It

'Okay.'

'Now that you have a watch you have no reason to be late home. Remember what I said: if you're not on time, the police will be looking for you on my behalf. At least until they catch the bastard who is killing children around here, don't you dare be a single minute late, or I'll be on that telephone.'

'Yes, Mamma.'

'One other thing. I don't want you going around alone. You know enough not to accept candy or rides from strangers — we both agree that you're no fool — and you're big for your age, but a grown man, particularly a crazy one, can overpower a child if he really wants to. When you go to the park or the library, go with one of your friends.'

'I will, Mamma.'

She looked out the window again and uttered a sigh that was full of trouble. 'Things have come to a pretty pass when a thing like this can go on. There's something ugly about this town, anyway. I've always thought so.' She looked back at him, brows drawn down. 'You're such a wanderer, Ben. You must know almost everyplace in Derry, don't you? The town part of it, at least.'

Ben didn't think he knew anywhere near all the places, but he did know a lot of them. And he was so thrilled by the unexpected gift of the Timex that he would have agreed with his mother that night if she had suggested John Wayne should play Adolf Hitler in a musical comedy about World War II. He nodded.

'You've never seen anything, have you?' she asked. 'Anything or anyone . . . well, suspicious? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything that scared you?'

And in his pleasure over the watch, his feeling of love for her, his small-boy gladness at her concern (which was at the same time a little frightening in its unhidden unabashed fierceness), he almost told her about the thing that had happened last January.

He opened his mouth and then something — some powerful intuition — closed it again.

What was that something, exactly? Intuition. No more than that . . . and no less. Even children may intuit love's more complex responsibilities from time to time, and to sense that in some cases it may be kinder to remain quiet. That was part of the reason Ben closed his mouth. But there was something else as well, something not so noble. She could be hard, his mamma. She could be a boss. She never called nun 'fat,' she called him 'big' (sometimes amplified to 'big for his age'), and when there were leftovers from supper she would often bring them to him while he was watching TV or doing his homework, and he would eat them, although some dim part of him hated himself for doing so (but never his mamma for putting the food before him — Ben Hanscom would not have dared to hate his mamma; God would surely strike him dead for feeling such a brutish, ungrateful emotion even for a second). And perhaps some even dimmer part of him — the far-off Tibet of Ben's deeper thoughts —

suspected her motives in this constant feeding. Was it just love? Could it be anything else? Surely not. But . . . he wondered. More to the point, she didn't know he had no friends. That lack of knowledge made nun distrust her, made him unsure of what her reaction would be to his story of the thing which had happened to him in January. If anything had happened. Coming in at six and staying in was not so bad, maybe. He could read, watch TV,

(eat)

build stuff with his logs and Erector Set. But having to stay in all day as well would be very bad . . . and if he told her what he had seen — or thought he had seen — in January, she might make him do just that.

So, for a variety of reasons, Ben withheld the story.

'No, Mamma,' he said. 'Just Mr McKibbon rooting around in other people's garbage.'

That made her laugh — she didn't like Mr McKibbon, who was a Republican as well as a 'Christer' — and her laugh closed the subject. That night Ben had lain awake late, but no thoughts of being cast adrift and parentless in a hard world troubled him. He felt loved and safe as he lay in his bed looking at the moonlight which came in through the window and spilled across the bed onto the floor. He alternately put his watch to his ear so he could listen to it tick and held it close to his eyes so he could admire its ghostly radiu m dial.

He had finally fallen asleep and dreamed he was playing baseball with the other boys in the vacant lot behind Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot. He had just hit a bases-clearing home run, swinging from his heels and getting every inch of that little honey, and his cheering teammates met him in a mob at home plate. They pummelled him and clapped him on the back. They hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him toward the place where their equipment was scattered. In the dream he was almost bursting with pride and happiness . . . and then he had looked out toward center field, where a chainlink fence marked the boundary between the cindery lot and the weedy ground beyond that sloped into the Barrens. A figure was standing in those tangled weeds and low bushes, almost out of sight. It held a clutch of balloons — red, yellow, blue, green — in one white-gloved hand. It beckoned with the other. He couldn't see the figure's face, but he could see the baggy suit with the big orange pompom-buttons down the front and the floppy yellow bow-tie.

It was a clown.

Dot's wight, wabbit, a phantom voice agreed.

When Ben awoke the next morning he had forgotten the dream but his pillow was damp to the touch . . . as if he had wept in the night.

7

He went up to the main desk in the Children's Library, shaking the train of thought the curfew sign had begun as easily as a dog shakes water after a swim.

'Hullo, Benny,' Mrs Starrett said. Like Mrs Douglas at school, she genuinely liked Ben. Grownups, especially those who sometimes needed to discipline children as part of their jobs, generally liked him, because he was polite, soft– spoken, thoughtful, sometimes even funny in a very quiet way. These were all the same reasons most kids thought he was a puke. 'You tired of summer vacation yet?'

Ben smiled. This was a standard witticism with Mrs Starrett. 'Not yet,' he said, 'since summer vacation's only been going on — he looked at his watch — one hour and seventeen minutes. Give me another hour.'

Mrs Starrett laughed, covering her mouth so it wouldn't be too loud. She asked Ben if he wanted to sign up for the summer reading program, and Ben said he did. She gave him a map of the United States and Ben thanked her very much.

He wandered off into the stacks, pulling a book here and there, looking at it, putting it back. Choosing books was serious business. You had to be careful. If you were a grownup you could have as many as you wanted, but kids could only take out three at a time. If you picked a dud, you were stuck with it.

He finally picked out his three — Bulldozer, The Black Stallion, and one that was sort of a shot in the dark: a book called Hot Rod, by a man named Henry Gregor Felsen.

'You may not like this one,' Mrs Starrett remarked, stamping the book. 'It's extremely bloody. I urge it on the teenagers, especially the ones who have just got their driving licenses, because it gives them something to think about. I imagine it slows some of them down for a whole week.'

'Well, I'll give it a whirl,' Ben said, and took his books over to one of the tables away from Pooh's Corner, where Big Billy Goat Gruff was in the process of giving a double dose of dickens to the troll under the bridge.

He worked on Hot Rod for awhile, and it was not too shabby. Not too shabby at all. It was about a kid who was a really great driver, but there was this party-pooper cop who was always trying to slow him down. Ben found out there were no speed limits in Iowa, where the book was set. That was sort of cool.

He looked up after three chapters, and his eye was caught by a brand-new display. The poster on top (the library was gung-ho for posters, all right) showed a happy mailman delivering a letter to a happy kid. LIBRARIES ARE FOR WRITING, TOO, the poster said. WHY NOT WRITE A FRIEND TODAY? THE SMILES ARE GUARANTEED !