C H A P T E R 1 9 4 страница

'The Girl Can't Help It. '

'Ben. . . the radio. . . they'll hear. . . '

'Oh God! '

He bunted her with one meaty hip and almost knocked her sprawling in the dark. She heard the radio fall to the floor. 'The girl can't help it if the menfolks stop and stare, ' Little Richard informed them with his customary hoarse enthusiasm. 'Can't help it! ' the back-up group testified, 'the girl can't help it! ' Ben was panting now, too. They sounded like a couple of steam-engines. Suddenly there was a crunch. . . and silence.

'Oh shit, ' Ben said. 'I just squashed it. Richie's gonna have a bird. ' He reached for her in the dark. She felt his hand touch one of her breasts, then jerk away, as if burned. She groped for him, got hold of his shirt, and drew him close.

'Beverly, what — ' 'Shhh! '

He quieted. They sat together, arms around each other, looking up. The darkness was not quite perfect; there was a narrow line of light down one side of the trapdoor, and three others outlined the slit window. One of these three was wide enought to let a slanted ray of sunlight fall into the clubhouse. She could only pray they wouldn't see it.

She could hear them approaching. At first she couldn't make out the words. . . and then she could. Her grip on Ben tightened.

'If she went into the bamboo, we can pick up her trail easy, ' Victor was saying.

'They play around here, ' Henry replied. His voice was strained, his words emerging in little puffs, as if with great effort. 'Boogers Taliendo said so. And the day we had that rockfight, they were coming from here. '

'Yeah, they play guns and stuff, ' Belch said.

Suddenly there were thudding footfalls right above them; the sod-covered cap vibrated up and down. Dirt sifted onto Beverly's upturned face. One, two, maybe even all three of them were standing on top of the clubhouse. A cramp laced her belly; she had to bite down against a cry. Ben put one big hand on the side of her face and pressed it against his arm as he looked up, waiting to see if they would guess. . . or if they knew already and were just playing games.

'They got a place, ' Henry was saying. 'That's what Boogers told me. Some kind of a treehouse or something. They call it their club. '

'I'll club em, if they want a club, ' Victor said. Belch uttered a thunderous heehawing of laughter at this.

Thump, thump, thump, overhead. The cap moved up and down a little more this time.

Surely they would notice it; ordinary ground just didn't have that kind of give. 'Let's look down by the river, ' Henry said. 'I bet she's down there. ' 'Okay, ' Victor said.

Thump, thump. They were moving off. Bev let a little sigh of relief trickle through her clamped teeth. . . and then Henry said: 'You stay here and guard the path, Belch. '

'Okay, ' Belch said, and he began to march back and forth, sometimes leaving the cap, sometimes coming back across it. More dirt sifted down. Ben and Beverly looked at each other with strained, dirty faces. Bev became aware that there was more than the smell of smoke in the clubhouse — a sweaty, garbag stink was rising as well. That's me, she thought dismally. In spite of the smell she hugged Ben even tighter. His bulk seemed suddenly very welcome, very comforting, and she was glad there was a lot of him to hug. He might have been nothing but a frightened fat-boy when school let out for the summer, but he was more than that now; like all of them, he had changed. If Belch discovered them down here, Ben just might give him a surprise.

'I'll club em if they want a club, ' Belch said, and chuckled. A Belch Huggins chuckle was a low, troll-like sound. 'Club em if they want a club. That's good. That's pretty much okeydokey. '

She became aware that Ben's upper body was heaving up and down in short, sharp movements; he was pulling air into his lungs and letting it out in sharp little bursts. For one alarmed moment she thought he was starting to cry, and then she got a closer look at his face and realized he was struggling against laughter. His eyes, leaking tears, caught hers, rolled madly, and looked away. In the faint light which leaked in through the cracks around the closed trapdoor and the window, she could see his face was nearly purple with the strain of holding it in.

'Club em if they want an ole clubby-dubby, ' Belch said, and sat down heavily right in the center of the cap. This time the roof trembled more alarmingly, and Bev heard a low but ominous crrrack from one of the supports. The cap had been meant to support the chunks of camouflaging sod laid on top of it. . . but not the added one hundred and sixty pounds of Belch Huggins's weight.

If he doesn't get up he's going to land in our laps, Bev thought, and she began to catch Ben's hysteria. It was trying to boil out of her in rancid whoops and brays. In her mind's eye she suddenly saw herself pushing the window up enough on its hinges for her hand to creep out and administer a really good goose to Belch Huggins's backside as he sat there in the hazy afternoon sunshine, muttering and giggling. She buried her face against Ben's chest in a lastditch effort to keep it inside.

'Shhh, ' Ben whispered. 'For Christ's sake, Bev — ' Ctrrrackk. Louder this time.

'Will it hold? ' she whispered back.

'It might, if he doesn't fart, ' Ben said, and a moment later Belch did cut one — a loud and fruity trumpet-blast that seemed to go on for at least three seconds. They held each other even tighter, muffling each other's frantic giggles. Beverly's head hurt so badly that she thought she might soon have a stroke.

Then, faintly, she heard Henry yelling Belch's name.

'What'? ' Belch bellowed, getting up with a thump and a thud that sifted more dirt down on

Ben and Beverly. 'What, Henry? '

Henry yelled something back; Beverly could only make out the words bank and bushes. 'Okay! ' Belch bawled, and his feet crossed the cap for the last time. There was a final cracking noise, this one much louder, and a splinter of wood landed in Bev's lap. She picked it up wonderingly.

'Five more minutes, ' Ben said in a low whisper. 'That's all it would have taken. ' 'Did you hear him when he let go? ' Beverly asked, beginning to giggle again.

'Sounded like World War III, ' Ben said, also beginning to laugh.

It was a relief to be able to let it out, and they laughed wildly, trying to do it in whispers.

Finally, unaware she was going to say it at all (and certainly not because it had any discernible bearing on this situation), Beverly said: Thank you for the poem, Ben. '

Ben stopped laughing all at once and regarded her gravely, cautiously. He took a dirty handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face with it slowly. 'Poem? '

The haiku. The haiku on the postcard. You sent it, didn't you? '

'No, ' Ben said. 'I didn't send you any haiku. Cause if a kid like me — a fat kid like me — did something like that, the girl would probably laugh at him. '

'I didn't laugh. I thought it was beautiful. '

'I could never write anything beautiful. Bill, maybe. Not me. '

'Bill will write, ' she agreed. 'But he'll never write anything as nice as that. May I use your handkerchief? '

He gave it to her and she began to clean her face as best she could.

'How did you know it was me? ' he asked finally.

'I don't know, ' she said. 'I just did. '

Ben's throat worked convulsively. He looked down at his hands. 'I didn't mean anything by it. '

She looked at him gravely. 'You better not mean that, ' she said. 'If you do, it's really going to spoil my day, and I'll tell you, it's going downhill already. '

He continued to look down at his hands and spoke at last in a voice she could barely hear.

'Well, I mean I love you, Beverly, but I don't want that to spoil anything. '

'It won't, ' she said, and hugged him. 'I need all the love I can get right now. '

'But you specially like Bill. '

'Maybe I do, ' she said, 'but that doesn't matter. If we were grown-ups, maybe it would, a little. But I like you all specially. You're the only friends I have. I love you too, Ben. '

'Thank you, ' he said. He paused, trying, and brought it out. He was even able to look at her as he said it. 'I wrote the poem. '

They sat without saying anything for a little while. Beverly felt safe. Protected. The images of her father's face and Henry's knife seemed less vivid and threatening when they sat close like this. That sense of protection was hard to define and she didn't try, although much later she would recognize the source of its strength: she was in the arms of a male who would die for her with no hesitation at all. It was a fact that she simply knew: it was in the scent that came from his pores, something utterly primitive that her own glands could respond to.

'The others were coming back, ' Ben said suddenly. 'What if they get caught out? '

She straightened up, aware that she had almost been dozing. Bill, she remembered, had invited Mike Hanlon home to lunch with him. Richie was going to go home with Stan and have sandwiches. And Eddie had promised to bring back his Parcheesi board. They would be arriving soon, totally unaware that Henry and his friends were in the Barrens.

'We've got to get to them, ' Beverly said. 'Henry's not just after me. '

'If we come out and they come back — '

'Yes, but at least we know they're here. Bill and the other guys don't. Eddie can't even run, they already broke his arm. '

'Jeezum-crow, ' Ben said. 'I guess we'll have to chance it. '

'Yeah. ' She swallowed and looked at her Timex. It was hard to read in the dimness, but she thought it was a little past one. 'Ben. . . '

'What? '

'Henry's really gone crazy. He's like that kid in The Blackboard Jungle. He was going to kill me and the other two were going to help him. '

'Aw, no, ' Ben said. 'Henry's crazy, but not that crazy. He's just. . . '

'Just what? ' Beverly said. She thought of Henry and Patrick in the automobile graveyard in the thick sunshine. Henry's blank eyes.

Ben didn't answer. He was thinking. Things had changed, hadn't they? When you were inside the changes, they were harder to see. You had to step back to see them. . . you had to try, anyway. When school let out he'd been afraid of Henry, but only because Henry was bigger, and because he was a bully — the kind of kid who would grab a firstgrader, Indianrub his arm and send him away crying. That was about all. Then he had engraved Ben's belly. Then there had been the rockfight, and Henry had been chucking M-80s at people's heads. You could kill somebody with one of those things. You could kill somebody easy. He had started to look different. . . haunted, almost. It seemed that you always had to be on the watch for him, the way you'd always have to be on the watch for tigers or poisonous snakes if you were in the jungle. But you got used to it; so used to it that it didn't even seem unusual, just the way things were. But Henry was crazy, wasn't he? Yes. Ben had known that on the day school ended, and had willfully refused to believe it, or remember it. It wasn't the kind of thing you wanted to believe or remember. And suddenly a thought — a thought so strong it was almost a certainty — crept into his mind full-blown, as cold as October mud. It's using Henry. Maybe the others too, but It's using them through Henry. And if that's the truth, then she's probably right. It's not just Indian rubs or rabbit-punches in the back of the neck during study-time near the end of the schoolday while Mrs Douglas reads her book at her desk, not just a push on the playground so that you fall down and skin your knee. If It's using him, then Henry will use the knife.

'An old lady saw them trying to beat me up, ' Beverly was saying. 'Henry went after her. He kicked her taillight out. '

This alarmed Ben more than anything else. He understood instinctively, as most kids did, that they lived below the sight-lines, and hence the thought-lines, of most adults. When a grownup was ditty-bopping down the street, thinking his grownup thoughts about work and appointments and buying cars and whatever else grownups thought about, he never noticed kids playing hopscotch or guns or kick-the-can or ring-a-levio or hide-and-go-seek. Bullies like Henry could get away with hurting other kids quite a lot if they were careful to stay below that sightline. At the very most, a passing adult was apt to say something like, " Why don't you quit that? ' and then just continue ditty-bopping along without waiting to see if the bully stopped or not. So the bully would wait until the grownup had turned the corner. . . and then go back to business as usual. It was like adults thought that real life only started when a person was five feet tall.

If Henry had gone after some old lady, he had gone above that sight-line. And that more than anything else suggested to Ben that he really was crazy.

Beverly saw the belief ni Ben's face and felt relief sweep over her. She would not have to tell him about how Mr Ross had simply folded his paper and walked into his house. She didn't want to tell him about that. It was too scary.

'Let's go up to Kansas Street, ' Ben said, and abruptly pushed open the trapdoor. 'Get ready to run. '

He stood up in the opening and looked around. The clearing was silent. He could hear the chuckling voice of the Kenduskeag close by, birdsong, the thum-thud-thum-thud of a diesel engine snorting its way into the trainyards. He heard nothing else and that made him uneasy. He would have felt much better if he'd heard Henry, Victor, and Belch cursing their way through the neavy undergrowth down by the stream. But he couldn't hear them at all.

Come on, ' he said, and helped Beverly up. She also looked around uneasily, brushing her hair back with her hands and grimacing at its greasy feel.

He took her hand and they pushed through a screen of bushes toward Kansas Street. 'We'd better stay off the path. '

'No, ' she said, 'we've got to hurry. '

He nodded. 'All right. '

They got to the path and started toward Kansas Street. Once she stumbled over a rock in the path and

The Seminary Grounds / 2: 17 A. M.

fell heavily on the moon-silvered sidewalk. A grunt was forced out of him, and a runner of blood came with the grunt, splatting on the cracked concrete. In the moonlight it looked as black as beetle-blood. Henry looked at it for a long dazed moment, then raised his head to look around.

Kansas Street was early-morning silent, the houses shut up and dark except for a scatter of nightlights.

Ah. Here was a sewer-grate.

A balloon with a smiley-smile face was tied to one of its iron bars. It bobbed and dipped in the faint breeze.

Henry got to his feet again, one sticky hand pressed to his belly. The nigger had stuck him pretty good, but Henry had gone him one better. Yessir. As far as the nigger was concerned, Henry felt like he was pretty much okey-dokey.

'Kid's a gone goose, ' Henry muttered, and made his shaky staggering way past the floating balloon. Fresh blood glimmered on his hand as it continued to flow from his stomach. 'Kid's all done. Greased the sucker. Gonna grease them all. Teach them to throw rocks. '

The world was coming in slow-rolling waves, big combers like the ones they used to show at the beginning of every Hawaii Five-O episode on the ward TV

(book em Danno, ha-ha Jack Fuckin Lord okay. Jack Fuckin Lord was pretty much okeydokey)

and Henry could Henry could Henry could almost

(hear the sound those Oahu big boys make as they rise curl and shake

(shakeshakeskake

(the reality of the world. 'Pipeline. ' Chantays. Remember 'Pipeline'? 'Pipeline' was pretty much okey-dokey. 'Wipe-Out. ' Crazy laugh there at the start. Sounded like Patrick

Hockstetter. Fucking queerboy. Got greased himself and as far as I) he was concerned that was a

(fuck of a lot better than okey-dokey, that was just FINE, that was JUST AS FINE AS

PAINT

(okay Pipeline shoot the line don't back down not my boys catch a wave and

(shoot

(shootshootshoot

(a wave and go sidewalk surfin with me shoot

(the line shoot the world but keep)

an ear inside his head: it kept hearing that ka-spanggg sound; an eye inside his head: it kept seeing Victor's head rising on the end of that spring, eyelids and cheeks and forehead tattooed with rosettes of blood.

Henry looked blearily to his left and saw that the houses had been replaced with a tall, black stand of hedge. Looming above it was the narrow, gloomily Victorian pile of the Theological Seminary. Not a window shone light. The Seminary had graduated its last class in June of 1974. It had closed its doors that summer, and whatever walked there now walked alone. . . and only by permission of the chattering women's club that called itself the Derry Historical Society.

He came to the walk which led up to the front door. It was barred by a heavy chain from which a metal sign hung: NO TRESPASSIN THIS ORDER ENFORCED BY DERRY POLICE DEPT.

Henry's feet tangled on this track and he fell heavily again — whap! — to the sidewalk. Up ahead, a car turned onto Kansas Street from Hawthorne. Its headlights washed down the street. Henry fought the dazzle long enough to see the lights on top: it was a fuzzmobile.

He crawled under the chain and crabbed his way to the left so he was behind the hedge. The night-dew on his hot face was wonderful. He lay face down, turning his head from side to side, wetting his cheeks, drinking what he could drink.

The police car floated by without slowing.

Then, suddenly, its bubble-lights came on, washing the darkness with erratic blue pulses of light. There was no need for the siren on the deserted streets, but Henry heard its null suddenly crank up to full revs. Rubber blistered a startled scream from the pavement.

Caught, I'm caught, his mind gibbered. . . and then he realized that the police-car was heading away from him, up Kansas Street. A moment later a hellish warbling sound filled the night, heading toward him from the south. He imagined some huge silky black cat loping through the dark, all green eyes and silky flexing pelt, It in a new shape, coming for him, coming to gobble him up.

Little by little (and only as the warbling began to veer away) he realized it was an ambulance, heading in the direction the fuzz-mobile had gone. He lay shuddering on the wet grass, too cold now, struggling

(fuzzit cousin buzzit cousin rock it roll it we got chicken in the barn what bam whose barn my)

not to vomit. He was afraid that if he vomited, all of his guts would come up. . . and there were five of them still to get.

Ambulance and police car. Where are they heading? The library, of course. The nigger. But they're too late. I greased him. Might as well turn off your sireen, boys. He ain't gonna hear it. He's just as dead as a fencepost. He — But was he?

Henry licked his peeling lips with his arid tongue. If he was dead, there would be no warbling siren in the night like the cry of a wounded panther. Not unless the nigger had called them. So maybe — just maybe — the nigger wasn't dead.

'No, ' Henry breathed. He rolled over on his back and stared up at the sky, at the billions of stars up there. It had come from there, he knew. From somewhere up in that sky. . . It

(came from outer space with a lust for Earthwomen came to rob all the women and rape all the men say Frank don't you mean rob all the men and rape all the women whoth running this show, thilly man, you or Jesse? Victor used to tell that one and that was pretty much) came from the spaces between the stars. Looking up at that starry sky gave him the creeps: it was too big, too black. It was all too possible to imagine it turning blood-red, all too possible to imagine a Face forming in lines of fire. . .

He closed his eyes, shivering and holding his arms crossed on his belly, and he thought:

The nigger is dead. Someone heard us fighting and sent the cops to investigate, that's all.

Then why the ambulance?

'Shut up, shut up, ' Henry groaned. He felt the old baffled rage again; he remembered how they had beaten him again and again in the old days — old days that seemed so close and so vital now — how, every time, when he believed he had them, they had somehow slipped through his fingers. It had been like that on the last day, after Belch saw the bitch running down Kansas Street toward the Barrens. He remembered that, oh yes, he remembered that clearly enough. When you got kicked in ht e balls, you remembered it. It had happened to him again and again that summer.

Henry struggled to a sitting position, wincing at the deep dagger of pain in his guts.

Victor and Belch had helped him down into the Barrens. He had walked as fast as he could in spite of the agony that griped and pulled at his groin and the root of his belly. The time had come to finish it. They had followed the path to a clearing from which five or six paths radiated like strands of a spider-web. Yes, there had been kids playing around there; you didn't have to be Tonto to see that. There were scraps of candy-wrapper, the curled tail of a shot-off roll of Bang caps, red and black. A few boards and a fluffy scatter of sawdust, as if something had been built there.

He remembered standing in the center of the clearing and scanning the trees, looking for their baby treehouse. He would spot it and then he would climb up and the girl would be cowering there, and he would use the knife to cut her throat and feel her titties nice and easy until they stopped moving.

But he hadn't been able to see any treehouse; neither had Belch or Victor. The old familiar frustration rose in his throat. He and Victor left Belch to guard the clearing while they went down the river. But there had been no sign of her there, either. He remembered bending over and picking up a rock and

The Barrens / 12: 55 P. M.

heaving it far down the stream, furious and bewildered. 'Where the fuck did she go? ' he demanded, wheeling toward Victor.

Victor shook his head slowly. 'Don't know, ' he said. 'You're bleeding. '

Henry looked down and saw a dark spot, the size of a quarter, on the crotch of his jeans. The pain had withdrawn to a low, throbbing ache, but his underpants felt too small and too tight. His balls were swelling. He felt that anger inside him again, something like a knotted rope around his heart. She had done this.

'Where is she? ' he hissed at Victor.

'Don't know, ' Victor said again in that same dull voice. He seemed hypnotized, sunstruck, not really there at all. 'Ran away, I guess. She could be all the way over to the Old Cape by now. '

'She's not, ' Henry said. 'She's hiding. They've got a place and she's hiding there. Maybe it's not a treehouse. Maybe it's something else. '

'What? '

'I. . . don't. . . know! ' Henry shouted, and Victor flinched back.

Henry stood in the Kenduskeag, the cold water boiling over the tops of his sneakers, looking around. His eyes fixed on a cylinder poking out of the embankment about twenty feet downstream — a pumping-station. He climbed out of the water and walked down to it, feeling a sort of necessary dread settle into him. His skin seemed to be tightening, his eyes widening so that they were able to see more and more; it seemed he could feel the tiny hairs in his ears stirring and moving like kelp in an underwater tidal flow.

Low humming came from the pumping-station, and beyond it he could see a pipe jutting out of the embankment over the Kenduskeag. A steady flow of sludge pulsed out of the pipe and ran into the water.

He leaned over the cylinder's round iron top.

'Henry? ' Victor called nervously. 'Henry? What you doing? '

Henry paid no attention. He put his eye to one of the round holes in the iron and saw nothing but blackness. He exchanged eye for ear.

'Wait. . . '

The voice drifted up to him from the blackness inside, and Henry felt his interior temperature plummet to zero, his veins and arteries freezing into crystal tubes of ice. But with these sensations came an almost unknown feeling: love. His eyes widened. A clownish smile spread his lips in a large nerveless arc. It was the voice from the moon. Now It was down in the pumping-station. . . down in the drains.

'Wait. . . watch. . . '

He waited, but there was no more: only the steady soporific drone of the pumping machinery. He walked back down to where Victor stood on the bank, watching him cautiously. Henry ignored him and hollered for Belch. In a little while Belch came.

'Come on, ' he said.

'What are we gonna do, Henry? ' Belch asked.

'Wait. Watch. '

They crept back toward the clearing and sat down. Henry tried to pull his underpants away from his aching balls, but it hurt too much.

'Henry, what — ' Belch began. 'Shhh! '

Belch fell obligingly silent. Henry had Camels but he didn't share them out. He didn't want the bitch to smell cigarette smoke if she was around. He could have explained, but there was no need. The voice had only spoken two words to him, but they seemed to explain everything. They played down here. Soon the others would come back. Why settle for just the bitch when they could have all seven of the little shitepokes?

They waited and watched. Victor and Belch seemed to have gone to sleep with their eyes open. It was not a long wait, but there was time for Henry to think of a good many things. How he had found the switchblade this morning, for instance. It wasn't the same one he'd had on the last day of school; he'd lost that one somewhere. This one looked a lot cooler.

It came in the mail.

Sort of.

He had stood on the porch, looking at their battered leaning RFD box, trying to grasp what he was seeing. The box was decked with balloons. Two were tied to the metal hook where the postman sometimes hung packages; others were tied to the flag. Red, yellow, blue, green. It was as if some weird circus had crept by on Witcham Road in the dead of night, leaving this sign.

As he approached the mailbox, he saw there were faces on the balloons — the faces of the kids who had deviled him all this summer, the kids who seemed to mock him at every turn. He had stared at these apparitions, gape-mouthed, and then the balloons popped, one by one. That had been good; it was as if he were making them pop just by thinking about it, killing them with his mind.

The front of the mailbox suddenly swung down. Henry walked toward it and peered in. Although the mailman didn't get this far out until the middle of the afternoon, he felt no surprise when he saw a flat rectangular package inside. He pulled it out. MR HENRY BOWERS, RFD #2, DERRY, MAINE, the address read. There was even a return-address of sorts: MR

ROBERT GRAY, DERRY, MAINE.

He opened the package, letting the brown paper drift down heedlessly by his feet. There was a white box inside. He opened it. Lying on a bed of white cotton had been the switchknife. He took it into the house.

His father was lying on his pallet in the bedroom they shared, surrounded by empty beer cans, his belly bulging over the top of his yellow underpants. Henry knelt beside him, listening to the snort and flutter of his father's breathing, watching his father's horsy lips purse and pucker with each breath.

Henry placed the business-end of the switchknife against his father's scrawny neck. His father moved a little and then settled back into beery sleep again. Henry kept the knife like that for almost five minutes, his eyes distant and thoughtful, the ball of his left thumb caressing the silver button set into the switchblade's neck. The voice from the moon spoke to him — it whispered like the spring wind which is warm with a cold blade buried somewhere in its middle, it buzzed like a paper nest full of roused hornets, it huckstered like a hoarse politician.

Everything the voice said seemed pretty much okey-dokey to Henry and so he pushed the silver button. There was a click inside the knife as the suicide-spring let go, and six inches of steel drove through Butch Bowers's neck. It went in as easily as the tines of a meat-fork into the breast of a well-roasted chicken. The tip of the blade popped out on the other side, dripping.

Butch's eyes flew open. He stared at the ceiling. His mouth dropped open. Blood ran from the corners of it and down his cheeks toward the lobes of his ears. He began to gurgle. A large blood-bubble formed between his slack lips and popped. One of his hands crept to Henry's knee and squeezed convulsively. Henry didn't mind. Presently the hand fell away. The gurgling noises stopped a moment later. Butch Bowers was dead.

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