It

there was light down here, light, and surely there could be no light in the Canal under the city. But it brightened steadily just the same.

Bill was beginning to have serious problems with Audra. It wasn’t the current-that had slackened-it was the depth. Pretty soon I’ll be floating her, he thought. He could see Ben on his left and Beverly on his right; by turning his head slightly, he could see Richie behind Ben. The footing was getting decidedly odd. The bottom of the tunnel was now heaped and mounded with detritus-bricks, it felt like. And up ahead, something was sticking out of the water like, the prow of a ship that is in the process of sinking.

Ben floundered toward it, shivering in the cold water. A soggy cigar box floated into his face. He pushed it aside and grabbed at the thing sticking out of the water. His eyes widened. It appeared to be a large sign. He was able to read the letters AL, and below that, FUT. And suddenly he knew.

“Bill! Richie! Bev!” He was laughing with astonishment.

“What is it, Ben?” Beverly shouted.

Grabbing it with both hands, Ben rocked it back. There was a grating sound as one side of the sign scraped along the wall of the tunnel. Now they could read: ALADDI, and, below that, BACK TO THE FUTURE.

“It’s the marquee for the Aladdin,” Richie said. “How-”

“The street caved in,” Bill whispered. His eyes were widening. He stared up the tunnel. The light was brighter still up ahead.

“What, Bill?”

“What the fuck happened?

“Bill? Bill? What-”

“All these drains!” Bill said wildly. “All these old drains! There’s been another flood! And I think this time-”

He began to flounder ahead again, holding Audra up. Ben, Bev, and Richie fell in behind him. Five minutes later Bill looked up and saw blue sky. He was looking through a crack in the ceiling of the tunnel, a crack that widened to better than seventy feet across as it ran away from where he stood. The water was broken by many islands and archipelagos up ahead-piles of bricks, the back deck of a Plymouth sedan with its trunk sprung open and pouring water, a parking-meter leaning against the tunnel wall at a drunken slant, its red VIOLATION flag up.

The footing had become almost impossible now-mini-mountains that rose and fell with no rhyme or reason, inviting a broken ankle. The water ran mildly around their armpits.

Mild now, Bill thought. But if we’d been here two hours ago, even one, I think we might have gotten the ride of our lives.

“What the fuck is this, Big Bill?” Richie asked. He was standing at Bill’s left elbow, his face soft with wonder as he looked up at the rip in the roof of the tunnel-except it’s not the roof of any tunnel Bill thought. It’s Main Street. At least it used to be.

“I think most of downtown Derry is now in the Canal and being carried down the Kenduskeag River. Pretty soon it’ll be in the Penobscot and then it will be in the Atlantic Ocean and good fucking riddance. Can you help me with Audra, Richie? I don’t think I can-”

“Sure,” Richie said. “sure, Bill. No sweat.”

He took Audra from Bill. In this light, Bill could see her better than he perhaps wanted to-her pallor masked but not hidden by the dirt and ordure that smeared her forehead and caked her cheeks. Her eyes were still wide open… wide open and innocent of all sense. Her hair hung lank and wet. She might as well have been one of those inflatable doilies they sold at the Pleasure Chest in New York or along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. The only difference was her slow, steady respiration… and that might have been a clockwork trick, no more than that.

“How are we going to get up from here?” he asked Richie.

“Get Ben to give you ten fingers,” Richie said. “You can yank Bev up, and the two of you can get your wife. Ben can boost me and we’ll get Ben. And after that I’ll show you how to set up a volleyball tournament for a thousand sorority girls.”

“Beep-beep, Richie.”

“Beep-beep your ass, Big Bill.”

The tiredness was going through him in steady waves. He caught Beverly’s level gaze and held it for a moment. She nodded to him slightly, and he made a smile for her.

“Give me ten fingers, B-B-Ben?”

Ben, who also looked unutterably weary, nodded. A deep scratch ran down one cheek. “I think I can handle that.”

He stooped slightly and laced his hands together. Bill hiked one foot, stepped into Ben’s hand, and jumped up. It wasn’t quite enough. Ben lifted the step he had made with his hands and Bill grabbed the edge of the broken-in tunnel roof. He yanked himself up. The first thing he saw was a white-and-orange crash barrier. The second thing was a crowd of milling men and women beyond the barrier. The third was Freese’s Department Store-only it had an oddly bulged-out, foreshortened look. It took him a moment to realize that almost half of Freese’s had sunk into the street and the Canal beneath. The top half had slued out over the street and seemed in danger of toppling over like a pile of badly stacked books.

“Look! Look! There’s someone in the street!”

A woman was pointing toward the place where Bill’s head had poked out of the crevasse in the shattered pavement.

“Praise God, there’s someone else!”

She started forward, an elderly woman with a kerchief tied over her head peasant-style. A cop held her back. “Not safe out there, Mrs Nelson. You know it. Rest of the street might go any time.”

Mrs Nelson, Bill thought. I remember you. Your sister used to sit George and me sometimes. He raised his hand to show her he was all right, and when she raised her own hand in return, he felt a sudden surge of good feelings-and hope.

He turned around and lay flat on the sagging pavement, trying to distribute his weight as evenly as possible, the way you were supposed to do on thin ice. He reached down for Bev. She grasped his wrists and, with what seemed to be the last of his strength, he pulled her up. The sun, which had disappeared again, now ran out from behind a brace of mackerel-scale clouds and gave them their shadows back. Beverly looked up, startled, caught Bill’s eyes, and smiled.

“I love you, Bill,” she said. “And I pray she’ll be all right.”

“Thuh-hank you, Bevvie,” he said, and his kind smile made her start to cry a little. He hugged her and the small crowd gathered behind the crash barrier applauded. A photographer from the Derry News snapped a picture. It appeared in the June 1st edition of the paper, which was printed in Bangor because of water damage to the News’s presses. The caption was simple enough, and true enough for Bill to cut the picture out and keep it tucked away in his wallet for years to come: SURVIVORS, the caption read. That was all, but that was enough.

It was six minutes of eleven in Derry, Maine.

7 DERRY / LATER THE SAME DAY

The glass corridor between the Children’s Library and the adult library had exploded at 10:30 A.M. At 10:33, the rain stopped. It didn’t taper off; it stopped all at once, as if Someone Up There had flicked a toggle switch. The wind had already begun to fall, and it fell so rapidly that people stared at each other with uneasy, superstitious faces. The sound was like the wind-down of a 747’s engines after it has been safely parked at the gate. The sun peeked out for the first time at 10:47. By midafternoon the clouds had burned away entirely, and the day had come off fair and hot. By 3:30 P.M. the mercury in the Orange Crush thermometer outside the door of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes read eighty-three-the highest reading of the young season. People walked through the streets like zombies, not talking much. Their expressions were remarkably similar: a kind of stupid wonder that would have been funny if it was not also so frankly pitiable. By evening reporters from ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN had arrived in Derry, and the network news reporters would bring some version of the truth home to most people; they would make it real… although there were those who might have suggested that reality is a highly untrustworthy concept, something perhaps no more solid than a piece of canvas stretched over an interlacing of cables like the strands of a spiderweb. The following morning Bryant Gumble and Willard Scott of the Today show would be in Derry. During the course of the program, Gumble would interview Andrew Keene. “Whole Standpipe just crashed over and rolled down the hill,” Andrew said. “It was like wow. You know what I mean? Like Steven Spielberg eat your heart out, you know? Hey, I always got the idea looking at you on TV that you were, you know, a lot bigger.” Seeing themselves and their neighbors on TV-that would make it real. It would give them a place from which to grasp this terrible, ungraspable thing. It had been a FREAK STORM. In the days following, THE DEATH-COUNT would rise in THE WAKE OF THE KILLER STORM. It was, in fact, THE WORST SPRING STORM IN MAINE HISTORY. All of these headlines, as terrible as they were, were useful-they helped to blunt the essential strangeness of what had happened… or perhaps strangeness was too mild a word. Insanity might have been better. Seeing themselves on TV would help make it concrete, less insane. But in the hours before the news crews arrived, there were only the people from Derry, walking through their rubble-strewn, mud-slicked streets with expressions of stunned unbelief on their faces. Only the people from Derry, not talking much, looking at things, occasionally picking things up and then tossing them down again, trying to figure out what had happened during the last seven or eight hours. Men stood on Kansas Street, smoking, looking at houses lying upside down in the Barrens. Other men and women stood beyond the white-and-orange crash barriers, looking into the black hole that had been downtown until ten that morning. The headline of that Sunday’s paper read: WE WILL REBUILD, vows DERRY MAYOR, and perhaps they would. But in the weeks that followed, while the City Council wrangled over how the rebuilding should begin, the huge crater that had been downtown continued to grow in an unspectacular but steady way. Four days after the storm, the office building of the Bangor Hydroelectric Company collapsed into the hole. Three days after that, the Flying Doghouse, which sold the best kraut- and chili-dogs in eastern Maine, fell in. Drains backed up periodically in houses, apartment buildings, and businesses. It got so bad in the Old Cape that people began to leave. June 10th was the first evening of horse-racing at Bassey Park; the first race was scheduled for 8:00 P.M. and that seemed to cheer everyone up. But a section of bleachers collapsed as the trotters in the first race turned into the home stretch, and half a dozen people were hurt. One of them was Foxy Foxworth, who had managed the Aladdin Theater until 1973. Foxy spent two weeks in the hospital, suffering from a broken leg and a punctured testicle. When he was released, he decided to go to his sister’s in Somersworth, New Hampshire.

He wasn’t the only one. Derry was falling apart.

8

They watched the orderly slam the back doors of the ambulance and go around to the passenger seat. The ambulance started up the hill toward the Derry Home Hospital. Richie had flagged it down at severe risk of life and limb, and had argued the irate driver to a draw when the driver insisted he just didn’t have any more room. He had ended up stretching Audra out on the floor.

“Now what?” Ben asked. There were huge brown circles under his eyes and a grimy ring of dirt around his neck.

“I’m g-going back to the Town House,” Bill said. “G-Gonna sleep for about suh-hixteen hours.”

“I second that,” Richie said. He looked hopefully at Bev. “Got any cigarettes, purty lady?”

“No,” Beverly said. “I think I’m going to quit again.”

“Sensible enough idea.”

They began to walk slowly up the hill, the four of them side by side.

“It’s o-o-over,” Bill said.