CONVICTED MURDERER COMMITS SUICIDE IN FALMOUTH

Richard P. Macklin, who was convicted of the murder of his four-year-old stepson nine years ago, was found dead in his small third-floor Falmouth apartment late yesterday afternoon. The parolee, who had lived and worked quietly in Falmouth since his release from Shawshank State Prison in 1964, was an apparent suicide.

“The note he left indicates an extremely confused state of mind,” Assistant Falmouth Police Chief Brandon K. Roche said. He refused to divulge the note’s contents, but a Police Department source said it consisted of two sentences: “I saw Eddie last night. He was dead.”

The “Eddie” referred to may well have been Macklin’s stepson, brother of the boy Macklin was convicted of killing in 1958. It was the disappearance of Edward Corcoran which eventually led to Macklin’s conviction for the beating death of Edward’s younger brother, Dorsey. The elder boy has been missing for nine years. In a brief court proceeding in 1966 the boy’s mother had her son declared legally dead so she could enter into possession of Edward Corcoran’s savings account. The account contained a sum of sixteen dollars.

 

3

 

Eddie Corcoran was dead, all right.

He died on the night of June 19th, and his stepfather had nothing at all to do with it. He died as Ben Hanscom sat home watching TV with his mother, as Eddie Kaspbrak’s mother anxiously felt Eddie’s forehead for signs of her favorite ailment, “phantom fever,” as Beverly Marsh’s stepfather-a gent who bore, in temperament at least, a remarkable resemblance to Eddie and Dorsey Corcoran’s stepfather-Lifted a high-stepping kick into the girl’s derriere and told her “to get out there and dry those goddam dishes like your mummer told you,” as Mike Hanlon got yelled at by some high-school boys (one of whom would some years later sire that fine upstanding young homophobe John “Webby” Garton) passing in an old Dodge while Mike pulled weeds out of the garden beside the small Hanlon home out on Witcham Road, not far from the farm owned by Henry Bowers’s crazy father, as Richie Tozier was sneaking a look at the half-undressed girls in a copy of Gem he had found at the bottom of his father’s socks-and-underwear drawer and getting a regular good boner, and as Bill Denbrough was throwing his dead brother’s photograph album across the room in horrified unbelief.

Although none of them would remember doing so later, all of them looked up at the. exact moment Eddie Corcoran died… as if hearing some distant cry.

The News had been absolutely right about one thing: Eddie’s rank-card was just bad enough to make him afraid to go home and face his stepdad. Also, his mother and the old man were fighting a lot this month. That made things even worse. When they got going at it hot and heavy, his mother shouted a lot of mostly incoherent accusations. His stepdad responded to these first with grunts, then yells to shut up, and finally with the enraged bellows of a boar which has gotten a quiver of porcupine needles in its snout. Eddie had never seen the old man use his fists on her, though. Eddie didn’t think he quite dared. He had saved his fists for Eddie and Dorsey in the old days, and now that Dorsey was dead, Eddie got his little brother’s share as well as his own.

These shouting matches came and went in cycles. They were most common at the end of the month, when the bills came in. A policeman, called by a neighbor, might drop by once or twice when things were at their worst and tell them to tone it down. Usually that ended it. His mother was apt to give the cop the finger and dare him to take her in, but his stepdad rarely said boo.

His stepdad was afraid of the cops, Eddie thought.

He lay low during these periods of stress. It was wiser. If you didn’t think so, just look at what had happened to Dorsey. Eddie didn’t know the specifics and didn’t want to, but he had an idea about Dorsey. He thought that Dorsey had been in the wrong place at the wrong time: the garage on the last day of the month. They told Eddie that Dorsey fell off the stepladder in the garage-’If I told him once to stay off n it I told him sixty times,” his stepdad had said-but his mother wouldn’t look at him except by accident… and when their eyes did meet, Eddie had seen a frightened ratty little gleam in hers that he didn’t like. The old man just sat there silently at the kitchen table with a quart of Rheingold, looking at nothing from beneath his heavy lowering eyebrows. Eddie kept out of his reach. When his stepfather was bellowing, he was usually-not always but usually-all right. It was when he stopped that you had to be careful.

Two nights ago he had thrown a chair at Eddie when Eddie got up to see what was on the other TV channel-just picked up one of the tubular aluminum kitchen chairs, swept it back over his head, and let fly. It hit Eddie in the butt and knocked him over. His butt still ached, but he knew it could have been worse: it could have been his head.

Then there had been the night when the old man had suddenly gotten up and rubbed a handful of mashed potatoes into Eddie’s hair for no reason at all. One day last September, Eddie had come in from school and foolishly allowed the screen door to slam shut behind him while his stepdad was taking a nap. Macklin came out of the bedroom in his billowy boxer shorts, hair standing up in corkscrews, cheeks grizzled with two days of weekend beard, breath grizzled with two days of weekend beer. “There now, Eddie,” he said, “I got to take you up for slammin that fuckin door.” In Rich Macklin’s lexicon, “taking you up” was a euphemism for “beating the shit out of you.” Which was what he then did to Eddie. Eddie had lost consciousness when the old man threw him into the front hall. His mother had mounted a pair of low coathooks out there, especially for him and Dorsey to hang their coats on. These hooks had rammed hard steel fingers into Eddie’s lower back, and that was when he passed out. When he came to ten minutes later he heard his mother yelling that she was going to take Eddie to the hospital and he couldn’t stop her.

“After what happened to Dorsey?” his stepdad had responded. “You want to go to jail, woman?”

That was the end of her talk about the hospital. She helped Eddie in to his room, where he lay shivering on his bed, his forehead beaded with sweat. The only time he left the room during the next three days was when they were both gone. Then he would hobble slowly into the kitchen, groaning softly, and get his stepdad’s whiskey from under the sink. A few nips dulled the pain. The pain was mostly gone by the fifth day, but he had pissed blood for almost two weeks.

And the hammer wasn’t in the garage anymore.

What about that? What about that, friends and neighbors?

Oh, the Craftsman hammer-the ordinary hammer-was still there. It was the Scotti recoilless which was missing. His stepdad’s special hammer, the one he and Dorsey had been forbidden to touch. “If one of you touches that baby,” he had told them the day he bought it, “you’ll both be wearing your guts for earmuffs.” Dorsey had asked timidly if that hammer was very expensive. The old man told him he was damn tooting. He said it was filled with ball-bearings and you couldn’t make it bounce back up no matter how hard you brought it down.

Now it was gone.

Eddie’s grades weren’t the best because he had missed a lot of school since his mother’s remarriage, but he was not a stupid boy by any means. He thought he knew what had happened to the Scotti recoilless hammer. He thought maybe his stepfather had used it on Dorsey and then buried it in the garden or maybe thrown it in the Canal. It was the sort of thing that happened frequently in the horror comics Eddie read, the ones he kept on the top shelf of his closet.

He walked closer to the Canal, which rippled between its concrete sides like oiled silk. A swatch of moonlight glimmered across its dark surface in a boomerang shape. He sat down, swinging his sneakers idly against the concrete in an irregular tattoo. The last six weeks had been quite dry and the water flowed past perhaps nine feet below the worn soles of his sneakers. But if you looked closely at the Canal’s sides, you could read the various levels to which it sometimes rose quite easily. The concrete was stained a dark brown just above the water’s current level. This brown stain slowly faded to yellow, then to a color that was almost white at the level where the heels of Eddie’s sneakers made contact when he swung them.

The water flowed smoothly and silently out of a concrete arch that was cobbled on the inside, past the place where Eddie sat, and then down to the covered wooden footbridge between Bassey Park and Derry High School. The bridge’s sides and plank footing-even the beams under the roof-were covered with an intaglio of initials, phone numbers, and declarations. Declarations of love; declarations that So-and-so was willing to “suck” or “blow’; declarations that those discovered sucking or blowing would lose their foreskins or have their assholes plugged with hot tar; occasional eccentric declarations that defied definition. One that Eddie had puzzled over all this spring read SAVE RUSSIAN JEWS! COLLECT VALUABLE PRIZES!

What, exactly, did that mean? Anything? And did it matter?

Eddie didn’t go into the Kissing Bridge tonight; he had no urge to cross over to the high-school side. He thought he would probably sleep in the park, maybe in the dead leaves under the bandstand, but for now it was fine just to sit here. He liked it in the park, and came often when he had to think. Sometimes there were people making out in the groves of trees which dotted the park, but Eddie left them alone and they left him alone. He had heard lurid stories in the playground at school about the queers that cruised in Bassey Park after sundown, and he accepted these stories without question, but he himself had never been bothered. The park was a peaceful place, and he thought the best part of it was right here where he was sitting. He liked it in the middle of summer, when the water was so low it chuckled over the stones and actually broke up into isolated streamlets that twisted and turned and sometimes came together again. He liked it in late March or early April, just after ice-out, when he would sometimes stand by the Canal (too cold to sit then; your ass would freeze) for an hour or more, the hood of his old parka, now two years too small for him, pulled up, his hands plunged into his pockets, unaware that his skinny body was shivering and shaking. The Canal had a terrible, irresistible power in the week or two after the ice went out. He was fascinated by the way the water boiled whitely out of the cobbled arch and roared past him, bearing sticks and branches and all manner of human trash along with it. More than once he had envisioned walking beside the Canal in March with his stepdad and giving the bastard a great big motherfucking push. He would scream and fall in, his arms pinwheeling for balance, and Eddie would stand on the concrete parapet and watch him carried off downstream, his head a black bobbing shape in the middle of the unruly whitecapped current. He would stand there, yes, and he would cup his hands around his mouth and scream: THAT WAS FOR DORSEY, YOU ROTTEN COCK-SUCKER! WHEN YOU GET DOWN TO HELL TELL THE DEVIL THE LAST THING YOU EVER HEARD WAS ME TELLING YOU TO PICK ON SOMEBODY YOUR OWN SIZE! It would never happen, of course, but it was an absolutely grand fantasy. A grand dream to dream as you sat here by the Canal, a g -

A hand closed around Eddie’s foot.

He had been looking across the Canal toward the school, smiling a sleepy and rather beautiful smile as he imagined his stepfather being carried off in the violent rip of the spring runoff, being carried out of his life forever. The soft yet strong grip startled him so much that he almost lost his balance and tumbled into the Canal.

Its one of the queers the big kids are always talking about, he thought, and then he looked down. His mouth dropped open. Urine spilled hotly down his legs and stained his jeans black in the moonlight. It wasn’t a queer.

It was Dorsey.

It was Dorsey as he had been buried, Dorsey in his blue blazer and gray pants, only now the blazer was in muddy tatters, Dorsey’s shirt was yellow rags, Dorsey’s pants clung wetly to legs as thin as broomsticks. And Dorsey’s head was horribly slumped, as if it had been caved in at the back and consequently pushed up in the front.

Dorsey was grinning.

“Eddieeeee,” his dead brother croaked, just like one of the dead people who were always coming back from the grave in the horror comics. Dorsey’s grin widened. Yellow teeth gleamed, and somewhere way back in that darkness things seemed to be squirming.

“Eddieeee… I came to see you Eddieeeeee…”

Eddie tried to scream. Waves of gray shock rolled over him, and he had the curious sensation that he was floating. But it was not a dream; he was awake. The hand on his sneaker was as white as a trout’s belly. His brother’s bare feet clung somehow to the concrete. Something had bitten one of Dorsey’s heels off.

“Come on down Eddieeeee…”

Eddie couldn’t scream. His lungs didn’t have enough ah-in them to manage a scream. He got out a curious reedy moaning sound. Anything louder seemed beyond him. That was all right. In a second or two his mind would snap and after that nothing would matter. Dorsey’s hand was small but implacable. Eddie’s buttocks were sliding over the concrete to the edge of the Canal.

Still making that reedy moaning sound, he reached behind himself and grabbed the concrete edging and yanked himself backward. He felt the hand slide away momentarily, heard an angry hiss, and had time to think: That’s not Dorsey. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not Dorsey. Then adrenaline flooded his body and he was crawling away, trying to run even before he was on his feet, his breath coming in short shrieky whistles.

White hands appeared on the concrete lip of the Canal. There was a wet slapping sound. Drops of water flew upward in the moonlight from dead pallid skin. Now Dorsey’s face appeared over the edge. Dim red sparks gleamed in his sunken eyes. His wet hair was plastered to his skull. Mud streaked his cheeks like warpaint.

Eddie’s chest finally unlocked. He hitched in breath and turned it into a scream. He got to his feet and ran. He ran looking back over his shoulder, needing to see where Dorsey was, and as a result he ran smack into a large elm tree.

It felt as if someone-his old man, for instance-had set off a dynamite charge in his left shoulder. Stars shot and corkscrewed through his head. He fell at the base of the tree as if poleaxed, blood trickling from his left temple. He swam in the waters of semiconsciousness for perhaps ninety seconds. Then he managed to gain his feet again. A groan escaped him as he tried to raise his left arm. It didn’t want to come. Felt all numb and far away. So he raised his right and rubbed his fiercely aching head.

Then he remembered why he had happened to run full-tilt into the elm tree in the first place and looked around.

There was the edge of the Canal, white as bone and straight as string in the moonlight. No sign of the thing from the Canal… if there ever had been a thing. He continued turning, working his way slowly through a complete three hundred and sixty degrees. Bassey Park was silent and as still as a black-and-white photograph. Weeping willows draggled their thin tenebrous arms, and anything could be standing, slumped and insane, within their shelter.

Eddie began to walk, trying to look everywhere at once. His sprained shoulder throbbed in painful sync with his heartbeat.

Eddieeeee, the breeze moaned through the trees, don’t you want to see meeeee, Eddieeeee? He felt flabby corpse-fingers caress the side of his neck. He whirled, his hands going up. As his feet tangled together and he fell, he saw that it had only been willow-fronds moving in the breeze.

He got up again. He wanted to run but when he tried another dynamite charge went off in his shoulder and he had to stop. He knew somehow that he should be getting over his fright by now, calling himself a stupid little baby who got spooked by a reflection or maybe fell asleep without knowing it and had a bad dream. That wasn’t happening, though; quite the reverse, in fact. His heart was now beating so fast he could no longer distinguish the separate thuds, and he felt sure it would soon burst in terror. He couldn’t run but when he got out of the willows he did manage a limping jogtrot.

He fixed his eyes on the streetlight that marked the park’s main gate. He headed in that direction, managing a little more speed, thinking: I’ll make it to the light, and that’s all right. I’ll make it to the light, and that’s all right. Bright light, no more fright, up all night, what a sight -

Something was following him.

Eddie could hear it bludgeoning its way through the willow grove. If he turned he would see it. It was gaining. He could hear its feet, a kind of shuffling, squelching stride, but he would not look back, no, he would look ahead at the light, the light was all right, he would just continue his flight to the light, and he was almost there, almost -

The smell was what made him look back. The overwhelming smell, as if fish had been left to rot in a huge pile that had become carrion-slushy in the summer heat. It was the smell of a dead ocean.

It wasn’t Dorsey after him now; it was the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The thing’s snout was long and pleated. Green fluid dripped from black gashes like vertical mouths in its cheeks. Its eyes were white and jellylike. Its webbed fingers were tipped with claws like razors. Its respiration was bubbly and deep, the sound of a diver with a bad regulator. As it saw Eddie looking, its green-black lips wrinkled back from huge fangs in a dead and vacant smile.

It shambled after him, dripping, and Eddie suddenly understood. It meant to take him back to the Canal, to carry him down into the dank blackness of the Canal’s underground passage. To eat him there.

Eddie put on a burst of speed. The arc-sodium light at the gate drew closer. He could see its halo of bugs and moths. A truck went by, headed for Route 2, the driver working his way up through the gears, and it crossed Eddie’s desperate, terrified mind that he could be drinking coffee from a paper cup and listening to a Buddy Holly tune on the radio, completely unaware that less than two hundred yards away there was a boy who might be dead in another twenty seconds.

The stink. The overwhelming stink of it. Gaining. All around him.

It was a park bench he tripped over. Some kids had casually pushed it over earlier that evening, heading toward their homes at a run to beat the curfew. Its seat poked an inch or two out of the grass, one shade of green on another, almost invisible in the moon-driven dark. The edge of the seat smacked Eddie in the shins, causing a burst of glassy, exquisite pain. His legs flipped out behind him and he thumped into the grass.

He looked behind him and saw the Creature bearing down, its white poached-egg eyes glittering, its scales dripping slime the color of seaweed, the gills up and down its bulging neck and cheeks opening and closing.

lAgr Eddie croaked. It seemed to be the only noise he could make. “Ag! Ag’Ag.’Ag!”

He crawled now, fingers hooking deep into the turf. His tongue hung out.

In the second before the Creature’s fish-smelling horny hands closed around his throat, a comforting thought came to him: This is a dream; it has to be. There’s no real Creature, no real Black Lagoon, and even if there was, that was in South America or the Florida Everglades or someplace like that. This is only a dream and I’ll wake up in my bed or maybe in the leaves under the bandstand and I -

Then batrachian hands closed around his neck and Eddie’s hoarse cries were choked off; as the Creature turned him over, the chitinous hooks which sprouted from those hands scrawled bleeding marks like calligraphy into his neck. He stared into its glowing white eyes. He felt the webs between its fingers pressing against his throat like constricting bands of living seaweed. His terror-sharpened gaze noted the fin, something like a rooster’s comb and something like a hornpout’s poisonous backfin, standing atop the Creature’s hunched and plated head. As its hands clamped tight, shutting off his air, he was even able to see the way the white light from the arc-sodium lamp turned a smoky green as it passed through that membranous headfin.

“You’re… not… real,” Eddie choked, but clouds of grayness were closing in now, and he realized faintly that it was real enough, this Creature. It was, after all, killing him.

And yet some rationality remained, even until the end: as the Creature hooked its claws into the soft meat of his neck, as his carotid artery let go in a warm and painless gout that splashed the thing’s reptilian plating, Eddie’s hands groped at the Creature’s back, feeling for a zipper. They fell away only when the Creature tore his head from his shoulders with a low satisfied grunt.

And as Eddie’s picture of what It was began to fade, It began promptly to

change into something else.

 

4

 

Unable to sleep, plagued by bad dreams, a boy named Michael Hanlon rose soon after first light on the first full day of summer vacation. The light was pale, bundled up in a low, thick mist that would lift by eight o’clock, taking the wraps off a perfect summer day.

But that was for later. For now the world was all gray and rose, as silent as a cat walking on a carpet.

Mike, dressed in corduroys, a tee-shirt, and black high-topped Keds, came downstairs, ate a bowl of Wheaties (he didn’t really like Wheaties but had wanted the free prize in the box-a Captain Midnight Magic Decoder Ring), then hopped on his bike and pedaled toward town, riding on the sidewalks because of the fog. The fog changed everything, made the most ordinary things like fire hydrants and stop-signs into objects of mystery-things both strange and a trifle sinister. You could hear cars but not see them, and because of the fog’s odd acoustic quality, you could not tell if they were far or near until you actually saw them come rolling out of the fog with ghost-halos of moisture ringing their headlamps.

He turned right on Jackson Street, bypassing downtown, and then crossed to Main Street by way of Palmer Lane-and during his short ride down this little byway’s one-block length he passed the house where he would live as an adult. He did not look at it; it was just a small two-story dwelling with a garage and a small lawn. It gave off no special vibration to the passing boy who would spend most of his adult life as its owner and only dweller.

At Main Street he turned right and rode up to Bassey Park, still wandering, simply riding and enjoying the stillness of the early day. Once inside the main gate he dismounted his bike, pushed down the kickstand, and walked toward the Canal. He was still, as far as he knew, impelled by nothing more than purest whim. Certainly it did not occur to him to think that his dreams of the night before had anything to do with his current course; he did not even remember exactly what his dreams had been-only that one had followed another until he had awakened at five o’clock, sweaty but shivering, and with the idea that he ought to eat a fast breakfast and then take a bike-ride into town.

Here in Bassey there was a smell in the fog he didn’t like: a sea-smell, salty and old. He had smelled it before, of course. In the early-morning fogs you could often smell the ocean in Derry, although the coast was forty miles away. But the smell this morning seemed thicker, more vital. Almost dangerous.

Something caught his eye. He bent down and picked up a cheap two-blade pocket knife. Someone had scratched the initials EC on the side. Mike looked at it thoughtfully for a moment or two and then pocketed it. Finders keepers, losers weepers.

He glanced around. Here, near where he had found the knife, was an overturned park bench. He righted it, setting its iron footings back into the holes they had made over a period of months or years. Beyond the bench he saw a matted place in the grass… and leading away from it, two grooves. The grass was springing back up, but those grooves were still fairly clear. They went in the direction of the Canal.; And there was blood.

(the bird remember the bird remember the)

But he did not want to remember the bird and so he pushed the thought away. Dogfight, that’s all. One of “em must have hurt the other one pretty bad. It was a convincing thought by which he was somehow not convinced. Thoughts of the bird kept wanting to come back-the one he had seen out at the Kitchener Ironworks, one Stan Uris never would have found in his bird-book.

But instead of getting out he followed the grooves. As he did he made up a little story in his mind. It was a murder story. Here’s this kid, out late, see. Out past the curfew. The killer gets him. And how does he get rid of the body? Drags it to the Canal and dumps it in, of course! Just like an Alfred Hitchcock Presents!

The marks he was following could have been made by a dragging pair of shoes or sneakers, he supposed.

Mike shivered and looked around uncertainly. The story was somehow a little too real.

And suppose that it wasn’t a man who did it but a monster. Like out of a horror comic or a horror book or a horror movie or

(a bad dream)

a fairytale or something.

He decided he didn’t like the story. It was a stupid story. He tried to push it out of his mind but it wouldn’t go. So what? Let it stay. It was dumb. Riding into town this morning had been dumb. Following these two matted grooves in the grass was dumb. His dad would have a lot of chores for him to do around the place today. He ought to get back and start in or when the hottest part of the afternoon rolled around he would be up the barn loft pitching hay. Yes, he ought to get back. And that’s just what he was going to do.

Sure you are, he thought. Want to bet?

Instead of going back to his bike and getting on and riding home and starting his chores, he followed the grooves in the grass. There were more drops of drying blood here and there. Not much, though. Not as much as there had been in that matted place back there by the park bench he had set to rights.

Mike could hear the Canal now, running quiet. A moment later he saw the concrete edge materialize out of the fog.

Here was something else in the grass. My goodness, it’s certainly your day for finding things, his mind said with dubious geniality, and then a gull screamed somewhere and Mike flinched, thinking again of the bird he had seen that day, that day just this spring.

Whatever that is in the grass, I don’t even want to look at it. And that was oh so very true, but here he was, already bending over it, hands planted just above his knees, to see what it was.

A tattered bit of cloth with a drop of blood on it.

The seagull screamed again. Mike stared at the bloody scrap of cloth and remembered what had happened to him in the spring.

 

5

 

Each year during April and May the Hanlon farm woke up from its winter doze.

Mike would let himself know that spring had come again not when the first crocuses showed under his mom’s kitchen windows or when kids started bringing immies and croakers to school or even when the Washington Senators kicked off the baseball season (usually getting themselves shellacked in the process), but only when his father hollered for Mike to help him push their mongrel truck out of the barn. The front half was an old Model-A Ford car, the back end a pick-up truck with a tailgate which was the remainder of the old henhouse door. If the winter hadn’t been too cold, the two of them could often get it going by pushing it down the driveway. The truck’s cab had no doors; likewise there was no windshield. The seat was half of an old sofa that Will Hanlon had scrounged from the Derry dump. The stick-shift ended in a glass doorknob.

They would push it down the driveway, one on each side, and when it got rolling good, Will would jump in, turn on the switch, retard the spark, step down on the clutch, punch the shift into first gear with his big hand clamped over the doorknob. Then he would holler: “Put me over the hump!” He’d pop the clutch and the old Ford engine would cough, choke, chug, backfire… and sometimes actually start to run, rough at first, then smoothing out. Will would roar down the road toward Rhulin Farms, turn around in their driveway (if he had gone the other way, Henry Bowers’s crazy father Butch probably would have blown his head off with a shotgun), and then roar back, the unmuffled engine blatting stridently while Mike jumped up and down with excitement, cheering, and his mom stood in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on a dishtowel and pretending a disgust she didn’t really feel.

Other times the truck wouldn’t roll-start and Mike would have to wait until his father came back from the barn, carrying the crank and muttering under his breath. Mike was quite sure that some of the words so muttered were swears, and he would be a little frightened of his daddy then. (It wasn’t until much later, during one of those interminable visits to the hospital room where Will Hanlon lay dying, that he found out his father muttered because he was afraid of the crank: once it had kicked back viciously, flown out of its socket, and torn the side of his mouth open.)

“Stand back, Mikey,” he would say, slipping the crank into its socket at the base of the radiator. And when the A was finally running, he’d say that next year he was going to trade it for a Chevrolet, but he never did. That old A-Ford hybrid was still in back of the home place, up to its axles and henhouse tailgate in weeds.

When it was running, and Mike was sitting in the passenger seat, smelling hot oil and blue exhaust, excited by the keen breeze that washed in through the glassless hole where the windshield had once been, he would think: Spring’s here again. We’re all waking up. And in his soul he would raise a silent cheer that shook the wails of that mostly cheerful room. He felt love for everything around him, and most of all for his dad, who would grin over at him and holler: “Hold on, Mikey! We gone wind this baby up! We gone make some birds run for cover!”

Then he would tear up the driveway, the A’s rear wheels spitting back black dirt and gray clods of clay, both of them jouncing up and down on the sofa-seat inside the open cab, laughing like stark natural-born fools. Will would run the A through the high grass of the back field, which was kept for hay, toward either the south field (potatoes), the west field (corn and beans), or the east field (peas, squash, and pumpkins). As they went, birds would burst up out of the grass before the truck, squawking in terror. Once a partridge flew up, a magnificent bird as brown as late-autumn oaks, the explosive coughing whirr of its wings audible even over the pounding engine.

Those rides were Mike Hanlon’s door into spring.

The year’s work began with the rock harvest. Every day for a week they would take the A out and load the bed with rocks which might break a harrow-blade when the time came to turn the earth and plant. Sometimes the truck would get stuck in the mucky spring earth and Will would mutter darkly under his breath… more swears, Mike surmised. He knew some of the words and expressions; others, such as “son of a whore,” puzzled him. He had come across the word in the Bible, and so far as he could tell, a whore was a woman who came from a place called Babylon. He had once set out to ask his father, but the A had been in mud up to her coil-springs, there had been thunderclouds on his father’s brow, and he had decided to wait for a better time. He ended up asking Richie Tozier later that year and Richie told him his father had told him a whore was a woman who got paid for having sex with men. “What’s having sex?” Mike had asked, and Richie had wandered away holding his head.

On one occasion Mike had asked his father why, since they harvested rocks every April, there were always more of them the following April.

They had been standing at the dumping-off place near sunset on the last day of that year’s rock harvest. A beaten dirt track, not quite serious enough to be called a road, led from the bottom of the west field to this gully near the bank of the Kenduskeag. The gully was a jumbled wasteland of rocks that had been dragged off Will’s land through the years.

Looking down at this badlands, which he had made first alone and then with the help of his son (somewhere under the rocks, he knew, were the rotting remains of the stumps he had yanked out one at a time before any of the fields could be tilled), Will had lighted a cigarette and said, “My daddy used to tell me that God loved rocks, houseflies, weeds, and poor people above all the rest of His creations, and that’s why He made so many of them.”

“But every year it’s like they come back.”

“Yeah, I think they do,” Will said. That’s the only way I know to explain it.”

A loon cried from the far side of the Kenduskeag in a dusky sunset that had turned the water a deep orange-red. It was a lonely sound, so lonely that it made Mike’s tired arms tighten with gooseflesh.

“I love you. Daddy,” he said suddenly, feeling his love so strongly that tears stung his eyes.

“Why, I love you too, Mikey,” his father said, and hugged him tight in his strong arms. Mike felt the rough fabric of his father’s flannel shirt against his cheek. “Now what do you say we go on back? We got just time to get a bath each before the good woman puts supper on the table.”

“Ayuh,” Mike said.

“Ayuh yourself,” Will Hanlon said, and they both laughed, feeling tired but feeling good, arms and legs worked but not overworked, their hands rock-roughened but not hurting too bad.

Spring’s here, Mike thought that night, drowsing off in his room while his mother and father watched The Honeymooners in the other room. Spring’s here again, thank You God, thank You very much. And turning to sleep, sinking down, he had heard the loon call again, the distance of its marshes blending into the desire of his dreams. Spring was a busy time, but it was a good time.

Following the rock harvest, Will would park the A in the high grass back of the house and drive the tractor out of the barn. There would be harrowing then, his father driving the tractor, Mike either riding behind and holding on to the iron seat or walking alongside, picking up any rocks they had missed and throwing them aside. Then came planting, and following the planting came summer’s work: hoeing… hoeing… hoeing. His mother would refurbish Larry, Moe, and Curly, their three scarecrows, and Mike would help his father put mooseblowers on top of each straw-filled head. A mooseblower was a can with both ends cut off. You tied a length of heavily waxed and rosined string tightly across the middle of the can and when the wind blew through it a wonderfully spooky sound resulted-a kind of whining croak. Crop-eating birds decided soon enough that Larry, Moe, and Curly were no threats, but the mooseblowers always frightened them off.

Starting in July, there was picking as well as hoeing-peas and radishes first, then the lettuce and the tomatoes that had been started in the shed-boxes, then the corn and beans in August, more corn and beans in September, then the pumpkins and the squash. Somewhere in the midst of all that came the new potatoes, and then, as the days shortened and the air sharpened, he and his dad would take in the mooseblowers (and sometime during the winter they would disappear; it seemed they had to make new ones each spring). The day after, Will would call Norman Sadler (who was as dumb as his son Moose but infinitely more goodhearted), and Normie would come over with his potato-digger.

For the next three weeks all of them would work picking potatoes. In addition to the family, Will would hire three or four high-school boys to help pick, paying them a quarter a barrel. The A-Ford would cruise slowly up and down the rows of the south field, the biggest field, always in low gear, the tailgate down, the back filled with barrels, each marked with the name of the person picking into it, and at the end of the day Will would open his old creased wallet and pay each of the pickers cash money. Mike was paid, and so was his mother; that money was theirs, and Will Hanlon never once asked either of them what they did with it. Mike had been given a five-percent interest in the farm when he was five years old-old enough, Will had told him then, to hold a hoe and to tell the difference between witchgrass and pea-plants. Each year he had been given another one percent, and each year, on the day after Thanksgiving, Will would compute the farm’s profits and deduct Mike’s share… but Mike never saw any of that money. It went into his college account and was to be touched under absolutely no other circumstances.

At last the day would come when Normie Sadler drove his potato-digger back home; by then the air would have most likely turned gray and cold and there would be frost on the drift of orange pumpkins piled against the side of the barn. Mike would stand in the dooryard, his nose red, his dirty hands stuffed into his jeans pockets, and watch as his father drove first the tractor and then the A-Ford back into the barn. He would think: We’re getting ready to go to sleep again. Spring… vanished. Summer… gone. Harvest-time… done. All that was left now was the butt end of autumn: leafless trees, frozen ground, a lacing of ice along the banks of the Kenduskeag. In the fields, crows would sometimes land on the shoulders of Moe, Larry, and Curly, and stay as long as they liked. The scarecrows were voiceless, threatless.

Mike would not exactly be dismayed by the thought of another year ending-at nine and ten he was still too young to make mortal metaphors-because there was plenty to look forward to: sledding in McCarron Park (or on Rhulin Hill out here in Derrytown if you were brave, although that was mostly for big kids), ice-skating, snowball fights, snowfort building. There was time to think about snowshoeing out for a Christmas tree with his daddy, and time to think about the Nordica downhill skis he might or might not get for Christmas. Winter was good… but watching his father drive the A back into the barn

(spring vanished summer gone harvest-time done)

always made him feel sad, the way the squadrons of birds heading south for the winter made him feel sad, or the way a certain slant of light could sometimes make him feel like crying for no good reason. We’re getting ready to go to sleep again…

It was not all school and chores, chores and school; Will Hanlon had told his wife more than once that a boy needed time to go fishing, even if it wasn’t fishing he was really doing. When Mike came home from school he first put his books on the TV in the parlor, second made himself some kind of snack (he was particularly partial to peanut-butter-and-onion sandwiches, a taste that made his mother raise her hands in helpless horror), and third studied the note his father had left him, telling Mike where he, Will, was and what Mike’s chores were-certain rows to be weeded or picked, baskets to be carried, produce to be rotated, the barn to be swept, whatever. But on at least one schoolday a week-and sometimes two-there would be no note. And on these days Mike would go fishing, even if it wasn’t really fishing he was doing. Those were great days… days when he had no particular place to go and consequently felt no urge to get there in a hurry.

Once in awhile his father left him another sort of note: “No chores,” one might say. “Go over to Old Cape amp; look at trolley tracks.” Mike would go over to the Old Cape area, find the streets with the tracks still embedded in them, and inspect them closely, marvelling to think of things like trains that had run right through the middle of the streets. That night he and his father might talk about them, and his dad would show him pictures from his Derry album of the trolleys actually running: a funny pole went from the roof of the trolley up to an electrical wire, and there were cigarette ads on the side. Another time he had sent Mike to Memorial Park, where the Standpipe was, to look at the birdbath, and once they had gone to the courthouse together to look at a terrible machine that Chief Borton had found in the attic. This gadget was called a tramp-chair. It was cast-iron, and there were manacles built into the arms and legs. Rounded knobs stuck out of the back and seat. It reminded Mike of a photograph he had seen in some book-a photograph of the electric chair at Sing Sing. Chief Borton let Mike sit in the tramp-chair and try on the manacles.

After the first ominous novelty of wearing the manacles wore off, Mike looked questioningly at his father and Chief Borton, not sure why this was supposed to be such a horrible punishment for the “vags” (Borton’s word for them) that had drifted into town in the twenties and thirties. The knobs made the chair a little uncomfortable to sit in, sure, and the manacles on your wrists and ankles made it hard to shift to a more comfortable position, but -

’Well, you’re just a kid,” Chief Borton said, laughing. “What do you weigh? Seventy, eighty pounds? Most of the vags Sheriff Sully posted into that chair in the old days would go twice that. They’d feel a bit oncomfortable after an hour or so, really oncomfortable after two or three, and right bad after four or five. After seven or eight hours they’d staat bellerin, and after sixteen or seventeen they’d staat cryin, mostly. And by the time their twenty-four-hour tour was up, they’d be willin to swear before God and man that the next time they came riding the rods up New England way they’d give Derry a wide berth. So far as I know, most of cm did. Twenty-four hours in the tramp-chair was a helluva persuader.”

Suddenly there seemed to be more knobs in the chair, digging more deeply into his buttocks, spine, the small of his back, even the nape of his neck. “Can I get out now, please?” he said politely, and Chief Borton laughed again. There was a moment, one panicked instant of time, when Mike thought the Chief would only dangle the key to the manacles in front of Mike’s eyes and say, Sure I’ll let you out… when your twenty-four hours is up.

“Why did you take me there, Daddy?” he asked on the way home.

“You’ll know when you’re older,” Will had replied.

“You don’t like Chief Borton, do you?”

“No,” his father had replied in a voice so curt that Mike hadn’t dared ask any more.

But Mike enjoyed most of the places in Derry his father sent or took him to, and by the time Mike was ten Will had succeeded in conveying his own interest in the layers of Derry’s history to his son. Sometimes, as when he had been trailing his fingers over the slightly pebbled surface of the stand in which the Memorial Park birdbath was set, or when he had squatted down to look more closely at the trolley tracks which grooved Mont Street in the Old Cape, he would be struck by a profound sense of time… time as something real, as something that had unseen weight, the way sunlight was supposed to have weight (some of the kids in school had laughed when Mrs Greenguss told them that, but Mike had been too stunned by the concept to laugh; his first thought had been, Light has weight? Oh my Lord, that’s terrible!)… time as something that would eventually bury him.

The first note his father left him in that spring of 1958 was scribbled on the back of an envelope and held down with a salt-shaker. The air was spring-warm, wonderfully sweet, and his mother had opened all the windows. No chores, the note read. If you want to, ride your bike out to Pasture Road. You’ll see a lot of tumbled masonry and old machinery out in the field on your left. Have a look around, bring back a souvenir. Don’t go near the cellarhole! And be back before dark. You know why.

Mike knew why, all right.

He told his mother where he was going and she frowned. “Why don’t you see if Randy Robinson wants to go with you?”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll stop by and ask him,” Mike said.

He did, too, but Randy had gone up to Bangor with his father to buy seedling potatoes. So Mike rode his bike over to Pasture Road alone. It was a goodish ride-a little over four miles. Mike reckoned it was three o’clock by the time he leaned his bike against an old wooden slat-fence on the left side of Pasture Road and climbed into the field beyond. He would have maybe an hour to explore and then he would have to start home again. Ordinarily, his mother would not be upset with him as long as he was back by six, when she put dinner on the table, but one memorable episode had taught him that wasn’t the case this year. On that one occasion when he had been late for dinner, she had been nearly hysterical. She took after him with a dishrag, whopping him with it as he stood open-mouthed in the kitchen entryway, his wicker creel with the rainbow trout in it at his feet.

“Don’t you ever scare me like that!” she had screamed. “don’t you ever! Don’t you ever! Ever-ever-ever!”

Each ever had been punctuated by another dishrag swat. Mike had expected his father to step in and put a stop to it, but his father hadn’t done so… Perhaps he knew that if he did she would turn her wildcat anger on him as well. Mike had learned the lesson; one whopping with the dishrag was all it took. Home before dark. Yes ma’am, right-o.

He walked across the field toward the titanic ruins standing in the center. This was, of course, the remains of the Kitchener Ironworks-he had ridden past it but had never thought to actually explore it, and he had never heard any kids saying that they had. Now, stooping to examine a few tumbled bricks that had formed a rough cairn, he thought he could understand why. The field was dazzlingly bright, washed by sun from the spring sky (occasionally, as a cloud passed before the sun, a great shutter of shadow would travel slowly across the field), but there was something spooky about it all the same-a brooding silence that was broken only by the wind. He felt like an explorer who has found the last remnants of some fabulous lost city.

Up ahead and to the right, he saw the rounded side of a massive tile cylinder rising out of the high field grass. He ran over to it. It was the Ironworks” main smokestack. He peered into its bore, and felt a fresh chill worm up his spine. It was big enough so he could have walked into it if he had wanted. But he didn’t want to; God knew what strange guck there might be, clinging to the smoke-blackened inner tiles, or what nasty bugs or beasts might have taken up residence inside. The wind gusted. When it blew across the mouth of the fallen stack it made a sound eerily like the sound of the wind vibrating the waxed strings he and his dad put in the mooseblowers every spring. He stepped back nervously, suddenly thinking about the movie he and his father had watched last night on the Early Show. It had been called Rodan, and watching it had seemed like great fun at the time, his father laughing and shouting “Git that bird, Mikey!” every time Rodan made its appearance, Mike shooting with his finger until his mom popped her head in and told them to hush up before they gave her a headache with the noise.

It didn’t seem so funny now. In the movie Rodan had been released from the bowels of the earth by these Japanese coal-miners who had been digging the world’s deepest tunnel. And looking into the black bore of this pipe, it was all too easy to imagine that bird crouched at the far end, leathery batlike wings folded over its back, staring at the small, round boyface looking into the darkness, staring, staring with its gold-ringed eyes…

Shivering, Mike pulled back.

He walked aways down the smokestack, which had sunken into the earth to half of its circumference. The land rose slightly, and on impulse he scrambled his way up on top. The stack was a lot less scary on the outside, its tiled surface sunwarm. He got to his feet and strolled along, holding his arms out (the surface was really too wide for him to need to worry about falling off, but he was pretending he was a tightwire-walker in the circus), liking the way the wind blew through his hair.

At the far end he jumped down and began to examine stuff: more bricks, twisted molds, hunks of wood, pieces of rusty machinery. Bring back a souvenir, his father’s note had said: he wanted a good one.

He wandered closer to the mill’s yawning cellarhold, looking at the debris, being careful not to cut himself on the broken glass. There was a lot of it around.

Mike was not unmindful of the cellarhold and his father’s warning to stay out of it; neither was he unmindful of the death that had been dealt out on this spot fifty-odd years before. He supposed that if there was a haunted place in Derry, this was it. But either in spite of that or because of it, he was determined to stay until he found something really good to take back and show his father.

He moved slowly and soberly toward the cellarhold, changing his course to parallel its ragged side, when a warning voice inside whispered that he was getting too close, that a bank weakened by the spring rains could crumble under his heels and pitch him into that hole, where God only knew how much sharp iron might be waiting to impale him like a bug, leaving him to die a rusty twitching death.

He picked up a window-sash and tossed it aside. Here was a dipper big enough for a giant’s table, its handle rippled and warped by some unimaginable flash of heat. Here was a piston too big for him to even budge, let alone lift. He stepped over it. He stepped over it and -

What if I find a skull? he thought suddenly. The skull of one of the kids who were killed here while they were hunting for chocolate Easter eggs back in nineteen-whenever-it-was?

He looked around the sunwashed empty field, nastily shocked by the idea. The wind blew a low conch-note in his ears and another shadow cruised silently across the field, like the shadow of a giant bat… or bird. He became aware all over again of how quiet it was here, and how strange the field looked with its straggling piles of masonry and its beached iron hulks leaning this way and that. It was as if some horrid battle had been fought here long ago.

Don’t be such a dip, he replied uneasily to himself. They found everything there was to find fifty years ago. After it happened. And even if they didn’t, some other kid-or grownup-would have found… the rest… since then. Or do you think you’re the only person who ever came here hunting for souvenirs?

No… no, I don’t think that. But…

But what? that rational side of his mind demanded, and Mike thought it was talking just a little too loud, a little too fast. Even if there was still something to find, it would have decayed long ago. So… what?

Mike found a splintered desk drawer in the weeds. He glanced at it, tossed it aside, and moved a little closer to the cellarhold, where the stuff was thickest. Surely he would find something there.

But what if there are ghosts? That’s but what. What if I see hands coming over the edge of that cellarhold, and what if they start to come up, kids in the remains of their Easter Sunday clothes, clothes that are all rotted and torn and marked with fifty years of spring mud and fall rain and caked winter snow? Kids with no heads (he had heard at school that, after the explosion, a woman had found the head of one of the victims in a tree in her back yard), kids with no legs, kids flayed open like codfish, kids just like me who would maybe come down and play… down there where it’s dark… under the leaning iron girders and the big old rusty cogs…

Oh, stop it, for the Lord’s sake!

But a shudder wrenched its way up his back and he decided it was time to take something-anything-and get the dickens out of here. He reached down, almost at random, and came up with a gear-toothed wheel about seven niches in diameter. He had a pencil in his pocket and he used it, quickly, to dig the dirt out of the teeth. Then he slipped his souvenir in his pocket. He would go now. He would go, yes -

But his feet moved slowly in the wrong direction, toward the cellarhold, and he realized with a dismal sort of horror that he needed to look down inside. He had to see.

He gripped a spongy support-beam leaning out of the earth and swayed forward, trying to see down and inside. He couldn’t quite do it. He had come to within fifteen feet of the edge, but that was still a little too far to see the bottom of the cellarhold.

I don’t care if I see the bottom or not. I’m going back now. I’ve got my souvenir. I don’t need to look down into any crummy old hole. And Daddy’s note said to stay away from it.

But the unhappy, almost feverish curiosity that had gripped him would not let go. He approached the cellarhold step by queasy step, aware that as soon as the wooden beam was out of his reach there would be no more grab-holds, also aware that the ground here was indeed squelchy and crumbly. In places along the edge he could see depressions, like graves that had fallen in, and knew that they were the sites of previous cave-ins.

Heart thudding in his chest like the hard measured strides of a soldier’s boots, he reached the edge and looked down.

Nested in the cellarhold, the bird looked up.

Mike was not at first sure what he was seeing. All the nerves and pathways in his body seemed frozen, including those which conducted thoughts. It was not just the shock of seeing a monster bird, a bird whose breast was as orange as a robin’s and whose feathers were the unremarkable fluffy gray of a sparrow’s feathers; most of it was the shock of the utterly unexpected. He had expected monoliths of machinery half-submerged in stagnant puddles and black mud; instead he was looking down into a giant nest which filled the cellarhold from end to end and side to side. It had been made out of enough timothy grass to make a dozen bales of hay, but this grass was silvery and old. The bird sat in the middle of it, its brightly ringed eyes as black as fresh, warm tar, and for an insane moment before his paralysis broke, Mike could see himself reflected in each of them.

Then the ground suddenly began to shift and run out from beneath his feet. He heard the tearing sound of shallow roots giving way and realized he was sliding.

With a yell he threw himself backward, pinwheeling his arms for balance. He lost it and thumped heavily to the littered ground. Some hard, dull chunk of metal pressed painfully into his back, and he had time to think of the tramp-chair before he heard the whirring, explosive sound of the bird’s wings.

He scrambled to his knees, crawled, looked back over his shoulder, and saw it rising out of the cellarhold. Its scaly talons were a dusky orange. Its beating wings, each more than ten feet across, blew the scraggy timothy grass this way and that, patternlessly, like the wind generated by helicopter rotors. It uttered a buzzing, chirruping scream. A few loose feathers slipped from its wings and spiraled back down into the cellarhold.

Mike gained his feet again and began to run.

He pounded across the field, not looking back now, afraid to look back. The bird did not look like Rodan, but he sensed it was the spirit of Rodan, risen from the cellarhold of the Kitchener Ironworks like a horrible bird-in-the-box. He stumbled, went to one knee, got up, and ran on.

That weird chirruping buzzing screech came again. A shadow covered him and when he looked up he saw the thing: it had passed less than five feet over his head. Its beak, dirty yellow, opened and closed, revealing a pink lining inside. It whirled back toward Mike. The wind it generated washed across his face, bringing a dry unpleasant smell with it: attic dust, dead antiques, rotting cushions.

He jigged to his left, and now he saw the fallen smokestack again. He sprinted for it, running all-out, his arms pumping in short jabbing strokes at his sides. The bird screamed, and he heard its fluttering wings. They sounded like sails. Something slammed into the back of his head. Warm fire traced its way up the nape of his neck. He felt it spread as blood began to trickle down the back of his shirt-collar.

The bird whirled around again, meaning to pick him up with its talons and carry him away like a hawk with a fieldmouse. Meaning to carry him back to its nest. Meaning to eat him.

As it flew at him, swooping down, its black, horribly alive eyes fixed on him, Mike cut sharply right. The bird missed him-barely. The dusty smell of its wings was overpowering, unbearable.

Now he was running parallel to the fallen smokestack, its tiles blurring by. He could see where it ended. If he could reach the end and buttonhook to the left, get inside, he might be safe. He thought the bird was too big to squeeze inside. He came very close to not making it. The bird flew at him again, pulling up as it closed in, its wings flapping and pushing air in a hurricane, its scaly talons now angled toward him and descending. It screamed again, and this time Mike thought he heard triumph in its voice.

He lowered his head, put his arm up, and rammed straight forward. The talons closed and for a moment the bird had him by the forearm. The grip was like the clutch of incredibly strong fingers tipped with tough nails. They bit like teeth. The bird’s flapping wings were a thunder in his ears; he was dimly aware of feathers falling around him, some brushing past his cheeks like phantom kisses. The bird rose then, and for just a moment Mike felt himself pulled upward, first straight, then on tiptoe… and for one freezing second he felt the toes of his Keds lose contact with the earth.

“Let me GO!” he screamed at it, and twisted his arm. For a moment the talons held on, and then the sleeve of his shirt ripped. He thumped back down. The bird squalled. Mike ran again, brushing through the thing’s tailfeathers, gagging at that dry smell. It was like running through a shower-curtain of feathers.

Still coughing, eyes stinging from both tears and whatever vile dust coated the bird’s feathers, he stumbled into the fallen smokestack. There was no thought now of what might be lurking inside. He ran into the darkness, his gasping sobs taking on a flat echo. He went back perhaps twenty feet and then turned toward the bright circle of daylight. His chest was rising and falling in quick jerks. He was suddenly aware that, if he had misjudged either the size of the bird or the size of the smokestack’s muzzle, he had killed himself as surely as if he had put his father’s shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. There was no way out. This wasn’t just a pipe; it was a blind alley. The other end of the stack was buried in the earth.

The bird squalled again, and suddenly the light at the end of the smokestack was blotted out as it lighted on the ground outside. He could see its yellow scaly legs, each as thick as a man’s cab’s. Then it cocked its head down and looked inside. Mike found himself again staring into those hideously bright fresh-tar eyes with their gold wedding-rings of iris. The bird’s beak opened and closed, opened and closed, and each time it snapped shut he heard an audible click, like the sound you hear in your own ears when you snap your teeth together hard. Sharp, he thought. Its beak is sharp. I guess I knew birds had sharp beaks, but I never really thought about it until now.

It squawked again. The sound was so loud in the tile throat of the stack that Mike clapped his hands to his ears.

The bird began to force itself into the mouth of the stack.

“No!” Mike cried. “No, you can’t!”

The light faded as more of the bird’s body pressed its way into the stack’s bore (Oh my Lord, why didn’t I remember it was mostly feathers? Why didn’t I remember it could squeeze?). The light faded… faded… was gone. Now there was only an inky blackness, the suffocating attic-smell of the bird, and the rustling sound of its feathers.

Mike fell on his knees and began to grope on the curved floor of the smokestack, his hands spread wide, feeling. He found a piece of broken tile, its sharp edges furred with what felt like moss. He cocked his arm back and pegged it. There was a thump. The bird uttered its buzzing, chirruping sound again.

“Get out of here!” Mike screamed.

There was silence… and then that crackly, rustling sound began again as the bird resumed forcing itself into the pipe. Mike felt along the floor, found other pieces of tile, and began to throw one after another. They thumped and thudded off the bird and then clinked to the tile sleeve of the smokestack.

Please, God, Mike thought incoherently. Please God, phase God, please God -

It came to him that he ought to retreat down the smokestack’s bore. He had run in through, what had been the stack’s base; it stood to reason that it would narrow as he backed up. He could retreat, yes, and listen to that low dusty rustle as the bird worked its way in after him. He could retreat, and if he was lucky he might get beyond the point where the bird could continue to advance.

But what if the bird got stuck?

If that happened, he and the bird would die in here together. They would die in here together and rot in here together. In the dark.

“Please, God!” he screamed, and was totally unaware that he had cried out aloud. He threw another piece of tile, and this time his throw was more powerful-he felt, he told the others much later, as if someone were behind him at that moment, and that someone had given his arm a tremendous push. This time there was no feathery thud; instead there was a splatting sound, the sound a kid’s hand might make slapping into the surface of a bowl of half-solidified Jell-O. This time the bird screamed not in anger but in real pain. The tenebrous whirr of its wings filled the smokestack; stinking air streamed past Mike in a hurricane, flapping his clothes, making him cough and gag and retreat as dust and moss flew.

Light appeared again, gray and weak at first, then brightening and shifting as the bird retreated from the stack’s muzzle. Mike burst into tears, fell to his knees again, and began grubbing madly for more pieces of tile. Without any conscious thought, he ran forward with both hands full of tiling (in this light he could see the pieces were splotched with blue-gray moss and lichen, like the surface of slate gravestones), until he was nearly at the mouth of the stack. He intended to keep the bird from coming back in if he could.

It bent down, cocking its head the way a trained bird on a perch will sometimes cock its head, and Mike saw where his last shot had struck home. The bird’s right eye was nearly gone. Instead of that glittering bubble of fresh tar, there was a crater filled with blood. Whitish-gray goo dripped from the corner of the socket and trickled along the side of the bird’s beak. Tiny parasites wriggled and squirmed in this pussy discharge.

It saw him and lunged forward. Mike began to throw chunks of tile at it. They struck its head and beak. It withdrew for a moment and then lunged again, beak opening, revealing that pink lining again, revealing something else that caused Mike to freeze for a moment, his own mouth dropping open. The bird’s tongue was silver, its surface as crazy-cracked as the surface of a volcanic land which has first baked and then slagged off.

And on this tongue, like weird tumbleweeds that had taken temporary root there, were a number of orange puffs.

Mike threw the last of his tiles directly into that gaping maw and the bird withdrew again, screaming its frustration, rage, and pain. For a moment Mike could see its reptilian talons… Then its wings ruffled the air and it was gone.

A moment later he lifted his face-a face that was gray-brown under the dirt, dust, and bits of moss that the bird’s wind-machine wings had blown at him-toward the clicking sound of its talons on the tile. The only clean places on Mike’s face were the tracks that had been washed clean by his tears.

The bird walked back and forth overhead: Tak-tak-tak-tak.

Mike retreated a bit, gathered up more chunks of tile, and heaped them as close to the mouth of the stack as he dared. If the thing came back, he wanted to be able to fire at it from point-blank range. The light outside was still bright-now that it was May, it wouldn’t get dark for a long time yet-but suppose the bird just decided to wait?

Mike swallowed, the dry sides of his throat rubbing together for a moment.

Overhead: Tak-tak-tak.

He had a fine pile of ammunition now. In the dim light, here beyond the place where the angle of the sun made a shadow-spiral inside the pipe, it looked like a pile of broken crockery swept together by a housewife. Mike rubbed the palms of his dirty hands along the sides of his jeans and waited to see what would happen next.

A space of time passed before something did-whether five minutes or twenty-five, he could not tell. He was only aware of the bird walking back and forth overhead like an insomniac pacing the floor at three in the morning.

Then its wings fluttered again. It landed in front of the smokestack’s opening. Mike, on his knees just behind his pile of tiling, began to peg missiles at it before it could even bend its head down. One of them slammed into a plated yellow leg and drew a trickle of blood so dark it seemed almost as black as the bird’s eyes. Mike screamed in triumph, the sound thin and almost lost under the bird’s own enraged squawk.

“Get out of here!” Mike cried. “I’m going to keep hitting you until you get out of here, I swear to God I will!”

The bird flew up to the top of the smokestack and resumed its pacing.

Mike waited.

Finally its wings ruffled again as it took off. Mike waited, expecting the yellow feet, so like hen’s feet, to appear again. They didn’t. He waited longer, convinced it had to be some kind of a trick, realizing at last that that wasn’t why he was waiting at all. He was waiting because he was scared to go out, scared to leave the safety of this bolthole.

Never mind! Never mind stuff like that! I’m not a rabbit!

He took as many chunks of tile as he could handle comfortably, then put some more inside his shirt. He stepped out of the smokestack, trying to look everywhere at once and wishing madly for eyes in the back of his head. He saw only the field stretching ahead and around him, littered with the exploded rusting remains of the Kitchener Ironworks. He wheeled around, sure he would see the bird perched on the lip of the stack like a vulture, a one-eyed vulture now, only wanting the boy to see him before it attacked for the final time, using that sharp beak to jab and rip and strip.

But the bird was not there.

It was really gone.

Mike’s nerve snapped.

He uttered a breaking scream of fear and ran for the weather-beaten fence between the field and the road, dropping the last pieces of tile from his hands. Most of the others fell out of his shirt as the shirt pulled free of his belt. He vaulted over the fence one-handed, like Roy Rogers showing off for Dale Evans on his way back from the corral with Pat Brady and the rest of the buckaroos. He grabbed the handlebars of his bike and ran beside it forty feet up the road before getting on. Then he pedaled madly, not daring to look back, not daring to slow down, until he reached the intersection of Pasture Road and Outer Main Street, where there were lots of cars passing back and forth.

When he got home, his father was changing the plugs on the tractor. Will observed that Mike looked powerful musty and dusty. Mike hesitated for just a split second and then told his father that he’d taken a tumble from his bike on the way home, swerving to avoid a pothole.

“Did you break anything, Mikey?” Will asked, observing his son a little more carefully.

“No, sir.”

“Sprains?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Sure?” * Mike nodded.

“Did you pick yourself up a souvenir?”

Mike reached into his pocket and found the gear-wheel. He showed it to his father, who looked at it briefly and then plucked a tiny crumb of tiling from the pad of flesh just below Mike’s thumb. He seemed more interested in this.

“From that old smokestack?” Will asked.

Mike nodded.

“You go inside there?”

Mike nodded again.

“See anything in there?” Will asked, and then, as if to make a joke of the question (which hadn’t sounded like a joke at all), he added: “Buried treasure?”

Smiling a little, Mike shook his head.

“Well, don’t tell your mother you was muckin about in there,” Will said.

“She’d shoot me first and you second.” He looked even more closely at his son.

“Mikey, are you all right?”

“Huh?”

“You look a little peaky around the eyes.”

“I guess I might be a little tired,” Mike said. “It’s eight or ten miles there and back again, don’t forget. You want some help with the tractor, Daddy?”

“No, I’m about done screwing it up for this week. You go on in and wash up.”

Mike started away, and then his father called to him once more. Mike looked back.

“I don’t want you going around that place again,” he said, “at least not until all this trouble is cleared up and they catch the man who’s doing it… you didn’t see anybody out there, did you? No one chased you, or hollered you down?”

“I didn’t see any people at all,” Mike said.

Will nodded and lit a cigarette. “I think I was wrong to send you there. Old

places like that… sometimes they can be dangerous.”

Their eyes locked briefly.

“Okay, Daddy,” Mike said. “I don’t want to go back anyway. It was a little spooky.”

Will nodded again. “Less said the better, I reckon. You go and get cleaned

up now. And tell her to put on three or four extra sausages.”

Mike did.

 

6

 

Never mind that now, Mike Hanlon thought, looking at the grooves which went up to the concrete edge of the Canal and stopped there. Never mind that, it might just have been a dream anyhow, and -

There were splotches of dried blood on the lip of the Canal.

Mike looked at these, and then he looked down into the Canal. Black water flowed smoothly past. Runners of dirty yellow foam clung to the Canal’s sides, sometimes breaking free to flow downstream in lazy loops and curves. For a moment-just a moment-two clots of this foam came together and seemed to form a face, a kid’s face, its eyes turned up in an avatar of terror and agony.

Mike’s breath caught, as if on a thorn.

The foam broke apart, became meaningless again, and at that moment there was a loud splash on his right. Mike snapped his head around, shrinking back a little, and for a moment he believed he saw something in the shadows of the outflow tunnel where the Canal resurfaced after its course under downtown.

Then it was gone.

Suddenly, cold and shuddering, he dug in his pocket for the knife he had found in the grass. He threw it into the Canal. There was a small splash, a ripple that began as a circle and was then tugged into the shape of an arrowhead by the current… then nothing.

Nothing except the fear that was suddenly suffocating him and the deadly certainty that there was something near, something watching him, gauging its chances, biding its time.

He turned, meaning to walk back to his bike-to run would be to dignify those fears and undignify himself-and then that splashing sound came again. It was a lot louder this second time. So much for dignity. Suddenly he was running as fast as he could, beating his buns for the gate and his bike, jamming the kickstand up with one heel and pedaling for the street as fast as he could. That sea-smell was all at once too thick… much too thick. It was everywhere. And the water dripping from the wet branches of the trees seemed much too loud.

Something was coming. He heard dragging, lurching footsteps in the grass.

He stood on the pedals, giving it everything, and shot out onto Main Street without looking back. He headed for home as fast as he could, wondering what in hell had possessed him to come in the first place… what had drawn him.

And then he tried to think about the chores, the whole chores, and nothing but the chores. After awhile he actually succeeded.

And when he saw the headline in the paper the next day (MISSING BOY PROMPTS NEW FEARS), he thought about the pocket knife he had thrown into the Canal-the pocket knife with the initials EC scratched on the side. He thought about the blood he had seen on the grass.

And he thought about those grooves which stopped at the edge of the Canal.

 

 

Chapter 7

THE DAM IN THE BARRENS

 

1

 

Seen from the expressway at quarter to five in the morning, Boston seems a city of the dead brooding over some tragedy in its past-a plague, perhaps, or a curse. The smell of salt, heavy and cloying, comes off the ocean. Runners of early-morning fog obscure much of what movement would be seen otherwise.

Driving north along Storrow Drive, sitting behind the wheel of the black ’84 Cadillac he picked up from Butch Carrington at Cape Cod Limousine, Eddie Kaspbrak thinks you can feel this city’s age; perhaps you can get that feeling of age nowhere else in America but here. Boston is a sprat compared with London, an infant compared with Rome, but by American standards at least it is old, old. It kept its place on these low hills three hundred years ago, when the Tea and Stamp Taxes were unthought of, Paul Revere and Patrick Henry unborn.

Its age, its silence, and the foggy smell of the sea-all of these things make Eddie nervous. When Eddie’s nervous he reaches for his aspirator. He sticks it in his mouth and triggers a cloud of revivifying spray down his throat.

There are a few people in the streets he’s passing, and a pedestrian or two on the walkways of the overpasses-they give lie to the impression that he has somehow wandered into a Lovecrafty tale of doomed cities, ancient evils, and monsters with unpronounceable names. Here, ganged around a bus stop with a sign reading KENMORE SQUARE CITY CENTER, he sees waitresses, nurses, city employees, their faces naked and puffed with sleep.

That’s right, Eddie thinks, now passing under a sign which reads TOBIN BRIDGE. That’s right, stick to the buses. Forget the subways. The subways are a bad idea; I wouldn’t go down there if I were you. Not down below. Not in the tunnels.

This is a bad thought to have; if he doesn’t get rid of it he will soon be using the aspirator again. He’s glad for the heavier traffic on the Tobin Bridge. He passes a monument works. Painted on the brick side is a slightly unsettling admonishment:

 

 

SLOW DOWN! WE CAN WAIT!

Here is a green reflectorized sign which reads TO 95 MAINE, N.H… ALL NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND POINTS. He looks at it and suddenly a bone-deep shudder wracks his body. His hands momentarily weld themselves to the wheel of the Cadillac. He would like to believe it is the onset of some sickness, a virus or perhaps one of his mother’s “phantom fevers,” but he knows better. It is the city behind him, poised silently on the straight-edge that runs between day and night, and what that sign promises ahead of him. He’s sick, all right, no doubt about that, but it’s not a virus or a phantom fever. He has been poisoned by his own memories.

I’m scared, Eddie thinks. That was always what was at the bottom of it. Just being scared. That was everything. But in the end I think we turned that around somehow. We used it. But how?

He can’t remember. He wonders if any of the others can. For all their sakes he certainly hopes so.

A truck drones by on his left. Eddie has still got his lights on and now he hits his brights momentarily as the truck draws safely ahead. He does this without thinking. It has become an automatic function, just part of driving for a living. The unseen driver in the truck flashes his running lights in return, quickly, twice, thanking Eddie for his courtesy. If only everything could be that simple and that clear, he thinks. He follows the signs to I-95. The northbound traffic is light, although he observes that the southbound lanes into the city are starting to fill up, even at this early hour. Eddie floats the big car along, pre-guessing most of the directional signs and getting into the correct lane long before he has to. It has been years-literally years-since he has guessed wrong enough to be swept past an exit he wanted. He makes his lane-choices as automatically as he flashed “okay to cut back in” to the trucker, as automatically as he once found his way through the tangle of paths in the Derry Barrens. The fact that he has never before in his life driven out of downtown Boston, one of the most confusing cities in America to drive in, does not seem to matter much at all.

He suddenly remembers something else about that summer, something Bill said to him one day: “Y-You’ve g-got a c-c-cuh-hompass in your head, E-E-Eddie.”

How that had pleased him! It pleases him again as the ’84 “dorado shoots back onto the turnpike. He slides the limo’s speed up to a cop-safe fifty-seven miles an hour and finds some quiet music on the radio. He supposes he would have died for Bill back then, if that had been required; if Bill had asked him, Eddie would simply have responded: “sure, Big Bill… you got a time in mind yet?”

Eddie laughs at this-not much of a sound, just a snort, but the sound of it startles him into a real laugh. He laughs seldom these days, and he certainly did not expect to find many chucks (Richie’s word, meaning chuckles, as in “You had any good chucks today, Eds?’) on this black pilgrimage. But, he supposes, if God is dirty-mean enough to curse the faithful with what they want most in life, He’s maybe quirky enough to deal you a good chuck or two along the way.

“Had any good chucks lately, Eds?” he says out loud, and laughs again. Man, he had hated it when Richie called him Eds… but he had sort of liked it, too. The way he thought Ben Hanscom got to like Richie calling him Haystack. It was something… like a secret name. A secret identity. A way to be people that had nothing to do with their parents” fears, hopes, constant demands. Richie couldn’t do his beloved Voices for shit, but maybe he did know how important it was for creeps like them to sometimes be different people.

Eddie glances at the change lined up neatly on the “dorado’s dashboard-lining up the change is another of those automatic tricks of the trade. When the tollbooths come up, you never want to have to dig for your silver, never want to find that you’ve gotten in an automatic-toll lane with the wrong change.

Among the coins are two or three Susan B. Anthony silver dollars. They are coins, he reflects, that you probably only find in the pockets of chauffeurs and taxi-drivers from the New York area these days, just as the only place you are apt to see a lot of two-dollar bills is at a race-track payoff window. He always keeps a few on hand because the robot tolltaker baskets on the George Washington and the Triboro Bridges take them.

Another of those lights suddenly comes on in his head: silver dollars. Not these fake copper sandwiches but real silver dollars, with Lady Liberty dressed in her gauzy robes stamped upon them. Ben Hanscom’s silver dollars. Yes, but wasn’t it Bill who once used one of those silver cartwheels to save their lives? He is not quite sure of this, is, in fact, not quite sure of anything… or is it just that he doesn’t want to remember?

It was dark in there, he thinks suddenly. I remember that much. It was dark

in there.

Boston is well behind him now and the fog is starting to bum off. Ahead is MAINE, N.H… ALL NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND POINTS. Derry is ahead, and there is something in Derry which should be twenty-seven years dead and yet is somehow not. Something with as many faces as Lon Chaney. But what is it really.” Didn’t they see it at the end as it really was, with all its masks cast aside?

Ah, he can remember so much… but not enough.

He remembers that he loved Bill Denbrough; he remembers that well enough. Bill never made fun of his asthma. Bill never called him little sissy queerboy. He loved Bill like he would have loved a big brother… or a father. Bill knew stuff to do. Places to go. Things to see. Bill was never up against it. When you ran with Bill you ran to beat the devil and you laughed… but you hardly ever ran out of breath. And hardly ever running out of breath was great, so fucking great, Eddie would tell the world. When you ran with Big Bill, you got your chucks every day.

“Sure, kid, EV-ery day,” he says in a Richie Tozier Voice, and laughs again.

It had been Bill’s idea to make the dam in the Barrens, and it was, in a way, the dam that had brought them all together. Ben Hanscom had been the one to show them how the dam could be built-and they had built it so well that they’d gotten in a lot of trouble with Mr Nell, the cop on the beat-but it had been Bill’s idea. And although all of them except Richie had seen very odd things-frightening things-in Derry since the turn of the year, it had been Bill who had first found the courage to say something out loud.

That dam.

That damn dam.

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

A day later, Ben Hanscom was grinning at them, saying:

“We could

“We could flood

“We could flood out the

 

2

 

whole Barrens, if we wanted to.”

Bill and Eddie looked at Ben doubtfully, and then at the stuff Ben had brought along with him: some boards (scrounged from Mr McKibbon’s back yard, but that was okay, since Mr McKibbon had probably scavenged them from someone else’s), a sledgehammer, a shovel.

“I dunno,” Eddie said, glancing at Bill. “When we tried yesterday, it didn’t work very good. The current kept washing our sticks away.”

“This’ll work,” Ben said. He also looked to Bill for the final decision.

“Well, let’s g-give it a t-t-try,” Bill said. “I c-called R-R-R-Richie Tozier this m-morning. He’s g-gonna be oh-over Mater, he s-said. Maybe him and Stuh-huh-hanley will want to h-help.”

“Stanley who?” Ben asked.

“Uris,” Eddie said. He was still looking cautiously at Bill, who seemed somehow different today-quieter, less enthusiastic about the idea of the dam. Bill looked pale today. Distant.

“Stanley Uris? I guess I don’t know him. Does he go to Derry Elementary?”

“He’s our age but he just finished the fourth grade,” Eddie said. “He started school a year late because he was sick a lot when he was a little kid. You think you took chong yesterday, you just oughtta be glad you’re not Stan. Someone’s always rackin Stan to the dogs an back.”

“He’s Juh-juh-hooish,” Bill said. “Luh-lots of k-kids don’t luh-hike him because h-he’s Jewish.”

“Oh yeah?” Ben asked, impressed. “Jewish, huh?” He paused and then said carefully: “Is that like being Turkish, or is it more like, you know, Egyptian?”

“I g-guess it’s more like Tur-hur-hurkish,” Bill said. He picked up one of the boards Ben had brought and looked at it. It was about six feet long and three feet wide. “My d-d-dad says most J-Jews have big nuh-noses and lots of m-m-money, but Stuh-Stuh-Stuh-”

“But Stan’s got a regular nose and he’s always broke,” Eddie said.

“Yeah,” Bill said, and broke into a real grin for the first time that day.

Ben grinned.

Eddie grinned.

Bill tossed the board aside, got up and brushed off the seat of his jeans. He walked to the edge of the stream and the other two boys joined him. Bill shoved his hands in his back pockets and sighed deeply. Eddie was sure Bill was going to say something serious. He looked from Eddie to Ben and then back to Eddie again, not smiling now. Eddie was suddenly afraid.

But all Bill said then was, “You got your ah-ah-aspirator, E-Eddie?”

Eddie slapped his pocket. “I’m loaded for bear.”

“Say, how’d it work with the chocolate milk?” Ben asked.

Eddie laughed. “Worked great!” he said. He and Ben broke up while Bill looked at them, smiling but puzzled. Eddie explained and Bill nodded, grinning again.

“E-E-Eddie’s muh-hum is w-w-worried that h-he’s g-gonna break and sh-she wuh-hon’t be able to g-get a re-re-refund.”

Eddie snorted and made as if to push him into the stream.

“Watch it, fuckface,” Bill said, sounding uncannily like Henry Bowers. “I’ll twist your head so far around you’ll be able to watch when you wipe yourself.”

Ben collapsed, shrieking with laughter. Bill glanced at him, still smiling, hands still in the back pockets of his jeans, smiling, yeah, but a little distant again, a little vague. He looked at Eddie and then cocked his head toward Ben.

“Kid’s suh-suh-soft,” he said.

“Yeah,” Eddie agreed, but he felt somehow that they were only going through the motions of having a good time. Something was on Bill’s mind. He supposed Bill would spill it when he was ready; the question was, did Eddie want to hear what it was? “Kid’s mentally retarded.”

“retreaded,” Ben said, still giggling.

“Y-You g-g-gonna sh-show us how to b-build a dam or a-are you g-g-gonna si-hit there on your b-big c-c-can all d-day?”

Ben got to his feet again. He looked first at the stream, flowing past them at moderate speed. The Kenduskeag was not terribly wide this far up in the Barrens, but it had defeated them yesterday just the same. Neither Eddie nor Bill had been able to figure out how to get a foothold on the current. But Ben was smiling, the smile of one who contemplates doing something new… something that will be fun but not very hard. Eddie thought: He knows how-I really think he does.

“Okay,” he said. “You guys want to take your shoes off, because you’re gonna get your little footsies wet.”

The mind-mother in Eddie’s head spoke up at once, her voice as stern and commanding as the voice of a traffic cop: Don’t you dare do it, Eddie! Don’t you dare! Wet feet, that’s one way-one of the thousands of ways-that colds start, and colds lead to pneumonia, so don’t you do it!

Bill and Ben were sitting on the bank, pulling off their sneakers and socks. Ben was fussily rolling up the legs of his jeans. Bill looked up at Eddie. His eyes were clear and warm, sympathetic. Eddie was suddenly sure Big Bill knew exactly what he had been thinking, and he was ashamed.

“Y-You c-c-comin?”

“Yeah, sure,” Eddie said. He sat down on the bank and undressed his feet while his mother ranted inside his head… but her voice was growing steadily more distant and echoey, he was relieved to note, as if someone had stuck a heavy fishhook through the back of her blouse and was now reeling her away from him down a very long corridor.

 

3

 

It was one of those perfect summer days which, in a world where everything was on track and on the beam, you would never forget. A moderate breeze kept the worst of the mosquitoes and blackflies away. The sky was a bright, crisp blue. Temperatures were in the low seventies. Birds sang and went about their birdy-business in the bushes and second-growth trees. Eddie had to use his aspirator once, and then his chest lightened and his throat seemed to widen magically to the size of a freeway. He spent the rest of the morning with it stuffed forgotten into his back pocket.

Ben Hanscom, who had seemed so timid and unsure the day before, became a confident general once he was fully involved in the actual construction of the dam. Every now and then he would climb the bank and stand there with his muddy hands on his hips, looking at the work in progress and muttering to himself. Sometimes he would run a hand through his hair, and by eleven o’clock it was standing up in crazy, comical spikes.

Eddie felt uncertainty at first, then a sense of glee, and finally an entirely new feeling-one that was at the same time weird, terrifying, and exhilarating. It was a feeling so alien to his usual state of being that he was not able to put a name to it until that night, lying in bed and looking at the ceiling and replaying the day. Power. That was what that feeling had been. Power. It was going to work, by God, and it was going to work better than he and Bill-maybe even Ben himself-had dreamed it could.

He could see Bill getting involved, too-only a little at first, still mulling over whatever it was he had on his mind, and then, bit by bit, committing himself fully. Once or twice he clapped Ben on one meaty shoulder and told him he was unbelievable. Ben flushed with pleasure each time.

Ben got Eddie and Bill to set one of the boards across the stream and hold it as he used the sledgehammer to seat it in the streambed. There-it’s in, but you’ll have to hold it or the current’ll just pull it loose,” he told Eddie, so Eddie stood in the middle of the stream holding the board while water sluiced over its top and made his hands into wavering starfish shapes.

Ben and Bill located a second board two feet downstream of the first. Ben used the sledge again to seat it and Bill held it while Ben began to fill up the space between the two boards with sandy earth from the stream-bank. At first it only washed away around the ends of the boards in gritty clouds and Eddie didn’t think it was going to work at all, but when Ben began adding rocks and muddy gook from the streambed, the clouds of escaping silt began to diminish. In less than twenty minutes he had created a heaped brown canal of earth and stones between the two boards in the middle of the stream. To Eddie it looked like an optical illusion.

“If we had real cement… instead of just… mud and rocks, they’d have to move the whole city… over to the Old Cape side by the middle of next week,” Ben said, slinging the shovel aside at last and sitting on the bank until he got his breath back. Bill and Eddie laughed, and Ben grinned at them. When he grinned, there was a ghost of the handsome man he would become in the lines of his face. Water had begun to pile up behind the upstream board now.

Eddie asked what they were going to do about the water escaping around the sides.

“Let it go. It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t explain exactly. You gotta let some out, though.”

“How do you know?”

Ben shrugged. I just do, the shrug said, and Eddie was silenced.

When he was rested, Ben got a third board-the thickest of the four or five he had carried laboriously across town to the Barrens-and placed it carefully against the downstream board, wedging one end firmly into the streambed and socking the other against the board Bill had been holding, creating the strut he had put in his little drawing the day before.

“Okay,” he said, standing back. He grinned at them. “You guys should be able to let go now. The gook in between the two boards will take most of the water pressure. The strut will take the rest.”

“Won’t the water wash it away?” Eddie asked.

“Nope. The water is just gonna push it in deeper.’

’And if you’re ruh-ruh-wrong, we g-get to k-k-kill yuh-you,” Bill said.

“That’s cool,” Ben said amiably.

Bill and Eddie stepped back. The two boards that formed the basis of the dam creaked a little, tilted a little… and that was all.

“Hot shit!” Eddie screamed, excited.

“It’s g-g-great,” Bill said, grinning.

“Yeah,” Ben said. “Let’s eat.”

 

4

 

They sat on the bank and ate, not talking much, watching the water stack up behind the dam and sluice around the ends of the boards. They had already done something to the geography of the streambanks, Eddie saw: the diverted current was cutting scalloped hollows into them. As he watched, the new course of the stream undercut the bank enough on the far side to cause a small avalanche.

Upstream of the dam the water formed a roughly circular pool, and at one place it had actually overflowed the bank. Bright, reflecting rills ran off into the grass and the underbrush. Eddie slowly began to realize what Ben had known from the first: the dam was already built. The gaps between the boards and the banks were sluiceways. Ben had not been able to tell Eddie this because he did not know the word. Above the boards the Kenduskeag had taken on a swelled look. The chuckling sound of shallow water babbling its way over stones and gravel was now gone; all the stones upstream of the dam were underwater. Every now and then more sod and dirt, undercut by the widening stream, would fall into the water with a splash.

Downstream of the dam the watercourse was nearly empty; thin trickles ran restlessly down its center, but that was about all. Stones which had been underwater for God knew how long were drying in the sun. Eddie looked at these drying stones with mild wonder… and that weird other feeling. They had done this. They. He saw a frog hopping along and thought maybe old Mr Froggy was wondering just where the water had gone. Eddie laughed out loud.

Ben was neatly stowing his empty wrappers in the lunchbag he had brought. Both Eddie and Bill had been amazed by the size of the repast Ben had laid out with businesslike efficiency: two PB amp;J sandwiches, one baloney sandwich, a hardcooked egg (complete with a pinch of salt twisted up in a small piece of waxed paper), two fig-bars, three large chocolate chip cookies, and a Ring-Ding.

“What did your ma say when she saw how bad you got racked?” Eddie asked him.

“Hmmmm?” Ben looked up from the spreading pool of water behind the dam and belched gently against the back of his hand. “Oh! Well, I knew she’d be grocery-shopping yesterday afternoon, so I was able to beat her home. I took a bath and washed my hair. Then I threw away the jeans and the sweatshirt I was wearing. I don’t know if she’ll notice they’re gone or not. Probably not the sweatshirt, I got lots of sweatshirts, but I guess I ought to buy myself a new pair of jeans before she gets nosing through my drawers.”

The thought of wasting his money on such a nonessential item cast momentary gloom across Ben’s face.

“W-W-What about the way yuh-you w-were b-bruised up?”

“I told her I was so excited to be out of school that I ran out the door and fell down the steps,” Ben said, and looked both amazed and a little hurt when Eddie and Bill began laughing. Bill, who had been chowing up a piece of his mother’s devil’s food cake, blew out a brown jet of crumbs and then had a coughing fit. Eddie, still howling, clapped him on the back.

“Well, I almost did fall down the steps,” Ben said. “Only it was because Victor Criss pushed me, not because I was running.”

“I’d be as h-hot as a tuh-tuh-tamale in a swuh-heatshirt like that,” Bill said, finishing the last bite of his cake.

Ben hesitated. For a moment it seemed he would say nothing. “It’s better when you’re fat,” he said finally. “sweatshirts, I mean.”

“Because of your gut?” Eddie asked.

Bill snorted. “Because of your tih-tih-tih-”

“Yeah, my tits. So what?”

“Yeah,” Bill said mildly. “s-So what?”

There was a moment of awkward silence and then Eddie said, “Look how dark the water’s getting when it goes around that side of the dam.”

“Oh, cripes!” Ben shot to his feet. “Current’s pulling out the fill! Jeez, I wish we had cement!”

The damage was quickly repaired, but even Eddie could see what would happen without someone there to almost constantly shovel in fresh fill: erosion would eventually cause the upstream board to collapse against the downstream board, and then everything would fall over.

“We can shore up the sides,” Ben said. That won’t stop the erosion, but it’ll slow it down.”

“If we use sand and mud, won’t it just go on washing away?” Eddie asked.

“We’ll use chunks of sod.”

Bill nodded, smiled, and made an O with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. “Let’s g-g-go. I’ll d-dig em and y-you sh-show me where to p-put em ih-in, Big Ben.”

From behind them a stridently cheery voice called: “My Gawd, someone put the Y-pool down in the Barrens, bellybutton lint and all!”

Eddie turned, noticing the way Ben tightened up at the sound of a strange voice, the way his lips thinned. Standing above them and aways upstream, on the path Ben had crossed the day before, were Richie Tozier and Stanley Uris.

Richie came bopping down to the stream, glanced at Ben with some interest, and then pinched Eddie’s check.

“Don’t do that! I hate it when you do that, Richie.”

“Ah, you love it, Eds,” Richie said, and beamed at him. “so what do you say? You havin any good chucks, or what?”

 

5

 

The five of them knocked off around four o’clock. They sat much higher on the bank-the place where Bill, Ben, and Eddie had eaten lunch was now underwater-and stared down at their handiwork. Even Ben found it a little difficult to believe. He felt a sense of tired accomplishment which was mixed with uneasy fright. He found himself thinking of Fantasia, and how Mickey Mouse had known enough to get the brooms started… but not enough to make them stop.

“Fucking incredible,” Richie Tozier said softly, and pushed his glasses up on his nose.

Eddie glanced over at him, but Richie was not doing one of his numbers now; his face was thoughtful, almost solemn.

On the far side of the stream, where the land first rose and then tilted shallowly downhill, they had created a new piece of bogland. Bracken and holly bushes stood in a foot of water. Even as they sat here they could see the bog sending out fresh pseudopods, spreading steadily westward. Behind the dam the Kenduskeag, shallow and harmless just this morning, had become a still, swollen band of water.

By two o’clock the widening pool behind the dam had taken so much embankment that the spillways had grown almost to the size of rivers themselves. Everyone but Ben had gone on an emergency expedition to the dump in search of more materials. Ben stuck around, methodically sodding up leaks. The scavengers had returned not only with boards but with four bald tires, the rusty door of a 1949 Hudson Hornet, and a big piece of corrugated-steel siding. Under Ben’s leadership they had built two wings on the original dam, blocking off the water’s escape around the sides again-and, with the wings raked back at an angle against the current, the dam worked even better than before.

“Stopped that sucker cold,” Richie said. “You’re a genius, man.”

Ben smiled. “It’s not so much.”

“I got some Winstons,” Richie said. “Who wants one?”

He produced the crumpled red-and-white pack from his pants pocket and passed it around. Eddie, thinking of the hell a cigarette would raise with his asthma, refused. Stan also refused. Bill took one, and, after a moment’s thought, Ben took one, too. Richie produced a book of matches with the words ROI-TAN on the outside, and lit first Ben’s cigarette, then Bill’s. He was about to light his own when Bill blew out the match.

“Thanks a lot, Denbrough, you wet,” Richie said.

Bill smiled apologetically. “The-The-Three on a muh-muh-hatch,” he said. “B-Bad luh-luh-luck.”

“Bad luck for your folks when you were born,” Richie said, and lit his cigarette with another match. He lay down and crossed his arms beneath his head. The cigarette jutted upward between his teeth. “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.” He turned his head slightly and winked at Eddie. “Ain’t that right, Eds?”

Ben, Eddie saw, was looking at Richie with a mixture of awe and wariness. Eddie could understand that. He had known Richie Tozier for four years, and he still didn’t really understand what Richie was about. He knew that Richie got A’s and B’s in his schoolwork, but he also knew that Richie regularly got C’s and D’s in deportment. His father really racked him about it and his mother just about cried every time Richie brought home those poor conduct grades, and Richie would swear to do better, and maybe he even would… for a quarter or two. The trouble with Richie was that he couldn’t keep still for more than a minute at a time and he couldn’t keep his mouth shut at all. Down here in the Barrens that didn’t get him in much trouble, but the Barrens weren’t Never-Never Land and they couldn’t be the Wild Boys for more than a few hours at a stretch (the idea of a Wild Boy with an aspirator in his back pocket made Eddie smile). The trouble with the Barrens was that you always had to leave. Out there in the wider world, Richie’s bullshit was always getting him in trouble-with adults, which was bad, and with guys like Henry Bowers, which was even worse.

His entrance earlier today was a perfect example. Ben Hanscom had no more than started to say in when Richie had fallen on his knees at Ben’s feet. He then began a series of gigantic salaams, his arms outstretched, his hands fwapping against the muddy bank every time he bowed again. At the same time he had begun to speak in one of his Voices.

Richie had about a dozen different Voices. His ambition, he had told Eddie one rainy afternoon when they were in the little raftered room over the Kaspbrak garage reading Little Lulu comic books, was to become the world’s greatest ventriloquist. He was going to be even greater than Edgar Bergen, he said, and he would be on The Ed Sullivan Show every week. Eddie admired this ambition but foresaw problems with it. First, ail of Richie’s Voices sounded pretty much like Richie Tozier. This was not to say Richie could not be very funny from time to time; he could be. When referring to verbal zingers and loud farts, Richie’s terminology was the same: he called it Getting Off A Good One, and he got off Good Ones of both types frequently… usually in inappropriate company, however. Second, when Richie did ventriloquism, his lips moved. Not just a little, on the “p”-and “b”-sounds, but a lot, and on all the sounds. Third, when Richie said he was going to throw his voice, it usually didn’t go very far. Most of his friends were too kind-or too bemused with Richie’s sometimes enchanting, often exhausting charm-to mention these little failings to him.

Salaaming frantically in front of the startled and embarrassed Ben Hanscom, Richie was speaking in what he called his Nigger Jim Voice.

“Lawks-a-mussy, it’s be Haystack Calhoun!” Richie screamed. “don’t fall on me, Mistuh Haystack, suh! You’se gwineter cream me if you do! Lawks-a-mussy, lawks-a-mussy! Three hunnert pounds of swaingin meat, eighty-eight inches from tit to tit, Haystack be smellin jest like a loader panther shit! I’se gwineter leadjer inter de raing, Mistuh Haystack, suh! I’se sho enuf gwineter leadjer! Jest don’tchoo be fallin on dis yere black boy!”

“D-Don’t wuh-worry,” Bill said. “It’s j-j-just Ruh-Ruh-Richie. He’s c-c-crazy.”

Richie bounced to his feet. “I heard that, Denbrough. You better leave me alone or I’ll sic Haystack here on you.”

“B-Best p-p-part of you r-ran down your fuh-fuh-hather’s l-l-leg,” Bill said.

“True,” Richie said, “but look how much good stuff was left. How ya doin, Haystack? Richie Tozier is my name, doing Voices is my game.” He popped his hand out. Thoroughly confused, Ben reached for it. Richie pulled his hand back. Ben bunked. Relenting, Richie shook.

“My name’s Ben Hanscom, in case you’re interested,” Ben said.

“Seen you around school,” Richie said. He swept a hand at the spreading pool of water. “This must have been your idea. These wet ends couldn’t light a firecracker with a flamethrower.”

“Speak for yourself, Richie,” Eddie said.

“Oh-you mean it was your idea, Eds? Jesus, I’m sorry.” He fell down in front of Eddie and began salaaming wildly again.

“Get up, stop it, you’re splattering mud on me!” Eddie cried.

Richie jumped to his feet a second time and pinched Eddie’s cheek. “Cute, cute, cute!” Richie exclaimed.

“Stop it, I hate that!”

“Fess up, Eds-who built the dam?”

“B-B-Ben sh-showed us,” Bill said.

“Good deal.” Richie turned and discovered Stanley Uris standing behind him, hands in his pockets, watching quietly as Richie put on his show. This here’s Stan the Man Uris,” Richie told Ben. “stan’s a Jew. Also, he killed Christ. At least that’s what Victor Criss told me one day. I been after Stan ever since. I figure if he’s that old, he ought to be able to buy us some beer. Right, Stan?”

“I think that must have been my father,” Stan said in a low, pleasant voice, and that broke them all up, Ben included. Eddie laughed until he was wheezing and tears were running down his face.

“A Good One!” Richie cried, striding around with his arms thrown up over his head like a football referee signalling that the extra point was good. “stan the Man Gets Off A Good One! Great Moments in History! Yowza-Yowza-YOWza!”

“Hi,” Stan said to Ben, seeming to take no notice of Richie at all.

“Hello,” Ben replied. “We were in the same class in second grade. You were the kid who-”

“-never said anything,” Stan finished, smiling a little.

“Right.”

“Stan wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful,” Richie said. “Which he FREE-quently does-yowza-yowza-YOW-”

“Sh-Sh-Shut uh-up, Richie,” Bill said.

“Okay, but first I have to tell you one more thing, much as I hate to. I think you’re losing your dam. Valley’s gonna flood, pardners. Let’s get the women and children out first.”

And without bothering to roll up his pants-or even to remove his sneakers-Richie jumped into the water and began to slam sods into place on the nearside wing of the dam, where the persistent current was pulling fill out in muddy streamers again. A piece of Red Cross adhesive tape was wrapped around one of the bows of his glasses, and the loose end flapped against his cheekbone as he worked. Bill caught Eddie’s eye, smiled a Little, and shrugged. It was just Richie. He could drive you bugshit… but it was still sort of nice to have him around.

They worked on the dam for the next hour or so. Richie took Ben’s commands-which had become rather tentative again, with two more kids to general-with perfect willingness, and fulfilled them at a manic pace. When each mission was completed he reported back to Ben for further orders, executing a backhand British salute and snapping the soggy heels of his sneakers together. Every now and then he would begin to harangue the others in one of his Voices: the German Commandant, Toodles the English Butler, the Southern Senator (who sounded quite a bit like Foghorn Leghorn and who would, in the fullness of time, evolve into a character named Buford Kissdrivel), the MovieTone Newsreel Narrator.

The work did not just go forward; it sprinted forward. And now, shortly before five o’clock, as they sat resting on the bank, it seemed that what Richie had said was true: they had stopped the sucker cold. The car door, the piece of corrugated steel, and the old tires had become the second stage of the dam, and it was backstopped by a huge sloping hill of earth and stones. Bill, Ben, and Richie smoked; Stan was lying on his back. A stranger might have thought he was just looking at the sky, but Eddie knew better. Stan was looking into the trees on the other side of the stream, keeping an eye out for a bird or two he could write up in his bird notebook that night. Eddie himself just sat cross-legged, feeling pleasantly tired and rather mellow. At that moment the others seemed to him like the greatest bunch of guys to chum with a fellow could ever hope to have. They felt right together; they fitted neatly against each other’s edges. He couldn’t explain it to himself any better than that, and since it didn’t really seem to need any explaining, he decided he ought to just let it be.

He looked over at Ben, who was holding his half-smoked cigarette clumsily and spitting frequently, as if he didn’t like the taste of it much. As Eddie watched, Ben stubbed it out and covered the long butt with dirt.

Ben looked up, saw Eddie watching him, and looked away, embarrassed.

Eddie glanced at Bill and saw something on Bill’s face that he didn’t like. Bill was looking across the water and into the trees and bushes on the far side, his eyes gray and thoughtful. That brooding expression was back on his face. Eddie thought Bill looked almost haunted.

As if reading his thought, Bill looked around at him. Eddie smiled, but Bill didn’t smile back. He put his cigarette out and looked around at the others. Even Richie had withdrawn into the silence of his own thoughts, an event which occurred about as seldom as a lunar eclipse.

Eddie knew that Bill rarely said anything important unless it was perfectly quiet, because it was so hard for him to speak. And he suddenly wished he had something to say, or that Richie would start in with one of his Voices. He was suddenly sure Bill was going to open his mouth and say something terrible, something which would change everything. Eddie reached automatically for his aspirator, pulled it out of his back pocket, and held it in his hand. He did this without even thinking about it.

“C-Can I tell you g-g-guys suh-homething?” Bill asked.

They all looked at him. Crack a joke, Richie! Eddie thought. Crack a joke, say something really outrageous, embarrass him, I don’t care, just shut him up. Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want things to change, I don’t want to be scared.

In his mind a tenebrous, croaking voice whispered: I’ll do it for a dime,

Eddie shuddered and tried to unthink that voice, and the sudden image it called up in his mind: the house on Neibolt Street, its front yard overgrown with weeds, gigantic sunflowers nodding in the untended garden off to one side.

“Sure, Big Bill,” Richie said. “What’s up?”

Bill opened his mouth (more anxiety on Eddie’s part), closed it (blessed relief for Eddie), and then opened it again (renewed anxiety).

“I-I-If you guh-guh-guys l-l-laugh, I-I’ll never h-hang around with you again,” Bill said. “It’s cuh-cuh-crazy, but I swear I’m not muh-haking it up. It r-r-really happened.”

“We won’t laugh,” Ben said. He looked around at the others. “Will we?”

Stan shook his head. So did Richie.

Eddie wanted to say, Yes we will too, Billy, we’ll laugh our heads off and say you’re really stupid, so why don’t you shut up right now? But of course he could not say any such thing. This was, after all, Big Bill. He shook his head miserably. No, he wouldn’t laugh. He had never felt less like laughing in his life.

They sat there above the dam Ben had showed them how to make, looking from Bill’s face to the expanding pool and the likewise expanding bog beyond it and then back to Bill’s face again, listening silently as he told them about what had happened when he opened George’s photograph album-how Georgie’s school photograph had turned its head and winked at him, how the book had bled when he threw it across the room. It was a long, painful recital, and by the time he finished Bill was red-faced and sweating. Eddie had never heard him stutter so badly.

At last, though, the tale was told. Bill looked around at them, both defiant and afraid. Eddie saw an identical expression on the faces of Ben, Richie, and Stan. It was solemn, awed fear. It was not in the slightest tinctured by disbelief. An urge came to him then, an urge to spring to his feet and shout: What a crazy story! You don’t believe that crazy story, do you, and even if you do, you don’t believe we believe it, do you? School pictures can’t wink! Books can’t bleed! You’re out of your mind, Big Bill!

But he couldn’t very well do so, because that expression of solemn fear was also on his own face. He couldn’t see it but he could feel it.

Come back here, kid, the hoarse voice whispered. I’ll blow you for free. Come back here!

No, Eddie moaned at it. Please, go away, I don’t want to think about that.

Come back here, kid.

And now Eddie saw something else-not on Richie’s face, at least he didn’t think so, but on Stan’s and Ben’s for sure. He knew what that something else was; knew because that expression was on his own face, too.

Recognition.

“I’ll blow you for free.

The house at 29 Neibolt Street was just outside the Derry trainyards. It was old and boarded up, its porch gradually sinking back into the ground, its lawn an overgrown field. An old trike, rusting and overturned, hid in that long grass, one wheel sticking up at an angle.

But on the left side of the porch there was a huge bald patch in the lawn and you could see dirty cellar windows set into the house’s crumbling brick foundation. It was in one of those windows that Eddie Kaspbrak first saw the face of the leper six weeks ago.

 

6

 

On Saturdays, when Eddie could find no one to play with, he often went down to the trainyards. No real reason; he just liked to go out there.

He would ride his bike out Witcham Street and then cut to the northwest along Route 2 where it crossed Witcham. The Neibolt Street Church School stood on the corner of Route 2 and Neibolt Street a mile or so farther on. It was a shabby-neat wood-frame building with a large cross on top and the words SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME written over the front door in gilt letters two feet high. Sometimes, on Saturdays, Eddie heard music and singing coming from inside. It was gospel music, but whoever was playing the piano sounded more like Jerry Lee Lewis than a regular church piano player. The singing didn’t sound very religious to Eddie, either, although there was lots of stuff in it about “beautiful Zion” and being “washed in the blood of the lamb” and “what a friend we have in Jesus.” The people singing seemed to be having much too good a time for it to really be sacred singing, in Eddie’s opinion. But he liked the sound of it all the same-the way he liked to hear Jerry Lee hollering out “Whole Lotta Shakin” Goin” On.” Sometimes he would stop for awhile across the street, leaning his bike against a tree and pretending to read on the grass, actually jiving along to the music.

Other Saturdays the Church School would be shut up and silent and he would ride out to the trainyard without stopping, out to where Neibolt Street ended in a parking lot with weeds growing up through the cracks in the asphalt. There he would lean his bike against the wooden fence and watch the trains go by. There were a lot of them on Saturdays. His mother told him that in the old days you could catch a GS amp;WM passenger train at what was then Neibolt Street Station, but the passenger trains had stopped running around the time the Korean War was starting up. “If you got on the northbound train you went to Brownsville Station,” she said, “and from Brownsville you could catch a train that would take you all the way across Canada if you wanted, all the way to the Pacific. The southbound tram would take you to Portland and then on down to Boston, and from South Station the country was yours. But the passenger trains have gone the way of the trolley lines now, I guess. No one wants to ride a train when they can just jump in a Ford and go. You may never even ride one.”

But great long freights still came through Derry. They headed south loaded down with pulpwood, paper, and potatoes, and north with manufactured goods for those towns of what Maine people sometimes called the Big Northern-Bangor, Millinocket, Machias, Presque Isle, Houlton. Eddie particularly liked to watch the northbound car-carriers with their loads of gleaming Fords and Chevies. I’ll have me a car like one of those someday, he promised himself. Like one of those or even better. Maybe even a Cadillac!

There were six tracks in all, swooping into the station like strands of cobweb tending toward the center: Bangor and Great Northern Lines from the north, the Great Southern and Western Maine from the west, the Boston and Maine from the south, and Southern Seacoast from the east.

One day two years before, when Eddie had been standing near the latter line and watching a train go through, a drunken trainman had thrown a crate out of a slow-moving boxcar at Mm. Eddie ducked and flinched backward, although the crate landed in the cinders ten feet away. There were things inside it, live things that clicked and moved. “Last ran, boy!” the drunken trainman had shouted. He pulled a flat brown bottle from one of the pockets of his denim jacket, tipped it up, drank, then flipped it into the cinders, where it smashed. The trainman pointed at the crate. “Take em home to yer mum! Compliments of the Southern-Fucking-Seacoast-Bound-for-Welfare Line!” He had reeled forward to shout these last words as the train pulled away, gathering speed now, and for one alarming moment Eddie thought he was going to tumble right out.

When the train was gone, Eddie went to the box and bent cautiously over it. He was afraid to get too close. The things inside were slithery and crawly. If the trainman had yelled that they were for him, Eddie would have left them right there. But he had said take em home to your Mom, and, like Ben, when someone said Mom, Eddie jumped.

He scrounged a hank of rope from one of the empty quonset warehouses and tied the crate onto the package carrier of his bike. His mother had peered inside the crate even more warily than Eddie himself, and then she screamed-but with delight rather than terror. There were four lobsters in the crate, big two-pounders with their claws pegged. She cooked them for supper and had been extremely grumpy with Eddie when he wouldn’t eat any.

“What do you think the Rockefellers are eating this evening at their place in Bar Harbor?” she asked indignantly. “What do you think the swells are eating at Twenty-one and Sardi’s in New York City? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? They’re eating lobster, Eddie, same as we are! Now come on-give it a try.”

But Eddie wouldn’t-at least that was what his mother said. Maybe it was true, but inside it felt more to Eddie like couldn’t than wouldn’t. He kept thinking of the way they had slithered inside the crate, and the clicking sounds their claws had made. She kept telling him how delicious they were and what a treat he was missing until he started to gasp for breath and had to use his aspirator. Then she left him alone.

Eddie retreated to his bedroom and read. His mother called up her friend Eleanor Dunton. Eleanor came over and the two of them read old copies of Photoplay and Screen Secrets and giggled over the gossip columns and gorged themselves on cold lobster salad. When Eddie got up for school the next morning, his mother was still in bed, snoring away and letting frequent farts that sounded like long, mellow cornet notes (she was Getting Off Some Good Ones, Richie would have said). There was nothing left in the bowl where the lobster salad had been except a few tiny blots of mayonnaise.

That was the last Southern Seacoast train Eddie ever saw, and when he later saw Mr Braddock, the Derry trainmaster, he asked him hesitantly what had happened. “Cump’ny went broke,” Mr Braddock said. “That’s all there was to it. Don’t you read the papers? It’s hap’nin ail over the damn country. Now get out of here. This ain’t no place for a kid.”

After that Eddie would sometimes walk along track 4, which had been the Southern Seacoast track, and listen as a mental conductor chanted names inside his head, reeling them off in a lovely Downcast monotone, those names, those magic names: Camden, Rockland, Bar Harbor (pronounced Baa Haabaa), Wiscasset, Bath, Portland, Ogunquit, the Berwicks; he would walk down track 4 heading east until he got tired, and the weeds growing up between the crossties made him feel sad. Once he had looked up and seen seagulls (probably just fat old dump-gulls who didn’t give a shit if they ever saw the ocean, but that had not occurred to him then) wheeling and crying overhead, and the sound of their voices had made him cry a little, too.

There had once been a gate at the entrance to the trainyards, but it had blown over in a windstorm and no one had bothered to replace it. Eddie came and went pretty much as he liked, although Mr Braddock would kick him out if he saw him (or any other kid, for that matter). There were truck-drivers who would chase you sometimes (put not very far) because they thought you were hanging around just so you could hawk something-and sometimes kids did.

Mostly, though, the place was quiet. There was a guard-booth but it was empty, its glass windows broken by stones. There had been no full-time security service since 1950 or so. Mr Braddock shooed the kids away by day and a night-watchman drove through four or five times a night in an old Studebaker with a searchlight mounted outside the vent window and that was all.

There were tramps and hobos sometimes, though. If anything about the trainyards scared Eddie, they did-men with unshaven cheeks and cracked skin and blisters on their hands and coldsores on their lips. They rode the rails for awhile and then climbed down for awhile and spent some time in Derry and then got on another train and went somewhere else. Sometimes they had missing fingers. Usually they were drunk and wanted to know if you had a cigarette.

One of these fellows had crawled out from under the porch of the house at 29 Neibolt Street one day and had offered to give Eddie a blowjob for a quarter. Eddie had backed away, his skin like ice, his mouth as dry as lintballs. One of the hobo’s nostrils had been eaten away. You could look right into the red, scabby channel.

“I don’t have a quarter,” Eddie said, backing toward his bike.

“I’ll do it for a dime,” the hobo croaked, coming toward him. He was wearing old green flannel pants. Yellow puke was stiffening across the lap. He unzipped his fly and reached inside. He was trying to grin. His nose was a red horror.

“I… I don’t have a dime, either,” Eddie said, and suddenly thought: Oh my God he’s got leprosy! If he touches me I’ll catch it too! His control snapped and he ran. He heard the hobo break into a shuffling run behind him, his old string-tied shoes slapping and flapping across the riotous lawn of the empty saltbox house.

“Come back here, kid! I’ll blow you for free. Come back here!”

Eddie had leaped on his bike, wheezing now, feeling his throat closing up to a pinhole. His chest had taken on weight. He hit the pedals and was just picking up speed when one of the hobo’s hands struck the package carrier. The bike shimmied. Eddie looked over his shoulder and saw the hobo running along behind the rear wheel (!!GAINING!!), his lips drawn back from the black stumps of his teeth in an expression which might have been either desperation or fury.

In spite of the stones lying on his chest Eddie had pedaled even faster, expecting that one of the hobo’s scab-crusted hands would close over his arm at any moment, pulling him from his Raleigh and dumping him in the ditch, where God knew what would happen to him. He hadn’t dared look around until he had flashed past the Church School and through the Route 2 intersection. The “bo was gone.

Eddie held this terrible story inside him for almost a week and then confided it to Richie Tozier and Bill Denbrough one day when they were reading comics over the garage.

“He didn’t have leprosy, you dummy,” Richie said. “He had the Syph.”

Eddie looked at Bill to see if Richie was ribbing him-he had never heard of a disease called the Sift before. It sounded like something Richie might have made up.

“Is there such a thing as the Sift, Bill?”

Bill nodded gravely. “Only it’s the Suh-Suh-Syph, not the Sift. It’s s-short for syphilis.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a disease you get from fucking,” Richie said. “You know about fucking, don’t you, Eds?”

“Sure,” Eddie said. He hoped he wasn’t blushing. He knew that when you got older, stuff came out of your penis when it was hard. Vincent “Boogers” Taliendo had filled him in on the rest one day at school. What you did when you fucked, according to Boogers, was you rubbed your cock against a girl’s stomach until it got hard (your cock, not the girl’s stomach). Then you rubbed some more until you started to “get the feeling.” When Eddie asked what that meant, Boogers had only shaken his head in a mysterious way. Boogers said that you couldn’t describe it, but you’d know it as soon as you got it. He said you could practice by lying in the bathtub and rubbing your cock with Ivory soap (Eddie had tried this, but the only feeling he got was the need to urinate after awhile). Anyway, Boogers went on, after you “got the feeling,” this stuff came out of your penis. Most kids called it come, Boogers said, but his big brother had told him that the really scientific word for it was jizzum. And when you “got the feeling,” you had to grab your cock and aim it real fast so you could shoot the jizzum into the girl’s bellybutton as soon as it came out. It went down into her stomach and made a baby there.

Do girls like that’? Eddie had asked Boogers Taliendo. He himself was sort of appalled.

I guess they must, Boogers had replied, looking mystified himself.

“Now listen up, Eds,” Richie said, “because there may be questions later. Some women have got this disease. Some men, too, but mostly it’s women. A guy can get it from a woman-”

“Or another g-g-guy if they’re kwuh-kwuh-queer,” Bill added.

“Right. The important thing is you get the Syph from screwing someone who’s already got it.”

“What does it do?” Eddie asked.

“Makes you rot,” Richie said simply.

Eddie stared at him, horrified.

“It’s bad, I know, but it’s true,” Richie said. “Your nose is the first thing to go. Some guys with the Syph, their noses fall right off. Then their cocks.”

“Puh-Puh-Puh-leeze,” Bill said. “I just a-a-ate.”

“Hey, man, this is science,” Richie said.

“So what’s the difference between leprosy and the Syph?” Eddie asked.

“You don’t get leprosy from fucking,” Richie said promptly, and then went off into a gale of laughter that left both Bill and Eddie mystified.

 

7

 

Following that day the house at 29 Neibolt Street had taken on a kind of glow in Eddie’s imagination. Looking at its weedy yard and its slumped porch and the boards nailed across its windows, he would feel an unhealthy fascination take hold of him. And six weeks ago he had parked his bike on the gravelly verge of the street (the sidewalk ended four houses farther back) and walked across the lawn toward the porch of that house.

His heart had been beating hard in his chest, and his mouth had that dry taste again-listening to Bill’s story of the dreadful picture, he knew that what he had felt when approaching that house was about the same as what Bill had felt going into George’s room. He did not feel as if he was in control of himself. He felt pushed.

It did not seem as if his feet were moving; instead the house itself, brooding and silent, seemed to draw closer to where he stood.

Faintly, he could hear a diesel engine in the trainyard-that and the liquid-metallic slam of couplings being made. They were shunting some cars onto sidings, picking up others. Making a train.

His hand gripped his aspirator, but, oddly, his asthma had not closed down as it had on the day he fled from the hobo with the rotted nose. There was only that sense of standing still and watching the house slide stealthily toward him, as if on a hidden track.

Eddie looked under the porch. There was no one there. It was not really surprising. This was spring, and hobos showed up most frequently in Derry from late September to early November. During those six weeks or so a man could pick up day-work on one of the outlying farms if he looked even half-decent. There were potatoes and apples to pick, snowfence to string, barn and shed roofs which needed to be patched before December came along, whistling up winter.

No hobos under the porch, but plenty of sign they had been there. Empty beer cans, empty beer bottles, empty liquor bottles. A dirt-crusted blanket lay against the brick foundation like a dead dog. There were drifts of crumpled newspapers and one old shoe and a smell like garbage. There were thick layers of old leaves under there.

Not wanting to do it but unable to help himself, Eddie had crawled under the porch. He could feel his heartbeat slamming in his head now, driving white spots of light across his field of vision.

The smell was worse underneath-booze and sweat and the dark brown perfume of decaying leaves. The old leaves didn’t even crackle under his hands and knees. They and the old newspapers only sighed.

I’m a hobo, Eddie thought incoherently. I’m a hobo and I ride the rods. That’s what I do. Ain’t got no money, ain’t got no home, but I got me a bottle and a dollar and a place to sleep. I’ll pick apples this week and potatoes the week after that and when the frost locks up the ground like money inside a bank vault, why, I’ll hop a GS amp;WM box that smells of sugar-beets and I’ll sit in the corner and pull some hay over me if there is some and I’ll drink me a little drink and chew me a link chew and sooner or later I’ll get to Portland or Beantown, and if I don’t get busted by a railroad security dick I’ll hop one of those “Bama Star boxes and head down south and when I get there I’ll pick lemons or limes or oranges. And if I get nagged I’ll build roads for tourists to ride on. Hell, I done it before, ain’t I? I’m just a lonesome old hobo, ain’t got no money, ain’t got no home, but I got me one thing; I got me a disease that’s eating me up. My skin’s cracking open, my teeth are falling out, and you know what? I can feel myself turning bad like an apple that’s going soft, I can feel it happening, eating from the inside to the out, eating, eating, eating me.

Eddie pulled the stiffening blanket aside, tweezing at it with his thumb and forefinger, grimacing at its matted feel. One of those low cellar windows was directly behind it, one pane broken, the other opaque with dirt. He leaned forward, now feeling almost hypnotized. He leaned closer to the window, closer to the cellar-darkness, breathing in that smell of age and must and dry-rot, closer and closer to the black, and surely the leper would have caught him if his asthma hadn’t picked that exact moment to kick up. It cramped his lungs with a weight that was painless yet frightening; his breath at once took on the familiar hateful whistling sound.

He drew back, and that was when the face appeared. Its coming was so sudden, so startling (and yet at the same time so expected), that Eddie could not have screamed even if he hadn’t been having an asthma attack. His eyes bulged. His mouth creaked open. It was not the hobo with the flayed nose, but there were resemblances. Terrible resemblances. And yet… this thing could not be human. Nothing could be so eaten up and remain alive.

The skin of its forehead was split open. White bone, coated with a membrane of yellow mucusy stuff, peered through like the lens of a bleary searchlight. The nose was a bridge of raw gristle above two red flaring channels. One eye was a gleeful blue. The other socket was filled with a mass of spongy brown-black tissue. The leper’s lower lip sagged like liver. It had no upper lip at all; its teeth poked out in a sneering ring.

It shot one hand out through the broken pane. It shot the other through the dirty glass to the left, shattering it to fragments. Its questing, clutching hands crawled with sores. Beetles crawled and lumbered busily to and fro.

Mewling, gasping, Eddie hunched his way backward. He could hardly breathe. His heart was a runaway engine in his chest. The leper appeared to be wearing the ragged remains of some strange silvery suit. Things were crawling in the straggles of its brown hair.

“How bout a blowjob, Eddie?” the apparition croaked, grinning with its remains of a mouth. It lilted, “Bobby does it for a dime, he will do it anytime, fifteen cents for overtime.” It winked. That’s me, Eddie-Bob Gray. And now that we’ve been properly introduced… ” One of its hands splatted against Eddie’s right shoulder. Eddie screamed thinly.

That’s all right,” the leper said, and Eddie saw with dreamlike terror that it was crawling out of the window. The bony shield behind its peeling forehead snapped the thin wooden strip between the two panes. Its hands clawed through the leafy, mulchy earth. The silver shoulders of its suit… costume… whatever it was… began to push through the gap. That one glaring blue eye never left Eddie’s face.

“Here I come, Eddie, that’s all right,” it croaked. “You’ll like it down here with us. Some of your friends are down here.”

Its hand reached out again, and in some corner of his panic-maddened, screaming mind, Eddie was suddenly, coldly sure that if that thing touched his bare skin, he would begin to rot, too. The thought broke his paralysis. He skittered backward on his hands and knees, then turned and lunged for the far end of the porch. Sunlight, falling in narrow dusty beams through the cracks between the porch boards, striped his face from moment to moment. His head pushed through the dusty cobwebs that settled in his hair. He looked back over his shoulder and saw that the leper was halfway out.

“It won’t do you any good to run, Eddie,” it called.

Eddie had reached the far end of the porch. There was a lattice-work skirt here. The sun shone through it, printing diamonds of light on his cheeks and forehead. He lowered his head and slammed into it with no hesitation at all, tearing the entire skirt free with a scream of rusted ha’penny nails. There was a tangle of rosebushes beyond and Eddie tore through these, stumbling to his feet as he did so, not feeling the thorns that scrawled shallow cuts along his arms and cheeks and neck.

He turned and backed away on buckling legs, pulling his aspirator out of his pocket, triggering it. Surely it hadn’t really happened? He had been thinking about that hobo and his mind had… well, had just

(put on a show)

shown him a movie, a horror movie, like one of those Saturday-matinee pictures with Frankenstein and Wolfman that they had sometimes at the Bijou or the Gem or the Aladdin. Sure, that was all. He had scared himself! What an asshole!

There was even time to utter a shaky laugh at the unsuspected vividness of his imagination before the rotting hands shot out from under the porch, clawing at the rosebushes with mindless ferocity, pulling at them, stripping them, printing beads of blood on them.

Eddie shrieked.

The leper was crawling out. It was wearing a clown suit, he saw-a clown suit with big orange buttons down the front. It saw Eddie and grinned. Its half-mouth dropped open and its tongue lolled out. Eddie shrieked again, but no one could have heard one boy’s breathless shriek under the pounding of the diesel engine in the trainyard. The leper’s tongue had not just dropped from its mouth; it was at least three feet long and had unrolled like a party-favor. It came to an arrow-point which dragged in the dirt. Foam, thick-sticky and yellowish, coursed along it. Bugs crawled over it.

The rosebushes, which had been showing the first touches of spring green when Eddie broke through them, now turned a dead and lacy black.

“Blowjob,” the leper whispered, and tottered to its feet.

Eddie raced for his bike. It was the same race as before, only it now had the quality of a nightmare, where you can only move with the most agonizing slowness no matter how hard you try to go fast… and in those dreams didn’t you always hear or feel something, some It, gaining on you? Didn’t you always smell Its stinking breath, as Eddie was smelling it now?

For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying… but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.

He did not try to mount his bike immediately; he ran with it instead, head down, pushing the handlebars. He felt as if he was drowning, not in water but inside his own chest.

“Blowjob,” the leper whispered again. “Come back anytime, Eddie. Bring your friends.”

Its rotting fingers seemed to touch the back of his neck, but perhaps that was only a dangling strand of cobweb from under the porch, caught in his hair and brushing against his shrinking flesh. Eddie leaped onto his bike and pedaled away, not caring that his throat had closed up tight as Tillie again, not giving two sucks for his asthma, not looking back. He didn’t look back until he was almost home, and of course there was nothing behind him when he finally did but two kids headed over to the park to play ball.

That night, lying straight as a poker in bed, one hand folded tightly around his aspirator, looking into the shadows, he heard the leper whisper: It won’t do you, any good to run, Eddie.

 

8

 

“Wow,” Richie said respectfully. It was the first thing any of them had said since Bill Denbrough finished his story.

“H-Have you g-g-got a-another suh-suh-higgarette, R-R-Richie?”

Richie gave him the last one in the pack he had hawked almost empty from his dad’s desk drawer. He even lit it for Bill.

“You didn’t dream it, Bill?” Stan asked suddenly.

Bill shook his head. “N-N-No duh-dream.”

“real,” Eddie said in a low voice.

Bill looked at him sharply. “Wh-Wh-What?”

“real, I said.” Eddie looked at him almost resentfully. “It really happened. It was real.” And before he could stop himself-before he even knew he was going to do it-Eddie found himself telling the story of the leper that had come crawling out of the basement at 29 Neibolt Street. Halfway through the telling he began to gasp and had to use his aspirator. And at the end he burst into shrill tears, his thin body shaking.

They all looked at him uncomfortably, and then Stan put a hand on his back. Bill gave him an awkward hug while the others glanced away, embarrassed.

That’s a-all right, E-Eddie. It’s o-o-okay.”

“I saw it too,” Ben Hanscom said suddenly. His voice was flat and harsh and scared.

Eddie looked up, his face still naked with tears, his eyes red and raw-looking. “What?”

“I saw the clown,” Ben said. “Only he wasn’t like you said-at least not when I saw him. He wasn’t all gooshy. He was… he was dry.” He paused, ducked his head, and looked at his hands, which lay palely on his elephantine thighs. “I think he was the mummy.”

“Like in the movies?” Eddie asked.

“Like that but not like that,” Ben said slowly. “In the movies he looks fake. It’s scary, but you can tell it’s a put-up job, you know? All those bandages, they look too neat, or something. But this guy… he looked the way a real mummy would look, I think. If you actually found one in a room under a pyramid, I mean. Except for the suit.”

“Wuh-wuh-wuh-hut suh-hoot?”

Ben looked at Eddie. “A silver suit with big orange buttons down the front.”

Eddie’s mouth dropped open. He shut it and said, “If you’re kidding, say so. I still… I still dream about that guy under the porch.”

“It’s not a joke,” Ben said, and began to tell the story. He told it slowly, beginning with his volunteering to help Mrs Douglas count and store books and ending with his own bad dreams. He spoke slowly, not looking at the others. He spoke as if deeply ashamed of his own behavior. He didn’t raise his head again until the story was over.

“You must have dreamed it,” Richie said finally. He saw Ben wince and hurried on: “Now don’t take it personal, Big Ben, but you got to see that balloons can’t, like, float against the wind-”

“Pictures can’t wink, either,” Ben said.

Richie looked from Ben to Bill, troubled. Accusing Ben of dreaming awake was one thing; accusing Bill was something else. Bill was their leader, the guy they all looked up to. No one said so out loud; no one needed to. But Bill was the idea man, the guy who could think of something to do on a boring day, the guy who remembered games the others had forgotten. And in some odd way they all sensed something comfortingly adult about Bill-perhaps it was a sense of accountability, a feeling that Bill would take the responsibility if responsibility needed to be taken. The truth was, Richie believed Bill’s story, crazy as it was. And perhaps he didn’t want to believe Ben’s… or Eddie’s, for that matter.

“Nothing like that ever happened to you, huh?” Eddie asked Richie.

Richie paused, began to say something, shook his head, paused again, then said: “scariest thing I’ve seen lately was Mark Prenderlist takin a leak in McCarron Park. Ugliest hogger you ever saw.”

Ben said, “What about you, Stan?”

“No,” Stan said quickly, and looked somewhere else. His small face was pale, his lips pressed together so tightly they were white.

“W-W-Was there suh-homething, S-St-Stan?” Bill asked.

“No, I told you!” Stan got to his feet and walked to the embankment, hands in his pockets. He stood watching the water course over the top of the original dam and pile up behind the second Watergate.

“Come on, now, Stanley!” Richie said in a shrill falsetto. This was another of his Voices: Granny Grunt. When speaking in his Granny Grunt Voice, Richie would hobble around with one fist against the small of his back, and cackle a lot. He still, however, sounded more like Richie Tozier than anyone else.

“Fess up, Stanley, tell your old Granny about the baaaaad clown and I’ll give you a chocker-chip cookie. You just tell-”

“Shut up!” Stan yelled suddenly, whirling on Richie, who fell back a step or two, astonished. “Just shut up!”

“Yowza, boss,” Richie said, and sat down. He looked at Stan Uris mistrustfully. Bright spots of color flamed in Stan’s cheeks, but he still looked more scared than mad.

“That’s okay,” Eddie said quietly. “Never mind, Stan.”

“It wasn’t a clown,” Stanley said. His eyes flicked from one of them to the next to the next to the next. He seemed to struggle with himself.

“Y-Y-You can t-tell,” Bill said, also speaking quietly. “W-We d-d-did.”

“It wasn’t a clown. It was-”

Which was when the carrying, whiskey-roughened tones of Mr Nell interrupted, making them all jump as if they had been shot: “Jay-sus Christ on a jumped-up chariot-driven crutch! Look at this mess! Jaysus Christ!”

 

 

Chapter 8

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