DERRY: THE FIRST INTERLUDE

 

“How many human eyes… had snatched glimpses of their secret anatomies, down the passage of years?”

-Clive Barker, Books of Blood

The segment below and all other Interlude segments are drawn from “derry: An Unauthorized Town History,” by Michael Hanlon. This is an unpublished set of notes and accompanying fragments of manuscript (which read almost like diary entries) found in the Derry Public Library vault. The title given is the one written on the cover of the looseleaf binder in which these notes were kept prior to their appearance here. The author, however, refers to the work several times within his own notes as “derry: A Look Through Hell’s Back Door.”

One supposes the thought of popular publication had done more than cross Mr Hanlon’s mind.

January 2nd, 1985

Can an entire city be haunted?

Haunted as some houses are supposed to be haunted?

Not just a single building in that city, or the corner of a single street, or a single basketball court in a single pocket-park, the netless basket jutting out at sunset like some obscure and bloody instrument of torture, not just one area

– but everything. The whole works.

Can that be?

Listen:

Haunted: “Often visited by ghosts or spirits.” Funk and Wagnalls.

Haunting: “Persistently recurring to the mind; difficult to forget.” Ditto Funk and Friend.

To haunt: “To appear or recur often, especially as a ghost.” But-and listen!-

“A place often visited: resort, den, hangout… ” Italics are of course mine.

And one more. This one, like the last, is a definition of haunt as a noun, and it’s the one that really scares me: “.A feeding place for animals.”

Like the animals that beat up Adrian Mellon and then threw him over the bridge?

Like the animal that was waiting underneath the bridge?

A feeding place for animals.

What’s feeding in Derry? What’s feeding on Derry?

You know, it’s sort of interesting-I didn’t know it was possible for a man to become as frightened as I have become since the Adrian Mellon business and still live, let alone function. It’s as if I’ve fallen into a story, and everyone knows you’re not supposed to feel this afraid until the end of the story, when the haunter of the dark finally comes out of the woodwork to feed… on you, of course.

On you.

But if this is a story, it’s not one of those classic screamers by Lovecraft or Bradbury or Poe. I know, you see-not everything, but a lot. I didn’t just start when I opened the Derry News one day last September, read the transcript of the Unwin boy’s preliminary hearing, and realized that the clown who killed George Denbrough might well be back again. I actually started around 1980-I think that is when some part of me which had been asleep woke up… knowing that Its time might be coming round again.

What part? The watchman part, I suppose.

Or maybe it was the voice of the Turtle. Yes… I rather think it was that. I know it’s what Bill Denbrough would believe.

I discovered news of old horrors in old books; read intelligence of old atrocities in old periodicals; always in the back of my mind, every day a bit louder, I heard the seashell drone of some growing, coalescing force; I seemed to smell the bitter ozone aroma of lightnings-to-come. I began making notes for a book I will almost certainly not live to write. And at the same time I went on with my life. On one level of my mind I was and am living with the most grotesque, capering horrors; on another I have continued to live the mundane life of a small-city librarian. I shelve books; I make out library cards for new patrons; I turn off the microfilm readers careless users sometimes leave on; I joke with Carole Danner about how much I would like to go to bed with her, and she jokes back about how much she’d like to go to bed with me, and both of us know that she’s really joking and I’m really not, just as both of us know that she won’t stay in a little place like Derry for long and I will be here until I die, taping torn pages in Business Week, sitting down at monthly acquisition meetings with my pipe in one hand and a stack of Library Journals in the other… and waking in the middle of the night with my fists jammed against my mouth to keep in the screams.

The gothic conventions are all wrong. My hair has not turned white. I do not sleepwalk. I have not begun to make cryptic comments or to carry a planchette around in my sportcoat pocket. I think I laugh a little more, that’s all, and sometimes it must seem a little shrill and strange, because sometimes people look at me oddly when I laugh.

Part of me-the part Bill would call the voice of the Turtle-says I should call them all, tonight. But am I, even now, completely sure? Do I want to be completely sure? No-of course not. But God, what happened to Adrian Mellon is so much like what happened to Stuttering Bill’s brother, George, in the fail of 1957.

If it has started again, I will call them. I’ll have to. But not yet. It’s too early anyway. Last time it began slowly and didn’t really get going until the summer of 1958. So… I wait. And fill up the waiting with words in this notebook and long moments of looking into the mirror to see the stranger the boy became.

The boy’s face was bookish and timid; the man’s face is the face of a bank teller in a Western movie, the fellow who never has any lines, the one who just gets to put his hands up and look scared when the robbers come in. And if the script calls for anyone to get shot by the bad guys, he’s the one.

Same old Mike. A little starey in the eyes, maybe, and a little punchy from broken sleep, but not so’s you’d notice without a good close look… like kissing-distance close, and I haven’t been that close to anyone in a very long time. If you took a casual glance at me you might think He’s been reading too many books, but that’s all. I doubt you’d guess how hard the man with the mild bank-teller’s face is now struggling just to hold on, to hold on to his own mind…

If I have to make those calls, it may kill some of them.

That’s one of the things I’ve had to face on the long nights when sleep won’t come, nights when I lie there in bed wearing my conservative blue pajamas, my spectacles neatly folded up and lying on the nighttable next to the glass of water I always put there in case I wake up thirsty in the night. I lie there in the dark and I take small sips of the water and I wonder how much-or how little-they remember. I am somehow convinced that they don’t remember any of it, because they don’t need to remember. I’m the only one that hears the voice of the Turtle, the only one who remembers, because I’m the only one who stayed here in Derry. And because they’re scattered to the four winds, they have no way of knowing the identical patterns their lives have taken. To bring them back, to show them that pattern… yes, it might kill some of them. It might kill all of them.

So I go over it and over it in my mind; I go over them, trying to re-create them as they were and as they might now be, trying to decide which of them is the most vulnerable. Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier, I think sometimes-he was the one Criss, Huggins, and Bowers seemed to catch up with the most often, in spite of the fact that Ben was so fat. Bowers was the one Richie was the most scared of-the one we were all the most scared of-but the others used to really put the fear of God into him, too. If I call him out there in California would he see it as some horrible Return of the Big Bullies, two from the grave and one from the madhouse in Juniper Hill where he raves to this day? Sometimes I think Eddie was the weakest, Eddie with his domineering tank of a mother and his terrible case of asthma. Beverly? She always tried to talk so tough, but she was as scared as the rest of us. Stuttering Bill, faced with a horror that won’t go away when he puts the cover on his typewriter? Stan Uris?

There’s a guillotine blade hanging over their lives, razor-sharp, but the more I think about it the more I think they don’t know that blade is there. I’m the one with my hand on the lever. I can pull it just by opening my telephone notebook and calling them, one after the other.

Maybe I won’t have to do it. I hold on to the waning hope that I’ve mistaken the rabbity cries of my own timid mind for the deeper, truer voice of the Turtle. After all, what do I have? Mellon in July. A child found dead on Neibolt Street last October, another found in Memorial Park in early December, just before the first snowfall. Maybe it was a tramp, as the papers say. Or a crazy who’s since left Derry or killed himself out of remorse and self-disgust, as some of the books say the real Jack the Ripper may have done.

Maybe.

But the Albrecht girl was found directly across the street from that damned old house on Neibolt Street… and she was killed on the same day as George Denbrough was, twenty-seven years before. And then the Johnson boy, found in Memorial Park with one of his legs missing below the knee. Memorial Park is, of course, the home of the Derry Standpipe, and the boy was found almost at its foot. The Standpipe is within a shout of the Barrens; the Standpipe is also where Stan Uris saw those boys.

Those dead boys.

Still, it could all be nothing but smoke and mirages. Could be. Or coincidence. Or perhaps something between the two-a kind of malefic echo. Could that be? I sense that it could be. Here in Derry, anything could be.

I think what was here before is still here-the thing that was here in 1957 and 1958; the thing that was here in 1929 and in 1930 when the Black Spot was burned down by the Maine Legion of White Decency; the thing that was here ha 1904 and 1905 and early 1906-at least until the Kitchener Ironworks exploded; the thing that was here in 1876 and 1877, the thing that has shown up every twenty-seven years or so. Sometimes it comes a little sooner, sometimes a little later… but it always comes. As one goes back the wrong notes are harder and harder to find because the records grow poorer and the moth-holes in the narrative history of the area grow bigger. But knowing where to look-and when to look-goes a long way toward solving the problem. It always comes back, you see.

It.

So-yes: I think I’ll have to make those calls. I think it was meant to be us. Somehow, for some reason, we’re the ones who have been elected to stop it forever. Blind fate? Blind luck? Or is it that damned Turtle again? Does it perhaps command as well as speak? I don’t know. And I doubt if it matters. All those years ago Bill said The Turtle can’t help us, and if it was true then it must be true now.

I think of us standing in the water, hands clasped, making that promise to come back if it ever started again-standing there almost like Druids in a ring, our hands bleeding their own promise, palm to palm. A ritual that is perhaps as old as mankind itself, an unknowing tap driven into the tree of all power-the one that grows on the borderline between the land of all we know and that of all we suspect.

Because the similarities -

But I’m doing my own Bill Denbrough here, stuttering over the same ground again and again, reciting a few facts and a lot of unpleasant (and rather gaseous) suppositions, growing more and more obsessive with every paragraph. No good. Useless. Dangerous, even. But it is so very hard to wait on events.

This notebook is supposed to be an effort to get beyond that obsession by widening the focus of my attention-after all, there is more to this story than six boys and one girl, none of them happy, none of them accepted by their peers, who stumbled into a nightmare during one hot summer when Eisenhower was still President. It is an attempt to pull the camera back a little, if you will-to see the whole city, a place where nearly thirty-five thousand people work and eat and sleep and copulate and shop and drive around and walk and go to school and go to jail and sometimes disappear into the dark.

To know what a place is, I really do believe one has to know what it was. And if I had to name a day when all of this really started again for me, it would be the day in the early spring of 1980 when I went to see Albert Carson, who died last summer-at ninety-one, he was full of years as well as honors. He was head librarian here from 1914 to 1960, an incredible span (but he was an incredible man), and I felt that if anyone would know which history of this area was the best one to start with, Albert Carson would. I asked him my question as we sat on his porch and he gave me my answer, speaking in a croak-he was already fighting the throat-cancer which would eventually kill him.

“Not one of them is worth a shit. As you damn well know.”

“Then where should I start?”

“Start what, for Christ’s sake?”

“researching the history of the area. Of Derry Township.”

“Oh. Well. Start with the Fricke and the Michaud. They’re supposed to be the best.”

“And after I read those-”

“read them? Christ, no! Throw em in the wastebasket! That’s your first step. Then read Buddinger. Branson Buddinger was a damned sloppy researcher and afflicted with a terminal boner, if half of what I heard when I was a kid was true, but when it came to Derry his heart was in the right place. He got most of the facts wrong, but he got them wrong with feeling, Hanlon.”

I laughed a little and Carson grinned with his leathery lips-an expression of good humor that was actually a little frightening. In that instant he looked like a vulture happily guarding a freshly killed animal, waiting for it to reach exactly the right stage of tasty decomposition before beginning to dine.

“When you finish with Buddinger, read Ives. Make notes on all the people he talked to. Sandy Ives is still at the University of Maine. Folklorist. After you read him, go see him. Buy him a dinner. I’d take him to the Orinoka, because dinner at the Orinoka seems to never end. Pump him. Fill up a notebook with names and addresses. Talk to the old-timers he’s talked to-those that are still left; there are a few of us, ah-hah-hah-hah!-and get some more names from them. By then you’ll have all the place to stand you’ll need, if you’re half as bright as I think you are. If you chase down enough people, you’ll find out a few things that aren’t in the histories. And you may find they disturb your sleep.”

“Derry…”

“What about it?”

“Derry’s not right, is it?”

“Right?” he asked in that whispery croak. “What’s right? What does that word mean? Is “right” pretty pictures of the Kenduskeag at sunset, Kodachrome by so-and-so, f-stop such-and-such? If so, then Derry is right, because there are pretty pictures of it by the score. Is right a damned committee of dry-boxed old virgins to save the Governor’s Mansion or to put a commemorative plaque in front of the Standpipe? If that’s right, then Derry’s right as rain, because we’ve got more than our share of old kitty-cats minding everybody’s business. Is right that ugly plastic statue of Paul Bunyan in front of City Center? Oh, if I had a truckful of napalm and my old Zippo lighter I’d take care of that fucking thing, I assure you… but if one’s aesthetic is broad enough to include plastic statues, then Derry is right. The question is, what does right mean to you, Hanlon? Eh? More to the point, what does right not mean?”

I could only shake my head. He either knew or he didn’t. He would either tell or he wouldn’t.

“Do you mean the unpleasant stories you may hear, or the ones you already know? There are always unpleasant stories. A town’s history is like a rambling old mansion filled with rooms and cubbyholes and laundry-chutes and garrets and all sorts of eccentric little hiding places… not to mention an occasional secret passage or two. If you go exploring Mansion Derry, you’ll find all sorts of things. Yes. You may be sorry later, but you’ll find them, and once a thing is found it can’t be unfound, can it? Some of the rooms are locked, but there are keys… there are keys.”

His eyes glinted at me with an old man’s shrewdness.

“You may come to think you’ve stumbled on the worst of Derry’s secrets… but there is always one more. And one more. And one more.”

“Do you-”

“I think I shall have to ask you to excuse me just now. My throat is very bad today. It’s time for my medicine and my nap.”

In other words, here is a knife and a fork, my friend; go see what you can cut with them.

I started with the Fricke history and the Michaud history. I followed Carson’s advice and threw them in the wastebasket, but I read them first. They were as bad as he had suggested. I read the Buddinger history, copied out the footnotes, and chased them down. That was more satisfactory, but footnotes are peculiar things, you know-like footpaths twisting through a wild and anarchic country. They split, then they split again; at any point you may take a wrong turn which leads you either to a bramble-choked dead end or into swampy quickmud. “If you find a footnote,” a library-science prof once told a class of which I was a part, “step on its head and kill it before it can breed.”

They do breed, and sometimes the breeding is a good thing, but I think that more often it is not. Those in Buddinger’s stiffly written A History of Old Derry (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1950) wander through one hundred years” worth of forgotten books and dusty master’s dissertations in the fields of history and folklore, through articles in defunct magazines, and amid brain-numbing stacks of town reports and ledgers.

My conversations with Sandy Ives were more interesting. His sources crossed Buddinger’s from time to time, but a crossing was all it ever was. Ives had spent a good part of his lifetime setting down oral histories-yarns, in other words-almost verbatim, a practice Branson Buddinger would undoubtedly have seen as taking the low road.

Ives had written a cycle of articles on Derry during the years 1963-66. Most of the old-timers he talked to then were dead by the time I started my own investigations, but they had sons, daughters, nephews, cousins. And, of course, one of the great true facts of the world is this: for every old-timer who dies, there’s a new old-timer coming along. And a good story never dies; it is always passed down. I sat on a lot of porches and back stoops, drank a lot of tea, Black Label beer, homemade beer, homemade rootbeer, tapwater, springwater. I did a lot of listening, and the wheels of my tape-player turned.

Both Buddinger and Ives agreed completely on one point: the original party of white settlers numbered about three hundred. They were English. They had a charter and were formally known as the Derrie Company. The land granted them covered what is today Derry, most of Newport, and little slices of the surrounding towns. And in the year 1741 everyone in Derry Township just disappeared. They were there in June of that year-a community which at that time numbered about three hundred and forty souls-but come October they were gone. The little village of wooden homes stood utterly deserted. One of them, which once stood roughly at the place where Witcham and Jackson Streets intersect today, was burned to the ground. The Michaud history states firmly that all of the villagers were slaughtered by Indians, but there is no basis-save the one burned house-for that idea. More likely, someone’s stove just got too hot and the house went up in flames.

Indian massacre? Doubtful. No bones, no bodies. Flood? Not that year. Disease? No word of it in the surrounding towns.

They just disappeared. All of them. All three hundred and forty of them. Without a trace.

So far as I know, the only case remotely like it in American history is the disappearance of the colonists on Roanoke Island, Virginia. Every school-child in the country knows about that one, but who knows about the Derry disappearance? Not even the people who live here, apparently. I quizzed several junior-high students who are taking the required Maine-history course, and none of them knew a thing about it. Then I checked the text, Maine Then and Now. There are better than forty index entries for Derry, most of them concerning the boom years of the lumber industry. Nothing about the disappearance of the original colonists… and yet that-what shall I call it?-that quiet fits the pattern, too.

There is a kind of curtain of quiet which cloaks much of what has happened here… and yet people do talk. I guess nothing can stop people from talking. But you have to listen hard, and that is a rare skill. I flatter myself that I’ve developed it over the last four years. If I haven’t, then my aptitude for the job must be poor indeed, because I’ve had enough practice. An old man told me about how his wife had heard voices speaking to her from the drain of her kitchen sink in the three weeks before their daughter died-that was in the early winter of 1957-58. The girl he spoke of was one of the early victims in the murder-spree which began with George Denbrough and did not end until the following summer.

“A whole slew of voices, all of em babblin together,” he told me. He owned a Gulf station on Kansas Street and talked in between slow, limping trips out to the pumps, where he filled gas-tanks, checked oil-levels, and wiped windshields. “said she spoke back once, even though she was ascairt. Leaned right over the dram, she did, and hollered down into it. “Who the hell are you?” she calls. “What’s your name?” And all these voices answered back, she said-grunts, and babbles and howls and yips, screams and laughin, don’t you know. And she said they were sayin what the possessed man said to Jesus: “Our name is Legion,” they said. She wouldn’t go near that sink for two years. For them two years I’d spend twelve hours a day down here, bustin my hump, then have to go home and warsh all the damn dishes.”

He was drinking a can of Pepsi from the machine outside the office door, a man of seventy-two or -three in faded gray work fatigues, rivers of wrinkles flowing down from the corners of his eyes and mouth.

“By now you prob’ly think I’m as crazy as a bedbug,” he said, “but I’ll tell you sumpin else, if you’ll turn off y “whirligig, there.”

I turned off my tape-recorder and smiled at him. “Considering some of the things I’ve heard over the last couple of years, you’d have to go a fair country distance to convince me you’re crazy,” I said.

He smiled back, but there was no humor in it. “I was doin the dishes one night, same as usual-this was in the fall of ’58, after things had settled down again. My wife was upstair, sleepin. Betty was the only kid God ever saw fit to give us, and after she was killed my wife spent a lot of her time sleepin. Anyway, I pulled the plug and the water started runnin out of the sink. You know the sound real soapy water makes when it goes down the drain? Kind of a suckin sound, it is. It was makin that noise, but I wasn’t thinkin about it, only about goin out and choppin some kindlin in the shed, and just as that sound started to die off, I heard my daughter down in there. I heard Betty somewhere down in those friggin pipes. Laughin. She was somewheres down there in the dark, laughin. Only it sounded more like she was screamin, once you listened a bit. Or both. Screamin and laughin down there in the pipes. That’s the only time I ever heard anything like that. Maybe I just imagined it. But… I don’t think so.”

He looked at me and I looked at him. The light falling through the dirty plate-glass windows onto his face filled him up with years, made him look as ancient as Methuselah. I remember how cold I felt at that moment; how cold.

“You think I’m storying you along?” the old man asked me, the old man who would have been just about forty-five in 1957, the old man to whom God had given a single daughter, Betty Ripsom by name. Betty had been found on Outer Jackson Street just after Christmas of that year, frozen, her remains ripped wide open.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think you’re just storying me along, Mr Ripsom.”

“And you’re tellin the truth, too,” he said with a land of wonder. “I can see it on y’face.”

I think he meant to tell me something more then, but the bell behind us dinged sharply as a car rolled over the hose on the tarmac and pulled up to the pumps. When the bell rang, both of us jumped and I uttered a thin little cry. Ripsom got to his feet and limped out to the car, wiping his hands on a ball of waste. When he came back in, he looked at me as though I were a rather unsavory stranger who had just happened to wander in off the street. I made my goodbyes and left.

Buddinger and Ives agree on some tiling else: things really are not right here in Derry; things in Derry have never been right.

I saw Albert Carson for the last time a scant month before he died. His throat had gotten much worse; all he could manage was a hissing little whisper. “still thinking about writing a history of Derry, Hanlon?”

“Still toying with the idea,” I said, but I had of course never planned to write a history of the township-not exactly-and I think he knew it.

“It would take you twenty years,” he whispered, “and no one would read it. No one would want to read it. Let it go, Hanlon.”

He paused a moment and then added:

“Buddinger committed suicide, you know.”

Of course I had known that-but only because people always talk and I had learned to listen. The article in the News had called it a falling accident, and it was true that Branson Buddinger had taken a fall. What the News neglected to mention was that he fell from a stool in his closet and he had a noose around his neck at the time.

“You know about the cycle?”

I looked at him, startled.

“Oh yes,” Carson whispered. “I know. Every twenty-six or twenty-seven years. Buddinger knew, too. A lot of the old-timers do, although that is one thing they won’t talk about, even if you load them up with booze. Let it go, Hanlon.”

He reached out with one bird-claw hand. He closed it around my wrist and I could feel the hot cancer that was loose and raving through his body, eating anything and everything left that was still good to eat-not that there could have been much by that time; Albert Carson’s cupboards were almost bare.

“Michael-this is nothing you want to mess into. There are things here in Derry that bite. Let it go. Let it go.”

“I can’t.”

“Then beware,” he said. Suddenly the huge and frightened eyes of a child were looking out of his dying old-man’s face. “Beware.”

Derry.

My home town. Named after the county of the same name in Ireland.

Derry.

I was born here, in Derry Home Hospital; attended Derry Elementary School; went to junior high at Ninth Street Middle School; to high school at Derry High. I went to the University of Maine-’ain’t in Derry, but it’s just down the rud,” the old-timers say-and then I came right back here. To the Derry Public Library. I am a small-town man living a small-town life, one among millions.

But.

But:

In 1851 a crew of lumber jacks found the remains of another crew that had spent the winter snowed in at a camp on the Upper Kenduskeag-at the tip of what the kids still call the Barrens. There were nine of them in all, all nine hacked to pieces. Heads had rolled… not to mention arms… a foot or two… and a man’s penis had been nailed to one wall of the cabin.

But:

In 1851 John Markson killed his entire family with poison and then, sitting in the middle of the circle he had made with their corpses, he gobbled an entire “white-nightshade” mushroom. His death agonies must have been intense. The town constable who found him wrote in his report that at first he believed the corpse was grinning at him; he wrote of “Markson’s awful white smile.” The white smile was an entire mouthful of the killer mushroom; Markson had gone on eating even as the cramps and the excruciating muscle spasms must have been wracking his dying body.

But:

On Easter Sunday 1906 the owners of the Kitchener Ironworks, which stood where the brand-spanking-new Derry Mall now stands, held an Easter-egg hunt for “all the good children of Derry.” The hunt took place in the huge Ironworks building. Dangerous areas were closed off, and employees volunteered their time to stand guard and make sure no adventurous boy or girl decided to duck under the barriers and explore. Five hundred chocolate Easter eggs wrapped in gay ribbons were hidden about the rest of the works. According to Buddinger, there was at least one child present for each of those eggs. They ran giggling and whooping and yelling through the Sunday-silent Ironworks, finding the eggs under the giant tipper-vats, inside the desk drawers of the foreman, balanced between the great rusty teeth of gearwheels, inside the molds on the third floor (in the old photographs these molds look like cupcake tins from some giant’s kitchen). Three generations of Kitcheners were there to watch the gay riot and to award prizes at the end of the hunt, which was to come at four o’clock, whether all the eggs had been found or not. The end actually came forty-five minutes early, at quarter past three. That was when the Ironworks exploded. Seventy-two people were pulled dead from the wreckage before the sun went down. The final toll was a hundred and two. Eighty-eight of the dead were children. On the following Wednesday, while the city still lay in stunned silent contemplation of the tragedy, a woman found the head of nine-year-old Robert Dohay caught in the limbs of her back-yard apple tree. There was chocolate on the Dohay lad’s teeth and blood in his hair. He was the last of the known dead. Eight children and one adult were never accounted for. It was the worst tragedy in Derry’s history, even worse than the fire at the Black Spot in 1930, and it was never explained. All four of the Ironworks” boilers were shut down. Not just banked; shut down.

But:

The murder rate in Derry is six times the murder rate of any other town of comparable size in New England. I found my tentative conclusions in this matter so difficult to believe that I turned my figures over to one of the high-school hackers, who spends what time he doesn’t spend in front of his Commodore here in the library. He went several steps further-scratch a hacker, find an overachiever-by adding another dozen small cities to what he called “the stat-pool” and presenting me with a computer-generated bar graph where Derry slicks out like a sore thumb. “People must have wicked short tempers here, Mr Hanlon,” was his only comment. I didn’t reply. If I had, I might have told him that something in Derry has a wicked short temper, anyway.

Here in Derry children disappear unexplained and unfound at the rate of forty to sixty a year. Most are teenagers. They are assumed to be runaways. I suppose some of them even are.

And during what Albert Carson would undoubtedly have called the time of the cycle, the rate of disappearance shoots nearly out of sight. In the year 1930, for instance-the year the Black Spot burned-there were better than one hundred and seventy child disappearances in Derry-and you must remember that these are only the disappearances which were reported to the police and thus documented. Nothing surprising about it, the current Chief of Police told me when I showed him the statistic. It was the Depression. Most of em probably got tired of eating potato soup or going flat hungry at home and went off riding the rods, looking for something better.

During 1958, a hundred and twenty-seven children, ranging in age from three to nineteen, were reported missing in Derry. Was there a Depression in 1958? I asked Chief Rademacher. No, he said. But people move around a lot, Hanlon. Kids in particular get itchy feet. Have a fight with the folks about coming in late after a date and boom, they’re gone.

I showed Chief Rademacher the picture of Chad Lowe which had appeared in the Derry News in April 1958. You think this one ran away after a fight with his folks about coming in late, Chief Rademacher? He was three and a half when he dropped out of sight.

Rademacher fixed me with a sour glance and told me it sure had been nice talking with me, but if there was nothing else, he was busy. I left.

Haunted, haunting, haunt.

Often visited by ghosts or spirits, as in the pipes under the sink; to appear or recur often, as every twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven years; a feeding place for animals, as in the cases of George Denbrough, Adrian Mellon, Betty Ripsom, the Albrecht girl, the Johnson boy.

A feeding place for animals. Yes, that’s the one that haunts me.

If anything else happens-anything at all-I’ll make the calls. I’ll have to. In the meantime I have my suppositions, my broken rest, and my memories-my damned memories. Oh, and one other thing-I have this notebook, don’t I? The wall I wail to. And here I sit, my hand shaking so badly I can hardly write in it, here I sit in the deserted library after closing, listening to faint sounds in the dark stacks, watching the shadows thrown by the dim yellow globes to make sure they don’t move… don’t change.

Here I sit next to the telephone.

I put my free hand on it… let it slide down… touch the holes in the dial that could put me in touch with all of them, my old pals.

We went deep together.

We went into the black together.

Would we come out of the black if we went in a second time?

I don’t think so.

Please God I don’t have to call them.

Please God.

 

Part 2

JUNE OF 1958

 

“My surface is myself.

Under which

To witness, youth is

buried. Roots?

Everybody has roots.”

–William Carlos Williams, Paterson

 

 

“Sometimes I wonder what I’m a-gonna do,

There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.”

–Eddie Cochran

 

Chapter 4

BEN HANSCOM TAKES A FALL

 

1

 

Around 11:45 PM… one of the stews serving first class on the Omaha-to-Chicago run-United Airlines’s flight 41-gets one hell of a shock. She thinks for a few moments that the man in 1-A has died.

When he boarded at Omaha she thought to herself: “Oh boy, here comes trouble. He’s just as drunk as a lord.” The stink of whiskey around his head reminded her fleetingly of the cloud of dust that always surrounds the dirty little boy in the Peanuts strip-Pig Pen, his name is. She was nervous about First Service, which is the booze service. She was sure he would ask for a drink-and probably a double. Then she would have to decide whether or not to serve him. Also, just to add to the fun, there have been thunderstorms all along the route tonight, and she is quite sure that at some point the man, a lanky guy dressed in jeans and chambray, would begin upchucking.

But when First Service came along, the tall man ordered nothing more than a glass of club soda, just as polite as you could want. His service light has not gone on, and the stew forgets all about him soon enough, because the flight is a busy one. The flight is, in fact, the kind you want to forget as soon as it’s over, one of those during which you just might-if you had time-have a few questions about the possibility of your own survival.

United 41 slaloms between the ugly pockets of thunder and lightning like a good skier going downhill. The air is very rough. The passengers exclaim and make uneasy jokes about the lightning they can see flickering on and off in the thick pillars of cloud around the plane. “Mommy, is God taking pictures of the angels?” a little boy asks, and his mother, who is looking rather green, laughs shakily. First Service turns out to be the only service on 41 that night. The seat-belt sign goes on twenty minutes into the flight and stays on. All the same the stewardesses stay in the aisles, answering the call-buttons which go off like strings of polite-society firecrackers.

“Ralph is busy tonight,” the head stew says to her as they pass in the aisle; the head stew is going back to tourist with a fresh supply of airsick bags. It is half-code, half-joke. Ralph is always busy on bumpy flights. The plane lurches, someone cries out softly, the stewardess turns a bit and puts out a hand to catch her balance, and looks directly into the staring, sightless eyes of the man in 1-A.

Oh my dear God he’s dead, she thinks. The liquor before he got on… then the bumps… his heart… scared to death.

The lanky man’s eyes are on hers, but they are not seeing her. They do not move. They are perfectly glazed. Surely they are the eyes of a dead man.

The stew turns away from that awful gaze, her own heart pumping away in her throat at a runaway rate, wondering what to do, how to proceed, and thanking God that at least the man has no seatmate to perhaps scream and start a panic. She decides she will have to notify first the head stew and then the male crew up front. Perhaps they can wrap a blanket around him and close his eyes. The pilot will keep the belt light on even if the air smooths out so no one can come forward to use the John, and when the other passengers deplane they’ll think he’s just asleep -

These thoughts go through her mind rapidly, and she turns back for a confirming look. The dead, sightless eyes fix upon hers… and then the corpse picks up his glass of club soda and sips from it.

Just then the plane staggers again, tilts, and the stew’s little scream of surprise is lost in other, heartier, cries of fear. The man’s eyes move then-not much, but enough so she understands that he is alive and seeing her. And she thinks: Why, I thought when he got on that he was in his mid-fifties, but he’s nowhere near that old, in spite of the graying hair.

She goes to him, although she can hear the impatient chime of call-buttons behind her (Ralph is indeed busy tonight: after their perfectly safe landing at O’Hare thirty minutes from now, the stews will dispose of over seventy airsick bags).

“Everything okay, sir?” she asks, smiling. The smile feels false, unreal.

“Everything is fine and well,” the lanky man says. She glances at the first-class

stub tacked into the little slot on his seat-back and sees that his name is Hanscom.

“Fine and well. But it’s a bit bumpy tonight, isn’t it? You’ve got your work cut out

for you, I think. Don’t bother with me. I’m-He offers her a ghastly smile, a smile

that makes her think of scarecrows flapping in dead November fields. “I’m fine and well.”

“You looked”

(dead)

“a little under the weather.”

“I was thinking of the old days,” he says. “I only realized earlier tonight that there were such things as old days, at least as far as I myself am concerned.”

More call-buttons chime. “Pardon me, stewardess?” someone calls nervously.

“Well, if you’re quite sure you’re all right-”

“I was thinking about a dam I built with some friends of mine,” Ben Hanscom says. “The first friends I ever had, I guess. They were building the dam when I-” He stops, looks startled, then laughs. It is an honest laugh, almost the carefree laugh of a boy, and it sounds very odd in this jouncing, bucking plane.’-when I dropped in on them. And that’s almost literally what I did. Anyhow, they were making a helluva mess with that dam. I remember that.”

“Stewardess?”

“Excuse me, sir-I ought to get about my appointed rounds again.”

“Of course you should.”

She hurries away, glad to be rid of that gaze-that deadly, almost hypnotic gaze.

Ben Hanscom turns his head to the window and looks out. Lightning goes off inside huge thunderheads nine miles off the starboard wing. In the stutter-flashes of light, the clouds look like huge transparent brains filled with bad thoughts.

He feels in the pocket of his vest, but the silver dollars are gone. Out of his pocket and into Ricky Lee’s. Suddenly he wishes he had saved at least one of them. It might have come in handy. Of course you could go down to any bank-at least when you weren’t bumping around at twenty-seven thousand feet you could-and get a handful of silver dollars, but you couldn’t do anything with the lousy copper sandwiches the government was trying to pass off as real coins these days. And for werewolves and vampires and all manner of things that squirm by starlight, it was silver you wanted; honest silver. You needed silver to stop a monster. You needed -

He closed his eyes. The air around him was full of chimes. The plane rocked and rolled and bumped and the air was full of chimes. Chimes?

No… bells.

It was bells, it was the bell, the bell of all bells, the one you waited for all year once the new wore off school again, and that always happened by the end of the first week. The bell, the one that signalled freedom again, the apotheosis of all school bells.

Ben Hanscom sits in his first-class seat, suspended amid the thunders at twenty-seven thousand feet, his face turned to the window, and he feels the wall of time grow suddenly thin; some terrible/wonderful peristalsis has begun to take place. He thinks; My God, I am being digested by my own past.

The lightning plays fitfully across his face, and although he does not know it, the day has just turned. May 28th, 1985, has become May 29th over the dark and stormy country that is western Illinois tonight; farmers backsore with plantings sleep like the dead below and dream their quicksilver dreams and who knows what may move in their barns and their cellars and their fields as the lightning walks and the thunder talks? No one knows these things; they know only that power is loose in the night, and the air is crazy with the big volts of the storm.

But it’s bells at twenty-seven thousand feet as the plane breaks into the clear again, as its motion steadies again; it is bells; it is the bell as Ben Hanscom sleeps; and as he sleeps the wall between past and present disappears completely and he tumbles backward through years like a man falling down a deep well-Wells’s Time Traveller, perhaps, falling with a broken iron rung in one hand, down and down into the land of the Morlocks, where machines pound on and on in the tunnels of the night. It’s 1981, 1977, 1969; and suddenly he is here, here in June of 1958; bright summerlight is everywhere and behind sleeping eyelids Ben Hanscom’s pupils contract at the command of his dreaming brain, which sees not the darkness which lies over western Illinois but the bright sunlight of a June day in Derry, Maine, twenty-seven yean ago.

Bells.

The bell.

School.

School is.

School is

 

2

 

out!

The sound of the bell went burring up and down the halls of Derry School, a big brick building which stood on Jackson Street, and at its sound the children in Ben Hanscom’s fifth-grade classroom raised a spontaneous cheer-and Mrs Douglas, usually the strictest of teachers, made no effort to quell them. Perhaps she knew it would have been impossible.

“Children!” she called when the cheer died. “May I have your attention for a final moment?”

Now a babble of excited chatter, mixed with a few groans, rose in the classroom. Mrs Douglas was holding their report cards in her hand.

“I sure hope I pass!” Sally Mueller said chirpily to Bev Marsh, who sat in the next row. Sally was bright, pretty, vivacious. Bev was also pretty, but there was nothing vivacious about her this afternoon, last day of school or not. She sat looking moodily down at her penny-loafers. There was a fading yellow bruise on one of her cheeks.

“I don’t give a shit if I do or not,” Bev said.

Sally sniffed. Ladies don’t use such language, the sniff said. Then she turned to Greta Bowie. It had probably only been the excitement of the bell signalling the end of another school-year that had caused Sally to slip and speak to Beverly anyhow, Ben thought. Sally Mueller and Greta Bowie both came from rich families with houses on West Broadway while Bev came to school from one of those shimmy apartment buildings on Lower Main Street. Lower Main Street and West Broadway were only a mile and a half apart, but even a kid like Ben knew that the real distance was like the distance between Earth and the planet Pluto. All you had to do was look at Beverly Marsh’s cheap sweater, her too-big skirt that probably came from the Salvation Army thrift-box, and her scuffed penny-loafers to know just how far one was from the other. But Ben still liked Beverly better-a lot better. Sally and Greta had nice clothes, and he guessed they probably had their hair permed or waved or something every month or so, but he didn’t think that changed the basic facts at all. They could get their hair permed every day and they’d still be a couple of conceited snots.

He thought Beverly was nicer… and much prettier, although he never in a million years would have dared say such a thing to her. But still, sometimes, in the heart of winter when the light outside seemed yellow-sleepy, like a cat curled up on a sofa, when Mrs Douglas was droning on about mathematics (how to carry down in long division or how to find the common denominator of two fractions so you could add them) or reading the questions from Shining Bridges or talking about tin deposits in Paraguay, on those days when it seemed that school would never end and it didn’t matter if it didn’t because all the world outside was slush… on those days Ben would sometimes look sideways at Beverly, stealing her face, and his heart would both hurt desperately and somehow grow brighter at the same time. He supposed he had a crush on her, or was in love with her, and that was why it was always Beverly he thought of when the Penguins came on the radio singing “Earth Angel’-’my darling dear / love you all the time… ” Yeah, it was stupid, all right, sloppy as a used Kleenex, but it was all right, too, because he would never tell. He thought that fat boys were probably only allowed to love pretty girls inside. If he told anyone how he felt (not that he had anyone to tell), that person would probably laugh until he had a heart-attack. And if he ever told Beverly, she would either laugh herself (bad), or make retching noises of disgust (worse).

“Now please come up as soon as I call your name. Paul Andersen… Carla Bordeaux… Greta Bowie… Calvin Clark… Cissy Clark…”

As she called their names, Mrs Douglas’s fifth-grade class came forward one by one (except for the Clark twins, who came together as always, hand in hand, indistinguishable except for the length of their white-blonde hair and the fact that she wore a dress while he wore jeans), took their buff-colored report cards with the American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance on the front and the Lord’s Prayer on the back, walked sedately out of the classroom… and then pounded down the hall to where the big front doors had been chocked open. And then they simply ran out into summer and were gone: some on bikes, some skipping, some riding invisible horses and slapping their hands against the sides of their thighs to manufacture hoofbeats, some with arms slung about each other, singing “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school” to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

“Marcia Fadden… Frank Frick… Ben Hanscom…”

He rose, stealing his last glance at Beverly Marsh for the summer (or so he thought then), and went forward to Mrs Douglas’s desk, an eleven-year-old kid with a can roughly the size of New Mexico-said can packed into a pair of horrid new blue-jeans that shone little darts of light from the copper rivets and went whssht-whssht-whssht as his big thighs brushed together. His hips swung girlishly. His stomach slid from side to side. He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt although the day was warm. He almost always wore baggy sweatshirts because he was deeply ashamed of his chest and had been since the first day of school after the Christmas vacation, when he had worn one of the new Ivy League shuts his mother had given him, and Belch Huggins, who was a sixthgrader, had cawed: “Hey, you guys! Lookit what Santy Claus brought Ben Hanscom for Christmas! A big set of titties!” Belch had nearly collapsed with the deliciousness of his wit. Others had laughed as well-a few of them girls. If a hole leading into the underworld had opened before him at that very moment, Ben would have dropped into it without a sound… or perhaps with the faintest murmur of gratitude.

Since that day he wore sweatshirts. He had four of them-the baggy brown, the baggy green, and two baggy blues. It was one of the few things on which he had managed to stand up to his mother, one of the few lines he had ever, in the course of his mostly complacent childhood, felt compelled to draw in the dust. If he had seen Beverly Marsh giggling with the others that day, he supposed he would have died.

“It’s been a pleasure having you this year, Benjamin,” Mrs Douglas said as

she handed him his report card.

“Thank you, Mrs Douglas.”

A mocking falsetto wavered from somewhere at the back of the room: “sank-ooo, Missus Dougwiss.”

It was Henry Bowers, of course. Henry was in Ben’s fifth-grade class instead of in the sixth grade with his friends Belch Huggins and Victor Criss because he had been kept back the year before. Ben had an idea that Bowers was going to stay back again. His name had not been called when Mrs Douglas handed out the rank-cards, and that meant trouble. Ben was uneasy about this, because if Henry did stay back again, Ben himself would be partly responsible… and Henry knew it.

During the year’s final tests the week before, Mrs Douglas had reseated them at random by drawing their names from a hat on her desk. Ben had ended up sitting next to Henry Bowers in the last row. As always, Ben curled his arm around his paper and then bent close to it, feeling the somehow comforting press of his gut against his desk, licking his Be-Bop pencil occasionally for inspiration.

About halfway through Tuesday’s examination, which happened to be math, a whisper drifted across the aisle to Ben. It was as low and uncarrying and expert as the whisper of a veteran con passing a message in the prison exercise yard: “Let me copy.”

Ben had looked to his left and directly into the black and furious eyes of Henry Bowers. Henry was a big boy even for twelve. His arms and legs were thick with farm-muscle. His father, who was reputed to be crazy, had a little spread out at the end of Kansas Street, near the Newport town line, and Henry put in at least thirty hours a week hoeing, weeding, planting, digging rocks, cutting wood, and reaping, if there was anything to reap.

Henry’s hair was cut in an angry-looking flattop short enough for the white of his scalp to show through. He Butch-Waxed the front with a tube he always carried in the hip pocket of his jeans, and as a result the hair just above his forehead looked like the teeth of an oncoming power-mower. An odor of sweat and Juicy Fruit gum always hung about him. He wore a pink motorcycle jacket with an eagle on the back to school. Once a fourthgrader was unwise enough to laugh at that jacket. Henry had turned on the little squirt, Umber as a weasel and quick as an adder, and double-pumped the squirt with one work-grimed fist. The squirt lost three front teeth. Henry got a two-week vacation from school. Ben had hoped, with the unfocused yet burning hope of the downtrodden and terrorized, that Henry would be expelled instead of suspended. No such luck. Bad pennies always turned up. His suspension over, Henry had swaggered back into the schoolyard, balefully resplendent in his pink motorcycle jacket, hair Butch-Waxed so heavily that it seemed to scream up from his skull. Both eyes bore the puffed, colorful traces of the beating his crazy father had administered for “fighting in the playyard.” The traces of the beating eventually faded; for the kids who had to somehow coexist with Henry at Derry, the lesson did not. To the best of Ben’s knowledge, no one had said anything about Henry’s pink motorcycle jacket with the eagle on the back since then.

When he whispered grimly at Ben to let him copy, three thoughts had gone skyrocketing through Ben’s mind-which was every bit as lean and quick as his body was obese-in a space of seconds. The first was that if Mrs Douglas caught Henry cheating answers off his paper, both of them would get zeros on their tests. The second was that if he didn’t let Henry copy, Henry would almost surely catch him after school and administer the fabled double-pump to him, probably with Huggins holding one of his arms and Criss holding the other.

These were the thoughts of a child, and there was nothing surprising about that, because he was a child. The third and last thought, however, was more sophisticated-almost adult.

He might get me, all right. But maybe I can keep out of his way for the last week of school. I’m pretty sure I can, if I really try. And he’ll forget over the summer, I think. Yeah. He’s pretty stupid. If he flunks this test, maybe he’ll stay back again. And if he stays back I’ll get ahead of him. I won’t be in the same room with him anymore… I’ll get to junior high before he does. I… I might be free.

“Let me copy,” Henry whispered again. His black eyes were now blazing, demanding.

Ben shook his head and curled his arm more tightly around his paper.

I’ll get you, fatboy,” Henry whispered, a little louder now. His paper was so far an utter blank save for his name. He was desperate. If he flunked his exams and stayed back again, his father would beat his brains out. “You let me copy or I’ll get you bad.”

Ben shook his head again, his jowls quivering. He was scared, but he was also determined. He realized that for the first time in his life he had consciously committed himself to a course of action, and that also frightened him, although he didn’t exactly know why-it would be long years before he would realize it was the cold-bloodedness of his calculations, the careful and pragmatic counting of the cost, with its intimations of onrushing adulthood, that had scared him even more than Henry had scared him. Henry he might be able to dodge. Adulthood, where he would probably think in such a way almost all the time, would get him in the end.

“Is someone talking back there?” Mrs Douglas had said then, very clearly. “If so, I want it to stop right now.”

Silence had prevailed for the next ten minutes; young heads remained studiously bent over examination sheets which smelled of fragrant purple mimeograph ink, and then Henry’s whisper had floated across the aisle again, thin, just audible, chilling in the calm assurance of its promise: “You’re dead, fatboy.”

 

3

 

Ben took his rank-card and escaped, grateful to whatever gods there are for eleven-year-old fatboys that Henry Bowers had not, by virtue of alphabetical order, been allowed to escape the classroom first so he could lay for Ben outside.

He did not run down the corridor like the other children. He could run, and quite fast for a kid his size, but he was acutely aware of how funny he looked when he did. He walked fast, though, and emerged from the cool book-smelling hall and into the bright June sunshine. He stood with his face turned up into that sunshine for a moment, grateful for its warmth and his freedom. September was a million years from today. The calendar might say something different, but what the calendar said was a lie. The summer would be much longer than the sum of its days, and it belonged to him. He felt as tall as the Standpipe and as wide as the whole town.

Someone bumped him-bumped him hard. Pleasant thoughts of the summer lying before him were driven from Ben’s mind as he tottered wildly for balance on the edge of the stone steps. He grabbed the iron railing just in time to save himself from a nasty tumble.

“Get out of my way, you tub of guts.” It was Victor Criss, his hair combed back in an Elvis pompadour and gleaming with Brylcreem. He went down the steps and along the walk to the front gate, hands in the pockets of his jeans, shirt-collar turned up hood-style, cleats on his engineer boots dragging and tapping.

Ben, his heart still beating rapidly from his fright, saw that Belch Huggins was standing across the street, having a butt. He raised a hand to Victor and passed him the cigarette when Victor joined him. Victor took a drag, handed it back to Belch, then pointed to where Ben stood, now halfway down the steps. He said something and they both broke up. Ben’s face flamed dully. They always got you. It was like fate or something.

“You like this place so well you’re gonna stand here all day?” a voice said at his elbow.

Ben turned, and his face became hotter still. It was Beverly Marsh, her auburn hair a dazzling cloud around her head and upon her shoulders, her eyes a lovely gray-green. Her sweater, pushed to her elbows, was frayed around the neck and almost as baggy as Ben’s sweatshirt. Too baggy, certainly, to tell if she was getting any chestworks yet, but Ben didn’t care; when love comes before puberty, it can come in waves so clear and so powerful that no one can stand against its simple imperative, and Ben made no effort to do so now. He simply gave in. He felt both foolish and exalted, as miserably embarrassed as he had ever been in his life… and yet inarguably blessed. These hopeless emotions mixed in a heady brew that left him feeling both sick and joyful.

“No,” he croaked. “Guess not.” A large grin spread across his face. He knew how idiotic it must look, but he could not seem to pull it back.

“Well, good. Cause school’s out, you know. Thank God.”

“Have… ” Another croak. He had to clear his throat, and his blush deepened. “Have a nice summer, Beverly.”

“You too, Ben. See you next year.”

She went quickly down the steps and Ben saw everything with his lover’s eye: the bright tartan of her skirt, the bounce of her red hair against the back of her sweater, her milky complexion, a small healing cut across the back of one calf, and (for some reason this last caused another wave of feeling to sweep him so powerfully he had to grope for the railing again; the feeling was huge, inarticulate, mercifully brief; perhaps a sexual pre-signal, meaningless to his body, where the endocrine glands still slept almost without dreaming, yet as bright as summer heat-lightning) a bright golden ankle-bracelet she wore just above her right loafer, winking back the sun in brilliant little flashes.

A sound-some sort of sound-escaped him. He went down the steps like a feeble old man and stood at the bottom, watching until she turned left and disappeared beyond the high hedge that separated the schoolyard from the sidewalk.

 

4

 

He only stood there for a moment, and then, while the kids were still streaming past in yelling, running groups, he remembered Henry Bowers and hurried around the building. He crossed the little-kids” playground, running his fingers across the swing-chains to make them jingle and stepping over the teeter-totter boards. He went out the much smaller gate which gave on Charter Street and headed off to the left, never looking back at the stone pile where he had spent most of his weekdays over the last nine months. He stuffed his rank-card in his back pocket and started to whistle. He was wearing a pair of Keds, but so far as he could tell, their soles never touched the sidewalk for eight blocks or so.

School had let out just past noon; his mother would not be home until at least six, because on Fridays she went right to the Shop “n Save after work. The rest of the day was his.

He went down to McCarron Park for awhile and sat under a tree, not doing anything but occasionally whispering “I love Beverly Marsh” under his breath, feeling more light-headed and romantic each time he said it. At one point, as a bunch of boys drifted into the park and began choosing up sides for a scratch baseball game, he whispered the words “Beverly Hanscom” twice, and then had to put his face into the grass until it cooled his burning cheeks.

Shortly after that he got up and headed across the park toward Costello Avenue. A walk of five more blocks would take him to the Public Library, which, he supposed, had been his destination all along. He was almost out of the park when a sixthgrader named Peter Gordon saw him and yelled: “Hey, tits! Wanna play? We need somebody to be right-field!” There was an explosion of laughter. Ben escaped it as fast as he could, hunching his neck down into his collar like a turtle drawing into its shell.

Still, he considered himself lucky, all in all; on another day the boys might have chased him, maybe just to rank him out, maybe to roll him in the dirt and see if he would cry. Today they were too absorbed in getting the game going-whether or not you could use fingers or get topsies when you threw the bat for first picks, which team would get their guaranteed last ups, all the rest. Ben happily left them to the arcana preceding the first ballgame of the summer and went on his way.

Three blocks down Costello he spied something interesting, perhaps even profitable, under someone’s front hedge. Glass gleamed through the ripped side of an old paper bag. Ben hooked the bag out onto the sidewalk with his foot. It seemed his luck really was in. There were four beer bottles and four big soda bottles inside. The biggies were worth a nickel each, the Rheingolds two pennies. Twenty-eight cents under someone’s hedge, just waiting for some kid to come along and scoff it up. Some lucky kid.

“That’s me,” Ben said happily, having no idea what the rest of the day had in store. He got moving again, holding the bag by the bottom so it wouldn’t break open. The Costello Avenue Market was a block farther down the street, and Ben turned in. He swapped the bottles for cash and most of the cash for candy.

He stood at the penny-candy window, pointing, delighted as always by the ratcheting sound the sliding door made when the storekeeper slid it along its track, which was lined with ball-bearings. He got five red licorice whips and five black, ten rootbeer barrels (two for a penny), a nickel strip of buttons (five to a row, five rows on a nickel strip, and you ate them right off the paper), a packet of Likem Ade, and a package of Pez for his Pez-Gun at home.

Ben walked out with a small brown paper sack of candy in his hand and four cents in the right front pocket of his new jeans. He looked at the brown bag with its load of sweetness and a thought suddenly tried to surface

(you keep eating this way Beverly Marsh is never going to look at you)

but it was an unpleasant thought and so he pushed it away. It went easily enough; this was a thought used to being banished.

If someone had asked him, “Ben, are you lonely?,” he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams; he had his Revell models; he had a gigantic set of Lincoln Logs and built all sorts of stuff with them. His mother had exclaimed more than once that Ben’s Lincoln Logs houses looked better than some real ones that came from blueprints. He had a pretty good Erector Set, too. He was hoping for the Super Set when his birthday came around in October. With that one you could build a clock that really told time and a car with real gears in it. Lonely? he might have asked in return, honestly foozled. Huh? What?

A child blind from birth doesn’t even know he’s blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it. It simply was, like his double- jointed thumb or the funny little jag inside one of his front teeth, the little jag his tongue began running over whenever he was nervous.

Beverly was a sweet dream; the candy was a sweet reality. The candy was his friend. So he told the alien thought to take a hike, and it went quietly, without causing any fuss whatsoever. And between the Costello Avenue Market and the library, he gobbled all of the candy in the sack. He honestly meant to save the Pez for watching TV that night-he liked to load them into the little plastic Pez-Gun’s handgrip one by one, liked to hear the accepting click of the small spring inside, and liked most of all to shoot them into his mouth one by one, like a kid committing suicide by sugar. Whirlybirds was on tonight, with Kenneth Tobey as the fearless helicopter pilot, and Dragnet, where the cases were true but the names had been changed to protect the innocent, and his favorite cop show of all time, Highway Patrol, which starred Broderick Craw-ford as Highway Patrolman Dan Matthews. Broderick Crawford was Ben’s personal hero. Broderick Crawford was fast, Broderick Crawford was mean, Broderick Crawford took absolutely no shit from nobody… and best of all, Broderick Crawford was fat.

He arrived at the corner of Costello and Kansas Street, where he crossed to the Public Library. It was really two buildings-the old stone structure in front, built with lumber-baron money in 1890, and the new low sandstone building behind, which housed the Children’s Library. The adult library in front and the Children’s Library behind were connected by a glass corridor.

This close to downtown, Kansas Street was one-way, so Ben only looked in one direction-right-before crossing. If he had looked left, he would have gotten a nasty shock. Standing in the shade of a big old oak tree on the lawn of the Derry Community House a block down were Belch Huggins, Victor Criss, and Henry Bowers.

 

5

 

“Let’s get him, Hank.” Victor was almost panting.

Henry watched the fat little prick scutter across the street, his belly bouncing, the cowlick at the back of his head springing back and forth like a goddam Slinky, his ass wiggling like a girl’s inside his new bluejeans. He estimated the distance between the three of them here on the Community House lawn and Hanscom, and between Hanscom and the safety of the library. He thought they could probably get him before he made it inside, but Hanscom might start screaming. He wouldn’t put it past the little pansy. If he did, an adult might interfere, and Henry wanted no interference. The Douglas bitch had told Henry he had flunked both English and math. She was passing him, she said, but he would have to take four weeks of summer make-up. Henry would rather have stayed back. If he’d stayed back, his father would have beaten him up once. With Henry at school four hours a day for four weeks of the farm’s busiest season, his father was apt to beat him up half a dozen times, maybe even more. He was reconciled to this grim future only because he intended to pass everything on to that fat little babyfag this afternoon.

With interest.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Belch said.

“We’ll wait for him to come out.”

They watched Ben open one of the big double doors and go inside, and then they sat down and smoked cigarettes and told travelling-salesman jokes and waited for him to come back out.

Eventually, Henry knew, he would. And when he did, Henry was going to make him sorry he was ever born.

 

6

 

Ben loved the library.

He loved the way it was always cool, even on the hottest day of a long hot summer; he loved its murmuring quiet, broken only by occasional whispers, the faint thud of a librarian stamping books and cards, or the riffle of pages being turned in the Periodicals Room, where the old men hung out, reading newspapers which had been threaded into long sticks. He loved the quality of the light, which slanted through the high narrow windows in the afternoons or glowed in lazy pools thrown by the chain-hung globes on winter evenings while the wind whined outside. He liked the smell of the books-a spicy smell, faintly fabulous. He would sometimes walk through the adult stacks, looking at the thousands of volumes and imagining a world of lives inside each one, the way he sometimes walked along his street in the burning smoke-hazed twilight of a late-October afternoon, the sun only a bitter orange line on the horizon, imagining the lives going on behind all the windows-people laughing or arguing or arranging flowers or feeding kids or pets or their own faces while they watched the boobtube. He liked the way the glass corridor connecting the old building with the Children’s Library was always hot, even in the winter, unless there had been a couple of cloudy days; Mrs Starrett, the head children’s librarian, told him that was caused by something called the greenhouse effect. Ben had been delighted with the idea. Years later he would build the hotly debated BBC communications center in London, and the arguments might rage for a thousand years and still no one would know (except for Ben himself) that the communications center was nothing but the glass corridor of the Derry Public Library stood on end.

He liked the Children’s Library as well, although it had none of the shadowy charm he felt in the old library, with its globes and curving iron staircases too narrow for two people to pass upon them-one always had to back up. The Children’s Library was bright and sunny, a little noisier in spite of the LET’s BE QUIET, SHALL WE? signs that were posted around. Most of the noise usually came from Pooh’s Corner, where the little kids went to look at picturebooks. When Ben came in today, story hour had just begun there. Miss Davies, the pretty young librarian, was reading “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.”

“Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge?”

Miss Davies spoke in the low, growling tones of the troll in the story. Some of the little ones covered their mouths and giggled, but most only watched her solemnly, accepting the voice of the troll as they accepted the voices of their dreams, and their grave eyes reflected the eternal fascination of the fairytale: would the monster be bested… or would it feed?

Bright posters were tacked everywhere. Here was a good cartoon kid who had brushed his teeth until his mouth foamed like the muzzle of a mad dog; here was a bad cartoon kid who was smoking cigarettes (WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE SICK A LOT, JUST LIKE MY DAD, it said underneath); here was a wonderful photograph of a billion tiny pinpoints of light flaring in darkness. The motto beneath said:

 

 

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