It (85 page)

“Well, if I can help you in no way at this moment . . .”

“Not right now,” Ben said. “A wonderful meal. Most . . . most unusual.”

“I leave you then,” she said, and bowed out through the beaded curtain. The beads were still swaying and clacking together when all of them pushed away from the table again.

“What is it?” Ben asked huskily, looking at the thing on Bill's plate.

“A fly,” Bill said. “A mutant fly. Courtesy of a writer named George Langlahan, I think. He wrote a story called ‘The Fly.' A movie was made out of it—not a terribly good one. But the story scared the bejesus out of me. It's up to Its old tricks, all right. That fly business
has been on my mind a lot lately, because I've sort of been planning this novel—
Roadbugs,
I've been thinking of calling it. I know the title sounds p-pretty stupid, but you see—”

“Excuse me,” Beverly said distantly. “I have to vomit, I think.”

She was gone before any of the men could rise.

Bill shook out his napkin and threw it over the fly, which was the size of a baby sparrow. Nothing so large could have come from something as small as a Chinese fortune cookie . . . but it had. It buzzed twice under the napkin and then fell silent.

“Jesus,” Eddie said faintly.

“Let's get the righteous fuck out of here,” Mike said. “We can meet Bev in the lobby.”

Beverly was just coming out of the women's room as they gathered by the cash register. She looked pale but composed. Mike paid the check, kissed Rose's cheek, and then they all went out into the rainy afternoon.

“Does this change anyone's mind?” Mike asked.

“I don't think it changes mine,” Ben said.

“No,” Eddie said.

“What
mind?” Richie said.

Bill shook his head and then looked at Beverly.

“I'm staying,” she said. “Bill, what did you mean when you said It's up to Its old tricks?”

“I've been thinking about writing a bug story,” he said. “That Langlahan story had woven itself into my thinking. And so I saw a fly. Yours was blood, Beverly. Why was blood on your mind?”

“I guess because of the blood from the drain,” Beverly said at once. “The blood that came out of the bathroom drain in the old place, when I was eleven.” But was that really it? She didn't really think so. Because what had flashed immediately to mind when the blood spurted across her fingers in a warm little jet had been the bloody footprint she had left behind her after stepping on the broken perfume bottle. Tom. And

(Bevvie sometimes I worry
a lot)

her father.

“You got a bug, too,” Bill said to Eddie. “Why?”

“Not just a bug,” Eddie said. “A
cricket.
There are crickets in our basement. Two-hundred-thousand-dollar house and we can't get rid
of the crickets. They drive us crazy at night. A couple of nights before Mike called, I had a really terrible nightmare. I dreamed I woke up and my bed was full of crickets. I was trying to shoot them with my aspirator, but all it would do when I squeezed it was make crackling noises, and just before I woke up I realized
it
was full of crickets, too.”

“The hostess didn't see any of it,” Ben said. He looked at Beverly. “Like your folks never saw the blood that came out of the drain, even though it was everywhere.”

“Yes,” she said.

They stood looking at each other in the fine spring rain.

Mike looked at his watch. “There'll be a bus in twenty minutes or so,” he said, “or I can take four of you in my car, if we cram. Or I can call some cabs. Whatever way you want to do it.”

“I think I'm going to walk from here,” Bill said. “I don't know where I'm going, but a little fresh air seems like a great idea along about now.”

“I'm going to call a cab,” Ben said.

“I'll share it with you, if you'll drop me off downtown,” Richie said.

“Okay. Where you going?”

Richie shrugged. “Not really sure yet.”

The others elected to wait for the bus.

“Seven tonight,” Mike reminded. “And be careful, all of you.”

They agreed to be careful, although Bill did not know how you could truthfully make a promise like that when dealing with such a formidable array of unknown factors.

He started to say so, then looked at their faces and saw that they knew it already.

He walked away instead, raising one hand briefly in farewell. The misty air felt good against his face. The walk back to town would be a long one, but that was all right. He had a lot to think about. He was glad that the reunion was over and the business had begun.

Richie Tozier got out of the cab at the three-way intersection of Kansas Street, Center Street, and Main Street, and Ben dismissed it at the top of Up-Mile Hill. The driver was Bill's “religious fella,” but neither Richie nor Ben knew it: Dave had lapsed into a morose silence. Ben could have gotten off with Richie, he supposed, but it seemed better somehow that they all start off alone.

He stood on the corner of Kansas Street and Daltrey Close, watching the cab pull back into traffic, hands stuffed deeply into his pockets, trying to get the lunch's hideous conclusion out of his mind. He couldn't do it; his thoughts kept returning to that black-gray fly crawling out of the fortune cookie on Bill's plate, its veined wings plastered to its back. He would try to divert his mind from this unhealthy image, think he had succeeded, only to discover five minutes later that his mind was back at it.

I'm trying to justify it somehow,
he thought, meaning it not in the moral sense but rather in the mathematical one. Buildings are built by observing certain natural laws; natural laws may be expressed by equations; equations must be justified. Where was the justification in what had happened less than half an hour ago?

Let it alone,
he told himself, not for the first time.
You can't justify it, so let it alone.

Very good advice; the problem was that he couldn't take it. He remembered that the day after he had seen the mummy on the iced-up Canal, his life had gone on as usual. He had known that whatever it
had been had come very close to getting him, but his life had gone on: he had attended school, taken an arithmetic test, visited the library when school was over, and eaten with his usual heartiness. He had simply incorporated the thing he had seen on the Canal into his life, and if he had almost been killed by it . . . well, kids were always almost getting killed. They dashed across streets without looking, they got horsing around in the lake and suddenly realized they had floated far past their depth on their rubber rafts and had to paddle back, they fell off monkey-bars on their asses and out of trees on their heads.

Now, standing here in the fading drizzle in front of a Trustworthy Hardware Store that had been a pawnshop in 1958 (Frati Brothers, Ben recalled, the double windows always full of pistols and rifles and straight-razors and guitars hung up by their necks like exotic animals), it occurred to him that kids were better at almost dying, and they were also better at incorporating the inexplicable into their lives. They believed implicitly in the invisible world. Miracles both bright and dark were to be taken into consideration, oh yes, most certainly, but they by no means stopped the world. A sudden upheaval of beauty or terror at ten did not preclude an extra cheesedog or two for lunch at noon.

But when you grew up, all that changed. You no longer lay awake in your bed, sure something was crouching in the closet or scratching at the window . . . but when something
did
happen, something beyond rational explanation, the circuits overloaded. The axons and dendrites got hot. You started to jitter and jive, you started to shake rattle and roll, your imagination started to hop and bop and do the funky chicken all over your nerves. You couldn't just incorporate what had happened into your life experience. It didn't digest. Your mind kept coming back to it, pawing it lightly like a kitten with a ball of string . . . until eventually, of course, you either went crazy or got to a place where it was impossible for you to function.

And if that happens,
Ben thought,
It's got me. Us. Cold.

He started to walk up Kansas Street, not conscious of heading anyplace in particular. And thought suddenly:
What did we do with the silver dollar?

He still couldn't remember.

The silver dollar, Ben . . . Beverly saved your life with it. Yours . . .
maybe all the others' . . . and especially Bill's. It almost ripped my guts out before Beverly did . . . what? What did she do? And how was it able to work? She backed it off, and we all helped her. But how?

A word came to him suddenly, a word that meant nothing at all but which tightened his flesh:
Chüd.

He looked down at the sidewalk and for a moment saw the shape of a turtle chalked there, and the world seemed to swim before his eyes. He shut them tightly and when he opened them saw it was not a turtle; only a hopscotch grid half-erased by the light rain.

Chüd.

What did that mean?

“I don't know,” he said aloud, and when he looked around quickly to see if anyone had heard him talking to himself, he saw that he had turned off Kansas Street and onto Costello Avenue. At lunch he had told the others that the Barrens were the only place in Derry where he had felt happy as a kid . . . but that wasn't quite true, was it? There had been another place. Either accidentally or unconsciously, he had come to that other place: the Derry Public Library.

He stood in front of it for a minute or two, hands still in his pockets. It hadn't changed; he admired its lines as much now as he had as a child. Like so many stone buildings that had been well-designed, it succeeded in confounding the closely observing eye with contradictions: its stone solidity was somehow balanced by the delicacy of its arches and slim columns; it looked both bank-safe squat and yet slim and clean (well, it
was
slim as city buildings went, especially those erected around the turn of the century, and the windows, crisscrossed with narrow strips of iron, were graceful and rounded). These contradictions saved it from ugliness, and he was not entirely surprised to feel a wave of love for the place.

Nothing much had changed on Costello Avenue. Glancing along it, he could see the Derry Community House, and he found himself wondering if the Costello Avenue Market was still there at the point where the avenue, which was semicircular, rejoined Kansas Street.

He walked across the library lawn, barely noticing that his dress boots were getting wet, to have a look at that glassed-in passageway between the grownups' library and the Children's Library. It was also unchanged, and from here, standing just outside the bowed branches of a weeping willow tree, he could see people passing back and forth.
The old delight flooded him, and he really forgot what had happened at the end of the reunion lunch for the first time. He could remember walking around to this very same spot as a kid, only in the winter, plowing his way through snow that was almost hip-deep, and then standing for as long as fifteen minutes. He would come at dusk, he remembered, and again it was the contrasts that drew him and held him there with the tips of his fingers going numb and snow melting inside his green gumrubber boots. It would be drawing-down-dark out where he was, the world going purple with early winter shadows, the sky the color of ashes in the east and embers in the west. It would be cold where he was, ten degrees perhaps, and chillier than that if the wind was blowing across from the frozen Barrens, as it so often did.

But there, less than forty yards from where he stood, people walked back and forth in their shirtsleeves. There, less than forty yards from where he stood, was a tubeway of bright white light, thrown by the overhead fluorescents. Little kids giggled together, high-school sweethearts held hands (and if the librarian saw them, she would make them stop). It was somehow magical, magical in a good way that he had been too young to account for with such mundane things as electric power and oil heat. The magic was that glowing cylinder of light and life connecting those two dark buildings like a lifeline, the magic was in watching people walk through it across the dark snowfield, untouched by either the dark or the cold. It made them lovely and Godlike.

Eventually he would walk away (as he was doing now) and circle the building to the front door (as he was doing now), but he would always pause and look back once (as he was doing now) before the bulking stone shoulder of the adult library cut off the sight-line to that delicate umbilicus.

Ruefully amused at the ache of nostalgia around his heart, Ben went up the steps to the door of the adult library, paused for a moment on the narrow verandah just inside the pillars, always so high and cool no matter how hot the day. Then he pulled open the iron-bound door with the book-drop slot in it and went into the quiet.

The force of memory almost dizzied him for a moment as he stepped into the mild light of the hanging glass globes. The force was not physical—not like a shot to the jaw or a slap. It was more
akin to that queer feeling of time doubling back on itself that people call, for want of a better term,
déjà-vu.
Ben had had the feeling before, but it had never struck him with such disorienting power; for the moment or two he stood inside the door, he felt literally lost in time, not really sure how old he was. Was he thirty-eight or eleven?

Here was the same murmuring quiet, broken only by an occasional whisper, the faint thud of a librarian stamping books or overdue notices, the hushed riffle of newspaper or magazine pages being turned. He loved the quality of the light as much now as then. It slanted through the high windows, gray as a pigeon's wing on this rainy afternoon, a light that was somehow somnolent and dozey.