Around 11:45 P. M. , one of the stews serving first class on the Omaha-to-
Chicago run—United Airlines’ flight 41—gets one hell of a shock. She thinks for a few moments that the man in 1-A has died.
When he boarded at Omaha she thought to herself: “Oh boy, here comes trouble. He’s just as drunk as a lord. ” The stink of whiskey around his head reminded her fleetingly of the cloud of dust that always surrounds the dirty little boy in the Peanuts strip—Pig Pen, his name is. She was nervous about First Service, which is the booze service. She was sure he would ask for a drink—and probably a double. Then she would have to decide whether or not to serve him. Also, just to add to the fun, there have been thunderstorms all along the route tonight, and she is quite sure that at some point the man, a lanky guy dressed in jeans and chambray, would begin upchucking.
But when First Service came along, the tall man ordered nothing more than a glass of club soda, just as polite as you could want. His service light has not gone on, and the stew forgets all about him soon enough, because
the flight is a busy one. The flight is, in fact, the kind you want to forget as soon as it’s over, one of those during which you just might—if you had time
—have a few questions about the possibility of your own survival.
United 41 slaloms between the ugly pockets of thunder and lightning like a good skier going downhill. The air is very rough. The passengers exclaim and make uneasy jokes about the lightning they can see flickering on and off in the thick pillars of cloud around the plane. “Mommy, is God taking
pictures of the angels? ” a little boy asks, and his mother, who is looking rather green, laughs shakily. First Service turns out to be the only service on 41 that night. The seat-belt sign goes on twenty minutes into the flight
and stays on. All the same the stewardesses stay in the aisles, answering the call-buttons which go off like strings of polite-society firecrackers.
“Ralph is busy tonight, ” the head stew says to her as they pass in the aisle; the head stew is going back to tourist with a fresh supply of airsick bags. It is half-code, half-joke. Ralph is always busy on bumpy flights. The plane lurches, someone cries out softly, the stewardess turns a bit and puts out a hand to catch her balance, and looks directly into the staring,
sightless eyes of the man in 1-A.
Oh my dear God he’s dead, she thinks. The liquor before he got on . . . then the bumps . . . his heart . . . scared to death.
The lanky man’s eyes are on hers, but they are not seeing her. They do not move. They are perfectly glazed. Surely they are the eyes of a dead man.
The stew turns away from that awful gaze, her own heart pumping away in her throat at a runaway rate, wondering what to do, how to proceed, and thanking God that at least the man has no seatmate to perhaps scream and start a panic. She decides she will have to notify first the head stew and then the male crew up front. Perhaps they can wrap a blanket around him and close his eyes. The pilot will keep the belt light on even if the air
smooths out so no one can come forward to use the john, and when the other passengers deplane they’ll think he’s just asleep—
These thoughts go through her mind rapidly, and she turns back for a confirming look. The dead, sightless eyes fix upon hers . . . and then the corpse picks up his glass of club soda and sips from it.
Just then the plane staggers again, tilts, and the stew’s little scream of
surprise is lost in other, heartier, cries of fear. The man’s eyes move then— not much, but enough so she understands that he is alive and seeing her.
And she thinks: Why, I thought when he got on that he was in his mid- fifties, but he’s nowhere near that old, in spite of the graying hair.
She goes to him, although she can hear the impatient chime of call-
buttons behind her (Ralph is indeed busy tonight: after their perfectly safe landing at O’Hare thirty minutes from now, the stews will dispose of over seventy airsick bags).
“Everything okay, sir? ” she asks, smiling. The smile feels false, unreal. “Everything is fine and well, ” the lanky man says. She glances at the
first-class stub tacked into the little slot on his seat-back and sees that his name is Hanscom. “Fine and well. But it’s a bit bumpy tonight, isn’t it?
You’ve got your work cut out for you, I think. Don’t bother with me. I’m—” He offers her a ghastly smile, a smile that makes her think of scarecrows flapping in dead November fields. “I’m fine and well. ”
“You looked”
(dead)
“a little under the weather. ”
“I was thinking of the old days, ” he says. “I only realized earlier tonight that there were such things as old days, at least as far as I myself am concerned. ”
More call-buttons chime. “Pardon me, stewardess? ” someone calls nervously.
“Well, if you’re quite sure you’re all right—”
“I was thinking about a dam I built with some friends of mine, ” Ben
Hanscom says. “The first friends I ever had, I guess. They were building the dam when I—”He stops, looks startled, then laughs. It is an honest laugh, almost the carefree laugh of a boy, and it sounds very odd in this jouncing, bucking plane. “—when I dropped in on them. And that’s almost literally what I did. Anyhow, they were making a hellava mess with that dam. I
remember that. ” “Stewardess? ”
“Excuse me, sir—I ought to get about my appointed rounds again. ” “Of course you should. ”
She hurries away, glad to be rid of that gaze—that deadly, almost hypnotic gaze.
Ben Hanscom turns his head to the window and looks out. Lightning goes off inside huge thunderheads nine miles off the starboard wing. In the
stutter-flashes of light, the clouds look like huge transparent brains filled with bad thoughts.
He feels in the pocket of his vest, but the silver dollars are gone. Out of his pocket and into Ricky Lee’s. Suddenly he wishes he had saved at least one of them. It might have come in handy. Of course you could go down to any bank—at least when you weren’t bumping around at twenty-seven thousand feet you could—and get a handful of silver dollars, but you
couldn’t do anything with the lousy copper sandwiches the government was trying to pass off as real coins these days. And for werewolves and vampires
and all manner of things that squirm by starlight, it was silver you wanted; honest silver. You needed silver to stop a monster. You needed—
He closed his eyes. The air around him was full of chimes. The plane rocked and rolled and bumped and the air was full of chimes. Chimes?
No . . . bells.
It was bells, it was the bell, the bell of all bells, the one you waited for all year once the new wore off school again, and that always happened by the end of the first week. The bell, the one that signalled freedom again, the
apotheosis of all school bells.
Ben Hanscom sits in his first-class seat, suspended amid the thunders at twenty-seven thousand feet, his face turned to the window, and he feels the wall of time grow suddenly thin; some terrible/wonderful peristalsis has begun to take place. He thinks: My God, I am being digested by my own past.
The lightning plays fitfully across his face, and although he does not know it, the day has just turned. May 28th, 1985, has become May 29th
over the dark and stormy country that is western Illinois tonight; farmers backsore with plantings sleep like the dead below and dream their
quicksilver dreams and who knows what may move in their barns and their cellars and their fields as the lightning walks and the thunder talks? No one knows these things; they know only that power is loose in the night, and the air is crazy with the big volts of the storm.
But it’s bells at twenty-seven thousand feet as the plane breaks into the clear again, as its motion steadies again; it is bells; it is the bell as Ben Hanscom sleeps; and as he sleeps the wall between past and present
disappears completely and he tumbles backward through years like a man falling down a deep well—Wells’s Time Traveller, perhaps, falling with a broken iron rung in one hand, down and down into the land of the
Morlocks, where machines pound on and on in the tunnels of the night. It’s 1981, 1977, 1969; and suddenly he is here, here in June of 1958; bright summerlight is everywhere and behind sleeping eyelids Ben Hanscom’s
pupils contract at the command of his dreaming brain, which sees not the darkness which lies over western Illinois but the bright sunlight of a June day in Derry, Maine, twenty-seven years ago.
Bells.
The bell.
School.
School is.
School is
2
out!
The sound of the bell went burring up and down the halls of Derry School, a big brick building which stood on Jackson Street, and at its sound the children in Ben Hanscom’s fifth-grade classroom raised a spontaneous cheer—and Mrs. Douglas, usually the strictest of teachers, made no effort to quell them. Perhaps she knew it would have been impossible.
“Children!” she called when the cheer died. “May I have your attention for a final moment? ”
Now a babble of excited chatter, mixed with a few groans, rose in the classroom. Mrs. Douglas was holding their report cards in her hand.
“I sure hope I pass!” Sally Mueller said chirpily to Bev Marsh, who sat in the next row. Sally was bright, pretty, vivacious. Bev was also pretty, but
there was nothing vivacious about her this afternoon, last day of school or not. She sat looking moodily down at her penny-loafers. There was a fading yellow bruise on one of her cheeks.
“I don’t give a shit if I do or not, ” Bev said.
Sally sniffed. Ladies don’t use such language, the sniff said. Then she turned to Greta Bowie. It had probably only been the excitement of the bell signalling the end of another school-year that had caused Sally to slip and speak to Beverly anyhow, Ben thought. Sally Mueller and Greta Bowie both came from rich families with houses on West Broadway while Bev came to school from one of those slummy apartment buildings on Lower Main Street. Lower Main Street and West Broadway were only a mile and a half apart, but even a kid like Ben knew that the real distance was like the
distance between Earth and the planet Pluto. All you had to do was look at Beverly Marsh’s cheap sweater, her too-big skirt that probably came from the Salvation Army thrift-box, and her scuffed penny-loafers to know just how far one was from the other. But Ben still liked Beverly better—a lot
better. Sally and Greta had nice clothes, and he guessed they probably had their hair permed or waved or something every month or so, but he didn’t think that changed the basic facts at all. They could get their hair permed every day and they’d still be a couple of conceited snots.
He thought Beverly was nicer . . . and much prettier, although he never in a million years would have dared say such a thing to her. But still, sometimes, in the heart of winter when the light outside seemed yellow- sleepy, like a cat curled up on a sofa, when Mrs. Douglas was droning on about mathematics (how to carry down in long division or how to find the common denominator of two fractions so you could add them) or reading
the questions from Shining Bridges or talking about tin deposits in Paraguay, on those days when it seemed that school would never end and it didn’t matter if it didn’t because all the world outside was slush . . . on
those days Ben would sometimes look sideways at Beverly, stealing her face, and his heart would both hurt desperately and somehow grow brighter at the same time. He supposed he had a crush on her, or was in love with her, and that was why it was always Beverly he thought of when the
Penguins came on the radio singing “Earth Angel”—“my darling dear / love you all the time . . . ” Yeah, it was stupid, all right, sloppy as a used Kleenex, but it was all right, too, because he would never tell. He thought that fat boys were probably only allowed to love pretty girls inside. If he told anyone how he felt (not that he had anyone to tell), that person would probably laugh until he had a heart-attack. And if he ever told Beverly, she would either laugh herself (bad), or make retching noises of disgust (worse).
“Now please come up as soon as I call your name. Paul Anderson . . . Carla Bordeaux . . . Greta Bowie . . . Calvin Clark . . . Cissy Clark . . . ”
As she called their names, Mrs. Douglas’s fifth-grade class came forward one by one (except for the Clark twins, who came together as always, hand in hand, indistinguishable except for the length of their white-blonde hair and the fact that she wore a dress while he wore jeans), took their buff- colored report cards with the American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance on the front and the Lord’s Prayer on the back, walked sedately out of the classroom . . . and then pounded down the hall to where the big front doors had been chocked open. And then they simply ran out into summer and
were gone: some on bikes, some skipping, some riding invisible horses and
slapping their hands against the sides of their thighs to manufacture hoofbeats, some with arms slung about each other, singing “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school” to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic. ”
“Marcia Fadden . . . Frank Frick . . . Ben Hanscom . . . ”
He rose, stealing his last glance at Beverly Marsh for the summer (or so he thought then), and went forward to Mrs. Douglas’s desk, an eleven-year- old kid with a can roughly the size of New Mexico—said can packed into a pair of horrid new bluejeans that shone little darts of light from the copper rivets and went whssht-whssht-whssht as his big thighs brushed together.
His hips swung girlishly. His stomach slid from side to side. He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt although the day was warm. He almost always wore baggy sweatshirts because he was deeply ashamed of his chest and had been since the first day of school after the Christmas vacation, when he had worn one of the new Ivy League shirts his mother had given him, and Belch Huggins, who was a sixthgrader, had cawed: “Hey, you guys! Look it what Santy Claus brought Ben Hanscom for Christmas! A big set of titties!” Belch had nearly collapsed with the deliciousness of his wit. Others had laughed as well—a few of them girls. If a hole leading into the underworld had opened before him at that very moment, Ben would have dropped into it without a sound . . . or perhaps with the faintest murmur of gratitude.
Since that day he wore sweatshirts. He had four of them—the baggy brown, the baggy green, and two baggy blues. It was one of the few things on which he had managed to stand up to his mother, one of the few lines he had ever, in the course of his mostly complacent childhood, felt compelled to draw in the dust. If he had seen Beverly Marsh giggling with the others that day, he supposed he would have died.
“It’s been a pleasure having you this year, Benjamin, ” Mrs. Douglas said as she handed him his report card.
“Thank you, Mrs. Douglas. ”
A mocking falsetto wavered from somewhere at the back of the room: “Sank-ooo, Missus Dougwiss. ”
It was Henry Bowers, of course. Henry was in Ben’s fifth-grade class instead of in the sixth grade with his friends Belch Huggins and Victor Criss because he had been kept back the year before. Ben had an idea that Bowers was going to stay back again. His name had not been called when Mrs.
Douglas handed out the rank-cards, and that meant trouble. Ben was uneasy about this, because if Henry did stay back again, Ben himself would be partly responsible . . . and Henry knew it.
During the year’s final tests the week before, Mrs. Douglas had reseated them at random by drawing their names from a hat on her desk. Ben had ended up sitting next to Henry Bowers in the last row. As always, Ben curled his arm around his paper and then bent close to it, feeling the
somehow comforting press of his gut against his desk, licking his Be-Bop pencil occasionally for inspiration.
About halfway through Tuesday’s examination, which happened to be math, a whisper drifted across the aisle to Ben. It was as low and uncarrying and expert as the whisper of a veteran con passing a message in the prison
exercise yard: “Let me copy. ”
Ben had looked to his left and directly into the black and furious eyes of Henry Bowers. Henry was a big boy even for twelve. His arms and legs
were thick with farm-muscle. His father, who was reputed to be crazy, had a little spread out at the end of Kansas Street, near the Newport town line, and Henry put in at least thirty hours a week hoeing, weeding, planting, digging rocks, cutting wood, and reaping, if there was anything to reap.
Henry’s hair was cut in an angry-looking flattop short enough for the white of his scalp to show through. He Butch-Waxed the front with a tube
he always carried in the hip pocket of his jeans, and as a result the hair just above his forehead looked like the teeth of an oncoming power-mower. An odor of sweat and Juicy Fruit gum always hung about him. He wore a pink motorcycle jacket with an eagle on the back to school. Once a fourthgrader was unwise enough to laugh at that jacket. Henry had turned on the little squirt, limber as a weasel and quick as an adder, and double-pumped the squirt with one work-grimed fist. The squirt lost three front teeth. Henry got a two-week vacation from school. Ben had hoped, with the unfocused yet burning hope of the downtrodden and terrorized, that Henry would be expelled instead of suspended. No such luck. Bad pennies always turned up. His suspension over, Henry had swaggered back into the schoolyard, balefully resplendent in his pink motorcycle jacket, hair Butch-Waxed so heavily that it seemed to scream up from his skull. Both eyes bore the puffed, colorful traces of the beating his crazy father had administered for “fighting in the playyard. ” The traces of the beating eventually faded; for
the kids who had to somehow coexist with Henry at Derry, the lesson did not. To the best of Ben’s knowledge, no one had said anything about Henry’s pink motorcycle jacket with the eagle on the back since then.
When he whispered grimly at Ben to let him copy, three thoughts had gone skyrocketing through Ben’s mind—which was every bit as lean and quick as his body was obese—in a space of seconds. The first was that if Mrs. Douglas caught Henry cheating answers off his paper, both of them would get zeros on their tests. The second was that if he didn’t let Henry
copy, Henry would almost surely catch him after school and administer the fabled double-pump to him, probably with Huggins holding one of his arms and Criss holding the other.
These were the thoughts of a child, and there was nothing surprising about that, because he was a child. The third and last thought, however, was more sophisticated—almost adult.
He might get me, all right. But maybe I can keep out of his way for the last week of school. I’m pretty sure I can, if I really try. And he’ll forget over the summer, I think. Yeah. He’s pretty stupid. If he flunks this test,
maybe he’ll stay back again. And if he stays back I’ll get ahead of him. I won’t be in the same room with him anymore. I’ll get to junior high
before he does. I I might be free.
“Let me copy, ” Henry whispered again. His black eyes were now blazing, demanding.
Ben shook his head and curled his arm more tightly around his paper. “I’ll get you, fatboy, ” Henry whispered, a little louder now. His paper
was so far an utter blank save for his name. He was desperate. If he flunked his exams and stayed back again, his father would beat his brains out. “You let me copy or I’ll get you bad. ”
Ben shook his head again, his jowls quivering. He was scared, but he was also determined. He realized that for the first time in his life he had consciously committed himself to a course of action, and that also frightened him, although he didn’t exactly know why—it would be long
years before he would realize it was the cold-bloodedness of his calculations, the careful and pragmatic counting of the cost, with its
intimations of onrushing adulthood, that had scared him even more than Henry had scared him. Henry he might be able to dodge. Adulthood, where
he would probably think in such a way almost all the time, would get him in the end.
“Is someone talking back there? ” Mrs. Douglas had said then, very clearly. “If so, I want it to stop right now. ”
Silence had prevailed for the next ten minutes; young heads remained studiously bent over examination sheets which smelled of fragrant purple mimeograph ink, and then Henry’s whisper had floated across the aisle again, thin, just audible, chilling in the calm assurance of its promise:
“You’re dead, fatboy. ”
3
Ben took his rank-card and escaped, grateful to whatever gods there are for eleven-year-old fatboys that Henry Bowers had not, by virtue of alphabetical order, been allowed to escape the classroom first so he could lay for Ben outside.
He did not run down the corridor like the other children. He could run, and quite fast for a kid his size, but he was acutely aware of how funny he looked when he did. He walked fast, though, and emerged from the cool book-smelling hall and into the bright June sunshine. He stood with his face turned up into that sunshine for a moment, grateful for its warmth and his freedom. September was a million years from today. The calendar might say something different, but what the calendar said was a lie. The summer would be much longer than the sum of its days, and it belonged to him. He felt as tall as the Standpipe and as wide as the whole town.
Someone bumped him—bumped him hard. Pleasant thoughts of the summer lying before him were driven from Ben’s mind as he tottered wildly for balance on the edge of the stone steps. He grabbed the iron railing just in time to save himself from a nasty tumble.
“Get out of my way, you tub of guts. ” It was Victor Criss, his hair combed back in an Elvis pompadour and gleaming with Brylcreem. He went down the steps and along the walk to the front gate, hands in the
pockets of his jeans, shirt-collar turned up hood-style, cleats on his engineer boots dragging and tapping.
Ben, his heart still beating rapidly from his fright, saw that Belch
Huggins was standing across the street, having a butt. He raised a hand to Victor and passed him the cigarette when Victor joined him. Victor took a drag, handed it back to Belch, then pointed to where Ben stood, now halfway down the steps. He said something and they both broke up. Ben’s face flamed dully. They always got you. It was like fate or something.
“You like this place so well you’re gonna stand here all day? ” a voice said at his elbow.
Ben turned, and his face became hotter still. It was Beverly Marsh, her auburn hair a dazzling cloud around her head and upon her shoulders, her eyes a lovely gray-green. Her sweater, pushed to her elbows, was frayed around the neck and almost as baggy as Ben’s sweatshirt. Too baggy, certainly, to tell if she was getting any chestworks yet, but Ben didn’t care; when love comes before puberty, it can come in waves so clear and so
powerful that no one can stand against its simple imperative, and Ben made no effort to do so now. He simply gave in. He felt both foolish and exalted, as miserably embarrassed as he had ever been in his life . . . and yet inarguably blessed. These hopeless emotions mixed in a heady brew that left him feeling both sick and joyful.
“No, ” he croaked. “Guess not. ” A large grin spread across his face. He knew how idiotic it must look, but he could not seem to pull it back.
“Well, good. Cause school’s out, you know. Thank God. ”
“Have . . . ” Another croak. He had to clear his throat, and his blush deepened. “Have a nice summer, Beverly. ”
“You too, Ben. See you next year. ”
She went quickly down the steps and Ben saw everything with his lover’s eye: the bright tartan of her skirt, the bounce of her red hair against the back of her sweater, her milky complexion, a small healing cut across the back of one calf, and (for some reason this last caused another wave of feeling to sweep him so powerfully he had to grope for the railing again; the feeling
was huge, inarticulate, mercifully brief; perhaps a s*xual pre-signal, meaningless to his body, where the endocrine glands still slept almost
without dreaming, yet as bright as summer heat-lightning) a bright golden ankle-bracelet she wore just above her right loafer, winking back the sun in brilliant little flashes.
A sound—some sort of sound—escaped him. He went down the steps
like a feeble old man and stood at the bottom, watching until she turned left and disappeared beyond the high hedge that separated the schoolyard from the sidewalk.
4
He only stood there for a moment, and then, while the kids were still streaming past in yelling, running groups, he remembered Henry Bowers and hurried around the building. He crossed the little-kids’ playground, running his fingers across the swing-chains to make them jingle and stepping over the teetertotter boards. He went out the much smaller gate which gave on Charter Street and headed off to the left, never looking back at the stone pile where he had spent most of his weekdays over the last nine months. He stuffed his rank-card in his back pocket and started to whistle. He was wearing a pair of Keds, but so far as he could tell, their soles never touched the sidewalk for eight blocks or so.
School had let out just past noon; his mother would not be home until at least six, because on Fridays she went right to the Shop ’n Save after work. The rest of the day was his.
He went down to McCarron Park for awhile and sat under a tree, not doing anything but occasionally whispering “I love Beverly Marsh” under his breath, feeling more lightheaded and romantic each time he said it. At one point, as a bunch of boys drifted into the park and began choosing up sides for a scratch baseball game, he whispered the words “Beverly
Hanscom” twice, and then had to put his face into the grass until it cooled his burning cheeks.
Shortly after that he got up and headed across the park toward Costello Avenue. A walk of five more blocks would take him to the Public Library, which, he supposed, had been his destination all along. He was almost out of the park when a sixthgrader named Peter Gordon saw him and yelled: “Hey, tits! Wanna play? We need somebody to be right-field!” There was an explosion of laughter. Ben escaped it as fast as he could, hunching his neck down into his collar like a turtle drawing into its shell.
Still, he considered himself lucky, all in all; on another day the boys might have chased him, maybe just to rank him out, maybe to roll him in
the dirt and see if he would cry. Today they were too absorbed in getting the game going—whether or not you could use fingers or get topsies when you threw the bat for first picks, which team would get their guaranteed last ups, all the rest. Ben happily left them to the arcana preceding the first ballgame of the summer and went on his way.
Three blocks down Costello he spied something interesting, perhaps even profitable, under someone’s front hedge. Glass gleamed through the ripped side of an old paper bag. Ben hooked the bag out onto the sidewalk with his foot. It seemed his luck really was in. There were four beer bottles and four big soda bottles inside. The biggies were worth a nickel each, the
Rheingolds two pennies. Twenty-eight cents under someone’s hedge, just waiting for some kid to come along and scoff it up. Some lucky kid.
“That’s me, ” Ben said happily, having no idea what the rest of the day had in store. He got moving again, holding the bag by the bottom so it wouldn’t break open. The Costello Avenue Market was a block farther down the street, and Ben turned in. He swapped the bottles for cash and most of the cash for candy.
He stood at the penny-candy window, pointing, delighted as always by the ratcheting sound the sliding door made when the storekeeper slid it
along its track, which was lined with ball-bearings. He got five red licorice whips and five black, ten rootbeer barrels (two for a penny), a nickel strip of buttons (five to a row, five rows on a nickel strip, and you ate them right off the paper), a packet of Likem Ade, and a package of Pez for his Pez- Gun at home.
Ben walked out with a small brown paper sack of candy in his hand and four cents in the right front pocket of his new jeans. He looked at the brown bag with its load of sweetness and a thought suddenly tried to surface
(you keep eating this way Beverly Marsh is never going to look at you)
but it was an unpleasant thought and so he pushed it away. It went easily enough; this was a thought used to being banished.
If someone had asked him, “Ben, are you lonely? , ” he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams; he had his Revell models; he had a gigantic set of Lincoln Logs and built all
sorts of stuff with them. His mother had exclaimed more than once that Ben’s Lincoln Logs houses looked better than some real ones that came from blueprints. He had a pretty good Erector Set, too. He was hoping for
the Super Set when his birthday came around in October. With that one you could build a clock that really told time and a car with real gears in it.
Lonely? he might have asked in return, honestly foozled. Huh? What?
A child blind from birth doesn’t even know he’s blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but
loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it. It simply was, like his double-jointed thumb or the funny little jag inside one of his front teeth, the little jag his tongue began running over whenever he was nervous.
Beverly was a sweet dream; the candy was a sweet reality. The candy was his friend. So he told the alien thought to take a hike, and it went quietly, without causing any fuss whatsoever. And between the Costello Avenue Market and the library, he gobbled all of the candy in the sack. He
honestly meant to save the Pez for watching TV that night—he liked to load them into the little plastic Pez-Gun’s handgrip one by one, liked to hear the accepting click of the small spring inside, and liked most of all to shoot them into his mouth one by one, like a kid committing suicide by sugar.
Whirlybirds was on tonight, with Kenneth Tobey as the fearless helicopter pilot, and Dragnet, where the cases were true but the names had been changed to protect the innocent, and his favorite cop show of all time,
Highway Patrol, which starred Broderick Crawford as Highway Patrolman Dan Matthews. Broderick Crawford was Ben’s personal hero. Broderick Crawford was fast, Broderick Crawford was mean, Broderick Crawford took absolutely no shit from nobody
. . . and best of all, Broderick Crawford was fat.
He arrived at the corner of Costello and Kansas Street, where he crossed to the Public Library. It was really two buildings—the old stone structure in front, built with lumber-baron money in 1890, and the new low sandstone building behind, which housed the Children’s Library. The adult library in front and the Children’s Library behind were connected by a glass corridor.
This close to downtown, Kansas Street was one-way, so Ben only looked in one direction—right—before crossing. If he had looked left, he would
have gotten a nasty shock. Standing in the shade of a big old oak tree on the lawn of the Derry Community House a block down were Belch Huggins, Victor Criss, and Henry Bowers.
5
“Let’s get him Hank. ” Victor was almost panting.
Henry watched the fat little prick scutter across the street; his belly bouncing, the cowlick at the back of his head springing back and forth like a goddam Slinky, his ass wiggling like a girl’s inside his new bluejeans. He estimated the distance between the three of them here on the Community House lawn and Hanscom, and between Hanscom and the safety of the library. He thought they could probably get him before he made it inside,
but Hanscom might start screaming. He wouldn’t put it past the little pansy. If he did, an adult might interfere, and Henry wanted no interference. The Douglas bitch had told Henry he had flunked both English and math. She
was passing him, she said, but he would have to take four weeks of summer make-up. Henry would rather have stayed back. If he’d stayed back, his father would have beaten him up once. With Henry at school four hours a day for four weeks of the farm’s busiest season, his father was apt to beat him up half a dozen times, maybe even more. He was reconciled to this grim future only because he intended to pass everything on to that fat little babyfag this afternoon.
With interest.
“Yeah, let’s go, ” Belch said.
“We’ll wait for him to come out. ”
They watched Ben open one of the big double doors and go inside, and then they sat down and smoked cigarettes and told travelling-salesman
jokes and waited for him to come back out.
Eventually, Henry knew, he would. And when he did, Henry was going to make him sorry he was ever born.
6
Ben loved the library.
He loved the way it was always cool, even on the hottest day of a long hot summer; he loved its murmuring quiet, broken only by occasional whispers, the faint thud of a librarian stamping books and cards, or the riffle of pages being turned in the Periodicals Room, where the old men hung out, reading newspapers which had been threaded into long sticks. He loved the quality of the light, which slanted through the high narrow windows in the
afternoons or glowed in lazy pools thrown by the chain-hung globes on winter evenings while the wind whined outside. He liked the smell of the books—a spicy smell, faintly fabulous. He would sometimes walk through
the adult stacks, looking at the thousands of volumes and imagining a world of lives inside each one, the way he sometimes walked along his street in
the burning smoke-hazed twilight of a late-October afternoon, the sun only a bitter orange line on the horizon, imagining the lives going on behind all the windows—people laughing or arguing or arranging flowers or feeding kids or pets or their own faces while they watched the boobtube. He liked the way the glass corridor connecting the old building with the Children’s Library was always hot, even in the winter, unless there had been a couple of cloudy days; Mrs. Starrett, the head children’s librarian, told him that
was caused by something called the greenhouse effect. Ben had been delighted with the idea. Years later he would build the hotly debated BBC communications center in London, and the arguments might rage for a thousand years and still no one would know (except for Ben himself) that the communications center was nothing but the glass corridor of the Derry Public Library stood on end.
He liked the Children’s Library as well, although it had none of the shadowy charm he felt in the old library, with its globes and curving iron
staircases too narrow for two people to pass upon them—one always had to back up. The Children’s Library was bright and sunny, a little noisier in
spite of the LET’S BE QUIET, SHALL WE? signs that were posted around. Most of the noise usually came from Pooh’s Corner, where the little kids went to look at picturebooks. When Ben came in today, story hour had just
begun there. Miss Davies, the pretty young librarian, was reading “The Three Billy Goats Gruff. ”
“Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge? ”
Miss Davies spoke in the low, growling tones of the troll in the story.
Some of the little ones covered their mouths and giggled, but most only watched her solemnly, accepting the voice of the troll as they accepted the voices of their dreams, and their grave eyes reflected the eternal fascination of the fairytale: would the monster be bested . . . or would it feed?
Bright posters were tacked everywhere. Here was a good cartoon kid who had brushed his teeth until his mouth foamed like the muzzle of a mad dog; here was a bad cartoon kid who was smoking cigarettes (WHEN I
GROW UP I WANT TO BE SICK A LOT, JUST LIKE MY DAD, it said
underneath); here was a wonderful photograph of a billion tiny pinpoints of light flaring in darkness. The motto beneath said:
ONE IDEA LIGHTS A THOUSAND CANDLES.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
There were invitations to JOIN THE SCOUTING EXPERIENCE. A poster advancing the idea that THE GIRLS’ CLUBS OF TODAY BUILD THE WOMEN OF TOMORROW. There were softball sign-up sheets and Community House Children’s Theater sign-up sheets. And, of course, one inviting kids to JOIN THE SUMMER READING PROGRAM. Ben was a big fan of the summer reading program. You got a map of the United States when you signed up. Then, for every book you read and made a report on, you got a state sticker to lick and put on your map. The sticker came
complete with info like the state bird, the state flower, the year admitted to
the Union, and what presidents, if any, had ever come from that state. When you got all forty-eight stuck on your map, you got a free book. Helluva good deal. Ben planned to do just as the poster suggested: “Waste no time, sign up today. ”
Conspicuous amid this bright and amiable riot of color was a simple stark poster taped to the checkout desk—no cartoons or fancy photographs here,
just black print on white poster-paper reading:
REMEMBER THE CURFEW.
7 P. M.
DERRY POLICE DEPARTMENT
Just looking at it gave Ben a chill. In the excitement of getting his rank- card, worrying about Henry Bowers, talking with Beverly, and starting summer vacation, he had forgotten all about the curfew, and the murders.
People argued about how many there had been, but everyone agreed that there had been at least four since last winter—five if you counted George Denbrough (many held the opinion that the little Denbrough boy’s death must have been some kind of bizarre freak accident). The first everyone
was sure of was Betty Ripsom, who had been found the day after Christmas in the area of turnpike construction on Outer Jackson Street. The girl, who was thirteen, had been found mutilated and frozen into the muddy earth.
This had not been in the paper, nor was it a thing any adult had spoken of to Ben. It was just something he had picked up around the corners of overheard conversations.
About three and a half months later, not long after the trout-fishing season had begun, a fisherman working the bank of a stream twenty miles east of Derry had hooked onto something he believed at first to be a stick. It had turned out to be the hand, wrist, and first four inches of a girl’s forearm. His hook had snagged this awful trophy by the web of flesh between the thumb and first finger.
The State Police had found the rest of Cheryl Lamonica seventy yards farther downstream, caught in a tree that had fallen across the stream the
previous winter. It was only luck that the body had not been washed into the Penobscot and then out to sea in the spring runoff.
The Lamonica girl had been sixteen. She was from Derry but did not attend school; three years before she had given birth to a daughter, Andrea.
She and her daughter lived at home with Cheryl’s parents. “Cheryl was a little wild sometimes but she was a good girl at heart, ” her sobbing father had told police. “Andi keeps asking ‘Where’s my mommy? ’ and I don’t know what to tell her. ”
The girl had been reported missing five weeks before the body was found. The police investigation of Cheryl Lamonica’s death began with a
logical enough assumption: that she had been murdered by one of her boyfriends. She had lots of boyfriends. Many were from the air base up Bangor way. “They were nice boys, most of them, ” Cheryl’s mother said. One of the “nice boys” had been a forty-year-old Air Force colonel with a wife and three children in New Mexico. Another was currently serving time in Shawshank for armed robbery.
A boyfriend, the police thought. Or just possibly a stranger. A s*xfiend. If it was a s*xfiend, he was apparently a fiend for boys as well. In late
April a junior-high teacher on a nature walk with his eighth-grade class had spied a pair of red sneakers and a pair of blue corduroy rompers protruding from the mouth of a culvert on Merit Street. That end of Merit had been blocked off with sawhorses. The asphalt had been bulldozed up the previous fall. The turnpike extension would cross there as well on its way north to Bangor.
The body had been that of three-year-old Matthew Clements, reported missing by his parents only the day before (his picture had been on the front page of the Derry News, a dark-haired little kid grinning brashly into the camera, a Red Sox cap perched on his head). The Clements family lived on Kansas Street, all the way on the other side of town. His mother, so stunned by her grief that she seemed to exist in a glass ball of utter calm, told police that Matty had been riding his tricycle up and down the sidewalk beside the house, which stood on the corner of Kansas Street and Kossuth Lane. She went to put her washing in the drier, and when she next looked out the
window to check on Matty, he was gone. There had only been his overturned trike on the grass between the sidewalk and the street. One of the back wheels was still spinning lazily. As she looked, it came to a stop.
That was enough for Chief Borton. He proposed the seven o’clock
curfew at a special session of the City Council the following evening; it was adopted unanimously and went into effect the next day. Small children were to be watched by a “qualified adult” at all times, according to the story which reported the curfew in the News. At Ben’s school there had been a special assembly a month ago. The Chief went on stage, hooked his thumbs into his gunbelt, and assured the children they had nothing at all to worry about as long as they followed a few simple rules: don’t talk to strangers, don’t accept rides with people unless you know them well, always remember that The Policeman Is Your Friend . . . and obey the curfew.
Two weeks ago a boy Ben knew only vaguely (he was in the other fifth- grade classroom at Derry Elementary) had looked into one of the
stormdrains out by Neibolt Street and had seen what looked like a lot of hair floating around in there. This boy, whose name was either Frankie or Freddy Ross (or maybe Roth), had been out prospecting for goodies with a gadget of his own invention, which he called THE FABULOUS GUM- STICK. When he talked about it you could tell he thought about it like that, in capital letters (and maybe neon, as well). THE FABULOUS GUM-
STICK was a birch branch with a big wad of bubble-gum stuck on the tip. In his spare time Freddy (or Frankie) walked around Derry with it, peering into sewers and drains. Sometimes he saw money— pennies mostly, but
sometimes a dime or even a quarter (he referred to these latter, for some reason known only to him, as “quay-monsters”). Once the money was spotted, Frankie-or-Freddy and THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK would swing into action. One downward poke through the grating and the coin was as good as in his pocket.
Ben had heard rumors of Frankie-or-Freddy and his gum-stick long before the kid had vaulted into the limelight by discovering the body of Veronica Grogan. “He’s really gross, ” a kid named Richie Tozier had
confided to Ben one day during activity period. Tozier was a scrawny kid who wore glasses. Ben thought that without them Tozier probably saw every bit as well as Mr. Magoo; his magnified eyes swam behind the thick
lenses with an expression of perpetual surprise. He also had huge front teeth that had earned him the nickname Bucky Beaver. He was in the same fifth- grade class as Freddy-or-Frankie. “Pokes that gum-stick of his down sewer- drains all day long and then chews the gum from the end of it at night. ”
“Oh gosh, that’s bad!” Ben had exclaimed.
“Dat’s wight, wabbit, ” Tozier said, and walked away.
Frankie-or-Freddy had worked THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK back and forth through the grate of the stormdrain, believing he’d found a wig. He thought maybe he could dry it out and give it to his mother for her birthday, or something. After a few minutes of poking and prodding, just as he was about to give up, a face had floated out of the murky water in the plugged drain, a face with dead leaves plastered to its white cheeks and dirt in its staring eyes.
Freddy-or-Frankie ran home screaming.
Veronica Grogan had been in the fourth grade at the Neibolt Street Church School, which was run by people Ben’s mother called “the Christers. ” She was buried on what would have been her tenth birthday.
After this most recent horror, Arlene Hanscom had taken Ben into the living room one evening and sat beside him on the couch. She picked up his hands and looked intently into his face. Ben looked back, feeling a little uneasy.
“Ben, ” she said presently, “are you a fool? ”
“No, Mamma, ” Ben said, feeling more uneasy than ever. He hadn’t the slightest idea what this was about. He could not remember ever seeing his mamma look so grave.
“No, ” she echoed. “I don’t believe you are. ”
She fell silent for a long time then, not looking at Ben but pensively out the window. Ben wondered briefly if she had forgotten all about him. She was a young woman still—only thirty-two—but raising a boy by herself
had put a mark on her. She worked forty hours a week in the spool-and-bale room at Stark’s Mills in Newport, and after workdays when the dust and lint had been particularly bad, she sometimes coughed so long and hard that Ben would become frightened. On those nights he would lie awake for a long time, looking through the window beside his bed into the darkness, wondering what would become of him if she died. He would be an orphan then, he supposed. He might become a State Kid (he thought that meant you had to go live with farmers who made you work from sunup to sunset), or
he might be sent to the Bangor Orphan Asylum. He tried to tell himself it was foolish to worry about such things, but the telling did absolutely no good. Nor was it just himself he was worried about; he worried for her as well. She was a hard woman, his mamma, and she insisted on having her own way about most things, but she was a good mamma. He loved her very much.
“You know about these murders, ” she said, looking back at last. He nodded.
“At first people thought they were. . . ” She hesitated over the next word, never spoken in her son’s presence before, but the circumstances were unusual and she forced herself. “. . . s*x crimes. Maybe they were and
maybe they weren’t. Maybe they’re over and maybe they’re not. No one
can be sure of anything anymore, except that some crazy man who preys on little children is out there. Do you understand me, Ben? ”
He nodded.
“And you know what I mean when I say they may have been s*x crimes?
”
He didn’t—at least not exactly—but he nodded again. If his mother felt
she had to talk to him about the birds and bees as well as this other business, he thought he would die of embarrassment.
“I worry about you, Ben. I worry that I’m not doing right by you. Ben squirmed and said nothing.
“You’re on your own a lot. Too much, I guess. You—” “Mamma—”
“Hush while I’m talking to you, ” she said, and Ben hushed. “You have to be careful, Benny. Summer’s coming and I don’t want to spoil your vacation, but you have to be careful. I want you in by suppertime every day. What time do we eat supper? ”
“Six o’clock. ”
“Right with Eversharp! So hear what I’m saying: if I set the table and pour your milk and see that there’s no Ben washing his hands at the sink, I’m going to go right away to the telephone and call the police and report you missing. Do you understand that? ”
“Yes, Mamma. ”
“And you believe I mean exactly what I say? ” “Yes. ”
“It would probably turn out that I did it for nothing, if I ever had to do it at all. I’m not entirely ignorant about the ways of boys. I know they get wrapped up in their own games and projects during summer vacation— lining bees back to their hives or playing ball or kick-the-can or whatever. I have a pretty good idea what you and your friends are up to, you see. ”
Ben nodded soberly, thinking that if she didn’t know he had no friends,
she probably didn’t know anywhere near as much about his boyhood as she thought she did. But he would never have dreamed of saying such a thing to her, not in ten thousand years of dreaming.
She took something from the pocket of her housedress and handed it to him. It was a small plastic box. Ben opened it. When he saw what was
inside, his mouth dropped open. “Wow!” he said, his admiration totally unaffected. “Thanks!”
It was a Timex watch with small silver numbers and an imitation-leather band. She had set it and wound it; he could hear it ticking.
“Jeez, it’s the coolest!” He gave her an enthusiastic hug and a loud kiss on the cheek.
She smiled, pleased that he was pleased, and nodded. Then she grew
grave again. “Put it on, keep it on, wear it, wind it, mind it, don’t lose it. ” “Okay. ”
“Now that you have a watch you have no reason to be late home.
Remember what I said: if you’re not on time, the police will be looking for you on my behalf. At least until they catch the bastard who is killing children around here, don’t you dare be a single minute late, or I’ll be on that telephone. ”
“Yes, Mamma. ”
“One other thing. I don’t want you going around alone. You know enough not to accept candy or rides from strangers—we both agree that
you’re no fool—and you’re big for your age, but a grown man, particularly a crazy one, can overpower a child if he really wants to. When you go to the park or the library, go with one of your friends. ”
“I will, Mamma. ”
She looked out the window again and uttered a sigh that was full of trouble. “Things have come to a pretty pass when a thing like this can go on. There’s something ugly about this town, anyway. I’ve always thought so. ” She looked back at him, brows drawn down. “You’re such a wanderer, Ben. You must know almost everyplace in Derry, don’t you? The town part of it, at least. ”
Ben didn’t think he knew anywhere near all the places, but he did know a lot of them. And he was so thrilled by the unexpected gift of the Timex that he would have agreed with his mother that night if she had suggested John Wayne should play Adolf Hitler in a musical comedy about World War II. He nodded.
“You’ve never seen anything, have you? ” she asked. “Anything or anyone. . . well, suspicious? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything that scared you? ”
And in his pleasure over the watch, his feeling of love for her, his small- boy gladness at her concern (which was at the same time a little frightening in its unhidden unabashed fierceness), he almost told her about the thing that had happened last January.
He opened his mouth and then something—some powerful intuition— closed it again.
What was that something, exactly? Intuition. No more than that. . . and no less. Even children may intuit love’s more complex responsibilities from time to time, and to sense that in some cases it may be kinder to remain quiet. That was part of the reason Ben closed his mouth. But there was something else as well, something not so noble. She could be hard, his mamma. She could be a boss. She never called him “fat, ” she called him
“big” (sometimes amplified to “big for his age”), and when there were leftovers from supper she would often bring them to him while he was watching TV or doing his homework, and he would eat them, although
some dim part of him hated himself for doing so (but never his mamma for putting the food before him—Ben Hanscom would not have dared to hate his mamma; God would surely strike him dead for feeling such a brutish,
ungrateful emotion even for a second). And perhaps some even dimmer part of him—the far-off Tibet of Ben’s deeper thoughts—suspected her motives in this constant feeding. Was it just love? Could it be anything else? Surely not. But . . . he wondered. More to the point, she didn’t know he had no friends. That lack of knowledge made him distrust her, made him unsure of what her reaction would be to his story of the thing which had happened to him in January. If anything had happened. Coming in at six and staying in was not so bad, maybe. He could read, watch TV, (eat) build stuff with his
logs and Erector Set. But having to stay in all day as well would be very bad
. . . and if he told her what he had seen—or thought he had seen—in January, she might make him do just that.
So, for a variety of reasons, Ben withheld the story.
“No, Mamma, ” he said. “Just Mr. McKibbon rooting around in other people’s garbage. ”
That made her laugh—she didn’t like Mr. McKibbon, who was a Republican as well as a “Christer”—and her laugh closed the subject. That night Ben had lain awake late, but no thoughts of being cast adrift and
parentless in a hard world troubled him. He felt loved and safe as he lay in
his bed looking at the moonlight which came in through the window and spilled across the bed onto the floor. He alternately put his watch to his ear so he could listen to it tick and held it close to his eyes so he could admire its ghostly radium dial.
He had finally fallen asleep and dreamed he was playing baseball with the other boys in the vacant lot behind Tracker Brothers’ Truck Depot. He
had just hit a bases-clearing home run, swinging from his heels and getting every inch of that little honey, and his cheering teammates met him in a mob at home plate. They pummelled him and clapped him on the back.
They hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him toward the place
where their equipment was scattered. In the dream he was almost bursting with pride and happiness. . . and then he had looked out toward center field, where a chainlink fence marked the boundary between the cindery lot and
the weedy ground beyond that sloped into the Barrens. A figure was standing in those tangled weeds and low bushes, almost out of sight. It held a clutch of balloons—red, yellow, blue, green—in one white-gloved hand.
It beckoned with the other. He couldn’t see the figure’s face, but he could
see the baggy suit with the big orange pompom-buttons down the front and the floppy yellow bow-tie.
It was a clown.
Dat’s wight, wabbit, a phantom voice agreed.
When Ben awoke the next morning he had forgotten the dream but his pillow was damp to the touch . . . as if he had wept in the night.
7
He went up to the main desk in the Children’s Library, shaking the train of thought the curfew sign had begun as easily as a dog shakes water after a swim.
“Hullo, Benny, ” Mrs. Starrett said. Like Mrs. Douglas at school, she genuinely liked Ben. Grownups, especially those who sometimes needed to discipline children as part of their jobs, generally liked him, because he was polite, soft-spoken, thoughtful, sometimes even funny in a very quiet way.
These were all the same reasons most kids thought he was a puke. “You tired of summer vacation yet? ”
Ben smiled. This was a standard witticism with Mrs. Starrett. “Not yet, ” he said, “since summer vacation’s only been going on”—he looked at his watch—“one hour and seventeen minutes. Give me another hour. ”
Mrs. Starrett laughed, covering her mouth so it wouldn’t be too loud. She asked Ben if he wanted to sign up for the summer reading program, and Ben said he did. She gave him a map of the United States and Ben thanked her very much.
He wandered off into the stacks, pulling a book here and there, looking at it, putting it back. Choosing books was serious business. You had to be careful. If you were a grownup you could have as many as you wanted, but kids could only take out three at a time. If you picked a dud, you were stuck with it.
He finally picked out his three—Bulldozer, The Black Stallion, and one that was sort of a shot in the dark: a book called Hot Rod, by a man named Henry Gregor Felsen.
“You may not like this one, ” Mrs. Starrett remarked, stamping the book. “It’s extremely bloody. I urge it on the teenagers, especially the ones who
have just got their driving licenses, because it gives them something to think about. I imagine it slows some of them down for a whole week. ”
“Well, I’ll give it a whirl, ” Ben said, and took his books over to one of
the tables away from Pooh’s Corner, where Big Billy Goat Gruff was in the process of giving a double dose of dickens to the troll under the bridge.
He worked on Hot Rod for awhile, and it was not too shabby. Not too shabby at all. It was about a kid who was a really great driver, but there was this party-pooper cop who was always trying to slow him down. Ben found out there were no speed limits in Iowa, where the book was set. That was sort of cool.
He looked up after three chapters, and his eye was caught by a brand-new display. The poster on top (the library was gung-ho for posters, all right) showed a happy mailman delivering a letter to a happy kid. LIBRARIES ARE FOR WRITING, TOO, the poster said. WHY NOT WRITE A
FRIEND TODAY? THE SMILES ARE GUARANTEED!
Beneath the poster were slots filled with pre-stamped postcards, pre- stamped envelopes, and stationery with a drawing of the Derry Public
Library on top in blue ink. The pre-stamped envelopes were a nickel each, the postcards three cents. The paper was two sheets for a penny.
Ben felt in his pocket. The remaining four cents of his bottle money was still there. He marked his place in Hot Rod and went back to the desk. “May I have one of those postcards, please? ”
“Certainly, Ben. ” As always, Mrs. Starrett was charmed by his grave
politeness and a little saddened by his size. Her mother would have said the boy was digging his grave with a knife and fork. She gave him the card and watched him go back to his seat. It was a table that could seat six, but Ben was the only one there. She had never seen Ben with any of the other boys. It was too bad, because she believed Ben Hanscom had treasures buried inside. He would yield them up to a kind and patient prospector . . . if one ever came along.
8
Ben took out his ballpoint pen, clicked the point down, and addressed the card simply enough: Miss Beverly Marsh, Lower Main Street, Derry, Maine, Zone 2. He did not know the exact number of her building, but his mamma had told him that most postmen had a pretty good idea of who their customers were once they’d been on their beats a little while. If the postman who had Lower Main Street could deliver this card, that would be great. If not, it would just go to the dead-letter office and he would be out three cents. It would certainly never come back to him, because he had no intention of putting his name and address on it.
Carrying the card with the address turned inward (he was taking no chances, even though he didn’t see anyone he recognized), he got a few square slips of paper from the wooden box by the cardfile. He took these back to his seat and began to scribble, to cross out, and then to scribble again.
During the last week of school before exams, they had been reading and writing haiku in English class. Haiku was a Japanese form of poetry, brief, disciplined. A haiku, Mrs. Douglas said, could be just seventeen syllables long—no more, no less. It usually concentrated on one clear image which
was linked to one specific emotion: sadness, joy, nostalgia, happiness . . . love.
Ben had been utterly charmed by the concept. He enjoyed his English classes, although mild enjoyment was generally as far as it went. He could do the work, but as a rule there was nothing in it which gripped him. Yet
there was something in the concept of haiku that fired his imagination. The idea made him feel happy, the way Mrs. Starrett’s explanation of the
greenhouse effect had made him happy. Haiku was good poetry, Ben felt, because it was structured poetry. There were no secret rules. Seventeen
syllables, one image linked to one emotion, and you were out. Bingo. It was clean, it was utilitarian, it was entirely contained within and dependent upon its own rules. He even liked the word itself, a slide of air broken as if along a dotted line by the “k”-sound at the very back of your mouth: haiku.
Her hair, he thought, and saw her going down the school steps again with it bouncing on her shoulders. The sun did not so much glint on it as seem to burn within it.
Working carefully over a twenty-minute period (with one break to go back and get more work-slips), striking out words that were too long, changing, deleting, Ben came up with this:
Your hair is winter fire, January embers.
My heart burns there, too.
He wasn’t crazy about it, but it was the best he could do. He was afraid that if he frigged around with it too long, worried it too much, he would end up getting the jitters and doing something much worse. Or not doing it at all. He didn’t want that to happen. The moment she had taken to speak to him had been a striking moment for Ben. He wanted to mark it in his memory. Probably Beverly had a crush on some bigger boy—a sixth- or
maybe even a seventhgrader, and she would think that maybe that boy had sent the haiku. That would make her happy, and so the day she got it would be marked in her memory. And although she would never know it had been Ben Hanscom who marked it for her, that was all right; he would know.
He copied his completed poem onto the back of the postcard (printing in block letters, as if copying out a ransom note rather than a love poem),
clipped his pen back into his pocket, and stuck the card in the back of Hot Rod.
He got up then, and said goodbye to Mrs. Starrett on his way out. “Goodbye, Ben, ” Mrs. Starrett said. “Enjoy your summer vacation, but
don’t forget about the curfew. ” “I won’t. ”
He strolled through the glassed-in passageway between the two buildings, enjoying the heat there (greenhouse effect, he thought smugly) followed by the cool of the adult library. An old man was reading the News in one of the ancient, comfortably overstuffed chairs in the Reading Room alcove. The headline just below the masthead blazed: DULLES PLEDGES
U. S. TROOPS TO HELP LEBANON IF NEEDED! There was also a
photo of Ike, shaking hands with an Arab in the Rose Garden. Ben’s
mamma said that when the country elected Hubert Humphrey President in 1960, maybe things would get moving again. Ben was vaguely aware that
there was something called a recession going on, and his mamma was afraid she might get laid off.
A smaller headline on the bottom half of page one read POLICE HUNT FOR PSYCHOPATH GOES ON.
Ben pushed open the library’s big front door and stepped out.
There was a mailbox at the foot of the walk. Ben fished the postcard from the back of the book and mailed it. He felt his heartbeat speed up a little as it slipped out of his fingers. What if she knows it’s me, somehow?
Don’t be a stupe, he responded, a little alarmed at how exciting that idea seemed to him.
He walked off up Kansas Street, hardly aware of where he was going and not caring at all. A fantasy had begun to form in his mind. In it, Beverly Marsh walked up to him, her gray-green eyes wide, her auburn hair tied back in a ponytail. I want to ask you a question, Ben, this make-believe girl said in his mind, and you’ve got to swear to tell the truth. She held up the postcard. Did you write this?
This was a terrible fantasy. This was a wonderful fantasy. He wanted it to stop. He didn’t want it to ever stop. His face was starting to burn again.
Ben walked and dreamed and shifted his library books from one arm to the other and began to whistle. You’ll probably think I’m horrible, Beverly said, but I think I want to kiss you. Her lips parted slightly.
Ben’s own lips were suddenly too dry to whistle.
“I think I want you to, ” he whispered, and smiled a dopey, dizzy, and absolutely beautiful grin.
If he had looked down at the sidewalk just then, he would have seen that three other shadows had grown around his own; if he had been listening he would have heard the sound of Victor’s cleats as he, Belch, and Henry closed in. But he neither heard nor saw. Ben was far away, feeling Beverly’s lips slip softly against his mouth, raising his timid hands to touch the dim Irish fire of her hair.
9
Like many cities, small and large, Derry had not been planned—like Topsy, it just growed. City planners never would have located it where it was in the first place. Downtown Derry was in a valley formed by the Kenduskeag Stream, which ran through the business district on a diagonal from southwest to northeast. The rest of the town had swarmed up the sides of
the surrounding hills.
The valley the township’s original settlers came to had been swampy and heavily grown over. The stream and the Penobscot River into which the Kenduskeag emptied were great things for traders, bad ones for those who sowed crops or built their houses too close to them—the Kenduskeag in particular, because it flooded every three or four years. The city was still
prone to flooding in spite of the vast amounts of money spent over the last fifty years to control the problem. If the floods had been caused only by the stream itself, a system of dams might have taken care of things. There were, however, other factors. The Kenduskeag’s low banks were one. The entire area’s logy drainage was another. Since the turn of the century there had been many serious floods in Derry and one disastrous one, in 1931. To
make matters worse, the hills on which much of Derry was built were honeycombed with small streams—Torrault Stream, in which the body of Cheryl Lamonica had been found, was one of them. During periods of heavy rain, they were all apt to overflow their banks. “If it rains two weeks
the whole damn town gets a sinus infection, ” Stuttering Bill’s dad had said once.
The Kenduskeag was caged in a concrete canal two miles long as it passed through downtown. This canal dived under Main Street at the intersection of Main and Canal, becoming an underground river for half a mile or so before surfacing again at Bassey Park. Canal Street, where most of Derry’s bars were ranked like felons in a police lineup, paralleled the Canal on its way out of town, and every few weeks or so the police would have to fish some drunk’s car out of the water, which was polluted to drop- dead levels by sewage and mill wastes. Fish were caught from time to time in the Canal, but they were inedible mutants.
On the northeastern side of town—the Canal side—the river had been managed to at least some degree. A thriving commerce went on all along it in spite of the occasional flooding. People walked beside the Canal,
sometimes hand in hand (if the wind was right, that was; if it was wrong, the stench took much of the romance out of such strolling), and at Bassey Park, which faced the high school across the Canal, there were sometimes Boy Scout campouts and Cub Scout wiener roasts. In 1969 the citizens would be shocked and sickened to discover that hippies (one of them had actually sewed an American flag on the seat of his pants, and that pinko- faggot was busted before you could say Gene McCarthy) were smoking
dope and trading pills up there. By’69 Bassey Park had become a regular open-air pharmacy. You just wait, people said. Somebody’ll get killed before they put a stop to it. And of course someone finally did—a seventeen-year- old boy had been found dead by the Canal, his veins full of almost pure heroin—what the kids called a tight white rail. After that the druggies began to drift away from Bassey Park, and there were even stories that the kid’s ghost was haunting the area. The story was stupid, of course, but if it kept
the speed-freaks and the nodders away, it was at least a useful stupid story.
On the southwestern side of town the river presented even more of a problem. Here the hills had been deeply cut open by the passing of the great glacier and further wounded by the endless water erosion of the Kenduskeag and its webwork of tributaries; the bedrock showed through in many places like the half-unearthed bones of dinosaurs. Veteran employees of the Derry Public Works Department knew that, following the fall’s first hard frost, they could count on a good deal of sidewalk repair on the
southwestern side of town. The concrete would contract and grow brittle and then the bedrock would suddenly shatter up through it, as if the earth meant to hatch something.
What grew best in the shallow soil which remained was plants with
shallow root-systems and hardy natures—weeds and trash-plants, in other words: scruffy trees, thick low bushes, and virulent infestations of poison ivy and poison oak grew everywhere they were allowed a foothold. The southwest was where the land fell away steeply to the area that was known in Derry as the Barrens. The Barrens—which were anything but barren— were a messy tract of land about a mile and a half wide by three miles long. It was bounded by upper Kansas Street on one side and by Old Cape on the other. Old Cape was a low-income housing development, and the drainage was so bad over there that there were stories of toilets and sewer-pipes actually exploding.
The Kenduskeag ran through the center of the Barrens. The city had grown up to the northeast and on both sides of it, but the only vestiges of the city down there were Derry Pumphouse #3 (the municipal sewage-
pumping station) and the City Dump. Seen from the air the Barrens looked like a big green dagger pointing at downtown.
To Ben all this geography mated with geology meant was a vague
awareness that there were no more houses on his right side now; the land had dropped away. A rickety whitewashed railing, about waist-high, ran beside the sidewalk, a token gesture of protection. He could faintly hear running water; it was the sound-track to his continuing fantasy.
He paused and looked out over the Barrens, still imagining her eyes, the clean smell of her hair.
From here the Kenduskeag was only a series of twinkles seen through breaks in the thick foliage. Some kids said that there were mosquitoes as big as sparrows down there at this time of year; others said there was quicksand as you approached the river. Ben didn’t believe it about the mosquitoes, but the idea of quicksand scared him.
Slightly to his left he could see a cloud of circling, diving seagulls: the dump. Their cries reached him faintly. Across the way he could see Derry Heights, and the low roofs of the Old Cape houses closest to the Barrens. To the right of Old Cape, pointing skyward like a squat white finger, was the Derry Standpipe. Directly below him a rusty culvert stuck out of the earth,
spilling discolored water down the hill in a glimmering little stream which disappeared into the tangled trees and bushes.
Ben’s pleasant fantasy of Beverly was suddenly broken by one far more grim: what if a dead hand flopped out of that culvert right now, right this second, while he was looking? And suppose that when he turned to find a phone and call the police, a clown was standing there? A funny clown wearing a baggy suit with big orange puffs for buttons? Suppose—
A hand fell on Ben’s shoulder, and he screamed.
There was laughter. He whirled around, shrinking against the white fence separating the safe, sane sidewalk of Kansas Street from the wildly undisciplined Barrens (the railing creaked audibly), and saw Henry Bowers, Belch Huggins, and Victor Criss standing there.
“Hi, Tits, ” Henry said.
“What do you want? ” Ben asked, trying to sound brave.
“I want to beat you up, ” Henry said. He seemed to contemplate this prospect soberly, even gravely. But oh, his black eyes sparkled. “I got to teach you something, Tits. You won’t mind. You like to learn new things, don’t cha? ”
He reached for Ben. Ben ducked away. “Hold him, you guys. ”
Belch and Victor seized his arms. Ben squealed. It was a cowardly sound, rabbity and weak, but he couldn’t help it. Please God don’t let them make
me cry and don’t let them break my watch, Ben thought wildly. He didn’t know if they would get around to breaking his watch or not, but he was pretty sure he would cry. He was pretty sure he would cry plenty before they were through with him.
“Jeezum, he sounds just like a pig, ” Victor said. He twisted Ben’s wrist. “Don’t he sound like a pig? ”
“He sure do, ” Belch giggled.
Ben lunged first one way and then the other. Belch and Victor went with him easily, letting him lunge, then yanking him back.
Henry grabbed the front of Ben’s sweatshirt and yanked it upward, exposing his belly. It hung over his belt in a swollen droop.
“Lookit that gut!” Henry cried in amazed disgust. “Jesus-please-us!” Victor and Belch laughed some more. Ben looked around wildly for help.
He could see no one. Behind him, down in the Barrens, crickets drowsed
and seagulls screamed.
“You just better quit!” he said. He wasn’t blubbering yet but was close to it. “You just better!”
“Or what? ” Henry asked as if he was honestly interested. “Or what, Tits?
Or what, huh? ”
Ben suddenly found himself thinking of Broderick Crawford, who played Dan Matthews on Highway Patrol—that bastard was tough, that bastard
was mean, that bastard took zero shit from anybody—and then he burst into tears. Dan Mat-thews would have belted these guys right through the fence, down the embankment, and into the puckerbrush. He would have done it with his belly.
“Oh boy, lookit the baby!” Victor chortled. Belch joined in. Henry smiled a little, but his face still held that grave, reflective cast—that look that was
somehow almost sad. It frightened Ben. It suggested he might be in for more than just a beating.
As if to confirm this idea, Henry reached into his jeans pocket and brought out a Buck knife.
Ben’s terror exploded. He had been whipsawing his body futilely to either side; now he suddenly lunged straight forward. There was an instant when he believed he was going to get away. He was sweating heavily, and the boys holding his arms had greasy grips at best. Belch managed to hold on to his right wrist, but just barely. He pulled entirely free of Victor.
Another lunge—
Before he could make it, Henry stepped forward and gave him a shove.
Ben flew backward. The railing creaked more loudly this time, and he felt it give a little under his weight. Belch and Victor grabbed him again.
“Now you hold him, ” Henry said. “You hear me? ”
“Sure, Henry, ” Belch said. He sounded a trifle uneasy. “He ain’t gonna get away. Don’t worry. ”
Henry stepped forward until his flat stomach almost touched Ben’s belly.
Ben stared at him, tears spilling helplessly out of his wide eyes. Caught! I’m caught! a part of his mind yammered. He tried to stop it—he couldn’t think at all with that yammering going on—but it wouldn’t stop. Caught! Caught! Caught!
Henry pulled out the blade, which was long and wide and engraved with his name. The tip glittered in the afternoon sunshine.
“I’m gonna test you now, ” Henry said in that same reflective voice. “It’s exam time, Tits, and you better be ready. ”
Ben wept. His heart thundered madly in his chest. Snot ran out of his
nose and collected on his upper lip. His library books lay in a scatter at his feet. Henry stepped on Bulldozer, glanced down, and dealt it into the gutter with a sideswipe of one black engineer boot.
“Here’s the first question on your exam, Tits. When somebody says ‘Let me copy’ during finals, what are you going to say? ”
“Yes!” Ben exclaimed immediately. “I’m going to say yes! Sure! Okay!
Copy all you want!”
The Buck’s tip slid through two inches of air and pressed against Ben’s stomach. It was as cold as an ice-cube tray just out of the Frigidaire. Ben gasped his belly away from it. For a moment the world went gray. Henry’s mouth was moving but Ben couldn’t tell what he was saying. Henry was
like a TV with the sound turned off and the world was swimming . . . swimming. . .
Don’t you dare faint! the panicky voice shrieked. If you faint he may get mad enough to kill you!
The world came back into some kind of focus. He saw that both Belch and Victor had stopped laughing. They looked nervous. . . almost scared. Seeing that had the effect of a head-clearing slap on Ben. All of a sudden they don’t know what he’s going to do, or how far he might go. However
bad you thought things were, that’s how bad they really are . . . maybe even a little worse. You got to think. If you never did before or never do again, you better think now. Because his eyes say they’re right to look nervous. His eyes say he’s crazy as a bedbug.
“That’s the wrong answer, Tits, ” Henry said. “If just anyone says ‘Let me copy, ’ I don’t give a red fuck what you do. Got it? ”
“Yes, ” Ben said, his belly hitching with sobs. “Yes, I got it. ”
“Well, okay. That’s one wrong, but the biggies are still coming up. You ready for the biggies? ”
“I. . . I guess so. ”
A car came slowly toward them. It was a dusty ’51 Ford with an old man and woman propped up in the front seat like a pair of neglected department store mannequins. Ben saw the old man’s head turn slowly toward him.
Henry stepped closer to Ben, hiding the knife. Ben could feel its point
dimpling his flesh just above his bellybutton. It was still cold. He didn’t see how that could be, but it was.
“Go ahead, yell, ” Henry said. “You’ll be pickin your fuckin guts off your sneakers. ” They were close enough to kiss. Ben could smell the sweet smell of Juicy Fruit gum on Henry’s breath.
The car passed and continued on down Kansas Street, as slow and serene as the pace car in the Tournament of Roses Parade.
“All right, Tits, here’s the second question. If I say ‘Let me copy’ during finals, what are you going to say? ”
“Yes. I’ll say yes. Right away. ”
Henry smiled. “That’s good. You got that one right, Tits. Now here’s the third question: how am I going to be sure you never forget that? ”
“I . . . I don’t know, ” Ben whispered.
Henry smiled. His face lit up and was for a moment almost handsome. “I know!” he said, as if he had discovered a great truth. “I know, Tits! I’ll
carve my name on your big fat gut!”
Victor and Belch abruptly began laughing again. For a moment Ben felt a species of bewildered relief, thinking it had all been nothing but make-
believe—a little shuck-and-jive the three of them had whomped up to scare the living hell out of him. But Henry Bowers wasn’t laughing, and Ben suddenly understood that Victor and Belch were laughing because they
were relieved. It was obvious to both of them that Henry couldn’t be serious. Except Henry was.
The Buck knife slid upward, smooth as butter. Blood welled in a bright red line on Ben’s pallid skin.
“Hey!” Victor cried. The word came out muffled, in a startled gulp. “Hold him!” Henry snarled. “You just hold him, hear me? ” Now there
was nothing grave and reflective on Henry’s face; now it was the twisted face of a devil.
“Jeezum-crow Henry don’t really cut im!” Belch screamed, and his voice was high, almost a girl’s voice.
Everything happened fast then, but to Ben Hanscom it all seemed slow; it all seemed to happen in a series of shutter-clicks, like action stills in a Life- magazine photo-essay. His panic was gone. He had discovered something
inside him suddenly, and because it had no use for panic, that something just ate the panic whole.
In the first shutterclick, Henry had snatched his sweatshirt all the way up to his nipples. Blood was pouring from the shallow vertical cut above his bellybutton.
In the second shutterclick, Henry drew the knife down again, operating fast, like a lunatic battle-surgeon under an aerial bombardment. Fresh blood flowed.
Backward, Ben thought coldly as blood flowed down and pooled between the waistband of his jeans and his skin. Got to go backward. That’s the only direction I can get away in. Belch and Victor weren’t holding him anymore. In spite of Henry’s command, they had drawn away. They had drawn away in horror. But if he ran, Bowers would catch him.
In the third shutterclick, Henry connected the two vertical slashes with a short horizontal line. Ben could feel blood running into his underpants now, and a sticky snail-trail was creeping down his left thigh.
Henry leaned back momentarily, frowning with the studied concentration of an artist painting a landscape. After H comes E, Ben thought, and that
was all it took to get him moving. He pulled forward a little bit and Henry shoved him back again. Ben pushed with his legs, adding his own force to Henry’s. He hit the whitewashed railing between Kansas Street and the drop into the Barrens. As he did, he raised his right foot and planted it in Henry’s belly. This was not a retaliatory act; Ben only wanted to increase his backward force. And yet when he saw the expression of utter surprise on Henry’s face, he was filled with a clear savage joy—a feeling so intense that for a split second he thought the top of his head was going to come off.
Then there was a cracking, splintering sound from the railing. Ben saw Victor and Belch catch Henry before he could fall on his ass in the gutter next to the remains of Bulldozer, and then Ben was falling backward into space. He went with a scream that was half a laugh.
Ben hit the slope on his back and buttocks just below the culvert he had spotted earlier. It was a good thing he landed below it; if he had landed on it, he might well have broken his back. As it was, he landed on a thick cushion of weeds and bracken and barely felt the impact. He did a backward somersault, feet and legs snapping over his head. He landed sitting up and went sliding down the slope backward like a kid on a big green Chute-the-Chute, his sweatshirt pulled up around his neck, his hands
grabbing for purchase and doing nothing but yanking out tuft after tuft of bracken and witchgrass.
He saw the top of the embankment (it seemed impossible that he had just been standing up there) receding with crazy cartoon speed. He saw Victor and Belch, their faces round white O’s, staring down at him. He had time to mourn his library books. Then he fetched up against something with agonizing force and nearly bit his tongue in half.
It was a downed tree, and it checked Ben’s fall by nearly breaking his left leg. He clawed his way back up the slope a little bit, pulling his leg free with a groan. The tree had stopped him about halfway down. Below, the
bushes were thicker. Water falling from the culvert ran over his hands in thin streams.
There was a shriek from above him. Ben looked up again and saw Henry Bowers come flying over the drop, his knife clenched between his teeth. He landed on both feet, body thrown backward at a steep angle so he would not overbalance. He skidded to the end of a gigantic set of footprints and then began to run down the embankment in a series of gangling kangaroo leaps.
“I’n goin oo kill ooo, Its!” Henry was shrieking around the knife, and Ben didn’t need a U. N. translator to tell him Henry was saying I’m going to kill you, Tits.
“I’n goin 00 huckin kill 000!”
Now, with that cold general’s eye he had discovered up above on the sidewalk, Ben saw what he had to do. He managed to gain his feet just before Henry arrived, the knife now in his hand and held straight out in
front of him like a bayonet. Ben was peripherally aware that the left leg of his jeans was shredded, and his leg was bleeding much more heavily than his stomach . . . but it was supporting him, and that meant it wasn’t broken. At least he hoped that’s what it meant.
Ben crouched slightly to maintain his precarious balance, and as Henry grabbed at him with one hand and swept the knife in a long flat arc with the other, Ben stepped aside. He lost his balance, but as he fell down he stuck out his shredded left leg. Henry’s shins struck it, and his legs were booted out from under him with great efficiency. For a moment Ben gaped, his terror overcome with a mixture of awe and admiration. Henry Bowers appeared to be flying exactly like Superman over the fallen tree where Ben had stopped. His arms were straight out in front of him, the way George
Reeves held his arms out on the TV show. Only George Reeves always looked like flying was as natural as taking a bath or eating lunch on the back porch. Henry looked like someone had shoved a hot poker up his ass. His mouth was opening and closing. A string of saliva was shooting back from one corner of it, and as Ben watched, it splatted against the lobe of Henry’s ear.
Then Henry crashed back to earth. The knife flew out of his hand. He rolled over on one shoulder, landed on his back, and slid away into the
bushes with his legs splayed into a V. There was a yell. A thud. And then silence.
Ben sat, dazed, looking at the matted place in the bushes where Henry had done his disappearing act. Suddenly rocks and pebbles began to bounce by him. He looked up again. Victor and Belch were now descending the embankment. They were moving more carefully than Henry, and hence
more slowly, but they would reach him in thirty seconds or less if he didn’t do something.
He moaned. Would this lunacy never end?
Keeping his eye on them, he clambered over the downed tree and began to scramble down the embankment, panting harshly. He had a stitch in his side. His tongue hurt like hell. The bushes were now almost as tall as Ben himself. The randy green smell of stuff growing out of control filled his nose. He could hear running water somewhere close, chuckling over stones and rilling between them.
His feet slipped and here he went again, rolling and sliding, smashing the back of his hand against a jutting rock, shooting through a patch of thorns that hooked blue-gray puffs of cotton from his sweatshirt and little divots of meat from his hands and cheeks.
He slammed to a jarring halt sitting up, with his feet in the water. Here was a little curving stream which wound its way into a thick stand of second-growth trees to his right; it looked as dark as a cave in there. He looked to his left and saw Henry Bowers lying on his back in the middle of
the stream. His half-open eyes showed only whites. Blood trickled from one ear and ran toward Ben in delicate threads.
Oh my God I killed him! Oh my God I’m a murderer! Oh my God!
Forgetting that Belch and Victor were behind him (or perhaps understanding they would lose all interest in beating the shit out of him
when they discovered their Fearless Leader was dead), Ben splashed twenty feet upstream to where Henry lay, his shirt in ribbons, his jeans soaked black, one shoe gone. Ben was vaguely aware that there was precious little left of his own clothes and that his body was one big rattletrap of aches and pains. His left ankle was the worst; it had already puffed tight against his soaking sneaker and he was favoring it so badly that he was really not walking but lurching like a sailor on shore for the first time after a long sea voyage.
He bent over Henry Bowers. Henry’s eyes popped wide open. He grabbed Ben’s calf with one scraped and bloody hand. His mouth worked, and although nothing but a series of whistling aspirations emerged, Ben could still make out what he was saying: Kill you, you fat shit.
Henry was trying to pull himself up, using Ben’s leg as a pole. Ben pulled backward frantically. Henry’s hand slipped down, then off. Ben flew backward, whirling his arms, and fell on his ass for a record-breaking third time in the last four minutes. He also bit his tongue again. Water splashed up around him. A rainbow glimmered for an instant in front of Ben’s eyes. Ben didn’t give a fuck about the rainbow. He didn’t give a fuck about finding a pot of gold. He would settle for his miserable fat life.
Henry rolled over. Tried to stand. Fell back. Managed to get to his hands and knees. And finally tottered to his feet. He stared at Ben with those black eyes. The front of his flattop now leaned this way and that, like cornhusks after a high wind has passed through.
Ben was suddenly angry. No—this was more than being angry. He was infuriated. He had been walking with his library books under his arm, having an innocent little daydream about kissing Beverly Marsh, bothering nobody. And look at this. Just look. Pants shredded. Left ankle maybe broken, badly sprained for sure. Leg all cut up, tongue all cut up, Henry goddam Bowers’s monogram on his stomach. How about all that happy crappy, sports fans? But it was probably the thought of his library books, for which he was liable, that drove him to charge Henry Bowers. His lost library books and his mental image of how reproachful Mrs. Starrett’s eyes would become when he told her. Whatever the reason—cuts, sprain, library books, or even the thought of the soggy and probably illegible rank-card in his back pocket—it was enough to get him moving. He lumbered forward,
squashy Keds spatting in the shallow water, and kicked Henry squarely in the balls.
Henry uttered a horrid rusty scream that sent birds beating up from the trees. He stood spraddle-legged for a moment, hands clasping his crotch, staring unbelievingly at Ben. “Ug, ” he said in a small voice.
“Right, ” Ben said.
“Ug, ” Henry said, in an even smaller voice. “Right, ” Ben said again.
Henry sank slowly back to his knees, not so much falling as folding up.
He was still looking at Ben with those unbelieving black eyes. “Ug. ”
“Damn right, ” Ben said.
Henry fell on his side, still clutching his testicles, and began to roll slowly from side to side.
“Ug!” Henry moaned. “My balls. Ug! Oh you broke my balls. Ug-ug!” He was now beginning to gain a little force, and Ben started to back away a step at a time. He was sickened by what he had done, but he was also filled with a kind of righteous, paralyzed fascination. “Ug!—my fuckin sack—
ug-UG!—oh my fuckin BALLS!”
Ben might have remained in the area for an untold length of time—
perhaps even until Henry recovered enough to come after him—but just then a rock struck him above the right ear with such a deep, drilling pain that, until he felt warm blood flowing again, Ben thought he had been stung by a wasp.
He turned and saw the other two striding up the middle of the stream toward him. They each had a handful of water-rounded rocks. Victor pegged one and Ben heard it whistle past his ear. He ducked and another struck his right knee, making him yell with surprised hurt. A third bounced off his right cheekbone, and that eye filled with water.
He scrambled for the far bank and climbed it as fast as he could, grabbing onto protruding roots and hauling on handfuls of bushes. He made it to the top (one final stone struck his buttock as he pulled himself up) and took a quick look back over his shoulder.
Belch was kneeling beside Henry while Victor stood half a dozen feet away, firing stones; one the size of a baseball clipped through the man-high bushes beside Ben. He had seen enough; in fact, he had seen much more
than enough. Worst of all, Henry Bowers was getting up again. Like Ben’s own Timex watch, Henry could take a licking and keep on ticking. Ben turned and smashed his way into the bushes, lumbering along in a direction he hoped was west. If he could cross to the Old Cape side of the Barrens, he could beg a dime off somebody and take the bus home. And when he got
there he would lock the door behind him and bury these tattered bloody
clothes in the trash and this crazy dream would finally be over. Ben thought of himself sitting in his chair in the living room, freshly tubbed, wearing his fuzzy red bathrobe, watching Daffy Duck cartoons on The Mighty Ninety and drinking milk through a strawberry Flav-R-Straw. Hold that thought, he told himself grimly, and kept lumbering along.
Bushes sprang into his face. Ben pushed them aside. Thorns reached and clawed. He tried to ignore them. He came to a flat area of ground that was black and mucky. A thick stand of bamboolike growth spread across it and a fetid smell rose from the earth. An ominous thought (quicksand)
slipped across the foreground of his mind like a shadow as he looked at the sheen of standing water deeper into the grove of bamboo-stuff. He
didn’t want to go in there. Even if it wasn’t quicksand, the mud would suck his sneakers off. He turned right instead, running along the front of the
bamboo-grove and finally into a patch of real woods.
The trees, mostly firs, were thick, growing everywhere, battling each other for a little space and sun, but there was less undergrowth and he could move faster. He was no longer sure what direction he was moving in, but still thought he was, on measure, a little ahead of the game. The Barrens
were enclosed by Derry on three sides and bounded by the half-finished turnpike extension on the fourth. Sooner or later he would come out
somewhere.
His stomach throbbed painfully, and he pulled up the remains of his sweatshirt for a look. He winced and drew a whistle of air in over his teeth. His belly looked like a grotesque Christmas-tree ball, all caked red blood and smeared green from his slide down the embankment. He pulled the sweatshirt down again. Looking at that mess made him feel like blowing lunch.
Now he heard a low humming noise from ahead—it was one steady note just above the low range of his hearing. An adult, intent only on getting the hell out of there (the mosquitoes had found Ben now, and while nowhere
near as big as sparrows, they were pretty big), would have ignored it, or simply not heard it at all. But Ben was a boy, and he was already getting over his fright. He swerved to his left and pushed through some low laurel bushes. Beyond them, sticking out of the ground, were the top three feet of a cement cylinder about four feet wide. It was capped with a vented iron manhole cover. The cover was stamped with the words DERRY SEWER
DEPT. The sound—this close it was more a drone than a hum—was coming from someplace deep inside.
Ben put one eye to a venthole but could see nothing. He could hear that drone, and water running down there someplace, but that was all. He took a breath, got a whiff of a sour smell that was both dank and shitty, and drew back with a wince. It was a sewer, that was all. Or maybe a combined sewer and drainage-tunnel—there were plenty of those in flood-conscious Derry. No big deal. But it had given him a funny sort of chill. Part of it was seeing the handiwork of man in all this overgrown jumble of wilderness, but he supposed part of it was the shape of the thing itself—that concrete cylinder jutting out of the ground. Ben had read H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine the year before, first the Classics Comics version and then the whole book. This cylinder with its vented iron cap reminded him of the wells which lead down into the country of the slumped and horrible Morlocks.
He moved away from it quickly, trying to find west again. He got to a
little clearing and turned until his shadow was as directly behind him as he could get it. Then he headed off in a straight line.
Five minutes later he heard more running water ahead, and voices. Kids’ voices.
He stopped to listen, and that was when he heard snapping branches and other voices behind him. They were perfectly recognizable. They belonged to Victor, Belch, and the one and only Henry Bowers.
The nightmare was not over yet, it seemed. Ben looked around for a place to go to earth.
10
He came out of his hiding place about two hours later, dirtier than ever, but a little refreshed. Incredible as it seemed to him, he had dozed off.
When he had heard the three of them behind him, coming after him still, Ben had come dangerously close to freezing up completely, like an animal caught in the headlamps of an oncoming truck. A paralytic drowsiness began to steal over him. The idea of simply lying down, curling up into a ball like a hedgehog, and letting them do whatever they felt they had to occurred to him. It was a crazy idea, but it also seemed like a strangely good idea.
But instead Ben began to move toward the sound of the running water and those other kids. He tried to untangle their voices and get the sense of what they were saying—anything to shake off that scary paralysis of the spirit. Some project. They were talking about some project. One or two of the voices were even a little familiar. There was a splash, followed by a
burst of good-natured laughter. The laughter filled Ben with a kind of stupid longing, and made him more aware of his dangerous position than anything else had done.
If he was going to be caught, there was no need to let these kids in for a dose of his medicine. Ben turned right again. Like many large people, he was remarkably light-footed. He passed close enough to the boys to see
their shadows moving back and forth between him and the bright water, but they neither saw him nor heard him. Gradually their voices began to fall behind.
He came to a narrow path which had been beaten down to the bare earth. Ben considered it for a moment, then shook his head a little. He crossed it and plunged into the undergrowth again. He moved more slowly now, pushing bushes aside rather than stampeding through them. He was still moving roughly parallel to the stream the other kids had been playing beside. Even through the intervening bushes and trees he could see it was much wider than the one into which he and Henry had fallen.
Here was another of those concrete cylinders, barely visible amid a snarl of blackberry creepers, humming quietly to itself. Beyond, an embankment dropped off to the stream, and here an old, gnarled elm tree leaned crookedly out over the water. Its roots, half-exposed by bank erosion, looked like a snarl of dirty hair.
Hoping there wouldn’t be bugs or snakes but too tired and numbly frightened to really care, Ben had worked his way between the roots and into a shallow cave beneath. He leaned back. A root jabbed him like an angry finger. He shifted his position a little and it supported him quite nicely.
Here came Henry, Belch, and Victor. He had thought they might be fooled into following the path, but no such luck. They stood close by him for a moment—any closer and he could have reached out of his hiding place and touched them.
“Bet them little snotholes back there saw him, ” Belch said.
“Well, let’s go find out, ” Henry replied, and they headed back the way they had come. A few moments later Ben heard him roar: “What the fuck you kids doin here? ”
There was some sort of reply, but Ben couldn’t tell what it was: the kids were too far away, and this close the river—it was the Kenduskeag, of
course—was too loud. But he thought the kid sounded scared. Ben could sympathize.
Then Victor Criss bellowed something Ben hadn’t understood at all: “What a fuckin baby dam!”
Baby dam? Baby damn? Or maybe Victor had said what a damn bunch of babies and Ben had misheard him.
“Let’s break it!” Belch proposed.
There were yells of protest followed by a scream of pain. Someone began to cry. Yes, Ben could sympathize. They hadn’t been able to catch him (or at least not yet), but here was another bunch of little kids for them to take out their mad on.
“Sure, break it, ” Henry said.
Splashes. Yells. Big moronic gusts of laughter from Belch and Victor. An agonized infuriated cry from one of the little kids.
“Don’t gimme any of your shit, you stuttering little freak, ” Henry Bowers said. “I ain’t takin no more shit from nobody today. ”
There was a splintering crack. The sound of running water downstream grew louder and roared briefly before quieting to its former placid chuckle. Ben suddenly understood. Baby dam, yes, that was what Victor had said.
The kids—two or three of them it had sounded like when he passed by— had been building a dam. Henry and his friends had just kicked it apart. Ben
even thought he knew who one of the kids was. The only “stuttering little freak” he knew from Derry School was Bill Denbrough, who was in the other fifth-grade classroom.
“You didn’t have to do that!” a thin and fearful voice cried out, and Ben recognized that voice as well, although he could not immediately put a face with it. “Why did you do that? ”
“Because I felt like it, fucknuts!” Henry roared back. There was a meaty thud. It was followed by a scream of pain. The scream was followed by weeping.
“Shut up, ” Victor said. “Shut up that crying, kid, or I’ll pull your ears down and tie em under your chin. ”
The crying became a series of choked snuffles.
“We’re going, ” Henry said, “but before we do, I want to know one thing.
You seen a fat kid in the last ten minutes or so? Big fat kid all bloody and cut up? ”
There was a reply too brief to be anything but no.
“You sure? ” Belch asked. “You better be, mushmouth. ” “I-I-I’m sh-sh-sure, ” Bill Denbrough replied.
“Let’s go, ” Henry said. “He probably waded acrost back that way. ” “Ta-ta, boys, ” Victor Criss called. “It was a real baby dam, believe me.
You’re better off without it. ”
Splashing sounds. Belch’s voice came again, but farther away now. Ben couldn’t make out the words. In fact, he didn’t want to make out the words. Closer by, the boy who had been crying now resumed. There were comforting noises from the other boy. Ben had decided there was just the two of them, Stuttering Bill and the weeper.
He half-sat, half-lay where he was, listening to the two boys by the river and the fading sounds of Henry and his dinosaur friends crashing toward
the far side of the Barrens. Sunlight flicked at his eyes and made little coins of light on the tangled roots above and around him. It was dirty in here, but it was also cozy . . . safe. The sound of running water was soothing. Even
the sound of the crying kid was sort of soothing. His aches and pains had faded to a dull throb, and the sound of the dinosaurs had faded out completely. He would wait awhile, just to be sure they weren’t coming back, and then he would make tracks.
Ben could hear the throb of the drainage machinery coming through the earth—could even feel it: a low, steady vibration that went from the ground to the root he was leaning against and then into his back. He thought of the Morlocks again, of their naked flesh; he imagined it would smell like the dank and shitty air that had come up through the ventholes of that iron cap. He thought of their wells driven deep into the earth, wells with rusty ladders bolted to their sides. He dozed, and at some point his thoughts became a dream.
11
It wasn’t Morlocks he dreamed of. He dreamed of the thing which had happened to him in January, the thing which he hadn’t quite been able to tell his mother.
It had been the first day of school after the long Christmas break. Mrs.
Douglas had asked for a volunteer to stay after and help her count the books that had been turned in just before the vacation. Ben had raised his hand.
“Thank you, Ben, ” Mrs. Douglas had said, favoring him with a smile of such brilliance that it warmed him down to his toes.
“Suckass, ” Henry Bowers remarked under his breath.
It had been the sort of Maine winter day that is both the best and the worst: cloudless, eye-wateringly bright, but so cold it was a little frightening. To make the ten-degree temperature worse, there was a strong wind to give the cold a bitter cutting edge.
Ben counted books and called out numbers; Mrs. Douglas wrote them down (not bothering to double-check his work even on a random basis, he was proud to note), and then they both carried the books down to the
storage room through halls where radiators clanked dreamily. At first the school had been full of sounds: slamming locker doors, the clackety-clack of Mrs. Thomas’s typewriter in the office, the slightly off-key choral
renditions of the glee club upstairs, the nervous thud-thud-thud of
basketballs from the gym and the scrooch and thud of sneakers as players drove toward the baskets or cut turns on the polished wood floor.
Little by little these sounds ceased, until, as the last set of books was totted up (one short, but it hardly mattered, Mrs. Douglas sighed—they
were all holding together on a wing and a prayer), the only sounds were the radiators, the faint whissh-whissh of Mr. Fazio’s broom as he pushed colored sawdust up the hall floor, and the howl of the wind outside.
Ben looked toward the book room’s one narrow window and saw that the light was fading rapidly from the sky. It was four o’clock and dusk was at hand. Membranes of dry snow blew around the icy jungle gym and swirled between the teetertotters, which were frozen solidly into the ground. Only
the thaws of April would break those bitter winter-welds. He saw no one at all on Jackson Street. He looked a moment longer, expecting a car to roll through the Jackson-Witcham intersection, but none did. Everyone in Derry save himself and Mrs. Douglas might be dead or fled, at least from what he could see from here.
He looked toward her and saw, with a touch of real fright, that she was feeling almost exactly the same things he was feeling himself. He could tell by the look in her eyes. They were deep and thoughtful and far off, not the eyes of a schoolteacher in her forties but those of a child. Her hands were folded just below her breasts, as if in prayer.
I’m scared, Ben thought, and she’s scared, too. But what are we really scared of?
He didn’t know. Then she looked at him and uttered a short, almost embarrassed laugh. “I’ve kept you too late, ” she said. “I’m sorry, Ben. ”
“That’s okay. ” He looked down at his shoes. He loved her a tittle—not with the frank unquestioning love he had lavished on Miss Thibodeau, his first-grade teacher . . . but he did love her.
“If I drove, I’d give you a ride, ” she said, “but I don’t. My husband’s going to pick me up around quarter past five. If you’d care to wait, we could—”
“No thanks, ” Ben said. “I ought to get home before then. ” This was not really the truth, but he felt a queer aversion to the idea of meeting Mrs.
Douglas’s husband.
“Maybe your mother could—”
“She doesn’t drive, either, ” Ben said. “I’ll be all right. It’s only a mile home. ”
“A mile’s not far when it’s nice, but it can be a very long way in this weather. You’ll go in somewhere if it gets too cold, won’t you, Ben? ”
“Aw, sure. I’ll go into Costello’s Market and stand by the stove a little while, or something. Mr. Gedreau doesn’t mind. And I got my snowpants. My new Christmas scarf, too. ”
Mrs. Douglas looked a little reassured . . . and then she glanced toward the window again. “It just looks so cold out there, ” she said. “So. . . so inimical. ”
He didn’t know the word but he knew exactly what she meant. Something just happened—what?
He had seen her, he realized suddenly, as a person instead of just a teacher. That was what had happened. Suddenly he had seen her face in an entirely different way, and because he did, it became a new face—the face of a tired poet. He could see her going home with her husband, sitting
beside him in the car with her hands folded as the heater hissed and he talked about his day. He could see her making them dinner. An odd thought crossed his mind and a cocktail-party question rose to his lips: Do you have children, Mrs. Douglas?
“I often think at this time of the year that people really weren’t meant to live this far north of the equator, ” she said. “At least not in this latitude. ” Then she smiled and some of the strangeness either went out of her face or his eye—he was able to see her, at least partially, as he always had. But you’ll never see her that way again, not completely, he thought, dismayed.
“I’ll feel old until spring, and then I’ll feel young again. It’s that way every year. Are you sure you’ll be all right, Ben? ”
“I’ll be fine. ”
“Yes, I suppose you will. You’re a good boy, Ben. ”
He looked back at his toes, blushing, loving her more than ever.
In the hallway Mr. Fazio said: “Be careful of de fros’bite, boy, ” without looking up from his red sawdust.
“I will. ”
He reached his locker, opened it, and yanked on his snowpants. He had been painfully unhappy when his mother insisted he wear them again this winter on especially cold days, thinking of them as baby clothes, but he was glad to have them this afternoon. He walked slowly toward the door, zipping his coat, yanking the drawstrings of his hood tight, pulling on his
mittens. He went out and stood on the snowpacked top step of the front stairs for a moment, listening as the door snicked closed—and locked— behind him.
Derry School brooded under a bruised skin of sky. The wind blew steadily. The snap-hooks on the flagpole rope rattled a lonesome tattoo against the steel pole itself. That wind cut into the warm and unprepared flesh of Ben’s face at once, numbing his cheeks.
Be careful of de fros’bite, boy.
He quickly pulled his scarf up until he looked like a small, pudgy
caricature of Red Ryder. That darkening sky had a fantastical sort of beauty, but Ben did not pause to admire it; it was too cold for that. He got going.
At first the wind was at his back and things didn’t seem so bad; in fact, it actually seemed to be helping him along. At Canal Street, however, he had to turn right and almost fully into the wind. Now it seemed to be holding him back . . . as if it had business with him. His scarf helped a little, but not enough. His eyes throbbed and the moisture in his nose froze to a crack- glaze. His legs were going numb. Several times he stuck his mittened hands into his armpits to warm them up. The wind whooped and screamed,
sometimes sounding almost human.
Ben felt both frightened and exhilarated. Frightened because he could now understand stories he had read, such as Jack London’s “To Build a
Fire, ” where people actually froze to death. It would be all too possible to freeze to death on a night like this, a night when the temperature would drop to fifteen below.
The exhilaration was hard to explain. It was a lonely feeling—a
somehow melancholy feeling. He was outside; he passed on the wings of the wind, and none of the people beyond the brightly lighted squares of
their windows saw him. They were inside, inside where there was light and warmth. They didn’t know he had passed them; only he knew. It was a secret thing.
The moving air burned like needles, but it was fresh and clean. White smoke jetted from his nose in neat little streams.
And as sundown came, the last of the day a cold yellowy-orange line on the western horizon, the first stars cruel diamond-chips glimmering in the sky overhead, he came to the Canal. He was only three blocks from home
now, and eager to feel the heat on his face and legs, moving the blood again, making it tingle.
Still—he paused.
The Canal was frozen in its concrete sluice like a frozen river of rose- milk, its surface humped and cracked and cloudy. It was moveless yet completely alive in this harshly puritanical winterlight; it had its own
unique and difficult beauty.
Ben turned the other way—southwest. Toward the Barrens. When he looked in this direction, the wind was at his back again. It made his
snowpants ripple and flap. The Canal ran straight between its concrete walls for perhaps half a mile; then the concrete was gone and the river sprawled
its way into the Barrens, at this time of the year a skeletal world of icy brambles and jutting naked branches.
A figure was standing on the ice down there.
Ben stared at it and thought: There may be a man down there, but can he be wearing what it looks like he’s wearing? It’s impossible, isn’t it?
The figure was dressed in what appeared to be a white-silver clown suit. It rippled around him in the polar wind. There were oversized orange shoes on his feet. They matched the pompom buttons which ran down the front of his suit. One hand grasped a bundle of strings which rose to a bright bunch of balloons, and when Ben observed that the balloons were floating in his direction, he felt unreality wash over him more strongly. He closed his eyes, rubbed them, opened them. The balloons still appeared to be floating toward him.
He heard Mr. Fazio’s voice in his head. Be careful of de fros’bite, boy.
It had to be a hallucination or a mirage brought on by some weird trick of the weather. There could be a man down there on the ice; he supposed it
was even technically possible he could be wearing a clown suit. But the balloons couldn’t be floating toward Ben, into the wind. Yet that was just what they appeared to be doing.
Ben! the clown on the ice called. Ben thought that voice was only in his mind, although it seemed he heard it with his ears. Want a balloon, Ben?
There was something so evil in that voice, so awful, that Ben wanted to run away as fast as he could, but his feet seemed as welded to this sidewalk as the teetertotters in the schoolyard were welded to the ground.
They float, Ben! They all float! Try one and see!
The clown began walking along the ice toward the Canal bridge where Ben stood. Ben watched him come, not moving; he watched as a bird
watches an approaching snake. The balloons should have burst in the
intense cold, but they did not; they floated above and ahead of the clown when they should have been streaming out behind him, trying to escape back into the Barrens. . . where, some part of Ben’s mind assured him, this creature had come from in the first place.
Now Ben noticed something else.
Although the last of the daylight had struck a rosy glow across the ice of the Canal, the clown cast no shadow. None at all.
You’ll like it here, Ben, the clown said. Now it was close enough so Ben could hear the clud-clud sound its funny shoes made as they advanced over the uneven ice. You’ll like it here, I promise, all the boys and girls I meet
like it here because it’s like Pleasure Island in Pinocchio and Never-Never Land in Peter Pan; they never have to grow up and that’s what all the
kiddies want! So come on! See the sights, have a balloon, feed the elephants, ride the Chute-the-Chutes! Oh you’ll like it and oh Ben how you’ll float—
And in spite of his fear, Ben found that part of him did want a balloon. Who in all the world owned a balloon which would float into the wind? Who had even heard of such a thing? Yes . . . he wanted a balloon, and he wanted to see the clown’s face, which was bent down toward the ice, as if to keep it out of that killer wind.
What might have happened if the five o’clock whistle atop the Derry Town Hall hadn’t blown just then Ben didn’t know . . . didn’t want to know.
The important thing was that it did blow, an ice-pick of sound drilling into the deep winter cold. The clown looked up, as if startled, and Ben saw its face.
The mummy! Oh my God it’s the mummy! was his first thought, accompanied by a swoony horror that caused him to clamp his hands down viciously on the bridge’s railing to keep from fainting. Of course it hadn’t been the mummy, couldn’t have been the mummy. Oh, there were Egyptian mummies, plenty of them, he knew that, but his first thought had been that it was the mummy—the dusty monster played by Boris Karloff in the old movie he had stayed up late to watch just last month on Shock Theater.
No, it wasn’t that mummy, couldn’t be, movie monsters weren’t real, everyone knew that, even little kids. But—
It wasn’t make-up the clown was wearing. Nor was the clown simply swaddled in a bunch of bandages. There were bandages, most of them around its neck and wrists, blowing back in the wind, but Ben could see the clown’s face clearly. It was deeply lined, the skin a parchment map of wrinkles, tattered cheeks, arid flesh. The skin of its forehead was split but bloodless. Dead lips grinned back from a maw in which teeth leaned like tombstones. Its gums were pitted and black. Ben could see no eyes, but something glittered far back in the charcoal pits of those puckered sockets, something like the cold jewels in the eyes of Egyptian scarab beetles. And although the wind was the wrong way, it seemed to him that he could smell cinnamon and spice, rotting cerements treated with weird drugs, sand, blood so old it had dried to flakes and grains of rust . . .
“We all float down here, ” the mummy-clown croaked, and Ben realized with fresh horror that somehow it had reached the bridge, it was now just below him, reaching up with a dry and twisted hand from which flaps of skin rustled like pennons, a hand through which bone like yellow ivory showed.
One almost fleshless finger caressed the tip of his boot. Ben’s paralysis broke. He pounded the rest of the way across the bridge with the five o’clock whistle still shrieking in his ears; it only ceased as he reached the far side. It had to be a mirage, had to be. The clown simply could not have come so far during the whistle’s ten- or fifteen-second blast.
But his fear was not a mirage; neither were the hot tears which spurted from his eyes and froze on his cheeks a second after being shed. He ran,
boots thudding on the sidewalk, and behind him he could hear the mummy in the clown suit climbing up from the Canal, ancient stony fingernails scraping across iron, old tendons creaking like dry hinges. He could hear
the arid whistle of its breath pulling in and pushing out of nostrils as devoid of moisture as the tunnels under the Great Pyramid. He could smell its shroud of sandy spices and he knew that in a moment its hands, as fleshless as the geometrical constructions he made with his Erector Set, would descend upon his shoulders. They would turn him around and he would
stare into that wrinkled, smiling face. The dead river of its breath would wash over him. Those black eyesockets with their deep glowing depths
would bend over him. The toothless mouth would yawn, and he would have his balloon. Oh yes. All the balloons he wanted.
But when he reached the corner of his own street, sobbing and winded, his heart slamming crazed, leaping beats into his ears, when he at last
looked back over his shoulder, the street was empty. The arched bridge with its low concrete sides and its oldfashioned cobblestone paving was also empty. He could not see the Canal itself, but he felt that if he could, he would see nothing there, either. No; if the mummy had not been a hallucination or a mirage, if it had been real, it would be waiting under the bridge—like the troll in the story of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff. ”
Under. Hiding under.
Ben hurried home, looking back every few steps until the door was safely shut and locked behind him. He explained to his mother—who was so tired from a particularly hard day at the mill that she had not, in truth, much missed him—that he had been helping Mrs. Douglas count books. Then he sat down to a dinner of noodles and Sunday’s leftover turkey. He stuffed
three helpings into himself, and the mummy seemed more distant and
dreamlike with each helping. It was not real, those things were never real, they came fully to life only between the commercials of the late-night TV movies or during the Saturday matinees, where if you were lucky you could get two monsters for a quarter—and if you had an extra quarter, you could buy all the popcorn you could eat.
No, they were not real. TV monsters and movie monsters and comic- book monsters were not real. Not until you went to bed and couldn’t sleep; not until the last four pieces of candy, wrapped in tissues and kept under your pillow against the evils of the night, were gobbled up; not until the bed itself turned into a lake of rancid dreams and the wind screamed outside and you were afraid to look at the window because there might be a face there, an ancient grinning face that had not rotted but simply dried like an old leaf, its eyes sunken diamonds pushed deep into dark sockets; not until you saw one ripped and clawlike hand holding out a bunch of balloons: See the sights, have a balloon, feed the elephants, ride the Chute-the-Chutes! Ben, oh, Ben, how you’ll float—
12
Ben awoke with a gasp, the dream of the mummy still on him, panicked by the close, vibrating dark all around him. He jerked, and the root stopped supporting him and poked him in the back again, as if in exasperation.
He saw light and scrambled for it. He crawled out into afternoon sunlight and the babble of the stream, and everything fell into place again. It was summer, not winter. The mummy had not carried him away to its desert crypt; Ben had simply hidden from the big kids in a sandy hole under a
half-uprooted tree. He was in the Barrens. Henry and his buddies had gone to town in a small way on a couple of kids playing downstream because they hadn’t been able to find Ben and go to town on him in a big way. Ta-ta, boys. It was a real baby dam, believe me. You’re better off without it.
Ben looked glumly down at his ruined clothes. His mother was going to give him sixteen different flavors of holy old hell.
He had slept just long enough to stiffen up. He slid down the embankment and then began to walk along the stream, wincing at every step. He was a medley of aches and pains; it felt like Spike Jones was playing a fast tune on broken glass inside most of his muscles. There seemed to be dried or drying blood on every inch of exposed skin. The dam-building kids would be gone anyway, he consoled himself. He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept, but even if it had only been half an hour, the encounter with Henry and his friends would have convinced Denbrough and his pal that some other place—like Timbuktu, maybe—would be better for their health.
Ben plugged grimly along, knowing if the big kids came back now he would not stand a chance of outrunning them. He hardly cared.
He rounded an elbow-bend in the stream and just stood there for a moment, looking. The dam-builders were still there. One of them was indeed Stuttering Bill Denbrough. He was kneeling beside the other boy, who was propped against the stream-bank in a sitting position. This other kid’s head was thrown so far back that his adam’s apple stood out like a triangular plug. There was dried blood around his nose, on his chin, and painted along his neck in a couple of streams. He had something white clasped loosely in one hand.
Stuttering Bill looked around sharply and saw Ben standing there. Ben saw with dismay that something was very wrong with the boy propped up
on the bank; Denbrough was obviously scared to death. He thought miserably: Won’t this day ever end?
“I wonder if yuh-yuh-you could help m-m-me, ” Bill Denbrough said. “H-His ah-ah-ah-asp-p-irator is eh-hempty. I think he m-might be—”
His face froze, turned red. He dug at the word, stuttering like a machine- gun. Spittle flew from his lips, and it took almost thirty seconds’ worth of “d-d-d-d” before Ben realized Denbrough was trying to say the other kid might be dying.
