o something in the water .. a natural trank of some kind. The exact opposite holds true here. Derry is a violent place to live in an ordinary year. But every twenty-seven years--although the cycle has never been perfectly exact--that violence has escalated to a furious peak ... and it has never been national news."
"You're saying there's a cancer at work here," Beverly said.
"Not at all. An untreated cancer invariably kills. Derry hasn't died; on the contrary, it has thrived ... in an unspectacular, unnewsworthy way, of course. It is simply a fairly prosperous small city in a relatively unpopulous state where bad things happen too often ... and where ferocious things happen every quarter of a century or so."
"That holds true all down the line?" Ben asked.
Mike nodded. "All down the line. 1715-16, 1740 until roughly 1743--that must have been a bad one--1769-70, and on and on. Right up to the present time. I have a feeling that it's been getting steadily worse, maybe because there have been more people in Derry at the end of each cycle, maybe for some other reason. And in 1958, the cycle appears to have come to a premature end. For which we were responsible."
Bill Denbrough leaned forward, his eyes suddenly bright. "You're sure of that? Sure?"
"Yes," Mike said. "All the other cycles reached their peak around September and then ended in a big way. Life usually took on its more or less normal tenor by Christmas
... Easter at the latest. In other words, there were bad 'years' of fourteen to twenty months every twenty-seven years. But the bad year that began when your brother was killed in October of 1957 ended quite abruptly in August of 1958."
"Why?" Eddie asked urgently. His breath had thinned; Bill remembered that high whistle as Eddie inhaled breath, and knew that he would soon be tooting on the old lung-sucker. "What did we do?"
The question hung there. Mike seemed to regard it ... and at last he shook his head. "You'll remember," he said. "In time you'll remember."
"What if we don't?" Ben asked.
"Then God help us all."
"Nine children dead this year," Rich said. "Christ."
"Lisa Albrecht and Steven Johnson in late 1984," Mike said. "In February a boy named Dennis Torrio disappeared. A high-school boy. His body was found in mid-March, in the Barrens. Mutilated. This was nearby."
He took a photograph from the same pocket into which he had replaced the notebook. It made its way around the table. Beverly and Eddie looked at it, puzzled, but Richie Tozier reacted violently. He dropped it as if it were hot. "Jesus! Jesus, Mike!" He looked up, his eyes wide and shocked. A moment later he passed the picture to Bill.
Bill looked at it and felt the world swim into gray tones all around him. For a moment he was sure he would pass out. He heard a groan, and knew he had made the sound. He dropped the picture.
"What is it?" he heard Beverly saying. "What does it mean, Bill?"
"It's my brother's school picture," Bill said at last. "It's Juh-Georgie. The picture from his album. The one that moved. The one that winked."
They handed it around again then, while Bill sat as still as stone at the head of the table, looking out into space. It was a photograph of a photograph. The picture showed a tattered school photo propped up against a white background--smiling lips parted to exhibit two holes where new teeth had never grown (unless they grow in your coffin, Bill thought, and shuddered). On the margin below George's picture were the words SCHOOL FRIENDS 1957-58.
"It was found this year?" Beverly asked again. Mike nodded and she turned to Bill. "When did you last see it, Bill?"
He wet his lips, tried to speak. Nothing came out. He tried again, hearing the words echo in his head, aware of the stutter coming back, fighting it, fighting the terror.
"I haven't seen that picture since 1958. That spring, the year after George died. When I tried to show it to Richie, it was g-gone."
There was an explosive gasping sound that made them all look around. Eddie was setting his aspirator back on the table and looking slightly embarrassed.
"Eddie Kaspbrak blasts off!" Richie cried cheerfully, and then, suddenly and eerily, the Voice of the MovieTone Newsreel Narrator came from Rich's mouth: "Today in Derry, a whole city turns out for Asthmatics on Parade, and the star of the show is Big Ed the Snothead, known all over New England as--"
He stopped abruptly, and one hand moved toward his face, as if to cover his eyes, and Bill suddenly thought: No-no, that's not it. Not to cover his eyes but to push his glasses up on his nose. The glasses that aren't even there anymore. Oh dear Christ, what's going on here?
"Eddie, I'm sorry," Rich said. "That was cruel. I don't know what the hell I was thinking about." He looked around at the others, bewildered.
Mike Hanlon spoke into the silence.
"I'd promised myself after Steven Johnson's body was discovered that if anything else happened--if there was one more clear case--I would make the calls that I ended up not making for another two months. It was as if I was hypnotized by what was happening, by the consciousness of it--the deliberateness of it. George's picture was found by a fallen log less than ten feet from the Torrio boy's body. It wasn't hidden; quite the contrary. It was as if the killer wanted it to be found. As I'm sure the killer did."
"How did you get the police photo, Mike?" Ben asked. "That's what it is, isn't it?"
"Yes, that's what it is. There's a fellow in the Police Department who isn't averse to making a little extra money. I pay him twenty bucks a month--all that I can afford. He's a pipeline.
"The body of Dawn Roy was found four days after the Torrio boy. McCarron Park. Thirteen years old. Decapitated.
"April 23rd of this year. Adam Terrault. Sixteen. Reported missing when he didn't come home from band practice. Found the next day just off the path that runs through the greenbelt behind West Broadway. Also decapitated.
"May 6th. Frederick Cowan. Two and a half. Found in an upstairs bathroom, drowned in the toilet."
"Oh, Mike!" Beverly cried.
"Yeah, it's bad," he said, almost angrily. "Don't you think I know that?"
"The police are convinced that it couldn't have been--well, some kind of accident?" Bev asked.
Mike shook his head. "His mother was hanging clothes in the back yard. She heard sounds of a struggle--heard her son screaming. She ran as fast as she could. As she went up the stairs, she says she heard the sound of the toilet flushing repeatedly--that, and someone laughing. She said it didn't sound human."
"And she saw nothing at all?" Eddie asked.
"Her son," Mike said simply. "His back had been broken, his skull fractured. The glass door of the shower-stall was broken. There was blood everywhere. The mother is in the Bangor Mental Health Institute, now. My ... my Police Department source says she's quite lost her mind."
"No fucking wonder," Richie said hoarsely. "Who's got a cigarette?"
Beverly gave him one. Rich lit it with hands that shook badly.
"The police line is that the killer came in through the front door while the Cowan boy's mother was hanging her clothes in the back yard. Then, when she ran up the back stairs, he supposedly jumped from the bathroom window into the yard she'd just left and got away clean. But the window is only one of those half-sized jobs; a kid of seven would have to wriggle to get through it. And the drop was twenty-five feet to a stone-flagged patio. Rademacher doesn't like to talk about those things, and no one in the press--certainly no one at the News-has pressed him about them."
Mike took a drink of water and then passed another picture down the line. This was not a police photograph; it was another school picture. It showed a grinning boy who was maybe thirteen. He was dressed in his best for the school photo and his hands were clean and folded neatly in his lap... but there was a devilish little glint in his eyes. He was black.
"Jeffrey Holly," Mike said. "May 13th. A week after the Cowan boy was killed. Torn open. He was found in Bassey Park, by the Canal.
"Nine days after that, May 22nd, a fifthgrader named John Feury was found dead out on Neibolt Street--"
Eddie uttered a high, quavering scream. He groped for his aspirator and knocked it off the table. It rolled down to Bill, who picked it up. Eddie's face had gone a sickish yellow color. His breath whistled coldly in his throat.
"Get him something to drink!" Ben roared. "Somebody get him--"
But Eddie was shaking his head. He triggered the aspirator down his throat. His chest heaved as he tore in a gulp of air. He triggered the aspirator again and then sat back, eyes half-closed, panting.
"I'll be all right," he gasped. "Gimme a minute, I'm with you."
"Eddie, are you sure?" Beverly asked. "Maybe you ought to lie down--"
"I'll be all right," he repeated querulously. "It was just ... the shock. You know. The shock. I'd forgotten all about Neibolt Street."
No one replied; no one had to. Bill thought: You believe your capacity has been reached, and then Mike produces another name, and yet another, like a black magician with a hatful of malign tricks, and you're knocked on your ass again.
It was too much to face all at once, this outpouring of inexplicable violence, somehow directly aimed at the six people here--or so George's photograph seemed to suggest.
"Both of John Feury's legs were gone," Mike continued softly, "but the medical examiner says that happened after he died. His heart gave out. He seems to have quite literally died of fear. He was found by the postman, who saw a hand sticking out from under the porch--"
"It was 29, wasn't it?" Rich said, and Bill looked at him quickly. Rich glanced back at him, nodded slightly, and then looked at Mike again. "Twenty-nine Neibolt Street."
"Oh yes," Mike said in that same calm voice. "It was number 29." He drank more water. "Are you really all right, Eddie?"
Eddie nodded. His breathing had eased.
"Rademacher made an arrest the day after Feury's body was discovered," Mike said. "There was a front-page editorial in the News that same day, calling for his resignation, incidentally."
"After eight murders?" Ben said. "Pretty radical of them, wouldn't you say?"
Beverly wanted to know who had been arrested.
"A guy who lives in a little shack way out on Route 7, almost over the town line and into Newport," Mike said. "Kind of a hermit. Burns scrapwood in his stove, roofed the place with scavenged shingles and hubcaps. Name of Harold Earl. Probably doesn't see two hundred dollars in cash money over the course of a year. Someone driving by saw him standing out in his dooryard, just looking up at the sky, on the day John Feury's body was discovered. His clothes were covered with blood."
"Then maybe--" Rich began hopefully.
"He had three butchered deer in his shed," Mike said. "He'd been jacking over in Haven. The blood on his clothes was deer-blood. Rademacher asked him if he killed John Feury, and Earl is supposed to have said, 'Oh ayuh, I killed a lot of people. I shot most of them in the war.' He also said he'd seen things in the woods at night. Blue lights sometimes, floating just a few inches off the ground. Corpse-lights, he called them. And Bigfoot.
"They sent him up to the Bangor Mental Health. According to the medical report, his liver's almost entirely gone. He's been drinking paint-thinner--"
"Oh my God," Beverly said.
"--and is prone to hallucinations. They've been holding on to him, and until three days ago Rademacher was sticking to his idea that Earl was the most likely suspect. He had eight guys out there, digging around his shack and looking for the missing heads, lampshades made out of human skin, God knows what."
Mike paused, head lowered, and then went on. His voice was slightly hoarse now. "I'd held off and held off. But when I saw this last one, I made the calls. I wish to God I'd made them sooner."
"Let's see," Ben said abruptly.
"The victim was another fifthgrader," Mike said. "A class-mate of the Feury boy. He was found just off Kansas Street, near where Bill used to hide his bike when we were in the Barrens. His name was Jerry Bellwood. He was torn apart. What ... what was left of him was found at the foot of a cement retaining wall that was put in along most of Kansas Street about twenty years ago to stop the soil erosion. This police photograph of the section of that wall where Bellwood was found was taken less than half an hour after the body was removed. Here."
He passed the picture to Rich Tozier, who looked and passed it on to Beverly. She glanced at it briefly, winced, and passed it on to Eddie, who gazed at it long and raptly before handing it on to Ben. Ben passed it to Bill with barely a glance.
Printing straggled its way across the concrete retaining wall. It said:
Bill looked up at Mike grimly. He had been bewildered and frightened; now he felt the first stirrings of anger. He was glad. Angry was not such a great way to feel, but it was better than the shock, better than the miserable fear. "Is that written in what I think it's written in?"
"Yes," Mike said. "Jerry Bellwood's blood."
5
Richie Gets Beeped
Mike had taken his photographs back. He had an idea that Bill might ask for the one of George's last school picture, but Bill did not. He put them in his inside jacket pocket, and when they were out of sight, all of them--Mike inctuded--felt a sense of relief.
"Nine children," Beverly was saying softly. "I can't believe it. I mean ... I can believe it, but I can't believe it. Nine kids and nothing? Nothing at all?"
"It's not quite like that," Mike said. "People are angry, people are scared ... or so it seems. It's really impossible to tell which ones really feel that way and which ones are faking."
"Faking?"
"Beverly, do you remember, when we were kids, the man who just folded his newspaper and went inside his house while you were screaming at him for help?"
For a moment something seemed to jump in her eyes and she looked both terrified and aware. Then she only looked puzzled. "No ... when was that, Mike?"
"Never mind. It will come to you in time. All I can say now is that everything looks the way it should in Derry. Faced with such a grisly string of murders, people are doing all the things you'd expect them to do, and most of them are the same things that went on while kids were disappearing and getting murdered back in '58. The Save Our Children Committee is meeting again, only this time at Derry Elementary School instead of Derry High. There are sixteen detectives from the State Attorney General's office in town, and a contingent of FBI agents as well--I don't know how many, and although Rademacher talks big, I don't think he does, either. The curfew's back in effect--"
"Oh yes. The curfew." Ben was rubbing the side of his neck slowly and deliberately. "That did wonders back in '58. I remember that much."
"--and there are Mothers' Walker Groups to make sure that every child who goes to school, grades K through eight, is chaperoned home. The News has gotten over two thousand letters demanding a solution in the last three weeks alone. And, of course, the out-migration has begun again. I sometimes think that's the only way to really tell who's sincere about wanting it stopped and who isn't. The really sincere ones get scared and leave."
"People really are leaving?" Richie asked.
"It happens each time the cycle cranks up again. It's impossible to tell just how many go, because the cycle hasn't fallen squarely in a census year since 1850 or so. But it's a fairish number. They run like kids who just found out the house was haunted for real after all."
"Come home, come home, come home," Beverly said softly. When she looked up from her hands it was Bill she looked at, not Mike. "It wanted us to come back. Why?"
"It may want us all back," Mike said a little cryptically. "Sure. It may. It may want revenge. After all, we balked It once before."
"Revenge ... or just to set things back in order," Bill said.
Mike nodded. "Things are out of order with your own lives, too, you know. None of you left Derry untouched ... without Its mark on you. All of you forgot what happened here, and your memories of that summer are still only fragmentary. And then there's the passingly curious fact that you're all rich."
"Oh, come on now!" Richie said. "That's hardly--"
"Be soft, be soft," Mike said, holding his hand up and smiling faintly. "I'm not accusing you of anything, just trying to get the facts out on the table. You are rich by the standards of a small-town librarian who makes just under eleven grand a year after taxes, okay?"
Rich shrugged the shoulders of his expensive suit uncomfortably. Ben appeared deeply absorbed in tearing small strips from the edge of his napkin. No one was looking directly at Mike except Bill.
"None of you are in the H. L. Hunt class, certainly," Mike said, "but you are all well-to-do even by the standards of the American upper-middle class. We're all friends here, so fess up: if there's one of you who declared less than ninety thousand dollars on his or her 1984 tax return, raise your hand."
They glanced around at each other almost furtively, embarrassed, as Americans always seem to be, by the raw fact of their own success--as if cash were hardcooked eggs and affluence the farts that inevitably follow an overdose of same. Bill felt hot blood in his cheeks and was helpless to stop its rise. He had been paid ten thousand more than the sum Mike had mentioned just for doing the first draft of the Attic Room screenplay. He had been promised an additional twenty thousand dollars each for two rewrites, if needed. Then there were royalties ... and the hefty advance on a two-book contract just signed .. how much had he declared on his '84 tax return? Just about eight hundred thousand dollars, right? Enough, anyway, to seem almost monstrous in light of Mike Hanlon's stated income of just under eleven thousand a year.
So that's how much they pay you to keep the lighthouse, Mike old kid, Bill thought. Jesus Christ, somewhere along the line you should have asked for a raise!
Mike said: "Bill Denbrough, a successful novelist in a society where there are only a few novelists and fewer still lucky enough to be making a living from the craft. Beverly Rogan, who's in the rag trade, a field to which more are called but even fewer chosen. She is, in fact, the most sought-after designer in the middle third of the country right now. "
"Oh, it's not me, Beverly said. She uttered a nervous little laugh and lit a fresh cigarette from the smoldering stub of the old one. "It's Tom. Tom's the one. Without him I'd still be relining skirt