It

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.
But:
In 1851 John Markson killed his entire family with poison and then, sitting in the middle of the circle he had made with their corpses, he gobbled an entire ‘white-nightshade’ mushroom. His death agonies must have been intense. The town constable who found him wrote in his report that at first he believed the corpse was grinning at him; he wrote of ‘Markson’s awful white smile.’ The white smile was an entire mouthful of the killer mushroom; Markson had gone on eating even as the cramps and the excruciating muscle spasms must have been wracking his dying body.
But:
On Easter Sunday 1906 the owners of the Kitchener Ironworks, which stood where the brand-spanking-new Derry Mall now stands, held an Easter-egg hunt for ‘all the good children of Derry.’ Th e hunt took place in the huge Ironworks building. Dangerous areas were closed off, and employees volunteered their time to stand guard and make sure no adventurous boy or girl decided to duck under the barriers and explore. Five hundred chocolate Easter eggs wrapped in gay ribbons were hidden about the rest of the works. According to Buddinger, there was at least one child present for each