THE DERRY TOWN HOUSE / 2:00 A.M.

 

friends,” Beverly said.

“Hmmm?” Bill looked at her. His thoughts had been far away. They had been walking hand-in-hand, the silence between them companionable, slightly charged with mutual attraction. He had caught only the last word of what she had said. A block ahead, the lights of the Town House shone through the low ground-fog.

“I said, you were my best friends. The only friends I ever had back then.” She smiled. “Making friends has never been my strong suit, I guess, although I’ve got a good one back in Chicago. A woman named Kay McCall. I think you’d like her, Bill.”

“Probably would. I’ve never been real fast to make friends myself.” He smiled. “Back then, we were all we nuh-nuh-needed.” He saw beads of moisture in her hair, appreciated the way the lights made a nimbus about her head. Her eyes were turned gravely up to his.

“I need something now,” she said.

“W-What’s that?”

“I need you to kiss me,” she said.

He thought of Audra, and for the first time it occurred to him that she looked like Beverly. He wondered if maybe that had been the attraction all along, the reason he had been able to find guts enough to ask Audra out near the end of the Hollywood party where they had been introduced. He felt a pang of unhappy guilt… and then he took Beverly, his childhood friend, in his arms.

Her kiss was firm and warm and sweet. Her breasts pushed against his open coat and her hips moved against him… away… and then against him again. When her hips moved away a second tune, he plunged both of his hands into her hair and moved against her. When she felt him growing hard, she uttered a little gasp and put her face against the side of his neck. He felt her tears on his skin, warm and secret.

“Come on,” she said. “Quick.”

He took her hand and they walked the rest of the way to the Town House. The lobby was old, festooned with plants, and still possessed of a certain fading charm. The decor was very much Nineteenth Century Lumberman. It was deserted at this hour except for the desk clerk, who could be dimly seen in the inner office, his feet cocked up on the desk, watching TV. Bill pushed the third-floor button with a finger that trembled just slightly-excitement? nervousness? guilt? all of the above? Oh yeah sure, and a kind of almost insane joy and fear as well. These feelings did not mix pleasantly, but they seemed necessary. He led her down the hallway toward his room, deciding in some confused way that if he were to be unfaithful, it should be a complete act of infidelity, consummated in his place, not hers. He found himself thinking of Susan Browne, his first book-agent and, at the age of not quite twenty, his first lover.

Cheating. Cheating on my wife. He tried to get this through his head, but it seemed both real and unreal at the same time. What seemed strongest was an unhappy sense of homesickness: an old-fashioned feeling of falling away. Audra would be up by now, making coffee, sitting at the kitchen table in her robe, perhaps studying lines, perhaps reading a Dick Francis novel.

His key rattled in the lock of room 311. If they had gone to Beverly’s room on the fifth floor, they would have seen the message-light on her phone blinking; the TV-watching desk clerk would have given her a message to call her friend Kay in Chicago (after Kay’s third frantic call, he had finally remembered to post the message), things might have taken a different course: the five of them might not have been fugitives from the Derry police when that day’s light finally broke. But they went to his-as things had perhaps, been arranged.

The door opened. They were inside. She looked at him, eyes bright, cheeks flushed, her breast rising and falling rapidly. He took her in his arms and was overwhelmed by the feeling of rightness-the feeling of the circle between past and present closing with a triumphant seamlessness. He kicked the door shut clumsily with one foot and she laughed her warm breath into his mouth.

“My heart-” She said, and put his hand on her left breast. He could feel it below that firm, almost maddening softness, racing like an engine.

“Your h-h-heart-”

“My heart.”

They were on the bed, still dressed, kissing. Her hand slipped inside his shirt, then out again. She traced a finger down the row of buttons, paused at his waist… and then that same finger slipped lower, tracing down the stony thickness of his cock. Muscles he hadn’t been aware of jumped and fluttered in his groin. He broke the kiss and moved his body away from hers on the bed.

“Bill?”

“Got to stuh-stuh-stop for a m-m-minute,” he said. “Or else I’m going to shoot in my p-p-pants like a k-kid.”

She laughed again, softly, and looked at him. “Is it that? Or are you having second thoughts?”

“Second thoughts,” Bill said. “I a-a-always have those.”

“I don’t. I hate him,” she said.

He looked at her, the smile fading.

“I didn’t know it all the way to the top of my mind until tonight,” she said. “Oh, I knew it-somewhere-all along, I guess. He hits and he hurts. I married him because… because my father always worried about me, I guess. No matter how hard I tried, he worried. And I guess I knew he’d approve of Tom. Because Tom would worry, too. He worried a lot. And as long as someone was worrying about me, I’d be safe. More than safe. Real.” She looked at him solemnly. Her blouse had pulled out of the waistband of her slacks, revealing a white stripe of stomach. He wanted to kiss it. “But it wasn’t real. It was a nightmare. Being married to Tom was like going back into the nightmare. Why would a person do that, Bill? Why would a person go back into the nightmare of her own accord?”

Bill said, “The o-o-only reason I can f-figure is that p-people go back to f-f-find thems-s-selves.”

“The nightmare’s here,” Bev said. “The nightmare is Derry. Tom looks small compared to that. I can see him better now. I loathe myself for the years I spent with him… You don’t know… the things he made me do, and oh, I was happy enough to do them, you know, because he worried about me. I’d cry… but sometimes there’s too much shame. You know?”

“Don’t,” he said quietly, and put his hand over hers. She held it tightly. Her eyes were overbright, but the tears didn’t fall. “Everybody g-g-goofs it. But it’s not an eh-eh-exam. You just go through it the b-b-best you can.”

“What I mean,” she said, “is that I’m not cheating on Tom, or trying to use you to get my own back on him, or anything like that. For me, it would be like something… sane and normal and sweet. But I don’t want to hurt you, Bill. Or trick you into something you’ll be sorry for later.”

He thought about this, thought about it with a real and deep seriousness. But the odd little mnemonic-he thrusts his fists, and so on-had begun to circle back, breaking into his thoughts. It had been a long day. Mike’s call and the invitation to lunch at Jade of the Orient seemed a hundred years ago. So many stories since then. So many memories, like photographs from George’s album.

“Friends don’t t-t-trick each o-other,” he said, and leaned toward her on the bed. Their lips touched and he began to unbutton her blouse. One of her hands went to the back of his neck and held him closer while the other first unzipped her slacks and then pushed them down. For a moment his hand was on her stomach, warm; then her panties were gone in a whisper; then he nudged and she guided.

As he entered her, she arched her back gently toward the thrust of his sex and muttered, “Be my friend… I love you, Bill.”

“I love you too,” he said, smiling against her bare shoulder. They began slowly and he felt sweat begin to flow out of his skin as she quickened beneath him. His consciousness began to drain downward, becoming focused more and more strongly on their connection. Her pores had opened, releasing a lovely musky odor.

Beverly felt her climax coming. She moved toward it, working for it, never doubting that it would come. Her body suddenly stuttered and seemed to leap upward, not orgasming but reaching a plateau far above any she had reached with Tom or the other two lovers she had had before Tom. She became aware that this wasn’t going to be just a come; it was going to be a tactical nuke. She became a little afraid… but her body picked up the rhythm again. She felt Bill’s long length stiffen against her, his whole body suddenly becoming as hard as the part of him inside herself, and at that same moment she climaxed-began to climax; pleasure so great it was nearly agony spilled out of unsuspected floodgates, and she bit down on his shoulder to stifle her cries.

“Oh my God,” Bill gasped, and although she was never sure later, she believed he was crying. He pulled back and she thought he was going to withdraw from her-she tried to prepare for that moment, which always brought a fleeting, inexplicable sense of loss and emptiness, something like a footprint-and then he thrust forward strongly again. Right away she had a second orgasm, something she hadn’t known was possible for her, and the window of memory opened again and she saw birds, thousands of birds, descending onto every roofpeak and telephone line and RFD mailbox in Derry, spring birds against a white April sky, and there was pain mixed with pleasure-but mostly it was low, as a white spring sky seems low. Low physical pain mixed with low physical pleasure and sense of affirmation. She had bled… she had… had…

’All of you?” she cried suddenly, her eyes widening, stunned.

He did pull back and out of her this time, but in the sudden shock of the revelation, she barely felt him go.

“What? Beverly? A-Are you all r-”

“All of you? I made love to all of you?”

She saw shocked surprise on Bill’s face, the drop of his jaw… and sudden understanding. But it was not her revelation; even in her own shock she saw that. It was his own.

“We-”

“Bill? What is it?”

“That was y-y-your way to get us out,” he said, and now his eyes blazed so brightly they frightened her. “Beverly, duh-duh-don’t you uh-understand? That was y-y-your way to get us out! We all… but we were… ” Suddenly he looked frightened, unsure.

“Do you remember the rest now?” she asked.

He shook his head slowly. “Not the spuh-spuh-specifics. But… ” He looked at her, and she saw he was badly frightened. “What it really c-c-came down to was we wuh-wuh-wished our way out. And I’m not s-sure… Beverly, I’m not sure that grownups can do that.”

She looked at him without speaking for a long moment, and sat on the edge of the bed and took her clothes off with no particular self-consciousness. Her body was smooth and lovely, the line of her backbone barely discernible in the dimness as she bent to take off the knee-high nylon stockings she had been wearing. Her hair was a sheaf coiled over one shoulder. He thought he would want her again before morning, and that feeling of guilt came again, tempered only by the guilty comfort of knowing that Audra was an ocean away. Put another nickle in the juke-box, he thought. This tune is called “What She Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Her.” But it hurts somewhere. In the spaces between people, maybe.

Beverly got up and turned the bed down. “Come to bed. We need sleep. Both of us.”

“A-A-All right.” Because that was right, that was a big ten-four. More than anything else he wanted to sleep… but not alone, not tonight. The latest shock was wearing off-too quickly, perhaps, but he felt so tired now, so used-up. Second-to-second reality had the quality of a dream, and in spite of the guilt he felt, he also felt that this was a safe place. It would be possible to lie here for a little while, to sleep in her arms. He wanted her warmth and her friendliness. Both were sexually charged, but that could hurt neither of them now.

He stripped off his socks and shirt and got in next to her. She pressed against him, her breasts warm, her long legs cool. Bill held her, aware of the differences-her body was longer than Audra’s, and fuller at the breast and the hip. But it was a welcome body.

It should have been Ben with you, dear, he thought drowsily. I think that was the way it was really supposed to be. Why wasn’t it Ben?

Because it was you then and it’s you now, that’s all. Because what goes around always comes around. I think Bob Dylan said that… or maybe it was Ronald Reagan. And maybe it’s me now because Ben’s the one who’s supposed to see the lady home.

Beverly wriggled against him, not in a sexual way (although, even as he fled toward sleep, she felt him stir again against her leg and was glad), but only wanting his warmth. She was already half asleep herself. Her happiness here with him, after all these years, was real. She knew that because of its bitter undertaste. There was tonight, and perhaps there would be another tune for them tomorrow morning. Then they would go down in the sewers as they had before, and they would find their It. The circle would close even tighter and their present lives would merge smoothly with their own childhoods; they would become like creatures on some crazy Moebius strip.

Either that, or they would die down there.

She turned over. He slipped an arm between her side and her arm and cupped one breast gently. She did not have to lie awake, wondering if the hand might suddenly clamp down in a hard pinch.

Her thoughts began to break up as sleep slid into her. As always, she saw brilliant wildflower patterns as she crossed over-masses and masses of them nodding brightly under a blue sky. These faded and there was a falling sensation-the sort of sensation that had sometimes snapped her awake and sweating as a child, a scream on the other side of her face. Childhood dreams of falling, she had read in her college psychology text, were common.

But she didn’t snap back this time; she could feel the warm and comforting weight of Bill’s arm, his hand cradling her breast. She thought that if she was falling, at least she wasn’t falling alone.

Then she touched down and was running: this dream, whatever it was, moved fast. She ran after it, pursuing sleep, silence, maybe just time. The years moved fast. The years ran. If you turned around and ran after your own childhood, you’d have to really let out your stride and bust your buns. Twenty-nine, the year she had streaked her hair (faster). Twenty-two, the year she had fallen in love with a football player named Greg Mallory who had damn near raped her after a fraternity party (faster, faster). Sixteen, getting drunk with two of her girlfriends on the Bluebird Hill Overlook in Portland. Fourteen… twelve…

faster, faster, faster…

She ran into sleep, chasing twelve, catching it, running through the barrier of memory that It had cast over all of them (it tasted like cold fog in her laboring dreamlungs), running back into her eleventh year, running, running like hell, running to beat the devil, looking back now, looking back

 

6

THE BARRENS / 12:40 P.M.

 

over her shoulder for any sign of them as she slipped and scrambled her way down the embankment. No sign, at least not yet. She had “really fetched it to him,” as her father sometimes said… and just thinking of her father brought another wave of guilt and despondency washing over her.

She looked under the rickety bridge, hoping to see Silver heeled over on his side, but Silver was gone. There was a cache of toy guns which they no longer bothered to take home, and that was all. She started down the path, looked back… and there they were, Belch and Victor supporting Henry between them, standing on the edge of the embankment like Indian sentries in a Randolph Scott movie. Henry was horribly pale. He pointed at her. Victor and Belch began to help him down the slope. Dirt and gravel spilled from beneath their heels.

Beverly looked at them for a long moment, almost hypnotized. Then she turned and sprinted through the trickle of brook-water that ran out from under the bridge, ignoring Ben’s stepping-stones, her sneakers spraying out flat sheets of water. She ran down the path, the breath hot in her throat. She could feel the muscles in her legs trembling. She didn’t have much left now. The clubhouse. If she could get there, she might still be safe.

She ran along the path, branches whipping even more color into her cheeks, one striking her eye and making it water. She cut to the right, blundered through tangles of underbrush, and came out into the clearing. Both the camouflaged trapdoor and the slit window stood open; rock n roll drifted up. At the sound of her approach, Ben Hanscom popped up. He had a box of Junior Mints in one hand and an Archie comic book in the other.

He got a good look at Bev and his mouth fell open. Under other circumstances it would have been almost funny. “Bev, what the hell-

She didn’t bother replying. Behind her, and not too far behind, either, she could hear branches snapping and whipping; there was a muffled shouted curse. It sounded as if Henry was getting livelier. So she just ran at the square trapdoor opening, her hair, tangled now with green leaves and twigs as well as the crud from her scramble under the garbage truck, streaming out behind her.

Ben saw she was coming in like the 101st Airborne and disappeared as quickly as he had come out. Beverly jumped and he caught her clumsily.

“Shut everything,” she panted. “Hurry up, Ben, for heaven’s sake! They’re coming!”

“Who?”

“Henry and his friends! Henry’s gone crazy, he’s got a knife-”

That was enough for Ben. He dropped his Junior Mints and his funny book. He pulled the trapdoor shut with a grunt. The top was covered with sods; Tangle-Track was still holding them remarkably well. A few blocks of sod had gotten a little loose, but that was all. Beverly stood on tiptoe and closed the window. They were in darkness.

She groped for Ben, found him, and hugged him with panicky tightness. After a moment he hugged her back. They were both on their knees. With sudden horror Beverly realized that Richie’s transistor radio was still playing somewhere in the blackness: Little Richard singing “The Girl Can’t Help It.”

“Ben… the radio… they’ll hear…”

“Oh God!”

He bunted her with one meaty hip and almost knocked her sprawling in the dark. She heard the radio fall to the floor. “The girl can’t help it if the menfolks stop and stare,” Little Richard informed them with his customary hoarse enthusiasm. “Can’t help it!” the back-up group testified, “the girl can’t help it!” Ben was panting now, too. They sounded like a couple of steam-engines. Suddenly there was a crunch… and silence.

“Oh shit,” Ben said. “I just squashed it. Richie’s gonna have a bird.” He reached for her in the dark. She felt his hand touch one of her breasts, then jerk away, as if burned. She groped for him, got hold of his shirt, and drew him close.

“Beverly, what-”

“Shhh!”

He quieted. They sat together, arms around each other, looking up. The darkness was not quite perfect; there was a narrow line of light down one side of the trapdoor, and three others outlined the slit window. One of these three was wide enought to let a slanted ray of sunlight fall into the clubhouse. She could only pray they wouldn’t see it.

She could hear them approaching. At first she couldn’t make out the words… and then she could. Her grip on Ben tightened.

“If she went into the bamboo, we can pick up her trail easy,” Victor was saying.

“They play around here,” Henry replied. His voice was strained, his words emerging in little puffs, as if with great effort. “Boogers Taliendo said so. And the day we had that rockfight, they were coming from here.”

“Yeah, they play guns and stuff,” Belch said.

Suddenly there were thudding footfalls right above them; the sod-covered cap vibrated up and down. Dirt sifted onto Beverly’s upturned face. One, two, maybe even all three of them were standing on top of the clubhouse. A cramp laced her belly; she had to bite down against a cry. Ben put one big hand on the side of her face and pressed it against his arm as he looked up, waiting to see if they would guess… or if they knew already and were just playing games.

“They got a place,” Henry was saying. “That’s what Boogers told me. Some kind of a treehouse or something. They call it their club.”

“I’ll club em, if they want a club,” Victor said. Belch uttered a thunderous heehawing of laughter at this.

Thump, thump, thump, overhead. The cap moved up and down a little more this time. Surely they would notice it; ordinary ground just didn’t have that kind of give.

“Let’s look down by the river,” Henry said. “I bet she’s down there.”

“Okay,” Victor said.

Thump, thump. They were moving off. Bev let a little sigh of relief trickle through her clamped teeth… and then Henry said: “You stay here and guard the path, Belch.”

“Okay,” Belch said, and he began to march back and forth, sometimes leaving the cap, sometimes coming back across it. More dirt sifted down. Ben and Beverly looked at each other with strained, dirty faces. Bev became aware that there was more than the smell of smoke in the clubhouse-a sweaty, garbag stink was rising as well. That’s me, she thought dismally. In spite of the smell she hugged Ben even tighter. His bulk seemed suddenly very welcome, very comforting, and she was glad there was a lot of him to hug. He might have been nothing but a frightened fat-boy when school let out for the summer, but he was more than that now; like all of them, he had changed. If Belch discovered them down here, Ben just might give him a surprise.

“I’ll club em if they want a club,” Belch said, and chuckled. A Belch Huggins chuckle was a low, troll-like sound. “Club em if they want a club. That’s good. That’s pretty much okey-dokey.”

She became aware that Ben’s upper body was heaving up and down in short, sharp movements; he was pulling air into his lungs and letting it out in sharp little bursts. For one alarmed moment she thought he was starting to cry, and then she got a closer look at his face and realized he was struggling against laughter. His eyes, leaking tears, caught hers, rolled madly, and looked away. In the faint light which leaked in through the cracks around the closed trapdoor and the window, she could see his face was nearly purple with the strain of holding it in.

“Club em if they want an ole clubby-dubby,” Belch said, and sat down heavily right in the center of the cap. This time the roof trembled more alarmingly, and Bev heard a low but ominous crrrack from one of the supports. The cap had been meant to support the chunks of camouflaging sod laid on top of it… but not the added one hundred and sixty pounds of Belch Huggins’s weight.

If he doesn’t get up he’s going to land in our laps, Bev thought, and she began to catch Ben’s hysteria. It was trying to boil out of her in rancid whoops and brays. In her mind’s eye she suddenly saw herself pushing the window up enough on its hinges for her hand to creep out and administer a really good goose to Belch Huggins’s backside as he sat there in the hazy afternoon sunshine, muttering and giggling. She buried her face against Ben’s chest in a last-ditch effort to keep it inside.

“Shhh,” Ben whispered. “For Christ’s sake, Bev-”

Ctrrrackk. Louder this time.

“Will it hold?” she whispered back.

“It might, if he doesn’t fart,” Ben said, and a moment later Belch did cut one-a loud and fruity trumpet-blast that seemed to go on for at least three seconds. They held each other even tighter, muffling each other’s frantic giggles. Beverly’s head hurt so badly that she thought she might soon have a stroke.

Then, faintly, she heard Henry yelling Belch’s name.

“What’?” Belch bellowed, getting up with a thump and a thud that sifted more dirt down on Ben and Beverly. “What, Henry?”

Henry yelled something back; Beverly could only make out the words bank and bushes.

“Okay!” Belch bawled, and his feet crossed the cap for the last time. There was a final cracking noise, this one much louder, and a splinter of wood landed in Bev’s lap. She picked it up wonderingly.

“Five more minutes,” Ben said in a low whisper. “That’s all it would have taken.”

“Did you hear him when he let go?” Beverly asked, beginning to giggle again.

“Sounded like World War III,” Ben said, also beginning to laugh.

It was a relief to be able to let it out, and they laughed wildly, trying to do it in whispers.

Finally, unaware she was going to say it at all (and certainly not because it had any discernible bearing on this situation), Beverly said: Thank you for the poem, Ben.”

Ben stopped laughing all at once and regarded her gravely, cautiously. He took a dirty handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face with it slowly. “Poem?”

The haiku. The haiku on the postcard. You sent it, didn’t you?”

“No,” Ben said. “I didn’t send you any haiku. Cause if a kid like me-a fat kid like me-did something like that, the girl would probably laugh at him.”

“I didn’t laugh. I thought it was beautiful.”

“I could never write anything beautiful. Bill, maybe. Not me.”

“Bill will write,” she agreed. “But he’ll never write anything as nice as that. May I use your handkerchief?”

He gave it to her and she began to clean her face as best she could.

“How did you know it was me?” he asked finally.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just did.”

Ben’s throat worked convulsively. He looked down at his hands. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

She looked at him gravely. “You better not mean that,” she said. “If you do, it’s really going to spoil my day, and I’ll tell you, it’s going downhill already.”

He continued to look down at his hands and spoke at last in a voice she could barely hear. “Well, I mean I love you, Beverly, but I don’t want that to spoil anything.”

“It won’t,” she said, and hugged him. “I need all the love I can get right now.”

“But you specially like Bill.”

“Maybe I do,” she said, “but that doesn’t matter. If we were grown-ups, maybe it would, a little. But I like you all specially. You’re the only friends I have. I love you too, Ben.”

“Thank you,” he said. He paused, trying, and brought it out. He was even able to look at her as he said it. “I wrote the poem.”

They sat without saying anything for a little while. Beverly felt safe. Protected. The images of her father’s face and Henry’s knife seemed less vivid and threatening when they sat close like this. That sense of protection was hard to define and she didn’t try, although much later she would recognize the source of its strength: she was in the arms of a male who would die for her with no hesitation at all. It was a fact that she simply knew: it was in the scent that came from his pores, something utterly primitive that her own glands could respond to.

“The others were coming back,” Ben said suddenly. “What if they get caught out?”

She straightened up, aware that she had almost been dozing. Bill, she remembered, had invited Mike Hanlon home to lunch with him. Richie was going to go home with Stan and have sandwiches. And Eddie had promised to bring back his Parcheesi board. They would be arriving soon, totally unaware that Henry and his friends were in the Barrens.

“We’ve got to get to them,” Beverly said. “Henry’s not just after me.”

“If we come out and they come back-”

“Yes, but at least we know they’re here. Bill and the other guys don’t. Eddie can’t even run, they already broke his arm.”

“Jeezum-crow,” Ben said. “I guess we’ll have to chance it.”

“Yeah.” She swallowed and looked at her Timex. It was hard to read in the dimness, but she thought it was a little past one. “Ben…”

“What?”

“Henry’s really gone crazy. He’s like that kid in The Blackboard Jungle. He was going to kill me and the other two were going to help him.”

“Aw, no,” Ben said. “Henry’s crazy, but not that crazy. He’s just…”

“Just what?” Beverly said. She thought of Henry and Patrick in the automobile graveyard in the thick sunshine. Henry’s blank eyes.

Ben didn’t answer. He was thinking. Things had changed, hadn’t they? When you were inside the changes, they were harder to see. You had to step back to see them… you had to try, anyway. When school let out he’d been afraid of Henry, but only because Henry was bigger, and because he was a bully-the kind of kid who would grab a firstgrader, Indian-rub his arm and send him away crying. That was about all. Then he had engraved Ben’s belly. Then there had been the rockfight, and Henry had been chucking M-80s at people’s heads. You could kill somebody with one of those things. You could kill somebody easy. He had started to look different… haunted, almost. It seemed that you always had to be on the watch for him, the way you’d always have to be on the watch for tigers or poisonous snakes if you were in the jungle. But you got used to it; so used to it that it didn’t even seem unusual, just the way things were. But Henry was crazy, wasn’t he? Yes. Ben had known that on the day school ended, and had willfully refused to believe it, or remember it. It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to believe or remember. And suddenly a thought-a thought so strong it was almost a certainty-crept into his mind full-blown, as cold as October mud. It’s using Henry. Maybe the others too, but It’s using them through Henry. And if that’s the truth, then she’s probably right. It’s not just Indian rubs or rabbit-punches in the back of the neck during study-time near the end of the schoolday while Mrs Douglas reads her book at her desk, not just a push on the playground so that you fall down and skin your knee. If It’s using him, then Henry will use the knife.

“An old lady saw them trying to beat me up,” Beverly was saying. “Henry went after her. He kicked her taillight out.”

This alarmed Ben more than anything else. He understood instinctively, as most kids did, that they lived below the sight-lines, and hence the thought-lines, of most adults. When a grownup was ditty-bopping down the street, thinking his grownup thoughts about work and appointments and buying cars and whatever else grownups thought about, he never noticed kids playing hopscotch or guns or kick-the-can or ring-a-levio or hide-and-go-seek. Bullies like Henry could get away with hurting other kids quite a lot if they were careful to stay below that sightline. At the very most, a passing adult was apt to say something like, “Why don’t you quit that?” and then just continue ditty-bopping along without waiting to see if the bully stopped or not. So the bully would wait until the grownup had turned the corner… and then go back to business as usual. It was like adults thought that real life only started when a person was five feet tall.

If Henry had gone after some old lady, he had gone above that sight-line. And that more than anything else suggested to Ben that he really was crazy.

Beverly saw the belief in Ben’s face and felt relief sweep over her. She would not have to tell him about how Mr Ross had simply folded his paper and walked into his house. She didn’t want to tell him about that. It was too scary.

“Let’s go up to Kansas Street,” Ben said, and abruptly pushed open the trapdoor. “Get ready to run.”

He stood up in the opening and looked around. The clearing was silent. He could hear the chuckling voice of the Kenduskeag close by, birdsong, the thum-thud-thum-thud of a diesel engine snorting its way into the trainyards. He heard nothing else and that made him uneasy. He would have felt much better if he’d heard Henry, Victor, and Belch cursing their way through the neavy undergrowth down by the stream. But he couldn’t hear them at all.

Come on,” he said, and helped Beverly up. She also looked around uneasily, brushing her hair back with her hands and grimacing at its greasy feel.

He took her hand and they pushed through a screen of bushes toward Kansas Street. “We’d better stay off the path.”

“No,” she said, “we’ve got to hurry.”

He nodded. “All right.”

They got to the path and started toward Kansas Street. Once she stumbled over a rock in the path and

 

7

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