"They got a place," Henry was saying. "That's what Boogers told me. Some kind of a treehouse or something. They call it their club."
"I'll club em, if they want a club," Victor said. Belch uttered a thunderous heehawing of laughter at this.
Thump, thump, thump, overhead. The cap moved up and down a little more this time. Surely they would notice it; ordinary ground just didn't have that kind of give.
"Let's look down by the river," Henry said. "I bet she's down there."
"Okay," Victor said.
Thump, thump. They were moving off. Bev let a little sigh of relief trickle through her clamped teeth... and then Henry said: "You stay here and guard the path, Belch."
"Okay," Belch said, and he began to march back and forth, sometimes leaving the cap, sometimes coming back across it. More dirt sifted down. Ben and Beverly looked at each other with strained, dirty faces. Bev became aware that there was more than the smell of smoke in the clubhouse-a sweaty, garbag stink was rising as well. That's me, she thought dismally. In spite of the smell she hugged Ben even tighter. His bulk seemed suddenly very welcome, very comforting, and she was glad there was a lot of him to hug. He might have been nothing but a frightened fat-boy when school let out for the summer, but he was more than that now; like all of them, he had changed. If Belch discovered them down here, Ben just might give him a surprise.
"I'll club em if they want a club," Belch said, and chuckled. A Belch Huggins chuckle was a low, troll-like sound. "Club em if they want a club. That's good. That's pretty much okey-dokey."
She became aware that Ben's upper body was heaving up and down in short, sharp movements; he was pulling air into his lungs and letting it out in sharp little bursts. For one alarmed moment she thought he was starting to cry, and then she got a closer look at his face and realized he was struggling against laughter. His eyes, leaking tears, caught hers, rolled madly, and looked away. In the faint light which leaked in through the cracks around the closed trapdoor and the window, she could see his face was nearly purple with the strain of holding it in.
"Club em if they want an ole clubby-dubby," Belch said, and sat down heavily right in the center of the cap. This time the roof trembled more alarmingly, and Bev heard a low but ominous crrrack from one of the supports. The cap had been meant to support the chunks of camouflaging sod laid on top of it... but not the added one hundred and sixty pounds of Belch Huggins's weight.
If he doesn't get up he's going to land in our laps, Bev thought, and she began to catch Ben's hysteria. It was trying to boil out of her in rancid whoops and brays. In her mind's eye she suddenly saw herself pushing the window up enough on its hinges for her hand to creep out and administer a really good goose to Belch Huggins's backside as he sat there in the hazy afternoon sunshine, muttering and giggling. She buried her face against Ben's chest in a last-ditch effort to keep it inside.
"Shhh," Ben whispered. "For Christ's sake, Bev-"
Ctrrrackk. Louder this time.
"Will it hold?" she whispered back.
"It might, if he doesn't fart," Ben said, and a moment later Belch did cut one-a loud and fruity trumpet-blast that seemed to go on for at least three seconds. They held each other even tighter, muffling each other's frantic giggles. Beverly's head hurt so badly that she thought she might soon have a stroke.
Then, faintly, she heard Henry yelling Belch's name.
"What'?" Belch bellowed, getting up with a thump and a thud that sifted more dirt down on Ben and Beverly. "What, Henry?"
Henry yelled something back; Beverly could only make out the words bank and bushes.
"Okay!" Belch bawled, and his feet crossed the cap for the last time. There was a final cracking noise, this one much louder, and a splinter of wood landed in Bev's lap. She picked it up wonderingly.
"Five more minutes," Ben said in a low whisper. "That's all it would have taken."
"Did you hear him when he let go?" Beverly asked, beginning to giggle again.
"Sounded like World War III," Ben said, also beginning to laugh.
It was a relief to be able to let it out, and they laughed wildly, trying to do it in whispers.
Finally, unaware she was going to say it at all (and certainly not because it had any discernible bearing on this situation), Beverly said: Thank you for the poem, Ben."
Ben stopped laughing all at once and regarded her gravely, cautiously. He took a dirty handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face with it slowly. "Poem?"
The haiku. The haiku on the postcard. You sent it, didn't you?"
"No," Ben said. "I didn't send you any haiku. Cause if a kid like me-a fat kid like me-did something like that, the girl would probably laugh at him."
"I didn't laugh. I thought it was beautiful."
"I could never write anything beautiful. Bill, maybe. Not me."
"Bill will write," she agreed. "But he'll never write anything as nice as that. May I use your handkerchief?"
He gave it to her and she began to clean her face as best she could.
"How did you know it was me?" he asked finally.
"I don't know," she said. "I just did."
Ben's throat worked convulsively. He looked down at his hands. "I didn't mean anything by it."
She looked at him gravely. "You better not mean that," she said. "If you do, it's really going to spoil my day, and I'll tell you, it's going downhill already."
He continued to look down at his hands and spoke at last in a voice she could barely hear. "Well, I mean I love you, Beverly, but I don't want that to spoil anything."
"It won't," she said, and hugged him. "I need all the love I can get right now."
"But you specially like Bill."
"Maybe I do," she said, "but that doesn't matter. If we were grown-ups, maybe it would, a little. But I like you all specially. You're the only friends I have. I love you too, Ben."
"Thank you," he said. He paused, trying, and brought it out. He was even able to look at her as he said it. "I wrote the poem."
They sat without saying anything for a little while. Beverly felt safe. Protected. The images of her father's face and Henry's knife seemed less vivid and threatening when they sat close like this. That sense of protection was hard to define and she didn't try, although much later she would recognize the source of its strength: she was in the arms of a male who would die for her with no hesitation at all. It was a fact that she simply knew: it was in the scent that came from his pores, something utterly primitive that her own glands could respond to.
"The others were coming back," Ben said suddenly. "What if they get caught out?"
She straightened up, aware that she had almost been dozing. Bill, she remembered, had invited Mike Hanlon home to lunch with him. Richie was going to go home with Stan and have sandwiches. And Eddie had promised to bring back his Parcheesi board. They would be arriving soon, totally unaware that Henry and his friends were in the Barrens.
"We've got to get to them," Beverly said. "Henry's not just after me."
"If we come out and they come back-"
"Yes, but at least we know they're here. Bill and the other guys don't. Eddie can't even run, they already broke his arm."
"Jeezum-crow," Ben said. "I guess we'll have to chance it."
"Yeah." She swallowed and looked at her Timex. It was hard to read in the dimness, but she thought it was a little past one. "Ben..."
"What?"
"Henry's really gone crazy. He's like that kid in The Blackboard Jungle. He was going to kill me and the other two were going to help him."
"Aw, no," Ben said. "Henry's crazy, but not that crazy. He's just..."
"Just what?" Beverly said. She thought of Henry and Patrick in the automobile graveyard in the thick sunshine. Henry's blank eyes.
Ben didn't answer. He was thinking. Things had changed, hadn't they? When you were inside the changes, they were harder to see. You had to step back to see them... you had to try, anyway. When school let out he'd been afraid of Henry, but only because Henry was bigger, and because he was a bully-the kind of kid who would grab a firstgrader, Indian-rub his arm and send him away crying. That was about all. Then he had engraved Ben's belly. Then there had been the rockfight, and Henry had been chucking M-80s at people's heads. You could kill somebody with one of those things. You could kill somebody easy. He had started to look different... haunted, almost. It seemed that you always had to be on the watch for him, the way you'd always have to be on the watch for tigers or poisonous snakes if you were in the jungle. But you got used to it; so used to it that it didn't even seem unusual, just the way things were. But Henry was crazy, wasn't he? Yes. Ben had known that on the day school ended, and had willfully refused to believe it, or remember it. It wasn't the kind of thing you wanted to believe or remember. And suddenly a thought-a thought so strong it was almost a certainty-crept into his mind full-blown, as cold as October mud. It's using Henry. Maybe the others too, but It's using them through Henry. And if that's the truth, then she's probably right. It's not just Indian rubs or rabbit-punches in the back of the neck during study-time near the end of the schoolday while Mrs Douglas reads her book at her desk, not just a push on the playground so that you fall down and skin your knee. If It's using him, then Henry will use the knife.
"An old lady saw them trying to beat me up," Beverly was saying. "Henry went after her. He kicked her taillight out."
This alarmed Ben more than anything else. He understood instinctively, as most kids did, that they lived below the sight-lines, and hence the thought-lines, of most adults. When a grownup was ditty-bopping down the street, thinking his grownup thoughts about work and appointments and buying cars and whatever else grownups thought about, he never noticed kids playing hopscotch or guns or kick-the-can or ring-a-levio or hide-and-go-seek. Bullies like Henry could get away with hurting other kids quite a lot if they were careful to stay below that sightline. At the very most, a passing adult was apt to say something like, "Why don't you quit that?" and then just continue ditty-bopping along without waiting to see if the bully stopped or not. So the bully would wait until the grownup had turned the corner... and then go back to business as usual. It was like adults thought that real life only started when a person was five feet tall.
If Henry had gone after some old lady, he had gone above that sight-line. And that more than anything else suggested to Ben that he really was crazy.
Beverly saw the belief in Ben's face and felt relief sweep over her. She would not have to tell him about how Mr Ross had simply folded his paper and walked into his house. She didn't want to tell him about that. It was too scary.
"Let's go up to Kansas Street," Ben said, and abruptly pushed open the trapdoor. "Get ready to run."
He stood up in the opening and looked around. The clearing was silent. He could hear the chuckling voice of the Kenduskeag close by, birdsong, the thum-thud-thum-thud of a diesel engine snorting its way into the trainyards. He heard nothing else and that made him uneasy. He would have felt much better if he'd heard Henry, Victor, and Belch cursing their way through the neavy undergrowth down by the stream. But he couldn't hear them at all.
Come on," he said, and helped Beverly up. She also looked around uneasily, brushing her hair back with her hands and grimacing at its greasy feel.
He took her hand and they pushed through a screen of bushes toward Kansas Street. "We'd better stay off the path."
"No," she said, "we've got to hurry."
He nodded. "All right."
They got to the path and started toward Kansas Street. Once she stumbled over a rock in the path and
7
THE SEMINARY GROUNDS / 2:17 A.M.
fell heavily on the moon-silvered sidewalk. A grunt was forced out of him, and a runner of blood came with the grunt, splatting on the cracked concrete. In the moonlight it looked as black as beetle-blood. Henry looked at it for a long dazed moment, then raised his head to look around.
Kansas Street was early-morning silent, the houses shut up and dark except for a scatter of nightlights.
Ah. Here was a sewer-grate.
A balloon with a smiley-smile face was tied to one of its iron bars. It bobbed and dipped in the faint breeze.
Henry got to his feet again, one sticky hand pressed to his belly. The nigger had stuck him pretty good, but Henry had gone him one better. Yessir. As far as the nigger was concerned, Henry felt like he was pretty much okey-dokey.
"Kid's a gone goose," Henry muttered, and made his shaky staggering way past the floating balloon. Fresh blood glimmered on his hand as it continued to flow from his stomach. "Kid's all done. Greased the sucker. Gonna grease them all. Teach them to throw rocks."
The world was coming in slow-rolling waves, big combers like the ones they used to show at the beginning of every Hawaii Five-O episode on the ward TV
(book em Danno, ha-ha Jack Fuckin Lord okay. Jack Fuckin Lord was pretty much okey-dokey)
and Henry could Henry could Henry could almost
(hear the sound those Oahu big boys make as they rise curl and shake
(shakeshakeskake
(the reality of the world. "Pipeline." Chantays. Remember "Pipeline'? "Pipeline" was pretty much okey-dokey. "Wipe-Out." Crazy laugh there at the start. Sounded like Patrick Hockstetter. Fucking queerboy. Got greased himself and as far as I)
he was concerned that was a
(fuck of a lot better than okey-dokey, that was just FINE, that was JUST AS FINE AS PAINT
(okay Pipeline shoot the line don't back down not my boys catch a wave and
(shoot
(shootshootshoot
(a wave and go sidewalk surfin with me shoot
(the line shoot the world but keep)
an ear inside his head: it kept hearing that ka-spanggg sound; an eye inside his head: it kept seeing Victor's head rising on the end of that spring, eyelids and cheeks and forehead tattooed with rosettes of blood.
Henry looked blearily to his left and saw that the houses had been replaced with a tall, black stand of hedge. Looming above it was the narrow, gloomily Victorian pile of the Theological Seminary. Not a window shone light. The Seminary had graduated its last class in June of 1974. It had closed its doors that summer, and whatever walked there now walked alone... and only by permission of the chattering women's club that called itself the Derry Historical Society.