and clawlike hand holding out a bunch of balloons: See the sights, have a balloon, feed the elephants, ride the Chute-the-Chutes! Ben, oh, Ben, how you'll float--
12
Ben awoke with a gasp, the dream of the mummy still on him, panicked by the close, vibrating dark all around him. He jerked, and the root stopped supporting him and poked him in the back again, as if in exasperation.
He saw light and scrambled for it. He crawled out into afternoon sunlight and the babble of the stream, and everything fell into place again. It was summer, not winter. The mummy had not carried him away to its desert crypt; Ben had simply hidden from the big kids in a sandy hole under a half-uprooted tree. He was in the Barrens. Henry and his buddies had gone to town in a small way on a couple of kids playing downstream because they hadn't been able to find Ben and go to town on him in a big way. Ta-ta, boys. It was a real baby dam, believe me. You're better off without it.
Ben looked glumly down at his ruined clothes. His mother was going to give him sixteen different flavors of holy old hell.
He had slept just long enough to stiffen up. He slid down the embankment and then began to walk along the stream, wincing at every step. He was a medley of aches and pains; it felt like Spike Jones was playing a fast tune on broken glass inside most of his muscles. There seemed to be dried or drying blood on every inch of exposed skin. The dam-building kids would be gone anyway, he consoled himself. He wasn't sure how long he'd slept, but even if it had only been half an hour, the encounter with Henry and his friends would have convinced Denbrough and his pal that some other place--like Timbuktu, maybe--would be better for their health.
Ben plugged grimly along, knowing if the big kids came back now he would not stand a chance of outrunning them. He hardly cared.
He rounded an elbow-bend in the stream and just stood there for a moment, looking. The dam-builders were still there. One of them was indeed Stuttering Bill Denbrough. He was kneeling beside the other boy, who was propped against the stream-bank in a sitting position. This other kid's head was thrown so far back that his adam's apple stood out like a triangular plug. There was dried blood around his nose, on his chin, and painted along his neck in a couple of streams. He had something white clasped loosely in one hand.
Stuttering Bill looked around sharply and saw Ben standing there. Ben saw with dismay that something was very wrong with the boy propped up on the bank; Denbrough was obviously scared to death. He thought miserably: Won't this day ever end?
"I wonder if yuh-yuh-you could help m-m-me," Bill Denbrough said. "H-His ah-ah-ah-asp-p-irator is eh-hempty. I think he m-might be--"
His face froze, turned red. He dug at the word, stuttering like a machine-gun. Spittle flew from his lips, and it took almost thirty seconds' worth of "d-d-d-d" before Ben realized Denbrough was trying to say the other kid might be dying.
CHAPTER 5
Bill Denbrough Beats the Devil (I)
1
Bill Denbrough thinks:I'm damned near space-travelling; I might as well be inside a bullet shot from a gun.
This thought, although perfectly true, is not one he finds especially comfortable. In fact, for the first hour following the Concorde's takeoff (or perhaps liftoff would be a better way to put it) from Heathrow, he has been coping with a mild case of claustrophobia. The airplane is narrow-unsettlingly so. The meal is just short of exquisite, but the flight attendants who serve it must twist and bend and squat to get the job done; they look like a troupe of gymnasts. Watching this strenuous service takes some of the pleasure out of the food for Bill, although his seatmate doesn't seem particularly bothered.
The seatmate is another drawback. He's fat and not particularly clean; it may be Ted Lapidus cologne on top of his skin, but beneath it Bill detects the unmistakable odors of dirt and sweat. He's not being very particular about his left elbow, either; every now and then it strikes Bill with a soft thud.
His eyes are drawn again and again to the digital readout at the front of the cabin. It shows how fast this British bullet is going. Now, as the Concorde reaches its cruising speed, it tops out at just over mach 2. Bill takes 'his pen from his shirt pocket and uses its tip to tap buttons on the computer watch Audra gave him last Christmas. If the machometer is right--and Bill has absolutely no reason to think it is not--then they are busting along at a speed of eighteen miles per minute. He is not sure this is anything he really wanted to know.
Outside his window, which is as small and thick as the window in one of the old Mercury space capsules, he can see a sky which is not blue but the twilight purple of dusk, although it is the middle of the day. At the point where the sea and the sky meet, he can see that the horizon-line is slightly bowed. I am sitting here, Bill thinks, a Bloody Mary in my hand and a dirty fat man's elbow poking into my bicep, observing the curvature of the earth.
He smiles a little, thinking that a man who can face something like that shouldn't be afraid of anything. But he is afraid, and not just of flying at eighteen miles a minute in this narrow fragile shell. He can almost feel Derry rushing at him. And that is exactly the right expression for it. Eighteen miles a minute or not, the sensation is of being perfectly still while Derry rushes at him like some big carnivore which has lain in wait for a long time and has finally broken from cover. Derry, ah, Derry! Shall we write an ode to Derry? The stink of its mills and its rivers? The dignified quiet of its tree-lined streets? The library? The Standpipe? Bassey Park? Derry Elementary School?
The Barrens?
Lights are going on in his head: big kliegs. It's like he's been sitting in a darkened theater for twenty-seven years, waiting for something to happen, and now it's finally begun. The set being revealed spot by spot and klieg by klieg is not, however, some harmless comedy like Arsenic and Old Lace; to Bill Denbrough it looks more like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
All those stories I wrote, he thinks with a stupid kind of amusement. All those novels. Derry is where they all came from; Derry was the wellspring. They came from what happened that summer, and from what happened to George the autumn before. All the interviewers that ever asked me THAT QUESTION ... I gave them the wrong answer.
The fat man's elbow digs into him again, and he spills some of his drink. Bill almost says something, then thinks better of it.
THAT QUESTION, of course, was "Where do you get your ideas?" It was a question Bill supposed all writers of fiction had to answer--or pretend to answer--at least twice a week, but a fellow like him, who made a living by writing of things which never were and never could be, had to answer it--or pretend to--much more often than that.
"All writers have a pipeline which goes down into the subconscious," he told them, neglecting to mention that he doubted more as each year passed if there even was such a thing as a subconscious. "But the man or woman who writes horror stories has a pipeline that goes further, maybe ... into the sub-subconscious, if you like."
Elegant answer, that, but one he had never really believed. Subconscious? Well, there was something down there all right, but Bill thought people had made much too big a deal out of a function which was probably the mental equivalent of your eyes watering when dust got in them or breaking wind an hour or so after a big dinner. The second metaphor was probably the better of the two, but you couldn't very well tell interviewers that as far as you were concerned, such things as dreams and vague longings and sensations like deja-vu really came down to nothing more than a bunch of mental farts. But they seemed to need something, all those reporters with their notebooks and their little Japanese tape-recorders, and Bill wanted to help them as much as he could. He knew that writing was a hard job, a damned hard job. There was no need to make theirs harder by telling them, "My friend, you might as well ask me 'Who cut the cheese?' and have done with it. "
He thought now: You always knew they were asking the wrong question, even before Mike called; now you also know what the right question was. Not where do you get your ideas but why do you get your ideas. There was a pipeline, all right, but it wasn't either the Freudian or Jungian version of the subconscious that it came out of; no interior drain-system of the mind, no subterranean cavern full of Morlocks waiting to happen. There was nothing at the other end of that pipe but Derry. Just Derry. And--
--and who's that, trip-trapping upon my bridge?
He sits bolt upright suddenly, and this time it's his elbow that goes wandering; it sinks deeply into his fat seatmate's side for a moment.
"Watch yourself, buddy," the fat man says. "Close quarters, you know."
"You stop whapping me with yours and I'll try to stop wuh-whapping you with m-mine." The fat man gives him a sour, incredulous what-the-hell-you-talking-about look. Bill simply gazes at him until the fat man looks away, muttering.
Who's there?
Who's trip-trapping over my bridge?
He looks out the window again and thinks: We're beating the devil.
His arms and the nape of his neck prickle. He knocks back the rest of his drink in one swallow. Another of those big lights has gone on.
Silver. His bike. That was what he had called it, after the Lone Ranger's horse. A big Schwinn, twenty-eight inches tall. "You'll kill yourself on that, Billy," his father had said, but with no real concern in his tone. He had shown little concern for anything since George's death. Before, he had been tough. Fair, but tough. Since, you could get around him. He would make fatherly gestures, go through fatherly motions, but motions and gestures were all they were. It was like he was always listening for George to come back into the house.
Bill had seen it in the window of the Bike and Cycle Shoppe down on Center Street. It leaned gloomily on its kickstand, bigger than the biggest of the others on display, dull where they were shiny, straight in places where the others were curved, bent in places where the others were straight. Propped on its front tire had been a sign: USED
Make an Offer
What actually happened was that Bill went in and the owner made him an offer, which Bill took--he wouldn't have known how to dicker with the Cycle Shoppe owner if his life depended on it, and the price--twenty-four dollars--the man quoted seemed very fair to Bill; generous, even. He paid for Silver with money he had saved up over the last seven or eight months--birthday money, Christmas money, lawn-mowing money. He had been noticing the bike in the window ever since Thanksgiving. He paid for it and wheeled it home as soon as the snow began to melt for good. It was funny, because he'd never thought much about owning a bike before last year. The idea seemed to come into his mind all at once, perhaps on one of those endless days after George died. Was murdered.
In the beginning, Bill almost did kill himself. The first ride on his new bike ended with Bill dumping it on purpose to keep from running smack into the board fence at the end of Kossuth Lane (he had not been so afraid of running into the fence as he had been of bashing right through it and falling sixty feet into the Barrens). He came away from that one with a five-inch gash running between the wrist and elbow of his left arm. Not even a week later he had found himself unable to brake soon enough and had shot through the intersection of Witcham and Jackson at perhaps thirty five miles an hour, a little kid on a dusty gray mastodon of a bike (Silver was silver only by the most energetic reach of a willing imagination), playing cards machine-gunning the spokes of the front and back wheels in a steady roar, and if a car had been coming he would have been dead meat. Just like Georgie.
He got control of Silver little by little as the spring advanced. Neither of his parents noticed during that time that he was courting death by bicycle. He thought that, after the first few days, they had ceased to really see his bike at all--to them it was just a relic with chipped paint which leaned against the garage wall oh rainy days.
Silver was a lot more than some dusty old relic, though. He didn't look like much, but he went like the wind. Bill's friend--his only real friend--was a kid named Eddie Kaspbrak, and Eddie was good with mechanical things. He had shown Bill how to get Silver in shape--which bolts to tighten and check regularly, where to oil the sprockets, how to tighten the chain, how to put on a bike patch so it would stay if you got a flat.
"You oughtta paint it," he remembered Eddie saying one day, but Bill didn't want to paint Silver. For reasons he couldn't even explain to himself he wanted the Schwinn just the way it was. It looked like a real bow-wow, the sort of bike a careless kid regularly left out on his lawn in the rain, a bike that would be all squeaks and shudders and slow friction. It looked like a bow-wow but it went like the wind. It would--
"It would beat the devil," he says aloud, and laughs. His fat seatmate looks at him sharply; the laugh has that howling quality that gave Audra the creeps earlier.
Yes, it looked pretty shoddy, with its old paint and the oldfashioned package carrier mounted above the back wheel and the ancient oogah-horn with its black rubber bulb--that horn was permanently welded to the handlebars with a rusty bolt the size of a baby's fist. Pretty shoddy.
But could Silver go? Could he? Christ!
And it was a damned good thing he could, because Silver had saved Bill Denbrough's life in the fourth week of June 1958--the week after he met Ben Hanscom for the first time, the week after he and Ben and Eddie built the dam, the week that Ben and Richie "Trashmouth" Tozier and Beverly Marsh showed up in the Barrens after the Saturday matinee. Richie had been riding behind him, on Silver's package carrier, the day Silver had saved Bill's life ... so he supposed Silver had saved Richie's, too. And he remembered the house they had been running from, all right. He remembered that just fine. That damned house on Neibolt Street.
He had raced to beat the devil that day, oh yeah, for sure, don't you just know it. Some devil with eyes as shiny as old deadly coins. Some hairy old devil with a mouthful of bloody teeth. But all that had come later. If Silver had saved Richie's life and his own that day, then perhaps he had saved Eddie Kaspbrak's on the day Bill and Eddie met Ben by the kicked-apart remains of their dam in the Barrens. Henry Bowers--who looked a little bit like someone had run him through a Disposall-had mashed Eddie's nose and then Eddie's asthma had come on strong and his aspirator turned up empty. So it had been Silver that day too, Silver to the rescue.
Bill Denbrough, who hasn't been on a bicycle in almost seventeen years, looks out the window of an airplane that would not have been credited--or even imagined, outside of a science-fiction magazine--in the year 1958. Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYY! he thinks, and has to close his eyes against the sudden needling sting of tears.
What happened to Silver? He can't remember. That part of the set is still dark; that klieg has yet to be turned on. Perhaps that is just as well. Perhaps that is a mercy.
Hi-yo.
Hi-yo Silver.
Hi-yo Silver
2
"AWAYYY!" he shouted. The wind tore the words back over his shoulder like a fluttering crepe streamer. They came out big and strong, those words, in a triumphant roar. They were the only ones that ever did.
He pedaled down Kansas Street toward town, gaining speed slowly at first. Silver rolled once he got going, but getting going was a job and a half. Watching the gray bike pick up speed was a little like watching a big plane roll down the runway. At first you couldn't believe such a huge waddling gadget could ever actually leave the earth--the idea was absurd. But then you could see its shadow beneath it, and before you even had time to wonder if it was a mirage, the shadow was trailing out long behind it and the plane was up, cutting its way through the air, as sleek and graceful as a dream in a satisfied mind.
Silver was like that.
Bill got a little downhill stretch and began to pedal faster, his legs pumping up and down as he stood forward over the bike's fork. He had learned very quickly--after being bashed a couple of times by that fork in the worst place a boy can be bashed--to yank his underpants up as high as he could before mounting Silver. Later that summer, observing this process, Richie would say, Bill does that because he thinks he might like to have some kids that live someday. It seems like a bad idea to me, but hey! they might always take after his wife, right?
He and Eddie had lowered the seat as far as it would go, and it now bumped and scraped against the small of his back as he worked the pedals. A woman digging weeds in her flower-garden shaded her eyes to watch him pass. She smiled a little. The boy on the huge bike reminded her of a monkey she had once seen riding a unicycle in the Barnum & Bailey Circus. He's apt to kill himself, though, she thought, turning back to her garden. That bike is too big for him. It was none of her problem, though.
3
Bill had had more sense than to argue with the big boys when they broke out of the bushes, looking like ill-tempered hunters on the track of a beast which had already mauled one of them. Eddie, however, had rashly opened his mouth and Henry Bowers had unloaded on him.
Bill knew who they were, all right; Henry, Belch, and Victor were just about the worst kids in Derry School. They had beaten up on Richie Tozier, who Bill sometimes chummed with, a couple of times. The way Bill looked at it, this was partly Richie's own fault; he was not known as Trashmouth for nothing.
One day in April Richie had said something about their collars as the three of them passed by in the schoolyard. The collars had all been turned up, just like Vic Morrow's in The Blackboard Jungle. Bill, who had been sitting against the building nearby and listlessly shooting a few marbles, hadn't really caught all of it. Neither did Henry and his friends... but they heard enough to turn in Richie's direction. Bill supposed Richie had meant to say whatever he said in a low voice. The trouble was, Richie didn't really have a low voice.
"What'd you say, you little four-eyes geek?" Victor Criss enquired.
"I didn't say nothing," Richie said, and that disclaimer--along with his face, which looked quite sensibly dismayed and scared--might have ended it. Except that Richie's mouth was like a half-tamed horse that has a way of bolting for absolutely no reason at all. Now it suddenly added: "You ought to dig the wax out of your ears, big fella. Want some