It (67 page)

Yet, when Stan did not answer immediately, she asked again: “What was it?”

Speaking carefully, Stan said: “I was over in that little park where the Standpipe is—”

“Oh God, I don't like that place,” Eddie said dolefully. “If there's a haunted house in Derry, that's it.”

“What?”
Stan said sharply. “What did you say?”

“Don't you
know
about that place?” Eddie asked. “My mom wouldn't let me go near there even before the kids started getting killed. She . . . she takes real good care of me.” He offered them an uneasy grin and held his aspirator tighter in his lap. “You see, some kids have been drowned in there. Three or four. They—Stan? Stan, are you all right?”

Stan Uris's face had gone a leaden gray. His mouth worked soundlessly. His eyes rolled up until the others could only see the bottommost curves of his irises. One hand clutched weakly at empty air and then fell against his thigh.

Eddie did the only thing he could think of. He leaned over, put one thin arm around Stan's slumping shoulders, jammed his aspirator into Stan's mouth, and triggered off a big blast.

Stan began to cough and choke and gag. He sat up straight, his eyes back in focus again. He coughed into his cupped hands. At last he uttered a huge, burping gasp and slumped back against his chair.

“What was that?” he managed at last.

“My asthma medicine,” Eddie said apologetically.

“God, it tastes like dead dogshit.”

They all laughed at this, but it was nervous laughter. The others were looking nervously at Stan. Thin color now burned in his cheeks.

“It's pretty bad, all right,” Eddie said with some pride.

“Yeah, but is it kosher?” Stan said, and they all laughed again, although none of them (including Stan) really knew what “kosher” meant.

Stan stopped laughing first and looked at Eddie intently. “Tell me what you know about the Standpipe,” he said.

Eddie started, but both Ben and Beverly also contributed. The Derry Standpipe stood on Kansas Street, about a mile and a half west of downtown, near the southern edge of the Barrens. At one time, near the end of the previous century, it had supplied all of Derry's water, holding one and three-quarters million gallons. Because the circular open-air gallery just below the Standpipe's roof offered a spectacular view of the town and the surrounding countryside, it had been a popular place until 1930 or so. Families would come out to tiny Memorial Park on a Saturday or Sunday forenoon when the weather was fine, climb the one hundred and sixty stairs inside the Standpipe to the gallery, and take in the view. More often than not they spread and ate a picnic lunch while they did so.

The stairs were between the Standpipe's outside, which was shingled a blinding white, and its inner sleeve, a great stainless-steel cylinder standing a hundred and six feet high. These stairs wound to the top in a narrow spiral.

Just below the gallery level, a thick wooden door in the Standpipe's inner jacket gave on a platform over the water itself—a black, gently lapping tarn lit by naked magnesium bulbs screwed into reflective tin hoods. The water was exactly one hundred feet deep when the supply was all the way up.

“Where did the water come from?” Ben asked.

Bev, Eddie, and Stan looked at each other. None of them knew.

“Well, what about the kids that drowned, then?”

They were only a bit clearer on that. It seemed that in those days (“olden days,” Ben called them solemnly, as he took up this part of the tale) the door leading to the platform over the water had always been left unlocked. One night a couple of kids . . . or maybe just one . . . or as many as three . . . had found the ground-level door also unlocked. They had gone up on a dare. They found their way out onto the platform over the water instead of onto the gallery by mistake. In the darkness, they had fallen over the edge before they quite knew where they were.

“I heard it from this kid Vic Crumly who said he heard it from his dad,” Beverly said, “so maybe it's true. Vic said his dad said that once they fell into the water they were as good as dead because there
was nothing to hold onto. The platform was just out of reach. He said they paddled around in there, yelling for help, all night long, probably. Only no one heard them and they just got tireder and tireder until—”

She trailed off, feeling the horror of it sink into her. She could see those boys in her mind's eye, real or made-up, paddling around like drenched puppies. Going under, coming up sputtering. Splashing more and swimming less as panic set in. Soggy sneakers treading water. Fingers scrabbling uselessly for any kind of purchase on the smooth steel walls of the sleeve. She could taste the water they must have swallowed. She could hear the flat, echoing quality of their cries. How long? Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? How long before the cries had ceased and they had simply floated face-down, strange fish for the caretaker to find the next morning?

“God,” Stan said dryly.

“I heard there was a woman who lost her baby, too,” Eddie said suddenly. “That was when they closed the place for good. At least, that's what I heard. They did use to let people go up, I know that. But then one time there was this lady and her baby. I don't know how old the baby was. But this platform, it's supposed to go right out over the water. And the lady went to the railing and she was, you know, holding the baby, and either she dropped it or maybe it just wriggled. I heard this guy tried to save it. Doing the hero bit, you know. He jumped right in, but the baby was gone. Maybe he was wearing a jacket or something. When your clothes get wet, they drag you down.”

Eddie abruptly put his hand into his pocket and brought out a small brown glass bottle. He opened it, took out two white pills, and swallowed them dry.

“What were those?” Beverly asked.

“Aspirin. I've got a headache.” He looked at her defensively, but Beverly said nothing more.

Ben finished. After the incident of the baby (he himself, he said, had heard that it was actually a kid, a little girl of about three), the Town Council had voted to lock the Standpipe, both downstairs and up, and stop the daytrips and picnics on the gallery. It had remained locked from then until now. Oh, the caretaker came and went, and the maintenance men once in awhile, and once every season there
were guided tours. Interested citizens could follow a lady from the Historical Society up the spiral of stairs to the gallery at the top, where they could ooh and aah over the view and snap Kodaks to show their friends. But the door to the inner sleeve was always locked now.

“Is it still full of water?” Stan asked.

“I guess so,” Ben said. “I've seen firetrucks filling up there during grassfire season. They hook a hose to the pipe at the bottom.”

Stanley was looking at the dryer again, watching the rags go around and around. The clump had broken up now, and some of them floated like parachutes.

“What did you see there?” Bev asked him gently.

For a moment it seemed he would not answer at all. Then he drew a deep, shuddering breath and said something that at first struck them all as being far from the point. “They named it Memorial Park after the 23rd Maine in the Civil War. The Derry Blues, they were called. There used to be a statue, but it blew down during a storm in the forties. They didn't have money enough to fix the statue, so they put in a birdbath instead. A big stone birdbath.”

They were all looking at him. Stan swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat.

“I watch birds, you see. I have an album, a pair of Zeiss-Ikon binoculars, and everything.” He looked at Eddie. “Do you have any more aspirins?”

Eddie handed him the bottle. Stan took two, hesitated, then took another. He gave the bottle back and swallowed the pills, one after another, grimacing. Then he went on with his story.

Stan's encounter had happened on a rainy April evening two months ago. He had donned his slicker, put his bird-book and his binoculars in a waterproof sack with a drawstring at the top, and set out for Memorial Park. He and his father usually went out together, but his father had had to “work over” that night and had called specially at suppertime to talk to Stan.

One of his customers at the agency, another birdwatcher, had spotted what he believed to be a male cardinal—
Fringillidae Richmondena
—drinking
from the birdbath in Memorial Park, he told Stan. They liked to eat, drink, and bathe right around dusk. It was very rare to spot a cardinal this far north of Massachusetts. Would Stan like to go down there and see if he could collect it? He knew the weather was pretty foul, but . . .

Stan had been agreeable. His mother made him promise to keep the hood of his slicker up, but Stan would have done that anyway. He was a fastidious boy. There were never any fights about getting him to wear his rubbers or his snowpants in the winter.

He walked the mile and a half to Memorial Park in a rain so fine and hesitant that it really wasn't even a drizzle; it was more like a constant hanging mist. The air was muted but somehow exciting just the same. In spite of the last dwindling piles of snow under bushes and in groves of trees (to Stan they looked like piles of dirty cast-off pillowcases), there was a smell of new growth in the air. Looking at the branches of elms and maples and oaks against the lead-white sky, Stan thought that their silhouettes looked mysteriously thicker. They would burst open in a week or two, unrolling leaves of a delicate, almost transparent green.

The
air
smells green tonight,
he thought, and smiled a little.

He walked quickly because the light would be gone in an hour or even less. He was as fastidious about his sightings as he was about his dress and study habits, and unless there was enough light left for him to be absolutely sure, he would not allow himself to collect the cardinal even if he knew in his heart he had really seen it.

He cut across Memorial Park on a diagonal. The Standpipe was a white bulking shape to his left. Stan barely glanced at it. He had no interest whatsoever in the Standpipe.

Memorial Park was a rough rectangle which sloped downhill. The grass (white and dead at this time of year) was kept neatly cut in the summertime, and there were circular beds of flowers. There was no playground equipment, however. This was considered a grownups' park.

At the far end, the grade smoothed out before dropping abruptly down to Kansas Street and the Barrens beyond. The birdbath his father had mentioned stood on this flat area. It was a shallow stone dish set into a squat masonry pedestal that was really much too big for the humble function it fulfilled. Stan's father had told him that,
before the money ran out, they had intended to put the statue of the soldier back up here again.

“I like the birdbath better, Daddy,” Stan said.

Mr. Uris ruffled his hair. “Me too, son,” he said. “More baths and less bullets, that's my motto.”

At the top of this pedestal a motto had been carved in the stone. Stanley read it but did not understand it; the only Latin he understood was the genus classifications of the birds in his book.

Apparebat eidolon senex.

—Pliny

the inscription read.

Stan sat down on a bench, took his bird-album out of the bag, and turned over to the picture of the cardinal one more time, going over it, familiarizing himself with the recognizable points. A male cardinal would be hard to mistake for something else—it was as red as a fire-engine, if not so large—but Stan was a creature of habit and convention; these things comforted him and reinforced his sense of place and belonging in the world. So he gave the picture a good three-minute study before closing the book (the moisture in the air was making the corners of the pages turn up) and putting it back into the bag. He uncased his binoculars and put them to his eyes. There was no need to adjust the field of focus, because the last time he had used the glasses he had been sitting on this same bench and looking at that same birdbath.

Fastidious boy, patient boy. He did not fidget. He did not get up and walk around or swing the binoculars here and there to see what else there might be to be seen. He sat still, field glasses trained on the birdbath, and the mist collected in fat drops on his yellow slicker.

He was not bored. He was looking down into the equivalent of an avian convention-site. Four brown sparrows sat there for awhile, dipping into the water with their beaks, flicking droplets casually back over their shoulders and onto their backs. Then a bluejay came hauling in like a cop breaking up a gaggle of loiterers. The jay was as big as a house in Stan's glasses, his quarrelsome cries absurdly thin by comparison (after you looked through the binoculars steadily for awhile the magnified birds you saw began to seem not odd but
perfectly correct). The sparrows flew off. The jay, now in charge, strutted, bathed, grew bored, departed. The sparrows returned, then flew off again as a pair of robins cruised in to bathe and (perhaps) to discuss matters of importance to the hollow-boned set. Stan's father had laughed at Stan's hesitant suggestion that maybe birds talked, and he was sure his dad was right when he said birds weren't smart enough to talk—that their brain-pans were too small—but by gosh they sure
looked
like they were talking. A new bird joined them. It was red. Stan hastily adjusted the field of focus on the binoculars a bit. Was it . . . ? No. It was a scarlet tanager, a good bird but not the cardinal he was looking for. It was joined by a flicker that was a frequent visitor to the Memorial Park birdbath. Stan recognized him by the tattered right wing. As always, he speculated on how that might have happened—a close call with some cat seemed the most likely explanation. Other birds came and went. Stan saw a grackle, as clumsy and ugly as a flying boxcar, a bluebird, another flicker. He was finally rewarded by a new bird—not the cardinal but a cowbird that looked vast and stupid in the eyepieces of the binoculars. He dropped them against his chest and fumbled the bird-book out of the bag again, hoping that the cowbird wouldn't fly away before he could confirm the sighting. He would have
something
to take home to his father, at least. And it was time to go. The light was fading fast. He felt cold and damp. He checked the book, then looked through the glasses again. It was still there, not bathing but only standing on the rim of the birdbath looking dumb. It was almost surely a cowbird. With no distinctive markings—at least none he could pick up at this distance—and in the fading light it was hard to be one hundred percent sure, but maybe he had just enough time and light for one more check. He looked at the picture in the book, studying it with a fierce frown of concentration, and then picked up the glasses again. He had only fixed them on the birdbath when a hollow rolling
boom!
sent the cowbird—if it had been a cowbird—winging. Stan tried to follow it with the glasses, knowing how slim his chances were of picking it up again. He lost it and made a hissing sound of disgust between his teeth. Well, if it had come once it would perhaps come again. And it had only been a cowbird