ONE IDEA LIGHTS A THOUSAND CANDLES.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

There were invitations to JOIN THE SCOUTING EXPERIENCE. A poster advancing the idea that THE GIRLS” CLUBS OF TODAY BUILD THE WOMEN OF TOMORROW. There were softball sign-up sheets and Community House Children’s Theater sign-up sheets. And, of course, one inviting kids to JOIN THE SUMMER READING PROGRAM. Ben was a big fan of the summer reading program. You got a map of the United States when you signed up. Then, for every book you read and made a report on, you got a state sticker to lick and put on your map. The sticker came complete with info like the state bird, the state flower, the year admitted to the Union, and what presidents, if any, had ever come from that state. When you got all forty-eight stuck on your map, you got a free book. Helluva good deal. Ben planned to do just as the poster suggested: “Waste no time, sign up today.”

Conspicuous amid this bright and amiable riot of color was a simple stark poster taped to the checkout desk-no cartoons or fancy photographs here, just black print on white poster-paper reading:

 

 

REMEMBER THE CURFEW.

P.M.

DERRY POLICE DEPARTMENT

Just looking at it gave Ben a chill. In the excitement of getting his rank-card, worrying about Henry Bowers, talking with Beverly, and starting summer vacation, he had forgotten all about the curfew, and the murders.

People argued about how many there had been, but everyone agreed that there had been at least four since last winter-five if you counted George Denbrough (many held the opinion that the little Denbrough boy’s death must have been some kind of bizarre freak accident). The first everyone was sure of was Betty Ripsom, who had been found the day after Christmas in the area of turnpike construction on Outer Jackson Street. The girl, who was thirteen, had been found mutilated and frozen into the muddy earth. This had not been in the paper, nor was it a thing any adult had spoken of to Ben. It was just something he had picked up around the corners of overheard conversations.

About three and a half months later, not long after the trout-fishing season had begun, a fisherman working the bank of a stream twenty miles east of Derry had hooked onto something he believed at first to be a stick. It had turned out to be the hand, wrist, and first four inches of a girl’s forearm. His hook had snagged this awful trophy by the web of flesh between the thumb and first finger.

The State Police had found the rest of Cheryl Lamonica seventy yards farther downstream, caught in a tree that had fallen across the stream the previous winter. It was only luck that the body had not been washed into the Penobscot and then out to sea in the spring runoff.

The Lamonica girl had been sixteen. She was from Derry but did not attend school; three years before she had given birth to a daughter, Andrea. She and her daughter lived at home with Cheryl’s parents. “Cheryl was a little wild sometimes but she was a good girl at heart,” her sobbing father had told police. “Andi keeps asking “Where’s my mommy?” and I don’t know what to tell her.”

The girl had been reported missing five weeks before the body was found. The police investigation of Cheryl Lamonica’s death began with a logical enough assumption: that she had been murdered by one of her boyfriends. She had lots of boyfriends. Many were from the air base up Bangor way. “They were nice boys, most of them,” Cheryl’s mother said. One of the “nice boys” had been a forty-year-old Air Force colonel with a wife and three children in New Mexico. Another was currently serving time in Shawshank for armed robbery.

A boyfriend, the police thought. Or just possibly a stranger. A sexfiend.

If it was a sexfiend, he was apparently a fiend for boys as well. In late April a junior-high teacher on a nature walk with his eighth-grade class had spied a pair of red sneakers and a pair of blue corduroy rompers protruding from the mouth of a culvert on Merit Street. That end of Merit had been blocked off with sawhorses. The asphalt had been bulldozed up the previous fall. The turnpike extension would cross there as well on its way north to Bangor.

The body had been that of three-year-old Matthew Clements, reported missing by his parents only the day before (his picture had been on the front page of the Derry News, a dark-haired little kid grinning brashly into the camera, a Red Sox cap perched on his head). The Clements family lived on Kansas Street, all the way on the other side of town. His mother, so stunned by her grief that she seemed to exist in a glass ball of utter calm, told police that Matty had been riding his tricycle up and down the sidewalk beside the house, which stood on the corner of Kansas Street and Kossuth Lane. She went to put her washing in the drier, and when she next looked out the window to check on Matty, he was gone. There had only been his overturned trike on the grass between the sidewalk and the street. One of the back wheels was still spinning lazily. As she looked, it came to a stop.

That was enough for Chief Borton. He proposed the seven o’clock curfew at a special session of the City Council the following evening; it was adopted unanimously and went into effect the next day. Small children were to be watched by a “qualified adult” at all times, according to the story which reported the curfew in the News. At Ben’s school there had been a special assembly a month ago. The Chief went on stage, hooked his thumbs into his gunbelt, and assured the children they had nothing at all to worry about as long as they followed a few simple rules: don’t talk to strangers, don’t accept rides with people unless you know them well, always remember that The Policeman Is Your Friend… and obey the curfew.

Two weeks ago a boy Ben knew only vaguely (he was in the other fifth-grade classroom at Derry Elementary) had looked into one of the stormdrains out by Neibolt Street and had seen what looked like a lot of hair floating around in there. This boy, whose name was either Frankie or Freddy Ross (or maybe Roth), had been out prospecting for goodies with a gadget of his own invention, which he called THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK. When he talked about it you could tell he thought about it like that, in capital letters (and maybe neon, as well). THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK was a birch branch with a big wad of bubble-gum stuck on the tip. In his spare time Freddy (or Frankie) walked around Derry with it, peering into sewers and drains. Sometimes he saw money-pennies mostly, but sometimes a dime or even a quarter (he referred to these latter, for some reason known only to him, as “quay-monsters’). Once the money was spotted, Frankie-or-Freddy and THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK would swing into action. One downward poke through the grating and the coin was as good as in his pocket.

Ben had heard rumors of Frankie-or-Freddy and his gum stick long before the kid had vaulted into the limelight by discovering the body of Veronica Grogan. “He’s really gross,” a kid named Richie Tozier had confided to Ben one day during activity period. Tozier was a scrawny kid who wore glasses. Ben thought that without them Tozier probably saw every bit as well as Mr Magoo; his magnified eyes swam behind the thick lenses with an expression of perpetual surprise. He also had huge front teeth that had earned him the nickname Bucky Beaver. He was in the same fifth-grade class as Freddy-or-Frankie. “Pokes that gum stick of his down sewerdrains all day long and then chews the gum from the end of it at night.”

“Oh gosh, that’s bad!” Ben had exclaimed.

“Dat’s wight, wabbit,” Tozier said, and walked away.

Frankie-or-Freddy had worked THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK back and forth through the grate of the stormdrain, believing he’d found a wig. He thought maybe he could dry it out and give it to his mother for her birthday, or something. After a few minutes of poking and prodding, just as he was about to give up, a face had floated out of the murky water in the plugged drain, a face with dead leaves plastered to its white cheeks and dirt in its staring eyes.

Freddy-or-Frankie ran home screaming.

Veronica Grogan had been in the fourth grade at the Neibolt Street Church School, which was run by people Ben’s mother called “the Christers.” She was buried on what would have been her tenth birthday.

After this most recent horror, Arlene Hanscom had taken Ben into the living room one evening and sat beside him on the couch. She picked up his hands and looked intently into his face. Ben looked back, feeling a little uneasy.

“Ben,” she said presently, “are you a fool?”

“No, Mamma,” Ben said, feeling more uneasy than ever. He hadn’t the

slightest idea what this was about. He could not remember ever seeing his

mamma look so grave.

“No,” she echoed. “I don’t believe you are.”

She fell silent for a long time then, not looking at Ben but pensively out the window. Ben wondered briefly if she had forgotten all about him. She was a young woman still-only thirty-two-but raising a boy by herself had put a mark on her. She worked forty hours a week in the spool-and-bale room at Stark’s Mills in Newport, and after workdays when the dust and lint had been particularly bad, she sometimes coughed so long and hard that Ben would become frightened. On those nights he would lie awake for a long time, looking through the window beside his bed into the darkness, wondering what would become of him if she died. He would be an orphan then, he supposed. He might become a State Kid (he thought that meant you had to go live with farmers who made you work from sunup to sunset), or he might be sent to the Bangor Orphan Asylum. He tried to tell himself it was foolish to worry about such things, but the telling did absolutely no good. Nor was it just himself he was worried about; he worried for her as well. She was a hard woman, his mamma, and she insisted on having her own way about most things, but she was a good mamma. He loved her very much.

“You know about these murders,” she said, looking back at last.

He nodded.

“At first people thought they were… ” She hesitated over the next word, never spoken in her son’s presence before, but the circumstances were unusual and she forced herself. ”… sex crimes. Maybe they were and maybe they weren’t. Maybe they’re over and maybe they’re not. No one can be sure of anything anymore, except that some crazy man who preys on little children is out there. Do you understand me, Ben?”

He nodded.

“And you know what I mean when I say they may have been sex crimes?”

He didn’t-at least not exactly-but he nodded again. If his mother felt she had to talk to him about the birds and bees as well as this other business, he thought he would die of embarrassment.

“I worry about you, Ben. I worry that I’m not doing right by you.”

Ben squirmed and said nothing.

“You’re on your own a lot. Too much, I guess. You-”

“Mamma-”

“Hush while I’m talking to you,” she said, and Ben hushed. “You have to be careful, Benny. Summer’s coming and I don’t want to spoil your vacation, but you have to be careful. I want you in by suppertime every day. What time do we eat supper?”

“Six o’clock.”

“Right with Eversharp! So hear what I’m saying: if I set the table and pour your milk and see that there’s no Ben washing his hands at the sink, I’m going to go right away to the telephone and call the police and report you missing. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, Mamma.”

“And you believe I mean exactly what I say?”

“Yes.”

“It would probably turn out that I did it for nothing, if I ever had to do it at all. I’m not entirely ignorant about the ways of boys. I know they get wrapped up in their own games and projects during summer vacation -lining bees back to their hives or playing ball or kick-the-can or whatever. I have a pretty good idea what you and your friends are up to, you see.”

Ben nodded soberly, thinking that if she didn’t know he had no friends, she probably didn’t know anywhere near as much about his boyhood as she thought she did. But he would never have dreamed of saying such a thing to her, not in ten thousand years of dreaming.

She took something from the pocket of her housedress and handed it to him It was a small plastic box. Ben opened it. When he saw what was inside, his mouth dropped open. “Wow!” he said, his admiration totally unaffected. “Thanks!”

It was a Timex watch with small silver numbers and an imitation-leather band. She had set it and wound it; he could hear it ticking.

“Jeez, it’s the coolest!” He gave her an enthusiastic hug and a loud kiss on the cheek.

She smiled, pleased that he was pleased, and nodded. Then she grew grave again. “Put it on, keep it on, wear it, wind it, mind it, don’t lose it.”

“Okay.”

“Now that you have a watch you have no reason to be late home. Remember what I said: if you’re not on time, the police will be looking for you on my behalf. At least until they catch the bastard who is killing children around here, don’t you dare be a single minute late, or I’ll be on that telephone.”

“Yes, Mamma.”

“One other thing. I don’t want you going around alone. You know enough not to accept candy or rides from strangers-we both agree that you’re no fool-and you’re big for your age, but a grown man, particularly a crazy one, can overpower a child if he really wants to. When you go to the park or the library, go with one of your friends.”

“I will, Mamma.”

She looked out the window again and uttered a sigh that was full of trouble. “Things have come to a pretty pass when a thing like this can go on. There’s something ugly about this town, anyway. I’ve always thought so.” She looked back at him, brows drawn down. “You’re such a wanderer, Ben. You must know almost everyplace in Derry, don’t you? The town part of it, at least.”

Ben didn’t think he knew anywhere near all the places, but he did know a lot of them. And he was so thrilled by the unexpected gift of the Timex that he would have agreed with his mother that night if she had suggested John Wayne should play Adolf Hitler in a musical comedy about World War II. He nodded.

“You’ve never seen anything, have you?” she asked. “Anything or anyone… well, suspicious? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything that scared you?”

And in his pleasure over the watch, his feeling of love for her, his small-boy gladness at her concern (which was at the same time a little frightening in its unhidden unabashed fierceness), he almost told her about the thing that had happened last January.

He opened his mouth and then something-some powerful intuition-closed it again.

What was that something, exactly? Intuition. No more than that… and no less. Even children may intuit love’s more complex responsibilities from time to time, and to sense that in some cases it may be kinder to remain quiet. That was part of the reason Ben closed his mouth. But there was something else as well, something not so noble. She could be hard, his mamma. She could be a boss. She never called nun “fat,” she called him “big” (sometimes amplified to “big for his age’), and when there were leftovers from supper she would often bring them to him while he was watching TV or doing his homework, and he would eat them, although some dim part of him hated himself for doing so (but never his mamma for putting the food before him-Ben Hanscom would not have dared to hate his mamma; God would surely strike him dead for feeling such a brutish, ungrateful emotion even for a second). And perhaps some even dimmer part of him-the far-off Tibet of Ben’s deeper thoughts-suspected her motives in this constant feeding. Was it just love? Could it be anything else? Surely not. But… he wondered. More to the point, she didn’t know he had no friends. That lack of knowledge made nun distrust her, made him unsure of what her reaction would be to his story of the thing which had happened to him in January. If anything had happened. Coming in at six and staying in was not so bad, maybe. He could read, watch TV,

(eat)

build stuff with his logs and Erector Set. But having to stay in all day as well would be very bad… and if he told her what he had seen-or thought he had seen-in January, she might make him do just that.

So, for a variety of reasons, Ben withheld the story.

“No, Mamma,” he said. “Just Mr McKibbon rooting around in other people’s garbage.”

That made her laugh-she didn’t like Mr McKibbon, who was a Republican as well as a “Christer’-and her laugh closed the subject. That night Ben had lain awake late, but no thoughts of being cast adrift and parentless in a hard world troubled him. He felt loved and safe as he lay in his bed looking at the moonlight which came in through the window and spilled across the bed onto the floor. He alternately put his watch to his ear so he could listen to it tick and held it close to his eyes so he could admire its ghostly radium dial.

He had finally fallen asleep and dreamed he was playing baseball with the other boys in the vacant lot behind Tracker Brothers” Truck Depot. He had just hit a bases-clearing home run, swinging from his heels and getting every inch of that little honey, and his cheering teammates met him in a mob at home plate. They pummelled him and clapped him on the back. They hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him toward the place where their equipment was scattered. In the dream he was almost bursting with pride and happiness… and then he had looked out toward center field, where a chainlink fence marked the boundary between the cindery lot and the weedy ground beyond that sloped into the Barrens. A figure was standing in those tangled weeds and low bushes, almost out of sight. It held a clutch of balloons-red, yellow, blue, green-in one white-gloved hand. It beckoned with the other. He couldn’t see the figure’s face, but he could see the baggy suit with the big orange pompom-buttons down the front and the floppy yellow bow-tie.

It was a clown.

Dot’s wight, wabbit, a phantom voice agreed.

When Ben awoke the next morning he had forgotten the dream but his pillow was damp to the touch… as if he had wept in the night.

 

7

 

He went up to the main desk in the Children’s Library, shaking the train of thought the curfew sign had begun as easily as a dog shakes water after a swim.

“Hullo, Benny,” Mrs Starrett said. Like Mrs Douglas at school, she genuinely liked Ben. Grownups, especially those who sometimes needed to discipline children as part of their jobs, generally liked him, because he was polite, soft-spoken, thoughtful, sometimes even funny in a very quiet way. These were all the same reasons most kids thought he was a puke. “You tired of summer vacation yet?”

Ben smiled. This was a standard witticism with Mrs Starrett. “Not yet,” he said, “since summer vacation’s only been going on-he looked at his watch-one hour and seventeen minutes. Give me another hour.”

Mrs Starrett laughed, covering her mouth so it wouldn’t be too loud. She asked Ben if he wanted to sign up for the summer reading program, and Ben said he did. She gave him a map of the United States and Ben thanked her very much.

He wandered off into the stacks, pulling a book here and there, looking at it, putting it back. Choosing books was serious business. You had to be careful. If you were a grownup you could have as many as you wanted, but kids could only take out three at a time. If you picked a dud, you were stuck with it.

He finally picked out his three-Bulldozer, The Black Stallion, and one that was sort of a shot in the dark: a book called Hot Rod, by a man named Henry Gregor Felsen.

“You may not like this one,” Mrs Starrett remarked, stamping the book. “It’s extremely bloody. I urge it on the teenagers, especially the ones who have just got their driving licenses, because it gives them something to think about. I imagine it slows some of them down for a whole week.”

“Well, I’ll give it a whirl,” Ben said, and took his books over to one of the tables away from Pooh’s Corner, where Big Billy Goat Gruff was in the process of giving a double dose of dickens to the troll under the bridge.

He worked on Hot Rod for awhile, and it was not too shabby. Not too shabby at all. It was about a kid who was a really great driver, but there was this party-pooper cop who was always trying to slow him down. Ben found out there were no speed limits in Iowa, where the book was set. That was sort of cool.

He looked up after three chapters, and his eye was caught by a brand-new display. The poster on top (the library was gung-ho for posters, all right) showed a happy mailman delivering a letter to a happy kid. LIBRARIES ARE FOR WRITING, TOO, the poster said. WHY NOT WRITE A FRIEND TODAY? THE SMILES ARE GUARANTEED!

Beneath the poster were slots filled with pre-stamped postcards, pre-stamped envelopes, and stationery with a drawing of the Derry Public Library on top in blue ink. The pre-stamped envelopes were a nickel each, the postcards three cents. The paper was two sheets for a penny.

Ben felt in his pocket. The remaining four cents of his bottle money was still there. He marked his place in Hot Rod and went back to the desk. “May I have one of those postcards, please?”

“Certainly, Ben.” As always, Mrs Starrett was charmed by his grave politeness and a little saddened by his size. Her mother would have said the boy was digging his grave with a knife and fork. She gave him the card and watched him go back to his seat. It was a table that could seat six, but Ben was the only one there. She had never seen Ben with any of the other boys. It was too bad, because she believed Ben Hanscom had treasures buried inside. He would yield them up to a kind and patient prospector… if one ever came along.

 

8

 

Ben took out his ballpoint pen, clicked the point down, and addressed the card simply enough: Miss Beverly Marsh, Lower Main Street, Derry, Maine, Zone 2. He did not know the exact number of her building, but his mamma had told him that most postmen had a pretty good idea of who their customers were once they’d been on their beats a little while. If the postman who had Lower Main Street could deliver this card, that would be great. If not, it would just go to the deadletter office and he would be out three cents. It would certainly never come back to him, because he had no intention of putting his name and address on it.

Carrying the card with the address turned inward (he was taking no chances, even though he didn’t see anyone he recognized), he got a few square slips of paper from the wooden box by the card-file. He took these back to his seat and began to scribble, to cross out, and then to scribble again.

During the last week of school before exams, they had been reading and writing haiku in English class. Haiku was a Japanese form of poetry, brief, disciplined. A haiku, Mrs Douglas said, could be just seventeen syllables long-no more, no less. It usually concentrated on one clear image which was linked to one specific emotion: sadness, joy, nostalgia, happiness… love.

Ben had been utterly charmed by the concept. He enjoyed his English classes, although mild enjoyment was generally as far as it went. He could do the work, but as a rule there was nothing in it which gripped him. Yet there was something in the concept of haiku that fired his imagination. The idea made him feel happy, the way Mrs Starrett’s explanation of the greenhouse effect had made him happy. Haiku was good poetry, Ben felt, because it was structured poetry. There were no secret rules. Seventeen syllables, one image linked to one emotion, and you were out. Bingo. It was clean, it was utilitarian, it was entirely contained within and dependent upon its own rules. He even liked the word itself, a slide of air broken as if along a dotted line by the “k’-sound at the very back of your mouth: haiku.

Her hair, he thought, and saw her going down the school steps again with it bouncing on her shoulders. The sun did not so much glint on it as seem to burn within it.

Working carefully over a twenty-minute period (with one break to go back and get more work-slips), striking out words that were too long, changing, deleting, Ben came up with this:

Your hair is winter fire,

January embers

My heart bums there, too.

He wasn’t crazy about it, but it was the best he could do. He was afraid that if he frigged around with it too long, worried it too much, he would end up getting the jitters and doing something much worse. Or not doing it at all. He didn’t want that to happen. The moment she had taken to speak to him had been a striking moment for Ben. He wanted to mark it in his memory. Probably Beverley had a crush on some bigger boy-a sixth-or maybe even a seventh-grader, and she would think that maybe that boy had sent the haiku. That would make her happy, and so the day she got it would be marked in her memory. And although she would never know it had been Ben Hanscom who marked it for her, that was all right; he would know.

He copied his completed poem onto the back of the postcard (printing in block letters, as if copying out a ransom note rather than a love poem), clipped his pen back into his pocket, and stuck the card in the back of Hot Rod.

He got up then, and said goodbye to Mrs Starrett on his way out.

“Goodbye, Ben,” Mrs Starrett said. “Enjoy your summer vacation, but don’t forget about the curfew.”

“I won’t.”

He strolled through the glassed-in passageway between the two buildings, enjoying the heat there (greenhouse effect, he thought smugly) followed by the cool of the adult library. An old man was reading the News in one of the ancient, comfortably overstuffed chairs in the Reading Room alcove. The headline just below the masthead blazed: DULLES PLEDGES us TROOPS TO HELP LEBANON IF NEEDED! There was also a photo of Ike, shaking hands with an Arab in the Rose Garden. Ben’s mamma said that when the country elected Hubert Humphrey President in 1960, maybe things would get moving again. Ben was vaguely aware that there was something called a recession going on, and his mamma was afraid she might get laid off.

A smaller headline on the bottom half of page one read POLICE HUNT FOR PSYCHOPATH GOES ON.

Ben pushed open the library’s big front door and stepped out.

There was a mailbox at the foot of the walk. Ben fished the postcard from the back of the book and mailed it. He felt his heartbeat speed up a little as it slipped out of his fingers. What if she knows it’s me, somehow?

Don’t be a stupe, he responded, a little alarmed at how exciting that idea seemed to him.

He walked off up Kansas Street, hardly aware of where he was going and not caring at all. A fantasy had begun to form in his mind. In it, Beverly Marsh walked up to him, her gray-green eyes wide, her auburn hair tied back in a pony-tail. I want to ask you a question, Ben, this make-believe girl said in his mind, and you’ve got to swear to tell the truth. She held up the postcard. Did you write this?

This was a terrible fantasy. This was a wonderful fantasy. He wanted it to stop. He didn’t want it to ever stop. His face was starting to burn again.

Ben walked and dreamed and shifted his library books from one arm to the other and began to whistle. You’ll probably think I’m horrible, Beverly said, but I think I want to kiss you. Her lips parted slightly.

Ben’s own lips were suddenly too dry to whistle.

“I think I want you to,” he whispered, and smiled a dopey, dizzy, and absolutely beautiful grin.

If he had looked down at the sidewalk just then, he would have seen that three other shadows had grown around his own; if he had been listening he would have heard the sound of Victor’s cleats as he, Belch, and Henry closed in. But he neither heard nor saw. Ben was far away, feeling Beverly’s lips slip softly against his mouth, raising his timid hands to touch the dim Irish fire of her hair.

 

9

 

Like many cities, small and large, Derry had not been planned-like Topsy, it just growed. City planners never would have located it where it was in the first place. Downtown Derry was in a valley formed by the Kenduskeag Stream, which ran through the business district on a diagonal from southwest to northeast. The rest of the town had swarmed up the sides of the surrounding hills.

The valley the township’s original settlers came to had been swampy and heavily grown over. The stream and the Penobscot River into which the Kenduskeag emptied were great things for traders, bad ones for those who sowed crops or built their houses too close to them-the Kenduskeag in particular, because it flooded every three or four years. The city was still prone to flooding in spite of the vast amounts of money spent over the last fifty years to control the problem. If the floods had been caused only by the stream itself, a system of dams might have taken care of things. There were, however, other factors. The Kenduskeag’s low banks were one. The entire area’s logy drainage was another. Since the turn of the century there had been many serious floods in Derry and one disastrous one, in 1931. To make matters worse, the hills on which much of Derry was built were honeycombed with small streams-Torrault Stream, in which the body of Cheryl Lamonica had been found, was one of them. During periods of heavy rain, they were all apt to overflow their banks. “If it rains two weeks the whole damn town gets a sinus infection,” Stuttering Bill’s dad had said once.

The Kenduskeag was caged in a concrete canal two miles long as it passed through downtown. This canal dived under Main Street at the intersection of Main and Canal, becoming an underground river for half a mile or so before surfacing again at Bassey Park. Canal Street, where most of Derry’s bars were ranked like felons in a police lineup, paralleled the Canal on its way out of town, and every few weeks or so the police would have to fish some drunk’s car out of the water, which was polluted to drop-dead levels by sewage and mill wastes. Fish were caught from time to time in the Canal, but they were inedible mutants.

On the northeastern side of town-the Canal side-the river had been managed to at least some degree. A thriving commerce went on all along it in spite of the occasional flooding. People walked beside the Canal, sometimes hand in hand (if the wind was right, that was; if it was wrong, the stench took much of the romance out of such strolling), and at Bassey Park, which faced the high school across the Canal, there were sometimes Boy Scout campouts and Cub Scout wiener roasts. In 1969 the citizens would be shocked and sickened to discover that hippies (one of them had actually sewed an American flag on the seat of his pants, and that pinko-faggot was busted before you could say Gene McCarthy) were smoking dope and trading pills up there. By ’69 Bassey Park had become a regular open-air pharmacy. You just wait, people said. Somebody’ll get killed before they put a stop to it. And of course someone finally did-a seventeen-year-old boy had been found dead by the Canal, his veins full of almost pure heroin-what the kids called a tight white rail. After that the druggies began to drift away from Bassey Park, and there were even stories that the kid’s ghost was haunting the area. The story was stupid, of course, but if it kept the speed-freaks and the nodders away, it was at least a useful stupid story.

On the southwestern side of town the river presented even more of a problem. Here the hills had been deeply cut open by the passing of the great glacier and further wounded by the endless water erosion of the Kenduskeag and its webwork of tributaries; the bedrock showed through in many places like the half-unearthed bones of dinosaurs. Veteran employees of the Derry Public Works Department knew that, following the fall’s first hard frost, they could count on a good deal of sidewalk repair on the southwestern side of town. The concrete would contract and grow brittle and then the bedrock would suddenly shatter up through it, as if the earth meant to hatch something.

What grew best in the shallow soil which remained was plants with shallow root-systems and hardy natures-weeds and trash-plants, in other words: scruffy trees, thick low bushes, and virulent infestations of poison ivy and poison oak grew everywhere they were allowed a foothold. The southwest was where the land fell away steeply to the area that was known in Derry as the Barrens. The Barrens-which were anything but barren-were a messy tract of land about a mile and a half wide by three miles long. It was bounded by upper Kansas Street on one side and by Old Cape on the other. Old Cape was a low-income housing development, and the drainage was so bad over there that there were stories of toilets and sewer-pipes actually exploding.

The Kenduskeag ran through the center of the Barrens. The city had grown up to the northeast and on both sides of it, but the only vestiges of the city down there were Derry Pumphouse #3 (the municipal sewage-pumping station) and the City Dump. Seen from the air the Barrens looked like a big green dagger pointing at downtown.

To Ben all this geography mated with geology meant was a vague awareness that there were no more houses on his right side now; the land had dropped away. A rickety whitewashed railing, about waist-high, ran beside the sidewalk, a token gesture of protection. He could faintly hear running water; it was the sound-track to his continuing fantasy.

He paused and looked out over the Barrens, still imagining her eyes, the clean smell of her hair.

From here the Kenduskeag was only a series of twinkles seen through breaks in the thick foliage. Some kids said that there were mosquitoes as big as sparrows down there at this time of year; others said there was quicksand as you approached the river. Ben didn’t believe it about the mosquitoes, but the idea of quicksand scared him.

Slightly to his left he could see a cloud of circling, diving seagulls: the dump. Their cries reached him faintly. Across the way he could see Derry Heights, and the low roofs of the Old Cape houses closest to the Barrens. To the right of Old Cape, pointing skyward like a squat white finger, was the Derry Standpipe. Directly below him a rusty culvert stuck out of the earth, spilling discolored water down the hill in a glimmering little stream which disappeared into the tangled trees and bushes.

Ben’s pleasant fantasy of Beverly was suddenly broken by one far more grim: what if a dead hand flopped out of that culvert right now, right this second, while he was looking? And suppose that when he turned to find a phone and call the police, a clown was standing there? A funny clown wearing a baggy suit with big orange puffs for buttons? Suppose -

A hand fell on Ben’s shoulder, and he screamed.

There was laughter. He whirled around, shrinking against the white fence separating the safe, sane sidewalk of Kansas Street from the wildly undisciplined Barrens (the railing creaked audibly), and saw Henry Bowers, Belch Huggins, and Victor Criss standing there.

“Hi, Tits,” Henry said.

“What do you want?” Ben asked, trying to sound brave.

“I want to beat you up,” Henry said. He seemed to contemplate this prospect soberly, even gravely. But oh, his black eyes sparkled. “I got to teach you something, Tits. You won’t mind. You like to learn new things, don’tcha?”

He reached for Ben. Ben ducked away.

“Hold him, you guys.”

Belch and Victor seized his arms. Ben squealed. It was a cowardly sound, rabbity and weak, but he couldn’t help it. Please God don’t let them make me cry and don’t let them break my watch, Ben thought wildly. He didn’t know if they would get around to breaking his watch or not, but he was pretty sure he would cry. He was pretty sure he would cry plenty before they were through with him.

“Jeezum, he sounds just like a pig,” Victor said. He twisted Ben’s wrist. “don’t he sound like a pig?”

“He sure do,” Belch giggled.

Ben lunged first one way and then the other. Belch and Victor went with him easily, letting him lunge, then yanking him back.

Henry grabbed the front of Ben’s sweatshirt and yanked it upward, exposing his belly. It hung over his belt in a swollen droop.

“Lookit that gut!” Henry cried in amazed disgust. “Jesus-please-us!”

Victor and Belch laughed some more. Ben looked around wildly for help. He could see no one. Behind him, down in the Barrens, crickets drowsed and seagulls screamed.

“You just better quit!” he said. He wasn’t blubbering yet but was close to it. “You just better!”

“Or what?” Henry asked as if he was honestly interested. “Or what, Tits? Or what, huh?”

Ben suddenly found himself thinking of Broderick Crawford, who played Dan Matthews on Highway Patrol-that bastard was tough, that bastard was mean, that bastard took zero shit from anybody-and then he burst into tears. Dan Matthews would have belted these guys right through the fence, down the embankment, and into the puckerbrush. He would have done it with his belly.

“Oh boy, lookit the baby!” Victor chortled. Belch joined in. Henry smiled a little, but his face still held that grave, reflective cast-that look that was somehow almost sad. It frightened Ben. It suggested he might be in for more than just a beating.

As if to confirm this idea, Henry reached into his jeans pocket and brought out a Buck knife.

Ben’s terror exploded. He had been whipsawing his body futilely to either side; now he suddenly lunged straight forward. There was an instant when he believed he was going to get away. He was sweating heavily, and the boys holding his arms had greasy grips at best. Belch managed to hold on to his right wrist, but just barely. He pulled entirely free of Victor. Another lunge -

Before he could make it, Henry stepped forward and gave him a shove. Ben flew backward. The railing creaked more loudly this tune, and he felt it give a little under his weight. Belch and Victor grabbed him again.

“Now you hold him,” Henry said. “You hear me?”

“Sure, Henry,” Belch said. He sounded a trifle uneasy. “He ain’t gonna get away. Don’t worry.”

Henry stepped forward until his flat stomach almost touched Ben’s belly. Ben stared at him, tears spilling helplessly out of his wide eyes. Caught! I’m caught! a part of his mind yammered. He tried to stop it-he couldn’t think at all with that yammering going on-but it wouldn’t stop. Caught! Caught! Caught!

Henry pulled out the blade, which was long and wide and engraved with his name. The tip glittered in the afternoon sunshine.

“I’ll gonna test you now,” Henry said in that same reflective voice. “It’s exam time, Tits, and you better be ready.”

Ben wept. His heart thundered madly in his chest. Snot ran out of his nose and collected on his upper lip. His library books lay in a scatter at his feet. Henry stepped on Bulldozer, glanced down, and dealt it into the gutter with a sideswipe of one black engineer boot.

“Here’s the first question on your exam, Tits. When somebody says “Let me copy” during finals, what are you going to say?”

“Yes!” Ben exclaimed immediately. “I’m going to say yes! Sure! Okay! Copy all you want!”

The Buck’s tip slid through two inches of air and pressed against Ben’s stomach. It was as cold as an ice-cube tray just out of the Frigidaire. Ben gasped his belly away from it. For a moment the world went gray. Henry’s mouth was moving but Ben couldn’t tell what he was saying. Henry was like a TV with the sound turned off and the world was swimming… swimming…

Don’t you dare faint! the panicky voice shrieked. If you faint he may get mad enough to kill you!

The world came back into some kind of focus. He saw that both Belch and Victor had stopped laughing. They looked nervous… almost scared. Seeing that had the effect of a head-clearing slap on Ben. All of a sudden they don’t know what he’s going to do, or how far he might go. However bad you thought things were, that’s how bad they really are… maybe even a little worse. You got to think. If you never did before or never do again, you better think now. Because his eyes say they’re right to look nervous. His eyes say he’s crazy as a bedbug.

“That’s the wrong answer, Tits,” Henry said. “If just anyone says “Let me copy,” I don’t give a red fuck what you do. Got it?”

“Yes,” Ben said, his belly hitching with sobs. “Yes, I got it.”

“Well, okay. That’s one wrong, but the biggies are still coming up. You ready for the biggies?”

“I… I guess so.”

A car came slowly toward them. It was a dusty ’51 Ford with an old man and woman propped up in the front seat like a pair of neglected department store mannequins. Ben saw the old man’s head turn slowly toward him. Henry stepped closer to Ben, hiding the knife. Ben could feel its point dimpling his flesh just above his bellybutton. It was still cold. He didn’t see how that could be, but it was.

“Go ahead, yell,” Henry said. “You’ll be pickin your fuckin guts off your sneakers.” They were close enough to kiss. Ben could smell the sweet smell of Juicy Fruit gum on Henry’s breath.

The car passed and continued on down Kansas Street, as slow and serene as the pace car in the Tournament of Roses Parade.

“All right, Tits, here’s the second question. If I say “Let me copy” during finals, what are you going to say?”

“Yes. I’ll say yes. Right away.”

Henry smiled. “That’s good. You got that one right, Tits. Now here’s the third question: how am I going to be sure you never forget that?”

“I… I don’t know,” Ben whispered.

Henry smiled. His face lit up and was for a moment almost handsome. “I know!” he said, as if he had discovered a great truth. “I know, Tits! I’ll carve my name on your big fat gut!”

Victor and Belch abruptly began laughing again. For a moment Ben felt a species of bewildered relief, thinking it had all been nothing but make-believe-a little shuck-and-jive the three of them had whomped up to scare the living hell out of him. But Henry Bowers wasn’t laughing, and Ben suddenly understood that Victor and Belch were laughing because they were relieved. It was obvious to both of them that Henry couldn’t be serious. Except Henry was.

The Buck knife slid upward, smooth as butter. Blood welled in a bright red line on Ben’s pallid skin.

“Hey!” Victor cried. The word came out muffled, in a startled gulp.

“Hold him!” Henry snarled. “You just hold him, hear me?” Now there was nothing grave and reflective on Henry’s face; now it was the twisted face of a devil.

“Jeezwm-crow Henry don’t really cut im!” Belch screamed, and his voice was high, almost a girl’s voice.

Everything happened fast then, but to Ben Hanscom it all seemed slow; it all seemed to happen in a series of shutterclicks, like action stills in a Life-magazine photo-essay. His panic was gone. He had discovered something inside him suddenly, and because it had no use for panic, that something just ate the panic whole.

In the first shutterclick, Henry had snatched his sweatshirt all the way up to his nipples. Blood was pouring from the shallow vertical cut above his bellybutton.

In the second shutterclick, Henry drew the knife down again, operating fast, like a lunatic battle-surgeon under an aerial bombardment. Fresh blood Sowed.

Backward, Ben thought coldly as blood flowed down and pooled between the waistband of his jeans and his skin. Got to go backward. That’s the only direction I can get away in. Belch and Victor weren’t holding him anymore. In spite of Henry’s command, they had drawn away. They had drawn away in horror. But if he ran, Bowers would catch him.

In the third shutterclick, Henry connected the two vertical slashes with a short horizontal line. Ben could feel blood running into his underpants now, and a sticky snail-trail was creeping down his left thigh.

Henry leaned back momentarily, frowning with the studied concentration of an artist painting a landscape. After H comes E, Ben thought, and that was all it took to get him moving. He pulled forward a little bit and Henry shoved him back again. Ben pushed with his legs, adding his own force to Henry’s. He hit the white-washed railing between Kansas Street and the drop into the Barrens. As he did, he raised his right foot and planted it in Henry’s belly. This was not a retaliatory act; Ben only wanted to increase his backward force. And yet when he saw the expression of utter surprise on Henry’s face, he was filled with a clear savage joy-a feeling so intense that for a split second he thought the top of his head was going to come off.

Then there was a cracking, splintering sound from the railing. Ben saw Victor and Belch catch Henry before he could fall on his ass in the gutter next to the remains of Bulldozer, and then Ben was falling backward into space. He went with a scream that was half a laugh.

Ben hit the slope on his back and buttocks just below the culvert he had spotted earlier. It was a good thing he landed below it; if he had landed on it, he might well have broken his back. As it was? he landed on a thick cushion of weeds and bracken and barely felt the impact. He did a backward somersault, feet and legs snapping over his head. He landed sitting up and went sliding down the slope backward like a kid on a big green Chute-the-Chute, his sweatshirt pulled up around his neck, his hands grabbing for purchase and doing nothing but yanking out tuft after tuft of bracken and witch-grass.

He saw the top of the embankment (it seemed impossible that he had just been standing up there) receding with crazy cartoon speed. He saw Victor and Belch, their faces round white O’s, staring down at him. He had time to mourn his library books. Then he fetched up against something with agonizing force and nearly bit his tongue in half.

It was a downed tree, and it checked Ben’s fall by nearly breaking his left leg. He clawed his way back up the slope a little bit, pulling his leg free with a groan. The tree had stopped him about halfway down. Below, the bushes were thicker. Water falling from the culvert ran over his hands in thin streams.

There was a shriek from above him. Ben looked up again and saw Henry Bowers come flying over the drop, his knife clenched between his teeth. He landed on both feet, body thrown backward at a steep angle so he would not overbalance. He skidded to the end of a gigantic set of footprints and then began to run down the embankment in a series of gangling kangaroo leaps.

“I’n goin oo kill ooo, Its!” Henry was shrieking around the knife, and Ben didn’t need a UN translator to tell him Henry was saying I’m going to kill you, Tits.

“I’n gain oo huckin kill ooo!”

Now, with that cold general’s eye he had discovered up above on the sidewalk, Ben saw what he had to do. He managed to gain his feet just before Henry arrived, the knife now in his hand and held straight out in front of him like a bayonet. Ben was peripherally aware that the left leg of his jeans was shredded, and his leg was bleeding much more heavily than his stomach… but it was supporting him, and that meant it wasn’t broken. At least he hoped that’s what it meant.

Ben crouched slightly to maintain his precarious balance, and as Henry grabbed at him with one hand and swept the knife in a long flat arc with the other, Ben stepped aside. He lost his balance, but as he fell down he stuck out his shredded left leg. Henry’s shins struck it, and his legs were booted out from under him with great efficiency. For a moment Ben gaped, his terror overcome with a mixture of awe and admiration. Henry Bowers appeared to be flying exactly like Superman over the fallen tree where Ben had stopped. His arms were straight out in front of him, the way George Reeves held his arms out on the TV show. Only George Reeves always looked like flying was as natural as taking a bath or eating lunch on the back porch. Henry looked like someone had shoved a hot poker up his ass. His mouth was opening and closing. A string of saliva was shooting back from one corner of it, and as Ben watched, it splatted against the lobe of Henry’s ear.

Then Henry crashed back to earth. The knife flew out of his hand. He rolled over on one shoulder, landed on his back, and slid away into the bushes with his legs splayed into a V. There was a yell. A thud. And then silence.

Ben sat, dazed, looking at the matted place in the bushes where Henry had done his disappearing act. Suddenly rocks and pebbles began to bounce by him. He looked up again. Victor and Belch were now descending the embankment. They were moving more carefully than Henry, and hence more slowly, but they would reach him in thirty seconds or less if he didn’t do something.-” He moaned. Would this lunacy never end?

Keeping his eye on them, he clambered over the downed tree and began to scramble down the embankment, panting harshly. He had a stitch in his side. His tongue hurt like hell. The bushes were no w almost as tall as Ben himself. The randy green smell of stuff growing out of control filled his nose. He could hear running water somewhere close, chuckling over stones and rilling between them.

His feet slipped and here he went again, rolling and sliding, smashing the back of his hand against a jutting rock, shooting through a patch of thorns that hooked blue-gray puffs of cotton from his sweatshirt and little divots of meat from his hands and cheeks.

He slammed to a jarring halt sitting up, with his feet in the water. Here was a little curving stream which wound its way into a thick stand of second-growth trees to his right; it looked as dark as a cave in there. He looked to his left and saw Henry Bowers lying on his back in the middle of the stream. His half-open eyes showed only whites. Blood trickled from one ear and ran toward Ben in delicate threads.

Oh my God I killed him! Oh my God I’m a murderer! Oh my God!

Forgetting that Belch and Victor were behind him (or perhaps understanding they would lose all interest in beating the shit out of him when they discovered their Fearless Leader was dead), Ben splashed twenty feet upstream to where Henry lay, his shirt in ribbons, his jeans soaked black, one shoe gone. Ben was vaguely aware that there was precious little left of his own clothes and that his body was one big rattletrap of aches and pains. His left ankle was the worst; it had already puffed tight against his soaking sneaker and he was favoring it so badly that he was really not walking but lurching like a sailor on shore for the first time after a long sea voyage.

He bent over Henry Bowers. Henry’s eyes popped wide open. He grabbed Ben’s calf with one scraped and bloody hand. His mouth worked, and although nothing but a series of whistling aspirations emerged, Ben could still make out what he was saying: Kill you, you fat shit.

Henry was trying to pull himself up, using Ben’s leg as a pole. Ben pulled backward frantically. Henry’s hand slipped down, then off. Ben flew backward, whirling his arms, and fell on his ass for a record-breaking third time in the last four minutes. He also bit his tongue again. Water splashed up around him. A rainbow glimmered for an instant in front of Ben’s eyes. Ben didn’t give a fuck about the rainbow. He didn’t give a fuck about finding a pot of gold. He would settle for his miserable fat life.

Henry rolled over. Tried to stand. Fell back. Managed to get to his hands and knees. And finally tottered to his feet. He stared at Ben with those black eyes. The front of his flattop now leaned this way and that, like cornhusks after a high wind has passed through.

Ben was suddenly angry. No-this was more than being angry. He was infuriated. He had been walking with his library books under his arm, having an innocent little daydream about kissing Beverly Marsh, bothering nobody. And look at this. Just look. Pants shredded. Left ankle maybe broken, badly sprained for sure. Leg all cut up, tongue all cut up, Henry goddam Bowers’s monogram on his stomach. How about all that happy crappy, sports fans? But it was probably the thought of his library books, for which he was liable, that drove him to charge Henry Bowers. His lost library books and his mental image of how reproachful Mrs Starrett’s eyes would become when he told her. Whatever the reason-cuts, sprain, library books, or even the thought of the soggy and probably illegible rank-card in his back pocket-it was enough to get him moving. He lumbered forward, squashy Keds spatting in the shallow water, and kicked Henry squarely in the balls.

Henry uttered a horrid rusty scream that sent birds beating up from the trees. He stood spraddle-legged for a moment, hands clasping his crotch, staring unbelievingly at Ben. “Ug,” he said in a small voice.

“Right,” Ben said.

“Ug,” Henry said, in an even smaller voice.

“Right,” Ben said again.

Henry sank slowly back to his knees, not so much falling as folding up. He was still looking at Ben with those unbelieving black eyes.

“Ug.”

“Damn right,” Ben said.

Henry fell on his side, still clutching his testicles, and began to roll slowly from side to side.

“Ug!” Henry moaned. “My balls. Ug! Oh you broke my balls. Ug-ug!” He was now beginning to gain a little force, and Ben started to back away a step at a time. He was sickened by what he had done, but he was also filled with a kind of righteous, paralyzed fascination. “Ug!-my fuckin sack-ug-UG!-oh my fuckin BALLS!”

Ben might have remained in the area for an untold length of time-perhaps even until Henry recovered enough to come after him-but just then a rock struck him above the right ear with such a deep, drilling pain that, until he felt warm blood flowing again, Ben thought he had been stung by a wasp.

He turned and saw the other two striding up the middle of the stream toward him. They each had a handful of water-rounded rocks. Victor pegged one and Ben heard it whistle past his ear. He ducked and another struck his right knee, making him yell with surprised hurt. A third bounced off his right cheekbone, and that eye filled with water.

He scrambled for the far bank and climbed it as fast as he could, grabbing onto protruding roots and hauling on handfuls of bushes. He made it to the top (one final stone struck his buttocks as he pulled himself up) and took a quick look back over his shoulder.

Belch was kneeling beside Henry while Victor stood half a dozen feet away, firing stones; one the size of a baseball clipped through the man-high bushes beside Ben. He had seen enough; in fact, he had seen much more than enough. Worst of all, Henry Bowers was getting up again. Like Ben’s own Timex watch, Henry could take a licking and keep on ticking. Ben turned and smashed his way into the bushes, lumbering along in a direction he hoped was west. If he could cross to the Old Cape side of the Barrens, he could beg a dime off somebody and take the bus home. And when he got there he would lock the door behind him and bury these tattered bloody clothes in the trash and this crazy dream would finally be over. Ben thought of himself sitting in his chair in the living room, freshly tubbed, wearing his fuzzy red bathrobe, watching Daffy Duck cartoons on The Mighty Ninety and drinking milk through a strawberry Flav-R-Straw. Hold that thought, he told himself grimly, and kept lumbering along.

Bushes sprang into his face. Ben pushed them aside. Thorns reached and clawed. He tried to ignore them. He came to a flat area of ground that was black and mucky. A thick stand of bamboo-like growth spread across it and a fetid smell rose from the earth. An ominous thought

(quicksand)

slipped across the foreground of his mind like a shadow as he looked at the sheen of standing water deeper into the grove of bamboo-stuff. He didn’t want to go in there. Even if it wasn’t quicksand, the mud would suck his sneakers off. He turned right instead, running along the front of the bamboo-grove and finally into a patch of real woods.

The trees, mostly firs, were thick, growing everywhere, battling each other for a little space and sun, but there was less undergrowth and he could move faster. He was no longer sure what direction he was moving in, but still thought he was, on measure, a little ahead of the game. The Barrens were enclosed by Derry on three sides and bounded by the half-finished turnpike extension on the fourth. Sooner or later he would come out somewhere.

His stomach throbbed painfully, and he pulled up the remains of his sweatshirt for a look. He winced and drew a whistle of air in over his teeth. His belly looked like a grotesque Christmas-tree ball, all caked red blood and smeared green from his slide down the embankment. He pulled the sweatshirt down again. Looking at that mess made him feel like blowing lunch.

Now he heard a low humming noise from ahead-it was one steady note just above the low range of his hearing. An adult, intent only on getting the hell out of there (the mosquitoes had found Ben now, and while nowhere near as big as sparrows, they were pretty big), would have ignored it, or simply not heard it at all. But Ben was a boy, and he was already getting over his fright. He swerved to his left and pushed through some low laurel bushes. Beyond them, sticking out of the ground, were the top three feet of a cement cylinder about four feet wide. It was capped with a vented iron manhole cover. The cover was stamped with the words DERRY SEWER DEFT. The sound-this close it was more a drone than a hum-was coming from someplace deep inside.

Ben put one eye to a venthole but could see nothing. He could hear that drone, and water running down there someplace, but that was all. He took a breath, got a whiff of a sour smell that was both dank and shitty, and drew back with a wince. It was a sewer, that was all. Or maybe a combined sewer and drainage-tunnel-there were plenty of those in flood-conscious Derry. No big deal. But it had given him a funny sort of chill. Part of it was seeing the handiwork of man in all this overgrown jumble of wilderness, but he supposed part of it was the shape of the thing itself-that concrete cylinder jutting out of the ground. Ben had read H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine the year before, first the Classics Comics version and then the whole book. This cylinder with its vented iron cap reminded him of the wells which lead down into the country of the slumped and horrible Morlocks.

He moved away from it quickly, trying to find west again. He got to a link clearing and turned until his shadow was as directly behind him as he could get it. Then he headed off in a straight line.

Five minutes later he heard more running water ahead, and voices. Kids” voices.

He stopped to listen, and that was when he heard snapping branches and other voices behind him. They were perfectly recognizable. They belonged to Victor, Belch, and the one and only Henry Bowers.

The nightmare was not over yet, it seemed.

Ben looked around for a place to go to earth.

 

10

 

He came out of his hiding place about two hours later, dirtier than ever, but a little refreshed. Incredible as it seemed to him, he had dozed off.

When he had heard the three of them behind him, coming after him still, Ben had come dangerously close to freezing up completely, like an animal caught in the headlamps of an oncoming truck. A paralytic drowsiness began to steal over him. The idea of simply lying down, curling up into a ball like a hedgehog, and letting them do whatever they felt they had to occurred to him. It was a crazy idea, but it also seemed like a strangely good idea.

But instead Ben began to move toward the sound of the running water and those other kids. He tried to untangle their voices and get the sense of what they were saying-anything to shake off that scary paralysis of the spirit. Some project. They were talking about some project. One or two of the voices were even a little familiar. There was a splash, followed by a burst of good-natured laughter. The laughter filled Ben with a kind of stupid longing, and made him more aware of his dangerous position than anything else had done.

If he was going to be caught, there was no need to let these kids in for a dose of his medicine. Ben turned right again. Like many large people, he was remarkably light-footed. He passed close enough to the boys to see their shadows moving back and forth between him and the bright water, but they neither saw him nor heard him. Gradually their voices began to fall behind.

He came to a narrow path which had been beaten down to the bare earth. Ben considered it for a moment, then shook his head a little. He crossed it and plunged into the undergrowth again. He moved more slowly now, pushing bushes aside rather than stampeding through them. He was still moving roughly parallel to the stream the other kids had been playing beside. Even through the intervening bushes and trees he could see it was much wider than the one into which he and Henry had fallen.

Here was another of those concrete cylinders, barely visible amid a snarl of blackberry creepers, humming quietly to itself. Beyond, an embankment dropped off to the stream, and here an old, gnarled elm tree leaned crookedly out over the water. Its roots, half-exposed by bank erosion, looked like a snarl of dirty hair.

Hoping there wouldn’t be bugs or snakes but too tired and numbly frightened to really care, Ben had worked his way between the roots and into a shallow cave beneath. He leaned back. A root jabbed him like an angry finger. He shifted his position a little and it supported him quite nicely.

Here came Henry, Belch, and Victor. He had thought they might be fooled into following the path, but no such luck. They stood close by him for a moment-any closer and he could have reached out of his hiding place and touched them.

“Bet them little snotholes back there saw him,” Belch said.

“Well, let’s go find out,” Henry replied, and they headed back the way they had come. A few moments later Ben heard him roar: “What the fuck you kids doin here?”

There was some sort of reply, but Ben couldn’t tell what it was: the kids were too far away, and this close the river-it was the Kenduskeag, of course-was too loud. But he thought the kid sounded scared. Ben could sympathize.

Then Victor Criss bellowed something Ben hadn’t understood at all: “What a fuckin baby dam!”

Baby dam? Baby damn? Or maybe Victor had said what a damn bunch of babies and Ben had misheard him.

“Let’s break it!” Belch proposed.

There were yells of protest followed by a scream of pain. Someone began to cry. Yes, Ben could sympathize. They hadn’t been able to catch him (or at least not yet), but here was another bunch of little kids for them to take out their mad on.

“Sure, break it,” Henry said.

Splashes. Yells. Big moronic gusts of laughter from Belch and Victor. An agonized infuriated cry from one of the little kids.

“Don’t gimme any of your shit, you stuttering little freak,” Henry Bowers said. “I ain’t takin no more shit from nobody today.”

There was a splintering crack. The sound of running water downstream grew louder and roared briefly before quieting to its former placid chuckle. Ben suddenly understood. Baby dam, yes, that was what Victor had said. The kids-two or three of them it had sounded like when he passed by-had been building a dam. Henry and his friends had just kicked it apart. Ben even thought he knew who one of the kids was. The only “stuttering little freak” he knew from Derry School was Bill Denbrough, who was in the other fifth-grade classroom.

“You didn’t have to do that!” a thin and fearful voice cried out, and Ben recognized that voice as well, although he could not immediately put a face with it. “Why did you do that?”

“Because I felt like it, fucknuts!” Henry roared back. There was a meaty thud. It was followed by a scream of pain. The scream was followed by weeping.

“Shut up,” Victor said. “shut up that crying, kid, or I’ll pull your ears down and tie em under your chin.”

The crying became a series of choked snuffles.

“We’re going,” Henry said, “but before we do, I want to know one thing. You seen a fat kid in the last ten minutes or so? Big fat kid all bloody and cut up?”

There was a reply too brief to be anything but no.

“You sure?” Belch asked. “You better be, mushmouth.”

“I-I-I’m sh-sh-sure,” Bill Denbrough replied.

“Let’s go,” Henry said. “He probably waded acrost back that way.”

“Ta-ta, boys,” Victor Criss called. “It was a real baby dam, believe me. You’re better off without it.”

Splashing sounds. Belch’s voice came again, but farther away now. Ben couldn’t make out the words. In fact, he didn’t want to make out the words. Closer by, the boy who had been crying now resumed. There were comforting noises from the other boy. Ben had decided there was just the two of them, Stuttering Bill and the weeper.

He half-sat, half-lay where he was, listening to the two boys by the river and the fading sounds of Henry and his dinosaur friends crashing toward the far side of the Barrens. Sunlight flicked at his eyes and made little coins of light on the tangled roots above and around him. It was dirty in here, but it was also cozy… safe. The sound of running water was soothing. Even the sound of the crying kid was sort of soothing. His aches and pains had faded to a dull throb, and the sound of the dinosaurs had faded out completely. He would wait awhile, just to be sure they weren’t coming back, and then he would make tracks.

Ben could hear the throb of the drainage machinery coming through the earth-could even feel it: a low, steady vibration that went from the ground to the root he was leaning against and then into his back. He thought of the Morlocks again, of their naked flesh; he imagined it would smell like the dank and shitty air that had come up through the ventholes of that iron cap. He thought of their wells driven deep into the earth, wells with rusty ladders bolted to their sides. He dozed, and at some point his thoughts became a dream.

 

11

 

It wasn’t Morlocks he dreamed of. He dreamed of the thing which had happened to him in January, the thing which he hadn’t quite been able to tell his mother.

It had been the first day of school after the long Christmas break. Mrs Douglas had asked for a volunteer to stay after and help her count the books that had been turned in just before the vacation. Ben had raised his hand.

“Thank you, Ben,” Mrs Douglas had said, favoring him with a smile of such brilliance that it warmed him down to his toes.,’suckass,” Henry Bowers remarked under his breath.

It had been the sort of Maine winter day that is both the best and the worst: cloudless, eye-wateringly bright, but so cold it was a little frightening. To make the ten-degree temperature worse, there was a strong wind to give the cold a bitter cutting edge.

Ben counted books and called out numbers; Mrs Douglas wrote them down (not bothering to double-check his work even on a random basis, he was proud to note), and then they both carried the books down to the storage room through halls where radiators clanked dreamily. At first the school had been full of sounds: slamming locker doors, the clackety-clack of Mrs Thomas’s typewriter in the office, the slightly off-key choral renditions of the glee club upstairs, the nervous thud-thud-thud of basketballs from the gym and the scrooch and thud of sneakers as players drove toward the baskets or cut turns on the polished wood floor.

Little by little these sounds ceased, until, as the last set of books was totted up (one short, but it hardly mattered, Mrs Douglas sighed-they were all holding together on a wing and a prayer), the only sounds were the radiators, the faint whissh-whissh of Mr Fazio’s broom as he pushed colored sawdust up the hall floor, and the howl of the wind outside.

Ben looked toward the book room’s one narrow window and saw that the light was fading rapidly from the sky. It was four o’clock and dusk was at hand. Membranes of dry snow blew around the icy jungle gym and skirled between the teetertotters, which were frozen solidly into the ground. Only the thaws of April would break those bitter winter-welds. He saw no one at all on Jackson Street. He looked a moment longer, expecting a car to roll through the Jackson-Witcham intersection, but none did. Everyone in Derry save himself and Mrs Douglas might be dead or fled, at least from what he could see from here.

He looked toward her and saw, with a touch of real fright, that she was feeling almost exactly the same things he was feeling himself. He could tell by the look in her eyes. They were deep and thoughtful and far off, not the eyes of a schoolteacher in her forties but those of a child. Her hands were folded just below her breasts, as if in prayer.

I’m scared, Ben thought, and she’s scared, too. But what are we realty scared of?

He didn’t know. Then she looked at him and uttered a short, almost embarrassed laugh. “I’ve kept you too late,” she said. “I’m sorry, Ben.”

“That’s okay.” He looked down at his shoes. He loved her a little-not with the frank unquestioning love he had lavished on Miss Thibodeau, his first-grade teacher… but he did love her.

“If I drove, I’d give you a ride,” she said, “but I don’t. My husband’s going to pick me up around quarter past five. If you’d care to wait, we could-”

“No thanks,” Ben said. “I ought to get home before then.” This was not really the truth, but he felt a queer aversion to the idea of meeting Mrs Douglas’s husband.

“Maybe your mother could-”

“She doesn’t drive, either,” Ben said. “I’ll be all right. It’s only a mile home.”

“A mile’s not far when it’s nice, but it can be a very long way in this weather. You’ll go in somewhere if it gets too cold, won’t you, Ben?”

“Aw, sure. I’ll go into Costello’s Market and stand by the stove a little while, or something. Mr Gedreau doesn’t mind. And I got my snowpants. My new Christmas scarf, too.”

Mrs Douglas looked a little reassured… and then she glanced toward the window again. “It just looks so cold out there,” she said. “so… so inimical.”

He didn’t know the word but he knew exactly what she meant. Something just happened-what?

He had seen her, he realized suddenly, as a person instead of just a teacher. That was what had happened. Suddenly he had seen her face in an entirely different way, and because he did, it became a new face-the face of a tired poet. He could see her going home with her husband, sitting beside him in the car with her hands folded as the heater hissed and he talked about his day. He could see her making them dinner. An odd thought crossed his mind and a cocktail-party question rose to his lips: Do you have children, Mrs Douglas?

“I often think at this time of the year that people really weren’t meant to live this far north of the equator,” she said. “At least not in this latitude.” Then she smiled and some of the strangeness either went out of her face or his eye-he was able to see her, at least partially, as he always had. But you’ll never see her that way again, not completely, he thought, dismayed.

“I’ll feel old until spring, and then I’ll feel young again. It’s that way every year. Are you sure you’ll be all right, Ben?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Yes, I suppose you will. You’re a good boy, Ben.”

He looked back at his toes, blushing, loving her more than ever.

In the hallway Mr Fazio said: “Be careful of de fros’bite, boy,” without looking up from his red sawdust.

“I will.”

He reached his locker, opened it, and yanked on his snowpants. He had been painfully unhappy when his mother insisted he wear them again this winter on especially cold days, thinking of them as baby clothes, but he was glad to have them this afternoon. He walked slowly toward the door, zipping his coat, yanking the drawstrings of his hood tight, pulling on his mittens. He went out and stood on the snowpacked top step of the front stairs for a moment, listening as the door snicked closed-and locked-behind him.

Derry School brooded under a bruised skin of sky. The wind blew steadily. The snap-hooks on the flagpole rope rattled a lonesome tattoo against the steel pole itself. That wind cut into the warm and unprepared flesh of Ben’s face at once, numbing his cheeks.

Be careful of de fros’bite, boy.

He quickly pulled his scarf up until he looked like a small, pudgy caricature of Red Ryder. That darkening sky had a fantastical sort of beauty, but Ben did not pause to admire it; it was too cold for that. He got going.

At first the wind was at his back and things didn’t seem so bad; in fact, it actually seemed to be helping him along. At Canal Street, however, he had to turn right and almost fully into the wind. Now it seemed to be holding him back… as if it had business with him. His scarf helped a little, but not enough. His eyes throbbed and the moisture in his nose froze to a crack-glaze. His legs were going numb. Several times he stuck his mittened hands into his armpits to warm them up. The wind whooped and screamed, sometimes sounding almost human.

Ben felt both frightened and exhilarated. Frightened because he could now understand stories he had read, such as Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” where people actually froze to death. It would be all too possible to freeze to death on a night like this, a night when the temperature would drop to fifteen below.

The exhilaration was hard to explain. It was a lonely feeling-a somehow melancholy feeling. He was outside; he passed on the wings of the wind, and none of the people beyond the brightly lighted squares of their windows saw him. They were inside, inside where there was light and warmth. They didn’t know he had passed them; only he knew. It was a secret thing.

The moving air burned like needles, but it was fresh and clean. White smoke jetted from his nose in neat little streams.

And as sundown came, the last of the day a cold yellowy-orange line on the western horizon, the first stars cruel diamond-chips glimmering in the sky overhead, he came to the Canal. He was only three blocks from home now, and eager to feel the heat on his face and legs, moving the blood again, making it tingle.

Still-he paused.

The Canal was frozen in its concrete sluice like a frozen river of rose-milk, its surface humped and cracked and cloudy. It was moveless yet completely alive in this harshly puritanical winterlight; it had its own unique and difficult beauty.

Ben turned the other way-southwest. Toward the Barrens. When he looked in this direction, the wind was at his back again. It made his snowpants ripple and flap. The Canal ran straight between its concrete walls for perhaps half a mile; then the concrete was gone and the river sprawled its way into the Barrens, at this time of the year a skeletal world of icy brambles and jutting naked branches.

A figure was standing on the ice down there.

Ben stared at it and thought: There may be a man down there, but can he be wearing what it looks like he’s wearing? It’s impossible, isn’t it?

The figure was dressed in what appeared to be a white-silver clown suit. It rippled around him in the polar wind. There were oversized orange shoes on his feet. They matched the pompom buttons which ran down the front of his suit. One hand grasped a bundle of strings which rose to a bright bunch of balloons, and when Ben observed that the balloons were floating in his direction, he felt unreality wash over him more strongly. He closed his eyes, rubbed them, opened them. The balloons still appeared to be floating toward him.

He heard Mr Fazio’s voke in his head. Be careful of de fros’bite, boy.

It had to be a hallucination or a mirage brought on by some weird trick of the weather. There could be a man down there on the ice; he supposed it was even technically possible he could be wearing a clown suit. But the balloons couldn’t be floating toward Ben, into the wind. Yet that was just what they appeared to be doing.

Ben! the clown on the ice called. Ben thought that voice was only in his mind, although it seemed he heard it with his ears. Want a balloon, Ben?

There was something so evil in that voice, so awful, that Ben wanted to run away as fast as he could, but his feet seemed as welded to this sidewalk as the teetertotters in the schoolyard were welded to the ground.

They float, Ben! They all float! Try one and see!

The clown began walking along the ice toward the Canal bridge where Ben stood. Ben watched him come, not moving; he watched as a bird watches an approaching snake. The balloons should have burst in the intense cold, but they did not; they floated above and ahead of the clown when they should have been streaming out behind him, trying to escape back into the Barrens… where, some part of Ben’s mind assured him, this creature had come from in the first place.

Now Ben noticed something else.

Although the last of the daylight had struck a rosy glow across the ice of the Canal, the clown cast no shadow. None at all.

You’ll like it here, Ben, the clown said. Now it was close enough so Ben could hear the dud-dud sound its funny shoes made as they advanced over the uneven ice. You’ll like it here, I promise, all the boys and girls I meet like it here because it’s like Pleasure Island in Pinocchio and Never-Never Land in Peter Pan; they never have to grow up and that’s what all the kiddies want! So come on! See the sights, have a balloon, feed the elephants, ride the Chute-the-Chutes! Oh you’II like it and oh Ben how you’II float -

And in spite of his fear, Ben found that part of him did want a balloon. Who in all the world owned a balloon which would float into the wind? Who had even heard of such a thing? Yes… he wanted a balloon, and he wanted to see the clown’s face, which was bent down toward the ice, as if to keep it out of that killer wind.

What might have happened if the five o’clock whistle atop the Derry Town Hall hadn’t blown just then Ben didn’t know… didn’t want to know. The important thing was that it did blow, an ice-pick of sound drilling into the deep winter cold. The clown looked up, as if startled, and Ben saw its face.

The mummy! Oh my God it’s the mummy! was his first thought, accompanied by a swoony horror that caused him to clamp his hands down viciously on the bridge’s railing to keep from fainting. Of course it hadn’t been the mummy, couldn’t have been the mummy. Oh, there were Egyptian mummies, plenty of them, he knew that, but his first thought had been that it was the mummy-the dusty monster played by Boris Karloff in the old movie he had stayed up late to watch just last month on Shock Theater.

No, it wasn’t that mummy, couldn’t be, movie monsters weren’t real, everyone knew that, even little kids. But -

It wasn’t make-up the clown was wearing. Nor was the clown simply swaddled in a bunch of bandages. There were bandages, most of them around its neck and wrists, blowing back in the wind, but Ben could see the clown’s face clearly. It was deeply lined, the skin a parchment map of wrinkles, tattered cheeks, arid flesh. The skin of its forehead was split but bloodless. Dead lips grinned back from a maw in which teeth leaned like tombstones. Its gums were pitted and black. Ben could see no eyes, but something glittered far back in the charcoal pits of those puckered sockets, something like the cold jewels in the eyes of Egyptian scarab beetles. And although the wind was the wrong way, it seemed to him that he could smell cinnamon and spice, rotting cerements treated with weird drugs, sand, blood so old it had dried to flakes and grains of rust…

’We all float down here,” the mummy-clown croaked, and Ben realized with fresh horror that somehow it had reached the bridge, it was now just below him, reaching up with a dry and twisted hand from which flaps of skin rustled like pennons, a hand through which bone like yellow ivory showed.

One almost fleshless finger caressed the tip of his boot. Ben’s paralysis broke. He pounded the rest of the way across the bridge with the five o’clock whistle still shrieking in his ears; it only ceased as he reached the far side. It had to be a mirage, had to be. The clown simply could not have come so far during the whistle’s ten-or fifteen-second blast.

But his fear was not a mirage; neither were the hot tears which spurted from his eyes and froze on his cheeks a second after being shed. He ran, boots thudding on the sidewalk, and behind him he could hear the mummy in the clown suit climbing up from the Canal, ancient stony fingernails scraping across iron, old tendons creaking like dry hinges. He could hear the arid whistle of its breath pulling in and pushing out of nostrils as devoid of moisture as the tunnels under the Great Pyramid. He could smell its shroud of sandy spices and he knew that in a moment its hands, as fleshless as the geometrical constructions he made with his Erector Set. would descend upon his shoulders. They would turn him around and he would stare into that wrinkled, smiling face. The dead river of its breath would wash over him. Those black eyesockets with their deep glowing depths would bend over him. The toothless mouth would yawn, and he would have his balloon. Oh yes. All the balloons he wanted.

But when he reached the corner of his own street, sobbing and winded, his heart slamming crazed, leaping beats into his ears, when he at last looked back over his shoulder, the street was empty. The arched bridge with its low concrete sides and its oldfashioned cobblestone paving was also empty. He could not see the Canal itself, but he felt that if he could, he would see nothing there, either. No; if the mummy had not been a hallucination or a mirage, if it had been real, it would be waiting under the bridge-like the troll in the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff.”

Under. Hiding under.

Ben hurried home, looking back every few steps until the door was safely shut and locked behind him. He explained to his mother-who was so tired from a particularly hard day at the mill that she had not, in truth, much missed him-that he had been helping Mrs Douglas count books. Then he sat down to a dinner of noodles and Sunday’s leftover turkey. He stuffed three helpings into himself, and the mummy seemed more distant and dreamlike with each helping. It was not real, those things were never real, they came fully to life only between the commercials of the late-night TV movies or during the Saturday matinees, where if you were lucky you could get two monsters for a quarter-and if you had an extra quarter, you could buy all the popcorn you could eat.

No, they were not real. TV monsters and movie monsters and comic-book monsters were not real. Not until you went to bed and couldn’t sleep; not until the last four pieces ot candy, wrapped in tissues and kept under your pillow against the evils of the night, were gobbled up; not until the bed itself turned into a lake of rancid dreams and the wind screamed outside and you were afraid to look at the window because there might be a face there, an ancient grinning face that had not rotted but simply dried like an old leaf, its eyes sunken diamonds pushed deep into dark sockets; not until you saw one ripped and claw like hand holding out a bunch of balloons: See the sights, have a balloon, feed the elephants, ride the Chute-the-Chutes! Ben, oh, Ben, how you’ll float-

 

12

 

Ben awoke with a gasp, the dream of the mummy still on him, panicked by the close, vibrating dark all around him. He jerked, and the root stopped supporting him and poked him in the back again, as if in exasperation.

He saw light and scrambled for it. He crawled out into afternoon sunlight and the babble of the stream, and everything fell into place again. It was summer, not winter. The mummy had not carried him away to its desert crypt; Ben had simply hidden from the big kids in a sandy hole under a half-uprooted tree. He was in the Barrens. Henry and his buddies had gone to town in a small way on a couple of kids playing downstream because they hadn’t been able to find Ben and go to town on him in a big way. Ta-ta, boys. It was a real baby dam, believe me. You’re better off without it.

Ben looked glumly down at his ruined clothes. His mother was going to give him sixteen different flavors of holy old hell.

He had slept just long enough to stiffen up. He slid down the embankment and then began to walk along the stream, wincing at every step. He was a medley of aches and pains; it felt like Spike Jones was playing a fast tune on broken glass inside most of his muscles. There seemed to be dried or drying blood on every inch of exposed skin. The dam-building kids would be gone anyway, he consoled himself. He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept, but even if it had only been half an hour, the encounter with Henry and his friends would have convinced Denbrough and his pal that some other place-like Timbuktu, maybe-would be better for their health.

Ben plugged grimly along, knowing if the big kids came back now he would not stand a chance of outrunning them. He hardly cared.

He rounded an elbow-bend in the stream and just stood there for a moment, looking. The dam-builders were still there. One of them was indeed Stuttering Bill Denbrough. He was kneeling beside the other boy, who was propped against the stream-bank in a sitting position. This other kid’s head was thrown so far back that his adam’s apple stood out like a triangular plug. There was dried blood around his nose, on his chin, and painted along his neck in a couple of streams. He had something white clasped loosely in one hand.

Stuttering Bill looked around sharply and saw Ben standing there. Ben saw with dismay that something was very wrong with the boy propped up on the bank; Denbrough was obviously scared to death. He thought miserably: Won’t this day ever end?

“I wonder if yuh-yuh-you could help m-m-me,” Bill Denbrough said. “H-His ah-ah-ah-asp-p-irator is eh-hempty. I think he m-might be-”

His face froze, turned red. He dug at the word, stuttering like a machine-gun. Spittle flew from his lips, and it took almost thirty seconds” worth of “d-d-d-d” before Ben realized Denbrough was trying to say the other kid might be dying.

 

 

Chapter 5

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