Bill give me the popcorn.” “Bill, give him the popcorn. George, don’t call me Ma. Ma’s a sound a sheep makes.” Or his dad would tell a joke and they would all laugh, even Mom. George didn’t always get the jokes, Bill knew, but he laughed because everyone else was laughing.
In those days his mom and dad had also been bookends on the couch, but he and George had been the books. Bill had tried to be a book between them while they were watching TV since George’s death, but it was cold work. They sent the cold out from both directions and Bill’s defroster was simply not big enough to cope with it. He had to leave because that kind of cold always froze his cheeks and made his eyes water.
“W-Want to h-hear a joke I heard today in s-s-school?” he had tried once, some months ago.
Silence from them. On television a criminal was begging his brother, who was a priest, to hide him.
Bill’s dad glanced up from the True he was looking at and glanced at Bill with mild surprise. Then he looked back down at the magazine again. There was a picture of a hunter sprawled in a snowbank and staring up at a huge snarling polar bear. “Mauled by the Killer from the White Wastes” was the name of the article. Bill had thought, I know where there’s some white wastes-right between my dad and mom on this couch.
His mother had never looked up at all.
“It’s about h-how many F-F-Frenchmen it takes to sc-c-herew in a luhhh-hightbulb,” Bill plunged ahead. He felt a fine mist of sweat spring out upon his forehead, as it sometimes did in school when he knew the teacher had ignored him as long as she safely could and must soon call on him. His voice was too loud, but he couldn’t seem to lower it. The words echoed in his head like crazy chimes, echoing, jamming up, spilling out again.
“D-D-Do you know h-h-how muh-muh-many?”
“One to hold the bulb and four to turn the house,” Zack Denbrough said absently, and turned the page of his magazine.
“Did you say something, dear?” his mother asked, and on Four Star Playhouse the brother who was a priest told the brother who was a hoodlum to turn himself in and pray for forgiveness.
Bill sat there, sweating but cold-so cold. It was cold because he wasn’t really the only book between those two ends; Georgie was still there, only now it was a Georgie he couldn’t see, a Georgie who never demanded the popcorn or hollered that Bill was pinching. This new version of George never cut up dickens. It was a one-armed Georgie who was palely, thoughtfully silent in the Motorola’s shadowy white-and-blue glow, and perhaps it was not from his parents but from George that the big chill was really coming; perhaps it was George who was the real killer from the white wastes. Finally Bill had fled from that cold, invisible brother and into his room, where he lay face down on his bed and cried into his pillow.
George’s room was just as it had been on the day he died. Zack had put a bunch of George’s toys into a canon one day about two weeks after he was buried, meaning them for the Goodwill or the Salvation Army or someplace like that, Bill supposed. Sharon Denbrough had spotted him coming out with the box in his arms and her hands had flown to her head like startled white birds and plunged themselves deep into her hair where they locked themselves into pulling fists. Bill had seen this and had fallen against the wall, the strength suddenly running out of his legs. His mother looked as mad as Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein.
“Don’t you DARE take his things!” she had screeched.
Zack flinched and then took the box of toys back into George’s room without a word. He even put them back in exactly the same places from which he had taken them. Bill came in and saw his father kneeling by George’s bed (which his mother still changed, although only once a week now instead of twice) with his head on his hairy muscular forearms. Bill saw his father was crying, and this increased his terror. A frightening possibility suddenly occurred to him: maybe sometimes things didn’t just go wrong and then stop; maybe sometimes they just kept going wronger and wronger until everything was totally fucked up.
“D-Duh-Dad-”
“Go on, Bill,” his father said. His voice was muffled and shaking. His back went up and down. Bill badly wanted to touch his father’s back, to see if perhaps his hand might be able to still that restless heaving. He did not quite dare. “Go on, buzz off.”
He left and went creeping along the upstairs hall, hearing his mother doing her own crying down in the kitchen. The sound was shrill and helpless. Bill thought, Why are they crying so far apart? and then he shoved the thought away.
9
On the first night of summer vacation Bill went into Georgie’s room. His heart was beating heavily in his chest, and his legs felt stiff and awkward with tension. He came to George’s room often, but that didn’t mean he liked it in here. The room was so full of George’s presence that it felt haunted. He came in and couldn’t help thinking that the closet door might creak open at any moment and there would be Georgie among the shirts and pants still neatly hung in there, a Georgie dressed in a rainslicker covered with red splotches and streaks, a rainslicker with one dangling yellow arm. George’s eyes would be blank and terrible, the eyes of a zombie in a horror movie. When he came out of the closet his galoshes would make squishy sounds as he walked across the room toward where Bill sat on his bed, a frozen block of terror -
If the power had gone out some evening while he sat here on George’s bed, looking at the pictures on George’s wall or the models on top of George’s dresser, he felt sure a heart attack, probably fatal, would ensue in the next ten seconds or so. But he went anyway. Warring with his terror of George-the-ghost was a mute and grasping need-a hunger-to somehow get over George’s death and find a decent way to go on. Not to forget George but somehow to find a way to make him not so fucking gruesome. He understood that his parents were not succeeding very well with that, and if he was going to do it for himself, he would have to do it by himself.
Nor was it just for himself that he came; he came for Georgie as well. He had loved George, and for brothers they had gotten along pretty well. Oh, they had their pissy moments-Bill giving George a good old Indian rope-burn, George tattling on Bill when Bill snuck downstairs after lights-out and ate the rest of the lemon-cream frosting-but mostly they got along. Bad enough that George should be dead. For him to turn George into some kind of horror-monster… that was even worse.
He missed the little kid, that was the truth. Missed his voice, his laughter-missed the way George’s eyes sometimes tipped confidently up to his own, sure that Bill would have whatever answers were required. And one surpassingly odd thing: there were times when he felt he loved George best in his fear, because even in his fear-his uneasy feelings that a zombie-George might be lurking in the closet or under the bed-he could remember loving George better in here, and George loving him. In his effort to reconcile these two emotions-his love and his terror-Bill felt that he was closest to finding where final acceptance lay.
These were not things of which he could have spoken; to his mind the ideas were nothing but an incoherent jumble. But his warm and desiring heart understood, and that was all that mattered.
Sometimes he looked through George’s books, sometimes he sifted through George’s toys.
He hadn’t looked in George’s photograph album since last December.
Now, on the night after meeting Ben Hanscom, Bill opened the door of George’s closet (steeling himself as always to meet the sight of Georgie himself, standing in his bloody slicker amid the hanging clothes, expecting as always to see one pallid, fish-fingered hand come pistoning out of the dark to grip his arm) and took the album down from the top shelf.
MY PHOTOGRAPHS, the gold script on the front read. Below, Scotch-taped on (the tape was now slightly yellow and peeling), the carefully printed words GEORGE ELMER DENBROUGH, AGE 6. Bill took it back to the bed Georgie had slept in, his heart beating heavier than ever. He couldn’t tell what had made him get the photograph album down again. After what had happened in December…
A second look, that’s all. Just to convince yourself that it wasn’t real the first time. That the first time was just your head playing a trick on itself.
Well, it was an idea, anyway.
It might even be true. But Bill suspected it was just the album itself. It held a certain mad fascination for him. What he had seen, or what he thought he had seen -
He opened the album now. It was filled with pictures George had gotten his mother, father, aunts, and uncles to give him. George didn’t care if they were pictures of people and places he knew or not; it was the idea of photography itself which fascinated him. When he had been unsuccessful at pestering anyone into giving him new photos to mount he would sit cross-legged on his bed where Bill was sitting now and look at the old ones, turning the pages carefully, studying the black-and-white Kodaks. Here was their mother when she was young and impossibly gorgeous; here their father, no more than eighteen, one of a trio of smiling rifle-toting young men standing over the open-eyed corpse of a deer; Uncle Hoyt standing on some rocks and holding up a pickerel; Aunt Fortuna, at the Derry Agricultural Fair, kneeling proudly beside a basket of tomatoes she had raised; an old Buick automobile; a church; a house; a road that went from somewhere to somewhere. All these pictures, snapped by lost somebodies for lost reasons, locked up here in a dead boy’s album of photographs.
Here Bill saw himself at three, propped up in a hospital bed with a turban of bandages covering his hair. Bandages went down his cheeks and under his fractured jaw. He had been struck by a car in the parking lot of the A amp;P on Center Street. He remembered very little of his hospital stay, only that they had given him ice-cream milk shakes through a straw and his head had ached dreadfully for three days.
Here was the whole family on the lawn of the house, Bill standing by his mother and holding her hand, and George, only a baby, sleeping in Zack’s arms. And here -
It wasn’t the end of the book, but it was the last page that mattered, because the following ones were all blank. The final picture was George’s school picture, taken in October of last year, less than ten days before he died. In it George was wearing a crew-neck shirt. His fly-away hair was slicked down with water. He was grinning, revealing two empty slots in which new teeth would never grow-unless they keep on growing after you die, Bill thought, and shuddered.
He looked at the picture fixedly for some time and was about to close the book when what had happened in December happened again.
George’s eyes rolled in the picture. They turned up to meet Bill’s own. George’s artificial say-cheese smile turned into a horrid leer. His right eye drooped closed in a wink: See you soon, Bill. In my closet. Maybe tonight.
Bill threw the book across the room. He clapped his hands over his mouth.
The book struck the wall and fell to the floor, open. The pages turned, although there was no draft. The book opened itself to that awful picture again, the picture which said SCHOOL FRIENDS 1957-58 beneath it.
Blood began to flow from the picture.
Bill sat frozen, his tongue a swelling choking lump in his mouth, his skin crawling, his hair lifting. He wanted to scream but the tiny whimpering sounds crawling out of his throat seemed to be the best he could manage.
The blood flowed across the page and began to drip onto the floor.
Bill fled the room, slammjng the door behind him.
Chapter 6
ONE OF THE MISSING:
