It (46 page)

A space of time passed before something did—whether five minutes or twenty-five, he could not tell. He was only aware of the bird walking back and forth overhead like an insomniac pacing the floor at three in the morning.

Then its wings fluttered again. It landed in front of the smokestack's opening. Mike, on his knees just behind his pile of tiling, began to peg missiles at it before it could even bend its head down. One of them slammed into a plated yellow leg and drew a trickle of blood so dark it seemed almost as black as the bird's eyes. Mike screamed in triumph, the sound thin and almost lost under the bird's own enraged squawk.

“Get out of here!”
Mike cried.
“I'm going to keep hitting you until you get out of here, I swear to God I will!”

The bird flew up to the top of the smokestack and resumed its pacing.

Mike waited.

Finally its wings ruffled again as it took off. Mike waited, expecting the yellow feet, so like hen's feet, to appear again. They didn't. He waited longer, convinced it had to be some kind of a trick, realizing at last that that wasn't why he was waiting at all. He was waiting because he was scared to go out, scared to leave the safety of this bolthole.

Never mind! Never mind stuff like that! I'm not a rabbit!

He took as many chunks of tile as he could handle comfortably, then put some more inside his shirt. He stepped out of the smokestack, trying to look everywhere at once and wishing madly for eyes in the back of his head. He saw only the field stretching ahead and around him, littered with the exploded rusting remains of the Kitchener Ironworks. He wheeled around, sure he would see the bird perched on the lip of the stack like a vulture, a one-eyed vulture now, only wanting the boy to see him before it attacked for the final time, using that sharp beak to jab and rip and strip.

But the bird was not there.

It was really gone.

Mike's nerve snapped.

He uttered a breaking scream of fear and ran for the weather-beaten
fence between the field and the road, dropping the last pieces of tile from his hands. Most of the others fell out of his shirt as the shirt pulled free of his belt. He vaulted over the fence one-handed, like Roy Rogers showing off for Dale Evans on his way back from the corral with Pat Brady and the rest of the buckaroos. He grabbed the handlebars of his bike and ran beside it forty feet up the road before getting on. Then he pedaled madly, not daring to look back, not daring to slow down, until he reached the intersection of Pasture Road and Outer Main Street, where there were lots of cars passing back and forth.

When he got home, his father was changing the plugs on the tractor. Will observed that Mike looked powerful musty and dusty. Mike hesitated for just a split second and then told his father that he'd taken a tumble from his bike on the way home, swerving to avoid a pothole.

“Did you break anything, Mikey?” Will asked, observing his son a little more carefully.

“No, sir.”

“Sprains?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Sure?”

Mike nodded.

“Did you pick yourself up a souvenir?”

Mike reached into his pocket and found the gear-wheel. He showed it to his father, who looked at it briefly and then plucked a tiny crumb of tiling from the pad of flesh just below Mike's thumb. He seemed more interested in this.

“From that old smokestack?” Will asked.

Mike nodded.

“You go inside there?”

Mike nodded again.

“See anything in there?” Will asked, and then, as if to make a joke of the question (which hadn't sounded like a joke at all), he added: “Buried treasure?”

Smiling a little, Mike shook his head.

“Well, don't tell your mother you was muckin about in there,” Will said. “She'd shoot me first and you second.” He looked even more closely at his son. “Mikey,
are
you all right?”

“Huh?”

“You look a little peaky around the eyes.”

“I guess I might be a little tired,” Mike said. “It's eight or ten miles there and back again, don't forget. You want some help with the tractor, Daddy?”

“No, I'm about done screwing it up for this week. You go on in and wash up.”

Mike started away, and then his father called to him once more. Mike looked back.

“I don't want you going around that place again,” he said, “at least not until all this trouble is cleared up and they catch the man who's doing it . . . you didn't see anybody out there, did you? No one chased you, or hollered you down?”

“I didn't see any people at all,” Mike said.

Will nodded and lit a cigarette. “I think I was wrong to send you there. Old places like that . . . sometimes they can be dangerous.”

Their eyes locked briefly.

“Okay, Daddy,” Mike said. “I don't want to go back anyway. It was a little spooky.”

Will nodded again. “Less said the better, I reckon. You go and get cleaned up now. And tell her to put on three or four extra sausages.”

Mike did.

Never mind that now, Mike Hanlon thought, looking at the grooves which went up to the concrete edge of the Canal and stopped there.
Never mind that, it might just have been a dream anyhow, and—

There were splotches of dried blood on the lip of the Canal.

Mike looked at these, and then he looked down into the Canal. Black water flowed smoothly past. Runners of dirty yellow foam clung to the Canal's sides, sometimes breaking free to flow downstream in lazy loops and curves. For a moment—just a moment—two clots of this foam came together and seemed to form a face, a kid's face, its eyes turned up in an avatar of terror and agony.

Mike's breath caught, as if on a thorn.

The foam broke apart, became meaningless again, and at that moment
there was a loud splash on his right. Mike snapped his head around, shrinking back a little, and for a moment he believed he saw something in the shadows of the outflow tunnel where the Canal resurfaced after its course under downtown.

Then it was gone.

Suddenly, cold and shuddering, he dug in his pocket for the knife he had found in the grass. He threw it into the Canal. There was a small splash, a ripple that began as a circle and was then tugged into the shape of an arrowhead by the current . . . then nothing.

Nothing except the fear that was suddenly suffocating him and the deadly certainty that there was something near, something watching him, gauging its chances, biding its time.

He turned, meaning to walk back to his bike—to run would be to dignify those fears and undignify himself—and then that splashing sound came again. It was a lot louder this second time. So much for dignity. Suddenly he was running as fast as he could, beating his buns for the gate and his bike, jamming the kickstand up with one heel and pedaling for the street as fast as he could. That sea-smell was all at once too thick . . .
much
too thick. It was everywhere. And the water dripping from the wet branches of the trees seemed much too loud.

Something was coming. He heard dragging, lurching footsteps in the grass.

He stood on the pedals, giving it everything, and shot out onto Main Street without looking back. He headed for home as fast as he could, wondering what in hell had possessed him to come in the first place . . . what had drawn him.

And then he tried to think about the chores, the whole chores, and nothing but the chores. After awhile he actually succeeded.

And when he saw the headline in the paper the next day (
MISSING BOY PROMPTS NEW FEARS
), he thought about the pocket knife he had thrown into the Canal—the pocket knife with the initials E.C. scratched on the side. He thought about the blood he had seen on the grass.

And he thought about those grooves which stopped at the edge of the Canal.

Seen from the expressway at quarter to five in the morning, Boston seems a city of the dead brooding over some tragedy in its past—a plague, perhaps, or a curse. The smell of salt, heavy and cloying, comes off the ocean. Runners of early-morning fog obscure much of what movement would be seen otherwise.

Driving north along Storrow Drive, sitting behind the wheel of the black '84 Cadillac he picked up from Butch Carrington at Cape Cod Limousine, Eddie Kaspbrak thinks you can feel this city's age; perhaps you can get that feeling of age nowhere else in America but here. Boston is a sprat compared with London, an infant compared with Rome, but by American standards at least it is old, old. It kept its place on these low hills three hundred years ago, when the Tea and Stamp Taxes were unthought of, Paul Revere and Patrick Henry unborn.

Its age, its silence, and the foggy smell of the sea—all of these things make Eddie nervous. When Eddie's nervous he reaches for his aspirator. He sticks it in his mouth and triggers a cloud of revivifying spray down his throat.

There
are
a few people in the streets he's passing, and a pedestrian or two on the walkways of the overpasses—they give lie to the impression that he has somehow wandered into a Lovecrafty tale of doomed cities, ancient evils, and monsters with unpronounceable names. Here, ganged around a bus stop with a sign reading
KENMORE SQUARE CITY CENTER
, he sees waitresses, nurses, city employees, their faces naked and puffed with sleep.

That's right,
Eddie thinks, now passing under a sign which reads
TOBIN BRIDGE
. That's right, stick to the buses. Forget the subways. The subways are a bad idea; I wouldn't go down there if I were you. Not down below. Not in the tunnels.

This is a bad thought to have; if he doesn't get rid of it he will soon be using the aspirator again. He's glad for the heavier traffic on the Tobin Bridge. He passes a monument works. Painted on the brick side is a slightly unsettling admonishment:
SLOW DOWN! WE CAN WAIT!

Here is a green reflectorized sign which reads
TO 95 MAINE, N.H., ALL NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND POINTS
. He looks at it and suddenly a bone-deep shudder wracks his body. His hands momentarily weld themselves to the wheel of the Cadillac. He would like to believe it is the onset of some sickness, a virus or perhaps one of his mother's “phantom fevers,” but he knows better. It is the city behind him, poised silently on the straight-edge that runs between day and night, and what that sign promises ahead of him. He's sick, all right, no doubt about that, but it's not a virus or a phantom fever. He has been poisoned by his own memories.

I'm scared,
Eddie thinks.
That was always what was at the bottom of it. Just being scared. That was everything. But in the end I think we turned that around somehow. We used it. But how?

He can't remember. He wonders if any of the others can. For all their sakes he certainly hopes so.

A truck drones by on his left. Eddie has still got his lights on and now he hits his brights momentarily as the truck draws safely ahead. He does this without thinking. It has become an automatic function, just part of driving for a living. The unseen driver in the truck flashes his running lights in return, quickly, twice, thanking Eddie for his courtesy.
If only everything could be that simple and that clear,
he thinks.

He follows the signs to 1–95. The northbound traffic is light, although he observes that the southbound lanes into the city are starting to fill up, even at this early hour. Eddie floats the big car along, pre-guessing most of the directional signs and getting into the correct lane long before he has to. It has been years—literally years—since he has guessed wrong enough to be swept past an exit he wanted. He makes his lane-choices as automatically as he flashed “okay to cut back in” to the trucker, as automatically as he once found his way through the tangle of paths in the Derry Barrens. The fact that he has never before in his life driven out of downtown Boston, one of the most confusing cities in America to drive in, does not seem to matter much at all.

He suddenly remembers something else about that summer, something Bill said to him one day: “Y-You've g-got a c-c-cuh-hompass in your head, E-E-Eddie.”

How that had pleased him! It pleases him again as the '84 'Dorado shoots
back onto the turnpike. He slides the limo's speed up to a cop-safe fifty-seven miles an hour and finds some quiet music on the radio. He supposes he would have died for Bill back then, if that had been required; if Bill had asked him, Eddie would simply have responded: “Sure, Big Bill . . . you got a time in mind yet?”

Eddie laughs at this—not much of a sound, just a snort, but the sound of it startles him into a real laugh. He laughs seldom these days, and he certainly did not expect to find many chucks (Richie's word, meaning
chuckles,
as in “You had any good chucks today, Eds?”) on this black pilgrimage. But, he supposes, if God is dirty-mean enough to curse the faithful with what they want most in life, He's maybe quirky enough to deal you a good chuck or two along the way.

“Had any good chucks lately, Eds?” he says out loud, and laughs again. Man, he had hated it when Richie called him Eds . . . but he had sort of liked it, too. The way he thought Ben Hanscom got to like Richie calling him Haystack. It was something . . . like a secret name. A secret
identity.
A way to be people that had nothing to do with their parents' fears, hopes, constant demands. Richie couldn't do his beloved Voices for shit, but maybe he did know how important it was for creeps like them to sometimes be different people.

Eddie glances at the change lined up neatly on the 'Dorado's dashboard—lining up the change is another of those automatic tricks of the trade. When the tollbooths come up, you never want to have to dig for your silver, never want to find that you've gotten in an automatic-toll lane with the wrong change.