11/22/63

I walked toward the Rec, as though there was nothing in the world I wanted to see more, but from the corner of my eye I continued to track Li’l Carrot-Top. She was swaying from side to side on the bicycle seat, trying to find out how much she could get away with before toppling over. Based on her scabby shins, this probably wasn’t the first time she’d played the game. There was no name on the mailbox of her house, just the number 379.

I walked to the FOR SALE sign and jotted information down on my newspaper. Then I turned around and headed back the way I’d come. As I passed 379 Kossuth (on the far side of the street, and pretending to be absorbed in my paper), a woman came out on the stoop. A boy was with her. He was munching something wrapped in a napkin, and in his free hand he was holding the Daisy air rifle with which, not so long from now, he would try to scare off his rampaging father.

“Ellen!” the woman called. “Get off that thing before you fall off! Come in and get a cookie.”

Ellen Dunning dismounted, dropped her bike on its side in the driveway, and ran into the house, bugling: “Sing-sang, I saw the whole gang!” at the top of her considerable lungs. Her hair, a shade of red far more unfortunate than Beverly Marsh’s, bounced like bedsprings in revolt.

The boy, who’d grow up to write a painfully composed essay that would bring me to tears, followed her. The boy who was going to be the only surviving member of his family.

Unless I changed it. And now that I had seen them, real people living their real lives, there seemed to be no other choice.

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 bought a pair of Wolverine workboots. On my way to the market, I kicked them repeatedly against the curbing until the toes were scuffed.