On the day after Mike Hanlon made his calls, Henry Bowers began to hear voices. Voices had been talking to him all day long. For awhile, Henry thought they were coming from the moon. In the late afternoon, looking up from where he was hoeing in the garden, he could see the moon in the blue daytime sky, pale and small. A ghost-moon.
That, in fact, was why he believed it was the moon that was talking to him. Only a ghost-moon would talk in ghost-voices—the voices of his old friends, and the voices of those little kids who had played down in the Barrens so long ago. Those, and another voice . . . one he did not dare name.
Victor Criss spoke from the moon first. They comin back, Henry. All of em, man. They comin back to Derry.
Then Belch Huggins spoke from the moon, perhaps from the dark side of the moon. You’re the only one, Henry. The only one of us left. You’ll have to get em for me and Vic. Ain’t no little kids can rank us out like that. Why, I hit a ball one time down to Tracker’s, and Tony Tracker said that ball would have been out of Yankee Stadium.
He hoed, looking up at the ghost-moon in the sky, and after awhile Fogarty came over and hit him in the back of the neck and knocked him flat on his face.
“You’re hoein up the peas right along with the weeds, you ijit.”
Henry got up, brushing dirt off his face and out of his hair. There stood Fogarty, a big man in a white jacket and white pants, his belly swelled out in front of him. It was illegal for the guards (who were called “counsellors” here at Juniper Hill) to carry billyclubs, so a number of them—Fogarty, Adler, and Koontz were the worst—carried rolls of quarters in their pockets. They almost always hit you with them in the same place, right in the back of the neck. There was no rule against quarters. Quarters were not considered a deadly weapon at Juniper Hill, an institution for the mentally insane which stood on the outskirts of Augusta near the Sidney town line.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Fogarty,” Henry said, and offered a big grin which showed an irregular line of yellow teeth. They looked like the pickets in a fence outside a haunted house. Henry had begun to lose his teeth when he was fourteen or so.
“Yeah, you’re sorry,” Fogarty said. “You’ll be a lot sorrier if I catch you doing it again, Henry.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Fogarty.”
Fogarty walked away, his black shoes leaving big brown tracks in the dirt of West Garden. Because Fogarty’s back was turned, Henry took a moment to look around surreptitiously. They had been shooed out to hoe as soon as the clouds cleared, everyone from the Blue Ward—which was where they put you if you had once been very dangerous but were now considered only moderately dangerous. Actually, all the patients at Juniper Hill were considered moderately dangerous; it was a facility for the criminally insane. Henry Bowers was here because he had been convicted of killing his father in the late fall of 1958—it had been a famous year for murder trials, all right; when it came to murder trials, 1958 had been a pip.
Only of course it wasn’t just his father they thought he had killed; if it had only been his father, Henry would not have spent twenty years in the Augusta State Mental Hospital, much of that time under physical and chemical restraint. No, not just his father; the authorities thought he had killed all of them, or at least most of them.
Following the verdict the News had published a front-page editorial titled “The End of Derry’s Long Night.” In it they had recapped the salient points: the belt in Henry’s bureau that belonged to the missing Patrick Hockstetter; the jumble of schoolbooks, some signed out to the missing Belch Huggins and some to the missing Victor Criss, both known chums of the Bowers boy, in Henry’s closet; most damning of all, the panties found tucked into a slit in Henry’s mattress, panties which had been identified by laundry-mark as having belonged to Veronica Grogan, deceased.
Henry Bowers, the News declared, had been the monster haunting Derry in the spring and summer of 1958.
But then the News had proclaimed the end of Derry’s long night on the front page of its December 6th edition, and even an ijit like Henry knew that in Derry night never ended.
They had bullied him with questions, had stood around him in a circle, had pointed fingers at him. Twice the Chief of Police had slapped him across the face and once a detective named Lottman had punched him in the gut, telling him to fess up, and be quick.
“There’s people outside and they ain’t happy, Henry,” this Lottman had said. “There ain’t been a lynching in Derry for a long time, but that don’t mean there couldn’t be one.”
He supposed they would have kept it up as long as necessary, not because any of them really believed the good Derryfolk were going to break into the police station, carry Henry out, and hang him from a sour-apple tree, but because they were desperate to close the books on that summer’s blood and horror; they would have, but Henry didn’t make them. They wanted him to confess to everything, he understood after awhile. Henry didn’t mind. After the horror in the sewers, after what had happened to Belch and Victor, he didn’t seem to mind about anything. Yes, he said, he had killed his father. This was true. Yes, he had killed Victor Criss and Belch Huggins. This was also true, at least in the sense that he had led them into the tunnels where they had been murdered. Yes, he had killed Patrick. Yes, Veronica. Yes one, yes all. Not true, but it didn’t matter. Blame needed to be taken. Perhaps that was why he had been spared. And if he refused . . .
He understood about Patrick’s belt. He had won it from Patrick playing scat one day in April, discovered it didn’t fit, and tossed it in his bureau. He understood about the books, too—hell, the three of them chummed around together and they cared no more for their summer textbooks than they had for their regular ones, which is to say, they cared for them about as much as a woodchuck cares for tap-dancing. There were probably as many of his books in their closets, and the cops probably knew it, too.
The panties . . . no, he didn’t know how Veronica Grogan’s panties had come to be in his mattress.
But he thought he knew who—or what—had taken care of it.
Best not to talk about such things.
Best to just dummy up.
So they sent him to Augusta and finally, in 1979, they had transferred him to Juniper Hill, and he had only run into trouble once here and that was because at first no one understood. A guy had tried to turn off Henry’s nightlight. The nightlight was Donald Duck doffing his little sailor hat. Donald was protection after the sun went down. With no light, things could come in. The locks on the door and the wire mesh did not stop them. They came like mist. Things. They talked and laughed . . . and sometimes they clutched. Hairy things, smooth things, things with eyes. The sort of things that had really killed Vic and Belch when the three of them had chased the kids into the tunnels under Derry in August of 1958.
Looking around now, he saw the others from the Blue Ward. There was George DeVille, who had murdered his wife and four children one winter night in 1962. George’s head was studiously bent, his white hair blowing in the breeze, snot running gaily out of his nose, his huge wooden crucifix bobbing and dancing as he hoed. There was Jimmy Donlin, and all they said in the papers about Jimmy was that he had killed his mother in Portland during the summer of 1965, but what they hadn’t said in the papers was that Jimmy had tried a novel experiment in body-disposal: by the time the cops came Jimmy had eaten more than half of her, including her brains. “They made me twice as smart,” Jimmy had confided to Henry one night after lights-out.
In the row beyond Jimmy, hoeing fanatically and singing the same line over and over, as always, was the little Frenchman Benny Beaulieu. Benny had been a firebug—a pyromaniac. Now as he hoed he sang this line from the Doors over and over: “Try to set the night on fire, try to set the night on fire, try to set the night on fire, try to—”
It got on your nerves after awhile.
Beyond Benny was Franklin D’Cruz, who had raped over fifty women before being caught with his pants down in Bangor’s Terrace Park. The ages of his victims ranged from three to eighty-one. Not very particular was Frank D’Cruz. Beyond him but way back was Arlen Weston, who spent as much time looking dreamily at his hoe as he did using it. Fogarty, Adler, and John Koontz had all tried the roll-of-quarters-in-the-fist trick on Weston to try and convince him he could move a bit faster, and one day Koontz had hit him maybe a little too hard because blood came not only from Arlen Weston’s nose but also from Arlen’s ears and that night he had a convulsion. Not a big one; just a little one. But since then Arlen had drifted further and further into his own interior blackness and now he was a hopeless case, almost totally unplugged from the world. Beyond Arlen was—
“You want to pick it up or I’ll give you some more help, Henry!” Fogarty bawled over, and Henry began to hoe again. He didn’t want any convulsions. He didn’t want to end up like Arlen Weston.
Soon the voices started in again. But this time they were the voices of the others, the voices of the kids that had gotten him into this in the first place, whispering down from the ghost-moon.
You couldn’t even catch a fatboy, Bowers, one of them whispered. Now I’m rich and you’re hoeing peas. Ha-ha on you, asshole!
B-B-Bowers, you c-c-couldn’t c-catch a c-c-cold! Read a-any g-g-good b-b-books since you’ve been in th-there? I ruh-ruh-wrote lots! I’m ruh-ruh-rich and y-you’re in Juh-juh-hooniper Hill! Ha-ha on you, you stupid asshole!
“Shut up,” Henry whispered to the ghost-voices, hoeing faster, beginning to hoe up the new pea-plants along with the weeds. Sweat rolled down his cheeks like tears. “We could’ve taken you. We could’ve.”
We got you locked up, you asshole, another voice laughed. You chased me and couldn’t catch me and I got rich, too! Way to go, banana-heels!
“Shut up,” Henry muttered, hoeing faster. “Just shut up!”
Did you want to get in my panties, Henry? another voice teased. Too bad! I let all of them do me, I was nothing but a slut, but now I’m rich too and we’re all together again, and we’re doing it again but you couldn’t do it now even if I let you because you couldn’t get it up, so ha-ha on you, Henry, ha-ha all OVER you—
He hoed madly, weeds and dirt and pea-plants flying; the ghost-voices from the ghost-moon were very loud now, echoing and flying in his head, and Fogarty was running toward him, bellowing, but Henry could not hear. Because of the voices.
Couldn’t even get hold of a nigger like me, could you? another jeering ghost-voice chimed in. We killed you guys in that rockfight! We fucking killed you!! Ha-ha, asshole! Ha-ha all over you!
Then they were all babbling together, laughing at him, calling him banana-heels, asking him how he’d liked the shock-treatments they’d given him when he came up here to the Red Ward, asking him if he liked it here at Juh-Juh-hooniper Hill, asking and laughing, laughing and asking, and Henry dropped his hoe and began to scream up at the ghost-moon in the blue sky and at first he was screaming in fury, and then the moon itself changed and became the face of the clown, its face a rotted pocked cheesy white, its eyes black holes, its red bloody grin turned up in a smile so obscenely ingenuous that it was insupportable, and so then Henry began to scream not in fury but in mortal terror and the voice of the clown spoke from the ghost-moon now and what it said was You have to go back, Henry. You have to go back and finish the job. You have to go back to Derry and kill them all. For Me. For—
Then Fogarty, who had been standing nearby and yelling at Henry for almost two minutes (while the other inmates stood in their rows, hoes grasped in their hands like comic phalluses, their expressions not exactly interested but almost, yes, almost thoughtful, as if they understood that this was all a part of the mystery that had put them here, that Henry Bowers’s sudden attack of the screaming meemies in West Garden was interesting in some more than technical way), got tired of shouting and gave Henry a real blast with his quarters, and Henry went down like a ton of bricks, the voice of the clown following him down into that terrible whirlpool of darkness, chanting over and over again: Kill them all, Henry, kill them all, kill them all, kill them all.
The moon was down and he felt a sharp sense of gratitude for that. The moon was less ghostly at night, more real, and if he should see that dreadful clown-face in the sky, riding over the hills and fields and woods, he believed he would die of terror.
He lay on his side, staring at his nightlight intently. Donald Duck had burned out; he had been replaced by Mickey and Minnie Mouse dancing a polka; they had been replaced with the green-glowing face of Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, and late last year Oscar had been replaced by the face of Fozzie Bear. Henry had measured out the years of his incarceration with burned-out nightlights instead of coffee-spoons.
At exactly 2:04 A.M. on the morning of May 30th, his nightlight went out. A little moan escaped him—no more. Koontz was on the door of the Blue Ward tonight—Koontz who was the worst of the lot. Worse even than Fogarty, who had hit him so hard in the afternoon that Henry could barely turn his head.
Sleeping around him were the other Blue Ward inmates. Benny Beaulieu slept in elastic restraints. He had been allowed to watch an Emergency rerun on the wardroom TV when they came in from hoeing and around six o’clock had begun jerking off constantly and without let-up, screaming “Try to set the night on fire! Try to set the night on fire! Try to set the night on fire!” He had been sedated, and that was good for about four hours, and then he had started in again around eleven when the Elavil wore off, whipping his old dingus so hard it had started to bleed through his fingers, shrieking “Try to set the night on fire!” So they sedated him again and put him in restraints. Now he slept, his pinched little face as grave in the dim light as Aristotle’s.
From around his bed Henry could hear low snores and loud ones, grunts, an occasional bedfart. He could hear Jimmy Donlin’s breathing; it was unmistakable even though Jimmy slept five beds over. Rapid and faintly whistling, for some reason it always made Henry think of a sewing machine. From beyond the door giving on the hall he could hear the faint sound of Koontz’s TV. He knew that Koontz would be watching the late movies on Channel 38, drinking Texas Driver and eating his lunch. Koontz favored sandwiches made out of chunky peanut-butter and Bermuda onions. When Henry heard this he had shuddered and thought: And they say all the crazy people are locked up.
This time the voice didn’t come from the moon.
This time it came from under the bed.
Henry recognized the voice at once. It was Victor Criss, whose head had been torn off somewhere beneath Derry twenty-seven years ago. It had been torn off by the Frankenstein-monster. Henry had seen it happen, and afterward he had seen the monster’s eyes shift and had felt its watery yellow gaze on him. Yes, the Frankenstein-monster had killed Victor and then it had killed Belch, but here was Vic again, like the almost ghostly rerun of a black-and-white program from the Nifty Fifties, when the President was bald and the Buicks had portholes.
And now that it had happened, now that the voice had come, Henry found that he was calm and unafraid. Relieved, even.
“Henry,” Victor said.
“Vic!” Henry cried. “What you doing under there?”
Benny Beaulieu snorted and muttered in his sleep. Jimmy’s neat nasal sewing-machine inhales and exhales paused for a moment. In the hall, the volume on Koontz’s small Sony was turned down and Henry Bowers could sense him, head cocked to one side, one hand on the TV’s volume knob, the fingers of the other hand touching the cylinder which bulged in the righthand pocket of his whites—the roll of quarters.
“You don’t have to talk out loud, Henry,” Vic said. “I can hear you if you just think. And they can’t hear me at all.”
What do you want, Vic? Henry asked.
There was no reply for a long time. Henry thought that maybe Vic had gone away. Outside the door the volume of Koontz’s TV went up again. Then there was a scratching noise from under the bed; the springs squealed slightly as a dark shadow pulled itself out from under. Vic looked up at him and grinned. Henry grinned back uneasily. Ole Vic was looking a little bit like the Frankenstein-monster himself these days. A scar like a hangrope tattoo circled his neck. Henry thought maybe that was where his head had been sewed back on. His eyes were a weird gray-green color, and the corneas seemed to float on a watery viscous substance.
Vic was still twelve.
“I want the same thing you want,” Vic said. “I want to pay em back.”
Pay em back, Henry Bowers said dreamily.
“But you’ll have to get out of here to do it,” Vic said. “You’ll have to go back to Derry. I need you, Henry. We all need you.”
They can’t hurt You, Henry said, understanding he was talking to more than Vic.
“They can’t hurt Me if they only half-believe,” Vic said. “But there have been some distressing signs, Henry. We didn’t think they could beat us back then, either. But the fatboy got away from you in the Barrens. The fatboy and the smartmouth and the quiff got away from us that day after the movies. And the rockfight, when they saved the nigger—”
Don’t talk about that! Henry shouted at Vic, and for a moment all of the peremptory hardness that had made him their leader was in his voice. Then he cringed, thinking Vic would hurt him—surely Vic could do whatever he wanted, since he was a ghost—but Vic only grinned.
“I can take care of them if they only half-believe,” he said, “but you’re alive, Henry. You can get them no matter if they believe, half-believe, or don’t believe at all. You can get them one by one or all at once. You can pay em back.”
Pay em back, Henry repeated. Then he looked at Vic doubtfully again. But I can’t get out of here, Vic. There’s wire on the windows and Koontz is on the door tonight. Koontz is the worst. Maybe tomorrow night . . .
“Don’t worry about Koontz,” Vic said, standing up. Henry saw he was still wearing the jeans he had been wearing that day, and that they were still splattered with drying sewer-muck. “I’ll take care of Koontz.” Vic held out his hand.
After a moment Henry took it. He and Vic walked toward the Blue Ward door and the sound of the TV. They were almost there when Jimmy Donlin, who had eaten his mother’s brains, woke up. His eyes widened as he saw Henry’s late-night visitor. It was his mother. Her slip was showing just a quarter-inch or so, as it always had. The top of her head was gone. Her eyes, horribly red, rolled toward him, and when she grinned, Jimmy saw the lipstick smears on her yellow, horsy teeth as he always had. Jimmy began to shriek. “No, Ma! No, Ma! No Ma!”
The TV went off at once, and even before the others could begin to stir, Koontz was jerking the door open and saying, “Okay, asshole, get ready to catch your head on the rebound. I’ve had it.”
“No, Ma! No, Ma! Please, Ma! No, Ma—”
Koontz came rushing in. First he saw Bowers, standing tall and paunchy and nearly ridiculous in his johnny, his loose flesh doughy in the light spilling in from the corridor. Then he looked left and screamed out two lungfuls of silent spun glass. Standing by Bowers was a thing in a clown suit. It stood perhaps eight feet tall. Its suit was silvery. Orange pompoms ran down the front. There were oversized funny shoes on its feet. But its head was not that of a man or a clown; it was the head of a Doberman pinscher, the only animal on God’s green earth of which John Koontz was frightened. Its eyes were red. Its silky muzzle wrinkled back to show huge white teeth.
A cylinder of quarters fell from Koontz’s nerveless fingers and rolled across the floor and into the corner. Late the following day Benny Beaulieu, who slept through the whole thing, would find them and hide them in his footlocker. The quarters bought him cigarettes—tailor-mades—for a month.
Koontz hitched in breath to scream again as the clown lurched toward him.
“It’s time for the circus!” the clown screamed in a growling voice, and its white-gloved hands fell on Koontz’s shoulders.
Except that the hands inside those gloves felt like paws.