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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 & WM railroad trestle not far away. A stick rose and fell
in his hand. He was beating something. The squealing stopped and I thought, It was a dog and he’s
finished with it. He took it out there on a rope leash and beat it until it was dead. There was no way I could
have known such a thing, of course . . . and yet I did. I was sure then, and I am now.
Something wrong.
Something bad.
Do any of those things bear on the story I’m telling? The story of the janitor’s father, and of Lee
Harvey Oswald (he of the smirky little I-know-a-secret smile and gray eyes that would never quite
meet yours)? I don’t know for sure, but I can tell you one more thing: there was something inside that
fallen chimney at the Kitchener Ironworks. I don’t know what and I don’t want to know, but at the
mouth of the thing I saw a heap of gnawed bones and a tiny chewed collar with a bell on it. A collar
that had surely belonged to some child’s beloved kitten. And from inside the pipe—deep in that
oversized bore—something moved and shuffled.
Come in and see, that something seemed to whisper in my head. Never mind all the rest of it, Jake—
come in and see. Come in and visit. Time doesn’t matter in here; 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.