IT

So I go over it and over it in my mind; I go over them, trying to re-create them as they were and as they might now be, trying to decide which of them is the most vulnerable. Richie 'Trashmouth' Tozier, I think sometimes - he was the one Criss, Huggins, and Bowers seemed to catch up with the most often, in spite of the fact that Ben was so fat. Bowers was the one Richie was the most scared of - the one we were all the most scared of - but the others used to really put the fear of God into him, too. If I call him out there in California would he see it as some horrible Return of the Big Bullies, two from the grave and one from the madhouse in Juniper Hill where he raves to this day? Sometimes I think Eddie was the weakest, Eddie with his domineering tank of a mother and his terrible case of asthma. Beverly? She always tried to talk so tough, but she was as scared as the rest of us. Stuttering Bill, faced with a horror that won't go away when he puts the cover on his typewriter? Stan Uris?

There's a guillotine blade hanging over their lives, razor-sharp, but the more I think about it the more I think they don't know that blade is there. I'm the one with my hand on the lever. I can pull it just by opening my telephone notebook and calling them, one after the other.

Maybe I won't have to do it. I hold on to the waning hope that I've mistaken the rabbity cries of my own timid mind for the deeper, truer voice of the Turtle. After all, what do I have? Mellon in July. A child found dead on Neibolt Street last October, another found in Memorial Park in early December, just before the first snowfall. Maybe it was a tramp, as the papers say. Or a crazy who's since left Derry or killed himself out of remorse and self-disgust, as some of the books say the real Jack the Ripper may have done.

Maybe.

But the Albrecht girl was found directly across the street from that damned old house on Neibolt Street . . . and she was killed on the same day as George Denbrough was, twenty-seven years before. And then the Johnson boy, found in Memorial Park with one of his legs missing below the knee. Memorial Park is, of course, the home of the Derry Standpipe, and the boy was found almost at its foot. The Standpipe is within a shout of the Barrens; the Standpipe is also where Stan Uris saw those boys.

Those dead boys.

Still, it could all be nothing but smoke and mirages. Could be. Or coincidence. Or perhaps something between the two - a kind of malefic echo. Could that be? I sense that it could be. Here in Derry, anything could be.

I think what was here before is still here - the thing that was here in 1957 and 1958; the thing that was here in 1929 and in 1930 when the Black Spot was burned down by the Maine Legion of White Decency; the thing that was here ha 1904 and 1905 and early 1906 - at least until the Kitchener Ironworks exploded; the thing that was here in 1876 and 1877, the thing that has shown up every twenty-seven years or so. Sometimes it comes a little sooner, sometimes a little later . . . but it always comes. As one goes back the wrong notes are harder and harder to find because the records grow poorer and the moth-holes in the narrative history of the area grow bigger. But knowing where to look - and when to look - goes a long way toward solving the problem. It always comes back, you see.

It.

So - yes: I think I'll have to make those calls. I think it was meant to be us. Somehow, for some reason, we're the ones who have been elected to stop it forever. Blind fate? Blind luck? Or is it that damned Turtle again? Does it perhaps command as well as speak? I don't know. And I doubt if it matters. All those years ago Bill said The Turtle can't help us, and if it was true then it must be true now.

I think of us standing in the water, hands clasped, making that promise to come back if it ever started again - standing there almost like Druids in a ring, our hands bleeding their own promise, palm to palm. A ritual that is perhaps as old as mankind itself, an unknowing tap driven into the tree of all power - the one that grows on the borderline between the land of all we know and that of all we suspect.

Because the similarities -

But I'm doing my own Bill Denbrough here, stuttering over the same ground again and again, reciting a few facts and a lot of unpleasant (and rather gaseous) suppositions, growing more and more obsessive with every paragraph. No good. Useless. Dangerous, even. But it is so very hard to wait on events.

This notebook is supposed to be an effort to get beyond that obsession by widening the focus of my attention - after all, there is more to this story than six boys and one girl, none of them happy, none of them accepted by their peers, who stumbled into a nightmare during one hot summer when Eisenhower was still President. It is an attempt to pull the camera back a little, if you will - to see the whole city, a place where nearly thirty-five thousand people work and eat and sleep and copulate and shop and drive around and walk and go to school and go to jail and sometimes disappear into the dark.

To know what a place is, I really do believe one has to know what it was. And if I had to name a day when all of this really started again for me, it would be the day in the early spring of 1980 when I went to see Albert Carson, who died last summer - at ninety-one, he was full of years as well as honors. He was head librarian here from 1914 to 1960, an incredible span (but he was an incredible man), and I felt that if anyone would know which history of this area was the best one to start with, Albert Carson would. I asked him my question as we sat on his porch and he gave me my answer, speaking in a croak - he was already fighting the throat-cancer which would eventually kill him.

'Not one of them is worth a shit. As you damn well know.'

'Then where should I start?'

'Start what, for Christ's sake?'

'Researching the history of the area. Of Derry Township.'

'Oh. Well. Start with the Fricke and the Michaud. They're supposed to be the best.'

'And after I read those - '

'Read them? Christ, no! Throw em in the wastebasket! That's your first step. Then read Buddinger. Branson Buddinger was a damned sloppy researcher and afflicted with a terminal boner, if half of what I heard when I was a kid was true, but when it came to Derry his heart was in the right place. He got most of the facts wrong, but he got them wrong with feeling, Hanlon.'

I laughed a little and Carson grinned with his leathery lips - an expression of good humor that was actually a little frightening. In that instant he looked like a vulture happily guarding a freshly killed animal, waiting for it to reach exactly the right stage of tasty decomposition before beginning to dine.

'When you finish with Buddinger, read Ives. Make notes on all the people he talked to. Sandy Ives is still at the University of Maine. Folklorist. After you read him, go see him. Buy him a dinner. I'd take him to the Orinoka, because dinner at the Orinoka seems to never end. Pump him. Fill up a notebook with names and addresses. Talk to the old-timers he's talked to - those that are still left; there are a few of us, ah-hah-hah-hah! - and get some more names from them. By then you'll have all the place to stand you'll need, if you're half as bright as I think you are. If you chase down enough people, you'll find out a few things that aren't in the histories. And you may find they disturb your sleep.'

'Derry . . . '

'What about it?'

'Derry's not right, is it?'

'Right?' he asked in that whispery croak. 'What's right? What does that word mean? Is "right" pretty pictures of the Kenduskeag at sunset, Kodachrome by so-and-so, f-stop such-and-such? If so, then Derry is right, because there are pretty pictures of it by the score. Is right a damned committee of dry-boxed old virgins to save the Governor's Mansion or to put a commemorative plaque in front of the Standpipe? If that's right, then Derry's right as rain, because we've got more than our share of old kitty-cats minding everybody's business. Is right that ugly plastic statue of Paul Bunyan in front of City Center? Oh, if I had a truckful of napalm and my old Zippo lighter I'd take care of that fucking thing, I assure you . . . but if one's aesthetic is broad enough to include plastic statues, then Derry is right. The question is, what does right mean to you, Hanlon? Eh? More to the point, what does right not mean?'

I could only shake my head. He either knew or he didn't. He would either tell or he wouldn't.

'Do you mean the unpleasant stories you may hear, or the ones you already know? There are always unpleasant stories. A town's history is like a rambling old mansion filled with rooms and cubbyholes and laundry-chutes and garrets and all sorts of eccentric little hiding places . . . not to mention an occasional secret passage or two. If you go exploring Mansion Derry, you'll find all sorts of things. Yes. You may be sorry later, but you'll find them, and once a thing is found it can't be unfound, can it? Some of the rooms are locked, but there are keys . . . there are keys.'

His eyes glinted at me with an old man's shrewdness.

'You may come to think you've stumbled on the worst of Derry's secrets . . . but there is always one more. And one more. And one more.'

'Do you - '

'I think I shall have to ask you to excuse me just now. My throat is very bad today. It's time for my medicine and my nap.'

In other words, here is a knife and a fork, my friend; go see what you can cut with them.

I started with the Fricke history and the Michaud history. I followed Carson's advice and threw them in the wastebasket, but I read them first. They were as bad as he had suggested. I read the Buddinger history, copied out the footnotes, and chased them down. That was more satisfactory, but footnotes are peculiar things, you know - like footpaths twisting through a wild and anarchic country. They split, then they split again; at any point you may take a wrong turn which leads you either to a bramble-choked dead end or into swampy quickmud. 'If you find a footnote,' a library-science prof once told a class of which I was a part, 'step on its head and kill it before it can breed.'

They do breed, and sometimes the breeding is a good thing, but I think that more often it is not. Those in Buddinger's stiffly written A History of Old Derry (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1950) wander through one hundred years' worth of forgotten books and dusty master's dissertations in the fields of history and folklore, through articles in defunct magazines, and amid brain-numbing stacks of town reports and ledgers.

My conversations with Sandy Ives were more interesting. His sources crossed Buddinger's from time to time, but a crossing was all it ever was. Ives had spent a good part of his lifetime setting down oral histories - yarns, in other words - almost verbatim, a practice Branson Buddinger would undoubtedly have seen as taking the low road.

Ives had written a cycle of articles on Derry during the years 1963-66. Most of the old-timers he talked to then were dead by the time I started my own investigations, but they had sons, daughters, nephews, cousins. And, of course, one of the great true facts of the world is this: for every old-timer who dies, there's a new old-timer coming along. And a good story never dies; it is always passed down. I sat on a lot of porches and back stoops, drank a lot of tea, Black Label beer, homemade beer, homemade rootbeer, tapwater, springwater. I did a lot of listening, and the wheels of my tape-player turned.

Both Buddinger and Ives agreed completely on one point: the original party of white settlers numbered about three hundred. They were English. They had a charter and were formally known as the Derrie Company. The land granted them covered what is today Derry, most of Newport, and little slices of the surrounding towns. And in the year 1741 everyone in Derry Township just disappeared. They were there in June of that year - a community which at that time numbered about three hundred and forty souls - but come October they were gone. The little village of wooden homes stood utterly deserted. One of them, which once stood roughly at the place where Witcham and Jackson Streets intersect today, was burned to the ground. The Michaud history states firmly that all of the villagers were slaughtered by Indians, but there is no basis - save the one burned house - for that idea. More likely, someone's stove just got too hot and the house went up in flames.

Indian massacre? Doubtful. No bones, no bodies. Flood? Not that year. Disease? No word of it in the surrounding towns.

They just disappeared. All of them. All three hundred and forty of them. Without a trace.

So far as I know, the only case remotely like it in American history is the disappearance of the colonists on Roanoke Island, Virginia. Every school-child in the country knows about that one, but who knows about the Derry disappearance? Not even the people who live here, apparently. I quizzed several junior-high students who are taking the required Maine-history course, and none of them knew a thing about it. Then I checked the text, Maine Then and Now. There are better than forty index entries for Derry, most of them concerning the boom years of the lumber industry. Nothing about the disappearance of the original colonists . . . and yet that - what shall I call it? - that quiet fits the pattern, too.

There is a kind of curtain of quiet which cloaks much of what has happened here . . . and yet people do talk. I guess nothing can stop people from talking. But you have to listen hard, and that is a rare skill. I flatter myself that I've developed it over the last four years. If I haven't, then my aptitude for the job must be poor indeed, because I've had enough practice. An old man told me about how his wife had heard voices speaking to her from the drain of her kitchen sink in the three weeks before their daughter died - that was in the early winter of 1957-58. The girl he spoke of was one of the early victims in the murder-spree which began with George Denbrough and did not end until the following summer.

'A whole slew of voices, all of em babblin together,' he told me. He owned a Gulf station on Kansas Street and talked in between slow, limping trips out to the pumps, where he filled gas-tanks, checked oil-levels, and wiped windshields. 'Said she spoke back once, even though she was ascairt. Leaned right over the dram, she did, and hollered down into it. "Who the hell are you?" she calls. "What's your name?" And all these voices answered back, she said - grunts, and babbles and howls and yips, screams and laughin, don't you know. And she said they were sayin what the possessed man said to Jesus: "Our name is Legion," they said. She wouldn't go near that sink for two years. For them two years I'd spend twelve hours a day down here, bustin my hump, then have to go home and warsh all the damn dishes.'

He was drinking a can of Pepsi from the machine outside the office door, a man of seventy-two or -three in faded gray work fatigues, rivers of wrinkles flowing down from the corners of his eyes and mouth.

'By now you prob'ly think I'm as crazy as a bedbug,' he said, 'but I'll tell you sumpin else, if you'll turn off y 'whirligig, there.'

I turned off my tape-recorder and smiled at him. 'Considering some of the things I've heard over the last couple of years, you'd have to go a fair country distance to convince me you're crazy,' I said.

He smiled back, but there was no humor in it. 'I was doin the dishes one night, same as usual - this was in the fall of '58, after things had settled down again. My wife was upstair, sleepin. Betty was the only kid God ever saw fit to give us, and after she was killed my wife spent a lot of her time sleepin. Anyway, I pulled the plug and the water started runnin out of the sink. You know the sound real soapy water makes when it goes down the drain? Kind of a suckin sound, it is. It was makin that noise, but I wasn't thinkin about it, only about goin out and choppin some kindlin in the shed, and just as that sound started to die off, I heard my daughter down in there. I heard Betty somewhere down in those friggin pipes. Laughin. She was somewheres down there in the dark, laughin. Only it sounded more like she was screamin, once you listened a bit. Or both. Screamin and laughin down there in the pipes. That's the only time I ever heard anything like that. Maybe I just imagined it. But . . . I don't think so.'

He looked at me and I looked at him. The light falling through the dirty plate-glass windows onto his face filled him up with years, made him look as ancient as Methuselah. I remember how cold I felt at that moment; how cold.

'You think I'm storying you along?' the old man asked me, the old man who would have been just about forty-five in 1957, the old man to whom God had given a single daughter, Betty Ripsom by name. Betty had been found on Outer Jackson Street just after Christmas of that year, frozen, her remains ripped wide open.

'No,' I said. 'I don't think you're just storying me along, Mr Ripsom.'

'And you're tellin the truth, too,' he said with a land of wonder. 'I can see it on y'face.'

I think he meant to tell me something more then, but the bell behind us dinged sharply as a car rolled over the hose on the tarmac and pulled up to the pumps. When the bell rang, both of us jumped and I uttered a thin little cry. Ripsom got to his feet and limped out to the car, wiping his hands on a ball of waste. When he came back in, he looked at me as though I were a rather unsavory stranger who had just happened to wander in off the street. I made my goodbyes and left.

Buddinger and Ives agree on some tiling else: things really are not right here in Derry; things in Derry have never been right.

I saw Albert Carson for the last time a scant month before he died. His throat had gotten much worse; all he could manage was a hissing little whisper. 'Still thinking about writing a history of Derry, Hanlon?'

'Still toying with the idea,' I said, but I had of course never planned to write a history of the township - not exactly - and I think he knew it.

'It would take you twenty years,' he whispered, 'and no one would read it. No one would want to read it. Let it go, Hanlon.'

He paused a moment and then added:

'Buddinger committed suicide, you know.'

Of course I had known that - but only because people always talk and I had learned to listen. The article in the News had called it a falling accident, and it was true that Branson Buddinger had taken a fall. What the News neglected to mention was that he fell from a stool in his closet and he had a noose around his neck at the time.

'You know about the cycle?'

I looked at him, startled.

'Oh yes,' Carson whispered. 'I know. Every twenty-six or twenty-seven years. Buddinger knew, too. A lot of the old-timers do, although that is one thing they won't talk about, even if you load them up with booze. Let it go, Hanlon.'

He reached out with one bird-claw hand. He closed it around my wrist and I could feel the hot cancer that was loose and raving through his body, eating anything and everything left that was still good to eat - not that there could have been much by that time; Albert Carson's cupboards were almost bare.

'Michael - this is nothing you want to mess into. There are things here in Derry that bite. Let it go. Let it go.'

'I can't.'

'Then beware,' he said. Suddenly the huge and frightened eyes of a child were looking out of his dying old-man's face. 'Beware.'

Derry.

My home town. Named after the county of the same name in Ireland.

Derry.

I was born here, in Derry Home Hospital; attended Derry Elementary School; went to junior high at Ninth Street Middle School; to high school at Derry High. I went to the University of Maine - 'ain't in Derry, but it's just down the rud,' the old-timers say - and then I came right back here. To the Derry Public Library. I am a small-town man living a small-town life, one among millions.

But.

But:

In 1851 a crew of lumber jacks found the remains of another crew that had spent the winter snowed in at a camp on the Upper Kenduskeag - at the tip of what the kids still call the Barrens. There were nine of them in all, all nine hacked to pieces. Heads had rolled . . . not to mention arms . . . a foot or two . . . and a man's penis had been nailed to one wall of the cabin.

But:

In 1851 John Markson killed his entire family with poison and then, sitting in the middle of the circle he had made with their corpses, he gobbled an entire 'white-nightshade' mushroom. His death agonies must have been intense. The town constable who found him wrote in his report that at first he believed the corpse was grinning at him; he wrote of 'Markson's awful white smile.' The white smile was an entire mouthful of the killer mushroom; Markson had gone on eating even as the cramps and the excruciating muscle spasms must have been wracking his dying body.

But:

On Easter Sunday 1906 the owners of the Kitchener Ironworks, which stood where the brand-spanking-new Derry Mall now stands, held an Easter-egg hunt for 'all the good children of Derry.' The hunt took place in the huge Ironworks building. Dangerous areas were closed off, and employees volunteered their time to stand guard and make sure no adventurous boy or girl decided to duck under the barriers and explore. Five hundred chocolate Easter eggs wrapped in gay ribbons were hidden about the rest of the works. According to Buddinger, there was at least one child present for each of those eggs. They ran giggling and whooping and yelling through the Sunday-silent Ironworks, finding the eggs under the giant tipper-vats, inside the desk drawers of the foreman, balanced between the great rusty teeth of gearwheels, inside the molds on the third floor (in the old photographs these molds look like cupcake tins from some giant's kitchen). Three generations of Kitcheners were there to watch the gay riot and to award prizes at the end of the hunt, which was to come at four o'clock, whether all the eggs had been found or not. The end actually came forty-five minutes early, at quarter past three. That was when the Ironworks exploded. Seventy-two people were pulled dead from the wreckage before the sun went down. The final toll was a hundred and two. Eighty-eight of the dead were children. On the following Wednesday, while the city still lay in stunned silent contemplation of the tragedy, a woman found the head of nine-year-old Robert Dohay caught in the limbs of her back-yard apple tree. There was chocolate on the Dohay lad's teeth and blood in his hair. He was the last of the known dead. Eight children and one adult were never accounted for. It was the worst tragedy in Derry's history, even worse than the fire at the Black Spot in 1930, and it was never explained. All four of the Ironworks' boilers were shut down. Not just banked; shut down.

But:

The murder rate in Derry is six times the murder rate of any other town of comparable size in New England. I found my tentative conclusions in this matter so difficult to believe that I turned my figures over to one of the high-school hackers, who spends what time he doesn't spend in front of his Commodore here in the library. He went several steps further - scratch a hacker, find an overachiever - by adding another dozen small cities to what he called 'the stat-pool' and presenting me with a computer-generated bar graph where Derry slicks out like a sore thumb. 'People must have wicked short tempers here, Mr Hanlon,' was his only comment. I didn't reply. If I had, I might have told him that something in Derry has a wicked short temper, anyway.

Here in Derry children disappear unexplained and unfound at the rate of forty to sixty a year. Most are teenagers. They are assumed to be runaways. I suppose some of them even are.

And during what Albert Carson would undoubtedly have called the time of the cycle, the rate of disappearance shoots nearly out of sight. In the year 1930, for instance - the year the Black Spot burned - there were better than one hundred and seventy child disappearances in Derry - and you must remember that these are only the disappearances which were reported to the police and thus documented. Nothing surprising about it, the current Chief of Police told me when I showed him the statistic. It was the Depression. Most of em probably got tired of eating potato soup or going flat hungry at home and went off riding the rods, looking for something better.

During 1958, a hundred and twenty-seven children, ranging in age from three to nineteen, were reported missing in Derry. Was there a Depression in 1958? I asked Chief Rademacher. No, he said. But people move around a lot, Hanlon. Kids in particular get itchy feet. Have a fight with the folks about coming in late after a date and boom, they're gone.

I showed Chief Rademacher the picture of Chad Lowe which had appeared in the Derry News in April 1958. You think this one ran away after a fight with his folks about coming in late, Chief Rademacher? He was three and a half when he dropped out of sight.

Rademacher fixed me with a sour glance and told me it sure had been nice talking with me, but if there was nothing else, he was busy. I left.

Haunted, haunting, haunt.

Often visited by ghosts or spirits, as in the pipes under the sink; to appear or recur often, as every twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven years; a feeding place for animals, as in the cases of George Denbrough, Adrian Mellon, Betty Ripsom, the Albrecht girl, the Johnson boy.

A feeding place for animals. Yes, that's the one that haunts me.

If anything else happens - anything at all - I'll make the calls. I'll have to. In the meantime I have my suppositions, my broken rest, and my memories - my damned memories. Oh, and one other thing - I have this notebook, don't I? The wall I wail to. And here I sit, my hand shaking so badly I can hardly write in it, here I sit in the deserted library after closing, listening to faint sounds in the dark stacks, watching the shadows thrown by the dim yellow globes to make sure they don't move . . . don't change.

Here I sit next to the telephone.

I put my free hand on it . . . let it slide down . . . touch the holes in the dial that could put me in touch with all of them, my old pals.

We went deep together.

We went into the black together.

Would we come out of the black if we went in a second time?

I don't think so.

Please God I don't have to call them.

Please God.

PART 2

JUNE OF 1958

'My surface is myself.

Under which

To witness, youth is

buried. Roots?

Everybody has roots.'

- William Carlos Williams,

Paterson

'Sometimes I wonder what I'm a-gonna do,

There ain't no cure for the summertime

blues.'

- Eddie Cochran

C H A P T E R 4

Ben Hanscom Takes a Fall

1

Around 11:45 PM., one of the stews serving first class on the Omaha-to-Chicago run - United Airlines's flight 41 - gets one hell of a shock. She thinks for a few moments that the man in 1-A has died.

When he boarded at Omaha she thought to herself: 'Oh boy, here comes trouble. He's just as drunk as a lord.' The stink of whiskey around his head reminded her fleetingly of the cloud of dust that always surrounds the dirty little boy in the Peanuts strip - Pig Pen, his name is. She was nervous about First Service, which is the booze service. She was sure he would ask for a drink - and probably a double. Then she would have to decide whether or not to serve him. Also, just to add to the fun, there have been thunderstorms all along the route tonight, and she is quite sure that at some point the man, a lanky guy dressed in jeans and chambray, would begin upchucking.

But when First Service came along, the tall man ordered nothing more than a glass of club soda, just as polite as you could want. His service light has not gone on, and the stew forgets all about him soon enough, because the flight is a busy one. The flight is, in fact, the kind you want to forget as soon as it's over, one of those during which you just might - if you had time - have a few questions about the possibility of your own survival.

United 41 slaloms between the ugly pockets of thunder and lightning like a good skier going downhill. The air is very rough. The passengers exclaim and make uneasy jokes about the lightning they can see flickering on and off in the thick pillars of cloud around the plane. 'Mommy, is God taking pictures of the angels?' a little boy asks, and his mother, who is looking rather green, laughs shakily. First Service turns out to be the only service on 41 that night. The seat-belt sign goes on twenty minutes into the flight and stays on. All the same the stewardesses stay in the aisles, answering the call-buttons which go off like strings of polite-society firecrackers.

'Ralph is busy tonight,' the head stew says to her as they pass in the aisle; the head stew is going back to tourist with a fresh supply of airsick bags. It is half-code, half-joke. Ralph is always busy on bumpy flights. The plane lurches, someone cries out softly, the stewardess turns a bit and puts out a hand to catch her balance, and looks directly into the staring, sightless eyes of the man in 1-A.

Oh my dear God he's dead, she thinks. The liquor before he got on . . . then the bumps . . . his heart . . . scared to death.

The lanky man's eyes are on hers, but they are not seeing her. They do not move. They are perfectly glazed. Surely they are the eyes of a dead man.

The stew turns away from that awful gaze, her own heart pumping away in her throat at a runaway rate, wondering what to do, how to proceed, and thanking God that at least the man has no seatmate to perhaps scream and start a panic. She decides she will have to notify first the head stew and then the male crew up front. Perhaps they can wrap a blanket around him and close his eyes. The pilot will keep the belt light on even if the air smooths out so no one can come forward to use the John, and when the other passengers deplane they'll think he's just asleep -

These thoughts go through her mind rapidly, and she turns back for a confirming look. The dead, sightless eyes fix upon hers . . . and then the corpse picks up his glass of club soda and sips from it.

Just then the plane staggers again, tilts, and the stew's little scream of surprise is lost in other, heartier, cries of fear. The man's eyes move then - not much, but enough so she understands that he is alive and seeing her. And she thinks: Why, I thought when he got on that he was in his mid-fifties, but he's nowhere near that old, in spite of the graying hair.

She goes to him, although she can hear the impatient chime of call-buttons behind her (Ralph is indeed busy tonight: after their perfectly safe landing at O'Hare thirty minutes from now, the stews will dispose of over seventy airsick bags).

'Everything okay, sir?' she asks, smiling. The smile feels false, unreal.

'Everything is fine and well,' the lanky man says. She glances at the first-class

stub tacked into the little slot on his seat-back and sees that his name is Hanscom.

'Fine and well. But it's a bit bumpy tonight, isn't it? You've got your work cut out

for you, I think. Don't bother with me. I'm - He offers her a ghastly smile, a smile

that makes her think of scarecrows flapping in dead November fields. 'I'm fine and

well.'

'You looked'

(dead)

'a little under the weather.'

'I was thinking of the old days,' he says. 'I only realized earlier tonight that there were such things as old days, at least as far as I myself am concerned.'

More call-buttons chime. 'Pardon me, stewardess?' someone calls nervously.

'Well, if you're quite sure you're all right - '

'I was thinking about a dam I built with some friends of mine,' Ben Hanscom says. 'The first friends I ever had, I guess. They were building the dam when I - ' He stops, looks startled, then laughs. It is an honest laugh, almost the carefree laugh of a boy, and it sounds very odd in this jouncing, bucking plane.' - when I dropped in on them. And that's almost literally what I did. Anyhow, they were making a helluva mess with that dam. I remember that.'

'Stewardess? '

'Excuse me, sir - I ought to get about my appointed rounds again.'

'Of course you should.'

She hurries away, glad to be rid of that gaze - that deadly, almost hypnotic gaze.

Ben Hanscom turns his head to the window and looks out. Lightning goes off inside huge thunderheads nine miles off the starboard wing. In the stutter-flashes of light, the clouds look like huge transparent brains filled with bad thoughts.

He feels in the pocket of his vest, but the silver dollars are gone. Out of his pocket and into Ricky Lee's. Suddenly he wishes he had saved at least one of them. It might have come in handy. Of course you could go down to any bank - at least when you weren't bumping around at twenty-seven thousand feet you could - and get a handful of silver dollars, but you couldn't do anything with the lousy copper sandwiches the government was trying to pass off as real coins these days. And for werewolves and vampires and all manner of things that squirm by starlight, it was silver you wanted; honest silver. You needed silver to stop a monster. You needed -

He closed his eyes. The air around him was full of chimes. The plane rocked and rolled and bumped and the air was full of chimes. Chimes?

No . . . bells.

It was bells, it was the bell, the bell of all bells, the one you waited for all year once the new wore off school again, and that always happened by the end of the first week. The bell, the one that signalled freedom again, the apotheosis of all school bells.

Ben Hanscom sits in his first-class seat, suspended amid the thunders at twenty-seven thousand feet, his face turned to the window, and he feels the wall of time grow suddenly thin; some terrible/wonderful peristalsis has begun to take place. He thinks; My God, I am being digested by my own past.

The lightning plays fitfully across his face, and although he does not know it, the day has just turned. May 28th, 1985, has become May 29th over the dark and stormy country that is western Illinois tonight; farmers backsore with plantings sleep like the dead below and dream their quicksilver dreams and who knows what may move in their barns and their cellars and their fields as the lightning walks and the thunder talks? No one knows these things; they know only that power is loose in the night, and the air is crazy with the big volts of the storm.

But it's bells at twenty-seven thousand feet as the plane breaks into the clear again, as its motion steadies again; it is bells; it is the bell as Ben Hanscom sleeps; and as he sleeps the wall between past and present disappears completely and he tumbles backward through years like a man falling down a deep well-Wells's Time Traveller, perhaps, falling with a broken iron rung in one hand, down and down into the land of the Morlocks, where machines pound on and on in the tunnels of the night. It's 1981, 1977, 1969; and suddenly he is here, here in June of 1958; bright summerlight is everywhere and behind sleeping eyelids Ben Hanscom's pupils contract at the command of his dreaming brain, which sees not the darkness which lies over western Illinois but the bright sunlight of a June day in Derry, Maine, twenty-seven yean ago.

Bells.

The bell.

School.

School is.

School is

2

out!

The sound of the bell went burring up and down the halls of Derry School, a big brick building which stood on Jackson Street, and at its sound the children in Ben Hanscom's fifth-grade classroom raised a spontaneous cheer - and Mrs Douglas, usually the strictest of teachers, made no effort to quell them. Perhaps she knew it would have been impossible.

'Children!' she called when the cheer died. 'May I have your attention for a final moment?'

Now a babble of excited chatter, mixed with a few groans, rose in the classroom. Mrs Douglas was holding their report cards in her hand.

'I sure hope I pass!' Sally Mueller said chirpily to Bev Marsh, who sat in the next row. Sally was bright, pretty, vivacious. Bev was also pretty, but there was nothing vivacious about her this afternoon, last day of school or not. She sat looking moodily down at her penny-loafers. There was a fading yellow bruise on one of her cheeks.

'I don't give a shit if I do or not,' Bev said.

Sally sniffed. Ladies don't use such language, the sniff said. Then she turned to Greta Bowie. It had probably only been the excitement of the bell signalling the end of another school-year that had caused Sally to slip and speak to Beverly anyhow, Ben thought. Sally Mueller and Greta Bowie both came from rich families with houses on West Broadway while Bev came to school from one of those shimmy apartment buildings on Lower Main Street. Lower Main Street and West Broadway were only a mile and a half apart, but even a kid like Ben knew that the real distance was like the distance between Earth and the planet Pluto. All you had to do was look at Beverly Marsh's cheap sweater, her too-big skirt that probably came from the Salvation Army thrift-box, and her scuffed penny-loafers to know just how far one was from the other. But Ben still liked Beverly better - a lot better. Sally and Greta had nice clothes, and he guessed they probably had their hair permed or waved or something every month or so, but he didn't think that changed the basic facts at all. They could get their hair permed every day and they'd still be a couple of conceited snots.

He thought Beverly was nicer . . . and much prettier, although he never in a million years would have dared say such a thing to her. But still, sometimes, in the heart of winter when the light outside seemed yellow-sleepy, like a cat curled up on a sofa, when Mrs Douglas was droning on about mathematics (how to carry down in long division or how to find the common denominator of two fractions so you could add them) or reading the questions from Shining Bridges or talking about tin deposits in Paraguay, on those days when it seemed that school would never end and it didn't matter if it didn't because all the world outside was slush . . . on those days Ben would sometimes look sideways at Beverly, stealing her face, and his heart would both hurt desperately and somehow grow brighter at the same time. He supposed he had a crush on her, or was in love with her, and that was why it was always Beverly he thought of when the Penguins came on the radio singing 'Earth Angel' - 'my darling dear / love you all the time . . . ' Yeah, it was stupid, all right, sloppy as a used Kleenex, but it was all right, too, because he would never tell. He thought that fat boys were probably only allowed to love pretty girls inside. If he told anyone how he felt (not that he had anyone to tell), that person would probably laugh until he had a heart-attack. And if he ever told Beverly, she would either laugh herself (bad), or make retching noises of disgust (worse).

'Now please come up as soon as I call your name. Paul Andersen . . . Carla Bordeaux . . . Greta Bowie . . . Calvin Clark . . . Cissy Clark . . . '

As she called their names, Mrs Douglas's fifth-grade class came forward one by one (except for the Clark twins, who came together as always, hand in hand, indistinguishable except for the length of their white-blonde hair and the fact that she wore a dress while he wore jeans), took their buff-colored report cards with the American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance on the front and the Lord's Prayer on the back, walked sedately out of the classroom . . . and then pounded down the hall to where the big front doors had been chocked open. And then they simply ran out into summer and were gone: some on bikes, some skipping, some riding invisible horses and slapping their hands against the sides of their thighs to manufacture hoofbeats, some with arms slung about each other, singing 'Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school' to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.'

'Marcia Fadden . . . Frank Frick . . . Ben Hanscom . . . '

He rose, stealing his last glance at Beverly Marsh for the summer (or so he thought then), and went forward to Mrs Douglas's desk, an eleven-year-old kid with a can roughly the size of New Mexico - said can packed into a pair of horrid new blue-jeans that shone little darts of light from the copper rivets and went whssht-whssht-whssht as his big thighs brushed together. His hips swung girlishly. His stomach slid from side to side. He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt although the day was warm. He almost always wore baggy sweatshirts because he was deeply ashamed of his chest and had been since the first day of school after the Christmas vacation, when he had worn one of the new Ivy League shuts his mother had given him, and Belch Huggins, who was a sixthgrader, had cawed: 'Hey, you guys! Lookit what Santy Claus brought Ben Hanscom for Christmas! A big set of titties!' Belch had nearly collapsed with the deliciousness of his wit. Others had laughed as well - a few of them girls. If a hole leading into the underworld had opened before him at that very moment, Ben would have dropped into it without a sound . . . or perhaps with the faintest murmur of gratitude.

Since that day he wore sweatshirts. He had four of them - the baggy brown, the baggy green, and two baggy blues. It was one of the few things on which he had managed to stand up to his mother, one of the few lines he had ever, in the course of his mostly complacent childhood, felt compelled to draw in the dust. If he had seen Beverly Marsh giggling with the others that day, he supposed he would have died.

'It's been a pleasure having you this year, Benjamin,' Mrs Douglas said as

she handed him his report card.

'Thank you, Mrs Douglas.'

A mocking falsetto wavered from somewhere at the back of the room: 'Sank-ooo, Missus Dougwiss.'

It was Henry Bowers, of course. Henry was in Ben's fifth-grade class instead of in the sixth grade with his friends Belch Huggins and Victor Criss because he had been kept back the year before. Ben had an idea that Bowers was going to stay back again. His name had not been called when Mrs Douglas handed out the rank-cards, and that meant trouble. Ben was uneasy about this, because if Henry did stay back again, Ben himself would be partly responsible . . . and Henry knew it.

During the year's final tests the week before, Mrs Douglas had reseated them at random by drawing their names from a hat on her desk. Ben had ended up sitting next to Henry Bowers in the last row. As always, Ben curled his arm around his paper and then bent close to it, feeling the somehow comforting press of his gut against his desk, licking his Be-Bop pencil occasionally for inspiration.

About halfway through Tuesday's examination, which happened to be math, a whisper drifted across the aisle to Ben. It was as low and uncarrying and expert as the whisper of a veteran con passing a message in the prison exercise yard: 'Let me copy.'

Ben had looked to his left and directly into the black and furious eyes of Henry Bowers. Henry was a big boy even for twelve. His arms and legs were thick with farm-muscle. His father, who was reputed to be crazy, had a little spread out at the end of Kansas Street, near the Newport town line, and Henry put in at least thirty hours a week hoeing, weeding, planting, digging rocks, cutting wood, and reaping, if there was anything to reap.

Henry's hair was cut in an angry-looking flattop short enough for the white of his scalp to show through. He Butch-Waxed the front with a tube he always carried in the hip pocket of his jeans, and as a result the hair just above his forehead looked like the teeth of an oncoming power-mower. An odor of sweat and Juicy Fruit gum always hung about him. He wore a pink motorcycle jacket with an eagle on the back to school. Once a fourthgrader was unwise enough to laugh at that jacket. Henry had turned on the little squirt, Umber as a weasel and quick as an adder, and double-pumped the squirt with one work-grimed fist. The squirt lost three front teeth. Henry got a two-week vacation from school. Ben had hoped, with the unfocused yet burning hope of the downtrodden and terrorized, that Henry would be expelled instead of suspended. No such luck. Bad pennies always turned up. His suspension over, Henry had swaggered back into the schoolyard, balefully resplendent in his pink motorcycle jacket, hair Butch-Waxed so heavily that it seemed to scream up from his skull. Both eyes bore the puffed, colorful traces of the beating his crazy father had administered for 'fighting in the playyard.' The traces of the beating eventually faded; for the kids who had to somehow coexist with Henry at Derry, the lesson did not. To the best of Ben's knowledge, no one had said anything about Henry's pink motorcycle jacket with the eagle on the back since then.

When he whispered grimly at Ben to let him copy, three thoughts had gone skyrocketing through Ben's mind - which was every bit as lean and quick as his body was obese - in a space of seconds. The first was that if Mrs Douglas caught Henry cheating answers off his paper, both of them would get zeros on their tests. The second was that if he didn't let Henry copy, Henry would almost surely catch him after school and administer the fabled double-pump to him, probably with Huggins holding one of his arms and Criss holding the other.

These were the thoughts of a child, and there was nothing surprising about that, because he was a child. The third and last thought, however, was more sophisticated - almost adult.

He might get me, all right. But maybe I can keep out of his way for the last week of school. I'm pretty sure I can, if I really try. And he'll forget over the summer, I think. Yeah. He's pretty stupid. If he flunks this test, maybe he'll stay back again. And if he stays back I'll get ahead of him. I won't be in the same room with him anymore . . . . I'll get to junior high before he does. I . . . I might be free.

'Let me copy,' Henry whispered again. His black eyes were now blazing, demanding.

Ben shook his head and curled his arm more tightly around his paper.

I'll get you, fatboy,' Henry whispered, a little louder now. His paper was so far an utter blank save for his name. He was desperate. If he flunked his exams and stayed back again, his father would beat his brains out. 'You let me copy or I'll get you bad.'

Ben shook his head again, his jowls quivering. He was scared, but he was also determined. He realized that for the first time in his life he had consciously committed himself to a course of action, and that also frightened him, although he didn't exactly know why - it would be long years before he would realize it was the cold-bloodedness of his calculations, the careful and pragmatic counting of the cost, with its intimations of onrushing adulthood, that had scared him even more than Henry had scared him. Henry he might be able to dodge. Adulthood, where he would probably think in such a way almost all the time, would get him in the end.

'Is someone talking back there?' Mrs Douglas had said then, very clearly. 'If so, I want it to stop right now.'

Silence had prevailed for the next ten minutes; young heads remained studiously bent over examination sheets which smelled of fragrant purple mimeograph ink, and then Henry's whisper had floated across the aisle again, thin, just audible, chilling in the calm assurance of its promise: 'You're dead, fatboy.'

3

Ben took his rank-card and escaped, grateful to whatever gods there are for eleven-year-old fatboys that Henry Bowers had not, by virtue of alphabetical order, been allowed to escape the classroom first so he could lay for Ben outside.

He did not run down the corridor like the other children. He could run, and quite fast for a kid his size, but he was acutely aware of how funny he looked when he did. He walked fast, though, and emerged from the cool book-smelling hall and into the bright June sunshine. He stood with his face turned up into that sunshine for a moment, grateful for its warmth and his freedom. September was a million years from today. The calendar might say something different, but what the calendar said was a lie. The summer would be much longer than the sum of its days, and it belonged to him. He felt as tall as the Standpipe and as wide as the whole town.

Someone bumped him - bumped him hard. Pleasant thoughts of the summer lying before him were driven from Ben's mind as he tottered wildly for balance on the edge of the stone steps. He grabbed the iron railing just in time to save himself from a nasty tumble.

'Get out of my way, you tub of guts.' It was Victor Criss, his hair combed back in an Elvis pompadour and gleaming with Brylcreem. He went down the steps and along the walk to the front gate, hands in the pockets of his jeans, shirt-collar turned up hood-style, cleats on his engineer boots dragging and tapping.

Ben, his heart still beating rapidly from his fright, saw that Belch Huggins was standing across the street, having a butt. He raised a hand to Victor and passed him the cigarette when Victor joined him. Victor took a drag, handed it back to Belch, then pointed to where Ben stood, now halfway down the steps. He said something and they both broke up. Ben's face flamed dully. They always got you. It was like fate or something.

'You like this place so well you're gonna stand here all day?' a voice said at his elbow.

Ben turned, and his face became hotter still. It was Beverly Marsh, her auburn hair a dazzling cloud around her head and upon her shoulders, her eyes a lovely gray-green. Her sweater, pushed to her elbows, was frayed around the neck and almost as baggy as Ben's sweatshirt. Too baggy, certainly, to tell if she was getting any chestworks yet, but Ben didn't care; when love comes before puberty, it can come in waves so clear and so powerful that no one can stand against its simple imperative, and Ben made no effort to do so now. He simply gave in. He felt both foolish and exalted, as miserably embarrassed as he had ever been in his life . . . and yet inarguably blessed. These hopeless emotions mixed in a heady brew that left him feeling both sick and joyful.

'No,' he croaked. 'Guess not.' A large grin spread across his face. He knew how idiotic it must look, but he could not seem to pull it back.

'Well, good. Cause school's out, you know. Thank God.'

'Have . . . ' Another croak. He had to clear his throat, and his blush deepened. 'Have a nice summer, Beverly.'

'You too, Ben. See you next year.'

She went quickly down the steps and Ben saw everything with his lover's eye: the bright tartan of her skirt, the bounce of her red hair against the back of her sweater, her milky complexion, a small healing cut across the back of one calf, and (for some reason this last caused another wave of feeling to sweep him so powerfully he had to grope for the railing again; the feeling was huge, inarticulate, mercifully brief; perhaps a sexual pre-signal, meaningless to his body, where the endocrine glands still slept almost without dreaming, yet as bright as summer heat-lightning) a bright golden ankle-bracelet she wore just above her right loafer, winking back the sun in brilliant little flashes.

A sound - some sort of sound - escaped him. He went down the steps like a feeble old man and stood at the bottom, watching until she turned left and disappeared beyond the high hedge that separated the schoolyard from the sidewalk.

4

He only stood there for a moment, and then, while the kids were still streaming past in yelling, running groups, he remembered Henry Bowers and hurried around the building. He crossed the little-kids' playground, running his fingers across the swing-chains to make them jingle and stepping over the teeter-totter boards. He went out the much smaller gate which gave on Charter Street and headed off to the left, never looking back at the stone pile where he had spent most of his weekdays over the last nine months. He stuffed his rank-card in his back pocket and started to whistle. He was wearing a pair of Keds, but so far as he could tell, their soles never touched the sidewalk for eight blocks or so.

School had let out just past noon; his mother would not be home until at least six, because on Fridays she went right to the Shop 'n Save after work. The rest of the day was his.

He went down to McCarron Park for awhile and sat under a tree, not doing anything but occasionally whispering 'I love Beverly Marsh' under his breath, feeling more light-headed and romantic each time he said it. At one point, as a bunch of boys drifted into the park and began choosing up sides for a scratch baseball game, he whispered the words 'Beverly Hanscom' twice, and then had to put his face into the grass until it cooled his burning cheeks.

Shortly after that he got up and headed across the park toward Costello Avenue. A walk of five more blocks would take him to the Public Library, which, he supposed, had been his destination all along. He was almost out of the park when a sixthgrader named Peter Gordon saw him and yelled: 'Hey, tits! Wanna play? We need somebody to be right-field!' There was an explosion of laughter. Ben escaped it as fast as he could, hunching his neck down into his collar like a turtle drawing into its shell.

Still, he considered himself lucky, all in all; on another day the boys might have chased him, maybe just to rank him out, maybe to roll him in the dirt and see if he would cry. Today they were too absorbed in getting the game going - whether or not you could use fingers or get topsies when you threw the bat for first picks, which team would get their guaranteed last ups, all the rest. Ben happily left them to the arcana preceding the first ballgame of the summer and went on his way.

Three blocks down Costello he spied something interesting, perhaps even profitable, under someone's front hedge. Glass gleamed through the ripped side of an old paper bag. Ben hooked the bag out onto the sidewalk with his foot. It seemed his luck really was in. There were four beer bottles and four big soda bottles inside. The biggies were worth a nickel each, the Rheingolds two pennies. Twenty-eight cents under someone's hedge, just waiting for some kid to come along and scoff it up. Some lucky kid.

'That's me,' Ben said happily, having no idea what the rest of the day had in store. He got moving again, holding the bag by the bottom so it wouldn't break open. The Costello Avenue Market was a block farther down the street, and Ben turned in. He swapped the bottles for cash and most of the cash for candy.

He stood at the penny-candy window, pointing, delighted as always by the ratcheting sound the sliding door made when the storekeeper slid it along its track, which was lined with ball-bearings. He got five red licorice whips and five black, ten rootbeer barrels (two for a penny), a nickel strip of buttons (five to a row, five rows on a nickel strip, and you ate them right off the paper), a packet of Likem Ade, and a package of Pez for his Pez-Gun at home.

Ben walked out with a small brown paper sack of candy in his hand and four cents in the right front pocket of his new jeans. He looked at the brown bag with its load of sweetness and a thought suddenly tried to surface

(you keep eating this way Beverly Marsh is never going to look at you)

but it was an unpleasant thought and so he pushed it away. It went easily enough; this was a thought used to being banished.

If someone had asked him, 'Ben, are you lonely?,' he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams; he had his Revell models; he had a gigantic set of Lincoln Logs and built all sorts of stuff with them. His mother had exclaimed more than once that Ben's Lincoln Logs houses looked better than some real ones that came from blueprints. He had a pretty good Erector Set, too. He was hoping for the Super Set when his birthday came around in October. With that one you could build a clock that really told time and a car with real gears in it. Lonely? he might have asked in return, honestly foozled. Huh? What?

A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it. It simply was, like his double- jointed thumb or the funny little jag inside one of his front teeth, the little jag his tongue began running over whenever he was nervous.

Beverly was a sweet dream; the candy was a sweet reality. The candy was his friend. So he told the alien thought to take a hike, and it went quietly, without causing any fuss whatsoever. And between the Costello Avenue Market and the library, he gobbled all of the candy in the sack. He honestly meant to save the Pez for watching TV that night - he liked to load them into the little plastic Pez-Gun's handgrip one by one, liked to hear the accepting click of the small spring inside, and liked most of all to shoot them into his mouth one by one, like a kid committing suicide by sugar. Whirlybirds was on tonight, with Kenneth Tobey as the fearless helicopter pilot, and Dragnet, where the cases were true but the names had been changed to protect the innocent, and his favorite cop show of all time, Highway Patrol, which starred Broderick Craw-ford as Highway Patrolman Dan Matthews. Broderick Crawford was Ben's personal hero. Broderick Crawford was fast, Broderick Crawford was mean, Broderick Crawford took absolutely no shit from nobody . . . and best of all, Broderick Crawford was fat.

He arrived at the corner of Costello and Kansas Street, where he crossed to the Public Library. It was really two buildings - the old stone structure in front, built with lumber-baron money in 1890, and the new low sandstone building behind, which housed the Children's Library. The adult library in front and the Children's Library behind were connected by a glass corridor.

This close to downtown, Kansas Street was one-way, so Ben only looked in one direction - right - before crossing. If he had looked left, he would have gotten a nasty shock. Standing in the shade of a big old oak tree on the lawn of the Derry Community House a block down were Belch Huggins, Victor Criss, and Henry Bowers.

5

'Let's get him, Hank.' Victor was almost panting.

Henry watched the fat little prick scutter across the street, his belly bouncing, the cowlick at the back of his head springing back and forth like a goddam Slinky, his ass wiggling like a girl's inside his new bluejeans. He estimated the distance between the three of them here on the Community House lawn and Hanscom, and between Hanscom and the safety of the library. He thought they could probably get him before he made it inside, but Hanscom might start screaming. He wouldn't put it past the little pansy. If he did, an adult might interfere, and Henry wanted no interference. The Douglas bitch had told Henry he had flunked both English and math. She was passing him, she said, but he would have to take four weeks of summer make-up. Henry would rather have stayed back. If he'd stayed back, his father would have beaten him up once. With Henry at school four hours a day for four weeks of the farm's busiest season, his father was apt to beat him up half a dozen times, maybe even more. He was reconciled to this grim future only because he intended to pass everything on to that fat little babyfag this afternoon.

With interest.

'Yeah, let's go,' Belch said.

'We'll wait for him to come out.'

They watched Ben open one of the big double doors and go inside, and then they sat down and smoked cigarettes and told travelling-salesman jokes and waited for him to come back out.

Eventually, Henry knew, he would. And when he did, Henry was going to make him sorry he was ever born.

6

Ben loved the library.

He loved the way it was always cool, even on the hottest day of a long hot summer; he loved its murmuring quiet, broken only by occasional whispers, the faint thud of a librarian stamping books and cards, or the riffle of pages being turned in the Periodicals Room, where the old men hung out, reading newspapers which had been threaded into long sticks. He loved the quality of the light, which slanted through the high narrow windows in the afternoons or glowed in lazy pools thrown by the chain-hung globes on winter evenings while the wind whined outside. He liked the smell of the books - a spicy smell, faintly fabulous. He would sometimes walk through the adult stacks, looking at the thousands of volumes and imagining a world of lives inside each one, the way he sometimes walked along his street in the burning smoke-hazed twilight of a late-October afternoon, the sun only a bitter orange line on the horizon, imagining the lives going on behind all the windows - people laughing or arguing or arranging flowers or feeding kids or pets or their own faces while they watched the boobtube. He liked the way the glass corridor connecting the old building with the Children's Library was always hot, even in the winter, unless there had been a couple of cloudy days; Mrs Starrett, the head children's librarian, told him that was caused by something called the greenhouse effect. Ben had been delighted with the idea. Years later he would build the hotly debated BBC communications center in London, and the arguments might rage for a thousand years and still no one would know (except for Ben himself) that the communications center was nothing but the glass corridor of the Derry Public Library stood on end.

He liked the Children's Library as well, although it had none of the shadowy charm he felt in the old library, with its globes and curving iron staircases too narrow for two people to pass upon them - one always had to back up. The Children's Library was bright and sunny, a little noisier in spite of the LET'S BE QUIET, SHALL WE? signs that were posted around. Most of the noise usually came from Pooh's Corner, where the little kids went to look at picturebooks. When Ben came in today, story hour had just begun there. Miss Davies, the pretty young librarian, was reading 'The Three Billy Goats Gruff.'

'Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge?'

Miss Davies spoke in the low, growling tones of the troll in the story. Some of the little ones covered their mouths and giggled, but most only watched her solemnly, accepting the voice of the troll as they accepted the voices of their dreams, and their grave eyes reflected the eternal fascination of the fairytale: would the monster be bested . . . or would it feed?

Bright posters were tacked everywhere. Here was a good cartoon kid who had brushed his teeth until his mouth foamed like the muzzle of a mad dog; here was a bad cartoon kid who was smoking cigarettes (WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE SICK A LOT, JUST LIKE MY DAD, it said underneath); here was a wonderful photograph of a billion tiny pinpoints of light flaring in darkness. The motto beneath said:

ONE IDEA LIGHTS A THOUSAND CANDLES.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

There were invitations to JOIN THE SCOUTING EXPERIENCE. A poster advancing the idea that THE GIRLS' CLUBS OF TODAY BUILD THE WOMEN OF TOMORROW. There were softball sign-up sheets and Community House Children's Theater sign-up sheets. And, of course, one inviting kids to JOIN THE SUMMER READING PROGRAM. Ben was a big fan of the summer reading program. You got a map of the United States when you signed up. Then, for every book you read and made a report on, you got a state sticker to lick and put on your map. The sticker came complete with info like the state bird, the state flower, the year admitted to the Union, and what presidents, if any, had ever come from that state. When you got all forty-eight stuck on your map, you got a free book. Helluva good deal. Ben planned to do just as the poster suggested: 'Waste no time, sign up today.'

Conspicuous amid this bright and amiable riot of color was a simple stark poster taped to the checkout desk - no cartoons or fancy photographs here, just black print on white poster-

paper reading:

REMEMBER THE CURFEW.

7 P.M.

DERRY POLICE DEPARTMENT

Just looking at it gave Ben a chill. In the excitement of getting his rank-card, worrying about Henry Bowers, talking with Beverly, and starting summer vacation, he had forgotten all about the curfew, and the murders.

People argued about how many there had been, but everyone agreed that there had been at least four since last winter - five if you counted George Denbrough (many held the opinion that the little Denbrough boy's death must have been some kind of bizarre freak accident). The first everyone was sure of was Betty Ripsom, who had been found the day after Christmas in the area of turnpike construction on Outer Jackson Street. The girl, who was thirteen, had been found mutilated and frozen into the muddy earth. This had not been in the paper, nor was it a thing any adult had spoken of to Ben. It was just something he had picked up around the corners of overheard conversations.

About three and a half months later, not long after the trout-fishing season had begun, a fisherman working the bank of a stream twenty miles east of Derry had hooked onto something he believed at first to be a stick. It had turned out to be the hand, wrist, and first four inches of a girl's forearm. His hook had snagged this awful trophy by the web of flesh between the thumb and first finger.

The State Police had found the rest of Cheryl Lamonica seventy yards farther downstream, caught in a tree that had fallen across the stream the previous winter. It was only luck that the body had not been washed into the Penobscot and then out to sea in the spring runoff.

The Lamonica girl had been sixteen. She was from Derry but did not attend school; three years before she had given birth to a daughter, Andrea. She and her daughter lived at home with Cheryl's parents. 'Cheryl was a little wild sometimes but she was a good girl at heart,' her sobbing father had told police. 'Andi keeps asking "Where's my mommy?" and I don't know what to tell her.'

The girl had been reported missing five weeks before the body was found. The police investigation of Cheryl Lamonica's death began with a logical enough assumption: that she had been murdered by one of her boyfriends. She had lots of boyfriends. Many were from the air base up Bangor way. 'They were nice boys, most of them,' Cheryl's mother said. One of the 'nice boys' had been a forty-year-old Air Force colonel with a wife and three children in New Mexico. Another was currently serving time in Shawshank for armed robbery.

A boyfriend, the police thought. Or just possibly a stranger. A sexfiend.

If it was a sexfiend, he was apparently a fiend for boys as well. In late April a junior-high teacher on a nature walk with his eighth-grade class had spied a pair of red sneakers and a pair of blue corduroy rompers protruding from the mouth of a culvert on Merit Street. That end of Merit had been blocked off with sawhorses. The asphalt had been bulldozed up the previous fall. The turnpike extension would cross there as well on its way north to Bangor.

The body had been that of three-year-old Matthew Clements, reported missing by his parents only the day before (his picture had been on the front page of the Derry News, a dark-haired little kid grinning brashly into the camera, a Red Sox cap perched on his head). The Clements family lived on Kansas Street, all the way on the other side of town. His mother, so stunned by her grief that she seemed to exist in a glass ball of utter calm, told police that Matty had been riding his tricycle up and down the sidewalk beside the house, which stood on the corner of Kansas Street and Kossuth Lane. She went to put her washing in the drier, and when she next looked out the window to check on Matty, he was gone. There had only been his overturned trike on the grass between the sidewalk and the street. One of the back wheels was still spinning lazily. As she looked, it came to a stop.

That was enough for Chief Borton. He proposed the seven o'clock curfew at a special session of the City Council the following evening; it was adopted unanimously and went into effect the next day. Small children were to be watched by a 'qualified adult' at all times, according to the story which reported the curfew in the News. At Ben's school there had been a special assembly a month ago. The Chief went on stage, hooked his thumbs into his gunbelt, and assured the children they had nothing at all to worry about as long as they followed a few simple rules: don't talk to strangers, don't accept rides with people unless you know them well, always remember that The Policeman Is Your Friend . . . and obey the curfew.

Two weeks ago a boy Ben knew only vaguely (he was in the other fifth-grade classroom at Derry Elementary) had looked into one of the stormdrains out by Neibolt Street and had seen what looked like a lot of hair floating around in there. This boy, whose name was either Frankie or Freddy Ross (or maybe Roth), had been out prospecting for goodies with a gadget of his own invention, which he called THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK. When he talked about it you could tell he thought about it like that, in capital letters (and maybe neon, as well). THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK was a birch branch with a big wad of bubble-gum stuck on the tip. In his spare time Freddy (or Frankie) walked around Derry with it, peering into sewers and drains. Sometimes he saw money - pennies mostly, but sometimes a dime or even a quarter (he referred to these latter, for some reason known only to him, as 'quay-monsters'). Once the money was spotted, Frankie-or-Freddy and THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK would swing into action. One downward poke through the grating and the coin was as good as in his pocket.

Ben had heard rumors of Frankie-or-Freddy and his gum stick long before the kid had vaulted into the limelight by discovering the body of Veronica Grogan. 'He's really gross,' a kid named Richie Tozier had confided to Ben one day during activity period. Tozier was a scrawny kid who wore glasses. Ben thought that without them Tozier probably saw every bit as well as Mr Magoo; his magnified eyes swam behind the thick lenses with an expression of perpetual surprise. He also had huge front teeth that had earned him the nickname Bucky Beaver. He was in the same fifth-grade class as Freddy-or-Frankie. 'Pokes that gum stick of his down sewerdrains all day long and then chews the gum from the end of it at night.'

'Oh gosh, that's bad!' Ben had exclaimed.

'Dat's wight, wabbit,' Tozier said, and walked away.

Frankie-or-Freddy had worked THE FABULOUS GUM-STICK back and forth through the grate of the stormdrain, believing he'd found a wig. He thought maybe he could dry it out and give it to his mother for her birthday, or something. After a few minutes of poking and prodding, just as he was about to give up, a face had floated out of the murky water in the plugged drain, a face with dead leaves plastered to its white cheeks and dirt in its staring eyes.

Freddy-or-Frankie ran home screaming.

Veronica Grogan had been in the fourth grade at the Neibolt Street Church School, which was run by people Ben's mother called 'the Christers.' She was buried on what would have been her tenth birthday.

After this most recent horror, Arlene Hanscom had taken Ben into the living room one evening and sat beside him on the couch. She picked up his hands and looked intently into his face. Ben looked back, feeling a little uneasy.

'Ben,' she said presently, 'are you a fool?'

'No, Mamma,' Ben said, feeling more uneasy than ever. He hadn't the

slightest idea what this was about. He could not remember ever seeing his

mamma look so grave.

'No,' she echoed. 'I don't believe you are.'

She fell silent for a long time then, not looking at Ben but pensively out the window. Ben wondered briefly if she had forgotten all about him. She was a young woman still - only thirty-two - but raising a boy by herself had put a mark on her. She worked forty hours a week in the spool-and-bale room at Stark's Mills in Newport, and after workdays when the dust and lint had been particularly bad, she sometimes coughed so long and hard that Ben would become frightened. On those nights he would lie awake for a long time, looking through the window beside his bed into the darkness, wondering what would become of him if she died. He would be an orphan then, he supposed. He might become a State Kid (he thought that meant you had to go live with farmers who made you work from sunup to sunset), or he might be sent to the Bangor Orphan Asylum. He tried to tell himself it was foolish to worry about such things, but the telling did absolutely no good. Nor was it just himself he was worried about; he worried for her as well. She was a hard woman, his mamma, and she insisted on having her own way about most things, but she was a good mamma. He loved her very much.

'You know about these murders,' she said, looking back at last.

He nodded.

'At first people thought they were . . . ' She hesitated over the next word, never spoken in her son's presence before, but the circumstances were unusual and she forced herself. ' . . . sex crimes. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't. Maybe they're over and maybe they're not. No one can be sure of anything anymore, except that some crazy man who preys on little children is out there. Do you understand me, Ben?'

He nodded.

'And you know what I mean when I say they may have been sex crimes?'

He didn't - at least not exactly - but he nodded again. If his mother felt she had to talk to him about the birds and bees as well as this other business, he thought he would die of embarrassment.

'I worry about you, Ben. I worry that I'm not doing right by you.'

Ben squirmed and said nothing.

'You're on your own a lot. Too much, I guess. You - '

'Mamma - '

'Hush while I'm talking to you,' she said, and Ben hushed. 'You have to be careful, Benny. Summer's coming and I don't want to spoil your vacation, but you have to be careful. I want you in by suppertime every day. What time do we eat supper?'

'Six o'clock.'

'Right with Eversharp! So hear what I'm saying: if I set the table and pour your milk and see that there's no Ben washing his hands at the sink, I'm going to go right away to the telephone and call the police and report you missing. Do you understand that?'

'Yes, Mamma.'

'And you believe I mean exactly what I say?'

'Yes.'

'It would probably turn out that I did it for nothing, if I ever had to do it at all. I'm not entirely ignorant about the ways of boys. I know they get wrapped up in their own games and projects during summer vacation -lining bees back to their hives or playing ball or kick-the-can or whatever. I have a pretty good idea what you and your friends are up to, you see.'

Ben nodded soberly, thinking that if she didn't know he had no friends, she probably didn't know anywhere near as much about his boyhood as she thought she did. But he would never have dreamed of saying such a thing to her, not in ten thousand years of dreaming.

She took something from the pocket of her housedress and handed it to him It was a small plastic box. Ben opened it. When he saw what was inside, his mouth dropped open. 'Wow!' he said, his admiration totally unaffected. 'Thanks!'

It was a Timex watch with small silver numbers and an imitation-leather band. She had set it and wound it; he could hear it ticking.

'Jeez, it's the coolest!' He gave her an enthusiastic hug and a loud kiss on the cheek.

She smiled, pleased that he was pleased, and nodded. Then she grew grave again. 'Put it on, keep it on, wear it, wind it, mind it, don't lose it.'

'Okay.'

'Now that you have a watch you have no reason to be late home. Remember what I said: if you're not on time, the police will be looking for you on my behalf. At least until they catch the bastard who is killing children around here, don't you dare be a single minute late, or I'll be on that telephone.'

'Yes, Mamma.'

'One other thing. I don't want you going around alone. You know enough not to accept candy or rides from strangers - we both agree that you're no fool - and you're big for your age, but a grown man, particularly a crazy one, can overpower a child if he really wants to. When you go to the park or the library, go with one of your friends.'

'I will, Mamma.'

She looked out the window again and uttered a sigh that was full of trouble. 'Things have come to a pretty pass when a thing like this can go on. There's something ugly about this town, anyway. I've always thought so.' She looked back at him, brows drawn down. 'You're such a wanderer, Ben. You must know almost everyplace in Derry, don't you? The town part of it, at least.'

Ben didn't think he knew anywhere near all the places, but he did know a lot of them. And he was so thrilled by the unexpected gift of the Timex that he would have agreed with his mother that night if she had suggested John Wayne should play Adolf Hitler in a musical comedy about World War II. He nodded.

'You've never seen anything, have you?' she asked. 'Anything or anyone . . . well, suspicious? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything that scared you?'

And in his pleasure over the watch, his feeling of love for her, his small-boy gladness at her concern (which was at the same time a little frightening in its unhidden unabashed fierceness), he almost told her about the thing that had happened last January.

He opened his mouth and then something - some powerful intuition - closed it again.

What was that something, exactly? Intuition. No more than that . . . and no less. Even children may intuit love's more complex responsibilities from time to time, and to sense that in some cases it may be kinder to remain quiet. That was part of the reason Ben closed his mouth. But there was something else as well, something not so noble. She could be hard, his mamma. She could be a boss. She never called nun 'fat,' she called him 'big' (sometimes amplified to 'big for his age'), and when there were leftovers from supper she would often bring them to him while he was watching TV or doing his homework, and he would eat them, although some dim part of him hated himself for doing so (but never his mamma for putting the food before him - Ben Hanscom would not have dared to hate his mamma; God would surely strike him dead for feeling such a brutish, ungrateful emotion even for a second). And perhaps some even dimmer part of him - the far-off Tibet of Ben's deeper thoughts - suspected her motives in this constant feeding. Was it just love? Could it be anything else? Surely not. But . . . he wondered. More to the point, she didn't know he had no friends. That lack of knowledge made nun distrust her, made him unsure of what her reaction would be to his story of the thing which had happened to him in January. If anything had happened. Coming in at six and staying in was not so bad, maybe. He could read, watch TV,

(eat)

build stuff with his logs and Erector Set. But having to stay in all day as well would be very bad . . . and if he told her what he had seen - or thought he had seen - in January, she might make him do just that.

So, for a variety of reasons, Ben withheld the story.

'No, Mamma,' he said. 'Just Mr McKibbon rooting around in other people's garbage.'

That made her laugh - she didn't like Mr McKibbon, who was a Republican as well as a 'Christer' - and her laugh closed the subject. That night Ben had lain awake late, but no thoughts of being cast adrift and parentless in a hard world troubled him. He felt loved and safe as he lay in his bed looking at the moonlight which came in through the window and spilled across the bed onto the floor. He alternately put his watch to his ear so he could listen to it tick and held it close to his eyes so he could admire its ghostly radium dial.

He had finally fallen asleep and dreamed he was playing baseball with the other boys in the vacant lot behind Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot. He had just hit a bases-clearing home run, swinging from his heels and getting every inch of that little honey, and his cheering teammates met him in a mob at home plate. They pummelled him and clapped him on the back. They hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him toward the place where their equipment was scattered. In the dream he was almost bursting with pride and happiness . . . and then he had looked out toward center field, where a chainlink fence marked the boundary between the cindery lot and the weedy ground beyond that sloped into the Barrens. A figure was standing in those tangled weeds and low bushes, almost out of sight. It held a clutch of balloons - red, yellow, blue, green - in one white-gloved hand. It beckoned with the other. He couldn't see the figure's face, but he could see the baggy suit with the big orange pompom-buttons down the front and the floppy yellow bow-tie.

It was a clown.

Dot's wight, wabbit, a phantom voice agreed.

When Ben awoke the next morning he had forgotten the dream but his pillow was damp to the touch . . . as if he had wept in the night.

7

He went up to the main desk in the Children's Library, shaking the train of thought the curfew sign had begun as easily as a dog shakes water after a swim.

'Hullo, Benny,' Mrs Starrett said. Like Mrs Douglas at school, she genuinely liked Ben. Grownups, especially those who sometimes needed to discipline children as part of their jobs, generally liked him, because he was polite, soft-spoken, thoughtful, sometimes even funny in a very quiet way. These were all the same reasons most kids thought he was a puke. 'You tired of summer vacation yet?'

Ben smiled. This was a standard witticism with Mrs Starrett. 'Not yet,' he said, 'since summer vacation's only been going on - he looked at his watch - one hour and seventeen minutes. Give me another hour.'

Mrs Starrett laughed, covering her mouth so it wouldn't be too loud. She asked Ben if he wanted to sign up for the summer reading program, and Ben said he did. She gave him a map of the United States and Ben thanked her very much.

He wandered off into the stacks, pulling a book here and there, looking at it, putting it back. Choosing books was serious business. You had to be careful. If you were a grownup you could have as many as you wanted, but kids could only take out three at a time. If you picked a dud, you were stuck with it.

He finally picked out his three - Bulldozer, The Black Stallion, and one that was sort of a shot in the dark: a book called Hot Rod, by a man named Henry Gregor Felsen.

'You may not like this one,' Mrs Starrett remarked, stamping the book. 'It's extremely bloody. I urge it on the teenagers, especially the ones who have just got their driving licenses, because it gives them something to think about. I imagine it slows some of them down for a whole week.'

'Well, I'll give it a whirl,' Ben said, and took his books over to one of the tables away from Pooh's Corner, where Big Billy Goat Gruff was in the process of giving a double dose of dickens to the troll under the bridge.

He worked on Hot Rod for awhile, and it was not too shabby. Not too shabby at all. It was about a kid who was a really great driver, but there was this party-pooper cop who was always trying to slow him down. Ben found out there were no speed limits in Iowa, where the book was set. That was sort of cool.

He looked up after three chapters, and his eye was caught by a brand-new display. The poster on top (the library was gung-ho for posters, all right) showed a happy mailman delivering a letter to a happy kid. LIBRARIES ARE FOR WRITING, TOO, the poster said. WHY NOT WRITE A FRIEND TODAY? THE SMILES ARE GUARANTEED!

Beneath the poster were slots filled with pre-stamped postcards, pre-stamped envelopes, and stationery with a drawing of the Derry Public Library on top in blue ink. The pre-stamped envelopes were a nickel each, the postcards three cents. The paper was two sheets for a penny.

Ben felt in his pocket. The remaining four cents of his bottle money was still there. He marked his place in Hot Rod and went back to the desk. 'May I have one of those postcards, please?'

'Certainly, Ben.' As always, Mrs Starrett was charmed by his grave politeness and a little saddened by his size. Her mother would have said the boy was digging his grave with a knife and fork. She gave him the card and watched him go back to his seat. It was a table that could seat six, but Ben was the only one there. She had never seen Ben with any of the other boys. It was too bad, because she believed Ben Hanscom had treasures buried inside. He would yield them up to a kind and patient prospector . . . if one ever came along.

8

Ben took out his ballpoint pen, clicked the point down, and addressed the card simply enough: Miss Beverly Marsh, Lower Main Street, Derry, Maine, Zone 2. He did not know the exact number of her building, but his mamma had told him that most postmen had a pretty good idea of who their customers were once they'd been on their beats a little while. If the postman who had Lower Main Street could deliver this card, that would be great. If not, it would just go to the deadletter office and he would be out three cents. It would certainly never come back to him, because he had no intention of putting his name and address on it.

Carrying the card with the address turned inward (he was taking no chances, even though he didn't see anyone he recognized), he got a few square slips of paper from the wooden box by the card-file. He took these back to his seat and began to scribble, to cross out, and then to scribble again.

During the last week of school before exams, they had been reading and writing haiku in English class. Haiku was a Japanese form of poetry, brief, disciplined. A haiku, Mrs Douglas said, could be just seventeen syllables long - no more, no less. It usually concentrated on one clear image which was linked to one specific emotion: sadness, joy, nostalgia, happiness . . . love.

Ben had been utterly charmed by the concept. He enjoyed his English classes, although mild enjoyment was generally as far as it went. He could do the work, but as a rule there was nothing in it which gripped him. Yet there was something in the concept of haiku that fired his imagination. The idea made him feel happy, the way Mrs Starrett's explanation of the greenhouse effect had made him happy. Haiku was good poetry, Ben felt, because it was structured poetry. There were no secret rules. Seventeen syllables, one image linked to one emotion, and you were out. Bingo. It was clean, it was utilitarian, it was entirely contained within and dependent upon its own rules. He even liked the word itself, a slide of air broken as if along a dotted line by the 'k'-sound at the very back of your mouth: haiku.

Her hair, he thought, and saw her going down the school steps again with it bouncing on her shoulders. The sun did not so much glint on it as seem to burn within it.

Working carefully over a twenty-minute period (with one break to go back and get more work-slips), striking out words that were too long, changing, deleting, Ben came up with this:

Your hair is winter fire,

January embers

My heart bums there, too.

He wasn't crazy about it, but it was the best he could do. He was afraid that if he frigged around with it too long, worried it too much, he would end up getting the jitters and doing something much worse. Or not doing it at all. He didn't want that to happen. The moment she had taken to speak to him had been a striking moment for Ben. He wanted to mark it in his memory. Probably Beverley had a crush on some bigger boy - a sixth - or maybe even a seventh-grader, and she would think that maybe that boy had sent the haiku. That would make her happy, and so the day she got it would be marked in her memory. And although she would never know it had been Ben Hanscom who marked it for her, that was all right; he would know.

He copied his completed poem onto the back of the postcard (printing in block letters, as if copying out a ransom note rather than a love poem), clipped his pen back into his pocket, and stuck the card in the back of Hot Rod.

He got up then, and said goodbye to Mrs Starrett on his way out.

'Goodbye, Ben,' Mrs Starrett said. 'Enjoy your summer vacation, but don't forget about the curfew.'

'I won't.'

He strolled through the glassed-in passageway between the two buildings, enjoying the heat there (greenhouse effect, he thought smugly) followed by the cool of the adult library. An old man was reading the News in one of the ancient, comfortably overstuffed chairs in the Reading Room alcove. The headline just below the masthead blazed: DULLES PLEDGES us TROOPS TO HELP LEBANON IF NEEDED! There was also a photo of Ike, shaking hands with an Arab in the Rose Garden. Ben's mamma said that when the country elected Hubert Humphrey President in 1960, maybe things would get moving again. Ben was vaguely aware that there was something called a recession going on, and his mamma was afraid she might get laid off.

A smaller headline on the bottom half of page one read POLICE HUNT FOR PSYCHOPATH GOES ON.

Ben pushed open the library's big front door and stepped out.

There was a mailbox at the foot of the walk. Ben fished the postcard from the back of the book and mailed it. He felt his heartbeat speed up a little as it slipped out of his fingers. What if she knows it's me, somehow?

Don't be a stupe, he responded, a little alarmed at how exciting that idea seemed to him.

He walked off up Kansas Street, hardly aware of where he was going and not caring at all. A fantasy had begun to form in his mind. In it, Beverly Marsh walked up to him, her gray-green eyes wide, her auburn hair tied back in a pony-tail. I want to ask you a question, Ben, this make-believe girl said in his mind, and you've got to swear to tell the truth. She held up the postcard. Did you write this?

This was a terrible fantasy. This was a wonderful fantasy. He wanted it to stop. He didn't want it to ever stop. His face was starting to burn again.

Ben walked and dreamed and shifted his library books from one arm to the other and began to whistle. You'll probably think I'm horrible, Beverly said, but I think I want to kiss you. Her lips parted slightly.

Ben's own lips were suddenly too dry to whistle.

'I think I want you to,' he whispered, and smiled a dopey, dizzy, and absolutely beautiful grin.

If he had looked down at the sidewalk just then, he would have seen that three other shadows had grown around his own; if he had been listening he would have heard the sound of Victor's cleats as he, Belch, and Henry closed in. But he neither heard nor saw. Ben was far away, feeling Beverly's lips slip softly against his mouth, raising his timid hands to touch the dim Irish fire of her hair.

9

Like many cities, small and large, Derry had not been planned - like Topsy, it just growed. City planners never would have located it where it was in the first place. Downtown Derry was in a valley formed by the Kenduskeag Stream, which ran through the business district on a diagonal from southwest to northeast. The rest of the town had swarmed up the sides of the surrounding hills.

The valley the township's original settlers came to had been swampy and heavily grown over. The stream and the Penobscot River into which the Kenduskeag emptied were great things for traders, bad ones for those who sowed crops or built their houses too close to them - the Kenduskeag in particular, because it flooded every three or four years. The city was still prone to flooding in spite of the vast amounts of money spent over the last fifty years to control the problem. If the floods had been caused only by the stream itself, a system of dams might have taken care of things. There were, however, other factors. The Kenduskeag's low banks were one. The entire area's logy drainage was another. Since the turn of the century there had been many serious floods in Derry and one disastrous one, in 1931. To make matters worse, the hills on which much of Derry was built were honeycombed with small streams - Torrault Stream, in which the body of Cheryl Lamonica had been found, was one of them. During periods of heavy rain, they were all apt to overflow their banks. 'If it rains two weeks the whole damn town gets a sinus infection,' Stuttering Bill's dad had said once.

The Kenduskeag was caged in a concrete canal two miles long as it passed through downtown. This canal dived under Main Street at the intersection of Main and Canal, becoming an underground river for half a mile or so before surfacing again at Bassey Park. Canal Street, where most of Derry's bars were ranked like felons in a police lineup, paralleled the Canal on its way out of town, and every few weeks or so the police would have to fish some drunk's car out of the water, which was polluted to drop-dead levels by sewage and mill wastes. Fish were caught from time to time in the Canal, but they were inedible mutants.

On the northeastern side of town - the Canal side - the river had been managed to at least some degree. A thriving commerce went on all along it in spite of the occasional flooding. People walked beside the Canal, sometimes hand in hand (if the wind was right, that was; if it was wrong, the stench took much of the romance out of such strolling), and at Bassey Park, which faced the high school across the Canal, there were sometimes Boy Scout campouts and Cub Scout wiener roasts. In 1969 the citizens would be shocked and sickened to discover that hippies (one of them had actually sewed an American flag on the seat of his pants, and that pinko-faggot was busted before you could say Gene McCarthy) were smoking dope and trading pills up there. By '69 Bassey Park had become a regular open-air pharmacy. You just wait, people said. Somebody'll get killed before they put a stop to it. And of course someone finally did - a seventeen-year-old boy had been found dead by the Canal, his veins full of almost pure heroin - what the kids called a tight white rail. After that the druggies began to drift away from Bassey Park, and there were even stories that the kid's ghost was haunting the area. The story was stupid, of course, but if it kept the speed-freaks and the nodders away, it was at least a useful stupid story.

On the southwestern side of town the river presented even more of a problem. Here the hills had been deeply cut open by the passing of the great glacier and further wounded by the endless water erosion of the Kenduskeag and its webwork of tributaries; the bedrock showed through in many places like the half-unearthed bones of dinosaurs. Veteran employees of the Derry Public Works Department knew that, following the fall's first hard frost, they could count on a good deal of sidewalk repair on the southwestern side of town. The concrete would contract and grow brittle and then the bedrock would suddenly shatter up through it, as if the earth meant to hatch something.

What grew best in the shallow soil which remained was plants with shallow root-systems and hardy natures - weeds and trash-plants, in other words: scruffy trees, thick low bushes, and virulent infestations of poison ivy and poison oak grew everywhere they were allowed a foothold. The southwest was where the land fell away steeply to the area that was known in Derry as the Barrens. The Barrens - which were anything but barren - were a messy tract of land about a mile and a half wide by three miles long. It was bounded by upper Kansas Street on one side and by Old Cape on the other. Old Cape was a low-income housing development, and the drainage was so bad over there that there were stories of toilets and sewer-pipes actually exploding.

The Kenduskeag ran through the center of the Barrens. The city had grown up to the northeast and on both sides of it, but the only vestiges of the city down there were Derry Pumphouse #3 (the municipal sewage-pumping station) and the City Dump. Seen from the air the Barrens looked like a big green dagger pointing at downtown.

To Ben all this geography mated with geology meant was a vague awareness that there were no more houses on his right side now; the land had dropped away. A rickety whitewashed railing, about waist-high, ran beside the sidewalk, a token gesture of protection. He could faintly hear running water; it was the sound-track to his continuing fantasy.

He paused and looked out over the Barrens, still imagining her eyes, the clean smell of her hair.

From here the Kenduskeag was only a series of twinkles seen through breaks in the thick foliage. Some kids said that there were mosquitoes as big as sparrows down there at this time of year; others said there was quicksand as you approached the river. Ben didn't believe it about the mosquitoes, but the idea of quicksand scared him.

Slightly to his left he could see a cloud of circling, diving seagulls: the dump. Their cries reached him faintly. Across the way he could see Derry Heights, and the low roofs of the Old Cape houses closest to the Barrens. To the right of Old Cape, pointing skyward like a squat white finger, was the Derry Standpipe. Directly below him a rusty culvert stuck out of the earth, spilling discolored water down the hill in a glimmering little stream which disappeared into the tangled trees and bushes.

Ben's pleasant fantasy of Beverly was suddenly broken by one far more grim: what if a dead hand flopped out of that culvert right now, right this second, while he was looking? And suppose that when he turned to find a phone and call the police, a clown was standing there? A funny clown wearing a baggy suit with big orange puffs for buttons? Suppose -

A hand fell on Ben's shoulder, and he screamed.

There was laughter. He whirled around, shrinking against the white fence separating the safe, sane sidewalk of Kansas Street from the wildly undisciplined Barrens (the railing creaked audibly), and saw Henry Bowers, Belch Huggins, and Victor Criss standing there.

'Hi, Tits,' Henry said.

'What do you want?' Ben asked, trying to sound brave.

'I want to beat you up,' Henry said. He seemed to contemplate this prospect soberly, even gravely. But oh, his black eyes sparkled. 'I got to teach you something, Tits. You won't mind. You like to learn new things, don'tcha?'

He reached for Ben. Ben ducked away.

'Hold him, you guys.'

Belch and Victor seized his arms. Ben squealed. It was a cowardly sound, rabbity and weak, but he couldn't help it. Please God don't let them make me cry and don't let them break my watch, Ben thought wildly. He didn't know if they would get around to breaking his watch or not, but he was pretty sure he would cry. He was pretty sure he would cry plenty before they were through with him.

'Jeezum, he sounds just like a pig,' Victor said. He twisted Ben's wrist. 'Don't he sound like a pig?'

'He sure do,' Belch giggled.

Ben lunged first one way and then the other. Belch and Victor went with him easily, letting him lunge, then yanking him back.

Henry grabbed the front of Ben's sweatshirt and yanked it upward, exposing his belly. It hung over his belt in a swollen droop.

'Lookit that gut!' Henry cried in amazed disgust. 'Jesus-please-us!'

Victor and Belch laughed some more. Ben looked around wildly for help. He could see no one. Behind him, down in the Barrens, crickets drowsed and seagulls screamed.

'You just better quit!' he said. He wasn't blubbering yet but was close to it. 'You just better!'

'Or what?' Henry asked as if he was honestly interested. 'Or what, Tits? Or what, huh?'

Ben suddenly found himself thinking of Broderick Crawford, who played Dan Matthews on Highway Patrol - that bastard was tough, that bastard was mean, that bastard took zero shit from anybody - and then he burst into tears. Dan Matthews would have belted these guys right through the fence, down the embankment, and into the puckerbrush. He would have done it with his belly.

'Oh boy, lookit the baby!' Victor chortled. Belch joined in. Henry smiled a little, but his face still held that grave, reflective cast - that look that was somehow almost sad. It frightened Ben. It suggested he might be in for more than just a beating.

As if to confirm this idea, Henry reached into his jeans pocket and brought out a Buck knife.

Ben's terror exploded. He had been whipsawing his body futilely to either side; now he suddenly lunged straight forward. There was an instant when he believed he was going to get away. He was sweating heavily, and the boys holding his arms had greasy grips at best. Belch managed to hold on to his right wrist, but just barely. He pulled entirely free of Victor. Another lunge -

Before he could make it, Henry stepped forward and gave him a shove. Ben flew backward. The railing creaked more loudly this tune, and he felt it give a little under his weight. Belch and Victor grabbed him again.

'Now you hold him,' Henry said. 'You hear me?'

'Sure, Henry,' Belch said. He sounded a trifle uneasy. 'He ain't gonna get away. Don't worry.'

Henry stepped forward until his flat stomach almost touched Ben's belly. Ben stared at him, tears spilling helplessly out of his wide eyes. Caught! I'm caught! a part of his mind yammered. He tried to stop it - he couldn't think at all with that yammering going on - but it wouldn't stop. Caught! Caught! Caught!

Henry pulled out the blade, which was long and wide and engraved with his name. The tip glittered in the afternoon sunshine.

'I'll gonna test you now,' Henry said in that same reflective voice. 'It's exam time, Tits, and you better be ready.'

Ben wept. His heart thundered madly in his chest. Snot ran out of his nose and collected on his upper lip. His library books lay in a scatter at his feet. Henry stepped on Bulldozer, glanced down, and dealt it into the gutter with a sideswipe of one black engineer boot.

'Here's the first question on your exam, Tits. When somebody says "Let me copy" during finals, what are you going to say?'

'Yes!' Ben exclaimed immediately. 'I'm going to say yes! Sure! Okay! Copy all you want!'

The Buck's tip slid through two inches of air and pressed against Ben's stomach. It was as cold as an ice-cube tray just out of the Frigidaire. Ben gasped his belly away from it. For a moment the world went gray. Henry's mouth was moving but Ben couldn't tell what he was saying. Henry was like a TV with the sound turned off and the world was swimming . . . swimming . . .

Don't you dare faint! the panicky voice shrieked. If you faint he may get mad enough to kill you!

The world came back into some kind of focus. He saw that both Belch and Victor had stopped laughing. They looked nervous . . . almost scared. Seeing that had the effect of a head-clearing slap on Ben. All of a sudden they don't know what he's going to do, or how far he might go. However bad you thought things were, that's how bad they really are . . . maybe even a little worse. You got to think. If you never did before or never do again, you better think now. Because his eyes say they're right to look nervous. His eyes say he's crazy as a bedbug.

'That's the wrong answer, Tits,' Henry said. 'If just anyone says "Let me copy," I don't give a red fuck what you do. Got it?'

'Yes,' Ben said, his belly hitching with sobs. 'Yes, I got it.'

'Well, okay. That's one wrong, but the biggies are still coming up. You ready for the biggies?'

'I . . . I guess so.'

A car came slowly toward them. It was a dusty '51 Ford with an old man and woman propped up in the front seat like a pair of neglected department store mannequins. Ben saw the old man's head turn slowly toward him. Henry stepped closer to Ben, hiding the knife. Ben could feel its point dimpling his flesh just above his bellybutton. It was still cold. He didn't see how that could be, but it was.

'Go ahead, yell,' Henry said. 'You'll be pickin your fuckin guts off your sneakers.' They were close enough to kiss. Ben could smell the sweet smell of Juicy Fruit gum on Henry's breath.

The car passed and continued on down Kansas Street, as slow and serene as the pace car in the Tournament of Roses Parade.

'All right, Tits, here's the second question. If I say "Let me copy" during finals, what are you going to say?'

'Yes. I'll say yes. Right away.'

Henry smiled. 'That's good. You got that one right, Tits. Now here's the third question: how am I going to be sure you never forget that?'

'I . . . I don't know,' Ben whispered.

Henry smiled. His face lit up and was for a moment almost handsome. 'I know!' he said, as if he had discovered a great truth. 'I know, Tits! I'll carve my name on your big fat gut!'

Victor and Belch abruptly began laughing again. For a moment Ben felt a species of bewildered relief, thinking it had all been nothing but make-believe - a little shuck-and-jive the three of them had whomped up to scare the living hell out of him. But Henry Bowers wasn't laughing, and Ben suddenly understood that Victor and Belch were laughing because they were relieved. It was obvious to both of them that Henry couldn't be serious. Except Henry was.

The Buck knife slid upward, smooth as butter. Blood welled in a bright red line on Ben's pallid skin.

'Hey!' Victor cried. The word came out muffled, in a startled gulp.

'Hold him!' Henry snarled. 'You just hold him, hear me?' Now there was nothing grave and reflective on Henry's face; now it was the twisted face of a devil.

'Jeezwm-crow Henry don't really cut im!' Belch screamed, and his voice was high, almost a girl's voice.

Everything happened fast then, but to Ben Hanscom it all seemed slow; it all seemed to happen in a series of shutterclicks, like action stills in a Life-magazine photo-essay. His panic was gone. He had discovered something inside him suddenly, and because it had no use for panic, that something just ate the panic whole.

In the first shutterclick, Henry had snatched his sweatshirt all the way up to his nipples. Blood was pouring from the shallow vertical cut above his bellybutton.

In the second shutterclick, Henry drew the knife down again, operating fast, like a lunatic battle-surgeon under an aerial bombardment. Fresh blood Sowed.

Backward, Ben thought coldly as blood flowed down and pooled between the waistband of his jeans and his skin. Got to go backward. That's the only direction I can get away in. Belch and Victor weren't holding him anymore. In spite of Henry's command, they had drawn away. They had drawn away in horror. But if he ran, Bowers would catch him.

In the third shutterclick, Henry connected the two vertical slashes with a short horizontal line. Ben could feel blood running into his underpants now, and a sticky snail-trail was creeping down his left thigh.

Henry leaned back momentarily, frowning with the studied concentration of an artist painting a landscape. After H comes E, Ben thought, and that was all it took to get him moving. He pulled forward a little bit and Henry shoved him back again. Ben pushed with his legs, adding his own force to Henry's. He hit the white-washed railing between Kansas Street and the drop into the Barrens. As he did, he raised his right foot and planted it in Henry's belly. This was not a retaliatory act; Ben only wanted to increase his backward force. And yet when he saw the expression of utter surprise on Henry's face, he was filled with a clear savage joy - a feeling so intense that for a split second he thought the top of his head was going to come off.

Then there was a cracking, splintering sound from the railing. Ben saw Victor and Belch catch Henry before he could fall on his ass in the gutter next to the remains of Bulldozer, and then Ben was falling backward into space. He went with a scream that was half a laugh.

Ben hit the slope on his back and buttocks just below the culvert he had spotted earlier. It was a good thing he landed below it; if he had landed on it, he might well have broken his back. As it was? he landed on a thick cushion of weeds and bracken and barely felt the impact. He did a backward somersault, feet and legs snapping over his head. He landed sitting up and went sliding down the slope backward like a kid on a big green Chute-the-Chute, his sweatshirt pulled up around his neck, his hands grabbing for purchase and doing nothing but yanking out tuft after tuft of bracken and witch-grass.

He saw the top of the embankment (it seemed impossible that he had just been standing up there) receding with crazy cartoon speed. He saw Victor and Belch, their faces round white O's, staring down at him. He had time to mourn his library books. Then he fetched up against something with agonizing force and nearly bit his tongue in half.

It was a downed tree, and it checked Ben's fall by nearly breaking his left leg. He clawed his way back up the slope a little bit, pulling his leg free with a groan. The tree had stopped him about halfway down. Below, the bushes were thicker. Water falling from the culvert ran over his hands in thin streams.

There was a shriek from above him. Ben looked up again and saw Henry Bowers come flying over the drop, his knife clenched between his teeth. He landed on both feet, body thrown backward at a steep angle so he would not overbalance. He skidded to the end of a gigantic set of footprints and then began to run down the embankment in a series of gangling kangaroo leaps.

'I'n goin oo kill ooo, Its!' Henry was shrieking around the knife, and Ben didn't need a UN translator to tell him Henry was saying I'm going to kill you, Tits.

'I'n gain oo huckin kill ooo!'

Now, with that cold general's eye he had discovered up above on the sidewalk, Ben saw what he had to do. He managed to gain his feet just before Henry arrived, the knife now in his hand and held straight out in front of him like a bayonet. Ben was peripherally aware that the left leg of his jeans was shredded, and his leg was bleeding much more heavily than his stomach . . . but it was supporting him, and that meant it wasn't broken. At least he hoped that's what it meant.

Ben crouched slightly to maintain his precarious balance, and as Henry grabbed at him with one hand and swept the knife in a long flat arc with the other, Ben stepped aside. He lost his balance, but as he fell down he stuck out his shredded left leg. Henry's shins struck it, and his legs were booted out from under him with great efficiency. For a moment Ben gaped, his terror overcome with a mixture of awe and admiration. Henry Bowers appeared to be flying exactly like Superman over the fallen tree where Ben had stopped. His arms were straight out in front of him, the way George Reeves held his arms out on the TV show. Only George Reeves always looked like flying was as natural as taking a bath or eating lunch on the back porch. Henry looked like someone had shoved a hot poker up his ass. His mouth was opening and closing. A string of saliva was shooting back from one corner of it, and as Ben watched, it splatted against the lobe of Henry's ear.

Then Henry crashed back to earth. The knife flew out of his hand. He rolled over on one shoulder, landed on his back, and slid away into the bushes with his legs splayed into a V. There was a yell. A thud. And then silence.

Ben sat, dazed, looking at the matted place in the bushes where Henry had done his disappearing act. Suddenly rocks and pebbles began to bounce by him. He looked up again. Victor and Belch were now descending the embankment. They were moving more carefully than Henry, and hence more slowly, but they would reach him in thirty seconds or less if he didn't do something. - ' He moaned. Would this lunacy never end?

Keeping his eye on them, he clambered over the downed tree and began to scramble down the embankment, panting harshly. He had a stitch in his side. His tongue hurt like hell. The bushes were no w almost as tall as Ben himself. The randy green smell of stuff growing out of control filled his nose. He could hear running water somewhere close, chuckling over stones and rilling between them.

His feet slipped and here he went again, rolling and sliding, smashing the back of his hand against a jutting rock, shooting through a patch of thorns that hooked blue-gray puffs of cotton from his sweatshirt and little divots of meat from his hands and cheeks.

He slammed to a jarring halt sitting up, with his feet in the water. Here was a little curving stream which wound its way into a thick stand of second-growth trees to his right; it looked as dark as a cave in there. He looked to his left and saw Henry Bowers lying on his back in the middle of the stream. His half-open eyes showed only whites. Blood trickled from one ear and ran toward Ben in delicate threads.

Oh my God I killed him! Oh my God I'm a murderer! Oh my God!

Forgetting that Belch and Victor were behind him (or perhaps understanding they would lose all interest in beating the shit out of him when they discovered their Fearless Leader was dead), Ben splashed twenty feet upstream to where Henry lay, his shirt in ribbons, his jeans soaked black, one shoe gone. Ben was vaguely aware that there was precious little left of his own clothes and that his body was one big rattletrap of aches and pains. His left ankle was the worst; it had already puffed tight against his soaking sneaker and he was favoring it so badly that he was really not walking but lurching like a sailor on shore for the first time after a long sea voyage.

He bent over Henry Bowers. Henry's eyes popped wide open. He grabbed Ben's calf with one scraped and bloody hand. His mouth worked, and although nothing but a series of whistling aspirations emerged, Ben could still make out what he was saying: Kill you, you fat shit.

Henry was trying to pull himself up, using Ben's leg as a pole. Ben pulled backward frantically. Henry's hand slipped down, then off. Ben flew backward, whirling his arms, and fell on his ass for a record-breaking third time in the last four minutes. He also bit his tongue again. Water splashed up around him. A rainbow glimmered for an instant in front of Ben's eyes. Ben didn't give a fuck about the rainbow. He didn't give a fuck about finding a pot of gold. He would settle for his miserable fat life.

Henry rolled over. Tried to stand. Fell back. Managed to get to his hands and knees. And finally tottered to his feet. He stared at Ben with those black eyes. The front of his flattop now leaned this way and that, like cornhusks after a high wind has passed through.

Ben was suddenly angry. No - this was more than being angry. He was infuriated. He had been walking with his library books under his arm, having an innocent little daydream about kissing Beverly Marsh, bothering nobody. And look at this. Just look. Pants shredded. Left ankle maybe broken, badly sprained for sure. Leg all cut up, tongue all cut up, Henry goddam Bowers's monogram on his stomach. How about all that happy crappy, sports fans? But it was probably the thought of his library books, for which he was liable, that drove him to charge Henry Bowers. His lost library books and his mental image of how reproachful Mrs Starrett's eyes would become when he told her. Whatever the reason - cuts, sprain, library books, or even the thought of the soggy and probably illegible rank-card in his back pocket - it was enough to get him moving. He lumbered forward, squashy Keds spatting in the shallow water, and kicked Henry squarely in the balls.

Henry uttered a horrid rusty scream that sent birds beating up from the trees. He stood spraddle-legged for a moment, hands clasping his crotch, staring unbelievingly at Ben. 'Ug,' he said in a small voice.

'Right,' Ben said.

'Ug,' Henry said, in an even smaller voice.

'Right,' Ben said again.

Henry sank slowly back to his knees, not so much falling as folding up. He was still looking at Ben with those unbelieving black eyes.

'Ug.'

'Damn right,' Ben said.

Henry fell on his side, still clutching his testicles, and began to roll slowly from side to side.

'Ug!' Henry moaned. 'My balls. Ug! Oh you broke my balls. Ug-ug!' He was now beginning to gain a little force, and Ben started to back away a step at a time. He was sickened by what he had done, but he was also filled with a kind of righteous, paralyzed fascination. 'Ug! - my fuckin sack - ug-UG! - oh my fuckin BALLS!'

Ben might have remained in the area for an untold length of time - perhaps even until Henry recovered enough to come after him - but just then a rock struck him above the right ear with such a deep, drilling pain that, until he felt warm blood flowing again, Ben thought he had been stung by a wasp.

He turned and saw the other two striding up the middle of the stream toward him. They each had a handful of water-rounded rocks. Victor pegged one and Ben heard it whistle past his ear. He ducked and another struck his right knee, making him yell with surprised hurt. A third bounced off his right cheekbone, and that eye filled with water.

He scrambled for the far bank and climbed it as fast as he could, grabbing onto protruding roots and hauling on handfuls of bushes. He made it to the top (one final stone struck his buttocks as he pulled himself up) and took a quick look back over his shoulder.

Belch was kneeling beside Henry while Victor stood half a dozen feet away, firing stones; one the size of a baseball clipped through the man-high bushes beside Ben. He had seen enough; in fact, he had seen much more than enough. Worst of all, Henry Bowers was getting up again. Like Ben's own Timex watch, Henry could take a licking and keep on ticking. Ben turned and smashed his way into the bushes, lumbering along in a direction he hoped was west. If he could cross to the Old Cape side of the Barrens, he could beg a dime off somebody and take the bus home. And when he got there he would lock the door behind him and bury these tattered bloody clothes in the trash and this crazy dream would finally be over. Ben thought of himself sitting in his chair in the living room, freshly tubbed, wearing his fuzzy red bathrobe, watching Daffy Duck cartoons on The Mighty Ninety and drinking milk through a strawberry Flav-R-Straw. Hold that thought, he told himself grimly, and kept lumbering along.

Bushes sprang into his face. Ben pushed them aside. Thorns reached and clawed. He tried to ignore them. He came to a flat area of ground that was black and mucky. A thick stand of bamboo-like growth spread across it and a fetid smell rose from the earth. An ominous thought

(quicksand)

slipped across the foreground of his mind like a shadow as he looked at the sheen of standing water deeper into the grove of bamboo-stuff. He didn't want to go in there. Even if it wasn't quicksand, the mud would suck his sneakers off. He turned right instead, running along the front of the bamboo-grove and finally into a patch of real woods.

The trees, mostly firs, were thick, growing everywhere, battling each other for a little space and sun, but there was less undergrowth and he could move faster. He was no longer sure what direction he was moving in, but still thought he was, on measure, a little ahead of the game. The Barrens were enclosed by Derry on three sides and bounded by the half-finished turnpike extension on the fourth. Sooner or later he would come out somewhere.

His stomach throbbed painfully, and he pulled up the remains of his sweatshirt for a look. He winced and drew a whistle of air in over his teeth. His belly looked like a grotesque Christmas-tree ball, all caked red blood and smeared green from his slide down the embankment. He pulled the sweatshirt down again. Looking at that mess made him feel like blowing lunch.

Now he heard a low humming noise from ahead - it was one steady note just above the low range of his hearing. An adult, intent only on getting the hell out of there (the mosquitoes had found Ben now, and while nowhere near as big as sparrows, they were pretty big), would have ignored it, or simply not heard it at all. But Ben was a boy, and he was already getting over his fright. He swerved to his left and pushed through some low laurel bushes. Beyond them, sticking out of the ground, were the top three feet of a cement cylinder about four feet wide. It was capped with a vented iron manhole cover. The cover was stamped with the words DERRY SEWER DEFT. The sound - this close it was more a drone than a hum - was coming from someplace deep inside.

Ben put one eye to a venthole but could see nothing. He could hear that drone, and water running down there someplace, but that was all. He took a breath, got a whiff of a sour smell that was both dank and shitty, and drew back with a wince. It was a sewer, that was all. Or maybe a combined sewer and drainage-tunnel - there were plenty of those in flood-conscious Derry. No big deal. But it had given him a funny sort of chill. Part of it was seeing the handiwork of man in all this overgrown jumble of wilderness, but he supposed part of it was the shape of the thing itself - that concrete cylinder jutting out of the ground. Ben had read H. G. Wells's The Time Machine the year before, first the Classics Comics version and then the whole book. This cylinder with its vented iron cap reminded him of the wells which lead down into the country of the slumped and horrible Morlocks.

He moved away from it quickly, trying to find west again. He got to a link clearing and turned until his shadow was as directly behind him as he could get it. Then he headed off in a straight line.

Five minutes later he heard more running water ahead, and voices. Kids' voices.

He stopped to listen, and that was when he heard snapping branches and other voices behind him. They were perfectly recognizable. They belonged to Victor, Belch, and the one and only Henry Bowers.

The nightmare was not over yet, it seemed.

Ben looked around for a place to go to earth.

10

He came out of his hiding place about two hours later, dirtier than ever, but a little refreshed. Incredible as it seemed to him, he had dozed off.

When he had heard the three of them behind him, coming after him still, Ben had come dangerously close to freezing up completely, like an animal caught in the headlamps of an oncoming truck. A paralytic drowsiness began to steal over him. The idea of simply lying down, curling up into a ball like a hedgehog, and letting them do whatever they felt they had to occurred to him. It was a crazy idea, but it also seemed like a strangely good idea.

But instead Ben began to move toward the sound of the running water and those other kids. He tried to untangle their voices and get the sense of what they were saying - anything to shake off that scary paralysis of the spirit. Some project. They were talking about some project. One or two of the voices were even a little familiar. There was a splash, followed by a burst of good-natured laughter. The laughter filled Ben with a kind of stupid longing, and made him more aware of his dangerous position than anything else had done.

If he was going to be caught, there was no need to let these kids in for a dose of his medicine. Ben turned right again. Like many large people, he was remarkably light-footed. He passed close enough to the boys to see their shadows moving back and forth between him and the bright water, but they neither saw him nor heard him. Gradually their voices began to fall behind.

He came to a narrow path which had been beaten down to the bare earth. Ben considered it for a moment, then shook his head a little. He crossed it and plunged into the undergrowth again. He moved more slowly now, pushing bushes aside rather than stampeding through them. He was still moving roughly parallel to the stream the other kids had been playing beside. Even through the intervening bushes and trees he could see it was much wider than the one into which he and Henry had fallen.

Here was another of those concrete cylinders, barely visible amid a snarl of blackberry creepers, humming quietly to itself. Beyond, an embankment dropped off to the stream, and here an old, gnarled elm tree leaned crookedly out over the water. Its roots, half-exposed by bank erosion, looked like a snarl of dirty hair.

Hoping there wouldn't be bugs or snakes but too tired and numbly frightened to really care, Ben had worked his way between the roots and into a shallow cave beneath. He leaned back. A root jabbed him like an angry finger. He shifted his position a little and it supported him quite nicely.

Here came Henry, Belch, and Victor. He had thought they might be fooled into following the path, but no such luck. They stood close by him for a moment - any closer and he could have reached out of his hiding place and touched them.

'Bet them little snotholes back there saw him,' Belch said.

'Well, let's go find out,' Henry replied, and they headed back the way they had come. A few moments later Ben heard him roar: 'What the fuck you kids doin here?'

There was some sort of reply, but Ben couldn't tell what it was: the kids were too far away, and this close the river - it was the Kenduskeag, of course - was too loud. But he thought the kid sounded scared. Ben could sympathize.

Then Victor Criss bellowed something Ben hadn't understood at all: 'What a fuckin baby dam!'

Baby dam? Baby damn? Or maybe Victor had said what a damn bunch of babies and Ben had misheard him.

'Let's break it!' Belch proposed.

There were yells of protest followed by a scream of pain. Someone began to cry. Yes, Ben could sympathize. They hadn't been able to catch him (or at least not yet), but here was another bunch of little kids for them to take out their mad on.

'Sure, break it,' Henry said.

Splashes. Yells. Big moronic gusts of laughter from Belch and Victor. An agonized infuriated cry from one of the little kids.

'Don't gimme any of your shit, you stuttering little freak,' Henry Bowers said. 'I ain't takin no more shit from nobody today.'

There was a splintering crack. The sound of running water downstream grew louder and roared briefly before quieting to its former placid chuckle. Ben suddenly understood. Baby dam, yes, that was what Victor had said. The kids - two or three of them it had sounded like when he passed by - had been building a dam. Henry and his friends had just kicked it apart. Ben even thought he knew who one of the kids was. The only 'stuttering little freak' he knew from Derry School was Bill Denbrough, who was in the other fifth-grade classroom.

'You didn't have to do that!' a thin and fearful voice cried out, and Ben recognized that voice as well, although he could not immediately put a face with it. 'Why did you do that?'

'Because I felt like it, fucknuts!' Henry roared back. There was a meaty thud. It was followed by a scream of pain. The scream was followed by weeping.

'Shut up,' Victor said. 'Shut up that crying, kid, or I'll pull your ears down and tie em under your chin.'

The crying became a series of choked snuffles.

'We're going,' Henry said, 'but before we do, I want to know one thing. You seen a fat kid in the last ten minutes or so? Big fat kid all bloody and cut up?'

There was a reply too brief to be anything but no.

'You sure?' Belch asked. 'You better be, mushmouth.'

'I-I-I'm sh-sh-sure,' Bill Denbrough replied.

'Let's go,' Henry said. 'He probably waded acrost back that way.'

'Ta-ta, boys,' Victor Criss called. 'It was a real baby dam, believe me. You're better off without it.'

Splashing sounds. Belch's voice came again, but farther away now. Ben couldn't make out the words. In fact, he didn't want to make out the words. Closer by, the boy who had been crying now resumed. There were comforting noises from the other boy. Ben had decided there was just the two of them, Stuttering Bill and the weeper.

He half-sat, half-lay where he was, listening to the two boys by the river and the fading sounds of Henry and his dinosaur friends crashing toward the far side of the Barrens. Sunlight flicked at his eyes and made little coins of light on the tangled roots above and around him. It was dirty in here, but it was also cozy . . . safe. The sound of running water was soothing. Even the sound of the crying kid was sort of soothing. His aches and pains had faded to a dull throb, and the sound of the dinosaurs had faded out completely. He would wait awhile, just to be sure they weren't coming back, and then he would make tracks.

Ben could hear the throb of the drainage machinery coming through the earth - could even feel it: a low, steady vibration that went from the ground to the root he was leaning against and then into his back. He thought of the Morlocks again, of their naked flesh; he imagined it would smell like the dank and shitty air that had come up through the ventholes of that iron cap. He thought of their wells driven deep into the earth, wells with rusty ladders bolted to their sides. He dozed, and at some point his thoughts became a dream.

11

It wasn't Morlocks he dreamed of. He dreamed of the thing which had happened to him in January, the thing which he hadn't quite been able to tell his mother.

It had been the first day of school after the long Christmas break. Mrs Douglas had asked for a volunteer to stay after and help her count the books that had been turned in just before the vacation. Ben had raised his hand.

'Thank you, Ben,' Mrs Douglas had said, favoring him with a smile of such brilliance that it warmed him down to his toes. , 'Suckass,' Henry Bowers remarked under his breath.

It had been the sort of Maine winter day that is both the best and the worst: cloudless, eye-wateringly bright, but so cold it was a little frightening. To make the ten-degree temperature worse, there was a strong wind to give the cold a bitter cutting edge.

Ben counted books and called out numbers; Mrs Douglas wrote them down (not bothering to double-check his work even on a random basis, he was proud to note), and then they both carried the books down to the storage room through halls where radiators clanked dreamily. At first the school had been full of sounds: slamming locker doors, the clackety-clack of Mrs Thomas's typewriter in the office, the slightly off-key choral renditions of the glee club upstairs, the nervous thud-thud-thud of basketballs from the gym and the scrooch and thud of sneakers as players drove toward the baskets or cut turns on the polished wood floor.

Little by little these sounds ceased, until, as the last set of books was totted up (one short, but it hardly mattered, Mrs Douglas sighed - they were all holding together on a wing and a prayer), the only sounds were the radiators, the faint whissh-whissh of Mr Fazio's broom as he pushed colored sawdust up the hall floor, and the howl of the wind outside.

Ben looked toward the book room's one narrow window and saw that the light was fading rapidly from the sky. It was four o'clock and dusk was at hand. Membranes of dry snow blew around the icy jungle gym and skirled between the teetertotters, which were frozen solidly into the ground. Only the thaws of April would break those bitter winter-welds. He saw no one at all on Jackson Street. He looked a moment longer, expecting a car to roll through the Jackson-Witcham intersection, but none did. Everyone in Derry save himself and Mrs Douglas might be dead or fled, at least from what he could see from here.

He looked toward her and saw, with a touch of real fright, that she was feeling almost exactly the same things he was feeling himself. He could tell by the look in her eyes. They were deep and thoughtful and far off, not the eyes of a schoolteacher in her forties but those of a child. Her hands were folded just below her breasts, as if in prayer.

I'm scared, Ben thought, and she's scared, too. But what are we realty scared of?

He didn't know. Then she looked at him and uttered a short, almost embarrassed laugh. 'I've kept you too late,' she said. 'I'm sorry, Ben.'

'That's okay.' He looked down at his shoes. He loved her a little - not with the frank unquestioning love he had lavished on Miss Thibodeau, his first-grade teacher . . . but he did love her.

'If I drove, I'd give you a ride,' she said, 'but I don't. My husband's going to pick me up around quarter past five. If you'd care to wait, we could - '

'No thanks,' Ben said. 'I ought to get home before then.' This was not really the truth, but he felt a queer aversion to the idea of meeting Mrs Douglas's husband.

'Maybe your mother could - '

'She doesn't drive, either,' Ben said. 'I'll be all right. It's only a mile home.'

'A mile's not far when it's nice, but it can be a very long way in this weather. You'll go in somewhere if it gets too cold, won't you, Ben?'

'Aw, sure. I'll go into Costello's Market and stand by the stove a little while, or something. Mr Gedreau doesn't mind. And I got my snowpants. My new Christmas scarf, too.'

Mrs Douglas looked a little reassured . . . and then she glanced toward the window again. 'It just looks so cold out there,' she said. 'So . . . so inimical.'

He didn't know the word but he knew exactly what she meant. Something just happened - what?

He had seen her, he realized suddenly, as a person instead of just a teacher. That was what had happened. Suddenly he had seen her face in an entirely different way, and because he did, it became a new face - the face of a tired poet. He could see her going home with her husband, sitting beside him in the car with her hands folded as the heater hissed and he talked about his day. He could see her making them dinner. An odd thought crossed his mind and a cocktail-party question rose to his lips: Do you have children, Mrs Douglas?

'I often think at this time of the year that people really weren't meant to live this far north of the equator,' she said. 'At least not in this latitude.' Then she smiled and some of the strangeness either went out of her face or his eye - he was able to see her, at least partially, as he always had. But you'll never see her that way again, not completely, he thought, dismayed.

'I'll feel old until spring, and then I'll feel young again. It's that way every year. Are you sure you'll be all right, Ben?'

'I'll be fine.'

'Yes, I suppose you will. You're a good boy, Ben.'

He looked back at his toes, blushing, loving her more than ever.

In the hallway Mr Fazio said: 'Be careful of de fros'bite, boy,' without looking up from his red sawdust.

'I will.'

He reached his locker, opened it, and yanked on his snowpants. He had been painfully unhappy when his mother insisted he wear them again this winter on especially cold days, thinking of them as baby clothes, but he was glad to have them this afternoon. He walked slowly toward the door, zipping his coat, yanking the drawstrings of his hood tight, pulling on his mittens. He went out and stood on the snowpacked top step of the front stairs for a moment, listening as the door snicked closed - and locked - behind him.

Derry School brooded under a bruised skin of sky. The wind blew steadily. The snap-hooks on the flagpole rope rattled a lonesome tattoo against the steel pole itself. That wind cut into the warm and unprepared flesh of Ben's face at once, numbing his cheeks.

Be careful of de fros'bite, boy.

He quickly pulled his scarf up until he looked like a small, pudgy caricature of Red Ryder. That darkening sky had a fantastical sort of beauty, but Ben did not pause to admire it; it was too cold for that. He got going.

At first the wind was at his back and things didn't seem so bad; in fact, it actually seemed to be helping him along. At Canal Street, however, he had to turn right and almost fully into the wind. Now it seemed to be holding him back . . . as if it had business with him. His scarf helped a little, but not enough. His eyes throbbed and the moisture in his nose froze to a crack-glaze. His legs were going numb. Several times he stuck his mittened hands into his armpits to warm them up. The wind whooped and screamed, sometimes sounding almost human.

Ben felt both frightened and exhilarated. Frightened because he could now understand stories he had read, such as Jack London's 'To Build a Fire,' where people actually froze to death. It would be all too possible to freeze to death on a night like this, a night when the temperature would drop to fifteen below.

The exhilaration was hard to explain. It was a lonely feeling - a somehow melancholy feeling. He was outside; he passed on the wings of the wind, and none of the people beyond the brightly lighted squares of their windows saw him. They were inside, inside where there was light and warmth. They didn't know he had passed them; only he knew. It was a secret thing.

The moving air burned like needles, but it was fresh and clean. White smoke jetted from his nose in neat little streams.

And as sundown came, the last of the day a cold yellowy-orange line on the western horizon, the first stars cruel diamond-chips glimmering in the sky overhead, he came to the Canal. He was only three blocks from home now, and eager to feel the heat on his face and legs, moving the blood again, making it tingle.

Still - he paused.

The Canal was frozen in its concrete sluice like a frozen river of rose-milk, its surface humped and cracked and cloudy. It was moveless yet completely alive in this harshly puritanical winterlight; it had its own unique and difficult beauty.

Ben turned the other way - southwest. Toward the Barrens. When he looked in this direction, the wind was at his back again. It made his snowpants ripple and flap. The Canal ran straight between its concrete walls for perhaps half a mile; then the concrete was gone and the river sprawled its way into the Barrens, at this time of the year a skeletal world of icy brambles and jutting naked branches.

A figure was standing on the ice down there.

Ben stared at it and thought: There may be a man down there, but can he be wearing what it looks like he's wearing? It's impossible, isn't it?

The figure was dressed in what appeared to be a white-silver clown suit. It rippled around him in the polar wind. There were oversized orange shoes on his feet. They matched the pompom buttons which ran down the front of his suit. One hand grasped a bundle of strings which rose to a bright bunch of balloons, and when Ben observed that the balloons were floating in his direction, he felt unreality wash over him more strongly. He closed his eyes, rubbed them, opened them. The balloons still appeared to be floating toward him.

He heard Mr Fazio's voke in his head. Be careful of de fros'bite, boy.

It had to be a hallucination or a mirage brought on by some weird trick of the weather. There could be a man down there on the ice; he supposed it was even technically possible he could be wearing a clown suit. But the balloons couldn't be floating toward Ben, into the wind. Yet that was just what they appeared to be doing.

Ben! the clown on the ice called. Ben thought that voice was only in his mind, although it seemed he heard it with his ears. Want a balloon, Ben?

There was something so evil in that voice, so awful, that Ben wanted to run away as fast as he could, but his feet seemed as welded to this sidewalk as the teetertotters in the schoolyard were welded to the ground.

They float, Ben! They all float! Try one and see!

The clown began walking along the ice toward the Canal bridge where Ben stood. Ben watched him come, not moving; he watched as a bird watches an approaching snake. The balloons should have burst in the intense cold, but they did not; they floated above and ahead of the clown when they should have been streaming out behind him, trying to escape back into the Barrens . . . where, some part of Ben's mind assured him, this creature had come from in the first place.

Now Ben noticed something else.

Although the last of the daylight had struck a rosy glow across the ice of the Canal, the clown cast no shadow. None at all.

You'll like it here, Ben, the clown said. Now it was close enough so Ben could hear the dud-dud sound its funny shoes made as they advanced over the uneven ice. You'll like it here, I promise, all the boys and girls I meet like it here because it's like Pleasure Island in Pinocchio and Never-Never Land in Peter Pan; they never have to grow up and that's what all the kiddies want! So come on! See the sights, have a balloon, feed the elephants, ride the Chute-the-Chutes! Oh you'II like it and oh Ben how you'II float -

And in spite of his fear, Ben found that part of him did want a balloon. Who in all the world owned a balloon which would float into the wind? Who had even heard of such a thing? Yes . . . he wanted a balloon, and he wanted to see the clown's face, which was bent down toward the ice, as if to keep it out of that killer wind.

What might have happened if the five o'clock whistle atop the Derry Town Hall hadn't blown just then Ben didn't know . . . didn't want to know. The important thing was that it did blow, an ice-pick of sound drilling into the deep winter cold. The clown looked up, as if startled, and Ben saw its face.

The mummy! Oh my God it's the mummy! was his first thought, accompanied by a swoony horror that caused him to clamp his hands down viciously on the bridge's railing to keep from fainting. Of course it hadn't been the mummy, couldn't have been the mummy. Oh, there were Egyptian mummies, plenty of them, he knew that, but his first thought had been that it was the mummy - the dusty monster played by Boris Karloff in the old movie he had stayed up late to watch just last month on Shock Theater.

No, it wasn't that mummy, couldn't be, movie monsters weren't real, everyone knew that, even little kids. But -

It wasn't make-up the clown was wearing. Nor was the clown simply swaddled in a bunch of bandages. There were bandages, most of them around its neck and wrists, blowing back in the wind, but Ben could see the clown's face clearly. It was deeply lined, the skin a parchment map of wrinkles, tattered cheeks, arid flesh. The skin of its forehead was split but bloodless. Dead lips grinned back from a maw in which teeth leaned like tombstones. Its gums were pitted and black. Ben could see no eyes, but something glittered far back in the charcoal pits of those puckered sockets, something like the cold jewels in the eyes of Egyptian scarab beetles. And although the wind was the wrong way, it seemed to him that he could smell cinnamon and spice, rotting cerements treated with weird drugs, sand, blood so old it had dried to flakes and grains of rust . . .

'We all float down here,' the mummy-clown croaked, and Ben realized with fresh horror that somehow it had reached the bridge, it was now just below him, reaching up with a dry and twisted hand from which flaps of skin rustled like pennons, a hand through which bone like yellow ivory showed.

One almost fleshless finger caressed the tip of his boot. Ben's paralysis broke. He pounded the rest of the way across the bridge with the five o'clock whistle still shrieking in his ears; it only ceased as he reached the far side. It had to be a mirage, had to be. The clown simply could not have come so far during the whistle's ten-or fifteen-second blast.

But his fear was not a mirage; neither were the hot tears which spurted from his eyes and froze on his cheeks a second after being shed. He ran, boots thudding on the sidewalk, and behind him he could hear the mummy in the clown suit climbing up from the Canal, ancient stony fingernails scraping across iron, old tendons creaking like dry hinges. He could hear the arid whistle of its breath pulling in and pushing out of nostrils as devoid of moisture as the tunnels under the Great Pyramid. He could smell its shroud of sandy spices and he knew that in a moment its hands, as fleshless as the geometrical constructions he made with his Erector Set. would descend upon his shoulders. They would turn him around and he would stare into that wrinkled, smiling face. The dead river of its breath would wash over him. Those black eyesockets with their deep glowing depths would bend over him. The toothless mouth would yawn, and he would have his balloon. Oh yes. All the balloons he wanted.

But when he reached the corner of his own street, sobbing and winded, his heart slamming crazed, leaping beats into his ears, when he at last looked back over his shoulder, the street was empty. The arched bridge with its low concrete sides and its oldfashioned cobblestone paving was also empty. He could not see the Canal itself, but he felt that if he could, he would see nothing there, either. No; if the mummy had not been a hallucination or a mirage, if it had been real, it would be waiting under the bridge - like the troll in the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff.'

Under. Hiding under.

Ben hurried home, looking back every few steps until the door was safely shut and locked behind him. He explained to his mother - who was so tired from a particularly hard day at the mill that she had not, in truth, much missed him - that he had been helping Mrs Douglas count books. Then he sat down to a dinner of noodles and Sunday's leftover turkey. He stuffed three helpings into himself, and the mummy seemed more distant and dreamlike with each helping. It was not real, those things were never real, they came fully to life only between the commercials of the late-night TV movies or during the Saturday matinees, where if you were lucky you could get two monsters for a quarter - and if you had an extra quarter, you could buy all the popcorn you could eat.

No, they were not real. TV monsters and movie monsters and comic-book monsters were not real. Not until you went to bed and couldn't sleep; not until the last four pieces ot candy, wrapped in tissues and kept under your pillow against the evils of the night, were gobbled up; not until the bed itself turned into a lake of rancid dreams and the wind screamed outside and you were afraid to look at the window because there might be a face there, an ancient grinning face that had not rotted but simply dried like an old leaf, its eyes sunken diamonds pushed deep into dark sockets; not until you saw one ripped and claw like hand holding out a bunch of balloons: See the sights, have a balloon, feed the elephants, ride the Chute-the-Chutes! Ben, oh, Ben, how you'll float -

12

Ben awoke with a gasp, the dream of the mummy still on him, panicked by the close, vibrating dark all around him. He jerked, and the root stopped supporting him and poked him in the back again, as if in exasperation.

He saw light and scrambled for it. He crawled out into afternoon sunlight and the babble of the stream, and everything fell into place again. It was summer, not winter. The mummy had not carried him away to its desert crypt; Ben had simply hidden from the big kids in a sandy hole under a half-uprooted tree. He was in the Barrens. Henry and his buddies had gone to town in a small way on a couple of kids playing downstream because they hadn't been able to find Ben and go to town on him in a big way. Ta-ta, boys. It was a real baby dam, believe me. You're better off without it.

Ben looked glumly down at his ruined clothes. His mother was going to give him sixteen different flavors of holy old hell.

He had slept just long enough to stiffen up. He slid down the embankment and then began to walk along the stream, wincing at every step. He was a medley of aches and pains; it felt like Spike Jones was playing a fast tune on broken glass inside most of his muscles. There seemed to be dried or drying blood on every inch of exposed skin. The dam-building kids would be gone anyway, he consoled himself. He wasn't sure how long he'd slept, but even if it had only been half an hour, the encounter with Henry and his friends would have convinced Denbrough and his pal that some other place - like Timbuktu, maybe - would be better for their health.

Ben plugged grimly along, knowing if the big kids came back now he would not stand a chance of outrunning them. He hardly cared.

He rounded an elbow-bend in the stream and just stood there for a moment, looking. The dam-builders were still there. One of them was indeed Stuttering Bill Denbrough. He was kneeling beside the other boy, who was propped against the stream-bank in a sitting position. This other kid's head was thrown so far back that his adam's apple stood out like a triangular plug. There was dried blood around his nose, on his chin, and painted along his neck in a couple of streams. He had something white clasped loosely in one hand.

Stuttering Bill looked around sharply and saw Ben standing there. Ben saw with dismay that something was very wrong with the boy propped up on the bank; Denbrough was obviously scared to death. He thought miserably: Won't this day ever end?

'I wonder if yuh-yuh-you could help m-m-me,' Bill Denbrough said. 'H-His ah-ah-ah-asp-p-irator is eh-hempty. I think he m-might be - '

His face froze, turned red. He dug at the word, stuttering like a machine-gun. Spittle flew from his lips, and it took almost thirty seconds' worth of 'd-d-d-d' before Ben realized Denbrough was trying to say the other kid might be dying.

C H A P T E R 5

Bill Denbrough Beats the Devil - I

1

Bill Denbrough thinks: I'm damned near space-travelling; I might as well be inside a bullet shot from a gun.

This thought, although perfectly true, is not one he finds especially comfortable. In fact, for the first hour following the Concorde's takeoff (or perhaps liftoff would be a better way to put it) from Heathrow, he has been coping with a mild case of claustrophobia. The airplane is narrow - unsettlingly so. The meal is just short of exquisite, but the flight attendants who serve it must twist and bend and squat to get the job done; they look like a troupe of gymnasts. Watching this strenuous service takes some of the pleasure out of the food for Bill, although his seatmate doesn't seem particularly bothered.

The seatmate is another drawback. He's fat and not particularly clean, it may be Ted Lapidus cologne on top of his skin, but beneath it Bill detects the unmistakable odors of dirt and sweat. He's not being very particular about his left elbow, either; every now and then it strikes Bill with a soft thud.

His eyes are drawn again and again to the digital readout at the front of the cabin. It shows how fast this British bullet is going. Now, as the Concorde reaches its cruising speed, it tops out at just over mach 2. Bill takes his pen from his shin pocket and uses its tip to tap buttons on the computer watch Audra gave him last Christmas. If the machometer is right - and Bill has absolutely no reason to think it is not - then they are busting along at a speed of eighteen miles per minute. He is not sure this is anything he really wanted to know.

Outside his window, which is as small and thick as the window in one of the old Mercury space capsules, he can see a sky which is not blue but the twilight purple of dusk, although it is the middle of the day. At the point where the sea and the sky meet, he can see that the horizon-line is slightly bowed. I am sitting here, Bill thinks, a Bloody Mary in my hand and a dirty fat man's elbow poking into my bicep, observing the curvature of the earth.

He smiles a little, thinking that a man who can face something like that shouldn't be afraid of anything. But he is afraid, and not just of flying at eighteen miles a minute in this narrow fragile shell. He can almost feel Derry rushing at him. And that is exactly the right expression for it. Eighteen miles a minute or not, the sensation is of being perfectly still while Derry rushes at him like some big carnivore which has lain in wait for a long time and has finally broken from cover. Derry, ah, Derry! Shall we write an ode to Derry? The stink of its mills and its rivers? The dignified quiet of its tree-lined streets? The library? The Standpipe? Bassey Park? Derry Elementary School?

The Barrens?

Lights are going on in his head; big kliegs. It's like he's been sitting in a darkened theater for twenty-seven years, waiting for something to happen, and now it's finally begun. The set being revealed spot by spot and klieg by klieg is not, however, some harmless comedy like Arsenic and Old Lace; to Bill Denbrough it looks more like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

All those stories I wrote, he thinks with a stupid kind of amusement. All those novels. Derry is where they all came from; Derry was the wellspring. They came from what happened that summer, and from what happened to George the autumn before. All the interviewers that ever asked me THAT QUESTION . . . I gave them the wrong answer.

The fat man's elbow digs into him again, and he spills some of his drink. Bill almost says something, then thinks better of it.

THAT QUESTION, of course, was 'Where do you get your ideas?' It was a question Bill supposed all writers of fiction had to answer - or pretend to answer - at least twice a week, but a fellow like him, who made a living by writing of things which never were and never could be, had to answer it - or pretend to - much more often than that.

'All writers have a pipeline which goes down into the subconscious,' he told them, neglecting to mention that he doubted more as each year passed if there even was such a thing as a subconscious. 'But the man or woman who writes honor stories has a pipeline that goes further, maybe . . . into the sub-subconscious, if you like.'

Elegant answer, that, but one he had never really believed. Subconscious? Well, there was something down there all right, but Bill thought people had made much too big a deal out of a function which was probably the mental equivalent of your eyes watering when dust got in them or breaking wind an hour or so after a big dinner. The second metaphor was probably the better of the two, but you couldn't very well tell interviewers that as far as you were concerned, such things as dreams and vague longings and sensations like déjà-vu really came down to nothing more than a bunch of mental farts. But they seemed to need something, all those reporters with their notebooks and their little Japanese tape-recorders, and Bill wanted to help them as much as he could. He knew that writing was a hard job, a damned hard job. There was no need to make theirs harder by telling them, 'My friend, you might as well ask me "Who cut the cheese?" and have done with it.'

He thought now: You always knew they were asking the wrong question, even before Mike called; now you also know what the right question was. Not where do you get your ideas but why do you get your ideas. There was a pipeline, all right, but it wasn't either the Freudian or Jungian version of the subconscious that it came out of; no interior drain-system of the mind, no subterranean cavern full of Morlocks waiting to happen. There was nothing at the other end of that pipe but Derry. Just Derry. And -

- and who's that, trip-trapping upon my bridge?

He sits bolt upright suddenly, and this time it's his elbow that goes wandering; it sinks deeply into his fat seatmate's side for a moment.

'Watch yourself buddy,' the fat man says. 'Close quarters, you know.'

'You stop whopping me with yours and I'll try to stop wuh-whapping you with m-mine.' The fat man gives him a sour, incredulous what-the-hell-you-talking-about look. Bill simply gazes at him until the fat man looks away, muttering.

Who's there?

Who's trip-trapping over my bridge?

He looks out the window again and thinks: We're beating the devil.

His arms and the nape of his neck prickle. He knocks back the rest of his drink in one swallow. Another of those big lights has gone on.

Silver. His bike. That was what he had called it, after the Lone Ranger's horse. A big Schwinn, twenty-eight inches tall. 'You'll kill yourself on that, Billy,' his father had said, but with no real concern in his tone. He had shown little concern for anything since George's death. Before, he had been tough. Fair, but tough. Since, you could get around him. He would make fatherly gestures, go through fatherly motions, but motions and gestures were all they were. It was like he was always listening for George to come back into the house.

Bill had seen it in the window of the Bike and Cycle Shoppe down on Center Street. It leaned gloomily on its kickstand, bigger than the biggest of the others on display, dull where they were shiny, straight in places where the others were curved, bent in places where the others were straight. Propped on its front tire had been a sign:

USED

Make an Offer

What actually happened was that Bill went in and the owner made him an offer, which Bill took - he wouldn't have known how to dicker with the Cycle Shoppe owner if his life depended on it, and the price - twenty-four dollars - the man quoted seemed very fair to Bill; generous, even. He paid for Silver with money he had saved up over the last seven or eight months - birthday money, Christmas money, lawn-mowing money. He had been noticing the bike in the window ever since Thanksgiving. He paid for it and wheeled it home as soon as the snow began to melt for good. It was funny, because he'd never thought much about owning a bike before last year. The idea seemed to come into his mind all at once, perhaps on one of those endless days after George died. Was murdered.

In the beginning, Bill almost did kill himself. The first ride on his new bike ended with Bill dumping it on purpose to keep from running smack into the board fence at the end of Kossuth Lane (he had not been so afraid of running into the fence as he had been of bashing right through it and falling sixty feet into the Barrens). He came away from that one with a five-inch gash running between the wrist and elbow of his left arm. Not even a week later he had found himself unable to brake soon enough and had shot through the intersection of Witcham and Jackson at perhaps thirty-five miles an hour, a little kid on a dusty gray mastodon of a bike (Silver was silver only by the most energetic reach of a willing imagination), playing cards machine-gunning the spokes of the front and back wheels in a steady roar, and if a car had been coming he would have been dead meat. Just like Georgie.

He got control of Silver little by little as the spring advanced. Neither of his parents noticed during that time that he was conning death by bicycle. He thought that, 'after the first few days, they had ceased to really see his bike at all - to them it was just a relic with chipped paint which leaned against the garage wall on rainy days.

Silver was a lot more than some dusty old relic, though. He didn't look like much, but he went like the wind. Bill's friend - his only real friend - was a kid named Eddie Kaspbrak, and Eddie was good with mechanical things. He had shown Bill how to get Silver in shape - which bolts to tighten and check regularly, where to oil the sprockets, how to tighten the chain, how to put on a bike patch so it would stay if you got a flat.

'You oughtta paint it,' he remembered Eddie saying one day, but Bill didn't want to paint Silver. For reasons he couldn't even explain to himself he wanted the Schwinn just the way it was. It looked like a real bow-wow, the sort of bike a careless kid regularly left out on his lawn in the rain, a bike that would be all squeaks and shudders and slow friction. It looked like a bow-wow but it went like the wind. It would -

'It would beat the devil,' he says aloud, and laughs. His fat seatmate looks at him sharply; the laugh has that howling quality that gave Audra the creeps earlier.

Yes, it looked pretty shoddy, with its old paint and the oldfashioned package carrier mounted above the back wheel and the ancient oogah-horn with its black rubber bulb - that horn was permanently welded to the handlebars with a rusty bolt the size of a baby's fist. Pretty shoddy.

But could Silver go? Could he? Christ!

And it was a damned good thing he could, because Silver had saved Bill Denbrough's life in the fourth week of June 1958 - the week after he met Ben Hanscom for the first lime, the week after he and Ben and Eddie built the dam, the week that Ben and Richie 'Trashmouth' Tozier and Beverly Marsh showed up in the Barrens after the Saturday matinee. Richie had been riding behind him, on Silver's package carrier, the day Silver had saved Bill's life . . . so he supposed Silver had saved Richie's, too. And he remembered the house they had been running from, all right. He remembered that just fine. That damned house on Neibolt Street.

He had raced to beat the devil that day, oh yeah, for sure, don't you just know it. Some devil with eyes as shiny as old deadly coins. Some hairy old devil with a mouthful of bloody teeth. But all that had come later. If Silver had saved Richie's life and his own that day, then perhaps he had saved Eddie Kaspbrak's on the day Bill and Eddie met Ben by the kicked-apart remains of their dam in the Barrens. Henry Bowers - who looked a little bit like someone had run him through a Disposall - had mashed Eddie's nose and then Eddie's asthma had come on strong and few aspirator turned up empty. So it had been Silver that day too, Silver to the rescue.

Bill Denbrough, who hasn't been on a bicycle in almost seventeen years, looks out the window of an airplane that would not have been credited - or even imagined, outside of a science-fiction magazine - in the year 1958. Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYY! he thinks, and has to close his eyes against the sudden needling sting of tears.

What happened to Silver? He can't remember. That pan of the set is still dark; that klieg has yet to be turned on. Perhaps that is just as well. Perhaps that is a mercy.

Hi-yo.

Hi-yo Silver.

Hi-yo Silver.

2

'AWAYYY!' he shouted. The wind tore the words back over his shoulder like a fluttering crepe streamer. They came out big and strong, those words, in a triumphant roar. They were the only ones that ever did.

He pedaled down Kansas Street toward town, gaining speed slowly at first. Silver rolled once he got going, but getting going was a job and a half. Watching the gray bike pick up speed was a little like watching a big plane roll down the runway. At first you couldn't believe such a huge waddling gadget could ever actually leave the earth - the idea was absurd. But then you could see its shadow beneath it, and before you even had time to wonder if it was a mirage, the shadow was trailing out long behind it and the plane was up, cutting its way through the air, as sleek and graceful as a dream in a satisfied mind.

Silver was like that.

Bill got a little downhill stretch and began to pedal faster, his legs pumping up and down as he stood forward over the bike's fork. He had learned very quickly - after being bashed a couple of times by that fork in the worst place a boy can be bashed - to yank his underpants up as high as he could before mounting Silver. Later that summer, observing this process, Richie would say, Bill does that because he thinks he might like to have some kids that live someday. It seems like a bad idea to me, but hey! they might always take after his wife, right?

He and Eddie had lowered the seat as far as it would go, and it now bumped and scraped against the small of his back as he worked the pedals. A woman digging weeds in her flower-garden shaded her eyes to watch him pass. She smiled a little. The boy on the huge bike reminded her of a monkey she had once seen riding a unicycle in the Barnum & Bailey Circus. He's apt to kill himself, though, she thought, turning back to her garden. That bike is too big for him. It was none of her problem, though.

3

Bill had had more sense than to argue with the big boys when they broke out of the bushes, looking like ill-tempered hunters on the track of a beast which had already mauled one of them. Eddie, however, had rashly opened his mouth and Henry Bowers had unloaded on him.

Bill knew who they were, all right; Henry, Belch, and Victor were just about the worst kids in Derry School. They had beaten up on Richie Tozier, who Bill sometimes chummed with, a couple of times. The way Bill looked at it, this was partly Richie's own fault; he was not known as Trashmouth for nothing.

One day in April Richie had said something about their collars as the three of them passed by in the schoolyard. The collars had all been turned up, just like Vie Morrow's in The Blackboard Jungle. Bill, who had been sitting against the building nearby and listlessly shooting a few marbles, hadn't really caught all of it. Neither did Henry and his friends . . . but they heard enough to turn in Richie's direction. Bill supposed Richie had meant to say whatever he said in a low voice. The trouble was, Richie didn't really have a low voice.

'What'd you say, you little four-eyes geek?' Victor Criss enquired.

'I didn't say nothing,' Richie said, and that disclaimer - along with his face, which looked quite sensibly dismayed and scared - might have ended it. Except that Richie's mouth was like a half-tamed horse that has a way of bolting for absolutely no reason at all. Now it suddenly added: 'You ought to dig the wax out of your ears, big fella. Want some blasting powder?'

They stood looking at him incredulously for a moment, and then they took after him. Stuttering Bill had watched the unequal race from its start to its preordained conclusion from his place against the side of the building. No sense getting involved; those three galoots would be just as happy to beat up on two kids for the price of one.

Richie ran diagonally across the little-kids' playyard, leaping over the teeter-totters and dodging among the swings, realizing he had run into a blind alley only when he struck the chainlink fence between the playyard and the park which abutted the school grounds. So he tried to go up the chainlink, all clutching fingers and pointing seeking sneaker-toes, and he was maybe two-thirds of the way to the top when Henry and Victor Criss hauled him back down again, Henry getting him by the back of the jacket and Victor grabbing the seat of his jeans. Richie was screaming when they peeled him off the fence. He hit the asphalt on his back. His glasses flew off. He reached for them and Belch Huggins kicked them away and that was why one of the bows was mended with adhesive tape this summer.

Bill had winced and walked around to the front of the building. He had observed Mrs Moran, one of the fourth-grade teachers, already hurrying over to break things up, but he knew they would get Richie hard before then, and by the time she actually arrived, Richie would be crying. Bawl-baby, bawl-baby, lookit-the-baby-bawl.

Bill had only had minor problems with them. They made fun of his stutter, of course. An occasional random cruelty came with the jibes; one rainy day as they were going to lunch in the gym, Belch Huggins had knocked Bill's lunchbag out of his hand and had stomped it flat with one engineer boot, squishing everything inside.

'Oh, juh-juh-gee!' Belch cried in mock horror, raising his hands and fluttering them about his face. 'Suh-suh-sorry about your l-l-lunch, fuh-huh-huck-face!' And he had strolled off down the hall toward where Victor Criss was leaning against the drinking fountain outside the boys'-room door, just about laughing himself into a hernia. That hadn't been so bad, though; Bill had cadged half a PB & J off Eddie Kaspbrak, and Richie was happy to give him his devilled egg, one of which his mother packed in his lunch about every second day and which made him want to puke, he claimed.

But you had to stay out of their way, and if you couldn't do that you had to try and be invisible.

Eddie forgot the rules, so they creamed him.

He hadn't been too bad until the big boys went downstream and splashed across to the other side, even though his nose was bleeding like a fountain. When Eddie's snotrag was soaked through, Bill had given him his own and made him put a hand on the nape of his neck and lean his head back. Bill could remember his mother getting Georgie to do that, because Georgie sometimes got nosebleeds -

Oh but it hurt to think about George.

It wasn't until the sound of the big boys' buffalolike progress through the Barrens had died away completely, and Eddie's nose-bleed had actually stopped, that his asthma got bad. He started heaving for air, his hands opening and then snapping shut like weak traps, his respiration a fluting whistle in his throat.

'Shit!' Eddie gasped. 'Asthma! Gripes!'

He scrambled for his aspirator and finally got it out of his pocket. It looked almost like a bottle of Windex, the kind with the sprayer attachment on top. He jammed it into his mouth and punched the trigger.

'Better?' Bill asked anxiously.

'No. It's empty.' Eddie looked at Bill with panicked eyes that said I'm caught, Bill! I'm caught!

The empty aspirator rolled away from his hand. The stream chuckled on, not caring in the least that Eddie Kaspbrak could barely breathe. Bill thought randomly that the big boys had been right about one thing: it had been a real baby dam. But they had been having fun, dammit, and he felt a sudden dull fury that it should have come to this.

Tuh-tuh-take it easy, Eh-Eddie,' he said.

For the next forty minutes or so Bill sat next to him, his expectation that Eddie's asthma attack would at any moment let up gradually fading into unease. By the time Ben Hanscom appeared, the unease had become real fear. It not only wasn't letting up; it was getting worse. And the Center Street Drug, where Eddie got his refills, was three miles away, almost. What il he went to get Eddie's stuff and came back to rind Eddie unconscious? Unconscious or

(don't shit please don't think that)

or even dead, his mind insisted implacably.

(like Georgie dead like Georgie]

Don't be such an asshole! He's not going to die!

No, probably not. But what if he came back and found Eddie in a comber? Bill knew all about combers; he had even deduced they were named after those great big waves guys surfed on in Hawaii, and that seemed right enough - after all, what was a comber but a wave that drowned your brain? On doctor shows like Ben Casey, people were always going into combers, and sometimes they stayed there in spite of all Ben Casey's ill-tempered shouting.

So he sat there, knowing he ought to go, he couldn't do Eddie any good staying here, but not wanting to leave him alone. An irrational, superstitious part of him felt sure Eddie would slip into a comber the minute he, Bill, turned his back. Then he looked upstream and saw Ben Hanscom standing there. He knew who Ben was, of course; the fattest kid in any school has his or her own sort of unhappy notoriety. Ben was in the other fifth grade. Bill sometimes saw him at recess, standing by himself - usually in a corner - looking at a book and eating his lunch out of a bag about the size of a laundry sack.

Looking at Ben now, Bill thought he looked even worse than Henry Bowers. It was hard to believe, but true. Bill could not begin to imagine the cataclysmic fight these two must have been in. Ben's hair stood up in wild, dirt-clotted spikes. His sweater or sweat-shirt - it was hard to tell which it had started the day as and it sure as shit didn't matter now - was a matted ruin, smeared with a sicko mixture of blood and grass. His pants were out at the knees.

He saw Bill looking at him and recoiled a bit, eyes going wary.

'Duh-duh-duh-hon't g-g-go!' Bill cried. He put his empty hands up in the air, palms out, to show he was harmless. 'W-W-We need some huh-huh-help.'

Ben came closer, eyes still wary. He walked as if one or both of his legs was killing him. 'Are they gone? Bowers and those guys?'

'Yuh-Yes,' Bill said. 'Listen, cuh-han y-y-you stay with my fruhhend while I go get his muh-medicine? He's got a-a-a-a - '

'Asthma?'

Bill nodded.

Ben came all the way down to the remains of the dam and dropped painfully to one knee beside Eddie, who was lying back with his eyes mostly closed and his chest heaving.

'Which one hit him?' Ben asked finally. He looked up, and Bill saw the same frustrated anger he had been feeling himself on the fat kid's face. 'Was it Henry Bowers?'

Bill nodded.

'It figures. Sure, go on. I'll stay with him.'

Thuh-thuh-hanks.'

'Oh, don't thank me,' Ben said. 'I'm the reason they landed on you in the first place. Go on. Hurry it up. I have to be home for supper.'

Bill went without saying anything else. It would have been good to tell Ben not to take it to heart - what had happened hadn't been Ben's fault any more than it had been Eddie's for stupidly opening his mouth. Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen; the little kids' version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones. It would have been good to say that, but he was so tightly wound right now it would have taken him about twenty minutes or so, and by then Eddie might have slipped into a comber (that was another thing Bill had learned from Drs Casey and Kildare; you never went into a comber; you always slipped into one).

He trotted downstream, glancing back once. He saw Ben Hanscom grimly collecting rocks from the edge of the water. For a moment Bill couldn't figure out what he was doing, and then he understood. It was an ammo dump. Just in case they came back.

4

The Barrens were no mystery to Bill. He had played here a lot this spring, sometimes with Richie, more frequently with Eddie, sometimes all by himself. He had by no means explored the whole area, but he could find his way back to Kansas Street from the Kenduskeag with no trouble, and now did. He came out at a wooden bridge where Kansas Street crossed one of the little no-name streams that flowed out of the Derry drainage system and into the Kenduskeag down below. Silver was stashed under this bridge, his handlebars tied to one of the bridge supports with a hank of rope to keep his wheels out of the water.

Bill untied the rope, stuck it in his shirt, and hauled Silver up to the sidewalk by main force, panting and sweating, losing his balance a couple of times and landing on his tail.

But at last it was up. Bill swung his leg over the high fork.

And as always, once he was on Silver he became someone else.

5

'Hi-yo Silver AW A YYY!'

The words came out deeper than his normal speaking voice - it was almost the voice of the man he would become. Silver gained speed slowly, the quickening clickety-ciack of the Bicycle playing cards clothespinned to the spokes marking the increase. Bill stood on the pedals, his hands clamped on the bike-grips with the wrists turned up. He looked like a man trying to lift a stupendously heavy barbell. Cords stood out on his neck. Veins pulsed in his temples. His mouth was turned down in a trembling sneer of effort as he fought the familiar battle against weight and inertia, busting his brains to get Silver moving.

As always, it was worth the effort.

Silver began to roll along more briskly. Houses slid past smoothly instead of just poking by. On his left, where Kansas Street crossed Jackson, the unfettered Kenduskeag became the Canal. Past the intersection Kansas Street headed swiftly downhill toward Center and Main, Berry's business district.

Streets crossed frequently here but they were all stop-signed in Bill's favor, and the possibility that a driver might one day blow by one of those stop signs and flatten him to a bleeding shadow on the street had never crossed Bill's mind. It is unlikely he would have changed his ways even if it had. He might have done so either earlier or later in his life, but this spring and early summer had been a strange thundery time for him. Ben would have been astounded if someone were to ask him if he was lonely; Bill would have been likewise astounded if someone asked him if he was courting death. Of cuh-cuh-course n-not! he would have responded immediately (and indignantly), but that did not change the fact that his runs down Kansas Street to town had become more and more like banzai charges as the weather warmed.

This section of Kansas Street was known as Up-Mile Hill. Bill took it at full speed, bent over Silver's handlebars to cut down the wind resistance, one hand poised over the cracked rubber bulb of his oogah-horn to warn the unwary, his red hair blowing back from his head in a rippling wave. The click of the playing cards had mounted to a steady roar. The effortful sneer had become a big goofball grin. The residences on the right had given way to business buildings (warehouses and meat-packing plants, most of them) which blurred by in a scary but satisfying rush. To his left the Canal was a wink of fire in the corner of his eye.

'HI-YO SILVER, AWAYYYY!' he screamed triumphantly.

Silver flew over the first curbing, and as they almost always did at that point, his feet lost contact with the pedals. He was freewheeling, now wholly in the lap of whatever god has been appointed the job of protecting small boys. He swerved into the street, doing maybe fifteen miles an hour over the posted speed of twenty-five.

It was all behind him now: his stutter, his dad's blank hurt eyes as he puttered around his garage workshop, the terrible sight of the dust on the closed piano cover upstairs - dusty because his mother didn't play anymore. The last time had been at George's funeral, three Methodist hymns. George going out into the rain, wearing his yellow slicker, carrying the newspaper boat with its glaze of paraffin; Mr Gardener coming up the street twenty minutes later with his body wrapped in a bloodstained quilt; his mother's agonized shriek. All behind him. He was the Lone Ranger, he was John Wayne, he was Bo Diddley, he was anybody he wanted to be and nobody who cried and got scared and wanted his muh-muh-mother.

Silver flew and Stuttering Bill Denbrough flew with him; their gantry-like shadow fled behind them. They raced down Up-Mile Hill together; the playing cards roared. Bill's feet found the pedals again and he began to pump, wanting to go even faster, wanting to reach some hypothetical speed - not of sound but of memory - and crash through the pain barrier.

He raced on, bent over his handlebars; he raced to beat the devil.

The three-way intersection of Kansas, Center, and Main was coming up fast. It was a horror of one-way traffic and conflicting signs and stoplights which were supposed to be timed but really weren't. The result, a Derry News editorial had proclaimed the year before, was a traffic-rotary conceived in hell.

As always, Bill's eyes flicked right and left, fast, gauging the traffic flow, looking for the holes. If his judgment was mistaken - if he stuttered, you might say - he would be badly hurt or killed.

He arrowed into the slow-moving traffic which dogged the intersection, running a red light and fading to the right to avoid a lumbering portholed Buick. He shot a bullet of a glance back over his shoulder to make sure the middle lane was empty. He looked forward again and saw that in roughly five seconds he was going to crash into the rear end of a pick-up truck that had stopped squarely in the middle of the intersection while the Uncle Ike type behind the wheel craned his neck to read all the signs and make sure he hadn't taken a wrong turn and somehow ended up in Miami Beach.

The lane on Bill's right was full of a Derry-Bangor intercity bus. He slipped in that direction just the same and shot the gap between the stopped pick-up and the bus, still moving at forty miles an hour. At the last second he snapped his head hard to one side, like a soldier doing an over-enthusiastic eyes-right, to keep the mirror mounted on the passenger side of the pick-up from rearranging his teeth. Hot diesel from the bus laced his throat like a kick of strong liquor. He heard a thin gasping squeal as one of his bike-grips kissed a line up the coach's aluminum side. He got just a glimpse of the bus driver, his face paper-white under his peaked Hudson Bus Company cap. The driver was shaking his fist at Bill and shouting something. Bill doubted it was happy birthday.

Here was a trio of old ladies crossing Main Street from the New England Bank side to the Shoeboat side. They heard the harsh burr of the playing cards and looked up. Their mouths dropped open as a boy on a huge bike passed within half a foot of them like a mirage.

The worst - and the best - of the trip was behind him now. He had looked at the very real possibility of his own death again and again had found himself able to look away. The bus had not crushed him; he had not killed himself and the three old ladies with their Freese's shopping bags and their Social Security checks; he had not been splattered across the tailgate of Uncle Ike's old Dodge pick-up. He was going uphill again now, speed bleeding away. Something - oh, call it desire, that was good enough, wasn't it? - was bleeding away with it. All the thoughts and memories were catching up - in Bill, gee, we almost lost sight of you for awhile there, but here we are - rejoining him, climbing up his shirt and jumping into his ear and whooshing into his brain like little kids going down a slide. He could feel them settling into their accustomed places, their feverish bodies jostling each other. Gosh! Wow! Here we are inside Bill's head again! Let's think about George! Okay! Who wants to start?

You think too much, Bill.

No - that wasn't the problem. The problem was, he imagined too much.

He turned into Richard's Alley and came out on Center Street a few moments later, pedaling slowly, feeling the sweat on his back and in his hair. He dismounted Silver in front of the Center Street Drug Store and went inside.

6

Before George's death, Bill would have gotten the salient points across to Mr Keene by speaking to him. The druggist was not exactly kind - or at least Bill had an idea he was not - but he was patient enough, and he did not tease or make fun. But now Bill's stutter was much worse, and he really was afraid something bad might happen to Eddie if he didn't move fast.

So when Mr Keene said, 'Hello, Billy Denbrough, can I help you?,' Bill took a folder advertising vitamins, turned it over, and wrote on the back: Eddie Kaspbrak and I were playing in the Barrens. He's got a bad assmar attack, I mean he can hardly breath. Canyon give me a refill on his asspirador?

He pushed this note across the glass-topped counter to Mr Keene, who read it, looked at Bill's anxious blue eyes, and said, 'Of course. Wait right here, and don't be handling anything you shouldn't.'

Bill shifted impatiently from one foot to the other while Mr Keene was behind the rear counter. Although he was back there less than five minutes, it seemed an age before he returned with one of Eddie's plastic squeeze-bottles. He handed it over to Bill, smiled, and said, This should take care of the problem.'

'Th-th-th-thanks,' Bill said. 'I don't h-have a-any m-m-muh-muh - '

'That's all right, son. Mrs Kaspbrak has an account here. I'll just add this on. I'm sure she'll want to thank you for your kindness.'

Bill, much relieved, thanked Mr Keene and left quickly. Mr Keene came around the counter to watch him go. He saw Bill toss the aspirator into his bike-basket and mount clumsily. Can he actually ride a bike that big? Mr Keene wondered. I doubt it. I doubt it very much. But the Denbrough kid somehow got it going without falling on his head, and pedaled slowly away. The bike, which looked to Mr Keene like somebody's idea of a joke, wobbled madly from side to side. The aspirator rolled back and forth in the basket.

Mr Keene grinned a little. If Bill had seen that grin, it might have gone a good way toward confirming his idea that Mr Keene was not exactly one of the world's champion nice guys. It was sour, the grin of a man who has found much to wonder about but almost nothing to uplift in the human condition. Yes - he would add Eddie's asthma medication to Sonia Kaspbrak's bill, and as always she would be surprised - and suspicious rather than grateful - at how cheap the medication was. Other drugs were so dear, she said. Mrs Kaspbrak, Mr Keene knew, was one of those people who believed nothing cheap could do a person much good. He could really have soaked her for her son's HydrOx Mist, and there had been times when he had been tempted . . . but why should he make himself a party to the woman's foolishness? It wasn't as though he were going to starve.

Cheap? Oh my, yes. HydrOx Mist (Administer as needed typed neatly on the gummed label he pasted on each aspirator bottle) was wonderfully cheap, but even Mrs Kaspbrak was willing to admit that it controlled her son's asthma quite well in spite of that fact. It was cheap because it was nothing but a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, with a dash of camphor added to give the mist a faint medicinal taste.

In other words, Eddie's asthma medicine was tapwater.

7