She opens her mouth and says, Hi, Duddie. Looks around and says, Hi, you guys.
Then, just like that, she’s gone. Just like that they are five instead of six, five big boys standing under the old oak with June’s ancient light printing their faces and the excited cries of the softball girls in their cars. Pete is crying. So is Jonesy. The wino is gone-he’s apparently collected enough for his bottle-but another man has come, a solemn man dressed in a winter parka in spite of the day’s warmth. His left check is covered with red stuff that could be a birthmark, except Henry knows it isn’t. It’s byrus. Owen Underhill has joined them in Strawford Park, is watching them, but that’s all right; no one sees this visitor from the far side of the dreamcatcher except for Henry himself.
Duddits is smiling, but he looks puzzled at the tears on two of his friends” cheeks. “Eye-ooo ine?” he asks Jonesy-why you cryin? “It doesn’t matter,” Jonesy says. When he slips his hand out of Duddits’s, the last of the connection breaks. Jonesy wipes at his face and so does Pete. Beav utters a sobbing little laugh. “I think I swallowed my toothpick,” he says.
“Nah, there it is, ya fag,” Henry says, and points to the grass, where the chewed-up pick is lying.
“Fine Osie?” Duddits asks.
“Can you, Duds?” Henry asks.
Duddits walks toward the softball field, and they follow him in a respectful little cluster. Duds walks right past Owen but of course doesn’t see him; to Duds, Owen Underhill doesn’t exist, at least not yet. He walks past the bleachers, past third base, past the little snackbar. Then he stops.
Beside him, Pete gasps.
Duddits turns and looks at him, bright-eyed and interested, almost laughing. Pete is holding out one finger, ticking it back and forth, looking past the moving finger at the ground. Henry follows his gaze and for a moment thinks he sees something-a bright flash of yellow on the grass, like paint-and then it’s gone. There’s only Pete, doing what he does when he’s using his special remembering gift.
“Ooo you eee-a yine, Eete?” Duddits inquires in a fatherly way that almost makes Henry laugh-Do you see the line, Pete? “Yeah,” Pete says, bug-eyed. “Fuck, yeah.” He looks up at the others. “She was here, you guys! She was right here!”
They walk across Strawford Park, following a line only Duddits and Pete can see while a man only Henry can see follows along behind them. At the north end of the park is a rickety board fence with a sign on it: D.B. amp;A. P,.R. PROPERTY KEEP OUT! Kids have been ignoring this sign for years, and it’s been years since the Derry, Bangor, and Aroostook actually ran freights along the spur through The Barrens, anyway. But they see the train-tracks when they push through a break in the fence; they are down at the bottom of the slope, gleaming rustily in the sun.
The slope is steep, a-riot with poison sumac and poison ivy, and halfway down they find Josie Rinkenhauer’s big plastic purse. It is old now and sadly battered-mended in several places with friction tape-but Henry would know that purse anywhere…
Duddits pounces on it happily, yanks it open, peers inside. “ArbyEn!” he announces, and pulls them out. Pete, meanwhile, has foraged on, bent over at the waist, grim as Sherlock Holmes on the trail of Professor Moriarty. And it is Pete Moore who actually finds her, looking wildly around at the others from a filthy concrete drainpipe that pokes out of the slope and tangled foliage: “She’s in here!” Pete screams deliriously. Except for two flaring patches of color on his checks, his face is as pale as paper. “Guys, I think she’s in here!”
There is an ancient and incredibly complex system of drains and sewers beneath Derry, a town which exists in what was once swampland shunned even by the Micmac Indians who lived all around it. Most of the sewer-system was built in the thirties, with New Deal money, and most of it will collapse in 1985, during the big storm that will flood the town and destroy the Derry Standpipe. Now the pipes still exist. This one slopes downward as it bores into the hill. josie Rinkenhauer ventured in, fell, then slid on fifty years” worth of dead leaves. She went down like a kid on a slide and lies at the bottom. She has exhausted herself in her efforts to climb back up the greasy, crumbling incline; she has eaten the two or three cookies she had in the pocket of her pants and for the last series of endless hours-twelve, perhaps fourteen-has only lain in the reeking darkness, listening to the faint hum of the outside world she cannot reach and waiting to die.
Now at the sound of Pete’s voice, she raises her head and calls with all of her remaining strength: “Help mee! I can’t get out! Pleeease, help meee!”
It never occurs to them that they should go for an adult perhaps for Officer Nell, who patrols this neighborhood. They are crazy to get her out; she has become their responsibility. They won’t let Duddits in, they maintain at least that much sanity, but the rest of them create a chain into the dark without so much as thirty seconds” discussion: Pete first, then the Beav, then Henry, then Jonesy, the heaviest, as their anchor.
In this fashion they crawl into the sewage-smelling dark (there’s the stench of something else, too, something old and nasty beyond belief), and before he’s gotten ten feet Henry finds one of Josie’s sneakers in the muck. He puts it in a back pocket of his jeans without even thinking about it.
A few seconds later, Pete calls back over his shoulder: “Whoa, stop.”
The girl’s weeping and pleas for help are very loud now, and Pete can actually see her sitting at the bottom of the leaf-lined slope. She’s peering up at them, her face a smudged white circle in the gloom.
They stretch their chain farther, being as careful as they can despite their excitement. Jonesy has got his feet braced against a huge chunk of fallen concrete. Josie reaches up… gropes… cannot quite touch Pete’s outstretched hand. At last, when it seems they must admit defeat, she scrambles a little way up. Pete grabs her scratched and filthy wrist.
“Yeah!” he screams triumphantly. “Gotcha!”
They pull her carefully back up the pipe toward where Duddits is waiting, holding up her purse in one hand and the two dolls in the other, shouting in to Josie not to worry, not to worry because he’s got BarbieKen. There’s sunlight, fresh air, and as they help her out of the pipe-
15
There was no telephone in the Humvee-two different radios but no telephone. Nevertheless, a phone rang loudly, shattering the vivid memory Henry had spun between them and scaring the hell out of both of them.
Owen jerked like a man coming out of a deep sleep and the Humvee lost its tenuous hold on the road, first skidding and then going into a slow and ponderous spin, like a dinosaur dancing.
“Holy fuck-”
He tried to turn into the skid. The wheel only spun, turning with sick ease, like the wheel of a sloop that has lost its rudder. The Humvee went backward down the single treacherous lane that was left on the southbound side of 1-95, and at last fetched up askew in the snowbank on the median side, headlights opening a cone of snowy light back in the direction they had come.
Brring! Brring! Brring! Out of thin air.
It’s in my head, Owen thought. I’m projecting it, but I think it’s actually in my head, more goddam telep-
There was a pistol on the seat between them, a Glock. Henry picked it up, and when he did, the ringing stopped. He put the muzzle against his ear with his entire fist wrapped around the gunbutt.
Of course, Owen thought. Makes perfect sense. He got a call on the Glock, that’s all. Happens all the time.
“Hello,” Henry said. Owen couldn’t hear the reply, but his companion’s tired face lit in a grin. “Jonesy! I knew it was you!” Who else would it be? Owen wondered. Oprah Winfrey?
“Where-” Listening. “Did he want Duddits, Jonesy? Is that why…” Listening again. Then: “The Standpipe? Why… Jonesy? Jonesy?” Henry held the pistol against the side of his head a moment longer, then looked at it without
seeming to realize what it was.
He laid it on the seat again. The smile had gone.
“He hung up. I think the other one was coming back. Mr Gray, he calls him.”
“He’s alive, your buddy, but you don’t look happy about it.” It was Henry’s thoughts that weren’t happy about it, but there was no longer any need to say this. Happy at first, the way you were always happy when someone you liked gave you a little ringy-dingy on the old Glock, but not happy now. Why?