IT

'Bill - ' he said, but Bill was no longer there. He was walking around to the righthand end of the porch, where Eddie must have crawled under. Richie had to chase after him, and he almost fell over the trike caught in the weeds and slowly rusting its way into the ground.

He caught up as Bill squatted, looking under the porch. There was no skirt at all on this end; someone - some hobo - had pried it off long ago to gain access to the shelter underneath, out of the January snow or the cold November rain or a summer thundershower.

Richie squatted beside him, his heart thudding like a drum. There was nothing under the porch but drifts of moldering leaves, yellowing newspapers, and shadows. Too many shadows.

'Bill,' he repeated.

'Wh-wh-what?' Bill had produced his father's Walther again. He pulled the clip carefully from the grip, and then took four bullets from his pants pocket. He loaded them in one at a tune. Richie watched this, fascinated, and then looked under the porch again. He saw something else this tune. Broken glass. Faintly glinting shards of glass. His stomach cramped painfully. He was not a stupid boy, and he understood this came close to completely confirming Eddie's story. Splinters of glass on the moldering leaves under the porch meant that the window had been broken from inside. From the cellar.

'Wh-what?' Bill asked again, looking up at Richie. His face was grim and white. Looking at that set face, Richie mentally threw in the towel.

'Nothing,' he said.

'You cuh-cuh-homing?'

'Yeah.'

They crawled under the porch.

The smell of decaying leaves was a smell Richie usually liked, but there was nothing pleasant about the smell under here. The leaves felt spongy under his hands and knees, and he had an impression that they might go down for two or three feet. He suddenly wondered what he would do if a hand or a claw sprang out of those leaves and seized him.

Bill was examining the broken window. Glass had sprayed everywhere. The wooden strip which had been between the panes lay in two splintered pieces under the porch steps. The top of the window frame jutted out like a broken bone.

'Something hit that fucker wicked hard,' Richie breathed. Bill, now peering inside - or trying to - nodded.

Richie elbowed him aside enough so he could look, too. The basement was a dim litter of crates and boxes. The floor was earth and, like the leaves, it gave off a damp and humid aroma. A furnace bulked to the left, thrusting round pipes at the low ceiling. Beyond it, at the end of the cellar, Richie could see a large stall with wooden sides. A horse stall was his first thought, but who kept horses in the jeezly cellar? Then he realized that in a house as old as this one, the furnace must have burned coal instead of oil. Nobody had bothered to convert the furnace because no one wanted the house. That thing with the sides was a coalbin. To the far right, Richie could make out a flight of stairs going up to ground level.

Now Bill was sitting down . . . hunching himself forward . . . and before Richie could actually believe what he was up to, his friend's legs were disappearing into the window.

'Bill!' he hissed. 'Chrissake, what are you doing? Get outta there!'

Bill didn't reply. He slithered through, scraping his duffel coat up from the small of his back, barely missing a chunk of glass that would have cut him a good one. A second later Richie heard his tennies smack down on the hard earth inside.

'Piss on this action,' Richie muttered frantically to himself, looking at the square of darkness into which his friend had disappeared. 'Bill, you gone out of your mind?

Bill's voice floated up: 'Y-You c-c-can stay up th-there if you w-want, Ruh-Ruh-Richie. St-Stand g-g-guard.'

Instead he rolled over on his belly and shoved his legs through the cellar window before his nerve could go bad on him, hoping he wouldn't cut his hands or his stomach on the broken glass.

Something clutched his legs. Richie screamed.

'I-I-It's juh-juh-hust m-me,' Bill hissed, and a moment later Richie was standing beside him in the cellar, pulling down his shirt and his jacket. 'Wh-who d-did you th-think it w-was?'

'The boogeyman,' Richie said, and laughed shakily.

'Y-You g-go th-that w-way and I-I - I'll g-g-g - '

'Fuck that,' Richie said. He could actually hear his heartbeat in his voice, making it sound bumpy and uneven, first up and then down. 'I'm stickin with you, Big Bill.'

They moved toward the coalpit first, Bill slightly in the lead, the gun in his hand, Richie close behind him, trying to look everywhere at once. Bill stood beyond one of the coalpit's jutting wooden sides for a moment, and then suddenly darted around it, pointing the gun with both hands. Richie squinched his eyes shut, steeling himself for the explosion. It didn't come. He opened his eyes again cautiously.

'Nuh-nuh-nothin but c-c-coal,' Bill said, and giggled nervously.

Richie stepped up beside Bill and looked. There was still a drift of old coal piled up almost to the ceiling at the back of the stall and trickling away to a lump or two by their feet. It was as black as a crow's wing.

'Let's - ' Richie began, and then the door at the head of the cellar stairs crashed open against the wall with a violent bang, spilling thin white daylight down the stairs.

Both boys screamed.

Richie heard snarling sounds. They were very loud - the sounds a wild animal in a cage might make. He saw loafers descend the steps. Faded jeans on top of them - swinging hands -

But they weren't hands . . . they were paws. Huge, misshapen paws.

'Cuh-cuh-climb the c-c-coal!' Bill was screaming, but Richie stood frozen, suddenly knowing what was coming for them, what was going to kill them in this cellar that stank of damp earth and the cheap wine that had been spilled in the corners. Knowing but needing to see. 'There's a wuh-wuh-window at the t-top of the c-coal!'

The paws were covered with dense brown hair that curled and coiled like wire; the fingers were tipped with jagged nails. Now Richie saw a silk jacket. It was black with orange piping - the Derry High School colors.

'G-G-Go!' Bill screamed, and gave Richie a gigantic shove. Richie went sprawling into the coal. Sharp jags and corners of it poked him painfully, breaking through his daze. More coal avalanched over his hands. That mad snarling went on and on.

Panic slipped its hood over Richie's mind.

Barely aware of what he was doing, he scrambled up the mountain of coal, gaining ground, sliding back, lunging upward again, screaming as he went. The window at the top was grimed black with coal-dust and let in next to no light at all. It was latched shut. Richie seized the latch, which was of the sort that turned, and threw all his weight against it. The latch moved not at all. The snarling was closer now.

The gun went off below him, the sound nearly deafening in the closed room. Gunsmoke, sharp and acrid, stung Richie's nose. It shocked him back to some sort of awareness and he realized that he had been trying to turn the thumb-latch the wrong way. He reversed the direction of the force he was applying, and the latch gave with a protracted rusty squeal. Coaldust sifted down on his hands like pepper.

The gun went off again with a second deafening bang. Bill Denbrough shouted, 'YOU KILLED MY BROTHER, YOU FUCKER!'

For a moment the creature which had come down the stairs seemed to laugh, seemed to speak - it was as if a vicious dog had suddenly begun to bark out garbled words, and for a moment Richie thought the thing in the high-school jacket snarled back, I'm going to kill you too.

'Richie!' Bill screamed then, and Richie heard coal clattering and falling again as Bill scrambled up. The snarls and roars continued. Wood splintered. There were mingled barks and howls - sounds out of a cold nightmare.

Richie gave the window a tremendous shove, not caring if the glass broke and cut his hands to ribbons. He was beyond caring. It did not break; it swung outward on an old steel hinge flaked with rust. More coal-dust sifted down, this time on Richie's face. He wriggled out into the side yard like an eel, smelling sweet fresh air, feeling the long grass whip at his face. He was dimly aware that it was raining. He could see the thick stalks of the giant sunflowers, green and hairy.

The Walther went off a third time, and the beast in the cellar screamed, a primitive sound of pure rage. Then Bill cried: 'It's g-got me, Richie! Help! It's g-g-got me!'

Richie turned around on his hands and knees and saw the terrified circle of his friend's upturned face in the square of the oversized cellar window through which a winter's load of coal had once been funnelled each October.

Bill was lying spreadeagled on the coal. His hands waved and clutched fruitlessly for the window frame, which was just out of reach. His shirt and jacket were rucked up almost to his breastbone. And he was sliding backward . . . no, he was being pulled backward by something Richie could barely see. It was a moving, bulking shadow behind Bill. A shadow that snarled and gibbered and sounded almost human.

Richie didn't need to see it. He had seen it the previous Saturday, on the screen of the Aladdin Theater. It was mad, totally mad, but even so it never occurred to Richie to doubt either his own sanity or his conclusion.

The Teenage Werewolf had Bill Denbrough. Only it wasn't that guy Michael Landon with a lot of makeup on his face and a lot of fake fur. It was real.

As if to prove it, Bill screamed again.

Richie reached in and caught Bill's hands in his own. The Walther pistol was in one of them, and for the second time that day Richie looked into its black eye . . . only this time it was loaded.

They tussled for Bill - Richie gripping his hands, the Werewolf gripping his ankles.

'G-G-Get out of h-here, Richie!' Bill screamed. 'G-Get - '

The face of the Werewolf suddenly swam out of the dark. Its forehead was low and prognathous, covered with scant hair. Its cheeks were hollow and furry. Its eyes were a dark brown, filled with horrible intelligence, horrible awareness. Its mouth dropped open and it began to snarl. White foam ran from the corners of its thick lower lip in twin streams that dripped from its chin. The hair on its head was swept back in a gruesome parody of a teenager's d.a. It threw its head back and roared, its eyes never leaving Richie's.

Bill scrambled up the coal. Richie seized his forearms and pulled. For a moment he thought he was actually going to win. Then the Werewolf laid hold of Bill's legs again and he was yanked backward toward the darkness once more. It was stronger. It had laid hold of Bill, and it meant to have him.

Then, with no thought at all about what he was doing or why he was doing it, Richie heard the Voice of the Irish Cop coming out of his mouth, Mr Nell's voice. But this was not Richie Tozier doing a bad imitation; it wasn't even precisely Mr Nell. It was the Voice of every Irish beat-cop that had ever lived and twirled a billy by its rawhide rope as he tried the doors of closed shops after midnight:

'Let go of him, boyo, or I'll crack yer thick head! I swear to Jaysus! Leave go of him now or I'll serve ye yer own arse on a platter!'

The creature in the cellar let out an ear-splitting roar of rage . . . but it seemed to Richie that there was another note in that bellow as well. Perhaps fear. Or pain.

He gave one more tremendous tug, and Bill flew out of the window and onto the grass. He stared up at Richie with dark horrified eyes. The front of his jacket was smeared black with coal-dust.

'Kwuh-Kwuh-Quick!' Bill panted. He was nearly moaning. He grabbed at Richie's shirt. 'W-W-We guh-guh-hotta - '

Richie could hear coal tumbling and avalanching down again. A moment later the Werewolf s face filled the cellar window. It snarled at them. Its paws clutched at the listless grass.

Bill still had the Walther - he had held on to the gun through all of it. Now he held it out in both hands, his eyes squinched down to slits, and pulled the trigger. There was another deafening bang. Richie saw a chunk of the Werewolf s skull tear free and a torrent of blood spilled down the side of its face, matting the fur there and soaking the collar of the school jacket it wore.

Roaring, it began to climb out of the window.

Moving slowly, dreamily, Richie reached under his coat and into his back pocket. He brought out the envelope with the picture of the sneezing man on it. He tore it open as the bleeding, roaring creature pulled itself out of the window, forcing its way, claws digging deep furrows in the earth. Richie tore the packet open and squeezed it. 'Git back in yer place, boyo!' he ordered in the Voice of the Irish Cop. A white cloud puffed into the Werewolf s face. Its roars suddenly stopped. It stared at Richie with almost comic surprise and made a choked wheezing sound. Its eyes, red and bleary, rolled toward Richie and seemed to mark him once and forever.

Then it began to sneeze.

It sneezed again and again and again. Ropy strings of saliva flew from its muzzle. Greenish-black clots of snot flew out of its nostrils. One of these splatted against Richie's skin and burned there, like acid. He wiped it away with a scream of hurt and disgust.

There was still anger in its face, but there was also pain - it was unmistakable. Bill might have hurt it with his dad's pistol, but Richie had hurt it more . . . first with the Voice of the Irish Cop, and then with the sneezing powder.

Jesus, if I had some itching powder too and maybe a joy buzzer I might be able to kill it, Richie thought, and then Bill grabbed the collar of his jacket and jerked him backward.

It was well that he did. The Werewolf stopped sneezing as suddenly as it had started and lunged at Richie. It was quick, too - incredibly quick.

Richie might have only sat there with the empty envelope of Dr Wacky's sneezing powder in one hand, staring at the Werewolf with a kind of drugged wonder, thinking how brown its fur was, how red the blood was, how nothing was in black and white in real life, he might have sat there until its paws closed around his neck and its long nails pulled his throat out, but Bill grabbed him again and pulled him to his feet.

Richie stumbled after him. They ran around to the front of the house and Richie thought, It won't dare chase us anymore, we're on the street now, it won't dare chase us, won't dare, won't dare -

But it was coming. He could hear it just behind them, gibbering and snarling and slobbering.

There was Silver, still leaning against the tree. Bill jumped onto the seat and threw his father's pistol into the carrier basket where they had carried so many play guns. Richie chanced a glance behind him as he flung himself onto the package carrier and saw the Werewolf crossing the lawn toward them, less than twenty feet away now. Blood and slobber mixed on its high-school jacket. White bone gleamed through its pelt about the right temple. There were white smudges of sneezing powder on the sides of its nose. And Richie saw two other things which seemed to complete the horror. There was no zipper on the thing's jacket; instead there were big fluffy orange buttons, like pompoms. The other thing was worse. It was the other thing that made him feel as if he might faint, or just give up and let it kill him. A name was stitched on the jacket in gold thread, the kind of thing you could get done down at Machen's for a buck if you wanted it.

Stitched on the bloody left breast of the Werewolf s jacket, stained but readable, were the words RICHIE TOZIER.

It lunged at them.

'Go, Bill!' Richie screamed.

Silver began to move, but slowly - much too slowly. It took Bill so long to get going -

The Werewolf crossed the rutted path just as Bill pedaled into the middle of Neibolt Street. Blood splattered its faded jeans, and looking back over his shoulder, filled with a kind of dreadful, unbreakable fascination that was akin to hypnosis, Richie saw that the seams of the jeans were giving way in places, and tufts of coarse brown fur had sprung through.

Silver wavered wildly back and forth. Bill was standing up, gripping the bike's handlebars from underneath, head turned up toward the cloudy sky, cords standing out on his neck. And still the playing cards were only firing single shots.

One paw groped for Richie. He screamed miserably and ducked away from it. The Werewolf snarled and grinned. It was close enough so Richie could see the yellowing corneas of its eyes, could smell sweet rotten meat on its breath. Its teeth were crooked fangs.

Richie screamed again as it swung a paw at him. He was sure it was going to take his head off - but the paw passed in front of him, missing by no more than an inch. The force of the swing blew Richie's sweaty hair back from his forehead.

'Hi-yo Silver AWAYYY!' Bill screamed at the top of his voice.

He had reached the top of a short, shallow hill. Not much, but enough to get Silver rolling. The playing cards picked up speed and began to burr along, gill pumped the pedals madly. Silver stopped wavering and cut a straight course down Neibolt Street toward Route 2.

Thank God, thank God, thank God., Richie thought incoherently. Thank -

The Werewolf roared again - oh my God it sounds like it's RIGHT BESIDE ME - and Richie's wind was cut off as his shirt and jacket were jerked back against his windpipe. He made a gargling, choking sound and managed to grip Bill's middle just before he was pulled off the back of the bike. Bill tilted backward but held on to Silver's handlebar grips. For one moment Richie thought the big bike would simply do a wheelie and spill both of them off the back. Then his jacket, which had been just about ready for the rag-bag anyway, parted down the back with a loud ripping noise that sounded weirdly like a big fart. Richie could breathe again.

He looked around and stared directly into those muddy murderous eyes.

'Bill!' He tried to howl it, but the word had no force, no sound.

Bill seemed to hear him anyway. He pedaled even harder, harder than he ever had in his life. All his guts seemed to be rising, coming unanchored. He could taste thick coppery blood in the back of his throat. His eyeballs were starting from their sockets. His mouth hung open, scooping air. And a crazy, ineluctable sense of exhilaration filled him - something that was wild and free and all his own. A desire. He stood on the pedals; coaxed them; battered them.

Silver continued to pick up speed. He was beginning to feel the road now, beginning to fly. Bill could feel him go.

'Hi-yo Silver!' he screamed again. 'Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYY!'

Richie could hear the fast rattle-thud of loafers on the macadam. He turned. The Werewolf s paw struck him above the eyes with stunning force, and for a moment Richie really did think the top of his head had come off. Things suddenly seemed dim, unimportant. Sounds faded in and out. The color washed out of the world. He turned back, clinging desperately to Bill. Warm blood ran into his right eye, stinging.

The paw swung again, striking the back fender this time. Richie felt the bike waver crazily, for a moment on the verge of tipping over, finally straightening out again. Bill yelled Hi-yo Silver, A WAY! again, but that was distant too, like an echo heard just before it dies out.

Richie closed his eyes and held on to Bill and waited for the end.

14

Bill had also heard the running steps and understood that the clown hadn't given up yet, but he didn't dare turn around and look. He would know if it caught up and knocked them flat. That was really all he needed to know.

Come on, boy, he thought. Give me everything now! Everything you got! Go, Silver! GO!

So once again Bill Denbrough found himself racing to beat the devil, only now the devil was a hideously grinning clown whose face sweated white greasepaint, whose mouth curved up in a leering red vampire smile, whose eyes were bright silver coins. A clown who was, for some lunatic reason, wearing a Derry High School jacket over its silvery suit with the orange ruff and the orange pompom buttons.

Go, boy, go - Silver, what do you say?

Neibolt Street blurred by him now. Silver was starting to hum good now. Had those running footfalls faded back a bit? He still didn't dare turn around to see. Richie had him in a death grip, he was pinching off his wind and Bill wanted to tell Richie to loosen up a little, but he didn't dare waste breath on that, either..

There, up ahead like a beautiful dream, was the stop-sign marking the intersection of Neibolt Street and Route 2. Cars were passing back and forth on Witcham. In his state of exhausted terror, this seemed somehow like a miracle to Bill.

Now, because he would have to put on his brakes in a moment (or do something really inventive), he risked a look back over his shoulder.

What he saw caused him to reverse Silver's pedals with a single snap-jerk. Silver skidded, laying rubber with its locked rear tire, and Richie's head smacked painfully into the hollow of Bill's right shoulder.

The street was completely empty.

But twenty-five yards or so behind them, by the first of the abandoned houses which formed a kind of funeral cortege leading up to the trainyards, there was a bright flick of orange. It lay close to a stormdrain cut into the curbing.

'Uhhnh . . . '

Almost too late, Bill realized that Richie was sliding off the back of Silver. Richie's eyes were turned up so Bill could only see the lower rims of the irises below his upper lids. The mended bow of his glasses hung askew. Blood was flowing slowly from his forehead.

Bill grabbed his arm, they both slipped to the right, and Silver overbalanced. They crashed to the street in a tangle of arms and legs. Bill barked his crazybone a good one and shouted with pain. Richie's eyes flickered at the sound.

'I am going to show you how to get to thees treasure, senhorr, but thees man Dobbs ees plenny dangerous,' Richie said in a snoring gasp. It was his Pancho Vanilla Voice, but its floating, unconnected quality scared Bill badly. He saw several coarse brown hairs clinging to the shallow head-wound on Richie's forehead. They were slightly kinky, like his father's pubic hair. They made him feel even more afraid, and he fetched Richie a strong smack upside the head.

'Yowch!' Richie cried. His eyes fluttered, then opened wide. 'What are you hittin me for, Big Bill? You'll break my glasses. They ain't in very good shape anyway, just in case you didn't notice.'

'I th-th-thought you w-w-were duh-duh-dying, or s-s-something,' Bill said.

Richie sat up slowly in the street and put a hand to his head. He groaned. 'What hap - ' And then he remembered. His eyes widened in sudden shock and terror and he scrambled around on his knees, gasping harshly.

'Duh-duh-don't,' Bill said. 'I-It's g-g-gone, R-R-Richie. It's gone.'

Richie saw the empty street where nothing moved and suddenly burst into tears. Bill looked at him for a moment and then put his arms around Richie and hugged him. Richie clutched at Bill's neck and hugged him back. He wanted to say something clever, something about how Bill should have tried the Bullseye on the Werewolf, but nothing would come out. Nothing except sobs.

'D-Don't, R-Richie,' Bill said, 'duh-duh-duh-h-h - ' Then he burst into tears himself and they only hugged each other on their knees in the street beside Bill's spilled bike, and their tears made clean streaks down their cheeks, which were sooted with coaldust.

C H A P T E R 9

Cleaning Up

1

Somewhere high over New York State on the afternoon of May 29th, 1985, Beverly Rogan begins to laugh again. She stifles it in both hands, afraid someone will think she is crazy, but can't quite stop.

We laughed a lot back then, she thinks. It is something else, another light on in the dark. We were afraid all the time, but we couldn't stop laughing, any more than I can stop now.

The guy sitting next to her in the aisle seat is young, long-haired, good-looking. He has given her several appreciative glances since the plane took off in Milwaukee at half past two (almost two and a half hours ago now, with a stop in Cleveland and another one in Philly), but has respected her clear desire not to talk; after a couple of conversational gambits to which she has responded with politeness but no more, he opens his tote-bag and takes out a Robert Ludlum novel.

Now he closes it, holding his place with his finger, and says with some concern: 'Everything cool with you?'

She nods, trying to make her face serious, and then snorts more laughter. He smiles a little, puzzled, questioning.

'It's nothing,' she says, once again trying to be serious, but it's no good; the more she tries to be serious the more her face wants to crack up. Just like the old days. 'It's just that all at once I realized I didn't know what airline I was on. Only that there was a great big d-d-duck on the s-s-side - ' But the thought is too much. She goes off into gales of merry laughter. People look around at her, some frowning.

'Republic,' he says.

'Pardon?'

'You are whizzing through the air at four hundred and seventy miles an hour courtesy of Republic Airlines. It's on the KYAG folder in the seat pocket.'

'KYAG?'

He pulls the folder (which does indeed have the Republic logo on the front) out of the pocket. It shows where the emergency exits are, where the flotation devices are, how to use the oxygen masks, how to assume the crash-landing position. 'The kiss-your-ass-goodbye folder,' he says, and this time they both burst out laughing,

He really is good-looking, she thinks suddenly - it is a fresh thought, somehow clear-eyed, the sort of thought you might expect to have upon waking, when your mind isn't all junked up. He's wearing a pullover sweater and faded jeans. His darkish blond hair is tied back with a piece of rawhide, and this makes her think of the ponytail she always wore her hair in when she was a kid. She thinks: I bet he's got a nice polite college-boy's cock. Long enough to jazz with, not thick enough to be really arrogant.

She starts to laugh again, totally unable to help it. She realizes she doesn't even have a handkerchief with which to wipe her streaming eyes, and this makes her laugh harder.

'You better get yourself under control or the stewardess will throw you off the plane,' he says solemnly, and she only shakes her head, laughing; her sides and her stomach hurt now.

He hands her a clean white handkerchief, and she uses it. Somehow this helps her to get it under control finally. She doesn't stop all at once, though. It just sort of tapers off into little hitchings and gaspings. Every now and then she thinks of the big duck on the side of the plane and belches out another little stream of giggles.

She passes his handkerchief back after a bit. 'Thank you.'

'Jesus, ma'am, what happened to your hand?' He holds it for a moment, concerned.

She looks down at it and sees the torn fingernails, the ones she ripped down to the quick tipping the vanity over on Tom. The memory of doing that hurts more than the fingernails themselves, and that stops the laughter for good. She takes her hand away from him, but gently.

'I slammed it in the car door at the airport,' she says, thinking of all the times she has lied about things Tom has done to her, and all the times she lied about the bruises her father put on her. Is this the last time, the last lie? How wonderful that would be . . . almost too wonderful to be believed. She thinks of a doctor coming in to see a terminal cancer patient and saying The X-rays show the tumor is shrinking. We don't have any idea why, but it's happening.

'It must hurt like hell,' he says.

'I took some aspirin.' She opens the in-flight magazine again, although he probably knows she's been through it twice already.

'Where are you headed?'

She closes the magazine, looks at him, smiles. 'You're very nice,' she says, 'but I don't want to talk. All right?'

'All right,' he says, smiling back. 'But if you want to drink to the big duck on the side of the plane when we get to Boston, I'm buying.'

'Thank you, but I have another plane to catch.'

'Boy, was my horoscope ever wrong this morning,' he says, and reopens his novel. 'But you sound great when you laugh. A guy could fall in love.'

She opens the magazine again, but finds herself looking at her jagged nails instead of the article on the pleasures of New Orleans. There are purple blood-blisters under too of them. In her mind she hears Tom screaming down the stairwell: 'I'll kill you, you bitch! You fucking bitch!' She shivers, cold. A bitch to Tom, a bitch to the seamstresses who goofed up before important shows and took a Beverly Rogan reaming for it, a bitch to her father long before either Tom or the hapless seamstresses became part of their lives.

A bitch.

You bitch.

You fucking bitch.

She closes her eyes momentarily.

Her foot, cut on a shard of perfume bottle as she fled their bedroom, throbs more than her fingers. Kay gave her a Band-Aid, a pair of shoes, and a check for a thousand dollars which Beverly cashed promptly at nine o'clock at the First Bank of Chicago in Water tower Square.

Over Kay's protests, Beverly wrote her own check for a thousand dollars on a plain sheet of typing paper. I read once that they have to take a check no matter what it's written on,' she told Kay. Her voice seemed to be coming from somewhere else. A radio in another room, maybe. 'Someone cashed a check once that was written on an artillery shell. I read that in The Book of Lists, I think.' She paused, then laughed uneasily. Kay looked at her soberly, even solemnly. 'But I'd cash it fast, before Tom thinks to freeze the accounts.'

Although she doesn't feel tired (she is aware, however, that by now she must be going purely on nerves and Kay's black coffee), the previous night seems like something she must have dreamed.

She can remember being followed by three teenaged boys who called and whistled but didn't quite dare come right up to her. She remembers the relief that washed over her when she saw the white fluorescent glow of a Seven-Eleven store spilling out onto the sidewalks at an intersection. She went in and let the pimply-faced counterman look down the front of her old blouse and talked him into loaning her forty cents for the pay phone. It wasn't hard, the view being what it was.

She called Kay McCall first, dialing from memory. The phone rang a dozen times and she began to fear that Kay was in New York. Kay's sleepy voice mumbled, 'It better be good, whoever you are' just as Beverly was about to hang up.

'It's Bev, Kay,' she said, hesitated, and then plunged. 'I need help.'

There was a moment of silence, and then Kay spoke again, sounding fully awake now. 'Where are you? What happened?'

'I'm at a Seven-Eleven on the comer of S trey land Avenue and some other street. I . . . Kay, I've left Tom.'

Kay, quick and emphatic and excited: 'Good! Finally! Hurray! I'll come and gel you! That son of a bitch! That piece of shit! I'll come and get you in the fucking Mercedes! I'll hire a forty-piece band! I'll - '

'I'll take a cab,' Bev said, holding the other two dimes in one sweating palm. In the round mirror at the back of the store she could see the pimply clerk staring at her ass with deep and dreamy concentration. 'But you'll have to pay the tab when I get there. I don't have any money. Not a cent.'

'I'll tip the bastard five bucks,' Kay cried. 'This is the best fucking news since Nixon resigned! You get your buns over here, girl. And - ' She paused and when she spoke again her voice was serious and so full of kindness and love that Beverly felt she might weep. 'Thank God you finally did it, Bev. I mean that. Thank God.'

Kay McCall is a former designer who married rich, divorced richer, and discovered feminist politics in 1972, about three years before Beverly first met her. At the time Of her greatest popularity/controversy she was accused of having embraced feminism after using archaic, chauvinistic laws to take her manufacturer husband for every cent the law would allow her.

'Bullshit!' Kay had once exclaimed to Beverly. 'The people who say that stuff never had to go to bed with Sam Chacowicz. Two pumps a tickle and a squirt, that was ole Sammy's motto. The only time he could keep it up for longer than seventy seconds was when he was pulling off in the tub. I didn't cheat him; I just took my combat pay retroactively.'

She wrote three books - one on feminism and the working woman, one on feminism and the family, one on feminism and spirituality. The first two were quite popular. In the three years since her last, she had fallen out of fashion to a degree, and Beverly thought it was something of a relief to her. Her investments had done well ('Feminism and capitalism are not mutually exclusive, thank God,' she had once told Bev) and now she was a wealthy woman with a townhouse, a place in the country, and two or three lovers virile enough to go the distance with her in the sack but not quite virile enough to beat her at tennis. 'When they get that good, I drop them at once,' she said, and although Kay clearly thought this was a joke, Beverly wondered if it really was.

Beverly called a cab and when it came she piled into the back with her suitcase, glad to be away from the clerk's eyes, and gave the driver Kay's address.

She was waiting at the end of her driveway, wearing her mink coat over a flannel nightgown. Pink fuzzy mules with great big pompoms were on her feet. Not orange pompoms, thank God - that might have sent Beverly screaming into the night again. The ride over to Kay's had been weird: things were coming back to her, memories pouring in so fast and so clearly that it was frightening. She felt as if someone had started up a big bulldozer in her head and begun excavating a mental graveyard she hadn't even known was there. Only it was names instead of bodies that were turning up, names she hadn't thought of in years: Ben Hanscom, Richie Tozier, Greta Bowie, Henry Bowers, Eddie Kaspbrak . . . Bill Denbrough. Especially Bill - Stuttering Bill, they had called him with that openness of children that is sometimes called candor, sometimes cruelty. He had seemed so tall to her, so perfect (until he opened his mouth and started to talk, that was).

Names . . . places . . . things that had happened.

Alternately hot and cold, she had remembered the voices from the drain . . . and the blood. She had screamed and her father had popped her one. Her father - Tom -

Tears threatened . . . and then Kay was paying the cab-driver and tipping him big enough to make the startled cabbie exclaim, 'Thanks, lady! Wow!'

Kay took her into the house, got her into the shower, gave her a robe when she got out, made coffee, examined her injuries, Mercurochromed her cut foot, and put a Band-Aid on it. She poured a generous dollop of brandy into Bev's second cup of coffee and hectored her into drinking every drop. Then she cooked them each a rare strip steak and sauteed fresh mushrooms to go with them.

'All right,' she said. 'What happened? Do we call the cops or just send you to Reno to do your residency?'

'I can't tell you too much,' Beverly said. 'It would sound too crazy. But it was my fault, mostly - '

Kay slammed her hand down on the table. It made a sound on the polished mahogany like a small-caliber pistol shot. Bev jumped.

'Don't you say that,' Kay said. There was high color in her cheeks, and her brown eyes were blazing. 'How long have we been friends? Nine years? Ten? If I hear you say it was your fault one more time, I'm going to puke. You hear me? I'm just going to fucking puke. It wasn't your fault this time, or last time, or the time before, or any of the times. Don't you know most of your friends thought that sooner or later he'd put you in a body cast, or maybe even kill you?'

Beverly was looking at her wide-eyed.

'And that would have been your fault, at least to a degree, for staying there and letting it happen. But now you're gone. Thank God for small favors. But don't you sit there with half of your fingernails ripped off and your foot cut open and belt-marks on your shoulders and tell me it was your fault.'

'He didn't use his belt on me,' Bev said. The lie was automatic . . . and so was the deep shame which brought a miserable flush to her cheeks.

'If you're done with Tom, you ought to be done with the lies as well,' Kay said quietly, and she looked at Bev so long and so lovingly that Bev had to drop her eyes. She could taste salt tears in the back of her throat. 'Who did you think you were fooling?' Kay asked, still speaking quietly. She reached across the table and took Ben's hands. 'The dark glasses, the blouses with high necks and long sleeves . . . maybe you fooled a buyer or two. But you can't fool your friends, Bev. Not the people who love you.'

And then Beverly did cry, long and hard, and Kay held her, and later, just before going to bed, she told Kay what she could: That an old friend from Derry, Maine, where she had grown up, had called, and had reminded her of a promise she had made long ago. The time to fulfill the promise had arrived, he said. Would she come? She said she would. Then the trouble with Tom had started.

'What was this promise?' Kay asked.

Beverly shook her head slowly. 'I can't tell you that, Kay. Much as I'd like to.

Kay chewed on this and then nodded. 'All right. Fair enough. What are you going to do about Tom when you get back from Maine?'

And Bev, who had begun to feel more and more that she wouldn't be coming back from Derry, ever, said only: 'I'll come to you first, and we'll decide together. Okay?'

'Very much okay,' Kay said. 'Is that a promise, too?'

'As soon as I'm back,' Bev said steadily, 'you can count on it.' And she hugged Kay hard.

With Kay's check cashed and Kay's shoes on her feet, she had taken a Greyhound north to Milwaukee, afraid that Tom might have gone out to O'Hare to look for her. Kay, who had gone with her to the bank and the bus depot, tried to talk her out of it.

'O'Hare's lousy with security people, dear,' she said. 'You don't have to worry about him. If he comes near you, what you do is scream your fucking head off.'

Beverly shook her head. 'I want to avoid him altogether. This is the way to do it.'

Kay looked at her shrewdly. 'You're afraid he might talk you out of it, aren't you?'

Beverly thought of the seven of them standing in the stream, of Stanley and his piece of broken Coke bottle glinting greenly in the sun; she thought of the thin pain as he cut her palm lightly on a slant, she thought of them clasping hands in a children's circle, promising to come back if it ever started again . . . to come back and kill it for good.

'No,' she said. 'He couldn't talk me out of this. But he might hurt me, security guards or not. You didn't see him last night, Kay.'

'I've seen him enough on other occasions,' Kay said, her brows drawing together. 'The asshole that walks like a man.'

'He was crazy,' Bev said. 'Security guards might not stop him. This is better. Believe me.'

'All right,' Kay said reluctantly, and Bev thought with some amusement that Kay was disappointed that there was going to be no confrontation, no big blowoff.

'Cash the check quick,' Beverly told her again, 'before he can think to freeze the accounts. He will, you know.'

'Sure,' Kay said. 'If he does that, I'll go see the son of a bitch with a horsewhip and take it out in trade.'

'You stay away from him,' Beverly said sharply. 'He's dangerous, Kay. Believe me. He was like - ' Like my father was what trembled on her lips. Instead she said, 'He was like a wildman.'

'Okay,' Kay said. 'Be easy in your mind, dear. Go keep your promise. And do some thinking about what comes after.'

'I will,' Bev said, but that was a lie. She had too many other things to think about: what had happened the summer she was eleven, for instance. Showing Richie Tozier how to make his yo-yo sleep, for instance. Voices from the drain, for instance. And something she had seen, something so horrible that even then, embracing Kay for the last time by the long silvery side of the grumbling Greyhound bus, her mind would not quite let her see it.

Now, as the plane with the duck on the side begins its long descent into the Boston area, her mind turns to that again . . . and to Stan Uris . . . and to an unsigned poem that came on a postcard . . . and the voices . . . and to those few seconds when she had been eye to eye with something that was perhaps infinite.

She looks out the window, looks down, and thinks that Tom's evil is a small and petty thing compared with the evil waiting for her in Derry. If there is a compensation, is that Bill Denbrough will be there . . . and there was a time when an eleven-year-old girl named Beverly Marsh loved Bill Denbrough. She remembers the postcard with the lovely poem written on the back, and remembers that she once knew who wrote it. She doesn't remember anymore, any more than she remembers exactly what the poem said . . . but she thinks it might have been Bill. Yes, it might well have been Stuttering Bill Denbrough.

She thinks suddenly of getting ready for bed the night after Richie and Ben took her to see those two honor movies. After her first date. She had cracked wise with Richie about it - in those days that had been her defense when she was out on the street - but a pan of her had been touched and excited and a little scared. It really had been her first date, even though there had been two boys instead of one. Richie had paid her way and everything, just like a real date. Then, afterward, there had been those boys who chased them . . . and they had spent the rest of the afternoon in the Barrens . . . and Bill Denbrough had come down with another kid, she couldn't remember who, but she remembered the way Bill's eyes had rested on hers for a moment, and the electric shock she had felt . . . the shock and a flush that seemed to warm her entire body.

She remembers thinking of all these things as she pulled on her nightgown and went into the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. She remembers thinking that it would take her a long time to get to sleep that night; because there was so much to think about . . . and to think about in a good way, because they seemed like good kids, like kids you could maybe goof with and maybe even trust a little bit. That would be nice. That would be . . . well, like heaven.

And thinking these things, she took her washcloth and leaned over the basin to get some water and the voice

2

came whispering out of the drain:

'Help me . . . '

Beverly drew back, startled, the dry washcloth dropping onto the floor. She shook her head a little, as if to clear it, and then she bent over the basin again and looked curiously at the drain. The bathroom was at the back of their four-room apartment. She could hear, faintly, some Western program going on the TV. When it was over, her father would probably switch over to a baseball game, or the fights, and then go to sleep in his easy chair.

The wallpaper in here was a hideous pattern of frogs on lily pads. It bulged and swayed over the lumpy plaster beneath. It was watermarked in some places, actually peeling away in others. The tub was rustmarked, the toilet seat cracked. One naked 40-watt bulb jutted from a porcelain socket over the basin. Beverly could remember - vaguely - that there had once been a light fixture, but it had been broken some years ago and never replaced. The floor was covered with linoleum from which the pattern had faded, except for a small patch under the sink.

Not a very cheery room, but Beverly had used it so long that she no longer noticed what it looked like.

The wash-basin was also water-stained. The drain was a simple cross-hatched circle about two inches in diameter. There had once been a chrome facing, but that was also long gone. A rubber drain-plug on a chain was looped nonchalantly over the faucet marked C. The drain-hole was pipe-dark, and as she leaned over it, she noticed for the first time that there was a faint, unpleasant smell - a slightly fishy smell - coming from the drain. She wrinkled her nose a little in disgust.

'Help me - '

She gasped. It was a voice. She had thought perhaps a rattle in the pipes . . . or maybe just her imagination . . . some holdover from those movies . . .

'Help me, Beverly . . . '

Alternate waves of coldness and warmth swept her. She had taken the rubber band out of her hair, which lay spread across her shoulders in a bright cascade. She could feel the roots trying to stiffen.

Unaware that she meant to speak, she bent over the basin again and half-whispered, 'Hello? Is someone there?' The voice from the drain had been that of a very young child who had perhaps just learned to talk. And in spite of the gooseflesh on her arms, her mind searched for some rational explanation. It was an apartment house. The Marshes lived in the back apartment on the ground floor. There were four other apartments. Maybe there was a kid in the building amusing himself by calling into the drain. And some trick of sound . . .

'Is someone there?' she asked the drain in the bathroom, louder this time. It suddenly occurred to her that if her father happened to come in just now he would think her crazy.

There was no answer from the drain, but that unpleasant smell seemed stronger. It made her think of the bamboo patch in the Barrens, and the dump beyond it; it called up images of slow, bitter smokes and black mud that wanted to suck the shoes off your feet.

There were no really little kids in the building, that was the thing. The Tremonts had had a boy who was five, and girls who were three and six months, but Mr Tremont had lost his job at the shoe shop on Tracker Avenue, they got behind on the rent, and one day not long before school let out they had all just disappeared in Mr Tremont's rusty old Power-Flite Buick. There was Skipper Bolton in the front apartment on the second floor, but Skipper was fourteen.

'We all want to meet you, Beverly . . . '

Her hand went to her mouth and her eyes widened in horror. For a moment . . . just for a moment . . . she believed she had seen something moving down there. She was suddenly aware that her hair was now hanging over her shoulders in two thick sheaves, and that they dangled close - very close - to that drainhole. Some clear instinct made her straighten up quick and get her hair away from there.

She looked around. The bathroom door was firmly closed. She could hear the TV faintly, Cheyenne Bodie warning the bad guy to put the gun down before someone got hurt. She was alone. Except, of course, for that voice.

'Who are you?' she called into the basin, pitching her voice low.

'Matthew Clements,' the voice whispered. The clown took me down here in the pipes and I died and pretty soon he'll come and take you, Beverly, and Ben Hanscom, and Bill Denbrough and Eddie - '

Her hands flew to her cheeks and clutched them. Her eyes widened, widened, widened. She felt her body growing cold. Now the voice sounded choked and ancient . . . and still it crawled with corrupted glee.

'You'll float down here with your friends, Beverly, we all float down here, tell Bill that Georgie says hello, tell Bill that Georgie misses him but he'll see him soon, tell him Georgie will be in the closet some night with a piece of piano wire to stick in his eye, tell him - '

The voice broke up in a series of choking hiccups and suddenly a bright red bubble backed up the drain and popped, spraying beads of blood on the distained porcelain.

The choking voice spoke rapidly now, and as it spoke it changed: now it was the young voice of the child that she had first heard, now it was a teenaged girl's voice, now - horribly - it became the voice of a girl Beverly had known . . . Veronica Grogan. But Veronica was dead, she had been found dead in a sewer-drain -

'I'm Matthew . . . I'm Betty . . . I'm Veronica . . . we're down here . . . down here with the clown . . . and the creature . . . and the mummy . . . and the werewolf . . . and you, Beverly, we're down here with you, and we float, we change . . . '

A gout of blood suddenly belched from the drain, splattering the sink and the mirror and the wallpaper with its frogs-and-lily-pads pattern. Beverly screamed, suddenly and piercingly. She backed away from the sink, struck the door, rebounded, clawed it open, and ran for the living room, where her father was just getting to his feet.

'What the Sam Hill's wrong with you?' he asked, his brows drawing together. The two of them were here alone this evening; Bev's mom was working the three-to-eleven shift at Green's Farm, Derry's best restaurant.

'The bathroom!' she cried hysterically. 'The bathroom, Daddy, in the bathroom - '

'Was someone peekin at you, Beverly? Huh?' His arm shot out and his hand gripped her arm hard, sinking into the flesh. There was concern on his face but it was a predatory concern, somehow more frightening than comforting.

'No . . . the sink . . . in the sink . . . the . . . the . . . ' She burst into hysterical tears before she could say anything more. Her heart was thundering so hard in her chest that she thought it would choke her.

Al Marsh thrust her aside with an 'O-Jesus-Christ-what-next' expression on his face and went into the bathroom. He was in there so long that Beverly became afraid again.

Then he bawled: 'Beverly! You come here, girl!'

There was no question of not going. If the two of them had been standing on the edge of a high cliff and he had told her to step off - right now, girl - her instinctive obedience would almost certainly have carried her over the edge before her rational mind could have intervened.

The bathroom door was open. There her father stood, a big man who was now losing the red-auburn hair he had passed on to Beverly. He was still wearing his gray fatigue pants and his gray shirt (he was a janitor at the Derry Home Hospital), and he was looking hard at Beverly. He did not drink, he did not smoke, he did not chase after women. I got all the women I need at home, he said on occasion, and when he said it a peculiar secretive smile would cross his face - it did not brighten it but did quite the opposite. Watching that smile was like watching the shadow of a cloud travel rapidly across a rocky field. They take care of me, and when they need it, I take care of them.

'Now just what the Sam Hill is this foolishness all about?' he asked as she came in.

Beverly felt as if her throat had been lined with slate. Her heart raced in her chest. She thought that she might vomit soon. There was blood on the mirror

running in long drips. There were spots of blood on the light over the sink; she could smell it cooking onto the 40-watt bulb. Blood ran down the porcelain sides of the sink and plopped in fat drops on the linoleum floor.

'Daddy . . . ' she whispered huskily.

He turned, disgusted with her (as he was so often), and began casually to wash his hands in the bloody sink. 'Good God, girl. Speak up. You scared hell out of me. Explain yourself, for Lord's sake.'

He was washing his hands in the basin, she could see blood staining the gray fabric of his pants where they rubbed against the lip of the sink, and if his forehead touched the mirror (it was close) it would be on his skin. She made a choked noise in her throat.

He turned off the water, grabbed a towel on which two fans of blood from the drain had splashed, and began to dry his hands. She watched, near swooning, as he grimed blood into his big knuckles and the lines of his palms. She could see blood under his fingernails like marks of guilt.

'Well? I'm waiting.' He tossed the bloody towel back over the rod.

There was blood . . . blood everywhere . . . and her father didn't see it.

'Daddy - ' She had no idea what might have come next, but her father interrupted her.

'I worry about you,' Al Marsh said. 'I don't think you're ever going to grow up, Beverly. You go out running around, you don't do hardly any of the housework around here, you can't cook, you can't sew. Half the time you're off on a cloud someplace with your nose stuck in a book and the other half you've got vapors and megrims. I worry.'

His hand suddenly swung and spatted painfully against her buttocks. She uttered a cry, her eyes fixed on his. There was a tiny stipple of blood caught in his bushy right eyebrow. If I look at that long enough I'll just go crazy and none of this will matter, she thought dimly.

'I worry a lot,' he said, and hit her again, harder, on the arm above the elbow. That arm cried out and then seemed to go to sleep. She would have a spreading yellowish-purple bruise there the next day.

'An awful lot,' he said, and punched her in the stomach. He pulled the punch at the last second, and Beverly lost only half of her air. She doubled over, gasping, tears starting in her eyes. Her father looked at her impassively. He shoved his bloody hands in the pockets of his trousers.

'You got to grow up, Beverly,' he said, and now his voice was kind and forgiving. 'Isn't that so?'

She nodded. Her head throbbed. She cried, but silently. If she sobbed aloud - started what her father called 'that baby whining ' - he might go to work on her in earnest. Al Marsh had lived his entire life in Derry and told people who asked (and sometimes those who did not) that he intended to be buried here - hopefully at the age of one hundred and ten. 'No reason why I shouldn't live forever,' he sometimes told Roger Aurlette, who cut his hair once each month. 'I have no vices.'

'Now explain yourself,' he said, 'and make it quick.'

'There was - ' She swallowed and it hurt because there was no moisture in her throat, none at all. 'There was a spider. A big fat black spider. It . . . it crawled out of the drain and I . . . I guess it crawled back down.'

'Oh\' He smiled a little at her now, as if pleased by this explanation. 'Was that it? Damn! If you'd told me, Beverly, I never would have hit you. All girls are scared of spiders. Sam Hill! Why didn't you speak up?'

He bent over the drain and she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out a warning . . . and some other voice spoke deep inside her, some terrible voice which could not have been a part of her; surely it was the voice of the devil himself: Let it get him, if it wants him. Let it pull him down. Good-fucking-riddance.

She turned away from that voice in horror. To allow such a thought to stay for even a moment in her head would surely damn her to hell.

He peered into the eye of the drain. His hands squelched in the blood on the rim of the basin. Beverly fought grimly with her gorge. Her belly ached where her dad had hit her.

'Don't see a thing,' he said. 'All these buildings are old, Bev. Got drains the size of freeways, you know it? When I was janitorin down in the old high school, we used to get drowned rats in the toilet bowls once in awhile. It drove the girls crazy.' He laughed fondly at the thought of such female vapors and megrims. 'Mostly when the Kenduskeag was high. Less wildlife in the pipes since they put in the new drain system, though.'

He put an arm around her and hugged her.

'Look. You go to bed and don't think about it anymore. Okay?'

She felt her love for him. I never hit you when you didn't deserve it, Beverly, he told her once when she had cried out that some punishment had been unfair. And surely that had to be true, because he was capable of love. Sometimes he would spend a whole day with her, showing her how to do things or just telling her stuff or walking around town with her, and when he was kind like that she thought her heart would swell with happiness until it killed her. She loved him, and tried to understand that he had to correct her often because it was (as he said) his God-given job. Daughters, Al Marsh said, need more correction than sons. He had no sons, and she felt vaguely as if that might be partly her fault as well.

'Okay, Daddy,' she said. 'I won't.'

They walked into her small bedroom together. Her right arm now ached fiercely from the blow it had taken. She looked back over her shoulder and saw the bloody sink, bloody mirror, bloody wall, bloody floor. The bloody towel her father had used and then hung casually over the rod. She thought: How can I ever go in there to wash up again? Please God, dear God, I'm sorry if I had a bad thought about my dad and You can punish me for it if You want, I deserve to be punished, make me fall down and hurt myself or make me have the flu like last winter when I coughed so hard once I threw up but please God make the blood be gone in the morning, pretty please, God, okay? Okay?

Her father tucked her in as he always did, and kissed her forehead. Then he only stood there for a moment in what she would always think of as 'his' way of standing, perhaps of being: bent slightly forward, hands plunged deep _ to above the wrist - in his pockets, the bright blue eyes in his mournful basset-hound's face looking down at her from above. In later years, long after she stopped thinking about Derry at all, she would see a man sitting on the bus or maybe standing on a comer with his dinnerbucket in his hand, shapes, oh shapes of men, sometimes seen as day closed down, sometimes seen across Watertower Square in the noonlight of a clear windy autumn day, shapes of men, rules of men, desires of men: or Tom, so like her father when he took off his shirt and stood slightly slumped in front of the bathroom mirror to shave. Shapes of men.

'Sometimes I worry about you, Bev,' he said, but there was no trouble or anger in his voice now. He touched her hair gently, smoothing it back from her forehead.

The bathroom is full of blood, Daddy! she almost screamed then. Didn't you see it? It's everywhere! Cooking onto the light over the sink, even! Didn't you SEE it?

But she kept her silence as he went out and closed the door behind him, filling her room with darkness. She was still awake, still staring into the darkness, when her mother came in at eleven-thirty and the TV went off. She heard her parents go into their room and she heard the bedsprings creaking steadily as they did their sex-act thing. Beverly had overheard Greta Bowie telling Sally Mueller that the sex-act thing hurt like fire and no nice girl ever wanted to do it ('At the end of it the man pees all over your bug,' Greta said, and Sally had cried: 'Oh yuck, I'd never let a boy do that to me!'). If it hurt as badly as Greta said, then Bev's mother kept the hurt to herself; Bev had heard her mom cry out once or twice in a low voice, but it hadn't sounded at all like a pain-cry.

The slow creak of the springs speeded up to a beat so rapid it was just short of frantic, and then stopped. There was a period of silence, then some low talk, then the sound of her mother's footsteps as she went into the bathroom. Beverly held her breath, waiting for her mother to scream or not.

There was no scream - only the sound of water running into the basin. That was followed by some low splashing. Then the water ran out of the basin with its familiar gurgling sound. Her mother was brushing her teeth now. Moments later the bedsprings in her parents' room creaked again as her mom got back into bed.

Five minutes or so after that her father began to snore.

A black fear stole over her heart and closed her throat. She found herself afraid to turn over on her right side - her favorite sleeping position - because she might see something looking in the window at her. So she just lay on her back, stiff as a poker, looking up at the pressed-tin ceiling. Some time later - minutes or hours, there was no way of telling - she fell into a thin troubled sleep.

3

Beverly always woke up when the alarm went off in her parents' bedroom. You had to be fast, because the alarm no more than got started before her father banged it off. She dressed quickly while her father used the bathroom. She paused (as she now almost always did) to look at her chest in the mirror, trying to decide if her breasts had gotten any bigger in the night. She had started getting them late last year. There had been some faint pain at first, but that was gone now. They were extremely small - not much more than spring apples, really - but they were there. It was true; childhood would end; she would be a woman.

She smiled at her reflection and put a hand behind her head, pushing her hair up and sticking her chest out. She giggled a little girl's unaffected giggle . . . and suddenly remembered the blood spewing out of the bathroom drain the night before. The giggles stopped abruptly.

She looked at her arm and saw the bruise that had formed there in the night - an ugly stain between her shoulder and elbow, a stain with many discolored fingers.

The toilet went with a bang and a flush.

Moving quickly, not wanting him to be mad with her this morning (not wanting him to even notice her this morning), Beverly pulled on a pair of jeans and her Derry High School sweatshirt. And then, because it could no longer be put off, she left her room for the bathroom. Her father passed her in the living room on his way back to his room to get dressed. His blue pyjama suit flapped loosely around him. He grunted something at her she didn't understand.

'Okay, Daddy,' she replied nevertheless.

She stood in front of the closed bathroom door for a moment, trying to get her mind ready for what she might see inside. At least it's daytime, she thought, and that brought some comfort. Not much, but some. She grasped the doorknob, turned it, and stepped inside.

4

That was a busy morning for Beverly. She got her father his breakfast - orange juice, scrambled eggs, Al Marsh's version of toast (the bread hot but not really toasted at all). He sat at the table, barricaded behind the News, and ate it all.

'Where's the bacon?'

'Gone, Daddy. We finished it yesterday.'

'Cook me a hamburger.'

'There's only a little bit of that left, t - '

The paper rustled, then dropped. His blue stare fell on her like weight.

'What did you say?' he asked softly.

'I said right away, Daddy.'

He looked at her a moment longer. Then the paper went back up and Beverly hurried to the refrigerator to get the meat.

She cooked him a hamburger, mashing the little bit of ground meat that was left in the icebox as hard as she could to make it look bigger. He ate it reading the Sports page and Beverly made his lunch - a couple of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, a big piece of cake her mother had brought back from Green's Farm last night, a Thermos of hot coffee heavily laced with sugar.

'You tell your mother I said to get this place cleaned up today,' he said, taking his dinnerbucket. 'It looks like a damn old pigsty. Sam Hill! I spend the whole day cleaning up messes over to the hospital. I don't need to come home to a pigsty. You mind me, Beverly.'

'Okay, Daddy. I will.'

He kissed her cheek, gave her a rough hug, and left. As she always did, Beverly went to the window of her room and watched him walk down the street. And as she always did, she felt a sneaking sense of relief when he turned the corner . . . and hated herself for it.

She did the dishes and then took the book she was reading out on the back steps for awhile. Lars Theramenius, his long blonde hair glowing with its own serene inner light, toddled over from the next building to show Beverly his new Tonka truck and the new scrapes on his knees. Beverly exclaimed over both. Then her mother was calling her.

They changed both beds, washed the floors and waxed the kitchen linoleum. Her mother did the bathroom floor, for which Beverly was profoundly grateful. Elfrida Marsh was a small woman with graying hair and a grim look. Her lined face told the world that she had been around for awhile and intended to stay around awhile longer . . . It also told the world that none of it had been easy and she did not look for an early change in that state of affairs.

'Will you do the living-room windows, Bevvie?' she asked, coming back into the kitchen. She had changed into her waitress uniform. 'I have to go up to Saint Joe's in Bangor to see Cheryl Tarrent. She broke her leg last night.'

'Yeah, I'll do them,' Beverly said. 'What happened to Mrs Tarrent? Did she fall down or something?' Cheryl Tarrent was a woman Elfrida worked with at the restaurant.

'She and that no-good she's married to were in a car wreck,' Beverly's mother said grimly. 'He was drinking. You want to thank God in your prayers every night that your father doesn't drink, Bevvie.'

'I do,' Beverly said. She did.

'She's going to lose her job, I guess, and he can't hold one.' Now tones of grim horror crept into Elfrida's voice. 'They'll have to go on the county, I guess.'

It was the worst thing Elfrida Marsh could think of. Losing a child or finding out you had cancer didn't hold a candle to it. You could be poor; you could spend your life doing what she called 'scratchin.' But at the bottom of everything, below even the gutter, was a time when you might have to go on the county and drink the worksweat from the brows of others as a gift. This, she knew, was the prospect that now faced Cheryl Tarrent.

'Once you got the windows washed and take the trash out, you can go and play awhile, if you want. It's your father's bowling night so you won't have to fix his supper, but I want you in before dark. You know why.'

'Okay, Mom.'

'My God, you're growing up fast,' Elfrida said. She looked for a moment at the nubs in Beverly's sweatshirt. Her glance was loving but pitiless. 'I don't know what I'm going to do around here once you're married and have a place of your own.'

'I'll be around for just about ever,' Beverly said, smiling. . Her mother hugged her briefly and kissed the corner of her mouth with her warm dry lips. 'I know better,' she said. 'But I love you, Bevvie.'

'I love you too, Momma.'

'You make sure there aren't any streaks on those windows when you're done,' she said, picking up her purse and going to the door. 'If there are, you'll catch the blue devil from your father.'

'I'll be careful.' As her mother opened the door to go out, Beverly asked in a tone she hoped was casual: 'Did you see anything funny in the bathroom, Mom?'

Elfrida looked back at her, frowning a little. 'Funny?'

'Well . . . I saw a spider in there last night. It crawled out of the drain. Didn't Daddy tell you?'

'Did you get your dad angry at you last night, Bevvie?'

'No! Huh-uh! I told him a spider crawled out of the drain and scared me and he said sometimes they used to find drowned rats in the toilets at the old high school. Because of the drains. He didn't tell you about the spider I saw?'

'No.'

'Oh. Well, it doesn't matter. I just wondered if you saw it.'

'I didn't see any spider. I wish we could afford a little new linoleum for that bathroom floor.' She glanced at the sky, which was blue and cloudless. 'They say if you kill a spider, it brings rain. You didn't kill it, did you?'

'No,' Beverly said. 'I didn't kill it.'

Her mother looked back at her, her lips pressed together so tightly they almost weren't there. 'You sure your dad wasn't angry with you last night?'

'Bevvie, does he ever touch you?'

'What?' Beverly looked at her mother, totally perplexed. God, her father touched her every day. 'I don't get what you - '

'Never mind,' Elfrida said shortly. 'Don't forget the trash. And if those windows are streaked, you won't need your father to give you blue devil.'

'I won't

(does he ever touch you)

'forget.'

'And be in before dark.'

'I will.'

(does he)

(worry an awful lot)

Elfrida left. Beverly went into her room again and watched her around the corner and out of view, as she had her father. Then, when she was sure her mother was well on her way to the bus stop, Beverly got the floorbucket, the Windex, and some rags from under the sink. She went into the living room and began on the windows. The apartment seemed too quiet. Each time the floor creaked or a door slammed, she jumped a little. When the Boltons' toilet flushed above her, she uttered a gasp that was nearly a scream.

And she kept looking toward the closed bathroom door.

At last she walked down there and drew it open again and looked inside. Her mother had cleaned in here this morning, and most of the blood which had pooled under the sink was gone. So was the blood on the sink's rim. But there were still maroon streaks drying in the sink itself, spots and splashes of it on the mirror and on the wallpaper.

Beverly looked at her pale reflection and realized with sudden, superstitious dread that the blood on the mirror made it seem as if her face was bleeding. She thought again: What am I going to do about this? Have I gone crazy? Am I imagining it?

The drain suddenly gave a burping chuckle.

Beverly screamed and slammed the door and five minutes later her hands were still trembling so badly that she almost dropped the bottle of Windex as she washed the windows in the living room.

5

It was around three o'clock that afternoon, the apartment locked up and the extra key tucked snugly away in the pocket of her jeans, when Beverly Marsh happened to turn up Richard's Alley, a narrow walk-through which connected Main and Center Streets, and came upon Ben Hanscom, Eddie Kaspbrak, and a boy named Bradley Donovan pitching pennies.

'Hi, Bev!' Eddie said. 'You get any nightmares from those movies?'

'Nope,' Beverly said, squatting down to watch the game. 'How'd you know about that?'

'Haystack told me,' Eddie said, jerking a thumb at Ben, who was blushing wildly for no good reason Beverly could see.

'What movieth?' Bradley asked, and now Beverly recognized him: he had come down to the Barrens a week ago with Bill Denbrough. They had a speech class together in Bangor. Beverly more or less dismissed him from her mind. If asked, she might have said he seemed somehow less important than Ben and Eddie - less there.

'Couple of creature features,' she said to him, and duck-walked closer until she was between Ben and Eddie. 'You pitchin?'

'Yes,' Ben said. He looked at her quickly, then looked away.

'Who's winning?'

'Eddie,' Ben said. 'Eddie's real good.'

She looked at Eddie, who polished his nails solemnly on the front of his shirt and then giggled.

'Can I play?'

'Okay with me,' Eddie said. 'You got pence?'

She felt in her pocket and brought out three.

'Jeez, how do you dare to go out of the house with such a wad?' Eddie asked. 'I'd be scared.'

Ben and Bradley Donovan laughed.

'Girls can be brave, too,' Beverly said gravely, and a moment later they were all laughing.

Bradley pitched first, then Ben, then Beverly. Because he was winning, Eddie had lasties. They tossed the pennies toward the back wall of the Center Street Drug Store. Sometimes they landed short, sometimes they struck and bounced back. At the end of each round the shooter with the penny closest to the wall collected all four pennies. Five minutes later, Beverly had twenty-four cents. She had lost only a single round.

'Girlth cheat!' Bradley said, disgusted, and got up to go. His good humor was gone, and he looked at Beverly with both anger and humiliation. 'Girlth thouldn't be allowed to - '

Ben bounced to his feet. It was awesome to watch Ben Hanscom bounce.

Take that back!'

Bradley looked at Ben, his mouth open.'What?'

Take it back! She didn't cheat!'

Bradley looked from Ben to Eddie to Beverly, who was still on her knees. Then he looked back at Ben again. 'You want a fat lip to math the reth of you, athhole?'

'Sure,' Ben said, and a grin suddenly crossed his face. Something in its quality caused Bradley to take a surprised, uneasy step backward. Perhaps what he saw in that grin was the simple fact that after tangling with Henry Bowers and coming out ahead not once but twice, Ben Hanscom was not about to be terrorized by skinny old Bradley Donovan (who had warts all over his hands as well as that cataclysmic lisp).

'Yeah, and then you all gang up on me,' Bradley said, taking another step backward. His voice had picked up an uncertain waver, and tears stood out in his eyes. 'All a bunth of cheaterth!'

'You just take back what you said about her,' Ben said.

'Never mind, Ben,' Beverly said. She held out a handful of coppers to Bradley. Take what's yours. I wasn't playing for keepsies anyway.'

Tears of humiliation spilled over Bradley's lower lashes. He struck the pennies from Beverly's hand and ran for the Center Street end of Richard's Alley. The others stood looking at him, open-mouthed. With safety within reach, Bradley turned around and shouted: 'You're jutht a little bith, that'th all! Cheater! Cheater! Your mother'th a whorel'

Beverly gasped. Ben ran up the alley toward Bradley and succeeded in doing no more than tripping over an empty crate and falling down. Bradley was gone, and Ben knew better than to believe he could ever catch him. He turned toward Beverly instead to see if she was all right. That word had shocked him as much as it had her.

She saw the concern in his face. She opened her mouth to say she was okay, not to worry, sticks-and-stones-will-break-my-bones-but-names-will-never-hurt-me . . . and that odd question her mother had asked

(does he ever touch you)

recurred. Odd question, yes - simple yet nonsensical, full of somehow ominous undertones, murky as old coffee. Instead of saying that names would never hurt her, she burst into tears.

Eddie looked at her uncomfortably, took his aspirator from his pants pocket, and sucked on it. Then he bent down and began picking up the scattered pennies. There was a fussy, careful expression on his face as he did this.

Ben moved toward her instinctively, wanting to hug and give comfort, and then stopped. She was too pretty. In the face of that prettiness he felt helpless.

'Cheer up,' he said, knowing it must sound idiotic but unable to think of anything more useful. He touched her shoulders lightly (she had put her hands over her face to hide her wet eyes and blotchy cheeks) and then took them away as if she were too hot to touch. He was now blushing so hard he looked apoplectic. 'Cheer up, Beverly.'

She lowered her hands and cried out in a shrill, furious voice: 'My mother is not a whore! She . . . she's a waitress!'

This was greeted by absolute silence. Ben stared at her with his lower jaw sprung ajar. Eddie looked up at her from the cobbled surface of the alley, his hands full of pennies. And suddenly all three of them were laughing hysterically.

'A waitress!' Eddie cackled. He had only the faintest idea of what a whore was, but something about this comparison struck him as delicious just the same. 'Is that what she is!'

'Yes! Yes, she is!' Beverly gasped, laughing and crying at the same time.

Ben was laughing so hard he couldn't stand up. He sat heavily on a trashcan. His bulk drove the lid into the can and spilled him into the alley on his side. Eddie pointed at him and howled with laughter. Beverly helped him to his feet.

A window went up above them and a woman yelled, 'You kids get out of there! There's people that have to work the night shift, you know! Get lost!'

Without thinking, the three of them linked hands, Beverly in the middle, and ran for Center Street. They were still laughing.

6

They pooled their money and discovered they had forty cents, enough for two ice-cream frappes from the drugstore. Because old Mr Keene was a grouch and wouldn't let kids under twelve eat their stuff at the soda fountain (he claimed the pinball machines in the back room might corrupt them), they took the frappes in two huge waxed containers up to Bassey Park and sat on the grass to drink them. Ben had coffee, Eddie strawberry. Beverly sat between the two boys with a straw, sampling each in turn like a bee at flowers. She felt okay again for the first time since the drain had coughed up its gout of blood the night before - washed out and emotionally exhausted, but okay, at peace with herself. For the time being, anyway.

'I just don't get what was wrong with Bradley,' Eddie said at last - it had the tone of awkward apology. 'He never acted like that before.'

'You stood up for me,' Beverly said, and suddenly kissed Ben on one cheek. 'Thank you.'

Ben went scarlet again. 'You weren't cheating,' he mumbled, and abruptly gulped down half of his coffee frappe in three monster swallows. This was followed by a burp as loud as a shotgun blast.

'Get any on you, Daddy-o?' Eddie asked, and Beverly laughed helplessly, holding her stomach.

'No more,' she giggled. 'My stomach hurts. Please, no more.'

Ben was smiling. That night, before sleep, he would play the moment when she had kissed him over and over again in his mind.

'Are you really okay now?' he asked.

She nodded. 'It wasn't him. It really wasn't even what he said about my mother. It was something that happened last night.' She hesitated, looking from Ben to Eddie and back to Ben again. 'I . . . I have to tell somebody. Or show somebody. Or something. I guess I cried because I've been scared I'm going looneytunes.'

'What are you talking about, looneytunes?' a new voice asked.

It was Stanley Uris. As always he looked small, slim, and preternaturally neat - much too neat for a kid who was just barely eleven. In his white shirt, neatly tucked into his fresh jeans all the way around, his hair combed, the toes of his high-top Keds spotlessly clean, he looked instead like the world's smallest adult. Then he smiled, and the illusion was broken.

She won't say whatever she was going to say, Eddie thought, because he wasn't there when Bradley called her mother that name.

But after a moment's hesitation, Beverly did tell. Because somehow Stanley was different from Bradley - he was there in a way Bradley had not been.

Stanley's one of us, Beverly thought, and wondered why that should cause her arms to suddenly break out in bumps. I'm not doing any of them any favors by telling, she thought. Not them, and not me, neither.

But it was too late. She was already speaking. Stan sat down with them, his face still and grave. Eddie offered him the last of the strawberry frappe and Stan only shook his head, his eyes never leaving Beverly's face. None of the boys spoke.

She told them about the voices. About recognizing Ronnie Grogan's voice. She knew Ronnie was dead, but it was her voice all the same. She told them about the blood, and how her father had not seen it or felt it, and how her mother had not seen it this morning.

When she finished, she looked around at their faces, afraid of what she might

see there . . . but she saw no disbelief. Terror, but no disbelief.

Finally Ben said, 'Let's go look.'

7

They went in by the back door, not just because that was the lock Bev's key fitted but because she said her father would kill her if Mrs Bolton saw her going into the apartment with three boys while her folks were gone.

'Why?' Eddie asked.

'You wouldn't understand, numbnuts,' Stan said. 'Just be quiet.'

Eddie started to reply, looked again at Stan's white, strained face and decided to keep his mouth shut.

The door gave on the kitchen, which was full of late-afternoon sun and summer silence. The breakfast dishes sparkled in the drainer. The four of them stood by the kitchen table, bunched up, and when a door slammed upstairs, they all jumped and then laughed nervously.

'Where is it?' Ben asked. He was whispering.

Her heart thudding in her temples, Beverly led them down the little hall with her parents' bedroom on one side and the closed bathroom door at the end. She pulled it open, stepped quickly inside, and pulled the chain over the sink. Then she stepped back between Ben and Eddie again. The blood had dried to maroon smears on the mirror and the basin and the wallpaper. She looked at the blood because it was suddenly easier to look at that than at them.

In a small voice she could hardly recognize as her own, she asked: 'Do you see it? Do any of you see it? Is it there?'

Ben stepped forward, and she was again struck by how delicately he moved for such a fat boy. He touched one of the smears of blood; then a second; then a long drip on the mirror. 'Here. Here. Here.' His voice was flat and authoritative.

'Jeepers! It looks like somebody killed a pig in here,' Stan said, softly awed.

'It all came out of the drain?' Eddie asked. The sight of the blood made him feel ill. His breath was shortening. He clutched at his aspirator.

Beverly had to struggle to keep from bursting into fresh tears. She didn't want to do that; she was afraid if she did they would dismiss her as just another girl. But she had to clutch for the doorknob as relief washed through her in a wave of frightening strength. Until that moment she hadn't realized how sure she was that she was going crazy, having hallucinations, something.

'And your mom and dad never saw it,' Ben marvelled. He touched a splotch of blood which had dried on the basin and then pulled his hand away and wiped it on the tail of his shirt. 'Jeepers-creepers.

'I don't know how I can ever come in here again,' Beverly said. 'Not to wash up or brush my teeth or . . . you know.'

'Well, why don't we clean the place up?' Stanley asked suddenly.

Beverly looked at him. 'Clean it?'

'Sure. Maybe we couldn't get all of it off the wallpaper - it looks sorta, you know, on its last legs - but we could get the rest. Haven't you got some rags?'

'Under the kitchen sink,' Beverly said. 'But my mom'll wonder where they went if we use them.'

'I've got fifty cents,' Stan said quietly. His eyes never left the blood that had spattered the area of the bathroom around the wash-basin. 'We'll clean up as good as we can, then take the rags down to that coin-op laundry place back the way we came. We'll wash them and dry them and they'll all be back under the sink before your folks get home.'

'My mother says you can't get blood out of cloth,' Eddie objected. 'She says it sets in, or something.'

Ben uttered a hysterical little giggle. 'Doesn't matter if it comes out of the

rags or not,' he said. 'They can't see it.'

No one had to ask him who he meant by 'they.'

'All right,' Beverly said. 'Let's try it.'

8

For the next half hour, the four of them cleaned like grim elves, and as the blood disappeared from the walls and the mirror and the porcelain basin, Beverly felt her heart grow lighter and lighter. Ben and Eddie did the sink and mirror while she scrubbed the floor. Stan worked on the wallpaper with studious care, using a rag that was almost dry. In the end, they got almost all of it. Ben finished by removing the light-bulb over the sink and replacing it with one from the box of bulbs in the pantry. There were plenty: Elfrida Marsh had bought a two-year supply from the Derry Lions during their annual light-bulb sale the fall before.

They used Elfrida's floorbucket, her Ajax, and plenty of hot water. They dumped the water frequently because none of them liked to have their hands in it once it had turned pink.

At last Stanley backed away, looked at the bathroom with the critical eye of a boy in whom neatness and order are not simply ingrained but actually innate, and told them: 'It's the best we can do, I think.'

There were still faint traces of blood on the wallpaper to the left of the sink, where the paper was so thin and ragged that Stanley had dared do no more than blot it gently. Yet even here the blood had been sapped of its former ominous strength; it was little more than a meaningless pastel smear.

Thank you,' Beverly said to all of them. She could not remember ever having meant thanks so deeply. 'Thank you all.'

'It's okay,' Ben mumbled. He was of course blushing again.

'Sure,' Eddie agreed.

'Let's get these rags done,' Stanley said. His face was set, almost stern. And later Beverly would think that perhaps only Stan realized that they had taken another step toward some unthinkable confrontation.

9

They measured out a cup of Mrs Marsh's Tide and put it in an empty mayonnaise jar. Bev found a paper shopping bag to put the bloody rags in, and the four of them went down to the Kleen-Kloze Washateria on the corner of Main and Cony Streets. Two blocks farther up they could see the Canal gleaming a bright blue in the afternoon sun.

The Kleen-Kloze was empty except for a woman in a white nurse's uniform who was waiting for her dryer to stop. She glanced at the four kids distrustfully and then went back to her paperback of Peyton Place.

'Cold water,' Ben said in a low voice. 'My mom says you gotta wash blood in cold water.'

They dumped the rags into the washer while Stan changed his two quarters for four dimes and two nickels. He came back and watched as Bev dumped the Tide over the rags and swung the washer's door closed. Then he plugged two dimes into the coin-op slot and twisted the start knob.

Beverly had chipped in most of the pennies she had won at pitch for the frappes, but she found four survivors deep down in the lefthand pocket of her jeans. She fished them out and offered them to Stan, who looked pained. 'Jeez,' he said, 'I take a girl on a laundry date and right away she wants to go Dutch.'

Beverly laughed a little. 'You sure?'

'I'm sure,' Stan said in his dry way. 'I mean, it's really breaking my heart to give up those four pence, Beverly, but I'm sure.'

The four of them went over to the line of plastic contour chairs against the Washateria's cinderblock wall and sat there, not talking. The Maytag with the rags in it chugged and sloshed. Fans of suds slobbered against the thick glass of its round porthole. At first the suds were reddish. Looking at them made Bev feel a little sick, but she found it was hard to look away. The bloody foam had a gruesome sort of fascination. The lady in the nurse's uniform glanced at them more and more often over the top of her book. She had perhaps been afraid they would be rowdy; now their very silence seemed to unnerve her. When her dryer stopped she took her clothes out, folded them, put them into a blue plastic laundry-bag and left, giving them one last puzzled look as she went out the door.

As soon as she was gone, Ben said abruptly, almost harshly: 'You're not alone.'

'What?' Beverly asked.

'You're not alone,' Ben repeated. 'You see - '

He stopped and looked at Eddie, who nodded. He looked at Stan, who looked unhappy . . . but who, after a moment, shrugged and also nodded.

'What in the world are you talking about?' Beverly asked. She was tired of people saying inexplicable things to her today. She gripped Ben's lower arm. 'If you know something about this, tell me!'

'Do you want to do it?' Ben asked Eddie.

Eddie shook his head. He took his aspirator out of his pocket and sucked in on it with a monstrous gasp.

Speaking slowly, picking his words, Ben told Beverly how he had happened to meet Bill Denbrough and Eddie Kaspbrak in the Barrens on the day school let out - that was almost a week ago, as hard as that was to believe. He told her about how they had built the dam in the Barrens the following day. He told Bill's story of how the school photograph of his dead brother had turned its head and winked. He told his own story of the mummy who had walked on the icy Canal in the dead heart of winter with balloons that floated against the wind. Beverly listened to all this with growing horror. She could feel her eyes widening, her hands and feet growing cold.

Ben stopped and looked at Eddie. Eddie took another wheezing pull on his aspirator and then told the story of the leper again, speaking as rapidly as Ben had slowly, his words tumbling over one another in their urgency to escape and be gone. He finished with a sucking little half-sob, but this time he didn't cry.

'And you?' she asked, looking at Stan Uris.

'I - '

There was sudden silence, making them all start the way a sudden explosion might have done.

'The wash is done,' Stan said.

They watched him get up - small, economical, graceful - and open the washer. He pulled out the rags, which were stuck together in a clump, and examined them.

There's a little stain left,' he said, 'but it's not too bad. Looks like it could be cranberry juice.'

He showed them, and they all nodded gravely, as if over important documents. Beverly felt a relief that was similar to the relief she had felt when the bathroom was clean again. She could stand the faded pastel smear on the peeling wallpaper in there, and she could stand the faint reddish stain on her mother's cleaning rags. They had done something about it, that seemed to be the important thing. Maybe it hadn't worked completely, but she discovered it had worked well enough to give her heart peace, and brother, that was good enough for Al Marsh's daughter Beverly.

Stan tossed them into one of the barrel-shaped dryers and put in two nickels. The dryer started to turn, and Stan came back and took his seat between Eddie and Ben.

For a moment the four of them sat silent again, watching the rags turn and fall, turn and fall. The drone of the gas-fired dryer was soothing, almost soporific. A woman passed by the chocked-open door, wheeling a cart of groceries. She glanced in at them and passed on.

'I did see something,' Stan said suddenly. 'I didn't want to talk about it, because I wanted to think it was a dream or something. Maybe even a fit, like that Stavier kid has. Any you guys know that kid?'

Ben and Bev shook their heads. Eddie said, The kid who's got epilepsy?'

'Yeah, right. That's how bad it was. I would have rather thought I had something like that than that I saw something . . . really real.'

'What was it?' Bev asked, but she wasn't sure she really wanted to know. This was not like listening to ghost-stories around a camp-fire while you ate wieners in toasted buns and cooked marshmallows over the flames until they were black and crinkly. Here they sat in this stifling laundromat and she could see great big dust kitties under the washing machines (ghost-turds, her father called them), she could see dust-motes dancing in the hot shafts of sunlight which fell through the laundromat's dirty plate-glass window, she could see old magazines with their covers torn off. These were all normal things. Nice and normal and boring. But she was scared. Terribly scared. Because, she sensed, none of these things were made-up storks, made-up monsters: Ben's mummy, Eddie's leper . . . either or both of them might be out tonight when the sun went down. Or Bill Denbrough's brother, one-armed and implacable, cruising through the black drains under the city with silver coins for eyes.

Yet, when Stan did not answer immediately, she asked again: 'What was it?'

Speaking carefully, Stan said: 'I was over in that little park where the Standpipe is - '

'Oh God, I don't like that place,' Eddie said dolefully. 'If there's a haunted house in Derry, that's it.'

'What? Stan said sharply. 'What did you say?'

'Don't you know about that place?' Eddie asked. 'My mom wouldn't let me go near there even before the kids started getting killed. She . . . she takes real good care of me.' He offered them an uneasy grin and held his aspirator tighter in his lap. 'You see, some kids have been drowned in there. Three or four. They - Stan? Stan, are you all right?'

Stan Uris's face had gone a leaden gray. His mouth worked soundlessly. His eyes rolled up until the others could only see the bottommost curves of his irises. One hand clutched weakly at empty air and then fell against his thigh.

Eddie did the only thing he could think of. He leaned over, put one thin arm around Stan's slumping shoulders, jammed his aspirator into Stan's mouth, and triggered off a big blast.

Stan began to cough and choke and gag. He sat up straight, his eyes back in focus again. He coughed into his cupped hands. At last he uttered a huge, burping gasp and slumped back against his chair.

'What was that?' he managed at last.

'My asthma medicine,' Eddie said apologetically.

'God, it tastes like dead dogshit.'

They all laughed at this, but it was nervous laughter. The others were looking nervously at Stan. Thin color now burned in his cheeks.

'It's pretty bad, all right,' Eddie said with some pride.

'Yeah, but is it kosher?' Stan said, and they all laughed again, although none of them (including Stan) really knew what 'kosher' meant.

Stan stopped laughing first and looked at Eddie intently. 'Tell me what you know about the Standpipe,' he said.

Eddie started, but both Ben and Beverly also contributed. The Derry Standpipe stood on Kansas Street, about a mile and a half west of downtown, near the southern edge of the Barrens. At one time, near the end of the previous century, it had supplied all of Derry's water, holding one and three-quarter million gallons. Because the circular open-air gallery just below the Standpipe's roof offered a spectacular view of the town and the surrounding countryside, it had been a popular place until 1930 or so. Families would come out to tiny Memorial Park on a Saturday or Sunday forenoon when the weather was fine, climb the one hundred and sixty stairs inside the Standpipe to the gallery, and take in the view. More often than not they spread and ate a picnic lunch while they did so.

The stairs were between the Standpipe's outside, which was shingled a blinding white, and its inner sleeve, a great stainless-steel cylinder standing a hundred and six feet high. These stairs wound to the top in a narrow spiral.

Just below the gallery level, a thick wooden door in the Standpipe's inner jacket gave on a platform over the water itself - a black, gently lapping tarn lit by naked magnesium bulbs screwed into reflective tin hoods. The water was exactly one hundred feet deep when the supply was all the way up.

'Where did the water come from?' Ben asked.

Bev, Eddie, and Stan looked at each other. None of them knew.

'Well, what about the kids that drowned, then?'

They were only a bit clearer on that. It seemed that in those days ('olden days,' Ben called them solemnly, as he took up this part of the tale) the door leading to the platform over the water had always been left unlocked. One night a couple of kids . . . or maybe just one . . . or as many as three . . . had found the ground-level door also unlocked. They had gone up on a dare. They found their way out onto the platform over the water instead of onto the gallery by mistake. In the darkness, they had fallen over the edge before they quite knew where they were.

'I heard it from this kid Vic Crumly who said he heard it from his dad,' Beverly said, 'so maybe it's true. Vie said his dad said that once they fell into the water they were as good as dead because there was nothing to hold onto. The platform was just out of reach. He said they paddled around in there, yelling for help, all night long, probably. Only no one heard them and they just got tireder and tireder until - '

She trailed off, feeling the horror of it sink into her. She could see those boys in her mind's eye, real or made-up, paddling around like drenched puppies. Going under, coming up sputtering. Splashing more and swimming less as panic set in. Soggy sneakers treading water. Fingers scrabbling uselessly for any kind of purchase on the smooth steel walls of the sleeve. She could taste the water they must have swallowed. She could hear the flat, echoing quality of their cries. How long? Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? How long before the cries had ceased and they had simply floated face-down, strange fish for the caretaker to find the next morning?

'God,' Stan said dryly.

'I heard there was a woman who lost her baby, too,' Eddie said suddenly. That was when they closed the place for good. At least, that's what I heard. They did use to let people go up, I know that. But then one time there was this lady and her baby. I don't know how old the baby was. But this platform, it's supposed to go right out over the water. And the lady went to the railing and she was, you know, holding the baby, and either she dropped it or maybe it just wriggled. I heard this guy tried to save it. Doing the hero bit, you know. He jumped right in, but the baby was gone. Maybe he was wearing a jacket or something. When your clothes get wet, they drag you down.'

Eddie abruptly put his hand into his pocket and brought out a small brown glass bottle. He opened it, took out two white pills, and swallowed them dry.

'What were those?' Beverly asked.

'Aspirin. I've got a headache.' He looked at her defensively, but Beverly said nothing more.

Ben finished. After the incident of the baby (he himself, he said, had heard that it was actually a kid, a little gjrl of about three), the Town Council had voted to lock the Standpipe, both downstairs and up, and stop the daytrips and picnics on the gallery. It had remained locked from then until now. Oh, the caretaker came and went, and the maintenance men once in awhile, and once every season there were guided tours. Interested citizens could follow a lady from the Historical Society up the spiral of stairs to the gallery at the top, where they could ooh and aah over the view and snap Kodaks to show their friends. But the door to the inner sleeve was always locked now.

'Is it still full of water?' Stan asked.

'I guess so,' Ben said. 'I've seen firetrucks filling up there during grassfire season. They hook a hose to the pipe at the bottom.'

Stanley was looking at the dryer again, watching the rags go around and Mound. The clump had broken up now, and some of them floated like parachutes.

'What did you see there?' Bev asked him gently.

For a moment it seemed he would not answer at all. Then he drew a deep, shuddering breath and said something that at first struck them all as being far from the point. 'They named it Memorial Park after the 23rd Maine in the Civil War. The Derry Blues, they were called. There used to be a statue, but it blew down during a storm in the forties. They didn't have money enough to fix the statue, so they put in a birdbath instead. A big stone birdbath.'

They were all looking at him. Stan swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat.

'I watch birds, you see. I have an album, a pair of Zeiss-Ikon binoculars, and everything.' He looked at Eddie. 'Do you have any more aspirins?'

Eddie handed him the bottle. Stan took two, hesitated, then took another. He gave the bottle back and swallowed the pills, one after another, grimacing. Then he went on with his story.

10

Stan's encounter had happened on a rainy April evening two months ago. He had donned his slicker, put his bird-book and his binoculars in a waterproof sack with a drawstring at the top, and set out for Memorial Park. He and his father usually went out together, but his father had had to 'work over' that night and had called specially at suppertime to talk to Stan.

One of his customers at the agency, another birdwatcher, had spotted what he believed to be a male cardinal - Fringillidae Richmondena - drinking from the birdbath in Memorial Park, he told Stan. They liked to eat, drink, and bathe right around dusk. It was very rare to spot a cardinal this far north of Massachusetts. Would Stan like to go down there and see if he could collect it? He knew the weather was pretty foul, but . . .

Stan had been agreeable. His mother made him promise to keep the hood of his slicker up, but Stan would have done that anyway. He was a fastidious boy. There were never any fights about getting him to wear his rubbers or his snowpants in the winter.

He walked the mile and a half to Memorial Park in a ram so fine and hesitant that it really wasn't even a drizzle; it was more like a constant hanging mist. The air was muted but somehow exciting just the same. In spite of the last dwindling piles of snow under bushes and in groves of trees (to Stan they looked like piles of dirty cast-off pillowcases), there was a smell of new growth in the air. Looking at the branches of elms and maples and oaks against the lead-white sky, Stan thought that their silhouettes looked mysteriously thicker. They would burst open in a week or two, unrolling leaves of a delicate, almost transparent green.

The air smells green tonight, he thought, and smiled a little.

He walked quickly because the light would be gone in an hour or even less. He was as fastidious about his sightings as he was about his dress and study habits, and unless there was enough light left for him to be absolutely sure, he would not allow himself to collect the cardinal even if he knew in his heart he had really seen it.

He cut across Memorial Park on a diagonal. The Standpipe was a white bulking shape to his left. Stan barely glanced at it. He had no interest whatsoever in the Standpipe.

Memorial Park was a rough rectangle which sloped downhill. The grass (white and dead at this time of year) was kept neatly cut in the summertime, and there were circular beds of flowers. There was no playground equipment, however. This was considered a grownups' park.

At the far end, the grade smoothed out before dropping abruptly down to Kansas Street and the Barrens beyond. The birdbath his father had mentioned stood on this flat area. It was a shallow stone dish set into a squat masonry pedestal that was really much too big for the humble function it fulfilled. Stan's father had told him that, before the money ran out, they had intended to put the statue of the soldier back up here again.

'I like the birdbath better, Daddy,' Stan said.

Mr Uris ruffled his hair. 'Me too, son,' he said. 'More baths and less bullets, that's my motto.'

At the top of this pedestal a motto had been carved in the stone. Stanley read it but did not understand it; the only Latin he understood was the genus classifications of the birds in his book.

Apparebat eidolon senex

- Pliny

the inscription read.

Stan sat down on a bench, took his bird-album out of the bag, and turned over to the picture of the cardinal one more time, going over it, familiarizing himself with the recognizable points. A male cardinal would be hard to mistake for something else - it was as red as a fire-engine, if not so large - but Stan was a creature of habit and convention; these things comforted him and reinforced his sense of place and belonging in the world. So he gave the picture a good three-minute study before closing the book (the moisture in the air was making the corners of the pages turn up) and putting it back into the bag. He uncased his binoculars and put them to his eyes. There was no need to adjust the field of focus, because the last time he had used the glasses he had been sitting on this same bench and looking at that same birdbath.

Fastidious boy, patient boy. He did not fidget. He did not get up and walk around or swing the binoculars here and there to see what else there might be to be seen. He sat still, field glasses trained on the birdbath, and the mist collected in fat drops on his yellow slicker.

He was not bored. He was looking down into the equivalent of an avian convention-site. Four brown sparrows sat there for awhile, dipping into the water with their beaks, flicking droplets casually back over their shoulders and onto their backs. Then a bluejay came hauling in like a cop breaking up a gaggle of loiterers. The jay was as big as a house in Stan's glasses, his quarrelsome cries absurdly thin by comparison (after you looked through the binoculars steadily for awhile the magnified birds you saw began to seem not odd but perfectly correct). The sparrows flew off. The jay, now in charge, strutted, bathed, grew bored, departed. The sparrows returned, then flew off again as a pair of robins cruised in to bathe and (perhaps) to discuss matters of importance to the hollow-boned set. Stan's father had laughed at Stan's hesitant suggestion that maybe birds talked, and he was sure his dad was right when he said birds weren't smart enough to talk - that their brain-pans were too small - but by gosh they sure looked like they were talking. A new bird joined them. It was red. Stan hastily adjusted the field of focus on the binoculars a bit. Was it . . . ? No. It was a scarlet tanager, a good bird but not the cardinal he was looking for. It was joined by a flicker that was a frequent visitor to the Memorial Park birdbath. Stan recognized him by the tattered right wing. As always, he speculated on how that might have happened - a close call with some cat seemed the most likely explanation. Other birds came and went. Stan saw a grackle, as clumsy and ugly as a flying boxcar, a bluebird, another flicker. He was finally rewarded by a new bird - not the cardinal but a cowbird that looked vast and stupid in the eyepieces of the binoculars. He dropped them against his chest and fumbled the bird-book out of the bag again, hoping that the cowbird wouldn't fly away before he could confirm the sighting. He would have something to take home to his father, at least. And it was time to go. The light was fading fast. He felt cold and damp. He checked the book, then looked through the glasses again. It was still there, not bathing but only standing on the rim of the birdbath looking dumb. It was almost surely a cowbird. With no distinctive markings - at least none he could pick up at this distance - and in the fading light it was hard to be one hundred percent sure, but maybe he had just enough time and light for one more check. He looked at the picture in the book, studying it with a fierce frown of concentration, and then picked up the glasses again. He had only fixed them on the birdbath when a hollow rolling boom! sent the cowbird - if it had been a cowbird - winging. Stan tried to follow it with the glasses, knowing how slim his chances were of picking it up again. He lost it and made a hissing sound of disgust between his teeth. Well, if it had come once it would perhaps come again. And it had only been a cowbird

(probably a cowbird)

after all, not a golden eagle or a great auk.

Stan recased his binoculars and put away his bird-album. Then he got up and looked around to see if he could tell what had been responsible for that sudden loud noise. It hadn't sounded like a gun or a car backfire. More like a door being thrown open in a spooky movie about castles and dungeons . . . complete with hokey echo effects.

He could see nothing.

He got up and started toward the slope down to Kansas Street. The Standpipe was now on his right, a chalky white cylinder, phantomlike in the mist and the growing darkness. It seemed almost to . . . to float.

That was an odd thought. He supposed it must have come from his own head - where else could a thought come from? - but it somehow did not seem like his own thought at all.

He looked at the Standpipe more closely, and then veered in that direction without even thinking about it. Windows circled the building at intervals, rising around it in a spiral that made Stan think of the barber pole in front of Mr Aurlette's shop, where he and his dad got their haircuts. The bone-white shingles bulged out over each of those dark windows like brows over eyes. Wonder how they did that, Stan thought - not with as much interest as Ben Hanscom would have felt, but with some - and that was when he saw there was a much larger space of darkness at the foot of the Standpipe - a clear oblong in the circular base.

He stopped, frowning, thinking that was a funny place for a window: it was

completely out of symmetry with the others. Then he realized it wasn't a

window. It was a door.

The noise I heard, he thought. It was that door, blowing open.

He looked around. Early, gloomy dusk. White sky now fading to a dull dusky purple, mist thickening a bit more toward the steady rain which would fall most of the night. Dusk and mist and no wind at all.

So . . . if it hadn't blown open, had someone pushed it open? Why? And it looked like an awfully heavy door to slam open hard enough to make a noise like that boom. He supposed a very big person . . . maybe . . .

Curious, Stan walked over for a closer look.

The door was bigger than he had first supposed - six feet high and two feet thick, the boards which composed it bound with brass strips. Stan swung it half-closed. It moved smoothly and easily on its hinges in spite of its size. It also moved silently - there was not a single squeak. He had moved it to see how much damage it had done to the shingles, blasting open like that. There was no damage at all; not so much as a single mark. Weirdsville, as Richie would say.

Well, it wasn't the door you heard, that's all, he thought. Maybe a jet from Loring boomed over Derry, or something. Door was probably open all al -

His foot struck something. Stan looked down and saw it was a padlock . . . correction. It was the remains of a padlock. It had been burst wide open. It looked, in fact, as if someone had rammed the Lock's keyway full of gunpowder and then set a match to it. Flowers of metal, deadly sharp, stood out from the body of the lock in a stiff spray. Stan could see the layers of steel inside. The thick hasp hung askew by one bolt which had been yanked three-uarters of the way out of the wood. The other three hasp-bolts lay on the wet grass. They had been twisted like pretzels.

Frowning, Stan swung the door open again and peered inside.

Narrow stairs led upward, circling around and out of sight. The outer wall of the staircase was bare wood supported by giant cross-beams which had been pegged together rather than nailed. To Stan some of the pegs looked thicker than his own upper arm. The inner wall was steel from which gigantic rivets swelled like boils.

'Is anyone here?' Stan asked.

There was no answer.

He hesitated, then stepped inside so he could see up the narrow throat of the staircase a little better. Nothing. And it was Creep City in here. As Richie would also say. He turned to leave . . . and heard music.

It was faint, but still instantly recognizable.

Calliope music.

He cocked his head, listening, the frown on his face starting to dissolve a little. Calliope music, all right, the music of carnivals and county fairs. It conjured up trace memories which were as delightful as they were ephemeral: popcorn, cotton candy, doughboys frying in hot grease, the chain-driven clatter of rides like the Wild Mouse, the Whip, the Koaster-Kups.

Now the frown had become a tentative grin. Stan went up one step, then two more, head still cocked. He paused again. As if thinking about carnivals could actually create one; he could now actually smell the popcorn, the cotton candy, the doughboys . . . and more! Peppers, chili-dogs, cigarette smoke and sawdust. There was the sharp smell of white vinegar, the kind you could shake over your french fries through a hole in the tin cap. He could smell mustard, bright yellow and stinging hot, that you spread on your hotdog with a wooden paddle.

This was amazing . . . incredible . . . irresistible.

He took another step up and that was when he heard the rustling, eager footsteps above him, descending the stairs. He cocked his head again. The calliope music had gotten suddenly louder, as if to mask the sound of the footsteps. He could recognize the tune now - it was 'Camptown Races.'

Footsteps, yeah: but they weren't exactly rustling footsteps, were they? They actually sounded kind of . . . squishy, didn't they? The sound was like people walking in rubbers full of water.

Camptown ladies sing dis song, doodah doodah

(Squish-squish)

Camptown Racetrack nine miles long, doodah doodah

(Squish-slosh - closer now)

Ride around all night

Ride around all day . . .

Now there were shadows bobbing on the wall above him.

The terror leaped down Stan's throat all at once - it was like swallowing something hot and horrible, bad medicine that suddenly galvanized you like electricity. It was the shadows that did it.

He saw them only for a moment. He had just that small bit of time to observe that there were two of them, that they were slumped, and somehow unnatural. He had only that moment because the light in here was fading, fading too fast, and as he turned, the heavy Standpipe door swung ponderously shut behind him.

Stanley ran back down the stairs (somehow he had climbed more than a dozen, although he could only remember climbing two, three at most), very much afraid now. It was too dark in here to see anything. He could hear his own breathing, he could hear die calliope tootling away somewhere above him

(what's a calliope doing up there in the dark? who's playing it?)

and he could hear those wet footsteps. Approaching him now. Getting closer.

He hit the door with his hands splayed out in front of him, hit it hard enough to send sparkly tingles of pain all the way up to his elbows. It had swung so easily before . . . and now it would not move at all.

No . . . that was not quite true. At first it had moved just a bit, just enough for him to see a mocking strip of gray light running vertically down its left side. Then gone again. As if someone was on the other side of it, holding the door closed.

Panting, terrified, Stan pushed against the door with all of his strength. He could feel the brass bindings digging into his hands. Nothing.

He whirled around, now pressing his back and his splayed hands against the door. He could feel sweat, oily and hot, running down his forehead. The calliope music had gotten louder yet. It drifted and echoed down the spiral staircase. There was nothing cheery about it now. It had changed. It had become a dirge. It screamed like wind and water, and in his mind's eye Stan saw a county fair at the end of autumn, wind and rain blowing up a deserted midway, pennons flapping, tents bulging, falling over, wheeling away like canvas bats. He saw empty rides standing against the sky like scaffolds; the wind drummed and hooted in the weird angles of their struts. He suddenly understood that death was in this place with him, that death was coming for him out of the dark and he could not run.

A sudden rush of water spilled down the stairs. Now it was not popcorn and doughboys and cotton candy he smelled but wet decay, the stench of dead pork which has exploded in a fury of maggots in a place hidden away from the sun.

'Who's here?' he screamed in a high, trembling voice.

He was answered by a low, bubbling voice that seemed choked with mud and old water.

'The dead ones, Stanley. We're the dead ones. We sank, but now we float . . . and you'll float, too.'

He could feel water washing around his feet. He cringed back against the door in an agony of fear. They were very close now. He could feel their nearness. He could smell them. Something was digging into his hip as he struck the door again and again in a mindless, useless effort to get away.

'We're dead, but sometimes we clown around a little, Stanley. Sometimes we - '

It was his bird-book.

Without thinking, Stan grabbed for it. It was stuck in his slicker pocket and wouldn't come out. One of them was down now; he could hear it shuffling across the little stone areaway where he had come in. It would reach for him in a moment, and he would feel its cold flesh.

He gave one more tremendous yank, and the bird-book was in his hands. He held it in front of him like a puny shield, not thinking of what he was doing, but suddenly sure that this was right.

'Robins!' he screamed into the darkness, and for a moment the thing approaching (it was surely less than five steps away now) hesitated - he was almost sure it did. And for a moment hadn't he felt some give in the door against which he was now cringing?

But he wasn't cringing anymore. He was standing up straight in the darkness. When had that happened? No time to wonder. Stan licked his dry lips and began to chant: 'Robins! Gray egrets! Loons! Scarlet tanagers! Crackles! Hammerhead woodpeckers! Red-headed woodpeckers! Chickadees! Wrens! Peli - '

The door opened with a protesting scream and Stan took a giant step backward into thin misty air. He fell sprawling on the dead grass. He had bent the bird-book nearly in half, and later that night he would see the clear impressions of his fingers sunken into its cover, as if it had been bound in Play-Doh instead of hard pressboard.

He didn't try to get up but began to dig in with his heels instead, his butt grooving through the slick grass. His lips were pulled back over his teeth. Inside that dim oblong he could see two sets of legs below the diagonal shadowline thrown by the door, which now stood half-open. He could see jeans that had decayed to a purplish-black. Orange threads lay plastered limply against the seams, and water dripped from the cuffs to puddle around shoes that had mostly rotted away, revealing swelled, purple toes within.

Their hands lay limply at their sides, too long, too waxy-white. Depending from each finger was a small orange pompom.

Holding his bent bird-book in front of him, his face wet with drizzle, sweat, and tears, Stan whispered in a husky monotone: 'Chickenhawks . . . grosbeaks . . . hummingbirds . . . albatrosses . . . kiwis . . . '

One of those hands turned over, showing a palm from which endless water had eroded all the lines, leaving something as idiot-smooth as the hand of a department-store dummy.

One finger unrolled . . . then rolled up again. The pompom bounced and

dangled, dangled and bounced.

It was beckoning him.

Stan Uris, who would die in a bathtub with crosses slashed into his forearms twenty-seven years later, got to his knees, then to his feet, then ran. He ran across Kansas Street without looking either way for traffic and paused, panting, on the far sidewalk, to look back.

From this angle he couldn't see the door in the base of the Standpipe; only the Standpipe itself, thick and yet somehow graceful, standing in the murk. 'They were dead,' Stan whispered to himself, shocked. He wheeled suddenly and ran for home.

11

The dryer had stopped. So had Stan.

The three others only looked at him for a long moment. His skin was nearly as gray as the April evening of which he had just told them.

'Wow,' Ben said at last. He let out his breath in a ragged, whistling sigh.

'It's true,' Stan said in a low voice. 'I swear to God it is.'

'I believe .you,' Beverly said. 'After what happened at my house, I'd believe anything.'

She got up suddenly, almost knocking over her chair, and went to the dryer. She began to pull out the rags one by one, folding them. Her back was turned, but Ben suspected she was crying. He wanted to go to her and lacked the courage.

'We gotta talk to Bill about this,' Eddie said. 'Bill will know what to do.'

'Do?' Stan said, turning to look at him. 'What do you mean, do?

Eddie looked at him, uncomfortable. 'Well . . . '

'I don't want to do anything,' Stan said. He was looking at Eddie with such a hard, fierce stare that Eddie squirmed in his chair. 'I want to forget about it. That's all I want to do.'

'Not that easy,' Beverly said quietly, turning around. Ben had been right: the hot sunlight slanting in through the Washateria's dirty windows reflected off bright lines of tears on her cheeks. 'It's not just us. I heard Ronnie Grogan. And the little boy I heard first . . . I think maybe it was that little Clements kid. The one who disappeared off his trike.'

'So what?' Stan said defiantly.

'So what if it gets more?' she asked. 'What if it gets more kids?'

His eyes, a hot brown, locked with her blue ones, answering the question without speaking: So what if it does?

But Beverly did not look down or away and at last Stan dropped his own eyes . . . perhaps only because she was still crying, but perhaps because her concern somehow made her stronger.

'Eddie's right,' she said. 'We ought to talk to Bill. Then maybe to the Police Chief - '

'Right,' Stan said. If he was trying to sound contemptuous, it didn't work. His voice came out sounding only tired. 'Dead kids in the Standpipe Blood that only kids can see, not grownups. Clowns walking on the Canal. Balloons that blow against the wind. Mummies. Lepers under porches. Chief Borton'll laugh his bum off . . . and then stick us in the loonybin.'

'If we all went to him,' Ben said, troubled. 'If we all went together . . . '

'Sure,' Stan said. 'Right. Tell me more, Haystack. Write me a book.' He got up and went to the window, hands in pockets, looking angry and upset and scared. He stared out for a moment, shoulders stiff and rejecting beneath his neat shirt. Without turning back to them he repeated: 'Write me a frigging book!'

'No,' Ben said quietly, 'Bill's going to write the books.'

Stan wheeled back, surprised, and the others looked at him. There was a shocked look on Ben Hanscom's face, as if he had suddenly and unexpectedly slapped himself.

Bev folded the last of the rags.

'Birds,' Eddie said.

'What?' Bev and Ben said together.

Eddie was looking at Stan. 'You got out by yelling birds' names at them?'

'Maybe,' Stan said reluctantly. 'Or maybe the door was just stuck and finally popped open.'

'Without you leaning on it?' Bev asked.

Stan shrugged. It was not a sullen shrug; it only said he didn't know.

'I think it was the birds you shouted at them,' Eddie said. 'But why? In the movies you hold up a cross . . . '

' . . . or say the Lord's Prayer . . . ' Ben added.

' . . . or the Twenty-third Psalm,' Beverly put in.

'I know the Twenty-third Psalm,' Stan said angrily, 'but I wouldn't do so good with the old crucifix business. I'm Jewish, remember?'

They looked away from him, embarrassed, either for his having been born that way or for their having forgotten it.

'Birds,' Eddie said again. 'Jesus!' Then he glanced guiltily at Stan again, but Stan was looking moodily across the street at the Bangor Hydro office.

'Bill will know what to do,' Ben said suddenly, as if finally agreeing with Bev and Eddie. 'Betcha anything. Betcha any amount of money.'

'Look,' Stan said, looking at all of them earnestly. 'That's okay. We can talk to Bill about it if you want. But that's where things stop for me. You can call me a chicken, or yellow, I don't care. I'm not a chicken, I don't think. It's just that those things in the Standpipe . . . '

'If you weren't afraid of something like that, you'd have to be crazy, Stan,' Beverly said softly.

'Yeah, I was scared, but that's not the problem,' Stan said hotly. 'It's not even what I'm talking about. Don't you see -

They were looking at him expectantly, their eyes both troubled and faintly hopeful, but Stan found he could not explain how he felt. The words had run out. There was a brick of feeling inside him, almost choking him, and he could not get it out of his throat. Neat as he was, sure as he was, he was still only an eleven-year-old boy who had that year finished the fourth grade.

He wanted to tell them that there were worse things than being frightened. You could be frightened by things like almost having a car hit you while you were riding your bike or, before the Salk vaccine, getting polio. You could be frightened of that crazyman Khrushchev or of drowning if you went out over your head. You could be frightened of all those things and still function.

But those things in the Standpipe . . .

He wanted to tell them that those dead boys who had lurched and shambled their way down the spiral staircase had done something worse than frighten him: they had offended him.

Offended, yes. It was the only word he could think of, and if he used it they would laugh - they liked him, he knew that, and they had accepted him as one of them, but they would still laugh. All the same, there were things that were not supposed to be. They offended any sane person's sense of order, they offended the central idea that God had given the earth a final tilt on its axis so that twilight would only last about twelve minutes at the equator and linger for an hour or more up where the Eskimos built their ice-cube houses, that He had done that and He then had said, in effect: 'Okay, if you can figure out the tilt, you can figure out any damn thing you choose. Because even light has weight, and when the note of a trainwhistle suddenly drops it's the Doppler effect and when an airplane breaks the sound barrier that bang isn't the applause of the angels or the flatulence of demons but only air collapsing back into place. I gave you the tilt and then I sat back about halfway up the auditorium to watch the show. I got nothing else to say, except that two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if there's blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead.' You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It's offense you maybe can't live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are live things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don't blink, and there's a stink down in that dark, and after awhile you think maybe there's a whole other universe down there, a universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I'd scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn't look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense.

Because he could say none of these things, he just reiterated: 'Being scared isn't the problem. I just don't want to be involved in something that will land me in the nuthatch.'

'Will you at least go with us to talk to him?' Bev asked. 'Listen to what he says?'

'Sure,' Stan said, and then laughed. 'Maybe I ought to bring my bird-book.'

They all laughed then, and it was a little easier.

12

Beverly left them outside the Kleen-Kloze and took the rags back home by herself. The apartment was still empty. She put them under the kitchen sink and closed the cupboard. She stood up and looked down toward the bathroom.

I'm not going down there, she thought. I'm going to watch Bandstand on TV. See if I can't learn how to do the Dog.

So she went into the living room and turned on the TV and five minutes later she turned it off while Dick Clark was showing how much oil just one Stri-Dex medicated pad could take off the face of your average teenager ('If you think you can get clean with just soap and water,' Dick said, holding the dirty pad up to the glassy eye of the camera so that every teenager in America could get a good look, 'you ought to take a good look at this.').

She went back to the kitchen cupboard over the sink, where her father kept his tools. Among them was a pocket tape, the kind that runs out a long yellow tongue of inches. She folded this into one cold hand and went down to the bathroom.

It was sparkling clean, silent. Somewhere, far distant, it seemed, she could hear Mrs Doyon yelling for her boy Jim to get in out of the road, right now.

She went to the bathroom basin and looked down into the dark eye of the drain.

She stood there for some time, her legs as cold as marble inside her jeans, her nipples feeling sharp enough and hard enough to cut paper, her lips dead dry. She waited for the voices.

No voices came.

A little shuddery sigh came from her, and she began to feed the thin steel tape into the drain. It went down smoothly - like a sword into the gullet of a 'county fair sideshow performer. Six inches, eight inches, ten. It stopped, bound up in the elbow-bend under the sink, Beverly supposed. She wiggled it, pushing gently at the same time, and eventually the tape began to feed into the drain again. Sixteen inches now, then two feet, then three.

She watched the yellow tape slipping out of the chromed-steel case, which had been worn black on the sides by her father's big hand. In her mind's eye she saw it sliding through the black bore of the pipe, picking up some muck, scraping away flakes of rust. Down there where the sun never shines and the night never stops, she thought.

She imagined the head of the tape, with its small steel buttplate no bigger than a fingernail, sliding farther and farther into the darkness, and part of her mind screamed What are you doing? She did not ignore that voice . . . but she seemed helpless to heed it. She saw the end of the tape going straight down now, descending into the cellar. She saw it striking the sewage pipe . . . and even as she saw it, the tape bound up again.

She wiggled it again, and the tape, thin enough to be limber, made a faint eerie sound that reminded her a little bit of the way a saw sounds when you bend it back and forth across your legs.

She could see its tip wiggling against the bottom of this wider pipe, which would have a baked ceramic surface. She could see it bending . . . and then she was able to push it forward again.

She ran out six feet. Seven. Nine -

And suddenly the tape began to run through her hands by itself, as if something down there was pulling the other end. Not just pulling it: running with it. She stared at the flowing tape, her eyes wide, her mouth a sagging O of fear - fear, yes, but no surprise. Hadn't she known? Hadn't she known something like this was going to happen?

The tape ran out to its final stop. Eighteen feet; an even six yards.

A soft chuckle came wafting out of the drain, followed by a low whisper that was almost reproachful: 'Beverly, Beverly, Beverly . . . you can't fight us . . . you'll die if you try . . . die if you try . . . die if you try . . . Beverly . . . Beverly . . . Beverly . . . ly-ly-ly . . . '

Something clicked inside the tape-measure's housing, and it suddenly began to run rapidly back into its case, the numbers and hashmarks blurring by. Near the end - the last five or six feet - the yellow became a dark, dripping red and she screamed and dropped it on the floor as if the tape had suddenly turned into a live snake.

Fresh blood trickled over the clean white porcelain of the basin and back down into the drain's wide eye. She bent, sobbing now, her fear a freezing weight in her stomach, and picked the tape up. She tweezed it between the thumb and first finger of her right hand and, holding it in front of her, took it into the kitchen. As she walked, blood dripped from the tape onto the faded linoleum of the hall and the kitchen.

She steadied herself by thinking of what her father would say to her - what he would do to her - if he found that she had gotten his measuring tape all bloody. Of course, he wouldn't be able to see the blood, but it helped to think that.

She took one of the clean rags - still as warm as fresh bread from the dryer - and went back into the bathroom. Before she began to clean, she put the hard rubber plug in the drain, closing that eye. The blood was fresh, and it cleaned up easily. She went up her own trail, wiping away the dune-sized drops on the linoleum, then rinsing the rag, wringing it out, and putting it aside.

She got a second rag and used it to clean her father's measuring tape. The blood was thick, viscous. In two places there were clots of the stuff, black and spongy.

Although the blood only went back five or six feet, she cleaned the entire length of the tape, removing from it all traces of pipemuck. That done, she put it back into the cupboard over the sink and took the two stained rags out in back of the apartment. Mrs Doyon was yelling at Jim again. Her voice was clear, almost bell-like in the still hot late afternoon.

In the back yard, which was mostly bare din, weeds, and clothes-lines, there Was a rusty incinerator. Beverly threw the rags into it, then sat down on the back steps. Tears came suddenly, with surprising violence, and this time she made no effort to hold them back.

She put her arms on her knees, her head in her arms, and wept while Mrs Doyon called for Jim to come out of that road, did he want to get hit by a car and be killed?

DERRY: THE SECOND INTERLUDE

'Quaeque ipsa miserrima vidi,

Et quorum pars magna fui.'

- Virgil

'You don't fuck around with the infinite.'

- Mean Streets

February 14th, 1985

Valentine's Day

Two more disappearances in the past week - both children. Just as I was beginning to relax. One of them a sixteen-year-old boy named Dennis Torrio, the other a girl of just five who was out sledding in back of her house on West Broadway. The hysterical mother found her sled, one of those blue plastic flying saucers, but nothing else. There had been a fresh fall of snow the night before - four inches or so. No tracks but hers, Chief Rademacher said when I called him. He is becoming extremely annoyed with me, I think. Not anything that's going to keep me awake nights; I have worse things to do than that, don't I?

Asked him if I could see the police photos. He refused.

Asked him if her tracks led away toward any sort of drain or sewer grating. This was followed by a long period of silence. Then Rademacher said, 'I'm beginning to wonder if maybe you shouldn't see a doctor, Hanlon. The head-peeper kind of doctor. The kid was snatched by her father. Don't you read the papers?'

'Was the Torrio boy snatched by his father?' I asked. .

Another long pause.

'Give it a rest, Hanlon,' he said. 'Give me a rest.'

He hung up.

Of course I read the papers - don't I put them out in the Reading Room of the Public Library each morning myself? The little girl, Laurie Ann Winterbarger, had been in the custody of her mother following an acrimonious divorce proceeding in the spring of 1982. The police are operating on the theory that Horst Winterbarger, who is supposedly working as a machinery maintenance man somewhere in Florida, drove up to Maine to snatch his daughter. They further theorize that he parked his car beside the house and called to his daughter, who then joined him - hence the lack of any tracks other than the little girl's. They have less to say about the fact that the girl had not seen her father since she was two. Part of the deep bitterness which accompanied the Winterbargers' divorce came from Mrs Winterbarger's allegations that on at least two occasions Horst Winterbarger had sexually molested the child. She asked the court to deny Winterbarger all visitation rights, a request the court granted in spite of Winterbarger's hot denials. Rademacher claims the court's decision, which had the effect of cutting Winterbarger off completely from his only child, may have pushed Winterbarger into taking his daughter. That at least has some dun plausibility, but ask yourself this: would little Laurie Ann have recognized him after three years and run to him when he called her? Rademacher says yes, even though she was two the last time she saw him. I don't think so. And her mother says Laurie Ann had been well trained about not approaching or talking to strangers, a lesson most Derry children learn early and well. Rademacher says he's got Florida State Police looking for Winterbarger and that his responsibility ends there.

'Matters of custody are more the province of the lawyers than that of the police,' this pompous, overweight asshole is quoted as saying in last Friday's Derry News.

But the Torrio boy . . . that's something else. Wonderful home life. Played football for the Derry Tigers. Honor Roll student. Had gone through the Outward Bound Survival School in the summer of '84 and passed with flying colors. No history of drug use. Had a girlfriend that he was apparently head-over-heels about. Had everything to live for. Everything to stay in Derry for, at least for the next couple of years.

All the same, he's gone.

What happened to him? A sudden attack of wanderlust? A drunk driver who maybe hit him, killed him, and buried him? Or is he maybe still in Derry, is he maybe on the nightside of Derry, keeping company with folks like Betty Ripsom and Patrick Hockstetter and Eddie Corcoran and all the rest? Is it

(later)

I'm doing it again. Going over and over the same ground, doing nothing constructive, only cranking myself up to the screaming point. I jump when the iron stairs leading up to the stacks creak. I jump at shadows. I find myself wondering how I'd react if I was shelving books up therein the stacks, pushing my little rubber-wheeled trolley in front of me, and a hand reached from between two leaning rows of books, a groping hand . . .

Had again a well-nigh insurmountable desire to begin calling them this afternoon. At one point I even got as far as dialing 404, the Atlanta area code, with Stanley Uris's number in front of me. Then I just held the phone against my ear, asking myself if I wanted to call them because I was really sure - one hundred percent sure - or simply because I'm now so badly spooked that I can't stand to be alone; that I have to talk to someone who knows (or will know) what it is I am spooked about.

For a moment I could hear Richie saying Batches? BATCHES? We doan need no stinkin' batches, senhorr! in his Pancho Vanilla Voice, as clearly as if he were standing beside me . . . and I hung up the phone. Because when you want to see someone as badly as I wanted to see Richie - or any of them - at that moment, you just can't trust your own motivations. We lie best when we lie to ourselves. The fact is, I'm still not one hundred percent sure. If another body should turn up, I will call . . . but for now I must suppose that even such a pompous ass as Rademacher may be right. She could have remembered her father; there may have been pictures of him. And I suppose a really persuasive adult could talk a kid into coming to his car, no matter what that child had been taught.

There's another fear that haunts me. Rademacher suggested that I might be going crazy. I don't believe that, but if I call them now, they may think I'm crazy. Worse than that, what if they should not remember me at all? Mike Hanlon? Who? I don't remember any Mike Hanlon. I don't remember you at all. What promise?

I feel that there will come a right time to call them . . . and when that time comes, I'll know that it's right. Their own circuits will open at the same time. It's as if there are two great wheels slowly coming into some sort of powerful convergence with each other, myself and the rest of Derry on one, and all my childhood friends on the other.

When the time comes, they will hear the voice of the Turtle.

So I'll wait, and sooner or later I'll know. I don't believe it's a question anymore of calling them or not calling them.

Only a question of when.

February 20th, 1985

The fire at the Black Spot.

'A perfect example of how the Chamber of Commerce will try to rewrite history, Mike,' old Albert Carson would have told me, probably cackling as he said it. 'They'll try, and sometimes they almost succeed . . . but the old people remember how things really went. They always remember. And sometimes they'll tell you, if you ask them right.'

There are people who have lived in Derry for twenty years and don't know that there was once a 'special' barracks for noncoms at the old Derry Army Air Corps Base, a barracks that was a good half a mile from the rest of the base - and in the middle of February, with the temperature standing right around zero and a forty-mile-an-hour wind howling across those flat runways and whopping the wind-chill factor down to something you could hardly believe, that extra half a mile became something that could give you frost-freeze or frostbite, or maybe even kill you.

The other seven barracks had oil heat, storm windows, and insulation. They were toasty and cozy. The 'special' barracks, which housed the twenty-seven men of Company E, was heated by a balky old wood furnace. Supplies of wood for it were catch-as-catch-can. The only insulation was the deep bank of pine and spruce boughs the men laid around the outside. One of the men promoted a complete set of storm windows for the place one day, but the twenty-seven inmates of the 'special' barracks were detailed up to Bangor that same day to help with some work at the base up there, and when they came back that night, tired and cold, all of those windows had been broken. Every one.

This was in 1930, when half of America's air force still consisted of biplanes. In Washington, Billy Mitchell had been courtmartialed and demoted to flying a desk because his gadfly insistence on trying to build a more modern air force had finally irritated his elders enough for them to slap him down hard. Not long after, he would resign.

So there was precious little flying that went on at the Derry base, in spite of its three runways (one of which was actually paved). Most of the soldiering that went on there was of the make-work variety.

One of the Company E soldiers who returned to Derry after his service tour

came to an end in 1937 was my dad. He told me this story:

'One day in the spring of 1930 - this was about six months before the fire at the Black Spot - I was coming back with four of my buddies from a three-day pass we had spent down in Boston.

'When we come through the gate there was this big old boy standing just inside the checkpoint, leaning on a shovel and picking the seat of his suntans out of his ass. A sergeant from someplace down south. Carroty-red hair. Bad teeth. Pimples. Not much more than an ape without the body hair, if you know what I mean. There were a lot of them like that in the army during the Depression.

'So here we come, four young guys back from leave, all of us still feeling fine, and we could see in his eyes that he was just looking for something to bust us with. So we snapped him salutes as if he was General Black Jack Pershing himself. I guess we might have been all right, but it was one fine late-April day, sun shining down, and I had to shoot off my lip. "A good afternoon to you, Sergeant Wilson, sir," said I, and he landed on me with both feet.

' "Did I give you any permission to speak to me?" he asks.

'"Nawsir," I say.

'He looks around at the rest of them - Trevor Dawson, Carl Roone, and Henry Whitsun, who was killed in the fire that fall - and he says to them, "This here smart nigger is in hack with me. If the rest of you jigaboos don't want to join him in one hardworking dirty bitch of an afternoon, you get over to your barracks, stow your gear, and get your asses over to the OD. You understand?"

'Well, they got going, and Wilson hollers, "Doubletime, you fuckers! Lemme see the soles of your eighty-fucking-nines!"

'So they doubletimed off, and Wilson took me over to one of the equipment sheds and he got me a spade. He took me out into the big field that used to be just about where the Northeast Airlines Airbus terminal stands today. And he looks at me, kind of grinning, and he points at the ground and he says, "You see that hole there, nigger?"

'There was no hole there, but I figured it was best for me to agree with whatever he said, so I looked down at the ground where he was pointing and said I sure did see it. So then he busted me one in the nose and knocked me over and there I was on the ground with blood running down over the last fresh shirt I had.

'"You don't see it because some bigmouth jig bastard filled it up!" he shouted at me, and he had two big blotches of color on his cheeks. But he was grinning, too, and you could tell he was enjoying himself. "So what you do, Mr A Good Afternoon To You, what you do is you get the dirt out of my hole. Doubletime!"

'So I dug for most two hours, and pretty soon I was in that hole up to my chin. The last couple of feet was clay, and by the time I finished I was standing in water up to my ankles and my shoes were soaked right through.

'"Get out of there, Hanlon," Sergeant Wilson said. He was sitting there on the grass, smoking a cigarette. He didn't offer me any help. I was dirt and muck from top to bottom, not to mention the blood drying on the blouse of my suntans. He stood up and walked over. He pointed at the hole.

'"What do you see there, nigger?" he asked me.

'"Your hole, Sergeant Wilson," says I.

'"Yeah, well, I decided I don't want it," he says. "I don't want no hole dug by a nigger. Put my dirt back in, Private Hanlon."

'So I filled it back in and by the time I was done the sun was going down and it was getting cold. He comes over and looks at it after I finished patting down the last of the dirt with the flat of the spade.

'"Now what do you see there, nigger?" he asks.

'"Bunch of dirt, sir," I said, and he hit me again. My God, Mikey, I came this close to just bouncing up off 'n the ground and splitting his head open with the edge of that shovel. But if I'd done that, I never would have looked at the sky again, except through a set of bars. Still, there were times when I almost think it would have been worth it. I managed to hold my peace somehow, though.

'"That ain't a bunch of dirt, you stupid coontail night-fighter!" he screams at me, the spit flying off'n his lips. "That's MY HOLE, and you best get the dirt out of it right now! Doubletime!"

'So I dug the dirt out of his hole and then I filled it in again, and then he asks me why I went and filled in his hole just when he was getting ready to take a crap in it. So I dug it out again and he drops his pants and hangs his skinny-shanks cracker redneck ass over the hole and he grins up at me while he's doing his business and says, "How you doin, Hanlon?"

'"I am doing just fine, sir," I says right back, because I had decided I wasn't going to give up until I fell unconscious or dropped dead. I had my dander up.

'"Well, I aim to fix that," he says. "To start with, you better just fill that hole in, Private Hanlon. And I want to see some life. You're slowin down."

'So I got her filled in again and I could see by the way he was grinning that he was only warming up. But just then this friend of his came humping across the field with a gas lantern and told him there'd been a surprise inspection and Wilson was in hack for having missed it. My friends covered for me and I was okay, but Wilson's friends - if that's what he called them - couldn't be bothered.

'He let me go then, and I waited to see if his name would go up on the Punishment Roster the next day, but it never did. I guess he must have just told the Loot he missed the inspection because he was teaching a smartmouth nigger who it was owned all the holes at the Derry army base - those that had already been dug and those that hadn't been. They probably gave him a medal instead of potatoes to peel. And that's how things were for Company E here in Derry.'

It was right around 1958 that my father told me the story, and I guess he was pushing fifty, although my mother was only forty or so. I asked him if that was the way Derry was, why had he come back?