Missing boy prompts New fears 19 страница

Bill hitched up his pants, flipped up the collar of his shirt, and began to slouch around in a kind of moody, hoody strut. His voice dropped down low and he said, 'I'm gonna killya, kid. Don't gimme no crap. I'm dumb but I'm big. I can crack walnuts with my forehead. I can piss vinegar and shit cement. My name's Honeybunch Bowers and I'm the boss prick round deseyere Derry parts.'

Eddie had collapsed to the stream-bank now and was rolling around, clutching his stomach and howling. Ben was doubled up, head between his knees, tears spouting from his eyes, snot hanging from his nose in long white runners, laughing like a hyena.

Bill sat down with them, and little by little the three of them quieted.

'There's one really good thing about it,' Eddie said presently. 'If Bowers is in summer school, we won't see him much down here.'

'You play in the Barrens a lot?' Ben asked. It was an idea that never would have crossed his own mind in a thousand years — not with the reputation the Barrens had — but now that he was down here, it didn't seem bad at all. In fact, this stretch of the low bank was very pleasant as the afternoon made its slow way toward dusk.

'S-S-Sure. It's n-neat. M-Mostly n-nobody b-buh-bothers u-us down h-here. We guh-guhhoof off a lot. B-B-Bowers and those uh-other g-guys don't come d-down here eh-ehanyway.'

'You and Eddie?'

'Ruh-Ruh-Ruh — ' Bill shook his head. His face knotted up like a wet dishrag when he stuttered, Ben noticed, and suddenly an odd thought occurred to him: Bill hadn't stuttered at all when he was mocking the way Henry Bowers talked. 'Richie!' Bill exclaimed now, paused a moment, and then went on. 'Richie T-Tozier usually c-comes down, too. But h-him and his d-dad were going to clean out their ah-ah-ah — '

'Attic,' Eddie translated, and tossed a stone into the water. Plonk.

'Yeah, I know him,' Ben said. 'You guys come down here a lot, huh?' The idea fascinated him — and made him feel a stupid sort of longing as well.

'Puh-Puh-Pretty much,' Bill said. 'Wuh-Why d-don't you c-c-come back down tuh-huhmorrow? M-Me and E-E-Eddie were tub-trying to make a duh-duh-ham.'

Ben could say nothing. He was astounded not only by the offer but by the simple and unstudied casualness with which it had come.

'Maybe we ought to do something else,' Eddie said. 'The dam wasn't working so hot anyway.'

Ben got up and walked down to the stream, brushing the dirt from his huge hams. There were still matted piles of small branches at either side of the stream, but anything else they'd put together had washed away.

'You ought to have some boards,' Ben said. 'Get boards and put em in a row... facing each other... like the bread of a sandwich.'

Bill and Eddie were looking at him, puzzled. Ben dropped to one knee. 'Look,' he said.

'Boards here and here. You stick em in the streambed facing each other. Okay? Then, before the water can wash them away, you fill up the space between them with rocks and sand — '

'Wuh-Wuh-We,' Bill said.

'Huh?'

'Wuh-We do it.'

'Oh,' Ben said, feeling (and looking, he was sure) extremely stupid. But he didn't care if he looked stupid, because he suddenly felt very happy. He couldn't even remember the last time he felt this happy. 'Yeah. We. Anyway, if you — we — fill up the space in between with rocks and stuff, it'll stay. The upstream board will lean back against the rocks and dirt as the

water piles up. The second board would tilt back and wash away after awhile, I guess, but if we had a third board... well, look.'

He drew in the dirt with a stick. Bill and Eddie Kaspbrak leaned over and studied this little drawing with sober interest:

'You ever built a dam before?' Eddie asked. His tone was respectful, almost awed.

'Nope.'

'Then h-h-how do you know this'll w-w-work?'

Ben looked at Bill, puzzled. 'Sure it will,' he said. 'Why wouldn't it?'

'But h-how do you nuh-nuh- know?' Bill asked. Ben recognize d the tone of the question as one not of sarcastic disbelief but honest interest. 'H-How can y-you tell?'

'I just know,' Ben said. He looked down at his drawing in the dirt again as if to confirm it to himself. He had never seen a cofferdam in his life, either in diagram or in fact, and had no idea that he had just drawn a pretty fair representation of one.

'O-Okay,' Bill said, and clapped Ben on the back. 'S-See you tuh-huh-morrow.'

'What time?'

'M-Me and Eh-Eddie'll g-get here by eh-eh-eight-th-thirty or so — '

'If me and my mom aren't still waiting at the Mergency Room,' Eddie said, and sighed.

'I'll bring some boards,' Ben said. 'This old guy on the next block's got a bunch of 'em. I'll hawk a few.'

'Bring some supplies, too,' Eddie said. 'Stuff to eat. You know, like san-widges, RingDings, stuff like that.'

'Okay.'

'You g-g-got any guh-guh-guns?'

'I got my Daisy air rifle,' Ben said. 'My mom gave it to me for Christmas, but she gets mad if I shoot it off in the house.'

'B-Bring it d-d-down,' Bill said. 'We'll play g-guns, maybe.'

'Okay,' Ben said happily. 'Listen, I got to split for home, you guys.'

'Uh-Us, too,' Bill said.

The three of them left the Barrens together. Ben helped Bill push Silver up the embankment. Eddie trailed behind them, wheezing again and looking unhappily at his bloodspotted shirt. Bill said goodbye and then pedaled off, shouting 'Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYY!' at the top of his lungs.

'That's a gigantic bike,' Ben said.

'Bet your fur,' Eddie said. He had taken another gulp from his aspirator and was breathing normally again. 'He rides me double sometimes on the back. Goes so fast it just about scares the crap outta me. He's a good man, Bill is.' He said this last in an offhand way, but his eyes said something more emphatic. They were worshipful. 'You know about what happened to his brother, don't you?'

'No — what about him?'

'Got killed last fail. Some guy killed him. Pulled one of his arms right off, just like pulling a wing off n a fly.'

'Jeezum- crow!'

'Bill, he used to only stutter a little. Now it's really bad. Did you notice that he stutters?'

'Well... a little.'

'But his brains don't stutter — get what I mean?'

'Yeah.'

'Anyway, I just told you because if you want Bill to be your friend, it's better not to talk to him about his little brother. Don't ask him questions or anythin. He's all frigged up about it.'

'Man, I would be, too,' Ben said. He remembered now, vaguely, about the little kid who had been killed the previous fall. He wondered if his mother had been thinking about George Denbrough when she gave him the watch he now wore, or only about the more recent killings. 'Did it happen right after the big flood?'

'Yeah.'

They had reached the corner of Kansas and Jackson, where they would have to split up. Kids ran here and there, playing tag and throwing baseballs. One dorky little kid in big blue shorts went trotting self-importantly past Ben and Eddie, wearing a Davy Crockett coonskin backward so that the tail hung down between his eyes. He was rolling a Hula Hoop and yelling 'Hoop-tag, you guys! Hoop-tag, wanna?'

The two bigger boys looked after him, amused, and then Eddie said: 'Well, I gotta go.'

'Wait a sec,' Ben said. 'I got an idea, if you really don't want to go to the Mergency Room.'

'Oh yeah?' Eddie looked at Ben, doubtful but wanting to hope.

'You got a nickel?'

'I got a dime. So what?'

Ben eyed the drying maroon splotches on Eddie's shirt. 'Stop at the store and get a chocolate milk. Pour about half of it on your shirt. Then when you get home tell your mama you spilled all of it.'

Eddie's eyes brightened. In the four years since his dad had died, his mother's eyesight had worsened considerably. For reasons of vanity (and because she didn't know how to drive a car), she refused to see an optometrist and get glasses. Dried bloodstains and chocolate milk stains looked about the same. Maybe...

'That might work,' he said.

'Just don't tell her it was my idea if she finds out.'

'I won't,' Eddie said. 'Seeya later, alligator.'

'Okay.'

'No,' Eddie said patiently. 'When I say that you're supposed to say, "After awhile, crocodile."'

'Oh. After awhile, crocodile.'

'You got it.' Eddie smiled.

'You know something?' Ben said. 'You guys are really cool.'

Eddie looked more than embarrassed; he looked almost nervous. 'Bill is,' he said, and started off.

Ben watched him go down Jackson Street, and then turned toward home. Three blocks up the street he saw three all-too-familiar figures standing at the bus stop on the corner of Jackson and Main. They were mostly turned away from Ben, which was damned lucky for him. He ducked behind a hedge, his heart beating hard. Five minutes later the DerryNewport-Haven interurban bus pulled up. Henry and his friends pitched their butts into the street and swung aboard.

Ben waited until the bus was out of sight and then hurried home.

That night a terrible thing happened to Bill Denbrough. It happened for the second time. His mom and dad were downstairs watching TV, not talking much, sitting at either end of the couch like bookends. There had been a time when the TV room opening off the kitchen would have been full of talk and laughter, sometimes so much of both you couldn't hear the TV at all. 'Shut up, Georgie!' Bill would roar. 'Stop hogging all the popcorn and I will,'

George would return. 'Ma, make Bill give me the popcorn.' 'Bill, give him the popcorn. George, don't call me Ma. Ma's a sound a sheep makes.' Or his dad would tell a joke and they would all laugh, even Mom. George didn't always get the jokes, Bill knew, but he laughed because everyone else was laughing.

In those days his mom and dad had also been bookends on the couch, but he and George had been the books. Bill had tried to be a book between them while they were watching TV

since George's death, but it was cold work. They sent the cold out from both directions and Bill's defroster was simply not big enough to cope with it. He had to leave because that kind of cold always froze his cheeks and made his eyes water.

'W-Want to h-hear a joke I heard today in s-s-school?' he had tried once, some months ago. Silence from them. On television a criminal was begging his brother, who was a priest, to hide him.

Bill's dad glanced up from the True he was looking at and glanced at Bill with mild surprise. Then he looked back down at the magazine again. There was a picture of a hunter sprawled in a snowbank and staring up at a huge snarling polar bear. 'Mauled by the Killer from the White Wastes' was the name of the article. Bill had thought, I know where there's some white wastes — right between my dad and mom on this couch.

His mother had never looked up at all.

'It's about h-how many F-F-Frenchmen it takes to sc-c-herew in a luhhh-hightbulb,' Bill plunged ahead. He felt a fine mist of sweat spring out upon his forehead, as it sometimes did in school when he knew the teacher had ignored him as long as she safely could and must soon call on him. His voice was too loud, but he couldn't seem to lower it. The words echoed in his head like crazy chimes, echoing, jamming up, spilling out again.

'D-D-Do you know h-h-how muh-muh-many?'

'One to hold the bulb and four to turn the house,' Zack Denbrough said absently, and turned the page of his magazine.

'Did you say something, dear?' his mother asked, and on Four Star Playhouse the brother who was a priest told the brother who was a hoodlum to turn himself in and pray for forgiveness.

Bill sat there, sweating but cold — so cold. It was cold because he wasn't really the only book between those two ends; Georgie was still there, only now it was a Georgie he couldn't see, a Georgie who never demanded the popcorn or hollered that Bill was pinching. This new version of George never cut up dickens. It was a one-armed Georgie who was palely, thoughtfully silent in the Motorola's shadowy white -and-blue glow, and perhaps it was not from his parents but from George that the big chill was really coming; perhaps it was George who was the real killer from the white wastes. Finally Bill had fled from that cold, invisible brother and into his room, where he lay face down on his bed and cried into his pillow. George's room was just as it had been on the day he died. Zack had put a bunch of George's toys into a canon one day about two weeks after he was buried, meaning them for the Goodwill or the Salvation Army or someplace like that, Bill supposed. Sharon Denbrough had spotted him coming out with the box in his arms and her hands had flown to her head like startled white birds and plunged themselves deep into her hair where they locked themselves into pulling fists. Bill had seen this and had fallen against the wall, the strength suddenly running out of his legs. His mother looked as mad as Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein.

'Don't you DARE take his things!' she had screeched.

Zack flinched and then took the box of toys back into George's room without a word. He even put them back in exactly the same places from which he had taken them. Bill came in and saw his father kneeling by George's bed (which his mother still changed, although only once a week now instead of twice) with his head on his hairy muscular forearms. Bill saw his father was crying, and this increased his terror. A frightening possibility suddenly occurred to him: maybe sometimes things didn't just go wrong and then stop; maybe sometimes they just kept going wronger and wronger until everything was totally fucked up.

'D-Duh-Dad — '

'Go on, Bill,' his father said. His voice was muffled and shaking. His back went up and down. Bill badly wanted to touch his father's back, to see if perhaps his hand might be able to still that restless heaving. He did not quite dare. 'Go on, buzz off.'

He left and went creeping along the upstairs hall, hearing his mother doing her own crying down in the kitchen. The sound was shrill and helpless. Bill thought, Why are they crying so far apart? and then he shoved the thought away.

On the first night of summer vacation Bill went into Georgie's room. His heart was beating heavily in his chest, and his legs felt stiff and awkward with tension. He came to George's room often, but that didn't mean he liked it in here. The room was so full of George's presence that it felt haunted. He came in and couldn't help thinking that the closet door might creak open at any moment and there would be Georgie among the shirts and pants still neatly hung in there, a Georgie dressed in a rainslicker covered with red splotches and streaks, a rainslicker with one dangling yellow arm. George's eyes would be blank and terrible, the eyes of a zombie in a horror movie. When he came out of the closet his galoshes would make squishy sounds as he walked across the room toward where Bill sat on his bed, a frozen block of terror —

If the power had gone out some evening while he sat here on George's bed, looking at the pictures on George's wall or the models on top of George's dresser, he felt sure a heart attack, probably fatal, would ensue in the next ten seconds or so. But he went anyway. Warring with his terror of George -the-ghost was a mute and grasping need — a hunger — to somehow get over George's death and find a decent way to go on. Not to forget George but somehow to find a way to make him not so fucking gruesome. He understood that his parents were not succeeding very well with that, and if he was going to do it for himself, he would have to do it by himself.

Nor was it just for himself that he came; he came for Georgie as well. He had loved George, and for brothers they had gotten along pretty well. Oh, they had their pissy moments

— Bill giving George a good old Indian rope-burn, George tattling on Bill when Bill snuck downstairs after lights-out and ate the rest of the lemon-cream frosting — but mostly they got along. Bad enough that George should be dead. For him to turn George into some kind of horror-monster... that was even worse.

He missed the little kid, that was the truth. Missed his voice, his laughter — missed the way George's eyes sometimes tipped confidently up to his own, sure that Bill would have whatever answers were required. And one surpassingly odd thing: there were times when he felt he loved George best in his fear, because even in his fear — his uneasy feelings that a zombie-George might be lurking in the closet or under the bed — he could remember loving George better in here, and George loving him. In his effort to reconcile these two emotions —

his love and his terror — Bill felt that he was closest to finding where final acceptance lay. These were not things of which he could have spoken; to his mind the ideas were nothing but an incoherent jumble. But his warm and desiring heart understood, and that was all that mattered.

Sometimes he looked through George's books, sometimes he sifted through George's toys. He hadn't looked in George's photograph album since last December. Now, on the night after meeting Ben Hanscom, Bill opened the door of George's closet (steeling himself as always to meet the sight of Georgie himself, standing in his bloody slicker amid the hanging clothes, expecting as always to see one pallid, fish-fingered hand come pistoning out of the dark to grip his arm) and took the album down from the top shelf. MY PHOTOGRAPHS, the gold script on the front read. Below, Scotch-taped on (the tape was now slightly yellow and peeling), the carefully printed words GEORGE ELMER DENBROUGH, AGE 6. Bill took it back to the bed Georgie had slept in, his heart beating heavier than ever. He couldn't tell what had made him get the photograph album down again. After what had happened in December...

A second look, that's all. Just to convince yourself that it wasn't real the first time. That the first time was just your head playing a trick on itself.

Well, it was an idea, anyway.

It might even be true. But Bill suspected it was just the album itself. It held a certain mad fascination for him. What he had seen, or what he thought he had seen —

He opened the album now. It was filled with pictures George had gotten his mother, father, aunts, and uncles to give him. George didn't care if they were pictures of people and places he knew or not; it was the idea of photography itself which fascinated him. When he had been unsuccessful at pestering anyone into giving him new photos to mount he would sit crosslegged on his bed where Bill was sitting now and look at the old ones, turning the pages carefully, studying the black-and-white Kodaks. Here was their mother when she was young and impossibly gorgeous; here their father, no more than eighteen, one of a trio of smiling rifle-toting young men standing over the open-eyed corpse of a deer; Uncle Hoyt standing on some rocks and holding up a pickerel; Aunt Fortuna, at the Derry Agricultural Fair, kneeling proudly beside a basket of tomatoes she had raised; an old Buick automobile; a church; a house; a road that went from somewhere to somewhere. All these pictures, snapped by lost somebodies for lost reasons, locked up here in a dead boy's album of photographs. Here Bill saw himself at three, propped up in a hospital bed with a turban of bandages covering his hair. Bandages went down his cheeks and under his fractured jaw. He had been struck by a car in the parking lot of the A&P on Center Street. He remembered very little of his hospital stay, only that they had given him ice-cream milk shakes through a straw and his head had ached dreadfully for three days.

Here was the whole family on the lawn of the house, Bill standing by his mother and holding her hand, and George, only a baby, sleeping in Zack's arms. And here —

It wasn't the end of the book, but it was the last page that mattered, because the following ones were all blank. The final picture was George's school picture, taken in October of last year, less than ten days before he died. In it George was wearing a crew-neck shirt. His flyaway hair was slicked down with water. He was grinning, revealing two empty slots in which new teeth would never grow — unless they keep on growing after you die, Bill thought, and shuddered.

He looked at the picture fixedly for some time and was about to close the book when what had happened in December happened again.

George's eyes rolled in the picture. They turned up to meet Bill's own. George's artificial say-cheese smile turned into a horrid leer. His right eye drooped closed in a wink: See you soon, Bill. In my closet. Maybe tonight.

Bill threw the book across the room. He clapped his hands over his mouth. The book struck the wall and fell to the floor, open. The pages turned, although there was no draft. The book opened itself to that awful picture again, the picture which said SCHOOL

FRIENDS 1957-58 beneath it.

Blood began to flow from the picture.

Bill sat frozen, his tongue a swelling choking lump in his mouth, his skin crawling, his hair lifting. He wanted to scream but the tiny whimpering sounds crawling out of his throat seemed to be the best he could manage.

The blood flowed across the page and began to drip onto the floor. Bill fled the room, slammjng the door behind him.

C H A P T E R 6

One of the Missing:

A Tale from the Summer of '58

They weren't all found. No; they weren't all found. And from time to time wrong assumptions were made.

From the Derry News, June 21st, 1958 (page 1):

MISSING BOY PROMPTS NEW FEARS

Edward L. Corcoran, of 73 Charter Street, Derry, was reported missing last night by his mother, Monica Macklin, and his stepfather, Richard P. Macklin. The Corcoran boy is ten. His disappearance has prompted new fears that Derry's young people are being stalked by a killer.

Mrs Macklin said the boy had been missing since June 19th, when he failed to return home from school after the last day of classes before summer vacation. When asked why they had delayed over twenty-four hours before reporting their son's absence, Mr and Mrs Macklin refused comment. Police Chief Richard Borton also declined comment, but a Police Department source told the News that the Corcoran boy's relationship with his stepfather was not a good one, and that he had spent nights out of the house before. The source speculated that the boy's final grades may have playe d a part in the boy's failure to turn up. Derry School Superintendent Harold Metcalf declined comment on the Corcoran boy's grades, pointing out they are not a matter of public record.

'I hope the disappearance of this boy will not cause unnecessary fears,' Chief Borton said last night. The mood of the community is understandably uneasy, but I want to emphasize that we log thirty to fifty missing-persons reports on minors each and every year. Most turn up alive and well within a week of the initial report. This will be the case with Edward Corcoran, God willing.'

Borton also reiterated his conviction that the murders of George Denbrough, Betty Ripsom, Cheryl Lamonica, Matthew Clements, and Veronica Grogan were not the work of one person. 'There are essential differences in each crime,' Borton said, but declined to elaborate. He said that local police, working in close co-operation with the Maine State Attorney General's office, are still following up a number of leads. Asked in a telephone interview last night how good these leads are, Chief Borton replied: 'Very good.' Asked if an arrest in any of the crimes was expected soon, Borton declined comment.

From the Derry News, June 22nd, 1958 (page 1):

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