It (69 page)

His eyes, a hot brown, locked with her blue ones, answering the question without speaking:
So what if it does?

But Beverly did not look down or away and at last Stan dropped his own eyes . . . perhaps only because she was still crying, but perhaps because her concern somehow made her stronger.

“Eddie's right,” she said. “We ought to talk to Bill. Then maybe to the Police Chief—”

“Right,” Stan said. If he was trying to sound contemptuous, it didn't work. His voice came out sounding only tired. “Dead kids in the Standpipe. Blood that only kids can see, not grownups. Clowns walking on the Canal. Balloons that blow against the wind. Mummies. Lepers under porches. Chief Borton'll laugh his bum off . . . and then stick us in the loonybin.”

“If we all went to him,” Ben said, troubled. “If we all went together . . .”

“Sure,” Stan said. “Right. Tell me more, Haystack. Write me a book.” He got up and went to the window, hands in pockets, looking angry and upset and scared. He stared out for a moment, shoulders stiff and rejecting beneath his neat shirt. Without turning back to them he repeated: “Write me a frigging
book!”

“No,” Ben said quietly, “Bill's going to write the books.”

Stan wheeled back, surprised, and the others looked at him. There
was a shocked look on Ben Hanscom's face, as if he had suddenly and unexpectedly slapped himself.

Bev folded the last of the rags.

“Birds,” Eddie said.

“What?” Bev and Ben said together.

Eddie was looking at Stan. “You got out by yelling birds' names at them?”

“Maybe,” Stan said reluctantly. “Or maybe the door was just stuck and finally popped open.”

“Without you leaning on it?” Bev asked.

Stan shrugged. It was not a sullen shrug; it only said he didn't know.

“I think it was the birds you shouted at them,” Eddie said. “But why? In the movies you hold up a cross . . .”

“. . . or say the Lord's Prayer . . .” Ben added.

“. . . or the Twenty-third Psalm,” Beverly put in.

“I know the Twenty-third Psalm,” Stan said angrily, “but I wouldn't do so good with the old crucifix business. I'm Jewish, remember?”

They looked away from him, embarrassed, either for his having been born that way or for their having forgotten it.

“Birds,” Eddie said again. “Jesus!” Then he glanced guiltily at Stan again, but Stan was looking moodily across the street at the Bangor Hydro office.

“Bill will know what to do,” Ben said suddenly, as if finally agreeing with Bev and Eddie. “Betcha anything. Betcha any amount of money.”

“Look,” Stan said, looking at all of them earnestly. “That's okay. We can talk to Bill about it if you want. But that's where things stop for me. You can call me a chicken, or yellow, I don't care. I'm not a chicken, I don't think. It's just that those things in the Standpipe . . .”

“If you weren't afraid of something like that, you'd have to be crazy, Stan,” Beverly said softly.

“Yeah, I was
scared,
but that's not the problem,” Stan said hotly. “It's not even what I'm talking about. Don't you
see—”

They were looking at him expectantly, their eyes both troubled
and faintly hopeful, but Stan found he could not explain how he felt. The words had run out. There was a brick of feeling inside him, almost choking him, and he could not get it out of his throat. Neat as he was, sure as he was, he was still only an eleven-year-old boy who had that year finished the fourth grade.

He wanted to tell them that there were worse things than being frightened. You could be frightened by things like almost having a car hit you while you were riding your bike or, before the Salk vaccine, getting polio. You could be frightened of that crazyman Khrushchev or of drowning if you went out over your head. You could be frightened of all those things and still function.

But those things in the Standpipe . . .

He wanted to tell them that those dead boys who had lurched and shambled their way down the spiral staircase had done something worse than frighten him: they had
offended
him.

Offended,
yes. It was the only word he could think of, and if he used it they would laugh—they liked him, he knew that, and they had accepted him as one of them, but they would still laugh. All the same, there were things that were not supposed to
be.
They offended any sane person's sense of order, they offended the central idea that God had given the earth a final tilt on its axis so that twilight would only last about twelve minutes at the equator and linger for an hour or more up where the Eskimos built their ice-cube houses, that He had done that and He then had said, in effect: “Okay, if you can figure out the tilt, you can figure out any damn thing you choose. Because even light has weight, and when the note of a trainwhistle suddenly drops it's the Doppler effect and when an airplane breaks the sound barrier that bang isn't the applause of the angels or the flatulence of demons but only air collapsing back into place. I gave you the tilt and then I sat back about halfway up the auditorium to watch the show. I got nothing else to say, except that two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if there's blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead.” You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It's
offense
you maybe can't live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are live things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don't blink, and there's a stink down in that dark, and after
awhile you think maybe there's a whole other universe down there, a universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I'd scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn't look like a miracle to me. It would look like an
offense.

Because he could say none of these things, he just reiterated: “Being scared isn't the problem. I just don't want to be involved in something that will land me in the nuthatch.”

“Will you at least go with us to talk to him?” Bev asked. “Listen to what he says?”

“Sure,” Stan said, and then laughed. “Maybe I ought to bring my bird-book.”

They all laughed then, and it was a little easier.

Beverly left them outside the Kleen-Kloze and took the rags back home by herself. The apartment was still empty. She put them under the kitchen sink and closed the cupboard. She stood up and looked down toward the bathroom.

I'm not going down there,
she thought.
I'm going to watch
Bandstand
on TV. See if I can't learn how to do the Dog.

So she went into the living room and turned on the TV and five minutes later she turned it off while Dick Clark was showing how much oil
just one
Stri-Dex medicated pad could take off the face of your average teenager (“If you think you can get clean with just soap and water,” Dick said, holding the dirty pad up to the glassy eye of the camera so that every teenager in America could get a good look, “you ought to take a good look at this”).

She went back to the kitchen cupboard over the sink, where her father kept his tools. Among them was a pocket tape, the kind that runs out a long yellow tongue of inches. She folded this into one cold hand and went down to the bathroom.

It was sparkling clean, silent. Somewhere, far distant, it seemed, she could hear Mrs. Doyon yelling for her boy Jim to get in out of the road, right
now.

She went to the bathroom basin and looked down into the dark eye of the drain.

She stood there for some time, her legs as cold as marble inside her jeans, her nipples feeling sharp enough and hard enough to cut paper, her lips dead dry. She waited for the voices.

No voices came.

A little shuddery sigh came from her, and she began to feed the thin steel tape into the drain. It went down smoothly—like a sword into the gullet of a county fair sideshow performer. Six inches, eight inches, ten. It stopped, bound up in the elbow-bend under the sink, Beverly supposed. She wiggled it, pushing gently at the same time, and eventually the tape began to feed into the drain again. Sixteen inches now, then two feet, then three.

She watched the yellow tape slipping out of the chromed-steel case, which had been worn black on the sides by her father's big hand. In her mind's eye she saw it sliding through the black bore of the pipe, picking up some muck, scraping away flakes of rust. Down there where the sun never shines and the night never stops, she thought.

She imagined the head of the tape, with its small steel buttplate no bigger than a fingernail, sliding farther and farther into the darkness, and part of her mind screamed
What are you doing?
She did not ignore that voice . . . but she seemed helpless to heed it. She saw the end of the tape going straight down now, descending into the cellar. She saw it striking the sewage pipe . . . and even as she saw it, the tape bound up again.

She wiggled it again, and the tape, thin enough to be limber, made a faint eerie sound that reminded her a little bit of the way a saw sounds when you bend it back and forth across your legs.

She could see its tip wiggling against the bottom of this wider pipe, which would have a baked ceramic surface. She could see it bending . . . and then she was able to push it forward again.

She ran out six feet. Seven. Nine—

And suddenly the tape began to run through her hands by itself, as
if something down there was pulling the other end. Not just pulling it:
running
with it. She stared at the flowing tape, her eyes wide, her mouth a sagging O of fear—fear, yes, but no surprise. Hadn't she
known?
Hadn't she
known
something like this was going to happen?

The tape ran out to its final stop. Eighteen feet; an even six yards.

A soft chuckle came wafting out of the drain, followed by a low whisper that was almost reproachful:
“Beverly, Beverly, Beverly . . . you can't fight us . . . you'll die if you try . . . die if you try . . . die if you try . . . Beverly . . . Beverly . . . Beverly . . . ly-ly-ly . . .”

Something clicked inside the tape-measure's housing, and it suddenly began to run rapidly back into its case, the numbers and hashmarks blurring by. Near the end—the last five or six feet—the yellow became a dark, dripping red and she screamed and dropped it on the floor as if the tape had suddenly turned into a live snake.

Fresh blood trickled over the clean white porcelain of the basin and back down into the drain's wide eye. She bent, sobbing now, her fear a freezing weight in her stomach, and picked the tape up. She tweezed it between the thumb and first finger of her right hand and, holding it in front of her, took it into the kitchen. As she walked, blood dripped from the tape onto the faded linoleum of the hall and the kitchen.

She steadied herself by thinking of what her father would say to her—what he would
do
to her—if he found that she had gotten his measuring tape all bloody. Of course, he wouldn't be able to see the blood, but it helped to think that.

She took one of the clean rags—still as warm as fresh bread from the dryer—and went back into the bathroom. Before she began to clean, she put the hard rubber plug in the drain, closing that eye. The blood was fresh, and it cleaned up easily. She went up her own trail, wiping away the dime-sized drops on the linoleum, then rinsing the rag, wringing it out, and putting it aside.

She got a second rag and used it to clean her father's measuring tape. The blood was thick, viscous. In two places there were clots of the stuff, black and spongy.

Although the blood only went back five or six feet, she cleaned the entire length of the tape, removing from it all traces of pipemuck. That done, she put it back into the cupboard over the sink and took
the two stained rags out in back of the apartment. Mrs. Doyon was yelling at Jim again. Her voice was clear, almost bell-like in the still hot late afternoon.

In the back yard, which was mostly bare dirt, weeds, and clotheslines, there was a rusty incinerator. Beverly threw the rags into it, then sat down on the back steps. Tears came suddenly, with surprising violence, and this time she made no effort to hold them back.

She put her arms on her knees, her head in her arms, and wept while Mrs. Doyon called for Jim to come out of that road, did he want to get hit by a car and be killed?

DERRY:

THE SECOND

INTERLUDE