuming like a sullen volcano that cannot quite make up its mind to erupt. He saw a flock of birds fly off the railroad trestle and toward the Old Cape. He looked up at the boiling clouds.
“What is it? ” Ben asked.
“Why h-h-haven’t they tried to guh-guh-het u-us? ” Bill asked. “They’re th-there. Eh-Eh-Eddie was ruh-hight about that. I can fuh-fuh-heel them. ”
“Yeah, ” Ben said. “I guess they might be stupid enough to think we’re going back into the clubhouse. Then they’d have us trapped. ”
“Muh-muh-maybe, ” Bill said, and he felt a sudden helpless fury at his stutter, which made it impossible for him to talk fast. Perhaps they were
things he would have found impossible to say anyway—how he felt he could almost see through Henry Bowers’s eyes, how he felt that, although on opposite sides, pawns controlled by opposing forces, he and Henry had grown very close.
Henry expected them to stand and fight.
It expected them to stand and fight.
And be killed.
A chilly explosion of white light seemed to fill his head. They would be victims of the killer that had been stalking Derry ever since George’s death
—all seven of them. Perhaps their bodies would be found, perhaps not. It all depended on whether or not It could or would protect Henry—and, to a lesser degree, Belch and Victor. Yes. To the outside, to the rest of this town, we’ll have been victims of the killer. And that’s right, in a funny sort of way that really is right. It wants us dead. Henry’s the tool to get it done so It
doesn’t have to come out. Me first, I think—Beverly and Richie might be
able to hold the others, or Mike, but Stan’s scared, and so’s Ben, although I think he’s stronger than Stan. And Eddie’s got a broken arm. Why did I lead them down here? Christ! Why did I?
“Bill? ” Ben said anxiously. The others joined them beside the clubhouse. Thunder whacked again, and the bushes began to rustle more urgently. The bamboo rattled on in the fading stormy light.
“Bill—” It was Richie now.
“Shhh!” The others fell uneasily silent under his blazing haunted eyes.
He stared at the underbrush, at the path twisting away through it and back toward Kansas Street, and felt his mind suddenly go up another notch, as if to a higher plane. There was no stuttering in his mind; he felt as if his
thoughts had been borne away on a mad flow of intuition—as if everything were coming to him.
George at one end, me and my friends at the other. And then it will stop (again)
again, yes, again, because this has happened before and there always has to be some sacrifice at the end, some terrible thing to stop it, I don’t know
how I can know that but I do
. . . and they . . . they . . .
“They luh-luh-let it happen, ” Bill muttered, staring wide-eyed at the ratty pigtail of path. “Shuh-Shuh-Sure they d-d-do. ”
“Bill? ” Bev asked, pleading. Stan stood on one side of her, small and neat in a blue polo shirt and chinos. Mike stood on the other, looking at Bill intensely, as if reading his thoughts.
They let it happen, they always do, and things quiet down, things go on, It . . . It . . .
(sleeps)
sleeps . . . or hibernates like a bear . . . and then it starts again, and they know . . . people know . . . they know it has to be so It can be.
“I luh-luh-luh-l-l-l—”
Oh please God oh please God he thrusts his fists please God against the posts let me get this out the posts and still insists oh God oh Christ OH PLEASE LET ME BE ABLE TO TALK!
“I 1-1-led you d-down huh-here b-b-b-b-because nuh-nuh-noplace is s-s- safe, ” Bill said. Spittle blabbered from his lips; he wiped them with the
back of one hand. “Duh-Duh-Derry is It. D-D-Do you uh-uh-understand m- m-me? ” He glared at them; they drew away a little, their eyes shiny, almost thanotropic with fright. “Duh-herry is Ih-Ih-It! Eh-Eh-hennyp-p-place we
g-g-go . . . when Ih-Ih-It g-g-g-gets uh-us, they w-w-wuh-hon’t suh-suh- see, they w-w-won’t huh-huh-hear, they w-w-won’t nuh-nuh-know. ” He looked at them, pleading. “Duh-don’t y-y-you suh-see h-how it ih-ih-is? A- A-All we c-c-can duh-duh-do is to t-t-try and fuh-hinish w-what w-w-w-we stuh-harted. ”
Beverly saw Mr. Ross getting up, looking at her, folding his paper, and simply going into his house. They won’t see, they won’t hear, they won’t
know. And my father
(take those pants off slutchild)
had meant to kill her.
Mike thought of lunch with Bill. Bill’s mother had been off in her own dreamy world, seeming not to see either of them, reading a Henry James novel while the boys made sandwiches and gobbled them standing at the counter. Richie thought of Stan’s neat but utterly empty house. Stan had been a little surprised; his mother was almost always home at lunchtime. On the few occasions when she wasn’t, she left a note saying where she could
be reached. But there had been no note today. The car was gone, and that was all. “Probably went shopping with her friend Debbie, ” Stan said, frowning a little, and had set to work making egg-salad sandwiches. Richie
had forgotten about it. Until now. Eddie thought of his mother. When he had gone out with his Parcheesi board there had been none of the usual cautions: Be careful, Eddie, get under cover if it rains, Eddie, don’t you
dare play any rough games, Eddie. She hadn’t asked if he had his aspirator, hadn’t told him what time to be home, hadn’t warned him against “those rough boys you play with. ” She had simply gone on watching her soap-
opera story on TV, as if he didn’t exist.
As if he didn’t exist.
A version of the same thought went through all of the boys’ minds: they had, at some point between getting up this morning and lunch-time, simply become ghosts.
Ghosts.
“Bill, ” Stan said harshly, “if we cut across? Through the Old Cape? ”
Bill shook his head. “I don’t thuh-thuh-hink s-s-so. We’d g-g-get c-c- caught in the buh-buh-bam-b-b-boo . . . the quh-quh-quick-m-mud . . . or there’d b-b-be ruh-ruh-real p-p-p-pirahna fuh-fuh-fish in the K-K- Kenduskeag . . . o-o-or suh-suh-homething e-e-else. ”
Each had his or her own different vision of the same end. Ben saw bushes which suddenly became man-eating plants. Beverly saw flying leeches like the ones that had come out of that old refrigerator. Stan saw the mucky ground in the bamboo vomiting up the living corpses of children caught in
there by the fabled quickmud. Mike Hanlon imagined small Jurassic reptiles with horrid sawteeth suddenly boiling out of the cleft of a rotten tree, attacking them, biting them to pieces. Richie saw the Crawling Eye oozing down on top of them as they ran under the railroad trestle. And Eddie saw them climbing the Old Cape embankment only to look up and see the leper standing at the top, his sagging flesh acrawl with beetles and maggots, waiting for them.
“If we could get out of town somehow . . . ” Richie muttered, then winced as thunder shouted a furious negative from the sky. More rain fell— it was still only squalling, but soon it would begin to come down seriously, in sheets and torrents. The day’s hazy peace was now utterly gone, as if it had never been at all. “We’d be safe if we could just get out of this fucking town. ”
Beverly began: “Beep-b—” And then a rock came flying out of the shaggy bushes and struck Mike on the side of the head. He staggered backward, blood flowing through the tight cap of his hair, and would have fallen if Bill hadn’t caught him.
“Teach you to throw rocks!” Henry’s voice floated mockingly to them.
Bill could see the others looking around, wild-eyed, ready to bolt in six different directions. And if they did that, it really would be over.
“B-B-Ben!” he said sharply.
Ben looked at him. “Bill, we gotta run. They—”
Two more rocks flew out of the bushes. One struck Stan on the upper thigh. He yelled, more surprised than hurt. Beverly sidestepped the second. It struck the ground and rolled through the clubhouse trapdoor.
“D-D-Do you r-r-ruh-remember the f-f-first duh-day you c-c-came d- down here? ” Bill shouted over the thunder. “The d-d-d-day schuh-hool l-let ow-out? ”
“Bill—” Richie shouted.
Bill thrust a shushing hand at him; his eyes remained fixed on Ben, pinning him to the spot.
“Sure, ” Ben said, miserably trying to look in all directions at once. The bushes were now wavering and dancing wildly, their motion nearly tidal.
“The druh-druh-drain, ” Bill said. “The p-p-pumping-stuh-hation. Thah- that’s where we’re suh-suh-hupposed to g-g-go. Take us there!”
“But—”
“Tuh-tuh-take us th-there!”
A fusillade of rocks whizzed out of the bushes and for a moment Bill saw Victor Criss’s face, somehow frightened, drugged, and avid all at the same time. Then a rock smashed into his cheekbone and it was Mike’s turn to keep Bill from falling down. For a moment he couldn’t see straight. His cheek felt numb. Then sensation returned in painful throbs and he felt blood running down his face. He swiped at his cheek, wincing at the painful knob that was rising there, looked at the blood, wiped it on his jeans. His hair whipped wildly in the freshening wind.
“Teach you to throw rocks, you stuttering asshole!” Henry half-laughed, half-screamed.
“Tuh-Tuh-Take us!” Bill yelled. He understood now why he had sent Eddie back to get Ben; it was that pumping-station they were supposed to
go to, that very one, and only Ben knew exactly which one it was—they ran along both banks of the Kenduskeag at irregular intervals. “Ih-ih-hit’s the pluh-pluh-hace! The w-w-way ih-in! The wuh-wuh-wuh-way to It!”
“Bill, you can’t know that!” Beverly cried.
He shouted furiously at her—at all of them: “I know!”
Ben stood there for a moment, wetting his lips, looking at Bill. Then he struck off across the clearing, heading toward the river. A brilliant bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, purplish-white, followed by a rip of thunder that made Bill reel on his feet. A fist-sized chunk of rock sailed past his nose and struck Ben’s buttocks. He yipped with pain and his hand went to the spot.
“Yaah, fatboy!” Henry cried in that same half-laughing, half-screaming voice. The bushes rustled and crashed and Henry appeared as the rain stopped fooling around and came in a downpour. Water ran in Henry’s
crewcut, in his eyebrows, down his cheeks. His grin showed all his teeth. “Teach you to throw r—”
Mike had found one of the pieces of scrapwood left over from building the clubhouse roof and now he threw it. It flipped over twice and struck Henry’s forehead. He screamed, clapped one hand to the spot like a man who’s just had one hell of a good idea, and sat down hard.
“Ruh-ruh-run!” Bill hollered. “A-After Buh-Buh-Ben!”
More crashings and stumblings in the bushes, and as the rest of the
Losers ran after Ben Hanscom, Victor and Belch appeared, Henry stood up, and the three of them gave chase.
Even later, when the rest of that day had come back to Ben, he recalled only jumbled images of their run through the bushes. He remembered
branches overloaded with dripping leaves slapping against his face, dousing him with cold water; he remembered that the thunder and lightning seemed to have become almost constant, and he remembered that Henry’s screams for them to come back and fight seemed to merge with the sound of the Kenduskeag as they drew closer to it. Every time he slowed, Bill would whack him on the back to make him hurry up.
What if I can’t find it? What if I can’t find that particular pumping- station?
The breath tore in and out of his lungs, hot and bloody-tasting in the back of his throat. A stitch was sinking into his side. His buttocks sang where the rock had hit him. Beverly had said Henry and his friends meant to kill them, and Ben believed it now, yes he did.
He came to the Kenduskeag’s bank so suddenly that he nearly plunged over the edge. He managed to get his balance, and then the embankment, undercut by the spring runoff, collapsed and he went tumbling over anyway, skidding all the way to the edge of the fast-running water, his shirt rucking up in the back, clayey mud streaking and sticking to his skin.
Bill piled into him and yanked him to his feet.
The others burst out of the bushes which overhung the bank one after the other. Richie and Eddie were last, Richie with one arm slung around Eddie’s waist, his dripping specs clinging precariously to the end of his nose.
“Wuh-Wuh-Where? ” Bill shouted.
Ben looked first left and then right, aware that the time was suicidally short. The river seemed higher already, and the rain-dark sky had given it a dangerous slate-gray color as it boiled its way along. Its banks were choked with underbrush and stunted trees, all of them now dancing to the wind’s tune. He could hear Eddie sobbing for breath.
“Wuh-wuh-where? ”
“I don’t kn—” he began, and then he saw the leaning tree and the eroded cave beneath it. That was where he had hidden that first day. He had dozed off, and when he woke up he had heard Bill and Eddie goofing around.
Then the big boys had come . . . seen . . . conquered. Ta-ta, boys, it was a real baby dam, believe me.
“There!” he shouted. “That way!”
Lightning flashed again and this time Ben could hear it, a buzzing noise
like an overloaded Lionel train-transformer. It struck the tree and blue-white electric fire sizzled its gnarly base into splinters and toothpicks sized for a
fairytale giant. It fell toward the river with a rending crash, driving spray high into the air. Ben drew in a dismayed gasp and smelled something hot and punky and wild. A fireball rolled up the bole of the downed tree, seemed to flash brighter, and went out. Thunder exploded, not above them but around them, as if they stood in the center of the thunderclap. The rain sheeted down.
Bill thumped him on the back, awaking him from his dazed contemplation of these things. “Guh-guh-GO!”
Ben went, splashing and stumbling along the verge of the river, his hair hanging in his eyes. He reached the tree- he little root-cave beneath it had been obliterated—and climbe over it, digging his toes into its wet hide, scraping his hands and forearms.
Bill and Richie manhandled Eddie over, and as he stumbled off the tree- trunk, Ben caught him. They both went tumbling to the ground. Eddie cried out.
“You all right? ” Ben shouted.
“I guess so, ” Eddie shouted back, getting to his feet. He fumbled for his aspirator and almost dropped it. Ben grabbed it for him and Eddie gave him a grateful look as he stuffed it into his mouth and triggered it.
Richie came over, then Stan and Mike. Bill boosted Beverly up onto the tree and Ben and Richie caught her coming down on the far side, her hair
plastered to her head, her bluejeans now black.
Bill came last, pulling himself onto the trunk and swinging his legs around. He saw Henry and the other two splashing down the river toward them, and as he slid off the fallen tree he shouted: “Ruh-ruh-rocks! Throw rocks!”
There were plenty of them here on the bank, and the lightning-struck tree made a perfect barricade. In a moment or two all seven of them were chucking rocks at Henry and his pals. They had nearly reached the tree; the range was point-blank. They were driven back, yelling with pain and fury, as rocks struck their faces, their chests, their arms and legs.
“Teach us to throw rocks!” Richie shouted, and chucked one the size of a hen’s egg at Victor. It struck his shoulder and bounced almost straight up into the air. Victor howled. “Ah say . . . Ah say . . . go on an teach us, boy! We learn good!”
“Yeeeeh-aaaah!” Mike screamed. “How do you like it? How do you like it? ”
The answer was not much. They retreated until they were out of range and huddled together. A moment later they climbed the bank, slipping and stumbling on the slick wet earth, which was already honeycombed with
little running streamlets, holding onto branches to stay upright.
They disappeared into the underbrush.
“They’re gonna go around us, Big Bill, ” Richie said, pushing his glasses up on his nose.
“That’s oh-oh-okay, ” Bill said. “G-Go on, B-B-Ben. We’ll fuh-fuh- follow y-you. ”
Ben trotted along the embankment, paused (expecting that Henry and the others would burst out into his face at any moment), and saw the pumping- station twenty yards farther down the streambed. The others followed him to it. They could see other cylinders on the opposite bank, one fairly close, the other forty yards upstream. Those two were both shooting torrents of muddy water into the Kenduskeag, but only a trickle was coming from the pipe sticking out of the embankment below this one. It wasn’t humming, either, Ben noticed. The pumping machinery had broken down.
He looked at Bill thoughtfully . . . and with some fright.
Bill was looking at Richie, Stan, and Mike. “W-W-We g-guh-hotta get the l-l-lid oh-oh-off, ” he said. “H-H-Help m-m-me. ”
There were handholds in the iron, but the rain had made them slippery and the lid itself was incredibly heavy. Ben moved in next to Bill, and Bill shifted his hands a little to make room. Ben could hear water dripping inside—an echoey, unpleasant sound, like water dripping into a well.
“Nuh-nuh-NOW!” Bill shouted, and the five of them heaved in unison.
The lid moved with an ugly grating sound.
Beverly grabbed on beside Richie and Eddie pushed with his good arm. “One, two, three, push!” Richie chanted. The lid grated a little farther off
the top of the cylinder. Now a crescent of darkness showed. “One, two, three, push!”
The crescent fattened. “One, two, three, push!”
Ben shoved until red spots danced in front of his eyes. “Stand back!” Mike shouted. “There it goes, there it goes!”
They stood away and watched as the big circular cap overbalanced, then fell. It dug a slash in the wet earth and landed upside-down, like an oversized checker. Beetles scurried off its surface and into the matted grass.
“Uck, ” Eddie said.
Bill peered inside. Iron rungs descended to a circular pool of black water, its surface now pocked with raindrops. The silent pump brooded in the
middle of this, half-submerged. He could see water flowing into the pumping-station from the mouth of its inflow pipe, and with a sinking in his guts he thought: That’s where we have to go. In there.
“Eh-Eh-Eh-Eddie. G-Grab on to m-m-me. ” Eddie looked at him, uncomprehending.
“Like a puh-puh-pigger-back. Hold on with y-your g-g-good ah-ah-arm. ” He demonstrated.
Eddie understood but was reluctant.
“Quick!” Bill snapped. “Th-Th-They’ll b-b-be here!”
Eddie grabbed on around Bill’s neck; Stan and Mike boosted him up so he could hook his legs around Bill’s midsection. As Bill swung clumsily over the lip of the cylinder, Ben saw that Eddie’s eyes were tightly shut.
Over the rain, he could hear another sound: whipping branches, snapping twigs, voices. Henry, Victor, and Belch. The world’s ugliest cavalry charge. Bill gripped the rough concrete lip of the cylinder and felt his way down,
step by careful step. The iron rungs were slippery. Eddie had him in what
was almost a deathgrip, and Bill supposed he was getting a pretty graphic demonstration of what Eddie’s asthma was really all about.
“I’m scared, Bill, ” Eddie whispered. “I-I-I am, too. ”
He let go of the concrete rim and grabbed the topmost rung. Although Eddie was nearly choking him and felt as if he had already gained forty
pounds, Bill paused a moment, looking at the Barrens, the Kenduskeag, the racing clouds. A voice inside—not a frightened voice, just a firm one—had told him to take a good look, in case he never saw the upper world again.
So he looked, then began to descend with Eddie clinging to his back. “I can’t hold on much longer, ” Eddie managed.
“You w-w-won’t have to, ” Bill said. “We’re almost duh-hown. ”
One of his feet went into chilly water. He felt for the next rung and found it. There was another below that and then the ladder ended. He was standing in knee-deep water beside the pump.
He squatted, wincing as the cold water soaked his pants, and let Eddie off. He drew a deep breath. The smell wasn’t so hot, but it was great not to have Eddie’s arm wrapped around his throat.
He looked up at the cylinder’s mouth. It was about ten feet over his head.
The others were grouped around the rim, looking down. “C-C-Come on!” he shouted. “Wuh-one at a t-t-time! Be quick!”
Beverly came first, swinging easily over the rim and grabbing the ladder, and Stan next. The others followed. Richie came last, pausing to listen to
the progress of Henry and friends. He thought, from the sound of their blundering progress, that they would probably pass a little to the left of this pumping-station, but almost certainly not by enough to make a difference.
At that moment Victor bellowed: “Henry! There! Tozier!”
Richie looked around and saw them rushing toward him. Victor was in the lead . . . and then Henry pushed him aside so savagely that Victor
skidded to his knees. Henry had a knife, all right, a regular pigsticker. Drops of water were falling from the blade.
Richie glanced into the cylinder, saw Ben and Stan helping Mike off the ladder, and swung over himself. Henry understood what he was doing and screamed at him. Richie, laughing crazily, slammed his left hand in the crook of his right elbow and stuck his forearm skyward, his hand fisted in
what may be the world’s oldest gesture. To be sure Henry got the point, he popped his middle finger up.
“You’ll die down there!” Henry shouted.
“Prove it!” Richie shouted, laughing. He was terrified of going into this concrete throat, but he still couldn’t stop laughing. And in his Irish Cop’s Voice he bugled: “Sure an begorrah, the luck of the Irish nivver runs out, me foine lad!”
Henry slipped on the wet grass and went sprawling on his butt less than twenty feet from where Richie stood, his feet on the top rung of the ladder bolted to the inner curve of the pumping-station, his head and chest out.
“Hey, banana-heels!” Richie shouted, delirious with triumph, and then scooted down the ladder. The iron rungs were slick and once he almost fell. Then Bill and Mike grabbed him and he was standing up to his knees in water with the rest of them in a loose circle around the pump. He was trembling all over, he felt hot and cold chills chasing each other up his back, and still he couldn’t stop laughing.
“You should have seen him, Big Bill, clumsy as ever, still can’t get out of his own frockin way—”
Henry’s head appeared in the circular opening at the top. Scratches from branches and brambles crisscrossed his cheeks. His mouth was working, and his eyes blazed.
“Okay, ” he shouted down at them. His words had a flat resonance inside the concrete cylinder, not quite an echo.
“Here I come. Got you now. ”
He swung one leg over, felt for the topmost rung with his foot, found it, swung the other one over.
Speaking loud, Bill said: “W-When h-h-he guh-gets d-d-down cluh-hose e-e-enough, w-w-we all gruh-gruh-grab h-him. P-P-Pull h-him d-d-down. Duh-Duh-Duck him uh-under. G-G-Got i-it? ”
“Right-o, guv’nor, ” Richie said, and snapped a salute with one trembling hand.
“Got you, ” Ben said.
Stan tipped a wink at Eddie, who didn’t understand what was going on— except it seemed to him that Richie had gone crazy. He was laughing like a loon while Henry Bowers—the dreaded Henry Bowers—prepared to come down and kill them all like rats in a rain-barrel.
“All ready for him, Bill!” Stan cried.
Henry froze three rungs down. He looked down at the Losers over his shoulder. His face seemed, for the first time, doubtful.
Eddie suddenly got it. If they came down, they would have to come one at a time. It was too high to jump, especially with the pumping machinery to land on, and here they were, the seven of them, waiting in a tight little circle.
“Cuh-cuh-home oh-on, H-Henry, ” Bill said pleasantly. “Wuh-wuh-what are you w-w-waiting for? ”
“That’s right, ” Richie chimed in. “You like to beat up little kids, right?
Come on, Henry. ”
“We’re waiting, Henry, ” Bev said sweetly. “I don’t think you’ll like it when you get down here, but come on if you want to. ”
“Unless you’re chicken, ” Ben added. He began to make chicken sounds. Richie joined him at once and soon all of them were doing it. The derisive clucking rebounded between the damp, trickling walls. Henry looked down at them, the knife clutched in his left hand, his face the color of old bricks. He put up with perhaps thirty seconds of it and then climbed out again. The Losers sent up catcalls and insults.
“O-O-Okay, ” Bill said. He spoke in a lower voice. “W-We guh-got to get ih-ih-into that druh-hain. Quh-quh-quick. ”
“Why? ” Beverly asked, but Bill was spared the effort of an answer.
Henry reappeared at the rim of the pumping-station and dropped a rock the size of a soccer ball into the pipe. Beverly screamed and Stan pulled Eddie against the circular wall with a hoarse yell. The rock struck the pumping machinery’s rusty housing and produced a musical bonggg! It ricocheted left and struck the concrete wall, missing Eddie by less than half a foot. A chip of concrete flicked painfully against his cheek. The rock fell into the water with a splash.
“Quh-quh-quick!” Bill shouted again, and they crowded around the pumping-station’s inflow pipe. Its bore was about five feet in diameter. Bill sent them in one after another (a vague circus image—all the big clowns coming out of the little car—passed across his consciousness in a meteoric flash; years later he would use the same image in a book called The Black Rapids), and climbed in last, after ducking another rock. As they watched,
more rocks flew down, most striking the pump housing and rebounding at crazy angles.
When they stopped falling, Bill looked out and saw Henry coming down the ladder again, as quick as he could. “G-G-Get h-h-him!” he shouted to
the others. Richie, Ben, and Mike floundered out behind Bill. Richie leaped high and grabbed Henry’s ankle. Henry cursed and shook his leg as if trying to kick away a small dog with big teeth—a terrier, perhaps, or a Pekinese.
Richie grabbed a rung, scrabbled up even higher, and actually did manage to sink his teeth into Henry’s ankle. Henry screamed and pulled himself up quickly. One of his loafers came off and splashed into the water, where it sank with no ado at all.
“Bit me!” Henry was screaming. “Bit me! Cocksucker bit me!”
“Yeah, good thing I had a tetanus shot this spring!” Richie flung at him. “Bash them!” Henry was raving. “Bash them, bomb them back to the
stone age, bash their brains in!”
More rocks flew. The boys backed into the drain again quickly. Mike was struck on the arm by a small rock and he held it tight, wincing, until the pain began to abate.
“It’s a standoff, ” Ben said. “They can’t get down and we can’t get up. ” “We’re not s-supposed to get up, ” Bill said quietly, “and y-y-you all
know it. W-We’re nuh-hot e-ever supposed to g-g-get up a-again. ” They looked at him, their eyes hurt and afraid. No one said anything.
Henry’s voice, fury masquerading as mockery, floated down: “We can wait up here all day, you guys!”
Beverly had turned away and was looking back along the bore of the inflow pipe. The light grew diffuse quickly, and she could not see much.
What she could see was a concrete tunnel, its lower third filled with rushing water. It was higher on her now than it had been when they first squeezed in here, she realized; that would be because this pump wasn’t working and only some of the water was exiting on the Kenduskeag side. She felt
claustrophobia touch her throat, turning the skin there to something that felt like flannel. If the water rose enough, they would drown.
“Bill, do we have to? ”
He shrugged. It said everything. Yeah, they had to; what else was there? Be killed by Henry, Victor, and Belch in the Barrens? Or by something else
—maybe something worse—in town? She understood his thought well
enough now; there was no stutter in his shrug. Better for them to go to It. Have it out, like the showdown in a Western movie. Cleaner. Braver.
Richie said: “What was that ritual you told us about, Big Bill? The one in the library book? ”
“Ch-Ch-Chüd, ” Bill said, smiling a little.
“Chüd. ” Richie nodded. “You bite Its tongue and It bites yours, right? ” “Ruh-ruh-right. ”
“Then you tell jokes. ” Bill nodded.
“Funny, ” Richie said, looking into the dark pipe, “I can’t think of a single one. ”
“Me either, ” Ben said. The fear was heavy in his chest, almost suffocating. He felt that the only thing keeping him from just sitting down in the water and blubbering like a baby—or just going crazy—was Bill’s calm, sure presence . . . and Beverly. He felt he would rather die than show Beverly how afraid he was.
“Do you know where this pipe goes? ” Stan asked Bill. Bill shook his head.
“Do you know how to find It? ” Bill shook his head again.
“We’ll know when we’re getting close, ” Richie said suddenly. He drew a deep, trembling breath. “If we have to do it, then let’s go. ”
Bill nodded. “I’ll be f-f-first. Then Eh-Eddie. B-B-Ben. Bev. Stuh-han
the M-M-Man. M-M-Mike. You luh-last, Rih-Richie. E-Everyone k-k-keep one h-h-hand on the shuh-houlder of the p-p-person in fruh-fruh-front of y- y-you. It’s gonna be d-dark. ”
“You coming out? ” Henry Bowers shrieked down at them.
“We’re gonna come out somewhere, ” Richie muttered. “I guess. ” They formed up like a procession of blindmen. Bill looked back once,
confirming that each had a hand on the shoulder of the person ahead. Then, bending forward slightly against the rush of the current, Bill Denbrough led his friends into the dark where the boat he had made for his brother had
gone almost a year before.
