It (29 page)

If someone had asked him, “Ben, are you lonely?,” he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams; he had his Revell models; he had a gigantic set of Lincoln
Logs and built all sorts of stuff with them. His mother had exclaimed more than once that Ben's Lincoln Logs houses looked better than some real ones that came from blueprints. He had a pretty good Erector Set, too. He was hoping for the Super Set when his birthday came around in October. With that one you could build a clock that really told time and a car with real gears in it. Lonely? he might have asked in return, honestly foozled. Huh? What?

A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it. It simply
was,
like his double-jointed thumb or the funny little jag inside one of his front teeth, the little jag his tongue began running over whenever he was nervous.

Beverly was a sweet dream; the candy was a sweet reality. The candy was his friend. So he told the alien thought to take a hike, and it went quietly, without causing any fuss whatsoever. And between the Costello Avenue Market and the library, he gobbled all of the candy in the sack. He honestly meant to save the Pez for watching TV that night—he liked to load them into the little plastic Pez-Gun's handgrip one by one, liked to hear the accepting click of the small spring inside, and liked most of all to shoot them into his mouth one by one, like a kid committing suicide by sugar.
Whirlybirds
was on tonight, with Kenneth Tobey as the fearless helicopter pilot, and
Dragnet,
where the cases were true but the names had been changed to protect the innocent, and his favorite cop show of all time,
Highway Patrol,
which starred Broderick Crawford as Highway Patrolman Dan Matthews. Broderick Crawford was Ben's personal hero. Broderick Crawford was
fast,
Broderick Crawford was
mean,
Broderick Crawford took absolutely no shit from nobody . . . and best of all, Broderick Crawford was fat.

He arrived at the corner of Costello and Kansas Street, where he crossed to the Public Library. It was really two buildings—the old stone structure in front, built with lumber-baron money in 1890, and the new low sandstone building behind, which housed the Children's
Library. The adult library in front and the Children's Library behind were connected by a glass corridor.

This close to downtown, Kansas Street was one-way, so Ben only looked in one direction—right—before crossing. If he had looked left, he would have gotten a nasty shock. Standing in the shade of a big old oak tree on the lawn of the Derry Community House a block down were Belch Huggins, Victor Criss, and Henry Bowers.

“Let's get him Hank.” Victor was almost panting.

Henry watched the fat little prick scutter across the street; his belly bouncing, the cowlick at the back of his head springing back and forth like a goddam Slinky, his ass wiggling like a girl's inside his new bluejeans. He estimated the distance between the three of them here on the Community House lawn and Hanscom, and between Hanscom and the safety of the library. He thought they could probably get him before he made it inside, but Hanscom might start screaming. He wouldn't put it past the little pansy. If he did, an adult might interfere, and Henry wanted no interference. The Douglas bitch had told Henry he had flunked both English and math. She was passing him, she said, but he would have to take four weeks of summer make-up. Henry would rather have stayed back. If he'd stayed back, his father would have beaten him up once. With Henry at school four hours a day for four weeks of the farm's busiest season, his father was apt to beat him up half a dozen times, maybe even more. He was reconciled to this grim future only because he intended to pass everything on to that fat little babyfag this afternoon.

With interest.

“Yeah, let's go,” Belch said.

“We'll wait for him to come out.”

They watched Ben open one of the big double doors and go inside, and then they sat down and smoked cigarettes and told travelling-salesman jokes and waited for him to come back out.

Eventually, Henry knew, he would. And when he did, Henry was going to make him sorry he was ever born.

Ben loved the library.

He loved the way it was always cool, even on the hottest day of a long hot summer; he loved its murmuring quiet, broken only by occasional whispers, the faint thud of a librarian stamping books and cards, or the riffle of pages being turned in the Periodicals Room, where the old men hung out, reading newspapers which had been threaded into long sticks. He loved the quality of the light, which slanted through the high narrow windows in the afternoons or glowed in lazy pools thrown by the chain-hung globes on winter evenings while the wind whined outside. He liked the smell of the books—a spicy smell, faintly fabulous. He would sometimes walk through the adult stacks, looking at the thousands of volumes and imagining a world of lives inside each one, the way he sometimes walked along his street in the burning smoke-hazed twilight of a late-October afternoon, the sun only a bitter orange line on the horizon, imagining the lives going on behind all the windows—people laughing or arguing or arranging flowers or feeding kids or pets or their own faces while they watched the boobtube. He liked the way the glass corridor connecting the old building with the Children's Library was always hot, even in the winter, unless there had been a couple of cloudy days; Mrs. Starrett, the head children's librarian, told him that was caused by something called the greenhouse effect. Ben had been delighted with the idea. Years later he would build the hotly debated BBC communications center in London, and the arguments might rage for a thousand years and still no one would know (except for Ben himself) that the communications center was nothing but the glass corridor of the Derry Public Library stood on end.

He liked the Children's Library as well, although it had none of the shadowy charm he felt in the old library, with its globes and curving iron staircases too narrow for two people to pass upon them—one always had to back up. The Children's Library was bright and sunny, a little noisier in spite of the
LET'S BE QUIET, SHALL WE
? signs that were posted around. Most of the noise usually came from Pooh's Corner, where the little kids went to look at picturebooks. When Ben came in today, story hour had just begun there. Miss Davies, the pretty young librarian, was reading “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.”

“Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge?”

Miss Davies spoke in the low, growling tones of the troll in the story. Some of the little ones covered their mouths and giggled, but most only watched her solemnly, accepting the voice of the troll as they accepted the voices of their dreams, and their grave eyes reflected the eternal fascination of the fairytale: would the monster be bested . . . or would it feed?

Bright posters were tacked everywhere. Here was a good cartoon kid who had brushed his teeth until his mouth foamed like the muzzle of a mad dog; here was a bad cartoon kid who was smoking cigarettes (
WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE SICK A LOT, JUST LIKE MY DAD
, it said underneath); here was a wonderful photograph of a billion tiny pinpoints of light flaring in darkness. The motto beneath said:

ONE IDEA LIGHTS A THOUSAND CANDLES.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

There were invitations to
JOIN THE SCOUTING EXPERIENCE
. A poster advancing the idea that
THE GIRLS' CLUBS OF TODAY BUILD THE WOMEN OF TOMORROW
. There were softball sign-up sheets and Community House Children's Theater sign-up sheets. And, of course, one inviting kids to
JOIN THE SUMMER READING PROGRAM
. Ben was a big fan of the summer reading program. You got a map of the United States when you signed up. Then, for every book you read and made a report on, you got a state sticker to lick and put on your map. The sticker came complete with info like the state bird, the state flower, the year admitted to the Union, and what presidents, if any, had ever come from that state. When you got all forty-eight stuck on your map, you got a free book. Helluva good deal. Ben planned to do just as the poster suggested: “Waste no time, sign up today.”

Conspicuous amid this bright and amiable riot of color was a simple stark poster taped to the checkout desk—no cartoons or fancy photographs here, just black print on white poster-paper reading:

REMEMBER THE CURFEW.

7 p.m.

DERRY POLICE DEPARTMENT

Just looking at it gave Ben a chill. In the excitement of getting his rank-card, worrying about Henry Bowers, talking with Beverly, and starting summer vacation, he had forgotten all about the curfew, and the murders.

People argued about how many there had been, but everyone agreed that there had been at least four since last winter—five if you counted George Denbrough (many held the opinion that the little Denbrough boy's death must have been some kind of bizarre freak accident). The first everyone was sure of was Betty Ripsom, who had been found the day after Christmas in the area of turnpike construction on Outer Jackson Street. The girl, who was thirteen, had been found mutilated and frozen into the muddy earth. This had not been in the paper, nor was it a thing any adult had spoken of to Ben. It was just something he had picked up around the corners of overheard conversations.

About three and a half months later, not long after the trout-fishing season had begun, a fisherman working the bank of a stream twenty miles east of Derry had hooked onto something he believed at first to be a stick. It had turned out to be the hand, wrist, and first four inches of a girl's forearm. His hook had snagged this awful trophy by the web of flesh between the thumb and first finger.

The State Police had found the rest of Cheryl Lamonica seventy yards farther downstream, caught in a tree that had fallen across the stream the previous winter. It was only luck that the body had not been washed into the Penobscot and then out to sea in the spring runoff.

The Lamonica girl had been sixteen. She was from Derry but did not attend school; three years before she had given birth to a daughter, Andrea. She and her daughter lived at home with Cheryl's parents. “Cheryl was a little wild sometimes but she was a good girl at heart,” her sobbing father had told police. “Andi keeps asking ‘Where's my mommy?' and I don't know what to tell her.”

The girl had been reported missing five weeks before the body was found. The police investigation of Cheryl Lamonica's death began with a logical enough assumption: that she had been murdered by one of her boyfriends. She had lots of boyfriends. Many were from the air base up Bangor way. “They were nice boys, most of them,” Cheryl's mother said. One of the “nice boys” had been a forty-year-old
Air Force colonel with a wife and three children in New Mexico. Another was currently serving time in Shawshank for armed robbery.

A boyfriend, the police thought. Or just possibly a stranger. A sexfiend.

If it was a sexfiend, he was apparently a fiend for boys as well. In late April a junior-high teacher on a nature walk with his eighth-grade class had spied a pair of red sneakers and a pair of blue corduroy rompers protruding from the mouth of a culvert on Merit Street. That end of Merit had been blocked off with sawhorses. The asphalt had been bulldozed up the previous fall. The turnpike extension would cross there as well on its way north to Bangor.

The body had been that of three-year-old Matthew Clements, reported missing by his parents only the day before (his picture had been on the front page of the Derry
News,
a dark-haired little kid grinning brashly into the camera, a Red Sox cap perched on his head). The Clements family lived on Kansas Street, all the way on the other side of town. His mother, so stunned by her grief that she seemed to exist in a glass ball of utter calm, told police that Matty had been riding his tricycle up and down the sidewalk beside the house, which stood on the corner of Kansas Street and Kossuth Lane. She went to put her washing in the drier, and when she next looked out the window to check on Matty, he was gone. There had only been his overturned trike on the grass between the sidewalk and the street. One of the back wheels was still spinning lazily. As she looked, it came to a stop.

That was enough for Chief Borton. He proposed the seven o'clock curfew at a special session of the City Council the following evening; it was adopted unanimously and went into effect the next day. Small children were to be watched by a “qualified adult” at all times, according to the story which reported the curfew in the
News.
At Ben's school there had been a special assembly a month ago. The Chief went on stage, hooked his thumbs into his gunbelt, and assured the children they had nothing at all to worry about as long as they followed a few simple rules: don't talk to strangers, don't accept rides with people unless you know them
well,
always remember that The Policeman Is Your Friend . . . and obey the curfew.

Two weeks ago a boy Ben knew only vaguely (he was in the other fifth-grade classroom at Derry Elementary) had looked into one of the
stormdrains out by Neibolt Street and had seen what looked like a lot of hair floating around in there. This boy, whose name was either Frankie or Freddy Ross (or maybe Roth), had been out prospecting for goodies with a gadget of his own invention, which he called
THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK
. When he talked about it you could tell he thought about it like that, in capital letters (and maybe neon, as well).
THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK
was a birch branch with a big wad of bubble-gum stuck on the tip. In his spare time Freddy (or Frankie) walked around Derry with it, peering into sewers and drains. Sometimes he saw money—pennies mostly, but sometimes a dime or even a quarter (he referred to these latter, for some reason known only to him, as “quay-monsters”). Once the money was spotted, Frankie-or-Freddy and
THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK
would swing into action. One downward poke through the grating and the coin was as good as in his pocket.