IT

'But Mom, this kid pushed me, he came up behind me, this big kid, and pushed me - ' Richie was by then near tears. This failure to make his mother understand hurt much worse than being slammed into the gutter by Card Jagermeyer, who was so stupid they hadn't even bothered to send him to summer-school.

'I don't want to hear any more about it,' Maggie Tozier said flatly. 'But the next time you see your father come in looking whipped after working late three nights in a row, you think a little bit, Richie. You think about it.'

'But Mom - '

'No more, I said.' Her voice was curt and final - worse, it was near tears. She left the room then and the TV went on much too loud. Richie had been left alone sitting miserably at the kitchen table.

It was this memory that caused Richie to shake his head again. 'My folks are okay, but they'd never believe something like this.'

'W-What a-a-about other kih-kids?'

And they looked around, Bill would remember years later, as if for someone who wasn't there.

'Who?' Stan asked doubtfully. 'I can't think of anyone else I trust.'

'Just the suh-suh-same . . . ' Bill said in a troubled voice, and a little silence fell among them while Bill thought about what to say next.

3

If asked, Ben Hanscom would have told you that Henry Bowers hated him more than any of the others in the Losers' Club, because of what had happened that day when he and Henry had shot the chutes down into the Barrens from Kansas Street, because of what had happened the day he and Richie and Beverly escaped from the Aladdin, but most of all because, by not allowing Henry to copy during examinations, he had caused Henry to be sent to summerschool and incur the wrath of his father, the reputedly insane Butch Bowers.

If asked, Richie Tozier would have told you Henry hated him more than any of the others, because of the day he had fooled Henry and his two other musketeers in Freese's.

Stan Uris would have told you that Henry hated him most of all because he was a Jew (when Stan had been in the third grade and Henry the fifth, Henry had once washed Stan's face with snow until it bled and he was screaming hysterically with pain and fear).

Bill Denbrough believed that Henry hated him the most because he was skinny, because he stuttered, and because he liked to dress well ('L-L-Look at the f-f-f-fucking puh-puh-PANSY!' Henry had cried when the Derry School had had Careers Day in April and Bill had come wearing a tie; before the day was over, the tie had been ripped off and flung into a tree halfway down Charter Street).

He did hate all four of them, but the boy in Derry who was number one on Henry's personal Hate Parade was not in the Losers' Club at all on that July 3rd; he was a black boy named Michael Hanlon, who lived a quarter of a mile down the road from the shirttail Bowers farm.

Henry's father, who was every bit as crazy as he was reputed to be, was Oscar 'Butch' Bowers. Butch Bowers associated his financial, physical, and mental decline with the Hanlon family in general and with Mike's father in particular. Will Hanlon, he was fond of telling his few friends and his son, had had him thrown in the county jail when all of his, Hanlon's, chickens died. 'So's he could get the insurance money, don't you know,' Butch would say, eying his audience with all the baleful interrupt-if-you-dare pugnacity of Captain Billy Bones in the Admiral Benbow. 'He got some of his friends to lie him up, and that's why I had to sell my Merc'ry.'

'Who lied him up, Daddy?' Henry had asked when he was eight, burning at the injustice that had been done to his father. He thought to himself that when he was a grownup he would find liar-uppers and coat them with honey and stake them out over anthills, like in some of those Western movies they showed at the Bijou Theater on Saturday afternoons.

And because his son was a tireless listener (although, if asked, Butch would have maintained that was only as it should be), Bowers Senior filled his son's ears with a litany of hate and hard luck. He explained to his son that while all niggers were stupid, some were cunning as well - and down deep they all hated white men and wanted to plow a white woman's furrow. Maybe it wasn't just the insurance money after all, Butch said; maybe Hanlon had decided to lay the blame for the dead chickens at his door because Butch had the next produce stand down the road. He done it, anyway, and that was just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket. He done it and then got a bunch of white nigger bleeding hearts from town to lie him up and threaten Butch with state prison if he didn't pay that nigger off. 'And why not?' Butch would ask his round-eyed dirty-necked silent son. 'Why not? I was just a man who fought the Japs for his country. There was lots of guys like us, but he was the only nigger in the county.'

The chicken business had been followed by one unlucky incident after another - his Deere tractor had blown a rod; his good harrow got busted in the north field; he got a boil on his neck which became infected, had to be lanced, then became infected again and had to be removed surgically; the nigger started using his foully gotten money to undercut Butch's prices so they lost custom.

In Henry's ears, it was a constant litany: the nigger, the nigger, the nigger. Everything was the nigger's fault. The nigger had a nice white house with an upstairs and an oil furnace while Butch and his wife and his son lived in what was not much better than a tarpaper shack. When Butch couldn't make enough money farming and had to go to work in the woods for awhile, it was the nigger's fault. When their well went dry in 1956, it was the nigger's fault.

Later that same year Henry, who was then ten years old, started to feed Mike's dog Mr Chips old stewbones and bags of potato-chips. It got so Mr Chips would wag his tail and come running when Henry called. When the dog was well used to Henry and Henry's treats, Henry one day fed him a pound of hamburger laced with insect poison. The bug-killer he found in the back shed; he had saved three weeks to buy the meat at Costello's.

Mr Chips ate half the poisoned meat and then stopped. 'Go on, finish your treat, Niggerdog,' Henry had said. Mr Chips wagged his tail. Since Henry had called him this from the beginning, he believed it was his other name. When the pains started, Henry produced a piece of clothesline and tied Mr Chips to a birch so he couldn't get away and run home. He then sat on a flat sun-warmed rock, put his chin in his palms, and watched the dog die. It took a good long time, but Henry considered it time well spent. At the end Mr Chips began to convulse and a thin green foam ran from between his jaws.

'How do you like that, Niggerdog?' Henry asked it, and it rolled its dying eyes up at the sound of Henry's voice and tried to wag its tail. 'Did you like your lunch, you shitty mutt?'

When the dog was dead, Henry removed the clothesline, went home, and told his father what he had done. Oscar Bowers was extremely crazy by that time; a year later his wife would leave him after he beat her nearly to death. Henry was likewise frightened of his father and felt a terrible hate for him sometimes, but he also loved him. And that afternoon, after he had told, he felt he had finally found the key to his father's affections, because his father had clapped him on the back (so hard that Henry almost fell over), taken him in the living room, and given him a beer. It was the first beer Henry had ever had, and for all the rest of his years he would associate that taste with positive emotions: victory and love.

'Here's to a good job well done,' Henry's crazy father had said. They clicked their brown bottles together and drank them down. So far as Henry knew, the niggers had never found out who killed their dog, but he supposed they had their suspicions. He hoped they did.

The others in the Losers' Club knew Mike by sight - in a town where he was the only Negro child, it would have been strange if they had not - but that was all, because Mike didn't go to Derry Elementary School. His mother was a devout Baptist and Mike was therefore sent to the Neibolt Street Church School. In between geography, reading, and arithuaetic there were Bible drills, lessons on such subjects as The Meaning of the Ten Commandments in a Godless World, and discussion-groups on how to handle everyday moral problems (if you saw a buddy shoplifting, for instance, or heard a teacher taking the name of God in vain).

Mike thought the Church School was okay. There were times when he suspected, in a vague way, that he was missing some things - a wider communication with kids his own age perhaps - but he was willing to wait until high school for these things to happen. The prospect made him a little nervous because his skin was brown, but both his mother and father had been well treated in town as far as Mike could see, and Mike believed he would be treated well if he treated others the same way.

The exception to this rule, of course, was Henry Bowers.

Although he tried to show it as little as possible, Mike went in constant terror of Henry. In 1958 Mike was slim and well built, taller than Stan Uris but not quite as tall as Bill Denbrough. He was fast and agile, and that had saved him from several beatings at Henry's hands. And, of course, he went to a different school. Because of that and the age difference, their paths rarely coincided. Mike took pains to keep things that way. So the irony was this: although Henry hated Mike Hanlon more than any other kid in Derry, Mike had been the least hurt of any of them.

Oh, he had taken his lumps. The spring after he had killed Mike's dog, Henry sprang out of the bushes one day while Mike was walking toward town to go to the library. It was late March, warm enough for bike-riding, but in those days Witcham Road turned to dirt just beyond the Bowers place, which meant that it was a quagmire of mud - no good for bikes.

'Hello, nigger,' Henry had said, emerging from the bushes, grinning.

Mike backed off, eyes flicking warily right and left, watching for a chance to get away. He knew that if he could buttonhook around Henry, he could outdistance him. Henry was big and Henry was strong, but Henry was also slow.

'Gonna make me a tarbaby,' Henry said, advancing on the smaller boy. 'You're not black enough, but I'll fix that.'

Mike cut his eyes to the left and twitched his body in that direction. Henry took the bait and broke that way - too fast and too far to pull himself back. Reversing with a sweet and natural speed, Mike took off to the right (in high school he would make the varsity football team as a tailback his sophomore year, and was only kept from breaking the school's all-time scoring record by a broken leg halfway through his senior season). He would have made it easily past Henry but for the mud. It was greasy, and Mike slipped to his knees. Before he could get up, Henry was upon him.

'Niggerniggernigger!' Henry cried in a kind of religious ecstasy as he rolled Mike over. Mud went up the back of Mike's shirt and down the back of his pants. He could feel it squeezing into his shoes. But he did not begin to cry until Henry slathered mud across his face, plugging up both of his nostrils.

'Now you're black!' Henry had screamed gleefully, rubbing mud in Mike's hair. 'Now you're REEEELY black!' He ripped up Mike's poplin jacket and the tee-shirt beneath and slammed a poultice of mud down over the boy's bellybutton. 'Now you're as black as midnight in a MINESHAFT!' Henry screamed triumphantly, and slammed mudplugs into both of Mike's ears. Then he stood back, muddy hands hooked into his belt, and yelled: 'I killed your dog, black boy!' But Mike did not hear this because of the mud in his ears and his own terrified sobs.

Henry kicked a final sticky clot of mud onto Mike and then turned and walked home, not looking back. A few moments later, Mike got up and did the same, still weeping.

His mother was of course furious; she wanted Will Hanlon to call Chief Borton and have him out to the Bowers house before the sun went down. 'He's been after Mikey before,' Mike heard her say. He was sitting in the bathtub and his parents were in the kitchen. This was his second tub of water; the first had turned black almost the moment he had stepped into it and sat down. In her fury, his mother had lapsed into a thick Texas patois Mike could barely understand. 'You put the law on him, Will Hanlon! Both the dog and the pup! You law em, hear me?'

Will heard, but did not do as his wife asked. Eventually, when she cooled down (by then it was that night and Mike two hours asleep), he refreshed her on the facts of life. Chief Borton was not Sheriff Sullivan. If Borton had been sheriff when the incident of the poisoned chickens occurred, Will would never have gotten his two hundred dollars and would have had to be content with that state of affairs. Some men would stand behind you and some men wouldn't; Borton was of the latter type. He was, in fact, a jellyfish.

'Mike has had trouble with that kid before, yes,' he told Jessica. 'But he hasn't had much because he's careful around Henry Bowers. This will serve to make him more careful.'

'You mean you're just going to let it go?'

'Bowers has told his son stories about his dealings with me, I guess,' Will said, 'and his son hates the three of us because of them, and because his father has also told him that hating niggers is what men are supposed to do. It all comes back to that. I can't change the fact that our son is a Negro any more than I can sit here and tell you that Henry Bowers is going to be the last one to take after him because his skin's brown. He's going to have to deal with it all the rest of his life, as I have dealt with it, and you have dealt with it. Why, right there in that Christian school you were bound he was going to go to the teacher told them blacks weren't as good as whites because Noah's son Ham looked at his father while he was drunk and naked and Noah's other two boys cast their eyes aside. That's why the sons of Ham were condemned to always be hewers of wood and drawers of water, she said. And Mikey said she was lookin right at him while she told that story to them.'

Jessica looked at her husband, mute and miserable. Two tears fell, one from each eye, and tracked slowly down her face. 'Isn't there ever any getting away from it?'

His reply was kind but implacable; it was a tune when wives believed their husbands, and Jessica had no reason to doubt her Will.

'No. There is no getting away from the word nigger, not now, not in the world we've been given to live in, you and me. Country niggers from Maine are still niggers. I have thought, times, that the reason I came back to Derry was that there is no better place to remember that. But I'll have a talk with the boy.'

The next day he called Mike out of the barn. Will sat on the yoke of his harrow and patted a place next to him for Mike.

'You want to stay out of that Henry Bowers's way,' he said.

Mike nodded.

'His father is crazy.'

Mike nodded again. He had heard as much around town. His few glimpses of Mr Bowers had reinforced the notion.

'I don't mean just a little crazy,' Will said, lighting a home-rolled Bugler cigarette and looking at his son. 'He's t about three steps away from the boobyhatch. He came back from the war that way.'

'I think Henry's crazy too,' Mike said. His voice was low but firm, and that strengthened Will's heart . . . although he was, even after a checkered life whose incidents had included almost being burned alive in a juryrigged speakeasy called the Black Spot, unable to believe a kid like Henry could be crazy.

'Well, he's listened to his father too much, but that is only natural,' Will said. Yet on this his son was closer to the truth. Henry Bowers, either because of his constant association with his father or because of something else - some interior thing - was indeed slowly but surely going crazy.

'I don't want you to make a career out of running away,' his father said, 'but because you're a Negro, you're apt to be put upon a good deal. Do you know what I mean?'

'Yes, Daddy,' Mike said, thinking of Bob Gautier at school, who had tried to explain to Mike that nigger could not be a bad word, because his father used it all the time. In fact, Bob told Mike earnestly, it was a good word. When a fighter on the Friday Night Fights took a bad beating and managed to stay on his feet, his daddy said, 'His head is as hard as a nigger's,' and when someone was really putting out at his work (which, for Mr Gautier, was Star Beef in town), his daddy said, 'That man works like a nigger.' 'And my daddy is just as much a Christian as your daddy,' Bob had finished. Mike remembered that, looking at Bob Gautier's white earnest pinched face, surrounded by the mangy fur of his hand-me-down snowsuit-hood, he had felt not anger but a terrible sadness that made him feel like crying. He had seen honesty and good intent in Bob's face, but what he had felt was loneliness, distance, a great whistling emptiness between himself and the other boy.

'I see that you do know what I mean,' Will said, and ruffled his son's hair. 'And what it all comes down to is that you have to be careful where you take your stand. You have to ask yourself if Henry Bowers is worth the trouble. Is he?'

'No,' Mike said. 'No, I don't think so.' It would be yet awhile before he changed his mind; July 3rd, 1958, in fact.

4

While Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Belch Huggins, Peter Gordon, and a half-retarded high-school boy named Steve Sadler (known as Moose, after the character in the Archie comics) were chasing a winded Mike Hanlon through the trainyard and toward the Barrens about half a mile away, Bill and the rest of the Losers' Club were still sitting on the bank of the Kenduskeag, pondering their nightmare problem.

'I nun-know w-where ih-ih-it is, I think,' Bill said, finally breaking the silence.

'The sewers,' Stan said, and they all jumped at a sudden, harsh rattling noise. Eddie smiled guiltily as he lowered his aspirator back into his lap.

Bill nodded. 'I wuh-wuh-was a-asking my fuh-father about the suh-sewers a f-few nuh-hi-hights a-a-ago.'

'All of this area was originally marsh,' Zack told his son, 'and the town fathers managed to put what's downtown these days in the very worst part of it. The section of the Canal that runs under Center and Main and comes out in Bassey Park is really nothing but a drain that happens to hold the Kenduskeag. Most of the year those drains are almost empty, but they're important when the spring runoff comes or when there are floods . . . 'He paused here, perhaps thinking that it had been during the flood of the previous autumn that he had lost his younger son. ' . . . because of the pumps,' he finished.

'Puh-puh-pumps?' Bill asked, turning his head a little without even thinking about it. When he stuttered over the plosive sounds, spittle flew from his lips.

The drainage pumps,' his father said. 'They're in the Barrens. Concrete sleeves that stick about three feet out of the ground - '

'Buh-Buh-Ben H-H-H-Hanscom calls them Muh-Morlock h-holes,' Bill said, grinning.

Zack grinned back . . . but it was a shadow of his old grin. They were in Zack's workshop, where he was turning chair-dowels without much interest. 'Sump-pumps is all they really are, kiddo,' he said. They sit in cylinders about ten feet deep, and they pump the sewage and the runoff along when the slope of the land levels out or angles up a little. It's old machinery, and the city should have some new pumps, but the Council always pleads poverty when the item comes up on the agenda at budget meetings. If I had a quarter for every time I've been down there, up to my knees in crap, rewiring one of those motors . . . but you don't want to hear all this, Bill. Why don't you go watch TV? I think Sugarfoot's on tonight.'

'I d-d-do wuh-want to h-hear it,' Bill said, and not only because he had come to the conclusion that there was something terrible under Derry someplace.

'Why do you want to hear about a bunch of sewer-pumps?' Zack asked.

'Skuh-skuh-hool ruh-report,' Bill said wildly.

'School's Out.'

'N-N-Next year.'

'Well, it's a pretty dull subject,' Zack said. Teacher'll probably give you an F for putting him to sleep. Look, here's the Kenduskeag' - he drew a straight line in the light fall of sawdust on the table in which his handsaw was embedded - 'and here's the Barrens. Now, because downtown's lower than the residential areas - Kansas Street, say, or the Old Cape, or West Broadway - most of the downtown waste has to be pumped into the river. The waste from the houses flows down to the Barrens pretty much on its own. You see?'

'Y-Y-Yes,' Bill said, drawing a little closer to his father to look at the lines, close enough so that his shoulder was against his father's arm.

'Someday they'll put a stop to pumping raw sewage into the river and that'll be an end to the whole business. But for now, we've got those pumps in the . . . what did your buddy call em?'

'Morlock holes,' Bill said, with not a trace of a stutter; neither he nor his father noticed.

'Yeah. That's what the pumps in the Morlock holes are for, anyway, and they work pretty well except when there's too much rain and the streams overflow. Because, although the gravity drains and the sewers with the pumps were meant to be separate systems, they actually crisscross all over the place. See?' He drew a series of 'X's radiating out from the line which represented the Kenduskeag, and Bill nodded. 'Well, the only thing you need to know about water draining is that it will go wherever it can. When it gets high, it starts to fill up the drains as well as the sewers. When the water in the drains gets high enough to reach those pumps, it shorts them out. Makes trouble for me, because I have to fix them.'

'Dad, h-how big are the suh-sewers and drains?'

'You mean, what's the bore on them?'

Bill nodded.

The main sewers are maybe six feet in diameter. The secondaries, from the residential areas, are three or four, I guess. Some of them might be a little bigger. And believe me when I tell you this, Billy, and you can tell your friends: you never want to go into one of those pipes, not in a game, not on a dare, not for any reason.'

'Why?'

'A dozen different town governments have built on them since 1885 or so. During the Depression the WPA put in a whole secondary drain system and a tertiary sewer system; there was lots of money for public works back then. But the fellow who bossed those projects got killed in World War II, and about five years later the Water Department found out that the system blueprints were mostly gone. That's about nine pounds of blues that just disappeared sometime between 1937 and 1950. My point is that nobody knows where all the damned sewers and drains go, or why.

'When they work, nobody cares. When they don't, there's three or four sad sacks from Derry Water who have to try and find out which pump went flooey or where the plug-up is. And when they go down there, they damn well pack a lunch. It's dark and it's smelly and there are rats. Those are all good reasons to stay out, but the best reason is that you could get lost. It's happened before.'

Lost under Derry. Lost in the sewers. Lost in the dark. There was something so dismal and chilling about the idea that Bill was momentarily silenced. Then he said, 'But haven't they ever suh-suh-hent people down to map - '

'I ought to finish these dowels,' Zack said abruptly, turning his back and pulling away. 'Go on in and see what's on TV'

'B-B-But Dah-Dah-Dad - '

'Go on, Bill,' Zack said, and Bill could feel the coldness again. That coldness made suppers a kind of torture as his father leafed through electrical journals (he hoped for a promotion the following year), as his mother read one of her endless British mysteries: Marsh, Sayers, Innes, Allingham. Eating in that coldness robbed food of its taste; it was like eating frozen dinners that had never seen the inside of an oven. Sometimes, after, he would go up to his room and lie on his bed, holding his griping stomach, and think: He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts. He thought of that more and more since Georgie had died, although his mother had taught him the phrase two years before. It had taken on a talismanic cast in his mind: the day he could walk up to his mother and simply speak that phrase without tripping or stuttering, looking her right in the eye as he spoke it, the coldness would break apart; her eyes would light up and she would hug him and say, 'Wonderful, Billy! What a good boy! What a good boy!'

He had, of course, told this to no one. Wild horses would not have dragged it from him; neither the rack nor the boot would have induced him to give up this secret fantasy, which lay at the very center of his heart. If he could say this phrase which she had taught him casually one Saturday morning as he and Georgie sat watching Guy Madison and Andy Devine in The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, it would be like the kiss that awakened Sleeping Beauty from her cold dreams to the warmer world of the fairytale prince's love.

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

Nor did he tell it to his friends on that July 3rd - but he told them what his father had told him about the Derry sewer and drain systems. He was a boy to whom invention came easily and naturally (sometimes more easily than telling the truth), and the scene he painted was quite different from the scene in which the conversation had actually taken place: he and his old man had been watching the tube together, he said, having cups of coffee.

'Your dad lets you have coffee?' Eddie asked.

'Sh-sh-sure,' Bill said.

'Wow,' Eddie said. 'My mother would never let me have a coffee. She says the caffeine in it is dangerous.' He paused. 'She drinks quite a bit of it herself, though.'

'My dad lets me have coffee if I want it,' Beverly said, 'but he'd kill me if he knew I smoked.'

'What makes you so sure it's in the sewers?' Richie asked, looking from Bill to Stan Uris and then back to Bill again.

'E-E-Everything g-goes back t-to th-th-that,' Bill said. 'The v-voices Beh-he-heverly heard c-came from the d-d-drain. And the bluh-blood. When the c-c-clown ch-chased us, those o-orange buh-buh-buttons were by a suh-sewer. And Juh juh-George - '

'It wasn't a clown, Big Bill,' Richie said. 'I told you that. I know it's crazy, but it was a werewolf.' He looked at the others defensively. 'Honest to God. I saw it.'

Bill said: 'It was a werewolf for y-y-you.'

'Huh?'

Bill said, 'D-Don't you s-s-see? It was a wuh-wuh-were wolf for y-you because y-you saw that duh-humb movie at the A-A-A-Aladdin.'

'I don't get it.'

'I think I do,' Ben said quietly.

'I went to the l-l-library and l-looked it uh-uh-up,' Bill said. 'I think It's a gluh-gluh' - he paused, throat straining, and spat it out - 'a glamour.'

'Glammer?' Eddie asked doubtfully.

'G-G-Glamour,' Bill said, and spelled it. He told them about an encyclopedia entry on the subject and, a chapter he had read in a book called Night's Truth. Glamour, he said, was the Gaelic name for the creature which was haunting Derry; other races and other cultures at other times had different words for it, but they all meant the same thing. The Plains Indians called it a manitou, which sometimes took the shape of a mountain-lion or an elk or an eagle. These same Indians believed that the spirit of a manitou could sometimes enter them, and at these times it was possible for them to shape the clouds themselves into representations of those animals for which their houses had been named. The Himalayans called it a tallus or taelus, which meant an evil magic being that could read your mind and then assume the shape of the thing you were most afraid of. In Central Europe it had been called eylak, brother of the vurderlak, or vampire. In France it was le loup-garou, or skin-changer, a concept that had been crudely translated as the werewolf, but, Bill told them, le loup-garou (which he pronounced 'le loop-garoo') could be anything, anything at all: a wolf, a hawk, a sheep, even a bug.

'Did any of those articles tell you how to beat a glamour?' Beverly asked.

Bill nodded, but he didn't look hopeful. 'The H-H-Himalayans had a rih-hi-hitual to g-get rih-rid of i-i-it, but ih-it's pretty gruh-gruh-grue-some.'

They looked at him, not wanting to hear but needing to.

'I-I-It was cuh-called the R-R-Ritual of Chüh-Chüd,' Bill said, and went on to explain what that was. If you were a Himalayan holy-man, you tracked the taelus. The taelus stuck its tongue out. You stuck yours out. You and it overlapped tongues and then you both bit in all the way so you were sort of stapled together, eye to eye.

'Oh, I think I'm gonna puke,' Beverly said, rolling over on the dirt. Ben patted her back tentatively, then looked around to see if he had been observed. He hadn't been; the others were looking at Bill, mesmerized.

'What then?' Eddie asked.

'W-W-Well,' Bill said, 'this sounds cuh-cuh-crazy, b-but the book s-said that th-then y-you started telling juh- jokes and rih-riddles.'

'What? Stan asked.

Bill nodded, his face that of a correspondent who wants you to know - without coining right out and saying it - that he doesn't make the news but only reports it. 'R-Right. F-First the t-taelus monster would tell o-o-one, then y-y-you got to t-t-tell o-one, and y-you w-w-went o-on like thuh-that, t-tay-takin t-turns - '

Beverly sat up again, knees against her chest, hands linked around her shins. 'I don't see how people could talk with their tongues, you know, nailed together.'

Richie immediately ran out his tongue, gripped it with his fingers, and intoned: 'My father works in a shit-yard!' That broke them all up for awhile even though it was a baby joke.

'M-Maybe it was suh-suh-suhpposed to be tuh-telepathy,' Bill said. 'A-Anyway, i-if the h-h-human laughed f-f-first in spi-hite of the p-p-p-p - '

'Pain?' Stan asked.

Bill nodded.' - then the taelus g-got to k-k-kill h-him and e-e-e-eat him. His soul, I think. B-But i-if the muh-man c-c-ould make the t-taelus l-laugh f-f-first, it had to go away for a huh-huh-hundred y-years.

'Did the book say where a thing like that would come from?' Ben asked.

Bill shook his head.

'Do you believe any of it?' Stan asked, sounding as if he wanted to scoff but could not quite find the moral or mental force to do so.

Bill shrugged and said, 'I a-a-almost d-do.' He seemed about to say more, then shook his head and remained silent.

'It explains a lot,' Eddie said slowly. The clown, the leper, the werewolf . . . ' He looked.over at Stan. 'The dead boys, too, I guess.'

'This sounds like a job for Richard Tozier,' Richie said, in the MovieTone Newsreel Announcer's Voice. 'Man of a thousand jokes and six thousand riddles.'

'If we sent you to do it, we'd all get killed,' Ben said. 'Slowly. In great pain.' At this they all laughed again.

'So what do we do about it?' Stan demanded, and once again Bill could only shake his head . . . and feel he almost knew. Stan stood up. 'Let's go somewhere else,' he said. 'I'm getting fanny fatigue.'

'I like it here,' Beverly said. 'It's shady and nice.' She glanced at Stan. 'I suppose you want to do something babyish like going down to the dump and breaking bottles with rocks.'

'I like breaking bottles with rocks,' Richie said, standing up beside Stan. 'It's the j.d. in me, baby.' He flipped up his collar and began to stalk around like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. 'They hurt me,' he said, looking moody and scratching his chest. 'You know, like wow. My parents. School. So-SY-ety. Everyone. It's pressure, baby. It's - '

'It's shit,' Beverly said, and sighed.

'I've got some firecrackers,' Stan said, and they forgot all about glamours, manitous, and Richie's bad James Dean imitation as Stan produced a package of Black Cats from his hip pocket. Even Bill was impressed.

'J-Jesus Christ, Stuh-Stuh-han, w-where did you g-g-get thuh-hose?'

'From this fat kid that I go to synagogue with sometimes,' Stan said. 'I

traded a bunch of Superman and Little Lulu funnybooks for em.'

'Let's shoot em off!' Richie cried, nearly apoplectic in his joy. 'Let's go shoot em off, Stanny, I won't tell any more guys you and your dad killed Christ, I promise, what do you say? I'll tell em your nose is small, Stanny! I'll tell em you're not circumcised!'

At this Beverly began to shriek with laughter and actually appeared to be approaching apoplexy before covering her face with her hands. Bill began to laugh, Eddie began to laugh, and after a moment even Stan joined in. The sound of it drifted across the broad shallow expanse of the Kenduskeag on that day before July 4th, a summer-sound, as bright as the sunrays darting off the water, and none of them saw the orange eyes staring at them from a tangle of brambles and sterile blackberry bushes to their left. This brambly patch scrubbed the entire bank for thirty feet, and in the center of it was one of Ben's Morlock holes. It was from this raised concrete pipe that the eyes, each more than two feet across, stared.

5

The reason Mike ran afoul of Henry Bowers and his not-so-merry band on that same day was because the next day was the Glorious Fourth. The Church School had a band in which Mike played the trombone. On the Fourth, the band would march in the annual holiday parade, playing 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic,' 'Onward Christian Soldiers,' and 'America the Beautiful.' This was an occasion that Mike had been looking forward to for over a month. He walked to the final rehearsal because his bike had a busted chain. The rehearsal was not scheduled until two-thirty, but he left at one because he wanted to polish his trombone, which was stored in the school's music room, until it glowed. Although his trombone-playing was really not much better than Richie's Voices, he was fond of the instrument, and whenever he felt blue a half an hour of foghorning Sousa marches, hymns, or patriotic airs cheered hun right up again. There was a can of Saddler's brass polish in one of the flap pockets of his khaki shirt and two or three clean rags were dangling from the hip pocket of his jeans. The thought of Henry Bowers was the furthest thing from his mind. A glance behind as he approached Neibolt Street and the Church School would have changed his mind in a hurry, because Henry, Victor, Belch, Peter Gordon, and Moose Sadler were spread across the road behind him. If they had left the Bowers house five minutes later, Mike would have been out of sight over the crest of the next hill; the apocalyptic rockfight and everything that followed it might have happened differently, or not at all.

But it was Mike himself, years later, who advanced the idea that perhaps none of them were entirely their own masters in the events of that summer; that if luck and free will had played parts, then their roles had been narrow ones. He would point out a number of these suspicious coincidences to the others at their reunion lunch, but there was at least one of which he was unaware. The meeting in the Barrens that day broke up when Stan Uris produced the Black Cats and the Losers' Club headed toward the dump to shoot them off. And Victor, Belch, and the others had come out to the Bowers farm because Henry had firecrackers, cherry-bombs, and M-80s (the possession of these last would a few years hence become a felony). The big boys were planning to go down beyond the trainyard coalpit and explode Henry's treasures.

None of them, not even Belch, went out to the Bowers farm under ordinary circumstances - primarily because of Henry's crazy father but also because they always ended up helping Henry do his chores: the weeding, the endless rock-picking, the lugging of wood, the toting of water, the pitching of hay, the picking of whatever happened to be ripe at the time of the season - peas, cukes, tomatoes, potatoes. These boys were not exactly allergic to work, but they had plenty to do at their own places without sweating for Henry's kooky father, who didn't much care who he hit (he had once taken a length of stovewood to Victor Criss when the boy dropped a basket of tomatoes he was lugging out to the roadside stand). Getting whopped with a chunk of birch was bad enough; what made it worse was that Butch Bowers had chanted 'I'm gonna kill all the Nips! I'm gonna kill all the fuckin Nips!' when he did it.

Dumb as he was, Belch Huggins had expressed it best: 'I don't fuck with crazy people,' he told Victor one day two years before. Victor had laughed and agreed.

But the siren-song of all those firecrackers had been too great to be withstood.

Tell you what, Henry,' Victor said when Henry called him up that morning at nine and invited him out. 'I'll meet you at the coalpit around one o'clock, what do you say?'

'You show up at the coalpit around one and I'm not gonna be there,' Henry replied. 'I got too many chores. If you show up at the coalpit around three, I will be there. And the first M-80 is going to go right up your old tan track, Vie.'

Vie hesitated, then agreed to come over and help with the chores.

The others came as well, and with the five of them, all big boys, working like fiends around the Bowers place, they got all the chores finished by early afternoon. When Henry asked his father if he could go, Bowers the elder simply waved a languid hand at his son. Butch was settled in for the afternoon on the back porch, a quart milk-bottle filled with exquisitely hard cider by his rocker, his Philco portable radio on the porch rail (later that afternoon the Red Sox would be playing the Washington Senators, a prospect that would have given a man who was not crazy a bad case of cold chills). An unsheathed Japanese sword lay across Butch's lap, a war souvenir which, Butch said, he had taken off the body of a dying Nip on the island of Tarawa (he had actually traded six bottles of Budweiser and three joysticks for the sword in Honolulu). Lately Butch almost always got out his sword when he drank. And since all of the boys, including Henry himself, were secretly convinced that sooner or later he would use it on someone, it was best to be far away when it made its appearance on Butch's lap.

The boys had no more than stepped out into the road when Henry spied Mike Hanlon up ahead. 'It's the nigger!' he said, his eyes lighting up like the eyes of a small child contemplating Santa Claus's imminent arrival on Christmas Eve.

'The nigger?' Belch Huggins looked puzzled - he had seen the Hanlons only rarely - and then his dim eyes lit up. 'Oh yeah! The nigger! Let's get him, Henry!'

Belch broke into a thunderous trot. The others were following suit when Henry grabbed Belch and hauled him back. Henry had more experience than the others chasing Mike Hanlon, and he knew that catching him was easier said than done. That black boy could move.

'He don't see us. Let's just walk fast till he does. Cut the distance.'

They did so. An observer might have been amused: the five of them looked as if they were trying out for that peculiar Olympic walking competition. Moose Sadler's considerable belly joggled up and down inside his Derry High School tee-shirt. Sweat rolled down Belch's face, which soon grew red. But the distance between them and Mike closed - two hundred yards, a hundred and fifty yards, a hundred - and so far Little Black Sambo hadn't looked back. They could hear him whistling.

'What you gonna do to him, Henry?' Victor Criss asked in a low voice. He sounded merely interested, but in truth he was worried. Just lately Henry had begun to worry him more and more. He wouldn't care if Henry wanted them to beat the Hanlon kid up, maybe even rip his shut off or throw his pants and underwear up in a tree, but he was not sure that was all Henry had in mind. This year there had been several unpleasant encounters with the children from Derry Elementary Henry referred to as 'the little shits.' Henry was used to dominating and terrorizing the little shits, but since March he had been balked by them time and time again. Henry and his friends had chased one of them, the four-eyes Tozier kid, into Freese's, and had lost him somehow just when it seemed his ass was surely theirs. Then, on the last day of school, the Hanscom kid -

But Victor didn't like to think of that.

What worried him, simply, was this: Henry might go TOO FAR Just what TOO FAR might be was something Victor didn't like to think of . . . but his uneasy heart had prompted the question just the same.

'We're gonna catch him and take him down to that coalpit,' Henry said. 'I thought we'd put a couple of firecrackers in his shoes and see if he dances.'

'But not the M-80s, Henry, right?'

If Henry intended something like that Victor was going to take a powder. An M-80 in each shoe would blow that nigger's feet off, and that was much TOO FAR

'I've got only four of those,' Henry said, not taking his eyes off Mike Hanlon's back. They had closed the distance to seventy-five yards now and he also spoke in a low voice. 'You think I'd waste two of em on a fuckin nightfighter?'

'No, Henry. Course not.'

'We'll just put a couple of Black Cats in his loafers,' Henry said, 'then strip him bareass and throw his clothes down into the Barrens. Maybe he'll catch poison ivy going after them.'

'We gotta roll im in the coal, too,' Belch said, his formerly dim eyes now glowing brightly. 'Okay, Henry? Is that cool?'

'Cool as a moose,' Henry said in a casual way Victor didn't quite like. 'We'll roll im in the coal, just like I rolled im in the mud that other time. And . . . ' Henry grinned, showing teeth that were already beginning to rot at the age of twelve. 'And I got something to tell him. I don't think he heard when I told im before.'

'What's that, Henry?' Peter asked. Peter Gordon was merely interested and excited. He came from one of Berry's 'good families'; he lived on West Broadway and in two years he would be sent to prep school in Groton - or so he believed on that July 3rd. He was brighter than Vie Criss, but had not hung around long enough to understand how Henry was eroding.

'You'll find out,' Henry said. 'Now shut up. We're gettin close.'

They were twenty-five yards behind Mike and Henry was just opening his mouth to give the order to charge when Moose Sadler set off the first firecracker of the day. Moose had eaten three plates of baked beans the night before, and the fart was almost as loud as a shotgun blast.

Mike looked around. Henry saw his eyes widen.

'Get him!' Henry howled.

Mike froze for a moment; then he took off, running for his life.

6

The Losers wound their way through the bamboo in the Barrens in this order: Bill; Richie; Beverly behind Richie, walking slim and pretty in bluejeans and a white sleeveless blouse, zoris on her feet; then Ben, trying not to puff too loudly (although it was eighty-one that day, he was wearing one of his baggy sweatshirts); Stan; Eddie bringing up the rear, the snout of his aspirator poking out of his right front pants pocket. Bill had fallen into a 'jungle-safari' fantasy, as he often did when walking through this part of the Barrens. The bamboo was high and white, limiting visibility to the path they had made through here. The earth was black and squelchy, with sodden patches that had to be avoided or jumped over if you didn't want to get mud in your shoes. The puddles of standing water had oddly flat rainbow colors. The air had a reeky smell that was half the dump and half rotting vegetation.

Bill halted one turn away from the Kenduskeag and turned back to Richie. T-T-Tiger up ahead, T-T-Tozier.'

Richie nodded and turned back to Beverly. 'Tiger,' he breathed.

'Tiger,' she told Ben. :

'Man-eater?' Ben asked, holding his breath to keep from panting.

'There's blood all over him,' Beverly said.

'Man-eating tiger,' Ben muttered to Stan, and he passed the news back to Eddie, whose thin face was hectic with excitement.

They faded into the bamboo, leaving the path of black earth that looped through it magically bare. The tiger passed in front of them and all of them nearly saw it: heavy, perhaps four hundred pounds, its muscles moving with grace and power beneath the silk of its striped pelt. They nearly saw its green eyes, and the flecks of blood around its snout from the last batch of pygmy warriors it had eaten alive.

The bamboo rattled faintly, a noise both musical and eerie, and then was still again. It might have been a breath of summer breeze . . . or it might have been the passage of an African tiger on its way toward the Old Cape side of the Barrens.

'Gone,' Bill said. He let out a pent-up breath and stepped out onto the path again. The others followed suit.

Richie was the only one who had come armed: he produced a cap-pistol with a friction-taped handgrip. 'I could have had a clear shot at him if you'd moved, Big Bill,' he said grimly. He pushed the bridge of his old glasses up on his nose with the muzzle of the gun.

'There's Wuh-Wuh-Watusis around h-h-here,' Bill said. 'C-C-Can't rih-risk a shot. Y-You w-want them down on t-t-top of us?'

'Oh,' Richie said, convinced.

Bill made a come-on gesture with his arm and they were back on the path again, which narrowed into a neck at the end of the bamboo patch. They stepped out onto the bank of the Kenduskeag, where a series of stepping-stones led across the river. Ben had shown them how to place them. You got a big rock and plopped it in the water, then you got a second and plopped it in the water while you were stepping on the first, then you got a third and plopped it in the water while you were stepping on the second, and so on until you were all the way across the river (which here, and at this time of year, was less than a foot deep and shaled with tawny sandbars) with your feet still dry. The trick was so simple it was damn near babyish, but none of them had seen it until Ben pointed it out. He was good at stuff like that, but when he showed you he never made you feel like a dummy.

They went down the bank in single file and started across the dry backs of the rocks they had planted.

'Bill!' Beverly called urgently.

He froze at once, not looking back, arms held out. The water chuckled and rilled around him. 'What?'

'There's piranha fish in here! I saw them eat a whole cow two days ago. A minute after it fell in, there was nothing but bones. Don't fall off!'

'Right,' Bill said. 'Be careful, men.'

They teetered their way across the rocks. A freight-train charged by on the railway embankment as Eddie Kaspbrak neared the halfway point, and the sudden blast of its airhorn caused him to jiggle on the edge of balance. He looked into the bright water and for one moment, between the sunnxx1 ashes that darted arrows of light into his eyes, he actually saw the cruising piranhas. They were not part of the make-believe that went with Bill's jungle safari fantasy; he was quite sure of that. The fish he saw looked like oversized goldfish with the great ugly jaws of catfish or groupers. Sawteeth protruded between their thick lips and, like goldfish, they were orange. As orange as the fluffy pompoms you sometimes saw on the suits the clowns wore at the circus.

They circled in the shallow water, gnashing.

Eddie pin wheeled his arms. I'm going in, he thought. I'm going in and they'll eat me alive -

Then Stanley Uris gripped his wrist firmly and brought him back to dead center.

'Close call,' Stan said. 'If you fell in, your mother'd give you heck.'

Thoughts of his mother were, for once, the furthest things from Eddie's mind. The others had gained the far bank now and were counting cars on the freight. Eddie stared wildly into Stan's eyes, then looked into the water again. He saw a potato-chip bag go dancing by, but that was all. He looked up at Stan again.

'Stan, I saw - '

- 'What?'

Eddie shook his head. 'Nothing, I guess,' he said. 'I'm just a little

(but they were there yes they were and they would have eaten me alive)

' - jumpy. The tiger, I guess. Keep going.'

This western bank of the Kenduskeag - the Old Cape bank - was a quagmire of mud during rainy weather and the spring runoff, but there had been no heavy rain in Derry for two weeks or more and the bank had dried to an alien crack-glaze from which several of those cement cylinders poked, casting grim little shadows. About twenty yards farther down, a cement pipe jutted out over the Kenduskeag and spilled a steady thin stream of foul-looking brown water into the river.

Ben said quietly, 'It's creepy here,' and the others nodded.

Bill led them up the dry bank and back into the heavy shrubbery, where bugs whirred and chiggers chigged. Every now and then there would be a heavy ruffle of wings as a bird took off. Once a squirrel ran across their path, and about five minutes later, as they approached the low wrinkle of ridge that guarded the town dump's blind side, a large rat with a bit of cellophane caught in its whiskers trundled in front of Bill, passing along its own secret run through its own microcosmic wilderness.

The smell of the dump was now clear and pungent; a black column of smoke rose in the sky. The ground, while still heavily overgrown except for their own narrow path, began to be strewn with litter. Bill had dubbed this 'dump-dandruff,' and Richie had been delighted; he had laughed almost until he cried. 'You ought to write that down, Big Bill,' he said. 'That's really good.'

Papers caught on branches wavered and flapped like cut-rate pennants; here was a silver gleam of summer sun reflected from a clutch of tin cans lying at the bottom of a green and tangled hollow; there the hotter reflection of sunrays bouncing off a broken beer bottle. Beverly spied a babydoll, its plastic skin so brightly pink it looked almost boiled. She picked it up, then dropped it with a little cry as she saw the whitish-gray beetles squirming from beneath its moldy skirt and down its rotting legs. She rubbed her fingers on her jeans.

They climbed to the top of the ridge and looked down into the dump.

'Oh shit,' Bill said, and jammed his hands into his pockets as the others gathered around him.

They were burning the northern end today, but here, at their end, the dumpkeeper (he was, in fact, Armando Fazio, Mandy to his friends, and the bachelor brother of the Derry Elementary School janitor) was tinkering on the World War II D-9 'dozer he used to push the crap into piles for burning. His shirt was off, and the big portable radio sitting under the canvas parasol on the 'dozer's seat was putting out the Red Sox - Senators pregame festivities.

'Can't go down there,' Ben agreed. Mandy Fazio was not a bad guy, but when he saw kids in the dump he ran them off at once - because of the rats, because of the poison he regularly sowed to keep the rat population down, because of the potential for cuts, falls, and burns . . . but mostly because he believed a dump was no place for children to be. 'Ain't you nice?' he would yell at the kids he spied who had been drawn to the dump with their .22s to plink away at bottles (or rats, or seagulls) or by the exotic fascination of 'dump-picking': you might find a toy that still worked, a chair that could be mended for a clubhouse, or a junked TV with the picture-tube still intact - if you threw a rock through one of these there was a very satisfying explosion. 'Ain't you kids nice?' Mandy would bellow (he bellowed not because he was angry but because he was deaf and wore no hearing-aid). 'Dintchore folks teach you to be nice? Nice boys and girls don't play in the dump! Go to the park! Go to the liberry! Go down to Community House and play box-hockey! Be nice!'

'Nope,' Richie said. 'Guess the dump's out.'

They all sat down for a few moments to watch Mandy work on his 'dozer, hoping he would give up and go away but not really believing he would: the presence of the radio suggested Mandy intended to stay all afternoon. It was enough to piss off the Pope, Bill thought. There was really no better place to come with firecrackers than the dump. You could put them under tin cans and then watch the cans fly into the air when the firecrackers went off, or you could light the fuses and drop them into bottles and then run like hell. The bottles didn't always break, but usually they did.

'Wish we had some M-80s,' Richie sighed, unaware of how soon one would be chucked at his head.

'My mother says people ought to be happy with what they have,' Eddie said so solemnly that they all laughed.

When the laughter died away, they all looked toward Bill again.

Bill thought about it and then said, 'I nuh-know a p-place. There's an old gruh-gruh-gravel-pit at the end of the Bun-Barrens by the t-t-trainyards - '

'Yeah!' Stan said, getting to his feet. 'I know that place! You're a genius, Bill!'

'They'll really echo there,' Beverly agreed.

'Well, let's go,' Richie said.

The six of them, one shy of the magic number, walked along the brow of the hill which circled the dump. Mandy Fazio glanced up once and saw them silhouetted against the blue sky like Indians out on a raiding party. He thought about hollering at them - the Barrens was no place for kids - and then he turned back to his work instead. At least they weren't in his dump.

7

Mike Hanlon ran past the Church School without pausing and pelted straight up Neibolt Street toward the Derry trainyards. There was a janitor at NCS, but Mr Gendron was very old and even deafer than Mandy Fazio. Also, he liked to spend most of his summer days asleep in the basement by the summer-silent boiler, stretched out in a battered old reclining chair with the Derry News in his lap. Mike would still be pounding on the door and shouting for the old man to let him in when Henry Bowers came up behind him and tore his freaking head off.

So Mike just ran.

But not blindly; he was trying to pace himself, trying to control his breathing, not yet going all out. Henry, Belch, and Moose Sadler presented no problems; even relatively fresh they ran like wounded buffalo. Victor Criss and Peter Gordon, however, were much faster. As Mike passed the house where Bill and Richie had seen the clown - or the werewolf - he snapped a glance back and was alarmed to see that Peter Gordon had almost closed the distance. Peter was grinning cheerfully - a steeplechase grin, a full-out polo grin, a pip-pip-jolly-good-show grin, and Mike thought: I wonder if he'd grin that way if he knew what's going to happen if they catch me . . . Does he think they're just going to say 'Tag, you're it,' and run away?

As the trainyard gate with its sign - PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED - loomed up, Mike was forced to let himself out to the limit. There was no pain - his breathing was rapid yet still controlled - but he knew everything was going to start hurting if he had to keep this pace up for long. The gate was standing halfway open. He snapped a second look back and saw that he'd pulled away from Peter again. Victor was perhaps ten paces behind Peter, the others now forty or fifty yards back. Even in that quick glance Mike could see the black anger on Henry's face.

He skittered through the opening, whirled, and slammed the gate closed. He heard the click as it latched. A moment later Peter Gordon slammed into the chainlink, and a moment after that, Victor Criss ran up beside him. Peter's smile was gone; a sulky, balked look had replaced it. He grabbed for the latch, but of course there was none: the latch was on the inside.

Incredibly, he said: 'Come on, kid, open the gate. That's not fair.'

'What's your idea of fair?' Mike asked, panting. 'Five against one?'

'Fair-up,' Peter repeated, as if he had not heard Mike at all.

Mike looked at Victor, saw the troubled look in Victor's eyes. He started to speak, but that was when the others pulled up to the gate.

'Open up, nigger!' Henry bawled. He began to shake the chainlink with such ferocity that Peter looked at him, startled. 'Open up! Open up right now!'

'I won't,' Mike said quietly.

'Open up!' Belch shouted. 'Open up, ya fuckin jigaboo!'

Mike backed away from the gate, his heart beating heavily in his chest. He couldn't remember ever being quite this scared, quite this upset. They lined their side of the gate, shouting at him, calling him names for nigger he had never dreamed existed - nightfighter, Ubangi, spade, blackberry, junglebunny, others. He was barely aware that Henry was taking something from his pocket, that he had popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail - and then a round red something came over the fence and he flinched instinctively away as the cherry-bomb exploded to his left, kicking up dust.

The bang silenced them all for a moment - Mike stared unbelievingly at them through the fence, and they stared back. Peter Gordon looked utterly shocked, and even Belch looked stunned.

They're ascared of him now, Mike thought suddenly, and a new voice spoke inside of him, perhaps for the first time, a voice that was disturbingly adult. They're ascared, but that won't stop them. You got to get away, Mikey, or something's going to happen. Not all of them will want it to happen, maybe - not Victor and maybe not Peter Gordon - but it will happen anyway because Henry will make it ' happen. So get away. Get away fast.

He backed up another two or three steps and then Henry Bowers said: 'I was the one killed your dog, nigger.'

Mike froze, feeling as if he had been hit in the belly with a bowling ball. He stared into Henry Bowers's eyes and understood that Henry was telling the simple truth: he had killed Mr Chips.

That moment of understanding seemed nearly eternal to Mike - looking into Henry's crazed sweat-ringed eyes and his rage-blackened face, it seemed to him that he understood a great many things for the first time, and the fact that Henry was far crazier than Mike had ever dreamed was only the least of them. He realized above all that the world was not kind, and it was more this than the news itself that forced the cry from him: 'You honky chickenshit bastard!'

Henry uttered a shriek of rage and attacked the fence, monkeying his way toward the top with a brute strength that was terrifying. Mike paused a moment longer, wanting to see if that adult voice that had spoken inside had been a true voice, and yes, it had been true: after the slightest hesitation, the others spread out and also began to climb.

Mike turned and ran again, sprinting across the trainyards, his shadow trailing squat at his feet. The freight which the Losers had seen crossing the Barrens was long gone now, and there was no sound but Mike's own breathing in his ears and the musical jingle of chainlink as Henry and the others climbed the fence.

Mike ran across one triple set of tracks, his sneakers kicking back cinders as he ran across the space between. He stumbled crossing the second set of tracks, and felt pain flare briefly in his ankle. He got up and ran on again. He heard a thud as Henry jumped down from the top of the fence behind him. 'Here I come for your ass, nigger!' Henry bawled.

Mike's reasoning self had decided that the Barrens were his only chance now. If he could get down there he could hide in the tangles of underbrush, in the bamboo . . . or, if things became really desperate, he could climb into one of the drainpipes and wait it out.

He could do those things, maybe . . . but there was a hot spark of fury in his chest that had nothing to do with his reasoning self. He could understand Henry chasing after him when he got the chance, but Mr Chips? . . . killing Mr Chips? My DOG wasn't a nigger, you cheapshit bastard, Mike thought as he ran, and the bewildered anger grew.

Now he heard another voice, this one his father's. I don't want you to make a career out of running away . . . and what it all comes down to is that you have to be careful where you take your stand. You have to ask yourself if Henry Bowers is worth the trouble . . .

Mike had been running a straight line across the trainyards toward the storage quonsets. Beyond them another chainlink fence divided the trainyards from the Barrens. He had been planning to scale that fence and jump over to the other side. Instead he veered hard right, toward the gravel-pit.

This gravel-pit had been used as a coalpit until 1935 or so - it had been a ' stoking-point for the trains which ran through the Derry yards. Then the diesels came, and the electrics. For a number of years after the coal was gone (much of the remainder stolen by people with coal-fired furnaces) a local contractor had dug gravel there, but he went bust in 1955 and since then the pit had been deserted. A spur railroad line still ran in a loop up to the pit and then back toward the switching-yards, but the tracks were dull with rust, and ragweed grew up between the rotting ties. These same weeds grew in the pit itself, vying for space with goldenrod and nodding sunflowers. Amid the vegetation there was still plenty of slag coal - the stuff people had once called 'clinkers.'

As Mike ran toward this place, he took his shirt off. He reached the run of the pit and looked back. Henry was coming across the tracks, his buddies spread out around him. That was okay, maybe.

Moving as quickly as he could, using his shirt for a bindle, Mike picked up half a dozen handfuls of hard clinkers. Then he ran back toward the fence, swinging his shirt by the arms. Instead of climbing the fence when he reached it, he turned so his back was against it. He dumped the coal out of his shirt, stooped, and picked up a couple of chunks.

Henry didn't see the coal; he only saw that he had the nigger trapped against the fence. He sprinted toward him, yelling.

'This is for my dog, you bastard!' Mike cried, unaware that he had begun to cry. He threw one of the chunks of coal overhand. It flew in a hard direct line. It struck Henry's forehead with a loud bonk! and then rebounded into the air. Henry stumbled to his knees. His hands went to his head. Blood seeped through his fingers at once, like a magician's surprise.

The others skidded to a stop, their faces stamped with identical expressions of disbelief. Henry uttered a high scream of pain and got to his feet again, still holding his head. Mike threw another chunk of coal. Henry ducked. He began to walk toward Mike, and when Mike threw a third chunk of coal, Henry removed one hand from his gashed forehead and batted the chunk of coal almost casually aside. He was grinning.

'Oh, you're gonna get such a surprise,' he said. 'Such a - OH MY GAWD!' Henry tried to say more, but only inarticulate gargling noises emerged from his mouth.

Mike had pegged another chunk of coal and this one had struck Henry square in the throat. Henry buckled to his knees again. Peter Gordon gaped. Moose Sadler's brow was furrowed, as if he were trying to figure out a difficult math problem.

'What are you guys waiting for?' Henry managed. Blood seeped between his fingers. His voice sounded rusty and foreign. 'Get him! Get the little cocksucker!'

Mike didn't wait to see if they would obey or not. He dropped his shirt and leaped at the fence. He began to pull himself up toward the top and then he felt rough hands grab his foot. He looked down and saw Henry Bowers's contorted face, smeared by blood and coal. Mike yanked his foot up. His sneaker came off in Henry's hand. He pistoned his bare foot down into Henry's face and heard something crunch. Henry screamed again and staggered backward, now holding his spouting nose.

Another hand - Belch Huggins's - snagged briefly in the cuff of Mike's leans, but he was able to pull free. He threw one leg over the top of the fence, and then something struck him with blinding force on the side of his face. Warmth trickled down his cheek. Something else struck his hip, his forearm, his upper thigh. They were throwing his own ammunition at him.

He hung briefly by his hands and then dropped, rolling over twice. The scrubby ground sloped downward here, and perhaps that saved Mike Hanlon's eyesight or even his life; Henry had approached the fence again and now looped one of his four M-80s over the top of the fence. It went off with a terrific CRRRACK! that echoed and blew a wide bare patch in the grass.

Mike, his ears ringing, went head-over-heels and staggered to his feet. He was now in high grass, on the edge of the Barrens. He wiped a hand down his right cheek and it came away bloody. The blood did not particularly worry him; he had not expected to come out of this unscathed.

Henry tossed a cherry-bomb, but Mike saw this one coming and moved away easily.

'Let's get him!' Henry roared, and began to climb the fence.

'Jeez, Henry, I don't know - ' This had gone too far for Peter Gordon, who had never encountered a situation that had turned so suddenly savage. Things were not supposed to get bloody - at least not for your team - when the odds were comfortably slugged in your favor.

'You better know,' Henry said, looking back at Peter from halfway up the fence. He hung there like a bloated poisonous spider in human shape. His baleful eyes stared at Peter; blood rimmed them on either side. Mike's downward kick had broken his nose, although Henry would not be aware of the fact for some time yet. 'You better know, or I'll come after you, you fucking jerk.'

The others began to climb the fence, Peter and Victor with some reluctance, Belch and Moose as vacantly eager as before.

Mike waited to see no more. He turned and ran into the scrub. Henry bellowed after him: 'I'll find you, nigger! I'll find you!'

8

The Losers had reached the far side of the gravel-pit, which was little more than a huge weedy pockmark in the earth now, three years after the last load of gravel had been taken out of it. They were all gathered around Stan, looking appreciatively at his package of Black Cats, when the first explosion came. Eddie jumped - he was still goofed up over the piranha fish he thought he had seen (he wasn't sure what real piranha fish looked like, but he was pretty sure they didn't look like oversized goldfish with teeth).

'Merrow down easy, Eddie-san,' Richie said, doing his Chinese Coolie Voice. 'Iss just other kids shooting off fireclackers.'

'That s-s-sucks the r-r-root, Rih-Rih-Richie,' Bill remarked. The others laughed.

'I keep trying, Big Bill,' Richie said. 'I feel like, if I get good enough, someday I'll earn your love.' He made dainty kissing gestures at the air. Bill shot him the finger. Ben and Eddie stood side by side, grinning.

'Oh I'm so young and you're so old,' Stan Uris piped up suddenly, doing an eerily accurate Paul Anka imitation, 'this my darling I've been told - '

'He can sayng!' Richie screeched in his Pickaninny Voice. 'Lawks-a-mussy, thisyere boy can sayng!' And then, in the MovieTone Announcer's Voice: 'Want you to sign right here, boy, on this dotted line.' Richie slung an arm around Stan's shoulders and favored him with a gigantic gleaming smile. 'We're going to grow your hair out, boy. Going to give you a git-tar. Going to - '

Bill popped Richie twice on the arm, quickly and lightly. They were all excited at the prospect of shooting off firecrackers.

'Open them up, Stan,' Beverly said. 'I've got some matches.'

They gathered around again as Stan carefully opened the package of firecrackers. There were exotic Chinese letters on the black label and a sober caution in English that got Richie giggling again. 'Do not hold in hand after fuse is lit,' this warning read.

'Good thing they told me,' Richie said. 'I always used to hold them after I lit them. I thought that's how you got rid of your frockin hangnails.'

Working slowly, almost reverently, Stan removed the red cellophane and laid the block of cardboard tubes, blue and red and green, on the palm of his hand. Their fuses had been braided together in a Chinese pigtail.

'I'll unwind the - ' Stan began, and then there was a much louder explosion. The echo rolled slowly across the Barrens. A cloud of gulls rose from the eastern side of the dump, squalling and crying. They all jumped this time. Stan dropped the firecrackers and had to pick them up.

Was that dynamite?' Beverly asked nervously. She was looking at Bill, whose head was up, his eyes wide. She thought he had never looked so handsome - but there was something too alert, too strung-up, in the attitude of his head. He was like a deer scenting fire in the air.

'That was an M-80, I think,' Ben said quietly. 'Last Fourth of July I was in the park and there were these high-school kids that had a couple. They put one of them in a steel trash-can. It made a noise like that.'

'Did it blow a hole in the can, Haystack?' Richie asked.

'No, but it bulged out the side. Looked like there was some little guy inside who just stroked it one. They ran away.'

The big one was closer,' Eddie said. He also glanced at Bill.

'Do you guys want to shoot these off or not?' Stan asked. He had unbraided about a dozen of the firecrackers and had put the rest neatly back in the waxed paper for later.

'Sure,' Richie said.

'P-P-Put them a-a-away.'

They looked at Bill questioningly, a little scared - it was his abrupt tone more than what he had said.

'P-P-Puh-hut them a-a-a-away,' Bill repeated, his face contorting with the effort he was making to get the words out. Spit flew from his lips. 'S-S-Suh-homething's g-g-gonna h-h-happen.'

Eddie licked his lips, Richie shoved his glasses up the sweaty slope of his nose with his thumb, and Ben moved closer to Beverly without even thinking about it.

Stan opened his mouth to say something and then there was another, smaller explosion - another cherry-bomb.

'Ruh-Rocks,' Bill said.

'What, Bill?' Stan asked.

'Ruh-Ruh-Rocks. A-A-Ammo.' Bill began to pick up stones, stuffing them into his pockets until they bulged. The others stared at him as though he had gone crazy . . . and then Eddie felt sweat break on his forehead. All of a sudden he knew what a malaria attack felt like. He had sensed something like this on the day he and Bill had met Ben (except Eddie, like the others, was already coming to think of Ben as Haystack), the day Henry Bowers had casually bloodied his nose - but this felt worse. This felt like maybe it was going to be Hiroshima time in the Barrens.

Ben started to get rocks, then Richie, moving quickly, not talking now. His glasses slipped all the way off and clicked to the gravelly surface of the ground. He folded them up absently and put them inside his shirt.

'Why did you do that, Richie?' Beverly asked. Her voice sounded thin, too taut.

'Don't know, keed,' Richie said, and went on picking up rocks.

'Beverly, maybe you better, uh, go back toward the dump for awhile,' Ben said. His hands were full of rocks.

'Shit on that,' she said. 'Shit all over that, Ben Hanscom.' She bent and began to gather rocks herself.

Stan looked at them thoughtfully as they grubbed for rocks like lunatic farmers. Then he began to gather them himself, his lips pressed into a thin and prissy line.

Eddie felt the familiar tightening sensation as his throat began to close up to a pinhole.

Not this time, dammit, he thought suddenly. Not if my friends need me. Like Bev said, shit all over that.

He also began to gather rocks.

9

Henry Bowers had gotten too big too fast to be either quick or agile under ordinary circumstances, but these circumstances were not ordinary. He was in a frenzy of pain and rage, and these lent him an ephemeral unthinking physical genius. Conscious thought was gone; his mind felt the way a late-summer grassfire looks as dusk comes on, all rose-red and smoke-gray. He took after Mike Hanlon like a bull after a red flag. Mike was following a rudimentary path along the side of the big pit, a path which would eventually lead to the dump, but Henry was too far gone to bother with such niceties as paths; he slammed through the bushes and the brambles on a straight line, feeling neither the tiny cuts inflicted by the thorns nor the slaps of limber bushes striking his face, neck, and arms. The only thing that mattered was the nigger's kinky head, drawing closer. Henry had one of the M-80s in his right hand and a wooden match in his left. When he caught the nigger he was going to strike the match, light the fuse, and stuff that ashcan right down the front of his pants.

Mike knew that Henry was gaining and the others were close on his heels. He tried to push himself faster. He was badly scared now, keeping panic at bay only by a grim effort of will. He had turned his ankle more seriously crossing the tracks than he had thought at first, and now he was limp-skipping along. The crackle and crash of Henry's go-for-broke progress behind him called up unpleasant images of being chased by a killer dog or a rogue bear.

The path opened out just ahead, and Mike more fell than ran into the gravel-pit. He rolled to the bottom, got to his feet, and was halfway across before he realized that there were kids there, six of them. They were spread out in a straight line and there was a funny look on their faces. It wasn't until later, when he'd had a chance to sort out his thoughts, that he realized what was so odd about that look: it was as if they had been expecting him.

'Help,' Mike managed as he limped toward them. He spoke instinctively to the tall boy with the red hair. 'Kids . . . big kids - '

That was when Henry burst into the gravel-pit. He saw the six of them and came to a skidding halt. For a moment his face was marked with uncertainty and he looked back over his shoulder. He saw his troops, and when Henry looked back at the Losers (Mike was now standing beside and slightly behind Bill Denbrough, panting rapidly), he was grinning.

'I know you, kid,' he said, speaking to Bill. He glanced at Richie. 'I know you, too. Where's your glasses, four-eyes?' And before Richie could reply, Henry saw Ben. 'Well, son of a bitch! The Jew and the fatboy are here too! That your girlfriend, fatboy?'

Ben jumped a little, as if goosed.

Just then Peter Gordon pulled up beside Henry. Victor arrived and stood on Henry's other side; Belch and Moose Sadler arrived last. They flanked Peter and Victor, and now the two opposing groups stood facing each other in neat, almost formal lines.

Panting heavily as he spoke and still sounding more than a little like a human bull, Henry said, 'I got bones to pick with a lot of you, but I can let that go for today. I want that nigger. So you little shits buzz off.'

'Right!' Belch said smartly.

'He killed my dog!' Mike cried out, his voice shrill and breaking. 'He said so!'

'You come on over here right now,' Henry said, 'and maybe I won't kill you.'

Mike trembled but did not move.

Speaking softly and clearly, Bill said: 'The B-Barrens are ours. You k-k-kids get out of h-here.'

Henry's eyes widened. It was as if he'd been slapped unexpectedly.

'Who's gonna make me?' he asked. 'You, horsefoot?'

'Uh-Uh-Us,' Bill said. 'We're through t-t-taking your shit, B-B-Bowers. Get ow-ow-out.'

'You stuttering freak,' Henry said. He lowered his head and charged.

Bill had a handful of rocks; all of them had a handful except Mike and Beverly, who was only holding one. Bill began to throw at Henry, not hurrying his throws, but chucking hard and with fair accuracy. The first rock missed; the second struck Henry on the shoulder. If the third had missed, Henry might have closed with Bill and wrestled him to the ground, but it didn't miss; it struck Henry's lowered head.

Henry cried out in surprised pain, looked up . . . and was hit four more times: a little billet-doux from Richie Tozier on the chest, one from Eddie that ricocheted off his shoulder-blade, one from Stan Uris that struck his shin, and Beverly's one rock, which hit him in the belly.

He looked at them unbelievingly, and suddenly the air was full of whizzing missiles. Henry fell back, that same bewildered, pained expression on his face. 'Come on, you guys!' he shouted. 'Help me!'

'Ch-ch-charge them,' Bill said in a low voice, and not waiting to see if they would or not, he ran forward.

They came with him, firing rocks not only at Henry now but at all the others. The big boys were grubbing on the ground for ammunition of their own, but before they could gather much, they had been peppered. Peter Gordon screamed as a rock thrown by Ben glanced off his cheekbone and drew blood. He backed up a few steps, paused, threw a hesitant rock or two back . . . and then fled. He had had enough; things were not done this way on West Broadway.

Henry grabbed up a handful of rocks in a savage sweeping gesture. Most of them, fortunately for the Losers, were pebbles. He threw one of the larger ones at Beverly and it cut her arm. She cried out.

Bellowing, Ben ran for Henry Bowers, who looked around in time to see him coming but not in time to sidestep. Henry was off-balance; Ben was one hundred and fifty trying for one-sixty; the result was no contest. Henry did not go sprawling but flying. He landed on his back and skidded. Ben ran toward him again and was only vaguely aware of a warm, blooming pain in his ear as Belch Huggins nailed him with a rock roughly the size of a golf ball.

Henry was getting groggily to his knees as Ben reached him and kicked him hard, his sneakered foot connecting solidly with Henry's left hip. Henry rolled over heavily on his back. His eyes blazed up at Ben.

'You ain't supposed to throw rocks at girls!' Ben shouted. He could not remember ever in his life feeling so outraged. 'You aint - '

Then he saw a flame in Henry's hand as Henry popped the wooden match alight. He touched it to the thick fuse of the M-80, which he then threw at Ben's face. Acting with no thought at all, Ben struck the ashcan with the palm of his hand, swinging at it as one would swing a racket at a badminton birdie. The M-80 went back down. Henry saw it coming. His eyes widened and then he rolled away, screaming. The ashcan exploded a split-second later, blackening the back of Henry's shirt and tearing some of it away.

A moment later Ben was hit by Moose Sadler and driven to his knees. His teeth clicked together over his tongue, drawing blood. He blinked around, dazed. Moose was coming toward him, but before he could reach the place where Ben was kneeling, Bill came up behind him and began pelting the big kid with rocks. Moose wheeled around, bellowing.

'You hit me from behind, yellowbelly!' Moose screamed. 'You fuckin dirtyfighter!'

He gathered himself to charge, but Richie joined Bill and also began to fire rocks at Moose. Richie was unimpressed with Moose's rhetoric on the subject of what might or might not constitute yellowbelly behavior; he had seen the five of them chasing one scared kid, and he didn't think that exactly put them up there with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. One of Richie's missiles split the skin above Moose's left eyebrow. Moose howled.

Eddie and Stan Uris moved up to join Bill and Richie. Beverly moved in with them, her arm bleeding but her eyes wildly alight. Rocks flew. Belch Huggins screamed as one of them clipped his crazy bone. He began to dance lumbersomely, rubbing his elbow. Henry got to his feet, the back of his shirt hanging in rags, the skin beneath almost miraculously unmarked. Before he could turn around, Ben Hanscom bounced a rock off the back of his head and drove him to his knees again.

It was Victor Criss who did the most damage to the Losers that day, partly because he was a pretty fair fastball pitcher, but mostly - paradoxically - because he was the least emotionally involved. More and more he didn't want to be here. People could get seriously hurt in rockfights; a kid could get his skull split, a mouthful of broken teeth, could even lose an eye. But since he was in it, he was in it. He intended to dish out some trouble.

That coolness had allowed him to take an extra thirty seconds and pick up a handful of good-sized rocks. He threw one at Eddie as the Losers re-formed their rough skirmish line, and it struck Eddie on the chin. He fell down, crying, the blood already starting to flow. Ben turned toward him but Eddie was already getting up again, the blood gruesomely bright against his pallid skin, his eyes slitted.

Victor threw at Richie and the rock thudded off Richie's chest. Richie threw

back but Vie ducked it easily and threw one sidearm at Bill Denbrough. Bill

snapped his head back, but not quite quickly enough; the rock cut his cheek

wide open.

Bill turned toward Victor. Their eyes locked, and Victor saw something in the stuttering kid's gaze that scared the hell out of him. Absurdly, the words I take it back! trembled behind his lips . . . except that was nothing you said to a little kid. Not if you didn't want your buddies to start ranking you to the dogs and back.

Bill started to walk toward Victor now, and Victor began to walk toward Bill. At the same moment, as if by some telepathic signal, they began to throw rocks at each other, still closing the distance. The righting flagged around them as the others turned to watch; even Henry turned his head.

Victor ducked and bobbed, but Bill made no such effort. Victor's rocks slammed him in the chest, the shoulder, the stomach. One clipped by his ear. Apparently unshaken by any of this, Bill threw one rock after another, pegging them with murderous force. The third one struck Victor's knee with a brittle chipping sound and Victor uttered a stifled groan. He was out of ammunition. Bill had one rock left. It was smooth and white, shot with quartz, roughly the size and shape of a duck's egg. To Victor Criss it looked very hard. Bill was less than five feet away from him.

'Y-Y-You g-get ow-out of h-h-here now,' he said, 'or I'm g-going to spuh-puh-lit your h-head o-o-open. I m-mean ih-ih-it.'

Looking into his eyes, Victor saw that he really did. Without another word, he turned and headed back the way Peter Gordon had gone.

Belch and Moose Sadler were looking around uncertainly. Blood trickled from the corner of the Sadler boy's mouth, and blood from a scalp-wound was sheeting down the side of Belch's face.

Henry's mouth worked but no sound came out. Bill turned toward Henry. 'G-G-Get out,' he said.

'What if I won't?' Henry was trying to sound tough, but Bill could now see a different thing in Henry's eyes. He was scared, and he would go. It should have made Bill feel good - triumphant, even - but he only felt tired.

'I-If you w-won't,' Bill said, 'w-w-we're g-going to muh-move i-in on y-you. I think the s-s-six of u-us can p-put you in the huh-huh-hospital.'

'Seven,' Mike Hanlon said, and joined them. He had a softball-sized rock in each hand. 'Just try me, Bowers. I'd love to.'

'You fucking NIGGER!' Henry's voice broke and wavered on the edge of tears. That voice took the last of the fight out of Belch and Moose; they backed away, their remaining rocks dropping from relaxing hands. Belch looked around as if wondering exactly where he might be.

'Get out of our place,' Beverly said.

'Shut up, you cunt,' Henry said. 'You - ' Four rocks flew at once, hitting Henry in four different places He screamed and scrambled backward over the weed-raddled ground, the tatters of his shirt flapping around him. He looked from the grim, old-young faces of the little kids to the frantic ones of Belch and Moose. There was no help there; no help at all. Moose turned away, embarrassed.

Henry got to his feet, sobbing and snuffling through his broken nose. 'I'll kill you all,' he said, and suddenly ran for the path. A moment later he was gone.

'G-G-Go on,' Bill said, speaking to Belch. 'Get ow-out. And d-don't c-c-come down h-here anymore. The B-B-Barrens are ow-ow-ours.

'You're gonna wish you didn't cross Henry, kid,' Belch said. 'Come on, Moose.'

They started away, heads down, not looking back.

The seven of them stood in a loose semicircle, all of them bleeding somewhere. The apocalyptic rockfight had lasted less than four minutes, but Bill felt as if he had fought his way through all of World War II, both theaters, without so much as a single time-out.

The silence was broken by Eddie Kaspbrak's whooping, whining struggle for air. Ben went toward him, felt the three Twinkies and four Ding-Dongs he had eaten on his way down to the Barrens begin to struggle and churn in his stomach, and ran past Eddie and into the bushes, where he was sick as privately and quietly as he could be.

It was Richie and Bev who went to Eddie. Beverly put an arm around the thin boy's waist while Richie dug his aspirator out of his pocket. 'Bite on this, Eddie,' he said, and Eddie took a hitching, gasping breath as Richie pulled the trigger.

'Thanks,' Eddie managed at last.

Ben came back out of the bushes, blushing, wiping a hand over his mouth. Beverly went over to him and took both of his hands in hers.

'Thanks for sticking up for me,' she said.

Ben nodded, looking at his dirty sneakers. 'Any time, keed,' he said.

One by one they turned to look at Mike, Mike with his dark skin. They looked at him carefully, cautiously, thoughtfully. Mike had felt such curiosity before - there had not been a time in his life when he had not felt it - and he looked back candidly enough.

Bill looked from Mike to Richie. Richie met his eyes. And Bill seemed almost to hear the click - some final part fitting neatly into a machine of unknown intent. He felt ice-chips scatter up his back. We're all together now, he thought, and the idea was so strong, so right, that for a moment he thought he might have spoken it aloud. But of course there was no need to speak it aloud; he could see it in Richie's eyes, in Ben's, in Eddie's, in Beverly's, in Stan's.

We're all together now, he thought again. Oh God help us. Now it really starts. Please God, help us.

'What's your name, kid?' Beverly asked.

'Mike Hanlon.'

'You want to shoot off some firecrackers?' Stan asked, and Mike's grin was answer enough.

C H A P T E R 1 4

The Album

1

As it turns out, Bill isn't the only one; they all bring booze.

Bill has bourbon, Beverly has vodka and a carton of orange juice, Richie a sixpack, Ben Hanscom a bottle of Wild Turkey. Mike has a sixpack in the little refrigerator in the staff lounge.

Eddie Kaspbrak comes in last, holding a small brown bag.

'What you got there, Eddie?' Richie asks. 'Za-Rex or Kool-Aid?'

Smiling nervously, Eddie removes first a bottle of gin and then a bottle of prune juice.

In the thunderstruck silence which follows, Richie says quietly: 'Somebody call for the men in the white coats. Eddie Kaspbrak's finally gone over the top.'

'Gin-and-prune juice happens to be very healthy,' Eddie replies defensively . . . and then they're all laughing wildly, the sound of their mirth echoing and re-echoing in the silent library, rolling up and down the glassed-in hall between the adult library and the Children's Library.

'You go head-on,' Ben says, wiping his streaming eyes. 'You go head-on, Eddie. I bet it really moves the mail, too.'

Smiling, Eddie fills a paper cup three-quarters full of prune juice and then soberly adds two capfuls of gin.

'Oh Eddie, I do love you,' Beverly says, and Eddie looks up, startled but smiling. She gazes up and down the table. 'I love all of you.'

Bill says, 'W-We love you too, B-Bev.'

'Yes,' Ben says. 'We love you.' His eyes widen a little, and he laughs. 'I think we still all love each other . . . Do you know how rare that must be?'

There's a moment of silence, and Mike is really not surprised to see that Rickie is wearing his glasses.

'My contacts started to burn and I had to take them out,' Richie says briefly when Mike asks. 'Maybe we should get down to business?'

They all look at Bill then, as they had in the gravel-pit, and Mike thinks: They look at Bill when they need a leader, at Eddie when they need a navigator. Get down to business, what a hell of a phrase that is. Do I tell them that the bodies of the children that were found back then and now weren't sexually molested, not even precisely mutilated, but partially eaten? Do I tell them I've got seven miner's helmets, the kind with strong electric lights set into the front, stored back at my house, one of them for a guy named Stan Uris who couldn't make the scene, as we used to say? Or is it maybe enough just to tell them to go home and get a good night's sleep, because it ends tomorrow or tomorrow night for good - either for It or us?

None of those things have to be said, perhaps, and the reason why they don't has already been stated: they still love one another. Things have changed over the last twenty-seven years, but that, miraculously, hasn't. It is, Mike thinks, our only real hope.

The only thing that really remains is to finish going through it, to complete the job of catching up, of stapling past to present so that the strip of experience forms some half-assed kind of wheel. Yes, Mike thinks, that's it. Tonight the job is to make the wheel; tomorrow we can see if it still turns . . . the way it did when we drove the big kids out of the gravel-pit and out of the Barrens.

'Have you remembered the rest?' Mike asks Richie.

Richie swallows some beer and shakes his head. 'I remember you telling us about the bird . . . and about the smoke-hole.' A grin breaks over Richie's face. 'I remembered about that walking over here tonight with Bevvie and Ben. What a fucking honor-show that was -

'Beep-beep, Richie,' Beverly says, smiling.

'Well, you know,' he says, still smiling himself and punching his glasses up on his nose in a gesture that is eerily reminiscent of the old Richie. He winks at Mike. 'You and me, right, Mikey?'

Mike snorts laughter and nods.

'Miss Scawlett! Miss Scawlett!' Richie shrieks in his Pickaninny Voice. 'It's gettin a little wa'am in de smokehouse, Miss Scawlett!'

Laughing, Bill says, 'Another engineering and architectural triumph by Ben Hanscom.'

Beverly nods. 'We were digging out the clubhouse when you brought your father's photograph album to the Barrens, Mike.'

'Oh, Christ!' Bill says, sitting suddenly bolt-upright. 'And the pictures - '

Richie nods grimly. 'The same trick as in Georgie's room. Only that time we all saw it.'

Ben says, 'I remembered what happened to the extra silver dollar.'

They all turn to look at him.

'I gave the other three to a friend of mine before I came out here,' Ben says quietly. 'For his kids. I remembered there had been a fourth, but I couldn't remember what happened to it. Now I do.' He looks at Bill. 'We made a silver slug out of it, didn't we? You, me, and Richie. At first we were going to make a silver bullet - '

'You were pretty sure you could do it,' Richie agrees. 'But in the end - '

'We got c-cold fuh-feet.' Bill nods slowly. The memory has fallen naturally into its place, and he hears that same low but distinct click! when it happens. We're getting closer, he thinks.

'We went back to Neibolt Street,' Richie says. 'All of us.'

'You saved my life, Big Bill,' Ben says suddenly and Bill shakes his head. ' You did, though,' Ben persists, and this time Bill doesn't shake his head. He suspects that maybe he had done just that, although he does not yet remember how . . . and was it him? He thinks maybe Beverly . . . but that is not there. Not yet, anyway.

'Excuse me for a second,' Mike says. 'I've got a sixpack in the back fridge.'

'Have one of mine,' Richie says.

'Hanlon no drinkum white man's beer,' Mike replies. 'Especially not yours, Trashmouth.'

'Beep-beep, Mikey,' Rickie says solemnly, and Mike goes to get his beer on a warm wave of their laughter.

He snaps on the light in the lounge, a tacky little room with seedy chairs, a Silex badly in need of scrubbing, and a bulletin board covered with old notices, wage and hour information, and a few New Yorker cartoons now turning yellow and curling up at the edges. He opens the little refrigerator and feels the shock sink into him, bone-deep and icewhite, the way February cold sank into you when February was here and it seemed that April never would be. Blue and orange balloons drift out in a flood, dozens of them, a New Year's Eve bouquet of party-balloons, and he thinks incoherently in the midst of his fear, All we need is Guy Lombardo tootling away on 'Auld Lang Syne.' They waft past his face and rise toward the lounge ceiling. He's trying to scream, unable to scream, seeing what had been behind the balloons, what It had popped into the refrigerator beside his beer, as if for a late-night snack after his worthless friends have all told their worthless stones and gone back to their rented beds in this home town that is no longer home.

Mike takes a step backward, his hands going to his face, shutting the vision out. He stumbles over one of the chairs, almost falls, and takes his hands away. It is still there; Stan Uris's severed head beside Mike's sixpack of Bud Light, the head not of a man but of an eleven-year-old boy. The mouth is open in a soundless scream but Mike can see neither teeth nor tongue because the mouth has been stuffed full of feathers. The feathers are a light brown and unspeakably huge. He knows well enough what bird those feathers came from. Oh yes. Oh yes indeed. He had seen the bird in May of 1958 and they had all seen it in early August of 1958 and then, years later, while visiting his dying father, he had found out that Will Hanlon had seen it once, too, after his escape from the fire at the Black Spot. The blood from S tan's tattered neck has dripped down and formed a coagulated pool on the fridge's bottom shelf. It glitters dark ruby-red in the uncompromising glow shed by the fridge bulb.

'Uh . . . uh . . . uh . . . ' Mike manages, but no more sound than that can he make. Then the head opens its eyes, and they are the silver-bright eyes of Pennywise the Clown. Those eyes roll in his direction and the head's lips begin to squirm around the mouthful of feathers. It is trying to speak, perhaps trying to deliver prophecy like the oracle in a Greek play.

Just thought I'd join you, Mike, because you can't win without me. You can't win without me and you know it, don't you? You might have had a chance if all of me had shown up, but I just couldn't stand the strain on my all-American brain, if you see what I mean, jellybean. Ail the six of you can do on your own is hash over some old times and then get yourselves killed. So I thought I'd head you off at the pass. Head you off, get it, Mikey? Get it, old pal? Get it, you fucking scumbag nigger?

You're not real! he screams, but no sound comes out; he is like a TV with the volume control turned all the way down.

Incredibly, grotesquely, the head winks at him.

I'm real, all right. Real as raindrops. And you know what I'm talking about, Mikey. What the six of you are planning to try is like taking off in a jet plane with no landing gear. There's no sense in going up if you can't get back down, is there? No sense in going down if you can't get back up, either. You'll never think of the right riddles and jokes. You'll never make me laugh, Mikey. You've all forgotten how to turn your screams upside-down. Beep-beep, Mikey, what do you say? Remember the bird? Nothing but a sparrow, but say-hey! it was a lulu, wasn't it? Big as a barn, big as one of those silly Japanese movie monsters that used to scare you when you were a little kid. The days when you knew how to turn that bird from your door are gone forever. Believe it, Mikey. If you know how to use your head, you'll get out of here, out of Derry, right now. If you don't know how to use it, it'll end up just like this one here. Today's guidepost along the great road of life is use it before you lose it, my good man.

The head rolls over on its face (the feathers in its mouth make a horrid crumpling sound) and falls out of the refrigerator. It thuks to the floor and rolls toward him like a hideous bowling ball, its blood-matted hair changing places with its grinning face; it rolls toward him leaving a gluey trail of blood and dismembered bits of feather behind, its mouth working around its clot of feathers.

Beep-beep, Mikey! it screams as Mike backs madly away from it, hands held out in a warding-off gesture. Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-fucking-beep!

Then there is a sudden loud pop - the sound of a plastic cork thumbed out of a bottle of cheap champagne. The head disappears (Real, Mike thinks sickly; there was nothing supernatural about that pop, anyway; that was the sound of air rushing back into a suddenly vacated space . . . real, oh God, real). A thin net of blood droplets floats up and then patters back down. No need to clean the lounge, though; Carole will see nothing when she comes in tomorrow, not even if she has to plow her way through the balloons to get to the hotplate and make her first cup of coffee. How handy. He giggles shrilly.

He looks up and yes, the balloons are still there. The blue ones say: DERRY NIGGERS GET THE BIRD. The orange ones say: THE LOSERS ARE STILL LOSING, BUT STANLEY URIS IS FINALLY AHEAD

No sense going up if you can't get back down, the speaking head had assured him, no sense going down if you can't get back up. This latter makes him think again of the stored miner's helmets. And was it true? Suddenly he's thinking about the first day he went down to the Barrens after the rockfight. July 6th, that had been, two days after he had marched in the Fourth of July parade . . . two days after he had seen Pennywise the Clown in person for the first time. It had been after that day in the Barrens, after listening to their stones and then, hesitantly, telling his own, that he had gone home and asked his father if he could look at his photograph album.

Why exactly had he gone down to the Barrens that July 6th? Had he known he would find them there? It seemed that he had - and not just that they would be there, but where they would be. They had been talking about a clubhouse of some sort, he remembers, but it had seemed to him that they had been talking about that because there was something else that they didn't know how to talk about.

Mike looks up at the balloons, not really seeing them now, trying to remember exactly how it had been that day, that hot hot day. Suddenly it seems very important to remember just what had happened, what every nuance had been, what his state of mind had been.

Because that was when everything began to happen. Before that the others had talked about killing It, but there had been no forward motion, no plan. When Mike had come the circle closed, the wheel began to roll. It had been later that same day that Bill and Richie and Ben went down to the library and began to do serious research on an idea that Bill had had a day or a week or a month before. It had all begun to -

'Mike?' Richie calls from the Reference Room where the others are gathered. 'Did you die in there?'

Almost, Mike thinks, looking at the balloons, the blood, the feathers inside the fridge.

He calls back: 'I think you guys better come in here.'

He hears the scrape of their chairs, the mutter of their voices; he hears Richie saying 'Oh Jesus, what's up now?' and another ear, this one in his memory, hears Richie saying something else, and suddenly he remembers what it is he has been searching for; even more, he understands why it has seemed so elusive. The reaction of the others when he stepped into the clearing in the darkest, deepest, and most overgrown part of the Barrens that day had been . . . nothing. No surprise, no questions about how he had found them, no big deal. Ben had been eating a Twinkie, he remembers, Beverly and Richie had been smoking cigarettes, Bill had been lying on his back with his hands behind his head, looking at the sky, Eddie and Stan were looking doubtfully at a series of strings which had been pegged into the ground to form a square of about five feet on a side.

No surprise, no questions, no big deal. He had simply shown up and been accepted. It was as if, without even knowing it, they had been waiting for him. And in that third ear, memory's ear, he hears Richie's Pickaninny Voice raised as it was earlier tonight: 'Lawdy, Miss Clawdy, here come

2

that black chile agin! Lawks-a-mussy, I doan know what thisyere Barrens is comin to! Look at that there nappy haid, Big Bill!' Bill didn't even look around; he just went on staring dreamily at the fat summer clouds marching across the sky. He was giving an important question his most careful consideration. Richie was not offended by the lack of attention, however. He pushed onward. 'Jest lookin at that nappy haid makes me b'leeve I needs me another mint joolip! I'se gwinter have it out on the verandah, where it's be a little bit coolah - '

'Beep-beep, Richie,' Ben said from around a mouthful of Twinkie, and Beverly laughed.

'Hi,' Mike said uncertainly. His heart was beating a little too hard, but he was determined to go on with this. He owed his thanks, and his father had told him that you always paid what you owed - and as quick as you could, before the interest mounted up.

Stan looked around. 'Hi,' he said, and then looked back at the square of strings pegged into the center of the clearing. 'Ben, are you sure this is going to work?'

'It'll work,' Ben said. 'Hi, Mike.'

'Want a cigarette?' Beverly asked. 'I got two left.'

'No thank you.' Mike took a deep breath and said, 'I wanted to thank you all again for helping me the other day. Those guys meant to hurt me bad. I'm sorry some of you guys got banged up.'

Bill waved his hand, dismissing it. 'D-D-Don't wuh-wuh-horry a-a-bout it. Th-they've h-had it i-i-in f-for us all y-y-year.' He sat up and looked at Mike with sudden starry interest. 'C-Can I a-ask you s-s-something?'

'I guess so,' Mike said. He sat down gingerly. He had heard such prefaces before. The Denbrough kid was going to ask him what it was like to be a Negro.

But instead Bill said: 'When L-L-Larsen pitched the n-no-h-hitter in the World S-Series two years ago, d-do you think that was just luh-luck?'

Richie dragged deep on his cigarette and started to cough. Beverly pounded nun good-naturedly on the back. 'You're just a beginner, Richie, you'll learn.'

'I think it's gonna fall in, Ben,' Eddie said worriedly, looking at the pegged square. 'I don't know how cool I am on the idea of getting buried alive.'

'You're not gonna get buried alive,' Ben said. 'And if you are, just suck your damn old aspirator until someone pulls you out.'

This struck Stanley Uris as deliciously funny. He leaned back on his elbow, his head turned up to the sky, and laughed until Eddie kicked his shin and told him to shut up.

'Luck,' Mike said finally. 'I think any no-hitter's more luck than skill.'

'M-M-Me t-too,' Bill said. Mike waited to see if there was more, but Bill seemed satisfied. He lay down again, laced his hands behind his head again, and went back to studying the clouds as they floated by.

'What are you guys up to?' Mike asked, looking at the square of strings pegged just above the ground

'Oh, this is Haystack's big idea of the week,' Richie said. 'Last time he flooded out the Barrens and that was pretty good, but this one's a real dinner-winner. This is Dig Your Own Clubhouse Month. Next month - '

'Y-You don't nuh-nuh-need to put B-B-B-Ben d-duh-hown,' Bill said, still looking at the sky. 'It's going to be guh-guh-good.'

'God's sake, Bill, I was just kidding.'

'Suh-Sometimes you k-k-kid too much, Rih-Richie.'

Richie accepted the rebuke silently.

'I still don't get it,' Mike said.

'Well, it's pretty simple,' Ben said. 'They wanted a treehouse, and we could do that, but people have a bad habit of breaking their bones when they fall out of treehouses - '

'Kookie . . . Kookie . . . lend me your bones,' Stan said, and laughed again while' the others looked at him, puzzled. Stan did not have much sense of humor, and the bit he did have was sort of peculiar.

'You ees goin loco, senhorr,' Richie said. 'Eees the heat an the cucarachas, I theenk.'

'Anyway,' Ben said, 'what we'll do is dig down about five feet in the square I pegged out there. We can't go much deeper than that or we'll hit groundwater, I guess. It's pretty close to the surface down here. Then we'll shore up the sides just to make sure they don't cave in.' He looked significantly at Eddie here, but Eddie was worried.

'Then what?' Mike asked, interested.

'We'll cap off the top.'

'Huh?'

'Put boards over the top of the hole. We can put in a trapdoor or something so we can get in and out, even windows if we want - '

'We'll need some hih-hih-hinges,' Bill said, still looking at the clouds.

'We can get those at Reynolds Hardware,' Ben said.

'Y-You guh-guh-guys have your a-a-allowances,' Bill said.

'I've got five dollars,' Beverly said. 'I saved it up from babysitting.'

Richie immediately began to crawl toward her on his hands and knees. 'I love you, Bevvie,' he said, making dog's eyes at her. 'Will you marry me? We'll live in a pine-studded bungalow - '

'A what'?' Beverly asked, while Ben watched them with an odd mixture of anxiety, amusement, and concentration.

'A bung-studded pinealow,' Richie said. 'Five bucks is enough, sweetie, you

and me and baby makes three - '

Beverly laughed and blushed and moved away from him.

'We sh-share the e-expenses,' Bill said. 'That's why we got a club.'

'So after we cap the hole with boards,' Ben went on, 'we put down this heavy-duty glue - Tangle-Track, they call it - and put the sods back on. Maybe sprinkle it with pine needles. We could be down there and people - people like Henry Bowers - could walk right over us and not even know we were there.'

'You thought of that?' Mike said. 'Jeez, that's great!'

Ben smiled. It was his turn to blush.

Bill sat up suddenly and looked at Mike. 'You w-w-want to heh-help?'

'Well . . . sure,' Mike said. That'd be fun.'

A look passed among the others - Mike felt it as well as saw it. There are seven of us here, Mike thought, and for no reason at all he shivered.

'When are you going to break ground?'

'P-P-hretty s-soon,' Bill said, and Mike knew - knew - that it wasn't just Ben's underground clubhouse Bill was talking about. Ben knew it, too. So did Richie, Beverly, and Eddie. Stan Uris had stopped smiling; 'W-We're g-gonna start this pruh-huh-hoject pretty suh-suh-soon.'

There was a pause then, and Mike was suddenly aware of two things: they wanted to say something, tell him something . . . and he was not entirely sure he wanted to hear it. Ben had picked up a stick and was doodling aimlessly in the dirt, his hair hiding his face. Richie was gnawing at his already ragged fingernails. Only Bill was looking directly at Mike.

'Is something wrong?' Mike asked uneasily.

Speaking very slowly, Bill said: 'W-W-We're a cluh-club. Y-You can be in the club if you w-w-want, but y-y-you have to kee-keep our see-see-secrets.'

'You mean, like the clubhouse?' Mike asked, now more uneasy than ever. 'Well, sure - '

'We've got another secret, kid,' Richie said, still not looking at Mike. 'And Big Bill says we've got something more important to do this summer than digging underground clubhouses.'

'He's right, too,' Ben added.

There was a sudden, whistling gasp. Mike jumped. It was only Eddie, blasting off. Eddie looked at Mike apologetically, shrugged, and then nodded.

'Well,' Mike said finally, 'don't keep me in suspense. Tell me.'

Bill was looking at the others. 'I-Is there a-a-anyone who d-doesn't want him in the cluh-club?'

No one spoke or raised a hand.

'W-Who wants to t-tell?' Bill asked.

There was another long pause, and this time Bill didn't break it. At last Beverly sighed and looked up at Mike.

'The kids who have been killed,' she said. 'We know who's been doing it, and it's not human.'

3

They told him, one by one: the clown on the ice, the leper under the porch, the blood and voices from the drain, the dead boys in the Standpipe. Richie told about what had happened when he and Bill went back to Neibolt Street, and Bill spoke last, telling about the school photo that had moved, and the picture he had stuck his hand into. He finished by explaining that it had killed his brother Georgie, and that the Losers' Club was dedicated to killing the monster . . . whatever the monster really was.

Mike thought later, going home that night, that he should have listened with disbelief mounting into horror and finally run away as fast as he could, not looking back, convinced either that he was being put on by a bunch of white kids who didn't like black folks or that he was in the presence of six authentic lunatics who had in some way caught their lunacy from each other, the way everyone in the same class could catch a particularly virulent cold.

But he didn't run, because in spite of the horror, he felt a strange sense of comfort. Comfort and something else, something more elemental: a feeling of coming home. There are seven of us here, he thought again as Bill finally finished speaking.

He opened his mouth, not sure of what he was going to say.

'I've seen the clown,' he said. :

'What?' Richie and Stan asked together, and Beverly turned her head so quickly that her pony-tail flipped from her left shoulder to her right.

'I saw him on the Fourth,' Mike said slowly, speaking to Bill mostly. Bill's eyes, sharp and utterly concentrated, were on his, demanding that he go on. 'Yes, on the Fourth of July . . . ' He trailed off momentarily, thinking: But I knew him. I knew him because that wasn't the first time I saw him. And it wasn't the first time I saw something . . . something wrong.

He thought of the bird then, the first time he'd really allowed himself to think of it - except in nightmares - since May. He had thought he was going crazy. It was a relief to find out he wasn't crazy . . . but it was still a scary relief. He wet his lips.

'Go on,' Bev said impatiently. 'Hurry up.'

'Well, the thing is, I was in the parade. I - '

'I saw you,' Eddie said. 'You were playing the saxophone.'

'Well, it's actually a trombone,' Mike said. 'I play with the Neibolt Church School Band. Anyway, I saw the clown. He was handing out balloons to kids on the three-way corner downtown. He was just like Ben and Bill said. Silver suit, orange buttons, white makeup on his face, big red smile. I don't know if it was lipstick or make-up, but it looked like blood.'

The others were nodding, excited now, but Bill only went on looking at Mike closely. 'O-O-Orange tufts of h-h-hair?' he asked Mike, making them unconsciously over his own head with his fingers.

Mike nodded.

'Seeing him like that . . . it scared me. And while I was looking at him, he turned around and waved at me, like he'd read my mind, or my feelings, or whatever you call it. And that . . . like, scared me worse. I didn't know why then, but he scared me so bad for a couple of seconds I couldn't play my 'bone anymore. All the spit in my mouth dried up and I felt . . . ' He glanced briefly at Beverly. He remembered it all so clearly now, how the sun had suddenly seemed intolerably dazzling on the brass of his horn and the chrome of the cars, the music too loud, the sky too blue. The clown had raised one white-gloved hand (the other was full of balloon strings) and had waved slowly back and forth, his bloody grin too red and too wide, a scream turned upside-down. He remembered how the flesh of his testicles had begun to crawl, how his bowels had suddenly felt all loose and hot, as if he might suddenly drop a casual load of shit into his pants. But he couldn't say any of that in front of Beverly. You didn't say stuff like that in front of girls, even if they were the sort of girls you could say things like 'bitch' and 'bastard' in front of. ' . . . I felt scared,' he finished, feeling that was too weak, but not knowing how to say the rest. But they were nodding as if they understood, and he felt an indescribable relief wash through him. Somehow that clown looking at him, smiling his red smile, his white-gloved hand penduluming slowly back and forth . . . that had been worse than having Henry Bowers and the rest after him. Ever so much worse.

'Then we were past,' Mike went on. 'We marched up Main Street Hill. And I saw him again, handing out balloons to kids. Except a lot of them didn't want to take them. Some of the little ones were crying. I couldn't figure out how he could have gotten up there so fast. I thought to myself that there must be two of them, you know, both of them dressed the same way. A team. But then he turned around and waved to me again and I knew it was him. It was the same man.'

'He's not a man,' Richie said, and Beverly shuddered. Bill put his arm around her for a moment and she looked at him gratefully.

'He waved to me . . . and then he winked. Like we had a secret. Or like . . . like maybe he knew I'd recognized him.'

Bill dropped his arm from Beverly's shoulders. 'You reh-reh-rehrecognized him?'

'I think so,' Mike said. 'I have to check something before I say it's for sure. My father's got some pictures . . . He collects them . . . Listen, you guys play down here a lot, don't you?'

'Sure,' Ben said. 'That's why we're building a clubhouse.'

Mike nodded. 'I'll check and see if I'm right. If I am, I can bring the pictures.'

'O-O-Old pic-pictures?' Bill asked.

'Yes.'

'W-W-What else?' Bill asked.

Mike opened his mouth and then closed it again. He looked around at them uncertainly and then said, 'You'd think I was crazy. Crazy or lying.'

'D-Do y-y-you th-think we're cruh-cruh-crazy?'

Mike shook his head.

'You bet we're not,' Eddie said. 'I got a lot wrong with me, but I'm not bughouse. I don't think.'

'No,' Mike said. 'I don't think you're crazy.'

'Well, we-we won't th-think you're cruh-cruh . . . nuts, e-e-either,' Bill said.

Mike looked them all over, cleared his throat, and said: 'I saw a bird. Couple, three months ago. I saw a bird.'

Stan Uris looked at Mike. 'What kind of a bird?'

Speaking more reluctantly than ever Mike said: 'It looked like a sparrow, sort of, but it also looked like a robin. It had an orange chest.'

'Well, what's so special about a bird?' Ben asked. 'There are lots of birds in Derry.' But he felt uneasy, and looking at Stan, he felt sure that Stan was remembering what had happened in the Standpipe, and how he had somehow stopped it from happening by shouting out the names of birds. But he forgot all about that and everything else when Mike spoke again.

'This bird was bigger than a housetrailer,' he said.

He looked at their shocked, amazed faces. He waited for their laughter, but none came. Stan looked as if someone had clipped him with a brick. His face had gone so pale it was the color of muted November sunlight.

'I swear it's true,' Mike said. 'It was a giant bird, like one of those birds in the monster-movies that are supposed to be prehistoric.'

'Yeah, like in The Giant Claw,' Richie said. He thought the bird in that had been sort of fake-looking, but by the time it got to New York he had still been excited enough to spill his popcorn over the balcony railing at the Aladdin. Foxy Foxworth would have kicked him out, but the movie was over by then anyway. Sometimes you got the shit kicked out of you, but as Big Bill said, sometimes you won one, too.

'But it didn't look prehistoric,' Mike said. 'And it didn't look like one of those whatdoyoucallums the Greeks and Romans made up stories about - '

'Ruh-Ruh-Rocs?' Bill suggested.

'Right, I guess so. It wasn't like those, either. It was just like a combination robin and sparrow. The two most common birds you see.' He laughed a little wildly.

'W-W-Where - ' Bill began.

'Tell us,' Beverly said simply, and after a moment to collect his thoughts, Mike did. And telling it, watching their faces grow concerned and scared but not disbelieving or derisive, he felt an incredible weight lift from his chest. Like Ben with his mummy or Eddie with his leper and Stan with the drowned boys, he had seen a thing that would have driven an adult insane, not just with terror but with the walloping force of an unreality too great to be explained away or, lacking any rational explanation, simply ignored. Elijah's face had been burned black by the light of God's love, or so Mike had read; but Elijah had been an old man when it happened, and maybe that made a difference. Hadn't one of those other Bible fellows, this one little more than a kid, actually wrestled an angel to a draw?

He had seen it and he had gone on with his life; he had integrated the memory into his view of the world. He was still young enough so that view was tremendously wide. But what had happened that day had nonetheless haunted his mind's darker corners, and sometimes in his dreams he ran from that grotesque bird as it printed its shadow on him from above. Some of these dreams he remembered and some he did not, but they were there, shadows which moved by themselves.

How little of it he had forgotten and how greatly it had troubled him (as he went about his daily round: helping his father, going to school, riding his bike, doing errands for his mother, waiting for the black groups to come on American Bandstand after school) was perhaps measurable in only one way - the relief he felt in sharing it with the others. As he did, he realized it was the first time he had even allowed himself to think of it fully since that early morning by the Canal, when he had seen those odd grooves . . . and the blood.

4

Mike told the story of the bird at the old Ironworks and how he had run into the pipe to escape it. Later on that afternoon, three of the Losers - Ben, Richie, Bill - walked toward the Derry Public Library. Ben and Richie were keeping a close watch for Bowers and Company, but Bill only looked at the sidewalk, frowning, lost in thought. About an hour after telling them his story Mike had left them, saying his father wanted him home by four to pick peas. Beverly had to do some marketing and fix dinner for her father, she said. Both Eddie and Stan had their own things to do. But before they broke up for the day they began digging what was to become - if Ben was right - their underground clubhouse. To Bill (and to all of them, he suspected), the groundbreaking had seemed an almost symbolic act. They had begun. Whatever it was they were supposed to do as a group, as a unit, they had begun.

Ben asked Bill if he believed like Hanlon's story. They were passing Derry Community House and the library was just ahead, a stone oblong comfortably shaded by elms a century old and as yet untouched by the Dutch Elm disease that would later plague and thin them.

'Yeah,' Bill said. 'I th-think it was the truh-hooth. C-C-Crazy, but true. What about you, Ruh-Ruh-Richie?'

Richie nodded. 'Yeah. I hate to believe it, if you know what I mean, but I guess I do. You remember what he said about the bird's tongue?

Bill and Ben nodded. Orange fluffs on it.

'That's the kicker,' Richie said. 'It's like some comic-book villain. Lex Luthor or the Joker or someone like that. It always leaves a trademark.'

Bill nodded thoughtfully. It was like some comic-book villain. Because they saw it that way? Thought of it that way? Yes, perhaps so. It was kid's stuff, but it seemed that was what this thing thrived on - kid's stuff.

They crossed the street to the library side.

'I a-a-asked Stuh-Stuh-Stan i-if he e-ever h-h-heard of a buh-bird l-like that,' Bill said. 'Nuh-nuh-not n-necessarily a b-b-big wuh-wuh-one, but j- just a-a-a - '

'A real one?' Richie suggested.

Bill nodded. 'H-He suh-said there m-m-might be a buh-bird like that in Suh-houth America or A-A-A-Africa, but nuh-nuh-not a-around h-h-here.'

'He didn't believe it, then?' Ben asked.

'H-H-He buh-believed i-i-it,' Bill said. And then he told them something else Stan had suggested when Bill walked with him back to where Stan had left his bike. Stan's idea was that nobody else could have seen that bird before Mike told them that story. Something else, maybe, but not that bird, because the bird was Mike Hanlon's personal monster. But now . . . why, now that bird was the property of the whole Losers' Club, wasn't it? Any of them might see it. It might not look exactly the same; Bill might see it as a crow, Richie as a hawk, Beverly as a golden eagle, for all Stan knew - but It could be a bird to all of them now. Bill told Stan that if that was true, then any of them might see the leper, the mummy, or possibly the dead boys.

'Which means we ought to do something pretty soon if we're going to do anything at all,' Stan had replied. 'It knows . . . '

'Wuh-What?' Bill had asked sharply. 'Eh-Everything we nuh-know?'

'Man, if It knows that, we're sunk,' Stan had answered. 'But you can bet It knows we know about It, I think It'll try to get us. Are you still thinking about what we talked about yesterday?'

'Yes.'

'I wish I could go with you.'

'Buh-Buh-Ben and Rih-Richie w-w-will. Ben's really s-s-smart, and Rih-Rih-Richie is, too, when he ih-isn't fucking o-off.'

Now, standing outside the library, Richie asked Bill exactly what it was he had in mind. Bill told them, speaking slowly so he wouldn't stutter too badly. The idea had been circling in his mind for the last two weeks, but it had taken Mike's story of the bird to crystallize it.

What did you do if you wanted to get rid of a bird?

Well, shooting it was pretty goddam final.

What did you do if you wanted to get rid of a monster? Well, the movies suggested that shooting it with a silver bullet was pretty goddam final.

Ben and Richie listened to this respectfully enough. Then Richie asked, 'How do you get a silver bullet, Big Bill? Send away for it?'

'Very fuh-fuh-funny. We'll have to m-m-make it.'

'How?'

'I guess that's what we're at the library to find out,' Ben said. Richie nodded and pushed his glasses up on his nose. Behind them, his eyes were sharp and thoughtful . . . but doubtful, Bill thought. He felt doubtful himself. At least there was no foolishness in Richie's eyes, and that was a step in the right direction.

'You thinking about your dad's Walther?' Richie asked. The one we took to Neibolt Street?'

'Yes,' Bill said.

'Even if we could really make silver bullets,' Richie said, 'where would we

get the silver?'

'Let me worry about that,' Ben said quietly.

'Well . . . okay,' Richie said. 'We'll let Haystack worry about that. Then what? Neibolt Street again?'

Bill nodded. 'Nee-Nee-Neibolt Street a-a-again. And then we buh-blow its fucking h-h-head o-off.'

The three of them stood there a moment longer, looking at each other solemnly, and then they went into the library.

5

'Sure an begorrah, it's that black feller again!' Richie cried in his Irish Cop Voice.

A week had passed; it was nearly mid July and the underground clubhouse was almost finished.

'Top o the mornin to ye, Mr O'Hanlon, sor! And a foine, foine day it promises to be, foine as pertaters a-growin, as me old mither used to - '

'So far as I know, noon is the top of the morning, Richie,' Ben said, popping up in the hole, 'and noon was two hours ago.' He and Richie had been putting in shoring around the sides of the hole. Ben had taken off his sweatshirt because the day was hot and the work was hard. His tee - shirt was gray with sweat and stuck to his chest and pouch of a stomach. He seemed remarkably unselfconscious of the way he looked, but Mike guessed that if Ben heard Beverly coming, he would be inside that baggy sweatshirt again before you could say puppy love.

'Don't be so picky - you sound like Stan the Man,' Richie said. He had gotten out of the hole five minutes before because, he told Ben, it was time for a cigarette break.

'I thought you said you didn't have any cigarettes,' Ben had said.

'I don't,' Richie had replied, 'but the principle remains the same.'

Mike had his father's photograph album under his arm. 'Where is everybody?' he asked. He knew Bill had to be somewhere around, because he had left his own bike parked under the bridge near Silver.

'Bill and Eddie went down to the dump about half an hour ago to liberate some more boards,' Richie said. 'Stanny and Bev went down to Reynolds Hardware to get hinges. I don't know what the frock Haystack's up to down there - up to down there, ha-ha, you get it? - but it's probably no good. Boy needs someone to keep an eye on him, you know. By the way, you owe us twenty-three cents if you still want to be in this club. Your share of the hinges.'

Mike switched the album from his right arm to his left and dug into his pocket. He counted out twenty-three cents (leaving a grand total of one dime in his own personal treasury) and handed it over to Richie. Then he walked over to the hole and looked in.

Except it really wasn't a hole anymore. The sides had been neatly squared off. Each side had been shored up. The boards were all mongrels, but Ben, Bill, and Stan had done a good job of sizing them with tools from Zack Denbrough's shop (and Bill had been at great pains to make sure every tool was returned every night, and in the same condition as when it was taken). Ben and Beverly had nailed cross-pieces between the supports. The hole still made Eddie a little nervous, but that was Eddie's nature. Piled carefully to one side were squares of sod which would later be glued to the top.

'I think you guys know what you're doing,' Mike said.

'Sure,' Ben said, and pointed to the album. 'What you got?'

'My father's Derry album,' Mike said. 'He collects old pictures and clippings about the town. It's his hobby. I was looking through it a couple of days ago - I told you I thought I'd seen that clown before. And I did. In here. So I brought it down.' He was too ashamed to add that he had not dared to ask his father's permission to do this. Afraid of the questions to which such a request might lead, he had taken it from the house like a thief while his father planted potatoes in the west field and his mother hung clothes in the back yard. 'I thought you guys ought to take a look, too.'

'Well, let's see,' Richie said.

'I'd like to wait until everybody's here. It might be better.'

'Okay.' Richie was, in truth, not that anxious to look at more pictures of Derry, in this or any other album. Not after what had happened in Georgie's room. 'You want to help me and Ben with the rest of the shoring?'

'You bet.' Mike put his father's album down carefully, far enough from the hole so it wouldn't be pelted with flying dirt, and took Ben's shovel.

'Dig right here,' Ben said, showing Mike the spot. 'Go down about a foot. Then I'll set a board in and hold it flush against the side while you shovel the dirt back in.'

'Good plan, man,' Richie said sagely from where he sat on the edge of the excavation with his sneakers dangling down.

'What's wrong with you?' Mike asked.

'Got a bone in my leg,' Richie said comfortably.

'How's your project with Bill going?' Mike stopped long enough to strip off his shirt and then began to dig. It was hot down here, even in the Barrens. Crickets hummed sleepily like summer clocks in the brush.

'Well . . . not too bad,' Richie said, and Mike thought he flashed Ben a mildly warning look. 'I guess.'

'Why don't you play your radio, Richie?' Ben asked. He slipped a board into the hole Mike had dug and held it there. Richie's transistor was hung by the strap in its accustomed place, on the thick branch of a nearby shrub.

'Batteries are worn out,' Richie said. 'You had to have my last twenty-five cents for hinges, remember? Cruel, Haystack, very cruel. After all the things I've done for you. Besides, all I can only get down here is WABI and they only play pansy rock.'

'Huh?' Mike asked.

'Haystack thinks Tommy Sands and Pat Boone sing rock and roll,' Richie said, 'but that's because he's ill. Elvis sings rock and roll. Ernie K. Doe sings rock and roll. Carl Perkins sings rock and roll. Bobby Darin. Buddy Holly. "Ah-ow Peggy . . . my Peggy Suh-uh-oo . . "'

'Please, Richie,' Ben said.

'Also,' Mike said, leaning on his shovel, 'there's Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Shep and the Limelights, La Verne Baker, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, the Coasters, the Isley Brothers, the Crests, the Chords, Stick McGhee - '

They were looking at him with such amazement that Mike laughed.

'You lost me after Little Richard,' Richie said. He liked Little Richard, but if he had a secret rock-and-roll hero that summer it was Jerry Lee Lewis. His mom had happened to come into the living room while Jerry Lee was performing on American Bandstand. This was at the point in his act where Jerry Lee actually climbed onto his piano and played it upside down with his hair hanging in his face. He had been singing 'High School Confidential.' For a moment Richie believed his mom was going to faint. She didn't, but she was so traumatized by what she had seen that she talked at dinner that night about sending Richie to one of those military-type camps for the rest of the summer. Now Richie shook his hair down over his eyes and began to sing: 'Come on over baby all the cats are at the high school rockin - '

Ben began to stagger around the hole, grasping his large belly and pretending to puke. Mike held his nose, but he was laughing so hard tears squirted out of his eyes.

'What's wrong?' Richie demanded. 'I mean, what ails you guys? That was good! I mean, that was really good!'

'Oh man,' Mike said, and now he was laughing so hard he could barely talk. 'That was priceless. I mean, that was really priceless.'

'Negroes have no taste,' Richie said. 'I think it even says so in the Bible.'

'Yo mamma,' Mike said, laughing harder than ever. When Richie asked, with honest bewilderment, what that meant, Mike sat down with a thump and rocked back and forth, howling and holding his stomach.

'You probably think I'm jealous,' Richie said. 'You probably think I want to be a Negro.'

Now Ben also fell down, laughing wildly. His whole body rippled and quaked alarmingly. His eyes bulged. 'No more, Richie,' he managed. 'I'm gonna shit my pants. I'm gonna d-d-die if you don't stub-stop - '

'I don't want to be a Negro,' Richie said. 'Who wants to wear pink pants and live in Boston and buy pizza by the slice? I want to be Jewish like Stan. I want to own a pawnshop and sell people switchblades and plastic dog-puke and used guitars.'

Ben and Mike were now actually screaming with laughter. Their laughter echoed through the green and jungly ravine that was the misnamed Barrens, causing birds to take wing and squirrels to freeze momentarily on limbs. It was a young sound, penetrating, lively, vital, unsophisticated, free. Almost every living thing within range of that sound reacted to it in some way, but the thing which had tumbled out of a wide concrete drain and into the upper Kenduskeag was not living. The previous afternoon there had been a sudden driving thunderstorm (the clubhouse-to-be had not been much affected - since digging operations had begun, Ben had covered the hole carefully each evening with a ragged piece of tarpaulin Eddie had scrounged from behind Wally's Spa; it smelled painty but it did the job), and the stormdrains under Derry had run with violent water for two or three hours. It was that spate of water that had pushed this unpleasant baggage into the sun for the flies to find.

It was the body of a nine-year old named Jimmy Cullum. Except for the nose, his face was gone. There was a churned and featureless mess where it had been. This raw meat was dotted with deep black marks that perhaps only Stan Uris would have recognized for what they were: pecks. Pecks made by a very large beak.

Water rilled over Jimmy Cullum's muddy chino pants. His white hands floated like dead fish. They had also been pecked, although not as badly. His paisley shirt ballooned out and collapsed back, ballooned out and collapsed back, like a bladder.

Bill and Eddie, loaded down with boards scrounged from the dump, crossed the Kenduskeag by stepping-stones less than forty yards from the body. They heard Richie, Ben, and Mike laughing, smiled a little themselves, and hurried past the unseen ruin of Jimmy Cullum to see what was so funny.

6

They were still laughing as Bill and Eddie came into the clearing, sweating under their load of lumber. Even Eddie, usually as pale as cheese, had some color in his face. They dropped the new boards on the almost depleted supply-pile. Ben climbed out of the hole to inspect them.

'Good deal!' he said. 'Wow! Great!'

Bill collapsed to the ground. 'Can I h-have my heart a-a-attack now or do I h-have to wuh-wait until luh-hater?'

'Have it later,' Ben said absently. He had brought a few tools of his own down to the Barrens and was now going over the new boards carefully, pounding out nails and removing screws. He tossed one aside because it was splintered. Rapping on another returned a dull punky sound in at least three places, and he also tossed that one aside. Eddie sat on a pile of dirt, watching him. He took a honk on his aspirator as Ben pulled a rusty nail from a board with the claw end of his hammer. The nail squealed like some small unpleasant animal that had been stepped on and didn't like it.

'You can get tetanus if you cut yourself on a rusty nail,' Eddie informed Ben.

'Yeah?' Richie said. 'What's titnuss? Sounds like a woman's disease.'

'You're a bird,' Eddie said. 'It's tetanus, not titnuss, and it means lock jaw. There's these special microbes that grow in rust, see, and if you cut yourself they can get inside your body and, um, fuck up your nerves.' Eddie went an even darker red and took another fast honk on his aspirator.

'Lock jaw, Jesus,' Richie said, impressed. 'That sounds mean.'

'You bet. First your jaw locks up so tight you can't open your mouth, not even to eat. They have to cut a hole in your cheek and feed you liquids through a tube.'

'Oh man,' Mike said, standing up in the hole. His eyes were wide, the corneas very white in his brown face. 'For sure?'

'My mom told me,' Eddie said. 'Then your throat locks up and you can't eat anymore and you starve to death.'

They contemplated this horror in silence.

'There's no cure,' Eddie amplified.

More silence.

'So,' Eddie said briskly, 'I always watch out for rusty nails and shit like that. I had to have a tetanus shot once and it really hurt.'

'So why'd you go to the dump with Bill and bring all this crap back?' Richie asked.

Eddie glanced briefly at Bill, who was looking into the clubhouse, and there was all the love and hero-worship in that gaze needed to answer such a question but Eddie said softly, 'Some stuff has to be done even if there is a risk. That's the first important thing I ever found out I didn't find out from my mother.'

A further silence, not quite uncomfortable, followed. Then Ben went back to pounding out rusty nails, and after awhile Mike Hanlon joined him.

Richie's transistor, robbed of its voice (at least until Richie's allowance came in or he found a lawn to mow), swung from its low branch in a mild breeze. Bill had time to reflect upon how odd all this was, how odd and how perfect, that they should all be here this summer. There were kids he knew visiting relatives. Kids he knew who were off on vacations at Disney land in California or on Cape Cod or, in the case of one chum, an unimaginably distant-sounding place with the queer but somehow evocative name of Gstaad. There were kids at church camp, kids at Scout camp, kids at rich-kid camps where you could learn to swim and play golf, camps where you learned to say 'Hey, good one!' instead of 'Fuck you!' when your opponent got a killer serve past you at tennis; kids whose parents had simply taken them AWAY. Bill could understand that. He knew some kids who wanted to go AWAY, frightened by the boogeyman stalking Derry this summer, but suspected there were more parents frightened by that boogeyman. People who had planned to take their vacations at home suddenly decided to go AWAY

(Gstaad? was that in Sweden? Argentina? Spain?)

instead. It was a little like the polio scare of 1956, when four kids who went swimming in the O'Brian Memorial Pool had gotten the disease. Grownups - word absolutely synonymous in Bill's mind with mothers and fathers - had decided then, as now, that AWAY was better. Safer. Anyone able to clear out had cleared. Bill understood AWAY, and he could muse over a word of such fabulous wonder as Gstaad, but wonder was cold comfort compared with desire; Gstaad was AWAY; Derry was desire.

And none of us have gone AWAY, he thought, watching as Ben and Mike pounded used nails out of used boards, as Eddie strolled off into the bushes to take a whiz (you had to go as soon as you could, in order to avoid seriously straining your bladder, he told Bill once, but you also had to watch out for poison ivy, because who needed a case of that on your pecker). We're all here in Derry. No camp, no relatives, no vacations, no AWAY. All right here. Present and accounted for.

'There's a door down there,' Eddie said, zipping his fly as he came back.

'Hope you shook off, Eds,' Richie said. 'If you don't shake off each time, you can get cancer. My mom told me so.'

Eddie looked startled, thinly worried, and then saw Richie's grin. He withered him (or tried to) with a babies-must-play look and then said, 'It was too big for us to carry. But Bill said if all of us went down we could get it up here.'

'Of course, you can never shake off completely,' Richie went on. 'You want to know what a wise man once told me, Eds?'

'No,' Eddie said, 'and I don't want you to call me Eds anymore, Richie. I mean, I'm sincere. I don't call you Dick, as in "You got any gum on ya, Dick?", so I don't see why - '

'This wise man,' Richie said, 'told me this: "No matter how much you squirm and dance, the last two drops go in your pants." And that's why there's so much cancer in the world, Eddie my love.'

'The reason there's so much cancer in the world is because nerds like you and Beverly Marsh smoke cigarettes,' Eddie said.

'Beverly is not a nerd,' Ben said in a forbidding voice. 'You just watch what you say, Trashmouth.'

'Beep-beep, you g-guys,' Bill said absently. 'And speaking of B-B-Beverly, she's pretty struh-struh-strong. She could h-h-help get that duh-door.'

Ben asked what kind of door it was.

'Muh-Muh-hogany, I th-hink.'

'Somebody threw out a mahogany door?' Ben asked, surprised but not unbelieving.

'People throw out everything,' Mike said. 'That dump? It kills me to go down there. I mean it kills me.'

'Yeah,' Ben agreed. 'A lot of that stuff could be fixed up easy. And there are people in China and South America with nothing. That's what my mother says.'

'There's people with nothing right here in Maine, Sunny Jim,' Richie said grimly.

'W-W-What's th-this?' Bill asked, noticing the album Mike had brought. Mike told him, saying he would show them the picture of the clown when Stan and Beverly got back with the hinges.

Bill and Richie exchanged a look.

'What's wrong?' Mike asked. 'Is it what happened in your brother's room,

'Bill?'

'Y-Yeah,' Bill said, and would say no more.

They took turns working on the hole until Stan and Beverly came back, each with a brown paper bag containing hinges. As Mike talked, Ben sat crosslegged, tailor-fashion, and made glassless windows that would swing open and shut in two of the long boards. Perhaps only Bill noticed how quickly and easily his fingers moved; how adept and knowing they were, like surgeon's fingers. Bill admired that.

'Some of these pictures go back a hundred years, my dad said,' Mike told them, holding the album on his lap. 'He gets them at those sales people have in their yards, and at secondhand shops. Sometimes he buys them or trades other collectors for them. Some of them are stereoscopes - there's two of them just the same on a long card, and when you look at them through this thing like binoculars, it looks like one picture, only in 3-D. Like House of Wax or The Creature from the Black Lagoon.'

'Why does he like all that stuff?' Beverly asked. She was wearing ordinary Levi's but she had done something amusing to the cuffs, blousing them out with a bright paisley material for the final four inches so that they looked like pants out of some sailor's whimsy.

'Yeah,' Eddie said. 'Most of the time, Derry's pretty boring.'

'Well, I don't know for sure, but I think it's because he wasn't born here,' Mike said diffidently. 'It's like - I don't know - like it's all new to him, or like, you know, if you came in during the middle of a movie - '

'Sh-sh-sure, you'd want to see the s-start,' Bill said.

'Yeah,' Mike said. 'There's a lot of history lying around in Derry. I kind of like it. And I think some of it has to do with this thing - this It, if you want to call it that.'

He looked at Bill and Bill nodded, his eyes thoughtful.

'So I was looking through it after the Fourth of July parade because I knew I'd seen that clown before. I knew it. And look.'

He opened the book, thumbed through it, then handed it to Ben, who was sitting on his right.

'D-D-Don't t-t-touch the puh-puh-pages!' Bill said, and there was such urgency in his voice that they all jumped. He had fisted the hand he had cut reaching into Georgie's album, Richie saw. Fisted it into a tight, protective knot.

'Bill's right,' Richie said, and that subdued, totally un-Richielike voice was a powerful convincer. 'Be careful. It's like Stan said. If we saw it happen, you guys could see it happen, too.'

'Feel it,' Bill added grimly.

The album went from hand to hand, each of them holding the book gingerly, by the edges, as if it were old dynamite sweating big beads of nitro.

It came back to Mike. He opened it to one of the first pages.

'Daddy says there's no way to date that one, but it's probably from the early or mid-seventeen-hundreds,' Mike said. 'He repaired a guy's handsaw for a box of old books and pictures. That was one of them. He says it might be worth forty bucks or even more.

The picture was a woodcut, the size of a large postcard. When Bill's turn came to look at it, he was relieved to see that Mike's father had the land of album where the pictures were under a protective plastic sheet. He looked, fascinated, and he thought: There. I'm seeing him - or It. Really seeing. That's the face of the enemy.

The picture showed a funny fellow juggling oversized bowling pins in the middle of a muddy street. There were a few houses on either side of the street, and a few huts that Bill guessed were stores, or trading posts, or whatever they called them back then. It didn't look like Derry at all, except for the Canal. It was there, neatly cobbled on both sides. In the upper background, Bill could see a team of mules on a towpath, dragging a barge.

There was a group of maybe half a dozen kids gathered around the funny fellow. One of them was wearing a pastoral straw hat. Another had a hoop and a stick to roll it with. Not the sort of stick that would come with a hoop that you bought today in a Woolworth's; it was a branch from a tree. Bill could see the bare knobs on it where smaller branches had been lopped off with a knife or a hatchet. That baby wasn't made in Taiwan or Korea, he thought, fascinated by this boy who could have been him if he'd been born four or five generations before.

The funny fellow had a huge grin on his face. He wore no makeup (except to Bill his whole face looked like make-up), but he was bald except for two tufts of hair that stuck up like horns over his ears, and Bill had no trouble recognizing their clown. Two hundred years ago or more, he thought, and felt a crazy surge of terror, anger, and excitement rush through him. Twenty-seven years later, sitting in the Derry Public Library and remembering his first look into Mike's father's album, he realized he had felt the way a hunter might feel, coming upon the first fresh spoor of an old killer tiger. Two hundred years ago . . . that long, and only God knows how much longer. This led him to wonder just how long the spirit of Pennywise had been here in Derry - but he found that was a thought he did not really want to pursue.

'Gimme, Bill!' Richie was saying, but Bill held the album a moment longer, staring fixedly at the woodcut, sure it would begin to move: the bowling pins (if that's what they were) which the funny fellow was juggling would rise and fall, rise and fall, the kids would laugh and applaud (except maybe they wouldn't all laugh and applaud; some of them might scream and run instead), the mule-team pulling the barge would move beyond the borders of the picture.

It didn't happen, and he passed the book on to Richie.

When the album came back to Mike he turned some more pages, hunting. 'Here,' he said. This one is from 1856, four years before Lincoln was elected President.'

The book went around again. This was a color picture - a sort of cartoon - which showed a bunch of drunks standing in front of a saloon while a fat politician with muttonchop whiskers declaimed from a board that had been set between two hogsheads. He held a foamy pitcher of beer in one hand. The board upon which he stood was considerably bowed with his weight. Some distance off, a group of bonneted women were looking at this show of mingled buffoonery and intemperance with disgust. The caption below the picture read: POLITICS IS THIRSTY WORK, SEZ SENATOR GARNER!

'Daddy says pictures like this were really popular for about twenty years before the Civil War,' Mike said. 'They called them "foolcards," and people used to send them to each other. They were like some of the jokes in Mad, I guess.'

'Suh-suh-satire,' Bill said.

'Yeah,' Mike said. 'But now look down in the corner of this one.'

The picture was like Mad in another way - it had as many details and little side-jokes as a big Mort Drucker panel in a Mad magazine movie take-off. There was a grinning fat man pouring a glass of beer down a spotted dog's throat. There was a woman who had fallen on her prat in a mudpuddle. There were two street urchins slyly sticking sulphur-headed matches into the soles of a prosperous-looking businessman's shoes, and a girl swinging from her heels in an elm tree so that her underpants showed. But despite this bewildering intaglio of detail, none of them really needed Mike to point the clown out. Dressed in a loud checked vest-busting drummer's suit, he was playing the shell-game with a bunch of drunken loggers. He was winking at a lumber jack who had, to judge by the gape-mouthed look of surprise on his face, just picked the wrong nutshell. The drummer/clown was taking a coin from him.

'Him again,' Ben said. 'What . . . a hundred years later?'

'Just about,' Mike said. 'And here's one from 1891.'

It was a clipping from the front page of the Derry News. HUZZAH! the headline proclaimed exuberantly. IRONWORKS OPENS! Just below this: 'Town Turns Out for Gala Picnic.' The picture showed a woodcut of the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Kitchener Ironworks; its style reminded Bill of the Currier and Ives prints his mother had in the dining room, although this was nowhere near as polished. A fellow tricked out in a morning coat and tophat was holding a large pair of open-jawed scissors above the Ironworks ribbon while a crowd of perhaps five hundred watched. Off to the left was a clown - their clown - turning a handspring for a group of children. The artist had caught him upside down, turning his smile into a scream.

He passed the book on quickly to Richie.

The next picture was a photograph under which Will Hanlon had written: 1933: Repeal in Derry. Although none of the boys knew much about either the Volstead Act or its repeal, the picture made the salient facts clear. The photo was of Wally's Spa down in Hell's Half-Acre. The place was almost literally filled to the rafters with men wearing open-collared white shirts, straw boaters, lumbermen's shirts, tee-shirts, banker's suits. All of them were holding glasses and bottles victoriously aloft. There were two big signs in the window. WELCOME BACK, JOHN BARLEYCORN! one read. The other said: FREE BEER TONIGHT. The clown, dressed like the biggest dandy you ever saw (white shoes, spats, gangster pants), had his foot on the running board of a Reo auto and was drinking champagne from a lady's high-heeled shoe.

'1945,' Mike said.

The Derry News again. The headline: JAPAN SURRENDERS - IT'S OVER! THANK GOD IT'S OVER! A parade was snake-dancing its way along Main Street toward Up-Mile Hill. And there was the clown in the background, wearing his silver suit with the orange buttons, frozen in the matrix of dots that made up the grainy newsprint photo, seeming to suggest (at least to Bill) that nothing was over, no one had surrendered, nothing was won, nil was still the rule, zilch still the custom; seeming to suggest above all that all was still lost.

Bill felt cold and dry and scared.

Suddenly the dots in the picture disappeared and it began to move.

'That's what - ' Mike began.

'L-L-Look,' Bill said. The word dropped out of his mouth like a partially melted ice-cube. 'A-A-All of you luh-look at th-this!'

They crowded around.

'Oh my God,' Beverly whispered, awed.

'That's IT!' Richie nearly screamed, pounding Bill on the back in his excitement. He looked around at Eddie's white, drawn face and Stan Uris's frozen one. 'That's what we saw in George's room! That's exactly what we -

'Shhh,' Ben said. 'Listen.' And, almost sobbing: 'You can hear them - Christ, you can hear them in there.'

And in the silence that was only broken by the mild stir of the summer breeze, they all realized they could. The band was playing a martial marching tune, made faint and tinny by distance . . . or the passage of time . . . or whatever it was. The cheering of the crowd was like sounds that might come through on a badly tuned radio station. There were popping noises, also faint, like the muffled sound of snapping fingers.

'Firecrackers,' Beverly whispered, and rubbed at her eyes with hands that shook. 'Those are firecrackers, aren't they?'

No one answered. They watched the picture, their eyes eating up their faces.

The parade wiggled its way toward them, but just before the marchers reached the extreme foreground - at the point where it seemed they must march right out of the picture and into a world thirteen years later - they dropped from sight, as if on some kind of unknowable curve. The World War I soldiers first, their faces strangely old under their pie-plate helmets, with their sign which read THE DERRY VFW WELCOMES HOME OUR BRAVE BOYS, then the Boy Scouts, the Kiwanians, the Home Nursing Corps, the Derry Christian Marching Band, then the Derry World War II vets themselves, with the high-school band behind them. The crowd moved and shifted. Tickertape and confetti fluttered down from the second- and third-floor windows of the business buildings that lined the streets. The clown pranced along the sidelines, doing splits and cartwheels, miming a sniper, miming a salute. And Bill noticed for the first time that people were turning from him - but not as if they saw him, exactly; it was more as if they felt a draft or smelled something bad.

Only the children really saw him, and they shrank away.

Ben stretched his hand out to the picture, as Bill had done in George's room.

'Nuh-Nuh-Nuh-NO!' Bill cried.

'I think it's all right, Bill,' Ben said. 'Look.' And he laid his hand on the protective plastic over the picture for a moment and then took it back. 'But if you stripped off that cover - '

Beverly screamed. The clown had left off its antics when Ben withdrew his hand. It rushed toward them, its paint-bloody mouth gibbering and laughing. Bill winced back but held onto the book all the same, thinking it would drop out of sight as the parade had done, and the marching band, and the Boy Scouts, and the Cadillac convertible carrying Miss Derry of 1945.

But the clown did not disappear along that curve that seemed to define the edge of that old existence. Instead, it leaped with a scary, nimble grace onto a lamppost that stood in the extreme left foreground of the picture. It shinnied up like a monkey on a stick - and suddenly its face was pressed against the tough plastic sheet Will Hanlon had put over each of the pages in his book. Beverly screamed again and this time Eddie joined her, although his scream was faint and blue-breathless. The plastic bulged out - later they would all agree they saw it. Bill saw the bulb of the clown's red nose flatten, the way your nose will flatten when you press it against a windowpane.

'Kill you all!' The clown was laughing and screaming. 'Try to stop me and I'll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can't stop me! I'm the Gingerbread Man! I'm the Teenage Werewolf!'

And for a moment It was the Teenage Werewolf, the moon-silvered face of the lycanthrope peering out at them from over the collar of the silver suit, white teeth bared.

'Can't stop me, I'm the leper!'

Now the leper's face, haunted and peeling, rotting with sores, stared at them with the eyes of the living dead.

'Can't stop me, I'm the mummy!'

The leper's face aged and ran with sterile cracks. Ancient bandages swam halfway out of its skin and solidified there. Ben turned away, his face as white as curds, one hand plastered over his neck and ear.

'Can't stop me, I'm the dead boys!'

'No!' Stan Uris screamed. His eyes bulged above braised-looking crescents of skin - shockflesh, Bill thought randomly, and it was a word he would use in a novel twelve years later, with no idea where it had come from, simply taking it, as writers take the right word at the right time, as a simple gift from that outer space

(otherspace)

where the good words come from sometimes.

Stan snatched the album from his hands and slammed it shut. He held it closed with both hands, the tendons standing out along the inner surfaces of his wrists and forearms. He looked around at the others with eyes that were nearly insane. 'No,' he said rapidly. 'No, no, no.'

And suddenly Bill found he was more concerned with Stan's repeated denials than with the clown, and he understood that this was exactly the sort of reaction the clown had hoped to provoke, because . . .

Because maybe It's scared us . . . really scared for the first time in Its long, long life.

He grabbed Stan and shook him twice, hard, holding onto his shoulders. Stan's teeth clicked together and he dropped the album. Mike picked it up and put it aside in a hurry, not liking to touch it after what he had seen. But it was still his father's, and he understood intuitively that his father would never see in it what he had just seen.

'No,' Stan said softly.

'Yes,' Bill said.

'No,' Stan said again.

'Yes. Wea-a-all - '

'No.'

' - a-a-all suh-haw it, Stan,' Bill said. He looked at the others.

'Yes,' Ben said.