BILL DENBROUGH TAKES TIME OUT

 

“Leave? Audra repeated. She looked at him, puzzled, a bit afraid, and then tucked her bare feet up and under her. The floor was cold. The whole cottage was cold, come to that. The south of England had been experiencing an exceptionally dank spring, and more than once, on his regular morning and evening walks, Bill Denbrough had found himself thinking of Maine… thinking in a surprised vague way of Derry.

The cottage was supposed to have central heating-the ad had said so, and there certainly was a furnace down there in the tidy little basement, tucked away in what had once been a coal-bin-but he and Audra had discovered early on in the shoot that the British idea of central heating was not at all the same as the American one. It seemed the Brits believed you had central heating as long as you didn’t have to piss away a scrim of ice in the toilet bowl when you got up in the morning. It was morning now-just quarter of eight. Bill had hung the phone up five minutes ago.

“Bill, you can’t just leave. You know that.”

“I have to,” he said. There was a hutch on the far side of the room. He went to it, took a bottle of Glenfiddich from the top shelf and poured himself a drink. Some of it slopped over the side of the glass. Tuck,” he muttered.

“Who was that on the telephone? What are you scared of, Bill?”

“I’m not scared.”

“Oh? Your hands always shake like that? You always have your first drink before breakfast?”

He came back to his chair, robe flapping around his ankles, and sat down. He tried to smile, but it was a poor effort and he gave it up.

On the telly the BBC announcer was wrapping up this morning’s batch of bad news before going on to last evening’s football scores. When they had arrived in the small suburban village of Fleet a month before the shoot was scheduled to begin, they had both marvelled over the technical quality of British television-on a good Pye color set, it really did look as though you could climb right inside. More lines or something, Bill had said. I don’t know what it is, but it’s great, Audra had replied. That was before they discovered that much of the programming consisted of American shows such as Dallas and endless British sports events ranging from the arcane and boring (champion darts-throwing, in which all the participants looked like hypertensive sumo wrestlers) to the simply boring (British football was bad; cricket was even worse).

“I’ve been thinking about home a lot lately,” Bill said, and sipped his drink.

“Home?” she said, and looked so honestly puzzled that he laughed.

“Poor Audra! Married almost eleven years to the guy and you don’t know doodley-squat about him. What do you know about that?” He laughed again and swallowed the rest of his drink. His laughter had a quality she cared for as little as seeing him with a glass of Scotch in his hand at this hour of the morning. The laugh sounded like something that really wanted to be a howl of pain. “I wonder if any of the others have got husbands and wives who are just finding out how little they know. I suppose they must.”

“Billy, I know that I love you,” she said. “For eleven years that’s been enough.”

“I know.” He smiled at her-the smile was sweet, tired, and scared.

“Please. Please tell me what this is about.”

She looked at him with her lovely gray eyes, sitting there in a tatty leased-house chair with her feet curled beneath the hem of her nightgown, a woman he had loved, married, and still loved. He tried to see through her eyes, to see what she knew. He tried to see it as a story. He could, but he knew it would never sell.

Here is a poor boy from the state of Maine who goes to the University on a scholarship. All his life he has wanted to be a writer, but when he enrolls in the writing courses he finds himself lost without a compass in a strange and frightening land. There’s one guy who wants to be Updike. There’s another one who wants to be a New England version of Faulkner-only he wants to write novels about the grim lives of the poor in blank verse. There’s a girl who admires Joyce Carol Gates but feels that because Oates was nurtured in a sexist society she is “radioactive in a literary sense.” Oates is unable to be clean, this girl says. She will be cleaner. There’s the short fat grad student who can’t or won’t speak above a mutter. This guy has written a play in which there are nine characters. Each of them says only a single word. Little by little the playgoers realize that when you put the single words together you come out with “War is the tool of the sexist death merchants.” This fellow’s play receives an A from the man who teaches Eh-141 (Creative Writing Honors Seminar). This instructor has published four books of poetry and his master’s thesis, all with the University Press. He smokes pot and wears a peace medallion. The fat mutterer’s play is produced by a guerrilla theater group during the strike to end the war which shuts down the campus in May of 1970. The instructor plays one of the characters.

Bill Denbrough, meanwhile, has written one locked-room mystery tale, three science-fiction stories, and several horror tales which owe a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Richard Matheson-in later years he will say those stories resembled a mid-1800s funeral hack equipped with a supercharger and painted Day-Glo red.

One of the sf tales earns him a B.

“This is better,” the instructor writes on the title page. “In the alien counterstrike we see the vicious circle in which violence begets violence; I particularly liked the “needle-nosed” spacecraft as a symbol of socio-sexual incursion. While this remains a slightly confused undertone throughout, it is interesting.”

All the others do no better than a C.

Finally he stands up in class one day, after the discussion of a sallow young woman’s vignette about a cow’s examination of a discarded engine block in a deserted field (this may or may not be after a nuclear war) has gone on for seventy minutes or so. The sallow girl, who smokes one Winston after another and picks occasionally at the pimples which nestle in the hollows of her temples, insists that the vignette is a socio-political statement in the manner of the early Orwell. Most of the class-and the instructor-agree, but still the discussion drones on.

When Bill stands up, the class looks at him. He is tail, and has a certain presence.

Speaking carefully, not stuttering (he has not stuttered in better than five years), he says: “I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics… culture… history… aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean… ” He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. “I mean… can’t you guys just let a story be a story?

No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack.

Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, “do you believe William Faulkner was just telling stories’? Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck? Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think.”

“I think that’s pretty close to the truth,” Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation.

“I suggest,” the instructor says, toying with his pen and smiling at Bill with half-lidded eyes, “that you have a great deal to learn.”

The applause starts somewhere in the back of the room.

Bill leaves… but returns the next week, determined to stick with it. In the time between he has written a story called “The Dark,” a tale about a small boy who discovers a monster in the cellar of his house. The little boy faces it, battles it, finally kills it. He feels a land of holy exaltation as he goes about the business of writing this story; he even feels that he is not so much telling the story as he is allowing the story to flow through him. At one point he puts his pen down and takes his hot and aching hand out into ten-degree December cold where it nearly smokes from the temperature change. He walks around, green cut-off boots squeaking in the snow like tiny shutter-hinges which need oil, and his head seems to bulge with the story; it is a little scary, the way it needs to get out. He feels that if it cannot escape by way of his racing hand that it will pop his eyes out in its urgency to escape and be concrete. “Going to knock the shit out of it,” he confides to the blowing winter dark, and laughs a little-a shaky laugh. He is aware that he has finally discovered how to do just that-after ten years of trying he has suddenly found the starter button on the vast dead bulldozer taking up so much space inside his head. It has started up. It is revving, revving. It is nothing pretty, this big machine. It was not made for taking pretty girls to proms. It is not a status symbol. It means business. It can knock things down. If he isn’t careful, it will knock him down.

He rushes inside and finishes “The Dark” at white heat, writing until four o’clock in the morning and finally falling asleep over his ring-binder. If someone had suggested to him that he was really writing about his brother, George, he would have been surprised. He has not thought about George in years-or so he honestly believes.

The story comes back from the instructor with an F slashed into the tide page. Two words are scrawled beneath, in capital letters. PULP, screams one. CRAP, screams the other.

Bill takes the fifteen-page sheaf of manuscript over to the wood-stove and opens the door. He is within a bare inch of tossing it in when the absurdity of what he is doing strikes him. He sits down in his rocking chair, looks at a Grateful Dead poster, and starts to laugh. Pulp? Fine! Let it be pulp! The woods were full of it!

“Let them fucking trees fall!” Bill exclaims, and laughs until tears spurt from his eyes and roll down his face.

He retypes the title page, the one with the instructor’s judgment on it, and sends it off to a men’s magazine named White Tie (although from what Bill can see, it really should be titled Naked Girls Who Look Like Drug Users’). Yet his battered Writer’s Market says they buy horror stories, and the two issues he has bought down at the local mom-and-pop store have indeed contained four horror stories sandwiched between the naked girls and the ads for dirty movies and potency pills. One of them, by a man named Dennis Etchison, is actually quite good.

He sends “The Dark” off with no real hopes-he has submitted a good many stories to magazines before with nothing to show for it but rejection slips-and is flabbergasted and delighted when the fiction editor of White Tie buys it for two hundred dollars, payment on publication. The assistant editor adds a short note which calls it “the best damned horror story since Ray Bradbury’s “The Jar.” He adds, “Too bad only about seventy people coast to coast will read it,” but Bill Denbrough does not care. Two hundred dollars!

He goes to his advisor with a drop card for Eh-141. His advisor initials it. Bill Denbrough staples the drop card to the assistant fiction editor’s congratulatory note and tacks both to the bulletin board on the creative-writing instructor’s door. In the corner of the bulletin board he sees an anti-war cartoon. And suddenly, as if moving of its own accord, his fingers pluck his pen from his breast pocket and across the cartoon he writes this: If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable, I’m going to kill myself, because I won’t know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do. He pauses, and then, feeling a bit small (but unable to help himself), he adds: I suggest you have a lot to learn.

His drop card comes back to him in the campus mail three days later. The instructor has initialed it. On the space marked GRADE AT TIME OF DROP, the instructor has not given him an incomplete or the low C to which his run of grades at that time would have entitled him; instead, another F is slashed angrily across the grade line. Below it the instructor has written: Do you think money proves anything about anything, Denbrough?

“Well, actually, yes,” Bill Denbrough says to his empty apartment, and once more begins to laugh crazily.

In his senior year of college he dares to write a novel because he has no idea what he’s getting into. He escapes the experience scratched and frightened… but alive, and with a manuscript nearly five hundred pages long. He sends it out to The Viking Press, knowing that it will be the first of many stops for his book, which is about ghosts… but he likes Viking’s ship logo, and that makes it as good a place to start as any. As it turns out, the first stop is also the last stop. Viking purchases the book… and for Bill Denbrough the fairytale begins. The man who was once known as Stuttering Bill has become a success at the age of twenty-three. Three years later and three thousand miles from northern New England, he attains a queer kind of celebrity by marrying a woman who is a movie-star and five years his senior at Hollywood’s Church in the Pines.

The gossip columnists give it seven months. The only bet, they say, is whether the end will come in a divorce or an annulment. Friends (and enemies) on both sides of the match feel about the same. The age difference apart, the disparities are startling. He is tall, already balding, already inclining a bit toward fat. He speaks slowly in company, and at times seems nearly inarticulate. Audra, on the other hand, is auburn-haired, statuesque, and gorgeous-she is less like an earthly woman than a creature from some semi-divine superrace.

He has been hired to do the screenplay of his second novel, The Black Rapids (mostly because the right to do at least the first draft of the screenplay was an immutable condition of sale, in spite of his agent’s moans that he was insane), and his draft has actually turned out pretty well. He has been invited out to Universal City for further rewrites and production meetings.

His agent is a small woman named Susan Browne. She is exactly five feet tall. She is violently energetic and even more violently emphatic. “don’t do it, Billy,” she tells him. “Kiss it off. They’ve got a lot of money tied up in it and they’ll get someone good to do the screenplay. Maybe even Goldman.”

“Who?”

“William Goldman. The only good writer who ever went out there and did both.”

“What are you talking about, Suze?”

“He stayed there and he stayed good,” she said. “The odds on both are like the odds on beating lung cancer-it can be done, but who wants to try? You’ll burn out on sex and booze. Or some of the nifty new drugs. ” Susan’s crazily fascinating brown eyes sparkle vehemently up at him. “And if it turns out to be some meatball who gets the assignment instead of someone like Goldman, so what? The book’s on the shelf there. They can’t change a word.”

“Susan-”

“Listen to me, Billy! Take the money and run. You’re young and strong. That’s what they like. You go out there and they will first separate you from your self-respect and then from your ability to write a straight line from point A to point B. Last but not least, they will take your testes. You write like a grownup, but you’re just a kid with a very high forehead.”

“I have to go.”

“Did someone just fart in here?” she returns. “Must have, because something sure stinks.”

“But I do. I have to.”

“Jesus!”

“I have to get away from New England.” He is afraid to say what comes next-it’s like mouthing a curse-but he owes it to her. “I have to get away from Maine.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“I don’t know. I just do.”

“Are you telling me something real, Billy, or just talking like a writer?”

“It’s real.”

They are in bed together during this conversation. Her breasts are small like peaches, sweet like peaches. He loves her a lot, although not the way they both know would be a really good way to love. She sits up with a pool of sheet in her lap and lights a cigarette. She’s crying, but he doubts if she knows he knows. It’s just this shine in her eyes. It would be tactful not to mention it, so he doesn’t. He doesn’t love her in that really good way, but he cares a mountain for her.

“Go on then,” she says in a dry businesslike voice as she turns back to him. “Give me a call when you’re ready, and if you still have the strength. I’ll come and pick up the pieces. If there are any left.”

The film version of The Black Rapids is called Pit of the Black Demon, and Audra Phillips is cast as the lead. The title is horrible, but the movie turns out to be quite good. And the only part of him he loses in Hollywood is his heart.

“Bill,” Audra said again, bringing him out of these memories. He saw she had snapped off the TV. He glanced out the window and saw fog nuzzling against the panes.

“I’ll explain as much as I can,” he said. “You deserve that. But first do two things for me.”

“All right.”

“Fix yourself another cup of tea and tell me what you know about me. Or what you think you know.”

She looked at him, puzzled, and then went to the highboy.

“I know you’re from Maine,” she said, making herself tea from the breakfast pot. She was not British, but just a touch of clipped British had crept into her voice-a holdover from the part she played in Attic Room, the movie they had come over here to do. It was Bill’s first original screenplay. He had been offered the directorial shot as well. Thank God he had declined that; his leaving now would have completed the job of bitching things up. He knew what they would all say, the whole crew. Billy Denbrough finally shows his true colors. Just another fucking writer, crazier than a shithouse rat.

God knew he felt crazy right about now.

“I know you had a brother and that you loved him very much and that he died,” Audra went on. “I know that you grew up in a town called Derry, moved to Bangor about two years after your brother died, and moved to Portland when you were fourteen. I know your dad died of lung cancer when you were seventeen. And you wrote a best-seller while you were still in college, paying your way with a scholarship and a part-time job in a textile mill. That must have seemed very strange to you… the change in income. In prospects.”

She returned to his side of the room and he saw it in her face then: the realization of the hidden spaces between them.

“I know that you wrote The Black Rapids a year later, and came out to Hollywood. And the week before shooting started on the movie, you met a very mixed-up woman named Audra Phillips who knew a little bit about what you must have been through-the crazy decompression-because she had been plain old Audrey Philpott five years before. And this woman was drowning-”

“Audra, don’t.”

Her eyes were steady, holding his. “Oh, why not? Let us tell the truth and shame the devil. I was drowning. I discovered poppers two years before I met you, and then a year later I discovered coke and that was even better. A popper in the morning, coke in the afternoon, wine at night, a Valium at bedtime. Audra’s vitamins. Too many important interviews, too many good parts. I was so much like a character in a Jacqueline Susann novel it was hilarious. Do you know how I think about that time now, Bill?”

“No.”

She sipped her tea, her eyes never leaving his, and grinned. “It was like running on the walkway at LA International. You get it?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“It’s a moving belt,” she said. “About a quarter of a mile long.”

“I know the walkway,” he said, “but I don’t see what you’re-”

“You just stand there and it carries you all the way to the baggage-claim area. But if you want, you don’t have to just stand there. You can walk on it. Or run. And it seems like you’re just doing your normal walk or your normal jog or your normal run or your normal all-out sprint-whatever-because your body forgets that what you’re really doing is topping the speed the walkway’s already making. That’s why they have those signs that say SLOW DOWN, MOVING RAMPWAY near the end. When I met you I felt as if I’d run right off the end of that thing onto a floor that didn’t move anymore. There I was, my body nine miles ahead of my feet. You can’t keep your balance. Sooner or later you fall right on your face. Except I didn’t. Because you caught me.”

She put her tea aside and lit a cigarette, her eyes never leaving him. He could only see that her hands were shaking in the minute jitter of the lighter-flame, which darted first to the right of the cigarette-end and then to the left before finding it.

She drew deep, blew out a fast jet of smoke.

“What do I know about you? I know you seemed to have it all under control. I know that. You never seemed to be in a hurry to get to the next drink or the next meeting or the next party. You seemed confident that all those things would be there… if you wanted them. You talked slow. Part of it was the Maine drawl, I guess, but most of it was just you. You were the first man I ever met out there who dared to talk slow. I had to slow down to listen. I looked at you, Bill, and I saw someone who never ran on the walkway, because he knew it would get him there. You seemed utterly untouched by the hype and hysteria. You didn’t lease a Rolls so you could drive down Rodeo Drive on Saturday afternoon with your own vanity plates on some glitzy rental company’s car. You didn’t have a press agent to plant items in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. You’d never done the Carson show.”

“Writers can’t unless they also do card-tricks or bend spoons,” he said, smiling. “It’s like a national law.”

He thought she would smile, but she didn’t. “I know you were there when I needed you. When I came flying off the end of the walkway like O. J. Simpson in that old Hertz ad. Maybe you saved me from eating the wrong pill on top of too much booze. Or maybe I would have made it out the other side on my own and it’s all a big dramatization on my part. But… it doesn’t feel like that. Not inside, where I am.”

She snuffed the cigarette, only two puffs gone.

“I know you’ve been there ever since. And I’ve been there for you. We’re good in bed. That used to seem like a big deal to me. But we’re also good out of it, and now that seems like a bigger deal. I feel as if I could grow old with you and still be brave. I know you drink too much beer and don’t get enough exercise; I know that some nights you dream badly-”

He was startled. Nastily startled. Almost frightened.

“I never dream.”

She smiled. “so you tell the interviewers when they ask where you get your ideas. But it’s not true. Unless it’s just indigestion when you start groaning in the night. And I don’t believe that, Billy.”

“Do I talk?” he asked cautiously. He could remember no dreams. No dreams at all, good or bad.

Audra nodded. “sometimes. But I can never make out what it is you say. And on a couple of occasions, you have wept.”

He looked at her blankly. There was a bad taste in his mouth; it trailed back along his tongue and down his throat like the taste of melted aspirin. So now you know how fear tastes, he thought. Time you found out, considering all you’ve written on the subject. He supposed it was a taste he would get used to. If he lived long enough.

Memories were suddenly trying to crowd in. It was as if a black sac in his mind were bulging, threatening to spew noxious

(dreams)

images up from his subconscious and into the mental field of vision commanded by his rational waking mind-and if that happened all at once, it would drive him mad. He tried to push them back, and succeeded, but not before he heard a voice-it was as if someone buried alive had cried out from the ground. It was Eddie Kaspbrak’s voice.

You saved my life, Bill. Those big boys, they drive me bugshit. Sometimes I think they really want to kill me-

“Your arms,” Audra said.

Bill looked down at them. The flesh there had humped into gooseflesh. Not little bumps but huge white knobs like insect eggs. They both stared, saying nothing, as if looking at an interesting museum exhibit. The goosebumps slowly melted away.

In the silence that followed Audra said: “And I know one other thing. Someone called you this morning from the States and said you have to leave me.”

He got up, looked briefly at the liquor bottles, then went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of orange juice. He said: “You know I had a brother, and you know he died, but you don’t know he was murdered.”

Audra took in a quick snatch of breath.

“Murdered! Oh, Bill, why didn’t you ever-”

“Tell you?” He laughed, that barking sound again. “I don’t know.”

“What happened?”

“We were living in Derry then. There had been a flood, but it was mostly over, and George was bored. I was sick in bed with the flu. He wanted me to make him a boat out of a sheet of newspaper. I knew how from daycamp the year before. He said he was going to sail it down the gutters on Witcham Street and Jackson Street, because they were still full of water. So I made him the boat and he thanked me and he went out and that was the last time I ever saw my brother George alive. If I hadn’t had the flu, maybe I could have saved him.”

He paused, right palm rubbing at his left cheek, as if testing for beard-stubble. His eyes, magnified by the lenses of his glasses, looked thoughtful… but he was not looking at her.

“It happened right there on Witcham Street, not too far from the intersection with Jackson. Whoever killed him pulled his left arm off the way a second-grader would pull a wing off a fly. Medical examiner said he either died of shock or blood-loss. Far as I could ever see, it didn’t make a dime’s worth of difference which it was.”

“Christ, Bill!”

“I imagine you wonder why I never told you. The truth is I wonder myself. Here we’ve been married eleven years and until today you never knew what happened to Georgie. I know about your whole family-even your aunts and uncles. I know your grandfather died in his garage in Iowa City frigging around with his chainsaw while he was drunk. I know those things because married people, no matter how busy they are, get to know almost everything after awhile. And if they get really bored and stop listening, they pick it up anyway-by osmosis. Or do you think I’m wrong?”

“No,” she said faintly. “You’re not wrong, Bill.”

“And we’ve always been able to talk to each other, haven’t we? I mean, neither of us got so bored it ever had to be osmosis, right?”

“Well,” she said, “until today I always thought so.”

“Come on, Audra. You know everything that’s happened to me over the last eleven years of my life. Every deal, every idea, every cold, every friend, every guy that ever did me wrong or tried to. You know I slept with Susan Browne. You know that sometimes I get maudlin when I drink and play the records too loud.”

“Especially the Grateful Dead,” she said, and he laughed. This time she smiled back.

“You know the most important stuff, too-the things I hope for.”

“Yes. I think so. But this… ” She paused, shook her head, thought for a moment. “How much does this call have to do with your brother, Bill?”

“Let me get to it ia my own way. Don’t try to rush me into the center of it or you’ll have me committed. It’s so big… and so… so quaintly awful… that I’m trying to sort of creep up on it. You see… it never occurred to me to tell you about Georgie.”

She looked at him, frowned, shook her head faintly-I don’t understand.

“What I’m trying to tell you, Audra, is that I haven’t even thought of George in twenty years or more.”

“But you told me you had a brother named-”

“I repeated a fact,” he said. “That was all. His name was a word. It cast no shadow at all in my mind.”

“But I think maybe it cast a shadow over your dreams,” Audra said. Her voice was very quiet.

“The groaning? The crying?”

She nodded.

“I suppose you could be right,” he said. “In fact, you’re almost surely right. But dreams you don’t remember don’t really count, do they?”

“Are you really telling me you never thought of him at all”

“Yes. I am.”

She shook her head, frankly disbelieving. “Not even the horrible way he died?”

“Not until today, Audra.”

She looked at him and shook her head again.

“You asked me before we were married if I had any brothers or sisters, and I said I had a brother who died when I was a kid. You knew my parents were gone, and you’ve got so much family that it took up your entire field of attention. But that’s not all.”

“What do you mean?”

“It isn’t just George that’s been in that black hole. I haven’t thought of Derry itself in twenty years. Not the people I chummed with-Eddie Kaspbrak and Richie the Mouth, Stan Uris, Bev Marsh… ” He ran his hands through his hair and laughed shakily. “It’s like having a case of amnesia so bad you don’t know you’ve got it. And when Mike Hanlon called-”

“Who’s Mike Hanlon?”

“Another kid that we chummed with-that I chummed with after Georgie died. Of course he’s no kid anymore. None of us are. That was Mike on the phone, transatlantic cable. He said, “Hello-have I reached the Denbrough residence?” and I said yes, and he said, “Bill? Is that you?” and I said yes, and he said, “This is Mike Hanlon.” It meant nothing to me, Audra. He might as well have been selling encyclopedias or Burl Ives records. Then he said, “From Derry.” And when he said that it was like a door opened inside me and some horrible light shined out, and I remembered who he was. I remembered Georgie. I remembered all the others. All this happened-”

Bill snapped his fingers.

“Like that. And I knew he was going to ask me to come.”

“Come back to Derry.”

“Yeah.” He took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, looked at her. Never in her life had she seen a man who looked so frightened. “Back to Derry. Because we promised, he said, and we did. We did. All of us. Us kids. We stood in the creek that ran through the Barrens, and we held hands in a circle, and we had cut our palms with a piece of glass so it was like a bunch of kids playing blood brothers, only it was real.”

He held his palms out to her, and in the center of each she could see a close-set ladder of white lines that could have been scar-tissue. She had held his hand-both his hands-countless times, but she had never noticed these scars across his palms before. They were faint, yes, but she would have believed -

And the party! That party!

Not the one where they had met, although this second one formed a perfect book-end to that first one, because it had been the wrap party at the end of the Pit of the Black Demon shoot. It had been loud and drunk, every inch the Topanga Canyon “do. ” Perhaps a little less bitchy than some of the other LA parties she had been to, because the shoot had gone better than they had any right to expect, and they all knew it. For Audra Phillips it had gone even better, because she had fallen in love with William Denbrough.

What was the name of the self-proclaimed palmist? She couldn’t remember now, only that she had been one of the makeup man’s two assistants. She remembered the girl whipping off her blouse at some point in the party (revealing a very filmy bra beneath) and tying it over her head like a gypsy’s scarf. High on pot and wine, she had read palms for the rest of the evening… or at least until she had passed out.

Audra could not remember now if the girl’s readings had been good or bad, witty or stupid: she had been pretty high herself that night. What she did remember was that at one point the girl had grabbed Bill’s palm and her own and had declared them perfectly matched. They were life-twins, she said. She could remember watching, more than a little jealous, as the girl traced the lines on his palm with her exquisitely lacquered fingernail-how stupid that was, in the weird LA film subculture where men patted women’s fannies as routinely as New York men pecked their cheeks! But there had been something intimate and lingering about that tracery.

There had been no little white scars on Bill’s palms then.

She had been watching the charade with a jealous lover’s eye, and she was sure of the memory. Sure of the fact.

She said so to Bill now.

He nodded. “You’re right. They weren’t there then. And although I can’t absolutely swear to it, I don’t think they were there last night, down at the Plow and Barrow. Ralph and I were hand-wrestling for beers again and I think I would have noticed.”

He grinned at her. The grin was dry, humorless, and scared.

“I think they came back when Mike Hanlon called. That’s what I think.”

“Bill, that isn’t possible.” But she reached for her cigarettes.

Bill was looking at his hands. “stan did it,” he said. “Cut our palms with a sliver of Coke bottle. I can remember it so clearly now.” He looked up at Audra and behind his glasses his eyes were hurt and puzzled. “I remember how that piece of glass flashed in the sun. It was one of the new clear ones. Before that Coke bottles used to be green, you remember that?” She shook her head but he didn’t see her. He was still studying his palms. “I can remember Stan doing his own hands last, pretending he was going to slash his wrists instead of just cut his palms a little. I guess it was just some goof, but I almost made a move on him… to stop him. Because for a second or two there he looked serious.”

“Bill, don’t,” she said in a low voice. This time she had to steady the lighter in her right hand by grasping its wrist in her left, like a policeman holding a gun on a shooting range. “scars can’t come back. They either are or aren’t.”

“You saw them before, huh? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“They’re very faint,” Audra said, more sharply than she had intended,

“We were all bleeding,” he said. “We were standing in the water not far from where Eddie Kaspbrak and Ben Hanscom and I built the dam that time-”

“You don’t mean the architect, do you?”

“Is there one by that name?”

“God, Bill, he built the new BBC communications center! They’re still arguing whether it’s a dream or an abortion!”

“Well, I don’t know if it’s the same guy or not. It doesn’t seem likely, but I guess it could be. The Ben I knew was great at building stuff. We all stood there, and I was holding Bev Marsh’s left hand in my right and Richie Tozier’s right hand in my left. We stood out there in the water like something out of a Southern baptism after a tent meeting, and I remember I could see the Derry Standpipe on the horizon. It looked as white as you imagine the robes of the archangels must be, and we promised, we swore, that if it wasn’t over, that if it ever started to happen again… we’d go back. And we’d do it again. And stop it. Forever.”

“Stop what? she cried, suddenly furious with him. “stop what’? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I wish you wouldn’t a-a-ask-” Bill began, and then stopped. She saw an expression of bemused horror spread over his face like a stain. “Give me a cigarette.”

She passed him the pack. He lit one. She had never seen him smoke a cigarette.

“I used to stutter, too.”

“You stuttered?”

“Yes. Back then. You said I was the only man in LA you ever knew who dared to speak slowly. The truth is, I didn’t dare talk fast. It wasn’t reflection. It wasn’t deliberation. It wasn’t wisdom. All reformed stutterers speak very slowly. It’s one of the tricks you learn, like thinking of your middle name just before you introduce yourself, because stutterers have more trouble with nouns than with any other words, and the one word in all the world that gives them the most trouble is their own first name.”

“Stuttered.” She smiled a small smile, as if he had told a joke and she had missed the point.

“Until Georgie died, I stuttered moderately,” Bill said, and already he had begun to hear words double in his mind, as if they were infinitesimally separated in time; the words came out smoothly, in his ordinary slow and cadenced way, but in his mind he heard words like Georgie and moderately overlap, becoming Juh-Juh-Georgie and m-moderately. “I mean, I had some really bad moments-usually when I was called on in class, and especially if I really knew the answer and wanted to give it-but mostly I got by. After George died, it got a lot worse. Then, around the age of fourteen or fifteen, things started to get better again. I went to Chevrus High in Portland, and there was a speech therapist there, Mrs Thomas, who was really great. She taught me some good tricks. Like thinking of my middle name just before I said “Hi, I’m Bill Denbrough” out loud. I was taking French 1 and she taught me to switch to French if I got badly stuck on a word. So if you’re standing there feeling like the world’s grandest asshole, saying “th-th-this buh-buh-buh-buh” over and over like a broken record, you switched over to French and “ce livre” would come flowing off your tongue. Worked every time. And as soon as you said it in French you could come back to English and say “this book” with no problem at all. If you got stuck on an s-word like ship or skate or slum, you could lisp it: thip, thkate, thlum. No stutter.

“All of that helped, but mostly it was just forgetting Derry and everything that happened there. Because that’s when the forgetting happened. When we were living in Portland and I was going to Chevrus. I didn’t forget everything at once, but looking back now I’d have to say it happened over a remarkably short period of time. Maybe no more than four months. My stutter and my memories faded out together. Someone washed the blackboard and all the old equations went away.”

He drank what was left of his juice. “When I stuttered on “ask” a few seconds ago, that was the first time in maybe twenty-one years.”

He looked at her.

“First the scars, then the stuh-hutter. Do you h-hear it?”

“You’re doing that on purpose!” she said, badly frightened.

“No. I guess there’s no way to convince a person of that, but it’s true. Stuttering’s funny, Audra. Spooky. On one level you’re not even aware it’s happening. But… it’s also something you can hear in your mind. It’s like part of your head is working an instant ahead of the rest. Or one of those reverb systems kids used to put in their jalopies back in the fifties, when the sound in the rear speaker would come just a split second a-after the sound in the front s-speaker.”

He got up and walked restlessly around the room. He looked tired, and she thought with some unease of how hard he had worked over the last thirteen years or so, as if it might be possible to justify the moderateness of his talent by working furiously, almost non-stop. She found herself having a very uneasy thought and tried to push it away, but it wouldn’t go. Suppose Bill’s call had really been from Ralph Foster, inviting him down to the Plow and Barrow for an hour of arm-wrestling or backgammon, or maybe from Freddie Firestone, the producer of Attic Room, on some problem or other? Perhaps even a “wrong-ring,” as the veddy British doctor’s wife down the lane put it?

What did such thoughts lead to?

Why, to the idea that all this Derry-Mike Hanlon business was nothing but a hallucination. A hallucination brought on by an incipient nervous breakdown.

But the scars, Audra-how do you explain the scars? He’s right. They weren’t there… and now they are. That’s the truth, and you know it.

“Tell me the rest,” she said. “Who killed your brother George? What did you and these other children do? What did you promise?”

He went to her, knelt before her like an oldfashioned suitor about to propose marriage, and took her hands.

“I think I could tell you,” he said softly. “I think that if I really wanted to, I could. Most of it I don’t remember even now, but once I started talking it would come. I can sense those memories… waiting to be born. They’re like clouds filled with rain. Only this rain would be very dirty. The plants that grew after a rain like that would be monsters. Maybe I can face that with the others-”

“Do they know?”

“Mike said he called them all. He thinks they’ll all come… except maybe for Stan. He said Stan sounded strange.”

“It all sounds strange to me. You’re frightening me very badly, Bill.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and kissed her. It was like getting a kiss from an utter stranger. She found herself hating this man Mike Hanlon. “I thought I ought to explain as much as I could; I thought that would be better than just creeping off into the night. I suppose some of them may do just that. But I have to go. And I think Stan will be there, no matter how strange he sounded. Or maybe that’s just because I can’t imagine not going myself.”

“Because of your brother?”

Bill shook his head slowly. “I could tell you that, but it would be a lie. I loved him. I know how strange that must sound after telling you I haven’t thought of him in twenty years or so, but I loved the hell out of that kid.” He smiled a little. “He was a spasmoid, but I loved him. You know?”

Audra, who had a younger sister, nodded. “I know.”

“But it isn’t George. I can’t explain what it is. I…”

He looked out the window at the morning fog.

“I feel like a bird must feel when fall comes and it knows… somehow it just knows it has to fly home. It’s instinct, babe… and I guess I believe instinct’s the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will. Unless you’re willing to take the pipe or eat the gun or take a long walk off a short dock, you can’t say no to some things. You can’t refuse to pick up your option because there is no option. You can’t stop it from happening any more than you could stand at home plate with a bat in your hand and let a fastball hit you. I have to go. That promise… it’s in my mind like a fuh-fishhook.”

She stood up and walked herself carefully to him; she felt very fragile, as if she might break. She put a hand on his shoulder and turned him to her.

“Take me with you, then.”

The expression of horror that dawned on his face then-not horror of her but for her-was so naked that she stepped back, really afraid for the first time.

“No,” he said. “don’t think of that, Audra. Don’t you ever think of that. You’re not going within three thousand miles of Derry. I think Derry’s going to be a very bad place to be during the next couple of weeks. You’re going to stay here and carry on and make all the excuses for me you have to. Now promise me that!”

“Should I promise?” she asked, her eyes never leaving his. “should I, Bill?”

“Audra-”

“Should I? You made a promise, and look what it’s got you into. And me as well, since I’m your wife and I love you.”

His big hands tightened painfully on her shoulders. “Promise me! Promise! P-Puh-Puh-Pruh-huh-”

And she could not stand that, that broken word caught in his mouth like a gaffed and wriggling fish.

“I promise, okay? I promise!” She burst into tears. “Are you happy now? Jesus! You’re crazy, the whole thing is crazy, but I promise!”

He put an arm around her and led her to the couch. Brought her a brandy. She sipped at it, getting herself under control a little at a time.

“When do you go, then?”

“Today,” he said. “Concorde. I can just make it if I drive to Heathrow instead of taking the train. Freddie wanted me on-set after ranch. You go on ahead at nine, and you don’t know anything, you see?”

She nodded reluctantly.

“I’ll be in New York before anything shows up funny. And in Derry before sundown, with the right c-c-connections.”

“And when do I see you again?” she asked softly.

He put an arm around her and held her tightly, but he never answered her question.

 

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