Стивен Кинг - It

The spasm passed and Rich groped blindly for the flush. Water roared. His early supper, regurgitated in hot chunks, vanished tastefully down the drain.

Into the sewers.

Into the pound and stink and darkness of the sewers.

He closed the lid, laid his forehead against it, and began to cry. It was the first time he had cried since his mother died in 1975. Without even thinking of what he was doing, he cupped his hands under his eyes, and the contact lenses he wore slipped out and lay glistening in his palms.

Forty minutes later, feeling husked-out and somehow cleansed, he threw his suitcases into the trunk of his MG and backed it out of the garage. The light was fading. He looked at his house with the new plantings, he looked at the beach, at the water, which had taken on the cast of pale emeralds broken by a narrow track of beaten gold. And a conviction stole over him that he would never see any of this again, that he was a dead man walking.

“Going home now,” Rich Tozier whispered to himself. “Going home, God help me, going home.”

He put the car in gear and went, feeling again how easy it had been to slip through an unsuspected fissure in what he had considered a solid life—how easy it was to get over onto the dark side, to sail out of the blue and into the black.

Out of the blue and into the black, yes, that was it. Where anything might be waiting.

3

Ben Hanscom Takes a Drink

If, on that night of May 28th, 1985, you had wanted to find the man Time magazine had called “perhaps the most promising young architect in America” (“Urban Energy Conservation and the Young Turks,” Time, October 15, 1984), you would have had to drive west out of Omaha on Interstate 80 to do it. You’d have taken the Swedholm exit and then Highway 81 to downtown Swedholm (of which there isn’t much). There you’d turn off on Highway 92 at Bucky’s Hi-Hat Eat-Em-Up (“Chicken Fried Steak Our Specialty”) and once out in the country again you’d hang a right on Highway 63, which runs straight as a string through the deserted little town of Gatlin and finally into Hemingford Home. Downtown Hemingford Home made downtown Swedholm look like New York City; the business district consisted of eight buildings, five on one side and three on the other. There was the Kleen Kut barber shop (propped in the window a yellowing hand-lettered sign fully fifteen years old read IF YOUR A “HIPPY” GET YOUR HAIR CUT SOMEWHERES ELSE), the second-run movie house, the five-and-dime. There was a branch of the Nebraska Homeowners’ Bank, a 76 gas station, a Rexall Drug, and the National Farmstead & Hardware Supply—which was the only business in town which looked halfway prosperous.

And, near the end of the main drag, set off a little way from the other buildings like a pariah and resting on the edge of the big empty, you had your basic roadhouse—the Red Wheel. If you had gotten that far, you would have seen in the potholed dirt parking lot an aging 1968 Cadillac convertible with double CB antennas on the back. The vanity plate on the front read simply: BEN’S CADDY. And inside, walking toward the bar, you would have found your man—lanky, sunburned, dressed in a chambray shirt, faded jeans, and a pair of scuffed engineer boots. There were faint squint-lines around the corners of his eyes, but nowhere else. He looked perhaps ten years younger than his actual age, which was thirty-eight.

“Hello, Mr. Hanscom,” Ricky Lee said, putting a paper napkin on the bar as Ben sat down. Ricky Lee sounded a trifle surprised, and he was. He had never seen Hanscom in the Wheel on a weeknight before. He came in regularly every Friday night for two beers, and every Saturday night for four or five; he always asked after Ricky Lee’s three boys; he always left the same five-dollar tip under his beer stein when he took off. In terms of both professional conversation and personal regard, he was far and away Ricky Lee’s favorite customer. The ten dollars a week (and the fifty left under the stein at each Christmas-time over the last five years) was fine enough, but the man’s company was worth far more. Worthwhile company was always a rarity, but in a honkytonk like this, where talk always came cheap, it was scarcer than hen’s teeth.

Although Hanscom’s roots were in New England and he had gone to college in California, there was more than a touch of the extravagant Texan about him. Ricky Lee counted on Ben Hanscom’s Friday-Saturday-night stops, because he had learned over the years that he could count on them. Mr. Hanscom might be building a skyscraper in New York (where he already had three of the most talked-about buildings in the city), a new art gallery in Redondo Beach, or a business building in Salt Lake City, but come Friday night the door leading to the parking lot would open sometime between eight o’clock and nine-thirty and in he would stroll, as if he lived no farther than the other side of town and had decided to drop in because there was nothing good on TV. He had his own Learjet and a private landing strip on his farm in Junkins.

Two years ago he had been in London, first designing and then overseeing the construction of the new BBC communications center—a building that was still hotly debated pro and con in the British press (the Guardian: “Perhaps the most beautiful building to be constructed in London over the last twenty years”; the Mirror: “Other than the face of my mother-in-law after a pub-crawl, the ugliest thing I have ever seen”). When Mr. Hanscom took that job, Ricky Lee had thought, Well, I’ll see him again sometime. Or maybe he’ll just forget all about us. And indeed, the Friday night after Ben Hanscom left for England had come and gone with no sign of him, although Ricky Lee found himself looking up quickly every time the door opened between eight and nine-thirty. Well, I’ll see him again sometime. Maybe. Sometime turned out to be the next night. The door had opened at quarter past nine and in he had ambled, wearing jeans and a GO ’BAMA tee-shirt and his old engineer boots, looking like he’d come from no farther away than cross-town. And when Ricky Lee cried almost joyfully “Hey, Mr. Hanscom! Christ! What are you doin here?,” Mr. Hanscom had looked mildly surprised, as if there was nothing in the least unusual about his being here. Nor had that been a one-shot; he had showed up every Saturday during the two-year course of his active involvement in the BBC job. He left London each Saturday morning at 11:00 A.M. on the Concorde, he told a fascinated Ricky Lee, and arrived at Kennedy in New York at 10:15 A.M.—forty-five minutes before he left London, at least by the clock (“God, it’s like time travel, ain’t it?” an impressed Ricky Lee had said). A limousine was standing by to take him over to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, a trip which usually took no more than an hour on Saturday morning. He could be in the cockpit of his Lear before noon with no trouble at all, and touching down in Junkins by two-thirty. If you head west fast enough, he told Ricky, the day just seems to go on forever. He would take a two-hour nap, spend an hour with his foreman and half an hour with his secretary. He would eat supper and then come on over to the Red Wheel for an hour and a half or so. He always came in alone, he always sat at the bar, and he always left the way he had come in, although God knew there were plenty of women in this part of Nebraska who would have been happy to screw the socks off him. Back at the farm he would catch six hours of sleep and then the whole process would reverse itself. Ricky had never had a customer who failed to be impressed with this story. Maybe he’s gay, a woman had told him once. Ricky Lee glanced at her briefly, taking in the carefully styled hair, the carefully tailored clothes which undoubtedly had designer labels, the diamond chips at her ears, the look in her eyes, and knew she was from somewhere back east, probably New York, out here on a brief duty visit to a relative or maybe an old school chum, and couldn’t wait to get out again. No, he had replied. Mr. Hanscom ain’t no sissy. She had taken a pack of Doral cigarettes from her purse and held one between her red, glistening lips until he lit it for her. How do you know? she had asked, smiling a little. I just do, he said. And he did. He thought of saying to her: I think he’s the most God-awful lonely man I ever met in my life. But he wasn’t going to say any such thing to this New York woman who was looking at him like he was some new and amusing type of life.