Or a crazy whos since left Derry or killed himself out of remorse and selfdisgust, 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 twoa 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 herethe 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 in 1904 and 1905 and early 1906at least until the Kitchener Ironworks exploded; the thing that was here in 1876 and 1877, the thing that has shown up every twentyseven 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 mothholes in the narrative history of the area grow bigger. But knowing where to lookand when to lookgoes a long way toward solving the problem. It always comes back, you see. It. Soyes I think Ill have to make those calls. I think it was meant to be us. Somehow, for some reason, were 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 dont know. And I doubt if it matters. All those years ago Bill said The Turtle cant 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 againstanding 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 powerthe one that grows on the borderline between the land of all we know and that of all we suspect. Because the similarities But Im 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 attentionafter 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 willto see the whole city, a place where nearly thirtyfive 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 summerat ninetyone, 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 croakhe was already fighting the throatcancer 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 Christs sake? Researching the history of the area. Of Derry Township. Oh. Well. Start with the Fricke and the Michaud. Theyre supposed to be the best. And after I read those Read them? Christ, no! Throw em in the wastebasket! Thats 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 lipsan 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. Id 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 oldtimers hes talked tothose that are still left; there are a few of us, ahhahhahhah!and get some more names from them. By then youll have all the place to stand youll need, if youre half as bright as I think you are. If you chase down enough people, youll find out a few things that arent in the histories. And you may find they disturb your sleep. Derry ... What about it? Derrys not right, is it? Right? he asked in that whispery croak. Whats right? What does that word mean? Is right pretty pictures of the Kenduskeag at sunset, Kodachrome by soandso, fstop suchandsuch? If so, then Derry is right, because there are pretty pictures of it by the score. Is right a damned committee of dryboxed old virgins to save the Governors Mansion or to put a commemorative plaque in front of the Standpipe? If thats right, then Derrys right as rain, because weve got more than our share of old kittycats minding everybodys 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 Id take care of that fucking thing, I assure you ... but if ones 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 didnt. He would either tell or he wouldnt. Do you mean the unpleasant stories you may hear, or the ones you already know? There are always unpleasant stories. A towns history is like a rambling old mansion filled with rooms and cubbyholes and laundrychutes 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, youll find all sorts of things. Yes. You may be sorry later, but youll find them, and once a thing is found it cant 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 mans shrewdness. You may come to think youve stumbled on the worst of Derrys 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. Its 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 Carsons 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 knowlike 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 bramblechoked dead end or into swampy quickmud. If you find a footnote, a libraryscience 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 Buddingers stiffly written A History of Old Derry (Orono University of Maine Press, 1950) wander through one hundred years worth of forgotten books and dusty masters dissertations in the fields of history and folklore, through articles in defunct magazines, and amid brainnumbing stacks of town reports and ledgers. My conversations with Sandy Ives were more interesting. His sources crossed Buddingers from time to time, but a crossing was all it ever was. Ives had spent a good part of his lifetime setting down oral historiesyarns, in other wordsalmost 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 196366. Most of the oldtimers 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 oldtimer who dies, theres a new oldtimer 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 tapeplayer 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 yeara community which at that time numbered about three hundred and forty soulsbut 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 basissave the one burned housefor that idea. More likely, someones 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 schoolchild 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 juniorhigh students who are taking the required Mainehistory 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 thatwhat 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 Ive developed it over the last four years. If I havent, then my aptitude for the job must be poor indeed, because Ive 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 diedthat was in the early winter of 195758. The girl he spoke of was one of the early victims in the murderspree 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 gastanks, checked oillevels, and wiped windshields. Said she spoke back once, even though she was ascairt. Leaned right over the drain, she did, and hollered down into it. Who the hell are you? she calls. Whats your name? And all these voices answered back, she saidgrunts and babbles and howls and yips, screams and laughin, dont you know. And she said they were sayin what the possessed man said to Jesus Our name is Legion, they said. She wouldnt go near that sink for two years. For them two years Id 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 seventytwo or three in faded gray work fatigues, rivers of wrinkles flowing down from the corners of his eyes and mouth. By now you probly think Im as crazy as a bedbug, he said, but Ill tell you sumpin else, if youll turn off ywhirlygig, there. I turned off my taperecorder and smiled at him. Considering some of the things Ive heard over the last couple of years, youd have to go a fair country distance to convince me youre crazy, I said. He smiled back, but there was no humor in it. I was doin the dishes one night, same as usualthis 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 suckin sound, it is. It was makin that noise, but I wasnt thinkin about it, only about goin out and choppin some kindlin 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 screamin, once you listened a bit. Or both. Screamin and laughin down there in the pipes. Thats the only time I ever heard anything like that. Maybe I just imagined it. But ... I dont think so. He looked at me and I looked at him. The light falling through the dirty plateglass 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 Im storying you along? the old man asked me, the old man who would have been just about fortyfive 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 dont think youre just storying me along, Mr. Ripsom. And youre tellin the truth, too, he said with a kind of wonder. I can see it on yface. 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 something 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 townshipnot exactlyand 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 thatbut 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 twentysix or twentyseven years. Buddinger knew, too. A lot of the oldtimers do, although that is one thing they wont talk about, even if you load them up with booze. Let it go, Hanlon. He reached out with one birdclaw 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 eatnot that there could have been much by that time; Albert Carsons cupboards were almost bare. Michaelthis is nothing you want to mess into. There are things here in Derry that bite. Let it go. Let it go. I cant. Then beware, he said. Suddenly the huge and frightened eyes of a child were looking out of his dying oldmans 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 Maineaint in Derry, but its just down the rud, the oldtimers sayand then I came right back here. To the Derry Public Library. I am a smalltown man living a smalltown life, one among millions. But. But In 1879 a crew of lumberjacks found the remains of another crew that had spent the winter snowed in at a camp on the Upper Kenduskeagat 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 mans 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 whitenightshade 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 Marksons 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 brandspankingnew Derry Mall now stands, held an Easteregg 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 Sundaysilent Ironworks, finding the eggs under the giant tippervats, 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 giants 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 oclock, whether all the eggs had been found or not. The end actually came fortyfive minutes early, at quarter past three. That was when the Ironworks exploded. Seventytwo people were pulled dead from the wreckage before the sun went down. The final toll was a hundred and two. Eightyeight 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 nineyearold Robert Dohay caught in the limbs of her backyard apple tree. There was chocolate on the Dohay lads 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 Derrys 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 highschool hackers, who spends what time he doesnt spend in front of his Commodore here in the library. He went several steps furtherscratch a hacker, find an overachieverby adding another dozen small cities to what he called the statpool and presenting me with a computergenerated bar graph where Derry sticks out like a sore thumb. People must have wicked short tempers here, Mr. Hanlon, was his only comment. I didnt 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 instancethe year the Black Spot burnedthere were better than one hundred and seventy child disappearances in Derryand 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 twentyseven 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, theyre 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 twentyfive, twentysix, or twentyseven 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, thats the one that haunts me. If anything else happensanything at allIll make the calls. Ill have to. In the meantime I have my suppositions, my broken rest, and my memoriesmy damned memories. Oh, and one other thingI have this notebook, dont 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 dont move ... dont 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 dont think so. Please God I dont have to call them. Please God. PART 2 JUNE OF 1958 My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots. William Carlos Williams, Paterson Sometimes I wonder what Im agonna do, There aint no cure for the summertime blues. Eddie Cochran CHAPTER 4 Ben Hanscom Takes a Fall 1 Around 1145 P.M., one of the stews serving first class on the OmahatoChicago runUnited Airlines flight 41gets one hell of a shock. She thinks for a few moments that the man in 1A has died. When he boarded at Omaha she thought to herselfOh boy, here comes trouble. Hes just as drunk as a lord. The stink of whiskey around his head reminded her fleetingly of the cloud of dust that always surrounds the dirty little boy in the Peanuts stripPig Pen, his name is. She was nervous about First Service, which is the booze service. She was sure he would ask for a drinkand probably a double. Then she would have to decide whether or not to serve him. Also, just to add to the fun, there have been thunderstorms all along the route tonight, and she is quite sure that at some point the man, a lanky guy dressed in jeans and chambray, would begin upchucking. But when First Service came along, the tall man ordered nothing more than a glass of club soda, just as polite as you could want. His service light has not gone on, and the stew forgets all about him soon enough, because the flight is a busy one. The flight is, in fact, the kind you want to forget as soon as its over, one of those during which you just mightifyou had timehave a few questions about the possibility of your own survival. United 41 slaloms between the ugly pockets of thunder and lightning like a good skier going downhill. The air is very rough. The passengers exclaim and make uneasy jokes about the lightning they can see flickering on and off in the thick pillars of cloud around the plane. Mommy, is God taking pictures of the angels? a little boy asks, and his mother, who is looking rather green, laughs shakily. First Service turns out to be the only service on 41 that night. The seatbelt sign goes on twenty minutes into the flight and stays on. All the same the stewardesses stay in the aisles, answering the callbuttons which go off like strings of politesociety firecrackers. Ralph is busy tonight, the head stew says to her as they pass in the aisle; the head stew is going back to tourist with a fresh supply of airsick bags. It is halfcode, halfjoke. Ralph is always busy on bumpy flights. The plane lurches, someone cries out softly, the stewardess turns a bit and puts out a hand to catch her balance, and looks directly into the staring, sightless eyes of the man in 1A. Oh my dear God hes dead, she thinks. The liquor before he got on ... then the bumps ... his heart ... scared to death. The lanky mans eyes are on hers, but they are not seeing her. They do not move. They are perfectly glazed. Surely they are the eyes of a dead man. The stew turns away from that awful gaze, her own heart pumping away in her throat at a runaway rate, wondering what to do, how to proceed, and thanking God that at least the man has no seatmate to perhaps scream and start a panic. She decides she will have to notify first the head stew and then the male crew up front. Perhaps they can wrap a blanket around him and close his eyes. The pilot will keep the belt light on even if the air smooths out so no one can come forward to use the john, and when the other passengers deplane theyll think hes just asleep These thoughts go through her mind rapidly, and she turns back for a confirming look. The dead, sightless eyes fix upon hers ... and then the corpse picks up his glass of club soda and sips from it. Just then the plane staggers again, tilts, and the stews little scream of surprise is lost in other, heartier, cries of fear. The mans eyes move thennot much, but enough so she understands that he is alive and seeing her. And she thinks Why, I thought when he got on that he was in his midfifties, but hes nowhere near that old, in spite of the graying hair. She goes to him, although she can hear the impatient chime of callbuttons behind her (Ralph is indeed busy tonight after their perfectly safe landing at OHare thirty minutes from now, the stews will dispose of over seventy airsick bags). Everything okay, sir? she asks, smiling. The smile feels false, unreal. Everything is fine and well, the lanky man says. She glances at the firstclass stub tacked into the little slot on his seatback and sees that his name is Hanscom. Fine and well. But its a bit bumpy tonight, isnt it? Youve got your work cut out for you, I think. Dont bother with me. Im He offers her a ghastly smile, a smile that makes her think of scarecrows flapping in dead November fields. Im fine and well. You looked (dead) a little under the weather. I was thinking of the old days, he says. I only realized earlier tonight that there were such things as old days, at least as far as I myself am concerned.  More callbuttons chime. Pardon me, stewardess? someone calls nervously. Well, if youre quite sure youre all right I was thinking about a dam I built with some friends of mine, Ben Hanscom says. The first friends I ever had, I guess. They were building the dam when IHe stops, looks startled, then laughs. It is an honest laugh, almost the carefree laugh of a boy, and it sounds very odd in this jouncing, bucking plane. when I dropped in on them. And thats almost literally what I did. Anyhow, they were making a hellava mess with that dam. I remember that. Stewardess? Excuse me, sirIought to get about my appointed rounds again. Of course you should. She hurries away, glad to be rid of that gazethatdeadly, almost hypnotic gaze. Ben Hanscom turns his head to the window and looks out. Lightning goes off inside huge thunderheads nine miles off the starboard wing. In the stutterflashes of light, the clouds look like huge transparent brains filled with bad thoughts. He feels in the pocket of his vest, but the silver dollars are gone. Out of his pocket and into Ricky Lees. Suddenly he wishes he had saved at least one of them. It might have come in handy. Of course you could go down to any bankat least when you werent bumping around at twentyseven thousand feet you couldand get a handful of silver dollars, but you couldnt do anything with the lousy copper sandwiches the government was trying to pass off as real coins these days. And for werewolves and vampires and all manner of things that squirm by starlight, it was silver you wanted; honest silver. You needed silver to stop a monster. You needed He closed his eyes. The air around him was full of chimes. The plane rocked and rolled and bumped and the air was full of chimes. Chimes? No ... bells. It was bells, it was the bell, the bell of all bells, the one you waited for all year once the new wore off school again, and that always happened by the end of the first week. The bell, the one that signalled freedom again, the apotheosis of all school bells. Ben Hanscom sits in his firstclass seat, suspended amid the thunders at twentyseven thousand feet, his face turned to the window, and he feels the wall of time grow suddenly thin; some terriblewonderful peristalsis has begun to take place. He thinks My God, I am being digested by my own past. The lightning plays fitfully across his face, and although he does not know it, the day has just turned.


May 28th, 1985, has become May 29th over the dark and stormy country that is western Illinois tonight; farmers backsore with plantings sleep like the dead below and dream their quicksilver dreams and who knows what may move in their barns and their cellars and their fields as the lightning walks and the thunder talks? No one knows these things; they know only that power is loose in the night, and the air is crazy with the big volts of the storm. But its bells at twentyseven thousand feet as the plane breaks into the clear again, as its motion steadies again; it is bells; it is the bell as Ben Hanscom sleeps; and as he sleeps the wall between past and present disappears completely and he tumbles backward through years like a man falling down a deep wellWellss Time Traveller, perhaps, falling with a broken iron rung in one hand, down and down into the land of the Morlocks, where machines pound on and on in the tunnels of the night. Its 1981, 1977, 1969; and suddenly he is here, here in June of 1958; bright summerlight is everywhere and behind sleeping eyelids Ben Hanscoms pupils contract at the command of his dreaming brain, which sees not the darkness which lies over western Illinois but the bright sunlight of a June day in Derry, Maine, twentyseven years ago. Bells. The bell. School. School is. School is 2 out! The sound of the bell went burring up and down the halls of Derry School, a big brick building which stood on Jackson Street, and at its sound the children in Ben Hanscoms fifthgrade classroom raised a spontaneous cheerand Mrs. Douglas, usually the strictest of teachers, made no effort to quell them. Perhaps she knew it would have been impossible. Children! she called when the cheer died. May I have your attention for a final moment? Now a babble of excited chatter, mixed with a few groans, rose in the classroom. Mrs. Douglas was holding their report cards in her hand. I sure hope I pass! Sally Mueller said chirpily to Bev Marsh, who sat in the next row. Sally was bright, pretty, vivacious. Bev was also pretty, but there was nothing vivacious about her this afternoon, last day of school or not. She sat looking moodily down at her pennyloafers. There was a fading yellow bruise on one of her cheeks. I dont give a shit if I do or not, Bev said. Sally sniffed. Ladies dont use such language, the sniff said. Then she turned to Greta Bowie. It had probably only been the excitement of the bell signalling the end of another schoolyear that had caused Sally to slip and speak to Beverly anyhow, Ben thought. Sally Mueller and Greta Bowie both came from rich families with houses on West Broadway while Bev came to school from one of those slummy apartment buildings on Lower Main Street. Lower Main Street and West Broadway were only a mile and a half apart, but even a kid like Ben knew that the real distance was like the distance between Earth and the planet Pluto. All you had to do was look at Beverly Marshs cheap sweater, her toobig skirt that probably came from the Salvation Army thriftbox, and her scuffed pennyloafers to know just how far one was from the other. But Ben still liked Beverly bettera lot better. Sally and Greta had nice clothes, and he guessed they probably had their hair permed or waved or something every month or so, but he didnt think that changed the basic facts at all. They could get their hair permed every day and theyd still be a couple of conceited snots. He thought Beverly was nicer ... and much prettier, although he never in a million years would have dared say such a thing to her. But still, sometimes, in the heart of winter when the light outside seemed yellowsleepy, like a cat curled up on a sofa, when Mrs. Douglas was droning on about mathematics (how to carry down in long division or how to find the common denominator of two fractions so you could add them) or reading the questions from Shining Bridges or talking about tin deposits in Paraguay, on those days when it seemed that school would never end and it didnt matter if it didnt because all the world outside was slush ... on those days Ben would sometimes look sideways at Beverly, stealing her face, and his heart would both hurt desperately and somehow grow brighter at the same time. He supposed he had a crush on her, or was in love with her, and that was why it was always Beverly he thought of when the Penguins came on the radio singing Earth Angelmy darling dear  love you all the time ... Yeah, it was stupid, all right, sloppy as a used Kleenex, but it was all right, too, because he would never tell. He thought that fat boys were probably only allowed to love pretty girls inside. If he told anyone how he felt (not that he had anyone to tell), that person would probably laugh until he had a heartattack. And if he ever told Beverly, she would either laugh herself (bad), or make retching noises of disgust (worse). Now please come up as soon as I call your name. Paul Anderson ... Carla Bordeaux ... Greta Bowie ... Calvin Clark ... Cissy Clark ... As she called their names, Mrs. Douglass fifthgrade class came forward one by one (except for the Clark twins, who came together as always, hand in hand, indistinguishable except for the length of their whiteblonde hair and the fact that she wore a dress while he wore jeans), took their buffcolored report cards with the American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance on the front and the Lords Prayer on the back, walked sedately out of the classroom ... and then pounded down the hall to where the big front doors had been chocked open. And then they simply ran out into summer and were gone some on bikes, some skipping, some riding invisible horses and slapping their hands against the sides of their thighs to manufacture hoofbeats, some with arms slung about each other, singing Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Marcia Fadden ... Frank Frick ... Ben Hanscom ... He rose, stealing his last glance at Beverly Marsh for the summer (or so he thought then), and went forward to Mrs. Douglass desk, an elevenyearold kid with a can roughly the size of New Mexicosaid can packed into a pair of horrid new bluejeans that shone little darts of light from the copper rivets and went whsshtwhsshtwhssht as his big thighs brushed together. His hips swung girlishly. His stomach slid from side to side. He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt although the day was warm. He almost always wore baggy sweatshirts because he was deeply ashamed of his chest and had been since the first day of school after the Christmas vacation, when he had worn one of the new Ivy League shirts his mother had given him, and Belch Huggins, who was a sixthgrader, had cawed Hey, you guys! Look it what Santy Claus brought Ben Hanscom for Christmas! A big set of titties! Belch had nearly collapsed with the deliciousness of his wit. Others had laughed as wella few of them girls. If a hole leading into the underworld had opened before him at that very moment, Ben would have dropped into it without a sound ... or perhaps with the faintest murmur of gratitude. Since that day he wore sweatshirts. He had four of themthe baggy brown, the baggy green, and two baggy blues. It was one of the few things on which he had managed to stand up to his mother, one of the few lines he had ever, in the course of his mostly complacent childhood, felt compelled to draw in the dust. If he had seen Beverly Marsh giggling with the others that day, he supposed he would have died. Its been a pleasure having you this year, Benjamin, Mrs. Douglas said as she handed him his report card. Thank you, Mrs. Douglas. A mocking falsetto wavered from somewhere at the back of the room Sankooo, Missus Dougwiss. It was Henry Bowers, of course. Henry was in Bens fifthgrade class instead of in the sixth grade with his friends Belch Huggins and Victor Criss because he had been kept back the year before. Ben had an idea that Bowers was going to stay back again. His name had not been called when Mrs. Douglas handed out the rankcards, and that meant trouble. Ben was uneasy about this, because if Henry did stay back again, Ben himself would be partly responsible ... and Henry knew it. During the years final tests the week before, Mrs. Douglas had reseated them at random by drawing their names from a hat on her desk. Ben had ended up sitting next to Henry Bowers in the last row. As always, Ben curled his arm around his paper and then bent close to it, feeling the somehow comforting press of his gut against his desk, licking his BeBop pencil occasionally for inspiration. About halfway through Tuesdays examination, which happened to be math, a whisper drifted across the aisle to Ben. It was as low and uncarrying and expert as the whisper of a veteran con passing a message in the prison exercise yard Let me copy. Ben had looked to his left and directly into the black and furious eyes of Henry Bowers. Henry was a big boy even for twelve. His arms and legs were thick with farmmuscle. His father, who was reputed to be crazy, had a little spread out at the end of Kansas Street, near the Newport town line, and Henry put in at least thirty hours a week hoeing, weeding, planting, digging rocks, cutting wood, and reaping, if there was anything to reap. Henrys hair was cut in an angrylooking flattop short enough for the white of his scalp to show through. He ButchWaxed the front with a tube he always carried in the hip pocket of his jeans, and as a result the hair just above his forehead looked like the teeth of an oncoming powermower. An odor of sweat and Juicy Fruit gum always hung about him. He wore a pink motorcycle jacket with an eagle on the back to school. Once a fourthgrader was unwise enough to laugh at that jacket. Henry had turned on the little squirt, limber as a weasel and quick as an adder, and doublepumped the squirt with one workgrimed fist. The squirt lost three front teeth. Henry got a twoweek vacation from school. Ben had hoped, with the unfocused yet burning hope of the downtrodden and terrorized, that Henry would be expelled instead of suspended. No such luck. Bad pennies always turned up. His suspension over, Henry had swaggered back into the schoolyard, balefully resplendent in his pink motorcycle jacket, hair ButchWaxed so heavily that it seemed to scream up from his skull. Both eyes bore the puffed, colorful traces of the beating his crazy father had administered for fighting in the playyard. The traces of the beating eventually faded; for the kids who had to somehow coexist with Henry at Derry, the lesson did not. To the best of Bens knowledge, no one had said anything about Henrys pink motorcycle jacket with the eagle on the back since then. When he whispered grimly at Ben to let him copy, three thoughts had gone skyrocketing through Bens mindwhich was every bit as lean and quick as his body was obesein a space of seconds. The first was that if Mrs. Douglas caught Henry cheating answers off his paper, both of them would get zeros on their tests. The second was that if he didnt let Henry copy, Henry would almost surely catch him after school and administer the fabled doublepump to him, probably with Huggins holding one of his arms and Criss holding the other. These were the thoughts of a child, and there was nothing surprising about that, because he was a child. The third and last thought, however, was more sophisticatedalmost adult. He might get me, all right. But maybe I can keep out of his way for the last week of school. Im pretty sure I can, if I really try. And hell forget over the summer, I think. Yeah. Hes pretty stupid. If he flunks this test, maybe hell stay back again. And if he stays back Ill get ahead of him. I wont be in the same room with him anymore.... Ill get to junior high before he does. I . . . I might be free. Let me copy, Henry whispered again. His black eyes were now blazing, demanding. Ben shook his head and curled his arm more tightly around his paper. Ill get you, fatboy, Henry whispered, a little louder now. His paper was so far an utter blank save for his name. He was desperate. If he flunked his exams and stayed back again, his father would beat his brains out. You let me copy or Ill get you bad. Ben shook his head again, his jowls quivering. He was scared, but he was also determined. He realized that for the first time in his life he had consciously committed himself to a course of action, and that also frightened him, although he didnt exactly know whyit would be long years before he would realize it was the coldbloodedness of his calculations, the careful and pragmatic counting of the cost, with its intimations of onrushing adulthood, that had scared him even more than Henry had scared him. Henry he might be able to dodge. Adulthood, where he would probably think in such a way almost all the time, would get him in the end. Is someone talking back there? Mrs. Douglas had said then, very clearly. If so, I want it to stop right now. Silence had prevailed for the next ten minutes; young heads remained studiously bent over examination sheets which smelled of fragrant purple mimeograph ink, and then Henrys whisper had floated across the aisle again, thin, just audible, chilling in the calm assurance of its promise Youre dead, fatboy. 3 Ben took his rankcard and escaped, grateful to whatever gods there are for elevenyearold fatboys that Henry Bowers had not, by virtue of alphabetical order, been allowed to escape the classroom first so he could lay for Ben outside. He did not run down the corridor like the other children. He could run, and quite fast for a kid his size, but he was acutely aware of how funny he looked when he did. He walked fast, though, and emerged from the cool booksmelling hall and into the bright June sunshine. He stood with his face turned up into that sunshine for a moment, grateful for its warmth and his freedom. September was a million years from today. The calendar might say something different, but what the calendar said was a lie. The summer would be much longer than the sum of its days, and it belonged to him. He felt as tall as the Standpipe and as wide as the whole town. Someone bumped himbumped him hard. Pleasant thoughts of the summer lying before him were driven from Bens mind as he tottered wildly for balance on the edge of the stone steps. He grabbed the iron railing just in time to save himself from a nasty tumble. Get out of my way, you tub of guts. It was Victor Criss, his hair combed back in an Elvis pompadour and gleaming with Brylcreem. He went down the steps and along the walk to the front gate, hands in the pockets of his jeans, shirtcollar turned up hoodstyle, cleats on his engineer boots dragging and tapping. Ben, his heart still beating rapidly from his fright, saw that Belch Huggins was standing across the street, having a butt. He raised a hand to Victor and passed him the cigarette when Victor joined him. Victor took a drag, handed it back to Belch, then pointed to where Ben stood, now halfway down the steps. He said something and they both broke up. Bens face flamed dully. They always got you. It was like fate or something. You like this place so well youre gonna stand here all day? a voice said at his elbow. Ben turned, and his face became hotter still. It was Beverly Marsh, her auburn hair a dazzling cloud around her head and upon her shoulders, her eyes a lovely graygreen. Her sweater, pushed to her elbows, was frayed around the neck and almost as baggy as Bens sweatshirt. Too baggy, certainly, to tell if she was getting any chestworks yet, but Ben didnt care; when love comes before puberty, it can come in waves so clear and so powerful that no one can stand against its simple imperative, and Ben made no effort to do so now. He simply gave in. He felt both foolish and exalted, as miserably embarrassed as he had ever been in his life ... and yet inarguably blessed. These hopeless emotions mixed in a heady brew that left him feeling both sick and joyful. No, he croaked. Guess not. A large grin spread across his face. He knew how idiotic it must look, but he could not seem to pull it back. Well, good. Cause schools out, you know. Thank God. Have ... Another croak. He had to clear his throat, and his blush deepened. Have a nice summer, Beverly. You too, Ben. See you next year. She went quickly down the steps and Ben saw everything with his lovers eye the bright tartan of her skirt, the bounce of her red hair against the back of her sweater, her milky complexion, a small healing cut across the back of one calf, and (for some reason this last caused another wave of feeling to sweep him so powerfully he had to grope for the railing again; the feeling was huge, inarticulate, mercifully brief; perhaps a sexual presignal, meaningless to his body, where the endocrine glands still slept almost without dreaming, yet as bright as summer heatlightning) a bright golden anklebracelet she wore just above her right loafer, winking back the sun in brilliant little flashes. A soundsome sort of soundescaped him. He went down the steps like a feeble old man and stood at the bottom, watching until she turned left and disappeared beyond the high hedge that separated the schoolyard from the sidewalk. 4 He only stood there for a moment, and then, while the kids were still streaming past in yelling, running groups, he remembered Henry Bowers and hurried around the building. He crossed the littlekids playground, running his fingers across the swingchains to make them jingle and stepping over the teetertotter boards. He went out the much smaller gate which gave on Charter Street and headed off to the left, never looking back at the stone pile where he had spent most of his weekdays over the last nine months. He stuffed his rankcard in his back pocket and started to whistle. He was wearing a pair of Keds, but so far as he could tell, their soles never touched the sidewalk for eight blocks or so. School had let out just past noon; his mother would not be home until at least six, because on Fridays she went right to the Shop n Save after work. The rest of the day was his. He went down to McCarron Park for awhile and sat under a tree, not doing anything but occasionally whispering I love Beverly Marsh under his breath, feeling more lightheaded and romantic each time he said it. At one point, as a bunch of boys drifted into the park and began choosing up sides for a scratch baseball game, he whispered the words Beverly Hanscom twice, and then had to put his face into the grass until it cooled his burning cheeks. Shortly after that he got up and headed across the park toward Costello Avenue. A walk of five more blocks would take him to the Public Library, which, he supposed, had been his destination all along. He was almost out of the park when a sixthgrader named Peter Gordon saw him and yelled Hey, tits! Wanna play? We need somebody to be rightfield! There was an explosion of laughter. Ben escaped it as fast as he could, hunching his neck down into his collar like a turtle drawing into its shell. Still, he considered himself lucky, all in all; on another day the boys might have chased him, maybe just to rank him out, maybe to roll him in the dirt and see if he would cry. Today they were too absorbed in getting the game goingwhether or not you could use fingers or get topsies when you threw the bat for first picks, which team would get their guaranteed last ups, all the rest. Ben happily left them to the arcana preceding the first ballgame of the summer and went on his way. Three blocks down Costello he spied something interesting, perhaps even profitable, under someones front hedge. Glass gleamed through the ripped side of an old paper bag. Ben hooked the bag out onto the sidewalk with his foot. It seemed his luck really was in. There were four beer bottles and four big soda bottles inside. The biggies were worth a nickel each, the Rheingolds two pennies. Twentyeight cents under someones hedge, just waiting for some kid to come along and scoff it up. Some lucky kid. Thats me, Ben said happily, having no idea what the rest of the day had in store. He got moving again, holding the bag by the bottom so it wouldnt break open. The Costello Avenue Market was a block farther down the street, and Ben turned in. He swapped the bottles for cash and most of the cash for candy. He stood at the pennycandy window, pointing, delighted as always by the ratcheting sound the sliding door made when the storekeeper slid it along its track, which was lined with ballbearings. He got five red licorice whips and five black, ten rootbeer barrels (two for a penny), a nickel strip of buttons (five to a row, five rows on a nickel strip, and you ate them right off the paper), a packet of Likem Ade, and a package of Pez for his PezGun at home. Ben walked out with a small brown paper sack of candy in his hand and four cents in the right front pocket of his new jeans. He looked at the brown bag with its load of sweetness and a thought suddenly tried to surface (you keep eating this way Beverly Marsh is never going to look at you) but it was an unpleasant thought and so he pushed it away. It went easily enough; this was a thought used to being banished. If someone had asked him, Ben, are you lonely?, he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams; he had his Revell models; he had a gigantic set of Lincoln Logs and built all sorts of stuff with them. His mother had exclaimed more than once that Bens Lincoln Logs houses looked better than some real ones that came from blueprints. He had a pretty good Erector Set, too. He was hoping for the Super Set when his birthday came around in October. With that one you could build a clock that really told time and a car with real gears in it. Lonely? he might have asked in return, honestly foozled. Huh? What? A child blind from birth doesnt even know hes blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it. It simply was, like his doublejointed thumb or the funny little jag inside one of his front teeth, the little jag his tongue began running over whenever he was nervous. Beverly was a sweet dream; the candy was a sweet reality. The candy was his friend. So he told the alien thought to take a hike, and it went quietly, without causing any fuss whatsoever. And between the Costello Avenue Market and the library, he gobbled all of the candy in the sack. He honestly meant to save the Pez for watching TV that nighthe liked to load them into the little plastic PezGuns handgrip one by one, liked to hear the accepting click of the small spring inside, and liked most of all to shoot them into his mouth one by one, like a kid committing suicide by sugar. Whirlybirds was on tonight, with Kenneth Tobey as the fearless helicopter pilot, and Dragnet, where the cases were true but the names had been changed to protect the innocent, and his favorite cop show of all time, Highway Patrol, which starred Broderick Crawford as Highway Patrolman Dan Matthews. Broderick Crawford was Bens personal hero. Broderick Crawford was fast, Broderick Crawford was mean, Broderick Crawford took absolutely no shit from nobody ... and best of all, Broderick Crawford was fat. He arrived at the corner of Costello and Kansas Street, where he crossed to the Public Library. It was really two buildingsthe old stone structure in front, built with lumberbaron money in 1890, and the new low sandstone building behind, which housed the Childrens Library. The adult library in front and the Childrens Library behind were connected by a glass corridor. This close to downtown, Kansas Street was oneway, so Ben only looked in one directionrightbefore crossing. If he had looked left, he would have gotten a nasty shock. Standing in the shade of a big old oak tree on the lawn of the Derry Community House a block down were Belch Huggins, Victor Criss, and Henry Bowers. 5 Lets get him Hank. Victor was almost panting. Henry watched the fat little prick scutter across the street; his belly bouncing, the cowlick at the back of his head springing back and forth like a goddam Slinky, his ass wiggling like a girls inside his new bluejeans. He estimated the distance between the three of them here on the Community House lawn and Hanscom, and between Hanscom and the safety of the library. He thought they could probably get him before he made it inside, but Hanscom might start screaming. He wouldnt put it past the little pansy. If he did, an adult might interfere, and Henry wanted no interference. The Douglas bitch had told Henry he had flunked both English and math. She was passing him, she said, but he would have to take four weeks of summer makeup. Henry would rather have stayed back. If hed stayed back, his father would have beaten him up once. With Henry at school four hours a day for four weeks of the farms busiest season, his father was apt to beat him up half a dozen times, maybe even more. He was reconciled to this grim future only because he intended to pass everything on to that fat little babyfag this afternoon. With interest. Yeah, lets go, Belch said. Well wait for him to come out. They watched Ben open one of the big double doors and go inside, and then they sat down and smoked cigarettes and told travellingsalesman jokes and waited for him to come back out. Eventually, Henry knew, he would. And when he did, Henry was going to make him sorry he was ever born. 6 Ben loved the library. He loved the way it was always cool, even on the hottest day of a long hot summer; he loved its murmuring quiet, broken only by occasional whispers, the faint thud of a librarian stamping books and cards, or the riffle of pages being turned in the Periodicals Room, where the old men hung out, reading newspapers which had been threaded into long sticks. He loved the quality of the light, which slanted through the high narrow windows in the afternoons or glowed in lazy pools thrown by the chainhung globes on winter evenings while the wind whined outside. He liked the smell of the booksa spicy smell, faintly fabulous. He would sometimes walk through the adult stacks, looking at the thousands of volumes and imagining a world of lives inside each one, the way he sometimes walked along his street in the burning smokehazed twilight of a lateOctober afternoon, the sun only a bitter orange line on the horizon, imagining the lives going on behind all the windowspeople laughing or arguing or arranging flowers or feeding kids or pets or their own faces while they watched the boobtube. He liked the way the glass corridor connecting the old building with the Childrens Library was always hot, even in the winter, unless there had been a couple of cloudy days; Mrs. Starrett, the head childrens librarian, told him that was caused by something called the greenhouse effect. Ben had been delighted with the idea. Years later he would build the hotly debated BBC communications center in London, and the arguments might rage for a thousand years and still no one would know (except for Ben himself) that the communications center was nothing but the glass corridor of the Derry Public Library stood on end. He liked the Childrens Library as well, although it had none of the shadowy charm he felt in the old library, with its globes and curving iron staircases too narrow for two people to pass upon themone always had to back up. The Childrens Library was bright and sunny, a little noisier in spite of the LETS BE QUIET, SHALL WE? signs that were posted around. Most of the noise usually came from Poohs Corner, where the little kids went to look at picturebooks. When Ben came in today, story hour had just begun there. Miss Davies, the pretty young librarian, was reading The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Who is that triptrapping upon my bridge? Miss Davies spoke in the low, growling tones of the troll in the story. Some of the little ones covered their mouths and giggled, but most only watched her solemnly, accepting the voice of the troll as they accepted the voices of their dreams, and their grave eyes reflected the eternal fascination of the fairytale would the monster be bested ... or would it feed? Bright posters were tacked everywhere. Here was a good cartoon kid who had brushed his teeth until his mouth foamed like the muzzle of a mad dog; here was a bad cartoon kid who was smoking cigarettes (WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE SICK A LOT, JUST LIKE MY DAD, it said underneath); here was a wonderful photograph of a billion tiny pinpoints of light flaring in darkness. The motto beneath said ONE IDEA LIGHTS A THOUSAND CANDLES. Ralph Waldo Emerson There were invitations to JOIN THE SCOUTING EXPERIENCE. A poster advancing the idea that THE GIRLS CLUBS OF TODAY BUILD THE WOMEN OF TOMORROW. There were softball signup sheets and Community House Childrens Theater signup sheets. And, of course, one inviting kids to JOIN THE SUMMER READING PROGRAM. Ben was a big fan of the summer reading program. You got a map of the United States when you signed up. Then, for every book you read and made a report on, you got a state sticker to lick and put on your map. The sticker came complete with info like the state bird, the state flower, the year admitted to the Union, and what presidents, if any, had ever come from that state. When you got all fortyeight stuck on your map, you got a free book. Helluva good deal. Ben planned to do just as the poster suggested Waste no time, sign up today. Conspicuous amid this bright and amiable riot of color was a simple stark poster taped to the checkout deskno cartoons or fancy photographs here, just black print on white posterpaper reading REMEMBER THE CURFEW. 7 P.M. DERRY POLICE DEPARTMENT Just looking at it gave Ben a chill. In the excitement of getting his rankcard, worrying about Henry Bowers, talking with Beverly, and starting summer vacation, he had forgotten all about the curfew, and the murders. People argued about how many there had been, but everyone agreed that there had been at least four since last winterfive if you counted George Denbrough (many held the opinion that the little Denbrough boys death must have been some kind of bizarre freak accident). The first everyone was sure of was Betty Ripsom, who had been found the day after Christmas in the area of turnpike construction on Outer Jackson Street. The girl, who was thirteen, had been found mutilated and frozen into the muddy earth. This had not been in the paper, nor was it a thing any adult had spoken of to Ben. It was just something he had picked up around the corners of overheard conversations. About three and a half months later, not long after the troutfishing season had begun, a fisherman working the bank of a stream twenty miles east of Derry had hooked onto something he believed at first to be a stick. It had turned out to be the hand, wrist, and first four inches of a girls forearm. His hook had snagged this awful trophy by the web of flesh between the thumb and first finger. The State Police had found the rest of Cheryl Lamonica seventy yards farther downstream, caught in a tree that had fallen across the stream the previous winter. It was only luck that the body had not been washed into the Penobscot and then out to sea in the spring runoff. The Lamonica girl had been sixteen. She was from Derry but did not attend school; three years before she had given birth to a daughter, Andrea. She and her daughter lived at home with Cheryls parents.


Cheryl was a little wild sometimes but she was a good girl at heart, her sobbing father had told police. Andi keeps asking Wheres my mommy? and I dont know what to tell her. The girl had been reported missing five weeks before the body was found. The police investigation of Cheryl Lamonicas death began with a logical enough assumption that she had been murdered by one of her boyfriends. She had lots of boyfriends. Many were from the air base up Bangor way. They were nice boys, most of them, Cheryls mother said. One of the nice boys had been a fortyyearold Air Force colonel with a wife and three children in New Mexico. Another was currently serving time in Shawshank for armed robbery. A boyfriend, the police thought. Or just possibly a stranger. A sexfiend. If it was a sexfiend, he was apparently a fiend for boys as well. In late April a juniorhigh teacher on a nature walk with his eighthgrade class had spied a pair of red sneakers and a pair of blue corduroy rompers protruding from the mouth of a culvert on Merit Street. That end of Merit had been blocked off with sawhorses. The asphalt had been bulldozed up the previous fall. The turnpike extension would cross there as well on its way north to Bangor. The body had been that of threeyearold Matthew Clements, reported missing by his parents only the day before (his picture had been on the front page of the Derry News, a darkhaired little kid grinning brashly into the camera, a Red Sox cap perched on his head). The Clements family lived on Kansas Street, all the way on the other side of town. His mother, so stunned by her grief that she seemed to exist in a glass ball of utter calm, told police that Matty had been riding his tricycle up and down the sidewalk beside the house, which stood on the comer of Kansas Street and Kossuth Lane. She went to put her washing in the drier, and when she next looked out the window to check on Matty, he was gone. There had only been his overturned trike on the grass between the sidewalk and the street. One of the back wheels was still spinning lazily. As she looked, it came to a stop. That was enough for Chief Borton. He proposed the seven oclock curfew at a special session of the City Council the following evening; it was adopted unanimously and went into effect the next day. Small children were to be watched by a qualified adult at all times, according to the story which reported the curfew in the News. At Bens school there had been a special assembly a month ago. The Chief went on stage, hooked his thumbs into his gunbelt, and assured the children they had nothing at all to worry about as long as they followed a few simple rules dont talk to strangers, dont accept rides with people unless you know them well, always remember that The Policeman Is Your Friend ... and obey the curfew. Two weeks ago a boy Ben knew only vaguely (he was in the other fifthgrade classroom at Derry Elementary) had looked into one of the stormdrains out by Neibolt Street and had seen what looked like a lot of hair floating around in there. This boy, whose name was either Frankie or Freddy Ross (or maybe Roth), had been out prospecting for goodies with a gadget of his own invention, which he called THE FABULOUS GUMSTICK. When he talked about it you could tell he thought about it like that, in capital letters (and maybe neon, as well). THE FABULOUS GUMSTICK was a birch branch with a big wad of bubblegum stuck on the tip. In his spare time Freddy (or Frankie) walked around Derry with it, peering into sewers and drains. Sometimes he saw money pennies mostly, but sometimes a dime or even a quarter (he referred to these latter, for some reason known only to him, as quaymonsters). Once the money was spotted, FrankieorFreddy and THE FABULOUS GUMSTICK would swing into action. One downward poke through the grating and the coin was as good as in his pocket. Ben had heard rumors of FrankieorFreddy and his gumstick long before the kid had vaulted into the limelight by discovering the body of Veronica Grogan. Hes really gross, a kid named Richie Tozier had confided to Ben one day during activity period. Tozier was a scrawny kid who wore glasses. Ben thought that without them Tozier probably saw every bit as well as Mr. Magoo; his magnified eyes swam behind the thick lenses with an expression of perpetual surprise. He also had huge front teeth that had earned him the nickname Bucky Beaver. He was in the same fifthgrade class as FreddyorFrankie. Pokes that gumstick of his down sewerdrains all day long and then chews the gum from the end of it at night. Oh gosh, thats bad! Ben had exclaimed. Dats wight, wabbit, Tozier said, and walked away. FrankieorFreddy had worked THE FABULOUS GUMSTICK back and forth through the grate of the stormdrain, believing hed found a wig. He thought maybe he could dry it out and give it to his mother for her birthday, or something. After a few minutes of poking and prodding, just as he was about to give up, a face had floated out of the murky water in the plugged drain, a face with dead leaves plastered to its white cheeks and dirt in its staring eyes. FreddyorFrankie ran home screaming. Veronica Grogan had been in the fourth grade at the Neibolt Street Church School, which was run by people Bens mother called the Christers. She was buried on what would have been her tenth birthday. After this most recent horror, Arlene Hanscom had taken Ben into the living room one evening and sat beside him on the couch. She picked up his hands and looked intently into his face. Ben looked back, feeling a little uneasy. Ben, she said presently, are you a fool? No, Mamma, Ben said, feeling more uneasy than ever. He hadnt the slightest idea what this was about. He could not remember ever seeing his mamma look so grave. No, she echoed. I dont believe you are. She fell silent for a long time then, not looking at Ben but pensively out the window. Ben wondered briefly if she had forgotten all about him. She was a young woman stillonly thirtytwobut raising a boy by herself had put a mark on her. She worked forty hours a week in the spoolandbale room at Starks Mills in Newport, and after workdays when the dust and lint had been particularly bad, she sometimes coughed so long and hard that Ben would become frightened. On those nights he would lie awake for a long time, looking through the window beside his bed into the darkness, wondering what would become of him if she died. He would be an orphan then, he supposed. He might become a State Kid (he thought that meant you had to go live with farmers who made you work from sunup to sunset), or he might be sent to the Bangor Orphan Asylum. He tried to tell himself it was foolish to worry about such things, but the telling did absolutely no good. Nor was it just himself he was worried about; he worried for her as well. She was a hard woman, his mamma, and she insisted on having her own way about most things, but she was a good mamma. He loved her very much. You know about these murders, she said, looking back at last. He nodded. At first people thought they were... She hesitated over the next word, never spoken in her sons presence before, but the circumstances were unusual and she forced herself. ... sex crimes. Maybe they were and maybe they werent. Maybe theyre over and maybe theyre not. No one can be sure of anything anymore, except that some crazy man who preys on little children is out there. Do you understand me, Ben? He nodded. And you know what I mean when I say they may have been sex crimes? He didntat least not exactlybut he nodded again. If his mother felt she had to talk to him about the birds and bees as well as this other business, he thought he would die of embarrassment. I worry about you, Ben. I worry that Im not doing right by you. Ben squirmed and said nothing. Youre on your own a lot. Too much, I guess. You Mamma Hush while Im talking to you, she said, and Ben hushed. You have to be careful, Benny. Summers coming and I dont want to spoil your vacation, but you have to be careful. I want you in by suppertime every day. What time do we eat supper? Six oclock. Right with Eversharp! So hear what Im saying if I set the table and pour your milk and see that theres no Ben washing his hands at the sink, Im going to go right away to the telephone and call the police and report you missing. Do you understand that? Yes, Mamma. And you believe I mean exactly what I say? Yes. It would probably turn out that I did it for nothing, if I ever had to do it at all. Im not entirely ignorant about the ways of boys. I know they get wrapped up in their own games and projects during summer vacationlining bees back to their hives or playing ball or kickthecan or whatever. I have a pretty good idea what you and your friends are up to, you see. Ben nodded soberly, thinking that if she didnt know he had no friends, she probably didnt know anywhere near as much about his boyhood as she thought she did. But he would never have dreamed of saying such a thing to her, not in ten thousand years of dreaming. She took something from the pocket of her housedress and handed it to him. It was a small plastic box. Ben opened it. When he saw what was inside, his mouth dropped open. Wow! he said, his admiration totally unaffected. Thanks! It was a Timex watch with small silver numbers and an imitationleather band. She had set it and wound it; he could hear it ticking. Jeez, its the coolest! He gave her an enthusiastic hug and a loud kiss on the cheek. She smiled, pleased that he was pleased, and nodded. Then she grew grave again. Put it on, keep it on, wear it, wind it, mind it, dont lose it. Okay. Now that you have a watch you have no reason to be late home. Remember what I said if youre not on time, the police will be looking for you on my behalf. At least until they catch the bastard who is killing children around here, dont you dare be a single minute late, or Ill be on that telephone. Yes, Mamma. One other thing. I dont want you going around alone. You know enough not to accept candy or rides from strangerswe both agree that youre no fooland youre big for your age, but a grown man, particularly a crazy one, can overpower a child if he really wants to. When you go to the park or the library, go with one of your friends. I will, Mamma. She looked out the window again and uttered a sigh that was full of trouble. Things have come to a pretty pass when a thing like this can go on. Theres something ugly about this town, anyway. Ive always thought so. She looked back at him, brows drawn down. Youre such a wanderer, Ben. You must know almost everyplace in Derry, dont you? The town part of it, at least. Ben didnt think he knew anywhere near all the places, but he did know a lot of them. And he was so thrilled by the unexpected gift of the Timex that he would have agreed with his mother that night if she had suggested John Wayne should play Adolf Hitler in a musical comedy about World War II. He nodded. Youve never seen anything, have you? she asked. Anything or anyone... well, suspicious? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything that scared you? And in his pleasure over the watch, his feeling of love for her, his smallboy gladness at her concern (which was at the same time a little frightening in its unhidden unabashed fierceness), he almost told her about the thing that had happened last January. He opened his mouth and then somethingsome powerful intuitionclosed it again. What was that something, exactly? Intuition. No more than that... and no less. Even children may intuit loves more complex responsibilities from time to time, and to sense that in some cases it may be kinder to remain quiet. That was part of the reason Ben closed his mouth. But there was something else as well, something not so noble. She could be hard, his mamma. She could be a boss. She never called him fat, she called him big (sometimes amplified to big for his age), and when there were leftovers from supper she would often bring them to him while he was watching TV or doing his homework, and he would eat them, although some dim part of him hated himself for doing so (but never his mamma for putting the food before himBen Hanscom would not have dared to hate his mamma; God would surely strike him dead for feeling such a brutish, ungrateful emotion even for a second). And perhaps some even dimmer part of himthe faroff Tibet of Bens deeper thoughtssuspected her motives in this constant feeding. Was it just love? Could it be anything else? Surely not. But ... he wondered. More to the point, she didnt know he had no friends. That lack of knowledge made him distrust her, made him unsure of what her reaction would be to his story of the thing which had happened to him in January. If anything had happened. Coming in at six and staying in was not so bad, maybe. He could read, watch TV, (eat) build stuff with his logs and Erector Set. But having to stay in all day as well would be very bad ... and if he told her what he had seenor thought he had seenin January, she might make him do just that. So, for a variety of reasons, Ben withheld the story. No, Mamma, he said. Just Mr. McKibbon rooting around in other peoples garbage. That made her laughshe didnt like Mr. McKibbon, who was a Republican as well as a Christerand her laugh closed the subject. That night Ben had lain awake late, but no thoughts of being cast adrift and parentless in a hard world troubled him. He felt loved and safe as he lay in his bed looking at the moonlight which came in through the window and spilled across the bed onto the floor. He alternately put his watch to his ear so he could listen to it tick and held it close to his eyes so he could admire its ghostly radium dial. He had finally fallen asleep and dreamed he was playing baseball with the other boys in the vacant lot behind Tracker Brothers Truck Depot. He had just hit a basesclearing home run, swinging from his heels and getting every inch of that little honey, and his cheering teammates met him in a mob at home plate. They pummelled him and clapped him on the back. They hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him toward the place where their equipment was scattered. In the dream he was almost bursting with pride and happiness... and then he had looked out toward center field, where a chainlink fence marked the boundary between the cindery lot and the weedy ground beyond that sloped into the Barrens. A figure was standing in those tangled weeds and low bushes, almost out of sight. It held a clutch of balloonsred, yellow, blue, greenin one whitegloved hand. It beckoned with the other. He couldnt see the figures face, but he could see the baggy suit with the big orange pompombuttons down the front and the floppy yellow bowtie. It was a clown. Dats wight, wabbit, a phantom voice agreed. When Ben awoke the next morning he had forgotten the dream but his pillow was damp to the touch ... as if he had wept in the night. 7 He went up to the main desk in the Childrens Library, shaking the train of thought the curfew sign had begun as easily as a dog shakes water after a swim. Hullo, Benny, Mrs. Starrett said. Like Mrs. Douglas at school, she genuinely liked Ben. Grownups, especially those who sometimes needed to discipline children as part of their jobs, generally liked him, because he was polite, softspoken, thoughtful, sometimes even funny in a very quiet way. These were all the same reasons most kids thought he was a puke. You tired of summer vacation yet? Ben smiled. This was a standard witticism with Mrs. Starrett. Not yet, he said, since summer vacations only been going onhe looked at his watchone hour and seventeen minutes. Give me another hour. Mrs. Starrett laughed, covering her mouth so it wouldnt be too loud. She asked Ben if he wanted to sign up for the summer reading program, and Ben said he did. She gave him a map of the United States and Ben thanked her very much. He wandered off into the stacks, pulling a book here and there, looking at it, putting it back. Choosing books was serious business. You had to be careful. If you were a grownup you could have as many as you wanted, but kids could only take out three at a time. If you picked a dud, you were stuck with it. He finally picked out his threeBulldozer, The Black Stallion, and one that was sort of a shot in the dark a book called Hot Rod, by a man named Henry Gregor Felsen. You may not like this one, Mrs. Starrett remarked, stamping the book. Its extremely bloody. I urge it on the teenagers, especially the ones who have just got their driving licenses, because it gives them something to think about. I imagine it slows some of them down for a whole week. Well, Ill give it a whirl, Ben said, and took his books over to one of the tables away from Poohs Corner, where Big Billy Goat Gruff was in the process of giving a double dose of dickens to the troll under the bridge. He worked on Hot Rod for awhile, and it was not too shabby. Not too shabby at all. It was about a kid who was a really great driver, but there was this partypooper cop who was always trying to slow him down. Ben found out there were no speed limits in Iowa, where the book was set. That was sort of cool. He looked up after three chapters, and his eye was caught by a brandnew display. The poster on top (the library was gungho for posters, all right) showed a happy mailman delivering a letter to a happy kid. LIBRARIES ARE FOR WRITING, TOO, the poster said. WHY NOT WRITE A FRIEND TODAY? THE SMILES ARE GUARANTEED! Beneath the poster were slots filled with prestamped postcards, prestamped envelopes, and stationery with a drawing of the Derry Public Library on top in blue ink. The prestamped envelopes were a nickel each, the postcards three cents. The paper was two sheets for a penny. Ben felt in his pocket. The remaining four cents of his bottle money was still there. He marked his place in Hot Rod and went back to the desk. May I have one of those postcards, please? Certainly, Ben. As always, Mrs. Starrett was charmed by his grave politeness and a little saddened by his size. Her mother would have said the boy was digging his grave with a knife and fork. She gave him the card and watched him go back to his seat. It was a table that could seat six, but Ben was the only one there. She had never seen Ben with any of the other boys. It was too bad, because she believed Ben Hanscom had treasures buried inside. He would yield them up to a kind and patient prospector ... if one ever came along. 8 Ben took out his ballpoint pen, clicked the point down, and addressed the card simply enough Miss Beverly Marsh, Lower Main Street, Derry, Maine, Zone 2. He did not know the exact number of her building, but his mamma had told him that most postmen had a pretty good idea of who their customers were once theyd been on their beats a little while. If the postman who had Lower Main Street could deliver this card, that would be great. If not, it would just go to the deadletter office and he would be out three cents. It would certainly never come back to him, because he had no intention of putting his name and address on it. Carrying the card with the address turned inward (he was taking no chances, even though he didnt see anyone he recognized), he got a few square slips of paper from the wooden box by the cardfile. He took these back to his seat and began to scribble, to cross out, and then to scribble again. During the last week of school before exams, they had been reading and writing haiku in English class. Haiku was a Japanese form of poetry, brief, disciplined. A haiku, Mrs. Douglas said, could be just seventeen syllables longno more, no less. It usually concentrated on one clear image which was linked to one specific emotion sadness, joy, nostalgia, happiness ... love. Ben had been utterly charmed by the concept. He enjoyed his English classes, although mild enjoyment was generally as far as it went. He could do the work, but as a rule there was nothing in it which gripped him. Yet there was something in the concept of haiku that fired his imagination. The idea made him feel happy, the way Mrs. Starretts explanation of the greenhouse effect had made him happy. Haiku was good poetry, Ben felt, because it was structured poetry. There were no secret rules. Seventeen syllables, one image linked to one emotion, and you were out. Bingo. It was clean, it was utilitarian, it was entirely contained within and dependent upon its own rules. He even liked the word itself, a slide of air broken as if along a dotted line by the ksound at the very back of your mouth haiku. Her hair, he thought, and saw her going down the school steps again with it bouncing on her shoulders. The sun did not so much glint on it as seem to burn within it. Working carefully over a twentyminute period (with one break to go back and get more workslips), striking out words that were too long, changing, deleting, Ben came up with this Your hair is winter fire, January embers. My heart burns there, too. He wasnt crazy about it, but it was the best he could do. He was afraid that if he frigged around with it too long, worried it too much, he would end up getting the jitters and doing something much worse. Or not doing it at all. He didnt want that to happen. The moment she had taken to speak to him had been a striking moment for Ben. He wanted to mark it in his memory. Probably Beverly had a crush on some bigger boya sixth or maybe even a seventhgrader, and she would think that maybe that boy had sent the haiku. That would make her happy, and so the day she got it would be marked in her memory. And although she would never know it had been Ben Hanscom who marked it for her, that was all right; he would know. He copied his completed poem onto the back of the postcard (printing in block letters, as if copying out a ransom note rather than a love poem), clipped his pen back into his pocket, and stuck the card in the back of Hot Rod. He got up then, and said goodbye to Mrs. Starrett on his way out. Goodbye, Ben, Mrs. Starrett said. Enjoy your summer vacation, but dont forget about the curfew. I wont. He strolled through the glassedin passageway between the two buildings, enjoying the heat there (greenhouse effect, he thought smugly) followed by the cool of the adult library. An old man was reading the News in one of the ancient, comfortably overstuffed chairs in the Reading Room alcove. The headline just below the masthead blazed DULLES PLEDGES U.S. TROOPS TO HELP LEBANON IF NEEDED! There was also a photo of Ike, shaking hands with an Arab in the Rose Garden. Bens mamma said that when the country elected Hubert Humphrey President in 1960, maybe things would get moving again. Ben was vaguely aware that there was something called a recession going on, and his mamma was afraid she might get laid off. A smaller headline on the bottom half of page one read POLICE HUNT FOR PSYCHOPATH GOES ON. Ben pushed open the librarys big front door and stepped out. There was a mailbox at the foot of the walk. Ben fished the postcard from the back of the book and mailed it. He felt his heartbeat speed up a little as it slipped out of his fingers. What if she knows its me, somehow? Dont be a stupe, he responded, a little alarmed at how exciting that idea seemed to him. He walked off up Kansas Street, hardly aware of where he was going and not caring at all. A fantasy had begun to form in his mind. In it, Beverly Marsh walked up to him, her graygreen eyes wide, her auburn hair tied back in a ponytail. I want to ask you a question, Ben, this makebelieve girl said in his mind, and youve got to swear to tell the truth. She held up the postcard. Did you write this? This was a terrible fantasy. This was a wonderful fantasy. He wanted it to stop. He didnt want it to ever stop. His face was starting to burn again. Ben walked and dreamed and shifted his library books from one arm to the other and began to whistle. Youll probably think Im horrible, Beverly said, but I think I want to kiss you. Her lips parted slightly. Bens own lips were suddenly too dry to whistle. I think I want you to, he whispered, and smiled a dopey, dizzy, and absolutely beautiful grin. If he had looked down at the sidewalk just then, he would have seen that three other shadows had grown around his own; if he had been listening he would have heard the sound of Victors cleats as he, Belch, and Henry closed in. But he neither heard nor saw. Ben was far away, feeling Beverlys lips slip softly against his mouth, raising his timid hands to touch the dim Irish fire of her hair. 9 Like many cities, small and large, Derry had not been plannedlike Topsy, it just growed. City planners never would have located it where it was in the first place. Downtown Derry was in a valley formed by the Kenduskeag Stream, which ran through the business district on a diagonal from southwest to northeast. The rest of the town had swarmed up the sides of the surrounding hills. The valley the townships original settlers came to had been swampy and heavily grown over. The stream and the Penobscot River into which the Kenduskeag emptied were great things for traders, bad ones for those who sowed crops or built their houses too close to themthe Kenduskeag in particular, because it flooded every three or four years. The city was still prone to flooding in spite of the vast amounts of money spent over the last fifty years to control the problem. If the floods had been caused only by the stream itself, a system of dams might have taken care of things. There were, however, other factors. The Kenduskeags low banks were one. The entire areas logy drainage was another. Since the turn of the century there had been many serious floods in Derry and one disastrous one, in 1931. To make matters worse, the hills on which much of Derry was built were honeycombed with small streamsTorrault Stream, in which the body of Cheryl Lamonica had been found, was one of them. During periods of heavy rain, they were all apt to overflow their banks. If it rains two weeks the whole damn town gets a sinus infection, Stuttering Bills dad had said once. The Kenduskeag was caged in a concrete canal two miles long as it passed through downtown. This canal dived under Main Street at the intersection of Main and Canal, becoming an underground river for half a mile or so before surfacing again at Bassey Park. Canal Street, where most of Derrys bars were ranked like felons in a police lineup, paralleled the Canal on its way out of town, and every few weeks or so the police would have to fish some drunks car out of the water, which was polluted to dropdead levels by sewage and mill wastes. Fish were caught from time to time in the Canal, but they were inedible mutants. On the northeastern side of townthe Canal sidethe river had been managed to at least some degree. A thriving commerce went on all along it in spite of the occasional flooding. People walked beside the Canal, sometimes hand in hand (if the wind was right, that was; if it was wrong, the stench took much of the romance out of such strolling), and at Bassey Park, which faced the high school across the Canal, there were sometimes Boy Scout campouts and Cub Scout wiener roasts. In 1969 the citizens would be shocked and sickened to discover that hippies (one of them had actually sewed an American flag on the seat of his pants, and that pinkofaggot was busted before you could say Gene McCarthy) were smoking dope and trading pills up there. By 69 Bassey Park had become a regular openair pharmacy. You just wait, people said. Somebodyll get killed before they put a stop to it. And of course someone finally dida seventeenyearold boy had been found dead by the Canal, his veins full of almost pure heroinwhat the kids called a tight white rail. After that the druggies began to drift away from Bassey Park, and there were even stories that the kids ghost was haunting the area. The story was stupid, of course, but if it kept the speedfreaks and the nodders away, it was at least a useful stupid story. On the southwestern side of town the river presented even more of a problem. Here the hills had been deeply cut open by the passing of the great glacier and further wounded by the endless water erosion of the Kenduskeag and its webwork of tributaries; the bedrock showed through in many places like the halfunearthed bones of dinosaurs. Veteran employees of the Derry Public Works Department knew that, following the falls first hard frost, they could count on a good deal of sidewalk repair on the southwestern side of town. The concrete would contract and grow brittle and then the bedrock would suddenly shatter up through it, as if the earth meant to hatch something. What grew best in the shallow soil which remained was plants with shallow rootsystems and hardy naturesweeds and trashplants, in other words scruffy trees, thick low bushes, and virulent infestations of poison ivy and poison oak grew everywhere they were allowed a foothold. The southwest was where the land fell away steeply to the area that was known in Derry as the Barrens. The Barrenswhich were anything but barrenwere a messy tract of land about a mile and a half wide by three miles long. It was bounded by upper Kansas Street on one side and by Old Cape on the other. Old Cape was a lowincome housing development, and the drainage was so bad over there that there were stories of toilets and sewerpipes actually exploding. The Kenduskeag ran through the center of the Barrens. The city had grown up to the northeast and on both sides of it, but the only vestiges of the city down there were Derry Pumphouse 3 (the municipal sewagepumping station) and the City Dump. Seen from the air the Barrens looked like a big green dagger pointing at downtown. To Ben all this geography mated with geology meant was a vague awareness that there were no more houses on his right side now; the land had dropped away. A rickety whitewashed railing, about waisthigh, ran beside the sidewalk, a token gesture of protection. He could faintly hear running water; it was the soundtrack to his continuing fantasy. He paused and looked out over the Barrens, still imagining her eyes, the clean smell of her hair. From here the Kenduskeag was only a series of twinkles seen through breaks in the thick foliage. Some kids said that there were mosquitoes as big as sparrows down there at this time of year; others said there was quicksand as you approached the river. Ben didnt believe it about the mosquitoes, but the idea of quicksand scared him. Slightly to his left he could see a cloud of circling, diving seagulls the dump. Their cries reached him faintly. Across the way he could see Derry Heights, and the low roofs of the Old Cape houses closest to the Barrens. To the right of Old Cape, pointing skyward like a squat white finger, was the Derry Standpipe. Directly below him a rusty culvert stuck out of the earth, spilling discolored water down the hill in a glimmering little stream which disappeared into the tangled trees and bushes. Bens pleasant fantasy of Beverly was suddenly broken by one far more grim what if a dead hand flopped out of that culvert right now, right this second, while he was looking? And suppose that when he turned to find a phone and call the police, a clown was standing there? A funny clown wearing a baggy suit with big orange puffs for buttons? Suppose A hand fell on Bens shoulder, and he screamed. There was laughter. He whirled around, shrinking against the white fence separating the safe, sane sidewalk of Kansas Street from the wildly undisciplined Barrens (the railing creaked audibly), and saw Henry Bowers, Belch Huggins, and Victor Criss standing there. Hi, Tits, Henry said. What do you want? Ben asked, trying to sound brave. I want to beat you up, Henry said. He seemed to contemplate this prospect soberly, even gravely. But oh, his black eyes sparkled. I got to teach you something, Tits.