Ben Hanscom Makes a Withdrawal
Richie Tozier got out of the cab at the three-way intersection of Kansas Street, Center Street, and Main Street, and Ben dismissed it at the top of
Up-Mile Hill. The driver was Bill’s “religious fella, ” but neither Richie nor Ben knew it: Dave had lapsed into a morose silence. Ben could have gotten off with Richie, he supposed, but it seemed better somehow that they all start off alone.
He stood on the corner of Kansas Street and Daltrey Close, watching the cab pull back into traffic, hands stuffed deeply into his pockets, trying to get the lunch’s hideous conclusion out of his mind. He couldn’t do it; his
thoughts kept returning to that black-gray fly crawling out of the fortune cookie on Bill’s plate, its veined wings plastered to its back. He would try
to divert his mind from this unhealthy image, think he had succeeded, only to discover five minutes later that his mind was back at it.
I’m trying to justify it somehow, he thought, meaning it not in the moral sense but rather in the mathematical one. Buildings are built by observing
certain natural laws; natural laws may be expressed by equations; equations must be justified. Where was the justification in what had happened less than half an hour ago?
Let it alone, he told himself, not for the first time. You can’t justify it, so let it alone.
Very good advice; the problem was that he couldn’t take it. He remembered that the day after he had seen the mummy on the iced-up
Canal, his life had gone on as usual. He had known that whatever it had been had come very close to getting him, but his life had gone on: he had attended school, taken an arithmetic test, visited the library when school was over, and eaten with his usual heartiness. He had simply incorporated the thing he had seen on the Canal into his life, and if he had almost been killed by it . . . well, kids were always almost getting killed. They dashed across streets without looking, they got horsing around in the lake and suddenly realized they had floated far past their depth on their rubber rafts and had to paddle back, they fell off monkey-bars on their asses and out of trees on their heads.
Now, standing here in the fading drizzle in front of a Trustworthy
Hardware Store that had been a pawnshop in 1958 (Frati Brothers, Ben recalled, the double windows always full of pistols and rifles and straight-
razors and guitars hung up by their necks like exotic animals), it occurred to him that kids were better at almost dying, and they were also better at incorporating the inexplicable into their lives. They believed implicitly in
the invisible world. Miracles both bright and dark were to be taken into consideration, oh yes, most certainly, but they by no means stopped the world. A sudden upheaval of beauty or terror at ten did not preclude an extra cheesedog or two for lunch at noon.
But when you grew up, all that changed. You no longer lay awake in your bed, sure something was crouching in the closet or scratching at the window
. . . but when something did happen, something beyond rational explanation, the circuits overloaded. The axons and dendrites got hot. You started to jitter and jive, you started to shake rattle and roll, your imagination started to hop and bop and do the funky chicken all over your nerves. You couldn’t just incorporate what had happened into your life experience. It didn’t digest. Your mind kept coming back to it, pawing it lightly like a kitten with a ball of string . . . until eventually, of course, you either went crazy or got to a place where it was impossible for you to function.
And if that happens, Ben thought, It’s got me. Us. Cold.
He started to walk up Kansas Street, not conscious of heading anyplace in particular. And thought suddenly: What did we do with the silver dollar?
He still couldn’t remember.
The silver dollar, Ben . . . Beverly saved your life with it. Yours . . . maybe all the others’ . . . and especially Bill’s. It almost ripped my guts out before Beverly did. . . what? What did she do? And how was it able to work? She backed it off, and we all helped her. But how?
A word came to him suddenly, a word that meant nothing at all but which tightened his flesh: Chüd.
He looked down at the sidewalk and for a moment saw the shape of a
turtle chalked there, and the world seemed to swim before his eyes. He shut them tightly and when he opened them saw it was not a turtle; only a hopscotch grid half-erased by the light rain.
Chüd.
What did that mean?
“I don’t know, ” he said aloud, and when he looked around quickly to see if anyone had heard him talking to himself, he saw that he had turned off
Kansas Street and onto Costello Avenue. At lunch he had told the others that the Barrens were the only place in Derry where he had felt happy as a kid . . . but that wasn’t quite true, was it? There had been another place.
Either accidentally or unconsciously, he had come to that other place: the Derry Public Library.
He stood in front of it for a minute or two, hands still in his pockets. It hadn’t changed; he admired its lines as much now as he had as a child. Like so many stone buildings that had been well-designed, it succeeded in confounding the closely observing eye with contradictions: its stone solidity was somehow balanced by the delicacy of its arches and slim columns; it looked both bank-safe squat and yet slim and clean (well, it was slim as city buildings went, especially those erected around the turn of the century, and the windows, crisscrossed with narrow strips of iron, were graceful and rounded). These contradictions saved it from ugliness, and he was not entirely surprised to feel a wave of love for the place.
Nothing much had changed on Costello Avenue. Glancing along it, he could see the Derry Community House, and he found himself wondering if the Costello Avenue Market was still there at the point where the avenue, which was semicircular, rejoined Kansas Street.
He walked across the library lawn, barely noticing that his dress boots were getting wet, to have a look at that glassed-in passageway between the grownups’ library and the Children’s Library. It was also unchanged, and
from here, standing just outside the bowed branches of a weeping willow tree, he could see people passing back and forth. The old delight flooded him, and he really forgot what had happened at the end of the reunion lunch for the first time. He could remember walking around to this very same spot as a kid, only in the winter, plowing his way through snow that was almost hip-deep, and then standing for as long as fifteen minutes. He would come at dusk, he remembered, and again it was the contrasts that drew him and held him there with the tips of his fingers going numb and snow melting
inside his green gumrubber boots. It would be drawing-down-dark out
where he was, the world going purple with early winter shadows, the sky
the color of ashes in the east and embers in the west. It would be cold where he was, ten degrees perhaps, and chillier than that if the wind was blowing across from the frozen Barrens, as it so often did.
But there, less than forty yards from where he stood, people walked back and forth in their shirtsleeves. There, less than forty yards from where he stood, was a tubeway of bright white light, thrown by the overhead fluorescents. Little kids giggled together, high-school sweethearts held
hands (and if the librarian saw them, she would make them stop). It was somehow magical, magical in a good way that he had been too young to account for with such mundane things as electric power and oil heat. The
magic was that glowing cylinder of light and life connecting those two dark buildings like a lifeline, the magic was in watching people walk through it across the dark snowfield, untouched by either the dark or the cold. It made them lovely and Godlike.
Eventually he would walk away (as he was doing now) and circle the building to the front door (as he was doing now), but he would always
pause and look back once (as he was doing now) before the bulking stone shoulder of the adult library cut off the sight-line to that delicate umbilicus.
Ruefully amused at the ache of nostalgia around his heart, Ben went up
the steps to the door of the adult library, paused for a moment on the narrow verandah just inside the pillars, always so high and cool no matter how hot
the day. Then he pulled open the iron-bound door with the book-drop slot in it and went into the quiet.
The force of memory almost dizzied him for a moment as he stepped into the mild light of the hanging glass globes. The force was not physical—not like a shot to the jaw or a slap. It was more akin to that queer feeling of time
doubling back on itself that people call, for want of a better term, déjà-vu. Ben had had the feeling before, but it had never struck him with such disorienting power; for the moment or two he stood inside the door, he felt literally lost in time, not really sure how old he was. Was he thirty-eight or eleven?
Here was the same murmuring quiet, broken only by an occasional whisper, the faint thud of a librarian stamping books or overdue notices, the hushed riffle of newspaper or magazine pages being turned. He loved the quality of the light as much now as then. It slanted through the high windows, gray as a pigeon’s wing on this rainy afternoon, a light that was
somehow somnolent and dozey.
He walked across the wide floor with its red-and-black linoleum pattern almost completely worn away, trying as he had always tried back then to hush the sound of his footfalls—the adult library rose up to a dome in the middle, and all sounds were magnified.
He saw that the circular iron staircases leading to the stacks were still there, one on either side of the horseshoeshaped main desk, but he also saw that a tiny cagework elevator had been added at some point in the twenty-
five years since he and his mamma had moved away. It was something of a relief—it drove a wedge into that suffocating feeling of déjà-vu.
He felt like an interloper crossing the wide floor, a spy from another country. He kept expecting the librarian at the desk to raise her head, look at him, and then challenge him in clear, ringing tones that would shatter the concentration of every reader here and focus every eye upon him: “You!
Yes, you! What are you doing here? You have no business here! You’re from Outside! You’re from Before! Go back where you came from! Go back right now, before I call the police!”
She did look up, a young girl, pretty, and for one absurd moment it seemed to Ben that the fantasy was really going to come true, and his heart rose into his throat as her pale-blue eyes touched his. Then they passed on indifferently, and Ben found he could walk again. If he was a spy, he hadn’t been found out.
He passed under the coil of one of the narrow and almost suicidally steep wrought-iron staircases on his way to the corridor leading to the Children’s Library, and was amused to realize (only after he had done it) that he had run down another old track of his childhood behavior. He had looked up,
hoping, as he had hoped as a kid, to see a girl in a skirt coming down those steps. He could remember (now he could remember) glancing up there for no reason at all one day when he was eight or nine and looking right up the chino skirt of a pretty high-school girl and seeing her clean pink underwear.
As the sudden sunlit glint of Beverly Marsh’s ankle-bracelet had shot an arrow of something more primitive than simple love or affection through his heart on the last day of school in 1958, so had the sight of the high- school girl’s panties affected him; he could remember sitting at a table in
the Children’s Library and thinking of that unexpected view for perhaps as long as twenty minutes, his cheeks and forehead hot, a book about the history of trains open and unread before him, his penis a hard little branch in his pants, a branch that had sunk its roots all the way up into his belly. He had fantasized the two of them married, living in a small house on the
outskirts of town, indulging in pleasures he did not in the least understand. The feelings had passed off almost as suddenly as they had come, but he had never walked under the stairway again without glancing up. He hadn’t ever seen anything else as interesting or affecting (once a fat lady working her way down with ponderous care, but he had looked away from that sight
hastily, feeling ashamed, like a violator), but the habit persisted—he had done it again now, as a grown man.
He walked slowly down the glassed-in passageway, noticing other changes now: Yellow decals that said OPEC LOVES IT WHEN YOU WASTE ENERGY, SO SAVE A WATT! had been plastered over the switchplates. The framed pictures on the far wall when he entered this
scaled-down world of blondewood tables and small blondewood chairs, this world where the drinking fountain was only four feet high, were not of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon but of Ronald Reagan and George Bush—Reagan, Ben recalled, had been host of GE Theater in the year that Ben had graduated from the fifth grade, and George Bush would not have seen thirty yet.
But—
That feeling of déjà-vu swept him again. He was helpless before it, and
this time he felt the numb horror of a man who finally realizes, after half an hour of helpless splashing, that the shore is growing no closer and he is drowning.
It was story hour, and over in the corner a group of roughly a dozen little ones sat solemnly on their tiny chairs in a semicircle, listening. “Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge? ” the librarian said in the low, growling
tones of the troll in the story, and Ben thought: When she raises her head I’ll see that it’s Miss Davies, yes, it’ll be Miss Davies and she won’t look a day older—
But when she did raise her head, he saw a much younger woman than Miss Davies had been even then.
Some of the children covered their mouths and giggled, but others only watched her, their eyes reflecting the eternal fascination of the fairy story: would the monster be bested . . . or would it feed?
“It is I, Billy Goat Gruff, trip-trapping on your bridge, ” the librarian went on, and Ben, pale, walked past her.
How can it be the same story? The very same story? Am I supposed to
believe that’s just coincidence? Because I don’t . . . goddammit, I just don’t!
He bent to the drinking fountain, bending so far he felt like Richie doing one of his salami-salami-baloney routines.
I ought to talk to someone, he thought, panicked. Mike . . . Bill . . . someone. Is something really stapling the past and present together here, or am I only imagining it? Because if I’m not, I’m not sure I bargained for this much. I—
He looked at the checkout desk, and his heart seemed to stop in his chest for a moment before beginning to race doubletime. The poster was simple, stark . . . and familiar. It said simply:
REMEMBER THE CURFEW. 7 P. M.
DERRY POLICE DEPARTMENT
In that instant it all seemed to come clear to him—it came in a grisly flash of light, and he realized that the vote they had taken was a joke. There was no turning back, never had been. They were on a track as preordained as the memory-track which had caused him to look up when he passed under the stairway leading to the stacks. There was an echo here in Derry, a
deadly echo, and all they could hope for was that the echo could be changed enough in their favor to allow them to escape with their lives.
“Christ, ” he muttered, and scrubbed a palm up one cheek, hard.
“Can I help you, sir? ” a voice at his elbow asked, and he jumped a little. It was a girl of perhaps seventeen, her dark-blonde hair held back from her pretty high-schooler’s face with barrettes. A library assistant, of course; they’d had them in 1958 too, high-school girls and boys who shelved books, showed kids how to use the card catalogue, discussed book reports and school papers, helped bewildered scholars with their footnotes and bibliographies. The pay was a pittance, but there were always kids willing to do it. It was agreeable work.
On the heels of this, reading the girl’s pleasant but questioning look a
little more closely, he remembered that he no longer really belonged here— he was a giant in the land of little people. An intruder. In the adults’ library he had felt uneasy about the possibility of being looked at or spoken to, but here it was something of a relief. For one thing, it proved he was still an adult, and the fact that the girl was clearly braless under her thin Western-
style shirt was also more relief than turn-on: if proof that this was 1985 and not 1958 was needed, the clearly limned points of her nipples against the cotton of her shirt was it.
“No thank you, ” he said, and then, for no reason at all that he could understand, he heard himself add: “I was looking for my son. ”
“Oh? What’s his name? Maybe I’ve seen him. ” She smiled. “I know most of the kids. ”
“His name is Ben Hanscom, ” he said. “But I don’t see him here. ”
“Tell me what he looks like and I’ll give him a message, if there is one. ” “Well, ” Ben said, uncomfortable now and beginning to wish he had
never started this, “he’s on the stout side, and he looks a little bit like me. But it’s no big deal, miss. If you see him, just tell him his dad popped by on his way home. ”
“I will, ” she said, and smiled, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes, and Ben suddenly realized that she hadn’t come over and spoken to him out of simple politeness and a wish to help. She happened to be a library assistant in the Children’s Library in a town where nine children had been slain over a span of eight months. You see a strange man in this scaled-down world where adults rarely come except to drop their kids off or pick them up.
You’re suspicious . . . of course.
“Thank you, ” he said, gave her a smile he hoped was reassuring, and then got the hell out.
He walked back through the corridor to the adults’ library and went to the desk on an impulse he didn’t understand . . . but of course they were supposed to follow their impulses this afternoon, weren’t they? Follow their impulses and see where they led.
The name plate on the circulation desk identified the pretty young librarian as Carole Danner. Behind her, Ben could see a door with a frosted- glass panel; lettered on this was MICHAEL HANLON HEAD LIBRARIAN.
“May I help you? ” Ms. Danner asked.
“I think so, ” Ben said. “That is, I hope so. I’d like to get a library card. ” “Very good, ” she said, and took out a form. “Are you a resident of
Derry? ”
“Not presently. ”
“Home address, then? ”
“Rural Star Route 2, Hemingford Home, Nebraska. ” He paused for a moment, a little amused by her stare, and then reeled off the Zip Code: “59341. ”
“Is this a joke, Mr. Hanscom? ” “Not at all. ”
“Are you moving to Derry, then? ” “I have no plans to, no. ”
“This is a long way to come to borrow books, isn’t it? Don’t they have libraries in Nebraska? ”
“It’s kind of a sentimental thing, ” Ben said. He would have thought telling a stranger this would be embarrassing, but he found it wasn’t. “I
grew up in Derry, you see. This is the first time I’ve been back since I was a kid. I’ve been walking around, seeing what’s changed and what hasn’t. And all at once it occurred to me that I spent about ten years of my life here between ages three and thirteen, and I don’t have a single thing to remember those years by. Not so much as a postcard. I had some silver dollars, but I lost one of them and gave the rest to a friend. I guess what I want is a souvenir of my childhood. It’s late, but don’t they say better late than never? ”
Carole Danner smiled, and the smile changed her pretty face into one that was beautiful. “I think that’s very sweet, ” she said. “If you’d like to browse
for ten or fifteen minutes, I’ll have the card made up for you when you come back to the desk. ”
Ben grinned a little. “I guess there’ll be a fee, ” he said. “Out-of-towner and all. ”
“Did you have a card when you were a boy? ”
“I sure did. ” Ben smiled. “Except for my friends, I guess that library card was the most important—”
“Ben, would you come up here? ” a voice called suddenly, cutting across the library hush like a scalpel.
He turned around, jumping guiltily the way people do when someone
shouts in a library. He saw no one he knew . . . and realized a moment later that no one had looked up or shown any sign of surprise or annoyance. The old men still read their copies of the Derry News, the Boston Globe, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, U. S. News & World Report. At the tables in the Reference Room, two high-school girls still had their heads together over a stack of papers and a pile of file-cards. Several browsers went on looking through the books on the shelves marked CURRENT
FICTION—SEVEN-DAY-LOAN. An old man in a ridiculous driving-cap, a cold pipe clenched between his teeth, went on leafing through a folio of Luis de Vargas’ sketches.
He turned back to the young woman, who was looking at him, puzzled. “Is anything wrong? ”
“No, ” Ben said, smiling. “I thought I heard something. I guess I’m more jet-lagged than I thought. What were you saying? ”
“Well, actually you were saying. But I was about to add that if you had a card when you were a resident, your name will still be in the files, ” she said. “We keep everything on microfiche now. Some change from when you were a kid here, I guess. ”
“Yes, ” he said. “A lot of things have changed in Derry . . . but a lot of things also seem to have remained the same. ”
“Anyway, I can just look you up and give you a renewal card. No charge.
”
“That’s great, ” Ben said, and before he could add thanks the voice cut
through the library’s sacramental silence again, louder now, ominously jolly: “Come on up, Ben! Come on up, you fat little fuck! This is Your Life, Ben Hanscom!”
Ben cleared his throat. “I appreciate it, ” he said.
“Don’t mention it. ” She cocked her head at him. “Has it gotten warm outside? ”
“A little, ” he said. “Why? ” “You’re—”
“Ben Hanscom did it!” the voice screamed. It was coming from above— coming from the stacks. “Ben Hanscom killed the children! Get him! Grab him!”
“—perspiring, ” she finished. “Am I? ” he said idiotically.
“I’ll have this made up right away, ” she said. “Thank you. ”
She headed for the old Royal typewriter at the corner of her desk.
Ben walked slowly away, his heart a thudding drum in his chest. Yes, he was sweating; he could feel it trickling down from his forehead, his armpits, matting the hair on his chest. He looked up and saw Pennywise the Clown standing at the top of the lefthand staircase, looking down at him. His face was white with greasepaint. His mouth bled lipstick in a killer’s grin. There were empty sockets where his eyes should have been. He held a bunch of
balloons in one hand and a book in the other.
Not he, Ben thought. It. I am standing here in the middle of the Derry
Public Library’s rotunda on a late-spring afternoon in 1985, I am a grown man, and I am face to face with my childhood’s greatest nightmare. I am
face to face with It.
“Come on up, Ben, ” Pennywise called down. “I won’t hurt you. I’ve got a book for you! A book . . . and a balloon! Come on up!”
Ben opened his mouth to call back. You’re insane if you think I’m going up there, and suddenly realized that if he did that, everyone here would be looking at him, everyone here would be thinking, Who is that crazyman?
“Oh, I know you can’t answer, ” Pennywise called down, and giggled. “Almost fooled you there for a minute, though, didn’t I? ‘Pardon me, sir, do you have Prince Albert in a can? . . . You do? . . . Better let the poor guy out!’ ‘Pardon me, ma’am, is your refrigerator running? . . . It is? . . . Then hadn’t you better go catch it? ’ ”
The clown on the landing threw its head back and shrieked laughter. It roared and echoed in the dome of the rotunda like a flight of black bats, and
Ben was only able to keep from clapping his hands over his ears with a tremendous effort of will.
“Come on up, Ben, ” Pennywise called down. “We’ll talk. Neutral ground. What do you say? ”
I’m not coming up there, Ben thought. When I finally come to you, you won’t want to see me, I think. We’re going to kill you.
The clown shrieked laughter again. “Kill me? Kill me? ” And suddenly, horribly, the voice was Richie Tozier’s voice, not his voice, precisely, but Richie Tozier doing his Pickaninny Voice: “Doan kill me, massa, I be a good nigguh, doan kill thisyere black boy, Haystack!” Then that shrieking laughter again.
Trembling, white-faced, Ben walked across the echoing center of the adults’ library. He felt that soon he would vomit. He stood in front of a shelf of books and took one down at random with a hand that trembled badly. His cold fingers flittered the pages.
“This is your one chance, Haystack!” the voice called from behind and
above him. “Get out of town. Get out before it gets dark tonight. I’ll be after you tonight . . . you and the others. You’re too old to stop me, Ben. You’re all too old. Too old to do anything but get yourselves killed. Get out, Ben.
Do you want to see this tonight? ”
He turned slowly, still holding the book in his icy hands. He didn’t want to look, but it was as if there were an invisible hand under his chin, tilting his head up and up and up.
The clown was gone. Dracula was standing at the top of the lefthand stairway, but it was no movie Dracula; it was not Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee or Frank Langella or Francis Lederer or Reggie Nalder. An ancient man-thing with a face like a twisted root stood there. Its face was deadly pale, its eyes purplish-red, the color of bloodclots. Its mouth dropped open, revealing a mouthful of Gillette Blue-Blades that had been set in the gums at angles; it was like looking into a deadly mirror-maze
where a single misstep could get you cut in half.
“KEEE-RUNCH!” it screamed, and its jaws snapped closed. Blood gouted from its mouth in a red-black flood. Chunks of its severed lips fell to the glowing white silk of its formal shirt and slid down its front, leaving
snail-trails of blood behind.
“What did Stan Uris see before he died? ” the vampire on the landing screamed down at him, laughing through the bloody hole of its mouth. “Was it Prince Albert in a can? Was it Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier? What did he see, Ben? Do you want to see it too? What did he
see? What did he see? ” Then that shrieking laughter again, and Ben knew that he would scream now himself, yes, there was no way to stop the scream, it was going to come. Blood was pattering down from the landing in a grisly shower. One drop had landed on the arthritis-bunched hand of an old man who was reading The Wall Street Journal. It was running down between his knuckles, unseen and unfelt.
Ben hitched in breath, sure the scream would follow, unthinkable in the quiet of this softly drizzling spring afternoon, as shocking as the slash of a knife . . . or a mouthful of razor-blades.
Instead, what came out in a shaky, uneven rush, spoken instead of screamed, spoken low like a prayer, were these words: “We made slugs out of it, of course. We made the silver dollar into silver slugs. ”
The gentleman in the driving-cap who had been perusing the de Vargas sketches looked up sharply. “Nonsense, ” he said. Now people did look up; someone hissed “Shhh!” at the old man in an annoyed voice.
“I’m sorry, ” Ben said in a low, trembling voice. He was faintly aware that his face was now running with sweat, and that his shirt was plastered to his body. “I was thinking aloud—”
“Nonsense, ” the old gentleman repeated, in a louder voice. “Can’t make silver bullets from silver dollars. Common misconception. Pulp fiction.
Problem is with specific gravity—”
Suddenly the woman, Ms. Danner, was there. “Mr. Brockhill, you’ll have to be quiet, ” she said kindly enough. “People are reading—”
“Man’s sick, ” Brockhill said abruptly, and went back to his book. “Give him an aspirin, Carole. ”
Carole Danner looked at Ben and her face sharpened with concern. “Are you ill, Mr. Hanscom? I know it’s terribly impolite to say so, but you look terrible. ”
Ben said, “I . . . I had Chinese food for lunch. I don’t think it’s agreed with me. ”
“If you want to lie down, there’s a cot in Mr. Hanlon’s office. You could
—”
“No. Thanks, but no. ” What he wanted was not to lie down but to get the hell out of the Derry Public Library. He looked up at the landing. The clown was gone. The vampire was gone. But tied to the low wrought-iron railing which surrounded the landing was a balloon. Written on its bulging skin
were the words: HAVE A GOOD DAY! TONIGHT YOU DIE!
“I’ve got your library card, ” she said, putting a tentative hand on his arm. “Do you still want it? ”
“Yes, thanks, ” Ben said. He drew a deep, shuddery breath. “I’m very sorry about this. ”
“I just hope it isn’t food-poisoning, ” she said.
“Wouldn’t work, ” Mr. Brockhill said without looking up from de Vargas or removing his dead pipe from the corner of his mouth. “Device of pulp fiction. Bullet would tumble. ”
And speaking again with no foreknowledge that he was going to speak, Ben said: “Slugs, not bullets. We realized almost right away that we couldn’t make bullets. I mean, we were just kids. It was my idea to—”
“Shhhh!” someone said again.
Brockhill gave Ben a slightly startled look, seemed about to speak, then went back to the sketches.
At the desk, Carole Danner handed him a small orange card with DERRY PUBLIC LIBRARY stamped across the top. Bemused, Ben realized it was
the first adult library-card he had owned in his whole life. The one he’d had as a kid had been canary-yellow.
“Are you sure you don’t want to lie down, Mr. Hanscom? ” “I’m feeling a little better, thanks. ”
“Sure? ”
He managed a smile. “I’m sure. ”
“You do look a little better, ” she said, but she said it doubtfully, as if understanding that this was the proper thing to say but not really believing it.
Then she was holding a book under the microfilm gadget they used these days to record book-loans, and Ben felt a touch of almost hysterical amusement. It’s the book I grabbed off the shelf when the clown started to do its Pickaninny Voice, he thought. She thought I wanted to borrow it. I’ve made my first withdrawal from the Derry Public Library in twenty-five
years, and I don’t even know what the book is. Furthermore, I don’t care. Just let me out of here, okay? That’ll be enough.
“Thank you, ” he said, putting the book under his arm.
“You’re more than welcome, Mr. Hanscom. Are you sure you wouldn’t like an aspirin? ”
“Quite sure, ” he said—and then hesitated. “You wouldn’t by any chance know what happened to Mrs. Starrett, would you? Barbara Starrett? She used to be the head of the Children’s Library. ”
“She died, ” Carole Danner said. “Three years ago. It was a stroke, I understand. It was a great shame. She was relatively young . . . fifty-eight or
-nine, I think. Mr. Hanlon closed the library for the day. ”
“Oh, ” Ben said, and felt a hollow place open in his heart. That’s what happened when you got back to your used-to-be, as the song put it. The frosting on the cake was sweet, but the stuff underneath was bitter. People forgot you, or died on you, or lost their hair and teeth. In some cases you found that they had lost their minds. Oh it was great to be alive. Boy howdy.
“I’m sorry, ” she said. “You liked her, didn’t you? ”
“All the kids liked Mrs. Starrett, ” Ben said, and was alarmed to realize that tears were now very close.
“Are you—”
If she asks me if I’m all right one more time, I really am going to cry, I think. Or scream. Or something.
He glanced at his watch and said, “I really have to run. Thanks for being so nice. ”
“Have a nice day, Mr. Hanscom. ”
Sure. Because tonight I die.
He tipped a finger her way and started back across the floor. Mr.
Brockhill glanced up at him once, sharply and suspiciously.
He looked up at the landing which topped the lefthand staircase. The balloon still floated there, tied by its string to lacy wrought-iron. But now the printing on its side read:
I KILLED BARBARA STARRETT!
—PENNYWISE THE CLOWN
He looked away, feeling the pulse in his throat starting to run again. He let himself out and was startled by sunlight—the clouds overhead were coming unravelled and a warm late-May sun was shafting down, making the grass look impossibly green and lush. Ben felt something start to lift
from his heart. It seemed to him that he had left some insupportable burden behind in the library . . . and then he looked down at the book he had inadvertently withdrawn and his teeth clamped together with sudden, painful force. It was Bulldozer, by Stephen W. Meader, one of the books he had withdrawn from the library on the day he had dived into the Barrens to get away from Henry Bowers and his friends.
And speaking of Henry, the track of his engineer boot was still on the book’s cover.
Shaking, fumbling at the pages, he turned to the back. The library had
gone over to a microfilm checkout system; he had seen that. But there was still a pocket in the back of this book with a card tucked into it. There was a name written on each line of the card followed by the librarian’s return-date stamp. Looking at the card, Ben saw this:
 |
And, on the last line of the card, his own childish signature, written in heavy pencil-strokes:
 |
Stamped across this card, stamped across the book’s flyleaf, stamped across the thickness of the pages, stamped again and again in smeary red ink that looked like blood, was one word: CANCEL.
“Oh dear God, ” Ben murmured. He did not know what else to say; that seemed to cover the entire situation. “Oh dear God, dear God. ”
He stood in the new sunlight, suddenly wondering what was happening to the others.
2
Eddie Kaspbrak Makes a Catch
Eddie got off the bus at the corner of Kansas Street and Kossuth Lane. Kossuth was a street that ran a quarter of a mile downhill before dead- ending abruptly where the crumbling earth sloped into the Barrens. He had absolutely no idea why he had chosen this place to leave the bus; Kossuth Lane meant nothing to him, and he had known no one on this particular section of Kansas Street. But it seemed like the right place. That was all he knew, but at this point it seemed to be enough. Beverly had climbed off the bus with a little wave at one of the Lower Main Street stops. Mike had taken his car back to the library.
Now, watching the small and somehow absurd Mercedes bus pull away, he wondered exactly what he was doing here, standing on an obscure street- corner in an obscure town nearly five hundred miles away from Myra, who was undoubtedly worried to tears about him. He felt an instant of almost painful vertigo, touched his jacket pocket, and remembered that he had left his Dramamine back at the Town House along with the rest of his pharmacopeia. He had aspirin, though. He would no more have gone out
sans aspirin than he would have gone out sans pants. He chugged a couple dry and began to walk along Kansas Street, thinking vaguely that he might go to the Public Library or perhaps cross over to Costello Avenue. It was beginning to clear now, and he supposed he could even walk across to West Broadway and admire the old Victorian houses that stood there along the only two really handsome residential blocks in Derry. He used to do that
sometimes when he was a kid—just walk along West Broadway, sort of casual, like he was on his way to somewhere else. There was the Muellers’, near the corner of Witcham and West Broadway, a red house with turrets on either side and hedges in front. The Muellers had a gardener who always looked at Eddie with suspicious eyes until he had passed on his way.
Then there was the Bowies’ house, which was four down from the Muellers’ on the same side—one of the reasons, he supposed, that Greta
Bowie and Sally Mueller had been such great friends in grammar school. It
was green-shingled and also had turrets . . . but while the turrets on the Muellers’ house were squared off, those on the Bowies’ house were capped with funny cone-shaped things that looked to Eddie like squatty duncecaps. In the summer there was always lawn-furniture on the side lawn—a table with a sporty yellow umbrella over it, wicker chairs, a rope hammock stretched between two trees. There was always a croquet game set up out back, too. Eddie knew this although he had never been invited over to Greta’s house to play croquet. Walking by casually (like he was on his way to somewhere else) Eddie would sometimes hear the click of the balls, laughter, groans as someone’s ball was “sent away. ” Once he had seen
Greta herself, a lemonade in one hand and her croquet mallet in the other, looking slim and pretty beyond the words of all the poets (even her sunburned shoulders seemed wonderfully pretty to Eddie Kaspbrak, who had at that time been nine), going after her ball, which had been “sent away”; it had ricocheted off a tree and had thus brought Greta into Eddie’s view.
He fell in love with her a little that day—her shining blonde hair falling to the shoulders of her culotte dress, which was a cool blue. She glanced around and for a moment he thought she had seen him, but that proved not to be so, because when he raised his hand in a timid hello, she did not raise hers in return but only whacked her ball back onto the rear lawn and then ran after it. He had walked on with no resentment at the unreturned hello
(he genuinely believed she must not have see him) or at the fact that he had never been invited to attend one of the Saturday-afternoon croquet games: why would a beautiful girl like Greta Bowie want to invite a kid like him? He was thin-chested, asthmatic, and had the face of a drowned water-rat.
Yeah, he thought, walking aimlessly back down Kansas Street, I should have gone over to West Broadway and looked at all those houses again. . . the Muellers’, the Bowies’, Dr. Hale’s place, the Trackers’—
His thoughts broke off abruptly at that last name, because—speak of the devil!—here he was, standing in front of Tracker Brothers’ Truck Depot.
“Still right here, ” Eddie said aloud, and laughed. “Son of a gun!”
The house on West Broadway which belonged to Phil and Tony Tracker, a pair of life-long bachelors, was probably the loveliest of the large houses on that street, a spotlessly white mid-Victorian with green lawns and great beds of flowers that rioted (in a neatly landscaped way, of course) all the
spring and summer long. Their driveway was freshly sealed each fall so that it always remained as black as a dark mirror, the slate shingles on the many slants of the roof were always a perfect mint green that almost exactly matched the lawn, and people sometimes stopped to take pictures of the mullioned windows, which were very old and quite remarkable.
“Any two men who bother keeping a house so nice must be queers, ” Eddie’s mother had once said in a disgruntled sort of way, and Eddie hadn’t dared ask for clarification.
The Truck Depot was the exact opposite of the Tracker house on West Broadway. It was a low brick structure; the bricks were old and crumbling in places, their dirty-orange hue shading to a sooty black at the building’s footings. The windows were uniformly filthy except for a small circular
place on one of the lower panes of the starter’s office. This one pane had been kept spotlessly clean by kids before Eddie and those who came after, because the starter kept a Playboy calendar over his desk. No boy came to play scratch baseball in the back lot without first stopping to wipe at the
glass with his ball-glove and examine that month’s pinup.
The depot was surrounded by a waste of gravel on three sides. Long-
distance haulers—Jimmy-Petes and Kenworths and Rios—all painted with the words TRACKER BROS. DERRY NEWTON PROVIDENCE
HARTFORD NEW YORK, sometimes stood here in tangled disordered profusion. Sometimes they were put together and sometimes there were just cabs or body-boxes, standing silent on their rear wheels and support-struts.
The brothers kept their trucks out of the lot at the back of the building as much as they could, because they were both avid baseball fans and liked the kids to come and play. Phil Tracker drove freight himself so the boys rarely saw him, but Tony Tracker, a man with huge slab arms and a gut to match, kept the books and the accounts, and Eddie (who never played—his mother would have killed him if she had heard he was playing baseball, racing around and getting dust in his delicate lungs, risking broken legs, concussions, and God alone knew what else) got used to seeing him. He
was a summer fixture, his voice as much a part of the game to Eddie then as Mel Allen’s later became: Tony Tracker, large but somehow ghostlike, his white shirt glimmering as summer dusk drew down and fireflies began to loom the air with their lace of lights, yelling: “You got to get under that bawl before you can catch it, Red! . . . You took your eye off ’n the bawl,
Half-Pint! You can’t hit the goddam thing, if you ain’t looking at it! . . . Slide, Horsefoot! You get the soles of them Keds in that second-baseman’s face, he ain’t never goan tag you out!”
Never called any of them by name, Eddie remembered. It was always hey Red, hey Blondie, hey Four-Eyes, hey Half-Pint. It was never a ball, it was always a bawl. It was never a bat, it was always something Tony Tracker called an “ash-handle, ” as in “You ain’t never goan hit that bawl if you don’t choke up on the ash-handle, Horsefoot. ”
Grinning, Eddie walked a little closer . . . and then the grin faded. The long brick building where orders had been processed, trucks repaired, and goods stored on a short-term basis was now dark and silent. Weeds were
growing up through the gravel, and there were no trucks in either side yard .
. . only a single box, its sides rusty and dull.
Getting closer still, he saw that there was a realtor’s FOR SALE sign in the window.
Tracker’s out of business, he thought, and was surprised at the sadness
the thought carried with it . . . as if someone had died. He was glad now he hadn’t walked over to West Broadway. If Tracker Brothers could have gone under—Tracker Brothers, which had seemed eternal—what might have happened on that street he had liked so much to walk down as a kid? He realized uneasily that he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to see Greta Bowie with gray in her hair, her hips and legs thickened with much sitting and much eating and much drinking; it was better—safer—to just stay away.
That’s what we all should have done, just stayed away. We’ve got no
business here. Coming back to where you grew up is like doing some crazy yoga trick, putting your feet in your own mouth and somehow swallowing yourself so there’s nothing left; it can’t be done, and any sane person ought to be fucking glad it can’t . . . what do you suppose happened to Tony and Phil Tracker, anyway?
A heart attack for Tony, perhaps; he had been carrying maybe seventy-
five extra pounds of meat on his bones. You had to watch out for what your heart might be up to. The poets might romance about broken hearts and Barry Manilow sing about them, and that was fine by Eddie (he and Myra had every album Barry Manilow had ever recorded), but he himself preferred a good solid EKG every year. Sure, Tony’s heart had probably
given it up as a bad job. And Phil? Bad luck on the highway maybe. Eddie, who made his living behind the wheel himself (or had; these days he only drove the celebs and spent the rest of his time driving a desk), knew about bad luck on the highway. Old Phil might have jackknifed a rig somewhere
in New Hampshire or in the Hainesville Woods up north in Maine when the going was icy or maybe he had lost his brakes on some long hill south of Derry, heading into Haven in a driving springtime rain. Those things or any of the others you heard in those shitkicking country songs about truck-
drivers who wore Stetson hats and had cheating on their minds. Driving a desk was sometimes lonely, but Eddie had been in the driver’s seat himself more than once, his aspirator riding there with him on the dashboard, its trigger reflected ghostly in the windshield (and a bucketload of pills in the glove compartment), and he knew that real loneliness was a smeary red: the color of the taillights of the car ahead of you reflected on wet hottop in a driving rain.
“Oh shit the time goes by, ” Eddie Kaspbrak said in a sighing sort of whisper, and was not even aware that he had spoken aloud.
Feeling both mellow and unhappy—a state more common to him than he ever would have believed—Eddie skirted the building, Gucci loafers crunching in the gravel, to look at the lot where the baseball games had been played when he was a kid—when, it seemed, ninety percent of the world had been made up of kids.
The lot wasn’t much changed, but a look was enough to convince him beyond doubt that the games had stopped—a tradition that had simply died out at some point in the years between, for reasons of its own.
In 1958 the diamond shape of the infield had been defined not by limed basepaths but in ruts made by running feet. They had no actual bases, those boys who had played baseball here (boys who were all older than the Losers, although Eddie remembered now that Stan Uris had sometimes played; his batting was only fair, but in the outfield he could run fast and he had the reflexes of an angel), but four pieces of dirty canvas were always kept under the loading-bay behind the long brick building, to be ceremonially taken out when enough kids had drifted into the back lot to play ball, and just as ceremonially returned when the shades of evening had fallen thickly enough to end further play.
Standing here now, Eddie could see no trace of those rutted basepaths. Weeds had grown up through the gravel in patchy profusion. Broken soda and beer bottles twinkled here and there; in the old days, such shards of broken glass had been religiously removed. The only thing that was the
same was the chainlink fence at the back of the lot, twelve feet high and as rusty as dried blood. It framed the sky in droves of diamond shapes.
That was home-run territory, Eddie thought, standing bemused with his hands in his pockets at the place where home plate had been twenty-seven years ago. Over the fence and down into the Barrens. They used to call it
The Automatic. He laughed out loud and then looked around nervously, as if it were a ghost who had laughed out loud instead of a guy in sixty-dollar slacks, a guy as solid as . . . well, as solid as . . . as. . .
Get off it, Eds, Richie’s voice seemed to whisper. You ain’t solid at all, and in the last few years the chucks have been few and far between. Right?
“Yeah, right, ” Eddie said in a low voice, and kicked a few loose stones away in a rattle.
In truth, he had only seen two balls go over the fence at the back of the lot behind Tracker Brothers, both of them hit by the same kid: Belch Huggins. Belch had been almost comically big, already six feet tall at twelve, weighing maybe a hundred and seventy. He had gotten his
nickname because he was able to articulate belches of amazing length and loudness—at his best, he sounded like a cross between a bullfrog and a cicada. Sometimes he would pat a hand rapidly across his open mouth while belching, emitting a sound like a hoarse Indian.
Belch had been big and not really fat, Eddie remembered now, but it was as if God had never really intended for a boy of twelve to attain such
remarkable size; if he had not died that summer, he might have grown to six-six or better, and might have learned along the way how to maneuver his outsized body through a world of smaller denizens. He might even,
Eddie thought, have learned gentleness. But at twelve he had been both clumsy and mean, not retarded but almost seeming so because all his body’s actions seemed so amazingly graceless and lunging. He had none of Stanley’s built-in rhythms; it was as if Belch’s body did not talk to his brain at all but existed in its own cosmos of slow thunder. Eddie could remember the evening a long, slow fly ball had been hit directly to Belch’s position in the outfield—Belch didn’t even have to move. He stood looking up, raised
his glove in an almost aimless punching gesture, and instead of settling into his glove, the ball had struck him squarely on top of the head, producing a hollow bonk! sound. It was as if the ball had been dropped from three
stories up onto the roof of a Ford sedan. It bounced up a good four feet and came down neatly into Belch’s glove. An unfortunate kid named Owen
Phillips had laughed at that bonking sound. Belch had walked over to him and had kicked his ass so hard that the Phillips kid had run screaming for home with a hole in the seat of his pants. No one else laughed . . . at least not on the outside. Eddie supposed that if Richie Tozier had been there, he
wouldn’t have been able to help it, and Belch probably would have put him in the hospital. Belch was similarly slow at the plate. He was easy to strike out, and if he hit a grounder even the most fumble-fingered infielders had no trouble throwing him out at first. But when he got all of one, it went a long, long way. The two balls Eddie had seen Belch hit over the fence had both been wonders. The first had never been recovered, although more than a dozen boys had tramped back and forth over the steeply slanting slope which plunged down into the Barrens, looking for it.
The second, however, had been recovered. The ball belonged to another sixthgrader (Eddie could not now remember what his real name had been, only that all the other kids called him Snuffy because he always had a cold) and had been in use for most of the late spring and early summer of’58. As a result, it was no longer the nearly perfect spherical creation of white
horsehide and red stitching that it had been when it came out of the box; it was scuffed, grass-stained, and cut in several places by its hundreds of bouncing trips over the gravel in the outfield. Its stitching was beginning to come unravelled in one place, and Eddie, who shagged foul balls when his asthma wasn’t too bad (relishing every casual Thanks, kid! when he threw the ball back to the playing field), knew that soon someone would produce a roll of Black Cat friction tape and embalm it so they could get another week or so out of it.
But before that day came, a seventhgrader with the unlikely name of Stringer Dedham tossed what he fancied a “change of speed” pitch to Belch Huggins. Belch timed the pitch perfectly (the slow ones were, you should pardon the pun, just his speed) and hit Snuffy’s elderly Spalding so hard that the cover came right off and fluttered down just a few feet shy of second base like a big white moth. The ball itself had continued up and up
into a gorgeous twilit sky, unravelling and unravelling as it went, kids turning to follow its progress in dumb wonder; up and over the chainlink
fence it went, still rising, and Eddie remembered Stringer Dedham had said “Ho-ly shit!” in a soft and awestruck voice as it went, riding a track into the sky, and they had all seen the unwinding string, and maybe even before it hit, six boys had been monkeying up that fence, and Eddie could remember Tony Tracker laughing in an amazed loonlike way and crying:
“That one would have been out of Yankee Stadium! Do you hear me?
That one would have been out of fucking Yankee Stadium!”
It had been Peter Gordon who found the ball, not far from the stream the Losers’ Club would dam up less than three weeks later. What was left was not even three inches through the center; it was some kind of cockeyed
miracle that the twine had never broken.
By unspoken consent, the boys had brought the remains of Snuffy’s ball back to Tony Tracker, who examined it without saying a word, surrounded by boys who were likewise silent. Seen from a distance that circle of boys standing around the tall man with the big sloping belly might have seemed almost religious in its intent—the veneration of a holy object. Belch
Huggins had not even run around the bases. He only stood among the others like a boy who had no precise idea of where he was. What Tony Tracker handed him that day was smaller than a tennis ball.
Eddie, lost in these memories, walked from the place where home had been, across the pitcher’s mound (only it had never been a mound; it had been a depression from which the gravel had been scraped clean), and out into shortstop country. He paused briefly, struck by the silence, and then strolled on out to the chainlink fence. It was rustier than ever, and overgrown by some sort of ugly climbing vine, but still there. Looking through it, he could see how the ground sloped away, aggressively green.
The Barrens were more junglelike than ever, and for the first time he found himself wondering why a stretch of such tangled and virulent growth should have been called the Barrens at all: it was many things, but barren was not one of them. Why not the Wilderness? Or the Jungle?
Barrens.
It had an ominous, almost sinister sound, but what it conjured up in the mind were not tangles of shrubs and trees so thick they had to fight for sunspace; it called up pictures of sand dunes shifting away endlessly, or
gray slate expanses of hardpan and desert. Barren. Mike had said earlier that they were all barren, and it seemed true enough. Seven of them, and not a kid among them. Even in these days of planned parenthood, that was bucking the odds.
He looked through the rusty diamond-shapes, hearing the faraway drone of cars on Kansas Street, the faraway trickle and rush of water down below. He could see glints of it in the spring sunshine, like flashes of glass. The bamboo stands were still down there, looking unhealthily white, like
patches of fungus in all the green. Beyond them, in the marshy stretches of ground bordering the Kenduskeag, there was supposed to have been quickmud.
I spent the happiest times of my childhood down there in that mess, he thought, and shivered.
He was about to turn away when something else caught his eye: a cement cylinder with a heavy steel cap on the top. Morlock holes, Ben used to call them, laughing with his mouth but not quite laughing with his eyes. If you went over to one, it would stand maybe waist-high on you (if you were a kid) and you would see the words DERRY DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WORKS stamped in raised metal in a semicircle. And you could hear a humming noise from deep inside. Some sort of machinery.
Morlock holes.
That’s where we went. In August. In the end. We went into one of Ben’s Morlock holes, into the sewers, but after awhile they weren’t sewers
anymore. They were . . . were . . . what?
Patrick Hockstetter was down there. Before It took him Beverly saw him doing something bad. It made her laugh but she knew it was bad. Something to do with Henry Bowers, wasn’t it? Yes, I think so. And—
He turned away suddenly and started back toward the abandoned depot, not wanting to look down into the Barrens anymore, not liking the thoughts they conjured up. He wanted to be home with Myra. He didn’t want to be here. He. . .
“Catch, kid!”
He turned toward the sound of the voice and here came some sort of a ball, right over the fence and toward him. It struck the gravel and bounced. Eddie stuck out his hand and caught it. In his unthinking reflex the catch was so neat it was almost elegant.
He looked down at what was in his hand and everything inside him went cool and loose. Once it had been a baseball. Now it was only a string- wrapped sphere, because the cover had been knocked off. He could see the string trailing away. It went over the top of the fence like a strand of spiderweb and disappeared into the Barrens.
Oh Jesus, he thought. Oh Jesus, It’s here, It’s here with me NOW—
“Come on down and play, Eddie, ” the voice on the other side of the
fence said, and Eddie realized with a fainting sort of horror that it was the
voice of Belch Huggins, who had been murdered in the tunnels under Derry in August of 1958. And now here was Belch himself, struggling up and over the bank on the other side of the fence.
He wore a pinstriped New York Yankees baseball uniform that was flecked with bits of autumn leaves and smeared with green. He was Belch but he was also the leper, a creature hideously arisen from long years in a wet grave. The flesh of his heavy face hung in putrescent strings and runners. One eyesocket was empty. Things squirmed in his hair. He wore a moss-slimed baseball-glove on one hand. He poked the rotting fingers of
his right hand through the diamonds of the chainlink fence, and when he curled them, Eddie heard a dreadful squirting sound which he thought might drive him mad.
“That one would have been out of Yankee Stadium, ” Belch said, and grinned. A toad, noxiously white and squirming, dropped from his mouth and tumbled to the ground. “Do you hear me? That one would have been out of fucking Yankee Stadium! And by the way, Eddie, do you want a
blowjob? I’ll do it for a dime. Hell, I’ll do it for free. ”
Belch’s face changed. The jellylike bulb of nose fell in, revealing two
raw red channels that Eddie had seen in his dreams. His hair coarsened and drew back from his temples, turned cobweb-white. The rotting skin on his forehead split open, revealing white bone covered with a mucusy substance, like the bleared lens of a searchlight. Belch was gone; the thing which had been under the porch at 29 Neibolt Street was here now.
“Bobby blows me for a dime, ” it crooned, beginning to climb the fence. It left little pieces of its flesh in the diamond shapes the crisscrossing wires made. The fence jingled and rattled with its weight. When it touched the climbing, vinelike weeds, they turned black. “He will do it anytime. Fifteen cents for overtime. ”
Eddie tried to scream. Nothing but a dry senseless squeak came out of him. His lungs felt like the world’s oldest ocarinas. He looked down at the ball in his hand and suddenly blood began to sweat up from between the wrapped strings. It pattered to the gravel and splashed on his loafers.
He threw it down and took two lurching stagger-steps backward, his eyes bulging from his face, rubbing his hands on the front of his shirt. The leper had reached the top of the fence. Its head swayed in silhouette against the sky, a nightmare shape like a bloated Halloween jackolantern. Its tongue lolled out, four feet long, perhaps six. It twined its way down the fence like a snake from the leper’s grinning mouth.
There one second . . . gone the next.
It did not fade, like a ghost in a movie; it simply winked out of existence.
But Eddie heard a sound which confirmed its essential solidity: a pop! sound, like a cork blowing out of a champagne bottle. It was the sound of air rushing in to fill the place where the leper had been.
He turned and began to run, but before he had gone ten feet, four stiff
shapes flew out from the shadows under the loading-bay of the abandoned brick depot. He thought at first they were bats and he screamed and covered his head. Then he saw that they were squares of canvas—the squares of
canvas that had been the bases when the big kids played here.
They whirled and twirled in the still air; he had to duck to avoid one of them. They settled in their accustomed places all at once, kicking up little puffs of grit: home, first, second, third.
Gasping, his breath short in his throat, Eddie ran past home plate, his lips drawn back, his face as white as cottage cheese.
WHACK! The sound of a bat hitting a phantom ball. And then—
Eddie stopped, the strength going out of his legs, a groan passing his lips. The ground was bulging in a straight line from home to first, as if a gigantic gopher was tunneling rapidly just below the surface of the ground. Gravel rolled off to either side. The shape under the earth reached the base and the canvas flipped up into the air. It went up so hard and fast it made a popping sound—the sound a shoe-shine kid makes when he’s feeling good and pops the rag. The ground began to ridge between first and second, racing and racing. Second base flew into the air with a similar popping sound and had barely settled back before the shape under the ground had reached third and was racing for home.
Home plate flew up as well, but before it could come down the thing had popped out of the ground like some grisly party-favor, and the thing was Tony Tracker, his face a skull to which a few blackened chunks of flesh still clung, his white shirt a mess of rotted linen strings. He poked out of the earth at home plate from the waist up, swaying back and forth like a
grotesque worm.
“Don’t matter how much you choke up on that ash-handle, ” Tony Tracker said in a gritty, grinding voice. Exposed teeth grinned in lunatic chumminess. “Don’t matter, Wheezy. We’ll get you. You and your friends. We’ll have a BAWL!”
Eddie shrieked and staggered away. There was a hand on his shoulder. He shrank away from it. The hand tightened for a moment, then gave way. He turned. It was Greta Bowie. She was dead. Half of her face was gone; maggots crawled in the churned red meat that was left. She held a green balloon in one hand.
“Car crash, ” the recognizable half of her mouth said, and grinned. The grin caused an unspeakable ripping sound, and Eddie could see raw tendons moving like terrible straps. “I was eighteen, Eddie. Drunk and done up on reds. Your friends are here, Eddie. ”
Eddie backed away from her, his hands held up in front of his face. She walked toward him. Blood had splashed, then dried on her legs in long splotches. She was wearing penny-loafers.
And now, beyond her, he saw the ultimate horror: Patrick Hockstetter was shambling toward him across the outfield. He too was wearing a New York Yankees uniform.
Eddie ran. Greta clutched at him again, tearing his shirt and spilling some terrible liquid down the back of his collar. Tony Tracker was pulling himself out of his man-sized gopher-run. Patrick Hockstetter stumbled and staggered. Eddie ran, not knowing where he was finding the breath to run, but running somehow anyway. And as he ran, he saw words floating in front of him, the words that had been printed on the side of the green balloon Greta Bowie had been holding:
ASTHMA MEDICINE CAUSES LUNG CANCER! COMPLIMENTS OF CENTER STREET DRUG
Eddie ran. He ran and ran and at some point he collapsed in a dead faint near McCarron Park and some kids saw him and steered clear of him
because he looked like a wino to them like he might have some kind of weird disease for all they knew he might even be the killer and they talked about reporting him to the police but in the end they didn’t.
3
Bev Rogan Pays a Call
Beverly walked absently down Main Street from the Derry Town House, where she had gone to change into a pair of bluejeans and a bright yellow
smock-blouse. She was not thinking about where she was going. Instead she thought this:
Your hair is winter fire, January embers.
My heart burns there, too.
She had hidden that in her bottom drawer, beneath her underwear. Her mother might have seen it, but that was all right. The important thing was, that was one drawer her father never looked in. If he had seen it, he might have looked at her with that bright, almost friendly, and utterly paralyzing stare of his and asked in his almost friendly way: “You been doing something you shouldn’t be doing, Bev? You been doing something with some boy? ” And if she said yes or if she said no, there would be a quick wham-bam, so quick and so hard it didn’t even hurt at first—it took a few seconds for the vacuum to dissipate and the pain to fill the place were the vacuum had been. Then his voice again, almost friendly: “I worry a lot
about you, Beverly. I worry an awful lot. You got to grow up, isn’t that so? ”
Her father might still be living here in Derry. He had been living here the last time she had heard from him, but that had been . . . how long ago? Ten years? Long before she had married Tom, anyway. She had gotten a
postcard from him, not a plain postcard like the one the poem had been written on but one showing the hideous plastic statue of Paul Bunyan which stood in front of City Center. The statue had been erected sometime in the fifties, and it had been one of the landmarks of her childhood, but her father’s card had called up no nostalgia or memories for her; it might as well have been a card showing Gateway Arch in Saint Louis or the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
“Hope you are doing well and being good, ” the card read. “Hope you will send me something if you can, as I don’t have much. I love you Bevvie. Dad. ”
He had loved her, and in some ways she supposed that had everything to do with why she had fallen so desperately in love with Bill Denbrough that long summer of 1958—because of all the boys, Bill was the one who projected the sense of authority she associated with her father . . . but it was a different sort of authority, somehow—it was authority that listened. She
saw no assumption in either his eyes or his actions that he believed her father’s kind of worrying to be the only reason authority needed to exist . . . as if people were pets, to be both cosseted and disciplined.
Whatever the reasons, by the end of their first meeting as a complete group in July of that year, that meeting of which Bill had taken such
complete and effortless charge, she had been madly, head-over-heels in love with him. Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not
giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him.
It was natural enough, she supposed, for her to want to believe it had been Bill who sent her the love-poem . . . although she had never gotten so far gone as to actually convince herself it was so. No, she had known who wrote the poem. And later on—at some point—hadn’t its author admitted this to her? Yes, Ben had told her so (although she could not now
remember, not for the life of her, just when or under what circumstances he had actually said it out loud), and although his love for her had been almost as well hidden as the love she had felt for Bill
(but you told him Bevvie you did you told him you loved) it was obvious to anyone who really looked (and who was kind)—it was in the way he was always careful to keep some space between them, in the draw of his breath when she touched his arm or his hand, in the way he dressed when he knew he was going to see her. Dear, sweet, fat Ben.
It had ended somehow, that difficult pre-adolescent triangle, but just how it had ended was one of the things she still couldn’t remember. She thought that Ben had confessed authoring and sending the little love-poem. She thought she had told Bill she loved him, that she would love him forever.
And somehow, those two tellings had helped save all of their lives . . . or had they? She couldn’t remember. These memories (or memories of memories: that was really closer to what they were) were like islands that were not really islands at all but only knobs of a single coral spine which happened to poke up above the waterline, not separate at all but one piece. Yet whenever she tried to dive deep and see the rest, a maddening image intervened: the grackles which came back each spring to New England, crowding the telephone lines, trees and rooftops, jostling for places and filling the thawing late-March air with their raucous gossip. This image
came to her again and again, foreign and disturbing, like a heavy radio beam that blankets the signal you really want to pick up.
She realized with sudden shock that she was standing outside of the
Kleen-Kloze Washateria, where she and Stan Uris and Ben and Eddie had taken the rags that day in late June—rags stained with blood which only they could see. The windows were now soaped opaque and there was a hand-lettered FOR SALE BY OWNER sign taped to the door. Peering between the swashes of soap, she could see an empty room with lighter
squares on the dirty yellow walls where the washers had stood.
I’m going home, she thought dismally, but walked on anyway.
This neighborhood hadn’t changed much. A few more of the trees were gone, probably elms felled by disease. The houses looked a little tackier; broken windows seemed slightly more common than they had been when
she was a girl. Some of the broken panes had been replaced with cardboard. Some hadn’t.
And here she stood in front of the apartment house, 127 Lower Main Street. Still here. The peeling white she remembered had become a peeling chocolate brown at some point during the years between, but it was still
unmistakable. There was the window which looked in on what had been their kitchen; there was the window of her bedroom.
(Jim Doyon, you come out of that road! Come out right now, you want to get run over and killed? )
She shivered, hugging her arms across her breasts in an X, cupping her elbows in her palms.
Daddy could still be living here; oh yes he could. He wouldn’t move unless he had to. Just walk on up there, Beverly. Look at the mailboxes.
Three boxes for three apartments, just like in the old days. And if there’s one which says MARSH, you can ring the bell and pretty soon there’ll be the
shuffle of slippers down the hall and the door will open and you can look at him, the man whose sperm made you redheaded and lefthanded and gave you the ability to draw . . . remember how he used to draw? He could draw anything he wanted. If he felt like it, that is. He didn’t feel like it often. I
guess he had too many things to worry about. But when he did, you used to sit for hours and watch while he drew cats and dogs and horses and cows with MOO coming out of their mouths in balloons. You’d laugh and he’d laugh and then he’d say Now you, Bevvie, and when you held the pen he’d guide your hand and you’d see the cow or the cat or the smiling man unspooling beneath your own fingers while you smelled his Mennen Skin
Bracer and the warmth of his skin. Go on up, Beverly. Ring the bell. He’ll come and he’ll be old, the lines will be drawn deep in his face and his teeth
—those that are left-will be yellow, and he’ll look at you, and he’ll say Why it’s Bevvie, Bevvie’s come home to see her old dad, come on in Bevvie, I’m so glad to see you, I’m glad because I worry about you Bevvie, I worry a LOT.
She walked slowly up the path, and the weeds growing up between the cracked concrete sections brushed at the legs of her jeans. She looked closely at the first-floor windows, but they were curtained off. She looked at the mailboxes. Third floor, STARKWEATHER. Second floor, BURKE. First floor—her breath caught—MARSH.
But I won’t ring. I don’t want to see him. I won’t ring the bell.
This was a firm decision, at last! The decision that opened the gate to a full and useful lifetime of firm decisions! She walked down the path! Back to downtown! Up to the Derry Town House! Packed! Cabbed! Flew! Told Tom to bug out! Lived successfully! Died happily!
Rang the bell.
She heard the familiar chimes from the living room—chimes that had always sounded to her like a Chinese name: Ching-Chong! Silence. No answer. She shifted on the porch from one foot to the other, suddenly needing to pee.
No one home, she thought, relieved. I can go now.
Instead she rang again: Ching-Chong! No answer. She thought of Ben’s lovely little poem and tried to remember exactly when and how he had confessed its authorship, and why, for a brief second, it called up an association with having her first menstrual period. Had she begun menstruating at eleven? Surely not, although her breasts had begun their first achy growth around mid-winter. Why . . . ? Then, intervening, a mental picture of thousands of grackles on phone lines and rooftops, all babbling at a white spring sky.
I’ll leave now. I’ve rung twice; that’s enough.
But she rang again.
Ching-Chong!
Now she heard someone approaching, and the sound was just as she had imagined: the tired whisper of old slippers. She looked around wildly and came very, very close to just taking to her heels. Could she make it down
the cement walk and around the corner, leaving her father to think it had been nothing but kids playing pranks? Hey mister, you got Prince Albert in a can . . . ?
She let out a sudden sharp breath and had to tighten her throat because what wanted to come out was a laugh of relief. It wasn’t her father at all. Standing in the doorway and looking out at her was a tall woman in her late seventies. Her hair was long and gorgeous, mostly white but shot through with lodes of purest gold. Behind her rimless spectacles were eyes as blue
as the water in the fjords her ancestors had perhaps hailed from. She wore a purple dress of watered silk. It was shabby but still dignified. Her wrinkled face was kind.
“Yes, miss? ”
“I’m sorry, ” Beverly said. The urge to laugh had passed as swiftly as it had come. She noticed that the old woman wore a cameo at her throat. It
was almost certainly real ivory, surrounded by a band of gold so thin it was
nearly invisible. “I must have rung the wrong bell. ” Or rang the wrong bell on purpose, her mind whispered. “I meant to ring for Marsh. ”
“Marsh? ” Her forehead wrinkled delicately. “Yes, you see—”
“There’s no Marsh here, ” the old woman said. “But—”
“Unless . . . you don’t mean Alvin Marsh, do you? ” “Yes!” Beverly said. “My father!”
The old woman’s hand rose to the cameo and touched it. She peered more closely at Beverly, making her feel ridiculously young, as if she should perhaps have a box of Girl Scout cookies in her hands, or maybe some tags—support the Derry High School Tigers. Then the old woman smiled . . . a kind smile that was nonetheless sad.
“Why you have fallen out of touch, miss. I don’t want to be the one who tells you this, a stranger, but your father has been dead these last five years. ”
“But . . . on the bell . . . ” She looked again and uttered a small, bewildered sound that was not quite a laugh. In her agitation, in her
subconscious but rock-solid certainty that her old man would still be here, she had read KERSH as MARSH.
“You’re Mrs. Kersh? ” she asked. She was staggered by this news of her father, but she also felt stupid about the mistake—the lady would think her little more than illiterate.
“Mrs. Kersh, ” she agreed.
“You . . . did you know my dad? ”
“Very little did I know him, ” Mrs. Kersh said. She sounded a little like Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, and Beverly felt like laughing again.
When had her emotions gone whipsawing so violently back and forth? The truth was she couldn’t remember a time . . . but she was dismally afraid she would before much longer. “He rented the ground-floor apartment before me. We saw each other, me coming and him going, over a space of a few days. He moved down to Roward Lane. Do you know it? ”
“Yes, ” Beverly said. Roward Lane branched off from Lower Main Street four blocks farther down, where the apartment buildings were smaller and even more desperately shabby.
“I used to see him at the Costello Avenue Market sometimes, ” Mrs.
Kersh said, “and at the Washateria before they closed it. We passed a word from time to time. We—girt, you’re pale. I’m sorry. Come in and let me
give you tea. ”
“No, I couldn’t, ” Beverly said weakly, but in fact she actually felt pale, like clouded glass that you could nearly look through. She could use tea, and a chair in which to sit and drink it.
“You could and you will, ” Mrs. Kersh said warmly. “It’s the least I can do for having told you such unpleasant news. ”
Before she could protest, Beverly found herself being led up the gloomy hall and into her old apartment, which now seemed much smaller but safe enough—safe, she supposed, because almost everything was different.
Instead of the pink-topped Formica table with its three chairs, there was a small round table, really not much bigger than an endtable, with silk
flowers in a pottery vase. Instead of the old Kelvinator refrigerator with the round drum on top (her father tinkered with it constantly to keep it going), there was a copper-colored Frigidaire. The stove was small but efficient- looking. There was an Amana RadarRange above it. Bright blue curtains hung in the windows, and she could see flowerboxes outside them. The floor, linoleum when she was a girl here, had been stripped to its original wood. Many applications of oil made it glow mellowly.
Mrs. Kersh looked around from the stove, where she was placing a teapot. “You grew up here? ”
“Yes, ” Beverly said. “But it’s very different now . . . so trim and tidy . . . wonderful!”
“How kind you are, ” Mrs. Kersh said, and her smile made her younger.
It was radiant. “I have a little money, you see. Not much, but with my Social Security I am comfortable. Once I was a girl in Sweden. I came to this country in 1920, a girl of fourteen with no money—which is the best way to learn the value of money, would you agree? ”
“Yes, ” Bev sad.
“At the hospital I worked, ” Mrs. Kersh said. “Many years—from 1925 I worked there. I rose to the position of head housekeeper. All the keys I had. My husband invested our money quite well. Now I have reached a little harbor. Look around, miss, while the water boils!”
“No, I couldn’t—”
“Please . . . still I feel guilty. Look, if you like!”
And so she did look. Her parents’ bedroom was now Mrs. Kersh’s bedroom, and the difference was profound. The room seemed brighter and airier now. A large cedar chest, the initials R. G. inlaid into it, breathed its gentle aroma into the air. A gigantic surprise-quilt lay on the bed. On it she could see women drawing water, boys driving cattle, men building haystacks. A wonderful quilt.
Her room had become a sewing room. A black Singer machine stood on a wrought-iron table under a pair of starkly efficient Tensor lamps. A
picture of Jesus hung on one wall, a picture of John F. Kennedy on another.
A beautiful breakfront stood below the picture of JFK—it was filled with books instead of china, but seemed none the worse for that.
She went into the bathroom last.
It had been redone in a rose color that was too low and pleasant to seem gaudy. All of the fixtures were new, and yet she approached the basin feeling that the old nightmare had gripped her again; she would peer down into that black and lidless eye, the whispering would begin, and then the blood—
She leaned over the sink, catching a glimpse of her pallid face and dark eyes in the mirror over the basin, and then she stared into that eye, waiting for the voices, the laughter, the groans, the blood.
How long might she have stood there, bent over the sink, waiting for the sights and sounds twenty-seven years gone, she didn’t know; it was Mrs.
Kersh’s voice that bid her return: “Tea, miss!”
She jerked back, the semi-hypnosis broken, and left the bathroom. If
there had been dark magic somewhere down in that drain, it was gone now .
. . or was sleeping.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have!”
Mrs. Kersh looked up at her brightly, smiling a little. “O miss, if you
knew how seldom company calls these days, you’d not say so. Why, I put on more than this for the man from the Bangor Hydro who comes to read my meter! I’m making him fat!”
Delicate cups and saucers stood on the round kitchen table, a clean bone- white edged with blue. There was a plate of small cakes and cookies.
Beside the sweets a pewter teapot chuffed mild steam and pleasant fragrance. Bemused, Bev thought that the only things missing were the tiny
sandwiches with the crusts cut off: auntsandwiches, she’d thought them,
always one word. Three main types of auntsandwiches—cream cheese and olive, watercress, and egg salad.
“Sit down, ” said Mrs. Kersh. “Sit down, miss, and I’ll pour out. ”
“I’m not a miss, ” Beverly said, and raised her left hand so that her ring would show.
Mrs. Kersh smiled and pushed a hand through the air—pshaw! the
gesture said. “I call all the pretty young girls miss, ” she said. “Just a habit. Don’t take offense. ”
“No, ” Beverly said, “not at all. ” But for some reason she felt a feather- touch of unease: there was something in the old woman’s smile that had seemed a little . . . what? Unpleasant ? False? Knowing? But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it?
“I love what you’ve done to the place. ”
“Do you? ” Mrs. Kersh said, and poured out. The tea looked dark, muddy. Beverly wasn’t sure she wanted to drink it . . . and suddenly she wasn’t sure she wanted to be here at all.
It did say Marsh under the doorbell, her mind whispered suddenly, and she was frightened.
Mrs. Kersh passed her tea.
“Thank you, ” Beverly said. The look of it might have been muddy; the aroma, however, was wonderful. She tasted. It was fine. Stop jumping at shadows, she told herself. “That cedar chest in particular is a wonderful piece. ”
“An antique, that one!” Mrs. Kersh said, and laughed. Beverly noticed that the old woman’s beauty was flawed on only one score, and that was common enough here in the northlands. Her teeth were very bad—strong- looking, but bad all the same. They were yellow, and the front two had crossed each other. The canines seemed very long, almost like tusks.
They were white . . . when she came to the door she smiled and you thought to yourself how white they were.
Suddenly she was not just a little frightened. Suddenly she wanted—
needed—to be away from here.
“Very old, oh yes!” Mrs. Kersh exclaimed, and drank her cup of tea off at a single gulp, with a sudden, shocking slurping sound. She smiled at Beverly—grinned at her—and Beverly saw that the woman’s eyes had
changed, too. The corneas were now yellow, ancient, threaded with bleary stitches of red. Her hair was thinner; the braid looked malnourished, no longer silver shot with bright yellow but a dull gray.
“Very old, ” Mrs. Kersh reminisced over her empty cup, looking slyly at Beverly from her yellowed eyes. Her snaggle teeth showed in that repulsive, almost leering grin. “From home with me it came. The RG carved into it? You noticed? ”
“Yes. ” Her voice came from far away, and a part of her brain yammered If she doesn’t know you’ve seen the change perhaps you’re still all right, if she doesn’t know, doesn’t see—
“My father, ” she said, pronouncing it fadder, and Beverly saw that her dress had also changed. It had become a scabrous, peeling black. The cameo was a skull, its jaw hung in a diseased gape. “His name was Robert Gray, better known as Bob Gray, better known as Pennywise the Dancing
Clown. Although that was not his name, either. But he did love his joke, my fadder. ”
She laughed again. Some of her teeth had turned as black as her dress.
The wrinkles in her skin now cut deep. Her milk-rose skin had gone a sickly yellow. Her fingers were claws. She grinned at Beverly. “Have something to eat, dear. ” Her voice had risen half an octave, but the octave was cracked in this register, and her voice was the sound of a crypt door swinging mindlessly on hinges clogged with black earth.
“No, thank you, ” Beverly heard her mouth say in a child’s high oh-I- must-be-going voice. The words did not seem to originate in her brain; rather they came out of her mouth and then had to travel around to her ears before she was aware of what she had said.
“No? ” the witch asked, and grinned. Her claws scrabbled on the plate and she began to cram thin molasses cookies and delicate frosted slices of cake into her mouth with both hands. Her horrid teeth plunged and reared, plunged and reared; her fingernails, long and dirty, dug into the sweets;
crumbs tumbled down the bony slab of her chin. Her breath was the smell of long-dead things burst wide open by the gases of their own decay. Her laugh was now a dead cackle. Her hair was thinner. Scaly scalp showed in patches.
“Oh, he loved his joke, my fadder! This is a joke, miss, if you enjoy them: my fadder bore me rather than my mutter. He shat me from his
asshole! Hee! Hee! Hee!”
“I ought to go, ” Beverly heard herself say in that same high wounded
voice—the voice of a small girl who has been viciously embarrassed at her first party. There was no strength in her legs. She was dimly aware that it was not tea in her cup but shit, liquid shit, a little party-favor from the
sewers under the city. She had drunk some of that, not much but a sip, oh God, oh God, oh blessed Jesus, please, please—
The woman was shrinking before her eyes, thinning; it was now a crone with an apple-doll’s face who sat across from her, giggling in a high, squealing voice and rocking back and forth.
“Oh my fadder and I are one, ” she said, “just me, just him, and dear, if you are wise you will run, run back to where you came from, run quickly,
because to stay will mean worse than your death. No one who dies in Derry really dies. You knew that before; believe it now. ”
In slow motion Beverly gathered her legs under her. As if from outside she saw herself gaining her feet and backing away from the table and from
the witch in an agony of horror and disbelief, disbelief because she realized for the first time that the neat little dining-room table was not dark oak but fudge. Even as she watched, the witch, still giggling, her ancient yellow
eyes slanted slyly off into the corner of the room, broke a piece of it off and stuffed it avidly into the black-ringed trap that was her mouth.
The cups, she saw, were white bark that had been carefully looped with blue-dyed frosting. The pictures of Jesus and John Kennedy were creations of nearly transparent spun sugar, and as she looked at them, Jesus stuck out His tongue and Kennedy dropped a stinky wink.
“We’re all waiting for you!” the witch screamed, and her fingernails scrabbled over the surface of the fudge table, drawing deep scars in its shining surface. “Oh yes! Oh yes!”
The overhead lights were globes of hard candy. The wainscotting was caramel taffy. She looked down and saw that her shoes were leaving prints on the floorboards, which were not boards at all but slices of chocolate. The smell of candy was cloying.
Oh God it’s Hansel and Gretel it’s the witch the one that always scared me the worst because she ate the children—
“You and your friends!” the witch screamed, laughing. “You and your friends! In the cage! In the cage until the oven’s hot!” She screamed
laughter, and Beverly ran for the door, but she ran as if in slow motion. The witch’s laughter beat and swirled around her head, a cloud of bats. Beverly shrieked. The hall stank of sugar and nougat and toffee and sickening
synthetic strawberries. The doorknob, mock crystal when she came in, was now a monstrous sugar diamond.
“I worry about you, Bevvie . . . I worry a LOT!”
She turned, swirls of red hair floating around her face, to see her father staggering toward her down the hallway, wearing the witch’s black dress and skull cameo; her father’s face hung with doughy, running flesh, his eyes as black as obsidian, his hands clenching and unclenching, his mouth grinning with soupy fervor.
“I beat you because I wanted to FUCK you, Bevvie, that’s all I wanted to do, I wanted to FUCK you, I wanted to EAT you, I wanted to eat your PUSSY, I wanted to SUCK your CLIT up between my teeth, YUM-YUM,
Bevvie, oooohhhhh, YUMMY IN MY TUMMY, I wanted to put you in the cage . . . and get the oven hot . . . and feel your CUNT . . . your plump CUNT . . . and when it was plump enough to eat . . . to eat . . . EAT. . . ”
Screaming, she grasped the sticky doorknob and bolted out onto a porch that was decorated with praline doodads and floored with fudge. Far away, dim, seeming to swim in her vision, she saw cars passing back and forth, and a woman pushing a cartful of groceries back from Costello’s.
I have to get out there, she thought, just barely coherent. That’s reality out there, if I can only get out to the sidewalk—
“Won’t do you any good to run, Bevvie, ” her father
(my fadder)
told her, laughing. “We’ve waited a long time for this. This is going to be
fun. This is going to be YUMMY in our TUMMIES. ”
She looked back again and now her dead father was not wearing the witch’s black dress but the clown suit with the big orange buttons. There was a 1958-style coonskin cap, the kind popularized by Fess Parker in the
Disney movie about Davy Crockett, perched on its head. In one hand it held a bunch of balloons. In the other it held the leg of a child like a chicken drumstick. Written on each balloon was the legend IT CAME FROM
OUTER SPACE.
“Tell your friends I am the last of a dying race, ” it said, grinning its sunken grin as it staggered and lurched down the porch steps after her. “The
only survivor of a dying planet. I have come to rob all the women . . . rape all the men . . . and learn to do the Peppermint Twist!”
It began to do a mad shuck-and-jive, balloons in one hand, severed, bleeding leg in the other. The clown costume writhed and flapped, but Beverly felt no wind. Her legs tangled in each other and she spilled to the pavement, throwing out her palms to take up the shock, which went all the way to her shoulders. The woman pushing the grocery cart paused and looked back doubtfully, then hurried on a little faster.
The clown came toward her again, casting the severed leg aside. It landed on the lawn with an indescribable thud. Beverly only lay sprawled on the pavement for a moment, sure somewhere inside that she must wake soon,
this couldn’t be real, had to be a dream—
She realized that wasn’t true a moment before the clown’s crooked, long- clawed fingers touched her. It was real; it could kill her. As it had killed the children.
“The grackles know your real name!” she screamed at it suddenly. It recoiled, and it seemed to her that for a moment the grin on the lips inside the great red grin that had been painted on and around them became a
grimace of hate and pain . . . and perhaps of fear as well. It might only have been her imagination, and she certainly had no idea why she had said such a crazy thing, but it bought her an instant of time.
She was on her feet and running. Brakes squealed and a hoarse voice, both mad and scared, yelled: “Why don’t you look where you’re going, you dumb quiff!” She had a blurred impression of the bakery truck that had almost hit her when she bolted into the street like a child after a rubber ball, and then she was standing on the opposite sidewalk, panting, a hot stitch in her left side. The bakery truck went on down Lower Main.
The clown was gone. The leg was gone. The house still stood there, but she saw now that it was crumbling and deserted, the windows boarded up, the steps leading up to the porch cracked and broken.
Was I really in there, or did I dream it all?
But her jeans were dirty, her yellow blouse smeared with dust. And there was chocolate on her fingers.
She rubbed them on the legs of her jeans and walked away fast, her face hot, her back cold as ice, her eyeballs seeming to pulse in and out with the rapid thud of her heart.
We can’t beat It. Whatever It is, we can’t beat It. It even wants us to try— It wants to settle the old score. Can’t be happy with a draw, I guess. We ought to get out of here . . . just leave.
Something brushed against her calf, light as a cat’s questing paw.
She jerked away from it with a little shriek. She looked down and cringed, one hand against her mouth.
It was a ballon, as yellow as her blouse. Written on the side of it in electric blue were the words THAT’S WIGHT, WABBIT.
As she watched, it went bouncing lightly up the street, urged by the pleasant late-spring breeze.
2
Richie Tozier Makes Tracks
Well, there was the day Henry and his friends chased me—before the end of school, this was. . . .
Richie was walking along Outer Canal Street, past Bassey Park. Now he stopped, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking toward the Kissing Bridge but not really seeing it.
I got away from them in the toy department of Freese’s. . . .
Since the mad conclusion of the reunion lunch, he had been walking aimlessly, trying to make his peace with the awful things which had been in the fortune cookies . . . or the things which had seemed to be in the cookies. He thought that most likely nothing at all had come out of them. It had been a group hallucination brought on by all the spooky shit they had been talking about. The best proof of the hypothesis was that Rose had seen nothing at all. Of course, Beverly’s parents had never seen any of the blood that came out of the bathroom drain either, but this wasn’t the same.
No? Why not?
“Because we’re grownups now, ” he muttered, and discovered the thought had absolutely no power or logic at all; it might as well have been a nonsense line from a kid’s skip-rope chant.
He started to walk again.
I went up by City Center and sat down on a park bench for awhile and I thought I saw . . .
He stopped again, frowning. Saw what?
. . . but that was just something I dreamed. Was it? Was it really?
He looked to the left and saw the big glass-brick-and-steel building that had looked so modern in the late fifties and now looked rather antique and tacky.
And here I am, he thought. Right back to fucking City Center. Scene of that other hallucination. Or dream. Or whatever it was.
The others saw him as the Klass Klown, the Krazy Kut-up, and he had fallen neatly and easily into that role again. Ah, we all fell neatly and easily back into our old roles again, didn’t you notice? But was there anything very unusual about that? He thought you would probably see much the
same thing at any tenth or twentieth high-school reunion—the class comedian who had discovered a vocation for the priesthood in college would, after two drinks, revert almost automatically to the wiseacre he had been; the Great English Brain who had wound up with a GM truck dealership would suddenly begin spouting off about John Irving or John Cheever; the guy who had played with the Moondogs on Saturday nights and who had gone on to become a mathematics professor at Cornell would suddenly find himself on stage with the band, a Fender guitar strapped over his shoulder, whopping out “Gloria” or “Surfin’ Bird” with gleeful drunken ferocity. What was it Springsteen said? No retreat, baby, no surrender . . . but it was easier to believe in the oldies on the record-player after a couple of drinks or some pretty good Panama Red.
But, Richie believed, it was the reversion that was the hallucination, not the present life. Maybe the child was the father of the man, but fathers and sons often shared very different interests and only a passing resemblance. They—
But you say grownups and now it sounds like nonsense; it sounds like so much bibble-babble. Why is that, Richie? Why?
Because Derry is as weird as ever. Why don’t we just leave it at that?
Because things weren’t that simple, that was why.
As a kid he had been a goof-off, a sometimes vulgar, sometimes amusing comedian, because it was one way to get along without getting killed by
kids like Henry Bowers or going absolutely loony-tunes with boredom and loneliness. He realized now that a lot of the problem had been his own mind, which was usually moving at a speed ten or twenty times that of his classmates. They had thought him strange, weird, or even suicidal, depending on the escapade in question, but maybe it had been a simple case of mental overdrive—if anything about being in constant mental overdrive was simple.
Anyway, it was the sort of thing you got under control after awhile—you got it under control or you found outlets for it, guys like Kinky Briefcase or Buford Kissdrivel, for instance. Richie had discovered that in the months after he had wandered into the college radio station, pretty much on a whim, and had discovered everything he had ever wanted during his first week behind the microphone. He hadn’t been very good at first; he had been too excited to be good. But he had understood his potential not to be just good at the job but great at it, and just that knowledge had been enough to put him over the moon on a cloud of euphoria. At the same time he had begun to understand the great principle that moved the universe, at least that part of the universe which had to do with careers and success: you found the crazy guy who was running around inside of you, fucking up your life. You chased him into a corner and grabbed him. But you didn’t kill him. Oh no.
Killing was too good for the likes of that little bastard. You put a harness over his head and then started plowing. The crazy guy worked like a demon once you had him in the traces. And he supplied you with a few chucks from time to time. That was really all there was. And that was enough.
He had been funny, all right, a laugh a minute, but in the end he had outgrown the nightmares that were on the dark side of all those laughs. Or he thought he had. Until today, when the word grownup suddenly stopped making sense to his own ears. And now here was something else to cope with, or at least think about; here was the huge and totally idiotic statue of Paul Bunyan in front of City Center.
I must be the exception that proves the rule, Big Bill.
Are you sure there was nothing, Richie? Nothing at all? Up by City Center . . . I thought I saw . . .
Sharp pain needled at his eyes for the second time that day and he clutched at them, a startled moan coming out of him. Then it was gone again, as quickly as it had come. But he had also smelled something, hadn’t he? Something that wasn’t really there, but something that had been there, something that made him think of
(I’m right here with you Richie hold my hand can you catch hold)
Mike Hanlon. It was smoke that had made his eyes sting and water.
Twenty-seven years ago they had breathed that smoke; in the end there had just been Mike and himself left and they had seen—
But it was gone.
He took a step closer to the plastic Paul Bunyan statue, as amazed by its cheerful vulgarity now as he had been overwhelmed by its size as a child.
The mythical Paul stood twenty feet high, and the base added another six feet. He stood smiling down at the car and pedestrian traffic on Outer Canal Street from the edge of the City Center lawn. City Center had been erected in the years 1954-55 for a minor-league basketball team that had never materialized. The Derry City Council had voted money for the statue a year later, in 1956. It had been hotly debated both in the council’s public
meetings and in the letters-to-the-editor columns of the Derry News. Many thought it would be a perfectly lovely statue, certain to become a tourist attraction of note. There were others who found the idea of a plastic Paul Bunyan horrible, garish, and unbelievably gauche. The art teacher at Derry High School, Richie remembered, had written a letter to the News saying that if such a monstrosity were actually to be erected in Derry, she would
blow it up. Grinning, Richie wondered if that babe’s contract had been renewed.
The controversy—which Richie recognized now as an utterly typical big- town/small-city tempest in a teapot—had raged for six months, and of
course it had been entirely meaningless; the statue had been purchased, and even if the City Council had done something as aberrant (especially for
New England) as deciding not to use an item for which money had been paid, where in God’s name could it have been stored? Then the statue, not really sculpted at all but simply cast in some Ohio plastics plant, had been set in place, still shrouded in a whack of canvas big enough to serve as a clipper-ship sail. It had been unveiled on May 13th, 1957, which was the incorporated township’s one-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday. One faction
gave voice to predictable moans of outrage; the other to equally predictable moans of rapture.
When Paul was revealed that day he was wearing his bib overalls and a red-and-white-checked shirt. His beard was splendidly black, splendidly full, splendidly lumberjack-y. A plastic axe, surely the Godzilla of all
plastic axes, was slung over one shoulder, and he grinned unceasingly at the northern skies, which on the day of the unveiling had been as blue as the skin of Paul’s reputed companion (Babe was not present at the unveiling, however; the cost estimate of adding a blue ox to the tableau had been prohibitive).
The children who attended the ceremonies (there were hundreds of them, and ten-year-old Richie Tozier, in the company of his dad, had been among them) were totally and uncritically delighted by the plastic giant. Parents boosted toddlers up onto the square pedestal on which Paul stood, took photos, and then watched with mixed apprehension and amusement as the kids climbed and crawled, laughing, over Paul’s huge black boots (correction: huge black plastic boots).
It had been March of the following year when Richie, exhausted and terrified, had finished up on one of the benches in front of the statue after eluding—by the barest of margins—Messrs. Bowers, Criss, and Huggins in a chase that had led from Derry Elementary School across most of the downtown area. He had finally ditched them in the toy department of Freese’s Department Store.
The Derry branch of Freese’s was a poor thing compared with the grand downtown department store in Bangor, but Richie had been far past caring about such things—by then it was a case of any port in a storm. Henry
Bowers had been right behind him and by then Richie had been flagging badly. He had dodged into the mouth of the department store’s revolving door as a last resort. Henry, who apparently didn’t understand the physics of such devices, had nearly lost the tips of his fingers trying to grab Richie as Richie trundled around and into the store.
Pelting downstairs, shirttail flying out behind him, he had heard the revolving door give off a series of reports almost as loud as TV gunfire and understood that Larry, Moe, and Curly were still after him. He was laughing as he went down the stairs to the basement level but that was only a nervous tic; he was as full of terror as a rabbit caught in a wire snare. They really
meant to beat him up good this time (he had no idea that in another ten
weeks or so he would believe the three of them, Henry in particular, capable of anything short of murder, and he surely would have whitened with shock if he had known of the apocalyptic rockfight in July, when even that last qualification would disappear from his mind). And the whole thing had been so utterly, typically stupid.
Richie and the other boys in his fifth-grade class had been filing into the gym. A sixth-grade class, Henry hulking among them like an ox among cows, had been coming out. Although he was still in the fifth grade, Henry went to gym with the older boys. The overhead pipes had been dripping again and Mr. Fazio hadn’t yet gotten around to putting up his CAUTION! WET FLOOR! sign on its little easel. Henry had slipped in a puddle and had landed on his keister.
Before he could stop it Richie’s traitor mouth had bugled: “Way to go, banana-heels!”
There had been an explosion of laughter from both Henry’s classmates and Richie’s, but there had been no laughter on Henry’s face as he picked himself up—only a dull flush the color of freshly fired brick.
“Later for you, four-eyes, ” he said, and walked on.
The laughter died at once. The boys in the hall looked at Richie as one already dead. Henry did not pause to check reactions; he simply walked off, head down, elbows red from catching the fall, a large wet place on the seat of his pants. Looking at that wet spot, Richie felt his suicidally witty mouth drop open again . . . but this time he snapped it shut again, so fast he almost amputated the tip of his tongue with the falling gate of his teeth.
Well, but he’ll forget, he told himself uneasily as he changed up for gym. Sure he will. Ole Hank just hasn’t got that many memory circuits working. Every time he takes a shit he probably has to look up the directions in the instruction booklet, ha-ha.
Ha-ha.
“You’re dead, Trashmouth, ” Vince “Boogers” Taliendo told him, pulling his jock up over a dork roughly the size and shape of an anemic peanut. He said it with a certain sad respect. “Don’t worry, though. I’ll bring flowers. ”
“Cut off your ears and bring cauliflowers, ” Richie had come back smartly, and everyone laughed, even ole “Boogers” Taliendo laughed, why not, they could all afford to laugh. What, me worry? They would all be
home watching Jimmy Dodd and the Mouseketeers on the Mickey Mouse Club or Frankie Lymon singing “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” on American Bandstand while Richie went shagging ass through ladies’
lingerie and housewares on his way to the toy department with sweat pouring down his back into the crack of his ass and his terrified balls strung up so high they felt like they might be hung over his bellybutton. Sure, they could laugh. Har-de-har-har-har.
Henry hadn’t forgotten. Richie had left by the door at the kindergarten end of the school building just in case, but Henry had stuck Belch Huggins there, also just in case. Har-de-har-har-har.
Richie saw Belch first or there would have been no contest at all. Belch was looking out toward Derry Park, holding an unlit cigarette in one hand and dreamily picking the seat of his chinos out of his ass with the other.
Heart pounding hard, Richie had walked quietly across the playground and was most of the way down Charter Street before Belch turned his head and saw him. He yelled for Henry and Victor, and since then the chase had been on.
When Richie reached the toy department it had been utterly, horribly deserted. There wasn’t even a sales clerk hanging out—a welcome adult to put a stop to things before they got entirely out of hand. He could hear the three dinosaurs of the apocalypse closing in now. And he simply couldn’t run anymore. Each breath produced a deep hurting stitch in his left side.
His eye fixed on a door which read EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY! ALARM WILL SOUND! Hope kindled in his chest.
Richie ran down an aisle crammed with Donald Duck jack-in-the-boxes, United States Army tanks made in Japan, Lone Ranger cap pistols, wind-up robots. He reached the door and slammed the push-bar as hard as he could. The door opened, letting in cool mid-March air. The alarm went off with a strident bray. Richie immediately doubled back and dropped to his hands and knees in the next aisle over. He was down before the door could settle closed again.
Henry, Belch, and Victor thundered into the toy department just as the door clicked shut and the alarm cut off. They raced for it, Henry in the lead, his face set and intent.
A sales clerk finally appeared, coming on the run. He wore a blue nylon duster over a plaid sportcoat of excruciating ugliness. The rims of his
spectacles were as pink as the eyes of a white rabbit. Richie thought he looked like Wally Cox in his Mr. Peepers role, and he had to slam his traitor mouth into the fat part of his forearm to keep from screaming out gales of exhausted laughter.
“You boys!” Mr. Peepers exclaimed. “You boys can’t go out there! That’s an emergency exit! You! Hey! You boys!”
Victor glanced at him a little nervously, but Henry and Belch never turned from their course and Victor followed them. The alarm brayed again, longer this time as they charged into the alley. Before it stopped clanging
Richie was on his feet and trotting back toward ladies’ lingerie.
“You boys will be barred from the store!” the clerk yelled after him. Looking back over his shoulder Richie squealed in his Granny Grunt
Voice, “Did anyone ever tell you you look just like Mr. Peepers, young man? ”
And so he had escaped. And so he had finished up almost a mile from Freese’s, in front of City Center . . . and, he devoutly hoped, out of harm’s way. At least for the time being. He was spent. He sat down on a bench just to the left of the Paul Bunyan statue, wanting only a little peace while he got himself back together. In a bit he would get up and head home, but for now it felt too good to just sit here in the afternoon sun. The day had opened in a cold drizzly gloom, but now you could believe spring might actually be on the way.
Farther up the lawn he could see the City Center marquee, which on that March day bore this message in large blue translucent letters:
HEY TEENS!
COMING MARCH 28TH!
THE ARNIE “WOO-WOO” GINSBERG ROCK AND ROLL SHOW!
JERRY LEE LEWIS THE PENGUINS
FRANKIE LYMON AND THE TEENAGERS GENE VINCENT AND THE BLUE CAPS
FREDDY “BOOM-BOOM” CANNON
AN EVENING OF WHOLESOME ENTERTAINMENT!!
That was a show Richie really wanted to see, but he knew there wasn’t a chance. His mother’s idea of wholesome entertainment did not include Jerry
Lee Lewis telling the young people of America we got chicken in the barn, whose barn, what barn, my barn. Nor, for that matter, did it include Freddy Cannon, whose Tallahassee lassie had a hi-fi chassis. She was willing to admit that she had done her share of screaming for Frank Sinatra (whom
she now called Frankie the Snot) as a bobby-soxer, but, like Bill Denbrough’s mother, she was death on rock and roll. Chuck Berry terrified her, and she declared that Richard Penniman, better known to his teen and subteen constituency as Little Richard, made her want to “barf like a chicken. ”
This was a phrase for which Richie had never asked a translation.
His dad was neutral on the subject of rock and roll and could perhaps have been swayed, but Richie knew in his heart that his mother’s wishes would rule on this subject—until he was sixteen or seventeen, anyway— and by then, his mother was firmly convinced, the country’s rock and roll mania would have passed.
Richie thought Danny and the Juniors were more right on that subject than his mom—rock and roll would never die. He himself loved it, although his sources were really only two—American Bandstand on Channel 7 in the afternoon and WMEX out of Boston at night, when the air had thinned and the hoarse enthusiastic voice of Arnie Ginsberg came wavering in and out
like the voice of a ghost called up at a seance. The beat did more than make him happy. It made him feel bigger, stronger, more there. When Frankie Ford sang “Sea Cruise” or Eddie Cochran sang “Summertime Blues, ”
Richie was actually transported with joy. There was power in that music, a power which seemed to most rightfully belong to all the skinny kids, fat kids, ugly kids, shy kids—the world’s losers, in short. In it he felt a mad
hilarious voltage which had the power to both kill and exalt. He idolized
Fats Domino (who made even Ben Hanscom look slim and trim) and Buddy Holly, who, like Richie, wore glasses, and Screaming Jay Hawkins, who popped out of a coffin at his concerts (or so Richie had been told), and the Dovells, who danced as good as black guys.
Well, almost.
He would have his rock and roll someday if he wanted it—he was confident it would still be there for him when his mother finally gave in and let him have it—but that would not be on March 28th, 1958 . . . or in 1959 .
. . or . . .
His eyes had drifted away from the marquee and then . . . well . . . then he must have fallen asleep. It was the only explanation that made sense. What had happened next could only happen in dreams.
And now here he was again, a Richie Tozier who had finally gotten all
the rock and roll he had ever wanted . . . and who had found, happily, that it still wasn’t enough. His eyes went to the marquee in front of City Center and saw that, with a hideous kind of serendipity, those same blue letters spelled out:
JUNE 14TH
HEAVY METAL MANIA!!
JUDAS PRIEST IRON MAIDEN
BUY YOUR TICKETS HERE OR AT ANY TICKETRON OUTLET
Somewhere along the way they dropped the wholesome entertainment line, but as far as I can tell that’s just about the only difference, Richie thought.
And heard Danny and the Juniors, dim and distant, like voices heard down a long corridor coming out of a cheap radio: Rock and roll will never die, I’ll dig it to the end . . . It’ll go down in history, just you watch my friend. . . .
Richie looked back at Paul Bunyan, patron saint of Derry—Derry, which had come into being, according to the stories, because this was where the
logs fetched up when they came downriver. There had been a time when, in the spring, both the Penobscot and the Kenduskeag would have been solid
logs from one side to the other, their black bark hides glistening in the spring sun. A fellow who was fast on his feet could walk from Wally’s Spa in Hell’s Half-Acre over to Ramper’s in Brewster (Ramper’s was a tavern of such horrible repute that it was commonly called the Bucket of Blood) without getting his boots wet over the third crossing of his rawhide laces. Or so it had been storied in Richie’s youth, and he supposed there was a bit of Paul Bunyan in all such stories.
Old Paul, he thought, looking up at the plastic statue. What you been doing since I’ve been gone? Made any new riverbeds coming home tired and dragging your axe behind you? Made any new lakes on account of
wanting a bathtub big enough so you could sit in water up to your neck? Scared any more little kids the way you scared me that day?
Ah, and suddenly he remembered it all, the way you will sometimes suddenly remember a word which has been dancing on the tip of your tongue.
There he had been, sitting in that mellow March sunshine, drowsing a little, thinking about going home and catching the last half hour of Bandstand, and suddenly there had been a warm swash of air into his face. It blew his hair back from his forehead. He looked up and Paul Bunyan’s huge plastic face had been right in front of his, bigger than a face on a
movie screen, filling everything. The rush of air had been caused by Paul’s bending down . . . although he did not precisely look like Paul anymore.
The forehead was now low and beetling; tufts of wiry hair poked from a nose as red as the nose of a long-time drunkard; his eyes were bloodshot and one had a slight cast to it.
The axe was no longer on his shoulder. Paul was leaning on its haft, and the blunt end of its head had crushed a trench in the concrete of the sidewalk. He was still grinning, but there was nothing cheery about it now. From between gigantic yellow teeth there drifted a smell like small animals rotting in hot underbrush.
“I’m going to eat you up, ” the giant had said in a low rumbling voice. It was the sound of boulders rocking against each other during an earthquake. “Unless you give me back my hen and my harp and my bags of gold, I’m going to eat you right the fuck up!”
The breath of these words made Richie’s shirt flutter and flap like a sail in a hurricane. He shrank back against the bench, eyes bugging, hair standing out to all sides like quills, wrapped in a pocket of carrion-stink.
The giant began to laugh. It settled its hands on the haft of its axe the way Ted Williams might have laid hold of his favorite baseball bat (or ash- handle, if you prefer), and pulled it out of the hole it had made in the sidewalk. The axe began to rise into the air. It made a low lethal rushing sound. Richie suddenly understood that the giant meant to split him right down the middle.
But he felt that he could not move; a logy sort of apathy had stolen over him. What did it matter? He was dozing, having a dream. Any moment now
some driver would blow his horn at a kid running across the street and he would wake up.
“That’s right, ” the giant had rumbled, “you’ll wake up in hell!” And at the last instant, as the axe slowed to its apogee and balanced there, Richie understood that this wasn’t a dream at all . . . and if it was, it was a dream that could kill.
Trying to scream but making no sound at all, he rolled off the bench and onto the raked gravel plot which surrounded what had been a statue and was now only a base with two huge steel bolts sticking out of it where the feet had been. The sound of the descending axe filled the world with its pressing insistent whisper; the giant’s grin had become a murderer’s grimace. Its lips had pulled back so far from its teeth that its plastic red gums, hideously red, gleamed.
The blade of the axe struck the bench where Richie had been only an instant before. The edge was so sharp that there was almost no sound at all, but the bench was sheared instantly in two. The halves sagged away from each other, the wood inside the green-painted skin a bright and somehow sickening white.
Richie was on his back. Still trying to scream, he pushed himself with his heels. Gravel went down the collar of his shirt, down the back of his pants.
And there was Paul, towering above him, looking down at him with eyes
the size of manhole covers; there was Paul, looking down at one small boy cowering on the gravel.
The giant took a step toward him. Richie felt the ground shudder when the black boot came down. Gravel spumed up in a cloud.
Richie rolled over onto his stomach and staggered to his feet. His legs were already trying to run before he was balanced, and as a result he fell flat on his belly again. He heard the wind whoof out of his lungs. His hair fell in his eyes. He could see the traffic going back and forth on Canal and
Main Streets as it did every day, as if nothing was happening, as if no one in any of those cars could see or care that Paul Bunyan had come to life and stepped down from its pedestal in order to commit murder with an axe roughly the size of a deluxe motor home.
The sunshine was blotted out. Richie lay in a patch of shade that looked like a man.
He scrambled to his knees, almost fell over sideways, managed to get to his feet, and ran as fast as he could—he ran with his knees popping almost all the way up to his chest and his elbows pistoning. Behind him he could hear that awful persistent whisper building again, a sound that seemed to be not really sound at all but pressure on the skin and eardrums: Swiiipppppp!
—
The earth shook. Richie’s upper and lower teeth rattled against each other like china plates in an earthquake. He did not have to look to know that Paul’s axe had buried itself haft-deep in the sidewalk inches behind his feet.
Madly, in his mind, he heard the Dovells: Oh the kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol When they do the Bristol Stomp. . . .
He passed out of the giant’s shadow into sunlight again, and as he did he began to laugh—the same exhausted laughter that had come from him when he bolted downstairs in Freese’s. Panting, that hot stitch in his side again, he had at last risked a glance back over his shoulder.
There was the statue of Paul Bunyan, standing on its pedestal where it
always stood, axe on its shoulder, head cocked toward the sky, lips parted in the eternal optimistic grin of the myth-hero. The bench which had been sheared in two was whole and intact, thank you very much. The gravel
where Tall Paul (He’s-a my all, Annette Funicello sang maniacally in Richie’s head) had planted his huge foot was raked and immaculate except for the scuffed spot where Richie had fallen off while he was
(getting away from the giant)
dreaming. There was no footprint, no axe-slash in the concrete. There was nothing here but a boy who had been chased by other boys, bigger boys, and so had had himself a very small (but very potent) dream about a homicidal Colossus . . . the Giant Economy-Size Henry Bowers, if you pleased.
“Shit, ” Richie said in a tiny wavering voice, and then uttered an uncertain laugh.
He stood there awhile longer, waiting to see if the statue would move
again—perhaps wink, perhaps shift its axe from one shoulder to the other, perhaps come down and have at him again. But of course none of those
things happened.
Of course.
What, me worry? Har-de-har-har-har.
A doze. A dream. No more than that.
But, as Abraham Lincoln or Socrates or someone like that had once observed, enough was enough. It was time to go home and cool out; to make like Kookie on 77 Sunset Strip and just lay chilly.
And although it would have been quicker to cut through the City Center grounds, he decided not to. He didn’t want to get close to that statue again. So he had gone the long way around and by that evening he had nearly forgotten the incident.
Until now.
Here sits a man, he thought, here sits a man dressed in a mossy-green sportcoat purchased at one of the best shops on Rodeo Drive; here sits a man with Bass Weejuns on his feet and Calvin Klein underwear to cover his ass; here sits a man with soft contact lenses resting easily on his eyes; here sits a man remembering the dream of a boy who thought an Ivy League shirt with a fruit-loop on the back and a pair of Snap-Jack shoes was the height of fashion; here sits a grownup looking at the same old statue, and hey, Paul, Tall Paul, I’m here to say you’re the same in every way, you ain’t aged a motherfucking day.
The old explanation still rang true in his mind: a dream.
He supposed he could believe in monsters if he had to; monsters were no big deal. Hadn’t he sat in radio studios at one time or another reading news copy about such fellows as Idi Amin Dada and Jim Jones and that guy who had blown away all those folks in a McDonald’s just down the road apiece? Shitfire and save matches, monsters were cheap! Who needed a five-buck movie ticket when you could read about them in the paper for thirty-five
cents or hear about them on the radio for free? And he supposed if he could believe in the Jim Jones variety, he could believe in Mike Hanlon’s version, at least for awhile; It even had Its own sorry charm, because It came from Outside and no one had to claim responsibility for It. He could believe in a monster that had as many faces as there are rubber masks in a novelty shop
(if you’re gonna have one, you might as well have a pack of em, he thought, cheaper by the dozen, right, gang? ), at least for the sake of argument . . . but a thirty-foot-high plastic statue that stepped off its pedestal and then tried to carve you up with its plastic axe? That was just a little too ripe. As Abraham Lincoln or Socrates or someone had also said, I’ll eat fish and I’ll eat meat, but there is some shit I will not eat. It just wasn’t—
That sharp needling pain struck his eyes again, without warning, jerking a dismayed cry from him. This was the worst yet, going deeper and lasting longer, scaring the bejesus out of him. He clapped his hands to his eyes and then groped instinctively for the bottom lids with his forefingers, meaning to pop his contacts out. It’s maybe some kind of infection, he thought dimly. But Jesus it hurts!
He pulled the lids down and was ready to give the single practiced blink that would send them tumbling out (and he would spend the next fifteen
minutes grovelling myopically for them in the gravel surrounding the bench but Jesus God who gave a shit, right now it felt like there were nails in his eyes), when the pain disappeared. It did not dwindle; it just went. One moment there, the next moment gone. His eyes teared briefly and then stopped.
He lowered his hands slowly, his heart running fast in his chest, ready to blink them out the instant the pain started again. It didn’t. And suddenly he found himself thinking about the only horror movie that had ever really scared him as a kid, possibly because he had taken so much shit about his
glasses and had spent so much time thinking about his eyes. That movie had been The Crawling Eye, with Forrest Tucker. Not very good. The other kids had laughed themselves into hysterics over it, but Richie had not laughed.
Richie had been rendered cold and white and dumb, for once with not a
single Voice to command, as that gelatinous tentacled eye came out of the manufactured fog of some English movie set, waving its fibrous tentacles in front of it. The sight of that eye had been very bad, the embodiment of a hundred not-quite-realized fears and disquiets. On some night not long after, he had dreamed of looking at himself in a mirror and bringing a large pin up and sticking it slowly into the black iris of his eye and feeling a numb, watery springiness as the bottom of his eye filled up with blood. He remembered—now he remembered—waking up and discovering that he had wet the bed. The best indicator of how gruesome that dream had been was that his primary feeling had been not shame at his nocturnal indiscretion but relief; he had embraced the warm wet patch with his body and blessed the reality of his sight.
“Fuck this, ” Richie Tozier said in a low voice that was not quite steady, and started to get up.
He would go back to the Derry Town House and take a nap. If this was Memory Lane, he preferred the L. A. Freeway at rush-hour. The pain in his eyes was probably no more than a signal of exhaustion and jet-lag, plus the stress of meeting the past all at once, in one afternoon. Enough shocks; enough exploring. He didn’t like the way his mind was skittering from one subject to the next. What was that Peter Gabriel tune? “Shock the Monkey. ” Well, this monkey had been shocked enough. It was time to catch some z’s and maybe gain a little perspective.
As he rose his eyes went to the marquee in front of City Center again. All at once the strength ran out of his legs and he sat down again. Hard.
RICHIE TOZIER MAN OF 1000 VOICES RETURNS TO DERRY LAND OF 1000 DANCES IN HONOR OF TRASHMOUTH’S RETURN
CITY CENTER PROUDLY PRESENTS
THE RICHIE TOZIER “ALL-DEAD” ROCK SHOW BUDDY HOLLY RICHIE VALENS THE BIG BOPPER FRANKIE LYMON GENE VINCENT MARVIN GAYE
HOUSE BAND
JIMI HENDRIX LEAD GUITAR
JOHN LENNON RHYTHM GUITAR PHIL LINOTT BASS GUITAR
KEITH MOON DRUMS
SPECIAL GUEST VOCALIST JIM MORRISON WELCOME HOME RICHIE!
YOU’RE DEAD TOO!
He felt as if someone had whopped all the breath out of him . . . and then he heard that sound again, that sound that was half pressure on the skin and eardrums, that keen homicidal whispering rush—Swiipppp! He rolled off
the bench onto the gravel, thinking So this is what they mean by déjà-vu,
now you know, you’ll never have to ask anybody again—
He hit on his shoulder and rolled, looking up at the Paul Bunyan statue— only it was no longer Paul Bunyan. The clown stood there instead, resplendent and evident, fantastic in plastic, twenty feet of Day-Glo colors, its painted face surmounting a cosmic comic ruff. Orange pompom buttons
cast in plastic, each as big as a volleyball, ran down the front of the silvery suit. Instead of an axe it held a huge bunch of plastic balloons. Engraved on each were two legends: IT’S STILL ROCK AND ROLL TO ME and RICHIE TOZIER’S “ALL-DEAD” ROCK SHOW.
He scrambled backward, using his heels and his palms. Gravel went down the back of his pants. He heard a seam tear loose in the underarm of his Rodeo Drive sportcoat. He rolled over, gained his feet, staggered, looked back. The clown looked down at him. Its eyes rolled wetly in their sockets.
“Did I give you a scare, m’man? ” it rumbled.
And Richie heard his mouth say, quite independently of his frozen brain: “Cheap thrills in the back of my car, Bozo. That’s all. ”
The clown grinned and nodded as if it had expected no more. Red paint- bleeding lips parted to show teeth like fangs, each one coming to a razor point. “I could have you now if I wanted you now, ” it said. “But this is going to be too much fun. ”
“Fun for me too, ” Richie heard his mouth say. “The most fun of all when we come to take your fucking head off, baby. ”
The clown’s grin spread wider and wider. It raised one hand, clad in a
white glove, and Richie felt the wind of the movement blow the hair off his forehead as it had on that day twenty-seven years ago. The clown’s index finger popped out at him. It was as big as a beam.
Big as a bea—, Richie thought, and then the pain struck again. It drove rusty spikes into the soft jelly of his eyes. He screamed and clutched at his face.
“Before removing the mote from thy neighbor’s eye, attend the beam in thine own, ” the clown intoned, its words rumbling and vibrating, and
Richie was again enveloped in the sweet stink of its carrion breath.
He looked up, and took half a dozen hurried steps backward. The clown was bending down, its gloved hands on its gaily pantalooned knees.
“Want to play some more, Richie? How about if I point at your pecker and give you prostate cancer? Or I could point at your head and give you a good old brain tumor—although I’m sure some people would say that would only be adding to what was already there. I can point at your mouth and your stupid flapping tongue will turn into so much running pus. I can do it, Richie. Want to see? ”
Its eyes were widening, widening, and in those black pupils, each as big as a softball, Richie saw the mad darkness that must exist over the rim of
the universe; he saw a shitty happiness that he felt would drive him insane. In that moment he understood It could do any of these things and more.
And yet again he heard his mouth, but this time it was not his voice, or any of his created Voices, past or present; it was a Voice he had never heard before. Later he would tell the others, hesitantly, that it was a kind of Mr.
Jiveass Nigger Voice, loud and proud, self-parodying and screechy.
“Git off mah case you big ole honky clown!” he shouted, and suddenly he was laughing again. “No shit an no shine, muhfuh! I got d’walk, I got d’talk, and I got d’big boppin cock! I got d’time, I got d’mine, I’m a man wit’ a plan an if you doan shit, you goan git! You hear me, you whiteface bunghole? ”
Richie thought the clown recoiled, but he did not stick around to find out for sure. He ran, elbows pumping, sportcoat flying out in wings behind him, not caring that a father who had stopped so his toddler could admire Paul
was now staring warily at him, as if he had gone crazy. As a matter of fact, folks, Richie thought, I feel like I’ve gone crazy. Oh God do I ever. And that had to have been the shittiest Grandmaster Flash imitation in history but
somehow it did the trick, somehow—
And then the clown’s voice thundered after him. The father of the little boy did not hear it, but the toddler’s face suddenly pinched in upon itself and he began to wail. The dad picked his son up and hugged him, bewildered. Even through his own terror, Richie observed this little
sideshow closely. The voice of the clown was perhaps angrily gleeful, perhaps just angry: “We’ve got the eye down here, Richie
. . . you hear me? The one that crawls. If you don’t want to fly, don’t wanna say goodbye, you come on down under this here town and give a great big hi to one great big eye! You come down and see it anytime. Just
any old time you like. You hear me, Richie? Bring your yo-yo. Have Beverly wear a big full skirt with four or five petticoats underneath. Have her wear her husband’s ring around her neck! Get Eddie to wear his saddle-shoes!
We’ll play some bop, Richie! We’ll play AAALLLL THE HITS!”
Reaching the sidewalk, Richie dared to look back over his shoulder, and what he saw was in no way comforting. Paul Bunyan was still gone, and
now the clown was gone, too. Where they had stood there was now a
twenty-foot-high plastic statue of Buddy Holly. He was wearing a button on one of the narrow lapels of his plaid sportcoat. RICHIE TOZIER’S
“ALL-DEAD” ROCK SHOW, the button read.
One bow of Buddy’s glasses had been mended with adhesive tape.
The little boy was still crying hysterically; his father was walking rapidly back toward downtown with the weeping child in his arms. He gave Richie a wide berth.
Richie got walking
(feets don’t fail me now)
trying not to think about
(we’ll play AAALLLL THE HITS!)
what had just happened. All he wanted to think about was the monster jolt of Scotch he was going to have in the Derry Town House bar before he went up to take that nap.
The thought of a drink—just your ordinary garden-variety drink—made him feel a little better. He looked over his shoulder one more time and the fact that Paul Bunyan was back, grinning at the sky, plastic axe over his shoulder, made him feel better still. Richie began to walk faster, making tracks, putting distance between himself and that statue. He had even begun to think about the possibility of hallucinations when the pain struck his eyes again, deep and agonizing, causing him to cry out hoarsely. A pretty young girl who had been walking ahead of him, looking dreamily up at the breaking clouds, looked back at him, hesitated, then hurried over.
“Mister, are you all right? ”
“It’s my contacts, ” he said in a strained voice. “My damned contact le—
oh my God that hurts!”
This time he got his forefingers up so quickly he almost jabbed them into his eyes. He pulled down the lower lids and thought, I won’t be able to blink them out, that’s what’s going to happen, I won’t be able to blink them out and it’s just going to go on hurting and hurting and hurting until I go blind go blind go b!—
But one blink did it as one blink always had. The sharp and defined world, where colors stayed inside the lines and where faces that you saw were clear and obvious, simply fell away. Wide bands of pastel fuzz took
their place. And although he and the high-school girl, who was both helpful
and concerned, searched the paving of the sidewalk for almost fifteen minutes, neither could find even a single lens.
In the back of his head Richie seemed to hear the clown laughing.
5
Bill Denbrough Sees a Ghost
Bill did not see Pennywise that afternoon—but he did see a ghost. A real ghost. So Bill believed then, and no subsequent event caused him to change his mind.
He had walked up Witcham Street and paused for some time by the drain where George met his end on that rainy October day in 1957. He squatted down and peered into the drain, which was cut into the stonework of the curbing. His heart was beating hard, but he looked anyway.
“Come out, why don’t you, ” he said in a low voice, and he had the not- quite-mad idea that his voice was floating along dark and dripping passageways, not dying out but continuing onward and onward, feeding on its own echoes, bouncing off moss-covered stone walls and long-dead machinery. He felt it float over still and sullen waters and perhaps issue softly from a hundred different drains in other parts of the city at the same time.
“Come out of there or we’ll come in and g-get you. ”
He waited nervily for a response, crouched down with his hands between his thighs like a catcher between pitches. There was no response.
He was about to stand up when a shadow fell over him.
Bill looked up sharply, eagerly, ready for anything . . . but it was only a
little kid, maybe ten, maybe eleven. He was wearing faded Boy Scout shorts which displayed his scabby knees to good advantage. He had a Freeze-Pop in one hand and a Fiberglas skateboard which looked almost as battered as his knees in the other. The Freeze-Pop was a fluorescent orange. The skateboard was a fluorescent green.
“You always talk into the sewers, mister? ” the boy asked.
“Only in Derry, ” Bill said.
They looked at each other solemnly for a moment and then burst into laughter at the same time.
“I want to ask you a stupid queh-question, ” Bill said. “Okay, ” the kid said.
“You ever h-hear anything down in one of these? ”
The kid looked at Bill as though he had flipped out. “O-Okay, ” Bill said, “forget I a-asked. ”
He started to walk away and had gotten maybe twelve steps—he was headed up the hill, vaguely thinking he would take a look at the home place
—when the kid called, “Mister? ”
Bill turned back. He had his sportcoat hooked on his finger and slung over his shoulder. His collar was unbuttoned, his tie loosened. The boy was watching him carefully, as if already regretting his decision to speak further. Then he shrugged, as if saying Oh what the hell.
“Yeah. ”
“Yeah? ”
“Yeah. ”
“What did it say? ”
“I don’t know. It talked some foreign language. I heard it coming out of one of those pumpin stations down in the Barrens. One of those pumpin stations, they look like pipes coming out of the ground—”
“I know what you mean. Was it a kid you heard? ”
“At first it was a kid, then it sounded like a man. ” The boy paused. “I was some scared. I ran home and told my father. He said maybe it was an echo or something, coming all the way down the pipes from someone’s house. ”
“Do you believe that? ”
The boy smiled charmingly. “I read in my Ripley’s Believe It or Not book that there was this guy, he got music from his teeth. Radio music. His
fillings were, like, little radios. I guess if I believed that, I could believe anything. ”
“A-Ayuh, ” Bill said. “But did you believe it? ” The boy reluctantly shook his head.
“Did you ever hear those voices again? ”
“Once when I was taking a bath, ” the boy said. “It was a girl’s voice.
Just crying. No words. I was ascared to pull the plug when I was done because I thought I might, you know, drownd her. ”
Bill nodded again.
The kid was looking at Bill openly now, his eyes shining and fascinated. “You know about those voices, mister? ”
“I heard them, ” Bill said. “A long, long time ago. Did you know any of the k-kids that have been murdered here, son? ”
The shine went out of the kid’s eyes; it was replaced by caution and disquiet. “My dad says I’m not supposed to talk to strangers. He says anybody could be that killer. ” He took an additional step away from Bill, moving into the dappled shade of an elm tree that Bill had once driven his bike into twenty-seven years ago. He had taken a spill and bent his handlebars.
“Not me, kid, ” he said. “I’ve been in England for the last four months. I just got into Derry yesterday. ”
“I still don’t have to talk to you, ” the kid replied. “That’s right, ” Bill agreed. “It’s a f-f-free country. ”
He paused and then said, “I used to pal around with Johnny Feury some of the time. He was a good kid. I cried, ” the boy finished matter-of-factly, and slurped down the rest of his Freeze-Pop. As an afterthought he ran out his tongue, which was temporarily bright orange, and lapped off his arm.
“Keep away from the sewers and drains, ” Bill said quietly. “Keep away from empty places and deserted places. Stay out of trainyards. But most of all, stay away from the sewers and the drains. ”
The shine was back in the kid’s eyes, and he said nothing for a very long time. Then: “Mister? You want to hear something funny? ”
“Sure. ”
“You know that movie where the shark ate all the people up? ” “Everyone does. J-J-Jaws. ”
“Well, I got this friend, you know? His name’s Tommy Vicananza, and he’s not that bright. Toys in the attic, you get what I mean? ”
“Yeah. ”
“He thinks he saw that shark in the Canal. He was up there by himself in Bassey Park a couple of weeks ago, and he said he seen this fin. He says it was eight or nine feet tall. Just the fin was that tall, you get me? He goes,
‘That’s what killed Johnny and the other kids. It was Jaws, I know because I saw it. ’ So I go, ‘That Canal’s so polluted nothing could live in it, not even a minnow. And you think you saw Jaws in there. You got toys in the attic, Tommy. ’ Tommy says it reared right out of the water like it did at the end of that movie and tried to bite him and he just got back in time. Pretty funny, huh, mister? ”
“Pretty funny, ” Bill agreed. “Toys in the attic, right? ”
Bill hesitated. “Stay away from the Canal too, son. You follow? ” “You mean you believe it? ”
Bill hesitated. He meant to shrug. Instead he nodded.
The kid let out his breath in a low, hissing rush. He hung his head as if ashamed. “Yeah. Sometimes I think I must have toys in the attic. ”
“I know what you mean. ” Bill walked over to the kid, who glanced up at him solemnly but didn’t shy away this time. “You’re killing your knees on that board, son. ”
The kid glanced down at his scabby knees and grinned. “Yeah, I guess so.
I bail out sometimes. ”
“Can I try it? ” Bill asked suddenly.
The kid looked at him gape-mouthed at first, then laughing. “That’d be funny, ” he said. “I never saw a grownup on a skateboard. ”
“I’ll give you a quarter, ” Bill said. “My dad said—”
“Never take money or c-candy from strangers. Good advice. I’ll still give you a q-quarter. What do you say? Just to the corner of Juh-Jackson Street. ”
“Never mind the quarter, ” the kid said. He burst into laughter again—a gay and uncomplicated sound. A fresh sound. “I don’t need your quarter. I got two bucks. I’m practically rich. I got to see this, though. Just don’t
blame me if you break something. ”
“Don’t worry, ” Bill said. “I’m insured. ”
He turned one of the skateboard’s scuffed wheels with his finger, liking the speedy ease with which it turned—it sounded like there was about a million ball-bearings in there. It was a good sound. It called up something
very old in Bill’s chest. Some desire as warm as want, as lovely as love. He smiled.
“What do you think? ” the kid asked.
“I think I’m g-gonna kill myself, ” Bill said, and the kid laughed.
Bill put the skateboard on the sidewalk and put one foot on it. He rolled it back and forth experimentally. The kid watched. In his mind Bill saw himself rolling down Witcham Street toward Jackson on the kid’s avocado- green skateboard, the tails of his sportcoat ballooning out behind him, his bald head gleaming in the sun, his knees bent in that fragile way
snowbunnies bend their knees their first day on the slopes. It was a posture that told you that in their heads they were already falling down. He bet the kid didn’t ride the board like that. He bet the kid rode
(to beat the devil)
like there was no tomorrow.
That good feeling died out of his chest. He saw, all too clearly, the board going out from under his feet, shooting unencumbered down the street, an improbable fluorescent green, a color that only a child could love. He saw himself coming down on his ass, maybe on his back. Slow dissolve to a
private room at the Derry Home Hospital, like the one they had visited
Eddie in after his arm had been broken. Bill Denbrough in a full body-cast, one leg held up by pullies and wires. A doctor comes in, looks at his chart, looks at him, and then says: “You were guilty of two major lapses, Mr.
Denbrough. The first was mismanagement of a skateboard. The second was forgetting that you are now approaching forty years of age. ”
He bent, picked the skateboard back up, and handed it back to the kid. “I guess not, ” he said.
“Chicken, ” the kid said, not unkindly.
Bill hooked his thumbs into his armpits and flapped his elbows. “Buck- buck-buck, ” he said.
The kid laughed. “Listen, I got to get home. ” “Be careful on that, ” Bill said.
“You can’t be careful on a skateboard, ” the kid replied, looking at Bill as if he might be the one with toys in the attic.
“Right, ” Bill said. “Okay. As we say in the movie biz, I hear you. But stay away from drains and sewers. And stay with your friends. ”
The kid nodded. “I’m right near home. ”
So was my brother, Bill thought.
“It’ll be over soon, anyway, ” Bill told the kid.
“Will it? ” the kid asked. “I think so, ” Bill said.
“Okay. See you later . . . chicken!”
The kid put one foot on the board and pushed off with the other. Once he was rolling he put the other foot on the board as well and went thundering down the street at what seemed to Bill a suicidal pace. But he rode as Bill had suspected he would: with lazy hipshot grace. Bill felt love for the boy, and exhilaration, and a desire to be the boy, along with an almost suffocating fear. The boy rode as if there were no such things as death or getting older. The boy seemed somehow eternal and ineluctable in his khaki Boy Scout shorts and scuffed sneakers, his ankles sockless and quite dirty, his hair flying back behind him.
Watch out, kid, you’re not going to make the corner! Bill thought, alarmed, but the kid shot his hips to the left like a break-dancer, his toes revolved on the green Fiberglas board, and he zoomed effortlessly around
the corner and onto Jackson Street, simply assuming no one would be there to get in his way. Kid, Bill thought, it won’t always be that way.
He walked up to his old house but did not stop; he only slowed his walk down to an idler’s pace. There were people on the lawn—a mother in a lawn chair, a sleeping baby in her arms, watching two kids, maybe ten and eight, play badminton in grass that was still wet from the rain earlier. The younger of the two, a boy, managed to hit the bird back over the net and the woman called, “Good one, Sean!”
The house was the same dark-green color and the fanlight was still over the door, but his mother’s flower-beds were gone. So, from what he could see, was the jungle-gym his father had built from scavenged pipes in the back yard. He remembered the day Georgie had fallen off the top and chipped a tooth. How he had screamed!
He saw these things (the ones there and the ones gone), and thought of walking over to the woman with the sleeping baby in her arms. He thought of saying Hello, my name is Bill Denbrough. I used to live here. And the woman saying, That’s nice. What else could there be? Could he ask her if
the face he had carved carefully in one of the attic beams—the face he and Georgie sometimes used to throw darts at—was still there? Could he ask her if her kids sometimes slept on the screened-in back porch when the summer nights were especially hot, talking together in low tones as they
watched heat-lightning dance on the horizon? He supposed he might be able to ask some of those things, but he felt he would stutter quite badly if he tried to be charming . . . and did he really want to know the answers to any of those questions? After Georgie died it had become a cold house, and whatever he had come back to Derry for was not here.
So he went on to the corner and turned right, not looking back.
Soon he was on Kansas Street, headed back downtown. He paused for awhile at the fence which bordered the sidewalk, looking down into the Barrens. The fence was the same, rickety wood covered with fading whitewash, and the Barrens looked the same . . . wilder, if anything. The only differences he could see were that the dirty smudge of smoke which had always marked the town dump was gone (the dump had been replaced
with a modern waste-treatment plant), and a long overpass marched across the tangled greenery now—the turnpike extension. Everything else was so similar that he might last have seen it the previous summer: weeds and
bushes sloping down to that flat marshy area on the left and to dense copses of junky-scrubby trees on the right. He could see the stands of what they had called bamboo, the silvery-white stalks twelve and fourteen feet high.
He remembered that Richie had once tried to smoke some of it, claiming it was like the stuff jazz musicians smoked and could get you high. All Richie had gotten was sick.
Bill could hear the trickle of water running in many small streams, could see the sun heliographing off the broader expanse of the Kenduskeag. And the smell was the same, even with the dump gone. The heavy perfume of growing things at the height of their spring strut did not quite mask the smell of waste and human offal. It was faint but unmistakable. A smell of corruption; a whiff of the underside.
That’s where it ended before, and that’s where it’s going to end this time,
Bill thought with a shiver. In there . . . under the city.
He stood awhile longer, convinced that he must see something—some manifestation—of the evil he had come back to Derry to fight. There was nothing. He heard water running, a springlike and vital sound that reminded him of the dam they had built down there. He could see trees and bushes ruffling in the faint breeze. There was nothing else. No sign. He walked on, dusting a faint whitewash stain from his hands as he went.
He kept heading downtown, half-remembering, half-dreaming, and here came another kid—this one a little girl of about ten in high-waisted corduroy pants and a faded red blouse. She was bouncing a ball with one hand and holding a babydoll by its blonde Arnel hair in the other.
“Hey!” Bill said.
She looked up. “What!”
“What’s the best store in Derry? ”
She thought about it. “For me or for anyone? ” “For you, ” Bill said.
“Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes, ” she said with no hesitation whatsoever.
“I beg your pardon? ” Bill asked. “You beg what? ”
“I mean, is that a store name? ”
“Sure, ” she said, looking at Bill as though he might well be enfeebled. “Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. My mom says it’s a junkshop, but I like it. They have old things. Like records you never heard of. Also postcards. It smells like a attic. I have to go home now. Bye. ”
She walked on, not looking back, bouncing her ball and holding her dolly by the hair.
“Hey!” he shouted after her.
She looked back whimsically. “I beg your whatchamacallit? ” “The store! Where is it? ”
She looked back over her shoulder and said, “Just the way you’re going.
It’s at the bottom of Up-Mile Hill. ”
Bill felt that sense of the past folding in on itself, folding in on him. He hadn’t meant to ask that little girl anything; the question had popped out of his mouth like a cork flying from the neck of a champagne bottle.
He descended Up-Mile Hill toward downtown. The warehouses and packing plants he remembered from childhood—gloomy brick buildings with dirty windows from which titanic meaty smells issued—were mostly gone, although the Armour and the Star Beef meat-packing plants were still there. But Hemphill was gone and there was a drive-in bank and a bakery where Eagle Beef and Kosher Meats had been. And there, where the Tracker Brothers’ Annex had stood, was a sign painted in oldfashioned
letters which read, just as the girl with the doll had said, SECONDHAND
ROSE, SECONDHAND CLOTHES. The red brick had been painted a
yellow which had perhaps been jaunty ten or twelve years ago, but was now dingy—a color Audra called urine-yellow.
Bill walked slowly toward it, feeling that sense of déjà-vu settle over him again. Later he told the others he knew what ghost he was going to see
before he actually saw it.
The show-window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes was more than dingy; it was filthy. No Downeast antique shop this, with nifty little
spool-beds and Hoosier cabinets and sets of Depression glassware highlighted by hidden spotlights; this was what his mother called with utter disdain “a Yankee pawnshop. ” The items were strewn in rickrack profusion, heaped aimlessly here, there, and everywhere. Dresses slumped off coathangers. Guitars hung from their necks like executed criminals.
There was a box of 45 rpm records—10c APIECE, the sign read. TWELVE FOR A BUCK. ANDREWS SISTERS, PERRY COMO, JIMMY
ROGERS, OTHERS. There were kids’ outfits and dreadful-looking shoes with a card in front of them which read SECONDS, BUT NOT BAD! $1. 00 A PAIR. There were two TVs that looked blind. A third was casting bleared images of The Brady Bunch out toward the street. A box of old paperbacks, most with stripped covers (2 FOR A QUARTER, 10 FOR A DOLLAR, MORE INSIDE, SOME “HOT”) sat atop a large radio with a filthy white plastic case and a tuning dial as big as an alarm clock. Bunches of plastic flowers sat in dirty vases on a chipped, gouged, dusty dining- room table.
All of these things Bill saw as a chaotic background to the thing his eyes had fixed upon immediately. He stood staring at it with wide unbelieving eyes. Gooseflesh ran madly up and down his body. His forehead was hot,
his hands cold, and for a moment it seemed that all the doors inside would swing wide and he would remember everything.
Silver was in the righthand window.
His kickstand was still gone and rust had flowered on the front and back fenders, but the oogah-horn was still there on the handlebars, its rubber bulb now glazed with cracks and age. The horn itself, which Bill had always kept neatly polished, was dull and pitted. The flat package carrier where Richie had often ridden double was still on the back fender, but it was bent now, hanging by a single bolt. At some point someone had covered the seat with
imitation tiger-skin which was now rubbed and frayed to a point where the stripes were almost indistinguishable.
Silver.
Bill raised an absent hand to wipe away the tears that were running slowly down his cheeks. After he had done a better job with his handkerchief, he went inside.
The atmosphere of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes was musty with age. It was, as the girl had said, a attic smell—but not a good smell, as some attic smells are. This was not the smell of linseed oil rubbed lovingly into the surface of old tables or of ancient plush and velvet. In here was a smell of rotting book-bindings, dirty vinyl cushions that had been half- cooked in the hot suns of summers past, dust, mouse-turds.
From the TV in the window the Brady Bunch cackled and whooped.
Competing with them from somewhere in the back was the radio voice of a disc jockey identifying himself as “your pal Bobby Russell” promising the new album by Prince to the caller who could give the name of the actor who had played Wally on Leave It to Beaver. Bill knew—it had been a kid named Tony Dow—but he didn’t want the new Prince album. The radio
was sitting on a high shelf amid a number of nineteenth-century portraits.
Below it and them sat the proprietor, a man of perhaps forty who was wearing designer jeans and a fishnet tee-shirt. His hair was slicked back and he was thin to the point of emaciation. His feet were cocked up on his desk, which was piled high with ledgers and dominated by an old scrolled cash register. He was reading a paperback novel which Bill thought had never been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It was called Construction Site Studs. On the floor in front of the desk was a barber pole, its stripe revolving up and up into infinity. Its frayed cord wound across the floor to a baseboard plug like a tired snake. The sign in front of it read: A DYEING BREED!
$250.
When the bell over the door jingled, the man behind the desk marked his place with a matchbook cover and looked up. “Help you? ”
“Yes, ” Bill said, and opened his mouth to ask about the bike in the
window. But before he could speak, his mind was suddenly filled with a single haunting sentence, words that drove away all other thought:
He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts. What in the name of God?
(thrusts)
“Looking for anything in particular? ” the proprietor asked. His voice was polite enough, but he was looking at Bill closely.
He’s looking at me, Bill thought, amused in spite of his distress, as if he’s got an idea I’ve been smoking some of that stuff that gets the jazz musicians high.
“Yes, I was ih-ih-interested ih-in—”
(his fists against the posts)
“—in that puh-puh-post—”
“The barber pole, you mean? ” The proprietor’s eyes now showed Bill something which, even in his present confused state, he remembered and hated from his childhood: the anxiety of a man or woman who must listen to a stutterer, the urge to jump in quickly and finish the thought, thus shutting the poor bastard up. But I don’t stutter! I beat it! I DON’T
FUCKING STUTTER! I—
(and still insists)
The words were so clear in his mind that it seemed someone else must be speaking in there, that he was like a man possessed by demons in Biblical
times—a man invaded by some presence from Outside. And yet he recognized the voice and knew it was his own. He felt sweat pop out warmly on his face.
“I could give you
(he sees the ghosts)
a deal on that post, ” the proprietor was saying. “Tell you the truth, I can’t move it at two-fifty. I’d give it to you for one-seventy-five, how’s that? It’s
the only real antique in the place. ”
(post)
“POLE, ” Bill almost screamed, and the proprietor recoiled a little. “Not the pole I’m interested in. ”
“Are you okay, mister? ” the proprietor asked. His solicitous tone belied the expression of hard wariness in his eyes, and Bill saw his left hand leave the desk. He knew, with a flash of something that was really more inductive reasoning than intuition, that there was an open drawer below Bill’s own sight-line, and that the proprietor had almost surely put his hand on a pistol of some type. He was maybe worried about robbery; more likely he was
just worried. He was, after all, clearly gay, and this was the town where the local juveniles had given Adrian Mellon a terminal bath.
(he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts)
It drove out all thought; it was like being insane. Where had it come from?
(he thrusts)
Repeating and repeating.
With a sudden titanic effort, Bill attacked it. He did this by forcing his mind to translate the alien sentence into French. It was the same way he had beaten the stutter as a teenager. As the words marched across his field of thought, he changed them . . . and suddenly he felt the grip of the stutter loosen.
He realized that the proprietor had been saying something. “P-P-Pardon me? ”
“I said if you’re going to have a fit, take it out on the street. I don’t need shit like that in here. ”
Bill drew in a deep breath.
“Let’s start o-over, ” he said. “Pretend I just came i-in. ”
“Okay, ” the proprietor said, agreeably enough. “You just came in. Now what? ”
“The b-bike in the window, ” Bill said. “How much do you want for the bike? ”
“Take twenty bucks. ” He sounded easier now, but his left hand still hadn’t come back into view. “I think it was a Schwinn at one time, but it’s a mongrel now. ” His eye measured Bill. “Big bike. You could ride it yourself. ”
Thinking of the kid’s green skateboard, Bill said, “I think my bike-riding days are o-o-over. ”
The proprietor shrugged. His left hand finally came up again. “Got a boy? ”
“Y-Yes. ”
“How old is he? ” “Eh-Eh-Eleven. ”
“Big bike for an eleven-year-old. ” “Will you take a traveller’s check? ”
“Long as it’s no more than ten bucks over the amount of the purchase. ”
“I can give you a twenty, ” Bill said. “Mind if I make a phone call? ” “Not if it’s local. ”
“It is. ”
“Be my guest. ”
Bill called the Derry Public Library. Mike was there.
“Where are you, Bill? ” he asked, and then immediately: “Are you all right? ”
“I’m fine. Have you seen any of the others? ”
“No. We’ll see them tonight. ” There was a brief pause. “That is, I presume. What can I do you for, Big Bill? ”
“I’m buying a bike, ” Bill said calmly. “I wondered if I could wheel it up to your house. Do you have a garage or something I could store it in? ”
There was silence. “Mike? Are you—”
“I’m here, ” Mike said. “Is it Silver? ”
Bill looked at the proprietor. He was reading his book again . . . or maybe just looking at it and listening carefully.
“Yes, ” he said.
“Where are you? ”
“It’s called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. ”
“All right, ” Mike said. “My place is 61 Palmer Lane. You’d want to go up Main Street—”
“I can find it. ”
“All right, I’ll meet you there. Want some supper? ” “That would be nice. Can you get off work? ”
“No problem. Carole will cover for me. ” Mike hesitated again. “She said that a fellow was in about an hour before I got back here. Said he left looking like a ghost. I got her to describe him. It was Ben. ”
“You sure? ”
“Yeah. And the bike. That’s part of it, too, isn’t it? ”
“Shouldn’t wonder, ” Bill said, keeping an eye on the proprietor, who still appeared to be absorbed in his book.
“I’ll see you at my place, ” Mike said. “Number 61. Don’t forget. ” “I won’t. Thank you, Mike. ”
“God bless, Big Bill. ”
Bill hung up. The proprietor promptly closed his book again. “Got you some storage space, my friend? ”
“Yeah. ” Bill took out his traveller’s checks and signed his name to a twenty. The proprietor examined the two signatures with a care that, in less distracted mental circumstances, Bill would have found rather insulting.
At last the proprietor scribbled a bill of sale and popped the traveller’s check into his old cash register. He got up, put his hands on the small of his back and stretched, then walked to the front of the store. He picked his way around the heaps of junk and almost-junk merchandise with an absent delicacy Bill found fascinating.
He lifted the bike, swung it around, and rolled it to the edge of the display space. Bill laid hold of the handlebars to help him, and as he did another shudder whipped through him. Silver. Again. It was Silver in his hands and
(he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts)
he had to force the thought away because it made him feel faint and strange. “That back tire’s a little soft, ” the proprietor said (it was, in fact, as flat
as a pancake). The front tire was up, but so bald the cord was showing through in places.
“No problem, ” Bill said.
“You can handle it from here? ”
(I used to be able to handle it just fine; now I don’t know)
“I guess so, ” Bill said. “Thanks. ”
“Sure. And if you want to talk about that barber pole, come back. ”
The proprietor held the door for him. Bill walked the bike out, turned left, and started toward Main Street. People glanced with amusement and curiosity at the man with the bald head pushing the huge bike with the flat rear tire and the oogah-horn protruding over the rusty bike-basket, but Bill hardly noticed them. He was marvelling at how well his grownup hands still fitted the rubber handgrips, was remembering how he had always meant to knot some thin strips of plastic, different colors, into the holes in each grip so they would flutter in the wind. He had never gotten around to that.
He stopped at the corner of Center and Main, outside of Mr. Paperback.
He leaned the bike against the building long enough to strip off his sportcoat. Pushing a bike with a flat tire was hard work, and the afternoon had come off hot. He tossed the coat into the basket and went on.
Chain’s rusty, he thought. Whoever had it didn’t take very good care of (him)
it.
He stopped for a moment, frowning, trying to remember just what had happened to Silver. Had he sold it? Given it away? Lost it, perhaps? He couldn’t remember. Instead, that idiotic sentence
(his fists against the posts and still insists)
resurfaced, as strange and out of place as an easy chair on a battlefield, a record-player in a fireplace, a row of pencils protruding from a cement sidewalk.
Bill shook his head. The sentence broke up and dispersed like smoke. He pushed Silver on to Mike’s place.
6
Mike Hanlon Makes a Connection
But first he made supper—hamburgers with sautéed mushrooms and onions and a spinach salad. They had finished working on Silver by then and were more than ready to eat.
The house was a neat little Cape Cod, white with green trim. Mike had just been arriving when Bill pushed Silver up Palmer Lane. He was behind the wheel of an old Ford with rusty rocker panels and a cracked rear
window, and Bill remembered the fact Mike had so quietly pointed out: the six members of the Losers’ Club who left Derry had quit being losers. Mike had stayed behind and was still behind.
Bill rolled Silver into Mike’s garage, which was floored with oiled dirt and was every bit as neat as the house proved to be. Tools hung from pegs, and the lights, shielded with tin cones, looked like the lights which hang over pool tables. Bill leaned the bike against the wall. The two of them looked at it without speaking for a bit, hands in pockets.
“It’s Silver, all right, ” Mike said at last. “I thought you might have been wrong. But it’s him. What are you going to do with him? ”
“Fucked if I know. Have you got a bicycle pump? ”
“Yeah. I think I’ve got a tire-patching kit, too. Are those tubeless tires? ” “They always were. ” Bill bent down to look at the flat tire. “Yeah.
Tubeless. ”
“Getting ready to ride it again? ”
“Of c-course not, ” Bill said sharply. “I just don’t like to see it si-hi- hitting there on a flat. ”
“Whatever you say, Big Bill. You’re the boss. ”
Bill looked around sharply at that, but Mike had gone to the garage’s back wall and was taking down a tire-pump. He got a tin tire-patching kit from one of the cabinets and handed it to Bill, who looked at it curiously. It was as he remembered such things from his childhood: a small tin box of about the same size and shape as those kept by men who roll their own cigarettes, except the top was bright and pebbled—you used it for roughing the rubber around the hole before you put on the patch. The box looked
brand-new, and there was a Woolco price sticker on it that said $7. 23. It seemed to him that when he was a kid such a kit had gone for about a buck- twenty-five.
“You didn’t just have this hanging around, ” Bill said. It wasn’t a question.
“No, ” Mike agreed. “I bought it last week. Out at the mall, as a matter of fact. ”
“You’ve got a bike of your own? ” “No, ” Mike said, meeting his eyes. “You just happened to buy this kit. ”
“Just got the urge, ” Mike agreed, his eyes still on Bill’s. “Woke up thinking it might come in handy. The thought kept coming back all day. So .
. . I got the kit. And here you are to use it. ”
“Here I am to use it, ” Bill agreed. “But like they say on the soaps, what does it all mean, dear? ”
“Ask the others, ” Mike said. “Tonight. ” “Will they all be there, do you think? ”
“I don’t know, Big Bill. ” He paused and added: “I think there’s a chance that all of them won’t be. One or two of them may decide to just creep out of town. Or . . . ” He shrugged.
“What do we do if that happens? ”
“I don’t know. ” Mike pointed to the tire-patching kit. “I paid seven
bucks for that thing. Are you going to do something with it or just look at it? ”
Bill took his sportcoat out of the basket and hung it carefully on an unoccupied wallpeg. Then he turned Silver upside down so that he rested on his seat and began to carefully rotate the rear tire. He didn’t like the rusty way the axle squeaked, and remembered the almost silent click of the ball- bearings in the kid’s skateboard. A little 3-in-1 oil would fix that right up,
he thought. Wouldn’t hurt to oil the chain, either. It’s rusty as hell. And
playing cards. It needs playing cards on the spokes. Mike would have cards, I bet. The good ones. Bikes, with the celluloid coating that made them so stiff and so slippery that the first time you tried to shuffle them they always sprayed all over the floor. Playing cards, sure, and clothespins to hold them
—
He stopped, suddenly cold.
What in the name of Jesus are you thinking of?
“Something wrong, Bill? ” Mike asked softly.
“Nothing. ” His fingers touched something small and round and hard. He got his nails under it and pulled. A small tack came out of the tire. “Here’s the cuh-cuh-culprit, ” he said, and it rose in his mind again, strange, unbidden, and powerful: He thrusts his fists against the posts and still
insists he sees the ghosts. But this time the voice, his voice, was followed by his mother’s voice, saying: Try again, Billy. You almost had it that time. And Andy Devine as Guy Madison’s sidekick Jingles yelling, Hey, Wild Bill, wait for me!
He shivered.
(the posts)
He shook his head. I couldn’t say that without stuttering even now, he thought, and for just a moment he felt that he was on the edge of understanding it all. Then it was gone.
He opened the tire-patching kit and went to work. It took a long time to get it just right. Mike leaned against the wall in a bar of late-afternoon sun, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and his tie yanked down, whistling a tune which Bill finally identified as “She Blinded Me with Science. ”
While he waited for the tire cement to set, Bill had—just for something to do, he told himself—oiled Silver’s chain, sprocket, and axles. It didn’t
make the bike look any better, but when he spun the tires he found that the squeak was gone, and that was satisfying. Silver never would have won any beauty-contests anyway. His one virtue was that he could go like a blue streak.
By that time, five-thirty in the afternoon, he had nearly forgotten Mike was there; he had become completely absorbed in small yet utterly satisfying acts of maintenance. He screwed the nozzle of the pump onto the rear tire’s valve and watched the tire fatten, shooting for the right pressure by guess and by gosh. He was pleased to see that the patch was holding nicely.
When he thought he had it right, he unscrewed the pump-nozzle and was about to turn Silver over when he heard the rapid snap-flutter of playing
cards behind him. He whirled, almost knocking Silver over.
Mike was standing there with a deck of blue-backed Bicycle playing cards in one hand. “Want these? ”
Bill let out a long, shaky sigh. “You’ve got clothespins, too, I suppose? ” Mike took four from the flap pocket of his shirt and held them out.
“Just happened to have them around, I suh-huppose? ” “Yeah, something like that, ” Mike said.
Bill took the cards and tried to shuffle them. His hands shook and the cards sprayed out of his hands. They went everywhere . . . but only two landed face-up. Bill looked at them, then up at Mike. Mike’s gaze was
frozen on the littered playing cards. His lips had pulled back from his teeth.
The two up cards were both the ace of spades.
“That’s impossible, ” Mike said. “I just opened that deck. Look. ” He pointed at the swill-can just inside the garage door and Bill saw the
cellophane wrapper. “How can one deck of cards have two aces of spades? ”
Bill bent down and picked them up. “How can you spray a deck of cards all over the floor and have only two of them land face up? ” he asked. “That’s an even better que—”
He turned the aces over, looked, and then showed them to Mike. One of them was a blueback, the other a redback.
“Holy Christ, Mikey, what have you got us into? ”
“What are you going to do with those? ” Mike asked in a numb voice.
“Why, put them on, ” Bill said, and suddenly he began to laugh. “That’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it? If there are certain preconditions for the use of magic, those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves.
Right? ”
Mike didn’t reply. He watched as Bill went to Silver’s rear wheel and attached the playing cards. His hands were still shaking and it took awhile, but he finally got it done, drew in one tight breath, held it, and spun the rear wheel. The playing cards machine-gunned loudly against the spokes in the garage’s silence.
“Come on, ” Mike said softly. “Come on in, Big Bill. I’ll make us some chow. ”
They had scoffed the burgers and now sat smoking, watching dark begin to unfold from dusk in Mike’s back yard. Bill took out his wallet, found someone’s business card, and wrote upon it the sentence that had plagued him ever since he had seen Silver in the window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. He showed it to Mike, who read it carefully, lips pursed.
“Does it mean anything to you? ” Bill asked.
“ ‘He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts. ’ ” He nodded. “Yes, I know what that is. ”
“Well then, tell me. Or are you going to give me some more cuh-cuh-crap about figuring it out for myself? ”
“No, ” Mike said, “in this case I think it’s okay to tell you. The phrase goes back to English times. It’s a tongue-twister that became a speech
exercise for lispers and stutterers. Your mother kept trying to get you to say it that summer. The summer of 1958. You used to go around mumbling it to yourself. ”
“I did? ” Bill said, and then, slowly, answering his own question: “I did. ” “You must have wanted to please her very much. ”
Bill, who suddenly felt he might cry, only nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
“You never made it, ” Mike told him. “I remember that. You tried like hell but your tang kept getting all tungled up. ”
“But I did say it, ” Bill replied. “At least once. ” “When? ”
Bill brought his fist down on the picnic table hard enough to hurt. “I don’t remember!” he shouted. And then, dully, he said it again: “I just don’t remember. ”
