It, Page 71

  He stopped at the corner of Center and Main, outside of Mr. Paperback. He leaned the bike against the building long enough to strip off his sportcoat. Pushing a bike with a flat tire was hard work, and the afternoon had come off hot. He tossed the coat into the basket and went on.

  Chain's rusty, he thought. Whoever had it didn't take very good care of

  (him)

  it.

  He stopped for a moment, frowning, trying to remember just what had happened to Silver. Had he sold it? Given it away? Lost it, perhaps? He couldn't remember. Instead, that idiotic sentence

  (his fists against the posts and still insists)

  resurfaced, as strange and out of place as an easy chair on a battlefield, a record-player in a fireplace, a row of pencils protruding from a cement sidewalk.

  Bill shook his head. The sentence broke up and dispersed like smoke. He pushed Silver on to Mike's place.

  6

  Mike Hanlon Makes a Connection

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

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

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

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

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

  "Yeah. I think I've got a tire-patching kit, too. Are those tubeless tires?"

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

  "Getting ready to ride it again?"

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

  "Whatever you say, Big Bill. You're the boss."

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

  "You didn't just have this hanging around," Bill said. It wasn't a question.

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

  "You've got a bike of your own?"

  "No," Mike said, meeting his eyes.

  "You just happened to buy this kit."

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

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

  "Ask the others," Mike said. "Tonight."

  "Will they all be there, do you think?"

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

  "What do we do if that happens?"

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

  Bill took his sportcoat out of the basket and hung it carefully on an unoccupied wallpeg. Then he turned Silver upside down so that he rested on his seat and began to carefully rotate the rear tire. He didn't like the rusty way the axle squeaked, and remembered the almost silent click of the ball-bearings in the kid's skateboard. A little 3-in-1 oil would fix that right up, he thought. Wouldn't hurt to oil the chain, either. It's rusty as hell.... And playing cards. It needs playing cards on the spokes. Mike would have cards, I bet. The good ones. Bikes, with the celluloid coating that made them so stiff and so slippery that the first time you tried to shuffle them they always sprayed all over the floor. Playing cards, sure, and clothespins to hold them--

  He stopped, suddenly cold.

  What in the name of Jesus are you thinking of?

  "Something wrong, Bill?" Mike asked softly.

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

  He shivered.

  (the posts)

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

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

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

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

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

  Mike was standing there with a deck of bluebacked Bicycle playing cards in one hand. "Want these?"

  Bill let out a long, shaky sigh. "You've got clothespins, too, I suppose?"

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

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

  "Yeah, something like that," Mike said.

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

  The two up cards were both the ace of spades.

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

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

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

  "Holy Christ, Mikey, what have you got us into?"

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

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

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

  "Come on," Mike said softly. "Come on in, Big Bill. I'll make us some chow."

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

  "Does it mean anything to you?" Bill asked.

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

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

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

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

  "You must have wanted to please her very much."

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

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

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

  "When?"

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

  CHAPTER 12

  Three Uninvited Guests

  1

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

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

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

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

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

  "You're hoein up the peas right along with the weeds, you ijit."

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

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

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

  "Yes sir, Mr. Fogarty."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Best not to talk about such things.

  Best to just dummy up.

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

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

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