The Death of Patrick Hockstetter
When he finishes, Eddie pours himself another drink with a hand not
completely steady. He looks at Beverly and says, “You saw It, didn’t you? You saw It take Patrick Hockstetter the day after you all signed my cast. ”
The others lean forward.
Beverly pushes her hair back in a reddish cloud. Beneath it her face
looks extraordinarily pale. She fumbles a fresh cigarette out of her pack—
the last one—and flicks her Bic. She can’t seem to guide the flame to the tip of her cigarette. After a moment Bill holds her wrist lightly but firmly and
puts the flame where it’s supposed to go. Beverly looks at him gratefully and exhales a cloud of bluish-gray smoke.
“Yeah, ” she says. “I saw that happen. ” She shivers.
“He was cruh–cruh–crazy, ” Bill says, and thinks: Just the fact that Henry let a flako like Patrick Hockstetter hang around as that summer wore on . . . that says something, doesn’t it? Either that Henry was losing some of his charm, some of his attraction, or that Henry’s own craziness had progressed far enough so that the Hockstetter kid seemed okay to him. Both came to
the same thing—Henry’s increasing . . . what? degeneration? Is that the
word? Yes, in light of what happened to him, where he ended up, I think it is.
There’s something else to support the idea, too, Bill thinks, but as yet he can only remember it vaguely. He and Richie and Beverly had been down at Tracker Brothers—early August by then, and the summer-school that had kept Henry out of their hair for most of the summer was just about to end- and hadn’t Victor Criss approached them? A very frightened Victor Criss?
Yes, that had happened. Things had been rapidly approaching the end by then, and Bill thinks now that every kid in Derry had sensed it—the Losers and Henry’s group most of all. But that had been later.
“Oh yeah you got that right, ” Beverly says flatly. “Patrick Hockstetter was crazy. None of the girls would sit in front of him in school. You’d be sitting there, doing your arithmetic or writing a story or a composition, and all at once you’d feel this hand . . . almost as light as a feather, but warm and sweaty. Meaty. ” She swallows, and there is a small click in her throat. The others watch her solemnly from around the table. “You’d feel it on your side, or maybe on your breast. Not that any of us had much in the way of
breasts back then. But Patrick didn’t seem to care about that.
“You’d feel that . . . that touch, and you’d jerk away from it, and turn around, and there Patrick would be, grinning with those big rubbery lips. He had a pencil box—”
“Full of flies, ” Richie says suddenly. “Sure. He’d kill em with this green ruler he had and then put em in his pencil box. I even remember what it looked like—red, with a wavy white plastic cover that slid open and closed. ”
Eddie is nodding.
“You’d jerk away and he’d grin and then maybe he’d open his pencil box so you could see the dead flies inside, ” Beverly says. “And the worst thing
—the horrible thing—was the way he’d smile and never say anything. Mrs. Douglas knew. Greta Bowie told on him, and I think Sally Mueller said something once, too. But . . . I think Mrs. Douglas was scared of him, too. ”
Ben has rocked back on the rear legs of his chair, and his hands are laced behind his neck. She still cannot believe how lean he is. “I’m pretty sure
you’re right, ” he says.
“Wh-What h-happened to h-h-him, Beverly? ” Bill asks.
She swallows again, trying to fight off the nightmarish power of what she saw that day in the Barrens, her roller skates tied together and hung over
her shoulder, one knee a stinging net of pain from a fall she had taken on Saint Crispin’s Lane, another of the short tree-lined streets that dead-ended where the land fell (and still falls) sharply into the Barrens. She remembers (oh these memories, when they come, are so clear and so powerful) that she was wearing a pair of denim shorts—really too short, they came only to just below the hem of her panties. She had become more conscious of her body
over the last year—over the last six months, actually, as it began to curve and become more womanly. The mirror was one reason for this heightened consciousness, of course, but not the main one; the main one was that her
father seemed even sharper just lately, more apt to use his slapping hand or even his fists. He seemed restless, almost caged, and she was more and
more nervous when she was around him, more and more on her mark. It was as if there was a smell they made between them, a smell that wasn’t
there when she was in the apartment alone, one that had never been there when they were in it together—not until this summer. And when Mom was gone it was worse. If there was a smell, some smell, then he knew it too, maybe, because Bev saw less and less of him as the hot weather wore on, partly because of his summer bowling league, partly because he was helping his friend Joe Tammerly fix cars . . . but she suspects it was partly
that smell, the one they made between them, neither of them meaning to but making it just the same, as helpless to stop it as either was helpless to stop sweating in July.
The vision of the birds, hundreds and thousands of them, descending on the roofpeaks of houses, on telephone wires, on TV aerials, intervenes again.
“And poison ivy, ” she says aloud. “W-W-What? ” Bill asks.
“Something about poison ivy, ” she says slowly, looking at him. “But it wasn’t. It just felt like poison ivy. Mike—? ”
“Never mind, ” Mike says. “It will come. Tell us what you do remember, Bev. ”
I remember the blue shorts, she would tell them, and how faded they were getting; how tight around my hips and butt. I had half a pack of Lucky
Strikes in one pocket and the Bullseye in the other—
“Do you remember the Bullseye? ” she asks Richie, but they all nod. “Bill gave it to me, ” she says. “I didn’t want it, but it. . . he . . . ” She
smiles at Bill, a little wanly. “You couldn’t say no to Big Bill, that was all. So I had it and that’s why I was out by myself that day. To practice. I still didn’t think I’d have the guts to use it when the time came. Except . . . I used it that day. I had to. I killed one of them . . . one of the parts of It. It was terrible. Even now it’s hard for me to think of. And one of the others got me. Look. ”
She raises her arm and turns it over so they can all see a puckery scar on the roundest part of her upper forearm. It looks as if a hot circular object about the size of a Havana cigar had been pressed against her skin. It is
slightly sunken, and looking at it gives Mike Hanlon a chill. This is one of the parts of the story which, like Eddie’s unwilling heart-to-heart with Keene, he has suspected but never actually heard.
“You were right about one thing, Richie, ” she says. “That Bullseye was a killer. I was scared of it, but I sorta loved it, too. ”
Richie laughs and claps her on the back. “Shit, I knew that back then, you stupid skirt. ”
“You did? Really? ”
“Yeah, really, ” he says. “It was something in your eyes, Bevvie. ” “I mean, it looked like a toy, but it was real. You could blow holes in
things. ”
“And you blew a hole in something with it that day, ” Ben muses. She nods.
“Was it Patrick you—”
“No, God no!” Beverly says. “It was the other . . . wait. ” She crushes out her cigarette, sips her drink, and gets herself under control again.
Finally she is. Well . . . no. But she has a feeling it’s the closest she’s going to get tonight. “I was roller-skating, you see, and I fell down and gave myself a good scrape. Then I decided I’d go down to the Barrens and practice. I went by the clubhouse first to see if you guys were there. You
weren’t. Just that smoky smell. You guys remember how long that place went on smelling of smoke? ”
They all nod, smiling.
“We never really did get the smell out, did we? ” Ben says.
“So then I headed down to the dump, ” she says, “because that’s where we had the . . . the tryouts, I guess you’d call them, and I knew there’d be
lots of things to shoot at. Maybe even, you know, rats. ” She pauses. There’s a fine misty sweat on her forehead now. “That’s what I really wanted to shoot at, ” she says finally. “Something that was alive. Not a seagull—I
knew I couldn’t shoot a gull—but a rat . . . I wanted to see if I could.
“I’m glad I came from the Kansas Street side instead of the Old Cape side, though, because there wasn’t much cover over there by the railroad
embankment. They would have seen me and God knows what would have happened the. ”
“Who would have suh-suh-seen y-you? ”
“Them, ” Beverly says. “Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Belch Huggins, and Patrick Hockstetter. They were down in the dump and—”
Suddenly, amazing all of them, she begins to giggle like a child, her cheeks turning rose-red. She giggles until tears stand in her eyes.
“What the hell, Bev, ” Richie says. “Let us in on the joke. ”
“Oh it was a joke, all right, ” she says. “It was a joke, but I think they might have killed me if they knew I’d seen. ”
“I remember now!” Ben cries, and he begins to laugh, too. “I remember you telling us!”
Giggling wildly, Beverly says, “They had their pants down and they were lighting farts. ”
There is an instant of thunderstruck silence and then they all begin to laugh—the sound echoes through the library.
Thinking of exactly how to tell them of Patrick Hockstetter’s death, the thing she fixes on first is how approaching the town dump from the Kansas Street side was like entering some weird asteroid belt. There was a rutted dirt track (a town road, actually; it even had a name, Old Lyme Street) that ran from Kansas Street to the dump, the only actual road into the Barrens— the city’s dump trucks used it. Beverly walked near Old Lyme Street but didn’t take it—she had grown more cautious—she supposed all of them had
—since Eddie’s arm had been broken. Especially when she was alone.
She wove her way through the heavy undergrowth, skirting a patch of poison ivy with its reddish oily leaves, smelling the dump’s smoky rot, hearing the seagulls. On her left, through occasional breaks in the foliage, she could see Old Lyme Street.
The others are looking at her, waiting. She checks her cigarette pack and finds it empty. Wordlessly, Richie tosses her one of his.
She lights up, looks around at them, and says: “Heading toward the dump from the Kansas Street side was a little like
2
entering some weird asteroid belt. The dumpoid belt. At first there was nothing but the underbrush growing from the spongy ground underfoot, and then you would see your first dumpoid: a rusty can that had once contained Prince Spaghetti Sauce, maybe, or an S’OK soda bottle crawling with bugs attracted by the sweet-sticky remains of cream soda or birch beer. Then
there would be a bright wink of sun kicking off a scrap of tinfoil caught in a tree. You might see a bedspring (or trip over it, if you weren’t watching
where you were going) or a bone some dog had carried away, gnawed, dropped.
The dump itself wasn’t so bad—was, in fact, sort of interesting, Beverly thought. What was nasty (and sort of creepy) was the way it had of spreading. Of creating this dumpoid belt.
She was getting closer now; the trees were bigger, mostly firs, and the bushes were thinning out. The gulls cheeped and cried in their shrill
querulous voices, and the air was smudgy with the smell of burning.
Now, on Beverly’s right, leaning at an angle against the base of a spruce tree, was a rusty Amana refrigerator. Beverly glanced at it, thinking vaguely of the state policeman who had visited her class when she had been in the third grade. He had told them that such things as discarded refrigerators
were dangerous—a kid could climb into one while playing hide-and-go- seek, for instance, and smother to death inside. Although why anyone would want to get in a scroungy old—
She heard a shout, so close it made her jump, followed by laughter.
Beverly grinned. So they were here. They had left the clubhouse because of the smoky smell and had come down here. They were maybe breaking
bottles with rocks, maybe just dump-picking.
She began to walk a little faster, the nasty scrape she had gotten earlier now forgotten in her eagerness to see them . . . to see him, with his red hair so much like hers, to see if he would smile at her in that oddly endearing
one-sided way of his. She knew she was too young to love a boy, too young to have anything but “crushes, ” but she loved Bill just the same. And she walked a little faster, her skates swinging heavily from her shoulder, the sling of his Bullseye beating soft time against her left buttock.
She almost walked into them before realizing it wasn’t her gang at all, but Bowers’s.
She walked out of the screening bushes and the dump’s steepest side lay about seventy yards ahead, a twinkling avalanche of junk lying along the high angle of the gravelpit. Mandy Fazio’s bulldozer was off to the left.
Much closer in front of her was a wilderness of junked cars. At the end of each month these were crushed and hauled off to Portland for scrap, but
now there were a dozen or more, some sitting on bare wheel-rims, some on their sides, one or two lying on their roofs like dead dogs. They were arranged in two rows and Beverly walked down the rough trash-littered
aisle between them like some punk bride of the future, wondering idly if she could break a windshield with the Bullseye. One of the pockets of her blue shorts bulged with the small ball-bearings that were her practice ammo.
The voices and laughter were coming from beyond the junked-out cars and to the left, at the edge of the dump proper. Beverly rounded the last one, a Studebaker with its entire front end missing. Her hail of greeting died on her lips. The hand she had put up to wave did not exactly fall back to her side; it seemed to wilt.
Her first furiously embarrassed thought was: Oh dear God, why are they all naked?
This was followed by the scary realization of who they were. She froze
there in front of the half-Studebaker with her shadow stapled to the heels of her low-topped sneakers. For that one moment she was totally visible to them; if any of the four had looked up from the circle they were squatting in, he could not have missed her, a girl of slightly more than medium height, a pair of skates over one shoulder, the knee of one long coltish leg still oozing blood, her mouth slack-jawed, her cheeks scarlet.
Before darting back behind the Studebaker she saw that they weren’t entirely naked after all; they had their shirts on, and their pants and
underpants were simply pulled down to their shoetops, as if they had to Go Number Two (in her shock, Beverly’s mind had automatically reverted to
the euphemism she had been taught as a toddler)—except whoever heard of four boys Going Number Two at the same time?
Once out of sight again, her first thought was to get away—get away fast.
Her heart was pumping hard, her muscles heavy with adrenaline. She looked around, seeing what she hadn’t bothered to notice walking up here, when she had thought the voices she heard belonged to her friends. The row
of junked cars on her left was really pretty thin—they were by no means packed in door to door as they would be in the week or so before the crusher came to turn them into rough blocks of twinkling metal. She had been exposed to the boys several times walking up to where she was now; if she retreated, she would be exposed again, and this time she might be seen.
Also, she felt a certain shameful curiosity: what in the world could they be doing?
Carefully, she peeked around the Studebaker.
Henry and Victor Criss were more or less facing in her direction. Patrick Hockstetter was on Henry’s left. Belch Huggins had his back to her. She observed the fact that Belch had an extremely large, extremely hairy ass, and half-hysterical giggles suddenly bubbled up her throat like the head on a glass of ginger ale. She had to clap both hands over her mouth and
withdraw behind the Studebaker again, struggling to hold the giggles in.
You’ve got to get out of here, Beverly. If they catch you— She looked back down between the junked cars, still holding her hands over her mouth.
The aisle was maybe ten feet wide, littered with cans, twinkling with little jigsaw pieces of Saf-T-Glas, scruffy with weeds. If she so much as made a sound, they might hear her . . . particularly if their absorption in whatever strange thing they were doing flagged. When she thought of how casually she had walked up here, her blood ran cold. Also . . .
What in the world can they be doing?
She peeked again, seeing more of the details this time. There was a
careless scatter of books and papers nearby—schoolbooks. They had just
come from their summer classes, then, what most of the kids called Dummy School or Make-up School. And, because Henry and Victor were facing her way, she could see their things. They were the first things she had ever seen in her life, other than pictures in a smudgy little book that Brenda Arrowsmith had showed her the year before, and in those pictures you really couldn’t see very much. Bev observed now that their things were
little tubes that hung down between their legs. Henry’s was small and hairless, but Victor’s was quite big, and there was a cloudy fuzz of fine black hair just over it.
Bill has one of those, she thought, and suddenly her whole body seemed to flush at once—heat rushed through her in a wave that made her feel giddy and faint and almost sick to her stomach. In that moment she felt
much the way Ben Hanscom had felt on the last day of school, looking down at her ankle bracelet and observing the way it flashed in the sun . . . but he had not felt the intermixed sense of terror she felt now.
She looked behind her once more. Now the pathway between the cars leading to the shelter of the Barrens seemed much longer. She was scared to move. If they knew she had seen their things, they would probably hurt her. And not just a little. They would hurt her badly.
Belch Huggins bellowed suddenly, making her jump, and Henry yelled: “Three feet! No shit, Belch! It was three feet! Wasn’t it, Vic? ”
Vic agreed it was, and they all roared with troll-like laughter. Beverly tried another look around the junked Studebaker. Patrick
Hockstetter had turned and half-risen so that his butt was nearly in Henry’s face. In Henry’s hand was a silvery, glinting object. After a moment’s study she made it out as a lighter.
“I thought you said you felt one coming on, ” Henry said.
“I do, ” Patrick said. “I’ll tell you when. Get ready! . . . Get ready, it’s coming! Get . . . now!”
Henry flicked the lighter. At the same moment there was the
unmistakable ripping sound of a really good fart. There was no mistaking that sound; Beverly had heard it enough in her own house, usually on Saturday night, after the beans and franks. A regular bear for his beans was her father. As Patrick blew off and Henry flicked the lighter, she saw something that made her jaw drop. A bright blue jet of flame appeared to roar directly out of Patrick’s bum. To Bev it looked like the pilot-light on a gas-burner.
The boys roared their troll-like laughter and Beverly withdrew behind the sheltering car, stifling mad giggles again. She was laughing, but not because she was amused. In some very weird way it was funny, yes, but mostly she was laughing because she felt a deep revulsion accompanied by a sort of horror. She was laughing because she knew of no other way to cope with what she had seen. It had something to do with seeing the boys’ things, but that was by no means all or even the great part of what she felt. She had known, after all, that boys had things, the same way she knew that girls had different things; this was only what you might call a confirmed sighting.
But the rest of what they were doing seemed so strange, so ludicrous and
yet at the same time so deadly-primitive that she found herself, in spite of the giggling fit, groping for the core of herself with some desperation.
Stop, she thought, as if this were the answer, stop, they’ll hear you, so just you stop it, Bevvie!
But that was impossible. The best she could do was to laugh without engaging her vocal cords, so that the sounds came out of her in a series of almost inaudible chuffs, her hands pasted over her mouth, her cheeks as red as Mac apples, her eyes swimming with tears.
“Holy shit, that hurts!” Victor roared.
“Twelve feet!” Henry bellowed. “I swear to God, Vic, twelve fuckin feet!
I swear it on my mother’s name!”
“I don’t care if it was twenty fuckin feet, you burned my ass off!” Victor howled, and there was more bellowing laughter ; still trying to giggle silently from behind the sheltering car, Beverly thought of a movie she had seen on TV. Jon Hall had been in it. It was about this jungle tribe, they had a secret rite, and if you saw it, you got sacrificed to their god, which was this big stone idol. This did not stop her giggles, but infused them with a nearly frantic quality. They were becoming more and more like silent screams. Her belly hurt. Tears streamed down her face.
3
Henry, Victor, Belch, and Patrick Hockstetter ended up in the dump lighting each others’ farts on that hot July afternoon because of Rena Davenport.
Henry knew what resulted from consuming large amounts of baked beans. This result was perhaps best expressed in a little ditty he had learned at his father’s knee when he was still in short pants: Beans, beans, the musical fruit! The more you eat, the more you toot! The more you toot, the better you feel! Then you’re ready for another meal!
Rena Davenport and his father had been courting for nearly eight years.
She was fat, forty, and usually filthy. Henry supposed that Rena and his father sometimes fucked, although he could not imagine anyone squashing his body down on Rena Davenport’s.
Rena’s beans were her pride. She soaked them Saturday nights and baked them over a slow fire all day Sunday. Henry supposed they were okay— they were something to shovel into your mouth and chew up, anyway—but after eight years anything lost its charm.
Nor was Rena content to make just a few beans; she cooked them in job lots. When she turned up Sunday evenings in her old green De Soto (a naked rubber babydoll hung from the rearview mirror, looking like the world’s youngest lynch-mob victim), she usually had the Bowerses’ beans steaming on the seat beside her in a twelve-gallon galvanized-steel pail. The three of them would eat the beans that night (Rena raving about her own cooking all the while, crazy Butch Bowers grunting and mopping up
beanjuice with a piece of Sonny Boy bread or simply telling her to shut up if there was a ballgame on the radio, Henry just eating, staring out the
window, thinking his own thoughts—it was over a plate of Sunday-night beans that he had conceived the idea of poisoning Mike Hanlon’s dog Mr.
Chips), and Butch would reheat a mess of them the next night. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays Henry would take a Tupperware box full of them to school. By Thursday or Friday, neither Henry nor his father could eat any more. The house’s two bedrooms would smell of stale farts in spite of the open windows. Butch would take the remains and mix them into the other
slops and feed them to Bip and Bop, the Bowerses’ two pigs. Rena would like as not show up the following Sunday with another steaming pail, and the cycle would start all over again.
That morning Henry had put up an enormous quantity of leftover beans, and the four of them had eaten the whole lot at noon, sitting out on the playground in the shade of a big old elm. They had eaten until they were nearly bursting.
It had been Patrick who suggested they go down to the dump, which would be fairly quiet in the middle of a working-day summer afternoon. By the time they arrived, the beans were doing their work quite nicely.
4
Little by little, Beverly got herself under control again. She knew she had to get out; beating a retreat was ultimately less dangerous than hanging around. They were absorbed in what they were doing, and even if worse
came to worst, she could get a head-start (and in the back of her mind she had also decided that, if worst came to terrible, a few shots from the
Bullseye might discourage them).
She was about to begin creeping away when Victor said, “I gotta go, Henry. My dad wants me to help him pick corn this afternoon. ”
“Oh shit, ” Henry said. “He’ll live. ”
“No, he’s mad at me. Because of what happened the other day. ” “Fuck him if he can’t take a joke. ”
Beverly listened more closely now, suspecting it might be the scuffle which had ended with Eddie’s broken arm that they were talking about.
“No, I gotta go. ”
“I think his ass hurts, ” Patrick said.
“Watch your mouth, fuckface, ” Victor said. “It might grow on you. ” “I got to go too, ” Belch said.
“Your father want you to pick corn? ” Henry asked angrily. This was what might have passed for a jest in Henry’s mind; Belch’s father was dead.
“No. But I got a job delivering the Weekly Shopper. I gotta do that tonight. ”
“What’s this Weekly Shopper crap? ” Henry asked, now sounding upset as well as angry.
“It’s a job, ” Belch said with ponderous patience. “I make money. ”
Henry made a disgusted sound, and Beverly risked another peek around the car. Victor and Belch were standing, buckling their belts. Henry and Patrick were still squatting with their pants down. The lighter glinted in Henry’s hand.
“You’re not chickening out, are you? ” Henry asked Patrick. “Nope, ” Patrick said.
“You don’t have to pick corn or go do some pussy job? ” “Nope, ” Patrick said again.
“Well, ” Belch said uncertainly, “see you around, Henry. ” “Sure, ” Henry said, and spat near one of Belch’s clodhopping
workshoes.
Vic and Belch started off together toward the two rows of wrecked cars . .
. toward the Studebaker behind which Beverly was crouching. At first she could only cringe, frozen with fear like a rabbit. Then she slid around the left side of the Studebaker and backed down the gap between it and the battered, doorless Ford next to it. For a moment she paused, looking from side to side, hearing them approach. She hesitated, her mouth cottony-dry, her back itchy with sweat; a part of her mind was numbly wondering how she’d look in a cast like Eddie’s, with the Losers’ names signed on it. Then she dived into the Ford on the passenger side. She curled up on the filthy floormat, making herself as small as possible. It was boiling hot inside the junked-out Ford, and it smelled so thickly of dust, rotting upholstery, and elderly rat-crap that she had to struggle grimly to keep from sneezing or coughing. She heard Belch and Victor pass close by, talking in low voices. Then they were gone.
She sneezed three times, quickly and quietly, into her cupped hands.
She supposed she could go now, if she was careful. The best way to do it would be to shift over to the driver’s side of the Ford, sneak back to the aisle, and then just do a fade. She believed she could manage it, but the shock of almost being discovered had robbed her of her courage, at least for the time being. She felt safer here in the Ford. And maybe, now that Victor and Belch had gone, the other two would also go soon. Then she could go back to the clubhouse. She had lost all interest in target-shooting.
Also, she had to pee.
Come on, she thought. Come on, hurry up and go, hurry up and go, puh- LEEZE!
A moment later she heard Patrick roar with mixed laughter and pain. “Six feet!” Henry bellowed. “Just like a fuckin blowtorch! Swear to
God!”
Silence then for awhile. Sweat trickling down her back. The sun beating through the Ford’s cracked windshield on the nape of her neck. Heaviness in her bladder.
Henry bellowed so loud that Beverly, who had been close to dozing in spite of her discomfort, almost cried out herself.
“Damn it, Hockstetter! You burned my frigging ass! What are you doing with that lighter? ”
“Ten feet, ” Patrick giggled (just the sound of it made Bev feel cold and revolted, as if she had seen a worm squirm its way out of her salad). “Ten feet if it was an inch, Henry. Bright blue. Ten feet if it was an inch. Swear to God!”
“Gimme that, ” Henry grunted.
Come on, come on, you stupidniks, go, get out!
When Patrick spoke again his voice was so low Bev could barely hear it.
If there had been the slightest breath of wind on the air that baking afternoon, she would not have done.
“Let me show you something, ” Patrick said. “What? ” Henry asked.
“Just something. ” Patrick paused. “It feels good. ” “What? ” Henry asked again.
Then there was silence.
I don’t want to look, I don’t want to see what they’re doing now, and besides, they might see me, in fact they probably will because you’ve used up all your luck today, girly-o. So just stay right here. No peeking . . .
But her curiosity had overcome her good sense. There was something
strange in that silence, something a little bit scary. She raised her head inch by inch until she could look through the Ford’s cracked cloudy windshield. She needn’t have worried about being seen; both of the boys were concentrating on what Patrick was doing. She didn’t understand what she was seeing, but she knew it was nasty . . . not that she would have expected anything else from Patrick, who was just so weird.
He had one hand between Henry’s thighs and one hand between his own.
One hand was flogging Henry’s thing gently; with his other hand Patrick
was rubbing his own. Except he wasn’t exactly rubbing it—he was kind of .
. . squoozing it, pulling it, letting it flop back down.
What is he doing? Beverly wondered, dismayed.
She didn’t know, not for sure, but it scared her. She didn’t think she had been this scared since the blood had vomited out of the bathroom drain and splattered all over everything. Some deep part of her cried out that if they discovered she had seen this, whatever it was, they might do more than hurt her; they might actually kill her.
Still, she couldn’t look away.
She saw that Patrick’s thing had gotten a little longer, but not much; it still dangled between his legs like a snake with no backbone. Henry’s, however, had grown amazingly. It stood up stiff and hard, almost poking his bellybutton. Patrick’s hand went up and down, up and down, sometimes pausing to squeeze, sometimes tickling that odd, heavy sac under Henry’s thing.
Those are his balls, Beverly thought. Do boys have to go around with those all the time? God, I’d go crazy! Another part of her mind then whispered: Bill has those. On its own, her mind visualized her holding
them, cupping them in her hand, testing their texture . . . and that hot feeling raced through her again, sparking off a furious blush.
Henry stared at Patrick’s hand as if hypnotized. His lighter lay on the rocky scree beside him, reflecting hot afternoon sun.
“Want me to put it in my mouth? ” Patrick asked. His big, livery lips smiled complacently.
“Huh? ” Henry asked, as if startled from some deep dream.
“I’ll put it in my mouth if you want. I don’t m—” Henry’s hand flashed out, half-curled, not quite a fist. Patrick was knocked sprawling. His head thudded on the gravel. Beverly dived down again, her heart crashing in her chest, her teeth locked against a little whimpering moan. After knocking Patrick down, Henry had turned and for a moment, just before she dropped back into her little huddled ball on the passenger side of the driveshaft hump, it seemed that her eyes and Henry’s had locked.
Please God the sun was in his eyes, she prayed. Please God I’m sorry I peeked. Please God.
There was an agonizing pause then. Her white blouse was plastered to her body with sweat. Droplets like seed pearls gleamed on her tanned arms. Her bladder throbbed painfully. She felt that very soon she would wet her pants. She waited for Henry’s furious crazy face to appear in the opening
where the Ford’s passenger door had been, sure it was going to happen— how could he have missed seeing her? He would drag her out and hurt her. He would—
A new and even more terrible thought now occurred to her, and once again she had to engage in a painful, crampy struggle to keep from wetting her pants. Suppose he did something to her with his thing? Suppose he wanted her to put it in her somewhere? She knew where it was supposed to
go, all right; it seemed that knowledge had suddenly sprung into her mind full-blown. She thought that if Henry tried to put his thing in her she would go crazy.
Please no, please God don’t let him have seen me, please, okay?
Then Henry spoke, and to her growing horror his voice was coming from someplace much closer. “I don’t go for that queer stuff. ”
From farther off, Patrick’s voice: “You liked it. ”
“I didn’t like it!” Henry shouted. “And if you tell anyone I did, I’ll kill you, you fucking little pansy!”
“You got a boner, ” Patrick said. He sounded like he was smiling. As much as she feared Henry Bowers, the smile would not have surprised Beverly. Patrick was crazy, crazier than Henry, maybe, and people that crazy weren’t afraid of anything. “I saw it. ”
Footsteps crunched over the gravel—closer and closer. Beverly looked up, her eyes bulging. Through the Ford’s old windshield she could now see the back of Henry’s head. He was looking toward Patrick now, but if he turned around—
“If you tell anyone, I’ll say you’re a cocksucker, ” Henry said. “Then I’ll kill you. ”
“You don’t scare me, Henry, ” Patrick said, and giggled. “But I might not tell if you gave me a dollar. ”
Henry shifted restlessly. He turned slightly; Beverly could now see one- quarter of his profile instead of just the back of his head. Please God please God, she begged incoherently, and her bladder throbbed more strongly.
“If you tell, ” Henry said, his voice low and deliberate, “I’ll tell what you’ve been doing with the cats. With the dogs, too. I’ll tell them about
your refrigerator. You know what’ll happen, Hockstetter? They’ll come and take you away and put you into the fucking-A looneybin. ”
Silence from Patrick.
Henry drummed his fingers on the hood of the Ford Beverly was hiding in. “Do you hear me? ”
“I hear you. ” Patrick sounded sullen now. Sullen and a little scared. He burst out: “You liked it! You got a boner! Biggest boner I ever saw!”
“Yeah, I bet you seen a lot of em, you fuckin little homo faggot. You just remember what I said about the refrigerator. Your refrigerator. And if I see you around again, I’ll knock your block off. ”
More silence from Patrick.
Henry moved away. Beverly turned her head and saw him pass by the driver’s side of the Ford. If he had looked to his left even a little bit, he would have seen her. But he didn’t look. A moment later she heard him heading off the way Victor and Belch had gone.
Now there was just Patrick.
Beverly waited, but nothing happened. Five minutes dragged by. Her need to urinate was now desperate. She might be able to hold out for another two or three minutes, but no more. And it made her uneasy not to know for sure where Patrick was.
She peeked through the windshield again and saw him just sitting there. Henry had forgotten his lighter. Patrick had put his schoolbooks back into a small canvas carrier sack and had slung it around his neck like a newsboy’s, but his pants and underpants were still down around his ankles. He was playing with the lighter. He would spin the wheel, produce a flame that was almost invisible in the bright day, snap the lighter closed, and then start all over again. He seemed hypnotized. A line of blood ran from the corner of
his mouth to his chin, and his lips were swelling up on the right side. He seemed not to notice, and once again Beverly felt a squirmy sort of revulsion. Patrick was crazy, all right; she had never in her life wanted so badly to get away from someone.
Moving very carefully, she crawled backward over the Ford’s driveshaft hump and squeezed under the steering wheel. She put her feet out on the ground and crept to the back of the Ford. Then she ran quickly back the way she had come. When she had entered the pines beyond the junked cars, she looked back over her shoulder. No one was there. The dump dozed in
the sun. She felt the bands of tension around her chest and stomach loosen with relief, and all that was left was the need to urinate, so great that she
now felt sick with it.
She hurried down the path a short way and then ducked off to the right.
She had her shorts unsnapped almost before the underbrush had closed behind her again. She took a quick look around to make sure there was no poison ivy at hand; then she squatted, holding the tough trunk of a bush for balance.
She was pulling her shorts up again when she heard approaching
footsteps from the dump. All she could see through the bushes were flashes
of blue denim and the faded plaid of a school-shirt. It was Patrick. She ducked down, waiting for him to pass by toward Kansas Street. She was more sanguine about her position here. The cover was good, she no longer had to pee, and Patrick was off in his own cuckoo world. When he was
gone she would double back and head for the clubhouse.
But Patrick didn’t pass by. He stopped on the path almost directly opposite her and stood looking at the rusting Amana refrigerator.
Beverly could observe Patrick along a natural sight-line in the bushes without too much chance of being seen. Now that she was relieved, she found she was curious again—and if Patrick did happen to see her, she felt certain she could outrun him. He wasn’t as fat as Ben, but he was podgy.
She pulled the Bullseye out of her back pocket, however, and put half a dozen steel pellets in the breast pocket of her old Ship ’n Shore. Crazy or not, a good one to the knee might discourage the likes of Patrick Hockstetter in a hurry.
She remembered the refrigerator well enough now. There were lots of discarded fridges at the dump, but it suddenly occurred to her that this was the only one she’d seen which Mandy Fazio hadn’t disarmed by either tearing out the latching mechanism with pliers or simply removing the door altogether.
Patrick began to hum and sway back and forth in front of the rusty old refrigerator, and Beverly felt a fresh chill course through her. He was like a guy in a horror movie trying to summon a dead body out of a crypt.
What’s he up to?
But if she had known that, or what was going to happen when Patrick finished his private ritual and opened the dead Amana’s rusty door, she would have run away as fast as she could.
5
No one—not even Mike Hanlon—had the slightest idea of how crazy Patrick Hockstetter really was. He was twelve, the son of a paint salesman. His mother was a devout Catholic who would die of breast cancer in 1962, four years after Patrick was consumed by the dark entity which existed in
and below Derry. Although his IQ tested out as low normal, Patrick had already repeated two grades, the first and third. He was taking summer classes this year so he would not have to repeat the fifth as well. His
teachers found him an apathetic student (this several of them noted on the bare six lines of the Derry Elementary School’s report cards reserved for TEACHER’S COMMENTS) and a rather disturbing one as well (which none noted—their feelings were too vague, too diffuse, to be expressed in sixty lines, let alone six). If he had been born ten years later, a guidance
counsellor might have steered him toward a child psychologist who might (or might not; Patrick was far more clever than his lackluster IQ results indicated) have realized the frightening depths behind that slack and pallid moonface.
He was a sociopath, and perhaps, by that hot July in 1958, he had become a full-fledged psychopath. He could not remember a time when he had believed that other people—any other living creatures, for that matter—
were “real. ” He believed himself to be an actual creature, probably the only one in the universe, but was by no means convinced that his actuality made him “real. ” He had no sense of hurting, exactly, and no real sense of being hurt (his indifference to being struck in the mouth by Henry in the dump
was a case in point). But while he found reality a totally meaningless concept, he understood the concept of “rules” perfectly. And while all of his teachers had found him odd (both Mrs. Douglas, his fifth-grade teacher, and Mrs. Weems, who had had Patrick in the third grade, knew about the pencil- box full of flies, and while neither of them totally ignored the implications, each had between twenty and twenty-eight other students, each with
problems of his or her own), none of them had serious disciplinary
problems with him. He might turn in test papers that were utterly blank—or blank except for a large, decorative question-mark-and Mrs. Douglas had discovered it was best to keep him away from the girls because of his Roman hands and Russian fingers, but he was quiet, so quiet that there were times when he might have been taken for a big lump of clay that had been crudely fashioned to look like a boy. It was easy to ignore a Patrick, who failed quietly, when you had to cope with boys like Henry Bowers and Victor Criss, who were actively disruptive and insolent, boys who would steal milk-money or happily deface school property if given a chance, and
girls like the unfortunately named Elizabeth Taylor, who was epileptic and
whose few poor brain-cells worked only sporadically and who had to be discouraged from pulling her dresses up in the playyard to show off a new pair of panties. In other words, Derry Elementary School was the typical confused educational carnival, a circus with so many rings that Pennywise himself might have gone unnoticed. Certainly none of Patrick’s teachers (or his parents, for that matter) suspected that, when he was five, Patrick had murdered his baby brother Avery.
Patrick had not liked it when his mother brought Avery home from the hospital. He didn’t care (or so he at first told himself) if his parents had two kids, five kids, or five dozen kids, as long as the kid or kids didn’t alter his own schedule. But he found that Avery did. Meals came late. The baby cried in the night and woke him up. It seemed that his parents were always hanging over its crib, and often when he tried to get their attention he found that he could not. For one of the few times in his life, Patrick became frightened. It occurred to him that if his parents had brought him, Patrick,
home from the hospital, and if he was “real, ” then Avery might be “real, ” too. It might even be that, when Avery got big enough to walk and talk, to bring in his father’s copy of the Derry News from the front step and to hand his mother the bowls when she baked bread, they might decide to get rid of Patrick altogether. It was not that he feared they loved Avery more (although it was obvious to Patrick that they did love him more, and in this case his judgment was probably correct). What he cared about was (1) the
rules that were being broken or had changed since Avery’s arrival, (2) Avery’s possible reality, and (3) the possibility that they might throw him out in favor of Avery.
Patrick went into Avery’s room one afternoon around two-thirty, shortly after the school-bus had dropped him off from his afternoon kindergarten session. It was January. Outside, snow was beginning to fall. A powerful wind boomed across McCarron Park and rattled the frosty upstairs storm windows. His mother was napping in her bedroom; Avery had been fussy all the previous night. His father was at work. Avery was sleeping on his stomach, his head turned to one side.
Patrick, his moonface expressionless, turned Avery’s head so his face was pressed directly into the pillow. Avery made a snuffling noise and turned his head back to the side. Patrick observed this, and stood thinking about it
while the snow melted off his yellow boots and puddled on the floor.
Perhaps five minutes passed (quick thinking was not Patrick’s specialty), and then he turned Avery’s face into the pillow again and held it there for a moment. Avery stirred under his hand, struggling. But his struggles were weak. Patrick let go. Avery turned his head to the side again, made one snorting little cry, and then went on sleeping. The wind gusted, rattling the windows. Patrick waited to see if the one little cry would awaken his mother. It didn’t.
Now he felt swept by a great excitement. The world seemed to stand out in front of him clearly for the first time. His emotional equipment was severely defective, and in those few moments he felt as a totally color-blind person might feel if given a shot which enabled him to perceive colors for a short time . . . or as a junkie who has just fixed feels as the smack rockets
his brain into orbit. This was a new thing. He had not suspected it existed.
Very gently, he turned Avery’s face into the pillow again. This time when Avery struggled, Patrick did not let go. He pressed the baby’s face more firmly into the pillow. The baby was making steady muffled cries now, and Patrick knew it was awake. He had a vague idea that it might tell on him to his mother if he stopped. He held it down. The baby struggled. Patrick held it down. The baby farted. Its struggles weakened. Patrick still held it down. It eventually became totally still. Patrick held it down for another five minutes, feeling that excitement crest and then begin to ebb: the shot wearing off, turning the world gray again, the fix mellowing into an accustomed low doze.
Patrick went downstairs and got himself a plate of cookies and poured himself a glass of milk. His mother came down half an hour later and said she hadn’t even heard him come in, she had been that tired (you won’t be anymore, mom, Patrick thought, don’t worry, I fixed it). She sat down with him, ate one of his cookies, and asked him how school had been. Patrick said it was all right and showed her his drawing of a house and a tree. His
paper was covered with looping meaningless scribbles made with black and brown crayon. His mother said it was very nice. Patrick brought home the
same looping scrawls of black and brown every day. Sometimes he said it was a turkey, sometimes a Christmas tree, sometimes a boy. His mother
always told him it was very nice . . . although sometimes, in a part of her so deep she hardly knew it was there, she worried. There was something a
little disquieting about the dark sameness of those big scribbled loops of black and brown.
She didn’t discover Avery’s death until nearly five o’clock; until then she had simply assumed he was taking a very long nap. By then Patrick was watching Crusader Rabbit on their seven-inch TV, and he went on watching TV through all the uproar that followed. Whirlybirds was on when Mrs.
Henley arrived from next door (his screaming mother had been holding the baby’s corpse in the open kitchen door, believing in some blind way that the cold air might revive it; Patrick was cold and got a sweater out of the
downstairs closet). Highway Patrol, Ben Hanscom’s favorite, was on when Mr. Hockstetter arrived home from work. By the time the doctor arrived,
Science Fiction Theater, with Your Host Truman Bradley, was just coming on. “Who knows what strange things the universe may hold? ” Truman Bradley speculated while Patrick’s mother shrieked and struggled in her husband’s arms in the kitchen. The doctor observed Patrick’s deep calm and unquestioning stare and assumed the boy was in shock. He wanted Patrick to take a pill. Patrick didn’t mind.
It was diagnosed as crib-death. Years later there might have been
questions about such a fatality, deviations from the usual infant-death
syndrome observed. But when it happened, the death was simply noted and the baby buried. Patrick was gratified that once things finally settled down his meals began to come on time again.
In the madness of that afternoon and evening—people banging in and out of the house, the red lights of the Home Hospital ambulance pulsing on the walls, Mrs. Hockstetter screaming and wailing and refusing to be comforted
—only Patrick’s father came within brushing distance of the truth. He was standing numbly by Avery’s empty crib some twenty minutes after the body had been removed, simply standing there, unable to believe any of this had happened. He looked down and saw a pair of tracks on the hardwood floor. They had been made by the snow melting off Patrick’s yellow rubber boots. He looked at them, and a dreadful thought rose briefly in his mind like bad gas from a deep mineshaft. His hand went slowly to his mouth and his eyes widened. A picture began to form in his mind. Before it could come clear
he left the room, slamming the door behind him so hard that the top of the frame splintered.
He never asked Patrick any questions.
Patrick had never done anything like that again, although he might have done so if the chance had presented itself. He felt no guilt, had no bad dreams. As time passed, however, he became more aware of what would
have happened to him if he had been caught. There were rules. Unpleasant things happened to you if you didn’t follow them . . . or if you were caught breaking them. You could be locked up or stuck in the electrocution chair.
But that remembered feeling of excitement—that feeling of color and sensation—was simply too powerful and too wonderful to give over entirely. Patrick killed flies. At first he only smacked them with his
mother’s flyswatter; later he discovered he could kill them quite efficiently with a plastic ruler. He also discovered the joys of flypaper. A long sticky runner of it could be purchased for two cents at the Costello Avenue Market and Patrick sometimes stood for as long as two hours in the garage, watching the flies land and then struggle to get free, his mouth ajar, his dusty eyes alight with that rare excitement, sweat running down his round
face and his thick body. Patrick killed beetles, but if possible he captured them first. Sometimes he would steal a long needle from his mother’s pincushion, impale a Japanese beetle on it, and sit cross-legged in the garden watching it die. His expression at these times was the expression of a boy who is reading a very good book. Once he had discovered a run-over cat that was dying in the gutter on Lower Main Street and sat watching it until an old woman saw him pushing the squashed and mewing thing around with his foot. She whacked him with the broom she had been using to sweep her walk. Go on home! she had shouted at him. What are you, crazy? Patrick had gone on home. He wasn’t mad at the old woman. He had been caught breaking the rules, that was all.
Then, last year (it would not have surprised Mike Hanlon or any of the others at that point to have known that it was, in fact, on the same day that George Denbrough had been murdered), Patrick had discovered the rusty
Amana refrigerator—one of the larger dumpoids in the belt surrounding the dump itself.
Like Bev, he had heard the cautionary warnings about such abandoned appliances, about how thirty-squirty million kids got their stupid selves smoked in them each year. Patrick had stood looking at the refrigerator for a long time, idly playing pocket-pool with himself. That excitement was back, stronger than it had ever been, except for the time he had fixed Avery.
The excitement was back because, in the chilly yet fuming wastes that passed for his mind, Patrick Hockstetter had had an idea.
The Luces, who lived three houses down from the Hockstetters, missed their cat, Bobby, a week later. The Luce kids, who couldn’t remember a
time when Bobby hadn’t been there, spent hours combing the neighborhood for him. They even pooled their money and put an ad in the Derry News Lost and Found column. Nothing came of it. And if any of them had seen Patrick that day, bulkier than ever in his mothball-smelling winter parka (after the floodwaters receded in that fall of ’57, it had come off bitterly cold almost at once), carrying a cardboard carton, they would have thought nothing of it.
The Engstroms, a block over and almost directly behind the Hockstetter home, lost their cocker pup about ten days before Thanksgiving. Other
families lost dogs and cats over the next six or eight months, and Patrick of course had taken them all, not to mention a dozen unremarked strays from the Hell’s Half-Acre area of Derry.
He put them into the rusty Amana near the dump, one by one. Each time he brought another animal down, his heart thundering in his chest, his eyes hot and watery with excitement, he would expect to find that Mandy Fazio had pulled the Amana’s latch or popped the hinges with his sledgehammer.
But Mandy never touched that particular refrigerator. Perhaps he didn’t
realize it was there, perhaps the force of Patrick’s will kept him away . . . or perhaps some other force did that.
The Engstroms’ cocker lasted the longest. In spite of the single-number cold, it was still alive when Patrick came back for the third time in as many days, although it had lost all of its friskiness (it had been wagging its tail and lapping his hands frantically when he originally hauled it out of the box and stuffed it into the refrigerator). When he came back a day after putting it in, the puppy had damn near gotten away. Patrick had to chase it almost all the way to the dump before he was able to jump it and get hold of one rear leg. The puppy had nipped Patrick with its sharp little teeth. Patrick didn’t mind. In spite of the nips, he had taken the cocker back to the refrigerator and bundled it back in. He had a hard-on when he did it. This
was not uncommon.
On the second day the puppy had tried to get out again, but it moved much too slowly. Patrick shoved it back in, slammed the Amana’s rusty
door, and leaned against it. He could hear the puppy scratching against the door. He could hear its muffled whines. “Good dog, ” said Patrick Hockstetter. His eyes were closed and he was breathing fast. “That’s a good dog. ” On the third day the puppy could only roll its eyes toward Patrick’s
face when the door opened. Its sides were heaving rapidly and shallowly. When Patrick returned the next day, the cocker was dead with a cake of foam frozen around its mouth and muzzle. This made Patrick think of coconut Popsicles, and he laughed quite hard as he hauled the frozen corpse from his killing-bottle and thew it in the bushes.
The supply of victims (which Patrick thought of, when he thought of them at all, as “test animals”) had been thin this summer. Questions of reality aside, his sense of self-preservation was well developed, his intuition exquisite. He suspected he was suspected. By whom he was not sure: Mr.
Engstrom? Perhaps. Mr. Engstrom had turned around and given Patrick a long speculative look in the A&P one day this spring. Mr. Engstrom had been buying cigarettes and Patrick had been sent for bread. Mrs. Josephs? Maybe. She sat in her parlor window with a telescope sometimes and was, according to Mrs. Hockstetter, a “nosy parker. ” Mr. Jacubois, who had an ASPCA sticker on the back bumper of his car? Mr. Nell? Someone else?
Patrick didn’t know for sure, but his intuition told him he was suspected, and he never argued with his intuition. He had taken a few wandering
animals from among the rotted tenements in the Half-Acre, picking only those that looked thin or diseased, but that was all.
He discovered, however, that the refrigerator near the dump had gotten an oddly powerful hold over him. He began to draw pictures of it in school when he was bored. He sometimes dreamed of it at night, and in his dreams the Amana was perhaps seventy feet tall, a whited sepulchre, a ponderous crypt iced in chilly moonlight. In these dreams the giant door would swing open and he would see huge eyes staring out at him. He would awake in a cold sweat, but he found he could not give up the joys of the refrigerator entirely.
Today he had finally found out who had suspected. Bowers. Knowing that Henry Bowers held the secret of his killing-bottle in his hands left Patrick as close to panic as he was ever apt to get. This was not very close at all, in truth, but he still found this—not fear exactly, but mental unrest—
oppressive and unpleasant. Henry knew. Knew that Patrick sometimes broke the rules.
His latest victim had been a pigeon he discovered on Jackson Street two days ago. The pigeon had been struck by a car and couldn’t fly. Patrick went home, got his box out of the garage, and put the pigeon inside. The pigeon pecked the back of Patrick’s hand several times, leaving shallow, bloody digs. Patrick didn’t mind. When he checked the refrigerator the next day, the pigeon had been quite dead, but Patrick hadn’t removed the corpse then. Now, following Henry’s threat to tell, Patrick decided he better get rid of the pigeon’s body right away. Perhaps he would even get a bucket of water and some rags and scrub out the interior of the refrigerator. It didn’t smell very good. If Henry told and Mr. Nell came down to check, he might be able to tell that something—several somethings, in fact—had died in there.
If he tells, Patrick thought, standing in the grove of pines and looking at the rusty Amana, I’ll tell that he broke Eddie Kaspbrak’s arm. Of course they probably knew that already, but they couldn’t prove anything because all of them said they had been playing out at Henry’s house that day and Henry’s crazy father had backed them up. But if he tells, I’ll tell. Tit for tat.
Never mind that now. What he had to do now was get rid of the bird. He would leave the refrigerator door open and then come back with the rags and the water and clean it up. Good.
Patrick opened the refrigerator door on his own death.
At first he was simply puzzled, unable to cope in any way with what he was seeing. It meant nothing to him at all. It had no context. Patrick merely stared, his head cocked to one side, his eyes wide.
The pigeon was nothing but a skeleton surrounded by a ragged fall of feathers. There was no flesh left on its body at all. And around it, stuck on the refrigerator’s inner walls, hanging from the underside of the freezer
compartment, dangling from the wire shelves, were dozens of flesh-colored objects that looked like big macaroni shells. Patrick saw that they were moving slightly, fluttering, as if in a breeze. Except there was no breeze. He frowned.
Suddenly one of the shell-like things unfurled insectile wings. Before Patrick could do more than register the fact, it had flown across the space between the refrigerator and Patrick’s left arm. It struck with a smacking
sound. There was an instant of heat. It faded and Patrick’s arm felt just like always again . . . but the shell-like creature’s pale flesh turned first pink, and then, with shocking suddenness, rose-red.
Although Patrick was afraid of almost nothing in the commonly understood sense of the word (it’s hard to be afraid of things that aren’t “real”), there was at least one thing that filled him with wretched loathing. He had come out of Brewster Lake one warm August day when he was seven to discover four or five leeches clinging to his stomach and legs. He had screamed himself hoarse until his father had pulled them off.
Now, in a deadly burst of inspiration, he realized that this was some weird kind of flying leech. They had infested his refrigerator.
Patrick began to scream and beat at the thing on his arm. It had swelled to nearly the size of a tennis ball. At the third blow it broke open with a sickening squtt sound. Blood—his blood—sprayed his arm from elbow to wrist, but the thing’s jellylike eyeless head held on. In a way, it was like a bird’s narrow head, ending in a beaklike structure, but this beak was not flat or pointed; it was tubular and blunt, like the proboscis of a mosquito. This proboscis was buried in Patrick’s arm.
Still screaming, he pinched the splattered creature between his fingers and pulled it off. The proboscis came out cleanly, followed by a watery
flow of blood mixed with some yellowish-white liquid like pus. It had made a painless dime-sized hole in his arm.
And the creature, although exploded, was still twisting and moving and seeking in his fingers.
Patrick threw it away, turned . . . and more of them flew out of the refrigerator, lighting on him even as he groped for the Amana’s handle. They landed on his hands, his arms, his neck. One touched down on his forehead. When Patrick raised his hand to pick it off, he saw four others on his hand, trembling minutely, turning first pink and then red.
There was no pain . . . but there was a hideous draining sensation.
Screaming, whirling, beating at his head and neck with his leech-encrusted hands, Patrick Hockstetter’s mind yammered: It isn’t real, it’s just a bad
dream, don’t worry, it’s not real, nothing is real—
But the blood pouring from the smashed leeches seemed real enough, the sound of their buzzing wings seemed real enough . . . and his own terror seemed real enough.
One of them fell down inside his shirt and settled on his chest. While he was beating frantically at it and watching the bloodstain spread above the place where it had taken its hold, another settled on his right eye. Patrick closed it, but that did no good; he felt a brief hot flare as the thing’s sucker poked through his eyelid and began to suck the fluid out of his eyeball.
Patrick felt his eye collapse in its socket and he screamed again. A leech flew into his mouth when he did and roosted on his tongue.
It was all almost painless.
Patrick went staggering and flapping up the path toward the junked cars. Parasites hung all over him. Some of them drank to capacity and then burst like balloons; when this happened to the bigger ones, they drenched Patrick with almost half a pint of his own hot blood. He could feel the leech inside his mouth swelling up and he opened his jaws because the only coherent thought he had left was that it must not burst in there; it must not, must not.
But it did. Patrick ejected a huge spray of blood and parasite-flesh like vomit. He fell down in the gravelly dirt and began to roll over and over, still screaming. Little by little the sound of his own screams began to seem faint, faraway.
Just before he passed out, he saw a figure step from behind the last of the junked cars. At first Patrick thought he was a guy, Mandy Fazio perhaps, and he would be saved. But as the figure drew closer, he saw its face was running like wax. Sometimes it began to harden and look like something— or someone—and then it would start to run again, as if it couldn’t make up its mind who or what it wanted to be.
“Hello and goodbye, ” a bubbling voice said from inside the running
tallow of its features, and Patrick tried to scream again. He didn’t want to die; as the only “real” person, he wasn’t supposed to die. If he did, everyone else in the world would die with him.
The manshape laid hold of his leech-encrusted arms and began to drag him away toward the Barrens. His bloodstained book-carrier bumped and thumped along beside him, its strap still twisted about his neck. Patrick, still trying to scream, lost consciousness.
He awoke only once: when, in some dark, smelly, drippy hell where no light shone, no light at all, It began to feed.
6
At first Beverly was not entirely sure what she was seeing or what was happening . . . only that Patrick Hockstetter had begun to thrash and dance and scream. She got up warily, holding the slingshot in one hand and two of the ball-bearings in the other. She could hear Patrick blundering off down
the path, still yelling his head off. In that moment, Beverly looked every inch the lovely woman she was going to become, and if Ben Hanscom had been around to see her just then, his heart might not have been able to stand it.
She was standing fully upright, her head cocked to the left, her eyes wide, her hair done in braids that had been tied off with two small red velvet bows which she had bought in Dahlie’s for a dime. Her posture was one of total attention and concentration; it was feline, lynxlike. She had shifted forward on her left foot, her body half-turned as if to go after Patrick, and the legs of her faded shorts had pulled up enough to show the edging on her yellow cotton panties. Below them, her legs were already smoothly muscled, beautiful in spite of the scabs, bruises, and smutches of dirt.
It’s a trick. He saw you and he knows he probably can’t catch you in a fair chase, so he’s trying to get you to come out. Don’t go, Bevvie!
But another part of her thought there was too much pain and fear in those screams. She wished she had seen whatever had happened to Patrick—if anything had—more clearly. She wished more than anything else that she had come into the Barrens a different way and missed the whole crazy shenanigans.
Patrick’s screams stopped. A moment later Beverly heard someone speak
—but she knew that had to be her imagination. She heard her father say, “Hello and goodbye. ” Her father wasn’t even in Derry that day: he had set off for Brunswick at eight o’clock. He and Joe Tammerly were going to pick up a Chevy truck in Brunswick. She shook her head as if to clear it.
The voice didn’t speak again. Her imagination, obviously.
She walked out of the bushes to the path, ready to run the instant she saw Patrick charging at her, her reactions on triggers as delicate as a cat’s
whiskers. She looked down at the path and her eyes widened. There was blood here. Quite a lot of it.
Fake blood, her mind insisted. You can buy a bottle of it at Dahlie’s for forty-nine cents. Be careful, Bevvie!
She knelt and quickly touched the blood with her fingers. She looked at them closely. It wasn’t fake blood.
There was a flash of heat in her left arm, just below the elbow. She looked down and saw something that she first thought was some kind of burr. No—not a burr. Burrs didn’t twitch and flutter. This thing was alive. A moment after that she realized it was biting her. She struck it hard with the back of her right hand and it spattered, spraying blood. She backed up a step, getting ready to scream now that it was over . . . and then she saw that it wasn’t over at all. The thing’s featureless head was still on her arm, its snout buried in her flesh.
With a shrill cry of disgust and fear, she picked it off and saw its
proboscis come out of her arm like a small dagger, dripping with blood. She understood the blood on the path now, oh yes, and her eyes went to the refrigerator.
The door had swung closed and latched again, but a number of the
parasites had been left outside and were crawling sluggishly over the rusty- white porcelain. As Beverly looked, one of them unfurled its membranous fly-like wings and buzzed toward her.
She acted without thinking, loading one of the steel ball-bearings into the cup of the Bullseye and pulling the sling back. As the muscles of her left arm flexed smoothly, she saw loose blood squirt from the hole the thing had made in her arm. She let fly anyway, unconsciously leading the flying thing.
Shit! Missed! she thought as the Bullseye snapped and the ball-bearing
flew, a glittering chunk of light in the hazy sun. And she would later tell the other Losers that she knew she had missed it, the same way a bowler knows he has missed the strike as soon as a bad ball leaves his hand. But then she
saw the ball-bearing curve. It happened in a split-second, but the impression was very clear: it had curved. It struck the flying thing and splattered it to mush. There was a shower of yellowish droplets which pattered on the path.
Beverly backed up slowly at first, her eyes huge, her lips trembling, her face a shocked grayish-white. Her gaze was pinned to the front of the discarded refrigerator, waiting to see if any of the other things would smell
or sense her. But the parasites only crawled slowly back and forth, like autumn flies drugged with the cold.
At last she turned and ran.
Panic beat darkly against her thoughts, but she would not give in to it entirely. She held the Bullseye in her left hand and looked back over her shoulder from time to time. There was still blood dappled brightly on the path and on the leaves of some of the bushes bordering it, as if Patrick had woven from side to side as he ran.
Beverly burst out into the area of the junked cars again. Ahead of her
there was a bigger splash of blood, just beginning to soak into the gravelly earth. The ground looked disturbed, darker streaks of earth lined into the
powdery-white surface. As if there had been a struggle there. Two grooves, about two and a half feet apart, led away from this spot.
Beverly halted, panting. She looked at her arm and was relieved to see that the flow of blood was finally slowing, although her lower forearm and the palm of her hand were streaked and tacky with it. The pain had begun now, a low steady throb. It felt the way her mouth felt about an hour after
the dentist’s, when the novocaine began to wear off.
She looked behind again, saw nothing, then looked back at those grooves leading away from the junked cars, away from the dump, and into the Barrens.
Those things were in the refrigerator. They got all over him—sure they did, look at all the blood. He got this far, and then
(hello and goodbye)
something else happened. What?
She was terribly afraid she knew. The leeches were a part of It, and they had driven Patrick into another part of It much as a panic-maddened steer is driven down the chute and into the slaughtering-pen.
Get out of here! Get out, Bevvie!
Instead she followed the grooves in the earth, holding the Bullseye tightly in her sweating hand.
At least get the others!
I will . . . in a little while.
She walked on, following the grooves as the ground sloped down and became softer. She followed them into heavy foliage again. Somewhere a
cicada burred loudly and then unwound into silence. Mosquitoes lighted on
her blood-streaked arm. She waved them away. Her teeth were clenched on her lower lip.
There was something lying on the ground ahead. She picked it up and looked at it. It was a handmade wallet, the sort of thing a kid might make as a crafts project at Community House. Except it was obvious to Bev that the kid who made this hadn’t been much of a craftsman; the wide plastic stitching was already coming unravelled and the bill compartment flapped
like a loose mouth. She found a quarter in the change compartment. The only other thing in the wallet was a library card, made out in the name of Patrick Hockstetter. She tossed the wallet aside, library card and all. She wiped her fingers on her shorts.
Fifty feet farther on she found a sneaker. The underbrush was now too dense for her to be able to follow the grooves in the earth, but you didn’t have to be the Pathfinder to follow the splashes and drips of blood on the bushes.
The trail wound down through a steep brake. Bev lost her footing once, slid, and was raked by thorns. Fresh lines of blood appeared on her upper thigh. She was breathing fast now, her hair sweaty and matted to her skull. The spots of blood led out onto one of the faint paths through the Barrens. The Kenduskeag was nearby.
Patrick’s other sneaker, its laces bloody, lay marooned on the path.
She approached the river with the Bullseye’s sling half-drawn. The grooves in the earth had reappeared. They were shallower now—that’s because he lost his sneakers, she thought.
She came around a final bend and faced the river. The grooves went down the bank and led ultimately to one of those concrete cylinders—one of the pumping-stations. There they stopped. The iron cover capping the top of this cylinder was a little ajar.
As she stood above it, looking down, a thick and monstrous chuckle suddenly issued from beneath.
It was too much. The panic which had threatened now descended.
Beverly turned and fled toward the clearing and clubhouse, her bloody left arm up to shield her face from the branches which whipped and slapped her.
Sometimes I worry too, Daddy, she thought wildly. Sometimes I worry a LOT.
7
Four hours later all of the Losers except Eddie crouched in the bushes near the spot where Beverly had hidden and watched Patrick Hockstetter go to the refrigerator and open it. The sky overhead had darkened with thunderheads, and the smell of rain was in the air again. Bill was holding
the end of a long length of clothesline in his hands. The six of them had pooled their available cash and bought the line and a Johnson’s first-aid kit for Beverly. Bill had carefully affixed a gauze pad over the bloody hole in her arm.
“T-Tell your puh-puh-harents you g-got a scruh-hape when you were skuh-skuh-skating, ” Bill said.
“My skates!” Beverly cried, dismayed. She had forgotten all about them. “There, ” Ben said, and pointed. They were lying in a heap not far away,
and she went to retrieve them before Ben or Bill or any of the others could offer. She remembered now that she had put them aside before urinating.
She didn’t want any of the others over there.
Bill himself had tied one end of the clothesline to the handle of the
Amana refrigerator, although they had all cautiously approached it together, ready to bolt at the first sign of movement. Bev had offered to give the
Bullseye back to Bill; he had insisted she keep it. As it turned out, nothing had moved. Although the area on the path in front of the refrigerator was splattered with blood, the parasites were gone. Perhaps they had flown away.
“You could bring Chief Borton and Mr. Nell and a hundred other cops down here and it still wouldn’t matter, ” Stan Uris said bitterly.
“Nope. They wouldn’t see a frockin thing, ” Richie agreed. “How’s your arm, Bev? ”
“Hurts. ” She paused, looking from Bill to Richie and back to Bill again. “Would my mom and dad see the hole that thing made in my arm? ”
“I d-d-don’t th-think s-s-so, ” Bill said. “Get reh-ready to ruh-ruh-run.
I’m gonna t-t-t-tie it uh-uh-on. ”
He looped the end of the clothesline around the refrigerator’s rust-flecked chrome handle, working with the care of a man defusing a live bomb. He tied a granny-knot and then stepped back, paying out the clothesline.
He grinned a small shaky grin at the others when they had made some distance. “Whooo, ” he said. “G-Glad that’s oh-over. ”
Now, a safe (they hoped) distance from the refrigerator, Bill told them again to get ready to run. Thunder boomed directly overhead and they all jumped. The first scattered drops began to fall.
Bill jerked the clothesline as hard as he could. His granny-knot popped off the handle, but not before it had pulled the refrigerator door open again. An avalanche of orange pompoms fell out, and Stan Uris uttered a painful groan. The others only stared, open-mouthed.
The rain began to come harder. Thunder whipcracked above them, making them cringe, and purplish-blue lightning flared as the refrigerator door swung all the way open. Richie saw it first and screamed, a high, hurt sound. Bill uttered some sort of angry, frightened cry. The others were silent.
Written on the inside of the door, written in drying blood, were these words:
 |
Hail mixed with the driving rain. The refrigerator door shuddered back and forth in the rising wind, the letters painted there beginning to drip and run now, taking on the draggling ominous look of a horror-movie poster.
Bev was not aware that Bill had gotten up until she saw him advancing across the path toward the refrigerator. He was shaking both fists. Water streamed down his face and plastered his shirt to his back.
“W-We’re going to k-k-kill you!” Bill screamed. Thunder whacked and cracked. Lightning flashed so brightly that she could smell it, and not far away there was a splintering, rending sound as a tree fell.
“Bill, come back!” Richie was yelling. “Come back, man!” He started to get up and Ben hauled him back down again.
“You killed my brother George! You son of a bitch! You bastard! You whoremaster! Let’s see you now! Let’s see you now!”
Hail came in a spate, stinging them even through the screening bushes.
Beverly held her arm up to protect her face. She could see red welts on Ben’s streaming cheeks.
“Bill, come back!” she screamed despairingly, and another thundercrack drowned her out; it rolled across the Barrens below the low black clouds.
“Let’s see you come out now, you fucker!”
Bill kicked wildly at the heap of pompoms that had spilled out of the refrigerator. He turned away and began to walk back toward them, his head down. He seemed not to feel the hail, although it now covered the ground
like snow.
He blundered into the bushes, and Stan had to grab his arm to keep him from going into the prickerbushes. He was crying.
“That’s okay, Bill, ” Ben said, putting a clumsy arm around him.
“Yeah, ” Richie said. “Don’t worry. We’re not gonna chicken out. ” He stared around at them, his eyes looking wildly out of his wet face. “Is there anyone here who’s gonna chicken out? ”
They shook their heads.
Bill looked up, wiping his eyes. They were all soaked to the skin and looked like a litter of pups that had just forded a river. “Ih-It’s scuh-scuh- hared of u-u-us, you know, ” he said. “I can fuh-feel th-that. I swear to Guh- God I c-c-can. ”
Bev nodded soberly. “I think you’re right. ”
“H-H-Help m-m-me, ” Bill said. “P-P-Pl-Please. H-H-Help m-m-me. ” “We will, ” Beverly said. She took Bill in her arms. She had not realized
how easily her arms would go around him, how thin he was. She could feel his heart racing under his shirt; she could feel it next to hers. She thought that no touch had ever seemed so sweet and strong.
Richie put his arms around both of them and laid his head on Beverly’s shoulder. Ben did the same from the other side. Stan Uris put his arms around Richie and Ben. Mike hesitated, and then slipped one arm around Beverly’s waist and the other over Bill’s shivering shoulders. They stood that way, hugging, and the sleet turned back to driving pouring rain, rain so heavy it seemed almost like a new atmosphere. The lightning walked and
the thunder talked. No one spoke. Beverly’s eyes were tightly shut. They stood in the rain in a huddled group, hugging each other, listening to it hiss down on the bushes. That was what she remembered best: the sound of the
rain and their own shared silence and a vague sorrow that Eddie was not there with them. She remembered those things.
She remembered feeling very young and very strong.
