It (49 page)

The work did not just go forward; it
sprinted
forward. And now, shortly before five o'clock, as they sat resting on the bank, it seemed that what Richie had said was true: they had stopped the sucker cold. The car door, the piece of corrugated steel, and the old tires had become the second stage of the dam, and it was backstopped by a huge sloping hill of earth and stones. Bill, Ben, and Richie smoked; Stan was lying on his back. A stranger might have thought he was just looking at the sky, but Eddie knew better. Stan was looking into the trees on the other side of the stream, keeping an eye out for a bird or two he could write up in his bird notebook that night. Eddie himself just sat cross-legged, feeling pleasantly tired and rather mellow. At that moment the others seemed to him like the greatest bunch of
guys to chum with a fellow could ever hope to have. They felt
right
together; they fitted neatly against each other's edges. He couldn't explain it to himself any better than that, and since it didn't really seem to need any explaining, he decided he ought to just let it be.

He looked over at Ben, who was holding his half-smoked cigarette clumsily and spitting frequently, as if he didn't like the taste of it much. As Eddie watched, Ben stubbed it out and covered the long butt with dirt.

Ben looked up, saw Eddie watching him, and looked away, embarrassed.

Eddie glanced at Bill and saw something on Bill's face that he didn't like. Bill was looking across the water and into the trees and bushes on the far side, his eyes gray and thoughtful. That brooding expression was back on his face. Eddie thought Bill looked almost haunted.

As if reading his thought, Bill looked around at him. Eddie smiled, but Bill didn't smile back. He put his cigarette out and looked around at the others. Even Richie had withdrawn into the silence of his own thoughts, an event which occurred about as seldom as a lunar eclipse.

Eddie knew that Bill rarely said anything important unless it was perfectly quiet, because it was so hard for him to speak. And he suddenly wished he had something to say, or that Richie would start in with one of his Voices. He was suddenly sure Bill was going to open his mouth and say something terrible, something which would change everything. Eddie reached automatically for his aspirator, pulled it out of his back pocket, and held it in his hand. He did this without even thinking about it.

“C-Can I tell you g-g-guys suh-homething?” Bill asked.

They all looked at him.
Crack a joke, Richie!
Eddie thought.
Crack a joke, say something really outrageous, embarrass him, I don't care, just shut him up. Whatever it is, I don't want to hear it, I don't want things to change, I don't want to be scared.

In his mind a tenebrous, croaking voice whispered:
I'll do it for a dime.

Eddie shuddered and tried to unthink that voice, and the sudden image it called up in his mind: the house on Neibolt Street, its front
yard overgrown with weeds, gigantic sunflowers nodding in the untended garden off to one side.

“Sure, Big Bill,” Richie said. “What's up?”

Bill opened his mouth (more anxiety on Eddie's part), closed it (blessed relief for Eddie), and then opened it again (renewed anxiety).

“I-I-If you guh-guh-guys l-l-laugh, I-I'll never h-hang around with you again,” Bill said. “It's cuh-cuh-crazy, but I swear I'm not muh-haking it up. It r-r-really happened.”

“We won't laugh,” Ben said. He looked around at the others. “Will we?”

Stan shook his head. So did Richie.

Eddie wanted to say,
Yes we will too, Billy, we'll laugh our heads off and say you're really stupid, so why don't you shut up right now?
But of course he could not say any such thing. This was, after all, Big Bill. He shook his head miserably. No, he wouldn't laugh. He had never felt less like laughing in his life.

They sat there above the dam Ben had showed them how to make, looking from Bill's face to the expanding pool and the likewise expanding bog beyond it and then back to Bill's face again, listening silently as he told them about what had happened when he opened George's photograph album—how Georgie's school photograph had turned its head and winked at him, how the book had bled when he threw it across the room. It was a long, painful recital, and by the time he finished Bill was red-faced and sweating. Eddie had never heard him stutter so badly.

At last, though, the tale was told. Bill looked around at them, both defiant and afraid. Eddie saw an identical expression on the faces of Ben, Richie, and Stan. It was solemn, awed fear. It was not in the slightest tinctured by disbelief. An urge came to him then, an urge to spring to his feet and shout:
What a crazy story! You don't believe that crazy story, do you, and even if you do, you don't believe
we
believe it, do you? School pictures can't wink! Books can't bleed! You're out of your mind, Big Bill!

But he couldn't very well do so, because that expression of solemn fear was also on his own face. He couldn't see it but he could feel it.

Come back here, kid,
the hoarse voice whispered.
I'll blow you for free. Come back here!

No,
Eddie moaned at it.
Please, go away, I don't want to think about that.

Come back here, kid.

And now Eddie saw something else—not on Richie's face, at least he didn't think so, but on Stan's and Ben's for sure. He knew what that something else was; knew because that expression was on his own face, too.

Recognition.

I'll blow you for free.

The house at 29 Neibolt Street was just outside the Derry trainyards. It was old and boarded up, its porch gradually sinking back into the ground, its lawn an overgrown field. An old trike, rusting and overturned, hid in that long grass, one wheel sticking up at an angle.

But on the left side of the porch there was a huge bald patch in the lawn and you could see dirty cellar windows set into the house's crumbling brick foundation. It was in one of those windows that Eddie Kaspbrak first saw the face of the leper six weeks ago.

On Saturdays, when Eddie could find no one to play with, he often went down to the trainyards. No real reason; he just liked to go out there.

He would ride his bike out Witcham Street and then cut to the northwest along Route 2 where it crossed Witcham. The Neibolt Street Church School stood on the corner of Route 2 and Neibolt Street a mile or so farther on. It was a shabby-neat wood-frame building with a large cross on top and the words
SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME
written over the front door in gilt letters two feet high. Sometimes, on Saturdays, Eddie heard music and singing coming from inside. It was gospel music, but whoever was playing the piano sounded more like Jerry Lee Lewis than a regular church piano player. The singing didn't sound very religious to Eddie, either, although there was lots of stuff in it about “beautiful Zion” and being “washed in the blood of the lamb” and “what a friend we have in Jesus.” The people singing seemed to be having
much too good a time for it to really be sacred singing, in Eddie's opinion. But he liked the sound of it all the same—the way he liked to hear Jerry Lee hollering out “Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On.” Sometimes he would stop for awhile across the street, leaning his bike against a tree and pretending to read on the grass, actually jiving along to the music.

Other Saturdays the Church School would be shut up and silent and he would ride out to the trainyard without stopping, out to where Neibolt Street ended in a parking lot with weeds growing up through the cracks in the asphalt. There he would lean his bike against the wooden fence and watch the trains go by. There were a lot of them on Saturdays. His mother told him that in the old days you could catch a GS&WM passenger train at what was then Neibolt Street Station, but the passenger trains had stopped running around the time the Korean War was starting up. “If you got on the northbound train you went to Brownsville Station,” she said, “and from Brownsville you could catch a train that would take you all the way across Canada if you wanted, all the way to the Pacific. The southbound train would take you to Portland and then on down to Boston, and from South Station the country was yours. But the passenger trains have gone the way of the trolley lines now, I guess. No one wants to ride a train when they can just jump in a Ford and go. You may never even ride one.”

But great long freights still came through Derry. They headed south loaded down with pulpwood, paper, and potatoes, and north with manufactured goods for those towns of what Maine people sometimes called the Big Northern—Bangor, Millinocket, Machias, Presque Isle, Houlton. Eddie particularly liked to watch the northbound car-carriers with their loads of gleaming Fords and Chevies.
I'll have me a car like one of those someday,
he promised himself.
Like one of those or even better. Maybe even a Cadillac!

There were six tracks in all, swooping into the station like strands of cobweb tending toward the center: Bangor and Great Northern Lines from the north, the Great Southern and Western Maine from the west, the Boston and Maine from the south, and Southern Seacoast from the east.

One day two years before, when Eddie had been standing near the latter line and watching a train go through, a drunken trainman had
thrown a crate out of a slow-moving boxcar at him. Eddie ducked and flinched backward, although the crate landed in the cinders ten feet away. There were things inside it, live things that clicked and moved. “Last run, boy!” the drunken trainman had shouted. He pulled a flat brown bottle from one of the pockets of his denim jacket, tipped it up, drank, then flipped it into the cinders, where it smashed. The trainman pointed at the crate. “Take em home to yer mum! Compliments of the Southern-Fucking-Seacoast-Bound-for-Welfare Line!” He had reeled forward to shout these last words as the train pulled away, gathering speed now, and for one alarming moment Eddie thought he was going to tumble right out.

When the train was gone, Eddie went to the box and bent cautiously over it. He was afraid to get too close. The things inside were slithery and crawly. If the trainman had yelled that they were for him, Eddie would have left them right there. But he had said take em home to your Mom, and, like Ben, when someone said Mom, Eddie jumped.

He scrounged a hank of rope from one of the empty quonset warehouses and tied the crate onto the package carrier of his bike. His mother had peered inside the crate even more warily than Eddie himself, and then she screamed—but with delight rather than terror. There were four lobsters in the crate, big two-pounders with their claws pegged. She cooked them for supper and had been extremely grumpy with Eddie when he wouldn't eat any.

“What do you think the Rockefellers are eating this evening at their place in Bar Harbor?” she asked indignantly. “What do you think the swells are eating at Twenty-one and Sardi's in New York City? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? They're eating
lobster,
Eddie, same as we are! Now come on—give it a try.”

But Eddie wouldn't—at least that was what his mother said. Maybe it was true, but inside it felt more to Eddie like couldn't than wouldn't. He kept thinking of the way they had slithered inside the crate, and the clicking sounds their claws had made. She kept telling him how delicious they were and what a treat he was missing until he started to gasp for breath and had to use his aspirator. Then she left him alone.

Eddie retreated to his bedroom and read. His mother called up her friend Eleanor Dunton. Eleanor came over and the two of them read
old copies of
Photoplay
and
Screen Secrets
and giggled over the gossip columns and gorged themselves on cold lobster salad. When Eddie got up for school the next morning, his mother was still in bed, snoring away and letting frequent farts that sounded like long, mellow cornet notes (she was Getting Off Some Good Ones, Richie would have said). There was nothing left in the bowl where the lobster salad had been except a few tiny blots of mayonnaise.

That was the last Southern Seacoast train Eddie ever saw, and when he later saw Mr. Braddock, the Derry trainmaster, he asked him hesitantly what had happened. “Cump'ny went broke,” Mr. Braddock said. “That's all there was to it. Don't you read the papers? It's hap'nin all over the damn country. Now get out of here. This ain't no place for a kid.”

After that Eddie would sometimes walk along track 4, which had been the Southern Seacoast track, and listen as a mental conductor chanted names inside his head, reeling them off in a lovely Downeast monotone, those names, those magic names: Camden, Rockland, Bar Harbor (pronounced Baa Haabaa), Wiscasset, Bath, Portland, Ogunquit, the Berwicks; he would walk down track 4 heading east until he got tired, and the weeds growing up between the crossties made him feel sad. Once he had looked up and seen seagulls (probably just fat old dump-gulls who didn't give a shit if they ever saw the ocean, but that had not occurred to him then) wheeling and crying overhead, and the sound of their voices had made him cry a little, too.

There had once been a gate at the entrance to the trainyards, but it had blown over in a windstorm and no one had bothered to replace it. Eddie came and went pretty much as he liked, although Mr. Braddock would kick him out if he saw him (or any other kid, for that matter). There were truck-drivers who would chase you sometimes (but not very far) because they thought you were hanging around just so you could hawk something—and sometimes kids did.

Mostly, though, the place was quiet. There was a guard-booth but it was empty, its glass windows broken by stones. There had been no full-time security service since 1950 or so. Mr. Braddock shooed the kids away by day and a night-watchman drove through four or five times a night in an old Studebaker with a searchlight mounted outside the vent window and that was all.