It (96 page)

Bill could hear the trickle of water running in many small streams, could see the sun heliographing off the broader expanse of the Kenduskeag. And the smell was the same, even with the dump gone. The heavy perfume of growing things at the height of their spring strut did not quite mask the smell of waste and human offal. It was faint but unmistakable. A smell of corruption; a whiff of the underside.

That's where it ended before, and that's where it's going to end this time,
Bill thought with a shiver.
In there . . . under the city.

He stood awhile longer, convinced that he must see something—some manifestation—of the evil he had come back to Derry to fight. There was nothing. He heard water running, a springlike and vital sound that reminded him of the dam they had built down there.
He could see trees and bushes ruffling in the faint breeze. There was nothing else. No sign. He walked on, dusting a faint whitewash stain from his hands as he went.

He kept heading downtown, half-remembering, half-dreaming, and here came another kid—this one a little girl of about ten in high-waisted corduroy pants and a faded red blouse. She was bouncing a ball with one hand and holding a babydoll by its blonde Arnel hair in the other.

“Hey!” Bill said.

She looked up. “What!”

“What's the best store in Derry?”

She thought about it. “For me or for anyone?”

“For you,” Bill said.

“Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes,” she said with no hesitation whatsoever.

“I beg your pardon?” Bill asked.

“You beg
what?”

“I mean, is that a store name?”

“Sure,” she said, looking at Bill as though he might well be enfeebled. “Secondhand
Rose,
Secondhand
Clothes.
My mom says it's a junkshop, but I like it. They have old things. Like records you never heard of. Also postcards. It smells like a attic. I have to go home now. Bye.”

She walked on, not looking back, bouncing her ball and holding her dolly by the hair.

“Hey!” he shouted after her.

She looked back whimsically. “I beg your whatchamacallit?”

“The store! Where is it?”

She looked back over her shoulder and said, “Just the way you're going. It's at the bottom of Up-Mile Hill.”

Bill felt that sense of the past folding in on itself, folding in on him. He hadn't meant to ask that little girl anything; the question had popped out of his mouth like a cork flying from the neck of a champagne bottle.

He descended Up-Mile Hill toward downtown. The warehouses and packing plants he remembered from childhood—gloomy brick buildings with dirty windows from which titanic meaty smells issued—were mostly gone, although the Armour and the Star Beef
meat-packing plants were still there. But Hemphill was gone and there was a drive-in bank and a bakery where Eagle Beef and Kosher Meats had been. And there, where the Tracker Brothers' Annex had stood, was a sign painted in oldfashioned letters which read, just as the girl with the doll had said,
SECONDHAND ROSE, SECONDHAND CLOTHES
. The red brick had been painted a yellow which had perhaps been jaunty ten or twelve years ago, but was now dingy—a color Audra called urine-yellow.

Bill walked slowly toward it, feeling that sense of
déjà-vu
settle over him again. Later he told the others he knew what ghost he was going to see before he actually saw it.

The show-window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes was more than dingy; it was filthy. No Downeast antique shop this, with nifty little spool-beds and Hoosier cabinets and sets of Depression glassware highlighted by hidden spotlights; this was what his mother called with utter disdain “a Yankee pawnshop.” The items were strewn in rickrack profusion, heaped aimlessly here, there, and everywhere. Dresses slumped off coathangers. Guitars hung from their necks like executed criminals. There was a box of 45 rpm records—10
C APIECE
, the sign read,
TWELVE FOR A BUCK. ANDREWS SISTERS, PERRY COMO, JIMMY ROGERS, OTHERS
. There were kids' outfits and dreadful-looking shoes with a card in front of them which read
SECONDS, BUT NOT BAD
! $1.00
A PAIR
. There were two TVs that looked blind. A third was casting bleared images of
The Brady Bunch
out toward the street. A box of old paperbacks, most with stripped covers (2
FOR A QUARTER
, 10
FOR A DOLLAR, MORE INSIDE, SOME “HOT”
) sat atop a large radio with a filthy white plastic case and a tuning dial as big as an alarm clock. Bunches of plastic flowers sat in dirty vases on a chipped, gouged, dusty dining-room table.

All of these things Bill saw as a chaotic background to the thing his eyes had fixed upon immediately. He stood staring at it with wide unbelieving eyes. Gooseflesh ran madly up and down his body. His forehead was hot, his hands cold, and for a moment it seemed that all the doors inside would swing wide and he would remember everything.

Silver was in the righthand window.

His kickstand was still gone and rust had flowered on the front and back fenders, but the oogah-horn was still there on the handle
bars, its rubber bulb now glazed with cracks and age. The horn itself, which Bill had always kept neatly polished, was dull and pitted. The flat package carrier where Richie had often ridden double was still on the back fender, but it was bent now, hanging by a single bolt. At some point someone had covered the seat with imitation tiger-skin which was now rubbed and frayed to a point where the stripes were almost indistinguishable.

Silver.

Bill raised an absent hand to wipe away the tears that were running slowly down his cheeks. After he had done a better job with his handkerchief, he went inside.

The atmosphere of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes was musty with age. It was, as the girl had said, a attic smell—but not a good smell, as some attic smells are. This was not the smell of linseed oil rubbed lovingly into the surface of old tables or of ancient plush and velvet. In here was a smell of rotting book-bindings, dirty vinyl cushions that had been half-cooked in the hot suns of summers past, dust, mouse-turds.

From the TV in the window the Brady Bunch cackled and whooped. Competing with them from somewhere in the back was the radio voice of a disc jockey identifying himself as “your pal Bobby Russell” promising the new album by Prince to the caller who could give the name of the actor who had played Wally on
Leave It to Beaver.
Bill knew—it had been a kid named Tony Dow—but he didn't want the new Prince album. The radio was sitting on a high shelf amid a number of nineteenth-century portraits. Below it and them sat the proprietor, a man of perhaps forty who was wearing designer jeans and a fishnet tee-shirt. His hair was slicked back and he was thin to the point of emaciation. His feet were cocked up on his desk, which was piled high with ledgers and dominated by an old scrolled cash register. He was reading a paperback novel which Bill thought had never been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It was called
Construction Site Studs.
On the floor in front of the desk was a barber pole, its stripe revolving up and up into infinity. Its frayed cord wound across the floor to a baseboard plug like a tired snake. The sign in front of it read:
A DYEING BREED
! $250.

When the bell over the door jingled, the man behind the desk marked his place with a matchbook cover and looked up. “Help you?”

“Yes,” Bill said, and opened his mouth to ask about the bike in the window. But before he could speak, his mind was suddenly filled with a single haunting sentence, words that drove away all other thought:

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

What in the name of God?

(thrusts)

“Looking for anything in particular?” the proprietor asked. His voice was polite enough, but he was looking at Bill closely.

He's looking at me,
Bill thought, amused in spite of his distress,
as if he's got an idea I've been smoking some of that stuff that gets the jazz musicians high.

“Yes, I was ih-ih-interested ih-in—”

(his fists against the posts)

“—in that puh-puh-post—”

“The barber pole, you mean?” The proprietor's eyes now showed Bill something which, even in his present confused state, he remembered and hated from his childhood: the anxiety of a man or woman who must listen to a stutterer, the urge to jump in quickly and finish the thought, thus shutting the poor bastard up.
But I
don't
stutter! I beat it! I DON'T FUCKING STUTTER! I—

(and still insists)

The words were so clear in his mind that it seemed someone else must be speaking in there, that he was like a man possessed by demons in Biblical times—a man invaded by some presence from Outside. And yet he recognized the voice and knew it was his own. He felt sweat pop out warmly on his face.

“I could give you

(he sees the ghosts)

a deal on that post,” the proprietor was saying. “Tell you the truth, I can't move it at two-fifty. I'd give it to you for one-seventy-five, how's that? It's the only real antique in the place.”

(post)

“POLE,”
Bill almost screamed, and the proprietor recoiled a little. “Not the
pole
I'm interested in.”

“Are you okay, mister?” the proprietor asked. His solicitous tone belied the expression of hard wariness in his eyes, and Bill saw his left hand leave the desk. He knew, with a flash of something that
was really more inductive reasoning than intuition, that there was an open drawer below Bill's own sight-line, and that the proprietor had almost surely put his hand on a pistol of some type. He was maybe worried about robbery; more likely he was just worried. He was, after all, clearly gay, and this was the town where the local juveniles had given Adrian Mellon a terminal bath.

(he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts)

It drove out all thought; it was like being insane. Where had it come from?

(he thrusts)

Repeating and repeating.

With a sudden titanic effort, Bill attacked it. He did this by forcing his mind to translate the alien sentence into French. It was the same way he had beaten the stutter as a teenager. As the words marched across his field of thought, he changed them . . . and suddenly he felt the grip of the stutter loosen.

He realized that the proprietor had been saying something.

“P-P-Pardon me?”

“I said if you're going to have a fit, take it out on the street. I don't need shit like that in here.” Bill drew in a deep breath.

“Let's start o-over,” he said. “Pretend I just came i-in.”

“Okay,” the proprietor said, agreeably enough. “You just came in. Now what?”

“The b-bike in the window,” Bill said. “How much do you want for the bike?”

“Take twenty bucks.” He sounded easier now, but his left hand still hadn't come back into view. “I think it was a Schwinn at one time, but it's a mongrel now.” His eye measured Bill. “Big bike. You could ride it yourself.”

Thinking of the kid's green skateboard, Bill said, “I think my bike-riding days are o-o-over.”

The proprietor shrugged. His left hand finally came up again. “Got a boy?”

“Y-Yes.”

“How old is he?”

“Eh-Eh-Eleven.”

“Big bike for an eleven-year-old.”

“Will you take a traveller's check?”

“Long as it's no more than ten bucks over the amount of the purchase.”

“I can give you a twenty,” Bill said. “Mind if I make a phone call?”

“Not if it's local.”

“It is.”

“Be my guest.”

Bill called the Derry Public Library. Mike was there.

“Where are you, Bill?” he asked, and then immediately: “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine. Have you seen any of the others?”

“No. We'll see them tonight.” There was a brief pause. “That is, I presume. What can I do you for, Big Bill?”

“I'm buying a bike,” Bill said calmly. “I wondered if I could wheel it up to your house. Do you have a garage or something I could store it in?”

There was silence.

“Mike? Are you—”

“I'm here,” Mike said. “Is it Silver?”

Bill looked at the proprietor. He was reading his book again . . . or maybe just looking at it and listening carefully.

“Yes,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“It's called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes.”

“All right,” Mike said. “My place is 61 Palmer Lane. You'd want to go up Main Street—”

“I can find it.”

“All right, I'll meet you there. Want some supper?”

“That would be nice. Can you get off work?”

“No problem. Carole will cover for me.” Mike hesitated again. “She said that a fellow was in about an hour before I got back here. Said he left looking like a ghost. I got her to describe him. It was Ben.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. And the bike. That's part of it, too, isn't it?”

“Shouldn't wonder,” Bill said, keeping an eye on the proprietor, who still appeared to be absorbed in his book.

“I'll see you at my place,” Mike said. “Number 61. Don't forget.”

“I won't. Thank you, Mike.”

“God bless, Big Bill.”

Bill hung up. The proprietor promptly closed his book again. “Got you some storage space, my friend?”

“Yeah.” Bill took out his traveller's checks and signed his name to a twenty. The proprietor examined the two signatures with a care that, in less distracted mental circumstances, Bill would have found rather insulting.