Characters in It

“What was that, Daddy?” “We found out that we had a pretty decent jazz-band among us,” he said slowly. “Martin Devereaux, who was a corporal, played drums. Ace Stevenson played cornet. Pop Snopes played a pretty decent barrelhouse piano. He wasn’t great, but he wasn’t no slouch either.

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.

It was illegal for the guards (who were called “counsellors” here at Juniper Hill) to carry billyclubs, so a number of them—Fogarty, Adler, and Koontz were the worst—carried rolls of quarters in their pockets.

… grinning man standing beside the bullet-riddled corpse of Al Bradley in the morgue, and if that man is not Chief Sullivan, it is surely his twin brother. It was from Mr. Keene that I finally got what I believe to be the true version of the story—Norbert Keene, who was …

As he walked past, never slowing, she burst into miserable tears. “I can’t drive Al Pacino!” she bawled. “I’ll smash into a stop-sign or something, I know I will! Eddie I’m scaaarrred!” He looked at the Seth Thomas clock on the table by the stairs. Twenty past nine.

Henry Whitsun . . . Stork Anson . . . Alan Snopes . . . Everett McCaslin . . . Horton Sartoris . . . all my friends, all dead in that fire. And that fire wasn’t set by old Sarge Wilson and his grits-and-cornpone friends.

And if I had to name a day when all of this really started again for me, it would be the day in the early spring of 1980 when I went to see Albert Carson, who died last summer—at ninety-one, he was full of years as well as honors.

Alfie Naugler, who had a farm out on the Naugler Road in Derry (it is gone now; where Alfie Naugler once grew his peas and beans and beets, the Interstate extension now runs its 8.8-mile, six-lane course), begged to disagree.

Harold Gardener shouted at Alfred Zitner, who ran Zitner’s Realty on the west side of town, asked him if the streets were going to collapse. Zitner said hell would freeze over before something like that happened.

“Marsh?” Her forehead wrinkled delicately. “Yes, you see—” “There’s no Marsh here,” the old woman said. “But—” “Unless . . . you don’t mean Alvin Marsh, do you?” “Yes!” Beverly said. “My father!” The old woman’s hand rose to the cameo and touched it.

For all history tells, he might have spent the rest of his life living in pleasant ease in Portsmouth, but somehow I doubt it. Two of the other “ringleaders,” Amsel Bickford and Davey Hartwell himself, were found floating face-down in the Kenduskeag.

She was from Derry but did not attend school; three years before she had given birth to a daughter, Andrea. She and her daughter lived at home with Cheryl’s parents. “Cheryl was a little wild sometimes but she was a good girl at heart,” her sobbing father had told police.

They did not, of course, believe their Stanley was destined for a life of squalor and poverty, but they thought “the kids were being hasty.” Donald Uris and Andrea Bertoly had themselves married in their early twenties, but they seemed to have forgotten the fact.

It wasn’t downtown falling into the earth—not then—it was the Standpipe. Only Andrew Keene, Norbert Keene’s grandson, actually saw it happen, and he had smoked so much Colombian Red that morning that at first he thought it had to be a hallucination.

… and in the Chief of Police’s office on the fifth floor, Chief Andrew Rademacher and Assistant District Attorney Tom Boutillier were questioning fifteen-year-old Christopher Unwin. Unwin, who wore faded jeans, a grease-smeared tee-shirt, and blocky engineer boots, was weeping. Rademacher and Boutillier had taken him because they had quite accurately …

There was a horrible series of animal mutilations that same year that was finally traced to Andrew Rhulin, the grand-uncle of the man who now runs the Rhulin Farms. He was apparently bludgeoned to death by the three deputies who were supposed to bring him in.

I saw Jake Pinnette cross over and he had a rifle in each hand. He met Andy Criss, and they walked over to one of the benches that used to stand where the War Memorial was—you know, where the Canal goes underground.

Four checked in; none checked out. One of them, Andy DeLesseps, was never seen again. For all history tells, he might have spent the rest of his life living in pleasant ease in Portsmouth, but somehow I doubt it.

In a moment she would begin to scream, and Anita MacKenzie next door would hear her, and it would be Anita MacKenzie who would call the police, convinced that someone had broken into the Uris house and that people were being killed over there.

A woman named Anne Stuart was killed when an ancient gear-wheel catapulted from her toilet along with a gout of sewage. The gear-wheel went through the frosted glass of the shower door and passed through her throat like a terrible bullet as she washed her hair. She was nearly decapitated.

The bar was as empty as a Monday-night bar far outside of football season can get. There were fewer than twenty paying customers in the place. Annie was sitting by the door into the kitchen, playing cribbage with the short-order cook. “Bad news, Mr. Hanscom?” “Bad news, that’s right.

The ages of his victims ranged from three to eighty-one. Not very particular was Frank D’Cruz. Beyond him but way back was Arlen Weston, who spent as much time looking dreamily at his hoe as he did using it.

After this most recent horror, Arlene Hanscom had taken Ben into the living room one evening and sat beside him on the couch. She picked up his hands and looked intently into his face. Ben looked back, feeling a little uneasy. “Ben,” she said presently, “are you a fool?”

They were burning the northern end today, but here, at their end, the dumpkeeper (he was, in fact, Armando Fazio, Mandy to his friends, and the bachelor brother of the Derry Elementary School janitor) was tinkering on the World War II D-9 ’dozer he used to push the crap into …

There were eight of em—Al Bradley, George Bradley, Joe Conklin and his brother Cal, an Irishman named Arthur Malloy who was called ‘Creeping Jesus’ Malloy because he was nearsighted but wouldn’t put on his specs unless he absolutely had to, and Patrick Caudy, a young fellow from Chicago who was …

Carl Snow . . . Aubrey Stacey . . . Eben Stampnell . . . and that old geezer who paints those funny pictures and drinks all night at Wally’s—Pickman, I think his name is—they’d remember.

The film version of The Black Rapids is called Pit of the Black Demon, and Audra Phillips is cast as the lead. The title is horrible, but the movie turns out to be quite good. And the only part of him he loses in Hollywood is his heart.

… 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 …

Her sister, my aunt Jean, was a miserly bitch who had to keep telling you what your place in the great scheme of things was, how lucky we were that my mom had a sister who could give us charity, how lucky we were not to be on welfare, all …

Aunt Margaret was feuding with the power company again. Stella Flanagan had gotten married again, some people never learned. Richie Huber had been fired again.

Certainly none of Patrick’s teachers (or his parents, for that matter) suspected that, when he was five, Patrick had murdered his baby brother Avery. Patrick had not liked it when his mother brought Avery home from the hospital.

“Quite sure,” he said—and then hesitated. “You wouldn’t by any chance know what happened to Mrs. Starrett, would you? Barbara Starrett? She used to be the head of the Children’s Library.” “She died,” Carole Danner said. “Three years ago. It was a stroke, I understand. It was a great shame.

“In a little while,” Officer Charles Avarino told him. Both Avarino and his partner, Barney Morrison, knew that Steve Dubay would not be going home tonight and maybe not for many nights to come.

In the row beyond Jimmy, hoeing fanatically and singing the same line over and over, as always, was the little Frenchman Benny Beaulieu. Benny had been a firebug—a pyromaniac.

… in the cases of George Denbrough, Adrian Mellon, Betty Ripsom, the Albrecht girl, the Johnson boy. A feeding place for animals. Yes, that’s the one that haunts me. If anything else happens—anything at all—I’ll make the calls. I’ll have to. In the meantime I have my suppositions, my broken rest, …

It came off a compact mirror. The Hauser woman was powdering her nose. “That was when Lal Machen and his helper, Biff Marlow, came running out of Machen’s store. ‘Put em up, Bradley, you’re surrounded!’ Lal shouts, and before Bradley could do more than turn his head, Lal started blasting.

They go into the vestibule, moving closer together, and Bill would have bet the royalties of the book the boy named Billy is holding under his arm that he has stolen a kiss before opening the outer door for the girl.

Do you know what I mean?” “Yes, Daddy,” Mike said, thinking of Bob Gautier at school, who had tried to explain to Mike that nigger could not be a bad word, because his father used it all the time. In fact, Bob told Mike earnestly, it was a good word.

“The next day I brought my rifle into the store with me and Bob Tanner, who worked harder than any assistant I ever had after him, brought in his pop’s shotgun.

The Luces, who lived three houses down from the Hockstetters, missed their cat, Bobby, a week later. The Luce kids, who couldn’t remember a time when Bobby hadn’t been there, spent hours combing the neighborhood for him.

“Clemons can talk to Mike O’Hara as well as he can to me.” “Clarence doesn’t want to talk to Mike, Rich. Clarence doesn’t want to talk to Bobby Russell. He doesn’t want to talk to me. Clarence is a big fan of Buford Kissdrivel and Wyatt the Homicidal Bag-Boy.

… Ben Hanscom, Eddie Kaspbrak, and a boy named Bradley Donovan pitching pennies. “Hi, Bev!” Eddie said. “You get any nightmares from those movies?” “Nope,” Beverly said, squatting down to watch the game. “How’d you know about that?” “Haystack told me,” Eddie said, jerking a thumb at Ben, who was blushing …

… down under the stern cross-examination of County Attorney Bradley Whitsun and admitted he had beaten the four-year-old boy to death with a recoilless hammer, which he then buried at the far end of his wife’s vegetable garden before taking the boy to Derry Home Hospital’s emergency room. The courtroom was …

“The note he left indicates an extremely confused state of mind,” Assistant Falmouth Police Chief Brandon K. Roche said. He refused to divulge the note’s contents, but a Police Department source said it consisted of two sentences: “I saw Eddie last night. He was dead.”

That’s your first step. Then read Buddinger. Branson Buddinger was a damned sloppy researcher and afflicted with a terminal boner, if half of what I heard when I was a kid was true, but when it came to Derry his heart was in the right place.

They were the first things she had ever seen in her life, other than pictures in a smudgy little book that Brenda Arrowsmith had showed her the year before, and in those pictures you really couldn’t see very much.

… cleanly through the silo of a farmer named Brent Kilgallon. Kilgallon’s sixteen-year-old son rushed out with his mother’s Kodak and took a picture. The National Enquirer bought it for sixty dollars, which the boy used to buy two new tires for his Yamaha motorcycle. A third explosion ripped through Hit …

He was killed instantly. Officer Bruce Andeen rushed in and found him lying on the ruins of his shattered desk, his pen still in one hand. Talked to Bill on the phone again. Audra is taking some solid food, he says, but otherwise there is no change.

Greg Cole was sitting in a doorway down the street with his .45 in his lap and about two dozen shells lined up beside him like toy sojers. Bruce Jagermeyer and that Swede, Olaf Theramenius, were standing underneath the marquee of the Bijou in the shade.”

The following morning Bryant Gumble and Willard Scott of the Today show would be in Derry. During the course of the program, Gumble would interview Andrew Keene. “Whole Standpipe just crashed over and rolled down the hill,” Andrew said. “It was like wow. You know what I mean?

Little Lars Theramenius pulled his Red Ball Flyer wagon quickly off the cracked sidewalk and stood on Bucky Pasquale’s dying lawn.

A moment or two later, Shorty’s building, which stood next to Mr. Paperback, began to descend. Buddy Angstrom was the first to see this phenomenon. He elbowed Alfred Zitner, who looked, gaped, and then elbowed Harold Gardener. Within a space of seconds the sandbagging operation stopped.

Butch Rowden over at the meat market would fess up to it, I guess—he keeps a picture of one of the cars they had up on the wall where he cuts meat. Looking at that picture you’d hardly know it was a car.

‘. . . by day after tomorrow. How’d that be?’ “Bradley grinned like he’d split his head around the back and said it sounded just as fine as paint. Cal Conklin said he’d still like to go on up to Bangor, but he was outvoted.

Paul Anderson . . . Carla Bordeaux . . . Greta Bowie . . . Calvin Clark . . . Cissy Clark . . .” As she called their names, Mrs. Douglas’s fifth-grade class came forward one by one (except for the Clark twins, who came together as always, hand …

When Bill asked how much a couple of two-inch bearing molds might cost, Carl Kitchener—who looked like a veteran boozehound and smelled like an old horse-blanket—asked what a couple of kids wanted with bearing molds.

he asks. “ ‘Nawsir,’ I say. “He looks around at the rest of them—Trevor Dawson, Carl Roone, and Henry Whitsun, who was killed in the fire that fall—and he says to them, ‘This here smart nigger is in hack with me.

Carl Snow . . . Aubrey Stacey . . . Eben Stampnell . . . and that old geezer who paints those funny pictures and drinks all night at Wally’s—Pickman, I think his name is—they’d remember.

Paul Anderson . . . Carla Bordeaux . . . Greta Bowie . . . Calvin Clark . . . Cissy Clark . . .” As she called their names, Mrs. Douglas’s fifth-grade class came forward one by one (except for the Clark twins, who came together as always, hand …

” Carol Feeny screamed with laughter. “That’s perfect! Perfect! My boyfriend says he doesn’t believe you can just do those voices, he says it’s got to be a voice-filter gadget or something—” “Just talent, my dear,” Rich said. Kinky Briefcase was gone.

I shelve books; I make out library cards for new patrons; I turn off the microfilm readers careless users sometimes leave on; I joke with Carole Danner about how much I would like to go to bed with her, and she jokes back about how much she’d like to go …

I showed Chief Rademacher the picture of Chad Lowe which had appeared in the Derry News in April 1958. You think this one ran away after a fight with his folks about coming in late, Chief Rademacher? He was three and a half when he dropped out of sight.

“I’ve got to get her to mellow out my stepfather, or there is going to be one hell of a punching-match when I get home.” “In a little while,” Officer Charles Avarino told him.

Looking at the card, Ben saw this: NAME OF BORROWER RETURN BY STAMPED DATE Charles N. Brown MAY 14 58 David Hartwell JUNE 1 58 Joseph Brennan JUN 17 58 And, on the last line of the card, his own childish signature, written …

Charlotte Littlefield would tell you a thing or two, if you could get on her good side; she teaches over to the high school, and although I reckon she must not have been more than ten or twelve at the time I bet she remembers plenty.

The State Police had found the rest of Cheryl Lamonica seventy yards farther downstream, caught in a tree that had fallen across the stream the previous winter. It was only luck that the body had not been washed into the Penobscot and then out to sea in the spring runoff.

“I have to go up to Saint Joe’s in Bangor to see Cheryl Tarrent. She broke her leg last night.” “Yeah, I’ll do them,” Beverly said. “What happened to Mrs. Tarrent? Did she fall down or something?” Cheryl Tarrent was a woman Elfrida worked with at the restaurant.

Steven Bishoff Dubay was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years in Shawshank State Prison. Christopher Philip Unwin was tried separately as a juvenile and convicted of second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to six months at the South Windham Boys’ Training Facility, sentence suspended.

Rich waited patiently. “All right,” Steve said. “I’ll shift the rotation—put Mike in for you. I can call Chuck Foster to pull a few shifts, I guess, if I can find what Chinese restaurant he’s currently holed up in. I’ll do it because we go back a long way together.

Paul Anderson . . . Carla Bordeaux . . . Greta Bowie . . . Calvin Clark . . . Cissy Clark . . .” As she called their names, Mrs. Douglas’s fifth-grade class came forward one by one (except for the Clark twins, who came together as always, hand …

“What do you mean, going away? According to the log I have right here in front of me, you’re on the air tomorrow from two in the afternoon until six P.M., just like always. In fact, you’re interviewing Clarence Clemons in the studio at four. You know Clarence Clemons, Rich?

… Gang . . . or the affair of Claude Heroux and the Silver Dollar. The Silver Dollar was a beerjoint, and what may have been the queerest mass murder in the entire history of America took place there in September of 1905. There are still a few old-timers in Derry …

He ran and ran (he runs quite fast Coach Black had told his mother and he ran plenty fast with that rotting thing after him oh yes you better believe it you bet your fur) in this dream where he was eleven years old, and then he had smelled something …

“He opened his mouth and then he closed it again. Nobody said anything. I walked off, and that was the last I had to do with Coach Woodleigh. When my home-room teacher handed me my course sheet for my junior year, someone had typed the word excused next to phys.

Webby Garton would later tell Officers Hughes and Conley that his “civic pride” had been wounded by seeing a fucking faggot wearing a hat which said I DERRY.

“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.”

“They float,” it growled, “they float, Georgie, and when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too—” George’s shoulder socked against the cement of the curb and Dave Gardener, who had stayed home from his job at The Shoeboat that day because of the flood, saw only a small boy …

According to Egbert Thoroughgood, the only reason anyone could figure for Heroux’s being in the movement at all was Davey Hartwell. Hartwell was the chief “organizer” or “ringleader,” and Heroux was in love with him.

Two of them, Tinker McCutcheon and Floyd Calderwood, had done jail-time. With them were Lathrop Rounds (his nickname, as obscure as the Floating Dog Hotel, was El Katook), David “Stugley” Grenier, and Eddie King—a bearded man whose spectacles were almost as fat as his gut.

… at the card, Ben saw this: NAME OF BORROWER RETURN BY STAMPED DATE Charles N. Brown MAY 14 58 David Hartwell JUNE 1 58 Joseph Brennan JUN 17 58 And, on the last line of the card, his own childish signature, written in heavy pencil-strokes: Benjamin …

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.

But there had been no note today. The car was gone, and that was all. “Probably went shopping with her friend Debbie,” Stan said, frowning a little, and had set to work making egg-salad sandwiches. Richie had forgotten about it. Until now. Eddie thought of his mother.

Delia, which would later enjoy a modest vogue in the Midwest, catered to young people—Delia skirts and blouses and shawls and slacks were sold largely to what Delia Castleman called “youth-stores” and what Tom called “head-shops.”

He was examining his shoes now. “There’s no one else.” “Neither of my uniforms fit anymore! They’re too tight in the tits!” “Have Delores let one of them out,” he said implacably. He threw two pairs of shoes back, found an empty shoebox, and popped a third pair into it.

He hoped fervently for Myra’s sake that Pacino wasn’t one of these. “Is he?” she asked timidly. “Yes. He is.” “How do you know?” “Demetrios drove him two or three times when he worked at Manhattan Limousine,” Eddie said glibly. “He said Mr. Pacino always tipped at least fifty dollars.”

Just as I was beginning to relax. One of them a sixteen-year-old boy named Dennis Torrio, the other a girl of just five who was sledding in back of her house on West Broadway. The hysterical mother found her sled, one of those blue plastic flying saucers, but nothing else.

Twice the Chief of Police had slapped him across the face and once a detective named Lottman had punched him in the gut, telling him to fess up, and be quick. “There’s people outside and they ain’t happy, Henry,” this Lottman had said.

There were food baskets and letters of condolence that were honestly meant. And there were helping hands held out. I met my friend Dewey Conroy during that time, and you know he’s just as white as vanilla ice cream, but I feel like he’s my brother.

If so, it was an odd sort of dream—an anxiety dream, his old psych prof Doc Abelson might have called it. There seemed to be no overt reason for the anxiety, but it was there all the same; the plain white room seemed to shriek menace.

Sometimes an old party will come in with a prescription blank that will say it right out: Placebo, or 25 grains Blue Skies, which was how old Doc Pearson used to put it.” Mr. Keene cackled briefly and then sucked on his coffee soda. “Well, what’s wrong with it?”

He was proud of it. “He was wearing it because he loved this shitty little town!” the boyfriend, Don Hagarty, screamed at the cops. “Now, now—there’s no need for that sort of language,” Officer Harold Gardener told Hagarty. Harold Gardener was one of Dave Gardener’s four sons.

They did not, of course, believe their Stanley was destined for a life of squalor and poverty, but they thought “the kids were being hasty.” Donald Uris and Andrea Bertoly had themselves married in their early twenties, but they seemed to have forgotten the fact.

In my conversation with Dr. Baynes, the word “psychosomatic” came up. I wonder if you’ve considered the possibility that— —that my son is crazy? Is that what you’re trying to say? ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY THAT MY SON IS CRAZY???? No, but— He’s delicate.

Then she went to Sisters of Mercy for treatment and met the famous Dr. Geffin, who right now was the only man she could think of whom she would not be perfectly happy to see wiped off the face of the earth. And from there home again, home again, jiggety-jog.

She and her husband used the money to make an extra two payments on their Bombardier Skidoo. Dr. Hale, a retired doctor who had lived on West Broadway for nearly fifty years, was killed at 8:00 A.M.

In 1976, three years after she had thrown away the last cycle of Ovral tablets, they saw a doctor named Harkavay in Atlanta. “We want to know if there is something wrong,” Stanley said, “and we want to know if we can do anything about it if there is.”

“Something like that,” Eddie agreed, not bothering to tell Dr. Robbins that his mother undoubtedly would have fallen down dead of a brain hemorrhage if she had seen or heard of her Eddie climbing trees. The truth was, he hadn’t been able to remember exactly how he broke the arm.

… attack and had to be taken away to Dr. Shratt’s office). Claude Heroux was led away. He was docile when they took him, more asleep than awake. That night the bars all up and down Exchange and Baker Streets boomed and hollered with news of the slaughter. A righteous drunken …

She had struck the bird with her fist and driven it off, seen that it had brought blood in two or three places on baby Mikey’s arms, and taken him to Dr. Stillwagon for a tetanus shot.

Carl Snow . . . Aubrey Stacey . . . Eben Stampnell . . . and that old geezer who paints those funny pictures and drinks all night at Wally’s—Pickman, I think his name is—they’d remember.

4 Eddie Kaspbrak Takes His Medicine If you would know all there is to know about an American man or woman of the middle class as the millennium nears its end, you would need only to look in his or her medicine cabinet—or so it has been said.

With them were Lathrop Rounds (his nickname, as obscure as the Floating Dog Hotel, was El Katook), David “Stugley” Grenier, and Eddie King—a bearded man whose spectacles were almost as fat as his gut.

One old campaigner, Egbert Thoroughgood, now ninety-three, told me of taking a slat-thin prostitute in a crib on Baker Street (a street which no longer exists; middle-class apartment housing stands quietly where Baker Street once boiled and brawled).

Then she left him alone. Eddie retreated to his bedroom and read. His mother called up her friend Eleanor Dunton. Eleanor came over and the two of them read old copies of Photoplay and Screen Secrets and giggled over the gossip columns and gorged themselves on cold lobster salad.

They changed both beds, washed the floors and waxed the kitchen linoleum. Her mother did the bathroom floor, for which Beverly was profoundly grateful. Elfrida Marsh was a small woman with graying hair and a grim look.

… a chance, and girls like the unfortunately named Elizabeth Taylor, who was epileptic and whose few poor brain-cells worked only sporadically and who had to be discouraged from pulling her dresses up in the playyard to show off a new pair of panties. In other words, Derry Elementary School was …

Avarino coaxed. “Well . . .” Steve said, and then, slowly, began to talk. 7 When the Falcon was opened in 1973, Elmer Curtie thought his clientele would consist mostly of bus-riders—the terminal next door serviced three different lines: Trailways, Greyhound, and Aroostook County.

From the Derry News, June 22nd, 1958 (page 1): COURT ORDERS SURPRISE EXHUMATION In a bizarre new twist to the disappearance of Edward Corcoran, Derry District Court Judge Erhardt K. Moulton ordered the exhumation of Corcoran’s younger brother, Dorsey, late yesterday.

Henry Whitsun . . . Stork Anson . . . Alan Snopes . . . Everett McCaslin . . . Horton Sartoris . . . all my friends, all dead in that fire. And that fire wasn’t set by old Sarge Wilson and his grits-and-cornpone friends.

“She was a liar,” Jonesy replied. “Drop your pants and let’s us see,” said a lumberman named Falkland, with whom Egbert Thoroughgood had been matching for drinks before Heroux came in. This provoked general laughter. Behind them, Floyd Calderwood was shrieking.

Is he? “I, for one, really don’t think so,” says Father Ashley O’Brian, who serves the Catholic prisoners at Shawshank. Macklin began taking instruction in the Catholic faith shortly after beginning his prison term, and Father O’Brian has spent a good deal of time with him.

… she had run for the telephone to call Father McDowell. But the phone was out of order. A funny noise like a police siren was all it would make. And so, although she knew it was probably a blasphemy she would have to answer for to Saint Peter, she had …

Two of them, Tinker McCutcheon and Floyd Calderwood, had done jail-time. With them were Lathrop Rounds (his nickname, as obscure as the Floating Dog Hotel, was El Katook), David “Stugley” Grenier, and Eddie King—a bearded man whose spectacles were almost as fat as his gut.

He hoed, looking up at the ghost-moon in the sky, and after awhile Fogarty came over and hit him in the back of the neck and knocked him flat on his face. “You’re hoein up the peas right along with the weeds, you ijit.”

She would explain it quietly and logically. How she had thought he was going to die when he was five, and how that would have driven her crazy after losing Frank only two years before.

“Why, I thank you, Ricky Lee. Now I am going to show you something I learned about in Peru, in 1978. I was working with a guy named Frank Billings—understudying with him, I guess you’d say. Frank Billings was the best damned architect in the world, I think.

“Marcia Fadden . . . Frank Frick . . . Ben Hanscom . . .” He rose, stealing his last glance at Beverly Marsh for the summer (or so he thought then), and went forward to Mrs. Douglas’s desk, an eleven-year-old kid with a can roughly the size of New …

It was a nightstick. He turned his head to see Officer Frank Machen, another member of Derry’s Finest. “Never mind, little buddy,” Machen told Garton. “Mind your business and leave those little gay boyos alone. Have some fun.” “Did you hear what he called me?” Garton asked hotly.

Beyond Benny was Franklin D’Cruz, who had raped over fifty women before being caught with his pants down in Bangor’s Terrace Park. The ages of his victims ranged from three to eighty-one. Not very particular was Frank D’Cruz.

Suppose Bill’s call had really been from Ralph Foster, inviting him down to the Plow and Barrow for an hour of arm-wrestling or backgammon, or maybe from Freddie Firestone, the producer of Attic Room, on some problem or other?

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?”

“They’d think I was ready for Juniper Hill,” Richie said. He was wearing an old pair of glasses today. The day before a friend of Henry Bowers’s named Gard Jagermeyer had come up behind Richie as Richie left the Derry Ice Cream Bar with a pistachio cone. “Tag, you’re it!”

There were also two women with them: Kitty Donahue, George Bradley’s common-law wife, and Marie Hauser, who belonged to Caudy but sometimes got passed around, according to the stories we all heard later.

Give us our own club. Sho!’ “And George Brannock, who was also killed in the fire that fall, he said: ‘Yeah, it’s a hell of a black spot, all right.’ And the name just stuck. “Hallorann got us going, though . . . Hallorann and Carl and me.

There was George DeVille, who had murdered his wife and four children one winter night in 1962. George’s head was studiously bent, his white hair blowing in the breeze, snot running gaily out of his nose, his huge wooden crucifix bobbing and dancing as he hoed.

Everybody was whooping it up and having a good time. Nobody inside knew anything was wrong until Gerry McCrew, who was playing assistant cook that night, opened the door to the kitchen and damn near got blowtorched. Flames shot out ten feet and burned his messjacket right off.

Some were carrying guns, some had axes, some had peaveys. The County Sheriff wasn’t due from Bangor until the noon stage the next day, so he wasn’t there, and Goose Machen was laid up in Dr. Shratt’s infirmary with his heart attack.

Twenty-two, the year she had fallen in love with a football player named Greg Mallory who had damn near raped her after a fraternity party (faster, faster). Sixteen, getting drunk with two of her girlfriends on the Bluebird Hill Overlook in Portland.

Around eleven that day Gregory Cole came in for a bicarb of soda and damned if he didn’t have a Colt .45 jammed right in his belt. “ ‘Don’t blow your balls off with that, Greg,’ I said.

“You’re scaring me a little, Mr. Hanscom,” Ricky Lee said. Two years ago Gresham Arnold, a rumdum of some local repute, had come into the Red Wheel with a roll of quarters in his hand and a twenty-dollar bill stuck into the band of his hat.

Sally sniffed. Ladies don’t use such language, the sniff said. Then she turned to Greta Bowie. It had probably only been the excitement of the bell signalling the end of another school-year that had caused Sally to slip and speak to Beverly anyhow, Ben thought.

I was told by the assistant principal, Gwendolyn Rayburn in those days, to stay out of it. She told me that when school employees get involved in cases of suspected child abuse, it always comes back to haunt the School Department at tax appropriation time.

Weeks after that he’d show up in a Winterport beerjoint, talking union and swearing he’d have his revenge on the men that had murdered his friends—Hamilton Tracker, William Mueller, and Richard Bowie were the names he mentioned the most frequently.

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.”

the boyfriend, Don Hagarty, screamed at the cops. “Now, now—there’s no need for that sort of language,” Officer Harold Gardener told Hagarty. Harold Gardener was one of Dave Gardener’s four sons. On the day his father had discovered the lifeless, one-armed body of George Denbrough, Harold Gardener had been five.

The source speculated that the boy’s final grades may have played a part in the boy’s failure to turn up. Derry School Superintendent Harold Metcalf declined comment on the Corcoran boy’s grades, pointing out they are not a matter of public record.

6 Derry/7:00–9:00 A.M. By 7:00 A.M., the wind-speed in Derry had picked up to about thirty-seven miles an hour, with gusts up to forty-five. Harry Brooks, a National Weather Service forecaster based at Bangor International Airport, made an alarmed call to NWS headquarters in Augusta.

A minute later, a blue-white stroke of lightning struck the steeple. Heather Libby, the minister’s wife, happened to be looking out the window of the parsonage’s kitchen at the time, and she said that the steeple “exploded like someone loaded it up with dynamite.”

From the Derry News, June 25th, 1958 (page 2): TEACHER SAYS EDWARD CORCORAN “OFTEN BRUISED” Henrietta Dumont, who teaches fifth grade at Derry Elementary School on Jackson Street, said that Edward Corcoran, who has now been missing for nearly a week, often came to school “covered with bruises.”

And yet there had been a time in his life when he had walked past that great red brick pile every day—and on more than one occasion he had run past it, with Henry Bowers and Belch Huggins and that other big boy, Victor Somebody or-Other, in hot pursuit, all …

he asks. “ ‘Nawsir,’ I say. “He looks around at the rest of them—Trevor Dawson, Carl Roone, and Henry Whitsun, who was killed in the fire that fall—and he says to them, ‘This here smart nigger is in hack with me.

The Traynor Consolidated School Department could offer her $9,200 and a probationary contract. “You are going to starve,” Herbert Blum said when his daughter told him she intended to take the job. “And you will be hot while you starve.”

“What are you boys doing? Let her alone!” Across the street—Bev saw this quite clearly—Herbert Ross got out of the lawn-chair on his porch, approached the porch rail, and looked over. His face was as blank as Belch Huggins’s. He folded his paper, turned, and went quietly into the house.

A Town Council member, maybe. Horst Mueller, maybe, or even Trace Naugler, who was mayor back then. Or it could just have been a professional man who didn’t want to be recognized. A doctor or a lawyer. I wouldn’t’ve recognized my own father in a get-up like that.”

The police are operating on the theory that Horst Winterbarger, who is supposedly working as a machinery maintenance man somewhere in Florida, drove up to Maine to snatch his daughter.

Henry Whitsun . . . Stork Anson . . . Alan Snopes . . . Everett McCaslin . . . Horton Sartoris . . . all my friends, all dead in that fire. And that fire wasn’t set by old Sarge Wilson and his grits-and-cornpone friends.

That was Howard. He never was any good. “ ‘You are goan join the army,’ your gramma Shirley told me. ‘I dunno if they start paying you right away or not, but once they do, you’re goan send me a lotment every month.

“There was hardly any traffic on Canal Street at all, either on foot or by car. Every now and then a delivery truck would pass, but that was about all. I saw Jake Pinnette cross over and he had a rifle in each hand.

“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.

Like his friend, the late Adrian Mellon. “Let’s go through it again,” Harold’s partner, Jeffrey Reeves, said. “The two of you came out of the Falcon and turned toward the Canal. Then what?” “How many times do I have to tell you idiots?” Hagarty was still screaming. “They killed him!

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.

He was, in fact, a jellyfish. “Mike has had trouble with that kid before, yes,” he told Jessica. “But he hasn’t had much because he’s careful around Henry Bowers. This will serve to make him more careful.” “You mean you’re just going to let it go?”

(Jim Doyon, you come out of that road! Come out right now, you want to get run over and killed?) She shivered, hugging her arms across her breasts in an X, cupping her elbows in her palms. Daddy could still be living here; oh yes he could.

Madder than a wet hen was Jim Sullivan), but a picture in a reference book on gangsters called Bloodletters and Badmen shows a grinning man standing beside the bullet-riddled corpse of Al Bradley in the morgue, and if that man is not Chief Sullivan, it is surely his twin brother.

Tough break, folks; just one of those odd weather patterns that sometimes developed in the Penobscot Valley with startling suddenness. On WZON, meteorologist Jim Witt described what he called an “extraordinarily disciplined” low-pressure system. That was putting it mildly.

It was that spate of water that had pushed this unpleasant baggage into the sun for the flies to find. It was the body of a nine-year-old named Jimmy Cullum. Except for the nose, his face was gone. There was a churned and featureless mess where it had been.

There was Jimmy Donlin, and all they said in the papers about Jimmy was that he had killed his mother in Portland during the summer of 1965, but what they hadn’t said in the papers was that Jimmy had tried a novel experiment in body-disposal: by the time the cops …

“Petie Vanness and Al Nell and Jimmy Gordon were all sitting on the courthouse steps, eating sandwiches and fruit out of their dinnerbuckets, trading with each other for stuff that looked better to them, the way kids do on the schoolyard. They was all armed.

There were eight of em—Al Bradley, George Bradley, Joe Conklin and his brother Cal, an Irishman named Arthur Malloy who was called ‘Creeping Jesus’ Malloy because he was nearsighted but wouldn’t put on his specs unless he absolutely had to, and Patrick Caudy, a young fellow from Chicago who was …

… league, partly because he was helping his friend Joe Tammerly fix cars . . . but she suspects it was partly that smell, the one they made between them, neither of them meaning to but making it just the same, as helpless to stop it as either was helpless to …

… he happened to be watching American Bandstand while Joey made a mess in the kitchen . . . if any of those things or a thousand others happened . . . then, after the smaller children were in bed, the spanking stick would come out and she would call the …

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.

Fogarty, Adler, and John Koontz had all tried the roll-of-quarters-in-the-fist trick on Weston to try and convince him he could move a bit faster, and one day Koontz had hit him maybe a little too hard because blood came not only from Arlen Weston’s nose but also from Arlen’s ears …

But: In 1851 John Markson killed his entire family with poison and then, sitting in the middle of the circle he had made with their corpses, he gobbled an entire “white-nightshade” mushroom. His death agonies must have been intense.

18 John Webber Garton was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to ten to twenty years in Thomaston State Prison. Steven Bishoff Dubay was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years in Shawshank State Prison.

Blood spouted from his wrist. At the bar, somebody called for more beer and someone else asked the bartender, whose name was Jonesy, if he was still dyeing his hair. “Never dyed it,” Jonesy said in an ill-tempered way; he was vain of his hair.

They went with sickening ease, most of them still whole. Andrew Keene recognized one of them as belonging to the Karl Massensik family. Mr. Massensik had been his sixth-grade teacher, a real pooch.

That’s all right. They had been married in a civil ceremony three months later. Two of his friends had come; the only friend of hers to attend had been Kay McCall, whom Tom called “that titsy women’s-lib bitch.”

“I see a kid go walking toward Up-Mile Hill—I think maybe it was Zack Denbrough, the father of your old buddy, the one who turned out to be a writer—and Kenny Borton says from the window of the Christian Science Reading Room, ‘You want to get out of here, kid; …

There were also two women with them: Kitty Donahue, George Bradley’s common-law wife, and Marie Hauser, who belonged to Caudy but sometimes got passed around, according to the stories we all heard later.

“Sheriff was there that day, all right. He was s’posed to go bird-hunting, but he changed his mind damn quick when Lal Machen came in and told him that he was expecting Al Bradley that very afternoon.” “How did Machen know that?” I asked.

Lars Theramenius, his long blonde hair glowing with its own serene inner light, toddled over from the next building to show Beverly his new Tonka truck and the new scrapes on his knees. Beverly exclaimed over both. Then her mother was calling her.

Two of them, Tinker McCutcheon and Floyd Calderwood, had done jail-time. With them were Lathrop Rounds (his nickname, as obscure as the Floating Dog Hotel, was El Katook), David “Stugley” Grenier, and Eddie King—a bearded man whose spectacles were almost as fat as his gut.

He hung up. Of course I read the papers—don’t I put them out in the Reading Room of the Public Library each morning myself? The little girl, Laurie Ann Winterbarger, had been in the custody of her mother following an acrimonious divorce proceeding in the spring of 1982.

… and yelled crossly: “If it’s that bull dyke Lesley, tell her to go eat out some model and let us sleep!” Beverly glanced up briefly, shook her head to indicate it wasn’t Lesley, and then looked back at the phone. Tom felt the muscles at the back of his neck …

“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.

Looking at them, Beverly laughed, too. Richie approached the ticket booth again. Liver Lips Cole looked at him sourly. “Good ahfternyoon, deah lady,” Richie said in his best Baron Butthole Voice.

“I seen the publisher, Mack Laughlin, put two rounds into Joe Conklin himself.” “Christ,” I muttered. “Get enough licorice, sonny?” “I got enough,” I said. I licked my lips. “Mr. Keene, how could a thing of that . . . that magnitude . . . be covered up?”

“Spare me the vulgarity at the breakfast table, if you please,” Maggie Tozier said to her husband as she brought Richie’s eggs over to the table. And to Richie: “I don’t know why you want to fill your head up with such awful junk anyway.” “Aw, Mom,” Richie said.

But Fuller was slow. I think he was afraid of the same thing some of us was afraid of—that some of the townies would be mad. Mueller hadn’t been back to see him, and I think Major Fuller must have been scared to go downtown and see Mueller.

“Marcia Fadden . . . Frank Frick . . . Ben Hanscom . . .” He rose, stealing his last glance at Beverly Marsh for the summer (or so he thought then), and went forward to Mrs. Douglas’s desk, an eleven-year-old kid with a can roughly the size of New …

There were also two women with them: Kitty Donahue, George Bradley’s common-law wife, and Marie Hauser, who belonged to Caudy but sometimes got passed around, according to the stories we all heard later.

“No talk.” He walked into the room, and as he stood at the foot of the bed, Mike saw with a hopeless chill how blank Mark Lamonica’s eyes were. His head was slightly cocked, as if hearing distant music. He took his hand out of his pocket.

Eddie asked Richie. Richie paused, began to say something, shook his head, paused again, then said: “Scariest thing I’ve seen lately was Mark Prenderlist takin a leak in McCarron Park. Ugliest hogger you ever saw.” Ben said, “What about you, Stan?” “No,” Stan said quickly, and looked somewhere else.

“What was that, Daddy?” “We found out that we had a pretty decent jazz-band among us,” he said slowly. “Martin Devereaux, who was a corporal, played drums. Ace Stevenson played cornet. Pop Snopes played a pretty decent barrelhouse piano. He wasn’t great, but he wasn’t no slouch either.

“You can just leave that offprint on the desk, Mary,” Mike says. “I’ll put it away.” She flashes a grateful smile. “Thanks, Mr. Hanlon.” “Goodnight. Goodnight, Billy. The two of you go right home.” “The boogeyman will get you if you don’t . . . watch . . . out!”

The body had been that of three-year-old Matthew Clements, reported missing by his parents only the day before (his picture had been on the front page of the Derry News, a dark-haired little kid grinning brashly into the camera, a Red Sox cap perched on his head).

Maureen Nell, who knew well how bad his ticker had been for the last three years, understood immediately that all was over with him, and after loosening his collar she had run for the telephone to call Father McDowell. But the phone was out of order.

And if he screwed up—if the baby shat her didies after the sitter went home and the mess was still in them when Mom got home . . . if he forgot to cross Megan on the Broad Street corner after her nursery school got out and that nosy Mrs. …

Part of her would always be walking back to the car with Michael Rosenblatt, listening to the crushed gravel under her pumps and his rented formal shoes, back to his father’s car, which Michael had borrowed for the evening, and which he had spent the afternoon waxing.

You know Clarence Clemons, Rich? As in ‘Come on and blow, Big Man’?” “Clemons can talk to Mike O’Hara as well as he can to me.” “Clarence doesn’t want to talk to Mike, Rich. Clarence doesn’t want to talk to Bobby Russell. He doesn’t want to talk to me.

When Ben came in today, story hour had just begun there. Miss Davies, the pretty young librarian, was reading “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” “Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge?” Miss Davies spoke in the low, growling tones of the troll in the story.

“We got doused—oh boy, a shit-shower, oh great, they ought to have a class trip down here sometime, Bill, we could get Mr. Carson to lead it—” “And Miss Jimmison could give a health lecture afterward,” Ben said in a trembling voice, and they all laughed shrilly.

“That’s okay.” He looked down at his shoes. He loved her a little—not with the frank unquestioning love he had lavished on Miss Thibodeau, his first-grade teacher . . . but he did love her. “If I drove, I’d give you a ride,” she said, “but I don’t.

… older brother, Edward, reported missing by Richard and Monica Macklin four days ago, Chief Borton answered: “I think it looks much more serious than we first supposed, don’t you?” From the Derry News, June 25th, 1958 (page 2): TEACHER SAYS EDWARD CORCORAN “OFTEN BRUISED” Henrietta Dumont, who teaches fifth grade …

That was the last Southern Seacoast train Eddie ever saw, and when he later saw Mr. Braddock, the Derry trainmaster, he asked him hesitantly what had happened. “Cump’ny went broke,” Mr. Braddock said. “That’s all there was to it. Don’t you read the papers?

“Mr. Brockhill, you’ll have to be quiet,” she said kindly enough. “People are reading—” “Man’s sick,” Brockhill said abruptly, and went back to his book. “Give him an aspirin, Carole.” Carole Danner looked at Ben and her face sharpened with concern. “Are you ill, Mr. Hanscom?

Later that same year Henry, who was then ten years old, started to feed Mike’s dog Mr. Chips old stewbones and bags of potato-chips. It got so Mr. Chips would wag his tail and come running when Henry called.

He suspected he was suspected. By whom he was not sure: Mr. Engstrom? Perhaps. Mr. Engstrom had turned around and given Patrick a long speculative look in the A&P one day this spring. Mr. Engstrom had been buying cigarettes and Patrick had been sent for bread. Mrs. Josephs? Maybe.

… sounds were the radiators, the faint whissh-whissh of Mr. Fazio’s broom as he pushed colored sawdust up the hall floor, and the howl of the wind outside. Ben looked toward the book room’s one narrow window and saw that the light was fading rapidly from the sky. It was four …

“Besides, if they give us any trouble, we’ll just tell Foxy to kick them out,” Bev said. Foxy was Mr. Foxworth, the thin, sallow, glum-looking man who managed the Aladdin. He was now selling candy and popcorn, chanting his litany of “Wait your turn, wait your turn, wait your turn.”

They had done this. They. He saw a frog hopping along and thought maybe old Mr. Froggy was wondering just where the water had gone. Eddie laughed out loud.

… really putting out at his work (which, for Mr. Gautier, was Star Beef in town), his daddy said, “That man works like a nigger.” “And my daddy is just as much a Christian as your daddy,” Bob had finished. Mike remembered that, looking at Bob Gautier’s white earnest pinched face, …

“Aw, sure. I’ll go into Costello’s Market and stand by the stove a little while, or something. Mr. Gedreau doesn’t mind. And I got my snowpants. My new Christmas scarf, too.” Mrs. Douglas looked a little reassured . . . and then she glanced toward the window again.

7 Mike Hanlon ran past the Church School without pausing and pelted straight up Neibolt Street toward the Derry trainyards. There was a janitor at NCS, but Mr. Gendron was very old and even deafer than Mandy Fazio.

Highway Patrol, Ben Hanscom’s favorite, was on when Mr. Hockstetter arrived home from work. By the time the doctor arrived, Science Fiction Theater, with Your Host Truman Bradley, was just coming on. “Who knows what strange things the universe may hold?”

Mrs. Josephs? Maybe. She sat in her parlor window with a telescope sometimes and was, according to Mrs. Hockstetter, a “nosy parker.” Mr. Jacubois, who had an ASPCA sticker on the back bumper of his car? Mr. Nell? Someone else?

Did the hospital have any word on Mr. Hanlon’s condition? Richie listened, nodding. “I understand, Mr. Kerpaskian—do you spell that with two k’s? You do. Okay. And you are—” He listened, now enough into his own fiction to make doodling motions with one finger, as if writing on a pad.

So, for a variety of reasons, Ben withheld the story. “No, Mamma,” he said. “Just Mr. McKibbon rooting around in other people’s garbage.” That made her laugh—she didn’t like Mr. McKibbon, who was a Republican as well as a “Christer”—and her laugh closed the subject.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think you’re just storying me along, Mr. Ripsom.” “And you’re tellin the truth, too,” he said with a kind of wonder. “I can see it on y’face.”

The Tremonts had had a boy who was five, and girls who were three and six months, but Mr. Tremont had lost his job at the shoe shop on Tracker Avenue, they got behind on the rent, and one day not long before school let out they had all just …

7 They went in by the back door, not just because that was the lock Bev’s key fitted but because she said her father would kill her if Mrs. Bolton saw her going into the apartment with three boys while her folks were gone. “Why?” Eddie asked.

“He said he didn’t have any money. And the Daughter of Frankenstein there would never let him in without a ticket.” Richie cocked a thumb at Mrs. Cole, who had been the ticket-taker at the Aladdin since a time well before the pictures had begun to talk.

One of them was holding a hose, the other a bucket of soapsuds. Both were slack-jawed. Mrs. Denton looked out of her second-floor apartment, one of her six daughters’ dresses in her lap, more mending in a basket on the floor, her mouth full of pins.

… Ben Hanscom’s fifth-grade classroom raised a spontaneous cheer—and Mrs. Douglas, usually the strictest of teachers, made no effort to quell them. Perhaps she knew it would have been impossible. “Children!” she called when the cheer died. “May I have your attention for a final moment?” Now a babble of excited …

It was sparkling clean, silent. Somewhere, far distant, it seemed, she could hear Mrs. Doyon yelling for her boy Jim to get in out of the road, right now. She went to the bathroom basin and looked down into the dark eye of the drain.

I asked Bob Tanner if he wanted to come along and he said he’d better finish filling Mrs. Emerson’s prescription and he’d see me later. ‘Leave me a live one, Mr. Keene,’ he said, but I allowed as how I couldn’t promise nothing.

… her nursery school got out and that nosy Mrs. Gant saw . . . if he happened to be watching American Bandstand while Joey made a mess in the kitchen . . . if any of those things or a thousand others happened . . . then, after the smaller …

… of the kids in school had laughed when Mrs. Greenguss told them that, but Mike had been too stunned by the concept to laugh; his first thought had been, Light has weight? Oh my Lord, that’s terrible!) . . . time as something that would eventually bury him. The first …

Whirlybirds was on when Mrs. Henley arrived from next door (his screaming mother had been holding the baby’s corpse in the open kitchen door, believing in some blind way that the cold air might revive it; Patrick was cold and got a sweater out of the downstairs closet).

5 No one—not even Mike Hanlon—had the slightest idea of how crazy Patrick Hockstetter really was. He was twelve, the son of a paint salesman.

Mr. Engstrom had been buying cigarettes and Patrick had been sent for bread. Mrs. Josephs? Maybe. She sat in her parlor window with a telescope sometimes and was, according to Mrs. Hockstetter, a “nosy parker.” Mr. Jacubois, who had an ASPCA sticker on the back bumper of his car?

Bill had winced and walked around to the front of the building. He had observed Mrs. Moran, one of the fourth-grade teachers, already hurrying over to break things up, but he knew they would get Richie hard before then, and by the time she actually arrived, Richie would be crying.

She started forward, an elderly woman with a kerchief tied over her head peasant-style. A cop held her back. “Not safe out there, Mrs. Nelson. You know it. Rest of the street might go any time.” Mrs. Nelson, Bill thought. I remember you.

Right?” “I guess not,” Eddie said. “But it seems so—” So stupid, he was going to say, and then he remembered a story Mrs. Portleigh had told the Sunday-school class when he was just a little kid—a first grader in Little Worshippers.

Mrs. Rogan had found work at the Ford plant. Tom, although only eleven, became the man of the family. And if he screwed up—if the baby shat her didies after the sitter went home and the mess was still in them when Mom got home . . . if he …

I went to Chevrus High in Portland, and there was a speech therapist there, Mrs. Thomas, who was really great. She taught me some good tricks. Like thinking of my middle name just before I said ‘Hi, I’m Bill Denbrough’ out loud.

She had told all of this to Mrs. Van Prett next door. “The time has come,” Mrs. Kaspbrak had said grimly, “to slap a few cards down on the table.”

And while all of his teachers had found him odd (both Mrs. Douglas, his fifth-grade teacher, and Mrs. Weems, who had had Patrick in the third grade, knew about the pencil-box full of flies, and while neither of them totally ignored the implications, each had between twenty and twenty-eight other …

Part of the deep bitterness which accompanied the Winterbargers’ divorce came from Mrs. Winterbarger’s allegations that on at least two occasions Horst Winterbarger had sexually molested the child. She asked the court to deny Winterbarger all visitation rights, a request the court granted in spite of Winterbarger’s hot denials.

Myra Kaspbrak was huge. She had only been big when Eddie married her five years ago, but he sometimes thought his subconscious had seen the potential for hugeness in her; God knew his own mother had been a whopper.

The day after, Will would call Norman Sadler (who was as dumb as his son Moose but infinitely more goodhearted), and Normie would come over with his potato-digger. For the next three weeks all of them would work picking potatoes.

Bruce Jagermeyer and that Swede, Olaf Theramenius, were standing underneath the marquee of the Bijou in the shade.” Mr. Keene looked at me, through me.

An unfortunate kid named Owen Phillips had laughed at that bonking sound. Belch had walked over to him and had kicked his ass so hard that the Phillips kid had run screaming for home with a hole in the seat of his pants.

I can take abuse. I mean, you’re looking at a man who once did an interview with Ozzy Osbourne.” “Tell it,” Bill said. He glanced over at Mike and saw that Mike looked happier—or more at rest—since the luncheon had begun.

… Calls (1985) 1 Stanley Uris Takes a Bath Patricia Uris later told her mother she should have known something was wrong. She should have known it, she said, because Stanley never took baths in the early evening. He showered early each morning and sometimes soaked late at night (with a …

Patrick Caudy took the women around shopping while the other men went into Machen’s Sporting Goods. Kitty Donahue bought a dress in Freese’s, and she died in it two days later. “Lal Machen waited on the men himself. He died in 1959. Too fat, he was. Always too fat.

Paul Anderson . . . Carla Bordeaux . . . Greta Bowie . . . Calvin Clark . . . Cissy Clark . . .” As she called their names, Mrs. Douglas’s fifth-grade class came forward one by one (except for the Clark twins, who came together as always, hand …

“I don’t want to talk no more.” “Just tell us about Tuesday afternoon at the fair,” Paul Hughes said. Hughes was tired and shocked and dismayed by this whole sordid business.

He was almost out of the park when a sixthgrader named Peter Gordon saw him and yelled: “Hey, tits! Wanna play? We need somebody to be right-field!” There was an explosion of laughter.

“Petie Vanness and Al Nell and Jimmy Gordon were all sitting on the courthouse steps, eating sandwiches and fruit out of their dinnerbuckets, trading with each other for stuff that looked better to them, the way kids do on the schoolyard. They was all armed.

Or for drinks? Or for dancing?” “I don’t think he will, but if he does, you take him. If it looks like he’s going to party all night, you can call Phil Thomas on the radio-phone after midnight. By then he’ll have a driver free to relieve you.

Carl Snow . . . Aubrey Stacey . . . Eben Stampnell . . . and that old geezer who paints those funny pictures and drinks all night at Wally’s—Pickman, I think his name is—they’d remember.

Suppose Bill’s call had really been from Ralph Foster, inviting him down to the Plow and Barrow for an hour of arm-wrestling or backgammon, or maybe from Freddie Firestone, the producer of Attic Room, on some problem or other?

Three months after the youngest had been born, Ralph Rogan had died—well, “died” was maybe not such a good word; maybe “committed suicide” would have been a better way to put it, since he had poured a generous quantity of lye into a tumbler of gin and quaffed this devil’s …

Randi Harlengen had gotten her tubes tied, they took cysts as big as golfballs out of her ovaries, no malignancy, thank God, but twenty-seven ovarian cysts, could you die?

He told his mother where he was going and she frowned. “Why don’t you see if Randy Robinson wants to go with you?” “Yeah, okay, I’ll stop by and ask him,” Mike said. He did, too, but Randy had gone up to Bangor with his father to buy seedling potatoes.

An elderly patron named Raymond Fogarty was killed by a toppling beer cooler. This was the same Raymond Fogarty who, as the minister of the First Methodist Church of Derry, had presided over the burial rites of George Denbrough in October of 1957.

A woman in Haven Village named Rebecca Paulson found a fifty-dollar bill fluttering from her back-door welcome mat, two twenties in her bird-house, and a hundred plastered against an oak tree in her back yard.

I was fat, all right. And there were these fellows in my home town who used to take after me pretty regularly. There was a fellow named Reginald Huggins, only everyone called him Belch. A kid named Victor Criss. A few other guys.

3 Henry, Victor, Belch, and Patrick Hockstetter ended up in the dump lighting each others’ farts on that hot July afternoon because of Rena Davenport. Henry knew what resulted from consuming large amounts of baked beans.

All of that was in the Bible and every word of it was true—so said Reverend Craig and so said Richie’s folks and so said Richie. He was perfectly willing to credit the possibility of Bill’s explanation; it was the logic which troubled him. “But you said you were scared.

Residents believed that the Reverend Jollyn had silenced the clock to show that the church was in mourning for the dead children, and Jollyn never disabused them of this notion although it was not true. The clock had simply not chimed.

A passing nurse looked in and said: “Do you need anything, Mr. Hanlon?” “New set of ’testines,” my dad said. “You got any handy, Rhoda?” She smiled a nervous, doubtful smile and passed on. My dad handed the glass to me and I put it back on his table.

Police Chief Richard Borton also declined comment, but a Police Department source told the News that the Corcoran boy’s relationship with his stepfather was not a good one, and that he had spent nights out of the house before.

… had murdered his friends—Hamilton Tracker, William Mueller, and Richard Bowie were the names he mentioned the most frequently. All of them lived in Derry, and their gabled gambrelled cupola-ed houses stand on West Broadway to this day. Years later, they and their descendants would fire the Black Spot. That there …

Eddie tried to swerve, but running full-out as he had been, he might have done better to jump over the kid (the kid’s name, in fact, was Richard Cowan, and he would grow up, marry, and father a son named Frederick Cowan, who would be drowned in a toilet and …

I know better now. I wish to God I didn’t.” Dorsey Corcoran’s older brother, Edward, ten, is still missing. From his cell in Derry County Jail, Richard Macklin continues to deny any part in either the death of his younger stepson or the disappearance of the older boy.

Aunt Margaret was feuding with the power company again. Stella Flanagan had gotten married again, some people never learned. Richie Huber had been fired again.

He looked perhaps ten years younger than his actual age, which was thirty-eight. “Hello, Mr. Hanscom,” Ricky Lee said, putting a paper napkin on the bar as Ben sat down. Ricky Lee sounded a trifle surprised, and he was.

On the following Wednesday, while the city still lay in stunned silent contemplation of the tragedy, a woman found the head of nine-year-old Robert Dohay caught in the limbs of her back-yard apple tree. There was chocolate on the Dohay lad’s teeth and blood in his hair.

… what Teddy Kennedy was really like, how much Robert Redford tipped . . . or maybe offer some insights into why Ben had been able to give up the extra pounds while he had needed to hang onto his aspirator. The fact is, Bill thought, Mike is going to start …

“No reason why I shouldn’t live forever,” he sometimes told Roger Aurlette, who cut his hair once each month. “I have no vices.” “Now explain yourself,” he said, “and make it quick.” “There was—” She swallowed and it hurt because there was no moisture in her throat, none at all.

He finally escaped by clawing his way up a steep embankment covered with shrubbery. He looked back once and saw a man he believed to be Roger Lernerd, the head loan officer at Harold’s credit union, trying to start his car in the parking-lot of the Canal Mini-Mall.

he yells at the bartender, who was a big lug with a broken nose named Romeo Dupree. ‘One for me and one pour l’homme avec les épais lèvres!’ And they all laughed like hell at that, but not in a mean way, Mikey.

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.”

But Eddie was still nervous. Mr. Keene had raised the counter-gate and was beckoning to Eddie with one bony finger. Eddie went, but reluctantly. Ruby, the counter-girl, was sitting by the cash register and reading a Silver Screen. “Would you make two ice-cream sodas, Ruby?” Mr. Keene called to her.

I want to help you. It’s time somebody did. If Russ Handor isn’t man enough to do it, I’ll have to. Your lung is like this balloon, except it’s surrounded by a blanket of muscle; these muscles are like the arms of a man operating a bellows, you understand?

“Shh, she’ll hear you,” Ruth Blum said. Patty had lain awake that night until long after midnight, dry-eyed, alternately hot and cold, hating them both. She had spent the next two years trying to get rid of that hate; there was too much hate inside her already.

… and so ended my last informal conversation with Mrs. Ruth Gladry. No great loss. The other members of the Board are the descendants of the lumber barons. Their support of the library is an act of inherited expiation: they raped the woods and now care for these books the way …

“I sure hope I pass!” Sally Mueller said chirpily to Bev Marsh, who sat in the next row. Sally was bright, pretty, vivacious. Bev was also pretty, but there was nothing vivacious about her this afternoon, last day of school or not. She sat looking moodily down at her penny-loafers.

“The people who say that stuff never had to go to bed with Sam Chacowicz. Two pumps a tickle and a squirt, that was ole Sammy’s motto. The only time he could keep it up for longer than seventy seconds was when he was pulling off in the tub.

“The hour groweth late.” “Sandy and I lived together for two and a half years,” Richie went on. “Came really close to getting married twice. As things turned out, I guess we saved ourselves a lot of heartache and all that community-property bullshit by keeping it simple.

Make notes on all the people he talked to. Sandy Ives is still at the University of Maine. Folklorist. After you read him, go see him. Buy him a dinner. I’d take him to the Orinoka, because dinner at the Orinoka seems to never end. Pump him.

“Why?” Ben asked. “It stopped, didn’t it? Gee, I remember this kid I was in kindergarten with, Scooter Morgan, and he got a bloody nose when he fell off the monkey bars. They took him to the Mergency Room, but only because it kept bleeding.” “Yeah?” Bill asked, interested.

The younger of the two, a boy, managed to hit the bird back over the net and the woman called, “Good one, Sean!” The house was the same dark-green color and the fanlight was still over the door, but his mother’s flower-beds were gone.

… hearty Irish cop’s voice said, “Sixth Street Station, Sergeant O’Bannon, how may I help you?” before hanging up. Oh, you’re doing fine. Jesus, yes. By the eighth or ninth time you’ll have mustered up guts enough to give him your name. She went into the kitchen and fixed herself a …

I guess we might have been all right, but it was one fine late-April day, sun shining down, and I had to shoot off my lip. ‘A good afternoon to you, Sergeant Wilson, sir,’ said I, and he landed on me with both feet.

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.

“What do you weigh? Seventy, eighty pounds? Most of the vags Sheriff Sully posted into that chair in the old days would go twice that. They’d feel a bit oncomfortable after an hour or so, really oncomfortable after two or three, and right bad after four or five.

That was Howard. He never was any good. “ ‘You are goan join the army,’ your gramma Shirley told me. ‘I dunno if they start paying you right away or not, but once they do, you’re goan send me a lotment every month.

There was Skipper Bolton in the front apartment on the second floor, but Skipper was fourteen. “We all want to meet you, Beverly. . . .” Her hand went to her mouth and her eyes widened in horror.

Yes—he would add Eddie’s asthma medication to Sonia Kaspbrak’s bill, and as always she would be surprised—and suspicious rather than grateful—at how cheap the medication was. Other drugs were so dear, she said.

… CHAPTER 3 Six Phone Calls (1985) 1 Stanley Uris Takes a Bath Patricia Uris later told her mother she should have known something was wrong. She should have known it, she said, because Stanley never took baths in the early evening. He showered early each morning and sometimes soaked late …

Aunt Margaret was feuding with the power company again. Stella Flanagan had gotten married again, some people never learned. Richie Huber had been fired again.

The only one like it stood in the town square of Haven Village, forty miles away. Stephen Bowie, a timber baron who lived on West Broadway, donated the clock to the town at a cost of some $17,000. Bowie could afford it.

Then he called Steve Covall, the KLAD program director. “What’s up, Rich?” Steve asked. The last Arbitron ratings had shown KLAD at the top of the cannibalistic Los Angeles FM-rock market, and ever since then Steve had been in an excellent mood—thank God for small favors.

4 While Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Belch Huggins, Peter Gordon, and a half-retarded high-school boy named Steve Sadler (known as Moose, after the character in the Archie comics) were chasing a winded Mike Hanlon through the trainyard and toward the Barrens about half a mile away, Bill and the rest …

18 John Webber Garton was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to ten to twenty years in Thomaston State Prison. Steven Bishoff Dubay was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years in Shawshank State Prison.

“In December of last year, an eight-year-old boy named Steven Johnson was found dead in Memorial Park. Like Adrian Mellon, he had been badly mutilated just before or just after his death, but he looked as if he could have died of just plain fright.” “Sexually assaulted?” Eddie asked. “No.

Henry Whitsun . . . Stork Anson . . . Alan Snopes . . . Everett McCaslin . . . Horton Sartoris . . . all my friends, all dead in that fire. And that fire wasn’t set by old Sarge Wilson and his grits-and-cornpone friends.

But before that day came, a seventhgrader with the unlikely name of Stringer Dedham tossed what he fancied a “change of speed” pitch to Belch Huggins.

He has been invited out to Universal City for further rewrites and production meetings. His agent is a small woman named Susan Browne. She is exactly five feet tall. She is violently energetic and even more violently emphatic. “Don’t do it, Billy,” she tells him. “Kiss it off.

“I can square it with the union boss,” he said. “Not myself, maybe; right now he’d see me in hell before giving me another stunt. I’ll send Teddy Rowland round to his office. Teddy’s a pouf, but he could talk the birds down from the trees. But what happens after?

And in case you hadn’t noticed, Patsy, we’re not getting any younger.” And then on to the Bruckner girl from down the block who had been sent home from school because she was wearing no bra and a blouse that you could see right through.

… It had in common with the stupid old Turtle and the cosmology of the macroverse outside the puny egg of this universe was just this: all living things must abide by the laws of the shape they inhabit. For the first time It realized that perhaps Its ability to change …

The Henley in question is Tim Henley, a multi-millionaire developer who came into Derry like a whirlwind in the late sixties—it was Henley and Zitner who organized the consortium responsible for building the Derry Mall (which, according to another piece on page one, is probably going to be declared a …

Two of them, Tinker McCutcheon and Floyd Calderwood, had done jail-time. With them were Lathrop Rounds (his nickname, as obscure as the Floating Dog Hotel, was El Katook), David “Stugley” Grenier, and Eddie King—a bearded man whose spectacles were almost as fat as his gut.

10 Tom Boutillier and Chief Rademacher leaned forward, neither of them speaking. Chris Unwin sat with his head down, talking monotonously to the floor. This was the part they wanted to hear; this was the part that was going to send at least two of these assholes to Thomaston.

Whore’s hair. Her eyes did not stutter to his face to read the emotional weather there, and Tom Rogan didn’t like that. He sat up. His head was starting to ache. Shit, it had probably already been aching, but when you were asleep you didn’t know it.

“You know that movie where the shark ate all the people up?” “Everyone does. J-J-Jaws.” “Well, I got this friend, you know? His name’s Tommy Vicananza, and he’s not that bright. Toys in the attic, you get what I mean?” “Yeah.” “He thinks he saw that shark in the Canal.

A Town Council member, maybe. Horst Mueller, maybe, or even Trace Naugler, who was mayor back then. Or it could just have been a professional man who didn’t want to be recognized. A doctor or a lawyer. I wouldn’t’ve recognized my own father in a get-up like that.”

he asks. “ ‘Nawsir,’ I say. “He looks around at the rest of them—Trevor Dawson, Carl Roone, and Henry Whitsun, who was killed in the fire that fall—and he says to them, ‘This here smart nigger is in hack with me.

… 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 …

It rolled to a stop by the booted foot of a lumberman named Varney, who had spent most of the day in the Dollar and who, by then, was so exquisitely slopped that he didn’t know if he was on land or at sea.

Five years ago, when Vernon Maitland had cancer of the esophagus—a painful, painful sort of cancer—and the doctors had run out of anything effective they could give him for his pain, I came by his hospital room with a bottle of sugar-pills. He was a special friend, you see.

At the bar, conversation had turned to what sort of winter lay ahead. Vernon Stanchfield, a farmer from Palmyra, claimed it would be a mild one—fall rain uses up winter snow was his scripture.

Ben had heard rumors of Frankie-or-Freddy and his gum-stick long before the kid had vaulted into the limelight by discovering the body of Veronica Grogan. “He’s really gross,” a kid named Richie Tozier had confided to Ben one day during activity period. Tozier was a scrawny kid who wore glasses.

“I heard it from this kid Vic Crumly who said he heard it from his dad,” Beverly said, “so maybe it’s true. Vic said his dad said that once they fell into the water they were as good as dead because there was nothing to hold onto.

Victor Criss. Oh Christ, that was nothing he wanted to know, not at this late date, but it didn’t seem to matter in the slightest. Something was happening down there in the vaults, down there where Rich Tozier kept his own personal collection of Golden Oldies. Doors were opening.

Richie Tozier might or might not have remembered him; he was Vincent Caruso Taliendo, better known to his fifth-grade contemporaries as “Boogers” Taliendo.

He looked at the ad to which Richie was pointing. “Horror movies,” Wentworth Tozier said. “Yeah,” Richie said, grinning. “Feel like you have to go,” Wentworth Tozier said. “Yeah!” “Feel like you’ll probably die in convulsions of disappointment if you don’t get to see those two trashy movies.”

The truck’s cab had no doors; likewise there was no windshield. The seat was half of an old sofa that Will Hanlon had scrounged from the Derry dump. The stick-shift ended in a glass doorknob.

The following morning Bryant Gumble and Willard Scott of the Today show would be in Derry. During the course of the program, Gumble would interview Andrew Keene. “Whole Standpipe just crashed over and rolled down the hill,” Andrew said. “It was like wow. You know what I mean?

… the men that had murdered his friends—Hamilton Tracker, William Mueller, and Richard Bowie were the names he mentioned the most frequently. All of them lived in Derry, and their gabled gambrelled cupola-ed houses stand on West Broadway to this day. Years later, they and their descendants would fire the Black …

Right now a gang of men—Zack Denbrough, George’s and Bill’s father, among them—were removing the sandbags they had thrown up the day before with such panicky haste. Yesterday overflow and expensive flood damage had seemed almost inevitable.