Audra snagged the strap of her purse and ran barefooted for the door at the end of the corridor. She was in a blind panic now, her only thought that she had to find the Derry Town House, and Bill. It didn’t matter if he was in bed with enough other women to make up a harem. She would find him and get him to take her away from whatever unspeakable thing there was in this town.
She fled down the walkway and into the parking-lot, looking around wildly for her car. For a moment her mind froze and she couldn’t even remember what she had been driving. Then it came: Datsun, tobacco-brown. She spotted it standing hubcapdeep in the still, curdled groundmist, and hurried over to it. She couldn’t find the keys in her purse. She swept through it with steadily increasing panic, shuffling Kleenex, cosmetics, change, sun-glasses, and sticks of gum into a meaningless jumble. She didn’t notice the battered LTD wagon parked nose-to-nose with her rented car, or the man sitting behind the wheel. She didn’t notice when the LTD’s door opened and the man got out; she was trying to cope with the growing certainty that she had left the Datsun’s keys in the room. She couldn’t go back in there; she couldn’t.
Her fingers touched hard serrated metal under a box of Altoid mints and she seized at it with a little cry of triumph. For a terrible moment she thought it might be the key to their Rover, now sitting in the Fleet railway station’s car-park three thousand miles away, and then she felt the lucite rental-car tab. She fumbled the key into the door-lock, breathing in harsh little gasps, and turned it. That was when a hand fell on her shoulder, and she screamed… screamed loudly this time. Somewhere a dog barked in answer, but that was all.
The hand, as hard as steel, bit cruelly in and forced her around. The face she saw looming over hers was puffed and lumpy. The eyes glittered. When the swelled lips spread in a grotesque smile, she saw that some of the man’s front teeth had been broken. The stumps looked jagged and savage.
She tried to speak and could not. The hand squeezed tighter, digging in.
“Haven’t I seen you in the movies?” Tom Rogan whispered.
3
EDDIE’S ROOM
Beverly and Bill dressed quickly, without speaking, and went up to Eddie’s room. On their way to the elevator they heard a phone-bell begin somewhere behind them. It was muffled, a somewhere-else sound.
“Bill, was that yours?”
“C-Could have b-b-been,” he said. “One of the uh-others c-calling, muh-haybe.” He punched the UP button.
Eddie opened the door for them, his face white and strained. His left arm was at an angle both peculiar and weirdly evocative of old times.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I took two Darvon. Pain’s not bad right now.” But it was clearly not good, either. His lips, pressed so tightly together they had almost disappeared, were purple with shock.
Bill looked past him and saw the body on the floor. One look was enough to satisfy him of two things-it was Henry Bowers, and he was dead. He moved past Eddie and knelt by the body. The neck of a Perrier bottle had been driven into Henry’s midsection, pulling the tatters of his shirt in after it. Henry’s eyes were half-open, glazed. His mouth, filled with coagulating blood, snarled. His hands were claws.
A shadow fell over him and Bill looked up. It was Beverly. She looked down at Henry with no expression at all.
“All the times he ch-ch-chased us,” Bill said.
She nodded. “He doesn’t look old. You know that, Bill? He doesn’t look old at all.” Abruptly she looked back at Eddie, who was sitting on the bed. Eddie looked old; old and haggard. His arm lay in his lap, useless. “We’ve got to call the doctor for Eddie.”
“No,” Bill and Eddie said in unison.
“But he’s hurt! His arm-”
“It’s the same as luh-luh-last t-t-time,” Bill said. He got to his feet and held her by the arms, looking into her face. “Once we g-go outside… once w-w-we ih-inv-v-holve the t-t-town-”
They’ll arrest me for murder,” Eddie said dully. “Or they’ll arrest all of us. Or they’ll detain us. Or something. Then there’ll be an accident. One of the special accidents that only happen in Derry. Maybe they’ll stick us in jail and a deputy sheriff will go berserk and shoot us all. Maybe we’ll all die of ptomaine, or decide to hang ourselves in our cells.”
“Eddie, that’s crazy! That’s-”
“Is it?” he asked. “remember, this is Derry.”
“But we’re grownups now! Surely you don’t think… I mean, he came here in the middle of the night… attacked you…”
“W-With what?” Bill said. “Where’s the nuh-nuh-knife?”
She looked around, didn’t see it, and dropped on her knees to look under the bed.
“Don’t bother,” Eddie said in that same faint, whistly voice. “I slammed the door on his arm when he tried to stick me with it. He dropped it and I kicked it under the TV. It’s gone now. I already looked.”
“B-B-Beheverly, c-call the others,” Bill said. “I can spuh-splint E-E-Eddie’s arm, I th-hink.”
She looked at him for a long moment, then she looked down at the body on the floor again. She thought that the picture this room presented should tell a perfectly clear story to any policeman with half a brain. The place was a mess. Eddie’s arm was broken. This man was dead. It was a clear case of self-defense against a night-prowler. And then she remembered Mr Ross. Mr Ross getting up and looking and then simply folding his newspaper and going back into the house.
Once we go outside… once we involve the town…
That made her remember Bill as a kid, his face white and tired and half-crazy, Bill saying Derry is It. Do you understand me?… Any place we go… when It gets us, they won’t see, they won’t hear, they won’t know. Don’t you see how it is? All we can do is to try and finish what we started.
Standing here now, looking down at Henry’s corpse, Beverly thought: They’re both saying we’ve all become ghosts again. That it’s started to repeat. All of it. As a kid I could accept that, because kids almost are ghosts. But -
’Are you sure?” she asked desperately. “Bill, are you sure?”
He was sitting on the bed with Eddie, gently touching his arm. “A-A-Aren’t y-you?” he asked. “After a-a-all that’s huh-happened t-today?”
Yes. All that had happened. The gruesome mess at the end of their reunion. The beautiful old woman who had turned into a crone before her eyes,
(my fodder was also my mudder)
the round of stories at the library tonight with the accompanying phenomena. All of those things. And still… her mind shouted at her desperately to stop this now, to spike it with sanity, because if she did not they were surely going to finish up this night by going down to the Barrens and finding a certain pumping-station and -
’I don’t know,” she said. “I just… I don’t know. Even after everything that’s happened, Bill, it seems to me that we could call the police. Maybe.”
“C-C-Call the uh-others,” he said again. “We’ll s-s-see what they th-think”
“All right.”
She called Richie first, then Ben. Both agreed to come right away. Neither asked what had happened. She found Mike’s telephone number in the book and dialed it. There was no answer; after a dozen rings she hung up.
“T-T-Try the luh-luh-hibrary,” Bill said. He had taken the short curtain rods down from the smaller of the two windows in Eddie’s room and was binding them firmly to Eddie’s arm with the belt of his bathrobe and the drawstring from his pyjamas.
Before she could find the number there was a knock at the door. Ben and Richie had arrived together, Ben in jeans and an untucked shirt, Richie in a pair of smart gray cotton trousers and his pyjama top. His eyes looked warily around the room from behind his glasses.
“Christ, Eddie, what happened to-”
^Oh my God!” Ben cried. He had seen Henry on the floor.
“B-B-Be quh-hiet!” Bill said sharply. “And close th-the d-door!”
Richie did it, his eyes fixed on the body. “Henry?”
Ben took three steps toward the corpse and then stopped, as if afraid it might bite him. He looked helplessly at Bill.
Y-Y-You t-tell,” he said to Eddie. “G-G-Goddam stuh-huh-hutter is g-getting wuh-wuh-worse all the t-t-time.” Eddie sketched in what had happened while Beverly hunted up the number for the Derry Public Library and called it. She expected that perhaps Mike had fallen asleep there-he might even have a bunk in his office. What she did not expect was what happened: the phone was picked up on the second ring and a voice she had never heard before said hello.
“Hello,” she answered, looking toward the others and making a shushing gesture with one hand. “Is Mr Hanlon there?”
“Who’s this?” the voice asked.
She wet her lips with her tongue. Bill was looking at her piercingly. Ben and Richie had looked around. The beginnings of real alarm stirred inside her.
“Who are you?” she countered. “You’re not Mr Hanlon.”
“I’m Derry Chief of Police Andrew Rademacher,” the voice said. “Mr Hanlon is at the Derry Home Hospital right now. He was assaulted and badly wounded a short time ago. Now who are you, please? I want your name.”
But she barely heard this last. Waves of shock rode through her, lifting her dizzily up and up, outside of herself. The muscles in her stomach and legs and crotch all went loose and numb, and she thought in a detached way: This must be how it happens, when people get so scared they wet their pants. Sure. You just lose control of those muscles -
’How badly has he been hurt?” she heard herself asking in a papery voice, and then Bill was beside her, his hand on her shoulder, and Ben was there, and Richie, and she felt such a rush of gratitude for them. She held her free hand out and Bill took it. Richie placed his hand over Bill’s and Ben put his over Richie’s. Eddie had come over, and now he put his good hand on top.
“I want your name, please,” Rademacher said briskly, and for a moment the skittering little craven inside of her, the one that had been bred by her father and cared for by her husband, almost answered: I’m Beverly Marsh and I’m at the Derry Town House. Please send Mr Nell over. There’s a dead man here who’s still half a boy and we’re all very frightened.
She said: “I… I’m afraid I can’t tell you. Not just yet.”
“What do you know about this?”
“Nothing,” she said, shocked. “What makes you think I do? Jesus Christ!”
“You just make a habit of calling the library every morning about three-thirty,” Rademacher said, “is that it? Can the bullshit, young lady. This is assault, and the way the guy looks, it could be murder by the time the sun comes up. I’ll ask you again: who are you and how much do you know about this?”
Closing her eyes, gripping Bill’s hand with all her strength, she asked again: “He might die? You’re not just saying that to scare me? He really might die? Please tell me.”
“He’s very badly hurt. And if that doesn’t scare you, miss, it ought to. Now I want to know who you are and why-”
As if in a dream she watched her hand float through space and drop the phone back into the cradle. She looked over at Henry and felt shock as keen as a slap from a cold hand. One of Henry’s eyes had closed. The other one, the shattered one, oozed as nakedly as before.
