IT

'I know something,' Beverly said in the dark, and to Bill her voice sounded older. 'I know because my father told me. I know how to bring us back together. And if we're not together we'll never get out.'

'What?' Ben asked, sounding bewildered and terrified. 'What are you talking about?'

'Something that will bring us together forever. Something that will show - '

'Nuh-Nuh-No, B-B-Beverly!' Bill said, suddenly understanding, understanding everything.

' - that will show that I love you all,' Beverly said, 'that you're all my friends.'

'What's she t - ' Mike began.

Calmly, Beverly cut across his words. 'Who's first?' she asked. 'I think

8

In the Lair of It / 1985

he's dying,' Beverly wept. 'His arm, It ate his arm - She reached for Bill, clung to him, and Bill shook her off.

'It's getting away again!' he roared at her. Blood caked his lips and chin. 'Cuh-Cuh-Come on! Richie! B-B-Ben! This tuh-time we're g-g-going to fuh-hinish her!'

Richie turned Bill toward him, looked at him as you would look at a man who is hopelessly raving. 'Bill, we have to take care of Eddie. We have to get a tourniquet on him, get him out of here.'

But Beverly was now sitting with Eddie's head in her lap, cradling him. She had closed his eyes. 'Go with Bill,' she said. 'If you let him die for nothing . if It comes back in another twenty-five years, or fifty, or even two thousand, I swear I'll . . . I'll haunt your ghosts. Go!'

Richie looked at her for a moment, indecisive. Then he became aware that her face was losing definition, becoming not a face but a pale shape in the growing shadows. The light was fading. It decided him. 'All right,' he said to Bill. 'This time we chase.'

Ben was standing in back of the spiderweb, which had begun to decay again. He had also seen the shape swaying high up in it, and he prayed that Bill would not look up.

But as the web began to fall in drifts and strands and skeins, Bill did.

He saw Audra, sagging as if in a very old and creaky elevator. She dropped ten feet, stopped, swaying from side to side, and then abruptly dropped another fifteen. Her face never changed. Her eyes, china-blue, were wide open. Her bare feet swung back and forth like pendulums. Her hair hung lankly over her shoulders. Her mouth was ajar.

'AUDRA!' he screamed.

'Bill, come on!' Ben shouted.

The web was falling all around them now, thudding to the floor and beginning to run. Richie suddenly grabbed Bill around the waist, and propelled him forward, shooting for a ten-foot-high gap between the floor and the bottommost cross-strand of the sagging web. 'Go, Bill! Go! Go!'

'That's Audra!' Bill shouted desperately. 'Thuh-That's AUDRA!'

'I don't give a shit if it's the Pope,' Richie said grimly. 'Eddie's dead and we're going to kill It, if It's still alive. We're going to finish the job this time, Big Bill. Either she's alive or she's not. Now come on!'

Bill hung back a moment longer, and then snapshots of the children, all the dead children, seemed to flutter through his mind like lost photographs from George's album. SCHOOL FRIENDS.

'A-A11 ruh-right. Let's g-go. Guh-Guh-God forgive m-me.'

He and Richie ran under the strand of cross-webbing seconds before it collapsed, and joined Ben on the other side. They ran after It as Audra swung and dangled fifty feet above the stone floor, wrapped in a numbing cocoon that was attached to the decaying web.

9

Ben

They followed the trail of Its black blood - oily pools of ichor that ran and dripped into the cracks between the flagstones. But as the floor began to rise toward a semicircular black opening at the far side of the chamber, Ben saw something new: a trail of eggs. Each was black and rough-shelled, perhaps as big as an ostrich-egg. A waxy light shone from within them. Ben realized they were semi-transparent; he could see black shapes moving inside.

Its children, he thought, and felt his gorge rise. Its miscarried children. God! God!

Richie and Bill had stopped and were staring at the eggs with stupid, dazed wonder.

'Go on! Go on!' Ben shouted. 'I'll take care of them! Get It!'

'Here!' Richie shouted, and threw Ben a pack of Derry Town House matches.

Ben caught them. Bill and Richie ran on. Ben watched them in the rapidly dimming light for a moment. They ran into the darkness of Its escape-passage and were lost from sight. Then he looked down at the first of the thin-shelled eggs, at the black, mantalike shadow inside, and felt his determination waver. This . . . hey guys, this was too much. This was simply too awful. And surely they would die without his help; they had not been so much laid as dropped.

But It's time was close . . . and if one of them is capable of surviving . . . even one . . .

Summoning all of his courage, summoning up Eddie's pale, dying face, Ben brought one Desert Driver boot down on the first egg. It broke with a sodden squelch as some stinking placenta ran out around his boot. Then a spider the size of a rat was scrabbling weakly across the floor, trying to get away, and Ben could hear it in his head, its high mewling cries like the sound of a handsaw being bent rapidly back and forth so that it makes ghost-music.

Ben lurched after it on legs that felt like stilts and brought his foot down again. He felt the spider's body crunch and splatter under the heel of his boot. His gorge clenched and this time there was no way he could hold back. He vomited, then twisted his heel, grinding the thing into the stones, listening to the cries in his head fade to nothing.

How many? How many eggs? Didn't I read somewhere that spiders can lay thousands . . . or millions? I can't keep doing this, I'll go mad -

You have to. You have to. Come on, Ben . . . get it together!

He went to the next egg and repeated the process in the last of the dying lieht Everything was repeated: the brittle snap, the squelch of liquid, the final coup de grâce. The next. The next. The next. Making his way slowly toward the black arch into which his friends had gone. The darkness was complete now Beverly and the decaying web somewhere behind him. He could still hear the whisper of its collapse. The eggs were pallid stones in the dark. As he reached each one he struck a light from the matchbook and broke it open. In each case he was able to follow the course of the dazed spiderling and crush it before the light flickered out. He had no idea how he was going to proceed if his matches gave out before he had crushed the last of the eggs and killed each one's unspeakable cargo.

10

It / 1985

Still coming.

It sensed them still coming, gaining, and Its fear grew. Perhaps It was not eternal after all - the unthinkable must finally be thought. Worse, It sensed the death of Its young. A third of these hated hateful men - boys was walking steadily up Its trail of birth, almost insane with revulsion but continuing nonetheless, methodically stamping the life from each of Its eggs.

No! It wailed, lurching from side to side, feeling Its life-force running from a hundred wounds, none of them mortal in itself, but each a song of pain, each slowing It. One of Its legs hung by a single living twist of meat. One of Its eyes was blind. It sensed a terrible rupture inside, the result of whatever poison one of the hated men-boys had managed to shoot down Its throat.

And still they came on, closing the distance, and how could this happen? It whined and mewled, and when It sensed them almost directly behind, It did the only thing It could do now: It turned to fight.

11

Beverly

Before the last of the light faded and utter dark closed down, she saw Bill's wife plunge another twenty feet and then fetch up again. She had begun to spin, her long red hair fanning out. His wife, she thought. But I was his first love, and if he thought some other woman was his first, it was only because he forgot . . . forgot Derry.

Then she was in darkness, alone with the sound of the falling web and Eddie's simple moveless weight. She didn't want to let him go, didn't want to let his face lie on the foul floor of this place. So she held his head in the crook of an arm that had gone mostly numb and brushed his hair away from his damp forehead. She thought of the birds . . . that was something she supposed she had gotten from Stan. Poor Stan, who hadn't been able to face this.

All of them . . . I was their first love.

She tried to remember it - it was something good to think about in all this darkness, where you couldn't place the sounds. It made her feel less alone. At first it wouldn't come; the image of the birds intervened - crows and grackles and starlings, spring birds that came back from somewhere while the streets were still running with meltwater and the last patches of crusted dirty snow clung grimly to their shady places.

It seemed to her that it was always on a cloudy day that you first heard and saw those spring birds and wondered where they came from. Suddenly they were just back in Derry, filling the white air with their raucous chatter. They lined the telephone wires and roofpeaks of the Victorian houses on West Broadway; they jostled for places on the aluminum branches of the elaborate TV antenna on top of Wally's Spa; they loaded the wet black branches of the elms on Lower Main Street. They settled, they talked to each other in the screamy babbling voices of old countrywomen at the weekly Grange Bingo games, and then, at some signal which humans could not discern, they all took wing at once, turning the sky black with their numbers . . . and came down somewhere else.

Yes, the birds, I was thinking of them because I was ashamed. It was my father who made me ashamed, I guess, and maybe that was It's doing, too. Maybe.

The memory came - the memory behind the birds - but it was vague and disconnected. Perhaps this one always would be. She had -

Her thoughts broke off as she realized that Eddie

12

Love and Desire / August 10th, 1958

comes to her first, because he is the most frightened. He comes to her not as her friend of that summer, or as her brief lover now, but the way he would have come to his mother only three or four years ago, to be comforted; he doesn't draw back from her smooth nakedness and at first she doubts if he even feels it. He is trembling, and although she holds him the darkness is so perfect that even this close she cannot see him; except for the rough cast he might as well be a phantom.

'What do you want?' he asks her.

'You have to put your thing in me,' she says.

He tries to pull back but she holds him and he subsides against her. She has heard someone - Ben, she thinks - draw in his breath.

'Bevvie, I can't do that. I don't know how - '

'I think it's easy. But you'll have to get undressed.' She thinks about the intricacies of managing cast and shirt, first somehow separating and then rejoining them, and amends, 'Your pants, anyway.'

'No, I can't!' But she thinks part of him can, and wants to, because his trembling has stopped and she feels something small and hard which presses against the right side of her belly.

'You can,' she says, and pulls him down. The surface beneath her bare back and legs is firm, clayey, dry. The distant thunder of the water is drowsy, soothing. She reaches for him. There's a moment when her father's face intervenes, harsh and forbidding

(I want to see if you're intact)

and then she closes her arms around Eddie's neck, her smooth cheek against his smooth cheek, and as he tentatively touches her small breasts she sighs and thinks for the first time This is Eddie and she remembers a day in July - could it only have been last month? - when no one else turned up in the Barrens but Eddie, and he had a whole bunch of Little Lulu comic books and they read together for most of the afternoon, Little Lulu looking for beebleberries and getting in all sorts of crazy situations, Witch Hazel, all of those guys. It had been fun.

She thinks of birds; in particular of the grackles and starlings and crows that come back in the spring, and her hands go to his belt and loosen it, and he says again that he can't do that; she tells him that he can, she knows he can, and what she feels is not shame or fear now but a kind of triumph.

'Where?' he says, and that hard thing pushes urgently against her inner thigh.

'Here,' she says.

'Bevvie, I'll fall on you!' he says, and she hears his breath start to whistle painfully.

'I think that's sort of the idea,' she tells him and holds him gently and guides him. He pushes forward too fast and there is pain.

Ssssss! - she draws her breath in, her teeth biting at her lower lip and thinks of the birds again, the spring birds, lining the roofpeaks of houses, taking wing all at once under low March clouds.

'Beverly?' he says uncertainly. 'Are you okay?'

'Go slower,' she says. 'It'll be easier for you to breathe.' He does move more slowly, and after awhile his breathing speeds up but she understands this is not because there is anything wrong with him.

The pain fades. Suddenly he moves more quickly, then stops, stiffens, and makes a sound - some sound. She senses that this is something for him, something extraordinarily, special, something like . . . like flying. She feels powerful: she feels a sense of triumph rise up strongly within her. Is this what her father was afraid of? Well he might be! There was power in this act, all right, a chain-breaking power that was blood-deep. She feels no physical pleasure, but there is a kind of mental ecstasy in it for her. She senses the closeness. He puts his face against her neck and she holds him. He's crying. She holds him. And feels the part of him that made a connection between them begin to fade. It is not leaving her, exactly; it is simply fading, becoming less.

When his weight shifts away she sits up and touches his face in the darkness.

'Did you?'.

'Did I what?'

'Whatever it is. I don't know, exactly.'

He shakes his head - she feels it with her hand against his cheek.

'I don't think it was exactly like . . . you know, like the big boys say. But it was . . . it was really something.' He speaks low so the others can't hear. 'I love you, Bevvie.'

Her consciousness breaks down a little there. She's quite sure there's more talk, some whispered, some loud, and can't remember what is said. It doesn't matter. Does she have to talk each of them into it all over again? Yes, probably. But it doesn't matter. They have to be talked into it, this essential human link between the world and the infinite, the only place where the bloodstream touches eternity. It doesn't matter. What matters is love and desire. Here in this dark is as good a place as any. Better than some, maybe.

Mike comes to her, then Richie, and the act is repeated. Now she feels some pleasure, dim heat in her childish unmatured sex, and she closes her eyes as Stan comes to her and she thinks of the birds, spring and the birds, and she sees them, again and again, all lighting at once, filling up the winter-naked trees, shockwave riders on the moving edge of nature's most violent season, she sees them take wing again and again, the flutter of their wings like the snap of many sheets on the line, and she thinks: A month from now every kid in Derry Park will have a kite, they'll run to keep the strings from getting tangled with each other. She thinks again: This is what flying is like.

With Stan as with the others, there is that rueful sense of fading, of leaving, with whatever they truly need from this act - some ultimate - close but as yet unfound.

'Did you?' she asks again, and although she doesn't know exactly what 'it' is, she knows that he hasn't.

There is a long wait, and then Ben comes to her.

He is trembling all over, but it is not the fearful trembling she felt in Stan.

'Beverly, I can't,' he says in a tone which purports to be reasonable and is anything but.

'You can too. I can feel it.'

She sure can. There's more of this hardness; more of him. She can feel it below the gentle push of his belly. Its size raises a certain curiosity and she touches the bulge lightly. He groans against her neck, and the blow of his breath causes her bare body to dimple with goosebumps. She feels the first twist of real heat race through her - suddenly the feeling in her is very large; she recognizes that it is too big

(and is he too big, can she take that into herself?)

and too old for her, something, some feeling that walks in boots. This is like Henry's M-80s, something not meant for kids, something that could explode and blow you up. But this was not the place or time for worry; here there was love, desire, and the dark. If they didn't try for the first two they would surely be left with the last.

'Beverly, don't - '

'Yes.'

'Show me how to fly,' she says with a calmness she doesn't feel, aware by the fresh wet warmth on her cheek and neck that he has begun to cry. 'Show me, Ben.'

'No . . . '

'If you wrote the poem, show me. Feel my hair if you want to, Ben. It's all right.'

'Beverly . . . I . . . I . . . '

He's not just trembling now; he's shaking all over. But she senses again that this ague is not all fear - part of it is the precursor of the throe this act is all about. She thinks of

(the birds)

his face, his dear sweet earnest face, and knows it is not fear; it is wanting he feels, a deep passionate wanting now barely held in check, and she feels that sense of power again, something like flying, something like looking down from above and seeing all the birds on the roofpeaks, on the TV antenna atop Wally's, seeing streets spread out maplike, oh desire, right, this was something, it was love and desire that taught you to fly.

'Ben! Yes!' she cries suddenly, and the leash breaks.

She feels pain again, and for a moment there is the frightening sensation of being crushed. Then he props himself up on the palms of his hands and that feeling is gone.

He's big, oh yes - the pain is back, and it's much deeper than when Eddie first entered her. She has to bite her lip again and think of the birds until the burning is gone. But it does go, and she is able to reach up and touch his lips with one finger, and he moans.

The heat is back, and she feels her power suddenly shift to him; she gives it gladly and goes with it. There is a sensation first of being rocked, of a delicious spiralling sweetness which makes her begin to turn her head helplessly from side to side, and a tuneless humming comes from between her closed lips, this is flying, this, oh love, oh desire, oh this is something impossible to deny, binding, giving, making a strong circle: binding, giving . . . flying.

'Oh Ben, oh my dear, yes,' she whispers, feeling the sweat stand out on her face, feeling their connection, something firmly in place, something like eternity, the number 8 rocked over on its side. 'I love you so much, dear.'

And she feels the thing begin to happen - something of which the girls who whisper and giggle about sex in the girls' room have no idea, at least as far as she knows; they only marvel at how gooshy sex must be, and now she realizes that for many of them sex must be some unrealized undefined monster; they refer to the act as It. Would you do It, do your sister and her boyfriend do It, do your mom and dad still do It, and how they never intend to do It; oh yes, you would think that the whole girls' side of the fifth-grade class was made up of spinsters-to-be, and it is obvious to Beverly that none of them can suspect this . . . this conclusion, and she is only kept from screaming by her knowledge that the others will hear and think her badly hurt. She puts the side of her hand in her mouth and bites down hard. She understands the screamy laughter of Greta Bowie and Sally Mueller and all the others better now: hadn't they, the seven of them, spent most of this, the longest, scariest summer of their lives, laughing like loons? You laugh because what's fearful and unknown is also what's funny, you laugh the way a small child will sometimes laugh and cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches, knowing it is supposed to be funny . . . but it is also unknown, full of the unknown's eternal power.

Biting her hand will not stay the cry, and she can only reassure them - and Ben - by crying out her affirmative in the darkness.

'Yes! Yes! Yes!' Glorious images of flight fill her head, mixing with the harsh calling of the grackles and starlings; these sounds become the world's sweetest music.

So she flies, she flies up, and now the power is not with her or with him but somewhere between them, and he cries out, and she can feel his arms trembling, and she arches up and into him, feeling his spasm, his touch, his total fleeting intimacy with her in the dark. They break through into the lifelight together.

Then it is over and they are in each other's arms and when he tries to say something - perhaps some stupid apology that would hurt what she remembers, some stupid apology like a handcuff, she stops his words with a kiss and sends him away.

Bill comes to her.

He tries to say something, but his stutter is almost total now.

'You be quiet,' she says, secure in her new knowledge, but aware that she is tired now. Tired and damned sore. The insides and backs of her thighs feel sticky, and she thinks it's maybe because Ben actually finished, or maybe because she is bleeding. 'Everything is going to be totally okay.'

'A-A-Are you shuh-shuh-shuh-hure?'

'Yes,' she says, and links her hands behind his neck, feeling the sweaty mat of his hair. 'You just bet.'

'Duh-duh-does ih-ih . . . does ih-ih-ih - '

'Shhh . . . '

It is not as it was with Ben; there is passion, but not the same kind. Being with Bill now is the best conclusion to this that there could be. He is kind; tender; just short of calm. She senses his eagerness, but it is tempered and held back by his anxiety for her, perhaps because only Bill and she herself realize what an enormous act this is, and how it must never be spoken of, not to anyone else, not even to each other.

At the end, she is surprised by that sudden upsurge and she has time to think: Oh! It's going to happen again, I don't know if I can stand it -

But her thoughts are swept away by the utter sweetness of it, and she barely hears him whispering, 'I love you, Bev, I love you, I'll always love you' saying it over and over and not stuttering at all.

She hugs him to her and for a moment they stay that way, his smooth cheek against hers.

He withdraws from her without saying anything and for a little while she's alone, putting her clothes back together, slowly putting them on, aware of a dull throbbing pain of which they, being male, will never know, aware also of a certain exhausted pleasure and the relief of having it over. There is an emptiness down there now, and although she is glad that her sex is her own again, the emptiness imparts a strange melancholy which she could never express . . . except to think of bare trees under a white winter sky, empty trees, trees waiting for blackbirds to come like ministers at the end of March to preside over the death of snow.

She finds them by groping for their hands.

For a moment no one speaks and when someone does, it does not surprise her much that it's Eddie. 'I think when we went right two turns back, we shoulda gone left. Jeez, I knew that, but I was so sweaty and frigged up - '

'Been frigged up your whole life, Eds,' Richie says. His voice is pleasant. The raw edge of panic is completely gone.

'We went wrong some other places too,' Eddie says, ignoring him, 'but that's the worst one. If we can find our way back there, we just might be okay.'

They form up in a clumsy line, Eddie first, Beverly second now, her hand on Eddie's shoulder as Mike's is on hers. They begin to move again, faster this time. Eddie displays none of his former nervous care.

We're going home, she thinks, and shivers with relief and joy. Home, yes. And that will be good. We've done our job, what we came for, now we can go back to just being kids again. And that will be good, too.

As they move through the dark she realizes the sound of running water is closer.

C H A P T E R 2 3

Out

1

Derry / 9:00 - 10:00 A.M.

By ten past nine, Derry windspeeds were being clocked at an average of fifty-five miles an hour, with gusts up to seventy. The anemometer in the courthouse registered one gust of eighty-one, and then the needle dropped all the way back to zero. The wind had ripped the whirling cuplike device on the courthouse roof off its moorings and it flew away into the rainswept dimness of the day. Like George Denbrough's boat, it was never seen again. By nine-thirty, the thing the Derry Water Department had sworn was now impossible seemed not only possible but imminent: that downtown Derry might be flooded for the first time since August of 1958, when many of the old drains had clogged up or caved in during a freak rainstorm. By quarter often, men with grim faces were arriving in cars and pick-up trucks along both sides of the Canal, their foul-weather gear rippling crazily in the freight-train wind. For the first time since October of 1957, sandbags began to go up along the Canal's cement sides. The arch where the Canal went under the three-way intersection at the heart of Derry's downtown area was full almost to the top; Main Street, Canal Street, and the foot of Up-Mile Hill were impassable except by foot, and those who splashed and hurried their way toward the sandbagging operation felt the very streets beneath their feet trembling with the frenzied flow of the water, the way a turnpike overpass will tremble when big trucks pass each other. But this was a steady vibration, and the men were glad to be on the north side of downtown, away from that steady rumbling that was felt rather than heard. Harold Gardener shouted at Alfred Zitner, who ran Zitner's Realty on the west side of town, asked him if the streets were going to collapse. Zitner said hell would freeze over before something like that happened. Harold had a brief image of Adolf Hitler and Judas Iscariot handing out ice-skates and went on heaving sandbags. The water was now less than three inches below the top of the Canal's cement walls. In the Barrens the Kenduskeag was already out of its banks, and by noon the luxuriant undergrowth and scrub trees would be poking out of a vast shallow, stinking lake. The men continued to work, pausing only when the supply of sandbags ran out . . . and then, at ten of ten, they were frozen by a great rending ripping sound. Harold Gardener later told his wife he thought maybe the end of the world had come. It wasn't downtown falling into the earth - not then - it was the Standpipe. Only Andrew Keene, Norbert Keene's grandson, actually saw it happen, and he had smoked so much Colombian Red that morning that at first he thought it had to be a hallucination. He had been wandering Derry's stormswept streets since about eight o'clock, roughly the same time that Dr Hale was ascending to that great family medical practice in the sky. He was drenched to the skin (except for the two-ounce baggie of pot tucked up into his armpit, that was) but totally unaware of it. His eyes widened in disbelief. He had reached Memorial Park, which stood on the flank of Standpipe Hill. And unless he was wrong, the Standpipe now had a pronounced lean, like that fucked-up tower in Pisa that was on all the macaroni boxes. 'Oh, wow!' Andrew Keene cried, his eyes widening even more - they looked as if they might be on small tough springs now - as the splintering sounds began. The Standpipe's lean was becoming more and more acute as he stood there with his jeans plastered to his skinny shanks and his drenched paisley headband dripping water into his eyes. White shingles were popping off the downtown side of the great round water-tower . . . no, not exactly popping off; it was more like they were squirting off. And a definite crinkle had appeared about twenty feet above the Standpipe's stone foundation. Water suddenly began to spray out through this crinkle, and now the shingles weren't squirting off the Standpipe's downtown side; they were spewing into the windstream. A rending sound began to come from the Standpipe, and Andrew could see it moving, like the hand of a great clock inclining from noon to one to two. The baggie of pot fell out of his armpit and fetched up inside his shirt somewhere near his belt. He didn't notice. He was utterly fetched. Large twanging sounds came from inside the Standpipe, as if the strings of the world's biggest guitar were being broken one by one. These were the cables inside the cylinder, which had provided the proper balance of stress against the water-pressure. The Standpipe began to heel over faster and faster, boards and beams ripping apart, splinters jumping and whirling into the air. 'FAAAR FUCKING OWWWWT!' Andrew Keene shrieked, but it was lost in the Standpipe's final crashing fall, and by the rising sound of one and three-quarter million gallons of water, seven thousand tons of water, pouring out of the building's ruptured spouting side. It went in a gray tidal wave, and of course if Andrew Keene had been on the downhill side of the Standpipe, he would have exited the world in no time. But God favors drunks, small children, and the cataclysmically stoned; Andrew was standing in a place where he could see it all and not be touched by a single drop. 'GREAT FUCKING SPECIAL EFFECTS!' Andrew screamed as the water rolled over Memorial Park like a solid thing, sweeping away the sundial beside which a small boy named Stan Uris had often stood watching birds with his father's field glasses. 'STEVEN SPIELBERG EAT YOUR HEART OUT!' The stone birdbath also went. Andrew saw it for a moment, turning over and over, pedestal for dish and dish for pedestal, and then it was gone. A line of maples and birches separating Memorial Park from Kansas Street were knocked down like so many pins in a bowling alley. They took wild spiky snarls of power lines with them. The water rolled across the street, beginning to spread now, beginning to look more like water than that mind-boggling solid wall that had taken sundial, birdbath, and trees, but it still had power enough to sweep almost a dozen houses on the far side of Kansas Street off their foundations and into the Barrens. They went with sickening ease, most of them still whole. Andrew Keene recognized one of them as belonging to the Karl Massensik family. Mr Massensik had been his sixth-grade teacher, a real pooch. As the house went over the edge and down the slope, Andrew realized he could still see a candle burning brightly in one window, and he wondered briefly if he might be mentally highsiding it, if you could dig the concept. There was an explosion from the Barrens and a brief gout of yellow flame as someone's Coleman gas lantern ignited oil pouring out of a ruptured fuel-tank. Andrew stared at the far side of Kansas Street, where until just forty seconds ago there had been a neat line of middle-class houses. They were Gone City now, and you better believe it, sweet thing. In their places were ten cellar-holes that looked like swimming-pools. Andrew wanted to advance the opinion that this was far fucking out, but he couldn't yell anymore. Seemed like his yeller was busted. His diaphragm felt weak and useless. He heard a series of crunching thuds, the sound of a giant with his shoes full of Ritz crackers marching down a flight of stairs. It was the Standpipe rolling down the hill, a huge white cylinder still spouting the last of its water supply, the thick cables that had helped to hold it together flying into the air and then cracking down again like steel bullwhips, digging runnels in the soft earth that immediately filled up with rushing rainwater. As Andrew watched, with his chin resting somewhere between his collarbones, the Standpipe, horizontal now, better than a hundred and twenty-five feet long, flew out into the air. For a moment it seemed frozen there, a surreal image straight out of rubber-walled strait-jacketed toodle-oo land, rainwater sparkling on its shattered sides, its windows broken, casements hanging, the flashing light on top, meant as a warning for low-flying light planes, still flashing, and then it fell into the street with a final rending crash. Kansas Street had channelled a lot of the water, and now it began to rush toward downtown by way of Up-Mile Hill. There used to be houses over there, Andrew Keene thought, and suddenly all the strength ran out of his legs. He sat down heavily - kersplash. He stared at the broken stone foundation on which the Standpipe had stood for his whole life. He wondered if anyone would ever believe him. He wondered if he believed it himself.

2

The Kill / 10:02 A.M., May31st, 1985

Bill and Richie saw It turn toward them, Its mandibles opening and closing, Its one good eye glaring down at them, and Bill realized It gave off Its own source of illumination, like some grisly lightning-bug. But the light was flickering and uncertain; It was badly hurt. Its thoughts buzzed and racketed

(let me go! let me go and you can have everything you've ever wanted - money, fame, fortune, power - I can give you these things)

in his head.

Bill moved forward empty-handed, his eyes fixed on Its single red one. He felt the power growing inside him, investing him, knotting his arms into cords, filling each clenched fist with its own force. Richie walked beside him, his lips pulled back over his teeth.

(I can give you your wife back - I can do it, only I - she'll remember nothing as the seven of you remembered nothing)

They were close, very close now. Bill could smell Its stinking aroma and realized with sudden horror that it was the smell of the Barrens, the smell they had taken for the smell of sewers and polluted streams and the burning dump . . . but had they ever really believed those were all it had been? It was the smell of It, and perhaps it had been strongest in the Barrens but it had hung over all Derry like a cloud and people just didn't smell it, the way zoo-keepers don't smell their charges after awhile, or even wonder why the visitors wrinkle their noses when they come in.

'Us two,' he muttered to Richie, and Richie nodded without taking his eyes off the Spider, which now shrank back from them, Its abominable spiny legs Glittering, brought to bay at last.

(I can't give you eternal life but I can touch you and you will live long long lives - two hundred years, three hundred, perhaps five hundred - I can make you gods of the Earth - if you let me go if you let me go if you let me - )

'Bill?' Richie asked hoarsely.

With a scream building in him, building up and up and up, Bill charged. Richie ran with him stride for stride. They struck together with their right fists, but Bill understood it was not really their fists they were striking with at all; it was their combined force, augmented by the force of that Other; it was the force of memory and desire; above all else, it was the force of love and unforgotten childhood like one big wheel.

The Spider's shriek filled Bill's head, seeming to splinter his brains. He felt his fist plunge deep into writhing wetness. His arm followed it in up to the shoulder. He pulled it back, dripping with the Spider's black blood. Ichor poured from the hole he had made.

He saw Richie standing almost beneath Its bloated body, covered with Its darkly sparkling blood, standing in the classic boxer's stance, his dripping fists pumping.

The Spider lashed at them with Its legs. Bill felt one of them rip down his side, parting his shirt, parting skin. Its stinger pumped uselessly against the floor. Its screams were clarion-bells in his head. It lunged clumsily forward, trying to bite him, and instead of retreating Bill drove forward, using not just his fist now but his whole body, making himself into a torpedo. He ran into Its gut like a sprinting fullback who lowers his shoulders and simply drives straight ahead.

For a moment he felt Its stinking flesh simply give, as if it would rebound and send him flying. With an inarticulate scream he drove harder, pushing forward and upward with his legs, digging at It with his hands. And he broke through; was inundated with Its hot fluids. They ran across his face, in his ears. He snuffled them up his nose in thin squirming streams.

He was in the black again, up to his shoulders inside Its convulsing body. And in his clogged ears he could hear a sound like the steady whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK of a big bass drum, the one that leads the parade when the circus comes to town with its complement of freaks and strutting capering clowns.

The sound of Its heart.

He heard Richie scream in sudden pain, a sound that rose into a quick, gasping moan and was cut off. Bill suddenly thrust both fisted hands forward. He was choking, strangling in Its pulsing bag of guts and waters.

Whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK -

He plunged his hands into It, ripping, tearing, parting, seeking the source of the sound; rupturing organs, his slimed fingers opening and closing, his locked chest seeming to swell from lack of air.

Whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK -

And suddenly it was in his hands, a great living thing that pumped and pulsed against his palms, pushing them back and forth.

NONONONONONONO)

Yes! Bill cried, choking, drowning. Yes! Try this, you bitch! TRY THIS ONE OUT! DO YOU LIKE IT? DO YOU LOVE IT? DO YOU?

He laced his fingers together over the pulsing narthex of Its heart, palms spread apart in an inverted V - and brought them together with all the force he could muster.

There was one final shriek of pain and fear as Its heart exploded between his hands, running out between his fingers in jittering strings.

Whack-WHACK-whack-WHA

The scream, fading, dwindling. Bill felt Its body clench around him suddenly, like a fist in a slick glove. Then everything loosened. He became aware that Its body was tilting, slipping slowly off to one side. At the same time he began pulling back, his consciousness leaving him.

The Spider collapsed on Its side, a huge bundle of steaming alien meat, Its legs still quivering and jerking, caressing the sides of the tunnel and scraping across the floor in random scrawls.

Bill staggered away, breathing in whooping gasps, spitting in an effort to clear his mouth of Its horrible taste. He tripped over his own feet and fell to his knees.

And clearly, he heard the Voice of the Other; the Turtle might be dead, but whatever had invested it was not.

'Son, you did real good.'

Then it was gone. The power went with it. He felt weak, revulsed, half-insane. He looked over his shoulder and saw the dying black nightmare of the Spider, still jerking and quivering.

'Richie!' He cried out in a hoarse, breaking voice. 'Richie, where are you

man?'

No answer.

The light was gone now. It had died with the Spider. He fumbled in the pocket of his matted shirt for the last book of matches. They were there, but they wouldn't light; the heads were soaked with blood.

'Richie!' he screamed again, beginning to weep now. He began to crawl forward, first one hand and then the other groping in the dark. At last one of them struck something which yielded limply to his touch. His hands flew over it . . . and stopped as they touched Richie's face.

'Richie! Richie!'

Still no answer. Struggling in the dark, Bill got one arm under Richie's back and the other under his knees. He wobbled to his feet and began to stumble back the way they had come with Richie in his arms.

3

Derry / 10:00 - 10:15 A.M.

At 10:00 the steady vibration which had been running through Derry's downtown streets increased to a rumbling roar. The Derry News would later write that the supports of the Canal's underground portion, weakened by the savage assault of what amounted to a flash flood, simply collapsed. There were, however, people who disagreed with that view. 'I was there, I know,' Harold Gardener later told his wife. 'It wasn't just that the Canal's supports collapsed. It was an earthquake, that's what it was. It was a fucking earthquake.'

Either way, the results were the same. As the rumbling built steadily up and up, windows began to shatter, plaster ceilings began to fall, and the inhuman cry of twisting beams and foundations swelled into a frightening chorus. Cracks raced up the bullet-pocked brick facade of Machen's like grasping hands. The cables holding the marquee of the Aladdin Theater out over the street snapped and the marquee came crashing down. Richard's Alley, which ran behind the Center Street Drug, suddenly filled up with an avalanche of yellow brick as the Brian X Dowd Professional Building, erected in 1952, came crashing down. A huge screen of jaundice-colored dust rose in the air and was snatched away like a veil.

At the same time the statue of Paul Bunyan in front of the City Center exploded. It was as if that long-ago art teacher's threat to blow it up had finally proved to be dead serious after all. The bearded grinning head rose straight up in the air. One leg kicked forward, the other back, as if Paul had attempted some sort of a split so enthusiastic it had resulted in dismemberment. The statue's midsection blew out in a cloud of shrapnel and the head of the plastic axe rose into the rainy sky, disappeared, and then came down again, twirling end over end. It sheared through the roof of the Kissing Bridge, and then its floor.

And then, at 10:02 A.M., downtown Derry simply collapsed.

Most of the water from the ruptured Standpipe had crossed Kansas Street and ended up in the Barrens, but tons of it rushed down into the business district by way of Up-Mile Hill. Perhaps that was the straw that broke the camel's back . . . or perhaps, as Harold Gardener told his wife, there really was an earthquake. Cracks raced across the surface of Main Street. They were narrow at first . . . and then they began to gape like hungry mouths and the sound of the Canal floated up, not muffled now but frighteningly loud. Everything began to shake. The neon sign proclaiming OUT-LET MOCCASINS in front of Shorty Squires's souvenir shop hit the street and shorted out in three feet of water. A moment or two later, Shorty's building, which stood next to Mr Paperback, began to descend. Buddy Angstrom was the first to see this phenomenon. He elbowed Alfred Zitner, who looked, gaped, and then elbowed Harold Gardener. Within a space of seconds the sandbagging operation stopped. The men lining both sides of the Canal only stood and stared toward downtown in the pouring rain, their faces stamped with identical expressions of horrified wonder. Squires's Souvenirs and Sundries appeared to have been built on some huge elevator which was now on the way down. It sank into the apparently solid concrete with ponderous stately dignity. When it came to a stop, you could have dropped to your hands and knees on the flooded sidewalk and entered through one of the third-floor windows. Water sprayed up all around the building, and a moment later Shorty himself appeared on the roof, waving his arms madly for rescue. Then he was obliterated as the office-building next door, the one which housed Mr Paperback at ground level, also sank into the ground. Unfortunately, this one did not go straight down as Shorty's building had done; the Mr Paperback building developed a marked lean (for a moment, in fact, it bore a strong resemblance to that fucked-up tower in Pisa, the one on the macaroni boxes). As it tilted, bricks began to shower from its top and sides. Shorty was struck by several. Harold Gardener saw him reel backward, hands to his head . . . and then the top three floors of the Mr Paperback building slid off as neatly as pancakes from the top of a stack. Shorty disappeared. Someone on the sandbag line screamed, and then everything was lost in the grinding roar of destruction. Men were knocked off their feet or sent wobbling and staggering back from the Canal. Harold Gardener saw the buildings which faced each other across Main Street lean forward, like ladies kibbitzing over a card-game, their heads almost touching. The street itself was sinking, cracking, breaking up. Water splashed and sprayed. And then, one after another, buildings on both sides of the street simply swayed past their centers of gravity and crashed into the street - the Northeast Bank, The Shoeboat, Alvey's Smokes 'n Jokes, Bailley's Lunch, Bandler's Record and Music Barn. Except that by then there was really no street for them to crash into. The street had fallen into the Canal, stretching like taffy at first and then breaking up into bobbing chunks of asphalt. Harold saw the traffic-island at the three-street intersection suddenly drop out of sight, and as water geysered up, he suddenly understood what was going to happen.

'Gotta get out of here!' he screamed at Al Zitner. 'It's gonna backwater! Al! Its gonna backwater!'

Al Zitner gave no sign that he had heard. His was the face of a sleepwalker, or perhaps of a man who has been deeply hypnotized. He stood in his soaked red-and-blue-checked sportcoat, in his open-collared Lacoste shirt with the little alligator on the left boob, in his blue socks with the crossed white golf-clubs knitted into their sides, in his brown L. L. Bean's boat shoes with the rubber soles. He was watching perhaps a million dollars of his own personal investments sinking into the street, three or four millions of his friends' investments - the guys he played poker with, the guys he golfed with, the guys he skied with at his time-sharing condo in Rangely. Suddenly his home town, Derry, Maine, for Christ's sake, looked bizarrely like that fucked-up city where the wogs pushed people around in those long skinny canoes. Water roiled and boiled between the buildings that were still standing. Canal Street ended in a jagged black diving board over the edge of a churning lake. It was really no wonder Zitner hadn't heard Harold. Others, however, had come to the same conclusion Gardener had come to - you couldn't drop that much shit into a raging body of water without causing a lot of trouble. Some dropped the sandbags they had been holding and took to their heels. Harold Gardener was one of these, and so he lived. Others were not so lucky and were still somewhere in the general area as the Canal, its throat now choked with tons of asphalt, concrete, brick, plaster, glass, and about four million dollars' worth of assorted merchandise, backsurged and poured over its concrete sleeve, carrying away men and sandbags impartially. Harold kept thinking it meant to have him; no matter how fast he ran the water kept gaming. He finally escaped by clawing his way up a steep embankment covered with shrubbery. He looked back once and saw a man he believed to be Roger Lernerd, the head loan officer at Harold's credit union, trying to start his car in the parking-lot of the Canal Mini-Mall. Even over the roar of the water and the bellowing wind, Harold could hear the K-car's little sewing-machine engine cranking and cranking and cranking as smooth black water ran rocker-panel high on both sides of it. Then, with a deep thundering cry, the Kenduskeag poured out of its banks and swept both the Canal Mini-Mall and Roger Lernerd's bright red K-car away. Harold began climbing again, grabbing onto branches, roots, anything that looked solid enough to take his weight. Higher ground, that was the ticket. As Andrew Keene might have said, Harold Gardener was really into the concept of higher ground that morning. Behind him he could hear downtown Derry continuing to collapse. The sound was like artillery fire.

4

Bill

'Beverly!' he shouted. His back and arms were one solid throbbing ache. Richie now seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds. Put him down, then, his mind whispered. He's dead, you know damn well he is, so why don't you just put him down?

But he wouldn't, couldn't, do that.

'Beverly!' he shouted again. 'Ben! Anyone!'

He thought: This is where It threw me - and Richie - except It threw us farther - so much farther. What was that like? I'm losing it, forgetting . . .

'Bill?' It was Ben's voice, shaky and exhausted, somewhere fairly close. 'Where are you?'

'Over here, man. I've got Richie. He got . . . he's hurt.'

'Keep talking.' Ben was closer now. 'Keep talking, Bill.'

'We killed It,' Bill said, walking toward where Ben's voice had come from. 'We killed the bitch. And if Richie's dead - '

'Dead?' Ben called, alarmed. He was very close now . . . and then his hand groped out of the dark and pawed lightly at Bill's nose. 'What do you mean, dead?'

'I . . . he . . . ' They were supporting Richie together now. 'I can't see him,' Bill said. 'That's the thing. I cuh-cuh-han't suh-suh-see him!'

'Richie!' Ben shouted, and shook him. 'Richie, come on! Come on, goddammit!' Ben's voice was blurring now, becoming shaky. 'RICHIE WILL YOU WAKE THE FUCK UP?'

And in the dark, Richie said in a sleepy, irritable, just-coming-out-of-it voice: 'All rye, Haystack. All rye. We doan need no stinkin batches . . . '

'Richie!' Bill screamed. 'Richie, are you all right?'

'Bitch threw me,' Richie muttered in that same tired, just-coming-out-of-sleep voice. 'I hit something hard. That's all . . . all I remember. Where's Bevvie?'

'Back this way,' Ben said. Quickly, he told them about the eggs. 'I stamped over a hundred. I think I got all of them.'

'I pray to God you did,' Richie said. He was starting to sound better. 'Put me down, Big Bill. I can walk . . . Is the water louder?'

'Yes,' Bill said. The three of them were holding hands in the dark. 'How's your head?'

'Hurts like hell. What happened after I got knocked out?'

Bill told them as much as he could bring himself to tell.

'And It's dead,' Richie marvelled. 'Are you sure, Bill?'

'Yes,' Bill said. 'This time I'm really shuh-hure.'

'Thank God,' Richie said. 'Hold onto me, Bill, I gotta barf.'

Bill did, and when Richie was done they walked on. Every now and then his foot struck something brittle that rolled off into the darkness. Parts of the Spider's eggs that Ben had tromped to pieces, he supposed, and shivered. It was good to know they were going in the right direction, but he was still glad he couldn't see the remains.

'Beverly!' Ben shouted. 'Beverly!'

'Here - '

Her cry was faint, almost lost in the steady rumble of the water. They moved forward in the dark, calling to her steadily, zeroing in.

When they finally reached her, Bill asked if she had any matches left. She put half a pack in his hand. He lit one and saw their faces spring into ghostly being - Ben with his arm around Richie, who was standing slumped, blood running from his right temple, Beverly with Eddie's head in her lap. Then he turned the other way. Audra was lying crumpled on the flagstones, her legs asprawl, her head turned away. The webbing had mostly melted off her.

The match burned his fingers and he let it drop. In the darkness he misjudged the distance, tripped over her, and nearly went sprawling.

'Audra! Audra, can you h-h-hear m-me?'

He got an arm under her back and sat her up. He slipped a hand under the sheaf of her hair and pressed his fingers against the side of her neck. Her pulse was there: a slow, steady beat.

He lit another match, and as it flared he saw her pupils contract. But that was an involuntary function; the fix of her gaze did not change, even when he brought the match close enough to her face to redden her skin. She was alive, but unresponsive. Hell, it was worse than that and he knew it. She was catatonic.

The second match burned his fingers. He shook it out.

'Bill, I don't like the sound of that water,' Ben said. 'I think we ought to get out of here.'

'How will we do it without Eddie?' Richie murmured.

'We can do it,' Bev said. 'Bill, Ben's right. We have to get out.'

'I'm taking her.'

'Of course. But we ought to go now.'

'Which way?'

'You'll know,' Beverly said softly. 'You killed It. You'll know, Bill.'

He picked Audra up as he had picked Richie up and went back to the others. The feel of her in his arms was disquieting, creepy; she was like a breathing waxwork.

'Which way, Bill?' Ben asked.

'Id-d-don't - '

(you'll know, you killed It and you'll know)

'Well, c-come on,' Bill said. 'Let's see if we can't find out. Beverly, gruh-gruh-hab these.' He handed her the matches.

'What about Eddie?' she asked. 'We have to take him out.'

'How c-can w-we?' Bill asked. 'It's . . . B-Beverly, the pluh-hace is f-falling apart.'

'We gotta get him out of here, man,' Richie said. 'Come on, Ben.'

Between them they managed to hoist up Eddie's body. Beverly lit them back to the fairytale door. Bill took Audra through it, holding her up from the floor as best he could. Richie and Ben carried Eddie through.

'Put him down,' Beverly said. 'He can stay here.'

'It's too dark,' Richie sobbed. 'You know . . . it's too dark. Eds . . . he . . . '

'No, it's okay,' Ben said. 'Maybe this is where he's supposed to be. I think maybe it is.'

They put him down, and Richie kissed Eddie's cheek. Then he looked blindly up at Ben. 'You sure?'

'Yeah. Come on, Richie.'

Richie got up and turned toward the door. 'Fuck you, Bitch!' he cried suddenly, and kicked the door shut with his foot. It made a solid chukking sound as it closed and latched.

'Why'd you do that?' Beverly asked.

'I don't know,' Richie said, but he knew well enough. He looked back over his shoulder just as the match Beverly was holding went out.

'Bill - the mark on the door?'

'What about it?' Bill panted.

Richie said: 'It's gone.'

5

Derry / 10:30 A.M.

The glass corridor connecting the adult library to the Children's Library suddenly exploded in a single brilliant flare of light. Glass flew out in an umbrella shape, whickering through the straining whipping trees which dotted the library grounds. Someone could have been severely hurt or even killed by such a deadly fusillade, but there was no one there, either inside or out. The library had not been opened that day at all. The tunnel which had so fascinated Ben Hanscom as a boy would never be replaced; there had been so much costly destruction in Derry that it seemed simpler to leave the two libraries as separate unconnected buildings. In time, no one on the Derry City Council could even remember what that glass umbilicus had been for. Perhaps only Ben himself could really have told them how it was to stand outside In the still cold of a January night, your nose running, the tips of your fingers numb inside your mittens, watching the people pass back and forth inside, walking through winter with their coats off and surrounded by light. He could have told them . but maybe it wasn't the sort of thing you could have gotten up and testified about at a City Council meeting - how you stood out in the cold dark and learned to love the light. All of that's as may be; the facts were just these: the glass corridor blew up for no apparent reason, no one was hurt (which was a blessing, since the final toll taken by that morning's storm - in human terms, at least - was sixty-seven killed and better than three hundred and twenty injured), and it was never rebuilt. After May 31st of 1985, if you wanted to get from the Children's Library to the adult library, you had to walk outside to do it. And if it was cold, or raining, or snowing, you had to put on your coat.

6

Out / 10:54 A.M., May 31st, 1985

'Wait,' Bill gasped. 'Give me a chance . . . rest.'

'Let me help you with her,' Richie said again. They had left Eddie back in the Spider's lair, and that was something none of them wanted to talk about. But Eddie was dead and Audra was still alive - at least, technically.

'I'll do it,' Bill said between choked gasps for air.

'Bullshit. You'll give yourself a fucking heart attack. Let me help you, Big Bill.'

'How's your h-h-head?'

'Hurts,' Richie said. 'Don't change the subject.'

Reluctantly, Bill let Richie take her. It could have been worse; Audra was a tall girl whose normal weight was one hundred and forty pounds. But the part she'd been scheduled to play in Attic Room was that of a young woman being held hostage by a borderline psychotic who fancied himself a political terrorist. Because Freddie Firestone had wanted to shoot all of the attic sequences first, Audra had gone on a strict poultry - cottage-cheese - tuna-fish diet and lost twenty pounds. Still, after stumble-staggering along with her in the dark for a quarter of a mile (or a half, or three-quarters of a mile, or who knew), that one hundred and twenty felt more like two hundred.

'Th-Thanks, m-m-man,' he said.

'Don't mention it. Your turn next, Haystack.'

'Beep-beep, Richie,' Ben said, and Bill grinned in spite of himself. It was a tired grin, and it didn't last long, but a little was better than none.

'Which way, Bill?' Beverly asked. 'That water sounds louder than ever. I don't really fancy drowning down here.'

'Straight ahead, then left,' Bill said. 'Maybe we better try to go a little faster.'

They went on for half an hour, Bill calling the lefts and rights. The sound of the water continued to swell until it seemed to surround them, a scary Dolby stereo effect in the dark. Bill felt his way around a corner, one hand trailing over damp brick, and suddenly water was running over his shoes. The current was shallow and fast.

'Give me Audra,' he said to Ben, who was panting loudly. 'Upstream now.' Ben passed her carefully back to Bill, who managed to sling her over his shoulder ma fireman's carry. If she'd only protest . . . move . . . do something. 'How's matches, Bev?'

'Not many. Half a dozen, maybe. Bill . . . do you know where you're going?'

'I think I d-d-do,' he said. 'Come on.'

They followed him around the corner. The water foamed about Bill's ankles, then it was up to his shins, and then it was thigh-deep. The thunder of the water had deepened to a steady bass roar. The tunnel they were in was shaking steadily. For awhile Bill thought the current was going to become too strong to walk against, but then they passed a feeder-pipe that was pouring a huge jet of water into their tunnel - he marvelled at the white-water force of it - and the current slacked off somewhat, although the water continued to deepen. It -

I saw the water coming out of that feeder-pipe! Saw it!

'H-H-Hey!' he shouted. 'Can y-y-you guys see a-any thing?'

'It's been getting lighter for the last fifteen minutes or so!' Beverly shouted back. 'Where are we, Bill? Do you know?'

I thought I did, Bill almost said. 'No! Come on!'

He had believed they must be approaching the concrete-channelled section of the Kenduskeag that was called the Canal . . . the part that went under downtown and came out in Bassey Park. But there was light down here, light, and surely there could be no light in the Canal under the city. But it brightened steadily just the same.

Bill was beginning to have serious problems with Audra. It wasn't the current - that had slackened - it was the depth. Pretty soon I'll be floating her, he thought. He could see Ben on his left and Beverly on his right; by turning his head slightly, he could see Richie behind Ben. The footing was getting decidedly odd. The bottom of the tunnel was now heaped and mounded with detritus - bricks, it felt like. And up ahead, something was sticking out of the water like, the prow of a ship that is in the process of sinking.

Ben floundered toward it, shivering in the cold water. A soggy cigar box floated into his face. He pushed it aside and grabbed at the thing sticking out of the water. His eyes widened. It appeared to be a large sign. He was able to read the letters AL, and below that, FUT. And suddenly he knew.

'Bill! Richie! Bev!' He was laughing with astonishment.

'What is it, Ben?' Beverly shouted.

Grabbing it with both hands, Ben rocked it back. There was a grating sound as one side of the sign scraped along the wall of the tunnel. Now they could read: ALADDI, and, below that, BACK TO THE FUTURE.

'It's the marquee for the Aladdin,' Richie said. 'How - '

'The street caved in,' Bill whispered. His eyes were widening. He stared up the tunnel. The light was brighter still up ahead.

'What, Bill?'

'What the fuck happened?

'Bill? Bill? What - '

'All these drains!' Bill said wildly. 'All these old drains! There's been another flood! And I think this time - '

He began to flounder ahead again, holding Audra up. Ben, Bev, and Richie fell in behind him. Five minutes later Bill looked up and saw blue sky. He was looking through a crack in the ceiling of the tunnel, a crack that widened to better than seventy feet across as it ran away from where he stood. The water was broken by many islands and archipelagos up ahead - piles of bricks, the back deck of a Plymouth sedan with its trunk sprung open and pouring water, a parking-meter leaning against the tunnel wall at a drunken slant, its red VIOLATION flag up.

The footing had become almost impossible now - mini-mountains that rose and fell with no rhyme or reason, inviting a broken ankle. The water ran mildly around their armpits.

Mild now, Bill thought. But if we'd been here two hours ago, even one, I think we might have gotten the ride of our lives.

'What the fuck is this, Big Bill?' Richie asked. He was standing at Bill's left elbow, his face soft with wonder as he looked up at the rip in the roof of the tunnel - except it's not the roof of any tunnel Bill thought. It's Main Street. At least it used to be.

'I think most of downtown Derry is now in the Canal and being carried down the Kenduskeag River. Pretty soon it'll be in the Penobscot and then it will be in the Atlantic Ocean and good fucking riddance. Can you help me with Audra, Richie? I don't think I can - '

'Sure,' Richie said. 'Sure, Bill. No sweat.'

He took Audra from Bill. In this light, Bill could see her better than he perhaps wanted to - her pallor masked but not hidden by the dirt and ordure that smeared her forehead and caked her cheeks. Her eyes were still wide open . . . wide open and innocent of all sense. Her hair hung lank and wet. She might as well have been one of those inflatable doilies they sold at the Pleasure Chest in New York or along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. The only difference was her slow, steady respiration . . . and that might have been a clockwork trick, no more than that.

'How are we going to get up from here?' he asked Richie.

'Get Ben to give you ten fingers,' Richie said. 'You can yank Bev up, and the two of you can get your wife. Ben can boost me and we'll get Ben. And after that I'll show you how to set up a volleyball tournament for a thousand sorority girls.'

'Beep-beep, Richie.'

'Beep-beep your ass, Big Bill.'

The tiredness was going through him in steady waves. He caught Beverly's level gaze and held it for a moment. She nodded to him slightly, and he made a smile for her.

'Give me ten fingers, B-B-Ben?'

Ben, who also looked unutterably weary, nodded. A deep scratch ran down one cheek. 'I think I can handle that.'

He stooped slightly and laced his hands together. Bill hiked one foot, stepped into Ben's hand, and jumped up. It wasn't quite enough. Ben lifted the step he had made with his hands and Bill grabbed the edge of the broken-in tunnel roof. He yanked himself up. The first thing he saw was a white-and-orange crash barrier. The second thing was a crowd of milling men and women beyond the barrier. The third was Freese's Department Store - only it had an oddly bulged-out, foreshortened look. It took him a moment to realize that almost half of Freese's had sunk into the street and the Canal beneath. The top half had slued out over the street and seemed in danger of toppling over like a pile of badly stacked books.

'Look! Look! There's someone in the street!'

A woman was pointing toward the place where Bill's head had poked out of the crevasse in the shattered pavement.

'Praise God, there's someone else!'

She started forward, an elderly woman with a kerchief tied over her head peasant-style. A cop held her back. 'Not safe out there, Mrs Nelson. You know it. Rest of the street might go any time.'

Mrs Nelson, Bill thought. I remember you. Your sister used to sit George and me sometimes. He raised his hand to show her he was all right, and when she raised her own hand in return, he felt a sudden surge of good feelings - and hope.

He turned around and lay flat on the sagging pavement, trying to distribute his weight as evenly as possible, the way you were supposed to do on thin ice. He reached down for Bev. She grasped his wrists and, with what seemed to be the last of his strength, he pulled her up. The sun, which had disappeared again, now ran out from behind a brace of mackerel-scale clouds and gave them their shadows back. Beverly looked up, startled, caught Bill's eyes, and smiled.

'I love you, Bill,' she said. 'And I pray she'll be all right.'

'Thuh-hank you, Bevvie,' he said, and his kind smile made her start to cry a little. He hugged her and the small crowd gathered behind the crash barrier applauded. A photographer from the Derry News snapped a picture. It appeared in the June 1st edition of the paper, which was printed in Bangor because of water damage to the News's presses. The caption was simple enough, and true enough for Bill to cut the picture out and keep it tucked away in his wallet for years to come: SURVIVORS, the caption read. That was all, but that was enough.

It was six minutes of eleven in Derry, Maine.

7

Derry / Later the Same Day

The glass corridor between the Children's Library and the adult library had exploded at 10:30 A.M. At 10:33, the rain stopped. It didn't taper off; it stopped all at once, as if Someone Up There had flicked a toggle switch. The wind had already begun to fall, and it fell so rapidly that people stared at each other with uneasy, superstitious faces. The sound was like the wind-down of a 747's engines after it has been safely parked at the gate. The sun peeked out for the first time at 10:47. By midafternoon the clouds had burned away entirely, and the day had come off fair and hot. By 3:30 P.M. the mercury in the Orange Crush thermometer outside the door of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes read eighty-three - the highest reading of the young season. People walked through the streets like zombies, not talking much. Their expressions were remarkably similar: a kind of stupid wonder that would have been funny if it was not also so frankly pitiable. By evening reporters from ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN had arrived in Derry, and the network news reporters would bring some version of the truth home to most people; they would make it real . . . although there were those who might have suggested that reality is a highly untrustworthy concept, something perhaps no more solid than a piece of canvas stretched over an interlacing of cables like the strands of a spiderweb. The following morning Bryant Gumble and Willard Scott of the Today show would be in Derry. During the course of the program, Gumble would interview Andrew Keene. 'Whole Standpipe just crashed over and rolled down the hill,' Andrew said. 'It was like wow. You know what I mean? Like Steven Spielberg eat your heart out, you know? Hey, I always got the idea looking at you on TV that you were, you know, a lot bigger.' Seeing themselves and their neighbors on TV - that would make it real. It would give them a place from which to grasp this terrible, ungraspable thing. It had been a FREAK STORM. In the days following, THE DEATH-COUNT would rise in THE WAKE OF THE KILLER STORM. It was, in fact, THE WORST SPRING STORM IN MAINE HISTORY. All of these headlines, as terrible as they were, were useful - they helped to blunt the essential strangeness of what had happened . . . or perhaps strangeness was too mild a word. Insanity might have been better. Seeing themselves on TV would help make it concrete, less insane. But in the hours before the news crews arrived, there were only the people from Derry, walking through their rubble-strewn, mud-slicked streets with expressions of stunned unbelief on their faces. Only the people from Derry, not talking much, looking at things, occasionally picking things up and then tossing them down again, trying to figure out what had happened during the last seven or eight hours. Men stood on Kansas Street, smoking, looking at houses lying upside down in the Barrens. Other men and women stood beyond the white-and-orange crash barriers, looking into the black hole that had been downtown until ten that morning. The headline of that Sunday's paper read: WE WILL REBUILD, vows DERRY MAYOR, and perhaps they would. But in the weeks that followed, while the City Council wrangled over how the rebuilding should begin, the huge crater that had been downtown continued to grow in an unspectacular but steady way. Four days after the storm, the office building of the Bangor Hydroelectric Company collapsed into the hole. Three days after that, the Flying Doghouse, which sold the best kraut- and chili-dogs in eastern Maine, fell in. Drains backed up periodically in houses, apartment buildings, and businesses. It got so bad in the Old Cape that people began to leave. June 10th was the first evening of horse-racing at Bassey Park; the first race was scheduled for 8:00 P.M. and that seemed to cheer everyone up. But a section of bleachers collapsed as the trotters in the first race turned into the home stretch, and half a dozen people were hurt. One of them was Foxy Foxworth, who had managed the Aladdin Theater until 1973. Foxy spent two weeks in the hospital, suffering from a broken leg and a punctured testicle. When he was released, he decided to go to his sister's in Somersworth, New Hampshire.

He wasn't the only one. Derry was falling apart.

8

They watched the orderly slam the back doors of the ambulance and go around to the passenger seat. The ambulance started up the hill toward the Derry Home Hospital. Richie had flagged it down at severe risk of life and limb, and had argued the irate driver to a draw when the driver insisted he just didn't have any more room. He had ended up stretching Audra out on the floor.

'Now what?' Ben asked. There were huge brown circles under his eyes and a grimy ring of dirt around his neck.

'I'm g-going back to the Town House,' Bill said. 'G-Gonna sleep for about suh-hixteen hours.'

'I second that,' Richie said. He looked hopefully at Bev. 'Got any cigarettes, purty lady?'

'No,' Beverly said. 'I think I'm going to quit again.'

'Sensible enough idea.'

They began to walk slowly up the hill, the four of them side by side.

'It's o-o-over,' Bill said.

Ben nodded. 'We did it. You did it, Big Bill.'

'We all did it,' Beverly said. 'I wish we could have brought Eddie up. I wish that more than anything.'

They reached the corner of Upper Main and Point Street. A kid in a red rainslicker and green rubber boots was sailing a paper boat along the brisk run of water in the gutter. He looked up, saw them looking at him, and waved tentatively. Bill thought it was the boy with the skateboard - the one whose friend had seen Jaws in the Canal. He smiled and stepped toward the boy.

'It's all right n-n-now,' he said.

The boy studied him gravely, and then grinned. The smile was sunny and hopeful. 'Yeah,' he said. 'I think it is.'

'Bet your a-a-ass.'

The kid laughed.

'You g-gonna be careful on thuh-hat skateboard?'

'Not really,' the kid said, and this time Bill laughed. He restrained an urge to ruffle the kid's hair - that probably would have been resented - and returned to the others.

'Who was that?' Richie asked.

'A friend,' Bill said. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. 'Do you remember it? When we came out before?'

Beverly nodded. 'Eddie got us back to the Barrens. Only we ended up on the other side of the Kenduskeag somehow. The Old Cape side.'

'You and Haystack pushed the lid off one of those pumping-stations,' Richie said to Bill, 'because you had the most weight.'

'Yeah,' Ben said. 'We did. The sun was out, but it was almost down.'

'Yeah,' Bill said. 'And we were all there.'

'But nothing lasts forever,' Richie said. He looked back down the hill they had just climbed and sighed. 'Look at this, for instance.'

He held his hands out. The tiny scars in the palms were gone. Beverly put her hands out; Ben did the same; Bill added his. All were dirty but unmarked.

'Nothing lasts forever,' Richie repeated. He looked up at Bill, and Bill saw tears cut slowly through the dirt on Richie's cheeks.

'Except maybe for love,' Ben said.

'And desire,' Beverly said.

'How about friends?' Bill asked, and smiled. 'What do you think, Trashmouth?'

'Well,' Richie said, smiling and rubbing his eyes, 'Ah got to thank about it, boy; Ah say, Ah say Ah got to thank about it.'

Bill put his hands out and they joined theirs with his and stood there for a moment, seven who had been reduced to four but who could still make a circle. They looked at each other. Ben was crying now too, the tears spilling from his eyes. But he was smiling.

'I love you guys so much,' he said. He squeezed Bev's and Richie's hands tight-tight-tight for a moment, and then dropped them. 'Now could we see if they've got such a thing as breakfast in this place? And we ought to call Mike. Tell him we're okay.'

'Good thinnin, senhorr,' Richie said. 'Every now an then I theenk you might turn out okay. Watchoo theenk, Beeg Beel?'

'I theenk you ought to go fuck yourself,' Bill said.

They walked into the Town House on a wave of laughter, and as Bill pushed through the glass door, Beverly caught sight of something which she never spoke of but never forgot. For just a moment she saw their reflections in the glass - only there were six, not four, because Eddie was behind Richie and Stan was behind Bill, that little half-smile on his face.

9

Out / Dusk, August 10th, 1958

The sun sits neatly on the horizon, a slightly oblate red ball that throws a flat feverish light over the Barrens. The iron cover on top of one of the pumping-stations rises a little, settles, rises again, and begins to slide.

'P-P-Push it, Buh-Ben, it's bruh-breaking my shoulder -

The cover slides farther, tilts, and falls into the shrubbery that has grown up around the concrete cylinder. Seven children come out one by one and look around, blinking owlishly in silent wonder. They are like children who have never seen daylight before.

'It's so quiet,' Beverly says softly.

The only sounds are the loud rush of water and the somnolent hum of insects. The storm is over but the Kenduskeag is still very high. Closer to town, not far from the place where the river is corseted in concrete and called a canal, it has overflowed its banks, although the flooding is by no means serious - a few wet cellars is the worst of it. This time.

Stan moves away from them, his face blank and thoughtful. Bill looks around and at first he thinks Stan has seen a small fire on the riverbank - fire is his first impression: a red glow almost too bright to look at. But when Stan picks the fire up in his right hand the angle of the light changes, and Bill sees it's nothing but a Coke bottle, one of the new clear ones, which someone has dropped by the river. He watches as Stan reverses it, holds it by the neck, and brings it down on a shelf of rock jutting out of the bank. The bottle breaks, and Bill is aware they are all watching Stan now as he pokes through the shattered remains of the bottle, his face sober and studious and absorbed. At last he picks up a narrow wedge of glass. The westering sun throws red glints from it, and Bill thinks again: Like a fire.

Stan looks up at him and Bill suddenly understands: it is perfectly clear to him, and perfectly right. He steps forward toward Stan with his hands held out, palms up. Stan backs away, into the water. Small black bugs stitch along just above the surface, and Bill can see an iridescent dragonfly go bussing off into the reeds along the far bank like a small flying rainbow. A frog begins a steady bass thud, and as Stan takes his left hand and draws the edge of glass down his palm, peeling skin and bringing thin blood, Bill thinks in a kind of ecstasy: There's so much life down here!

'Bill?'

'Sure. Both.'

Stan cuts his other hand. There is pain, but not much. A whippoorwill has begun to call somewhere, a cool sound, peaceful. Bill thinks: That whippoorwill is raising the moon.

He looks at his hands, both of them bleeding now, and then around him. The others are there - Eddie with his aspirator clutched tightly in one hand; Ben with his big belly pushing palely out through the tattered remains of his shirt; Richie, his face oddly naked without his glasses; Mike, silent and solemn, his normally full lips compressed to a thin line. And Beverly, her head up, her eyes wide and clear, her hair still somehow lovely in spite of the dirt that mats it.

All of us. All of us are here.

And he sees them, really sees them, for the last time, because in some way he understands that they will never all be together again, the seven of them - not this way. No one talks. Beverly holds out her hands, and after a moment Richie and Ben hold out theirs. Mike and Eddie do the same. Stan cuts them one by one as the sun begins to slip behind the horizon, cooling that red furnace-glow to a dusky rose-pink. The whippoorwill cries again, Bill can see the first faint swirls of mist on the water, and he feels as if he has become a part of everything - this is a brief ecstasy which he will no more talk about than Beverly will later talk about the brief reflection she sees of two dead men who were, as boys, her friends.

A breeze touches the trees and bushes, making them sigh, and he thinks: This is a lovely place, and I'll never forget it. It's lovely, and they are lovely; each one of them is gorgeous. The whippoorwill cries again, sweet and liquid, and for a moment Bill feels at one with it, as if he could sing and then be gone into the dusk - as if he could fly away, brave in the air.

He looks at Beverly and she is smiling at him. She closes her eyes and holds her hands out to either side. Bill takes her left; Ben her right. Bill can feel the warmth of her blood mixing with his own. The others join in and they stand in a circle, all of their hands now sealed in that peculiarly intimate way.

Stan is looking at Bill with a kind of urgency; a kind of fear.

'Swuh-Swear to muh-me that you'll c-c-c-come buh-back,' Bill says. 'Swear to me that if lh-Ih-It isn't d-d-dead, you'll cuh-home back.'

'Swear,' Ben said.

'Swear.' Richie.

'Yes - I swear.' Bev.

'Swear it,' Mike Hanlon mutters.

'Yeah. Swear.' Eddie, his voice a thin and reedy whisper.

'I swear too,' Stan whispers, but his voice falters and he looks down as he speaks.

'I-I swuh-swuh-swear.'

That was it; that was all. But they stand there for awhile longer, feeling the power that is in their circle, the closed body that they make. The light paints their faces in pale fading colors; the sun is now gone and sunset is dying. They stand together in a circle as the darkness creeps down into the Barrens, filling up the paths they have walked this summer, the clearings where they have played tag and guns, the secret places along the riverbanks where they have sat and discussed childhood's long questions or smoked Beverly's cigarettes or where they have merely been silent, watching the passage of the clouds reflected in the water. The eye of the day is closing.

At last Ben drops his hands. He starts to say something, shakes his head, and walks away. Richie follows him, then Beverly and Mike, walking together. No one talks; they climb the embankment to Kansas Street and simply take leave of one another. And when Bill thinks it over twenty-seven years later, he realizes that they really never did all get together again. Four of them quite often, sometimes five, and maybe six once or twice. But never all seven.

He's the last to go. He stands for a long time with his hands on the rickety white fence, looking down into the Barrens as, overhead, the first stars seed the summer sky. He stands under the blue and over the black and watches the Barrens fill up with darkness.

I never want to play down there again, he thinks suddenly and is amazed to find the thought is not terrible or distressing but tremendously liberating.

He stands there a moment longer and then turns away from the Barrens and starts home, walking along the dark sidewalk with his hands in his pockets, glancing from time to time at the houses of Derry, warmly lit against the night.

After a block or two he begins to walk faster, thinking of supper . . . and a block or two after that, he begins to whistle.

DERRY: THE LAST INTERLUDE

'"The ocean, in these times, is a perfect fleet of ships, and we can hardly fail

to encounter many, in running over. It is merely crossing,' said Mr Micawber

trifling with his eyeglass, 'merely crossing. The distance is quite imaginary."'

- Charles Dickens.

David Copperfield

June 4th, 1985

Bill came in about twenty minutes ago and brought me this book - Carole found it on one of the tables in the library and gave it to him when he asked for it. I thought Chief Rademacher might have taken it, but apparently he didn't want anything to do with it.

Bill's stutter is disappearing again, but the poor man has aged four years in the last four days. He told me he expects Audra to be discharged from Derry Home Hospital (where I myself yet tarry) tomorrow, only to take a private ambulance north to the Bangor Mental Health Institute. Physically she's fine - minor cuts and bruises that are already healing. Mentally . . .

'You raise her hand and it stays up,' Bill said. He was sitting by the window, twiddling a can of diet soda between his hands. 'It just floats there until someone puts it down again. Her reflexes are there, but very slow. The EEG they did shows a severely repressed alpha wave. She's c-c-catatonic, Mike.'

I said, 'I've got an idea. Maybe not such a good one. If you don't like it, just say so.'

'What?'

'I'm going to be in here another week,' I said. 'Instead of sending Audra up to Bangor, why don't you take her to my place, Bill? Spend the week with her. Talk to her, even if she doesn't talk back. Is she . . . is she continent?'

'No,' Bill said bleakly.

'Can you - I mean, would you - '

'Would I change her?' He smiled, and it was such a painful smile that I had to look away for a moment. It was the way my father smiled the time he told me about Butch Bowers and the chickens. 'Yes. I think I could do that much.'

'I won't tell you to take it easy on yourself when you're obviously not prepared to do that,' I said, 'but please remember that you yourself agreed that much or all of what's happened was almost certainly ordained. That may include Audra's part in this.'

'I sh-should have kept my mouth shut about where I was g-going.'

Sometimes it's better to say nothing - so that's what I did.

'All right,' he said at last. 'If you really mean it - '

'I mean it. They've got my housekeys down at the Patient Services Desk. There's a couple of Delmonico steaks in the freezer. Maybe that was ordained, too.'

'She's eating mostly soft foods and, uh, luh-liquids.'

'Well,' I said, holding onto my smile, 'maybe there'll be cause for a celebration. There's a pretty good bottle of wine on the top shelf in the pantry, too. Mondavi. Domestic, but good.'

He came over and gripped my hand. 'Thank you, Mike.'

'Any time, Big Bill.'

He let go of my hand. 'Richie flew back to California this morning.'

I nodded. 'Think you'll stay in touch?'

'M-Maybe,' he said. 'For awhile, anyway. But . . . 'He looked at me levelly. 'It's going to happen again, I think.'

'The forgetting?'

'Yes. In fact, I think it's already started. Just little things so far. Details. But I think it's going to spread.'

'Maybe that's best.'

'Maybe.' He looked out the window, still twiddling his can of diet soda, almost surely thinking about his wife, so wide-eyed and silent and beautiful and plastic. Catatonic. The sound of a door slamming shut and locked. He sighed. 'Maybe it is.'

'Ben? Beverly?'

He looked back at me and smiled a little. 'Ben's invited her to come back to Nebraska with him, and she's agreed to go, at least for awhile. You know about her friend in Chicago?'

I nodded. Beverly told Ben and Ben told me yesterday. If I may understate the case (grotesquely understate the case), Beverly's later description of her wonderful fantastic husband, Tom, was much truer than her original one. Wonderful fantastic Tom kept Bev in emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical bondage for the last four years or so. Wonderful fantastic Tom got here by beating the information out of Bev's only close woman friend.

'She told me she's going to fly back to Chicago the week after next and file a missing-persons report on him. Tom, I mean.'

'Smart enough,' I said. 'No one's ever going to find him down there.' Or Eddie either, I thought but did not say.

'No, I suppose not,' Bill said. 'And when she goes back, I'm betting Ben will go with her. And you know something else? Something really crazy?'

'What?'

'I don't think she really remembers what happened to Tom.'

I just stared at him.

'She's forgotten or forgetting,' Bill said. 'And I can't remember what the doorway looked like anymore. The d-doorway into Its place. I try to think of it and the craziest thing happens - I get this ih-image of g-g-goats walking over a bridge. From that story "The Three Billy Goats Gruff." Crazy, huh?'

'They'll trace Tom Rogan to Derry eventually,' I said. 'He'll have left a paper trail a mile wide. Rent-a-car, plane tickets.'

'I'm not so sure of that,' Bill said, lighting a cigarette. 'I think he might have paid cash for his plane ticket and given a phony name. Maybe bought a cheap car here or stole one.'

'Why?'

'Oh, come on,' Bill said. 'Do you think he came all this way to give her a spanking?'

Our eyes met for a long moment and then he stood up. 'Listen, Mike . . . '

'Too hip, gotta split,' I said. 'I can dig it.'

He laughed at that, laughed hard, and when he had sobered he said: Thanks for the use of your place, Mikey.'

'I'm not going to swear to you it'll make any difference. It has no therapeutic qualities that I'm aware of.'

'Well . . . I'll see you.' He did an odd thing then, odd but rather lovely. He kissed my cheek. 'God bless, Mike. I'll be around.'

Things may be okay, Bill,' I said. 'Don't give up hope. They may be okay.'

He smiled and nodded, but I think the same word was in both of our minds: Catatonic.

June 5th, 1985

Ben and Beverly came in today to say goodbye. They're not flying - Ben's rented a great big Cadillac from the Hertz people and they're going to drive, not hurrying. There's something in their eyes when they look at each other, and I'd bet my pension-plan that if they're not making it now, they will be by the time they get to Nebraska.

Beverly hugged me, told me to get well quickly, and then cried.

Ben also hugged me, and asked for the third or fourth time if I would write. I told him I would indeed write, and so I will . . . for awhile, at least. Because this tune it's happening to me, as well.

I'm forgetting things.

As Bill said, right now it's only small things, details. But it feels like the sort of thing that's going to spread. It could be that in a month or a year, this notebook will be all I'll have to remind me of what happened here in Derry. I suppose the words themselves might begin to fade, eventually leaving this book as blank as when I first picked it up in the school-supplies department at Freese's. That's an awful thought and in the daytime it seems wildly paranoid . . . but, do you know, in the watches of the night it seems perfectly logical.

This forgetting . . . the prospect fills me with panic, but it also offers a sneaking sort of relief. It suggests to me more than anything else that this time they really did kill It; that there is no need of a watchman to stand and wait for the cycle to begin again.

Dull panic, sneaking relief. It's the relief I'll embrace, I think, sneaking or not.

Bill called to say he and Audra had moved in. There is no change in her.

'I'll always remember you.' That's what Beverly told me just before she and Ben left.

I think I saw a different truth in her eyes.

June 6th, 1985

Interesting piece in the Derry News today, on page one. The story was headed: STORM CAUSES HENLEY TO GIVE UP AUDITORIUM EXPANSION PLANS. The Henley in question is Tim Henley a multi-millionaire developer who came into Derry like a whirlwind in the late sixties - it was Henley and Zitner who organized the consortium responsible for building the Derry Mall (which, according to another piece on page one, is probably going to be declared a total loss). Tim Henley was determined to see Derry grow. There was a profit-motive, yes indeed, but there was more to it than that: Henley genuinely wanted to see it happen. His sudden abandonment of the auditorium expansion suggests several things to me. That Henley may have soured on Derry is only the most obvious. I think it's also possible that he's in the process of losing his shirt because of the destruction of the mall.

But the article also suggests that Henley is not alone; that other investors and potential investors in Derry's future may be rethinking their options. Of course, Al Zitner won't have to bother; God retired him when downtown collapsed. Of the others, those who thought like Henley are now facing a rather difficult problem - how do you rebuild an urban area which is now at least fifty percent underwater?

I think that, after a long and ghoulishly vital existence, Derry may be dying . . . like a nightshade whose time to bloom has come and gone.

Called Bill Denbrough late this afternoon. No change in Audra.

An hour ago I put through another call, this one to Richie Tozier in California. His answering machine fielded the call, with Creedence Clearwater Revival music playing in the background. Those machines always fuck up my timing somehow. I left my name and number, hesitated, and added that I hoped he was able to wear his contact lenses again. I was about to hang up when Richie himself picked up the phone and said, 'Mikey! How you be?' His voice was pleased and warm . . . but there was an obvious bewilderment there as well. He was wearing the verbal expression of a man who has been caught utterly flat-footed.

'Hello, Richie,' I said. 'I'm doing pretty well.'

'Good. How much pain you having?'

'Some. It's going away. The itch is worse. I'll be damn glad when they finally decide to unstrap my ribs. By the way, I liked the Creedence.'

Richie laughed. 'Shit, that ain't Creedence, that's "Rock and Roll Girls," from Fogarty's new album. Centerfield, it's called. You haven't heard any of it?'

'Huh-uh.'

'You got to get it, it's great. It's just like . . . ' He trailed off for a moment and then said, 'It's just like the old days.'

'I'll pick it up,' I said, and I probably will. I always liked John Fogarty. 'Green River' was my all-tune Creedence favorite, I guess. Get back home, he says. Just before the fade he says it.

'What about Bill?'

'He and Audra are keeping house for me while I'm in here.'

'Good. That's good.' He paused for a moment. 'You want to hear something fucking bizarre, ole Mikey?'

'Sure,' I said. I had a pretty good idea what he was going to say.

'Well . . . I was sitting here in my study, listening to some of the new Cashbox hot prospects, going over some ad copy, reading memos . . . there's about two mountains of stuff backed up, and I'm looking at roughly a month of twenty-five-hour days. So I had the answering machine turned on, but with the volume turned up so I could intercept the calls I wanted and just let the dimwits talk to the tape. And the reason I let you talk to the tape as long as I did - '

' - was because at first you didn't have the slightest idea who I was.'

'Jesus, that's right! How did you know that?'

'Because we're forgetting again. All of us this time.'

'Mikey, are you sure?'

'What was Stan's last name?' I asked him.

There was silence on the other end of the line - a long silence. In it, faintly, I could hear a woman talking in Omaha . . . or maybe she was in Ruthven, Arizona, or Flint, Michigan. I heard her, as faint as a space-traveller leaving the solar system in the nosecone of a burned-out rocket, thank someone for the cookies.

Then Richie said, uncertainly: 'I think it was Underwood, but that isn't Jewish, it it?'

'It was Uris.'

'Uris!' Richie cried, sounding both relieved and shaken. 'Jesus, I hate it when I get something right on the tip of my tongue and can't quite pick it off. Someone brings out a Trivial Pursuit game, I say "Excuse me but I think the diarrhea's coming back so maybe I'll just go home, okay?" But you remember, anyhow, Mikey. Like before.'

'No. I looked it up in my address book.'

Another long silence. Then: 'You didn't remember?'

'Nope.'

'No shit?'

'No shit.'

'Then this tune it's really over,' he said, and the relief in his voice was unmistakable.

'Yes, I think so.'

That long-distance silence fell again - all the miles between Maine and California. I believe we were both thinking the same thing: it was over, yes, and in six weeks or six months, we will have forgotten all about each other. It's over, and all it's cost us is our friendship and Stan and Eddie's lives. I've almost forgotten them, you know it? Horrible as it may sound, I have almost forgotten Stan and Eddie. Was it asthma Eddie had, or chronic migraine? I'll be damned if I can remember for sure, although I think it was migraine. I'll ask Bill. He'll know.

'Well, you say hi to Bill and that pretty wife of his,' Richie said with a cheeriness that sounded canned.

'I will, Richie,' I said, closing my eyes and rubbing my forehead. He remembered Bill's wife was in Derry . . . but not her name, or what had happened to her.

'And if you're ever in LA, you got the number. We'll get together and mouth some chow.'

'Sure.' I felt hot tears behind my eyes. 'And if you get back this way, the

same thing goes.'

'Mikey?'

'Right here.'

'I love you, man.'

'Same here.'

'Okay. Keep your thumb on it.'

'Beep-beep, Richie.'

He laughed. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stick it in your ear, Mike. Ah say, in yo ear, boy.'

He hung up and so did I. Then I lay back on my pillows with my eyes shut and didn't open them for a long time.

June 7th, 1985

Police Chief Andrew Rademacher, who took over from Chief Borton in the late sixties, is dead. It was a bizarre accident, one I can't help associating with what has been happening in Derry . . . what has just ended in Derry.

The combination police-station - courthouse stands on the edge of the area that fell into the Canal, and while it didn't go, the upheaval - or the flood - must have caused structural damage of which no one was aware.

Rademacher was working late in his office last night, the story in the paper says, as he has every night since the storm and the flood. The Police Chiefs office has moved from the third to the fifth floor since the old days, to just below an attic where all sorts of records and useless city artifacts are stored. One of those artifacts was the tramp-chair I have described earlier in these pages. It was made of iron and weighed better than four hundred pounds. The building shipped a quantity of water during the downpour of May 31st, and that must have weakened the attic floor (or so the paper says). Whatever the reason, the tramp-chair fell from the attic directly onto Chief Rademacher as he sat at his desk, reading accident reports. He was killed instantly. Officer Bruce Andeen rushed in and found him lying on the ruins of his shattered desk, his pen still in one hand.

Talked to Bill on the phone again. Audra is taking some solid food, he says, but otherwise there is no change. I asked him if Eddie's big problem had been asthma or migraine.

'Asthma,' he said promptly. 'Don't you remember his aspirator?'

'Sure,' I said, and did. But only when Bill mentioned it.

'Mike?'

'Yeah?'

'What was his last name?'

I looked at my address book lying on the nighttable, but didn't pick it up. 'I don't quite remember.'

'It was like Kerkorian,' Bill said, sounding distressed, 'but that wasn't quite it. You've got everything written down, though. Right?'

'Right,' I said.

'Thank God for that.'

'Have you had any ideas about Audra?'

'One,' he said, 'but it's so crazy I don't want to talk about it.'

'You sure?'

'Yeah.'

'All right.'

'Mike, it's scary, isn't it? Forgetting like this?'

'Yes,' I said. And it is.

June 8th, 1985

Raytheon, which had been scheduled to break ground on its Derry plant in July, has decided at the last minute to build in Waterville instead. The editorial on page one of the News expresses dismay . . . and, if I read correctly between the lines, a little fright.

I think I know what Bill's idea is. He'll have to act quickly, before the last of the magic departs this place. If it hasn't already.

I guess what I thought before wasn't so paranoid after all. The names and addresses of the others in my little book are fading. The color and quality of the ink combine to make those entries look as if they were written fifty or seventy-five years before the others I've jotted in there. This has happened in the last four or five days. I'm convinced that by September their names will be utterly gone.

I suppose I could preserve them; I could just keep copying them. But I'm also convinced that each would fade in its turn, and that very soon it would become an exercise in futility - like writing I will not throw spit-balls in class five hundred times. I would be writing names that meant nothing for a reason I didn't remember.

Let it go, let it go.

Bill, act quickly . . . but be careful!

June 9th, 1985

Woke up in the middle of the night from a terrible nightmare I couldn't remember, got panicky, couldn't breathe. Reached for the call-button and then couldn't use it. Had a terrible vision of Mark Lamonica answering the bell with a hypo . . . or Henry Bowers with his switchblade.

I grabbed my address book and called Ben Hanscom in Nebraska . . . the address and number have faded still more, but they are still legible. No go, Joe. Got a recorded phone-company voice telling me service to that number has been cancelled.

Was Ben fat, or did he have something like a club foot?

Lay awake until dawn.

June 10th, 1985

They tell me I can go home tomorrow.

I called Bill and told him that - I suppose I wanted to warn him that his time is getting shorter all the time. Bill is the only one I remember clearly and I'm convinced that I'm the only one he remembers clearly. Because we are both still here in Derry, I suppose.

'All right,' he said. 'By tomorrow we'll be out of your hair.'

'You still got your idea?'

'Yeah. Looks like it's time to try it.'

'Be careful.'

He laughed and said something I both do and don't understand: 'You can't be c-c-careful on a skuh-hateboard, man.'

'How will I know how it turned out, Bill?'

'You'll know,' he said, and hung up.

My heart's with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams.

I'm almost done with this diary now - and I suppose a diary is all that it will ever be, and that the story of Derry's old scandals and eccentricities has no place outside these pages. That's fine with me; I think that, when they let me out of here tomorrow, it might finally be time to start thinking about some sort of new life . . . although just what that might be is unclear to me.

I loved you guys, you know.

I loved you so much.

EPILOGUE

BILL DENBROUGH BEATS THE DEVIL - II

'I knew the bride when she used to do the Pony,

I knew the bride when she used to do the Stroll.

I knew the bride when she used to wanna party,

I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll.'

- Nick Lowe

'You can't be careful on a skateboard man'

- some kid

1

Noon of a summer day.

Bill stood naked in Mike Hanlon's bedroom, looking at his lean body in the mirror on the door. His bald head gleamed in the light which fell through the window and cast his shadow along the floor and up the wall. His chest was hairless, his thighs and shanks skinny but overlaid with ropes of muscle. Still, he thought, it's an adult's body we got here, no question about that. There's the pot belly that comes with a few too many good steaks, a few too many bottles of Kirin beer, a few too many poolside lunches where you had the Reuben or the French dip instead of the diet plate. Your seat's dropped, too, Bill old buddy. You can still serve an ace if you're not too hung over and if your eye's in, but you can't hustle after the old Dunlop the way you could when you were seventeen. You got love handles and your balls are starting to get that middle-aged dangly look. There's lines on your face that weren't there when you were seventeen . . . Hell, they weren't there on your first author photo, the one where you tried so hard to look as if you knew something . . . anything. You're too old for what you've got in mind, Billy-boy. You'll kill both of you.

He put on his underpants.

If we'd believed that, we never could have . . . have done whatever it was we did.

Because he didn't really remember what it was they had done, or what had happened to turn Audra into a catatonic wreck. He only knew what he was supposed to do now, and he knew that if he didn't do it now, he would forget that, too. Audra was sitting downstairs in Mike's easy chair, her hair hanging lankly to her shoulders, staring with rapt attention at the TV, which was currently showing Dialing for Dollars. She didn't speak and would only move if you led her.

This is different. You're just too old, man. Believe it.

I won't.

Then die here in Derry. Big fucking deal.

He put on athletic socks, the one pair of jeans he had brought, the tank top he'd bought at the Shirt Shack in Bangor the day before. The tank was bright orange. Across the front it said WHERE THE HELL IS DERRY, MAINE? He sat down on Mike's bed - the one he had shared for the last week of nights with his warm but corpse-like wife - and put on his sneakers . . . a pair of Keds, which he had also bought yesterday in Bangor.

He stood up and looked at himself in the mirror again. He saw a man pressing middle age dressed up in a kid's clothes.

You look ludicrous.

What kid doesn't?

You're no kid. Give this up!

'Fuck, let's rock and roll a little,' Bill said softly, and left the room.

2

In the dreams he will have in later years, he is always leaving Derry alone, at sunset. The town is deserted; everyone has left. The Theological Seminary and the Victorian houses on West Broadway brood black against a lurid sky, every summer sunset you ever saw rolled up into one.

He can hear his footfalls echoing back as they rap along the concrete. The only other sound is water rushing hollowly through the stormdrains

3

He rolled Silver out into the driveway, put him on the kickstand, and checked the tires again. The front one was okay but the back one felt a little mushy. He got the bike pump that Mike had bought and firmed it up. When he put the pump back, he checked the playing cards and the clothespins. The bike's wheels still made those exciting machine-gun sounds Bill remembered from his boyhood. Good deal.

You've gone crazy.

Maybe. We'll see.

He went back into Mike's garage again, got the 3-in-l, and oiled the chain and sprocket. Then he stood up, looked at Silver, and gave the bulb of the oogah-horn a light, experimental squeeze. It sounded good. He nodded and went into the house.

4

and he sees all those places again, intact, as they were then: the hulking brick fort of Derry Elementary, the Kissing Bridge with its complex intaglio of initials, high-school sweethearts ready to crack the world open with their passion who had grown up to become insurance agents and car salesmen and waitresses and beauticians; he sees the statue of Paul Bunyan against that bleeding sunset sky and the leaning white fence which ran along the Kansas Street sidewalk at the edge of the Barrens. He sees them as they were, as they always will be in some part of his mind . . . and his heart breaks with love and honor.

Leaving, leaving Derry, he thinks. We are leaving Derry, and if this was a story it would be the last half-dozen pages or so; get ready to put this one up on the shelf and forget it. The sun's going down and there's no sound but my footfalls and the water in the drains. This is the time of

5

Dialing for Dollars had given way to Wheel of Fortune. Audra sat passively

in front of it, her eyes never leaving the set. Her demeanor did not change

when Bill snapped the TV off.

'Audra,' he said, going to her and taking her hand. 'Come on.'

She didn't move. Her hand lay in his, warm wax. Bill took her other hand from the arm of Mike's chair and pulled her to her feet. He had dressed her that morning much as he had dressed himself - she was wearing Levis and a blue shell top. She would have looked quite lovely if not for her wide-eyed vacant stare.

'Cuh-come on,' he said again, and led her through the door, into Mike's kitchen and, eventually, outside. She came willingly enough . . . although she would have plunged off the back porch stoop and gone sprawling in the dirt if Bill had not put an arm around her waist and guided her down the steps.

He led her over to where Silver stood heeled over on his kick-stand in the bright summer noonlight. Audra stood beside the bike, looking serenely at the side of Mike's garage.

'Get on, Audra.'

She didn't move. Patiently, Bill worked at getting her to swing one of her long legs over the carrier mounted on Silver's back fender. At last she stood there with the package carrier between her legs, not quite touching her crotch. Bill pressed his hand lightly to the top of her head and Audra sat down.

He swung onto Silver's saddle and put up the kickstand with his heel. He prepared to reach behind him for Audra's hands and draw them around his middle, but before he could do it they crept around him of their own accord, like small dazed mice.

He looked down at them, his heart beating faster, seeming to pump in his throat as much as in his chest. It was the first independent action Audra had taken all week, so far as he knew . . . the first independent action she had taken since It happened . . . whatever It had been.

'Audra?'

There was no answer. He tried to crane his neck around and see her but couldn't quite make it. There were only her hands around his waist, the nails showing the last chips of a red polish that had been put on by a bright, lively, talented young woman in a small English town.

'We're going for a ride,' Bill said, and he began to roll Silver forward toward Palmer Lane, listening to the gravel crunch under the tires. 'I want you to hold on, Audra. I think . . . I think I may go sort of f-f-fast.'

If I don't lose my guts.

He thought of the kid he had met earlier during his stay in Derry, when It had still been happening. You can't be careful on a skateboard, the kid had said.

Truer words were never spoken, kid.

'Audra? You ready?'

No answer. Had her hands tightened the tiniest bit across his middle? Probably just wishful thinking.

He reached the end of the driveway and looked right. Palmer Lane ran straight to Upper Main Street, where a left turn would take him onto the hill running downtown. Downhill. Picking up speed. He felt a tremor of fear at the image, and a disquieting thought

(old bones break easy, Billy-boy)

ran through his mind almost too quickly to read and was gone. But . . .

But it wasn't all disquiet, was it? No. It was desire as well . . . the feeling he'd had when he saw the kid walking along with the skateboard under his arm. The desire to go fast, to feel the wind race past you without knowing if you were racing toward or running away from, to just go. To fly.

Disquiet and desire. All the difference between world and want - the difference between being an adult who counted the cost and a child who just got on it and went, for instance. All the world between. Yet not that much difference at all. Bedfellows, really. The way you felt when the roller-coaster car approached the top of the first steep grade, where the ride really begins.

Disquiet and desire. What you want and what you're scared to try for. Where you've been and where you want to go. Something in a rock-and-roll song about wanting the girl, the car, the place to stand and be. Oh please God can you dig it.

Bill closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the soft dead weight of his wife behind him, feeling the hill somewhere ahead of him, feeling his own heart inside him.

Be brave, be true, stand.

He began to push Silver forward again. 'You want to rock and roll a little, Audra?'

No answer. But that was all right. He was ready.

'Hold on, then.'

He began to pedal. It was hard going at first. Silver wobbled alarmingly back and forth, Audra's weight adding to the imbalance . . . yet she must be doing some balancing, even unconsciously, or they would have crashed right away. Bill stood on the pedals, hands squeezing the handlegrips with maniacal tightness, his head turned skyward, his eyes slits, the cords on his neck standing out.

Gonna fall splat right here in the street, split her skull and mine -

(no you ain't go for it Bill go for it go for the son of a bitch)

He stood on the pedals, revolving them, feeling every cigarette he'd smoked over the last twenty years in his elevated blood-pressure and the race of his heart. Fuck that, too! he thought, and the rush of crazy exhilaration made him grin.

The playing cards, which had been firing isolated shots, now began to click-clock faster. They were new, nice new Bikes, and they made a good loud sound. Bill felt the first touch of breeze on his bald pate, and his grin widened. I made that breeze, he thought. I made it by pumping these damn pedals.

The STOP sign at the end of the lane was coming up. Bill began to brake . . . and then (his grin still widening, showing more and more of his teeth) he began to pump again.

Ignoring the STOP sign, Bill Denbrough swept to the left, onto Upper Main Street above Bassey Park. Again Audra's weight fooled him and they almost overbalanced and crashed. The bike wavered, wobbled, then righted itself. That breeze was stronger now, cooling the sweat on his forehead, evaporating it, rushing past his ears with a low intoxicating sound that was a little like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell but was really like nothing else on earth. Bill supposed it was a sound the kid with the skateboard was familiar with. But it's a sound you'll fall out of touch with, kid, he thought. Things have a way of changing. It's a dirty trick, so be prepared for it.

Pedaling faster now, finding a surer balance in speed. The ruins of Paul Bunyan on the left, like a fallen colossus. Bill shouted: 'Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYYYY!'

Audra's hands tightened around his middle; he felt her stir against his back. But there was no urge to turn and try to see her now . . . no urge, no need. He pedaled faster, laughing out loud, a tall skinny bald man on a bike crouched over the handlebars to lessen the wind-resistance. People turned to look as he raced alongside Bassey Park.

Now Upper Main Street began to incline toward the caved-in center of town at a steeper angle, and a voice inside whispered to him that if he didn't brake soon he would find himself unable; he would simply go sweeping into the sunken remains of the three-way intersection like a bat out of hell and kill both of them.

Instead of braking he began to pedal again, urging the bike to go even faster. Now he was flying down Main Street Hill and he could see the white-and-orange crash barriers, the smudgepots with their smoky Halloween flames marking the edge of the cave-in, he could see the tops of buildings which jutted out of the streets like the figments of a madman's imagination.

'Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYYYYYY!' Bill Denbrough cried deliriously, and rushed down the hill toward whatever there would be, aware for one last time of Derry as his place, aware most of all that he was alive under a real sky, and that all was desire, desire, desire.

He raced down the hill on Silver: he raced to beat the devil.

6

leaving.

So you leave, and there is an urge to look back, to look back just once as the sunset fades, to see that severe New England skyline one final time - the spires, the Standpipe, Paul with his axe slung over his shoulder. But it is perhaps not such a good idea to look back - all the stories say so. Look what happened to Lot's wife. Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.

You leave and you leave quick when the sun starts to go down, he thinks in this dream. That's what you do. And if you spare a last thought, maybe it's ghosts you wonder about . . . the ghosts of children standing in the water at sunset, standing in a circle, standing with their hands joined together, their faces young, sure, but tough . . . tough enough, anyway, to give birth to the people they will become, tough enough to understand, maybe, that the people they will become must necessarily birth the people they were before they can get on with trying to understand simple mortality. The circle closes, the wheel rolls, and that's all there is.

You don't have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever, live with them forever, love with them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become.

Children I love you. I love you so much.

So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away, drive away from Derry, from memory . . . but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night.

Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.

All the rest is darkness.

7

'Hey!'

'Hey mister, you - '

' - lookout!'

'Damn fool's gonna - '

Words whipped by in the slipstream, as meaningless as pennants in a breeze or untethered balloons. Here came the crash barriers; he could smell the sooty aroma of kerosene from the smudgepots. He saw the yawning darkness where the street had been, heard sullen water rushing down there in the tangled darkness, and laughed at the sound.

He dragged Silver hard left, so close to the crash barriers now that the leg of his jeans actually whispered along one of them. Silver's wheels were less than three inches from the place where the tar ended in empty space, and he was running out of maneuvering room. Up ahead the water had eroded all of the street and half the sidewalk in front of Cash's Jewelry Store. Barriers closed off what was left of the sidewalk; it had been severely undercut.

'Bill?' It was Audra's voice, dazed and a little thick. She sounded as if she had just awakened from a deep sleep. 'Bill, where are we? What are we doing?'

'Hi yo, Silver!' Bill shouted, pointing the rushing gantry that was Silver directly at the crash barrier jutting out at right angles to the empty Cash show window. 'HI YO SILVER AWAYYYYY!'

Silver struck the barrier at better than forty miles an hour and it went flying, the centerboard in one direction, the A-shaped supports in two others. Audra cried out and squeezed Bill so tightly that he lost his breath. Up and down Main Street, Canal Street, and Kansas Street, people stood in doorways and on sidewalks, watching.

Silver shot out onto the bridge of undercut sidewalk. Bill felt his left hip and knee chip the side of the jewelry store. He felt Silver's rear wheel sag suddenly and understood that the sidewalk was falling in behind them -

- and then Silver's forward motion carried them back onto solid roadway. Bill swerved to avoid an overturned trashcan and barrelled out into the street again. Brakes squealed. He saw the grille of a big truck approaching and still couldn't seem to stop laughing. He ran through the space the heavy truck wound up occupying a full second before it got there. Shit, time to spare!

Yelling, tears squirting from his eyes, Bill blew Silver's oogah-horn, listening to each hoarse bray embed itself in the day's bright light.

'Bill, you're going to kill us both!' Audra cried out, and although there was terror in her voice, she was also laughing.

Bill heeled Silver over, and this time he felt Audra leaning with him, making die bike easier to control, helping to make the two of them exist with it, at least for this small compact moment of time, as three living things.

'Do you think so?' he shouted back.

'I know so!' she cried, and then grabbed his crotch, where there was a huge and cheerful erection. 'But don't stop!'

He had nothing to say about it, however. Silver's speed was bleeding away on Up-Mile Hill, the heavy roar of the playing cards becoming single gunshots again. Bill stopped and turned to her. She was pale, wide-eyed, obviously scared and confused . . . but awake, aware, and laughing.

'Audra,' he said, laughing with her. He helped her off Silver, leaned the bike against a handy brick wall, and embraced her. He kissed her forehead, her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, her neck, her breasts.

She hugged him while he did it.

'Bill, what's been happening? I remember getting off the plane at Bangor, and I can't remember a thing after that. Are you all right?'

'Yes.'

'Am I?'

'Yes. Now.'

She pushed him away so she could look at him. 'Bill, are you still stuttering?'

'No,' Bill said, and kissed her. 'My stutter is gone.'

'For good?'

'Yes,' he said. 'I think this time it's gone for good.'

'Did you say something about rock and roll?'

'I don't know. Did I?'

'I love you,' she said.

He nodded and smiled. When he smiled he looked very young, bald head or not. 'I love you too,' he said. 'And what else counts?'

8

He awakens from this dream unable to remember exactly what it was, or much at all beyond the simple fact that he has dreamed about being a child again. He touches his wife's smooth back as she sleeps her warm sleep and dreams her own dreams; he thinks that it is good to be a child, but it is also good to be grownup and able to consider the mystery of childhood . . . its beliefs and desires. I will write about all of this one day, he thinks, and knows it's just a dawn thought, an after-dreaming thought. But it's nice to think so for awhile in the morning's clean silence, to think that childhood has its own sweet secrets and confirms mortality, and that mortality defines all courage and love. To think that what has looked forward must also look back, and that each life makes its own imitation of immortality: a wheel.

Or so Bill Denbrough sometimes thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood, and the friends with whom he shared it.

The book was begun in Bangor, Maine, on September 9th, 1981, and completed in Bangor, Maine, on December 28th, 1985.