C H A P T E R 1 8. C H A P T E R 1 9. C H A P T E R 2 0

The Circle Closes

Tom

Tom Rogan was having one fuck of a crazy dream. In it he was killing his father.

Part of his mind understood how crazy this was; his father had died when Tom was only in the third grade. Well. . . maybe 'died' wasn't such a good word. Maybe 'committed suicide' was actually the truth. Ralph Rogan had made himself a gin-and-lye cocktail. One for the road, you might say. Tom had been put in nominal charge of his brother and sisters, and then he began to receive 'whuppins' if anything went wrong with them.

So he couldn't have killed his father. . . except there he was, in this frightening dream, holding what looked like a harmless handle of some sort to his father's neck. . . only it wasn't really harmless, was it? There was a button in the end of the handle, and if he pushed it a blade would pop out and go right through his father's neck. I'm not going to do anything like that, Daddy, don't worry, his dreaming mind thought just before his finger jammed down on the button and the blade popped out. His father's sleeping eyes opened and stared up at the ceiling; his father's mouth opened and a bloody gargling sound came out. Daddy, I didn't do it! his mind screamed. Someone else —

He struggled to wake up and couldn't. The best he could do (and it turned out to be not very good at all) was to fade into a new dream. In this one he was splashing and slogging his way down a long dark tunnel. His balls hurt and his face stung because it was crisscrossed with scratches. There were others with him, but he could only make out vague shapes. It didn't matter, anyway. What mattered were the kids somewhere up ahead. They needed to pay. They needed (a whuppin) to be punished.

Whatever purgatory this was, it was a smelly one. Water dripped and echoed. His shoes and pants were soaked. The little shitpots were somewhere up ahead in this maze of tunnels, and perhaps they thought

(Henry)

Tom and his friends would get lost, but the joke was on them

(ha-ha all over you! )

because he had another friend, oh yes, a special friend, and this friend had marked the path they were to take with. . . with. . .

(Moon-Balloons)

thingamajigs that were big and round and somehow lighted from within so that they shed a glow like that which falls mysteriously from oldfashioned streetlamps. One of these balloons floated and drifted at each intersection, and on the side of each was an arrow, pointing the way into the tunnel-branch he and

(Belch and Victor)

his unseen friends were to take. And it was the right path, oh yes: he could hear the others ahead, their splashing progress echoing back, the distorted murmurs of their voices. They were getting closer, catching up. And when they did. . . Tom looked down and saw that he still had the switchknife in his hand.

For a moment he was frightened — this was like one of those crazy astral experiences he sometimes read about in the weekly tabloids, when your spirit left your body and entered someone else's. The shape of his body felt different to him, as if he were not Tom but

(Henry)

someone else, someone younger. He began to fight his way out of the dream, panicked, and then a voice was atlking to him, a soothing voice, whispering in his ear: It doesn't matter when this is, and it doesn't matter who you are. What matters is that Beverly is up there, she's with them, my good friend, and do you know what? She's been doing something one hell of a lot worse than sneaking smokes. You know what? She's been fucking her old friend Bill

Denbrough! Yes indeed! She and that stuttering freak, going right at it! They — That's a lie! he tried to scream. She wouldn't dare!

But he knew it was no lie. She had used a belt on his

(kicked me in the) balls and run off and she now had cheated on him, the slutty

(child)

little roundheels bitch had actually cheated on him, and oh dear friends, oh good neighbors, she was going to get the whuppin of all whuppins — first her and then Denbrough, her novel-writing friend. And anyone who tried to get in his way, you could count them in for a piece of the action, too.

He stepped up his pace, although the breath was already whistling in and out of his throat. Up ahead he could see another luminous circle bobbing in the darkness — another MoonBalloon. He could hear the voices of the people ahead of him, and the fact that they were childish voices no longer bothered him. It was as the voice said: it didn't matter where, when or who. Beverly was up there, and oh dear friends, oh good neighbors —

'Come on, you guys, move your asses, ' he said, and it didn't even matter that his voice wasn't his own but the voice of a boy.

Then, as they approached the Moon-Balloon, he looked around and saw his companions for the first time. Both of them were dead. One was headless. The face of the other had been split open, as if by a great talon.

'We're moving as fast as we can, Henry, ' the boy with the split face said, and his lips moved in two pieces, grotesquely out of sync with each other, and that was when Tom shrieked the dream to pieces and came back to himself, tottering on the brink of what felt like some great empty space.

He struggled to keep his balance, lost it, and tumbled to the floor. The floor was carpeted but the fall still sent a sickening burst of pain through his hurt knee and he Stifled another cry against his forearm.

Where am I? Where the fuck am I?

He became aware of a faint but clear white light, and for a frightening moment he thought he was back in the dream again, that it was light cast by one of those crazy balloons. Then he remembered leaving the bathroom door partially open and the fluorescent light in there on. He always left the light on when staying in a strange place; it saved you barking your shins if you had to get up in the night to pee.

That clicked reality into place. It had been a dream, all some crazy dream. He was in a Holiday Inn. This was Derry, Maine. He had chased his wife here, and, in the middle of a crazy nightmare, he had fallen out of bed. That was all; that was the long and the short of it.

That wasn't just a nightmare.

He jumped as if the words had been spoken beside his ear instead of inside his own mind. It didn't seem like his own interior voice at all — it was cold, alien. . . but somehow hypnotic and believable.

He got up slowly, fumbled a glass of water off the table beside the bed, and drank it down. He ran shaky hands through his hair. The clock on the table said ten past three.

Go back to sleep. Wait until morning.

That alien voice answered: But there will be people around in the morning — too many people. And besides, you can beat them down there this time. This time you can be first.

Down there? He thought of his dream: the water, the dripping dark.

The light suddenly seemed brighter. He turned his head, not wanting to but helpless to stop. A groan slipped out of his mouth. A balloon was tied to the knob of the bathroom door. It floated at the end of a string about three feet long. The balloon glowed, full of a ghostly white light; it looked like a will-o-the-wisp glimpsed in a swamp, floating dreamily between trees overhung with gray ropes of moss. An arrow was printed on the balloon's gently bulging skin, an arrow that was blood-scarlet.

It was pointing at the door leading out into the hall.

It doesn't really matter who I am, the voice said soothingly, and Tom realized now that it wasn't coming from either his own head or from beside his ear; it was coming from the balloon, from the center of that strange lovely white light. All that matters is that I am going to see that everything turns out to your satisfaction, Tom. I want to see her take a whuppin; I want to see them all take a whuppin. They've crossed my path once too often. . . and much too late in the day for them. So listen, Tom. Listen very carefully. All together now. . . follow the bouncing ball. . .

Tom listened. The voice from the balloon explained. It explained everything.

When it was done, it popped in one final flash of light and Tom began to dress.

Audra

Audra also had nightmares.

She awoke with a start, sitting bolt-upright in bed, the sheet pulled around her waist, her small breasts moving with her quick, agitated breathing.

Like Tom's, her dreaming had been a jumbled, distressful experience. Like Tom, she had had the sensation of being someone else — or rather, of having her own consciousness deposited (and partially submerged) in another body and another mind. She had been in a dark place with a number of others around her, and she had been aware of an oppressive sensation of danger — they were going into the danger deliberately and she wanted to scream at them to stop, to explain to her what was happening. . . but the person with whom she had merged seemed to know, and to believe it was necessary.

She was also aware that they were being chased, and that their pursuers were catching up, little by little.

Bill had been in the dream, but his story about how he had forgotten his childhood must have been on her mind, because in her dream Bill was only a boy, ten or twelve years old — he still had all his hair! She was holding his hand, and was dimly aware that she loved him very much, and that her willingness to go on was based on the rock-solid belief that Bill would protect her and all of them, that Bill, Big Bill, would somehow bring them through this and back into the daylight again.

Oh but she was so terrified.

They came to a branching of many tunnels and Bill stood there, looking from one to the next, and one of the others — a boy with his arm in a cast which glimmered a ghostly-white in the darkness — spoke up: That one, Bill. The bottom one. '

'Y-Y-You're s-s-sure? ' 'Yes. '

And so they had gone that way and then there had been a door, a wee wooden door no more than three feet high, the sort of door you might see in a fairytale book, and there had been a mark on the door. She could not remember what that mark had been, what strange rune or symbol. But it had brought all her terror to a focusing-point and she had yanked herself out of that other body, that girl's body, whoever

(Beverly — Beverly)

she might have been. She awoke bolt-upright in a strange bed, sweaty, wide-eyed, gasping as if she had just run a race. Her hands flew to her legs, half-expecting to find them wet and cold with the water she had been walking through in her head. But she was dry.

Disorientation followed — this was not their home in Topanga Canyon or the rented house in Fleet. It was noplace — limbo furnished with a bed, a dresser, two chairs, and a TV.

'Oh God, come on, Audra — '

She scrubbed her hands viciously across her face and that sickening feeling of mental vertigo receded. She was in Derry. Derry, Maine, where her husband had grown through a childhood he claimed no longer to remember. Not a familiar place to her, or a particularly good place by its feel, but at least a known place. She was here because Bill was here, and she would see him tomorrow, at the Derry Town House. Whatever terrible thing was wrong here, whatever those new scars on his hands meant, they would face it together. She would call him, tell him she was here, then join him. After that. . . well. . .

Actually, she had no idea what came after that. The vertigo, that sense of being in a place that was really noplace, was threatening again. When she was nineteen she had done a whistle-stop tour with a scraggy little production company, forty not-so-wonderful performances of Arsenic and Old Lace in forty not-so-wonderful towns and small cities. All of this in forty-seven not-so-wonderful days. They began at the Peabody Dinner Theater in Massachusetts and ended at Play It Again Sam in Sausalito. And somewhere in between, in some Midwestern town like Ames Iowa or Grand Isle Nebraska or maybe Jubilee North Dakota, she had awakened like this in the middle of the night, panicked by disorientation, unsure what town she was in, what day it was, or why she was wherever she was. Even her name seemed unreal to her.

That feeling was back now. Her bad dreams had carried over into her waking and she felt a nightmarish free-floating terror. The town seemed to have wrapped itself around her like a python. She could sense it, and the feelings it produced were not good. She found herself wishing that she had heeded Freddie's advice and stayed away.

Her mind fixed on Bill, grasping at the thought of him the way a drowning woman would grip at a spar, a life-preserver, anything that

(we all float down here, Audra) floats.

A chill raced through her and she crisscrossed her arms across her naked breasts. She shivered and saw goosebumps ripple their way up her flesh. For a moment it seemed to her that a voice had spoken aloud, but inside her head. As if there was an alien presence in there.

Am I going crazy? God, is that it?

No, her mind responded. It's just disorientation. . . jet-lag. . . worry over your man.

Nobody's talking inside your head. Nobody —

'We all float down here, Audra, ' a voice said from the bathroom. It was a real voice, real as houses. And sly. Sly and duty and evil. 'You'll float, too. ' The voice uttered a fruity little giggle that dropped in pitch until it sounded like a clogged drain bubbling thickly. Audra cried out. . . then pressed her hands against her mouth.

I didn't hear that.

She said it out loud, daring the voice to contradict her. It didn't. The room was silent. Somewhere, far away, a train whistled in the night.

Suddenly she needed Bill so badly that waiting until daylight seemed impossible. She was in a standardized motel room exactly like the other thirty-nine units in the place, but suddenly it was too much. Everything. When you started hearing voices, it was just too much. Too creepy. She seemed to be slipping back into the nightmare she'd so lately escaped. She felt scared and terribly alone. It's worse than that, she thought. I feel dead. Her heart suddenly skipped two beats in her chest, making her gasp and utter a startled cough. She felt an instant of prison-panic, claustrophobia inside her own body, and wondered if all this terror didn't have a stupidly ordinary physical root after all: maybe she was going ot have a heart attack. Or was already having one.

Her heart settled, but uneasily.

Audra turned on the light by the bed-table and looked at her watch. Twelve past three. He would be sleeping, but that didn't matter to her now — nothing mattered except hearing his voice. She wanted to finish the night with him. If Bill was beside her, her clockwork would fall in sync with his and settle down. The nightmares would stay away. He sold nightmares to others — that was his trade — but to her he had never given anything but peace. Outside that odd cold nut imbedded in his imagination, peace seemed to be all he was made for or meant for. She got the Yellow Pages, found the number for the Derry Town House, and dialed it.

'Derry Town House. '

'Would you please ring Mr Denbrough's room? Mr William Denbrough? '

'Does that guy ever get any calls in the daytime? ' the clerk said, and before she could think to ask what that was supposed to mean, he had plugged her call through. The phone burred once, twice, three times. She could imagine him, sleeping with everything under the covers except the top of his head; she could imagine one hand coming out, feeling for the phone. She had seen him do it before, and a fond little smile touched her lips. It faded as the phone rang a fourth time. . . and a fifth, and a sixth. Halfway through the seventh ring, the connection was broken.

'That room does not answer. '

'No shit, Sherlock, ' Audra said, more upset and frightened than ever. 'Are you sure you rang the right room? '

'Ayup, ' the clerk said. 'Mr Denbrough had an inter-room call 'not five minutes ago. I know he answered that one, because the light stayed on the switchboard a minute or two. He must have gone to the person's room. '

'Well, which room was it? '

'I don't remember. Sixth floor, I think. But — '

She dropped the phone back into its cradle. A queer disheartening certainty came to her. It was a woman. Some woman had called him. . . and he had gone to her. Well, what now, Audra? How do we handle this?

She felt tears threaten. They stung her eyes and her nose; she could feel the lump of a sob in the back of her throat. No anger, at least not yet. . . only a sick sense of loss and abandonment.

Audra, get hold of yourself. You're jumping to conclusions. It's the middle of the night and you had a bad dream and now you've got Bill with some other woman. But it ain't necessarily so. What you're going to do is sit up — you'll never get back to sleep now anyway. Turn on some lights and finish the novel you brought to read on the plane. Remember what Bill says? Finest kind of dope. Book-Valium. No more heebie-jeebies. No more whim-whams and hearing voices. Dorothy Sayers and Lord Peter, that's the ticket. The Nine Tailors. That'll take you through to dawn. That'll —

The bathroom light suddenly went on; she could see it under the door. Then the latch clicked and the door juddered open. She stared at this, eyes widening, arms instinctively crossing over her breasts again. Her heart began to slam against her ribcage and the sour taste of adrenaline flooded her mouth.

That voice, low and dragging, said: 'We all float down here, Audra. ' The last word became a long, low, fading scream — Audraaaaa — that ended once again in that sick, clogged, bubbly sound that was so much like laughter.

'Who's there? ' she cried, backing away. That wasn't my imagination, no way, you're not going to tell me that —

The TV clicked on. She whirled around and saw a clown in a silvery suit with big orange buttons capering around on the screen. There were black sockets where its eyes should have been, and when its madeup lips stretched even wider in a grin, she saw teeth like razors. It held up a dripping, severed head. Its eyes were turned up to the whites and the mouth sagged open, but she could see well enough that it was Freddie Firestone's head. The clown laughed and danced. It swung the head around and drops of blood splashed against the inside of the TV screen. She could hear them sizzling in there.

Audra tried to scream and nothing came out but a little whine. She grabbed blindly for the dress lying over the back of the chair, and for her purse. She bolted into the hall and slammed the door behind her, gasping, her face paper-white. She dropped the purse between her feet and slipped the dress over her head.

'Float, ' a low, chuckling voice said from behind her, and she felt a cold finger caress her bare heel.

She uttered another high out-of-breath scream and danced away from the door. White corpse-fingers were seeking back and forth under it, the nails peeled away to show purplishwhite bloodless quicks. They made hoarse whispering noises on the rough nap of the hall carpet.

Audra snagged the strap of her purse and ran barefooted for the door at the end of the corridor. She was in a blind panic now, her only thought that she had to find the Derry Town House, and Bill. It didn't matter if he was in bed with enough other women to make up a harem. She would find him and get him to take her away from whatever unspeakable thing there was in this town.

She fled down the walkway and into the parking-lot, looking around wildly for her car. For a moment her mind froze and she couldn't even remember what she had been driving. Then it came: Datsun, tobacco-brown. She spotted it standing hubcapdeep in the still, curdled groundmist, and hurried over to it. She couldn't find the keys in her purse. She swept through it with steadily increasing panic, shuffling Kleenex, cosmetics, change, sun-glasses, and sticks of gum into a meaningless jumble. She didn't notice the battered LTD wagon parked nose-to-nose with her rented car, or the man sitting behind the wheel. She didn't notice when the LTD's door opened and the man got out; she was trying to cope with the growing certainty that she had left the Datsun's keys in the room. She couldn't go back in there; she couldn't.

Her fingers touched hard serrated metal under a box of Altoid mints and she seized at it with a little cry of triumph. For a terrible moment she thought it might be the key to their Rover, now sitting in the Fleet railway station's car-park three thousand miles away, and then she felt the lucite rental-car tab. She fumbled the key into the door-lock, breathing in harsh little gasps, and turned it. That was when a hand fell on her shoulder, and she screamed. . . screamed loudly this time. Somewhere a dog barked in answer, but that was all.

The hand, as hard as steel, bit cruelly in and forced her around. The face she saw looming over hers was puffed and lumpy. The eyes glittered. When the swelled lips spread in a grotesque smile, she saw that some of the man's front teeth had been broken. The stumps looked jagged and savage.

She tried to speak and could not. The hand squeezed tighter, digging in. 'Haven't I seen you in the movies? ' Tom Rogan whispered.

Eddie's Room

Beverly and Bill dressed quickly, without speaking, and went up to Eddie's room. On their way to the elevator they heard a phone-bell begin somewhere behind them. It was muffled, a somewhere-else sound.

'Bill, was that yours? '

'C-Could have b-b-been, ' he said. 'One of the uh-others c-calling, muh-haybe. ' He punched the UP button.

Eddie opened the door for them, his face white and strained. His left arm was at an angle both peculiar and weirdly evocative of old times.

'I'm okay, ' he said. 'I took two Darvon. Pain's not bad right now. ' But it was clearly not good, either. His lips, pressed so tightly together they had almost disappeared, were purple with shock.

Bill looked past him and saw the body on the floor. One look was enough to satisfy him of two things — it was Henry Bowers, and he was dead. He moved past Eddie and knelt by the body. The neck of a Perrier bottle had been driven into Henry's midsection, pulling the tatters of his shirt in after it. Henry's eyes were half-open, glazed. His mouth, filled with coagulating blood, snarled. His hands were claws.

A shadow fell over him and Bill looked up. It was Beverly. She looked down at Henry with no expression at all.

'All the times he ch-ch-chased us, ' Bill said.

She nodded. 'He doesn't look old. You know that, Bill? He doesn't look old at all. ' Abruptly she looked back at Eddie, who was sitting on the bed. Eddie looked old; old and haggard. His arm lay in his lap, useless. 'We've got to call the doctor for Eddie. ' 'No, ' Bill and Eddie said in unison.

'But he's hurt! His arm — '

'It's the same as luh-luh-last t-t-time, ' Bill said. He got to his feet and held her by the arms, looking into her face. 'Once we g-go outside. . . once w-w-we ih-inv-v-holve the t-t-town — ' They'll arrest me for murder, ' Eddie said dully. 'Or they'll arrest all of us. Or they'll detain us. Or something. Then there'll be an accident. One of the special accidents that only happen in Derry. Maybe they'll stick us in jail and a deputy sheriff will go berserk and shoot us all. Maybe we'll all die of ptomaine, or decide to hang ourselves in our cells. '

'Eddie, that's crazy! That's — '

'Is it? ' he asked. 'Remember, this is Derry. '

'But we're grownups now! Surely you don't think. . . I mean, he came here in the middle of the night. . . attacked you. . . '

'W-With what? ' Bill said. 'Where's the nuh-nuh-knife? '

She looked around, didn't see it, and dropped on her knees to look under the bed.

'Don't bother, ' Eddie said in that same faint, whistly voice. 'I slammed the door on his arm when he tried to stick me with it. He dropped it and I kicked it under the TV. It's gone now. I already looked. '

'B-B-Beheverly, c-call the others, ' Bill said. 'I can spuh-splint E-E-Eddie's arm, I th-hink. '

She looked at him for a long moment, then she looked down at the body on the floor again. She thought that the picture this room presented should tell a perfectly clear story to any policeman with half a brain. The place was a mess. Eddie's arm was broken. This man was dead. It was a clear case of self-defense against a night-prowler. And then she remembered Mr Ross. Mr Ross getting up and looking and then simply folding his newspaper and going back into the house.

Once we go outside. . . once we involve the town. . .

That made her remember Bill as a kid, his face white and tired and half-crazy, Bill saying Derry is It. Do you understand me? . . . Any place we go. . . when It gets us, they won't see, they won't hear, they won't know. Don't you see how it is? All we can do is to try and finish what we started.

Standing here now, looking down at Henry's corpse, Beverly thought: They're both saying we've all become ghosts again. That it's started to repeat. All of it. As a kid I could accept that, because kids almost are ghosts. But —

'Are you sure? ' she asked desperately. 'Bill, are you sure? '

He was sitting on the bed with Eddie, gently touching his arm. 'A-A-Aren't y-you? ' he asked. 'After a-a-all that's huh-happened t-today? '

Yes. All that had happened. The gruesome mess at the end of their reunion. The beautiful old woman who had turned into a crone before her eyes,

(my fodder was also my mudder)

the round of stories at the library tonight with the accompanying phenomena. All of those things. And still. . . her mind shouted at her desperately to stop this now, to spike it with sanity, because if she did not htey were surely going to finish up this night by going down to the Barrens and finding a certain pumping-station and —

'I don't know, ' she said. 'I just. . . I don't know. Even after everything that's happened, Bill, it seems to me that we could call the police. Maybe. '

'C-C-Call the uh-others, ' he said again. 'We'll s-s-see what they th-think '

'All right. '

She called Richie first, then Ben. Both agreed to come right away. Neither asked what had happened. She found Mike's telephone number in the book and dialed it. There was no answer; after a dozen rings she hung up.

'T-T-Try the luh-luh-hibrary, ' Bill said. He had taken the short curtain rods down from the smaller of the two windows in Eddie's room and was binding them firmly to Eddie's arm with the belt of his bathrobe and the drawstring from his pyjamas.

Before she could find the number there was a knock at the door. Ben and Richie had arrived together, Ben in jeans and an untucked shirt, Richie in a pair of smart gray cotton trousers and his pyjama top. His eyes looked warily around the room from behind his glasses.

'Christ, Eddie, what happened to — '

^Oh my God! ' Ben cried. He had seen Henry on the floor.

'B-B-Be quh-hiet! ' Bill said sharply. 'And close th-the d-door! '

Richie did it, his eyes fixed on the body. 'Henry? '

Ben took three steps toward the corpse and then stopped, as if afraid it might bite him. He looked helplessly at Bill.

Y-Y-You t-tell, ' he said to Eddie. 'G-G-Goddam stuh-huh-hutter is g-getting wuh-wuhworse all the t-t-time. ' Eddie sketched in what had happened while Beverly hunted up the number for the Derry Public Library and called it. She expected that perhaps Mike had fallen asleep there — he might even have a bunk in his office. What she did not expect was what happened: the phone was picked up on the second ring and a voice she had never heard before said hello.

'Hello, ' she answered, looking toward the others and making a shushing gesture with one hand. 'Is Mr Hanlon there? ' 'Who's this? ' the voice asked.

She wet her lips with her tongue. Bill was looking at her piercingly. Ben and Richie had looked around. The beginnings of real alarm stirred inside her.

'Who are you? ' she countered. 'You're not Mr Hanlon. '

'I'm Derry Chief of Police Andrew Rademacher, ' the voice said. 'Mr Hanlon is at the Derry Home Hospital right now. He was assaulted and badly wounded a short time ago. Now who are you, please? I want your name. '

But she barely heard this last. Waves of shock rode through her, lifting her dizzily up and up, outside of herself. The muscles in her stomach and legs and crotch all went loose and numb, and she thought in a detached way: This must be how it happens, when people get so scared they wet their pants. Sure. You just lose control of those muscles —

'How badly has he been hurt? ' she heard herself asking in a papery voice, and then Bill was beside her, his hand on her shoulder, and Ben was there, and Richie, and she felt such a rush of gratitude for them. She held her free hand out and Bill took it. Richie placed his hand over Bill's and Ben put his over Richie's. Eddie had come over, and now he put his good hand on top.

'I want your name, please, ' Rademacher said briskly, and for a moment the skittering little craven inside of her, the one that had been bred by her father and cared for by her husband, almost answered: I'm Beverly Marsh and I'm at the Derry Town House. Please send Mr Nell over. There's a dead man here who's still half a boy and we're all very frightened.

She said: 'I. . . I'm afraid I can't tell you. Not just yet. '

'What do you know about this? '

'Nothing, ' she said, shocked. 'What makes you think I do? Jesus Christ! '

'You just make a habit of calling the library every morning about three-thirty, ' Rademacher said, 'is that it? Can the bullshit, young lady. This is assault, and the way the guy looks, it could be murder by the time the sun comes up. I'll ask you again: who are you and how much do you know about this? '

Closing her eyes, gripping Bill's hand with all her strength, she asked again: 'He might die?

You're not just saying that to scare me? He really might die? Please tell me. '

'He's very badly hurt. And if that doesn't scare you, miss, it ought to. Now I want to know who you are and why — '

As if in a dream she watched her hand float through space and drop the phone back into the cradle. She looked over at Henry and felt shock as keen as a slap from a cold hand. One of Henry's eyes had closed. The other one, the shattered one, oozed as nakedly as before. Henry seemed to be winking at her.

Richie called the hospital. Bill led Beverly over to the bed, where she sat with Eddie, looking off into space. She thought she would cry, but no tears came. The only feeling she was strongly and immediately aware of was a wish that someone would cover Henry Bowers.

That winky look was really not cool at all.

In one giddy instant Richie became a reporter from the Derry News. He understood that Mr Michael Hanlon, the town's head librarian, had been assaulted while working late. Did the hospital have any word on Mr Hanlon's condition?

Richie listened, nodding.

'I understand, Mr Kerpaskian — do you spell that with two k's? You do. Okay. And you are — '

He listened, now enough into his own fiction to make doodling motions with one finger, as ifwriting on a pad.

'Uh-huh. . . uh-huh. . . yes. Yes, I understand. Well, what we usually do in cases like this is to quote you as " a source. " Then, later on, we can. . . uh-huh. . . right! Just right! ' Richie laughed heartily and armed a film of sweat from his forehead. He listened again. 'Okay, Mr

Kerpaskian. Yes. I'll. . . yes, I got it, K-E-R-P-A-S-K-I-A-N, right! Czech-Jewish, is it? Really! That's. . . that's most unusual. Yes, I will. Goodnight. Thank you. '

He hung up and closed his eyes. 'Jesus! ' he cried in a thick, low voice. 'Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! ' He made as ifto shove the phone off the table and then simply let his hand fall. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his pyjama top.

'He's alive, but in grave condition, ' he told the others. 'Henry sliced him up like a Christmas turkey. One of the cuts chopped into his femoral artery and he's lost all the blood a man can and still stay alive. Mike managed to get some kind of tourniquet on it, or he would have been dead when they found him. '

Beverly began to cry. She did it like a child, with both hands plastered to her face. For a little while her hitching sobs and the rapid whistle of Eddie's breathing were the only sounds in the room.

'Mike wasn't the only one who got sliced up like a Christmas turkey, ' Eddie said at last.

'Henry looked like he just went twelve rounds with Rocky Balboa in a Cuisinart. '

'D-Do you still w-w-want to g-g-go to the p-p-police, Bev? '

There were Kleenex on the nighttable but they were a caked and sodden mass in the middle of a puddle of Perrier. She went into the bathroom, making a wide circle around Henry, got a wash-cloth, and ran cool water on it. It felt delicious against her hot puffy face. She felt that she could think clearly again — not rationally but clearly. She was suddenly sure that rationality would kill them if they tried to use it now. That cop. Rademacher. He had been suspicious. Why not? People didn't call the library at three-thirty in the morning. He had assumed some guilty knowledge. What would he assume if he found out that she had called him from a room where there was a dead man on the floor with a jagged bottle-neck planted in his guts? That she and four other strangers had just come into town the day before for a little reunion and this guy just happened to drop by? Would she buy the tale if the shoe were on the other foot? Would anyone? Of course, they could buttress their tale by adding that they had come back to finish the monster that lived in the drains under the city. That would certainly add a convincing note of gritty realism.

She came out of the bathroom and looked at Bill. 'No, ' she said. 'I don't want to go to the police. I think Eddie's right — something might happen to us. Something final. But that isn't

the real reason. ' She looked at the four of them. 'We swore it, ' she said. 'We swore. Bill's brother. . . Stan. . . all the others. . . and now Mike. I'm ready, Bill. ' Bill looked at the others.

Richie nodded. 'Okay, Big Bill. Let's try. '

Ben said, 'The odds look worse than ever. We're two short now. ' Bill said nothing.

'Okay. ' Ben nodded. 'She's right. We swore. '

'E-E-Eddie? '

Eddie smiled wanly. 'I guess I get another pigger-back down that ladder, huh? If the ladder's still there. '

'No one throwing rocks this time, though, ' Beverly said. 'They're dead. All three of them. ' 'Do we do it now, Bill? ' Richie asked.

'Y-Y-Yes, ' Bill said. 'I th-think this is the t-t-time. '

'Can I say something? ' Ben asked abruptly.

Bill looked at him and grinned a little. 'A-A-Any time. '

'You guys are still the best friends I ever had, ' Ben said. 'No matter how this turns out. I just. . . you know, wanted to tell you that. '

He looked around at them, and they looked solemnly back at him.

'I'm glad I remembered you, ' he added. Richie snorted. Beverly giggled. Then they were all laughing, looking at each other in the old way, in spite of the fact that Mike was in the hospital, perhaps dying or already dead, in spite of the fact that Eddie's arm was broken (again), in spite of the fact that it was the deepest ditch of the morning.

'Haystack, you have such a way with words, ' Richie said, laughing and wiping his eyes.

'He should have been the writer, Big Bill. '

Still smiling a little, Bill said: 'And on that nuh-nuh-note — '

They took Eddie's borrowed limo. Richie drove. The groundfog was thicker now, drifting through the streets like cigarette smoke, not quite reaching the hooded streetlamps. The stars overhead were bright chips of ice, spring stars. but by cocking his head to the half-open window on the passenger side, Bill thought he could hear summer thunder in the distance. Ram was being ordered up somewhere over the horizon.

Richie turned on the radio and there was Gene Vincent singing 'Be-Bop-A-Lula. ' He hit one of the other buttons and got Buddy Holly. A third punch brought Eddie Cochran singing

'Summertime Blues. '

'I'd like to help you, son, but you're too young to vote, ' a deep voice said.

'Turn it off, Richie, ' Beverly said softly.

He reached for it, and then his hand froze. 'Stay tuned for more of the Richie Tozier AllDead Rock Show! ' the clown's laughing, screaming voice cried over the finger-pops and guitar-chops of the Eddie Cochran tune. 'Don't touch that dial, keep it tuned to the rockpile, they're gone from the charts but not from our hearts and you keep coming, come right along, come on everybody! We play aaaalll the hits down here! Aaallllll the hits! And if you don't believe me, just listen to this morning's graveyard-shift guest deejay, Georgie Denbrough!

Tell em, Georgie! '

And suddenly Bill's brother was wailing out of the radio.

'You sent me out and It killed me! I thought It was in the cellar, Big Bill, I thought It was in the cellar but It was in the drain, It was in the drain and It killed me, you let It kill me, Big

Bill, you let It —

Richie snapped the radio off so hard the knob spun away and hit the floormat.

'Rock and roll in the sticks really sucks, ' he said. His voice was not quite steady. 'Bev's right, we'll leave it off, what do you say? '

No one replied. Bill's face was pale and still and thoughtful under the glow of the passing streetlamps, and when the thunder muttered again in the west they all heard it.

In the Barrens

Same old bridge.

Richie parked beside it and they got out and moved to the railing — same old railing — and looked down.

Same old Barrens.

It seemed untouched by the last twenty-seven years; to Bill the turnpike overpass, which was the only new feature, looked unreal, something as ephemeral as a matte painting or a rear-screen projection effect in a movie. Cruddy little trees and scrub bushes glimmered in the twining fog and Bill thought: I guess this is what we mean when we talk about the persistence of memory, this or something like this, something you see at the right time and from the right angle, image that kicks off emotion like a jet engine. You see it so clear that all the things which happened in between are gone. If desire is what closes the circle between world and want, then the circle has closed.

'Cuh-Cuh-Come on, ' he said, and climbed over the railing. They followed him down the embankment in a scatter of scree and pebbles. When they reached the bottom Bill checked automatically for Silver and then laughed at himself. Silver was leaning against the wall of Mike's garage. It seemed Silver had no pan to play in this at all, although that was strange, after the way it had turned up. Tuh-Take us there, ' Bill told Ben.

Ben looked at him and Bill read the thought in his eyes — It's been twenty-seven years, Bill, dream on — and then he nodded and headed into the undergrowth.

The path — their path — had long since grown over, and they had to force themselves through tangles of thornbushes, prickers, and wild hydrangea so fragrant it was cloying. Crickets sang somnolently all around them, and a few lightning-bugs, early arrivals at summer's luscious party, poked at the dark. Bill supposed kids still played down here, but they had made their own runs and secret ways.

They came to the clearing where the clubhouse had been, but now there was no clearing here at all. Bushes and lackluster scrub pines had reclaimed it all.

'Look, ' Ben whispered, and crossed the clearing (in their memories it was still here, simply overlaid with another of those matte paintings). He yanked at something. It was the mahogany door they had found on the edge of the dump, the one they had used to finish off the clubhouse roof. It had been cast aside here and looked as if it hadn't been touched in a dozen years or more. Creepers were firmly entrenched across its dirty surface.

'Leave it alone, Haystack, ' Richie murmured. 'It's old. '

'Tuh-Tuh-Take us th-there, B-Ben, ' Bill repeated from behind them.

So they went down to the Kenduskeag following him, bearing left away from the clearing that didn't exist anymore. The sound of running water grew steadily louder, but they still almost fell into the Kenduskeag before any of them saw it: the foliage had grown up in a tangled wall on the edge of the embankment. The edge broke off under the heels of Ben's cowboy boots and Bill yanked him back by the scruff of the neck.

'Thanks, ' Ben said.

'De nada. In the o-old d-days, you wuh-hould have puh-pulled me ih-in a-a-after you. DDown this wuh-way? '

Ben nodded and led them along the overgrown bank, fighting through hte tangles of bushes and brambles, thinking how much easier this was when you were only four feet five and able to go under most tangles (those in your mind as well as those in your path, he supposed) in one nonchalant duck. Well, everything changed. Our lesson for today, boys and girls, is the more things change, the more things change. Whoever said the more things change the more things stay the same was obviously suffering severe mental retardation. Because — His foot hooked under something and he fell over with a thud, nearly striking his head on the pumping-station's concrete cylinder. It was almost completely buried in a wallow of blackberry bushes. As he got to his feet again he realized that his face and arms and hands had been striped by blackberry thorns in two dozen places.

'Make that three dozen, ' he said, feeling thin blood running down his cheeks.

'What? ' Eddie asked.

'Nothing. ' He bent down to see what he had tripped over. A root, probably.

But it wasn't a root. It was the iron manhole cover. Someone had pushed it off.

Of course, Ben thought. We did. Twenty-seven years ago.

But he realized that was crazy even before he saw fresh metal twinkling through the rust in parallel scrape-marks. The pump hadn't been working that day. Sooner or later someone would have come down to fix it, and would have replaced the cover in the bargain.

He stood up and the five of them gathered around the cylinder and looked in. They could hear the faint sound of dripping water. That was all. Richie had brought all the matches from Eddie's room. Now he lit an entire book of them and tossed it in. For a moment they could see the cylinder's damp inner sleeve and the silent bulk of the pumping machinery. That was all.

'Could have been off for a long time, ' Richie said uneasily. 'Didn't necessarily have to happen t — '

'It's happened fairly recently, ' Ben said. 'Since the last rain, anyway. ' He took another book of matches from Richie, lit one, and pointed out the fresh scratches.

'There's suh-suh-something uh-under it, ' Bill said as Ben shook out the match.

'What? ' Ben asked.

'C-C-Couldn't tuh-tuh-tell. Looked like a struh-struh-strap. You and Rih-Richie help me -t t-turn it o-over. '

They grabbed the cover and flipped it like a giant coin. This time Beverly lit the match and Ben cautiously picked up the purse which had been under the manhole cover. He held it up by the strap. Beverly started to shake out the match and then looked at Bill's face. She froze until the flame touched the ends of her fingers and then dropped it with a little gasp. 'Bill?

What is it? What's wrong? '

Bill's eyes felt too heavy. They couldn't leave that scuffed leather bag with its long leather strap. Suddenly he could remember the name of the song which had been playing on the radio in the back room of the leather-goods shop when he had bought it for her. 'Sausalito Summer Nights. ' It was the surpassing weirdism. All the spit was gone out of his mouth, leaving his tongue and inner cheeks as smooth and dry as chrome. He could hear the crickets and see the lightning-bugs and smell big green growing dark out of control all around him and he thought It's another trick another illusion she's in England and this is just a cheap shot because It's scared, oh yes, It's maybe not as sure as It was when It called us all back, and really, Bill, get serious — how many scuffed leather purses with long straps do you think there are in the world? A million? Ten million?

Probably more. But only one like this. He had bought it for Audra in a Burbank leathergoods store while 'Sausalito Summer Nights' played on the radio in the back room.

'Bill? ' Beverly's hand on his shoulder, shaking him. Far away. Twenty-seven leagues under the sea. What was the name of the group that sang 'Sausalito Summer Nights'? Richie would know.

'I know, ' Bill said calmly into Richie's scared, wide-eyed face, and smiled. 'It was Diesel.

How's that for total recall? '

'Bill, what's wrong? ' Richie whispered.

Bill screamed. He snatched the matches out of Beverly's hand, lit one, and then yanked the purse away from Ben.

'Bill, Jesus, what — '

He unzipped the purse and turned it over. What fell out was so much Audra that for a moment he was too unmanned to scream again. Amid the Kleenex, sticks of chewing gum, and items of make-up, he saw a tin of Altoid mints. . . and the jewelled compact Freddie Firestone had given her when she signed for Attic Room.

'My wuh-wuh-wife's down there, ' he said, and fell on his knees and began pushing her things back into the purse. He brushed hair that no longer existed out of his eyes without even thinking about it.

'Your wife? Audra? Beverly's face was shocked, her eyes huge.

'Her p-p-purse. Her th-things. '

'Jesus, Bill, ' Richie muttered. 'That can't be, you know th — '

He had found her alligator wallet. He opened it and held it up. Richie lit another match and was looking at a face he had seen in half a dozen movies. The picture on Audra's California driver's license was less glamorous but completely conclusive.

'But Huh-Huh-Henry's dead, and Victor, and B-B-Belch. . . so who's got her? ' He stood up, staring around at them with febrile intensity. Who's got her? '

Ben put a hand on Bill's shoulder. 'I guess we better go down and find out, huh? '

Bill looked around at hull, as if unsure of who Ben might be, and then his eyes cleared. 'Y-

Yeah, ' he said. 'Eh-Eh-Eddie? '

'Bill, I'm sorry. '

'Can you cluh-climb on? ' 'I did once. '

Bill bent over and Eddie hooked his right arm around Bill's neck. Ben and Richie boosted him up until he could hook his legs around Bill's midsection.

As Bill swung one leg clumsily over the lip of the cylinder, Ben saw that Eddie's eyes were tightly shut. . . and for a moment he thought he heard the world's ugliest cavalry charge bashing its way through the bushes. He turned, expecting to see the three of them come out of the fog and the brambles, but all he had heard was the rising breeze rattling the bamboo a quarter of a mile or so from here. Their old enemies were all gone now.

Bill gripped the rough concrete lip of the cylinder and felt his way down, step by step and rung by rung. Eddie had him in a deathgrip and Bill could barely breathe. Her purse, dear God, how did her purse get here? Doesn't matter. But if You're there, God, and if You're taking requests, let her be all right, don't let her suffer for what Bev and I did tonight or for what I did one summer when I was a boy. . . and was it the clown? Was it Bob Gray who got her? If it was, I don't know if even God can help her.

'I'm scared, Bill, ' Eddie said in a thin voice.

Bill's foot touched cold standing water. He lowered himself into it, remembering the feel and the dank smell, remembering the claustrophobic way this place had made him feel. . . and, just by the way, what had happened to them? How had they fared down in these drains and tunnels? Where exactly had they gone, and how exactly had they gotten out again? He still couldn't remember any of that; all he could think of was Audra.

'I am t-t-too. ' He half-squatted, wincing as the cold water ran into his pants and over his balls, and let Eddie off. They stood shindeep in the water and watched the others descend the ladder.

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