BILL DENBROUGH GETS A LOOK

 

Perhaps it was simply the dimness of the room that caused the illusion, which lasted for only the briefest moment, but Bill wondered later if it wasn’t some sort of message meant strictly for him: that fate could also be kind.

In that brief moment it seemed to him that none of them had grown up, that his friends had somehow done a Peter Pan act and were all still children.

Richie Tozier was rocked back in his chair so that he was leaning against the wall, caught in the act of saying something to Beverly Marsh, who had a hand cupped over her mouth to hide a giggle; Richie had a wise-ass grin on his face that was perfectly familiar. There was Eddie Kaspbrak, sitting on Beverly’s left, and in front of him on the table, next to his water-glass, was a plastic squeeze-bottle with a pistol-grip handle curving down from its top. The trimmings were a little more state-of-the-art, but the purpose was obviously the same: it was an aspirator. Sitting at one end of the table, watching this trio with an expression of mixed anxiety, amusement, and concentration, was Ben Hanscom.

Bill found his hand wanting to go to his head and realized with a sorry kind of amusement that in that second he had almost rubbed his pate to see if his haur had magically come back-that red, fine hair that he had begun to lose when he was only a college sophomore.

That broke the bubble. Richie was not wearing glasses, he saw, and thought: He probably has contacts now-he would. He hated those glasses. The tee-shirts and cord pants he’d habitually worn had been replaced by a suit that hadn’t been purchased off any rack-Bill estimated that he was looking at nine hundred dollars” worth of tailor-made on the hoof.

Beverly Marsh (if her name still was Marsh) had become a stunningly beautiful woman. Instead of the casual pony-tail, her hair-which was almost exactly the same shade his own had been-spilled over the shoulders of her plain white Ship “n Shore blouse in a torrent of subdued color. In this dim light it merely glowed like a well-banked bed of embers. In daylight, even the light of such a subdued day as this one, Bill imagined it would flame. And he found himself wondering what it would feel like to plunge his hands into that hair. The world’s oldest story, he thought wryly. I love my wife but oh you kid.

Eddie-it was weird but true-had grown up to look quite a little bit like Anthony Perkins. His face was prematurely lined (although in his movements he seemed somehow younger than either Richie or Ben) and made older still by the rimless spectacles he wore-spectacles you would imagine a British barrister wearing as he approached the bench or leafed through a legal brief. His hair was short, worn in an out-of-date style that had been known as Ivy League in the late fifties and early sixties. He was wearing a loud checked sportcoat that looked like something grabbed from the Distress Sale rack of a men’s clothing store that would shortly be out of business… but the watch on one wrist was a Patek Philippe, and the ring on the little finger of his right hand was a ruby. The stone was too hugely vulgar and too ostentatious to be anything but real.

Ben was the one who had really changed, and, looking at him again, Bill felt unreality wash easily over him. His face was the same, and his hair, although graying and longer, was combed in the same unusual right-side part. But Ben had gotten thin. He sat easily enough in his chair, his unadorned leather vest open to show the blue chambray work-shirt beneath. He wore Levi’s with straight legs, cowboy boots, and a wide belt with a beaten-silver buckle. These clothes clung easily to a body which was slim and narrow-hipped. He wore a bracelet with heavy links on one wrist-not gold links but copper ones. He got thin, Bill thought. He’s a shadow of his former self so to speak… Ole Ben got thin. Wonders never cease.

There was a moment of silence among the six of them that was beyond description. It was one of the strangest moments Bill Denbrough ever passed in his life. Stan was not here, but a seventh had come, nonetheless. Here in this private restaurant dining room Bill felt its presence so fully that it was almost personified-but not as an old man in a white robe with a scythe on his shoulder. It was the white spot on the map which lay between 1958 and 1985, an area an explorer might have called the Great Don’t Know. Bill wondered what exactly was there. Beverly Marsh in a short skirt which showed most of her long, coltish legs, a Beverly Marsh in white go-go boots, her hair parted in the middle and ironed? Richie Tozier carrying a sign which said STOP THE WAR on one side and GET ROTC OFF CAMPUS on the other? Ben Hanscom in a yellow hard-hat with a flag decal on the front, running a bulldozer under a canvas parasol, his shirt off, showing a stomach which protruded less and less over the waistband of his pants? Was this seventh creature black? No relation to either H. Rap Brown or Grandmaster Flash, not this fellow, this fellow wore plain white shirts and fade-into-the-woodwork J. C. Penney slacks, and he sat in a library carrell at the University of Maine, writing papers on the origin of footnotes and the possible advantages of ISBN numbers in book cataloguing while the marchers marched outside and Phil Ochs sang “Richard Nixon find yourself another country to be part of and men died with their stomachs blown out for villages whose names they could not pronounce; he sat there studiously bent over his work (Bill saw him), which lay in a slant of crisp white winterlight, his face sober and absorbed, knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity’s engine. Was he the seventh? Or was it a young man standing before his mirror, looking at the way his forehead was growing, looking at a combful of pulled-out red hairs, looking at a pile of university notebooks on the desk reflected in the mirror, notebooks which held the completed, messy first draft of a novel entitled Joanna, which would be published a year later?

Some of the above, all of the above, none of the above.

It didn’t matter, really. The seventh was there, and in that one moment they all felt it… and perhaps understood best the dreadful power of the thing that had brought them back. It lives, Bill thought, cold inside his clothes. Eye of newt, tail of dragon, Hand of Glory… whatever It was, It’s here again, in Derry. It.

And he felt-suddenly that It was the seventh; that It and time were somehow interchangeable, that It wore all their faces as well as the thousand others with which It had terrified and killed… and the idea that It might be them was somehow the most frightening idea of all. How much of us was left behind here? he thought with sudden rising terror. How much of us never left the drains and the sewers where It lived… and where It fed? Is that why we forgot? Because part of each of us never had any future, never grew, never left Derry? Is that why?

He saw no answers on their faces… only his own questions reflected back at him.

Thoughts form and pass in a matter of seconds or milliseconds, and create their own time-frames, and all of this passed through Bill Denbrough’s mind in a space of no more than five seconds.

Then Richie Tozier, leaning back against the wall, grinned again and said: “Oh my, look at this-Bill Denbrough went for the chrome dome look. How long you been Turtle Waxing your head, Big Bill?”

And Bill, with no idea at all of what might come out, opened his mouth and heard himself say: “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Trashmouth.”

There was a moment of silence-and then the room exploded with laughter. Bill crossed to them and began to shake hands, and while there was something horrible in what he now felt, there was also something comforting about it: this sensation of having come home for good.

 

3

BEN HANSCOM GETS SKINNY

 

Mike Hanlon ordered drinks, and as if to make up for the prior silence, everyone began to talk at once. Beverly Marsh was now Beverly Rogan, it turned out. She said she was married to a wonderful man in Chicago who had turned her whole life around and who had, by some benign magic, been able to transform his wife’s simple talent for sewing into a successful dress business. Eddie Kaspbrak owned a limousine company in New York. “For all I know, my wife could be in bed with Al Pacino right now,” he said, smiling mildly, and the room broke up.

They all knew what Bill and Ben had been up to, but Bill had a peculiar sense that there had been no personal association of their names-Ben as an architect, himself as a writer-with people they had known as children until very, very recently. Beverly had paperback copies of Joanna and The Black Rapids in her purse, and asked him if he would sign them. Bill did so, noticing as he did that both books were in mint condition-as if they had been purchased in the airport newsstand as she got off the plane.

In like fashion, Richie told Ben how much he had admired the BBC communications center in London… but there was a puzzled son of light in his eyes, as if he could not quite reconcile that building with this man… or with the fat earnest boy who had showed them how to flood out half the Barrens with scrounged boards and a rusty car door.

Richie was a disc jockey in California. He told them he was known as the Man of a Thousand Voices and Bill groaned. “God, Richie, your Voices were always so terrible.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, mawster,” Richie replied loftily.

When Beverly asked him if he wore contacts now, Richie said in a low voice, “Come a little closer, bay-bee. Look in my eyes.” Beverly did, and exclaimed delightedly as Richie tilted his head a little so she could see the lower rims of the Hydromist soft lenses he wore.

“Is the library still the same?” Ben asked Mike Hanlon.

Mike took out his wallet and produced a snap of the library, taken from above. He did it with the proud air of a man producing snapshots of his kids when asked about his family. “Guy in a light plane took this,” he said, as the picture went from hand to hand. Tve been trying to get either the City Council or some well-heeled private donor to supply enough cash to get it blown up to mural size for the Children’s Library. So far, no soap. But it’s a good picture, huh?”

They all agreed that it was. Ben held it longest, looking at it fixedly. Finally he tapped the glass corridor which connected the two buildings. “do you recognize this from anywhere else, Mike?”

Mike smiled. “It’s your communications center,” he said, and all six of them burst out laughing.

The drinks came. They sat down.

That silence, sudden, awkward, and perplexing, fell again. They looked at

each other.

“Well?” Beverly asked in her sweet, slightly husky voice. “What do we drink to?”

“To us,” Richie said suddenly. And now he wasn’t smiling. His eyes caught Bill’s and with a force so great he could barely deal with it, Bill remembered himself and Richie in the middle of Neibolt Street, after the thing which might have been a clown or which might have been a werewolf had disappeared, embracing each other and weeping. When he picked up his glass, his hand was trembling, and some of his drink spilled on the napery.

Richie rose slowly to his feet, and one by one the others followed suit: Bill first, then Ben and Eddie, Beverly, and finally Mike Hanlon. “To us,” Richie said, and like Bill’s hand, his voice trembled a little. To the Losers” Club of 1958.”

“The Losers,” Beverly said, slightly amused.

The Losers,” Eddie said. His face was pale and old behind his rimless glasses.

The Losers,” Ben agreed. A faint and painful smile ghosted at the corners of his mouth.

The Losers,” Mike Hanlon said softly.

The Losers,” Bill finished.

Their glasses touched. They drank.

That silence fell again, and this time Richie did not break it. This time the silence seemed necessary.

They sat back down and Bill said, “so spill it, Mike. Tell us what’s been happening here, and what we can do.”

“Eat first,” Mike said. “We’ll talk afterward.”

So they ate… and they ate long and well. Like that old joke about the condemned man, Bill thought, but his own appetite was better than it had been in ages… since he was a kid, he was tempted to think. The food was not stunningly good, but it was far from bad, and there was a lot of it. The six of them began trading stuff back and forth-spareribs, moo goo gaipan, chicken wings that had been delicately braised, egg rolls, water chestnuts wrapped in bacon, strips of beef that had been threaded onto wooden skewers.

They began with pu-pu platters, and Richie made a childish but amusing business of broiling a little bit of everything over the flaming pot in the center of the platter he was sharing with Beverly-including half an egg roll and a few red kidney beans. “Flambe at my table, I love it,” he told Ben. “I’d eat shit on a shingle if it was flambe at my table.”

“And probably has,” Bill remarked. Beverly laughed so hard at this she had to spit a mouthful of food into her napkin.

“Oh God, I think I’m gonna ralph,” Richie said in an eerily exact imitation of Don Pardo, and Beverly laughed harder, blushing a bright red.

“Stop it, Richie,” she said. “I’m warning you.”

“The warning is taken,” Richie said. “Eat well, dear.”

Rose herself brought them their dessert-a great mound of baked Alaska «vhich she ignited at the head of the table, where Mike sat.

“More flambe at my table,” Richie said in the voice of a man who has died and gone to heaven. “This may be the best meal I’ve ever eaten in my life.”

“But of course,” Rose said demurely.

“If I blow that out, do I get my wish?” he asked her.

“At Jade of the Orient, all wishes are granted, sir.”

Richie’s smile faltered suddenly. “I applaud the sentiment,” he said, “but you know, I really doubt the veracity.”

They almost demolished the baked Alaska. As Bill sat back, his belly straining the waistband of his pants, he happened to notice the glasses on the table. There seemed to be hundreds of them. He grinned a little, realizing that he himself had sunk two martinis before the meal and God knew how many bottles of Kirin beer with it. The others had done about as well. In their state, fried chunks of bowling pin would probably have tasted okay. And yet he didn’t feel drunk.

“I haven’t eaten like that since I was a kid,” Ben said. They looked at him and a faint flush of color tinged his cheeks. “I mean it literally. That may be the biggest meal I’ve eaten since I was a sophomore in high school.”

“You went on a diet?” Eddie asked.

“Yeah,” Ben said. “I did. The Ben Hanscom Freedom Diet.”

“What got you going?” Richie asked.

“You don’t want to hear all that ancient history… ” Ben shifted uncomfortably.

“I don’t know about the rest of them,” Bill said, “but I do. Come on, Ben. Give. What turned Haystack Calhoun into the magazine model we see before us today?”

Richie snorted a little. “Haystack, right. I’d forgotten that.”

“It’s not much of a story,” Ben said. “No story at all, really. After that summer-after 1958-we stayed in Derry another two years. Then my mom lost her job and we ended up moving to Nebraska, because she had a sister there who offered to take us in until my mother got on her feet again. It wasn’t so great. Her sister, my aunt Jean, was a miserly bitch who had to keep telling you what your place in the great scheme of things was, how lucky we were that my mom had a sister who could give us charity, how lucky we were not to be on welfare, all that sort of thing. I was so fat I disgusted her. She couldn’t leave it alone. “Ben, you ought to get more exercise. Ben, you’ll have a heart attack before you’re forty if you don’t lose weight. Ben, with little children starving in the world, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” He paused for a moment and sipped some water.

The thing was, she also trotted the starving children out if I didn’t clean my plate.”

Richie laughed and nodded.

“Anyway, the country was just pulling out of a recession and my mother was almost a year finding steady work. By the time we moved out of aunt Jean’s place in La Vista and got our own in Omaha, I’d put on about ninety pounds over when you guys knew me. I think I put on most of it just to spite my Aunt Jean.”

Eddie whistled. “That would have put you at about-”

“At about two hundred and ten,” Ben said gravely. “Anyway, I was going to East Side High School in Omaha, and the physedPeriods were… well, pretty bad. The other kids called me Jugs. That ought to give you the idea.

“The ragging went on for about seven months, and then one day, while we were getting dressed in the locker room after the period, two or three of the guys started to… to kind of slap my gut. They called it “fat-paddling.” Pretty soon two or three others got in on it. Then four or five more. Pretty soon it was all of them, chasing me around the locker room and up the hall, whacking my gut, my butt, my back, my legs. I got scared and started to scream. That made the rest of them laugh like crazy.

“You know,” he said, looking down and carefully rearranging his silverware, “that’s the last time I can remember thinking of Henry Bowers until Mike called me two days ago. The kid who started it was a farmboy with these big old hands, and while they were chasing after me I remember thinking that Henry had come back. I think-no, I know-that’s when I panicked.

They chased me up the hall past the lockers where the guys who played sports kept their stuff. I was naked and red as a lobster. I’d lost any sense of dignity or… or of myself, I guess you’d say. Where myself was. I was screaming for help. And here they came after me, screaming “Fat-paddling! Fat-paddling! Fat-paddling!” There was a bench-”

“Ben, you don’t have to put yourself through this,” Beverly said suddenly. Her face had gone ashy-pale. She toyed with her water-glass, and almost spilled it.

“Let him finish,” Bill said.

Ben looked at him for a moment and then nodded. There was a bench at the end of the corridor. I fell over it and hit my head. They were all around me in another minute or two, and then this voice said: “Okay. That’s enough. You guys go change up.”

“It was Coach, standing there in the doorway, wearing his blue sweatpants with the white stripe up the sides and his white tee-shirt. There was no way of telling how long he’d been standing there. They all looked at him, some of them grinning, some of them guilty, some of them just looking sort of vacant. They went away. And I burst into tears.

’Coach just stood there in the doorway leading back to the gym, watching me, watching this naked fat boy with his skin all red from the fat-paddling, watching this fat kid crying on the floor.

“And finally he said, “Benny, why don’t you just fucking shut up?”

“It shocked me so much to hear a teacher use that word that I did. I looked up at him, and he came over and sat down on the bench I’d fallen over. He leaned over me, and the whistle around his neck swung out and bonked me on the forehead. For a second I thought he was going to kiss me or something, and I shrank back from him, but what he did was grab one of my tits in each hand and squeeze. Then he took his hands away and rubbed them on his pants like he’d touched something dirty.

“You think I’m going to comfort you?” he asked me. “I’m not. You disgust them and you disgust me as well. We got different reasons, but that’s because they’re kids and I’m not. They don’t know why you disgust them. I do know. It’s because I see you burying the good body God gave you in a great big mess of fat. It’s a lot of stupid self-indulgence, and it makes me want to puke. Now listen to me, Benny, because this is the only tune I’m going to say it to you. I got a football team to coach, and basketball, and track, and somewhere in between I’ve got swimming team. So I’ll just say it once. You’re fat up here.” And he tapped my forehead right where his damned whistle had bonked me. “That’s where everybody’s fat. You put what’s between your ears on a diet and you’re going to lose weight. But guys like you never do.’”

“What a bastardl” Beverly said indignantly.

“Yeah,” Ben said, grinning. “But he didn’t know he was a bastard, that’s how dumb he was. He’d probably seen Jack Webb in that movie The D.I. about sixty times, and he actually thought he was doing me a favor. And as it turned out, he was. Because I thought of something right then. I thought…”

He looked away, frowning-and Bill had the strangest feeling that he knew what Ben was going to say before he said it.

“I told you that the last time I can remember thinking of Henry Bowers was when the other boys were chasing after me and fat-paddling. Well, when the Coach was getting up to go, that was the last time I really thought of what we’d done in the summer of ’58. I thought-”

He hesitated again, looking at each of them in turn, seeming to search their faces. He went on carefully.

“I thought of how good we were together. I thought of what we did and how we did it, and all at once it hit me that if Coach had to face anything like that, his hair would probably have turned white all at once and his heart would have stopped dead in his chest like an old watch. It wasn’t fair, of course, but he hadn’t been fair to me. What happened was simple enough-”

“You got mad,” Bill said.

Ben smiled. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “I called, “Coach!”

“He turned around and looked at me. “You say you coach track?” I asked him.

“That’s right,” he said. “Not that it’s anything to you.”

“You listen to me, you stupid stone-brained son of a bitch,” I said, and his mouth dropped open and his eyes bugged out. “I’ll be out there for the track team in March. What do you think about that?”

“I think you better shut your mouth before it gets you into big trouble,” he said.

“I’m going to run down everyone you get out,” I said. “I’m going to run down your best. And then I want a fucking apology from you.”

“His fists clenched, and for a minute I thought he was going to come back in there and let me have it. Then they unclenched again. “You just keep talking, fatboy,” he said softly. “You got the motormouth. But the day you can outrun my best will be the day I quit this place and go back to picking corn on the circuit.” And he left.”

“You lost the weight?” Richie asked.

“Well, I did,” Ben said. “But Coach was wrong. It didn’t start in my head. It started with my mother. I went home that night and told her I wanted to lose some weight. We ended up having a hell of a fight, both of us crying. She started out with that same old song and dance: I wasn’t really fat, I just had big bones, and a big boy who was going to be a big man had to eat big just to stay even. It was a… a kind of security thing with her, I think. It was scary for her, trying to raise a boy on her own. She had no education and no real skills, just a willingness to work hard. And when she could give me a second helping… or when she could look across the table at me and see that I was looking solid…”

“She felt like she was winning the battle,” Mike said.

“Uh-huh.” Ben drank off the last of his beer and wiped a small mustache of foam off his upper lip with the heel of his hand. “so the biggest fight wasn’t with my head; it was with her. She just wouldn’t accept it, not for months. She wouldn’t take in my clothes and she wouldn’t buy me new ones. I was running by then, I ran everywhere, and sometimes my heart pounded so hard I felt like I was going to pass out. The first of my mile runs I finished by puking and then fainting. Then for awhile I just puked. And after awhile I was holding up my pants while I ran.

“I got a paper-route and I ran with the bag around my neck, bouncing against my chest, while I held up my pants. My shirts started to look like sails. And nights when I went home and would only eat half the stuff on my plate my mother would burst into tears and say that I was starving myself, killing myself, that I didn’t love her anymore, that I didn’t care about how hard she had worked for me.”

“Christ,” Richie muttered, lighting a cigarette. “I don’t know how you handled it, Ben.”

“I just kept the Coach’s face in front of me,” Ben said. “I just kept remembering the way he looked after he grabbed my tits in the hallway to the boys” locker room that time. That’s how I did it. I got myself some new jeans and stuff with the paper-route money, and the old guy in the first-floor apartment used his awl to punch some new holes in my belt-about five of them, as I remember. I think that I might have remembered the other time I had to buy a pair of new jeans-that was when Henry pushed me into the Barrens that day and they just about got torn off my body.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, grinning. “And you told me about the chocolate milk. Remember that?”

Ben nodded. “If I did remember,” he went on, “it was just for a second-there and gone. About that same time I started taking Health and Nutrition at school, and I found out you could eat just about all the raw green stuff you wanted and not gain weight. So one night my mother put on a salad with lettuce and raw spinach in it, chunks of apple and maybe a little leftover ham. Now I’ve never liked rabbit-food that much, but I had three helpings and just raved on and on to my mother about how good it was.

“That went a long way toward solving the problem. She didn’t care so much what I ate as long as I ate a lot of it. She buried me in salads. I ate them for the next three years. There were times when I had to look in the mirror to make sure my nose wasn’t wriggling.”

“So what happened about the Coach?” Eddie asked. “did you go out for track?” He touched his aspirator, as if the thought of running had reminded him of it.

“Oh yeah, I went out,” Ben said. “The two-twenty and the four-forty. By then I’d lost seventy pounds and I’d sprung up two inches so that what was left was better distributed. On the first day of trials I won the two-twenty by six lengths and the four-forty by eight. Then I went over to Coach, who looked mad enough to chew nails and spit out staples, and I said: “Looks like it’s time you got out on the circuit and started picking corn. When are you heading down Kansas way?”

“He didn’t say a thing at first-just swung a roundhouse and knocked me flat on my back. Then he told me to get off the field. Said he didn’t want a smartmouth bastard like me on his track team.

“I wouldn’t be on it if President Kennedy appointed me to it,” I said, wiping blood out of the corner of my mouth. “And since you got me going I won’t hold you to it… but the next time you sit down to a big plate of corn on the cob, spare me a thought.”

“He told me if I didn’t get out right then he was going to beat the living crap out of me.” Ben was smiling a little… but there was nothing very pleasant about that smile, certainly nothing nostalgic. “Those were his exact words. Everyone was watching us, including the kids I’d beaten. They looked pretty embarrassed. So I just said, “I’ll tell you what, Coach. You get one free, on account of you’re a sore loser but too old to learn any better now. But you put one more on me and I’ll try to see to it that you lose your job. I’m not sure I can do it, but I can make a good try. I lost the weight so I could have a little dignity and a little peace. Those are things worth fighting for.”

Bill said, “All of that sounds wonderful, Ben… but the writer in me wonders if any kid ever really talked like that.”

Ben nodded, still smiling that peculiar smile. “I doubt if any kid who hadn’t

been through the things we went through ever did,” he said. “But I said them

… and I meant them.’

Bill thought about this and then nodded. “All right.”

“The Coach stood back with his hands on the hips of his sweat-pants,” Ben said. “He opened his mouth and then he closed it again. Nobody said anything. I walked off, and that was the last I had to do with Coach Woodleigh. When my home-room teacher handed me my course sheet for my junior year, someone had typed the word excused next to phys. ed. and he’d initialed it.”

“You beat him!” Richie exclaimed, and shook his clenched hands over his head. “Way to go, Ben!”

Ben shrugged. “I think what I did was beat part of myself. Coach got me going, I guess… but it was thinking of you guys that made me really believe that I could do it. And I did do it.”

Ben shrugged charmingly, but Bill believed he could see fine drops of sweat at his hairline. “End of True Confessions. Except I sure could use another beer. Talking’s thirsty work.”

Mike signalled the waitress.

All six of them ended up ordering another round, and they talked of light matters until the drinks came. Bill looked into his beer, watching the way the bubbles crawled up the sides of the glass. He was both amused and appalled to realize he was hoping someone else would begin to story about the years between-that Beverly would tell them about the wonderful man she had married (even if he was boring, as most wonderful men were), or that Richie Tozier would begin to expound on Funny Incidents in the Broadcasting Studio, or that Eddie Kaspbrak would tell them what Teddy Kennedy was really like, how much Robert Redford tipped… or maybe offer some insights into why Ben had been able to give up the extra pounds while he had needed to hang onto his aspirator.

The fact is, Bill thought, Mike is going to start talking any minute now, and I’m not sure I want to hear what he has to say. The fact is, my heart is beating just a little too fast and my hands are just a little too cold. The fact is, I’m just about twenty-five years too old to be this scared. We all are. So say something, someone. Let’s talk of careers and spouses and what it’s like to look at your old playmates and realize that you’ve taken a few really good shots in the nose from time itself. Let’s talk about sex, baseball, the price of gas, the future of the Warsaw Pact nations. Anything but what we came here to talk about. So say something, some body.

Someone did. Eddie Kaspbrak did. But it was not what Teddy Kennedy was really like or how much Redford tipped or even why he had found it necessary to keep what Richie had sometimes called “Eddie’s lung-sucker” in the old days. He asked Mike when Stan Uris had died.

“The night before last. When I made the calls.”

“Did it have to do with… with why we’re here?”

“I could beg the question and say that, since he didn’t leave a note, no one can know for sure,” Mike answered, “but since it happened almost immediately after I called him, I think the assumption is safe enough.”

“He killed himself, didn’t he?” Beverly said dully. “Oh God-poor Stan.”

The others were looking at Mike, who finished his drink and said: “He committed suicide, yes. Apparently went up to the bathroom shortly after I called him, drew a bath, got into it, and cut his wrists.”

Bill looked down the table, which seemed suddenly lined with shocked, pale faces-no bodies, only those faces, like white circles. Like white balloons, moon balloons, tethered here by an old promise that should have long since lapsed.

“How did you find out?” Richie asked. “Was it carried in the papers up here?”

“No. For some time now I’ve subscribed to the newspapers of those towns closest to all of you. I have kept tabs over the years.”

“I Spy.” Richie’s face was sour. “Thanks, Mike.”

“It was my job,” Mike said simply.

“Poor Stan,” Beverly repeated. She seemed stunned, unable to cope with the news. “But he was so brave back then. So… determined.”

“People change,” Eddie said.

“-do they?” Bill asked. “stan was-” He moved his hands on the tablecloth, trying to catch the right words. “He was an ordered person. The kind of person who has to have his books divided up into fiction and nonfiction on his shelves… and then wants to have each section in alphabetical order. I can remember something he said once-I don’t remember where we were or what we were doing, at least not yet, but I think it was toward the end of things. He said he could stand to be scared, but he hated being dirty. That seemed to me the essence of Stan. Maybe it was just too much, when Mike called. He saw his choices as being only two: stay alive and get dirty or die clean. Maybe people really don’t change as much as we think. Maybe they just… maybe they just stiffen-up.’

There was a moment of silence and then Richie said, “All right, Mike. What’s happening in Derry? Tell us.”

“I can tell you some,” Mike said. “I can tell you, for instance, what’s happening now-and I can tell you some things about yourselves. But I can’t tell you everything that happened back in the summer of 1958, and I don’t believe I’ll ever have to. Eventually you’ll remember it for yourselves. And I think if I told you too much before your minds were ready to remember, what happened to Stan-”

“Might happen to us?” Ben asked quietly.

Mike nodded. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

Bill said: “Then tell us what you can, Mike.”

“All right,” he said. “I will.”

 

4

THE LOSERS GET THE SCOOP

 

“The murders have started again,” Mike said flatly.

He looked up and down the table, and then his eyes fixed on Bill’s.

The first of the “new murders"-if you’ll allow me that rather grisly conceit-began on the Main Street Bridge and ended underneath it. The victim was a gay and rather childlike man named Adrian Mellon. He had a bad case of asthma.”

Eddie’s hand stole out and touched the side of his aspirator.

“It happened last summer on July 21st, the last night of the Canal Days Festival, which was a kind of celebration, a… a…”

“A Derry ritual,” Bill said in a low voice. His long fingers were slowly massaging his temples, and it was not hard to guess he was thinking about his brother George… George, who had almost certainly opened the way the last time this had happened.

“A ritual,” Mike said quietly. “Yes.”

He told them the story of what had happened to Adrian Mellon quickly, watching with no pleasure as their eyes got bigger and bigger. He told them what the News had reported and what it had not… the latter including the testimony of Don Hagarty and Christopher Unwin about a certain clown which had been under the bridge like the troll in the fabled story of yore, a clown which had looked like a cross between Ronald McDonald and Bozo, according to Hagarty.

“It was him,” Ben said in a sick hoarse voice. “It was tHat fucker Penny-

wise.”

“There’s one other thing,” Mike said, looking at Bill. “One of the investigating officers-the one who actually pulled Adrian Mellon out of the Canal-was a town cop named Harold Gardener.”

“Oh Jesus Christ,” Bill said in a weak teary voice.

“Bill?” Beverly looked at him, then put a hand on his arm. Her voice was full of startled concern. “Bill, what’s wrong?”

“Harold would have been about five then,” Bill said. His stunned eyes searched Mike’s face for confirmation.

“Yes.”

“What is it, Bill?” Richie asked.

“H-H-Harold Gardener was the s-son of Dave Gardener,” Bill said. “dave lived down the street from us back then, when George was k-killed. He was the one who got to Juh juh… to my brother first and brought him up to the house, wrapped in a piece of qu-quilt.”

They sat silently, saying nothing. Beverly put a hand briefly over her eyes.

“It all fits rather too well, doesn’t it?” Mike said finally.

“Yes,” Bill said in a low voice. “It fits, all right.”

“I’d kept tabs on the six of you over the years, as I said,” Mike went on, “but it wasn’t until then that I began to understand just why I had been doing it, that it had a real and concrete purpose. Still, I held off, waiting to see how things would develop. You see, I felt that I had to be absolutely sure before I… disturbed your lives. Not ninety percent, not even ninety-five percent. One hundred was all that would do it.

“In December of last year, an eight-year-old boy named Steven Johnson was found dead in Memorial Park. Like Adrian Mellon, he had been badly mutilated just before or just after his death, but he looked as if he could have died of just plain fright.”

“Sexually assaulted?” Eddie asked.

“No. Just plain mutilated.”

“How many in all?” Eddie asked, not looking as if he really wanted to know.

’It’s bad,” Mike said.

“How many?” Bill repeated.

“Nine. So far.”

“It can’t be!” Beverly cried. “I would have read about it in the paper… seen it on the news! When that crazy cop killed all those women in Castle Rock, Maine… and those children that were murdered in Atlanta…”

“Yes, that,” Mike said. “I’ve thought about that a lot. It’s really the closest correlative to what’s going on here, and Bev’s right: that really was coast-to-coast news. In some ways, the Atlanta comparison is the thing about all of this that frightens me the most. The murder of nine children… we should have TV news correspondents here, and phony psychics, and reporters from The Atlantic Monthly and Rolling Stone… the whole media circus, in short.”

“But it hasn’t happened,” Bill said.

“No,” Mike answered, “it hasn’t. Oh, there was a Sunday-supplement piece about it in the Portland Sunday Telegram, and another one in the Boston Globe after the last two. A Boston-based television program called Good Day! did a segment this February on unsolved murders, and one of the experts mentioned the Derry murders, but only passingly… and he certainly gave no indication of knowing there had been a similar batch of murders in 1957-58, and another in 1929-30.

“There are some ostensible reasons, of course. Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Detroit… those are big media towns, and in big media towns when something happens it makes a bang. There isn’t a single TV or radio station in Derry, unless you count the little FM the English and Speech Department runs up at the high school. Bangor’s got the corner on the market when it comes to the media.”

“Except for the Derry News,” Eddie said, and they all laughed.

“But we all know that doesn’t really cut it with the way the world is today. The communication web is there, and at some point the story should have broken nationally. But it didn’t. And I think the reason is just this: It doesn’t want it to.”

“It,” Bill mused, almost to himself.

“It,” Mike agreed. “If we have to call It something, it might as well be what we used to call It. I’ve begun to think, you see, that It has been here so long whatever It really is… that It’s become a part of Derry, something as much a part of the town as the Standpipe, or the Canal, or Bassey Park, or the library. Only It’s not a matter of outward geography, you understand. Maybe that was true once, but now It’s… inside. Somehow It’s gotten inside. That’s the only way I know to understand all of the terrible things that have happened here-the nominally explicable as well as the utterly inexplicable! There was a fire at a Negro nightclub called the Black Spot in 1930. A year before that, a bunch of half-bright Depression outlaws was gunned down on Canal Street in the middle of the afternoon.”

“The Bradley Gang,” Bill said. “The FBI got them, right?”

“That’s what the histories say, but that’s not precisely true. So far as I’ve been able to find out-and I’d give a lot to believe that it wasn’t so, because I love this town-the Bradley Gang, all seven of them, were actually gunned down by the good citizens of Derry. I’ll tell you about it sometime.

“There was the explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks during an Easter-egg hunt in 1906. There was a horrible series of animal mutilations that same year that was finally traced to Andrew Rhulin, the grand-uncle of the man who now runs the Rhulin Farms. He was apparently bludgeoned to death by the three deputies who were supposed to bring him in. None of the deputies were ever brought to trial.”

Mike Hanlon produced a small notebook from an inner pocket and paged through it, talking without looking up. “In 1877 there were four lynchings inside the incorporated town limits. One of those that climbed a rope was the lay preacher of the Methodist Church, who apparently drowned all four of his children in the bathtub as if they were kittens and then shot his wife in the head. He put the gun in her hand to make it look like suicide, but no one was fooled. A year before that four loggers were found dead in a cabin downstream on the Kenduskeag, literally torn apart. Disappearances of children, of whole families, are recorded in old diary extracts… but not in any public document. It goes on and on, but perhaps you get the idea.”

“I get the idea, all right,” Ben said. “something’s going on here, but it’s private.”

Mike closed his notebook, replaced it in his inner pocket, and looked at them soberly.

“If I were an insurance man instead of a librarian, I’d draw you a graph, maybe. It would show an unusually high rate of every violent crime we know of, not excluding rape, incest, breaking and entering, auto theft, child abuse, spouse abuse, assault.

“There’s a medium-sized city in Texas where the violent-crime-rate is far below what you’d expect for a city of its size and mixed racial make-up. The extraordinary placidity of the people who live there has been traced to something in the water… a natural trank of some kind. The exact opposite holds true here. Derry is a violent place to live in an ordinary year. But every twenty-seven years-although the cycle has never been perfectly exact-that violence has escalated to a furious peak… and it has never been national news.”

“You’re saying there’s a cancer at work here,” Beverly said.

“Not at all. An untreated cancer invariably kills. Derry hasn’t died; on the contrary, it has thrived… in an unspectacular, unnewsworthy way, of course. It is simply a fairly prosperous small city in a relatively unpopulous state where bad things happen too often… and where ferocious things happen every quarter of a century or so.”

“That holds true all down the line?” Ben asked.

“Mike nodded. “All down the line. 1715-16, 1740 until roughly 1743-that must have been a bad one-1769-70, and on and on. Right up to the present time. I have a feeling that it’s been getting steadily worse, maybe because there have been more people in Derry at the end of each cycle, maybe for some other reason. And in 1958, the cycle appears to have come to a premature end.-For which we were responsible.”

Bill Denbrough leaned forward, his eyes suddenly bright. “You’re sure of that? Sure?”

“Yes,” Mike said. “All the other cycles reached their peak around September and then ended in a big way. Life usually took on its more or less normal tenor by Christmas… Easter at the latest. In other words, there were bad “years” of fourteen to twenty months every twenty-seven years. But the bad year that began when your brother was killed in October of 1957 ended quite abruptly in August of 1958.”

“Why?” Eddie asked urgently. His breath had thinned; Bill remembered that high whistle as Eddie inhaled breath, and knew that he would soon be tooting on the old lung-sucker. “What did we do?

The question hung there. Mike seemed to regard it… and at last he shook his head. “You’ll remember,” he said. “In time you’ll remember.”

“What if we don’t?” Ben asked.

“Then God help us all.”

“Nine children dead this year,” Rich said. “Christ.”

“Lisa Albrecht and Steven Johnson in late 1984,” Mike said. “In February a boy named Dennis Torrio disappeared. A high-school boy. His body was found in mid-March, in the Barrens. Mutilated. This was nearby.”

He took a photograph from the same pocket into which he had replaced the notebook. It made its way around the table. Beverly and Eddie looked at it, puzzled, but Richie Tozier reacted violently. He dropped it as if it were hot. “Jesus! Jesus, Mike!” He looked up, his eyes wide and shocked. A moment later he passed the picture to Bill.

Bill looked at it and felt the world swim into gray tones all around him. For a moment he was sure he would pass out. He heard a groan, and knew he had made the sound. He dropped the picture.

“What is it?” he heard Beverly saying. “What does it mean, Bill?”

“It’s my brother’s school picture,” Bill said at last. “It’s Juh-Georgie. The picture from his album. The one that moved. The one that winked.”

They handed it around again then, while Bill sat as still as stone at the head of the table, looking out into space. It was a photograph of a photograph. The picture showed a tattered school photo propped up against a white background-smiling lips parted to exhibit two holes where new teeth had never grown (unless they grow in your coffin, Bill thought, and shuddered). On the margin below George’s picture were the words SCHOOL FRIENDS 1957-58.

“It was found this year?” Beverly asked again. Mike nodded and she turned to Bill. “When did you last see it, Bill?”

He wet his lips, tried to speak. Nothing came out. He tried again, hearing the words echo in his head, aware of the stutter coming back, fighting it, fighting the terror.

“I haven’t seen that picture since 1958. That spring, the year after George died. When I tried to show it to Richie, it was g-gone.”

There was an explosive gasping sound that made them all look around. Eddie was setting his aspirator back on the table and looking slightly embarrassed.

“Eddie Kaspbrak blasts off!” Richie cried cheerfully, and then, suddenly and eerily, the Voice of the MovieTone Newsreel Narrator came from Rich’s mouth: “Today in Derry, a whole city turns out for Asthmatics on Parade, and the star of the show is Big Ed the Snothead, known all over New England as-”

He stopped abruptly, and one hand moved toward his face, as if to cover his eyes, and Bill suddenly thought: No-no, that’s not it. Not to cover his eyes but to push his glasses up on his nose. The glasses that aren’t even there anymore. Oh dear Christ, what’s going on here?

“Eddie, I’m sorry,” Rich said. “That was cruel. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking about.” He looked around at the others, bewildered.

Mike Hanlon spoke into the silence.

“I’d promised myself after Steven Johnson’s body was discovered that if anything else happened-if there was one more clear case-I would make the calls that I ended up not making for another two months. It was as if I was hypnotized by what was happening, by the consciousness of it-the deliberateness of it. George’s picture was found by a fallen log less than ten feet from the Torrio boy’s body. It wasn’t hidden; quite the contrary. It was as if the killer wanted it to be found. As I’m sure the killer did.”

“How did you get the police photo, Mike?” Ben asked. That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s what it is. There’s a fellow in the Police Department who isn’t averse to making a little extra money. I pay him twenty bucks a month-all that I can afford. He’s a pipeline.

The body of Dawn Roy was found four days after the Torrio boy. McCarron Park. Thirteen years old. Decapitated.

“April 23rd of this year. Adam Terrault. Sixteen. Reported missing when he didn’t come home from band practice. Found the next day just off the path that runs through the greenbelt behind West Broadway. Also decapitated.

“May 6th. Frederick Cowan. Two and a half. Found in an upstairs bathroom, drowned in the toilet.”

“Oh, Mike!” Beverly cried.

“Yeah, it’s bad,” he said, almost angrily. “don’t you think I know that?”

“The police are convinced that it couldn’t have been-well, some kind of accident?” Bev asked.

Mike shook his head. “His mother was hanging clothes in the back yard. She heard sounds of a struggle-heard her son screaming. She ran as fast as she could. As she went up the stairs, she says she heard the sound of the toilet flushing repeatedly-that, and someone laughing. She said it didn’t sound human.”

“And she saw nothing at all?” Eddie asked.

“Her son,” Mike said simply. “His back had been broken, his skull fractured. The glass door of the shower-stall was broken. There was blood everywhere. The mother is in the Bangor Mental Health Institute, now. My… my Police Department source says she’s quite lost her mind.”

“No fucking wonder,” Richie said hoarsely. “Who’s got a cigarette?”

Beverly gave him one. Rich lit it with hands that shook badly.

“The police line is that the killer came in through the front door while the Cowan boy’s mother was hanging her clothes in the back yard. Then, when she ran up the back stairs, he supposedly jumped from the bathroom window into the yard she’d just left and got away clean. But the window is only one of those half-sized jobs; a kid of seven would have to wriggle to get through it. And the drop was twenty-five feet to a stone-flagged patio. Rademacher doesn’t like to talk about those things, and no one in the press-certainly no one at the News-has pressed him about them.”

Mike took a drink of water and then passed another picture down the line. This was not a police photograph; it was another school picture. It showed a grinning boy who was maybe thirteen. He was dressed in his best for the school photo and his hands were clean and folded neatly in his lap… but there was a devilish little glint in his eyes. He was black.

“Jeffrey Holly,” Mike said. “May 13th. A week after the Cowan boy was killed. Torn open. He was found in Bassey Park, by the Canal.

“Nine days after that, May 22nd, a fifthgrader named John Feury was found dead out on Neibolt Street-”

Eddie uttered a high, quavering scream. He groped for his aspirator and knocked it off the table. It rolled down to Bill, who picked it up. Eddie’s face had gone a sickish yellow color. His breath whistled coldly in his throat.

“Get him something to drink!” Ben roared. “somebody get him -

But Eddie was shaking his head. He triggered the aspirator down his throat. His chest heaved as he tore in a gulp of air. He triggered the aspirator again and then sat back, eyes half-closed, panting.

“I’ll be all right,” he gasped. “Gimme a minute, I’m with you.”

“Eddie, are you sure?” Beverly asked. “Maybe you ought to lie down-”

“I’ll be all right,” he repeated querulously. “It was just… the shock. You know. The shock. I’d forgotten all about Neibolt Street.”

No one replied; no one had to. Bill thought: You believe your capacity has been reached, and then Mike produces another name, and yet another, like a black magician with a hatful of malign tricks, and you’re knocked onyour ass again.

It was too much to face all at once, this outpouring of inexplicable violence, somehow directly aimed at the six people here-or so George’s photograph seemed to suggest.

“Both of John Feury’s legs were gone,” Mike continued softly, “but the medical examiner says that happened after he died. His heart gave out. He seems to have quite literally died of fear. He was found by the postman, who saw a hand sticking out from under the porch-”

“It was 29, wasn’t it?” Rich said, and Bill looked at him quickly. Rich glanced back at him, nodded slightly, and then looked at Mike again. “Twenty-nine Neibolt Street.”

“Oh yes,” Mike said in that same calm voice. “It was number 29.” He drank more water. “Are you really all right, Eddie?”

Eddie nodded. His breathing had eased.

“Rademacher made an arrest the day after Feury’s body was discovered,” Mike said. “There was a front-page editorial in the News that same day, calling for his resignation, incidentally.”

“After eight murders?” Ben said. “Pretty radical of them, wouldn’t you say?”

Beverly wanted to know who had been arrested.

“A guy who lives in a little shack way out on Route 7, almost over the town line and into Newport,” Mike said. “Kind of a hermit. Burns scrapwood in his stove, roofed the place with scavenged shingles and hubcaps. Name of Harold Earl. Probably doesn’t see two hundred dollars in cash money over the course of a year. Someone driving by saw him standing out in his dooryard, just looking up at the sky, on the day John Feury’s body was discovered. His clothes were covered with blood.”

Then maybe-” Rich began hopefully.

“He had three butchered deer in his shed,” Mike said. “He’d been jacking over in Haven. The blood on his clothes was deer-blood. Rademacher asked him if he killed John Feury, and Earl is supposed to have said, “Oh ayuh, I killed a lot of people. I shot most of them in the war.” He also said he’d seen things in the woods at night. Blue lights sometimes, floating just a few inches off the ground. Corpse-lights, he called them. And Bigfoot.

“They sent him up to the Bangor Mental Health. According to the medical report, his liver’s almost entirely gone. He’s been drinking paint-thinner-”

“Oh my God,” Beverly said.

“-and is prone to hallucinations. They’ve been holding on to him, and until three days ago Rademacher was sticking to his idea that Earl was the most likely suspect. He had eight guys out there, digging around his shack and looking for the missing heads, lampshades made out of human skin, God knows what.”

Mike paused, head lowered, and then went on. His voice was slightly hoarse now. “I’d held off and held off. But when I saw this last one, I made the calls. I wish to God I’d made them sooner.”

“Let’s see,” Ben said abruptly.

“The victim was another fifthgrader,” Mike said. “A classmate of the Feury boy. He was found just off Kansas Street, near where Bill used to hide his bike when we were in the Barrens. His name was Jerry Bellwood. He was torn apart. What… what was left of him was found at the foot of a cement retaining wall that was put in along most of Kansas Street about twenty years ago to stop the soil erosion. This police photograph of the section of that wall where Bellwood was found was taken less than half an hour after the body was removed. Here.”

He passed the picture to Rich Tozier, who looked and passed it on to Beverly. She glanced at it briefly, winced, and passed it on to Eddie, who gazed at it long and raptly before handing it on to Ben. Ben passed it to Bill with barely a glance.

Printing straggled its way across the concrete retaining wall. It said:

[image of the handwritten words “COME HOME COME HOME COME HOME"]

Bill looked up at Mike grimly. He had been bewildered and frightened; now he felt the first stirrings of anger. He was glad. Angry was not such a great way to feel, but it was better than the shock, better than the miserable fear. “Is that written in what I think it’s written in?” “Yes,” Mike said. “Jerry Bellwood’s blood.”

 

5

RICHIE GETS BEEPED

 

Mike had taken his photographs back. He had an idea that Bill might ask for the one of George’s last school picture, but Bill did not. He put them in his inside jacket pocket, and when they were out of sight, all of them-Mike included-felt a sense of relief.

“Nine children,” Beverly was saying softly. “I can’t believe it. I mean… I can believe it, but I can’t believe it. Nine kids and nothing? Nothing at all?

“It’s not quite like that,” Mike said. “People are angry, people are scared… or so it seems. It’s really impossible to tell which ones really feel that way and which ones are faking.”

“Faking?

“Beverly, do you remember, when we were kids, the man who just folded his newspaper and went inside his house while you were screaming at him for help?”

For a moment something seemed to jump in her eyes and she looked both terrified and aware. Then she only looked puzzled. “No… when was that, Mike?”

“Never mind. It will come to you in time. All I can say now is that everything iooks the way it should in Derry. Faced with such a grisly string of murders, people are doing all the things you’d expect them to do, and most of them are the same things that went on while kids were disappearing and getting murdered back in ’58. The Save Our Children Committee is meeting again, only this time at Derry Elementary School instead of Derry High. There are sixteen detectives from the State Attorney General’s office in town, and a contingent of FBI agents as well-I don’t know how many, and although Rademacher talks big, I don’t think he does, either. The curfew’s back in effect-”

“Oh yes. The curfew.” Ben was rubbing the side of his neck slowly and deliberately. “That did wonders back in ’58. I remember that much.”

“-and there are Mothers” Walker Groups to make sure that every child who goes to school, grades K through eight, is chaperoned home. The News has gotten over two thousand letters demanding a solution in the last three weeks alone. And, of course, the out-migration has begun again. I sometimes think that’s the only way to really tell who’s sincere about wanting it stopped and who isn’t. The really sincere ones get scared and leave.”

“People really are leaving?” Richie asked.

“It happens each time the cycle cranks up again. It’s impossible to tell just how many go, because the cycle hasn’t fallen squarely in a census year since 1850 or so. But it’s a fairish number. They run like kids who just found out the house was haunted for real after all.”

“Come home, come home, come home,” Beverly said softly. When she looked up from her hands it was Bill she looked at, not Mike. “It wanted us to come back. Why?”

“It may want us all back,” Mike said a little cryptically. “sure. It may. It may want revenge. After all, we balked It once before.”

“revenge… or just to set things back in order,” Bill said.

Mike nodded. “Things are out of order with your own lives, too, you know. None of you left Derry untouched… without Its mark on you. All of you forgot what happened here, and your memories of that summer are still only fragmentary. And then there’s the passingly curious fact that you’re all rich.”

“Oh, come on now!” Richie said. “That’s hardly-”

“Be soft, be soft,” Mike said, holding his hand up and smiling faintly. “I’m not accusing you of anything, just trying to get the facts out on the table. You are rich by the standards of a small-town librarian who makes just under eleven grand a year after taxes, okay?”

Rich shrugged the shoulders of his expensive suit uncomfortably. Ben appeared deeply absorbed in tearing small strips from the edge of his napkin. No one was looking directly at Mike except Bill.

“None of you are in the H. L. Hunt class, certainly,” Mike said, “but you are all well-to-do even by the standards of the American upper-middle class. We’re all friends here, so fess up: if there’s one of you who declared less than ninety thousand dollars on his or her 1984 tax return, raise your hand.”

They glanced around at each other almost furtively, embarrassed, as Americans always seem to be, by the raw fact of their own success-as if cash were hardcooked eggs and affluence the farts that inevitably follow an overdose of same. Bill felt hot blood in his cheeks and was helpless to stop its rise. He had been paid ten thousand more than the sum Mike had mentioned just for doing the first draft of the Attic Room screenplay. He had been promised an additional twenty thousand dollars each for two rewrites, if needed. Then there were royalties… and the hefty advance on a two-book contract just signed… how much had he declared on his ’84 tax return? Just about eight hundred thousand dollars, right? Enough, anyway, to seem almost monstrous in light of Mike Hanlon’s stated income of just under eleven thousand a year.

So that’s how much they pay you to keep the lighthouse, Mike old kid, Bill thought. Jesus Christ, somewhere along the line you should have asked for a raise!

Mike said: “Bill Denbrough, a successful novelist in a society where there are only a few novelists and fewer still lucky enough to be making a living from the craft. Beverly Rogan, who’s in the rag trade, a field to which more are called but even fewer chosen. She is, in fact, the most sought-after designer in the middle third of the country right now.”

“Oh, it’s not me,” Beverly said. She uttered a nervous little laugh and lit a fresh cigarette from the smoldering stub of the old one. “It’s Tom. Tom’s the one. Without him I’d still be relining skirts and sewing up hems. I don’t have any business sense at all, even Tom says so. It’s just… you know, Tom. And luck.” She took a single deep drag from her cigarette and then snuffed it.

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Richie said slyly.

She turned quickly in her seat and gave him a hard look, her color high. “Just what’s that supposed to mean, Richie Tozier?”

“Doan hits me, Miz Scawlett!” Richie cried in a high, trembling Pickaninny Voice-and in that moment Bill could see with an eerie clarity the boy he had known; he was not just a superseded presence lurking under Rich Tozier’s grownup exterior but a creature almost more real than the man himself. “doan hits me! Lemme bring you anothuh mint joolip, Miz Scawlett! Youse goan drink hit out on de po’ch where it’s be a little bit cooluh! Doan whup disyere boy!”

“You’re impossible, Richie,” Beverly said coldly. “You ought to grow up.”

Richie looked at her, his grin fading slowly into uncertainty. “Until I came back here,” he said, “I thought I had.”

“Rich, you may just be the most successful disc jockey in the United States,” Mike said. “You’ve certainly got LA in the palm of your hand. On top of that there are two syndicated programs, one of them a straight top-forty countdown show, the other one something called The Freaky Forty -

’You better watch out, fool,” Richie said in a gruff Mr T Voice, but he was blushing. “I’ll make your front and back change places. I’ll give you brain-surgery with my fist. I’ll-”

“Eddie,” Mike went on, ignoring Richie, “you’ve got a healthy limousine service in a city where you just about have to elbow long black cars out of your way when you cross the street. Two limo companies a week go smash in the Big Apple, but you’re doing fine.

“Ben, you’re probably the most successful young architect in the world.”

Ben opened his mouth, probably to protest, and then closed it again abruptly.

Mike smiled at them, spread his hands. “I don’t want to embarrass anyone, but I do want all the cards on the table. There are people who succeed young, and there are people who succeed in highly specialized jobs-if there weren’t people who bucked the odds successfully, I guess everybody would give up. If it was just one or two of you, we could pass it off as coincidence. But it’s not just one or two; it’s all of you, and that includes Stan Uris, who was the most successful young accountant in Atlanta… which means in the whole South. My conclusion is that your success stems from what happened here twenty-seven years ago. If you had all been exposed to asbestos at that time and had all developed lung cancer by now, the correlative would be no less clear or persuasive. Do any of you want to dispute it?”

He looked at them. No one answered.

“All except you,” Bill said. “What happened to you, Mikey?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” He grinned. “I stayed here.”

“You kept the lighthouse,” Ben said. Bill jerked around and looked at him, startled, but Ben was staring hard at Mike and didn’t see. “That doesn’t make me feel so good, Mike. In fact, it makes me feel sort of like a bugturd.”

“Amen,” Beverly said.

Mike shook his head patiently. “You have nothing to feel guilty about, any of you. Do. you think it was my choice to stay here, any more than it was your choice-any of you-to leave? Hell, we were kids. For one reason or another your parents moved away, and you guys were part of the baggage they took along. My parents stayed. And was it really their decision-any of them) I don’t think so. How was it decided who would go and who would stay? Was it luck? Fate? It? Some Other? I don’t know. But it wasn’t us guys. So quit it.”

“You’re not… not bitter?” Eddie asked timidly.

“I’ve been too busy to be bitter,” Mike said. “I’ve spent a long time watching and waiting… I was watching and waiting even before I knew it, I think, but for the last five years or so I’ve been on what you might call red alert. Since the turn of the year I’ve been keeping a journal. And when a man writes, he thinks harder… or maybe just more specifically. And one of the things I’ve spent time writing and thinking about is the nature of It. It changes; we know that. I think It also manipulates, and leaves Its marks on people just by the nature of what It is-the way you can smell a skunk on you even after a long bath, if it lets go its bag of scent too near you. The way a grasshopper will spit bug juice into your palm if you catch it in your hand.”

Mike slowly unbuttoned his shirt and spread it wide. They could all see the pinkish scrawls of scar across the smooth brown skin of his chest between the nipples.

“The way claws leave scars,” he said.

“The werewolf,” Richie almost moaned. “Oh Christ, Big Bill, the werewolf! When we went back to Neibolt Street!”

“What?” Bill asked. He sounded like a man called out of a dream. “What, Richie?”

“Don’t you remember?

“No… do you?”

“I… I almost do… ” Looking both confused and scared, Richie subsided.

“Are you saying this thing isn’t evil?” Eddie asked Mike abruptly. He was staring at the scars as if hypnotized. “That it’s just some part of the… the natural order?”

“It’s no part of a natural order we understand or condone,” Mike said, rebuttoning his shirt, “and I see no reason to operate on any other basis than the one we do understand: that It kills, kills children, and that’s wrong. Bill understood that before any of us. Do you remember, Bill?”

“I remember that I wanted to kill It,” Bill said, and for the first time (and ever after) he heard the pronoun gain proper-noun status in his own voice. “But I didn’t have much of a world-view on the subject, if you see what I mean-I just wanted to kill It because It killed George.”

“And do you still?”

Bill considered this carefully. He looked down at his spread hands on the table and remembered George in his yellow slicker, his hood up, the paper boat with its thin glaze of paraffin in one hand. He looked up at Mike.

“M-M-More than ever,” he said.

Mike nodded as if this were exactly what he had expected. “It left Its mark on us. It worked Its will on us, just as It has worked Its will on this whole town, day in and day out, even during those long periods when It is asleep or hibernating or whatever It does between Its more… more lively periods.”

Mike raised one finger.

“But if It worked Its will on us, at some point, in some way, we aho worked our will on It. We stopped It before It was done-I know we did. Did we weaken It? Hurt It? Did we, in fact, almost kill It? I think we did. I think we came so close to killing It that we went away thinking we had.”

“But you don’t remember that part either, do you?” Ben asked.

“No. I can remember everything up until August 15th 1958 with almost perfect clarity. But from then until September 4th or so, when school was called in again, everything is a total blank. It isn’t murky or hazy; it is just completely gone. With one exception: I seem to remember Bill screaming about something called the dead-lights.”

Bill’s arm jerked convulsively. It struck one of his empty beer bottles, and the bottle shattered on the floor like a bomb.

“Did you cut yourself?” Beverly asked. She had half-risen.

“No,” he said. His voice was harsh and dry. His arms had broken out in gooseflesh. It seemed that his skull had somehow grown; he could feel

(the deadlights)

it pressing out against the stretched skin of his face in steady numbing throbs.

“I’ll pick up the-”

“No, just sit down.” He wanted to look at her and couldn’t. He couldn’t take

his eyes off Mike.

“Do you remember the deadlights, Bill?” Mike asked softly.

“No,” he said. His mouth felt the way it did when the dentist got a little too enthusiastic with the novocaine.

“You will.”

“I hope to God I don’t.”

“You will anyway,” Mike said. “But for now… no. Not me, either. Do any of you?”

One by one they shook their heads.

“But we did something,” Mike said quietly. “At some point we were able to exercise some sort of group will. At some point we achieved some special understanding, whether conscious or unconscious.” He stirred restlessly. “God, [wish Stan was here. I have a feeling that Stan, with his ordered mind, might have had some idea.”

“Maybe he did,” Beverly said. “Maybe that’s why he killed himself. Maybe he understood that if there was magic, it wouldn’t work for grown-ups.”

“I think it could, though,” Mike said. “Because there’s one other thing we six have in common. I wonder if any of you have realized what that is.”

It was Bill’s turn to open his mouth and then shut it again.

“Go on,” Mike said. “You know what it is. I can see it on your face.”

“I’m not sure I know,” Bill replied, “but I think w-we’re all childless. Is that ih-it?”

There was a moment of shocked silence.

“Yeah,” Mike said. “That’s it.”

“Jesus Christ Almighty!” Eddie spoke up indignantly. “What in the world does that have to do with the price of beans in Peru? What gave you the idea that everyone in the world has to have kids? That’s nuts!”

“Do you and your wife have children?” Mike asked.

“If you’ve been keeping track of us all the way you said, then you know goddam well we don’t. But I still say it doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

“Have you tried to have children?”

“We don’t use birth control, if that’s what you mean.” Eddie spoke with an oddly moving dignity, but his cheeks were flushed. “It just so happens that my wife is a little… Oh hell. She’s a lot overweight. We went to see a doctor and she told us my wife might never have kids if she didn’t lose some weight. Does that make us criminals?”

“Take it easy, Eds,” Richie soothed, and leaned toward him.

“Don’t call me Eds and don’t you dare pinch my cheek!” he cried, rounding on Richie. “You know I hate that! I always hated it!”

Richie recoiled, blinking.

“Beverly?” Mike asked. “What about you and Tom?”

“No children,” she said. “Also no birth control. Tom wants kids… and so do I, of course,” she added hastily, glancing around at them quickly. Bill thought her eyes seemed overbright, almost the eyes of an actress giving a good performance. “It just hasn’t happened yet.”

“Have you had those tests?” Ben asked her.

“Oh yes, of course,” she said, and uttered a light laugh that was almost a titter. And in one of those leaps of comprehension that sometimes come to people who are gifted with both curiosity and insight, Bill suddenly understood a great deal about Beverly and her husband Tom, alias the Greatest Man in the World. Beverly had gone to have fertility tests. His guess was that the Greatest Man in the World had refused to entertain even for a moment the notion that there might be something wrong with the sperm being manufactured in the Sacred Sacs.

“What about you and your wife, Big Bill?” Rich asked. “Been trying?” They all looked at him curiously… because his wife was someone they knew. Audra was by no means the best-known or the best-loved actress in the world, but she was certainly part of the celebrity coinage that had somehow replaced talent as a medium of exchange in the latter half of the twentieth century; there had been a picture of her in People magazine when she cut her hair short, and during a particularly boring stretch in New York (the play she had been planning to do Off Broadway fell through) she had done a week-long stint on Holly wood Squares, over her agent’s strenuous objections. She was a stranger whose lovely face was known to them. He thought Beverly looked particularly curious.

“We’ve been trying off and on for the last six years,” Bill said. “For the last eight months or so it’s been off, because of the movie we were doing-Attic Room, it’s called.”

“You know, we run a little entertainment syndic every day from five-fifteen in the afternoon until five-thirty,” Richie said. “seein” Stars, it’s called. They had a feature on that damned movie just last week-Husband and Wife Working Happily Together kind of thing. They said both of your names and I never made the connection. Funny, isn’t it?”

“Very,” Bill said. “Anyway, Audra said it would be just our luck if she caught pregnant while we were in preproduction and she had to do ten weeks of strenuous acting and being morning-sick at the same time. But we want kids, yes. And we’ve tried quite hard.” “Had fertility tests?” Ben asked.

“Uh-huh. Four years ago, in New York. The doctors discovered a very small benign tumor in Audra’s womb, and they said it was a lucky thing because, although it wouldn’t have prevented her from getting pregnant, it might have caused a tubal pregnancy. She and I are both fertile, though.”

Eddie repeated stubbornly, “It doesn’t prove a goddam thing.”

“Suggestive, though,” Ben murmured.

“No little accidents on your front, Ben?” Bill asked. He was shocked and amused to find that his mouth had very nearly called Ben Haystack instead.

“I’ve never been married, I’ve always been careful, and there have been no paternity suits,” Ben said. “Beyond that I don’t think there’s any real way of telling.”

“You want to hear a funny story?” Richie asked. He was smiling, but there was no smile in his eyes.

“Sure,” Bill said. “You were always good at the funny stuff, Richie.”

“Your face and me own buttocks, boyo,” Richie said in the Irish Cop’s Voice. It was a great Irish Cop’s Voice. You’ve improved out of all measure, Richie, Bill thought. As a kid, you couldn’t do an Irish Cop no matter how you busted your brains. Except once… or twice… when

(the deadlights)

was that?

“Your face and me own buttocks; just keep rememb “rin that com-pay-ri-son, me foine bucko.”

Ben Hanscom suddenly held his nose and cried in a high quavering boyish voice: “Beep-beep, Richie! Beep-beep! Beep-beep!”

After a moment, laughing, Eddie held his own nose and joined in. Beverly did the same.

“Awright! Awright!” Richie cried, laughing himself. “Awright, I give up! Chrissake!”

“Oh man,” Eddie said. He collapsed back in his chair, laughing so hard he was almost crying. “We gotcha that time, Trashmouth. Way to go, Ben.”

Ben was smiling but he looked a little bewildered.

“Beep-beep,” Bev said, and giggled. “I forgot all about that. We always used to beep you, Richie.”

“You guys never appreciated true talent, that’s all,” Richie said comfortably. As in the old days, you could knock him off-balance, but he was like one of those inflatable Joe Palooka dolls with sand in the base-he floated upright again almost at once. “That was one of your little contributions to the Losers” Club, wasn’t it, Haystack?”

“Yeah, I guess it was.”

“What a man!” Richie said in a trembling, awestruck voice and then began to salaam over the table, nearly sticking his nose in his tea-cup each time he went down. “What a man! Oh chillun, what a man!”

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Ben said solemnly, and then exploded laughter in a hearty baritone utterly unlike his wavering childhood voice. “You’re the same old roadrunner.”

You guys want to hear this story or not?” Richie asked. “I mean, no big deal one way or the other. Beep away if you want to. I can take abuse. I mean, you’re looking at a man who once did an interview with Ozzy Osbourne.”

“Tell it,” Bill said. He glanced over at Mike and saw that Mike looked happier-or more at rest-since the luncheon had begun. Was it because he saw the almost unconscious knitting-together that was happening, the sort of easy falling-back into old roles that almost never happened when old chums got together? Bill thought so. And he thought, If there are certain preconditions for the belief in magic that makes it possible to use the magic, then maybe those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves. It was not a very comforting thought. It made him feel like a man strapped to the nosecone of a guided missile.

Beep-beep indeed.

“Well,” Richie was saying, “I could make this long and sad or I could give you the Blondie and Dagwood comic-strip version, but I’ll settle for something in the middle. The year after I moved out to California I met a girl, and we fell pretty hard for each other. Started living together. She was on the pill at first, but it made her feel sick almost all the time. She talked about getting an IUD, but I wasn’t too crazy about that-the first stories about how they might not be completely safe were just starting to come out in the papers.

“We had talked a lot about kids, and had pretty well decided we didn’t want them even if we decided to legalize the relationship. Irresponsible to bring kids into such a shitty, dangerous, overpopulated world… and blah-blah-blah, babble-babble-babble, let’s go out and put a bomb in the men’s room of the Bank of America and then come on back to the crashpad and smoke some dope and talk about the difference between Maoism and Trotskyism, if you see what I mean.

“Or maybe I’m being too hard on both of us. Shit, we were young and reasonably idealistic. The upshot was that I got my wires cut, as the Beverly Hills crowd puts it with their unfailing vulgar chic. The operation went with no problem and I had no adverse aftereffects. There can be, you know. I had a friend whose balls swelled up to roughly the size of the tires on a 1959 Cadillac. I was gonna give him a pair of suspenders and a couple of barrels for his birthday-sort of a designer truss-but they went down before then.”

“All put with your customary tact and dignity,” Bill remarked, and Beverly began to laugh again.

Richie offered a large, sincere smile. “Thank you, Bill, for those words of support. The word “fuck” was used two hundred and six times in your last book. I counted.”

“Beep-beep, Trashmouth,” Bill said solemnly, and they all laughed. Bill found it nearly impossible to believe they had been talking about dead children less than ten minutes ago.

“Press onward, Richie,” Ben said. “The hour groweth late.”

“Sandy and I lived together for two and a half years,” Richie went on. “Came really close to getting married twice. As things turned out, I guess we saved ourselves a lot of heartache and all that community-property bullshit by keeping it simple. She got an offer to join a corporate law-firm in Washington around the same time I got an offer to come to KLAD as a weekend jock-not much, but a foot in the door. She told me it was her big chance and I had to be the most insensitive male chauvinist oinker in the United States to be dragging my feet, and furthermore she’d had it with California anyway. I told her I also had a chance. So we thrashed it out, and we trashed each other out, and at the end of all the thrashing and trashing Sandy went.

“About a year after that I decided to try and get the vasectomy reversed. No real reason for it, and I knew from the stuff I’d read that the chances were pretty spotty, but I thought what the hell.”

“You were seeing someone steadily then?” Bill asked.

“No-that’s the funny part of it,” Richie said, frowning. “I just woke up one day with this… I dunno, this hobbyhorse about getting it reversed.”

“You must have been nuts,” Eddie said. “General anesthetic instead of a local? Surgery? Maybe a week in the hospital afterward?”

“Yeah, the doctor told me all of that stuff,” Richie replied. “And I told him I wanted to go ahead anyway. I don’t know why. The doc asked me if I understood the aftermath of the operation was sure to be painful while the result was only going to be a coin-toss at best. I said I did. He said okay, and I asked him when-my attitude being the sooner the better, you know. So he says hold your horses, son, hold your horses, the first step is to get a sperm sample just to make sure the reversal operation is necessary. I said, “Come on, I had the exam after the vasectomy. It worked.” He told me that sometimes the vasa reconnected spontaneously. “Yo mamma!” I says. “Nobody ever told me that.” He said the chances were very small-infinitesimal, really-but because the operation was so serious, we ought to check it out. So I popped into the men’s room with a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue and jerked off into a Dixie cup-”

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Beverly said.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Richie said. “The part about the Frederick’s catalogue is a lie-you never find anything that good in a doctor’s office. Anyway, the doc called me three days later and asked me which I wanted first, the good news or the bad news.

“Gimme the good news first,” I said.

“The good news is the operation won’t be necessary,” he said. “The bad news is that anybody you’ve been to bed with over the last two or three years could hit you with a paternity suit pretty much at will.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” I asked him.

“I’m telling you that you aren’t shooting blanks and haven’t been for quite awhile now,” he said. “Millions of little wigglies in your sperm sample. Your days of going gaily in bareback with no questions asked have temporarily come to an end, Richard.

“I thanked him and hung up. Then I called Sandy in Washington.

“Rich!” she says to me,” and Richie’s voice suddenly became the voice of this girl Sandy whom none of them had ever met. It was not an imitation or even a likeness, exactly; it was more like an auditory painting. ” “It’s great to hear from you! I got married!”

“Yeah, that’s great,” I said. “You should have let me know. I would have sent you a blender.”

“She goes, “Same old Richie, always full of gags.”

“So I said “Sure, same old Richie, always full of gags. By the way, Sandy, you didn’t happen to have a kid or anything after you left LA, did you? Or maybe an unscheduled d and c, or something?”

“That gag isn’t so funny, Rich,” she said, and I had a brainwave that she was getting ready to hang up on me, so I told her what happened. She started laughing, only this time it was real hard-she was laughing the way I always used to laugh with you guys, like somebody had told her the world’s biggest bellybuster. So when she finally starts slowing down I ask her what in God’s name is funny. “It’s just so wonderful,” she said. “This time the joke’s on you. After all these years the joke is finally on Records Tozier. How many bastards have you sired since I came east, Rich?”

“I take it that means you still haven’t experienced the joys of motherhood?” I ask her.

“I’m due in July,” she says. “Were there any more questions?”

“Yeah,” I go. “When did you change your mind about the immorality of bringing children into such a shitty world?”

“When I finally met a man who wasn’t a shit,” she answers, and hangs up.”

Bill began to laugh. He laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. “Yeah,” Richie said. “I think she cut it off quick so she’d really get the last word, but she could have hung on the line all day. I know when I’ve been aced. I went back to the doctor a week later and asked him if he could be a little clearer on the odds against that sort of spontaneous regeneration. He said he’d talked with some of his colleagues about the matter. It turned out that in the three-year period 1980-82, the California branch of the AMA logged twenty-three reports of spontaneous regeneration. Six of those turned out to be simply botched operations. Six others were either hoaxes or cons-guys looking to take a bite out of some doctor’s bank account. So… eleven real ones in three years.”

“Eleven out of how many?” Beverly asked.

“Twenty-eight thousand six hundred and eighteen,” Richie said calmly.

Silence around the table.

“So I went and beat Irish Sweepstakes odds,” Richie said, “and still no kid to show for it. That give you any good chucks, Eds?”

Eddie began stubbornly: “It still doesn’t prove-”

“No,” Bill said, “it doesn’t prove a thing. But it certainly suggests a link. The question is, what do we do now? Have you thought about that, Mike?”

“I’ve thought about it, sure,” Mike said, “but it was impossible to decide anything until you all got together again and talked, the way you’ve been doing. There was no way I could predict how this reunion would go until it actually happened.”

He paused for a long time, looking thoughtfully at them.

“I’ve got one idea,” he said, “but before I tell you what it is, I think we have to agree on whether or not we have business to do here. Do we want to try again to do what we tried to do once before? Do we want to try to kill It again? Or do we just divide the check up six ways and go back to what we were doing?”

“It seems as if-” Beverly began, but Mike shook his head at her. He wasn’t done.

“You have to understand that our chances of success are impossible to predict. I know they’re not good, just as I know they would have been a little better if Stan was here, too. Still not real good, but better. With Stan gone, the circle we made that day is broken. I don’t really think we can destroy Itf or even send It away for a little while, as we did before, with a broken circle. I think It will kill us, one by one by one, and probably in some extremely horrible ways. As children we made a complete circle in some way I don’t understand even now. I think that, if we agree to go ahead, we’ll have to try to form a smaller circle. I don’t know if that can be done. I believe it might be possible to think we’d done it, only to discover-when it was too late-well… that it was too late.”

Mike regarded them again, eyes sunken and tired in his brown face. “so I think we need to take a vote. Stay and try it again, or go home. Those are the choices. I got you here on the strength of an old promise I wasn’t even sure you’d remember, but I can’t hold you here on the strength of that promise. The results of that would be worse and more of it.”

He looked at Bill, and in that moment Bill understood what was coming. He dreaded it, was helpless to stop it, and then, with the same feeling of relief he imagined must come to a suicide when he takes his hands off the wheel of the speeding car and simply uses them to cover his eyes, he accepted it. Mike had gotten them here, Mike had laid it all neatly out for them… and now he was relinquishing the mantle of leadership. He intended that mantle to go back to the person who had worn it in 1958.

“What do you say, Big Bill? Call the question.”

“Before I do,” Bill said, “d-does everyone understand the question? You were going to say something, Bev.”

She shook her head.

“All right; I g-guess the question is, do we stay and fight or do we forget the whole thing? Those in favor of staying?”

No one at the table moved at all for perhaps five seconds, and Bill was reminded of auctions he had attended where the price on an item suddenly soared into the stratosphere and those who didn’t want to bid anymore almost literally played statues; one was afraid to scratch an itch or wave a fly off the end of one’s nose for fear the auctioneer would take it for another five grand or twenty-five.

Bill thought of Georgie, Georgie who had meant no one any harm, who had only wanted to get out of the house after being cooped up all week, Georgie with his color high, his newspaper boat in one hand, snapping the buckles of his yellow rainslicker with die other, Georgie thanking him… and then bending over and kissing Bill’s fever-heated cheek: Thanks, Bill. It’s a neat boat.

He felt the old rage rise in him, but he was older now and his perspective was wider. It wasn’t just Georgie now. A horrid slew of names marched through his head: Betty Ripsom, found frozen into the ground, Cheryl Lamonica, fished out of the Kenduskeag, Matthew Clements, torn from his tricycle, Veronica Grogan, nine years old and found in a sewer, Steven Johnson, Lisa Albrecht, all the others, and God only knew how many of the missing.

He raised his hand slowly and said, “Let’s kill It. This time let’s really kill It.”

For a moment his hand hung there alone, like the hand of the only kid in class who knows the right answer, the one all the other kids hate. Then Richie sighed, raised his own hand, and said: “What the hell. It can’t be any worse than interviewing Ozzy Osbourne.”

Beverly raised her hand. Her color was back now, but in hectic patches that flared along her cheekbones. She looked both tremendously excited and scared to death.

Mike raised his hand.

Ben raised his.

Eddie Kaspbrak sat back in his chair, looking as if he wished he could actually melt into it and thus disappear. His face, thin and delicate-looking, was miserably afraid as he looked first right and then left and then back to Bill. For a moment Bill felt sure Eddie was simply going to push back his chair, rise, and bolt from the room without looking back. Then he raised one hand in the air and grasped his aspirator tightly in the other.

“Way to go, Eds,” Richie said. “We’re really gonna have ourselves some chucks this time, I bet.”

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Eddie said in a wavering voice.

 

6

THE LOSERS GET DESSERT

 

“So what’s your one idea, Mike?” Bill asked. The mood had been broken by Rose, the hostess, who had come in with a dish of fortune cookies. She looked around at the six people who had their hands in the air with a carefully polite lack of curiosity. They lowered them hastily, and no one said anything until Rose was gone again.

“It’s simple enough,” Mike said, “but it might be pretty damn dangerous, too.”

“Spill it,’Richie said.

“I think we ought to split up for the rest of the day. I think each of us ought to go back to the place in Derry he or she remembers best… outside the Barrens, that is. I don’t think any of us should go there-not yet. Think of it as a series of walking-tours, if you like.”

“What’s the purpose, Mike?” Ben asked.

“I’m not entirely sure. You have to understand that I’m going pretty much on intuition here-”

“But this has got a good beat and you can dance to it,” Richie said.

The others smiled. Mike did not; he nodded instead. “That’s as good a way of putting it as any. Going on intuition is like picking up a beat and dancing to it. Using intuition is a hard thing for grownups to do, and that’s the main reason I think it might be the right thing for us to do. Kids, after all, operate on it about eighty percent of the time, at least until they’re fourteen or so.”

“You’re talking about plugging back into the situation,” Eddie said.

“I suppose so. Anyway, that’s my idea. If no specific place to go comes to you, just follow your feet and see where they take you. Then we meet tonight, at the library, and talk over what happened.”

“If anything happens,” Ben said.

“Oh, I think things will.”

“What sort of things?” Bill asked.

Mike shook his head. “I have no idea. I think whatever happens is apt to be unpleasant. I think it’s even possible that one of us may not turn up at the library tonight. No reason for thinking that… except that intuition thing again.”

Silence greeted this.

“Why alone?” Beverly asked finally. “If we’re supposed to do this as a group, why do you want us to start alone, Mike? Especially if the risk really turns out to be as high as you think it might be?”

“I think I can answer that,” Bill said.

“Go ahead, Bill,” Mike said.

“It started alone for each of us,” Bill said to Beverly. “I don’t remember everything-not yet-but I sure remember that much. The picture in George’s room that moved. Ben’s mummy. The leper that Eddie saw under the porch on Neibolt Street. Mike finding the blood on the grass near the Canal in Bassey Park. And the bird… there was something about a bird, wasn’t there, Mike?”

Mike nodded grimly.

“A big bird.”

“Yes, but not as friendly as the one on Sesame Street.”

Richie cackled wildly. “derry’s answer to James Brown Gets Off A Good One! Oh chillun, is we blessed or is we blessed!”

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Mike said, and Richie subsided.

“For you it was the voice from the pipe and the blood that came out of the drain,” Bill said to Beverly. “And for Richie… ” But here he paused, puzzled.

“I must be the exception that proves the rule, Big Bill,” Richie said. “The first time I came in contact with anything that summer that was weird-I mean really big-league weird-was in George’s room, with you. When you and I went back to your house that day and looked at his photo album. The picture of Center Street by the Canal started to move. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” Bill said. “But are you sure there was nothing before that, Richie? Nothing at all?”

“I-” Something flickered in Richie’s eyes. He said slowly, “Well, there was the day Henry and his friends chased me-before the end of school, this was, and I got away from them in the toy department of Freese’s. I went up by City Center and sat down on a park bench for awhile and I thought I saw… but that was just something I dreamed.”

“What was it?” Beverly asked.

“Nothing,” Richie said, almost brusquely. “A dream. Really.” He looked at Mike. “I don’t mind taking a walk, though. It’ll kill the afternoon. Views of the old homestead.”

“So we’re agreed?” Bill asked.

They nodded.

“And we’ll meet at the library tonight at… when do you suggest, Mike?”

“Seven o’clock. Ring the bell if you’re late. The libe closes at seven on weekdays until summer vacation starts for the kids.”

“Seven it is,” Bill said, and let his eyes range soberly over them. “And be careful. You want to remember that none of us really knows what we’re d-d-doing. Think of this as reconnaissance. If you should see something, don’t fight. Run.”

“I’m a lover, not a fighter,” Richie said in a dreamy Michael Jackson Voice.

“Well, if we’re going to do it, we ought to get going,” Ben said. A small smile pulled up the left corner of his mouth. It was more bitter than amused. “Although I’ll be damned if I could tell you right this minute where I’m going to go, if the Barrens are out. That was the best of it for me-going down there with you guys.” His eyes moved to Beverly, held there for a moment, moved away. “I can’t think of anyplace else that means very much to me. Probably I’ll just wander around for a couple of hours, looking at buildings and getting wet feet.”

“You’ll find a place to go, Haystack,” Richie said. “Visit some of your old food-stops and gas up.”

Ben laughed. “My capacity’s gone down a lot since I was eleven. I’m so full

you guys may just have to roll me out of here.”

“Well, I’m all set,” Eddie said.

“Wait a sec!” Beverly cried as they began to push back from their chairs. “The fortune cookies! Don’t forget those!”

“Yeah,” Richie said. “I can see mine now. YOU WILL SOON BE EATEN UP BY A LARGE MONSTER. HAVE A NICE DAY.”

They laughed and Mike passed the little bowl of fortune cookies to Richie, who took one and then sent it on around the table. Bill noticed that no one opened his or her cookie until each had one; they sat with the little hat-shaped cookies either in front of them or held in their hands, and even as Beverly, still smiling, picked hers up, Bill felt a cry rising in his throat: No! No, don’t do that, its part of it, put it back, don’t open it!

But it was too late. Beverly had broken hers open, Ben was doing the same to his, Eddie was cutting into his with the edge of his fork, and just before Beverly’s smile turned to a grimace of horror Bill had time to think: We knew, somehow we knew, because no one simply bit into his or her fortune cookie. That would have been the normal thing to do, but no one did it. Somehow, some pan of us still remembers… everything.

And he found that insensate underknowledge somehow the most horrifying realization of all; it spoke more eloquently than Mike could have about how surely and deeply It had touched each one of them… and how Its touch was still upon them.

Blood spurted up from Beverly’s fortune cookie as if from a slashed artery. It splashed across her hand and then gouted onto the white napery which covered the table, staining it a bright red that sank in and then spread out in grasping pink fingers.

Eddie Kaspbrak uttered a strangled cry and pushed himself away from the table with such a sudden revolted confusion of arms and legs that his chair nearly tipped over. A huge bug, its chitinous carapace an ugly yellow-brown, was pushing its way out of his fortune cookie as if from a cocoon. Its obsidian eyes stared blindly forward. As it lurched onto Eddie’s bread-and-butter plate, cookie crumbs fell from its back in a little shower that Bill heard clearly and which came back to haunt his dreams when he slept for awhile later that afternoon. As it freed itself entirely it rubbed its thin rear legs together, producing a dry reedy hum, and Bill realized it was some sort of terribly mutated cricket. It lumbered to the edge of the dish and tumbled onto the tablecloth on its back.

“Oh God!” Richie managed in a choked voice. “Oh God Big Bill it’s an eye dear God it’s an eye a fucking eye -

Bill’s head snapped around and he saw Richie staring down at his fortune cookie, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a kind of sickened leer. A chunk of his cookie’s glazed surface had fallen onto the tablecloth, revealing a hole from which a human eyeball stared with glazed intensity. Cookie crumbs were scattered across its blank brown iris and embedded in its sclera.

Ben Hanscom threw his-not a calculated throw but the startled reaction of a person who has been utterly surprised by some piece of nasty work. As his fortune cookie rolled across the table Bill saw two teeth inside its hollow, their roots dark with clotted blood. They raided together like seeds in a hollow gourd.

He looked back at Beverly and saw she was hitching in breath to scream. Her eyes were fixed on the thing that had crawled out of Eddie’s cookie, the thing that was now kicking its sluggish legs as it lay overturned on the tablecloth.

Bill got moving. He was not thinking, only reacting. Intuition, he thought crazily as he lunged out of his seat and clapped his hand over Beverly’s mouth just before she could utter the scream. Here I am, acting on intuition. Mike should be proud of me.

What came out of Beverly’s mouth was not a scream but a strangled “Mmmmph!”

Eddie was making those whistling sounds that Bill remembered so well. No problem there, a good honk on the old lung-sucker would set Eddie right. Right as a trivet, Freddie Firestone would have said, and Bill wondered-not for the first time-why a person had such weird thoughts at times like these.

He glanced around fiercely at the others, and what came out was something else from that summer, something that sounded both impossibly archaic and exactly right: “dummy up! All of you! Not one sound! Just dummy up!”

Rich wiped a hand across his mouth. Mike’s complexion had gone a dirty gray, but he nodded at Bill. All of them moved away from the table. Bill had not opened his own fortune cookie, but now he could see its sides moving slowly in and out-bulge and relax, bulge and relax, bulge and relax-as his own party-favor tried to escape.

“Mmmmmph!” Beverly said against his hand again, her breath tickling his palm.

“Dummy up, Bev,” he said, and took his hand away.

Her face seemed to be all eyes. Her mouth twitched. “Bill… Bill, did you see… ” Her eyes strayed back to the cricket and then fixed there. The cricket appeared to be dying. Its rugose eyes stared back at her, and presently Beverly began to moan.

“Quh-Quh-Quit that,” he said grimly. “Pull back to the table.”

“I can’t, Billy, I can’t get near that thi-”

“You can! You h-have to!” He heard footsteps, light and quick, coming up the short hall on the other side of the beaded curtain. He looked around at the others. “All of you! Pull up to the table! Talk! Look natural!”

Beverly looked at him, eyes pleading, and Bill shook his head. He sat down and pulled his chair in, trying not to look at the fortune cookie on his plate. It had swelled like some unimaginable boil which was filling with pus. And still it pulsed slowly in and out. I could have bitten into that, he thought faintly.

Eddie triggered his aspirator down his throat again, gasping mist into his lungs in a long, thin screaming sound.

“So who do you think’s going to win the pennant?” Bill asked Mike, smiling insanely. Rose came through the curtain just then, her face politely questioning. Out of the corner of his eye Bill saw that Bev had pulled up to the table again. Good girl, he thought.

“I think the Chicago Bears look good,” Mike said.

“Everything is all right?” Rose asked.

“F-Fine,” Bill said. He cocked a thumb in Eddie’s direction. “Our friend had an asthma attack. He took his medication. He’s better now.”

Rose looked at Eddie, concerned.

“Better,” Eddie wheezed.

“You would like that I clear now?”

“Very shortly,” Mike said, and offered a large false smile.

“Was good?” Her eyes surveyed the table again, a bit of doubt overlaying a deep well of serenity. She did not see the cricket, the eye, the teeth, or the way Bill’s fortune cookie appeared to be breathing. Her eye similarly passed over the bloodstain splotched on the tablecloth without trouble.

“Everything was very good,” Beverly said, and smiled-a more natural smile than either Bill’s or Mike’s. It seemed to set Rose’s mind at rest, convinced her that if something had gone wrong in here, it had been the fault of neither Rose’s service nor her kitchen. Girl’s got a lot of guts, Bill thought.

“Fortunes were good?” Rose asked.

“Well,” Richie said, “I don’t know about the others, but I for one got a real eyeful.”

Bill heard a minute cracking sound. He looked down at his plate and saw a leg poking blindly out of his fortune cookie. It scraped at his plate.

I could have bitten into that, he thought again, but held onto his smile. “Very fine,” he said.

Richie was looking at Bill’s plate. A great grayish-black fly was slowing birthing itself from the collapsing remains of his cookie. It buzzed weakly. Yellowish goo flowed sluggishly out of the cookie and puddled on the tablecloth. There was a smell now, the bland thick smell of an infected wound.

“Well, if I can help you in no way at this moment…”

“Not right now,” Ben said. “A wonderful meal. Most… most unusual.”

“I leave you then,” she said, and bowed out through the beaded curtain. The beads were still swaying and clacking together when all of them pushed away from the table again.

“What is it?” Ben asked huskily, looking at the thing on Bill’s plate.

“A fly,” Bill said. “A mutant fly. Courtesy of a writer named George Langla-han, I think. He wrote a story called “The Fly.” A movie was made out of it-not a terribly good one. But the story scared the bejesus out of me. It’s up to Its old tricks, all right. That fly business has been on my mind a lot lately, because I’ve sort of been planning this novel-Roadbugs, I’ve been thinking of calling it. I know the title sounds p-pretty stupid, but you see-”

“Excuse me,” Beverly said distantly. “I have to vomit, I think.”

She was gone before any of the men could rise.

Bill shook out his napkin and threw it over the fly, which was the size of a baby sparrow. Nothing so large could have come from something as small as a Chinese fortune cookie… but it had. It buzzed twice under the napkin and then fell silent.

“Jesus,” Eddie said faintly.

“Let’s get the righteous fuck out of here,” Mike said. “We can meet Bev in the lobby.”

Beverly was just coming out of the women’s room as they gathered by the cash register. She looked pale but composed. Mike paid the check, kissed Rose’s cheek, and then they all went out into the rainy afternoon.

“Does this change anyone’s mind?” Mike asked.

“I don’t think it changes mine,’Ben said.

“No,” Eddie said.

“What mind?” Richie said.

Bill shook his head and then looked at Beverly.

“I’m staying,” she said. “Bill, what did you mean when you said It’s up to Its old tricks?”

“I’ve been thinking about writing a bug story,” he said. “That Langlahan story had woven itself into my thinking. And so I saw a fly. Yours was blood, Beverly. Why was blood on your mind?”

“I guess because of the blood from the drain,” Beverly said at once. “The blood that came out of the bathroom drain in the old place, when I was eleven.” But was that really it? She didn’t really think so. Because what had flashed immediately to mind when the blood spurted across her fingers in a warm little jet had been the bloody footprint she had left behind her after stepping on the broken perfume bottle. Tom. And

(Bevvie sometimes I worry a lot)

her father.

“You got a bug, too,” Bill said to Eddie. “Why?”

“Not just a bug,” Eddie said. “A cricket. There are crickets in our basement. Two-hundred-thousand-dollar house and we can’t get rid of the crickets. They drive us crazy at night. A couple of nights before Mike called, I had a really terrible nightmare. I dreamed I woke up and my bed was full of crickets. I was trying to shoot them with my aspirator, but all it would do when I squeezed it was make crackling noises, and just before I woke up I realized it was full of crickets, too.”

“The hostess didn’t see any of it,” Ben said. He looked at Beverly. “Like your folks never saw the blood that came out of the drain, even though it was everywhere.”

“Yes,” she said.

They stood looking at each other in the fine spring rain.

Mike looked at his watch. “There’ll be a bus in twenty minutes or so,” he said, “or I can take four of you in my car, if we cram. Or I can call some cabs. Whatever way you want to do it.”

“I think I’m going to walk from here,” Bill said. “I don’t know where I’m going, but a little fresh air seems like a great idea along about now.”

“I’m going to call a cab,” Ben said.

“I’ll share it with you, if you’ll drop me off downtown,” Richie said.

“Okay. Where you going?”

Richie shrugged.’Not really sure yet.”

The others elected to wait for the bus.

“Seven tonight,” Mike reminded. “And be careful, all of you.” They agreed to be careful, although Bill did not know how you could truthfully make a promise like that when dealing with such a formidable array of unknown factors.

He started to say so, then looked at their faces and saw that they knew it already.

He walked away instead, raising one hand briefly in farewell. The misty air felt good against his face. The walk back to town would be a long one, but that was all right. He had a lot to think about. He was glad that the reunion was over and the business had begun.

 

 

Chapter 11

WALKING TOURS

 

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