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She crossed the Canal, feet pounding on cement while cars rumbled over the heavy wooden slats of the bridge to her right. To her left she could see the stone semicircle where the Canal went under the downtown area. She cut suddenly across Main Street, oblivious of the honking horns and squealing brakes. She went right because the Barrens lay in that direction. It was still almost a mile away, and if she was to get there she would somehow have to outdistance her father on the gruelling slope of Up-Mile Hill (or one of the even steeper side-streets). But that was all there was.

'COME BACK YOU LITTLE BITCH I'M WARNING YOU! '

As she gained the sidewalk on the far side of the street she snatched another glance behind her, the heavy weight of her red hair shifting over her shoulder as she did. Her father was crossing the street, as heedless of the traffic as she had been, his face a bright sweaty red.

She ducked down an alley that ran behind Warehouse Row. This was the rear of the buildings which fronted on Up-Mile Hill: Star Beef, Armour Meatpacking, Hemphill Storage & Warehousing, Eagle Beef & Kosher Meats. The alley was narrow and cobbled, made narrower still by the bunches of fuming garbage cans and bins set out here. The cobbles were slimy with God knew what offal and ordure. There was a mixture of smells, some bland, some sharp, some simply titanic. . . but all spoke of meat and slaughter. Flies buzzed in clouds. From inside some of the buildings she could hear the blood-curdling whine of bonesaws. Her feet stuttered unevenly on the slick cobbles. One hip struck a galvanized garbage can and packages of tripe wrapped in newspaper fell out like great meaty jungle blossoms.

'YOU GET RIGHT THE HELL BACK HERE BEVVIE! I MEAN IT NOW! DON'T MAKE

IT ANY WORSE THAN IT ALREADY IS, GIRL! '

Two men lounged in the loading doorway of the Kirshner Packing Works, munching thick sandwiches, open dinnerbuckets near at hand. 'You in a woeful place, girl, ' one of them said mildly. 'Looks like you're goin to the woodshed with your pa. ' The other laughed.

He was gaining. She could hear his thundering footfalls and heavy respiration almost behind her now; looking to her right she could see the black wing of his shadow flying along the high board fence there.

Then he yelled in surprise and fury as his feet slipped out from under him and he thumped to the cobblestones. He was up a moment later, no longer bellowing words but only shrieking out his incoherent fury while the men in the doorway laughed and slapped each other on the back.

The alley zigged to the left. . . and Beverly came to a skittering halt, her mouth opening in dismay. A city dumpster was parked across the alley's mouth. There was not even nine inches of clearance on either side. Its motor was idling. Under that sound, barely audible, she could hear the murmur of conversation from the dumpster's cab. More men on lunch-break. It lacked no more than three or four minutes of noon; soon the courthouse clock would begin to chime the hour.

She could hear him coming again, closing in. She threw herself down and hooked her way under the dumpster, using her elbows and wounded knees. The stink of exhaust and diesel fuel mixed with the smell of ripe meat and made her feel a kind of giddy nausea. In a way, the ease of her progress was worse; she was skidding greasily over a coating of slime and garbagey crud. She kept moving, once rising too high off the cobbles so that her back came in contact with the dumpster's hot exhaust-pipe. She had to bite back a scream.

'Beverly? You under there? ' Each word separated from the last by an out-of-breath gasp for air. She looked back and met his eyes as he bent and peered under the truck.

'Leave. . . me alone! ' she managed.

'You bitch, ' he replied in a thick, spit-choked voice. He threw himself flat, keys jingling, and began to crawl after her, using a grotesque swimming stroke to pull himself along.

Beverly clawed her way from under the truck's cab, grabbed one of the huge tires — her fingers hooked their way into a tread up to the second knuckle — and yanked herself up. She banged her tail-bone on the dumpster's front bumper and then she was running again, heading up Up-Mile Hill now, her blouse and jeans smeared with goop and stinking to high heaven. She looked back and saw her father's hands and freckled arms shoot out from under the dumpster's cab like the claws of some imagined childhood monster from under the bed.

Quickly, hardly thinking at all, she darted between Feldman's Storage and the Tracker Brothers' Annex. This covert, too narrow to even be called an alley, was filled with broken crates, weeds, sunflowers, and, of course, more garbage. Beverly dived behind a pile of crates and crouched there. A few moments later she saw her father pound by the mouth of the covert and on up the hill.

Beverly got up and hurried to the far end of the covert. There was a chainlink fence here. She monkeyed her way to the top, got over, and worked her way down the far side. She was now on Derry Theological Seminary property. She ran up the manicured back lawn and around the side of the building. She could hear someone inside playing something classical on an organ. The notes seemed to engrave their pleasant, calm selves on the still air.

There was a tall hedge between the Seminary and Kansas Street. She peered through it and saw her father on the far side of the street, breathing hard, patches of sweat darkening his gray work-shirt under the arms. He was peering around, hands on hips. His keyring twinkled brightly in the sun.

Beverly watched him, also breathing hard, her heart beating rabbit-fast in her throat. She was very thirsty, and her simmering smell disgusted her. If I was drawn in a comicstrip, she thought distractedly, there'd be all those wavy stink-lines coming up from me.

Her father crossed slowly to the Seminary side. Beverly's breath stopped.

Please God, I can't run anymore. Help me, God. Don't let him find me.

Al Marsh walked slowly down the sidewalk, directly past where his daughter crouched on the far side of the hedge.

Dear God, don't let him smell me!

He didn't — perhaps because, after a tumble in the alleyway and crawling under the dumpster himself, Al smelled as bad as she did. He walked on. She watched him go back down Up-Mile Hill until he was out of sight.

Beverly picked herself up slowly. Her clothes were covered with garbage, her face was dirty, her back hurt where she had burnt it on the exhaust-pipe of the dumpster. These physical things paled before the confused swirl of her thoughts — she felt that she had sailed off the edge of the world, and none of the normal patterns of behavior seemed to apply. She could not imagine going home; but she could not imagine not going home. She had defied her father, defied him —

She had to push that thought away because it made her feel weak and trembly, sick to her stomach. She loved her father. Wasn't one of the Ten Commandments 'Honor thy mother and father that thy days may be long upon the earth'? Yes. But he hadn't been himself. Hadn't been her father. Had, in fact, been someone completely different. An imposter. It —

Suddenly she went cold as a terrible question occurred to her. Was this happening to the others? Or something like it? She ought to warn them. They had hurt It, and perhaps now It was taking steps to assure Itself they would never hurt It again. And, really, where else was there to go? They were the only friends she had. Bill. Bill would know what to do. Bill would tell her what to do, Bill would supply the what next.

She stopped where the Seminary walk joined the Kansas Street sidewalk and peered around the hedge. Her father was truly gone. She turned right and began to walk along Kansas Street toward the Barrens. Probably none of them would be there right now; they would be at home, eating their lunches. But they would be back. Meantime, she could go down into the cool clubhouse and try to get herself under some kind of control. She would leave the little window wide open so she could have some sunshine, and perhaps she would even be able to sleep. Her tired body and overstrained mind grasped eagerly at the thought.

Sleep, yes, that would be good.

Her head drooped as she plodded past the last bunch of houses before the land grew too steep for houses and plunged down into the Barrens — the Barrens where, as incredible as it seemed to her, her father had been lurking and spying.

She certainly did not hear footfalls behind her. The boys there were at great pains to be quiet. They had been outrun before; they did not intend to be outrun again. They drew closer and closer to her, walking cat-soft. Belch and Victor were grinning, but Henry's face was both vacant and serious. His hair was uncombed and snarly. His eyes were as unfocused as Al Marsh's had been in the apartment. He held one dirty finger pressed over his lips in a shhh gesture as they closed the distance from seventy feet to fifty to thirty.

Through that summer Henry had been edging steadily out over some mental abyss, walking on a bridge that had grown relentlessly more and more narrow. On the day when he had allowed Patrick Hockstetter to caress him, that bridge had narrowed to a tightrope. The tightrope had snapped this morning. He had gone out into the yard, naked except for his ragged, yellowing undershorts, and looked up into the sky. The ghost of last night's moon still lingered there, and as he looked at it the moon had suddenly changed into a skeletal grinning face. Henry had fallen on his knees before this face, exalted with terror and joy. Ghost-voices came from the moon. The voices changed, sometimes seemed to merge together in a soft babble that was barely understandable. . . but he sensed the truth, which was simply that all these voices were one voice, one intelligence. The voice told him to hunt up Belch and Victor and be at the corner of Kansas Street and Costello Avenue around noon. The voice told him he would know what to do then. Sure enough, the cunt had come bopping along. He waited to hear what the voice would tell him to do next. The answer came as they continued to close the distance. The voice came not from the moon, but from the sewer-grating they were passing. The voice was low but clear. Belch and Victor glanced toward the grating in a dazed, almost hypnotized way, then back at Beverly.

Kill her, the voice from the sewer said.

Henry Bowers reached into the pocket of his jeans and brought out a slim nine-inch-long instrument with imitation-ivory inlays along its sides. A small chromium button glittered at one end of this dubious objet d'art. Henry pushed it A six-inch blade popped out of the slit at the end of the handle. He bounced the switchblade on his palm. He began to walk a little faster. Victor and Belch, still looking dazed, increased their own walking speed to keep up with him.

Beverly did not hear them, precisely; that was not what made her turn her head as Henry

Bowers closed the distance. Bent-kneed, shuffling, a frozen grin on his face, Henry was as silent as an Indian. No; it was simply a feeling, too clear and direct and powerful to be denied, of

The Derry Public Library - 1: 55 A. M.

being watched.

Mike Hanlon laid his pen aside and looked across the shadowy inverted bowl of the library's main room. He saw islands of light thrown by the hanging globes; he saw books fading into dimness; he saw the iron staircases making their graceful trellised spirals up to the stacks. He saw nothing out of place.

All the same, he did not believe he was alone in here. Not anymore.

After the others were gone, Mike had cleaned up with a care that was only habit. He was on autopilot, his mind a million miles — and twenty-seven years — away. He dumped ashtrays, threw away the empty liquor bottles (putting a layer of waste over them so that Carole wouldn't be shocked), and the returnable cans in a box behind his desk. Then he got the broom and swept up the remains of the gin bottle Eddie had broken.

When the table was clean, he had gone into the Periodicals Room and picked up the scattered magazines. As he did these simple chores, his mind sifted the stories they had told — concentrating the most, perhaps, on what they had left out. They believed they remembered everything; he thought that Bill and Beverly almost did. But there was more. It would come to them. . . if it allowed them the time. In 1958, there had been no chance for preparation. They had talked endlessly — their talk interrupted only by the rockfight and that one act of group heroism at 29 Neibolt Street — and might, in the end, have done no more than talk. Then August 14th had come, and Henry and his friends had simply chased them into the sewers.

Maybe I should have told them, he thought, putting the last of the magazines back in their places. But something spoke strongly against the idea — the voice of the Turtle, he supposed. Perhaps that was part of it, and perhaps that sense of circularity was part of it, too. Maybe that last act was going to repeat itself, in some updated fashion, as well. He had put flashlights and miner's helmets carefully by against tomorrow; he had the blueprints of the Derry sewer and drain systems neatly rolled up and held with rubber bands in that same closet. But, when they were kids, all their talk and all their plans, half-baked or otherwise, had come to nothing in the end; in the end they had simply been chased into the drains, hurled into the confrontation which had followed. Was that going to happen again? Faith and power, he had come to believe, were interchangeable. Was the final truth even simpler? That no act of faith was possible until you were rudly pushed out into the screaming middle of things like a newborn child skydiving chutelessly out of his mother's womb? Once you were falling, you were forced to believe in the chute, into existence, weren't you? Pulling the ring as you fell became your final statement on the subject, one way or the other. Jesus Christ, it's Fulton Sheen in blackface, Mike thought, and laughed a little.

Mike cleaned, neatened, thought his thoughts, while another part of his brain expected that he would finish and finally find himself tired enough to go home and sleep for a few hours. But when he finally did finish, he found himself as wide awake as ever. So he had gone to the single closed stack behind his office, unlocking the wire gate with a key from his ring and letting himself in. This stack, supposedly fireproof when the vault-type door was closed and locked, contained the library's valuable first editions, books signed by writers long since dead

(among the signed editions were Moby Dick and Whitman's Leaves of Grass), historical matter relating to the town, and the personal papers of the few writers who had lived and worked in Derry. Mike hoped, if all of this ended well, to persuade Bill to leave his manuscripts to the Derry Public library. Walking down the third aisle of the stack beneath tinshaded light-bulbs, smelling the familiar library scents of must and dust and cinnimony, ageing paper, he thought: When I die, I guess I'll go with a library card in one hand and an OVERDUE stamp in the other. Well, maybe that's better than dying with a gun in your hand, nigger.

He stopped halfway down this third aisle. His dog-eared steno notebook, which contained the jotted tales of Derry and his own troubled wanderings, was tucked between Fricke's Old Derry-Town and Michaud's History of Derry. He had pushed the notebook so far back it was nearly invisible. No one would stumble across it unless they were looking for it.

Mike took it and went back to the table where they had held their meeting, pausing to turn off the lights in the closed stack and to re-lock the wire mesh. He sat down and flipped through the pages he had written, thinking what a strange, crippled affidavit he had created: half-history, half-scandal, part diary, part confessional. He had not entered since April 6th. Have to get a new book soon, he thought, thumbing the few blank pages that were left. He thought bemusedly for a moment of Margaret Mitchell's first draft of Gone with the Wind, written in longhand in stacks and stacks and stacks of school composition books. Then he uncapped his pen and wrote May 31st two lines below the end of his last entry. He paused, looking vaguely across the empty library, and then began to write about everything that had happened during the last three days, beginning with his telephone call to Stanley Uris.

He wrote carefully for fifteen minutes, and then his concentration began to come unravelled. He paused more and more frequently. The image of Stan Uris's severed head in the refrigerator tried to intrude, Stan's bloody head, the mouth open and full of feathers, falling out of the refrigerator and rolling across the floor toward him. He banished it with an effort and went on writing. Five minutes later he jerked upright and whirled around, convinced he would see that head rolling across the old black and red tiles of the main floor, eyes as glassy and avid as the eyes in the mounted head of a deer. There was nothing. No head, no sound except the muffled drum of his own heart.

Got to get ahold of yourself, Mikey. It's the jim-jams, that's all. Nothing else to it. But it was no use. The words began to get away from him, the thoughts seemed to dangle just out of reach. There was a pressure on the back of his neck, and it seemed to grow heavier.

Being watched.

He put his pen down and got up from the table. 'Is anyone here? ' he called, and his voice echoed back from the rotunda, giving him a jolt. He licked his lips and tried again. 'Bill? . . .

Ben? '

Bill-ill-ill. . . Ben-en-en. . .

Suddenly Mike decided he wanted to be home. He would simply take the notebook with him. He reached for it. . . and heard a faint sliding footstep.

He looked up again. Pools of light surrounded by deepening lagoons of shadow. Nothing else. . . at least nothing he could see. He waited, heart beating hard.

The footstep came again, and this time he pinpointed the location. The glassed-in passageway that connected the adult library to the Children's Library. In there. Someone. Something.

Moving quietly, Mike walked across to the checkout desk. The double doors leading into the passageway were held open by wooden chocks, and he could see a little way in. He could see what looked like feet, and with sudden swooning horror he wondered if maybe Stan had come after all, if maybe Stan was going to step out of the shadows with his bird encyclopedia in one hand, his face white, his lips purple, his wrists and forearms cut open. I finally came, Stan would say. It took me awhile because I had to pull myself out of a hole in the ground, but I finally came. . .

There was another footstep and now Mike could see shoes for sure — shoes and ragged pantslegs — denim, with strings hanging down against sockless ankles. And, in the darkness almost six feet above those ankles, he could see glittering eyes.

He groped over the surface of the semicircular checkout desk and felt along the other side without taking his gaze from those moveless, glittering eyes. His fingers felt one wooden corner of a small box — the overdue cards. A paper box — paper clips and rubber bands. They happened on something that was metal and seized it. It was a letter-opener with the words JESUS SAVES stamped on the handle. A flimsy thing that had come in the mail from the Grace Baptist Church as part of a fund-raising drive. Mike had not attended services in fifteen years, but Grace Baptist had been his mother's church and he had sent them five dollars he could not really afford. He had meant to throw the letter-opener out but it had stayed here, amid the clutter on his side of the desk (Carole's side was always spotlessly clean) until now.

He clutched it with feverish strength and stared into the shadowy hallway.

There was another step. . . another. Now the ragged denim pants were visible up to the knees. He could see the shape these lower legs belonged to: it was big, hulking. The shoulders were rounded. There was a suggestion of ragged hair. The figure was ape-like.

'Who are you? '

There was no answer. The shape merely stood there, contemplating him.

Although still afraid, Mike had gotten over the debilitating idea that it might be Stan Uris, returned from the grave, called back by the scars on his palms, some eldritch magnetism which had brought him back like a zombie in a Hammer horror film. Whoever this was, it wasn't Stan Uris, who had finished at five-seven when he had his full growth.

The shape took another step, and now the light from the globe closest to the passageway fell across the beltless loops of the jeans around the shape's waist.

Suddenly Mike knew. Even before the shape spoke, he knew.

'Why, it's the nigger, ' the shape said. 'Been throwing rocks at anyone, nigger? Want to know who poisoned your fucking dog? '

The shape stepped forward. The light fell on the face of Henry Bowers. It had grown fat and sagging; the skin had an unhealthy tallowy hue; the cheeks had become hanging jowls that were specked with stubble, almost as much white in that stubble as black. Wavy lines — three of them — were engraved in the shelf of the forehead above the bushy brows. Other lines formed parentheses at the corners of the full-lipped mouth. The eyes were small and mean inside discolored pouches of flesh — bloodshot and thoughtless. It was the face of a man being pushed into a premature age, a man who was thirty-nine going on seventy-three. But it was also the face of a twelve-year-old boy. Henry's clothes were still green with whatever bushes he had spent the day hiding in. 'Ain't you ganna say howdy, nigger? ' Henry asked.

'Hellow, Henry. ' It occurred to him dimly that he had not listened to the radio for the last two days, and he had not even read the paper, which was a ritual with him. Too much going on. Too busy.

Too bad.

Henry emerged from the corridor between the Children's Library and the adult library and stood there, peering at Mike with his piggy little eyes. His lips parted in an unspeakable grin, revealing rotted back-Maine teeth.

'Voices, ' he said. 'You hear voices, nigger? '

'Which voices are those, Henry? ' He put both hands behind his back, like a schoolboy called upon to recite, and transferred the letter-opener from his left hand to his right. The grandfather clock, given by Horst Mueller in 1923, ticked solemn seconds into the smooth pond of library silence.

'From the moon, ' Henry said. He put a hand in his pocket. 'Came from the moon. Lots of voices. ' He paused, frowned slightly, then shook his head. 'Lots but really only one. It's voice. '

'Did you see It, Henry? '

'Yep, ' Henry said. 'Frankenstein. Tore off Victor's head. You should have heard it. Made a sound like a great big zipper going down. Then It went after Belch. Belch fought It. '

'Did he? '

'Yep. That's how I got away. '

'You left him to die. '

'Don't you say that! ' Henry's cheeks flushed a dull red. He took two steps forward. The farther he walked from the umbilicus connecting the Children's Library to the adult library, the younger he looked to Mike. He saw the same old meanness in Henry's face, but he saw something else as well: the child who had been brought up by crazy Butch Bowers on a good farm that had gone to shitshack shambles over the years. 'Don't you say that! It would have killed me, too. '

'It didn't kill us. '

Henry's eyes gleamed with rancid humor. 'Not yet. But It will. 'Less I don't leave any of you for It to get, ' He pulled his hand out of his pocket. In it was a slim nine-inch-long instrument with imitation-ivory inlay along its sides. A small chromium button glittered at one end of this dubious objet d'art. Henry pushed it. A six-inch steel blade popped out of the slit at the end of the handle. He bounced the switchblade on his palm and began to walk toward the checkout desk a little faster.

'Look what I found, ' he said. 'I knew where to look. ' Obscenely, one red-rimmed eyelid drooped in a wink. 'The man in the moon told me. ' Henry revealed his teeth again. 'Hid today. Hitchhiked a ride tonight. Old man. Hit him. Killed him, I think. Ditched the car over in

Newport. Just over the Derry town line, I heard that voice. I looked in a drain. There was these clothes. And the knife. My old knife. ' 'You're forgetting something, Henry. '

Henry, grinning, only shook his head.

'We got away and you got away. If It wants us, It wants you too. '

'No. '

'I think yes. Maybe you yo-yos did Its work, but It didn't exactly play favorites, did It? It got both of your friends, and while Belch was fighting It, you got away. But now you're back. I think you're part of Its unfinished business, Henry. I really do. '

'No! '

'Maybe Frankenstein's what you'll see. Or the Werewolf? A Vampire. The Clown, Or Henry! Maybe you'll really see what It looks like, Henry. We did. Want me to tell you? Want me to — '

'You shut up! ' Henry screamed, and launched himself at Mike.

Mike stepped aside and stuck out one foot. Henry tripped over it and went skidding over the footworn tiles like a shuffleboard weight. His head struck a leg of the table where the Losers had sat earlier that night, telling their tales. For a moment he was stunned; the knife hung loose in his hand.

Mike went after him, went after the knife. In that moment he could have finished Henry; it would have been possible to have planted the JESUS SAVES letter-opener which had come in the mail from his mother's old church in the back of Henry's neck and then called the police. There would have been a certain amount of official nonsense, but not too much of it — not in Derry, where such weird and violent events were not entirely exceptional.

What stopped him was a realization, almost too lightninglike to be conscious, that if he killed Henry, he would be doing Its work as surely as Henry would be doing Its work by killing Mike. And something else; that other look he had seen on Henry's face, the tired, bewildered look of the badly used child who has been set on a poisonous path for some unknown purpose. Henry had grown up within the contaminated radius of Butch Bowers's mind; surely he had belonged to It even before he suspected it existed.

So instead of planting the letter-opener in Henry's vulnerable neck, he dropped to his knees and snatched at the knife. It twisted in his hand — seemingly of its own volition — and his ringers closed on the blade. There was no immediate pain; only red blood flowing down the first three fingers of his right hand and into his scarred palm.

He pulled back. Henry rolled away and grabbed the knife again. Mike got to his knees and the two of them faced each other that way, each bleeding: Mike's fingers, Henry's nose.

Henry shook his head and droplets flew away into the darkness.

'Thought you were so smart! ' he cried hoarsely. 'Fucking sissies is all you were! We could have beat you in a fair fight! '

'Put the knife down, Henry, ' Mike said quietly. 'I'll call the police. They'll come and get you and take you back to Juniper Hill. You'll be out of Derry. You'll be safe. '

Henry tried to talk and couldn't. He couldn't tell this hateful jig that he wouldn't be safe in Juniper Hill, or Los Angeles, or the rainforests of Timbuktu. Sooner or later the moon would rise, bone-white and snow-cold, and the ghost-voices would start, and the face of the moon would change into Its face, babbling and laughing and ordering. He swallowed slick-slimy blood.

'You never fought fair! '

'Did you? ' Mike asked.

'You niggerboogienight-fighterjungle-bunnyapemancoon! ' Henry screamed, and leaped at Mike again.

Mike leaned back to avoid his blundering, awkward rush, overbalanced, and went sprawling on his back. Henry struck the table again, rebounded, turned, and clutched Mike's arm. Mike swept the letter-opener around and felt it go deep into Henry's forearm. Henry screamed, but instead of letting go, he tightened his grip. He pulled himself toward Mike, his hair in his eyes, blood flowing from his ruptured nose over his thick lips.

Mike tried to get a foot in Henry's side and push him away. Henry swung the switchblade in a glittering arc, and all six inches of it went into Mike's thigh. It went in effortlessly, as if into a warm cake of butter. Henry pulled it out, dripping, and with a scream of combined pain and effort, Mike shoved him away.

He struggled to his feet but Henry was up more quickly, and Mike was barely able to avoid Henry's next blundering rush. He could feel blood pouring down his leg in an alarming flood, filling his loafer. He got my femoral artery, I think. Jesus, he got me bad. Blood everywhere. Blood on the floor. Shoes won't be any good, shit, just bought them two months ago — Henry came again, panting and puffing like a bull in heat. Mike staggered aside and swept the letter-opener at him again. It tore through Henry's ragged shirt and pulled a deep cut across his ribs. Henry grunted as Mike shoved him away again.

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