It (86 page)

He walked across the wide floor with its red-and-black linoleum pattern almost completely worn away, trying as he had always tried back then to hush the sound of his footfalls—the adult library rose up to a dome in the middle, and all sounds were magnified.

He saw that the circular iron staircases leading to the stacks were still there, one on either side of the horseshoe-shaped main desk, but he also saw that a tiny cagework elevator had been added at some point in the twenty-five years since he and his mamma had moved away. It was something of a relief—it drove a wedge into that suffocating feeling of
déjà-vu.

He felt like an interloper crossing the wide floor, a spy from another country. He kept expecting the librarian at the desk to raise her head, look at him, and then challenge him in clear, ringing tones that would shatter the concentration of every reader here and focus every eye upon him:
“You! Yes, you! What are you doing here? You have no business here! You're from Outside! You're from Before! Go back where you came from! Go back right now, before I call the police!”

She did look up, a young girl, pretty, and for one absurd moment it seemed to Ben that the fantasy was really going to come true, and his heart rose into his throat as her pale-blue eyes touched his. Then they passed on indifferently, and Ben found he could walk again. If he was a spy, he hadn't been found out.

He passed under the coil of one of the narrow and almost suicidally steep wrought-iron staircases on his way to the corridor leading to the Children's Library, and was amused to realize (only after he had done it) that he had run down another old track of his childhood behavior. He had looked up, hoping, as he had hoped as a kid, to see a
girl in a skirt coming down those steps. He could remember
(now
he could remember) glancing up there for no reason at all one day when he was eight or nine and looking right up the chino skirt of a pretty high-school girl and seeing her clean pink underwear. As the sudden sunlit glint of Beverly Marsh's ankle-bracelet had shot an arrow of something more primitive than simple love or affection through his heart on the last day of school in 1958, so had the sight of the high-school girl's panties affected him; he could remember sitting at a table in the Children's Library and thinking of that unexpected view for perhaps as long as twenty minutes, his cheeks and forehead hot, a book about the history of trains open and unread before him, his penis a hard little branch in his pants, a branch that had sunk its roots all the way up into his belly. He had fantasized the two of them married, living in a small house on the outskirts of town, indulging in pleasures he did not in the least understand.

The feelings had passed off almost as suddenly as they had come, but he had never walked under the stairway again without glancing up. He hadn't ever seen anything else as interesting or affecting (once a fat lady working her way down with ponderous care, but he had looked away from
that
sight hastily, feeling ashamed, like a violator), but the habit persisted—he had done it again now, as a grown man.

He walked slowly down the glassed-in passageway, noticing other changes now: Yellow decals that said
OPEC LOVES IT WHEN YOU WASTE ENERGY, SO SAVE A WATT
! had been plastered over the switchplates. The framed pictures on the far wall when he entered this scaled-down world of blonde-wood tables and small blondewood chairs, this world where the drinking fountain was only four feet high, were not of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon but of Ronald Reagan and George Bush—Reagan, Ben recalled, had been host of
GE Theater
in the year that Ben had graduated from the fifth grade, and George Bush would not have seen thirty yet.

But—

That feeling of
déjà-vu
swept him again. He was helpless before it, and this time he felt the numb horror of a man who finally realizes, after half an hour of helpless splashing, that the shore is growing no closer and he is drowning.

It was story hour, and over in the corner a group of roughly a dozen little ones sat solemnly on their tiny chairs in a semicircle,
listening.
“Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge?”
the librarian said in the low, growling tones of the troll in the story, and Ben thought:
When she raises her head I'll see that it's Miss Davies, yes, it'll be Miss Davies and she won't look a day older—

But when she did raise her head, he saw a much younger woman than Miss Davies had been even then.

Some of the children covered their mouths and giggled, but others only watched her, their eyes reflecting the eternal fascination of the fairy story: would the monster be bested . . . or would it feed?

“It is I, Billy Goat Gruff, trip-trapping on your bridge,” the librarian went on, and Ben, pale, walked past her.

How can it be the same story?
The very same story?
Am I supposed to believe that's just coincidence? Because I don't . . . goddammit, I just don't!

He bent to the drinking fountain, bending so far he felt like Richie doing one of his salami-salami-baloney routines.

I ought to talk to someone,
he thought, panicked.
Mike. . . . Bill . . . someone. Is something really stapling the past and present together here, or am I only imagining it? Because if I'm not, I'm not sure I bargained for this much. I—

He looked at the checkout desk, and his heart seemed to stop in his chest for a moment before beginning to race doubletime. The poster was simple, stark . . . and familiar. It said simply:

REMEMBER THE CURFEW.

7 P.M.

DERRY POLICE DEPARTMENT

In that instant it all seemed to come clear to him—it came in a grisly flash of light, and he realized that the vote they had taken was a joke. There was no turning back, never had been. They were on a track as preordained as the memory-track which had caused him to look up when he passed under the stairway leading to the stacks. There was an echo here in Derry, a deadly echo, and all they could hope for was that the echo could be changed enough in their favor to allow them to escape with their lives.

“Christ,” he muttered, and scrubbed a palm up one cheek, hard.

“Can I help you, sir?” a voice at his elbow asked, and he jumped a little. It was a girl of perhaps seventeen, her dark-blonde hair held
back from her pretty high-schooler's face with barrettes. A library assistant, of course; they'd had them in 1958 too, high-school girls and boys who shelved books, showed kids how to use the card catalogue, discussed book reports and school papers, helped bewildered scholars with their footnotes and bibliographies. The pay was a pittance, but there were always kids willing to do it. It was agreeable work.

On the heels of this, reading the girl's pleasant but questioning look a little more closely, he remembered that he no longer really belonged here—he was a giant in the land of little people. An intruder. In the adults' library he had felt uneasy about the possibility of being looked at or spoken to, but here it was something of a relief. For one thing, it proved he was still an adult, and the fact that the girl was clearly braless under her thin Western-style shirt was also more relief than turn-on: if proof that this was 1985 and not 1958 was needed, the clearly limned points of her nipples against the cotton of her shirt was it.

“No thank you,” he said, and then, for no reason at all that he could understand, he heard himself add: “I was looking for my son.”

“Oh? What's his name? Maybe I've seen him.” She smiled. “I know most of the kids.”

“His name is Ben Hanscom,” he said. “But I don't see him here.”

“Tell me what he looks like and I'll give him a message, if there is one.”

“Well,” Ben said, uncomfortable now and beginning to wish he had never started this, “he's on the stout side, and he looks a little bit like me. But it's no big deal, miss. If you see him, just tell him his dad popped by on his way home.”

“I will,” she said, and smiled, but the smile didn't reach her eyes, and Ben suddenly realized that she hadn't come over and spoken to him out of simple politeness and a wish to help. She happened to be a library assistant in the Children's Library in a town where nine children had been slain over a span of eight months. You see a strange man in this scaled-down world where adults rarely come except to drop their kids off or pick them up. You're suspicious . . . of course.

“Thank you,” he said, gave her a smile he hoped was reassuring, and then got the hell out.

He walked back through the corridor to the adults' library and went to the desk on an impulse he didn't understand . . . but of
course they were supposed to follow their impulses this afternoon, weren't they? Follow their impulses and see where they led.

The name plate on the circulation desk identified the pretty young librarian as Carole Danner. Behind her, Ben could see a door with a frosted-glass panel; lettered on this was
MICHAEL HANLON HEAD LIBRARIAN
.

“May I help you?” Ms. Danner asked.

“I think so,” Ben said. “That is, I hope so. I'd like to get a library card.”

“Very good,” she said, and took out a form. “Are you a resident of Derry?”

“Not presently.”

“Home address, then?”

“Rural Star Route 2, Hemingford Home, Nebraska.” He paused for a moment, a little amused by her stare, and then reeled off the Zip Code: “59341.”

“Is this a joke, Mr. Hanscom?”

“Not at all.”

“Are you moving to Derry, then?”

“I have no plans to, no.”

“This is a long way to come to borrow books, isn't it? Don't they have libraries in Nebraska?”

“It's kind of a sentimental thing,” Ben said. He would have thought telling a stranger this would be embarrassing, but he found it wasn't. “I grew up in Derry, you see. This is the first time I've been back since I was a kid. I've been walking around, seeing what's changed and what hasn't. And all at once it occurred to me that I spent about ten years of my life here between ages three and thirteen, and I don't have a single thing to remember those years by. Not so much as a postcard. I had some silver dollars, but I lost one of them and gave the rest to a friend. I guess what I want is a souvenir of my childhood. It's late, but don't they say better late than never?”

Carole Danner smiled, and the smile changed her pretty face into one that was beautiful. “I think that's very sweet,” she said. “If you'd like to browse for ten or fifteen minutes, I'll have the card made up for you when you come back to the desk.”

Ben grinned a little. “I guess there'll be a fee,” he said. “Out-of-towner and all.”

“Did you have a card when you were a boy?”

“I sure did.” Ben smiled. “Except for my friends, I guess that library card was the most important—”

“Ben, would you come up here?” a voice called suddenly, cutting across the library hush like a scalpel.

He turned around, jumping guiltily the way people do when someone shouts in a library. He saw no one he knew . . . and realized a moment later that no one had looked up or shown any sign of surprise or annoyance. The old men still read their copies of the Derry
News,
the Boston
Globe, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report.
At the tables in the Reference Room, two high-school girls still had their heads together over a stack of papers and a pile of file-cards. Several browsers went on looking through the books on the shelves marked
CURRENT FICTION—SEVEN-DAY-LOAN
. An old man in a ridiculous driving-cap, a cold pipe clenched between his teeth, went on leafing through a folio of Luis de Vargas' sketches.

He turned back to the young woman, who was looking at him, puzzled.

“Is anything wrong?”

“No,” Ben said, smiling. “I thought I heard something. I guess I'm more jet-lagged than I thought. What were you saying?”

“Well, actually
you
were saying. But I was about to add that if you had a card when you were a resident, your name will still be in the files,” she said. “We keep everything on microfiche now. Some change from when you were a kid here, I guess.”

“Yes,” he said. “A lot of things have changed in Derry . . . but a lot of things also seem to have remained the same.”

“Anyway, I can just look you up and give you a renewal card. No charge.”

“That's great,” Ben said, and before he could add thanks the voice cut through the library's sacramental silence again, louder now, ominously jolly:
“Come on up, Ben! Come on up, you fat little fuck! This is Your Life, Ben Hanscom!”

Ben cleared his throat. “I appreciate it,” he said.

“Don't mention it.” She cocked her head at him. “Has it gotten warm outside?”

“A little,” he said. “Why?”

“You're—”

“Ben Hanscom did it!”
the voice screamed. It was coming from above—coming from the stacks.
“Ben Hanscom killed the children! Get him! Grab him!”

“—perspiring,” she finished.

“Am I?” he said idiotically.

“I'll have this made up right away,” she said.

“Thank you.”

She headed for the old Royal typewriter at the corner of her desk.

Ben walked slowly away, his heart a thudding drum in his chest. Yes, he was sweating; he could feel it trickling down from his forehead, his armpits, matting the hair on his chest. He looked up and saw Pennywise the Clown standing at the top of the lefthand staircase, looking down at him. His face was white with greasepaint. His mouth bled lipstick in a killer's grin. There were empty sockets where his eyes should have been. He held a bunch of balloons in one hand and a book in the other.