MIKE HANLON MAKES A CONNECTION

 

But first he made supper-hamburgers with sauteed mushrooms and onions and a spinach salad. They had finished working on Silver by then and were more than ready to eat.

The house was a neat little Cape Cod, white with green trim. Mike had just been arriving when Bill pushed Silver up Palmer Lane. He was behind the wheel of an old Ford with rusty rocker panels and a cracked rear window, and Bill remembered the fact Mike had so quietly pointed out: the six members of the Losers” Club who left Derry had quit being losers. Mike had stayed behind and was still behind.

Bill rolled Silver into Mike’s garage, which was floored with oiled dirt and was every bit as neat as the house proved to be. Tools hung from pegs, and the lights, shielded with tin cones, looked like the lights which hang over pool tables. Bill leaned the bike against the wall. The two of them looked at it without speaking for a bit, hands in pockets.

“It’s Silver, all right,” Mike said at last. “I thought you might have been wrong. But it’s him. What are you going to do with him?”

“Fucked if I know. Have you got a bicycle pump?”

“Yeah. I think I’ve got a tire-patching kit, too. Are those tubeless tires?”

“They always were.” Bill bent down to look at the flat tire. “Yeah. Tubeless.”

“Getting ready to ride it again?”

“Of c-course not,” Bill said sharply. “I just don’t like to see it si-hi-hitting there on a flat.”

“Whatever you say, Big Bill. You’re the boss.”

Bill looked around sharply at that, but Mike had gone to the garage’s back wall and was taking down a tire-pump. He got a tin tire-patching kit from one of the cabinets and handed it to Bill, who looked at it curiously. It was as he remembered such things from his childhood: a small tin box of about the same size and shape as those kept by men who roll their own cigarettes, except the top was bright and pebbled-you used it for roughing the rubber around the hole before you put on the patch. The box looked brand-new, and there was a Woolco price sticker on it that said $7.23. It seemed to him that when he was a kid such a kit had gone for about a buck-twenty-five.

“You didn’t just have this hanging around,” Bill said. It wasn’t a question.

“No,” Mike agreed. “I bought it last week. Out at the mall, as a matter of fact.’

“You’ve got a bike of your own?”

“No,” Mike said, meeting his eyes.

“You just happened to buy this kit.”

“Just got the urge,” Mike agreed, his eyes still on Bill’s. “Woke up thinking it might come in handy. The thought kept coming back all day. So… I got the kit. And here you are to use it.”

“Here I am to use it,” Bill agreed. “But like they say on the soaps, what does it all mean, dear?”

“Ask the others,” Mike said. “Tonight.”

“Will they all be there, do you think?”

“I don’t know, Big Bill.” He paused and added: “I think there’s a chance that all of them won’t be. One or two of them may decide to just creep out of town. Or… “He shrugged.

“What do we do if that happens?”

“I don’t know.” Mike pointed to the tire-patching kit. “I paid seven bucks for that thing. Are you going to do something with it or just look at it?”

Bill took his sportcoat out of the basket and hung it carefully on an unoccupied wallpeg. Then he turned Silver upside down so that he rested on his seat and began to carefully rotate the rear tire. He didn’t like the rusty way the axle squeaked, and remembered the almost silent click of the ball-bearings in the kid’s skateboard. A little 3-in-1 oil would fix that right up, he thought.

Wouldn’t hurt to oil the chain, either. It’s rusty as hell… And playing cards. It needs playing cards on the spokes. Mike would have cards, I bet. The good ones. Bikes, with the celluloid coating that made them so stiff and so slippery that the first time you tried to shuffle them they always sprayed all over the floor. Playing cards, sure, and clothespins to hold them -

He stopped, suddenly cold.

What in the name of Jesus are you thinking of?

“Something wrong, Bill?” Mike asked softly.

“Nothing.” His fingers touched something small and round and hard. He got his nails under it and pulled. A small tack came out of the tire. “Here’s the cuh-cuh-culprit,” he said, and it rose in his mind again, strange, unbidden, and powerful: He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts. But this time the voice, his voice, was followed by his mother’s voice, saying: Try again, Billy. You almost had it that time. And Andy Devine as Guy Madison’s sidekick Jingles yelling, Hey, Wild Bill, wait for me!

He shivered.

(the posts)

He shook his head. I couldn’t say that without stuttering even now, he thought, and for just a moment he felt that he was on the edge of understanding it all.

Then it was gone.

He opened the tire-patching kit and went to work. It took a long time to get it just right. Mike leaned against the wall in a bar of late-afternoon sun, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and his tie yanked down, whistling a tune which Bill finally identified as “she Blinded Me with Science.”

While he waited for the tire cement to set, Bill had-just for something to do, he told himself-oiled Silver’s chain, sprocket, and axles. It didn’t make the bike look any better, but when he spun the tires he found that the squeak was gone, and that was satisfying. Silver never would have won any beauty-contests anyway. His one virtue was that he could go like a blue streak.

By that tune, five-thirty in the afternoon, he had nearly forgotten Mike was there; he had become completely absorbed in small yet utterly satisfying acts of maintenance. He screwed the nozzle of the pump onto the rear tire’s valve and watched the tire fatten, shooting for the right pressure by guess and by gosh. He was pleased to see that the patch was holding nicely.

When he thought he had it right, he unscrewed the pump-nozzle and was about to turn Silver over when he heard the rapid snap-flutter of playing cards behind him. He whirled, almost knocking Silver over.

Mike was standing there with a deck of blue-backed Bicycle playing cards in one hand. “Want these?”

Bill let out a long, shaky sigh. “You’ve got clothespins, too, I suppose?”

Mike took four from the flap pocket of his shirt and held them out.

“Just happened to have them around, I suh-huppose?”

“Yeah, something like that,” Mike said.

Bill took the cards and tried to shuffle them. His hands shook and the cards sprayed out of his hands. They went everywhere.,. but only two landed face-up. Bill looked at them, then up at Mike. Mike’s gaze was frozen on the littered playing cards. His lips had pulled back from his teeth.

The two up cards were both the ace of spades.

“That’s impossible,” Mike said. “I just opened that deck. Look.” He pointed at the swill-can just inside the garage door and Bill saw the cellophane wrapper, “How can one deck of cards have two aces of spades?”

Bill bent down and picked them up. “How can you spray a deck of cards all over the floor and have only two of them land face up?” he asked. “That’s an even better que-”

He turned the aces over, looked, and then showed them to Mike. One of them was a blueback, the other a redback.

“Holy Christ, Mikey, what have you got us into?”

“What are you going to do with those?” Mike asked in a numb voice.

“Why, put them on,” Bill said, and suddenly he began to laugh. “That’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it? If there are certain preconditions for the use of magic, those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves. Right?”

Mike didn’t reply. He watched as Bill went to Silver’s rear wheel and attached the playing cards. His hands were still shaking and it took awhile, but he finally got it done, drew in one tight breath, held it, and spun the rear wheel. The playing cards machine-gunned loudly against the spokes in the garage’s silence.

“Come on,” Mike said softly. “Come on in, Big Bill. I’ll make us some chow.”

They had scoffed the burgers and now sat smoking, watching dark begin to unfold from dusk in Mike’s back yard. Bill took out his wallet, found someone’s business card, and wrote upon it the sentence that had plagued him ever since he had seen Silver in the window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. He showed it to Mike, who read it carefully, lips pursed.

“Does it mean anything to you?” Bill asked.

“He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.” He nodded. “Yes, I know what that is.”

“Well then, tell me. Or are you going to give me some more cuh-cuh-crap about figuring it out for myself?”

“No,” Mike said, “in this case I think it’s okay to tell you. The phrase goes back to English times. It’s a tongue-twister that became a speech exercise for lispers and stutterers. Your mother kept trying to get you to say it that summer. The summer of 1958. You used to go around mumbling it to yourself.”

“I did?” Bill said, and then, slowly, answering his own question: “I did.”

“You must have wanted to please her very much.”

Bill, who suddenly felt he might cry, only nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

“You never made it,” Mike told him. “I remember that. You tried like hell but your tang kept getting all tungled up.”

“But I did say it,” Bill replied. “At least once.”

“When?”

Bill brought his fist down on the picnic table hard enough to hurt. “I don’t remember!” he shouted. And then, dully, he said it again: “I just don’t remember.”

 

 

Chapter 12

THREE UNINVITED GUESTS

 

1

 

On the day after Mike Hanlon made his calls, Henry Bowers began to hear voices. Voices had been talking to him all day long. For awhile, Henry thought they were coming from the moon. In the late afternoon, looking up from where he was hoeing in the garden, he could see the moon in the blue daytime sky, pale and small. A ghost-moon.

That, in fact, was why he believed it was the moon that was talking to him. Only a ghost-moon would talk in ghost-voices-the voices of his old friends, and the voices of those little kids who had played down in the Barrens so long ago. Those, and another voice… one he did not dare name.

Victor Criss spoke from the moon first. They comin back, Henry. All of em, man. They comin back to Derry.

Then Belch Huggins spoke from the moon, perhaps from the dark side of the moon. You’re the only one, Henry. The only one of us left. You’ll have to get em for me and Vie. Ain’t no little kids can rank us out like that. Why, I hit a ball one time down to Tracker’s, and Tony Tracker said that ball would have been out of Yankee Stadium.

He hoed, looking up at the ghost-moon in the sky, and after awhile Fogarty came over and hit him in the back of the neck and knocked him flat on his face.

“You’re hoein up the peas right along with the weeds, you ijit.”

Henry got up, brushing dirt off his face and out of his hair. There stood Fogarty, a big man in a white jacket and white pants, his belly swelled out in front of him. It was illegal for the guards (who were called “counsellors” here at Juniper Hill) to carry billyclubs, so a number of them-Fogarty, Adler, and Koontz were the worst-carried rolls of quarters in their pockets. They almost always hit you with them in the same place, right in the back of the neck. There was no rule against quarters. Quarters were not considered a deadly weapon at Juniper Hill, an institution for the mentally insane which stood on the outskirts of Augusta near the Sidney town line.

“I’m sorry, Mr Fogarty,” Henry said, and offered a big grin which showed an irregular line of yellow teeth. They looked like the pickets in a fence outside a haunted house. Henry had begun to lose his teeth when he was fourteen or so.

“Yeah, you’re sorry,” Fogarty said. “You’ll be a lot sorrier if I catch you doing it again, Henry.”

“Yes sir, Mr Fogarty.”

Fogarty walked away, his black shoes leaving big brown tracks in the dirt of West Garden. Because Fogarty’s back was turned, Henry took a moment to look around surreptitiously. They had been shooed out to hoe as soon as the clouds cleared, everyone from the Blue Ward-which was where they put you if you had once been very dangerous but were now considered only moderately dangerous. Actually, all the patients at Juniper Hill were considered moderately dangerous; it was a facility for the criminally insane. Henry Bowers was here because he had been convicted of killing his father in the late fall of 1958-it had been a famous year for murder trials, all right; when it came to murder trials, 1958 had been a pip.

Only of course it wasn’t just his father they thought he had killed; if it had only been his father, Henry would not have spent twenty years in the Augusta State Mental Hospital, much of that time under physical and chemical restraint. No, not just his father; the authorities thought he had killed all of them, or at least most of them.

Following the verdict the News had published a front-page editorial titled “The End of Derry’s Long Night.” In it they had recapped the salient points: the belt in Henry’s bureau that belonged to the missing Patrick Hockstetter; the jumble of schoolbooks, some signed out to the missing Belch Huggins and some to the missing Victor Criss, both known chums of the Bowers boy, in Henry’s closet; most damning of all, the panties found tucked into a slit in Henry’s mattress, panties which had been identified by laundry-mark as having belonged to Veronica Grogan, deceased.

Henry Bowers, the News declared, had been the monster haunting Derry in the spring and summer of 1958.

But then the News had proclaimed the end of Derry’s long night on the front page of its December 6th edition, and even an ijit like Henry knew that in Derry night never ended.

They had bullied him with questions, had stood around him in a circle, had pointed fingers at him. Twice the Chief of Police had slapped him across the face and once a detective named Lottman had punched him in the gut, telling him to fess up, and be quick.

“There’s people outside and they ain’t happy, Henry,” this Lottman had said. “There ain’t been a lynching in Derry for a long tune, but that don’t mean there couldn’t be one.”

He supposed they would have kept it up as long as necessary, not because any of them really believed the good Derryfolk were going to break into the Police station, carry Henry out, and hang him from a sour-apple tree, but because they were desperate to close the books on that summer’s blood and horror; they would have, but Henry didn’t make them. They wanted him to confess to everything, he understood after awhile. Henry didn’t mind. After the horror in the sewers, after what had happened to Belch and Victor, he didn’t seem to mind about anything. Yes, he said, he had killed his father This was true. Yes, he had killed Victor Criss and Belch Huggins. This was also true, at least in the sense that he had led them into the tunnels where they had been murdered. Yes, he had killed Patrick. Yes, Veronica. Yes one, yes all. Not true, but it didn’t matter. Blame needed to be taken. Perhaps that was why he had been spared. And if he refused…

He understood about Patrick’s belt. He had won it from Patrick playing seal one day in April, discovered it didn’t fit, and tossed it in his bureau. He understood about the books, too-hell, the three of them chummed around together and they cared no more for their summer textbooks than they had for their regular ones, which is to say, they cared for them about as much as a woodchuck cares for tap-dancing. There were probably as many of his books in their closets, and the cops probably knew it, too.

The panties… no, he didn’t know how Veronica Grogan’s panties had come to be in his mattress.

But he thought he knew who-or what-had taken care of it.

Best not to talk about such things.

Best to just dummy up.

So they sent him to Augusta and finally, in 1979, they had transferred him to Juniper Hill, and he had only run into trouble once here and that was because at first no one understood. A guy had tried to turn off Henry’s nightlight. The nightlight was Donald Duck doffing his little sailor hat. Donald was protection after the sun went down. With no light, things could come in. The locks on the door and the wire mesh did not stop them. They came like mist. Things. They talked and laughed… and sometimes they clutched. Hairy things, smooth things, things with eyes. The sort of things that had really killed Vie and Belch when the three of them had chased the kids into the tunnels under Derry in August of 1958.

Looking around now, he saw the others from the Blue Ward. There was George DeVille, who had murdered his wife and four children one winter night in 1962. George’s head was studiously bent, his white hair blowing in the breeze, snot running gaily out of his nose, his huge wooden crucifix bobbing and dancing as he hoed. There was Jimmy Donlin, and all they said in the papers about Jimmy was that he had killed his mother in Portland during the summer of 1965, but what they hadn’t said in the papers was that Jimmy had tried a novel experiment in body-disposal: by the time the cops came Jimmy had eaten more than half of her, including her brains. “They made me twice as smart,” Jimmy had confided to Henry one night after lights-out.

In the row beyond Jimmy, hoeing fanatically and singing the same line over and over, as always, was the little Frenchman Benny Beaulieu. Benny had been a firebug-a pyromaniac. Now as he hoed he sang this line from the Doors over and over: “Try to set the night on fire, try to set the night on fire, try to set the night on fire, try to-”

It got on your nerves after awhile.

Beyond Benny was Franklin D’Cruz, who had raped over fifty women before being caught with his pants down in Bangor’s Terrace Park. The ages of his victims ranged from three to eighty-one. Not very particular was Frank D’Cruz. Beyond him but way back was Arlen Weston, who spent as much time looking dreamily at his hoe as he did using it. Fogarty, Adler, and John Koontz had all tried the roll-of-quarters-in-the-fist trick on Weston to try and convince him he could move a bit faster, and one day Koontz had hit him maybe a little too hard because blood came not only from Arlen Weston’s nose but also from Arlen’s ears and that night he had a convulsion. Not a big one; just a little one. But since then Arlen had drifted further and further into his own interior blackness and now he was a hopeless case, almost totally unplugged from the world. Beyond Arlen was -

“You want to pick it up or I’ll give you some more help, Henry!” Fogarty bawled over, and Henry began to hoe again. He didn’t want any convulsions. He didn’t want to end up like Arlen Weston.

Soon the voices started in again. But this tune they were the voices of the others, the voices of the kids that had gotten him into this in the first place, whispering down from the ghost-moon.

You couldn’t even catch a fatboy, Bowers, one of them whispered. Now I’m rich and you’re hoeing peas. Ha-ha on you, asshole!

B-B-Bowers, you c-c-couldn’t c-catch a c-c-cold! Read a-any g-g-good b-b-books since you’ve been in th-there? I ruh-ruh-wrote lots! I’m ruh-ruh-rich andy-you’re in Juh-Juh-hooniper Hill! Ha-ha on you, you stupid asshole!

“Shut up,” Henry whispered to the ghost-voices, hoeing faster, beginning to hoe up the new pea-plants along with the weeds. Sweat rolled down his cheeks like tears. “We could’ve taken you. We could’ve.”

We got you locked up, you asshole, another voice laughed. You chased me and couldn’t catch me and I got rich, too! Way to go, banana-heels!

“Shut up,” Henry muttered, hoeing faster. “Just shut up!”

Did you want to get in my panties, Henry? another voice teased. Too bad! I let all of them do me, I was nothing but a slut, but now I’m rich too and we’re all together again, and we’re doing it again but you couldn’t do it now even if I let you because you couldn’t get it up, so ha-ha on you, Henry, ha-ha all OVER you -

He hoed madly, weeds and dirt and pea-plants flying; the ghost-voices from the ghost-moon were very loud now, echoing and flying in his head, and Fogarty was running toward him, bellowing, but Henry could not hear. Because of the voices.

Couldn’t even get hold of a nigger like me, could you? another jeering ghost-voice chimed in. We killed you guys in that rockfight! We fucking killed you!! Ha-ha, asshole! Ha-ha all over you!

Then they were all babbling together, laughing at him, calling him banana-heels, asking him how he’d liked the shock-treatments they’d given him when he came up here to the Red Ward, asking him if he liked it here at Juh-Juh-hooniper Hill, asking and laughing, laughing and asking, and Henry dropped his hoe and began to scream up at the ghost-moon in the blue sky and at first he was screaming in fury, and then the moon itself changed and became the face of the clown, its face a rotted pocked cheesy white, its eyes black holes, its red bloody grin turned up in a smile so obscenely ingenuous that it was insupportable, and so then Henry began to scream not in fury but in mortal terror and the voice of the clown spoke from the ghost-moon now and what it said was You have to go back, Henry. You have to go back and finish the job. You have to go back to Derry and kill them all. For Me. For-

Then Fogarty, who had been standing nearby and yelling at Henry for almost two minutes (while the other inmates stood in their rows, hoes grasped in their hands like comic phalluses, their expressions not exactly interested but almost, yes, almost thoughtful, as if they understood that this was all a part of the mystery that had put them here, that Henry Bowers’s sudden attack of the screaming meemies in West Garden was interesting in some more than technical way), got tired of shouting and gave Henry a real blast with his quarters, and Henry went down like a ton of bricks, the voice of the clown following him down into that terrible whirlpool of darkness, chanting over and over again: Kill them all, Henry, kill them all, kill them all, kill them all.

 

2

 

Henry Bowers lay awake.

The moon was down and he felt a sharp sense of gratitude for that. The moon was less ghostly at night, more real, and if he should see that dreadful clown-face in the sky, riding over the hills and fields and woods, he believed he would die of terror.

He lay on his side, staring at his nightlight intently. Donald Duck had burned out; he had been replaced by Mickey and Minnie Mouse dancing a polka; they had been replaced with the green-glowing face of Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, and late last year Oscar had been replaced by the face of Fozzie Bear. Henry had measured out the years of his incarceration with burned-out nightlights instead of coffee-spoons.

At exactly 2:04 A.M. on the morning of May 30th, his nightlight went out. A little moan escaped him-no more. Koontz was on the door of the Blue Ward tonight-Koontz who was the worst of the lot. Worse even than Fogarty, who had hit him so hard in the afternoon that Henry could barely turn his head.

Sleeping around him were the other Blue Ward inmates. Benny Beaulieu slept in elastic restraints. He had been allowed to watch an Emergency rerun on the wardroom TV when they came in from hoeing and around six o’clock had begun jerking off constantly and without let-up, screaming Try to set the night on fire! Try to set the night on fire! Try to set the night on fire!” He had been sedated, and that was good for about four hours, and then he had started in again around eleven when the Elavil wore off, whipping his old dingus so hard it had started to bleed through his fingers, shrieking “Try to set the night on fire!” So they sedated him again and put him in restraints. Now he slept, his pinched little face as grave in the dim light as Aristotle’s.

From around his bed Henry could hear low snores and loud ones, grunts, an occasional bedfart. He could hear Jimmy Donlin’s breathing; it was unmistakable even though Jimmy slept five beds over. Rapid and faintly whistling, for some reason it always made Henry think of a sewing machine. From beyond the door giving on the hall he could hear the faint sound of Koontz’s TV. He knew that Koontz would be watching the late movies on Channel 38, drinking Texas Driver and eating his lunch. Koontz favored sandwiches made out of chunky peanut-butter and Bermuda onions. When Henry heard this he had shuddered and thought: And they say all the crazy people are locked up.

This tune the voice didn’t come from the moon.

This time it came from under the bed.

Henry recognized the voice at once. It was Victor Criss, whose head had been torn off somewhere beneath Derry twenty-seven years ago. It had been torn off by the Frankenstein-monster. Henry had seen it happen, and afterward he had seen the monster’s eyes shift and had felt its watery yellow gaze on him. Yes, the Frankenstein-monster had killed Victor and then it had killed Belch, but here was Vie again, like the almost ghostly rerun of a black-and-white program from the Nifty Fifties, when the President was bald and the Buicks had portholes.

And now that it had happened, now that the voice had come, Henry found that he was calm and unafraid. Relieved, even.

“Henry,” Victor said.

“Vie!” Henry cried. “What you doing under there?”

Benny Beaulieu snorted and muttered in his sleep. Jimmy’s neat nasal sewing-machine inhales and exhales paused for a moment. In the hall, the volume on Koontz’s small Sony was turned down and Henry Bowers could sense him, head cocked to one side, one hand on the TV’s volume knob, the fingers of the other hand touching the cylinder which bulged in the righthand pocket of his whites-the roll of quarters.

“You don’t have to talk out loud, Henry,” Vie said. “I can hear you if you just think. And they can’t hear me at all.”

What do you want, Vie? Henry asked.

There was no reply for a long time. Henry thought that maybe Vie had gone away. Outside the door the volume of Koontz’s TV went up again. Then there was a scratching noise from under the bed; the springs squealed slightly as a dark shadow pulled itself out from under. Vie looked up at him and grinned. Henry grinned back uneasily. Ole Vie was looking a little bit like the Frankenstein-monster himself these days. A scar like a hangrope tattoo circled his neck. Henry thought maybe that was where his head had been sewed back on. His eyes were a weird gray-green color, and the corneas seemed to float on a watery viscous substance.

Vie was still twelve.

“I want the same thing you want,” Vie said. “I want to pay em back.”

Pay em back, Henry Bowers said dreamily.

“But you’ll have to get out of here to do it,” Vie said. “You’ll have to go back to Derry. I need you, Henry. We all need you.”

They can’t hurt You, Henry said, understanding he was talking to more than Vie.

They can’t hurt Me if they only half-believe,” Vie said. “But there have been some distressing signs, Henry. We didn’t think they could beat us back then, either. But the fatboy got away from you in the Barrens. The fatboy and the smartmouth and the quiff got away from us that day after the movies. And the rockfight, when they saved the nigger-”

Don’t talk about that! Henry shouted at Vie, and for a moment all of the peremptory hardness that had made him their leader was in his voice. Then he cringed, thinking Vie would hurt him-surely Vie could do whatever he wanted, since he was a ghost-but Vie only grinned.

“I can take care of them if they only half-believe,” he said, “but you’re alive, Henry. You can get them no matter if they believe, half-believe, or don’t believe at all. You can get them one by one or all at once. You can pay em back.”

Pay em back, Henry repeated. Then he looked at Vie doubtfully again. But I can’t get out of here, Vie. There’s wire on the windows and Koontz is on the door tonight. Koontz is the worst. Maybe tomorrow night…

’don’t worry about Koontz,” Vie said, standing up. Henry saw he was still wearing the jeans he had been wearing that day, and that they were still splattered with drying sewer-muck. “I’ll take care of Koontz.” Vie held out his hand.

After a moment Henry took it. He and Vie walked toward the Blue Ward door and the sound of the TV. They were almost there when Jimmy Donlin, who had eaten his mother’s brains, woke up. His eyes widened as he saw Henry’s late-night visitor. It was his mother. Her slip was showing just a quarter-inch or so, as it always had. The top of her head was gone. Her eyes, horribly red, rolled toward him, and when she grinned, Jimmy saw the lipstick smears on her yellow, horsy teeth as he always had. Jimmy began to shriek. “No, Ma! No, Ma! No Ma!”

The TV went off at once, and even before the others could begin to stir, Koontz was jerking the door open and saying, “Okay, asshole, get ready to catch your head on the rebound. I’ve had it.”

“No, Ma! No, Ma! Please, Ma! No, Ma-”

Koontz came rushing in. First he saw Bowers, standing tall and paunchy and nearly ridiculous in his johnny, his loose flesh doughy in the light spilling in from the corridor. Then he looked left and screamed out two lungfuls of silent spun glass. Standing by Bowers was a thing in a clown suit. It stood perhaps eight feet tall. Its suit was silvery. Orange pompoms ran down the front. There were oversized funny shoes on its feet. But its head was not that of a man or a clown; it was the head of a Doberman pinscher, the only animal on God’s green earth of which John Koontz was frightened. Its eyes were red. Its silky muzzle wrinkled back to show huge white teeth.

A cylinder of quarters fell from Koontz’s nerveless fingers and rolled across the floor and into the corner. Late the following day Benny Beaulieu, who slept through the whole thing, would find them and hide them in his footlocker. The quarters bought him cigarettes-tailor-mades-for a month.

Koontz hitched in breath to scream again as the clown lurched toward him.

“It’s time for the circus!” the clown screamed in a growling voice, and its white-gloved hands fell on Koontz’s shoulders.

Except that the hands inside those gloves felt like paws.

 

3

 

For the third time that day-that long, long day-Kay McCall went to the telephone.

She got further this time than she had on the first two occasions; this time she waited until the phone had been picked up on the other end and a hearty Irish cop’s voice said “sixth Street Station, Sergeant O’Bannon, how may I help you?” before hanging up.

Oh, you’re doing fine. Jesus, yes. By the eighth or ninth time you’ll have mustered up guts enough to give him your name.

She went into the kitchen and fixed herself a weak Scotch-and-soda, although she knew it probably wasn’t a good idea on top of the Darvon. She recalled a snatch of folk-song from the college coffee-houses of her youth-Got a headful of whiskey and a bellyful of gin / Doctor say it kill me but he don’t say when-and laughed jaggedly. There was a mirror running along the top of the bar. She saw her reflection in it and stopped laughing abruptly.

Who is that woman?

One eye swollen nearly shut.

Who is that battered woman?

Nose the color of a drunken knight’s after thirty or so years of tilting at ginmills, and puffed to a grotesque size.

Who is that battered woman who looks like the ones who drag themselves to a women’s shelter after they finally get frightened enough or brave enough or just plain mad enough to leave the man who is hurting them, who has systematically hurt them week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out?

Laddered scratch up one cheek.

Who is she, Kay-Bird?

One arm in a sling.

Who? Is it you? Can it be you?

“Here she is… Miss America,” she sang, wanting her voice to come out tough and cynical. It started out that way but warbled on the seventh syllable and cracked on the eighth. It was not a tough voice. It was a scared voice. She knew it; she had been scared before and had always gotten over it. She thought she would be a long time getting over this.

The doctor who had treated her in one of the little cubicles just off Emergency Admitting at Sisters of Mercy half a mile down the road had been young and not bad-looking. Under different circumstances she might have idly (or not so idly) considered trying to get him home and take him on a sexual tour of the world. But she hadn’t felt in the least bit horny. Pain wasn’t conducive to horniness. Neither was fear.

His name was Geffin, and she didn’t care for the fixed way he was looking at her. He took a small white paper cup to the room’s sink, half-filled it with water, produced a pack of cigarettes from the drawer of his desk, and offered them to her.

She took one and he lit it for her. He had to chase the tip for a second or two with the match because her hand was shaking. He tossed the match in a paper cup. Fssss.

“A wonderful habit,” he said. “Right?’

’Oral fixation,” Kay replied.

He nodded and then there was silence. He kept looking at her. She got the feeling he was expecting her to cry, and it made her mad because she felt she might just do that. She hated to be emotionally preguessed, and most of all by a man.

“Boyfriend?” he asked at last.

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Uh-huh.” He smoked and looked at her.

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you it was impolite to stare?”

She wanted it to come out hard-edged, but it sounded like a plea: Stop looking at me, I know how I look, I saw. This thought was followed by another, one she suspected her friend Beverly must have had more than once, that the worst of the beating took place inside, where you were apt to suffer something that might be called interspiritual bleeding. She knew what she looked like, yes. Worse still, she knew what she felt like. She felt yellow. It was a dismal feeling.

“I’ll say this just once,” Geffin said. His voice was low and pleasant. “When I work E.R.-my turn in the barrel, you might say-I see maybe two dozen battered women a week. The interns treat two dozen more. So look-there’s a telephone right here on the desk. It’s my dime. You call Sixth Street, give them your name and address, tell them what happened and who did it. Then you hang up and I’ll take the bottle of bourbon I keep over there in the file cabinet-strictly for medicinal purposes, you understand-and we’ll have a drink on it. Because I happen to think, this is just my personal opinion, that the only lower form of life than a man who would beat up a woman is a rat with syphilis.”

Kay smiled wanly. “I appreciate the offer,” she said, “but I’ll pass. For the time being.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “But when you go home take a good look at yourself in the mirror, Ms. McCall. Whoever it was, he jobbed you good.”

She did cry then. She couldn’t help it.

Tom Rogan had called around noon of the day after she had seen Beverly safely off, wanting to know if Kay had been in touch with his wife. He sounded calm, reasonable, not the least upset. Kay told him she hadn’t seen Beverly in almost two weeks. Tom thanked her and hung up.

Around one the doorbell rang while she was writing in her study. She went to the door.

“Who is it?”

“Cragin’s Flowers, ma’am,” a high voice said, and how stupid she had been not to realize it had been Tom doing a bad falsetto, how stupid she had been to believe that Tom had given up so easily, how stupid she had been to take the chain off before opening the door.

In he had come, and she had gotten just this far: “You get out of h-” before Tom’s fist came flying out of nowhere, slamming into her right eye, closing it and sending a bolt of incredible agony through her head. She had gone reeling backward down the hallway, clutching at things to try and stay upright: a delicate one-rose vase that had gone smashing to the tiles, a coat-tree that had tumbled over. She fell over her own feet as Tom closed the front door behind him and walked toward her.

“Get out of here!” she had screamed at him.

“As soon as you tell me where she is,” Tom said, walking down the hall toward her. She was dimly aware that Tom didn’t look very good-well, actually, terrible might have been a better word-and she felt a dim but ferocious gladness skyrocket through her. Whatever Tom had done to Bev, it looked as if Bev had given it back in spades. It had been enough to keep him off his feet for one whole day, anyhow-and he still didn’t look as if he belonged anywhere but in a hospital.

But he also looked very mean, and very angry.

Kay scrambled to her feet and backed away, keeping her eyes on him as you might keep your eyes on a wild animal that had escaped its cage.

“I told you I haven’t seen her and that was the truth,” she said. “Now get out of here before I call the police.”

“You’ve seen her,” Tom said. His swollen lips were trying to grin. She saw that his teeth had a strange jagged look. Some of the front ones had been broken. “I call up, tell you I don’t know where Bev is. You say you haven’t seen her in two weeks. Never a single question. Never a discouraging word, even though I know damn well that you hate my guts. So where is she, you numb cunt? Tell me.”

Kay turned then and ran for the end of the hall, wanting to get into the parlor, rake the sliding mahogany doors close’d on their recessed tracks, and turn the thumb-bolt. She got there ahead of him-he was limping-but before she could slam the doors shut he had inserted his body between. He gave one convulsive lunge and pushed through. She turned to run again; he caught her by her dress and yanked her so hard he tore the entire back of it straight down to her waist. Your wife made that dress, you shit, she thought incoherently, and then she was twisted around.

Where is she?”

Kay brought her hand up in a walloping slap that rocked his head back and started the cut on the left side of his face bleeding again. He grabbed her hair and pulled her head forward into his fist. It felt to her for a moment as if her nose had exploded. She screamed, inhaled to scream again, and began to cough on her own blood. She was in utter terror now. She had not known there could be so much terror in all the wide world. The crazy son of a bitch was going to kill her.

She screamed, she screamed, and then his fist looped into her belly, driving the air out of her and she could only gasp. She began to cough and gasp at the same time and for one terrifying moment she thought she was going to choke.

“Where is she?”

Kay shook her head. “Haven’t… seen her,” she gasped. “Police… you’ll go to jail… asshole…”

He jerked her to her feet and she felt something give in her shoulder. More pain, so strong it was sickening. He whirled her around, still holding onto her arm, and now he twisted her arm up behind her and she bit down on her lower lip, promising herself that she would not scream again.

“Where is she?”

Kay shook her head.

He jerked her arm up again, jerked it so hard that she heard him grunt. His warm breath puffed against her ear. She felt her closed right fist strike her own left shoulderblade and she screamed again as that thing in her shoulder gave some more.

“Where is she?”

“… know…”

“What?”

“I don’t KNOW!”

He let go of her and gave her a push. She collapsed to the floor, sobbing, snot and blood running out of her nose. There was an almost musical crash, and when she looked around, Tom was bending over her. He had broken the top off another vase, this one of Waterford crystal. He held the base. The jagged neck was only inches from her face. She stared at it, hypnotized.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, the words coming out in little pants and blows of warm air, “you’re going to tell me where she went or you’re going to be picking your face up off the floor. You’ve got three seconds, maybe less. When I’m mad it seems like time goes a lot faster.”

My face, she thought, and that was what finally caused her to give in… or cave in, if you liked that better: the thought of this monster using the jagged neck of the Waterford vase to cut her face apart.

“She went home,” Kay sobbed. “Her home town. Derry. It’s a place called Derry, in Maine.”

“How did she go?”

“She took a b-b-bus to Milwaukee. She was going to fly from there.”

“That shitty little cooze!” Tom cried, straightening up. He walked around in a large, aimless semicircle, running his hands through his hair so that it stood up in crazy spikes and whorls. “That cunt, that cooze, that nickelplated crotch!” He picked up a delicate wood sculpture of a man and woman making love-she’d had it since she was twenty-two-and threw in into the fireplace, where it shattered to splinters. He came face to face with himself for a moment in the mirror over the fireplace and stood wide-eyed, as if looking at a ghost. Then he whirled on her again. He had taken something from the pocket of the sportcoat he was wearing, and she saw with a stupid kind of wonder that it was a paperback novel. The cover was almost completely black, except for the red-foil letters which spelled out the title and a picture of several young people standing on a high bluff over a river. The Black Rapids.

“Who’s this fuck?”

“Huh? What?”

“Denbrough. Denbrough.” He shook the book impatiently in front of her face, then suddenly slapped her with it. Her cheek flared with pain and then dull red heat, like stove-coals. “Who is he?”

She began to understand.

“They were friends. When they were children. They both grew up in Derry.”

He whacked her with the book again, this time from the other side.

“Please,” she sobbed. “Please, Tom.”

He pulled an Early American chair with spindly, graceful legs over to her, turned it around, and sat down on it. His jackolantern face looked down at her over the chairback.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You listen to your old uncle Tommy. Can you do that, you bra-burning bitch?”

She nodded. She could taste blood, hot and coppery, in her throat. Her shoulder was on fire. She prayed it was only dislocated and not broken. But that was not the worst. My face, he was going to cut up my face -

’If you call the police and tell them I was here, I’ll deny it. You can’t prove a fucking thing. It’s the maid’s day off and we’re all by our twosome. Of course, they might arrest me anyway, anything’s possible, right?”

She found herself nodding again, as if her head was on a string.

“Sure it is. And what I’d do is post bail and come right back here. They’d find your tits on the kitchen table and your eyes in the fishbowl. Do you understand me? Are you getting your old uncle Tommy?”

Kay burst into tears again. That string attached to her head was still working; it bobbed up and down.

“Why?”

“What? I… I don’t.

“Wake up, for God’s sake! Why did she go back?”

“I don’t know!” Kay nearly screamed.

He wiggled the broken vase at her.

“I don’t know,” she said in a lower voice. “Please. She didn’t tell me Please don’t hurt me.”

He tossed the vase in the wastebasket and stood up.

He left without looking back, head down, a big shambling bear of a man

She rushed after him and locked the door. She rushed into the kitchen and locked that door. After a moment’s pause she had limped upstairs (as fast as her aching belly would allow) and had locked the french doors which gave on the upstairs verandah-it was not beyond possibility that he might decide to shinny up one of the pillars and come in again that way. He was hurt, but he was also insane.

She went for the telephone for the first time and had no more than dropped her hand on it before remembering what he had said.

What I’d do is post bail and come right back here… your tits on the kitchen table and your eyes in the fishbowl.

She jerked her hand off the phone.

She went into the bathroom then and looked at her dripping tomato nose, her black eye. She didn’t weep; the shame and horror she felt were too deep for tears. Oh Bev, I did the best I could, dear, she thought. But my face… he said he would cut up my face…

There was Darvon and Valium in the medicine cabinet. She debated between them and finally swallowed one of each. Then she went to Sisters of Mercy for treatment and met the famous Dr Geffin, who right now was the only man she could think of whom she would not be perfectly happy to see wiped off the face of the earth.

And from there home again, home again, jiggety-jog.

She went to her bedroom window and looked out. The sun was low on the horizon now. On the East Coast it would be late twilight-just going on seven o’clock in Maine.

You can decide what to do about the cops later. The important thing now is to warn Beverly.

It would be a hell of a lot easier, Kay thought, if you had told me where you were staying, Beverly my love. I suppose you didn’t know yourself.

Although she had quit smoking two years before, she kept a pack of Pall Malls in the drawer of her desk for emergencies. She shot one out of the pack, lit up, grimaced. She had last smoked from this pack around December of 1982, and this baby was staler than the ERA in the Illinois state Senate. She smoked it anyway, one eye half-lidded against the smoke, the other just half-lidded, period. Thanks to Tom Rogan.

Using her left hand laboriously-the son of a bitch had dislocated her good arm-she dialed Maine information and asked for the name and number of every hotel and motel in Derry.

“Ma’am, that’s going to take awhile,” the directory-assistance operator said dubiously.

“It’s going to take even longer than that, sister,” Kay said. “I’m going to have to write with my stupid hand. My good one’s on vacation.”

“It’s not customary for-”

“Listen to me,” Kay said, not unkindly. “I’m calling you from Chicago, and I’m trying to reach a woman-friend of mine who has just left her husband and gone back to Derry, where she grew up. Her husband knows where she went. He got the information out of me by beating the living shit out of me. This man is a psycho. She needs to know he’s coming.”

There was a long pause, and then the directory-assistance operator said in a decidedly more human voice, “I think the number you really need is the Derry Police Department.”

“Fine. I’ll take that, too. But she has to be warned,” Kay said. “And… ” She thought of Tom’s cut cheeks, the knot on his forehead, the one on his temple, his limp, his hideously swelled lips. “And if she knows he’s coming, that may be enough.”

There was another long pause.

“You there, sis?” Kay asked.

“Arlington Motor Lodge,” the operator said, ’643-8146. Bassey Park Inn, 648-4083. The Bunyan Motor Court-”

“Slow down a little, okay?” she asked, writing furiously. She looked for an ashtray, didn’t see one, and mashed the Pall Mall out on the desk blotter. “Okay, go on.”

The Clarendon Inn-”

 

4

 

She got half-lucky on her fifth call. Beverly Rogan was registered at the Derry Town House. She was only half-lucky because Beverly was out. She left her name and number and a message that Beverly should call her the instant she came back, no matter how late it was.

The desk clerk repeated the message. Kay went upstairs and took another Valium. She lay down and waited for sleep. Sleep didn’t come. I’m sorry, Bev, she thought, looking into the dark, floating on the dope. What he said about my face… I just couldn’t stand that. Call soon, Bev. Please call soon. And watch out for the crazy son of a bitch you married.

 

5

 

The crazy son of a bitch Bev had married did better on connections than Beverly had the day before because he left from O’Hare, the hub of commercial aviation in the continental United States. During the flight he read and reread the brief note on the author at the end of The Black Rapids. It said that William Denbrough was a native of New England and the author of three other novels (which were also available, the note added helpfully, in Signet paperback editions). He and his wife, the actress Audra Phillips, lived in California. He was currently at work on a new novel. Noticing that the paperback of The Black Rapids had been issued in 1976, Tom supposed the guy had written some of the other novels since then.

Audra Phillips… he had seen her in the movies, hadn’t he? He rarely noticed actresses-Tom’s idea of a good flick was a crime story, a chase story, or a monster picture-but if this babe was the one he was thinking of, he had noticed her especially because she looked a lot like Beverly: long red hair, green eyes, tits that wouldn’t quit.

He sat up a little straighter in his seat, tapping the paperback against his leg, trying to ignore the ache in his head and in his mouth. Yes, he was sure. Audra Phillips was the redhead with the good tits. He had seen her in a Clint Eastwood movie, and then about a year later in a horror flick called Graveyard Moon. Beverly had gone with him to see that one, and coming out of the theater, he had mentioned his idea that the actress looked a lot like her. “I don’t think so,” Bev had said. “I’m taller and she’s prettier. Her hair’s a darker red, too.” That was all. He hadn’t thought of it again until now.

He and his wife, the actress Audra Phillips…

Tom had some dim understanding of psychology; he had used it to manipulate his wife all the years of their marriage. And now a nagging unpleasantness began to nag at him, more feeling than thought. It centered on the fact that Bev and this Denbrough had played together as kids and that Denbrough had married a woman who, in spite of what Beverly said, looked amazingly like Tom Rogan’s wife.

What sort of games had Denbrough and Beverly played when they were kids? Post-office? Spin-the-bottle?

Other games?

Tom sat in his seat and tapped the book against his leg and felt his temples begin to throb.

When he arrived at Bangor International Airport, and canvassed the rental-car booths, the girls-some dressed in yellow, some in red, some in Irish green-looked at his blasted dangerous face nervously and told him (more nervously still) that they had no cars to rent, so sorry.

Tom went to the newsstand and got a Bangor paper. He turned to the want-ads, oblivious to the looks he was getting from people passing by, and isolated three likelies. He hit paydirt on his second call.

“Paper says you’ve got a ’76 LTD wagon. Fourteen hundred bucks.”

“Right, sure.”

“I tell you what,” Tom said, touching the wallet in his jacket pocket. It was fat with cash-six thousand dollars. “You bring it out to the airport and we’ll do the deal right here. You give me the car and a bill of sale and your pink-slip.

I’ll give you cash money.” The fellow with the LTD for sale paused and then said, “I’d have to take my plates off.”

“Sure, fine.”

“How will I know you, Mr-?”

“Mr Barr,” Tom said. He was looking at a sign across the terminal lobby that said BAR HARBOUR AIRLINES GIVES YOU NEW ENGLAND-AND THE WORLD! “I’ll be standing by the far door. You’ll know me because my face doesn’t look so hot. My wife and I went roller-skating yesterday and I took one hell of a fall. Things could be worse, I guess. I didn’t break anything but my face.”

“Gee, I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Barr.”

“I’ll mend. You just get the car out here, my good buddy.”

He hung up, walked across to the door, and stepped out into the warm fragrant May night.

The guy with the LTD showed up ten minutes later driving out of the late-spring dusk. He was only a kid. They did the deal; the kid scribbled him a bill of sale which Tom stuffed indifferently into his overcoat pocket. He stood there and watched the kid take off the LTD’s Maine plates.

“Give you an extra three bucks for the screwdriver,” Tom said when he was done.

The kid looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, shrugged, handed the screwdriver over, and took the three ones Tom was holding out. None of my business, the shrug said, and Tom thought: How right you are, my good little buddy. Tom saw him into a cab, then got behind the wheel of the Ford.

It was a piece of shit: transmission whiny, universal groany, body rattly, brakes slushy. None of it mattered. He drove around to the long-term parking lot, took a ticket, and drove in. He parked next to a Subaru that looked as if it had been there for awhile. He used the kid’s screwdriver to remove the Subaru’s plates and put them on the LTD. He hummed as he worked.

By 10:00 P.M. he was driving east on Route 2, a Maine roadmap open on the seat beside him. He had discovered that the LTD’s radio didn’t work, so he drove in silence. That was all right. He had plenty to think about. All the wonderful things he was going to do to Beverly when he caught up with her, for instance.

He was sure in his heart, quite sure, that Beverly was close by.

And smoking.

Oh my dear girl, you fucked with the wrong man when you fucked with Tom Rogan. And the question is this-what, exactly, are we to do with you?

The Ford bulled its way through the night, chasing its high beams, and by the time Tom got to Newport, he knew. He found a drugs-and-sundries shop on the main drag that was still open. He went inside and bought a carton of Camels. The proprietor wished him a good evening. Tom wished him the same.

He tossed the carton on the seat and got moving again. He drove slowly on up Route 7, hunting for his turnoff. Here it was-Route 3, with a sign which read HAVEN 21 DERRY 15.

He made the turn and got the Ford rolling faster. He glanced at the carton of cigarettes and smiled a little. In the green glow of the dashlights, his cut and lumpy face looked strange, ghoulish.

Got some cigarettes for you, Bevvie, Tom thought as the wagon ran between stands of pine and spruce, heading toward Derry at a little better than sixty. Oh my yes. A whole carton. Just for you. And when I see you, dear, I’m going to make you eat every fucking one. And if this guy Denbrough needs some education, we can arrange that, too. No problem, Bevvie. No problem at all.

For the first time since the dirty bitch had bushwhacked him and run out, Tom began to feel good.

 

6

 

Audra Denbrough flew first class to Maine in a British Airways DC-10. She had left Heathrow at ten minutes of six that afternoon and had been chasing the sun ever since. The sun was winning-had won, in fact-but that didn’t really matter. By a stroke of providential luck she had discovered that British Airways flight 23, London to Los Angeles, made one refueling stop… at Bangor International Airport.

The day had been a crazy nightmare. Freddie Firestone, the producer of Attic Room, had of course wanted Bill first thing. There had been some kind of ballsup about the stuntwoman who was supposed to fall down a flight of stairs for Audra. It seemed that stuntpeople had a union too, and this woman had fulfilled her quota of stunts for the week, or some silly thing. The union was demanding that Freddie either sign an extension-of-salary waiver or hire another woman to do the stunt. The problem was there was no other woman close enough to Audra’s body-type available. Freddie told the union boss that they would have to get a man to do the stunt, then, wouldn’t they? It wasn’t as if the fall had to be taken in bra and panties. They had the auburn-haired wig, and the wardrobe woman could fit the fellow up with falsies and hip-padding. Even some arse-pads, if that was necessary.

Can’t be done, mate, the union boss said. Against the union charter to have a man step in for a woman. Sexual discrimination.

In the movie business Freddie’s temper was fabled, and at that point he had lost it. He told the union boss, a fat man whose BO was almost paralyzing, to bugger himself. The union boss told Freddie he better watch his gob or there would be no more stunts on the set of Attic Room at all. Then he had rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in a baksheesh gesture that had driven Freddie crazy. The union boss was big but soft; Freddie, who still played football every chance he got and who had once scored a century at cricket, was big and hard.

He threw the union boss out, went back into his office to meditate, and then came out again twenty minutes later hollering for Bill. He wanted the entire scene rewritten so that the fall could be scrubbed. Audra had to tell Freddie that Bill was no longer in England.

“What? Freddie said. His mouth hung open. He was looking at Audra as if he believed she had gone mad. “What are you telling me?”

“He’s been called back to the States-that’s what I’m telling you.”

Freddie made as if to grab her and Audra shrank back, a bit afraid. Freddie looked down at his hands, then put them in his pockets and only looked at her.

“I’m sorry, Freddie,” she said in a small voice. “really.”

She got up and poured herself a cup of coffee from the Silex on Freddie’s hotplate, noticing that her hands were trembling slightly. As she sat down she heard Freddie’s amplified voice over the studio loudspeakers, telling everyone to go home or to the pub; the day’s shooting was off. Audra winced. There went a minimum of ten thousand pounds, right down the bog.

Freddie turned off the studio intercom, got up, poured his own cup of coffee. He sat down again and offered her his pack of Silk Cut cigarettes.

Audra shook her head.

Freddie took one, lit it, and squinted at her through the smoke. “This is serious, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Audra said, keeping her composure as best she could.

“What’s happened?”

And because she genuinely liked Freddie and genuinely trusted him, Audra told him everything she knew. Freddie listened intently, gravely. It didn’t take long to tell; doors were still slamming and engines starting in the parking lot outside when she finished.

Freddie was silent for some time, looking out his window. Then he swung back to her. “He’s had a nervous breakdown of some sort.”

Audra shook her head. “No. It wasn’t like that. He wasn’t like that.” She swallowed and added, “Maybe you had to be there.”

Freddie smiled crookedly. “You must realize that grown men rarely feel compelled to honor promises they made as little boys. And you’ve read Bill’s work; you know how much of it is about childhood, and it’s very good stuff indeed. Very much on the nail. The idea that he’s forgotten everything that ever happened to him back then is absurd.”

“The scars on his hands,” Audra said. “They were never there. Not until this morning.”

“Bollocks! You just didn’t notice them until this morning.”

She shrugged helplessly. “I’d’ve noticed.”

She could see he didn’t believe that, either.

“What’s to do, then?” Freddie asked her, and she could only shake her head. Freddie lit another cigarette from the smoldering end of the first. “I can square it with the union boss,” he said. “Not myself, maybe; right now he’d see me in hell before giving me another stunt. I’ll send Teddy Rowland round to his office. Teddy’s a pouf, but he could talk the birds down from the trees But what happens after? We’ve got four weeks of shooting left, and here’s your

husband somewhere in Massachusetts-”

“Maine-”

He waved a hand. “Wherever. And how much good are you going to be without him?”

“I-”

He leaned forward. “I like you, Audra. I genuinely do. And I like Bill-even in spite of this mess. We can make do, I guess. If the script needs cobbling up, I can cobble it. I’ve done my share of that sort of shoemaking in my time, Christ knows… If he doesn’t like the way it turns out, he’ll have no one but himself to blame. I can do without Bill, but I can’t do without you. I can’t have you running off to the States after your man, and I’ve got to have you putting out at full power. Can you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nor do I. But I want you to think about something. We can keep things quiet for awhile, maybe for the rest of the shoot, if you’ll stand up like a trouper and do your job. But if you take off, it can’t be kept quiet. I can be pissy, but I’m not vindictive by nature and I’m not going to tell you that if you take off I’ll see that you never work in the business again. But you should know that if you get a reputation for temperament, you might end up stuck with just that. I’m talking to you like a Dutch uncle, I know. Do you resent it?”

“No,” she said listlessly. In truth, she didn’t care much one way or the other. Bill was all she could think of. Freddie was a nice enough man, but Freddie didn’t understand; in the last analysis, nice man or not, all he could think of was what this was going to do to his picture. He had not seen the look in Bill’s eyes… or heard him stutter.

“Good.” He stood up. “Come on over to the Hare and Hounds with me. We can both use a drink.”

She shook her head. “A drink’s the last thing I need. I’m going home and think this out.”

“I’ll call for the car,” he said.

“No. I’ll take the train.”

He looked at her fixedly, one hand on the telephone. “I believe you mean to go after him,” Freddie said, “and I’m telling you that it’s a serious mistake, dear girl. He’s got a bee in his bonnet, but at bottom he’s steady enough. He’ll shake it, and when he does he’ll come back. If he’d wanted you along, he would have said so.”

“I haven’t decided anything,” she said, knowing that she had in fact decided everything; had decided even before the car picked her up that morning. “Have a care, love,” Freddie said. “don’t do something you’ll regret later.” She felt the force of his personality beating on her, demanding that she give in, make the promise, do her job, wait passively for Bill to come back… or to disappear again into that hole of the past from which he had come.

She went to him and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I’ll see you, Freddie.” She went home and called British Airways. She told the clerk she might be interested in reaching a small Maine city called Derry if it was at all possible. There had been silence while the woman consulted her computer terminal… and then the news, like a sign from heaven, that BA #23 made a stop in Bangor, which was less than fifty miles away.

“Shall I book the flight for you, ma’am?”

Audra closed her eyes and saw Freddie’s craggy, mostly kind, very earnest face, heard him saying: Have a care, love. Don’t do something you’ll regret later.

Freddie didn’t want her to go; Bill didn’t want her to go; so why was her heart screaming at her that she had to go? She closed her eyes Jesus, I feel so fucked up -

’Ma’am? Are you still holding the wire?”

“Book it,” Audra said, then hesitated. Have a care love… Maybe she should sleep on it; get some distance between herself and the craziness. She began to rummage in her purse for her American Express card. “For tomorrow First class if you have it, but I’ll take anything.” And if I change my mind I can cancel. Probably will. I’ll wake up sane and everything will be clear.

But nothing had been clear this morning, and her heart clamored just as loudly for her to go. Her sleep had been a crazy tapestry of nightmares. So she had called Freddie, not because she wanted to but because she felt she owed him that. She had not gotten far-she was trying, in some stumbling way, to tell him how much she felt Bill might need her-when there was a soft click at Freddie’s end. He had hung up without saying a word after his initial hello.

But in a way, Audra thought, that soft click said everything that needed to be said.

 

7

 

The plane landed at Bangor at 7:09, EDT. Audra was the only passenger to deplane, and the others looked at her with a kind of thoughtful curiosity, probably wondering why anyone would choose to get off here, in this godforsaken little place. Audra thought of telling them I’m looking for my husband, that’s why. He came back to a little town near here because one of his boyhood chums called him and reminded him of a promise he couldn’t quite remember. The call also reminded him that he hadn’t thought of his dead brother in over twenty years. Oh yes: it also brought back his stutter… and some funny white scars on the palms of his hands.

And then, she thought, the customs agent standing by in the jetway would whistle up the men in the white coats.

She collected her single piece of luggage-it looked very lonely riding the carousel all by itself-and approached the rental-car booths as Tom Rogan Would about an hour later. Her luck was better than his would be; National Car Rental had a Datsun.

The girl filled out the form and Audra signed it.

“I thought it was you,” the girl said, and then, timidly: “Might I please have your autograph?”

Audra gave it, writing her name on the back of a rental form, and thought: Enjoy it while you can, girl. If Freddie Firestone is right, it won’t be worth doodley-squat five years from now.

With some amusement she realized that, after only fifteen minutes back in the States, she had begun to think like an American again.

She got a roadmap, and the girl, so star-struck she could barely talk, managed to trace out her best route to Derry.

Ten minutes later Audra was on the road, reminding herself at every intersection that if she forgot and began driving on the left, they would be scrubbing her off the asphalt.

And as she drove, she realized that she was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.

 

8

 

By one of those odd quirks of fate or coincidence which sometimes obtain (and which, in truth, obtained more frequently in Derry), Tom had taken a room at the Koala Inn on Outer Jackson Street and Audra had taken a room at the Holiday Inn; the two motels were side by side, their parking lots divided only by a raised concrete sidewalk. And as it so happened, Audra’s rented Datsun and Tom’s purchased LTD wagon were parked nose-to-nose, separated only by that walkway. Both slept now, Audra quietly on her side, Tom Rogan on his back, snoring so heavily that his swollen lips flapped.

 

9

 

Henry spent that day hiding-hiding in the puckies beside Route 9. Sometimes he slept. Sometimes he lay watching police cruisers slide by like hunting dogs. While the Losers ate lunch, Henry listened to voices from the moon.

And when dark fell, he went out to the verge of the road and stuck out his thumb.

After awhile, some fool came along and picked him up.

 

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