It (68 page)

(probably a cowbird)

after all, not a golden eagle or a great auk.

Stan recased his binoculars and put away his bird-album. Then he got up and looked around to see if he could tell what had been responsible for that sudden loud noise. It hadn't sounded like a gun or a car backfire. More like a door being thrown open in a spooky movie about castles and dungeons . . . complete with hokey echo effects.

He could see nothing.

He got up and started toward the slope down to Kansas Street. The Standpipe was now on his right, a chalky white cylinder, phantomlike in the mist and the growing darkness. It seemed almost to . . . to float.

That was an odd thought. He supposed it must have come from his own head—where else could a thought come from?—but it somehow did not seem like his own thought at all.

He looked at the Standpipe more closely, and then veered in that direction without even thinking about it. Windows circled the building at intervals, rising around it in a spiral that made Stan think of the barber pole in front of Mr. Aurlette's shop, where he and his dad got their haircuts. The bone-white shingles bulged out over each of those dark windows like brows over eyes.
Wonder how they did that,
Stan thought—not with as much interest as Ben Hanscom would have felt, but with some—and that was when he saw there was a much larger space of darkness at the foot of the Standpipe—a clear oblong in the circular base.

He stopped, frowning, thinking that was a funny place for a window: it was completely out of symmetry with the others. Then he realized it wasn't a window. It was a door.

The noise I heard,
he thought.
It was that door, blowing open.

He looked around. Early, gloomy dusk. White sky now fading to a dull dusky purple, mist thickening a bit more toward the steady rain which would fall most of the night. Dusk and mist and no wind at all.

So . . . if it hadn't blown open, had someone pushed it open? Why? And it looked like an awfully heavy door to slam open hard enough to make a noise like that boom. He supposed a very big person . . . maybe . . .

Curious, Stan walked over for a closer look.

The door was bigger than he had first supposed—six feet high and two feet thick, the boards which composed it bound with brass
strips. Stan swung it half-closed. It moved smoothly and easily on its hinges in spite of its size. It also moved silently—there was not a single squeak. He had moved it to see how much damage it had done to the shingles, blasting open like that. There was no damage at all; not so much as a single mark. Weirdsville, as Richie would say.

Well, it wasn't the door you heard, that's all,
he thought.
Maybe a jet from Loring boomed over Derry, or something. Door was probably open all al—

His foot struck something. Stan looked down and saw it was a padlock . . . correction. It was the
remains
of a padlock. It had been burst wide open. It looked, in fact, as if someone had rammed the lock's keyway full of gunpowder and then set a match to it. Flowers of metal, deadly sharp, stood out from the body of the lock in a stiff spray. Stan could see the layers of steel inside. The thick hasp hung askew by one bolt which had been yanked three-quarters of the way out of the wood. The other three hasp-bolts lay on the wet grass. They had been twisted like pretzels.

Frowning, Stan swung the door open again and peered inside.

Narrow stairs led upward, circling around and out of sight. The outer wall of the staircase was bare wood supported by giant crossbeams which had been pegged together rather than nailed. To Stan some of the pegs looked thicker than his own upper arm. The inner wall was steel from which gigantic rivets swelled like boils.

“Is anyone here?” Stan asked.

There was no answer.

He hesitated, then stepped inside so he could see up the narrow throat of the staircase a little better. Nothing. And it was Creep City in here. As Richie would
also
say. He turned to leave . . . and heard music.

It was faint, but still instantly recognizable.

Calliope music.

He cocked his head, listening, the frown on his face starting to dissolve a little. Calliope music, all right, the music of carnivals and county fairs. It conjured up trace memories which were as delightful as they were ephemeral: popcorn, cotton candy, doughboys frying in hot grease, the chain-driven clatter of rides like the Wild Mouse, the Whip, the Koaster-Kups.

Now the frown had become a tentative grin. Stan went up one
step, then two more, head still cocked. He paused again. As if thinking about carnivals could actually create one; he could now actually
smell
the popcorn, the cotton candy, the doughboys . . . and more! Peppers, chili-dogs, cigarette smoke and sawdust. There was the sharp smell of white vinegar, the kind you could shake over your french fries through a hole in the tin cap. He could smell mustard, bright yellow and stinging hot, that you spread on your hotdog with a wooden paddle.

This was amazing . . . incredible . . . irresistible.

He took another step up and that was when he heard the rustling, eager footsteps above him, descending the stairs. He cocked his head again. The calliope music had gotten suddenly louder, as if to mask the sound of the footsteps. He could recognize the tune now—it was “Camptown Races.”

Footsteps, yeah; but they weren't exactly
rustling
footsteps, were they? They actually sounded kind of . . .
squishy,
didn't they? The sound was like people walking in rubbers full of water.

Camptown ladies sing dis song, doodah doodah

(Squish-squish)

Camptown Racetrack nine miles long, doodah doodah

(Squish-slosh—closer now)

Ride around all night

Ride around all day . . .

Now there were shadows bobbing on the wall above him.

The terror leaped down Stan's throat all at once—it was like swallowing something hot and horrible, bad medicine that suddenly galvanized you like electricity. It was the shadows that did it.

He saw them only for a moment. He had just that small bit of time to observe that there were two of them, that they were slumped, and somehow unnatural. He had only that moment because the light in here was fading, fading too fast, and as he turned, the heavy Standpipe door swung ponderously shut behind him.

Stanley ran back down the stairs (somehow he had climbed more than a dozen, although he could only remember climbing two, three at most), very much afraid now. It was too dark in here to see anything.
He could hear his own breathing, he could hear the calliope tootling away somewhere above him

(what's a calliope doing up there in the dark? who's playing it?)

and he could hear those wet footsteps. Approaching him now. Getting closer.

He hit the door with his hands splayed out in front of him, hit it hard enough to send sparkly tingles of pain all the way up to his elbows. It had swung so easily before . . . and now it would not move at all.

No . . . that was not quite true. At first it had moved just a bit, just enough for him to see a mocking strip of gray light running vertically down its left side. Then gone again. As if someone was on the other side of it, holding the door closed.

Panting, terrified, Stan pushed against the door with all of his strength. He could feel the brass bindings digging into his hands. Nothing.

He whirled around, now pressing his back and his splayed hands against the door. He could feel sweat, oily and hot, running down his forehead. The calliope music had gotten louder yet. It drifted and echoed down the spiral staircase. There was nothing cheery about it now. It had changed. It had become a dirge. It screamed like wind and water, and in his mind's eye Stan saw a county fair at the end of autumn, wind and rain blowing up a deserted midway, pennons flapping, tents bulging, falling over, wheeling away like canvas bats. He saw empty rides standing against the sky like scaffolds; the wind drummed and hooted in the weird angles of their struts. He suddenly understood that death was in this place with him, that death was coming for him out of the dark and he could not run.

A sudden rush of water spilled down the stairs. Now it was not popcorn and doughboys and cotton candy he smelled but wet decay, the stench of dead pork which has exploded in a fury of maggots in a place hidden away from the sun.

“Who's here?”
he screamed in a high, trembling voice.

He was answered by a low, bubbling voice that seemed choked with mud and old water.

“The dead ones, Stanley. We're the dead ones. We sank, but now we float . . . and you'll float, too.”

He could feel water washing around his feet. He cringed back against the door in an agony of fear. They were very close now. He could feel their nearness. He could
smell
them. Something was digging into his hip as he struck the door again and again in a mindless, useless effort to get away.

“We're dead, but sometimes we clown around a little, Stanley. Sometimes we—”

It was his bird-book.

Without thinking, Stan grabbed for it. It was stuck in his slicker pocket and wouldn't come out. One of
them
was down now; he could hear it shuffling across the little stone areaway where he had come in. It would reach for him in a moment, and he would feel its cold flesh.

He gave one more tremendous yank, and the bird-book was in his hands. He held it in front of him like a puny shield, not thinking of what he was doing, but suddenly sure that this was
right.

“Robins!” he screamed into the darkness, and for a moment the thing approaching (it was surely less than five steps away now) hesitated—he was almost sure it did. And for a moment hadn't he felt some give in the door against which he was now cringing?

But he
wasn't
cringing anymore. He was standing up straight in the darkness. When had that happened? No time to wonder. Stan licked his dry lips and began to chant: “Robins! Gray egrets! Loons! Scarlet tanagers! Grackles! Hammerhead woodpeckers! Redheaded woodpeckers! Chickadees! Wrens! Peli—”

The door opened with a protesting scream and Stan took a giant step backward into thin misty air. He fell sprawling on the dead grass. He had bent the bird-book nearly in half, and later that night he would see the clear impressions of his fingers sunken into its cover, as if it had been bound in Play-Doh instead of hard pressboard.

He didn't try to get up but began to dig in with his heels instead, his butt grooving through the slick grass. His lips were pulled back over his teeth. Inside that dim oblong he could see two sets of legs below the diagonal shadowline thrown by the door, which now stood half-open. He could see jeans that had decayed to a purplish-black. Orange threads lay plastered limply against the seams, and water dripped from the cuffs to puddle around shoes that had mostly rotted away, revealing swelled, purple toes within.

Their hands lay limply at their sides, too long, too waxy-white. Depending from each finger was a small orange pompom.

Holding his bent bird-book in front of him, his face wet with drizzle, sweat, and tears, Stan whispered in a husky monotone: “Chickenhawks . . . grosbeaks . . . hummingbirds . . . albatrosses . . . kiwis . . .

One of those hands turned over, showing a palm from which endless water had eroded all the lines, leaving something as idiot-smooth as the hand of a department-store dummy.

One finger unrolled . . . then rolled up again. The pompom bounced and dangled, dangled and bounced.

It was beckoning him.

Stan Uris, who would die in a bathtub with crosses slashed into his forearms twenty-seven years later, got to his knees, then to his feet, then ran. He ran across Kansas Street without looking either way for traffic and paused, panting, on the far sidewalk, to look back.

From this angle he couldn't see the door in the base of the Standpipe; only the Standpipe itself, thick and yet somehow graceful, standing in the murk.

“They were dead,” Stan whispered to himself, shocked.

He wheeled suddenly and ran for home.

The dryer had stopped. So had Stan.

The three others only looked at him for a long moment. His skin was nearly as gray as the April evening of which he had just told them.

“Wow,” Ben said at last. He let out his breath in a ragged, whistling sigh.

“It's true,” Stan said in a low voice. “I swear to God it is.”

“I believe you,” Beverly said. “After what happened at my house, I'd believe
anything.”

She got up suddenly, almost knocking over her chair, and went to the dryer. She began to pull out the rags one by one, folding them. Her back was turned, but Ben suspected she was crying. He wanted to go to her and lacked the courage.

“We gotta talk to Bill about this,” Eddie said. “Bill will know what to do.”

“Do?” Stan said, turning to look at him. “What do you mean,
do?”

Eddie looked at him, uncomfortable. “Well . . .”

“I don't want to
do
anything,” Stan said. He was looking at Eddie with such a hard, fierce stare that Eddie squirmed in his chair. “I want to
forget
about it. That's all I want to
do.”

“Not that easy,” Beverly said quietly, turning around. Ben had been right: the hot sunlight slanting in through the Washateria's dirty windows reflected off bright lines of tears on her cheeks. “It's not just
us.
I heard Ronnie Grogan. And the little boy I heard first . . . I think maybe it was that little Clements kid. The one who disappeared off his trike.”

“So
what?”
Stan said defiantly.

“So what if it gets more?” she asked. “What if it gets more kids?”