Stanley Uris Takes a Bath
Patricia Uris later told her mother she should have known something was wrong. She should have known it, she said, because Stanley never took
baths in the early evening. He showered early each morning and sometimes soaked late at night (with a magazine in one hand and a cold beer in the other), but baths at 7:00 P. M. were not his style.
And then there was the thing about the books. It should have delighted him; instead, in some obscure way she did not understand, it seemed to
have upset and depressed him. About three months before that terrible night, Stanley had discovered that a childhood friend of his had turned out to be a writer—not a real writer, Patricia told her mother, but a novelist.
The name on the books was William Denbrough, but Stanley had
sometimes called him Stuttering Bill. He had worked his way through almost all of the man’s books; had, in fact, been reading the last on the night of the bath—the night of May 28th, 1985. Patty herself had picked up one of the earlier ones, out of curiosity. She had put it down after just three chapters.
It had not just been a novel, she told her mother later; it had been a horrorbook. She said it just that way, all one word, the way she would have said s*xbook. Patty was a sweet, kind woman, but not terribly articulate— she had wanted to tell her mother how much that book had frightened her and why it had upset her, but had not been able. “It was full of monsters, ” she said. “Full of monsters chasing after little children. There were killings, and . . . I don’t know . . . bad feelings and hurt. Stuff like that. ” It had, in fact, struck her as almost pornographic; that was the word which kept
eluding her, probably because she had never in her life spoken it, although she knew what it meant. “But Stan felt as if he’d rediscovered one of his childhood chums.
. . He talked about writing to him, but I knew he wouldn’t.
. . . I knew those stories made him feel bad, too . . . and . . . and . . . ” And then Patty Uris began to cry.
That night, lacking roughly six months of being twenty-eight years from the day in 1957 when George Denbrough had met Pennywise the Clown, Stanley and Patty had been sitting in the den of their home in a suburb of Atlanta. The TV was on. Patty was sitting in the love-seat in front of it, dividing her attention between a pile of sewing and her favorite game-show, Family Feud. She simply adored Richard Dawson and thought the watch- chain he always wore was terribly s*xy, although wild horses would not
have drawn this admission out of her. She also liked the show because she almost always got the most popular answers (there were no right answers on Family Feud, exactly; only the most popular ones). She had once asked Stan why the questions that seemed so easy to her usually seemed so hard to the families on the show. “It’s probably a lot tougher when you’re up
there under those lights, ” Stanley had replied, and it seemed to her that a shadow had drifted over his face. “Everything’s a lot tougher when it’s for real. That’s when you choke. When it’s for real. ”
That was probably very true, she decided. Stanley had really fine insights into human nature sometimes. Much finer, she considered, than his old friend William Denbrough, who had gotten rich writing a bunch of
horrorbooks which appealed to people’s baser natures.
Not that the Urises were doing so badly themselves! The suburb where they lived was a fine one, and the home which they had purchased for $87, 000 in 1979 would probably now sell quickly and painlessly for $165, 000
—not that she wanted to sell, but such things were good to know. She
sometimes drove back from the Fox Run Mall in her Volvo (Stanley drove a Mercedes dieset—teasing him, she called it Sedanley) and saw her house, set tastefully back behind low yew hedges, and thought: Who lives there?
Why, I do! Mrs. Stanley Uris does! This was not an entirely happy thought; mixed with it was a pride so fierce that it sometimes made her feel a bit ill. Once upon a time, you see, there had been a lonely eighteen-year-old girl named Patricia Blum who had been refused entry to the after-prom party
that was held at the country club in the upstate town of Glointon, New York. She had been refused admission, of course, because her last name rhymed with plum. That was her, just a skinny little kike plum, 1967 that had been, and such discrimination was against the law, of course, har-de- har-har-har, and besides, it was all over now. Except that for part of her it was never going to be over. Part of her would always be walking back to the car with Michael Rosenblatt, listening to the crushed gravel under her
pumps and his rented formal shoes, back to his father’s car, which Michael had borrowed for the evening, and which he had spent the afternoon waxing. Part of her would always be walking next to Michael in his rented white dinner jacket—how it had glimmered in the soft spring night! She had been in a pale green evening gown which her mother declared made her look like a mermaid, and the idea of a kike mermaid was pretty funny, har- de-har-har-har. They had walked with their heads up and she had not wept
—not then—but she had understood they weren’t walking back, no, not really; what they had been doing was slinking back, slinking, rhymes with stinking, both of them feeling more Jewish than they had ever felt in their lives, feeling like pawnbrokers, feeling like cattle-car riders, feeling oily, long-nosed, sallow-skinned; feeling like mockies sheenies kikes; wanting to feel angry and not being able to feel angry—the anger came only later, when it didn’t matter. At that moment she had only been able to feel ashamed, had only been able to ache. And then someone had laughed. A high shrill tittering laugh like a fast run of notes on a piano, and in the car
she had been able to weep, oh you bet, here is the kike mermaid whose
name rhymes with plum just weeping away like crazy. Mike Rosenblatt had put a clumsy, comforting hand on the back of her neck and she had twisted away from it, feeling ashamed, feeling dirty, feeling Jewish.
The house set so tastefully back behind the yew hedges made that better .
. . but not all better. The hurt and shame were still there, and not even being accepted in this quiet, sleekly well-to-do neighborhood could quite make that endless walk with the sound of grating stones beneath their shoes stop happening. Not even being members of this country club, where the maître d’ always greeted them with a quietly respectful “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Uris. ” She would come home, cradled in her 1984 Volvo, and she would look at her house sitting on its expanse of green lawn, and she would often—all too often, she supposed—think of that shrill titter. And she would
hope that the girl who had tittered was living in a shitty tract house with a goy husband who beat her, that she had been pregnant three times and had miscarried each time, that her husband cheated on her with diseased women, that she had slipped discs and fallen arches and cysts on her dirty tittering tongue.
She would hate herself for these thoughts, these uncharitable thoughts, and promise to do better—to stop drinking these bitter gall-and-wormwood cocktails. Months would go by when she did not think such thoughts. She would think: Maybe all of that is finally past me. I am not that girl of eighteen anymore. I am a woman of thirty-six; the girl who heard the
endless click and grate of those driveway stones, the girl who twisted away from Mike Rosenblatt’s hand when he tried to comfort her because it was a Jewish hand, was half a life ago. That silly little mermaid is dead. I can
forget her now and just be myself. Okay. Good. Great. But then she would be somewhere—at the supermarket, maybe—and she would hear sudden
tittering laughter from the next aisle and her back would prickle, her nipples would go hard and hurtful, her hands would tighten on the bar of the shopping cart or just on each other, and she would think: Someone just told someone else that I’m Jewish, that I’m nothing but a bignose mockie kike, that Stanley’s nothing but a bignose mockie kike, he’s an accountant, sure,
Jews are good with numbers, we let them into the country club, we had to, back in 1981 when that bignose mockie gynecologist won his suit, but we
laugh at them, we laugh and laugh and laugh. Or she would simply hear the phantom click and grate of stones and think Mermaid! Mermaid!
Then the hate and shame would come flooding back like a migraine headache and she would despair not only for herself but for the whole
human race. Werewolves. The book by Denbrough—the one she had tried to read and then put aside—was about werewolves. Werewolves, shit. What did a man like that know about werewolves?
Most of the time, however, she felt better than that—felt she was better than that. She loved her man, she loved her house, and she was usually able to love her life and herself. Things were good. They had not always been that way, of course—were things ever? When she accepted Stanley’s engagement ring, her parents had been both angry and unhappy. She had met him at a sorority party. He had come over to her school from New York State University, where he was a scholarship student. They had been
introduced by a mutual friend, and by the time the evening was over, she suspected that she loved him. By the mid-term break, she was sure. When spring came around and Stanley offered her a small diamond ring with a daisy pushed through it, she had accepted it.
In the end, in spite of their qualms, her parents had accepted it as well.
There was little else they could do, although Stanley Uris would soon be sallying forth into a job-market glutted with young accountants—and when he went into that jungle, he would do so with no family finances to backstop him, and with their only daughter as his hostage to fortune. But Patty was twenty-two, a woman now, and would herself soon graduate with a B. A.
“I’ll be supporting that four-eyed son of a bitch for the rest of my life, ” Patty had heard her father say one night. Her mother and father had gone out for dinner, and her father had drunk a little too much.
“Shh, she’ll hear you, ” Ruth Blum said.
Patty had lain awake that night until long after midnight, dry-eyed, alternately hot and cold, hating them both. She had spent the next two years trying to get rid of that hate; there was too much hate inside her already.
Sometimes when she looked into the mirror she could see the things it was doing to her face, the fine lines it was drawing there. That was a battle she won. Stanley had helped her.
His own parents had been equally concerned about the marriage. They did not, of course, believe their Stanley was destined for a life of squalor and poverty, but they thought “the kids were being hasty. ” Donald Uris and Andrea Bertoly had themselves married in their early twenties, but they seemed to have forgotten the fact.
Only Stanley had seemed sure of himself, confident of the future, unconcerned with the pitfalls their parents saw strewn all about “the kids. ” And in the end it was his confidence rather than their fears which had been justified. In July of 1972, with the ink barely dry on her diploma, Patty had landed a job teaching shorthand and business English in Traynor, a small town forty miles south of Atlanta. When she thought of how she had come by that job, it always struck her as a little—well, eerie. She had made a list of forty possibles from the ads in the teachers’ journals, then had written forty letters over five nights—eight each evening—requesting further information on the job, and an application for each. Twenty-two replies
indicated that the positions had been filled. In other cases, a more detailed explanation of the skills needed made it clear she wasn’t in the running; applying would only be a waste of her time and theirs. She had finished with a dozen possibles. Each looked as likely as any other. Stanley had
come in while she was puzzling over them and wondering if she could possibly manage to fill out a dozen teaching applications without going totally bonkers. He looked at the strew of papers on the table and then tapped the letter from the Traynor Superintendent of Schools, a letter which to her looked no more or less encouraging than any of the others.
“There, ” he said.
She looked up at him, startled by the simple certainty in his voice. “Do you know something about Georgia that I don’t? ”
“Nope. Only time I was ever there was at the movies. ” She looked at him, an eyebrow cocked.
“Gone with the Wind. Vivien Leigh. Clark Gable. ‘I will think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is anothah day. ’ Do I sound like I come from the South, Patty? ”
“Yes. South Bronx. If you don’t know anything about Georgia and you’ve never been there, then why—”
“Because it’s right. ”
“You can’t know that, Stanley. ”
“Sure I can, ” he said simply. “I do. ” Looking at him, she had seen he wasn’t joking: he really meant it. She had felt a ripple of unease go up her back.
“How do you know? ”
He had been smiling a little. Now the smile faltered, and for a moment he had seemed puzzled. His eyes had darkened, as if he looked inward, consulting some interior device which ticked and whirred correctly but which, ultimately, he understood no more than the average man understands the workings of the watch on his wrist.
“The turtle couldn’t help us, ” he said suddenly. He said that quite clearly. She heard it. That inward look—that look of surprised musing—was still on his face, and it was starting to scare her.
“Stanley? What are you talking about? Stanley? ”
He jerked. She had been eating peaches as she went over the applications, and his hand struck the dish. It fell on the floor and broke. His
eyes seemed to clear. “Oh, shit! I’m sorry. ”
“It’s all right. Stanley—what were you talking about? ”
“I forget, ” he said. “But I think we ought to think Georgia, babylove. ” “But—”
“Trust me, ” he said, so she did.
Her interview had gone smashingly. She had known she had the job when she got on the train back to New York. The head of the Business Department had taken an instant liking to Patty, and she to him; she had almost heard the click. The confirming letter had come a week later. The Traynor Consolidated School Department could offer her $9, 200 and a probationary contract.
“You are going to starve, ” Herbert Blum said when his daughter told him she intended to take the job. “And you will be hot while you starve. ”
“Fiddle-dee-dee, Scarlett, ” Stanley said when she told him what her father had said. She had been furious, near tears, but now she began to giggle, and Stanley swept her into his arms.
Hot they had been; starved they had not. They were married on August 19th, 1972. Patty Uris had gone to her marriage bed a virgin. She had slipped naked between cool sheets at a resort hotel in the Poconos, her mood turbulent and stormy—lightning-flares of wanting and delicious lust, dark clouds of fright. When Stanley slid into bed beside her, ropy with muscle, his penis an exclamation point rising from gingery pubic hair, she had whispered: “Don’t hurt me, dear. ”
“I will never hurt you, ” he said as he took her in his arms, and it was a promise he had kept faithfully until May 28th, 1985—the night of the bath.
Her teaching had gone well. Stanley got a job driving a bakery truck for one hundred dollars a week. In November of that year, when the Traynor
Flats Shopping Center opened, he got a job with the H & R Block office out there for a hundred and fifty. Their combined income was then $17, 000 a
year—this seemed a king’s ransom to them, in those days when gas sold for thirty-five cents a gallon and a loaf of white bread could be had for a nickel less than that. In March of 1973, with no fuss and no fanfare, Patty Uris had thrown away her birth-control pills.
In 1975 Stanley quit H & R Block and opened his own business. All four in-laws agreed that this was a foolhardy move. Not that Stanley should not
have his own business—God forbid he should not have his own business! But it was too early, all of them agreed, and it put too much of the financial burden on Patty. (“At least until the pisher knocks her up, ” Herbert Blum told his brother morosely after a night of drinking in the kitchen, “and then I’ll be expected to carry them. ”) The consensus of in-law opinion on the matter was that a man should not even think about going into business for himself until he had reached a more serene and mature age—seventy-eight, say.
Again, Stanley seemed almost preternaturally confident. He was young, personable, bright, apt. He had made contacts working for Block. All of
these things were givens. But he could not have known that Corridor Video, a pioneer in the nascent videotape business, was about to settle on a huge patch of farmed-out land less than ten miles from the suburb to which the
Urises had eventually moved in 1979, nor could he have known that Corridor would be in the market for an independent marketing survey less than a year after its move to Traynor. Even if Stan had been privy to some of this information, he surely could not have believed they would give the job to a young, bespectacled Jew who also happened to be a damyankee—a Jew with an easy grin, a hipshot way of walking, a taste for bell-bottomed
jeans on his days off, and the last ghosts of his adolescent acne still on his face. Yet they had. They had. And it seemed that Stan had known it all along.
His work for CV led to an offer of a full-time position with the company
—starting salary, $30, 000 a year.
“And that really is only the start, ” Stanley told Patty in bed that night. “They are going to grow like corn in August, my dear. If no one blows up the world in the next ten years or so, they are going to be right up there on the big board along with Kodak and Sony and RCA. ”
“So what are you going to do? ” she asked, already knowing.
“I am going to tell them what a pleasure it was to do business with them, ” he said, and laughed, and drew her close, and kissed her. Moments later
he mounted her, and there were climaxes—one, two, and three, like bright rockets going off in a night sky . . . but there was no baby.
His work with Corridor Video had brought him into contact with some of Atlanta’s richest and most powerful men—and they were both astonished to find that these men were mostly okay. In them they found a degree of
acceptance and broad-minded kindliness that was almost unknown in the North. Patty remembered Stanley once writing home to his mother and father: The best rich men in America live in Atlanta, Georgia. I am going to help make some of them richer, and they are going to make me richer, and no one is going to own me except my wife, Patricia, and since I already own her, I guess that is safe enough.
By the time they moved from Traynor, Stanley was incorporated and employed six people. In 1983 their income had entered unknown territory— territory of which Patty had heard only the dimmest rumors. This was the fabled land of SIX FIGURES. And it had all happened with the casual ease of slipping into a pair of sneakers on Saturday morning. This sometimes frightened her. Once she had made an uneasy joke about deals with the devil. Stanley had laughed until he almost choked, but to her it hadn’t seemed that funny, and she supposed it never would.
The turtle couldn’t help us.
Sometimes, for no reason at all, she would wake up with this thought in her mind like the last fragment of an otherwise forgotten dream, and she would turn to Stanley, needing to touch him, needing to make sure he was still there.
T+was a good life—there was no wild drinking, no outside s*x, no drugs, no boredom, no bitter arguments about what to do next. There was only a
single cloud. It was her mother who first mentioned the presence of this cloud. That her mother would be the one to finally do so seemed, in retrospect, preordained. It finally came out as a question in one of Ruth Blum’s letters. She wrote Patty once a week, and that particular letter had arrived in the early fall of 1979. It came forwarded from the old Traynor
address and Patty read it in a living room filled with cardboard liquor-store cartons from which spilled their possessions, looking forlorn and uprooted and dispossessed.
In most ways it was the usual Ruth Blum Letter from Home: four closely written blue pages, each one headed JUST A NOTE FROM RUTH. Her scrawl was nearly illegible, and Stanley had once complained he could not read a single word his mother-in-law wrote. “Why would you want to? ” Patty had responded.
This one was full of Mom’s usual brand of news; for Ruth Blum recollection was a broad delta, spreading out from the moving point of the now in an ever-widening fan of interlocking relationships. Many of the
people of whom her mother wrote were beginning to fade in Patty’s memory like photographs in an old album, but to Ruth all of them remained fresh. Her concerns for their health and her curiosity about their various
doings never seemed to wane, and her prognoses were unfailingly dire. Her father was still having too many stomach-aches. He was sure it was just dyspepsia; the idea that he might have an ulcer, she wrote, would not cross his mind until he actually began coughing up blood and probably not even then. You know your father, dear—he works like a mule, and he also thinks like one sometimes, God should forgive me for saying so. Randi Harlengen had gotten her tubes tied, they took cysts as big as golfballs out of her ovaries, no malignancy, thank God, but twenty-seven ovarian cysts, could you die? It was the water in New York City, she was quite sure of that—the city air was dirty, too, but she was convinced it was the water that really got
to you after awhile. It built up deposits inside a person. She doubted if Patty knew how often she had thanked God that “you kids” were out in the country, where both air and water— but particularly the water—were healthier (to Ruth all of the South, including Atlanta and Birmingham, was the country). Aunt Margaret was feuding with the power company again.
Stella Flanagan had gotten married again, some people never learned. Richie Huber had been fired again.
And in the middle of this chatty—and often catty—out-pouring, in the middle of a paragraph, apropos of nothing which had gone before or which
came after, Ruth Blum had casually asked the Dreaded Question: “So when are you and Stan going to make us grandparents? We’re all ready to start spoiling him (or her) rotten. And in case you hadn’t noticed, Patsy, we’re not getting any younger. ” And then on to the Bruckner girl from down the block who had been sent home from school because she was wearing no bra and a blouse that you could see right through.
Feeling low and homesick for their old place in Traynor, feeling unsure and more than a little afraid of what might be ahead, Patty had gone into what was to become their bedroom and had lain down upon the mattress
(the box spring was still out in the garage, and the mattress, lying all by itself on the big carpetless floor, looked like an artifact cast up on a strange
yellow beach). She put her head in her arms and lay there weeping for nearly twenty minutes. She supposed that cry had been coming anyway. Her mother’s letter had just brought it on sooner, the way dust hurries the tickle in your nose into a sneeze.
Stanley wanted kids. She wanted kids. They were as compatible on that subject as they were on their enjoyment of Woody Allen’s films, their more or less regular attendance at synagogue, their political leanings, their dislike of marijuana, a hundred other things both great and small. There had been an extra room in the Traynor house, which they had split evenly down the middle. On the left he had a desk for working and a chair for reading; on the right she had a sewing machine and a cardtable where she did jigsaw puzzles. There had been an agreement between them about that room so strong they rarely spoke of it—it was simply there, like their noses or the wedding rings on their left hands. Someday that room would belong to Andy or to Jenny. But where was that child? The sewing machine and the
baskets of fabric and the cardtable and the desk and the La-Z-Boy all kept their places, seeming each month to solidify their holds on their respective positions in the room and to further establish their legitimacy. So she thought, although she never could quite crystallize the thought; like the word pornographic, it was a concept that danced just beyond her ability to quantify. But she did remember one time when she got her period, sliding open the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get a sanitary napkin; she remembered looking at the box of Stayfree pads and thinking that the box looked almost smug, seemed almost to be saying: Hello, Patty! We are your children. We are the only children you will ever have, and we are hungry.
Nurse us. Nurse us on blood.
In 1976, three years after she had thrown away the last cycle of Ovral tablets, they saw a doctor named Harkavay in Atlanta. “We want to know if there is something wrong, ” Stanley said, “and we want to know if we can do anything about it if there is. ”
They took the tests. They showed that Stanley’s sperm was perky, that Patty’s eggs were fertile, that all the channels that were supposed to be open were open.
Harkavay, who wore no wedding ring and who had the open, pleasant, ruddy face of a college grad student just back from a midterm skiing vacation in Colorado, told them that maybe it was just nerves. He told them
that such a problem was by no means uncommon. He told them that there seemed to be a psychological correlative in such cases that was in some ways similar to s*xual impotency—the more you wanted to, the less you could. They would have to relax. They ought, if they could, to forget all about procreation when they had s*x.
Stan was grumpy on the way home. Patty asked him why. “I never do, ” he said.
“Do what? ”
“Think of procreation during. ”
She began to giggle, even though she was by then feeling a bit lonesome and frightened. And that night, lying in bed, long after she believed that Stanley must be asleep, he had frightened her by speaking out of the dark. His voice was flat but nevertheless choked with tears. “It’s me, ” he said. “It’s my fault. ”
She rolled toward him, groped for him, held him.
“Don’t be a stupid, ” she said. But her heart was beating fast—much too fast. It wasn’t just that he had startled her; it was as if he had looked into her mind and read a secret conviction she held there but of which she had not known until this minute. With no rhyme, no reason, she felt—knew— that
he was right. There was something wrong, and it wasn’t her. It was him. Something in him.
“Don’t be such a klutz, ” she whispered fiercely against his shoulder. He was sweating lightly and she became suddenly aware that he was afraid.
The fear was coming off him in cold waves; lying naked with him was suddenly like lying naked in front of an open refrigerator.
“I’m not a klutz and I’m not being stupid, ” he said in that same voice, which was simultaneously flat and choked with emotion, “and you know it. It’s me. But I don’t know why. ”
“You can’t know any such thing. ” Her voice was harsh, scolding—her mother’s voice when her mother was afraid. And even as she scolded him a shudder ran through her body, twisting it like a whip. Stanley felt it and his arms tightened around her.
“Sometimes, ” he said, “sometimes I think I know why. Sometimes I
have a dream, a bad dream, and I wake up and I think, ‘I know now. I know what’s wrong. ’ Not just you not catching pregnant—everything.
Everything that’s wrong with my life. ”
“Stanley, nothing’s wrong with your life!”
“I don’t mean from inside, ” he said. “From inside is fine. I’m talking about outside. Something that should be over and isn’t. I wake up from
these dreams and think, ‘My whole pleasant life has been nothing but the eye of some storm I don’t understand. ’ I’m afraid. But then it just . . . fades. The way dreams do. ”
She knew that he sometimes dreamed uneasily. On half a dozen
occasions he had awakened her, thrashing and moaning. Probably there had been other times when she had slept through his dark interludes. Whenever she reached for him, asked him, he said the same thing: I can’t remember.
Then he would reach for his cigarettes and smoke sitting up in bed, waiting for the residue of the dream to pass through his pores like bad sweat.
No kids. On the night of May 28th, 1985—the night of the bath—their assorted in-laws were still waiting to be grandparents. The extra room was still an extra room; the Stayfree Maxis and Stayfree Minis still occupied their accustomed places in the cupboard under the bathroom sink; the cardinal still paid its monthly visit. Her mother, who was much occupied with her own affairs but not entirely oblivious to her daughter’s pain, had stopped asking in her letters and when Stanley and Patty made their twice- yearly trips back to New York. There were no more humorous remarks about whether or not they were taking their vitamin E. Stanley had also stopped mentioning babies, but sometimes, when she didn’t know he was looking, she saw a shadow on his face. Some shadow. As if he were trying desperately to remember something.
Other than that one cloud, their lives were pleasant enough until the phone rang during the middle of Family Feud on the night of May 28th.
Patty had six of Stan’s shirts, two of her blouses, her sewing kit, and her odd-button box; Stan had the new William Denbrough novel, not even out in paperback yet, in his hands. There was a snarling beast on the front of
this book. On the back was a bald man wearing glasses.
Stan was sitting nearer the phone. He picked it up and said, “Hello—Uris residence. ”
He listened, and a frown line delved between his eyebrows. “Who did you say? ”
Patty felt an instant of fright. Later, shame would cause her to lie and tell her parents that she had known something was wrong from the instant the
telephone had rung, but in reality there had only been that one instant, that one quick look up from her sewing. But maybe that was all right. Maybe they had both suspected that something was coming long before that phone call, something that didn’t fit with the nice house set tastefully back behind the low yew hedges, something so much a given that it really didn’t need much of an acknowledgment . . . that one sharp instant of fright, like the stab of a quickly withdrawn icepick, was enough.
Is it Mom? she mouthed at him in that instant, thinking that perhaps her father, twenty pounds overweight and prone to what he called “the
bellyache” since his early forties, had had a heart attack.
Stan shook his head at her, and then smiled a bit at something the voice on the phone was saying. “You . . . you! Well, I’ll be goddamned! Mike! How did y—”
He fell silent again, listening. As his smile faded she recognized—or thought she did—his analytic expression, the one which said someone was unfolding a problem or explaining a sudden change in an ongoing situation or telling him something strange and interesting. This last was probably the case, she gathered. A new client? An old friend? Perhaps. She turned her attention back to the TV, where a woman was flinging her arms around Richard Dawson and kissing him madly. She thought that Richard Dawson must get kissed even more than the Blarney stone. She also thought she wouldn’t mind kissing him herself.
As she began searching for a black button to match the ones on Stanley’s blue denim shirt, Patty was vaguely aware that the conversation was settling into a smoother groove—Stanley grunted occasionally, and once he asked: “Are you sure, Mike? ” Finally, after a very long pause, he said, “All right, I understand. Yes, I . . . Yes. Yes, everything. I have the picture. I . . . what? .
. . No, I can’t absolutely promise that, but I’ll consider it carefully. You know that . . . oh? . . . He did? . . . Well, you bet! Of course I do. Yes . . . sure . . . thank you . . . yes. Bye-bye. ” He hung up.
Patty glanced at him and saw him staring blankly into space over the TV set. On her show, the audience was applauding the Ryan family, which had just scored two hundred and eighty points, most of them by guessing that
the audience survey would answer “math” in response to the question “What class will people say Junior hates most in school? ” The Ryans were jumping up and down and screaming joyfully. Stanley, however, was
frowning. She would later tell her parents she thought Stanley’s face had looked a little off-color, and so she did, but she neglected to tell them she had dismissed it at the time as only a trick of the table-lamp, with its green glass shade.
“Who was that, Stan? ”
“Hmmmm? ” He looked around at her. She thought the look on his face was one of gentle abstraction, perhaps mixed with minor annoyance. It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and into the black.
“Who was that on the phone? ”
“No one, ” he said. “No one, really. I think I’ll take a bath. ” He stood up. “What, at seven o’clock? ”
He didn’t answer, only left the room. She might have asked him if something was wrong, might even have gone after him and asked him if he was sick to his stomach—he was s*xually uninhibited, but he could be oddly prim about other things, and it wouldn’t be at all unlike him to say he was going to take a bath when what he really had to do was whoops something which hadn’t agreed with him. But now a new family, the Piscapos, were being introduced, and Patty just knew Richard Dawson would find something funny to say about that name, and besides, she was having the devil’s own time finding a black button, although she knew there were loads of them in the button box. They hid, of course; that was the only explanation. . . .
So she let him go and did not think of him again until the credit-crawl, when she looked up and saw his empty chair. She had heard the water running into the tub upstairs and had heard it stop five or ten minutes later .
. . but now she realized she had never heard the fridge door open and close, and that meant he was up there without a can of beer. Someone had called him up and dropped a big fat problem in his lap, and had she offered him a single word of commiseration ? No. Tried to draw him out a little about it?
No. Even noticed that something was wrong? For the third time, no. All because of that stupid TV show—she couldn’t even really blame the buttons; they were only an excuse.
Okay—she’d take him up a can of Dixie, and sit beside him on the edge of the tub, scrub his back, play Geisha and wash his hair if he wanted her to, and find out just what the problem was . . . or who it was.
She got a can of beer out of the fridge and went upstairs with it. The first real disquiet stirred in her when she saw that the bathroom door was shut.
Not just part-way closed but shut tight. Stanley never closed the door when he was taking a bath. It was something of a joke between them—the closed door meant he was doing something his mother had taught him, the open door meant he would not be averse to doing something the teaching of which his mother had quite properly left to others.
Patty tapped on the door with her nails, suddenly aware, too aware, of the reptilian clicking sound they made on the wood. And surely tapping on the bathroom door, knocking like a guest, was something she had never done
before in her married life—not here, not on any other door in the house. The disquiet suddenly grew strong in her, and she thought of Carson
Lake, where she had gone swimming often as a girl. By the first of August the lake was as warm as a tub . . . but then you’d hit a cold pocket that
would shiver you with surprise and delight. One minute you were warm; the next moment it felt as if the temperature had plummeted twenty degrees
below your hips. Minus the delight, that was how she felt now—as if she had just struck a cold pocket. Only this cold pocket was not below her hips, chilling her long teenager’s legs in the black depths of Carson Lake.
This one was around her heart. “Stanley? Stan? ”
This time she did more than tap with her nails. She rapped on the door.
When there was still no answer, she hammered on it.
“Stanley? ”
Her heart. Her heart wasn’t in her chest anymore. It was beating in her throat, making it hard to breathe.
“Stanley!”
In the silence following her shout (and just the sound of herself shouting up here, less than thirty feet from the place where she laid her head down and went to sleep each night, frightened her even more), she heard a sound which brought panic up from the belowstairs part of her mind like an
unwelcome guest. Such a small sound, really. It was only the sound of dripping water. Plink . . . pause. Plink . . . pause. Plink . . . pause. Plink . . .
She could see the drops forming on the snout of the faucet, growing heavy and fat there, growing pregnant there, and then falling off: plink.
Just that sound. No other. And she was suddenly, terribly sure that it had been Stanley, not her father, who had been stricken with a heart attack tonight.
With a moan, she gripped the cut-glass doorknob and turned it. Yet still the door would not move: it was locked. And suddenly three nevers occurred to Patty Uris in rapid succession: Stanley never took a bath in the early evening, Stanley never closed the door unless he was using the toilet, and Stanley had never locked the door against her at all.
Was it possible, she wondered crazily, to prepare for a heart attack?
Patty ran her tongue over her lips—it produced a sound in her head like
fine sandpaper sliding along a board—and called his name again. There was still no answer except the steady, deliberate drip of the faucet. She looked down and saw she still held the can of Dixie beer in one hand. She gazed at it stupidly, her heart running like a rabbit in her throat; she gazed at it as if
she had never seen a can of beer in her whole life before this minute. And indeed it seemed she never had, or at least never one like this, because when she blinked her eyes it turned into a telephone handset, as black and as threatening as a snake.
“May I help you, ma’am? Do you have a problem? ” the snake spat at her. Patty slammed it down in its cradle and stepped away, rubbing the hand which had held it. She looked around and saw she was back in the TV room and understood that the panic which had come into the front of her mind
like a prowler walking quietly up a flight of stairs had had its way with her. Now she could remember dropping the beer can outside the bathroom door and pelting headlong back down the stairs, thinking vaguely: This is all a mistake of some kind and we’ll laugh about it later. He filled up the tub and then remembered he didn’t have cigarettes and went out to get them before he took his clothes off—
Yes. Only he had already locked the bathroom door from the inside and because it was too much of a bother to unlock it again he had simply opened the window over the tub and gone down the side of the house like a fly crawling down a wall. Sure, of course, sure—
Panic was rising in her mind again—it was like bitter black coffee threatening to overflow the rim of a cup. She closed her eyes and fought
against it. She stood there, perfectly still, a pale statue with a pulse beating in its throat.
Now she could remember running back down here, feet stuttering on the stair-levels, running for the phone, oh yes, oh sure, but who had she meant to call?
Crazily, she thought: I would call the turtle, but the turtle couldn’t help us.
It didn’t matter anyway. She had gotten as far as 0 and she must have said something not quite standard, because the operator had asked if she had a problem. She had one, all right, but how did you tell that faceless voice that Stanley had locked himself in the bathroom and didn’t answer her, that the steady sound of the water dripping into the tub was killing her heart?
Someone had to help her. Someone—
She put the back of her hand into her mouth and deliberately bit down on it. She tried to think, tried to force herself to think.
The spare keys. The spare keys in the kitchen cupboard.
She got going, and one slippered foot kicked the bag of buttons resting beside her chair. Some of the buttons spilled out, glittering like glazed eyes in the lamplight. She saw at least half a dozen black ones.
Mounted inside the door of the cupboard over the double-basin sink was a large varnished board in the shape of a key—one of Stan’s clients had
made it in his workshop and given it to him two Christmases ago. The key- board was studded with small hooks, and swinging on these were all the
keys the house took, two duplicates of each to a hook. Beneath each hook was a strip of Mystik tape, each strip lettered in Stan’s small, neat printing: GARAGE, ATTIC, D’STAIRS BATH, UPSTAIRS BATH, FRONT DOOR,
BACK DOOR. Off to one side were ignition-key dupes labelled M-B and VOLVO.
Patty snatched the key marked UPSTAIRS BATH, began to run for the stairs, and then made herself walk. Running made the panic want to come back, and the panic was too close to the surface as it was. Also, if she just walked, maybe nothing would be wrong. Or, if there was something wrong, God could look down, see she was just walking, and think: Oh, good— pulled a hell of a boner, but I’ve got time to take it all back.
Walking as sedately as a woman on her way to a Ladies’ Book Circle meeting, she went up the stairs and down to the closed bathroom door.
“Stanley? ” she called, trying the door again at the same time, suddenly more afraid than ever, not wanting to use the key because having to use the key was somehow too final. If God hadn’t taken it back by the time she used the key, then He never would. The age of miracles, after all, was past.
But the door was still locked; the deliberate plink . . . pause of dripping water was her only answer.
Her hand was shaking, and the key chattered all the way around the plate before finding its way into the keyhole and socking itself home. She turned it and heard the lock snap back. She fumbled for the cut-glass knob. It tried to slide through her hand again—not because the door was locked this time but because her palm was wet with sweat. She firmed her grip and made it turn. She pushed the door open.
“Stanley? Stanley? St—”
She looked at the tub with its blue shower curtain bunched at the far end of the stainless steel rod and forgot how to finish her husband’s name. She simply stared at the tub, her face as solemn as the face of a child on her first day at school. In a moment she would begin to scream, and Anita
MacKenzie next door would hear her, and it would be Anita MacKenzie who would call the police, convinced that someone had broken into the Uris house and that people were being killed over there.
But for now, this one moment, Patty Uris simply stood silent with her
hands clasped in front of her against her dark cotton skirt, her face solemn, her eyes huge. And now the look of almost holy solemnity began to transform itself into something else. The huge eyes began to bulge. Her mouth pulled back into a dreadful grin of horror. She wanted to scream and couldn’t. The screams were too big to come out.
The bathroom was lit by fluorescent tubes. It was very bright. There were no shadows. You could see everything, whether you wanted to or not. The water in the tub was bright pink. Stanley lay with his back propped against
the rear of the tub. His head had rolled so far back on his neck that strands of his short black hair brushed the skin between his shoulder-blades. If his staring eyes had still been capable of seeing, she would have looked upside down to him. His mouth hung open like a sprung door. His expression was one of abysmal, frozen horror. A package of Gillette Platinum Plus razor
blades lay on the rim of the tub. He had slit his inner forearms open from wrist to the crook of the elbow, and then had crossed each of these cuts just
below the Bracelets of Fortune, making a pair of bloody capital T’s. The gashes glared red-purple in the harsh white light. She thought the exposed tendons and ligaments looked like cuts of cheap beef.
A drop of water gathered at the lip of the shiny chromium faucet. It grew fat. Grew pregnant, you might say. It sparkled. It dropped. Plink.
He had dipped his right forefinger in his own blood and had written a single word on the blue tiles above the tub, written it in two huge, staggering letters. A zig-zagging bloody fingermark fell away from the
second letter of this word—his finger had made that mark, she saw, as his hand fell into the tub, where it now floated. She thought Stanley must have made that mark—his final impression on the world—as he lost consciousness. It seemed to cry out at her:
 |
Another drop fell into the tub.
Plink.
That did it. Patty Uris at last found her voice. Staring into her husband’s dead and sparkling eyes, she began to scream.
2
Richard Tozier Takes a Powder
Rich felt like he was doing pretty good until the vomiting started.
He had listened to everything Mike Hanlon told him, said all the right things, answered Mike’s questions, even asked a few of his own. He was vaguely aware that he was doing one of his Voices—not a strange and
outrageous one, like those he sometimes did on the radio (Kinky Briefcase, S*xual Accountant was his own personal favorite, at least for the time being, and positive listener response on Kinky was almost as high as for his listeners’ all-time favorite, Colonel Buford Kissdrivel), but a warm, rich, confident Voice. An I’m-All-Right Voice. It sounded great, but it was a lie. Just like all the other Voices were lies.
“How much do you remember, Rich? ” Mike asked him.
“Very little, ” Rich said, and then paused. “Enough, I suppose. ” “Will you come? ”
“I’ll come, ” Rich said, and hung up.
He sat in his study for a moment, leaning back in the chair behind his desk, looking out at the Pacific Ocean. A couple of kids were down on the left, horsing around on their surfboards, not really riding them. There wasn’t much surf to ride.
The clock on the desk—an expensive L. E. D. quartz that had been a gift from a record company rep—said that it was 5:09 P. M. on May 28th, 1985. It would, of course, be three hours later where Mike was calling from. Dark already. He felt a prickle of gooseflesh at that and he began to move, to do things. First, of course, he put on a record—not hunting, just grabbing blindly among the thousands racked on the shelves. Rock and roll was almost as much a part of his life as the Voices, and it was hard for him to do anything without music playing—and the louder the better. The record he grabbed turned out to be a Motown retrospective. Marvin Gaye, one of the newer members of what Rich sometimes called The All-Dead Band, came on singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine. ”
“Oooh-hoo, I bet you’re wond’rin’ how I knew ”
“Not bad, ” Rich said. He even smiled a little. This was bad, and it had admittedly knocked him for a loop, but he felt that he was going to be able to handle it. No sweat.
He began getting ready to go back home. And at some point during the next hour it occurred to him that it was as if he had died and had yet been allowed to make all of his own final business dispositions not to
mention his own funeral arrangements. And he felt as if he was doing pretty
good. He tried the travel agent he used, thinking she would probably be on the freeway and headed home by now but taking a shot on the off-chance. For a wonder, he caught her in. He told her what he needed and she asked him for fifteen minutes.
“I owe you one, Carol, ” he said. They had progressed from Mr. Tozier and Ms. Feeny to Rich and Carol over the last three years—pretty chummy, considering they had never met face to face.
“All right, pay off, ” she said. “Can you do Kinky Briefcase for me? ”
Without even pausing—if you had to pause to find your Voice, there was usually no Voice there to be found—Rich said: “Kinky Briefcase, S*xual Accountant, here—I had a fellow come in the other day who wanted to
know what the worst thing was about getting AIDS. ” His voice had dropped slightly; at the same time its rhythm had speeded up and become jaunty—it was clearly an American voice and yet it somehow conjured up images of a wealthy British colonial chappie who was as charming, in his muddled way, as he was addled. Rich hadn’t the slightest idea who Kinky Briefcase really was, but he was sure he always wore white suits, read Esquire, and drank things which came in tall glasses and smelled like
coconut-scented shampoo. “I told him right away—trying to explain to your mother how you picked it up from a Haitian girl. Until next time, this is Kinky Briefcase, S*xual Accountant, saying ‘You need my card if you can’t get hard. ’ ”
Carol Feeny screamed with laughter. “That’s perfect! Perfect! My boyfriend says he doesn’t believe you can just do those voices, he says it’s got to be a voice-filter gadget or something—”
“Just talent, my dear, ” Rich said. Kinky Briefcase was gone. W. C. Fields, top hat, red nose, golf-bags and all, was here. “I’m so stuffed with talent I have to plug up all my bodily orifices to keep it from just running out like . . . well, just running out. ”
She went off into another screamy gale of laughter, and Rich closed his eyes. He could feel the beginnings of a headache.
“Be a dear and see what you can do, would you? ” he asked, still being
W. C. Fields, and hung up on her laughter.
Now he had to go back to being himself, and that was hard—it got harder to do that every year. It was easier to be brave when you were someone else.
He was trying to pick out a pair of good loafers and had about decided to stick with sneakers when the phone rang again. It was Carol Feeny, back in record time. He felt an instant urge to fall into the Buford Kissdrivel Voice and fought it off. She had been able to get him a first-class seat on the American Airlines red-eye nonstop from LAX to Boston. He would leave
L. A. at 9:03 P. M. and arrive at Logan about five o’clock tomorrow morning. Delta would fly him out of Boston at 7:30 A. M. and into Bangor, Maine, at 8:20. She had gotten him a full-sized sedan from Avis, and it was only twenty-six miles from the Avis counter at Bangor International Airport to the Derry town line.
Only twenty-six miles? Rich thought. Is that all, Carol? Well, maybe it is
—in miles, anyway. But you don’t have the slightest idea how far it really is to Derry, and I don’t, either. But oh God, oh dear God, I am going to find out.
“I didn’t try for a room because you didn’t tell me how long you’d be there, ” she said. “Do you—”
“No—let me take care of that, ” Rich said, and then Buford Kissdrivel took over. “You’ve been a peach, my deah. A Jawja peach, a cawse. ”
He hung up gently on her—always leave em laughing—and then dialed 207-555-1212 for State of Maine Directory Assistance. He wanted a number for the Derry Town House. God, there was a name from the past. He hadn’t thought of the Derry Town House in—what?—ten years?
twenty? twenty-five years, even? Crazy as it seemed, he guessed it had been at least twenty-five years, and if Mike hadn’t called, he supposed he might never have thought of it again in his life. And yet there had been a
time in his life when he had walked past that great red brick pile every day
—and on more than one occasion he had run past it, with Henry Bowers and Belch Huggins and that other big boy, Victor Somebody-or-Other, in hot pursuit, all of them yelling little pleasantries like We’re gonna getcha, fuckface! Gonna getcha, you little smartass! Gonna getcha, you foureyed faggot! Had they ever gotten him?
Before Rich could remember, an operator was asking him what city, please.
“In Derry, operator—”
Derry! God! Even the word felt strange and forgotten in his mouth; saying it was like kissing an antique.
“—do you have a number for the Derry Town House? ” “One moment, sir. ”
No way. It’ll be gone. Razed in an urban-renewal program. Changed into an Elks’ Hall or a Bowl-a-Drome or an Electric Dreamscape Video Arcade.
Or maybe burned down one night when the odds finally ran out on some
drunk shoe salesman smoking in bed. All gone, Richie—just like the glasses Henry Bowers always used to rag you about. What’s that Springsteen song say? Glory days. . . gone in the wink of a young girl’s eye. What young girl? Why, Bev, of course. Bev . . .
Changed the Town House might be, but gone it apparently was not, because a blank, robotic voice now came on the line and said: “The . . . number . . . is . . . 9 . . . 4 . . . I. . . 8. . . 2. . . 8. . . 2. Repeat: . . . the. . .
number . . . is . . .
But Rich had gotten it the first time. It was a pleasure to hang up on that droning voice—it was too easy to imagine some great globular Directory Assistance monster buried somewhere in the earth, sweating rivets and
holding thousands of telephones in thousands of jointed chromium tentacles
—the Ma Bell version of Spidey’s nemesis, Dr. Octopus. Each year the world Rich lived in felt more and more like a huge electronic haunted house in which digital ghosts and frightened human beings lived in uneasy coexistence.
Still standing. To paraphrase Paul Simon, still standing after all these years.
He dialed the hotel he had last seen through the horn-rimmed spectacles of his childhood. Dialing that number, 1-207-941-8282, was fatally easy. He held the telephone to his ear, looking out his study’s wide picture window.
The surfers were gone; a couple was walking slowly up the beach, hand in hand, where they had been. The couple could have been a poster on the wall of the travel agency where Carol Feeny worked, that was how perfect they were. Except, that was, for the fact they were both wearing glasses.
Gonna getcha, fuckface! Gonna break your glasses!
Criss, his mind sent up abruptly. His last name was Criss. Victor Criss.
Oh Christ, that was nothing he wanted to know, not at this late date, but it didn’t seem to matter in the slightest. Something was happening down there in the vaults, down there where Rich Tozier kept his own personal collection of Golden Oldies. Doors were opening.
Only they’re not records down there, are they? Down there you’re not Rich “Records” Tozier, hot-shot KLAD deejay and the Man of a Thousand Voices, are you? And those things that are opening . . . they aren’t exactly doors, are they?
He tried to shake these thoughts off.
Thing to remember is that I’m okay. I’m okay, you’re okay, Rich Tozier’s okay. Could use a cigarette, is all.
He had quit four years ago but he could use one now, all right.
They’re not records but dead bodies. You buried them deep but now
there’s some kind of crazy earthquake going on and the ground is spitting
them up to the surface. You’re not Rich “Records” Tozier down there; down there you’re just Richie “Four-Eyes” Tozier and you’re with your buddies and you’re so scared it feels like your balls are turning into Welch’s grape
jelly. Those aren’t doors, and they’re not opening. Those are crypts, Richie. They’re cracking open and the vampires you thought were dead are all flying out again.
A cigarette, just one. Even a Carlton would do, for Christ’s sweet sake. Gonna getcha, four-eyes! Gonna make you EAT that fuckin bookbag! “Town House, ” a male voice with a Yankee tang said; it had travelled all
the way across New England, the Midwest, and under the casinos of Las Vegas to reach his ear.
Rich asked the voice if he could reserve a suite of rooms at the Town House, beginning tomorrow. The voice told him he could, and then asked him for how long.
“I can’t say. I’ve got—” He paused briefly, minutely.
What did he have, exactly? In his mind’s eye he saw a boy with a tartan bookbag running from the tough guys; he saw a boy who wore glasses, a thin boy with a pale face that had somehow seemed to scream Hit me! Go on and hit me! in some mysterious way to every passing bully. Here’s my lips! Mash them back against my teeth! Here’s my nose! Bloody it for sure and break it if you can! Box an ear so it swells up like a cauliflower! Split an eyebrow! Here’s my chin, go for the knockout button! Here are my eyes, so blue and so magnified behind these hateful, hateful glasses, these horn- rimmed specs one bow of which is held on with adhesive tape. Break the specs! Drive a shard of glass into one of these eyes and close it forever!
What the hell!
He closed his eyes and said: “I’ve got business in Derry, you see. I don’t know how long the transaction will take. How about three days, with an option to renew? ”
“An option to renew? ” the desk-clerk asked doubtfully, and Rich waited patiently for the fellow to work it over in his mind. “Oh, I get you! That’s very good!”
“Thank you, and I. . . ah . . . hope you can vote for us in Novembah, ” John F. Kennedy said. “Jackie wants to . . . ah . . . do ovuh the . . . ah . . . Oval Office, and I’ve got a job all lined up for my . . . ah . . . brothah Bobby. ”
“Mr. Tozier? ”
“Yes. ”
“Okay . . . somebody else got on the line there for a few seconds. ”
Just an old pol from the D. O. P. , Rich thought. That’s Dead Old Party, in case you should wonder. Don’t worry about it. A shudder worked through him, and he told himself again, almost desperately: You’re okay, Rich.
“I heard it, too, ” Rich said. “Must have been a line cross-over. How we looking on that room? ”
“Oh, there’s no problem with that, ” the clerk said. “We do business here in Derry, but it really never booms. ”
“Is that so? ”
“Oh, ayuh, ” the clerk agreed, and Rich shuddered again. He had forgotten that, too—that simple northern New England-ism for yes. Oh, ayuh.
Gonna getcha, creep! the ghostly voice of Henry Bowers screamed, and he felt more crypts cracking open inside of him; the stench he smelled was not decayed bodies but decayed memories, and that was somehow worse.
He gave the Town House clerk his American Express number and hung up. Then he called Steve Covall, the KLAD program director.
“What’s up, Rich? ” Steve asked. The last Arbitron ratings had shown KLAD at the top of the cannibalistic Los Angeles FM-rock market, and ever since then Steve had been in an excellent mood—thank God for small favors.
“Well, you might be sorry you asked, ” he told Steve. “I’m taking a powder. ”
“Taking—” He could hear the frown in Steve’s voice. “I don’t think I get you, Rich. ”
“I have to put on my boogie shoes. I’m going away. ”
“What do you mean, going away? According to the log I have right here in front of me, you’re on the air tomorrow from two in the afternoon until six P. M. , just like always. In fact, you’re interviewing Clarence Clemons in the studio at four. You know Clarence Clemons, Rich? As in ‘Come on and blow, Big Man’? ”
“Clemons can talk to Mike O’Hara as well as he can to me. ”
“Clarence doesn’t want to talk to Mike, Rich. Clarence doesn’t want to talk to Bobby Russell. He doesn’t want to talk to me. Clarence is a big fan of Buford Kissdrivel and Wyatt the Homicidal Bag-Boy. He wants to talk to you, my friend. And I have no interest in having a pissed-off two-hundred- and-fifty-pound saxophone player who was once almost drafted by a pro football team running amok in my studio. ”
“I don’t think he has a history of running amok, ” Rich said. “I mean, we’re talking Clarence Clemons here, not Keith Moon. ”
There was silence on the line. Rich waited patiently.
“You’re not serious, are you? ” Steve finally asked. He sounded plaintive. “I mean, unless your mother just died or you’ve got to have a brain tumor out or something, this is called crapping out. ”
“I have to go, Steve. ”
“Is your mother sick? Did she God-forbid die? ” “She died ten years ago. ”
“Have you got a brain tumor? ” “Not even a rectal polyp. ”
“This is not funny, Rich. ” “No. ”
“You’re being a fucking busher, and I don’t like it. ” “I don’t like it either, but I have to go. ”
“Where? Why? What is this? Talk to me, Rich!”
“Someone called me. Someone I used to know a long time ago. In another place. Back then something happened. I made a promise. We all promised that we would go back if the something started happening again. And I guess it has. ”
“What something are we talking about, Rich? ”
“I’d just as soon not say. ” Also, you’ll think I’m crazy if I tell you the truth: I don’t remember.
“When did you make this famous promise? ” “A long time ago. In the summer of 1958. ”
There was another long pause, and he knew Steve Covall was trying to decide if Rich “Records” Tozier, aka Buford Kissdrivel, aka Wyatt the Homicidal Bag-Boy, etc. , etc. , was having him on or was having some kind of mental breakdown.
“You would have been just a kid, ” Steve said flatly. “Eleven. Going on twelve. ”
Another long pause. Rich waited patiently.
“All right, ” Steve said. “I’ll shift the rotation—put Mike in for you. I can call Chuck Foster to pull a few shifts, I guess, if I can find what Chinese restaurant he’s currently holed up in. I’ll do it because we go back a long way together. But I’m never going to forget you bushed out on me, Rich. ”
“Oh, get down off it, ” Rich said, but the headache was getting worse. He knew what he was doing; did Steve really think he didn’t? “I need a few
days off, is all. You’re acting like I took a shit on our FCC charter. ” “A few days off for what? The reunion of your Cub Scout pack in
Shithouse Falls, North Dakota, or Pussyhump City, West Virginia? ” “Actually I think Shithouse Falls is in Arkansas, bo, ” Buford Kissdrivel
said in his big hollow-barrel Voice, but Steve was not to be diverted.
“Because you made a promise when you were eleven? Kids don’t make serious promises when they’re eleven, for Christ’s sake! And it’s not even that, Rich, and you know it. This is not an insurance company; this is not a law office. This is show-business, be it ever so humble, and you fucking well know it. If you had given me a week’s notice, I wouldn’t be holding
this phone in one hand and a bottle of Mylanta in the other. You are putting my balls to the wall, and you know it, so don’t you insult my intelligence!”
Steve was nearly screaming now, and Rich closed his eyes. I’m never going to forget it, Steve had said, and Rich supposed he never would. But Steve had also said kids didn’t make serious promises when they were eleven, and that wasn’t true at all. Rich couldn’t remember what the
promise had been—wasn’t sure he wanted to remember—but it had been plenty serious.
“Steve, I have to. ”
“Yeah. And I told you I could handle it. So go ahead. Go ahead, you busher. ”
“Steve, this is rid—”
But Steve had already hung up. Rich put the phone down. He had barely started away from it when it began to ring again, and he knew without picking it up that it was Steve again, madder than ever. Talking to him at
this point would do no good; things would just get uglier. He slid the switch on the side of the phone to the right, cutting it off in mid-ring.
He went upstairs, pulled two suitcases out of the closet, and filled them with a barely glanced-at conglomeration of clothes—jeans, shirts, underwear, socks. It would not occur to him until later that he had taken nothing but kid-clothes. He carried the suitcases back downstairs.
On the den wall was a black-and-white Ansel Adams photograph of Big Sur. Rich swung it back on hidden hinges, exposing a barrel safe. He opened it, pawed his way past the paperwork—the house here, poised cozily between the fault-line and the brush-fire zone, twenty acres of timberland in Idaho, a bunch of stocks. He had bought the stocks seemingly at random—when his broker saw Rich coming, he immediately clutched his head—but the stocks had all risen steadily over the years. He was
sometimes surprised by the thought that he was almost—not quite, but
almost—a rich man. All courtesy of rock-and-roll music . . . and the Voices, of course.
House, acres, stocks, insurance policy, even a copy of his last will and testament. The strings that bind you tight to the map of your life, he thought.
There was a sudden wild impulse to whip out his Zippo and light it up, the whole whore’s combine of wherefores and know-ye-all-men-by-these-
present’s and the-bearer-of-this-certificate-is-entitled’s. And he could do it, too. The papers in his safe had suddenly ceased to signify anything.
The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing at all supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned the motherfucker on. Easy. Burn it up or blow it away, then just take a powder.
Behind the papers, which were only currency’s second cousins, was the real stuff. The cash. Four thousand dollars in tens, twenties, and fifties.
Taking it now, stuffing it into the pocket of his jeans, he wondered if he hadn’t somehow known what he was doing when he put the money in here
—fifty bucks one month, a hundred and twenty the next, maybe only ten the month after that. Rathole money. Taking-a-powder money.
“Man, that’s scary, ” he said, barely aware he had spoken. He was looking blankly out the big window at the beach. It was deserted now, the surfers gone, the honeymooners (if that was what they had been) gone, too.
Ah, yes, doc—it all comes back to me now. Remember Stanley Uris, for instance? Bet your fur I do. Remember how we used to say that, and
think it was so cool? Stanley Urine, the big kids called him. “Hey, Urine! Hey, you fuckin Christ-killer! Where ya goin? One of ya fag friends gonna give you a bee jay? ”
He slammed the safe door shut and swung the picture back into place.
When had he last thought of Stan Uris? Five years ago? Ten? Twenty? Rich and his family had moved away from Derry in the spring of 1960, and how fast all of their faces faded, his gang, that pitiful bunch of losers with their
little clubhouse in what had been known then as the Barrens—funny name for an area as lush with growth as that place had been. Kidding themselves that they were jungle explorers, or Seabees carving out a landing strip on a Pacific atoll while they held off the Japs, kidding themselves that they were dam-builders, cowboys, spacemen on a jungle world, you name it, but whatever you name it, don’t let’s forget what it really was: it was hiding.
Hiding from the big kids. Hiding from Henry Bowers and Victor Criss and Belch Huggins and the rest of them. What a bunch of losers they had been
—Stan Uris with his big Jew-boy nose, Bill Denbrough who could say nothing but “Hi-yo, Silver!” without stuttering so badly that it drove you almost dogshit, Beverly Marsh with her bruises and her cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of her blouse, Ben Hanscom who had been so big he looked like a human version of Moby Dick, and Richie Tozier with his thick
glasses and his A averages and his wise mouth and his face which just begged to be pounded into new and exciting shapes. Was there a word for what they had been? Oh yes. There always was. Le mot juste. In this case le mot juste was wimps.
How it came back, how all of it came back and now he stood here in
his den shivering as helplessly as a homeless mutt caught in a thunderstorm, shivering because the guys he had run with weren’t all he remembered.
There were other things, things he hadn’t thought of in years, trembling just below the surface.
Bloody things.
A darkness. Some darkness.
The house on Neibolt Street, and Bill screaming: You k-killed my brother, you fuh-fuh-fucker!
Did he remember? Just enough not to want to remember any more, and you could bet your fur on that.
A smell of garbage, a smell of shit, and a smell of something else.
Something worse than either. It was the stink of the beast, the stink of It, down there in the darkness under Derry where the machines thundered on and on. He remembered George—
But that was too much and he ran for the bathroom, blundering into his Eames chair on his way and almost falling. He made it . . . barely. He slid
across the slick tiles to the toilet on his knees like some weird break-dancer, gripped the edges, and vomited everything in his guts. Even then it wouldn’t stop; suddenly he could see Georgie Denbrough as if he had last seen him yesterday, Georgie who had been the start of it all, Georgie who had been murdered in the fall of 1957. Georgie had died right after the flood, one of his arms had been ripped from its socket, and Rich had blocked all of that out of his memory. But sometimes those things come back, oh yes indeedy, they come back, sometimes they come back.
The spasm passed and Rich groped blindly for the flush. Water roared. His early supper, regurgitated in hot chunks, vanished tastefully down the drain.
Into the sewers.
Into the pound and stink and darkness of the sewers.
He closed the lid, laid his forehead against it, and began to cry. It was the first time he had cried since his mother died in 1975. Without even thinking of what he was doing, he cupped his hands under his eyes, and the contact
lenses he wore slipped out and lay glistening in his palms.
Forty minutes later, feeling husked-out and somehow cleansed, he threw his suitcases into the trunk of his MG and backed it out of the garage. The light was fading. He looked at his house with the new plantings, he looked at the beach, at the water, which had taken on the cast of pale emeralds
broken by a narrow track of beaten gold. And a conviction stole over him that he would never see any of this again, that he was a dead man walking. “Going home now, ” Rich Tozier whispered to himself. “Going home,
God help me, going home. ”
He put the car in gear and went, feeling again how easy it had been to slip through an unsuspected fissure in what he had considered a solid life— how easy it was to get over onto the dark side, to sail out of the blue and into the black.
Out of the blue and into the black, yes, that was it. Where anything might be waiting.
3
Ben Hanscom Takes a Drink
If, on that night of May 28th, 1985, you had wanted to find the man Time
magazine had called “perhaps the most promising young architect in America” (“Urban Energy Conservation and the Young Turks, ” Time, October 15, 1984), you would have had to drive west out of Omaha on Interstate 80 to do it. You’d have taken the Swedholm exit and then
Highway 81 to downtown Swedholm (of which there isn’t much). There you’d turn off on Highway 92 at Bucky’s Hi-Hat Eat-Em-Up (“Chicken Fried Steak Our Specialty”) and once out in the country again you’d hang a right on Highway 63, which runs straight as a string through the deserted
little town of Gatlin and finally into Hemingford Home. Downtown Hemingford Home made downtown Swedholm look like New York City;
the business district consisted of eight buildings, five on one side and three on the other. There was the Kleen Kut barber shop (propped in the window a yellowing hand-lettered sign fully fifteen years old read IF YOUR A
“HIPPY” GET YOUR HAIR CUT SOMEWHERES ELSE), the second-run
movie house, the five-and-dime. There was a branch of the Nebraska Homeowners’ Bank, a 76 gas station, a Rexall Drug, and the National
Farmstead & Hardware Supply—which was the only business in town which looked halfway prosperous.
And, near the end of the main drag, set off a little way from the other buildings like a pariah and resting on the edge of the big empty, you had your basic roadhouse—the Red Wheel. If you had gotten that far, you would have seen in the potholed dirt parking lot an aging 1968 Cadillac
convertible with double CB antennas on the back. The vanity plate on the front read simply: BEN’S CADDY. And inside, walking toward the bar, you would have found your man—lanky, sunburned, dressed in a chambray shirt, faded jeans, and a pair of scuffed engineer boots. There were faint
squint-lines around the corners of his eyes, but nowhere else. He looked perhaps ten years younger than his actual age, which was thirty-eight.
“Hello, Mr. Hanscom, ” Ricky Lee said, putting a paper napkin on the bar as Ben sat down. Ricky Lee sounded a trifle surprised, and he was. He had never seen Hanscom in the Wheel on a weeknight before. He came in regularly every Friday night for two beers, and every Saturday night for four or five; he always asked after Ricky Lee’s three boys; he always left
the same five-dollar tip under his beer stein when he took off. In terms of both professional conversation and personal regard, he was far and away Ricky Lee’s favorite customer. The ten dollars a week (and the fifty left under the stein at each Christmas-time over the last five years) was fine enough, but the man’s company was worth far more. Worthwhile company was always a rarity, but in a honkytonk like this, where talk always came cheap, it was scarcer than hen’s teeth.
Although Hanscom’s roots were in New England and he had gone to
college in California, there was more than a touch of the extravagant Texan about him. Ricky Lee counted on Ben Hanscom’s Friday-Saturday-night stops, because he had learned over the years that he could count on them.
Mr. Hanscom might be building a skyscraper in New York (where he already had three of the most talked-about buildings in the city), a new art gallery in Redondo Beach, or a business building in Salt Lake City, but
come Friday night the door leading to the parking lot would open sometime between eight o’clock and nine-thirty and in he would stroll, as if he lived no farther than the other side of town and had decided to drop in because
there was nothing good on TV. He had his own Learjet and a private landing strip on his farm in Junkins.
Two years ago he had been in London, first designing and then overseeing the construction of the new BBC communications center—a building that was still hotly debated pro and con in the British press (the Guardian: “Perhaps the most beautiful building to be constructed in
London over the last twenty years”; the Mirror: “Other than the face of my mother-in-law after a pub-crawl, the ugliest thing I have ever seen”). When Mr. Hanscom took that job, Ricky Lee had thought, Well, I’ll see him again sometime. Or maybe he’ll just forget all about us. And indeed, the Friday night after Ben Hanscom left for England had come and gone with no sign of him, although Ricky Lee found himself looking up quickly every time
the door opened between eight and nine-thirty. Well, I’ll see him again sometime. Maybe. Sometime turned out to be the next night. The door had opened at quarter past nine and in he had ambled, wearing jeans and a GO ‘BAMA tee-shirt and his old engineer boots, looking like he’d come from
no farther away than cross-town. And when Ricky Lee cried almost joyfully “Hey, Mr. Hanscom! Christ! What are you doin here? , ” Mr. Hanscom had looked mildly surprised, as if there was nothing in the least unusual about
his being here. Nor had that been a one-shot; he had showed up every Saturday during the two-year course of his active involvement in the BBC job. He left London each Saturday morning at 11:00 A. M. on the Concorde, he told a fascinated Ricky Lee, and arrived at Kennedy in New York at 10:15 A. M.—forty-five minutes before he left London, at least by the clock (“God, it’s like time travel, ain’t it? ” an impressed Ricky Lee had said). A limousine was standing by to take him over to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, a trip which usually took no more than an hour on Saturday
morning. He could be in the cockpit of his Lear before noon with no trouble at all, and touching down in Junkins by two-thirty. If you head west fast enough, he told Ricky, the day just seems to go on forever. He would take a two-hour nap, spend an hour with his foreman and half an hour with his secretary. He would eat supper and then come on over to the Red Wheel for an hour and a half or so. He always came in alone, he always sat at the bar, and he always left the way he had come in, although God knew there were plenty of women in this part of Nebraska who would have been happy to
screw the socks off him. Back at the farm he would catch six hours of sleep and then the whole process would reverse itself. Ricky had never had a customer who failed to be impressed with this story. Maybe he’s gay, a
woman had told him once. Ricky Lee glanced at her briefly, taking in the carefully styled hair, the carefully tailored clothes which undoubtedly had designer labels, the diamond chips at her ears, the look in her eyes, and
knew she was from somewhere back east, probably New York, out here on a brief duty visit to a relative or maybe an old school chum, and couldn’t wait to get out again. No, he had replied. Mr. Hanscom ain’t no sissy. She had taken a pack of Doral cigarettes from her purse and held one between her red, glistening lips until he lit it for her. How do you know? she had asked, smiling a little. I just do, he said. And he did. He thought of saying to her: I think he’s the most God-awful lonely man I ever met in my life. But
he wasn’t going to say any such thing to this New York woman who was looking at him like he was some new and amusing type of life.
Tonight Mr. Hanscom looked a little pale, a little distracted.
“Hello, Ricky Lee, ” he said, sitting down, and then fell to studying his hands.
Ricky Lee knew he was slated to spend the next six or eight months in Colorado Springs, overseeing the start of the Mountain States Cultural Center, a sprawling six-building complex which would be cut into the side of a mountain. When it’s done people are going to say it looks like a giant- kid left his toy blocks all over a flight of stairs, Ben had told Ricky Lee.
Some will, anyway, and they’ll be at least half-right. But I think it’s going to work. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever tried and putting it up is going to be
scary as hell, but I think it’s going to work.
Ricky Lee supposed it was possible that Mr. Hanscom had a little touch of stage fright. Nothing surprising about that, and nothing wrong about it, either. When you got big enough to be noticed, you got big enough to come gunning for. Or maybe he just had a touch of the bug. There was a hell of a lively one going around.
Ricky Lee got a beer stein from the backbar and reached for the Olympia tap.
“Don’t do that, Ricky Lee. ”
Ricky Lee turned back, surprised—and when Ben Hanscom looked up from his hands, he was suddenly frightened. Because Mr. Hanscom didn’t look like he had stage fright, or the virus that was going around, or anything like that. He looked like he had just taken a terrible blow and was still trying to understand whatever it was that had hit him.
Someone died. He ain’t married but every man’s got a fambly, and
someone in his just bit the dust. That’s what happened, just as sure as shit rolls downhill from a privy.
Someone dropped a quarter into the juke-box, and Barbara Mandrell started to sing about a drunk man and a lonely woman.
“You okay, Mr. Hanscom? ”
Ben Hanscom looked at Ricky Lee out of eyes that suddenly looked ten
—no, twenty—years older than the rest of his face, and Ricky Lee was astonished to observe that Mr. Hanscom’s hair was graying. He had never noticed any gray in his hair before.
Hanscom smiled. The smile was ghastly, horrible. It was like watching a corpse smile.
“I don’t think I am, Ricky Lee. No sir. Not tonight. Not at all. ”
Ricky Lee set the stein down and walked back over to where Hanscom sat. The bar was as empty as a Monday-night bar far outside of football season can get. There were fewer than twenty paying customers in the place. Annie was sitting by the door into the kitchen, playing cribbage with the short-order cook.
“Bad news, Mr. Hanscom? ”
“Bad news, that’s right. Bad news from home. ” He looked at Ricky Lee.
He looked through Ricky Lee.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Hanscom. ” “Thank you, Ricky Lee. ”
He fell silent and Ricky Lee was about to ask him if there was anything he could do when Hanscom said:
“What’s your bar whiskey, Ricky Lee? ”
“For everyone else in this dump it’s Four Roses, ” Ricky Lee said. “But for you I think it’s Wild Turkey. ”
Hanscom smiled a little at that. “That’s good of you, Ricky Lee. I think you better grab that stein after all. What you do is fill it up with Wild Turkey. ”
“Fill it? ” Ricky Lee asked, frankly astonished. “Christ, I’ll have to roll you out of here!” Or call an ambulance, he thought.
“Not tonight, ” Hanscom said. “I don’t think so. ”
Ricky Lee looked carefully into Mr. Hanscom’s eyes to see if he could possibly be joking, and it took less than a second to see that he wasn’t. So
he got the stein from the backbar and the bottle of Wild Turkey from one of the shelves below. The neck of the bottle chattered against the rim of the stein as he began to pour. He watched the whiskey gurgle out, fascinated in spite of himself. Ricky Lee decided it was more than just a touch of the Texan that Mr. Hanscom had in him: this had to be the biggest goddamned shot of whiskey he ever had poured or ever would pour in his life.
Call an ambulance, my ass. He drinks this baby and I’ll be calling Parker and Waters in Swedholm for their funeral hack.
Nevertheless he brought it back and set it down in front of Hanscom; Ricky Lee’s father had once told him that if a man was in his right mind, you brought him what he paid for, be it piss or poison. Ricky Lee didn’t
know if that was good advice or bad, but he knew that if you tended bar for a living, it went a fair piece toward saving you from being chomped into gator-bait by your own conscience.
Hanscom looked at the monster drink thoughtfully for a moment and then asked, “What do I owe you for a shot like that, Ricky Lee? ”
Ricky Lee shook his head slowly, eyes still on the steinful of whiskey, not wanting to look up and meet those socketed, staring eyes. “No, ” he said. “This one is on the house. ”
Hanscom smiled again, this time more naturally. “Why, I thank you, Ricky Lee. Now I am going to show you something I learned about in Peru, in 1978. I was working with a guy named Frank Billings—understudying with him, I guess you’d say. Frank Billings was the best damned architect in the world, I think. He caught a fever and the doctors injected about a billion different antibiotics into him and not a single one of them touched it. He burned for two weeks and then he died. What I’m going to show you I learned from the Indians who worked on the project. The local popskull is pretty potent. You take a slug and you think it’s going down pretty mellow, no problem, and then all at once it’s like someone lit a blowtorch in your mouth and aimed it down your throat. But the Indians drink it like Coca- Cola, and I rarely saw one drunk, and I never saw one with a hangover.
Never had the sack to try it their way myself. But I think I’ll give it a go tonight. Bring me some of those lemon wedges there. ”
Ricky Lee brought him four and laid them out neatly on a fresh napkin next to the stein of whiskey. Hanscom picked one of them up, tilted his
head back like a man about to administer eyedrops to himself, and then began to squeeze raw lemon-juice into his right nostril.
“Holy Jesus!” Ricky Lee cried, horrified.
Hanscom’s throat worked. His face flushed . . . and then Ricky Lee saw tears running down the flat planes of his face toward his ears. Now the
Spinners were on the juke, singing about the rubberband-man. “Oh Lord, I just don’t know how much of this I can stand, ” the Spinners sang.
Hanscom groped blindly on the bar, found another slice of lemon, and squeezed the juice into his other nostril.
“You’re gonna fucking kill yourself, ” Ricky Lee whispered.
Hanscom tossed both of the wrung-out lemon wedges onto the bar. His eyes were fiery red and he was breathing in hitching, wincing gasps. Clear lemon-juice dripped from both of his nostrils and trickled down to the
corners of his mouth. He groped for the stein, raised it, and drank a third of it. Frozen, Ricky Lee watched his adam’s apple go up and down.
Hanscom set the stein aside, shuddered twice, then nodded. He looked at Ricky Lee and smiled a little. His eyes were no longer red.
“Works about like they said it did. You are so fucking concerned about your nose that you never feel what’s going down your throat at all. ”
“You’re crazy, Mr. Hanscom, ” Ricky Lee said.
“You bet your fur, ” Mr. Hanscom said. “You remember that one, Ricky Lee? We used to say that when we were kids ‘You bet your fur. ’ Did I ever tell you I used to be fat? ”
“No sir, you never did, ” Ricky Lee whispered. He was now convinced that Mr. Hanscom had received some intelligence so dreadful that the man really had gone crazy . . . or at least taken temporary leave of his senses.
“I was a regular butterball. Never played baseball or basketball, always got caught first when we played tag, couldn’t keep out of my own way. I
was fat, all right. And there were these fellows in my home town who used to take after me pretty regularly. There was a fellow named Reginald Huggins, only everyone called him Belch. A kid named Victor Criss. A few other guys. But the real brains of the combination was a fellow named Henry Bowers. If there has ever been a genuinely evil kid strutting across
the skin of the world, Ricky Lee, Henry Bowers was that kid. I wasn’t the only kid he used to take after; my problem was, I couldn’t run as fast as
some of the others. ”
Hanscom unbuttoned his shirt and opened it. Leaning forward, Ricky Lee saw a funny, twisted scar on Mr. Hanscom’s stomach, just above his navel. Puckered, white, and old. It was a letter, he saw. Someone had carved the letter “H” into the man’s stomach, probably long before Mr. Hanscom had been a man.
“Henry Bowers did that to me. About a thousand years ago. I’m lucky I’m not wearing his whole damned name down there. ”
“Mr. Hanscom—”
Hanscom took the other two lemon-slices, one in each hand, tilted his head back, and took them like nose-drops. He shuddered wrackingly, put them aside, and took two big swallows from the stein. He shuddered again, took another gulp, and then groped for the padded edge of the bar with his eyes closed. For a moment he held on like a man on a sailboat clinging to
the rail for support in a heavy sea. Then he opened his eyes again and smiled at Ricky Lee.
“I could ride this bull all night, ” he said.
“Mr. Hanscom, I wish you wouldn’t do that anymore, ” Ricky Lee said nervously.
Annie came over to the waitresses’ stand with her tray and called for a couple of Millers. Ricky Lee drew them and took them down to her. His legs felt rubbery.
“Is Mr. Hanscom all right, Ricky Lee? ” Annie asked. She was looking past Ricky Lee and he turned to follow her gaze. Mr. Hanscom was leaning over the bar, carefully picking lemon-slices out of the caddy where Ricky Lee kept the drink garnishes.
“I don’t know, ” he said. “I don’t think so. ”
“Well get your thumb out of your ass and do something about it. ” Annie was, like most other women, partial to Ben Hanscom.
“I dunno. My daddy always said that if a man’s in his right mind—” “Your daddy didn’t have the brains God gave a gopher, ” Annie said. “Never mind your daddy. You got to put a stop to that, Ricky Lee. He’s
going to kill himself. ”
Thus given his marching orders, Ricky Lee went back down to where Ben Hanscom sat. “Mr. Hanscom, I really think you’ve had en—”
Hanscom tilted his head back. Squeezed. Actually sniffed the lemon-juice back this time, as if it were cocaine. He gulped whiskey as if it were water.
He looked at Ricky Lee solemnly. “Bing-bang, I saw the whole gang, dancing on my living-room rug, ” he said, and then laughed. There was maybe two inches of whiskey left in the stein.
“That is enough, ” Ricky Lee said, and reached for the stein. Hanscom moved it gently out of his reach. “Damage has been done,
Ricky Lee, ” he said. “The damage has been done, boy. ” “Mr. Hanscom, please—”
“I’ve got something for your kids, Ricky Lee. Damn if I didn’t almost forget!”
He was wearing a faded denim vest, and now he reached something out of one of its pockets. Ricky Lee heard a muted clink.
“My dad died when I was four, ” Hanscom said. There was no slur at all in his voice. “Left us a bunch of debts and these. I want your kiddos to have them, Ricky Lee. ” He put three cartwheel silver dollars on the bar, where they gleamed under the soft lights. Ricky Lee caught his breath.
“Mr. Hanscom, that’s very kind, but I couldn’t—”
“There used to be four, but I gave one of them to Stuttering Bill and the others. Bill Denbrough, that was his real name. Stuttering Bill’s just what we used to call him . . . just a thing we used to say, like ‘You bet your fur. ’
He was one of the best friends I ever had—I did have a few, you know, even a fat kid like me had a few. Stuttering Bill’s a writer now. ”
Ricky Lee barely heard him. He was looking at the cartwheels, fascinated. 1921, 1923, and 1924. God knew what they were worth now, just in terms of the pure silver they contained.
“I couldn’t, ” he said again.
“But I insist. ” Mr. Hanscom took hold of the stein and drained it. He should have been flat on his keister, but his eyes never left Ricky Lee’s. Those eyes were watery, and very bloodshot, but Ricky Lee would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that they were also the eyes of a sober man.
“You’re scaring me a little, Mr. Hanscom, ” Ricky Lee said. Two years ago Gresham Arnold, a rumdum of some local repute, had come into the Red Wheel with a roll of quarters in his hand and a twenty-dollar bill stuck into the band of his hat. He handed the roll to Annie with instructions to feed the quarters into the juke-box by fours. He put the twenty on the bar and instructed Ricky Lee to set up drinks for the house. This rumdum, this Gresham Arnold, had long ago been a star basketball player for the
Hemingford Rams, leading them to their first (and most likely last) high- school team championship. In 1961 that had been. An almost unlimited
future seemed to lie ahead of the young man. But he had flunked out of L.
S. U. his first semester, a victim of drink, drugs, and all-night parties. He
came home, cracked up the yellow convertible his folks had given him as a graduation present, and got a job as head salesman in his daddy’s John
Deere dealership. Five years passed. His father could not bear to fire him, and so he finally sold the dealership and retired to Arizona, a man haunted and made old before his time by the inexplicable and apparently irreversible degeneration of his son. While the dealership still belonged to his daddy and he was at least pretending to work, Arnold had made some effort to keep the booze at arm’s length; afterward, it got him completely. He could get mean, but he had been just as sweet as horehound candy the night he brought in the quarters and set up drinks for the house, and everyone had thanked him kindly, and Annie kept playing Moe Bandy songs because Gresham Arnold liked ole Moe Bandy. He sat there at the bar—on the very stool where Mr. Hanscom was sitting now, Ricky Lee realized with steadily deepening unease—and drank three or four bourbon-and-bitters, and sang along with the juke, and caused no trouble, and went home when Ricky Lee closed the Wheel up, and hanged himself with his belt in an upstairs closet. Gresham Arnold’s eyes that night had looked a little bit like Ben Hanscom’s eyes looked right now.
“Scaring you a bit, am I? ” Hanscom asked, his eyes never leaving Ricky Lee’s. He pushed the stein away and then folded his hands neatly in front of those three silver cartwheels. “I probably am. But you’re not as scared as I am, Ricky Lee. Pray to Jesus you never are. ”
“Well, what’s the matter? ” Ricky Lee asked. “Maybe—” He wet his lips. “Maybe I can give you a help. ”
“The matter? ” Ben Hanscom laughed. “Why, not too much. I had a call from an old friend tonight. Guy named Mike Hanlon. I’d forgotten all about him, Ricky Lee, but that didn’t scare me much. After all, I was just a kid when I knew him, and kids forget things, don’t they? Sure they do. You bet your fur. What scared me was getting about halfway over here and realizing that it wasn’t just Mike I’d forgotten about—I’d forgotten everything about being a kid. ”
Ricky Lee only looked at him. He had no idea what Mr. Hanscom was talking about—but the man was scared, all right. No question about that. It sat funny on Ben Hanscom, but it was real.
“I mean I’d forgotten all about it, ” he said, and rapped his knuckles lightly on the bar for emphasis. “Did you ever hear, Ricky Lee, of having an amnesia so complete you didn’t even know you had amnesia? ”
Ricky Lee shook his head.
“Me either. But there I was, tooling along in the Caddy tonight, and all of a sudden it hit me. I remembered Mike Hanlon, but only because he called me on the phone. I remembered Derry, but only because that was where he was calling from. ”
“Derry? ”
“But that was all. It hit me that I hadn’t even thought about being a kid since . . . since I don’t even know when. And then, just like that, it all started to flood back in. Like what we did with the fourth silver dollar. ”
“What did you do with it, Mr. Hanscom? ”
Hanscom looked at his watch, and suddenly slipped down from his stool.
He staggered a bit—the slightest bit. That was all. “Can’t let the time get away from me, ” he said. “I’m flying tonight. ”
Ricky Lee looked instantly alarmed, and Hanscom laughed.
“Flying but not driving the plane. Not this time. United Airlines, Ricky Lee. ”
“Oh. ” He supposed his relief showed on his face, but he didn’t care. “Where are you going? ”
Hanscom’s shirt was still open. He looked thoughtfully down at the puckered white lines of the old scar on his belly and then began to button the shirt over it.
“Thought I told you that, Ricky Lee. Home. I’m going home. Give those cartwheels to your kids. ” He started toward the door, and something about the way he walked, even the way he hitched at the sides of his pants, terrified Ricky Lee. The resemblance to the late and mostly unlamented Gresham Arnold was suddenly so acute it was nearly like seeing a ghost.
“Mr. Hanscom!” he cried in alarm.
Hanscom turned back, and Ricky Lee stepped quickly backward. His ass hit the backbar and glassware gossiped briefly as the bottles knocked together. He stepped back because he was suddenly convinced that Ben
Hanscom was dead. Yes, Ben Hanscom was lying dead someplace, in a ditch or an attic or possibly in a closet with a belt noosed around his neck and the toes of his four-hundred-dollar cowboy boots dangling an inch or two above the floor, and this thing standing near the juke and staring back at him was a ghost. For a moment—just a moment, but it was plenty long enough to cover his working heart with a rime of ice—he was convinced he could see tables and chairs right through the man.
“What is it, Ricky Lee? ” “Nuh-n-nuh. Nothin. ”
Ben Hanscom looked out at Ricky Lee from eyes which had dark-purple crescents beneath them. His cheeks burned with liquor; his nose looked red and sore.
“Nothin, ” Ricky Lee whispered again, but he couldn’t take his eyes from that face, the face of a man who has died deep in sin and now stands hard by hell’s smoking side door.
“I was fat and we were poor, ” Ben Hanscom said. “I remember that now.
And I remember that either a girl named Beverly or Stuttering Bill saved my life with a silver dollar. I’m scared almost insane by whatever else I may remember before tonight’s over, but how scared I am doesn’t matter, because it’s going to come anyway. It’s all there, like a great big bubble that’s growing in my mind. But I’m going, because all I’ve ever gotten and all I have now is somehow due to what we did then, and you pay for what
you get in this world. Maybe that’s why God made us kids first and built us close to the ground, because He knows you got to fall down a lot and bleed a lot before you learn that one simple lesson. You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for . . . and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you. ”
“You gonna be back this weekend, though, ain’t you? ” Ricky Lee asked through numbed lips. In his increasing distress this was all he could find to hold on to. “You gonna be back this weekend just like always, ain’t you? ”
“I don’t know, ” Mr. Hanscom said, and smiled a terrible smile. “I’m going a lot farther than London this time, Ricky Lee. ”
“Mr. Hanscom—!”
“You give those cartwheels to your kids, ” he repeated, and slipped out into the night.
“What the blue hell? ” Annie asked, but Ricky Lee ignored her. He flipped up the bar’s partition and ran over to one of the windows which looked out on the parking lot. He saw the headlights of Mr. Hanscom’s Caddy come on, heard the engine rev. It pulled out of the dirt lot, kicking up a rooster-tail of dust behind it. The taillights dwindled away to red points down Highway 63, and the Nebraska nightwind began to pull the hanging dust apart.
“He took on a boxcar full of booze and you let him get in that big car of his and drive away, ” Annie said. “Way to go, Ricky Lee. ”
“Never mind. ”
“He’s going to kill himself. ”
And although this had been Ricky Lee’s own thought less than five
minutes ago, he turned to her when the taillights winked out of sight and shook his head.
“I don’t think so, ” he said. “Although the way he looked tonight, it might be better for him if he did. ”
“What did he say to you? ”
He shook his head. It was all confused in his mind, and the sum total of it seemed to mean nothing. “It doesn’t matter. But I don’t think we’re ever going to see that old boy again. ”
4
Eddie Kaspbrak Takes His Medicine
If you would know all there is to know about an American man or woman of the middle class as the millennium nears its end, you would need only to look in his or her medicine cabinet—or so it has been said. But dear Lord, get a look into this one as Eddie Kaspbrak slides it open, mercifully sliding aside his white face and wide, staring eyes.
On the top shelf there’s Anacin, Excedrin, Excedrin P. M. , Contac, Gelusil, Tylenol, and a large blue jar of Vicks, looking like a bit of brooding deep twilight under glass. There is a bottle of Vivarin, a bottle of Serutan
(That’s “Nature’s” spelled backwards, the ads on Lawrence Welk used to say when Eddie Kaspbrak was but a wee slip of a lad), and two bottles of Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia—the regular, which tastes like liquid chalk, and the new mint flavor, which tastes like mint-flavored liquid chalk. Here is a large bottle of Rolaids standing chummily close to a large bottle of Turns.
The Turns are standing next to a large bottle of orange-flavored Di-Gel tablets. The three of them look like a trio of strange piggy-banks, stuffed with pills instead of dimes.
Second shelf, and dig the vites: you got your E, your C, your C with rosehips. You got B-simple and B-complex and B-12. There’s L-Lysine, which is supposed to do something about those embarrassing skin problems, and lecithin, which is supposed to do something about that embarrassing cholesterol build-up in and around the Big Pump. There’s iron, calcium, and cod liver oil. There’s One-A-Day multiples, Myadec multiples, Centrum multiples. And sitting up on top of the cabinet itself is a gigantic bottle of Geritol, just for good measure.
Moving right along to Eddie’s third shelf, we find the utility infielders of the patent-medicine world. Ex-Lax. Carter’s Little Pills. Those two keep
Eddie Kaspbrak moving the mail. Here, nearby, is Kaopectate, Pepto- Bismol, and Preparation H in case the mail moves too fast or too painfully. Also some Tucks in a screw-top jar just to keep everything tidy after the mail has gone through, be it just an advertising circular or two addressed to OCCUPANT or a big old special-delivery package. Here is Formula 44 for coughs, Nyquil and Dristan for colds, and a big bottle of castor oil. There’s a tin of Sucrets in case Eddie’s throat gets sore, and there’s a quartet of mouthwashes: Chloraseptic, Cépacol, Cēpestat in the spray bottle, and of
course good old Listerine, often imitated but never duplicated. Visine and Murine for the eyes. Cortaid and Neosporin ointment for the skin (the second line of defense if the L-Lysine doesn’t live up to expectations), a
tube of Oxy-5 and a plastic bottle of Oxy-Wash (because Eddie would definitely rather have a few less cents than a few more zits), and some tetracyline pills.
And off to one side, clustered like bitter conspirators, are three bottles of coal-tar shampoo.
The bottom shelf is almost deserted, but the stuff which is here means serious business—you could cruise on this stuff, okay. On this stuff you
could fly higher than Ben Hanscom’s jet and crash harder than Thurman Munson’s. There’s Valium, Percodan, Elavil, and Darvon Complex. There is also another Sucrets box on this low shelf, but there are no Sucrets in it. If you opened that one you would find six Quaaludes.
Eddie Kaspbrak believed in the Boy Scout motto.
He was swinging a blue tote-bag as he came into the bathroom. He set it on the sink, unzipped it, and then, with trembling hands, he began to spill bottles and jars and tubes and squeeze-bottles and spray-bottles into it.
Under other circumstances he would have taken them out handful by careful handful, but there was no time for such niceties now. The choice, as Eddie saw it, was as simple as it was brutal: get moving and keep moving or stand in one place long enough to start thinking about what all of this meant and simply die of fright.
“Eddie? ” Myra called up from downstairs. “Eddie, what are you
dooooing? ”
Eddie dropped the Sucrets box containing the ’ludes into the bag. The medicine cabinet was now entirely empty except for Myra’s Midol and a small, almost used-up tube of Blistex. He paused for a moment and then grabbed the Blistex. He started to zip the bag closed, debated, and then
threw in the Midol as well. She could always buy more. “Eddie? ” from halfway up the stairs now.
Eddie zipped the bag the rest of the way closed and then left the bathroom, swinging it by his side. He was a short man with a timid, rabbity sort of face. Much of his hair was gone; what was left grew in listless, piebald patches. The weight of the bag pulled him noticeably to one side.
An extremely large woman was climbing slowly to the second floor.
Eddie could hear the stairs creak protestingly under her. “What are you DOOOOOOOOING? ”
Eddie did not need a shrink to tell him that he had, in a sense, married his mother. Myra Kaspbrak was huge. She had only been big when Eddie married her five years ago, but he sometimes thought his subconscious had seen the potential for hugeness in her; God knew his own mother had been a whopper. And she looked somehow more huge than ever as she reached
the second-floor landing. She was wearing a white nightgown which swelled, comberlike, at bosom and hip. Her face, devoid of make-up, was white and shiny. She looked badly frightened.
“I have to go away for awhile, ” Eddie said.
“What do you mean, you have to go away? What was that telephone call?
”
“Nothing, ” he said, fleeing abruptly down the hallway to their walk-in
closet. He put the tote-bag down, opened the closet’s foldback door, and raked aside the half-dozen identical black suits which hung there, as
conspicuous as a thundercloud among the other, more brightly colored, clothes. He always wore one of the black suits when he was working. He bent into the closet, smelling mothballs and wool, and pulled out one of the suitcases from the back. He opened it and began throwing clothes in.
Her shadow fell over him.
“What’s this about, Eddie? Where are you going? You tell me!” “I can’t tell you. ”
She stood there, watching him, trying to decide what to say next, or what to do. The thought of simply bundling him into the closet and then standing with her back against the door until this madness had passed crossed her mind, but she was unable to bring herself to do it, although she certainly could have; she was three inches taller than Eddie and outweighed him by a hundred pounds. She couldn’t think of what to do or say, because this was so utterly unlike him. She could not have been any more dismayed and frightened if she had walked into the television room and found their new big-screen TV floating in the air.
“You can’t go, ” she heard herself saying. “You promised you’d get me Al Pacino’s autograph. ” It was an absurdity—God knew it was—but at this point even an absurdity was better than nothing.
“You’ll still get it, ” Eddie said. “You’ll have to drive him yourself. ”
Oh, here was a new terror to join those already circling in her poor dazzled head. She uttered a small scream. “I can’t—I never—”
“You’ll have to, ” he said. He was examining his shoes now. “There’s no one else. ”
“Neither of my uniforms fit anymore! They’re too tight in the tits!”
“Have Delores let one of them out, ” he said implacably. He threw two pairs of shoes back, found an empty shoebox, and popped a third pair into it. Good black shoes, plenty of use left in them still, but looking just a bit
too worn to wear on the job. When you drove rich people around New York for a living, many of them famous rich people, everything had to look just
right. These shoes no longer looked just right . . . but he supposed they would do for where he was going. And for whatever he might have to do when he got there. Maybe Richie Tozier would—
But then the blackness threatened and he felt his throat beginning to close up. Eddie realized with real panic that he had packed the whole damned
drugstore and had left the most important thing of all—his aspirator— downstairs on top of the stereo cabinet.
He banged the suitcase closed and latched it. He looked around at Myra, who was standing there in the hallway with her hand pressed against the short thick column of her neck as if she were the one with the asthma. She was staring at him, her face full of perplexity and terror, and he might have felt sorry for her if his heart had not already been so filled with terror for himself.
“What’s happened, Eddie? Who was that on the telephone? Are you in trouble? You are, aren’t you? What kind of trouble are you in? ”
He walked toward her, zipper-bag in one hand and suitcase in the other, standing more or less straight now that he was more evenly weighted. She moved in front of him, blocking off the stairway, and at first he thought she would not give way. Then, when his face was about to crash into the soft roadblock of her breasts, she did give way . . . fearfully. As he walked past, never slowing, she burst into miserable tears.
“I can’t drive Al Pacino!” she bawled. “I’ll smash into a stop-sign or something, I know I will! Eddie I’m scaaarrred!”
He looked at the Seth Thomas clock on the table by the stairs. Twenty past nine. The canned-sounding Delta clerk had told him he had already missed the last flight north to Maine—that one had left La Guardia at eight- twenty-five. He had called Amtrak and discovered there was a late train to Boston departing Penn Station at eleven-thirty. It would drop him off at South Station, where he could take a cab to the offices of Cape Cod
Limousine on Arlington Street. Cape Cod and Eddie’s company, Royal Crest, had worked out a useful and friendly reciprocal arrangement over the years. A quick call to Butch Carrington in Boston had taken care of his transportation north—Butch said he would have a Cadillac limo gassed and ready for him. So he would go in style, and with no pain-in-the-ass client sitting in the back seat, stinking the air up with a big cigar and asking if
Eddie knew where he could score a broad or a few grams of coke or both.
Going in style, all right, he thought. Only way you could go in more style would be if you were going in a hearse. But don’t worry, Eddie—that’s
probably how you’ll come back. If there’s enough of you left to pick up, that is.
“Eddie? ”
Nine-twenty. Plenty of time to talk to her, plenty of time to be kind. Ah, but it would have been so much better if this had been her whist night, if he could have just slipped out, leaving a note under one of the magnets on the refrigerator door (the refrigerator door was where he left all his notes for Myra, because there she never missed them). Leaving that way—like a fugitive—would not have been good, but this was even worse. This was
like having to leave home all over again, and that had been so hard he’d had to do it three times.
Sometimes home is where the heart is, Eddie thought randomly. I believe that. Old Bobby Frost said home’s the place where, when you have to go
there, they have to take you in. Unfortunately, it’s also the place where, once you’re in there, they don’t ever want to let you out.
He stood at the head of the stairs, forward motion temporarily spent, filled with fear, breath wheezing noisily in and out of the pinhole his throat had become, and regarded his weeping wife.
“Come on downstairs with me and I’ll tell you what I can, ” he said.
Eddie put his two bags—clothes in one, medicine in the other—by the door in the front hall. He remembered something else then . . . or rather the ghost of his mother, who had been dead many years but who still spoke frequently in his mind, remembered for him.
You know when your feet get wet you always get a cold, Eddie—you’re not like other people, you have a very weak system, you have to be careful. That’s why you must always wear your rubbers when it rains.
It rained a lot in Derry.
Eddie opened the front-hall closet, got his rubbers off the hook where they hung neatly in a plastic bag, and put them in his clothes suitcase.
That’s a good boy, Eddie.
He and Myra had been watching TV when the shit hit the fan. Eddie went into the television room and pushed the button which lowered the screen of the MuralVision TV—its screen was so big that it made Freeman McNeil look like a visitor from Brobdingnag on Sunday afternoons. He picked up
the telephone and called a taxi. The dispatcher told him it would probably be fifteen minutes. Eddie said that was no problem.
He hung up and grabbed his aspirator off the top of their expensive Sony compact-disc player. I spent fifteen hundred bucks on a state-of-the-art sound system so that Myra wouldn’t miss a single golden note on her Barry Manilow records and her “Supremes Greatest Hits, ” he thought, and then felt a flush of guilt. That wasn’t fair, and he damn well knew it. Myra would have been just as happy with her old scratchy records as she was with the
new 45-rpm-sized laser discs, just as she would have been happy to keep on living in the little four-room house in Queens until they were both old and gray (and, if the truth were told, there was a little snow on Eddie Kaspbrak’s mountain already). He had bought the luxury sound system for the same reasons that he had bought this low fieldstone house on Long
Island, where the two of them often rattled around like the last two peas in a can: because he had been able to, and because they were ways of appeasing the soft, frightened, often bewildered, always implacable voice of his mother; they were ways of saying: I made it, Ma! Look at all this! I made it! Now will you please for Christ’s sake shut up awhile?
Eddie stuffed the aspirator into his mouth and, like a man miming suicide, pulled the trigger. A cloud of awful licorice taste roiled and boiled its way down his throat, and Eddie breathed deeply. He could feel breathing passages which had almost closed start to open up again. The tightness in
his chest started to ease, and suddenly he heard voices in his mind, ghost- voices.
Didn’t you get the note I sent you? I got it, Mrs. Kaspbrak, but—
Well, in case you can’t read, Coach Black, let me tell you in person. Are you ready?
Mrs. Kaspbrak—
Good. Here it comes, from my lips to your ears. Ready? My Eddie cannot take physical education. I repeat: he can NOT take phys ed. Eddie is very delicate, and if he runs . . . or jumps . . .
Mrs. Kaspbrak, I have the results of Eddie’s last physical on file in my
office—that’s a state requirement. It says that Eddie is a little small for his age, but otherwise he’s absolutely normal. So I called your family physician just to be sure and he confirmed—
Are you saying I’m a liar, Coach Black? Is that it? Well, here he is!
Here’s Eddie, standing right beside me! Can you hear the way he’s breathing? CAN you?
Mom . . . please . . . I’m all right . . .
Eddie, you know better than that. I taught you better than that. Don’t interrupt your elders.
I hear him, Mrs. Kaspbrak, but—
Do you? Good! I thought maybe you were deaf! He sounds like a truck going uphill in low gear, doesn’t he? And if that isn’t asthma—
Mom, I’ll be—
Be quiet, Eddie, don’t interrupt me again. If that isn’t asthma, Coach Black, then I’m Queen Elizabeth!
Mrs. Kaspbrak, Eddie often seems very well and happy in his physical- education classes. He loves to play games, and he runs quite fast. In my conversation with Dr. Baynes, the word “psychosomatic” came up. I
wonder if you’ve considered the possibility that—
—that my son is crazy? Is that what you’re trying to say? ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY THAT MY SON IS CRAZY? ? ? ?
No, but— He’s delicate.
Mrs. Kaspbrak—
My son is very delicate.
Mrs. Kaspbrak, Dr. Baynes confirmed that he could find nothing at all—
“—physically wrong, ” Eddie finished. The memory of that humiliating encounter, his mother screaming at Coach Black in the Derry Elementary School gymnasium while he gasped and cringed at her side and the other kids huddled around one of the baskets and watched, had recurred to him tonight for the first time in years. Nor was that the only memory which
Mike Hanlon’s call was going to bring back, he knew. He could feel many others, as bad or even worse, crowding and jostling like sale-mad shoppers bottlenecked in a department-store doorway. But soon the bottleneck would break and they would be along. He was quite sure of that. And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go.
“Nothing physically wrong, ” he repeated, took a deep shuddery breath, and stuffed the aspirator into his pocket.
“Eddie, ” Myra said. “Please tell me what all of this is about!”
Tear-tracks shone on her chubby cheeks. Her hands twisted restlessly together like a pair of pink and hairless animals at play. Once, shortly
before actually proposing marriage, he had taken a picture of Myra which
she had given him and had put it next to one of his mother, who had died of congestive heart-failure at the age of sixty-four. At the time of her death Eddie’s mother had topped the scales at over four hundred pounds—four hundred and six, to be exact. She had become something nearly monstrous by then—her body had seemed nothing more than boobs and butt and belly, all overtopped by her pasty, perpetually dismayed face. But the picture of her which he put next to Myra’s picture had been taken in 1944, two years before he had been born (You were a very sickly baby, the ghost-mom now whispered in his ear. Many times we despaired of your life . . . ). In 1944 his mother had been a relatively svelte one hundred and eighty pounds.
He had made that comparison, he supposed, in a last-ditch effort to stop himself from committing psychological incest. He looked from Mother to Myra and back again to Mother.
They could have been sisters. The resemblance was that close.
Eddie looked at the two nearly identical pictures and promised himself he would not do this crazy thing. He knew that the boys at work were already making jokes about Jack Sprat and his wife, but they didn’t know the half of it. The jokes and snide remarks he could take, but did he really want to
be a clown in such a Freudian circus as this? No. He did not. He would break it off with Myra. He would let her down gently because she was really very sweet and had had even less experience with men than he’d had with women. And then, after she had finally sailed over the horizon of his life, he could maybe take those tennis lessons he’d been thinking of for such a long time
(Eddie often seems very well and happy in his physical-education classes)
or there were the pool memberships they were selling at the U. N. Plaza Hotel
(Eddie loves to play games)
not to mention that health club which had opened up on Third Avenue across from the garage . . .
(Eddie runs quite fast he runs quite fast when you’re not here runs quite fast when there’s nobody around to remind him of how delicate he is and I see in his face Mrs. Kaspbrak that he knows even now at the age of nine he knows that the biggest favor in the world he could do himself would be to run fast in any direction you’re not going let him go Mrs. Kaspbrak let him RUN)
But in the end he had married Myra anyway. In the end the old ways and the old habits had simply been too strong. Home was the place where, when you have to go there, they have to chain you up. Oh, he might have beaten his mother’s ghost. It would have been hard but he was quite sure he could have done that much, if that had been all which needed doing. It was Myra herself who had ended up tipping the scales away from independence. Myra had condemned him with solicitude, had nailed him with concern, had chained him with sweetness. Myra, like his mother, had reached the final, fatal insight into his character: Eddie was all the more delicate because he
sometimes suspected he was not delicate at all; Eddie needed to be protected from his own dim intimations of possible bravery.
On rainy days Myra always took his rubbers out of the plastic bag in the closet and put them by the coat-rack next to the door. Beside his plate of unbuttered wheat toast each morning was a dish of what might have been taken at a casual glance for a multi-colored pre-sweetened children’s cereal, but which a closer look would have revealed to be a whole spectrum of
vitamins (most of which Eddie had in his medicine-bag right now). Myra, like Mother, understood, and there had really been no chance for him. As a
young unmarried man he had left his mother three times and returned home to her three times. Then, four years after his mother had died in the front hall of her Queens apartment, blocking the front door so completely with her bulk that the Medcu guys (called by the people downstairs when they heard the monstrous thud of Mrs. Kaspbrak going down for the final count) had had to break in through the locked door between the apartment’s kitchen and the service stairwell, he had returned home for a fourth and final time. At least he had believed then it was for the final time—home again, home again, jiggety-jog; home again, home again, with Myra the hog. A hog she was, but she was a sweet hog, and he loved her, and there had really been no chance for him at all. She had drawn him to her with the fatal, hypnotizing snake’s eye of understanding.
Home again forever, he had thought then.
But maybe I was wrong, he thought. Maybe this isn’t home, nor ever was
—maybe home is where I have to go tonight. Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark.
He shuddered helplessly, as if he had gone outside without his rubbers and caught a terrible chill.
“Eddie, please!”
She was beginning to weep again. Tears were her final defense, just as they had always been his mother’s: the soft weapon which paralyzes, which turns kindness and tenderness into fatal chinks in one’s armor.
Not that he’d ever worn much armor anyway—suits of armor did not seem to fit him very well.
Tears had been more than a defense for his mother; they had been a weapon. Myra had rarely used her own tears so cynically . . . but, cynically or not, he realized she was trying to use them that way now . . . and she was succeeding.
He couldn’t let her. It would be too easy to think of how lonely it was going to be, sitting in a seat on that train as it barrelled north toward Boston through the darkness, his suitcase overhead and his tote-bag full of
nostrums between his feet, the fear sitting on his chest like a rancid Vicks- pack. Too easy to let Myra take him upstairs and make love to him with
aspirins and an alcohol-rub. And put him to bed, where they might or might not make a franker sort of love.
But he had promised. Promised.
“Myra, listen to me, ” he said, making his voice purposely dry, purposely matter-of-fact.
She looked at him with her wet, naked, terrified eyes.
He thought he would try now to explain—as best he could; he would tell her about how Mike Hanlon had called and told him that it had started again, and yes, he thought most of the others were coming.
But what came out of his mouth was much saner stuff.
“Go down to the office first thing in the morning. Talk to Phil. Tell him I had to take off and that you’ll drive Pacino—”
“Eddie, I just can’t!” she wailed. “He’s a big star! If I get lost he’ll shout at me, I know he will, he’ll shout, they all do when the driver gets lost . . .
and . . . and I’ll cry . . . there could be an accident . . . there probably will be an accident . . . Eddie . . . Eddie, you have to stay home. ”
“For God’s sake! Stop it!”
She recoiled from his voice, hurt; although Eddie gripped his aspirator, he would not use it. She would see that as a weakness, one she could use against him. Dear God, if You are there, please believe me when I say I don’t want to hurt Myra. I don’t want to cut her, don’t even want to bruise her. But I promised, we all promised, we swore in blood, please help me God because I have to do this. . . .
“I hate it when you shout at me, Eddie, ” she whispered.
“Myra, I hate it when I have to, ” he said, and she winced. There you go, Eddie—youhurt her again. Why don’t you just punch her around the room a few times? That would probably be kinder. And quicker.
Suddenly—probably it was the thought of punching someone around the room which caused the image to come—he saw the face of Henry Bowers. It was the first time he had thought of Bowers in years, and it did nothing for his peace of mind. Nothing at all.
He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them and said: “You won’t get lost, and he won’t shout at you. Mr. Pacino is very nice, very understanding. ” He had never driven Pacino before in his life, but contented himself with knowing that at least the law of averages was on the side of this lie— according to popular myth most celebrities were shitheels, but Eddie had driven enough of them to know it usually wasn’t true.
There were, of course, exceptions to the rule—and in most cases the
exceptions were real monstrosities. He hoped fervently for Myra’s sake that Pacino wasn’t one of these.
“Is he? ” she asked timidly. “Yes. He is. ”
“How do you know? ”
“Demetrios drove him two or three times when he worked at Manhattan Limousine, ” Eddie said glibly. “He said Mr. Pacino always tipped at least fifty dollars. ”
“I wouldn’t care if he only tipped me fifty cents, as long as he didn’t
shout at me. ”
“Myra, it’s all as easy as one-two-three. One, you make the pickup at the Saint Regis tomorrow at seven P. M. and take him over to the ABC
Building. They’re retaping the last act of this play Pacino’s in—American Buffalo, I think it’s called. Two, you take him back to the Saint Regis around eleven. Three, you go back to the garage, turn in the car, and sign the greensheet. ”
“That’s all? ”
“That’s all. You can do it standing on your head, Marty. ”
She usually giggled at this pet name, but now she only looked at him with a painful childlike solemnity.
“What if he wants to go out to dinner instead of back to the hotel? Or for drinks? Or for dancing? ”
“I don’t think he will, but if he does, you take him. If it looks like he’s going to party all night, you can call Phil Thomas on the radio-phone after midnight. By then he’ll have a driver free to relieve you. I’d never stick you with something like this in the first place if I had a driver who was free, but I got two guys out sick, Demetrios on vacation, and everyone else booked up solid. You’ll be snug in your own bed by one in the morning, Marty—
one in the morning at the very, very latest. I apple-solutely guarantee it. ” She didn’t laugh at apple-solutely, either.
He cleared his throat and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Instantly the ghost-mom whispered: Don’t sit that way, Eddie. It’s bad for your
posture, and it cramps your lungs. You have very delicate lungs.
He sat up straight again, hardly aware he was doing it.
“This better be the only time I have to drive, ” she nearly moaned. “I’ve turned into such a horse in the last two years, and my uniforms look so bad now. ”
“It’s the only time, I swear. ” “Who called you, Eddie? ”
As if on cue, lights swept across the wall; a horn honked once as the cab turned into the driveway. He felt a surge of relief. They had spent the fifteen minutes talking about Pacino instead of Derry and Mike Hanlon and Henry Bowers, and that was good. Good for Myra, and good for him as well. He did not want to spend any time thinking or talking about those things until
he had to.
Eddie stood up. “It’s my cab. ”
She got up so fast she tripped over the hem of her own nightgown and fell forward. Eddie caught her, but for a moment the issue was in grave
doubt: she outweighed him by a hundred pounds.
And she was beginning to blubber again. “Eddie, you have to tell me!”
“I can’t. There’s no time. ”
“You never kept anything from me before, Eddie, ” she wept.
“And I’m not now. Not really. I don’t remember it all. At least, not yet.
The man who called was—is—an old friend. He—”
“You’ll get sick, ” she said desperately, following him as he walked toward the front hall again. “I know you will. Let me come, Eddie, please, I’ll take care of you, Pacino can get a cab or something, it won’t kill him, what do you say, okay? ” Her voice was rising, becoming frantic, and to Eddie’s horror she began to look more and more like his mother, his mother as she had looked in the last months before she died: old and fat and crazy. “I’ll rub your back and see that you get your pills. . . . I . . . I’ll help you. . . . I won’t talk if you don’t want me to but you can tell me everything. . . .
Eddie . . . Eddie, please don’t go! Eddie, please! Pleeeeeease!”
He was striding down the hall to the front door now, walking blind, head down, moving as a man moves against a high wind. He was wheezing again. When he picked up the bags each of them seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He could feel her plump pink hands on him, touching, exploring, pulling with helpless desire but no real strength, trying to seduce him with her sweet tears of concern, trying to draw him back.
I’m not going to make it! he thought desperately. The asthma was worse now, worse than it had been since he was a kid. He reached for the doorknob but it seemed to be receding from him, receding into the
blackness of outer space.
“If you stay I’ll make you a sour-cream coffee-cake, ” she babbled. “We’ll have popcorn. . . . I’ll make your favorite turkey dinner I’ll
make it for breakfast tomorrow morning if you want I’ll start right now .
. . and giblet gravy Eddie please I’m scared you’re scaring me so
bad!”
She grabbed his collar and pulled him backward, like a beefy cop putting the grab on a suspicious fellow who is trying to flee. With a final fading effort, Eddie kept going and when he was at the absolute end of his
strength and ability to resist, he felt her grip trail away.
She gave one final wail.
His fingers closed around the doorknob—how blessedly cool it was! He pulled the door open and saw a Checker cab sitting out there, an ambassador from the land of sanity. The night was clear. The stars were bright and lucid.
He turned back to Myra, whistling and wheezing. “You need to understand that this isn’t something I want to do, ” he said. “If I had a choice—any choice at all—I wouldn’t go. Please understand that, Marty. I’m going but I’ll be coming back. ”
Oh but that felt like a lie. “When? How long? ”
“A week. Or maybe ten days. Surely no longer than that. ”
“A week!” she screamed, clutching at her bosom like a diva in a bad opera. “A week! Ten days! Please, Eddie! Pleeeeeee—”
“Marty, stop. Okay? Just stop. ”
For a wonder, she did: stopped and stood looking at him with her wet, bruised eyes, not angry at him, only terrified for him and, coincidentally, for herself. And for perhaps the first time in all the years he had known her, he felt that he could love her safely. Was that part of the going away? He supposed it was. No . . . you could flush the supposed. He knew it was.
Already he felt like something living in the wrong end of a telescope.
But it was maybe all right. Was that what he meant? That he had finally decided it was all right to love her? That it was all right even though she looked like his mother when his mother had been younger and even though she ate brownies in bed while watching Hardcastle and McCormick or Falcon Crest and the crumbs always got on his side and even though she wasn’t all that bright and even though she understood and condoned his
remedies in the medicine cabinet because she kept her own in the refrigerator?
Or was it . . . Could it be that . . .
These other ideas were all things he had considered in one way or another, at one time or another, during his oddly entwined lives as a son and a lover and a husband; now, on the point of leaving home for what felt like
the absolutely last time, a new possibility came to him, and startled wonder brushed him like the wing of some large bird.
Could it be that Myra was even more frightened than he was?
Could it be that his mother had been?
Another Derry memory came shooting up from his subconscious like a balefully fizzing firework. There had been a shoe store downtown on Center Street. The Shoeboat. His mother had taken him there one day—he thought he could have been no more than five or six—and told him to sit still and be good while she got a pair of white pumps for a wedding. So he sat still and was good while his mother talked with Mr. Gardener, who was one of the shoe-clerks, but he was only five (or maybe six), and after his mother had rejected the third pair of white pumps Mr. Gardener showed her, Eddie got bored and walked over to the far corner to look at something he had spotted there. At first he thought it was just a big crate standing on end. When he got closer he decided it was some kind of desk. But it sure was the kookiest desk he had ever seen. It was so narrow! It was made of bright polished wood with lots of curvy inlaid lines and carved doojiggers in it.
Also, there was a little flight of three stairs leading up to it, and he had never seen a desk with stairs. When he got right up to it, he saw that there was a slot at the bottom of the desk-thing, a button on one side, and on top of it—entrancing!—was something that looked exactly like Captain Video’s Spacescope.
Eddie walked around to the other side and there was a sign. He must have been at least six, because he had been able to read it, softly whispering each word aloud:
DO YOUR SHOES FIT RIGHT? CHECK AND SEE!
He went back around, climbed the three steps to the little platform, and then stuck his foot into the slot at the bottom of the shoe-checker. Did his shoes fit right? Eddie didn’t know, but he was wild to check and see. He socked his face into the rubber faceguard and thumbed the button. Green light flooded his eyes. Eddie gasped. He could see a foot floating inside a shoe filled with green smoke. He wiggled his toes, and the toes he was looking at wiggled right back—they were his, all right, just as he had suspected. And then he realized it was not just his toes he could see; he could see his bones, too! The bones in his foot! He crossed his great toe
over his second toe (as if sneakily warding off the consequences of telling a lie) and the eldritch bones in the scope made an X that was not white but goblin-green. He could see—
Then his mother shrieked, a rising sound of panic that cut through the quiet shoe store like a runaway reaper-blade, like a firebell, like doom on horseback. He jerked his startled, dismayed face out of the viewer and saw her pelting toward him across the store in her stocking feet, her dress flying out behind her. She knocked a chair over and one of those shoe-measuring things that always tickled his feet went flying. Her bosom heaved. Her mouth was a scarlet O of horror. Faces turned to follow her progress.
“Eddie get off there!” she screamed. “Get off there! Those machines give you cancer! Get off there! Eddie! Eddieeeeeee—”
He backed away as if the machine had suddenly grown red-hot. In his startled panic he forgot the little flight of stairs behind him. His heels dropped over the top one and he stood there, slowly falling backward, his arms pinwheeling wildly in a losing battle to retain his departing balance. And hadn’t he thought with a kind of mad joy I’m going to fall! I’m going to find out what it feels like to fall and bump my head! Goody for me! . . . ? Hadn’t he thought that? Or was it only the man imposing his own self- serving adult ideas over whatever his child’s mind, always roaring with
confused surmises and half-perceived images (images which lost their sense in their very brightness), had thought . . . or tried to think?
Either way, it was a moot question. He had not fallen. His mother had gotten there in time. His mother had caught him. He had burst into tears, but he had not fallen.
Everyone had been looking at them. He remembered that. He remembered Mr. Gardener picking up the shoe-measuring thing and checking the little sliding gadgets on it to make sure they were still okay
while another clerk righted the fallen chair and then flapped his arms once, in amused disgust, before putting on his pleasantly neutral salesman’s face again. Mostly he remembered his mother’s wet cheek and her hot, sour breath. He remembered her whispering over and over in his ear, “Don’t you ever do that again, don’t you ever do that again, don’t you ever. ” It was what his mother chanted to ward off trouble. She had chanted the same thing a year earlier when she discovered the baby-sitter had taken Eddie to the public pool in Derry Park one stiflingly hot summer day—this had been when the polio scare of the early fifties was just beginning to wind down.
She had dragged him out of the pool, telling him he must never do that,
never, never, and all the kids had looked as all the clerks and customers were looking now, and her breath had had that same sour tang.
She dragged him out of The Shoeboat, shouting at the clerks that she would see them all in court if there was anything wrong with her boy.
Eddie’s terrified tears had continued off and on for the rest of the morning, and his asthma had been particularly bad all day. That night he had lain
awake for hours past the time he was usually asleep, wondering exactly what cancer was, if it was worse than polio, if it killed you, how long it took if it did, and how bad it hurt before you died. He also wondered if he would go to hell afterward.
The threat had been serious, he knew that much. She had been so scared. That was how he knew. So terrified.
“Marty, ” he said across this gulf of years, “would you give me a kiss? ”
She kissed him and hugged him so tightly while she was doing it that the bones in his back groaned. If we were in water, he thought, she’d drown us both.
“Don’t be afraid, ” he whispered in her ear.
“I can’t help it!” she wailed.
“I know, ” he said, and realized that, even though she was hugging him with rib-breaking tightness, his asthma had eased. That whistling note in his breathing was gone. “I know, Marty. ”
The taxi-driver honked again.
“Will you call? ” she asked him tremulously. “If I can. ”
“Eddie, can’t you please tell me what it is? ”
And suppose he did? How far would it go toward setting her mind at rest?
Marty, I got a call from Mike Hanlon tonight, and we talked for awhile, but everything we said boiled down to two things. “It’s started again, ”
Mike said; “Will you come? ” Mike said. And now I’ve got a fever, Marty, only it’s a fever you can’t damp down with aspirin, and I’ve got a shortness of breath the goddamned aspirator won’t touch, because that shortness of breath isn’t in my throat or my lungs—it is around my heart. I’ll come back to you if I can, Marty, but I feel like a man standing at the mouth of an old
mine-shaft that is full of cave-ins waiting to happen, standing there and saying goodbye to the daylight.
Yes—my, yes! That would surely set her mind at rest! “No, ” he said. “I guess I can’t tell you what it is. ”
And before she could say more, before she could begin again (Eddie, get out of that taxi! They give you cancer!), he was striding away from her, faster and faster. By the time he got to the cab he was almost running.
She was still standing in the doorway when the cab backed into the street, still standing there when they started for the city—a big black woman-
shadow cut out of the light spilling from their house. He waved, and thought she raised her hand in return.
“Where we headed tonight, my friend? ” the cabbie asked.
“Penn Station, ” Eddie said, and his hand relaxed on the aspirator. His asthma had gone to wherever it went to brood between its assaults on his bronchial tubes. He felt . . . almost well.
But he needed the aspirator worse than ever four hours later, coming out of a light doze all in a single spasmodic jerk that caused the fellow in the
business suit across the way to lower his paper and look at him with faintly apprehensive curiosity.
I’m back, Eddie! the asthma yelled gleefully. I’m back and oh, I dunno, this time I just might killya! Why not? Gotta do it sometime, you know!
Can’t fuck around with you forever!
Eddie’s chest surged and pulled. He groped for the aspirator, found it, pointed it down his throat, and pulled the trigger. Then he sat back in the tall Amtrak seat, shivering, waiting for relief, thinking of the dream from which he had just awakened. Dream? Christ, if that was all. He was afraid it was more memory than dream. In it there had been a green light like the light inside a shoe-store X-ray machine, and a rotting leper had pursued a screaming boy named Eddie Kaspbrak through tunnels under the earth. He ran and ran
(he runs quite fast Coach Black had told his mother and he ran plenty fast with that rotting thing after him oh yes you better believe it you bet your fur) in this dream where he was eleven years old, and then he had
smelled something like the death of time, and someone lit a match and he had looked down and seen the decomposing face of a boy named Patrick Hockstetter, a boy who had disappeared in July of 1958, and there were
worms crawling in and out of Patrick Hockstetter’s cheeks, and that gassy, awful smell was coming from inside of Patrick Hockstetter, and in that dream that was more memory than dream he had looked to one side and had seen two schoolbooks that were fat with moisture and overgrown with green mold: Roads to Everywhere, and Understanding Our America. They were in their current condition because it was a foul wetness down here
(“How I Spent My Summer Vacation, ” a theme by Patrick Hockstetter—“I spent it dead in a tunnel! Moss grew on my books and they swelled up to
the size of Sears catalogues!”). Eddie opened his mouth to scream and that was when the scabrous fingers of the leper clittered around his cheek and plunged themselves into his mouth and that was when he woke up with that back-snapping jerk to find himself not in the sewers under Derry, Maine, but in an Amtrak club-car near the head of a train speeding across Rhode Island under a big white moon.
The man across the aisle hesitated, almost thought better of speaking, and then did. “Are you all right, sir? ”
“Oh yes, ” Eddie said. “I fell asleep and had a bad dream. It got my asthma going. ”
“I see. ” The paper went up again. Eddie saw it was the paper his mother had sometimes referred to as The Jew York Times.
Eddie looked out the window at a sleeping landscape lit only by the fairy moon. Here and there were houses, or sometimes clusters of them, most dark, a few showing lights. But the lights seemed little, and falsely mocking, compared to the moon’s ghostglow.
He thought the moon talked to him, he thought suddenly. Henry Bowers. God, he was so crazy. He wondered where Henry Bowers was now. Dead? In prison? Drifting across empty plains somewhere in the middle of the country like an incurable virus, sticking up Seven-Elevens in the deep
slumbrous hours between one and four in the morning or maybe killing some of the people stupid enough to slow down for his cocked thumb in order to transfer the dollars in their wallets to his own?
Possible, possible.
In a state asylum somewhere? Looking up at this moon, which was approaching the full? Talking to it, listening to answers which only he could hear?
Eddie considered this somehow even more possible. He shivered. I am remembering my boyhood at last, he thought. I am remembering how I spent my own summer vacation in that dim dead year of 1958. He sensed that now he could fix upon almost any scene from that summer he wanted to, but he did not want to. Oh God if I could only forget it all again.
He leaned his forehead against the dirty glass of the window, his aspirator clasped loosely in one hand like a religious artifact, watching as the night
flew apart around the train.
Going north, he thought, but that was wrong.
Not going north. Because it’s not a train; it’s a time machine. Not north; back. Back in time.
He thought he heard the moon mutter.
Eddie Kaspbrak held his aspirator tightly and closed his eyes against sudden vertigo.
5
Beverly Rogan Takes a Whuppin
Tom was nearly asleep when the phone rang. He struggled halfway up, leaning toward it, and then felt one of Beverly’s breasts press against his shoulder as she reached over him to get it. He flopped back on his pillow, wondering dully who was calling on their unlisted home phone number at this hour of the night. He heard Beverly say hello, and then he drifted off
again. He had put away nearly three sixpacks during the baseball game, and he was shagged.
Then Beverly’s voice, sharp and curious—“Whaaat? ”—drilled into his ear like an ice-pick and he opened his eyes again. He tried to sit up and the phone cord dug into his thick neck.
“Get that fucking thing off me, Beverly, ” he said, and she got up quickly and walked around the bed, holding the phone cord up with tented fingers. Her hair was a deep red, and it flowed over her nightgown in natural waves almost to her waist. Whore’s hair. Her eyes did not stutter to his face to read
the emotional weather there, and Tom Rogan didn’t like that. He sat up. His head was starting to ache. Shit, it had probably already been aching, but when you were asleep you didn’t know it.
He went into the bathroom, urinated for what felt like three hours, and then decided that as long as he was up he ought to get another beer and try to take the curse off the impending hangover.
Passing back through the bedroom on his way to the stairs, a man in
white boxer shorts that flapped like sails below his considerable belly, his
arms like slabs (he looked more like a dock-walloper than the president and general manager of Beverly Fashions, Inc. ), he looked over his shoulder and yelled crossly: “If it’s that bull dyke Lesley, tell her to go eat out some model and let us sleep!”
Beverly glanced up briefly, shook her head to indicate it wasn’t Lesley, and then looked back at the phone. Tom felt the muscles at the back of his neck tighten up. It felt like a dismissal. Dismissed by Milady. Mifuckinlady. This was starting to look like it might turn into a situation. It might be that Beverly needed a short refresher course on who was in charge around here. It was possible. Sometimes she did. She was a slow learner.
He went downstairs and padded along the hall to the kitchen, absently picking the seat of his shorts out of the crack of his ass, and opened the refrigerator. His reaching hand closed on nothing more alcoholic than a blue Tupperware dish of leftover noodles Romanoff. All the beer was gone.
Even the can he kept way in the back (much as he kept a twenty-dollar bill folded up behind his driver’s license for emergencies) was gone. The game had gone fourteen innings, and all for nothing. The White Sox had lost.
Bunch of candy-asses this year.
His eyes drifted to the bottles of hard stuff on the glassed-in shelf over
the kitchen bar and for a moment he saw himself pouring a splash of Beam over a single ice-cube. Then he walked back toward the stairs, knowing that was asking for even more trouble than his head was currently in. He glanced at the face of the antique pendulum clock at the foot of the stairs and saw it was past midnight. This intelligence did nothing to improve his temper, which was never very good even at the best of times.
He climbed the stairs with slow deliberation, aware—too aware—of how hard his heart was working. Ka-boom, ka-thud. Ka-boom, ka-thud. Ka- boom, ka-thud. It made him nervous when he could feel his heart beating in
his ears and wrists as well as in his chest. Sometimes when that happened
he would imagine it not as a squeezing and loosening organ but as a big dial on the left side of his chest with the needle edging ominously into the red zone. He did not like that shit; he did not need that shit. What he needed
was a good night’s sleep.
But the numb cunt he was married to was still on the phone.
“I understand that, Mike. . . . yes . . . yes, I am . . . I know . . . but . . . ” A longer pause.
“Bill Denbrough? ” she exclaimed, and that ice-pick drilled into his ear again.
He stood outside the bedroom door until he got his breath back. Now it was ka-thud, ka-thud, ka-thud again: the booming had stopped. He briefly imagined the needle edging out of the red and then willed the picture away.
He was a man, for Christ’s sake, and a damned good one, not a furnace with a bad thermostat. He was in great shape. He was iron. And if she needed to relearn that, he would be happy to teach her.
He started in, then thought better of it and stood where he was a moment longer, listening to her, not particularly caring about who she was talking to or what she said, only listening to the rising-falling tones of her voice. And what he felt was the old familiar dull rage.
He had met her in a downtown Chicago singles bar four years ago. Conversation had been easy enough, because they both worked in the Standard Brands Building, and knew a few of the same people. Tom worked for King & Landry, Public Relations, on forty-two. Beverly Marsh—so she had been then—was an assistant designer at Delia Fashions, on twelve.
Delia, which would later enjoy a modest vogue in the Midwest, catered to young people—Delia skirts and blouses and shawls and slacks were sold largely to what Delia Castleman called “youth-stores” and what Tom called “head-shops. ” Tom Rogan knew two things about Beverly Marsh almost at once: she was desirable and she was vulnerable. In less than a month he
knew a third as well: she was talented. Very talented. In her drawings of casual dresses and blouses he saw a money-machine of almost scary potential.
Not in the head-shops, though, he thought, but did not say (at least not then). No more bad lighting, no more knockdown prices, no more shitty displays somewhere in the back of the store between the dope
paraphernalia and the rock-group tee-shirts. Leave that shit for the small- timers.
He had known a great deal about her before she knew he had any real interest in her, and that was just the way Tom wanted it. He had been looking for someone like Beverly Marsh all his life, and he moved in with the speed of a lion making a run at a slow antelope. Not that her vulnerability showed on the surface—you looked and saw a gorgeous
woman, slim but abundantly stacked. Hips weren’t so great, maybe, but she had a great ass and the best set of tits he had ever seen. Tom Rogan was a tit-man, always had been, and tall girls almost always had disappointing tits. They wore thin shirts and their nipples drove you crazy, but when you got those thin shirts off you discovered that nipples were really all they had. The tits themselves looked like the pull-knobs on a bureau drawer. “More than a handful’s wasted, ” his college roommate had been fond of saying, but as far as Tom was concerned his college roommate had been so full of shit he squeaked going into a turn.
Oh, she had been some kind of fine-looking, all right, with that dynamite body and that gorgeous fall of red wavy hair. But she was weak . . . weak
somehow. It was as if she was sending out radio signals which only he could receive. You could point to certain things—how much she smoked (but he had almost cured her of that), the restless way her eyes moved, never quite meeting the eyes of whoever was talking to her, only touching them from time to time and then leaping nimbly away; her habit of lightly rubbing her elbows when she was nervous; the look of her fingernails, which were kept neat but brutally short. Tom noticed this latter the first time he met her. She picked up her glass of white wine, he saw her nails, and thought: She keeps them short like that because she bites them.
Lions may not think, at least not the way people think . . . but they see. And when antelopes start away from a waterhole, alerted by that dusty-rug scent of approaching death, the cats can observe which one falls to the rear of the pack, maybe because it has a lame leg, maybe because it is just naturally slower . . . or maybe because its sense of danger is less developed. And it might even be possible that some antelopes—and some women— want to be brought down.
Suddenly he heard a sound that jerked him rudely out of these memories
—the snap of her cigarette lighter.
The dull rage came again. His stomach filled with a heat which was not entirely unpleasant. Smoking. She was smoking. They had had a few of Tom Rogan’s Special Seminars on the subject. And here she was, doing it again. She was a slow learner, all right, but a good teacher is at his best with slow learners.
“Yes, ” she said now. “Uh-huh. All right. Yes . . . ” She listened, then uttered a strange, jagged laugh he had never heard before. “Two things,
since you ask—reserve me a room and say me a prayer. Yes, okay . . . uh- huh . . . me too. Goodnight. ”
She was hanging up as he came in. He meant to come in hard, yelling at her to put it out, put it out now, RIGHT NOW!, but when he saw her the
words died in his throat. He had seen her like this before, but only two or three times. Once before their first big show, once before the first private
preview showing for national buyers, and once when they had gone to New York for the International Design Awards.
She was moving across the bedroom in long strides, the white lace nightgown molded to her body, the cigarette clamped between her front teeth (God he hated the way she looked with a butt in her mouth) sending back a little white riband over her left shoulder like smoke from a locomotive’s stack.
But it was her face that really gave him pause, that caused the planned shout to die in his throat. His heart lurched—ka-BAMP! —and he winced, telling himself that what he felt was not fear but only surprise at finding her this way.
She was a woman who really came alive all the way only when the rhythm of her work spiked toward a climax. Each of those remembered occasions had of course been career-related. At those times he had seen a
different woman from the one he knew so well—a woman who fucked up
his sensitive fear-radar with wild bursts of static. The woman who came out in times of stress was strong but high-strung, fearless but unpredictable.
There was lots of color in her cheeks now, a natural blush high on her cheekbones. Her eyes were wide and sparkly, not a trace of sleep left in them. Her hair flowed and streamed. And . . . oh, looky here, friends and neighbors! Oh you just looky right here! Is she taking a suitcase out of the closet? A suitcase? By God, she is!
Reserve me a room . . . say me a prayer.
Well, she wasn’t going to need a room in any hotel, not in the foreseeable future, because little Beverly Rogan was going to be staying right here at home, thank you very much, and taking her meals standing up for the next
three or four days.
But she very well might need a prayer or two before he was through with her.
She tossed the suitcase on the foot of the bed and then went to her bureau. She opened the top drawer and pulled out two pairs of jeans and a pair of cords. Tossed them into the suitcase. Back to the bureau, cigarette streaming smoke over her shoulder. She grabbed a sweater, a couple of tee- shirts, one of the old Ship ’n Shore blouses that she looked so stupid in but refused to give up. Whoever had called her sure hadn’t been a jet-setter.
This was dull stuff, strictly Jackie-Kennedy-Hyannisport-weekend stuff.
Not that he cared about who had called her or where she thought she was going, since she wasn’t going anywhere. Those were not the things which pecked steadily at his mind, dull and achy from too much beer and not enough sleep.
It was that cigarette.
Supposedly she had thrown them all out. But she had held out on him— the proof was clamped between her teeth right now. And because she still had not noticed him standing in the doorway, he allowed himself the
pleasure of remembering the two nights which had assured him of his complete control over her.
I don’t want you to smoke around me anymore, he told her as they headed home from a party in Lake Forest. October, that had been. I have to choke that shit down at parties and at the office, but I don’t have to choke it down when I’m with you. You know what it’s like? I’m going to tell you the truth— it’s unpleasant but it’s the truth. It’s like having to eat someone else’s snot.
He thought this would bring some faint spark of protest, but she had only looked at him in her shy, wanting-to-please way. Her voice had been low and meek and obedient. All right, Tom.
Pitch it then.
She pitched it. Tom had been in a good humor for the rest of that night.
A few weeks later, coming out of a movie, she unthinkingly lit a cigarette in the lobby and puffed it as they walked across the parking lot to the car. It had been a bitter November night, the wind chopping like a maniac at any
exposed square inch of flesh it could find. Tom remembered he had been
able to smell the lake, as you sometimes could on cold nights—a flat smell that was both fishy and somehow empty. He let her smoke the cigarette. He even opened her door for her when they got to the car. He got in behind the wheel, closed his own door, and then said: Bev?
She took the cigarette out of her mouth, turned toward him, inquiring, and he unloaded on her pretty good, his hard open hand striking across her cheek hard enough to make his palm tingle, hard enough to rock her head back against the headrest. Her eyes widened with surprise and pain . . . and something else as well. Her own hand flew to her cheek to investigate the warmth and tingling numbness there. She cried out Owww! Tom!
He looked at her, eyes narrowed, mouth smiling casually, completely alive, ready to see what would come next, how she would react. His cock was stiffening in his pants, but he barely noticed. That was for later. For
now, school was in session. He replayed what had just happened. Her face. What had that third expression been, there for a bare instant and then gone? First the surprise. Then the pain. Then the (nostalgia)
look of a memory . . . of some memory. It had only been for a moment.
He didn’t think she even knew it had been there, on her face or in her mind.
Now: now. It would all be in the first thing she didn’t say. He knew that as well as his own name.
It wasn’t You son of a bitch!
It wasn’t See you later, Macho City.
It wasn’t We’re through, Tom.
She only looked at him with her wounded, brimming hazel eyes and said:
Why did you do that? Then she tried to say something else and burst into tears instead.
Throw it out.
What? What, Tom? Her make-up was running down her face in muddy tracks. He didn’t mind that. He kind of liked seeing her that way. It was messy, but there was something s*xy about it, too. Slutty. Kind of exciting.
The cigarette. Throw it out.
Realization dawning. And with it, guilt.
I just forgot! she cried. That’s all!
Throw it out, Bev, or you’re going to get another shot.
She rolled the window down and pitched the cigarette. Then she turned back to him, her face pale and scared and somehow serene.
You can’t . . . you aren’t supposed to hit me. That’s a bad basis for a . . . a
. . . a lasting relationship. She was trying to find a tone, an adult rhythm of speech, and failing. He had regressed her. He was in this car with a child. Voluptuous and s*xy as hell, but a child.
Can’t and aren’t are two different things, keed, he said. He kept his voice calm but inside he was jittering and jiving. And I’ll be the one to decide what constitutes a lasting relationship and what doesn’t. If you can live with that, fine. If you can’t, you can take a walk. I won’t stop you. I might kick you once in the ass as a going-away present, but I won’t stop you. It’s a free country. What more can I say?
Maybe you’ve already said enough, she whispered, and he hit her again, harder than the first time, because no broad was ever going to smart off to Tom Rogan. He would pop the Queen of England if she cracked smart to him.
Her cheek banged the padded dashboard. Her hand groped for the doorhandle and then fell away. She only crouched in the corner like a
rabbit, one hand over her mouth, her eyes large and wet and frightened. Tom looked at her for a moment and then he got out and walked around the back of the car. He opened her door. His breath was smoke in the black, windy November air and the smell of the lake was very clear.
You want to get out, Bev? I saw you reaching for the doorhandle, so I guess you must want to get out. Okay. That’s all right. I asked you to do
something and you said you would. Then you didn’t. So you want to get out? Come on. Get out. What the fuck, right? Get out. You want to get out?
No, she whispered.
What? I can’t hear you.
No, I don’t want to get out, she said a little louder.
What—those cigarettes giving you emphysema? If you can’t talk, I’ll get you a fucking megaphone. This is your last chance, Beverly. You speak up so I can hear you: do you want to get out of this car or do you want to come back with me?
Want to come back with you, she said, and clasped her hands on her skirt like a little girl. She wouldn’t look at him. Tears slipped down her cheeks.
All right, he said. Fine. But first you say this for me, Bev. You say, “I forgot about smoking in front of you, Tom. ”
Now she looked at him, her eyes wounded, pleading, inarticulate. You can make me do this, her eyes said, but please don’t. Don’t, I love you, can’t it be over?
No—it could not. Because that was not the bottom of her wanting, and both of them knew it.
Say it.
I forgot about smoking in front of you, Tom. Good. Now say “I’m sorry. ”
I’m sorry, she repeated dully.
The cigarette lay smoking on the pavement like a cut piece of fuse.
People leaving the theater glanced over at them, the man standing by the open passenger door of a late-model, fade-into-the-woodwork Vega, the woman sitting inside, her hands clasped primly in her lap, her head down, the domelight outlining the soft fall of her hair in gold.
He crushed the cigarette out. He smeared it against the blacktop.
Now say: “I’ll never do it again without your permission. ” I’ll never . . .
Her voice began to hitch.
. . . never . . . n-n-n— Say it, Bev.
. . . never d-do it again. Without your p-permission.
So he had slammed the door and gone back around to the driver’s seat. He got behind the wheel and drove them back to his downtown apartment. Neither of them said a word. Half the relationship had been set in the parking lot; the second half was set forty minutes later, in Tom’s bed.
She didn’t want to make love, she said. He saw a different truth in her
eyes and the strutty cock of her legs, however, and when he got her blouse off her nipples had been rock hard. She moaned when he brushed them, and cried out softly when he suckled first one and then the other, kneading them restlessly as he did so. She grabbed his hand and thrust it between her legs.
I thought you didn’t want to, he said, and she had turned her face away . .
. but she did not let go of his hand, and the rocking motion of her hips actually speeded up.
He pushed her back on the bed . . . and now he was gentle, not ripping her underwear but removing it with a careful consideration that was almost prissy.
Sliding into her was like sliding into some exquisite oil.
He moved with her, using her but letting her use him as well, and she
came the first time almost at once, crying out and digging her nails into his back. Then they rocked together in long, slow strokes and somewhere in
there he thought she came again. Tom would get close, and then he would think of White Sox batting averages or who was trying to undercut him for the Chesley account at work and he would be okay again. Then she began to speed up, her rhythm finally dissolving into an excited bucking. He looked at her face, the raccoon ringlets of mascara, the smeared lipstick, and he felt himself suddenly shooting deliriously toward the edge.
She jerked her hips up harder and harder—there had been no beergut between them in those days and their bellies clapped hands in a quickening beat.
Near the end she screamed and then bit his shoulder with her small, even teeth.
How many times did you come? he asked her after they had showered.
She turned her face away, and when she spoke her voice was so low he almost couldn’t hear her. That isn’t something you’re supposed to ask.
No? Who told you that? Mister Rogers?
He took her face in one hand, thumb pressing deep into one cheek, fingers pressing into the other, palm cupping her chin in between.
You talk to Tom, he said. You hear me, Bev? Talk to Papa. Three, she said reluctantly.
Good, he said. You can have a cigarette.
She looked at him distrustfully, her red hair spread over the pillows, wearing nothing but a pair of hip-hugger panties. Just looking at her that way got his motor turning over again. He nodded.
Go on, he said. That’s all right.
They had been married in a civil ceremony three months later. Two of his friends had come; the only friend of hers to attend had been Kay McCall, whom Tom called “that titsy women’s-lib bitch. ”
All of these memories went through Tom’s mind in a space of seconds, like a speeded-up piece of film, as he stood in the doorway watching her.
She had gone on to the bottom drawer of what she sometimes called her “weekend bureau, ” and now she was tossing underwear into the suitcase— not the sort of stuff he liked, the slippery satins and smooth silks; this was cotton stuff, little-girl stuff, most of it faded and with little puffs of popped elastic on the waistbands. A cotton nightie that looked like something out of Little House on the Prairie. She poked in the back of this bottom drawer to see what else might be lurking in there.
Tom Rogan, meanwhile, moved across the shag rug toward his wardrobe.
His feet were bare and his passage noiseless as a puff of breeze. It was the cigarette. That was what had really gotten him mad. It had been a long time since she had forgotten that first lesson. There had been other lessons to learn since, a great many, and there had been hot days when she had worn long-sleeved blouses or even cardigan sweaters buttoned all the way to the neck. Gray days when she had worn sunglasses. But that first lesson had been so sudden and fundamental—
He had forgotten the telephone call that had wakened him out of his deepening sleep. It was the cigarette. If she was smoking now, then she had forgotten Tom Rogan. Temporarily, of course, only temporarily, but even temporarily was too damned long. What might have caused her to forget didn’t matter. Such things were not to happen in his house for any reason.
There was a wide black strip of leather hanging from a hook inside the closet door. There was no buckle on it; he had removed that long ago. It was doubled over at one end where a buckle would have gone, and this doubled- over section formed a loop into which Tom Rogan now slipped his hand.
Tom, you been bad! his mother had sometimes said—well, “sometimes” was maybe not such a good word; maybe “often” would have been a better one. You come here, Tommy! I got to give you a whuppin. His life as a child had been punctuated by whuppins. He had finally escaped to Wichita State College, but apparently there was no such thing as a complete escape,
because he continued to hear her voice in dreams: Come here, Tommy. I got to give you a whuppin. Whuppin . . .
He had been the eldest of four. Three months after the youngest had been born, Ralph Rogan had died—well, “died” was maybe not such a good word; maybe “committed suicide” would have been a better way to put it,
since he had poured a generous quantity of lye into a tumbler of gin and quaffed this devil’s brew while sitting on the bathroom hopper. Mrs. Rogan
had found work at the Ford plant. Tom, although only eleven, became the man of the family. And if he screwed up—if the baby shat her didies after
the sitter went home and the mess was still in them when Mom got home . .
. if he forgot to cross Megan on the Broad Street corner after her nursery school got out and that nosy Mrs. Gant saw . . . if he happened to be watching American Bandstand while Joey made a mess in the kitchen . . . if any of those things or a thousand others happened . . . then, after the smaller children were in bed, the spanking stick would come out and she would call the invocation: Come here, Tommy. I got to give you a whuppin.
Better to be the whupper than the whupped.
If he had learned nothing else on the great toll-road of life, he had learned that.
So he flipped the loose end of the belt over once and pulled the loop snug. Then he closed his fist over it. It felt good. It made him feel like a grownup. The strip of leather hung from his clenched fist like a dead blacksnake. His headache was gone.
She had found that one last thing in the back of the drawer: an old white cotton bra with gunshell cups. The thought that this early-morning call might have been from a lover surfaced briefly in his mind and then sank again. That was ridiculous. A woman going away to meet her lover did not pack her faded Ship ’n Shore blouses and her cotton K-Mart undies with the pops and snarls in the elastic. Also, she wouldn’t dare.
“Beverly, ” he said softly, and she turned at once, startled, her eyes wide, her long hair swinging.
The belt hesitated . . . dropped a little. He stared at her, feeling that little bloom of uneasiness again. Yes, she had looked this way before the big shows, and then he hadn’t gotten in her way, understanding that she was so filled with a mixture of fear and competitive aggressiveness that it was as if her head was full of illuminating gas: a single spark and she would explode. She had seen the shows not as a chance to split off from Delia Fashions, to make a living—or even a fortune—on her own. If that had been all, she would have been fine. But if that were all, she also would not have been so ungodly talented. She had seen those shows as a kind of super-exam on which she would be graded by fierce teachers. What she saw on those
occasions was some creature without a face. It had no face, but it did have a name—Authority.
All of that wide-eyed nerviness was on her face now. But not just there; it was all around her, an aura that seemed almost visible, a high-tension
charge which made her suddenly both more alluring and more dangerous than she had seemed to him in years. He was afraid because she was here, all here, the essential she as apart from the she Tom Rogan wanted her to be, the she he had made.
Beverly looked shocked and frightened. She also looked almost madly exhilarated. Her cheeks glowed with hectic color, yet there were stark white patches below her lower lids which looked almost like a second pair of eyes. Her forehead glowed with a creamy resonance.
And the cigarette was still jutting out of her mouth, now at a slight up- angle, as if she thought she was goddam Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The cigarette! Just looking at it caused dull fury to wash over him again in a green wave. Faintly, far back in his mind, he remembered her saying something to him one night out of the dark, speaking in a dull and listless voice: Someday you’re going to kill me, Tom. Do you know that? Someday you’re just going to go too far and that will be the end. You’ll snap.
He had answered: You do it my way, Bev, and that day will never come.
Now, before the rage blotted out everything, he wondered if that day hadn’t come after all.
The cigarette. Never mind the call, the packing, the weird look on her face. They would deal with the cigarette. Then he would fuck her. Then they could discuss the rest. By then it might even seem important.
“Tom, ” she said. “Tom, I have to—”
“You’re smoking, ” he said. His voice seemed to come from a distance, as if over a pretty good radio. “Looks like you forgot, babe. Where you been hiding them? ”
“Look, I’ll put it out, ” she said, and went to the bathroom door. She flipped the cigarette—even from here he could see the teethmarks driven deep into the filter—into the bowl of the john. Fsssss. She came back out. “Tom, that was an old friend. An old old friend. I have to—”
“Shut up, that’s what you have to do!” he shouted at her. “Just shut up!” But the fear he wanted to see—the fear of him—was not on her face. There was fear, but it had come out of the telephone, and fear was not supposed to come to Beverly from that direction. It was almost as if she didn’t see the
belt, didn’t see him, and Tom felt a trickle of unease. Was he here? It was a stupid question, but was he?
This question was so terrible and so elemental that for a moment he felt in danger of coming completely unwrapped from the root of himself and just floating off like a tumbleweed in a high breeze. Then he caught hold of himself. He was here, all right, and that was quite enough fucking
psychobabble for one night. He was here, he was Tom Rogan, Tom by-God Rogan, and if this dippy cunt didn’t straighten up and fly right in the next thirty seconds or so, she was going to look like she got pushed out of a fast- moving boxcar by a mean railroad dick.
“Got to give you a whuppin, ” he said. “Sorry about that, babe. ”
He had seen that mixture of fear and aggressiveness before, yes. Now for the first time ever it flashed out at him.
“Put that thing down, ” she said. “I have to get out to O’Hare as fast as I can. ”
Are you here, Tom? Are you?
He pushed the thought away. The strip of leather which had once been a belt swung slowly before him like a pendulum. His eyes flickered and then held fast to her face.
“Listen to me, Tom. There’s been some trouble back in my home town. Very bad trouble. I had a friend in those days. I guess he would have been my boyfriend, except we weren’t quite old enough for that. He was only an eleven-year-old kid with a bad stutter back then. He’s a novelist now. You even read one of his books, I think . . . The Black Rapids? ”
She searched his face but his face gave no sign. There was only the belt penduluming back and forth, back and forth. He stood with his head lowered and his stocky legs slightly apart. Then she ran her hand restlessly through her hair—distractedly—as if she had many important things to think of and hadn’t seen the belt at all, and that haunting, awful question resurfaced in his head again: Are you there? Are you sure?
“That book laid around here for weeks and I never made the connection. Maybe I should have, but we’re all older and I haven’ even thought about Derry in a long, long time. Anyway, Bill had a brother, George, and George was killed before I really knew Bill. He was murdered. And then, the next summer—”
But Tom had listened to enough craziness from within and from without. He moved in on her fast, cocking his right arm back over his shoulder like a man about to throw a javelin. The belt hissed a path through the air. Beverly saw it coming and tried to duck away, but her right shoulder struck the bathroom doorway and there was a meaty whap! as the belt struck her left forearm, leaving a red weal.
“Gonna whup you, ” Tom repeated. His voice was sane, even regretful, but his teeth showed in a white and frozen smile. He wanted to see that look in her eyes, that look of fear and terror and shame, that look that said Yes
you’re right I deserved it, that look that said Yes you’re there all right, I feel your presence. Then love could come back, and that was right and good,
because he did love her. They could even have a discussion, if she wanted it, of exactly who had called and what all this was about. But that must
come later. For now, school was in session. The old one-two. First the whuppin, then the fuckin.
“Sorry, babe. ”
“Tom, don’t do th—”
He swung the belt sidearm and saw it lick around her hip. There was a satisfying snap as it finished on her buttock. And . . .
And Jesus, she was grabbing at it! She was grabbing at the belt!
For a moment Tom Rogan was so astounded by this unexpected act of insubordination that he almost lost his punisher, would have lost it except for the loop, which was tucked securely into his fist.
He jerked it back.
“Don’t you ever try to grab something away from me, ” he said hoarsely. “You hear me? You ever do that again and you’ll spend a month pissing raspberry juice. ”
“Tom, stop it, ” she said, and her very tone infuriated him—she sounded like a playground monitor talking down to a tantrumy six-year-old. “I have to go. This is no joke. People are dead, and I made a promise a long time
ago—”
Tom heard little of this. He bellowed and ran at her with his head down, the belt swinging blindly. He hit her with it, driving her away from the doorway and along the bedroom wall. He cocked his arm back, hit her, cocked his arm back, hit her, cocked his arm back, hit her. Later that morning he would not be able to raise the arm above eye level until he had
swallowed three codeine tablets, but for now he was aware of nothing but the fact that she was defying him. She had not only been smoking, she had tried to grab the belt away from him, and oh folks, oh friends and neighbors, she had asked for it, and he would testify before the throne of God Almighty that she was going to get it.
He drove her along the wall, swinging the belt, raining blows on her. Her hands were up to protect her face, but he had a clear shot at the rest of her. The belt made thick bullwhip cracks in the quiet room. But she did not scream, as she sometimes did, and she did not beg him to stop, as she usually did. Worst of all, she did not cry, as she always did. The only
sounds were the belt and their breathing, his heavy and hoarse, hers quick and light.
She broke for the bed and the vanity table on her side of it. Her shoulders were red from the belt’s blows. Her hair streamed fire. He lumbered after her, slower but big, very big—he had played squash until he had popped an Achilles tendon two years ago, and since then his weight had gotten out of hand a little bit (or maybe “a lot” would have been a better way to put it), but the muscle was still there, firm cordage sheathed in the fat. Still, he was a little alarmed at how out of breath he was.
She reached the vanity and he thought she would crouch there, or maybe try to crawl under it. Instead she groped . . . turned . . . and suddenly the air was full of flying missiles. She was throwing cosmetics at him. A bottle of Chantilly struck him squarely between the nipples, fell to his feet, shattered. He was suddenly enveloped in the gagging scent of flowers.
“Quit it!” he roared. “Quit it, you bitch!”
Instead of quitting it, her hands flew along the vanity’s littered glass top, grabbing whatever they found, throwing it. He groped at his chest where the bottle of Chantilly had struck him, unable to believe she had hit him with something, even as other objects flew around him. The bottle’s glass stopper had cut him. It was not much of a cut, little more than a triangular scratch, but was there a certain red-haired lady who was going to see the sun come up from a hospital bed? Oh yes, there was. A certain lady who—
A jar of cream struck him above the right eyebrow with sudden, cracking force. He heard a dull thud seemingly inside his head. White light exploded over that eye’s field of vision and he fell back a step, mouth dropping open.
Now a tube of Nivea cream struck his belly with a small slapping sound and she was—was she? was it possible?—yes! She was yelling at him!
“I’m going to the airport, you son of a bitch! Do you hear me? I have business and I’m going! You want to get out of my way because I’M GOING!”
Blood ran into his right eye, stinging and hot. He knuckled it away.
He stood there for a moment, staring at her as if he had never seen her before. In a way he never had. Her breasts heaved rapidly. Her face, all flush and livid pallor, blazed. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a snarl. She had, however, denuded the top of the vanity table. The missile silo was empty. He could still read the fear in her eyes . . . but it was still not fear of him.
“You put those clothes back, ” he said, struggling not to pant as he spoke.
That would not sound good. That would sound weak. “Then you put the suitcase back and get into bed. And if you do those things, maybe I won’t beat you up too bad. Maybe you’ll be able to go out of the house in two
days instead of two weeks. ”
“Tom, listen to me. ” She spoke slowly. Her gaze was very clear. “If you come near me again, I’ll kill you. Do you understand that, you tub of guts? I’ll kill you. ”
And suddenly—maybe it was because of the utter loathing on her face, the contempt, maybe because she had called him a tub of guts, or maybe only because of the rebellious way her breasts rose and fell—the fear was suffocating him. It was not a bud or a bloom but a whole goddam garden, the fear, the horrible fear that he was not here.
Tom Rogan rushed at his wife, not bellowing this time. He came as silently as a torpedo cutting through the water. His intent now was probably not merely to beat and subjugate but to do to her what she had so rashly said she would do to him.
He thought she would run. Probably for the bathroom. Maybe for the stairs. Instead, she stood her ground. Her hip whacked the wall as she threw her weight against the vanity table, pushing it up and toward him, ripping two fingernails down to the quick when the sweat on her palms caused her hands to slip.
For a moment the table tottered on an angle and then she shoved herself forward again. The vanity waltzed on one leg, mirror catching the light and
reflecting a brief swimmy aquarium shadow across the ceiling, and then it tilted forward and outward. Its leading edge slammed into Tom’s upper
thighs and knocked him over. There was a musical jingle as bottles tipped over and shattered inside. He saw the mirror strike the floor on his left and
threw an arm up to shield his eyes, losing the belt. Glass coughed across the floor, silver on the back. He felt some of it sting him, drawing blood.
Now she was crying, her breath coming in high, screamy sobs. Time after time she had seen herself leaving him, leaving Tom’s tyranny as she had left that of her father, stealing away in the night, bags piled in the trunk of her Cutlass. She was not a stupid woman, certainly not stupid enough even
now, standing on the rim of this incredible shambles, to believe that she had not loved Tom and did not in some way love him still. But that did not
preclude her fear of him . . . her hate of him . . . and her contempt of herself for choosing him for dim reasons buried in the times that should be over.
Her heart was not breaking; it seemed rather to be broiling in her chest, melting. She was afraid the heat from her heart might soon destroy her sanity in fire.
But above all this, yammering steadily in the back of her mind, she could hear Mike Hanlon’s dry, steady voice: It’s come back, Beverly . . . it’s come back . . . and you promised. . .
The vanity heaved up and down. Once. Twice. A third time. It looked as if it were breathing.
Moving with careful agility, her mouth turned down at the corners and jerking as if in prelude to some sort of convulsion, she skirted the vanity, toe-stepping through the broken glass, and grabbed the belt just as Tom heaved the vanity off to one side. Then she backed up, sliding her hand into the loop. She shook her hair out of her eyes and watched to see what he would do.
Tom got up. Some of the mirror-glass had cut one of his cheeks. A diagonal cut traced a line as fine as thread across his brow. He squinted at her as he rose slowly to his feet, and she saw drops of blood on his boxer shorts.
“You just give me that belt, ” he said.
Instead she took two turns of it around her hand and looked at him defiantly.
“Quit it, Bev. Right now. ”
“If you come for me, I’m going to strap the shit out of you. ” The words were coming out of her mouth but she couldn’t believe it was her saying them. And just who was this caveman in the bloody undershorts, anyway? Her husband? Her father? The lover she had taken in college who had broken her nose one night, apparently on a whim? Oh God help me, she thought. God help me now. And still her mouth went on. “I can do it, too. You’re fat and slow, Tom. I’m going, and I think maybe I’ll stay gone. I think maybe it’s over. ”
“Who’s this guy Denbrough? ” “Forget it. I was—”
She realized almost too late that the question had been a distraction. He was coming for her before the last word was out of his mouth. She whickered the belt through the air in an arc and the sound it made when it smashed across his mouth was the sound of a stubborn cork coming out of a bottle.
He squealed and clapped his hands to his mouth, his eyes huge, hurt and shocked. Blood began to pour between his fingers and over the backs of his hands.
“You broke my mouth, you bitch!” he screamed, muffled. “Ah God you broke my mouth!”
He came at her again, hands reaching, his mouth a wet red smear. His lips appeared to have burst in two places. The crown had been knocked from
one of his front teeth. As she watched, he spit it to one side. Part of her was backing away from this scene, sick and moaning, wanting to shut her eyes. But that other Beverly felt the exultation of a death-row convict freed in a freak earthquake. That Beverly liked all of this just fine. I wish you’d swallowed it! that one thought. Wish you’d choked on it!
It was this latter Beverly who swung the belt for the last time—the belt he had used on her buttocks, her legs, her breasts. The belt he had used on her times without number over the last four years. How many strokes you
got depended on how badly you’d screwed up. Tom comes home and dinner is cold? Two with the belt. Bev’s working late at the studio and forgets to call home? Three with the belt. Oh hey, look at this—Beverly got another parking ticket. One with the belt . . . across the breasts. He was good. He rarely bruised. It didn’t even hurt that much. Except for the humiliation.
That hurt. And what hurt worse was knowing that part of her craved the hurt. Craved the humiliation.
Last time pays for all, she thought, and swung.
She brought the belt in low, brought it in sidearm, and it whacked across his balls with a brisk yet heavy sound, the sound of a woman striking a rug with a carpet-beater. That was all it took. All the fight promptly went out of Tom Rogan.
He uttered a thin, strengthless shriek and fell on his knees as if to pray. His hands were between his legs. His head was thrown back. Cords stood out on his neck. His mouth was a tragedy-grimace of pain. His left knee
came down squarely on a heavy, pointed hook of shattered perfume bottle and he rolled silently over on one side like a whale. One hand left his balls to grab his squirting knee.
The blood, she thought. Dear Lord, he’s bleeding everywhere.
He’ll live, this new Beverly—the Beverly who seemed to have surfaced at Mike Hanlon’s phone call—replied coldly. Guys like him always live. You just get the hell out of here before he decides he wants to tango some more. Or before he decides to go down cellar and get his Winchester.
She backed away and felt pain stab her foot as she stepped on a chunk of glass from the broken vanity mirror. She bent down to grab the handle of her suitcase. She never took her eyes off him. She backed out the door and she backed down the hall. She was holding the suitcase in front of her in both hands and it banged her shins as she backed. Her cut foot printed bloody heel-prints. When she reached the stairs she turned around and went down quickly, not letting herself think. She suspected she had no coherent
thoughts left inside anyway, at least for the time being. She felt a light pawing against her leg and screamed.
She looked down and saw it was the end of the belt. It was still wrapped around her hand. In this dim light it looked more like a dead snake than ever. She threw it over the bannister, her face a wince of disgust, and saw it land in an S on the rug of the downstairs hallway.
At the foot of the stairs she grasped the hem of her white lace nightgown cross-handed and pulled it over her head. It was bloody, and she would not wear it one second longer, no matter what. She tossed it aside and it billowed onto the rubber-plant by the doorway to the living room like a lacy
parachute. She bent, naked, to the suitcase. Her nipples were cold, hard as bullets.
“BEVERLY, YOU GET YOUR ASS UPSTAIRS!”
She gasped, jerked, then bent back to the suitcase. If he was strong enough to scream that loud, her time was a good deal shorter than she had thought. She opened the case and pawed out panties, a blouse, an old pair of Levi’s. She jerked these on standing by the door, her eyes never leaving the stairs. But Tom did not appear at the top of them. He bawled her name
twice more, and each time she flinched away from that sound, her eyes hunted, her lips pulling back from her teeth in an unconscious snarl.
She jabbed the buttons of the blouse through the holes as fast as she could. The top two buttons were gone (it was ironic how little of her own sewing ever got done) and she supposed she looked quite a bit like a part- time hooker looking for one last quickie before calling it a night—but it would have to do.
“I’LL KILL YOU, YOU BITCH! YOU FUCKING BITCH!”
She slammed the suitcase closed and latched it. The arm of a blouse poked out like a tongue. She looked around once, quickly, suspecting that she would never see this house again.
She discovered only relief in the idea, and so opened the door and let herself out.
She was three blocks away, walking with no clear sense of where she was going, when she realized her feet were still bare. The one she had cut—the left—throbbed dully. She had to get something on her feet, and it was nearly two o’clock in the morning. Her wallet and credit-cards were at home. She felt in the pockets of the jeans and came up with nothing but a
few puffs of lint. She didn’t have a dime; not so much as a red penny. She looked around at the residential neighborhood she was in—nice homes, manicured lawns and plantings, dark windows.
And suddenly she began to laugh.
Beverly Rogan sat on a low stone wall, her suitcase between her dirty feet, and laughed. The stars were out, and how bright they were! She tilted her head back and laughed at them, that wild exhilaration washing through her again like a tidal wave that lifted and carried and cleansed, a force so powerful that any conscious thought was lost; only her blood thought and its one powerful voice spoke to her in some inarticulate way of desire,
although what it was it desired she neither knew nor cared. It was enough to feel that warmth filling her up with its insistence. Desire, she thought, and
inside her that tidal wave of exhilaration seemed to gather speed, rushing her onward toward some inevitable crash.
She laughed at the stars, frightened but free, her terror as sharp as pain and as sweet as a ripe October apple, and when a light came on in an
upstairs bedroom of the house this stone wall belonged to, she grabbed the handle of her suitcase and fled off into the night, still laughing.
6
Bill Denbrough Takes Time Out
“Leave? ” Audra repeated. She looked at him, puzzled, a bit afraid, and then tucked her bare feet up and under her. The floor was cold. The whole cottage was cold, come to that. The south of England had been experiencing an exceptionally dank spring, and more than once, on his regular morning and evening walks, Bill Denbrough had found himself thinking of Maine . . . thinking in a surprised vague way of Derry.
The cottage was supposed to have central heating—the ad had said so, and there certainly was a furnace down there in the tidy little basement, tucked away in what had once been a coalbin—but he and Audra had discovered early on in the shoot that the British idea of central heating was not at all the same as the American one. It seemed the Brits believed you had central heating as long as you didn’t have to piss away a scrim of ice in the toilet bowl when you got up in the morning. It was morning now—just quarter of eight. Bill had hung the phone up five minutes ago.
“Bill, you can’t just leave. You know that. ”
“I have to, ” he said. There was a hutch on the far side of the room. He went to it, took a bottle of Glenfiddich from the top shelf and poured himself a drink. Some of it slopped over the side of the glass. “Fuck, ” he muttered.
“Who was that on the telephone? What are you scared of, Bill? ”
“I’m not scared. ”
“Oh? Your hands always shake like that? You always have your first drink before breakfast? ”
He came back to his chair, robe flapping around his ankles, and sat down.
He tried to smile, but it was a poor effort and he gave it up.
On the telly the BBC announcer was wrapping up this morning’s batch of bad news before going on to last evening’s football scores. When they had arrived in the small suburban village of Fleet a month before the shoot was scheduled to begin, they had both marvelled over the technical quality of British television—on a good Pye color set, it really did look as though you could climb right inside. More lines or something, Bill had said. I don’t
know what it is, but it’s great, Audra had replied. That was before they discovered that much of the programming consisted of American shows such as Dallas and endless British sports events ranging from the arcane and boring (champion darts-throwing in which all the participants looked
like hypertensive sumo wrestlers) to the simply boring (British football was bad; cricket was even worse).
“I’ve been thinking about home a lot lately, ” Bill said, and sipped his drink.
“Home? ” she said, and looked so honestly puzzled that he laughed. “Poor Audra! Married almost eleven years to the guy and you don’t know
doodley-squat about him. What do you know about that? ” He laughed again and swallowed the rest of his drink. His laughter had a quality she cared for as little as seeing him with a glass of Scotch in his hand at this hour of the morning. The laugh sounded like something that really wanted to be a howl of pain. “I wonder if any of the others have got husbands and wives who are just finding out how little they know. I suppose they must. ”
“Billy, I know that I love you, ” she said. “For eleven years that’s been enough. ”
“I know. ” He smiled at her—the smile was sweet, tired, and scared. “Please. Please tell me what this is about. ”
She looked at him with her lovely gray eyes, sitting there in a tatty
leased-house chair with her feet curled beneath the hem of her nightgown, a woman he had loved, married, and still loved. He tried to see through her eyes, to see what she knew. He tried to see it as a story. He could, but he
knew it would never sell.
Here is a poor boy from the state of Maine who goes to the University on a scholarship. All his life he has wanted to be a writer, but when he enrolls in the writing courses he finds himself lost without a compass in a strange and frightening land. There’s one guy who wants to be Updike. There’s another one who wants to be a New England version of Faulkner—only he wants to write novels about the grim lives of the poor in blank verse.
There’s a girl who admires Joyce Carol Oates but feels that because Oates was nurtured in a s*xist society she is “radioactive in a literary sense. ”
Oates is unable to be clean, this girl says. She will be cleaner. There’s the short fat grad student who can’t or won’t speak above a mutter. This guy has written a play in which there are nine characters. Each of them says only a single word. Little by little the playgoers realize that when you put the single words together you come out with “War is the tool of the s*xist death merchants. ” This fellow’s play receives an A from the man who
teaches Eh-141 (Creative Writing Honors Seminar). This instructor has published four books of poetry and his master’s thesis, all with the University Press. He smokes pot and wears a peace medallion. The fat mutterer’s play is produced by a guerrilla theater group during the strike to end the war which shuts down the campus in May of 1970. The instructor plays one of the characters.
Bill Denbrough, meanwhile, has written one locked-room mystery tale,
three science-fiction stories, and several horror tales which owe a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Richard Matheson—in later years he will say those stories resembled a mid-1800s funeral hack equipped with a supercharger and painted Day-Glo red.
One of the sf tales earns him a B.
“This is better, ” the instructor writes on the title page. “In the alien
counterstrike we see the vicious circle in which violence begets violence; I particularly liked the ‘needle-nosed’ spacecraft as a symbol of socio-s*xual incursion. While this remains a slightly confused undertone throughout, it is interesting. ”
All the others do no better than a C.
Finally he stands up in class one day, after the discussion of a sallow young woman’s vignette about a cow’s examination of a discarded engine block in a deserted field (this may or may not be after a nuclear war) has gone on for seventy minutes or so. The sallow girl, who smokes one
Winston after another and picks occasionally at the pimples which nestle in the hollows of her temples, insists that the vignette is a socio-political statement in the manner of the early Orwell. Most of the class—and the instructor—agree, but still the discussion drones on.
When Bill stands up, the class looks at him. He is tall, and has a certain presence.
Speaking carefully, not stuttering (he has not stuttered in better than five years), he says: “I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics . . . culture . . . history . . . aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean . . . ” He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a s*xist death merchant in their midst. “I mean .
. . can’t you guys just let a story be a story? ”
No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her
cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack.
Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, “Do you believe William Faulkner was just telling stories? Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck? Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think. ”
“I think that’s pretty close to the truth, ” Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation.
“I suggest, ” the instructor says, toying with his pen and smiling at Bill with half-lidded eyes, “that you have a great deal to learn. ”
The applause starts somewhere in the back of the room.
Bill leaves . . . but returns the next week, determined to stick with it. In the time between he has written a story called “The Dark, ” a tale about a
small boy who discovers a monster in the cellar of his house. The little boy faces it, battles it, finally kills it. He feels a kind of holy exaltation as he
goes about the business of writing this story; he even feels that he is not so much telling the story as he is allowing the story to flow through him. At
one point he puts his pen down and takes his hot and aching hand out into ten-degree December cold where it nearly smokes from the temperature change. He walks around, green cut-off boots squeaking in the snow like
tiny shutter-hinges which need oil, and his head seems to bulge with the story; it is a little scary, the way it needs to get out. He feels that if it cannot escape by way of his racing hand that it will pop his eyes out in its urgency to escape and be concrete. “Going to knock the shit out of it, ” he confides to the blowing winter dark, and laughs a little—a shaky laugh. He is aware that he has finally discovered how to do just that—after ten years of trying he has suddenly found the starter button on the vast dead bulldozer taking up so much space inside his head. It has started up. It is revving, revving. It is nothing pretty, this big machine. It was not made for taking pretty girls to proms. It is not a status symbol. It means business. It can knock things down. If he isn’t careful, it will knock him down.
He rushes inside and finishes “The Dark” at white heat, writing until four o’clock in the morning and finally falling asleep over his ring-binder. If
someone had suggested to him that he was really writing about his brother, George, he would have been surprised. He has not thought about George in years—or so he honestly believes.
The story comes back from the instructor with an F slashed into the title page. Two words are scrawled beneath, in capital letters. PULP, screams one. CRAP, screams the other.
Bill takes the fifteen-page sheaf of manuscript over to the woodstove and opens the door. He is within a bare inch of tossing it in when the absurdity of what he is doing strikes him. He sits down in his rocking chair, looks at a Grateful Dead poster, and starts to laugh. Pulp? Fine! Let it be pulp! The
woods were full of it!
“Let them fucking trees fall!” Bill exclaims, and laughs until tears spurt from his eyes and roll down his face.
He retypes the title page, the one with the instructor’s judgment on it, and sends it off to a men’s magazine named White Tie (although from what Bill can see, it really should be titled Naked Girls Who Look Like Drug Users).
Yet his battered Writer’s Market says they buy horror stories, and the two issues he has bought down at the local mom-and-pop store have indeed contained four horror stories sandwiched between the naked girls and the ads for dirty movies and potency pills. One of them, by a man named
Dennis Etchison, is actually quite good.
He sends “The Dark” off with no real hopes—he has submitted a good many stories to magazines before with nothing to show for it but rejection
slips—and is flabbergasted and delighted when the fiction editor of White Tie buys it for two hundred dollars, payment on publication. The assistant editor adds a short note which calls it “the best damned horror story since Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Jar. ’ ” He adds, “Too bad only about seventy people coast to coast will read it, ” but Bill Denbrough does not care. Two hundred dollars!
He goes to his advisor with a drop card for Eh-141. His advisor initials it.
Bill Denbrough staples the drop card to the assistant fiction editor’s congratulatory note and tacks both to the bulletin board on the creative- writing instructor’s door. In the corner of the bulletin board he sees an anti- war cartoon. And suddenly, as if moving of its own accord, his fingers pluck his pen from his breast pocket and across the cartoon he writes this: If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable, I’m going to kill myself, because I won’t know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do. He pauses, and then, feeling a bit small (but
unable to help himself), he adds: I suggest you have a lot to learn.
His drop card comes back to him in the campus mail three days later. The instructor has initialed it. On the space marked GRADE AT TIME OF DROP, the instructor has not given him an incomplete or the low C to which his run of grades at that time would have entitled him; instead, another F is slashed angrily across the grade line. Below it the instructor has written: Do you think money proves anything about anything, Denbrough?
“Well, actually, yes, ” Bill Denbrough says to his empty apartment, and once more begins to laugh crazily.
In his senior year of college he dares to write a novel, because he has no idea what he’s getting into. He escapes the experience scratched and frightened . . . but alive, and with a manuscript nearly five hundred pages long. He sends it out to The Viking Press, knowing that it will be the first of many stops for his book, which is about ghosts . . . but he likes Viking’s ship logo, and that makes it as good a place to start as any. As it turns out,
the first stop is also the last stop. Viking purchases the book . . . and for Bill Denbrough the fairytale begins. The man who was once known as Stuttering Bill has become a success at the age of twenty-three. Three years later and three thousand miles from northern New England, he attains a queer kind of celebrity by marrying a woman who is a movie-star and five years his senior at Hollywood’s Church in the Pines.
The gossip columnists give it seven months. The only bet, they say, is whether the end will come in a divorce or an annulment. Friends (and enemies) on both sides of the match feel about the same. The age difference apart, the disparities are startling. He is tall, already balding, already inclining a bit toward fat. He speaks slowly in company, and at times seems nearly inarticulate. Audra, on the other hand, is aubumhaired, statuesque, and gorgeous—she is less like an earthly woman than a creature from some semidivine super-race.
He has been hired to do the screenplay of his second novel, The Black Rapids (mostly because the right to do at least the first draft of the screenplay was an immutable condition of sale, in spite of his agent’s
moans that he was insane), and his draft has actually turned out pretty well. He has been invited out to Universal City for further rewrites and production meetings.
His agent is a small woman named Susan Browne. She is exactly five feet tall. She is violently energetic and even more violently emphatic. “Don’t do it, Billy, ” she tells him. “Kiss it off. They’ve got a lot of money tied up in it and they’ll get someone good to do the screenplay. Maybe even Goldman. ”
“Who? ”
“William Goldman. The only good writer who ever went out there and did both. ”
“What are you talking about, Suze? ”
“He stayed there and he stayed good, ” she said. “The odds on both are
like the odds on beating lung cancer—it can be done, but who wants to try? You’ll burn out on s*x and booze. Or some of the nifty new drugs. ” Susan’s crazily fascinating brown eyes sparkle vehemently up at him. “And if it
turns out to be some meatball who gets the assignment instead of someone like Goldman, so what? The book’s on the shelf there. They can’t change a word. ”
“Susan—”
“Listen to me, Billy! Take the money and run. You’re young and strong. That’s what they like. You go out there and they will first separate you from your self-respect and then from your ability to write a straight line from point A to point B. Last but not least, they will take your testes. You write
like a grownup, but you’re just a kid with a very high forehead. ”
“I have to go. ”
“Did someone just fart in here? ” she returns. “Must have, because something sure stinks. ”
“But I do. I have to. ” “Jesus!”
“I have to get away from New England. ” He is afraid to say what comes next—it’s like mouthing a curse—but he owes it to her. “I have to get away from Maine. ”
“Why, for God’s sake? ” “I don’t know. I just do. ”
“Are you telling me something real, Billy, or just talking like a writer? ” “It’s real. ”
They are in bed together during this conversation. Her breasts are small like peaches, sweet like peaches. He loves her a lot, although not the way
they both know would be a really good way to love. She sits up with a pool of sheet in her lap and lights a cigarette. She’s crying, but he doubts if she knows he knows. It’s just this shine in her eyes. It would be tactful not to mention it, so he doesn’t. He doesn’t love her in that really good way, but
he cares a mountain for her.
“Go on then, ” she says in a dry businesslike voice as she turns back to him. “Give me a call when you’re ready, and if you still have the strength. I’ll come and pick up the pieces. If there are any left. ”
The film version of The Black Rapids is called Pit of the Black Demon,
and Audra Phillips is cast as the lead. The title is horrible, but the movie
turns out to be quite good. And the only part of him he loses in Hollywood is his heart.
“Bill, ” Audra said again, bringing him out of these memories. He saw she had snapped off the TV. He glanced out the window and saw fog nuzzling against the panes.
“I’ll explain as much as I can, ” he said. “You deserve that. But first do two things for me. ”
“All right. ”
“Fix yourself another cup of tea and tell me what you know about me. Or what you think you know. ”
She looked at him, puzzled, and then went to the highboy.
“I know you’re from Maine, ” she said, making herself tea from the breakfast pot. She was not British, but just a touch of clipped British had crept into her voice—a holdover from the part she played in Attic Room, the movie they had come over here to do. It was Bill’s first original screenplay. He had been offered the directorial shot as well. Thank God he had declined that; his leaving now would have completed the job of bitching things up.
He knew what they would all say, the whole crew. Billy Denbrough finally shows his true colors. Just another fucking writer, crazier than a shithouse rat.
God knew he felt crazy right about now.
“I know you had a brother and that you loved him very much and that he died, ” Audra went on. “I know that you grew up in a town called Derry, moved to Bangor about two years after your brother died, and moved to Portland when you were fourteen. I know your dad died of lung cancer when you were seventeen. And you wrote a best-seller while you were still in college, paying your way with a scholarship and a part-time job in a
textile mill. That must have seemed very strange to you . . . the change in income. In prospects. ”
She returned to his side of the room and he saw it in her face then: the realization of the hidden spaces between them.
“I know that you wrote The Black Rapids a year later, and came out to Hollywood. And the week before shooting started on the movie, you met a very mixed-up woman named Audra Phillips who knew a little bit about what you must have been through—the crazy decompression—because she had been plain old Audrey Philpott five years before. And this woman was drowning—”
“Audra, don’t. ”
Her eyes were steady, holding his. “Oh, why not? Let us tell the truth and shame the devil. I was drowning. I discovered poppers two years before I met you, and then a year later I discovered coke and that was even better. A popper in the morning, coke in the afternoon, wine at night, a Valium at bedtime. Audra’s vitamins. Too many important interviews, too many good parts. I was so much like a character in a Jacqueline Susann novel it was hilarious. Do you know how I think about that time now, Bill? ”
“No. ”
She sipped her tea, her eyes never leaving his, and grinned. “It was like running on the walkway at L. A. International. You get it? ”
“Not exactly, no. ”
“It’s a moving belt, ” she said. “About a quarter of a mile long. ” “I know the walkway, ” he said, “but I don’t see what you’re—”
“You just stand there and it carries you all the way to the baggage-claim area. But if you want, you don’t have to just stand there. You can walk on it. Or run. And it seems like you’re just doing your normal walk or your normal jog or your normal run or your normal all-out sprint—whatever—
because your body forgets that what you’re really doing is topping the speed the walkway’s already making. That’s why they have those signs that say SLOW DOWN, MOVING RAMPWAY near the end. When I met you I felt as if I’d run right off the end of that thing onto a floor that didn’t move anymore. There I was, my body nine miles ahead of my feet. You can’t keep your balance. Sooner or later you fall right on your face. Except I didn’t. Because you caught me. ”
She put her tea aside and lit a cigarette, her eyes never leaving him. He could only see that her hands were shaking in the minute jitter of the lighter-flame, which darted first to the right of the cigarette-end and then to the left before finding it.
She drew deep, blew out a fast jet of smoke.
“What do I know about you? I know you seemed to have it all under control. I know that. You never seemed to be in a hurry to get to the next drink or the next meeting or the next party. You seemed confident that all those things would be there . . . if you wanted them. You talked slow. Part
of it was the Maine drawl, I guess, but most of it was just you. You were the first man I ever met out there who dared to talk slow. I had to slow down to listen. I looked at you, Bill, and I saw someone who never ran on the walkway, because he knew it would get him there. You seemed utterly untouched by the hype and hysteria. You didn’t lease a Rolls so you could
drive down Rodeo Drive on Saturday afternoon with your own vanity plates on some glitzy rental company’s car. You didn’t have a press agent to plant items in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. You’d never done the Carson
show. ”
“Writers can’t unless they also do card-tricks or bend spoons, ” he said, smiling. “It’s like a national law. ”
He thought she would smile, but she didn’t. “I know you were there when I needed you. When I came flying off the end of the walkway like O.
J. Simpson in that old Hertz ad. Maybe you saved me from eating the wrong pill on top of too much booze. Or maybe I would have made it out
the other side on my own and it’s all a big dramatization on my part. But . .
. it doesn’t feel like that. Not inside, where I am. ” She snuffed the cigarette, only two puffs gone.
“I know you’ve been there ever since. And I’ve been there for you. We’re good in bed. That used to seem like a big deal to me. But we’re also good out of it, and now that seems like a bigger deal. I feel as if I could grow old with you and still be brave. I know you drink too much beer and don’t get enough exercise; I know that some nights you dream badly—”
He was startled. Nastily startled. Almost frightened. “I never dream. ”
She smiled. “So you tell the interviewers when they ask where you get your ideas. But it’s not true. Unless it’s just indigestion when you start groaning in the night. And I don’t believe that, Billy. ”
“Do I talk? ” he asked cautiously. He could remember no dreams. No dreams at all, good or bad.
Audra nodded. “Sometimes. But I can never make out what it is you say.
And on a couple of occasions, you have wept. ”
He looked at her blankly. There was a bad taste in his mouth; it trailed back along his tongue and down his throat like the taste of melted aspirin. So now you know how fear tastes, he thought. Time you found out, considering all you’ve written on the subject. He supposed it was a taste he would get used to. If he lived long enough.
Memories were suddenly trying to crowd in. It was as if a black sac in his mind were bulging, threatening to spew noxious
(dreams)
images up from his subconscious and into the mental field of vision commanded by his rational waking mind—and if that happened all at once, it would drive him mad. He tried to push them back, and succeeded, but not before he heard a voice—it was as if someone buried alive had cried out from the ground. It was Eddie Kaspbrak’s voice.
You saved my life, Bill. Those big boys, they drive me bugshit. Sometimes I think they really want to kill me—
“Your arms, ” Audra said.
Bill looked down at them. The flesh there had humped into gooseflesh. Not little bumps but huge white knobs like insect eggs. They both stared, saying nothing, as if looking at an interesting museum exhibit. The
goosebumps slowly melted away.
In the silence that followed Audra said: “And I know one other thing.
Someone called you this morning from the States and said you have to leave me. ”
He got up, looked briefly at the liquor bottles, then went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of orange juice. He said: “You know I had a brother, and you know he died, but you don’t know he was murdered. ”
Audra took in a quick snatch of breath. “Murdered! Oh, Bill, why didn’t you ever—”
“Tell you? ” He laughed, that barking sound again. “I don’t know. ” “What happened? ”
“We were living in Derry then. There had been a flood, but it was mostly over, and George was bored. I was sick in bed with the flu. He wanted me to make him a boat out of a sheet of newspaper. I knew how from daycamp the year before. He said he was going to sail it down the gutters on Witcham Street and Jackson Street, because they were still full of water. So I made him the boat and he thanked me and he went out and that was the last time I ever saw my brother George alive. If I hadn’t had the flu, maybe I could have saved him. ”
He paused, right palm rubbing at his left cheek, as if testing for beard- stubble. His eyes, magnified by the lenses of his glasses, looked thoughtful .
. . but he was not looking at her.
“It happened right there on Witcham Street, not too far from the intersection with Jackson. Whoever killed him pulled his left arm off the way a second-grader would pull a wing off a fly. Medical examiner said he either died of shock or blood-loss. Far as I could ever see, it didn’t make a dime’s worth of difference which it was. ”
“Christ, Bill!”
“I imagine you wonder why I never told you. The truth is, I wonder myself. Here we’ve been married eleven years and until today you never knew what happened to Georgie. I know about your whole family—even your aunts and uncles. I know your grandfather died in his garage in Iowa
City frigging around with his chainsaw while he was drunk. I know those things because married people, no matter how busy they are, get to know almost everything after awhile. And if they get really bored and stop
listening, they pick it up anyway—by osmosis. Or do you think I’m wrong? ”
“No, ” she said faintly. “You’re not wrong, Bill. ”
“And we’ve always been able to talk to each other, haven’t we? I mean, neither of us got so bored it ever had to be osmosis, right? ”
“Well, ” she said, “until today I always thought so. ”
“Come on, Audra. You know everything that’s happened to me over the last eleven years of my life. Every deal, every idea, every cold, every friend, every guy that ever did me wrong or tried to. You know I slept with Susan Browne. You know that sometimes I get maudlin when I drink and play the records too loud. ”
“Especially the Grateful Dead, ” she said, and he laughed. This time she smiled back.
“You know the most important stuff, too—the things I hope for. ”
“Yes. I think so. But this . . . ” She paused, shook her head, thought for a moment. “How much does this call have to do with your brother, Bill? ”
“Let me get to it in my own way. Don’t try to rush me into the center of it or you’ll have me committed. It’s so big . . . and so . . . so quaintly awful . .
. that I’m trying to sort of creep up on it. You see . . . it never occurred to me to tell you about Georgie. ”
She looked at him, frowned, shook her head faintly—I don’t understand.
“What I’m trying to tell you, Audra, is that I haven’t even thought of George in twenty years or more. ”
“But you told me you had a brother named—”
“I repeated a fact, ” he said. “That was all. His name was a word. It cast no shadow at all in my mind. ”
“But I think maybe it cast a shadow over your dreams, ” Audra said. Her voice was very quiet.
“The groaning? The crying? ” She nodded.
“I suppose you could be right, ” he said. “In fact, you’re almost surely right. But dreams you don’t remember don’t really count, do they? ”
“Are you really telling me you never thought of him at all? ”
“Yes. I am. ”
She shook her head, frankly disbelieving. “Not even the horrible way he died? ”
“Not until today, Audra. ”
She looked at him and shook her head again.
“You asked me before we were married if I had any brothers or sisters, and I said I had a brother who died when I was a kid. You knew my parents were gone, and you’ve got so much family that it took up your entire field of attention. But that’s not all. ”
“What do you mean? ”
“It isn’t just George that’s been in that black hole. I haven’t thought of Derry itself in twenty years. Not the people I chummed with—Eddie Kaspbrak and Richie the Mouth, Stan Uris, Bev Marsh . . . ” He ran his hands through his hair and laughed shakily. “It’s like having a case of
amnesia so bad you don’t know you’ve got it. And when Mike Hanlon called—”
“Who’s Mike Hanlon? ”
“Another kid that we chummed with—that I chummed with after Georgie died. Of course he’s no kid anymore. None of us are. That was Mike on the phone, transatlantic cable. He said, ‘Hello—have I reached the Denbrough
residence? ’ and I said yes, and he said, ‘Bill? Is that you? ’ and I said yes, and he said, ‘This is Mike Hanlon. ’ It meant nothing to me, Audra. He might as well have been selling encyclopedias or Burl Ives records. Then he said, ‘From Derry. ’ And when he said that it was like a door opened inside me and some horrible light shined out, and I remembered who he was. I remembered Georgie. I remembered all the others. All this happened—”
Bill snapped his fingers.
“Like that. And I knew he was going to ask me to come. ” “Come back to Derry. ”
“Yeah. ” He took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, looked at her. Never in her life had she seen a man who looked so frightened. “Back to Derry.
Because we promised, he said, and we did. We did. All of us. Us kids. We stood in the creek that ran through the Barrens, and we held hands in a circle, and we had cut our palms with a piece of glass so it was like a bunch of kids playing blood brothers, only it was real. ”
He held his palms out to her, and in the center of each she could see a close-set ladder of white lines that could have been scar-tissue. She had held his hand—both his hands—countless times, but she had never noticed these scars across his palms before. They were faint, yes, but she would
have believed—
And the party! That party!
Not the one where they had met, although this second one formed a perfect book-end to that first one, because it had been the wrap party at the end of the Pit of the Black Demon shoot. It had been loud and drunk, every inch the Topanga Canyon “do. ” Perhaps a little less bitchy than some of the other L. A. parties she had been to, because the shoot had gone better than they had any right to expect, and they all knew it. For Audra Phillips it had gone even better, because she had fallen in love with William Denbrough.
What was the name of the self-proclaimed palmist? She couldn’t remember now, only that she had been one of the makeup man’s two assistants. She remembered the girl whipping off her blouse at some point in the party (revealing a very filmy bra beneath) and tying it over her head like a gypsy’s scarf. High on pot and wine, she had read palms for the rest of the evening . . . or at least until she had passed out.
Audra could not remember now if the girl’s readings had been good or bad, witty or stupid: she had been pretty high herself that night. What she did remember was that at one point the girl had grabbed Bill’s palm and her own and had declared them perfectly matched. They were life-twins, she said. She could remember watching, more than a little jealous, as the girl traced the lines on his palm with her exquisitely lacquered fingernail—how stupid that was, in the weird L. A. film subculture where men patted women’s fannies as routinely as New York men pecked their cheeks! But
there had been something intimate and lingering about that tracery.
There had been no little white scars on Bill’s palms then.
She had been watching the charade with a jealous lover’s eye, and she was sure of the memory. Sure of the fact.
She said so to Bill now.
He nodded. “You’re right. They weren’t there then. And although I can’t absolutely swear to it, I don’t think they were there last night, down at the Plow and Barrow. Ralph and I were handwrestling for beers again and I think I would have noticed. ”
He grinned at her. The grin was dry, humorless, and scared.
“I think they came back when Mike Hanlon called. That’s what I think. ” “Bill, that isn’t possible. ” But she reached for her cigarettes.
Bill was looking at his hands. “Stan did it, ” he said. “Cut our palms with a sliver of Coke bottle. I can remember it so clearly now. ” He looked up at Audra and behind his glasses his eyes were hurt and puzzled. “I remember how that piece of glass flashed in the sun. It was one of the new clear ones. Before that Coke bottles used to be green, you remember that? ” She shook her head but he didn’t see her. He was still studying his palms. “I can remember Stan doing his own hands last, pretending he was going to slash his wrists instead of just cut his palms a little. I guess it was just some goof, but I almost made a move on him . . . to stop him. Because for a second or two there he looked serious. ”
“Bill, don’t, ” she said in a low voice. This time she had to steady the lighter in her right hand by grasping its wrist in her left, like a policeman holding a gun on a shooting range. “Scars can’t come back. They either are or aren’t. ”
“You saw them before, huh? Is that what you’re telling me? ”
“They’re very faint, ” Audra said, more sharply than she had intended. “We were all bleeding, ” he said. “We were standing in the water not far
from where Eddie Kaspbrak and Ben Hanscom and I built the dam that time
—”
“You don’t mean the architect, do you? ” “Is there one by that name? ”
“God, Bill, he built the new BBC communications center! They’re still arguing whether it’s a dream or an abortion!”
“Well, I don’t know if it’s the same guy or not. It doesn’t seem likely, but I guess it could be. The Ben I knew was great at building stuff. We all stood there, and I was holding Bev Marsh’s left hand in my right and Richie Tozier’s right hand in my left. We stood out there in the water like something out of a Southern baptism after a tent meeting, and I remember I could see the Derry Standpipe on the horizon. It looked as white as you
imagine the robes of the archangels must be, and we promised, we swore, that if it wasn’t over, that if it ever started to happen again . . . we’d go back. And we’d do it again. And stop it. Forever. ”
“Stop what? ” she cried, suddenly furious with him. “Stop what? What the fuck are you talking about? ”
“I wish you wouldn’t a-a-ask—” Bill began, and then stopped. She saw an expression of bemused horror spread over his face like a stain. “Give me a cigarette. ”
She passed him the pack. He lit one. She had never seen him smoke a cigarette.
“I used to stutter, too. ” “You stuttered? ”
“Yes. Back then. You said I was the only man in L. A. you ever knew who dared to speak slowly. The truth is, I didn’t dare talk fast. It wasn’t reflection. It wasn’t deliberation. It wasn’t wisdom. All reformed stutterers speak very slowly. It’s one of the tricks you learn, like thinking of your
middle name just before you introduce yourself, because stutterers have
more trouble with nouns than with any other words, and the one word in all the world that gives them the most trouble is their own first name. ”
“Stuttered. ” She smiled a small smile, as if he had told a joke and she had missed the point.
“Until Georgie died, I stuttered moderately, ” Bill said, and already he had begun to hear words double in his mind, as if they were infinitesimally separated in time; the words came out smoothly, in his ordinary slow and cadenced way, but in his mind he heard words like Georgie and moderately overlap, becoming Juh-Juh-Georgie and m-moderately. “I mean, I had some really bad moments—usually when I was called on in class, and especially if I really knew the answer and wanted to give it—but mostly I got by. After George died, it got a lot worse. Then, around the age of fourteen or fifteen,
things started to get better again. I went to Chevrus High in Portland, and
there was a speech therapist there, Mrs. Thomas, who was really great. She taught me some good tricks. Like thinking of my middle name just before I said ‘Hi, I’m Bill Denbrough’ out loud. I was taking French 1 and she taught me to switch to French if I got badly stuck on a word. So if you’re standing there feeling like the world’s grandest asshole, saying ‘th-th-this buh-buh-buh-buh’ over and over like a broken record, you switched over to French and ‘ce livre’ would come flowing off your tongue. Worked every time. And as soon as you said it in French you could come back to English
and say ‘this book’ with no problem at all. If you got stuck on an s-word
like ship or skate or slum, you could lisp it: thip, thkate, thlum. No stutter. “All of that helped, but mostly it was just forgetting Derry and everything
that happened there. Because that’s when the forgetting happened. When we were living in Portland and I was going to Chevrus. I didn’t forget everything at once, but looking back now I’d have to say it happened over a remarkably short period of time. Maybe no more than four months. My stutter and my memories faded out together. Someone washed the blackboard and all the old equations went away. ”
He drank what was left of his juice. “When I stuttered on ‘ask’ a few seconds ago, that was the first time in maybe twenty-one years. ”
He looked at her.
“First the scars, then the stuh-hutter. Do you h-hear it? ”
“You’re doing that on purpose!” she said, badly frightened.
“No. I guess there’s no way to convince a person of that, but it’s true.
Stuttering’s funny, Audra. Spooky. On one level you’re not even aware it’s happening. But . . . it’s also something you can hear in your mind. It’s like part of your head is working an instant ahead of the rest. Or one of those reverb systems kids used to put in their jalopies back in the fifties, when the sound in the rear speaker would come just a split second a-after the sound in the front s-speaker. ”
He got up and walked restlessly around the room. He looked tired, and she thought with some unease of how hard he had worked over the last
thirteen years or so, as if it might be possible to justify the moderateness of his talent by working furiously, almost nonstop. She found herself having a very uneasy thought and tried to push it away, but it wouldn’t go. Suppose Bill’s call had really been from Ralph Foster, inviting him down to the Plow and Barrow for an hour of arm-wrestling or backgammon, or maybe from
Freddie Firestone, the producer of Attic Room, on some problem or other? Perhaps even a “wrong-ring, ” as the veddy British doctor’s wife down the lane put it?
What did such thoughts lead to?
Why, to the idea that all this Derry-Mike Hanlon business was nothing but a hallucination. A hallucination brought on by an incipient nervous breakdown.
But the scars, Audra—how do you explain the scars? He’s right. They weren’t there . . . and now they are. That’s the truth, and you know it.
“Tell me the rest, ” she said. “Who killed your brother George? What did you and these other children do? What did you promise? ”
He went to her, knelt before her like an oldfashioned suitor about to propose marriage, and took her hands.
“I think I could tell you, ” he said softly. “I think that if I really wanted to, I could. Most of it I don’t remember even now, but once I started talking it would come. I can sense those memories . . . waiting to be born. They’re like clouds filled with rain. Only this rain would be very dirty. The plants that grew after a rain like that would be monsters. Maybe I can face that with the others—”
“Do they know? ”
“Mike said he called them all. He thinks they’ll all come . . . except maybe for Stan. He said Stan sounded strange. ”
“It all sounds strange to me. You’re frightening me very badly, Bill. ” “I’m sorry, ” he said, and kissed her. It was like getting a kiss from an
utter stranger. She found herself hating this man Mike Hanlon. “I thought I ought to explain as much as I could; I thought that would be better than just creeping off into the night. I suppose some of them may do just that. But I have to go. And I think Stan will be there, no matter how strange he sounded. Or maybe that’s just because I can’t imagine not going myself. ” “Because of your brother? ”
Bill shook his head slowly. “I could tell you that, but it would be a lie. I loved him. I know how strange that must sound after telling you I haven’t thought of him in twenty years or so, but I loved the hell out of that kid. ” He smiled a little. “He was a spasmoid, but I loved him. You know? ”
Audra, who had a younger sister, nodded. “I know. ” “But it isn’t George. I can’t explain what it is. I . . . ” He looked out the window at the morning fog.
“I feel like a bird must feel when fall comes and it knows . . . somehow it just knows it has to fly home. It’s instinct, babe . . . and I guess I believe instinct’s the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will. Unless you’re willing to take the pipe or eat the gun or take a long walk off a short dock, you can’t say no to some things. You can’t refuse to pick up your option
because there is no option. You can’t stop it from happening any more than
you could stand at home plate with a bat in your hand and let a fastball hit you. I have to go. That promise . . . it’s in my mind like a fuh-fishhook. ”
She stood up and walked herself carefully to him; she felt very fragile, as if she might break. She put a hand on his shoulder and turned him to her.
“Take me with you, then. ”
The expression of horror that dawned on his face then—not horror of her but for her—was so naked that she stepped back, really afraid for the first time.
“No, ” he said. “Don’t think of that, Audra. Don’t you ever think of that.
You’re not going within three thousand miles of Derry. I think Derry’s going to be a very bad place to be during the next couple of weeks. You’re going to stay here and carry on and make all the excuses for me you have to. Now promise me that!”
“Should I promise? ” she asked, her eyes never leaving his. “Should I, Bill? ”
“Audra—”
“Should I? You made a promise, and look what it’s got you into. And me as well, since I’m your wife and I love you. ”
His big hands tightened painfully on her shoulders. “Promise me!
Promise! P-Puh-Puh-Pruh-huh—”
And she could not stand that, that broken word caught in his mouth like a gaffed and wriggling fish.
“I promise, okay? I promise!” She burst into tears. “Are you happy now?
Jesus! You’re crazy, the whole thing is crazy, but I promise!”
He put an arm around her and led her to the couch. Brought her a brandy.
She sipped at it, getting herself under control a little at a time. “When do you go, then? ”
“Today, ” he said. “Concorde. I can just make it if I drive to Heathrow instead of taking the train. Freddie wanted me on-set after lunch. You go on ahead at nine, and you don’t know anything you see? ”
She nodded reluctantly.
“I’ll be in New York before anything shows up funny. And in Derry before sundown, with the right c-c-connections. ”
“And when do I see you again? ” she asked softly.
He put an arm around her and held her tightly, but he never answered her question.
“How many human eyes . . . had snatched
glimpses of their secret anatomies, down the passages of years? ”
—Clive Barker, Books of Blood
The segment below and all other Interlude segments are drawn from “Derry: An Unauthorized Town History, ” by Michael Hanlon. This is an unpublished set of notes and accompanying fragments of manuscript (which read almost like diary entries) found in the Derry Public Library vault. The title given is the one written on the cover of the looseleaf binder in which these notes were kept prior to their appearance here. The author, however, refers to the work several
times within his own notes as “Derry: A Look Through Hell’s Back Door. ”
One supposes the thought of popular publication had done more than cross Mr. Hanlon’s mind.
January 2nd, 1985
Can an entire city be haunted?
Haunted as some houses are supposed to be haunted?
Not just a single building in that city, or the corner of a single street, or a single basketball court in a single pocket-park, the netless basket jutting out at sunset like some obscure and bloody instrument of torture, not just one area—but everything. The whole works.
Can that be?
Listen:
Haunted: “Often visited by ghosts or spirits. ” Funk and Wagnalls. Haunting: “Persistently recurring to the mind; difficult to forget. ” Ditto
Funk and Friend.
To haunt: “To appear or recur often, especially as a ghost. ” But—and listen!—“Aplace often visited: resort, den, hangout . . . ” Italics are or
course mine.
And one more. This one, like the last, is a definition of haunt as a noun, and it’s the one that really scares me: “A feeding place for animals. ”
Like the animals that beat up Adrian Mellon and then threw him over the bridge?
Like the animal that was waiting underneath the bridge?
A feeding place for animals.
What’s feeding in Derry? What’s feeding on Derry?
You know, it’s sort of interesting—I didn’t know it was possible for a man to become as frightened as I have become since the Adrian Mellon business and still live, let alone function. It’s as if I’ve fallen into a story,
and everyone knows you’re not supposed to feel this afraid until the end of the story, when the haunter of the dark finally comes out of the woodwork to feed . . . on you, of course.
On you.
But if this is a story, it’s not one of those classic screamers by Lovecraft or Bradbury or Poe. I know, you see—not everything, but a lot. I didn’t just start when I opened the Derry News one day last September, read the transcript of the Unwin boy’s preliminary hearing, and realized that the clown who killed George Denbrough might well be back again. I actually started around 1980—I think that is when some part of me which had been asleep woke up . . . knowing that Its time might be coming round again.
What part? The watchman part, I suppose.
Or maybe it was the voice of the Turtle. Yes . . . I rather think it was that.
I know it’s what Bill Denbrough would believe.
I discovered news of old horrors in old books; read intelligence of old
atrocities in old periodicals; always in the back of my mind, every day a bit louder, I heard the seashell drone of some growing, coalescing force; I seemed to smell the bitter ozone aroma of lightnings-to-come. I began making notes for a book I will almost certainly not live to write. And at the same time I went on with my life. On one level of my mind I was and am living with the most grotesque, capering horrors; on another I have continued to live the mundane life of a small-city librarian. I shelve books; I make out library cards for new patrons; I turn off the microfilm readers
careless users sometimes leave on; I joke with Carole Danner about how much I would like to go to bed with her, and she jokes back about how
much she’d like to go to bed with me, and both of us know that she’s really joking and I’m really not, just as both of us know that she won’t stay in a
little place like Derry for long and I will be here until I die, taping torn
pages in Business Week, sitting down at monthly acquisition meetings with my pipe in one hand and a stack of Library Journals in the other . . . and waking in the middle of the night with my fists jammed against my mouth to keep in the screams.
The gothic conventions are all wrong. My hair has not turned white. I do not sleepwalk. I have not begun to make cryptic comments or to carry a
planchette around in my sportcoat pocket. I think I laugh a little more, that’s all, and sometimes it must seem a little shrill and strange, because
sometimes people look at me oddly when I laugh.
Part of me—the part Bill would call the voice of the Turtle—says I should call them all, tonight. But am I, even now, completely sure? Do I want to be completely sure? No—of course not. But God, what happened to Adrian Mellon is so much like what happened to Stuttering Bill’s brother, George, in the fall of 1957.
If it has started again, I will call them. I’ll have to. But not yet. It’s too early anyway. Last time it began slowly and didn’t really get going until the summer of 1958. So . . . I wait. And fill up the waiting with words in this notebook and long moments of looking into the mirror to see the stranger
the boy became.
The boy’s face was bookish and timid; the man’s face is the face of a bank teller in a Western movie, the fellow who never has any lines, the one who just gets to put his hands up and look scared when the robbers come in. And if the script calls for anyone to get shot by the bad guys, he’s the one.
Same old Mike. A little starey in the eyes, maybe, and a little punchy from broken sleep, but not so’s you’d notice without a good close look . . .
like kissing-distance close, and I haven’t been that close to anyone in a very long time. If you took a casual glance at me you might think He’s been reading too many books, but that’s all. I doubt you’d guess how hard the man with the mild bank-teller’s face is now struggling just to hold on, to hold on to his own mind. . . .
If I have to make those calls, it may kill some of them. That’s one of the things I’ve had to face on the long nights when sleep won’t come, nights when I lie there in bed wearing my conservative blue pajamas, my
spectacles neatly folded up and lying on the nighttable next to the glass of water I always put there in case I wake up thirsty in the night. I lie there in
the dark and I take small sips of the water and I wonder how much—or how little—they remember. I am somehow convinced that they don’t remember any of it, because they don’t need to remember. I’m the only one that hears the voice of the Turtle, the only one who remembers, because I’m the only one who stayed here in Derry. And because they’re scattered to the four winds, they have no way of knowing the identical patterns their lives have taken. To bring them back, to show them that pattern . . . yes, it might kill
some of them. It might kill all of them.
So I go over it and over it in my mind; I go over them, trying to re-create them as they were and as they might now be, trying to decide which of them is the most vulnerable. Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier, I think sometimes
—he was the one Criss, Huggins, and Bowers seemed to catch up with the most often, in spite of the fact that Ben was so fat. Bowers was the one
Richie was the most scared of—the one we were all the most scared of— but the others used to really put the fear of God into him, too. If I call him out there in California would he see it as some horrible Return of the Big Bullies, two from the grave and one from the madhouse in Juniper Hill
where he raves to this day? Sometimes I think Eddie was the weakest,
Eddie with his domineering tank of a mother and his terrible case of asthma. Beverly? She always tried to talk so tough, but she was as scared as the rest of us. Stuttering Bill, faced with a horror that won’t go away when he puts the cover on his typewriter? Stan Uris?
There’s a guillotine blade hanging over their lives, razor-sharp, but the more I think about it the more I think they don’t know that blade is there.
I’m the one with my hand on the lever. I can pull it just by opening my telephone notebook and calling them, one after the other.
Maybe I won’t have to do it. I hold on to the waning hope that I’ve mistaken the rabbity cries of my own timid mind for the deeper, truer voice of the Turtle. After all, what do I have? Mellon in July. A child found dead on Neibolt Street last October, another found in Memorial Park in early December, just before the first snowfall. Maybe it was a tramp, as the
papers say. Or a crazy who’s since left Derry or killed himself out of
remorse and self-disgust, as some of the books say the real Jack the Ripper may have done.
Maybe.
But the Albrecht girl was found directly across the street from that damned old house on Neibolt Street . . . and she was killed on the same day as George Denbrough was, twenty-seven years before. And then the Johnson boy, found in Memorial Park with one of his legs missing below
the knee. Memorial Park is, of course, the home of the Derry Standpipe, and the boy was found almost at its foot. The Standpipe is within a shout of the Barrens; the Standpipe is also where Stan Uris saw those boys.
Those dead boys.
Still, it could all be nothing but smoke and mirages. Could be. Or coincidence. Or perhaps something between the two—a kind of malefic echo. Could that be? I sense that it could be. Here in Derry, anything could be.
I think what was here before is still here—the thing that was here in 1957 and 1958; the thing that was here in 1929 and in 1930 when the Black Spot was burned down by the Maine Legion of White Decency; the thing that
was here in 1904 and 1905 and early 1906—at least until the Kitchener Ironworks exploded; the thing that was here in 1876 and 1877, the thing
that has shown up every twenty-seven years or so. Sometimes it comes a little sooner, sometimes a little later . . . but it always comes. As one goes back the wrong notes are harder and harder to find because the records
grow poorer and the moth-holes in the narrative history of the area grow bigger. But knowing where to look—and when to look—goes a long way toward solving the problem. It always comes back, you see.
It.
So—yes: I think I’ll have to make those calls. I think it was meant to be us. Somehow, for some reason, we’re the ones who have been elected to stop it forever. Blind fate? Blind luck? Or is it that damned Turtle again? Does it perhaps command as well as speak? I don’t know. And I doubt if it matters. All those years ago Bill said The Turtle can’t help us, and if it was true then it must be true now.
I think of us standing in the water, hands clasped, making that promise to come back if it ever started again—standing there almost like Druids in a ring, our hands bleeding their own promise, palm to palm. A ritual that is
perhaps as old as mankind itself, an unknowing tap driven into the tree of
all power—the one that grows on the borderline between the land of all we know and that of all we suspect.
Because the similarities—
But I’m doing my own Bill Denbrough here, stuttering over the same ground again and again, reciting a few facts and a lot of unpleasant (and rather gaseous) suppositions, growing more and more obsessive with every paragraph. No good. Useless. Dangerous, even. But it is so very hard to wait on events.
This notebook is supposed to be an effort to get beyond that obsession by widening the focus of my attention—after all, there is more to this story than six boys and one girl, none of them happy, none of them accepted by their peers, who stumbled into a nightmare during one hot summer when Eisenhower was still President. It is an attempt to pull the camera back a little, if you will—to see the whole city, a place where nearly thirty-five thousand people work and eat and sleep and copulate and shop and drive around and walk and go to school and go to jail and sometimes disappear into the dark.
To know what a place is, I really do believe one has to know what it was.
And if I had to name a day when all of this really started again for me, it would be the day in the early spring of 1980 when I went to see Albert Carson, who died last summer—at ninety-one, he was full of years as well
as honors. He was head librarian here from 1914 to 1960, an incredible span (but he was an incredible man), and I felt that if anyone would know which history of this area was the best one to start with, Albert Carson would. I asked him my question as we sat on his porch and he gave me my answer, speaking in a croak—he was already fighting the throat-cancer which would eventually kill him.
“Not one of them is worth a shit. As you damn well know. ” “Then where should I start? ”
“Start what, for Christ’s sake? ”
“Researching the history of the area. Of Derry Township. ”
“Oh. Well. Start with the Fricke and the Michaud. They’re supposed to be the best. ”
“And after I read those—”
“Read them? Christ, no! Throw em in the wastebasket! That’s your first step. Then read Buddinger. Branson Buddinger was a damned sloppy
researcher and afflicted with a terminal boner, if half of what I heard when I was a kid was true, but when it came to Derry his heart was in the right place. He got most of the facts wrong, but he got them wrong with feeling, Hanlon. ”
I laughed a little and Carson grinned with his leathery lips—an expression of good humor that was actually a little frightening. In that instant he looked like a vulture happily guarding a freshly killed animal, waiting for it to reach exactly the right stage of tasty decomposition before beginning to dine.
“When you finish with Buddinger, read Ives. Make notes on all the people he talked to. Sandy Ives is still at the University of Maine.
Folklorist. After you read him, go see him. Buy him a dinner. I’d take him to the Orinoka, because dinner at the Orinoka seems to never end. Pump him. Fill up a notebook with names and addresses. Talk to the old-timers he’s talked to—those that are still left; there are a few of us, ah-hah-hah- hah!—and get some more names from them. By then you’ll have all the
place to stand you’ll need, if you’re half as bright as I think you are. If you chase down enough people, you’ll find out a few things that aren’t in the histories. And you may find they disturb your sleep. ”
“Derry . . . ” “What about it? ”
“Derry’s not right, is it? ”
“Right? ” he asked in that whispery croak. “What’s right? What does that word mean? Is ‘right’ pretty pictures of the Kenduskeag at sunset,
Kodachrome by so-and-so, f-stop such-and-such? If so, then Derry is right, because there are pretty pictures of it by the score. Is right a damned
committee of dry-boxed old virgins to save the Governor’s Mansion or to put a commemorative plaque in front of the Standpipe? If that’s right, then Derry’s right as rain, because we’ve got more than our share of old kitty- cats minding everybody’s business. Is right that ugly plastic statue of Paul Bunyan in front of City Center? Oh, if I had a truckful of napalm and my old Zippo lighter I’d take care of that fucking thing, I assure you . . . but if one’s aesthetic is broad enough to include plastic statues, then Derry is right. The question is, what does right mean to you, Hanlon? Eh? More to the point, what does right not mean? ”
I could only shake my head. He either knew or he didn’t. He would either tell or he wouldn’t.
“Do you mean the unpleasant stories you may hear, or the ones you already know? There are always unpleasant stories. A town’s history is like a rambling old mansion filled with rooms and cubbyholes and laundry-
chutes and garrets and all sorts of eccentric little hiding places . . . not to mention an occasional secret passage or two. If you go exploring Mansion Derry, you’ll find all sorts of things. Yes. You may be sorry later, but you’ll find them, and once a thing is found it can’t be unfound, can it? Some of the rooms are locked, but there are keys . . . there are keys. ”
His eyes glinted at me with an old man’s shrewdness.
“You may come to think you’ve stumbled on the worst of Derry’s secrets
. . . but there is always one more. And one more. And one more. ” “Do you—”
“I think I shall have to ask you to excuse me just now. My throat is very bad today. It’s time for my medicine and my nap. ”
In other words, here is a knife and a fork, my friend; go see what you can cut with them.
I started with the Fricke history and the Michaud history. I followed Carson’s advice and threw them in the wastebasket, but I read them first. They were as bad as he had suggested. I read the Buddinger history, copied out the footnotes, and chased them down. That was more satisfactory, but
footnotes are peculiar things, you know—like footpaths twisting through a wild and anarchic country. They split, then they split again; at any point you may take a wrong turn which leads you either to a bramble-choked dead end or into swampy quickmud. “If you find a footnote, ” a library-science prof once told a class of which I was a part, “step on its head and kill it
before it can breed. ”
They do breed, and sometimes the breeding is a good thing, but I think that more often it is not. Those in Buddinger’s stiffly written A History of Old Derry (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1950) wander through one hundred years’ worth of forgotten books and dusty master’s dissertations in the fields of history and folklore, through articles in defunct magazines, and amid brain-numbing stacks of town reports and ledgers.
My conversations with Sandy Ives were more interesting. His sources crossed Buddinger’s from time to time, but a crossing was all it ever was.
Ives had spent a good part of his lifetime setting down oral histories— yarns, in other words—almost verbatim, a practice Branson Buddinger would undoubtedly have seen as taking the low road.
Ives had written a cycle of articles on Derry during the years 1963-66.
Most of the old-timers he talked to then were dead by the time I started my own investigations, but they had sons, daughters, nephews, cousins. And, of course, one of the great true facts of the world is this: for every old-timer who dies, there’s a new old-timer coming along. And a good story never dies; it is always passed down. I sat on a lot of porches and back stoops, drank a lot of tea, Black Label beer, homemade beer, homemade rootbeer, tapwater, springwater. I did a lot of listening, and the wheels of my tape- player turned.
Both Buddinger and Ives agreed completely on one point: the original party of white settlers numbered about three hundred. They were English. They had a charter and were formally known as the Derrie Company. The land granted them covered what is today Derry, most of Newport, and little slices of the surrounding towns. And in the year 1741 everyone in Derry Township just disappeared. They were there in June of that year—a community which at that time numbered about three hundred and forty souls—but come October they were gone. The little village of wooden
homes stood utterly deserted. One of them, which once stood roughly at the place where Witcham and Jackson Streets intersect today, was burned to the ground. The Michaud history states firmly that all of the villagers were slaughtered by Indians, but there is no basis—save the one burned house— for that idea. More likely, someone’s stove just got too hot and the house went up in flames.
Indian massacre? Doubtful. No bones, no bodies. Flood? Not that year.
Disease? No word of it in the surrounding towns.
They just disappeared. All of them. All three hundred and forty of them.
Without a trace.
So far as I know, the only case remotely like it in American history is the disappearance of the colonists on Roanoke Island, Virginia. Every school- child in the country knows about that one, but who knows about the Derry disappearance? Not even the people who live here, apparently. I quizzed several junior-high students who are taking the required Maine-history course, and none of them knew a thing about it. Then I checked the text,
Maine Then and Now. There are better than forty index entries for Derry, most of them concerning the boom years of the lumber industry. Nothing about the disappearance of the original colonists . . . and yet that—what shall I call it?—that quiet fits the pattern, too.
There is a kind of curtain of quiet which cloaks much of what has happened here . . . and yet people do talk. I guess nothing can stop people from talking. But you have to listen hard, and that is a rare skill. I flatter myself that I’ve developed it over the last four years. If I haven’t, then my aptitude for the job must be poor indeed, because I’ve had enough practice. An old man told me about how his wife had heard voices speaking to her from the drain of her kitchen sink in the three weeks before their daughter died—that was in the early winter of 1957-58. The girl he spoke of was one of the early victims in the murder-spree which began with George Denbrough and did not end until the following summer.
“A whole slew of voices, all of em babblin together, ” he told me. He owned a Gulf station on Kansas Street and talked in between slow, limping trips out to the pumps, where he filled gas-tanks, checked oil-levels, and wiped windshields. “Said she spoke back once, even though she was ascairt. Leaned right over the drain, she did, and hollered down into it. ‘Who the hell are you? ’ she calls. ‘What’s your name? ’ And all these
voices answered back, she said—grunts and babbles and howls and yips, screams and laughin, don’t you know. And she said they were sayin what the possessed man said to Jesus: ‘Our name is Legion, ’ they said. She wouldn’t go near that sink for two years. For them two years I’d spend
twelve hours a day down here, bustin my hump, then have to go home and warsh all the damn dishes. ”
He was drinking a can of Pepsi from the machine outside the office door, a man of seventy-two or -three in faded gray work fatigues, rivers of
wrinkles flowing down from the corners of his eyes and mouth.
“By now you prob’ly think I’m as crazy as a bedbug, ” he said, “but I’ll tell you sumpin else, if you’ll turn off y’whirlygig, there. ”
I turned off my tape-recorder and smiled at him. “Considering some of the things I’ve heard over the last couple of years, you’d have to go a fair country distance to convince me you’re crazy, ” I said.
He smiled back, but there was no humor in it. “I was doin the dishes one night, same as usual—this was in the fall of’58, after things had settled
down again. My wife was upstair, sleepin. Betty was the only kid God ever saw fit to give us, and after she was killed my wife spent a lot of her time sleepin. Anyway, I pulled the plug and the water started runnin out of the sink. You know the sound real soapy water makes when it goes down the
drain? Kind of a suckin sound, it is. It was makin that noise, but I wasn’t thinkin about it, only about goin out and choppin some kindlin in the shed, and just as that sound started to die off, I heard my daughter down in there.
I heard Betty somewhere down in those friggin pipes. Laughin. She was
somewheres down there in the dark, laughin. Only it sounded more like she was screamin, once you listened a bit. Or both. Screamin and laughin down there in the pipes. That’s the only time I ever heard anything like that.
Maybe I just imagined it. But . . . I don’t think so. ”
He looked at me and I looked at him. The light falling through the dirty plate-glass windows onto his face filled him up with years, made him look as ancient as Methuselah. I remember how cold I felt at that moment; how cold.
“You think I’m storying you along? ” the old man asked me, the old man who would have been just about forty-five in 1957, the old man to whom God had given a single daughter, Betty Ripsom by name. Betty had been found on Outer Jackson Street just after Christmas of that year, frozen, her remains ripped wide open.
“No, ” I said. “I don’t think you’re just storying me along, Mr. Ripsom. ” “And you’re tellin the truth, too, ” he said with a kind of wonder. “I can
see it on y’face. ”
I think he meant to tell me something more then, but the bell behind us dinged sharply as a car rolled over the hose on the tarmac and pulled up to the pumps. When the bell rang, both of us jumped and I uttered a thin little cry. Ripsom got to his feet and limped out to the car, wiping his hands on a ball of waste. When he came back in, he looked at me as though I were a
rather unsavory stranger who had just happened to wander in off the street. I made my good-byes and left.
Buddinger and Ives agree on something else: things really are not right here in Derry; things in Derry have never been right.
I saw Albert Carson for the last time a scant month before he died. His throat had gotten much worse; all he could manage was a hissing little whisper. “Still thinking about writing a history of Derry, Hanlon? ”
“Still toying with the idea, ” I said, but I had of course never planned to write a history of the township—not exactly—and I think he knew it.
“It would take you twenty years, ” he whispered, “and no one would read it. No one would want to read it. Let it go, Hanlon. ”
He paused a moment and then added:
“Buddinger committed suicide, you know. ”
Of course I had known that—but only because people always talk and I had learned to listen. The article in the News had called it a falling accident, and it was true that Branson Buddinger had taken a fall. What the News neglected to mention was that he fell from a stool in his closet and he had a noose around his neck at the time.
“You know about the cycle? ” I looked at him, startled.
“Oh yes, ” Carson whispered. “I know. Every twenty-six or twenty-seven years. Buddinger knew, too. A lot of the old-timers do, although that is one thing they won’t talk about, even if you load them up with booze. Let it go, Hanlon. ”
He reached out with one bird-claw hand. He closed it around my wrist and I could feel the hot cancer that was loose and raving through his body, eating anything and everything left that was still good to eat—not that there could have been much by that time; Albert Carson’s cupboards were almost bare.
“Michael—this is nothing you want to mess into. There are things here in Derry that bite. Let it go. Let it go. ”
“I can’t. ”
“Then beware, ” he said. Suddenly the huge and frightened eyes of a child were looking out of his dying old-man’s face. “Beware. ”
Derry.
My home town. Named after the county of the same name in Ireland. Derry.
I was born here, in Derry Home Hospital; attended Derry Elementary School; went to junior high at Ninth Street Middle School; to high school at Derry High. I went to the University of Maine—“ain’t in Derry, but it’s just down the rud, ” the old-timers say—and then I came right back here. To the Derry Public Library. I am a small-town man living a small-town life, one among millions.
But.
But:
In 1879 a crew of lumberjacks found the remains of another crew that had spent the winter snowed in at a camp on the Upper Kenduskeag—at the tip of what the kids still call the Barrens. There were nine of them in all, all nine hacked to pieces. Heads had rolled . . . not to mention arms . . . a foot or two . . . and a man’s penis had been nailed to one wall of the cabin.
But:
In 1851 John Markson killed his entire family with poison and then, sitting in the middle of the circle he had made with their corpses, he gobbled an entire “white-nightshade” mushroom. His death agonies must have been intense. The town constable who found him wrote in his report that at first he believed the corpse was grinning at him; he wrote of
“Markson’s awful white smile. ” The white smile was an entire mouthful of the killer mushroom; Markson had gone on eating even as the cramps and
the excruciating muscle spasms must have been wracking his dying body.
But:
On Easter Sunday 1906 the owners of the Kitchener Ironworks, which stood where the brand-spanking-new Derry Mall now stands, held an
Easter-egg hunt for “all the good children of Derry. ” The hunt took place in the huge Ironworks building. Dangerous areas were closed off, and
employees volunteered their time to stand guard and make sure no
adventurous boy or girl decided to duck under the barriers and explore. Five hundred chocolate Easter eggs wrapped in gay ribbons were hidden about
the rest of the works. According to Buddinger, there was at least one child present for each of those eggs. They ran giggling and whooping and yelling through the Sunday-silent Ironworks, finding the eggs under the giant tipper-vats, inside the desk drawers of the foreman, balanced between the great rusty teeth of gearwheels, inside the molds on the third floor (in the old photographs these molds look like cupcake tins from some giant’s kitchen). Three generations of Kitcheners were there to watch the gay riot and to award prizes at the end of the hunt, which was to come at four o’clock, whether all the eggs had been found or not. The end actually came forty-five minutes early, at quarter past three. That was when the Ironworks exploded. Seventy-two people were pulled dead from the wreckage before the sun went down. The final toll was a hundred and two. Eighty-eight of
the dead were children. On the following Wednesday, while the city still lay in stunned silent contemplation of the tragedy, a woman found the head of nine-year-old Robert Dohay caught in the limbs of her back-yard apple tree. There was chocolate on the Dohay lad’s teeth and blood in his hair. He was the last of the known dead. Eight children and one adult were never accounted for. It was the worst tragedy in Derry’s history, even worse than
the fire at the Black Spot in 1930, and it was never explained. All four of the Ironworks’ boilers were shut down. Not just banked; shut down.
But:
The murder rate in Derry is six times the murder rate of any other town of comparable size in New England. I found my tentative conclusions in
this matter so difficult to believe that I turned my figures over to one of the high-school hackers, who spends what time he doesn’t spend in front of his Commodore here in the library. He went several steps further—scratch a hacker, find an overachiever—by adding another dozen small cities to what he called “the stat-pool” and presenting me with a computer-generated bar graph where Derry sticks out like a sore thumb. “People must have wicked short tempers here, Mr. Hanlon, ” was his only comment. I didn’t reply. If I had, I might have told him that something in Derry has a wicked short temper, anyway.
Here in Derry children disappear unexplained and unfound at the rate of forty to sixty a year. Most are teenagers. They are assumed to be runaways. I suppose some of them even are.
And during what Albert Carson would undoubtedly have called the time of the cycle, the rate of disappearance shoots nearly out of sight. In the year 1930, for instance—the year the Black Spot burned—there were better than one hundred and seventy child disappearances in Derry—and you must remember that these are only the disappearances which were reported to the police and thus documented. Nothing surprising about it, the current Chief of Police told me when I showed him the statistic. It was the Depression.
Most of em probably got tired of eating potato soup or going flat hungry at home and went off riding the rods, looking for something better.
During 1958, a hundred and twenty-seven children, ranging in age from three to nineteen, were reported missing in Derry. Was there a Depression
in 1958? I asked Chief Rademacher. No, he said. But people move around a
lot, Hanlon. Kids in particular get itchy feet. Have a fight with the folks about coming in late after a date and boom, they’re gone.
I showed Chief Rademacher the picture of Chad Lowe which had appeared in the Derry News in April 1958. You think this one ran away after a fight with his folks about coming in late, Chief Rademacher? He was
three and a half when he dropped out of sight.
Rademacher fixed me with a sour glance and told me it sure had been nice talking with me, but if there was nothing else, he was busy. I left.
Haunted, haunting, haunt.
Often visited by ghosts or spirits, as in the pipes under the sink; to appear or recur often, as every twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven years; a feeding place for animals, as in the cases of George Denbrough, Adrian Mellon, Betty Ripsom, the Albrecht girl, the Johnson boy.
A feeding place for animals. Yes, that’s the one that haunts me.
If anything else happens—anything at all—I’ll make the calls. I’ll have to. In the meantime I have my suppositions, my broken rest, and my memories—my damned memories. Oh, and one other thing—I have this notebook, don’t I? The wall I wail to. And here I sit, my hand shaking so badly I can hardly write in it, here I sit in the deserted library after closing, listening to faint sounds in the dark stacks, watching the shadows thrown by the dim yellow globes to make sure they don’t move . . . don’t change.
Here I sit next to the telephone.
I put my free hand on it . . . let it slide down . . . touch the holes in the dial that could put me in touch with all of them, my old pals.
We went deep together.
We went into the black together.
Would we come out of the black if we went in a second time? I don’t think so.
Please God I don’t have to call them. Please God.
