Chapter 8
In the weeks before Halloween, Mr. George Amberson inspected almost every commercial-zoned piece of property in Derry and the surrounding towns.
I knew better than to believe that I’d ever be accepted as a townie on short notice, but I wanted to get the locals accustomed to the sight of my sporty red Sunliner convertible, just part of the scenery.
There goes that real estate fella, been here almost a month now.
If he knows what he’s doin, there might be some money in it for someone.
I made a point of checking out the defunct Kitchener Ironworks not long after speaking with Chaz Frati.
It was in a large overgrown stretch of empty to the north of town, and yes, it would be the perfect spot for a shopping mall once the extension of the Mile-A-Minute Highway reached it.
But on the day I visited—leaving my car and walking when the road turned to axle-smashing rubble—it could have been the ruin of an ancient civilization: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Heaps of brick and rusty chunks of old machinery poked out of the high grass.
In the middle was a long-collapsed ceramic smokestack, its sides blackened by soot, its huge bore full of darkness.
If I’d lowered my head and hunched over, I could have walked into it, and I am not a short man.
I saw a lot of Derry in those weeks before Halloween, and I felt a lot of Derry.
Longtime residents were pleasant to me, but—with one exception—never chummy.
Chaz Frati was that exception, and in retrospect I guess his unprompted revelations should have struck me as odd, but I had a great many things on my mind, and Frati didn’t seem all that important.
I thought, sometimes you just meet a friendly guy, that’s all, and let it go at that.
Certainly I had no idea that a man named Bill Turcotte had put Frati up to it.
Bill Turcotte, aka No Suspenders.
2
Bevvie-from-the-levee had said she thought the bad times in Derry were over, but the more of it I saw (and the more I felt—that especially), the more I came to believe that Derry wasn’t like other places.
Derry wasn’t right. At first I tried to tell myself that it was me, not the town.
I was a man out of joint, a temporal bedouin, and any place would have felt a little strange to me, a little skewed—like the cities that seem so much like bad dreams in those strange Paul Bowles novels.
This was persuasive at first, but as the days passed and I continued to explore my new environment, it became less so.
I even began to question Beverly Marsh’s assertion that the bad times were over, and imagined (on nights when I couldn’t sleep, and there were quite a few of those) that she questioned it herself.
Hadn’t I glimpsed a seed of doubt in her eyes?
The look of someone who doesn’t quite believe but wants to? Maybe even needs to?
Something wrong, something bad.
Certain empty houses that seemed to stare like the faces of people suffering from terrible mental illness.
An empty barn on the outskirts of town, the hayloft door swinging slowly open and closed on rusty hinges, first disclosing darkness, then hiding it, then disclosing it again.
A splintered fence on Kossuth Street, just a block away from the house where Mrs. Dunning and her children lived.
To me that fence looked as if something—or someone—had been hurled through it and into the Barrens below.
An empty playground with the roundy-round slowly spinning even though there were no kids to push it and no appreciable wind to turn it.
It screamed on its hidden bearings as it moved.
One day I saw a roughly carved Jesus go floating down the canal and into the tunnel that ran beneath Canal Street.
It was three feet long. The teeth peeped from lips parted in a snarling grin.
A crown of thorns, jauntily askew, circled the forehead; bloody tears had been painted below the thing’s weird white eyes.
It looked like a juju fetish. On the so-called Kissing Bridge in Bassey Park, amid the declarations of school spirit and undying love, someone had carved the words I WILL KILL MY MOTHER SOON, and below it someone had added: NOT SOON ENOUGH SHES FULL OF DISEEZE.
One afternoon while walking on the east side of the Barrens, I heard a terrible squealing and looked up to see the silhouette of a thin man standing on the GS in here, time just floats away. You know you want to, you know you’re curious. Maybe it’s even another rabbit-hole. Another portal.
Maybe it was, but I don’t think so. I think it was Derry in there—everything that was wrong with it, everything that was askew, hiding in that pipe. Hibernating. Letting people believe the bad times were over, waiting for them to relax and forget there had ever been bad times at all.
I left in a hurry, and to that part of Derry I never went back.
3
One day in the second week of October—by then the oaks and elms on Kossuth Street were a riot of gold and red—I once more visited the defunct West Side Rec.
No self-respecting real estate bounty hunter would fail to fully investigate the possibilities of such a prime site, and I asked several people on the street what it was like inside (the door was padlocked, of course) and when it had closed.
One of the people I spoke to was Doris Dunning.
Pretty as a picture, Chaz Frati had said.
A generally meaningless cliché, but true in this case.
The years had put fine lines around her eyes and deeper ones at the corners of her mouth, but she had exquisite skin and a terrific full-breasted figure (in 1958, the heyday of Jayne Mansfield, full breasts are considered attractive rather than embarrassing).
We spoke on the stoop. To invite me in with the house empty and the kids at school would have been improper and no doubt the subject of neighborly gossip, especially with her husband “living out.” She had a dustrag in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
There was a bottle of furniture polish poking out of her apron pocket.
Like most folks in Derry, she was polite but distant.
Yes, she said, when it was still up and running, West Side Rec had been a fine facility for the kiddos.
It was so nice to have a place like that close by where they could go after school and race around to their hearts’ content.
She could see the playground and the basketball court from her kitchen window, and it was very sad to see them empty.
She said she thought the Rec had been closed in a round of budget cuts, but the way her eyes shifted and her mouth tucked in suggested something else to me: that it had been closed during the round of child-murders and disappearances.
Budget concerns might have been secondary.
I thanked her and handed her one of my recently printed business cards. She took it, gave me a distracted smile, and closed the door. It was a gentle close, not a slam, but I heard a rattle from behind it and knew she was putting on the chain.
I thought the Rec might do for my purposes when Halloween came, although I didn’t completely love it.
I anticipated no problems getting inside, and one of the front windows would give me a fine view of the street.
Dunning might come in his car rather than on foot, but I knew what it looked like.
It would be after dark, according to Harry’s essay, but there were streetlights.
Of course, that visibility thing cut both ways.
Unless he was totally fixated on what he’d come to do, Dunning would almost certainly see me running at him.
I had the pistol, but it was only dead accurate up to fifteen yards.
I’d need to be even closer before I dared risk a shot, because on Halloween night, Kossuth Street was sure to be alive with pint-sized ghosts and goblins.
Yet I couldn’t wait until he actually got in the house before breaking cover, because according to the essay, Doris Dunning’s estranged husband had gone to work right away.
By the time Harry came out of the bathroom, all of them were down and all but Ellen were dead.
If I waited, I was apt to see what Harry had seen: his mother’s brains soaking into the couch.