It

color and the fanlight was still over the door, but his mother’s flower-beds were gone. So, from what he could see, was the jungle-gym his father had built from scavenged pipes in the back yard. He remembered the day Georgie had fallen off the top and chipped a tooth. How he had screamed!
He saw these things (the ones there and the ones gone), and thought of walking over to the woman with the sleeping baby in her arms. He thought of saying Hello, my name is BillDenbrough. I used to live here. And the woman saying, That’s nice. What else could there be? Could he ask her if the face he had carved carefully in one of the attic beams — the face he and Georgie sometimes used to throw darts at — was still there? Could he ask her if her kids sometimes slept on the screened-in back porch when the summer nights were especially hot, talking together in low tones as they watched heat-lightning dance on the horizon? He supposed he might be able to ask some of those things, but he felt he would stutter quite badly if he tried to be charming . . . and did he really want to know the answers to any of those questions? After Georgie died it had become a cold house, and whatever he had come back to Derry for was not here.
So he went on to the corner and turned right, not looking back.
Soon he was on Kansas Street, headed back downtown. He paused for awhile at the fence which bordered the sidewalk, looking down into the Barrens. The fence was the same, rickety wood covered with fading whitewash, and the Barrens looked the same . . . wilder, if anything. The only differences he could see were that the dirty smudge of smoke which had always marked the town dump was gone (the dump had been replaced with a modern waste-treatment plant), and a long overpass marched across the tangled greenery now — the turnpike extension. Everything else was so similar that he might last have seen it the previous summer: weeds and bushes sloping down to that flat marshy area on the left and to dense copses of junky-scrubby trees on the right. He could see the stands of what they had called bamboo, the silvery-white stalks twelve and fourteen feet high. He remembered that Richie had once tried to smoke some of it, claiming it was like the stuff jazz musicians smoked and could get you high. All Richie had gotten was sick.
Bill could hear the trickle of water running in many small streams, could see the sun heliographing off the broader expanse of the Kenduskeag. And the smell was the same, even with the dump gone. The heavy perfume of growing things at the height of their spring strut did not quite mask the smell of waste and human offal. It was faint but unmistakable. A smell of corruption; a whiff of the underside.
That’s where it ended before, and that’s where it’s going to end this time, Bill thought with a shiver. In there . . . under the city.
He stood awhile longer, convinced that he must see something — some manifestation — of the evil he had come back to Derry to fight. There was nothing. He heard water running, a springlike and vital sound that reminded him of the dam they had built down there. He could see trees and bushes ruffling in the faint breeze. There was nothing else. No sign. He walked on, dusting a faint whitewash stain from his hands as he went.
He kept heading downtown, half-remembering, half-dreaming, and here came another kid — this one a little girl of about ten in high-waisted corduroy pants and a faded red blouse. She was bouncing a ball with one hand and holding a babydoll by its blonde Arnel hair in the other.
‘Hey!’ Bill said.
She looked up. ‘What!’
‘What’s the best store in Derry?’
She thought about it.’ For me or for anyone?’
‘For you,’ Bill said.
‘Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes,’ she said with no hesitation whatsoever.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Bill asked.
‘You beg what?
‘I mean, is that a store name?’
‘Sure,’ she said, looking at Bill as though he might well be enfeebled. ‘Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. My mom says it’s a junkshop, but I like it. They have old things. Like records you never heard of. Also postcards. It smells like a attic. I have to go home now. Bye.’
She walked on, not looking back, bouncing her ball and holding her dolly by the hair.
‘Hey!’ he shouted after her.
She looked back whimsically. ‘I beg your whatchamacallit?’
The store! Where is it?’
She looked back over her shoulder and said, ‘Just the way you’re going. It’s at the bottom of Up-Mile Hill.’
Bill felt that sense