THE DEATH OF PATRICK HOCKSTETTER

 

1

 

When he finishes, Eddie pours himself another drink with a hand not completely steady. He looks at Beverly and says, “You saw It, didn’t you? You saw It take Patrick Hockstetter the day after you all signed my cast.”

The others lean forward.

Beverly pushes her hair back in a reddish cloud. Beneath it her face looks extraordinarily pale. She fumbles a fresh cigarette out of her pack-the last one-and flicks her Bic. She can’t seem to guide the flame to the tip of her cigarette. After a moment Bill holds her wrist lightly but firmly and puts the flame where it’s supposed to go. Beverly looks at him gratefully and exhales a cloud of bluish-gray smoke.

“Yeah,” she says. “I saw that happen.”

She shivers.

“He was cruh-cruh-crazy,” Bill says, and thinks: Just the fact that Henry let a flako like Patrick Hockstetter hang around as that summer wore on… that says something, doesn’t it? Either that Henry was losing some of his charm, some of his attraction, or that Henry’s own craziness had progressed far enough so that the Hockstetter kid seemed okay to him. Both came to the same thing-Henry’s increasing… what? degeneration? Is that the word? Yes, in light of what happened to him, where he ended up, I think it is.

There’s something else to support the idea, too, Bill thinks, but as yet he can only remember it vaguely. He and Richie and Beverly had been down at Tracker Brothers-early August by then, and the summer-school that had kept Henry out of their hair for most of the summer was just about to end-and hadn’t Victor Criss approached them? A very frightened Victor Criss? Yes, that had happened. Things had been rapidly approaching the end by then, and Bill thinks now that every kid in Derry had sensed it-the Losers and Henry’s group most of all. But that had been later.

“Oh yeah you got that right,” Beverly says flatly. “Patrick Hockstetter was crazy. None of the girls would sit in front of him in school. You’d be sitting there, doing your arithmetic or writing a story or a composition, and all at once you’d feel this hand… almost as light as a feather, but warm and sweaty. Meaty.” She swallows, and there is a small click in her throat. The others watch her solemnly from around the table. “You’d feel it on your side, or maybe on your breast. Not that any of us had much in the way of breasts back then. But Patrick didn’t seem to care about that.

“You’d feel that… that touch, and you’d jerk away from it, and turn around, and there Patrick would be, grinning with those big rubbery lips. He had a pencil-box-”

“Full of flies,” Richie says suddenly. “sure. He’d kill em with this green ruler he had and then put em in his pencil-box. I even remember what it looked like-red, with a wavy white plastic cover that slid open and closed.”

Eddie is nodding.

“You’d jerk away and he’d grin and then maybe he’d open his pencil-box so you could see the dead flies inside,” Beverly says. “And the worst thing-the horrible thing-was the way he’d smile and never say anything. Mrs Douglas knew. Greta Bowie told on him, and I think Sally Mueller said something once, too. But… I think Mrs Douglas was scared of him, too.”

Ben has rocked back on the rear legs of his chair, and his hands are laced behind his neck. She still cannot believe how lean he is. “I’m pretty sure you’re right,” he says.

“Wh-What h-happened to h-h-him, Beverly?” Bill asks.

She swallows again, trying to fight off the nightmarish power of what she saw that day in the Barrens, her roller skates tied together and hung over her shoulder, one knee a stinging net of pain from a fall she had taken on Saint Crispin’s Lane, another of the short tree-lined streets that dead-ended where the land fell (and still falls) sharply into the Barrens. She remembers (oh these memories, when they come, are so clear and so powerful) that she was wearing a pair of denim shorts-really too short, they came only to just below the hem of her panties. She had become more conscious of her body over the last year-over the last six months, actually, as it began to curve and become more womanly. The mirror was one reason for this heightened consciousness, of course, but not the main one; the main one was that her father seemed even sharper just lately, more apt to use his slapping hand or even his fists. He seemed restless, almost caged, and she was more and more nervous when she was around him, more and more on her mark. It was as if there was a smell they made between them, a smell that wasn’t there when she was in the apartment alone, one that had never been there when they were in it together-not until this summer. And when Mom was gone it was worse. If there was a smell, some smell, then he knew it too, maybe, because Bev saw less and less of him as the hot weather wore on, partly because of his summer bowling league, partly because he was helping his friend Joe Tammerly fix cars… but she suspects it was partly that smell, the one they made between them, neither of them meaning to but making it just the same, as helpless to stop it as either was helpless to stop sweating in July.

The vision of the birds, hundreds and thousands of them, descending on the roofpeaks of houses, on telephone wires, on TV aerials, intervenes again.

“And poison ivy,” she says aloud.

“W-W-What?” Bill asks.

“Something about poison ivy,” she says slowly, looking at him. “But it wasn’t. It just felt like poison ivy. Mike-?”

“Never mind,” Mike says. “It will come. Tell us what you do remember, Bev.”

I remember the blue shorts, she would tell them, and how faded they were getting; how tight around my hips and butt. I had half a pack of Lucky Strikes in one pocket and the Bullseye in the other-

“Do you remember the Bullseye?” she asks Richie, but they all nod.

“Bill gave it to me,” she says. “I didn’t want it, but it… he… ” She smiles at Bill, a little wanly. “You couldn’t say no to Big Bill, that was all. So I had it and that’s why I was out by myself that day. To practice. I still didn’t think I’d have the guts to use it when the time came. Except… I used it that day. I had to. I killed one of them… one of the parts of It. It was terrible. Even now it’s hard for me to think of. And one of the others got me. Look.”

She raises her arm and turns it over so they can all see a puckery scar on the roundest part of her upper forearm. It looks as if a hot circular object about the size of a Havana cigar had been pressed against her skin. It is slightly sunken, and looking at it gives Mike Hanlon a chill. This is one of the parts of the story which, like Eddie’s unwilling heart-to-heart with Keene, he has suspected but never actually heard.

“You were right about one thing, Richie,” she says. “That Bullseye was a killer. I was scared of it, but I sorta loved it, too.”

Richie laughs and claps her on the back. “shit, I knew that back then, you stupid skirt.”

“You did? Really?”

“Yeah, really,” he says. “It was something in your eyes, Bevvie.”

“I mean, it looked like a toy, but it was real. You could blow holes in things.”

“And you blew a hole in something with it that day,” Ben muses.

She nods.

“Was it Patrick you-”

“No, God no!” Beverly says. “It was the other… wait.” She crushes out her cigarette, sips her drink, and gets herself under control again. Finally she is. Well… no. But she has a feeling it’s the closest she’s going to get tonight. “I was roller-skating, you see, and I fell down and gave myself a good scrape. Then I decided I’d go down to the Barrens and practice. I went by the clubhouse first to see if you guys were there. You weren’t. Just that smoky smell. You guys remember how long that place went on smelling of smoke?”

They all nod, smiling.

“We never really did get the smell out, did we?” Ben says.

“So then I headed down to the dump,” she says, “because that’s where we had the… the tryouts, I guess you’d call them, and I knew there’d be lots of things to shoot at. Maybe even, you know, rats.” She pauses. There’s a fine misty sweat on her forehead now. “That’s what I really wanted to shoot at,” she says finally. “something that was alive. Not a seagull-I knew I couldn’t shoot a gull-but a rat… I wanted to see if I could.

“I’m glad I came from the Kansas Street side instead of the Old Cape side, though, because there wasn’t much cover over there by the railroad embankment. They would have seen me and God knows what would have happened then.”

“Who would have suh-suh-seen y-you?”

“Them,” Beverly says. “Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Belch Huggins, and Patrick Hockstetter. They were down in the dump and”

Suddenly, amazing all of them, she begins to giggle like a child, her cheeks turning rose-red. She giggles until tears stand in her eyes.

“What the hell, Bev,” Rickie says. “Let us in on the joke.”

“Oh it was a joke, all right,” she says. “It was a joke, but I think they might have killed me if they knew I’d seen.”

“I remember now!” Ben cries, and he begins to laugh, too. “I remember you telling us!”

Giggling wildly, Beverly says, “They had their pants down and they were lighting farts.”

There is an instant of thunderstruck silence and then they all begin to laugh-the sound echoes through the library.

Thinking of exactly how to tell them of Patrick Hockstetter’s death, the thing she fixes on first is how approaching the town dump from the Kansas Street side was like entering some weird asteroid belt. There was a rutted din track (a town road, actually; it even had a name, Old Lyme Street) that ran from Kansas Street to the dump, the only actual road into the Barrens-the city’s dump trucks used it. Beverly walked near Old Lyme Street but didn’t take it-she had grown more cautious-she supposed all of them had-since Eddie’s arm had been broken. Especially when she was alone.

She wove her way through the heavy undergrowth, skirting a patch of poison ivy with its reddish oily leaves, smelling the dump’s smoky rot, hearing the seagulls. On her left, through occasional breaks in the foliage, she could see Old Lyme Street.

The others are looking at her, waiting. She checks her cigarette pack and finds it empty. Wordlessly, Richie tosses her one of his.

She lights up, looks around at them, and says: “Heading toward the dump from the Kansas Street side was a little like

 

2

 

entering some weird asteroid belt. The dumpoid belt. At first there was nothing but the underbrush growing from the spongy ground underfoot, and then you would see your first dumpoid: a rusty can that had once contained Prince Spaghetti Sauce, maybe, or an S “OK sodabottle crawling with bugs attracted by the sweet-sticky remains of cream soda or birch beer. Then there would be a bright wink of sun kicking off a scrap of tinfoil caught in a tree. You might see a bedspring (or trip over it, if you weren’t watching where you were going) or a bone some dog had carried away, gnawed, dropped.

The dump itself wasn’t so bad-was, in fact, sort of interesting, Beverly thought. What was nasty (and sort of creepy) was the way it had of spreading. Of creating this dumpoid belt.

She was getting closer now; the trees were bigger, mostly firs, and the bushes were thinning out. The gulls cheeped and cried in their shrill querulous voices, and the air was smudgy with the smell of burning.

Now, on Beverly’s right, leaning at an angle against the base of a spruce tree, was a rusty Amana refrigerator. Beverly glanced at it, thinking vaguely of the state policeman who had visited her class when she had been in the third grade. He had told them that such things as discarded refrigerators were dangerous-a kid could climb into one while playing hide-and-go-seek, for instance, and smother to death inside. Although why anyone would want to get in a scroungy old -

She heard a shout, so close it made her jump, followed by laughter. Beverly grinned. So they were here. They had left the clubhouse because of the smoky smell and had come down here. They were maybe breaking bottles with rocks, maybe just dump-picking.

She began to walk a little faster, the nasty scrape she had gotten earlier now forgotten in her eagerness to see them… to see him, with his red hair so much like hers, to see if he would smile at her in that oddly endearing one-sided way of his. She knew she was too young to love a boy, too young to have anything but “crushes,” but she loved Bill just the same. And she walked a little faster, her skates swinging heavily from her shoulder, the sling of his Bullseye beating soft time against her left buttock.

She almost walked into them before realizing it wasn’t her gang at all, but Bowers’s.

She walked out of the screening bushes and the dump’s steepest side lay about seventy yards ahead, a twinkling avalanche of junk lying along the high angle of the gravel-pit. Mandy Fazio’s bulldozer was off to the left. Much closer in front of her was a wilderness of junked cars. At the end of each month these were crushed and hauled off to Portland for scrap, but now there were a dozen or more, some sitting on bare wheel-rims, some on their sides, one or two lying on their roofs like dead dogs. They were arranged in two rows and Beverly walked down the rough trash-littered aisle between them like some punk bride of the future, wondering idly if she could break a windshield with the Bullseye. One of the pockets of her blue shorts bulged with the small ball-bearings that were her practice ammo.

The voices and laughter were coming from beyond the junked-out cars and to the left, at the edge of the dump proper. Beverly rounded the last one, a Studebaker with its entire front end missing. Her hail of greeting died on her lips. The hand she had put up to wave did not exactly fail back to her side; it seemed to wilt.

Her first furiously embarrassed thought was: Oh dear God, why are they all naked?

This was followed by the scary realization of who they were. She froze there in front of the half-Studebaker with her shadow stapled to the heels of her low-topped sneakers. For that one moment she was totally visible to them; if any of the four had looked up from the circle they were squatting in, he could not have missed her, a girl of slightly more than medium height, a pair of skates over one shoulder, the knee of one long coltish leg still oozing blood, her mouth slack-jawed, her cheeks scarlet.

Before darting back behind the Studebaker she saw that they weren’t entirely naked after all; they had their shirts on, and their pants and underpants were simply pulled down to their shoetops, as if they had to Go Number Two (in her shock, Beverly’s mind had automatically reverted to the euphemism she had been taught as a toddler)-except whoever heard of four boys Going Number Two at the same time?

Once out of sight again, her first thought was to get away-get away fast. Her heart was pumping hard, her muscles heavy with adrenaline. She looked around, seeing what she hadn’t bothered to notice walking up here, when she had thought the voices she heard belonged to her friends. The row of junked cars on her left was really pretty thin-they were by no means packed in door to door as they would be in the week or so before the crusher came to turn them into rough blocks of twinkling metal. She had been exposed to the boys several times walking up to where she was now; if she retreated, she would be exposed again, and this time she might be seen.

Also, she felt a certain shameful curiosity: what in the world could they be doing?

Carefully, she peeked around the Studebaker.

Henry and Victor Criss were more or less facing in her direction. Patrick Hockstetter was on Henry’s left. Belch Huggins had his back to her. She observed the fact that Belch had an extremely large, extremely hairy ass, and half-hysterical giggles suddenly bubbled up her throat like the head on a glass of ginger ale. She had to clap both hands over her mouth and withdraw behind the Studebaker again, struggling to hold the giggles in.

You’ve got to get out of here, Beverly. If they catch you”

She looked back down between the junked cars, still holding her hands over her mouth. The aisle was maybe ten feet wide, littered with cans, twinkling with little jigsaw pieces of Saf-T-Glas, scruffy with weeds. If she so much as made a sound, they might hear her… particularly if their absorption in whatever strange thing they were doing flagged. When she thought of how casually she had walked up here, her blood ran cold. Also…

What in the world can they be doing?

She peeked again, seeing more of the details this time. There was a careless scatter of books and papers nearby-schoolbooks. They had just come from their summer classes, then, what most of the kids called Dummy School or Make-up School. And, because Henry and Victor were facing her way, she could see their things. They were the first things she had ever seen in her life, other than pictures in a smudgy little book that Brenda Arrowsmith had showed her the year before, and in those pictures you really couldn’t see very much. Bev observed now that their things were little tubes that hung down between their legs. Henry’s was small and hairless, but Victor’s was quite big, and there was a cloudy fuzz of fine black hair just over it.

Bill has one of those, she thought, and suddenly her whole body seemed to flush at once-heat rushed through her in a wave that made her feel giddy and faint and almost sick to her stomach. In that moment she felt much the way Ben Hanscom had felt on the last day of school, looking down at her ankle bracelet and observing the way it flashed in the sun… but he had not felt the intermixed sense of terror she felt now.

She looked behind her once more. Now the pathway between the cars leading to the shelter of the Barrens seemed much longer. She was scared to move. If they knew she had seen their things, they would probably hurt her. And not just a little, they would hurt her badly.

Belch Huggins bellowed suddenly, making her jump, and Henry yelled: “Three feet! No shit, Belch! It was three feet! Wasn’t it, Vie?”

Vie agreed it was, and they all roared with troll-like laughter.

Beverly tried another look around the junked Studebaker.

Patrick Hockstetter had turned and half-risen so that his butt was nearly in Henry’s face. In Henry’s hand was a silvery, glinting object. After a moment’s study she made it out as a lighter.

“I thought you said you felt one coming on,” Henry said.

“I do,” Patrick said. I’ll tell you when. Get ready!… Get ready, it’s coming! Get… now!”

Henry flicked the lighter. At the same moment there was the unmistakable ripping sound of a really good fart. There was no mistaking that sound; Beverly had heard it enough in her own house, usually on Saturday night, after the beans and franks. A regular bear for his beans was her father. As Patrick blew off and Henry flicked the lighter, she saw something that made her jaw drop. A bright blue jet of flame appeared to roar directly out of Patrick’s bum. To Bev it looked like the pilot-light on a gasburner.

The boys roared their troll-like laughter and Beverly withdrew behind the sheltering car, stifling mad giggles again. She was laughing, but not because she was amused. In some very weird way it was funny, yes, but mostly she was laughing because she felt a deep revulsion accompanied by a sort of horror. She was laughing because she knew of no other way to cope with what she had seen. It had something to do with seeing the boys” things, but that was by no means all or even the great part of what she felt. She had known, after all, that boys had things, the same way she knew that girls had different things; this was only what you might call a confirmed sighting. But the rest of what they were doing seemed so strange, so ludicrous and yet at the same time so deadly-primitive that she found herself, in spite of the giggling fit, groping for the core of herself with some desperation.

Stop, she thought, as if this were the answer, stop, they’ll hear you, so just you stop it, Bevvie!

But that was impossible. The best she could do was to laugh without engaging her vocal cords, so that the sounds came out of her in a series of almost inaudible chuffs, her hands pasted over her mouth, her cheeks as red as Mac apples, her eyes swimming with tears.

“Holy skit, that hurts!” Victor roared.

“Twelve feet!” Henry bellowed. “I swear to God, Vie, twelve fuckin feet! I swear it on my mother’s name!”

“I don’t care if it was twenty fuckin feet, you burned my ass off!” Victor howled, and there was more bellowing laughter; still trying to giggle silently from behind the sheltering car, Beverly thought of a movie she had seen on TV. Jon Hall had been in it. It was about this jungle tribe, they had a secret rite, and if you saw it, you got sacrificed to their god, which was this big stone idol. This did not stop her giggles, but infused them with a nearly frantic quality. They were becoming more and more like silent screams. Her belly hurt. Tears streamed down her face.

 

3

 

Henry, Victor, Belch, and Patrick Hockstetter ended up in the dump lighting each others” farts on that hot July afternoon because of Rena Davenport.

Henry knew what resulted from consuming large amounts of baked beans. This result was perhaps best expressed in a little ditty he had learned at his father’s knee when he was still in short pants: Beans, beans, the musical fruit! The more you eat, the more you toot! The more you toot, the better you feel! Then you’re ready for another meal!

Rena Davenport and his father had been courting for nearly eight years. She was fat, forty, and usually filthy. Henry supposed that Rena and his father sometimes fucked, although he could not imagine anyone squashing his body down on Rena Davenport’s.

Rena’s beans were her pride. She soaked them Saturday nights and baked them over a slow fire all day Sunday. Henry supposed they were okay-they were something to shovel into your mouth and chew up, anyway-but after eight years anything lost its charm.

Nor was Rena content to make just a few beans; she cooked them in job lots. When she turned up Sunday evenings in her old green De Soto (a naked rubber babydoll hung from the rearview mirror, looking like the world’s youngest lynch-mob victim), she usually had the Bowerses” beans steaming on the seat beside her in a twelve-gallon galvanized-steel pail. The three of them would eat the beans that night (Rena raving about her own cooking all the while, crazy Butch Bowers grunting and mopping up bean juice with a piece of Sonny Boy bread or simply telling her to shut up if there was a ballgame on the radio, Henry just eating, staring out the window, thinking his own thoughts it was over a plate of Sunday-night beans that he had conceived the idea of poisoning Mike Hanlon’s dog Mr Chips), and Butch would reheat a mess of them the next night. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays Henry would take a Tupperware box full of them to school. By Thursday or Friday, neither Henry or his father could eat any more. The house’s two bedrooms would smell of stale farts in spite of the open windows. Butch would take the remains and mix them into the other slops and feed them to Bip and Bop, the Bowerses” two pigs. Rena would like as not show up the following Sunday with another steaming pail, and the cycle would start all over again.

That morning Henry had put up an enormous quantity of leftover beans, and the four of them had eaten the whole lot at noon, sitting out on the playground in the shade of a big old elm. They had eaten until they were nearly bursting.

It had been Patrick who suggested they go down to the dump, which would be fairly quiet in the middle of a working-day summer afternoon. By the time they arrived, the beans were doing their work quite nicely.

 

4

 

Little by little, Beverly got herself under control again. She knew she had to get out; beating a retreat was ultimately less dangerous than hanging around. They were absorbed in what they were doing, and even if worse came to worst, she could get a head-start (and in the back of her mind she had also decided that, if worst came to terrible, a few shots from the Bullseye might discourage them).

She was about to begin creeping away when Victor said, “I gotta go, Henry. My dad wants me to help him pick com this afternoon.”

“Oh shit,” Henry said. “He’ll live.”

“No, he’s mad at me. Because of what happened the other day.”

“Fuck him if he can’t take a joke.”

Beverly listened more closely now, suspecting it might be the scuffle which had ended with Eddie’s broken arm that they were talking about.

“No, I gotta go.”

“I think his ass hurts,” Patrick said.

“Watch your mouth, fuckface,” Victor said. “It might grow on you.”

“I got to go too,” Belch said.

“Your father want you to pick corn?” Henry asked angrily. This was what might have passed for a jest in Henry’s mind; Belch’s father was dead.

“No. But I got a job delivering the Weekly Shopper. I gotta do that tonight.”

“What’s this Weekly Shopper crap?” Henry asked, now sounding upset as well as angry.

“It’s a job,” Belch said with ponderous patience. “I make money.”

Henry made a disgusted sound, and Beverly risked another peek around the car. Victor and Belch were standing, buckling their belts. Henry and Patrick were still squatting with their pants down. The lighter glinted in Henry’s hand.

“You’re not chickening out, are you?” Henry asked Patrick.

“Nope,” Patrick said.

“You don’t have to pick corn or go do some pussy job?”

“Nope,” Patrick said again.

“Well,” Belch said uncertainly, “see you around, Henry.”

“Sure,” Henry said, and spat near one of Belch’s clodhopping workshoes.

Vie and Belch started off together toward the two rows of wrecked cars… toward the Studebaker behind which Beverly was crouching. At first she could only cringe, frozen with fear like a rabbit. Then she slid around the left side of the Studebaker and backed down the gap between it and the battered, doorless Ford next to it. For a moment she paused, looking from side to side, hearing them approach. She hesitated, her mouth cottony-dry, her back itchy with sweat; a part of her mind was numbly wondering how she’d look-in a cast like Eddie’s, with the Losers” names signed on it. Then she dived into the Ford on the passenger side. She curled up on the filthy floormat, making herself as small as possible. It was boiling hot inside the junked-out Ford, and it smelled so thickly of dust, rotting upholstery, and elderly rat-crap that she had to struggle grimly to keep from sneezing or coughing. She heard Belch and Victor pass close by, talking in low voices. Then they were gone.

She sneezed three times, quickly and quietly, into her cupped hands.

She supposed she could go now, if she was careful. The best way to do it would be to shift over to the driver’s side of the Ford, sneak back to the aisle, and then just do a fade. She believed she could manage it, but the shock of almost being discovered had robbed her of her courage, at least for the time being. She felt safer here in the Ford. And maybe, now that Victor and Belch had gone, the other two would also go soon. Then she could go back to the clubhouse. She had lost all interest in target-shooting.

Also, she had to pee.

Come on, she thought. Come on, hurry up and go, hurry up and go, puh-LEEZE!

A moment later she heard Patrick roar with mixed laughter and pain.

“Six feet!” Henry bellowed. “Just like a fuckin blowtorch! Swear to God!”

Silence then for awhile. Sweat trickling down her back. The sun beating through the Ford’s cracked windshield on the nape of her neck. Heaviness in her bladder.

Henry bellowed so loud that Beverly, who had been close to dozing in spite of her discomfort, almost cried out herself. “damn it, Hockstetter! You burned my frigging ass! What are you doing with that lighter?”

“Ten feet,” Patrick giggled (just the sound of it made Bev feel cold and revolted, as if she had seen a worm squirm its way out of her salad). “Ten feet if it was an inch, Henry. Bright blue. Ten feet if it was an inch. Swear to God!”

“Gimme that,” Henry grunted.

Come on, come on, you stupidniks, go, get out!

When Patrick spoke again his voice was so low Bev could barely hear it. If there had been the slightest breath of wind on the air that baking afternoon, she would not have done.

“Let me show you something,” Patrick said.

“What?” Henry asked.

“Just something.” Patrick paused. “It feels good.”

“What?” Henry asked again.

Then there was silence.

I don’t want to look, I don’t want to see what they’re doing now, and besides,

they might see me, in fact they probably will because you’ve used up all your luck

today, girly-o. So just stay right here. No peeking…

But her curiosity had overcome her good sense. There was something strange in that silence, something a little bit scary. She raised her head inch by inch until she could look through the Ford’s cracked cloudy windshield. She needn’t have worried about being seen; both of the boys were concentrating on what Patrick was doing. She didn’t understand what she was seeing, but she knew it was nasty… not that she would have expected anything else from Patrick, who was just so weird.

He had one hand between Henry’s thighs and one hand between his own. One hand was flogging Henry’s thing gently; with his other hand Patrick was rubbing his own. Except he wasn’t exactly rubbing it-he was kind of… squeezing it, pulling it, letting it flop back down.

What is he doing? Beverly wondered, dismayed.

She didn’t know, not for sure, but it scared her. She didn’t think she had been this scared since the blood had vomited out of the bathroom drain and splattered all over everything. Some deep part of her cried out that if they discovered she had seen this, whatever it was, they might do more than hurt her; they might actually kill her. Still, she couldn’t look away.

She saw that Patrick’s thing had gotten a little longer, but not much; it still dangled between his legs like a snake with no backbone. Henry’s, however, had grown amazingly. It stood up stiff and hard, almost poking his bellybutton. Patrick’s hand went up and down, up and down, sometimes pausing to squeeze, sometimes tickling that odd, heavy sac under Henry’s thing.

Those are his balls, Beverly thought. Do boys have to go around with those all the time? God, I’d go crazy! Another part of her mind then whispered: Bill has those. On its own, her mind visualized her holding them, cupping them in her hand, testing their texture… and that hot feeling raced through her again, sparking off a furious blush.

Henry stared at Patrick’s hand as if hypnotized. His lighter lay on the rocky scree beside him, reflecting hot afternoon sun.

“Want me to put it in my mouth?” Patrick asked. His big, livery lips smiled complacently.

“Huh?” Henry asked, as if startled from some deep dream.

“I’ll put it in my mouth if you want. I don’t m-”

Henry’s hand flashed out, half-curled, not quite a fist. Patrick was knocked sprawling. His head thudded on the gravel. Beverly dived down again, her heart crashing in her chest, her teeth locked against a little whimpering moan. After knocking Patrick down, Henry had turned and for a moment, just before she dropped back into her little huddled ball on the passenger side of the driveshaft hump, it seemed that her eyes and Henry’s had locked.

Please God the sun was in his eyes, she prayed. Please God I’m sorry I peeked. Please God.

There was an agonizing pause then. Her white blouse was plastered to her body with sweat. Droplets like seed pearls gleamed on her tanned arms. Her bladder throbbed painfully. She felt that very soon she would wet her pants. She waited for Henry’s furious crazy face to appear in the opening where the Ford’s passenger door had been, sure it was going to happen-how could he have missed seeing her? He would drag her out and hurt her. He would -

A new and even more terrible thought now occurred to her, and once again she had to engage in a painful, crampy struggle to keep from wetting her pants. Suppose he did something to her with his thing) Suppose he wanted her to put it in her somewhere? She knew where it was supposed to go, all right; it seemed that knowledge had suddenly sprung into her mind full-blown. She thought that if Henry tried to put his thing in her she would go crazy.

Please no, please God don’t let him have seen me, please, okay?

Then Henry spoke, and to her growing horror his voice was coming from someplace much closer. “I don’t go for that queer stuff.”

From farther off, Patrick’s voice: “You liked it.”

“I didn’t like it!” Henry shouted. “And if you tell anyone I did, I’ll kill you, you fucking little pansy!”

“You got a boner,” Patrick said. He sounded like he was smiling. As much as she feared Henry Bowers, the smile would not have surprised Beverly. Patrick was crazy, crazier than Henry, maybe, and people that crazy weren’t afraid of anything. “I saw it.”

Footsteps crunched over the gravel-closer and closer. Beverly looked up, her eyes bulging. Through the Ford’s old windshield she could now see the back of Henry’s head. He was looking toward Patrick now, but if he turned around -

’If you tell anyone, I’ll say you’re a cocksucker,” Henry said. “Then I’ll kill you.”

“You don’t scare me, Henry,” Patrick said, and giggled. “But I might not tell if you gave me a dollar.”

Henry shifted restlessly. He turned slightly; Beverly could now see one-quarter of his profile instead of just the back of his head. Please God please God, she begged incoherently, and her bladder throbbed more strongly.

“If you tell,” Henry said, his voice low and deliberate, “I’ll tell what you’ve been doing with the cats. With the dogs, too. I’ll tell them about your refrigerator. You know what’ll happen, Hockstetter? They’ll come and take you away and put you into the fucking-A loonybin.”

Silence from Patrick.

Henry drummed his fingers on the hood of the Ford Beverly was hiding in. “do you hear me?”

“I hear you.” Patrick sounded sullen now. Sullen and a little scared. He burst out: “You liked it! You got a boner! Biggest boner I ever saw!”

“Yeah, I bet you seen a lot of em, you fuckin little homo faggot. You just remember what I said about the refrigerator. Your refrigerator. And if I see you around again, I’ll knock your block off.”

More silence from Patrick.

Henry moved away. Beverly turned her head and saw him pass by the driver’s side of the Ford. If he had looked to his left even a little bit, he would have seen her. But he didn’t look. A moment later she heard him heading off the way Victor and Belch had gone.

Now there was just Patrick.

Beverly waited, but nothing happened. Five minutes dragged by. Her need to urinate was now desperate. She might be able to hold out for another two or three minutes, but no more. And it made her uneasy not to know for sure where Patrick was.

She peeked through the windshield again and saw him just sitting there. Henry had forgotten his lighter. Patrick had put his schoolbooks back into a small canvas carrier sack and had slung it around his neck like a newsboy’s, but his pants and underpants were still down around his ankles. He was playing with the lighter. He would spin the wheel, produce a flame that was almost invisible in the bright day, snap the lighter closed, and then start all over again. He seemed hypnotized. A line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth to his chin, and his lips were swelling up on the right side. He seemed not to notice, and once again Beverly felt a squirmy sort of revulsion. Patrick was crazy, all right; she had never in her life wanted so badly to get away from someone.

Moving very carefully, she crawled backward over the Ford’s driveshaft hump and squeezed under the steering wheel. She put her feet out on the ground and crept to the back of the Ford. Then she ran quickly back the way she had come. When she had entered the pines beyond the junked cars; she looked back over her shoulder. No one was there. The dump dozed in the sun. She felt the bands of tension around her chest and stomach loosen with relief, and all that was left was the need to urinate, so great that she now felt sick with it.

She hurried down the path a short way and then ducked off to the right. She had her shorts unsnapped almost before the underbrush had closed behind her again. She took a quick look around to make sure there was no poison ivy at hand; then she squatted, holding the tough trunk of a bush for balance.

She was pulling her shorts up again when she heard approaching footsteps from the dump. All she could see through the bushes were flashes of blue denim and the faded plaid of a school-shirt. It was Patrick. She ducked down, waiting for him to pass by toward Kansas Street. She was more sanguine about her position here. The cover was good, she no longer had to pee, and Patrick was off in his own cuckoo world. When he was gone she would double back and head for the clubhouse.

But Patrick didn’t pass by. He stopped on the path almost directly opposite her and stood looking at the rusting Amana refrigerator.

Beverly could observe Patrick along a natural sight-line in the bushes without too much chance of being seen. Now that she was relieved, she found she was curious again-and if Patrick did happen to see her, she felt certain she could outrun him. He wasn’t as fat as Ben, but he was podgy. She pulled the Bullseye out of her back pocket, however, and put half a dozen steel pellets in the breast pocket of her old Ship “n Shore. Crazy or not, a good one to the knee might discourage the likes of Patrick Hockstetter in a hurry.

She remembered the refrigerator well enough now. There were lots of discarded fridges at the dump, but it suddenly occurred to her that this was the only one she’d seen which Mandy Fazio hadn’t disarmed by either tearing out the latching mechanism with pliers or simply removing the door altogether.

Patrick began to hum and sway back and forth in front of the rusty old refrigerator, and Beverly felt a fresh chill course through her. He was like a guy in a horror movie trying to summon a dead body out of a crypt.

What’s he up to?

But if she had known that, or what was going to happen when Patrick finished his private ritual and opened the dead Amana’s rusty door, she would have run away as fast as she could.

 

5

 

No one-not even Mike Hanlon-had the slightest idea of how crazy Patrick Hockstetter really was. He was twelve, the son of a paint salesman. His mother was a devout Catholic who would die of breast cancer in 1962, four years after Patrick was consumed by the dark entity which existed in and below Derry. Although his IQ tested out as low normal, Patrick had already repeated two grades, the first and third. He was taking summer classes this year so he would not have to repeat the fifth as well. His teachers found him an apathetic student (this several of them noted on the bare six lines of the Derry Elementary School’s report cards reserved for TEACHER’s COMMENTS) and a rather disturbing one as well (which none noted-their feelings were too vague, too diffuse, to be expressed in sixty lines, let alone six). If he had been born ten years later, a guidance counsellor might have steered him toward a child psychologist who might (or might not; Patrick was far more clever than his lackluster IQ results indicated) have realized the frightening depths behind that slack and pallid moonface.

He was a sociopath, and perhaps, by that hot July in 1958, he had become a full-fledged psychopath. He could not remember a time when he had believed that other people-any other living creatures, for that matter-were “real.” He believed himself to be an actual creature, probably the only one in the universe, but was by no means convinced that his actuality made him “real.” He had no sense of hurting, exactly, and no real sense of being hurt (his indifference to being struck in the mouth by Henry in the dump was a case in point). But while he found reality a totally meaningless concept, he understood the concept of “rules” perfectly. And while all of his teachers had found him odd (both Mrs Douglas, his fifth-grade teacher, and Mrs Weems, who had had Patrick in the third grade, knew about the pencil-box full of flies, and while neither of them totally ignored the implications, each had between twenty and twenty-eight other students, each with problems of his or her own), none of them had serious disciplinary problems with him. He might turn in test papers that were utterly blank-or blank except for a large, decorative question-mark-and Mrs Douglas had discovered it was best to keep him away from the girls because of his Roman hands and Russian fingers, but he was quiet, so quiet that there were times when he might have been taken for a big lump of clay that had been crudely fashioned to look like a boy. It was easy to ignore a Patrick, who failed quietly, when you had to cope with boys like Henry Bowers and Victor Criss, who were actively disruptive and insolent, boys who would steal milk-money or happily deface school property if given a chance, and girls like the unfortunately named Elizabeth Taylor, who was epileptic and whose few poor brain-cells worked only sporadically and who had to be discouraged from pulling her dresses up in the playyard to show off a new pan: of panties. In other words, Derry Elementary School was the typical confused educational carnival, a circus with so many rings that Pennywise himself might have gone unnoticed. Certainly none of Patrick’s teachers (or his parents, for that matter) suspected that, when he was five, Patrick had murdered his baby brother Avery.

Patrick had not liked it when his mother brought Avery home from the hospital. He didn’t care (or so he at first told himself) if his parents had two kids, five kids, or five dozen kids, as long as the kid or kids didn’t alter his own schedule. But he found that Avery did. Meals came late. The baby cried in the night and woke him up. It seemed that his parents were always hanging over its crib, and often when he tried to get their attention he found that he could not. For one of the few times in his life, Patrick became frightened. It occurred to him that if his parents had brought him, Patrick, home from the hospital, and if he was “real,” then Avery might be “real,” too. It might even be that, when Avery got big enough to walk and talk, to bring in his father’s copy of the Derry News from the front step and to hand his mother the bowls when she baked bread, they might decide to get rid of Patrick altogether. It was not that he feared they loved Avery more (although it was obvious to Patrick that they did love him more, and in this case his judgment was probably correct). What he cared about was (1) the rules that were being broken or had changed since Avery’s arrival, (2) Avery’s possible reality, and (3) the possibility that they might throw him out in favor of Avery.

Patrick went into Avery’s room one afternoon around two-thirty, shortly after the school-bus had dropped him off from his afternoon kindergarten session. It was January. Outside, snow was beginning to fall. A powerful wind boomed across McCarron Park and rattled the frosty upstairs storm windows. His mother was napping in her bedroom; Avery had been fussy all the previous night. His father was at work. Avery was sleeping on his stomach, his head turned to one side.

Patrick, his moonface expressionless, turned Avery’s head so his face was pressed directly into the pillow. Avery made a snuffling noise and turned his head back to the side. Patrick observed this, and stood thinking about it while the snow melted off his yellow boots and puddled on the floor. Perhaps five minutes passed (quick thinking was not Patrick’s specialty), and then he turned Avery’s face into the pillow again and held it there for a moment. Avery stirred under his hand, struggling. But his struggles were weak. Patrick let go. Avery turned his head to the side again, made one snorting little cry, and then went on sleeping. The wind gusted, rattling the windows. Patrick waited to see if the one little cry would awaken his mother. It didn’t.

Now he felt swept by a great excitement. The world seemed to stand out in front of him clearly for the first time. His emotional equipment was severely defective, and in those few moments he felt as a totally color-blind person might feel if given a shot which enabled him to perceive colors for a short time… or as a junkie who has just fixed feels as the smack rockets his brain into orbit. This was a new thing. He had not suspected it existed.

Very gently, he turned Avery’s face into the pillow again. This time when Avery struggled, Patrick did not let go. He pressed the baby’s face more firmly into the pillow. The baby was making steady muffled cries now, and Patrick knew it was awake. He had a vague idea that it might tell on him to his mother if he stopped. He held it down. The baby struggled. Patrick held it down. The baby farted. Its struggles weakened. Patrick still held it down. It eventually became totally still. Patrick held it down for another five minutes, feeling that excitement crest and then begin to ebb: the shot wearing off, turning the world gray again, the fix mellowing into an accustomed low doze.

Patrick went downstairs and got himself a plate of cookies and poured himself a glass of milk. His mother came down half an hour later and said she hadn’t even heard him come in, she had been that tired (you won’t be anymore, Mom, Patrick thought, don’t worry, I fixed it). She sat down with him, ate one of his cookies, and asked him how school had been. Patrick said it was all right and showed her his drawing of a house and a tree. His paper was covered with looping meaningless scribbles made with black and brown crayon. His mother said it was very nice. Patrick brought home the same looping scrawls of black and brown every day. Sometimes he said it was a turkey, sometimes a Christmas tree, sometimes a boy. His mother always told him it was very nice… although sometimes, in a part of her so deep she hardly knew it was there, she worried. There was something a little disquieting about the dark sameness of those big scribbled loops of black and brown.

She didn’t discover Avery’s death until nearly five o’clock; until then she had simply assumed he was taking a very long nap. By then Patrick was watching Crusader Rabbit on their seven-inch TV, and he went on watching TV through all the uproar that followed. Whirlybirds was on when Mrs Henley arrived from next door (his screaming mother had been holding the baby’s corpse in the open kitchen door, believing in some blind way that the cold air might revive it; Patrick was cold and got a sweater out of the downstairs closet). Highway Patrol, Ben Hanscom’s favorite, was on when Mr Hockstetter arrived home from work. By the time the doctor arrived, Science Fiction Theater, with Your Host Truman Bradley, was just coming on. “Who knows what strange things the universe may hold?” Truman Bradley speculated while Patrick’s mother shrieked and struggled in her husband’s arms in the kitchen. The doctor observed Patrick’s deep calm and unquestioning stare and assumed the boy was in shock. He wanted Patrick to take a pill. Patrick didn’t mind.

It was diagnosed as crib-death. Years later there might have been questions about such a fatality, deviations from the usual infant-death syndrome observed. But when it happened, the death was simply noted and the baby buried. Patrick was gratified that once things finally settled down his meals began to come on time again.

In the madness of that afternoon and evening-people banging in and out of the house, the red lights of the Home Hospital ambulance pulsing on the walls, Mrs Hockstetter screaming and wailing and refusing to be comforted-only Patrick’s father came within brushing distance of the truth. He was standing numbly by Avery’s empty crib some twenty minutes after the body had been removed, simply standing there, unable to believe any of this had happened. He looked down and saw a pair of tracks on the hardwood floor. They had been made by the snow melting off Patrick’s yellow rubber boots. He looked at them, and a dreadful thought rose briefly in his mind like bad gas from a deep mineshaft. His hand went slowly to his mouth and his eyes widened. A picture began to form in his mind. Before it could come clear he left the room, slamming the door behind him so hard that the top of the frame splintered.

He never asked Patrick any questions.

Patrick had never done anything like that again, although he might have done so if the chance had presented itself. He felt no guilt, had no bad dreams. As time passed, however, he became more aware of what would have happened to him if he had been caught. There were rules. Unpleasant things happened to you if you didn’t follow them… or if you were caught breaking them. You could be locked up or stuck in the electrocution chair.

But that remembered feeling of excitement-that feeling of color and sensation-was simply too powerful and too wonderful to give over entirely. Patrick killed flies. At first he only smacked them with his mother’s flyswatter; later he discovered he could kill them quite efficiently with a plastic ruler. He also discovered the joys of flypaper. A long sticky runner of it could be purchased for two cents at the Costello Avenue Market and Patrick sometimes stood for as long as two hours in the garage, watching the flies land and then struggle to get free, his mouth ajar, his dusty eyes alight with that rare excitement, sweat running down his round face and his thick body. Patrick killed beetles, but if possible he captured them first. Sometimes he would steal a long needle from his mother’s pincushion, impale a Japanese beetle on it, and sit cross-legged in the garden watching it die. His expression at these times was the expression of a boy who is reading a very good book. Once he had discovered a run-over cat that was dying in the gutter on Lower Main Street and sat watching it until an old woman saw him pushing the squashed and mewing thing around with his foot. She whacked him with the broom she had been using to sweep her walk. Go on home! she had shouted at him. What are you, crazy? Patrick had gone on home. He wasn’t mad at the old woman. He had been caught breaking the rules, that was all.

Then, last year (it would not have surprised Mike Hanlon or any of the others at that point to have known that it was, in fact, on the same day that George Denbrough had been murdered), Patrick had discovered the rusty Amana refrigerator-one of the larger dumpoids in the belt surrounding the dump itself.

Like Bev, he had heard the cautionary warnings about such abandoned appliances, about how thirty-squirty million kids got their stupid selves smoked in them each year. Patrick had stood looking at the refrigerator for a long time, idly playing pocket-pool with himself. That excitement was back, stronger than it had ever been, except for the time he had fixed Avery. The excitement was back because, in the chilly yet fuming wastes that passed for his mind, Patrick Hockstetter had had an idea.

The Luces, who lived three houses down from the Hockstetters, missed their cat, Bobby, a week later. The Luce kids, who couldn’t remember a time when Bobby hadn’t been there, spent hours combing the neighborhood for him. They even pooled their money and put an ad in the Derry News Lost and Found column. Nothing came of it. And if any of them had seen Patrick that day, bulkier than ever in his mothball-smelling winter parka (after the floodwaters receded in that fall of ’57, it had come off bitterly cold almost at once), carrying a cardboard carton, they would have thought nothing of it.

The Engstroms, a block over and almost directly behind the Hockstetter home, lost their cocker pup about ten days before Thanksgiving. Other families lost dogs and cats over the next six or eight months, and Patrick of course had taken them all, not to mention a dozen unremarked strays from the Hell’s Half-Acre area of Derry.

He put them into the rusty Amana near the dump, one by one. Each time he brought another animal down, his heart thundering in his chest, his eyes hot and watery with excitement, he would expect to find that Mandy Fazio had pulled the Amana’s latch or popped the hinges with his sledgehammer. But Mandy never touched that particular refrigerator. Perhaps he didn’t realize it was there, perhaps the force of Patrick’s will kept him away… or perhaps some other force did that.

The Engstroms” cocker lasted the longest. In spite of the single-number cold, it was still alive when Patrick came back for the third time in as many days, although it had lost all of its original friskiness (it had been wagging its tail and lapping his hands frantically when he originally hauled it out of the box and stuffed it into the refrigerator). When he came back a day after putting it in, the puppy had damn near gotten away. Patrick had to chase it almost all the way to the dump before he was able to jump it and get hold of one rear leg. The puppy had nipped Patrick with its sharp little teeth. Patrick didn’t mind. In spite of the nips, he had taken the cocker back to the refrigerator and bundled it back in. He had a hard-on when he did it. This was not uncommon.

On the second day the puppy had tried to get out again, but it moved much too slowly. Patrick shoved it back in, slammed the Amana’s rusty door, and leaned against it. He could hear the puppy scratching against the door. He could hear its muffled whines. “Good dog,” said Patrick Hockstetter. His eyes were closed and he was breathing fast. “That’s a good dog.” On the third day the puppy could only roll its eyes toward Patrick’s face when the door opened. Its sides were heaving rapidly and shallowly. When Patrick returned the next day, the cocker was dead with a cake of foam frozen around its mouth and muzzle. This made Patrick think of coconut Popsicles, and he laughed quite hard as he hauled the frozen corpse from his killing-bottle and threw it in the bushes.

The supply of victims (which Patrick thought of, when he thought of them at all, as “test animals’) had been thin this summer. Questions of reality aside, his sense of self-preservation was well developed, his intuition exquisite. He suspected he was suspected. By whom he was not sure: Mr Engstrom? Perhaps. Mr Engstrom had turned around and given Patrick a long speculative look in the A amp;P one day this spring. Mr Engstrom had been buying cigarettes and Patrick had been sent for bread. Mrs Josephs? Maybe. She sat in her parlor window with a telescope sometimes and was, according to Mrs Hockstetter, a “nosy parker.” Mr Jacubois, who had an ASPCA sticker on the back bumper of his car? Mr Nell? Someone else? Patrick didn’t know for sure, but his intuition told him he was suspected, and he never argued with his intuition. He had taken a few wandering animals from among the rotted tenements in the Half-Acre, picking only those that looked thin or diseased, but that was all.

He discovered, however, that the refrigerator near the dump had gotten an oddly powerful hold over him. He began to draw pictures of it in school when he was bored. He sometimes dreamed of it at night, and in his dreams the Amana was perhaps seventy feet tall, a whited sepulchre, a ponderous crypt iced in chilly moonlight. In these dreams the giant door would swing open and he would see huge eyes staring out at him. He would awake in a cold sweat, but he found he could not give up the joys of the refrigerator entirely.

Today he had finally found out who had suspected. Bowers. Knowing that Henry Bowers held the secret of his killing-bottle in his hands left Patrick as close to panic as he was ever apt to get. This was not very close at all, in truth, but he still found this-not fear exactly, but mental unrest-oppressive and unpleasant. Henry knew. Knew that Patrick sometimes broke the rules.

His latest victim had been a pigeon he discovered on Jackson Street two days ago. The pigeon had been struck by a car and couldn’t fly. Patrick went home, got his box out of the garage, and put the pigeon inside. The pigeon pecked the back of Patrick’s hand several times, leaving shallow, bloody digs. Patrick didn’t mind. When he checked the refrigerator the next day, the pigeon had been quite dead, but Patrick hadn’t removed the corpse then. Now, following Henry’s threat to tell, Patrick decided he better get rid of the pigeon’s body right away. Perhaps he would even get a bucket of water and some rags and scrub out the interior of the refrigerator. It didn’t smell very good. If Henry told and Mr Nell came down to check, he might be able to tell that something-several somethings, in fact-had died in there.

If he tells, Patrick thought, standing in the grove of pines and looking at the rusty Amana, I’ll tell that he broke Eddie Kaspbrak’s arm. Of course they probably knew that already, but they couldn’t prove anything because all of them said they had been playing out at Henry’s house that day and Henry’s crazy father had backed them up. But if he tells, I’ll tell. Tit for tat.

Never mind that now. What he had to do now was get rid of the bird. He would leave the refrigerator door open and then come back with the rags and the water and clean it up. Good.

Patrick opened the refrigerator door on his own death.

At first he was simply puzzled, unable to cope in any way with what he was seeing. It meant nothing to him at all. It had no context. Patrick merely stared, his head cocked to one side, his eyes wide.

The pigeon was nothing but a skeleton surrounded by a ragged fall of feathers. There was no flesh left on its body at all. And around it, stuck on the refrigerator’s inner walls, hanging from the underside of the freezer compartment, dangling from the wire shelves, were dozens of flesh-colored objects that looked like big macaroni shells. Patrick saw that they were moving slightly, fluttering, as if in a breeze. Except there was no breeze. He frowned.

Suddenly one of the shell-like things unfurled insectile wings. Before Patrick could do more than register the fact, it had flown across the space between the refrigerator and Patrick’s left arm. It struck with a smacking sound. There was an instant of heat. It faded and Patrick’s arm felt just like always again… but the shell-like creature’s pale flesh turned first pink, and then, with shocking suddenness, rose-red.

Although Patrick was afraid of almost nothing in the commonly understood sense of the word (it’s hard to be afraid of things that aren’t “real’), there was at least one thing that filled him with wretched loathing. He had come out of Brewster Lake one warm August day when he was seven to discover four or five leeches clinging to his stomach and legs. He had screamed himself hoarse until his father had pulled them off.

Now, in a deadly burst of inspiration, he realized that this was some weird kind of flying leech. They had infested his refrigerator.

Patrick began to scream and beat at the thing on his arm. It had swelled to nearly the size of a tennis ball. At the third blow it broke open with a sickening squtt sound. Blood-his blood-sprayed his arm from elbow to wrist, but the thing’s jellylike eyeless head held on. In a way, it was like a bird’s narrow head, ending in a beaklike structure, but this beak was not flat or pointed; it was tubular and blunt, like the proboscis of a mosquito. This proboscis was buried in Patrick’s arm.

Still screaming, he pinched the splattered creature between his fingers and pulled it off. The proboscis came out cleanly, followed by a watery flow of blood mixed with some yellowish-white liquid like pus. It had made a painless dime-sized hole in his arm.

And the creature, although exploded, was still twisting and moving and seeking in his fingers.

Patrick threw it away, turned… and more of them flew out of the refrigerator, lighting on him even as he groped for the Amana’s handle. They landed on his hands, his arms, his neck. One touched down on his forehead. When Patrick raised his hand to pick it off, he saw four others on his hand, trembling minutely, turning first pink and then red.

There was no pain… but there was a hideous draining sensation. Screaming, whirling, beating at his head and neck with his leech-encrusted hands, Patrick Hockstetter’s mind yammered: It isn’t real, it’s just a bad dream, don’t worry, it’s not real, nothing is real -

But the blood pouring from the smashed leeches seemed real enough, the sound of their buzzing wings seemed real enough… and his own terror seemed real enough.

One of them fell down inside his shirt and settled on his chest. While he was beating frantically at it and watching the bloodstain spread above the place where it had taken its hold, another settled on his right eye. Patrick closed it, but that did no good; he felt a brief hot flare as the thing’s sucker poked through his eyelid and began to suck the fluid out of his eyeball. Patrick felt his eye collapse in its socket and he screamed again. A leech flew into his mouth when he did and roosted on his tongue.

It was all almost painless.

Patrick went staggering and flapping up the path toward the junked cars. Parasites hung all over him. Some of them drank to capacity and then burst like balloons; when this happened to the bigger ones, they drenched Patrick with almost half a pint of his own hot blood. He could feel the leech inside his mouth swelling up and he opened his jaws because the only coherent thought he had left was that it must not burst in there; it must not, must not.

But it did. Patrick ejected a huge spray of blood and parasite-flesh like vomit. He fell down in the gravelly dirt and began to roll over and over, still screaming. Little by little the sound of his own screams began to seem faint, faraway.

Just before he passed out, he saw a figure step from behind the last of the junked cars. At first Patrick thought he was a guy, Mandy Fazio perhaps, and he would be saved. But as the figure drew closer, he saw its face was running like wax. Sometimes it began to harden and look like something-or someone-and then it would start to run again, as if it couldn’t make up its mind who or what it wanted to be.

“Hello and goodbye,” a bubbling voice said from inside the running tallow of its features, and Patrick tried to scream again. He didn’t want to die; as the only “real” person, he wasn’t supposed to die. If he did, everyone else in the world would die with him.

The manshape laid hold of his leech-encrusted arms and began to drag him away toward the Barrens. His bloodstained book-carrier bumped and thumped along beside him, its strap still twisted about his neck. Patrick, still trying to scream, lost consciousness.

He awoke only once: when, in some dark, smelly, drippy hell where no light shone, no light at all, It began to feed.

 

6

 

At first Beverly was not entirely sure what she was seeing or what was happening… only that Patrick Hockstetter had begun to thrash and dance and scream. She got up warily, holding the slingshot in one hand and two of the ball-bearings in the other. She could hear Patrick blundering off down the path, still yelling his head off. In that moment, Beverly looked every inch the lovely woman she was going to become, and if Ben Hanscom had been around to see her just then, his heart might not have been able to stand it.

She was standing fully upright, her head cocked to the left, her eyes wide, her hair done in braids that had been tied off with two small red velvet bows which she had bought in Dahlie’s for a dime. Her posture was one of total attention and concentration; it was feline, lynxlike. She had shifted forward on her left foot, her body half-turned as if to go after Patrick, and the legs of her faded shorts had pulled up enough to show the edging on her yellow cotton panties. Below them, her legs were already smoothly muscled, beautiful in spite of the scabs, bruises, and smutches of dirt.

It’s a trick. He saw you and he knows he probably can’t catch you in a fair chase, so he’s trying to get you to come out. Don’t go, Bevvie.”

But another part of her thought there was too much pain and fear in those screams. She wished she had seen whatever had happened to Patrick-if anything had-more clearly. She wished more than anything else that she had come into the Barrens a different way and missed the whole crazy shenanigans.

Patrick’s screams stopped. A moment later Beverly heard someone speak-but she knew that had to be her imagination. She heard her father say, “Hello and goodbye.” Her father wasn’t even in Derry that day: he had set off for Brunswick at eight o’clock. He and Joe Tammerly were going to pick up a Chevy truck in Brunswick. She shook her head as if to clear it. The voice didn’t speak again. Her imagination, obviously.

She walked out of the bushes to the path, ready to run the instant she saw Patrick charging at her, her reactions on triggers as delicate as a cat’s whiskers. She looked down at the path and her eyes widened. There was blood here. Quite a lot of it.

Fake blood, her mind insisted. You can buy a bottle of it at Dahlie’s for forty-nine cents. Be careful, Bevvie!

She knelt and quickly touched the blood with her fingers. She looked at them closely. It wasn’t fake blood.

There was a flash of heat in her left arm, just below the elbow. She looked down and saw something that she first thought was some kind of burr. No-not a burr. Burrs didn’t twitch and flutter. This thing was alive. A moment after that she realized it was biting her. She struck it hard with the back of her right hand and it spattered, spraying blood. She backed up a step, getting ready to scream now that it was over… and then she saw that it wasn’t over at all. The thing’s featureless head was still on her arm, its snout buried in her flesh.

With a shrill cry of disgust and fear, she picked it off and saw its proboscis come out of her arm like a small dagger, dripping with blood. She understood the blood on the path now, oh yes, and her eyes went to the refrigerator.

The door had swung closed and latched again, but a number of the parasites had been left outside and were crawling sluggishly over the rusty-white porcelain. As Beverly looked, one of them unfurled its membranous fly-like wings and buzzed toward her.

She acted without thinking, loading one of the steel ball-bearings into the cup of the Bullseye and pulling the sling back. As the muscles of her left arm flexed smoothly, she saw loose blood squirt from the hole the thing had made in her arm. She let fly anyway, unconsciously leading the flying thing.

Shit! Missed! she thought as the Bullseye snapped and the ball-bearing flew, a glittering chunk of light in the hazy sun. And she would later tell the other Losers that she knew she had missed it, the same way a bowler knows he has missed the strike as soon as a bad ball leaves his hand. But then she saw the ball-bearing curve. It happened in a split-second, but the impression was very clear: it had curved. It struck the flying thing and splattered it to mush. There was a shower of yellowish droplets which pattered on the path.

Beverly backed up slowly at first, her eyes huge, her lips trembling, her face a shocked grayish-white. Her gaze was pinned to the front of the discarded refrigerator, waiting to see if any of the other things would smell or sense her. But the parasites only crawled slowly back and forth, like autumn flies drugged with the cold.

At last she turned and ran.

Panic beat darkly against her thoughts, but she would not give in to it entirely. She held the Bullseye in her left hand and looked back over her shoulder from time to time. There was still blood dappled brightly on the path and on the leaves of some of the bushes bordering it, as if Patrick had woven from side to side as he ran.

Beverly burst out into the area of the junked cars again. Ahead of her there was a bigger splash of blood, just beginning to soak into the gravelly earth. The ground looked disturbed, darker streaks of earth lined into the powdery-white surface. As if there had been a struggle there. Two grooves, about two and a half feet apart, led away from this spot.

Beverly halted, panting. She looked at her arm and was relieved to see that the flow of blood was finally slowing, although her lower forearm and the palm of her hand were streaked and tacky with it. The pain had begun now, a low steady throb. It felt the way her mouth felt about an hour after the dentist’s, when the novocaine began to wear off.

She looked behind again, saw nothing, then looked back at those grooves leading away from the junked cars, away from the dump, and into the Barrens.

Those things were in the refrigerator. They got all over him-sure they did, look at all the blood. He got this far, and then

(hello and goodbye)

something else happened. What?

She was terribly afraid she knew. The leeches were a part of It, and they had driven Patrick into another part of It much as a panic-maddened steer is driven down the chute and into the slaughtering-pen.

Get out of here! Get out, Bevvie!

Instead she followed the grooves in the earth, holding the Bullseye tightly

in her sweating hand.

At least get the others!

I will… in a little while.

She walked on, following the grooves as the ground sloped down and became softer. She followed them into heavy foliage again. Somewhere a cicada burred loudly and then unwound into silence. Mosquitoes lighted on her blood-streaked arm. She waved them away. Her teeth were clenched on her lower lip.

There was something lying on the ground ahead. She picked it up and looked at it. It was a handmade wallet, the sort of thing a kid might make as a crafts project at Community House. Except it was obvious to Bev that the kid who made this hadn’t been much of a craftsman; the wide plastic stitching was already coming unravelled and the bill compartment flapped like a loose mouth. She found a quarter in the change compartment. The only other thing in the wallet was a library card, made out in the name of Patrick Hockstetter. She tossed the wallet aside, library card and all. She wiped her fingers on her shorts.

Fifty feet farther on she found a sneaker. The underbrush was now too dense for her to be able to follow the grooves in the earth, but you didn’t have to be the Pathfinder to follow the splashes and drips of blood on the bushes.

The trail wound down through a steep brake. Bev lost her footing once, slid, and was raked by thorns. Fresh lines of blood appeared on her upper thigh. She was breathing fast now, her hair sweaty and matted to her skull. The spots of blood led out onto one of the faint paths through the Barrens. The Kenduskeag was nearby.

Patrick’s other sneaker, its laces bloody, lay marooned on the path.

She approached the river with the Bullseye’s sling half-drawn. The grooves in the earth had reappeared. They were shallower now-that’s because he lost his sneakers, she thought.

She came around a final bend and faced the river. The grooves went down the bank and led ultimately to one of those concrete cylinders-one of the pumping-stations. There they stopped. The iron cover capping the top of this cylinder was a little ajar.

As she stood above it, looking down, a thick and monstrous chuckle suddenly issued from beneath.

It was too much. The panic which had threatened now descended. Beverly turned and fled toward the clearing and clubhouse, her bloody left arm up to shield her face from the branches which whipped and slapped her.

Sometimes I worry too, Daddy, she thought wildly. Sometimes I worry a LOT.

 

7

 

Four hours later all of the Losers except Eddie crouched in the bushes near the spot where Beverly had hidden and watched Patrick Hockstetter go to the refrigerator and open it. The sky overhead had darkened with thunder-heads, and the smell of rain was in the air again. Bill was holding the end of a long length of clothesline in his hands. The six of them had pooled their available cash and bought the line and a Johnson’s first-aid kit for Beverly. Bill had carefully affixed a gauze pad over the bloody hole in her arm.

“T-Tell your puh-puh-harents you g-got a scruh-hape when you were skuh-skuh-skating,” Bill said.

“My skates!” Beverly cried, dismayed. She had forgotten all about them.

“There,” Ben said, and pointed. They were lying in a heap not far away, and she went to retrieve them before Ben or Bill or any of the others could offer. She remembered now that she had put them aside before urinating. She didn’t want any of the others over there.

Bill himself had tied one end of the clothesline to the handle of the Amana refrigerator, although they had all cautiously approached it together, ready to bolt at the first sign of movement. Bev had offered to give the Bullseye back to Bill; he had insisted she keep it. As it turned out, nothing had moved.

Although the area on the path in front of the refrigerator was splattered with blood, the parasites were gone. Perhaps they had flown away.

“You could bring Chief Borton and Mr Nell and a hundred other cops down here and it still wouldn’t matter,” Stan Uris said bitterly.

“Nope. They wouldn’t see a frockin thing,” Richie agreed. “How’s your arm, Bev?”

“Hurts.” She paused, looking from Bill to Richie and back to Bill again. “Would my mom and dad see the hole that thing made in my arm?”

“I d-d-don’t th-think s-s-so,” Bill said. “Get reh-ready to ruh-ruh-run. I’m gonna t-t-t-tie it uh-uh-on.”

He looped the cod of the clothesline around the refrigerator’s rust-flecked chrome handle, working with the care of a man defusing a live bomb. He tied a granny-knot and then stepped back, paying out the clothesline.

He grinned a small shaky grin at the others when they had made some distance. “Whooo,” he said. “G-Glad that’s oh-over.”

Now, a safe (they hoped) distance from the refrigerator, Bill told them again to get ready to run. Thunder boomed directly overhead and they all jumped. The first scattered drops began to fall.

Bill jerked the clothesline as hard as he could. His granny-knot popped off the handle, but not before it had pulled the refrigerator door open again. An avalanche of orange pompoms fell out, and Stan Uris uttered a painful groan. The others only stared, open-mouthed.

The rain began to come harder. Thunder whipcracked above them, making them cringe, and purplish-blue lightning flared as the refrigerator door swung all the way open. Richie saw it first and screamed, a high, hurt sound. Bill uttered some sort of angry, frightened cry. The others were silent.

Written on the inside of the door, written in drying blood, were these words:

[image of handwriting, in shaky capitals, with the words “STOP NOW BEFORE I KILL YOU ALL. A WORD TO THE WISE FROM YOUR FRIEND, PENNYWISE"]

Hail mixed with the driving rain. The refrigerator door shuddered back and forth in the rising wind, the letters painted there beginning to drip and run now, taking on the draggling ominous look of a horror-movie poster.

Bev was not aware that Bill had gotten up until she saw him advancing across the path toward the refrigerator. He was shaking both fists. Water streamed down his face and plastered his shirt to his back.

“W-We’re going to k-k-kill you!” Bill screamed. Thunder whacked and cracked. Lightning flashed so brightly that she could smell it, and not far away there was a splintering, rending sound as a tree fell.

“Bill, come back!” Richie was yelling. “Come back, man!” He started to get up and Ben hauled him back down again.

“You killed my brother George! You son of a bitch! You bastard! You whoremaster! Let’s see you now! Let’s see you now!”

Hail came in a spate, stinging them even through the screening bushes. Beverly held her arm up to protect her face. She could see red welts on Ben’s streaming cheeks.

“Bill, come back!” she screamed despairingly, and another thundercrack drowned her out; it rolled across the Barrens below the low black clouds.

“Let’s see you come out now, you fucker!”

Bill kicked wildly at the heap of pompoms that had spilled out of the refrigerator. He turned away and began to walk back toward them, his head down. He seemed not to feel the hail, although it now covered the ground like snow.

He blundered into the bushes, and Stan had to grab bis arm to keep him from going into the prickerbushes. He was crying.

“That’s okay, Bill,” Ben said, putting a clumsy arm around him.

“Yeah,” Richie said. “don’t worry. We’re not gonna chicken out.” He stared around at them, his eyes looking wildly out of his wet face. “Is there anyone here who’s gonna chicken out?”

They shook their heads.

Bill looked up, wiping his eyes. They were all soaked to the skin and looked like a litter of pups that had just forded a river. “Ih-It’s scuh-scuh-hared of u-u-us, you know,” he said. “I can fuh-feel th-that. I swear to Guh-God I c-c-can.”

Bev nodded soberly. “I think you’re right.”

“H-H-Help m-m-me,” Bill said. “P-P-Pl-Please. H-H-Help m-m-me.”

“We will,” Beverly said. She took Bill in her arms. She had not realized how easily her arms would go around him, how thin he was. She could feel his heart racing under his shut; she could feel it next to hers. She thought that no touch had ever seemed so sweet and strong.

Richie put his arms around both of them and laid his head on Beverly’s shoulder. Ben did the same from the other side. Stan Uris put his arms around Richie and Ben. Mike hesitated, and then slipped one arm around Beverly’s waist and the other over Bill’s shivering shoulders. They stood that way, hugging, and the sleet turned back to driving pouring rain, rain so heavy it seemed almost like a new atmosphere. The lightning walked and the thunder talked. No one spoke. Beverly’s eyes were tightly shut. They stood in the rain in a huddled group, hugging each other, listening to it hiss down on the bushes. That was what she remembered best: the sound of the rain and their own shared silence and a vague sorrow that Eddie was not there with them. She remembered those things.

She remembered feeling very young and very strong.

 

 

Chapter 18

THE BULLSEYE

 

1

 

“Okay, Haystack,” Richie says. “Your turn. The redhead’s smoked all of her cigarettes and most of mine. The hour groweth late.”

Ben glances up at the clock. Yes, it’s late: nearly midnight. Just time for one more story, he thinks. One more story before twelve. Just to keep us warm. What should it be? But that, of course, is only a joke, and not a very good one; there is only one story left, at least only one he remembers, and that is the story of the silver slugs-how they were made in Zack Denbrough’s workshop on the night of July 23rd and how they were used on the 25th.

“I’ve got my own scars,” he says. “do you remember?”

Beverly and Eddie shake their heads; Bill and Richie nod. Mike sits silent, his eyes watchful in his tired face.

Ben stands up and unbuttons the work-shirt he is wearing, spreading it open. An old scar in the shape of the letter H shows there. Its lines are broken-the belly was much bigger when that scar was put there-but its shape still identifiable.

The heavy scar depending downward from the cross-bar of the H is much clearer. It looks like a twisted white hangrope from which the noose has been cut.

Beverly’s hand goes to her mouth. “The werewolf! In that house! Oh Jesus Christ!” And she turns to the windows, as if to see it lurking outside in the darkness.

“That’s right,” Ben said. “And you want to know something funny? That scar wasn’t there two days ago. Henry’s old calling-card was; I know, because I showed it to a friend of mine, a bar-tender named Ricky Lee back in Hemingford Home. But this one-” He laughs without much humor and begins buttoning his shirt again. This one just came back.”

“Like the ones on our hands.”

“Yeah,” Mike says as Ben buttons his skin up again. “The werewolf. We all saw It as the werewolf that time.”

“Because that’s how R-R-Richie saw Ih-It before,” Bill murmurs. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Mike says.

“We were close, weren’t we?” Beverly says. Her voice is softly marvelling. “Close enough to read each other’s minds.”

“Ole Big Hairy damn near had your guts for garters, Ben,” Richie says, and he is not smiling as he says it. He pushes his mended glasses up on his nose and behind them his face looks white and haggard and ghostly.

“Bill saved your bacon,” Eddie says abruptly. “I mean, Bev saved us all, but if it hadn’t been for you, Bill-”

“Yes,” Ben agrees. “You did, big Bill. I was, like, lost in the funhouse.”

Bill points briefly at the empty chair. “I had some help from Stan Uris. And he paid for it. Maybe died for it.”

Ben Hansom is shaking his head. “don’t say that, Bill.”

“But it’s t-true. And if it’s yuh-your f-fault, it’s my fault, too, and e-e-everyone else’s here, because we went on. Even after Patrick, and what was written on that r-re-frigerator, we went on. It would be my fault m-most of all, I guess, because I wuh-wuh-wanted us to go on. Because of Juh-George. Maybe even because I thought that if I killed whatever k-killed George, my puh-harents would have to luh-luh-luh-”

“Love you again?” Beverly asks gently.

“Yes. Of course. But I d-d-don’t think it was a-a-anyone’s fuh-hault, Ben. It was just the w-w-way Stan was built.”

“He couldn’t face it,” Eddie says. He is thinking of Mr Keene’s revelation about his asthma medicine, and how he could still not give it up. He is thinking that he might have been able to give up the habit of being sick; it was the habit of believing he had been unable to kick. As things had turned out, maybe that habit had saved his life.

“He was great that day,” Ben says. “stan and his birds.”

A chuckle stirs through them, and they look at the chair where Stan would have been in a rightful sane world where all the good guys won all of the time. I miss him, Ben thinks. God, how I miss him! He says, “You remember that day, Richie, when you told him you heard somewhere he killed Christ, and Stan says totally deadpan, “I think that was my father"?”

“I remember,” Richie says in a voice almost too low to hear. He takes his handkerchief out of his back pocket, removes his glasses, wipes his eyes, then puts his glasses back on. He puts away the handkerchief and without looking up from his hands he says, “Why don’t you just tell it, Ben?’

’It hurts, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Richie says, his voice so thick it is hard to understand him. “Why, sure. It hurts.”

Ben looks around at them, then nods. “All right, then. One more story before twelve. Just to keep us warm. Bill and Richie had the idea of the bullets-”

“No,” Richie demurs. “Bill thought of it first, and he got nervous first.”

“I just started to wuh-wuh-worry-”

“Doesn’t really matter, I guess,” Ben says. “The three of us spent some heavy library time that July. We were trying to find out how to make silver bullets. I had the silver; four silver dollars that were my father’s. Then Bill got nervous, thinking about what kind of shape we’d be in if we had a misfire with some kind of monster coming down our throats. And when we saw how good Beverly was with that slingshot of his, we ended up using one of my silver dollars to make slugs instead. We got the stuff together and all of us we went down to Bill’s place. Eddie, you were there-”

“I told my mother we were going to play Monopoly,” Eddie says. “My arm was really hurting, but I had to walk. That’s how pissed she was at me. And every time I heard someone behind me on the sidewalk I’d whip around, thinking it was Bowers. It didn’t help the pain.”

Bill grins. “And what we did was stand around and watch Ben make the ammo. I think Ben r-really could have made sil-silver bullets.”

“Oh, I’m not so sure of that,” Ben says, although he still is. He remembers how the dusk was drawing down outside (Mr Denbrough had promised them all rides home), the sound of the crickets in the grass, the first lightning-bugs blinking outside the windows. Bill had carefully set up the Monopoly board in the dining room, making it look as if the game had been going on for an hour or more.

He remembers that, and the clean pool of yellow light falling on Zack’s worktable. He remembers Bill saying, “We gotta be c-c-

 

2

 

–careful. I don’t want to leave a muh-muh-mess. My dad’ll be-”

He spat out a number of “p’s, and finally managed to say “pissed off.”

Richie made a burlesque of wiping his cheek. “do you serve towels with your showers, Stuttering Bill?”

Bill made as if to hit him. Richie cowered, shrieking in his Pickaninny Voice.

Ben took very little notice of them. He watched Bill lay out the implements and tools one by one in the light. Part of his mind was wishing that someday” he might have such a nice worktable as this himself. Most of it was centered directly on the job ahead. Hot as difficult as making silver bullets would have been, but he would still be careful. There was no excuse for sloppy workmanship. This was not something he had been taught or told, just something he knew.

Bill had insisted that Ben make the slugs, just as he continued to insist that Beverly would be the one carrying the Bullseye. These things could have and had been discussed, but it was only twenty-seven years later, telling the story, that Ben realized no one had even suggested that a silver bullet or slug might not stop a monster-they had the weight of what seemed like a thousand horror movies on their side.

“Okay,” Ben said. He cracked his knuckles and then looked at Bill. “You got the molds?”

“Oh!” Bill jumped a little. “H-H-Here.” He reached into his pants pocket and brought out his handkerchief. He put it on the workbench and unfolded it. There were two dull steel balls inside, each with a small hole in it. They were bearing molds.

After deciding on slugs instead of bullets, Bill and Richie had gone back to the library and had researched how bearings were made. “You boys are so busy,” Mrs Starrett had said. “Bullets one week and bearings the next! And it’s summer vacation, too!”

“We like to stay sharp,” Richie said. “Right, Bill?”

“Ruh-Ruh-Right.”

It turned out that making bearings was a cinch, once you had the molds. The only real question was where to get them. A couple of discreet questions to Zack Denbrough had taken care of that… and none of the Losers were too surprised to find that the only machine-shop in Derry where such molds might be obtained was Kitchener Precision Tool amp; Die. The Kitchener who owned and ran it was a great-great-grandnephew of the brothers who had owned the Kitchener Ironworks.

Bill and Richie had gone over together with all the cash the Losers had been able to raise on short notice-ten dollars and fifty-nine cents-in Bill’s pocket. When Bill asked how much a couple of two-inch bearing molds might cost, Carl Kitchener-who looked like a veteran boozehound and smelled like an old horse-blanket-asked what a couple of kids wanted with bearing molds. Richie let Bill speak, knowing things would probably go easier that way-children made fun of Bill’s stutter; adults were embarrassed by it. Sometimes this was surprisingly helpful.

Bill got halfway through the explanation he and Richie had worked out on the way over-something about a model windmill for next year’s science project-when Kitchener waved for him to shut up and quoted them the unbelievable price of fifty cents per mold.

Hardly able to believe their good fortune, Bill forked over a single dollar bill.

“Don’t expect me to give you a bag,” Carl Kitchener said, eying them with the bloodshot contempt of a man who believes he has seen everything the world holds, most of it twice. “You don’t get no bag unless you spend at least five bucks.”

That’s o-o-okay, suh-sir,” Bill said.

“And don’t hang around out front,” Kitchener said. “You both need haircuts.”

Outside Bill said: “Y-Y-You ever nuh-hotice, Ruh-Richie, how guh-guh-grownups w-w-won’t sell you a-a-anything except c-candy or cuh-cuh-homic books or m-maybe movie t-t-tickets without first they w-want to know what y-you want it f-for?”

“Sure,” Richie said.

“W-Why? Why ih-is that?”

“Because they think we’re dangerous.”

“Y-Yeah? You thuh-thuh-think s-so?”

“Yeah,” Richie said, and then giggled. “Let’s hang around out front, want to? We’ll put up our collars and sneer at people and let our hair grow.”

“Fuck y-you,” Bill said.

 

3

 

“Okay,” Ben said, looking at the molds carefully and then putting them down. “Good. Now-”

They gave him a little more room, looking at him hopefully, the way a man with engine trouble who knows nothing about cars will look at a mechanic. Ben didn’t notice their expressions. He was concentrating on the job.

“Gimme that shell,” he said, “and the blowtorch.”

Bill handed a cut-down mortar shell to him. It was a war souvenir. Zack had picked it up five days after he and the rest of General Patton’s army had crossed the river into Germany. There had been a time, when Bill was very young and George was still in diapers, that his father had used it as an ashtray. Later he had quit smoking, and the mortar shell had disappeared. Bill had found it in the back of the garage just a week ago.

Ben put the mortar shell into Zack’s vise, tightened it, and then took the blowtorch from Beverly. He reached into his pocket, brought out a silver dollar, and dropped it into the makeshift crucible. It made a hollow sound.

“Your father gave you that, didn’t he?” Beverly asked.

“Yes,” Ben said, “but I don’t remember him very well.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

He looked at her and smiled. “Yes,” he said.

She smiled back. It was enough for Ben. If she had smiled at him twice, he would gladly have made enough silver bearings to shoot a platoon of werewolves. He looked hastily away. “Okay. Here we go. No problem. Easy as pie, right?”

They nodded hesitantly.

Years later, recounting all of this, Ben would think: These days a kid could just run out and buy a propane torch… or his dad would have one in the workshop.

There had been no such things in 1958, however; Zack Denbrough had a tank-job, and it made Beverly nervous. Ben could tell she was nervous, wanted to tell her not to worry, but was afraid his voice would tremble.

“Don’t worry,” he said to Stan, who was standing next to her.

“Huh?” Stan said, looking at him and bunking.

“Don’t worry,”

“I’m not.”

“Oh. I thought you were. And I just wanted you to know this is perfectly safe. If you were. Worrying, I mean.”

“Are you okay, Ben?”

“Fine,” Ben muttered. “Gimme the matches, Richie.”

Richie gave him a book of matches. Ben twisted the valve on the tank and lit a match under the nozzle of the torch. There was a flump! and a bright blue-orange glare. Ben tuned the flame to a blue edge and began to heat the base of the mortar shell.

“You got the funnel?” he asked Bill.

“R-R-Right here.” Bill handed over a homemade funnel that Ben had made earlier. The tiny hole at its base fit the hole in the bearing molds almost exactly. Ben had done this without taking a single measurement. Bill had been amazed-almost flabbergasted-but did not know how to say so without embarrassing Ben.

Absorbed in what he was doing, Ben could talk to Beverly-he spoke with the dry precision of a surgeon addressing a nurse.

“Bev, you got the steadiest hands. Suck the funnel in the hole. Use one of those gloves so you don’t get burned.”

Bill handed her one of his father’s work gloves. Beverly put the tin funnel in the mold. No one spoke. The hissing of the blowtorch flame seemed very loud. They watched it, eyes squinted almost shut.

“Wuh-wuh-wait,” Bill said suddenly, and dashed into the house. He came back a minute later with a pair of cheap Turtle wraparound sunglasses that had been languishing in a kitchen drawer for a year or more. “Better p-put these uh-on, H-H-Haystack.”

Ben took them, grinned, and slipped them on.

“Shit, it’s Fabian!” Richie said. “Or Frankie Avalon, or one of those Bandstand wops.”

“Fuck you, Trashmouth,” Ben said, but he started giggling in spite of himself. The idea of him being Fabian or someone like that was just too weird. The flame wavered and he stopped laughing; his concentration narrowed to a point again.

Two minutes later he handed the torch to Eddie, who held it gingerly in his good hand. “It’s ready,” he said to Bill. “Gimme that other glove. Fast! Fast!”

Bill gave it to him. Ben put it on and held the mortar shell with the gloved hand while he turned the vise lever with the other.

“Hold it steady, Bev.”

“I’m ready, don’t wait for me,” she rapped back at him.

Ben tilted the shell over the funnel. The others watched as a rivulet of molten silver flowed between the two receptacles. Ben poured precisely; not a drop was spilled. And for a moment, he felt galvanized. He seemed to see everything magnified through a strong white glow. For that one moment he did not feel like plain fat old Ben Hanscom, who wore sweatshirts to disguise his gut and his tits; he felt like Thor, working thunder and lightning at the smithy of the gods.

Then the feeling was gone.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m gonna have to reheat the silver. Someone shove a nail or something up the spout of the funnel before the goop hardens in there.”

Stan did it.

Ben clamped the mortar shell in the vise again and took the torch from Eddie.

“Okay,” he said, “number two.”

And went back to work.

 

4

 

Ten minutes later it was done.

“Now what?” Mike asked.

“Now we play Monopoly for an hour,” Ben said, “while they harden in the molds. Then I clip em open with a chisel along the cut-lines and we’re done.”

Richie looked uneasily at the cracked face of his Timex, which had taken a great many lickings and kept on ticking. “When will your folks be back, Bill?”

“N-N-Not until tuh-ten or ten-thuh-thuh-hirty,” Bill said. “It’s a double f-f-f-feature at the Uh-Uh-Uh-”

“Aladdin,” Stan said.

“Yeah. And they’ll stop in for a slice of p-p-pizza after. They a-almost always d-do.”

“So we have plenty of time,” Ben said.

Bill nodded.

“Then let’s go in,” Bev said. “I want to call home. I promised I would. And don’t any of you talk. He thinks I’m at Community House and that I’m getting a ride home from there.”

“What if he wants to come down and pick you up early?” Mike asked.

“Then,” Beverly said, “I’m going to be in a lot of trouble.”

Ben thought: I’d protect you, Beverly. In his mind’s eye, an instant daydream unfolded, one with an ending so sweet he shivered. Bev’s father started to give her a hard time; to bawl her out and all that (even in his daydream he did not imagine how bad all that could get with Al Marsh). Ben threw himself in front of her and told Marsh to lay off.

If you want trouble, fatboy, you just keep protecting my daughter.

Hanscom, usually a quiet bookish type, can be a ravening tiger when you get him mad. He speaks to Al Marsh with great sincerity. If you want to get to her, you’ll have to come through me first.

Marsh starts forward… and then the steely glint in Hanscom’s eyes stops him.

You’ll be sorry, he mumbles, but it’s clear all the fight has gone out of him-He’s just a paper tiger after all.

Somehow I doubt that, Hanscom says with a tight Gary Cooper smile, and Beverly’s father slinks away.

What’s happened to you, Ben? Bev cries, but her eyes are shining and full of stars. You looked ready to kill him!

Kill him? Hanscom says, the Gary Cooper smile still lingering on his lips. No way, baby. He may be a creep, but he’s still your father. I might have roughed him up a little, but that’s only because when someone talks wrong to you I get a little hot under the collar. You know?

She throws her arms around him and kisses him (on the lips! on the LIPS!). I love you, Ben! she sobs. He can feel her small breasts pressing firmly against his chest and -

He shivered a little, throwing this bright, terribly clear picture off with an effort. Richie stood in the doorway, asking him if he was coming, and Ben realized he was all alone in the workroom.

“Yeah,” he said, starting a little. “sure I am.”

“You’re goin senile, Haystack,” Richie said as Ben went though the door, but he clapped Ben on the shoulder. Ben grinned and hooked an elbow briefly around Richie’s neck.

 

5

 

There was no problem with Beverly’s dad. He had come home late from work, Bev’s mother told her over the phone, fallen asleep in front of the TV, and waked up just long enough to get himself into bed.

“You got a ride home, Bevvie?”

“Yes. Bill Denbrough’s dad is going to take a whole bunch of us home.”

Mrs Marsh sounded suddenly alarmed. “You’re not on a date, are you, Bevvie?”

“No, of course not,” Bev said, looking through the arched doorway between the darkened hall where she was and the dining room, where the others were sitting down around the Monopoly board. But I sure wish I was. “Boys, uck. But they have a sign-up sheet down here, and every night a different dad or mom takes kids home.” That much, at least, was true. The rest was a lie so outrageous that she could feel herself blushing hotly in the dark.

“All right,” her mom said. “I just wanted to be sure. Because if your dad caught you going on dates at your age, he’d be mad.” Almost as an afterthought she added: “I would be, too.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bev said, still looking into the dining room. She did know; yet here she was, not with one boy but six of them, in a house where the parents were gone. She saw Ben looking at her anxiously, and she sketched a smiling little salute at him. He blushed but gave her the little salute right back.

“Are any of your girlfriends there?”

What girlfriends, Mamma?

“Um, Patty O’Hara’s here. And Ellie Geiger, I think. She’s playing shuffle-board downstairs.” The facility with which the lies came from her lips made her ashamed. She wished she were talking to her father; she would have been more scared but less ashamed. She supposed she really wasn’t a very good girl.

“I love you, Mamma,” she said.

“Same goes back to you, Bev.” Her mother paused briefly and added: “Be careful. The paper says there may be another one. A boy named Patrick Hockstetter. He’s missing. Did you know him, Bevvie?”

She closed her eyes briefly. “No, Mom.”

“Well… goodbye, then.”

“Bye.”

She joined the others at the table and for an hour they played Monopoly. Stan was the big winner.

“Jews are very good at making money,” Stan said, putting a hotel on Atlantic Avenue and two more green houses on Ventnor Avenue. “Everybody knows that.”

“Jesus, make me Jewish,” Ben said promptly, and everyone laughed. Ben was almost broke.

Beverly glanced across the table from time to time at Bill, noting his clean hands, his blue eyes, the fine red hair. As he moved the little silver shoe he was using as a marker around the board, she thought, If he held my hand, I think I’d be so glad I’d probably die. A warm light seemed to glow briefly in her chest and she smiled secretly down at her hands.

 

6

 

The evening’s finale was almost anticlirnactic. Ben took one of Zack’s chisels from the shelf and used a hammer to strike the molds on the cut-lines. They opened easily. Two small silver balls fell out. In one they could faintly see part of a date: 925. In the other, wavery lines Beverly thought were the remnants of Lady Liberty’s hair. They looked at them without speaking for a moment, and then Stan picked one up.

“Pretty small,” he said.

“So was the rock in David’s sung when he went up against Goliath,” Mike said. “They look powerful to me.”

Ben found himself nodding. They did to him, as well.

“We’re all d-d-done?” Bill asked.

“All done,” Ben said. “Here.” He tossed the second slug to Bill, who was so surprised he almost fumbled it.

The slugs went around the circle. Each of them looked closely at both, marvelling at their roundness, weight, actuality. When they came back to Ben, he held them in his hand and then looked at Bill. “What do we do with them now?”

“G-G-Give them to B-Beverly.”

“No!”

He looked at her. His face was kind enough, but stern. “B-B-Bev, we’ve been thruh-through this a-a-already, and-”

“Ill do it,” she said. “I’ll shoot the goddamned things when the time comes, If it comes. I’ll probably get us all killed, but I’ll do it. I don’t want to take them home, though. One of my

(father)

parents might find them. Then I’d be in dutch.”

“Don’t you have a secret hiding place?” Richie asked. “Criminy, I got four or five.”

“I’ve got a place,” Beverly said. There was a small slit in the bottom of her box-spring where she sometimes stashed cigarettes, comic books, and, just lately, film and fashion magazines. “But nothing I’d trust for something like this. You keep them, Bill. Until it’s time, anyway, you keep them.”

“Okay,” Bill said mildly, and just then lights splashed into the driveway. “Holy cruh-crow, they’re e-e-early. L-Let’s get out of h-here.”

They were just sitting down around the Monopoly board again when Sharon Denbrough opened the kitchen door.

Richie rolled his eyes and mimed wiping sweat from his forehead; the others laughed heartily. Richie had Gotten Off A Good One.

A moment later she came in. “Your dad’s waiting for your friends in the car, Bill.”

“O-O-Okay, M-Mom,” Bill said. “W-We were juh-just f-f-finishing, a-anyway.”

“Who won?” Sharon asked, smiling bright-eyed at Bill’s little friends. The girl was going to be very pretty, she thought. She supposed in another year or two the children would have to be chaperoned if there were going to be girls instead of just the regular gang of boys. But surely it was still too soon to worry about sex rearing its ugly head.

“St-Stan wuh-wuh-won,” Bill said. “Juh-Juh-Jews are very g-g-good at m-making money.”

“Bill!” She cried, horrified and blushing… and then she looked around at them, amazed, as they roared with laughter, Stan included. Amazement turned to something like fear (although she said nothing of this to her husband later, in bed). There was a feeling in the air, like static electricity, only somehow much more powerful, much more scary. She felt that if she touched any of them, she would receive a walloping shock. What’s happened to them? she thought, dismayed, and perhaps she even opened her mouth to say something like that. Then Bill was saying he was sorry (but still with that devilish glint in his eye), and Stan was saying that was all right, it was just a joke they laid on him from time to time, and she found herself too confused to say anything at all.

But she felt relieved when the children were gone and her own puzzling, stuttering son had gone to his room and turned off the light.

 

7

 

The day that the Losers” Club finally met It in face-to-face combat, the day It almost had Ben Hanscom’s guts for garters, was July 25th, 1958. It was hot and muggy and still. Ben remembered the weather clearly enough; it had been the last day of the hot weather. After that day, a long spell of cool and cloudy had come in.

They arrived at 29 Neibolt Street around ten that morning, Bill riding Richie double on Silver, Ben with his ample buttocks spilling over either side of the sagging seat on his Raleigh. Beverly came down Neibolt Street on her girl’s Schwinn, her red hair held back from her forehead by a green band. It streamed out behind her. Mike came by himself, and about five minutes later Stan and Eddie walked up together.

“H-H-How’s your a-a-arm, Eh-Eh-Eddie?”

“Aw, not too bad. Hurts if I roll over on that side while I’m sleeping. Did you bring the stuff?”

There was a canvas-wrapped bundle in Silver’s bike-basket. Bill took it out and unwrapped it. He handed the slingshot to Beverly, who took it with a little grimace but said nothing. There was also a tin Sucrets box in the bundle. Bill opened it and showed them the two silver balls. They looked at them silently, gathered close together on the balding lawn on 29 Neibolt Street-a lawn where only weeds seemed to grow. Bill, Richie, and Eddie had seen the house before; the others hadn’t, and they looked at it curiously.

The windows look tike eyes, Stan thought, and his hand went to the paperback book in his back pocket. He touched it for luck. He carried the book with him almost everywhere-it was M. K. Handey’s Guide to North American Birds. They look like dirty blind eyes. It stinks, Beverly thought. I can smell it-but not with my nose, not exactly.

Mike thought, It’s like that time out where the Ironworks used to be. It has the same feel… as if it’s telling us to step on in.

This is one of Its places, all right, Ben thought. One of the places like the Morlock holes, where It goes out and comes back in. And It knows we’re out here. It’s waiting for us to come in.

“Yuh-yuh-you all still want to?” Bill asked.

They looked back at him, pale and solemn. No one said no. Eddie fumbled his aspirator out of his pocket and took a long whooping gasp at it.

“Gimme some of that,” Richie said.

Eddie looked at him, surprised, waiting for the punchline.

Richie held out his hand. “No fake, Jake. Can I have some?”

Eddie shrugged with his good shoulder-an oddly disjointed movement-and handed it over. Richie triggered the aspirator and breathed deep. “Needed that,” he said, and handed it back. He was coughing a little, but his eyes were sober.

“Me too,” Stan said. “Okay?”

So one after another they used Eddie’s aspirator. When it came back to him, Eddie jammed it in his back pocket, where the nozzle stuck out. They turned to look at the house again.

“Does anybody live on this street?” Beverly asked in a low voice.

“Not this end of it,” Mike said. “Not anymore. I guess there are still bums sometimes. Guys that come through on the freights.”

“They wouldn’t see anything,” Stan said. “They’d be safe. Most of them, anyway.” He looked at Bill. “Can any grownups at all see It, do you think,

Bill?”

“I don’t nuh-know,” Bill said. “There must be suh-suh-some.”

“I wish we could meet one,” Richie said glumly. “This really isn’t a job for kids, you know what I mean?”

Bill knew. Whenever the Hardy Boys got into trouble, Fenton Hardy was around to bail them out. Same with Rick Brant’s dad in the Rick Brant Science Adventures. Shit, even Nancy Drew had a father who would show up in the nick of time if the bad guys tied her up and threw her into an abandoned mine or something.

“Ought to be a grownup along,” Richie said, looking at the closed house with hs peeling paint, its duty windows, its shadowy porch. He sighed tiredly. For a moment, Ben felt their resolution falter.

Then Bill said, “Cuh-cuh-home a-a-a-around h-here. Look at th-this.”

They walked around to the left side of the porch, where the skirting was torn off. The brambly, run-to-the-wild roses were still there… and those It had touched when It climbed out were still black and dead.

“It just touched them and it did that?” Beverly asked, horrified.

Bill nodded. “Are you guh-huys s-s-sure?

For a moment nobody replied. They weren’t sure; even though all of them knew by Bill’s face that he would go on without them, they weren’t sure. There was also a species of shame on Bill’s face. As he had told them before, George hadn’t been their brother.

But all the other kids, Ben thought. Betty Ripsom, Cheryl Lamonica, that Clements kid, Eddie Corcoran (maybe), Ronnie Grogan… even Patrick Hockstetter. It kills kids, goddamit, kids!

“I’ll go, Big Bill, “he said.

“Shit, yeah,” Beverly said.

“Sure,” Richie said. “You think we’re gonna let you have all the fun, mushmouth?”

Bill looked at them, his throat working, and then he nodded. He handed the tin box to Beverly.

“Are you sure, Bill?”

“Sh-Sh-Sure.”

She nodded, at once horrified by the responsibility and bewitched by his trust. She opened the box, took out the slugs, and slipped one into the right front pocket of her jeans. The other she socketed in the Bullseye’s rubber cup, and it was by the cup that she carried the slingshot. She could feel the ball tightly enclosed in her fist, cold at first and then warming.

“Let’s go,” she said, her voice not quite steady. “Let’s go before I chicken out.”

Bill nodded, then looked sharply at Eddie. “Cuh-Can you d-d-do this, Eh-Eh-Eddie?”

Eddie nodded. “sure I can. I was alone last time. This time I’m with my friends. Right?” He looked at them and grinned a little. His expression was shy, fragile, and quite beautiful.

Richie clapped him on the back. “Thass right, senhorr. Anywhunn tries to steal your assipirator, we keel heem. But we keel heem slow.”

That’s terrible, Richie,” Bev said, giggling.

“Uh-Uh-under the p-porch,” Bill said. “A-A11 of you b-b-behind me. Then into the suh-suh-cellar.”

“If you go first and that thing jumps you, what do I do?” Beverly asked. “shoot through you?”

“If y-you have to,” Bill said. “But I suh-suh-suggest y-y-you try guh-hoing a-around, first.”

Richie laughed wildly at this.

“We’ll g-g-go through the whole puh-puh-place, if we have t-to.” He shrugged. “Maybe we won’t find be a-a-anything.”

“Do you believe that?” Mike asked.

“No,” Bill said briefly. “It’s h-h-here.”

Ben believed he was right. The house at 29 Neibolt Street seemed to be encased in a poisonous envelope. It could not be seen… but it could be felt. He licked his lips.

“You ruh-ruh-ready?” Bill asked them.

They all looked back at him. “ready, Bill,” Richie said.

“Cuh-come on, th-then,” Bill said. “stay cluh-close behind me, B-Beverly.” He dropped to his knees, crawled through the blighted rosebushes and under the porch.

 

8

 

They went this way: Bill, Beverly, Ben, Eddie, Richie, Stan, Mike. The leaves under the porch crackled and puffed up a sour old smell. Ben wrinkled his nose. Had he ever smelled fallen leaves like these? He thought not. And then an unpleasant idea struck him. They smelled the way he imagined a mummy would smell, just after its discoverer had levered open its coffin: all dust and bitter ancient tannic acid.

Bill had reached the broken cellar window and was looking into the cellar. Beverly crawled up beside him. “You see anything?”

Bill shook his head. “But that d-doesn’t m-m-mean nuh-huthin’s there. L-Look; there’s the c-coal-pile me and R-R-Richie used to get ow-out.”

Ben, who was looking between them, saw it. He was becoming excited as well as afraid now, and he welcomed the excitement, instinctively recognizing the fact that it could be a tool. Seeing the coal-pile was a little like seeing a great landmark about which you had only read or heard from others.

Bill turned around and slipped lithely through the window. Beverly gave Ben the Bullseye, folding his hand over the cup and ball nestled in it. “Give it to me the second I’m down,” she said. “The second.”

“Got you.”

She slipped down as easily and lithely as Bill had before her. There was-for Ben, at least-one heart-stopping instant when her blouse pulled out of her jeans and he saw her flat white belly. Then there was the thrill of her hands over his as he handed the slingshot down.

“Okay, I’ve got it. Come on.”

Ben turned around himself and began to wriggle through the window. He should have forseen what happened next; it was really inevitable. He got stuck. His fanny bound up against the rectangular cellar window and he couldn’t go in any further. He started to pull himself out and realized, horrified, that he could do it, but was very apt to yank his pants-and perhaps his underpants as well-down to his knees when he did. And there he would be, with his extremely large ass practically in his beloved’s face.

“Hurry up!” Eddie said.

Ben pushed grimly with both hands. For a moment he still couldn’t move, and then his butt popped through the window-hole. His bluejeans dragged painfully up into his crotch, squashing his balls. The top of the window rucked his shin all the way up to his shoulderblades. Now his gut was stuck.

“Suck in, Haystack,” Richie said, giggling hysterically. “You better suck in or we’ll have to send Mike after his dad’s chainfall to pull you out again.”

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Ben said through gritted teeth. He sucked his belly in as much as he could. He had never really realized just how big his stupid stomach was until this supremely embarrassing moment. He moved a little further, then stopped again.

He turned his head as far as he could, fighting panic and claustrophobia. His face had gone a bright sweaty red. The sour smell of the leaves was heavy in his nostrils, cloying. “Bill! Can you guys pull me?”

He felt Bill grasp one of his ankles, Beverly the other. He sucked his belly in as far as he could. A moment later he came tumbling through the window. Bill grabbed him. Both of them almost fell over. Ben couldn’t look at Bev. He had never in his life been as embarrassed as he was at that moment.

“Y-Y-You okay, m-m-man?”

“Yeah.”

Bill laughed shakily. Beverly joined him, and then Ben was able to laugh a little too, although it would be years before he could see anything remotely funny in what had happened.

“Hey!” Richie called down. “Eddie needs help, okay?”

“O-O-Okay.” Bill and Ben took up positions below the window. Eddie came through on his back. Bill got his legs just above the knees.

“Watch what you’re doing,” Eddie said in a querulous, nervous voice. “I’m ticklish.”

“Ramon ees plenny teekeleesh, senhorr,” Richie’s voice called down.

Ben got Eddie around the waist, trying to keep his hand away from the cast and the sling. The two of them manhandled Eddie through the cellar window like a corpse. Eddie cried out once, but that was all.

“Eh-Eh-Eddie?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, “okay. No big deal.” But large drops of sweat stood out on his forehead and he was breathing in quick rasps. His eyes darted around the cellar.

Bill stepped back again. Beverly stood near him, now holding the Bullseye by the shaft and the cup, ready to fire if necessary. Her eyes swept the cellar constantly. Richie came through next, followed by Stan and Mike. Both of the latter moved with a smooth grace that Ben deeply envied. Then they were all down, down in the cellar where Bill and Richie had seen It only a month before.

The room was dim, but not dark. Dusky light shafted in through the windows and pooled on the dirt floor. The cellar seemed very big to Ben, almost too big, as if he were witnessing an optical illusion of some sort. Dusty rafters crisscrossed overhead. The furnace-pipes were rusty. Some sort of duty white cloth hung from the water-pipes in dirty strings and strands. The smell was down here too. A dirty yellow smell. Ben thought: It’s here, all right. Oh yeah.

Bill started toward the stairs. The others fell in behind him. He halted at their foot and glanced underneath. He reached under with one foot and kick-pawed something out. They looked at it wordlessly. It was a white clown-glove, now streaked with dirt and dust.

“Uh-uh-upstairs,” he said.

They went up and emerged into a dirty kitchen. One plain straight-backed chair stood marooned in the center of the humped hillocky linoleum. That was it for furniture. There were empty liquor bottles in one corner. Ben could see others in the pantry. He could smell booze-wine, mostly-and old stale cigarettes. Those smells were dominant, but that other smell was there, too. It was getting stronger all the time.

Beverly went to the cupboards and opened one of them. She screamed piercingly as a blackish-brown Norway rat tumbled out almost into her face. It struck the counter with a plop and glared around at them with its black eyes. Still screaming, Beverly raised the Bullseye and pulled the sling back.

“NO!” Bill roared.

She turned her pale terrified face toward him. Then she nodded and relaxed her arm, the silver ball unfired-but Ben thought she had been very, very close. She backed up slowly, ran into Ben, jumped. He put an arm around her, tight.

The rat scurried down the length of the counter, jumped to the floor, ran into the pantry, and was gone.

“It wanted me to shoot at it,” Beverly said in a faint voice. “Use up half of our ammunition on it.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “It’s l-l-like the FBI training r-range at Quh-Quh-Quantico, in a w-w-way. They seh-send y-you down this f-f-hake street and p-pop up tuh-hargets. If you shuh-shoot any honest citizens ih-instead of just cruh-crooks, you l-lose puh-hoints.”

“I can’t do this, Bill,” she said. “I’ll mess it up. Here. You.” She held the Bullseye out, but Bill shook his head.

“You h-h-have to, B-Beverly.”

There was a mewling from another cupboard.

Richie walked toward it.

“Don’t get too close!” Stan barked. “It might-”

Richie looked inside and an expression of sick disgust crossed his face. He slammed the cupboard shut with a bang that produced a dead echo in the empty house.

“A litter.” Richie sounded ill. “Biggest litter I ever saw… anyone ever saw, probably.” He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. There’s hundreds of them in there.” He looked at them, his mouth twitching a little on one side. “Their tails… they were all tangled up, Bill. Knotted together.” He grimaced. “Like snakes.”

They looked at the cupboard door. The mewling was muffled but still audible. Rats, Ben thought, looking at Bill’s white face and, over Bill’s shoulder, Mike’s ashy-gray one. Everyone’s ascared of rats. It knows it, too.

“C-C-Come on,” Bill said. “H-Here on Nuh-Nuh-Neibolt Street, the f-f-fun just neh-hever stops.”

They went down the front hall. Here the unlovely smells of rotting plaster and old urine were intermixed. They were able to look out at the street through dirty panes of glass and see their bikes. Bev’s and Ben’s were heeled over on their kickstands. Bill’s leaned against a stunted maple tree. To Ben the bikes looked a thousand miles away, like things seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The deserted street with its casual patchings of asphalt, the faded humid sky, the steady ding-ding-ding of a locomotive running on a siding… these things seemed like dreams to him, hallucinations. What was real was this squalid hallway with its stinks and shadows.

There was a shatter of broken brown glass in one corner-Rheingold bottles.

In the other corner, wet and swelled, was a digest-sized girlybook. The woman on the cover was bent over a chair, her skirt up in the back to show the tops of her fishnet hose and her black panties. The picture did not look particularly sexy to Ben, nor did it embarrass him that Beverly had also glanced at it. Moisture had yellowed the woman’s skin and moisture had humped the cover in ripples that became wrinkles on her face. Her salacious wink had become the leer of a dead whore.

(Years later, as Ben recounted this, Bev suddenly cried out, startling all of them-they were not so much listening to the story as reliving it. “It was her!” Bev yelled. “Mrs Kersh! It was her!”)

As Ben looked, the young/old crone on the girlybook cover winked at him. She wiggled her fanny in an obscene come-on.

Cold all over, yet sweating, Ben looked away.

Bill pushed open a door on the left and they followed him into a vaultlike room that might once have been a parlor. A crumpled pair of green pants was hung over the light-fixture which depended from the ceiling. Like the cellar, this room seemed much too big to Ben, almost as long as a freight-car. Much too long for a house as small as this one had appeared from the outside -

Oh, but that was outside, a new voice spoke inside his mind. It was a jocular, squealing voice, and Ben realized with sudden numbing certainty that he was hearing Pennywise Itself; Pennywise was speaking to him on some crazy mental radio. Outside, things always look smaller than they really are, don’t they, Ben?

“Go away,” he whispered.

Richie turned to look at him, his face still strained and pale. “You say something?”

Ben shook his head. The voice was gone. That was an important thing, a good thing. Yet

(outside)

he had understood. This house was a special place, a kind of station, one of the places in Derry, one of the many, perhaps, from which It was able to find its way into the overworld. This stinking rotted house where everything was somehow wrong. It wasn’t just that it seemed too big; the angles were wrong, the perspective crazy. Ben was standing just inside the door between the parlor and the hallway and the others were moving away from him across a space that now looked almost as big as Bassey Park… but as they moved away, they seemed to grow larger instead of smaller. The floor seemed to slope, and -

Mike turned. “Ben!” he called, and Ben saw alarm on his face. “Catch up! We’re losing you!” He could barely hear the last word. It trailed away as if the others were being swept off on a fast train.

Suddenly terrified, he began to run. The door behind him swept shut with a muffled bang. He screamed… and something seemed to sweep through the air just behind him, ruffling his shirt. He looked back but there was nothing there. That did not change his belief, however, that something had been.

He caught up with the others. He was panting, out of breath, and would have sworn he had run half a mile at least… but when he looked back, the parlor’s far wall was not ten feet away.

Mike grasped his shoulder hard enough to hurt.

“You scared me, man,” he said. Richie, Stan, and Eddie were looking at Mike questioningly. “He looked small,” Mike said. “Like he was a mile away.”

“Bill!”

Bill looked back.

“We gotta make sure everybody stays close,” Ben panted. “This place… it’s like the funhouse in a carnival, or something. We’ll get lost. I think It wants us to get lost. To get separated.”

Bill looked at him for a moment, lips thin. “All right,” he said. “We a-all stay cluh-cluh-hose. No s-s-stragglers.”

They nodded back, frightened, clustered outside the hall door. Stan’s hand groped at the bird-book in his back pocket. Eddie was holding his aspirator in one hand, crunching it, loosening up, then crunching it again, like a ninety-eight-pound weakling trying to build up his muscles with a tennis ball.

Bill opened the door and here was another, narrower hall. The wallpaper, which showed runners of roses and elves wearing green caps, was falling away from the spongy plaster in draggling leaves. Yellow waterstains spread in senile rings on the ceiling overhead. A scummy wash of light fell through a dirty window at the end of the hall.

Abruptly the corridor seemed to elongate. The ceiling rose and then began to diminish above them like some weird rocket. The doors grew with the ceiling, pulled up like taffy. The faces of the elves grew long and became alien, their eyes bleeding black holes.

Stan shrieked and clapped his hands to his eyes.

“Ih-Ih-hit’s not ruh-ruh-ruh-REAL!” Bill screamed.

“It is!” Stan screamed back, his small closed fists plugging his eyes. “It’s real, you know it is, God, I’m going crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy -

’Wuh-wuh-WATCH!” Bill bellowed at Stan, at all of them, and Ben, his head reeling, watched as Bill bent down, coiled, and suddenly flung himself upward. His closed left fist struck nothing, nothing at all, but there was a heavy crr-rack! sound. Plaster dust puffed from a place where there was no longer any ceiling… and then there was. The hallway was just a hallway again, narrow, low-ceilinged, dirty. But the walls no longer stretched up into forever. There was only Bill, looking at them and nursing his bleeding hand, which was floury with plaster-dust. Overhead was the clear mark his fist had made in the soft plaster of the ceiling.

“N-N-Not ruh-ruh-real,” he said to Stan, to all of them. “Just a f-f-false f-fuh-face. Like a Huh-Huh-Huh-Halloween muh-muh-hask.”

“To you, maybe,” Stan said dully. His face was shocked and horrified. He looked around as if no longer sure where he was. Looking at him, smelling the sour reek coming out of his pores, Ben, who had been overjoyed at Bill’s victory, got scared all over again. Stan was close to cracking up. Soon he would go into hysterics, begin to scream, perhaps, and what would happen then?

“To you,” Stan said again. “But if I’d tried that, nothing would have happened. Because… you’ve got your brother, Bill, but I don’t have anything.” He looked around-first back toward the parlor, which had taken on a somber brown atmosphere, so thick and smoggy they could barely see the door through which they had entered it, to this hall, which was bright but somehow dark, somehow filthy, somehow utterly mad. Elves capered on the decaying wallpaper under runners of roses. Sun glared on the panes of the window at the end of the hall, and Ben knew that if they went down there they would see dead flies… more broken glass… and then what? The floorboards spreading apart, spilling them into a dead darkness where grasping fingers waited to catch them? Stan was right, God, why had they come into Its lair with nothing but their two stupid silver slugs and a fucking slingshot?

He saw Stan’s panic leap from one of them to the next to the next-like a grassfire driven by a hot wind, it widened in Eddie’s eyes, dropped Bev’s mouth into a wounded gasp, made Richie push his glasses up with both hands and stare around as if followed from close behind by a fiend.

They trembled on the brink of flight, Bill’s warning to stay together almost forgotten. They were listening to gale-force panicwinds blowing between their ears. As if in a dream Ben heard Miss Davies, the assistant librarian, reading to the little ones: Who is that trip-trapping on my bridge? And he saw them, the little ones, the babies, leaning forward, their faces still and solemn, their eyes reflecting the eternal fascination of the fairy-story: would the monster be bested… or would It feed?

“I don’t have anything!” Stan Uris wailed, and he seemed very small, almost small enough to slip through one of the cracks in the hallway’s plank flooring like a human letter. “You got your brother, man, but I don’t have anything?

“You duh-duh-duh-do!” Bill yelled back. He grabbed Stan and Ben felt sure he was going to bust him one and his thoughts moaned, No, Bill, please, that’s Henry’s way, if you do that It’ll kill us all right now!

But Bill didn’t hit Stan. He whirled him around with rough hands and tore the paperback from the back pocket of Stan’s jeans.

“Gimme it!” Stan screamed, beginning to cry. The others stood stunned, shrinking away from Bill, whose eyes now seemed to actually burn. His forehead glowed like a lamp, and he held the book out to Stan like a priest holding out a cross to ward off a vampire.

“You guh-guh-got your b-b-bi-bir-bir -

He turned his head up, the cords in his neck standing out like cables, his adam’s apple like an arrowhead buried in his throat. Ben was filled with both fear and pity for his friend Bill Denbrough; but there was also a strong sense of wonderful relief. Had he doubted Bill? Had any of them? Oh Bill, say it, please, can’t you say it?

And somehow, Bill did. “You got your BUH-BUH-BUH-BIRDS! Your BUH-BUH-BIRDS!”

He thrust the book at Stan. Stan took it, and looked at Bill dumbly. Tears glimmered on his cheeks. He held the book so tightly that his fingers were white. Bill looked at him, then at the others.

“Cuh-cuh-home on,” he said again.

“Will the birds work?” Stan asked. His voice was low, husky.

They worked in the Standpipe, didn’t they?” Bev asked him.

Stan looked at her uncertainly.

Richie clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, Stan-kid,” he said. “Is you a man or is you a mouse?”

“I must be a man,” Stan said shakily, and wiped tears from his face with the heel of his left hand. “so far as I know, mice don’t shit their pants.”

They laughed and Ben could have sworn he felt the house pulling away from them, from that sound. Mike turned. “That big room. The one we just came through. Look!”

They looked. The parlor was now almost black. It was not smoke, nor any kind of gas; it was just blackness, a nearly solid blackness. The air had been robbed of its light. The blackness seemed to roll and flex as they stared into it, to almost coalesce into faces.

“Come oh-oh-on.”

They turned away from the black and walked down the hall. Three doors opened off it, two with dirty white porcelain doorknobs, the third with only a hole where the knob’s shaft had been. Bill grabbed the first knob, turned it, and pushed the door open. Bev crowded up next to him, raising the Bullseye.

Ben drew back, aware that the others were doing the same, crowding behind Bill like frightened quail. It was a bedroom, empty save for one stained mattress. The rusty ghosts of the coils in a box-spring long departed were tattooed into the mattress’s yellow hide. Outside the room’s one window, sunflowers dipped and nodded.

“There’s nothing-” Bill began, and then the mattress began to bulge in and out rhythmically. It suddenly ripped straight down the middle. A black sticky fluid began to spill out, staining the mattress and then running over the floor toward the doorway. It came in long ropy tendrils.

“Shut it, Bill!” Richie shouted. “shut the fuckin door!”

Bill slammed it shut, looked around at them, and nodded. “Come on.” He had barely touched the knob of the second door-this one on the other side of the narrow hall-when the buzzing scream began behind the cheap wood.

 

9

 

Even Bill drew back from that rising, inhuman cry. Ben felt the sound might drive him mad; his mind visualized a giant cricket behind the door, like something from a movie where radiation made all the bugs get big-The Beginning of the End, maybe, or The Black Scorpion, or that one about the ants in the Los Angeles stormdrains. He could not have run even if that buzzing rugose horror had splintered the panels of the door and begun caressing him with its great hairy legs. Beside him, he was dimly aware that Eddie was breathing in hacking gasps.

The scream rose in pitch, never losing that buzzing, insectile quality. Bill

fell back another step, no blood in his face now, his eyes bulging, his lips only

a purple scar below his nose.

“Shoot it, Beverly!” Ben heard himself cry. “shoot it through the door, shoot it before it can get us!” And the sun fell through the dirty window at the end of the hall, a heavy feverish weight.

Beverly raised the Bullseye like a girl in a dream as the buzzing scream rose louder, louder, louder-

But before she could pull the sling back, Mike was shouting: “No! No! Don’t, Bev! Oh gosh! I’ll be dipped!” And incredibly, Mike was laughing. He pushed forward, grabbed the knob, turned it, and shoved the door open. It came free of the swollen jamb with a brief grinding noise. “It’s a mooseblower! Just a mooseblower, that’s all, something to scare the crows!”

The room was an empty box. Lying on the floor was a Sterno can with both ends cut off. In the middle, strung tight and knotted outside holes punched in the can’s sides, was a waxed length of string. Although there was no breeze in the room-the one window was shut and indifferently boarded over, letting light pass only in chinks and rays-there could be no doubt that the buzzing was coming from the can.

Mike walked to it and fetched it a solid kick. The buzzing stopped as the can tumbled into a far corner.

“Just a mooseblower,” he said to the others, as if apologizing. “We put cm on the scarecrows. It’s nothing. Only a cheap trick. But I ain’t a crow.” He looked at Bill, not laughing anymore but smiling still. “I’m still scared of It-I guess we all are-but It’s scared of us, too. Tell you the truth, I think It’s scared pretty bad.”

Bill nodded. “I-I do, too,” he said.

They went down to the door at the end of the hall, and as Ben watched Bill hook his finger into the hole where the doorknob’s shaft had been, he understood that this was where it was going to end; there would be no trick behind this door. The smell was worse now, and that thundery feeling of two opposing powers swirling around them was much stronger. He glanced at Eddie, one arm in a sling, his good hand clutching his aspirator. He looked at Bev on his other side, white-faced, holding the slingshot up like a wishbone. He thought: If we have to run, I’ll try to protect you, Beverly. I swear I’ll try.

She might have heard his thought, because she turned toward him and offered him a strained smile. Ben smiled back.

Bill pulled the door open. Its hinges uttered a dull scream and then were silent. It was a bathroom… but something was wrong with it. Someone broke something in here was all that Ben could make out at first. Not a booze bottle… what?

White chips and shards, glimmering wickedly, lay strewn everywhere. Then he understood. It was the crowning insanity. He laughed. Richie joined him.

“Somebody must have let the granddaddy of all farts,” Eddie said, and Mike began to giggle and nod his head. Stan was smiling a little. Only Bill and Beverly remained grim.

The white pieces littered across the floor were shards of porcelain. The toilet-bowl had exploded. The tank stood drunkenly at an angle in a puddle of water, saved from falling over by the fact that the toilet had been placed in one corner of the room and the tank had landed kitty-corner.

They crowded in behind Bill and Beverly, their feet gritting on bits of porcelain. Whatever it was, Ben thought, it blew that poor toilet right to hell. He had a vision of Henry Bowers dropping two or three of his M-80s into it, slamming the lid down, then bugging out in a hurry. He couldn’t think of anything else short of dynamite that would have done such a cataclysmic job. There were a few chunks, but damned few; most of what was left were wicked-looking slivers like blowgun darts. The wallpaper (rose-runners and capering elves, as in the hall) was peppered with holes all the way around the room. It looked like shotgun blasts but Ben knew it was more porcelain, driven into the walls by the force of the explosion.

There was a bathtub standing on claw feet with generations of grimy toe-jam between each blunt talon. Ben peeked into it and saw a tidal-flat of silt and grit on the bottom. A rusty showerhead glared down from above. There was a basin and a medicine cabinet standing ajar above it, disclosing empty shelves. There were small rust-rings on these shelves, where bottles had once stood.

“I wouldn’t get too close to that, big Bill!” Richie said sharply, and Ben looked around.

Bill was approaching the mouth of the drainhole in the floor, over which the toilet had once sat. He leaned toward it… and then turned back to the others.

“I can h-h-hear the pub-pumping muh-muh-machinery… just like in the Buh-Buh-harrens!”

Bev drew closer to Bill. Ben followed her, and yes, he could hear it; that steady thrumming noise. Except, echoing up through the pipes, it didn’t sound like machinery at all. It sounded like something alive.

Th-Th-This is w-w-where It cuh-cuh-hame fr-from,” Bill said. His face was still deadly pale, but his eyes were alight with excitement. “This is w-where it cuh-hame from that d-d-day, and th-hat’s w-w-where it a-a-always comes fr-rom! The druh-druh-drains!”

Richie was nodding. “We were in the cellar, but that isn’t where It was-It came down the stairs. Because this is where It could get out.”

“And It did this?” Beverly asked.

“Ih-It was in a h-h-hurry, I th-think,” Bill said gravely.

Ben looked into the pipe. It was about three feet in diameter and dark as a mineshaft. The inner ceramic surface of the pipe was crusted with stuff he didn’t want to know about. That thrumming sound floated up hypnotically… and suddenly he saw something. He did not see it with his physical eyes, not at first, but with one buried deep in his mind.

It was rushing toward them, moving at express-train speed, filling the throat of this dark pipe from side to side; It was in Its own form now, whatever that might be; It would take some shape from their minds when It got here. It was coming, coming up from Its own foul runs and black catacombs under the earth, Its eyes glowing a feral yellowish green, coming, coming; It was coming.

And then, at first like sparks, he saw Its eyes down in that darkness. They took shape-flaring and malignant. Over the thrumming sound of the machinery, Ben could now hear a new noise-Whoooooooo… A fetid smell belched from the ragged mouth of the drain-pipe and he fell back, coughing and gagging.

“It’s coming!” He screamed. “Bill, I saw It, It’s coming!”

Beverly raised the Bullseye. “Good,” she said.

Something exploded out of the drainpipe. Ben, trying to recall that first confrontation later, could only remember a silvery-orange shifting shape. It was not ghostly; it was solid, and he sensed some other shape, some real and ultimate shape, behind it… but his eyes could not grasp what he was seeing, not precisely.

Then Richie was stumbling backward, his face a scrawl of terror, screaming over and over again: “The Werewolf! Bill! It’s the Werewolf! The Teenage Werewolf.” And suddenly the shape locked into reality, for Ben, for all of them. Richie’s It became their It.

The Werewolf stood poised over the drainpipe, one hairy foot on either side of where the toilet had once been. Its green eyes glared at them from Its feral face. Its muzzle wrinkled back and yellowish-white foam seeped through Its teeth. It uttered a shattering growl. Its arms pistoned out toward Beverly, the cuffs of Its high-school letter jacket pulling back from Its fur-covered arms. Its smell was hot and raw and murderous.

Beverly screamed. Ben grabbed the back of her blouse and yanked so hard that the seams under the arms tore. One clawed hand swept through the air where she had been only a moment before. Beverly went stumbling backwards against the wall. The silver ball popped out of the cup of the Bullseye. For a moment it glimmered in the air. Mike, quicker than quick, snatched it and gave it back to her.

“Shoot it, baby,” he said. His voice was perfectly calm; almost serene. “You shoot it right now.”

The Werewolf uttered a shattering roar that became a flesh-freezing howl, Its snout turned up toward the ceiling.

The howl became a laugh. It lunged at Bill as Bill turned to look at Beverly. Ben shoved him aside and Bill went sprawling.

“Shoot It, Bev!” Richie screamed. “For God’s sake, shoot It!”

The Werewolf sprang forward, and there was no question in Ben’s mind, then or later, that It knew exactly who was in charge here. Bill was the one It was after. Beverly drew and fired. The ball flew and again it was off the mark but this time there was no saving curve. It missed by more than a foot, punching a hole in the wallpaper above the tub. Bill, his arms peppered with bits of porcelain and bleeding in a dozen pieces, uttered a screaming curse.

The Werewolf s head snapped around; its gleaming green eyes considered Beverly. Not thinking, Ben stepped in front of her as she groped in her pocket for the other silver slug. The jeans she wore were too tight. She had donned them with no thought of provocation; it was just that, like the shorts she had worn on the day of Patrick Hockstetter and the refrigerator, she was still wearing last year’s model. Her fingers closed on the ball but it squirted away. She groped again and got it. She pulled it, turning her pocket inside out and spilling fourteen cents, the stubs of two Aladdin tickets, and a quantity of pocket-lint onto the floor.

The Werewolf lunged at Ben, who was standing protectively in front of her… and blocking her field of fire. Its head was cocked at the predator’s deadly questing angle, its jaws snapping. Ben reached blindly for It. There seemed to be no room in his reactions now for terror-he felt a clear-headed sort of anger instead, mixed with bewilderment and a sense that somehow time had come to a sudden unexpected screech-halt. He snagged his hands in tough matted hair-the pelt, he thought, I’ve got Its pelt-and he could feel the heavy bone of Its skull beneath. He thrust at that wolvish head with all of his force, but although he was a big boy, it did no good at all. If he had not stumbled back and struck the wall, the thing would have torn his throat open with its teeth.

It came after him, Its greenish-yellow eyes flaring. It growled with each breath. It smelled of the sewer and something else, some wild yet unpleasant odor like rotten hazelnuts. One of Its heavy paws rose and Ben skittered aside as best he could. The paw, tipped with heavy claws, ripped bloodless wounds through the wallpaper and into the cheesy plaster beneath. He could dimly hear Richie bellowing something, Eddie howling at Beverly to shoot it, shoot it. But Beverly did not. This was her only other chance. It didn’t matter; she intended that it be the only one she would need. A clear coldness she never saw again in her life fell over her sight. In it everything stood out and forward; never again would she see the three dimensions of reality so clearly denned. She possessed every color, every angle, every distance. Fear departed. She felt the hunter’s simple lust of certainty and oncoming consummation. Her pulse slowed. The hysterical trembling grip in which she had been holding the Bullseye loosened, then firmed and became natural. She drew in a deep breath. It seemed to her that her lungs would never fill completely. Dimly, faintly, she heard popping sounds. Didn’t matter, whatever they were. She tracked left, waiting for the Werewolfs improbable head to fall with cool perfection into the wishbone beyond the extended V of the drawn-back sling.

The Werewolfs claws descended again. Ben tried to duck under them… but suddenly he was in Its grip. It jerked him forward as if he had been no more than a ragdoll. Its jaws snapped open.

“Bastard-”

He thrust a thumb into one of Its eyes. It bellowed with pain, and one of those claw-tipped paws ripped through his shirt. Ben sucked his stomach in, but one of the claws pulled a sizzling line of pain down his chest and stomach. Blood gushed out of him and splattered on his pants, his sneakers, the floor. The Werewolf threw him into the bathtub. He thumped his head, saw stars, struggled into a sitting position, and saw his lap was full of blood.

The Werewolf whirled around. Ben observed with that same lunatic clarity that It was wearing faded Levi Strauss bluejeans. The seams had split open. A snot-caked red bandanna, the sort a train-man might carry, hung from one back pocket. Written on the back of Its silver and orange high school jacket were the words DERRY HIGH SCHOOL KILLING TEAM. Below this, the name PENNYWISE. And in the center, a number: 13.

It went for Bill again. He had gotten to his feet and now stood with his back to the wall, looking at It steadily.

“Shoot it, Beverly!” Richie screamed again.

“Beep-beep, Richie,” she heard herself reply from roughly a thousand miles away. The Werewolf’s head was suddenly there, in the wishbone. She covered one of its green eyes with the cup and released. There was no shake in either of her hands; she fired as smoothly and naturally as she had fired at the cans in the dump on the day they had all taken turns to see who was the best.

There was time for Ben to think Oh Beverly if you miss this time we’re all dead and I don’t want to die in this dirty bathtub but I can’t get out. There was no miss. A round eye-not green but dead black-suddenly appeared high up in the center of Its snout: she had aimed for the right eye and missed by less than half an inch.

Its scream-an almost human scream of surprise, pain, fear and rage-was deafening. Ben’s ears rang with it. Then the perfect round hole in Its snout was gone, obscured by freshets of blood. It was not flowing; it gouted from the wound in a high-pressure torrent. The freshet drenched Bill’s face and hair. Doesn’t matter, Ben thought hysterically. Don’t worry, Bill. Nobody will be able to see it anyway when we get out of here. If we ever do.

Bill and Beverly advanced on the Werewolf, and behind them, Richie cried out hysterically: “shoot It again, Beverly! Kill it!”

“Kill It!” Mike screamed.

“That’s right, kill It!” Eddie chimed in.

“Kill it!” Bill cried, his mouth drawn down in a quivering bow. There was a whitish-yellow streak of plaster dust in his hair. “Kill It, Beverly, don’t let it get away!”

No ammo left, Ben thought incoherently, we’re slugged out. What are you talking about, kill it? But he looked at Beverly and understood. If his heart had never been hers before that moment, it would have flown to her then. She had pulled the sling back again. Her fingers were closed over the cup, hiding its emptiness.

“Kill It!” Ben screamed, and flopped clumsily over the edge of the tub. His jeans and underwear were soaked against his skin with blood. He had no idea if he was hurt badly or not. Following the original hot sizzle there hadn’t been much pain, but there sure was an awful lot of blood.

The Werewolf’s greenish eyes flickered among them, now filled with uncertainty as well as pain. Blood poured down the front of Its jacket in freshets.

Bill Denbrough smiled. It was a gentle, rather lovely smile… but it did not touch his eyes. “You shouldn’t have started with my brother,” he said. “send the fucker to hell, Beverly.”

The uncertainty left the creature’s eyes-It believed. With lithe smooth grace, It turned and dove into the drain. As It went, It changed. The Derry High jacket melted into its pelt and the color ran out of both. The shape of Its skull elongated, as if it had been made of wax which was now softening and beginning to run. Its shape changed. For one instant Ben believed he had nearly seen what shape It really was, and his heart froze inside his chest, leaving him gasping.

“I’ll kill you all!” a voice roared from inside the drainpipe. It was thick, savage, not in the least human. “Kill you all… kill you all… kill you all… ” The words faded back and back, diminishing, washing out, growing distant… at last joining the low throbbing hum of the pumping machinery floating through the pipes.

The house seemed to settle with a heavy sub-audible thud. But it wasn’t settling, Ben realized; in some strange way it was shrinking, coming back to its normal size. Whatever magic It had used to make the house at 29 Neibolt Street seem bigger was now withdrawn. The house snapped back like an elastic. It was only a house now, smelling damp and a little rotten, an unfurnished house where winos and hobos sometimes came to drink and talk and sleep out of the rain.

It was gone.

In Its wake the silence seemed very loud.

 

10

 

“W-W-We guh-got to g-g-get ow-ow-out of this p-place,” Bill said. He walked over to where Ben was trying to get up and grabbed one of his outstretched hands. Beverly was standing near the drain. She looked down at herself and that coldness disappeared in a flush that seemed to turn all her skin into one warm stocking. It must have been a deep breath indeed. The dim popping sounds had been the buttons on her blouse. They were gone, every single one of them. The blouse hung open and her small breasts were clearly revealed. She snatched the blouse closed.

“Ruh-Ruh-Richie,” Bill said. “Help me with B-B-Ben. He’s h-h-h-”

Richie joined him, then Stan and Mike. The four of them got Ben to his feet. Eddie had gone to Beverly and put his good arm awkwardly around her shoulders. “You did great,” he said, and Beverly burst into tears.

Ben took two big staggering steps to the wall and leaned against it before he could fall over again. His head felt light. Color kept washing in and out of the world. He felt decidedly pukey.

Then Bill’s arm was around him, strong and comforting.

“How b-b-bad ih-ih-is it, H-H-Haystack?”

Ben forced himself to look down at his stomach. He found performing two simple actions-bending his neck and spreading apart the slit in his shirt-took more courage than he had needed to enter the house in the first place. He expected to see half his insides hanging down in front of him like grotesque udders. Instead he saw that the flow of blood had slowed to a sluggish trickle. The Werewolf had slashed him long and deep, but apparently not mortally.

Richie joined them. He looked at the cut which ran a twisting course down Ben’s chest and petered out on the upper bulge of his stomach, then soberly into Ben’s face. “It just about had your guts for suspenders. Haystack. You know it?”

“No fake, Jake,” Ben said.

He and Richie stared at each other for a long, considering moment, and then they broke into hysterical giggles at the same instant, spraying each other with spittle. Richie took Ben into his arms and pounded his back. “We beat It, Haystack! We beat It!”

“W-W-We dih-dih-dih-didn’t beat It,” Bill said grimly. “We got l-l-lucky. Let’s g-get out b-b-before Ih-Ih-It d-d-decides to come buh-back.”

“Where?” Mike asked.

“The Buh-Buh-Barrens,” Bill said.

Beverly made her way over to them, still holding her blouse closed. Her cheeks were bright red. “The clubhouse?”

Bill nodded.

“Can I have someone’s shirt?” Beverly asked, blushing more furiously than ever. Bill glanced down at her, and the blood came into his own face, all in a rush. He turned his eyes away hastily, but in that instant Ben felt a rush of knowledge and dismal momentary jealousy. In that instant, that one bare second, Bill had become aware of her in a way that only Ben had himself been before.

The others had also looked and then looked away. Richie coughed against the back of his hand. Stan turned red. And Mike Hanlon dropped back a step or two as if actually frightened by the sideswell of that one small white breast, visible below her hand.

Beverly threw her head up, shaking her tangled hair back behind her. She was still blushing, but her face was lovely.

“I can’t help it that I’m a girl,” she said, “or that I’m starting to get big on top… now can’t I please have someone’s shirt?”

“Sh-sh-sure,” Bill said. He pulled his white t-shirt over his head, baring his narrow chest, the visible rack of his ribs, his sunburned, freckled shoulders. “H-H-Here.”

“Thank you, Bill,” she said, and for one hot, smoking moment their eyes locked directly. Bill did not look away this time. His gaze was firm, adult.

“W-W-W-Welcome,” he said.

Good luck, Big Bill, Ben thought, and he turned away from that gaze. It was hurting him, hurting him in a deeper place than any Vampire or Werewolf would ever be able to reach. But all the same, there was such a thing as propriety. The word he didn’t know; on the concept he was very clear. Looking at them when they were looking at each other that way would be as wrong as looking at her breasts when she let go of the front of her blouse to pull Bill’s t-shirt over her head. If that’s the way it is. But you’ll never love her the way I do. Never.

Bill’s t-shirt came down almost to her knees. If not for the jeans poking out from beneath its hem, she would have looked as if she was wearing a slip.

“L-L-Let’s guh-guh-go,” Bill repeated. “I duh-don’t nun-know about you g-guys, but I’ve h-h-had ee-ee-enough for wuh-wuh-one d-day.”

Turned out they all had.

 

11

 

The passage of an hour found them in the clubhouse, both the window and the trapdoor open. It was cool inside, and the Barrens were blessedly silent that day. They sat without talking much, each lost in his or her own thoughts. Richie and Bev passed a Marlboro back and forth. Eddie took a brief snort from his aspirator. Mike sneezed several times and apologized. He said he was catching a cold.

“Thass the oney theeng you could catch, senhorr,” Richie said, companionably enough, and that was all.

Ben kept expecting the mad interlude in the house on Neibolt Street to take on the hues of a dream. It’ll recede and fall apart, he thought, the way that bad dreams do. You wake up gasping and sweating all over, but fifteen minutes later you can’t remember what the dream was even about.

But that didn’t happen. Everything that had happened, from the time he had forced his way in through the cellar window to the moment Bill had used the chair in the kitchen to break a window so they could get out, remained bright and clearly fixed in his memory. It had not been a dream. The clotted wound on his chest and belly was not a dream, and it didn’t matter if his mom could see it or not.

At last Beverly stood up. “I have to go home,” she said. “I want to change before my mom gets home. If she sees me wearing a boy’s shirt, she’ll kill me.”

“Keel you, senhorrita,” Richie agreed, “but she will keel you slow.”

“Beep-beep, Richie.”

Bill was looking at her gravely.

“I’ll return your shirt, Bill.”

He nodded and waved a hand to show that this wasn’t important.

“Will you get in trouble? Coming home without it?”

“N-No. They h-h-hardly nuh-hotice when I’m a-a-around, anyway.”

She nodded, bit her full underlip, a girl of eleven who was tall for her age and simply beautiful.

“What happens next, Bill?”

“I d-d-don’t nuh-nuh-know.”

“It’s not over, is it?”

Bill shook his head.

Ben said, “It’ll want us more than ever now.”

“More silver slugs?” she asked him. He found he could barely stand to meet her glance. I love you, Beverly… just let me have that. You can have Bill, or the world, or whatever you need. Just let me have that, let me go on loving you, and I guess it’ll be enough.

“I don’t know,” Ben said. “We could, but… ” He trailed off vaguely, shrugged. He could not say what he felt, was somehow not able to bring it out-that this was like being in a monster movie, but it wasn’t. The Mummy had looked different in some ways… ways that confirmed its essential reality. The same was true of the Werewolf-he could testify to that because he had seen it in a paralyzing close-up no film, not even one in 3-D, allowed, he had had his hands in the wiry underbrush of Its tangled pelt, he had seen a small, baleful-orange firespot (like a pompom!) in one of Its green eyes. These things were… well… they were dreams-made-real. And once dreams became real, they escaped the power of the dreamer and became their own deadly things, capable of independent action. The silver slugs had worked because the seven of them had been unified in their belief that they would. But they hadn’t killed It. And next time It would approach them in a new shape, one over which silver wielded no power.

Power, power, Ben thought, looking at Beverly. It was okay now; her eyes had met Bill’s again and they were looking at each other as if lost. It was only for a moment, but to Ben it seemed very long.

It always comes back to power. I love Beverly Marsh and she has power over me. She loves Bill Denbrough and so he has power over her. But-I think-he is coming to love her. Maybe it was her face, how it looked when she said she couldn’t help being a girl. Maybe it was seeing one breast for just a second. Maybe just the way she looks sometimes when the light is right, or her eyes. Doesn’t matter. But if he’s starting to love her, she’s starting to have power over him. Superman has power, except when there’s Kryptonite around. Batman has power, even though he can’t fly or see through walls. My mom has power over me, and her boss down in the mill has power over her. Everyone has some… except maybe for link kids and babies.

Then he thought that even little kids and babies had power; they could cry until you had to do something to shut them up.

“Ben?” Beverly asked, looking back at him. “Cat got your tongue?”

“Huh? No. I was thinking about power. The power of the slugs.”

Bill was looking at him closely.

“I was wondering where that power came from,” Ben said.

“Ih-Ih-It-” Bill began, and then shut his mouth. A thoughtful, vague expression drifted over his face.

“I really have to go,” Beverly said. “I’ll see you all, huh?”

“Sure, come on down tomorrow,” Stan said. “We’re going to break Eddie’s other arm.”

They all laughed. Eddie pretended to throw his aspirator at Stan.

“Bye, then,” Beverly said, and boosted herself up and out.

Ben looked at Bill and saw that he hadn’t joined in the laughter. That thoughtful expression was still on his face, and Ben knew you would have to call his name two or three times before he would answer. He knew what Bill was thinking about; he would be thinking about it himself in the days ahead. Not all the time, no. There would be clothes to hang out and take in for his mother, games of tag and guns in the Barrens, and, during a rainy spell the first four days of August, the seven of them would go on a mad Parcheesi jag at Richie Tozier’s house, making blockades, sending each other back with great abandon, deliberating exactly how to split the roll of the dice while rain dripped and ran outside. His mother would announce to him that she believed Pat Nixon was the prettiest woman in America, and be horror-struck when Ben opted for Marilyn Monroe (except for the color of her hair, he thought that Bev looked like Marilyn Monroe). There would be time to eat as many Twinkies and Ring-Dings and Devil Dogs as he could get his hands on, and time to sit on the back porch reading Lucky Starr and the Moons of Mercury. There would be time for all of those things while the wound on his chest and belly healed to a scab and began to itch, because life went on and at eleven, although bright and apt, he held no real sense of perspective. He could live with what had happened in the house on Neibolt Street. The world was, after all, full of wonders.

But there would be odd moments of time when he pulled the questions out again and examined them: The power of the silver, the power of the slugs-where does power like that come from? Where does any power come from? How do you get it? How do you use it?

It seemed to him that their lives might depend on those questions. One night as he was falling asleep, the rain a steady lulling patter on the roof and against the windows, it occurred to him that there was another question, perhaps the only question. It had some real shape; he had nearly seen it. To see the shape was to see the secret. Was that also true of power? Perhaps it was. For wasn’t it true that power, like It, was a shape-changer? It was a baby crying in the middle of the night, it was an atomic bomb, it was a silver slug, it was the way Beverly looked at Bill and the way Bill looked back.

What, exactly what, was power, anyway?

 

12

 

Nothing much happened for the next two weeks.

 

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