LOVE AND DESIRE / AUGUST 10TH, 1958

 

comes to her first, because he is the most frightened. He comes to her not as her friend of that summer, or as her brief lover now, but the way he would have come to his mother only three or four years ago, to be comforted; he doesn’t draw back from her smooth nakedness and at first she doubts if he even feels it. He is trembling, and although she holds him the darkness is so perfect that even this close she cannot see him; except for the rough cast he might as well be a phantom.

“What do you want?” he asks her.

“You have to put your thing in me,” she says.

He tries to pull back but she holds him and he subsides against her. She has heard someone-Ben, she thinks-draw in his breath.

“Bevvie, I can’t do that. I don’t know how-”

“I think it’s easy. But you’ll have to get undressed.” She thinks about the intricacies of managing cast and shirt, first somehow separating and then rejoining them, and amends, “Your pants, anyway.”

“No, I can’t!” But she thinks part of him can, and wants to, because his trembling has stopped and she feels something small and hard which presses against the right side of her belly.

“You can,” she says, and pulls him down. The surface beneath her bare back and legs is firm, clayey, dry. The distant thunder of the water is drowsy, soothing. She reaches for him. There’s a moment when her father’s face intervenes, harsh and forbidding

(I want to see if you’re intact)

and then she closes her arms around Eddie’s neck, her smooth cheek against his smooth cheek, and as he tentatively touches her small breasts she sighs and thinks for the first time This is Eddie and she remembers a day in July-could it only have been last month?-when no one else turned up in the Barrens but Eddie, and he had a whole bunch of Little Lulu comic books and they read together for most of the afternoon, Little Lulu looking for beebleberries and getting in all sorts of crazy situations, Witch Hazel, all of those guys. It had been fun.

She thinks of birds; in particular of the grackles and starlings and crows that come back in the spring, and her hands go to his belt and loosen it, and he says again that he can’t do that; she tells him that he can, she knows he can, and what she feels is not shame or fear now but a kind of triumph.

“Where?” he says, and that hard thing pushes urgently against her inner thigh.

“Here,” she says.

“Bevvie, I’ll fall on you!” he says, and she hears his breath start to whistle painfully.

“I think that’s sort of the idea,” she tells him and holds him gently and guides him. He pushes forward too fast and there is pain.

Ssssss!-she draws her breath in, her teeth biting at her lower lip and thinks of the birds again, the spring birds, lining the roofpeaks of houses, taking wing all at once under low March clouds.

“Beverly?” he says uncertainly. “Are you okay?”

“Go slower,” she says. “It’ll be easier for you to breathe.” He does move more slowly, and after awhile his breathing speeds up but she understands this is not because there is anything wrong with him.

The pain fades. Suddenly he moves more quickly, then stops, stiffens, and makes a sound-some sound. She senses that this is something for him, something extraordinarily, special, something like… like flying. She feels powerful: she feels a sense of triumph rise up strongly within her. Is this what her father was afraid of? Well he might be! There was power in this act, all right, a chain-breaking power that was blood-deep. She feels no physical pleasure, but there is a kind of mental ecstasy in it for her. She senses the closeness. He puts his face against her neck and she holds him. He’s crying. She holds him. And feels the part of him that made a connection between them begin to fade. It is not leaving her, exactly; it is simply fading, becoming less.

When his weight shifts away she sits up and touches his face in the darkness.

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Whatever it is. I don’t know, exactly.”

He shakes his head-she feels it with her hand against his cheek.

“I don’t think it was exactly like… you know, like the big boys say. But it was… it was really something.” He speaks low so the others can’t hear. “I love you, Bevvie.”

Her consciousness breaks down a little there. She’s quite sure there’s more talk, some whispered, some loud, and can’t remember what is said. It doesn’t matter. Does she have to talk each of them into it all over again? Yes, probably. But it doesn’t matter. They have to be talked into it, this essential human link between the world and the infinite, the only place where the bloodstream touches eternity. It doesn’t matter. What matters is love and desire. Here in this dark is as good a place as any. Better than some, maybe.

Mike comes to her, then Richie, and the act is repeated. Now she feels some pleasure, dim heat in her childish unmatured sex, and she closes her eyes as Stan comes to her and she thinks of the birds, spring and the birds, and she sees them, again and again, all lighting at once, filling up the winter-naked trees, shockwave riders on the moving edge of nature’s most violent season, she sees them take wing again and again, the flutter of their wings like the snap of many sheets on the line, and she thinks: A month from now every kid in Derry Park will have a kite, they’ll run to keep the strings from getting tangled with each other. She thinks again: This is what flying is like.

With Stan as with the others, there is that rueful sense of fading, of leaving, with whatever they truly need from this act-some ultimate-close but as yet unfound.

“Did you?” she asks again, and although she doesn’t know exactly what “it” is, she knows that he hasn’t.

There is a long wait, and then Ben comes to her.

He is trembling all over, but it is not the fearful trembling she felt in Stan.

“Beverly, I can’t,” he says in a tone which purports to be reasonable and is anything but.

“You can too. I can feel it.”

She sure can. There’s more of this hardness; more of him. She can feel it below the gentle push of his belly. Its size raises a certain curiosity and she touches the bulge lightly. He groans against her neck, and the blow of his breath causes her bare body to dimple with goosebumps. She feels the first twist of real heat race through her-suddenly the feeling in her is very large; she recognizes that it is too big

(and is he too big, can she take that into herself?)

and too old for her, something, some feeling that walks in boots. This is like Henry’s M-80s, something not meant for kids, something that could explode and blow you up. But this was not the place or time for worry; here there was love, desire, and the dark. If they didn’t try for the first two they would surely be left with the last.

“Beverly, don’t-”

“Yes.”

“Show me how to fly,” she says with a calmness she doesn’t feel, aware by the fresh wet warmth on her cheek and neck that he has begun to cry. “show me, Ben.”

“No…”

“If you wrote the poem, show me. Feel my hair if you want to, Ben. It’s all right.”

“Beverly… I… I…”

He’s not just trembling now; he’s shaking all over. But she senses again that this ague is not all fear-part of it is the precursor of the throe this act is all about. She thinks of

(the birds)

his face, his dear sweet earnest face, and knows it is not fear; it is wanting he feels, a deep passionate wanting now barely held in check, and she feels that sense of power again, something like flying, something like looking down from above and seeing all the birds on the roofpeaks, on the TV antenna atop Wally’s, seeing streets spread out maplike, oh desire, right, this was something, it was love and desire that taught you to fly.

“Ben! Yes!” she cries suddenly, and the leash breaks.

She feels pain again, and for a moment there is the frightening sensation of being crushed. Then he props himself up on the palms of his hands and that feeling is gone.

He’s big, oh yes-the pain is back, and it’s much deeper than when Eddie first entered her. She has to bite her lip again and think of the birds until the burning is gone. But it does go, and she is able to reach up and touch his lips with one finger, and he moans.

The heat is back, and she feels her power suddenly shift to him; she gives it gladly and goes with it. There is a sensation first of being rocked, of a delicious spiralling sweetness which makes her begin to turn her head helplessly from side to side, and a tuneless humming comes from between her closed lips, this is flying, this, oh love, oh desire, oh this is something impossible to deny, binding, giving, making a strong circle: binding, giving… flying.

“Oh Ben, oh my dear, yes,” she whispers, feeling the sweat stand out on her face, feeling their connection, something firmly in place, something like eternity, the number 8 rocked over on its side. “I love you so much, dear.”

And she feels the thing begin to happen-something of which the girls who whisper and giggle about sex in the girls” room have no idea, at least as far as she knows; they only marvel at how gooshy sex must be, and now she realizes that for many of them sex must be some unrealized undefined monster; they refer to the act as It. Would you do It, do your sister and her boyfriend do It, do your mom and dad still do It, and how they never intend to do It; oh yes, you would think that the whole girls” side of the fifth-grade class was made up of spinsters-to-be, and it is obvious to Beverly that none of them can suspect this… this conclusion, and she is only kept from screaming by her knowledge that the others will hear and think her badly hurt. She puts the side of her hand in her mouth and bites down hard. She understands the screamy laughter of Greta Bowie and Sally Mueller and all the others better now: hadn’t they, the seven of them, spent most of this, the longest, scariest summer of their lives, laughing like loons? You laugh because what’s fearful and unknown is also what’s funny, you laugh the way a small child will sometimes laugh and cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches, knowing it is supposed to be funny… but it is also unknown, full of the unknown’s eternal power.

Biting her hand will not stay the cry, and she can only reassure them-and Ben-by crying out her affirmative in the darkness.

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Glorious images of flight fill her head, mixing with the harsh calling of the grackles and starlings; these sounds become the world’s sweetest music.

So she flies, she flies up, and now the power is not with her or with him but somewhere between them, and he cries out, and she can feel his arms trembling, and she arches up and into him, feeling his spasm, his touch, his total fleeting intimacy with her in the dark. They break through into the lifelight together.

Then it is over and they are in each other’s arms and when he tries to say something-perhaps some stupid apology that would hurt what she remembers, some stupid apology like a handcuff, she stops his words with a kiss and sends him away.

Bill comes to her.

He tries to say something, but his stutter is almost total now.

“You be quiet,” she says, secure in her new knowledge, but aware that she is tired now. Tired and damned sore. The insides and backs of her thighs feel sticky, and she thinks it’s maybe because Ben actually finished, or maybe because she is bleeding. “Everything is going to be totally okay.”

“A-A-Are you shuh-shuh-shuh-hure?”

“Yes,” she says, and links her hands behind his neck, feeling the sweaty mat of his hair. “You just bet.”

“Duh-duh-does ih-ih… does ih-ih-ih-”

“Shhh…”

It is not as it was with Ben; there is passion, but not the same kind. Being with Bill now is the best conclusion to this that there could be. He is kind; tender; just short of calm. She senses his eagerness, but it is tempered and held back by his anxiety for her, perhaps because only Bill and she herself realize what an enormous act this is, and how it must never be spoken of, not to anyone else, not even to each other.

At the end, she is surprised by that sudden upsurge and she has time to think: Oh! It’s going to happen again, I don’t know if I can stand it -

But her thoughts are swept away by the utter sweetness of it, and she barely hears him whispering, “I love you, Bev, I love you, I’ll always love you” saying it over and over and not stuttering at all.

She hugs him to her and for a moment they stay that way, his smooth cheek against hers.

He withdraws from her without saying anything and for a little while she’s alone, putting her clothes back together, slowly putting them on, aware of a dull throbbing pain of which they, being male, will never know, aware also of a certain exhausted pleasure and the relief of having it over. There is an emptiness down there now, and although she is glad that her sex is her own again, the emptiness imparts a strange melancholy which she could never express… except to think of bare trees under a white winter sky, empty trees, trees waiting for blackbirds to come like ministers at the end of March to preside over the death of snow.

She finds them by groping for their hands.

For a moment no one speaks and when someone does, it does not surprise her much that it’s Eddie. “I think when we went right two turns back, we shoulda gone left. Jeez, I knew that, but I was so sweaty and frigged up-”

“Been frigged up your whole life, Eds,” Richie says. His voice is pleasant. The raw edge of panic is completely gone.

“We went wrong some other places too,” Eddie says, ignoring him, “but that’s the worst one. If we can find our way back there, we just might be okay.”

They form up in a clumsy line, Eddie first, Beverly second now, her hand on Eddie’s shoulder as Mike’s is on hers. They begin to move again, faster this time. Eddie displays none of his former nervous care.

We’re going home, she thinks, and shivers with relief and joy. Home, yes. And that will be good. We’ve done our job, what we came for, now we can go back to just being kids again. And that will be good, too.

As they move through the dark she realizes the sound of running water is closer.

 

 

Chapter 23

OUT

 

1

DERRY / 9:00-10:00 A.M.

 

By ten past nine, Derry windspeeds were being clocked at an average of fifty-five miles an hour, with gusts up to seventy. The anemometer in the courthouse registered one gust of eighty-one, and then the needle dropped all the way back to zero. The wind had ripped the whirling cuplike device on the courthouse roof off its moorings and it flew away into the rainswept dimness of the day. Like George Denbrough’s boat, it was never seen again. By nine-thirty, the thing the Derry Water Department had sworn was now impossible seemed not only possible but imminent: that downtown Derry might be flooded for the first time since August of 1958, when many of the old drains had clogged up or caved in during a freak rainstorm. By quarter often, men with grim faces were arriving in cars and pick-up trucks along both sides of the Canal, their foul-weather gear rippling crazily in the freight-train wind. For the first time since October of 1957, sandbags began to go up along the Canal’s cement sides. The arch where the Canal went under the three-way intersection at the heart of Derry’s downtown area was full almost to the top; Main Street, Canal Street, and the foot of Up-Mile Hill were impassable except by foot, and those who splashed and hurried their way toward the sandbagging operation felt the very streets beneath their feet trembling with the frenzied flow of the water, the way a turnpike overpass will tremble when big trucks pass each other. But this was a steady vibration, and the men were glad to be on the north side of downtown, away from that steady rumbling that was felt rather than heard. Harold Gardener shouted at Alfred Zitner, who ran Zitner’s Realty on the west side of town, asked him if the streets were going to collapse. Zitner said hell would freeze over before something like that happened. Harold had a brief image of Adolf Hitler and Judas Iscariot handing out ice-skates and went on heaving sandbags. The water was now less than three inches below the top of the Canal’s cement walls. In the Barrens the Kenduskeag was already out of its banks, and by noon the luxuriant undergrowth and scrub trees would be poking out of a vast shallow, stinking lake. The men continued to work, pausing only when the supply of sandbags ran out… and then, at ten of ten, they were frozen by a great rending ripping sound. Harold Gardener later told his wife he thought maybe the end of the world had come. It wasn’t downtown falling into the earth-not then-it was the Standpipe. Only Andrew Keene, Norbert Keene’s grandson, actually saw it happen, and he had smoked so much Colombian Red that morning that at first he thought it had to be a hallucination. He had been wandering Derry’s stormswept streets since about eight o’clock, roughly the same time that Dr Hale was ascending to that great family medical practice in the sky. He was drenched to the skin (except for the two-ounce baggie of pot tucked up into his armpit, that was) but totally unaware of it. His eyes widened in disbelief. He had reached Memorial Park, which stood on the flank of Standpipe Hill. And unless he was wrong, the Standpipe now had a pronounced lean, like that fucked-up tower in Pisa that was on all the macaroni boxes. “Oh, wow!” Andrew Keene cried, his eyes widening even more-they looked as if they might be on small tough springs now-as the splintering sounds began. The Standpipe’s lean was becoming more and more acute as he stood there with his jeans plastered to his skinny shanks and his drenched paisley headband dripping water into his eyes. White shingles were popping off the downtown side of the great round water-tower… no, not exactly popping off; it was more like they were squirting off. And a definite crinkle had appeared about twenty feet above the Standpipe’s stone foundation. Water suddenly began to spray out through this crinkle, and now the shingles weren’t squirting off the Standpipe’s downtown side; they were spewing into the windstream. A rending sound began to come from the Standpipe, and Andrew could see it moving, like the hand of a great clock inclining from noon to one to two. The baggie of pot fell out of his armpit and fetched up inside his shirt somewhere near his belt. He didn’t notice. He was utterly fetched. Large twanging sounds came from inside the Standpipe, as if the strings of the world’s biggest guitar were being broken one by one. These were the cables inside the cylinder, which had provided the proper balance of stress against the water-pressure. The Standpipe began to heel over faster and faster, boards and beams ripping apart, splinters jumping and whirling into the air. “FAAAR FUCKING OWWWWT!” Andrew Keene shrieked, but it was lost in the Standpipe’s final crashing fall, and by the rising sound of one and three-quarter million gallons of water, seven thousand tons of water, pouring out of the building’s ruptured spouting side. It went in a gray tidal wave, and of course if Andrew Keene had been on the downhill side of the Standpipe, he would have exited the world in no time. But God favors drunks, small children, and the cataclysmically stoned; Andrew was standing in a place where he could see it all and not be touched by a single drop. “GREAT FUCKING SPECIAL EFFECTS!” Andrew screamed as the water rolled over Memorial Park like a solid thing, sweeping away the sundial beside which a small boy named Stan Uris had often stood watching birds with his father’s field glasses. “sTEVEN SPIELBERG EAT YOUR HEART OUT!” The stone birdbath also went. Andrew saw it for a moment, turning over and over, pedestal for dish and dish for pedestal, and then it was gone. A line of maples and birches separating Memorial Park from Kansas Street were knocked down like so many pins in a bowling alley. They took wild spiky snarls of power lines with them. The water rolled across the street, beginning to spread now, beginning to look more like water than that mind-boggling solid wall that had taken sundial, birdbath, and trees, but it still had power enough to sweep almost a dozen houses on the far side of Kansas Street off their foundations and into the Barrens. They went with sickening ease, most of them still whole. Andrew Keene recognized one of them as belonging to the Karl Massensik family. Mr Massensik had been his sixth-grade teacher, a real pooch. As the house went over the edge and down the slope, Andrew realized he could still see a candle burning brightly in one window, and he wondered briefly if he might be mentally highsiding it, if you could dig the concept. There was an explosion from the Barrens and a brief gout of yellow flame as someone’s Coleman gas lantern ignited oil pouring out of a ruptured fuel-tank. Andrew stared at the far side of Kansas Street, where until just forty seconds ago there had been a neat line of middle-class houses. They were Gone City now, and you better believe it, sweet thing. In their places were ten cellar-holes that looked like swimming-pools. Andrew wanted to advance the opinion that this was far fucking out, but he couldn’t yell anymore. Seemed like his yeller was busted. His diaphragm felt weak and useless. He heard a series of crunching thuds, the sound of a giant with his shoes full of Ritz crackers marching down a flight of stairs. It was the Standpipe rolling down the hill, a huge white cylinder still spouting the last of its water supply, the thick cables that had helped to hold it together flying into the air and then cracking down again like steel bullwhips, digging runnels in the soft earth that immediately filled up with rushing rainwater. As Andrew watched, with his chin resting somewhere between his collarbones, the Standpipe, horizontal now, better than a hundred and twenty-five feet long, flew out into the air. For a moment it seemed frozen there, a surreal image straight out of rubber-walled strait-jacketed toodle-oo land, rainwater sparkling on its shattered sides, its windows broken, casements hanging, the flashing light on top, meant as a warning for low-flying light planes, still flashing, and then it fell into the street with a final rending crash. Kansas Street had channelled a lot of the water, and now it began to rush toward downtown by way of Up-Mile Hill. There used to be houses over there, Andrew Keene thought, and suddenly all the strength ran out of his legs. He sat down heavily-kersplash. He stared at the broken stone foundation on which the Standpipe had stood for his whole life. He wondered if anyone would ever believe him. He wondered if he believed it himself.

 

2

THE KILL / 10:02 A.M… MAY31ST, 1985

 

Bill and Richie saw It turn toward them, Its mandibles opening and closing, Its one good eye glaring down at them, and Bill realized It gave off Its own source of illumination, like some grisly lightning-bug. But the light was flickering and uncertain; It was badly hurt. Its thoughts buzzed and racketed

(let me go! let me go and you can have everything you’ve ever wanted-money, fame, fortune, power-I can give you these things)

in his head.

Bill moved forward empty-handed, his eyes fixed on Its single red one. He felt the power growing inside him, investing him, knotting his arms into cords, filling each clenched fist with its own force. Richie walked beside him, his lips pulled back over his teeth.

(I can give you your wife back-I can do it, only I-she’ll remember nothing as the seven of you remembered nothing)

They were close, very close now. Bill could smell Its stinking aroma and realized with sudden horror that it was the smell of the Barrens, the smell they had taken for the smell of sewers and polluted streams and the burning dump… but had they ever really believed those were all it had been? It was the smell of It, and perhaps it had been strongest in the Barrens but it had hung over all Derry like a cloud and people just didn’t smell it, the way zoo-keepers don’t smell their charges after awhile, or even wonder why the visitors wrinkle their noses when they come in.

“Us two,” he muttered to Richie, and Richie nodded without taking his eyes off the Spider, which now shrank back from them, Its abominable spiny legs Glittering, brought to bay at last.

(I can’t give you eternal life but I can touch you and you will live long long lives-two hundred years, three hundred, perhaps five hundred-I can make you gods of the Earth-if you let me go if you let me go if you let me-)

“Bill?” Richie asked hoarsely.

With a scream building in him, building up and up and up, Bill charged. Richie ran with him stride for stride. They struck together with their right fists, but Bill understood it was not really their fists they were striking with at all; it was their combined force, augmented by the force of that Other; it was the force of memory and desire; above all else, it was the force of love and unforgotten childhood like one big wheel.

The Spider’s shriek filled Bill’s head, seeming to splinter his brains. He felt his fist plunge deep into writhing wetness. His arm followed it in up to the shoulder. He pulled it back, dripping with the Spider’s black blood. Ichor poured from the hole he had made.

He saw Richie standing almost beneath Its bloated body, covered with Its darkly sparkling blood, standing in the classic boxer’s stance, his dripping fists pumping.

The Spider lashed at them with Its legs. Bill felt one of them rip down his side, parting his shirt, parting skin. Its stinger pumped uselessly against the floor. Its screams were clarion-bells in his head. It lunged clumsily forward, trying to bite him, and instead of retreating Bill drove forward, using not just his fist now but his whole body, making himself into a torpedo. He ran into Its gut like a sprinting fullback who lowers his shoulders and simply drives straight ahead.

For a moment he felt Its stinking flesh simply give, as if it would rebound and send him flying. With an inarticulate scream he drove harder, pushing forward and upward with his legs, digging at It with his hands. And he broke through; was inundated with Its hot fluids. They ran across his face, in his ears. He snuffled them up his nose in thin squirming streams.

He was in the black again, up to his shoulders inside Its convulsing body. And in his clogged ears he could hear a sound like the steady whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK of a big bass drum, the one that leads the parade when the circus comes to town with its complement of freaks and strutting capering clowns.

The sound of Its heart.

He heard Richie scream in sudden pain, a sound that rose into a quick, gasping moan and was cut off. Bill suddenly thrust both fisted hands forward. He was choking, strangling in Its pulsing bag of guts and waters.

Whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK -

He plunged his hands into It, ripping, tearing, parting, seeking the source of the sound; rupturing organs, his slimed fingers opening and closing, his locked chest seeming to swell from lack of air.

Whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK -

And suddenly it was in his hands, a great living thing that pumped and pulsed against his palms, pushing them back and forth.

NONONONONONONO)

Yes! Bill cried, choking, drowning. Yes! Try this, you bitch! TRY THIS ONE OUT! DO YOU LIKE IT? DO YOU LOVE IT? DO YOU?

He laced his fingers together over the pulsing narthex of Its heart, palms spread apart in an inverted V-and brought them together with all the force he could muster.

There was one final shriek of pain and fear as Its heart exploded between his hands, running out between his fingers in jittering strings.

Whack-WHACK-whack-WHA

The scream, fading, dwindling. Bill felt Its body clench around him suddenly, like a fist in a slick glove. Then everything loosened. He became aware that Its body was tilting, slipping slowly off to one side. At the same time he began pulling back, his consciousness leaving him.

The Spider collapsed on Its side, a huge bundle of steaming alien meat, Its legs still quivering and jerking, caressing the sides of the tunnel and scraping across the floor in random scrawls.

Bill staggered away, breathing in whooping gasps, spitting in an effort to clear his mouth of Its horrible taste. He tripped over his own feet and fell to his knees.

And clearly, he heard the Voice of the Other; the Turtle might be dead, but whatever had invested it was not.

“Son, you did real good.”

Then it was gone. The power went with it. He felt weak, revulsed, half-insane. He looked over his shoulder and saw the dying black nightmare of the Spider, still jerking and quivering.

“Richie!” He cried out in a hoarse, breaking voice. “Richie, where are you

man?”

No answer.

The light was gone now. It had died with the Spider. He fumbled in the pocket of his matted shirt for the last book of matches. They were there, but they wouldn’t light; the heads were soaked with blood.

“Richie!” he screamed again, beginning to weep now. He began to crawl forward, first one hand and then the other groping in the dark. At last one of them struck something which yielded limply to his touch. His hands flew over it… and stopped as they touched Richie’s face.

“Richie! Richie!”

Still no answer. Struggling in the dark, Bill got one arm under Richie’s back and the other under his knees. He wobbled to his feet and began to stumble back the way they had come with Richie in his arms.

 

3

DERRY / 10:00-10:15 A.M.

 

At 10:00 the steady vibration which had been running through Derry’s downtown streets increased to a rumbling roar. The Derry News would later write that the supports of the Canal’s underground portion, weakened by the savage assault of what amounted to a flash flood, simply collapsed. There were, however, people who disagreed with that view. “I was there, I know,” Harold Gardener later told his wife. “It wasn’t just that the Canal’s supports collapsed. It was an earthquake, that’s what it was. It was a fucking earthquake.”

Either way, the results were the same. As the rumbling built steadily up and up, windows began to shatter, plaster ceilings began to fall, and the inhuman cry of twisting beams and foundations swelled into a frightening chorus. Cracks raced up the bullet-pocked brick facade of Machen’s like grasping hands. The cables holding the marquee of the Aladdin Theater out over the street snapped and the marquee came crashing down. Richard’s Alley, which ran behind the Center Street Drug, suddenly filled up with an avalanche of yellow brick as the Brian X Dowd Professional Building, erected in 1952, came crashing down. A huge screen of jaundice-colored dust rose in the air and was snatched away like a veil.

At the same time the statue of Paul Bunyan in front of the City Center exploded. It was as if that long-ago art teacher’s threat to blow it up had finally proved to be dead serious after all. The bearded grinning head rose straight up in the air. One leg kicked forward, the other back, as if Paul had attempted some sort of a split so enthusiastic it had resulted in dismemberment. The statue’s midsection blew out in a cloud of shrapnel and the head of the plastic axe rose into the rainy sky, disappeared, and then came down again, twirling end over end. It sheared through the roof of the Kissing Bridge, and then its floor.

And then, at 10:02 A.M… downtown Derry simply collapsed.

Most of the water from the ruptured Standpipe had crossed Kansas Street and ended up in the Barrens, but tons of it rushed down into the business district by way of Up-Mile Hill. Perhaps that was the straw that broke the camel’s back… or perhaps, as Harold Gardener told his wife, there really was an earthquake. Cracks raced across the surface of Main Street. They were narrow at first… and then they began to gape like hungry mouths and the sound of the Canal floated up, not muffled now but frighteningly loud. Everything began to shake. The neon sign proclaiming OUT-LET MOCCASINS in front of Shorty Squires’s souvenir shop hit the street and shorted out in three feet of water. A moment or two later, Shorty’s building, which stood next to Mr Paperback, began to descend. Buddy Angstrom was the first to see this phenomenon. He elbowed Alfred Zitner, who looked, gaped, and then elbowed Harold Gardener. Within a space of seconds the sandbagging operation stopped. The men lining both sides of the Canal only stood and stared toward downtown in the pouring rain, their faces stamped with identical expressions of horrified wonder. Squires’s Souvenirs and Sundries appeared to have been built on some huge elevator which was now on the way down. It sank into the apparently solid concrete with ponderous stately dignity. When it came to a stop, you could have dropped to your hands and knees on the flooded sidewalk and entered through one of the third-floor windows. Water sprayed up all around the building, and a moment later Shorty himself appeared on the roof, waving his arms madly for rescue. Then he was obliterated as the office-building next door, the one which housed Mr Paperback at ground level, also sank into the ground. Unfortunately, this one did not go straight down as Shorty’s building had done; the Mr Paperback building developed a marked lean (for a moment, in fact, it bore a strong resemblance to that fucked-up tower in Pisa, the one on the macaroni boxes). As it tilted, bricks began to shower from its top and sides. Shorty was struck by several. Harold Gardener saw him reel backward, hands to his head… and then the top three floors of the Mr Paperback building slid off as neatly as pancakes from the top of a stack. Shorty disappeared. Someone on the sandbag line screamed, and then everything was lost in the grinding roar of destruction. Men were knocked off their feet or sent wobbling and staggering back from the Canal. Harold Gardener saw the buildings which faced each other across Main Street lean forward, like ladies kibbitzing over a card-game, their heads almost touching. The street itself was sinking, cracking, breaking up. Water splashed and sprayed. And then, one after another, buildings on both sides of the street simply swayed past their centers of gravity and crashed into the street-the Northeast Bank, The Shoeboat, Alvey’s Smokes “n Jokes, Bailley’s Lunch, Bandler’s Record and Music Barn. Except that by then there was really no street for them to crash into. The street had fallen into the Canal, stretching like taffy at first and then breaking up into bobbing chunks of asphalt. Harold saw the traffic-island at the three-street intersection suddenly drop out of sight, and as water geysered up, he suddenly understood what was going to happen.

“Gotta get out of here!” he screamed at Al Zitner. “It’s gonna backwater! Al! Its gonna backwater!”

Al Zitner gave no sign that he had heard. His was the face of a sleepwalker, or perhaps of a man who has been deeply hypnotized. He stood in his soaked red-and-blue-checked sportcoat, in his open-collared Lacoste shirt with the little alligator on the left boob, in his blue socks with the crossed white golf-clubs knitted into their sides, in his brown L. L. Bean’s boat shoes with the rubber soles. He was watching perhaps a million dollars of his own personal investments sinking into the street, three or four millions of his friends” investments-the guys he played poker with, the guys he golfed with, the guys he skied with at his time-sharing condo in Rangely. Suddenly his home town, Derry, Maine, for Christ’s sake, looked bizarrely like that fucked-up city where the wogs pushed people around in those long skinny canoes. Water roiled and boiled between the buildings that were still standing. Canal Street ended in a jagged black diving board over the edge of a churning lake. It was really no wonder Zitner hadn’t heard Harold. Others, however, had come to the same conclusion Gardener had come to-you couldn’t drop that much shit into a raging body of water without causing a lot of trouble. Some dropped the sandbags they had been holding and took to their heels. Harold Gardener was one of these, and so he lived. Others were not so lucky and were still somewhere in the general area as the Canal, its throat now choked with tons of asphalt, concrete, brick, plaster, glass, and about four million dollars” worth of assorted merchandise, backsurged and poured over its concrete sleeve, carrying away men and sandbags impartially. Harold kept thinking it meant to have him; no matter how fast he ran the water kept gaming. He finally escaped by clawing his way up a steep embankment covered with shrubbery. He looked back once and saw a man he believed to be Roger Lernerd, the head loan officer at Harold’s credit union, trying to start his car in the parking-lot of the Canal Mini-Mall. Even over the roar of the water and the bellowing wind, Harold could hear the K-car’s little sewing-machine engine cranking and cranking and cranking as smooth black water ran rocker-panel high on both sides of it. Then, with a deep thundering cry, the Kenduskeag poured out of its banks and swept both the Canal Mini-Mall and Roger Lernerd’s bright red K-car away. Harold began climbing again, grabbing onto branches, roots, anything that looked solid enough to take his weight. Higher ground, that was the ticket. As Andrew Keene might have said, Harold Gardener was really into the concept of higher ground that morning. Behind him he could hear downtown Derry continuing to collapse. The sound was like artillery fire.

 

4

BILL

 

“Beverly!” he shouted. His back and arms were one solid throbbing ache. Richie now seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds. Put him down, then, his mind whispered. He’s dead, you know damn well he is, so why don’t you just put him down?

But he wouldn’t, couldn’t, do that.

“Beverly!” he shouted again. “Ben! Anyone!”

He thought: This is where It threw me-and Richie-except It threw us farther-so much farther. What was that like? I’m losing it, forgetting…

’Bill?” It was Ben’s voice, shaky and exhausted, somewhere fairly close. “Where are you?”

“Over here, man. I’ve got Richie. He got… he’s hurt.”

“Keep talking.” Ben was closer now. “Keep talking, Bill.”

“We killed It,” Bill said, walking toward where Ben’s voice had come from. “We killed the bitch. And if Richie’s dead-”

“Dead?” Ben called, alarmed. He was very close now… and then his hand groped out of the dark and pawed lightly at Bill’s nose. “What do you mean, dead?”

“I… he… ” They were supporting Richie together now. “I can’t see him,” Bill said. “That’s the thing. I cuh-cuh-han’t suh-suh-see him!”

“Richie!” Ben shouted, and shook him. “Richie, come on! Come on, goddammit!” Ben’s voice was blurring now, becoming shaky. “RICHIE WILL YOU WAKE THE FUCK UP?”

And in the dark, Richie said in a sleepy, irritable, just-coming-out-of-it voice: “All rye, Haystack. All rye. We doan need no stinkin batches…”

“Richie!” Bill screamed. “Richie, are you all right?”

“Bitch threw me,” Richie muttered in that same tired, just-coming-out-of-sleep voice. “I hit something hard. That’s all… all I remember. Where’s Bevvie?”

“Back this way,” Ben said. Quickly, he told them about the eggs. “I stamped over a hundred. I think I got all of them.”

“I pray to God you did,” Richie said. He was starting to sound better. “Put me down, Big Bill. I can walk… Is the water louder?”

“Yes,” Bill said. The three of them were holding hands in the dark. “How’s your head?”

“Hurts like hell. What happened after I got knocked out?”

Bill told them as much as he could bring himself to tell.

“And It’s dead,” Richie marvelled. “Are you sure, Bill?”

“Yes,” Bill said. “This time I’m really shuh-hure.”

“Thank God,” Richie said. “Hold onto me, Bill, I gotta barf.”

Bill did, and when Richie was done they walked on. Every now and then his foot struck something brittle that rolled off into the darkness. Parts of the Spider’s eggs that Ben had tromped to pieces, he supposed, and shivered. It was good to know they were going in the right direction, but he was still glad he couldn’t see the remains.

“Beverly!” Ben shouted. “Beverly!”

“Here-”

Her cry was faint, almost lost in the steady rumble of the water. They moved forward in the dark, calling to her steadily, zeroing in.

When they finally reached her, Bill asked if she had any matches left. She put half a pack in his hand. He lit one and saw their faces spring into ghostly being-Ben with his arm around Richie, who was standing slumped, blood running from his right temple, Beverly with Eddie’s head in her lap. Then he turned the other way. Audra was lying crumpled on the flagstones, her legs asprawl, her head turned away. The webbing had mostly melted off her.

The match burned his fingers and he let it drop. In the darkness he misjudged the distance, tripped over her, and nearly went sprawling.

“Audra! Audra, can you h-h-hear m-me?”

He got an arm under her back and sat her up. He slipped a hand under the sheaf of her hair and pressed his fingers against the side of her neck. Her pulse was there: a slow, steady beat.

He lit another match, and as it flared he saw her pupils contract. But that was an involuntary function; the fix of her gaze did not change, even when he brought the match close enough to her face to redden her skin. She was alive, but unresponsive. Hell, it was worse than that and he knew it. She was catatonic.

The second match burned his fingers. He shook it out.

“Bill, I don’t like the sound of that water,” Ben said. “I think we ought to get out of here.”

“How will we do it without Eddie?” Richie murmured.

“We can do it,” Bev said. “Bill, Ben’s right. We have to get out.”

“I’m taking her.”

“Of course. But we ought to go now.”

“Which way?”

“You’ll know,” Beverly said softly. “You killed It. You’ll know, Bill.”

He picked Audra up as he had picked Richie up and went back to the others. The feel of her in his arms was disquieting, creepy; she was like a breathing waxwork.

“Which way, Bill?” Ben asked.

“Id-d-don’t-”

(you’ll know, you killed It and you’ll know)

“Well, c-come on,” Bill said. “Let’s see if we can’t find out. Beverly, gruh-gruh-hab these.” He handed her the matches.

“What about Eddie?” she asked. “We have to take him out.”

“How c-can w-we?” Bill asked. “It’s… B-Beverly, the pluh-hace is f-falling apart.”

“We gotta get him out of here, man,” Richie said. “Come on, Ben.”

Between them they managed to hoist up Eddie’s body. Beverly lit them back to the fairytale door. Bill took Audra through it, holding her up from the floor as best he could. Richie and Ben carried Eddie through.

“Put him down,” Beverly said. “He can stay here.”

“It’s too dark,” Richie sobbed. “You know… it’s too dark. Eds… he…”

“No, it’s okay,” Ben said. “Maybe this is where he’s supposed to be. I think maybe it is.”

They put him down, and Richie kissed Eddie’s cheek. Then he looked blindly up at Ben. “You sure?”

“Yeah. Come on, Richie.”

Richie got up and turned toward the door. “Fuck you, Bitch!” he cried suddenly, and kicked the door shut with his foot. It made a solid chukking sound as it closed and latched.

“Why’d you do that?” Beverly asked.

“I don’t know,” Richie said, but he knew well enough. He looked back over his shoulder just as the match Beverly was holding went out.

“Bill-the mark on the door?”

“What about it?” Bill panted.

Richie said: “It’s gone.”

 

5

DERRY / 10:30 A.M.

 

The glass corridor connecting the adult library to the Children’s Library suddenly exploded in a single brilliant flare of light. Glass flew out in an umbrella shape, whickering through the straining whipping trees which dotted the library grounds. Someone could have been severely hurt or even killed by such a deadly fusillade, but there was no one there, either inside or out. The library had not been opened that day at all. The tunnel which had so fascinated Ben Hanscom as a boy would never be replaced; there had been so much costly destruction in Derry that it seemed simpler to leave the two libraries as separate unconnected buildings. In time, no one on the Derry City Council could even remember what that glass umbilicus had been for. Perhaps only Ben himself could really have told them how it was to stand outside In the still cold of a January night, your nose running, the tips of your fingers numb inside your mittens, watching the people pass back and forth inside, walking through winter with their coats off and surrounded by light. He could have told them. but maybe it wasn’t the sort of thing you could have gotten up and testified about at a City Council meeting-how you stood out in the cold dark and learned to love the light. All of that’s as may be; the facts were just these: the glass corridor blew up for no apparent reason, no one was hurt (which was a blessing, since the final toll taken by that morning’s storm-in human terms, at least-was sixty-seven killed and better than three hundred and twenty injured), and it was never rebuilt. After May 31st of 1985, if you wanted to get from the Children’s Library to the adult library, you had to walk outside to do it. And if it was cold, or raining, or snowing, you had to put on your coat.

 

6

OUT / 10:54 A.M… MAY 31ST, 1985

 

“Wait,” Bill gasped. “Give me a chance… rest.”

“Let me help you with her,” Richie said again. They had left Eddie back in the Spider’s lair, and that was something none of them wanted to talk about. But Eddie was dead and Audra was still alive-at least, technically.

“I’ll do it,” Bill said between choked gasps for air.

“Bullshit. You’ll give yourself a fucking heart attack. Let me help you, Big Bill.”

“How’s your h-h-head?”

“Hurts,” Richie said. “don’t change the subject.”

Reluctantly, Bill let Richie take her. It could have been worse; Audra was a tall girl whose normal weight was one hundred and forty pounds. But the part she’d been scheduled to play in Attic Room was that of a young woman being held hostage by a borderline psychotic who fancied himself a political terrorist. Because Freddie Firestone had wanted to shoot all of the attic sequences first, Audra had gone on a strict poultry-cottage-cheese-tuna-fish diet and lost twenty pounds. Still, after stumble-staggering along with her in the dark for a quarter of a mile (or a half, or three-quarters of a mile, or who knew), that one hundred and twenty felt more like two hundred.

“Th-Thanks, m-m-man,” he said.

“Don’t mention it. Your turn next, Haystack.”

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Ben said, and Bill grinned in spite of himself. It was a tired grin, and it didn’t last long, but a little was better than none.

“Which way, Bill?” Beverly asked. “That water sounds louder than ever. I don’t really fancy drowning down here.”

“Straight ahead, then left,” Bill said. “Maybe we better try to go a little faster.”

They went on for half an hour, Bill calling the lefts and rights. The sound of the water continued to swell until it seemed to surround them, a scary Dolby stereo effect in the dark. Bill felt his way around a corner, one hand trailing over damp brick, and suddenly water was running over his shoes. The current was shallow and fast.

“Give me Audra,” he said to Ben, who was panting loudly. “Upstream now.” Ben passed her carefully back to Bill, who managed to sling her over his shoulder ma fireman’s carry. If she’d only protest… move… do something. “How’s matches, Bev?”

“Not many. Half a dozen, maybe. Bill… do you know where you’re going?”

“I think I d-d-do,” he said. “Come on.”

They followed him around the corner. The water foamed about Bill’s ankles, then it was up to his shins, and then it was thigh-deep. The thunder of the water had deepened to a steady bass roar. The tunnel they were in was shaking steadily. For awhile Bill thought the current was going to become too strong to walk against, but then they passed a feeder-pipe that was pouring a huge jet of water into their tunnel-he marvelled at the white-water force of it-and the current slacked off somewhat, although the water continued to deepen. It -

I saw the water coming out of that feeder-pipe! Saw it!

“H-H-Hey!” he shouted. “Can y-y-you guys see a-any thing?”

“It’s been getting lighter for the last fifteen minutes or so!” Beverly shouted back. “Where are we, Bill? Do you know?”

I thought I did, Bill almost said. “No! Come on!”

He had believed they must be approaching the concrete-channelled section of the Kenduskeag that was called the Canal… the part that went under downtown and came out in Bassey Park. But there was light down here, light, and surely there could be no light in the Canal under the city. But it brightened steadily just the same.

Bill was beginning to have serious problems with Audra. It wasn’t the current-that had slackened-it was the depth. Pretty soon I’ll be floating her, he thought. He could see Ben on his left and Beverly on his right; by turning his head slightly, he could see Richie behind Ben. The footing was getting decidedly odd. The bottom of the tunnel was now heaped and mounded with detritus-bricks, it felt like. And up ahead, something was sticking out of the water like, the prow of a ship that is in the process of sinking.

Ben floundered toward it, shivering in the cold water. A soggy cigar box floated into his face. He pushed it aside and grabbed at the thing sticking out of the water. His eyes widened. It appeared to be a large sign. He was able to read the letters AL, and below that, FUT. And suddenly he knew.

“Bill! Richie! Bev!” He was laughing with astonishment.

“What is it, Ben?” Beverly shouted.

Grabbing it with both hands, Ben rocked it back. There was a grating sound as one side of the sign scraped along the wall of the tunnel. Now they could read: ALADDI, and, below that, BACK TO THE FUTURE.

“It’s the marquee for the Aladdin,” Richie said. “How-”

“The street caved in,” Bill whispered. His eyes were widening. He stared up the tunnel. The light was brighter still up ahead.

“What, Bill?”

“What the fuck happened?

“Bill? Bill? What-”

“All these drains!” Bill said wildly. “All these old drains! There’s been another flood! And I think this time-”

He began to flounder ahead again, holding Audra up. Ben, Bev, and Richie fell in behind him. Five minutes later Bill looked up and saw blue sky. He was looking through a crack in the ceiling of the tunnel, a crack that widened to better than seventy feet across as it ran away from where he stood. The water was broken by many islands and archipelagos up ahead-piles of bricks, the back deck of a Plymouth sedan with its trunk sprung open and pouring water, a parking-meter leaning against the tunnel wall at a drunken slant, its red VIOLATION flag up.

The footing had become almost impossible now-mini-mountains that rose and fell with no rhyme or reason, inviting a broken ankle. The water ran mildly around their armpits.

Mild now, Bill thought. But if we’d been here two hours ago, even one, I think we might have gotten the ride of our lives.

“What the fuck is this, Big Bill?” Richie asked. He was standing at Bill’s left elbow, his face soft with wonder as he looked up at the rip in the roof of the tunnel-except it’s not the roof of any tunnel Bill thought. It’s Main Street. At least it used to be.

“I think most of downtown Derry is now in the Canal and being carried down the Kenduskeag River. Pretty soon it’ll be in the Penobscot and then it will be in the Atlantic Ocean and good fucking riddance. Can you help me with Audra, Richie? I don’t think I can-”

“Sure,” Richie said. “sure, Bill. No sweat.”

He took Audra from Bill. In this light, Bill could see her better than he perhaps wanted to-her pallor masked but not hidden by the dirt and ordure that smeared her forehead and caked her cheeks. Her eyes were still wide open… wide open and innocent of all sense. Her hair hung lank and wet. She might as well have been one of those inflatable doilies they sold at the Pleasure Chest in New York or along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. The only difference was her slow, steady respiration… and that might have been a clockwork trick, no more than that.

“How are we going to get up from here?” he asked Richie.

“Get Ben to give you ten fingers,” Richie said. “You can yank Bev up, and the two of you can get your wife. Ben can boost me and we’ll get Ben. And after that I’ll show you how to set up a volleyball tournament for a thousand sorority girls.”

“Beep-beep, Richie.”

“Beep-beep your ass, Big Bill.”

The tiredness was going through him in steady waves. He caught Beverly’s level gaze and held it for a moment. She nodded to him slightly, and he made a smile for her.

“Give me ten fingers, B-B-Ben?”

Ben, who also looked unutterably weary, nodded. A deep scratch ran down one cheek. “I think I can handle that.”

He stooped slightly and laced his hands together. Bill hiked one foot, stepped into Ben’s hand, and jumped up. It wasn’t quite enough. Ben lifted the step he had made with his hands and Bill grabbed the edge of the broken-in tunnel roof. He yanked himself up. The first thing he saw was a white-and-orange crash barrier. The second thing was a crowd of milling men and women beyond the barrier. The third was Freese’s Department Store-only it had an oddly bulged-out, foreshortened look. It took him a moment to realize that almost half of Freese’s had sunk into the street and the Canal beneath. The top half had slued out over the street and seemed in danger of toppling over like a pile of badly stacked books.

“Look! Look! There’s someone in the street!”

A woman was pointing toward the place where Bill’s head had poked out of the crevasse in the shattered pavement.

“Praise God, there’s someone else!”

She started forward, an elderly woman with a kerchief tied over her head peasant-style. A cop held her back. “Not safe out there, Mrs Nelson. You know it. Rest of the street might go any time.”

Mrs Nelson, Bill thought. I remember you. Your sister used to sit George and me sometimes. He raised his hand to show her he was all right, and when she raised her own hand in return, he felt a sudden surge of good feelings-and hope.

He turned around and lay flat on the sagging pavement, trying to distribute his weight as evenly as possible, the way you were supposed to do on thin ice. He reached down for Bev. She grasped his wrists and, with what seemed to be the last of his strength, he pulled her up. The sun, which had disappeared again, now ran out from behind a brace of mackerel-scale clouds and gave them their shadows back. Beverly looked up, startled, caught Bill’s eyes, and smiled.

“I love you, Bill,” she said. “And I pray she’ll be all right.”

“Thuh-hank you, Bevvie,” he said, and his kind smile made her start to cry a little. He hugged her and the small crowd gathered behind the crash barrier applauded. A photographer from the Derry News snapped a picture. It appeared in the June 1st edition of the paper, which was printed in Bangor because of water damage to the News’s presses. The caption was simple enough, and true enough for Bill to cut the picture out and keep it tucked away in his wallet for years to come: SURVIVORS, the caption read. That was all, but that was enough.

It was six minutes of eleven in Derry, Maine.

 

7

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