It

. . but you don’t want to hear all this, Bill. Why don’t you go watch TV? I think Sugarfoot’s on tonight.’
‘I d-d-do wuh-want to h-hear it,’ Bill said, and not only because he had come to the conclusion that there was something terrible under Derry someplace.
‘Why do you want to hear about a bunch of sewer-pumps?’ Zack asked.
‘Skuh-skuh-hool ruh –report,’ Bill said wildly.
‘School’s Out.’
‘N-N-Next year.’
‘Well, it’s a pretty dull subject,’ Zack said. Teacher’ll probably give you an F for putting him to sleep. Look, here’s the Kenduskeag’ — he drew a straight line in the light fall of sawdust on the table in which his handsaw was embedded — ‘and here’s the Barrens. Now, because downtown’s lower than the residential areas — Kansas Street, say, or the Old Cape, or West Broadway — most of the downtown waste has to be pumped into the river. The waste from the houses flows down to the Barrens pretty much on its own. You see?’
‘Y-Y-Yes,’ Bill said, drawing a little closer to his father to look at the lines, close enough so that his shoulder was against his father’s arm.
‘Someday they’ll put a stop to pumping raw sewage into the river and that’ll be an end to the whole business. But for now, we’ve got those pumps in ht e . . . what did your buddy call em?’
‘Morlock holes,’ Bill said, with not a trace of a stutter; neither he nor his father noticed.
‘Yeah. That’s what the pumps in the Morlock holes are for, anyway, and they work pretty well except when there’s too much rain and the streams overflow. Because, although the gravity drains and the sewers with the pumps were meant to be separate systems, they actually crisscross all over the place. See?’ He drew a series of ‘X’s radiating out from the line which represented the Kenduskeag, and Bill nodded. ‘Well, the only thing you need to know about water draining is that it will go wherever it can. When it gets high, it starts to fill up the drains as well as the sewers. When the water in the drains gets high enough to reach those pumps, it shorts them out. Makes trouble for me, because I have to fix them.’
‘Dad, h-how big are the suh-sewers and drains?’
‘You mean, what’s the bore on them?’
Bill nodded.
The main sewers are maybe six feet in diameter. The secondaries, from the residential areas, are three or four, I guess. Some of them might be a little bigger. And believe me when I tell you this, Billy, and you can tell your friends: you never want to go into one of those pipes, not in a game, not on a dare, not for any reason.’
‘Why?’
‘A dozen different town governments have built on them since 1885 or so. During the Depression the WPA put in a whole secondary drain system and a tertiary sewer system; there was lots of money for public works back then. But the fellow who bossed those projects got killed in World War II, and about five years later the Water Department found out that the system blueprints were mostly gone. That’s about nine pounds of blues that just disappeared sometime between 1937 and 1950. My point is that nobody knows where all the damned sewers and drains go, or why.
‘When they work, nobody cares. When they don’t, there’s three or four sad sacks from Derry Water who have to try and find out which pump went flooey or where the plug-up is. And when they go down there, they damn well pack a lunch. It’s dark and it’s smelly and there are rats. Those are all good reasons to stay out, but the best reason is that you could get lost. It’s happened before.’
Lost under Derry. Lost in the sewers. Lost in the dark. There was something so dismal and chilling about the idea that Bill was momentarily silenced. Then he said, ‘But haven’t they ever suh-suh –hent people down to map — ‘
‘I ought to finish these dowels,’ Zack said abruptly, turning his back and pulling away. ‘Go on in and see what’s on TV’
‘B-B-But Dah-Dah-Dad — ‘
‘Go on, Bill,’ Zack said, and Bill could feel the coldness again. That coldness made suppers a kind of torture as his father leafed through electrical journals (he hoped for a promotion the following year), as his mother read one of her endless British mysteries: Marsh, Sayers, Innes, Allingham. Eating in that coldness robbed food of its taste; it was like eating frozen dinners that had never seen the inside of an oven. Sometimes, after, he would go up to his room and lie on his bed, holding his griping stomach, and think: He thrusts his fists againstthe posts and still insists he sees the ghosts. He thought of that more and more since Georgie had died, although his mother had taught him the phrase two years before. It had taken