It (149 page)

He got a good look at Bev and his mouth fell open. Under other circumstances it would have been almost funny. “Bev, what the
hell—”

She didn't bother replying. Behind her, and not too far behind, either, she could hear branches snapping and whipping; there was a muffled shouted curse. It sounded as if Henry was getting livelier. So she just ran at the square trapdoor opening, her hair, tangled now with green leaves and twigs as well as the crud from her scramble under the garbage truck, streaming out behind her.

Ben saw she was coming in like the 101st Airborne and disappeared as quickly as he had come out. Beverly jumped and he caught her clumsily.

“Shut everything,” she panted. “Hurry up, Ben, for heaven's sake! They're coming!”

“Who?”

“Henry and his friends! Henry's gone crazy, he's got a knife—”

That was enough for Ben. He dropped his Junior Mints and funnybook. He pulled the trapdoor shut with a grunt. The top was cov
ered with sods; the Tangle-Track was still holding them remarkably well. A few blocks of sod had gotten loose, but that was all. Beverly stood on tiptoe and closed the window. They were in darkness.

She felt for Ben, found him, and hugged him with panicky tightness. After a moment he hugged her back. They were both on their knees. With sudden horror Beverly realized that Richie's transistor radio was still playing somewhere in the blackness: Little Richard singing “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 enough 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 heehaw 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, garbagey 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 fatboy 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 okey-dokey.”

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 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 struggled 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 last-ditch effort to keep it inside.

“Shhh,” Ben whispered. “For Christ's sake, Bev—”

Crrrrackk.
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 grownups, 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, Indian-rub 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 watch for him, the way you'd always have to be on 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 sight-line. 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.