Frowning, Stan swung the door open again and peered inside.
Narrow stairs led upward, circling around and out of sight. The outer wall of the staircase was bare wood supported by giant cross-beams which had been pegged together rather than nailed. To Stan some of the pegs looked thicker than his own upper arm. The inner wall was steel from which gigantic rivets swelled like boils.
"Is anyone here?" Stan asked.
There was no answer.
He hesitated, then stepped inside so he could see up the narrow throat of the staircase a little better. Nothing. And it was Creep City in here. As Richie would also say. He turned to leave... and heard music.
It was faint, but still instantly recognizable.
Calliope music.
He cocked his head, listening, the frown on his face starting to dissolve a little. Calliope music, all right, the music of carnivals and county fairs. It conjured up trace memories which were as delightful as they were ephemeral: popcorn, cotton candy, doughboys frying in hot grease, the chain-driven clatter of rides like the Wild Mouse, the Whip, the Koaster-Kups.
Now the frown had become a tentative grin. Stan went up one step, then two more, head still cocked. He paused again. As if thinking about carnivals could actually create one; he could now actually smell the popcorn, the cotton candy, the doughboys... and more! Peppers, chili-dogs, cigarette smoke and sawdust. There was the sharp smell of white vinegar, the kind you could shake over your french fries through a hole in the tin cap. He could smell mustard, bright yellow and stinging hot, that you spread on your hotdog with a wooden paddle.
This was amazing... incredible... irresistible.
He took another step up and that was when he heard the rustling, eager footsteps above him, descending the stairs. He cocked his head again. The calliope music had gotten suddenly louder, as if to mask the sound of the footsteps. He could recognize the tune now-it was "Camptown Races."
Footsteps, yeah: but they weren't exactly rustling footsteps, were they? They actually sounded kind of... squishy, didn't they? The sound was like people walking in rubbers full of water.
Camptown ladies sing dis song, doodah doodah
(Squish-squish)
Camptown Racetrack nine miles long, doodah doodah
(Squish-slosh-closer now)
Ride around all night
Ride around all day...
Now there were shadows bobbing on the wall above him.
The terror leaped down Stan's throat all at once-it was like swallowing something hot and horrible, bad medicine that suddenly galvanized you like electricity. It was the shadows that did it.
He saw them only for a moment. He had just that small bit of time to observe that there were two of them, that they were slumped, and somehow unnatural. He had only that moment because the light in here was fading, fading too fast, and as he turned, the heavy Standpipe door swung ponderously shut behind him.
Stanley ran back down the stairs (somehow he had climbed more than a dozen, although he could only remember climbing two, three at most), very much afraid now. It was too dark in here to see anything. He could hear his own breathing, he could hear die calliope tootling away somewhere above him
(what's a calliope doing up there in the dark? who's playing it?)
and he could hear those wet footsteps. Approaching him now. Getting closer.
He hit the door with his hands splayed out in front of him, hit it hard enough to send sparkly tingles of pain all the way up to his elbows. It had swung so easily before... and now it would not move at all.
No... that was not quite true. At first it had moved just a bit, just enough for him to see a mocking strip of gray light running vertically down its left side. Then gone again. As if someone was on the other side of it, holding the door closed.
Panting, terrified, Stan pushed against the door with all of his strength. He could feel the brass bindings digging into his hands. Nothing.
He whirled around, now pressing his back and his splayed hands against the door. He could feel sweat, oily and hot, running down his forehead. The calliope music had gotten louder yet. It drifted and echoed down the spiral staircase. There was nothing cheery about it now. It had changed. It had become a dirge. It screamed like wind and water, and in his mind's eye Stan saw a county fair at the end of autumn, wind and rain blowing up a deserted midway, pennons flapping, tents bulging, falling over, wheeling away like canvas bats. He saw empty rides standing against the sky like scaffolds; the wind drummed and hooted in the weird angles of their struts. He suddenly understood that death was in this place with him, that death was coming for him out of the dark and he could not run.
A sudden rush of water spilled down the stairs. Now it was not popcorn and doughboys and cotton candy he smelled but wet decay, the stench of dead pork which has exploded in a fury of maggots in a place hidden away from the sun.
"Who's here?" he screamed in a high, trembling voice.
He was answered by a low, bubbling voice that seemed choked with mud and old water.
"The dead ones, Stanley. We're the dead ones. We sank, but now we float... and you'll float, too."
He could feel water washing around his feet. He cringed back against the door in an agony of fear. They were very close now. He could feel their nearness. He could smell them. Something was digging into his hip as he struck the door again and again in a mindless, useless effort to get away.
"We're dead, but sometimes we clown around a little, Stanley. Sometimes we-"
It was his bird-book.
Without thinking, Stan grabbed for it. It was stuck in his slicker pocket and wouldn't come out. One of them was down now; he could hear it shuffling across the little stone areaway where he had come in. It would reach for him in a moment, and he would feel its cold flesh.
He gave one more tremendous yank, and the bird-book was in his hands. He held it in front of him like a puny shield, not thinking of what he was doing, but suddenly sure that this was right.
"Robins!" he screamed into the darkness, and for a moment the thing approaching (it was surely less than five steps away now) hesitated-he was almost sure it did. And for a moment hadn't he felt some give in the door against which he was now cringing?
But he wasn't cringing anymore. He was standing up straight in the darkness. When had that happened? No time to wonder. Stan licked his dry lips and began to chant: "Robins! Gray egrets! Loons! Scarlet tanagers! Crackles! Hammerhead woodpeckers! Red-headed woodpeckers! Chickadees! Wrens! Peli-"
The door opened with a protesting scream and Stan took a giant step backward into thin misty air. He fell sprawling on the dead grass. He had bent the bird-book nearly in half, and later that night he would see the clear impressions of his fingers sunken into its cover, as if it had been bound in Play-Doh instead of hard pressboard.
He didn't try to get up but began to dig in with his heels instead, his butt grooving through the slick grass. His lips were pulled back over his teeth. Inside that dim oblong he could see two sets of legs below the diagonal shadowline thrown by the door, which now stood half-open. He could see jeans that had decayed to a purplish-black. Orange threads lay plastered limply against the seams, and water dripped from the cuffs to puddle around shoes that had mostly rotted away, revealing swelled, purple toes within.
Their hands lay limply at their sides, too long, too waxy-white. Depending from each finger was a small orange pompom.
Holding his bent bird-book in front of him, his face wet with drizzle, sweat, and tears, Stan whispered in a husky monotone: "Chickenhawks... grosbeaks... hummingbirds... albatrosses... kiwis..."
One of those hands turned over, showing a palm from which endless water had eroded all the lines, leaving something as idiot-smooth as the hand of a department-store dummy.
One finger unrolled... then rolled up again. The pompom bounced and
dangled, dangled and bounced.
It was beckoning him.
Stan Uris, who would die in a bathtub with crosses slashed into his forearms twenty-seven years later, got to his knees, then to his feet, then ran. He ran across Kansas Street without looking either way for traffic and paused, panting, on the far sidewalk, to look back.
From this angle he couldn't see the door in the base of the Standpipe; only the Standpipe itself, thick and yet somehow graceful, standing in the murk. "They were dead," Stan whispered to himself, shocked. He wheeled suddenly and ran for home.
11
The dryer had stopped. So had Stan.
The three others only looked at him for a long moment. His skin was nearly as gray as the April evening of which he had just told them.
"Wow," Ben said at last. He let out his breath in a ragged, whistling sigh.
"It's true," Stan said in a low voice. "I swear to God it is."
"I believe.you," Beverly said. "After what happened at my house, I'd believe anything."
She got up suddenly, almost knocking over her chair, and went to the dryer. She began to pull out the rags one by one, folding them. Her back was turned, but Ben suspected she was crying. He wanted to go to her and lacked the courage.
"We gotta talk to Bill about this," Eddie said. "Bill will know what to do."
"Do?" Stan said, turning to look at him. "What do you mean, do?
Eddie looked at him, uncomfortable. "Well..."
"I don't want to do anything," Stan said. He was looking at Eddie with such a hard, fierce stare that Eddie squirmed in his chair. "I want to forget about it. That's all I want to do."
"Not that easy," Beverly said quietly, turning around. Ben had been right: the hot sunlight slanting in through the Washateria's dirty windows reflected off bright lines of tears on her cheeks. "It's not just us. I heard Ronnie Grogan. And the little boy I heard first... I think maybe it was that little Clements kid. The one who disappeared off his trike."
"So what?" Stan said defiantly.
"So what if it gets more?" she asked. "What if it gets more kids?"
His eyes, a hot brown, locked with her blue ones, answering the question without speaking: So what if it does?
But Beverly did not look down or away and at last Stan dropped his own eyes... perhaps only because she was still crying, but perhaps because her concern somehow made her stronger.
"Eddie's right," she said. "We ought to talk to Bill. Then maybe to the Police Chief-"
"Right," Stan said. If he was trying to sound contemptuous, it didn't work. His voice came out sounding only tired. "dead kids in the Standpipe Blood that only kids can see, not grownups. Clowns walking on the Canal. Balloons that blow against the wind. Mummies. Lepers under porches. Chief Borton'll laugh his bum off... and then stick us in the loonybin."
"If we all went to him," Ben said, troubled. "If we all went together..."
"Sure," Stan said. "Right. Tell me more, Haystack. Write me a book." He got up and went to the window, hands in pockets, looking angry and upset and scared. He stared out for a moment, shoulders stiff and rejecting beneath his neat shirt. Without turning back to them he repeated: "Write me a frigging book!"
"No," Ben said quietly, "Bill's going to write the books."
Stan wheeled back, surprised, and the others looked at him. There was a shocked look on Ben Hanscom's face, as if he had suddenly and unexpectedly slapped himself.
Bev folded the last of the rags.
"Birds," Eddie said.
"What?" Bev and Ben said together.
Eddie was looking at Stan. "You got out by yelling birds" names at them?"
"Maybe," Stan said reluctantly. "Or maybe the door was just stuck and finally popped open."
"Without you leaning on it?" Bev asked.
Stan shrugged. It was not a sullen shrug; it only said he didn't know.
"I think it was the birds you shouted at them," Eddie said. "But why? In the movies you hold up a cross..."
"... or say the Lord's Prayer... " Ben added.
"... or the Twenty-third Psalm," Beverly put in.
"I know the Twenty-third Psalm," Stan said angrily, "but I wouldn't do so good with the old crucifix business. I'm Jewish, remember?"
They looked away from him, embarrassed, either for his having been born that way or for their having forgotten it.
"Birds," Eddie said again. "Jesus!" Then he glanced guiltily at Stan again, but Stan was looking moodily across the street at the Bangor Hydro office.
"Bill will know what to do," Ben said suddenly, as if finally agreeing with Bev and Eddie. "Betcha anything. Betcha any amount of money."
"Look," Stan said, looking at all of them earnestly. "That's okay. We can talk to Bill about it if you want. But that's where things stop for me. You can call me a chicken, or yellow, I don't care. I'm not a chicken, I don't think. It's just that those things in the Standpipe..."
"If you weren't afraid of something like that, you'd have to be crazy, Stan," Beverly said softly.
"Yeah, I was scared, but that's not the problem," Stan said hotly. "It's not even what I'm talking about. Don't you see -
They were looking at him expectantly, their eyes both troubled and faintly hopeful, but Stan found he could not explain how he felt. The words had run out. There was a brick of feeling inside him, almost choking him, and he could not get it out of his throat. Neat as he was, sure as he was, he was still only an eleven-year-old boy who had that year finished the fourth grade.
He wanted to tell them that there were worse things than being frightened. You could be frightened by things like almost having a car hit you while you were riding your bike or, before the Salk vaccine, getting polio. You could be frightened of that crazyman Khrushchev or of drowning if you went out over your head. You could be frightened of all those things and still function.
But those things in the Standpipe...
He wanted to tell them that those dead boys who had lurched and shambled their way down the spiral staircase had done something worse than frighten him: they had offended him.
Offended, yes. It was the only word he could think of, and if he used it they would laugh-they liked him, he knew that, and they had accepted him as one of them, but they would still laugh. All the same, there were things that were not supposed to be. They offended any sane person's sense of order, they offended the central idea that God had given the earth a final tilt on its axis so that twilight would only last about twelve minutes at the equator and linger for an hour or more up where the Eskimos built their ice-cube houses, that He had done that and He then had said, in effect: "Okay, if you can figure out the tilt, you can figure out any damn thing you choose. Because even light has weight, and when the note of a trainwhistle suddenly drops it's the Doppler effect and when an airplane breaks the sound barrier that bang isn't the applause of the angels or the flatulence of demons but only air collapsing back into place. I gave you the tilt and then I sat back about halfway up the auditorium to watch the show. I got nothing else to say, except that two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if there's blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead." You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It's offense you maybe can't live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are live things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don't blink, and there's a stink down in that dark, and after awhile you think maybe there's a whole other universe down there, a universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I'd scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn't look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense.