It, Page 22

  "Oh gosh, that's bad!" Ben had exclaimed.

  "Dat's wight, wabbit," Tozier said, and walked away.

  Frankie-or-Freddy had worked THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK back and forth through the grate of the stormdrain, believing he'd 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.

  Freddy-or-Frankie ran home screaming.

  Veronica Grogan had been in the fourth grade at the Neibolt Street Church School, which was run by people Ben's 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 hadn't the slightest idea what this was about. He could not remember ever seeing his mamma look so grave.

  "No," she echoed. "I don't 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 still--only thirty-two--but raising a boy by herself had put a mark on her. She worked forty hours a week in the spool-and-bale room at Stark's 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 son's presence before, but the circumstances were unusual and she forced herself. "... sex crimes. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't. Maybe they're over and maybe they're 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 didn't--at least not exactly--but 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 I'm not doing right by you.

  Ben squirmed and said nothing.

  "You're on your own a lot. Too much, I guess. You--"

  "Mamma--"

  "Hush while I'm talking to you," she said, and Ben hushed. "You have to be careful, Benny. Summer's coming and I don't 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 o'clock."

  "Right with Eversharp! So hear what I'm saying: if I set the table and pour your milk and see that there's no Ben washing his hands at the sink, I'm 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. I'm not entirely ignorant about the ways of boys. I know they get wrapped up in their own games and projects during summer vacation--lining bees back to their hives or playing ball or kick-the-can 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 didn't know he had no friends, she probably didn't 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 imitation-leather band. She had set it and wound it; he could hear it ticking.

  "Jeez, it's 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, don't lose it."

  "Okay."

  "Now that you have a watch you have no reason to be late home. Remember what I said: if you're 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, don't you dare be a single minute late, or I'll be on that telephone."

  "Yes, Mamma."

  "One other thing. I don't want you going around alone. You know enough not to accept candy or rides from strangers--we both agree that you're no fool--and you're 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. There's something ugly about this town, anyway. I've always thought so." She looked back at him, brows drawn down. "You're such a wanderer, Ben. You must know almost everyplace in Derry, don't you? The town part of it, at least."

  Ben didn't 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.

  "You've 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 small-boy 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 something--some powerful intuition--closed it again.

  What was that something, exactly? Intuition. No more than that... and no less. Even children may intuit love's 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 him--Ben 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 him--the far-off Tibet of Ben's deeper thoughts--suspected 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 didn't know he had no friends. T
hat 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 seen--or thought he had seen--in 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 people's garbage."

  That made her laugh--she didn't like Mr. McKibbon, who was a Republican as well as a "Christer"--and 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 bases-clearing 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 balloons--red, yellow, blue, green--in one white-gloved hand. It beckoned with the other. He couldn't see the figure's face, but he could see the baggy suit with the big orange pompom-buttons down the front and the floppy yellow bow-tie.

  It was a clown.

  Dat's 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 Children's 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, soft-spoken, 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 vacation's only been going on"--he looked at his watch--"one hour and seventeen minutes. Give me another hour."

  Mrs. Starrett laughed, covering her mouth so it wouldn't 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 three--Bulldozer, 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. "It's 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, I'll give it a whirl," Ben said, and took his books over to one of the tables away from Pooh's 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 party-pooper 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 brand-new display. The poster on top (the library was gung-ho 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 pre-stamped postcards, pre-stamped envelopes, and stationery with a drawing of the Derry Public Library on top in blue ink. The pre-stamped 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 they'd 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 dead-letter 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 didn't 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 long--no 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. Starrett's 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 "k"-sound 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 twenty-minute period (with one break to go back and get more work-slips), striking out words that were too long, changing, deleting, Ben came up with this: Your hair is winte
r fire,

  January embers.

  My heart burns there, too.

  He wasn't 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 didn't 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 boy--a 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 don't forget about the curfew."

  "I won't."

  He strolled through the glassed-in 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. Ben's 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.