It (23 page)

“It happened right there on Witcham Street, not too far from the intersection with Jackson. Whoever killed him pulled his left arm off the way a second-grader would pull a wing off a fly. Medical examiner said he either died of shock or blood-loss. Far as I could ever see, it didn't make a dime's worth of difference which it was.”

“Christ,
Bill!”

“I imagine you wonder why I never told you. The truth is, I wonder myself. Here we've been married eleven years and until today you never knew what happened to Georgie. I know about your whole family—even your aunts and uncles. I know your grandfather died in his garage in Iowa City frigging around with his chainsaw while he was drunk. I know those things because married people, no matter how busy they are, get to know almost everything after awhile. And if they get really bored and stop listening, they pick it up anyway—by osmosis. Or do you think I'm wrong?”

“No,” she said faintly. “You're not wrong, Bill.”

“And we've always been able to talk to each other, haven't we? I mean, neither of us got so bored it ever had to be osmosis, right?”

“Well,” she said, “until today I always thought so.”

“Come on, Audra. You know everything that's happened to me over the last eleven years of my life. Every deal, every idea, every cold, every friend, every guy that ever did me wrong or tried to. You know I slept with Susan Browne. You know that sometimes I get maudlin when I drink and play the records too loud.”

“Especially the Grateful Dead,” she said, and he laughed. This time she smiled back.

“You know the most important stuff, too—the things I hope for.”

“Yes. I think so. But this . . .” She paused, shook her head, thought for a moment. “How much does this call have to do with your brother, Bill?”

“Let me get to it in my own way. Don't try to rush me into the center of it or you'll have me committed. It's so big . . . and so . . . so quaintly awful . . . that I'm trying to sort of creep up on it. You see . . . it never occurred to me to tell you about Georgie.”

She looked at him, frowned, shook her head faintly—
I don't understand.

“What I'm trying to tell you, Audra, is that I haven't even
thought
of George in twenty years or more.”

“But you told me you had a brother named—”

“I repeated a
fact,”
he said. “That was all. His name was a word. It cast no shadow at all in my mind.”

“But I think maybe it cast a shadow over your dreams,” Audra said. Her voice was very quiet.

“The groaning? The crying?”

She nodded.

“I suppose you could be right,” he said. “In fact, you're almost surely right. But dreams you don't remember don't really count, do they?”

“Are you really telling me you never thought of him at
all?”

“Yes. I am.”

She shook her head, frankly disbelieving. “Not even the horrible way he died?”

“Not until today, Audra.”

She looked at him and shook her head again.

“You asked me before we were married if I had any brothers or sisters,
and I said I had a brother who died when I was a kid. You knew my parents were gone, and you've got so much family that it took up your entire field of attention. But that's not
all.”

“What do you mean?”

“It isn't just George that's been in that black hole. I haven't thought of
Derry itself
in twenty years. Not the people I chummed with—Eddie Kaspbrak and Richie the Mouth, Stan Uris, Bev Marsh . . .” He ran his hands through his hair and laughed shakily. “It's like having a case of amnesia so bad you don't know you've got it. And when Mike Hanlon called—”

“Who's Mike Hanlon?”

“Another kid that we chummed with—that I chummed with after Georgie died. Of course he's no kid anymore. None of us are. That was Mike on the phone, transatlantic cable. He said, ‘Hello—have I reached the Denbrough residence?' and I said yes, and he said, ‘Bill? Is that you?' and I said yes, and he said, ‘This is Mike Hanlon.' It meant nothing to me, Audra. He might as well have been selling encyclopedias or Burl Ives records. Then he said, ‘From Derry.' And when he said that it was like a door opened inside me and some horrible light shined out, and I remembered who he was. I remembered Georgie. I remembered all the others. All this happened—”

Bill snapped his fingers.

“Like that. And I knew he was going to ask me to come.”

“Come back to Derry.”

“Yeah.” He took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, looked at her. Never in her life had she seen a man who looked so frightened. “Back to Derry. Because we promised, he said, and we did. We
did.
All of us. Us kids. We stood in the creek that ran through the Barrens, and we held hands in a circle, and we had cut our palms with a piece of glass so it was like a bunch of kids playing blood brothers, only it was real.”

He held his palms out to her, and in the center of each she could see a close-set ladder of white lines that could have been scar-tissue. She had held his hand—
both
his hands—countless times, but she had never noticed these scars across his palms before. They were faint, yes, but she would have believed—

And the party! That party!

Not the one where they had met, although this second one formed
a perfect book-end to that first one, because it had been the wrap party at the end of the
Pit of the Black Demon
shoot. It had been loud and drunk, every inch the Topanga Canyon “do.” Perhaps a little less bitchy than some of the other L.A. parties she had been to, because the shoot had gone better than they had any right to expect, and they all knew it. For Audra Phillips it had gone even better, because she had fallen in love with William Denbrough.

What was the name of the self-proclaimed palmist? She couldn't remember now, only that she had been one of the makeup man's two assistants. She remembered the girl whipping off her blouse at some point in the party (revealing a
very
filmy bra beneath) and tying it over her head like a gypsy's scarf. High on pot and wine, she had read palms for the rest of the evening . . . or at least until she had passed out.

Audra could not remember now if the girl's readings had been good or bad, witty or stupid: she had been pretty high herself that night. What she
did
remember was that at one point the girl had grabbed Bill's palm and her own and had declared them perfectly matched. They were life-twins, she said. She could remember watching, more than a little jealous, as the girl traced the lines on his palm with her exquisitely lacquered fingernail—how stupid that was, in the weird L.A. film subculture where men patted women's fannies as routinely as New York men pecked their cheeks! But there had been something intimate and lingering about that tracery.

There had been no little white scars on Bill's palms then.

She had been watching the charade with a jealous lover's eye, and she was sure of the memory. Sure of the
fact.

She said so to Bill now.

He nodded. “You're right. They weren't there then. And although I can't absolutely swear to it, I don't think they were there last night, down at the Plow and Barrow. Ralph and I were handwrestling for beers again and I think I would have noticed.”

He grinned at her. The grin was dry, humorless, and scared.

“I think they came back when Mike Hanlon called. That's what I think.”

“Bill, that isn't possible.” But she reached for her cigarettes.

Bill was looking at his hands. “Stan did it,” he said. “Cut our palms with a sliver of Coke bottle. I can remember it so clearly now.”
He looked up at Audra and behind his glasses his eyes were hurt and puzzled. “I remember how that piece of glass flashed in the sun. It was one of the new clear ones. Before that Coke bottles used to be green, you remember that?” She shook her head but he didn't see her. He was still studying his palms. “I can remember Stan doing his own hands last, pretending he was going to slash his wrists instead of just cut his palms a little. I guess it was just some goof, but I almost made a move on him . . . to stop him. Because for a second or two there he looked serious.”

“Bill, don't,” she said in a low voice. This time she had to steady the lighter in her right hand by grasping its wrist in her left, like a policeman holding a gun on a shooting range. “Scars can't come back. They either are or aren't.”

“You saw them before, huh? Is that what you're telling me?”

“They're very faint,” Audra said, more sharply than she had intended.

“We were all bleeding,” he said. “We were standing in the water not far from where Eddie Kaspbrak and Ben Hanscom and I built the dam that time—”

“You don't mean the architect, do you?”

“Is there one by that name?”

“God, Bill, he built the new BBC communications center! They're still arguing whether it's a dream or an abortion!”

“Well, I don't know if it's the same guy or not. It doesn't seem likely, but I guess it could be. The Ben I knew was great at building stuff. We all stood there, and I was holding Bev Marsh's left hand in my right and Richie Tozier's right hand in my left. We stood out there in the water like something out of a Southern baptism after a tent meeting, and I remember I could see the Derry Standpipe on the horizon. It looked as white as you imagine the robes of the archangels must be, and we promised, we
swore,
that if it wasn't over, that if it ever started to happen again . . . we'd go back. And we'd do it again. And stop it. Forever.”

“Stop
what?”
she cried, suddenly furious with him. “Stop
what?
What the fuck are you
talking
about?”

“I wish you wouldn't a-a-ask—” Bill began, and then stopped. She saw an expression of bemused horror spread over his face like a stain. “Give me a cigarette.”

She passed him the pack. He lit one. She had never seen him smoke a cigarette.

“I used to stutter, too.”

“You stuttered?”

“Yes. Back then. You said I was the only man in L.A. you ever knew who dared to speak slowly. The truth is, I didn't dare talk fast. It wasn't reflection. It wasn't deliberation. It wasn't wisdom. All reformed stutterers speak very slowly. It's one of the tricks you learn, like thinking of your middle name just before you introduce yourself, because stutterers have more trouble with nouns than with any other words, and the one word in all the world that gives them the most trouble is their own first name.”

“Stuttered.” She smiled a small smile, as if he had told a joke and she had missed the point.

“Until Georgie died, I stuttered moderately,” Bill said, and already he had begun to hear words double in his mind, as if they were infinitesimally separated in time; the words came out smoothly, in his ordinary slow and cadenced way, but in his mind he heard words like
Georgie
and
moderately
overlap, becoming
Juh-Juh-Georgie
and
m-moderately.
“I mean, I had some really bad moments—usually when I was called on in class, and especially if I really knew the answer and wanted to give it—but mostly I got by. After George died, it got a lot worse. Then, around the age of fourteen or fifteen, things started to get better again. I went to Chevrus High in Portland, and there was a speech therapist there, Mrs. Thomas, who was really great. She taught me some good tricks. Like thinking of my middle name just before I said ‘Hi, I'm Bill Denbrough' out loud. I was taking French 1 and she taught me to switch to French if I got badly stuck on a word. So if you're standing there feeling like the world's grandest asshole, saying ‘th-th-this buh-buh-buh-buh' over and over like a broken record, you switched over to French and ‘
ce livre'
would come flowing off your tongue. Worked every time. And as soon as you said it in French you could come back to English and say ‘this book' with no problem at all. If you got stuck on an s-word like ship or skate or slum, you could lisp it: thip, thkate, thlum. No stutter.

“All of that helped, but mostly it was just forgetting Derry and everything that happened there. Because that's when the forgetting happened. When we were living in Portland and I was going to
Chevrus. I didn't forget everything at once, but looking back now I'd have to say it happened over a remarkably short period of time. Maybe no more than four months. My stutter and my memories faded out together. Someone washed the blackboard and all the old equations went away.”

He drank what was left of his juice. “When I stuttered on ‘ask' a few seconds ago, that was the first time in maybe twenty-one years.”

He looked at her.

“First the scars, then the stuh-hutter. Do you h-hear it?”

“You're doing that on purpose!” she said, badly frightened.

“No. I guess there's no way to convince a person of that, but it's true. Stuttering's funny, Audra. Spooky. On one level you're not even aware it's happening. But . . . it's also something you can hear in your mind. It's like part of your head is working an instant ahead of the rest. Or one of those reverb systems kids used to put in their jalopies back in the fifties, when the sound in the rear speaker would come just a split second a-after the sound in the front s-speaker.”

He got up and walked restlessly around the room. He looked tired, and she thought with some unease of how hard he had worked over the last thirteen years or so, as if it might be possible to justify the moderateness of his talent by working furiously, almost nonstop. She found herself having a very uneasy thought and tried to push it away, but it wouldn't go. Suppose Bill's call had really been from Ralph Foster, inviting him down to the Plow and Barrow for an hour of arm-wrestling or backgammon, or maybe from Freddie Firestone, the producer of
Attic Room,
on some problem or other? Perhaps even a “wrong-ring,” as the veddy British doctor's wife down the lane put it?