Ben could hear the throb of the drainage machinery coming through the earth — could even feel it: a low, steady vibration that went from the ground to the root he was leaning against and then into his back. He thought of the Morlocks again, of their naked flesh; he imagined it would smell like the dank and shitty air that had come up through the ventholes of that iron cap. He thought of their wells driven deep into the earth, wells with rusty ladders bolted to their sides. He dozed, and at some point his thoughts became a dream.
11
It wasn't Morlocks he dreamed of. He dreamed of the thing which had happened to him in January, the thing which he hadn't quite been able to tell his mother.
It had been the first day of school after the long Christmas break. Mrs Douglas had asked for a volunteer to stay after and help her count the books that had been turned in just before the vacation. Ben had raised his hand.
'Thank you, Ben,' Mrs Douglas had said, favoring him with a smile of such brilliance that it warmed him down to his toes. , 'Suckass,' Henry Bowers remarked under his breath.
It had been the sort of Maine winter day that is both the best and the worst: cloudless, eye –wateringly bright, but so cold it was a little frightening. To make the ten-degree temperature worse, there was a strong wind to give the cold a bitter cutting edge.
Ben counted books and called out numbers; Mrs Douglas wrote them down (not bothering to double –check his work even on a random basis, he was proud to note), and then they both carried the books down to the storage room through halls where radiators clanked dreamily. At first the school had been full of sounds: slamming locker doors, the clackety-clack of Mrs Thomas's typewriter in the office, the slightly off-key choral renditions of the glee club upstairs, the nervous thud-thud-thud of basketballs from the gym and the scrooch and thud of sneakers as players drove toward the baskets or cut turns on the polished wood floor.
Little by little these sounds ceased, until, as the last set of books was totted up (one short, but it hardly mattered, Mrs Douglas sighed — they were all holding together on a wing and a
prayer), the only sounds were the radiators, the faint whissh-whissh of Mr Fazio's broom as he pushed colored sawdust up the hall floor, and the howl of the wind outside.
Ben looked toward the book room's one narrow window and saw that the light was fading rapidly from the sky. It was four o'clock and dusk was at hand. Membranes of dry snow blew around the icy jungle gym and skirled between the teetertotters, which were frozen solidly into the ground. Only the thaws of April would break those bitter winter-welds. He saw no one at all on Jackson Street. He looked a moment longer, expecting a car to roll through the Jackson-Witcham intersection, but none did. Everyone in Derry save himself and Mrs Douglas might be dead or fled, at least from what he could see from here.
He looked toward her and saw, with a touch of real fright, that she was feeling almost exactly the same things he was feeling himself. He could tell by the look in her eyes. They were deep and thoughtful and far off, not the eyes of a schoolteacher in her forties but those of a child. Her hands were folded just below her breasts, as if in prayer.
I'm scared, Ben thought, and she's scared, too. But what are we realty scared of?
He didn't know. Then she looked at him and uttered a short, almost embarrassed laugh. 'I've kept you too late,' she said. 'I'm sorry, Ben.'
'That's okay.' He looked down at his shoes. He loved her a little — not with the frank unquestioning love he had lavished on Miss Thibodeau, his first-grade teacher . . . but he did love her.
'If I drove, I'd give you a ride,' she said, 'but I don't. My husband's going to pick me up around quarter past five. If you'd care to wait, we could — '
'No thanks,' Ben said. 'I ought to get home before then.' This was not really the truth, but he felt a queer aversion to the idea of meeting Mrs Douglas's husband.
'Maybe your mother could — '
'She doesn't drive, either,' Ben said. 'I'll be all right. It's only a mile home.'
'A mile's not far when it's nice, but it can be a very long way in this weather. You'll go in somewhere if it gets too cold, won't you, Ben?'
'Aw, sure. I'll go into Costello's Market and stand by the stove a little while, or something. Mr Gedreau doesn't mind. And I got my snowpants. My new Christmas scarf, too.'
Mrs Douglas looked a little reassured . . . and then she glanced toward the window again. 'It just looks so cold out there,' she said. 'So . . . so inimical.'
He didn't know the word but he knew exactly what she meant. Something just happened —what?
He had seen her, he realized suddenly, as a person instead of just a teacher. That was what had happened. Suddenly he had seen her face in an entirely different way, and because he did, it became a new face — the face of a tired poet. He could see her going home with her husband, sitting beside him in the car with her hands folded as the heater hissed and he talked about his day. He could see her making them dinner. An odd thought crossed his mind and a cocktail-party question rose to his lips: Do you have children, Mrs Douglas?
'I often think at this time of the year that people really weren't meant to live this far north of the equator,' she said. 'At least not in this latitude.' Then she smiled and some of the strangeness either went out of her face or his eye — he was able to see her, at least partially, as he always had. But you'll never see her that way again, not completely, he thought, dismayed.
'I'll feel old until spring, and then I'll feel young again. It's that way every year. Are you sure you'll be all right, Ben?'
'I'll be fine.'
'Yes, I suppose you will. You're a good boy, Ben.'
He looked back at his toes, blushing, loving her more than ever.
In the hallway Mr Fazio said: 'Be careful of de fros'bite, boy,' without looking up from his red sawdust.
'I will.'
He reached his locker, opened it, and yanked on his snowpants. He had been painfully unhappy when his mother insisted he wear them again this winter on especially cold days, thinking of them as baby clothes, but he was glad to have them this afternoon. He walked slowly toward the door, zipping his coat, yanking the drawstrings of his hood tight, pulling on his mittens. He went out and stood on the snowpacked top step of the front stairs for a moment, listening as the door snicked closed — and locked — behind him.
Derry School brooded under a bruised skin of sky. The wind blew steadily. The snap-hooks on the flagpole rope rattled a lonesome tattoo against the steel pole itself. That wind cut into the warm and unprepared flesh of Ben's face at once, numbing his cheeks.
Be careful of de fros'bite, boy.
He quickly pulled his scarf up until he looked like a small, pudgy caricature of Red Ryder. That darkening sky had a fantastical sort of beauty, but Ben di d not pause to admire it; it was too cold for that. He got going.
At first the wind was at his back and things didn't seem so bad; in fact, it actually seemed to be helping him along. At Canal Street, however, he had to turn right and almost fully into the wind. Now it seemed to be holding him back . . . as if it had business with him. His scarf helped a little, but not enough. His eyes throbbed and the moisture in his nose froze to a crack-glaze. His legs were going numb. Several times he stuck his mittened hands into his armpits to warm them up. The wind whooped and screamed, sometimes sounding almost human.