It (30 page)

Ben had heard rumors of Frankie-or-Freddy and his gum-stick long before the kid had vaulted into the limelight by discovering the body of Veronica Grogan. “He's really gross,” a kid named Richie Tozier had confided to Ben one day during activity period. Tozier was a scrawny kid who wore glasses. Ben thought that without them Tozier probably saw every bit as well as Mr. Magoo; his magnified eyes swam behind the thick lenses with an expression of perpetual surprise. He also had huge front teeth that had earned him the nickname Bucky Beaver. He was in the same fifth-grade class as Freddy-or-Frankie. “Pokes that gum-stick of his down sewer-drains all day long and then chews the gum from the end of it at night.”

“Oh gosh, that's bad!” Ben had exclaimed.

“Dat's wight, wabbit,” Tozier said, and walked away.

Frankie-or-Freddy had worked
THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK
back and forth through the grate of the stormdrain, believing he'd found a wig. He thought maybe he could dry it out and give it to his mother for her birthday, or something. After a few minutes of poking and prodding, just as he was about to give up, a face had floated out of the murky water in the plugged drain, a face with dead leaves plastered to its white cheeks and dirt in its staring eyes.

Freddy-or-Frankie ran home screaming.

Veronica Grogan had been in the fourth grade at the Neibolt Street Church School, which was run by people Ben's mother called
“the Christers.” She was buried on what would have been her tenth birthday.

After this most recent horror, Arlene Hanscom had taken Ben into the living room one evening and sat beside him on the couch. She picked up his hands and looked intently into his face. Ben looked back, feeling a little uneasy.

“Ben,” she said presently, “are you a fool?”

“No, Mamma,” Ben said, feeling more uneasy than ever. He hadn't the slightest idea what this was about. He could not remember ever seeing his mamma look so grave.

“No,” she echoed. “I don't believe you are.”

She fell silent for a long time then, not looking at Ben but pensively out the window. Ben wondered briefly if she had forgotten all about him. She was a young woman still—only thirty-two—but raising a boy by herself had put a mark on her. She worked forty hours a week in the spool-and-bale room at Stark's Mills in Newport, and after workdays when the dust and lint had been particularly bad, she sometimes coughed so long and hard that Ben would become frightened. On those nights he would lie awake for a long time, looking through the window beside his bed into the darkness, wondering what would become of him if she died. He would be an orphan then, he supposed. He might become a State Kid (he thought that meant you had to go live with farmers who made you work from sunup to sunset), or he might be sent to the Bangor Orphan Asylum. He tried to tell himself it was foolish to worry about such things, but the telling did absolutely no good. Nor was it just himself he was worried about; he worried for her as well. She was a hard woman, his mamma, and she insisted on having her own way about most things, but she was a good mamma. He loved her very much.

“You know about these murders,” she said, looking back at last.

He nodded.

“At first people thought they were . . .” She hesitated over the next word, never spoken in her son's presence before, but the circumstances were unusual and she forced herself. “. . . sex crimes. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't. Maybe they're over and maybe they're not. No one can be sure of anything anymore, except that some crazy man who preys on little children is out there. Do you understand me, Ben?”

He nodded.

“And you know what I mean when I say they may have been sex crimes?”

He didn't—at least not exactly—but he nodded again. If his mother felt she had to talk to him about the birds and bees as well as this other business, he thought he would die of embarrassment.

“I worry about you, Ben. I worry that I'm not doing right by you.

Ben squirmed and said nothing.

“You're on your own a lot. Too much, I guess. You—”

“Mamma—”

“Hush while I'm talking to you,” she said, and Ben hushed. “You have to be careful, Benny. Summer's coming and I don't want to spoil your vacation, but you have to be careful. I want you in by suppertime every day. What time do we eat supper?”

“Six o'clock.”

“Right with Eversharp! So hear what I'm saying: if I set the table and pour your milk and see that there's no Ben washing his hands at the sink, I'm going to go right away to the telephone and call the police and report you missing. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, Mamma.”

“And you believe I mean exactly what I say?”

“Yes.”

“It would probably turn out that I did it for nothing, if I ever had to do it at all. I'm not entirely ignorant about the ways of boys. I know they get wrapped up in their own games and projects during summer vacation—lining bees back to their hives or playing ball or kick-the-can or whatever. I have a pretty good idea what you and your friends are up to, you see.”

Ben nodded soberly, thinking that if she didn't know he had no friends, she probably didn't know anywhere near as much about his boyhood as she thought she did. But he would never have dreamed of saying such a thing to her, not in ten thousand years of dreaming.

She took something from the pocket of her housedress and handed it to him. It was a small plastic box. Ben opened it. When he saw what was inside, his mouth dropped open.
“Wow!”
he said, his admiration totally unaffected.
“Thanks!”

It was a Timex watch with small silver numbers and an imitation-leather band. She had set it and wound it; he could hear it ticking.

“Jeez, it's the coolest!” He gave her an enthusiastic hug and a loud kiss on the cheek.

She smiled, pleased that he was pleased, and nodded. Then she grew grave again. “Put it on, keep it on, wear it, wind it, mind it, don't lose it.”

“Okay.”

“Now that you have a watch you have no reason to be late home. Remember what I said: if you're not on time, the police will be looking for you on my behalf. At least until they catch the bastard who is killing children around here, don't you dare be a single minute late, or I'll be on that telephone.”

“Yes, Mamma.”

“One other thing. I don't want you going around alone. You know enough not to accept candy or rides from strangers—we both agree that you're no fool—and you're big for your age, but a grown man, particularly a crazy one, can overpower a child if he really wants to. When you go to the park or the library, go with one of your friends.”

“I will, Mamma.”

She looked out the window again and uttered a sigh that was full of trouble. “Things have come to a pretty pass when a thing like this can go on. There's something ugly about this town, anyway. I've always thought so.” She looked back at him, brows drawn down. “You're such a wanderer, Ben. You must know almost everyplace in Derry, don't you? The town part of it, at least.”

Ben didn't think he knew anywhere near all the places, but he did know a lot of them. And he was so thrilled by the unexpected gift of the Timex that he would have agreed with his mother that night if she had suggested John Wayne should play Adolf Hitler in a musical comedy about World War II. He nodded.

“You've
never seen anything, have you?” she asked. “Anything or anyone . . . well, suspicious? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything that scared you?”

And in his pleasure over the watch, his feeling of love for her, his small-boy gladness at her concern (which was at the same time a little frightening in its unhidden unabashed fierceness), he almost told her about the thing that had happened last January.

He opened his mouth and then something—some powerful intuition—closed it again.

What was that something, exactly? Intuition. No more than that . . . and no less. Even children may intuit love's more complex responsibilities from time to time, and to sense that in some cases it may be kinder to remain quiet. That was part of the reason Ben closed his mouth. But there was something else as well, something not so noble. She could be hard, his mamma. She could be a boss. She never called him “fat,” she called him “big” (sometimes amplified to “big for his age”), and when there were leftovers from supper she would often bring them to him while he was watching TV or doing his homework, and he would eat them, although some dim part of him hated himself for doing so (but never his mamma for putting the food before him—Ben Hanscom would not have dared to hate his mamma; God would surely strike him dead for feeling such a brutish, ungrateful emotion even for a second). And perhaps some even dimmer part of him—the far-off Tibet of Ben's deeper thoughts—suspected her motives in this constant feeding. Was it just love? Could it be anything else? Surely not. But . . . he wondered. More to the point, she didn't know he had no friends. That lack of knowledge made him distrust her, made him unsure of what her reaction would be to his story of the thing which had happened to him in January. If
anything
had happened. Coming in at six and staying in was not so bad, maybe. He could read, watch TV,

(eat)

build stuff with his logs and Erector Set. But having to stay in all day as well would be
very
bad . . . and if he told her what he had seen—or thought he had seen—in January, she might make him do just that.

So, for a variety of reasons, Ben withheld the story.

“No, Mamma,” he said. “Just Mr. McKibbon rooting around in other people's garbage.”

That made her laugh—she didn't like Mr. McKibbon, who was a Republican as well as a “Christer”—and her laugh closed the subject. That night Ben had lain awake late, but no thoughts of being cast adrift and parentless in a hard world troubled him. He felt loved and safe as he lay in his bed looking at the moonlight which came in through the window and spilled across the bed onto the floor. He alternately put his watch to his ear so he could listen to it tick and held it close to his eyes so he could admire its ghostly radium dial.

He had finally fallen asleep and dreamed he was playing baseball with the other boys in the vacant lot behind Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot. He had just hit a bases-clearing home run, swinging from his heels and getting every inch of that little honey, and his cheering teammates met him in a mob at home plate. They pummelled him and clapped him on the back. They hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him toward the place where their equipment was scattered. In the dream he was almost bursting with pride and happiness . . . and then he had looked out toward center field, where a chainlink fence marked the boundary between the cindery lot and the weedy ground beyond that sloped into the Barrens. A figure was standing in those tangled weeds and low bushes, almost out of sight. It held a clutch of balloons—red, yellow, blue, green—in one white-gloved hand. It beckoned with the other. He couldn't see the figure's face, but he could see the baggy suit with the big orange pompom-buttons down the front and the floppy yellow bow-tie.

It was a clown.

Dat's wight, wabbit,
a phantom voice agreed.

When Ben awoke the next morning he had forgotten the dream but his pillow was damp to the touch . . . as if he had wept in the night.

He went up to the main desk in the Children's Library, shaking the train of thought the curfew sign had begun as easily as a dog shakes water after a swim.

“Hullo, Benny,” Mrs. Starrett said. Like Mrs. Douglas at school, she genuinely liked Ben. Grownups, especially those who sometimes needed to discipline children as part of their jobs, generally liked him, because he was polite, soft-spoken, thoughtful, sometimes even funny in a very quiet way. These were all the same reasons most kids thought he was a puke. “You tired of summer vacation yet?”

Ben smiled. This was a standard witticism with Mrs. Starrett. “Not yet,” he said, “since summer vacation's only been going on”—he looked at his watch—“one hour and seventeen minutes. Give me another hour.”

Mrs. Starrett laughed, covering her mouth so it wouldn't be too loud. She asked Ben if he wanted to sign up for the summer reading program, and Ben said he did. She gave him a map of the United States and Ben thanked her very much.

He wandered off into the stacks, pulling a book here and there, looking at it, putting it back. Choosing books was serious business. You had to be careful. If you were a grownup you could have as many as you wanted, but kids could only take out three at a time. If you picked a dud, you were stuck with it.

He finally picked out his three—
Bulldozer, The Black Stallion,
and one that was sort of a shot in the dark: a book called
Hot Rod,
by a man named Henry Gregor Felsen.

“You may not like this one,” Mrs. Starrett remarked, stamping the book. “It's extremely bloody. I urge it on the teenagers, especially the ones who have just got their driving licenses, because it gives them something to think about. I imagine it slows some of them down for a whole week.”

“Well, I'll give it a whirl,” Ben said, and took his books over to one of the tables away from Pooh's Corner, where Big Billy Goat Gruff was in the process of giving a double dose of dickens to the troll under the bridge.

He worked on
Hot Rod
for awhile, and it was not too shabby. Not too shabby at all. It was about a kid who was a really great driver, but there was this party-pooper cop who was always trying to slow him down. Ben found out there were no speed limits in Iowa, where the book was set. That was sort of cool.

He looked up after three chapters, and his eye was caught by a brand-new display. The poster on top (the library was gung-ho for posters, all right) showed a happy mailman delivering a letter to a happy kid.
LIBRARIES ARE FOR WRITING, TOO
, the poster said.
WHY NOT WRITE A FRIEND TODAY? THE SMILES ARE GUARANTEED
!