Missing boy prompts New fears 13 страница

But.

But:

In 1851 a crew of lumber jacks 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 foreman, 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 slicks 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.

'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

C H A P T E R 4

Ben Hanscom Takes a Fall

Around 11:45 PM., one of the stews serving first class on the Omaha-to-Chicago run —

United Airlines's 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 — if you 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 other 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 helluva mess with that dam. I remember that.'

'Stewardess? '

'Excuse me, sir — I ought to get about my appointed rounds again.'

'Of course you should.'

She hurries away, glad to be rid of that gaze — that deadly, almost hypnotic gaze. Ben Hanscom turns his head to the window and looks out. Lightning goes off inside huge thunderheads nine miles off the starboard wing. In the stutter-flashes of light, the clouds look like huge transparent brains filled with bad thoughts.

He feels in the pocket of his vest, but the silver dollars are gone. Out of his pocket and into Ricky Lee's. Suddenly he wishes he had saved at least one of them. It might have come in handy. Of course you could go down to any bank — at least when you weren't bumping around at twenty-seven thousand feet you could — and get a handful of silver dollars, but you couldn't do anything with the lousy copper sandwiches the government was trying to pass off as real coins these days. And for werewolves and vampires and all manner of things that squirm by starlight, it was silver you wanted; honest silver. You needed silver to stop a monster. You needed —

He closed his eyes. The air around him was full of chimes. The plane rocked and rolled and bumped and the air was full of chimes. Chimes?

No... bells.

It was bells, it was the bell, the bell of all bells, the one you waited for all year once the new wore off school again, and that always happened by the end of the first week. The bell, the one that signalled freedom again, the apotheosis of all school bells. Ben Hanscom sits in his first-class seat, suspended amid the thunders at twenty-seven thousand feet, his face turned to the window, and he feels the wall of time grow suddenly thin; some terrible/wonderful peristalsis has begun to take place. He thinks; My God, I am being digested by my own past.

The lightning plays fitfully across his face, and although he does not know it, the day has just turned. May 28th, 1985, has become May 29th over the dark and stormy country that is western Illinois tonight; farmers backsore with plantings sleep like the dead below and dream their quicksilver dreams and who knows what may move in their barns and their cellars and their fields as the lightning walks and the thunder talks? No one knows these things; they know only that power is loose in the night, and the air is crazy with the big volts of the storm.

But it's bells at twenty-seven thousand feet as the plane breaks into the clear again, as its motion steadies again; it is bells; it is the bell as Ben Hanscom sleeps; and as he sleeps the wall between past and present disappears completely and he tumbles backward through years like a man falling down a deep well-Wells's Time Traveller, perhaps, falling with a broken iron rung in one hand, down and down into the land of the Morlocks, where machines pound on and on in the tunnels of the night. It's 1981, 1977, 1969; and suddenly he is here, here in June of 1958; bright summerlight is everywhere and behind sleeping eyelids Ben Hanscom's pupils contract at the command of his dreaming brain, which sees not the darkness which lies over western Illinois but the bright sunlight of a June day in Derry, Maine, twenty-seven yean ago.

Bells.

The bell.

School.

School is.

School is

out!

The sound of the bell went burring up and down the halls of Derry School, a big brick building which stood on Jackson Street, and at its sound the children in Ben Hanscom's fifthgrade classroom raised a spontaneous cheer — and Mrs Douglas, usually the strictest of teachers, made no effort to quell them. Perhaps she knew it would have been impossible.

'Children!' she called when the cheer died. 'May I have your attention for a final moment?'

Now a babble of excited chatter, mixed with a few groans, rose in the classroom. Mrs Douglas was holding their report cards in her hand.

'I sure hope I pass!' Sally Mueller said chirpily to Bev Marsh, who sat in the next row. Sally was bright, pretty, vivacious. Bev was also pretty, but there was nothing vivacious about her this afternoon, last day of school or not. She sat looking moodily down at her penny-loafers. There was a fading yellow bruise on one of her cheeks.

'I don't give a shit if I do or not,' Bev said.

Sally sniffed. Ladies don't use such language, the sniff said. Then she turned to Greta Bowie. It had probably only been the excitement of the bell signalling the end of another school-year that had caused Sally to slip and speak to Beverly anyhow, Ben thought. Sally Mueller and Greta Bowie both came from rich families with houses on West Broadway while Bev came to school from one of those shimmy apartment buildings on Lower Main Street. Lower Main Street and West Broadway were only a mile and a half apart, but even a kid like Ben knew that the real distance was like the distance between Earth and the planet Pluto. All you had to do was look at Beverly Marsh's cheap sweater, her too-big skirt that probably came from the Salvation Army thrift-box, and her scuffed penny-loafers to know just how far one was from the other. But Ben still liked Beverly better — a lot better. Sally and Greta had nice clothes, and he guessed they probably had their hair permed or waved or something every month or so, but he didn't think that changed the basic facts at all. They could get their hair permed every day and they'd still be a couple of conceited snots. He thought Beverly was nicer... and much prettier, although he never in a million years would have dared say such a thing to her. But still, sometimes, in the heart of winter when the light outside seemed yellow-sleepy, like a cat curled up on a sofa, when Mrs Douglas was droning on about mathematics (how to carry down in long division or how to find the common denominator of two fractions so you could add them) or reading the questions from Shining Bridges or talking about tin deposits in Paraguay, on those days when it seemed that school would never end and it didn't matter if it didn't because all the world outside was slush

... on those days Ben would sometimes look sideways at Beverly, stealing her face, and his heart would both hurt desperately and somehow grow brighter at the same time. He supposed he had a crush on her, or was in love with her, and that was why it was always Beverly he thought of when the Penguins came on the radio singing 'Earth Angel' — 'my darling dear /

love you all the time... ' Yeah, it was stupid, all right, sloppy as a used Kleenex, but it was all right, too, because he would never tell. He thought that fat boys were probably only allowed to love pretty girls inside. If he told anyone how he felt (not that he had anyone to tell), that person would probably laugh until he had a heart-attack. And if he ever told Beverly, she would either laugh herself (bad), or make retching noises of disgust (worse).

'Now please come up as soon as I call your name. Paul Andersen... Carla Bordeaux... Greta Bowie... Calvin Clark... Cissy Clark... '

As she called their names, Mrs Douglas's fifth-grade class came forward one by one (except for the Clark twins, who came together as always, hand in hand, indistinguishable except for the length of their white-blonde hair and the fact that she wore a dress while he wore jeans), took their buff-colored report cards with the American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance on the front and the Lord's Prayer on the back, walked sedately out of the classroom... and then pounded down the hall to where the big front doors had been chocked open. And then they simply ran out into summer and were gone: some on bikes, some skipping, some riding invisible horses and slapping their hands against the sides of their thighs to manufacture hoofbeats, some with arms slung about each other, singing 'Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school' to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.'

'Marcia Fadden... Frank Frick... Ben Hanscom... '

He rose, stealing his last glance at Beverly Marsh for the summer (or so he thought then), and went forward to Mrs Douglas's desk, an eleven-year-old kid with a can roughly the size of New Mexico — said can packed into a pair of horrid new blue-jeans that shone little darts of light from the copper rivets and went whssht-whssht-whssht as his big thighs brushed together. His hips swung girlishly. His stomach slid from side to side. He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt although the day was warm. He almost always wore baggy sweatshirts because he was deeply ashamed of his chest and had been since the first day of school after the Christmas vacation, when he had worn one of the new Ivy League shuts his mother had given him, and Belch Huggins, who was a sixthgrader, had cawed: 'Hey, you guys! Lookit what Santy Claus brought Ben Hanscom for Christmas! A big set of titties!' Belch had nearly collapsed with the deliciousness of his wit. Others had laughed as well — a few of them girls. If a hole leading into the underworld had opened before him at that very moment, Ben would have dropped into it without a sound... or perhaps with the faintest murmur of gratitude. Since that day he wore sweatshirts. He had four of them — the baggy brown, the baggy green, and two baggy blues. It was one of the few things on which he had managed to stand up to his mother, one of the few lines he had ever, in the course of his mostly complacent childhood, felt compelled to draw in the dust. If he had seen Beverly Marsh giggling with the others that day, he supposed he would have died.

'It's been a pleasure having you this year, Benjamin,' Mrs Douglas said as she handed him his report card.

'Thank you, Mrs Douglas.'

A mocking falsetto wavered from somewhere at the back of the room: 'Sank -ooo, Missus Dougwiss.'

It was Henry Bowers, of course. Henry was in Ben's fifth-grade class instead of in the sixth grade with his friends Belch Huggins and Victor Criss because he had been kept back the year before. Ben had an idea that Bowers was going to stay back again. His name had not been called when Mrs Douglas handed out the rank-cards, and that meant trouble. Ben was uneasy about this, because if Henry did stay back again, Ben himself would be partly responsible... and Henry knew it.

During the year's final tests the week before, Mrs Douglas had reseated them at random by drawing their names from a hat on her desk. Ben had ended up sitting next to Henry Bowers in the last row. As always, Ben curled his arm around his paper and then bent close to it, feeling the somehow comforting press of his gut against his desk, licking his Be-Bop pencil occasionally for inspiration.

About halfway through Tuesday's examination, which happened to be math, a whisper drifted across the aisle to Ben. It was as low and uncarrying and expert as the whisper of a veteran con passing a message in the prison exercise yard: 'Let me copy.'

Ben had looked to his left and directly into the black and furious eyes of Henry Bowers. Henry was a big boy even for twelve. His arms and legs were thick with farm-muscle. His father, who was reputed to be crazy, had a little spread out at the end of Kansas Street, near the Newport town line, and Henry put in at least thirty hours a week hoeing, weeding, planting, digging rocks, cutting wood, and reaping, if there was anything to reap. Henry's hair was cut in an angry-looking flattop short enough for the white of his scalp to show through. He Butch-Waxed the front with a tube he always carrie d in the hip pocket of his jeans, and as a result the hair just above his forehead looked like the teeth of an oncoming power-mower. An odor of sweat and Juicy Fruit gum always hung about him. He wore a pink motorcycle jacket with an eagle on the back to school. Once a fourthgrader was unwise enough to laugh at that jacket. Henry had turned on the little squirt, Umber as a weasel and quick as an adder, and double-pumped the squirt with one work-grimed fist. The squirt lost three front teeth. Henry got a two-week vacation from school. Ben had hoped, with the unfocused yet burning hope of the downtrodden and terrorized, that Henry would be expelled instead of suspended. No such luck. Bad pennies always turned up. His suspension over, Henry had swaggered back into the schoolyard, balefully resplendent in his pink motorcycle jacket, hair Butch-Waxed so heavily that it seemed to scream up from his skull. Both eyes bore the puffed, colorful traces of the beating his crazy father had administered for 'fighting in the playyard.' The traces of the beating eventually faded; for the kids who had to somehow coexist with Henry at Derry, the lesson did not. To the best of Ben's knowledge, no one had said anything about Henry's pink motorcycle jacket with the eagle on the back since then. When he whispered grimly at Ben to let him copy, three thoughts had gone skyrocketing through Ben's mind — which was every bit as lean and quick as his body was obese — in a space of seconds. The first was that if Mrs Douglas caught Henry cheating answers off his paper, both of them would get zeros on their tests. The second was that if he didn't let Henry copy, Henry would almost surely catch him after school and administer the fabled doublepump to him, probably with Huggins holding one of his arms and Criss holding the other. These were the thoughts of a child, and there was nothing surprising about that, because he was a child. The third and last thought, however, was more sophisticated — almost adult. He might get me, all right. But maybe I can keep out of his way for the last week of school. I'm pretty sure I can, if I really try. And he'll forget over the summer, I think. Yeah. He's pretty stupid. If he flunks this test, maybe he'll stay back again. And if he stays back I'll get ahead of him. I won't be in the same room with him anymore.... I'll get to junior high before he does. I... I might be free.

'Let me copy,' Henry whispered again. His black eyes were now blazing, demanding. Ben shook his head and curle d his arm more tightly around his paper. I'll get you, fatboy,' Henry whispered, a little louder now. His paper was so far an utter blank save for his name. He was desperate. If he flunked his exams and stayed back again, his father would beat his brains out. 'You let me copy or I'll get you bad.'

Ben shook his head again, his jowls quivering. He was scared, but he was also determined. He realized that for the first time in his life he had consciously committed himself to a course of action, and that also frightened him, although he didn't exactly know why — it would be long years before he would realize it was the cold-bloodedness of his calculations, the careful and pragmatic counting of the cost, with its intimations of onrushing adulthood, that had scared him even more than Henry had scared him. Henry he might be able to dodge. Adulthood, where he would probably think in such a way almost all the time, would get him in the end.

'Is someone talking back there?' Mrs Douglas had said then, very clearly. 'If so, I want it to stop right now.'

Silence had prevailed for the next ten minutes; young heads remained studiously bent over examination sheets which smelled of fragrant purple mimeograph ink, and then Henry's whisper had floated across the aisle again, thin, just audible, chilling in the calm assurance of its promise: 'You're dead, fatboy.'

Ben took his rank-card and escaped, grateful to whatever gods there are for eleven-year-old fatboys that Henry Bowers had not, by virtue of alphabetical order, been allowed to escape the classroom first so he could lay for Ben outside.

He did not run down the corridor like the other children. He could run, and quite fast for a kid his size, but he was acutely aware of how funny he looked when he did. He walked fast, though, and emerged from the cool book-smelling hall and into the bright June sunshine. He stood with his face turned up into that sunshine for a moment, grateful for its warmth and his freedom. September was a million years from today. The calendar might say something different, but what the calendar said was a lie. The summer would be much longer than the sum of its days, and it belonged to him. He felt as tall as the Standpipe and as wide as the whole town.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26