It (31 page)

Beneath the poster were slots filled with pre-stamped postcards, pre-stamped envelopes, and stationery with a drawing of the Derry Public Library on top in blue ink. The pre-stamped envelopes were a nickel each, the postcards three cents. The paper was two sheets for a penny.

Ben felt in his pocket. The remaining four cents of his bottle
money was still there. He marked his place in
Hot Rod
and went back to the desk. “May I have one of those postcards, please?”

“Certainly, Ben.” As always, Mrs. Starrett was charmed by his grave politeness and a little saddened by his size. Her mother would have said the boy was digging his grave with a knife and fork. She gave him the card and watched him go back to his seat. It was a table that could seat six, but Ben was the only one there. She had never seen Ben with any of the other boys. It was too bad, because she believed Ben Hanscom had treasures buried inside. He would yield them up to a kind and patient prospector . . . if one ever came along.

Ben took out his ballpoint pen, clicked the point down, and addressed the card simply enough:
Miss Beverly Marsh, Lower Main Street, Derry, Maine, Zone 2.
He did not know the exact number of her building, but his mamma had told him that most postmen had a pretty good idea of who their customers were once they'd been on their beats a little while. If the postman who had Lower Main Street could deliver this card, that would be great. If not, it would just go to the dead-letter office and he would be out three cents. It would certainly never come back to him, because he had no intention of putting his name and address on it.

Carrying the card with the address turned inward (he was taking no chances, even though he didn't see anyone he recognized), he got a few square slips of paper from the wooden box by the cardfile. He took these back to his seat and began to scribble, to cross out, and then to scribble again.

During the last week of school before exams, they had been reading and writing haiku in English class. Haiku was a Japanese form of poetry, brief, disciplined. A haiku, Mrs. Douglas said, could be just seventeen syllables long—no more, no less. It usually concentrated on one clear image which was linked to one specific emotion: sadness, joy, nostalgia, happiness . . . love.

Ben had been utterly charmed by the concept. He enjoyed his English classes, although mild enjoyment was generally as far as it went.
He could do the work, but as a rule there was nothing in it which gripped him. Yet there
was
something in the concept of haiku that fired his imagination. The idea made him feel happy, the way Mrs. Starrett's explanation of the greenhouse effect had made him happy. Haiku was good poetry, Ben felt, because it was
structured
poetry. There were no secret rules. Seventeen syllables, one image linked to one emotion, and you were out. Bingo. It was clean, it was utilitarian, it was entirely contained within and dependent upon its own rules. He even liked the word itself, a slide of air broken as if along a dotted line by the “
k
”-sound at the very back of your mouth:
haiku.

Her hair,
he thought, and saw her going down the school steps again with it bouncing on her shoulders. The sun did not so much glint on it as seem to burn within it.

Working carefully over a twenty-minute period (with one break to go back and get more work-slips), striking out words that were too long, changing, deleting, Ben came up with this:

Your hair is winter fire,

January embers.

My heart burns there, too.

He wasn't crazy about it, but it was the best he could do. He was afraid that if he frigged around with it too long, worried it too much, he would end up getting the jitters and doing something much worse. Or not doing it at all. He didn't want that to happen. The moment she had taken to speak to him had been a striking moment for Ben. He wanted to mark it in his memory. Probably Beverly had a crush on some bigger boy—a sixth- or maybe even a seventhgrader, and she would think that maybe that boy had sent the haiku. That would make her happy, and so the day she got it would be marked in her memory. And although she would never know it had been Ben Hanscom who marked it for her, that was all right;
he
would know.

He copied his completed poem onto the back of the postcard (printing in block letters, as if copying out a ransom note rather than a love poem), clipped his pen back into his pocket, and stuck the card in the back of
Hot Rod.

He got up then, and said goodbye to Mrs. Starrett on his way out.

“Goodbye, Ben,” Mrs. Starrett said. “Enjoy your summer vacation, but don't forget about the curfew.”

“I won't.”

He strolled through the glassed-in passageway between the two buildings, enjoying the heat there
(greenhouse effect,
he thought smugly) followed by the cool of the adult library. An old man was reading the
News
in one of the ancient, comfortably overstuffed chairs in the Reading Room alcove. The headline just below the masthead blazed:
DULLES PLEDGES U.S. TROOPS TO HELP LEBANON IF NEEDED
! There was also a photo of Ike, shaking hands with an Arab in the Rose Garden. Ben's mamma said that when the country elected Hubert Humphrey President in 1960, maybe things would get moving again. Ben was vaguely aware that there was something called a recession going on, and his mamma was afraid she might get laid off.

A smaller headline on the bottom half of page one read
POLICE HUNT FOR PSYCHOPATH GOES ON
.

Ben pushed open the library's big front door and stepped out.

There was a mailbox at the foot of the walk. Ben fished the postcard from the back of the book and mailed it. He felt his heartbeat speed up a little as it slipped out of his fingers.
What if she knows it's me, somehow?

Don't be a stupe,
he responded, a little alarmed at how exciting that idea seemed to him.

He walked off up Kansas Street, hardly aware of where he was going and not caring at all. A fantasy had begun to form in his mind. In it, Beverly Marsh walked up to him, her gray-green eyes wide, her auburn hair tied back in a ponytail.
I want to ask you a question, Ben,
this make-believe girl said in his mind,
and you've got to swear to tell the truth.
She held up the postcard.
Did you write this?

This was a terrible fantasy. This was a wonderful fantasy. He wanted it to stop. He didn't want it to
ever
stop. His face was starting to burn again.

Ben walked and dreamed and shifted his library books from one arm to the other and began to whistle.
You'll probably think I'm horrible,
Beverly said,
but I think I want to kiss you.
Her lips parted slightly.

Ben's own lips were suddenly too dry to whistle.

“I think I want you to,” he whispered, and smiled a dopey, dizzy, and absolutely beautiful grin.

If he had looked down at the sidewalk just then, he would have seen that three other shadows had grown around his own; if he had been listening he would have heard the sound of Victor's cleats as he, Belch, and Henry closed in. But he neither heard nor saw. Ben was far away, feeling Beverly's lips slip softly against his mouth, raising his timid hands to touch the dim Irish fire of her hair.

Like many cities, small and large, Derry had not been planned—like Topsy, it just growed. City planners never would have located it where it was in the first place. Downtown Derry was in a valley formed by the Kenduskeag Stream, which ran through the business district on a diagonal from southwest to northeast. The rest of the town had swarmed up the sides of the surrounding hills.

The valley the township's original settlers came to had been swampy and heavily grown over. The stream and the Penobscot River into which the Kenduskeag emptied were great things for traders, bad ones for those who sowed crops or built their houses too close to them—the Kenduskeag in particular, because it flooded every three or four years. The city was still prone to flooding in spite of the vast amounts of money spent over the last fifty years to control the problem. If the floods had been caused only by the stream itself, a system of dams might have taken care of things. There were, however, other factors. The Kenduskeag's low banks were one. The entire area's logy drainage was another. Since the turn of the century there had been many serious floods in Derry and one disastrous one, in 1931. To make matters worse, the hills on which much of Derry was built were honeycombed with small streams—Torrault Stream, in which the body of Cheryl Lamonica had been found, was one of them. During periods of heavy rain, they were all apt to overflow their banks. “If it rains two weeks the whole damn town gets a sinus infection,” Stuttering Bill's dad had said once.

The Kenduskeag was caged in a concrete canal two miles long as it passed through downtown. This canal dived under Main Street at the intersection of Main and Canal, becoming an underground river for half a mile or so before surfacing again at Bassey Park. Canal Street,
where most of Derry's bars were ranked like felons in a police lineup, paralleled the Canal on its way out of town, and every few weeks or so the police would have to fish some drunk's car out of the water, which was polluted to drop-dead levels by sewage and mill wastes. Fish were caught from time to time in the Canal, but they were inedible mutants.

On the northeastern side of town—the Canal side—the river had been managed to at least some degree. A thriving commerce went on all along it in spite of the occasional flooding. People walked beside the Canal, sometimes hand in hand (if the wind was right, that was; if it was wrong, the stench took much of the romance out of such strolling), and at Bassey Park, which faced the high school across the Canal, there were sometimes Boy Scout campouts and Cub Scout wiener roasts. In 1969 the citizens would be shocked and sickened to discover that hippies (one of them had actually sewed an American flag on the seat of his pants, and
that
pinko-faggot was busted before you could say Gene McCarthy) were smoking dope and trading pills up there. By '69 Bassey Park had become a regular open-air pharmacy.
You just wait,
people said.
Somebody'll get killed before they put a stop to it.
And of course someone finally did—a seventeen-year-old boy had been found dead by the Canal, his veins full of almost pure heroin—what the kids called a tight white rail. After that the druggies began to drift away from Bassey Park, and there were even stories that the kid's ghost was haunting the area. The story was stupid, of course, but if it kept the speed-freaks and the nodders away, it was at least a
useful
stupid story.

On the southwestern side of town the river presented even more of a problem. Here the hills had been deeply cut open by the passing of the great glacier and further wounded by the endless water erosion of the Kenduskeag and its webwork of tributaries; the bedrock showed through in many places like the half-unearthed bones of dinosaurs. Veteran employees of the Derry Public Works Department knew that, following the fall's first hard frost, they could count on a good deal of sidewalk repair on the southwestern side of town. The concrete would contract and grow brittle and then the bedrock would suddenly shatter up through it, as if the earth meant to hatch something.

What grew best in the shallow soil which remained was plants with
shallow root-systems and hardy natures—weeds and trash-plants, in other words: scruffy trees, thick low bushes, and virulent infestations of poison ivy and poison oak grew everywhere they were allowed a foothold. The southwest was where the land fell away steeply to the area that was known in Derry as the Barrens. The Barrens—which were anything
but
barren—were a messy tract of land about a mile and a half wide by three miles long. It was bounded by upper Kansas Street on one side and by Old Cape on the other. Old Cape was a low-income housing development, and the drainage was so bad over there that there were stories of toilets and sewer-pipes actually exploding.

The Kenduskeag ran through the center of the Barrens. The city had grown up to the northeast and on both sides of it, but the only vestiges of the city down there were Derry Pumphouse #3 (the municipal sewage-pumping station) and the City Dump. Seen from the air the Barrens looked like a big green dagger pointing at downtown.

To Ben all this geography mated with geology meant was a vague awareness that there were no more houses on his right side now; the land had dropped away. A rickety whitewashed railing, about waist-high, ran beside the sidewalk, a token gesture of protection. He could faintly hear running water; it was the sound-track to his continuing fantasy.

He paused and looked out over the Barrens, still imagining her eyes, the clean smell of her hair.

From here the Kenduskeag was only a series of twinkles seen through breaks in the thick foliage. Some kids said that there were mosquitoes as big as sparrows down there at this time of year; others said there was quicksand as you approached the river. Ben didn't believe it about the mosquitoes, but the idea of quicksand scared him.

Slightly to his left he could see a cloud of circling, diving seagulls: the dump. Their cries reached him faintly. Across the way he could see Derry Heights, and the low roofs of the Old Cape houses closest to the Barrens. To the right of Old Cape, pointing skyward like a squat white finger, was the Derry Standpipe. Directly below him a rusty culvert stuck out of the earth, spilling discolored water down the hill in a glimmering little stream which disappeared into the tangled trees and bushes.

Ben's pleasant fantasy of Beverly was suddenly broken by one far
more grim: what if a dead hand flopped out of that culvert right now, right this second, while he was looking? And suppose that when he turned to find a phone and call the police, a clown was standing there? A funny clown wearing a baggy suit with big orange puffs for buttons? Suppose—