It (34 page)

“Let's break it!” Belch proposed.

There were yells of protest followed by a scream of pain. Someone began to cry. Yes, Ben could sympathize. They hadn't been able to catch him (or at least not yet), but here was another bunch of little kids for them to take out their mad on.

“Sure, break it,” Henry said.

Splashes. Yells. Big moronic gusts of laughter from Belch and Victor. An agonized infuriated cry from one of the little kids.

“Don't gimme any of your shit, you stuttering little freak,” Henry Bowers said. “I ain't takin no more shit from nobody today.”

There was a splintering crack. The sound of running water downstream grew louder and roared briefly before quieting to its former placid chuckle. Ben suddenly understood. Baby dam, yes, that was what Victor had said. The kids—two or three of them it had sounded
like when he passed by—had been building a dam. Henry and his friends had just kicked it apart. Ben even thought he knew who one of the kids was. The only “stuttering little freak” he knew from Derry School was Bill Denbrough, who was in the other fifth-grade classroom.

“You didn't have to do that!” a thin and fearful voice cried out, and Ben recognized that voice as well, although he could not immediately put a face with it. “Why did you do that?”

“Because I
felt
like it, fucknuts!” Henry roared back. There was a meaty thud. It was followed by a scream of pain. The scream was followed by weeping.

“Shut up,” Victor said. “Shut up that crying, kid, or I'll pull your ears down and tie em under your chin.”

The crying became a series of choked snuffles.

“We're going,” Henry said, “but before we do, I want to know one thing. You seen a fat kid in the last ten minutes or so? Big fat kid all bloody and cut up?”

There was a reply too brief to be anything but no.

“You sure?” Belch asked. “You better be, mushmouth.”

“I-I-I'm sh-sh-sure,” Bill Denbrough replied.

“Let's go,” Henry said. “He probably waded acrost back that way.”

“Ta-ta, boys,” Victor Criss called. “It was a real baby dam, believe me. You're better off without it.”

Splashing sounds. Belch's voice came again, but farther away now. Ben couldn't make out the words. In fact, he didn't
want
to make out the words. Closer by, the boy who had been crying now resumed. There were comforting noises from the other boy. Ben had decided there was just the two of them, Stuttering Bill and the weeper.

He half-sat, half-lay where he was, listening to the two boys by the river and the fading sounds of Henry and his dinosaur friends crashing toward the far side of the Barrens. Sunlight flicked at his eyes and made little coins of light on the tangled roots above and around him. It was dirty in here, but it was also cozy . . . safe. The sound of running water was soothing. Even the sound of the crying kid was sort of soothing. His aches and pains had faded to a dull throb, and the sound of the dinosaurs had faded out completely. He would wait awhile, just to be sure they weren't coming back, and then he would make tracks.

Ben could hear the throb of the drainage machinery coming through the earth—could even feel it: a low, steady vibration that went from the ground to the root he was leaning against and then into his back. He thought of the Morlocks again, of their naked flesh; he imagined it would smell like the dank and shitty air that had come up through the ventholes of that iron cap. He thought of their wells driven deep into the earth, wells with rusty ladders bolted to their sides. He dozed, and at some point his thoughts became a dream.

It wasn't Morlocks he dreamed of. He dreamed of the thing which had happened to him in January, the thing which he hadn't quite been able to tell his mother.

It had been the first day of school after the long Christmas break. Mrs. Douglas had asked for a volunteer to stay after and help her count the books that had been turned in just before the vacation. Ben had raised his hand.

“Thank you, Ben,” Mrs. Douglas had said, favoring him with a smile of such brilliance that it warmed him down to his toes.

“Suckass,” Henry Bowers remarked under his breath.

It had been the sort of Maine winter day that is both the best and the worst: cloudless, eye-wateringly bright, but so cold it was a little frightening. To make the ten-degree temperature worse, there was a strong wind to give the cold a bitter cutting edge.

Ben counted books and called out numbers; Mrs. Douglas wrote them down (not bothering to double-check his work even on a random basis, he was proud to note), and then they both carried the books down to the storage room through halls where radiators clanked dreamily. At first the school had been full of sounds: slamming locker doors, the clackety-clack of Mrs. Thomas's typewriter in the office, the slightly off-key choral renditions of the glee club upstairs, the nervous thud-thud-thud of basketballs from the gym and the scrooch and thud of sneakers as players drove toward the baskets or cut turns on the polished wood floor.

Little by little these sounds ceased, until, as the last set of books was totted up (one short, but it hardly mattered, Mrs. Douglas
sighed—they were all holding together on a wing and a prayer), the only sounds were the radiators, the faint
whissh-whissh
of Mr. Fazio's broom as he pushed colored sawdust up the hall floor, and the howl of the wind outside.

Ben looked toward the book room's one narrow window and saw that the light was fading rapidly from the sky. It was four o'clock and dusk was at hand. Membranes of dry snow blew around the icy jungle gym and swirled between the teetertotters, which were frozen solidly into the ground. Only the thaws of April would break those bitter winter-welds. He saw no one at all on Jackson Street. He looked a moment longer, expecting a car to roll through the Jackson-Witcham intersection, but none did. Everyone in Derry save himself and Mrs. Douglas might be dead or fled, at least from what he could see from here.

He looked toward her and saw, with a touch of real fright, that she was feeling almost exactly the same things he was feeling himself. He could tell by the look in her eyes. They were deep and thoughtful and far off, not the eyes of a schoolteacher in her forties but those of a child. Her hands were folded just below her breasts, as if in prayer.

I'm scared,
Ben thought,
and she's scared, too. But what are we really scared of?

He didn't know. Then she looked at him and uttered a short, almost embarrassed laugh. “I've kept you too late,” she said. “I'm sorry, Ben.”

“That's okay.” He looked down at his shoes. He loved her a little—not with the frank unquestioning love he had lavished on Miss Thibodeau, his first-grade teacher . . . but he
did
love her.

“If I drove, I'd give you a ride,” she said, “but I don't. My husband's going to pick me up around quarter past five. If you'd care to wait, we could—”

“No thanks,” Ben said. “I ought to get home before then.” This was not really the truth, but he felt a queer aversion to the idea of meeting Mrs. Douglas's husband.

“Maybe your mother could—”

“She doesn't drive, either,” Ben said. “I'll be all right. It's only a mile home.”

“A mile's not far when it's nice, but it can be a very long way
in this weather. You'll go in somewhere if it gets too cold, won't you, Ben?”

“Aw, sure. I'll go into Costello's Market and stand by the stove a little while, or something. Mr. Gedreau doesn't mind. And I got my snowpants. My new Christmas scarf, too.”

Mrs. Douglas looked a little reassured . . . and then she glanced toward the window again. “It just looks so cold out there,” she said. “So . . . so inimical.”

He didn't know the word but he knew exactly what she meant.
Something just happened—what?

He had seen her, he realized suddenly, as a person instead of just a teacher. That was what had happened. Suddenly he had seen her face in an entirely different way, and because he did, it became a new face—the face of a tired poet. He could see her going home with her husband, sitting beside him in the car with her hands folded as the heater hissed and he talked about his day. He could see her making them dinner. An odd thought crossed his mind and a cocktail-party question rose to his lips:
Do you have children, Mrs. Douglas?

“I often think at this time of the year that people really weren't meant to live this far north of the equator,” she said. “At least not in this latitude.” Then she smiled and some of the strangeness either went out of her face or his eye—he was able to see her, at least partially, as he always had.
But you'll never see her that way again, not completely,
he thought, dismayed.

“I'll feel old until spring, and then I'll feel young again. It's that way every year. Are you sure you'll be all right, Ben?”

“I'll be fine.”

“Yes, I suppose you will. You're a good boy, Ben.”

He looked back at his toes, blushing, loving her more than ever.

In the hallway Mr. Fazio said: “Be careful of de fros'bite, boy,” without looking up from his red sawdust.

“I will.”

He reached his locker, opened it, and yanked on his snowpants. He had been painfully unhappy when his mother insisted he wear them again this winter on especially cold days, thinking of them as baby clothes, but he was glad to have them this afternoon. He walked slowly toward the door, zipping his coat, yanking the drawstrings of
his hood tight, pulling on his mittens. He went out and stood on the snowpacked top step of the front stairs for a moment, listening as the door snicked closed—and locked—behind him.

Derry School brooded under a bruised skin of sky. The wind blew steadily. The snap-hooks on the flagpole rope rattled a lonesome tattoo against the steel pole itself. That wind cut into the warm and unprepared flesh of Ben's face at once, numbing his cheeks.

Be careful of de fros'bite, boy.

He quickly pulled his scarf up until he looked like a small, pudgy caricature of Red Ryder. That darkening sky had a fantastical sort of beauty, but Ben did not pause to admire it; it was too cold for that. He got going.

At first the wind was at his back and things didn't seem so bad; in fact, it actually seemed to be helping him along. At Canal Street, however, he had to turn right and almost fully into the wind. Now it seemed to be holding him back . . . as if it had business with him. His scarf helped a little, but not enough. His eyes throbbed and the moisture in his nose froze to a crack-glaze. His legs were going numb. Several times he stuck his mittened hands into his armpits to warm them up. The wind whooped and screamed, sometimes sounding almost human.

Ben felt both frightened and exhilarated. Frightened because he could now understand stories he had read, such as Jack London's “To Build a Fire,” where people actually froze to death. It would be all too possible to freeze to death on a night like this, a night when the temperature would drop to fifteen below.

The exhilaration was hard to explain. It was a lonely feeling—a somehow melancholy feeling. He was outside; he passed on the wings of the wind, and none of the people beyond the brightly lighted squares of their windows saw him. They were inside, inside where there was light and warmth. They didn't know he had passed them; only he knew. It was a secret thing.

The moving air burned like needles, but it was fresh and clean. White smoke jetted from his nose in neat little streams.

And as sundown came, the last of the day a cold yellowy-orange line on the western horizon, the first stars cruel diamond-chips glimmering in the sky overhead, he came to the Canal. He was only three
blocks from home now, and eager to feel the heat on his face and legs, moving the blood again, making it tingle.

Still—he paused.

The Canal was frozen in its concrete sluice like a frozen river of rose-milk, its surface humped and cracked and cloudy. It was moveless yet completely alive in this harshly puritanical winterlight; it had its own unique and difficult beauty.

Ben turned the other way—southwest. Toward the Barrens. When he looked in this direction, the wind was at his back again. It made his snowpants ripple and flap. The Canal ran straight between its concrete walls for perhaps half a mile; then the concrete was gone and the river sprawled its way into the Barrens, at this time of the year a skeletal world of icy brambles and jutting naked branches.

A figure was standing on the ice down there.

Ben stared at it and thought:
There may be a man down there, but can he be wearing what it looks like he's wearing? It's impossible, isn't it?

The figure was dressed in what appeared to be a white-silver clown suit. It rippled around him in the polar wind. There were oversized orange shoes on his feet. They matched the pompom buttons which ran down the front of his suit. One hand grasped a bundle of strings which rose to a bright bunch of balloons, and when Ben observed that the balloons were floating in his direction, he felt unreality wash over him more strongly. He closed his eyes, rubbed them, opened them. The balloons still appeared to be floating toward him.

He heard Mr. Fazio's voice in his head.
Be careful of de fros'bite, boy.

It had to be a hallucination or a mirage brought on by some weird trick of the weather. There could be a man down there on the ice; he supposed it was even technically possible he could be wearing a clown suit. But the balloons couldn't be floating toward Ben,
into
the wind. Yet that was just what they appeared to be doing.

Ben!
the clown on the ice called. Ben thought that voice was only in his mind, although it seemed he heard it with his ears.
Want a balloon, Ben?

There was something so evil in that voice, so awful, that Ben wanted to run away as fast as he could, but his feet seemed as welded to this sidewalk as the teetertotters in the schoolyard were welded to the ground.