It

by Stephen King

  Can't be done, mate, the union boss said. Against the union charter to have a man step in for a woman. Sexual discrimination.

  In the movie business Freddie's temper was fabled, and at that point he had lost it. He told the union boss, a fat man whose B.O. was almost paralyzing, to bugger himself. The union boss told Freddie he better watch his gob or there would be no more stunts on the set of Attic Room at all. Then he had rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in a baksheesh gesture that had driven Freddie crazy. The union boss was big but soft; Freddie, who still played football every chance he got and who had once bowled a century at cricket, was big and hard. He threw the union boss out, went back into his office to meditate, and then came out again twenty minutes later hollering for Bill. He wanted the entire scene rewritten so that the fall could be scrubbed. Audra had to tell Freddie that Bill was no longer in England.

  "What?" Freddie said. His mouth hung open. He was looking at Audra as if he believed she had gone mad. "What are you telling me?"

  "He's been called back to the States--that's what I'm telling you."

  Freddie made as if to grab her and Audra shrank back, a bit afraid. Freddie looked down at his hands, then put them in his pockets and only looked at her.

  "I'm sorry, Freddie," she said in a small voice. "Really."

  She got up and poured herself a cup of coffee from the Silex on Freddie's hotplate, noticing that her hands were trembling slightly. As she sat down she heard Freddie's amplified voice over the studio loudspeakers, telling everyone to go home or to the pub; the day's shooting was off. Audra winced. There went a minimum of ten thousand pounds, right down the bog.

  Freddie turned off the studio intercom, got up, poured his own cup of coffee. He sat down again and offered her his pack of Silk Cut cigarettes.

  Audra shook her head.

  Freddie took one, lit it, and squinted at her through the smoke. "This is serious, isn't it?"

  "Yes," Audra said, keeping her composure as best she could.

  "What's happened?"

  And because she genuinely liked Freddie and genuinely trusted him, Audra told him everything she knew. Freddie listened intently, gravely. It didn't take long to tell; doors were still slamming and engines starting in the parking lot outside when she finished.

  Freddie was silent for some time, looking out his window. Then he swung back to her. "He's had a nervous breakdown of some sort."

  Audra shook her head. "No. It wasn't like that. He wasn't like that." She swallowed and added, "Maybe you had to be there."

  Freddie smiled crookedly. "You must realize that grown men rarely feel compelled to honor promises they made as little boys. And you've read Bill's work; you know how much of it is about childhood, and it's very good stuff indeed. Very much on the nail. The idea that he's forgotten everything that ever happened to him back then is absurd."

  "The scars on his hands," Audra said. "They were never there. Not until this morning."

  "Bollocks! You just didn't notice them until this morning." She shrugged helplessly. "I'd've noticed."

  She could see he didn't believe that, either.

  "What's to do, then?" Freddie asked her, and she could only shake her head. Freddie lit another cigarette from the smoldering end of the first. "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 Row-land round to his office. Teddy's a pouf, but he could talk the birds down from the trees. But what happens after? We've got four weeks of shooting left, and here's your husband somewhere in Massachusetts--"

  "Maine--"

  He waved a hand. "Wherever. And how much good are you going to be without him?"

  "I--"

  He leaned forward. "I like you, Audra. I genuinely do. And I like Bill--even in spite of this mess. We can make do, I guess. If the script needs cobbling up, I can cobble it. I've done my share of that sort of shoemaking in my time, Christ knows.... If he doesn't like the way it turns out, he'll have no one but himself to blame. I can do without Bill, but I can't do without you. I can't have you running off to the States after your man, and I've got to have you putting out at full power. Can you do that?"

  "I don't know."

  "Nor do I. But I want you to think about something. We can keep things quiet for awhile, maybe for the rest of the shoot, if you'll stand up like a trouper and do your job. But if you take off, it can't be kept quiet. I can be pissy, but I'm not vindictive by nature and I'm not going to tell you that if you take off I'll see that you never work in the business again. But you should know that if you get a reputation for temperament, you might end up stuck with just that. I'm talking to you like a Dutch uncle, I know. Do you resent it?"

  "No," she said listlessly. In truth, she didn't care much one way or the other. Bill was all she could think of. Freddie was a nice enough man, but Freddie didn't understand; in the last analysis, nice man or not, all he could think of was what this was going to do to his picture. He had not seen the look in Bill's eyes ... or heard him stutter.

  "Good." He stood up. "Come on over to the Hare and Hounds with me. We can both use a drink."

  She shook her head. "A drink's the last thing I need. I'm going home and think this out."

  "I'll call for the car," he said.

  "No. I'll take the train."

  He looked at her fixedly, one hand on the telephone. "I believe you mean to go after him," Freddie said, "and I'm telling you that it's a serious mistake, dear girl. He's got a bee in his bonnet, but at bottom he's steady enough. He'll shake it, and when he does he'll come back. If he'd wanted you along, he would have said so."

  "I haven't decided anything," she said, knowing that she had in fact decided everything; had decided even before the car picked her up that morning.

  "Have a care, love," Freddie said. "Don't do something you'll regret later."

  She felt the force of his personality beating on her, demanding that she give in, make the promise, do her job, wait passively for Bill to come back ... or to disappear again into that hole of the past from which he had come.

  She went to him and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "I'll see you, Freddie."

  She went home and called British Airways. She told the clerk she might be interested in reaching a small Maine city called Derry if it was at all possible. There had been silence while the woman consulted her computer terminal ... and then the news, like a sign from heaven, that BA #23 made a stop in Bangor, which was less than fifty miles away.

  "Shall I book the flight for you, ma'am?"

  Audra closed her eyes and saw Freddie's craggy, mostly kind, very earnest face, heard him saying: Have a care, love. Don't do something you'll regret later.

  Freddie didn't want her to go; Bill didn't want her to go; so why was her heart screaming at her that she had to go? She closed her eyes. Jesus, I feel so fucked up--

  "Ma'am ? Are you still holding the wire?"

  "Book it," Audra said, then hesitated. Have a care love.... Maybe she should sleep on it; get some distance between herself and the craziness. She began to rummage in her purse for her American Express card. "For tomorrow. First class if you have it, but I'll take anything." And if I change my mind I can cancel. Probably will. I'll wake up sane and everything will be clear.

  But nothing had been clear this morning, and her heart clamored just as loudly for her to go. Her sleep had been a crazy tapestry of nightmares. So she had called Freddie, not because she wanted to but because she felt she owed him that. She had not gotten far--she was trying, in some stumbling way, to tell him how much she felt Bill might need her--when there was a soft click at Freddie's end. He had hung up without saying a word after his initial hello.

  But in a way, Audra thought, that soft click said everything that needed to be said.

  7

  The plane landed at Bangor at 7:09, EDT. Audra was the only passenger to deplane, and the others looked at her with a kind of thoughtful curiosity, probably wondering why any
one would choose to get off here, in this godforsaken little place. Audra thought of telling them I'm looking for my husband, that's why. He came back to a little town near here because one of his boyhood chums called him and reminded him of a promise he couldn't quite remember. The call also reminded him that he hadn't thought of his dead brother in over twenty years. Oh yes: it also brought back his stutter ... and some funny white scars on the palms of his hands.

  And then, she thought, the customs agent standing by in the jetway would whistle up the men in the white coats.

  She collected her single piece of luggage--it looked very lonely riding the carousel all by itself--and approached the rental-car booths as Tom Rogan would about an hour later. Her luck was better than his would be; National Car Rental had a Datsun.

  The girl filled out the form and Audra signed it.

  "I thought it was you," the girl said, and then, timidly:

  "Might I please have your autograph?"

  Audra gave it, writing her name on the back of a rental form, and thought: Enjoy it while you can, girl. If Freddie Firestone is right, it won't be worth doodley-squat five years from now.

  With some amusement she realized that, after only fifteen minutes back in the States, she had begun to think like an American again.

  She got a roadmap, and the girl, so star-struck she could barely talk, managed to trace out her best route to Derry.

  Ten minutes later Audra was on the road, reminding herself at every intersection that if she forgot and began driving on the left, they would be scrubbing her off the asphalt.

  And as she drove, she realized that she was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.

  8

  By one of those odd quirks of fate or coincidence which sometimes obtain (and which, in truth, obtained more frequently in Derry), Tom had taken a room at the Koala Inn on Outer Jackson Street and Audra had taken a room at the Holiday Inn; the two motels were side by side, their parking lots divided only by a raised concrete sidewalk. And as it so happened, Audra's rented Datsun and Tom's purchased LTD wagon were parked nose-to-nose, separated only by that walkway. Both slept now, Audra quietly on her side, Tom Rogan on his back, snoring so heavily that his swollen lips flapped.

  9

  Henry spent that day hiding--hiding in the puckies beside Route 9. Sometimes he slept. Sometimes he lay watching police cruisers slide by like hunting dogs. While the Losers ate lunch, Henry listened to voices from the moon.

  And when dark fell, he went out to the verge of the road and stuck out his thumb.

  After awhile, some fool came along and picked him up.

  DERRY: THE THIRD INTERLUDE

  "A bird came down the Walk--

  He did not know I saw--

  He bit an Angleworm in halves

  And ate the fellow, raw"

  --Emily Dickinson, "A Bird Came Down the Walk"

  March 17th,1985

  The fire at the Black Spot happened in the late fall of 1930. So far as I am able to determine, that fire--the one my father barely escaped--ended the cycle of murder and disappearance which happened in the years 1929-30, just as the explosion at the Ironworks ended a cycle some twenty-five years before. It is as if a monstrous sacrifice is needed at the end of the cycle to quiet whatever terrible force it is which works here... to send It to sleep for another quarter-century or so.

  But if such a sacrifice is needed to end each cycle, it seems that some similar event is needed to set each cycle in motion.

  Which brings me to the Bradley Gang.

  Their execution took place at the three-way intersection of Canal, Main, and Kansas--not far, in fact, from the place shown in the picture which began to move for Bill and Richie one day in June of 1958--some thirteen months before the fire at the Black Spot, in October of 1929 ... not long before the stock-market crash.

  As with the fire at the Black Spot, many Derry residents affect not to remember what happened that day. Or they were out of town, visiting relatives. Or they were napping that afternoon and never found out what had happened until they heard it on the radio news that night. Or they will simply look you full in the face and lie to you.

  The police logs for that day indicate that Chief Sullivan was not even in town (Sure I remember, Aloysius Nell told me from a chair on the sun-terrace of the Paulson Nursing Home in Bangor. That was my first year on the force, and I ought to remember. He was off in western Maine, bird-hunting. They'd been sheeted and carried off by the time he got back. 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 A1 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 the proprietor of the Center Street Drug Store from 1925 until 1975. He talked to me willingly enough, but, like Betty Ripsom's father, he made me turn off my tape-recorder before he would really unwind the tale--not that it mattered; I can hear his papery voice yet--another a capella singer in the damned choir that is this town.

  "No reason not to tell you," he said. "No one will print it, and no one would believe it even if they did." He offered me an old-fashioned apothecary jar. "Licorice whip? As I remember, you were always partial to the red ones, Mikey."

  I took one. "Was Chief Sullivan there that day?"

  Mr. Keene laughed and took a licorice whip for himself. "You wondered about that, did you?"

  "I wondered," I agreed, chewing a piece of the red licorice. I hadn't had one since I was a kid, shoving my pennies across the counter to a much younger and sprier Mr. Keene. It tasted just as fine as it had back then.

  "You're too young to remember when Bobby Thomson hit his home run for the Giants in the play-off game in 1951," Mr. Keene said. "You wouldn't have been but four years old. Well! They ran an article about that game in the newspaper a few years after, and it seemed like just about a million folks from New York claimed they were there in the ballpark that day." Mr. Keene gummed his licorice whip and a little dark drool ran down from the corner of his mouth. He wiped it off fastidiously with his handkerchief. We were sitting in the office behind the drugstore, because although Norbert Keene was eighty-five and retired ten years, he still did the books for his grandson.

  "Just the opposite when it comes to the Bradley Gang!" Keene exclaimed. He was smiling, but it was not a pleasant smile--it was cynical, coldly reminiscent. "There was maybe twenty thousand people who lived in downtown Derry back then. Main Street and Canal Street had both been paved for four years, but Kansas Street was still dirt. Raised dust in the summer and turned into a boghole every March and November. They used to oil Up-Mile Hill every June and every Fourth of July the Mayor would talk about how they were going to pave Kansas Street, but it never happened until 1942. It... but what was I saying?"

  "Twenty thousand people who lived right downtown," I prompted.

  "Oh. Ayuh. Well, of those twenty thousand, there's probably half that have passed away since, maybe even more--fifty years is a long time. And people have a funny way of dying young in Derry. Perhaps it is the air. But of those left, I don't think you'd find more than a dozen who'd say they were in town the day the Bradley Gang went to Tophet. 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. 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. 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. They were all there...."

  He trailed off vaguely, looking at the licorice whip in his hand. I thought of prodding hi
m and decided not to.

  At last he said, "Most of the others would lie about it, the way people lied and said they were there when Bobby Thomson hit his homer, that's all I mean. But people lied about being at that ballgame because they wished they had been there. People would lie to you about being in Derry that day because they wish they hadn't been. Do you understand me, sonny?"

  I nodded.

  "You sure you want to hear the rest of this?" Mr. Keene asked me. "You're looking a bit peaked, Mr. Mikey."

  "I don't," I said, "but I think I better, all the same."

  "Okay," Mr. Keene said mildly. It was my day for memories; as he offered me the apothecary jar with the licorice whips in it, I suddenly remembered a radio program my mother and dad used to listen to when I was just a little kid: Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons.

  "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.

  "Well, that's an instructive tale in itself," Mr. Keene said, and the cynical smile creased his face again. "Bradley wasn't never Public Enemy Number One on the FBI's hit parade, but they had wanted him--since 1928 or so. To show they could cut the mustard, I guess. Al Bradley and his brother George hit six or seven banks across the Midwest and then kidnapped a banker for ransom. The ransom was paid--thirty thousand dollars, a big sum for those days--but they killed the banker anyway.

  "By then the Midwest had gotten a little toasty for the gangs that ran there, so Al and George and their litter of ratlings run northeast, up this way. They rented themselves a big farmhouse just over the town line in Newport, not far from where the Rhulin Farms are today.