It (177 page)

Stan looks up at him and Bill suddenly understands: it is perfectly clear to him, and perfectly right. He steps forward toward Stan with his hands held out, palms up. Stan backs away, into the water. Small black bugs stitch along just above the surface, and Bill can see an iridescent dragonfly go buzzing off into the reeds along the far bank like a small flying rainbow. A frog begins a steady bass thud, and as Stan takes his left hand and draws the edge of glass down his palm, peeling skin and bringing thin blood, Bill thinks in a kind of ecstasy:
There's so much life down here!

“Bill?”

“Sure. Both.”

Stan cuts his other hand. There is pain, but not much. A whippoorwill has begun to call somewhere, a cool sound, peaceful. Bill thinks:
That whippoorwill is raising the moon.

He looks at his hands, both of them bleeding now, and then around him. The others are there—Eddie with his aspirator clutched tightly in one hand; Ben with his big belly pushing palely out through the tattered remains of his shirt; Richie, his face oddly naked without his glasses; Mike, silent and solemn, his normally full lips compressed to a thin line. And Beverly, her head up, her eyes wide and clear, her hair still somehow lovely in spite of the dirt that mats it.

All of us. All of us are here.

And he sees them, really sees them, for the last time, because in some way he understands that they will never all be together again, the seven of them—not this way. No one talks. Beverly holds out her hands, and after a moment Richie and Ben hold out theirs. Mike and Eddie do the same. Stan cuts them one by one as the sun begins to slip behind the horizon, cooling that red furnace-glow to a dusky rose-pink. The whippoorwill cries again, Bill can see the first faint swirls of mist on the water, and he feels as if he has become a part of everything—this is a brief ecstasy which he will no more talk about than Beverly will later talk about the brief reflection she sees of two dead men who were, as boys, her friends.

A breeze touches the trees and bushes, making them sigh, and he thinks:
This is a lovely place, and I'll never forget it. It's lovely, and
they
are lovely; each one of them is gorgeous.
The whippoorwill cries again, sweet and liquid, and for a moment Bill feels at one with it, as if he could sing and then be gone into the dusk—as if he could fly away, brave in the air.

He looks at Beverly and she is smiling at him. She closes her eyes and holds her hands out to either side. Bill takes her left; Ben her right. Bill can feel the warmth of her blood mixing with his own. The others join in and they stand in a circle, all of their hands now sealed in that peculiarly intimate way.

Stan is looking at Bill with a kind of urgency; a kind of fear.

“Swuh-Swear to muh-me that you'll c-c-c-come buh-back,” Bill says. “Swear to me that if Ih-Ih-It isn't d-d-dead, you'll cuh-home back.”

“Swear,” Ben said.

“Swear.” Richie.

“Yes—I swear.” Bev.

“Swear it,” Mike Hanlon mutters.

“Yeah. Swear.” Eddie, his voice a thin and reedy whisper. “I swear too,” Stan whispers, but his voice falters and he looks down as he speaks.

“I-I swuh-swuh-swear.”

That was it; that was all. But they stand there for awhile longer, feeling the power that is in their circle, the closed body that they make. The light paints their faces in pale fading colors; the sun is now gone and sunset is dying. They stand together in a circle as the darkness creeps down into the Barrens, filling up the paths they have walked this summer, the clearings where they have played tag and guns, the secret places along the riverbanks where they have sat and discussed childhood's long questions or smoked Beverly's cigarettes or where they have merely been silent, watching the passage of the clouds reflected in the water. The eye of the day is closing.

At last Ben drops his hands. He starts to say something, shakes his head, and walks away. Richie follows him, then Beverly and Mike, walking together. No one talks; they climb the embankment to Kansas Street and simply take leave of one another. And when Bill thinks it over twenty-seven years later, he realizes that they really never did all get together again. Four of them quite often, sometimes five, and maybe six once or twice. But never all seven.

He's the last to go. He stands for a long time with his hands on the rickety white fence, looking down into the Barrens as, overhead, the first stars seed the summer sky. He stands under the blue and over the black and watches the Barrens fill up with darkness.

I never want to play down there again,
he thinks suddenly and is amazed to find the thought is not terrible or distressing but tremendously liberating.

He stands there a moment longer and then turns away from the Barrens and starts home, walking along the dark sidewalk with his hands in his pockets, glancing from time to time at the houses of Derry, warmly lit against the night.

After a block or two he begins to walk faster, thinking of supper . . . and a block or two after that, he begins to whistle.

DERRY:

THE LAST

INTERLUDE

“ ‘The ocean, in these times, is a perfect fleet of ships; and we can hardly fail to encounter many, in running over. It is merely crossing,' said Mr. Micawber, trifling with his eyeglass, ‘merely crossing. The distance is quite imaginary.' ”

—Charles Dickens,
David Copperfield

June 4th, 1985

Bill came in about twenty minutes ago and brought me this book—Carole found it on one of the tables in the library and gave it to him when he asked for it. I thought Chief Rademacher might have taken it, but apparently he didn't want anything to do with it.

Bill's stutter is disappearing again, but the poor man has aged four years in the last four days. He told me he expects Audra to be discharged from Derry Home Hospital (where I myself yet tarry) tomorrow, only to take a private ambulance north to the Bangor Mental Health Institute. Physically she's fine—minor cuts and bruises that are already healing. Mentally . . .

“You raise her hand and it stays up,” Bill said. He was sitting by the window, twiddling a can of diet soda between his hands. “It just floats there until someone puts it down again. Her reflexes are there, but very slow. The EEG they did shows a severely repressed alpha wave. She's c-c-catatonic, Mike.”

I said, “I've got an idea. Maybe not such a good one. If you don't like it, just say so.”

“What?”

“I'm going to be in here another week,” I said. “Instead of sending Audra up to Bangor, why don't you take her to my place, Bill? Spend the week with her. Talk to her, even if she doesn't talk back. Is she . . . is she continent?”

“No,” Bill said bleakly.

“Can you—I mean, would you—”

“Would I change her?” He smiled, and it was such a painful smile that I had to look away for a moment. It was the way my father smiled the time he told me about Butch Bowers and the chickens. “Yes. I think I could do that much.”

“I won't tell you to take it easy on yourself when you're obviously
not prepared to do that,” I said, “but please remember that you yourself agreed that much or all of what's happened was almost certainly ordained. That may include Audra's part in this.”

“I sh-should have kept my mouth shut about where I was g-going.”

Sometimes it's better to say nothing—so that's what I did.

“All right,” he said at last. “If you really mean it—”

“I mean it. They've got my housekeys down at the Patient Services Desk. There's a couple of Delmonico steaks in the freezer. Maybe that was ordained, too.”

“She's eating mostly soft foods and, uh, luh-liquids.”

“Well,” I said, holding onto my smile, “maybe there'll be cause for a celebration. There's a pretty good bottle of wine on the top shelf in the pantry, too. Mondavi. Domestic, but good.”

He came over and gripped my hand. “Thank you, Mike.”

“Any time, Big Bill.”

He let go of my hand. “Richie flew back to California this morning.”

I nodded. “Think you'll stay in touch?”

“M-Maybe,” he said. “For awhile, anyway. But . . .” He looked at me levelly. “It's going to happen again, I think.”

“The forgetting?”

“Yes. In fact, I think it's already started. Just little things so far. Details. But I think it's going to spread.”

“Maybe that's best.”

“Maybe.” He looked out the window, still twiddling his can of diet soda, almost surely thinking about his wife, so wide-eyed and silent and beautiful and plastic.
Catatonic.
The sound of a door slamming shut and locked. He sighed. “Maybe it is.”

“Ben? Beverly?”

He looked back at me and smiled a little. “Ben's invited her to come back to Nebraska with him, and she's agreed to go, at least for awhile. You know about her friend in Chicago?”

I nodded. Beverly told Ben and Ben told me yesterday. If I may understate the case
(grotesquely
understate the case), Beverly's later description of her wonderful fantastic husband, Tom, was much truer than her original one. Wonderful fantastic Tom kept Bev in emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical bondage for the last four
years or so. Wonderful fantastic Tom got here by beating the information out of Bev's only close woman friend.

“She told me she's going to fly back to Chicago the week after next and file a missing-persons report on him. Tom, I mean.”

“Smart enough,” I said. “No one's ever going to find him down
there.” Or Eddie either,
I thought but did not say.

“No, I suppose not,” Bill said. “And when she goes back, I'm betting Ben will go with her. And you know something else? Something really crazy?”

“What?”

“I don't think she really remembers
what
happened to Tom.”

I just stared at him.

“She's forgotten or forgetting,” Bill said. “And I can't remember what the
doorway
looked like anymore. The d-doorway into Its place. I try to think of it and the craziest thing happens—I get this ih-image of g-g-goats walking over a bridge. From that story ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff.' Crazy, huh?”

“They'll trace Tom Rogan to Derry eventually,” I said. “He'll have left a paper trail a mile wide. Rent-a-car, plane tickets.”

“I'm not so sure of that,” Bill said, lighting a cigarette. “I think he might have paid cash for his plane ticket and given a phony name. Maybe bought a cheap car here or stole one.”

“Why?”

“Oh, come on,” Bill said. “Do you think he came all this way to give her a spanking?”

Our eyes met for a long moment and then he stood up. “Listen, Mike . . .”

“Too hip, gotta split,” I said. “I can dig it.”

He laughed at that, laughed hard, and when he had sobered he said: “Thanks for the use of your place, Mikey.”

“I'm not going to swear to you it'll make any difference. It has no therapeutic qualities that I'm aware of.”

“Well . . . I'll see you.” He did an odd thing then, odd but rather lovely. He kissed my cheek. “God bless, Mike. I'll be around.”

“Things may be okay, Bill,” I said. “Don't give up hope. They may be okay.”

He smiled and nodded, but I think the same word was in both of our minds:
Catatonic.

June 5th, 1985

Ben and Beverly came in today to say goodbye. They're not flying—Ben's rented a great big Cadillac from the Hertz people and they're going to drive, not hurrying. There's something in their eyes when they look at each other, and I'd bet my pension-plan that if they're not making it now, they will be by the time they get to Nebraska.

Beverly hugged me, told me to get well quickly, and then cried.

Ben also hugged me, and asked for the third or fourth time if I would write. I told him I would indeed write, and so I will . . . for awhile, at least. Because this time it's happening to me, as well.

I'm forgetting things.

As Bill said, right now it's only small things, details. But it feels like the sort of thing that's going to spread. It could be that in a month or a year, this notebook will be all I'll have to remind me of what happened here in Derry. I suppose the words themselves might begin to fade, eventually leaving this book as blank as when I first picked it up in the school-supplies department at Freese's. That's an awful thought and in the daytime it seems wildly paranoid . . . but, do you know, in the watches of the night it seems perfectly logical.