Come on, she thought. Come on, hurry up and go, hurry up and go, puh-LEEZE!
A moment later she heard Patrick roar with mixed laughter and pain.
“Six feet!” Henry bellowed. “Just like a fuckin blowtorch! Swear to God!”
Silence then for awhile. Sweat trickling down her back. The sun beating through the Ford’s cracked windshield on the nape of her neck. Heaviness in her bladder.
Henry bellowed so loud that Beverly, who had been close to dozing in spite of her discomfort, almost cried out herself. “damn it, Hockstetter! You burned my frigging ass! What are you doing with that lighter?”
“Ten feet,” Patrick giggled (just the sound of it made Bev feel cold and revolted, as if she had seen a worm squirm its way out of her salad). “Ten feet if it was an inch, Henry. Bright blue. Ten feet if it was an inch. Swear to God!”
“Gimme that,” Henry grunted.
Come on, come on, you stupidniks, go, get out!
When Patrick spoke again his voice was so low Bev could barely hear it. If there had been the slightest breath of wind on the air that baking afternoon, she would not have done.
“Let me show you something,” Patrick said.
“What?” Henry asked.
“Just something.” Patrick paused. “It feels good.”
“What?” Henry asked again.
Then there was silence.
I don’t want to look, I don’t want to see what they’re doing now, and besides,
they might see me, in fact they probably will because you’ve used up all your luck
today, girly-o. So just stay right here. No peeking…
But her curiosity had overcome her good sense. There was something strange in that silence, something a little bit scary. She raised her head inch by inch until she could look through the Ford’s cracked cloudy windshield. She needn’t have worried about being seen; both of the boys were concentrating on what Patrick was doing. She didn’t understand what she was seeing, but she knew it was nasty… not that she would have expected anything else from Patrick, who was just so weird.
He had one hand between Henry’s thighs and one hand between his own. One hand was flogging Henry’s thing gently; with his other hand Patrick was rubbing his own. Except he wasn’t exactly rubbing it-he was kind of… squeezing it, pulling it, letting it flop back down.
What is he doing? Beverly wondered, dismayed.
She didn’t know, not for sure, but it scared her. She didn’t think she had been this scared since the blood had vomited out of the bathroom drain and splattered all over everything. Some deep part of her cried out that if they discovered she had seen this, whatever it was, they might do more than hurt her; they might actually kill her. Still, she couldn’t look away.
She saw that Patrick’s thing had gotten a little longer, but not much; it still dangled between his legs like a snake with no backbone. Henry’s, however, had grown amazingly. It stood up stiff and hard, almost poking his bellybutton. Patrick’s hand went up and down, up and down, sometimes pausing to squeeze, sometimes tickling that odd, heavy sac under Henry’s thing.
Those are his balls, Beverly thought. Do boys have to go around with those all the time? God, I’d go crazy! Another part of her mind then whispered: Bill has those. On its own, her mind visualized her holding them, cupping them in her hand, testing their texture… and that hot feeling raced through her again, sparking off a furious blush.
Henry stared at Patrick’s hand as if hypnotized. His lighter lay on the rocky scree beside him, reflecting hot afternoon sun.
“Want me to put it in my mouth?” Patrick asked. His big, livery lips smiled complacently.
“Huh?” Henry asked, as if startled from some deep dream.
“I’ll put it in my mouth if you want. I don’t m-”
Henry’s hand flashed out, half-curled, not quite a fist. Patrick was knocked sprawling. His head thudded on the gravel. Beverly dived down again, her heart crashing in her chest, her teeth locked against a little whimpering moan. After knocking Patrick down, Henry had turned and for a moment, just before she dropped back into her little huddled ball on the passenger side of the driveshaft hump, it seemed that her eyes and Henry’s had locked.
Please God the sun was in his eyes, she prayed. Please God I’m sorry I peeked. Please God.
There was an agonizing pause then. Her white blouse was plastered to her body with sweat. Droplets like seed pearls gleamed on her tanned arms. Her bladder throbbed painfully. She felt that very soon she would wet her pants. She waited for Henry’s furious crazy face to appear in the opening where the Ford’s passenger door had been, sure it was going to happen-how could he have missed seeing her? He would drag her out and hurt her. He would -
A new and even more terrible thought now occurred to her, and once again she had to engage in a painful, crampy struggle to keep from wetting her pants. Suppose he did something to her with his thing) Suppose he wanted her to put it in her somewhere? She knew where it was supposed to go, all right; it seemed that knowledge had suddenly sprung into her mind full-blown. She thought that if Henry tried to put his thing in her she would go crazy.
Please no, please God don’t let him have seen me, please, okay?
Then Henry spoke, and to her growing horror his voice was coming from someplace much closer. “I don’t go for that queer stuff.”
From farther off, Patrick’s voice: “You liked it.”
“I didn’t like it!” Henry shouted. “And if you tell anyone I did, I’ll kill you, you fucking little pansy!”
“You got a boner,” Patrick said. He sounded like he was smiling. As much as she feared Henry Bowers, the smile would not have surprised Beverly. Patrick was crazy, crazier than Henry, maybe, and people that crazy weren’t afraid of anything. “I saw it.”
Footsteps crunched over the gravel-closer and closer. Beverly looked up, her eyes bulging. Through the Ford’s old windshield she could now see the back of Henry’s head. He was looking toward Patrick now, but if he turned around -
’If you tell anyone, I’ll say you’re a cocksucker,” Henry said. “Then I’ll kill you.”
“You don’t scare me, Henry,” Patrick said, and giggled. “But I might not tell if you gave me a dollar.”
Henry shifted restlessly. He turned slightly; Beverly could now see one-quarter of his profile instead of just the back of his head. Please God please God, she begged incoherently, and her bladder throbbed more strongly.
“If you tell,” Henry said, his voice low and deliberate, “I’ll tell what you’ve been doing with the cats. With the dogs, too. I’ll tell them about your refrigerator. You know what’ll happen, Hockstetter? They’ll come and take you away and put you into the fucking-A loonybin.”
Silence from Patrick.
Henry drummed his fingers on the hood of the Ford Beverly was hiding in. “do you hear me?”
“I hear you.” Patrick sounded sullen now. Sullen and a little scared. He burst out: “You liked it! You got a boner! Biggest boner I ever saw!”
“Yeah, I bet you seen a lot of em, you fuckin little homo faggot. You just remember what I said about the refrigerator. Your refrigerator. And if I see you around again, I’ll knock your block off.”
More silence from Patrick.
Henry moved away. Beverly turned her head and saw him pass by the driver’s side of the Ford. If he had looked to his left even a little bit, he would have seen her. But he didn’t look. A moment later she heard him heading off the way Victor and Belch had gone.
Now there was just Patrick.
Beverly waited, but nothing happened. Five minutes dragged by. Her need to urinate was now desperate. She might be able to hold out for another two or three minutes, but no more. And it made her uneasy not to know for sure where Patrick was.
She peeked through the windshield again and saw him just sitting there. Henry had forgotten his lighter. Patrick had put his schoolbooks back into a small canvas carrier sack and had slung it around his neck like a newsboy’s, but his pants and underpants were still down around his ankles. He was playing with the lighter. He would spin the wheel, produce a flame that was almost invisible in the bright day, snap the lighter closed, and then start all over again. He seemed hypnotized. A line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth to his chin, and his lips were swelling up on the right side. He seemed not to notice, and once again Beverly felt a squirmy sort of revulsion. Patrick was crazy, all right; she had never in her life wanted so badly to get away from someone.
Moving very carefully, she crawled backward over the Ford’s driveshaft hump and squeezed under the steering wheel. She put her feet out on the ground and crept to the back of the Ford. Then she ran quickly back the way she had come. When she had entered the pines beyond the junked cars; she looked back over her shoulder. No one was there. The dump dozed in the sun. She felt the bands of tension around her chest and stomach loosen with relief, and all that was left was the need to urinate, so great that she now felt sick with it.
She hurried down the path a short way and then ducked off to the right. She had her shorts unsnapped almost before the underbrush had closed behind her again. She took a quick look around to make sure there was no poison ivy at hand; then she squatted, holding the tough trunk of a bush for balance.
She was pulling her shorts up again when she heard approaching footsteps from the dump. All she could see through the bushes were flashes of blue denim and the faded plaid of a school-shirt. It was Patrick. She ducked down, waiting for him to pass by toward Kansas Street. She was more sanguine about her position here. The cover was good, she no longer had to pee, and Patrick was off in his own cuckoo world. When he was gone she would double back and head for the clubhouse.
But Patrick didn’t pass by. He stopped on the path almost directly opposite her and stood looking at the rusting Amana refrigerator.
Beverly could observe Patrick along a natural sight-line in the bushes without too much chance of being seen. Now that she was relieved, she found she was curious again-and if Patrick did happen to see her, she felt certain she could outrun him. He wasn’t as fat as Ben, but he was podgy. She pulled the Bullseye out of her back pocket, however, and put half a dozen steel pellets in the breast pocket of her old Ship “n Shore. Crazy or not, a good one to the knee might discourage the likes of Patrick Hockstetter in a hurry.
She remembered the refrigerator well enough now. There were lots of discarded fridges at the dump, but it suddenly occurred to her that this was the only one she’d seen which Mandy Fazio hadn’t disarmed by either tearing out the latching mechanism with pliers or simply removing the door altogether.
Patrick began to hum and sway back and forth in front of the rusty old refrigerator, and Beverly felt a fresh chill course through her. He was like a guy in a horror movie trying to summon a dead body out of a crypt.
What’s he up to?
But if she had known that, or what was going to happen when Patrick finished his private ritual and opened the dead Amana’s rusty door, she would have run away as fast as she could.
5
No one-not even Mike Hanlon-had the slightest idea of how crazy Patrick Hockstetter really was. He was twelve, the son of a paint salesman. His mother was a devout Catholic who would die of breast cancer in 1962, four years after Patrick was consumed by the dark entity which existed in and below Derry. Although his IQ tested out as low normal, Patrick had already repeated two grades,
