It Chapter 3 (Continued) *1985*

CHAPTER 3 (Continued)

Six Phone Calls

1 She broke for the bed and the vanity table on her side of it. Her shoulders were red from the belt's blows. Her hair streamed fire. He lumbered after her, slower but big, very big — he had played squash until he had popped an Achilles tendon two years ago, and since then his weight had gotten out of hand a little bit (or maybe 'a lot' would have been a better way to put it), but the muscle was still there, firm cordage sheathed in the fat. Still, he was a little alarmed at how out of breath he was. She reached the vanity and he thought she would crouch there, or maybe try to crawl under it. Instead she groped . . . turned . . . and suddenly the air was full of flying missiles. She was throwing cosmetics at him. A bottle of Chantilly struck him squarely between the nipples, fell to his feet, shattered. He was suddenly enveloped in the gagging scent of flowers. 'Quit it!' he roared. 'Quit it, you bitch!' Instead of quitting it, her hands flew along the vanity's littered glass top, grabbing whatever they found, throwing it. He groped at his chest where the bottle of Chantilly had struck him, unable to believe she had hit him with something, even as other objects flew around him. The bottle's glass stopper had cut him. It was not much of a cut, little more than a triangular scratch, but was there a certain red-haired lady who was going to see the sun come up from a hospital bed? Oh yes, there was. A certain lady who — A jar of cream struck him above the right eyebrow with sudden, cracking force. He heard a dull thud seemingly inside his head. White light exploded over that eye's field of vision and he fell back a step, mouth dropping open. Now a tube of Nivea cream struck his belly with a small slapping sound and she was — was she? was it possible? — yes! She was yelling at him! 'I'm going to the airport, you son of a bitch! Do you hear me? I have business and I'm going! You want to get out of my way because I'M GOING!' Blood ran into his right eye, stinging and hot. He knuckled it away. He stood there for a moment, staring at her as if he had never seen her before. In a way he never had. Her breasts heaved rapidly. Her face, all flush and livid pallor, blazed. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a snarl. She had, however, denuded the top of the vanity table. The missile silo was empty. He could still read the fear in her eyes . . . but it was still not fear of him. 'You put those clothes back,' he said, struggling not to pant as he spoke. That would not sound good. That would sound weak. 'Then you put the suitcase back and get into bed. And if you do those things, maybe I won't beat you up too bad. Maybe you'll be able to go out of the house in two days instead of two weeks.' 'Tom, listen to me.' She spoke slowly. Her gaze was very clear. 'If you come near me again, I'll kill you. Do you understand that, you tub of guts? I'll kill you.' And suddenly — maybe it was because of the utter loathing on her face, the contempt, maybe because she had called him a tub of guts, or maybe only because of the rebellious way her breasts rose and fell — the fear was suffocating him. It was not a bud or a bloom but a whole goddam garden, the fear, the horrible fear that he was not here. Tom Rogan rushed at his wife, not bellowing this time. He came as silently as a torpedo cutting through the water. His intent now was probably not merely to beat and subjugate but to do to her what she had so rashly said she would do to him. He thought she would run. Probably for the bathroom. Maybe for the stairs. Instead, she stood her ground. Her hip whacked the wall as she threw her weight against the vanity table, pushing it up and toward him, ripping two fingernails down to the quick when the sweat on her palms caused her hands to slip. For a moment the table tottered on an angle and then she shoved herself forward again. The vanity waltzed on one leg, mirror catching the light and reflecting a brief swimmy aquarium shadow across the ceiling, and then it tilted forward and outward. Its leading edge slammed into Tom's upper thighs and knocked him over. There was a musical jingle as bottles tipped over and shattered inside. He saw the mirror strike the floor on his left and threw an arm up to shield his eyes, losing the belt. Glass coughed across the floor, silver on the back. He felt some of it sting him, drawing blood. Now she was crying, her breath coming in high, screamy sobs. Time after time she had seen herself leaving him, leaving Tom's tyranny as she had left that of her father, stealing away in the night, bags piled in the trunk of her Cutlass. She was not a stupid woman, certainly not stupid enough even now, standing on the rim of this incredible shambles, to believe that she had not loved Tom and did not in some way love him still. But that did not preclude her fear of him . . . her hate of him . . . and her contempt of herself for choosing him for dim reasons buried in the times that should be over. Her heart was not breaking; it seemed rather to be broiling in her chest, melting. She was afraid the heat from her heart might soon destroy her sanity in fire. But above all this, yammering steadily in the back of her mind, she could hear Mike Hanlon's dry, steady voice: It's come back, Beverly . . . it's come back . . . and you promised . . . The vanity heaved up and down. Once. Twice. A third time. It looked as if it were breathing. Moving with careful agility, her mouth turned down at the corners and jerking as if in prelude to some sort of convulsion, she skirted the vanity, toe-stepping through the broken glass, and grabbed the belt just as Tom heaved the vanity off to one side. Then she backed up, sliding her hand into the loop. She shook her hair out of her eyes and watched to see what he would do. Tom got up. Some of the mirror-glass had cut one of his cheeks. A diagonal cut traced a line as fine as thread across his brow. He squinted at her as he rose slowly to his feet, and she saw drops of blood on his boxer shorts. 'You just give me that belt,' he said. Instead she took two turns of it around her hand and looked at him defiantly. 'Quit it, Bev. Right now.' 'If you come for me, I'm going to strap the shit out of you.' The words were coming out of her mouth but she couldn't believe it was her saying them. And just who was this caveman in the bloody undershorts, anyway? Her husband? Her father? The lover she had taken in college who had broken her nose one night, apparently on a whim? Oh God help me, she thought. God help me now. And still her mouth went on. 'I can do it, too. You're fat and slow, Tom. I'm going, and I think maybe I'll stay gone. I think maybe it's over.' 'Who's this guy Denbrough?' 'Forget it. I was — ' She realized almost too late that the question had been a distraction. He was coming for her before the last word was out of his mouth. She whickered the belt through the air in an arc and the sound it made when it smashed across his mouth was the sound of a stubborn cork coming out of a bottle. He squealed and clapped his hands to his mouth, his eyes huge, hurt and shocked. Blood began to pour between his fingers and over the backs of his hands. 'You broke my mouth, you bitch!' he screamed, muffled. 'Ah God you broke my mouth!' He came at her again, hands reaching, his mouth a wet red smear. His lips appeared to have burst in two places. The crown had been knocked from one of his front teeth. As she watched, he spit it to one side. Part of her was backing away from this scene, sick and moaning, wanting to shut her eyes. But that other Beverly felt the exultation of a death-row convict freed in a freak earthquake. That Beverly liked all of this just fine. I wish you'd swallowed it! that one thought. Wish you'd choked on it! It was this latter Beverly who swung the belt for the last time — the belt he had used on her buttocks, her legs, her breasts. The belt he had used on her times without number over the last four years. How many strokes you got depended on how badly you'd screwed up. Tom comes home and dinner is cold? Two with the belt. Bev's working late at the studio and forgets to call home? Three with the belt. Oh hey, look at this — Beverly got another parking ticket. One with the belt . . . across the breasts. He was good. He rarely bruised. It didn't even hurt that much. Except for the humiliation. That hurt. And what hurt worse was knowing that part of her craved the hurt. Craved the humiliation. Last time pays for all, she thought, and swung. She brought the belt in low, brought it in sidearm, and it whacked across his balls with a brisk yet heavy sound, the sound of a woman striking a rug with a carpet-beater. That was all it took. All the fight promptly went out of Tom Rogan. He uttered a thin, strengthless shriek and fell on his knees as if to pray. His hands were between his legs. His head was thrown back. Cords stood out on his neck. His mouth was a tragedy-grimace of pain. His left knee came down squarely on a heavy, pointed hook of shattered perfume bottle and he rolled silently over on one side like a whale. One hand left his balls to grab his squirting knee. The blood, she thought. Dear Lord, he's bleeding everywhere. He'll live, this new Beverly — the Beverly who seemed to have surfaced at Mike Hanlon's phone call — replied coldly. Guys like him always live. You just get the hell out of here before he decides he wants to tango some more. Or before he decides to go down cellar and get his Winchester. She backed away and felt pain stab her foot as she stepped on a chunk of glass from the broken vanity mirror. She bent down to grab the handle of her suitcase. She never took her eyes off him. She backed out the door and she backed down the hall. She was holding the suitcase in front of her in both hands and it banged her shins as she backed. Her cut foot printed bloody heel-prints. When she reached the stairs she turned around and went down quickly, not letting herself think. She suspected she had no coherent thoughts left inside anyway, at least for the time being. She felt a light pawing against her leg and screamed, She looked down and saw it was the end of the belt. It was still wrapped around her hand. In this dim light it looked more like a dead snake than ever. She threw it over the bannister, her face a wince of disgust, and saw it land in an S on the rug of the downstairs hallway. At the foot of the stairs she grasped the hem of her white lace nightgown cross-handed and pulled it over her head. It was bloody, and she would not wear it one second longer, no matter what. She tossed it aside and it billowed onto the rubber-plant by the doorway to the living room like a lacy parachute. She bent, naked, to the suitcase. Her nipples were cold, hard as bullets. 'BEVERLY YOU GET YOUR ASS UPSTAIRS!' She gasped, jerked, then bent back to the suitcase. If he was strong enough to scream that loud, her time was a good deal shorter than she had thought. She opened the case and pawed out panties, a blouse, an old pair of Levi's. She jerked these on standing by the door, her eyes never leaving the stairs. But Tom did not appear at the top of them. He bawled her name twice more, and each time she flinched away from that sound, her eyes hunted, her lips pulling back from her teeth in an unconscious snarl. She jabbed the buttons of the blouse through the holes as fast as she could. The top two buttons were gone (it was ironic how little of her own sewing ever got done) and she supposed she looked quite a bit like a part-time hooker looking for one last quickie before calling it a night — but it would have to do. 'I'LL KILL YOU, YOU BITCH! YOU FUCKING BITCH!' She slammed the suitcase closed and latched it. The arm of a blouse poked out like a tongue. She looked around once, quickly, suspecting that she would never see this house again. She discovered only relief in the idea, and so opened the door and let herself out. She was three blocks away, walking with no clear sense of where she was going, when she realized her feet were still bare. The one she had cut — the left — throbbed dully. She had to get something on her feet, and it was nearly two o'clock in the morning. Her wallet and credit-cards were at home. She felt in the pockets of the jeans and came up with nothing but a few puffs of lint. She didn't have a dime; not so much as a red penny. She looked around at the residential neighborhood she was in — nice homes, manicured lawns and plantings, dark windows. And suddenly she began to laugh. Beverly Rogan sat on a low stone wall, her suitcase between her dirty feet, and laughed. The stars were out, and how bright they were! She tilted her head back and laughed at them, that wild exhilaration washing through her again like a tidal wave that lifted and carried and cleansed, a force so powerful that any conscious thought was lost; only her blood thought and its one powerful voice spoke to her in some inarticulate way of desire, although what it was it desired she neither knew nor cared. It was enough to feel that warmth filling her up with its insistence. Desire, she thought, and inside her that tidal wave of exhilaration seemed to gather speed, rushing her onward toward some inevitable crash. She laughed at the stars, frightened but free, her terror as sharp as pain and as sweet as a ripe October apple, and when a light came on in an upstairs bedroom of the house this stone wall belonged to, she grabbed the handle of her suitcase and fled off into the night, still laughing. 6 Bill Denbrough Takes Time Out Leave? Audra repeated. She looked at him, puzzled, a bit afraid, and then tucked her bare feet up and under her. The floor was cold. The whole cottage was cold, come to that. The south of England had been experiencing an exceptionally dank spring, and more than once, on his regular morning and evening walks, Bill Denbrough had found himself thinking of Maine . . . thinking in a surprised vague way of Derry. The cottage was supposed to have central heating — the ad had said so, and there certainly was a furnace down there in the tidy little basement, tucked away in what had once been a coal-bin — but he and Audra had discovered early on in the shoot that the British idea of central heating was not at all the same as the American one. It seemed the Brits believed you had central heating as long as you didn't have to piss away a scrim of ice in the toilet bowl when you got up in the morning. It was morning now — just quarter of eight. Bill had hung the phone up five minutes ago. 'Bill, you can't just leave. You know that.' 'I have to,' he said. There was a hutch on the far side of the room. He went to it, took a bottle of Glenfiddich from the top shelf and poured himself a drink. Some of it slopped over the side of the glass. Tuck,' he muttered. 'Who was that on the telephone? What are you scared of, Bill?''I'm not scared.' 'Oh? Your hands always shake like that? You always have your first drink before breakfast?' He came back to his chair, robe flapping around his ankles, and sat down. He tried to smile, but it was a poor effort and he gave it up. On the telly the BBC announcer was wrapping up this morning's batch of bad news before going on to last evening's football scores. When they had arrived in the small suburban village of Fleet a month before the shoot was scheduled to begin, they had both marvelled over the technical quality of British television — on a good Pye color set, it really did look as though you could climb right inside. More lines or something, Bill had said. I don't know what it is, but it's great, Audra had replied. That was before they discovered that much of the programming consisted of American shows such as Dallas and endless British sports events ranging from the arcane and boring (champion darts-throwing, in which all the participants looked like hypertensive sumo wrestlers) to the simply boring (British football was bad; cricket was even worse). 'I've been thinking about home a lot lately,' Bill said, and sipped his drink. 'Home?' she said, and looked so honestly puzzled that he laughed. 'Poor Audra! Married almost eleven years to the guy and you don't know doodley-squat about him. What do you know about that?' He laughed again and swallowed the rest of his drink. His laughter had a quality she cared for as little as seeing him with a glass of Scotch in his hand at this hour of the morning. The laugh sounded like something that really wanted to be a howl of pain. 'I wonder if any of the others have got husbands and wives who are just finding out how little they know. I suppose they must. ' 'Billy, I know that I love you,' she said. 'For eleven years that's been enough.' 'I know.' He smiled at her — the smile was sweet, tired, and scared. 'Please. Please tell me what this is about.' She looked at him with her lovely gray eyes, sitting there in a tatty leased-house chair with her feet curled beneath the hem of her nightgown, a woman he had loved, married, and still loved. He tried to see through her eyes, to see what she knew. He tried to see it as a story. He could, but he knew it would never sell. Here is a poor boy from the state of Maine who goes to the University on a scholarship. All his life he has wanted to be a writer, but when he enrolls in the writing courses he finds himself lost without a compass in a strange and frightening land. There's one guy who wants to be Updike. There's another one who wants to be a New England version of Faulkner — only he wants to write novels about the grim lives of the poor in blank verse. There's a girl who admires Joyce Carol Gates but feels that because Oates was nurtured in a sexist society she is 'radioactive in a literary sense.' Oates is unable to be clean, this girl says. She will be cleaner. There's the short fat grad student who can't or won't speak above a mutter. This guy has written a play in which there are nine characters. Each of them says only a single word. Little by little the playgoers realize that when you put the single words together you come out with 'War is the tool of the sexist death merchants.' This fellow's play receives an A from the man who teaches Eh-141 (Creative Writing Honors Seminar). This instructor has published four books of poetry and his master's thesis, all with the University Press. He smokes pot and wears a peace medallion. The fat mutterer's play is produced by a guerrilla theater group during the strike to end the war which shuts down the campus in May of 1970. The instructor plays one of the characters. Bill Denbrough, meanwhile, has written one locked-room mystery tale, three sciencefiction stories, and several horror tales which owe a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Richard Matheson — in later years he will say those stories resembled a mid1800s funeral hack equipped with a supercharger and painted Day-Glo red. One of the sf tales earns him a B. 'This is better,' the instructor writes on the title page. 'In the alien counterstrike we see the vicious circle in which violence begets violence; I particularly liked the "needle-nosed" spacecraft as a symbol of socio-sexual incursion. While this remains a slightly confused undertone throughout, it is interesting.' All the others do no better than a C. Finally he stands up in class one day, after the discussion of a sallow young woman's vignette about a cow's examination of a discarded engine block in a deserted field (this may or may not be after a nuclear war) has gone on for seventy minutes or so. The sallow girl, who smokes one Winston after another and picks occasionally at the pimples which nestle in the hollows of her temples, insists that the vignette is a socio-political statement in the manner of the early Orwell. Most of the class — and the instructor — agree, but still the discussion drones on. When Bill stands up, the class looks at him. He is tail, and has a certain presence. Speaking carefully, not stuttering (he has not stuttered in better than five years), he says: 'I don't understand this at all. I don't understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socioanything? Politics . . . culture . . . history . . . aren't those natural ingredients in any story, if it's told well? I mean . . . ' He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. 'I mean . . . can't you guys just let a story be a story? No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack. Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, 'Do you believe William Faulkner was just telling stories'? Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck? Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think.' 'I think that's pretty close to the truth,' Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation. 'I suggest,' the instructor says, toying with his pen and smiling at Bill with half-lidded eyes, 'that you have a great deal to learn.' The applause starts somewhere in the back of the room. Bill leaves . . . but returns the next week, determined to stick with it. In the time between he has written a story called 'The Dark,' a tale about a small boy who discovers a monster in the cellar of his house. The little boy faces it, battles it, finally kills it. He feels a land of holy exaltation as he goes about the business of writing this story; he even feels that he is not so much telling the story as he is allowing the story to flow through him. At one point he puts his pen down and takes his hot and aching hand out into ten-degree December cold where it nearly smokes from the temperature change. He walks around, green cut-off boots squeaking in the snow like tiny shutter-hinges which need oil, and his head seems to bulge with the story; it is a little scary, the way it needs to get out. He feels that if it cannot escape by way of his racing hand that it will pop his eyes out in its urgency to escape and be concrete. 'Going to knock the shit out of it,' he confides to the blowing winter dark, and laughs a little — a shaky laugh. He is aware that he has finally discovered how to do just that — after ten years of trying he has suddenly found the starter button on the vast dead bulldozer taking up so much space inside his head. It has started up. It is revving, revving. It is nothing pretty, this big machine. It was not made for taking pretty girls to proms. It is not a status symbol. It means business. It can knock things down. If he isn't careful, it will knock him down. He rushes inside and finishes 'The Dark' at white heat, writing until four o'clock in the morning and finally falling asleep over his ring-binder. If someone had suggested to him that he was really writing about his brother, George, he would have been surprised. He has not thought about George in years — or so he honestly believes. The story comes back from the instructor with an F slashed into the tide page. Two words are scrawled beneath, in capital letters. PULP, screams one. CRAP, screams the other. Bill takes the fifteen-page sheaf of manuscript over to the wood-stove and opens the door. He is within a bare inch of tossing it in when the absurdity of what he is doing strikes him. He sits down in his rocking chair, looks at a Grateful Dead poster, and starts to laugh. Pulp? Fine! Let it be pulp! The woods were full of it! 'Let them fucking trees fall!' Bill exclaims, and laughs until tears spurt from his eyes and roll down his face. He retypes the title page, the one with the instructor's judgment on it, and sends it off to a men's magazine named White Tie (although from what Bill can see, it really should be titled Naked Girls Who Look Like Drug Users'). Yet his battered Writer's Market says they buy horror stories, and the two issues he has bought down at the local mom-and-pop store have indeed contained four horror stories sandwiched between the naked girls and the ads for dirty movies and potency pills. One of them, by a man named Dennis Etchison, is actually quite good. He sends 'The Dark' off with no real hopes — he has submitted a good many stories to magazines before with nothing to show for it but rejection slips — and is flabbergasted and delighted when the fiction editor of White Tie buys it for two hundred dollars, payment on publication. The assistant editor adds a short note which calls it 'the best damned horror story since Ray Bradbury's "The Jar."' He adds, 'Too bad only about seventy people coast to coast will read it,' but Bill Denbrough does not care. Two hundred dollars! He goes to his advisor with a drop card for Eh-141. His advisor initials it. Bill Denbrough staples the drop card to the assistant fiction editor's congratulatory note and tacks both to the bulletin board on the creative-writing instructor's door. In the corner of the bulletin board he sees an anti-war cartoon. And suddenly, as if moving of its own accord, his fingers pluck his pen from his breast pocket and across the cartoon he writes this: If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable, I'm going to kill myself, because I won't know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do. He pauses, and then, feeling a bit small (but unable to help himself), he adds: I suggest you have a lot to learn. His drop card comes back to him in the campus mail three days later. The instructor has initialed it. On the space marked GRADE AT TIME OF DROP, the instructor has not given him an incomplete or the low C to which his run of grades at that time would have entitled him; instead, another F is slashed angrily across the grade line. Below it the instructor has written: Do you think money proves anything about anything, Denbrough? 'Well, actually, yes,' Bill Denbrough says to his empty apartment, and once more begins to laugh crazily. In his senior year of college he dares to write a novel because he has no idea what he's getting into. He escapes the experience scratched and frightened . . . but alive, and with a manuscript nearly five hundred pages long. He sends it out to The Viking Press, knowing that it will be the first of many stops for his book, which is about ghosts . . . but he likes Viking's ship logo, and that makes it as good a place to start as any. As it turns out, the first stop is also the last stop. Viking purchases the book . . . and for Bill Denbrough the fairytale begins. The man who was once known as Stuttering Bill has become a success at the age of twentythree. Three years later and three thousand miles from northern New England, he attains a queer kind of celebrity by marrying a woman who is a movie-star and five years his senior at Hollywood's Church in the Pines. The gossip columnists give it seven months. The only bet, they say, is whether the end will come in a divorce or an annulment. Friends (and enemies) on both sides of the match feel about the same. The age difference apart, the disparities are startling. He is tall, already balding, already inclining a bit toward fat. He speaks slowly in company, and at times seems nearly inarticulate. Audra, on the other hand, is auburn-haired, statuesque, and gorgeous — she is less like an earthly woman than a creature from some semi-divine superrace. He has been hired to do the screenplay of his second novel, The Black Rapids (mostly because the right to do at least the first draft of the screenplay was an immutable condition of sale, in spite of his agent's moans that he was insane), and his draft has actually turned out pretty well. He has been invited out to Universal City for further rewrites and production meetings. His agent is a small woman named Susan Browne. She is exactly five feet tall. She is violently energetic and even more violently emphatic. 'Don't do it, Billy,' she tells him. 'Kiss it off. They've got a lot of money tied up in it and they'll get someone good to do the screenplay. Maybe even Goldman.' 'Who?' 'William Goldman. The only good writer who ever went out there and did both.' 'What are you talking about, Suze?' 'He stayed there and he stayed good,' she said. 'The odds on both are like the odds on beating lung cancer — it can be done, but who wants to try? You'll burn out on sex and booze. Or some of the nifty new drugs. ' Susan's crazily fascinating brown eyes sparkle vehemently up at him. 'And if it turns out to be some meatball who gets the assignment instead of someone like Goldman, so what? The book's on the shelf there. They can't change a word.' 'Susan — ' 'Listen to me, Billy! Take the money and run. You're young and strong. That's what they like. You go out there and they will first separate you from your self-respect and then from your ability to write a straight line from point A to point B. Last but not least, they will take your testes. You write like a grownup, but you're just a kid with a very high forehead.' 'I have to go.' 'Did someone just fart in here?' she returns. 'Must have, because something sure stinks.' 'But I do. I have to.' 'Jesus!' 'I have to get away from New England.' He is afraid to say what comes next — it's like mouthing a curse — but he owes it to her. 'I have to get away from Maine.' 'Why, for God's sake?' 'I don't know. I just do.' 'Are you telling me something real, Billy, or just talking like a writer?' 'It's real.' They are in bed together during this conversation. Her breasts are small like peaches, sweet like peaches. He loves her a lot, although not the way they both know would be a really good way to love. She sits up with a pool of sheet in her lap and lights a cigarette. She's crying, but he doubts if she knows he knows. It's just this shine in her eyes. It would be tactful not to mention it, so he doesn't. He doesn't love her in that really good way, but he cares a mountain for her. 'Go on then,' she says in a dry businesslike voice as she turns back to him. 'Give me a call when you're ready, and if you still have the strength. I'll come and pick up the pieces. If there are any left.' The film version of The Black Rapids is called Pit of the Black Demon, and Audra Phillips is cast as the lead. The title is horrible, but the movie turns out to be quite good. And the only part of him he loses in Hollywood is his heart. 'Bill,' Audra said again, bringing him out of these memories. He saw she had snapped off the TV. He glanced out the window and saw fog nuzzling against the panes. 'I'll explain as much as I can,' he said. 'You deserve that. But first do two things for me.' 'All right.' 'Fix yourself another cup of tea and tell me what you know about me. Or what you think you know.' She looked at him, puzzled, and then went to the highboy. 'I know you're from Maine,' she said, making herself tea from the breakfast pot. She was not British, but just a touch of clipped British had crept into her voice — a holdover from the part she played in Attic Room, the movie they had come over here to do. It was Bill's first original screenplay. He had been offered the directorial shot as well. Thank God he had declined that; his leaving now would have completed the job of bitching things up. He knew what they would all say, the whole crew. Billy Denbrough finally shows his true colors. Just another fucking writer, crazier than a shithouse rat. God knew he felt crazy right about now. 'I know you had a brother and that you loved him very much and that he died,' Audra went on. 'I know that you grew up in a town called Derry, moved to Bangor about two years after your brother died, and moved to Portland when you were fourteen. I know your dad died of lung cancer when you were seventeen. And you wrote a best-seller while you were still in college, paying your way with a scholarship and a part-time job in a textile mill. That must have seemed very strange to you . . . the change in income. In prospects.' She returned to his side of the room and he saw it in her face then: the realization of the hidden spaces between them. 'I know that you wrote The Black Rapids a year later, and came out to Hollywood. And the week before shooting started on the movie, you met a very mixed-up woman named Audra Phillips who knew a little bit about what you must have been through — the crazy decompression — because she had been plain old Audrey Philpott five years before. And this woman was drowning — ' 'Audra, don't.' Her eyes were steady, holding his. 'Oh, why not? Let us tell the truth and shame the devil. I was drowning. I discovered poppers two years before I met you, and then a year later I discovered coke and that was even better. A popper in the morning, coke in the afternoon, wine at night, a Valium at bedtime. Audra's vitamins. Too many important interviews, too many good parts. I was so much like a character in a Jacqueline Susann novel it was hilarious. Do you know how I think about that time now, Bill?' 'No.' She sipped her tea, her eyes never leaving his, and grinned. 'It was like running on the walkway at LA International. You get it?' 'Not exactly, no.' 'It's a moving belt,' she said. 'About a quarter of a mile long.' 'I know the walkway,' he said, 'but I don't see what you're — ' 'You just stand there and it carries you all the way to the baggage-claim area. But if you want, you don't have to just stand there. You can walk on it. Or run. And it seems like you're just doing your normal walk or your normal jog or your normal run or your normal all-out sprint — whatever — because your body forgets that what you're really doing is topping the speed the walkway's already making. That's why they have those signs that say SLOW DOWN, MOVING RAMPWAY near the end. When I met you I felt as if I'd run right off the end of that thing onto a floor that didn't move anymore. There I was, my body nine miles ahead of my feet. You can't keep your balance. Sooner or later you fall right on your face. Except I didn't. Because you caught me.' She put her tea aside and lit a cigarette, her eyes never leaving him. He could only see that her hands were shaking in the minute jitter of the lighter-flame, which darted first to the right of the cigarette-end and then to the left before finding it. She drew deep, blew out a fast jet of smoke. 'What do I know about you? I know you seemed to have it all under control. I know that. You never seemed to be in a hurry to get to the next drink or the next meeting or the next party. You seemed confident that all those things would be there . . . if you wanted them. You talked slow. Part of it was the Maine drawl, I guess, but most of it was just you. You were the first man I ever met out there who dared to talk slow. I had to slow down to listen. I looked at you, Bill, and I saw someone who never ran on the walkway, because he knew it would get him there. You seemed utterly untouched by the hype and hysteria. You didn't lease a Rolls so you could drive down Rodeo Drive on Saturday afternoon with your own vanity plates on some glitzy rental company's car. You didn't have a press agent to plant items in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. You'd never done the Carson show.' 'Writers can't unless they also do card-tricks or bend spoons,' he said, smiling. 'It's like a national law.' He thought she would smile, but she didn't. 'I know you were there when I needed you. When I came flying off the end of the walkway like O. J. Simpson in that old Hertz ad. Maybe you saved me from eating the wrong pill on top of too much booze. Or maybe I would have made it out the other side on my own and it's all a big dramatization on my part. But . . . it doesn't feel like that. Not inside, where I am.' She snuffed the cigarette, only two puffs gone. 'I know you've been there ever since. And I've been there for you. We're good in bed. That used to seem like a big deal to me. But we're also good out of it, and now that seems like a bigger deal. I feel as if I could grow old with you and still be brave. I know you drink too much beer and don't get enough exercise; I know that some nights you dream badly — ' He was startled. Nastily startled. Almost frightened. 'I never dream.' She smiled. 'So you tell the interviewers when they ask where you get your ideas. But it's not true. Unless it's just indigestion when you start groaning in the night. And I don't believe that, Billy.' 'Do I talk?' he asked cautiously. He could remember no dreams. No dreams at all, good or bad. Audra nodded. 'Sometimes. But I can never make out what it is you say. And on a couple of occasions, you have wept.' He looked at her blankly. There was a bad taste in his mouth; it trailed back along his tongue and down his throat like the taste of melted aspirin. So now you know how fear tastes, he thought. Time you found out, considering all you've written on the subject. He supposed it was a taste he would get used to. If he lived long enough. Memories were suddenly trying to crowd in. It was as if a black sac in his mind were bulging, threatening to spew noxious (dreams) images up from his subconscious and into the mental field of vision commanded by his rational waking mind — and if that happened all at once, it would drive him mad. He tried to push them back, and succeeded, but not before he heard a voice — it was as if someone buried alive had cried out from the ground. It was Eddie Kaspbrak's voice. You saved my life, Bill. Those big boys, they drive me bugshit. Sometimes I think they really want to kill me — 'Your arms,' Audra said.Bill looked down at them. The flesh there had humped into gooseflesh. Not little bumps but huge white knobs like insect eggs. They both stared, saying nothing, as if looking at an interesting museum exhibit. The goosebumps slowly melted away. In the silence that followed Audra said: 'And I know one other thing. Someone called you this morning from the States and said you have to leave me.' He got up, looked briefly at the liquor bottles, then went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of orange juice. He said: 'You know I had a brother, and you know he died, but you don't know he was murdered.' Audra took in a quick snatch of breath. 'Murdered! Oh, Bill, why didn't you ever — ' 'Tell you?' He laughed, that barking sound again. 'I don't know.' 'What happened?' 'We were living in Derry then. There had been a flood, but it was mostly over, and George was bored. I was sick in bed with the flu. He wanted me to make him a boat out of a sheet of newspaper. I knew how from daycamp the year before. He said he was going to sail it down the gutters on Witcham Street and Jackson Street, because they were still full of water. So I made him the boat and he thanked me and he went out and that was the last time I ever saw my brother George alive. If I hadn't had the flu, maybe I could have saved him.' He paused, right palm rubbing at his left cheek, as if testing for beard-stubble. His eyes, magnified by the lenses of his glasses, looked thoughtful . . . but he was not looking at her. 'It happened right there on Witcham Street, not too far from the intersection with Jackson. Whoever killed him pulled his left arm off the way a second-grader would pull a wing off a fly. Medical examiner said he either died of shock or blood-loss. Far as I could ever see, it didn't make a dime's worth of difference which it was.' 'Christ, Bill!' 'I imagine you wonder why I never told you. The truth is I wonder myself. Here we've been married eleven years and until today you never knew what happened to Georgie. I know about your whole family — even your aunts and uncles. I know your grandfather died in his garage in Iowa City frigging around with his chainsaw while he was drunk. I know those things because married people, no matter how busy they are, get to know almost everything after awhile. And if they get really bored and stop listening, they pick it up anyway — by osmosis. Or do you think I'm wrong?' 'No,' she said faintly. 'You're not wrong, Bill.' 'And we've always been able to talk to each other, haven't we? I mean, neither of us got so bored it ever had to be osmosis, right?' 'Well,' she said, 'until today I always thought so.' 'Come on, Audra. You know everything that's happened to me over the last eleven years of my life. Every deal, every idea, every cold, every friend, every guy that ever did me wrong or tried to. You know I slept with Susan Browne. You know that sometimes I get maudlin when I drink and play the records too loud.' 'Especially the Grateful Dead,' she said, and he laughed. This time she smiled back. 'You know the most important stuff, too — the things I hope for.' 'Yes. I think so. But this . . . ' She paused, shook her head, thought for a moment. 'How much does this call have to do with your brother, Bill?' 'Let me get to it ia my own way. Don't try to rush me into the center of it or you'll have me committed. It's so big . . . and so . . . so quaintly awful . . . that I'm trying to sort of creep up on it. You see . . . it never occurred to me to tell you about Georgie.' She looked at him, frowned, shook her head faintly — I don't understand. 'What I'm trying to tell you, Audra, is that I haven't even thought of George in twenty years or more. 'But you told me you had a brother named — ' 'I repeated a fact,' he said. 'That was all. His name was a word. It cast no shadow at all in my mind.' 'But I think maybe it cast a shadow over your dreams,' Audra said. Her voice was very quiet. 'The groaning? The crying?' She nodded. 'I suppose you could be right,' he said. 'In fact, you're almost surely right. But dreams you don't remember don't really count, do they?' 'Are you really telling me you never thought of him at all' 'Yes. I am.' She shook her head, frankly disbelieving. 'Not even the horrible way he died?' 'Not until today, Audra.' She looked at him and shook her head again. 'You asked me before we were married if I had any brothers or sisters, and I said I had a brother who died when I was a kid. You knew my parents were gone, and you've got so much family that it took up your entire field of attention. But that's not all.' 'What do you mean?' 'It isn't just George that's been in that black hole. I haven't thought of Derry itself in twenty years. Not the people I chummed with — Eddie Kaspbrak and Richie the Mouth, Stan Uris, Bev Marsh . . . ' He ran his hands through his hair and laughed shakily. 'It's like having a case of amnesia so bad you don't know you've got it. And when Mike Hanlon called — ' 'Who's Mike Hanlon?' 'Another kid that we chummed with — that I chummed with after Georgie died. Of course he's no kid anymore. None of us are. That was Mike on the phone, transatlantic cable. He said, "Hello — have I reached the Denbrough residence?" and I said yes, and he said, "Bill? Is that you?" and I said yes, and he said, "This is Mike Hanlon." It meant nothing to me, Audra. He might as well have been selling encyclopedias or Burl Ives records. Then he said, "From Derry." And when he said that it was like a door opened inside me and some horrible light shined out, and I remembered who he was. I remembered Georgie. I remembered all the others. All this happened — ' Bill snapped his fingers. 'Like that. And I knew he was going to ask me to come.' 'Come back to Derry.' 'Yeah.' He took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, looked at her. Never in her life had she seen a man who looked so frightened. 'Back to Derry. Because we promised, he said, and we did. We did. All of us. Us kids. We stood in the creek that ran through the Barrens, and we held hands in a circle, and we had cut our palms with a piece of glass so it was like a bunch of kids playing blood brothers, only it was real.' He held his palms out to her, and in the center of each she could see a close-set ladder of white lines that could have been scar-tissue. She had held his hand — both his hands — countless times, but she had never noticed these scars across his palms before. They were faint, yes, but she would have believed — And the party! That party! Not the one where they had met, although this second one formed a perfect book-end to that first one, because it had been the wrap party at the end of the Pit of the Black Demon shoot. It had been loud and drunk, every inch the Topanga Canyon 'do. ' Perhaps a little less bitchy than some of the other LA parties she had been to, because the shoot had gone better than they had any right to expect, and they all knew it. For Audra Phillips it had gone even better, because she had fallen in love with William Denbrough. What was the name of the self-proclaimed palmist? She couldn't remember now, only that she had been one of the makeup man's two assistants. She remembered the girl whipping off her blouse at some point in the party (revealing a very filmy bra beneath) and tying it over her head like a gypsy's scarf. High on pot and wine, she had read palms for the rest of the evening . . . or at least until she had passed out. Audra could not remember now if the girl's readings had been good or bad, witty or stupid: she had been pretty high herself that night. What she did remember was that at one point the girl had grabbed Bill's palm and her own and had declared them perfectly matched. They were life-twins, she said. She could remember watching, more than a little jealous, as the girl traced the lines on his palm with her exquisitely lacquered fingernail — how stupid that was, in the weird LA film subculture where men patted women's fannies as routinely as New York men pecked their cheeks! But there had been something intimate and lingering about that tracery. There had been no little white scars on Bill's palms then. She had been watching the charade with a jealous lover's eye, and she was sure of the memory. Sure of the fact. She said so to Bill now. He nodded. 'You're right. They weren't there then. And although I can't absolutely swear to it, I don't think they were there last night, down at the Plow and Barrow. Ralph and I were hand-wrestling for beers again and I think I would have noticed.' He grinned at her. The grin was dry, humorless, and scared. 'I think they came back when Mike Hanlon called. That's what I think.' 'Bill, that isn't possible.' But she reached for her cigarettes. Bill was looking at his hands. 'Stan did it,' he said. 'Cut our palms with a sliver of Coke bottle. I can remember it so clearly now.' He looked up at Audra and behind his glasses his eyes were hurt and puzzled. 'I remember how that piece of glass flashed in the sun. It was one of the new clear ones. Before that Coke bottles used to be green, you remember that?' She shook her head but he didn't see her. He was still studying his palms. 'I can remember Stan doing his own hands last, pretending he was going to slash his wrists instead of just cut his palms a little. I guess it was just some goof, but I almost made a move on him . . . to stop him. Because for a second or two there he looked serious.' 'Bill, don't,' she said in a low voice. This time she had to steady the lighter in her right hand by grasping its wrist in her left, like a policeman holding a gun on a shooting range. 'Scars can't come back. They either are or aren't.' 'You saw them before, huh? Is that what you're telling me?' 'They're very faint,' Audra said, more sharply than she had intended, 'We were all bleeding,' he said. 'We were standing in the water not far from where Eddie Kaspbrak and Ben Hanscom and I built the dam that time — ' 'You don't mean the architect, do you?' 'Is there one by that name?' 'God, Bill, he built the new BBC communications center! They're still arguing whether it's a dream or an abortion!' 'Well, I don't know if it's the same guy or not. It doesn't seem likely, but I guess it could be. The Ben I knew was great at building stuff. We all stood there, and I was holding Bev Marsh's left hand in my right and Richie Tozier's right hand in my left. We stood out there in the water like something out of a Southern baptism after a tent meeting, and I remember I could see the Derry Standpipe on the horizon. It looked as white as you imagine the robes of the archangels must be, and we promised, we swore, that if it wasn't over, that if it ever started to happen again . . . we'd go back. And we'd do it again. And stop it. Forever.' 'Stop what? she cried, suddenly furious with him. 'Stop what'? What the fuck are you talking about?' 'I wish you wouldn't a-a-ask — ' Bill began, and then stopped. She saw an expression of bemused horror spread over his face like a stain. 'Give me a cigarette.' She passed him the pack. He lit one. She had never seen him smoke a cigarette. 'I used to stutter, too.' 'You stuttered?' 'Yes. Back then. You said I was the only man in LA you ever knew who dared to speak slowly. The truth is, I didn't dare talk fast. It wasn't reflection. It wasn't deliberation. It wasn't wisdom. All reformed stutterers speak very slowly. It's one of the tricks you learn, like thinking of your middle name just before you introduce yourself, because stutterers have more trouble with nouns than with any other words, and the one word in all the world that gives them the most trouble is their own first name.' 'Stuttered.' She smiled a small smile, as if he had told a joke and she had missed the point. 'Until Georgie died, I stuttered moderately,' Bill said, and already he had begun to hear words double in his mind, as if they were infinitesimally separated in time; the words came out smoothly, in his ordinary slow and cadenced way, but in his mind he heard words like Georgie and moderately overlap, becoming Juh-Juh-Georgie and m-moderately. 'I mean, I had some really bad moments — usually when I was called on in class, and especially if I really knew the answer and wanted to give it — but mostly I got by. After George died, it got a lot worse. Then, around the age of fourteen or fifteen, things started to get better again. I went to Chevrus High in Portland, and there was a speech therapist there, Mrs Thomas, who was really great. She taught me some good tricks. Like thinking of my middle name just before I said "Hi, I'm Bill Denbrough" out loud. I was taking French 1 and she taught me to switch to French if I got badly stuck on a word. So if you're standing there feeling like the world's grandest asshole, saying "th-th-this buh-buh-buh-buh" over and over like a broken record, you switched over to French and "ce livre" would come flowing off your tongue. Worked every time. And as soon as you said it in French you could come back to English and say "this book" with no problem at all. If you got stuck on an s-word like ship or skate or slum, you could lisp it: thip, thkate, thlum. No stutter. 'All of that helped, but mostly it was just forgetting Derry and everything that happened there. Because that's when the forgetting happened. When we were living in Portland and I was going to Chevrus. I didn't forget everything at once, but looking back now I'd have to say it happened over a remarkably short period of time. Maybe no more than four months. My stutter and my memories faded out together. Someone washed the blackboard and all the old equations went away.' He drank what was left of his juice. 'When I stuttered on "ask" a few seconds ago, that was the first time in maybe twenty-one years.' He looked at her. 'First the scars, then the stuh-hutter. Do you h-hear it?' 'You're doing that on purpose!' she said, badly frightened. 'No. I guess there's no way to convince a person of that, but it's true. Stuttering's funny, Audra. Spooky. On one level you're not even aware it's happening. But . . . it's also something you can hear in your mind. It's like part of your head is working an instant ahead of the rest. Or one of those reverb systems kids used to put in their jalopies back in the fifties, when the sound in the rear speaker would come just a split second a-after the sound in the front speaker.' He got up and walked restlessly around the room. He looked tired, and she thought with some unease of how hard he had worked over the last thirteen years or so, as if it might be possible to justify the moderateness of his talent by working furiously, almost non-stop. She found herself having a very uneasy thought and tried to push it away, but it wouldn't go. Suppose Bill's call had really been from Ralph Foster, inviting him down to the Plow and Barrow for an hour of arm-wrestling or backgammon, or maybe from Freddie Firestone, the producer of Attic Room, on some problem or other? Perhaps even a 'wrong-ring,' as the veddy British doctor's wife down the lane put it? What did such thoughts lead to? Why, to the idea that all this Derry-Mike Hanlon business was nothing but a hallucination. A hallucination brought on by an incipient nervous breakdown. But the scars, Audra — how do you explain the scars? He's right. They weren't there . . . and now they are. That's the truth, and you know it. 'Tell me the rest,' she said. 'Who killed your brother George? What did you and these other children do? What did you promise?' He went to her, knelt before her like an oldfashioned suitor about to propose marriage, and took her hands. 'I think I could tell you,' he said softly. 'I think that if I really wanted to, I could. Most of it I don't remember even now, but once I started talking it would come. I can sense those memories . . . waiting to be born. They're like clouds filled with rain. Only this rain would be very dirty. The plants that grew after a rain like that would be monsters. Maybe I can face that with the others — ' 'Do they know?' 'Mike said he called them all. He thinks they'll all come . . . except maybe for Stan. He said Stan sounded strange.' 'It all sounds strange to me. You're frightening me very badly, Bill.' 'I'm sorry,' he said, and kissed her. It was like getting a kiss from an utter stranger. She found herself hating this man Mike Hanlon. 'I thought I ought to explain as much as I could; I thought that would be better than just creeping off into the night. I suppose some of them may do just that. But I have to go. And I think Stan will be there, no matter how strange he sounded. Or maybe that's just because I can't imagine not going myself.' 'Because of your brother?' Bill shook his head slowly. 'I could tell you that, but it would be a lie. I loved him. I know how strange that must sound after telling you I haven't thought of him in twenty years or so, but I loved the hell out of that kid.' He smiled a little. 'He was a spasmoid, but I loved him. You know?' Audra, who had a younger sister, nodded. 'I know.' 'But it isn't George. I can't explain what it is. I . . . ' He looked out the window at the morning fog. 'I feel like a bird must feel when fall comes and it knows . . . somehow it just knows it has to fly home. It's instinct, babe . . . and I guess I believe instinct's the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will. Unless you're willing to take the pipe or eat the gun or take a long walk off a short dock, you can't say no to some things. You can't refuse to pick up your option because there is no option. You can't stop it from happening any more than you could stand at home plate with a bat in your hand and let a fastball hit you. I have to go. That promise . . . it's in my mind like a fuh-fishhook.' She stood up and walked herself carefully to him; she felt very fragile, as if she might break. She put a hand on his shoulder and turned him to her. 'Take me with you, then. The expression of horror that dawned on his face then — not horror of her but for her — was so naked that she stepped back, really afraid for the first time. 'No,' he said. 'Don't think of that, Audra. Don't you ever think of that. You're not going within three thousand miles of Derry. I think Derry's going to be a very bad place to be during the next couple of weeks. You're going to stay here and carry on and make all the excuses for me you have to. Now promise me that!' 'Should I promise?' she asked, her eyes never leaving his. 'Should I, Bill?' 'Audra — ' 'Should I? You made a promise, and look what it's got you into. And me as well, since I'm your wife and I love you.' His big hands tightened painfully on her shoulders. 'Promise me! Promise! P-Puh-PuhPruh-huh — ' And she could not stand that, that broken word caught in his mouth like a gaffed and wriggling fish. 'I promise, okay? I promise!' She burst into tears. 'Are you happy now? Jesus! You're crazy, the whole thing is crazy, but I promise!' He put an arm around her and led her to the couch. Brought her a brandy. She sipped at it, getting herself under control a little at a time. 'When do you go, then?' 'Today,' he said. 'Concorde. I can just make it if I drive to Heathrow instead of taking the train. Freddie wanted me on-set after ranch. You go on ahead at nine, and you don't know anything, you see?' She nodded reluctantly. 'I'll be in New York before anything shows up funny. And in Derry before sundown, with the right c-c-connections.' 'And when do I see you again?' she asked softly. He put an arm around her and held her tightly, but he never answered her question.'How many human eyes . . . had snatched glimpses of their secret anatomies, down the passage of years?'The segment below and all other Interlude segments are drawn from 'Derry: An Unauthorized Town History,' by Michael Hanlon. This is an unpublished set of notes and accompanying fragments of manuscript (which read almost like diary entries) found in the Derry Public Library vault. The title given is the one written on the cover of the looseleaf binder in which these notes were kept prior to their appearance here. The author, however, refers to the work several times within his own notes as 'Derry: A Look Through Hell's Back Door.' One supposes the thought of popular publication had done more than cross Mr Hanlon's mind. January 2nd, 1985 Can an entire city be haunted? Haunted as some houses are supposed to be haunted? Not just a single building in that city, or the corner of a single street, or a single basketball court in a single pocket-park, the netless basket jutting out at sunset like some obscure and bloody instrument of torture, not just one area — but everything. The whole works. Can that be? Listen: Haunted: 'Often visited by ghosts or spirits.' Funk and Wagnalls. Haunting: 'Persistently recurring to the mind; difficult to forget.' Ditto Funk and Friend. To haunt: 'To appear or recur often, especially as a ghost.' But — and listen! — 'A place often visited: resort, den, hangout . . . ' Italics are of course mine. And one more. This one, like the last, is a definition of haunt as a noun, and it's the one that really scares me: '.A feeding place for animals.' Like the animals that beat up Adrian Mellon and then threw him over the bridge? Like the animal that was waiting underneath the bridge? A feeding place for animals. What's feeding in Derry? What's feeding on Derry? You know, it's sort of interesting — I didn't know it was possible for a man to become as frightened as I have become since the Adrian Mellon business and still live, let alone function. It's as if I've fallen into a story, and everyone knows you're not supposed to feel this afraid until the end of the story, when the haunter of the dark finally comes out of the woodwork to feed . . . on you, of course. On you. But if this is a story, it's not one of those classic screamers by Lovecraft or Bradbury or Poe. I know, you see — not everything, but a lot. I didn't just start when I opened the Derry News one day last September, read the transcript of the Unwin boy's preliminary hearing, and realized that the clown who killed George Denbrough might well be back again. I actually started around 1980 — I think that is when some part of me which had been asleep woke up . . . knowing that Its time might be coming round again. What part? The watchman part, I suppose. Or maybe it was the voice of the Turtle. Yes . . . I rather think it was that. I know it's what Bill Denbrough would believe. I discovered news of old horrors in old books; read intelligence of old atrocities in old periodicals; always in the back of my mind, every day a bit louder, I heard the seashell drone of some growing, coalescing force; I seemed to smell the bitter ozone aroma of lightnings-tocome. I began making notes for a book I will almost certainly not live to write. And at the same time I went on with my life. On one level of my mind I was and am living with the most grotesque, capering horrors; on another I have continued to live the mundane life of a smallcity librarian. I shelve books; I make out library cards for new patrons; I turn off the microfilm readers careless users sometimes leave on; I joke with Carole Danner about how much I would like to go to bed with her, and she jokes back about how much she'd like to go to bed with me, and both of us know that she's really joking and I'm really not, just as both of us know that she won't stay in a little place like Derry for long and I will be here until I die, taping torn pages in Business Week, sitting down at monthly acquisition meetings with my pipe in one hand and a stack of Library Journals in the other . . . and waking in the middle of the night with my fists jammed against my mouth to keep in the screams. The gothic conventions are all wrong. My hair has not turned white. I do not sleepwalk. I have not begun to make cryptic comments or to carry a planchette around in my sportcoat pocket. I think I laugh a little more, that's all, and sometimes it must seem a little shrill and strange, because sometimes people look at me oddly when I laugh. Part of me — the part Bill would call the voice of the Turtle — says I should call them all, tonight. But am I, even now, completely sure? Do I want to be completely sure? No — of course not. But God, what happened to Adrian Mellon is so much like what happened to Stuttering Bill's brother, George, in the fail of 1957. If it has started again, I will call them. I'll have to. But not yet. It's too early anyway. Last time it began slowly and didn't really get going until the summer of 1958. So . . . I wait. And fill up the waiting with words in this notebook and long moments of looking into the mirror to see the stranger the boy became. The boy's face was bookish and timid; the man's face is the face of a bank teller in a Western movie, the fellow who never has any lines, the one who just gets to put his hands up and look scared when the robbers come in. And if the script calls for anyone to get shot by the bad guys, he's the one. Same old Mike. A little starey in the eyes, maybe, and a little punchy from broken sleep, but not so's you'd notice without a good close look . . . like kissing-distance close, and I haven't been that close to anyone in a very long time. If you took a casual glance at me you might think He's been reading too many books, but that's all. I doubt you'd guess how hard the man with the mild bank-teller's face is now struggling just to hold on, to hold on to his own mind . . . . If I have to make those calls, it may kill some of them. That's one of the things I've had to face on the long nights when sleep won't come, nights when I lie there in bed wearing my conservative blue pajamas, my spectacles neatly folded up and lying on the nighttable next to the glass of water I always put there in case I wake up thirsty in the night. I lie there in the dark and I take small sips of the water and I wonder how much — or how little — they remember. I am somehow convinced that they don't remember any of it, because they don't need to remember. I'm the only one that hears the voice of the Turtle, the only one who remembers, because I'm the only one who stayed here in Derry. And because they're scattered to the four winds, they have no way of knowing the identical patterns their lives have taken. To bring them back, to show them that pattern . . . yes, it might kill some of them. It might kill all of them. So I go over it and over it in my mind; I go over them, trying to re-create them as they were and as they might now be, trying to decide which of them is the most vulnerable. Richie 'Trashmouth' Tozier, I think sometimes — he was the one Criss, Huggins, and Bowers seemed to catch up with the most often, in spite of the fact that Ben was so fat. Bowers was the one Richie was the most scared of — the one we were all the most scared of — but the others used to really put the fear of God into him, too. If I call him out there in California would he see it as some horrible Return of the Big Bullies, two from the grave and one from the madhouse in Juniper Hill where he raves to this day? Sometimes I think Eddie was the weakest, Eddie with his domineering tank of a mother and his terrible case of asthma. Beverly? She always tried to talk so tough, but she was as scared as the rest of us. Stuttering Bill, faced with a horror that won't go away when he puts the cover on his typewriter? Stan Uris? There's a guillotine blade hanging over their lives, razor-sharp, but the more I think about it the more I think they don't know that blade is there. I'm the one with my hand on the lever. I can pull it just by opening my telephone notebook and calling them, one after the other. Maybe I won't have to do it. I hold on to the waning hope that I've mistaken the rabbity cries of my own timid mind for the deeper, truer voice of the Turtle. After all, what do I have? Mellon in July. A child found dead on Neibolt Street last October, another found in Memorial Park in early December, just before the first snowfall. Maybe it was a tramp, as the papers say. Or a crazy who's since left Derry or killed himself out of remorse and self-disgust, as some of the books say the real Jack the Ripper may have done. Maybe. But the Albrecht girl was found directly across the street from that damned old house on Neibolt Street . . . and she was killed on the same day as George Denbrough was, twentyseven years before. And then the Johnson boy, found in Memorial Park with one of his legs missing below the knee. Memorial Park is, of course, the home of the Derry Standpipe, and the boy was found almost at its foot. The Standpipe is within a shout of the Barrens; the Standpipe is also where Stan Uris saw those boys. Those dead boys. Still, it could all be nothing but smoke and mirages. Could be. Or coincidence. Or perhaps something between the two — a kind of malefic echo. Could that be? I sense that it could be. Here in Derry, anything could be. I think what was here before is still here — the thing that was here in 1957 and 1958; the thing that was here in 1929 and in 1930 when the Black Spot was burned down by the Maine Legion of White Decency; the thing that was here ha 1904 and 1905 and early 1906 — at least until the Kitchener Ironworks exploded; the thing that was here in 1876 and 1877, the thing that has shown up every twenty-seven years or so. Sometimes it comes a little sooner, sometimes a little later . . . but it always comes. As one goes back the wrong notes are harder and harder to find because the records grow poorer and the moth-holes in the narrative history of the area grow bigger. But knowing where to look — and when to look — goes a long way toward solving the problem. It always comes back, you see. It. So — yes: I think I'll have to make those calls. I think it was meant to be us. Somehow, for some reason, we're the ones who have been elected to stop it forever. Blind fate? Blind luck? Or is it that damned Turtle again? Does it perhaps command as well as speak? I don't know. And I doubt if it matters. All those years ago Bill said The Turtle can't help us, and if it was true then it must be true now. I think of us standing in the water, hands clasped, making that promise to come back if it ever started again — standing there almost like Druids in a ring, our hands bleeding their own promise, palm to palm. A ritual that is perhaps as old as mankind itself, an unknowing tap driven into the tree of all power — the one that grows on the borderline between the land of all we know and that of all we suspect. Because the similarities — But I'm doing my own Bill Denbrough here, stuttering over the same ground again and again, reciting a few facts and a lot of unpleasant (and rather gaseous) suppositions, growing more and more obsessive with every paragraph. No good. Useless. Dangerous, even. But it is so very hard to wait on events. This notebook is supposed to be an effort to get beyond that obsession by widening the focus of my attention — after all, there is more to this story than six boys and one girl, none of them happy, none of them accepted by their peers, who stumbled into a nightmare during one hot summer when Eisenhower was still President. It is an attempt to pull the camera back a little, if you will — to see the whole city, a place where nearly thirty-five thousand people work and eat and sleep and copulate and shop and drive around and walk and go to school and go to jail and sometimes disappear into the dark. To know what a place is, I really do believe one has to know what it was. And if I had to name a day when all of this really started again for me, it would be the day in the early spring of 1980 when I went to see Albert Carson, who died last summer — at ninety-one, he was full of years as well as honors. He was head librarian here from 1914 to 1960, an incredible span (but he was an incredible man), and I felt that if anyone would know which history of this area was the best one to start with, Albert Carson would. I asked him my question as we sat on his porch and he gave me my answer, speaking in a croak — he was already fighting the throat-cancer which would eventually kill him. 'Not one of them is worth a shit. As you damn well know.' 'Then where should I start?' 'Start what, for Christ's sake?' 'Researching the history of the area. Of Derry Township.' 'Oh. Well. Start with the Fricke and the Michaud. They're supposed to be the best.' 'And after I read those — ' 'Read them? Christ, no! Throw em in the wastebasket! That's your first step. Then read Buddinger. Branson Buddinger was a damned sloppy researcher and afflicted with a terminal boner, if half of what I heard when I was a kid was true, but when it came to Derry his heart was in the right place. He got most of the facts wrong, but he got them wrong with feeling, Hanlon.' I laughed a little and Carson grinned with his leathery lips — an expression of good humor that was actually a little frightening. In that instant he looked like a vulture happily guarding a freshly killed animal, waiting for it to reach exactly the right stage of tasty decomposition before beginning to dine. 'When you finish with Buddinger, read Ives. Make notes on all the people he talked to. Sandy Ives is still at the University of Maine. Folklorist. After you read him, go see him. Buy him a dinner. I'd take him to the Orinoka, because dinner at the Orinoka seems to never end. Pump him. Fill up a notebook with names and addresses. Talk to the old-timers he's talked to — those that are still left; there are a few of us, ah-hah-hah-hah! — and get some more names from them. By then you'll have all the place to stand you'll need, if you're half as bright as I think you are. If you chase down enough people, you'll find out a few things that aren't in the histories. And you may find they disturb your sleep.' 'Derry . . . ' 'What about it?' 'Derry's not right, is it?' 'Right?' he asked in that whispery croak. 'What's right? What does that word mean? Is "right" pretty pictures of the Kenduskeag at sunset, Kodachrome by so-and-so, f-stop suchand-such? If so, then Derry is right, because there are pretty pictures of it by the score. Is right a damned committee of dry-boxed old virgins to save the Governor's Mansion or to put a commemorative plaque in front of the Standpipe? If that's right, then Derry's right as rain, because we've got more than our share of old kitty-cats minding everybody's business. Is right that ugly plastic statue of Paul Bunyan in front of City Center? Oh, if I had a truckful of napalm and my old Zippo lighter I'd take care of that fucking thing, I assure you . . . but if one's aesthetic is broad enough to include plastic statues, then Derry is right. The question is, what does right mean to you, Hanlon? Eh? More to the point, what does right not mean?' I could only shake my head. He either knew or he didn't. He would either tell or he wouldn't. 'Do you mean the unpleasant stories you may hear, or the ones you already know? There are always unple asant stories. A town's history is like a rambling old mansion filled with rooms and cubbyholes and laundry-chutes and garrets and all sorts of eccentric little hiding places . . . not to mention an occasional secret passage or two. If you go exploring Mansion Derry, you'll find all sorts of things. Yes. You may be sorry later, but you'll find them, and once a thing is found it can't be unfound, can it? Some of the rooms are locked, but there are keys . . . there are keys.' His eyes glinted at me with an old man's shrewdness. 'You may come to think you've stumbled on the worst of Derry's secrets . . . but there is always one more. And one more. And one more.' 'Do you — ' 'I think I shall have to ask you to excuse me just now. My throat is very bad today. It's time for my medicine and my nap.' In other words, here is a knife and a fork, my friend; go see what you can cut with them. I started with the Fricke history and the Michaud history. I followed Carson's advice and threw them in the wastebasket, but I read them first. They were as bad as he had suggested. I read the Buddinger history, copied out the footnotes, and chased them down. That was more satisfactory, but footnotes are peculiar things, you know - like footpaths twisting through a wild and anarchic country. They split, then they split again; at any point you may take a wrong turn which leads you either to a bramble-choked dead end or into swampy quickmud. 'If you find a footnote,' a library-science prof once told a class of which I was a part, 'step on its head and kill it before it can breed.' They do breed, and sometimes the breeding is a good thing, but I think that more often it is not. Those in Buddinger's stiffly written A History of Old Derry (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1950) wander through one hundred years' worth of forgotten books and dusty master's dissertations in the fields of history and folklore, through articles in defunct magazines, and amid brain-numbing stacks of town reports and ledgers. My conversations with Sandy Ives were more interesting. His sources crossed Buddinger's from time to time, but a crossing was all it ever was. Ives had spent a good part of his lifetime setting down oral histories — yarns, in other words — almost verbatim, a practice Branson Buddinger would undoubtedly have seen as taking the low road. Ives had written a cycle of articles on Derry during the years 1963-66. Most of the old - timers he talked to then were dead by the time I started my own investigations, but they had sons, daughters, nephews, cousins. And, of course, one of the great true facts of the world is this: for every old-timer who dies, there's a new old-timer coming along. And a good story never dies; it is always passed down. I sat on a lot of porches and back stoops, drank a lot of tea, Black Label beer, homemade beer, homemade rootbeer, tapwater, springwater. I did a lot of listening, and the wheels of my tape-player turned. Both Buddinger and Ives agreed completely on one point: the original party of white settlers numbered about three hundred. They were English. They had a charter and were formally known as the Derrie Company. The land granted them covered what is today Derry, most of Newport, and little slices of the surrounding towns. And in the year 1741 everyone in Derry Township just disappeared. They were there in June of that year — a community which at that time numbered about three hundred and forty souls — but come October they were gone. The little village of wooden homes stood utterly deserted. One of them, which once stood roughly at the place where Witcham and Jackson Streets intersect today, was burned to the ground. The Michaud history states firmly that all of the villagers were slaughtered by Indians, but there is no basis — save the one burned house — for that idea. More likely, someone's stove just got too hot and the house went up in flames. Indian massacre? Doubtful. No bones, no bodies. Flood? Not that year. Disease? No word of it in the surrounding towns. They just disappeared. All of them. All three hundred and forty of them. Without a trace. So far as I know, the only case remotely like it in American history is the disappearance of the colonists on Roanoke Island, Virginia. Every school-child in the country knows about that one, but who knows about the Derry disappearance? Not even the people who live here, apparently. I quizzed several junior-high students who are taking the required Maine-history course, and none of them knew a thing about it. Then I checked the text, Maine Then and Now. There are better than forty index entries for Derry, most of them concerning the boom years of the lumber industry. Nothing about the disappearance of the original colonists . . . and yet that — what shall I call it? — that quiet fits the pattern, too. There is a kind of curtain of quiet which cloaks much of what has happened here . . . and yet people do talk. I guess nothing can stop people from talking. But you have to listen hard, and that is a rare skill. I flatter myself that I've developed it over the last four years. If I haven't, then my aptitude for the job must be poor indeed, because I've had enough practice. An old man told me about how his wife had heard voices speaking to her from the drain of her kitchen sink in the three weeks before their daughter died — that was in the early winter of 1957-58. The girl he spoke of was one of the early victims in the murder-spree which began with George Denbrough and did not end until the following summer. 'A whole slew of voices, all of em babblin together,' he told me. He owned a Gulf station on Kansas Street and talked in between slow, limping trips out to the pumps, where he filled gas-tanks, checked oil-levels, and wiped windshields. 'Said she spoke back once, even though she was ascairt. Leaned right over the dram, she did, and hollered down into it. "Who the hell are you?" she calls. "What's your name?" And all these voices answered back, she said — grunts, and babbles and howls and yips, screams and laughing, don't you know. And she said they were saying what the possessed man said to Jesus: "Our name is Legion," they said. She wouldn't go near that sink for two years. For them two years I'd spend twelve hours a day down here, bustin my hump, then have to go home and warsh all the damn dishes.' He was drinking a can of Pepsi from the machine outside the office door, a man of seventy-two or -three in faded gray work fatigues, rivers of wrinkles flowing down from the corners of his eyes and mouth. 'By now you probably think I'm as crazy as a bedbug,' he said, 'but I'll tell you sumpin else, if you'll turn off y 'whirligig, there.' I turned off my tape-recorder and smiled at him. 'Considering some of the things I've heard over the last couple of years, you'd have to go a fair country distance to convince me you're crazy,' I said. He smiled back, but there was no humor in it. 'I was doin the dishes one night, same as usual — this was in the fall of '58, after things had settled down again. My wife was upstair, sleepin. Betty was the only kid God ever saw fit to give us, and after she was killed my wife spent a lot of her time sleepin. Anyway, I pulled the plug and the water started runnin out of the sink. You know the sound real soapy water makes when it goes down the drain? Kind of a sucking sound, it is. It was making that noise, but I wasn't thinking about it, only about going out and chopping some kindling in the shed, and just as that sound started to die off, I heard my daughter down in there. I heard Betty somewhere down in those friggin pipes. Laughin. She was somewheres down there in the dark, laughin. Only it sounded more like she was screaming, once you listened a bit. Or both. Screaming and laughing down there in the pipes. That's the only time I ever heard anything like that. Maybe I just imagined it. But . . . I don't think so.' He looked at me and I looked at him. The light falling through the dirty plate-glass windows onto his face filled him up with years, made him look as ancient as Methuselah. I remember how cold I felt at that moment; how cold. 'You think I'm storying you along?' the old man asked me, the old man who would have been just about forty-five in 1957, the old man to whom God had given a single daughter, Betty Ripsom by name. Betty had been found on Outer Jackson Street just after Christmas of that year, frozen, her remains ripped wide open. 'No,' I said. 'I don't think you're just storying me along, Mr Ripsom.' 'And you're tellin the truth, too,' he said with a land of wonder. 'I can see it on y'face.' I think he meant to tell me something more then, but the bell behind us dinged sharply as a car rolled over the hose on the tarmac and pulled up to the pumps. When the bell rang, both of us jumped and I uttered a thin little cry. Ripsom got to his feet and limped out to the car, wiping his hands on a ball of waste. When he came back in, he looked at me as though I were a rather unsavory stranger who had just happened to wander in off the street. I made my goodbyes and left. Buddinger and Ives agree on some tiling else: things really are not right here in Derry; things in Derry have never been right. I saw Albert Carson for the last time a scant month before he died. His throat had gotten much worse; all he could manage was a hissing little whisper. 'Still thinking about writing a history of Derry, Hanlon?' 'Still toying with the idea,' I said, but I had of course never planned to write a history of the township — not exactly — and I think he knew it. 'It would take you twenty years,' he whispered, 'and no one would read it. No one would want to read it. Let it go, Hanlon.' He paused a moment and then added: 'Buddinger committed suicide, you know.' Of course I had known that — but only because people always talk and I had learned to listen. The article in the News had called it a falling accident, and it was true that Branson Buddinger had taken a fall. What the News neglected to mention was that he fell from a stool in his closet and he had a noose around his neck at the time. 'You know about the cycle?' I looked at him, startled. 'Oh yes,' Carson whispered. 'I know. Every twenty-six or twenty-seven years. Buddinger knew, too. A lot of the old-timers do, although that is one thing they won't talk about, even if you load them up with booze. Let it go, Hanlon.' He reached out with one bird-claw hand. He closed it around my wrist and I could feel the hot cancer that was loose and raving through his body, eating anything and everything left that was still good to eat — not that there could have been much by that time; Albert Carson's cupboards were almost bare. 'Michael — this is nothing you want to mess into. There are things here in Derry that bite. Let it go. Let it go.' 'I can't.' 'Then beware,' he said. Suddenly the huge and frightened eyes of a child were looking out of his dying old-man's face. 'Beware.' Derry. My home town. Named after the county of the same name in Ireland. Derry. I was born here, in Derry Home Hospital; attended Derry Elementary School; went to junior high at Ninth Street Middle School; to high school at Derry High. I went to the University of Maine — 'ain't in Derry, but it's just down the rud,' the old-timers say — and then I came right back here. To the Derry Public Library. I am a small-town man living a small-town life, one among millions. But. But: In 1851 a crew of lumber jacks found the remains of another crew that had spent the winter snowed in at a camp on the Upper Kenduskeag — at the tip of what the kids still call the Barrens. There were nine of them in all, all nine hacked to pieces. Heads had rolled . . . not to mention arms . . . a foot or two . . . and a man's penis had been nailed to one wall of the cabin. But: In 1851 John Markson killed his entire family with poison and then, sitting in the middle of the circle he had made with their corpses, he gobbled an entire 'white-nightshade' mushroom. His death agonies must have been intense. The town constable who found him wrote in his report that at first he believed the corpse was grinning at him; he wrote of 'Markson's awful white smile.' The white smile was an entire mouthful of the killer mushroom; Markson had gone on eating even as the cramps and the excruciating muscle spasms must have been wracking his dying body. But: On Easter Sunday 1906 the owners of the Kitchener Ironworks, which stood where the brand-spanking-new Derry Mall now stands, held an Easter-egg hunt for 'all the good children of Derry.' The hunt took place in the huge Ironworks building. Dangerous areas were closed off, and employees volunteered their time to stand guard and make sure no adventurous boy or girl decided to duck under the barriers and explore. Five hundred chocolate Easter eggs wrapped in gay ribbons were hidden about the rest of the works. According to Buddinger, there was at least one child present for each of those eggs. They ran giggling and whooping and yelling through the Sunday-silent Ironworks, finding the eggs under the giant tipper-vats, inside the desk drawers of the foreman, balanced between the great rusty teeth of gearwheels, inside the molds on the third floor (in the old photographs these molds look like cupcake tins from some giant's kitchen). Three generations of Kitcheners were there to watch the gay riot and to award prizes at the end of the hunt, which was to come at four o'clock, whether all the eggs had been found or not. The end actually came forty-five minutes early, at quarter past three. That was when the Ironworks exploded. Seventy-two people were pulled dead from the wreckage before the sun went down. The final toll was a hundred and two. Eighty-eight of the dead were children. On the following Wednesday, while the city still lay in stunned silent contemplation of the tragedy, a woman found the head of nine-year-old Robert Dohay caught in the limbs of her back-yard apple tree. There was chocolate on the Dohay lad's teeth and blood in his hair. He was the last of the known dead. Eight children and one adult were never accounted for. It was the worst tragedy in Derry's history, even worse than the fire at the Black Spot in 1930, and it was never explained. All four of the Ironworks' boilers were shut down. Not just banked; shut down. But: The murder rate in Derry is six times the murder rate of any other town of comparable size in New England. I found my tentative conclusions in this matter so difficult to believe that I turned my figures over to one of the high-school hackers, who spends what time he doesn't spend in front of his Commodore here in the library. He went several steps further — scratch a hacker, find an overachiever — by adding another dozen small cities to what he called 'the stat-pool' and presenting me with a computer-generated bar graph where Derry slicks out like a sore thumb. 'People must have wicked short tempers here, Mr Hanlon,' was his only comment. I didn't reply. If I had, I might have told him that something in Derry has a wicked short temper, anyway. Here in Derry children disappear unexplained and unfound at the rate of forty to sixty a year. Most are teenagers. They are assumed to be runaways. I suppose some of them even are. And during what Albert Carson would undoubtedly have called the time of the cycle, the rate of disappearance shoots nearly out of sight. In the year 1930, for instance — the year the Black Spot burned — there were better than one hundred and seventy child disappearances in Derry — and you must remember that these are only the disappearances which were reported to the police and thus documented. Nothing surprising about it, the current Chief of Police told me when I showed him the statistic. It was the Depression. Most of em probably got tired of eating potato soup or going flat hungry at home and went off riding the rods, looking for something better. During 1958, a hundred and twenty-seven children, ranging in age from three to nineteen, were reported missing in Derry. Was there a Depression in 1958? I asked Chief Rademacher. No, he said. But people move around a lot, Hanlon. Kids in particular get itchy feet. Have a fight with the folks about coming in late after a date and boom, they're gone. I showed Chief Rademacher the picture of Chad Lowe which had appeared in the Derry News in April 1958. You think this one ran away after a fight with his folks about coming in late, Chief Rademacher? He was three and a half when he dropped out of sight. Rademacher fixed me with a sour glance and told me it sure had been nice talking with me, but if there was nothing else, he was busy. I left. Haunted, haunting, haunt. Often visited by ghosts or spirits, as in the pipes under the sink; to appear or recur often, as every twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven years; a feeding place for animals, as in the cases of George Denbrough, Adrian Mellon, Betty Ripsom, the Albrecht girl, the Johnson boy. A feeding place for animals. Yes, that's the one that haunts me. If anything else happens — anything at all — I'll make the calls. I'll have to. In the meantime I have my suppositions, my broken rest, and my memories — my damned memories. Oh, and one other thing — I have this notebook, don't I? The wall I wail to. And here I sit, my hand shaking so badly I can hardly write in it, here I sit in the deserted library after closing, listening to faint sounds in the dark stacks, watching the shadows thrown by the dim yellow globes to make sure they don't move . . . don't change. Here I sit next to the telephone. I put my free hand on it . . . let it slide down . . . touch the holes in the dial that could put me in touch with all of them, my old pals. We went deep together. We went into the black together. Would we come out of the black if we went in a second time? I don't think so. Please God I don't have to call them. Please God.