It

CHAPTER 1 0 The Reunion

1

Bill Denbrough Gets a Cab

The telephone was ringing, bringing him up and out of a sleep too deep for dreams. He groped for it without opening his eyes, without coming more than halfway awake. If it had stopped ringing just then he would have slipped back down into sleep without a hitch; he would have done ti as simply and easily as he had once slipped down the snow-covered hills in McCarron Park on his Flexible Flyer. You ran with the sled, threw yourself onto it, and down you went — seemingly at the speed of sound. You couldn't do that as a grownup; it racked the hell out of your balls.

His fingers walked over the telephone's dial, slipped off, climbed it again. He had a dim premonition that it would be Mike Hanlon, Mike Hanlon calling from Derry, telling him he had to come back, telling him he had to remember, telling him they had made a promise, Stan Uris had cut their palms with a sliver of Coke bottle and they had made a promise —

Except all of that had already happened.

He had gotten in late yesterday afternoon — just before 6 P .M ., actually. He supposed that, if he had been the last call on Mike's list, all of them must have gotten in at varying times; some might even have spent most of the day here. He himself had seen none of them, felt no urge to see any of them. He had simply checked in, gone up to his room, ordered a meal from room service which he found he could not eat once it was laid out before him, and then had tumbled into bed and slept dreamlessly until now.

Bill cracked one eye open and fumbled for the telephone's handset. It fell off onto the table and he groped for it, opening his other eye. He felt totally blank inside his head, totally unplugged, running on batteries.

He finally managed to scoop up the phone. He got up on one elbow and put it against his ear. 'Hello?'

'Bill?' It was Mike Hanlon's voice — he'd had at least that much right. Last week he didn't remember Mike at all, and now a single word was enough to identify him. It was rather marvellous . . . but in an ominous way.

'Yeah, Mike.'

'Woke you up, huh?'

'Yeah, you did. That's okay.' On the wall above the TV was an abysmal painting of lobstermen in yellow slickers and rainhats pulling lobster traps. Looking at it, Bill remembered where he was: the Derry Town House on Upper Main Street. Half a mile farther up and across the street was Bassey Park . . . the Kissing Bridge . . . the Canal. 'What time is it, Mike?'

'Quarter of ten.'

'What day?'

'The 30th.' Mike sounded a little amused.

'Yeah. 'Kay.'

'I've arranged a little reunio n,' Mike said. He sounded diffident now.

'Yeah?' Bill swung his legs out of bed. They all came?'

'All but Stan Uris,' Mike said. Now there was something in his voice that Bill couldn't read. 'Bev was the last one. She got in late last evening.'

'Why do you say the last one, Mike? Stan might show up today.'

'Bill, Stan's dead.'

'What? How? Did his plane — '

'Nothing like that,' Mike said. 'Look, if it's all the same to you, I think it ought to wait until we get together. It would be better if I could tell all of you at the same time.'

'It has to do with this?'

'Yes, I think so.' Mike paused briefly. 'I'm sure it does.'

Bill felt the familiar weight of dread settle around his heart again — was it something you could get used to so quickly, then? Or had it been something he had carried all along, simply unfelt and unthought-of, like the inevitable fact of his own death?

He reached for his cigarettes, lit one, and blew out the match with the first drag.

'None of them got together, yesterday?'

'No — I don't believe so.'

'And you haven't seen any of us yet?'

'No — just talked to you on the phone.'

'Okay,' he said. 'Where's the reunion?'

'You remember where the old Ironworks used to be?

'Pasture Road, sure.'

'You're behind the times, old chum. That's Mall Road these days. We've got the third-biggest shopping mall in the state out there. Forty-eight Different Merchants Under One Roof for Your Shopping Convenience.'

'Sounds really A-A-American, all right.'

'Bill?'

'What?'

'You all right?'

'Yes.' But his heart was beating too fast, the tip of his cigarette jittering a tiny bit. He had stuttered. Mike had heard it.

There was a moment of silence and then Mike said, 'Just out past the mall, there's a restaurant called Jade of the Orient. They have private rooms for parties. I arranged for one of them yesterday. We can have it the whole afternoon, if we want it.'

'You think this might take that long?'

'I just don't know.'

'A cab will know how to get there?'

'Sure.' 'All right,' Bill said. He wrote the name of the restaurant down on the pad by the phone. 'Why there?'

'Because it's new, I guess,' Mike said slowly. 'It seemed like . . . I don't know . . . '

'Neutral ground?' Bill suggested.

'Yes. I guess that's it.'

'Food any good?'

'I don't know,' Mike said. 'How's your appetite?'

Bill chuffed out smoke and half-laughed, half-coughed. 'It ain't so good, ole pal.'

'Yeah,' Mike said. 'I hear you.'

'Noon?'

'More like one, I guess. We'll let Beverly catch a few more z's.'

Bill snuffed the cigarette. 'She married?'

Mike hesitated again. 'We'll catch up on everything,' he said.

'Just like when you go back to your high-school reunion ten years later, huh?' Bill said. 'You get to see who got fat, who got bald, who got k-kids.'

'I wish it was like that,' Mike said.

'Yeah. Me too, Mikey. Me too.'

He hung up the phone, took a long shower, and ordered a breakfast that he didn't want and which he only picked at. No; his appetite was really not much good at all.

Bill dialed the Big Yellow Cab Company and asked to be picked up at quarter of one, thinking that fifteen minutes would be plenty of time to get him out to Pasture Road (he found himself totally unable to think of it as Mall Road, even when he actually saw the mall), but he had underestimated the lunch-hour traffic –flow . . . and how much Derry had grown.

In 1958 it had been a big town, not much more. There were maybe thirty thousand people inside the Derry incorporated city limits and maybe another seven thousand beyond that in the surrounding burgs.

Now it had become a city — a very small city by London or New York standards, but doing just fine by Maine standards, where Portland, the state's largest, could boast barely three hundred thousand.

As the cab moved slowly down Main Street (we're over the Canal now, Bill thought; can'tsee it, but it's down there, running in the dark) and then turned up Center, his first thought was predictable enough: how much had changed. But the predictable thought was accompanied by a deep dismay that he never would have expected. He remembered his childhood here as a fearful, nervous time . . . not only because of the summer of '58, when the seven of them had faced the terror, but because of George's death, the deep dream his parents seemed to have fallen into following that death, the constant ragging about his stutter, Bowers and Huggins and Criss constantly on the prod for them after the rockfight in the Barrens

(Bowers and Huggins and Criss, oh my! Bowers and Huggins and Criss, oh my!)

and just a feeling that Derry was cold, that Derry was hard, that Derry didn't much give a shit if any of them lived or died, and certainly not if they triumphed over Pennywise the Clown. Derry folk had lived with Pennywise in all his guises for a long time . . . and maybe, in some mad way, they had even come to understand him. To like him, need him. Love him? Maybe. Yes, maybe that too.

So why this dismay?

Perhaps only because it seemed such dull change, somehow. Or perhaps because Derry seemed to have lost its essential face for him.

The Bijou Theater was gone, replaced with a parking lot (BY PERMIT ONLY, the sign over the ramp announced; VIOLATORS SUBJECT TO TOW). The Shoeboat and Bailley's Lunch, which had stood next to it, were also gone. They had been replaced by a branch of the Northern National Bank. A digital readout jutted from the front of the bland cinderblock structure, showing the time and the temperature — the latter in both degrees Fahrenheit and degrees Celsius. The Center Street Drug, lair of Mr Keene and the place where Bill had gotten Eddie his asthma medicine that day, was also gone. Richard's Alley had become some strange hybrid called a 'mini-mall.' Looking inside as the cab idled at a stoplight, Bill could see a record shop, a natural-foods store, and a toys-and –games shop which was featuring a clearance sale on ALL DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS SUPPLIES.

The cab pulled forward with a jerk. 'Gonna take awhile,' the driver said. 'I wish all these goddam banks would stagger their lunch-hours. Pardon my French if you're a religious man.'

'That's all right,' Bill said. It was overcast outside, and no w a few splatters of rain hit the cab's windshield. The radio muttered about an escaped mental patient from somewhere who was supposed to be very dangerous, and then began muttering about the Red Sox who weren't. Showers early, then clearing. When Barry Manilow began moaning about Mandy, who came and who gave without taking, the cabbie snapped the radio off. Bill asked, 'When did they go up?'

'What? The banks?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Oh, late sixties, early seb'nies, most of em,' the cabbie said. He was a big man with a thick neck. He wore a red-and –black-checked hunter's jacket. A fluorescent-orange cap was jammed down squarely on his head. It was smudged with engine-oil. 'They got this urban-renewal money. Reb 'nue Sharin, they call it. So how they shared it was rip down everythin. And the banks come in. I guess that was all that could afford to come in. Hell of a note, ain't it? Urban renewal, says they. Shit for dinner, says I. Pardon my French if you're a religious man. There was a lot of talk about how they was gonna revitalize the downtown. Ayup, they revitalized it just fine. Tore down most the old stores and put up a lot of banks and parking lots. And you know you still can't find a fucking slot to park your car in. Ought to string the whole City Council up by their cocks. Except for that Polock woman that's on it. String her up by her tits. On second thought, it don't seem like she's got any. Flat as a fuckin board. Pardon my French if you're a religious man.'

'I am,' Bill said, grinning.

'Then get outta my cab and go to fucking church,' the cabbie said, and they both burst out laughing.

'You lived here long?' Bill asked.

'My whole life. Born in Derry Home Hospital, and they'll bury my fuckin remains out in Mount Hope Cemetery.'

'Good deal,' Bill said.

'Yeah, right,' the cabbie said. He hawked, rolled down his window, and spat an extremely large yellow-green lunger into the rainy air. His attitude, contradictory but somehow attractive — almost piquant — was one of glum good cheer. 'Guy who catches that won't have to buy no fuckin chewing gum for a week. Pardon my French if you're a religious man.'

'It hasn't all changed,' Bill said. The depressing promenade of banks and parking lots was slipping behind them as they climbed Center Street. Over the hill and past the First National, they began to pick up some speed. 'The Aladdin's still there.'

'Yeah,' the cabbie conceded. 'But just barely. Suckers tried to tear that down, too.'

'For another bank?' Bill asked, a pan of h im amused to find that another part of him stood aghast at the idea. He couldn't believe that anyone in his right mind would want to tear down that stately pleasure dome with its glittering glass chandelier, its sweeping right-and –left staircases which spiraled up to the balcony, and its mammoth curtain, which did not simply pull apart when the show started but which instead rose in magical folds and tucks and gathers, all underlit in fabulous shades of red and blue and yellow and green while pullies off stage ratcheted and groaned. Not the Aladdin, that shocked part of him cried out. How couldthey ever even think of tearing down the Aladdin for a BANK?

'Oh, ayup, a bank,' the cabbie said. 'You're fucking-A, pardon my French if you're a religious man. It was the First Merchants of Penobscot County had its eye on the 'laddin. Wanted to pull it down and put up what they called a "complete banking mall." Got all the papers from the City Council, and the Aladdin was condemned. Then a bunch of folks formed a committee — folks that had lived here a long time — and they petitioned, and they marched, and they hollered, and finally they had a public City Council meeting about it, and Hanlon blew those suckers out.' The cabbie sounded extremely satisfied.

'Hanlon?' Bill asked, startled. 'Mike Hanlon?'

'Ayup,' the cabbie said. He twisted around briefly to look at Bill, revealing a round, chapped face and horn-rimmed glasses with old specks of white paint on the bows. 'Librarian. Black fella. You know him?'

'I did,' Bill said, remembering how he had met Mike, back in July 1958. It had been Bowers and Huggins and Criss again . . . of course. Bowers and Huggins and Criss

(oh my)

at every turn, playing their own part, unwitting visegrips driving the seven of them together — tight, tighter, tightest. 'We played together when we were kids. Before I moved away.'

'Well, there you go,' the cabbie said. 'It's a small fucking world, pardon my — '

' — French if you're a religious man,' Bill finished wit h him.

'There you go,' the cabbie repeated comfortably, and they rode in silence for awhile before he said, 'It's changed a lot, Derry has, but yeah, a lot of it's still here. The Town House, where I picked you up. The Standpipe in Memorial Park. You remember that place, mister? When we were kids, we used to think that place was haunted.'

'I remember it,' Bill said.

'Look, there's the hospital. You recognize it?'

They were passing the Derry Home Hospital on the right now. Behind it, the Penobscot flowed toward its meeting-place with the Kenduskeag. Under the rainy spring sky, the river was dull pewter. The hospital that Bill remembered — a white woodframe building with two wings, three stories high — was still there, but now it was surrounded, dwarfed, by a whole complex of buildings, maybe a dozen in all. He could see a parking-lot off to the left, and what looked like better than five hundred cars parked there.

'My God, that's not a hospital, that's a fucking college campus!' Bill excla imed.

The cab-driver cackled. 'Not bein a religious man, I'll pardon your French. Yeah, it's almost as big as the Eastern Maine up in Bangor now. They got radiation labs and a therapy center and six hundred rooms and their own laundry and God knows what else. The old hospital's still there, but it's all administration now.'

Bill felt a queer doubling sensation in his mind, the sort of sensation he remembered getting the first time he watched a 3– D movie. Trying to bring together two images that didn't quite jibe. You could fool your eyes and your brain into doing that trick, he remembered, but you were apt to end up with a whopper of a headache . . . and he could feel his own headache coming on now. New Derry, fine. But the old Derry was still here, like the wooden Home Hospital building. The old Derry was mostly buried under all the new construction . . . but your eye was somehow dragged helplessly back to look at it . . . to look for it.

'The trainyard's probably gone, isn't it?' Bill asked.

The cabbie laughed again, delighted. 'For someone who moved away when he was just a kid, you got a good memory, mister.' Bill thought: You should have met me last week, myFrench-speaking friend. 'It's all still out there, but it's nothing but ruins and rusty tracks now. The freights don't even stop no more. Fella wanted to buy the land and put up a whole roadside entertainment thing pitch 'n putt, batting cages, driving ranges, mini golf, go –karts, little shack fulla video games, I don't know whatall — but there's some kind of big mixup about who owns the land now. I guess he'll get it eventually — he's a persistent fella — but right now it's in the courts.'

'And the Canal,' Bill murmured as they turned off Outer Center Street and onto Pasture Road — which, as Mike had said, was now marked with a green roadsign reading MALL ROAD. 'The Canal's still here.'

'Ayup,' the cabbie said. 'That'll always be here, I guess.'

Now the Derry Mall was on Bill's left, and as they rolled past it, he felt that queer doubling sensation again. When they had been kids all of this had been a great long field full of rank grasses and gigantic nodding sunflowers which marked the northeastern end of the Barrens. Behind it, to the west, was the Old Cape low-income housing development. He could remember them exploring this field, being careful not to fall into the gaping cellarhold of the Kitchener Ironworks, which had exploded on Easter Sunday in the year 1906. The field had been full of relics and they had unearthed them with all the solemn interest of archaeologists exploring Egyptian ruins: bricks, dippers, chunks of iron with rusty bolts hanging from them, panes of glass, bottles full of unnamable gunk that smelled like the worst poison in the world.

Something bad had happened near here, too, in the gravel-pit close to the dump, but he could not remember it yet. He could only remember a name, Patrick Humboldt, and that it had something to do with a refrigerator. And something about a bird that had chased Mike Hanlon. What . . . ?

He shook his head. Fragments. Straws in the wind. That was all.

The field was gone now, as were the remains of the Ironworks. Bill remembered the great chimney of the Ironworks suddenly. Faced with tile, caked black with soot for the final ten feet of its length, it had lain in the high grass like a gigantic pipe. They had scrambled up somehow and had walked along it, arms held out like tightwire walkers, laughing — He shook his head, as if to dismiss the mirage of the mall, an ugly collection of buildings with signs that said SEARS and J. C. PENNEY and WOOLWORTH 's and C V S and YORK 'S STEAK HOUSE and WALDENBOOKS and dozens of others. Roads wove in and out of parking lots. The mall did not go away, because it was no mirage. The Kitchener Ironworks was gone, and the field that had grown up around its rums was likewise gone. The mall was the reality, not the memories.

But somehow he didn't believe that.

'Here you go, mister,' the cabbie said. He pulled into the parking-lot of a build ing that looked like a large plastic pagoda. 'A little late, but better late than never, am I right?'

'Indeed you are,' Bill said. He gave the cab-driver a five. 'Keep the change.'

'Good fucking deal!' the cabbie exclaimed. 'You need someone to driv e y o u , c a l l B i g Yellow and ask for Dave. Ask for me by name.'

'I'll just ask for the religious fella,' Bill said, grinning. 'The one who's got his plot all picked out in Mount Hope.'

'You got it,' Dave said, laughing. 'Have a good one, mister.'

'You too, Dave.'

He stood in the light rain for a moment, watching the cab draw away. He realized that he had meant to ask the driver one more question, and had forgotten — perhaps on purpose.

He had meant to ask Dave if he liked living in Derry.

Abruptly, Bill Denbrough turned and walked into the Jade of the Orient. Mike Hanlon was in the lobby, sitting in a wicker chair with a huge flaring back. He got to his feet, and Bill felt deep unreality wash over him — through him. That sensation of doubling was back, but now it was much, much worse.

He remembered a boy who had been about five feet three, trim, and agile. Before him was a man who stood about five-seven. He was skinny. His clothes seemed to hang on him. And the lines in his face said that he was on the darker side of forty instead of only thirty-eight or so.

Bill's shock must have shown on his face, because Mike said quietly: 'I know how I look.'

Bill flushed and said, 'It's not that bad, Mike, it's just that I remember you as a kid. That's all it is.'

'Is it?'

'You look a little tired.'

'I am a little tired,' Mike said, 'but I'll make it. I guess.' He smiled then, and the smile lit his face. In it Bill saw the boy he had known twenty-seven years ago. As the old woodframe Home Hospital had been overwhelmed with modern glass and cinderblock, so had the boy that Bill had known been overwhelmed with the inevitable accessories of adulthood. There were wrinkles on his forehead, lines had grooved themselves from the comers of his mouth nearly to his chin, and his hair was graying on both sides above the ears. But as the old hospital, although overwhelmed, was still there, still visible, so was the boy Bill had known.

Mike stuck out his hand and said, 'Welcome back to Derry, Big Bill.'

Bill ignored the hand and embraced Mike. Mike hugged him back fiercely, and Bill could feel his hair, stiff and kinky, against his own shoulder and the side of his neck.

'Whatever's wrong, Mike, we'll take care of it,' Bill said. He heard the rough sound of tears in his throat and didn't care. 'We beat it once, and we can b-beat it a-a-again.'

Mike pulled away from him, held him at arm's length; although he was still smiling, there was too much sparkle in his eyes. He took out hi s handkerchief and wiped them. 'Sure, Bill,' he said. 'You bet.'

'Would you gentlemen like to follow me?' the hostess asked. She was a smiling Oriental woman in a delicate pink kimono upon which a dragon cavorted and curled its plated tail. Her dark hair was piled high on her head and held with ivory combs.

'I know the way, Rose,' Mike said.

'Very good, Mr Hanlon.' She smiled at both of them. 'You are well met in friendship, I think.'

'I think we are,' Mike said. 'This way, Bill.'

He led him down a dim corridor, past the main dining room and toward a door where a beaded curtain hung.

'The others — ?' Bill began.

'All here now,' Mike said. 'All that could come.'

Bill hesitated for a moment outside the door, suddenly frightened. It was not the unknown that scared him, not the supernatural; it was the simple knowledge that he was fifteen inches taller than he had been in 1958 and minus most of his hair. He was suddenly uneasy — almost terrified — at the thought of seeing them all again, their children's faces almost worn away, almost buried under change as the old hospital had been buried. Banks erected inside their heads where once magic picture-palaces had stood.

We grew up, he thought. We didn't think it would happen, not then, not to us. But it did, and if I go in there it will be real: we're all grownups now.

He looked at Mike, suddenly bewildered and timid. 'How do they look?' he heard himself asking in a faltering voice. 'Mike . . . how do they look?'

'Come in a nd find out,' Mike said, kindly enough, and led Bill into the small private room.

2

Bill Denbrough Gets a Look

Perhaps it was simply the dimness of the room that caused the illusion, which lasted for only the briefest moment, but Bill wondered later if it wasn't some sort of message meant strictly for him: that fate could also be kind.

In that brief moment it seemed to him that none of them had grown up, that his friends had somehow done a Peter Pan act and were all still children.

Richie Tozier wa s rocked back in his chair so that he was leaning against the wall, caught in the act of saying something to Beverly Marsh, who had a hand cupped over her mouth to hide a giggle; Richie had a wise-ass grin on his face that was perfectly familiar. There was Eddie Kaspbrak, sitting on Beverly's left, and in front of him on the table, next to his water-glass, was a plastic squeeze-bottle with a pistol-grip handle curving down from its top. The trimmings were a little more state-of-the –art, but the purpose was obviously the same: it was an aspirator. Sitting at one end of the table, watching this trio with an expression of mixed anxiety, amusement, and concentration, was Ben Hanscom.

Bill found his hand wanting to go to his head and realized with a sorry kind of amusement that in that second he had almost rubbed his pate to see if his haur had magically come back — that red, fine hair that he had begun to lose when he was only a college sophomore.

That broke the bubble. Richie was not wearing glasses, he saw, and thought: He probablyhas contacts now — he would. He hated those glasses. The tee-shirts and cord pants he'd

habitually worn had been replaced by a suit that hadn't been purchased off any rack — B i l l estimated that he was looking at nine hundred dollars' worth of tailor-made on the hoof.

Beverly Marsh (if her name still was Marsh) had become a stunningly beautiful woman. Instead of the casual pony-tail, her hair — which was almost exactly the same shade his own had been — spilled over the shoulders of her plain white Ship 'n Shore blouse in a torrent of subdued color. In this dim light it merely glowed like a well-banked bed of embers. In daylight, even the light of such a subdued day as this one, Bill imagined it would flame. And he found himself wondering what it would feel like to plunge his hands into that hair. Theworld's oldest story, he thought wryly. I love my wife but oh you kid.

Eddie — it was weird but true — had grown up to look quite a little bit like Anthony Perkins. His face was prematurely lined (although in his movements he seemed somehow younger than either Richie or Ben) and made older still by the rimless spectacles he wore — spectacles you would imagine a British barrister wearing as he approached the bench or leafed through a legal brief. His hair was short, worn in an out-of-date style that had been known as Ivy League in the late fifties and early sixties. He was wearing a loud checked sportcoat that looked like something grabbed from the Distress Sale rack of a men's clothing store that would shortly be out of business . . . but the watch on one wrist was a Patek Philippe, and the ring on the little finger of his right hand was a ruby. The stone was too hugely vulgar and too ostentatious to be anything but real.

Ben was the one who had really changed, and, looking at him again, Bill felt unreality wash easily over him. His face was the same, and his hair, although graying and longer, was combed in the same unusual right-side part. But Ben had gotten thin. He sat easily enough in his chair, his unadorned leather vest open to show the blue chambray work-shirt beneath. He wore Levi's with straight legs, cowboy boots, and a wide belt with a beaten-silver buckle. These clothes clung easily to a body which was slim and narrow-hipped. He wore a bracelet with heavy links on one wrist — not gold links but copper ones. He got thin, Bill thought. He's a shadow of his former self so to speak . . . Ole Ben got thin. Wonders never cease.

There was a moment of silence among the six of them that was beyond description. It was one of the strangest moments Bill Denbrough ever passed in his life. Stan was not here, but a seventh had come, nonetheless. Here in this private restaurant dining room Bill felt its presence so fully that it was almost personified — but not as an old man in a white robe with a scythe on his shoulder. It was the white spot on the map which lay between 1958 and 1985, an area an explorer might have called the Great Don't Know. Bill wondered what exactly was there. Beverly Marsh in a short skirt which showed most of her long, coltish legs, a Beverly Marsh in white go– go boots, her hair parted in the middle and ironed? Richie Tozier carrying a sign which said STOPTHEWAR on one side and GETROTCOFFCAMPUS on the other? Ben Hanscom in a yellow hard-hat with a flag decal on the front, running a bulldozer under a canvas parasol, his shirt off, showing a stomach which protruded less and less over the waistband of his pants? Was this seventh creature black? No relation to either H. Rap Brown or Grandmaster Flash, not this fellow, this fellow wore plain white shirts and fade –into –the –woodwork J. C. Penney slacks, and he sat in a library carrell at the University of Maine, writing papers on the origin of footnotes and the possible advantages of ISBN numbers in book cataloguing while the marchers marched outside and Phil Ochs sang 'Richard Nixon find yourself another country to be part of and men died with their stomachs blown out for villages whose names they could not pronounce; he sat there studiously bent over his work (Bill saw him), which lay in a slant of crisp white winterlight, his face sober and absorbed, knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity's engine. Was he the seventh? Or was it a young man standing before his mirror, looking at the way his forehead was growing, looking at a combful of pulled-out red hairs, looking at a pile of university notebooks on the desk reflected in the mirror, notebooks

which held the completed, messy first draft of a novel entitled Joanna, which would be published a year later?

Some of the above, all of the above, none of the above.

It didn't matter, really. The seventh was there, and in that one moment ht ey all felt it . . . and perhaps understood best the dreadful power of the thing that had brought them back. It lives, Bill thought, cold inside his clothes. Eye of newt, tail of dragon, Hand of Glory . . . whatever It was, It's here again, in Derry. It.

And he felt — suddenly that It was the seventh; that It and time were somehow interchangeable, that It wore all their faces as well as the thousand others with which It had terrified and killed . . . and the idea that It might be them was somehow the most frightening idea of all. How much of us was left behind here? he thought with sudden rising terror. How much of us never left the drains and the sewers where It lived . . . and where It fed? Is that why we forgot? Because part of each of us never had any future, never grew, never left Derry? Is that why?

He saw no answers on their faces . . . only his own questions reflected back at him.

Thoughts form and pass in a matter of seconds or milliseconds, and create their own time-frames, and all of this passed through Bill Denbrough's mind in a space of no more than five seconds.

Then Richie Tozier, leaning back against the wall, grinned again and said: 'Oh my, look at this — Bill Denbrough went for the chrome dome look. How long you been Turtle Waxing your head, Big Bill?'

And Bill, with no idea at all of what might come out, opened his mouth and heard himself say: 'Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Trashmouth.'

There was a moment of silence — and then the room exploded with laughter. Bill crossed to them and began to shake hands, and while there was something horrible in what he now felt, there was also something comforting about it: this sensation of having come home for good.

3

Ben Hanscom Gets Skinny

Mike Hanlon ordered drinks, and as if to make up for the prior silence, everyone began to talk at once. Beverly Marsh was now Beverly Rogan, it turned out. She said she was married to a wonderful man in Chicago who had turned her whole life around and who had, by some benign magic, been able to transform his wife's simple talent for sewing into a successful dress business. Eddie Kaspbrak owned a limousine company in New York. 'For all I know, my wife could be in bed with Al Pacino right now,' he said, smiling mildly, and the room broke up.

They all knew what Bill and Ben had been up to, but Bill had a peculiar sense that there had been no personal association of their names — Ben as an architect, himself as a writer — with people they had known as children until very, very recently. Beverly had paperback copies of Joanna and The Black Rapids in her purse, and asked him if he would sign them. Bill did so, noticing as he did that both books were in mint condition — as if they had been purchased in the airport newsstand as she got off the plane.

In like fashion, Richie told Ben how much he had admired the BBC communications center in London . . . but there was a puzzled son of light in his eyes, as if he could not quite reconcile that building with this man . . . or with the fat earnest boy who had showed them how to flood out half the Barrens with scrounged boards and a rusty car door.

Richie was a disc jockey in California. He told them he was known as the Man of a Thousand Voices and Bill groaned. 'God, Richie, your Voices were always so terrible.'

'Flattery will get you nowhere, mawster,' Richie replied loftily.

When Beverly asked him if he wore contacts now, Richie said in a low voice, 'Come a little closer, bay-bee. Look in my eyes.' Beverly did, and exclaimed delightedly as Richie tilted his head a little so she could see the lower rims of the Hydromist soft lenses he wore.

'Is the library still the same?' Ben asked Mike Hanlon.

Mike took out his wallet and produced a snap of the library, taken from above. He did it with the proud air of a man producing snapshots of his kids when asked about his family. 'Guy in a light plane took this,' he said, as the picture went from hand to hand. Tve been trying to get either the City Council or some well-heeled private donor to supply enough cash to get it blown up to mural size for the Children's Library. So far, no soap. But it's a good picture, huh?'

They all agreed that it was. Ben held it longest, looking at it fixedly. Finally he tapped the glass corridor which connected the two buildings. 'Do you recognize this from anywhere else, Mike?'

Mike smiled. 'It's your communications center,' he said, and all six of them burst out laughing.

The drinks came. They sat down.

That silence, sudden, awkward, and perplexing, fell again. They looked at

each other.

'Well?' Beverly asked in her sweet, slightly husky voice. 'What do we drink to?'

'To us,' Richie said suddenly. And now he wasn't smiling. His eyes caught Bill's and with a force so great he could barely deal with it, Bill remembered himself and Richie in the middle of Neibolt Street, after the thing which might have been a clown or which might have been a werewolf had disappeared, embracing each other and weeping. When he picked up his glass, his hand was trembling, and some of his drink spilled on the napery.

Richie rose slowly to his feet, and one by one the others followed suit: Bill first, then Ben and Eddie, Beverly, and finally Mike Hanlon. 'To us,' Richie said, and like Bill's hand, his voice trembled a little. To the Losers' Club of 1958.'

'The Losers,' Beverly said, slightly amused.

The Losers,' Eddie said. His face was pale and old behind his rimless glasses.

The Losers,' Ben agreed. A faint and painful smile ghosted at the corners of his mouth.

The Losers,' Mike Hanlon said softly.

The Losers,' Bill finished.

Their glasses touched. They drank.

That silence fell again, and this time Richie did not break it. This time the silence seemed necessary.

They sat back down and Bill said, 'So spill it, Mike. Tell us what's been happening here, and what we can do.'

'Eat first,' Mike said. 'We'll talk afterward.'

So they ate . . . and they ate long and well. Like that old joke about the condemned man, Bill thought, but his own appetite was better than it had been in ages . . . since he was a kid, he was tempted to think. The food was not stunningly good, but it was far from bad, and there was a lot of it. The six of them began trading stuff back and forth — spareribs, moo goo gaipan, chicken wings that had been delicately braised, egg rolls, water chestnuts wrapped in bacon, strips of beef that had been threaded onto wooden skewers.

They began with pu-pu platters, and Richie made a childish but amusing business of broiling a little bit of everything over the flaming pot in the center of the platter he was

sharing with Beverly — including half an egg roll and a few red kidney beans. 'Flambé at my table, I love it,' he told Ben. 'I'd eat shit on a shingle if it was flambé at my table.'

'And probably has,' Bill remarked. Beverly laughed so hard at this she had to spit a mouthful of food into her napkin.

'Oh God, I think I'm gonna ralph,' Richie said in an eerily exact imitation of Don Pardo, and Beverly laughed harder, blushing a bright red.

'Stop it, Richie,' she said. 'I'm warning you.'

'The warning is taken,' Richie said. 'Eat well, dear.'

Rose herself brought them their dessert — a great mound of baked Alaska

'More flambé at my table,' Richie said in the voice of a man who has died and gone to heaven. 'This may be the best meal I've ever eaten in my life.'

'But of course,' Rose said demurely.

'If I blow that out, do I get my wish?' he asked her.

'At Jade of the Orient, all wishes are granted, sir.'

Richie's smile faltered suddenly. 'I applaud the sentiment,' he said, 'but you know, I really doubt the veracity.'

They almost demolished the baked Alaska. As Bill sat back, his belly straining the waistband of his pants, he happened to notice the glasses on the table. There seemed to be hundreds of them. He grinned a little, realizing that he himself had sunk two martinis before the meal and God knew how many bottles of Kirin beer with it. The others had done about as well. In their state, fried chunks of bowling pin would probably have tasted okay. And yet he didn't feel drunk.

'I haven't eaten like that since I was a kid,' Ben said. They looked at him and a faint flush of color tinged his cheeks. 'I mean it literally. That may be the biggest meal I've eaten since I was a sophomore in high school.'

'You went on a diet?' Eddie asked.

'Yeah,' Ben said. 'I did. The Ben Hanscom Freedom Diet.'

'What got you going?' Richie asked.

'You don't want to hear all that ancient history . . . ' Ben shifted uncomfortably.

'I don't know about the rest of them,' Bill said, 'but I do. Come on, Ben. Give. What turned Haystack Calhoun into the magazine model we see before us today?'

Richie snorted a little. 'Haystack, right. I'd forgotten that.'

'It's not much of a story,' Ben said. 'No story at all, really. After that summer — after 1958 — we stayed in Derry another two years. Then my mom lost her job and we ended up moving to Nebraska, because she had a sister there who offered to take us in until my mother got on her feet again. It wasn't so great. Her sister, my aunt Jean, was a miserly bitch who had to keep telling you what your place in the great scheme of things was, how lucky we were that my mom had a sister who could give us charity, how lucky we were not to be on welfare, all that sort of thing. I was so fat I disgusted her. She couldn't leave it alone. "Ben, you ought to get more exercise. Ben, you'll have a heart attack before you're forty if you don't lose weight. Ben, with little children starving in the world, you ought to be ashamed of yourself."' He paused for a moment and sipped some water.

The thing was, she also trotted the starving children out if I didn't clean my plate.'

Richie laughed and nodded.

'Anyway, the country was just pulling out of a recession and my mother was almost a year finding steady work. By the time we moved out of aunt Jean's place in La Vista and got our own in Omaha, I'd put on about ninety pounds over when you guys knew me. I think I put on most of it just to spite my Aunt Jean.'

Eddie whistled. 'That would have put you at about — '

'At about two hundred and ten,' Ben said gravely. 'Anyway, I was going to East Side High School in Omaha, and the physedPeriods were . . . well, pretty bad. The other kids called me Jugs. That ought to give you the idea.

'The ragging went on for about seven months, and then one day, while we were getting dressed ni the locker room after the period, two or three of the guys started to . . . to kind of slap my gut. They called it "fat-paddling." Pretty soon two or three others got in on it. Then four or five more. Pretty soon it was all of them, chasing me around the locker room and up the hall, whacking my gut, my butt, my back, my legs. I got scared and started to scream. That made the rest of them laugh like crazy.

'You know,' he said, looking down and carefully rearranging his silverware, 'that's the last time I can remember thinking of Henry Bowers until Mike called me two days ago. The kid who started it was a farmboy with these big old hands, and while they were chasing after me I remember thinking that Henry had come back. I think — no, I know — that's when I panicked.

They chased me up the hall past the lockers where the guys who played sports kept their stuff. I was naked and red as a lobster. I'd lost any sense of dignity or . . . or of myself, I guess you'd say. Where myself was. I was screaming for help. And here they came after me, screaming "Fat-paddling! Fat-paddling! Fat-paddling!" There was a bench — '

'Ben, you don't have to put yourself through this,' Beverly said suddenly. Her face had gone ashy-pale. She toyed with her water-glass, and almost spilled it.

'Let him finish,' Bill said.

Ben looked at him for a moment and then nodded. There was a bench at the end of the corridor. I fell over it and hit my head. They were all around me in another minute or two, and then this voice said: "Okay. That's enough. You guys go change up."

'It was Coach, standing there in the doorway, wearing his blue sweatpants with the white stripe up the sides and his white tee-shirt. There was no way of telling how long he'd been standing there. They all looked at him, some of them grinning, some of them guilty, some of them just looking sort of vacant. They went away. And I burst into tears.

'Coach just stood there in the doorway leading back to the gym, watching me, watching this naked fat boy with h i s s k i n a l l r e d f r o m t h e f a t – paddling, watching this fat kid crying on the floor.

'And finally he said, "Benny, why don't you just fucking shut up?"

'It shocked me so much to hear a teacher use that word that I did. I looked up at him, and he came over and sat down on the bench I'd fallen over. He leaned over me, and the whistle around his neck swung out and bonked me on the forehead. For a second I thought he was going to kiss me or something, and I shrank back from him, but what he did was grab one of my tits in each hand and squeeze. Then he took his hands away and rubbed them on his pants like he'd touched something dirty.

'"You think I'm going to comfort you?" he asked me. "I'm not. You disgust them and you disgust me as well. We got different reasons, but that's because they're kids and I'm not. They don't know why you disgust them. I do know. It's because I see you burying the good body God gave you in a great big mess of fat. It's a lot of stupid self-indulgence, and it makes me want to puke. Now listen to me, Benny, because this is the only tune I'm going to say it to you. I got a football team to coach, and basketball, and track, and some where in between I've got swimming team. So I'll just say it once. You're fat up here." And he tapped my forehead right where his damned whistle had bonked me. "That's where everybody's fat. You put what's between your ears on a diet and you're going to lose weight. But guys like you never do.'"

'What a bastardl' Beverly said indignantly.

'Yeah,' Ben said, grinning. 'But he didn't know he was a bastard, that's how dumb he was. He'd probably seen Jack Webb in that movie The D.I. about sixty times, and he actually thought he was doing me a favor. And as it turned out, he was. Because I thought of something right then. I thought . . . '

He looked away, frowning — and Bill had the strangest feeling that he knew what Ben was going to say before he said it.

'I told you that the last time I can remember thinking of Henry Bowers was when the other boys were chasing after me and fat-paddling. Well, when the Coach was getting up to go, that was the last time I really thought of what we'd done in the summer of '58. I thought — '

He hesitated again, looking at each of them in turn, seeming to search their faces. He went on carefully.

'I thought of how good we were together. I thought of what we did and how we did it, and all at once it hit me that if Coach had to face anything like that, his hair would probably have turned white all at once and his heart would have stopped dead in his chest like an old watch. It wasn't fair, of course, but he hadn't been fair to me. What happened was simple enough — '

'You got mad,' Bill said.

Ben smiled. 'Yeah, that's right,' he said. 'I called, "Coach!"

'He turned around and looked at me. "You say you coach track?" I asked him.

'"That's right," he said. "Not that it's anything to you."

'"You listen to me, you stupid stone-brained son of a bitch," I said, and his mouth dropped open and his eyes bugged out. "I'll be out there for the track team in March. What do you think about that?"

'"I think you better shut your mouth before it gets you into big trouble," he said.

'"I'm going to run down everyone you get out," I said. "I'm going to run down your best. And then I want a fucking apology from you."

'His fists clenched, and for a minute I thought he was going to come back in there and let me have it. Then they unclenched again. "You just keep talking, fatboy," he said softly. "You got the motormouth. But the day you can outrun my best will be the day I quit this place and go back to picking corn on the circuit." And he left.'

'You lost the weight?' Richie asked.

'Well, I did,' Ben said. 'But Coach was wrong. It didn't start in my head. It started with my mother. I went home that night and told her I wanted to lose some weight. We ended up having a hell of a fight, both of us crying. She started out with that same old song and dance: I wasn't really fat, I just had big bones, and a big boy who was going to be a big man had to eat big just to stay even. It was a . . . a kind of security thing with her, I think. It was scary for her, trying to raise a boy on her own. She had no education and no real skills, just a willingness to work hard. And when she could give me a second helping . . . or when she could look across the table at me and see that I was looking solid . . . '

'She felt like she was winning the battle,' Mike said.

'Uh-huh.' Ben drank off the last of his beer and wiped a small mustache of foam off his upper lip with the heel of his hand. 'So the biggest fight wasn't with my head; it was with her. She just wouldn't accept it, not for months. She wouldn't take in my clothes and she wouldn't buy me new ones. I was running by then, I ran everywhere, and sometimes my heart pounded so hard I felt like I was going to pass out. The first of my mile runs I finished by puking and then fainting. Then for awhile I just puked. And after awhile I was holding up my pants while I r an.

'I got a paper-route and I ran with the bag around my neck, bouncing against my chest, while I held up my pants. My shirts started to look like sails. And nights when I went home and would only eat half the stuff on my plate my mother would burst ni to tears and say that I

was starving myself, killing myself, that I didn't love her anymore, that I didn't care about how hard she had worked for me.'

'Christ,' Richie muttered, lighting a cigarette. 'I don't know how you handled it, Ben.'

'I just kept the Coach's face in front of me,' Ben said. 'I just kept remembering the way he looked after he grabbed my tits in the hallway to the boys' locker room that time. That's how I did it. I got myself some new jeans and stuff with the paper-route money, and the old guy in the first –floor apartment used his awl to punch some new holes in my belt — about five of them, as I remember. I think that I might have remembered the other time I had to buy a pair of new jeans — that was when Henry pushed me into the Barrens that day and they just about got torn off my body.'

'Yeah,' Eddie said, grinning. 'And you told me about the chocolate milk. Remember that?'

Ben nodded. 'If I did remember,' he went on, 'it was just for a second — there and gone. About that same time I started taking Health and Nutrition at school, and I found out you could eat just about all the raw green stuff you wanted and not gain weight. So one night my mother put on a salad with lettuce and raw spinach in it, chunks of apple and maybe a little leftover ham. Now I've never liked rabbit-food that much, but I had three helpings and just raved on and on to my mother about how good it was.

'That went a long way toward solving the problem. She didn't care so much what I ate as long as I ate a lot of it. She buried me in salads. I ate them for the next three years. There were times when I had to look in the mirror to make sure my nose wasn't wriggling.'

'So what happened about the Coach?' Eddie asked. 'Did you go out for track?' He touched his aspirator, as if the thought of running had reminded him of it.

'Oh yeah, I went out,' Ben said. 'The two-twenty and the four-forty. By then I'd lost seventy pounds and I'd sprung up two inches so that what was left was better distributed. On the first day of trials I won the two-twenty by six lengths and the four –forty by eight. Then I went over to Coach, who looked mad enough to chew nails and spit out staples, and I said: "Looks like it's time you got out on the circuit and started picking corn. When are you heading down Kansas way?"'

'He didn't say a thing at first — just swung a roundhouse and knocked me flat on my back. Then he told me to get off the field. Said he didn't want a smartmouth bastard like me on his track team.

'"I wouldn't be on it if President Kennedy appointed me to it," I said, wiping blood out of the corner of my mouth. "And since you got me going I won't hold you to it . . . but the next time you sit down to a big plate of corn on the cob, spare me a thought."

'He told me if I didn't get out right then he was going to beat the living crap out of me.' Ben was smiling a little . . . but there was nothing very pleasant about that smile, certainly nothing nostalgic. 'Those were his exact words. Everyone was watching us, including the kids I'd beaten. They looked pretty embarrassed. So I just said, "I'll tell you what, Coach. You get one free, on account of you're a sore loser but too old to learn any better now. But you put one more on me and I'll try to see to it that you lose your job. I'm not sure I can do it, but I can make a good try. I lost the weight so I could have a little dignity and a little peace. Those are things worth fighting for."'

Bill said, 'All of that sounds wonderful, Ben . . . but the writer in me wonders if any kid ever really talked like that.'

Ben nodded, still smiling that peculiar smile. 'I doubt if any kid who hadn't been through the things we went through ever did,' he said. 'But I said them . . . and I meant them.'

Bill thought about this and then nodded. 'All right.'

'The Coach stood back with his hands on the hips of his sweat-pants,' Ben said. 'He opened his mouth and then he closed it again. Nobody said anything. I walked off, and that was the

last I had to do with Coach Woodleigh. When my home-room teacher handed me my course sheet for my junior year, someone had typed the word excused next to phys. ed. and he'd initialed it.'

'You beat him!' Richie exclaimed, and shook his clenched hands over his head. 'Way to go, Ben!'

Ben shrugged. 'I think what I did was beat part of myself. Coach got me going, I guess . . . but it was thinking of you guys that made me really believe that I could do it. And I did do it.'

Ben shrugged charmingly, but Bill believed he could see fine drops of sweat at his hairline. 'End of True Confessions. Except I sure could use another beer. Talking's thirsty work.'

Mike signalled the waitress.

All six of them ended up ordering another round, and they talked of light matters until the drinks came. Bill looked into his beer, watching the way the bubbles crawled up the sides of the glass. He was both amused and appalled to realize he was hoping someone else would begin to story about the years between — that Beverly would tell them about the wonderful man she had married (even if he was boring, as most wonderful men were), or that Richie Tozier would begin to expound on Funny Incidents in the Broadcasting Studio, or that Eddie Kaspbrak would tell them what Teddy Kennedy was really like, how much Robert Redford tipped . . . or maybe offer some insights into why Ben had been able to give up the extra pounds while he had needed to hang onto his aspirator.

The fact is, Bill thought, Mike is going to start talking any minute now, and I' m not sure I want to hear what he has to say. The fact is, my heart is beating just a little too fast and my hands are just a little too cold. The fact is, I'm just about twenty-five years too old to be this scared. We all are. So say something, someone. Let's talk of careers and spouses and what it's like to look at your old playmates and realize that you've taken a few really good shots in the nose from time itself. Let's talk about sex, baseball, the price of gas, the future of the Warsaw Pact nations. Anything but what we came here to talk about. So say something, some body.

Someone did. Eddie Kaspbrak did. But it was not what Teddy Kennedy was really like or how much Redford tipped or even why he had found it necessary to keep what Richie had sometimes called 'Eddie's lung-sucker' in the old days. He asked Mike when Stan Uris had died.

'The night before last. When I made the calls.'

'Did it have to do with . . . with why we're here?'

'I could beg the question and say that, since he didn' t leave a note, no one can know for sure,' Mike answered, 'but since it happened almost immediately after I called him, I think the assumption is safe enough.'

'He killed himself, didn't he?' Beverly said dully. 'Oh God — poor Stan.'

The others were looking at Mike, who finished his drink and said: 'He committed suicide, yes. Apparently went up to the bathroom shortly after I called him, drew a bath, got into it, and cut his wrists.'

Bill looked down the table, which seemed suddenly lined with shocked, pale faces — no bodies, only those faces, like white circles. Like white balloons, moon balloons, tethered here by an old promise that should have long since lapsed.

'How did you find out?' Richie asked. 'Was it carried in the papers up here?'

'No. For some time now I've subscribed to the newspapers of those towns closest to all of you. I have kept tabs over the years.'

'I Spy.' Richie's face was sour. 'Thanks, Mike.'

'It was my job,' Mike said simply.

'Poor Stan,' Beverly repeated. She seemed stunned, unable to cope with the news. 'But he was so brave back then. So . . . determined.'

'People change,' Eddie said.

' — 'Do they?' Bill asked. 'Stan was — ' He moved his hands on the tablecloth, trying to catch the right words. 'He was an ordered person. The kind of person who has to have his books divided up into fiction and nonfiction on his shelves . . . and then wants to have each section in alphabetical order. I can remember something he said once — I don't remember where we were or what we were doing, at least not yet, but I think it was toward the end of things. He said he could stand to be scared, but he hated being dirty. That seemed to me the essence of Stan. Maybe it was just too much, when Mike called. He saw his choices as being only two: stay alive and get dirty or die clean. Maybe people really don't change as much as we think. Maybe they just . . . maybe they just stiffen-up.'

There was a moment of silence and then Richie said, 'All right, Mike. What's happenin g i n Derry? Tell us.'

'I can tell you some,' Mike said. 'I can tell you, for instance, what's happening now — and I can tell you some things about yourselves. But I can't tell you everything that happened back in the summer of 1958, and I don't believe I'll ever have to. Eventually you'll remember it for yourselves. And I think if I told you too much before your minds were ready to remember, what happened to Stan — '

'Might happen to us?' Ben asked quietly.

Mike nodded. 'Yes. That's exactly what I'm afraid of.'

Bill said: 'Then tell us what you can, Mike.'

'All right,' he said. 'I will.'

4

The Losers Get the Scoop

'The murders have started again,' Mike said flatly.

He looked up and down the table, and then his eyes fixed on Bill's.

The first of the "new murders" — if you'll allow me that rather grisly conceit — began on the Main Street Bridge and ended underneath it. The victim was a gay and rather childlike man named Adrian Mellon. He had a bad case of asthma.'

Eddie's hand stole out and touched the side of his aspirator.

'It happened last summer on July 21st, the last night of the Canal Days Festival, which was a kind of celebration, a . . . a . . . '

'A Derry ritual,' Bill said in a low voice. His long fingers were slowly massaging his temples, and it was not hard to guess he was thinking about his brother George . . . George, who had almost certainly opened the way the last time this had happened.

'A ritual,' Mike said quietly. 'Yes.'

He told them the story of what had happened to Adrian Mellon quickly, watching with no pleasure as their eyes got bigger and bigger. He told them what the News had reported and what it had not . . . the latter including the testimony of Don Hagarty and Christopher Unwin about a certain clown which had been under the bridge like the troll in the fabled story of yore, a clown which had looked like a cross between Ronald McDonald and Bozo, according to Hagarty.

'It was him,' Ben said in a sick hoarse voice. 'It was tHat fucker Penny –wise.'

'There's one other thing,' Mike said, looking at Bill. 'One of the investigating officers — the one who actually pulled Adrian Mellon out of the Canal — was a town cop named Harold Gardener.'

'Oh Jesus Christ,' Bill said in a weak teary voice.

'Bill?' Beverly looked at him, then put a hand on his arm. Her voice was full of startled concern. 'Bill, what's wrong?'

'Harold would have been about five then,' Bill said. His stunned eyes searched Mike's face for confirmation.

'Yes.'

'What is it, Bill?' Richie asked.

'H-H-Harold Gardener was the s-son of Dave Gardener,' Bill said. 'Dave lived down the street from us back then, when George was k-killed. He was the one who got to Juh juh . . . to my brother first and brought him up to the house, wrapped in a piece of qu-quilt.'

They sat silently, saying nothing. Beverly put a hand briefly over her eyes.

'It all fits rather too well, doesn't it?' Mike said finally.

'Yes,' Bill said in a low voice. 'It fits, all right.'

'I'd kept tabs on the six of you over the years, as I said,' Mike went on, 'but it wasn't until then that I began to understand just why I had been doing it, that it had a real and concrete purpose. Still, I held off, waiting to see how things would develop. You see, I felt that I had to be absolutely sure before I . . . disturbed your lives. Not ninety percent, not even ninety-five percent. One hundred was all that would do it.

'In December of last year, an eight-year-old boy named Steven Johnson was found dead in Memorial Park. Like Adrian Mellon, he had been badly mutilated just before or just after his death, but he looked as if he could have died of just plain fright.'

'Sexually assaulted?' Eddie asked.

'No. Just plain mutilated.'

'How many in all?' Eddie asked, not looking as if he really wanted to know.

'It's bad,' Mike said.

'How many?' Bill repeated.

'Nine. So far.'

'It can't be!' Beverly cried. 'I would have read about it in the paper . . . seen it on the news! When that crazy cop killed all those women in Castle Rock, Maine . . . and those children that were murdered in Atlanta . . . '

'Yes, that,' Mike said. 'I've thought about that a lot. It's really the closest correlative to what's going on here, a nd Bev's right: that really was coast-to-coast news. In some ways, the Atlanta comparison is the thing about all of this that frightens me the most. The murder of nine children . . . we should have TV news correspondents here, and phony psychics, and reporters from The Atlantic Monthly and Rolling Stone . . . the whole media circus, in short.'

'But it hasn't happened,' Bill said.

'No,' Mike answered, 'it hasn't. Oh, there was a Sunday-supplement piece about it in the Portland Sunday Telegram, and ano ther one in the Boston Globe after the last two. A Boston-based television program called Good Day! did a segment this February on unsolved murders, and one of the experts mentioned the Derry murders, but only passingly . . . and he certainly gave no indic ation of knowing there had been a similar batch of murders in 1957 –58, and another in 1929-30.

'There are some ostensible reasons, of course. Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Detroit . . . those are big media towns, and in big media towns when something happens it makes a bang. There isn't a single TV or radio station in Derry, unless you count the little FM the English and Speech Department runs up at the high school. Bangor's got the corner on the market when it comes to the media.'

'Except for the Derr y News,' Eddie said, and they all laughed.

'But we all know that doesn't really cut it with the way the world is today. The communication web is there, and at some point the story should have broken nationally. But it didn't. And I think the reason is just this: It doesn't want it to.'

'It,' Bill mused, almost to himself.

'It,' Mike agreed. 'If we have to call It something, it might as well be what we used to call It. I've begun to think, you see, that It has been here so long whatever It really is . . . that It's become a part of Derry, something as much a part of the town as the Standpipe, or the Canal, or Bassey Park, or the library. Only It's not a matter of outward geography, you understand. Maybe that was true once, but now It's . . . inside. Somehow It's gotten inside. That's the only way I know to understand all of the terrible things that have happened here — the nominally explicable as well as the utterly inexplicable! There was a fire at a Negro nightclub called the Black Spot in 1930. A year before that, a bunch of half-bright Depression outlaws was gunned down on Canal Street in the middle of the afternoon.'

'The Bradley Gang,' Bill said. 'The FBI got them, right?'

'That's what the histories say, but that's not precisely true. So far as I've been able to find out — and I'd give a lot to believe that it wasn't so, because I love this town — the Bradley Gang, all seven of them, were actually gunned down by the good citizens of Derry. I'll tell you about it sometime.

'There was the explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks during an Easter –egg hunt in 1906. There was a horrible series of animal mutilations that same year that was finally traced to Andrew Rhulin, the grand-uncle of the man who now runs the Rhulin Farms. He was apparently bludgeoned to death by the three deputies who were supposed to bring him in. None of the deputies were ever brought to trial.'

Mike Hanlon produced a small notebook from an inner pocket and paged through it, talking without looking up. 'In 1877 there were four lynchings inside the incorporated town limits. One of those that climbed a rope was the lay preacher of the Methodist Church, who apparently drowned all four of his children in the bathtub as if they were kittens and then shot his wife in the head. He put the gun in her hand to make it look like suicide, but no one was fooled. A year before that four loggers were found dead in a cabin downstream on the Kenduskeag, literally torn apart. Disappearances of children, of whole families, are recorded in old diary extracts . . . but not in any public document. It goes on and on, but perhaps you get the idea.'

'I get the idea, all right,' Ben said. 'Something's going on here, but it's private.'

Mike closed his notebook, replaced it in his inner pocket, and looked at them soberly.

'If I were an insurance man instead of a librarian, I'd draw you a graph, maybe. It would show an unusually high rate of every violent crime we know of, not excluding rape, incest, breaking and entering, auto theft, child abuse, spouse abuse, assault.

'There's a medium-sized city in Texas where the violent-crime –rate is far below what you'd expect for a city of its size and mixed racial make-up. The extraordinary placidity of the people who live there has been traced to something in the water . . . a natural trank of some kind. The exact opposite holds true here. Derry is a violent place to live in an ordinary year. But every twenty-seven years — although the cycle has never been perfectly exact — that violence ha s escalated to a furious peak . . . and it has never been national news.'

'You're saying there's a cancer at work here,' Beverly said.

'Not at all. An untreated cancer invariably kills. Derry hasn't died; on the contrary, it has thrived . . . in an unspectacular, unnewsworthy way, of course. It is simply a fairly prosperous small city in a relatively unpopulous state where bad things happen too often . . . and where ferocious things happen every quarter of a century or so.'

'That holds true all down the line?' Ben asked.

'Mike nodded. 'All down the line. 1715-16, 1740 until roughly 1743 — that must have been a bad one — 1769-70, and on and on. Right up to the present time. I have a feeling that it's been getting steadily worse, maybe because there have been more people in Derry at the

end of each cycle, maybe for some other reason. And in 1958, the cycle appears to have come to a premature end. — For which we were responsible.'

Bill Denbrough leaned forward, his eyes suddenly bright. 'You're sure of that? Sure? '

'Yes,' Mike said. 'All the other cycles reached their peak around September and then ended in a big way. Life usually took on its more or less normal tenor by Christmas . . . Easter at the latest. In other words, there were bad "years" of fourteen to twenty months every twenty-seven years. But the bad year that began when your brother was killed in October of 1957 ended quite abruptly in August of 1958.'

'Why?' Eddie asked urgently. His breath had thinned; Bill remembered that high whistle as Eddie inhaled breath, and knew that he would soon be tooting on the old lung-sucker. 'What did we do?

The question hung there. Mike seemed to regard it . . . and at last he shook his head. 'You'll remember,' he said. 'In time you'll remember.'

'What if we don't?' Ben asked.

'Then God help us all.'

'Nine children dead this year,' Rich said. 'Christ.'

'Lisa Albrecht and Steven Johnson in late 1984,' Mike said. 'In February a boy named Dennis Torrio disappeared. A high-school boy. His body was found in mid-March, in the Barrens. Mutilated. This was nearby.'

He took a photograph from the same pocket into which he had replaced the notebook. It made its way around the table. Beverly and Eddie looked at it, puzzled, but Richie Tozier reacted violently. He dropped it as if it were hot. 'Jesus! Jesus, Mike!' He looked up, his eyes wide and shocked. A moment later he passed the picture to Bill.

Bill looked at it and felt the world swim into gray tones all around him. For a moment he was sure he would pass out. He heard a groan, and knew he had made the sound. He dropped the picture.

'What is it?' he heard Beverly saying. 'What does it mean, Bill?'

'It's my brother's school picture,' Bill said at last. 'It's Juh-Georgie. The picture from his album. The one that moved. The one that winked.'

They handed it around again then, while Bill sat as still as stone at the head of the table, looking out into space. It was a photograph of a photograph. The picture showed a tattered school photo propped up against a white background — smiling lips parted to exhibit two holes where new teeth had never grown (unless they grow in your coffin, Bill thought, and shuddered). On the margin below George's picture were the words SCHOOL FRIENDS 1957-58.

'It was found this year?' Beverly asked again. Mike nodded and she turned to Bill. 'When did you last see it, Bill?'

He wet his lips, tried to speak. Nothing came out. He tried again, hearing the words echo in his head, aware of the stutter coming back, fighting it, fighting the terror.

'I haven't seen that picture since 1958. That spring, the year after George died. When I tried to show it to Richie, it was g-gone.'

There was an explosive gasping sound that made them all look around. Eddie was setting his aspirator back on the table and looking slightly embarrassed.

'Eddie Kaspbrak blasts off!' Richie cried cheerfully, and then, suddenly and eerily, the Voice of the MovieTone Newsreel Narrator came from Rich's mouth: 'Today in Derry, a whole city turns out for Asthmatics on Parade, and the star of the show is Big Ed the Snothead, known all over New England as — '

He stopped abruptly, and one hand moved toward his face, as if to cover his eyes, and Bill suddenly thought: No — no, that's not it. Not to cover his eyes but to push his glasses up on his nose. The glasses that aren't even there anymore. Oh dear Christ, what's going on here?

'Eddie, I'm sorry,' Rich said. 'That was cruel. I don't know what the hell I was thinking about.' He looked around at the others, bewildered.

Mike Hanlon spoke into the silence.

'I'd promised myself after Steven Johnson's body was discovered that if anything else happened — if there was one more clear case — I would make the calls that I ended up not making for another two months. It was as if I was hypnotized by what was happening, by the consciousness of it — the deliberateness of it. George's picture was found by a fallen log less than ten feet from the Torrio boy's body. It wasn't hidden; quite the contrary. It was as if the killer wanted it to be found. As I'm sure the killer did.'

'How did you get the police photo, Mike?' Ben asked. That's what it is, isn't it?'

'Yes, that's what it is. There's a fellow in the Police Department who isn't averse to making a little extra money. I pay him twenty bucks a month — all that I can afford. He's a pipeline.

The body of Dawn Roy was found four days after the Torrio boy. McCarron Park. Thirteen years old. Decapitated.

'April 23rd of this year. Adam Terrault. Sixteen. Reported missing when he didn't come home from band practice. Found the next day just off the path that runs through the greenbelt behind West Broadway. Also decapitated.

'May 6th. Frederick Cowan. Two and a half. Found in an upstairs bathroom, drowned in the toilet.'

'Oh, Mike!' Beverly cried.

'Yeah, it's bad,' he said, almost angrily. 'Don't you think I know that?'

'The police are convinced that it couldn't have been — w e l l , s o m e k i n d o f a c c i d ent?' Bev asked.

Mike shook his head. 'His mother was hanging clothes in the back yard. She heard sounds of a struggle — heard her son screaming. She ran as fast as she could. As she went up the stairs, she says she heard the sound of the toilet flushing repeatedly — that, and someone laughing. She said it didn't sound human.'

'And she saw nothing at all?' Eddie asked.

'Her son,' Mike said simply. 'His back had been broken, his skull fractured. The glass door of the shower-stall was broken. There was blood everywhere. The mother is in the Bangor Mental Health Institute, now. My . . . my Police Department source says she's quite lost her mind.'

'No fucking wonder,' Richie said hoarsely. 'Who's got a cigarette?'

Beverly gave him one. Rich li t it with hands that shook badly.

'The police line is that the killer came in through the front door while the Cowan boy's mother was hanging her clothes in the back yard. Then, when she ran up the back stairs, he supposedly jumped from the bathroom window into the yard she'd just left and got away clean. But the window is only one of those half-sized jobs; a kid of seven would have to wriggle to get through it. And the drop was twenty-five feet to a stone-flagged patio. Rademacher doesn't like to talk about those things, and no one in the press — certainly no one at the News — has pressed him about them.'

Mike took a drink of water and then passed another picture down the line. This was not a police photograph; it was another school picture. It showed a grinning boy who was maybe thirteen. He was dressed in his best for the school photo and his hands were clean and folded neatly in his lap . . . but there was a devilish little glint in his eyes. He was black.

'Jeffrey Holly,' Mike said. 'May 13th. A week after the Cowan boy was killed. Torn open. He was found in Bassey Park, by the Canal.

'Nine days after that, May 22nd, a fifthgrader named John Feury was found dead out on Neibolt Street — '

Eddie uttered a high, quavering scream. He groped for his aspirator and knocked it off the table. It rolled down to Bill, who picked it up. Eddie's face had gone a sickish yellow color. His breath whistled coldly in his throat.

'Get him something to drink!' Ben roared. 'Somebody get him —

But Eddie was shaking his head. He triggered the aspirator down his throat. His chest heaved as he tore in a gulp of air. He triggered the aspirator again and then sat back, eyes half-closed, panting.

'I'll be all right,' he gasped. 'Gimme a minute, I'm with you.'

'Eddie, are you sure?' Beverly asked. 'Maybe you ought to lie down — '

'I'll be all right,' he repeated querulously. 'It was just . . . the shock. You know. The shock. I'd forgotten all about Neibolt Street.'

No one replied; no one had to. Bill thought: You believe your capacity has been reached, and then Mike produces another name, and yet another, like a black magician with a hatful of malign tricks, and you're knocked onyour ass again.

It was too much to face all at once, this outpouring of inexplicable violence, somehow directly aimed at the six people here — or so George's photograph seemed to suggest.

'Both of John Feury's legs were gone,' Mike continued softly, 'but the medical examiner says that happened after he died. H is heart gave out. He seems to have quite literally died of fear. He was found by the postman, who saw a hand sticking out from under the porch — '

'It was 29, wasn't it?' Rich said, and Bill looked at him quickly. Rich glanced back at him, nodded slightly, and then looked at Mike again. 'Twenty-nine Neibolt Street.'

'Oh yes,' Mike said in that same calm voice. 'It was number 29.' He drank more water. 'Are you really all right, Eddie?'

Eddie nodded. His breathing had eased.

'Rademacher made an arrest the day after Feury's body was discovered,' Mike said. 'There was a front-page editorial in the News that same day, calling for his resignation, incidentally.'

'After eight murders?' Ben said. 'Pretty radical of them, wouldn't you say?'

Beverly wanted to know who had been arrested.

'A guy who lives in a little shack way out on Route 7, almost over the town line and into Newport,' Mike said. 'Kind of a hermit. Burns scrapwood in his stove, roofed the place with scavenged shingles and hubcaps. Name of Harold Earl. Probably doesn't see two hundred dollars in cash money over the course of a year. Someone driving by saw him standing out in his dooryard, just looking up at the sky, on the day John Feury's body was discovered. His clothes were covered with blood.'

Then maybe — ' Rich began hopefully.

'He had three butchered deer in his shed,' Mike said. 'He'd been jacking over in Haven. The blood on his clothes was deer-blood. Rademacher asked him if he killed John Feury, and Earl is sup posed to have said, "Oh ayuh, I killed a lot of people. I shot most of them in the war." He also said he'd seen things in the woods at night. Blue lights sometimes, floating just a few inches off the ground. Corpse-lights, he called them. And Bigfoot.

'They sent him up to the Bangor Mental Health. According to the medical report, his liver's almost entirely gone. He's been drinking paint-thinner — '

'Oh my God,' Beverly said.

' — and is prone to hallucinations. They've been holding on to him, a nd until three days ago Rademacher was sticking to his idea that Earl was the most likely suspect. He had eight guys out there, digging around his shack and looking for the missing heads, lampshades made out of human skin, God knows what.'

Mike paused, head lowered, and then went on. His voice was slightly hoarse now. 'I'd held off and held off. But when I saw this last one, I made the calls. I wish to God I'd made them sooner.'

'Let's see,' Ben said abruptly.

'The victim was another fifthgrader,' Mike said. 'A classmate of the Feury boy. He was found just off Kansas Street, near where Bill used to hide his bike when we were in the Barrens. His name was Jerry Bellwood. He was torn apart. What . . . what was left of him was found at the foot of a cement retaining wall that was put in along most of Kansas Street about twenty years ago to stop the soil erosion. This police photograph of the section of that wall where Bellwood was found was taken less than half an hour after the body was removed. Here.'

He passed the picture to Rich Tozier, who looked and passed it on to Beverly. She glanced at it briefly, winced, and passed it on to Eddie, who gazed at it long and raptly before handing it on to Ben. Ben passed it to Bill with barely a glance.

Printing straggled its way across the concrete retaining wall. It said:

Bill looked up at Mike grimly. He had been bewildered and frightened; now he felt the first stirrings of anger. He was glad. Angry was not such a great way to feel, but it was better than the shock, better than the miserable fear. 'Is that written in what I think it's written in?' 'Yes,' Mike said. 'Jerry Bellwood's blood.'

5

Richie Gets Beeped

Mike had taken his photographs back. He had an idea that Bill might ask for the one of George's last school picture, but Bill did not. He put them in his inside jacket pocket, and when they were out of sight, all of them — Mike included — felt a sense of relief.

'Nine children,' Beverly was saying softly. 'I can't believe it. I mean . . . I can believe it, but I can't believe it. Nine kids and nothing? Nothing at all?

'It's not quite like that,' Mike said. 'People are angry, people are scared . . . or so it seems. It's really impossible to tell which ones really feel that way and which ones are faking.'

'Faking?

'Beverly, do you remember, when we were kids, the man who just folded his newspaper and went inside his house while you were screaming at him for help?'

For a moment something seemed to jump in her eyes and she looked both terrified and aware. Then she only looked puzzled. 'No . . . when was that, Mike?'

'Never mind. It will come to you in time. All I can say now is that everything iooks the way it should in Derry. Faced with such a grisly string of murders, people are doing all the things you'd expect them to do, and most of them are the same things that went on while kids were disappearing and getting murdered back in '58. The Save Our Children Committee is meeting again, only this time at Derry Elementary School instead of Derry High. There are sixteen detectives from the State Attorney General's office in town, and a contingent of FBI agents as well — I don't know how many, and although Rademacher talks big, I don't think he does, either. The curfew's back in effect — '

'Oh yes. The curfew.' Ben was rubbing the side of his neck slowly and deliberately. 'That did wonders back in '58. I remember that much.'

' — and there are Mothers' Walker Groups to make sure that every child who goes to school, grades K through eight, is chaperoned home. The News has gotten over two thousand letters demanding a solution in the last three weeks alone. And, of course, the out-migration has begun again. I sometimes think that's the only way to really tell who's sincere about wanting it stopped and who isn't. The really sincere ones get scared and leave.'

'People really are leaving?' Richie asked.

'It happens each time the cycle cranks up again. It's impossible to tell just how many go, because the cycle hasn't fallen squarely in a census year since 1850 or so. But it's a fairish number. They run like kids who just found out the house was haunted for real after all.'

'Come home, come home, come home,' Beverly said softly. When she looked up from her hands it was Bill she looked at, not Mike. 'It wanted us to come back. Why?'

'It may want us all back,' Mike said a little cryptically. 'Sure. It may. It may want revenge. After all, we balked It once before.'

'Revenge . . . or just to set things back in order,' Bill said.

Mike nodded. 'Things are out of order with your own lives, too, you know. None of you left Derry untouched . . . without Its mark on you. All of you forgot what happened here, and your memories of that summer are still only fragmentary. And then there's the passingly curious fact that you're all rich.'

'Oh, come on now!' Richie said. 'That's hardly — '

'Be soft, be soft,' Mike said, holding his hand up and smiling faintly. 'I'm not accusing you of anything, just trying to get the facts out on the table. You are rich by the standards of a small –town librarian who makes just under eleven grand a year after taxes, okay?'

Rich shrugged the shoulders of his expensive suit uncomfortably. Ben appeared deeply absorbed in tearing small strip s from the edge of his napkin. No one was looking directly at Mike except Bill.

'None of you are in the H. L. Hunt class, certainly,' Mike said, 'but you are all well-to-do even by the standards of the American upper-middle class. We're all friends here, so fess up: if there's one of you who declared less than ninety thousand dollars on his or her 1984 tax return, raise your hand.'

They glanced around at each other almost furtively, embarrassed, as Americans always seem to be, by the raw fact of their own success — as if cash were hardcooked eggs and affluence the farts that inevitably follow an overdose of same. Bill felt hot blood in his cheeks and was helpless to stop its rise. He had been paid ten thousand more than the sum Mike had mentioned just for doing the first draft of the Attic Room screenplay. He had been promised an additional twenty thousand dollars each for two rewrites, if needed. Then there were royalties . . . and the hefty advance on a two-book contract just signed . . . how much had he declared on his '84 tax return? Just about eight hundred thousand dollars, right? Enough, anyway, to seem almost monstrous in light of Mike Hanlon's stated income of just under eleven thousand a year.

So that's how much they pay you to keep the lighthouse, Mike old kid, Bill thought. Jesus Christ, somewhere along the line you should have asked for a raise!

Mike said: 'Bill Denbrough, a successful novelist in a society where there are only a few novelists and fewer still lucky enough to be making a living from the craft. Beverly Rogan, who's in the rag trade, a field to which more are called but even fewer chosen. She is, in fact, the most sought –after designer in the middle third of the country right now.'

'Oh, it's not me,' Beverly said. She uttered a nervous little laugh and lit a fresh cigarette from the smoldering stub of the old one. 'It's Tom. Tom's the one. Without him I'd still be relining skirts and sewing up hems. I don't have any business sense at all, even Tom says so. It's just . . . you know, Tom. And luck.' She took a single deep drag from her cigarette and then snuffed it.

'Methinks the lady doth protest too much,' Richie said slyly.

She turned quickly in her seat and gave him a hard look, her color high. 'Just what's that supposed to mean, Richie Tozier?'

'Doan hits me, Miz Scawlett!' Richie cried in a high, trembling Pickaninny Voice — and in that moment Bill could see with an eerie clarity the boy he had known; he was not just a superseded presence lurking under Rich Tozier's grownup exterior but a creature almost more real than the man himself. 'Doan hits me! Lemme bring you anothuh mint joolip, Miz Scawlett! Youse goan drink hit out on de po'ch where it's be a little bit cooluh! Doan whup disyere boy!'

'You're impossible, Richie,' Beverly said coldly. 'You ought to grow up.'

Richie looked at her, his grin fading slowly into uncertainty. 'Until I came back here,' he said, 'I thought I had.'

'Rich, you may just be the most successful disc jockey in the United States,' Mike said. 'You've certainly got LA in the palm of your hand. On top of that there are two syndicated programs, one of them a straight top-forty countdown show, the other one something called The Freaky Forty —

'You better watch out, fool,' Richie said in a gruff Mr T Voice, but he was blushing. 'I'll make your front and back change places. I'll give you brain-surgery with my fist. I'll — '

'Eddie,' Mike went on, ignoring Richie, 'you've got a healthy limousine service in a city where you just about have to elbow long black cars out of your way when you cross the street. Two limo companies a week go smash in the Big Apple, but you're doing fine.

'Ben, you're probably the most successful young architect in the world.'

Ben opened his mouth, probably to protest, and then closed it again abruptly.

Mike smiled at them, spread his hands. 'I don't want to embarrass anyone, but I do want all the cards on the table. There are people who succeed young, and there are people who succeed in highly specialized jobs — if there weren't people who bucked the odds successfully, I guess everybody would give up. If it was just one or two of you, we could pass it off as coincidence. But it's not just one or two; it's all of you, and that inclu des Stan Uris, who was the most successful young accountant in Atlanta . . . which means in the whole South. My conclusion is that your success stems from what happened here twenty-seven years ago. If you had all been exposed to asbestos at that time and ha d all developed lung cancer by now, the correlative would be no less clear or persuasive. Do any of you want to dispute it?'

He looked at them. No one answered.

'All except you,' Bill said. 'What happened to you, Mikey?'

'Isn't it obvious?' He grinned. 'I stayed here.'

'You kept the lighthouse,' Ben said. Bill jerked around and looked at him, startled, but Ben was staring hard at Mike and didn't see. 'That doesn't make me feel so good, Mike. In fact, it makes me feel sort of like a bugturd.'

'Amen,' Beverly said.

Mike shook his head patiently. 'You have nothing to feel guilty about, any of you. Do. you think it was my choice to stay here, any more than it was your choice — a n y o f y o u — to leave? Hell, we were kids. For one reason or another your parents moved away, and you guys were part of the baggage they took along. My parents stayed. And was it really their decision — any of them) I don't think so. How was it decided who would go and who would stay? Was it luck? Fate? It? Some Other? I don't know. But it wasn't us guys. So quit it.'

'You're not . . . not bitter?' Eddie asked timidly.

'I've been too busy to be bitter,' Mike said. 'I've spent a long time watching and waiting . . . I was watching and waiting even before I knew it, I think, but for the last five years or so I've been on what you might call red alert. Since the turn of the year I've been keeping a journal.

And when a man writes, he thinks harder . . . or maybe just more specifically. And one of the things I've spent time writing and thinking about is the nature of It. It changes; we know that. I think It also manipulates, and leaves Its marks on people just by the nature of what It is — the way you can smell a skunk on you even after a long bath, if it lets go its bag of scent too near you. The way a grasshopper will spit bug juice into your palm if you catch it in your hand.'

Mike slowly unbuttoned his shirt and spread it wide. They could all see the pinkish scrawls of scar across the smooth brown skin of his chest between the nipples.

'The way claws leave scars,' he said.

'The werewolf,' Richie almost moaned. 'Oh Christ, Big Bill, the werewolf! When we went back to Neibolt Street!'

'What?' Bill asked. He sounded like a man called out of a dream. 'What, Richie?'

'Don't you remember?

'No . . . do you?'

'I . . . I almost do . . . ' Looking both confused and scared, Richie subsided.

'Are you saying this thing isn't evil?' Eddie asked Mike abruptly. He was staring at the scars as if hypno tized. 'That it's just some part of the . . . the natural order?'

'It's no part of a natural order we understand or condone,' Mike said, rebuttoning his shirt, 'and I see no reason to operate on any other basis than the one we do understand: that It kills, kills children, and that's wrong. Bill understood that before any of us. Do you remember, Bill?'

'I remember that I wanted to kill It,' Bill said, and for the first time (and ever after) he heard the pronoun gain proper-noun status in his own voic e. 'But I didn't have much of a world –view on the subject, if you see what I mean — I just wanted to kill It because It killed George.'

'And do you still?'

Bill considered this carefully. He looked down at his spread hands on the table and remembered George in his yellow slicker, his hood up, the paper boat with its thin glaze of paraffin in one hand. He looked up at Mike.

'M-M-More than ever,' he said.

Mike nodded as if this were exactly what he had expected. 'It left Its mark on us. It worked Its will on us, just as It has worked Its will on this whole town, day in and day out, even during those long periods when It is asleep or hibernating or whatever It does between Its more . . . more lively periods.'

Mike raised one finger.

'But if It worked Its will on us, at some point, in some way, we aho worked our will on It. We stopped It before It was done — I know we did. Did we weaken It? Hurt It? Did we, in fact, almost kill It? I think we did. I think we came so close to killing It that we went away thinking we had.'

'But you don't remember that part either, do you?' Ben asked.

'No. I can remember everything up until August 15th 1958 with almost perfect clarity. But from then until September 4th or so, when school was called in again, everything is a total blank. It isn't murky or hazy; it is just completely gone. With one exception: I seem to remember Bill screaming about something called the dead-lights.'

Bill's arm jerked convulsively. It struck one of his empty beer bottles, and the bottle shattered on the floor like a bomb.

'Did you cut yourself?' Beverly asked. She had half-risen.

'No,' he said. His voice was harsh and dry. His arms had broken out in gooseflesh. It seemed that his skull had somehow grown; he could feel

(the deadlights)

it pressing out against the stretched skin of his face in steady numbing throbs.

'I'll pick up the — '

'No, just sit down.' He wanted to look at her and couldn't. He couldn't take his eyes off Mike.

'Do you remember the deadlights, Bill?' Mike asked softly.

'No,' he said. His mouth felt the way it did when the dentist got a little too enthusiastic with the novocaine.

'You will.'

'I hope to God I don't.'

'You will anyway,' Mike said. 'But for now . . . no. Not me, either. Do any of you?'

One by one they shook their heads.

'But we did something,' Mike said quietly. 'At some point we were able to exercise some sort of group will. At some point we achieved some special understanding, whether conscious or unconscious.' He stirred restlessly. 'God, [ wish Stan was here. I have a feeling that Stan, with his ordered mind, might have had some idea.'

'Maybe he did,' Beverly said. 'Maybe that's why he killed himself. Maybe he understood that if there was magic, it wouldn't work for grown-ups.'

'I think it could, though,' Mike said. 'Because there's one other thing we six have in common. I wonder if any of you have realized what that is.'

It was Bill's turn to open his mouth and then shut it again.

'Go on,' Mike said. 'You know what it is. I can see it on your face.'

'I'm not sure I know,' Bill replied, 'but I think w-we're all childless. Is that ih-it?'

There was a moment of shocked silence.

'Yeah,' Mike said. 'That's it.'

'Jesus Christ Almighty!' Eddie spoke up indignantly. 'What in the world does that have to do with the price of beans in Peru? What gave you the idea that everyone in the world has to have kids? That's nuts!'

'Do you and your wife have children?' Mike asked.

'If you've been keeping track of us all the way you said, then you know goddam well we don't. But I still say it doesn't mean a damn thing.'

'Have you tried to have children?'

'We don't use birth control, if that's what you mean.' Eddie spoke with an oddly moving dignity, but his cheeks were flushed. 'It just so happens that my wife is a little . . . Oh hell. She's a lot overweight. We went to see a doctor and she told us my wife might never have kids if she didn't lose some weight. Does that make us criminals?'

'Take it easy, Eds,' Richie soothed, and leaned toward him.

'Don't call me Eds and don't you dare pinch my cheek!' he cried, rounding on Richie. 'You know I hate that! I always hated it!'

Richie recoiled, blinking.

'Beverly?' Mike asked. 'What about you and Tom?'

'No children,' she said. 'Also no birth control. Tom wants kids . . . and so do I, of course,' she added hastily, glancing around at them quickly. Bill thought her eyes seemed overbright, almost the eyes of an actress giving a good performance. 'It just hasn't happened yet.'

'Have you had those tests?' Ben asked her.

'Oh yes, of course,' she said, and uttered a light laugh that was almost a titter. And in one of those leaps of comprehension that sometimes come to people who are gifted with both curiosity and insight, Bill suddenly understood a great deal about Beverly and her husband Tom, alias the Greatest Man in the World. Beverly had gone to have fertility tests. His guess was that the Greatest Ma n in the World had refused to entertain even for a moment the notion that there might be something wrong with the sperm being manufactured in the Sacred Sacs.

'What about you and your wife, Big Bill?' Rich asked. 'Been trying?' They all looked at him curiously . . . because his wife was someone they knew. Audra was by no means the best-known or the best-loved actress in the world, but she was certainly part of the celebrity coinage that had somehow replaced talent as a medium of exchange in the latter half of the twentieth century; there had been a picture of her in People magazine when she cut her hair short, and during a particularly boring stretch in New York (the play she had been planning to do Off Broadway fell through) she had done a week-long stint on Holly wood Squares, over her agent's strenuous objections. She was a stranger whose lovely face was known to them. He thought Beverly looked particularly curious.

'We've been trying off and on for the last six years,' Bill said. 'For the last eight months or so it's been off, because of the movie we were doing — Attic Room, it's called.'

'You know, we run a little entertainment syndic every day from five-fifteen in the afternoon until five-thirty,' Richie said. 'Seein' Stars, it's called. The y had a feature on that damned movie just last week — Husband and Wife Working Happily Together kind of thing. They said both of your names and I never made the connection. Funny, isn't it?'

'Very,' Bill said. 'Anyway, Audra said it would be just our luck if she caught pregnant while we were in preproduction and she had to do ten weeks of strenuous acting and being morning –sick at the same time. But we want kids, yes. And we've tried quite hard.' 'Had fertility tests?' Ben asked.

'Uh-huh. Four years ago, in New York. The doctors discovered a very small benign tumor in Audra's womb, and they said it was a lucky thing because, although it wouldn't have prevented her from getting pregnant, it might have caused a tubal pregnancy. She and I are both fertile, though.'

Eddie repeated stubbornly, 'It doesn't prove a goddam thing.'

'Suggestive, though,' Ben murmured.

'No little accidents on your front, Ben?' Bill asked. He was shocked and amused to find that his mouth had very nearly called Ben Haystack instead.

'I've never been married, I've always been careful, and there have been no paternity suits,' Ben said. 'Beyond that I don't think there's any real way of telling.'

'You want to hear a funny story?' Richie asked. He was smiling, but there was no smile in his eyes.

'Sure,' Bill said. 'You were always good at the funny stuff, Richie.'

'Your face and me own buttocks, boyo,' Richie said in the Irish Cop's Voice. It was a great Irish Cop's Voice. You've improved out of all measure, Richie, Bill thought. As a kid, you couldn't do an Irish Cop no matter how you busted your brains. Except once . . . or twice . . . when

(the deadlights)

was that?

'Your face and me own buttocks; just keep rememb 'rin that com-pay-ri-son, me foine bucko.'

Ben Hanscom suddenly held his nose and cried in a high quavering boyish voice: 'Beep-beep, Richie! Beep-beep! Beep-beep!'

After a moment, laughing, Eddie held his own nose and joined in. Beverly did the same.

'Awright! Awright!' Richie cried, laughing himself. 'Awright, I give up! Chrissake!'

'Oh man,' Eddie said. He collapsed back in his chair, laughing so hard he was almost crying. 'We gotcha that time, Trashmouth. Way to go, Ben.'

Ben was smiling but he looked a little bewildered.

'Beep-beep,' Bev said, and giggled. 'I forgot all about that. We always used to beep you, Richie.'

'You guys never appreciated true talent, that's all,' Richie said comfortably. As in the old days, you could knock him off-balance, but he wa s like one of those inflatable Joe Palooka dolls with sand in the base — he floated upright again almost at once. 'That was one of your little contributions to the Losers' Club, wasn't it, Haystack?'

'Yeah, I guess it was.'

'What a man!' Richie said in a trembling, awestruck voice and then began to salaam over the table, nearly sticking his nose in his tea-cup each time he went down. 'What a man! Oh chillun, what a man!'

'Beep-beep, Richie,' Ben said solemnly, and then exploded laughter in a he arty baritone utterly unlike his wavering childhood voice. 'You're the same old roadrunner.'

You guys want to hear this story or not?' Richie asked. 'I mean, no big deal one way or the other. Beep away if you want to. I can take abuse. I mean, you're looking at a man who once did an interview with Ozzy Osbourne.'

'Tell it,' Bill said. He glanced over at Mike and saw that Mike looked happier — or more at rest — since the luncheon had begun. Was it because he saw the almost unconscious knitting-together that was happening, the sort of easy falling — back into old roles that almost never happened when old chums got together? Bill thought so. And he thought, If there are certainpreconditions for the belief in magic that makes it possible to use the magic, then maybe those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves. It was not a very comforting thought. It made him feel like a man strapped to the nosecone of a guided missile.

Beep-beep indeed.

'Well,' Richie was saying, 'I could make this lo ng and sad or I could give you the Blondie and Dagwood comic-strip version, but I'll settle for something in the middle. The year after I moved out to California I met a girl, and we fell pretty hard for each other. Started living together. She was on the pill at first, but it made her feel sick almost all the time. She talked about getting an IUD, but I wasn't too crazy about that — the first stories about how they might not be completely safe were just starting to come out in the papers.

'We had talked a lot about kids, and had pretty well decided we didn't want them even if we decided to legalize the relationship. Irresponsible to bring kids into such a shitty, dangerous, overpopulated world . . . and blah-blah-blah, babble-babble-babble, let's go out and put a bomb in the men's room of the Bank of America and then come on back to the crashpad and smoke some dope and talk about the difference between Maoism and Trotskyism, if you see what I mean.

'Or maybe I'm being too hard on both of us. Shit, we were young and reasonably idealistic. The upshot was that I got my wires cut, as the Beverly Hills crowd puts it with their unfailing vulgar chic. The operation went with no problem and I had no adverse aftereffects. There can be, you know. I had a friend whose balls swelled up to roughly the size of the tires on a 1959 Cadillac. I was gonna give him a pair of suspenders and a couple of barrels for his birthday — sort of a designer truss — but they went down before then.'

'All put with your customary tact and dignity,' Bill remarked, and Beverly began to laugh again.

Richie offered a large, sincere smile. 'Thank you, Bill, for those words of support. The word "fuck" was used two hundred and six times in your last book. I counted.'

'Beep-beep, Trashmouth,' Bill said solemnly, and they all laughed. Bill found it nearly impossible to believe they had been talking about dead children less than ten minutes ago.

'Press onward, Richie,' Ben said. 'The hour groweth late.'

'Sandy and I lived together for two and a half years,' Richie went on. 'Came really close to getting married twice. As things turned out, I guess we saved ourselves a lot of heartache and all that community-property bullshit by keeping it simple. She got an offer to join a corporate law-firm in Washington around the same time I got an offer to come to KLAD as a weekend

jock — not much, but a foot in the door. She told me it was her big chance and I had to be the most insensitive male chauvinist oinker in the United States to be dragging my feet, and furthermore she'd had it with California anyway. I told her I also had a chance. So we thrashed it out, and we trashed each other out, and at the end of all the thrashing and trashing Sandy went.

'About a year after that I decided to try and get the vasectomy reversed. No real reason for it, and I knew from the stuff I'd read that the chances were pretty spotty, but I thought what the hell.'

'You were seeing someone steadily then?' Bill asked.

'No — that's the funny part of it,' Richie said, frowning. 'I just woke up one day with this . . . I dunno, this hobbyhorse about getting it reversed.'

'You must have been nuts,' Eddie said. 'General anesthetic instead of a local? Surgery? Maybe a week in the hospital afterward?'

'Yeah, the doctor told me all of that stuff,' Richie replied. 'And I told him I wanted to go ahead anyway. I don't know why. The doc asked me if I understood the aftermath of the operation was sure to be painful while the result was only going to be a coin-toss at best. I said I did. He said okay, and I asked him when — my attitude being the sooner the better, you know. So he says hold your horses, son, hold your horses, the first step is to get a sperm sample just to make sure the reversal operation is necessary. I said, "Come on, I had the exam after the vasectomy. It worked." He told me that sometimes the vasa reconnected spontaneously. "Yo mamma!" I says. "Nobody ever told me that." He said the chances were very small — infinitesimal, really — but because the operation was so serious, we ought to check it out. So I popped into the men's room with a Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue and jerked off into a Dixie cup — '

'Beep-beep, Richie,' Beverly said.

'Yeah, you're right,' Richie said. 'The part about the Frederick's catalogue is a lie — y o u never find anything that good in a doctor's office. Anyway, the doc called me three days later and asked me which I wanted first, the good news or the bad news.

'"Gimme the good news first," I said.

'"The good news is the operation won't be necessary," he said. "The bad news is that anybody you've been to bed with over the last two or three years could hit you with a paternity suit pretty much at will."

'"Are you saying what I think you're saying?" I asked him.

'"I'm telling you that you aren't shooting blanks and haven't been for quite awhile now," he said. "Millions of little wigglies in your sperm sample. Your days of going gaily in bareback with no questions asked have temporarily come to an end, Richard.

'I thanked him and hung up. Then I called Sandy in Washington.

'"Rich!" she says to me,' and Richie's voice suddenly became the voice of this girl Sandy whom none of them had ever met. It was not an imitation or even a likeness, exactly; it was more like an auditory painting. ' "It's great to hear from you! I got married!"

'"Yeah, that's great," I said. "You should have let me know. I would have sent you a blender."

'She goes, "Same old Richie, always full of gags."

'So I said "Sure, same old Richie, always full of gags. By the way, Sandy, you didn't happen to have a kid or anything after you left LA, did you? Or maybe an unscheduled d and c, or something?"

'"That gag isn't so funny, Rich," she said, and I had a brainwave that she was getting ready to hang up on me, so I told her what happened. She started laughing, only this time it was real hard — she was laughing the way I always used to laugh with you guys, like somebody had told her the world's biggest bellybuster. So when she finally starts slowing down I ask her

what in God's name is funny. "It's just so wonderful," she said. "This time the joke's on you. After all these years the joke is finally on Records Tozier. How many bastards have you sired since I came east, Rich?"

'"I take it that means you still haven't experienced the joys of motherhood?" I ask her.

'"I'm due in July," she says. "Were there any more questions?"

'"Yeah," I go. "When did you change your mind about the immorality of bringing children into such a shitty world?"

'"When I finally met a man who wasn't a shit," she answers, and hangs up.'

Bill began to laugh. He laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. 'Yeah,' Richie said. 'I think she cut it off quick so she'd really get the last word, but she could have hung on the line all day. I know when I've been aced. I went back to the doctor a week later and asked him if he could be a little clearer on the odds against that sort of spontaneous regeneration. He said he'd talked with some of his colleagues about the matter. It turned out that in the three –year period 1980-82, the California branch of the AMA logged twenty-three reports of spontaneous regeneration. Six of those turned out to be simply botched operations. Six others were either hoaxes or cons — guys looking to take a bite out of some doctor's bank account. So . . . eleven real ones in three years.'

'Eleven out of how many?' Beverly asked.

'Twenty –eight thousand six hundred and eighteen,' Richie said calmly.

Silence around the table.

'So I went and beat Irish Sweepstakes odds,' Richie said, 'and still no kid to show for it. That give you any good chucks, Eds?'

Eddie began stubbornly: 'It still doesn't prove — '

'No,' Bill said, 'it doesn't prove a thing. But it certainly suggests a link. The question is, what do we do now? Have you thought about that, Mike?'

'I've thought about it, sure,' Mike said, 'but it was impossible to decide anything until you all got together again and talked, the way you've been doing. There was no way I could predict how this reunion would go until it actually happened.'

He paused for a long time, looking thoughtfully at them.

'I've got one idea,' he said, 'but before I tell you what it is, I think we have to agree on whether or not we have business to do here. Do we want to try again to do what we tried to do once before? Do we want to try to kill It again? Or do we just divide the check up six ways and go back to what we were doing?'

'It seems as if — ' Beverly began, but Mike shook his head at her. He wasn't done.

'You have to understand that our chances of success are impossible to predict. I know they're not good, just as I know they would have been a little better if Stan was here, too. Still not real good, but better. With Stan gone, the circle we made that day is broken. I don't really think we can destroy Itf or even send It away for a little while, as we did before, with a broken circle. I think It will kill us, one by one by one, and probably in some extremely horrible ways. As children we made a complete circle in some way I don't understand even now. I think that, if we agree to go ahead, we'll have to try to form a smaller circle. I don't know if that can be done. I believe it might be possible to think we'd done it, only to discover — when it was too late — well . . . that it was too late.'

Mike regarded them again, eyes sunken and tired in his brown face. 'So I think we need to take a vote. Stay and try it again, or go home. Those are the choices. I got you here on the strength of an old promise I wasn't even sure you'd remember, but I can't hold you here on the strength of that promise. The results of that would be worse and more of it.'

He looked at Bill, and in that moment Bill understood what was coming. He dreaded it, was helpless to stop it, and then, with the same feeling of relief he imagined must come to a suicide when he takes his hands off the wheel of the speeding car and simply uses them to

cover his eyes, he accepted it. Mike had gotten them here, Mike had laid it all neatly out for them . . . and now he was relinquishing the mantle of leadership. He intended that mantle to go back to the person who had worn it in 1958.

'What do you say, Big Bill? Call the question.'

'Before I do,' Bill said, 'd– does everyone understand the question? You were going to say something, Bev.'

She shook her head.

'All right; I g-guess the question is, do we stay and fight or do we forget the whole thing? Those in favor of staying?'

No one at the table moved at all for perhaps five seconds, and Bill was reminded of auctions he had attended where the price on an item suddenly soared into the stratosphere and those who didn't want to bid anymore almost literally played statues; one was afraid to scratch an itch or wave a fly off the end of one's nose for fear the auctioneer would take it for another five grand or twenty-five.

Bill thought of Georgie, Georgie who had meant no one any harm, who had only wanted to get out of the house after being cooped up all week, Georgie with his color high, his newspaper boat in one hand, snapping the buckles of his yellow rainslicker with die other, Georgie thanking him . . . and then bending over and kissing Bill's fever-heated cheek: Thanks, Bill. It's a neat boat.

He felt the old rage rise in him, but he was older now and his perspective was wider. It wasn't just Georgie now. A horrid slew of names marched through his head: Betty Ripsom, found frozen into the ground, Cheryl Lamonica, fished out of the Kenduskeag, Matthew Clements, torn from his tricycle, Veronica Grogan, nine years old and found in a sewer, Steven Johnson, Lisa Albrecht, all the others, and God only knew how many of the missing.

He raised his hand slowly and said, 'Let's kill It. This time let's really kill It.'

For a moment his hand hung there alone, like the hand of the only kid in class who knows the right answer, the one all the other kids hate. Then Richie sighed, raised his own hand, and said: 'What the hell. It can't be any worse than interviewing Ozzy Osbourne.'

Beverly raised her hand. Her color was back now, but in hectic patches that flared along her cheekbones. She looked both tremendously excited and scared to death.

Mike raised his hand.

Ben raised his.

Eddie Kaspbrak sat back in his chair, looking as if he wished he could actually melt into it and thus disappear. His face, thin and delicate-looking, was miserably afraid as he looked first right and then left and then back to Bill. For a moment Bill felt sure Eddie was simply going to push back his chair, rise, and bolt from the room without looking back. Then he raised one hand in the air and grasped his aspirator tightly in the other.

'Way to go, Eds,' Richie said. 'We're really gonna have ourselves some chucks this time, I bet.'

'Beep-beep, Richie,' Eddie said in a wavering voice.

6

The Losers Get Dessert

'So what's your one idea, Mike?' Bill asked. The mood had been broken by Rose, the hostess, who had come in with a dish of fortune cookies. She looked around at the six people who had their hands in the air with a carefully polite lack of curiosity. They lowered them hastily, and no one said anything until Rose was gone again. 'It's simple enough,' Mike said, 'but it might be pretty damn dangerous, too.'

'Spill it,'Richie said.

'I think we ought to split up for the rest of the day. I think each of us ought to go back to the place in Derry he or she remembers best . . . outside the Barrens, that is. I don't think any of us should go there — not yet. Think of it as a series of walking –tours, if you like.'

'What's the purpose, Mike?' Ben asked.

'I'm not entirely sure. You have to understand that I'm going pretty much on intuition here — '

'But this has got a good beat and you can dance to it,' Richie said.

The others smiled. Mike did not; he nodded instead. 'That's as good a way of putting it as any. Going on intuition is like picking up a beat and dancing to it. Using intuition is a hard thing for grownups to do, and that's the main reason I think it might be the right thing for us to do. Kids, after all, operate on it about eighty percent of the time, at least until they're fourteen or so.'

'You're talking about plugging back into the situation,' Eddie said.

'I suppose so. Anyway, that's my idea. If no specific place to go comes to you, just follow your feet and see where they take you. Then we meet tonight, at the library, and talk over what happened.'

'If anything happens,' Ben said.

'Oh, I think things will.'

'What sort of things?' Bill asked.

Mike shook his head. 'I have no idea. I think whatever happens is apt to be unpleasant. I think it's even possible that one of us may not turn up at the library tonight. No reason for thinking that . . . except that intuition thing again.'

Silence greeted this.

'Why alone?' Beverly asked finally. 'If we're supposed to do this as a group, why do you want us to start alone, Mike? Especially if the risk really turns out to be as high as you think it might be?'

'I think I can answer that,' Bill said.

'Go ahead, Bill,' Mike said.

'It started alone for each of us,' Bill said to Beverly. 'I don't remember everything — not yet — but I sure remember that much. The picture in George's room that moved. Ben's mummy. The leper that Eddie saw under the porch on Neibolt Street. Mike finding the blood on the grass near the Canal in Bassey Park. And the bird . . . there was something about a bird, wasn't there, Mike?'

Mike nodded grimly.

'A big bird.'

'Yes, but not as friendly as the one on Sesame Street.'

Richie cackled wildly. 'Derry's answer to James Brown Gets Off A Good One! Oh chillun, is we blessed or is we blessed!'

'Beep-beep, Richie,' Mike said, and Richie subsided.

'For you it was the voice from the pipe and the blood that came out of the drain,' Bill said to Beverly. 'And for Richie . . . ' But here he paused, puzzled.

'I must be the exception that proves the rule, Big Bill,' Richie said. 'The first time I came in contact with anything that summer that was weird — I mean really big-league weird — was in George's room, with you. When you and I went back to your house that day and looked at his photo album. The picture of Center Street by the Canal started to move. Do you remember?'

'Yes,' Bill said. 'But are you sure there was nothing before that, Richie? Nothing at all?'

'I — ' Something flickered in Richie's eyes. He said slowly, 'Well, there was the day Henry and his friends chased me — before the end of school, this was, and I got away from them in

the toy department of Freese's. I went up by City Center and sat down on a park bench for awhile and I thought I saw . . . but that was just something I dreamed.'

'What was it?' Beverly asked.

'Nothing,' Richie said, almost brusquely. 'A dream. Really.' He looked at Mike. 'I don't mind taking a walk, though. It'll kill the afternoon. Views of the old homestead.'

'So we're agreed?' Bill asked.

They nodded.

'And we'll meet at the library tonight at . . . when do you suggest, Mike?'

'Seven o'clock. Ring the bell if you're late. The libe closes at seven on weekdays until summer vacation starts for the kids.'

'Seven it is,' Bill said, and let his eyes range soberly over them. 'And be careful. You want to remember that none of us really knows what we're d-d-doing. Think of this as reconnaissance. If you should see something, don't fight. Run.'

'I'm a lover, not a fighter,' Richie said in a dreamy Michael Jackson Voice.

'Well, if we're going to do it, we ought to get going,' Ben said. A small smile pulled up the left corner of his mouth. It was more bitter than amused. 'Although I'll be damned if I could tell you right this minute where I'm going to go, if the Barrens are out. That was the best of it for me — going down there with you guys.' His eyes moved to Beverly, held there for a moment, moved away. 'I can't think of anyplace else that means very much to me. Probably I'll just wander around for a couple of hours, looking at buildings and getting wet feet.'

'You'll find a place to go, Haystack,' Richie said. 'Visit some of your old food-stops and gas up.'

Ben laughed. 'My capacity's gone down a lot since I was eleven. I'm so full you guys may just have to roll me out of here.'

'Well, I'm all set,' Eddie said.

'Wait a sec!' Beverly cried as they began to push back from their chairs. 'The fortune cookies! Don't forget those!'

'Yeah,' Richie said. 'I can see mine now. YOU WILL SOON BE EATEN UP BY A LARGE MONSTER. HAVE A NICE DAY.'

They laughed and Mike passed the little bowl of fortune cookies to Richie, who took one and then sent it on around the table. Bill noticed that no one opened his or her cookie until each had one; they sat with the little hat-shaped cookies either in front of them or held in their hands, and even as Beverly, still smiling, picked hers up, Bill felt a cry rising in his throat: No! No, don't do that, its part of it, put it back, don't open it!

But it was too late. Beverly had broken hers open, Ben was doing the same to his, Eddie was cutting into his with the edge of his fork, and just before Beverly's smile turned to a grimace of horror Bill had time to think: We knew, somehow we knew, because no one simplybit into his or her fortune cookie. That would have been the normal thing to do, but no one did it. Somehow, some pan of us still remembers . . . everything.

And he found that insensate underknowledge somehow the most horrifying realization of all; it spoke more eloquently than Mike could have about how surely and deeply It had touched each one of them . . . and how Its touch was still upon them.

Blood spurted up from Beverly's fortune cookie as if from a slashed artery. It splashed across her hand and then gouted onto the white napery which covered the table, staining it a bright red that sank in and then spread out in grasping pink fingers.

Eddie Kaspbrak uttered a strangled cry and pushed himself away from the table with such a sudden revolted confusion of arms and legs that his chair nearly tipped over. A huge bug, its chitinous carapace an ugly yellow-brown, was pushing its way out of his fortune cookie as if from a cocoon. Its obsidian eyes stared blindly forward. As it lurched onto Eddie's bread-and –butter plate, cookie crumbs fell from its back in a little shower that Bill heard clearly and

which came back to haunt his dreams when he slept for awhile later that afternoon. As it freed itself entirely it rubbed its thin rear legs together, producing a dry reedy hum, and Bill realized it was some sort of terribly mutated cricket. It lumbered to the edge of the dish and tumbled onto the tablecloth on its back.

'Oh God!' Richie managed in a choked voice. 'Oh God Big Bill it's an eye dear God it's an eye a fucking eye —

Bill's head snapped around and he saw Richie staring down at his fortune cookie, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a kind of sickened leer. A chunk of his cookie's glazed surface had fallen onto the tablecloth, revealing a hole from which a human eyeball stared with glazed intensity. Cookie crumbs were scattered across its blank brown iris and embedded in its sclera.

Ben Hanscom threw his — not a calculated throw but the startled reaction of a person who has been utterly surprised by some piece of nasty work. As his fortune cookie rolled across the table Bill saw two teeth inside its hollow, their roots dark with clotted blood. They raided together like seeds in a hollow gourd.

He looked back at Beverly and saw she was hitching in breath to scream. Her eyes were fixed on the thing that had crawled out of Eddie's cookie, the thing that was now kicking its sluggish legs as it lay overturned on the tablecloth.

Bill got moving. He was not thinking, only reacting. Intuition, he thought crazily as he lunged out of his seat and clapped his hand over Beverly's mouth just before she could utter the scream. Here I am, acting on intuition. Mike should be proud of me.

What came out of Beverly's mouth was not a scream but a strangled 'Mmmmph!'

Eddie was making those whistling sounds that Bill remembered so well. No problem there, a good honk on the old lung-sucker would set Eddie right. Right as a trivet, Freddie Firestone would have said, and Bill wondered — not for the first time — why a person had such weird thoughts at times like these.

He glanced around fiercely at the others, and what came out was something else from that summer, something that sounded both impossibly archaic and exactly right: 'Dummy up! All of you! Not one sound! Just dummy up!'

Rich wiped a hand across his mouth. Mike's complexion had gone a dirty gray, but he nodded at Bill. All of them moved away from the table. Bill had not opened his own fortune cookie, but now he could see its sides moving slowly in and out — bulge and relax, bulge and relax, bulge and relax — as his own party-favor tried to escape.

'Mmmmmph!' Beverly said against his hand again, her breath tickling his palm.

'Dummy up, Bev,' he said, and took his hand away.

Her face seemed to be all eyes. Her mouth twitched. 'Bill . . . Bill, did you see . . . ' Her eyes strayed back to the cricket and then fixed there. The cricket appeared to be dying. Its rugose eyes stared back at her, and presently Beverly began to moan.

'Quh-Quh-Quit that,' he said grimly. 'Pull back to the table.'

'I can't, Billy, I can't get near that thi — '

'You can! You h-have to!' He heard footsteps, light and quick, coming up the short hall on the other side of the beaded curtain. He looked around at the others. 'All of you! Pull up to the table! Talk! Look natural!'

Beverly looked at him, eyes pleading, and Bill shook his head. He sat down and pulled his chair in, trying not to look at the fortune cookie on his plate. It had swelled like some unimaginable boil which was filling with pus. And still it pulsed slowly in and out. I couldhave bitten into that, he thought faintly.

Eddie triggered his aspirator down his throat again, gasping mist into his lungs in a long, thin screaming sound.

'So who do you think's going to win the pennant?' Bill asked Mike, smiling insanely. Rose came through the curtain just then, her face politely questioning. Out of the corner of his eye Bill saw that Bev had pulled up to the table again. Good girl, he thought.

'I think the Chicago Bears look good,' Mike said.

'Everything is all right?' Rose asked.

'F-Fine,' Bill said. He cocked a thumb in Eddie's direction. 'Our friend had an asthma attack. He took his medication. He's better now.'

Rose looked at Eddie, concerned.

'Better,' Eddie wheezed.

'You would like that I clear now?'

'Very shortly,' Mike said, and offered a large false smile.

'Was good?' Her eyes surveyed the table again, a bit of doubt overlaying a deep well of serenity. She did not see the cricket, the eye, the teeth, or the way Bill's fortune cookie appeared to be breathing. Her eye similarly passed over the bloodstain splotched on the tablecloth without trouble.

'Everything was very good,' Beverly said, and smiled — a m o re natural smile than either Bill's or Mike's. It seemed to set Rose's mind at rest, convinced her that if something had gone wrong in here, it had been the fault of neither Rose's service nor her kitchen. Girl's got a lot of guts, Bill thought.

'Fortunes were good?' Rose asked.

'Well,' Richie said, 'I don't know about the others, but I for one got a real eyeful.'

Bill heard a minute cracking sound. He looked down at his plate and saw a leg poking blindly out of his fortune cookie. It scraped at his plate.

I could have bitten into that, he thought again, but held onto his smile. 'Very fine,' he said.

Richie was looking at Bill's plate. A great grayish-black fly was slowing birthing itself from the collapsing remains of his cookie. It buzzed weakly. Yellowish goo flowed sluggishly out of the cookie and puddled on the tablecloth. There was a smell now, the bland thick smell of an infected wound.

'Well, if I can help you in no way at this moment . . . '

'Not right now,' Ben said. 'A wonderful meal. Most . . . most unusual.'

'I leave you then,' she said, and bowed out through the beaded curtain. The beads were still swaying and clacking together when all of them pushed away from the table again.

'What is it?' Ben asked huskily, looking at the thing on Bill's plate.

'A fly,' Bill said. 'A mutant fly. Courtesy of a writer named George Langla-han, I think. He wrote a story called "The Fly." A movie was made out of it — not a terribly good one. But the story scared the bejesus o ut of me. It's up to Its old tricks, all right. That fly business has been on my mind a lot lately, because I've sort of been planning this novel — Roadbugs, I've been thinking of calling it. I know the title sounds p-pretty stupid, but you see — '

'Excuse me,' Beverly said distantly. 'I have to vomit, I think.'

She was gone before any of the men could rise.

Bill shook out his napkin and threw it over the fly, which was the size of a baby sparrow. Nothing so large could have come from something as small as a Chinese fortune cookie . . . but it had. It buzzed twice under the napkin and then fell silent.

'Jesus,' Eddie said faintly.

'Let's get the righteous fuck out of here,' Mike said. 'We can meet Bev in the lobby.'

Beverly was just coming out of the women's room as they gathered by the cash register. She looked pale but composed. Mike paid the check, kissed Rose's cheek, and then they all went out into the rainy afternoon.

'Does this change anyone's mind?' Mike asked.

'I don't think it changes mine,'Ben said.

'No,' Eddie said.

'What mind?' Richie said.

Bill shook his head and then looked at Beverly.

'I'm staying,' she said. 'Bill, what did you mean when you said It's up to Its old tricks?'

'I've been thinking about writing a bug story,' he said. 'That Langlahan story had woven itself into my thinking. And so I saw a fly. Yours was blood, Beverly. Why was blood on your mind?'

'I guess because of the blood from the drain,' Beverly said at once. 'The blood that came out of the bathroom drain in the old place, when I was eleven.' But was that really it? She didn't really think so. Because what had flashed immediately to mind when the blood spurted across her fingers in a warm little jet had been the bloody footprint she had left behind her after stepping on the broken perfume bottle. Tom. And

(Bevvie sometimes I worry a lot)

her father.

'You got a bug, too,' Bill said to Eddie. 'Why?'

'Not just a bug,' Eddie said. 'A cricket. There are crickets in our basement. Two-hundred-thousand –dollar house and we can't get rid of the crickets. They drive us crazy at night. A couple of nights before Mike called, I had a really terrible nightmare. I dreamed I woke up and my bed was full of crickets. I was trying to shoot them with my aspirator, but all it would do when I squeezed it was make crackling noises, and just before I woke up I realized it was full of crickets, too.'

'The hostess didn't see any of it,' Ben said. He looked at Beverly. 'Like your folks never saw the blood that came out of the drain, even though it was everywhere.'

'Yes,' she said.

They stood looking at each other in the fine spring rain.

Mike looked at his watch. 'There'll be a bus in twenty minutes or so,' he said, 'or I can take four of you in my car, if we cram. Or I can call some cabs. Whatever way you want to do it.'

'I think I'm going to walk from here,' Bill said. 'I don't know where I'm going, but a little fresh air seems like a great idea along about now.'

'I'm going to call a cab,' Ben said.

'I'll share it with you, if you'll drop me off downtown,' Richie said.

'Okay. Where you going?'

Richie shrugged.'Not really sure yet.'

The others elected to wait for the bus.

'Seven tonight,' Mike reminded. 'And be careful, all of you.' They agreed to be careful, although Bill did not know how you could truthfully make a promise like that when dealing with such a formidable array of unknown factors.

He started to say so, then looked at their faces and saw that they knew it already.

He walked away instead, raising one hand briefly in farewell. The misty air felt good against his face. The walk back to town would be a long one, but that was all right. He had a lot to think about. He was glad that the reunion was over and the business had begun.

CHAPTER 1 1 Walking Tours

1

Ben Hanscom Makes a Withdrawal

Richie Tozier got out of the cab at the three-way intersection of Kansas Street, Center Street, and Main Street, and Ben dismissed it at the top of Up-Mile Hill. The driver was Bill's 'religious fella,' but neither Richie nor Ben knew it: Dave had lapsed into a morose silence. Ben could have gotten off with Richie, he supposed, but it seemed better somehow that they all start off alone.

He stood on the corner of Kansas Street and Daltrey Close, watching the cab pull back into traffic, hands stuffed deeply into his pockets, trying to get the lunch's hideous conclusion out of his mind. He couldn't do it; his thoughts kept returning to that black-gray fly crawling out of the fortune cookie on Bill's plate, its veined wings plastered to its back. He would try to divert his mind from this unhealthy image, think he had succeeded, only to discover five minutes later that his mind was back at it.

I'm trying to justify it somehow, he thought, meaning it not in the moral sense but rather in the mathematical one. Buildings are built by observing certain natural laws; natural laws may be expressed by equations; equations must be justified. Where was the justification in what had happened less than half an hour ago?

Let it alone, he told himself, not for the first time. You can't justify it, so let it alone.

Very good advice; the problem was that he couldn't take it. He remembered that the day after he had seen the mummy on the iced-up Canal, his life had gone on as usual. He had known that whatever it had been had come very close to getting him, but his life had gone on: he had attended school, taken an arithmetic test, visited the library when school was over, and eaten with his usual heartiness. He had simply incorporated the thing he had seen on the Canal into his life, and if he had almost been killed by it . . . well, kids were always almost getting killed. They dashed across streets without looking, they got horsing around in the lake and suddenly realized they had floated far past their depth on their rubber rafts and had to paddle back, they fell off monkey-bars on their asses and out of trees on their heads.

Now, standing here in the fading drizzle in front of a Trustworthy Hardware Store that had been a pawnshop in 1958 (Frati Brothers, Ben recalled, the double windows always full of pistols and rifles and straight-razors and guitars hung up by their necks like exotic animals), ti occurred to him that kids were better at almost dying, and they were also better at incorporating the inexplicable into their lives. They believed implicitly in the invisible world. Miracles both bright and dark were to be taken into consideration, oh yes, most certainly, but they by no means stopped the world. A sudden upheaval of beauty or terror at ten did not preclude an extra cheese-dog or two for lunch at noon.

But when you grew up, all that changed. You no longer lay awake in your bed, sure something was crouching in the closet or scratching at the window . . . but when something did happen, something beyond rational explanation, the circuits overloaded. The axons and dendrites got hot. You started to jitter and jive, you started to shake rattle and roll, your imagination started to hop and bop and do the funky chicken all over your nerves. You couldn't just incorporate what had happened into your life experience. It didn't digest. Your mind kept coming back to it, pawing it lightly like a kitten with a ball of string . . . until eventually, of course, you either went crazy or got to a place where it was impossible for you to function.

And if that happens, Ben thought, It's got me. Us. Cold.

He started to walk up Kansas Street, not conscious of heading anyplace in particular. And thought suddenly: What did we do with the silver dollar?

He still couldn't remember.

The silver dollar, Ben . . . Beverly saved your life with it. Yours . . . maybe all the others' . . . and especially Bill's. It almost ripped my guts out before Beverly did . . . what? What did she do? And how was it able to work? She backed it off, and we all helped her. But how?

A word came to him suddenly, a word that meant nothing at all but which tightened his flesh: Chüd.

He looked down at the sidewalk and for a moment saw the shape of a turtle chalked there, and the world seemed to swim before his eyes. He shut them tightly and when he opened them saw it was not a turtle; only a hopscotch grid half-erased by the light rain.

Chüd.

What did that mean?

'I don't know,' he said aloud, and when he looked around quickly to see if anyone had heard him talking to himself, he saw that he had turned off Kansas Street and onto Costello Avenue. At lunch he had told the others that the Barrens were the only place in Derry where he had felt happy as a kid . . . but that wasn't quite true, was it? There had been another place. Either accidentally or unconsciously, he had come to that other place: the Derry Public Lib rary.

He stood in front of it for a minute or two, hands still in his pockets. It hadn't changed; he admired its lines as much now as he had as a child. Like so many stone buildings that had been well-designed, it succeeded in confounding the closely observing eye with contradictions: its stone solidity was somehow balanced by the delicacy of its arches and slim columns; it looked both bank –safe squat and yet slim and clean (well, it was slim as city buildings went, especially those erected around the turn of the century, and the windows, crisscrossed with narrow strips of iron, were graceful and rounded). These contradictions saved it from ugliness, and he was not entirely surprised to feel a wave of love for the place.

Nothing much had changed on Costello Avenue. Glancing along it, he could see the Derry Community House, and he found himself wondering if the Costello Avenue Market was still there at the point where the avenue, which was semicircular, rejoined Kansas Street.

He walked across the library lawn, barely noticing that his dress boots were getting wet, to have a look at that glassed-in passageway between the grownups' library and the Children's Library. It was also unchanged, and from here, standing just outside the bowed branches of a weeping willow tree, he could see people passing back and forth. The old delight flooded him, and he really forgot what had happened at the end of the reunion lunch for the first time. He could remember walking around to this very same spot as a kid, only in the winter, plowing his way through snow that was almost hip –deep, and then standing for as long as fifteen minutes. He would come at dusk, he remembered, and again it was the contrasts that drew him and held him there with the tips of his fingers going numb and snow melting inside his green gumrubber boots. It would be drawing-down-dark out where he was, the world going purple with early winter shadows, the sky the color of ashes in the east and embers in the west. It would be cold where he was, ten degrees perhaps, and chillier than that if the wind was blowing across from the frozen Barrens, as it so often did.

But there, less than forty yards from where he stood, people walked back and forth in their shirtsleeves. There, less than forty yards from where he stood, was a tubeway of bright white light, thrown by the overhead fluorescents. Little kids giggled together, high-school sweethearts held hands (and if the librarian saw them, she would make them stop). It was somehow magical, magical in a good way that he had been too young to account for with such mundane things as electric power and oil heat. The magic was that glowing cylinder of

light and life connecting those two dark buildings like a lifeline, the magic was in watching people walk through it across the dark snowfield, untouched by either the dark or the cold. It made them lovely and Godlike.

Eventually he would walk away (as he was doing now) and circle the building to the front door (as he was doing now), but he would always pause and look back once (as he was doing now) before the bulking stone shoulder of the adult library cut off the sight-line to that delicate umbilicus.

Ruefully amused at the ache of nostalgia around his heart, Ben went up the steps to the door of the adult li brary, paused for a moment on the narrow verandah just inside the pillars, always so high and cool no matter how hot the day. Then he pulled open the iron-bound door with the book-drop slot in it and went into the quiet.

The force of memory almost dizzied him for a moment as he stepped into the mild light of the hanging glass globes. The force was not physical — not like a shot to the jaw or a slap. It was more akin to that queer feeling of time doubling back on itself that people call, for want of a better term, déjà vu. Ben had had the feeling before, but it had never struck him with such disorienting power; for the moment or two he stood inside the door, he felt literally lost in time, not really sure how old he was. Was he thirty-eight or eleven?

Here was the same murmuring quiet, broken only by an occasional whisper, the faint thud of a librarian stamping books or overdue notices, the hushed riffle of newspaper or magazine pages being turned. He loved the quality of the light as much now as then. It slanted through the high windows, gray as a pigeon's wing on this rainy afternoon, a light that was somehow somnolent and dozey.

He walked across the wide floor with its red-and –black linoleum pattern almost completely worn away, trying as he had always tried back then to hush the sound of his footfalls — the adult library rose up to a dome in the middle, and all sounds were magnified.

He saw that the circular iron staircases leading to the stacks were still there, one on either side of the horseshoe-shaped main desk, but he also saw that a tiny cagework elevator had been added at some point in the twenty-five years since he and his mamma had moved away. It was something of a relief — it drove a wedge into that suffocating feeling of deja-vu.

He felt like an interloper crossing the wide floor, a spy from another country. He kept expecting the librarian at the desk to raise her head, look at him, and then challenge him in clear, ringing tones that would shatter the concentration of every reader here and focus every eye upon him: 'You! Yes, you! What are you doing here? You have no business here! You're from Outside! You're from Before! Go back where you came from! Go back right now, before I call the police!'

She did look up, a young girl, pretty, and for one absurd moment it seemed to Ben that the fantasy was really going to come true, and his' heart rose into his throat as her pale-blue eyes touched his. Then they passed on indifferently, and Ben found he could walk again. If he was a spy, he hadn't been found out.

He passed under the coil of one of the narrow and almost suicidally steep wrought-iron staircases on his way to the corridor leading to the Children's Library, and was amused to realize (only after he had done it) that he had run down another old track of his childhood behavior. He had looked up, hoping, as he had hoped as a kid, to see a girl in a skirt coming down those steps. He could remember (now he could remember) glancing up there for no reason at all one day when he was eight or nine and looking right up the chino skirt of a pretty high-school girl and seeing her clean pink underwear. As the sudden sunlit glint of Beverly Marsh's ankle –bracelet had shot an arrow of something more primitive than simple love or affection through his heart on the last day of school in 1958, so had the sight of the high-school girl's panties affected him; he could remember sitting at a table in the Children's Library and thinking of that unexpected view for perhaps as long as twenty minutes, his

cheeks and forehead hot, a book about the history of trains open and unread before him, his penis a hard little branch in his pants, a branch that had sunk its roots all the way up into his belly. He had fantasized the two of them married, living in a small house on the outskirts of town, indulging in pleasures he did not in the least understand.

The feelings had passed off almost as suddenly as they had come, but he had never walked under the stairway again without glancing up. He hadn't ever seen anything else as interesting or affecting (once a fat lady working her way down with ponderous care, but he had looked away from that sight hastily, feeling ashamed, like a violator), but the habit persisted — he had done it again now, as a grown man.

He walked slowly down the glassed-in passageway, noticing other changes now: Yellow decals that said OPEC LOVES IT WHEN YO U WASTE ENERGY, so SAVE A WATT! had been plastered over the switchplates. The framed pictures on the far wall when he entered this scaled-down world of blondewood tables and small blondewood chairs, this world where the drinking fountain was only four feet high, were not of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon but of Ronald Reagan and George Bush — Reagan, Ben recalled, had been host of GETheater in the year that Ben had graduated from the fifth grade, and George Bush would not have seen thirty yet.

But —

T h a t f e e l i n g o f déjà vu swept him again. He was helpless before it, and this time he felt the numb horror of a man who finally realizes, after half an hour of helpless splashing, that the shore is growing no closer and he is drowning.

It was story hour, and over in the corner a group of roughly a dozen little ones sat solemnly on their tiny chairs in a semicircle, listening. 'Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge?' the librarian said in the low, growling tones of the troll in the story, and Ben thought: When sheraises her head I'll see that it's Miss Dames, yes, it'll be Miss Davies and she won't look a day older —

But when she did raise her head, he saw a much younger woman than Miss Davies had been even then.

Some of the children covered their mouths and giggled, but others only watched her, their eyes reflecting the eternal fascination of the fairy story: would the monster be bested . . . or would it feed?

'It is I, Billy Goat Gruff, trip –trapping on your bridge,' the librarian went on, and Ben, pale, walked past her.

How can it be the same story? The very same story? Am I supposed to believe that's just coincidence? Because I don't . . . goddammit, I just don't!

He bent to the drinking fountain, bending so far he felt like Richie doing one of his salami-salami-baloney routines.

I ought to talk to someone, he thought, panicked. Mike . . . Bill . . . someone. Is something really stapling the past and present together here, or am I only imagining it? Because if I'm not, I'm not sure I bargained for this much. I —

He looked at the checkout desk, and his heart seemed to stop in his chest for a moment before beginning to race doubletime. The poster was simple, stark . . . and familiar. It said simply:

REMEMBER THE CURFEW.

7 P.M.

DERRY POLICE DEPARTMENT.

In that instant it all seemed to come clear to him — it came in a grisly flash of light, and he realized that the vote they had taken was a joke. There was no turning back, never had been.

They were on a track as preordained as the memory-track which had caused him to look up when he passed under the stairway leading to the stacks. There was an echo here in Derry, a deadly echo, and all they could hope for was that the echo could be changed enough in their favor to allow them to escape with their lives.

'Christ,' he muttered, and scrubbed a palm up one cheek, hard.

'Can I help you, sir?' a voice at his elbow asked, and he jumped a little. It was a girl of perhaps seventeen, her dark– blonde hair held back from her pretty high– schooler's face with barrettes. A library assistant, of course; they'd had them in 1958 too, high-school girls and boys who shelved books, showed kids how to use the card catalogue, discussed book reports and school papers, helped bewildered scholars with their footnotes and bibliographies. The pay was a pittance, but there were always kids willing to do it. It was agreeable work.

On the heels of this, reading the girl's pleasant but questioning look a little more closely, he remembered that he no longer really belonged here — he was a giant in the land of little people. An intruder. In the adults' library he had felt uneasy about the possibility of being looked at or spoken to, but here it was something of a relief. For one thing, it proved he was still an adult, and the fact that the girl was clearly braless under her thin Western-style shirt was also more relief than turn-on: if proof that this was 1985 and not 1958 was needed, the clearly limned points of her nipples against the cotton of her shirt was it.

'No thank you,' he said, and then, for no reason at all that he could understand, he heard himself add: 'I was looking for my son.'

'Oh? What's his name? Maybe I've seen him.' She smiled. 'I know most of the kids.'

'His name is Ben Hanscom,' he said. 'But I don't see him here.'

'Tell me what he looks like and I'll give him a message, if there is one.'

'Well,' Ben said, uncomfortable now and beginning to wish he had never started this, 'he's on the stout side, and he looks a little bit like me. But it's no big deal, miss. If you see him, just tell him his dad popped by on his way home.'

'I will,' she said, and smiled, but the smile didn't reach her eyes, and Ben suddenly realized that she hadn't come over and spoken to him out of simple politeness and a wish to help. She happened to be a library assistant in the Children's Library in a town where nine children had been slain over a span of eight months. You see a strange man in this scaled-down world where adults rarely come except to drop their kids off or pick them up. You're suspicious . . . of course.

'Thank you,' he said, gave her a smile he hoped was reassuring, and then got the hell out.

He walked back through the corridor to the adults' library and went to the desk on an impulse he didn't understand . . . but of course they were supposed to follow their impulses this afternoon, weren't they? Follow their impulses and see where they led.

The name plate on the circulation desk identified the pretty young librarian as Carole Banner. Behind her, Ben could see a door with a frosted-glass panel; lettered on this was

MICHAEL HANLON HEAD LIBRARIAN .

'May I help you?' Ms Banner asked. 'I think so,' Ben said. 'That is, I hope so. I'd like to get a library card.' 'Very good,' she said, and took out a form. 'Are you a resident of Berry?' 'Not presently.' 'Home address, then?'

'Rural Star Route 2, Hemingford Home, Nebraska.' He paused for a moment, a little amused by her stare, and then reeled off the Zip Code: '59341.' 'Is this a joke, Mr Hanscom?' 'Not at all.

'Are you moving to Derry, then?' 'I have no plans to, no.'

'This is a long way to come to borrow books, isn't it? Don't they have libraries in Nebraska?'

'It's kind of a sentimental thing,' Ben said. He would have thought telling a stranger this would be embarrassing, but he found it wasn't. 'I grew up in Berry, you see. This is the first time I've been back since I was a kid. I've been walking around, seeing what's changed and what hasn't. And all at once it occurred to me that I spent about ten years of my life here between ages three and thirteen, and I don't have a single thing to remember those years by. Not so much as a postcard. I had some silver dollars, but I lost one of them and gave the rest to a friend. I guess what I want is a souvenir of my childhood. It's late, but don't they say better late than never?'

Carole Banner smiled, and the smile changed her pretty face into one that was beautiful. 'I think that's very sweet,' she said. 'If you'd like to browse for ten or fifteen minutes, I'll have the card made up for you when you come back to the desk.'

Ben grinned a little. 'I guess there'll be a fee,' he said. 'Out-of-towner and all.'

'Bid you have a card when you were a boy?'

'I sure did.' Ben smiled. 'Except for my friends, I guess that library card was the most important — '

'Ben, would you come up here?' a voice called suddenly, cutting across the library hush like a scalpel.

He turned around, jumping guiltily the way people do when someone shouts in a library. He saw no one he knew . . . and realized a moment later that no one had looked up or shown any sign of surprise or annoyance. The old men still read their copies of the Berry News, the Boston Globe, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report. At the tables in the Reference Room, tw o high –school girls still had their heads together over a stack of papers and a pile of file-cards. Several browsers went on looking through the books on the shelves marked CURRENT FICTION — SEVEN –DAY-LOAN . An old man in a ridiculous driving –cap, a cold pipe clenched between his teeth, went on leafing through a folio of Luis de Vargas' sketches.

He turned back to the young woman, who was looking at him, puzzled.

'Is anything wrong?'

'No,' Ben said, smiling. 'I thought I heard something. I guess I'm more jet-lagged than I thought. What were you saying?'

'Well, actually you were saying. But I was about to add that if you had a card when you were a resident, your name will still be in the files,' she said. 'We keep everything on microfiche now. Some change from when you were a kid here, I guess.'

'Yes,' he said. 'A lot of things have changed in Derry . . . but a lot of things also seem to have remained the same.'

'Anyway, I can just look you up and give you a renewal card. No charge.'

'That's great,' Ben said, and before he could add thanks the voice cut through the library's sacramental silence again, louder now, ominously jolly: 'Come on tip, Ben! Come on up, youfat little fuck! This Is Your Life, Ben Hanscom!'

Ben cleared his throat. 'I appreciate it,' he said.

'Don't mention it.' She cocked her head at him. 'Has it gotten warm outside?'

'A little,' he said. 'Why?'

'You're — '

'Ben Hanscom did it!' the voice screamed. It was coming from above — coming from the stacks. 'Ben Hanscom killed the children! Get him! Grab him!'

' — perspiring,' she finished.

'Am I?' he said idiotically.

'I'll have this made up right away,' she said.

'Thank you.'

She headed for the old Royal typewriter at the corner of her desk.

Ben walked slowly away, his heart a thudding drum in his chest. Yes, he was sweating; he could feel it trickling down from his forehead, his armpits, matting the hair on his chest. He looked up and saw Pennywise the Clown standing at the top of the lefthand staircase, looking down at him. His face was white with greasepaint. His mouth bled lipstick in a killer's grin. There were empty sockets where his eyes should have been. He held a bunch of balloons in one hand and a book in the other.

Not he, Ben thought. It. I am standing here in the middle of the Derry Public Library's rotunda on a late-spring afternoon in 1985, I am a grown man, and I am face to face with my childhood's greatest nightmare. I am face to face with It.

'Come on up, Ben,' Pennywise called down. 'I won't hurt you. I've got a book for you! A book . . . and a balloon! Come on up!'

Ben opened his mouth to call back, You're insane if you think I'm going up there, and suddenly realized that if he did that, everyone he re would be looking at him, everyone here would be thinking, Who is that crazyman?

'Oh, I know you can't answer,' Pennywise called down, and giggled. 'Almost fooled you there for a minute, though, didn't I? "Pardon me, sir, do you have Prince Albert in a can? . . . You do? . . . Better let the poor guy out!" "Pardon me, ma'am, is your refrigerator running? . . . It is? . . . Then hadn't you better go catch it?'"

The clown on the landing threw its head back and shrieked laughter. It roared and echoed in the dome of the rotunda like a flight of black bats, and Ben was only able to keep from clapping his hands over his ears with a tremendous effort of will.

'Come on up, Ben,' Pennywise called down. 'We'll talk. Neutral ground. What do you say?'

I'm not coming up there, Ben thought. When I finally come to you, you won't want to see me, I think. We're going to kill you.

The clown shrieked laughter again. 'Kill me? Kill me?' And suddenly, horribly, the voice was Richie Tozier's voice, not his voice, precisely, but Richie Tozier doing his Pickaninny Voice: 'Doan kill me, massa, I be a good nigguh, doan kill thisyere black boy, Haystack!' Then that shrieking laughter again.

Trembling, white-faced, Ben walked across the echoing center of the adults' library. He felt that soon he would vomit. He stood in front of a shelf of books and took one down at random with a hand that trembled badly. His cold fingers flittered the pages.

'This is your one chance, Haystack!' the voice called from behind an d above him. 'Get out of town. Get out before it gets dark tonight. I'll be after you tonight . . . you and the others. You're too old to stop me, Ben. You're all too old. Too old to do anything but get yourselves killed. Get out, Ben. Do you want to see this tonight?'

He turned slowly, still holding the book in his icy hands. He didn't want to look, but it were as if there were an invisible hand under his chin, tilting his head up and up and up.

The clown was gone. Dracula was standing at the top of the lefthand stairway, but it was no movie Dracula; it was not Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee or Frank Langella or Francis Lederer or Reggie Nalder. An ancient man-thing with a face like a twisted root stood there. Its face was deadly pale, its eyes pur plish-red, the color of bloodclots. Its mouth dropped open, revealing a mouthful of Gillette Blue –Blades that had been set in the gums at angles; it was like looking into a deadly mirror-maze where a single misstep could get you cut in half.

'KEEE-RUNCH!' it screamed, and its jaws snapped closed. Blood gouted from its mouth in a red-black flood. Chunks of its severed lips fell to the glowing white silk of its formal shirt and slid down its front, leaving snail-trails of blood behind.

'What did Stan Uris see before he died?' the vampire on the landing screamed down at him, laughing through the bloody hole of its mouth. 'Was it Prince Albert in a can? Was it Davy

Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier? What did he see, Ben? Do you want to see it too? What did he see? What did he see?' Then that shrieking laughter again, and Ben knew that he would scream now himself, yes, there was no way to stop the scream, it was going to come. Blood was pattering down from the landing in a grisly shower. One drop had landed on the arthritis-bunched hand of an old man who was reading The Wall Street Journal. It was running down between his knuckles, unseen and unfelt.

Ben hitched in breath, sure the scream would follow, unthinkable in the quiet of this softly drizzling spring afternoon, as shocking as the slash of a knife . . . or a mouthful of razor-blades.

Instead, what came out in a shaky, uneven rush, spoken instead of screamed, spoken low like a prayer, were these words: 'We made slugs out of it, of course. We made the silver dollar into silver slugs.'

The gentleman in the driving-cap who had been perusing the de Vargas sketches looked up sharply. 'Nonsense,' he said. Now people did look up; someone hissed 'Shhh!' at the old man in an annoyed voice.

'I'm sorry,' Ben said in a low, trembling voice. He was faintly aware that his face was now running with sweat, and that his shirt was plastered to his body. 'I was thinking aloud — '

'Nonsense,' the old gentleman repeated, in a louder voice. 'Can't make silver bullets from silver dollars. Common misconception. Pulp fiction. Problem is with specific gravity — '

Suddenly the woman, Ms. Danner, was there. 'Mr Brockhill, you'll have to be quiet,' she said kindly enough. 'People are reading — '

'Man's sick,' Brockhill said abruptly, and went back to his book. 'Give him an aspirin, Carole.'

Carole Danner looked at Ben and her face sharpened with concern. 'Are you ill, Mr Hanscom? I know it's terribly impolite to say so, but you look terrible.'

Ben said, 'I . . . I had Chinese food for lunch. I don't think it's agreed with me.'

'If you want to lie down, there's a cot in Mr Hanlon's office. You could — ' 'No. Thanks, but no.' What he wanted was not to lie down but to get the hell out of the Derry Public Library. He looked up at the landing. The clown was gone. The vampire was gone. But tied to the low wrought-iron railing which surrounded the landing was a balloon. Written on its bulging skin were the words: HAVE A GOOD DAY! TONIGHT YOU DIE!

'I've got your library card,' she said, putting a tentative hand on his arm. 'Do you still want it?'

'Yes, thanks,' Ben said. He drew a deep, shuddery breath. 'I'm very sorry about this.'

'I just hope it isn't food-poisoning,' she said.

'Wouldn't work,' Mr Brockhill said without looking up from de Vargas or removing his dead pipe from the corner of his mouth. 'Device of pulp fiction. Bullet would tumble.'

And speaking again with no foreknowledge that he was going to speak, Ben said: 'Slugs, no t bullets. We realized almost right away that we couldn't make bullets. I mean, we were just kids. It was my idea to — '

'Shhhh!' someone said again.

Brockhill gave Ben a slightly startled look, seemed about to speak, then went back to the sketches.

At the desk, Carole Danner handed him a small orange card with DERRY PUBLIC LIBRARY stamped across the top. Bemused, Ben realized it was the first adult library-card he had owned in his whole life. The one he'd had as a kid had been canary-yellow.

'Are you sure you don't want to lie down, Mr Hanscom?'

'I'm feeling a little better, thanks.'

'Sure?'

He managed a smile. 'I'm sure.'

'You do look a little better,' she said, but she said it doubtfully, as if understanding that this was the proper thing to say but not really believing it.

Then she was holding a book under the microfilm gadget they used these days to record book-loans, and Ben felt a touch of almost hysterical amusement. It's the book I grabbed offthe shelf when the clown started to do its Pickaninny Voice, he thought. She thought I wanted to borrow it. I've made my first withdrawal from the Demy Public Library in twenty-five years, and I don't even know what the book is. Furthermore, I don't care. Just let me out of here, okay? That'll be enough.

'Thank you,' he said, putting the book under his arm.

'You're more than welcome, Mr Hanscom. Are you sure you wouldn't like an aspirin?'

'Quite sure,' he said — and then hesitated. 'You wouldn't by any chance know what happened to Mrs Starrett, would you? Barbara Starrett? She used to be the head of the Children's Library.'

'She died,' Carole Danner said. Three years ago. It was a stroke, I understand. It was a great shame. She was relatively young . . . fifty-eight or –nine, I think. Mr Hanlon closed the library for the day.'

'Oh,' Ben said, and felt a hollow place open in his heart. That's what happened when you got back to your used-to-be, as the song put it. The frosting on the cake was sweet, but the stuff underneath was bitter. People forgot you, or died on you, or lost their hair and teeth. In some cases you found that they had lost their minds. Oh it was great to be alive. Boy howdy.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'You liked her, didn't you?'

'All the kids liked Mrs Starrett,' Ben said, and was alarmed to realize that tears were now very close.

'Are you — '

If she asks me if I'm all right one more time, I really am going to cry, I think. Or scream. Or something.

He glanced at his watch and said, 'I really have to run. Thanks for being so nice.'

'Have a nice day, Mr Hanscom.'

Sure. Because tonight I die.

He tipped a finger her way and started back across the floor. Mr Brockhill glanced up at him once, sharply and suspiciously.

He looked up at the landing which topped the lefthand staircase. The balloon still floated there, tied by its string to lacy wrought-iron. But now the printing on its side read:

I KILLED BARBARA STARRETT! — PENNYWISE THE CLOWN

He looked away, feeling the pulse in his throat starting to run again. He let himself out and was startled by sunlight — the clouds overhead were coming unravelled and a warm late –May sun was shafting down, making the grass look impossibly green and lush. Ben felt something st art to lift from his heart. It seemed to him that he had left some insupportable burden behind in the library . . . and then he looked down at the book he had inadvertently withdrawn and his teeth clamped together with sudden, painful force. It was Bulldoz er, by Stephen W. Meader, one of the books he had withdrawn from the library on the day he had dived into the Barrens to get away from Henry Bowers and his friends.

And speaking of Henry, the track of his engineer boot was still on the book's cover.

Shaking, fumbling at the pages, he turned to the back. The library had gone over to a microfilm checkout system; he had seen that. Bat there was still a pocket in the back of this book with a card tucked into it. There was a name written on each line of the card followed by the librarian's return-date stamp. Looking at the card, Ben saw this:

NAME OF BORROWER RETURN BY STAMPED DATE

Charles N. Brown MAY 14 58

David Hartwell JUN 1 58

Joseph Brennan JUN 17 58

And, on the last line of the card, his own childish signature, written in heavy pencil-strokes:

Benjamin Hanscom JUN 9 58

Stamped across this card, stamped across the book's flyleaf, stamped across the thickness of the pages, stamped again and again in smeary red ink that looked like blood, was one word: CANCEL.

'Oh dear God,' Ben murmured. He did not know what else to say; that seemed to cover the entire situation. 'Oh dear God, dear God.'

He stood in the new sunlight, suddenly wondering what was happening to the others.

2

Eddie Kaspbrak Makes a Catch

Eddie got off the bus at the corner of Kansas Street and Kossuth Lane. Kossuth was a street that ran a quarter of a mile downhill before dead-ending abruptly where the crumbling earth sloped into the Barrens. He had absolutely no idea why he had chosen this place to leave the bus; Kossuth Lane meant nothing to him, and he had known no one on this particular section of Kansas Street. But it seemed like the right place. That was all he knew, but at this point it seemed to be enough. Beverly had climbed off the bus with a little wave at one of the Lower Main Street stops. Mike had taken his car back to the library.

Now, watching the small and somehow absurd Mercedes bus pull away, he wondered exactly what he was doing here, standing on an obscure street– corner in an obscure town nearly five hundred miles away from Myra, who was undoubtedly worried to tears about him. He felt an instant of almost painful vertigo, touched his jacket pocket, and remembered that he had left his Dramamine back at the Town House along with the rest of his pharmacopeia. He had aspirin, though. He would no more have gone out sans aspirin than he would have gone out sans pants. He chugged a couple dry and began to walk along Kansas Street, thinking vaguely that he might go to the Public Library or perhaps cross over to Costello Avenue. It was beginning to clear now, and he supposed he could even walk across to West Broadway and admire the old Victorian houses that stood there along the only two really handsome residential blocks in Derry. He used to do that sometimes when he was a kid — just walk along West Broadway, sort of casual, like he was on his way to somewhere else. There was the Muellers', near the corner of Witcham and West Broadway, a red house with turrets on either side and hedges in front. The Muellers had a gardener who always looked at Eddie with suspicious eyes until he had passed on his way.

Then there was the Bowies' house, which was four down from the Muellers' on the same sid e — one of the reasons, he supposed, that Greta Bowie and Sally Mueller had been such great friends in grammar school. It was green-shingled and also had turrets . . . but while the turrets on the Muellers' house were squared off, those on the Bowies' house were capped with funny cone-shaped things that looked to Eddie like squatty duncecaps. In the summer there was always lawn-furniture on the side lawn — a table with a sporty yellow umbrella over it,

wicker chairs, a rope hammock stretched between two trees. There was always a croquet game set up out back, too. Eddie knew this although he had never been invited over to Greta's house to play croquet. Walking by casually (like he was on his way to somewhere else) Eddie would sometimes hear the click of the balls, laughter, groans as someone's ball was 'sent away.' Once he had seen Greta herself, a lemonade in one hand and her croquet mallet in the other, looking slim and pretty beyond the words of all the poets (even her sunburned shoulders seemed wonderfully pretty to Eddie Kaspbrak, who had at that time been nine), going after her ball, which had been 'sent away'; it had ricocheted off a tree and had thus brought Greta into Eddie's view.

He fell in love with her a little that day — her shining blonde hair falling to the shoulders of her culotte dress, which was a cool blue. She glanced around and for a moment he thought she had seen him, but that proved not to be so, because when he raised his hand in a timid hello, she did not raise hers in return but only whacked her ball back onto the rear lawn and then ran after it. He had walked on with no resentment at the unreturned hello (he genuinely believed she must not have see him) or at the fact that he had never been invited to attend one of the Saturday-aft ernoon croquet games: why would a beautiful girl like Greta Bowie want to invite a kid like him? He was thin-chested, asthmatic, and had the face of a drowned water-rat.

Yeah, he thought, walking aimlessly back down Kansas Street, I should have gone over toWest Broadway and looked at all those houses again . . . the Muellers', the Bowies', Dr Hole's place, the Trackers' —

His thoughts broke off abruptly at that last name, because — speak of the devil! — here he was, standing in front of Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot.

'Still right here,' Eddie said aloud, and laughed. 'Son of a gun!'

The house on West Broadway which belonged to Phil and Tony Tracker, a pair of life-long bachelors, was probably the loveliest of the large houses on that street, a spotlessly white mid –Victorian with green lawns and great beds of flowers that rioted (in a neatly landscaped way, of course) all the spring and summer long. Their driveway was freshly sealed each fall so that it always remained as black as a dark mirror, the slate shingles on the many slants of the roof were always a perfect mint green that almost exactly matched the lawn, and people sometimes stopped to take pictures of the mullioned windows, which were very old and quite remarkable.

' A n y t w o m e n who bother keeping a house so nice must be queers,' Eddie's mother had once said in a disgruntled sort of way, and Eddie hadn't dared ask for clarification.

The Truck Depot was the exact opposite of the Tracker house on West Broadway. It was a low bric k structure; the bricks were old and crumbling in places, their dirty-orange hue shading to a sooty black at the building's footings. The windows were uniformly filthy except for a small circular place on one of the lower panes of the starter's office. This one pane had been kept spotlessly clean by kids before Eddie and those who came after, because the starter kept a Playboy calendar over his desk. No boy came to play scratch baseball in the back lot without first stopping to wipe at the glass with his ball-glove and examine that month's pinup.

The depot was surrounded by a waste of gravel on three sides. Long-distance haulers — Jimmy-Petes and Kenworths and Rios — all painted with the words TRACKER BROS. DERRY NEWTON PROVIDENCE HARTFORD NEW YORK, some times stood here in tangled disordered profusion. Sometimes they were put together and sometimes there were just cabs or body-boxes, standing silent on their rear wheels and support-struts.

The brothers kept their trucks out of the lot at the back of th e building as much as they could, because they were both avid baseball fans and liked the kids to come and play. Phil Tracker drove freight himself so the boys rarely saw him, but Tony Tracker, a man with huge slab arms and a gut to match, kept the books and the accounts, and Eddie (who never played

— his mother would have killed him if she had heard he was playing baseball, racing around and getting dust in his delicate lungs, risking broken legs, concussions, and God alone knew what else) got used to seeing him. He was a summer fixture, his voice as much a part of the game to Eddie then as Mel Alien's later became: Tony Tracker, large but somehow ghostlike, his white shirt glimmering as summer dusk drew down and fireflies began to loom the air with their lace of lights, yelling: 'You got to get under that bawl before you can catch it, Red! . . . You took your eye off 'n the bawl, Half-Pint! You can't hit the goddam thing if you ain't looking at it! . . . Slide, Horsefoot! You get the soles of them Keds in that second-baseman's face, he ain't never goan tag you out!'

Never called any of them by name, Eddie remembered. It was always hey Red, hey Blondie, hey Four-Eyes, hey Half –Pint. It was never a ball, it was always a bawl. It was never a bat, it was always something Tony Tracker called an 'ash-handle,' as in 'You ain't never goan hit that bawl if you don't choke up on the ash-handle, Horsefoot.'

Grinning, Eddie walked a little closer . . . and then the grin faded. The long brick building where orders had been processed, trucks repaired, and goods stored on a short-term basis was now dark and silent. Weeds were growing up through the gravel, and there were no trucks in either side yard . . . only a single box, its sides rusty and dull.

Getting clo ser still, he saw that there was a realtor's FOR SALE sign in the window.

Tracker's out of business, he thought, and was surprised at the sadness the thought carried with it . . . as if someone had died. He was glad now he hadn't walked over to West Br oadway. If Tracker Brothers could have gone under — Tracker Brothers, which had seemed eternal — what might have happened on that street he had liked so much to walk down as a kid? He realized uneasily that he didn't want to know. He didn't want to see Greta Bowie with gray in her hair, her hips and legs thickened with much sitting and much eating and much drinking; it was better — safer — to just stay away.

That's what we all should have done, just stayed away. We've got no business here. Coming back to where you grew up is like doing some crazy yoga trick, putting your feet in your own mouth and somehow swallowing yourself so there's nothing left; it can't be done, and any sane person ought to be fucking glad it can't . . . what do you suppose happened to Tony and Phil Tracker, anyway?

A heart attack for Tony, perhaps; he had been carrying maybe seventy-five extra pounds of meat on his bones. You had to watch out for what your heart might be up to. The poets might romance about broken hearts and Barry Manilow sing about them, and that was fine by Eddie (he and Myra had every album Barry Manilow had ever recorded), but he himself preferred a good solid EKG every year. Sure, Tony's heart had probably given it up as a bad job. And Phil? Bad luck on the highway maybe. Eddie, who made his living behind the wheel himself (or had; these days he only drove the celebs and spent the rest of his tune driving a desk), knew about bad luck on the highway. Old Phil might have jack-knifed a rig somewhere in New Hampshire or in the Hainesville Woods up north in Maine when the going was icy or maybe he had lost his brakes on some long hill south of Derry, heading into Haven in a driving springtime rain. Those things or any of the others you heard in those shitkicking country songs about truck-drivers who wore Stetson hats and had cheating on their minds. Driving a desk was sometimes lonely, but Eddie had been in the driver's seat himself more than once, his aspirator riding there with him on the dashboard, its trigger reflected ghostly in the windshield (and a bucket-load of pills in the glove compartment), and he knew that real loneliness was a smeary red: the color of the taillights of the car ahead of you reflected on wet hottop in a driving rain.

'Oh shit the time goes by,' Eddie Kaspbrak said in a sighing sort of whisper, and was not even aware that he had spoken aloud.

Feeling both mellow and unhappy — a state more common to him than he ever would have believed — Eddie skirted the building, Gucci loafers crunching in the gravel, to look at the lot where the baseball games had been played when he was a kid — when, it seemed, ninety percent of the world had been made up of kids.

The lot wasn't much changed, but a look was enough to convince him beyond doubt that the games had stopped — a tradition that had simply died out at some point in the years between, for reasons of its own.

In 1958 the diamond shape of the infield had been defined not by limed basepaths but in ruts made by running feet. They had no actual bases, those boys who had played baseball here (boys who were all older than the Losers, although Eddie remembered now that Stan Uris had sometimes played; his batting was only fair, but in the outfield he could run fast and he had the reflexes of an angel), but four pieces of dirty canvas were always kept under the loading-bay behind the long brick building, to be ceremonially taken out when enough kids had drifted into the back lot to play ball, and just as ceremonially returned when the shades of evening had fallen thickly enough to end further play.

Standing here now, Eddie could see no trace of those rutted basepaths. Weeds had grown up through the gravel in patchy profusion. Broken soda and beer bottles twinkled here and there; in the old days, such shards of broken glass had been religiously removed. The only thing that was the same was the chainlink fence at the back of the lot, twelve feet high and as rusty as dried blood. It framed the sky in droves of diamond shapes.

That was home-run territory, Eddie thought, standing bemused with his hands in his pockets at the place where home plate had been twenty-seven years ago. Over the fence anddown into the Barrens. They used to call it The Automatic. He laughed out loud and then looked around nervously, as if it were a ghost who had laughed out loud instead of a guy in sixty-dollar slacks, a guy as solid as . . . well, as solid as . . . as . . .

Get off it, Eds, Richie's voice seemed to whisper. You ain't solid at all, and in the last few years the chucks have been few and far between. Right? 'Yeah, right,' Eddie said in a low voice, and kicked a few loose stones away in a rattle.

In truth, he had only seen two balls go over the fence at the back of the lot behind Tracker Brothers, both of them hit by the same kid: Belch Huggins. Belch had been almost comically big, already six feet tall at twelve, weighing maybe a hundred and seventy. He had gotten his nickname because he was able to articulate belches of amazing length and loudness — at his best, he sounded like a cross between a bullfrog and a cicada. Sometimes he would pat a hand rapidly across his open mouth while belching, emitting a sound like a hoarse Indian.

Belch had been big and not really fat, Eddie remembered now, but it was as if God had never really intended for a boy of twelve to attain such remarkable size; if he had not died t h a t s u m m e r , h e m i g h t h a v e g r o w n t o s i x – six or better, and might have learned along the way how to maneuver his outsized body through a world of smaller denizens. He might even, Eddie thought, have learned gentleness. But at twelve he had been both clumsy and mean, not retarded but almost seeming so because all his body's actions seemed so amazingly graceless and lunging. He had none of Stanley's built-in rhythms; it was as if Belch's body did not talk to his brain at all but existed in its own cosmos of slow thunder. Eddie could remember the evening a long, slow fly ball had been hit directly to Belch's position in the outfield — Belch didn't even have to move. He stood looking up, raised his glove in an almost aimless punching gesture, and instead of settling into his glove, the ball had struck him squarely on top of the head, producing a hollow bonk! sound. It was as if the ball had been dropped from three stories up onto the roof of a Ford sedan. It bounced up a good four feet and came down neatly into Belch's glove. An unfortunate kid named Owen Phillips had laughed at that bonking sound. Belch had walked over to him and had kicked his ass so hard that the Phillips kid had run screaming for home with a hole in the seat of his pants. No one else laughed . . .

at least not on the outside. Eddie supposed that if Richie Tozier had been there, he wouldn't have been able to help it, and Belch probably would have put him in the hospital. Belch was similarly slow at the plate. He was easy to strike out, and if he hit a grounder even the most fumble –fingered infielders had no trouble throwing him out at first. But when he got all of one, it went a long, long way. The two balls Eddie had seen Belch hit over the fence had both been wonders. The first had never been recovered, although more than a dozen boys had tramped back and forth over the steeply slanting slope which plunged down into the Barrens, looking for it.

The second, however, had been recovered. The ball belonged to another sixthgrader (Eddie could not now remember what his real name had been, only that all the other kids called him Snuffy because he always had a cold) and had been in use for most of the late spring and early summer of '58. As a result, it was no longer the nearly perfect spherical creation of white horsehide and red stitching that it had been when it came out of the box; it was scuffed, grassstained, and cut in several places by its hundreds of bouncing trips over the gravel in the outfield. Its stitching was beginning to come unravelled in one place, and Eddie, who shagged foul balls when his asthma wasn't too bad (relishing every casual Thanks, kid! when he threw the ball back to the playing field), knew that soon someone would produce a roll of Black Cat friction tape and embalm it so they could get another week or so out of it.

But before that day came, a seventhgrader with the unlikely name of Stringer Dedham tossed what he fancied a 'change of speed' pitch to Belch Huggins. Belch timed the pitch perfectly (the slow ones were, you should pardon the pun, just his speed) and hit Snuffy's elderly Spalding so hard that the cover came right off and fluttered down just a few feet shy of second base like a big white moth. The ball itself had continued up and up into a gorgeous twilit sky, unravelling and unravelling as it went, kids turning to follow its progress in dumb wonder; up and over the chainlink fence it went, still rising, and Eddie remembered Stringer Dedham had said 'Ho-ly shit!' in a soft and awestruck voice as it went, riding a track into the sky, and they had all seen the unwinding string, and maybe even before it hit, six boys had been monkeying up that fence, and Eddie could remember Tony Tracker laughing in an amazed loonlike way and crying: 'That one would have been out of Yankee Stadium! Do you hear me? That one would have been out of fucking Yankee Stadium!'

It had been Peter Gordon who found the ball, no t far from the stream the Losers' Club would dam up less than three weeks later. What was left was not even three inches through the center; it was some kind of cockeyed miracle that the twine had never broken.

By unspoken consent, the boys had brought the remains of Snuffy's ball back to Tony Tracker, who examined it without saying a word, surrounded by boys who were likewise silent. Seen from a distance that circle of boys standing around the tall man with the big sloping belly might have seemed almost religious in its intent — the veneration of a holy object. Belch Huggins had not even run around the bases. He only stood among the others like a boy who had no precise idea of where he was. What Tony Tracker handed him that day was smaller than a tennis ball.

Eddie, lost in these memories, walked from the place where home had been, across the pitcher's mound (only it had never been a mound; it had been a depression from which the gravel had been scraped clean), and out into shortstop country. He paused briefly, struck by the silence, and then strolled on out to the chainlink fence. It was rustier than ever, and overgrown by some sort of ugly climbing vine, but still there. Looking through it, he could see how the ground sloped away, aggressively green.

The Barrens were more junglelike than ever, and for the first time he found himself wondering why a stretch of such tangled and virulent growth should have been called the Barrens at all: it was many things, but barren was not one of them. Why not ht e Wilderness? Or the Jungle?

Barrens.

It had an ominous, almost sinister sound, but what it conjured up in the mind were not tangles of shrubs and trees so thick they had to fight for sunspace; it called up pictures of sand dunes shifting away end lessly, or gray slate expanses of hardpan and desert. Barren. Mike had said earlier that they were all barren, and it seemed true enough. Seven of them, and not a kid among them. Even in these days of planned parenthood, that was bucking the odds.

He looked through the rusty diamond –shapes, hearing the far-away drone of cars on Kansas Street, the faraway trickle and rush of water down below. He could see glints of it in the spring sunshine, like flashes of glass. The bamboo stands were still down there, looking unhealthily white, like patches of fungus in all the green. Beyond them, in the marshy stretches of ground bordering the Kenduskeag, there was supposed to have been quickmud.

I spent the happiest times of my childhood down there in that mess, he thought, and shivered.

He was about to turn away when something else caught his eye: a cement cylinder with a heavy steel cap on the top. Morlock holes, Ben used to call them, laughing with his mouth but not quite laughing with his eyes. If you went over to one, it would stand maybe waist-high on you (if you were a kid) and you would see the words DERRY DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WORKS stamped in raised metal in a semicircle. And you could hear a humming noise from deep inside. Some sort of machinery.

Morlock holes.

That's where we went. In August. In the end. We went into one of Ben's Morlock holes, into the sewers, but after awhile they weren't sewers anymore. They were . . . were . . . what?

Patrick Hockstetter was down there. Before It took him Beverly saw him doing something bad. It made her laugh but she knew it was bad. Something to do with Henry Bowers, wasn't it? Yes, I think so. And —

He turned away suddenly and started back toward the abandoned depot, not wanting to look down into the Barrens anymore, not liking the thoughts they conjured up. He wanted to be home with Myra. He didn't want to be here. He . . .

'Catch, kid!'

He turned toward the sound of the voice and here came some sort of a ball, right over the fence and toward him. It struck the gravel and bounced. Eddie stuck out his hand and caught it. In his unthinking reflex the catch was so neat it was almost elegant.

He looked down at what was in his hand and everything inside him went cool and loose. Once it had been a baseball. Now it was only a string-wrapped sphere, because the cover had been knocked off. He could see the string trailing away. It went over the top of the fence like a strand of spiderweb and disappeared into the Barrens.

Oh Jesus, he thought. Oh Jesus, Its here, It's here with me NOW —

'Come on down and play, Eddie,' the voice on the other side of the fence said, and Eddie realized with a fainting sort of horror that it was the voice of Belch Huggins, who had been murdered in the tunnels under Derry in August of 1958. And now here was Belch himself, struggling up and over the bank on the other side of the fence.

He wore a pinstriped New York Yankees baseball uniform that was flecked with bits of autumn leaves and smeared with green. He was Belch but he was also the leper, a creature hideously arisen from long years in a wet grave. The flesh of his heavy face hung in putrescent strings and runners. One eyesocket was empty. Things squirmed in his hair. He wore a moss-slimed baseball-glo ve on one hand. He poked the rotting fingers of his right hand through the diamonds of the chainlink fence, and when he curled them, Eddie heard a dreadful squirting sound which he thought might drive him mad.

'That one would have been out of Yankee Stadium,' Belch said, and grinned. A toad, noxiously white and squirming, dropped from his mouth and tumbled to the ground. 'Do you hear me? That one would have been out of fucking Yankee Stadium! And by the way, Eddie, do you want a blow job? I'll do it for a dime. Hell, I'll do it for free.'

Belch's face changed. The jellylike bulb of nose fell in, revealing two raw red channels that Eddie had seen in his dreams. His hair coarsened and drew back from his temples, turned cobweb-white. The rotting skin on his forehead split open, revealing white bone covered with a mucusy substance, like the bleared lens of a searchlight. Belch was gone; the thing which had been under the porch at 29 Neibolt Street was here now.

'Bobby blows me for a dime,' it crooned, beginning to climb the fence. It left little pieces of its flesh in the diamond shapes the crisscrossing wires made. The fence jingled and rattled with its weight. When it touched the climbing, vinelike weeds, they turned black. 'He will do it anytime. Fifteen cents for overtime.'

Eddie tried to scream. Nothing but a dry senseless squeak came out of him. His lungs felt like the world's oldest ocarinas. He looked down at the ball in his hand and suddenly blood began to sweat up from between the wrapped strings. It pattered to the gravel and splashed on his loafers.

He threw it down and took two lurching stagger-steps backward, his eyes bulging from his face, rubbing his hands on the front of his shirt. The leper had reached the top of the fence. Its head swayed in silhouette against the sky, a nightmare shape like a bloated Halloween jackolantern. Its tongue lolled out, four feet long, perhaps six. It twined its way down the fence like a snake from the leper's grinning mouth.

There one second . . . gone the next.

It did not fade, like a ghost in a movie; it simply winked out of existence. But Eddie heard a sound which confirmed its essential solidity: a pop! sound, like a cork blowing out of a champagne bottle. It was the sound of air rushing in to fill the place where the leper had been.

He turned and began to run, but before he had gone ten feet, four stiff shapes flew out from the shadows under the loading– bay of the abandoned brick depot. He thought at first they were bats and he screamed and covered his head . . . Then he saw that they were squares of canvas — the squares of canvas that had been the bases when the big kids played here.

They whirled and twirled in the still air; he had to duck to avoid one of them. They settled in the ir accustomed places all at once, kicking up little puffs of grit: home, first, second, third.

Gasping, his breath short in his throat, Eddie ran past home plate, his lips drawn back, his face as white as cottage cheese.

WHACK! The sound of a bat hitting a phantom ball. And then —

Eddie stopped, the strength going out of his legs, a groan passing his lips. The ground was bulging in a straight line from home to first, as if a gigantic gopher was tunneling rapidly just below the surface of the ground. Gravel rolled off to either side. The shape under the earth reached the base and the canvas flipped up into the air. It went up so hard and fast it made a popping sound — the sound a shoeshine kid makes when he's feeling good and pops the rag. The ground began to ridge between first and second, racing and racing. Second base flew into the air with a similar popping sound and had barely settled back before the shape under the ground had reached third and was racing for home.

Home plate flew up as well, but before it could come down the thing had popped out of the ground like some grisly party-favor, and the thing was Tony Tracker, his face a skull to which a few blackened chunks of flesh still clung, his white shirt a mess of rotted linen strings. He poked out of the earth at home plate from the waist up, swaying back and forth like a grotesque worm.

'Don't matter how much you choke up on that ash-handle,' Tony Tracker said in a gritty, grinding voice. Exposed teeth grinned in lunatic chumminess. 'Don't matter, Wheezy. We'll get you. You and your friends. We'll have a BAWL!'

Eddie shrieked and staggered away. There was a hand on his shoulder. He shrank away from it. The hand tightened for a moment, then gave way. He turned. It was Greta Bowie. She was dead. Half of her face was gone; maggots crawled in the churned red meat that was left. She held a green balloon in one hand.

'Car crash,' the recognizable half of her mouth said, and grinned. The grin caused an unspeakable ripping sound, and Eddie could see raw tendons moving like terrible straps. 'I was eighteen, Eddie. Drunk and done up on reds. Your friends are here, Eddie.'

Eddie backed away from her, his hands held up in front of his face. She walked toward him. Blood had splashed, then dried on her legs in long splotches. She was wearing penny-loafers.

And now, beyond her, he saw the ultimate horror: Patrick Hockstetter was shambling toward him across the outfield. He too was wearing a New York Yankees uniform.

Eddie ran. Greta clutched at him again, tearing his shirt and spilling some terrible liquid down the back of his collar. Tony Tracker was pulling himself out of his man-sized gopher-run. Patrick Hockstetter stumbled and staggered. Eddie ran, not knowing where he was find ing the breath to run, but running somehow anyway. And as he ran, he saw words floating in front of him, the words that had been printed on the side of the green balloon Greta Bowie had been holding:

ASTHMA MEDICINE CAUSES LUNG CANCER ! COMPLIMENTS OF CENTER STREET DRUG

Eddie ran. He ran and ran and at some point he collapsed in a dead faint near McCarron Park and some kids saw him and steered clear of him because he looked like a wino to them like he might have some kind of weird disease for all they knew he might even be the killer and they talked about reporting him to the police but in the end they didn't.

3

Bev Rogan Pays a Call

Beverly walked absently down Main Street from the Derry Town House, where she had gone to change into a pair of bluejeans and a bright yellow smock– blouse. She was not thinking about where she was going. Instead she thought this:

Your hair is winter fire,

January embers.

My heart bums there, too.

She had hidden that in her bottom drawer, beneath her underwear. Her mother might have seen it, but that was all right. The important thing was, that was one drawer her father never looked in. If he had seen it, he might have looked at her with that bright, almost friendly, and utterly paralyzing stare of his and asked in h is almost friendly way: 'You been doing something you shouldn't be doing, Bev? You been doing something with some boy?' And if she said yes or if she said no, there would be a quick wham-bam, so quick and so hard it didn't even hurt at first — it took a few seconds for the vacuum to dissipate and the pain to

fill the place were the vacuum had been. Then his voice again, almost friendly: 'I worry a lot about you, Beverly. I worry an awful lot. You got to grow up, isn't that so?'

Her father might still be living here in Derry. He had been living here the last time she had heard from him, but that had been . . . how long ago? Ten years? Long before she had married Tom, anyway. She had gotten a postcard from him, not a plain postcard like the one the poem had been written on but one showing the hideous plastic statue of Paul Bunyan which stood in front of City Center. The statue had been erected sometime in the fifties, and it had been one of the landmarks of her childhood, but her father's card had called up no nostalgia or memories for her; it might as well have been a card showing Gateway Arch in Saint Louis or the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

'Hope you are doing well and being good,' the card read. 'Hope you will send me something if you can, as I don't have much. I love you Bevvie. Dad.'

He had loved her, and in some ways she supposed that had everything to do with why she had fallen so desperately in love with Bill Denbrough that long summer of 1958 — because of all the boys, Bill was the on e who projected the sense of authority she associated with her father . . . but it was a different sort of authority, somehow — it was authority that listened. She saw no assumption in either his eyes or his actions that he believed her father's kind of worrying to be the only reason authority needed to exist . . . as if people were pets, to be both cosseted and disciplined.

Whatever the reasons, by the end of their first meeting as a complete group in July of that year, that meeting of which Bill had taken such complete and effortless charge, she had been madly, head-over-heels in love with him. Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls –Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him.

It was natural enough, she supposed, for her to want to believe it had been Bill who sent her the love –poem . . . although she had never gotten so far gone as to actually convince herself it was so. No, she had known who wrote the poem. And later on — at some point — hadn't its author admitted this to her? Yes, Ben had told her so (although she could not now remember, not for the life of her, just when or under what circumstances he had actually said it out loud), and although his love for her had been almost as well hidden as the love she had felt for Bill

(but you told him Bevvie you did you told him you loved)

it was obvious to anyone who really looked (and who was kind) — it was in the way he was always careful to keep some space between them, in the draw of his breath when she touched his arm or his hand, in the way he dressed when he knew he was going to see her. Dear, sweet, fat Ben.

It had ended somehow, that difficult pre-adolescent triangle, but just how it had ended was one of the things she still couldn't remember. She thought that Ben had confessed authoring and sending the little love –poem. She thought she had told Bill she loved him, that she would love him forever. And somehow, those two tellings had helped save all of their lives . . . or had they? She couldn't remember. These memories (or memories of memories: that was really closer to what they were) were hike islands that were not really islands at all but only knobs of a single coral spine which happened to poke up above the waterline, not separate at all but one piece. Yet whenever she tried to dive deep and see the rest, a maddening image intervened: the grackles which came back each spring to New England, crowding the telephone lines, trees and rooftops, jostling for places and filling the thawing late-March air with their raucous gossip. This image came to her again and again, foreign and disturbing, like a heavy radio beam that blankets the signal you really want to pick up.

She realized with sudden shock that she was standing outside of the Kleen-Kloze Washateria, where she and Stan Uris and Ben and Eddie had taken the rags that day in late June — rags stained with blood which only they could see. The windows were now soaped opaque and there was a hand-lettered FORSALEBYOWNER sign taped to the door. Peering between the swashes of soap, she could see an empty room with lighter squares on the dirty yellow walls where the washers had stood.

I'm going home, she thought dismally, but walked on anyway.

This neighborhood hadn't changed much. A few more of the trees were gone, probably elms felled by disease. The houses looked a little tackier; broken windows seemed slightly more common than they had been when she was a girl. Some of the broken panes had been replaced with cardboard. Some hadn't.

And here she stood in front of the apartment house, 127 Lower Main Street. Still here. The peeling white she remembered had become a peeling chocolate brown at some point during the years between, but it was still unmistakable. There was the window which looked in on what had been their kitchen; there was the window of her bedroom.

(Jim Doyon, you come out of that road! Come out right now, you want to get run over and killed?)

She shivered, hugging her arms across her breasts in an X, cupping her elbows in her palms.

Daddy could still be living here; oh yes he could. He wouldn't move unless he had to. Just walk on up there, Beverly. Look at the mailboxes. Three boxes for three apartments, just like in the old days. And if there's one which says MARSH, you can ring the bell and pretty soon there'll be the shuffle of slippers down the hall and the door will open and you can look at him, the man whose sperm made you redheaded and lefthanded and gave you the ability to draw . . . remember how he used to draw? He could draw anything he wanted. If he felt like it, that is. He didn't feel like it often. I guess he had too many things to worry about. But when he did, you used to sit for hours and watch while he drew cats and dogs and horses and cows with MOO coming out of their mouths in balloons. You'd laugh and he'd laugh and then he'd say Now you, Bevvie, and when you held the pen he'd guide your hand and you'd see the cow or the cat or the smiling man unspooling beneath your own fingers while you smelled his Mennen Skin Bracer and the warmth of his skin. Go on up, Beverly. Ring the bell. He'll come and he'll be old, the lines will be drawn deep in his face and his teeth — those that are left — will be yellow, and he'll look at you, and he'll say Why it's Bevvie, Bevvie's come home to see her old dad, come on in Bevvie, I'm so glad to see you, I'm glad because I worry about you Bevvie, I worry a LOT.

She walked slowly up the path, and the weeds growing up between the cracked concrete sections brushe d at the legs of her jeans. She looked closely at the first-floor windows, but they were curtained off. She looked at the mailboxes. Third floor, STARK-WEATHER. Second floor, BURKE. First floor — her breath caught — MARSH.

But I won't ring. I don't want to see him. I won't ring the bell.

This was a firm decision, at last! The decision that opened the gate to a full and useful lifetime of firm decisions! She walked down the path! Back to downtown! Up to the Derry Town House! Packed! Cabbed! Flew! Told Tom to bug out! Lived successfully! Died happily!

Rang the bell.

She heard the familiar chimes from the living room — chimes that had always sounded to her like a Chinese name: Ching-Chong! Silence. No answer. She shifted on the porch from one foot to the other, suddenly needing to pee.

No one home, she thought, relieved. I can go now.

Instead she rang again: Ching-Chong! No answer. She thought of Ben's lovely little poem and tried to remember exactly when and how he had confessed its authorship, and why, for a brief second, it called up an association with having her first menstrual period. Had she begun menstruating at eleven? Surely not, although her breasts had begun their first achy growth around mid –winter. Why . . . ? Then, intervening, a mental picture of thousands of grackles on phone lines and rooftops, all babbling at a white spring sky.

I'll leave now. I've rung twice; that's enough.

But she rang again.

Ching-Chong!

Now she heard someone approaching, and the sound was just as she had imagined: the tired whisper of old slippers. She looked around wildly and came very, very close to just taking to her heels. Could she make it down the cement walk and around the corner, leaving her father to think it had been nothing but kids playing pranks? Hey mister, you got PrinceAlbert in a can . . . ?

She let out a sudden sharp breath and had to tighten her throat because what wanted to come out was a laugh of relief. It wasn't her father at all. Standing in the doorway and looking out at her was a tall woman in her late seventies. Her hair was long and gorgeous, mostly white but shot through with lodes of purest gold. Behind her rimless spectacles were eyes as blue as the water in the fjords her ancestors had perhaps hailed from. She wore a purple dress of watered silk. It was shabby but still dignified. Her wrinkled face was kind.

'Yes, miss?'

'I'm sorry,' Beverly said. The urge to laugh had passed as swiftly as it had come. She noticed that the old woman wore a cameo at her throat. It was almost certainly real ivory, surrounded by a band of gold so thin it was nearly invisible. 'I must have rung the wrong bell.' Or rang the wrong bell on purpose, her mind whispered. 'I meant to ring for Marsh.'

'Marsh?' Her forehead wrinkled delicately.

'Yes, you see — '

'There's no Marsh here,' the old woman said.

'But — '

'Unless . . . you don't mean Alvin Marsh, do you?'

'Yes!' Beverly said. 'My father!'

The old woman's hand rose to the cameo and touched it. She peered more closely at Beverly, making her feel ridiculously young, as if she should perhaps have a box of Girl Scout cookies in her hands, or maybe some tags — support the Derry High School Tigers. Then the old woman smiled . . . a kind smile that was nonetheless sad.

'Why you have fallen out of touch, miss. I don't want to be the one who tells you this, a stranger, but your father has been dead these last five years.'

'But . . . on the bell . . . ' She looked again and uttered a small, bewildered sound that was not quite a laugh. In her agitation, in her subconscious but rock-solid certainty that her old man would still be here, she had read KERSH as MARSH.

'You're Mrs Kersh?' she asked. She was staggered by this news of her father, b ut she also felt stupid about the mistake — the lady would think her little more than illiterate.

'Mrs Kersh,' she agreed.

'You . . . did you know my dad?'

'Very little did I know him,' Mrs Kersh said. She sounded a little like Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, and Beverly felt like laughing again. When had her emotions gone whipsawing so violently back and forth? The truth was she couldn't remember a time . . . but she was dismally afraid she would before much longer. 'He rented the ground-floor apartment before

me. We saw each other, me coming and him going, over a space of a few days. He moved down to Reward Lane. Do you know it?'

'Yes,' Beverly said. Roward Lane branched off from Lower Main Street four blocks farther down, where the apartment buildings were smaller and even more desperately shabby.

'I used to see him at the Costello Avenue Market sometimes,' Mrs Kersh said, 'and at the Washateria before they closed it. We passed a word from time to time. We — girl, you're pale. I'm sorry. Come in and let me give you tea.'

'No, I couldn't,' Beverly said weakly, but in fact she actually felt pale, like clouded glass that you could nearly look through. She could use tea, and a chair in which to sit and drink it.

'You could and you will,' Mrs Kersh said warmly. 'It's the least I can do for having told you such unpleasant news.'

Before she could protest, Beverly found herself being led up the gloomy hall and into her old apartment, which now seemed much smaller but safe enough — safe, she supposed, because almost everything was different. Instead of the pink-topped Formica table with its three chairs, there was a small round table, really not much bigger than an endtable, with silk flowers in a pottery vase. Instead of the old Kelvinator refrigerator with the round drum on top (her father tinkered with it constantly to keep it going), there was a copper-colored Frigidaire. The stove was small but efficient-looking. There was an Amana Radar Range above it. Bright blue curtains hung in the windows, and she could see flowerboxes outside them. The floor, linoleum when she was a girl here, had been stripped to its original wood. Many applications of oil made it glow mellowly.

Mrs Kersh looked around from the stove, where she was placing a teapot. 'You grew up here?'

'Yes,' Beverly said. 'But it's very different now . . . so trim and tidy . . . wonderful!'

'How kind you are,' Mrs Kersh said, and her smile made her younger. It was radiant. 'I have a little money, you see. Not much, but with my Social Security I am comfortable. Once I was a girl in Sweden. I came to this country in 1920, a girl of fourteen with no money — which is the best way to learn the value of money, would you agree?'

'Yes,' Bev said.

'At the hospital I worked,' Mrs Kersh said. 'Many years — from 1925 I worked there. I rose to the position of head housekeeper. All the keys I had. My husband invested our money quite well. Now I have reached a little harbor. Look around, miss, while the water boils!'

'No, I couldn't — '

'Please . . . still I feel guilty. Look, if you like!'

And so she did look. Her parents' bedroom was now Mrs Kersh's bedroom, and the difference was profound. The room seemed brighter and airier now. A large cedar chest, the initials RG inlaid into it, breathed its gentle aroma into the air. A gigantic surprise-quilt lay on the bed. On it she could see women drawing water, boys driving cattle, men building haystacks. A wonderful quilt.

Her room had become a sewing room. A black Singer machine stood on a wrought-iron table under a pair of starkly efficient Tensor lamps. A picture of Jesus hung on one wall, a picture of John F. Kennedy on another. A beautiful breakfront stood below the picture of JFK — it was filled with books ins tead of china, but seemed none the worse for that.

She went into the bathroom last.

It had been redone in a rose color that was too low and pleasant to seem gaudy. All of the fixtures were new, and yet she approached the basin feeling that the old nightmare had gripped her again; she would peer down into that black and lidless eye, the whispering would begin, and then the blood —

She leaned over the sink, catching a glimpse of her pallid face and dark eyes in the mirror over the basin, and then she stared into that eye, waiting for the voices, the laughter, the groans, the blood.

How long might she have stood there, bent over the sink, waiting for the sights and sounds twenty-seven years gone, she didn't know; it was Mrs Kersh's voice that bi d her return: 'Tea, miss!'

She jerked back, the semi-hypnosis broken, and left the bathroom. If there had been dark magic somewhere down in that drain, it was gone now . . . or was sleeping.

'Oh, you shouldn't have!'

Mrs Kersh looked up at her brightly, smiling a little. 'O miss, if you knew how seldom company calls these days, you'd not say so. Why, I put on more than this for the man from the Bangor Hydro who comes to read my meter! I'm making him fat!'

Delicate cups and saucers stood on the round kitchen table, a clean bone-white edged with blue. There was a plate of small cakes and cookies. Beside the sweets a pewter teapot chuffed mild steam and pleasant fragrance. Bemused, Bev thought that the only things missing were the tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off: auntsandwiches, she'd thought them, always one word. Three main types of auntsandwiches — cream cheese and olive, watercress, and egg salad.

'Sit down,' said Mrs Kersh. 'Sit down, miss, and I'll pour out.'

'I'm not a mis s,' Beverly said, and raised her left hand so that her ring would show.

Mrs Kersh smiled and pushed a hand through the air — pshaw! the gesture said. 'I call all the pretty young girls miss,' she said. 'Just a habit. Don't take offense.'

'No,' Beve rly said, 'not at all.' But for some reason she felt a feather-touch of unease: there was something in the old woman's smile that had seemed a little . . . what? Unpleasant? False? Knowing? But that was ridiculous, wasn't it?

'I love what you've done to the place.'

'Do you?' Mrs Kersh said, and poured out. The tea looked dark, muddy. Beverly wasn't sure she wanted to drink it . . . and suddenly she wasn't sure she wanted to be here at all.

It did say Marsh under the doorbell, her mind whispered suddenly, and she was frightened.

Mrs Kersh passed her tea.

Thank you,' Beverly said. The look of it might have been muddy; the aroma, however, was wonderful. She tasted. It was fine. Stop jumping at shadows, she told herself. That cedar chest in particular is a wonderful piece.'

'An antique, that one!' Mrs Kersh said, and laughed. Beverly noticed that the old woman's beauty was flawed on only one score, and that was common enough here in the northlands. Her teeth were very bad — strong-looking, but bad all the same. They were yellow, and the front two had crossed each other. The canines seemed very long, almost like tusks.

They were white . . . when she came to the door she smiled and you thought to yourself how white they were.

Suddenly she was not just a little frightened. Suddenly she wanted — needed — to be away from here.

'Very old, oh yes!' Mrs Kersh exclaimed, and drank her cup of tea off at a single gulp, with a sudden, shocking slurping sound. She smiled at Beverly — grinned at her — and Beverly saw that the woman's eyes had changed, too. The corneas were now yellow, ancient, threaded with bleary stitches of red. Her hair was thinner; the braid looked malnourished, no longer silver shot with bright yellow but a dull gray.

'Very old,' Mrs Kersh reminisced over her empty cup, looking slyly at Beverly from her yellowed eyes. Her snaggle teeth showed in that repulsive, almost leering grin. 'From home with me it came. The RG carved into it? You noticed?'

'Yes.' Her voice came from far away, and a part of her brain yammered If she doesn't knowyou've seen the change perhaps you're still all right, if she doesn't know, doesn't see —

'My father,' she said, pronouncing it fodder, and Beverly saw that her dress had also changed. It had become a scabrous, peeling black. The cameo was a skull, its jaw hung in a diseased gape. 'His name was Robert Gray, better known as Bob Gray, better known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Although that was not his name, either. But he did love hi s joke, my fadder.'

She laughed again. Some of her teeth had turned as black as her dress. The wrinkles in her skin now cut deep. Her milk-rose skin had gone a sickly yellow. Her ringers were claws. She grinned at Beverly. 'Have something to eat, dear.' Her voice had risen half an octave, but the octave was cracked in this register, and her voice was the sound of a crypt door swinging mindlessly on hinges clogged with black earth.

'No, thank you,' Beverly heard her mouth say in a child's high oh-I-must-be-going voice. The words did not seem to originate in her brain; rather they came out of her mouth and then had to travel around to her ears before she was aware of what she had said.

'No?' the witch asked, and grinned. Her claws scrabbled on the plate and she began to cram thin molasses cookies and delicate frosted slices of cake into her mouth with both hands. Her horrid teeth plunged and reared, plunged and reared; her fingernails, long and dirty, dug into the sweets; crumbs tumbled down the bony slab of her chin. Her breath was the smell of long-dead things burst wide open by the gases of their own decay. Her laugh was now a dead cackle. Her hair was thinner. Scaly scalp showed in patches.

'Oh, he loved his joke, my fadder! This is a joke, miss, if you enjoy them: my fadder bore me rather than my mutter. He shat me from his asshole! Hee! Hee! Hee!'

'I ought to go,' Beverly heard herself say in that same high wounded voice — the voice of a small girl who has been viciously embarrassed at her first party. There was no strength in her legs. She was dimly aware that it was not tea in her cup but shit, liquid shit, a little party-favor from the sewers under the city. She had drunk some of that, not much but a sip, oh God,oh God, oh blessed Jesus, please, please —

The woman was shrinking before her eyes, thinning; it was now a crone with an apple-doll's face who sat across from her, giggling in a high, squealing voice and rocking back and forth.

'Oh my fadder and I are one,' she said, 'just me, just him, and dear, if you are wise you will run, run back to where you came from, run quickly, because to stay will mean worse than your death. No one who dies in Derry really dies. You knew that before; believe it now.'

In slow motion Bever ly gathered her legs under her. As if from outside she saw herself gaining her feet and backing away from the table and from the witch in an agony of horror and disbelief, disbelief because she realized for the first time that the neat little dining– room table was not dark oak but fudge. Even as she watched, the witch, still giggling, her ancient yellow eyes slanted slyly off into the corner of the room, broke a piece of it off and stuffed it avidly into the black-ringed trap that was her mouth.

The cups, she saw, were white bark that had been carefully looped with blue-dyed frosting. The pictures of Jesus and John Kennedy were creations of nearly transparent spun sugar, and as she looked at them, Jesus stuck out His tongue and Kennedy dropped a stinky wink.

'We're all waiting for you!' the witch screamed, and her fingernails scrabbled over the surface of the fudge table, drawing deep scars in its shining surface. 'Oh yes! Oh yes!'

The overhead lights were globes of hard candy. The wainscotting was caramel taffy. She looked down and saw that her shoes were leaving prints on the floorboards, which were not boards at all but slices of chocolate. The smell of candy was cloying.

Oh God it's Hansel and Gretel it's the witch the one that always scared me the worst because she ate the children —

'You and your friends!' the witch screamed, laughing.' You and your friends! In the cage! In the cage until the oven's hot!' She screamed laughter, and Beverly ran for the door, but she ran as if in slow motion. The witch's laughter beat and swirled around her head, a cloud of bats. Beverly shrieked. The hall stank of sugar and nougat and toffee and sickening synthetic strawberries. The doorknob, mock crystal when she came in, was now a monstrous sugar diamond.

'I worry about you, Bevvie . . . I worry a LOT!'

She turned, swirls of red hair floating around her face, to see her father staggering toward her down the hallway, wearing the witch's black dress and skull cameo; her father's face hung with doughy, running flesh, his eyes as black as obsidian, his hands clenching and unclenching, his mouth grinning with soupy fervor.

'I beat you because I wanted to FUCK you, Bevvie, that's all I wanted to do, I wanted to FUCK you, I wanted to EAT you, I wanted to eat your PUSSY, I wanted to SUCK your CLIT up between my teeth, YUM-YUM, Bevvie, oooohhhhh, YUMMY IN MY TUMMY, I wanted to put you in the cage . . . and get the oven hot . . . and feel your CUNT . . . your plump CUNT . . . and when it was plump enough to eat . . . to eat . . . EAT . . . '

Screaming, she grasped the sticky doorknob and bolted out onto a porch that was decorated with praline doodads and floored with fudge. Far away, dim, seeming to swim in her vision, she saw cars passing back and forth, and a woman pushing a cartful of groceries back from Costello's.

I have to get out there, she thought, just barely coherent. That's reality out there, if I can only get out to the sidewalk —

'Won't do you any good to run, Bevvie,' her father

(my fadder)

told her, laughing. 'We've waited a long time for this. This is going to be fun. This is going to be YUMMY in our TUMMIES.'

She looked back again and now her dead father was not wearing the witch's black dress but the clown suit with the big orange buttons. There was a 1958-style coonskin cap, the kind popularized by Fess Parker in the Disney movie about Davy Crockett, perched on its head. In one hand it held a bunch of balloons. In the other it held the leg of a child like a chicken drumstick. Written on each balloon was the legend IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE.

'Tell your friends I am the last of a dying race,' it said, grinning its sunken grin as it staggered and lurched down the porch steps after her. 'The only survivor of a dying planet. I have come to rob all the women . . . rape all the men . . . and learn to do the Peppermint Twist!'

It began to do a mad shuck-and –jive, balloons in one hand, severed, bleeding leg in the other. The clown costume writhed and flapped, but Beverly felt no wind. Her legs tangled in each other and she spilled to the pavement, throwing out her palms to take up the shock, which went all the way to her shoulders. The woman pushing the grocery cart paused and looked back doubtfully, then hurried on a little faster.

The clown came toward her again, casting the severed leg aside. It landed on the lawn with an indescribable thud. Beverly only lay sprawled on the pavement for a moment, sure somewhere inside that she must wake soon, this couldn't be real, had to be a dream —

She realized that wasn't true a moment before the clown's crooked, long-clawed fingers touched her. It was real; it could kill her. As it had killed the children.

'The grackles know your real name!' she screamed at it suddenly. It recoiled, and it seemed to her that for a moment the grin on the lips inside the great red grin that had been painted on and around them became a grimace of hate and pain . . . and perhaps of fear as well. It might only have been her imagination, an d she certainly had no idea why she had said such a crazy thing, but it bought her an instant of time.

She was on her feet and running. Brakes squealed and a hoarse voice, both mad and scared, yelled: 'Why don't you look where you're going, you dumb quiff!' She had a blurred impression of the bakery truck that had almost hit her when she bolted into the street like a child after a rubber ball, and then she was standing on the opposite sidewalk, panting, a hot stitch in her left side. The bakery truck went on down Lower Main.

The clown was gone. The leg was gone. The house still stood there, but she saw now that it was crumbling and deserted, the windows boarded up, the steps leading up to the porch cracked and broken.

Was I really in there, or did I dream it all?

But her jeans were dirty, her yellow blouse smeared with dust.

And there was chocolate on her fingers.

She rubbed them on the legs of her jeans and walked away fast, her face hot, her back cold as ice, her eyeballs seeming to pulse in and out with the rapid thud of her heart.

We can't beat It. Whatever It is, we can't beat It. It even wants us to try — It wants to settle the old score. Can't be happy with a draw, I guess. We ought to get out of here . . . just leave.

Something brushed against her calf, light as a cat's questing paw.

She jerked away from it with a little shriek. She looked down and cringed, one hand against her mouth.

It was a balloon, as yellow as her blouse. Written on the side of it in electric blue were the words THAT 'S WIGHT, WABBIT.

As she watched, it went bouncing lightly up the street, urged by the pleasant late-spring breeze.

4

Richie Tozier Makes Tracks

Well, there was the day Henry and his friends chased me — before the end of school, this was . . .

Richie was walking along Outer Canal Street, past Bassey Park. Now he stopped, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking toward the .Kissing Bridge but not really seeing it.

I got away from them in the toy department of Freese's . . .

Since the mad conclusion of the reunion lunch, he had been walking aimlessly, trying to make his peace with the awful things which had been in the fortune cookies . . . or the things which had seemed to be in the cookies. He thought that most likely nothing at all had come out of them. It had been a group hallucination brought on by all the spooky shit they had been talking about. The best proof of the hypothesis was that Rose had seen nothing at all. Of course, Beverly's parents had never seen any of the blood that came out of the bathroom drain either, but this wasn't the same.

No? Why not?

'Because we're grownups now,' he muttered, and discovered the thought had absolutely no power or logic at all; it might as well have been a nonsense line from a kid's skip –rope chant.

He started to walk again.

I went up by City Center and sat down on a park bench for awhile and I thought I saw . . .

He stopped again, frowning.

Saw what?

. .. but that was just something I dreamed.

Was it? Was it really?

He looked to the left and saw the big glass-brick-and –steel building that had looked so modern in the late fifties and now looked rather antique and tacky.

And here I am, he thought. Right back to fucking City Center. Scene of that other hallucination. Or dream. Or whatever it was.

The others saw him as the Klass Klown, the Krazy Kut-up, and he had fallen neatly and easily into that role again. Ah, we all fell neatly and easily back into our old roles again, didn't you notice? But was there anything very unusual about that? He thought you would probably see much the same thing at any tenth or twentieth high school reunion — the class comedian who had discovered a vocation for the priesthood in college would, after two drinks, revert almost automatically to the wiseacre he had been; the Great English Brain who had wound up with a GM truck dealership would suddenly begin spouting off about John Irving or John Cheever; the guy who had played with the Moondogs on Saturday nights and who had gone on to become a mathematics professor at Cornell would suddenly find himself on stage with the band, a Fender guitar strapped over his shoulder, whopping out 'Gloria' or 'Surfin' Bird' with gleeful drunken ferocity. What was it Springsteen said? No retreat, baby, no surrender . . . but it was easier to believe in the oldies on the record-player after a couple of drinks or some pretty good Panama Red.

But, Richie believed, it was the reversion that was the hallucination, not the present life. Maybe the child was the father of the man, but fathers and sons often shared very different interests and only a passing resemblance. They —

But you say grownups and now it sounds like nonsense; it sounds like so much bibble-babble. Why is that, Richie? Why?

Because Derry is as weird as ever. Why don't we just leave it at that?

Because things weren't that simple, that was why.

As a kid he had been a goof-off, a sometimes vulgar, sometimes amusing comedian, because it was one way to get along without getting killed by kids like Henry Bowers or going absolutely loony-tunes with boredom and loneliness. He realized now that a lot of the problem had been his own mind, which was usually moving at a speed ten or twenty times that of his classmates. They had thought him strange, weird, or even suicidal, depending on the escapade in question, but maybe it had been a simple case of mental overdrive — i f anything about being in constant mental overdrive was simple.

Anyway, it was the sort of thing you got under control after awhile — you got it under control or you found outlets for it, guys like Kinky Briefcase or Buford Kissdrivel, for instance. Richie had discovered that in the months after he had wandered into the college radio station, pretty much on a whim, and had discovered everything he had ever wanted during his first week behind the microphone. He hadn't been very good at first; he had been too excited to be good. But he had understood his potential not to be just good at the job bu t great at it, and just that knowledge had been enough to put him over the moon on a cloud of euphoria. At the same time he had begun to understand the great principle that moved the universe, at least that part of the universe which had to do with career s and success: you found the crazy guy who was running around inside of you, fucking up your life. You chased him into a corner and grabbed him. But you didn't kill him. Oh no. Killing was too good for the likes of that little bastard. You put a harness over his head and then started plowing. The crazy guy worked like a demon once you had him in the traces. And he supplied you with a few chucks from time to tune. That was really all there was. And that was enough.

He had been funny, all right, a laugh a minute, but in the end he had outgrown the nightmares that were on the dark side of all those laughs. Or he thought he had. Until today, when the word grownup suddenly stopped making sense to his own ears. And now here was something else to cope with, or at least think about; here was the huge and totally idiotic statue of Paul Bunyan in front of City Center.

I must be the exception that proves the rule, Big Bill.

Are you sure there was nothing, Richie? Nothing at all?

Up by City Center . . . I thought I saw . . .

Sharp pain needled at his eyes for the second time that day and he clutched at them, a startled moan coming out of him. Then it was gone again, as quickly as it had come. But he had also smelled something, hadn't he? Something that wasn't really there, but something that had been there, something that made him think of

(I'm right here with you Richie hold my hand can you catch hold)

Mike Hanlon. It was smoke that had made his eyes sting and water. Twenty-seven years ago they had breathed that smoke; in the end there had just been Mike and himself left and they had seen —

But it was gone.

He took a step closer to the plastic Paul Bunyan statue, as amazed by its cheerful vulgarity now as he had been overwhelmed by its size as a child. The mythical Paul stood twenty feet high, and the base added another six feet. He stood smiling down at the car and pedestrian traffic on Outer Canal Street from the edge of the City Center lawn. City Center had been erected in the years 1954-55 for a minor-league basketball team that had never materialized. The Derry City Council had voted money for the statue a year later, in 1956. I had been hotly debated, both in the council's public meetings and in the letters –to-the –editor columns of the Derry News. Many thought it would be a perfectly lovely statue, certain to become a tourist attraction of note. There were others who found the idea of a plastic Paul Bunyan horrible, garish, and unbelievably gauche. The art teacher at Derry High School, Richie remembered, had written a letter to the News saying that if such a monstrosity were actually to be erected in Derry, she would blow it up. Grinning, Richie wondered if that babe's contract had been renewed.

The controversy — which Richie recognized now as an utterly typical big-town/small-city tempest in a teapot — had raged for six months, and of course it had been entirely meaningless; the statue had been purchased, and even if the City Council had done something as aberrant (especially for New England) as deciding not to use an item for which money had been paid, where in God's name could it have been stored? Then the statue, not really sculpted at all but simply cast in some Ohio plastics plant, had been set in place, still shrouded in a whack of canvas big enough to serve as a clippership sail. It had been unveiled on May 13th, 1957, which was the incorporated township's one-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday. One faction gave voice to predictable moans of outrage; the other to equally predictable moans of rapture.

When Paul was revealed that day he was wearing his bib overalls and a red-and –white –checked shirt. His beard was splendidly black, splendidly full, splendidly lumber jack-y. A plastic axe, surely the Godzilla of all plastic axes, was slung over one shoulder, and he grinned unceasingly at the northern skies, which on the day of the unveiling had been as blue as the skin of Paul's reputed companion (Babe was not present at the unveiling, however; the cost estimate of adding a blue ox to the tableau had been prohibitive).

The children who attended the ceremonies (there were hundreds of them, and ten-year-old Richie Tozier, in the company of his dad, had been among them) were totally and uncritically delighted by the plastic giant. Parents boosted toddlers up onto the square pedestal on which Paul stood, took photos, and then watched with mixed apprehension and amusement as the kids climbed and crawled, laughing, over Paul's huge black boots (correction: huge black plastic boots).

It had been March of the following year when Richie, exhausted and terrified, had finished up on one of the benches in front of the statue after eluding — by the barest of margins — Messrs. Bowers, Criss, and Huggins in a chase that had led from Derry Elementary School

across most of the downtown area. He had finally ditched them in the toy department of Freese's Department Store.

The Derry branch of Freese's was a poor thing compared with the grand downtown department store in Bangor, but Richie had been far past caring about such things — by then it was a case of any port in a storm. Henry Bowers had been right behind him and by then Richie had been flagging badly. He had dodged into the mouth of the department store's revolving door as a last resort. Henry, who apparently didn't understand the physics of such devices, had nearly lost the tips of his fingers trying to grab Richie as Richie trundled around and into the store.

Pelting downstairs, shirttail flying out behind him, he had heard the revolving door give off a series of reports almost as loud as TV gunfire and understood that Larry, Moe, and Curly were still after him. He was laughing as he went down the stairs to the basement level but that was only a nervous tic; he was as full of terror as a rabbit caught in a wire snare. They really meant to beat him up good this time (he had no idea that in another ten weeks or so he would believe the three of them, Henry in particular, capable of anything short of murder, and he surely would have whitened with shock if he had known of the apocalyptic rockfight in July, when even that last qualification would disappear from his mind). And the whole thing had been so utterly, typically stupid.

Richie and the other boys in his fifth-grade class had been filing into the gym. A sixth-grade class, Henry hulking among them like an ox among cows, had been coming out. Although he was still in the fifth grade, Henry went to gym with the older boys. The overhead pipes had been dripping again and Mr Fazio hadn't yet gotten around to putting up his CAUTION! WETFLOOR ! sign on its little easel. Henry had slipped in a puddle and had landed on his keister.

Before he could stop it Richie's traitor mouth had bugled: 'Way to go, banana-heels!'

There had been an explosion of laughter from both Henry's classmates and Richie's, but there had been no laughter on Henry's face as he picked himself up — only a dull flush the color of freshly fired brick.

'Later for you, four-eyes,' he said, and walked on.

The laughter died at once. The boys in the hall looked at Richie as one already dead. Henry did not pause to check reactions; he simply walked off, head down, elbows red from catching the fall, a large wet place on the seat of his pants. Looking at that wet spot, Richie felt his suicidally witty mouth drop open again . . . but this time he snapped it shut again, so fast he almost amputated the tip of his tongue with the falling gate of his teeth.

Well, but he'll forget, he told himself uneasily as he changed up for gym. Sure he will. OleHank just hasn't got that many memory circuits working. Every time he takes a shit he probably has to look up the directions in the instruction booklet, ha-ha.

Ha-ha.

'You're dead, Trashmouth,' Vince 'Boogers' Taliendo told him, pulling his jock up over a dork roughly the size and shape of an anemic peanut. He said it with a certain sad respect. 'Don't worry, though. I'll bring flowers.'

'Cut off your ears and bring cauliflowers,' Richie had come back smartly, and everyone laughed, even ole 'Boogers' Taliendo laughed, why not, they could all afford to laugh. What, me worry? They would all be home watching Jimmy Dodd and the Mouseketeers on the Mickey Mouse Club or Frankie Lymon singing 'I'm Not a Juvenile Delinquent' on AmericanBandstand while Richie went shagging ass through ladies' lingerie and housewares on his way to the toy department with sweat pouring down his back into the crack of his ass and his terrified balls strung up so high they felt like they might be hung over his bellybutton. Sure, they could laugh. Har-de-har –har –har.

Henry hadn't forgotten. Richie had left by the door at the kindergarten end of the school building just in case, but Henry had stuck Belch Huggins there, also just in case. Har-de-har –har-har.

Richie saw Belch first or there would have been no contest at all. Belch was looking out toward Derry Park, holding an unlit cigarette in one hand and dreamily picking the seat of his chinos out of his ass with the other. Heart pounding hard, Richie had walked quietly across the playground and was most of the way down Charter Street before Belch turned his head and saw him. He yelled for Henry and Victor, and since then the chase had been on.

When Richie reached the toy department it had been utterly, horribly deserted. There wasn't even a sales clerk hanging out — a welcome adult to put a stop to things before they got entirely out of hand. He could hear the three dinosaurs of the apocalypse closing in now. And he simply couldn't run anymore. Each breath produced a deep hurting stitch in his left side.

His eye fixed on a door which read EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY\ ALARM WILL SOUND! Hope kindled in his chest.

Richie ran down an aisle crammed with Donald Duck jack-in-the –boxes, United States Army tanks made in Japan, Lone Ranger cap pistols, wind-up robots. He reached the door and slammed the push-bar as hard as he could. The door opened, letting in cool mid –March air. The alarm went off with a strident bray. Richie immediately doubled back and dropped to his hands and knees in the next aisle over. He was down before the door could settle closed again.

Henry, Belch, and Victor thundered into the toy department just as the door clicked shut and the alarm cut off. They raced for it, Henry in the lead, his face set and intent.

A sales clerk finally appeared, coming on the run. He wore a blue nylon duster over a plaid sportcoat of excruciating ugliness. The rims of his spectacles were as pink as the eyes of a white rabbit. Richie thought he looked like Wally Cox in his Mr Peepers role, and he had to slam his traitor mouth into the fat part of his forearm to keep from screaming out gales of exhausted laughter.

'You boys!' Mr Peepers exclaimed. 'You boys can't go out there! That's an emergency exit! You! Hey! You boys!'

Victor glanced at him a little nervously, but Henry and Belch never turned from their course and Victor followed them. The alarm brayed again, longer this time as they charged into the alley. Before it stopped clanging Richie was on his feet and trotting back toward ladies' lingerie.

'You boys will be barred from the store!' the clerk yelled after him.

Looking back over his shoulder Richie squealed in his Granny Grunt Voice, 'Did anyone ever tell you you look just like Mr Peepers, young man?'

And so he had escaped. And so he had finished up almost a mile from Freese's, in front of City Center . . . and, he devoutly hoped, out of harm's way. At least for the time being. He was spent. He sat down on a bench just to the left of the Paul Bunyan statue, wanting only a little peace while he got himself back together. In a bit he would get up and head home, but for now it felt too good to just sit here in the afternoon sun. The day had opened in a cold drizzly gloom, but now you could believe spring might actually be on the way.

Farther up the lawn he could see the City Center marquee, which on that March day bore this message in large blue translucent letters:

HEY TEENS!

COMING MARCH 28TH

THE ARNIE "WOO-WOO' GINSBERG ROCK AND ROLL SHOW!

JERRY LEE LEWIS

THE PENGUINS

FRANKIE LYMON AND THE TEENAGERS

GENE VINCENT AND THE BLUE CAPS

FREDDY 'BOOM –BOOM ' CANNON

AN EVENING OF WHOLESOME ENTERTAINMENT!!

That was a show Richie really wanted to see, but he knew there wasn't a chance. His mother's idea of wholesome entertainment did not include Jerry Lee Lewis telling the young people of America we got chicken in the barn, whose barn, what barn, my barn. Nor, for that matter, did it include Freddy Cannon, whose Tallahassee lassie had a hi-fi chassis. She was willing to admit that she had done her share of screaming for Frank Sinatra (whom she now called Frankie the Snot) as a bobby-soxer, but, like Bill Denbrough's mother, she was death on rock and roll. Chuck Berry terrified her, and she declared that Richard Penniman, better known to his teen and subteen constituency as Little Richard, made her want to 'barf like a chicken.'

This was a phrase for which Richie had never asked a translation.

His dad was neutral on the subject of rock and roll and could perhaps have been swayed, but Richie knew in his heart that his mother's wishes would rule on this subject — until he was sixteen or seventeen, anyway — and by then, his mother was firmly convinced, the country's rock and roll mania would have passed.

Richie thought Danny and the Juniors were more right on that subject than his mom — rock and roll would never die. He himself loved it, although his sources were really only two — American Bandstand on Channel 7 in the afternoon and WMEX out of Boston at night, when the air had thinned and the hoarse enthusiastic voice of Arnie Ginsberg came wavering in and out like the voice of a ghost called up at a seance. The beat did more than make him happy. It made him feel bigger, stronger, more there. When Frankie Ford sang 'Sea Cruise' or Eddie Cochran sang 'Summertime Blues,' Richie was actually transported with joy. There was power in that music, a power which seemed to most rightfully belong to all the skinny kids, fat kids, ugly kids, shy kids — the world's losers, in short. In it he felt a mad hilarious voltage which had the power to both kill and exalt. He idolized Fats Domino (who made even Ben Hanscom look sum and trim) and Buddy Holly, who, like Richie, wore glasses, and Screaming Jay Hawkins, who popped out of a coffin at his concerts (or so Richie had been told), and the Dovells, who danced as good as black guys.

Well, almost.

He would have his rock and roll someday if he wanted it — he was confident it would still be there for him when his mother finally gave in and let him have it — but that would not be on March 28th, 1958 . . . or in 1959 . . . or . . .

His eyes had drifted away from the marquee and then . . . well . . . then he must have fallen asleep. It was the only explanation that made sense. What had happened next could only happen in dreams.

And now here he was again a Richie Tozier who had finally gotten all the rock and roll he had ever wanted . . . and who had found, happily, that it still wasn't enough. His eyes went to the marquee in front of City Center and saw that, with a hideous kind of serendipity, those same blue letters spelled out:

JUNE 14TH

HEAVY METAL MANIA!

JUDAS PRIEST

IRON MAIDEN

BUY YOUR TICKETS HERE OR AT ANY TICKETRON OUTLET

Somewhere along the way they dropped the wholesome entertainment line, thought Richie, but as far as I can tell that's just about the only difference,

And heard Danny and the Juniors, dim and distant, like voices heard down a long corridor coming out of a cheap radio: Rock and roll will never die, I'll dig it to the end . . . It'll go down in history, just you watch my friend . . .

Richie looked back at Paul Bunyan, patron saint of Derry — Derry, which had come into being, according to the stories, because this was where the logs fetched up when they came downriver. There had been a time when, in the spring, both the Penobscot and the Kenduskeag would have been solid logs from one side to the other, their black bark hides glistening in the spring sun. A fellow who was fast on his feet could walk from Wally's Spa in Hell's Half-Acre over to Ramper's in Brewster (Ramper's was a tavern of such horrible repute that it was commonly called the Bucket of Blood) without getting his boots wet over the third crossing of his rawhide laces. Or so it had been storied in Richie's youth, and he supposed there was a bit of Paul Bunyan in all such stories.

Old Paul, he thought, looking up at the plastic statue. What you been doing since I've beengone? Made any new riverbeds coming home tired and dragging your axe behind you? Made any new lakes on account of wanting a bathtub big enough so you could sit in water up to your neck? Scared any more little kids the way you scared me that day?

Ah, and suddenly he remembered it all, the way you will sometimes suddenly remember a word which has been dancing on the tip of your tongue.

There he had been, sitting in that mellow March sunshine, drowsing a little, thinking about going home and catching the last half hour of Bandstand, and suddenly there had been a warm swash of air into his face. It blew his hair back from his forehead. He looked up and Paul Bunyan's huge plastic face had been right in front of his, bigger than a face on a movie screen, filling everything. The rush of air had been caused by Paul bending down . . . although he did not precisely look like Paul anymore. The forehead was now low and beetling; tufts of wiry hair poked from a nose as red as the nose of a long-time drunkard; his eyes were bloodshot and one had a slight cast to it.

The axe was no longer on his shoulder. Paul was leaning on its haft, and the blunt end of its head had crushed a trench in the concrete of the sidewalk. He was still grinning, but there was nothing cheery about it now. From between gigantic yellow teeth there drifted a smell like small animals rotting in hot underbrush.

'I'm going to eat you up,' the giant had said in a low rumbling voice. It was the sound of boulders rocking against each other during an earthquake. 'Unless you give me back my hen and my harp and my bags of gold, I'm going to eat you right the fuck up!'

The breath of these words made Richie's shirt flutter and flap like a sail in a hurricane. He shrank back against the bench, eyes bugging, hair standing out to all sides like quills, wrapped in a pocket of carrion-stink.

The giant began to laugh. It settled its hands on the haft of its axe the way Ted Williams might have laid hold of his favorite baseball bat (or ash-handle, if you prefer), and pulled it out of the hole it had made in the sidewalk. The axe began to rise into the air. It made a low lethal rushing sound. Richie suddenly understood that the giant meant to split him right down the middle.

But he felt that he could not move; a logy sort of apathy had stolen over him. What did it matter? He was dozing, having a dream. Any moment now some driver would blow his horn at a kid running across the street and he would wake up.

'That's right,' the giant had rumbled, 'you'll wake up in hell!' And at the last instant, as the axe slowed to its apogee and balanced there, Richie understood that this wasn't a dream at all . . . and if it was, it was a dream that could kill.

Trying to scream but making no sound at all, he rolle d off the bench and onto the raked gravel plot which surrounded what had been a statue and was now only a base with two huge steel bolts sticking out of it where the feet had been. The sound of the descending axe filled the world with its pressing insistent whisper; the giant's grin had become a murderer's grimace. Its lips had pulled back so far from its teeth that its plastic red gums, hideously red, gleamed.

The blade of the axe struck the bench where Richie had been only an instant before. The edge was so sharp that there was almost no sound at all, but the bench was sheared instantly in two. The halves sagged away from each other, the wood inside the green-painted skin a bright and somehow sickening white.

Richie was on his back. Still trying to scream, he pushed himself with his heels. Gravel went down the collar of his shirt, down the back of his pants. And there was Paul, towering above him, looking down at him with eyes the size of manhole covers; there was Paul, looking down at one small boy cowering on the gravel.

The giant took a step toward him. Richie felt the ground shudder when the black boot came down. Gravel spumed up in a cloud.

Richie rolled over onto his stomach and staggered to his feet. His legs were already trying to run before he was balanced, and as a result he fell flat on his belly again. He heard the wind whoof out of his lungs. His hair fell in his eyes. He could see the traffic going back and forth on Canal and Main Streets as it did every day, as if nothing was happening, as if no one in any of those cars could see or care that Paul Bunyan had come to life and stepped down from its pedestal in order to commit murder with an axe roughly the size of a deluxe motor home.

The sunshine was blotted out. Richie lay in a patch of shade that looked like a man.

He scrambled to his knees, almost fell over sideways, managed to get to his feet, and ran as fast as he could — he ran with his knees popping almost all the way up to his chest and his elbows pistoning. Behind him he could hear that awful persistent whisper building again, a sound that seemed to be not really sound at all but pressure on the skin and eardrums: Swiiipppppp! —

The earth shook. Richie's upper and lower teeth rattled against each other like china plates in an earthquake. He did not have to look to know that Paul's axe had buried itself haft-deep in the sidewalk inches behind his feet.

Madly, in his mind, he heard the Dovells: Oh the kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol When they do the Bristol Stomp . . .

He passed out of the giant's shadow into sunlight again, and as he did he began to laugh — the same exhausted laughter that had come from him when he bolted downstairs in Freese's. Panting, that hot stitch in his side again, he had at last risked a glance back over his shoulder.

There was the statue of Paul Bunyan, standing on its pedestal where it always stood, axe on its shoulder, head cocked toward the sky, lips parted in the eternal optimistic grin of the myth-hero. The bench which had been sheared in two was whole and intact, thank you very much. The gravel where Tall Paul (He's –a my all, A n n e t t e F u n i c e l l o s a n g m a n i a c a l l y i n Richie's head) had planted his huge foot was raked and immaculate except for the scuffed spot where Richie had fallen off while he was

(getting away from the giant)

dreaming. There was no footprint, no axe-slash in the concrete. There was nothing here but a boy who had been chased by other boys, bigger boys, and so had had himself a very small (but ve ry potent) dream about a homicidal Colossus . . . the Giant Economy-Size Henry Bowers, if you pleased.

'Shit,' Richie said in a tiny wavering voice, and then uttered an uncertain laugh.

He stood there awhile longer, waiting to see if the statue would move again — perhaps wink, perhaps shift its axe from one shoulder to the other, perhaps come down and have at him again. But of course none of those things happened.

Of course.

What, me worry? Har-de-har-har –har.

A doze. A dream. No more than that.

But, as Abraham Lincoln or Socrates or someone like that had once observed, enough was enough. It was time to go home and cool out; to make like Kookie on 77 Sunset Strip and just lay chilly.

And although it would have been quicker to cut through the City Center grounds, he decided not to. He didn't want to get close to that statue again. So he had gone the long way around and by that evening he had nearly forgotten the incident.

Until now.

Here sits a man, he thought, here sits a man dressed in a mossy-green sportcoat purchased at one of the best shops on Rodeo Drive; here sits a man with Bass Weejuns on his feet and Calvin Klein underwear to cover his ass; here sits a man with soft contact lenses resting easily on his eyes; here sits a man remembering the dream of a boy who thought an Ivy League shin with a fruit-loop on the back and a pair of Snap Jack shoes was the height of fashion; here sits a grownup looking at the same old statue, and hey, Paul, Tall Paul, I'm here to say you'r e the same in every way, you ain't aged a motherfucking day.

The old explanation still rang true in his mind: a dream.

He supposed he could believe in monsters if he had to; monsters were no big deal. Hadn't he sat in radio studios at one time or another reading news copy about such fellows as Idi Amin Dada and Jim Jones and that guy who had blown away all those folks in a McDonald's just down the road apiece? Shitfire and save matches, monsters were cheap! Who needed a five –buck movie ticket when you could read about them in the paper for thirty-five cents or hear about them on the radio for free? And he supposed if he could believe in the Jim Jones variety, he could believe in Mike Hanlon's version, at least for awhile; It even had Its own sorry charm, because It came from Outside and no one had to claim responsibility for It. He could believe in a monster that had as many faces as there are rubber masks in a novelty shop (if you're gonna have one, you might as well have a pack of em, he thought, cheaper by the dozen, right, gang?), at least for the sake of argument . . . but a thirty-foot-high plastic statue that stepped off its pedestal and then tried to carve you up with its plastic axe? That was just a little too ripe. As Abraham Lincoln or Socrates or someone had also said, I'll eat fish and I'll eat meat, but there is some shit I will not eat. It just wasn't —

That sharp needling pain struck his eyes again, without warning jerking a dismayed cry from him. This was the worst yet, going deeper and lasting longer, scaring the bejesus out of him. He clapped his hands to his eyes and then groped instinctively for the bottom lids with his forefingers, meaning to pop his contacts out. It's maybe some kind of infection, he thoughtdimly. But Jesus it hurts!

He pulled the lids down and was ready to give the single practiced blink that would send them tumbling out (and he would spend the next fifteen minutes grovelling myopically for them in the gravel surrounding the bench but Jesus God who gave a shit, right now it felt like there were nails in his eyes), when the pain disappeared. It did not dwindle; it just went. One moment there, the next moment gone. His eyes teared briefly and then stopped.

He lowered his hands slowly, his heart running fast in his chest, ready to blink them out the instant the pain started again. It didn't. And suddenly he found himself thinking about the only horror movie that had ever really scared him as a kid, possibly because he had taken so much shit about his glasses and had spent so much time thinking about his eyes. That movie had been The Crawling Eye, with Forrest Tucker. Not very good. The other kids had laughed

themselves into hysterics over it, but Richie had not laughed. Richie had been rendered cold and white and dumb, for once with not a single Voice to command, as that gelatinous tentacled eye came out of the manufactured fog of some English movie set, waving its fibrous tentacles in front of it. The sight of that eye had been very bad, the embodiment of a hundred not-quite-realized fears and disquiets. On some night not long after, he had dreamed of looking at himself in a mirror and bringing a large pin up and sticking it slowly into the black iris of his eye and feeling a numb, watery springiness as the bottom of his eye filled up with blood. He remembered — now he remembered — waking up and discovering that he had wet the bed. The best indicator of how gruesome that dream had been was that his primary feeling had been not shame at his nocturnal indiscretion but relief; he had embraced the warm wet patch with his body and blessed the reality of his sight.

'Fuck this,' Richie Tozier said in a low voice that was not quite steady, and started to get up.

He would go back to the Derry Town House and take a nap. If this was Memory Lane, he preferred the LA. Freeway at rush-hour. The pain in his eyes was probably no more than a signal of exhaustion and jet-lag, plus the stress of meeting the past all at once, in one afternoon. Enough shocks; enough exploring. He didn't like the way his mind was skittering from one subject to the next. What was that Peter Gabriel tune? 'Shock the Monkey.' Well, this monkey had been shocked enough. It was time to catch some z's and maybe gain a little perspective.

As he rose his eyes went to the marquee in front of City Center again. All at once the strength ran out of his legs and he sat down again. Hard.

RICHIE TOZIER MAN OF 1000 VOICES RETURNS TO DERRY LAND OF 1000 DANCES

IN HONOUR OF TRASHMOUTH'S RETURN CITY CENTER PROUDLY PRESENTS THE RICHIE TOZIER 'ALL-DEAD' ROCK SHOW

BUDDY HOLLY RICHIE VALENS THE BIG BOPPER FRANKIE LYMON GENE VINCENT MARVIN GAYE

HOUSE BAND

JIMI HENDRIX LEAD GUITAR

JOHN LENNON RHYTHM GUITAR

PHIL LINOTT BASS GUITAR

KEITH MOON DRUMS

SPECIAL GUEST VOCLAIST JIM MORRISON

WELCOME HOME RICHIE! YOU 'RE DEAD TOO!

He felt as if someone had whopped all the breath out of him . . . and then he heard that sound again, that sound that was half pressure on the skin and eardrums, that keen homicidal whispering rush — Swiipppp! He rolled off the bench onto the gravel, thinking So this iswhat they mean by déjà vu, now you know, you'll never have to ask anybody again —

He hit on his shoulder and rolled, looking up at the Paul Bunyan statue — only it was no longer Paul Bunyan. The clown stood there instead, resplendent and evident, fantastic in plastic, twenty feet of Day-Glo colors, its painted face surmounting a cosmic comic ruff. Orange pompom buttons cast in plastic, each as big as a volleyball, ran down the front of the

silvery suit. Instead of an axe it held a huge bunch of plastic balloons. Engraved on each were two legends: IT'S STILL ROCK AND ROLL TO ME and RICHIE TOZIER 's 'ALL-DEAD' ROCK SHOW.

He scrambled backward, using his heels and his palms. Gravel went down the back of his pants. He heard a seam tear loose in die underarm of his Rodeo Drive sportcoat. He rolled over, gamed his feet, staggered, looked back. The down looked down at him. Its eyes rolled wetly in their sockets.

'Did I give you a scare, m'man?' it rumbled.

And Richie heard his mouth say, quite independently of his frozen brain: 'Cheap thrills in the back of my car, Bozo. That's all.'

The clown grinned and nodded as if it had expected no more. Red paint-bleeding lips parted to show teeth like fangs, each one coming to a razor point. 'I could have you now if I wanted you now,' it said. 'But this is going to be too much fun.'

'Fun for me too,' Richie heard his mouth say. 'The most fun of all when we come to take your fucking head off, baby.'

The clown's grin spread wider and wider. It raised one hand, clad in a white glove, and Richie felt the wind of the movement blow the hair off his forehead as it had on that day twenty-seven years ago. The clown's index finger popped out at him. It was as big as a beam.

Big as a bea — , Richie thought, and then the pain struck again. It drove nisty spikes into the soft jelly of his eyes. He screamed and clutched at his face.

'Before removing the mote from thy neighbor's eye, attend the beam in thine own,' the clown intoned, its words rumbling and vibrating, and Richie was again enveloped in the sweet stink of its carrion breath.

He looked up, and took half a dozen hurried steps backward. The clown was bending down, its gloved hands on its gaily pantalooned knees.

'Want to play some more, Richie? How about if I point at your pecker and give you prostate cancer? Or I could point at your head and give you a good old brain tumor — although I'm sure some people would say that would only be adding to what was already there. I can point at your mouth and your stupid flapping tongue will turn into so much running pus. I can do it, Richie. Want to see?'

Its eyes were widening, widening, and in those black pupils, each as big as a softball, Richie saw the mad darkness that must exist over the rim of the universe; he saw a shitty happiness that he felt would drive him insane. In that moment he understood It could do any of these things and more.

And yet again he heard his mouth, but this time it was not his voice, or any of his created Voices, past or present; it was a Voice he had never heard before. Later he would tell the others, hesitantly, that it was a kind of Mr Jiveass Nigger Voice, loud and proud, self-parodying and screechy. 'Git off man case you big ole honky clown!' he shouted, and suddenly he was laughing again. 'No shit an no shine, muhfuh! I got d'walk, I got d'talk, and I got d'big boppin cock! I got d' 'time, I got d' 'mine, I'm a man wit' a plan an if you doan shit, you goan git \ You hear me, you whiteface bunghole?'

Richie thought the clown recoiled, but he did not stick around to find out for sure. He ran, elbows pumping, sportcoat flying out in wings behind him, not caring that a father who had stopped so his toddler could admire Paul was now staring warily at him, as if he had gone crazy. As a matter of fact, folks, Richie thought, I feel like I've gone crazy. Oh God do I ever. And that had to have been the shiniest Grandmaster Flash imitation in history but somehow it did the trick, somehow —

And then the clown's voice thundered after him. The father of the little boy did not hear it, but the toddler's face suddenly pinched in upon itself and he began to wail. The dad picked his son up and hugged him, bewildered. Even through his own terror, Richie observed this little sideshow closely. The voice of the clown was perhaps angrily gleeful, perhaps just

angry: 'We've got the eye down here, Richie . . . you hear me? The on e that crawls. If you don't want to fly, don't wanna say goodbye, you come on down under this here town and give a great big hi to one great big eye! You come down and see it anytime. Just any old time you like. You hear me, Richie? Bring your yo-yo. Have Beverly wear a big full skin with four or five petticoats underneath. Have her wear her husband's ring around her neck! Get Eddie to wear his saddle-shoes! We'll play some bop, Richie! We'll play AAALLLL THE HITS!'

Reaching the sidewalk, Richie dared to look back over his shoulder, and what he saw was in no way comforting. Paul Bunyan was still gone, and now the clown was gone, too. Where they had stood there was now a twenty-foot-high plastic statue of Buddy Holly. He was wearing a button on one of the narrow lapels of his plaid sportcoat. RICHIETOZIER 's 'ALL –DEAD' ROCK SHOW, the button read.

One bow of Buddy's glasses had been mended with adhesive tape.

The little boy was still crying hysterically; his father was walking rapidly back toward downtown with the weeping child in his arms. He gave Richie a wide berth.

Richie got walking

(feets don't fail me now)

trying not to think about

(we'll play AAALLLL THE HITS!)

what had just happened. All he wanted to think about was the monster jolt of Scotch he was going to have in the Derry Town House bar before he went up to take that nap.

The thought of a drink — just your ordinary garden-variety drink — made him feel a little better. He looked over his shoulder one more time and the fact that Paul Bunyan was back, grinning at the sky, plastic axe over his shoulder, made him feel better still. Richie began to walk faster, making tracks, putting distance between himself and that statue. He had even begun to think about the possibility of hallucinations when the pain struck his eyes again, deep and agonizing, causing him to cry out hoarsely. A pretty young girl who had been walking ahead of him, looking dreamily up at the breaking clouds, looked back at him, hesitated, then hurried over.

'Mister, are you all right?'

'It's my contacts,' he said in a strained voice. 'My damned contact le — oh my God thathurts!'

This time he got his forefingers up so quickly he almost jabbed them into his eyes. He pulled down the lower lids an d thought, I won't be able to blink them out, that's what's going to happen, I won't be able to blink them out and it's just going to go on hurting and hurting and hurting until I go blind go blind go bl — But one blink did it as one blink always had. The sharp and denned world, where colors stayed inside the lines and where faces that you saw were clear and obvious, simply fell away. Wide bands of pastel fuzz took their place. And although he and the high-school girl, who was both helpful and concerned, searched the paving of the sidewalk for almost fifteen minutes, neither could find even a single lens.

In the back of his head Richie seemed to hear the clown laughing.

5

Bill Denbrough Sees a Ghost

Bill did not see Pennywise that afternoon — but he did see a ghost. A real ghost. So Bill believed then, and no subsequent event caused him to change his mind.

He had walked up Witcham Street and paused for some time by the drain where George met his end on that rainy October day in 1957. He squatted down and peered into the drain,

which was cut into the stonework of the curbing. His heart was beating hard, but he looked anyway.

'Come out, why don't you,' he said in a low voice, and he had the not-quite-mad idea that his voice was floating along dark and dripping passageways, not dying out but continuing onward and onward, feeding on its own echoes, bouncing off moss-covered stone walls and long-dead machinery. He felt it float over still and sullen waters and perhaps issue softly from a hundred different drains in other parts of the city at the same time.

'Come out of there or we'll come in and g-get you.'

He waited nervily for a response, crouched down with his hands between his thighs like a catcher between pitches. There was no response.

He was about to stand up when a shadow fell over him.

Bill looked up sharply, eagerly, ready for anything . . . but it was only a little kid, maybe ten, maybe eleven. He was wearing faded Boy Scout shorts which displayed his scabby knees to good advantage. He had a Freeze-Pop in one hand and a Fiberglas skateboard which looked almost as battered as his knees in the other. The Freeze-Pop was a fluorescent orange. The skateboard was a fluorescent green.

'You always talk into the sewers, mister?' the boy asked.

'Only in Derry,' Bill said.

They looked at each other solemnly for a moment and then burst into laughter at the same time.

'I want to ask you a stupid queh-question,' Bill said.

'Okay,' the kid said.

'You ever h-hear anything down in one of these?'

The kid looked at Bill as though he had flipped out.

'O-Okay,' Bill said, 'forget I a-asked.'

He started to walk away and had gotten maybe twelve steps — he was headed up the hill, vaguely thinking he would take a look at the home place — when the kid called, 'Mister?'

Bill turned back. He had his sportcoat hooked on his finger and slung over his shoulder. His collar was unbuttoned, his tie loosened. The boy was watching him carefully, as if already regretting his decision to speak further. Then he shrugged, as if saying Oh what the hell.

'Yeah.'

'Yeah?'

'Yeah.'

'What did it say?'

'I don't know. It talked some foreign language. I heard it coming out of one of those pumpin stations down in the Barrens. One of those pumpin stations, they look like pipes coming out of the ground — '

'I know what you mean. Was it a kid you heard?'

'At first it was a kid, then it sounded like a man.' The boy paused. 'I was some scared. I ran home and told my father. He said maybe it was an echo or something, coming all the way down the pipes from someone's house.'

'Do you believe that?'

The boy smiled charmingly. 'I read in my Ripley's Believe It or Not book that there was this guy, he got music from his teeth. Radio music. His fillings were, like, little radios. I guess if I believed that, I could believe anything.'

'A-Ayuh,' Bill said. 'But did you believe it?'

The boy reluctantly shook his head.

'Did you ever hear those voices again?'

'Once when I was taking a bath,' the boy said. 'It was a girl's voice. Just crying. No words. I was ascared to pull the plug when I was done because I thought I might, you know, drownd her.'

Bill nodded again.

The kid was looking at Bill openly now, his eyes shining and fascinated. 'You know about those voices, mister?'

'I heard them,' Bill said. 'A long, long time ago. Did you know any of the k-kids that have been murdered here, son?'

The shine went out of the kid's eyes; it was replaced by caution and disquiet. 'My dad says I'm not supposed to talk to strangers. He says anybody could be that killer.' He took an additional step away from Bill, moving into the dappled shade of an elm tree that Bill had once driven his bike into twenty-seven years ago. He had taken a spill and bent his handlebars.

'Not me, kid,' he said. 'I've been in England for the last four months. I just got into Derry yesterday.'

'I still don't have to talk to you,' the kid replied.

'That's right,' Bill agreed. 'It's a f-f-free country.'

He paused and then said, 'I used to pal around with Johnny Feury some of the time. He was a good kid. I cried,' the boy finished matter-of-factly, and slurped down the rest of his Freeze –Pop. As an afterthought he ran out his tongue, which was temporarily bright orange, and lapped off his arm.

'Keep away from the sewers and drains,' Bill said quietly. 'Keep away from empty places and deserted places. Stay out of trainyards. But most of all, stay away from the sewers and the drains.'

The shine was back in the kid's eyes, and he said nothing for a very long time. Then: 'Mister? You want to hear something funny?'

'Sure.'

'You know that movie where the shark ate all the people up?'

'Everyone does. J-J– Jaws'

'Well, I got this friend, you know? His name's Tommy Vicananza, and he's not that bright. Toys in the attic, you get what I mean?'

'Yeah.'

'He thinks he saw that shark in the Canal. He was up there by himself in Bassey Park a couple of weeks ago, an d he said he seen this fin. He says it was eight or nine feet tall. Just the fin was that tall, you get me? He goes, "That's what killed Johnny and the other kids. It was Jaws, I know because I saw it." So I go, "That Canal's so polluted nothing could live in it, not even a minnow. And you think you saw Jaws in there. You got toys in the attic, Tommy." Tommy says it reared right out of the water like it did at the end of that movie and tried to bite him and he just got back in time. Pretty funny, huh, mister?'

'Pretty funny,' Bill agreed.

'Toys in the attic, right?'

Bill hesitated. 'Stay away from the Canal too, son. You follow?'

'You mean you believe it?'

Bill hesitated. He meant to shrug. Instead he nodded.

The kid let out his breath in a low, hissing rush. He hung his head as if ashamed. 'Yeah. Sometimes I think I must have toys in the attic.'

'I know what you mean.' Bill walked over to the kid, who glanced up at him solemnly but didn't shy away this time. 'You're killing your knees on that board, son.'

The kid glanced down at his scabby knees and grinned. 'Yeah, I guess so. I bail out sometimes.'

'Can I try it?' Bill asked suddenly.

The kid looked at him, gape-mouthed at first, then laughing. 'That'd be funny,' he said. 'I never saw a grownup on a skateboard.'

'I'll give you a quarter,' Bill said.

'My dad said — '

'Never take money or c-candy from strangers. Good advice. I'll still give you a q-quarter. What do you say? Just to the corner of Juh-Jackson Street.'

'Never mind the quarter,' the kid said. He burst into laughter again — a gay and uncomplicated sound. A fresh sound. 'I don't need your quarter. I got two bucks. I'm practically rich. I got to see this, though. Just don't blame me if you break something.'

'Don't worry,' Bill said. 'I'm insured.'

He turned one of the skateboard's scuffed wheels with his finger, liking the speedy ease with which it turned — it sounded like there was about a million ball-bearings in there. It was a good sound. It called up something very old in Bill's chest. Some desire as warm as want, as lovely as love. He smiled.

'What do you think?' the kid asked.

'I think I'm g-gonna kill myself,' Bill said, and the kid laughed.

Bill put the skateboard on th e sidewalk and put one foot on it. He rolled it back and forth experimentally. The kid watched. In his mind Bill saw himself rolling down Witcham Street toward Jackson on the kid's avocado– green skateboard, the tails of his sport– coat ballooning out behind him, his bald head gleaming in the sun, his knees bent in that fragile way snowbunnies bend their knees their first day on the slopes. It was a posture that told you that in their heads they were already falling down. He bet the kid didn't ride the board like that. He bet the kid rode

(to beat the devil)

like there was no tomorrow.

That good feeling died out of his chest. He saw, all too clearly, the board going out from under his feet, shooting unencumbered down the street, an improbable fluorescent green, a color that only a child could love. He saw himself coming down on his ass, maybe on his back. Slow dissolve to a private room at the Derry Home Hospital, like the one they had visited Eddie in after his arm had been broken. Bill Denbrough in a full body-cast, one leg held up by pullies and wires. A doctor comes in, looks at his chart, looks at him, and then says: 'You were guilty of two major lapses, Mr Denbrough. The first was mismanagement of a skateboard. The second was forgetting that yo u are now approaching forty years of age.'

He bent, picked the skateboard back up, and handed it back to the kid. 'I guess not,' he said.

'Chicken,' the kid said, not unkindly.

Bill hooked his thumbs into his armpits and flapped his elbows. 'Buck-buck-buck,' he said.

The kid laughed. 'Listen, I got to get home.'

'Be careful on that,' Bill said.

'You can't be careful on a skateboard,' the kid replied, looking at Bill as if he might be the one with toys in the attic.

'Right,' Bill said. 'Okay. As we say in the movie biz, I hear you. But stay away from drams and sewers. And stay with your friends.'

The kid nodded. 'I'm right near home.'

So was my brother, Bill thought.

'It'll be over soon, anyway,' Bill told the kid.

'Will it?' the kid asked.

'I think so,' Bill said.

'Okay. See you later . . . chicken!'

The kid put one foot on the board and pushed off with the other. Once he was rolling he put the other foot on the board as well and went thundering down the street at what seemed to Bill a suicidal pace. But he rode as Bill had suspected he would: with lazy hipshot grace. Bill felt love for the boy, and exhilaration, and a desire to be the boy, along with an almost suffocating fear. The boy rode as if there were no such things as death or getting older. The boy seemed somehow eternal and ineluctable in his khaki Boy Scout shorts and scuffed sneakers, his ankles sockless and quite dirty, his hair flying back behind him.

Watch out, kid, you're not going to make the comer! Bill thought, alarmed, but the kid shot his hips to the left like a break-dancer, his toes revolved on the green Fiberglas board, and he zoomed effortlessly around the corner and onto Jackson Street, simply assuming no one would be there to get in his way. Kid, Bill thought, it won't always be that way.

He walked up to his old house but did not stop; he only slowed his walk down to an idler's pace. There were people on the lawn — a mother in a lawn chair, a sleeping baby in her arms, watching two kids, maybe ten and eight, play badminton in grass that was still wet from the rain earlier. The younger of the two, a boy, managed to hit the bird back over the net and the woman called, 'Good one, Scan!'

The house was the same dark-green 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 of the past folding in on itself, folding in on him. He hadn't meant to ask that little girl anything; the question had popped out of his mouth like a cork flying from the neck of a champagne bottle.

He descended Up-Mile Hill toward downtown. The warehouses and packing plants he remembered from childhood — gloomy brick buildings with duty windows from which titanic meaty smells issued — were mostly gone, although the Armour and the Star Beef meat-packing plants were still there. But Hemphill was gone and there was a drive –in bank and a bakery where Eagle Beef and Kosher Meats had been. And there, where the Tracker Brothers' Annex had stood, was a sign painted in oldfashioned letters which read, just as the girl with the doll had said, SECONDHAND ROSE, SECONDHAND CLOTHES . The red brick ha d been painted a yellow which had perhaps been jaunty ten or twelve years ago, but was now dingy — a color Audra called urine –yellow.

Bill walked slowly toward it, feeling that sense of déjà vu settle over nun again. Later he told the others he knew what ghost he was going to see before he actually saw it.

The show-window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes was more than dingy; it was filthy. No Downcast antique shop this, with nifty little spool-beds and Hoosier cabinets and sets of Depression glassware highlighted by hidden spotlights; this was what his mother called with utter disdain 'a Yankee pawnshop.' The items were strewn in rickrack profusion, heaped aimlessly here, there, and everywhere. Dresses slumped off coathangers. Guitars hung from their necks like executed criminals. There was a box of 45 rpm records — 10 c APIECE,

the sign read. TWELVE FOR A BUCK. ANDREWS SISTERS, PERRY COMO, JIMMY ROGERS, OTHERS. There were kids' outfits and dreadful-looking shoes with a card in front of them which read SECONDS, BUT NOT BAD! $1.00 A PAIR. There were two TVs that looked blind. A third was casting bleared images of The Brady Bunch out toward the street. A box of old paperbacks, most with stripped covers (2 FOR A QUARTER, 10 FOR A DOLLAR, more inside , SOME 'HOT') sat atop a large radio with a filthy white plastic case and a tuning dial as big as an alarm clock. Bunches of plastic flowers sat in dirty vases on a chipped, gouged, dusty dining-room table.

All of these things Bill saw as a chaotic background to the thing his eyes had fixed upon immediately. He stood staring at it with wide unbelieving eyes. Gooseflesh ran madly up and down his body. His forehead was hot, his hands cold, and for a moment it seemed that all the doors inside would swing wide and he would remember everything.

Silver was in the righthand window.

His kickstand was still gone and rust had flowered on the front and back fenders, but the oogah-horn was still there on the handlebars, its rubber bulb now glazed with cracks and age. The horn itself, which Bill had always kept neatly polished, was dull and pitted. The flat package carrier where Richie had often ridden double was still on the back fender, but it was bent now, hanging by a single bolt. At some point someone had covered the seat with imitation tiger-skin which was now rubbed and frayed to a point where the stripes were almost indistinguishable.

Silver.

Bill raised an absent hand to wipe away the tears that were running slowly down his cheeks. After he had done a better job with his handkerchief, he went inside.

The atmosphere of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes was musty with age. It was, as the girl had said, a attic smell — but not a good smell, as some attic smells are. This was not the smell of linseed oil rubbed lovingly into the surface of old tables or of ancient plush and velvet. In here was a smell of rotting book-bindings, dirty vinyl cushions that had been half-cooked in the hot suns of summers past, dust, mouse-turds.

From the TV in th e window the Brady Bunch cackled and whooped. Competing with them from somewhere in the back was the radio voice of a disc jockey identifying himself as 'your pal Bobby Russell' promising the new album by Prince to the caller who could give the name of the actor who had played Wally on Leave It to Beaver. Bill knew — it had been a kid named Tony Dow — but he didn't want the new Prince album. The radio was sitting on a high shelf amid a number of nineteenth-century portraits. Below it and them sat the proprietor, a man of perhaps forty who was wearing designer jeans and a fishnet tee-shirt. His hair was slicked back and he was thin to the point of emaciation. His feet were cocked up on his desk, which was piled high with ledgers and dominated by an old scrolled cash register. He was reading a paperback novel which Bill thought had never been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It was called Construction Site Studs. On the floor in front of the desk was a barber pole, its stripe revolving up and up into infinity. Its frayed cord wound across the floor to a baseboard plug like a tired snake. The sign in front of it read: A DYEING BREED ! $250.

When the bell over the door jingled, the man behind the desk marked his place with a matchbook cover and looked up. 'Help you?'

'Yes,' Bill said, and opened his mouth to ask about the bike in the window. But before he could speak, his mind was suddenly filled with a single haunting sentence, words that drove away all other thought:

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

What in the name of God?

(thrusts)

'Looking for anything in particular?' the proprietor asked. His voice was polite enough, but he was looking at Bill closely.

He's looking at me, Bill thought, amused in spite of his distress, as if he's got an idea I'vebeen smoking some of that stuff that gets the jazz musicians high.

'Yes, I was ih-ih-interested ih-in — '

(his fists against the posts)

' — in that puh-puh-post — '

'The barber pole , you mean?' The proprietor's eyes now showed Bill something which, even in his present confused state, he remembered and hated from his childhood: the anxiety of a man or woman who must listen to a stutterer, the urge to jump in quickly and finish the thought, thus shutting the poor bastard up. But I don't stutter! I beat it! I DON'T FUCKINGSTUTTER! I —

(and still insists)

The words were so clear in his mind that it seemed someone else must be speaking in there, that he was like a man possessed by demons in Biblical times — a man invaded by some presence from Outside. And yet he recognized the voice and knew it was his own. He felt sweat pop out warmly on his face.

'I could give you

(he sees the ghosts)

a deal on that post,' the proprietor was saying. 'Tell you the truth, I can't move it at two-fifty. I'd give it to you for one-seventy-five, how's that? It's the only real antique in the place.'

(post)

'POLE,' Bill almost screamed, and the proprietor recoiled a little. 'Not the pole I'm interested in.'

'Are you okay, mister?' the proprietor asked. His solicitous tone belied the expression of hard wariness in his eyes, and Bill saw his left hand leave the desk. He knew, with a flash of something that was really more inductive reasoning than intuition that there was an open drawer below Bill's own sight-line, and that the proprietor had almost surely put his hand on a pistol of some type. He was maybe worried about robbery; more likely he was just worried. He was, after all, cle arly gay, and this was the town where the local juveniles had given Adrian Mellon a terminal bath.

(he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts)

It drove out all thought; it was like being insane. Where had it come from?

(he thrusts)

Repeating and repeating.

With a sudden titanic effort, Bill attacked it. He did this by forcing his mind to translate the alien sentence into French. It was the same way he had beaten the stutter as a teenager. As the words marched across his field of thought, he changed them . . . and suddenly he felt the grip of the stutter loosen.

He realized that the proprietor had been saying something.

'P-P-Pardon me?'

'I said if you're going to have a fit, take it out on the street. I don't need shit like that in here.'

Bill drew in a deep breath.

'Let's start o-over,' he said. 'Pretend I just came i-in.'

'Okay,' the proprietor said, agreeably enough. 'You just came in. Now what?'

'The b-bike in the window,' Bill said. 'How much do you want for the bike?'

'Take twenty bucks.' He sounded easier now, but his left hand still hadn't come back into view. 'I think it was a Schwinn at one time, but it's a mongrel now.' His eye measured Bill. 'Big bike. You could ride it yourself.'

Thinking of the kid's green skateboard, Bill said, 'I think my bike-riding days are o-o-over.'

The proprietor shrugged. His left hand finally came up again. 'Got a boy?'

'Y-Yes.'

'How old is he?'

'Eh-Eh –Eleven.'

'Big bike for an eleven-year-old.'

'Will you take a traveller's check?'

'Long as it's no more than ten bucks over the amount of the purchase.'

'I can give you a twenty,' Bill said. 'Mind if I make a phone call?'

'Not if it's local.'

'It is.'

'Be my guest.'

Bill called the Derry Public Library. Mike was there. 'Where are you, Bill?' he asked, and then immediately: 'Are you all right?'

'I'm fine. Have you seen any of the others?'

'No. We'll see them tonight.' There was a brief pause. That is, I presume. What can I do you for, Big Bill?'

'I'm buying a bike,' Bill said calmly. 'I wondered if I could wheel it up to your house. Do you have a garage or something I could store it in?'

There was silence.

'Mike? Are you — '

'I'm here,' Mike said. 'Is it Silver?'

Bill looked at the proprietor. He was reading his book again . . . or maybe just looking at it and listening carefully.

'Yes,' he said.

'Where are you?'

'It's called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes.'

'All right,' Mike said. 'My place is 61 Palmer Lane. You'd want to go up MainStreet — '

'I can find it.'

'All right, I'll meet you there. Want some supper?'

'That would be nice. Can you get off work?'

'No problem. Carole will cover for me.' Mike hesitated again. 'She said that a fellow was in about an hour before I got back here. Said he left looking like a ghost. I got her to describe him. It was Ben.'

'You sure?'

'Yeah. And the bike. That's part of it, too, isn't it?'

'Shouldn't wonder,' Bill said, keeping an eye on the proprietor, who still appeared to be absorbed in his book.

'I'll see you at my place,' Mike said. 'Number 61. Don't forget.'

'I won't. Thank you, Mike.'

'God bless, Big Bill.'

Bill hung up. The proprietor promptly closed his book again. 'Got you some storage space, my friend?'

'Yeah.' Bill took out his traveller's checks and signed his name to a twenty. The proprietor examined the two signatures with a care that, in less distracted mental circumstances, Bill would have found rather insulting.

At last the proprietor scribbled a bill of sale and popped the traveller's check into his old cash register. He got up, put his hands on the small of his back and stretched, then walked to the front of the store. He picked his way around the heaps of junk and almost-junk merchandise with an absent delicacy Bill found fascinating.

He lifted the bike, swung it around, and rolled it to the edge of the display space. Bill laid hold of the handlebars to help him, and as he did another shudder whipped through him. Silver. Again. It was Silver in his hands and

(he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts)

he had to force the thought away because it made h im feel faint and strange.

'That back tire's a little soft,' the proprietor said (it was, in fact, as flat as a pancake). The front tire was up, but so bald the cord was showing through in places.

'No problem,' Bill said.

'You can handle it from here?'

(I used to be able to handle it just fine; now I don't know)

'I guess so,' Bill said. 'Thanks.'

'Sure. And if you want to talk about that barber pole, come back.'

The proprietor held the door for him. Bill walked the bike out, turned left, and started toward Main Street. People glanced with amusement and curiosity at the man with the bald head pushing the huge bike with the flat rear tire and the oogah-horn protruding over the rusty bike-basket, but Bill hardly noticed them. He was marvelling at how well his grownup hands still fitted the rubber handgrips, was remembering how he had always meant to knot some thin strips of plastic, different colors, into the holes in each grip so they would flutter in the wind. He had never gotten around to that.

He stopped at the corner of Center and Main, outside of Mr Paperback. He leaned the bike against the building long enough to strip off his sportcoat. Pushing a bike with a flat tire was hard work, and the afternoon had come off hot. He tossed the coat into the basket and went on.

Chain's rusty, he thought. Whoever had it didn't take very good care of

(him)

it.

He stopped for a moment, frowning, trying to remember just what had happened to Silver. Had he sold it? Given it away? Lost it, perhaps? He couldn't remember. Instead, that idiotic sentence

(his fists against the posts and still insists)

resurfaced, as strange and out of place as an easy chair on a battlefield, a record-player in a fireplace, a row of pencils protruding from a cement sidewalk.

Bill shook his head. The sentence broke up and dispersed like smoke. He pushed Silver on to Mike's place.

6

Mike Hanlon Makes a Connection

But first he made supper — hamburgers with sauteed mushrooms and onions and a spinach salad. They had finished working on Silver by then and were more than ready to eat.

The house was a neat little Cape Cod, white with green trim. Mike had just been arriving when Bill pushed Silver up Palmer Lane. He was behind the wheel of an old Ford with rusty rocker panels and a cracked rear window, and Bill remembered the fact Mike had so quietly pointed out: the six members of the Losers' Club who left Derry had quit being losers. Mike had stayed behind and was still behind.

Bill rolle d Silver into Mike's garage, which was floored with oiled dirt and was every bit as neat as the house proved to be. Tools hung from pegs, and the lights, shielded with tin cones, looked like the lights which hang over pool tables. Bill leaned the bike against the wall. The two of them looked at it without speaking for a bit, hands in pockets.

'It's Silver, all right,' Mike said at last. 'I thought you might have been wrong. But it's him. What are you going to do with him?'

'Fucked if I know. Have you got a bicycle pump?'

'Yeah. I think I've got a tire-patching kit, too. Are those tubeless tires?'

'They always were.' Bill bent down to look at the flat tire. 'Yeah. Tubeless.'

'Getting ready to ride it again?'

'Of c-course not,' Bill said sharply. 'I just don't like to see it si-hi-hitting there on a flat.'

'Whatever you say, Big Bill. You're the boss.'

Bill looked around sharply at that, but Mike had gone to the garage's back wall and was taking down a tire-pump. He got a tin tir e-patching kit from one of the cabinets and handed it to Bill, who looked at it curiously. It was as he remembered such things from his childhood: a small tin box of about the same size and shape as those kept by men who roll their own cigarettes, except the top was bright and pebbled — you used it for roughing the rubber around the hole before you put on the patch. The box looked brand-new, and there was a Woolco price sticker on it that said $7.23. It seemed to him that when he was a kid such a kit had gone for about a buck-twenty-five.

'You didn't just have this hanging around,' Bill said. It wasn't a question.

'No,' Mike agreed. 'I bought it last week. Out at the mall, as a matter of fact.'

'You've got a bike of your own?'

'No,' Mike said, meeting his eyes.

'You just happened to buy this kit.'

'Just got the urge,' Mike agreed, his eyes still on Bill's. 'Woke up thinking it might come in handy. The thought kept coming back all day. So . . . I got the kit. And here you are to use it.'

'Here I am to use it,' Bill agreed. 'But like they say on the soaps, what does it all mean, dear?'

'Ask the others,' Mike said. 'Tonight.'

'Will they all be there, do you think?'

'I don't know, Big Bill.' He paused and added: 'I think there's a chance that all of them won't be. One or two of them may decide to just creep out of town. Or . . . 'He shrugged.

'What do we do if that happens?'

'I don't know.' Mike pointed to the tire-patching kit. 'I paid seven bucks for that thing. Are you going to do something with it or just look at it?'

Bill took his sportcoat out of the basket and hung it carefully on an unoccupied wallpeg. Then he turned Silver upside down so that he rested on his seat and began to carefully rotate the rear tire. He didn't like the rusty way the axle squeaked, and remembered the almost silent click of the ball-bearings in the kid's skateboard. A little 3-in-1 oil would fix that right up, he thought.

Wouldn't hurt to oil the chain, either. It's rusty as hell . . . And playing cards. It needs playing cards on the spokes. Mike would have cards, I bet. The good ones. Bikes, with the celluloid coating that made them so stiff and so slippery that the first time you tried to shuffle them they always sprayed all over the floor. Playing cards, sure, and clothespins to hold them —

He stopped, suddenly cold.

What in the name of Jesus are you thinking of?

'Something wrong, Bill?' Mike asked softly.

'Nothing.' His fingers touched something small and round and hard. He got his nails under it and pulled. A small tack came out of the tire. 'Here's the cuh-cuh-culprit,' he said, and it rose in his mind again, strange, unbidden, and powerful: He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts. But this time the voice, his voice, was followed by his mother's voice, saying: Try again, Billy. You almost had it that time. And Andy Devine as Guy Madison's sidekick Jingles yelling, Hey, Wild Bill, wait for me!

He shivered.

(the posts)

He shook his head. I couldn't say that without stuttering even now, he thought, and for just a moment he felt that he was on the edge of understanding it all.

Then it was gone.

He opened the tire-patching kit and went to work. It took a long time to get it just right. Mike leaned against the wall in a bar of late-afternoon sun, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and his tie yanked down, whistling a tune which Bill finally identified as 'She Blinded Me with Science.'

While he waited for the tire cement to set, Bill had — just for something to do, he told himself — oiled Silver's chain, sprocket, and axles. It didn't make the bike look any better, but when he spun the tires he found that the squeak was gone, and that was satisfying. Silver never would have won any beauty-contests anyway. His one virtue was that he could go like a blue streak.

By that tune, five –thirty in the afternoon, he had nearly forgotten Mike was there; he had become completely absorbed in small yet utterly satisfying acts of maintenance. He screwed the nozzle of the pump onto the rear tire's valve and watched the tire fatten, shooting for the right pressure by guess and by gosh. He was pleased to see that the patch was holding nicely.

When he thought he had it right, he unscrewed the pump-nozzle and was about to turn Silver over when he heard the rapid snap-flutter of playing cards behind him. He whirled, almost knocking Silver over.

Mike was standing there with a deck of blue-backed Bicycle playing cards in one hand . 'Want these?'

Bill let out a long, shaky sigh. 'You've got clothespins, too, I suppose?'

Mike took four from the flap pocket of his shirt and held them out.

'Just happened to have them around, I suh-huppose?'

'Yeah, something like that,' Mike said.

Bill took the cards and tried to shuffle them. His hands shook and the cards sprayed out of his hands. They went everywhere . , . but only two landed face-up. Bill looked at them, then up at Mike. Mike's gaze was frozen on the littered playing cards. His lips had pulled back from his teeth.

The two up cards were both the ace of spades.

'That's impossible,' Mike said. 'I just opened that deck. Look.' He pointed at the swill-can just inside the garage door and Bill saw the cellophane wrapper, 'How can one deck of cards have two aces of spades?'

Bill bent down and picked them up. 'How can you spray a deck of cards all over the floor and have only two of them land face up?' he asked. 'That's an even better que — '

He turned the aces over, looked, and then showed them to Mike. One of them was a blueback, the other a redback.

'Holy Christ, Mikey, what have you got us into?'

'What are you going to do with those?' Mike asked in a numb voice.

'Why, put them on,' Bill said, and suddenly he began to laugh. 'That's what I'm supposed to do, isn't it? If there are certain preconditions for the use of magic, those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves. Right?'

Mike didn't reply. He watched as Bill went to Silver's rear wheel and attached the playing cards. His hands were still shaking and it took awhile, but he finally got it done, drew in one tight breath, held it, and spun the rear wheel. The playing cards machine-gunned loudly against the spokes in the garage's silence.

'Come on,' Mike said softly. 'Come on in, Big Bill. I'll make us some chow.'

They had scoffed the burgers and now sat smoking, watching dark begin to unfold from dusk in Mike's back yard. Bill took out his wallet, found someone's business card, and wrote upon it the sentence that had plagued him ever since he had seen Silver in the window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. He showed it to Mike, who read it carefully, lips pursed.

'Does it mean anything to you?' Bill asked.

'"He thr usts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts."' He nodded. 'Yes, I know what that is.'

'Well then, tell me. Or are you going to give me some more cuh-cuh-crap about figuring it out for myself?'

'No,' Mike said, 'in this case I think it's okay to tell you. The phrase goes back to English times. It's a tongue-twister that became a speech exercise for lispers and stutterers. Your mother kept trying to get you to say it that summer. The summer of 1958. You used to go around mumb ling it to yourself.'

'I did?' Bill said, and then, slowly, answering his own question: 'I did.'

'You must have wanted to please her very much.'

Bill, who suddenly felt he might cry, only nodded. He didn't trust himself to speak.

'You never made it,' Mike told him. 'I remember that. You tried like hell but your tang kept getting all tungled up.'

'But I did say it,' Bill replied. 'At least once.'

'When?'

Bill brought his fist down on the picnic table hard enough to hurt. 'I don't remember!' he shouted. And then, dully, he said it again: 'I just don't remember.'

CHAPTER 1 2 Three Uninvited Guests

1

On the day after Mike Hanlon made his calls, Henry Bowers began to hear voices. Voices had been talking to him all day long. For awhile, Henry thought they were coming from the moon. In the late afternoon, looking up from where he was hoeing in the garden, he could see the moon in the blue daytime sky, pale and small. A ghost-moon.

That, in fact, was why he believed it was the moon that was talking to him. Only a ghost-moon would talk in ghost-voices — the voices of his old friends, and the voices of those little kids who had played down in the Barrens so long ago. Those, and another voice . . . one he did not dare name.

Victor Criss spoke from the moon first. They comin back, Henry. All of em, man. They comin back to Derry.

Then Belch Huggins spoke from the moon, perhaps from the dark side of the moon. You'rethe only one, Henry. The only one of us left. You'll have to get em for me and Vie. Ain't no little kids can rank us out like that. Why, I hit a ball one time down to Tracker's, and Tony Tracker said that ball would have been out of Yankee Stadium.

He hoed, looking up at the ghost-moon in the sky, and after awhile Fogarty came over and hit him in the back of the neck and knocked him flat on his face.

'You're hoein up the peas right along with the weeds, you ijit.'

Henry got up, brushing dirt off his face and out of his hair. There stood Fogarty, a big man in a white jacket and white pants, his belly swelled out in front of him. It was illegal for the guards (who were called 'counsellors' here at Juniper Hill) to carry billyclubs, so a number of them — Fogarty, Adler, and Koontz were the worst — carried rolls of quarters in their pockets. They almost always hit you with them in the same place, right in the back of the neck. There was no rule against quarters. Quarters were not considered a deadly weapon at Juniper Hill, an institution for the mentally ins ane which stood on the outskirts of Augusta near the Sidney town line.

'I'm sorry, Mr Fogarty,' Henry said, and offered a big grin which showed an irregular line of yellow teeth. They looked like the pickets in a fence outside a haunted house. Henry had begun to lose his teeth when he was fourteen or so.

'Yeah, you're sorry,' Fogarty said. 'You'll be a lot sorrier if I catch you doing it again, Henry.'

'Yes sir, Mr Fogarty.'

Fogarty walked away, his black shoes leaving big brown tracks in the dirt of West Garden. Because Fogarty's back was turned, Henry took a moment to look around surreptitiously. They had been shooed out to hoe as soon as the clouds cleared, everyone from the Blue Ward — which was where they put you if you had once been very dangerous but were now considered only moderately dangerous. Actually, all the patients at Juniper Hill were considered moderately dangerous; it was a facility for the criminally insane. Henry Bowers was here because he had been convicted of killing his father in the late fall of 1958 — it had been a famous year for murder trials, all right; when it came to murder trials, 1958 had been a pip.

Only of course it wasn't just his father they thought he had killed; if it had only been his father, Henry would not have spent twenty years in the Augusta State Mental Hospital, much of that time under physical and chemical restraint. No, not just his father; the authorities thought he had killed all of them, or at least most of them.

Following the verdict the News had published a front-page editorial titled 'The End of Derry's Long Night.' In it they had recapped the salient points: the belt in Henry's bureau that belonged to the missing Patrick Hockstetter; the jumble of schoolbooks, some signed out to the missing Belch Huggins and some to the missing Victor Criss, both known chums of the Bowers boy, in Henry's closet; most damning of all, the panties found tucked into a slit in Henry's mattress, panties which had been identified by laundry-mark as having belonged to Veronica Grogan, deceased.

Henry Bowers, the News declared, had been the monster haunting Derry in the spring and summer of 1958.

But then the News had proclaimed the end of Derry's long night on the front page of its December 6th edition, and even an ijit like Henry knew that in Derry night never ended.

They had bullied him with questions, had stood around him in a circle, had pointed fingers at him. Twice the Chief of Police had slapped him across the face and once a detective named Lottman had punched him in the gut, telling him to fess up, and be quick.

'There's people outside and they ain't happy, Henry,' this Lottman had said. 'There ain't been a lynching in Derry for a long tune, but that don't mean there couldn't be one.'

He supposed they would have kept it up as long as necessary, not because any of them really believed the good Derryfolk were going to break into the Police station, carry Henry out, and hang him from a sour-apple tree, but because they were desperate to close the books on that summer's blood and horror; they would have, but Henry didn't make them. They wanted him to confess to everything, he understood after awhile. Henry didn't mind. After the horror in the sewers, after what had happened to Belch and Victor, he didn't seem to mind about anything. Yes, he said, he had killed his father This was true. Yes, he had killed Victor Criss and Belch Huggins. This was also true, at least in the sense that he had led them into the tunnels where they had been murdered. Yes, he had killed Patrick. Yes, Veronica. Yes one, yes all. Not true, but it didn't matter. Blame needed to be taken. Perhaps that was why he had been spared. And if he refused . . .

He understood about Patrick's belt. He had won it from Patrick playing seal one day in April, discovered it didn't fit, and tossed it in his bureau. He understood about the books, too — hell, the three of them chummed around together and they cared no more for their summer textbooks than they had for their regular ones, which is to say, they cared for them about as much as a woodchuck cares for tap-dancing. There were probably as many of his books in their closets, and the cops probably knew it, too.

The panties . . . no, he didn't know how Veronica Grogan's panties had come to be in his mattress.

But he thought he knew who — or what — had taken care of it.

Best not to talk about such things.

Best to just dummy up.

So they sent him to Augusta and finally, in 1979, they had transferred him to Juniper Hill, and he had only run into trouble once here and that was because at first no one understood. A guy had tried to turn off Henry's nightlight. The nightlight was Donald Duck doffing his little sailor hat. Donald was protection after the sun went down. With no light, things could come in. The locks on the door and the wire mesh did not stop them. They came like mist. Things. They talked and laughed . . . and sometimes they clutched. Hairy things, smooth things, things with eyes. The sort of things that had really killed Vie and Belch when the three of them had chased the kids into the tunnels under Derry in August of 1958.

Looking around now, he saw the others from the Blue Ward. There was George DeVille, who had murdered his wife and four children one winter night in 1962. George's head was studiously bent, his white hair blowing in the breeze, snot running gaily out of his nose, his huge wooden crucifix bobbing and dancing as he hoed. There was Jimmy Donlin, and all they said in the papers about Jimmy was that he had killed his mother in Portland during the summer of 1965, but what they hadn't said in the papers was that Jimmy had tried a novel experiment in body-disposal: by the time the cops came Jimmy had eaten more than half of her, including her brains. 'They made me twice as smart,' Jimmy had confided to Henry one night after lights-out.

In the row beyond Jimmy, hoeing fanatically and singing the same line over and over, as always, was the little Frenchman Benny Beaulieu. Benny had been a firebug — a pyromaniac. Now as he hoed he sang this line from the Doors over and over: 'Try to set the night on fire, try to set the night on fire, try to set the night on fire, try to — '

It got on your nerves after awhile.

Beyond Benny was Franklin D'Cruz, who had raped over fifty women before being caught with his pants down in Bangor's Terrace Park. The ages of his victims ranged from three to eighty-one. Not very particular was Frank D'Cruz. Beyond him but way back was Arlen Weston, who spent as much time looking dreamily at his hoe as he did using it. Fogarty, Adler, and John Koontz had all tried the roll-of-quarters-in-the –fist trick on Weston to try and convince him he could move a bit faster, and one day Koontz had hit him maybe a little too hard because blood came not only from Arlen Weston's nose but also from Arlen's ears and that night he had a convulsion. Not a big one; just a little one. But since then Arlen had drifted further and further into his own interior blackness and now he was a hopeless case, almost totally unplugged from the world. Beyond Arlen was —

'You want to pick it up or I'll give you some more help, Henry!' Fogarty bawled over, and Henry began to hoe again. He didn't want any convulsions. He didn't want to end up like Arlen Weston.

Soon the voices started in again. But this tune they were the voices of the others, the voices of the kids that had gotten him into this in the first place, whispering down from the ghost-moon.

You couldn't even catch a fatboy, Bowers, one of them whispered. Now I'm rich and you'rehoeing peas. Ha-ha on you, asshole!

B-B-Bowers, you c-c-couldn't c-catch a c-c-cold! Read a-any g-g-good b-b-books since you've been in th-there? I ruh-ruh-wrote lots! I'm ruh-ruh-rich andy-you're in Juh-Juh-hooniper Hill! Ha-ha on you, you stupid asshole!

'Shut up,' Henry whispered to the ghost-voices, hoeing faster, beginning to hoe up the new pea– plants along with the weeds. Sweat rolled down his cheeks like tears. 'We could've taken you. We could've.'

We got you locked up, you asshole, another voice laughed. You chased me and couldn't catch me and I got rich, too! Way to go, banana-heels!

'Shut up,' Henry muttered, hoeing faster. 'Just shut up!'

Did you want to get in my panties, Henry? another voice teased. Too bad! I let all of them do me, I was nothing but a slut, but now I'm rich too and we're all together again, and we're doing it again but you couldn't do it now even if I let you because you couldn't get it up, so ha-ha on you, Henry, ha-ha all OVER you —

He hoed madly, weeds and dirt and pea-plants flying; the ghost-voices from the ghost-moon were very loud now, echoing and flying in his head, and Fogarty was running toward him, bellowing, but Henry could not hear. Because of the voices.

Couldn't even get hold of a nigger like me, could you? another jeering ghost-voice chimed in. We killed you guys in that rockfight! We fucking killed you!! Ha-ha, asshole! Ha-ha all over you!

Then they were all babbling together, laughin g at him, calling him banana –heels, asking him how he'd liked the shock-treatments they'd given him when he came up here to the Red Ward, asking him if he liked it here at Juh-Juh –hooniper Hill, asking and laughing, laughing and asking, and Henry dropped hi s hoe and began to scream up at the ghost-moon in the blue sky and at first he was screaming in fury, and then the moon itself changed and became the face of the clown, its face a rotted pocked cheesy white, its eyes black holes, its red bloody grin turned up in a smile so obscenely ingenuous that it was insupportable, and so then Henry began to scream not in fury but in mortal terror and the voice of the clown spoke from the ghost-moon now and what it said was You have to go back, Henry. You have to go back and finish the job. You have to go back to Derry and kill them all. For Me. For —

Then Fogarty, who had been standing nearby and yelling at Henry for almost two minutes (while the other inmates stood in their rows, hoes grasped in their hands like comic phalluses, their expressions not exactly interested but almost, yes, almost thoughtful, as if they understood that this was all a part of the mystery that had put them here, that Henry Bowers's sudden attack of the screaming meemies in West Garden was interesting in some more than technical way), got tired of shouting and gave Henry a real blast with his quarters, and Henry went down like a ton of bricks, the voice of the clown following him down into that terrible whirlpool of darkness, chanting over and over again: Kill them all, Henry, kill them all, killthem all, kill them all.

2

Henry Bowers lay awake.

The moon was down and he felt a sharp sense of gratitude for that. The moon was less ghostly at night, more real, and if he should see that dreadful clown– face in the sky, riding over the hills and fields and woods, he believed he would die of terror.

He lay on his side, staring at his nightlight intently. Donald Duck had burned out; he had been replaced by Mickey and Minnie Mouse dancing a polka; they had been replaced with the green-glowing face of Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, and late last year Oscar had been replaced by the face of Fozzie Bear. Henry had measured out the years of his incarceration with burned-out nightlights instead of coffee-spoons.

At exactly 2:04 A.M. on the morning of May 30th, his nightlight went out. A little moan escaped him — no more. Koontz was on the door of the Blue Ward tonight — Koontz who was the worst of the lot. Worse even than Fogarty, who ha d hit him so hard in the afternoon that Henry could barely turn his head.

Sleeping around him were the other Blue Ward inmates. Benny Beaulieu slept in elastic restraints. He had been allowed to watch an Emergency rerun on the wardroom TV when they came in from hoeing and around six o'clock had begun jerking off constantly and without let­up, screaming Try to set the night on fire! Try to set the night on fire! Try to set the night on fire! ' He had been sedated, and that was good for about four hours, and then he had started in again around eleven when the Elavil wore off, whipping his old dingus so hard it had started to bleed through his fingers, shrieking 'Try to set the night on fire!' So they sedated him again and put him in restraints. Now he slept, his pinched little face as grave in the dim light as Aristotle's.

From around his bed Henry could hear low snores and loud ones, grunts, an occasional bedfart. He could hear Jimmy Donlin's breathing; it was unmistakable even though Jimmy

slept five beds over. Rapid and faintly whistling, for some reason it always made Henry think of a sewing machine. From beyond the door giving on the hall he could hear the faint sound of Koontz's TV. He knew that Koontz would be watching the late movies on Channel 38, drinking Texas Driver and eating his lunch. Koontz favored sandwiches made out of chunky peanut-butter and Bermuda onions. When Henry heard this he had shuddered and thought: And they say all the crazy people are locked up.

This tune the voice didn't come from the moon.

This time it came from under the bed.

Henry recognized the voice at once. It was Victor Criss, whose head had been torn off somewhere beneath Derry twenty-seven years ago. It had been torn off by the Frankenstein-monster. Henry had seen it happen, and afterward he had seen the monster's eyes shift and had felt its watery yellow gaze on him. Yes, the Frankenstein-monster had killed Victor and then it had killed Belch, but here was Vie again, like the almost ghostly rerun of a black-and –white program from the Nifty Fifties, when the President was bald and the Buicks had portholes.

And now that it had happened, now that the voice had come, Henry found that he was calm and unafraid. Relieved, even.

'Henry,' Victor said.

'Vie!' Henry cried. 'What you doing under there?'

Benny Beaulieu snorted and muttered in his sleep. Jimmy's neat nasal sewing-machine inhales and exhales paused for a moment. In the hall, the volume on Koontz's small Sony was turned down and Henry Bowers could sense him, head cocked to one side, one hand on the TV's volume knob, the fingers of the other hand touching the cylinder which bulged in the righthand pocket of his whites — the roll of quarters.

'You don't have to talk out loud, Henry,' Vie said. 'I can hear you if you just think. And they can't hear me at all.'

What do you want, Vie? Henry asked.

There was no reply for a long time. Henry thought that maybe Vie had gone away. Outside the door the volume of Koontz's TV went up again. Then there was a scratching noise from under the bed; the springs squealed slightly as a dark shadow pulled itself out from under. Vie looked up at him and grinned. Henry grinned back uneasily. Ole Vie was looking a little bit like the Frankenstein-monster himself these days. A scar like a hangrope tattoo circled his neck. Henry thought maybe that was where his head had been sewed back on. His eyes were a weird gray-green color, and the corneas seemed to float on a watery viscous substance.

Vie was still twelve.

'I want the same thing you want,' Vie said. 'I want to pay em back.'

Pay em back, Henry Bowers said dreamily.

'But you'll have to get out of here to do it,' Vie said. 'You'll have to go back to Derry. I need you, Henry. We all need you.'

They can't hurt You, Henry said, understanding he was talking to more than Vie.

They can't hurt Me if they only half-believe,' Vie said. 'But there have been some distressing signs, Henry. We didn't think they could beat us back then, either. Bu t the fatboy got away from you in the Barrens. The fatboy and the smartmouth and the quiff got away from us that day after the movies. And the rockfight, when they saved the nigger — '

Don't talk about that! Henry shouted at Vie, and for a moment all of the peremptory hardness that had made him their leader was in his voice. Then he cringed, thinking Vie would hurt him — surely Vie could do whatever he wanted, since he was a ghost — but Vie only grinned.

'I can take care of them if they only half-believe,' he said, 'but you're alive, Henry. You can get them no matter if they believe, half-believe, or don't believe at all. You can get them one by one or all at once. You can pay em back.'

Pay em back, Henry repeated. Then he looked at Vie doubtfully again. But I can't get out of here, Vie. There's wire on the windows and Koontz is on the door tonight. Koontz is the worst. Maybe tomorrow night . . .

'Don't worry about Koontz,' Vie said, standing up. Henry saw he was still wearing the jeans he ha d been wearing that day, and that they were still splattered with drying sewer-muck. 'I'll take care of Koontz.' Vie held out his hand.

After a moment Henry took it. He and Vie walked toward the Blue Ward door and the sound of the TV. They were almost there when Jimmy Donlin, who had eaten his mother's brains, woke up. His eyes widened as he saw Henry's late-night visitor. It was his mother. Her slip was showing just a quarter-inch or so, as it always had. The top of her head was gone. Her eyes, horribly red, rolled toward him, and when she grinned, Jimmy saw the lipstick smears on her yellow, horsy teeth as he always had. Jimmy began to shriek. 'No, Ma! No, Ma! No Ma!'

The TV went off at once, and even before the others could begin to stir, Koontz was jerking the door open and saying, 'Okay, asshole, get ready to catch your head on the rebound. I've had it.'

'No, Ma! No, Ma! Please, Ma! No, Ma — '

Koontz came rushing in. First he saw Bowers, standing tall and paunchy and nearly ridiculous in his johnny, his loose flesh doughy in the light spilling in from the corridor. Then he looked left and screamed out two lungfuls of silent spun glass. Standing by Bowers was a thing in a clown suit. It stood perhaps eight feet tall. Its suit was silvery. Orange pompoms ran down the front. There were oversized funny shoes on its feet. But its head was not that of a man or a clown; it was the head of a Doberman pinscher, the only animal on God's green earth of which John Koontz was frightened. Its eyes were red. Its silky muzzle wrinkled back to show huge white teeth.

A cylinder of quarters fell from Koontz's nerveless fingers and rolled across the floor and into the corner. Late the following day Benny Beaulieu, who slept through the whole thing, would find them and hide them in his footlocker. The quarters bought him cigarettes — tailor-mades — for a month.

Koontz hitched in breath to scream again as the clown lurched toward him.

'It's time for the circus!' the clown screamed in a growling voice, and its white –gloved hands fell on Koontz's shoulders.

Except that the hands inside those gloves felt like paws.

3

For the third time that day — that long, long day — Kay McCall went to the telephone.

She got further this time than she had on ht e first two occasions; this time she waited until the phone had been picked up on the other end and a hearty Irish cop's voice said 'Sixth Street Station, Sergeant O'Bannon, how may I help you?' before hanging up.

Oh, you're doing fine. Jesus, yes. By the eighth or ninth time you'll have mustered up guts enough to give him your name.

She went into the kitchen and fixed herself a weak Scotch-and –soda, although she knew it probably wasn't a good idea on top of the Darvon. She recalled a snatch of folk-song from the college coffee-houses of her youth — Got a headful of whiskey and a bellyful of gin / Doctor

say it kill me but he don't say when — and laughed jaggedly. There was a mirror running along the top of the bar. She saw her reflection in it and stopped laughing abruptly.

Who is that woman?

One eye swollen nearly shut.

Who is that battered woman?

Nose the color of a drunken knight's after thirty or so years of tilting at ginmills, and puffed to a grotesque size.

Who is that battered woman who looks like the ones who drag themselves to a women's shelter after they finally get frightened enough or brave enough or just plain mad enough to leave the man who is hurting them, who has systematically hurt them week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out?

Laddered scratch up one cheek.

Who is she, Kay-Bird?

One arm in a sling.

Who? Is it you? Can it be you?

'Here she is . . . Miss America,' she sang, wanting her voice to come out tough and cynical. It started out that way but warbled on the seventh syllable and cracked on the eighth. It was not a tough voice. It was a scared voice. She knew it; she had been scared before and had always gotten over it. She thought she would be a long time getting over this.

The doctor who had treated her in one of the little cubicles just off Emergency Admitting at Sisters of Mercy half a mile down the road had been young and not bad-looking. Under different circumstances she might have idly (or not so idly) considered trying to get him home and take him on a sexual tour of the world. But she hadn't felt in the least bit horny. Pain wasn't conducive to horniness. Neither was fear.

His name was Geffin, and she didn't care for the fixed way he was looking at her. He took a small white paper cup to the room's sink, half– filled it with water, produced a pack of cigarettes from the drawer of his desk, and offered them to her.

She took one and he lit it for her. He had to chase the tip for a second or two with th e match because her hand was shaking. He tossed the match in a paper cup. Fssss.

'A wonderful habit,' he said. 'Right?'

'Oral fixation,' Kay replied.

He nodded and then there was silence. He kept looking at her. She got the feeling he was expecting her to cry, and it made her mad because she felt she might just do that. She hated to be emotionally preguessed, and most of all by a man.

'Boyfriend?' he asked at last.

'I'd rather not talk about it.'

'Uh-huh.' He smoked and looked at her.

'Didn't your mother ever tell you it was impolite to stare?'

She wanted it to come out hard-edged, but it sounded like a plea: Stop looking at me, I know how I look, I saw. This thought was followed by another, one she suspected her friend Beverly must have had more than once, that the worst of the beating took place inside, where you were apt to suffer something that might be called interspiritual bleeding. She knew what she looked like, yes. Worse still, she knew what she felt like. She felt yellow. It was a dismal feeling.

'I'll say this just once,' Geffin said. His voice was low and pleasant. 'When I work E.R. — my turn in the barrel, you might say — I see maybe two dozen battered women a week. The interns treat two dozen more. So look — there's a telephone right here on the desk. It's my dime. You call Sixth Street, give them your name and address, tell them what happened and who did it. Then you hang up and I'll take the bottle of bourbon I keep over there in the file cabinet — strictly for medicinal purposes, you understand — and we'll have a drink on it.

Because I happen to think, this is just my personal opinion, that the only lower form of life than a man who would beat up a woman is a rat with syphilis.'

Kay smiled wanly. 'I appreciate the offer,' she said, 'but I'll pass. For the time being.'

'Uh-huh,' he said. 'But when you go home take a good look at yourself in the mirror, Ms. McCall. Whoever it was, he jobbed you good.'

She did cry then. She couldn't help it.

Tom Rogan had called around noon of the day after she had seen Beverly safely off, wanting to know if Kay had been in touch with his wife. He sounded calm, reasonable, not the least upset. Kay told him she hadn't seen Beverly in almost two weeks. Tom thanked he r and hung up.

Around one the doorbell rang while she was writing in her study. She went to the door.

'Who is it?'

'Cragin's Flowers, ma'am,' a high voice said, and how stupid she had been not to realize it had been Tom doing a bad falsetto, ho w stupid she had been to believe that Tom had given up so easily, how stupid she had been to take the chain off before opening the door.

In he had come, and she had gotten just this far: 'You get out of h — ' before Tom's fist came flying out of nowhere, slamming into her right eye, closing it and sending a bolt of incredible agony through her head. She had gone reeling backward down the hallway, clutching at things to try and stay upright: a delicate one-rose vase that had gone smashing to the tiles, a coat-tree that had tumbled over. She fell over her own feet as Tom closed the front door behind him and walked toward her.

'Get out of here!' she had screamed at him.

'As soon as you tell me where she is,' Tom said, walking down the hall toward her. She was dimly aware that Tom didn't look very good — well, actually, terrible might have been a better word — and she felt a dim but ferocious gladness skyrocket through her. Whatever Tom had done to Bev, it looked as if Bev had given it back in spades. It had been enough to keep him off his feet for one whole day, anyhow — and he still didn't look as if he belonged anywhere but in a hospital.

But he also looked very mean, and very angry.

Kay scrambled to her feet and backed away, keeping her eyes on him as you might keep your eyes on a wild animal that had escaped its cage.

'I told you I haven't seen her and that was the truth,' she said. 'Now get out of here before I call the police.'

'You've seen her,' Tom said. His swollen lips were trying to grin. She saw that his teeth had a strange jagged look. Some of the front ones had been broken. 'I call up, tell you I don't know where Bev is. You say you haven't seen her in two weeks. Never a single question. Never a discouraging word, even though I know damn well that you hate my guts. So where is she, you numb cunt? Tell me.'

Kay turned then and ran for the end of the hall, wanting to get into the parlor, rake the sliding mahogany doors close'd on their recessed tracks, and turn the thumb-bolt. She got there ahead of him — he was limping — but before she could slam the doors shut he had inserted his body between. He gave one convulsive lunge and pushed through. She turned to run again; he caught her by her dress and yanked her so hard he tore the entire back of it straight down to her waist. Your wife made that dress, you shit, she thought incoherently, and then she was twisted around.

Where is she?'

Kay brought her hand up in a walloping slap that rocked his head back and started the cut on the left side of his face bleeding again. He grabbed her hair and pulled her head forward into his fist. It felt to her for a moment as if her nose had exploded. She screamed, inhaled to scream again, and began to cough on her own blood. She was ni utter terror now. She had not

known there could be so much terror in all the wide world. The crazy son of a bitch was going to kill her.

She screamed, she screamed, and then his fist looped into her belly, driving the air out of her and she could only gasp. She began to cough and gasp at the same time and for one terrifying moment she thought she was going to choke.

'Where is she?'

Kay shook her head. 'Haven't . . . seen her,' she gasped. 'Police . . . you'll go to jail . . . asshole . . . '

He jerked her to her feet and she felt something give in her shoulder. More pain, so strong it was sickening. He whirled her around, still holding onto her arm, and now he twisted her arm up behind her and she bit down on her lower lip, promising herself that she would not scream again.

'Where is she?'

Kay shook her head.

He jerked her arm up again, jerked it so hard that she heard him grunt. His warm breath puffed against her ear. She felt her closed right fist strike her own left shoulderblade and she screamed again as that thing in her shoulder gave some more.

'Where is she?'

' . . . know . . . '

'What?'

'I don't KNOW!'

He let go of her and gave her a push. She collapsed to the floor, sobbing, snot and blood running out of her nose. There was an almost musical crash, and when she looked around, Tom was bending over her. He had broken the top off another vase, this one of Waterford crystal. He held the base. The jagged neck was only inches from her face. She stared at it, hypnotized.

'Let me tell you something,' he said, the words coming out in little pants and blows of warm air, 'you're going to tell me where she went or you're going to be picking your face up off the floor. You've got three seconds, maybe less. When I' m mad it seems like time goes a lot faster.'

My face, she thought, and that was what finally caused her to give in . . . or cave in, if you liked that better: the thought of this monster using the jagged neck of the Waterford vase to cut her face apart.

'She went home,' Kay sobbed. 'Her home town. Derry. It's a place called Derry, in Maine.'

'How did she go?'

'She took a b-b-bus to Milwaukee. She was going to fly from there.'

'That shitty little cooze! ' Tom cried, straightening up. He walked around in a large, aimless semicircle, running his hands through his hair so that it stood up in crazy spikes and whorls. 'That cunt, that cooze, that nickelplated crotch! ' He picked up a delicate wood sculpture of a man and woman making love — she'd had it since she was twenty-two — and threw in into the fireplace, where it shattered to splinters. He came face to face with himself for a moment in the mirror over the fireplace and stood wide-eyed, as if looking at a ghost. Then he whirled on her again. He had taken something from the pocket of the sportcoat he was wearing, and she saw with a stupid kind of wonder that it was a paperback novel. The cover was almost completely black, except for the red-foil letters which spelled out the title and a pictu re of several young people standing on a high bluff over a river. The Black Rapids.

'Who's this fuck?'

'Huh? What?'

'Denbrough. Denbrough.' He shook the book impatiently in front of her face, then suddenly slapped her with it. Her cheek flared with pain and then dull red heat, like stove –coals. 'Who is he?'

She began to understand.

'They were friends. When they were children. They both grew up in Derry.'

He whacked her with the book again, this time from the other side.

'Please,' she sobbed. 'Please, Tom.'

He pulled an Early American chair with spindly, graceful legs over to her, turned it around, and sat down on it. His jackolantern face looked down at her over the chairback.

'Listen to me,' he said. 'You listen to your ol d uncle Tommy. Can you do that, you bra-burning bitch?'

She nodded. She could taste blood, hot and coppery, in her throat. Her shoulder was on fire. She prayed it was only dislocated and not broken. But that was not the worst. My face,he was going to cut up my face —

'If you call the police and tell them I was here, I'll deny it. You can't prove a fucking thing. It's the maid's day off and we're all by our twosome. Of course, they might arrest me anyway, anything's possible, right?'

She found herself nodding again, as if her head was on a string.

'Sure it is. And what I'd do is post bail and come right back here. They'd find your tits on the kitchen table and your eyes in the fishbowl. Do you understand me? Are you getting your old uncle Tommy?'

Kay burst into tears again. That string attached to her head was still working; it bobbed up and down.

'Why?'

'What? I . . . I don't.

'Wake up, for God's sake! Why did she go back?'

'I don't know!' Kay nearly screamed.

He wiggled the broken vase at her.

'I don't know,' she said in a lower voice. 'Please. She didn't tell me Please don't hurt me.'

He tossed the vase in the wastebasket and stood up.

He left without looking back, head down, a big shambling bear of a man

She rushed after him and locked the door. She rushed into the kitchen and locked that door. After a moment's pause she had limped upstairs (as fast as her aching belly would allow) and had locked the french doors which gave on the upstairs verandah — it was not beyond possibility that he might decide to shinny up one of the pillars and come in again that way. He was hurt, but he was also insane.

She went for the telephone for the first time and had no more than dropped her hand on it before remembering what he had said.

What I'd do is post bail and come right back here . . . your tits on the kitchen table and your eyes in the fishbowl.

She jerked her hand off the phone.

She went into the bathroom then and looked at her dripping tomato nose, her black eye. She didn't weep; the shame and horror she felt were too deep for tears. Oh Bev, I did the best I could, dear, she thought. But my face . . . he said he would cut up my face . . .

There was Darvon and Valium in the medicine cabinet. She debated between them and finally swallowed one of each. Then she went to Sisters of Mercy for treatment and met the famous Dr Geffin, who right now was the only man she could think of whom she would not be perfectly happy to see wiped off the face of the earth.

And from there home again, home again, jiggety-jog.

She went to her bedroom window and looked out. The sun was low on the horizon now. On the East Coast it would be late twilight — just going on seven o'clock in Maine.

You can decide what to do about the cops later. The important thing now is to warn Beverly.

It would be a hell of a lot easier, Kay thought, if you had told me where you were staying, Beverly my love. I suppose you didn't know yourself.

Although she had quit smoking two years before, she kept a pack of Pall Malls in the drawer of her desk for emergencies. She shot one out of the pack, lit up, grimaced. She had last smoked from this pack around December of 1982, and this baby was staler than the ERA in the Illinois state Senate. She smoked it anyway, one eye half-lidded against the smoke, the other just half-lidded, period. Thanks to Tom Rogan.

Using her left hand laboriously — the son of a bitch had dislocated her good arm — s h e dialed Maine information and asked for the name and number of every hotel and motel in Derry.

'Ma'am, that's going to take awhile,' the directory-assistance operator said dubiously. 'It's going to take even longer than that, sister,' Kay said. 'I'm going to have to write with my stupid hand. My good one's on vacation.'

'It's not customary for — '

'Listen to me,' Kay said, not unkindly. 'I'm calling you from Chicago, and I'm trying to reach a woman-friend of mine who has just left her husband and gone back to Derry, where she grew up. Her husband knows where she went. He got the information out of me by beating the living shit out of me. This man is a psycho. She needs to know he's coming.'

There was a long pause, and then the directory-assistance operator said in a decidedly more human voice, 'I think the number you really need is the Derry Police Department.'

'Fine. I'll take that, too. But she has to be warned,' Kay said. 'And . . . ' She thought of Tom's cut cheeks, the knot on his forehead, the one on his temple , his limp, his hideously swelled lips. 'And if she knows he's coming, that may be enough.'

There was another long pause.

'You there, sis?' Kay asked.

'Arlington Motor Lodge,' the operator said, '643-8146. Bassey Park Inn, 648-4083. The Bunyan Motor Court — '

'Slow down a little, okay?' she asked, writing furiously. She looked for an ashtray, didn't see one, and mashed the Pall Mall out on the desk blotter. 'Okay, go on.'

The Clarendon Inn — '

4

She got half-lucky on her fifth call. Beverly Rogan was registered at the Derry Town House. She was only half-lucky because Beverly was out. She left her name and number and a message that Beverly should call her the instant she came back, no matter how late it was.

The desk clerk repeated the message. Kay went upstairs and took another Valium. She lay down and waited for sleep. Sleep didn't come. I'm sorry, Bev, she thought, looking into the dark, floating on the dope. What he said about my face . . . I just couldn't stand that. Call soon, Bev. Please call soon. And watch out for the crazy son of a bitch you married.

5

The crazy son of a bitch Bev had married did better on connections than Beverly had the day before because he left from O'Hare, the hub of commercial aviation in the contin ental United States. During the flight he read and reread the brief note on the author at the end of The Black Rapids. It said that William Denbrough was a native of New England and the author of three other novels (which were also available, the note added helpfully, in Signet paperback editions). He and his wife, the actress Audra Phillips, lived in California. He was currently at work on a new novel. Noticing that the paperback of The Black Rapids had been issued in 1976, Tom supposed the guy had written some of the other novels since then.

Audra Phillips . . . he had seen her in the movies, hadn't he? He rarely noticed actresses — Tom's idea of a good flick was a crime story, a chase story, or a monster picture — but if this babe was the one he was thinking of, he had noticed her especially because she looked a lot like Beverly: long red hair, green eyes, tits that wouldn't quit.

He sat up a little straighter in his seat, tapping the paperback against his leg, trying to ignore the ache in his head and in his mouth. Yes, he was sure. Audra Phillips was the redhead with the good tits. He had seen her in a Clint Eastwood movie, and then about a year later in a horror flick called Graveyard Moon. Beverly had gone with him to see that one, and coming out of the theater, he had mentioned his idea that the actress looked a lot like her. 'I don't think so,' Bev had said. 'I'm taller and she's prettier. Her hair's a darker red, too.' That was all. He hadn't thought of it again until now.

He and his wife, the actress Audra Phillips . . .

Tom had some dim understanding of psychology; he had used it to manipulate his wife all the years of their marriage. And now a nagging unpleasantness began to nag at him, more feeling than thought. It centered on the fact that Bev and this Denbrough had played together as kids and that Denbrough had married a woman who, in spite of what Beverly said, looked amazingly like Tom Rogan's wife.

What sort of games had Denbrough and Beverly played when they were kids? Post-office? Spin-the –bottle?

Other games?

Tom sat in his seat and tapped the book against his leg and felt his temples begin to throb.

When he arrived at Bangor International Airport, and canvassed the rental-car booths, the girls — some dressed in yellow, some in red, some in Irish green — looked at his blasted dangerous face nervously and told him (more nervously still) that they had no cars to rent, so sorry.

Tom went to the newsstand and got a Bangor paper. He turned to the want-ads, oblivious to the looks he was getting from people passing by, and isolated three likelies. He hit paydirt on his second call.

'Paper says you've got a '76 LTD wagon. Fourteen hundred bucks.'

'Right, sure.'

'I tell you what,' Tom said, touching the wallet in his jacket pocket. It was fat with cash — six thousand dollars. 'You bring it out to the airport and we'll do the deal right here. You give me the car and a bill of sale and your pink-slip.

I'll give you cash money.' The fellow with the LTD fo r sale paused and then said, 'I'd have to take my plates off.'

'Sure, fine.'

'How will I know you, Mr — ?'

'Mr Barr,' Tom said. He was looking at a sign across the terminal lobby that said BAR HARBOUR AIRLINES GIVES YOU NEW ENGLAND — AND THE WORLD! 'I'll be standing by the far door. You'll know me because my face doesn't look so hot. My wife and I went roller-skating yesterday and I took one hell of a fall. Things could be worse, I guess. I didn't break anything but my face.'

'Gee, I'm sorry to hear that, Mr Barr.'

'I'll mend. You just get the car out here, my good buddy.'

He hung up, walked across to the door, and stepped out into the warm fragrant May night.

The guy with the LTD showed up ten minutes later driving out of the la te-spring dusk. He was only a kid. They did the deal; the kid scribbled him a bill of sale which Tom stuffed indifferently into his overcoat pocket. He stood there and watched the kid take off the LTD's Maine plates.

'Give you an extra three bucks for the screwdriver,' Tom said when he was done.

The kid looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, shrugged, handed the screwdriver over, and took the three ones Tom was holding out. None of my business, the shrug said, and Tom thought: How right you are, my good little buddy. Tom saw him into a cab, then got behind the wheel of the Ford.

It was a piece of shit: transmission whiny, universal groany, body rattly, brakes slushy. None of it mattered. He drove around to the long-term parking lot, took a ticket, and drove in. He parked next to a Subaru that looked as if it had been there for awhile. He used the kid's screwdriver to remove the Subaru's plates and put them on the LTD. He hummed as he worked.

By 10:00 P.M. he was driving east on Route 2, a Maine roadmap open on the seat beside him. He had discovered that the LTD's radio didn't work, so he drove in silence. That was all right. He had plenty to think about. All the wonderful things he was going to do to Beverly when he caught up with her, for instance.

He was sure in his heart, quite sure, that Beverly was close by.

And smoking.

Oh my dear girl, you fucked with the wrong man when you fucked with Tom Rogan. And the question is this — what, exactly, are we to do with you?

The Ford bulled its way through the night, chasing its high beams, and by the time Tom got to Newport, he knew. He found a drugs-and –sundries shop on the main drag that was still open. He went inside and bought a carton of Camels. The proprietor wished him a good evening. Tom wished him the same.

He tossed the carton on the seat and got moving again. He drove slowly on up Route 7, hunting for his turnoff. Here it was — Route 3, with a sign which read HAVEN 21 DERRY 15.

He made the turn and got the Ford rolling faster. He glanced at the carton of cigarettes and smiled a little. In the green glow of the dashlights, his cut and lumpy face looked strange, ghoulish.

Got some cigarettes for you, Bevvie, Tom thought as the wagon ran between stands of pine and spruce, heading toward Derry at a little better than sixty. Oh my yes. A whole carton. Justfor you. And when I see you, dear, I'm going to make you eat every fucking one. And if this guy Denbrough needs some education, we can arrange that, too. No problem, Bevvie. No problem at all.

For the first time since the dirty bitch had bushwhacked him and run out, Tom began to feel good.

6

Audra Denbrough flew first class to Maine in a British Airways DC-10. She had left Heathrow at ten minutes of six that aft ernoon and had been chasing the sun ever since. The sun was winning — had won, in fact — but that didn't really matter. By a stroke of providential luck she had discovered that British Airways flight 23, London to Los Angeles, made one refueling stop . . . at Bangor International Airport.

The day had been a crazy nightmare. Freddie Firestone, the producer of Attic Room, had of course wanted Bill first thing. There had been some kind of ballsup about the stuntwoman who was supposed to fall down a flight of stairs for Audra. It seemed that stuntpeople had a union too, and this woman had fulfilled her quota of stunts for the week, or some silly thing. The union was demanding that Freddie either sign an extension-of-salary waiver or hire another woman to do the stunt. The problem was there was no other woman close enough to Audra's body-type available. Freddie told the union boss that they would have to get a man to do the stunt, then, wouldn't they? It wasn't as if the fall had to be taken in bra and panties. They had the auburn-haired wig, and the wardrobe woman could fit the fellow up with falsies and hip-padding. Even some arse-pads, if that was necessary.

Can't be done, mate, the union boss said. Against the union charter to have a man step in for a woman. Sexual discrimination.

In the movie business Freddie's temper was fabled, and at that point he had lost it. He told the union boss, a fat man whose BO was almost paralyzing, to bugger himself. The union boss told Freddie he better watch his gob or there would be no more stunts on the set of Attic Room at all. Then he had rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in a baksheesh gesture that had driven Freddie crazy. The union boss was big but soft; Freddie, who still played football every chance he got and who had once scored a century at cricket, was big and hard.

He threw the union boss out, went back into his office to meditate, and then came out again twenty minutes later hollering for Bill. He wanted the entire scene rewritten so that the fall could be scrubbed. Audra had to tell Freddie that Bill was no longer in England.

'What? Freddie said. His mouth hung open. He was looking at Audra as if he believed she had gone mad. 'What are you telling me?'

'He's been called back to the States — that's what I'm telling you.'

Freddie made as if to grab her and Audra shrank back, a bit afraid. Freddie looked down at his hands, then put them in his pockets and only looked at her.

'I'm sorry, Freddie,' she said in a small voice. 'Really.'

She got up and poured herself a cup of coffee from the Silex on Freddie's hotplate, noticing that her hands were trembling slightly. As she sat down she heard Freddie's amplified voice over the studio loudspeakers, telling everyone to go home or to the pub; the day's shooting was off. Audra winced. There went a minimum of ten thousand pounds, right down the bog.

Freddie turned off the studio intercom, got up, poured his own cup of coffee. He sat down again and offered her his pack of Silk Cut cigarettes.

Audra shook her head.

Freddie took one, lit it, and squinted at her through the smoke. 'This is serious, isn't it?'

'Yes,' Audra said, keeping her composure as best she could.

'What's happened?'

And because she genuinely liked Freddie and genuinely trusted him, Audra told him everything she knew. Freddie listened intently, gravely. It didn't take long to tell; doors were still slamming and engines starting in the parking lot outside when she finished.

Freddie was silent for some time, looking out his window. Then he swung back to her. 'He's had a nervous breakdown of some sort.'

Audra shook her head. 'No. It wasn't like that. He wasn't like that.' She swallowed and added, 'Maybe you had to be there.'

Freddie smiled crookedly. 'You must realize that grown men rarely feel compelled to honor promises they made as little boys. And you've read Bill's work; you know how much of it is about childhood, and it's very good stuff indeed. Very much on the nail. The idea that he's forgotten everything that ever happened to him back then is absurd.'

'The scars on his hands,' Audra said. 'They were never there. Not until this morning.'

'Bollocks! You just didn't notice them until this morning.'

She shrugged helplessly. 'I'd've noticed.'

She could see he didn't believe that, either.

'What's to do, then?' Freddie asked her, and she could only shake her head. Freddie lit another cigarette from the smoldering end of the first. 'I can square it with the union boss,' he said . 'Not myself, maybe; right now he'd see me in hell before giving me another stunt. I'll send Teddy Rowland round to his office. Teddy's a pouf, but he could talk the birds down from the trees But what happens after? We've got four weeks of shooting left, and here's your husband somewhere in Massachusetts — '

'Maine — '

He waved a hand. 'Wherever. And how much good are you going to be

without him?'

'I — '

He leaned forward. 'I like you, Audra. I genuinely do. And I like Bill — even in spite of this mess. We can make do, I guess. If the script needs cobbling up, I can cobble it. I've done my share of that sort of shoemaking in my time, Christ knows . . . If he doesn't like the way it turns out, he'll have no one but himself to blame. I can do without Bill, but I can't do without you. I can't have you running off to the States after your man, and I've got to have you putting out at full power. Can you do that?'

'I don't know.'

'Nor do I. But I want you to think about something. We can keep things quiet for awhile, maybe for the rest of the shoot, if you'll stand up like a trouper and do your job. But if you take off, it can't be kept quiet. I can be pissy, but I'm not vindictive by nature and I'm not going to tell you that if you take off I'll see that you never work in the business again. But you should know that if you get a reputation for temperament, you might end up stuck with just that. I'm talking to you like a Dutch uncle, I know. Do you resent it?'

'No,' she said listlessly. In truth, she didn't care much one way or the other. Bill was all she could think of. Freddie was a nice enough man, but Freddie didn't understand; in the last analysis, nice man or not, all he could think of was what this was going to do to his picture . He had not seen the look in Bill's eyes . . . or heard him stutter.

'Good.' He stood up. 'Come on over to the Hare and Hounds with me. We can both use a drink.'

She shook her head. 'A drink's the last thing I need. I'm going home and think this o ut.'

'I'll call for the car,' he said.

'No. I'll take the train.'

He looked at her fixedly, one hand on the telephone. 'I believe you mean to go after him,' Freddie said, 'and I'm telling you that it's a serious mistake, dear girl. He's got a be e in his bonnet, but at bottom he's steady enough. He'll shake it, and when he does he'll come back. If he'd wanted you along, he would have said so.'

'I haven't decided anything,' she said, knowing that she had in fact decided everything; had decided even before the car picked her up that morning. 'Have a care, love,' Freddie said. 'Don't do something you'll regret later.' She felt the force of his personality beating on her, demanding that she give in, make the promise, do her job, wait passively for Bill to come back . . . or to disappear again into that hole of the past from which he had come.

She went to him and kissed him lightly on the cheek. 'I'll see you, Freddie.' She went home and called British Airways. She told the clerk she might be interested in reaching a small Maine city called Derry if it was at all possible. There had been silence while the woman consulted her computer terminal . . . and then the news, like a sign from heaven, that BA #23 made a stop in Bangor, which was less than fifty miles away.

'Shall I book the flight for you, ma'am?'

Audra closed her eyes and saw Freddie's craggy, mostly kind, very earnest face, heard him saying: Have a care, love. Don't do something you'll regret later.

Freddie didn't want her to go; Bill didn't want her to go; so why was her heart screaming at her that she had to go? She closed her eyes Jesus, I feel so fucked up —

'Ma'am? Are you still holding the wire?'

'Book it,' Audra said, then hesitated. Have a care love . . . . Maybe she should sleep on it; get some distance between herself and the craziness. She began to rummage in her purse for her American Express card. 'For tomorrow First class if you have it, but I'll take anything.' And if I change my mind I can cancel. Probably will. I'll wake up sane and everything will be clear.

But nothing had been clear this morning, and her heart clamored just as loudly for her to go. Her sleep had been a crazy tapestry of nightmares. So she had called Freddie, not because she wanted to but because she felt she owed him that. She had not gotten far — she was trying, in some stumbling way, to tell him how much she felt Bill might need her — when there was a soft click at Freddie's end. He had hung up without saying a word after his init ial hello.

But in a way, Audra thought, that soft click said everything that needed to be said.

7

The plane landed at Bangor at 7:09, EDT. Audra was the only passenger to deplane, and the others looked at her with a kind of thoughtful curiosity, probably wondering why anyone would choose to get off here, in this godforsaken little place. Audra thought of telling them I'm looking for my husband, that's why. He came back to a little town near here because one of his boyhood chums called him and reminded him of a promise he couldn't quite remember. The call also reminded him that he hadn't thought of his dead brother in over twenty years. Oh yes: it also brought back his stutter . . . and some funny white scars on the palms of his hands.

And then, she thought, the customs agent standing by in the jetway would whistle up the men in the white coats.

She collected her single piece of luggage — it looked very lonely riding the carousel all by itself — and approached the rental-car booths as Tom Rogan Would about an hour later. Her luck was better than his would be; National Car Rental had a Datsun.

The girl filled out the form and Audra signed it.

'I thought it was you,' the girl said, and then, timidly: 'Might I please have your autograph?'

Audra gave it, writing her name on the back of a rental form, and thought: Enjoy it whileyou can, girl. If Freddie Firestone is right, it won't be worth doodley-squat five years from now.

With some amusement she realized that, after only fifteen minutes back in the States, she had begun to think like an American again.

She got a roadmap, and the girl, so star-struck she could barely talk, managed to trace out her best route to Derry.

Ten minutes later Audra was on the road, reminding herself at every intersection that if she forgot and began driving on the left, they would be scrubbing her off the asphalt.

And as she drove, she realized that she was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.

8

By one of those odd quirks of fate or coincidence which sometimes obtain (and which, in truth, obtained more frequently in Derry), Tom had taken a room at the Koala Inn on Outer Jackson Street and Audra had taken a room at the Holiday Inn; the two motels were side by side, their parking lots divided only by a raised concrete sidewalk. And as it so happened, Audra's rented Datsun and Tom's purchased LTD wagon were parked nose-to-nose, separated only by that walkway. Both slept now, Audra quietly on her side, Tom Rogan on his back, snoring so heavily that his swollen lips flapped.

9

Henry spent that day hiding — hiding in the puckies beside Route 9. Sometimes he slept. Sometimes he lay watching police cruisers slide by like hunting dogs. While the Losers ate lunch, Henry listened to voices from the moon.

And when dark fell, he went out to the verge of the road and stuck out his thumb.

After awhile, some fool came along and picked him up.

'A bird came down the Walk — He did not know I saw — He bit an Angleworm in halves And ate the fellow, raw'

— Emily Dickinson, 'A Bird Came Down the Walk

March 17th, 1985

The fire at the Black Spot happened in the late fall of 1930. So far as I am able to determine, that fire — the one my father barely escaped — ended the cycle of murder and disappearance which happened in the years 1929-30, just as the explosion at the Ironworks ended a cycle some twenty-five years before. It is as if a monstrous sacrifice is needed at the end of the cycle to quiet whatever terrible force it is which works here . . . to send It to sleep for another quarter-century or so.

But if such a sacrifice is needed to end each cycle, it seems that some similar event is needed to set each cycle in motion.

Which brings me to the Bradley Gang.

Their execution took place at the three-way intersection of Canal, Main, and Kansas — not far, in fact, from the place shown in the picture which began to move for Bill and Richie one day in June of 1958 — some thirteen months before the fire at the Black Spot, in October of 1929 . . . not long before the stock-market crash.

As with the fire at the Black Spot, many Derry residents affect not to remember what happened that day. Or they were out of town, visiting relatives. Or they were napping that afternoon and never found out what had happened until they heard it on the radio news that night. Or they will simply look you full in the face and lie to you.

The police logs for that day indicate that Chief Sullivan was not even in town (Sure I remember, Aloysius Nell told me from a chair on the sun-terrace of the Paulson Nursing Home in Bangor. That was my first year on the force, and I ought to remember. He was off inwestern Maine, bird-hunting. They'd been sheeted and carried off by the time he got back. Madder than a wet hen was Jim Sullivan), but a picture in a reference book on gangsters called Bloodletters and Badmen shows a grinning man standing beside the bullet-riddled corpse of Al Bradley in the morgue, and if that man is not Chief Sullivan, it is surely his twin brother.

It was from Mr Keene that I finally got what I believe to be the true version of the story — Norbert Keene, who was the proprietor of the Center Street Drug Store from 1925 until 1975. He talked to me willingly enough, but, like Betty Ripsom's father, he made me turn off my tape-recorder before he would really unwind the tale — not that it mattered; I can hear his papery voice yet — another a capella singer in the damned choir that is this town.

'No reason not to tell you,' he said . 'No one will print it, and no one would believe it even if they did.' He offered me an old-fashioned apothecary jar. 'Licorice whip? As I remember, you were always partial to the red ones, Mikey.'

I took one. 'Was Chief Sullivan there that day?'

Mr Keene laughed and took a licorice whip for himself. 'You wondered about that, did you?'

'I wondered,' I agreed, chewing a piece of the red licorice. I hadn't had one since I was a kid, shoving my pennies across the counter to a much younger and sprier Mr Keene. It tasted just as fine as it had back then.

'You're too young to remember when Bobby Thomson hit his home run for the Giants in the play-off game in 1951,' Mr Keene said. 'You wouldn't have been but four years old. Well! They ran an article about that game in the newspaper a few years after, and it seemed like just about a million folks from New York claimed they were there in the ballpark that day.' Mr Keene gummed his licorice whip and a little dark drool ran down from the corner of his mouth. He wiped it off fastidiously with his handkerchief. We were sitting in the office behind the drugstore, because although Norbert Keene was eighty-five and retired ten years, he still did the books for his grandson.

'Just the opposite when it come s to the Bradley Gang!' Keene exclaimed. He was smiling, but it was not a pleasant smile — it was cynical, coldly reminiscent. 'There was maybe twenty thousand people who lived in downtown Derry back then. Main Street and Canal Street had both been paved fo r four years, but Kansas Street was still dirt. Raised dust in the summer and turned into a boghole every March and November. They used to oil Up-Mile Hill every June and every Fourth of July the Mayor would talk about how they were going to pave Kansas Street, but it never happened until 1942. It . . . but what was I saying?'

'Twenty thousand people who lived right downtown,' I prompted.

'Ayuh. Well, of those twenty thousand, there's probably half that have passed away since, maybe even more — f i f ty years is a long time. And people have a funny way of dying young in Derry. Perhaps it is the air. But of those left, I don't think you'd find more than a dozen who'd say they were in town the day the Bradley Gang went to Tophet. Butch Rowden over at the meat market would fess up to it, I guess — he keeps a picture of one of the cars they had up on the wall where he cuts meat. Looking at that picture you'd hardly know it was a car. Charlotte Littlefield would tell you a thing or two, if you could get on he r good side; she teaches over to the high school, and although I reckon she must not have been more than ten or twelve at the tune I bet she remembers plenty. Carl Snow . . . Aubrey Stacey . . . Eben Stampnell . . . and that old geezer who paints those funny pictures and drinks all night at Wally's — Pickman, I think his name is — they'd remember. They were all there . . . '

He trailed off vaguely, looking at the licorice whip in his hand. I thought of prodding him and decided not to.

At last he said, 'Most of the others would lie about it, the way people lied and said they were there when Bobby Thomson hit his homer, that's all I mean. But people lied about being at that ballgame because they wished they had been there. People would lie to you about being in Derry that day because they wish they hadn't been. Do you understand me, sonny?'

I nodded.

'You sure you want to hear the rest of this?' Mr Keene asked me. 'You're looking a bit peaked, Mr Mikey.'

'I don't,' I said, 'but I think I better, all the same.'

'Okay,' Mr Keene said mildly. It was my day for memories; as he offered me the apothecary jar with the licorice whips in it, I suddenly remembered a radio program my mother and dad used to listen to when I was just a little kid: Mr Keene, Tracer of LostPersons.

'Sheriff was there that day, all right. He was s'posed to go bird-hunting, but he changed his mind damn quick when Lal Machen came in and told nun that he was expecting Al Bradley that very afternoon.'

'How did Machen know that?' I asked.

'Well, that's an instructive tale in itself,' Mr Keene said, and the cynical smile creased his face again. 'Bradley wasn't never Public Enemy Number One on the FBI's hit parade, but they had wanted him — since 1928 or so. To show they could cut the mustard, I guess. Al Bradley and his brother George hit six or seven banks across the Midwest and then kidnapped a banker for ransom. The ransom was paid — thirty thousand dollars, a big sum for those days — but they killed the banker anyway.

'By then the Midwest had gotten a little toasty for the gangs that ran there, so Al and George and their litter of ratlings run northeast, up this way. They rented themselves a big farmhouse just over the town line in Newport, not far from where the Rhulin Farms are today.

That was in the dog-days of '29, maybe July, maybe August, maybe even early September . . . I don't know for sure just when. There were eight of em — Al Bradley, George Bradley, Joe Conklin and his brother Cal, an Irishman named Arthur Malloy who was called "Creeping Jesus Malloy" because he was nearsighted but wouldn't put on his specs unless he

absolutely had to, and Patrick Caudy, a young fellow from Chicago who was said to be kill-crazy but as handsome as Adonis. There were also two women with them: Kitty Donahue, George Bradley's common-law wife, and Marie Hauser, who belonged to Caudy but sometimes got passed around, according to the stories we all heard later.

'They made one bad assumption when they got up here, sonny — they got the idea they were so far away from Indiana that they were safe.

'They laid low for awhile, and then got bored and decided they wanted to go hunting. They had plenty of firepower but they were a bit low on ammunition. So they all came into Derry on the seventh of October in two cars. Patrick Gaudy took the women around shopping while the other men went into Machen's Sporting Goods. Kitty Donahue bought a dress in Freese's, and she died in it two days later.

'Lal Machen waited on the men himself. He died in 1959. Too fat, he was. Always too fat. But there wasn't nothing wrong with his eyes, and he knew it was Al Bradley the minute he walked in, he said. He thought he recognized some of the others, but he wasn't sure of Malloy until he put on his specs to look at a display of knives in a glass case.

'Al Bradley walked up to him and said, "We'd like to buy some ammunition."

'"Well," Lal Machen says, "you come to the right place."

'Bradley handed him a paper and Lal read it over. The paper has been lost, at least so far as I know, but Lal said it would have turned your blood cold. They wanted five hundred rounds of .38-caliber ammunition, eight hundred rounds of .45-caliber, sixty rounds of .50-caliber, which they don't even make anymore, shotgun shells loaded both with buck and bird, and a thousand rounds each of .22 short– and long-rifle. Plus — get this — sixteen thousand rounds of .45 machine-gun bullets.

'Holy shit! ' I said.

Mr Keene smiled that cynical smile again and offered me the apothecary jar. At first I shook my head and then I took another whip.

'"This here is quite a shopping-list, boys," Lal says.

'"Come on, Al," Creeping Jesus Malloy says. "I told you we wasn't going to get it in a hick town like this. Let's go on up to Bangor. They won't have nothing there either, but I can use a ride."

'"Now hold your horses," Lal says, just as cool as a cucumber. "This here is one hell of a good order and I wouldn't want to lose it to that Jew up Bangor. I can give you the .22s right now, also the bird and half the buck. I can give you a hundred rounds each of the .38– and .45-caliber, too. I could have the rest for you . . . " And here Lal sort of half-closed his eyes and tapped his chin, as if calculating it out. " . . . by day after tomorrow. How'd that be?"

'Bradley grinned like he'd split his head around the back and said it sounded just as fine as paint. Cal Conklin said he'd still like to go on up to Bangor, but he was outvoted. "Now. if you're not sure you can make good on this order, you ought to say so right now," Al Bradley says to Lal, "because I'm a pretty fine fellow but when I get mad you don't want to get into a pissing contest with me. You follow?"

'"I do," Lal says, "and I'll have all the ammo you could want, Mr — ?"

'"Rader," Brady says. "Richard D. Rader, at your service."

'He stuck out his hand and Lal pumped it, grinning all the while. "Real pleased, Mr Rader "

'So then Bradley asked him what would be a good time for him an d his friends to drop by and pick up the goods, and Lal Machen asked them right back how two in the afternoon sounded to them. They agreed that would be fine. Out they went. Lal watched them go. They met the two women and Gaudy on the sidewalk outside. Lal recognized Gaudy, too.

'So,' Mr Keene said, looking at me bright-eyed, 'what do you think Lal done then? Called the cops?'

'I guess he didn't,' I said, 'based on what happened. Me, I would have broken my leg getting to the telephone.'

'Well, maybe you would and maybe you wouldn't,' Mr Keene said with that same cynical, bright-eyed smile, and I shivered because I knew what he meant . . . and he knew I knew. Once something heavy begins to roll, it can't be stopped; it's simply going to roll until it finds a flat place long enough to wear away all of its forward motion. You can stand in front of that thing and get flattened . . . but that won't stop it, either.

'Maybe you would have and maybe you wouldn't,' Mr Keene repeated. 'But I can tell yo u what Lal Machen did. The rest of that day and all of the next, when someone he knew came in — some man — why, he would tell them that he knew who had been out in the woods around the Newport-Derry line shooting at deer and grouse and God knows what else with Kansas City typewriters. It was the Bradley Gang. He knew for a fact because he had recognized em. He'd tell em that Bradley and his men were coming back the next day around two to pick up the rest of their order. He'd tell them he'd promised Bradley all the ammunition he could want, and that was a promise he intended to keep.'

'How many?' I asked. I felt hypnotized by his glittering eye. Suddenly the dry smell of this back room — the smell of prescription drugs and powders, of Musterole and Vicks VapoRub and Robitussin cough syrup — suddenly all those smells seemed suffocating . . . but I could no more have left than I could kill myself by holding my breath.

'How many men did Lal pass the word to?' Mr Keene asked.

I nodded.

'Don't know for sure,' Mr Keene said. 'Didn't stand right there and take up sentry duty. All those he felt he could trust, I suppose.'

Those he could trust,' I mused. My voice was a little hoarse.

'Ayuh,' Mr Keene said. 'Derrymen, you know. Not that many of em raised cows.' He laughed at this old joke before going on. 'I came in around ten the day after the Bradleys first dropped in on Lal. He told me the story, then asked how he could help me. I'd only come in to see if my last roll of pictures had been developed — in those days Machen's handled all the Kodak films and cameras — but after I got my photos I also said I could use some ammo for my Winchester.

'"You gonna shoot some game, Norb?" Lal asks me, passing over the shells.

'"Might plug some varmints," I said, and we had us a chuckle over that.' Mr Keene laughed and slapped his skinny leg as if this was still the best joke he had ever heard. He leaned forward and tapped my knee. 'All I mean, son, is that the story got around all it needed to. Small towns, you know. If you tell the right people, what you need to pass along will get along . . . see what I mean? Like another licorice whip?'

I took one with numb fingers.

'Make you fat,' Mr Keene said, and cackled. He looked old then . . . infinitely old, with his bifocals slipping down the gaunt blade of his nose and the skin stretched too tight and thin across his cheeks to wrinkle.

The next day I brought my rifle into the store with me and Bob Tanner, who worked harder than any assistant I ever had after him, brought in his pop's shotgun. Around eleven that day Gregory Cole came in for a bicarb of soda and damned if he didn't have a Colt.45 jammed right in his belt.

'"Don't blow your balls off with that, Greg," I said.

'"I come out of the woods all the way from Milford for this and I got one fuck of a hangover," Greg says. "I guess I'll blow someone's balls off before the sun goes down."

'Around one –thirty, I put the little sign I had, BE BACK SOON, PLEASE BE PATIENT, in the door and took my rifle and walked out the back into Richard's Alley. I asked Bob Tanner if he wanted to come along and he said he'd better finish filling Mrs Emerson's prescription and

he'd see me later. "Leave me a live one, Mr Keene," he said, but I allowed as how I couldn't promise nothing.

'There was hardly any traffic on Canal Street at all, either on foot or by car. Every now and then a delivery truck would pass, but that was about all. I saw Jake Pinnette cross over and he had a rifle in each hand. He met Andy Criss, and they walked over to one of the benches that used to stand where the War Memorial was — you know, where the Canal goes underground.

'Petie Vanness and Al Nell and Jimmy Gordon were all sitting on the courthouse steps, eating sandwic hes and fruit out of their dinnerbuckets, trading with each other for stuff that looked better to them, the way kids do on the schoolyard. They was all armed. Jimmy Gordon had himself a World War I Springfield that looked bigger than he did.

'I see a ki d go walking toward Up-Mile Hill — I think maybe it was Zack Denbrough, the father of your old buddy, the one who turned out to be a writer — and Kenny Borton says from the window of the Christian Science Reading Room, "You want to get out of here, kid; there's going to be shooting." Zack took one look at his face and ran like hell.

There were men everywhere, men with guns, standing in doorways and sitting on steps and looking out of windows. Greg Cole was sitting in a doorway down the street with his .45 in his lap and about two dozen shells lined up beside him like toy sojers. Bruce Jagermeyer and that Swede, Olaf Theramenius, were standing underneath the marquee of the Bijou in the shade.'

Mr Keene looked at me, through me. His eyes were not sharp now; they were hazy with memory, soft as the eyes of a man only become when he is remembering one of the best times of his life — the first home run he ever hit, maybe, or the first trout he ever landed that was big enough to keep, or the first time he ever lay with a willing woman.

'I remember I heard the wind, sonny,' he said dreamily. 'I remember hearing the wind hearing the courthouse clock toll two. Bob Tanner came up behind me and I was so tight-wired I almost blew his head off.

'He only nodded at me and crossed over to Vannock's Dry Goods, trailing his shadow out behind him.

'You would have thought that when it got to be two-ten and nothing happened, then two-fifteen, then two-twenty, folks would have just up and left, wouldn't you? But it didn't happen that way at all. People just kept their place. Because — '

'Because you knew they were going to come, didn't you?' I asked. There was never any question at all.'

He beamed at me like a teacher pleased with a student's recital. That's right!' he said. 'We knew. No one had to talk about it, no one had to say, "Wellnow, let's wait until twenty past and if they don't show I've got to get back to work." Things just stayed quiet, and around two-twenty-five that afternoon these two cars, on e red and one dark blue, started down Up-Mile Hill and came into the intersection. One of them was a Chevrolet and the other was a La Salle. The Conklin brothers, Patrick Caudy, and Marie Hauser were in the Chevrolet. The Bradleys, Malloy, and Kitty Donahue were in the La Salle.

They started through the intersection okay, and then Al Bradley slammed on the brakes of that La Salle so sudden that Caudy damn near ran into him. The street was too quiet and Bradley knew it. He wasn't nothing but an animal, but it doesn't take much to put up an animal's wind when it's been chased like a weasel in the corn for four years.

'He opened the door of the La Salle and stood up on the running board for a moment. He looked around, then he made a "go-back" gesture to Caudy with his hand. Caudy said "What, boss?" I heard that plain as day, the only thing I heard any of them say that day. There was a wink of sun, too, I remember that. It came off a compact mirror. The Hauser woman was powdering her nose.

That was when Lal Machen and his helper, Biff Marlow, came running out of Machen's store. "Put em up, Bradley, you're surrounded!" Lal shouts, and before Bradley could do more than turn his head, Lal started blasting. He was wild at first, but then he put one into Bradley's shoulder. The claret started to pour out of that hole right away. Bradley caught hold of the La Salle's doorpost and swung himself back into the car. He threw it into gear, and that's when everyone started to shoot.

'It was all over in four, maybe five minutes, but it seemed a whole hell of a lot longer while it was happening. Petie and Al and Jimmy Gordon just sat there on the courthouse steps and poured bullets into the back end of the Chevrolet. I saw Bob Tanner down on one knee, firing and working the bolt on that old rifle of his like a madman. Jagermeyer and Theramenius were shooting into the right side of the La Salle from under the theater marquee and Greg Cole stood in the gutter, holding that .45 automatic out in both hands, pulling the trigger just as fast as he could work it.

'There must have been fifty, sixty men firing all at once. After it was all over Lal Machen dug thirty-six slugs out of the brick sides of his store. And that was three days later, after just about every-damn-body in town who wanted one for a souvenir had come down and dug one out with his penknife. When it was at its worst, it sounded like the Battle of the Marne. Windows were blown in by rifle –fire all around Machen's.

'Bradley got the La Salle around in a half-circle and he wasn't slow but by the time he'd done he was running on four flats. Both the headlights were blowed out, and the windscreen was gone. Creeping Jesus Malloy and George Bradley were each at a backseat window, firing pistols. I seen one bullet take Malloy high up in the neck and tear it wide open. He shot twice more and then collapsed out the window with his arms hanging down.

'Gaudy tried to turn the Chevrolet and only ran into the back end of Bradley's La Salle. That was really the end of em right there, son. The Chevrolet's front bumper locked with the La Salle's back one and there went any chance they might have had to make a run for it.

'Joe Conklin got out of the back seat and just stood there in the middle of the intersectio n, a pistol in each hand, and started to pour it on. He was shooting at Jake Pinnette and Andy Criss. The two of them fell off the bench they'd been sitting on and landed in the grass, Andy Criss shouting "I'm killed! I'm killed!" over and over again, alth ough he was never so much as touched; neither of them were.

'Joe Conklin, he had time to fire both his guns empty before anything so much as touched him. His coat flew back and his pants twitched like some woman you couldn't see was stitching on them. He was wearing a straw hat, and it flew off his head so you could see how he'd center-parted his hair. He had one of his guns under his arm and was trying to reload the other when someone cut the legs out from under him and he went down. Kenny Borton claimed him later, but there was really no way to tell. Could have been anybody.

'Conklin's brother Cal came out after him soon's Joe fell and down he went like a ton of bricks with a hole in his head.

'Marie Hauser came out. Maybe she was trying to sur render, I dunno. She still had the compact she'd been using to powder her nose in her right hand. She was screaming, I believe, but by then it was hard to hear. Bullets was flying all around them. That compact mirror was blown right out of her hand. She started back to the car then but she took one in the hip. She made it somehow and managed to crawl inside again.

'Al Bradley revved the La Salle up just as high as it would go, and managed to get it moving again. He dragged the Chevrolet maybe ten feet before the bumper tore right off 'n it.

'The boys poured lead into it. All the windows was busted. One of the mudguards was laying in the street. Malloy was dead hanging out the window, but both of the Bradley brothers were still alive. George was firing from the back seat. His woman was dead beside him with one of her eyes shot out.

'Al Bradley got to the big intersection, then his auto mounted the curb and stopped there. He got out from behind the wheel and started running up Canal Street. He was riddled.

'Patrick Gaudy got out of the Chevrolet, looked as if he was going to surrender for a minute, then he grabbed a.38 from a cheater-holster under his armpit. He triggered it off maybe three times, just firing wild, and then his shirt blew back fr om his chest in flames. He slid down the side of the Chevy until he was sitting on the running board. He shot one more time, and so far as I know that was the only bullet that hit anyone; it ricocheted off something and then grazed across the back of Greg Cole's hand. Left a scar he used to show off when he was drunk until someone — Al Nell, maybe — took him aside and told him it might be a good idea to shut up about what happened to the Bradley Gang.

'The Hauser woman came out and that time wasn't any doubt she was trying to surrender — she had her hands up. Maybe no one really meant to kill her, but by then there was a crossfire and she walked right into it.

'George Bradley run as far as that bench by the War Memorial, then someone pulped the back of his head with a shotgun blast. He fell down dead with his pants full of piss . . . '

Hardly aware I was doing it, I took a licorice whip from the jar.

'They went on pouring rounds into those cars for another minute or so before it began to taper off,' Mr Keene said. 'When men get then: blood up, it doesn't go down easy. That was when I looked around and saw Sheriff Sullivan behind Nell and the others on the courthouse steps, putting rounds through that dead Chevy with a Remington pump. Don't let anyone tell you he wasn't there; Norbert Keene is sitting in front of you and telling you he was.

'By the time the firing stopped, those cars didn't look like cars at all anymore, just hunks of junk with glass around them. Men started to walk over to them. No one talked. All you could hear was the wind and feet gritting over broken glass. That's when the picture-taking started. And you ought to know this, sonny: when the picture-taking starts, the story is over.'

Mr Keene rocked in his chair, his slippers bumping placidly on the floor, looking at me.

'There's nothing like that in the Derry News,' was all I could think of to say. The headline for that day had read STATE POLICE , FBI GUN DOWN BRADLEY GANG IN PITCHED BATTLE . W i t h the subhead 'Local Police Lend Support.'

'Course not,' Mr Keene said, laughing delightedly. 'I seen the publisher, Mack Laughlin, put two rounds into Joe Conklin himself.'

'Christ,' I muttered.

'Get enough licorice, sonny?'

'I got enough,' I said. I licked my lips. 'Mr Keene, how could a thing of that . . . that magnitude . . . be covered up?'

'Wasn't no cover-up,' he said, looking honestly surprised. 'It was just that no one talked about it much. And really, who cared? It wasn't President and Mrs Hoover that went down that day. It was no worse than shooting mad dogs that would kill you with a bite if you give them half a chance.'

'But the women?'

'Couple of whores,' he said indifferently. 'Besides, it happened in Derry, not in New York or Chicago. Th e place makes it news as much as what happened in the place, sonny. That's why there are bigger headlines when an earthquake kills twelve people in Los Angeles than there are when one kills three thousand in some heathen country in the Mideast.'

Besid es, it happened in Derry.

I've heard it before, and I suppose if I continue to pursue this I'll hear it again . . . and again . . . and again. They say it as if speaking patiently to a mental defective. They say it the way they would say Because of gravity if you asked them how come you stick to the ground when you walk. They say it as if it were a natural law any natural man should understand. And, of course, the worst of that is I do understand.

I had one more question for Norbert Keene.

'Did you see anyone at all that day that you didn't recognize once the shooting started?'

Mr Keene's answer was quick enough to drop my blood temperature ten degrees — or so it felt. 'The clown, you mean? How did you find out about him, sonny?'

'Oh, I heard it somewhere,' I said.

'I only caught a glimpse of him. Once things got hot, I tended pretty much to my own knittin. I glanced around just once and saw him upstreet beyond them Swedes under the Bijou's marquee,' Mr Keene said. 'He wasn't wearing a clown suit or nothing like that. He was dressed in a pair of farmer's biballs and a cotton shirt underneath. But his face was covered with that white grease-paint they use, and he had a big red clown smile painted on. Also had these tufts of fake hair, you know. Orange. Sorta comical.

'Lal Machen never saw that fellow, but Biff did. Only Biff must have been confused, because he thought he saw him in one of the windows of an apartment over somewhere to the left, and once when I asked Jimmy Gordon — he wa s killed in Pearl Harbor, you know, went down with his ship, the California, I think it was — he said he saw the guy behind the War Memorial.'

Mr Keene shook his head, smiling a little.

'It's funny how people get during a thing like that, and even funnier what they remember after it's all over. You can listen to sixteen different tales and no two of them will jibe together. Take the gun that clown fellow had, for instance — '

'Gun?' I asked. 'He was shooting, too?'

'Ayuh,' Mr Keene said. The one glimpse I caught of him, it looked like he had a Winchester bolt-action, and it wasn't until later that I figured out I must have thought that because that's what I had. Biff Marlow thought he had a Remington, because that was what he had. And when I asked Jimmy about it, he said that guy was shooting an old Springfield, just like his. Funny, huh?'

'Funny,' I managed. 'Mr Keene . . . didn't any of you wonder what in hell a clown, especially one in farmer's biballs, was doing there just then?'

'Sure,' Mr Keene said. 'It wasn't no big deal, you understand, but sure we wondered. Most of us figured it was somebody who wanted to attend the party but didn't want to be recognized. A Town Council member, maybe. Horst Mueller, maybe, or even Trace Naugler, who was mayor back then. Or it could just have been a professional man who didn't want to be recognized. A doctor or a lawyer. I wouldn't 've recognized my own father in a get-up like that.'

He laughed a little and I asked him what was funny.

'There's also a possibility that it was a real clown,' he said. 'Back in the twenties and thirties the county fair in Esty came a lot earlier than it does now, and it was set up and going full blast the week that the Bradley Gang met their end. There were clowns at the county fair. Maybe one of them heard we were going to have our own little carnival and rode down because he wanted to be in on it.

He smiled at me, dryly.

'I'm about talked out,' he said, 'but I'll tell you one more thing, since you 'pear to be so interested and you listen so close. It was something Biff Marlow said about sixteen years later, when we were having a few beers up to Pilot's in Bangor. Right out of a clear blue sky he said it. Said that clown was leanin out of the window so far that Biff couldn't believe he wasn't fallin out. It wasn't just his head and shoulders and arms that was out; Biff said he was right out to the knees, hanging there in midair, shooting down at the cars the Bradleys had come in, with that big red grin on his face. "He was tricked out like a jackolantern that had got a bad scare," was how Biff put it.'

'Like he was floating,' I said.

'Ayuh,' Mr Keene agreed. 'And Biff said there was something else, something that bothered him for weeks afterward. One of those things you get right on the tip of your tongue but won't quite come off, or something that lights on your skin like a mosquito or a noseeum. He said he finally figured out what it was one night when he had to get up and tap a kidney. He stood there whizzing into the bowl, thinking of nothing in particular, when it come to him all at once that it was two-twenty-five in the afternoon when the shooting started and the sun was out but that clown didn't cast any shadow. No shadow at all.'