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CHAPTER 7
1
How should I tell you about my seven weeks in Derry? How to explain the way I came to hate and fear
it?
It wasn’t because it kept secrets (although it did), and it wasn’t because terrible crimes, some of
them still unsolved, had happened there (although they had). All that’s over, the girl named Beverly
had said, the boy named Richie had agreed, and I came to believe that, too . . . although I also came to
believe the shadow never completely left that city with its odd sunken downtown.
It was a sense of impending failure that made me hate it. And that feeling of being in a prison with
elastic walls. If I wanted to leave, it would let me go (willingly!), but if I stayed, it would squeeze me
tighter. It would squeeze me until I couldn’t breathe. And—here’s the bad part—leaving wasn’t an
option, because now I had seen Harry before the limp and before the trusting but slightly dazed smile.
I had seen him before he became Hoptoad Harry, hoppin down the av-a-new.
I had seen his sister, too. Now she was more than just a name in a painstakingly written essay, a
faceless little girl who loved to pick flowers and put them in vases. Sometimes I lay awake thinking of
how she planned to go trick-or-treating as Princess Summerfall Winterspring. Unless I did
something, that was never going to happen. There was a coffin waiting for her after a long and
fruitless struggle for life. There was a coffin waiting for her mother, whose first name I still didn’t
know. And for Troy. And for Arthur, known as Tugga.
If I let that happen, I didn’t see how I could live with myself. So I stayed, but it wasn’t easy. And
every time I thought of putting myself through this again, in Dallas, my mind threatened to freeze
up. At least, I told myself, Dallas wouldn’t be like Derry. Because no place on earth could be like
Derry.
How should I tell you, then?
In my life as a teacher, I used to hammer away at the idea of simplicity. In both fiction and
nonfiction, there’s only one question and one answer. What happened? the reader asks. This is what
happened, the writer responds. This . . . and this . . . and this, too. Keep it simple. It’s the only sure way
home.
So I’ll try, although you must always keep in mind that in Derry, reality is a thin skim of ice over a
deep lake of dark water. But still:
What happened?
This happened. And this. And this, too.
2
On Friday, my second full day in Derry, I went down to the Center Street Market. I waited until five
in the afternoon, because I thought that was when the place would be busiest—Friday’s payday, after
all, and for a lot of people (by which I mean wives; one of the rules of life in 1958 is Men Don’t Buy
Groceries) that meant shopping day. Lots of shoppers would make it easier for me to blend in. To help
in that regard, I went to W. T. Grant’s and supplemented my wardrobe with some chinos and blue
workshirts. Remembering No Suspenders and his buddies outside the Sleepy Silver Dollar, I also