It (24 page)

What did such thoughts lead to?

Why, to the idea that all this Derry-Mike Hanlon business was nothing but a hallucination. A hallucination brought on by an incipient nervous breakdown.

But the scars, Audra—how do you explain the scars? He's right. They weren't there . . . and now they are. That's the truth, and you know it.

“Tell me the rest,” she said. “Who killed your brother George? What did you and these other children do? What did you promise?”

He went to her, knelt before her like an oldfashioned suitor about to propose marriage, and took her hands.

“I think I could tell you,” he said softly. “I think that if I really
wanted to, I could. Most of it I don't remember even now, but once I started talking it would come. I can sense those memories . . . waiting to be born. They're like clouds filled with rain. Only this rain would be very dirty. The plants that grew after a rain like that would be monsters. Maybe I can face that with the others—”

“Do they know?”

“Mike said he called them all. He thinks they'll all come . . . except maybe for Stan. He said Stan sounded strange.”

“It
all
sounds strange to me. You're frightening me very badly, Bill.”

“I'm sorry,” he said, and kissed her. It was like getting a kiss from an utter stranger. She found herself hating this man Mike Hanlon. “I thought I ought to explain as much as I could; I thought that would be better than just creeping off into the night. I suppose some of them may do just that. But I have to go. And I think Stan will be there, no matter how strange he sounded. Or maybe that's just because I can't imagine not going myself.”

“Because of your brother?”

Bill shook his head slowly. “I could tell you that, but it would be a lie. I loved him. I know how strange that must sound after telling you I haven't thought of him in twenty years or so, but I loved the
hell
out of that kid.” He smiled a little. “He was a spasmoid, but I loved him. You know?”

Audra, who had a younger sister, nodded. “I know.”

“But it isn't George. I can't explain what it is. I . . .”

He looked out the window at the morning fog.

“I feel like a bird must feel when fall comes and it knows . . . somehow it just knows it has to fly home. It's instinct, babe . . . and I guess I believe instinct's the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will. Unless you're willing to take the pipe or eat the gun or take a long walk off a short dock, you can't say no to some things. You can't refuse to pick up your option because there
is
no option. You can't stop it from happening any more than you could stand at home plate with a bat in your hand and let a fastball hit you. I have to go. That promise . . . it's in my mind like a fuh-fishhook.”

She stood up and walked herself carefully to him; she felt very fragile, as if she might break. She put a hand on his shoulder and turned him to her.

“Take me with you, then.”

The expression of horror that dawned on his face then—not horror
of
her but
for
her—was so naked that she stepped back, really afraid for the first time.

“No,” he said. “Don't think of that, Audra. Don't you
ever
think of that. You're not going within three thousand miles of Derry. I think Derry's going to be a very bad place to be during the next couple of weeks. You're going to stay here and carry on and make all the excuses for me you have to. Now promise me that!”

“Should I promise?” she asked, her eyes never leaving his. “Should I, Bill?”

“Audra—”

“Should I? You made a promise, and look what it's got you into. And me as well, since I'm your wife and I love you.”

His big hands tightened painfully on her shoulders. “Promise me! Promise! P-Puh-Puh-Pruh-huh—”

And she could not stand that, that broken word caught in his mouth like a gaffed and wriggling fish.

“I promise, okay? I promise!” She burst into tears. “Are you happy now? Jesus! You're crazy, the whole thing is crazy, but I promise!”

He put an arm around her and led her to the couch. Brought her a brandy. She sipped at it, getting herself under control a little at a time.

“When do you go, then?”

“Today,” he said. “Concorde. I can just make it if I drive to Heathrow instead of taking the train. Freddie wanted me on-set after lunch. You go on ahead at nine, and you don't know anything you see?”

She nodded reluctantly.

“I'll be in New York before anything shows up funny. And in Derry before sundown, with the right c-c-connections.”

“And when do I see you again?” she asked softly.

He put an arm around her and held her tightly, but he never answered her question.

DERRY:

THE FIRST

INTERLUDE

“How many human eyes . . . had snatched glimpses of their secret anatomies, down the passages of years?”

—Clive Barker,
Books of Blood

The segment below and all other
Interlude
segments are drawn from “Derry: An Unauthorized Town History,” by Michael Hanlon. This is an unpublished set of notes and accompanying fragments of manuscript (which read almost like diary entries) found in the Derry Public Library vault. The title given is the one written on the cover of the looseleaf binder in which these notes were kept prior to their appearance here. The author, however, refers to the work several times within his own notes as “Derry: A Look Through Hell's Back Door.”

One supposes the thought of popular publication had done more than cross Mr. Hanlon's mind.

January 2nd, 1985

Can an
entire city
be haunted?

Haunted as some houses are supposed to be haunted?

Not just a single building in that city, or the corner of a single street, or a single basketball court in a single pocket-park, the netless basket jutting out at sunset like some obscure and bloody instrument of torture, not just one area—but
everything.
The whole works.

Can that be?

Listen:

Haunted: “Often visited by ghosts or spirits.” Funk and Wagnalls.

Haunting: “Persistently recurring to the mind; difficult to forget.” Ditto Funk and Friend.

To haunt: “To appear or recur often, especially as a ghost.”
But
—and listen!—
“A place often visited:
resort, den, hangout . . .” Italics are or course mine.

And one more. This one, like the last, is a definition of
haunt
as a noun, and it's the one that really scares me:
“A feeding place for animals.”

Like the animals that beat up Adrian Mellon and then threw him over the bridge?

Like the animal that was waiting underneath the bridge?

A feeding place for animals.

What's feeding in Derry? What's feeding
on
Derry?

You know, it's sort of interesting—I didn't know it was possible for a man to become as frightened as I have become since the Adrian Mellon business and still live, let alone function. It's as if I've fallen into a story, and everyone knows you're not supposed to feel this afraid until the
end
of the story, when the haunter of the dark finally comes out of the woodwork to feed . . . on you, of course.

On
you.

But if this is a story, it's not one of those classic screamers by Lovecraft or Bradbury or Poe. I know, you see—not everything, but a lot. I didn't just start when I opened the Derry
News
one day last September, read the transcript of the Unwin boy's preliminary hearing, and realized that the clown who killed George Denbrough might well be back again. I actually started around 1980—I think that is when some part of me which had been asleep woke up . . . knowing that Its time might be coming round again.

What part? The watchman part, I suppose.

Or maybe it was the voice of the Turtle. Yes . . . I rather think it was that. I know it's what Bill Denbrough would believe.

I discovered news of old horrors in old books; read intelligence of old atrocities in old periodicals; always in the back of my mind, every day a bit louder, I heard the seashell drone of some growing, coalescing force; I seemed to smell the bitter ozone aroma of lightnings-to-come. I began making notes for a book I will almost certainly not live to write. And at the same time I went on with my life. On one level of my mind I was and am living with the most grotesque, capering horrors; on another I have continued to live the mundane life of a small-city librarian. I shelve books; I make out library cards for new patrons; I turn off the microfilm readers careless users sometimes leave on; I joke with Carole Danner about how much I would like to go to bed with her, and she jokes back about how much she'd like to go to bed with me, and both of us know that she's really joking and I'm really not, just as both of us know that she won't stay in a little place like Derry for long and I will be here until I die, taping torn pages in
Business Week,
sitting down at monthly acquisition meetings with my pipe in one hand and a stack of
Library Journals
in the other . . . and waking in the middle of the night with my fists jammed against my mouth to keep in the screams.

The gothic conventions are all wrong. My hair has not turned white. I do not sleepwalk. I have not begun to make cryptic comments or to carry a planchette around in my sportcoat pocket. I think I laugh a little more, that's all, and sometimes it must seem a little shrill and strange, because sometimes people look at me oddly when I laugh.

Part of me—the part Bill would call the voice of the Turtle—says I should call them all, tonight. But am I, even now, completely sure? Do I
want
to be completely sure? No—of course not. But God, what happened to Adrian Mellon is so much like what happened to Stuttering Bill's brother, George, in the fall of 1957.

If it
has
started again, I
will
call them. I'll have to. But not yet. It's too early anyway. Last time it began slowly and didn't really get going until the summer of 1958. So . . . I wait. And fill up the waiting with words in this notebook and long moments of looking into the mirror to see the stranger the boy became.

The boy's face was bookish and timid; the man's face is the face of a bank teller in a Western movie, the fellow who never has any lines, the one who just gets to put his hands up and look scared when the robbers come in. And if the script calls for anyone to get shot by the bad guys, he's the one.

Same old Mike. A little starey in the eyes, maybe, and a little punchy from broken sleep, but not so's you'd notice without a good close look . . . like kissing-distance close, and I haven't been that close to anyone in a very long time. If you took a casual glance at me you might think
He's been reading too many books,
but that's all. I doubt you'd guess how hard the man with the mild bank-teller's face is now struggling just to hold on, to hold on to his own mind. . . .

If I have to make those calls, it may kill some of them.

That's one of the things I've had to face on the long nights when sleep won't come, nights when I lie there in bed wearing my conservative blue pajamas, my spectacles neatly folded up and lying on the nighttable next to the glass of water I always put there in case I wake up thirsty in the night. I lie there in the dark and I take small sips of the water and I wonder how much—or how little—they remember. I am somehow convinced that they don't remember
any
of it, because
they don't
need
to remember. I'm the only one that hears the voice of the Turtle, the only one who remembers, because I'm the only one who stayed here in Derry. And because they're scattered to the four winds, they have no way of knowing the identical patterns their lives have taken. To bring them back, to show them that pattern . . . yes, it might kill some of them. It might kill
all
of them.

So I go over it and over it in my mind; I go over
them,
trying to re-create them as they were and as they might now be, trying to decide which of them is the most vulnerable. Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier, I think sometimes—he was the one Criss, Huggins, and Bowers seemed to catch up with the most often, in spite of the fact that Ben was so fat. Bowers was the one Richie was the most scared of—the one we were all the most scared of—but the others used to really put the fear of God into him, too. If I call him out there in California would he see it as some horrible Return of the Big Bullies, two from the grave and one from the madhouse in Juniper Hill where he raves to this day? Sometimes I think Eddie was the weakest, Eddie with his domineering tank of a mother and his terrible case of asthma. Beverly? She always tried to talk so tough, but she was as scared as the rest of us. Stuttering Bill, faced with a horror that won't go away when he puts the cover on his typewriter? Stan Uris?