It, Page 23

  A smaller headline on the bottom half of page one read POLICE HUNT FOR PSYCHOPATH GOES ON.

  Ben pushed open the library's 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 it's me, somehow?

  Don't 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 gray-green eyes wide, her auburn hair tied back in a pony-tail. I want to ask you a question, Ben, this make-believe girl said in his mind, and you've 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 didn't 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. You'll probably think I'm horrible, Beverly said, but I think I want to kiss you. Her lips parted slightly.

  Ben's 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 Victor's cleats as he, Belch, and Henry closed in. But he neither heard nor saw. Ben was far away, feeling Beverly's 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 planned--like 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 township's 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 them--the 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 Kenduskeag's low banks were one. The entire area's 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 streams--Torrault 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 Bill's 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 Derry's 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 drunk's car out of the water, which was polluted to drop-dead 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 town--the Canal side--the 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 pinko-faggot was busted before you could say Gene McCarthy) were smoking dope and trading pills up there. By '69 Bassey Park had become a regular open-air pharmacy. You just wait, people said. Somebody'll get killed before they put a stop to it. And of course someone finally did--a seventeen-year-old boy had been found dead by the Canal, his veins full of almost pure heroin--what 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 kid's ghost was haunting the area. The story was stupid, of course, but if it kept the speed-freaks 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 half-unearthed bones of dinosaurs. Veteran employees of the Derry Public Works Department knew that, following the fall's 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 root-systems and hardy natures--weeds and trash-plants, 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 Barrens--which were anything but barren--were 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 low-income housing development, and the drainage was so bad over there that there were stories of toilets and sewer-pipes 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 sewage-pumping 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 waist-high, ran beside the sidewalk, a token gesture of protection. He could faintly hear running water; it was the sound-track 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 didn't 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.

  Ben's 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 th
ere? A funny clown wearing a baggy suit with big orange puffs for buttons? Suppose--

  A hand fell on Ben's 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. You won't mind. You like to learn new things, don't cha?"

  He reached for Ben. Ben ducked away.

  "Hold him, you guys."

  Belch and Victor seized his arms. Ben squealed. It was a cowardly sound, rabbity and weak, but he couldn't help it. Please God don't let them make me cry and don't let them break my watch, Ben thought wildly. He didn't know if they would get around to breaking his watch or not, but he was pretty sure he would cry. He was pretty sure he would cry plenty before they were through with him.

  "Jeezum, he sounds just like a pig," Victor said. He twisted Ben's wrist. "Don't he sound like a pig?"

  "He sure do," Belch giggled.

  Ben lunged first one way and then the other. Belch and Victor went with him easily, letting him lunge, then yanking him back.

  Henry grabbed the front of Ben's sweatshirt and yanked it upward, exposing his belly. It hung over his belt in a swollen droop.

  "Lookit that gut!" Henry cried in amazed disgust. "Jesus-please-us!"

  Victor and Belch laughed some more. Ben looked around wildly for help. He could see no one. Behind him, down in the Barrens, crickets drowsed and seagulls screamed.

  "You just better quit!" he said. He wasn't blubbering yet but was close to it. "You just better!"

  "Or what?" Henry asked as if he was honestly interested. "Or what, Tits? Or what, huh?"

  Ben suddenly found himself thinking of Broderick Crawford, who played Dan Matthews on Highway Patrol--that bastard was tough, that bastard was mean, that bastard took zero shit from anybody--and then he burst into tears. Dan Matthews would have belted these guys right through the fence, down the embankment, and into the puckerbrush. He would have done it with his belly.

  "Oh boy, lookit the baby!" Victor chortled. Belch joined in. Henry smiled a little, but his face still held that grave, reflective cast--that look that was somehow almost sad. It frightened Ben. It suggested he might be in for more than just a beating.

  As if to confirm this idea, Henry reached into his jeans pocket and brought out a Buck knife.

  Ben's terror exploded. He had been whipsawing his body futilely to either side; now he suddenly lunged straight forward. There was an instant when he believed he was going to get away. He was sweating heavily, and the boys holding his arms had greasy grips at best. Belch managed to hold on to his right wrist, but just barely. He pulled entirely free of Victor. Another lunge--

  Before he could make it, Henry stepped forward and gave him a shove. Ben flew backward. The railing creaked more loudly this time, and he felt it give a little under his weight. Belch and Victor grabbed him again.

  "Now you hold him," Henry said. "You hear me?"

  "Sure, Henry," Belch said. He sounded a trifle uneasy. "He ain't gonna get away. Don't worry."

  Henry stepped forward until his flat stomach almost touched Ben's belly. Ben stared at him, tears spilling helplessly out of his wide eyes. Caught! I'm caught! a part of his mind yammered. He tried to stop it--he couldn't think at all with that yammering going on--but it wouldn't stop. Caught! Caught! Caught!

  Henry pulled out the blade, which was long and wide and engraved with his name. The tip glittered in the afternoon sunshine.

  "I'm gonna test you now," Henry said in that same reflective voice. "It's exam time, Tits, and you better be ready."

  Ben wept. His heart thundered madly in his chest. Snot ran out of his nose and collected on his upper lip. His library books lay in a scatter at his feet. Henry stepped on Bulldozer, glanced down, and dealt it into the gutter with a sideswipe of one black engineer boot.

  "Here's the first question on your exam, Tits. When somebody says 'Let me copy' during finals, what are you going to say?"

  "Yes!" Ben exclaimed immediately. "I'm going to say yes! Sure! Okay! Copy all you want!"

  The Buck's tip slid through two inches of air and pressed against Ben's stomach. It was as cold as an ice-cube tray just out of the Frigidaire. Ben gasped his belly away from it. For a moment the world went gray. Henry's mouth was moving but Ben couldn't tell what he was saying. Henry was like a TV with the sound turned off and the world was swimming ... swimming...

  Don't you dare faint! the panicky voice shrieked. If you faint he may get mad enough to kill you!

  The world came back into some kind of focus. He saw that both Belch and Victor had stopped laughing. They looked nervous... almost scared. Seeing that had the effect of a head-clearing slap on Ben. All of a sudden they don't know what he's going to do, or how far he might go. However bad you thought things were, that's how bad they really are ... maybe even a little worse. You got to think. If you never did before or never do again, you better think now. Because his eyes say they're right to look nervous. His eyes say he's crazy as a bedbug.

  "That's the wrong answer, Tits," Henry said. "If just anyone says 'Let me copy,' I don't give a red fuck what you do. Got it?"

  "Yes," Ben said, his belly hitching with sobs. "Yes, I got it."

  "Well, okay. That's one wrong, but the biggies are still coming up. You ready for the biggies?"

  "I... I guess so."

  A car came slowly toward them. It was a dusty '51 Ford with an old man and woman propped up in the front seat like a pair of neglected department store mannequins. Ben saw the old man's head turn slowly toward him. Henry stepped closer to Ben, hiding the knife. Ben could feel its point dimpling his flesh just above his bellybutton. It was still cold. He didn't see how that could be, but it was.

  "Go ahead, yell," Henry said. "You'll be pickin your fuckin guts off your sneakers." They were close enough to kiss. Ben could smell the sweet smell of Juicy Fruit gum on Henry's breath.

  The car passed and continued on down Kansas Street, as slow and serene as the pace car in the Tournament of Roses Parade.

  "All right, Tits, here's the second question. If I say 'Let me copy' during finals, what are you going to say?"

  "Yes. I'll say yes. Right away."

  Henry smiled. "That's good. You got that one right, Tits. Now here's the third question: how am I going to be sure you never forget that?"

  "I ... I don't know," Ben whispered.

  Henry smiled. His face lit up and was for a moment almost handsome. "I know!" he said, as if he had discovered a great truth. "I know, Tits! I'll carve my name on your big fat gut!"

  Victor and Belch abruptly began laughing again. For a moment Ben felt a species of bewildered relief, thinking it had all been nothing but make-believe--a little shuck-and-jive the three of them had whomped up to scare the living hell out of him. But Henry Bowers wasn't laughing, and Ben suddenly understood that Victor and Belch were laughing because they were relieved. It was obvious to both of them that Henry couldn't be serious. Except Henry was.

  The Buck knife slid upward, smooth as butter. Blood welled in a bright red line on Ben's pallid skin.

  "Hey!" Victor cried. The word came out muffled, in a startled gulp.

  "Hold him!" Henry snarled. "You just hold him, hear me?" Now there was nothing grave and reflective on Henry's face; now it was the twisted face of a devil.

  "Jeezum-crow Henry don't really cut im!" Belch screamed, and his voice was high, almost a girl's voice.

  Everything happened fast then, but to Ben Hanscom it all seemed slow; it all seemed to happen in a series of shutterclicks, like action stills in a Life-magazine photo-essay. His panic w
as gone. He had discovered something inside him suddenly, and because it had no use for panic, that something just ate the panic whole.

  In the first shutterclick, Henry had snatched his sweatshirt all the way up to his nipples. Blood was pouring from the shallow vertical cut above his bellybutton.

  In the second shutterclick, Henry drew the knife down again, operating fast, like a lunatic battle-surgeon under an aerial bombardment. Fresh blood flowed.

  Backward, Ben thought coldly as blood flowed down and pooled between the waistband of his jeans and his skin. Got to go backward. That's the only direction I can get away in. Belch and Victor weren't holding him anymore. In spite of Henry's command, they had drawn away. They had drawn away in horror. But if he ran, Bowers would catch him.

  In the third shutterclick, Henry connected the two vertical slashes with a short horizontal line. Ben could feel blood running into his underpants now, and a sticky snail-trail was creeping down his left thigh.

  Henry leaned back momentarily, frowning with the studied concentration of an artist painting a landscape. After H comes E, Ben thought, and that was all it took to get him moving. He pulled forward a little bit and Henry shoved him back again. Ben pushed with his legs, adding his own force to Henry's. He hit the whitewashed railing between Kansas Street and the drop into the Barrens. As he did, he raised his right foot and planted it in Henry's belly. This was not a retaliatory act; Ben only wanted to increase his backward force. And yet when he saw the expression of utter surprise on Henry's face, he was filled with a clear savage joy--a feeling so intense that for a split second he thought the top of his head was going to come off.

  Then there was a cracking, splintering sound from the railing. Ben saw Victor and Belch catch Henry before he could fall on his ass in the gutter next to the remains of Bulldozer, and then Ben was falling backward into space. He went with a scream that was half a laugh.

  Ben hit the slope on his back and buttocks just below the culvert he had spotted earlier. It was a good thing he landed below it; if he had landed on it, he might well have broken his back. As it was, he landed on a thick cushion of weeds and bracken and barely felt the impact. He did a backward somersault, feet and legs snapping over his head. He landed sitting up and went sliding down the slope backward like a kid on a big green Chute-the-Chute, his sweatshirt pulled up around his neck, his hands grabbing for purchase and doing nothing but yanking out tuft after tuft of bracken and witchgrass.