Chapter 11

They stood adjacent the north end of the Bennington Brothers Transport building. A nearly full moon riding the night sky revealed a swath of crumbled, leaf-strewn concrete at their feet. To their left, in the small, formerly neatly kept employee’s patio of 1963, the pair of picnic tables covered with plastic red and white check tablecloths were gone, also the trio of white-painted, rattan chairs. The once intact chain link fence surrounding the patio sagged, the west side crumpled beneath a fallen, mostly rotted-away tree. The door into the building hung inward on its bottom hinge, either kicked in long ago, or rotted away like the fallen oak. Beyond the crumpled section of fencing were the remains of an overgrown baseball diamond. The backstop was almost unrecognizable, covered in vines.

Stunned, Camilla swung her gaze north, where the buildings forming Warehouse Row were a line of burned-out husks, the roofs collapsed into jagged shells. The Overlook Avenue market across the street (Costello’s Market in the books) had survived whatever disaster befell Warehouse Row but was an empty shell in its own right: the windows and door-glass smashed out, the shelving inside bare. A rectangular plywood sign was screwed to the left doorjamb, but Camilla couldn’t read the letters in the darkness, if they were legible at all. Down East Palmer Street to the town center below, abandoned, and sometimes burned-out buildings lined the road, with several abandoned vehicles at the curb.

“What the fuck?” she choked.

“Jump ahead!” Bill ordered. “Get us into daylight, Camilla!”

“When?” she cried in a panic.

“Any time! 10 AM this morning, dammit! Just go!”

With the shrill beep and flash of blue light, the remote jumped them forward into dilute daylight. A low, threatening overcast hung overhead. It rendered the desolation of the surrounding buildings nearly as frightening as when seen in near darkness. It took a moment to comprehend that not one of the few vehicles in sight looked younger than the mid-sixties. All were rusted hulks, resting on flat tires. The tires of the closest vehicles looked riddled with dry rot. Nothing appeared to be currently burning in town, thankfully, and nothing could charge them unawares from a place of concealment. She hoped not, anyway.

“Keep that thing handy!” he ordered.

A choked, guttural reply was all Camilla could give. Gooseflesh had erupted across her upper body, triggering a case of human-hackles. She hunched, remote clasped in her right hand, ready to take flight at an instant’s notice.

“What happened here?” she rasped.

“Is this 2019?” he demanded. When the remote confirmed that it was, he croaked again: “Are we in danger? Is anyone alive here? What the fuck happened, anyway?”

The remote had no answers to any of those questions.

The Crescent Park standpipe no longer had a roof. What remained of the conical cap lay in the weeds and tall grass fifty-foot distant, apparently blown off the tank during a violent windstorm. The north side of the structure had collapsed inward as a result, the boards forming that portion of the tank-wall in an advanced state of decay. The building’s once pristine white paint had mostly flaked away, leaving the underlying boards weather-beaten and warped. The construct looked in imminent danger of collapse.

“What the fuck happened here?” Bill repeated.

Camilla eyed the wild disarray of the Amazon. In the years since 1963 it had broken the bounds of the deep stream valley, encroached the town, making inroads into East Palmer Street in a half-dozen locations. In two spots down the long hill, growth had bisected the roadway completely, trees and shrubbery forming a barrier impenetrable to any but the largest, toughest vehicles. Only a bulldozer could clear a path to downtown along East Palmer, she thought.

“Downtown’s flooded,” Bill said hoarsely.

Camilla had noted that, also. A blockage somewhere in the canal system had caused the Winnipesaukee to overflow its banks, leaving the parklands surrounding the canal deep underwater. Rising water had eventually reached and crested the protective barriers safeguarding low town itself, inundating the streets and buildings, some to a depth of six to eight feet. The area was a swamp.

“Mr. Remote, can you transport us to my house on Hemlock Street?”

“What?” she gasped, starting as he wrapped her shoulders with an arm.

“Go!” he ordered when the remote beep-flashed in the affirmative. An instant later, they stood before a dilapidated, two-story frame house, surrounded by an equally dilapidated white picket fence. Overgrowth had swallowed the yard, the sidewalk leading to the front porch left invisible beneath the tall grass. Several full height elm trees, oaks and maples crowded the front yard, a massive oak that had stood guard on the property in 1963, towering over the interlopers. The homes either side of the Denbrough’s were in a similar state of disrepair; three doors down, the neighbor’s house had succumbed to fire, leaving it a blackened, burned-out shell, though with a mostly intact roof. One window which had somehow survived the flames was an empty rectangle. Several of the neighbors had boarded over the windows and doors before leaving. The windows in Bill’s house were not. Neither was the front door.

“Shit!” he muttered. “Mom ... Dad...?” Camilla grabbed his arm as he stumbled forward.

“Th-think about this,” she stuttered.

“Fuck that!” he choked, shaking off her hand. “I gotta know what happened here!”

“We don’t know it’s safe, Bill! What if there’s radiation?”

“Who fucking cares!” he shouted hoarsely. “I gotta find out what happened to my parents!”

What had happened to hers, she wondered dazedly? We’re they alive over here? Was she? Had she even been born?

“Bill, wait!”

Rather than listen, Bill kicked the gate, knocking it into the waist high grass. The gate somehow held together as he trampled it and proceeded up the invisible sidewalk.

“This is so stupid,” she muttered. “What if they’re snakes in there? Mr. Remote, can you transport me to the front porch, please?” An instant later, she turned and watched Bill reach the front steps, unchallenged by snakes or any other creature residing in the undergrowth.

“You’re lucky the porch held you,” he grumbled. Camilla had failed to note the bowed, and sometimes rotted boards forming the deck. The board beneath her left foot creaked threateningly, causing her to sidestep onto firmer looking footing. Carefully, Bill mounted the bottom porch step and then the middle.

“Shoulda known you’d cop out and take the easy way,” he quipped.

Pocketing the remote, she shook her head. “I’m serious. What if there’s radiation here?”

He glanced around, swinging a hand. “See any bomb-blasted buildings, Camilla?”

She pressed her lips tightly together. “That’s not an answer, and you know it, Bill Denbrough! Marshall’s hardly on anyone’s list for an A-bomb.”

Snorting, he glanced around. “Even if that’s right, we have no way of knowing one way or another. Whatdya gonna do? Jump back for a Geiger counter, Camilla?”

Ready to level a rebuke, Camilla backed a step to allow him onto the porch. Unexpected color above made her raise her eyes. She blinked, and then stared openmouthed at the black-striped, yellow box dangling from a nail hammered into the backside of the fascia.

“What’re you looking at?” Bill demanded. “Is that...?” He swung about, throwing anxious glances around the visible part of the neighborhood while Camilla examined the old-fashioned Geiger counter with mixed awe and wonder. Where had that come from? How did it get here, she wondered? And who left it?

“Someone’s been here,” she whispered.

“No way!” he countered. “Not anytime recent, anyway. See any footsteps in the grass besides mine?”

She had to admit the answer was no, though how easily they’d be recognizable after even a short period of time, she couldn’t reasonably say. Had Bill’s parents left the counter here? For what reason? And if so, when?

“Do you think it works?” she asked. He batted her hand away as she reached up on her tippy toes to find out.

“Hey!”

He grabbed her wrist as she made to touch it again. “It could be booby trapped, dammit!” He colored and then glowered at her as she laughed.

“Booby trapped, Bill? Do you hear yourself?”

His face and his expression grew darker. “A Geiger counter just happens to show up at the one house in Marshall we’d visit, Camilla?”

She bit her lower lip and glanced around. “It does seem kinda unlikely,” she admitted. “Can I have my hand back, please?”

Despite his displeasure, he couldn’t help cracking a grin. “Don’t want to go steady, huh?”

Camilla’s blush deepened. Rubbing her wrist, which he’d been careful not to hurt, she said: “It would be obvious if the thing was actually booby trapped, Bill. I don’t see any wires, do you?”

The device dangled from a black leather strap, not quite touching the backside of the board. The strap looked to be the same age and condition as the rest of the counter, part of the original construction, she’d bet. The counter had seen a fair amount of wear, the yellow case grimy with accumulated grease and dirt, the diagonal black stripes ragged at the edges and torn in places. Scratches on the plastic cover partly obscured the gauge. “I think it’s safe to take it down,” she said.

Grudgingly, he did. It was then she noticed that the 10-penny galvanized nail was untouched by rust. It might have been hammered into the back of the board yesterday, she thought. Or today. Looking more closely at the device itself—brand named ‘Victoreen’--it occurred to her that ‘old-fashioned’ was not an accurate description to a resident of 1963. To Bill, it probably looked state of the art.

Flipping the switch below the big round dial elicited a staccato burst of clicks that made them both jump. The ticking was unearthly loud in the otherwise unbroken quiet of the neighborhood. The rapid clicking quickly slowed to less than a click per second, however, with the needle settling at 45 CPM. That seemed neither excessive nor dangerous to Camilla, given the needle’s location at the left side of the dial.

“Do you know if that’s bad?” she asked anyway. She wished to hell she had her iPhone to check Google.

Bill shrugged. “Background radiation runs anywhere between 7 to 30 counts per minute. I’d say 45 CPM is not especially dangerous to us. Not if we don’t stay too long, anyway.”

She glanced around, shivering. How long was too long?

“What do you think happened here?” she asked.

“It’s what we came to find out, isn’t it?”

Not exactly, she thought uneasily. Whatever she had postulated to the others in 1963, she’d secretly expected 2019 to be the same in Right-Hand World, as it was on her side. The fact that Marshall appeared even worse than the reality discovered by Jake Epping in 2011, left her unnerved and frightened. “Let’s get inside,” she whispered hoarsely. “Can we get inside?”

He waved the Geiger counter left and right, and then held it close to the top of the railing, the nearby upright post, and then the surface of the warped porch with no audible change in the CPM. Flipping the switch to the off position, he grunted: “Hope my keys still work.”

Camilla swallowed hard. She hadn’t considered that his keys might not. Once Bill opened the rusted screen door, however, and inserted his key into the doorknob, it twisted to the left easily enough, emitting a slight rasp of protest. The deadbolt unlocked as readily, though Bill seemed surprised to find it locked in the first place.

“They stopped using it in 1960,” he muttered, opening the front door. Then he shook his head. “Of course, it was set, dummy. What’s the matter with you?”

No child disappearances/murders panicking the population this time, she thought darkly. “Was Marshall evacuated?”

Bill closed and dead-bolted the door again. “We don’t know what happed here. I don’t feel like guessing until we know better, either.”

She followed Bill into the living room and looked around. The moderate-size space was decorated Early American, the floors varnished hardwood, mostly obscured by a large area oval rug. The dining room table, visible through an arched doorway, had four settings in place atop a dingy white tablecloth. Camilla wondered if that was standard practice in 1963. A large hutch stood beyond the table against the wall, China arrayed inside. Everything in sight was covered with a thick layer of dust.

Bill crossed to a brown leather recliner and lifted a folded newspaper from the side table. Camilla recognized the ‘Marshall Herald-Tribune’ logo at the top. The edition was dark with age, the paper fragile and curled at the edges. Holding it out, he showed Camilla the day and date printed below the masthead.

“Monday, November 25, 1963,” she read aloud. A huge black headline below read: ‘Russia Invades West Berlin!’ Below, typeface half the size continued: ‘Retaliation for US Move Against Cuba, Kremlin Says’

“My God,” she muttered. “Are you kidding me?”

In a strained voice, Bill began to read.

“‘Associated Press. Today, Pentagon officials confirmed that elements of the Red Army’s 1st and 2nd Belorussian Groups launched a pincer movement designed to isolate the former German capital city. It’s reported that troops either arrested or detained members of West Berlin’s ruling coalition, also West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and a dozen Bundesrat members, in West Berlin to coordinate West Germany’s response to the shootings in Dallas, Texas. The Kremlin steadfastly denies involvement in the November 22nd incidents, claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald never resided in, nor visited the Soviet Union at any time. Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko has accused both the FBI and the CIA of disseminating false evidence of Oswald’s contact with Soviet institutions. ‘We have no record of Lee Harvey Oswald in our immigration files’, Soviet authorities insist. ‘Nor does the Committee for State Security’, although why the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would be privy to the records of the Committee for State Security is not entirely understood.’”

“Jesus,” Bill grunted. “My older self didn’t stop Oswald from killing Kennedy. Is Oswald alive? Didn’t Jack Ruby kill him? Was I killed?” All color had drained from his face. Camilla lifted the paper from his fingertips.

“Remember that George got hauled off to police headquarters after they killed Oswald on the 6th floor. It wasn’t until President Kennedy called to thank him for saving his life that the police and the FBI backed off and let him go.” That wasn’t exactly right, she recalled, but close enough for the situation. “Until we find out what happened in Dallas, let’s not do any conclusion-jumping, okay? Let me read.”