Chapter no 9 – Cleaning Up

IT by Stephen King

Somewhere high over New York State on the afternoon of May 29th, 1985,

Beverly Rogan begins to laugh again. She stifles it in both hands, afraid someone will think she is crazy, but can’t quite stop.

We laughed a lot back then, she thinks. It is something else, another light on in the dark. We were afraid all the time, but we couldn’t stop laughing, any more than I can stop now.

The guy sitting next to her in the aisle seat is young, long-haired, good- looking. He has given her several appreciative glances since the plane took off in Milwaukee at half past two (almost two and a half hours ago now, with a stop in Cleveland and another one in Philly), but has respected her clear desire not to talk; after a couple of conversational gambits to which

she has responded with politeness but no more, he opens his tote-bag and takes out a Robert Ludlum novel.

Now he closes it, holding his place with his finger, and says with some concern: “Everything cool with you? ”

She nods, trying to make her face serious, and then snorts more laughter.

He smiles a little, puzzled, questioning.

“It’s nothing, ” she says, once again trying to be serious, but it’s no good; the more she tries to be serious the more her face wants to crack up. Just like the old days. “It’s just that all at once I realized I didn’t know what airline I was on. Only that there was a great big d-d-duck on the s-s-side—” But the thought is too much. She goes off into gales of merry laughter.

People look around at her, some frowning. “Republic, ” he says.

“Pardon? ”

“You are whizzing through the air at four hundred and seventy miles an hour courtesy of Republic Airlines. It’s on the KYAG folder in the seat pocket. ”

“KYAG? ”

He pulls the folder (which does indeed have the Republic logo on the

front) out of the pocket. It shows where the emergency exits are, where the flotation devices are, how to use the oxygen masks, how to assume the crash-landing position. “The kiss-your-ass-goodbye folder, ” he says, and this time they both burst out laughing.

He really is good-looking, she thinks suddenly—it is a fresh thought, somehow clear-eyed, the sort of thought you might expect to have upon waking, when your mind isn’t all junked up. He’s wearing a pullover

sweater and faded jeans. His darkish blond hair is tied back with a piece of rawhide, and this makes her think of the ponytail she always wore her hair in when she was a kid. She thinks: I bet he’s got a nice polite college-boy’s cock. Long enough to jazz with, not thick enough to be really arrogant.

She starts to laugh again, totally unable to help it. She realizes she doesn’t even have a handkerchief with which to wipe her streaming eyes, and this makes her laugh harder.

“You better get yourself under control or the stewardess will throw you off the plane, ” he says solemnly, and she only shakes her head, laughing; her sides and her stomach hurt now.

He hands her a clean white handkerchief, and she uses it. Somehow this helps her to get it under control finally. She doesn’t stop all at once, though. It just sort of tapers off into little hitchings and gaspings. Every now and then she thinks of the big duck on the side of the plane and belches out

another little stream of giggles.

She passes his handkerchief back after a bit. “Thank you. ” “Jesus, ma’am, what happened to your hand? ” He holds it for a moment, concerned.

She looks down at it and sees the torn fingernails, the ones she ripped down to the quick tipping the vanity over on Tom. The memory of doing that hurts more than the fingernails themselves, and that stops the laughter for good. She takes her hand away from him, but gently.

“I slammed it in the car door at the airport, ” she says, thinking of all the times she has lied about things Tom has done to her, and all the times she

lied about the bruises her father put on her. Is this the last time, the last lie? How wonderful that would be . . . almost too wonderful to be believed. She thinks of a doctor coming in to see a terminal cancer patient and saying

The X-rays show the tumor is shrinking. We don’t have any idea why, but it’s happening.

“It must hurt like hell, ” he says.

“I took some aspirin. ” She opens the in-flight magazine again, although he probably knows she’s been through it twice already.

“Where are you headed? ”

She closes the magazine, looks at him, smiles. “You’re very nice, ” she says, “but I don’t want to talk. All right? ”

“All right, ” he says, smiling back. “But if you want to drink to the big duck on the side of the plane when we get to Boston, I’m buying. ”

“Thank you, but I have another plane to catch. ”

“Boy, was my horoscope ever wrong this morning, ” he says, and

reopens his novel. “But you sound great when you laugh. A guy could fall in love. ”

She opens the magazine again, but finds herself looking at her jagged nails instead of the article on the pleasures of New Orleans. There are

purple blood-blisters under two of them. In her mind she hears Tom

screaming down the stairwell: “I’ll kill you, you bitch! You fucking bitch!” She shivers, cold. A bitch to Tom, a bitch to the seamstresses who goofed up before important shows and took a Beverly Rogan reaming for it, a bitch to her father long before either Tom or the hapless seamstresses became part of their lives.

A bitch.

You bitch.

You fucking bitch.

She closes her eyes momentarily.

Her foot, cut on a shard of perfume bottle as she fled their bedroom,

throbs more than her fingers. Kay gave her a Band-Aid, a pair of shoes, and a check for a thousand dollars which Beverly cashed promptly at nine

o’clock at the First Bank of Chicago in Watertower Square.

Over Kay’s protests, Beverly wrote her own check for a thousand dollars on a plain sheet of typing paper. “I read once that they have to take a check no matter what it’s written on, ” she told Kay. Her voice seemed to be

coming from somewhere else. A radio in another room, maybe. “Someone cashed a check once that was written on an artillery shell. I read that in The Book of Lists, I think. ” She paused, then laughed uneasily. Kay looked at

her soberly, even solemnly. “But I’d cash it fast, before Tom thinks to freeze the accounts. ”

Although she doesn’t feel tired (she is aware, however, that by now she must be going purely on nerves and Kay’s black coffee), the previous night seems like something she must have dreamed.

She can remember being followed by three teenaged boys who called and whistled but didn’t quite dare come right up to her. She remembers the relief that washed over her when she saw the white fluorescent glow of a Seven- Eleven store spilling out onto the sidewalks at an intersection. She went in and let the pimply-faced counterman look down the front of her old blouse and talked him into loaning her forty cents for the pay phone. It wasn’t

hard, the view being what it was.

She called Kay McCall first, dialing from memory. The phone rang a dozen times and she began to fear that Kay was in New York. Kay’s sleepy voice mumbled, “It better be good, whoever you are” just as Beverly was about to hang up.

“It’s Bev, Kay, ” she said, hesitated, and then plunged. “I need help. ”

There was a moment of silence, and then Kay spoke again, sounding fully awake now. “Where are you? What happened? ”

“I’m at a Seven-Eleven on the corner of Streyland Avenue and some other street. I . . . Kay, I’ve left Tom. ”

Kay, quick and emphatic and excited: “Good! Finally! Hurray! I’ll come and get you! That son of a bitch! That piece of shit! I’ll come and get you in the fucking Mercedes! I’ll hire a forty-piece band! I’ll—”

“I’ll take a cab, ” Bev said, holding the other two dimes in one sweating palm. In the round mirror at the back of the store she could see the pimply clerk staring at her ass with deep and dreamy concentration. “But you’ll

have to pay the tab when I get there. I don’t have any money. Not a cent. ” “I’ll tip the bastard five bucks, ” Kay cried. “This is the best fucking

news since Nixon resigned! You get your buns over here, girl. And—” She paused and when she spoke again her voice was serious and so full of

kindness and love that Beverly felt she might weep. “Thank God you finally did it, Bev. I mean that. Thank God. ”

Kay McCall is a former designer who married rich, divorced richer, and discovered feminist politics in 1972, about three years before Beverly first met her. At the time of her greatest popularity/controversy she was accused of having embraced feminism after using archaic, chauvinistic laws to take her manufacturer husband for every cent the law would allow her.

“Bullshit!” Kay had once exclaimed to Beverly. “The people who say that stuff never had to go to bed with Sam Chacowicz. Two pumps a tickle and a squirt, that was ole Sammy’s motto. The only time he could keep it up for longer than seventy seconds was when he was pulling off in the tub. I didn’t cheat him; I just took my combat pay retroactively. ”

She wrote three books—one on feminism and the working woman, one on feminism and the family, one on feminism and spirituality. The first two

were quite popular. In the three years since her last, she had fallen out of fashion to a degree, and Beverly thought it was something of a relief to her. Her investments had done well (“Feminism and capitalism are not mutually exclusive, thank God, ” she had once told Bev) and now she was a wealthy woman with a townhouse, a place in the country, and two or three lovers

virile enough to go the distance with her in the sack but not quite virile enough to beat her at tennis. “When they get that good, I drop them at once, ” she said, and although Kay clearly thought this was a joke, Beverly

wondered if it really was.

Beverly called a cab and when it came she piled into the back with her suitcase, glad to be away from the clerk’s eyes, and gave the driver Kay’s address.

She was waiting at the end of her driveway, wearing her mink coat over a flannel nightgown. Pink fuzzy mules with great big pompoms were on her feet. Not orange pompoms, thank God—that might have sent Beverly

screaming into the night again. The ride over to Kay’s had been weird:

things were coming back to her, memories pouring in so fast and so clearly that it was frightening. She felt as if someone had started up a big bulldozer in her head and begun excavating a mental graveyard she hadn’t even known was there. Only it was names instead of bodies that were turning up, names she hadn’t thought of in years: Ben Hanscom, Richie Tozier, Greta Bowie, Henry Bowers, Eddie Kaspbrak . . . Bill Denbrough. Especially Bill

—Stuttering Bill, they had called him with that openness of children that is

sometimes called candor, sometimes cruelty. He had seemed so tall to her, so perfect (until he opened his mouth and started to talk, that was).

Names . . . places . . . things that had happened.

Alternately hot and cold, she had remembered the voices from the drain .

. . and the blood. She had screamed and her father had popped her one. Her father—Tom—

Tears threatened . . . and then Kay was paying the cabdriver and tipping him big enough to make the startled cabbie exclaim, “Thanks, lady! Wow!”

Kay took her into the house, got her into the shower, gave her a robe when she got out, made coffee, examined her injuries, Mercurochromed her cut foot, and put a Band-Aid on it. She poured a generous dollop of brandy into Bev’s second cup of coffee and hectored her into drinking every drop.

Then she cooked them each a rare strip steak and sauteed fresh mushrooms to go with them.

“All right, ” she said. “What happened? Do we call the cops or just send you to Reno to do your residency? ”

“I can’t tell you too much, ” Beverly said. “It would sound too crazy. But it was my fault, mostly—”

Kay slammed her hand down on the table. It made a sound on the polished mahogany like a small-caliber pistol shot. Bev jumped.

“Don’t you say that, ” Kay said. There was high color in her cheeks, and her brown eyes were blazing. “How long have we been friends? Nine years? Ten? If I hear you say it was your fault one more time, I’m going to puke. You hear me? I’m just going to fucking puke. It wasn’t your fault this time, or last time, or the time before, or any of the times. Don’t you know most of your friends thought that sooner or later he’d put you in a body cast, or maybe even kill you? ”

Beverly was looking at her wide-eyed.

“And that would have been your fault, at least to a degree, for staying there and letting it happen. But now you’re gone. Thank God for small favors. But don’t you sit there with half of your fingernails ripped off and

your foot cut open and belt-marks on your shoulders and tell me it was your fault. ”

“He didn’t use his belt on me, ” Bev said. The lie was auto-matic . . . and so was the deep shame which brought a miserable flush to her cheeks.

“If you’re done with Tom, you ought to be done with the lies as well, ” Kay said quietly, and she looked at Bev so long and so lovingly that Bev had to drop her eyes. She could taste salt tears in the back of her throat. “Who did you think you were fooling? ” Kay asked, still speaking quietly. She reached across the table and took Bev’s hands. “The dark glasses, the blouses with high necks and long sleeves . . . maybe you fooled a buyer or two. But you can’t fool your friends, Bev. Not the people who love you. ”

And then Beverly did cry, long and hard, and Kay held her, and later, just before going to bed, she told Kay what she could: That an old friend from Derry, Maine, where she had grown up, had called, and had reminded her of a promise she had made long ago. The time to fulfill the promise had arrived, he said. Would she come? She said she would. Then the trouble with Tom had started.

“What was this promise? ” Kay asked.

Beverly shook her head slowly. “I can’t tell you that, Kay. Much as I’d like to. ”

Kay chewed on this and then nodded. “All right. Fair enough. What are you going to do about Tom when you get back from Maine? ”

And Bev, who had begun to feel more and more that she wouldn’t be coming back from Derry, ever, said only: “I’ll come to you first, and we’ll decide together. Okay? ”

“Very much okay, ” Kay said. “Is that a promise, too? ”

“As soon as I’m back, ” Bev said steadily, “you can count on it. ” And she hugged Kay hard.

With Kay’s check cashed and Kay’s shoes on her feet, she had taken a Greyhound north to Milwaukee, afraid that Tom might have gone out to

O’Hare to look for her. Kay, who had gone with her to the bank and the bus depot, tried to talk her out of it.

“O’Hare’s lousy wth security people, dear, ” she said. “You don’t have to worry about him. If he comes near you, what you do is scream your fucking head off. ”

Beverly shook her head. “I want to avoid him altogether. This is the way to do it. ”

Kay looked at her shrewdly. “You’re afraid he might talk you out of it, aren’t you? ”

Beverly thought of the seven of them standing in the stream, of Stanley and his piece of broken Coke bottle glinting in the sun; she thought of the thin pain as he cut her palm lightly on a slant, she thought of them clasping hands in a children’s circle, promising to come back if it ever started again .

. . to come back and kill it for good.

“No, ” she said. “He couldn’t talk me out of this. But he might hurt me, security guards or not. You didn’t see him last night, Kay. ”

“I’ve seen him enough on other occasions, ” Kay said, her brows drawing together. “The asshole that walks like a man. ”

“He was crazy, ” Bev said. “Security guards might not stop him. This is better. Believe me. ”

“All right, ” Kay said reluctantly, and Bev thought with some amusement that Kay was disappointed that there was going to be no confrontation, no big blowoff.

“Cash the check quick, ” Beverly told her again, “before he can think to freeze the accounts. He will, you know. ”

“Sure, ” Kay said. “If he does that, I’ll go see the son of a bitch with a horsewhip and take it out in trade. ”

“You stay away from him, ” Beverly said sharply. “He’s dangerous, Kay. Believe me. He was like—” Like my father was what trembled on her lips. Instead she said, “He was like a wildman. ”

“Okay, ” Kay said. “Be easy in your mind, dear. Go keep your promise.

And do some thinking about what comes after. ”

“I will, ” Bev said, but that was a lie. She had too many other things to think about: what had happened the summer she was eleven, for instance.

Showing Richie Tozier how to make his yo-yo sleep, for instance. Voices from the drain, for instance. And something she had seen, something so

horrible that even then, embracing Kay for the last time by the long silvery side of the grumbling Greyhound bus, her mind would not quite let her see it.

Now, as the plane with the duck on the side begins its long descent into the Boston area, her mind turns to that again . . . and to Stan Uris . . . and

to an unsigned poem that came on a postcard . . . and the voices . . . and to those few seconds when she had been eye to eye with something that was

perhaps infinite.

She looks out the window, looks down, and thinks that Tom’s evil is a small and petty thing compared with the evil waiting for her in Derry. If

there is a compensation, it is that Bill Denbrough will be there . . . and there was a time when an eleven-year-old girl named Beverly Marsh loved Bill

Denbrough. She remembers the postcard with the lovely poem written on the back, and remembers that she once knew who wrote it. She doesn’t

remember anymore, any more than she remembers exactly what the poem said . . . but she thinks it might have been Bill. Yes, it might well have been Stuttering Bill Denbrough.

She thinks suddenly of getting ready for bed the night after Richie and Ben took her to see those two horror movies. After her first date. She had cracked wise with Richie about it—in those days that had been her defense when she was out on the street—but a part of her had been touched and excited and a little scared. It really had been her first date, even though

there had been two boys instead of one. Richie had paid her way and everything, just like a real date. Then, afterward, there had been those boys who chased them . . . and they had spent the rest of the afternoon in the

Barrens . . . and Bill Denbrough had come down with another kid, she couldn’t remember who, but she remembered the way Bill’s eyes had rested on hers for a moment, and the electric shock she had felt . . . the shock and a flush that seemed to warm her entire body.

She remembers thinking of all these things as she pulled on her nightgown and went into the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. She remembers thinking that it would take her a long time to get to sleep that night; because there was so much to think about . . . and to think about in a good way, because they seemed like good kids, like kids you could maybe goof with and maybe even trust a little bit. That would be nice. That would be . . . well, like heaven.

And thinking these things, she took her washcloth and leaned over the basin to get some water and the voice

came whispering out of the drain:

“Help me. ”

Beverly drew back, startled, the dry washcloth dropping onto the floor.

She shook her head a little, as if to clear it, and then she bent over the basin again and looked curiously at the drain. The bathroom was at the back of their four-room apartment. She could hear, faintly, some Western program going on the TV. When it was over, her father would probably switch over to a baseball game, or the fights, and then go to sleep in his easy chair.

The wallpaper in here was a hideous pattern of frogs on lily pads. It bulged and swayed over the lumpy plaster beneath. It was watermarked in some places, actually peeling away in others. The tub was rustmarked, the toilet seat cracked. One naked 40-watt bulb jutted from a porcelain socket over the basin. Beverly could remember—vaguely—that there had once been a light fixture, but it had been broken some years ago and never replaced. The floor was covered with linoleum from which the pattern had faded, except for a small patch under the sink.

Not a very cheery room, but Beverly had used it so long that she no longer noticed what it looked like.

The wash-basin was also water-stained. The drain was a simple cross- hatched circle about two inches in diameter. There had once been a chrome facing, but that was also long gone. A rubber drain-plug on a chain was looped nonchalantly over the faucet marked C. The drain-hole was pipe- dark, and as she leaned over it, she noticed for the first time that there was a faint, unpleasant smell—a slightly fishy smell—coming from the drain. She wrinkled her nose a little in disgust.

“Help me—”

She gasped. It was a voice. She had thought perhaps a rattle in the pipes .

. . or maybe just her imagination . . . some holdover from those movies. . . . “Help me, Beverly ”

Alternate waves of coldness and warmth swept her. She had taken the rubber band out of her hair, which lay spread across her shoulders in a bright cascade. She could feel the roots trying to stiffen.

Unaware that she meant to speak, she bent over the basin again and half- whispered, “Hello? Is someone there? ” The voice from the drain had been that of a very young child who had perhaps just learned to talk. And in spite of the gooseflesh on her arms, her mind searched for some rational explanation. It was an apartment house. The Marshes lived in the back

apartment on the ground floor. There were four other apartments. Maybe there was a kid in the building amusing himself by calling into the drain. And some trick of sound . . .

“Is someone there? ” she asked the drain in the bathroom, louder this time. It suddenly occurred to her that if her father happened to come in just now he would think her crazy.

There was no answer from the drain, but that unpleasant smell seemed stronger. It made her think of the bamboo patch in the Barrens, and the dump beyond it; it called up images of slow, bitter smokes and black mud that wanted to suck the shoes off your feet.

There were no really little kids in the building, that was the thing. The Tremonts had had a boy who was five, and girls who were three and six months, but Mr. Tremont had lost his job at the shoe shop on Tracker Avenue, they got behind on the rent, and one day not long before school let out they had all just disappeared in Mr. Tremont’s rusty old Power-Flite

Buick. There was Skipper Bolton in the front apartment on the second floor, but Skipper was fourteen.

“We all want to meet you, Beverly ”

Her hand went to her mouth and her eyes widened in horror. For a moment . . . just for a moment she believed she had seen something

moving down there. She was suddenly aware that her hair was now hanging over her shoulders in two thick sheaves, and that they dangled close—very close—to that drainhole. Some clear instinct made her straighten up quick and get her hair away from there.

She looked around. The bathroom door was firmly closed. She could hear the TV faintly, Cheyenne Bodie warning the bad guy to put the gun down

before someone got hurt. She was alone. Except, of course, for that voice. “Who are you? ” she called into the basin, pitching her voice low.

“Matthew Clements, ” the voice whispered. “The clown took me down here in the pipes and I died and pretty soon he’ll come and take you, Beverly, and Ben Hanscom, and Bill Denbrough and Eddie—”

Her hands flew to her cheeks and clutched them. Her eyes widened, widened, widened. She felt her body growing cold. Now the voice sounded choked and ancient and still it crawled with corrupted glee.

“You’ll float down here with your friends, Beverly, we all float down

here, tell Bill that Georgie says hello, tell Bill that Georgie misses him but

he’ll see him soon, tell him Georgie will be in the closet some night with a piece of piano wire to stick in his eye, tell him—”

The voice broke up in a series of choking hiccups and suddenly a bright red bubble backed up the drain and popped, spraying beads of blood on the distained porcelain.

The choking voice spoke rapidly now, and as it spoke it changed: now it was the young voice of the child that she had first heard, now it was a teenaged girl’s voice, now—horribly—it became the voice of a girl Beverly had known . . . Veronica Grogan. But Veronica was dead, she had been found dead in a sewer-drain—

“I’m Matthew . . . I’m Betty . . . I’m Veronica . . . we’re down here . . . down here with the clown . . . and the creature . . . and the mummy . . . and the werewolf . . . and you, Beverly, we’re down here with you, and we float, we change . . . ”

A gout of blood suddenly belched from the drain, splattering the sink and the mirror and the wallpaper with its frogs-and-lilypads pattern. Beverly screamed, suddenly and piercingly. She backed away from the sink, struck

the door, rebounded, clawed it open, and ran for the living room, where her father was just getting to his feet.

“What the Sam Hill’s wrong with you? ” he asked, his brows drawing together. The two of them were here alone this evening, Bev’s mom was working the three-to-eleven shift at Green’s Farm, Derry’s best restaurant.

“The bathroom!” she cried hysterically. “The bathroom, Daddy, in the bathroom—”

“Was someone peekin at you, Beverly? Huh? ” His arm shot out and his hand gripped her arm hard, sinking into the flesh. There was concern on his face but it was a predatory concern, somehow more frightening than comforting.

“No . . . the sink . . . in the sink . . . the . . . the . . . ” She burst into hysterical tears before she could say anything more. Her heart was thundering so hard in her chest that she thought it would choke her.

Al Marsh thrust her aside with an “O Jesus-Christ-what-next” expression on his face and went into the bathroom. He was in there so long that Beverly became afraid again.

Then he bawled: “Beverly! You come here, girl!”

There was no question of not going. If the two of them had been standing on the edge of a high cliff and he had told her to step off—right now, girl— her instinctive obedience would almost certainly have carried her over the

edge before her rational mind could have intervened.

The bathroom door was open. There her father stood, a big man who was now losing the auburn hair he had passed on to Beverly. He was still wearing his gray fatigue pants and his gray shirt (he was a janitor at the Derry Home Hospital), and he was looking hard at Beverly. He did not drink, he did not smoke, he did not chase after women. I got all the women I need at home, he said on occasion, and when he said it a peculiar secretive

smile would cross his face—it did not brighten it but did quite the opposite. Watching that smile was like watching the shadow of a cloud travel rapidly across a rocky field. They take care of me, and when they need it, I take

care of them.

“Now just what the Sam Hill is this foolishness all about? ” he asked as she came in.

Beverly felt as if her throat had been lined with slate. Her heart raced in her chest. She thought that she might vomit soon. There was blood on the mirror, running in long drips. There were spots of blood on the light over

the sink; she could smell it cooking onto the 40-watt bulb. Blood ran down the porcelain sides of the sink and plopped in fat drops on the linoleum floor.

“Daddy . . . ” she whispered huskily.

He turned, disgusted with her (as he was so often), and began casually to wash his hands in the bloody sink. “Good God, girl. Speak up. You scared hell out of me. Explain yourself, for Lord’s sake. ”

He was washing his hands in the basin, she could see blood staining the gray fabric of his pants where they rubbed against the lip of the sink, and if his forehead touched the mirror (it was close) it would be on his skin. She made a choked noise in her throat.

He turned off the water, grabbed a towel on which two fans of blood from the drain had splashed, and began to dry his hands. She watched, near swooning, as he grimed blood into his big knuckles and the lines of his palms. She could see blood under his fingernails like marks of guilt.

“Well? I’m waiting. ” He tossed the bloody towel back over the rod.

There was blood . . . blood everywhere . . . and her father didn’t see it.

“Daddy—” She had no idea what might have come next, but her father interrupted her.

“I worry about you, ” Al Marsh said. “I don’t think you’re ever going to grow up, Beverly. You go out running around, you don’t do hardly any of the housework around here, you can’t cook, you can’t sew. Half the time

you’re off on a cloud someplace with your nose stuck in a book and the other half you’ve got vapors and megrims. I worry. ”

His hand suddenly swung and spatted painfully against her buttocks. She uttered a cry, her eyes fixed on his. There was a tiny stipple of blood caught in his bushy right eyebrow. If I look at that long enough I’ll just go crazy and none of this will matter, she thought dimly.

“I worry a lot, ” he said, and hit her again, harder, on the arm above the

elbow. That arm cried out and then seemed to go to sleep. She would have a spreading yellowish-purple bruise there the next day.

“An awful lot, ” he said, and punched her in the stomach. He pulled the punch at the last second, and Beverly lost only half of her air. She doubled over, gasping, tears starting in her eyes. Her father looked at her impassively. He shoved his bloody hands in the pockets of his trousers.

“You got to grow up, Beverly, ” he said, and now his voice was kind and forgiving. “Isn’t that so? ”

She nodded. Her head throbbed. She cried, but silently. If she sobbed aloud—started what her father called “that baby whining”—he might go to work on her in earnest. Al Marsh had lived his entire life in Derry and told people who asked (and sometimes those who did not) that he intended to be buried here—hopefully at the age of one hundred and ten. “No reason why I shouldn’t live forever, ” he sometimes told Roger Aurlette, who cut his hair once each month. “I have no vices. ”

“Now explain yourself, ” he said, “and make it quick. ”

“There was—” She swallowed and it hurt because there was no moisture in her throat, none at all. “There was a spider. A big fat black spider. It . . . it crawled out of the drain and I . . . I guess it crawled back down. ”

“Oh!” He smiled a little at her now, as if pleased by this explanation.

“Was that it? Damn! If you’d told me, Beverly, I never would have hit you. All girls are scared of spiders. Sam Hill! Why didn’t you speak up? ”

He bent over the drain and she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out a warning . . . and some other voice spoke deep inside her, some terrible

voice which could not have been a part of her; surely it was the voice of the devil himself: Let it get him, if it wants him. Let it pull him down. Good fucking-riddance.

She turned away from that voice in horror. To allow such a thought to stay for even a moment in her head would surely damn her to hell.

He peered into the eye of the drain. His hands squelched in the blood on the rim of the basin. Beverly fought grimly with her gorge. Her belly ached where her dad had hit her.

“Don’t see a thing, ” he said. “All these buildings are old, Bev. Got drains the size of freeways, you know it? When I was janitorin down in the old high school, we used to get drowned rats in the toilet bowls once in awhile.

It drove the girls crazy. ” He laughed fondly at the thought of such female

vapors and megrims. “Mostly when the Kenduskeag was high. Less wildlife in the pipes since they put in the new drain system, though. ”

He put an arm around her and hugged her.

“Look. You go to bed and don’t think about it anymore. Okay? ”

She felt her love for him. I never hit you when you didn’t deserve it,

Beverly, he told her once when she had cried out that some punishment had been unfair. And surely that had to be true, because he was capable of love.

Sometimes he would spend a whole day with her, showing her how to do

things or just telling her stuff or walking around town with her, and when he was kind like that she thought her heart would swell with happiness until it killed her. She loved him, and tried to understand that he had to correct her often because it was (as he said) his God-given job. Daughters, Al Marsh said, need more correction than sons. He had no sons, and she felt vaguely as if that might be partly her fault as well.

“Okay, Daddy, ” she said. “I won’t. ”

They walked into her small bedroom together. Her right arm now ached fiercely from the blow it had taken. She looked back over her shoulder and saw the bloody sink, bloody mirror, bloody wall, bloody floor. The bloody towel her father had used and then hung casually over the rod. She thought:

How can I ever go in there to wash up again? Please God, dear God, I’m sorry if I had a bad thought about my dad and You can punish me for it if You want, I deserve to be punished, make me fall down and hurt myself or make me have the flu like last winter when I coughed so hard once I threw

up but please God make the blood be gone in the morning, pretty please, God, okay? Okay?

Her father tucked her in as he always did, and kissed her forehead. Then he only stood there for a moment in what she would always think of as

“his” way of standing, perhaps of being: bent slightly forward, hands plunged deep—to above the wrist—in his pockets, the bright blue eyes in his mournful basset-hound’s face looking down at her from above. In later years, long after she stopped thinking about Derry at all, she would see a

man sitting on the bus or maybe standing on a corner with his dinnerbucket in his hand, shapes, oh shapes of men, sometimes seen as day closed down, sometimes seen across Watertower Square in the noonlight of a clear windy autumn day, shapes of men, rules of men, desires of men: or Tom, so like her father when he took off his shirt and stood slightly slumped in front of

the bathroom mirror to shave. Shapes of men.

“Sometimes I worry about you, Bev, ” he said, but there was no trouble or anger in his voice now. He touched her hair gently, smoothing it back from her forehead.

The bathroom is full of blood, Daddy! she almost screamed then. Didn’t you see it? It’s everywhere! Cooking onto the light over the sink, even!

Didn’t you SEE it?

But she kept her silence as he went out and closed the door behind him, filling her room with darkness. She was still awake, still staring into the darkness, when her mother came in at eleven-thirty and the TV went off. She heard her parents go into their room and she heard the bedsprings creaking steadily as they did their s*x-act thing. Beverly had overheard

Greta Bowie telling Sally Mueller that the s*x-act thing hurt like fire and no nice girl ever wanted to do it (“At the end of it the man pees all over your bug, ” Greta said, and Sally had cried: “Oh yuck, I’d never let a boy do that to me!”). If it hurt as badly as Greta said, then Bev’s mother kept the hurt to herself; Bev had heard her mom cry out once or twice in a low voice, but it hadn’t sounded at all like a pain-cry.

The slow creak of the springs speeded up to a beat so rapid it was just short of frantic, and then stopped. There was a period of silence, then some low talk, then the sound of her mother’s footsteps as she went into the bathroom. Beverly held her breath, waiting for her mother to scream or not.

There was no scream—only the sound of water running into the basin. That was followed by some low splashing. Then the water ran out of the basin with its familiar gurgling sound. Her mother was brushing her teeth now. Moments later the bedsprings in her parents’ room creaked again as her mom got back into bed.

Five minutes or so after that her father began to snore.

A black fear stole over her heart and closed her throat. She found herself afraid to turn over on her right side—her favorite sleeping position—

because she might see something looking in the window at her. So she just lay on her back, stiff as a poker, looking up at the pressed-tin ceiling. Some time later—minutes or hours, there was no way of telling—she fell into a thin troubled sleep.

Beverly always woke up when the alarm went off in her parents’ bedroom. You had to be fast, because the alarm no more than got started before her father banged it off. She dressed quickly while her father used the bathroom. She paused briefly (as she now almost always did) to look at her chest in the mirror trying to decide if her breasts had gotten any bigger in

the night. She had started getting them late last year. There had been some faint pain at first, but that was gone now. They were extremely small—not much more than spring apples, really—but they were there. It was true; childhood would end; she would be a woman.

She smiled at her reflection and put a hand behind her head, pushing her hair up and sticking her chest out. She giggled a little girl’s unaffected

giggle . . . and suddenly remembered the blood spewing out of the bathroom drain the night before. The giggles stopped abruptly.

She looked at her arm and saw the bruise that had formed there in the night—an ugly stain between her shoulder and elbow, a stain with many discolored fingers.

The toilet went with a bang and a flush.

Moving quickly, not wanting him to be mad with her this morning (not wanting him to even notice her this morning), Beverly pulled on a pair of

jeans and her Derry High School sweatshirt. And then, because it could no longer be put off, she left her room for the bathroom. Her father passed her in the living room on his way back to his room to get dressed. His blue

pajama suit flapped loosely around him. He grunted something at her she didn’t understand.

“Okay, Daddy, ” she replied nevertheless.

She stood in front of the closed bathroom door for a moment, trying to get her mind ready for what she might see inside. At least it’s daytime, she thought, and that brought some comfort. Not much, but some. She grasped the doorknob, turned it, and stepped inside.

That was a busy morning for Beverly. She got her father his breakfast—

orange juice, scrambled eggs, Al Marsh’s version of toast (the bread hot but not really toasted at all). He sat at the table, barricaded behind the News, and ate it all.

“Where’s the bacon? ”

“Gone, Daddy. We finished it yesterday. ” “Cook me a hamburger. ”

“There’s only a little bit of that left, t—”

The paper rustled, then dropped. His blue stare fell on her like weight. “What did you say? ” he asked softly.

“I said right away, Daddy. ”

He looked at her a moment longer. Then the paper went back up and Beverly hurried to the refrigerator to get the meat.

She cooked him a hamburger, mashing the little bit of ground meat that was left in the icebox as hard as she could to make it look bigger. He ate it reading the Sports page and Beverly made his lunch—a couple of peanut- butter-and-jelly sandwiches, a big piece of cake her mother had brought back from Green’s Farm last night, a Thermos of hot coffee heavily laced with sugar.

“You tell your mother I said to get this place cleaned up today, ” he said, taking his dinnerbucket. “It looks like a damn old pigsty. Sam Hill! I spend

the whole day cleaning up messes over to the hospital. I don’t need to come home to a pigsty. You mind me, Beverly. ”

“Okay, Daddy. I will. ”

He kissed her cheek, gave her a rough hug, and left. As she always did, Beverly went to the window of her room and watched him walk down the street. And as she always did, she felt a sneaking sense of relief when he turned the corner . . . and hated herself for it.

She did the dishes and then took the book she was reading out on the back steps for awhile. Lars Theramenius, his long blonde hair glowing with its own serene inner light, toddled over from the next building to show Beverly his new Tonka truck and the new scrapes on his knees. Beverly exclaimed over both. Then her mother was calling her.

They changed both beds, washed the floors and waxed the kitchen linoleum. Her mother did the bathroom floor, for which Beverly was profoundly grateful. Elfrida Marsh was a small woman with graying hair and a grim look. Her lined face told the world that she had been around for awhile and intended to stay around awhile longer It also told the world

that none of it had been easy and she did not look for an early change in that state of affairs.

“Will you do the living-room windows, Bevvie? ” she asked, coming back into the kitchen. She had changed into her waitress uniform. “I have to go up to Saint Joe’s in Bangor to see Cheryl Tarrent. She broke her leg last night. ”

“Yeah, I’ll do them, ” Beverly said. “What happened to Mrs. Tarrent? Did she fall down or something? ” Cheryl Tarrent was a woman Elfrida worked with at the restaurant.

“She and that no-good she’s married to were in a car wreck, ” Beverly’s mother said grimly. “He was drinking. You want to thank God in your

prayers every night that your father doesn’t drink, Bevvie. ” “I do, ” Beverly said. She did.

“She’s going to lose her job, I guess, and he can’t hold one. ” Now tones of grim horror crept into Elfrida’s voice. “They’ll have to go on the county, I guess. ”

It was the worst thing Elfrida Marsh could think of. Losing a child or finding out you had cancer didn’t hold a candle to it. You could be poor; you could spend your life doing what she called “scratchin. ” But at the

bottom of everything, below even the gutter, was a time when you might

have to go on the county and drink the worksweat from the brows of others as a gift. This, she knew, was the prospect that now faced Cheryl Tarrent.

“Once you got the windows washed and take the trash out, you can go and play awhile, if you want. It’s your father’s bowling night so you won’t have to fix his supper, but I want you in before dark. You know why. ”

“Okay, Mom. ”

“My God, you’re growing up fast, ” Elfrida said. She looked for a moment at the nubs in Beverly’s sweatshirt. Her glance was loving but pitiless. “I don’t know what I’m going to do around here once you’re married and have a place of your own. ”

“I’ll be around for just about ever, ” Beverly said, smiling.

Her mother hugged her briefly and kissed the corner of her mouth with her warm dry lips. “I know better, ” she said. “But I love you, Bevvie. ”

“I love you too, Momma. ”

“You make sure there aren’t any streaks on those windows when you’re done, ” she said, picking up her purse and going to the door. “If there are, you’ll catch the blue devil from your father. ”

“I’ll be careful. ” As her mother opened the door to go out, Beverly asked in a tone she hoped was casual: “Did you see anything funny in the bathroom, Mom? ”

Elfrida looked back at her, frowning a little. “Funny? ” “Well . . . I saw a spider in there last night. It crawled out of the drain. Didn’t Daddy tell you? ”

“Did you get your dad angry at you last night, Bewie? ”

“No! Huh-uh! I told him a spider crawled out of the drain and scared me and he said sometimes they used to find drowned rats in the toilets at the old high school. Because of the drains. He didn’t tell you about the spider I saw? ”

“No. ”

“Oh. Well, it doesn’t matter. I just wondered if you saw it. ”

“I didn’t see any spider. I wish we could afford a little new linoleum for that bathroom floor. ” She glanced at the sky, which was blue and cloudless. “They say if you kill a spider, it brings rain. You didn’t kill it, did you? ”

“No, ” Beverly said. “I didn’t kill it. ”

Her mother looked back at her, her lips pressed together so tightly they almost weren’t there. “You sure your dad wasn’t angry with you last night? ”

“No!”

“Bevvie, does he ever touch you? ”

“What? ” Beverly looked at her mother, totally perplexed. God, her father touched her every day. “I don’t get what you—”

“Never mind, ” Elfrida said shortly. “Don’t forget the trash. And if those windows are streaked, you won’t need your father to give you blue devil. ”

“I won’t

(does he ever touch you)

“forget. ”

“And be in before dark. ” “I will. ”

(does he)

(worry an awful lot)

Elfrida left. Beverly went into her room again and watched her around the corner and out of view, as she had her father. Then, when she was sure her mother was well on her way to the bus stop, Beverly got the

floorbucket, the Windex, and some rags from under the sink. She went into the living room and began on the windows. The apartment seemed too quiet. Each time the floor creaked or a door slammed, she jumped a little. When the Boltons’ toilet flushed above her, she uttered a gasp that was nearly a scream.

And she kept looking toward the closed bathroom door.

At last she walked down there and drew it open again and looked inside. Her mother had cleaned in here this morning, and most of the blood which had pooled under the sink was gone. So was the blood on the sink’s rim.

But there were still maroon streaks drying in the sink itself, spots and splashes of it on the mirror and on the wallpaper.

Beverly looked at her pale reflection and realized with sudden,

superstitious dread that the blood on the mirror made it seem as if her face was bleeding. She thought again: What am I going to do about this? Have I gone crazy? Am I imagining it?

The drain suddenly gave a burping chuckle.

Beverly screamed and slammed the door and five minutes later her hands were still trembling so badly that she almost dropped the bottle of Windex as she washed the windows in the living room.

It was around three o’clock that afternoon, the apartment locked up and the extra key tucked snugly away in the pocket of her jeans, when Beverly Marsh happened to turn up Richard’s Alley, a narrow walk-through which connected Main and Center Streets, and came upon Ben Hanscom, Eddie Kaspbrak, and a boy named Bradley Donovan pitching pennies.

“Hi, Bev!” Eddie said. “You get any nightmares from those movies? ” “Nope, ” Beverly said, squatting down to watch the game. “How’d you

know about that? ”

“Haystack told me, ” Eddie said, jerking a thumb at Ben, who was blushing wildly for no good reason Beverly could see.

“What movieth? ” Bradley asked, and now Beverly recognized him: he had come down to the Barrens a week ago with Bill Denbrough. They had a speech class together in Bangor. Beverly more or less dismissed him from her mind. If asked, she might have said he seemed somehow less important than Ben and Eddie—less there.

“Couple of creature features, ” she said to him, and duck-walked closer until she was between Ben and Eddie. “You pitchin? ”

“Yes, ” Ben said. He looked at her quickly, then looked away. “Who’s winning? ”

“Eddie, ” Ben said. “Eddie’s real good. ”

She looked at Eddie, who polished his nails solemnly on the front of his shirt and then giggled.

“Can I play? ”

“Okay with me, ” Eddie said. “You got pence? ” She felt in her pocket and brought out three.

“Jeez, how do you dare to go out of the house with such a wad? ” Eddie asked. “I’d be scared. ”

Ben and Bradley Donovan laughed.

“Girls can be brave, too, ” Beverly said gravely, and a moment later they were all laughing.

Bradley pitched first, then Ben, then Beverly. Because he was winning, Eddie had lasties. They tossed the pennies toward the back wall of the Center Street Drug Store. Sometimes they landed short, sometimes they struck and bounced back. At the end of each round the shooter with the penny closest to the wall collected all four pennies. Five minutes later, Beverly had twenty-four cents. She had lost only a single round.

“Girlth cheat!” Bradley said, disgusted, and got up to go. His good humor was gone, and he looked at Beverly with both anger and humiliation. “Girlth thouldn’t be allowed to—”

Ben bounced to his feet. It was awesome to watch Ben Hanscom bounce. “Take that back!”

Bradley looked at Ben, his mouth open. “What? ” “Take it back! She didn’t cheat!”

Bradley looked from Ben to Eddie to Beverly, who was still on her knees.

Then he looked back at Ben again. “You want a fat lip to math the reth of you, athhole? ”

“Sure, ” Ben said, and a grin suddenly crossed his face. Something in its quality caused Bradley to take a surprised, uneasy step backward. Perhaps what he saw in that grin was the simple fact that after tangling with Henry Bowers and coming out ahead not once but twice, Ben Hanscom was not about to be terrorized by skinny old Bradley Donovan (who had warts all over his hands as well as that cataclysmic lisp).

“Yeah, and then you all gang up on me, ” Bradley said, taking another step backward. His voice had picked up an uncertain waver, and tears stood out in his eyes. “All a bunth of cheaterth!”

“You just take back what you said about her, ” Ben said.

“Never mind, Ben, ” Beverly said. She held out a handful of coppers to Bradley. “Take what’s yours. I wasn’t playing for keepsies anyway. ”

Tears of humiliation spilled over Bradley’s lower lashes. He struck the

pennies from Beverly’s hand and ran for the Center Street end of Richard’s Alley. The others stood looking at him, open-mouthed. With safety within reach, Bradley turned around and shouted: “You’re jutht a little bith, that’th all! Cheater! Cheater! Your mother’th a whore!”

Beverly gasped. Ben ran up the alley toward Bradley and succeeded in doing no more than tripping over an empty crate and falling down. Bradley was gone, and Ben knew better than to believe he could ever catch him. He turned toward Beverly instead to see if she was all right. That word had shocked him as much as it had her.

She saw the concern in his face. She opened her mouth to say she was okay, not to worry, sticks-and-stones-will-break-my-bones-but-names-will- never-hurt-me . . . and that odd question her mother had asked

(does he ever touch you)

recurred. Odd question, yes—simple yet nonsensical, full of somehow ominous undertones, murky as old coffee. Instead of saying that names would never hurt her, she burst into tears.

Eddie looked at her uncomfortably, took his aspirator from his pants pocket, and sucked on it. Then he bent down and began picking up the scattered pennies. There was a fussy, careful expression on his face as he did this.

Ben moved toward her instinctively, wanting to hug and give comfort, and then stopped. She was too pretty. In the face of that prettiness he felt helpless.

“Cheer up, ” he said, knowing it must sound idiotic but unable to think of anything more useful. He touched her shoulders lightly (she had put her

hands over her face to hide her wet eyes and blotchy cheeks) and then took them away as if she were too hot to touch. He was now blushing so hard he looked apoplectic. “Cheer up, Beverly. ”

She lowered her hands and cried out in a shrill, furious voice: “My mother is not a whore! She . . . she’s a waitress!”

This was greeted by absolute silence. Ben stared at her with his lower jaw sprung ajar. Eddie looked up at her from the cobbled surface of the alley, his hands full of pennies. And suddenly all three of them were laughing hysterically.

“A waitress!” Eddie cackled. He had only the faintest idea of what a whore was, but something about this comparison struck him as delicious just the same. “Is that what she is!”

“Yes! Yes, she is!” Beverly gasped, laughing and crying at the same time.

Ben was laughing so hard he couldn’t stand up. He sat heavily on a trashcan. His bulk drove the lid into the can and spilled him into the alley

on his side. Eddie pointed at him and howled with laughter. Beverly helped him to his feet.

A window went up above them and a woman yelled, “You kids get out of there! There’s people that have to work the night shift, you know! Get lost!”

Without thinking, the three of them linked hands, Beverly in the middle, and ran for Center Street. They were still laughing.

They pooled their money and discovered they had forty cents, enough for two ice-cream frappes from the drugstore. Because old Mr. Keene was a grouch and wouldn’t let kids under twelve eat their stuff at the soda fountain (he claimed the pinball machines in the back room might corrupt them), they took the frappes in two huge waxed containers up to Bassey Park and sat on the grass to drink them. Ben had coffee, Eddie strawberry. Beverly sat between the two boys with a straw, sampling each in turn like a bee at flowers. She felt okay again for the first time since the drain had coughed up its gout of blood the night before—washed out and emotionally exhausted, but okay, at peace with herself. For the time being, anyway.

“I just don’t get what was wrong with Bradley, ” Eddie said at last—it had the tone of awkward apology. “He never acted like that before. ”

“You stood up for me, ” Beverly said, and suddenly kissed Ben on one cheek. “Thank you. ”

Ben went scarlet again. “You weren’t cheating, ” he mumbled, and abruptly gulped down half of his coffee frappe in three monster swallows. This was followed by a burp as loud as a shotgun blast.

“Get any on you, Daddy-o? ” Eddie asked, and Beverly laughed helplessly, holding her stomach.

“No more, ” she giggled. “My stomach hurts. Please, no more. ”

Ben was smiling. That night, before sleep, he would play the moment when she had kissed him over and over again in his mind.

“Are you really okay now? ” he asked.

She nodded. “It wasn’t him. It really wasn’t even what he said about my mother. It was something that happened last night. ” She hesitated, looking

from Ben to Eddie and back to Ben again. “I . . . I have to tell somebody. Or show somebody. Or something. I guess I cried because I’ve been scared I’m going looneytunes. ”

“What are you talking about, looneytunes? ” a new voice asked.

It was Stanley Uris. As always he looked small, slim, and preternaturally neat—much too neat for a kid who was just barely eleven. In his white shirt, neatly tucked into his fresh jeans all the way around, his hair combed, the toes of his high-top Keds spotlessly clean, he looked instead like the world’s smallest adult. Then he smiled, and the illusion was broken.

She won’t say whatever she was going to say, Eddie thought, because he wasn’t there when Bradley called her mother that name.

But after a moment’s hesitation, Beverly did tell. Because somehow Stanley was different from Bradley—he was there in a way Bradley had not been.

Stanley’s one of us, Beverly thought, and wondered why that should

cause her arms to suddenly break out in bumps. I’m not doing any of them any favors by telling, she thought. Not them, and not me, neither.

But it was too late. She was already speaking. Stan sat down with them, his face still and grave. Eddie offered him the last of the strawberry frappe and Stan only shook his head, his eyes never leaving Beverly’s face. None of the boys spoke.

She told them about the voices. About recognizing Ronnie Grogan’s voice. She knew Ronnie was dead, but it was her voice all the same. She told them about the blood, and how her father had not seen it or felt it, and how her mother had not seen it this morning.

When she finished, she looked around at their faces, afraid of what she might see there . . . but she saw no disbelief. Terror, but no disbelief.

Finally Ben said, “Let’s go look. ”

They went in by the back door, not just because that was the lock Bev’s key fitted but because she said her father would kill her if Mrs. Bolton saw her going into the apartment with three boys while her folks were gone.

“Why? ” Eddie asked.

“You wouldn’t understand, numbnuts, ” Stan said. “Just be quiet. ”

Eddie started to reply, looked again at Stan’s white, strained face and decided to keep his mouth shut.

The door gave on the kitchen, which was full of late-afternoon sun and summer silence. The breakfast dishes sparkled in the drainer. The four of them stood by the kitchen table, bunched up, and when a door slammed upstairs, they all jumped and then laughed nervously.

“Where is it? ” Ben asked. He was whispering.

Her heart thudding in her temples, Beverly led them down the little hall with her parents’ bedroom on one side and the closed bathroom door at the end. She pulled it open, stepped quickly inside, and pulled the chain over

the sink. Then she stepped back between Ben and Eddie again. The blood had dried to maroon smears on the mirror and the basin and the wallpaper. She looked at the blood because it was suddenly easier to look at that than at them.

In a small voice she could hardly recognize as her own, she asked: “Do you see it? Do any of you see it? Is it there? ”

Ben stepped forward, and she was again struck by how delicately he moved for such a fat boy. He touched one of the smears of blood; then a second; then a long drip on the mirror. “Here. Here. Here. ” His voice was flat and authoritative.

“Jeepers! It looks like somebody killed a pig in here, ” Stan said, softly awed.

“It all came out of the drain? ” Eddie asked. The sight of the blood made him feel ill. His breath was shortening. He clutched at his aspirator.

Beverly had to struggle to keep from bursting into fresh tears. She didn’t want to do that; she was afraid if she did they would dismiss her as just another girl. But she had to clutch for the doorknob as relief washed through her in a wave of frightening strength. Until that moment she hadn’t realized how sure she was that she was going crazy, having hallucinations, something.

“And your mom and dad never saw it, ” Ben marvelled. He touched a splotch of blood which had dried on the basin and then pulled his hand away and wiped it on the tail of his shirt. “Jeepers-creepers. ”

“I don’t know how I can ever come in here again, ” Beverly said. “Not to wash up or brush my teeth or . . . you know. ”

“Well, why don’t we clean the place up? ” Stanley asked suddenly. Beverly looked at him. “Clean it? ”

“Sure. Maybe we couldn’t get all of it off the wallpaper—it looks sorta, you know, on its last legs—but we could get the rest. Haven’t you got some rags? ”

“Under the kitchen sink, ” Beverly said. “But my mom’ll wonder where they went if we use them. ”

“I’ve got fifty cents, ” Stan said quietly. His eyes never left the blood that had spattered the area of the bathroom around the washbasin. “We’ll clean up as good as we can, then take the rags down to that coin-op laundry place back the way we came. We’ll wash them and dry them and they’ll all be back under the sink before your folks get home. ”

“My mother says you can’t get blood out of cloth, ” Eddie objected. “She says it sets in, or something. ”

Ben uttered a hysterical little giggle. “Doesn’t matter if it comes out of the rags or not, ” he said. “They can’t see it. ”

No one had to ask him who he meant by “they. ” “All right, ” Beverly said. “Let’s try it. ”

For the next half hour, the four of them cleaned like grim elves, and as the blood disappeared from the walls and the mirror and the porcelain basin, Beverly felt her heart grow lighter and lighter. Ben and Eddie did the sink and mirror while she scrubbed the floor. Stan worked on the wallpaper with studious care, using a rag that was almost dry. In the end, they got almost all of it. Ben finished by removing the light-bulb over the sink and replacing it with one from the box of bulbs in the pantry. There were plenty: Elfrida Marsh had bought a two-year supply from the Derry Lions during their annual light-bulb sale the fall before.

They used Elfrida’s floorbucket, her Ajax, and plenty of hot water. They dumped the water frequently because none of them liked to have their

hands in it once it had turned pink.

At last Stanley backed away, looked at the bathroom with the critical eye of a boy in whom neatness and order are not simply ingrained but actually innate, and told them: “It’s the best we can do, I think. ”

There were still faint traces of blood on the wallpaper to the left of the sink, where the paper was so thin and ragged that Stanley had dared do no more than blot it gently. Yet even here the blood had been sapped of its former ominous strength; it was little more than a meaningless pastel smear.

“Thank you, ” Beverly said to all of them. She could not remember ever having meant thanks so deeply. “Thank you all. ”

“It’s okay, ” Ben mumbled. He was of course blushing again. “Sure, ” Eddie agreed.

“Let’s get these rags done, ” Stanley said. His face was set, almost stern. And later Beverly would think that perhaps only Stan realized that they had taken another step toward some unthinkable confrontation.

They measured out a cup of Mrs. Marsh’s Tide and put it in an empty

mayonnaise jar. Bev found a paper shopping bag to put the bloody rags in, and the four of them went down to the Kleen-Kloze Washateria on the corner of Main and Cony Streets. Two blocks farther up they could see the Canal gleaming a bright blue in the afternoon sun.

The Kleen-Kloze was empty except for a woman in a white nurse’s uniform who was waiting for her dryer to stop. She glanced at the four kids distrustfully and then went back to her paperback of Peyton Place.

“Cold water, ” Ben said in a low voice. “My mom says you gotta wash blood in cold water. ”

They dumped the rags into the washer while Stan changed his two

quarters for four dimes and two nickels. He came back and watched as Bev dumped the Tide over the rags and swung the washer’s door closed. Then he plugged two dimes into the coin-op slot and twisted the start knob.

Beverly had chipped in most of the pennies she had won at pitch for the frappes, but she found four survivors deep down in the lefthand pocket of

her jeans. She fished them out and offered them to Stan, who looked pained. “Jeez, ” he said, “I take a girl on a laundry date and right away she wants to go Dutch. ”

Beverly laughed a little. “You sure? ”

“I’m sure, ” Stan said in his dry way. “I mean, it’s really breaking my heart to give up those four pence, Beverly, but I’m sure. ”

The four of them went over to the line of plastic contour chairs against the Washateria’s cinderblock wall and sat there, not talking. The Maytag

with the rags in it chugged and sloshed. Fans of suds slobbered against the thick glass of its round porthole. At first the suds were reddish. Looking at them made Bev feel a little sick, but she found it was hard to look away.

The bloody foam had a gruesome sort of fascination. The lady in the nurse’s uniform glanced at them more and more often over the top of her book. She had perhaps been afraid they would be rowdy; now their very silence seemed to unnerve her. When her dryer stopped she took her clothes out, folded them, put them into a blue plastic laundry-bag and left, giving them one last puzzled look as she went out the door.

As soon as she was gone, Ben said abruptly, almost harshly: “You’re not alone. ”

“What? ” Beverly asked.

“You’re not alone, ” Ben repeated. “You see—”

He stopped and looked at Eddie, who nodded. He looked at Stan, who looked unhappy . . . but who, after a moment, shrugged and also nodded.

“What in the world are you talking about? ” Beverly asked. She was tired of people saying inexplicable things to her today. She gripped Ben’s lower arm. “If you know something about this, tell me!”

“Do you want to do it? ” Ben asked Eddie.

Eddie shook his head. He took his aspirator out of his pocket and sucked in on it with a monstrous gasp.

Speaking slowly, picking his words, Ben told Beverly how he had happened to meet Bill Denbrough and Eddie Kaspbrak in the Barrens on the day school let out—that was almost a week ago, as hard as that was to believe. He told her about how they had built the dam in the Barrens the following day. He told Bill’s story of how the school photograph of his dead brother had turned its head and winked. He told his own story of the mummy who had walked on the icy Canal in the dead heart of winter with

balloons that floated against the wind. Beverly listened to all this with growing horror. She could feel her eyes widening, her hands and feet growing cold.

Ben stopped and looked at Eddie. Eddie took another wheezing pull on his aspirator and then told the story of the leper again, speaking as rapidly as Ben had slowly, his words tumbling over one another in their urgency to escape and be gone. He finished with a sucking little half-sob, but this time he didn’t cry.

“And you? ” she asked, looking at Stan Uris. “I—”

There was sudden silence, making them all start the way a sudden explosion might have done.

“The wash is done, ” Stan said.

They watched him get up—small, economical, graceful—and open the washer. He pulled out the rags, which were stuck together in a clump, and examined them.

“There’s a little stain left, ” he said, “but it’s not too bad. Looks like it could be cranberry juice. ”

He showed them, and they all nodded gravely, as if over important documents. Beverly felt a relief that was similar to the relief she had felt when the bathroom was clean again. She could stand the faded pastel smear on the peeling wallpaper in there, and she could stand the faint reddish stain on her mother’s cleaning rags. They had done something about it, that seemed to be the important thing. Maybe it hadn’t worked completely, but

she discovered it had worked well enough to give her heart peace, and brother, that was good enough for Al Marsh’s daughter Beverly.

Stan tossed them into one of the barrel-shaped dryers and put in two nickels. The dryer started to turn, and Stan came back and took his seat between Eddie and Ben.

For a moment the four of them sat silent again, watching the rags turn and fall, turn and fall. The drone of the gas-fired dryer was soothing, almost soporific. A woman passed by the chocked-open door, wheeling a cart of groceries. She glanced in at them and passed on.

“I did see something, ” Stan said suddenly. “I didn’t want to talk about it, because I wanted to think it was a dream or something. Maybe even a fit,

like that Stavier kid has. Any you guys know that kid? ”

Ben and Bev shook their heads. Eddie said, “The kid who’s got epilepsy?

”

“Yeah, right. That’s how bad it was. I would have rather thought I had

something like that than that I saw something . . . really real. ”

“What was it? ” Bev asked, but she wasn’t sure she really wanted to

know. This was not like listening to ghost-stories around a campfire while you ate wieners in toasted buns and cooked marshmallows over the flames until they were black and crinkly. Here they sat in this stifling laundromat and she could see great big dust kitties under the washing machines (ghost- turds, her father called them), she could see dust-motes dancing in the hot shafts of sunlight which fell through the laundromat’s dirty plate-glass

window, she could see old magazines with their covers torn off. These were all normal things. Nice and normal and boring. But she was scared. Terribly scared. Because, she sensed, none of these things were made-up stories, made-up monsters: Ben’s mummy, Eddie’s leper . . . either or both of them might be out tonight when the sun went down. Or Bill Denbrough’s brother, one-armed and implacable, cruising through the black drains under the city with silver coins for eyes.

Yet, when Stan did not answer immediately, she asked again: “What was it? ”

Speaking carefully, Stan said: “I was over in that little park where the Standpipe is—”

“Oh God, I don’t like that place, ” Eddie said dolefully. “If there’s a haunted house in Derry, that’s it. ”

“What? ” Stan said sharply. “What did you say? ”

“Don’t you know about that place? ” Eddie asked. “My mom wouldn’t let me go near there even before the kids started getting killed. She . . . she

takes real good care of me. ” He offered them an uneasy grin and held his aspirator tighter in his lap. “You see, some kids have been drowned in there. Three or four. They—Stan? Stan, are you all right? ”

Stan Uris’s face had gone a leaden gray. His mouth worked soundlessly. His eyes rolled up until the others could only see the bottommost curves of his irises. One hand clutched weakly at empty air and then fell against his thigh.

Eddie did the only thing he could think of. He leaned over, put one thin arm around Stan’s slumping shoulders, jammed his aspirator into Stan’s

mouth, and triggered off a big blast.

Stan began to cough and choke and gag. He sat up straight, his eyes back in focus again. He coughed into his cupped hands. At last he uttered a huge, burping gasp and slumped back against his chair.

“What was that? ” he managed at last.

“My asthma medicine, ” Eddie said apologetically. “God, it tastes like dead dogshit. ”

They all laughed at this, but it was nervous laughter. The others were looking nervously at Stan. Thin color now burned in his cheeks.

“It’s pretty bad, all right, ” Eddie said with some pride.

“Yeah, but is it kosher? ” Stan said, and they all laughed again, although none of them (including Stan) really knew what “kosher” meant.

Stan stopped laughing first and looked at Eddie intently. “Tell me what you know about the Standpipe, ” he said.

Eddie started, but both Ben and Beverly also contributed. The Derry Standpipe stood on Kansas Street, about a mile and a half west of

downtown, near the southern edge of the Barrens. At one time, near the end of the previous century, it had supplied all of Derry’s water, holding one and three-quarters million gallons. Because the circular open-air gallery just

below the Standpipe’s roof offered a spectacular view of the town and the surrounding countryside, it had been a popular place until 1930 or so.

Families would come out to tiny Memorial Park on a Saturday or Sunday forenoon when the weather was fine, climb the one hundred and sixty stairs inside the Standpipe to the gallery, and take in the view. More often than not they spread and ate a picnic lunch while they did so.

The stairs were between the Standpipe’s outside, which was shingled a blinding white, and its inner sleeve, a great stainless-steel cylinder standing a hundred and six feet high. These stairs wound to the top in a narrow spiral.

Just below the gallery level, a thick wooden door in the Standpipe’s inner jacket gave on a platform over the water itself—a black, gently lapping tarn lit by naked magnesium bulbs screwed into reflective tin hoods. The water was exactly one hundred feet deep when the supply was all the way up.

“Where did the water come from? ” Ben asked.

Bev, Eddie, and Stan looked at each other. None of them knew. “Well, what about the kids that drowned, then? ”

They were only a bit clearer on that. It seemed that in those days (“olden days, ” Ben called them solemnly, as he took up this part of the tale) the door leading to the platform over the water had always been left unlocked. One night a couple of kids . . . or maybe just one . . . or as many as three . . . had found the ground-level door also unlocked. They had gone up on a dare. They found their way out onto the platform over the water instead of onto the gallery by mistake. In the darkness, they had fallen over the edge

before they quite knew where they were.

“I heard it from this kid Vic Crumly who said he heard it from his dad, ” Beverly said, “so maybe it’s true. Vic said his dad said that once they fell into the water they were as good as dead because there was nothing to hold onto. The platform was just out of reach. He said they paddled around in there, yelling for help, all night long, probably. Only no one heard them and they just got tireder and tireder until—”

She trailed off, feeling the horror of it sink into her. She could see those boys in her mind’s eye, real or made-up, paddling around like drenched

puppies. Going under, coming up sputtering. Splashing more and swimming less as panic set in. Soggy sneakers treading water. Fingers scrabbling uselessly for any kind of purchase on the smooth steel walls of the sleeve.

She could taste the water they must have swallowed. She could hear the flat, echoing quality of their cries. How long? Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? How long before the cries had ceased and they had simply floated face-down, strange fish for the caretaker to find the next morning?

“God, ” Stan said dryly.

“I heard there was a woman who lost her baby, too, ” Eddie said suddenly. “That was when they closed the place for good. At least, that’s what I heard. They did use to let people go up, I know that. But then one

time there was this lady and her baby. I don’t know how old the baby was. But this platform, it’s supposed to go right out over the water. And the lady went to the railing and she was, you know, holding the baby, and either she dropped it or maybe it just wriggled. I heard this guy tried to save it. Doing the hero bit, you know. He jumped right in, but the baby was gone. Maybe

he was wearing a jacket or something. When your clothes get wet, they drag you down. ”

Eddie abruptly put his hand into his pocket and brought out a small brown glass bottle. He opened it, took out two white pills, and swallowed

them dry.

“What were those? ” Beverly asked.

“Aspirin. I’ve got a headache. ” He looked at her defensively, but Beverly said nothing more.

Ben finished. After the incident of the baby (he himself, he said, had heard that it was actually a kid, a little girl of about three), the Town Council had voted to lock the Standpipe, both downstairs and up, and stop the daytrips and picnics on the gallery. It had remained locked from then until now. Oh, the caretaker came and went, and the maintenance men once in awhile, and once every season there were guided tours. Interested

citizens could follow a lady from the Historical Society up the spiral of

stairs to the gallery at the top, where they could ooh and aah over the view and snap Kodaks to show their friends. But the door to the inner sleeve was always locked now.

“Is it still full of water? ” Stan asked.

“I guess so, ” Ben said. “I’ve seen firetrucks filling up there during grassfire season. They hook a hose to the pipe at the bottom. ”

Stanley was looking at the dryer again, watching the rags go around and around. The clump had broken up now, and some of them floated like parachutes.

“What did you see there? ” Bev asked him gently.

For a moment it seemed he would not answer at all. Then he drew a deep, shuddering breath and said something that at first struck them all as being far from the point. “They named it Memorial Park after the 23rd Maine in

the Civil War. The Derry Blues, they were called. There used to be a statue, but it blew down during a storm in the forties. They didn’t have money enough to fix the statue, so they put in a birdbath instead. A big stone birdbath. ”

They were all looking at him. Stan swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat.

“I watch birds, you see. I have an album, a pair of Zeiss-Ikon binoculars, and everything. ” He looked at Eddie. “Do you have any more aspirins? ”

Eddie handed him the bottle. Stan took two, hesitated, then took another.

He gave the bottle back and swallowed the pills, one after another, grimacing. Then he went on with his story.

Stan’s encounter had happened on a rainy April evening two months ago.

He had donned his slicker, put his bird-book and his binoculars in a waterproof sack with a drawstring at the top, and set out for Memorial Park. He and his father usually went out together, but his father had had to “work over” that night and had called specially at suppertime to talk to Stan.

One of his customers at the agency, another birdwatcher, had spotted what he believed to be a male cardinal—Fringillidae Richmondena— drinking from the birdbath in Memorial Park, he told Stan. They liked to eat, drink, and bathe right around dusk. It was very rare to spot a cardinal

this far north of Massachusetts. Would Stan like to go down there and see if he could collect it? He knew the weather was pretty foul, but . . .

Stan had been agreeable. His mother made him promise to keep the hood of his slicker up, but Stan would have done that anyway. He was a

fastidious boy. There were never any fights about getting him to wear his rubbers or his snowpants in the winter.

He walked the mile and a half to Memorial Park in a rain so fine and hesitant that it really wasn’t even a drizzle; it was more like a constant hanging mist. The air was muted but somehow exciting just the same. In

spite of the last dwindling piles of snow under bushes and in groves of trees (to Stan they looked like piles of dirty cast-off pillowcases), there was a smell of new growth in the air. Looking at the branches of elms and maples and oaks against the lead-white sky, Stan thought that their silhouettes looked mysteriously thicker. They would burst open in a week or two, unrolling leaves of a delicate, almost transparent green.

The air smells green tonight, he thought, and smiled a little.

He walked quickly because the light would be gone in an hour or even less. He was as fastidious about his sightings as he was about his dress and study habits, and unless there was enough light left for him to be absolutely sure, he would not allow himself to collect the cardinal even if he knew in his heart he had really seen it.

He cut across Memorial Park on a diagonal. The Standpipe was a white bulking shape to his left. Stan barely glanced at it. He had no interest whatsoever in the Standpipe.

Memorial Park was a rough rectangle which sloped downhill. The grass

(white and dead at this time of year) was kept neatly cut in the summertime, and there were circular beds of flowers. There was no playground equipment, however. This was considered a grownups’ park.

At the far end, the grade smoothed out before dropping abruptly down to Kansas Street and the Barrens beyond. The birdbath his father had mentioned stood on this flat area. It was a shallow stone dish set into a squat masonry pedestal that was really much too big for the humble function it fulfilled. Stan’s father had told him that, before the money ran out, they had intended to put the statue of the soldier back up here again.

“I like the birdbath better, Daddy, ” Stan said.

Mr. Uris ruffled his hair. “Me too, son, ” he said. “More baths and less bullets, that’s my motto. ”

At the top of this pedestal a motto had been carved in the stone. Stanley read it but did not understand it; the only Latin he understood was the genus classifications of the birds in his book.

Apparebat eidolon senex.

—Pliny

the inscription read.

Stan sat down on a bench, took his bird-album out of the bag, and turned over to the picture of the cardinal one more time, going over it, familiarizing himself with the recognizable points. A male cardinal would be hard to mistake for something else—it was as red as a fire-engine, if not so large—but Stan was a creature of habit and convention; these things

comforted him and reinforced his sense of place and belonging in the world.

So he gave the picture a good three-minute study before closing the book (the moisture in the air was making the corners of the pages turn up) and putting it back into the bag. He uncased his binoculars and put them to his

eyes. There was no need to adjust the field of focus, because the last time he had used the glasses he had been sitting on this same bench and looking at that same birdbath.

Fastidious boy, patient boy. He did not fidget. He did not get up and walk around or swing the binoculars here and there to see what else there might be to be seen. He sat still, field glasses trained on the birdbath, and the mist collected in fat drops on his yellow slicker.

He was not bored. He was looking down into the equivalent of an avian convention-site. Four brown sparrows sat there for awhile, dipping into the water with their beaks, flicking droplets casually back over their shoulders and onto their backs. Then a bluejay came hauling in like a cop breaking up a gaggle of loiterers. The jay was as big as a house in Stan’s glasses, his

quarrelsome cries absurdly thin by comparison (after you looked through the binoculars steadily for awhile the magnified birds you saw began to

seem not odd but perfectly correct). The sparrows flew off. The jay, now in charge, strutted, bathed, grew bored, departed. The sparrows returned, then flew off again as a pair of robins cruised in to bathe and (perhaps) to discuss matters of importance to the hollow-boned set. Stan’s father had laughed at Stan’s hesitant suggestion that maybe birds talked, and he was sure his dad was right when he said birds weren’t smart enough to talk—that their brain- pans were too small—but by gosh they sure looked like they were talking.

A new bird joined them. It was red. Stan hastily adjusted the field of focus on the binoculars a bit. Was it . . . ? No. It was a scarlet tanager, a good bird but not the cardinal he was looking for. It was joined by a flicker that was a frequent visitor to the Memorial Park birdbath. Stan recognized him by the tattered right wing. As always, he speculated on how that might have

happened—a close call with some cat seemed the most likely explanation. Other birds came and went. Stan saw a grackle, as clumsy and ugly as a flying boxcar, a bluebird, another flicker. He was finally rewarded by a new bird—not the cardinal but a cowbird that looked vast and stupid in the

eyepieces of the binoculars. He dropped them against his chest and fumbled the bird-book out of the bag again, hoping that the cowbird wouldn’t fly away before he could confirm the sighting. He would have something to

take home to his father, at least. And it was time to go. The light was fading fast. He felt cold and damp. He checked the book, then looked through the glasses again. It was still there, not bathing but only standing on the rim of the birdbath looking dumb. It was almost surely a cowbird. With no

distinctive markings—at least none he could pick up at this distance—and in the fading light it was hard to be one hundred percent sure, but maybe he

had just enough time and light for one more check. He looked at the picture in the book, studying it with a fierce frown of concentration, and then picked up the glasses again. He had only fixed them on the birdbath when a hollow rolling boom! sent the cowbird—if it had been a cowbird—winging. Stan tried to follow it with the glasses, knowing how slim his chances were of picking it up again. He lost it and made a hissing sound of disgust between his teeth. Well, if it had come once it would perhaps come again.

And it had only been a cowbird

(probably a cowbird)

after all, not a golden eagle or a great auk.

Stan recased his binoculars and put away his bird-album. Then he got up and looked around to see if he could tell what had been responsible for that sudden loud noise. It hadn’t sounded like a gun or a car backfire. More like a door being thrown open in a spooky movie about castles and dungeons . .

. complete with hokey echo effects.

He could see nothing.

He got up and started toward the slope down to Kansas Street. The

Standpipe was now on his right, a chalky white cylinder, phantomlike in the mist and the growing darkness. It seemed almost to . . . to float.

That was an odd thought. He supposed it must have come from his own head—where else could a thought come from? —but it somehow did not seem like his own thought at all.

He looked at the Standpipe more closely, and then veered in that direction without even thinking about it. Windows circled the building at intervals, rising around it in a spiral that made Stan think of the barber pole in front of Mr. Aurlette’s shop, where he and his dad got their haircuts. The bone-white shingles bulged out over each of those dark windows like brows over eyes. Wonder how they did that, Stan thought—not with as much interest as Ben Hanscom would have felt, but with some—and that was when he saw there was a much larger space of darkness at the foot of the

Standpipe—a clear oblong in the circular base.

He stopped, frowning, thinking that was a funny place for a window: it was completely out of symmetry with the others. Then he realized it wasn’t a window. It was a door.

The noise I heard, he thought. It was that door, blowing open.

He looked around. Early, gloomy dusk. White sky now fading to a dull dusky purple, mist thickening a bit more toward the steady rain which would fall most of the night. Dusk and mist and no wind at all.

So . . . if it hadn’t blown open, had someone pushed it open? Why? And it looked like an awfully heavy door to slam open hard enough to make a noise like that boom. He supposed a very big person . . . maybe . . .

Curious, Stan walked over for a closer look.

The door was bigger than he had first supposed—six feet high and two feet thick, the boards which composed it bound with brass strips. Stan swung it half-closed. It moved smoothly and easily on its hinges in spite of its size. It also moved silently—there was not a single squeak. He had moved it to see how much damage it had done to the shingles, blasting open like that. There was no damage at all; not so much as a single mark.

Weirdsville, as Richie would say.

Well, it wasn’t the door you heard, that’s all, he thought. Maybe a jet from Loring boomed over Derry, or something. Door was probably open all al—

His foot struck something. Stan looked down and saw it was a padlock . .

. correction. It was the remains of a padlock. It had been burst wide open. It looked, in fact, as if someone had rammed the lock’s keyway full of gunpowder and then set a match to it. Flowers of metal, deadly sharp, stood out from the body of the lock in a stiff spray. Stan could see the layers of steel inside. The thick hasp hung askew by one bolt which had been yanked three-quarters of the way out of the wood. The other three hasp-bolts lay on the wet grass. They had been twisted like pretzels.

Frowning, Stan swung the door open again and peered inside.

Narrow stairs led upward, circling around and out of sight. The outer wall of the staircase was bare wood supported by giant crossbeams which had been pegged together rather than nailed. To Stan some of the pegs looked thicker than his own upper arm. The inner wall was steel from which gigantic rivets swelled like boils.

“Is anyone here? ” Stan asked. There was no answer.

He hesitated, then stepped inside so he could see up the narrow throat of the staircase a little better. Nothing. And it was Creep City in here. As

Richie would also say. He turned to leave . . . and heard music.

It was faint, but still instantly recognizable.

Calliope music.

He cocked his head, listening, the frown on his face starting to dissolve a little. Calliope music, all right, the music of carnivals and county fairs. It conjured up trace memories which were as delightful as they were ephemeral: popcorn, cotton candy, doughboys frying in hot grease, the chain-driven clatter of rides like the Wild Mouse, the Whip, the Koaster- Kups.

Now the frown had become a tentative grin. Stan went up one step, then two more, head still cocked. He paused again. As if thinking about carnivals could actually create one; he could now actually smell the popcorn, the cotton candy, the doughboys . . . and more! Peppers, chili-dogs, cigarette

smoke and sawdust. There was the sharp smell of white vinegar, the kind you could shake over your french fries through a hole in the tin cap. He could smell mustard, bright yellow and stinging hot, that you spread on your hotdog with a wooden paddle.

This was amazing . . . incredible . . . irresistible.

He took another step up and that was when he heard the rustling, eager footsteps above him, descending the stairs. He cocked his head again. The calliope music had gotten suddenly louder, as if to mask the sound of the footsteps. He could recognize the tune now—it was “Camptown Races. ”

Footsteps, yeah; but they weren’t exactly rustling footsteps, were they? They actually sounded kind of . . . squishy, didn’t they? The sound was like people walking in rubbers full of water.

Camptown ladies sing dis song, doodah doodah (Squish-squish)

Camptown Racetrack nine miles long, doodah doodah (Squish-slosh—closer now)

Ride around all night Ride around all day . . .

Now there were shadows bobbing on the wall above him.

The terror leaped down Stan’s throat all at once—it was like swallowing something hot and horrible, bad medicine that suddenly galvanized you like electricity. It was the shadows that did it.

He saw them only for a moment. He had just that small bit of time to

observe that there were two of them, that they were slumped, and somehow

unnatural. He had only that moment because the light in here was fading, fading too fast, and as he turned, the heavy Standpipe door swung ponderously shut behind him.

Stanley ran back down the stairs (somehow he had climbed more than a dozen, although he could only remember climbing two, three at most), very much afraid now. It was too dark in here to see anything. He could hear his own breathing, he could hear the calliope tootling away somewhere above him

(what’s a calliope doing up there in the dark? who’s playing it? ) and he could hear those wet footsteps. Approaching him now. Getting closer.

He hit the door with his hands splayed out in front of him, hit it hard enough to send sparkly tingles of pain all the way up to his elbows. It had swung so easily before . . . and now it would not move at all.

No . . . that was not quite true. At first it had moved just a bit, just enough for him to see a mocking strip of gray light running vertically down its left side. Then gone again. As if someone was on the other side of it, holding

the door closed.

Panting, terrified, Stan pushed against the door with all of his strength.

He could feel the brass bindings digging into his hands. Nothing.

He whirled around, now pressing his back and his splayed hands against the door. He could feel sweat, oily and hot, running down his forehead. The calliope music had gotten louder yet. It drifted and echoed down the spiral staircase. There was nothing cheery about it now. It had changed. It had

become a dirge. It screamed like wind and water, and in his mind’s eye Stan saw a county fair at the end of autumn, wind and rain blowing up a deserted midway, pennons flapping, tents bulging, falling over, wheeling away like

canvas bats. He saw empty rides standing against the sky like scaffolds; the wind drummed and hooted in the weird angles of their struts. He suddenly understood that death was in this place with him, that death was coming for him out of the dark and he could not run.

A sudden rush of water spilled down the stairs. Now it was not popcorn and doughboys and cotton candy he smelled but wet decay, the stench of dead pork which has exploded in a fury of maggots in a place hidden away from the sun.

“Who’s here? ” he screamed in a high, trembling voice.

He was answered by a low, bubbling voice that seemed choked with mud and old water.

“The dead ones, Stanley. We’re the dead ones. We sank, but now we float

. . . and you’ll float, too. ”

He could feel water washing around his feet. He cringed back against the door in an agony of fear. They were very close now. He could feel their nearness. He could smell them. Something was digging into his hip as he struck the door again and again in a mindless, useless effort to get away.

“We’re dead, but sometimes we clown around a little, Stanley.

Sometimes we—”

It was his bird-book.

Without thinking, Stan grabbed for it. It was stuck in his slicker pocket and wouldn’t come out. One of them was down now; he could hear it shuffling across the little stone areaway where he had come in. It would reach for him in a moment, and he would feel its cold flesh.

He gave one more tremendous yank, and the bird-book was in his hands.

He held it in front of him like a puny shield, not thinking of what he was doing, but suddenly sure that this was right.

“Robins!” he screamed into the darkness, and for a moment the thing approaching (it was surely less than five steps away now) hesitated—he was almost sure it did. And for a moment hadn’t he felt some give in the door against which he was now cringing?

But he wasn’t cringing anymore. He was standing up straight in the darkness. When had that happened? No time to wonder. Stan licked his dry lips and began to chant: “Robins! Gray egrets! Loons! Scarlet tanagers!

Grackles! Hammerhead woodpeckers! Redheaded woodpeckers! Chickadees! Wrens! Peli—”

The door opened with a protesting scream and Stan took a giant step backward into thin misty air. He fell sprawling on the dead grass. He had bent the bird-book nearly in half, and later that night he would see the clear impressions of his fingers sunken into its cover, as if it had been bound in Play-Doh instead of hard pressboard.

He didn’t try to get up but began to dig in with his heels instead, his butt grooving through the slick grass. His lips were pulled back over his teeth.

Inside that dim oblong he could see two sets of legs below the diagonal

shadowline thrown by the door, which now stood half-open. He could see

jeans that had decayed to a purplish-black. Orange threads lay plastered limply against the seams, and water dripped from the cuffs to puddle around shoes that had mostly rotted away, revealing swelled, purple toes within.

Their hands lay limply at their sides, too long, too waxy-white.

Depending from each finger was a small orange pompom.

Holding his bent bird-book in front of him, his face wet with drizzle, sweat, and tears, Stan whispered in a husky monotone: “Chickenhawks . . . grosbeaks . . . hummingbirds . . . albatrosses . . . kiwis . . .

One of those hands turned over, showing a palm from which endless water had eroded all the lines, leaving something as idiot-smooth as the hand of a department-store dummy.

One finger unrolled . . . then rolled up again. The pompom bounced and dangled, dangled and bounced.

It was beckoning him.

Stan Uris, who would die in a bathtub with crosses slashed into his

forearms twenty-seven years later, got to his knees, then to his feet, then ran. He ran across Kansas Street without looking either way for traffic and paused, panting, on the far sidewalk, to look back.

From this angle he couldn’t see the door in the base of the Standpipe; only the Standpipe itself, thick and yet somehow graceful, standing in the murk.

“They were dead, ” Stan whispered to himself, shocked. He wheeled suddenly and ran for home.

The dryer had stopped. So had Stan.

The three others only looked at him for a long moment. His skin was nearly as gray as the April evening of which he had just told them.

“Wow, ” Ben said at last. He let out his breath in a ragged, whistling sigh. “It’s true, ” Stan said in a low voice. “I swear to God it is. ”

“I believe you, ” Beverly said. “After what happened at my house, I’d believe anything. ”

She got up suddenly, almost knocking over her chair, and went to the dryer. She began to pull out the rags one by one, folding them. Her back was turned, but Ben suspected she was crying. He wanted to go to her and lacked the courage.

“We gotta talk to Bill about this, ” Eddie said. “Bill will know what to do.

”

“Do? ” Stan said, turning to look at him. “What do you mean, do? ” Eddie looked at him, uncomfortable. “Well . . . ”

“I don’t want to do anything, ” Stan said. He was looking at Eddie with

such a hard, fierce stare that Eddie squirmed in his chair. “I want to forget

about it. That’s all I want to do. ”

“Not that easy, ” Beverly said quietly, turning around. Ben had been right: the hot sunlight slanting in through the Washateria’s dirty windows reflected off bright lines of tears on her cheeks. “It’s not just us. I heard

Ronnie Grogan. And the little boy I heard first . . . I think maybe it was that little Clements kid. The one who disappeared off his trike. ”

“So what? ” Stan said defiantly.

“So what if it gets more? ” she asked. “What if it gets more kids? ”

His eyes, a hot brown, locked with her blue ones, answering the question without speaking: So what if it does?

But Beverly did not look down or away and at last Stan dropped his own eyes . . . perhaps only because she was still crying, but perhaps because her concern somehow made her stronger.

“Eddie’s right, ” she said. “We ought to talk to Bill. Then maybe to the Police Chief—”

“Right, ” Stan said. If he was trying to sound contemptuous, it didn’t work. His voice came out sounding only tired. “Dead kids in the Standpipe. Blood that only kids can see, not grownups. Clowns walking on the Canal. Balloons that blow against the wind. Mummies. Lepers under porches.

Chief Borton’ll laugh his bum off . . . and then stick us in the loonybin. ” “If we all went to him, ” Ben said, troubled. “If we all went together . . . ” “Sure, ” Stan said. “Right. Tell me more, Haystack. Write me a book. ”

He got up and went to the window, hands in pockets, looking angry and upset and scared. He stared out for a moment, shoulders stiff and rejecting beneath his neat shirt. Without turning back to them he repeated: “Write me a frigging book!”

“No, ” Ben said quietly, “Bill’s going to write the books. ”

Stan wheeled back, surprised, and the others looked at him. There was a shocked look on Ben Hanscom’s face, as if he had suddenly and unexpectedly slapped himself.

Bev folded the last of the rags. “Birds, ” Eddie said.

“What? ” Bev and Ben said together.

Eddie was looking at Stan. “You got out by yelling birds’ names at them?

”

“Maybe, ” Stan said reluctantly. “Or maybe the door was just stuck and

finally popped open. ”

“Without you leaning on it? ” Bev asked.

Stan shrugged. It was not a sullen shrug; it only said he didn’t know.

“I think it was the birds you shouted at them, ” Eddie said. “But why? In the movies you hold up a cross . . . ”

“. . . or say the Lord’s Prayer . . . ” Ben added.

“. . . or the Twenty-third Psalm, ” Beverly put in.

“I know the Twenty-third Psalm, ” Stan said angrily, “but I wouldn’t do so good with the old crucifix business. I’m Jewish, remember? ”

They looked away from him, embarrassed, either for his having been born that way or for their having forgotten it.

“Birds, ” Eddie said again. “Jesus!” Then he glanced guiltily at Stan again, but Stan was looking moodily across the street at the Bangor Hydro office.

“Bill will know what to do, ” Ben said suddenly, as if finally agreeing with Bev and Eddie. “Betcha anything. Betcha any amount of money. ”

“Look, ” Stan said, looking at all of them earnestly. “That’s okay. We can talk to Bill about it if you want. But that’s where things stop for me. You can call me a chicken, or yellow, I don’t care. I’m not a chicken, I don’t think. It’s just that those things in the Standpipe . . . ”

“If you weren’t afraid of something like that, you’d have to be crazy, Stan, ” Beverly said softly.

“Yeah, I was scared, but that’s not the problem, ” Stan said hotly. “It’s not even what I’m talking about. Don’t you see—”

They were looking at him expectantly, their eyes both troubled and faintly hopeful, but Stan found he could not explain how he felt. The words

had run out. There was a brick of feeling inside him, almost choking him, and he could not get it out of his throat. Neat as he was, sure as he was, he was still only an eleven-year-old boy who had that year finished the fourth grade.

He wanted to tell them that there were worse things than being frightened. You could be frightened by things like almost having a car hit you while you were riding your bike or, before the Salk vaccine, getting polio. You could be frightened of that crazyman Khrushchev or of drowning if you went out over your head. You could be frightened of all those things and still function.

But those things in the Standpipe . . .

He wanted to tell them that those dead boys who had lurched and shambled their way down the spiral staircase had done something worse than frighten him: they had offended him.

Offended, yes. It was the only word he could think of, and if he used it they would laugh—they liked him, he knew that, and they had accepted him as one of them, but they would still laugh. All the same, there were things that were not supposed to be. They offended any sane person’s sense of order, they offended the central idea that God had given the earth a final tilt on its axis so that twilight would only last about twelve minutes at the equator and linger for an hour or more up where the Eskimos built their ice- cube houses, that He had done that and He then had said, in effect: “Okay, if you can figure out the tilt, you can figure out any damn thing you choose.

Because even light has weight, and when the note of a trainwhistle suddenly drops it’s the Doppler effect and when an airplane breaks the sound barrier that bang isn’t the applause of the angels or the flatulence of demons but only air collapsing back into place. I gave you the tilt and then I sat back about halfway up the auditorium to watch the show. I got nothing else to say, except that two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if there’s blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead. ” You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It’s offense you maybe can’t live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are live things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don’t blink, and there’s a stink down in that dark, and after awhile you think maybe there’s a whole other universe down there, a universe where a

square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have

five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow

roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I’d scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn’t look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense.

Because he could say none of these things, he just reiterated: “Being scared isn’t the problem. I just don’t want to be involved in something that will land me in the nuthatch. ”

“Will you at least go with us to talk to him? ” Bev asked. “Listen to what he says? ”

“Sure, ” Stan said, and then laughed. “Maybe I ought to bring my bird- book. ”

They all laughed then, and it was a little easier.

Beverly left them outside the Kleen-Kloze and took the rags back home by herself. The apartment was still empty. She put them under the kitchen sink and closed the cupboard. She stood up and looked down toward the bathroom.

I’m not going down there, she thought. I’m going to watch Bandstand on TV. See if I can’t learn how to do the Dog.

So she went into the living room and turned on the TV and five minutes later she turned it off while Dick Clark was showing how much oil just one Stri-Dex medicated pad could take off the face of your average teenager (“If you think you can get clean with just soap and water, ” Dick said, holding

the dirty pad up to the glassy eye of the camera so that every teenager in America could get a good look, “you ought to take a good look at this”).

She went back to the kitchen cupboard over the sink, where her father kept his tools. Among them was a pocket tape, the kind that runs out a long

yellow tongue of inches. She folded this into one cold hand and went down to the bathroom.

It was sparkling clean, silent. Somewhere, far distant, it seemed, she could hear Mrs. Doyon yelling for her boy Jim to get in out of the road, right now.

She went to the bathroom basin and looked down into the dark eye of the drain.

She stood there for some time, her legs as cold as marble inside her jeans, her nipples feeling sharp enough and hard enough to cut paper, her lips dead dry. She waited for the voices.

No voices came.

A little shuddery sigh came from her, and she began to feed the thin steel tape into the drain. It went down smoothly—like a sword into the gullet of a county fair sideshow performer. Six inches, eight inches, ten. It stopped, bound up in the elbow-bend under the sink, Beverly supposed. She wiggled it, pushing gently at the same time, and eventually the tape began to feed into the drain again. Sixteen inches now, then two feet, then three.

She watched the yellow tape slipping out of the chromed-steel case, which had been worn black on the sides by her father’s big hand. In her mind’s eye she saw it sliding through the black bore of the pipe, picking up some muck, scraping away flakes of rust. Down there where the sun never shines and the night never stops, she thought.

She imagined the head of the tape, with its small steel buttplate no bigger than a fingernail, sliding farther and farther into the darkness, and part of her mind screamed What are you doing? She did not ignore that voice . . . but she seemed helpless to heed it. She saw the end of the tape going straight down now, descending into the cellar. She saw it striking the

sewage pipe . . . and even as she saw it, the tape bound up again.

She wiggled it again, and the tape, thin enough to be limber, made a faint eerie sound that reminded her a little bit of the way a saw sounds when you bend it back and forth across your legs.

She could see its tip wiggling against the bottom of this wider pipe, which would have a baked ceramic surface. She could see it bending . . . and then she was able to push it forward again.

She ran out six feet. Seven. Nine—

And suddenly the tape began to run through her hands by itself, as if something down there was pulling the other end. Not just pulling it: running with it. She stared at the flowing tape, her eyes wide, her mouth a sagging O of fear—fear, yes, but no surprise. Hadn’t she known? Hadn’t she known something like this was going to happen?

The tape ran out to its final stop. Eighteen feet; an even six yards.

A soft chuckle came wafting out of the drain, followed by a low whisper that was almost reproachful: “Beverly, Beverly, Beverly . . . you can’t fight us . . . you’ll die if you try . . . die if you try . . . die if you try . . . Beverly . . . Beverly . . . Beverly. . . ly-ly-ly . . . ”

Something clicked inside the tape-measure’s housing, and it suddenly began to run rapidly back into its case, the numbers and hashmarks blurring by. Near the end—the last five or six feet—the yellow became a dark, dripping red and she screamed and dropped it on the floor as if the tape had suddenly turned into a live snake.

Fresh blood trickled over the clean white porcelain of the basin and back down into the drain’s wide eye. She bent, sobbing now, her fear a freezing weight in her stomach, and picked the tape up. She tweezed it between the thumb and first finger of her right hand and, holding it in front of her, took it into the kitchen. As she walked, blood dripped from the tape onto the faded linoleum of the hall and the kitchen.

She steadied herself by thinking of what her father would say to her— what he would do to her—if he found that she had gotten his measuring tape all bloody. Of course, he wouldn’t be able to see the blood, but it helped to think that.

She took one of the clean rags—still as warm as fresh bread from the dryer—and went back into the bathroom. Before she began to clean, she put the hard rubber plug in the drain, closing that eye. The blood was fresh, and it cleaned up easily. She went up her own trail, wiping away the dime-sized drops on the linoleum, then rinsing the rag, wringing it out, and putting it aside.

She got a second rag and used it to clean her father’s measuring tape. The blood was thick, viscous. In two places there were clots of the stuff, black and spongy.

Although the blood only went back five or six feet, she cleaned the entire length of the tape, removing from it all traces of pipemuck. That done, she

put it back into the cupboard over the sink and took the two stained rags out in back of the apartment. Mrs. Doyon was yelling at Jim again. Her voice

was clear, almost bell-like in the still hot late afternoon.

In the back yard, which was mostly bare dirt, weeds, and clotheslines,

there was a rusty incinerator. Beverly threw the rags into it, then sat down on the back steps. Tears came suddenly, with surprising violence, and this time she made no effort to hold them back.

She put her arms on her knees, her head in her arms, and wept while Mrs.

Doyon called for Jim to come out of that road, did he want to get hit by a car and be killed?

‌DERRY: THE SECOND INTERLUDE‌

“Quaeque ipsa miserrima vidi, Et quorum pars magna fui. ”

—Virgil

“You don’t fuck around with the infinite. ”

—Mean Streets

February 14th, 1985 Valentine’s Day

Two more disappearances in the past week—both children. Just as I was beginning to relax. One of them a sixteen-year-old boy named Dennis Torrio, the other a girl of just five who was sledding in back of her house on West Broadway. The hysterical mother found her sled, one of those blue

plastic flying saucers, but nothing else. There had been a fresh fall of snow the night before—four inches or so. No tracks but hers, Chief Rademacher said when I called him. He is becoming extremely annoyed with me, I think. Not anything that’s going to keep me awake nights; I have worse

things to do than that, don’t I?

Asked him if I could see the police photos. He refused.

Asked him if her tracks led away toward any sort of drain or sewer grating. This was followed by a long period of silence. Then Rademacher said, “I’m beginning to wonder if maybe you shouldn’t see a doctor, Hanlon. The head-peeper kind of doctor. The kid was snatched by her father. Don’t you read the papers? ”

“Was the Torrio boy snatched by his father? ” I asked. Another long pause.

“Give it a rest, Hanlon, ” he said. “Give me a rest. ” He hung up.

Of course I read the papers—don’t I put them out in the Reading Room of the Public Library each morning myself? The little girl, Laurie Ann Winterbarger, had been in the custody of her mother following an

acrimonious divorce proceeding in the spring of 1982. The police are operating on the theory that Horst Winterbarger, who is supposedly working as a machinery maintenance man somewhere in Florida, drove up to Maine to snatch his daughter. They further theorize that he parked his car beside

the house and called to his daughter, who then joined him—hence the lack of any tracks other than the little girl’s. They have less to say about the fact that the girl had not seen her father since she was two. Part of the deep

bitterness which accompanied the Winterbargers’ divorce came from Mrs. Winterbarger’s allegations that on at least two occasions Horst Winterbarger had s*xually molested the child. She asked the court to deny Winterbarger all visitation rights, a request the court granted in spite of Winterbarger’s hot denials. Rademacher claims the court’s decision, which had the effect of cutting Winterbarger off completely from his only child, may have pushed Winterbarger into taking his daughter. That at least has some dim plausibility, but ask yourself this: would little Laurie Ann have recognized him after three years and run to him when he called her? Rademacher says yes, even though she was two the last time she saw him. I don’t think so.

And her mother says Laurie Ann had been well trained about not approaching or talking to strangers, a lesson most Derry children learn early and well. Rademacher says he’s got Florida State Police looking for Winterbarger and that his responsibility ends there.

“Matters of custody are more the province of the lawyers than that of the police, ” this pompous, overweight asshole is quoted as saying in last Friday’s Derry News.

But the Torrio boy. . . that’s something else. Wonderful home life. Played football for the Derry Tigers. Honor Roll student. Had gone through the Outward Bound Survival School in the summer of ’84 and passed with flying colors. No history of drug use. Had a girlfriend that he was apparently head-over-heels about. Had everything to live for. Everything to stay in Derry for, at least for the next couple of years.

All the same, he’s gone.

What happened to him? A sudden attack of wanderlust? A drunk driver who maybe hit him, killed him, and buried him? Or is he maybe still in

Derry, is he maybe on the nightside of Derry, keeping company with folks like Betty Ripsom and Patrick Hockstetter and Eddie Corcoran and all the rest? Is it

(later)

I’m doing it again. Going over and over the same ground, doing nothing constructive, only cranking myself up to the screaming point. I jump when the iron stairs leading up to the stacks creak. I jump at shadows. I find myself wondering how I’d react if I was shelving books up there in the stacks, pushing my little rubber-wheeled trolley in front of me, and a hand reached from between two leaning rows of books, a groping hand. . . .

Had again a well-nigh insurmountable desire to begin calling them this afternoon. At one point I even got as far as dialing 404, the Atlanta area code, with Stanley Uris’s number in front of me. Then I just held the phone against my ear, asking myself if I wanted to call them because I was really sure—one hundred percent sure—or simply because I’m now so badly spooked that I can’t stand to be alone; that I have to talk to someone who

knows (or will know) what it is I am spooked about.

For a moment I could hear Richie saying Batches? BATCHES? We doan need no stinkin’ batches, senhorr! in his Pancho Vanilla Voice, as clearly as if he were standing beside me . . . and I hung up the phone. Because when you want to see someone as badly as I wanted to see Richie—or any of them—at that moment, you just can’t trust your own motivations. We lie best when we lie to ourselves. The fact is, I’m still not one hundred percent sure. If another body should turn up, I will call. . . but for now I must

suppose that even such a pompous ass as Rademacher may be right. She could have remembered her father; there may have been pictures of him. And I suppose a really persuasive adult could talk a kid into coming to his car, no matter what that child had been taught.

There’s another fear that haunts me. Rademacher suggested that I might be going crazy. I don’t believe that, but if I call them now, they may think I’m crazy. Worse than that, what if they should not remember me at all?

Mike Hanlon? Who? I don’t remember any Mike Hanlon. I don’t remember you at all. What promise?

I feel that there will come a right time to call them. . . and when that time comes, I’ll know that it’s right. Their own circuits will open at the same time. It’s as if there are two great wheels slowly coming into some sort of powerful convergence with each other, myself and the rest of Derry on one, and all my childhood friends on the other.

When the time comes, they will hear the voice of the Turtle.

So I’ll wait, and sooner or later I’ll know. I don’t believe it’s a question anymore of calling them or not calling them.

Only a question of when.

February 20th, 1985

The fire at the Black Spot.

“A perfect example of how the Chamber of Commerce will try to rewrite history, Mike, ” old Albert Carson would have told me, probably cackling

as he said it. “They’ll try, and sometimes they almost succeed. . . but the old people remember how things really went. They always remember. And

sometimes they’ll tell you, if you ask them right. ”

There are people who have lived in Derry for twenty years and don’t

know that there was once a “special” barracks for noncoms at the old Derry Army Air Corps Base, a barracks that was a good half a mile from the rest of the base—and in the middle of February, with the temperature standing right around zero and a forty-mile-an-hour wind howling across those flat

runways and whopping the wind-chill factor down to something you could hardly believe, that extra half a mile became something that could give you frost-freeze or frostbite, or maybe even kill you.

The other seven barracks had oil heat, storm windows, and insulation.

They were toasty and cozy. The “special” barracks, which housed the twenty-seven men of Company E, was heated by a balky old wood furnace.

Supplies of wood for it were catch-as-catch-can. The only insulation was the deep bank of pine and spruce boughs the men laid around the outside. One of the men promoted a complete set of storm windows for the place one day, but the twenty-seven inmates of the “special” barracks were

detailed up to Bangor that same day to help with some work at the base up

there, and when they came back that night, tired and cold, all of those windows had been broken. Every one.

This was in 1930, when half of America’s air force still consisted of biplanes. In Washington, Billy Mitchell had been courtmartialed and demoted to flying a desk because his gadfly insistence on trying to build a more modern air force had finally irritated his elders enough for them to slap him down hard. Not long after, he would resign.

So there was precious little flying that went on at the Derry base, in spite of its three runways (one of which was actually paved). Most of the soldiering that went on there was of the make-work variety.

One of the Company E soldiers who returned to Derry after his service tour came to an end in 1937 was my dad. He told me this story:

“One day in the spring of 1930—this was about six months before the

fire at the Black Spot—I was coming back with four of my buddies from a three-day pass we had spent down in Boston.

“When we come through the gate there was this big old boy standing just inside the checkpoint, leaning on a shovel and picking the seat of his

suntans out of his ass. A sergeant from someplace down south. Carroty-red hair. Bad teeth. Pimples. Not much more than an ape without the body hair, if you know what I mean. There were a lot of them like that in the army during the Depression.

“So here we come, four young guys back from leave, all of us still feeling fine, and we could see in his eyes that he was just looking for something to bust us with. So we snapped him salutes as if he was General Black Jack Pershing himself. I guess we might have been all right, but it

was one fine late-April day, sun shining down, and I had to shoot off my lip. ‘A good afternoon to you, Sergeant Wilson, sir, ’ said I, and he landed on

me with both feet.

“ ‘Did I give you any permission to speak to me? ’ he asks. “ ‘Nawsir, ’ I say.

“He looks around at the rest of them—Trevor Dawson, Carl Roone, and Henry Whitsun, who was killed in the fire that fall—and he says to them,

‘This here smart nigger is in hack with me. If the rest of you jigaboos don’t want to join him in one hardworking dirty bitch of an afternoon, you get over to your barracks, stow your gear, and get your asses over to the O. D. You understand? ’

“Well, they got going, and Wilson hollers, ‘Doubletime, you fuckers!

Lemme see the soles of your eighty-fucking-nines!’

“So they doubletimed off, and Wilson took me over to one of the equipment sheds and he got me a spade. He took me out into the big field that used to be just about where the Northeast Airlines Airbus terminal

stands today. And he looks at me, kind of grinning, and he points at the ground and he says, ‘You see that hole there, nigger? ’

“There was no hole there, but I figured it was best for me to agree with whatever he said, so I looked down at the ground where he was pointing and said I sure did see it. So then he busted me one in the nose and knocked me over and there I was on the ground with blood running down over the last fresh shirt I had.

“ ‘You don’t see it because some bigmouth jig bastard filled it up!’ he shouted at me, and he had two big blotches of color on his cheeks. But he

was grinning, too, and you could tell he was enjoying himself. ‘So what you do, Mr. A Good Afternoon To You, what you do is you get the dirt out of my hole. Doubletime!’

“So I dug for most two hours, and pretty soon I was in that hole up to my chin. The last couple of feet was clay, and by the time I finished I was standing in water up to my ankles and my shoes were soaked right through.

“ ‘Get out of there, Hanlon, ’ Sergeant Wilson said. He was sitting there on the grass, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t offer me any help. I was dirt and muck from top to bottom, not to mention the blood drying on the blouse of my suntans. He stood up and walked over. He pointed at the hole.

“ ‘What do you see there, nigger? ’ he asked me. “ ‘Your hole, Sergeant Wilson, ’ says I.

“ ‘Yeah, well, I decided I don’t want it, ’ he says. ‘I don’t want no hole dug by a nigger. Put my dirt back in, Private Hanlon. ’

“So I filled it back in and by the time I was done the sun was going down and it was getting cold. He comes over and looks at it after I finished patting down the last of the dirt with the flat of the spade.

“ ‘Now what do you see there, nigger? ’ he asks.

“ ‘Bunch of dirt, sir, ’ I said, and he hit me again. My God, Mikey, I came this close to just bouncing up off’n the ground and splitting his head open with the edge of that shovel. But if I’d done that, I never would have looked at the sky again, except through a set of bars. Still, there were times when I

almost think it would have been worth it. I managed to hold my peace somehow, though.

“ ‘That ain’t a bunch of dirt, you stupid coontail night-fighter!’ he

screams at me, the spit flying off’n his lips. ‘That’s MY HOLE, and you best get the dirt out of it right now! Doubletime!’

“So I dug the dirt out of his hole and then I filled it in again, and then he asks me why I went and filled in his hole just when he was getting ready to take a crap in it. So I dug it out again and he drops his pants and hangs his skinny-shanks cracker redneck ass over the hole and he grins up at me

while he’s doing his business and says, ‘How you doin, Hanlon? ’

“ ‘I am doing just fine, sir, ’ I says right back, because I had decided I wasn’t going to give up until I fell unconscious or dropped dead. I had my dander up.

“ ‘Well, I aim to fix that, ’ he says. ‘To start with, you better just fill that hole in, Private Hanlon. And I want to see some life. You’re slowin down. ’

“So I got her filled in again and I could see by the way he was grinning that he was only warming up. But just then this friend of his came humping across the field with a gas lantern and told him there’d been a surprise inspection and Wilson was in hack for having missed it. My friends covered for me and I was okay, but Wilson’s friends—if that’s what he called them

—couldn’t be bothered.

“He let me go then, and I waited to see if his name would go up on the Punishment Roster the next day, but it never did. I guess he must have just told the Loot he missed the inspection because he was teaching a smartmouth nigger who it was owned all the holes at the Derry base—those that had already been dug and those that hadn’t been. They probably gave him a medal instead of potatoes to peel. And that’s how things were for Company E here in Derry. ”

It was right around 1958 that my father told me the story, and I guess he was pushing fifty, although my mother was only forty or so. I asked him if that was the way Derry was, why had he come back?

“Well, I was only sixteen when I joined the army, Mikey, ” he said. “Lied about my age to get in. Wasn’t my idea, either. My mother told me to do it. I was big, and that’s the only reason the lie stuck, I guess. I was born and

grew up in Burgaw, North Carolina, and the only time we saw meat was right after the tobacco was in, or sometimes in the winter if my father shot a

coon or a possum. The only good thing I remember about Burgaw is possum pie with hoecakes spread around her just as pretty as you could want.

“So when my dad died in an accident with some farm machinery, my ma said she was going to take Philly Loubird up to Corinth, where she had people. Philly Loubird was the baby of the family. ”

“You mean my Uncle Phil? ” I asked, smiling to think of anybody calling him Philly Loubird. He was a lawyer in Tucson, Arizona, and had been on

the City Council there for six years. When I was a kid, I thought Uncle Phil was rich. For a black man in 1958, I suppose he was. He made twenty thousand dollars a year.

“That’s who I mean, ” my dad said. “But in those days he was just a twelve-year-old kid who wore a ricepaper sailor hat and mended biballs and had no shoes. He was the youngest, I was the second youngest. All the

others were gone—two dead, two married, one in jail. That was Howard. He never was any good.

“ ‘You are goan join the army, ’ your gramma Shirley told me. ‘I dunno if they start paying you right away or not, but once they do, you’re goan send me a lotment every month. I hate to send you away, son, but if you don’t

take care of me and Philly, I don’t know what’s going to become of us. ’

She gave me my birth certificate to show the recruiter and I seen she fixed the year on it somehow to make me eighteen.

“So I went to the courthouse where the army recruiter was and asked about joining up. He showed me the papers and the line where I could make my mark. ‘I kin write my name, ’ I said, and he laughed like he didn’t

believe me.

“ ‘Well then, you go on and write it, black boy, ’ he says.

“ ‘Hang on a minute, ’ I says back. ‘I want to ast you a couple of questions. ’

“ ‘Fire away then, ’ he says. ‘I can answer anything you can ask. ’

“ ‘Do they have meat twice a week in the army? ’ I asked. ‘My mamma says they do, but she is powerful set on me joining up. ’

“ ‘No, they don’t have it twice a week, ’ he says.

“ ‘Well, that’s about what I thought, ’ I says, thinking that the man surely does seem like a booger but at least he’s an honest booger.

“Then he says, ‘They got it ever night, ’ making me wonder how I ever could have thought he was honest.

“ ‘You must think I’m a pure-d fool, ’ I says. “ ‘You got that right, nigger, ’ he says.

“ ‘Well, if I join up, I got to do something for my mamma and Philly Loubird, ’ I says. ‘Mamma says it’s a lotment. ’

“ ‘That’s this here, ’ he says, and taps the allotment form. ‘Now what else is on your mind? ’

“ ‘Well, ’ says I, ‘what about trainin to be an officer? ’

“He threw his head back when I said that and laughed until I thought he was gonna choke on his own spit. Then he says, ‘Son, the day they got nigger officers in this man’s army will be the day you see the bleedin Jesus Christ doing the Charleston at Birdland. Now you sign or you don’t sign.

I’m out of patience. Also, you’re stinkin the place up. ’

“So I signed, and watched him staple the allotment form to my muster- sheet, and then he give me the oath, and then I was a soldier. I was thinking that they’d send me up to New Jersey, where the army was building bridges on account of there being no wars to fight. Instead, I got Derry, Maine, and Company E. ”

He sighed and shifted in his chair, a big man with white hair that curled close to his skull. At that time we had one of the bigger farms in Derry, and probably the best roadside produce stand south of Bangor. The three of us worked hard, and my father had to hire on extra help during harvesting time, and we made out.

He said: “I came back because I’d seen the South and I’d seen the North, and there was the same hate in both places. It wasn’t Sergeant Wilson that convinced me of that. He was nothing but a Georgia cracker, and he took

the South with him wherever he went. He didn’t have to be south of the Mason-Dixon line to hate niggers. He just did. No, it was the fire at the Black Spot that convinced me of that. You know, Mikey, in a way . . . ”

He glanced over at my mother, who was knitting. She hadn’t looked up, but I knew she was listening closely, and my father knew it too, I think.

“In a way it was the fire made me a man. There was sixty people killed in that fire, eighteen of them from Company E. There really wasn’t any company left when that fire was over. Henry Whitsun. . . Stork Anson. . .

Alan Snopes . . . Everett McCaslin. . . Horton Sartoris . . . all my friends, all

dead in that fire. And that fire wasn’t set by old Sarge Wilson and his grits- and-cornpone friends. It was set by the Derry branch of the Maine Legion of White Decency. Some of the kids you go to school with, son, their

fathers struck the matches that lit the Black Spot on fire. And I’m not talking about the poor kids, neither. ”

“Why, Daddy? Why did they? ”

“Well, part of it was just Derry, ” my father said, frowning. He lit his pipe slowly and shook out the wooden match. “I don’t know why it happened here; I can’t explain it, but at the same time I ain’t surprised by it.

“The Legion of White Decency was the Northerners’ version of the Ku Klux Klan, you see. They marched in the same white sheets, they burned the same crosses, they wrote the same hate-notes to black folks they felt were getting above their station or taking jobs that were meant for white men. In churches where the preachers talked about black equality, they

sometimes planted charges of dynamite. Most of the history books talk

more about the KKK than they do about the Legion of White Decency, and a lot of people don’t even know there was such a thing. I think it might be because most of the histories have been written by Northerners and they’re ashamed.

“It was most pop‘lar in the big cities and the manufacturin areas. New York, New Jersey, Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, Portsmouth—they all had their chapters. They tried to organize in Maine, but Derry was the only

place they had any real success. Oh, for awhile there was a pretty good chapter in Lewiston—this was around the same time as the fire at the Black Spot—but they weren’t worried about niggers raping white women or taking jobs that should have belonged to white men, because there weren’t any niggers to speak of up here. In Lewiston they were worried about

tramps and hobos and that something called ‘the bonus army’ would join up with something they called ‘the Communist riffraff army, ’ by which they meant any man who was out of work. The Legion of Decency used to send these fellows out of town just as fast as they came in. Sometimes they stuffed poison ivy down the backs of their pants. Sometimes they set their

shirts on fire.

“Well, the Legion was pretty much done up here after the fire at the Black Spot. Things got out of hand, you see. The way things seem to do in this town, sometimes. ”

He paused, puffing.

“It’s like the Legion of White Decency was just another seed, Mikey, and it found some earth that nourished it well here. It was a regular rich-man’s club. And after the fire, they all just laid away their sheets and lied each other up and it was papered over. ” Now there was a kind of vicious contempt in his voice that made my mother look up, frowning. “After all, who got killed? Eighteen army niggers, fourteen or fifteen town niggers, four members of a nigger jazz-band. . . and a bunch of nigger-lovers. What did it matter? ”

“Will, ” my mother said softly. “That’s enough. ” “No, ” I said. “I want to hear!”

“It’s getting to be your bedtime, Mikey, ” he said, ruffling my hair with his big, hard hand. “I just want to tell you one thing more, and I don’t think you’ll understand it, because I’m not sure I understand it myself. What

happened that night at the Black Spot, bad as it was. . . I don’t really think it happened because we was black. Not even because the Spot was close behind West Broadway, where the rich whites in Derry lived then and still

live today. I don’t think that the Legion of White Decency happened to get along so well here because they hated black people and bums more in Derry than they did in Portland or Lewiston or Brunswick. It’s because of that soil. It seems that bad things, hurtful things, do right well in the soil of this town. I’ve thought so again and again over the years. I don’t know why it should be . . . but it is.

“But there are good folks here too, and there were good folks here then. When the funerals were held afterward, thousands of people turned out, and they turned out for the blacks as well as the whites. Businesses closed up for most of a week. The hospitals treated the hurt ones free of charge. There were food baskets and letters of condolence that were honestly meant. And there were helping hands held out. I met my friend Dewey Conroy during that time, and you know he’s just as white as vanilla ice cream, but I feel

like he’s my brother. I’d die for Dewey if he asked me to, and although no man really knows another man’s heart, I think he’d die for me if it came to that.

“Anyway, the army sent away those of us that were left after that fire,

like they were ashamed. . . and I guess they were. I ended up down at Fort Hood, and I stayed there for six years. I met your mother there, and we

were married in Galveston, at her folks’ house. But all through the years between, Derry never escaped my mind. And after the war, I brought your mom back here. And we had you. And here we are, not three miles from where the Black Spot stood in 1930. And I think it’s your bedtime, Mr.

Man. ”

“I want to hear about the fire!” I yelled. “Tell me about it, Daddy!” And he looked at me in that frowning way that always shut me up . . .

maybe because he didn’t look that way often. Mostly he was a smiling man. “That’s no story for a boy, ” he said. “Another time, Mikey. When we’ve both walked around a few more years. ”

As it turned out, we both walked around another four years before I heard the story of what happened at the Black Spot that night, and by then my father’s walking days were all done. He told me from the hospital bed

where he lay, full of dope, dozing in and out of reality as the cancer worked away inside of his intestines, eating him up.

February 26th, 1985

I got reading over what I had written last in this notebook and surprised myself by bursting into tears over my father, who has now been dead for

twenty-three years. I can remember my grief for him—it lasted for almost two years. Then when I graduated from high school in 1965 and my mother looked at me and said, “How proud your father would have been!” we cried in each other’s arms and I thought that was the end, that we had finished the job of burying him with those late tears. But who knows how long a grief may last? Isn’t it possible that, even thirty or forty years after the death of a child or a brother or a sister, one may half-waken, thinking of that person with that same lost emptiness, that feeling of places which may never be filled . . . perhaps not even in death?

He left the army in 1937 with a disability pension. By that year, my father’s army had become a good deal more warlike; anyone with half an eye, he told me once, could see by then that soon all the guns would be coming out of storage again. He had risen to the rank of sergeant in the interim, and he had lost most of his left foot when a new recruit who was so scared he was almost shitting peach-pits pulled the pin on a hand grenade

and then dropped it instead of throwing it. It rolled over to my father and exploded with a sound that was, he said, like a cough in the middle of the night.

A lot of the ordnance those long-ago soldiers had to train with was either defective or had sat so long in almost forgotten supply depots that it was impotent. They had bullets that wouldn’t fire and rifles that sometimes exploded in their hands when the bullets did fire. The navy had torpedoes that usually didn’t go where they were aimed and didn’t explode when they did. The Army Air Corps and the Navy Air Arm had planes whose wings fell off if they landed hard, and at Pensacola in 1939, I have read, a supply officer discovered a whole fleet of government trucks that wouldn’t run

because cockroaches had eaten the rubber hoses and the fanbelts.

So my father’s life was saved (including, of course, the part of him that became Your Ob’dt Servant Michael Hanlon) by a combination of

bureaucratic porkbarrelling folderol and defective equipment. The grenade only half-exploded and he just lost part of one foot instead of everything from the breastbone on down.

Because of the disability money he was able to marry my mother a year earlier than he had planned. They didn’t come to Derry at once; they moved to Houston, where they did war work until 1945. My father was a foreman in a factory that made bomb-casings. My mother was a Rosie the Riveter.

But as he told me that night when I was eleven, the thought of Derry never escaped his mind. And now I wonder if that blind thing might not have been at work even then, drawing him back so I could take my place in that circle in the Barrens that August evening. If the wheels of the universe are in true, then good always compensates for evil—but good can be awful as well.

My father had a subscription to the Derry News. He kept his eye on the ads announcing land for sale. They had saved up a good bit of money. At last he saw a farm for sale that looked like a good proposition. . . on paper, at least. The two of them rode up from Texas on a Trailways bus, looked at it, and bought it the same day. The First Merchants of Penobscot County issued my father a ten-year mortgage, and they settled down.

“We had some problems at first, ” my father said another time. “There

were people who didn’t want Negroes in the neighborhood. We knew it was going to be that way—I hadn’t forgotten about the Black Spot—and we just hunkered down to wait it out. Kids would go by and throw rocks or beer

cans. I must have replaced twenty windows that first year. And some of them weren’t just kids, either. One day when we got up, there was a

swastika painted on the side of the chickenhouse and all the chickens were dead. Someone had poisoned their feed. Those were the last chickens I ever tried to keep.

“But the County Sheriff—there wasn’t any police chief in those days, Derry wasn’t quite big enough for such a thing—got to work on the matter and he worked hard. That’s what I mean, Mikey, when I say there is good here as well as bad. It didn’t make any difference to that man Sullivan that

my skin was brown and my hair was kinky. He come out half a dozen times, he talked to people, and finally he found out who done it. And who do you think it was? I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two don’t count!”

“I don’t know, ” I said.

My father laughed until tears spouted out of his eyes. He took a big white handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped them away. “Why, it was Butch Bowers, that’s who! The father of the kid you say is the biggest bully at your school. The father’s a turd and the son’s a little fart. ”

“There are kids at school who say Henry’s father is crazy, ” I told him. I think I was in the fourth grade at that time—far enough along to have had my can righteously kicked by Henry Bowers more than once, anyway. . . and now that I think about it, most of the pejorative terms for “black” or

“Negro” I’ve ever heard, I heard first from the lips of Henry Bowers, between grades one and four.

“Well, I’ll tell you, ” he said, “the idea that Butch Bowers is crazy might not be far wrong. People said he was never right after he come back from

the Pacific. He was in the Marines over there. Anyway, the Sheriff took him into custody and Butch was hollering that it was a put-up job and they were all just a bunch of nigger-lovers. Oh, he was gonna sue everybody. I guess he had a list that would have stretched from here to Witcham Street. I doubt if he had a single pair of underdrawers that was whole in the seat, but he

was going to sue me, Sheriff Sullivan, the Town of Derry, the County of Penobscot, and God alone knows who else.

“As to what happened next. . . well, I can’t swear it’s true, but this is how I heard it from Dewey Conroy. Dewey said the Sheriff went in to see Butch at the jail up in Bangor. And Sheriff Sullivan says, ‘It’s time for you to shut your mouth and do some listening, Butch. That black guy, he don’t want to

press charges. He don’t want to send you to Shawshank, he just wants the worth of his chickens. He figures two hundred dollars would do her. ’

“Butch tells the Sheriff he can put his two hundred dollars where the sun don’t shine, and Sheriff Sullivan, he tells Butch: ‘They got a lime pit down at the Shank, Butch, and they tell me after you’ve been workin there about two years, your tongue goes as green as a lime Popsicle. Now you pick.

Two years peelin lime or two hundred dollars. What do you think? ’

“ ‘No jury in Maine will convict me, ’ Butch says, ‘not for killing a nigger’s chickens.

“ ‘I know that, ’ ” Sullivan says.

“ ‘Then what the Christ are we chinnin about? ’ Butch asks him.

“ ‘You better wake up, Butch. They won’t put you away for the chickens, but they will put you away for the swastiker you painted on the door after you killed em. ’

“Well, Dewey said Butch’s mouth just kind of dropped open, and Sullivan went away to let him think about it. About three days later Butch told his brother, the one that froze to death couple of years after while out hunting drunk, to sell his new Mercury, which Butch had bought with his muster-out pay and was mighty sweet on. So I got my two hundred dollars and Butch swore he was going to burn me out. He went around telling all

his friends that. So I caught up with him one afternoon. He’d bought an old pre-war Ford to replace the Merc, and I had my pick-up. I cut him off out on Witcham Street by the trainyards and got out with my Winchester rifle.

“ ‘Any fires out my way and you got one bad black man gunning for you, old hoss, ’ I told him.

“ ‘You can’t talk to me that way, nigger, ’ he said, and he was damn near to blubbering between bein mad and bein scared. ‘You can’t talk to no

white man that way, not a jig like you. ’

“Well, I’d had enough of the whole thing, Mikey. And I knew if I didn’t scare him off for good right then I’d never be shed of him. There wasn’t nobody around. I reached in that Ford with one hand and caught him by the

hair of the head. I put the stock of my rifle against the buckle of my belt and got the muzzle right up under his chin. I said, ‘The next time you call me a nigger or a jig, your brains are going to be dripping off the domelight of your car. And you believe me, Butch: any fires out my way and I’m

gunning for you. I may come gunning for your wife and your brat and your nocount brother as well. I have had enough. ’

“Then he did start to cry, and I never saw an uglier sight in my life. ‘Look what things has come to here, ’ he says, ‘when a nih . . . when a jih . .

. when a feller can put a gun to a workingman’s head in broad daylight by the side of the road. ’

“ ‘Yeah, the world must be going to a camp-meeting hell when something like that can happen, ’ I agreed. ‘But that don’t matter now. All that matters now is, do we have an understanding here or do you want to see if you can learn how to breathe through your forehead? ’

“He allowed as how we had an understanding, and that was the last bit of trouble I ever had with Butch Bowers, except for maybe when your dog Mr.

Chips died, and I’ve got no proof that was Bowers’s doing. Chippy might have just got a poison bait or something.

“Since that day we’ve been pretty much left alone to make our way, and when I look back on it, there ain’t much I regret. We’ve had a good life here, and if there are nights when I dream about that fire, well, there isn’t nobody that can live a natural life without having a few bad dreams. ”

February 28th, 1985

It’s been days since I sat down to write the story of the fire at the Black Spot as my father told it to me, and I haven’t gotten to it yet. It’s in The

Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that “way leads on to way”; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go . . . well, anywhere at all. It’s the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don’t. Maybe in the end it’s the voice that tells the

stories more than the stories themselves that matters.

It’s his voice that I remember, certainly: my father’s voice, low and slow, how he would chuckle sometimes or laugh outright. The pauses to light his pipe or to blow his nose or to go and get a can of Narragansett (Nasty Gansett, he called it) from the icebox. That voice, which is for me somehow the voice of all voices, the voice of all years, the ultimate voice of this place

—one that’s in none of the Ives interviews nor in any of the poor histories of this place. . . nor on any of my own tapes.

My father’s voice.

Now it’s ten o’clock, the library closed an hour ago, and a proper old jeezer is starting to crank up outside. I can hear tiny spicules of sleet striking the windows in here and in the glassed-in corridor which leads to the Children’s Library. I can hear other sounds, too—stealthy creaks and bumps outside the circle of light where I sit, writing on the lined yellow pages of a legal pad. Just the sounds of an old building settling, I tell

myself. . . but I wonder. As I wonder if somewhere out in this storm there is a clown selling balloons tonight.

Well . . . never mind. I think I’ve finally found my way to my father’s final story. I heard it in his hospital room no more than six weeks before he died.

I went to see him with my mother every afternoon after school, and alone every evening. My mother had to stay home and do the chores then, but she insisted that I go. I rode my bike. She wouldn’t let me hook rides, not even four years after the murders had ended.

That was a hard six weeks for a boy who was only fifteen. I loved my father, but I came to hate those evening visits—watching him shrink and shrivel, watching the pain-lines spread and deepen on his face. Sometimes he would cry, although he tried not to. And going home it would be getting dark and I would think back to the summer of ’58, and I’d be afraid to look

behind me because the clown might be there. . . or the werewolf. . . or Ben’s mummy. . . or my bird. But I was mostly afraid that no matter what shape It took, It would have my father’s cancer-raddled face. So I would pedal as fast as I could no matter how hard my heart thundered in my chest and

come in flushed and sweaty-haired and out of breath and my mother would say, “Why do you want to ride so fast, Mikey? You’ll make yourself sick. ” And I’d say, “I wanted to get back in time to help you with the chores, ” and she’d give me a hug and a kiss and tell me I was a good boy.

As time went on, it got so I could hardly think of things to talk about with him anymore. Riding into town, I’d rack my brain for subjects of conversation, dreading the moment when both of us would run out of things to say. His dying scared me and enraged me, but it embarrassed me, too; it seemed to me then and it seems to me now that when a man or woman goes

it should be a quick thing. The cancer was doing more than killing him. It was degrading him, demeaning him.

We never spoke of the cancer, and in some of those silences I thought that we must speak of it, that there would be nothing else and we would be stuck with it like kids caught without a place to sit in a game of musical

chairs when the piano stops, and I would become almost frantic, trying to think of something—anything!—to say so that we would not have to

acknowledge the thing which was now destroying my daddy, who had once taken Butch Bowers by the hair and jammed his rifle into the shelf of his chin and demanded of Butch to be left alone. We would be forced to speak of it, and if we were I would cry. I wouldn’t be able to help it. And at fifteen, I think the thought of crying in front of my father scared and distressed me more than anything else.

It was during one of those interminable, scary pauses that I asked him again about the fire at the Black Spot. They’d filled him full of dope that evening because the pain was very bad, and he had been drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes speaking clearly, sometimes speaking in that exotic language I think of as Sleepmud. Sometimes I knew he was talking to me, but at other times he seemed to have me confused with his brother

Phil. I asked him about the Black Spot for no real reason; it had just jumped into my mind and I seized on it.

His eyes sharpened and he smiled a little. “You ain’t never forgot that, have you, Mikey? ”

“No, sir, ” I said, and although I hadn’t thought about it in three years or better, I added what he sometimes said: “It hasn’t ever escaped my mind. ”

“Well, I’ll tell you now, ” he said. “Fifteen is old enough, I guess, and your mother ain’t here to stop me. Besides, you ought to know. I think something like it could only have happened in Derry, and you need to know that, too. So you can beware. The conditions for such things have always seemed right here. You’re careful, aren’t you, Mikey? ”

“Yes, sir, ” I said.

“Good, ” he said, and his head dropped back on his pillow. “That’s good. ” I thought he was going to drift off again—his eyes had slipped closed— but instead he began to talk.

“When I was at the army base here in ’29 and ’30, ” he said, “there was an NCO Club up there on the hill, where Derry Community College is now.

It was right behind the PX, where you used to be able to get a pack of Lucky Strike Greens for seven cents. The NCO Club was only a big old quonset hut, but they had fixed it up nice inside—carpet on the floor, booths along the walls, a jukebox—and you could get soft drinks on the weekend. .

. if you were white, that was. They would have bands in most Saturday nights, and it was quite a place to go. It was just pop over the bar, it being Prohibition, but we heard you could get stronger stuff if you wanted it . . . and if you had a little green star on your army card. That was like a secret sign they had. Home-brew beer mostly, but on weekends you could

sometimes get stronger stuff. If you were white.

“Us Company E boys weren’t allowed any place near it, of course. So we went on the town if we had a pass in the evening. In those days Derry was still something of a logging town and there were eight or ten bars, most of em down in a part of town they called Hell’s Half-Acre. They wasn’t speakeasies; that was too grand a name for em. Wasn’t anybody in em

spoke very easy, anyhow. They was what folks called ‘blind pigs, ’ and that was about right, because most of the customers acted like pigs when they were in there and they was about blind when they turned em out. The Sheriff knew and the cops knew, but those places roared all night long,

same as they’d done since the logging days in the 1890s. I suppose palms got greased, but maybe not as many or with so much as you might think; in Derry people have a way of looking the other way. Some served hard stuff as well as beer, and by all accounts I ever heard, the stuff you could get in

town was ten times as good as the rotgut whiskey and bathtub gin you could get at the white boys’ NCO on Friday and Saturday nights. The downtown hooch came over the border from Canada in pulp trucks, and most of them bottles had what the labels said. The good stuff was expensive, but there

was plenty of furnace-oil too, and it might hang you over but it didn’t kill you, and if you did go blind, it didn’t last. On any given night you’d have to duck your head when the bottles came flying by. There was Nan’s, the Paradise, Wally’s Spa, the Silver Dollar, and one bar, the Powderhorn,

where you could sometimes get a whore. Oh, you could pick up a woman at any pig, you didn’t even have to work at it that hard—there was a lot of them wanted to find out if a slice off’n the rye loaf was any different—but to kids like me and Trevor Dawson and Carl Roone, my friends in those

days, the thought of buying a whore—a white whore—that was something you had to sit down and consider. ”

As I’ve told you, he was heavily doped that night. I don’t believe he would have said any of that stuff—not to his fifteen-year-old son—if he had not been.

“Well, it wasn’t very long before a representative of the Town Council showed up, wanting to see Major Fuller. He said he wanted to talk about ‘some problems between the townspeople and the enlisted men’ and

‘concerns of the electorate’ and ‘questions of propriety, ’ but what he really wanted Fuller to know was as clear as a windowpane. They didn’t want no army niggers in their pigs, botherin white women and drinkin illegal hooch at a bar where only white men was supposed to be standin and drinkin illegal hooch.

“All of which was a laugh, all right. The flower of white womanhood they were so worried about was mostly a bunch of barbags, and as far as getting in the way of the men . . . ! Well, all I can say is that I never saw a member of the Derry Town Council down in the Silver Dollar, or in the Powderhorn. The men who drank in those dives were pulp-cutters in those big red-and-black-checked lumberman’s jackets, scars and scabs all over their hands, some of em missing eyes or fingers, all of em missing most of their teeth, all of em smellin like woodchips and sawdust and sap. They

wore green flannel pants and green gumrubber boots and tracked snow

across the floor until it was black with it. They smelled big, Mikey, and they walked big, and they talked big. They were big. I was in Wally’s Spa one night when I saw a fella split his shirt right down one arm while he was armrassling this other fella. It didn’t just rip—you probably think that’s what I mean, but it ain’t. Arm of that man’s shirt damn near exploded—sort of blew off his arm, in rags. And everybody cheered and applauded and somebody slapped me on the back and said, ‘That’s what you call an armrassler’s fart, blackface. ’

“What I’m telling you is that if the men who used those blind pigs on Friday and Saturday nights when they come out of the woods to drink whiskey and fuck women instead of knotholes greased up with lard, if those men hadn’t wanted us there, they would have thrown us out on our asses.

But the fact of it was, Mikey, they didn’t seem to give much of a toot one way or the other.

“One of em took me aside one night—he was six foot, which was damn big for those days, and he was dead drunk, and he smelled as high as a basket of month-old peaches. If he’d stepped out of his clothes, I think they would have stood up alone. He looks at me and says, ‘Mister, I gonna ast you sumpin, me. Are you be a Negro? ’

“ ‘That’s right, ’ I says.

“ ‘Commen’ ça va!’ he says in the Saint John Valley French that sounds almost like Cajun talk, and grins so big I saw all four of his teeth. ‘I knew you was, me! Hey! I seen one in a book once! Had the same—’ and he couldn’t think how to say what was on his mind, so he reaches out and flaps at my mouth.

“ ‘Big lips, ’ I says.

“ ‘Yeah, yeah!’ he says, laughin like a kid. ‘Beeg leeps! Épais lèvres!

Beeg leeps! Gonna buy you a beer, me!’

“ ‘Buy away, ’ I says, not wanting to get on his bad side.

“He laughed at that too and clapped me on the back—almost knocking me on my face—and pushed his way up to the plankwood bar where there must have been seventy men and maybe fifteen women lined up. ‘I need two beers fore I tear this dump apart!’ he yells at the bartender, who was a big lug with a broken nose named Romeo Dupree. ‘One for me and one

pour l’homme avec les épais lèvres!’ And they all laughed like hell at that, but not in a mean way, Mikey.

“So he gets the beers and gives me mine and he says, ‘What’s your name? I don’t want to call you Beeg Leeps, me. Don’t sound good. ’

“ ‘William Hanlon, ’ I says.

“ ‘Well, here’s to you, Weelyum Anlon, ’ he says.

“ ‘No, here’s to you, ’ I says. ‘You’re the first white man who ever bought me a drink. ’ Which was true.

“So we drank those beers down and then we had two more and he says, ‘You sure you’re a Negro? Except for them épais leeps, you look just like a white man with brown skin to me. ’ ”

My father got to laughing at this, and so did I. He laughed so hard his stomach started to hurt him, and he held it, grimacing, his eyes turned up, his upper plate biting down on his lower lip.

“You want me to ring for the nurse, Daddy? ” I asked, alarmed.

“No . . . no. I’m goan be okay. The worst thing of this, Mikey, is that you can’t even laugh anymore when you feel like it. Which is damn seldom. ”

He fell silent for a few moments, and I realize now that that was the only time we came close to talking about what was killing him. Maybe it would have been better—better for both of us—if we had done more.

He took a sip of water and then went on.

“Anyway, it wasn’t the few women who travelled the pigs, and it wasn’t the lumberjacks that made up their main custom who wanted us out. It was those five old men on the Town Council who were really offended, them and the dozen or so men that stood behind them—Derry’s old line, you

know. None of them had ever stepped a foot inside of the Paradise or Wally’s Spa, they did their boozing at the country club which then stood over on Derry Heights, but they wanted to make sure that none of those barbags or peavey-swingers got polluted by the blacks of Company E.

“So Major Fuller says, ‘I never wanted them here in the first place. I keep thinking it’s an oversight and they’ll get sent back down south or maybe to New Jersey. ’

“ ‘That’s not my problem, ’ this old fart tells him. Mueller, I think his name was—”

“Sally Mueller’s father? ” I asked, startled. Sally Mueller was in the same high-school class with me.

My father grinned a sour, crooked little grin. “No, this would have been her uncle. Sally Mueller’s dad was off in college somewhere then. But if he’d been in Derry, he would have been there, I guess, standing with his brother. And in case you’re wondering how true this part of the story is, all I can tell you is that the conversation was repeated to me by Trevor Dawson, who was swabbing the floors over there in officers’ country that day and heard it all.

“ ‘Where the government sends the black boys is your problem, not mine, ’ Mueller tells Major Fuller. ‘My problem is where you’re letting them go on Friday and Saturday nights. If they go on whooping it up downtown, there’s going to be trouble. We’ve got the Legion in this town, you know. ’

“ ‘Well, but I am in a bit of a tight here, Mr. Mueller, ’ he says. ‘I can’t let them drink over at the NCO Club. Not only is it against the regulations for

the Negroes to drink with the whites, they couldn’t anyway. It’s an NCO club, don’t you see? Every one of those black boys is a bucky-tail private. ’

“ ‘That’s not my problem either. I simply trust you will take care of the matter. Responsibility accompanies rank. ’ And off he goes.

“Well, Fuller solved the problem. The Derry Army Base was a damn big patch of land in those days, although there wasn’t a hell of a lot on it. Better than a hundred acres, all told. Going north, it ended right behind West Broadway, where a sort of greenbelt was planted. Where Memorial Park is now, that was where the Black Spot stood.

“It was just an old requisition shed in early 1930, when all of this happened, but Major Fuller mustered in Company E and told us it was going to be ‘our’ club. Acted like he was Daddy Warbucks or something, and maybe he even felt that way, giving a bunch of black privates their own place, even if it was nothing but a shed. Then he added, like it was nothing, that the pigs downtown were off-limits to us.

“There was a lot of bitterness about it, but what could we do? We had no real power. It was this young fellow, a Pfc. named Dick Hallorann who was a mess-cook, who suggested that maybe we could fix it up pretty nice if we really tried.

“So we did. We really tried. And we made out pretty well, all things considered. The first time a bunch of us went in there to look it over, we

were pretty depressed. It was dark and smelly, full of old tools and boxes of papers that had gone moldy. There was only two little windows and no lectricity. The floor was dirt. Carl Roone laughed in a kind of bitter way, I remember that, and said, ‘The ole Maje, he a real prince, ain’t he? Give us our own club. Sho!’

“And George Brannock, who was also killed in the fire that fall, he said: ‘Yeah, it’s a hell of a black spot, all right. ’ And the name just stuck.

“Hallorann got us going, though. . . Hallorann and Carl and me. I guess God will forgive us for what we did, though—cause He knows we had no idea how it would turn out.

“After awhile the rest of the fellows pitched in. With most of Derry off- limits, there wasn’t much else we could do. We hammered and nailed and cleaned. Trev Dawson was a pretty good jackleg carpenter, and he showed us how to cut some more windows along the side, and damned if Alan

Snopes didn’t come up with panes of glass for them that were different

colors—sort of a cross between carnival glass and the sort you see in church windows.

“ ‘Where’d you get this? ’ I asked him. Alan was the oldest of us; he was about forty-two, old enough so that most of us called him Pop Snopes.

“He stuck a Camel in his mouth and tipped me a wink. ‘Midnight Requisitions, ’ he says, and would say no more.

“So the place come along pretty good, and by the middle of the summer we was using it. Trev Dawson and some of the others had partitioned off the back quarter of the building and got a little kitchen set up in there, not much more than a grill and a couple of deep-fryers, so that you could get a hamburg and some french fries, if you wanted. There was a bar down one side, but it was just meant for sodas and drinks like Virgin Marys—shit, we knew our place. Hadn’t we been taught it? If we wanted to drink hard, we’d do it in the dark.

“The floor was still dirt, but we kept it oiled down nice. Trev and Pop Snopes ran in a lectric line—more Midnight Requisitions, I imagine. By

July, you could go in there any Saturday night and sit down and have a cola and a hamburger—or a slaw-dog. It was nice. It never really got finished— we was still working on it when the fire burned it down. It got to be a kind of hobby. . . or a way of thumbing our noses at Fuller and Mueller and the Town Council. But I guess we knew it was ours when Ev McCaslin and I put up a sign one Friday night that said THE BLACK SPOT, and just below that, COMPANY E AND GUESTS. Like we were exclusive, you know!

“It got looking nice enough that the white boys started to grumble about it, and next thing you know, the white boys’ NCO was looking finer than ever. They was adding on a special lounge and a little cafeteria. It was like they wanted to race. But that was one race that we didn’t want to run. ”

My dad smiled at me from his hospital bed.

“We were young, except for Snopesy, but we weren’t entirely foolish. We knew that the white boys let you race against them, but if it starts to look

like you are getting ahead, why, somebody just breaks your legs so you can’t run as fast. We had what we wanted, and that was enough. But then. . . something happened. ” He fell silent, frowning.

“What was that, Daddy? ”

“We found out that we had a pretty decent jazz-band among us, ” he said slowly. “Martin Devereaux, who was a corporal, played drums. Ace

Stevenson played cornet. Pop Snopes played a pretty decent barrelhouse piano. He wasn’t great, but he wasn’t no slouch either. There was another fellow who played clarinet, and George Brannock played the saxophone.

There were others of us who sat in from time to time, playing guitar or harmonica or juiceharp or even just a comb with waxed paper over it.

“This didn’t all happen at once, you understand, but by the end of that August, there was a pretty hot little Dixieland combo playing Friday and Saturday nights at the Black Spot. They got better and better as the fall drew on, and while they were never great—I don’t want to give you that

idea—they played in a way that was different. . . hotter somehow . . . it . . . ” He waved his skinny hand above the bedclothes.

“They played bodacious, ” I suggested, grinning.

“That’s right!” he exclaimed, grinning back. “You got it! They played bodacious Dixieland. And the next thing you know, people from town started to show up at our club. Even some of the white soldiers from the

base. It got so the place was getting crowded a right smart every weekend. That didn’t happen all at once, either. At first those white faces looked like sprinkles of salt in a pepperpot, but more and more of them turned up as

time went on.

“When those white people showed up, that’s when we forgot to be careful. They were bringin in their own booze in brown bags, most of it the finest high-tension stuff there is—made the stuff you could get in the pigs downtown look like soda pop. Country-club booze is what I mean, Mikey. Rich people’s booze. Chivas. Glenfiddich. The kind of champagne they served to first-class passengers on ocean liners. ‘Champers, ’ some of em called it, same as we used to call ugly-minded mules back home. We should have found a way to stop it, but we didn’t know how. They was town! Hell, they was white!

“And, like I said, we were young and proud of what we’d done. And we underestimated how bad things might get. We all knew that Mueller and his friends must have known what was going on, but I don’t think any of us realized that it was drivin em crazy—and I mean what I say: crazy. There they were in their grand old Victorian houses on West Broadway not a quarter of a mile away from where we were, listening to things like ‘Aunt Hagar’s Blues’ and ‘Diggin My Potatoes. ’ That was bad. Knowing that their young people were there too, whooping it up right cheek by jowl with

the blacks, that must have been ever so much worse. Because it wasn’t just the lumberjacks and the barbags that were turning up as September came into October. It got to be kind of a thing in town. Young folks would come to drink and to dance to that no-name jazz-band until one in the morning

came and shut us down. They didn’t just come from Derry, either. They come from Bangor and Newport and Haven and Cleaves Mills and Old Town and all the little burgs around these parts. You could see fraternity boys from the University of Maine at Orono cutting capers with their sorority girlfriends, and when the band learned how to play a ragtime

version of ‘The Maine Stein Song, ’ they just about ripped the roof off. Of course, it was an enlisted-men’s club—technically, at least—and off-limits to civilians who didn’t have an invitation. But in fact, Mikey, we just opened the door at seven and let her stand open until one. By the middle of October it got so that any time you went out on the dancefloor you were standing hip to hip with six other people. There wasn’t no room to dance, so you had to just sort of stand there and wiggle. . . but if anyone minded, I never heard him let on. By midnight, it was like an empty freight-car rocking and reeling on an express run. ”

He paused, took another drink of water, and then went on. His eyes were bright now.

“Well, well. Fuller would have put an end to it sooner or later. If it had been sooner, a lot less people would have died. All he had to do was send in MPs and have them confiscate all the bottles of liquor that people had brought in with them. That would have been good enough—just what he wanted, in fact. It would have shut us down good and proper. There would have been court-martials and the stockade in Rye for some of us and

transfers for all the rest. But Fuller was slow. I think he was afraid of the same thing some of us was afraid of—that some of the townies would be mad. Mueller hadn’t been back to see him, and I think Major Fuller must have been scared to go downtown and see Mueller. He talked big, Fuller did, but he had all the spine of a jellyfish.

“So instead of the thing ending in some put-up way that would have at least left all those that burned up that night still alive, the Legion of Decency ended it. They came in their white sheets early that November and cooked themselves a barbecue. ”

He fell silent again, not sipping at his water this time, only looking moodily into the far corner of his room while outside a bell dinged softly somewhere and a nurse passed the open doorway, the soles of her shoes

squeaking on the linoleum. I could hear a TV someplace, a radio someplace else. I remember that I could hear the wind blowing outside, snuffling up

the side of the building. And although it was August, the wind made a cold sound. It knew nothing of Cain’s Hundred on the television, or the Four

Seasons singing “Walk Like a Man” on the radio.

“Some of them came through that greenbelt between the base and West Broadway, ” he resumed at last. “They must have met at someone’s house over there, maybe in the basement, to get their sheets on and to make the torches that they used.

“I’ve heard that others came right onto the base by Ridgeline Road, which was the main way onto the base back then. I heard—I won’t say where—that they came in a brand-new Packard automobile, dressed in their white sheets with their white goblin-hats on their laps and torches on the floor. The torches were Louisville Sluggers with big hunks of burlap snugged down over the fat parts with red rubber gaskets, the kind ladies use when they put up preserves. There was a booth where Ridgeline Road branched off Witcham Road and came onto the base, and the O. D. passed that Packard right along.

“It was Saturday night and the joint was jumping, going round and round.

There might have been two hundred people there, maybe three. And here came these white men, six or eight in their bottle-green Packard, and more coming through the trees between the base and the fancy houses on West

Broadway. They wasn’t young, not many of them, and sometimes I wonder how many cases of angina and bleeding ulcers there were the next day. I

hope there was a lot. Those dirty sneaking murdering bastards.

“The Packard parked on the hill and flashed its lights twice. About four men got out of it and joined the rest. Some had those two-gallon tins of

gasoline that you could buy at service stations back in those days. All of them had torches. One of em stayed behind the wheel of that Packard.

Mueller had a Packard, you know. Yes he did. A green one.

“They got together at the back of the Black Spot and doused their torches with gas. Maybe they only meant to scare us. I’ve heard it the other way, but I’ve heard it that way, too. I’d rather believe that’s how they meant it,

because I ain’t got feeling mean enough even yet to want to believe the worst.

“It could have been that the gas dripped down to the handles of some of those torches and when they lit them, why, those holding them panicked and threw them any whichway just to get rid of them. Whatever, that black November night was suddenly blazing with torches. Some was holding em up and waving em around, little flaming pieces of burlap falling off’n the

tops of em. Some of them were laughing. But like I say, some of the others up and threw em through the back windows, into what was our kitchen. The place was burning merry hell in a minute and a half.

“The men outside, they were all wearing their peaky white hoods by then. Some of them were chanting ‘Come out, niggers! Come out, niggers! Come out, niggers!’ Maybe some of them were chanting to scare us, but I like to believe most of em were trying to warn us—same way as I like to

believe that maybe those torches going into the kitchen the way they did was an accident.

“Either way, it didn’t much matter. The band was playing louder’n a factory whistle. Everybody was whooping it up and having a good time. Nobody inside knew anything was wrong until Gerry McCrew, who was playing assistant cook that night, opened the door to the kitchen and damn near got blowtorched. Flames shot out ten feet and burned his messjacket right off. Burned most of his hair off as well.

“I was sitting about halfway down the east wall with Trev Dawson and Dick Hallorann when it happened, and at first I had an idea the gas stove had exploded. I’d no more than got on my feet when I was knocked down by people headed for the door. About two dozen of em went marchin right up my back, an I guess that was the only time during the whole thing when I really felt scared. I could hear people screamin and tellin each other they had to get out, the place was on fire. But every time I tried to get up,

someone footed me right back down again. Someone landed his big shoe square on the back of my head and I saw stars. My nose mashed on that

oiled floor and I snuffled up dirt and began to cough and sneeze at the same time. Someone else stepped on the small of my back. I felt a lady’s high heel slam down between the cheeks of my butt, and son, I never want another half-ass enema like that one. If the seat of my khakis had ripped, I believe I’d be bleedin down there to this day.

“It sounds funny now, but I damn near died in that stampede. I was whopped, whapped, stomped, walked on, and kicked in so many places I couldn’t walk ’tall the next day. I was screaming and none of those people topside heard me or paid any mind.

“It was Trev saved me. I seen this big brown hand in front of me and I grabbed it like a drownin man grabs a life preserver. I grabbed and he hauled and up I came. Someone’s foot got me in the side of my neck right here—”

He massaged that area where the jaw turns up toward the ear, and I nodded.

“—and it hurt so bad that I guess I blacked out for a minute. But I never let go of Trev’s hand, and he never let go of mine. I got to my feet, finally, just as the wall we’d put up between the kitchen and the hall fell over. It

made a noise like—floomp—the noise a puddle of gasoline makes when you light it. I saw it go over in a big bundle of sparks, and I saw the people running to get out of its way as it fell. Some of em made it. Some didn’t.

One of our fellas—I think it might have been Hort Sartoris—was buried under it, and for just one second I seen his hand underneath all those blazing coals, openin and closin. There was a white girl, surely no more than twenty, and the back of her dress went up. She was with a college boy and I heard her screamin at him, beggin him to help her. He took just about two swipes at it and then ran away with the others. She stood there screamin as her dress went up on her.

“It was like hell out where the kitchen had been. The flames was so bright you couldn’t look at them. The heat was bakin hot, Mikey, roastin hot. You could feel your skin going shiny. You could feel the hairs in your nose gettin crispy.

“ ‘We gotta break outta here!’ Trev yells, and starts to drag me along the wall. ‘Come on!’

“Then Dick Hallorann catches hold of him. He couldn’t have been no

more than nineteen, and his eyes was as big as bil’ard balls, but he kept his head better than we did. He saved our lives. ‘Not that way!’ he yells. ‘This way!’ And he pointed back toward the bandstand. . . toward the fire, you

know.

“ ‘You’re crazy!’ Trevor screamed back. He had a big bull voice, but you could barely hear him over the thunder of the fire and the screaming people.

‘Die if you want to, but me and Willy are gettin out!’

“He still had me by the hand and he started to haul me toward the door again, although there were so many people around it by then you couldn’t see it at all. I would have gone with him. I was so shell-shocked I didn’t

know what end was up. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be baked like a human turkey.

“Dick grabbed Trev by the hair of the head just as hard as he could, and when Trev turned back, Dick slapped his face. I remember seeing Trev’s head bounce off the wall and thinking Dick had gone crazy. Then he was hollerin in Trev’s face, ‘You go that way and you goan die! They jammed up against that door, nigger!’

“ ‘You don’t know that!’ Trev screamed back at him, and then there was this loud BANG! like a firecracker, only what it was, it was the heat exploding Marty Devereaux’s bass drum. The fire was runnin along the

beams overhead and the oil on the floor was catchin. “ ‘I know it!’ Dick screams back. ‘I know it!’

“He grabbed my other hand, and for a minute there I felt like the rope in a tug-o-war game. Then Trev took a good look at the door and went Dick’s way. Dick got us down to a window and grabbed a chair to bust it out, but

before he could swing it, the heat blew it out for him. Then he grabbed Trev Dawson by the back of his pants and hauled him up. ‘Climb!’ he shouts. ‘Climb, motherfucker!’ And Trev went, head up and tail over the dashboard.

“He boosted me next, and I went up. I grabbed the sides of the window and hauled. I had a good crop of blisters all over my palms the next day: that wood was already smokin. I come out headfirst, and if Trev hadn’t grabbed me I mighta broke my neck.

“We turned back around, and it was like something from the worst

nightmare you ever had, Mikey. That window was just a yellow, blazin square of light. Flames was shootin up through that tin roof in a dozen places. We could hear people screamin inside.

“I saw two brown hands waving around in front of the fire—Dick’s hands. Trev Dawson made me a step with his own hands and I reached through that window and grabbed Dick. When I took his weight my gut went against the side of the building, and it was like having your belly against a stove that’s just starting to get real good and hot. Dick’s face came

up and for a few seconds I didn’t think we was going to be able to get him. He’d taken a right smart of smoke, and he was close to passing out. His lips had cracked open. The back of his shirt was smoldering.

“And then I damn near let go, because I could smell the people burning inside. I’ve heard people say that smell is like barbecuing pork ribs, but it ain’t like that. It’s more like what happens sometimes after they geld hosses. They build a big fire and throw all that shit into it and when the fire gets hot enough you can hear them hossballs poppin like chestnuts, and that’s what

people smell like when they start to cook right inside their clo’es. I could smell that and I knew I couldn’t take it for long so I gave one more great big yank, and out came Dick. He lost one of his shoes.

“I tumbled off Trev’s hands and went down. Dick come down on top of me, and I’m here to tell you that nigger’s head was hard. I lost most of my breath and just laid there on the dirt for a few seconds, rolling around and holding my bellyguts.

“Presently I was able to get to my knees, then to my feet. And I seen

these shapes running off toward the greenbelt. At first I thought they were ghosts, and then I seen shoes. By then it was so bright around the Black Spot it was like daylight. I seen shoes and understood it was men wearin sheets. One of them had fallen a little bit behind the others and I saw . . . ”

He trailed off, licking his lips.

“What did you see, Daddy? ” I asked.

“Never you mind, ” he said. “Give me my water, Mikey. ”

I did. He drank most of it and then got coughing. A passing nurse looked in and said: “Do you need anything, Mr. Hanlon? ” “New set of ’testines, ” my dad said. “You got any handy. Rhoda? ”

She smiled a nervous, doubtful smile and passed on. My dad handed the glass to me and I put it back on his table. “It’s longer tellin than it is rememberin, ” he said. “You goan fill that glass up for me before you leave? ”

“Sure, Daddy. ”

“This story goan give you nightmares, Mikey? ”

I opened my mouth to lie, and then thought better of it. And I think now that if I had lied, he would have stopped right there. He was far gone by then, but maybe not that far gone.

“I guess so, ” I said.

“That’s not such a bad thing, ” he said to me. “In nightmares we can think the worst. That’s what they’re for, I guess. ”

He reached out his hand and I took it and we held hands while he finished.

“I looked around just in time to see Trev and Dick goin around the front of the building, and I chased after them, still trying to catch m’wind. There was maybe forty or fifty people out there, some of them cryin, some of them pukin, some of them screamin, some of them doing all three things at once, it seemed like. Others were layin on the grass, fainted dead away with the smoke. The door was shut, and we heard people screamin on the other side, screamin to let them out, out for the love of Jesus, they were burning up.

“It was the only door, except for the one that went out through the kitchen to where the garbage cans and things were, you see. To go in you pushed the door open. To go out you had to pull it.

“Some people had gotten out, and then they started to jam up at that door and push. The door got slammed shut. The ones in the back kept pushin forward to get away from the fire, and everybody got jammed up. The ones right up front were squashed. Wasn’t no way they could get that door open against the weight of all those behind. So there they were, trapped, and the fire raged.

“It was Trev Dawson that made it so it was only eighty or so that died instead of a hundred or maybe two hundred, and what he got for his pains wasn’t a medal but two years in the Rye stockade. See, right about then this big old cargo truck pulled up, and who should be behind the wheel but my old friend Sergeant Wilson, the fella who owned all the holes there on the base.

“He gets out and starts shoutin orders that didn’t make much sense and which people couldn’t hear anyway. Trev grabbed my arm and we run over to him. I’d lost all track of Dick Hallorann by then and didn’t even see him until the next day.

“ ‘Sergeant, I have to use your truck!’ Trev yells in his face.

“ ‘Get out of my way, nigger, ’ Wilson says, and pushes him down. Then he starts yelling all that confused shit again. Wasn’t nobody paying any attention to him, and he didn’t go on for long anyway, because Trevor Dawson popped up like a jack-in-the-box and decked him.

“Trev could hit damned hard, and almost any other man would have stayed down, but that cracker had a hard head. He got up, blood pouring out of his mouth and nose, and he said, ‘I’m goan kill you for that. ’ Well, Trev hit him in the belly just as hard as he could, and when he doubled over I put my hands together and pounded the back of his neck just as hard as I could.

It was a cowardly thing to do, hitting a man from behind like that, but

desperate times call for desperate measures. And I would be lyin, Mikey, if I didn’t tell you that hitting that poormouth sonofabitch didn’t give me a bit of pleasure.

“Down he went, just like a steer hit with a poleaxe. Trev run to the truck, fired it up, and drove it around so it was facin the front of the Black Spot, but to the left of the door. He th’owed it into first, popped the clutch on that cocksucker, and here he come!

“ ‘Look out there!’ I shouted at that crowd of people standing around. ‘

’Ware that truck!’

“They scattered like quail, and for a wonder Trev didn’t hit none of em. He hit the side of the building going maybe thirty, and cracked his face a good one on the steerin wheel of the truck. I seen the blood fly from his

nose when he shook his head to clear it. He punched out reverse, backed up fifty yards, and come down on her again. WHAM! The Black Spot wasn’t nothing but corrugated tin, and that second hit did her. The whole side of that oven fell in and the flames come roarin out. How anything could have still been alive in there I don’t know, but there was. People are a lot tougher than you’d believe, Mikey, and if you don’t believe it, just take a look at me, slidin off the skin of the world by my fingernails. That place was like a smelting furnace, it was a hell of flames and smoke, but people came running out in a regular torrent. There were so many that Trev didn’t even

dare back the truck up again for fear he would run over some of them. So he got out and ran back to me, leaving it where it was.

“We stood there, watching it end. It hadn’t been five minutes all told, but it felt like forever. The last dozen or so that made it out were on fire. People grabbed em and started to roll em around on the ground, trying to put em out. Looking in, we could see other people trying to come, and we knew they wasn’t never going to make it.

“Trev grabbed my hand and I grabbed him back twice as hard. We stood there holding hands just like you and me are doing now, Mikey, him with

his nose broke and blood running down his face and his eyes puffing shut, and we watched them people. They were the real ghosts we saw that night, nothing but shimmers shaped like men and women in that fire, walking toward the opening Trev had bashed with Sergeant Wilson’s truck. Some of em had their arms held out, like they expected someone to save them. The others just walked, but they didn’t seem to get nowhere. Their clo’es were blazin. Their faces were runnin. And one after another they just toppled over and you didn’t see them no more.

“The last one was a woman. Her dress had burned off her and there she was in her slip. She was burnin like a candle. She seemed to look right at me at the end, and I seen her eyelids was on fire.

“When she fell down it was over. The whole place went up in a pillar of fire. By the time the base firetrucks and two more from the Main Street fire station got there, it was already burning itself out. That was the fire at the Black Spot, Mikey. ”

He drank the last of his water and handed me the glass to fill at the drinking fountain in the hall. “Goan piss the bed tonight I guess, Mikey. ”

I kissed his cheek and then went out into the hall to fill his glass. When I returned, he was drifting away again, his eyes glassy and contemplative.

When I put the glass on the nighttable, he mumbled a thank-you I could barely understand. I looked at the Westclox on his table and saw it was almost eight. Time for me to go home.

I leaned over to kiss him goodbye. . . and instead heard myself whisper, “What did you see? ”

His eyes, which were now slipping shut, barely turned toward the sound of my voice. He might have known it was me, or he might have believed he was hearing the voice of his own thoughts. “Hunh? ”

“The thing you saw, ” I whispered. I didn’t want to hear, but I had to hear. I was both hot and cold, my eyes burning, my hands freezing. But I had to hear. As I suppose Lot’s wife had to turn back and look at the destruction of Sodom.

“ ‘Twas a bird, ” he said. “Right over the last of those runnin men. A hawk, maybe. What they call a kestrel. But it was big. Never told no one. Would have been locked up. That bird was maybe sixty feet from wingtip to wingtip. It was the size of a Japanese Zero. But I seen. . . seen its eyes . . . and I think . . . it seen me. ”

His head slipped over to the side, toward the window, where the dark was coming.

“It swooped down and grabbed that last man up. Got him right by the sheet, it did . . . and I heard that bird’s wings. The sound was like fire . .

. and it hovered . . . and I thought, Birds can’t hover but this one could,

because . . . because ”

He fell silent.

“Why, Daddy? ” I whispered. “Why could it hover? ” “It didn’t hover, ” he said.

I sat there in silence, thinking he had gone to sleep for sure this time. I had never been so afraid in my life. because four years before, I had seen

that bird. Somehow, in some unimaginable way, I had nearly forgotten that nightmare. It was my father who brought it back.

“It didn’t hover, ” he said. “It floated. It floated. There were big bunches of balloons tied to each wing, and it floated. ”

My father went to sleep.

March 1st, 1985

It’s come again. I know that now. I’ll wait, but in my heart I know it. I’m not sure I can stand it. As a kid I was able to deal with it, but it’s different with kids. In some fundamental way it’s different.

I wrote all of that last night in a kind of frenzy—not that I could have gone home anyway. Derry has been blanketed in a thick glaze of ice, and although the sun is out this morning, nothing is moving.

I wrote until long after three this morning, pushing the pen faster and faster, trying to get it all out. I had forgotten about seeing the giant bird when I was eleven. It was my father’s story that brought it back and I

never forgot it again. Not any of it. In a way, I suppose it was his final gift to me. A terrible gift, you would say, but wonderful in its way.

I slept right where I was, my head in my arms, my notebook and pen on the table in front of me. I woke up this morning with a numb ass and an aching back, but feeling free, somehow purged of that old story.

And then I saw that I had had company in the night, as I slept.

The tracks, drying to faint muddy impressions, led from the front door of the library (which I locked; I always lock it) to the desk where I slept.

There were no tracks leading away.

Whatever it was, it came to me in the night, left its talisman. . . and then simply disappeared.

Tied to my reading lamp was a single balloon. Filled with helium, it floated in a morning sunray which slanted in through one of the high windows.

On it was a picture of my face, the eyes gone, blood running down from the ragged sockets, a scream distorting the mouth on the balloon’s thin and bulging rubber skin.

I looked at it and I screamed. The scream echoed through the library, echoing back, vibrating from the circular iron staircase leading to the stacks.

The balloon burst with a bang.