It (27 page)

But when First Service came along, the tall man ordered nothing more than a glass of club soda, just as polite as you could want. His service light has not gone on, and the stew forgets all about him soon enough, because the flight is a busy one. The flight is, in fact, the kind you want to forget as soon as it's over, one of those during which you just might—if you had time—have a few questions about the possibility of your own survival.

United 41 slaloms between the ugly pockets of thunder and lightning like a good skier going downhill. The air is very rough. The passengers exclaim and make uneasy jokes about the lightning they can see flickering on and off in the thick pillars of cloud around the plane. “Mommy, is God taking pictures of the angels?” a little boy asks, and his mother, who is looking rather green, laughs shakily. First Service turns out to be the only service on 41 that night. The seat-belt sign goes on twenty minutes into the flight and stays on. All the
same the stewardesses stay in the aisles, answering the call-buttons which go off like strings of polite-society firecrackers.

“Ralph is busy tonight,” the head stew says to her as they pass in the aisle; the head stew is going back to tourist with a fresh supply of airsick bags. It is half-code, half-joke. Ralph is
always
busy on bumpy flights. The plane lurches, someone cries out softly, the stewardess turns a bit and puts out a hand to catch her balance, and looks directly into the staring, sightless eyes of the man in 1-A.

Oh my dear God he's dead,
she thinks.
The liquor before he got on . . . then the bumps . . . his heart . . . scared to death.

The lanky man's eyes are on hers, but they are not seeing her. They do not move. They are perfectly glazed. Surely they are the eyes of a dead man.

The stew turns away from that awful gaze, her own heart pumping away in her throat at a runaway rate, wondering what to do, how to proceed, and thanking God that at least the man has no seatmate to perhaps scream and start a panic. She decides she will have to notify first the head stew and then the male crew up front. Perhaps they can wrap a blanket around him and close his eyes. The pilot will keep the belt light on even if the air smooths out so no one can come forward to use the john, and when the other passengers deplane they'll think he's just asleep—

These thoughts go through her mind rapidly, and she turns back for a confirming look. The dead, sightless eyes fix upon hers . . . and then the corpse picks up his glass of club soda and sips from it.

Just then the plane staggers again, tilts, and the stew's little scream of surprise is lost in other, heartier, cries of fear. The man's eyes move then—not much, but enough so she understands that he is alive and seeing her. And she thinks:
Why, I thought when he got on that he was in his mid-fifties, but he's nowhere
near
that old, in spite of the graying hair.

She goes to him, although she can hear the impatient chime of call-buttons behind her (Ralph is indeed busy tonight: after their perfectly safe landing at O'Hare thirty minutes from now, the stews will dispose of over seventy airsick bags).

“Everything okay, sir?” she asks, smiling. The smile feels false, unreal.

“Everything is fine and well,” the lanky man says. She glances at the first-class stub tacked into the little slot on his seat-back and sees that his name is Hanscom. “Fine and well. But it's a bit bumpy tonight, isn't it? You've got your work cut out for you, I think. Don't bother with me. I'm—” He offers
her a ghastly smile, a smile that makes her think of scarecrows flapping in dead November fields. “I'm fine and well.”

“You looked”

(dead)

“a little under the weather.”

“I was thinking of the old days,” he says. “I only realized earlier tonight that there
were
such things as old days, at least as far as I myself am concerned.”

More call-buttons chime. “Pardon me, stewardess?” someone calls nervously.

“Well, if you're quite sure you're all right—”

“I was thinking about a dam I built with some friends of mine,” Ben Hanscom says. “The first friends I ever had, I guess. They were building the dam when I—” He stops, looks startled, then laughs. It is an honest laugh, almost the carefree laugh of a boy, and it sounds very odd in this jouncing, bucking plane. “—when I dropped in on them. And that's almost literally what I did. Anyhow, they were making a hellava mess with that dam. I remember that.”

“Stewardess?”

“Excuse me, sir—I ought to get about my appointed rounds again.”

“Of course you should.”

She hurries away, glad to be rid of that gaze—that deadly, almost hypnotic gaze.

Ben Hanscom turns his head to the window and looks out. Lightning goes off inside huge thunderheads nine miles off the starboard wing. In the stutter-flashes of light, the clouds look like huge transparent brains filled with bad thoughts.

He feels in the pocket of his vest, but the silver dollars are gone. Out of his pocket and into Ricky Lee's. Suddenly he wishes he had saved at least one of them. It might have come in handy. Of course you could go down to any bank—at least when you weren't bumping around at twenty-seven thousand feet you could—and get a handful of silver dollars, but you couldn't do anything with the lousy copper sandwiches the government was trying to pass off as real coins these days. And for werewolves and vampires and all manner of things that squirm by starlight, it was silver you wanted; honest silver. You needed silver to stop a monster. You needed—

He closed his eyes. The air around him was full of chimes. The plane rocked and rolled and bumped and the air was full of chimes. Chimes?

No . . . bells.

It was bells, it was
the
bell, the bell of all bells, the one you waited for all year once the new wore off school again, and that always happened by the end of the first week.
The
bell, the one that signalled freedom again, the apotheosis of all school bells.

Ben Hanscom sits in his first-class seat, suspended amid the thunders at twenty-seven thousand feet, his face turned to the window, and he feels the wall of time grow suddenly thin; some terrible/wonderful peristalsis has begun to take place. He thinks:
My God, I am being digested by my own past.

The lightning plays fitfully across his face, and although he does not know it, the day has just turned. May 28th, 1985, has become May 29th over the dark and stormy country that is western Illinois tonight; farmers backsore with plantings sleep like the dead below and dream their quicksilver dreams and who knows what may move in their barns and their cellars and their fields as the lightning walks and the thunder talks? No one knows these things; they know only that power is loose in the night, and the air is crazy with the big volts of the storm.

But it's bells at twenty-seven thousand feet as the plane breaks into the clear again, as its motion steadies again; it is bells; it is
the
bell as Ben Hanscom sleeps; and as he sleeps the wall between past and present disappears completely and he tumbles backward through years like a man falling down a deep well—Wells's Time Traveller, perhaps, falling with a broken iron rung in one hand, down and down into the land of the Morlocks, where machines pound on and on in the tunnels of the night. It's 1981, 1977, 1969; and suddenly he is here, here in June of 1958; bright summerlight is everywhere and behind sleeping eyelids Ben Hanscom's pupils contract at the command of his dreaming brain, which sees not the darkness which lies over western Illinois but the bright sunlight of a June day in Derry, Maine, twenty-seven years ago.

Bells.

The
bell.

School.

School is.

School is

out!

The sound of the bell went burring up and down the halls of Derry School, a big brick building which stood on Jackson Street, and at its sound the children in Ben Hanscom's fifth-grade classroom raised a spontaneous cheer—and Mrs. Douglas, usually the strictest of teachers, made no effort to quell them. Perhaps she knew it would have been impossible.

“Children!” she called when the cheer died. “May I have your attention for a final moment?”

Now a babble of excited chatter, mixed with a few groans, rose in the classroom. Mrs. Douglas was holding their report cards in her hand.

“I sure hope I pass!” Sally Mueller said chirpily to Bev Marsh, who sat in the next row. Sally was bright, pretty, vivacious. Bev was also pretty, but there was nothing vivacious about her this afternoon, last day of school or not. She sat looking moodily down at her penny-loafers. There was a fading yellow bruise on one of her cheeks.

“I don't give a shit if I do or not,” Bev said.

Sally sniffed. Ladies don't use such language, the sniff said. Then she turned to Greta Bowie. It had probably only been the excitement of the bell signalling the end of another school-year that had caused Sally to slip and speak to Beverly anyhow, Ben thought. Sally Mueller and Greta Bowie both came from rich families with houses on West Broadway while Bev came to school from one of those slummy apartment buildings on Lower Main Street. Lower Main Street and West Broadway were only a mile and a half apart, but even a kid like Ben knew that the real distance was like the distance between Earth and the planet Pluto. All you had to do was look at Beverly Marsh's cheap sweater, her too-big skirt that probably came from the Salvation Army thrift-box, and her scuffed penny-loafers to know just how far one was from the other. But Ben still liked Beverly better—a
lot
better. Sally and Greta had nice clothes, and he guessed they probably had their hair permed or waved or something every month or so, but he didn't think that changed the basic facts at all. They could get their hair permed every
day
and they'd still be a couple of conceited snots.

He thought Beverly was nicer . . . and
much
prettier, although he never in a million years would have dared say such a thing to her. But still, sometimes, in the heart of winter when the light outside seemed yellow-sleepy, like a cat curled up on a sofa, when Mrs. Douglas was droning on about mathematics (how to carry down in long division or how to find the common denominator of two fractions so you could add them) or reading the questions from
Shining Bridges
or talking about tin deposits in Paraguay, on those days when it seemed that school would never end and it didn't matter if it didn't because all the world outside was slush . . . on those days Ben would sometimes look sideways at Beverly, stealing her face, and his heart would both hurt desperately and somehow grow brighter at the same time. He supposed he had a crush on her, or was in love with her, and that was why it was always Beverly he thought of when the Penguins came on the radio singing “Earth Angel”—“my darling dear / love you all the time . . .” Yeah, it was stupid, all right, sloppy as a used Kleenex, but it was all right, too, because he would never tell. He thought that fat boys were probably only allowed to love pretty girls inside. If he told anyone how he felt (not that he had anyone to tell), that person would probably laugh until he had a heart-attack. And if he ever told Beverly, she would either laugh herself (bad), or make retching noises of disgust (worse).

“Now please come up as soon as I call your name. Paul Anderson . . . Carla Bordeaux . . . Greta Bowie . . . Calvin Clark . . . Cissy Clark . . .”

As she called their names, Mrs. Douglas's fifth-grade class came forward one by one (except for the Clark twins, who came together as always, hand in hand, indistinguishable except for the length of their white-blonde hair and the fact that she wore a dress while he wore jeans), took their buff-colored report cards with the American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance on the front and the Lord's Prayer on the back, walked sedately out of the classroom . . . and then pounded down the hall to where the big front doors had been chocked open. And then they simply ran out into summer and were gone: some on bikes, some skipping, some riding invisible horses and slapping their hands against the sides of their thighs to manufacture hoofbeats, some with arms slung about each other, singing “Mine eyes
have seen the glory of the burning of the school” to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

“Marcia Fadden . . . Frank Frick . . . Ben Hanscom . . .”

He rose, stealing his last glance at Beverly Marsh for the summer (or so he thought then), and went forward to Mrs. Douglas's desk, an eleven-year-old kid with a can roughly the size of New Mexico—said can packed into a pair of horrid new bluejeans that shone little darts of light from the copper rivets and went
whssht-whssht-whssht
as his big thighs brushed together. His hips swung girlishly. His stomach slid from side to side. He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt although the day was warm. He almost always wore baggy sweatshirts because he was deeply ashamed of his chest and had been since the first day of school after the Christmas vacation, when he had worn one of the new Ivy League shirts his mother had given him, and Belch Huggins, who was a sixthgrader, had cawed: “Hey, you guys! Look it what Santy Claus brought Ben Hanscom for Christmas! A big set of titties!” Belch had nearly collapsed with the deliciousness of his wit. Others had laughed as well—a few of them girls. If a hole leading into the underworld had opened before him at that very moment, Ben would have dropped into it without a sound . . . or perhaps with the faintest murmur of gratitude.