IT

It took Bill longer to get back, because he was going uphill. In several places he had to dismount and push Silver. He simply didn't have the musclepower necessary to keep the bike going up more than mild slopes.

By the time he had stashed his bike and made his way back to the stream, it was ten past four. All sorts of black suppositions were crossing his mind. The Hanscom kid would have deserted, leaving Eddie to die. Or the bullies could have backtracked and beaten the shit out of both of them. Or . . . worst of all . . . the man whose business was murdering kids might have gotten one or both of them. As he had gotten George.

He knew there had been a great deal of gossip and speculation about that. Bill had a bad stutter, but he wasn't deaf - although people sometimes seemed to think he must be, since he spoke only when absolutely necessary. Some people felt that the murder of his brother wasn't related at all to the murders of Betty Ripsom, Cheryl Lamonica, Matthew Clements, and Veronica Grogan. Others claimed that George, Ripsom, and Lamonica had been killed by one man, and the other two were the work of a 'copy-cat killer.' A third school of thought held that the boys had been killed by one man, the girls by another.

Bill believed they had all been killed by the same person . . . if it was a person. He sometimes wondered about that. As he sometimes wondered about his feelings concerning Derry this summer. Was it still the aftermath of George's death, the way his parents seemed to ignore him now, so lost in their grief over their younger son that they couldn't see the simple fact that Bill was still alive, and might be hurting himself? Those things combined with the other murders? The voices that sometimes seemed to speak in his head now, whispering to him (and surely they were not variations of his own voice, for these voices did not stutter - they were quiet, but they were sure), advising him to do certain things but not others? Was it those things which made Derry seem somehow different now? Somehow threatening, with unexplored streets that did not invite but seemed instead to yawn in a kind of ominous silence? That made some faces look secret and frightened?

He didn't know, but he believed - as he believed all the murders were the work of a single agency - that Derry really had changed, and that his brother's death had signalled the beginning of that change. The black suppositions in his head came from the lurking idea that anything could happen in Derry now. Anything.

But when he came around the last bend, all looked cool. Ben Hanscom was still there, sitting beside Eddie. Eddie himself was sitting up now, his hands dangling in his lap, head bent, still wheezing. The sun had sunk low enough to project long green shadows across the stream.

'Boy, that was quick,' Ben said, standing up. 'I didn't expect you for another half an hour.'

'I got a f-f-fast b-bike,' Bill said with some pride. For a moment the two of them looked at each other cautiously, warily. Then Ben smiled tentatively, and Bill smiled back. The kid was fat, but he seemed okay. And he had stayed put. That must have taken some guts, with Henry and his j.d. friends maybe still wandering around out there someplace.

Bill winked at Eddie, who was looking at him with dumb gratitude. 'H-Here you g-go, E-E-E-Eddie.' He tossed him the aspirator. Eddie plunged it into his open mouth, triggered it, and gasped convulsively. Then he leaned back, eyes shut. Ben watched this with concern.

'Jeez! He's really got it bad, doesn't he?'

Bill nodded.

'I was scared there for awhile,' Ben said in a low voice. 'I was wonderin what to do if he had a convulsion, or something. I kept tryin to remember the stuff they told us in that Red Cross assembly we had in April. All I could come up with was put a stick in his mouth so he wouldn't bite his tongue off.'

'I think that's for eh-eh-hepileptics.'

'Oh. Yeah, I guess you're right.'

'He w-won't have a c-c-convulsion, anyway,' Bill said. 'That m-m-medicine will f-fix him right up. Luh-Luh-Look.'

Eddie's labored breathing had eased. He opened his eyes and looked up at them.

'Thanks, Bill,' he said. 'That one was a real pisswah.'

'I guess it started when they creamed your nose, huh?' Ben asked.

Eddie laughed ruefully, stood up, and stuck the aspirator in his back pocket. 'Wasn't even thinking about my nose. Was thinking about my mom.'

'Yeah? Really?' Ben sounded surprised, but his hand went to the rags of his sweatshirt and began fiddling there nervously.

'She's gonna take one look at the blood on my shirt and have me down to the Mergency Room at Derry Home in about five seconds.'

'Why?' Ben asked. 'It stopped, didn't it? Gee, I remember this kid I was in kindergarten with, Scooter Morgan, and he got a bloody nose when he fell off the monkey bars. They took him to the Mergency Room, but only because it kept bleeding.'

'Yeah?' Bill asked, interested. 'Did he d-d-die?'

'No, but he was out of school a week.'

'It doesn't matter if it stopped or not,' Eddie said gloomily. 'She'll take me anyway. She'll think it's broken and I got pieces of bone sticking in my brain, or something.'

'C-C-Can you get bones in your buh-buh-brain?' Bill asked. This was turning into the most interesting conversation he'd had in weeks.

'I don't know. If you listen to my mother, you can get anything.' Eddie turned to Ben again. 'She takes me down to the Mergency Room about once or twice a month. I hate that place. There was this orderly once? He told her they oughtta make her pay rent. She was really PO'd.'

'Wow,' Ben said. He thought Eddie's mother must be really weird. He was unconscious of the fact that now both of his hands were fiddling in the remains of his sweatshirt. 'Why don't you just say no? Say something like "Hey Ma, I feel all right, I just want to stay home and watch Sea Hunt." Like that.'

'Awww,' Eddie said uncomfortably, and said no more.

'You're Ben H-H-H-Hanscom, r-right?' Bill asked.

'Yeah. You're Bill Denbrough.'

'Yuh-Yes. And this is Eh-Eh-Eh-heh-Eh-Eh - '

'Eddie Kaspbrak,' Eddie said. 'I hate it when you stutter my name, Bill. You sound like Elmer Fudd.'

'Suh-horry.'

'Well, I'm pleased to meet you both,' Ben said. It came out sounding prissy and a little lame. A silence fell amid the three of them. It was not an entirely uncomfortable silence. In it they became friends.

'Why were those guys chasing you?' Eddie asked at last.

'They're a-a-always chuh-hasing s-someone,' Bill said. 'I h-hate those fuckers.'

Ben was silent a moment - mostly in admiration - before Bill's use of what Ben's mother sometimes called The Really Bad Word. Ben had never said The Really Bad Word out loud in his whole life, although he had written it (in extremely small letters) on a telephone pole the Halloween before last.

'Bowers ended up sitting next to me during the exams,' Ben said at last. 'He wanted to copy off my paper. I wouldn't let him.'

'You must want to die young, kid,' Eddie said admiringly.

Stuttering Bill burst out laughing. Ben looked at him sharply, decided he wasn't being laughed at, exactly (it was hard to say how he knew it, but he did), and grinned.

'I guess I must,' he said. 'Anyway, he's got to take summer-school, and he and those other two guys were laying for me, and that's what happened.'

'Y-You look like t-t-they kuh-hilled you,' Bill said.

'I fell down here from Kansas Street. Down the side of the hill.' He looked at Eddie. 'I'll probably see you in the Mergency Room, now that I think about it. When my mom gets a look at my clothes, she'll put me there.'

Both Bill and Eddie burst out laughing this time, and Ben joined them. It hurt his stomach to laugh but he laughed anyway, shrilly and a little hysterically. Finally he had to sit down on the bank, and the plopping sound his butt made when it hit the dirt got him going all over again. He liked the way his laughter sounded with theirs. It was a sound he had never heard before: not mingled laughter - he had heard that lots of times - but mingled laughter of which his own was a part.

He looked up at Bill Denbrough, their eyes met, and that was all it took to get both of them laughing again.

Bill hitched up his pants, flipped up the collar of his shirt, and began to slouch around in a kind of moody, hoody strut. His voice dropped down low and he said, 'I'm gonna killya, kid. Don't gimme no crap. I'm dumb but I'm big. I can crack walnuts with my forehead. I can piss vinegar and shit cement. My name's Honeybunch Bowers and I'm the boss prick round dese-yere Derry parts.'

Eddie had collapsed to the stream-bank now and was rolling around, clutching his stomach and howling. Ben was doubled up, head between his knees, tears spouting from his eyes, snot hanging from his nose in long white runners, laughing like a hyena.

Bill sat down with them, and little by little the three of them quieted.

'There's one really good thing about it,' Eddie said presently. 'If Bowers is in summer school, we won't see him much down here.'

'You play in the Barrens a lot?' Ben asked. It was an idea that never would have crossed his own mind in a thousand years - not with the reputation the Barrens had - but now that he was down here, it didn't seem bad at all. In fact, this stretch of the low bank was very pleasant as the afternoon made its slow way toward dusk.

'S-S-Sure. It's n-neat. M-Mostly n-nobody b-buh-bothers u-us down h-here. We guh-guh-hoof off a lot. B-B-Bowers and those uh-other g-guys don't come d-down here eh-eh-anyway.'

'You and Eddie?'

'Ruh-Ruh-Ruh - ' Bill shook his head. His face knotted up like a wet dishrag when he stuttered, Ben noticed, and suddenly an odd thought occurred to him: Bill hadn't stuttered at all when he was mocking the way Henry Bowers talked. 'Richie!' Bill exclaimed now, paused a moment, and then went on. 'Richie T-Tozier usually c-comes down, too. But h-him and his d-dad were going to clean out their ah-ah-ah - '

'Attic,' Eddie translated, and tossed a stone into the water. Plonk.

'Yeah, I know him,' Ben said. 'You guys come down here a lot, huh?' The idea fascinated him - and made him feel a stupid sort of longing as well.

'Puh-Puh-Pretty much,' Bill said. 'Wuh-Why d-don't you c-c-come back down tuh-huh-morrow? M-Me and E-E-Eddie were tub-trying to make a duh-duh-ham.'

Ben could say nothing. He was astounded not only by the offer but by the simple and unstudied casualness with which it had come.

'Maybe we ought to do something else,' Eddie said. 'The dam wasn't working so hot anyway.'

Ben got up and walked down to the stream, brushing the dirt from his huge hams. There were still matted piles of small branches at either side of the stream, but anything else they'd put together had washed away.

'You ought to have some boards,' Ben said. 'Get boards and put em in a row . . . facing each other . . . like the bread of a sandwich.'

Bill and Eddie were looking at him, puzzled. Ben dropped to one knee. 'Look,' he said. 'Boards here and here. You stick em in the streambed facing each other. Okay? Then, before the water can wash them away, you fill up the space between them with rocks and sand - '

'Wuh-Wuh-We,' Bill said.

'Huh?'

'Wuh-We do it.'

'Oh,' Ben said, feeling (and looking, he was sure) extremely stupid. But he didn't care if he looked stupid, because he suddenly felt very happy. He couldn't even remember the last time he felt this happy. 'Yeah. We. Anyway, if you - we - fill up the space in between with rocks and stuff, it'll stay. The upstream board will lean back against the rocks and dirt as the water piles up. The second board would tilt back and wash away after awhile, I guess, but if we had a third board . . . well, look.'

He drew in the dirt with a stick. Bill and Eddie Kaspbrak leaned over and studied this little drawing with sober interest:

[image of a simple dam, built with boards and rocks]

'You ever built a dam before?' Eddie asked. His tone was respectful, almost awed.

'Nope.'

'Then h-h-how do you know this'll w-w-work?'

Ben looked at Bill, puzzled. 'Sure it will,' he said. 'Why wouldn't it?'

'But h-how do you nuh-nuh-know?' Bill asked. Ben recognized the tone of the question as one not of sarcastic disbelief but honest interest. 'H-How can y-you tell?'

'I just know,' Ben said. He looked down at his drawing in the dirt again as if to confirm it to himself. He had never seen a cofferdam in his life, either in diagram or in fact, and had no idea that he had just drawn a pretty fair representation of one.

'O-Okay,' Bill said, and clapped Ben on the back. 'S-See you tuh-huh-morrow.'

'What time?'

'M-Me and Eh-Eddie'll g-get here by eh-eh-eight-th-thirty or so - '

'If me and my mom aren't still waiting at the Mergency Room,' Eddie said, and sighed.

'I'll bring some boards,' Ben said. 'This old guy on the next block's got a bunch of 'em. I'll hawk a few.'

'Bring some supplies, too,' Eddie said. 'Stuff to eat. You know, like san-widges, Ring-Dings, stuff like that.'

'Okay.'

'You g-g-got any guh-guh-guns?'

'I got my Daisy air rifle,' Ben said. 'My mom gave it to me for Christmas, but she gets mad if I shoot it off in the house.'

'B-Bring it d-d-down,' Bill said. 'We'll play g-guns, maybe.'

'Okay,' Ben said happily. 'Listen, I got to split for home, you guys.'

'Uh-Us, too,' Bill said.

The three of them left the Barrens together. Ben helped Bill push Silver up the embankment. Eddie trailed behind them, wheezing again and looking unhappily at his blood-spotted shirt.

Bill said goodbye and then pedaled off, shouting 'Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYY!' at the top of his lungs.

'That's a gigantic bike,' Ben said.

'Bet your fur,' Eddie said. He had taken another gulp from his aspirator and was breathing normally again. 'He rides me double sometimes on the back. Goes so fast it just about scares the crap outta me. He's a good man, Bill is.' He said this last in an offhand way, but his eyes said something more emphatic. They were worshipful. 'You know about what happened to his brother, don't you?'

'No - what about him?'

'Got killed last fail. Some guy killed him. Pulled one of his arms right off, just like pulling a wing off n a fly.'

'Jeezum-crow!'

'Bill, he used to only stutter a little. Now it's really bad. Did you notice that he stutters?'

'Well . . . a little.'

'But his brains don't stutter - get what I mean?'

'Yeah.'

'Anyway, I just told you because if you want Bill to be your friend, it's better not to talk to him about his little brother. Don't ask him questions or anythin. He's all frigged up about it.'

'Man, I would be, too,' Ben said. He remembered now, vaguely, about the little kid who had been killed the previous fall. He wondered if his mother had been thinking about George Denbrough when she gave him the watch he now wore, or only about the more recent killings. 'Did it happen right after the big flood?'

'Yeah.'

They had reached the corner of Kansas and Jackson, where they would have to split up. Kids ran here and there, playing tag and throwing baseballs. One dorky little kid in big blue shorts went trotting self-importantly past Ben and Eddie, wearing a Davy Crockett coonskin backward so that the tail hung down between his eyes. He was rolling a Hula Hoop and yelling 'Hoop-tag, you guys! Hoop-tag, wanna?'

The two bigger boys looked after him, amused, and then Eddie said: 'Well, I gotta go.'

'Wait a sec,' Ben said. 'I got an idea, if you really don't want to go to the Mergency Room.'

'Oh yeah?' Eddie looked at Ben, doubtful but wanting to hope.

'You got a nickel?'

'I got a dime. So what?'

Ben eyed the drying maroon splotches on Eddie's shirt. 'Stop at the store and get a chocolate milk. Pour about half of it on your shirt. Then when you get home tell your mama you spilled all of it.'

Eddie's eyes brightened. In the four years since his dad had died, his mother's eyesight had worsened considerably. For reasons of vanity (and because she didn't know how to drive a car), she refused to see an optometrist and get glasses. Dried bloodstains and chocolate milk stains looked about the same. Maybe . . .

'That might work,' he said.

'Just don't tell her it was my idea if she finds out.'

'I won't,' Eddie said. 'Seeya later, alligator.'

'Okay.'

'No,' Eddie said patiently. 'When I say that you're supposed to say, "After awhile, crocodile."'

'Oh. After awhile, crocodile.'

'You got it.' Eddie smiled.

'You know something?' Ben said. 'You guys are really cool.'

Eddie looked more than embarrassed; he looked almost nervous. 'Bill is,' he said, and started off.

Ben watched him go down Jackson Street, and then turned toward home. Three blocks up the street he saw three all-too-familiar figures standing at the bus stop on the corner of Jackson and Main. They were mostly turned away from Ben, which was damned lucky for him. He ducked behind a hedge, his heart beating hard. Five minutes later the Derry-Newport-Haven interurban bus pulled up. Henry and his friends pitched their butts into the street and swung aboard.

Ben waited until the bus was out of sight and then hurried home.

8

That night a terrible thing happened to Bill Denbrough. It happened for the second time.

His mom and dad were downstairs watching TV, not talking much, sitting at either end of the couch like bookends. There had been a time when the TV room opening off the kitchen would have been full of talk and laughter, sometimes so much of both you couldn't hear the TV at all. 'Shut up, Georgie!' Bill would roar. 'Stop hogging all the popcorn and I will,' George would return. 'Ma, make Bill give me the popcorn.' 'Bill, give him the popcorn. George, don't call me Ma. Ma's a sound a sheep makes.' Or his dad would tell a joke and they would all laugh, even Mom. George didn't always get the jokes, Bill knew, but he laughed because everyone else was laughing.

In those days his mom and dad had also been bookends on the couch, but he and George had been the books. Bill had tried to be a book between them while they were watching TV since George's death, but it was cold work. They sent the cold out from both directions and Bill's defroster was simply not big enough to cope with it. He had to leave because that kind of cold always froze his cheeks and made his eyes water.

'W-Want to h-hear a joke I heard today in s-s-school?' he had tried once, some months ago.

Silence from them. On television a criminal was begging his brother, who was a priest, to hide him.

Bill's dad glanced up from the True he was looking at and glanced at Bill with mild surprise. Then he looked back down at the magazine again. There was a picture of a hunter sprawled in a snowbank and staring up at a huge snarling polar bear. 'Mauled by the Killer from the White Wastes' was the name of the article. Bill had thought, I know where there's some white wastes - right between my dad and mom on this couch.

His mother had never looked up at all.

'It's about h-how many F-F-Frenchmen it takes to sc-c-herew in a luhhh-hightbulb,' Bill plunged ahead. He felt a fine mist of sweat spring out upon his forehead, as it sometimes did in school when he knew the teacher had ignored him as long as she safely could and must soon call on him. His voice was too loud, but he couldn't seem to lower it. The words echoed in his head like crazy chimes, echoing, jamming up, spilling out again.

'D-D-Do you know h-h-how muh-muh-many?'

'One to hold the bulb and four to turn the house,' Zack Denbrough said absently, and turned the page of his magazine.

'Did you say something, dear?' his mother asked, and on Four Star Playhouse the brother who was a priest told the brother who was a hoodlum to turn himself in and pray for forgiveness.

Bill sat there, sweating but cold - so cold. It was cold because he wasn't really the only book between those two ends; Georgie was still there, only now it was a Georgie he couldn't see, a Georgie who never demanded the popcorn or hollered that Bill was pinching. This new version of George never cut up dickens. It was a one-armed Georgie who was palely, thoughtfully silent in the Motorola's shadowy white-and-blue glow, and perhaps it was not from his parents but from George that the big chill was really coming; perhaps it was George who was the real killer from the white wastes. Finally Bill had fled from that cold, invisible brother and into his room, where he lay face down on his bed and cried into his pillow.

George's room was just as it had been on the day he died. Zack had put a bunch of George's toys into a canon one day about two weeks after he was buried, meaning them for the Goodwill or the Salvation Army or someplace like that, Bill supposed. Sharon Denbrough had spotted him coming out with the box in his arms and her hands had flown to her head like startled white birds and plunged themselves deep into her hair where they locked themselves into pulling fists. Bill had seen this and had fallen against the wall, the strength suddenly running out of his legs. His mother looked as mad as Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein.

'Don't you DARE take his things!' she had screeched.

Zack flinched and then took the box of toys back into George's room without a word. He even put them back in exactly the same places from which he had taken them. Bill came in and saw his father kneeling by George's bed (which his mother still changed, although only once a week now instead of twice) with his head on his hairy muscular forearms. Bill saw his father was crying, and this increased his terror. A frightening possibility suddenly occurred to him: maybe sometimes things didn't just go wrong and then stop; maybe sometimes they just kept going wronger and wronger until everything was totally fucked up.

'D-Duh-Dad - '

'Go on, Bill,' his father said. His voice was muffled and shaking. His back went up and down. Bill badly wanted to touch his father's back, to see if perhaps his hand might be able to still that restless heaving. He did not quite dare. 'Go on, buzz off.'

He left and went creeping along the upstairs hall, hearing his mother doing her own crying down in the kitchen. The sound was shrill and helpless. Bill thought, Why are they crying so far apart? and then he shoved the thought away.

9

On the first night of summer vacation Bill went into Georgie's room. His heart was beating heavily in his chest, and his legs felt stiff and awkward with tension. He came to George's room often, but that didn't mean he liked it in here. The room was so full of George's presence that it felt haunted. He came in and couldn't help thinking that the closet door might creak open at any moment and there would be Georgie among the shirts and pants still neatly hung in there, a Georgie dressed in a rainslicker covered with red splotches and streaks, a rainslicker with one dangling yellow arm. George's eyes would be blank and terrible, the eyes of a zombie in a horror movie. When he came out of the closet his galoshes would make squishy sounds as he walked across the room toward where Bill sat on his bed, a frozen block of terror -

If the power had gone out some evening while he sat here on George's bed, looking at the pictures on George's wall or the models on top of George's dresser, he felt sure a heart attack, probably fatal, would ensue in the next ten seconds or so. But he went anyway. Warring with his terror of George-the-ghost was a mute and grasping need - a hunger - to somehow get over George's death and find a decent way to go on. Not to forget George but somehow to find a way to make him not so fucking gruesome. He understood that his parents were not succeeding very well with that, and if he was going to do it for himself, he would have to do it by himself.

Nor was it just for himself that he came; he came for Georgie as well. He had loved George, and for brothers they had gotten along pretty well. Oh, they had their pissy moments - Bill giving George a good old Indian rope-burn, George tattling on Bill when Bill snuck downstairs after lights-out and ate the rest of the lemon-cream frosting - but mostly they got along. Bad enough that George should be dead. For him to turn George into some kind of horror-monster . . . that was even worse.

He missed the little kid, that was the truth. Missed his voice, his laughter - missed the way George's eyes sometimes tipped confidently up to his own, sure that Bill would have whatever answers were required. And one surpassingly odd thing: there were times when he felt he loved George best in his fear, because even in his fear - his uneasy feelings that a zombie-George might be lurking in the closet or under the bed - he could remember loving George better in here, and George loving him. In his effort to reconcile these two emotions - his love and his terror - Bill felt that he was closest to finding where final acceptance lay.

These were not things of which he could have spoken; to his mind the ideas were nothing but an incoherent jumble. But his warm and desiring heart understood, and that was all that mattered.

Sometimes he looked through George's books, sometimes he sifted through George's toys.

He hadn't looked in George's photograph album since last December.

Now, on the night after meeting Ben Hanscom, Bill opened the door of George's closet (steeling himself as always to meet the sight of Georgie himself, standing in his bloody slicker amid the hanging clothes, expecting as always to see one pallid, fish-fingered hand come pistoning out of the dark to grip his arm) and took the album down from the top shelf.

MY PHOTOGRAPHS, the gold script on the front read. Below, Scotch-taped on (the tape was now slightly yellow and peeling), the carefully printed words GEORGE ELMER DENBROUGH, AGE 6. Bill took it back to the bed Georgie had slept in, his heart beating heavier than ever. He couldn't tell what had made him get the photograph album down again. After what had happened in December . . .

A second look, that's all. Just to convince yourself that it wasn't real the first time. That the first time was just your head playing a trick on itself.

Well, it was an idea, anyway.

It might even be true. But Bill suspected it was just the album itself. It held a certain mad fascination for him. What he had seen, or what he thought he had seen -

He opened the album now. It was filled with pictures George had gotten his mother, father, aunts, and uncles to give him. George didn't care if they were pictures of people and places he knew or not; it was the idea of photography itself which fascinated him. When he had been unsuccessful at pestering anyone into giving him new photos to mount he would sit cross-legged on his bed where Bill was sitting now and look at the old ones, turning the pages carefully, studying the black-and-white Kodaks. Here was their mother when she was young and impossibly gorgeous; here their father, no more than eighteen, one of a trio of smiling rifle-toting young men standing over the open-eyed corpse of a deer; Uncle Hoyt standing on some rocks and holding up a pickerel; Aunt Fortuna, at the Derry Agricultural Fair, kneeling proudly beside a basket of tomatoes she had raised; an old Buick automobile; a church; a house; a road that went from somewhere to somewhere. All these pictures, snapped by lost somebodies for lost reasons, locked up here in a dead boy's album of photographs.

Here Bill saw himself at three, propped up in a hospital bed with a turban of bandages covering his hair. Bandages went down his cheeks and under his fractured jaw. He had been struck by a car in the parking lot of the A&P on Center Street. He remembered very little of his hospital stay, only that they had given him ice-cream milk shakes through a straw and his head had ached dreadfully for three days.

Here was the whole family on the lawn of the house, Bill standing by his mother and holding her hand, and George, only a baby, sleeping in Zack's arms. And here -

It wasn't the end of the book, but it was the last page that mattered, because the following ones were all blank. The final picture was George's school picture, taken in October of last year, less than ten days before he died. In it George was wearing a crew-neck shirt. His fly-away hair was slicked down with water. He was grinning, revealing two empty slots in which new teeth would never grow - unless they keep on growing after you die, Bill thought, and shuddered.

He looked at the picture fixedly for some time and was about to close the book when what had happened in December happened again.

George's eyes rolled in the picture. They turned up to meet Bill's own. George's artificial say-cheese smile turned into a horrid leer. His right eye drooped closed in a wink: See you soon, Bill. In my closet. Maybe tonight.

Bill threw the book across the room. He clapped his hands over his mouth.

The book struck the wall and fell to the floor, open. The pages turned, although there was no draft. The book opened itself to that awful picture again, the picture which said SCHOOL FRIENDS 1957-58 beneath it.

Blood began to flow from the picture.

Bill sat frozen, his tongue a swelling choking lump in his mouth, his skin crawling, his hair lifting. He wanted to scream but the tiny whimpering sounds crawling out of his throat seemed to be the best he could manage.

The blood flowed across the page and began to drip onto the floor.

Bill fled the room, slammjng the door behind him.

C H A P T E R 6

One of the Missing:

A Tale from the Summer of '58

1

They weren't all found. No; they weren't all found. And from time to time wrong assumptions were made.

2

From the Derry News, June 21st, 1958 (page 1):

MISSING BOY PROMPTS NEW FEARS

Edward L. Corcoran, of 73 Charter Street, Derry, was reported missing last night by his mother, Monica Macklin, and his stepfather, Richard P. Macklin. The Corcoran boy is ten. His disappearance has prompted new fears that Derry's young people are being stalked by a killer.

Mrs Macklin said the boy had been missing since June 19th, when he failed to return home from school after the last day of classes before summer vacation.

When asked why they had delayed over twenty-four hours before reporting their son's absence, Mr and Mrs Macklin refused comment. Police Chief Richard Borton also declined comment, but a Police Department source told the News that the Corcoran boy's relationship with his stepfather was not a good one, and that he had spent nights out of the house before. The source speculated that the boy's final grades may have played a part in the boy's failure to turn up. Derry School Superintendent Harold Metcalf declined comment on the Corcoran boy's grades, pointing out they are not a matter of public record.

'I hope the disappearance of this boy will not cause unnecessary fears,' Chief Borton said last night. The mood of the community is understandably uneasy, but I want to emphasize that we log thirty to fifty missing-persons reports on minors each and every year. Most turn up alive and well within a week of the initial report. This will be the case with Edward Corcoran, God willing.'

Borton also reiterated his conviction that the murders of George Denbrough, Betty Ripsom, Cheryl Lamonica, Matthew Clements, and Veronica Grogan were not the work of one person. 'There are essential differences in each crime,' Borton said, but declined to elaborate. He said that local police, working in close co-operation with the Maine State Attorney General's office, are still following up a number of leads. Asked in a telephone interview last night how good these leads are, Chief Borton replied: 'Very good.' Asked if an arrest in any of the crimes was expected soon, Borton declined comment.

From the Derry News, June 22nd, 1958 (page 1):

COURT ORDERS SURPRISE EXHUMATION

In a bizarre new twist to the disappearance of Edward Corcoran, Derry District Court Judge Erhardt K. Moulton ordered the exhumation of Corcoran's younger brother, Dorsey, late yesterday. The court order followed a joint request from the County Attorney and the County Medical Examiner.

Dorsey Corcoran, who also lived with his mother and stepfather at 73 Charter Street, died of what were reported to be accidental causes in May of 1957. The boy was brought into the Derry Home Hospital suffering from multiple fractures, including a fractured skull. Richard P. Macklin, the boy's stepfather, was the admitting person. He stated that Dorsey Corcoran had been playing on a stepladder in the garage and had apparently fallen from the top. The boy died without recovering consciousness three days later.

Edward Corcoran, ten, was reported missing late Wednesday. Asked if either Mr or Mrs Macklin was under suspicion in either the younger boy's death or the older boy's disappearance, Chief Richard Borton declined comment.

From the Derry News, June 24th, 1958 (page 1):

MACKLIN ARRESTED IN BEATING DEATH

Under Suspicion in Unsolved Disappearance

Chief Richard Borton of the Derry Police called a news conference yesterday to announce that Richard P. Macklin, of 73 Charter Street, had been arrested and charged with the murder of his stepson, Dorsey Corcoran. The Corcoran boy died in Derry Home Hospital of reported 'accidental causes' on May 31st of last year. 'The medical examiner's report shows that the boy was badly beaten,' Borton said. Although Macklin claimed the boy had fallen from a stepladder while playing in the garage, Borton said the County Medical Examiner's report showed that Dorsey Corcoran was severely beaten with some blunt instrument. When asked what sort of instrument, Borton said: 'It might have been a hammer. Right now the important thing is the medical examiner's conclusion that this boy was struck repeated blows with some object hard enough to break his bones. The wounds, particularly those in the skull, are not at all consistent with those which might be incurred in a fall. Dorsey Corcoran was beaten within an inch of his life and then dumped off at the Home Hospital emergency room to die.'

Asked if the doctors who treated the Corcoran boy might have been derelict in their duty when it came to reporting either an incidence of child abuse or the actual cause of death, Borton said, 'They will have serious questions to answer when Mr Macklin comes to trial.'

Asked for an opinion on how these developments might bear on the recent disappearance of Dorsey Corcoran's older brother, Edward, reported missing by Richard and Monica Macklin four days ago, Chief Borton answered: 'I think it looks much more serious than we first supposed, don't you?'

From the Derry News, June 25th, 1958 (page 2):

TEACHER SAYS EDWARD CORCORAN 'OFTEN BRUISED'

Henrietta Dumont, who teaches fifth grade at Derry Elementary School on Jackson Street, said that Edward Corcoran, who has now been missing for nearly a week, often came to school 'covered with bruises.' Mrs Dumont, who has taught one of Derry's two fifth-grade classes since the end of World War II, said that the Corcoran boy came to school one day about three weeks before his disappearance 'with both eyes nearly closed shut. When I asked him what happened, he said his father had "taken him up" for not eating his supper.'

When asked why she had not reported a beating of such obvious severity, Mrs Dumont said, 'This isn't the first time I've seen such a thing as this in my career as a teacher. The first few times I had a student with a parent who was confusing beatings with discipline, I tried to do something about it. I was told by the assistant principal, Gwendolyn Rayburn in those days, to stay out of it. She told me that when school employees get involved in cases of suspected child abuse, it always comes back to haunt the School Department at tax appropriation tune. I went to the principal and he told me to forget it or I would be reprimanded. I asked him if a reprimand in a matter like that would go on my record. He said a reprimand did not have to be on a teacher's record. I got the message.'

Asked if the attitude in the Derry school system remained the same now, Mrs Dumont said, 'Well, what does it look like, in light of this current situation? And I might add that I would not be speaking to you now if I hadn't retired at the end of this school year.'

Mrs Dumont went on, 'Since this thing came out I get down on my knees every night and pray that Eddie Corcoran just got fed up with that beast of a stepfather and ran away. I pray that when he reads in the paper or hears on the news that Macklin has been locked up, Eddie will come home.'

In a brief telephone interview Monica Macklin hotly refuted Mrs Dumont's charges. 'Rich never beat Dorsey, and he never beat Eddie, either,' she said. 'I'm telling you that right now, and when I die I'll stand at the Throne of Judgment and look God right in the eye and tell Him the same thing.'

From the Derry News, June 28th, 1958 (page 2):

'DADDY HAD TO TAKE ME UP 'CAUSE I'M BAD,'

TOT TOLD NURSERY TEACHER BEFORE BEATING DEATH

A local nursery-school teacher who declined to be identified told a News reporter yesterday that young Dorsey Corcoran came to his twice-weekly nursery-school class with bad sprains of his right thumb and three fingers of his right hand less than a week before his death in a purported garage accident.

'It was hurting him enough so that the poor little guy couldn't color his Mr Do safety poster,' the teacher said. The fingers were swelled up like sausages. When I asked Dorsey what happened, he said that his father (stepfather Richard P. Macklin) had bent his fingers back because he had walked across a floor his mother had just washed and waxed. "Daddy had to take me up 'cause I'm bad" was the way he put it. I felt like crying, looking at his poor, dear fingers. He really wanted to color his poster like the other children, so I gave him some baby aspirin and let him color while the others were having Story Time. He loved to color the Mr Do posters - that was what he liked best - and now I'm so glad I was able to help him have a little happiness that day.

'When he died it never crossed my mind to think it was anything but an accident. I guess at first I thought he must have fallen because he couldn't grip very well with that hand. Now I think I just couldn't believe an adult could do such a thing to a little person. I know better now. I wish to God I didn't.'

Dorsey Corcoran's older brother, Edward, ten, is still missing. From his cell in Derry County Jail, Richard Macklin continues to deny any part in either the death of his younger stepson or the disappearance of the older boy.

From the Derry News, June 30th, 1958 (page 5):

MACKLIN QUESTIONED IN DEATHS

OF GROGAN, CLEMENTS

Produces Unshakable Alibis, Source Claims

From the Derry News, July 6th, 1958 (page 1):

MACKLIN TO BE CHARGED ONLY WITH MURDER

OF STEPSON DORSEY, BORTON SAYS

Edward Corcoran Still Missing

From the Derry News, July 24th, 1958 (page 1):

WEEPING STEPFATHER CONFESSES TO BLUDGEON DEATH OF

STEPSON

In a dramatic development in the District Court trial of Richard Macklin for the murder of his stepson Dorsey Corcoran, Macklin broke down under the stern cross-examination of County Attorney Bradley Whitsun and admitted he had beaten the four-year-old boy to death with a recoilless hammer, which he then buried at the far end of his wife's vegetable garden before taking the boy to Derry Home Hospital's emergency room.

The courtroom was stunned and silent as the sobbing Macklin, who had previously admitted beating both of his stepsons 'occasionally, if they had it coming, for their own good,' poured out his story.

'I don't know what came over me. I saw he was climbing on the damn ladder again and I grabbed the hammer from the bench where it was laying and I just started to use it on him. I didn't mean to kill him. With God as my witness I never meant to kill him.'

'Did he say anything to you before he passed out?' Whitsun asked.

'He said, "Stop daddy, I'm sorry, I love you,"' Macklin replied.

'Did you stop?'

'Eventually,' Macklin said. He then began to weep in such a hysterical manner that Judge Erhardt Moulton declared the court in recess.

From the Derry News, September 18th, 1958 (page 16):

WHERE IS EDWARD CORCORAN?

His stepfather, sentenced to a term of two to ten years in Shawshank State Prison for the murder of his four-year-old brother, Dorsey, continues to claim he has no idea where Edward Corcoran is. His mother, who has instituted divorce proceedings against Richard P. Macklin, says she thinks her soon-to-be ex-husband is lying.

Is he?

'I, for one, really don't think so,' says Father Ashley O'Brian, who serves the Catholic prisoners at Shawshank. Macklin began taking instruction in the Catholic faith shortly after beginning his prison term, and Father O'Brian has spent a good deal of time with him. 'He is sincerely sorry for what he has done,' Father O'Brian goes on, adding that when he initially asked Macklin why he wanted to be a Catholic, Macklin replied, 'I hear they have an act of contrition and I need to do a lot of that or else I'll go to hell when I die.'

'He knows what he did to the younger boy,' Father O'Brian said. 'If he also did something to the older one, he doesn't remember it. As far as Edward goes, he believes his hands are clean.'

How clean Macklin's hands are in the matter of his stepson Edward is a question which continues to trouble Derry residents, but he has been convincingly cleared of the other child-murders which have taken place here. He was able to produce ironclad alibis for the first three, and he was in jail when seven others were committed in late June, July, and August.

All ten murders remain unsolved.

In an exclusive interview with the News last week Macklin again asserted that he knows nothing of Edward Corcoran's whereabouts. 'I beat them both,' he said in a painful monologue which was often halted by bouts of weeping. 'I loved them but I beat them. I don't know why, any more than I know why Monica let me, or why she covered up for me after Dorsey died. I guess I could have killed Eddie as easy as I did Dorsey, but I swear before God and Jesus and all the saints of heaven that I didn't. I know how it looks, but I didn't do it. I think he just ran away. If he did, that's one thing I've got to thank God for.'

Asked if he is aware of any gaps in his memory - if he could have killed Edward and then blocked it out of his mind - Macklin replied: 'I ain't aware of any gaps. I know only too well what I did. I've given my life to Christ, and I'm going to spend the rest of it trying to make up for it.'

From the Derry News, January 27th, 1960 (page 1):

BODY NOT THAT OF CORCORAN YOUTH,

BORTON ANNOUNCES

Police Chief Richard Borton told reporters early today that the badly decomposed body of a boy about the age of Edward Corcoran, who disappeared from his Derry home in June of 1958, is definitely not that of the missing youth. The body was found in Aynesford, Massachusetts, buried in a gravel pit. Both Maine and Massachusetts State Police at first theorized that the body might be that of the Corcoran boy, believing that he might have been picked up by a child molester after running away from the Charter Street home where his younger brother had been beaten and killed.

Dental charts showed conclusively that the body found in Aynesford was not that of the Corcoran youth, who has now been missing for nineteen months.

From the Portland Press-Herald, July 19th, 1967 (page 3):

CONVICTED MURDERER COMMITS SUICIDE IN FALMOUTH

Richard P. Macklin, who was convicted of the murder of his four-year-old stepson nine years ago, was found dead in his small third-floor Falmouth apartment late yesterday afternoon. The parolee, who had lived and worked quietly in Falmouth since his release from Shawshank State Prison in 1964, was an apparent suicide.

'The note he left indicates an extremely confused state of mind,' Assistant Falmouth Police Chief Brandon K. Roche said. He refused to divulge the note's contents, but a Police Department source said it consisted of two sentences: 'I saw Eddie last night. He was dead.'

The 'Eddie' referred to may well have been Macklin's stepson, brother of the boy Macklin was convicted of killing in 1958. It was the disappearance of Edward Corcoran which eventually led to Macklin's conviction for the beating death of Edward's younger brother, Dorsey. The elder boy has been missing for nine years. In a brief court proceeding in 1966 the boy's mother had her son declared legally dead so she could enter into possession of Edward Corcoran's savings account. The account contained a sum of sixteen dollars.

3

Eddie Corcoran was dead, all right.

He died on the night of June 19th, and his stepfather had nothing at all to do with it. He died as Ben Hanscom sat home watching TV with his mother, as Eddie Kaspbrak's mother anxiously felt Eddie's forehead for signs of her favorite ailment, 'phantom fever,' as Beverly Marsh's stepfather - a gent who bore, in temperament at least, a remarkable resemblance to Eddie and Dorsey Corcoran's stepfather - Lifted a high-stepping kick into the girl's derriere and told her 'to get out there and dry those goddam dishes like your mummer told you,' as Mike Hanlon got yelled at by some high-school boys (one of whom would some years later sire that fine upstanding young homophobe John 'Webby' Garton) passing in an old Dodge while Mike pulled weeds out of the garden beside the small Hanlon home out on Witcham Road, not far from the farm owned by Henry Bowers's crazy father, as Richie Tozier was sneaking a look at the half-undressed girls in a copy of Gem he had found at the bottom of his father's socks-and-underwear drawer and getting a regular good boner, and as Bill Denbrough was throwing his dead brother's photograph album across the room in horrified unbelief.

Although none of them would remember doing so later, all of them looked up at the. exact moment Eddie Corcoran died . . . as if hearing some distant cry.

The News had been absolutely right about one thing: Eddie's rank-card was just bad enough to make him afraid to go home and face his stepdad. Also, his mother and the old man were fighting a lot this month. That made things even worse. When they got going at it hot and heavy, his mother shouted a lot of mostly incoherent accusations. His stepdad responded to these first with grunts, then yells to shut up, and finally with the enraged bellows of a boar which has gotten a quiver of porcupine needles in its snout. Eddie had never seen the old man use his fists on her, though. Eddie didn't think he quite dared. He had saved his fists for Eddie and Dorsey in the old days, and now that Dorsey was dead, Eddie got his little brother's share as well as his own.

These shouting matches came and went in cycles. They were most common at the end of the month, when the bills came in. A policeman, called by a neighbor, might drop by once or twice when things were at their worst and tell them to tone it down. Usually that ended it. His mother was apt to give the cop the finger and dare him to take her in, but his stepdad rarely said boo.

His stepdad was afraid of the cops, Eddie thought.

He lay low during these periods of stress. It was wiser. If you didn't think so, just look at what had happened to Dorsey. Eddie didn't know the specifics and didn't want to, but he had an idea about Dorsey. He thought that Dorsey had been in the wrong place at the wrong time: the garage on the last day of the month. They told Eddie that Dorsey fell off the stepladder in the garage - 'If I told him once to stay off n it I told him sixty times,' his stepdad had said

- but his mother wouldn't look at him except by accident . . . and when their eyes did meet, Eddie had seen a frightened ratty little gleam in hers that he didn't like. The old man just sat there silently at the kitchen table with a quart of Rheingold, looking at nothing from beneath his heavy lowering eyebrows. Eddie kept out of his reach. When his stepfather was bellowing, he was usually - not always but usually - all right. It was when he stopped that you had to be careful.

Two nights ago he had thrown a chair at Eddie when Eddie got up to see what was on the other TV channel - just picked up one of the tubular aluminum kitchen chairs, swept it back over his head, and let fly. It hit Eddie in the butt and knocked him over. His butt still ached, but he knew it could have been worse: it could have been his head.

Then there had been the night when the old man had suddenly gotten up and rubbed a handful of mashed potatoes into Eddie's hair for no reason at all. One day last September, Eddie had come in from school and foolishly allowed the screen door to slam shut behind him while his stepdad was taking a nap. Macklin came out of the bedroom in his billowy boxer shorts, hair standing up in corkscrews, cheeks grizzled with two days of weekend beard, breath grizzled with two days of weekend beer. 'There now, Eddie,' he said, 'I got to take you up for slammin that fuckin door.' In Rich Macklin's lexicon, 'taking you up' was a euphemism for 'beating the shit out of you.' Which was what he then did to Eddie. Eddie had lost consciousness when the old man threw him into the front hall. His mother had mounted a pair of low coathooks out there, especially for him and Dorsey to hang their coats on. These hooks had rammed hard steel fingers into Eddie's lower back, and that was when he passed out. When he came to ten minutes later he heard his mother yelling that she was going to take Eddie to the hospital and he couldn't stop her.

'After what happened to Dorsey?' his stepdad had responded. 'You want to go to jail, woman?'

That was the end of her talk about the hospital. She helped Eddie in to his room, where he lay shivering on his bed, his forehead beaded with sweat. The only time he left the room during the next three days was when they were both gone. Then he would hobble slowly into the kitchen, groaning softly, and get his stepdad's whiskey from under the sink. A few nips dulled the pain. The pain was mostly gone by the fifth day, but he had pissed blood for almost two weeks.

And the hammer wasn't in the garage anymore.

What about that? What about that, friends and neighbors?

Oh, the Craftsman hammer - the ordinary hammer - was still there. It was the Scotti recoilless which was missing. His stepdad's special hammer, the one he and Dorsey had been forbidden to touch. 'If one of you touches that baby,' he had told them the day he bought it, 'you'll both be wearing your guts for earmuffs.' Dorsey had asked timidly if that hammer was very expensive. The old man told him he was damn tooting. He said it was filled with ball-bearings and you couldn't make it bounce back up no matter how hard you brought it down.

Now it was gone.

Eddie's grades weren't the best because he had missed a lot of school since his mother's remarriage, but he was not a stupid boy by any means. He thought he knew what had happened to the Scotti recoilless hammer. He thought maybe his stepfather had used it on Dorsey and then buried it in the garden or maybe thrown it in the Canal. It was the sort of thing that happened frequently in the horror comics Eddie read, the ones he kept on the top shelf of his closet.

He walked closer to the Canal, which rippled between its concrete sides like oiled silk. A swatch of moonlight glimmered across its dark surface in a boomerang shape. He sat down, swinging his sneakers idly against the concrete in an irregular tattoo. The last six weeks had been quite dry and the water flowed past perhaps nine feet below the worn soles of his sneakers. But if you looked closely at the Canal's sides, you could read the various levels to which it sometimes rose quite easily. The concrete was stained a dark brown just above the water's current level. This brown stain slowly faded to yellow, then to a color that was almost white at the level where the heels of Eddie's sneakers made contact when he swung them.

The water flowed smoothly and silently out of a concrete arch that was cobbled on the inside, past the place where Eddie sat, and then down to the covered wooden footbridge between Bassey Park and Derry High School. The bridge's sides and plank footing - even the beams under the roof - were covered with an intaglio of initials, phone numbers, and declarations. Declarations of love; declarations that So-and-so was willing to 'suck' or 'blow'; declarations that those discovered sucking or blowing would lose their foreskins or have their assholes plugged with hot tar; occasional eccentric declarations that defied definition. One that Eddie had puzzled over all this spring read SAVE RUSSIAN JEWS! COLLECT VALUABLE PRIZES!

What, exactly, did that mean? Anything? And did it matter?

Eddie didn't go into the Kissing Bridge tonight; he had no urge to cross over to the high-school side. He thought he would probably sleep in the park, maybe in the dead leaves under the bandstand, but for now it was fine just to sit here. He liked it in the park, and came often when he had to think. Sometimes there were people making out in the groves of trees which dotted the park, but Eddie left them alone and they left him alone. He had heard lurid stories in the playground at school about the queers that cruised in Bassey Park after sundown, and he accepted these stories without question, but he himself had never been bothered. The park was a peaceful place, and he thought the best part of it was right here where he was sitting. He liked it in the middle of summer, when the water was so low it chuckled over the stones and actually broke up into isolated streamlets that twisted and turned and sometimes came together again. He liked it in late March or early April, just after ice-out, when he would sometimes stand by the Canal (too cold to sit then; your ass would freeze) for an hour or more, the hood of his old parka, now two years too small for him, pulled up, his hands plunged into his pockets, unaware that his skinny body was shivering and shaking. The Canal had a terrible, irresistible power in the week or two after the ice went out. He was fascinated by the way the water boiled whitely out of the cobbled arch and roared past him, bearing sticks and branches and all manner of human trash along with it. More than once he had envisioned walking beside the Canal in March with his stepdad and giving the bastard a great big motherfucking push. He would scream and fall in, his arms pinwheeling for balance, and Eddie would stand on the concrete parapet and watch him carried off downstream, his head a black bobbing shape in the middle of the unruly whitecapped current. He would stand there, yes, and he would cup his hands around his mouth and scream: THAT WAS FOR DORSEY, YOU ROTTEN COCK-SUCKER! WHEN YOU GET DOWN TO HELL TELL THE DEVIL THE LAST THING YOU EVER HEARD WAS ME TELLING YOU TO PICK ON SOMEBODY YOUR OWN SIZE! It would never happen, of course, but it was an absolutely grand fantasy. A grand dream to dream as you sat here by the Canal, a g -

A hand closed around Eddie's foot.

He had been looking across the Canal toward the school, smiling a sleepy and rather beautiful smile as he imagined his stepfather being carried off in the violent rip of the spring runoff, being carried out of his life forever. The soft yet strong grip startled him so much that he almost lost his balance and tumbled into the Canal.

Its one of the queers the big kids are always talking about, he thought, and then he looked down. His mouth dropped open. Urine spilled hotly down his legs and stained his jeans black in the moonlight. It wasn't a queer.

It was Dorsey.

It was Dorsey as he had been buried, Dorsey in his blue blazer and gray pants, only now the blazer was in muddy tatters, Dorsey's shirt was yellow rags, Dorsey's pants clung wetly to legs as thin as broomsticks. And Dorsey's head was horribly slumped, as if it had been caved in at the back and consequently pushed up in the front.

Dorsey was grinning.

'Eddieeeee,' his dead brother croaked, just like one of the dead people who were always coming back from the grave in the horror comics. Dorsey's grin widened. Yellow teeth gleamed, and somewhere way back in that darkness things seemed to be squirming.

'Eddieeee . . . I came to see you Eddieeeeee . . . '

Eddie tried to scream. Waves of gray shock rolled over him, and he had the curious sensation that he was floating. But it was not a dream; he was awake. The hand on his sneaker was as white as a trout's belly. His brother's bare feet clung somehow to the concrete. Something had bitten one of Dorsey's heels off.

'Come on down Eddieeeee . . . '

Eddie couldn't scream. His lungs didn't have enough ah - in them to manage a scream. He got out a curious reedy moaning sound. Anything louder seemed beyond him. That was all right. In a second or two his mind would snap and after that nothing would matter. Dorsey's hand was small but implacable. Eddie's buttocks were sliding over the concrete to the edge of the Canal.

Still making that reedy moaning sound, he reached behind himself and grabbed the concrete edging and yanked himself backward. He felt the hand slide away momentarily, heard an angry hiss, and had time to think: That's not Dorsey. I don't know what it is, but it's not Dorsey. Then adrenaline flooded his body and he was crawling away, trying to run even before he was on his feet, his breath coming in short shrieky whistles.

White hands appeared on the concrete lip of the Canal. There was a wet slapping sound. Drops of water flew upward in the moonlight from dead pallid skin. Now Dorsey's face appeared over the edge. Dim red sparks gleamed in his sunken eyes. His wet hair was plastered to his skull. Mud streaked his cheeks like warpaint.

Eddie's chest finally unlocked. He hitched in breath and turned it into a scream. He got to his feet and ran. He ran looking back over his shoulder, needing to see where Dorsey was, and as a result he ran smack into a large elm tree.

It felt as if someone - his old man, for instance - had set off a dynamite charge in his left shoulder. Stars shot and corkscrewed through his head. He fell at the base of the tree as if poleaxed, blood trickling from his left temple. He swam in the waters of semiconsciousness for perhaps ninety seconds. Then he managed to gain his feet again. A groan escaped him as he tried to raise his left arm. It didn't want to come. Felt all numb and far away. So he raised his right and rubbed his fiercely aching head.

Then he remembered why he had happened to run full-tilt into the elm tree in the first place and looked around.

There was the edge of the Canal, white as bone and straight as string in the moonlight. No sign of the thing from the Canal . . . if there ever had been a thing. He continued turning, working his way slowly through a complete three hundred and sixty degrees. Bassey Park was silent and as still as a black-and-white photograph. Weeping willows draggled their thin tenebrous arms, and anything could be standing, slumped and insane, within their shelter.

Eddie began to walk, trying to look everywhere at once. His sprained shoulder throbbed in painful sync with his heartbeat.

Eddieeeee, the breeze moaned through the trees, don't you want to see meeeee, Eddieeeee? He felt flabby corpse-fingers caress the side of his neck. He whirled, his hands going up. As his feet tangled together and he fell, he saw that it had only been willow-fronds moving in the breeze.

He got up again. He wanted to run but when he tried another dynamite charge went off in his shoulder and he had to stop. He knew somehow that he should be getting over his fright by now, calling himself a stupid little baby who got spooked by a reflection or maybe fell asleep without knowing it and had a bad dream. That wasn't happening, though; quite the reverse, in fact. His heart was now beating so fast he could no longer distinguish the separate thuds, and he felt sure it would soon burst in terror. He couldn't run but when he got out of the willows he did manage a limping jogtrot.

He fixed his eyes on the streetlight that marked the park's main gate. He headed in that direction, managing a little more speed, thinking: I'll make it to the light, and that's all right. I'll make it to the light, and that's all right. Bright light, no more fright, up all night, what a sight -

Something was following him.

Eddie could hear it bludgeoning its way through the willow grove. If he turned he would see it. It was gaining. He could hear its feet, a kind of shuffling, squelching stride, but he would not look back, no, he would look ahead at the light, the light was all right, he would just continue his flight to the light, and he was almost there, almost -

The smell was what made him look back. The overwhelming smell, as if fish had been left to rot in a huge pile that had become carrion-slushy in the summer heat. It was the smell of a dead ocean.

It wasn't Dorsey after him now; it was the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The thing's snout was long and pleated. Green fluid dripped from black gashes like vertical mouths in its cheeks. Its eyes were white and jellylike. Its webbed fingers were tipped with claws like razors. Its respiration was bubbly and deep, the sound of a diver with a bad regulator. As it saw Eddie looking, its green-black lips wrinkled back from huge fangs in a dead and vacant smile.

It shambled after him, dripping, and Eddie suddenly understood. It meant to take him back to the Canal, to carry him down into the dank blackness of the Canal's underground passage. To eat him there.

Eddie put on a burst of speed. The arc-sodium light at the gate drew closer. He could see its halo of bugs and moths. A truck went by, headed for Route 2, the driver working his way up through the gears, and it crossed Eddie's desperate, terrified mind that he could be drinking coffee from a paper cup and listening to a Buddy Holly tune on the radio, completely unaware that less than two hundred yards away there was a boy who might be dead in another twenty seconds.

The stink. The overwhelming stink of it. Gaining. All around him.

It was a park bench he tripped over. Some kids had casually pushed it over earlier that evening, heading toward their homes at a run to beat the curfew. Its seat poked an inch or two out of the grass, one shade of green on another, almost invisible in the moon-driven dark. The edge of the seat smacked Eddie in the shins, causing a burst of glassy, exquisite pain. His legs flipped out behind him and he thumped into the grass.

He looked behind him and saw the Creature bearing down, its white poached-egg eyes glittering, its scales dripping slime the color of seaweed, the gills up and down its bulging neck and cheeks opening and closing.

lAgr Eddie croaked. It seemed to be the only noise he could make. 'Ag! Ag'Ag.'Ag!'

He crawled now, fingers hooking deep into the turf. His tongue hung out.

In the second before the Creature's fish-smelling horny hands closed around his throat, a comforting thought came to him: This is a dream; it has to be. There's no real Creature, no real Black Lagoon, and even if there was, that was in South America or the Florida Everglades or someplace like that. This is only a dream and I'll wake up in my bed or maybe in the leaves under the bandstand and I -

Then batrachian hands closed around his neck and Eddie's hoarse cries were choked off; as the Creature turned him over, the chitinous hooks which sprouted from those hands scrawled bleeding marks like calligraphy into his neck. He stared into its glowing white eyes. He felt the webs between its fingers pressing against his throat like constricting bands of living seaweed. His terror-sharpened gaze noted the fin, something like a rooster's comb and something like a hornpout's poisonous backfin, standing atop the Creature's hunched and plated head. As its hands clamped tight, shutting off his air, he was even able to see the way the white light from the arc-sodium lamp turned a smoky green as it passed through that membranous headfin.

'You're . . . not . . . real,' Eddie choked, but clouds of grayness were closing in now, and he realized faintly that it was real enough, this Creature. It was, after all, killing him.

And yet some rationality remained, even until the end: as the Creature hooked its claws into the soft meat of his neck, as his carotid artery let go in a warm and painless gout that splashed the thing's reptilian plating, Eddie's hands groped at the Creature's back, feeling for a zipper. They fell away only when the Creature tore his head from his shoulders with a low satisfied grunt.

And as Eddie's picture of what It was began to fade, It began promptly to

change into something else.

4

Unable to sleep, plagued by bad dreams, a boy named Michael Hanlon rose soon after first light on the first full day of summer vacation. The light was pale, bundled up in a low, thick mist that would lift by eight o'clock, taking the wraps off a perfect summer day.

But that was for later. For now the world was all gray and rose, as silent as a cat walking on a carpet.

Mike, dressed in corduroys, a tee-shirt, and black high-topped Keds, came downstairs, ate a bowl of Wheaties (he didn't really like Wheaties but had wanted the free prize in the box - a Captain Midnight Magic Decoder Ring), then hopped on his bike and pedaled toward town, riding on the sidewalks because of the fog. The fog changed everything, made the most ordinary things like fire hydrants and stop-signs into objects of mystery - things both strange and a trifle sinister. You could hear cars but not see them, and because of the fog's odd acoustic quality, you could not tell if they were far or near until you actually saw them come rolling out of the fog with ghost-halos of moisture ringing their headlamps.

He turned right on Jackson Street, bypassing downtown, and then crossed to Main Street by way of Palmer Lane - and during his short ride down this little byway's one-block length he passed the house where he would live as an adult. He did not look at it; it was just a small two-story dwelling with a garage and a small lawn. It gave off no special vibration to the passing boy who would spend most of his adult life as its owner and only dweller.

At Main Street he turned right and rode up to Bassey Park, still wandering, simply riding and enjoying the stillness of the early day. Once inside the main gate he dismounted his bike, pushed down the kickstand, and walked toward the Canal. He was still, as far as he knew, impelled by nothing more than purest whim. Certainly it did not occur to him to think that his dreams of the night before had anything to do with his current course; he did not even remember exactly what his dreams had been - only that one had followed another until he had awakened at five o'clock, sweaty but shivering, and with the idea that he ought to eat a fast breakfast and then take a bike-ride into town.

Here in Bassey there was a smell in the fog he didn't like: a sea-smell, salty and old. He had smelled it before, of course. In the early-morning fogs you could often smell the ocean in Derry, although the coast was forty miles away. But the smell this morning seemed thicker, more vital. Almost dangerous.

Something caught his eye. He bent down and picked up a cheap two-blade pocket knife. Someone had scratched the initials EC on the side. Mike looked at it thoughtfully for a moment or two and then pocketed it. Finders keepers, losers weepers.

He glanced around. Here, near where he had found the knife, was an overturned park bench. He righted it, setting its iron footings back into the holes they had made over a period of months or years. Beyond the bench he saw a matted place in the grass . . . and leading away from it, two grooves. The grass was springing back up, but those grooves were still fairly clear. They went in the direction of the Canal. ; And there was blood.

(the bird remember the bird remember the)

But he did not want to remember the bird and so he pushed the thought away. Dogfight, that's all. One of 'em must have hurt the other one pretty bad. It was a convincing thought by which he was somehow not convinced. Thoughts of the bird kept wanting to come back - the one he had seen out at the Kitchener Ironworks, one Stan Uris never would have found in his bird-book.

But instead of getting out he followed the grooves. As he did he made up a little story in his mind. It was a murder story. Here's this kid, out late, see. Out past the curfew. The killer gets him. And how does he get rid of the body? Drags it to the Canal and dumps it in, of course! Just like an Alfred Hitchcock Presents!

The marks he was following could have been made by a dragging pair of shoes or sneakers, he supposed.

Mike shivered and looked around uncertainly. The story was somehow a little too real.

And suppose that it wasn't a man who did it but a monster. Like out of a horror comic or a horror book or a horror movie or

(a bad dream)

a fairytale or something.

He decided he didn't like the story. It was a stupid story. He tried to push it out of his mind but it wouldn't go. So what? Let it stay. It was dumb. Riding into town this morning had been dumb. Following these two matted grooves in the grass was dumb. His dad would have a lot of chores for him to do around the place today. He ought to get back and start in or when the hottest part of the afternoon rolled around he would be up the barn loft pitching hay. Yes, he ought to get back. And that's just what he was going to do.

Sure you are, he thought. Want to bet?

Instead of going back to his bike and getting on and riding home and starting his chores, he followed the grooves in the grass. There were more drops of drying blood here and there. Not much, though. Not as much as there had been in that matted place back there by the park bench he had set to rights.

Mike could hear the Canal now, running quiet. A moment later he saw the concrete edge materialize out of the fog.

Here was something else in the grass. My goodness, it's certainly your day for finding things, his mind said with dubious geniality, and then a gull screamed somewhere and Mike flinched, thinking again of the bird he had seen that day, that day just this spring.

Whatever that is in the grass, I don't even want to look at it. And that was oh so very true, but here he was, already bending over it, hands planted just above his knees, to see what it was.

A tattered bit of cloth with a drop of blood on it.

The seagull screamed again. Mike stared at the bloody scrap of cloth and remembered what had happened to him in the spring.

5

Each year during April and May the Hanlon farm woke up from its winter doze.

Mike would let himself know that spring had come again not when the first crocuses showed under his mom's kitchen windows or when kids started bringing immies and croakers to school or even when the Washington Senators kicked off the baseball season (usually getting themselves shellacked in the process), but only when his father hollered for Mike to help him push their mongrel truck out of the barn. The front half was an old Model-A Ford car, the back end a pick-up truck with a tailgate which was the remainder of the old henhouse door. If the winter hadn't been too cold, the two of them could often get it going by pushing it down the driveway. The truck's cab had no doors; likewise there was no windshield. The seat was half of an old sofa that Will Hanlon had scrounged from the Derry dump. The stick-shift ended in a glass doorknob.

They would push it down the driveway, one on each side, and when it got rolling good, Will would jump in, turn on the switch, retard the spark, step down on the clutch, punch the shift into first gear with his big hand clamped over the doorknob. Then he would holler: 'Put me over the hump!' He'd pop the clutch and the old Ford engine would cough, choke, chug, backfire . . . and sometimes actually start to run, rough at first, then smoothing out. Will would roar down the road toward Rhulin Farms, turn around in their driveway (if he had gone the other way, Henry Bowers's crazy father Butch probably would have blown his head off with a shotgun), and then roar back, the unmuffled engine blatting stridently while Mike jumped up and down with excitement, cheering, and his mom stood in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on a dishtowel and pretending a disgust she didn't really feel.

Other times the truck wouldn't roll-start and Mike would have to wait until his father came back from the barn, carrying the crank and muttering under his breath. Mike was quite sure that some of the words so muttered were swears, and he would be a little frightened of his daddy then. (It wasn't until much later, during one of those interminable visits to the hospital room where Will Hanlon lay dying, that he found out his father muttered because he was afraid of the crank: once it had kicked back viciously, flown out of its socket, and torn the side of his mouth open.)

'Stand back, Mikey,' he would say, slipping the crank into its socket at the base of the radiator. And when the A was finally running, he'd say that next year he was going to trade it for a Chevrolet, but he never did. That old A-Ford hybrid was still in back of the home place, up to its axles and henhouse tailgate in weeds.

When it was running, and Mike was sitting in the passenger seat, smelling hot oil and blue exhaust, excited by the keen breeze that washed in through the glassless hole where the windshield had once been, he would think: Spring's here again. We're all waking up. And in his soul he would raise a silent cheer that shook the wails of that mostly cheerful room. He felt love for everything around him, and most of all for his dad, who would grin over at him and holler: 'Hold on, Mikey! We gone wind this baby up! We gone make some birds run for cover!'

Then he would tear up the driveway, the A's rear wheels spitting back black dirt and gray clods of clay, both of them jouncing up and down on the sofa-seat inside the open cab, laughing like stark natural-born fools. Will would run the A through the high grass of the back field, which was kept for hay, toward either the south field (potatoes), the west field (corn and beans), or the east field (peas, squash, and pumpkins). As they went, birds would burst up out of the grass before the truck, squawking in terror. Once a partridge flew up, a magnificent bird as brown as late-autumn oaks, the explosive coughing whirr of its wings audible even over the pounding engine.

Those rides were Mike Hanlon's door into spring.

The year's work began with the rock harvest. Every day for a week they would take the A out and load the bed with rocks which might break a harrow-blade when the time came to turn the earth and plant. Sometimes the truck would get stuck in the mucky spring earth and Will would mutter darkly under his breath . . . more swears, Mike surmised. He knew some of the words and expressions; others, such as 'son of a whore,' puzzled him. He had come across the word in the Bible, and so far as he could tell, a whore was a woman who came from a place called Babylon. He had once set out to ask his father, but the A had been in mud up to her coil-springs, there had been thunderclouds on his father's brow, and he had decided to wait for a better time. He ended up asking Richie Tozier later that year and Richie told him his father had told him a whore was a woman who got paid for having sex with men. 'What's having sex?' Mike had asked, and Richie had wandered away holding his head.

On one occasion Mike had asked his father why, since they harvested rocks every April, there were always more of them the following April.

They had been standing at the dumping-off place near sunset on the last day of that year's rock harvest. A beaten dirt track, not quite serious enough to be called a road, led from the bottom of the west field to this gully near the bank of the Kenduskeag. The gully was a jumbled wasteland of rocks that had been dragged off Will's land through the years.

Looking down at this badlands, which he had made first alone and then with the help of his son (somewhere under the rocks, he knew, were the rotting remains of the stumps he had yanked out one at a time before any of the fields could be tilled), Will had lighted a cigarette and said, 'My daddy used to tell me that God loved rocks, houseflies, weeds, and poor people above all the rest of His creations, and that's why He made so many of them.'

'But every year it's like they come back.'

'Yeah, I think they do,' Will said. That's the only way I know to explain it.'

A loon cried from the far side of the Kenduskeag in a dusky sunset that had turned the water a deep orange-red. It was a lonely sound, so lonely that it made Mike's tired arms tighten with gooseflesh.

'I love you. Daddy,' he said suddenly, feeling his love so strongly that tears stung his eyes.

'Why, I love you too, Mikey,' his father said, and hugged him tight in his strong arms. Mike felt the rough fabric of his father's flannel shirt against his cheek. 'Now what do you say we go on back? We got just time to get a bath each before the good woman puts supper on the table.'

'Ayuh,' Mike said.

'Ayuh yourself,' Will Hanlon said, and they both laughed, feeling tired but feeling good, arms and legs worked but not overworked, their hands rock-roughened but not hurting too bad.

Spring's here, Mike thought that night, drowsing off in his room while his mother and father watched The Honeymooners in the other room. Spring's here again, thank You God, thank You very much. And turning to sleep, sinking down, he had heard the loon call again, the distance of its marshes blending into the desire of his dreams. Spring was a busy time, but it was a good time.

Following the rock harvest, Will would park the A in the high grass back of the house and drive the tractor out of the barn. There would be harrowing then, his father driving the tractor, Mike either riding behind and holding on to the iron seat or walking alongside, picking up any rocks they had missed and throwing them aside. Then came planting, and following the planting came summer's work: hoeing . . . hoeing . . . hoeing. His mother would refurbish Larry, Moe, and Curly, their three scarecrows, and Mike would help his father put mooseblowers on top of each straw-filled head. A mooseblower was a can with both ends cut off. You tied a length of heavily waxed and rosined string tightly across the middle of the can and when the wind blew through it a wonderfully spooky sound resulted - a kind of whining croak. Crop-eating birds decided soon enough that Larry, Moe, and Curly were no threats, but the mooseblowers always frightened them off.

Starting in July, there was picking as well as hoeing - peas and radishes first, then the lettuce and the tomatoes that had been started in the shed-boxes, then the corn and beans in August, more corn and beans in September, then the pumpkins and the squash. Somewhere in the midst of all that came the new potatoes, and then, as the days shortened and the air sharpened, he and his dad would take in the mooseblowers (and sometime during the winter they would disappear; it seemed they had to make new ones each spring). The day after, Will would call Norman Sadler (who was as dumb as his son Moose but infinitely more goodhearted), and Normie would come over with his potato-digger.

For the next three weeks all of them would work picking potatoes. In addition to the family, Will would hire three or four high-school boys to help pick, paying them a quarter a barrel. The A-Ford would cruise slowly up and down the rows of the south field, the biggest field, always in low gear, the tailgate down, the back filled with barrels, each marked with the name of the person picking into it, and at the end of the day Will would open his old creased wallet and pay each of the pickers cash money. Mike was paid, and so was his mother; that money was theirs, and Will Hanlon never once asked either of them what they did with it. Mike had been given a five-percent interest in the farm when he was five years old - old enough, Will had told him then, to hold a hoe and to tell the difference between witchgrass and pea-plants. Each year he had been given another one percent, and each year, on the day after Thanksgiving, Will would compute the farm's profits and deduct Mike's share . . . but Mike never saw any of that money. It went into his college account and was to be touched under absolutely no other circumstances.

At last the day would come when Normie Sadler drove his potato-digger back home; by then the air would have most likely turned gray and cold and there would be frost on the drift of orange pumpkins piled against the side of the barn. Mike would stand in the dooryard, his nose red, his dirty hands stuffed into his jeans pockets, and watch as his father drove first the tractor and then the A-Ford back into the barn. He would think: We're getting ready to go to sleep again. Spring . . . vanished. Summer . . . gone. Harvest-time . . . done. All that was left now was the butt end of autumn: leafless trees, frozen ground, a lacing of ice along the banks of the Kenduskeag. In the fields, crows would sometimes land on the shoulders of Moe, Larry, and Curly, and stay as long as they liked. The scarecrows were voiceless, threatless.

Mike would not exactly be dismayed by the thought of another year ending - at nine and ten he was still too young to make mortal metaphors - because there was plenty to look forward to: sledding in McCarron Park (or on Rhulin Hill out here in Derrytown if you were brave, although that was mostly for big kids), ice-skating, snowball fights, snowfort building. There was time to think about snowshoeing out for a Christmas tree with his daddy, and time to think about the Nordica downhill skis he might or might not get for Christmas. Winter was good . . . but watching his father drive the A back into the barn

(spring vanished summer gone harvest-time done)

always made him feel sad, the way the squadrons of birds heading south for the winter made him feel sad, or the way a certain slant of light could sometimes make him feel like crying for no good reason. We're getting ready to go to sleep again . . .

It was not all school and chores, chores and school; Will Hanlon had told his wife more than once that a boy needed time to go fishing, even if it wasn't fishing he was really doing. When Mike came home from school he first put his books on the TV in the parlor, second made himself some kind of snack (he was particularly partial to peanut-butter-and-onion sandwiches, a taste that made his mother raise her hands in helpless horror), and third studied the note his father had left him, telling Mike where he, Will, was and what Mike's chores were - certain rows to be weeded or picked, baskets to be carried, produce to be rotated, the barn to be swept, whatever. But on at least one schoolday a week - and sometimes two - there would be no note. And on these days Mike would go fishing, even if it wasn't really fishing he was doing. Those were great days . . . days when he had no particular place to go and consequently felt no urge to get there in a hurry.

Once in awhile his father left him another sort of note: 'No chores,' one might say. 'Go over to Old Cape & look at trolley tracks.' Mike would go over to the Old Cape area, find the streets with the tracks still embedded in them, and inspect them closely, marvelling to think of things like trains that had run right through the middle of the streets. That night he and his father might talk about them, and his dad would show him pictures from his Derry album of the trolleys actually running: a funny pole went from the roof of the trolley up to an electrical wire, and there were cigarette ads on the side. Another time he had sent Mike to Memorial Park, where the Standpipe was, to look at the birdbath, and once they had gone to the courthouse together to look at a terrible machine that Chief Borton had found in the attic. This gadget was called a tramp-chair. It was cast-iron, and there were manacles built into the arms and legs. Rounded knobs stuck out of the back and seat. It reminded Mike of a photograph he had seen in some book - a photograph of the electric chair at Sing Sing. Chief Borton let Mike sit in the tramp-chair and try on the manacles.

After the first ominous novelty of wearing the manacles wore off, Mike looked questioningly at his father and Chief Borton, not sure why this was supposed to be such a horrible punishment for the 'vags' (Borton's word for them) that had drifted into town in the twenties and thirties. The knobs made the chair a little uncomfortable to sit in, sure, and the manacles on your wrists and ankles made it hard to shift to a more comfortable position, but -

'Well, you're just a kid,' Chief Borton said, laughing. 'What do you weigh? Seventy, eighty pounds? Most of the vags Sheriff Sully posted into that chair in the old days would go twice that. They'd feel a bit oncomfortable after an hour or so, really oncomfortable after two or three, and right bad after four or five. After seven or eight hours they'd staat bellerin, and after sixteen or seventeen they'd staat cryin, mostly. And by the time their twenty-four-hour tour was up, they'd be willin to swear before God and man that the next time they came riding the rods up New England way they'd give Derry a wide berth. So far as I know, most of cm did. Twenty-four hours in the tramp-chair was a helluva persuader.'

Suddenly there seemed to be more knobs in the chair, digging more deeply into his buttocks, spine, the small of his back, even the nape of his neck. 'Can I get out now, please?' he said politely, and Chief Borton laughed again. There was a moment, one panicked instant of time, when Mike thought the Chief would only dangle the key to the manacles in front of Mike's eyes and say, Sure I'll let you out . . . when your twenty-four hours is up.

'Why did you take me there, Daddy?' he asked on the way home.

'You'll know when you're older,' Will had replied.

'You don't like Chief Borton, do you?'

'No,' his father had replied in a voice so curt that Mike hadn't dared ask any more.

But Mike enjoyed most of the places in Derry his father sent or took him to, and by the time Mike was ten Will had succeeded in conveying his own interest in the layers of Derry's history to his son. Sometimes, as when he had been trailing his fingers over the slightly pebbled surface of the stand in which the Memorial Park birdbath was set, or when he had squatted down to look more closely at the trolley tracks which grooved Mont Street in the Old Cape, he would be struck by a profound sense of time . . . time as something real, as something that had unseen weight, the way sunlight was supposed to have weight (some of the kids in school had laughed when Mrs Greenguss told them that, but Mike had been too stunned by the concept to laugh; his first thought had been, Light has weight? Oh my Lord, that's terrible!) . . time as something that would eventually bury him.

The first note his father left him in that spring of 1958 was scribbled on the back of an envelope and held down with a salt-shaker. The air was spring-warm, wonderfully sweet, and his mother had opened all the windows. No chores, the note read. If you want to, ride your bike out to Pasture Road. You'll see a lot of tumbled masonry and old machinery out in the field on your left. Have a look around, bring back a souvenir. Don't go near the cellarhole! And be back before dark. You know why.

Mike knew why, all right.

He told his mother where he was going and she frowned. 'Why don't you see if Randy Robinson wants to go with you?'

'Yeah, okay, I'll stop by and ask him,' Mike said.

He did, too, but Randy had gone up to Bangor with his father to buy seedling potatoes. So Mike rode his bike over to Pasture Road alone. It was a goodish ride - a little over four miles. Mike reckoned it was three o'clock by the time he leaned his bike against an old wooden slat-fence on the left side of Pasture Road and climbed into the field beyond. He would have maybe an hour to explore and then he would have to start home again. Ordinarily, his mother would not be upset with him as long as he was back by six, when she put dinner on the table, but one memorable episode had taught him that wasn't the case this year. On that one occasion when he had been late for dinner, she had been nearly hysterical. She took after him with a dishrag, whopping him with it as he stood open-mouthed in the kitchen entryway, his wicker creel with the rainbow trout in it at his feet.

'Don't you ever scare me like that!' she had screamed. 'Don't you ever! Don't you ever! Ever-ever-ever!'

Each ever had been punctuated by another dishrag swat. Mike had expected his father to step in and put a stop to it, but his father hadn't done so . . . Perhaps he knew that if he did she would turn her wildcat anger on him as well. Mike had learned the lesson; one whopping with the dishrag was all it took. Home before dark. Yes ma'am, right-o.

He walked across the field toward the titanic ruins standing in the center. This was, of course, the remains of the Kitchener Ironworks - he had ridden past it but had never thought to actually explore it, and he had never heard any kids saying that they had. Now, stooping to examine a few tumbled bricks that had formed a rough cairn, he thought he could understand why. The field was dazzlingly bright, washed by sun from the spring sky (occasionally, as a cloud passed before the sun, a great shutter of shadow would travel slowly across the field), but there was something spooky about it all the same - a brooding silence that was broken only by the wind. He felt like an explorer who has found the last remnants of some fabulous lost city.

Up ahead and to the right, he saw the rounded side of a massive tile cylinder rising out of the high field grass. He ran over to it. It was the Ironworks' main smokestack. He peered into its bore, and felt a fresh chill worm up his spine. It was big enough so he could have walked into it if he had wanted. But he didn't want to; God knew what strange guck there might be, clinging to the smoke-blackened inner tiles, or what nasty bugs or beasts might have taken up residence inside. The wind gusted. When it blew across the mouth of the fallen stack it made a sound eerily like the sound of the wind vibrating the waxed strings he and his dad put in the mooseblowers every spring. He stepped back nervously, suddenly thinking about the movie he and his father had watched last night on the Early Show. It had been called Rodan, and watching it had seemed like great fun at the time, his father laughing and shouting 'Git that bird, Mikey!' every time Rodan made its appearance, Mike shooting with his finger until his mom popped her head in and told them to hush up before they gave her a headache with the noise.

It didn't seem so funny now. In the movie Rodan had been released from the bowels of the earth by these Japanese coal-miners who had been digging the world's deepest tunnel. And looking into the black bore of this pipe, it was all too easy to imagine that bird crouched at the far end, leathery batlike wings folded over its back, staring at the small, round boyface looking into the darkness, staring, staring with its gold-ringed eyes . . .

Shivering, Mike pulled back.

He walked aways down the smokestack, which had sunken into the earth to half of its circumference. The land rose slightly, and on impulse he scrambled his way up on top. The stack was a lot less scary on the outside, its tiled surface sunwarm. He got to his feet and strolled along, holding his arms out (the surface was really too wide for him to need to worry about falling off, but he was pretending he was a tightwire-walker in the circus), liking the way the wind blew through his hair.

At the far end he jumped down and began to examine stuff: more bricks, twisted molds, hunks of wood, pieces of rusty machinery. Bring back a souvenir, his father's note had said: he wanted a good one.

He wandered closer to the mill's yawning cellarhold, looking at the debris, being careful not to cut himself on the broken glass. There was a lot of it around.

Mike was not unmindful of the cellarhold and his father's warning to stay out of it; neither was he unmindful of the death that had been dealt out on this spot fifty-odd years before. He supposed that if there was a haunted place in Derry, this was it. But either in spite of that or because of it, he was determined to stay until he found something really good to take back and show his father.

He moved slowly and soberly toward the cellarhold, changing his course to parallel its ragged side, when a warning voice inside whispered that he was getting too close, that a bank weakened by the spring rains could crumble under his heels and pitch him into that hole, where God only knew how much sharp iron might be waiting to impale him like a bug, leaving him to die a rusty twitching death.

He picked up a window-sash and tossed it aside. Here was a dipper big enough for a giant's table, its handle rippled and warped by some unimaginable flash of heat. Here was a piston too big for him to even budge, let alone lift. He stepped over it. He stepped over it and -

What if I find a skull? he thought suddenly. The skull of one of the kids who were killed here while they were hunting for chocolate Easter eggs back in nineteen-whenever-it-was?

He looked around the sunwashed empty field, nastily shocked by the idea. The wind blew a low conch-note in his ears and another shadow cruised silently across the field, like the shadow of a giant bat . . . or bird. He became aware all over again of how quiet it was here, and how strange the field looked with its straggling piles of masonry and its beached iron hulks leaning this way and that. It was as if some horrid battle had been fought here long ago.

Don't be such a dip, he replied uneasily to himself. They found everything there was to find fifty years ago. After it happened. And even if they didn't, some other kid - or grownup - would have found . . . the rest . . . since then. Or do you think you're the only person who ever came here hunting for souvenirs?

No . . . no, I don't think that. But . . .

But what? that rational side of his mind demanded, and Mike thought it was talking just a little too loud, a little too fast. Even if there was still something to find, it would have decayed long ago. So . . . what?

Mike found a splintered desk drawer in the weeds. He glanced at it, tossed it aside, and moved a little closer to the cellarhold, where the stuff was thickest. Surely he would find something there.

But what if there are ghosts? That's but what. What if I see hands coming over the edge of that cellarhold, and what if they start to come up, kids in the remains of their Easter Sunday clothes, clothes that are all rotted and torn and marked with fifty years of spring mud and fall rain and caked winter snow? Kids with no heads (he had heard at school that, after the explosion, a woman had found the head of one of the victims in a tree in her back yard), kids with no legs, kids flayed open like codfish, kids just like me who would maybe come down and play . . . down there where it's dark . . . under the leaning iron girders and the big old rusty cogs . . .

Oh, stop it, for the Lord's sake!

But a shudder wrenched its way up his back and he decided it was time to take something - anything - and get the dickens out of here. He reached down, almost at random, and came up with a gear-toothed wheel about seven niches in diameter. He had a pencil in his pocket and he used it, quickly, to dig the dirt out of the teeth. Then he slipped his souvenir in his pocket. He would go now. He would go, yes -

But his feet moved slowly in the wrong direction, toward the cellarhold, and he realized with a dismal sort of horror that he needed to look down inside. He had to see.

He gripped a spongy support-beam leaning out of the earth and swayed forward, trying to see down and inside. He couldn't quite do it. He had come to within fifteen feet of the edge, but that was still a little too far to see the bottom of the cellarhold.

I don't care if I see the bottom or not. I'm going back now. I've got my souvenir. I don't need to look down into any crummy old hole. And Daddy's note said to stay away from it.

But the unhappy, almost feverish curiosity that had gripped him would not let go. He approached the cellarhold step by queasy step, aware that as soon as the wooden beam was out of his reach there would be no more grab-holds, also aware that the ground here was indeed squelchy and crumbly. In places along the edge he could see depressions, like graves that had fallen in, and knew that they were the sites of previous cave-ins.

Heart thudding in his chest like the hard measured strides of a soldier's boots, he reached the edge and looked down.

Nested in the cellarhold, the bird looked up.

Mike was not at first sure what he was seeing. All the nerves and pathways in his body seemed frozen, including those which conducted thoughts. It was not just the shock of seeing a monster bird, a bird whose breast was as orange as a robin's and whose feathers were the unremarkable fluffy gray of a sparrow's feathers; most of it was the shock of the utterly unexpected. He had expected monoliths of machinery half-submerged in stagnant puddles and black mud; instead he was looking down into a giant nest which filled the cellarhold from end to end and side to side. It had been made out of enough timothy grass to make a dozen bales of hay, but this grass was silvery and old. The bird sat in the middle of it, its brightly ringed eyes as black as fresh, warm tar, and for an insane moment before his paralysis broke, Mike could see himself reflected in each of them.

Then the ground suddenly began to shift and run out from beneath his feet. He heard the tearing sound of shallow roots giving way and realized he was sliding.

With a yell he threw himself backward, pinwheeling his arms for balance. He lost it and thumped heavily to the littered ground. Some hard, dull chunk of metal pressed painfully into his back, and he had time to think of the tramp-chair before he heard the whirring, explosive sound of the bird's wings.

He scrambled to his knees, crawled, looked back over his shoulder, and saw it rising out of the cellarhold. Its scaly talons were a dusky orange. Its beating wings, each more than ten feet across, blew the scraggy timothy grass this way and that, patternlessly, like the wind generated by helicopter rotors. It uttered a buzzing, chirruping scream. A few loose feathers slipped from its wings and spiraled back down into the cellarhold.

Mike gained his feet again and began to run.

He pounded across the field, not looking back now, afraid to look back. The bird did not look like Rodan, but he sensed it was the spirit of Rodan, risen from the cellarhold of the Kitchener Ironworks like a horrible bird-in-the-box. He stumbled, went to one knee, got up, and ran on.

That weird chirruping buzzing screech came again. A shadow covered him and when he looked up he saw the thing: it had passed less than five feet over his head. Its beak, dirty yellow, opened and closed, revealing a pink lining inside. It whirled back toward Mike. The wind it generated washed across his face, bringing a dry unpleasant smell with it: attic dust, dead antiques, rotting cushions.

He jigged to his left, and now he saw the fallen smokestack again. He sprinted for it, running all-out, his arms pumping in short jabbing strokes at his sides. The bird screamed, and he heard its fluttering wings. They sounded like sails. Something slammed into the back of his head. Warm fire traced its way up the nape of his neck. He felt it spread as blood began to trickle down the back of his shirt-collar.

The bird whirled around again, meaning to pick him up with its talons and carry him away like a hawk with a fieldmouse. Meaning to carry him back to its nest. Meaning to eat him.

As it flew at him, swooping down, its black, horribly alive eyes fixed on him, Mike cut sharply right. The bird missed him - barely. The dusty smell of its wings was overpowering, unbearable.

Now he was running parallel to the fallen smokestack, its tiles blurring by. He could see where it ended. If he could reach the end and buttonhook to the left, get inside, he might be safe. He thought the bird was too big to squeeze inside. He came very close to not making it. The bird flew at him again, pulling up as it closed in, its wings flapping and pushing air in a hurricane, its scaly talons now angled toward him and descending. It screamed again, and this time Mike thought he heard triumph in its voice.

He lowered his head, put his arm up, and rammed straight forward. The talons closed and for a moment the bird had him by the forearm. The grip was like the clutch of incredibly strong fingers tipped with tough nails. They bit like teeth. The bird's flapping wings were a thunder in his ears; he was dimly aware of feathers falling around him, some brushing past his cheeks like phantom kisses. The bird rose then, and for just a moment Mike felt himself pulled upward, first straight, then on tiptoe . . . and for one freezing second he felt the toes of his Keds lose contact with the earth.

'Let me GO!' he screamed at it, and twisted his arm. For a moment the talons held on, and then the sleeve of his shirt ripped. He thumped back down. The bird squalled. Mike ran again, brushing through the thing's tailfeathers, gagging at that dry smell. It was like running through a shower-curtain of feathers.

Still coughing, eyes stinging from both tears and whatever vile dust coated the bird's feathers, he stumbled into the fallen smokestack. There was no thought now of what might be lurking inside. He ran into the darkness, his gasping sobs taking on a flat echo. He went back perhaps twenty feet and then turned toward the bright circle of daylight. His chest was rising and falling in quick jerks. He was suddenly aware that, if he had misjudged either the size of the bird or the size of the smokestack's muzzle, he had killed himself as surely as if he had put his father's shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. There was no way out. This wasn't just a pipe; it was a blind alley. The other end of the stack was buried in the earth.

The bird squalled again, and suddenly the light at the end of the smokestack was blotted out as it lighted on the ground outside. He could see its yellow scaly legs, each as thick as a man's cab's. Then it cocked its head down and looked inside. Mike found himself again staring into those hideously bright fresh-tar eyes with their gold wedding-rings of iris. The bird's beak opened and closed, opened and closed, and each time it snapped shut he heard an audible click, like the sound you hear in your own ears when you snap your teeth together hard. Sharp, he thought. Its beak is sharp. I guess I knew birds had sharp beaks, but I never really thought about it until now.

It squawked again. The sound was so loud in the tile throat of the stack that Mike clapped his hands to his ears.

The bird began to force itself into the mouth of the stack.

'No!' Mike cried. 'No, you can't!'

The light faded as more of the bird's body pressed its way into the stack's bore (Oh my Lord, why didn't I remember it was mostly feathers? Why didn't I remember it could squeeze?). The light faded . . . faded . . . was gone. Now there was only an inky blackness, the suffocating attic-smell of the bird, and the rustling sound of its feathers.

Mike fell on his knees and began to grope on the curved floor of the smokestack, his hands spread wide, feeling. He found a piece of broken tile, its sharp edges furred with what felt like moss. He cocked his arm back and pegged it. There was a thump. The bird uttered its buzzing, chirruping sound again.

'Get out of here!' Mike screamed.

There was silence . . . and then that crackly, rustling sound began again as the bird resumed forcing itself into the pipe. Mike felt along the floor, found other pieces of tile, and began to throw one after another. They thumped and thudded off the bird and then clinked to the tile sleeve of the smokestack.

Please, God, Mike thought incoherently. Please God, phase God, please God -

It came to him that he ought to retreat down the smokestack's bore. He had run in through, what had been the stack's base; it stood to reason that it would narrow as he backed up. He could retreat, yes, and listen to that low dusty rustle as the bird worked its way in after him. He could retreat, and if he was lucky he might get beyond the point where the bird could continue to advance.

But what if the bird got stuck?

If that happened, he and the bird would die in here together. They would die in here together and rot in here together. In the dark.

'Please, God!' he screamed, and was totally unaware that he had cried out aloud. He threw another piece of tile, and this time his throw was more powerful - he felt, he told the others much later, as if someone were behind him at that moment, and that someone had given his arm a tremendous push. This time there was no feathery thud; instead there was a splatting sound, the sound a kid's hand might make slapping into the surface of a bowl of half-solidified Jell-O. This time the bird screamed not in anger but in real pain. The tenebrous whirr of its wings filled the smokestack; stinking air streamed past Mike in a hurricane, flapping his clothes, making him cough and gag and retreat as dust and moss flew.

Light appeared again, gray and weak at first, then brightening and shifting as the bird retreated from the stack's muzzle. Mike burst into tears, fell to his knees again, and began grubbing madly for more pieces of tile. Without any conscious thought, he ran forward with both hands full of tiling (in this light he could see the pieces were splotched with blue-gray moss and lichen, like the surface of slate gravestones), until he was nearly at the mouth of the stack. He intended to keep the bird from coming back in if he could.

It bent down, cocking its head the way a trained bird on a perch will sometimes cock its head, and Mike saw where his last shot had struck home. The bird's right eye was nearly gone. Instead of that glittering bubble of fresh tar, there was a crater filled with blood. Whitish-gray goo dripped from the corner of the socket and trickled along the side of the bird's beak. Tiny parasites wriggled and squirmed in this pussy discharge.

It saw him and lunged forward. Mike began to throw chunks of tile at it. They struck its head and beak. It withdrew for a moment and then lunged again, beak opening, revealing that pink lining again, revealing something else that caused Mike to freeze for a moment, his own mouth dropping open. The bird's tongue was silver, its surface as crazy-cracked as the surface of a volcanic land which has first baked and then slagged off.

And on this tongue, like weird tumbleweeds that had taken temporary root there, were a number of orange puffs.

Mike threw the last of his tiles directly into that gaping maw and the bird withdrew again, screaming its frustration, rage, and pain. For a moment Mike could see its reptilian talons . . . Then its wings ruffled the air and it was gone.

A moment later he lifted his face - a face that was gray-brown under the dirt, dust, and bits of moss that the bird's wind-machine wings had blown at him - toward the clicking sound of its talons on the tile. The only clean places on Mike's face were the tracks that had been washed clean by his tears.

The bird walked back and forth overhead: Tak-tak-tak-tak.

Mike retreated a bit, gathered up more chunks of tile, and heaped them as close to the mouth of the stack as he dared. If the thing came back, he wanted to be able to fire at it from point-blank range. The light outside was still bright - now that it was May, it wouldn't get dark for a long time yet - but suppose the bird just decided to wait?

Mike swallowed, the dry sides of his throat rubbing together for a moment.

Overhead: Tak-tak-tak.

He had a fine pile of ammunition now. In the dim light, here beyond the place where the angle of the sun made a shadow-spiral inside the pipe, it looked like a pile of broken crockery swept together by a housewife. Mike rubbed the palms of his dirty hands along the sides of his jeans and waited to see what would happen next.

A space of time passed before something did - whether five minutes or twenty-five, he could not tell. He was only aware of the bird walking back and forth overhead like an insomniac pacing the floor at three in the morning.

Then its wings fluttered again. It landed in front of the smokestack's opening. Mike, on his knees just behind his pile of tiling, began to peg missiles at it before it could even bend its head down. One of them slammed into a plated yellow leg and drew a trickle of blood so dark it seemed almost as black as the bird's eyes. Mike screamed in triumph, the sound thin and almost lost under the bird's own enraged squawk.

'Get out of here!' Mike cried. 'I'm going to keep hitting you until you get out of here, I swear to God I will!'

The bird flew up to the top of the smokestack and resumed its pacing.

Mike waited.

Finally its wings ruffled again as it took off. Mike waited, expecting the yellow feet, so like hen's feet, to appear again. They didn't. He waited longer, convinced it had to be some kind of a trick, realizing at last that that wasn't why he was waiting at all. He was waiting because he was scared to go out, scared to leave the safety of this bolthole.

Never mind! Never mind stuff like that! I'm not a rabbit!

He took as many chunks of tile as he could handle comfortably, then put some more inside his shirt. He stepped out of the smokestack, trying to look everywhere at once and wishing madly for eyes in the back of his head. He saw only the field stretching ahead and around him, littered with the exploded rusting remains of the Kitchener Ironworks. He wheeled around, sure he would see the bird perched on the lip of the stack like a vulture, a one-eyed vulture now, only wanting the boy to see him before it attacked for the final time, using that sharp beak to jab and rip and strip.

But the bird was not there.

It was really gone.

Mike's nerve snapped.

He uttered a breaking scream of fear and ran for the weather-beaten fence between the field and the road, dropping the last pieces of tile from his hands. Most of the others fell out of his shirt as the shirt pulled free of his belt. He vaulted over the fence one-handed, like Roy Rogers showing off for Dale Evans on his way back from the corral with Pat Brady and the rest of the buckaroos. He grabbed the handlebars of his bike and ran beside it forty feet up the road before getting on. Then he pedaled madly, not daring to look back, not daring to slow down, until he reached the intersection of Pasture Road and Outer Main Street, where there were lots of cars passing back and forth.

When he got home, his father was changing the plugs on the tractor. Will observed that Mike looked powerful musty and dusty. Mike hesitated for just a split second and then told his father that he'd taken a tumble from his bike on the way home, swerving to avoid a pothole.

'Did you break anything, Mikey?' Will asked, observing his son a little more carefully.

'No, sir.'

'Sprains?'

'Huh-uh.'

'Sure?' * Mike nodded.

'Did you pick yourself up a souvenir?'

Mike reached into his pocket and found the gear-wheel. He showed it to his father, who looked at it briefly and then plucked a tiny crumb of tiling from the pad of flesh just below Mike's thumb. He seemed more interested in this.

'From that old smokestack?' Will asked.

Mike nodded.

'You go inside there?'

Mike nodded again.

'See anything in there?' Will asked, and then, as if to make a joke of the question (which hadn't sounded like a joke at all), he added: 'Buried treasure?'

Smiling a little, Mike shook his head.

'Well, don't tell your mother you was muckin about in there,' Will said.

'She'd shoot me first and you second.' He looked even more closely at his son.

'Mikey, are you all right?'

'Huh?'

'You look a little peaky around the eyes.'

'I guess I might be a little tired,' Mike said. 'It's eight or ten miles there and back again, don't forget. You want some help with the tractor, Daddy?'

'No, I'm about done screwing it up for this week. You go on in and wash up.'

Mike started away, and then his father called to him once more. Mike looked back.

'I don't want you going around that place again,' he said, 'at least not until all this trouble is cleared up and they catch the man who's doing it . . . you didn't see anybody out there, did you? No one chased you, or hollered you down?'

'I didn't see any people at all,' Mike said.

Will nodded and lit a cigarette. 'I think I was wrong to send you there. Old

places like that . . . sometimes they can be dangerous.'

Their eyes locked briefly.

'Okay, Daddy,' Mike said. 'I don't want to go back anyway. It was a little spooky.'

Will nodded again. 'Less said the better, I reckon. You go and get cleaned

up now. And tell her to put on three or four extra sausages.'

Mike did.

6

Never mind that now, Mike Hanlon thought, looking at the grooves which went up to the concrete edge of the Canal and stopped there. Never mind that, it might just have been a dream anyhow, and -

There were splotches of dried blood on the lip of the Canal.

Mike looked at these, and then he looked down into the Canal. Black water flowed smoothly past. Runners of dirty yellow foam clung to the Canal's sides, sometimes breaking free to flow downstream in lazy loops and curves. For a moment - just a moment - two clots of this foam came together and seemed to form a face, a kid's face, its eyes turned up in an avatar of terror and agony.

Mike's breath caught, as if on a thorn.

The foam broke apart, became meaningless again, and at that moment there was a loud splash on his right. Mike snapped his head around, shrinking back a little, and for a moment he believed he saw something in the shadows of the outflow tunnel where the Canal resurfaced after its course under downtown.

Then it was gone.

Suddenly, cold and shuddering, he dug in his pocket for the knife he had found in the grass. He threw it into the Canal. There was a small splash, a ripple that began as a circle and was then tugged into the shape of an arrowhead by the current . . . then nothing.

Nothing except the fear that was suddenly suffocating him and the deadly certainty that there was something near, something watching him, gauging its chances, biding its time.

He turned, meaning to walk back to his bike - to run would be to dignify those fears and undignify himself - and then that splashing sound came again. It was a lot louder this second time. So much for dignity. Suddenly he was running as fast as he could, beating his buns for the gate and his bike, jamming the kickstand up with one heel and pedaling for the street as fast as he could. That sea-smell was all at once too thick . . . much too thick. It was everywhere. And the water dripping from the wet branches of the trees seemed much too loud.

Something was coming. He heard dragging, lurching footsteps in the grass.

He stood on the pedals, giving it everything, and shot out onto Main Street without looking back. He headed for home as fast as he could, wondering what in hell had possessed him to come in the first place . . . what had drawn him.

And then he tried to think about the chores, the whole chores, and nothing but the chores. After awhile he actually succeeded.

And when he saw the headline in the paper the next day (MISSING BOY PROMPTS NEW FEARS), he thought about the pocket knife he had thrown into the Canal - the pocket knife with the initials EC scratched on the side. He thought about the blood he had seen on the grass.

And he thought about those grooves which stopped at the edge of the Canal.

C H A P T E R 7

The Dam in the Barrens

1

Seen from the expressway at quarter to five in the morning, Boston seems a city of the dead brooding over some tragedy in its past - a plague, perhaps, or a curse. The smell of salt, heavy and cloying, comes off the ocean. Runners of early-morning fog obscure much of what movement would be seen otherwise.

Driving north along Storrow Drive, sitting behind the wheel of the black '84 Cadillac he picked up from Butch Carrington at Cape Cod Limousine, Eddie Kaspbrak thinks you can feel this city's age; perhaps you can get that feeling of age nowhere else in America but here. Boston is a sprat compared with London, an infant compared with Rome, but by American standards at least it is old, old. It kept its place on these low hills three hundred years ago, when the Tea and Stamp Taxes were unthought of, Paul Revere and Patrick Henry unborn.

Its age, its silence, and the foggy smell of the sea - all of these things make Eddie nervous. When Eddie's nervous he reaches for his aspirator. He sticks it in his mouth and triggers a cloud of revivifying spray down his throat.

There are a few people in the streets he's passing, and a pedestrian or two on the walkways of the overpasses - they give lie to the impression that he has somehow wandered into a Lovecrafty tale of doomed cities, ancient evils, and monsters with unpronounceable names. Here, ganged around a bus stop with a sign reading KENMORE SQUARE CITY CENTER, he sees waitresses, nurses, city employees, their faces naked and puffed with sleep.

That's right, Eddie thinks, now passing under a sign which reads TOBIN BRIDGE. That's right, stick to the buses. Forget the subways. The subways are a bad idea; I wouldn't go down there if I were you. Not down below. Not in the tunnels.

This is a bad thought to have; if he doesn't get rid of it he will soon be using the aspirator again. He's glad for the heavier traffic on the Tobin Bridge. He passes a monument works. Painted on the brick side is a slightly unsettling admonishment:

SLOW DOWN! WE CAN WAIT!

Here is a green reflectorized sign which reads TO 95 MAINE, N.H., ALL NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND POINTS. He looks at it and suddenly a bone-deep shudder wracks his body. His hands momentarily weld themselves to the wheel of the Cadillac. He would like to believe it is the onset of some sickness, a virus or perhaps one of his mother's 'phantom fevers,' but he knows better. It is the city behind him, poised silently on the straight-edge that runs between day and night, and what that sign promises ahead of him. He's sick, all right, no doubt about that, but it's not a virus or a phantom fever. He has been poisoned by his own memories.

I'm scared, Eddie thinks. That was always what was at the bottom of it. Just being scared. That was everything. But in the end I think we turned that around somehow. We used it. But how?

He can't remember. He wonders if any of the others can. For all their sakes he certainly hopes so.

A truck drones by on his left. Eddie has still got his lights on and now he hits his brights momentarily as the truck draws safely ahead. He does this without thinking. It has become an automatic function, just part of driving for a living. The unseen driver in the truck flashes his running lights in return, quickly, twice, thanking Eddie for his courtesy. If only everything could be that simple and that clear, he thinks. He follows the signs to I-95. The northbound traffic is light, although he observes that the southbound lanes into the city are starting to fill up, even at this early hour. Eddie floats the big car along, pre-guessing most of the directional signs and getting into the correct lane long before he has to. It has been years - literally years - since he has guessed wrong enough to be swept past an exit he wanted. He makes his lane-choices as automatically as he flashed 'okay to cut back in' to the trucker, as automatically as he once found his way through the tangle of paths in the Derry Barrens. The fact that he has never before in his life driven out of downtown Boston, one of the most confusing cities in America to drive in, does not seem to matter much at all.

He suddenly remembers something else about that summer, something Bill said to him one day: 'Y-You've g-got a c-c-cuh-hompass in your head, E-E-Eddie.'

How that had pleased him! It pleases him again as the '84 'Dorado shoots back onto the turnpike. He slides the limo's speed up to a cop-safe fifty-seven miles an hour and finds some quiet music on the radio. He supposes he would have died for Bill back then, if that had been required; if Bill had asked him, Eddie would simply have responded: 'Sure, Big Bill . . . you got a time in mind yet?'

Eddie laughs at this - not much of a sound, just a snort, but the sound of it startles him into a real laugh. He laughs seldom these days, and he certainly did not expect to find many chucks (Richie's word, meaning chuckles, as in 'You had any good chucks today, Eds?') on this black pilgrimage. But, he supposes, if God is dirty-mean enough to curse the faithful with what they want most in life, He's maybe quirky enough to deal you a good chuck or two along the way.

'Had any good chucks lately, Eds?' he says out loud, and laughs again. Man, he had hated it when Richie called him Eds . . . but he had sort of liked it, too. The way he thought Ben Hanscom got to like Richie calling him Haystack. It was something . . . like a secret name. A secret identity. A way to be people that had nothing to do with their parents' fears, hopes, constant demands. Richie couldn't do his beloved Voices for shit, but maybe he did know how important it was for creeps like them to sometimes be different people.

Eddie glances at the change lined up neatly on the 'Dorado's dashboard - lining up the change is another of those automatic tricks of the trade. When the tollbooths come up, you never want to have to dig for your silver, never want to find that you've gotten in an automatic-toll lane with the wrong change.

Among the coins are two or three Susan B. Anthony silver dollars. They are coins, he reflects, that you probably only find in the pockets of chauffeurs and taxi-drivers from the New York area these days, just as the only place you are apt to see a lot of two-dollar bills is at a race-track payoff window. He always keeps a few on hand because the robot tolltaker baskets on the George Washington and the Triboro Bridges take them.

Another of those lights suddenly comes on in his head: silver dollars. Not these fake copper sandwiches but real silver dollars, with Lady Liberty dressed in her gauzy robes stamped upon them. Ben Hanscom's silver dollars. Yes, but wasn't it Bill who once used one of those silver cartwheels to save their lives? He is not quite sure of this, is, in fact, not quite sure of anything . . . or is it just that he doesn't want to remember?

It was dark in there, he thinks suddenly. I remember that much. It was dark

in there.

Boston is well behind him now and the fog is starting to bum off. Ahead is MAINE, N.H., ALL NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND POINTS. Derry is ahead, and there is something in Derry which should be twenty-seven years dead and yet is somehow not. Something with as many faces as Lon Chaney. But what is it really.' Didn't they see it at the end as it really was, with all its masks cast aside?

Ah, he can remember so much . . . but not enough.

He remembers that he loved Bill Denbrough; he remembers that well enough. Bill never made fun of his asthma. Bill never called him little sissy queerboy. He loved Bill like he would have loved a big brother . . . or a father. Bill knew stuff to do. Places to go. Things to see. Bill was never up against it. When you ran with Bill you ran to beat the devil and you laughed . . . but you hardly ever ran out of breath. And hardly ever running out of breath was great, so fucking great, Eddie would tell the world. When you ran with Big Bill, you got your chucks every day.

'Sure, kid, EV-ery day,' he says in a Richie Tozier Voice, and laughs again.

It had been Bill's idea to make the dam in the Barrens, and it was, in a way, the dam that had brought them all together. Ben Hanscom had been the one to show them how the dam could be built - and they had built it so well that they'd gotten in a lot of trouble with Mr Nell, the cop on the beat - but it had been Bill's idea. And although all of them except Richie had seen very odd things - frightening things - in Derry since the turn of the year, it had been Bill who had first found the courage to say something out loud.

That dam.

That damn dam.

He remembered Victor Cris: 'Ta-ta, boys. It was a real baby dam, believe me. You're better off without it.'

A day later, Ben Hanscom was grinning at them, saying:

'We could

'We could flood

'We could flood out the

2

whole Barrens, if we wanted to.'

Bill and Eddie looked at Ben doubtfully, and then at the stuff Ben had brought along with him: some boards (scrounged from Mr McKibbon's back yard, but that was okay, since Mr McKibbon had probably scavenged them from someone else's), a sledgehammer, a shovel.

'I dunno,' Eddie said, glancing at Bill. 'When we tried yesterday, it didn't work very good. The current kept washing our sticks away.'

'This'll work,' Ben said. He also looked to Bill for the final decision.

'Well, let's g-give it a t-t-try,' Bill said. 'I c-called R-R-R-Richie Tozier this m-morning. He's g-gonna be oh-over Mater, he s-said. Maybe him and Stuh-huh-hanley will want to h-help.'

'Stanley who?' Ben asked.

'Uris,' Eddie said. He was still looking cautiously at Bill, who seemed somehow different today - quieter, less enthusiastic about the idea of the dam. Bill looked pale today. Distant.

'Stanley Uris? I guess I don't know him. Does he go to Derry Elementary?'

'He's our age but he just finished the fourth grade,' Eddie said. 'He started school a year late because he was sick a lot when he was a little kid. You think you took chong yesterday, you just oughtta be glad you're not Stan. Someone's always rackin Stan to the dogs an back.'

'He's Juh-juh-hooish,' Bill said. 'Luh-lots of k-kids don't luh-hike him because h-he's Jewish.'

'Oh yeah?' Ben asked, impressed. 'Jewish, huh?' He paused and then said carefully: 'Is that like being Turkish, or is it more like, you know, Egyptian?'

'I g-guess it's more like Tur-hur-hurkish,' Bill said. He picked up one of the boards Ben had brought and looked at it. It was about six feet long and three feet wide. 'My d-d-dad says most J-Jews have big nuh-noses and lots of m-m-money, but Stuh-Stuh-Stuh - '

'But Stan's got a regular nose and he's always broke,' Eddie said.

'Yeah,' Bill said, and broke into a real grin for the first time that day.

Ben grinned.

Eddie grinned.

Bill tossed the board aside, got up and brushed off the seat of his jeans. He walked to the edge of the stream and the other two boys joined him. Bill shoved his hands in his back pockets and sighed deeply. Eddie was sure Bill was going to say something serious. He looked from Eddie to Ben and then back to Eddie again, not smiling now. Eddie was suddenly afraid.

But all Bill said then was, 'You got your ah-ah-aspirator, E-Eddie?'

Eddie slapped his pocket. 'I'm loaded for bear.'

'Say, how'd it work with the chocolate milk?' Ben asked.

Eddie laughed. 'Worked great!' he said. He and Ben broke up while Bill looked at them, smiling but puzzled. Eddie explained and Bill nodded, grinning again.

'E-E-Eddie's muh-hum is w-w-worried that h-he's g-gonna break and sh-she wuh-hon't be able to g-get a re-re-refund.'

Eddie snorted and made as if to push him into the stream.

'Watch it, fuckface,' Bill said, sounding uncannily like Henry Bowers. 'I'll twist your head so far around you'll be able to watch when you wipe yourself.'

Ben collapsed, shrieking with laughter. Bill glanced at him, still smiling, hands still in the back pockets of his jeans, smiling, yeah, but a little distant again, a little vague. He looked at Eddie and then cocked his head toward Ben.

'Kid's suh-suh-soft,' he said.

'Yeah,' Eddie agreed, but he felt somehow that they were only going through the motions of having a good time. Something was on Bill's mind. He supposed Bill would spill it when he was ready; the question was, did Eddie want to hear what it was? 'Kid's mentally retarded.'

'Retreaded,' Ben said, still giggling.

'Y-You g-g-gonna sh-show us how to b-build a dam or a-are you g-g-gonna si-hit there on your b-big c-c-can all d-day?'

Ben got to his feet again. He looked first at the stream, flowing past them at moderate speed. The Kenduskeag was not terribly wide this far up in the Barrens, but it had defeated them yesterday just the same. Neither Eddie nor Bill had been able to figure out how to get a foothold on the current. But Ben was smiling, the smile of one who contemplates doing something new . . . something that will be fun but not very hard. Eddie thought: He knows how - I really think he does.

'Okay,' he said. 'You guys want to take your shoes off, because you're gonna get your little footsies wet.'

The mind-mother in Eddie's head spoke up at once, her voice as stern and commanding as the voice of a traffic cop: Don't you dare do it, Eddie! Don't you dare! Wet feet, that's one way - one of the thousands of ways - that colds start, and colds lead to pneumonia, so don't you do it!

Bill and Ben were sitting on the bank, pulling off their sneakers and socks. Ben was fussily rolling up the legs of his jeans. Bill looked up at Eddie. His eyes were clear and warm, sympathetic. Eddie was suddenly sure Big Bill knew exactly what he had been thinking, and he was ashamed.

'Y-You c-c-comin?'

'Yeah, sure,' Eddie said. He sat down on the bank and undressed his feet while his mother ranted inside his head . . . but her voice was growing steadily more distant and echoey, he was relieved to note, as if someone had stuck a heavy fishhook through the back of her blouse and was now reeling her away from him down a very long corridor.

3

It was one of those perfect summer days which, in a world where everything was on track and on the beam, you would never forget. A moderate breeze kept the worst of the mosquitoes and blackflies away. The sky was a bright, crisp blue. Temperatures were in the low seventies. Birds sang and went about their birdy-business in the bushes and second-growth trees. Eddie had to use his aspirator once, and then his chest lightened and his throat seemed to widen magically to the size of a freeway. He spent the rest of the morning with it stuffed forgotten into his back pocket.

Ben Hanscom, who had seemed so timid and unsure the day before, became a confident general once he was fully involved in the actual construction of the dam. Every now and then he would climb the bank and stand there with his muddy hands on his hips, looking at the work in progress and muttering to himself. Sometimes he would run a hand through his hair, and by eleven o'clock it was standing up in crazy, comical spikes.

Eddie felt uncertainty at first, then a sense of glee, and finally an entirely new feeling - one that was at the same time weird, terrifying, and exhilarating. It was a feeling so alien to his usual state of being that he was not able to put a name to it until that night, lying in bed and looking at the ceiling and replaying the day. Power. That was what that feeling had been. Power. It was going to work, by God, and it was going to work better than he and Bill - maybe even Ben himself - had dreamed it could.

He could see Bill getting involved, too - only a little at first, still mulling over whatever it was he had on his mind, and then, bit by bit, committing himself fully. Once or twice he clapped Ben on one meaty shoulder and told him he was unbelievable. Ben flushed with pleasure each time.

Ben got Eddie and Bill to set one of the boards across the stream and hold it as he used the sledgehammer to seat it in the streambed. There - it's in, but you'll have to hold it or the current'll just pull it loose,' he told Eddie, so Eddie stood in the middle of the stream holding the board while water sluiced over its top and made his hands into wavering starfish shapes.

Ben and Bill located a second board two feet downstream of the first. Ben used the sledge again to seat it and Bill held it while Ben began to fill up the space between the two boards with sandy earth from the stream-bank. At first it only washed away around the ends of the boards in gritty clouds and Eddie didn't think it was going to work at all, but when Ben began adding rocks and muddy gook from the streambed, the clouds of escaping silt began to diminish. In less than twenty minutes he had created a heaped brown canal of earth and stones between the two boards in the middle of the stream. To Eddie it looked like an optical illusion.

'If we had real cement . . . instead of just . . . mud and rocks, they'd have to move the whole city . . . over to the Old Cape side by the middle of next week,' Ben said, slinging the shovel aside at last and sitting on the bank until he got his breath back. Bill and Eddie laughed, and Ben grinned at them. When he grinned, there was a ghost of the handsome man he would become in the lines of his face. Water had begun to pile up behind the upstream board now.

Eddie asked what they were going to do about the water escaping around the sides.

'Let it go. It doesn't matter.'

'It doesn't?'

'Nope.'

'Why not?'

'I can't explain exactly. You gotta let some out, though.'

'How do you know?'

Ben shrugged. I just do, the shrug said, and Eddie was silenced.

When he was rested, Ben got a third board - the thickest of the four or five he had carried laboriously across town to the Barrens - and placed it carefully against the downstream board, wedging one end firmly into the streambed and socking the other against the board Bill had been holding, creating the strut he had put in his little drawing the day before.

'Okay,' he said, standing back. He grinned at them. 'You guys should be able to let go now. The gook in between the two boards will take most of the water pressure. The strut will take the rest.'

'Won't the water wash it away?' Eddie asked.

'Nope. The water is just gonna push it in deeper.'

'And if you're ruh-ruh-wrong, we g-get to k-k-kill yuh-you,' Bill said.

'That's cool,' Ben said amiably.

Bill and Eddie stepped back. The two boards that formed the basis of the dam creaked a little, tilted a little . . . and that was all.

'Hot shit!' Eddie screamed, excited.

'It's g-g-great,' Bill said, grinning.

'Yeah,' Ben said. 'Let's eat.'

4

They sat on the bank and ate, not talking much, watching the water stack up behind the dam and sluice around the ends of the boards. They had already done something to the geography of the streambanks, Eddie saw: the diverted current was cutting scalloped hollows into them. As he watched, the new course of the stream undercut the bank enough on the far side to cause a small avalanche.

Upstream of the dam the water formed a roughly circular pool, and at one place it had actually overflowed the bank. Bright, reflecting rills ran off into the grass and the underbrush. Eddie slowly began to realize what Ben had known from the first: the dam was already built. The gaps between the boards and the banks were sluiceways. Ben had not been able to tell Eddie this because he did not know the word. Above the boards the Kenduskeag had taken on a swelled look. The chuckling sound of shallow water babbling its way over stones and gravel was now gone; all the stones upstream of the dam were underwater. Every now and then more sod and dirt, undercut by the widening stream, would fall into the water with a splash.

Downstream of the dam the watercourse was nearly empty; thin trickles ran restlessly down its center, but that was about all. Stones which had been underwater for God knew how long were drying in the sun. Eddie looked at these drying stones with mild wonder . . . and that weird other feeling. They had done this. They. He saw a frog hopping along and thought maybe old Mr Froggy was wondering just where the water had gone. Eddie laughed out loud.

Ben was neatly stowing his empty wrappers in the lunchbag he had brought. Both Eddie and Bill had been amazed by the size of the repast Ben had laid out with businesslike efficiency: two PB&J sandwiches, one baloney sandwich, a hardcooked egg (complete with a pinch of salt twisted up in a small piece of waxed paper), two fig-bars, three large chocolate chip cookies, and a Ring-Ding.

'What did your ma say when she saw how bad you got racked?' Eddie asked him.

'Hmmmm?' Ben looked up from the spreading pool of water behind the dam and belched gently against the back of his hand. 'Oh! Well, I knew she'd be grocery-shopping yesterday afternoon, so I was able to beat her home. I took a bath and washed my hair. Then I threw away the jeans and the sweatshirt I was wearing. I don't know if she'll notice they're gone or not. Probably not the sweatshirt, I got lots of sweatshirts, but I guess I ought to buy myself a new pair of jeans before she gets nosing through my drawers.'

The thought of wasting his money on such a nonessential item cast momentary gloom across Ben's face.

'W-W-What about the way yuh-you w-were b-bruised up?'

'I told her I was so excited to be out of school that I ran out the door and fell down the steps,' Ben said, and looked both amazed and a little hurt when Eddie and Bill began laughing. Bill, who had been chowing up a piece of his mother's devil's food cake, blew out a brown jet of crumbs and then had a coughing fit. Eddie, still howling, clapped him on the back.

'Well, I almost did fall down the steps,' Ben said. 'Only it was because Victor Criss pushed me, not because I was running.'

'I'd be as h-hot as a tuh-tuh-tamale in a swuh-heatshirt like that,' Bill said, finishing the last bite of his cake.

Ben hesitated. For a moment it seemed he would say nothing. 'It's better when you're fat,' he said finally. 'Sweatshirts, I mean.'

'Because of your gut?' Eddie asked.

Bill snorted. 'Because of your tih-tih-tih - '

'Yeah, my tits. So what?'

'Yeah,' Bill said mildly. 'S-So what?'

There was a moment of awkward silence and then Eddie said, 'Look how dark the water's getting when it goes around that side of the dam.'

'Oh, cripes!' Ben shot to his feet. 'Current's pulling out the fill! Jeez, I wish we had cement!'

The damage was quickly repaired, but even Eddie could see what would happen without someone there to almost constantly shovel in fresh fill: erosion would eventually cause the upstream board to collapse against the downstream board, and then everything would fall over.

'We can shore up the sides,' Ben said. That won't stop the erosion, but it'll slow it down.'

'If we use sand and mud, won't it just go on washing away?' Eddie asked.

'We'll use chunks of sod.'

Bill nodded, smiled, and made an O with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. 'Let's g-g-go. I'll d-dig em and y-you sh-show me where to p-put em ih-in, Big Ben.'

From behind them a stridently cheery voice called: 'My Gawd, someone put the Y-pool down in the Barrens, bellybutton lint and all!'

Eddie turned, noticing the way Ben tightened up at the sound of a strange voice, the way his lips thinned. Standing above them and aways upstream, on the path Ben had crossed the day before, were Richie Tozier and Stanley Uris.

Richie came bopping down to the stream, glanced at Ben with some interest, and then pinched Eddie's check.

'Don't do that! I hate it when you do that, Richie.'

'Ah, you love it, Eds,' Richie said, and beamed at him. 'So what do you say? You havin any good chucks, or what?'

5

The five of them knocked off around four o'clock. They sat much higher on the bank - the place where Bill, Ben, and Eddie had eaten lunch was now underwater - and stared down at their handiwork. Even Ben found it a little difficult to believe. He felt a sense of tired accomplishment which was mixed with uneasy fright. He found himself thinking of Fantasia, and how Mickey Mouse had known enough to get the brooms started . . . but not enough to make them stop.

'Fucking incredible,' Richie Tozier said softly, and pushed his glasses up on his nose.

Eddie glanced over at him, but Richie was not doing one of his numbers now; his face was thoughtful, almost solemn.

On the far side of the stream, where the land first rose and then tilted shallowly downhill, they had created a new piece of bogland. Bracken and holly bushes stood in a foot of water. Even as they sat here they could see the bog sending out fresh pseudopods, spreading steadily westward. Behind the dam the Kenduskeag, shallow and harmless just this morning, had become a still, swollen band of water.

By two o'clock the widening pool behind the dam had taken so much embankment that the spillways had grown almost to the size of rivers themselves. Everyone but Ben had gone on an emergency expedition to the dump in search of more materials. Ben stuck around, methodically sodding up leaks. The scavengers had returned not only with boards but with four bald tires, the rusty door of a 1949 Hudson Hornet, and a big piece of corrugated-steel siding. Under Ben's leadership they had built two wings on the original dam, blocking off the water's escape around the sides again - and, with the wings raked back at an angle against the current, the dam worked even better than before.

'Stopped that sucker cold,' Richie said. 'You're a genius, man.'

Ben smiled. 'It's not so much.'

'I got some Winstons,' Richie said. 'Who wants one?'

He produced the crumpled red-and-white pack from his pants pocket and passed it around. Eddie, thinking of the hell a cigarette would raise with his asthma, refused. Stan also refused. Bill took one, and, after a moment's thought, Ben took one, too. Richie produced a book of matches with the words ROI-TAN on the outside, and lit first Ben's cigarette, then Bill's. He was about to light his own when Bill blew out the match.

'Thanks a lot, Denbrough, you wet,' Richie said.

Bill smiled apologetically. 'The-The-Three on a muh-muh-hatch,' he said. 'B-Bad luh-luh-luck.'

'Bad luck for your folks when you were born,' Richie said, and lit his cigarette with another match. He lay down and crossed his arms beneath his head. The cigarette jutted upward between his teeth. 'Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.' He turned his head slightly and winked at Eddie. 'Ain't that right, Eds?'

Ben, Eddie saw, was looking at Richie with a mixture of awe and wariness. Eddie could understand that. He had known Richie Tozier for four years, and he still didn't really understand what Richie was about. He knew that Richie got A's and B's in his schoolwork, but he also knew that Richie regularly got C's and D's in deportment. His father really racked him about it and his mother just about cried every time Richie brought home those poor conduct grades, and Richie would swear to do better, and maybe he even would . . . for a quarter or two. The trouble with Richie was that he couldn't keep still for more than a minute at a time and he couldn't keep his mouth shut at all. Down here in the Barrens that didn't get him in much trouble, but the Barrens weren't Never-Never Land and they couldn't be the Wild Boys for more than a few hours at a stretch (the idea of a Wild Boy with an aspirator in his back pocket made Eddie smile). The trouble with the Barrens was that you always had to leave. Out there in the wider world, Richie's bullshit was always getting him in trouble - with adults, which was bad, and with guys like Henry Bowers, which was even worse.

His entrance earlier today was a perfect example. Ben Hanscom had no more than started to say in when Richie had fallen on his knees at Ben's feet. He then began a series of gigantic salaams, his arms outstretched, his hands fwapping against the muddy bank every time he bowed again. At the same time he had begun to speak in one of his Voices.

Richie had about a dozen different Voices. His ambition, he had told Eddie one rainy afternoon when they were in the little raftered room over the Kaspbrak garage reading Little Lulu comic books, was to become the world's greatest ventriloquist. He was going to be even greater than Edgar Bergen, he said, and he would be on The Ed Sullivan Show every week. Eddie admired this ambition but foresaw problems with it. First, ail of Richie's Voices sounded pretty much like Richie Tozier. This was not to say Richie could not be very funny from time to time; he could be. When referring to verbal zingers and loud farts, Richie's terminology was the same: he called it Getting Off A Good One, and he got off Good Ones of both types frequently . . . usually in inappropriate company, however. Second, when Richie did ventriloquism, his lips moved. Not just a little, on the 'p' - and 'b' - sounds, but a lot, and on all the sounds. Third, when Richie said he was going to throw his voice, it usually didn't go very far. Most of his friends were too kind - or too bemused with Richie's sometimes enchanting, often exhausting charm - to mention these little failings to him.

Salaaming frantically in front of the startled and embarrassed Ben Hanscom, Richie was speaking in what he called his Nigger Jim Voice.

'Lawks-a-mussy, it's be Haystack Calhoun!' Richie screamed. 'Don't fall on me, Mistuh Haystack, suh! You'se gwineter cream me if you do! Lawks-a-mussy, lawks-a-mussy! Three hunnert pounds of swaingin meat, eighty-eight inches from tit to tit, Haystack be smellin jest like a loader panther shit! I'se gwineter leadjer inter de raing, Mistuh Haystack, suh! I'se sho enuf gwineter leadjer! Jest don'tchoo be fallin on dis yere black boy!'

'D-Don't wuh-worry,' Bill said. 'It's j-j-just Ruh-Ruh-Richie. He's c-c-crazy.'

Richie bounced to his feet. 'I heard that, Denbrough. You better leave me alone or I'll sic Haystack here on you.'

'B-Best p-p-part of you r-ran down your fuh-fuh-hather's l-l-leg,' Bill said.

'True,' Richie said, 'but look how much good stuff was left. How ya doin, Haystack? Richie Tozier is my name, doing Voices is my game.' He popped his hand out. Thoroughly confused, Ben reached for it. Richie pulled his hand back. Ben bunked. Relenting, Richie shook.

'My name's Ben Hanscom, in case you're interested,' Ben said.

'Seen you around school,' Richie said. He swept a hand at the spreading pool of water. 'This must have been your idea. These wet ends couldn't light a firecracker with a flamethrower.'

'Speak for yourself, Richie,' Eddie said.

'Oh - you mean it was your idea, Eds? Jesus, I'm sorry.' He fell down in front of Eddie and began salaaming wildly again.

'Get up, stop it, you're splattering mud on me!' Eddie cried.

Richie jumped to his feet a second time and pinched Eddie's cheek. 'Cute, cute, cute!' Richie exclaimed.

'Stop it, I hate that!'

'Fess up, Eds - who built the dam?'

'B-B-Ben sh-showed us,' Bill said.

'Good deal.' Richie turned and discovered Stanley Uris standing behind him, hands in his pockets, watching quietly as Richie put on his show. This here's Stan the Man Uris,' Richie told Ben. 'Stan's a Jew. Also, he killed Christ. At least that's what Victor Criss told me one day. I been after Stan ever since. I figure if he's that old, he ought to be able to buy us some beer. Right, Stan?'

'I think that must have been my father,' Stan said in a low, pleasant voice, and that broke them all up, Ben included. Eddie laughed until he was wheezing and tears were running down his face.

'A Good One!' Richie cried, striding around with his arms thrown up over his head like a football referee signalling that the extra point was good. 'Stan the Man Gets Off A Good One! Great Moments in History! Yowza-Yowza-YOWza!'

'Hi,' Stan said to Ben, seeming to take no notice of Richie at all.

'Hello,' Ben replied. 'We were in the same class in second grade. You were the kid who - '

' - never said anything,' Stan finished, smiling a little.

'Right.'

'Stan wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful,' Richie said. 'Which he FREE-quently does - yowza-yowza-YOW - '

'Sh-Sh-Shut uh-up, Richie,' Bill said.

'Okay, but first I have to tell you one more thing, much as I hate to. I think you're losing your dam. Valley's gonna flood, pardners. Let's get the women and children out first.'

And without bothering to roll up his pants - or even to remove his sneakers - Richie jumped into the water and began to slam sods into place on the nearside wing of the dam, where the persistent current was pulling fill out in muddy streamers again. A piece of Red Cross adhesive tape was wrapped around one of the bows of his glasses, and the loose end flapped against his cheekbone as he worked. Bill caught Eddie's eye, smiled a Little, and shrugged. It was just Richie. He could drive you bugshit . . . but it was still sort of nice to have him around.

They worked on the dam for the next hour or so. Richie took Ben's commands - which had become rather tentative again, with two more kids to general - with perfect willingness, and fulfilled them at a manic pace. When each mission was completed he reported back to Ben for further orders, executing a backhand British salute and snapping the soggy heels of his sneakers together. Every now and then he would begin to harangue the others in one of his Voices: the German Commandant, Toodles the English Butler, the Southern Senator (who sounded quite a bit like Foghorn Leghorn and who would, in the fullness of time, evolve into a character named Buford Kissdrivel), the MovieTone Newsreel Narrator.

The work did not just go forward; it sprinted forward. And now, shortly before five o'clock, as they sat resting on the bank, it seemed that what Richie had said was true: they had stopped the sucker cold. The car door, the piece of corrugated steel, and the old tires had become the second stage of the dam, and it was backstopped by a huge sloping hill of earth and stones. Bill, Ben, and Richie smoked; Stan was lying on his back. A stranger might have thought he was just looking at the sky, but Eddie knew better. Stan was looking into the trees on the other side of the stream, keeping an eye out for a bird or two he could write up in his bird notebook that night. Eddie himself just sat cross-legged, feeling pleasantly tired and rather mellow. At that moment the others seemed to him like the greatest bunch of guys to chum with a fellow could ever hope to have. They felt right together; they fitted neatly against each other's edges. He couldn't explain it to himself any better than that, and since it didn't really seem to need any explaining, he decided he ought to just let it be.

He looked over at Ben, who was holding his half-smoked cigarette clumsily and spitting frequently, as if he didn't like the taste of it much. As Eddie watched, Ben stubbed it out and covered the long butt with dirt.

Ben looked up, saw Eddie watching him, and looked away, embarrassed.

Eddie glanced at Bill and saw something on Bill's face that he didn't like. Bill was looking across the water and into the trees and bushes on the far side, his eyes gray and thoughtful. That brooding expression was back on his face. Eddie thought Bill looked almost haunted.

As if reading his thought, Bill looked around at him. Eddie smiled, but Bill didn't smile back. He put his cigarette out and looked around at the others. Even Richie had withdrawn into the silence of his own thoughts, an event which occurred about as seldom as a lunar eclipse.

Eddie knew that Bill rarely said anything important unless it was perfectly quiet, because it was so hard for him to speak. And he suddenly wished he had something to say, or that Richie would start in with one of his Voices. He was suddenly sure Bill was going to open his mouth and say something terrible, something which would change everything. Eddie reached automatically for his aspirator, pulled it out of his back pocket, and held it in his hand. He did this without even thinking about it.

'C-Can I tell you g-g-guys suh-homething?' Bill asked.

They all looked at him. Crack a joke, Richie! Eddie thought. Crack a joke, say something really outrageous, embarrass him, I don't care, just shut him up. Whatever it is, I don't want to hear it, I don't want things to change, I don't want to be scared.

In his mind a tenebrous, croaking voice whispered: I'll do it for a dime,

Eddie shuddered and tried to unthink that voice, and the sudden image it called up in his mind: the house on Neibolt Street, its front yard overgrown with weeds, gigantic sunflowers nodding in the untended garden off to one side.

'Sure, Big Bill,' Richie said. 'What's up?'

Bill opened his mouth (more anxiety on Eddie's part), closed it (blessed relief for Eddie), and then opened it again (renewed anxiety).

'I-I-If you guh-guh-guys l-l-laugh, I-I'll never h-hang around with you again,' Bill said. 'It's cuh-cuh-crazy, but I swear I'm not muh-haking it up. It r-r-really happened.'

'We won't laugh,' Ben said. He looked around at the others. 'Will we?'

Stan shook his head. So did Richie.

Eddie wanted to say, Yes we will too, Billy, we'll laugh our heads off and say you're really stupid, so why don't you shut up right now? But of course he could not say any such thing. This was, after all, Big Bill. He shook his head miserably. No, he wouldn't laugh. He had never felt less like laughing in his life.

They sat there above the dam Ben had showed them how to make, looking from Bill's face to the expanding pool and the likewise expanding bog beyond it and then back to Bill's face again, listening silently as he told them about what had happened when he opened George's photograph album - how Georgie's school photograph had turned its head and winked at him, how the book had bled when he threw it across the room. It was a long, painful recital, and by the time he finished Bill was red-faced and sweating. Eddie had never heard him stutter so badly.

At last, though, the tale was told. Bill looked around at them, both defiant and afraid. Eddie saw an identical expression on the faces of Ben, Richie, and Stan. It was solemn, awed fear. It was not in the slightest tinctured by disbelief. An urge came to him then, an urge to spring to his feet and shout: What a crazy story! You don't believe that crazy story, do you, and even if you do, you don't believe we believe it, do you? School pictures can't wink! Books can't bleed! You're out of your mind, Big Bill!

But he couldn't very well do so, because that expression of solemn fear was also on his own face. He couldn't see it but he could feel it.

Come back here, kid, the hoarse voice whispered. I'll blow you for free. Come back here!

No, Eddie moaned at it. Please, go away, I don't want to think about that.

Come back here, kid.

And now Eddie saw something else - not on Richie's face, at least he didn't think so, but on Stan's and Ben's for sure. He knew what that something else was; knew because that expression was on his own face, too.

Recognition.

'I'll blow you for free.

The house at 29 Neibolt Street was just outside the Derry trainyards. It was old and boarded up, its porch gradually sinking back into the ground, its lawn an overgrown field. An old trike, rusting and overturned, hid in that long grass, one wheel sticking up at an angle.

But on the left side of the porch there was a huge bald patch in the lawn and you could see dirty cellar windows set into the house's crumbling brick foundation. It was in one of those windows that Eddie Kaspbrak first saw the face of the leper six weeks ago.

6

On Saturdays, when Eddie could find no one to play with, he often went down to the trainyards. No real reason; he just liked to go out there.

He would ride his bike out Witcham Street and then cut to the northwest along Route 2 where it crossed Witcham. The Neibolt Street Church School stood on the corner of Route 2 and Neibolt Street a mile or so farther on. It was a shabby-neat wood-frame building with a large cross on top and the words SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME written over the front door in gilt letters two feet high. Sometimes, on Saturdays, Eddie heard music and singing coming from inside. It was gospel music, but whoever was playing the piano sounded more like Jerry Lee Lewis than a regular church piano player. The singing didn't sound very religious to Eddie, either, although there was lots of stuff in it about 'beautiful Zion' and being 'washed in the blood of the lamb' and 'what a friend we have in Jesus.' The people singing seemed to be having much too good a time for it to really be sacred singing, in Eddie's opinion. But he liked the sound of it all the same - the way he liked to hear Jerry Lee hollering out 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On.' Sometimes he would stop for awhile across the street, leaning his bike against a tree and pretending to read on the grass, actually jiving along to the music.

Other Saturdays the Church School would be shut up and silent and he would ride out to the trainyard without stopping, out to where Neibolt Street ended in a parking lot with weeds growing up through the cracks in the asphalt. There he would lean his bike against the wooden fence and watch the trains go by. There were a lot of them on Saturdays. His mother told him that in the old days you could catch a GS&WM passenger train at what was then Neibolt Street Station, but the passenger trains had stopped running around the time the Korean War was starting up. 'If you got on the northbound train you went to Brownsville Station,' she said, 'and from Brownsville you could catch a train that would take you all the way across Canada if you wanted, all the way to the Pacific. The southbound tram would take you to Portland and then on down to Boston, and from South Station the country was yours. But the passenger trains have gone the way of the trolley lines now, I guess. No one wants to ride a train when they can just jump in a Ford and go. You may never even ride one.'

But great long freights still came through Derry. They headed south loaded down with pulpwood, paper, and potatoes, and north with manufactured goods for those towns of what Maine people sometimes called the Big Northern - Bangor, Millinocket, Machias, Presque Isle, Houlton. Eddie particularly liked to watch the northbound car-carriers with their loads of gleaming Fords and Chevies. I'll have me a car like one of those someday, he promised himself. Like one of those or even better. Maybe even a Cadillac!

There were six tracks in all, swooping into the station like strands of cobweb tending toward the center: Bangor and Great Northern Lines from the north, the Great Southern and Western Maine from the west, the Boston and Maine from the south, and Southern Seacoast from the east.

One day two years before, when Eddie had been standing near the latter line and watching a train go through, a drunken trainman had thrown a crate out of a slow-moving boxcar at Mm. Eddie ducked and flinched backward, although the crate landed in the cinders ten feet away. There were things inside it, live things that clicked and moved. 'Last ran, boy!' the drunken trainman had shouted. He pulled a flat brown bottle from one of the pockets of his denim jacket, tipped it up, drank, then flipped it into the cinders, where it smashed. The trainman pointed at the crate. 'Take em home to yer mum! Compliments of the Southern-Fucking-Seacoast-Bound-for-Welfare Line!' He had reeled forward to shout these last words as the train pulled away, gathering speed now, and for one alarming moment Eddie thought he was going to tumble right out.

When the train was gone, Eddie went to the box and bent cautiously over it. He was afraid to get too close. The things inside were slithery and crawly. If the trainman had yelled that they were for him, Eddie would have left them right there. But he had said take em home to your Mom, and, like Ben, when someone said Mom, Eddie jumped.

He scrounged a hank of rope from one of the empty quonset warehouses and tied the crate onto the package carrier of his bike. His mother had peered inside the crate even more warily than Eddie himself, and then she screamed - but with delight rather than terror. There were four lobsters in the crate, big two-pounders with their claws pegged. She cooked them for supper and had been extremely grumpy with Eddie when he wouldn't eat any.

'What do you think the Rockefellers are eating this evening at their place in Bar Harbor?' she asked indignantly. 'What do you think the swells are eating at Twenty-one and Sardi's in New York City? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? They're eating lobster, Eddie, same as we are! Now come on - give it a try.'

But Eddie wouldn't - at least that was what his mother said. Maybe it was true, but inside it felt more to Eddie like couldn't than wouldn't. He kept thinking of the way they had slithered inside the crate, and the clicking sounds their claws had made. She kept telling him how delicious they were and what a treat he was missing until he started to gasp for breath and had to use his aspirator. Then she left him alone.

Eddie retreated to his bedroom and read. His mother called up her friend Eleanor Dunton. Eleanor came over and the two of them read old copies of Photoplay and Screen Secrets and giggled over the gossip columns and gorged themselves on cold lobster salad. When Eddie got up for school the next morning, his mother was still in bed, snoring away and letting frequent farts that sounded like long, mellow cornet notes (she was Getting Off Some Good Ones, Richie would have said). There was nothing left in the bowl where the lobster salad had been except a few tiny blots of mayonnaise.

That was the last Southern Seacoast train Eddie ever saw, and when he later saw Mr Braddock, the Derry trainmaster, he asked him hesitantly what had happened. 'Cump'ny went broke,' Mr Braddock said. 'That's all there was to it. Don't you read the papers? It's hap'nin ail over the damn country. Now get out of here. This ain't no place for a kid.'

After that Eddie would sometimes walk along track 4, which had been the Southern Seacoast track, and listen as a mental conductor chanted names inside his head, reeling them off in a lovely Downcast monotone, those names, those magic names: Camden, Rockland, Bar Harbor (pronounced Baa Haabaa), Wiscasset, Bath, Portland, Ogunquit, the Berwicks; he would walk down track 4 heading east until he got tired, and the weeds growing up between the crossties made him feel sad. Once he had looked up and seen seagulls (probably just fat old dump-gulls who didn't give a shit if they ever saw the ocean, but that had not occurred to him then) wheeling and crying overhead, and the sound of their voices had made him cry a little, too.

There had once been a gate at the entrance to the trainyards, but it had blown over in a windstorm and no one had bothered to replace it. Eddie came and went pretty much as he liked, although Mr Braddock would kick him out if he saw him (or any other kid, for that matter). There were truck-drivers who would chase you sometimes (put not very far) because they thought you were hanging around just so you could hawk something - and sometimes kids did.

Mostly, though, the place was quiet. There was a guard-booth but it was empty, its glass windows broken by stones. There had been no full-time security service since 1950 or so. Mr Braddock shooed the kids away by day and a night-watchman drove through four or five times a night in an old Studebaker with a searchlight mounted outside the vent window and that was all.