Indian massacre? Doubtful. No bones, no bodies. Flood? Not that year. Disease? No word of it in the surrounding towns.
They just disappeared. All of them. All three hundred and forty of them. Without a trace.
So far as I know, the only case remotely like it in American history is the disappearance of the colonists on Roanoke Island, Virginia. Every school-child in the country knows about that one, but who knows about the Derry disappearance? Not even the people who live here, apparently. I quizzed several junior-high students who are taking the required Maine –history course, and none of them knew a thing about it. Then I checked the text, Maine Then and Now. There are better than forty index entries for Derry, most of them concerning the boom years of the lumber industry. Nothing about the disappearance of the original colonists . . . and yet that — what shall I call it? — that quiet fits the pattern, too.
There is a kind of curtain of quiet which cloaks much of what has happened here . . . and yet people do talk. I guess nothing can stop people from talking. But you have to listen hard, and that is a rare skill. I flatter myself that I've developed it over the last four years. If I haven't, then my aptitude for the job must be poor indeed, because I've had enough practice. An old man told me about how his wife had heard voices speaking to her from the drain of her kitchen sink in the three weeks before their daughter died — that was in the early winter of 1957– 58. The girl he spoke of was one of the early victims in the murder– spree which began with George Denbrough and did not end until the following summer.
'A whole slew of voices, all of em babblin together,' he told me. He owned a Gulf station on Kansas Street and talked in between slow, limping trips out to the pumps, where he filled g a s – tanks, checked oil-levels, and wiped windshields. 'Said she spoke back once, even thoug h she was ascairt. Leaned right over the dram, she did, and hollered down into it. "Who the hell are you?" she calls. "What's your name?" And all these voices answered back, she said — grunts, and babbles and howls and yips, screams and laughin, don't you know. And she said they were sayin what the possessed man said to Jesus: "Our name is Legion," they said. She wouldn't go near that sink for two years. For them two years I'd spend twelve hours a day down here, bustin my hump, then have to go home and warsh all the damn dishes.'
He was drinking a can of Pepsi from the machine outside the office door, a man of seventy-two or –three in faded gray work fatigues, rivers of wrinkles flowing down from the corners of his eyes and mouth.
'By now you prob'ly think I'm as crazy as a bedbug,' he said, 'but I'll tell you sumpin else, if you'll turn off y 'whirligig, there.'
I turned off my tape-recorder and smiled at him. 'Considering some of the things I've heard over the last couple of years, you'd have ot go a fair country distance to convince me you're crazy,' I said.
He smiled back, but there was no humor in it. 'I was doin the dishes one night, same as usual — this was in the fall of '58, after things had settled down again. My wife was upstair, sleepin. Betty was the only kid God ever saw fit to give us, and after she was killed my wife spent a lot of her time sleepin. Anyway, I pulled the plug and the water started runnin out of the sink. You know the sound real soapy water makes when it goes down the drain? Kind of a suckin sound, it is. It was makin that noise, but I wasn't thinkin about it, only about goin out and choppin some kindlin in the shed, and just as that sound started to die off, I heard my daughter down in there. I heard Betty somewhere down in those friggin pipes. Laughin. She was somewheres down there in the dark, laughin. Only it sounded more like she was screamin, once you listened a bit. Or both. Screamin and laughin down there in the pipes.
That's the only time I ever heard anything like that. Maybe I just imagined it. But . . . I don't think so.'
He looked at me and I looked at him. The light falling through the dirty plate-glass windows onto his face filled him up with years, made him look as ancient as Methuselah. I remember how cold I felt at that moment; how cold.
'You think I'm storying you along?' the old man asked me, the old man who would have been just about forty-five in 1957, the old man to whom God had given a single daughter, Betty Ripsom by name. Betty had been found on Outer Jackson Street just after Christmas of that year, frozen, her remains ripped wide open.
'No,' I said. 'I don't think you're just storying me along, Mr Ripsom.'
'And you're tellin the truth, too,' he said with a land of wonder. 'I can see it on y'face.'
I think he meant to tell me something more then, but the bell behind us dinged sharply as a car rolled over the hose on the tarmac and pulled up to the pumps. When the bell rang, both of us jumped and I uttered a thin little cry. Ripsom got to his feet and limped out to the car, wiping his hands on a ball of waste. When he came back in, he looked at me as though I were a rather unsavory stranger who had just happened to wander in off the street. I made my goodbyes and left.
Buddinger and Ives agree on some tiling else: things really are not right here in Derry; things in Derry have never been right.
I saw Albert Carson for the last time a scant month before he died. His throat had gotten much worse; all he could manage was a hissing little whisper. 'Still thinking about writing a history of Derry, Hanlon?'
'Still toying with the idea,' I said, but I had of course never planned to write a history of the township — not exactly — and I think he knew it.
'It would take yo u twenty years,' he whispered, 'and no one would read it. No one would want to read it. Let it go, Hanlon.'
He paused a moment and then added:
'Buddinger committed suicide, you know.'
Of course I had known that — but only because people always talk and I had learned to listen. The article in the News had called it a falling accident, and it was true that Branson Buddinger had taken a fall. What the News neglected to mention was that he fell from a stool in his closet and he had a noose around hi s neck at the time.
'You know about the cycle?'
I looked at him, startled.
'Oh yes,' Carson whispered. 'I know. Every twenty-six or twenty-seven years. Buddinger knew, too. A lot of the old –timers do, although that is one thing they won't talk about, even if you load them up with booze. Let it go, Hanlon.'
He reached out with one bird-claw hand. He closed it around my wrist and I could feel the hot cancer that was loose and raving through his body, eating anything and everything left that wa s still good to eat — not that there could have been much by that time; Albert Carson's cupboards were almost bare.
'Michael — this is nothing you want to mess into. There are things here in Derry that bite. Let it go. Let it go.'
'I can't.'
'Then beware,' he said. Suddenly the huge and frightened eyes of a child were looking out of his dying old –man's face. 'Beware.'
Derry.
My home town. Named after the county of the same name in Ireland.
Derry.
I was born here, in Derry Home Hospital; attended Derry Elementary School; went to junior high at Ninth Street Middle School; to high school at Derry High. I went to the University of Maine — 'ain't in Derry, but it's just down the rud,' the old-timers say — and then I came right back here. To the Derry Public Library. I am a small-town man living a small –town life, one among millions.
But.
But:
In 1851 a crew of lumber jacks found the remains of another crew that had spent the winter snowed in at a camp on the Upper Kenduskeag — at the tip of what the kids still call the Barrens. There were nine of them in all, all nine hacked to pieces. Heads had rolled . . . not to mention arms . . . a foot or two . . . and a man's penis had been nailed to one wall of the cabin.