It

“Yeah,” the cabbie conceded. “But just barely. Suckers tried to tear that down, too.”

“For another bank?” Bill asked, a pan of him amused to find that another part of him stood aghast at the idea. He couldn’t believe that anyone in his right mind would want to tear down that stately pleasure dome with its glittering glass chandelier, its sweeping right-and-left staircases which spiraled up to the balcony, and its mammoth curtain, which did not simply pull apart when the show started but which instead rose in magical folds and tucks and gathers, all underlit in fabulous shades of red and blue and yellow and green while pullies off stage ratcheted and groaned. Not the Aladdin, that shocked part of him cried out. How could they ever even think of tearing down the Aladdin for a BANK?

“Oh, ayup, a bank,” the cabbie said. “You’re fucking-A, pardon my French if you’re a religious man. It was the First Merchants of Penobscot County had its eye on the “laddin. Wanted to pull it down and put up what they called a “complete banking mall.” Got all the papers from the City Council, and the Aladdin was condemned. Then a bunch of folks formed a committee-folks that had lived here a long time-and they petitioned, and they marched, and they hollered, and finally they had a public City Council meeting about it, and Hanlon blew those suckers out.” The cabbie sounded extremely satisfied.

“Hanlon?” Bill asked, startled. “Mike Hanlon?”

“Ayup,” the cabbie said. He twisted around briefly to look at Bill, revealing a round, chapped face and horn-rimmed glasses with old specks of white paint on the bows. “Librarian. Black fella. You know him?”

“I did,” Bill said, remembering how he had met Mike, back in July 1958. It had been Bowers and Huggins and Criss again… of course. Bowers and Huggins and Criss

(oh my)

at every turn, playing their own part, unwitting visegrips driving the seven of them together-tight, tighter, tightest. “We played together when we were kids. Before I moved away.”

“Well, there you go,” the cabbie said. “It’s a small fucking world, pardon my-”

“-French if you’re a religious man,” Bill finished with him.

“There you go,” the cabbie repeated comfortably, and they rode in silence for awhile before he said, “It’s changed a lot, Derry has, but yeah, a lot of it’s still here. The Town House, where I picked you up. The Standpipe in Memorial Park. You remember that place, mister? When we were kids, we used to think that place was haunted.”

“I remember it,” Bill said.

“Look, there’s the hospital. You recognize it?”

They were passing the Derry Home Hospital on the right now. Behind it, the Penobscot flowed toward its meeting-place with the Kenduskeag. Under the rainy spring sky, the river was dull pewter. The hospital that Bill remembered-a white woodframe building with two wings, three stories high-was still there, but now it was surrounded, dwarfed, by a whole complex of buildings, maybe a dozen in all. He could see a parking-lot off to the left, and what looked like better than five hundred cars parked there.

“My God, that’s not a hospital, that’s a fucking college campus!” Bill exclaimed.

The cab-driver cackled. “Not bein a religious man, I’ll pardon your French. Yeah, it’s almost as big as the Eastern Maine up in Bangor now. They got radiation labs and a therapy center and six hundred rooms and their own laundry and God knows what else. The old hospital’s still there, but it’s all administration now.”

Bill felt a queer doubling sensation in his mind, the sort of sensation he remembered getting the first time he watched a 3-D movie. Trying to bring together two images that didn’t quite jibe. You could fool your eyes and your brain into doing that trick, he remembered, but you were apt to end up with a whopper of a headache… and he could feel his own headache coming on now. New Derry, fine. But the old Derry was still here, like the wooden Home Hospital building. The old Derry was mostly buried under all the new construction… but your eye was somehow dragged helplessly back to look at it… to look for it.

“The trainyard’s probably gone, isn’t it?” Bill asked.

The cabbie laughed again, delighted. “For someone who moved away when he was just a kid, you got a good memory, mister.” Bill thought: You should have met me last week, my French- speaking friend. “It’s all still out there, but it’s nothing but ruins and rusty tracks now. The freights don’t even stop no more. Fella wanted to buy the land and put up a whole roadside entertainment thing _ pitch “n putt, batting cages, driving ranges, mini golf, go-karts, little shack fulla video games, I don’t know whatall-but there’s some kind of big mixup about who owns the land now. I guess he’ll get it eventually-he’s a persistent fella-but right now it’s in the courts.”

“And the Canal,” Bill murmured as they turned off Outer Center Street and onto Pasture Road-which, as Mike had said, was now marked with a green roadsign reading MALL ROAD. “The Canal’s still here.”

“Ayup,” the cabbie said. “That’ll always be here, I guess.”

Now the Derry Mall was on Bill’s left, and as they rolled past it, he felt that queer doubling sensation again. When they had been kids all of this had been a great long field full of rank grasses and gigantic nodding sunflowers which marked the northeastern end of the Barrens. Behind it, to the west, was the Old Cape low-income housing development. He could remember them exploring this field, being careful not to fall into the gaping cellarhold of the Kitchener Ironworks, which had exploded on Easter Sunday in the year 1906. The field had been full of relics and they had unearthed them with all the solemn interest of archaeologists exploring Egyptian ruins: bricks, dippers, chunks of iron with rusty bolts hanging from them, panes of glass, bottles full of unnamable gunk that smelled like the worst poison in the world. Something bad had happened near here, too, in the gravel-pit close to the dump, but he could not remember it yet. He could only remember a name, Patrick Humboldt, and that it had something to do with a refrigerator. And something about a bird that had chased Mike Hanlon. What…?

He shook his head. Fragments. Straws in the wind. That was all.

The field was gone now, as were the remains of the Ironworks. Bill remembered the great chimney of the Ironworks suddenly. Faced with tile, caked black with soot for the final ten feet of its length, it had lain in the high grass like a gigantic pipe. They had scrambled up somehow and had walked along it, arms held out like tightwire walkers, laughing-He shook his head, as if to dismiss the mirage of the mall, an ugly collection of buildings with signs that said SEARS and J. C. PENNEY and WOOLWORTH “s and CVS and YORK’s STEAK HOUSE and WALDENBOOKS and dozens of others. Roads wove in and out of parking lots. The mall did not go away, because it was no mirage. The Kitchener Ironworks was gone, and the field that had grown up around its rums was likewise gone. The mall was the reality, not the memories.

But somehow he didn’t believe that.

“Here you go, mister,” the cabbie said. He pulled into the parking-lot of a building that looked like a large plastic pagoda. “A little late, but better late than never, am I right?”

“Indeed you are,” Bill said. He gave the cab-driver a five. “Keep the change.”

“Good fucking deal!” the cabbie exclaimed. “You need someone to drive you, call Big Yellow and ask for Dave. Ask for me by name.”

“I’ll just ask for the religious fella,” Bill said, grinning. “The one who’s got his plot all picked out in Mount Hope.”

“You got it,” Dave said, laughing. “Have a good one, mister.”

“You too, Dave.”

He stood in the light rain for a moment, watching the cab draw away. He realized that he had meant to ask the driver one more question, and had forgotten-perhaps on purpose.

He had meant to ask Dave if he liked living in Derry.

Abruptly, Bill Denbrough turned and walked into the Jade of the Orient. Mike Hanlon was in the lobby, sitting in a wicker chair with a huge flaring back. He got to his feet, and Bill felt deep unreality wash over him-through him. That sensation of doubling was back, but now it was much, much worse.

He remembered a boy who had been about five feet three, trim, and agile. Before him was a man who stood about five-seven. He was skinny. His clothes seemed to hang on him. And the lines in his face said that he was on the darker side of forty instead of only thirty-eight or so.

Bill’s shock must have shown on his face, because Mike said quietly: “I know how I look.”

Bill flushed and said, “It’s not that bad, Mike, it’s just that I remember you as a kid. That’s all it is.”

“Is it?”

“You look a little tired.”

“I am a little tired,” Mike said, “but I’ll make it. I guess.” He smiled then, and the smile lit his face. In it Bill saw the boy he had known twenty-seven years ago. As the old woodframe Home Hospital had been overwhelmed with modern glass and cinderblock, so had the boy that Bill had known been overwhelmed with the inevitable accessories of adulthood. There were wrinkles on his forehead, lines had grooved themselves from the comers of his mouth nearly to his chin, and his hair was graying on both sides above the ears. But as the old hospital, although overwhelmed, was still there, still visible, so was the boy Bill had known.

Mike stuck out his hand and said, “Welcome back to Derry, Big Bill.”

Bill ignored the hand and embraced Mike. Mike hugged him back fiercely, and Bill could feel his hair, stiff and kinky, against his own shoulder and the side of his neck.

“Whatever’s wrong, Mike, we’ll take care of it,” Bill said. He heard the rough sound of tears in his throat and didn’t care. “We beat it once, and we can b-beat it a-a-again.”

Mike pulled away from him, held him at arm’s length; although he was still smiling, there was too much sparkle in his eyes. He took out his handkerchief and wiped them. “sure, Bill,” he said. “You bet.”

“Would you gentlemen like to follow me?” the hostess asked. She was a smiling Oriental woman in a delicate pink kimono upon which a dragon cavorted and curled its plated tail. Her dark hair was piled high on her head and held with ivory combs.

“I know the way, Rose,” Mike said.

“Very good, Mr Hanlon.” She smiled at both of them. “You are well met in friendship, I think.”

“I think we are,” Mike said. “This way, Bill.”

He led him down a dim corridor, past the main dining room and toward a door where a beaded curtain hung.

“The others-?” Bill began.

“All here now,” Mike said. “All that could come.”

Bill hesitated for a moment outside the door, suddenly frightened. It was not the unknown that scared him, not the supernatural; it was the simple knowledge that he was fifteen inches taller than he had been in 1958 and minus most of his hair. He was suddenly uneasy-almost terrified-at the thought of seeing them all again, their children’s faces almost worn away, almost buried under change as the old hospital had been buried. Banks erected inside their heads where once magic picture-palaces had stood.

We grew up, he thought. We didn’t think it would happen, not then, not to us. But it did, and if I go in there it will be real: we’re all grownups now.

He looked at Mike, suddenly bewildered and timid. “How do they look?” he heard himself asking in a faltering voice. “Mike… how do they look?”

“Come in and find out,” Mike said, kindly enough, and led Bill into the small private room.

2 BILL DENBROUGH GETS A LOOK

Perhaps it was simply the dimness of the room that caused the illusion, which lasted for only the briefest moment, but Bill wondered later if it wasn’t some sort of message meant strictly for him: that fate could also be kind.