C H A P T E R 3. C H A P T E R 4. C H A P T E R 5

Bill Denbrough Beats the Devil - I

Bill Denbrough thinks: I'm damned near space-travelling; I might as well be inside a bullet shot from a gun.

This thought, although perfectly true, is not one he finds especially comfortable. In fact, for the first hour following the Concorde's takeoff (or perhaps liftoff would be a better way to put it) from Heathrow, he has been coping with a mild case of claustrophobia. The airplane is narrow — unsettlingly so. The meal is just short of exquisite, but the flight attendants who serve it must twist and bend and squat to get the job done; they look like a troupe of gymnasts. Watching this strenuous service takes some of the pleasure out of the food for Bill, although his seatmate doesn't seem particularly bothered.

The seatmate is another drawback. He's fat and not particularly clean, it may be Ted Lapidus cologne on top of his skin, but beneath it Bill detects the unmistakable odors of dirt and sweat. He's not being very particular about his left elbow, either; every now and then it strikes Bill with a soft thud.

His eyes are drawn again and again to the digital readout at the front of the cabin. It shows how fast this British bullet is going. Now, as the Concorde reaches its cruising speed, it tops out at just over mach 2. Bill takes his pen from his shin pocket and uses its tip to tap buttons on the computer watch Audra gave him last Christmas. If the machometer is right — and Bill has absolutely no reason to think it is not — then they are busting along at a speed of eighteen miles per minute. He is not sure this is anything he really wanted to know.

Outside his window, which is as small and thick as the window in one of the old Mercury space capsules, he can see a sky which is not blue but the twilight purple of dusk, although it is the middle of the day. At the point where the sea and the sky meet, he can see that the horizon-line is slightly bowed. I am sitting here, Bill thinks, a Bloody Mary in my hand and a dirty fat man's elbow poking into my bicep, observing the curvature of the earth.

He smiles a little, thinking that a man who can face something like that shouldn't be afraid of anything. But he is afraid, and not just of flying at eighteen miles a minute in this narrow fragile shell. He can almost feel Derry rushing at him. And that is exactly the right expression for it. Eighteen miles a minute or not, the sensation is of being perfectly still while Derry rushes at him like some big carnivore which has lain in wait for a long time and has finally broken from cover. Derry, ah, Derry! Shall we write an ode to Derry? The stink of its mills and its rivers? The dignified quiet of its tree-lined streets? The library? The Standpipe?

Bassey Park? Derry Elementary School? The Barrens?

Lights are going on in his head; big kliegs. It's like he's been sitting in a darkened theater for twenty-seven years, waiting for something to happen, and now it's finally begun. The set being revealed spot by spot and klieg by klieg is not, however, some harmless comedy like Arsenic and Old Lace; to Bill Denbrough it looks more like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

All those stories I wrote, he thinks with a stupid kind of amusement. All those novels.

Derry is where they all came from; Derry was the wellspring. They came from what happened that summer, and from what happened to George the autumn before. All the interviewers that ever asked me THAT QUESTION. . . I gave them the wrong answer.

The fat man's elbow digs into him again, and he spills some of his drink. Bill almost says something, then thinks better of it.

THAT QUESTION, of course, was 'Where do you get your ideas? ' It was a question Bill supposed all writers of fiction had to answer — or pretend to answer — at least twice a week, but a fellow like him, who made a living by writing of things which never were and never could be, had to answer it — or pretend to — much more often than that.

'All writers have a pipeline which goes down into the subconscious, ' he told them, neglecting to mention that he doubted more as each year passed if there even was such a thing as a subconscious. 'But the man or woman who writes honor stories has a pipeline that goes further, maybe. . . into the sub-subconscious, if you like. '

Elegant answer, that, but one he had never really believed. Subconscious? Well, there was something down there all right, but Bill thought people had made much too big a deal out of a function which was probably the mental equivalent of your eyes watering when dust got in them or breaking wind an hour or so after a big dinner. The second metaphor was probably the better of the two, but you couldn't very well tell interviewers that as far as you were concerned, such things as dreams and vague longings and sensations like dé jà -vu really came down to nothing more than a bunch of mental farts. But they seemed to need something, all those reporters with their notebooks and their little Japanese tape-recorders, and Bill wanted to help them as much as he could. He knew that writing was a hard job, a damned hard job. There was no need to make theirs harder by telling them, 'My friend, you might as well ask me " Who cut the cheese? " and have done with it. '

He thought now: You always knew they were asking the wrong question, even before Mike called; now you also know what the right question was. Not where do you get your ideas but why do you get your ideas. There was a pipeline, all right, but it wasn't either the Freudian or Jungian version of the subconscious that it came out of; no interior drain-system of the mind, no subterranean cavern full of Morlocks waiting to happen. There was nothing at the other end of that pipe but Derry. Just Derry. And —

— and who's that, trip-trapping upon my bridge?

He sits bolt upright suddenly, and this time it's his elbow that goes wandering; it sinks deeply into his fat seatmate's side for a moment.

'Watch yourself buddy, ' the fat man says. 'Close quarters, you know. '

'You stop whopping me with yours and I'll try to stop wuh-whapping you with m-mine. ' The fat man gives him a sour, incredulous what-the-hell-you-talking-about look. Bill simply gazes at him until the fat man looks away, muttering.

Who's there?

Who's trip-trapping over my bridge?

He looks out the window again and thinks: We're beating the devil.

His arms and the nape of his neck prickle. He knocks back the rest of his drink in one swallow. Another of those big lights has gone on.

Silver. His bike. That was what he had called it, after the Lone Ranger's horse. A big Schwinn, twenty-eight inches tall. 'You'll kill yourself on that, Billy, ' his father had said, but with no real concern in his tone. He had shown little concern for anything since George's death. Before, he had been tough. Fair, but tough. Since, you could get around him. He would make fatherly gestures, go through fatherly motions, but motions and gestures were all they were. It was like he was always listening for George to come back into the house. Bill had seen it in the window of the Bike and Cycle Shoppe down on Center Street. It leaned gloomily on its kickstand, bigger than the biggest of the others on display, dull where they were shiny, straight in places where the others were curved, bent in places where the others were straight. Propped on its front tire had been a sign:

USED

Make an Offer

What actually happened was that Bill went in and the owner made him an offer, which Bill took — he wouldn't have known how to dicker with the Cycle Shoppe owner if his life depended on it, and the price — twenty-four dollars — the man quoted seemed very fair to Bill; generous, even. He paid for Silver with money he had saved up over the last seven or eight months — birthday money, Christmas money, lawn-mowing money. He had been noticing the bike in the window ever since Thanksgiving. He paid for it and wheeled it home as soon as the snow began to melt for good. It was funny, because he'd never thought much about owning a bike before last year. The idea seemed to come into his mind all at once, perhaps on one of those endless days after George died. Was murdered.

In the beginning, Bill almost did kill himself. The first ride on his new bike ended with Bill dumping it on purpose to keep from running smack into the board fence at the end of Kossuth Lane (he had not been so afraid of running into the fence as he had been of bashing right through it and falling sixty feet into the Barrens). He came away from that one with a fiveinch gash running between the wrist and elbow of his left arm. Not even a week later he had found himself unable to brake soon enough and had shot through the intersection of Witcham and Jackson at perhaps thirty-five miles an hour, a little kid on a dusty gray mastodon of a bike (Silver was silver only by the most energetic reach of a willing imagination), playing cards machine-gunning the spokes of the front and back wheels in a steady roar, and if a car had been coming he would have been dead meat. Just like Georgie.

He got control of Silver little by little as the spring advanced. Neither of his parents noticed during that time that he was conning death by bicycle. He thought that, 'after the first few days, they had ceased to really see his bike at all — to them it was just a relic with chipped paint which leaned against the garage wall on rainy days.

Silver was a lot more than some dusty old relic, though. He didn't look like much, but he went like the wind. Bill's friend — his only real friend — was a kid named Eddie Kaspbrak, and Eddie was good with mechanical things. He had shown Bill how to get Silver in shape — which bolts to tighten and check regularly, where to oil the sprockets, how to tighten the chain, how to put on a bike patch so it would stay if you got a flat.

'You oughtta paint it, ' he remembered Eddie saying one day, but Bill didn't want to paint Silver. For reasons he couldn't even explain to himself he wanted the Schwinn just the way it was. It looked like a real bow-wow, the sort of bike a careless kid regularly left out on his lawn in the rain, a bike that would be all squeaks and shudders and slow friction. It looked like a bow-wow but it went like the wind. It would —

'It would beat the devil, ' he says aloud, and laughs. His fat seatmate looks at him sharply; the laugh has that howling quality that gave Audra the creeps earlier.

Yes, it looked pretty shoddy, with its old paint and the oldfashioned package carrier mounted above the back wheel and the ancient oogah-horn with its black rubber bulb — that horn was permanently welded to the handlebars with a rusty bolt the size of a baby's fist.

Pretty shoddy.

But could Silver go? Could he? Christ!

And it was a damned good thing he could, because Silver had saved Bill Denbrough's life in the fourth week of June 1958 — the week after he met Ben Hanscom for the first lime, the week after he and Ben and Eddie built the dam, the week that Ben and Richie 'Trashmouth' Tozier and Beverly Marsh showed up in the Barrens after the Saturday matinee. Richie had been riding behind him, on Silver's package carrier, the day Silver had saved Bill's life. . . so he supposed Silver had saved Richie's, too. And he remembered the house they had been running from, all right. He remembered that just fine. That damned house on Neibolt Street. He had raced to beat the devil that day, oh yeah, for sure, don't you just know it. Some devil with eyes as shiny as old deadly coins. Some hairy old devil with a mouthful of bloody teeth. But all that had come later. If Silver had saved Richie's life and his own that day, then perhaps he had saved Eddie Kaspbrak's on the day Bill and Eddie met Ben by the kickedapart remains of their dam in the Barrens. Henry Bowers — who looked a little bit like someone had run him through a Disposall — had mashed Eddie's nose and then Eddie's asthma had come on strong and few aspirator turned up empty. So it had been Silver that day too, Silver to the rescue.

Bill Denbrough, who hasn't been on a bicycle in almost seventeen years, looks out the window of an airplane that would not have been credited — or even imagined, outside of a science-fiction magazine — in the year 1958. Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYY! he thinks, and has to close his eyes against the sudden needling sting of tears.

What happened to Silver? He can't remember. That pan of the set is still dark; that klieg has yet to be turned on. Perhaps that is just as well. Perhaps that is a mercy. Hi-yo.

Hi-yo Silver.

'AWAYYY! ' he shouted. The wind tore the words back over his shoulder like a fluttering crepe streamer. They came out big and strong, those words, in a triumphant roar. They were the only ones that ever did.

He pedaled down Kansas Street toward town, gaining speed slowly at first. Silver rolled once he got going, but getting going was a job and a half. Watching the gray bike pick up speed was a little like watching a big plane roll down the runway. At first you couldn't believe such a huge waddling gadget could ever actually leave the earth — the idea was absurd. But then you could see its shadow beneath it, and before you even had time to wonder if it was a mirage, the shadow was trailing out long behind it and the plane was up, cutting its way through the air, as sleek and graceful as a dream in a satisfied mind. Silver was like that.

Bill got a little downhill stretch and began to pedal faster, his legs pumping up and down as he stood forward over the bike's fork. He had learned very quickly — after being bashed a couple of times by that fork in the worst place a boy can be bashed — to yank his underpants up as high as he could before mounting Silver. Later that summer, observing this process, Richie would say, Bill does that because he thinks he might like to have some kids that live someday. It seems like a bad idea to me, but hey! they might always take after his wife, right? He and Eddie had lowered the seat as far as it would go, and it now bumped and scraped against the small of his back as he worked the pedals. A woman digging weeds in her flowergarden shaded her eyes to watch him pass. She smiled a little. The boy on the huge bike reminded her of a monkey she had once seen riding a unicycle in the Barnum & Bailey Circus. He's apt to kill himself, though, she thought, turning back to her garden. That bike is too big for him. It was none of her problem, though.

Bill had had more sense than to argue with the big boys when they broke out of the bushes, looking like ill-tempered hunters on the track of a beast which had already mauled one of them. Eddie, however, had rashly opened his mouth and Henry Bowers had unloaded on him. Bill knew who they were, all right; Henry, Belch, and Victor were just about the worst kids in Derry School. They had beaten up on Richie Tozier, who Bill sometimes chummed with, a couple of times. The way Bill looked at it, this was partly Richie's own fault; he was not known as Trashmouth for nothing.

One day in April Richie had said something about their collars as the three of them passed by in the schoolyard. The collars had all been turned up, just like Vie Morrow's in The Blackboard Jungle. Bill, who had been sitting against the building nearby and listlessly shooting a few marbles, hadn't really caught all of it. Neither did Henry and his friends. . . but they heard enough to turn in Richie's direction. Bill supposed Richie had meant to say whatever he said in a low voice. The trouble was, Richie didn't really have a low voice.

'What'd you say, you little four-eyes geek? ' Victor Criss enquired.

'I didn't say nothing, ' Richie said, and that disclaimer — along with his face, which looked quite sensibly dismayed and scared — might have ended it. Except that Richie's mouth was like a half-tamed horse that has a way of bolting for absolutely no reason at all. Now it suddenly added: 'You ought to dig the wax out of your ears, big fella. Want some blasting powder? '

They stood looking at him incredulously for a moment, and then they took after him. Stuttering Bill had watched the unequal race from its start to its preordained conclusion from his place against the side of the building. No sense getting involved; those three galoots would be just as happy to beat up on two kids for the price of one.

Richie ran diagonally across the little-kids' playyard, leaping over the teeter-totters and dodging among the swings, realizing he had run into a blind alley only when he struck the chainlink fence between the playyard and the park which abutted the school grounds. So he tried to go up the chainlink, all clutching fingers and pointing seeking sneaker-toes, and he was maybe two-thirds of the way to the top when Henry and Victor Criss hauled him back down again, Henry getting him by the back of the jacket and Victor grabbing the seat of his jeans. Richie was screaming when they peeled him off the fence. He hit the asphalt on his back. His glasses flew off. He reached for them and Belch Huggins kicked them away and that was why one of the bows was mended with adhesive tape this summer.

Bill had winced and walked around to the front of the building. He had observed Mrs Moran, one of the fourth-grade teachers, already hurrying over to break things up, but he knew they would get Richie hard before then, and by the time she actually arrived, Richie would be crying. Bawl-baby, bawl-baby, lookit-the-baby-bawl.

Bill had only had minor problems with them. They made fun of his stutter, of course. An occasional random cruelty came with the jibes; one rainy day as they were going to lunch in the gym, Belch Huggins had knocked Bill's lunchbag out of his hand and had stomped it flat with one engineer boot, squishing everything inside.

'Oh, juh-juh-gee! ' Belch cried in mock horror, raising his hands and fluttering them about his face. 'Suh-suh-sorry about your l-l-lunch, fuh-huh-huck-face! ' And he had strolled off down the hall toward where Victor Criss was leaning against the drinking fountain outside the boys'-room door, just about laughing himself into a hernia. That hadn't been so bad, though; Bill had cadged half a PB & J off Eddie Kaspbrak, and Richie was happy to give him his devilled egg, one of which his mother packed in his lunch about every second day and which made him want to puke, he claimed.

But you had to stay out of their way, and if you couldn't do that you had to try and be invisible.

Eddie forgot the rules, so they creamed him.

He hadn't been too bad until the big boys went downstream and splashed across to the other side, even though his nose was bleeding like a fountain. When Eddie's snotrag was soaked through, Bill had given him his own and made him put a hand on the nape of his neck and lean his head back. Bill could remember his mother getting Georgie to do that, because Georgie sometimes got nosebleeds — Oh but it hurt to think about George.

It wasn't until the sound of the big boys' buffalolike progress through the Barrens had died away completely, and Eddie's nose-bleed had actually stopped, that his asthma got bad. He started heaving for air, his hands opening and then snapping shut like weak traps, his respiration a fluting whistle in his throat. 'Shit! ' Eddie gasped. 'Asthma! Gripes! '

He scrambled for his aspirator and finally got it out of his pocket. It looked almost like a bottle of Windex, the kind with the sprayer attachment on top. He jammed it into his mouth and punched the trigger. 'Better? ' Bill asked anxiously.

'No. It's empty. ' Eddie looked at Bill with panicked eyes that said I'm caught, Bill! I'm caught!

The empty aspirator rolled away from his hand. The stream chuckled on, not caring in the least that Eddie Kaspbrak could barely breathe. Bill thought randomly that the big boys had been right about one thing: it had been a real baby dam. But they had been having fun, dammit, and he felt a sudden dull fury that it should have come to this. Tuh-tuh-take it easy, Eh-Eddie, ' he said.

For the next forty minutes or so Bill sat next to him, his expectation that Eddie's asthma attack would at any moment let up gradually fading into unease. By the time Ben Hanscom appeared, the unease had become real fear. It not only wasn't letting up; it was getting worse. And the Center Street Drug, where Eddie got his refills, was three miles away, almost. What il he went to get Eddie's stuff and came back to rind Eddie unconscious? Unconscious or

(don't shit please don't think that) or even dead, his mind insisted implacably.

(like Georgie dead like Georgie]

Don't be such an asshole! He's not going to die!

No, probably not. But what if he came back and found Eddie in a comber? Bill knew all about combers; he had even deduced they were named after those great big waves guys surfed on in Hawaii, and that seemed right enough — after all, what was a comber but a wave that drowned your brain? On doctor shows like Ben Casey, people were always going into combers, and sometimes they stayed there in spite of all Ben Casey's ill-tempered shouting. So he sat there, knowing he ought to go, he couldn't do Eddie any good staying here, but not wanting to leave him alone. An irrational, superstitious part of him felt sure Eddie would slip into a comber the minute he, Bill, turned his back. Then he looked upstream and saw Ben Hanscom standing there. He knew who Ben was, of course; the fattest kid in any school has his or her own sort of unhappy notoriety. Ben was in the other fifth grade. Bill sometimes saw him at recess, standing by himself — usually in a corner — looking at a book and eating his lunch out of a bag about the size of a laundry sack.

Looking at Ben now, Bill thought he looked even worse than Henry Bowers. It was hard to believe, but true. Bill could not begin to imagine the cataclysmic fight these two must have been in. Ben's hair stood up in wild, dirt-clotted spikes. His sweater or sweat-shirt — it was hard to tell which it had started the day as and it sure as shit didn't matter now — was a matted ruin, smeared with a sicko mixture of blood and grass. His pants were out at the knees.

He saw Bill looking at him and recoiled a bit, eyes going wary.

'Duh-duh-duh-hon't g-g-go! ' Bill cried. He put his empty hands up in the air, palms out, to show he was harmless. 'W-W-We need some huh-huh-help. '

Ben came closer, eyes still wary. He walked as if one or both of his legs was killing him.

'Are they gone? Bowers and those guys? '

'Yuh-Yes, ' Bill said. 'Listen, cuh-han y-y-you stay with my fruhhend while I go get his muh-medicine? He's got a-a-a-a — '

'Asthma? ' Bill nodded.

Ben came all the way down to the remains of the dam and dropped painfully to one knee beside Eddie, who was lying back with his eyes mostly closed and his chest heaving.

'Which one hit him? ' Ben asked finally. He looked up, and Bill saw the same frustrated anger he had been feeling himself on the fat kid's face. 'Was it Henry Bowers? ' Bill nodded.

'It figures. Sure, go on. I'll stay with him. '

Thuh-thuh-hanks. '

'Oh, don't thank me, ' Ben said. 'I'm the reason they landed on you in the first place. Go on.

Hurry it up. I have to be home for supper. '

Bill went without saying anything else. It would have been good to tell Ben not to take it to heart — what had happened hadn't been Ben's fault any more than it had been Eddie's for stupidly opening his mouth. Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen; the little kids' version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones. It would have been good to say that, but he was so tightly wound right now it would have taken him about twenty minutes or so, and by then Eddie might have slipped into a comber (that was another thing Bill had learned from Drs Casey and Kildare; you never went into a comber; you always slipped into one).

He trotted downstream, glancing back once. He saw Ben Hanscom grimly collecting rocks from the edge of the water. For a moment Bill couldn't figure out what he was doing, and then he understood. It was an ammo dump. Just in case they came back.

The Barrens were no mystery to Bill. He had played here a lot this spring, sometimes with Richie, more frequently with Eddie, sometimes all by himself. He had by no means explored the whole area, but he could find his way back to Kansas Street from the Kenduskeag with no trouble, and now did. He came out at a wooden bridge where Kansas Street crossed one of the little no-name streams that flowed out of the Derry drainage system and into the Kenduskeag down below. Silver was stashed under this bridge, his handlebars tied to one of the bridge supports with a hank of rope to keep his wheels out of the water.

Bill untied the rope, stuck it in his shirt, and hauled Silver up to the sidewalk by main force, panting and sweating, losing his balance a couple of times and landing on his tail.

But at last it was up. Bill swung his leg over the high fork.

And as always, once he was on Silver he became someone else.

'Hi-yo Silver AW A YYY! '

The words came out deeper than his normal speaking voice — it was almost the voice of the man he would become. Silver gained speed slowly, the quickening clickety-ciack of the Bicycle playing cards clothespinned to the spokes marking the increase. Bill stood on the pedals, his hands clamped on the bike-grips with the wrists turned up. He looked like a man trying to lift a stupendously heavy barbell. Cords stood out on his neck. Veins pulsed in his temples. His mouth was turned down in a trembling sneer of effort as he fought the familiar battle against weight and inertia, busting his brains to get Silver moving.

As always, it was worth the effort.

Silver began to roll along more briskly. Houses slid past smoothly instead of just poking by. On his left, where Kansas Street crossed Jackson, the unfettered Kenduskeag became the Canal. Past the intersection Kansas Street headed swiftly downhill toward Center and Main, Berry's business district.

Streets crossed frequently here but they were all stop-signed in Bill's favor, and the possibility that a driver might one day blow by one of those stop signs and flatten him to a bleeding shadow on the street had never crossed Bill's mind. It is unlikely he would have changed his ways even if it had. He might have done so either earlier or later in his life, but this spring and early summer had been a strange thundery time for him. Ben would have been astounded if someone were to ask him if he was lonely; Bill would have been likewise astounded if someone asked him if he was courting death. Of cuh-cuh-course n-not! he would have responded immediately (and indignantly), but that did not change the fact that his runs down Kansas Street to town had become more and more like banzai charges as the weather warmed.

This section of Kansas Street was known as Up-Mile Hill. Bill took it at full speed, bent over Silver's handlebars to cut down the wind resistance, one hand poised over the cracked rubber bulb of his oogah-horn to warn the unwary, his red hair blowing back from his head in a rippling wave. The click of the playing cards had mounted to a steady roar. The effortful sneer had become a big goofball grin. The residences on the right had given way to business buildings (warehouses and meat-packing plants, most of them) which blurred by in a scary but satisfying rush. To his left the Canal was a wink of fire in the corner of his eye.

'HI-YO SILVER, AWAYYYY! ' he screamed triumphantly.

Silver flew over the first curbing, and as they almost always did at that point, his feet lost contact with the pedals. He was freewheeling, now wholly in the lap of whatever god has been appointed the job of protecting small boys. He swerved into the street, doing maybe fifteen miles an hour over the posted speed of twenty-five.

It was all behind him now: his stutter, his dad's blank hurt eyes as he puttered around his garage workshop, the terrible sight of the dust on the closed piano cover upstairs — dusty because his mother didn't play anymore. The last time had been at George's funeral, three Methodist hymns. George going out into the rain, wearing his yellow slicker, carrying the newspaper boat with its glaze of paraffin; Mr Gardener coming up the street twenty minutes later with his body wrapped in a bloodstained quilt; his mother's agonized shriek. All behind him. He was the Lone Ranger, he was John Wayne, he was Bo Diddley, he was anybody he wanted to be and nobody who cried and got scared and wanted his muh-muh-mother.

Silver flew and Stuttering Bill Denbrough flew with him; their gantry-like shadow fled behind them. They raced down Up-Mile Hill together; the playing cards roared. Bill's feet found the pedals again and he began to pump, wanting to go even faster, wanting to reach some hypothetical speed — not of sound but of memory — and crash through the pain barrier.

He raced on, bent over his handlebars; he raced to beat the devil.

The three-way intersection of Kansas, Center, and Main was coming up fast. It was a horror of one-way traffic and conflicting signs and stoplights which were supposed to be timed but really weren't. The result, a Derry News editorial had proclaimed the year before, was a traffic-rotary conceived in hell.

As always, Bill's eyes flicked right and left, fast, gauging the traffic flow, looking for the holes. If his judgment was mistaken — if he stuttered, you might say — he would be badly hurt or killed.

He arrowed into the slow-moving traffic which dogged the intersection, running a red light and fading to the right to avoid a lumbering portholed Buick. He shot a bullet of a glance back over his shoulder to make sure the middle lane was empty. He looked forward again and saw that in roughly five seconds he was going to crash into the rear end of a pick-up truck that had stopped squarely in the middle of the intersection while the Uncle Ike type behind the wheel craned his neck to read all the signs and make sure he hadn't taken a wrong turn and somehow ended up in Miami Beach.

The lane on Bill's right was full of a Derry-Bangor intercity bus. He slipped in that direction just the same and shot the gap between the stopped pick-up and the bus, still moving at forty miles an hour. At the last second he snapped his head hard to one side, like a soldier doing an over-enthusiastic eyes-right, to keep the mirror mounted on the passenger side of the pick-up from rearranging his teeth. Hot diesel from the bus laced his throat like a kick of strong liquor. He heard a thin gasping squeal as one of his bike-grips kissed a line up the coach's aluminum side. He got just a glimpse of the bus driver, his face paper-white under his peaked Hudson Bus Company cap. The driver was shaking his fist at Bill and shouting something. Bill doubted it was happy birthday.

Here was a trio of old ladies crossing Main Street from the New England Bank side to the Shoeboat side. They heard the harsh burr of the playing cards and looked up. Their mouths dropped open as a boy on a huge bike passed within half a foot of them like a mirage.

The worst — and the best — of the trip was behind him now. He had looked at the very real possibility of his own death again and again had found himself able to look away. The bus had not crushed him; he had not killed himself and the three old ladies with their Freese's shopping bags and their Social Security checks; he had not been splattered across the tailgate of Uncle Ike's old Dodge pick-up. He was going uphill again now, speed bleeding away. Something — oh, call it desire, that was good enough, wasn't it? — was bleeding away with it. All the thoughts and memories were catching up — in Bill, gee, we almost lost sight of you for awhile there, but here we are — rejoining him, climbing up his shirt and jumping into his ear and whooshing into his brain like little kids going down a slide. He could feel them settling into their accustomed places, their feverish bodies jostling each other. Gosh! Wow!

Here we are inside Bill's head again! Let's think about George! Okay! Who wants to start?

You think too much, Bill.

No — that wasn't the problem. The problem was, he imagined too much.

He turned into Richard's Alley and came out on Center Street a few moments later, pedaling slowly, feeling the sweat on his back and in his hair. He dismounted Silver in front of the Center Street Drug Store and went inside.

Before George's death, Bill would have gotten the salient points across to Mr Keene by speaking to him. The druggist was not exactly kind — or at least Bill had an idea he was not — but he was patient enough, and he did not tease or make fun. But now Bill's stutter was much worse, and he really was afraid something bad might happen to Eddie if he didn't move fast.

So when Mr Keene said, 'Hello, Billy Denbrough, can I help you?, ' Bill took a folder advertising vitamins, turned it over, and wrote on the back: Eddie Kaspbrak and I were playing in the Barrens. He's got a bad assmar attack, I mean he can hardly breath. Canyon give me a refill on his asspirador?

He pushed this note across the glass-topped counter to Mr Keene, who read it, looked at Bill's anxious blue eyes, and said, 'Of course. Wait right here, and don't be handling anything you shouldn't. '

Bill shifted impatiently from one foot to the other while Mr Keene was behind the rear counter. Although he was back there less than five minutes, it seemed an age before he returned with one of Eddie's plastic squeeze-bottles. He handed it over to Bill, smiled, and said, This should take care of the problem. '

'Th-th-th-thanks, ' Bill said. 'I don't h-have a-any m-m-muh-muh — '

'That's all right, son. Mrs Kaspbrak has an account here. I'll just add this on. I'm sure she'll want to thank you for your kindness. '

Bill, much relieved, thanked Mr Keene and left quickly. Mr Keene came around the counter to watch him go. He saw Bill toss the aspirator into his bike-basket and mount clumsily. Can he actually ride a bike that big? Mr Keene wondered. I doubt it. I doubt it very much. But the Denbrough kid somehow got it going without falling on his head, and pedaled slowly away. The bike, which looked to Mr Keene like somebody's idea of a joke, wobbled madly from side to side. The aspirator rolled back and forth in the basket.

Mr Keene grinned a little. If Bill had seen that grin, it might have gone a good way toward confirming his idea that Mr Keene was not exactly one of the world's champion nice guys. It was sour, the grin of a man who has found much to wonder about but almost nothing to uplift in the human condition. Yes — he would add Eddie's asthma medication to Sonia Kaspbrak's bill, and as always she would be surprised — and suspicious rather than grateful — at how cheap the medication was. Other drugs were so dear, she said. Mrs Kaspbrak, Mr Keene knew, was one of those people who believed nothing cheap could do a person much good. He could really have soaked her for her son's HydrOx Mist, and there had been times when he had been tempted. . . but why should he make himself a party to the woman's foolishness? It wasn't as though he were going to starve.

Cheap? Oh my, yes. HydrOx Mist (Administer as needed typed neatly on the gummed label he pasted on each aspirator bottle) was wonderfully cheap, but even Mrs Kaspbrak was willing to admit that it controlled her son's asthma quite well in spite of that fact. It was cheap because it was nothing but a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, with a dash of camphor added to give the mist a faint medicinal taste.

In other words, Eddie's asthma medicine was tapwater.

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Boy, that was quick, ' Ben said, standing up. 'I didn't expect you for another half an hour. ' 'I got a f-f-fast b-bike, ' Bill said with some pride. For a moment the two of them looked at each other cautiously, warily. Then Ben smiled tentatively, and Bill smiled back. The kid was fat, but he seemed okay. And he had stayed put. That must have taken some guts, with Henry and his j. d. friends maybe still wandering around out there someplace.

Bill winked at Eddie, who was looking at him with dumb gratitude. 'H-Here you g-go, E-EE-Eddie. ' He tossed him the aspirator. Eddie plunged it into his open mouth, triggered it, and gasped convulsively. Then he leaned back, eyes shut. Ben watched this with concern. 'Jeez! He's really got it bad, doesn't he? ' Bill nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I don't know. If you listen to my mother, you can get anything. ' Eddie turned to Ben again. 'She takes me down to the Mergency Room about once or twice a month. I hate that place.

There was this orderly once? He told her they oughtta make her pay rent. She was really PO'd. '

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

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

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

'Yeah. You're Bill Denbrough. '

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

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

Elmer Fudd. '

'Suh-horry. '

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'You and Eddie? '

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Huh? ' 'Wuh-We do it. '

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

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

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

'Nope. '

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

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

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

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

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

'What time? '

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

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

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

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

Dings, stuff like that. '

'Okay. '

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

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

'B-Bring it d-d-down, ' Bill said. 'We'll play g-guns, maybe. ' 'Okay, ' Ben said happily. 'Listen, I got to split for home, you guys. ' 'Uh-Us, too, ' Bill said.

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

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

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

'Bet your fur, ' Eddie said. He had taken another gulp from his aspirator and was breathing normally again. 'He rides me double sometimes on the back. Goes so fast it just about scares the crap outta me. He's a good man, Bill is. ' He said this last in an offhand way, but his eyes said something more emphatic. They were worshipful. 'You know about what happened to his brother, don't you? ' 'No — what about him? '

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

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

'Well. . . a little. '

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

'Yeah. '

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

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

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

The two bigger boys looked after him, amused, and then Eddie said: 'Well, I gotta go. ' 'Wait a sec, ' Ben said. 'I got an idea, if you really don't want to go to the Mergency Room. ' 'Oh yeah? ' Eddie looked at Ben, doubtful but wanting to hope.

'You got a nickel? ' 'I got a dime. So what? '

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

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

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

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

'Okay. '

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

'Oh. After awhile, crocodile. ' 'You got it. ' Eddie smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'W-Want to h-hear a joke I heard today in s-s-school? ' he had tried once, some months ago. Silence from them. On television a criminal was begging his brother, who was a priest, to hide him.

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

His mother had never looked up at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'D-Duh-Dad — '

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

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

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

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

Nor was it just for himself that he came; he came for Georgie as well. He had loved

George, and for brothers they had gotten along pretty well. Oh, they had their pissy moments

— Bill giving George a good old Indian rope-burn, George tattling on Bill when Bill snuck downstairs after lights-out and ate the rest of the lemon-cream frosting — but mostly they got along. Bad enough that George should be dead. For him to turn George into some kind of horror-monster. . . that was even worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FRIENDS 1957-58 beneath it.

Blood began to flow from the picture.

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

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

Bill fled the room, slammjng the door behind him.

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