IT

There were tramps and hobos sometimes, though. If anything about the trainyards scared Eddie, they did - men with unshaven cheeks and cracked skin and blisters on their hands and coldsores on their lips. They rode the rails for awhile and then climbed down for awhile and spent some time in Derry and then got on another train and went somewhere else. Sometimes they had missing fingers. Usually they were drunk and wanted to know if you had a cigarette.

One of these fellows had crawled out from under the porch of the house at 29 Neibolt Street one day and had offered to give Eddie a blowjob for a quarter. Eddie had backed away, his skin like ice, his mouth as dry as lintballs. One of the hobo's nostrils had been eaten away. You could look right into the red, scabby channel.

'I don't have a quarter,' Eddie said, backing toward his bike.

'I'll do it for a dime,' the hobo croaked, coming toward him. He was wearing old green flannel pants. Yellow puke was stiffening across the lap. He unzipped his fly and reached inside. He was trying to grin. His nose was a red horror.

'I . . . I don't have a dime, either,' Eddie said, and suddenly thought: Oh my God he's got leprosy! If he touches me I'll catch it too! His control snapped and he ran. He heard the hobo break into a shuffling run behind him, his old string-tied shoes slapping and flapping across the riotous lawn of the empty saltbox house.

'Come back here, kid! I'll blow you for free. Come back here!'

Eddie had leaped on his bike, wheezing now, feeling his throat closing up to a pinhole. His chest had taken on weight. He hit the pedals and was just picking up speed when one of the hobo's hands struck the package carrier. The bike shimmied. Eddie looked over his shoulder and saw the hobo running along behind the rear wheel (!!GAINING!!), his lips drawn back from the black stumps of his teeth in an expression which might have been either desperation or fury.

In spite of the stones lying on his chest Eddie had pedaled even faster, expecting that one of the hobo's scab-crusted hands would close over his arm at any moment, pulling him from his Raleigh and dumping him in the ditch, where God knew what would happen to him. He hadn't dared look around until he had flashed past the Church School and through the Route 2 intersection. The 'bo was gone.

Eddie held this terrible story inside him for almost a week and then confided it to Richie Tozier and Bill Denbrough one day when they were reading comics over the garage.

'He didn't have leprosy, you dummy,' Richie said. 'He had the Syph.'

Eddie looked at Bill to see if Richie was ribbing him - he had never heard of a disease called the Sift before. It sounded like something Richie might have made up.

'Is there such a thing as the Sift, Bill?'

Bill nodded gravely. 'Only it's the Suh-Suh-Syph, not the Sift. It's s-short for syphilis.'

'What's that?'

'It's a disease you get from fucking,' Richie said. 'You know about fucking, don't you, Eds?'

'Sure,' Eddie said. He hoped he wasn't blushing. He knew that when you got older, stuff came out of your penis when it was hard. Vincent 'Boogers' Taliendo had filled him in on the rest one day at school. What you did when you fucked, according to Boogers, was you rubbed your cock against a girl's stomach until it got hard (your cock, not the girl's stomach). Then you rubbed some more until you started to 'get the feeling.' When Eddie asked what that meant, Boogers had only shaken his head in a mysterious way. Boogers said that you couldn't describe it, but you'd know it as soon as you got it. He said you could practice by lying in the bathtub and rubbing your cock with Ivory soap (Eddie had tried this, but the only feeling he got was the need to urinate after awhile). Anyway, Boogers went on, after you 'got the feeling,' this stuff came out of your penis. Most kids called it come, Boogers said, but his big brother had told him that the really scientific word for it was jizzum. And when you 'got the feeling,' you had to grab your cock and aim it real fast so you could shoot the jizzum into the girl's bellybutton as soon as it came out. It went down into her stomach and made a baby there.

Do girls like that'? Eddie had asked Boogers Taliendo. He himself was sort of appalled.

I guess they must, Boogers had replied, looking mystified himself.

'Now listen up, Eds,' Richie said, 'because there may be questions later. Some women have got this disease. Some men, too, but mostly it's women. A guy can get it from a woman - '

'Or another g-g-guy if they're kwuh-kwuh-queer,' Bill added.

'Right. The important thing is you get the Syph from screwing someone who's already got it.'

'What does it do?' Eddie asked.

'Makes you rot,' Richie said simply.

Eddie stared at him, horrified.

'It's bad, I know, but it's true,' Richie said. 'Your nose is the first thing to go. Some guys with the Syph, their noses fall right off. Then their cocks.'

'Puh-Puh-Puh-leeze,' Bill said. 'I just a-a-ate.'

'Hey, man, this is science,' Richie said.

'So what's the difference between leprosy and the Syph?' Eddie asked.

'You don't get leprosy from fucking,' Richie said promptly, and then went

off into a gale of laughter that left both Bill and Eddie mystified.

7

Following that day the house at 29 Neibolt Street had taken on a kind of glow in Eddie's imagination. Looking at its weedy yard and its slumped porch and the boards nailed across its windows, he would feel an unhealthy fascination take hold of him. And six weeks ago he had parked his bike on the gravelly verge of the street (the sidewalk ended four houses farther back) and walked across the lawn toward the porch of that house.

His heart had been beating hard in his chest, and his mouth had that dry taste again - listening to Bill's story of the dreadful picture, he knew that what he had felt when approaching that house was about the same as what Bill had felt going into George's room. He did not feel as if he was in control of himself. He felt pushed.

It did not seem as if his feet were moving; instead the house itself, brooding and silent, seemed to draw closer to where he stood.

Faintly, he could hear a diesel engine in the trainyard - that and the liquid-metallic slam of couplings being made. They were shunting some cars onto sidings, picking up others. Making a train.

His hand gripped his aspirator, but, oddly, his asthma had not closed down as it had on the day he fled from the hobo with the rotted nose. There was only that sense of standing still and watching the house slide stealthily toward him, as if on a hidden track.

Eddie looked under the porch. There was no one there. It was not really surprising. This was spring, and hobos showed up most frequently in Derry from late September to early November. During those six weeks or so a man could pick up day-work on one of the outlying farms if he looked even half-decent. There were potatoes and apples to pick, snowfence to string, barn and shed roofs which needed to be patched before December came along, whistling up winter.

No hobos under the porch, but plenty of sign they had been there. Empty beer cans, empty beer bottles, empty liquor bottles. A dirt-crusted blanket lay against the brick foundation like a dead dog. There were drifts of crumpled newspapers and one old shoe and a smell like garbage. There were thick layers of old leaves under there.

Not wanting to do it but unable to help himself, Eddie had crawled under the porch. He could feel his heartbeat slamming in his head now, driving white spots of light across his field of vision.

The smell was worse underneath - booze and sweat and the dark brown perfume of decaying leaves. The old leaves didn't even crackle under his hands and knees. They and the old newspapers only sighed.

I'm a hobo, Eddie thought incoherently. I'm a hobo and I ride the rods. That's what I do. Ain't got no money, ain't got no home, but I got me a bottle and a dollar and a place to sleep. I'll pick apples this week and potatoes the week after that and when the frost locks up the ground like money inside a bank vault, why, I'll hop a GS&WM box that smells of sugar-beets and I'll sit in the corner and pull some hay over me if there is some and I'll drink me a little drink and chew me a link chew and sooner or later I'll get to Portland or Beantown, and if I don't get busted by a railroad security dick I'll hop one of those 'Bama Star boxes and head down south and when I get there I'll pick lemons or limes or oranges. And if I get nagged I'll build roads for tourists to ride on. Hell, I done it before, ain't I? I'm just a lonesome old hobo, ain't got no money, ain't got no home, but I got me one thing; I got me a disease that's eating me up. My skin's cracking open, my teeth are falling out, and you know what? I can feel myself turning bad like an apple that's going soft, I can feel it happening, eating from the inside to the out, eating, eating, eating me.

Eddie pulled the stiffening blanket aside, tweezing at it with his thumb and forefinger, grimacing at its matted feel. One of those low cellar windows was directly behind it, one pane broken, the other opaque with dirt. He leaned forward, now feeling almost hypnotized. He leaned closer to the window, closer to the cellar-darkness, breathing in that smell of age and must and dry-rot, closer and closer to the black, and surely the leper would have caught him if his asthma hadn't picked that exact moment to kick up. It cramped his lungs with a weight that was painless yet frightening; his breath at once took on the familiar hateful whistling sound.

He drew back, and that was when the face appeared. Its coming was so sudden, so startling (and yet at the same time so expected), that Eddie could not have screamed even if he hadn't been having an asthma attack. His eyes bulged. His mouth creaked open. It was not the hobo with the flayed nose, but there were resemblances. Terrible resemblances. And yet . . . this thing could not be human. Nothing could be so eaten up and remain alive.

The skin of its forehead was split open. White bone, coated with a membrane of yellow mucusy stuff, peered through like the lens of a bleary searchlight. The nose was a bridge of raw gristle above two red flaring channels. One eye was a gleeful blue. The other socket was filled with a mass of spongy brown-black tissue. The leper's lower lip sagged like liver. It had no upper lip at all; its teeth poked out in a sneering ring.

It shot one hand out through the broken pane. It shot the other through the dirty glass to the left, shattering it to fragments. Its questing, clutching hands crawled with sores. Beetles crawled and lumbered busily to and fro.

Mewling, gasping, Eddie hunched his way backward. He could hardly breathe. His heart was a runaway engine in his chest. The leper appeared to be wearing the ragged remains of some strange silvery suit. Things were crawling in the straggles of its brown hair.

'How bout a blowjob, Eddie?' the apparition croaked, grinning with its remains of a mouth. It lilted, 'Bobby does it for a dime, he will do it anytime, fifteen cents for overtime.' It winked. That's me, Eddie - Bob Gray. And now that we've been properly introduced . . . ' One of its hands splatted against Eddie's right shoulder. Eddie screamed thinly.

That's all right,' the leper said, and Eddie saw with dreamlike terror that it was crawling out of the window. The bony shield behind its peeling forehead snapped the thin wooden strip between the two panes. Its hands clawed through the leafy, mulchy earth. The silver shoulders of its suit . . . costume . . . whatever it was . . . began to push through the gap. That one glaring blue eye never left Eddie's face.

'Here I come, Eddie, that's all right,' it croaked. 'You'll like it down here with us. Some of your friends are down here.'

Its hand reached out again, and in some corner of his panic-maddened, screaming mind, Eddie was suddenly, coldly sure that if that thing touched his bare skin, he would begin to rot, too. The thought broke his paralysis. He skittered backward on his hands and knees, then turned and lunged for the far end of the porch. Sunlight, falling in narrow dusty beams through the cracks between the porch boards, striped his face from moment to moment. His head pushed through the dusty cobwebs that settled in his hair. He looked back over his shoulder and saw that the leper was halfway out.

'It won't do you any good to run, Eddie,' it called.

Eddie had reached the far end of the porch. There was a lattice-work skirt here. The sun shone through it, printing diamonds of light on his cheeks and forehead. He lowered his head and slammed into it with no hesitation at all, tearing the entire skirt free with a scream of rusted ha'penny nails. There was a tangle of rosebushes beyond and Eddie tore through these, stumbling to his feet as he did so, not feeling the thorns that scrawled shallow cuts along his arms and cheeks and neck.

He turned and backed away on buckling legs, pulling his aspirator out of his pocket, triggering it. Surely it hadn't really happened? He had been thinking about that hobo and his mind had . . . well, had just

(put on a show)

shown him a movie, a horror movie, like one of those Saturday-matinee pictures with Frankenstein and Wolfman that they had sometimes at the Bijou or the Gem or the Aladdin. Sure, that was all. He had scared himself! What an asshole!

There was even time to utter a shaky laugh at the unsuspected vividness of his imagination before the rotting hands shot out from under the porch, clawing at the rosebushes with mindless ferocity, pulling at them, stripping them, printing beads of blood on them.

Eddie shrieked.

The leper was crawling out. It was wearing a clown suit, he saw - a clown suit with big orange buttons down the front. It saw Eddie and grinned. Its half-mouth dropped open and its tongue lolled out. Eddie shrieked again, but no one could have heard one boy's breathless shriek under the pounding of the diesel engine in the trainyard. The leper's tongue had not just dropped from its mouth; it was at least three feet long and had unrolled like a party-favor. It came to an arrow-point which dragged in the dirt. Foam, thick-sticky and yellowish, coursed along it. Bugs crawled over it.

The rosebushes, which had been showing the first touches of spring green when Eddie broke through them, now turned a dead and lacy black.

'Blowjob,' the leper whispered, and tottered to its feet.

Eddie raced for his bike. It was the same race as before, only it now had the quality of a nightmare, where you can only move with the most agonizing slowness no matter how hard you try to go fast . . . and in those dreams didn't you always hear or feel something, some It, gaining on you? Didn't you always smell Its stinking breath, as Eddie was smelling it now?

For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.

He did not try to mount his bike immediately; he ran with it instead, head down, pushing the handlebars. He felt as if he was drowning, not in water but inside his own chest.

'Blowjob,' the leper whispered again. 'Come back anytime, Eddie. Bring your friends.'

Its rotting fingers seemed to touch the back of his neck, but perhaps that was only a dangling strand of cobweb from under the porch, caught in his hair and brushing against his shrinking flesh. Eddie leaped onto his bike and pedaled away, not caring that his throat had closed up tight as Tillie again, not giving two sucks for his asthma, not looking back. He didn't look back until he was almost home, and of course there was nothing behind him when he finally did but two kids headed over to the park to play ball.

That night, lying straight as a poker in bed, one hand folded tightly around

his aspirator, looking into the shadows, he heard the leper whisper: It won't

do you, any good to run, Eddie.

8

'Wow,' Richie said respectfully. It was the first thing any of them had said since Bill Denbrough finished his story.

'H-Have you g-g-got a-another suh-suh-higgarette, R-R-Richie?'

Richie gave him the last one in the pack he had hawked almost empty from his dad's desk drawer. He even lit it for Bill.

'You didn't dream it, Bill?' Stan asked suddenly.

Bill shook his head. 'N-N-No duh-dream.'

'Real,' Eddie said in a low voice.

Bill looked at him sharply. 'Wh-Wh-What?'

'Real, I said.' Eddie looked at him almost resentfully. 'It really happened. It was real.' And before he could stop himself - before he even knew he was going to do it - Eddie found himself telling the story of the leper that had come crawling out of the basement at 29 Neibolt Street. Halfway through the telling he began to gasp and had to use his aspirator. And at the end he burst into shrill tears, his thin body shaking.

They all looked at him uncomfortably, and then Stan put a hand on his back. Bill gave him an awkward hug while the others glanced away, embarrassed.

That's a-all right, E-Eddie. It's o-o-okay.'

'I saw it too,' Ben Hanscom said suddenly. His voice was flat and harsh and scared.

Eddie looked up, his face still naked with tears, his eyes red and raw-looking. 'What?'

'I saw the clown,' Ben said. 'Only he wasn't like you said - at least not when I saw him. He wasn't all gooshy. He was . . . he was dry.' He paused, ducked his head, and looked at his hands, which lay palely on his elephantine thighs. 'I think he was the mummy.'

'Like in the movies?' Eddie asked.

'Like that but not like that,' Ben said slowly. 'In the movies he looks fake. It's scary, but you can tell it's a put-up job, you know? All those bandages, they look too neat, or something. But this guy . . . he looked the way a real mummy would look, I think. If you actually found one in a room under a pyramid, I mean. Except for the suit.'

'Wuh-wuh-wuh-hut suh-hoot?'

Ben looked at Eddie. 'A silver suit with big orange buttons down the front.'

Eddie's mouth dropped open. He shut it and said, 'If you're kidding, say so. I still . . . I still dream about that guy under the porch.'

'It's not a joke,' Ben said, and began to tell the story. He told it slowly, beginning with his volunteering to help Mrs Douglas count and store books and ending with his own bad dreams. He spoke slowly, not looking at the others. He spoke as if deeply ashamed of his own behavior. He didn't raise his head again until the story was over.

'You must have dreamed it,' Richie said finally. He saw Ben wince and hurried on: 'Now don't take it personal, Big Ben, but you got to see that balloons can't, like, float against the wind - '

'Pictures can't wink, either,' Ben said.

Richie looked from Ben to Bill, troubled. Accusing Ben of dreaming awake was one thing; accusing Bill was something else. Bill was their leader, the guy they all looked up to. No one said so out loud; no one needed to. But Bill was the idea man, the guy who could think of something to do on a boring day, the guy who remembered games the others had forgotten. And in some odd way they all sensed something comfortingly adult about Bill - perhaps it was a sense of accountability, a feeling that Bill would take the responsibility if responsibility needed to be taken. The truth was, Richie believed Bill's story, crazy as it was. And perhaps he didn't want to believe Ben's . . . or Eddie's, for that matter.

'Nothing like that ever happened to you, huh?' Eddie asked Richie.

Richie paused, began to say something, shook his head, paused again, then said: 'Scariest thing I've seen lately was Mark Prenderlist takin a leak in McCarron Park. Ugliest hogger you ever saw.'

Ben said, 'What about you, Stan?'

'No,' Stan said quickly, and looked somewhere else. His small face was pale, his lips pressed together so tightly they were white.

'W-W-Was there suh-homething, S-St-Stan?' Bill asked.

'No, I told you!' Stan got to his feet and walked to the embankment, hands in his pockets. He stood watching the water course over the top of the original dam and pile up behind the second Watergate.

'Come on, now, Stanley!' Richie said in a shrill falsetto. This was another of his Voices: Granny Grunt. When speaking in his Granny Grunt Voice, Richie would hobble around with one fist against the small of his back, and cackle a lot. He still, however, sounded more like Richie Tozier than anyone else.

'Fess up, Stanley, tell your old Granny about the baaaaad clown and I'll give you a chocker-chip cookie. You just tell - '

'Shut up!' Stan yelled suddenly, whirling on Richie, who fell back a step or two, astonished. 'Just shut up!'

'Yowza, boss,' Richie said, and sat down. He looked at Stan Uris mistrustfully. Bright spots of color flamed in Stan's cheeks, but he still looked more scared than mad.

'That's okay,' Eddie said quietly. 'Never mind, Stan.'

'It wasn't a clown,' Stanley said. His eyes flicked from one of them to the next to the next to the next. He seemed to struggle with himself.

'Y-Y-You can t-tell,' Bill said, also speaking quietly. 'W-We d-d-did.'

'It wasn't a clown. It was - '

Which was when the carrying, whiskey-roughened tones of Mr Nell interrupted, making them all jump as if they had been shot: 'Jay-sus Christ on a jumped-up chariot-driven crutch! Look at this mess! Jaysus Christ!'

C H A P T E R 8

Georgie's Room and the House on Neibolt Street

1

Richard Tozier turns off the radio, which has been blaring out Madonna's 'Like a Virgin' on WZON (a station which declares itself to be 'Banger's AM stereo rocker!' with a kind of hysterical frequency), pulls over to the side of the road, shuts down the engine of the Mustang the Avis people rented him at Bangor International, and gets out. He hears the pull and release of his own breath in his ears. He has seen a sign which has caused the flesh of his back to break out in hard ridges of gooseflesh.

He walks to the front of the car and puts one hand on its hood. He hears the engine ticking softly to itself as it cools. He hears a jay scream briefly and then shut up. There are crickets. And as far as the soundtrack goes, that's it.

He has seen the sign, he passes it, and suddenly he is in Derry again. After twenty-five years Richie 'Trashmouth' Tozier has come home. He has -

Burning agony suddenly needles into his eyes, breaking his thought cleanly off. He utters a strangled little shout and his hands fly up to his face. The only time he felt anything even remotely like this burning pain was when he got an eyelash caught under one of his contacts in college - and that was only in one eye. This terrible pain is in both.

Before he can reach even halfway to his face, the pain is gone.

He lowers his hands again slowly, thoughtfully, and looks down Route 7. He left the turnpike at the Etna-Haven exit, wanting, for some reason he doesn't understand, not to come in by the turnpike, which was still under construction in the Derry area when he and his folks shook the dust of this weird little town from their heels and headed out for the Midwest. No - the turnpike would have been quicker, but it would have been wrong.

So he had driven along Route 9 through the sleeping nestle of buildings that was Haven Village, then turned off on Route 7. And as he went the day grew steadily brighter.

Now this sign. It was the same sort of sign which marked the borders of more than six hundred Maine towns, but how this one had squeezed his heart!

Penobscot

County

D

E

R

R

Y

Maine

Beyond that an Elks sign; a Rotary Club sign; and completing the trinity, a sign proclaiming the fact that DERR Y LIONS ROAR FOR THE UNITED FUND! Past that one there is just Route 7 again, continuing on in a straight line between bulking banks of pine and spruce. In this silent light as the day steadies itself those trees look as dreamy as blue-gray cigarette smoke stacked on the moveless air of a sealed room.

Derry, he thinks. Derry, God help me. Derry. Stone the crows.

Here he is on Route 7. Five miles up, if time or tornado has not carried it away in the intervening years, will be the Rhulin Farms, where his mother bought all of their eggs and most of their vegetables. Two miles beyond that Route 7 became Witcham Road and of course Witcham Road eventually became Witcham Street, can you gimme hallelujah world without end amen. And somewhere along there between the Rhulin Farms and town he would drive past the Bowers place and then the Hanlon place. A mile or so after Hanlon's he would see the first glitter of the Kenduskeag and the first spreading tangle of poison green. The lush lowlands that had been known for some reason as the Barrens.

I really don't know if I can face all of that, Richie thinks. I mean, let's tell the truth here, folks. I just don't know if I can.

The whole previous night has passed in a dream for him. As long as he continued travelling, moving forward, making miles, the dream went on. But now he has stopped - or rather the sign has stopped him - and he has awakened to a strange truth: the dream was the reality. Derry is the reality.

It seems he just cannot stop remembering, he thinks the memories will eventually drive him mad, and now he bites down on his lip and puts his hands together palm to palm, tight, as if to keep himself from flying apart. He feels that he will fly apart, and soon. There seems to be some mad part of him which actually looks forward to what may be coming, but most of him only wonders how he's going to get through the next few days. He -

And now his thoughts break off again.

A deer is walking out into the road. He can hear the light thud of its spring-soft hoofs on the tar.

Richie's breath stops in mid-exhale, then slowly starts again. He looks, dumbfounded, part of him thinking that he never saw anything like this on Rodeo Drive. No - he'd needed to come back home to see something like this.

It's a doe ('Doe, a deer, a female deer,' a Voice chants merrily in his head). She's out of the woods on the right and pauses in the middle of Route 7, front legs on one side of the broken white line, rear legs on the other. Her dark eyes regard Rich Tozier mildly. He reads interest in those eyes but no fear.

He looks at her in wonder, thinking she's an omen or a portent or some sort of Madame Azonka shit like that. And then, quite unexpectedly, a memory of Mr Nell comes to him. What a start he had given them that day, busting in on them in the wake of Bill's story and Ben's story and Eddie's story! The whole bunch of them had damn near gone up to heaven.

Now, looking at the deer, Rich draws in a deep breath and finds himself speaking in one of his Voices . . . but for the first time in twenty-five years or more it is the Voice of the Irish Cop, one he had incorporated into his repertoire after that memorable day. It comes rolling out of the morning silence like a great big bowling ball - it is louder and bigger than Richie would ever have believed:

'Jay-sus Christ on a jumped-up chariot-driven crutch! What's a nice girrul like you doin out in this wilderness, deer? Jaysus Christ! You be gettin on home before I decide to tell Father O'Staggers on ye!'

Before the echoes have died away, before the first shocked jay can begin scolding him for his sacrilege, the doe flicks her tail at him like a truce flag and disappears into the smoky-looking firs on the left side of the road, leaving only a small pile of steaming pellets behind to show that, even at thirty-seven, Richie Tozier is still capable of Getting Off A Good One from time to time.

Richie begins to laugh. He is only chuckling at first, and then his own ludicrousness strikes him - standing here in the dawnlight of a Maine morning, thirty-four hundred miles from home, shouting at a deer in the accents of an Irish cop. The chuckles become a string of giggles, the giggles become guffaws, the guffaws become howls, and he is finally reduced to holding on to his car while tears roll down his face and he wonders dimly if he's going to wet his pants or what. Every time he starts to get control of himself his eyes fix on that little clump of pellets and he goes off into fresh gales.

Snorting and snickering, he is at last able to get back into the driver's seat and restart the Mustang's engine. An Orinco chemical-fertilizer truck snores by in a blast of wind. After it passes him, Rich pulls out and heads for Derry again. He feels better now, in control . . . or maybe it's just that he's moving again, making miles, and the dream has reasserted itself.

He starts thinking about Mr Nell again - Mr Nell and that day by the dam. Mr Nell had asked them who thought this little trick up. He can see the five of them looking uneasily at each other, and remembers how Ben finally stepped forward, cheeks pale and eyes downcast, face trembling all over as he fought grimly to keep from blubbering. Poor kid probably thought he was going to get five-to-ten in Shawshank for back-flooding the drains on Witcham Street, Rich thinks now, but he had owned up to it just the same. And by doing that he had forced the rest of them to come forward and back him up. It was either that or consider themselves bad guys. Cowards. All the things their TV heroes were not. And that had welded them together, for better or worse. Had apparently welded them together for the last twenty-seven years. Sometimes events are dominoes. The first knocks over the second, the second knocks over the third, and there you are.

When, Richie wonders, did it become too late to turn back? When he and Stan showed up and pitched in, helping to build the dam? When Bill told them how the school picture of his brother had turned its head and winked? Maybe . . . but to Rich Tozier it seems that the dominoes really began to fall when Ben Hanscom stepped forward and said' I showed them

2

how to do it. It's my fault.'

Mr Nell simply stood there looking at him, lips pressed together, hands on his creaking black leather belt. He looked from Ben to the spreading pool behind the dam and then back to Ben again, his face that of a man who can't believe what he is seeing. He was a burly Irishman, his hair a premature white, combed back in neat waves beneath his peaked blue cap. His eyes were bright blue, his nose bright red. There were small nests of burst capillaries in his cheeks. He was a man of no more than medium height, but to the five boys arrayed before him he looked at least eight feet tall.

Mr Nell opened his mouth to speak, but before he could. Bill Denbrough had stepped up beside Ben.

'Ih-Ih-Ih-It w-wuh-wuh-was m-my i-i-i-i-idea,' he finally managed to say. He heaved in a gigantic, gulping breath and as Mr Nell stood there regarding him impassively, the sun tossing back imperial flashes from his badge, Bill managed to stutter out the rest of what he needed to say: it wasn't Ben's fault; Ben just happened to come along and show them how to do better what they were already doing badly.

'Me too,' Eddie said abruptly, and stepped up on Ben's other side.

'What's this "me too"?' Mr Nell asked. 'Is that yer name or yer address, buckaroo?'

Eddie flushed brightly - the color went all the way up to the roots of bis hair. 'I was with Bill before Ben even came,' he said. 'That was all I meant.'

Richie stepped up next to Eddie. The idea that a Voice or two might cheer Mr Nell up a little, get him thinking jolly thoughts, popped into his head. On second thought (and second thoughts were, for Richie, extremely rare and wonderful things), maybe a Voice or two might only make things worse. Mr Nell didn't look like he was in what Richie sometimes thought of as a chuckalicious mood. In fact, Mr Nell looked like maybe chucks were the last thing on his mind. So he just said, 'I was in on it too,' in a low voice, and then made his mouth shut up.

'And me,' Stan said, stepping next to Bill.

Now the five of them were standing before Mr Nell in a line. Ben looked from one side to the other, more than dazed - he was almost stupefied by their support. For a moment Richie thought ole Haystack was going to burst into tears of gratitude.

'Jaysus,' Mr Nell said again, and although he sounded deeply disgusted, his face suddenly looked as if it might like to laugh. 'A sorrier bunch of boyos I ain't nivver seen. If yer folks knew where you were, I guess there'd be some hot bottoms tonight. I ain't sure there won't be anyway.'

Richie could hold back no longer; his mouth simply fell open and then ran away like the gingerbread man, as it so often did.

'How's things back in the auid country, Mr Nell?' it bugled. 'Ah, yer a sight for sore eyes, sure an begorrah, yer a lovely man, a credit to the auld sod - '

'I'll be a credit to the seat of yer pants in about three seconds, my dear little friend,' Mr Nell said dryly.

Bill turned on him, snarled: 'For G-G-God's s-sake R-R-Richie shuh-shuh-hut UP!'

'Good advice, Master William Denbrough,' Mr Nell said. 'I'll bet Zack doesn't know you're down here in the Bar'ns playing amongst the floating turdies, does he?'

Bill dropped his eyes, shook his head. Wild roses burned in his cheeks.

Mr Nell looked at Ben. 'I don't recall your name, son.'

'Ben Hanscom, sir,' Ben whispered.

Mr Nell nodded and looked back at the dam again. 'This was your idea?'

'How to build it, yeah.' Ben's whisper was now nearly inaudible.

'Well, yer a hell of an engineer, big boy, but you don't know Jack Shit about these here Bar'ns or the Derry drainage system, do you?'

Ben shook his head.

Not unkindly, Mr Nell told him, 'There's two parts to the system. One part carries solid human waste - shit, if I'd not be offendin yer tender ears. The other part carries gray water - water flushed from toilets or run down the drains from sinks and washin-machines and showers; it's also the water that runs down the gutters into the city drains.

'Well, ye've caused no problems with the solid-waste removal, thank God - all of that gets pumped into the Kenduskeag a bit farther down. There's probably some almighty big patties down that way half a mile dryin in the sun thanks to what you done, but you can be pretty sure that there ain't shit stickin to anyone's ceiling because of it.

'But as for the gray water . . . well, there's no pumps for gray water. That all runs downhill in what the engineer boyos call gravity drains. And I'll bet you know where all them gravity drains end up, don't you, big boy?'

'Up there,' Ben said. He pointed to the area behind the dam, the area they had in large part submerged. He did this without looking up. Big tears were beginning to course slowly down his cheeks. Mr Nell pretended not to notice.

'That's right, my large young friend. All them gravity drains feed into streams that feed into the upper Barrens. In fact, a good many of them little streams that come tricklin down are gray water and gray water only, comin out of drams you can't even see, they're so deep-buried in the underbrush. The shit goes one way and everythin else goes the other, God praise the clever mind o man, and did it ever cross yer minds that you'd spent the whole live-long day paddlin around in Derry's pee an old wash-water?'

Eddie suddenly began to gasp and had to use his aspirator.

'What you did was back water up into about six o the eight central Catch-basins that serve Witcham and Jackson and Kansas and four or five little streets that run between em.' Mr Nell fixed Bill Denbrough with a dry glance. 'One of em serves yer own hearth an home, young Master Denbrough. So there we are, with sinks that won't drain, washin-machines that won't drain, outflow pipes pourin merrily into cellars - '

Ben let out a dry barking sob. The others turned toward him and then looked away. Mr Nell put a large hand on the boy's shoulder. It was callused and hard, but at the moment it was also gentle.

'Now, now. No need to take on, big boy. Maybe it ain't that bad, at least not yet; could be I exaggerated just a mite to make sure you took my point. They sent me down to see if a tree blew down across the stream. That happens from time to time. There's no need for anyone but me and you five to know it wasn't just that. We've got more important things to worry about in town these days than a little backed-up water. I'll say on my report that I located the blowdown and some boys came along and helped me shift it out o the way o the water. Not that I'll mention ye by name. Ye'Il not be gettin any citations for dam-building in the Bar'ns.'

He surveyed the five of them. Ben was furiously wiping his eyes with his handkerchief; Bill was looking thoughtfully at the dam; Eddie was holding his aspirator in one hand; Stan stood close by Richie with one hand on Richie's arm, ready to squeeze - hard - if Richie should show the slightest sign of having anything to say other than thank you very much.

'You boys got no business at all in a dirty place like this,' Mr Nell went on. 'There's probably sixty different kinds o disease breeding down here.' Breeding came out braidin, as in what a girl may do with her hair in the morning. 'Dump down one way, streams full of piss an gray water, muck an slop, bugs an brambles, quick-mud . . . you got no business at all in a dirty place like this. Four clean city parks for you boyos to be playin ball in all the day long and I catch you down here. Jaysus Christ!'

'Wuh-Wuh-We l-l-l-like it d-d-down h-here,' Bill said suddenly and defiantly. 'Wh-When w-w-we cuh-hum down h-here, nuh-ho-hobody gives us a-a-any stuh-stuh-hatic.'

'What'd he say?' Mr Nell asked Eddie.

'He said when we come down here nobody gives us any static,' Eddie said. His voice was thin and whistling, but it was also unmistakably firm. 'And he's right. When guys like us go to the park and say we want to play baseball, the other guys say sure, you want to be second base or third?'

Richie cackled. 'Eddie Gets Off A Good One! And . . . You Are There!'

Mr Nell swung his head to look at him.

Richie shrugged. 'Sorry. But he's right. And Bill's right, too. We like it down here.'

Richie thought Mr Nell would become angry again at that, but the white-haired cop surprised him - surprised them all - with a smile. 'Ayuh,' he said. 'I liked it down here meself as a boy, so I did. And I'll not forbid ye. But hark to what I'm tellin you now.' He leveled a finger at them and they all looked at him soberly. 'If ye come down here to play ye come in a gang like ye are now. Together. Do you understand me?'

They nodded.

That means together all the time. No hide-an-seek games where yer split up one an one an one. You all know what's goin on in this town. All the same, I don't forbid you to come down here, mostly because ye'd be down here anyway. But for yer own good, here or anywhere around, gang together.' He looked at Bill. 'Do you disagree with me, young Master Bill Denbrough?'

'N-N-No, sir,' Bill said. 'W-We'll stay tuh-tuh-tuh - '

'That's good enough for me,' Mr Nell said. 'Yer hand on it.'

Bill stuck out his hand and Mr Nell shook it.

Richie shook off Stan and stepped forward.

'Sure an begorrah, Mr Nell, yer a prince among men, y'are! A foine man! A foine, foine man!' He stuck out his own hand, seized the Irishman's huge paw, and flagged it furiously, grinning all the time. To the bemused Mr Nell the boy looked like a hideous parody of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

'Thank you, boy,' Mr Nell said, retrieving his hand. 'Ye want to work on that a bit. As of now, ye sound about as Irish as Groucho Marx.'

The other boys laughed, mostly in relief. Even as he was laughing, Stan shot Richie a reproachful look: Grow up, Richie!

Mr Nell shook hands all around, gripping Ben's last of all.

'Ye've nothing to be ashamed of but bad judgment, big boy. As for that there . . . did you see how to do it in a book?'

Ben shook his head.

'Just figured it out?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Well if that don't beat Harry! Ye'Il do great things someday, I've no doubt. But the Barrens isn't the place to do em.' He looked around thoughtfully. 'No great thing will ever be done here. Nasty place.' He sighed. 'Tear it down, dear boys. Tear it right down. I believe I'll just sit me down in the shade o this bush here and bide a wee as you do it.' He looked ironically at Richie as he said this last, as if inviting another manic outburst.

'Yes, sir,' Richie said humbly, and that was all. Mr Nell nodded, satisfied, and the boys fell to work, once again turning to Ben - this time to show them the quickest way to tear down what he had shown them how to build. Meanwhile, Mr Nell removed a brown bottle from inside his tunic and helped himself to a large gulp. He coughed, then blew out breath in an explosive sigh and regarded the boys with watery, benign eyes.

'And what might ye have in yer bottle, sor?' Richie asked from the place where he was standing knee-deep in the water.

'Richie, can't you ever shut up?' Eddie hissed.

'This?' Mr Nell regarded Richie with mild surprise and looked at the bottle again. It had no label of any kind on it. 'This is the cough medicine of the gods, my boy. Now let's see if you can bend yer back anywhere near as fast as you can wag yer tongue.'

3

Bill and Richie were walking up Witcham Street together later on. Bill was pushing Silver; after first building and then tearing down the dam, he simply did not have the energy it would have taken to get Silver up to cruising speed. Both boys were dirty, dishevelled, and pretty well used up.

Stan had asked them if they wanted to come over to his house and play Monopoly or Parcheesi or something, but none of them wanted to. It was getting late. Ben, sounding tired and depressed, said he was going to go home and see if anybody had returned his library books. He had some hope of this, since the Derry Library insisted on writing in the borrower's street address as well as his name on each book's pocket card. Eddie said he was going to watch The Rock Show on TV because Neil Sedaka was going to be on and he wanted to see if Neil Sedaka was a Negro. Stan told Eddie not to be so stupid, Neil Sedaka was white, you could tell he was white just listening to him. Eddie claimed you couldn't tell anything by listening to them; until last year he had been positive Chuck Berry was white, but when he was on Bandstand he turned out to be a Negro.

'My mother still thinks he's white, so that's one good thing,' Eddie said. 'If she finds out he's a Negro, she probably won't let me listen to his songs anymore.'

Stan bet Eddie four funnybooks that Neil Sedaka was white, and the two of them set off together for Eddie's house to settle the issue.

And here were Bill and Richie, headed in a direction which would bring them to Bill's house after awhile, neither of them talking much. Richie found himself thinking about Bill's story of the picture that had turned its head and winked. And in spite of his tiredness, an idea came to him. It was crazy . . . but it also held a certain attraction.

'Billy me boy,' he said. 'Let's stop for awhile. Take five. I'm dead.'

'No such l-l-luck,' Bill said, but he stopped, laid Silver carefully down on the edge of the green Theological Seminary lawn, and the two boys sat on the wide stone steps which led up to the rambling red Victorian structure.

'What a d-d-day,' Bill said glumly. There were dark purplish patches under his eyes. His face looked white and used. 'You better call your house when w-we get to muh-mine. So your f-folks don't go b-b-bananas.'

'Yeah. You bet. Listen, Bill - '

Richie paused for a moment, thinking about Ben's mummy, Eddie's leper, and whatever Stan had almost told them. For a moment something swam in his own mind, something about that Paul Bunyan statue out by the City Center. But that had only been a dream, for God's sake.

He pushed away such irrelevant thoughts and plunged.

'Let's go up to your house, what do you say? Take a look in Georgie's room. I want to see that picture.'

Bill looked at Richie, shocked. He tried to speak but could not; his stress was simply too great. He settled for shaking his head violently.

Richie said, 'You heard Eddie's story. And Ben's. Do you believe what they said?'

'I don't nuh-nuh-know. I th-hink they m-m-must have sub-seen suh-homething.'

'Yeah. Me too. All the kids that've been killed around here, I think all of them would have had stories to tell, too. The only difference between Ben and Eddie and those other kids is that Ben and Eddie didn't get caught.'

Bill raised his eyebrows but showed no great surprise. Richie had supposed Bill would have taken it that far himself. He couldn't talk so good, but he was no dummy.

'So now dig on this awhile, Big Bill,' Richie said. 'A guy could dress up in a clown suit and kill kids. I don't know why he'd want to, but nobody can tell why crazy people do things, right?'

'Ruh-Ruh-Ruh - '

'Right. It's not that much different than the Joker in a Batman funnybook.' Just hearing his ideas out loud excited Richie. He wondered briefly if he was actually trying to prove something or just throwing up a smokescreen of words so he could see that room, that picture. In the end it probably didn't matter. In the end maybe just seeing Bill's eyes light up with their own excitement was enough.

'B-B-But wh-wh-where does the pih-hicture fit i-i-in?'

'What do you think, Billy?'

In a low voice, not looking at Richie, Bill said he didn't think it had anything to do with the murders. 'I think it was Juh-Juh-Georgie's g-ghost.'

'A ghost in a picture?' Bill nodded.

Richie thought about it. The idea of ghosts gave his child's mind no trouble at all. He was sure there were such things. His parents were Methodists, and Richie went to church every Sunday and to Thursday-night Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings as well. He knew a great deal of the Bible already, and he knew the Bible believed in all sorts of weird stuff. According to the Bible, God Himself was at least one-third Ghost, and that was just the beginning. You could tell the Bible believed in demons, because Jesus threw a bunch of them out of this guy. Real chuckalicious ones, too. When Jesus asked the guy who had them what his name was, the demons answered and told Him to go join the Foreign Legion. Or something like that. The Bible believed in witches, or else why would it say 'Thou shall not suffer a witch to live'? Some of the stuff in the Bible was even better than the stuff in the horror comics. People getting boiled in oil or hanging themselves like Judas Iscariot; the story about how wicked King Ahaz fell off the tower and all the dogs came and licked up his blood; the mass baby-murders that had accompanied the births of both Moses and Jesus Christ; guys who came out of their graves or flew into the air; soldiers who witched down walls; prophets who saw the future and fought monsters. All of that was in the Bible and every word of it was true - so said Reverend Craig and so said Richie's folks and so said Richie. He was perfectly willing to credit the possibility of Bill's explanation; it was the logic which troubled him.

'But you said you were scared. Why would George's ghost want to scare you, Bill?'

Bill put a hand to his mouth and wiped it. The hand was trembling slightly. 'H-He's probably muh-muh-mad at m-m-me. For g-getting him kin-hilled. It was my fuh-fuh-fault. I s-sent him out with the buh-buh-buh - ' He was incapable of getting the word out, so he rocked his hand in the air instead. Richie nodded to show he understood what Bill meant . . . but not to indicate agreement.

'I don't think so,' he said. 'If you stabbed him in the back or shot him, that would be different. Or even if you, like, gave him a loaded gun that belonged to your dad to play with and he shot himself with it. But it wasn't a gun, it was just a boat. You didn't want to hurt him; in fact' - Richie raised one finger and waggled it at Bill in a lawyerly way - 'you just wanted the kid to have a little fun, right?'

Bill thought back - thought desperately hard. What Richie had just said had made him feel better about George's death for the first time in months, but there was a part of him which insisted with quiet firmness that he was not supposed to feel better. Of course it was your fault, that part of him insisted; not entirely, maybe, but at least partly.

If not, how come there's that cold place on the couch between your mother and father? If not, how come no one ever says anything at the supper table anymore? Now it's just knives and forks rattling until you can't take it anymore and ask if you can be eh-eh-eh-excused, please.

It was as if he were the ghost, a presence that spoke and moved but was not quite heard or seen, a thing vaguely sensed but still not accepted as real.

He did not like the thought that he was to blame, but the only alternative he could think of to explain their behavior was much worse: that all the love and attention his parents had given him before had somehow been the result of George's presence, and with George gone there was nothing for him . . . and all of that had happened at random, for no reason at all. And if you put your ear to that door, you could hear the winds of madness blowing outside.

So he went over what he had done and felt and said on the day Georgie had died, part of him hoping that what Richie had said was true, part of him hoping just as hard it was not. He hadn't been a saint of a big brother to George, that much was certain. They had had fights, plenty of them. Surely there had been one that day?

No. No fight. For one thing, Bill himself had still been feeling too punk to work up a really good quarrel with George. He had been sleeping, dreaming something, dreaming about some

(turtle)

funny little animal, he couldn't remember just what, and he had awakened to the sound of the diminishing rain outside and George muttering unhappily to himself in the dining room. He asked George what was wrong. George came in and said he was trying to make a paper boat from the directions in his Best Book of Activities but it kept coming out wrong. Bill told George to bring his book. And sitting next to Richie on the steps leading up to the seminary, he remembered how Georgie's eyes lit up when the paper boat came out right, and how good that look had made him feel, like Georgie thought he was a real hot shit, a straight shooter, the guy who could do it until it got done. Making him feel, in short, like a big brother.

The boat had killed George, but Richie was right - it hadn't been like handing George a loaded gun to play with. Bill hadn't known what was going to happen. No way he could.

He drew a deep, shuddering breath, feeling something like a rock - something he hadn't even known was there - go rolling off his chest. All at once he felt better, better about everything.

He opened his mouth to tell Richie this and burst into tears instead.

Alarmed, Richie put an arm around Bill's shoulders (after taking a quick glance around to make sure no one who might mistake them for a couple of fagolas was looking).

'You're okay,' he said. 'You're okay, Billy, right? Come on. Turn off the waterworks.'

'I didn't wuh-wuh-want h-him t-to g-g-get kuh-hilled!' Bill sobbed. 'TH-THAT WUH-WUH-WASN'T ON MY M-M-M-MIND AT UH-UH-ALL!'

'Christ, Billy, I know it wasn't,' Richie said. 'If you'd wanted to scrub him, you woulda pushed him downstairs or something.' Richie patted Bill's shoulder clumsily and gave him a hard little hug before letting go. 'Come on, quit bawlin, okay? You sound like a baby.'

Little by little Bill stopped. He still hurt, but this hurt seemed cleaner, as if he had cut himself open and taken out something that was rotting inside him. And that feeling of relief was still there.

'I-I didn't w-want him to get kuh-kuh-killed,' Bill repeated, 'and ih-if y-y-you t-tell anybody I w-was c-c-cryin, I'll b-b-bust your n-n-nose.

'I won't tell,' Richie said, 'don't worry. He was your brother, for gosh sake. If my brother got killed, I'd cry my fuckin head off.'

'Yuh-Yuh-You d-don't have a buh-brother.'

'Yeah, but if I did.'

'Y-You w-w-would?'

'Course.' Richie paused, fixing Bill with a wary eye, trying to decide if Bill was really over it. He was still wiping his red eyes with his snotrag, but Richie decided he probably was. 'All I meant was that I don't know why George would want to haunt you. So maybe the picture's got something to do with . . . well, with that other. The clown.'

'Muh-Muh-Maybe G-G-George d-d-doesn't nuh-nuh-know. Maybe h-he th-thinks - '

Richie understood what Bill was trying to say and waved it aside. 'After you croak you know everything people ever thought about you, Big Bill.' He spoke with the indulgent air of a great teacher correcting a country bumpkin's fatuous ideas. 'It's in the Bible. It says, "Yea, even though we can't see too much in the mirror right now, we will see through it like it was a window after we die." That's in First Thessalonians or Second Babylonians, I forget which. It means - '

'I suh-suh-see what it m-m-means,' Bill said.

'So what do you say?'

'Huh?'

'Let's go up to his room and take a look. Maybe we'll get a clue about who's killing all the kids.'

'I'm s-s-scared to.'

'I am too,' Richie said, thinking it was just more sand, something to say that would get Bill moving, and then something heavy turned over in his midsection and he discovered it was true: he was scared green.

4

The two boys slipped into the Denbrough house like ghosts.

Bill's father was still at work. Sharon Denbrough was in the kitchen, reading a paperback at the kitchen table. The smell of supper - codfish - drifted out into the front hall. Richie called home so his mom would know he wasn't dead, just at Bill's.

'Someone there?' Mrs Denbrough called as Richie put the phone down. They froze, eyeing each other guiltily. Then Bill called: 'M-Me, Mom. And R-R-R-R-R - '

'Richie Tozier, ma'am,' Richie yelled.

'Hello, Richie,' Mrs Denbrough called back, her voice disconnected, almost not there at all. 'Would you like to stay for supper?'

'Thanks, ma'am, but my mom's gonna pick me up in half an hour or so.'

Tell her I said hello, won't you?'

'Yes ma'am, I sure will.'

'C-Come on,' Bill whispered. 'That's enough s-small talk.'

They went upstairs and down the hall to Bill's room. It was boy-neat, which meant it would have given the mother of the boy in question only a mild headache to look at. The shelves were stuffed with a helter-skelter collection of books and comics. There were more comics, plus a few models and toys and a stack of 45s, on the desk. There was also an old Underwood office model typewriter on it. His folks had given it to him for Christmas two years ago, and Bill sometimes wrote stories on it. He did this a bit more frequently since George's death. The pretending seemed to ease his mind.

There was a phonograph on the floor across from the bed with a pile of folded clothes stacked on the lid. Bill put the clothes in the drawers of his bureau and then took the records from the desk. He shuffled through them, picking half a dozen. He put them on the phonograph's fat spindle and turned the machine on. The Fleetwoods started singing 'Come Softly Darling.'

Richie held his nose.

Bill grinned in spite of his thumping heart. 'Th-They d-don't luh-luh-hike rock and r-roll,' he said. 'They g-gave me this wuh-one for my b-b-birthday. Also two P-Pat B-B-Boone records and Tuh-Tuh-Tommy Sands. I keep L-L-Little Ruh-Richard and Scuh-hreamin J- Jay Hawkins for when they're not h-here. But if she hears the m-m-music she'll th-think we're i-in m-my room. C-C-Come o-on.'

George's room was across the hall. The door was shut. Richie looked at it and licked his lips.

'They don't keep it locked?' he whispered to Bill. Suddenly he found himself hoping it was locked. Suddenly he was having trouble believing this had been his idea.

Bill, his face pale, shook his head and turned the knob. He stepped in and looked back at Richie. After a moment Richie followed. Bill shut the door behind them, muffling the Fleetwoods. Richie jumped a little at the soft snick of the latch.

He looked around, fearful and intensely curious at the same tune. The first thing he noticed was the dry mustiness of the air - No one's opened a window in here for a long time, he thought. Heck, no one's breathed in here for a long time. That's really what it feels like. He shuddered a little at the thought and licked his lips again.

His eye fell on George's bed, and he thought of George sleeping now under a comforter of earth in Mount Hope Cemetery. Rotting there. His hands not folded because you needed two hands to do the old folding routine, and George had been buried with only one.

A little sound escaped Richie's throat. Bill turned and looked at him enquiringly.

'You're right,' Richie said huskily. 'It's spooky in here. I don't see how you could stand to come in alone.'

'H-He was my bruh-brother,' Bill said simply. 'Sometimes I w-w-want to, is a-all.'

There were posters on the walls - little-kid posters. One showed Tom Terrific, the cartoon character on Captain Kangaroo's program. Tom was springing over the head and clutching hands of Crabby Appleton, who was, of course, Rotten to the Core. Another showed Donald Duck's nephews, Huey, Louie, and Dewie, marching off into the wilderness in their Junior Woodchucks coonskin caps. A third, which George had colored himself, showed Mr Do holding up traffic so a bunch of little kids headed for school could cross the street. MR DO SAYS WAIT FOR THE CROSSING GUARD!, it said underneath.

Kid wasn't too cool about staying in the lines, Richie thought, and then shuddered. The kid was never going to get any better at it, either. Richie looked at the table by the window. Mrs Denbrough had stood up all of George's rank-cards there, half-open. Looking at them, knowing there would never be more, knowing that George had died before he could stay in the lines when he colored, knowing his life had ended irrevocably and eternally with only those few kindergarten and first-grade rank-cards, all the idiot truth of death crashed home to Richie for the first time. It was as if a large iron safe had fallen into his brain and buried itself there. I could die! his mind screamed at him suddenly in tones of betrayed horror. Anybody could! Anybody could!

'Boy oh boy,' he said in a shaky voice. He could manage no more.

'Yeah,' Bill said in a near-whisper. He sat down on George's bed. 'Look.'

Richie followed Bill's pointing finger and saw the photo album lying closed on the floor. MY PHOTOGRAPHS, Richie read. GEORGE ELMER DENBROUGH, AGE 6.

Age 6! his mind shrieked in those same tones of shrill betrayal. Age 6 forever! Anybody could! Shit! Fucking anybody!

'It was oh-oh-open,' Bill said. 'B-Before.'

'So it closed,' Richie said uneasily. He sat down on the bed beside Bill and looked at the photo album. 'Lots of books close on their own.'

'The p-p-pages, maybe, but n-not the cuh-cuh-cover. It c-closed itself.' He looked at Richie solemnly, his eyes very dark in his pale, tired face. 'B-But it wuh-wuh-wants y-you to oh-open it up again. That's what I th-think.'

Richie got up and walked slowly over to the photograph album. It lay at the base of a window screened with light curtains. Looking out, he could see the apple tree in the Denbrough back yard. A swing rocked slowly back and forth from one gnarled, black limb.

He looked down at George's book again.

A dried maroon stain colored the thickness of the pages in the middle of the book. It could have been old ketchup. Sure; it was easy enough to see George looking at his photo album while eating a hot dog or a big sloppy hamburger; he takes a big bite and some ketchup squirts out onto the book. Little kids were always doing spasmoid stuff like that. It could be ketchup. But Richie knew it was not.

He touched the album briefly and then drew his hand away. It felt cold. It had been lying in a place where the strong summer sunlight, only slightly filtered by those light curtains, would have been falling on it all day, but it felt cold.

Well, I'll just leave it alone, Richie thought. I don't want to look in his stupid old album anyway, see a lot of people I don't know. I think maybe I'll tell Bill I changed my mind, and we can go to his room and read comic books for awhile and then I'll go home and eat supper and go to bed early because I'm pretty tired, and when I wake up tomorrow morning I'm sure I'll be sure that stuff was just ketchup. That's just what I'll do. Yowza.

So he opened the album with hands that seemed a thousand miles away from him, at the end of long plastic arms, and he looked at the faces and places in George's album, the aunts, the uncles, the babies, the houses, the old Fords and Studebakers, the telephone lines, the mailboxes, the picket fences, the wheelruts with muddy water in them, the Ferris wheel at the Esty County Fair, the Standpipe, the ruins of the Kitchener Ironworks -

His fingers flipped faster and faster and suddenly the pages were blank. He turned back, not wanting to but unable to help himself. Here was a picture of downtown Derry, Main Street and Canal Street from around 1930, and beyond it there was nothing.

'There's no school picture of George in here,' Richie said. He looked at Bill with a mixture of relief and exasperation. 'What kind of line were you handing me, Big Bill?'

'W-W-What?'

'This picture of downtown in the olden days is the last one in the book. All the rest of the pages are blank.'

Bill got off the bed and joined Richie. He looked at the picture of downtown Derry as it had been almost thirty years ago, old-fashioned cars and trucks, old-fashioned streetlights with clusters of globes like big white grapes, pedestrians by the Canal caught in mid-stride by the click of a shutter. He turned the page and, just as Richie had said, there was nothing.

No, wait - not quite nothing. There was one studio corner, the sort of item you use to mount photographs.

'It w-w-was here,' he said, and tapped the studio corner. 'L-Look.'

'Jeepers! What do you think happened to it?'

'I d-don't nuh-nuh-know.'

Bill had taken the album from Richie and was now holding it on his own lap. He turned back through the pages, looking for George's picture. He gave up after a minute, but the pages did not. They turned themselves, flipping slowly but steadily, with big deliberate riffling sounds. Bill and Richie looked at each other, wide-eyed, and then back down.

It arrived at that last picture again and the pages stopped turning. Here was downtown Derry in sepia tones, the city as it had been long before either Bill or Richie had been born.

'Say!' Richie said suddenly, and took the album back from Bill. There was no fear in his voice now, and his face was suddenly full of wonder. 'Holy shit!'

'W-What? What ih-ih-is it?'

'Us! That's what it is! Holy-jeezly-crow, look!'

Bill took one side of the book. Bent over it, sharing it, they looked like boys at choir practice. Bill drew in breath sharply, and Richie knew he had seen it too.

Caught under the shiny surface of this old black-and-white photograph two small boys were walking along Main Street toward the point where Main and Center intersected - the point where the Canal went underground for a mile and a half or so. The two boys showed up clearly against the low concrete wall at the edge of the Canal. One was wearing knickers. The other was wearing something that looked almost like a sailor suit. A tweed cap was perched on his head. They were turned in three-quarter profile toward the camera, looking at something on the far side of the street. The boy in the knickers was Richie Tozier, beyond a doubt. And the boy in the sailor suit and the tweed cap was Stuttering Bill.

They stared at themselves in a picture almost three times as old as they were, hypnotized. The inside of Richie's mouth suddenly felt as dry as dust and as smooth as glass. A few steps ahead of the boys in the picture there was a man holding the brim of his fedora, his topcoat frozen forever as it flapped out behind him in a sudden gust of wind. There were Model-Ts on the street, a Pierce-Arrow, Chevrolets with running boards.

'I-I-I-I d-don't buh-buh-believe - ' Bill began, and that was when the picture began to move.

The Model-T that should have remained eternally in the middle of the intersection (or at least until the chemicals in the old photo finally dissolved completely) passed through it, a haze of exhaust puffing out of its tailpipe. It went on toward Up-Mile Hill. A small white hand shot out of the driver's side window and signalled a left turn. It swung onto Court Street and passed beyond the photo's white border and so out of sight.

The Pierce-Arrow, the Chevrolets, the Packards - they all began to roll along, dodging their separate ways through the intersection. After twenty-eight years or so the skirt of the man's topcoat finally finished its flap. He settled his hat more firmly on his head and walked on.

The two boys completed their turn, coming full-face, and a moment later Richie saw what they had been looking at as a mangy dog came trotting across Center Street. The boy in the sailor suit - Bill - raised two fingers to the corners of his mouth and whistled. Stunned beyond any ability to move or think, Richie realized he could hear the whistle, could hear the cars' irregular sewing-machine engines. The sounds were faint, like sounds heard through thick glass, but they were there.

The dog glanced toward the two boys, then trotted on. The boys glanced at each other and laughed like chipmunks. They started to walk on, and then the Richie in knickers grabbed Bill's arm and pointed toward the Canal. They turned in that direction.

No, Richie thought, don't do that, don't -

They went to the low concrete wall and suddenly the clown popped up over its edge like a horrible jack-in-the-box, a clown with Georgie Denbrough's face, his hair slicked back, his mouth a hideous grin full of bleeding greasepaint, his eyes black holes. One hand clutched three balloons on a string. With the other he reached for the boy in the sailor suit and seized his neck.

'Nuh-Nuh-NO!' Bill cried, and reached for the picture.

Reached into the picture!

'Stop it, Bill!' Richie shouted, and grabbed for him.

He was almost too late. He saw the tips of Bill's fingers go through the surface of the photograph and into that other world. He saw the fingertips go from the warm pink of living flesh to the mummified cream color that passed for white in old photos. At the same tune they became small and disconnected. It was like the peculiar optical illusion one sees when one thrusts a hand into a glass bowl of water: the part of the hand underwater seems to be floating, disembodied, inches away from the part which is still out of the water.

A series of diagonal cuts slashed across Bill's fingers at the point where they ceased being his fingers and became photo-fingers; it was as if he had stuck his hand into the blades of a fan instead of into a picture.

Richie seized his forearm and gave a tremendous yank. They both fell over. George's album hit the floor and snapped itself shut with a dry clap. Bill stuck his fingers in his mouth. Tears of pain stood in his eyes. Richie could see blood running down his palm to his wrist in thin streams.

'Let me see,' he said.

'Hu-Hurts,' Bill said. He held his hand out to Richie, palm down. There were ladderlike slash-cuts running up his index, second, and third fingers. The pinky had barely touched the surface of the photograph (if it had a surface), and although that finger had not been cut, Bill told Richie later that the nail had been neatly clipped, as if with a pair of manicurist's scissors.

'Jesus, Bill,' Richie said. Band-Aids. That was all he could think of. God, they had been lucky - if he hadn't pulled Bill's arm when he did, his fingers might have been amputated instead of just badly cut. 'We got to fix those up. Your mother can - '

'Neh-neh-never m-mind m-my muh-huther,' Bill said. He grabbed the photo album again, spilling drops of blood on the floor.

'Don't open that again!' Richie cried, grabbing frantically at Bill's shoulder. 'Jesus Christ, Billy, you almost lost your fingers!'

Bill shook him off. He flipped through the pages, and there was a grim determination on his face that scared Richie more than anything else. Bill's eyes looked almost mad. His wounded fingers printed George's album with new blood - it didn't look like ketchup yet, but when it had a little time to dry it would. Of course it would.

And here was the downtown scene again.

The Model-T stood in the middle of the intersection. The other cars were frozen in the places where they had been before. The man walking toward the intersection held the brim of his fedora; his coat once more belled out in mid-flap.

The two boys were gone.

There were no boys in the picture anywhere. But -

'Look,' Richie whispered, and pointed. He was careful to keep the tip of his finger well away from the picture. An arc showed just over the low concrete wall at the edge of the Canal - the top of something round.

Something like a balloon.

5

They got out of George's room just in time. Bill's mother was a voice at the foot of the stairs and a shadow on the wall. 'Have you boys been wrestling?' she asked sharply. 'I heard a thud.'

'Just a lih-lih-little, M-Mom.' Bill threw a sharp glance at Richie. Be quiet, it said.

'Well, I want you to stop it. I thought the ceiling was going to come right down on my head.'

'W-W-We will.'

They heard her go back toward the front of the house. Bill had wrapped his handkerchief around his bleeding hand; it was turning red and in a moment would start to drip. The boys went down to the bathroom, where Bill held his hand under the faucet until the bleeding stopped. Cleaned, the cuts looked thin but cruelly deep. Looking at their white lips and the red meat just inside them made Richie feel sick to his stomach. He wrapped them with Band-Aids as fast as he could.

'H-H-Hurts like hell,' Bill said.

'Well, why'd you want to go and put your hand in there, you wet end?'

Bill looked solemnly at the rings of Band-Aids on his fingers, then up at Richie. 'I-I-It was the cluh-hown,' he said. 'It w-w-was the c-clown pretending to be Juh-Juh-George.'

'That's right,' Richie said. 'Like it was the clown pretending to be the mummy when Ben saw it. Like it was the clown pretending to be that sick bum Eddie saw.'

'The luh-luh-leper.'

'Right.'

'But ih-is it r-r-really a cluh-cluh-clown?'

'It's a monster,' Richie said flatly. 'Some kind of monster. Some kind of monster right here in Derry. And it's killing kids.'

6

On a Saturday, not long after the incident of the dam in the Barrens, Mr Nell, and the picture that moved, Richie, Ben, and Beverly Marsh came face to face with not one monster but two - and they paid to do it. Richie did, anyway. These monsters were scary but not really dangerous; they stalked their victims on the screen of the Aladdin Theater while Richie, Ben, and Bev watched from the balcony.

One of the monsters was a werewolf, played by Michael Landon, and he was cool because even when he was the werewolf he still had sort of a duck's ass haircut. The other was this smashed-up hotrodder, played by Gary Conway. He was brought back to life by a descendant of Victor Frankenstein, who fed all parts he didn't need to a bunch of alligators he kept in the basement. Also on the program: a MovieTone Newsreel that showed the latest Paris fashions and the latest Vanguard rocket explosions at Cape Canaveral, two Warner Brothers cartoons, one Popeye cartoon, and a Chilly Willy cartoon (for some reason the hat Chilly Willy wore always cracked Richie up), and PREVUES OF COMING ATTRACTIONS. The coming attractions included two pictures Richie immediately put on his gotta-see list: I Married a Monster from Outer Space and The Blob.

Ben was very quiet during the show. Ole Haystack had nearly been spotted by Henry, Belch, and Victor earlier, and Richie assumed that was all that was troubling him. Ben, however, had forgotten all about the creeps (they were sitting close to the screen down below, chucking popcorn boxes at each other and hooting). Beverly was the reason for his silence. Her nearness was so overwhelming that he was almost ill with it. His body would break out in goosebumps and then, if she should so much as shift in her seat, his skin would flash hot, as if with a tropical fever. When her hand brushed his reaching for the popcorn, he trembled with exaltation. He thought later that those three hours in the dark next to Beverly had been both the longest and shortest hours of his life.

Richie, unaware that Ben was in deep throes of calf-love, was feeling just as fine as paint. In his book the only thing any better than a couple of Francis the Talking Mule pictures was a couple of horror pictures in a theater filled with kids, all of them yelling and screaming at the gory parts. He certainly did not connect any of the goings-ons in the two low-budget American-International pictures they were watching with what was going on in town . . . not then, at least.

He had seen the Twin Shock Show Saturday Matinee ad in the News on Friday morning and had almost immediately forgotten how badly he had slept the night before - and how he had finally gotten up and turned on the light in his closet, a real baby trick for sure, but he hadn't been able to get a wink of sleep until he'd done it. But by the following morning things had seemed normal again . . . well, almost. He began to think that maybe he and Bill had just shared a hallucination. Of course the cuts on Bill's fingers weren't a hallucination, but maybe they'd just been paper-cuts from some of the sheets in Georgie's album. Pretty thick paper. Could of been. Maybe. Besides, there was no law saying he had to spend the next ten years thinking about it, was there? Nope.

And so, following an experience that might well have sent an adult running for the nearest headshrinker, Richie Tozier got up, ate a giant pancake breakfast, saw the ad for the two horror movies on the Amusements page of the paper, checked his funds, found them a little low (well . . . 'nonexistent' might actually have been a better word), and began to pester his father for chores.

His dad, who had come to the table already wearing his white dentist's tunic, put down the Sports pages and poured himself a second cup of coffee. He was a pleasant-looking man with a rather thin face. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles, was developing a bald spot at the back of his head, and would die of cancer of the larynx in 1973. He looked at the ad to which Richie was pointing.

'Horror movies,' Wentworth Tozier said.

'Yeah,' Richie said, grinning.

'Feel like you have to go,' Wentworth Tozier said.

'Yeah!'

'Feel like you'll probably die in convulsions of disappointment if you don't get to see those two trashy movies.'

'Yeah, yeah, I would! I know I would! Graaaag!' Richie fell out of his chair onto the floor, clutching his throat, his tongue sticking out. This was Richie's admittedly peculiar way of turning on the charm.

'Oh God, Richie, will you please stop it?' his mother asked him from the stove, where she was frying him a couple of eggs to top off the pancakes.

'Gee, Rich,' his father said as Richie got back into his chair. 'I guess I must have forgotten to pay you your allowance on Monday. That's the only reason I can think of for you needing more money on Friday.'

'Well . . . '

'Gone?'

'Well . . . '

'That's an extremely deep subject for a boy with such a shallow mind,' Wentworth Tozier said. He put his elbow on the table and then cupped his chin on the palm of his hand, regarding his only son with what appeared to be deep fascination. 'Where'd it go?'

Richie immediately fell into the Voice of Toodles the English Butler. 'Why, I spent it, didn't I, guv'nor? Pip-pip, cheerio, and all that rot! My part of the war effort. All got to do our bit to beat back the bloody Hun, don't we? Bit of a sticky wicket, ay-wot? Bit of a wet hedgehog, wot-wot? Bit of a - '

'Bit of a pile of bullshit,' Went said amiably, and reached for the strawberry preserves.

'Spare me the vulgarity at the breakfast table, if you please,' Maggie Tozier said to her husband as she brought Richie's eggs over to the table. And to Richie: 'I don't know why you want to fill your head up with such awful junk anyway.'

'Aw, Mom,' Richie said. He was outwardly crushed, inwardly jubilant. He could read both of his parents like books - well-worn and well-loved books - and he was pretty sure he was going to get what he wanted: chores and permission to go to the show Saturday afternoon.

Went leaned forward toward Richie and smiled widely. 'I think I have you right where I want you,' he said.

'Is that right, Dad?' Richie said, and smiled back . . . a trifle uneasily.

'Oh yes. You know our lawn, Richie? You are familiar with our lawn?'

'Indeed I am, guv'nor,' Richie said, becoming Toodles again - or trying to. 'Bit shaggy, ay-wot?'

'Wot-wot,' Went agreed. 'And you, Richie, will remedy that condition.'

'I will?'

'You will. Mow it, Richie.'

'Okay, Dad, sure,' Richie said, but a terrible suspicion had suddenly blossomed in his mind. Maybe his dad didn't mean just the front lawn.

Wentworth Tozier's smile widened to a predatory shark's grin. 'All of it, O idiot child of my loins. Front. Back. Sides. And when you finish, I will cross your palm with two green pieces of paper with the likeness of George Washington on one side and a picture of a pyramid o'ertopped with the Ever-Watching Oculary on the other.'

'I don't get you, Dad,' Richie said, but he was afraid he did.

'Two bucks.'

'Two bucks for the whole lawn?' Richie cried, genuinely wounded. 'It's the biggest lawn on the block! Jeez, Dad!'

Went sighed and picked the paper up again. Richie could read the front page headline: MISSING BOY PROMPTS NEW FEARS. He thought briefly of George Denbrough's strange scrapbook - but that had surely been a hallucination . . . and even if it hadn't been, that was yesterday and this was today.

'Guess you didn't want to see those movies as bad as you thought,' Went said from behind the paper. A moment later his eyes appeared over the top, studying Richie. Studying him a trifle smugly, in truth. Studying him the way a man with four of a kind studies his poker opponent over the fan of his cards.

'When the Clark twins do it all, you give them two dollars each!'

'That's true,' Went admitted. 'But as far as I know, they don't want to go to the movies tomorrow. Or if they do, they must have funds sufficient to the occasion, because they haven't popped by to check the state of the herbiage surrounding our domicile lately. You, on the other hand, do want to go and find yourself lacking the funds to do so. That pressure you feel in your midsection may be the five pancakes and two eggs you ate for breakfast, Richie, or it may just be the barrel I have you over. Wot-wot?' Went's eyes submerged behind the paper again.

'He's blackmailing me,' Richie said to his mother, who was eating dry toast. She was trying to lose weight again. This is blackmail, I just hope you know that.'

'Yes, dear, I know that,' his mother said. 'There's egg on your chin.'

Richie wiped the egg off his chin. 'Three bucks if I have it all done when you get home tonight?' he asked the newspaper.

His father's eyes appeared again briefly.'Two-fifty.'

'Oh, man,' Richie said. 'You and Jack Benny.'

'My idol,' Went said from behind the paper. 'Make up your mind, Richie. I want to read these box scores.'

'Deal,' Richie said, and sighed. When your folks had you by the balls, they really knew how to squeeze. It was pretty chuckalicious, when you thought it over. As he mowed, he practiced his Voices.

7

He finished - front, back, and sides - by three o'clock Friday afternoon, and began Saturday with two dollars and fifty cents in his jeans. Pretty damn near a fortune. He called Bill up, but Bill told him glumly that he had to go up to Bangor and take some kind of speech-therapy test.

Richie sympathized and then added in his best Stuttering Bill Voice: 'G-G-Give em h-h-hell, Buh-Buh-Big Bih-Bill.'

'Your f-f-face and my buh-buh-butt, T-T-Tozier,' Bill said, and hung up.

He called Eddie Kaspbrak next, but Eddie sounded even more depressed than Bill - his mother had gotten them each a full-day bus-pass, he said, and they were going to visit Eddie's aunts in Haven and Bangor and Hampden. All three of them were fat, like Mrs Kaspbrak, and all three of them were single.

'They'll all pinch my cheek and tell me how much I've grown,' Eddie said.

'That's cause they know how cute you are, Eds - just like me. I saw what a cutie you were the first time I met you.'

'Sometimes you're really a turd, Richie.'

'It takes one to know one, Eds, and you know em all. You gonna be down in the Barrens next week?'

'I guess so, if you guys are. Want to play guns?'

'Maybe. But . . . I think me and Big Bill have got something to tell you.'

'What?'

'It's really Bill's story, I guess. I'll see you. Enjoy your aunts.'

'Very funny.'

His third call was to Stan the Man, but Stan was in dutch with his folks for breaking their picture window. He had been playing flying-saucer with a pie-plate and it took a bad bank. Kee-rash. He had to do chores all weekend, and probably next weekend, too. Richie commiserated and then asked Stan if he would be coming down to the Barrens next week. Stan said he guessed so, if his father didn't decide to ground him, or something.

'Jeez, Stan, it was just a window,' Richie said.

'Yeah, but a big one,' Stan said, and hung up.

Richie started to leave the living room, then thought of Ben Hanscom. He thumbed through the telephone book and found a listing for an Arlene Hanscom. Since she was the only lady Hanscom among the four listed, Richie figured it had to be Ben's number and called.

'I'd like to go, but I already spent my allowance,' Ben said. He sounded depressed and ashamed by the admission - he had, in fact, spent it all on candy, soda, chips, and beef-jerky strips.

Richie, who was rolling in dough (and who didn't like to go to the movies alone), said: 'I got plenty of money. You can gimme owesies.' wooi:'

'Yeah? Really? You'd do that?'

'Sure,' Richie said, puzzled. 'Why not?'

'Okay!' Ben said happily. 'Okay, that'd be great! Two horror movies! Did you say one was a werewolf picture?'

'Yeah.'

'Man, I love werewolf pictures!'

'Jeez, Haystack, don't wet your pants.'

Ben laughed. 'I'll see you out in front of the Aladdin, okay?'

'Yeah, great.'

Richie hung up and looked at the phone thoughtfully. It suddenly occurred to him that Ben Hanscom was lonely. And that in turn made him feel rather heroic. He was whistling as he ran upstairs to get some comics to read before the show.

8

The day was sunny, breezy, and cool. Richie jived along Center Street toward the Aladdin, popping his fingers and singing 'Rockin' Robin' under his breath. He was feeling good. Going to the movies always made him feel good - he loved that magic world, those magic dreams. He felt sorry for anyone who had dull duties to discharge on such a day - Bill with his speech therapy, Eddie with his aunts, poor old Stan the Man who would be spending the afternoon scraping down the front-porch steps or sweeping the garage because the pie-plate he'd been throwing around swept right when it was supposed to sweep left.

Richie had his yo-yo tucked in his back pocket and now he took it out and tried again to get it to sleep. This was an ability Richie lusted to acquire, but so far, no soap. The crazy l'il fucker just wouldn't do it. Either it went down and popped right back up or it went down and dropped dead at the end of its string.

Halfway up Center Street Hill he saw a girl in a beige pleated skirt and a white sleeveless blouse sitting on a bench outside Shock's Drug Store. She was eating what looked like a pistachio ice-cream cone. Bright red-auburn hair, its highlights seeming coppery or sometimes almost blonde, hung down to her shoulderblades. Richie knew only one girl with hair of that particular shade. It was Beverly Marsh.

Richie liked Bev a lot. Well, he liked her, but not that way. He admired her looks (and knew he wasn't alone - girls like Sally Mueller and Greta Bowie hated Beverly like fire, still too young to understand how they could have everything else so easily . . . and still have to compete in the matter of looks with a girl who lived in one of those shimmy apartments on Lower Main Street), but mostly he liked her because she was tough and had a really good sense of humor. Also, she usually had cigarettes. He liked her, in short, because she was a good guy. Still, he had once or twice caught himself wondering what color underwear she was wearing under her small selection of rather faded skirts, and that was not the sort of thing you wondered about the other guys, was it?

And, Richie had to admit, she was one hell of a pretty guy.

Approaching the bench where she sat eating her ice cream, Richie belted an invisible topcoat around his middle, pulled down an invisible slouch hat, and pretended to be Humphrey Bogart. Adding the correct Voice, he became Humphrey Bogart - at least to himself. To others he would have sounded like Richie Tozier with a mild headcold.

'Hello, shweetheart,' he said, gliding up to the bench where she was sitting and looking out at the traffic. 'No sensh waitin for a bus here. The Nazish have cut off our retreat. The last plane leavesh at midnight. You be on it. He needsh you, shweetheart. So do I . . . but I'll get along shomehow.'

'Hi, Richie,' Bev said, and when she turned toward him he saw a purple-blackish bruise on her right cheek, like the shadow of a crow's wing. He was again struck by her good looks . . . only it occurred to him now that she might actually be beautiful. It had never really occurred to him until that moment that there might be beautiful girls outside of the movies, or that he himself might know one. Perhaps it was the bruise that allowed him to see the possibility of her beauty - an essential contrast, a particular flaw which first drew attention to itself and then somehow denned the rest: the gray-blue eyes, the naturally red lips, the creamy unblemished child's skin. There was a tiny spray of freckles across her nose.

'See anything green?' she asked, tossing her head pertly.

'You, shweetheart,' Richie said. 'You've turned green ash limberger cheese. But when we get you out of Cashablanca, you're going into the finesht hoshpital money can buy. We'll turn you white again. I shwear it on my mother'sh name.'

'You're an asshole, Richie. That doesn't sound like Humphrey Bogart at all.' But she smiled a little as she said it.

Richie sat down next to her. 'You going to the movies?'

'I don't have any money,' she said. 'Can I see your yo-yo?'

He handed it over, 'I oughtta take it back,' he told her. 'It's supposed to sleep but it doesn't. I got japped.'

She poked her finger through the loop of string and Richie pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose so he could watch what she was doing better. She turned her hand over, palm toward the sky, the Duncan yo-yo tucked neatly into the valley of flesh formed by her cupped hand. She rolled the yo-yo off her index finger. It went down to the end of its string and fell asleep. When she twitched her fingers in a come-on gesture it promptly woke up and climbed its string to her palm again.

'Oh bug-dung, look at that,' Richie said.

'That's kid stuff,' Bev said. 'Watch this.' She snapped the yo-yo down again. She let it sleep for a moment and then walked the dog with it in a smart series of snap jerks up the string to her hand again.

'Oh, stop it,' Richie said. 'I hate show-offs.'

'Or how about this?' Bev asked, smiling sweetly. She got the yo-yo going back and front, making the red wooden Duncan look like a Bo-Lo Bouncer Richie had had once. She finished with two Around the Worlds (almost hitting a shuffling old lady, who glared at them). The yo-yo ended up in her cupped palm, its string neatly rolled around its spindle. Bev handed it back to Richie and sat down on the bench again. Richie sat down next to her, his jaw hanging agape in perfectly unaffected admiration. Bev looked at him and giggled.

'Shut your mouth, you're drawing flies.'

Richie shut his mouth with a snap.

'Besides, that last part was just luck. First time in my life I did two Around the Worlds in a row without fizzing out.'

Kids were walking past them now, on their way to the show. Peter Gordon walked by with Marcia Fadden. They were supposed to be going together, but Richie figured it was just that they lived nest door to each other on West Broadway and were such a couple of assholes that they needed each other's support and attention. Peter Gordon was already getting a pretty good crop of acne, although he was only twelve. He sometimes hung around with Bowers, Criss, and Huggins, but he wasn't quite brave enough to try anything on his own.

He glanced over at Richie and Bev sitting together on the bench and chanted, 'Richie and Beverly up in a tree! Kay-Eye-Ess-Ess-Eye-En-Gee! First comes love, then comes marriage - '

' - and here comes Richie with a baby carriage!' Marcia finished, cawing laughter.

'Sit on this, dear heart,' Bev said, and whipped the finger on them. Marcia looked away, disgusted, as if she could not believe anyone could be so uncouth. Gordon slipped an arm around her and called back over his shoulder to Richie, 'Maybe I'll see you later, four-eyes.'

'Maybe you'll see your mother's girdle,' Richie responded smartly (if a little senselessly). Beverly collapsed with laughter. She leaned against Richie's shoulder for a moment and Richie had just time to reflect that her touch, and the sensation of her lightly carried weight, was not exactly unpleasant. Then she sat up again.

'What a pair of jerks,' she said.

'Yeah, I think Marcia Fadden pees rosewater,' Richie said, and Beverly got the giggles again.

'Chanel Number Five,' she said, her voice muffled because her hands were over her mouth.

'You bet,' said Richie, although he hadn't the slightest idea what Chanel Number Five was. 'Bev?'

'What?'

'Can you show me how to make it sleep?'

'I guess so. I never tried to show anyone.'

'How did you learn? Who showed you?'

She gave him a disgusted look. 'No one showed me. I just figured it out. Like twirling a baton. I'm great at that - '

'No conceit in your family,' Richie said, rolling his eyes.

'Well, I am,' she said. 'But I didn't take classes, or anything.'

'You really can twirl?'

'Sure.'

'Probably be a cheerleader in junior high, huh?'

She smiled. It was a kind of smile Richie had never seen before. It was wise, cynical, and sad all at the same time. He recoiled a little from its unknowing power, as he had recoiled from the picture of downtown in Georgie's album when it had begun to move.

'That's for girls like Marcia Fadden,' she said. 'Her and Sally Mueiler and Greta Bowie. Girls who pee rosewater. Their fathers help to buy the sports equipment and the uniforms. They got an in. I'll never be a cheerleader.' ,"

'Jeez, Bev, that's no attitude to take - '

'Sure it is, if it's the truth.' She shrugged. 'I don't care. Who wants to do somersaults and show your underwear to a million people, anyway? Look, Richie. Watch this.'

For the next ten minutes she worked on showing Richie how to make his yo-yo sleep. Near the end, Richie actually began to get the hang of it, although he could usually only get it to come halfway up the string after waking it up.

'You're not jerking your fingers hard enough, that's all,' she said.

Richie looked at the clock on the Merrill Trust across the street and jumped up, stuffing his yo-yo into his back pocket. 'Jeepers, I gotta get goin, Bev. I'm supposed to meet ole Haystack. He'll think I changed my mind or some-thin.'

'Who's Haystack?'

'Oh. Ben Hanscom. I call him Haystack, though. You know, like Haystack Calhoun, the wrestler.'

Bev frowned at him. 'That's not very nice. I like Ben.'

'Doan whup me, massa!' Richie screeched in his Pickaninny Voice, rolling his eyes and flapping his hands. 'Doan whup me, I'se gwineter be a good dahkie, ma'am, I'se - '

'Richie,' Bev said thinly.

Richie quit it. 'I like him, too,' he said. 'We all built a dam down in the Barrens a couple of days ago and - '

'You go down there? You and Ben play down there?'

'Sure. A bunch of us guys do. It's sorta cool down there.' Richie glanced at the clock again. 'I really gotta split for the scene. Ben'll be waiting.'

'Okay.'

He paused, thought, and said, 'If you're not doing anything, come on with me.'

'I told you. I don't have any money.'

'I'll pay your way. I got a couple of bucks.'

She tossed the remains of her ice-cream cone in a nearby litter barrel. Her eyes, that fine clear shade of blue-gray, turned up to his. They were coolly amused. She pretended to primp her hair and asked him, 'Oh dear, am I being asked out on a date?'

For a moment Richie was uncharacteristically flustered. He actually felt a blush rising in his cheeks. He had made the offer in a perfectly natural way, just as he had made it to Ben . . . except hadn't he said something to Ben about owesies? Yes. But he hadn't said anything about owesies to Beverly.

Richie suddenly felt a bit weird. He had dropped his eyes, retreating from her amused glance, and realized now that her skirt had ridden up a bit when she shifted forward to drop the ice-cream cone in the litter barrel, and he could see her knees. He raised his eyes but that was no help; now he was looking at the beginning swells of her bosoms.

Richie, as he usually did in such moments of confusion, took refuge in absurdity.

'Yes! A date!' he screamed, throwing himself on his knees before her and holding his clasped hands up. 'Please come! Please come! I shall ruddy kill meself if you say no, ay-wot? Wot-wot?'

'Oh, Richie, you're such a fuzzbrain,' she said, giggling again . . . but weren't her cheeks also a trifle flushed? If so, it made her look prettier than ever. 'Get up before you get arrested.'

He got up and plopped down beside her again. He felt as if his equilibrium had returned. A little foolishness always helped when you had a dizzy spell, he believed. 'You wanna go?'

'Sure,' she said. Thank you very much. Think of it! My first date. Just wait until I write it in my diary tonight.' She clasped her hands together between her budding breasts, fluttered her eyelashes rapidly, and then laughed.

'I wish you'd stop calling it that,' Richie said.

She sighed. 'You don't have much romance in your soul.'

'Damn right I don't.'

But he felt somehow delighted with himself. The world seemed suddenly very clear to him, and very friendly. He found himself glancing sideways at her from time to time. She was looking in the shop windows - at the dresses and nightgowns in Cornell-Hopley's, at the towels and pots in the window of the Discount Barn, and he stole glances at her hair, the line of her jaw. He observed the way her bare arms came out of the round holes of her blouse. He saw the edge of her slip strap. All of these things delighted him. He could not have said why, but what had happened in George Denbrough's bedroom had never seemed more distant to him than it did right then. It was time to go, time to meet Ben, but he would sit here just a moment longer while her eyes window-shopped, because it was good to look at her, and be with her.

9

Kids were ponying up their quarter admissions at the Aladdin's box-office window and going into the lobby. Looking through the bank of glass doors, Richie could see a crowd around the candy counter. The popcorn machine was in overdrive, spilling out drifts of the stuff, its greasy hinged lid jittering up and down. He didn't see Ben anywhere. He asked Beverly if she had spotted him. She shook her head.

'Maybe he already went in.'

'He said he didn't have any money. And the Daughter of Frankenstein there would never let him in without a ticket.' Richie cocked a thumb at Mrs Cole, who had been the ticket-taker at the Aladdin since a time well before the pictures had begun to talk. Her hair, dyed a bright red, was so thin you could see her scalp beneath. She had enormous hanging lips which she painted with plum-colored lipstick. Wild blotches of rouge covered her cheeks. Her eyebrows were drawn on in black pencil. Mrs Cole was a perfect democrat. She hated all kids equally.

'Boy, I don't wanna go in without him but the show's gonna start,' Richie said. 'Where in heck is he?'

'You can buy him a ticket and leave it at the box-office,' Bev said, reasonably enough. 'Then when he comes - '

But just then Ben came around the corner of Center and Macklin Streets. He was puffing, and his belly joggled beneath his sweatshirt. He saw Richie and raised one hand to wave. Then he saw Bev and his hand stopped in mid-flap. His eyes widened momentarily. He finished his wave and then walked slowly to where they stood under the Aladdin's marquee.

'Hi, Richie,' he said, and then looked at Bev briefly. It was as if he was afraid that an overlong look might result in a flash burn. 'Hi, Bev.'

'Hello, Ben,' she said, and a strange silence fell between the two of them - it was not precisely awkward; it was, Richie thought, almost powerful. And he felt a vague twinge of jealousy, because something had passed between them and whatever it had been, he had been excluded from it.

'Howdy, Haystack!' he said. Thought you went chicken on me. These movies goan scare ten pounds off your pudgy body. Ah say, Ah say, they goan turn your hair white, boy. When you come out of this theater, you goan need an usher to help you up the aisle, you goan be shakin so bad.'

Richie started for the box-office and Ben touched his arm. Ben started to speak, glanced at Bev, who was smiling at him, and had to start over again. 'I was here,' he said, 'but I went up the street and around the corner when those guys came along.'

'What guys?' Richie asked, but he thought he already knew.

'Henry Bowers. Victor Criss. Belch Huggins. Some other guys, too.'

Richie whistled. 'They must have already gone inside the theater. I don't see em buying candy.'

'Yeah. I guess so.'

'If I was them, I wouldn't bother paying to see a couple of horror movies,' Richie said. 'I'd just stay home and look in a mirror. Save some bread.'

Bev laughed merrily at that, but Ben only smiled a little. Henry Bowers had maybe only started out to hurt him that day last week, but he had ended up meaning to kill him. Ben was quite sure of that.

'Tell you what,' Richie said. 'We'll go up in the balcony. They'll all be sittin down in the second or third row with their feet up.'

'You positive?' Ben asked. He was not at all sure Richie understood what bad news those kids were . . . Henry, of course, being the worst news of all.

Richie, who had barely escaped what might have been a really bad beating at the hands of Henry and his spasmoid friends three months ago (he had managed to elude them in the toy department of Freese's Department Store, of all places), understood more about Henry and his merry crew than Ben thought he did.

'If I wasn't fairly positive, I wouldn't go in,' he said. 'I want to see those movies, Haystack, but I don't want to, like, die for em.'

'Besides, if they give us any trouble, we'll just tell Foxy to kick them out,' Bev said. Foxy was Mr Foxworth, the thin, sallow, glum-looking man who managed the Aladdin. He was now selling candy and popcorn, chanting his litany of 'Wait your turn, wait your turn, wait your turn.' In his threadbare tux and yellowing boiled shirt he looked like an undertaker who had fallen on hard times. : Ben looked doubtfully from Bev to Foxy to Richie.

'You can't let em run your life, man,' Richie said softly. 'Don't you know that?'

'I guess so,' Ben said, and sighed. Actually, he knew no such thing . . . but Beverly's being here had given the equation a crazy skew. If she hadn't come, he would have tried to persuade Richie to go to the movies another day. And if Richie had persisted, Ben might have bowed out. But Bev was here. He didn't want to look like a chicken in front of her. And the thought of being with her, in the balcony, in the dark (even if Richie was between them, as he probably would be), was a powerful attraction.

'We'll wait until the show starts before we go in,' Richie said. He grinned and punched Ben on the arm. 'Shit, Haystack, you wanna live forever?'

Ben's brows drew together, and then he snorted laughter. Richie also laughed. Looking at them, Beverly laughed, too.

Richie approached the ticket booth again. Liver Lips Cole looked at him sourly.

'Good ahfternyoon, deah lady,' Richie said in his best Baron Butthole Voice. 'I am in diah need of three tickey-tickies to youah deah old American flicktoons.'

'Cut the crap and tell me what you want, kid!' Liver Lips barked through the round hole cut in the glass, and something about the way her painted eyebrows were going up and down unsettled Richie so much that he simply pushed a rumpled dollar through the slot and muttered, 'Three, please.'

Three tickets popped out of the slot. Richie took them. Liver Lips rammed a quarter back at him. 'Don't be smart, don't throw popcorn boxes, don't holler, don't run in the lobby, don't run in the aisles.'

'No, ma'am,' Richie said, backing away to where Ben and Bev stood. He said to them, 'It always warms my heart to see an old fart like that who really likes kids.'

They stood outside awhile longer, waiting for the show to start. Liver Lips glared at them suspiciously from her glass cage. Richie regaled Bev with the story of the dam in the Barrens, trumpeting Mr Nell's lines in his new Irish Cop Voice. Beverly was giggling before long, laughing hard not long after that. Even Ben was grinning a little, although his eyes kept shifting either toward the Aladdin's glass doors or to Beverly's face.

10

The balcony was okay. During the first reel of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein Richie spotted Henry Bowers and his shitkicking friends. They were down in the second row, just as he had figured they would be. There were five or six of them in all - fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders, all of them with their motorhuckle boots cocked up on the seats in front of them. Foxy would come down and tell them to put their feet on the floor. They would. Foxy would leave. Up went the motorhuckle boots again as soon as he did. Five or ten minutes later Foxy would return and the entire charade would be acted out again. Foxy didn't quite have the guts to kick them out and they knew it.

The movies were great. The Teenage Frankenstein was suitably gross. The Teenage Werewolf was somehow scarier, though . . . perhaps because he also seemed a little sad. What had happened wasn't his own fault. There was this hypnotist who had fucked him up, but the only reason he'd been able to was that the kid who turned into the werewolf was full of anger and bad feelings. Richie found himself wondering if there were many people in the world hiding bad feelings like that. Henry Bowers was just overflowing with bad feelings, but he sure didn't bother hiding them.

Beverly sat between the boys, ate popcorn from their boxes, screamed, covered her eyes, sometimes laughed. When the Werewolf was stalking the girl doing exercises in the gym after school, she pressed her face against Ben's arm, and Richie heard Ben's gasp of surprise even over the screams of the two hundred kids below them.

The Werewolf was finally killed. In the last scene one cop solemnly told another that this should teach people not to fiddle with things best left to God. The curtain came down and the lights came up. There was applause. Richie felt totally satisfied, if a little headachy. He'd probably have to go to the eye-doctor pretty soon and get his lenses changed again. He really would be wearing Coke bottles on his eyes by the time he got to high school, he thought glumly.

Ben twitched at his sleeve. 'They saw us, Richie,' he said in a dry, dismayed voice.

'Huh?'

'Bowers and Criss. They looked up here on their way out. They saw us!'

'Okay, okay,' Richie said. 'Calm down, Haystack. Just caaalm down. We'll go out the side door. Nothing to worry about.'

They went down the stairs, Richie in the lead, Beverly in the middle, Ben bringing up the rear and looking back over his shoulder every two steps or so.

'Have those guys really got it in for you, Ben?' Beverly asked.

'Yeah, I guess they do,' Ben said. 'I got in a fight with Henry Bowers on the last day of school.'

'Did he beat you up?'

'Not as much as he wanted to,' Ben said. 'That's why he's still mad, I guess.'

'Ole Hank the Tank also lost a fair amount of skin,' Richie murmured. 'Or so I heard. I don't think he was very pleased about that, either.' He pushed open the exit door and the three of them stepped out into the alley that ran between the Aladdin and Nan's Luncheonette. A cat which had been rooting in a garbage can hissed and ran past them down the alley, which was blocked at the far end by a board fence. The cat scrambled up and over. A trashcan lid clattered. Bev jumped, grabbed Richie's arm, and then laughed nervously. 'I guess I'm still scared from the movies,' she said.

'You won't - ' Richie began.

'Hello, fuckface,' Henry Bowers said from behind them.

Startled, the three of them turned around. Henry, Victor, and Belch were standing at the mouth of the alley. There were two other guys behind them.

'Oh shit, I knew this was going to happen,' Ben moaned.

Richie turned quickly back toward the Aladdin, but the exit door had closed behind them and there was no way to open it from the outside.

'Say goodbye, fuckface,' Henry said, and suddenly ran at Ben.

The things that happened next seemed to Richie both then and later like something out of a movie - such things simply did not happen in real life. In real life the little kids took their beatings, picked up their teeth and went home.

It didn't happen that way this time.

Beverly stepped forward and to one side, almost as if she intended to meet Henry, perhaps shake his hand. Richie could hear the cleats on his boots rapping. Victor and Belch were coming after him; the other two boys stood at the mouth of the alley, guarding it.

'Leave him alone!' Beverly shouted. 'Pick on someone your own size!'

'He's as big as a fucking Mack truck, bitch,' Henry, no gentleman, snarled. 'Now get out of my - '

Richie stuck out his foot. He didn't think he meant to. His foot went out the same way wisecracks dangerous to his health sometimes emerged, all on their own, from his mouth. Henry ran into it and fell forward. The brick surface of the alley was slippery with spilled garbage from the overflowing cans on the luncheonette side. Henry went skidding like a shuffleboard weight.

He started to get up, his shirt blotched with coffee grounds, mud, and bits of lettuce. 'Oh you guys are gonna DIE!' he screamed.

Until this moment Ben had been terrified. Now something in him snapped. He let out a roar and grabbed one of the garbage cans. For just a moment, holding it up, garbage spilling everywhere, he really did look like Haystack Calhoun. His face was pale and furious. He threw the garbage can. It struck Henry in the small of the back and knocked him flat again.

'Let's get out of here!' Richie screamed.

They ran toward the mouth of the alley. Victor Criss jumped in front of them. Bellowing, Ben lowered his head and rammed it into Victor's middle. 'Woof!' Victor grunted, and sat down.

Belch grabbed a handful of Beverly's pony-tail and whipped her smartly against the Aladdin's brick wall. Beverly bounced off and ran down the alley, rubbing her arm. Richie ran after her, grabbing a garbage-can lid on the way. Belch Huggins swung a fist almost the size of a Daisy ham at him. Richie pistoned out the galvanized steel lid. Belch's fist met it. There was a loud bonnngg! - a sound that was almost mellow. Richie felt the shock travel all the way up his arm to the shoulder. Belch screamed and began to hop up and down, holding his swelling hand.

'Yondah lies da tent of my faddah,' Richie said confidentially, doing a very passable Tony Curtis Voice, and then ran after Ben and Beverly.

One of the boys at the mouth of the alley had caught Beverly. Ben was tussling with him. The other boy began to rabbit-punch Ben in the small of the back. Richie swung his foot. It connected with the rabbit-puncher's buttocks. The boy howled with pain. Richie grabbed Beverly's arm in one hand, Ben's in the other.

'Run!' he shouted.

The boy Ben had been tussling with let go of Beverly and looped a punch at Richie. His ear exploded with momentary pain, then went numb and became very warm. A high whistling sound began to whine in his head. It sounded like the noise you were supposed to listen for when the school nurse put the earphones on you to test your hearing.

They ran down Center Street. People turned to look at them. Ben's large stomach pogoed up and down. Beverly's pony-tail bounced. Richie let go of Ben and held his glasses against his forehead with his left thumb so he wouldn't lose them. His head was still ringing and he believed his ear was going to swell, but he felt wonderful. He started laughing. Beverly joined him. Soon Ben was laughing, too.

They cut up Court Street and collapsed on a bench in front of the police station: at that moment it seemed the only place in Derry where they might possibly be safe. Beverly looped an arm around Ben's neck and Richie's. She gave them a furious hug.

'That was great!' Her eyes sparkled. 'Did you see those guys? Did you see them?'

'I saw them, all right,' Ben gasped. 'And I never want to see them again.'

This sent them off into another storm of hysterical laughter. Richie kept expecting Henry's gang to come around the corner onto Court Street and take after them again, police station or not. Still, he could not stop laughing. Beverly was right. It had been great.

'The Losers' Club Gets Off A Good One!' Richie yelled exuberantly. 'Wacka-wacka-wacka!' He cupped his hands around his mouth and put on his Ben Bernie Voice: 'YOW-za YOW-za YOWZA, childrens!'

A cop poked his head out of an open second-floor window and shouted: 'You kids get out of here! Right now! Take a walk!'

Richie opened his mouth to say something brilliant - quite possibly in his brand-new Irish Cop Voice - and Ben kicked his foot. 'Shut up, Richie,' he said, and promptly had trouble believing that he had said such a thing.

'Right, Richie,' Bev said, looking at him fondly. 'Beep-beep.'

'Okay,' Richie said. 'What do you guys want to do? Wanna go find Henry Bowers and ask him if he wants to work it out over a game of Monopoly?'

'Bite your tongue,' Bev said.

'Huh? What does that mean?'

'Never mind,' Bev said. 'Some guys are so ignorant.'

Hesitantly, blushing furiously, Ben asked: 'Did that guy hurt your hair, Beverly?'

She smiled at him gently, and in that moment she became sure of something she had only guessed at before - that it had been Ben Hanscom who had sent her the postcard with the beautiful little haiku on it. 'No, it wasn't bad,' she said.

'Let's go down in the Barrens,' Richie proposed.

And so that was where they went . . . or where they escaped. Richie would think later that it set a pattern for the rest of the summer. The Barrens had become their place. Beverly, like Ben on the day of his first encounter with the big boys, had never been down there before. She walked between Richie and Ben as the three of them moved single-file down the path. Her skirt twitched prettily, and looking at her, Ben was aware of waves of feeling, as powerful as stomach cramps. She was wearing her ankle bracelet. It flashed in the afternoon sun.

They crossed the arm of the Kenduskeag the boys had dammed up (the stream divided about seventy yards farther up along its course and became one again about two hundred yards farther on toward town), using stepping-stones downstream of the place where the dam had been, found another path, and eventually came out on the bank of the stream's eastern fork, which was much wider than the other. It sparkled in the afternoon light. To his left, Ben could see two of those concrete cylinders with the manhole covers on top. Below them, jutting out over the stream, were large concrete pipes. Thin streams of muddy water poured over the lips of these outflow pipes and into the Kenduskeag. Someone takes a crap uptown and here's where it comes out, Ben thought, remembering Mr Nell's explanation of Derry's drainage system. He felt a dull sort of helpless anger. Once there had probably been fish in this river. Now your chances of catching a trout wouldn't be so hot. Your chances of catching a used wad of toilet paper would be better.

'It's so beautiful here,' Bev sighed.

'Yeah, not bad,' Richie agreed. 'The blackflies are gone and there's enough of a breeze to keep the mosquitoes away.' He looked at her hopefully. 'Got any cigarettes?'

'No,' she said. 'I had a couple but I smoked them yesterday.'

'Too bad,' Richie said.

There was the blast of an air-horn and they all watched as a long freight rumbled across the embankment on the far side of the Barrens and toward the trainyards. Jeez, if it was a passenger train they'd have a great view, Richie thought. First the poor-folks' houses of the Old Cape, then the bamboo swamps on the other side of the Kenduskeag, and finally, before leaving the Barrens, the smoldering gravel-pit that was the town dump.

For just a moment he found himself thinking about Eddie's story again - the leper under the abandoned house on Neibolt Street. He pushed it out of his mind and turned to Ben.

'So what was your best part, Haystack?'

'Huh?' Ben turned to him guiltily. As Bev looked out across the Kenduskeag, lost in thoughts of her own, he had been looking at her profile . . . and at the bruise on her cheekbone.

'Of the movies, Dumbo. What was your best part?'

'I liked it when Dr Frankenstein started tossing the bodies to the crocodiles under his house,' Ben said. That was my best part.'

'That was gross,' Beverly said, and shivered. 'I hate things like that. Crocodiles and piranhas and sharks.'

'Yeah? What's piranhas?' Richie asked, immediately interested.

'Little tiny fish,' Beverly said. 'And they've got all these little tiny teeth, but they're wicked sharp. And if you go into a river where they are, they eat you right down to the bone.'

'Wow!'

'I saw this movie once and these natives wanted to cross a river but the footbridge was down,' she said. 'So they put a cow in the water on a rope, and crossed while the piranhas were eating the cow. When they pulled it out, the cow was nothing but a skeleton. I had nightmares for a week.'

'Man, I wish I had some of those fish,' Richie said happily. 'I'd put em in Henry Bowers' bathtub.'

Ben began to giggle. 'I don't think he takes baths.'

'I don't know about that, but I do know we better watch out for those guys,' Beverly said. Her ringers touched the bruise on her cheek. 'My dad went up the side of my head day before yesterday for breaking a pile of dishes. One a week is enough.'

There was a moment of silence that might have been awkward but was not. Richie broke it by saying his best part was when the Teenage Werewolf got the evil hypnotist. They talked about the movies - and other horror movies they had seen, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents on TV - for an hour or more. Bev spotted daisies growing on the riverbank and picked one. She held it first under Richie's chin and then under Ben's chin to see if they liked butter. She said they both did. As she held the flower under their chins, each was conscious of her light touch on their shoulders and the clean scent of her hair. Her face was close to Ben's only for a moment or two, but that night he dreamed of how her eyes had looked during that brief endless span of time.

Conversation was fading a little when they heard the crackling sounds of people approaching along the path. The three of them turned quickly toward the sound and Richie was suddenly, acutely aware that the river was at their backs. There was no place to run.

The voices drew closer. They got to their feet, Richie and Ben moving a little in front of Beverly without even thinking about it.

The screen of bushes at the end of the path shook - and suddenly Bill Denbrough emerged. Another kid was with him, a fellow Richie knew a little bit. His name was Bradley something, and he had a terrible lisp. Probably went up to Bangor with Bill for that speech-therapy thing, Richie thought.

'Big Bill!' he said, and then in the Voice of Toodles: 'We are glad to see you, Mr Denbrough, mawster.'

Bill looked at them and grinned - and a peculiar certainty stole over Richie as Bill looked from him to Ben to Beverly and then back to Bradley Whatever-His-Name-Was. Beverly was a part of them. Bill's eyes said so. Bradley What's-His-Name was not. He might stay for awhile today, might even come down to the Barrens again - no one would tell him no, so sorry, the Losers' Club membership is full, we already have our speech-impediment member - but he was not part of it. He was not part of them.

This thought led to a sudden, irrational fear. For a moment he felt the way you did when you suddenly realized you had swum out too far and the water was over your head. There was an intuitive flash: We're being drawn into something. Being picked and chosen. None of this is accidental. Are we all here yet?

Then the intuition fell into a meaningless jumble of thought - like the smash of a glass pane on a stone floor. Besides, it didn't matter. Bill was here, and Bill would take care; Bill would not let things get out of control. He was the tallest of them, and surely the most handsome. Richie only had to look sideways at Bev's eyes, fixed on Bill, and then farther, to Ben's eyes, fixed knowingly and unhappily on Bev's face, to know that. Bill was also the strongest of them - and not just physically. There was a good deal more to it than that, but since Richie did not know either the word charisma or the full meaning of the word magnetism., he only felt that Bill's strength ran deep and might manifest itself in many ways, some of them probably unexpected. And Richie suspected if Beverly fell for him, or 'got a crush on him,' or whatever they called it, Ben would not be jealous (like he would, Richie thought, if she got a crush on me); he would accept it as nothing but natural. And there was something else: Bill was good. It was stupid to think such a thing (he did not, in fact, precisely think it; he felt it), but there it was. Goodness and strength seemed to radiate from Bill. He was like a knight in an old movie, a movie that was corny but still had the power to make you cry and cheer and clap at the end. Strong and good. And five years later, after his memories of what had happened in Derry both during and before that summer had begun to fade rapidly, it occurred to a Richie Tozier in his mid-teens that John Kennedy reminded him of Stuttering

Bill.

Who? His mind would respond.

He would look up, faintly puzzled, and shake his head. Some guy I used to know, he would think, and would dismiss vague unease by pushing his glasses up on his nose and turning to his homework again. Some guy I used to know a long time ago.

Bill Denbrough put his hands on his hips, smiled sunnily, and said: 'Wuh-wuh-well, h-here we a-a-are . . . now wuh-wuh-wuh-what are w-we d-d-doing?'

'Got any cigarettes?' Richie asked hopefully.

11

Five days later, as June drew toward its end, Bill told Richie that he wanted to go down to Neibolt Street and investigate under the porch where Eddie had seen the leper.

They had just arrived back at Richie's house, and Bill was walking Silver. He had ridden Richie double most of the way home, an exhilarating speed-trip across Derry, but he had been careful to let Richie dismount a block away from his house. If Richie's mother saw Bill riding Richie double she'd have a bird.

Silver's wire basket was full of play six-shooters, two of them Bill's, three of them Richie's. They had been down in the Barrens for most of the afternoon, playing guns. Beverly Marsh had shown up around three o'clock, wearing faded jeans and toting a very old Daisy air rifle that had lost most of its pop - when you pulled its tape-wrapped trigger, it uttered a wheeze that sounded to Richie more like someone sitting on a very old Whoopee Cushion than a rifleshot. Her specialty was Japanese-sniper. She was very good at climbing trees and shooting the unwary as they passed below. The bruise on her cheekbone had faded to a faint yellow.

'What did you say?' Richie asked. He was shocked . . . but also a little intrigued.

'I w-w-want to take a l-look under that puh-puh-porch,' Bill said. His voice was stubborn but he wouldn't look at Richie. There was a hard spot of flush high on each of his cheekbones. They had arrived in front of Richie's house. Maggie Tozier was on the porch, reading a book. She waved to them and called, 'Hi, boys! Want some iced tea?'

'We'll be right there, Mom,' Richie said, and then to Bill: 'There isn't going to be anything there. He probably just saw a hobo and got all bent out of shape, for God's sake. You know Eddie.'

'Y-Yeah, I nun-know E-E-Eddie. B-But ruh-remem-member the pi-pi-picture in the a-album?'

Richie shifted his feet, uncomfortable. Bill raised his right hand. The Band-Aids were gone now, but Richie could see circlets of healing scab on Bill's first three fingers.

'Yeah, but - '

'Luh-luh-histen to me-me,' Bill said. He began to speak very slowly, holding Richie's eyes with his own. Once more he related the similarities between Ben's story and Eddie's . . . and tied those to what they had seen in the picture that moved. He suggested again that the clown had murdered the boys and girls who had been found dead in Berry since the previous December. 'A-And muh-muh-haybe not just t-thein,' Bill finished. 'W-What about a-a-all the o-ones who d-disappeared? W-What about E-E-Eddie Cuh-Cuh-Corcoran?'

'Shit, his stepfather scared him off,' Richie said. 'Don't you read the papers?'

'W-well, m-maybe he d-d-did, and m-maybe he d-d-didn't,' Bill said. 'I knew him a l-lih-little bit, t-too, and I nuh-nuh-know his d-dad b-b-beat him. And I a-also k-know he u-u-used to stay out n-nuh-hights s-sometimes to g-get aw-way from h-h-him.'

'So maybe the clown got him while he was staying away,' Richie said thoughtfully. 'Is that it?'

Bill nodded.

'What do you want, then? Its autograph?'

'If the cluh-cluh-cluh-hown killed the o-o-others, then h-he k-k-killed Juh-Georgie,' Bill said. His eyes caught Richie's. They were like slate - hard, uncompromising, unforgiving. 'I w-want to k-k-kill it.'

'Jesus Christ,' Richie said, frightened. 'How are you going to do that?'

'Muh-my d-dad's got a pih-pih-pistol,' Bill said. A little spittle flew from his lips but Richie barely noticed. 'H-He doesn't nuh-know I know, but I d-d-do. It's on the top sh-shelf in his cluh-cluh-hoset.'

That's great if it's a man,' Richie said, 'and if we can find him sitting on a pile of kids' bones - '

'I poured the tea, boys!' Richie's mom called cheerily. 'Better come and get it!'

'Right there, Mom!' Richie called again, offering a big, false smile. It disappeared immediately as he turned back to Bill. 'Because I wouldn't shoot a guy just because he was wearing a clown suit, Billy. You're my best friend, but I wouldn't do it and I wouldn't let you do it if I could stop you.'

'Wh-what i-if there r-really w-was a p-pile of buh-buh-bones?'

Richie licked his lips and said nothing for a moment. Then he asked Bill, 'What are you going to do if it's not a man, Billy? What if it really is some kind of monster? What if there really are such things? Ben Hanscom said it was the mummy and the balloons were floating against the wind and it didn't cast a shadow. The picture in Georgie's album . . . either we imagined that or it was magic, and I gotta tell you, man, I don't think we just imagined it. Your fingers sure didn't imagine it, did they?'

Bill shook his head.

'So what are we going to do if it's not a man, Billy?'

'Th-then wuh-wuh-we'll have to f-figure suh-homething e-else out.'

'Oh yeah,' Richie said. 'I can see it. After you shoot it four or five times and it keeps comin at us like the Teenage Werewolf in that movie me and Ben and Bev saw, you can try your Bullseye on it. And if the Bullseye doesn't work, I'll throw some of my sneezing powder at it. And if it keeps on coming after that we'll just call time and say, "Hey now, hold on. This ain't getting it, Mr Monster. Look, I got to read up on it at the library. I'll be back. Pawdon me." Is that what you're going to say, Big Bill?'

He looked at his friend, his head thudding rapidly. Part of him wanted Bill to press on with his idea to check under the porch of that old house, but another part wanted - desperately wanted - Bill to give the idea up. In some ways all of this was like having stepped into one of those Saturday-afternoon horror movies at the Aladdin, but in another way - a crucial way - it wasn't like that at all. Because this wasn't safe like a movie, where you knew everything would turn out all right and even if it didn't it was no skin off your ass. The picture in Georgie's room hadn't been like a movie. He had thought he was forgetting that, but apparently he had been fooling himself because now he could see those cuts whirling up Billy's fingers. If he hadn't pulled Bill back -

Incredibly, Bill was grinning. Actually grinning. 'Y-Y-You wuh-wanted m-me to take y-you to luh-luh-look at a p-picture,' he said. 'N-Now I w-want to t-take you to l-look at a h-house. Tit for t-tat.'

'You got no tits,' Richie said, and they both burst out laughing.

'T-Tomorrow muh-muh-morning,' Bill said, as if it had been resolved.

'And if it's a monster?' Richie asked, holding Bill's eyes. 'If your dad's gun doesn't stop it, Big Bill? If it just keeps coming?'

'Wuh-wuh-we'll thuh-thuh-think of suh-homething else,' Bill said again. 'We'll h-h-have to.' He threw back his head and laughed like a loon. After a moment Richie joined him. It was impossible not to.

They walked up the crazy-paving to Richie's porch together. Maggie had set out huge glasses of iced tea with mint-sprigs in them and a plate of vanilla wafers.

'Yuh-you w-w-want t-t-to?'

'Well, no,' Richie said. 'But I will.'

Bill clapped him on the back, hard, and that seemed to make the fear bearable - although Richie was suddenly sure (and he was not wrong) that sleep would be long coming that night.

'You boys looked like you were having a serious discussion out there,' Mrs Tozier said, sitting down with her book in one hand and a glass of iced tea in the other. She looked at the boys expectantly.

'Aw, Denbrough's got this crazy idea the Red Sox are going to finish in the first division,' Richie said.

'M-Me and my d-d-d-d-dad th-think t-they got a sh-shot at t-third,' Bill said, and slipped his iced tea. T-This is veh-veh-very go-good, Muh-Mrs Tozier.'

Thank you, Bill.'

'The year the Sox finish in the first division will be the year you stop stuttering, mush mouth,' Richie said.

'Richie!' Mrs Tozier screamed, shocked. She nearly dropped her glass of iced tea. But both Richie and Bill Denbrough were laughing hysterically, totally cracked up. She looked from her son to Bill and back to her son again, touched by wonder that was mostly simple perplexity but partly a fear so thin and sharp that it found its way deep into her inner heart and vibrated there like a tuning-fork made of clear ice.

I don't understand either of them, she thought. Where they go, what they do, what they want . . . or what will become of them. Sometimes, oh sometimes their eyes are wild, and sometimes I'm afraid for them and sometimes I'm afraid of them . . .

She found herself thinking, not for the first time, that it would have been nice if she and Went could have had a girl as well, a pretty blonde girl that she could have dressed in skirts and matching bows and black patent-leather shoes on Sundays. A pretty little girl who would ask to bake cupcakes after school and who would want dolls instead of books on ventriloquism and Revell models of cars that went fast.

A pretty little girl she could have understood.

12

'Did you get it?' Richie asked anxiously.

They were walking their bikes up Kansas Street beside the Barrens at ten o'clock the next morning. The sky was a dull gray. Rain had been forecast for that afternoon. Richie hadn't gotten to sleep until after midnight and he thought Denbrough looked as if he had spent a fairly restless night himself; ole Big Bill was toting a matched set of Samsonite bags, one under each eye.

'I g-got it,' Bill said. He patted the green duffel coat he was wearing.

'Lemme see,' Richie said, fascinated.

'Not now,' Bill said, and then grinned. 'Someone eh-eh-else might see, too. But l-l-look what else I bruh-brought.' He reached behind him, under the coat, and brought his Bullseye slingshot out of his back pocket.

'Oh shit, we're in trouble,' Richie said, beginning to laugh.

Bill pretended to be hurt. 'Ih-Ih-It was y-your idea, T-T-Tozier.'

Bill had gotten the custom aluminum slingshot for his birthday the year before. It had been Zack's compromise between the .22 Bill had wanted and his mother's adamant refusal to even consider giving a boy Bill's age a firearm. The instruction booklet said a slingshot could be a fine hunting weapon, once you learned to use it. 'In the right hands, your Bullseye Slingshot is as deadly and effective as a good ash bow or a high-powered firearm,' the booklet proclaimed. With such virtues dutifully extolled, the booklet went on to warn that a slingshot could be dangerous; the owner should no more aim one of the twenty ball-bearing slugs which came with it at a person than he would aim a loaded pistol at a person.

Bill wasn't very good at it yet (and guessed privately he probably never would be), but he thought the booklet's caution was merited - the slingshot's thick elastic had a hard pull, and when you hit a tin can with it, it made one hell of a hole.

'You doin any better with it, Big Bill?' Richie asked.

'A luh-luh-little,' Bill said. This was only partly true. After much study of the pictures in the booklet (which were labelled figs, as in fig 1, fig 2, and so on) and enough practice in Derry Park to lame his arm, he had gotten so he could hit the paper target which had also come with the slingshot maybe three times out of every ten tries. And once he had gotten a bullseye. Almost.

Richie pulled the sling back by the cup, twanged it, then handed it back. He said nothing but privately doubted if it would count for as much as Zack Denbrough's pistol when it came to killing monsters.

'Yeah?' he said. 'You brought your slingshot, okay, big deal. That's nothing. Look what I brought, Denbrough.' And from his own jacket he hauled out a packet with a cartoon picture on it of a bald man saying Ah-CHOO! as his cheeks puffed out like Dizzy Gillespie's. DR WACKY'S SNEEZING POWDER, the packet said. IT'S A LAFF RIOT!

The two of them stared at each other for a long moment and then broke up, screaming with laughter and pounding each other on the back.

'W-W-We're pruh-prepared for a-a-anything,' Bill said finally, still giggling and wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket.

'Your face and my ass, Stuttering Bill,' Richie said.

'I th-th-thought it wuh-was the uh-uh-other way a-around,' Bill said. 'Now listen. W-We're g-gonna st-ha-hash y-your b-b-bike down in the B-Barrens. W-Where I puh-put Silver when we play. Y-You ride d-d-double b-behind me, in c-case w-we have to make a quih-hick g-g-getaway.'

Richie nodded, feeling no urge to argue. His twenty-two-inch Raleigh (he sometimes whammed his kneecaps on the handlebars when he was pedaling fast) looked like a pygmy bike next to the scrawny, gantry like edifice that was Silver. He knew that Bill was stronger and Silver was faster.

They got to the little bridge and Bill helped Richie stow his bike underneath. Then they sat down, and, with the occasional rumble of traffic passing over their heads, Bill unzipped his duffel and took out his father's pistol.

'Y-You be goddam c-c-careful,' Bill said, handing it over after Richie had whistled his frank approval. 'Th-There's n-no s-s-safety on a pih-pihstol like that.'

'Is it loaded?' Richie asked, awed. The pistol, an SSPK-Walther that Zack Denbrough had picked up during the Occupation, seemed unbelievably heavy.

'N-Not y-yet,' Bill said. He patted his pocket. 'I g-g-got some buh-buh-buh-bullets in h-h-here. But my d-d-dad s-says s-sometimes you l-look a-and th-then, i-if the g-g-g-gun th-thinks y-you're not being c-c-careful, it l-loads ih-ih-itself. S-so it can sh-sh-hoot you.' His face uttered a strange smile which said that, while he didn't believe anything so silly, he believed it completely.

Richie understood. There was a caged deadliness in the thing that he had never sensed in his dad's .22, .30-.30, or even the shotgun (although there was something about the shotgun, wasn't there? - something about the way it leaned, mute and oily, in the corner of the garage closet; as if it might say I could be mean if I wanted to; plenty mean, you bet if it could speak). But this pistol, this Walther . . . it was as if it had been made for the express purpose of shooting people. With a chill Richie realized that was why it had been made. What else could you do with a pistol? Use it to light your cigarettes?

He turned the muzzle toward him, being careful to keep his hands far away from the trigger. One look into the Walther's black lidless eye made him understand Bill's peculiar smile perfectly. He remembered his father saying, If you remember there is no such thing as an unloaded gun, you'll be okay with firearms all your life, Richie. He handed the gun back to Bill, glad to be rid of it.

Bill stowed it in his duffel coat again. Suddenly the house on Neibolt Street seemed less frightening to Richie . . . but the possibility that blood might actually be spilled - that seemed much stronger.

He looked at Bill, perhaps meaning to appeal this idea again, but he saw Bill's face, read it, and only said, 'You ready?'

13

As always, when Bill finally pulled his second foot up from the ground, Richie felt sure that they would crash, splitting their silly skulls on unyielding cement. The big bike wavered crazily from side to side. The cards clothespinned to the fender-struts stopped firing single shots and started machine-gunning. The bike's drunken wavers became more pronounced. Richie closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable.

Then Bill bellowed, 'Hi-yo Silver, AWWAYYYYY!'

The bike picked up more speed and finally stopped that seasick side-to-side wavering. Richie loosened his deathgrip on Bill's middle and held the front of the package carrier over the rear wheel instead. Bill crossed Kansas Street on a slant, raced down sidestreets at an ever-quickening pace, heading for Witcham as if racing down a set of geographical steps. They came bulleting out of Strapham Street and onto Witcham at an exorbitant rate of speed. Bill laid Silver damn near over on his side and bellowed 'Hi-yo Silver!' again.

'Ride it, Big Bill!' Richie screamed, so scared he was nearly creaming his jeans but laughing wildly all the same. 'Stand on this baby!'

Bill suited the action to the word, getting up and leaning over the handlebars and pumping the pedals at a lunatic rate. Looking at Bill's back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going-on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable . . . they would live forever and ever. Well . . . perhaps not they, but Bill would. Bill had no idea of how strong he was, how somehow sure and perfect.

They sped along, the houses thinning out a little now, the streets crossing Witcham at longer intervals.

'Hi-yo Silver!' Bill yelled, and Richie hollered in his Nigger Jim Voice, high and shrill, 'Hi-yo Silvuh, massa, thass rant! You is rahdin disyere bike fo sho! Lawks-a-mussy! Hi-yo Silvuh AWWAYYY!'

Now they were passing green fields that looked flat and depthless under the gray sky. Richie could see the old brick train station up ahead in the distance. To the right of it quonset warehouses marched off in a row. Silver bumped over one set of train tracks, then another.

And here was Neibolt Street, cutting off to the right. DERRY TRAINYARDS, a blue sign under the street-sign read. It was rusty and hung askew. Below this was a much bigger sign, yellow field, black letters. It was almost like a comment on the trainyards themselves: DEAD END, it read.

Bill turned onto Neibolt Street, coasted to the sidewalk, and put his foot back down. 'Let's w-w-walk from here.'

Richie slipped off the package carrier with mingled feelings of relief and regret. 'Okay.'

They walked along the sidewalk, which was cracked and weedy. Up ahead of them, in the trainyards, a diesel engine revved slowly up, faded off, and then began all over again. Once or twice they heard the metallic music of couplings being smashed together.

'You scared?' Richie asked Bill.

Bill, walking Silver by the handlebars, looked over at Richie briefly and then nodded. 'Y-Yeah. You?'

'I sure am,' Richie said.

Bill told Richie he had asked his father about Neibolt Street the night before. His father said that a lot of trainmen had lived out this way until the end of World War II - engineers, conductors, signalmen, yardworkers, baggage handlers. The street had declined with the trainyards, and as Bill and Richie moved farther along it, the houses became farther apart, seedier, dirtier. The last three or four on both sides were empty and boarded up, their yards overgrown. A FOR SALE sign flapped forlornly from the porch of one. To Richie the sign looked about a thousand years old. The sidewalk stopped, and now they were walking along a beaten track from which weeds grew half-heartedly.

Bill stopped and pointed. 'Th-there it i-i-is,' he said softly.

Twenty-nine Neibolt Street had once been a trim red Cape Cod. Maybe, .Richie thought, an engineer used to live there, a bachelor with no pants but jeans and lots of those gloves with the big stiff cuffs and four or five pillowtick caps - a fellow who would come home once or twice a month for stretches of three or four days and listen to the radio while he pottered in the garden; a fellow who would eat mostly fried foods (and no vegetables, although he would grow them for his friends) and who would, on windy nights, think about the Girl He Left Behind.

Now the red paint had faded to a wishy-washy pink that was peeling away in ugly patches that looked like sores. The windows were blind eyes, boarded up. Most of the shingles were gone. Weeds grew rankly down both sides of the house and the lawn was covered with the season's first bumper crop of dandelions. To the left, a high board fence, perhaps once a neat white but now faded to a dull gray that almost matched the lowering sky, lurched drunkenly in and out of the dank shrubbery. About halfway down this fence Richie could see a monstrous grove of sunflowers - the tallest looked five feet tall or more. They had a bloated, nasty look he didn't like. A breeze rustled them and they seemed to nod together: The boys are here, isn't that nice? More boys. Our boys. Richie shivered.

While Bill leaned Silver carefully against an elm, Richie surveyed the house. He saw a wheel sticking out of the thick grass near the porch, and pointed it out to Bill. Bill nodded; it was the overturned trike Eddie had mentioned.

They looked up and down Neibolt Street. The chug of the diesel engine rose and fell off, then began again. The sound seemed to hang in the overcast like a charm. The street was utterly deserted. Richie could hear occasional cars passing on Route 2, but could not see them.

The diesel engine chugged and faded, chugged and faded.

The huge sunflowers nodded sagely together. Fresh boys. Good boys. Our boys.

'Y-Y-You r-ruh-ready?' Bill asked, and Richie jumped a little.

'You know, I was just thinking that maybe the last bunch of library books I took out are due today,' Richie said. 'Maybe I ought to - '

'Cuh-Cuh-Cut the c-crap, R-R-Richie. Are y-you ready or n-n-not?'

'I guess I am,' Richie said, knowing he was not ready at all - he was never going to be ready for this scene.

They crossed the overgrown lawn to the porch.

'Luh-look th-th-there,' Bill said.

At the far lefthand side, the porch's latticework skirt leaned out against a tangle of bushes. Both boys could see the rusty nails that had been pulled free. There were old rosebushes here, and while the roses both to the right and the left of the unanchored stretch of latticework were blooming in a lackadaisical way, those directly around and in front of it were skeletal and dead.

Bill and Richie looked at each other grimly. Everything Eddie said seemed true enough; seven weeks later, the evidence was still here.

'You don't really want to go under there, do you?' Richie asked. He was almost pleading.

'Nuh-nuh-no,' Bill said, 'b-but I'm g-gonna.'

And with a sinking heart, Richie saw that he absolutely meant it. That gray light was back in Billy's eyes, shining steadily. There was a stony eagerness in the lines of his face that made him look older. Richie thought, I think he really does mean to kill it, if it's still there. Kill it and maybe cut off its head and take it to his father and say, 'Look, this is what killed Georgie, now will you talk to me again at night, maybe just tell me how your day was, or who lost when you guys were flipping to see who paid for the morning coffee?'