It (25 page)

There's a guillotine blade hanging over their lives, razor-sharp, but the more I think about it the more I think they don't know that blade is there. I'm the one with my hand on the lever. I can pull it just by opening my telephone notebook and calling them, one after the other.

Maybe I won't have to do it. I hold on to the waning hope that I've mistaken the rabbity cries of my own timid mind for the deeper, truer voice of the Turtle. After all, what do I have? Mellon in July. A child found dead on Neibolt Street last October, another found in Memorial Park in early December, just before the first snowfall. Maybe it was a tramp, as the papers say. Or a crazy who's since left Derry or killed himself out of remorse and self-disgust, as some of the books say the real Jack the Ripper may have done.

Maybe.

But the Albrecht girl was found directly across the street from that damned old house on Neibolt Street . . . and she was killed on the same day as George Denbrough was, twenty-seven years before.
And then the Johnson boy, found in Memorial Park with one of his legs missing below the knee. Memorial Park is, of course, the home of the Derry Standpipe, and the boy was found almost at its foot. The Standpipe is within a shout of the Barrens; the Standpipe is also where Stan Uris saw those boys.

Those dead boys.

Still, it could all be nothing but smoke and mirages.
Could
be. Or coincidence. Or perhaps something between the two—a kind of malefic echo. Could that be? I sense that it could be. Here in Derry,
anything
could be.

I think what was here before is still here—the thing that was here in 1957 and 1958; the thing that was here in 1929 and in 1930 when the Black Spot was burned down by the Maine Legion of White Decency; the thing that was here in 1904 and 1905 and early 1906—at least until the Kitchener Ironworks exploded; the thing that was here in 1876 and 1877, the thing that has shown up every twenty-seven years or so. Sometimes it comes a little sooner, sometimes a little later . . . but it always comes. As one goes back the wrong notes are harder and harder to find because the records grow poorer and the moth-holes in the narrative history of the area grow bigger. But knowing where to look—and
when
to look—goes a long way toward solving the problem. It always comes back, you see.

It.

So—yes: I think I'll have to make those calls. I think it was meant to be us. Somehow, for some reason, we're the ones who have been elected to stop it forever. Blind fate? Blind luck? Or is it that damned Turtle again? Does it perhaps command as well as speak? I don't know. And I doubt if it matters. All those years ago Bill said
The Turtle can't help us,
and if it was true then it must be true now.

I think of us standing in the water, hands clasped, making that promise to come back if it ever started again—standing there almost like Druids in a ring, our hands bleeding their own promise, palm to palm. A ritual that is perhaps as old as mankind itself, an unknowing tap driven into the tree of all power—the one that grows on the borderline between the land of all we know and that of all we suspect.

Because the similarities—

But I'm doing my own Bill Denbrough here, stuttering over the same ground again and again, reciting a few facts and a lot of unpleasant
(and rather gaseous) suppositions, growing more and more obsessive with every paragraph. No good. Useless. Dangerous, even. But it is so very hard to wait on events.

This notebook is supposed to be an effort to get beyond that obsession by widening the focus of my attention—after all, there is more to this story than six boys and one girl, none of them happy, none of them accepted by their peers, who stumbled into a nightmare during one hot summer when Eisenhower was still President. It is an attempt to pull the camera back a little, if you will—to see the whole city, a place where nearly thirty-five thousand people work and eat and sleep and copulate and shop and drive around and walk and go to school and go to jail and sometimes disappear into the dark.

To know what a place
is,
I really do believe one has to know what it
was.
And if I had to name a day when all of this really started again for me, it would be the day in the early spring of 1980 when I went to see Albert Carson, who died last summer—at ninety-one, he was full of years as well as honors. He was head librarian here from 1914 to 1960, an incredible span (but he was an incredible man), and I felt that if anyone would know which history of this area was the best one to start with, Albert Carson would. I asked him my question as we sat on his porch and he gave me my answer, speaking in a croak—he was already fighting the throat-cancer which would eventually kill him.

“Not one of them is worth a shit. As you damn well know.”

“Then where should I start?”

“Start what, for Christ's sake?”

“Researching the history of the area. Of Derry Township.”

“Oh. Well. Start with the Fricke and the Michaud. They're supposed to be the best.”

“And after I read those—”

“Read
them? Christ, no! Throw em in the wastebasket! That's your first step. Then read Buddinger. Branson Buddinger was a damned sloppy researcher and afflicted with a terminal boner, if half of what I heard when I was a kid was true, but when it came to Derry his heart was in the right place. He got most of the facts wrong, but he got them wrong with
feeling,
Hanlon.”

I laughed a little and Carson grinned with his leathery lips—an expression of good humor that was actually a little frightening. In
that instant he looked like a vulture happily guarding a freshly killed animal, waiting for it to reach exactly the right stage of tasty decomposition before beginning to dine.

“When you finish with Buddinger, read Ives. Make notes on all the people he talked to. Sandy Ives is still at the University of Maine. Folklorist. After you read him, go see him. Buy him a dinner. I'd take him to the Orinoka, because dinner at the Orinoka seems to
never
end. Pump him. Fill up a notebook with names and addresses. Talk to the old-timers he's talked to—those that are still left; there are a few of us, ah-hah-hah-hah!—and get some more names from them. By then you'll have all the place to stand you'll need, if you're half as bright as I think you are. If you chase down enough people, you'll find out a few things that aren't in the histories. And you may find they disturb your sleep.”

“Derry . . .”

“What about it?”

“Derry's not right, is it?”

“Right?” he asked in that whispery croak. “What's right? What does that word mean? Is ‘right' pretty pictures of the Kenduskeag at sunset, Kodachrome by so-and-so, f-stop such-and-such? If so, then Derry is right, because there are pretty pictures of it by the score. Is right a damned committee of dry-boxed old virgins to save the Governor's Mansion or to put a commemorative plaque in front of the Standpipe? If
that's
right, then Derry's right as rain, because we've got more than our share of old kitty-cats minding everybody's business. Is right that ugly plastic statue of Paul Bunyan in front of City Center? Oh, if I had a truckful of napalm and my old Zippo lighter I'd take care of
that
fucking thing, I assure you . . . but if one's aesthetic is broad enough to include plastic statues, then Derry is right. The question is, what does right mean to you, Hanlon? Eh? More to the point, what does right
not
mean?”

I could only shake my head. He either knew or he didn't. He would either tell or he wouldn't.

“Do you mean the unpleasant stories you may hear, or the ones you already know? There are
always
unpleasant stories. A town's history is like a rambling old mansion filled with rooms and cubbyholes and laundry-chutes and garrets and all sorts of eccentric little hiding places . . . not to mention an occasional secret passage or two. If you
go exploring Mansion Derry, you'll find all sorts of things. Yes. You may be sorry later, but you'll find them, and once a thing is found it can't be unfound, can it? Some of the rooms are locked, but there are keys . . . there are keys.”

His eyes glinted at me with an old man's shrewdness.

“You may come to think you've stumbled on the worst of Derry's secrets . . . but there is always one more. And one more. And one more.”

“Do you—”

“I think I shall have to ask you to excuse me just now. My throat is very bad today. It's time for my medicine and my nap.”

In other words, here is a knife and a fork, my friend; go see what you can cut with them.

I started with the Fricke history and the Michaud history. I followed Carson's advice and threw them in the wastebasket, but I read them first. They were as bad as he had suggested. I read the Buddinger history, copied out the footnotes, and chased them down. That was more satisfactory, but footnotes are peculiar things, you know—like footpaths twisting through a wild and anarchic country. They split, then they split again; at any point you may take a wrong turn which leads you either to a bramble-choked dead end or into swampy quickmud. “If you find a footnote,” a library-science prof once told a class of which I was a part, “step on its head and kill it before it can breed.”

They
do
breed, and sometimes the breeding is a good thing, but I think that more often it is not. Those in Buddinger's stiffly written
A History of Old Derry
(Orono: University of Maine Press, 1950) wander through one hundred years' worth of forgotten books and dusty master's dissertations in the fields of history and folklore, through articles in defunct magazines, and amid brain-numbing stacks of town reports and ledgers.

My conversations with Sandy Ives were more interesting. His sources crossed Buddinger's from time to time, but a crossing was all it ever was. Ives had spent a good part of his lifetime setting down oral histories—yarns, in other words—almost verbatim, a practice Branson Buddinger would undoubtedly have seen as taking the low road.

Ives had written a cycle of articles on Derry during the years
1963–66. Most of the old-timers he talked to then were dead by the time I started my own investigations, but they had sons, daughters, nephews, cousins. And, of course, one of the great true facts of the world is this: for every old-timer who dies, there's a new old-timer coming along. And a good story never dies; it is always passed down. I sat on a lot of porches and back stoops, drank a lot of tea, Black Label beer, homemade beer, homemade rootbeer, tapwater, springwater. I did a lot of listening, and the wheels of my tape-player turned.

Both Buddinger and Ives agreed completely on one point: the original party of white settlers numbered about three hundred. They were English. They had a charter and were formally known as the Derrie Company. The land granted them covered what is today Derry, most of Newport, and little slices of the surrounding towns. And in the year 1741 everyone in Derry Township just disappeared. They were there in June of that year—a community which at that time numbered about three hundred and forty souls—but come October they were gone. The little village of wooden homes stood utterly deserted. One of them, which once stood roughly at the place where Witcham and Jackson Streets intersect today, was burned to the ground. The Michaud history states firmly that all of the villagers were slaughtered by Indians, but there is no basis—save the one burned house—for that idea. More likely, someone's stove just got too hot and the house went up in flames.

Indian massacre? Doubtful. No bones, no bodies. Flood? Not that year. Disease? No word of it in the surrounding towns.

They just disappeared. All of them. All three hundred and forty of them. Without a trace.

So far as I know, the only case remotely like it in American history is the disappearance of the colonists on Roanoke Island, Virginia. Every school-child in the country knows about that one, but who knows about the Derry disappearance? Not even the people who live here, apparently. I quizzed several junior-high students who are taking the required Maine-history course, and none of them knew a thing about it. Then I checked the text,
Maine Then and Now.
There are better than forty index entries for Derry, most of them concerning the boom years of the lumber industry. Nothing about the disappearance of the original colonists . . . and yet that—what shall I call it?—that
quiet
fits the pattern, too.

There is a kind of curtain of quiet which cloaks much of what has happened here . . . and yet people
do
talk. I guess nothing can stop people from talking. But you have to listen hard, and that is a rare skill. I flatter myself that I've developed it over the last four years. If I haven't, then my aptitude for the job must be poor indeed, because I've had enough practice. An old man told me about how his wife had heard voices speaking to her from the drain of her kitchen sink in the three weeks before their daughter died—that was in the early winter of 1957–58. The girl he spoke of was one of the early victims in the murder-spree which began with George Denbrough and did not end until the following summer.

“A whole slew of voices, all of em babblin together,” he told me. He owned a Gulf station on Kansas Street and talked in between slow, limping trips out to the pumps, where he filled gas-tanks, checked oil-levels, and wiped windshields. “Said she spoke back once, even though she was ascairt. Leaned right over the drain, she did, and hollered down into it. ‘Who the hell are you?' she calls. ‘What's your name?' And all these voices answered back, she said—grunts and babbles and howls and yips, screams and laughin, don't you know. And she said they were sayin what the possessed man said to Jesus: ‘Our name is Legion,' they said. She wouldn't go near that sink for two years. For them two years I'd spend twelve hours a day down here, bustin my hump, then have to go home and warsh all the damn dishes.”