Beyond them, the rain had spilled out of gutters clogged with branches and rocks and big sticky piles of autumn leaves. Stencilled across each of the horses was DERRY DEPT. He had made it sitting up in bed, his back propped against a pile of pillows, while their mother played Fur Elise on the piano in the parlor and rain swept restlessly against his bedroom window.Ībout three-quarters of the way down the block as one headed toward the intersection and the dead traffic light, Witcham Street was blocked to motor traffic by smudgepots and four orange sawhorses. In that autumn of 1957, eight months before the real horrors began and twenty-eight years before the final showdown, Stuttering Bill was ten years old.īill had made the boat beside which George now ran. His brother, William, known to most of the kids at Derry Elementary School (and even to the teachers, who would never have used the nickname to his face) as Stuttering Bill, was at home, hacking out the last of a nasty case of influenza. The boy in the yellow slicker was George Denbrough. It tapped on the yellow hood of the boy's slicker, sounding to his ears like rain on a shed roof. The rain had not stopped, but it was finally slackening.
Most sections of Derry had lost their power then, and it was not back on yet.Ī small boy in a yellow slicker and red galoshes ran cheerfully along beside the newspaper boat. There had been steady rain for a week now, and two days ago the winds had come as well.
The three vertical lenses on all sides of the traffic light were dark this afternoon in the fall of 1957, and the houses were all dark, too. The boat bobbed, listed, righted itself again, dived bravely through treacherous whirlpools, and continued on its way down Witcham Street toward the traffic light which marked the intersection of Witcham and Jackson. The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
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