It Read online

  There is a kind of curtain of quiet which cloaks much of what has happened here ... and yet people do talk. I guess nothing can stop people from talking. But you have to listen hard, and that is a rare skill. I flatter myself that I've developed it over the last four years. If I haven't, then my aptitude for the job must be poor indeed, because I've had enough practice. An old man told me about how his wife had heard voices speaking to her from the drain of her kitchen sink in the three weeks before their daughter died--that was in the early winter of 1957-58. The girl he spoke of was one of the early victims in the murder-spree which began with George Denbrough and did not end until the following summer.

  "A whole slew of voices, all of em babblin together," he told me. He owned a Gulf station on Kansas Street and talked in between slow, limping trips out to the pumps, where he filled gas-tanks, checked oil-levels, and wiped windshields. "Said she spoke back once, even though she was ascairt. Leaned right over the drain, she did, and hollered down into it. 'Who the hell are you?' she calls. 'What's your name?' And all these voices answered back, she said--grunts and babbles and howls and yips, screams and laughin, don't you know. And she said they were sayin what the possessed man said to Jesus: 'Our name is Legion,' they said. She wouldn't go near that sink for two years. For them two years I'd spend twelve hours a day down here, bustin my hump, then have to go home and warsh all the damn dishes."

  He was drinking a can of Pepsi from the machine outside the office door, a man of seventy-two or -three in faded gray work fatigues, rivers of wrinkles flowing down from the corners of his eyes and mouth.

  "By now you prob'ly think I'm as crazy as a bedbug," he said, "but I'll tell you sumpin else, if you'll turn off y'whirlygig, there."

  I turned off my tape-recorder and smiled at him. "Considering some of the things I've heard over the last couple of years, you'd have to go a fair country distance to convince me you're crazy," I said.

  He smiled back, but there was no humor in it. "I was doin the dishes one night, same as usual--this was in the fall of '58, after things had settled down again. My wife was upstair, sleepin. Betty was the only kid God ever saw fit to give us, and after she was killed my wife spent a lot of her time sleepin. Anyway, I pulled the plug and the water started runnin out of the sink. You know the sound real soapy water makes when it goes down the drain? Kind of a suckin sound, it is. It was makin that noise, but I wasn't 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. That's the only time I ever heard anything like that. Maybe I just imagined it. But ... I don't think so."

  He looked at me and I looked at him. The light falling through the dirty plate-glass windows onto his face filled him up with years, made him look as ancient as Methuselah. I remember how cold I felt at that moment; how cold.

  "You think I'm storying you along?" the old man asked me, the old man who would have been just about forty-five in 1957, the old man to whom God had given a single daughter, Betty Ripsom by name. Betty had been found on Outer Jackson Street just after Christmas of that year, frozen, her remains ripped wide open.

  "No," I said. "I don't think you're just storying me along, Mr. Ripsom."

  "And you're tellin the truth, too," he said with a kind of wonder. "I can see it on y'face."

  I think he meant to tell me something more then, but the bell behind us dinged sharply as a car rolled over the hose on the tarmac and pulled up to the pumps. When the bell rang, both of us jumped and I uttered a thin little cry. Ripsom got to his feet and limped out to the car, wiping his hands on a ball of waste. When he came back in, he looked at me as though I were a rather unsavory stranger who had just happened to wander in off the street. I made my good-byes 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 township--not exactly--and I think he knew it.

  "It would take you twenty years," he whispered, "and no one would read it. No one would want to read it. Let it go, Hanlon."

  He paused a moment and then added:

  "Buddinger committed suicide, you know."

  Of course I had known that--but only because people always talk and I had learned to listen. The article in the News had called it a falling accident, and it was true that Branson Buddinger had taken a fall. What the News neglected to mention was that he fell from a stool in his closet and he had a noose around his neck at the time.

  "You know about the cycle?"

  I looked at him, startled.

  "Oh yes," Carson whispered. "I know. Every twenty-six or twenty-seven years. Buddinger knew, too. A lot of the old-timers do, although that is one thing they won't talk about, even if you load them up with booze. Let it go, Hanlon."

  He reached out with one bird-claw hand. He closed it around my wrist and I could feel the hot cancer that was loose and raving through his body, eating anything and everything left that was still good to eat--not that there could have been much by that time; Albert Carson's cupboards were almost bare.

  "Michael--this is nothing you want to mess into. There are things here in Derry that bite. Let it go. Let it go."

  "I can't."

  "Then beware," he said. Suddenly the huge and frightened eyes of a child were looking out of his dying old-man's face. "Beware."

  Derry.

  My home town. Named after the county of the same name in Ireland.

  Derry.

  I was born here, in Derry Home Hospital; attended Derry Elementary School; went to junior high at Ninth Street Middle School; to high school at Derry High. I went to the University of Maine--"ain't in Derry, but it's just down the rud," the old-timers say--and then I came right back here. To the Derry Public Library. I am a small-town man living a small-town life, one among millions.

  But.

  But:

  In 1879 a crew of lumberjacks found the remains of another crew that had spent the winter snowed in at a camp on the Upper Kenduskeag--at the tip of what the kids still call the Barrens. There were nine of them in all, all nine hacked to pieces. Heads had rolled ... not to mention arms ... a foot or two ... and a man's penis had been nailed to one wall of the cabin.

  But:

  In 1851 John Markson killed his entire family with poison and then, sitting in the middle of the circle he had made with their corpses, he gobbled an entire "white-nightshade" mushroom. His death agonies must have been intense. The town constable who found him wrote in his report that at first he believed the corpse was grinning at him; he wrote of "Markson's awful white smile." The white smile was an entire mouthful of the killer mushroom; Markson had gone on eating even as the cramps and the excruciating muscle spasms must have been wracking his dying body.

  But:

  On Easter Sunday 1906 the owners of the Kitchener Ironworks, which stood where the brand-spanking-new Derry Mall now stands, held an Easter-egg hunt for "all the good children of Derry." The hunt took place in the huge Ironworks building. Dangerous areas were closed off, and employees volunteered their time to stand guard and make sure no adventurous boy or girl decided to duck under the barriers and explore. Five hundred chocolate Easter eggs wrapped in gay ribbons were hidden about the rest of the works. According to Buddinger, there was at least one child present for each of those eggs. They ran giggling and whooping and yelling through the Sunday-silent Ironworks, finding the eggs under the giant tipper-vats, inside the desk drawers of the forem
an, balanced between the great rusty teeth of gearwheels, inside the molds on the third floor (in the old photographs these molds look like cupcake tins from some giant's kitchen). Three generations of Kitcheners were there to watch the gay riot and to award prizes at the end of the hunt, which was to come at four o'clock, whether all the eggs had been found or not. The end actually came forty-five minutes early, at quarter past three. That was when the Ironworks exploded. Seventy-two people were pulled dead from the wreckage before the sun went down. The final toll was a hundred and two. Eighty-eight of the dead were children. On the following Wednesday, while the city still lay in stunned silent contemplation of the tragedy, a woman found the head of nine-year-old Robert Dohay caught in the limbs of her back-yard apple tree. There was chocolate on the Dohay lad's teeth and blood in his hair. He was the last of the known dead. Eight children and one adult were never accounted for. It was the worst tragedy in Derry's history, even worse than the fire at the Black Spot in 1930, and it was never explained. All four of the Ironworks' boilers were shut down. Not just banked; shut down.

  But:

  The murder rate in Derry is six times the murder rate of any other town of comparable size in New England. I found my tentative conclusions in this matter so difficult to believe that I turned my figures over to one of the high-school hackers, who spends what time he doesn't spend in front of his Commodore here in the library. He went several steps further--scratch a hacker, find an overachiever--by adding another dozen small cities to what he called "the stat-pool" and presenting me with a computer-generated bar graph where Derry sticks out like a sore thumb. "People must have wicked short tempers here, Mr. Hanlon," was his only comment. I didn't reply. If I had, I might have told him that something in Derry has a wicked short temper, anyway.

  Here in Derry children disappear unexplained and unfound at the rate of forty to sixty a year. Most are teenagers. They are assumed to be runaways. I suppose some of them even are.

  And during what Albert Carson would undoubtedly have called the time of the cycle, the rate of disappearance shoots nearly out of sight. In the year 1930, for instance--the year the Black Spot burned--there were better than one hundred and seventy child disappearances in Derry--and you must remember that these are only the disappearances which were reported to the police and thus documented. Nothing surprising about it, the current Chief of Police told me when I showed him the statistic. It was the Depression. Most of em probably got tired of eating potato soup or going flat hungry at home and went off riding the rods, looking for something better.

  During 1958, a hundred and twenty-seven children, ranging in age from three to nineteen, were reported missing in Derry. Was there a Depression in 1958? I asked Chief Rademacher. No, he said. But people move around a lot, Hanlon. Kids in particular get itchy feet. Have a fight with the folks about coming in late after a date and boom, they're gone.

  I showed Chief Rademacher the picture of Chad Lowe which had appeared in the Derry News in April 1958. You think this one ran away after a fight with his folks about coming in late, Chief Rademacher? He was three and a half when he dropped out of sight.

  Rademacher fixed me with a sour glance and told me it sure had been nice talking with me, but if there was nothing else, he was busy. I left.

  Haunted, haunting, haunt.

  Often visited by ghosts or spirits, as in the pipes under the sink; to appear or recur often, as every twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven years; a feeding place for animals, as in the cases of George Denbrough, Adrian Mellon, Betty Ripsom, the Albrecht girl, the Johnson boy.

  A feeding place for animals. Yes, that's the one that haunts me.

  If anything else happens--anything at all--I'll make the calls. I'll have to. In the meantime I have my suppositions, my broken rest, and my memories--my damned memories. Oh, and one other thing--I have this notebook, don't I? The wall I wail to. And here I sit, my hand shaking so badly I can hardly write in it, here I sit in the deserted library after closing, listening to faint sounds in the dark stacks, watching the shadows thrown by the dim yellow globes to make sure they don't move ... don't change.

  Here I sit next to the telephone.

  I put my free hand on it ... let it slide down ... touch the holes in the dial that could put me in touch with all of them, my old pals.

  We went deep together.

  We went into the black together.

  Would we come out of the black if we went in a second time?

  I don't think so.

  Please God I don't have to call them.

  Please God.

  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 I'm a-gonna do, There ain't no cure for the summertime blues.

  --Eddie Cochran

  CHAPTER 4

  Ben Hanscom Takes a Fall

  1

  Around 11:45 P.M., one of the stews serving first class on the Omaha-to-Chicago run--United Airlines' flight 41--gets one hell of a shock. She thinks for a few moments that the man in 1-A has died.

  When he boarded at Omaha she thought to herself:"Oh boy, here comes trouble. He's 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 strip--Pig Pen, his name is. She was nervous about First Service, which is the booze service. She was sure he would ask for a drink--and 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 it's over, one of those during which you just might--ifyou had time--have 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 seat-belt sign goes on twenty minutes into the flight and stays on. All the same the stewardesses stay in the aisles, answering the call-buttons which go off like strings of polite-society 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 half-code, half-joke. 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 1-A.

  Oh my dear God he's dead, she thinks. The liquor before he got on ... then the bumps ... his heart ... scared to death.

  The lanky man's 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 othe
r passengers deplane they'll think he's 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 stew's little scream of surprise is lost in other, heartier, cries of fear. The man's eyes move then--not 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 mid-fifties, but he's nowhere near that old, in spite of the graying hair.

  She goes to him, although she can hear the impatient chime of call-buttons behind her (Ralph is indeed busy tonight: after their perfectly safe landing at O'Hare 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 first-class stub tacked into the little slot on his seat-back and sees that his name is Hanscom. "Fine and well. But it's a bit bumpy tonight, isn't it? You've got your work cut out for you, I think. Don't bother with me. I'm--" He offers her a ghastly smile, a smile that makes her think of scarecrows flapping in dead November fields. "I'm 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 call-buttons chime. "Pardon me, stewardess?" someone calls nervously.

  "Well, if you're quite sure you're 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 I--"He 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 that's almost literally what I did. Anyhow, they were making a hellava mess with that dam. I remember that."