Chapter no 18 – The Bullseye

IT by Stephen King

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

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

Denbrough’s workshop on the night of July 23rd and how they were used on the 25th.

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

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

Ben stands up and unbuttons the work-shirt he is wearing, spreading it open. An old scar in the shape of the letter H shows there. Its lines are

broken—the belly was much bigger when that scar was put there—but its shape still identifiable.

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

Beverly’s hand goes to her mouth. “The werewolf! In that house! Oh

Jesus Christ!” And she turns to the windows, as if to see it lurking outside in the darkness.

“That’s right, ” Ben said. “And you want to know something funny? That scar wasn’t there two nights ago. Henry’s old calling-card was; I know,

because I showed it to a friend of mine, a bartender named Ricky Lee back

in Hemingford Home. But this one—” He laughs without much humor and begins buttoning his shirt again. “This one just came back.

“Like the ones on our hands. ”

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

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

“Yes, ” Mike says.

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

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

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

“Yes, ” Ben agrees. ”You did, Big Bill. I was, like, lost in the funhouse. ” Bill points briefly at the empty chair. “I had some help from Stan Uris.

And he paid for it. Maybe died for it. ”

Ben Hanscom is shaking his head. “Don’t say that, Bill. ”

“But it’s t-true. And if it’s yuh-your f-fault, it’s my fault, too, and e-e-

everyone else’s here, because we went on. Even after Patrick, and what was written on that r-re-frigerator, we went on. It would be my fault m-most of all, I guess, because I wuh-wuh-wanted us to go on. Because of Juh-

George. Maybe even because I thought that if I killed whatever k-killed George, my puh-harents would have to luh-luh-luh—”

“Love you again? ” Beverly asks gently.

“Yes. Of course. But I d-d-don’t think it was a-a-anyone’s fuh-hault, Ben.

It was just the w-w-way Stan was built. ”

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

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

A chuckle stirs through them, and they look at the chair where Stan would have been in a rightful sane world where all the good guys won all of

the time. I miss him, Ben thinks. God, how I miss him! He says, “You remember that day, Richie, when you told him you heard somewhere he

killed Christ, and Stan says, totally deadpan, ‘I think that was my father’? ” “I remember, ” Richie says in a voice almost too low to hear. He takes

his handkerchief out of his back pocket, removes his glasses, wipes his eyes, then puts his glasses back on. He puts away the handkerchief and without looking up from his hands he says, “Why don’t you just tell it, Ben? ”

“It hurts, doesn’t it? ”

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

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

“No, ” Richie demurs. “Bill thought of it first, and he got nervous first. ” “I just started to wuh-wuh-worry—”

“Doesn’t really matter, I guess, ” Ben says. “The three of us spent some heavy library time that July. We were trying to find out how to make silver bullets. I had the silver; four silver dollars that were my father’s. Then Bill got nervous, thinking about what kind of shape we’d be in if we had a

misfire with some kind of monster coming down our throats. And when we

saw how good Beverly was with that slingshot of his, we ended up using one of my silver dollars to make slugs instead. We got the stuff together and all of us we went down to Bill’s place. Eddie, you were there—”

“I told my mother we were going to play Monopoly, ” Eddie says. “My arm was really hurting, but I had to walk. That’s how pissed she was at me.

And every time I heard someone behind me on the sidewalk I’d whip around, thinking it was Bowers. It didn’t help the pain. ”

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

“Oh, I’m not so sure of that, ” Ben says, although he still is. He

remembers how the dusk was drawing down outside (Mr. Denbrough had promised them all rides home), the sound of the crickets in the grass, the first lightning-bugs blinking outside the windows. Bill had carefully set up the Monopoly board in the dining room, making it look as if the game had been going on for an hour or more.

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

careful. I don’t want to leave a muh-muh-mess. My dad’ll be—” He spat out a number of “p”s, and finally managed to say “pissed off. ”

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

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

Ben took very little notice of them. He watched Bill lay out the

implements and tools one by one in the light. Part of his mind was wishing that someday he might have such a nice worktable as this himself. Most of it was centered directly on the job ahead. Not as difficult as making silver

bullets would have been, but he would still be careful. There was no excuse for sloppy workmanship. This was not something he had been taught or told, just something he knew.

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

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

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

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

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

It turned out that making bearings was a cinch, once you had the molds.

The only real question was where to get them. A couple of discreet

questions to Zack Denbrough had taken care of that . . . and none of the Losers were too surprised to find that the only machine-shop in Derry

where such molds might be obtained was Kitchener Precision Tool & Die. The Kitchener who owned and ran it was a great-great-grandnephew of the brothers who had owned the Kitchener Ironworks.

Bill and Richie had gone over together with all the cash the Losers had been able to raise on short notice—ten dollars and fifty-nine cents—in Bill’s pocket. When Bill asked how much a couple of two-inch bearing

molds might cost, Carl Kitchener—who looked like a veteran boozehound and smelled like an old horse-blanket—asked what a couple of kids wanted with bearing molds. Richie let Bill speak, knowing things would probably go easier that way—children made fun of Bill’s stutter; adults were embarrassed by it. Sometimes this was surprisingly helpful.

Bill got halfway through the explanation he and Richie had worked out on the way over—something about a model windmill for next year’s

science project—when Kitchener waved for him to shut up and quoted them the unbelievable price of fifty cents per mold.

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

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

“That’s o-o-okay, suh-sir, ” Bill said.

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

Outside Bill said: “Y-Y-You ever nuh-hotice, Ruh-Richie, how guh-guh- grownups w-w-won’t sell you a-a-anything except c-candy or cuh-cuh-

homic books or m-maybe movie t-t-tickets without first they w-want to know what y-you want it f-for? ”

“Sure, ” Richie said.

“W-Why? Why ih-is that? ”

“Because they think we’re dangerous. ” “Y-Yeah? You thuh-thuh-think s-so? ”

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

“Fuck y-you, ” Bill said.

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

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

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

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

Bill had found it in the back of the garage just a week ago.

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

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

“Yes, ” Ben said, “but I don’t remember him very well. ” “Are you sure you want to do this? ”

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

She smiled back. It was enough for Ben. If she had smiled at him twice, he would gladly have made enough silver bearings to shoot a platoon of

werewolves. He looked hastily away. “Okay. Here we go. No problem. Easy as pie, right? ”

They nodded hesitantly.

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

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

“Don’t worry, ” he said to Stan, who was standing next to her. “Huh? ” Stan said, looking at him and blinking.

“Don’t worry. ”

“I’m not. ”

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

“Are you okay, Ben? ”

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

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

“You got the funnel? ” he asked Bill.

“R-R-Right here. ” Bill handed over a homemade funnel that Ben had made earlier. The tiny hole at its base fit the hole in the bearing molds

almost exactly. Ben had done this without taking a single measurement. Bill had been amazed— almost flabbergasted—but did not know how to say so without embarrassing Ben.

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

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

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

“Wuh-wuh-wait, ” Bill said suddenly, and dashed into the house. He

came back a minute later with a pair of cheap Turtle wraparound sunglasses that had been languishing in a kitchen drawer for a year or more. “Better p- put these uh-on, H-H-Haystack. ”

Ben took them, grinned, and slipped them on.

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

Bandstand wops. ”

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

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

“Gimme that other glove. Fast! Fast!”

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

“Hold it steady, Bev. ”

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

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

disguise his gut and his tits; he felt like Thor, working thunder and lightning at the smithy of the gods.

Then the feeling was gone.

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

Stan did it.

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

“Okay, ” he said, “number two. ” And went back to work.

Ten minutes later it was done. “Now what? ” Mike asked.

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

Richie looked uneasily at the cracked face of his Timex, which had taken a great many lickings and kept on ticking.

“When will your folks be back, Bill? ”

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

“Aladdin, ” Stan said.

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

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

“Then let’s go in, ” Bev said. “I want to call home. I promised I would.

And don’t any of you talk. He thinks I’m at Community House and that I’m getting a ride home from there. ”

“What if he wants to come down and pick you up early? ” Mike asked. “Then, ” Beverly said, “I’m going to be in a lot of trouble. ”

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

Ben threw himself in front of her and told Marsh to lay off.

If you want trouble, fat boy, you just keep protecting my daughter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You got a ride home, Bevvie? ”

“Yes. Bill Denbrough’s dad is going to take a whole bunch of us home. ” Mrs. Marsh sounded suddenly alarmed. “You’re not on a date, are you,

Bevvie? ”

“No, of course not, ” Bev said, looking through the arched doorway between the darkened hall where she was and the dining room, where the

others were sitting down around the Monopoly board. But I sure wish I was. “Boys, uck. But they have a sign-up sheet down here, and every night a different dad or mom takes kids home. ” That much, at least, was true. The rest was a lie so outrageous that she could feel herself blushing hotly in the dark.

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

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

salute right back.

“Are any of your girlfriends there? ” What girlfriends, Mamma?

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

“I love you, Mamma, ” she said.

“Same goes back to you, Bev. ” Her mother paused briefly and added:

“Be careful. The paper says there may be another one. A boy named Patrick Hockstetter. He’s missing. Did you know him, Bevvie? ”

She closed her eyes briefly. “No, Mom. ” “Well . . . goodbye, then. ”

“Bye. ”

She joined the others at the table and for an hour they played Monopoly.

Stan was the big winner.

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

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

Ben was almost broke.

Beverly glanced across the table from time to time at Bill, noting his clean hands, his blue eyes, the fine red hair. As he moved the little silver

shoe he was using as a marker around the board, she thought, If he held my hand, I think I’d be so glad I’d probably die. A warm light seemed to glow briefly in her chest and she smiled secretly down at her hands.

The evening’s finale was almost anticlimactic. Ben took one of Zack’s chisels from the shelf and used a hammer to strike the molds on the cut-

lines. They opened easily. Two small silver balls fell out. In one they could faintly see part of a date: 925. In the other, wavery lines Beverly thought were the remnants of Lady Liberty’s hair. They looked at them without speaking for a moment, and then Stan picked one up.

“Pretty small, ” he said.

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

Ben found himself nodding. They did to him, as well. “We’re all d-d-done? ” Bill asked.

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

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

“G-G-Give them to B-Beverly. ” “No!”

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

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

(father)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who won? ” Sharon asked, smiling bright-eyed at Bill’s little friends.

The girl was going to be very pretty, she thought. She supposed in another year or two the children would have to be chaperoned if there were going to be girls instead of just the regular gang of boys. But surely it was still too soon to worry about sex rearing its ugly head.

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

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

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

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

They arrived at 29 Neibolt Street around ten that morning, Bill riding Richie double on Silver, Ben with his ample buttocks spilling over either

side of the sagging seat on his Raleigh. Beverly came down Neibolt Street on her girl’s Schwinn, her red hair held back from her forehead by a green band. It streamed out behind her. Mike came by himself, and about five

minutes later Stan and Eddie walked up together. “H-H-How’s your a-a-arm, Eh-Eh-Eddie? ”

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

There was a canvas-wrapped bundle in Silver’s bike-basket. Bill took it out and unwrapped it. He handed the slingshot to Beverly, who took it with a little grimace but said nothing. There was also a tin Sucrets box in the bundle. Bill opened it and showed them the two silver balls. They looked at them silently, gathered close together on the balding lawn on 29 Neibolt

Street—a lawn where only weeds seemed to grow. Bill, Richie, and Eddie had seen the house before; the others hadn’t, and they looked at it curiously.

The windows look like eyes, Stan thought, and his hand went to the paperback book in his back pocket. He touched it for luck. He carried the book with him almost everywhere—it was M. K. Handey’s Guide to North American Birds. They look like dirty blind eyes.

It stinks Beverly thought. I can smell it—but not with my nose, not exactly.

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

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

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

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

“Gimme some of that, ” Richie said.

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

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

Eddie shrugged with his good shoulder—an oddly disjointed movement

—and handed it over. Richie triggered the aspirator and breathed deep.

“Needed that, ” he said, and handed it back. He was coughing a little, but his eyes were sober.

“Me too, ” Stan said. “Okay? ”

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

“Does anybody live on this street? ” Beverly asked in a low voice. “Not this end of it, ” Mike said. “Not anymore. Just the bums that stay

for awhile and then go out on the freights. ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It just touched them and it did that? ” Beverly asked, horrified. Bill nodded. “Are you guh-huys s-s-sure? ”

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

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

Hockstetter. It kills kids, goddammit, kids!

“I’ll go, Big Bill, ” he said. “Shit, yeah, ” Beverly said.

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

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

“Are you sure, Bill? ” “Sh-Sh-Sure. ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Uh-Uh-under the p-porch, ” Bill said. “A-All of you b-b-behind me.

Then into the suh-suh-cellar. ”

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

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

Richie laughed wildly at this.

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

“Do you believe that? ” Mike asked. “No, ” Bill said briefly. “It’s h-h-here. ”

Ben believed he was right. The house at 29 Neibolt Street seemed to be encased in a poisonous envelope. It could not be seen . . . but It could be

felt. He licked his lips.

“You ruh-ruh-ready? ” Bill asked them.

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

“Cuh-come on, th-then, ” Bill said. “Stay cluh-close behind me, B-

Beverly. ” He dropped to his knees, crawled through the blighted rosebushes and under the porch.

They went this way: Bill, Beverly, Ben, Eddie, Richie, Stan, Mike. The leaves under the porch crackled and puffed up a sour old smell. Ben

wrinkled his nose. Had he ever smelled fallen leaves like these? He thought not. And then an unpleasant idea struck him. They smelled the way he imagined a mummy would smell, just after its discoverer had levered open its coffin: all dust and bitter ancient tannic acid.

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

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

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

Bill turned around and slipped through the window. Beverly gave Ben

the Bullseye, folding his hand over the cup and ball nestled in it. “Give it to me the second I’m down, ” she said. “The second. ”

“Got you. ”

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

“Okay, I’ve got it. Come on. ”

Ben turned around himself and began to wriggle through the window. He should have foreseen what happened next; it was really inevitable. He got stuck. His fanny bound up against the rectangular cellar window and he couldn’t go in any farther. He started to pull himself out and realized, horrified, that he could do it, but was very apt to yank his pants—and

perhaps his underpants as well—down to his knees when he did. And there he would be, with his extremely large ass practically in his beloved’s face.

“Hurry up!” Eddie said.

Ben pushed grimly with both hands. For a moment he still couldn’t move, and then his butt popped through the window-hole. His bluejeans dragged painfully up into his crotch, squashing his balls. The top of the

window rucked his shirt all the way up to his shoulderblades. Now his gut was stuck.

“Suck in, Haystack, ” Richie said, giggling hysterically.

“You better suck in or we’ll have to send Mike after his dad’s chainfall to pull you out again. ”

“Beep-beep, Richie, ” Ben said through gritted teeth. He sucked his belly in as much as he could. He moved a little farther, then stopped again.

He turned his head as far as he could, fighting panic and claustrophobia.

His face had gone a bright sweaty red. The sour smell of the leaves was heavy in his nostrils, cloying.

“Bill! Can you guys pull me? ”

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

“Y-Y-You okay, m-m-man? ” “Yeah. ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eh-Eh-Eddie? ”

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

Bill stepped back again. Beverly stood near him, now holding the

Bullseye by the shaft and the cup, ready to fire if necessary. Her eyes swept the cellar constantly. Richie came through next, followed by Stan and Mike, all of them moving with a smooth grace that Ben deeply envied. Then they were all down, down in the cellar where Bill and Richie had seen It only a month before.

The room was dim, but not dark. Dusky light shafted in through the

windows and pooled on the dirt floor. The cellar seemed very big to Ben, almost too big, as if he were witnessing an optical illusion of some sort. Dusty rafters crisscrossed overhead. The furnace-pipes were rusty. Some sort of dirty white cloth hung from the water-pipes in dirty strings and strands. The smell was down here too. A dirty yellow smell. Ben thought: It’s here, all right. Oh yeah.

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

“Uh-uh-upstairs, ” he said.

They went up and emerged into a dirty kitchen. One plain straight-backed chair stood marooned in the center of the humped hillocky linoleum. That

was it for furniture. There were empty liquor bottles in one corner. Ben could see others in the pantry. He could smell booze—wine, mostly—and old stale cigarettes. Those smells were dominant, but that other smell was there, too. It was getting stronger all the time.

Beverly went to the cupboards and opened one of them. She screamed piercingly as a blackish-brown Norway rat tumbled out almost into her face. It struck the counter with a plop and glared around at them with its

black eyes. Still screaming, Beverly raised the Bullseye and pulled the sling back.

“NO!” Bill roared.

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

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

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

“Yes, ” Bill said. “It’s 1-1-like the FBI training r-range at Quh-Quh- Quantico, in a w-w-way. They seh-send y-you down this f-f-hake street and p-pop up tuh-hargets. If you shuh-shoot any honest citizens ih-instead of just cruh-crooks, you l-lose puh-hoints. ”

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

“You h-h-have to, B-Beverly. ”

There was a mewling from another cupboard. Richie walked toward it.

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

Richie looked inside and an expression of sick disgust crossed his face.

He slammed the cupboard shut with a bang that produced a dead echo in the empty house.

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

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

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

They went down the front hall. Here the unlovely smells of rotting plaster and old urine were intermixed. They were able to look out at the street through dirty panes of glass and see their bikes. Bev’s and Ben’s were heeled over on their kickstands. Bill’s leaned against a stunted maple tree.

To Ben the bikes looked a thousand miles away, like things seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The deserted street with its casual patchings of asphalt, the faded humid sky, the steady ding-ding-ding of a locomotive running on a siding . . . these things seemed like dreams to him, hallucinations. What was real was this squalid hallway with its stinks and shadows.

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

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

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

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

Cold all over, yet sweating, Ben looked away.

Bill pushed open a door on the left and they followed him into a vaultlike room that might once have been a parlor. A crumpled pair of green pants

was hung over the light-fixture which depended from the ceiling. Like the cellar, this room seemed much too big to Ben, almost as long as a freight- car. Much too long for a house as small as this one had appeared from the outside—

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

“Go away, ” he whispered.

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

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

(outside)

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

but as they moved away, they seemed to grow larger instead of smaller. The floor seemed to slope, and—

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

Suddenly terrified, he began to run. The door behind him swept shut with a muffled bang. He screamed . . . and something seemed to sweep through

the air just behind him, ruffling his shirt. He looked back, but there was nothing there. That did not change his belief, however, that something had been.

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

Mike grasped his shoulder hard enough to hurt.

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

“Bill!”

Bill looked back.

“We gotta make sure everybody stays close, ” Ben panted.

“This place . . . it’s like the funhouse in a carnival, or something. We’ll get lost. I think It wants us to get lost. To get separated. ”

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

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

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

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

became alien, their eyes bleeding black holes.

Stan shrieked and clapped his hands to his eyes.

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

“It is!” Stan screamed back, his small closed fists plugging his eyes. “It’s

real, you know it is, God, I’m going crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy—”

“Wuh-wuh-WATCH!” Bill bellowed at Stan, at all of them, and Ben, his head reeling, watched as Bill bent down, coiled, and suddenly flung himself upward. His closed left fist struck nothing, nothing at all, but there was a heavy crr-rack! sound. Plaster dust puffed from a place where there was no longer any ceiling . . . and then there was. The hallway was just a hallway

again—narrow, low-ceilinged, dirty, but the walls no longer stretched up into forever. There was only Bill, looking at them and nursing his bleeding hand, which was floury with plaster-dust. Overhead was the clear mark his fist had made in the soft plaster of the ceiling.

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

“To you, maybe, ” Stan said dully. His face was shocked and horrified.

He looked around as if no longer sure where he was. Looking at him, smelling the sour reek coming out of his pores, Ben, who had been overjoyed at Bill’s victory, got scared all over again. Stan was close to

cracking up. Soon he would go into hysterics, begin to scream, perhaps, and what would happen then?

“To you, ” Stan said again. “But if I’d tried that, nothing would have happened. Because . . . you’ve got your brother, Bill, but I don’t have anything. ” He looked around—first back toward the parlor, which had taken on a somber brown atmosphere, so thick and smoggy they could barely see the door through which they had entered it, to this hall, which

was bright but somehow dark, somehow filthy, somehow utterly mad. Elves capered on the decaying wallpaper under runners of roses. Sun glared on

the panes of the window at the end of the hall, and Ben knew that if they went down there they would see dead flies . . . more broken glass . . . and then what? The floorboards spreading apart, spilling them into a dead

darkness where grasping fingers waited to catch them? Stan was right; God, why had they come into Its lair with nothing but their two stupid silver

slugs and a frocking slingshot?

He saw Stan’s panic leap from one of them to the next to the next—like a grassfire driven by a hot wind, it widened in Eddie’s eyes, dropped Bev’s mouth into a wounded gasp, made Richie push his glasses up with both

hands and stare around as if followed from close behind by a fiend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He turned his head up, the cords in his neck standing out, his adam’s

apple like an arrowhead buried in his throat. Ben was filled with both fear and pity for his friend Bill Denbrough; but there was also a strong sense of wonderful relief. Had he doubted Bill? Had any of them? Oh Bill, say it, please, can’t you say it?

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

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

“Cuh-cuh-home on, ” he said again.

“Will the birds work? ” Stan asked. His voice was low, husky. “They worked in the Standpipe, didn’t they? ” Bev asked him. Stan looked at her uncertainly.

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

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

They laughed and Ben could have sworn he felt the house pulling away from them, from that sound. Mike turned.

“That big room. The one we just came through. Look!”

They looked. The parlor was now almost black. It was not smoke, or any kind of gas; it was just blackness, a nearly solid blackness. The air had been robbed of its light. The blackness seemed to roll and flex as they stared into it, to almost coalesce into faces.

“Come oh-oh-on. ”

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

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

window, sunflowers dipped and nodded.

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

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

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

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

The scream rose in pitch, never losing that buzzing, insectile quality. Bill fell back another step, no blood in his face now, his eyes bulging, his lips only a purple scar below his nose.

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

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

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

crows!”

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

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

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

Bill nodded. “I-I do, too, ” he said.

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

swear I’ll try.

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

Bill pulled the door open. Its hinges uttered a dull scream and then were silent. It was a bathroom . . . but something was wrong with it. Someone

broke something in here was all that Ben could make out at first. Not a booze bottle . . . what?

White chips and shards, glimmering wickedly, lay strewn everywhere.

Then he understood. It was the crowning insanity. He laughed. Richie joined him.

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

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

They crowded in behind Bill and Beverly, their feet gritting on bits of porcelain. Whatever it was, Ben thought, it blew that poor toilet right to hell. He had a vision of Henry Bowers dropping two or three of his M-80s into it, slamming the lid down, then bugging out in a hurry. He couldn’t think of anything else short of dynamite that would have done such a

cataclysmic job. There were a few chunks, but damned few; most of what was left were tiny sharp slivers like blowgun darts. The wallpaper (rose- runners and capering elves, as in the hall) was peppered with holes all the way around the room. It looked like shotgun blasts but Ben knew it was more porcelain, driven into the walls by the force of the explosion.

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

once stood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And It did this? ” Beverly asked.

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

Ben looked into the pipe. It was about three feet in diameter and dark as a mineshaft. The inner ceramic surface of the pipe was crusted with stuff he didn’t want to know about. That thrumming sound floated up hypnotically .

. . and suddenly he saw something. He did not see it with his physical eyes, not at first, but with one buried deep in his mind.

It was rushing toward them, moving at express-train speed, filling the throat of this dark pipe from side to side; It was in Its own form now,

whatever that might be; It would take some shape from their minds when It got here. It was coming, coming up from Its own foul runs and black

catacombs under the earth, Its eyes glowing a feral yellowish green, coming, coming; It was coming.

And then, at first like sparks, he saw Its eyes down in that darkness. They took shape—flaring and malignant. Over the thrumming sound of the machinery, Ben could now hear a new noise—Whoooooooo. A fetid

smell belched from the ragged mouth of the drainpipe and he fell back, coughing and gagging.

“It’s coming!” he screamed. “Bill, I saw It, It’s coming!” Beverly raised the Bullseye. “Good, ” she said.

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

seeing, not precisely.

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

The Werewolf stood poised over the drainpipe, one hairy foot on either side of where the toilet had once been. Its green eyes glared at them from Its feral face. Its muzzle wrinkled back and yellowish-white foam seeped

through Its teeth. It uttered a shattering growl. Its arms pistoned out toward Beverly, the cuffs of Its high-school letter jacket pulling back from Its fur- covered arms. Its smell was hot and raw and murderous.

Beverly screamed. Ben grabbed the back of her blouse and yanked so hard that the seams under the arms tore. One clawed hand swept through

the air where she had been only a moment before. Beverly went stumbling backward against the wall. The silver ball popped out of the cup of the Bullseye. For a moment it glimmered in the air. Mike, quicker than quick, snatched it and gave it back to her.

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

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

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

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

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

The Werewolf’s head snapped around; Its gleaming green eyes considered Beverly. Not thinking, Ben stepped in front of her as she groped in her pocket for the other silver slug. The jeans she wore were too tight.

She had donned them with no thought of provocation; it was just that, as with the shorts she had worn on the day of Patrick Hockstetter and the refrigerator, she was still wearing last year’s model. Her fingers closed on the ball but it squirted away. She groped again and got it. She pulled it, turning her pocket inside out and spilling fourteen cents, the stubs of two Aladdin tickets, and a quantity of pocket-lint onto the floor.

The Werewolf lunged at Ben, who was standing protectively in front of her . . . and blocking her field of fire. Its head was cocked at the predator’s

deadly questing angle, Its jaws snapping. Ben reached blindly for It. There seemed to be no room in his reactions now for terror—he felt a clearheaded sort of anger instead, mixed with bewilderment and a sense that somehow

time had come to a sudden unexpected screech-halt. He snagged his hands in tough matted hair—the pelt, he thought, I’ve got Its pelt—and he could feel the heavy bone of Its skull beneath. He thrust at that wolfish head with all of his force, but although he was a big boy, it did no good at all. If he had not stumbled back and struck the wall, the thing would have torn his throat open with Its teeth.

It came after him, Its greenish-yellow eyes flaring, growling with each breath. It smelled of the sewer and something else, some wild yet unpleasant odor like rotten hazelnuts. One of Its heavy paws rose and Ben skittered aside as best he could. The paw, tipped with heavy claws, ripped bloodless wounds through the wallpaper and into the cheesy plaster beneath. He could dimly hear Richie bellowing something, Eddie howling

at Beverly to shoot It, shoot It. But Beverly did not. This was her only other chance. That didn’t matter; she intended that it be the only one she would need. A clear coldness she never saw again in her life fell over her sight. In it everything stood out and forward; never again would she see the three

dimensions of reality so clearly defined. She possessed every color, every angle, every distance. Fear departed. She felt the hunter’s simple lust of certainty and oncoming consummation. Her pulse slowed. The hysterical trembling grip in which she had been holding the Bullseye loosened, then firmed and became natural. She drew in a deep breath. It seemed to her that her lungs would never fill completely. Dimly, faintly, she heard popping sounds. Didn’t matter, whatever they were. She tracked left, waiting for the Werewolfs improbable head to fall with cool perfection into the wishbone beyond the extended V of the drawn-back sling.

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

“Bastard—”

He thrust a thumb into one of Its eyes. It bellowed with pain, and one of

those claw-tipped paws ripped through his shirt. Ben sucked his stomach in, but one of the claws pulled a sizzling line of pain down his torso. Blood gushed out of him and splattered on his pants, his sneakers, the floor. The

Werewolf threw him into the bathtub. He thumped his head, saw stars, struggled into a sitting position, and saw his lap was full of blood.

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

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

“Shoot It, Beverly!” Richie screamed again.

“Beep-beep, Richie, ” she heard herself reply from roughly a thousand

miles away. The Werewolf’s head was suddenly there, in the wishbone. She covered one of Its green eyes with the cup and released. There was no shake in either of her hands; she fired as smoothly and naturally as she had fired at the cans in the dump on the day they had all taken turns to see who was the best.

There was time for Ben to think Oh Beverly if you miss this time we’re all dead and I don’t want to die in this dirty bathtub but I can’t get out.

There was no miss. A round eye—not green but dead black—suddenly appeared high up in the center of Its snout: she had aimed for the right eye and missed by less than half an inch.

Its scream—an almost human scream of surprise, pain, fear, and rage— was deafening. Ben’s ears rang with it. Then the perfect round hole in Its snout was gone, obscured by freshets of blood. It was not flowing; it gouted from the wound in a high-pressure torrent. The freshet drenched Bill’s face and hair. Doesn’t matter, Ben thought hysterically. Don’t worry, Bill.

Nobody will be able to see it anyway when we get out of here. If we ever do.

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

“Kill It!” Mike screamed.

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

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

No ammo left, Ben thought incoherently, we’re slugged out. What are you talking about, kill It? But he looked at Beverly and understood. If his heart had never been hers before that moment, it would have flown to her then.

She had pulled the sling back again. Her fingers were closed over the cup, hiding its emptiness.

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

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

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

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

“I’ll kill you all!” a voice roared from inside the drainpipe. It was thick, savage, not in the least human. “Kill you all . . . kill you all . . . kill you all .

. . ” The words faded back and back, diminishing, washing out, growing distant . . . at last joining the low throbbing hum of the pumping machinery floating through the pipes.

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

It was gone.

In Its wake the silence seemed very loud.

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

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

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

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

Then Bill’s arm was around him, strong and comforting. “How b-b-bad ih-ih-is it, H-H-Haystack? ”

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

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

“No fake, Jake, ” Ben said.

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

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

“Where? ” Mike asked.

“The Buh-Buh-Barrens, ” Bill said.

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

Bill nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“W-W-W-Welcome, ” he said.

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

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

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

Turned out they all had.

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

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

Ben kept expecting the mad interlude in the house on Neibolt Street to

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

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

At last Beverly stood up. “I have to go home, ” she said. “I want to

change before my mom gets home. If she sees me wearing a boy’s shirt, she’ll kill me. ”

“Keel you, senhorrita, ” Richie agreed, “but she weel keel you slow. ” “Beep-beep, Richie. ”

Bill was looking at her gravely. “I’ll return your shirt, Bill. ”

He nodded and waved a hand to show that this wasn’t important. “Will you get in trouble? Coming home without it? ”

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

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

“What happens next, Bill? ” “I d-d-don’t nuh-nuh-know. ” “It’s not over, is it? ”

Bill shook his head.

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

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

“I don’t know, ” Ben said. “We could, but . . . ” He trailed off vaguely, shrugged. He could not say what he felt, was somehow not able to bring it out—that this was like being in a monster movie, but it wasn’t. The mummy had looked different in some ways . . . ways that confirmed its essential reality. The same was true of the Werewolf—he could testify to that because he had seen it in a paralyzing close-up no film, not even one in 3-D, allowed, he had had his hands in the wiry underbrush of Its tangled pelt, he had seen a small, baleful-orange firespot (like a pompom!) in one of Its green eyes. These things were . . . well . . . they were dreams-made-real.

And once dreams became real, they escaped the power of the dreamer and became their own deadly things, capable of independent action. The silver slugs had worked because the seven of them had been unified in their belief that they would. But they hadn’t killed It. And next time It would approach them in a new shape, one over which silver wielded no power.

Power, power, Ben thought, looking at Beverly. It was okay now; her

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

It always comes back to power. I love Beverly Marsh and she has power over me. She loves Bill Denbrough and so he has power over her. But—I

think—he is coming to love her. Maybe it was her face, how it looked when she said she couldn’t help being a girl. Maybe it was seeing one breast for just a second. Maybe just the way she looks sometimes when the light is

right, or her eyes. Doesn’t matter. But if he’s starting to love her, she’s starting to have power over him. Superman has power, except when there’s Kryptonite around. Batman has power, even though he can’t fly or see

through walls. My mom has power over me, and her boss down in the mill has power over her. Everyone has some . . . except maybe for little kids and babies.

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

“Ben? ” Beverly asked, looking back at him. “Cat got your tongue? ” “Huh? No. I was thinking about power. The power of the slugs. ” Bill was looking at him closely.

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

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

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

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

They all laughed. Eddie pretended to throw his aspirator at Stan. “Bye, then, ” Beverly said, and boosted herself up and out.

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

Starr and the Moons of Mercury. There would be time for all of those things while the wound on his chest and belly healed to a scab and began to itch,

because life went on and at eleven, although bright and apt, he held no real sense of perspective. He could live with what had happened in the house on Neibolt Street. The world was, after all, full of wonders.

But there would be odd moments of time when he pulled the questions out again and examined them: The power of the silver, the power of the

slugs—where does power like that come from? Where does any power come from? How do you get it? How do you use it?

It seemed to him that their lives might depend on those questions. One night as he was falling asleep, the rain a steady lulling patter on the roof and against the windows, it occurred to him that there was another question,

perhaps the only question. It had some real shape; he had nearly seen It. To see the shape was to see the secret. Was that also true of power? Perhaps it was. For wasn’t it true that power, like It, was a shape-changer? It was a baby crying in the middle of the night, it was an atomic bomb, it was a silver slug, it was the way Beverly looked at Bill and the way Bill looked back.

What, exactly what, was power, anyway?

Nothing much happened for the next two weeks.

‌DERRY: THE FOURTH INTERLUDE‌

“You got to lose

You can’t win all the time. You got to lose

You can’t win all the time, what’d I say? I know, pretty baby,

I see trouble comin down the line. ”

—John Lee Hooker, “You Got to Lose”

April 6th, 1985

Tell you what, friends and neighbors—I’m drunk tonight. Fuck-drunk. Rye whiskey. Went down to Wally’s and got started, went to the greenfront down on Center Street half an hour before they closed and bought a fifth of rye. I know what I’m up to. Drink cheap tonight, pay dear tomorrow. So

here he sits, one drunk nigger in a public library after closing, with this book open in front of me and the bottle of Old Kentucky on my left. “Tell the truth and shame the devil, ” my mom used to say, but she forgot to tell

me that sometimes you can’t shame Mr. Splitfoot sober. The Irish know, but of course they’re God’s white niggers and who knows, maybe they’re a step ahead.

Want to write about drink and the devil. Remember Treasure Island? The old seadog at the Admiral Benbow. “We’ll do ’em yet, Jacky!” I bet the bitter old fuck even believed it. Full of rum—or rye—you can believe anything.

Drink and the devil. Okay.

Amuses me sometimes to think how long I’d last if I actually published some of this stuff I write in the dead of night. If I flashed some of the

skeletons in Derry’s closet. There is a library Board of Directors. Eleven of them. One is a seventy-year-old writer who suffered a stroke two years ago and who now often needs help to find his place on each meeting’s printed

agenda (and who has sometimes been observed picking large dry boogers out of his hairy nostrils and placing them carefully in his ear, as if for safe- keeping). Another is a pushy woman who came here from New York with her doctor husband and who talks in a constant, whiny monologue about

how provincial Derry is, how no one here understands THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE and how one has to go to Boston to buy a skirt one would care to be seen in. Last time this anorexic babe spoke to me without the

services of an intermediary was during the Board’s Christmas party about a year and a half ago. She had consumed a pretty large amount of gin, and asked me if anyone in Derry understood THE BLACK EXPERIENCE. I had also consumed a pretty large amount of gin, and answered: “Mrs.

Gladry, Jews may be a great mystery, but niggers are understood the whole world round. ” She choked on her drink, turned around so sharply that her panties were momentarily visible under her flaring skirt (not a very interesting view; would that it had been Carole Danner!), and so ended my last informal conversation with Mrs. Ruth Gladry. No great loss.

The other members of the Board are the descendants of the lumber barons. Their support of the library is an act of inherited expiation: they raped the woods and now care for these books the way a libertine might decide, in his middle age, to provide for the gaily gotten bastards of his youth. It was their grandfathers and great-grandfathers who actually spread the legs of the forests north of Derry and Bangor and raped those green- gowned virgins with their axes and peaveys. They cut and slashed and strip- timbered and never looked back. They tore the hymen of those great forests open when Grover Cleveland was President and had pretty well finished the job by the time Woodrow Wilson had his stroke. These lace-ruffled ruffians raped the great woods, impregnated them with a litter of slash and junk spruce, and changed Derry from a sleepy little ship-building town into a booming honky-tonk where the ginmills never closed and the whores turned tricks all night long. One old campaigner, Egbert Thoroughgood, now ninety-three, told me of taking a slat-thin prostitute in a crib on Baker Street (a street which no longer exists; middle-class apartment housing stands quietly where Baker Street once boiled and brawled).

“I only realized after I spent m’spunk in her that she was laying in a pool of jizzum maybe an inch deep. Stuff had just about gone to jelly. ‘Girl, ’ I says, ‘ain’t you never cared for y’self? ’ She looks down and says, ‘I’ll put

on a new sheet if you want to go again. There’s two in the cu’bud down the hall, I think. I knows pretty much what I’m layin in until nine or ten, but by midnight my cunt’s so numb it might’s well be in Ellsworth. ’”

So that was Derry right through the first twenty or so years of the twentieth century: all boom and booze and balling. The Penobscot and the Kenduskeag were full of floating logs from ice-out in April to ice-in in November. The business began to slack off in the twenties without the Great War or the hardwoods to feed it, and it staggered to a stop during the Depression. The lumber barons put their money in those New York or Boston banks that had survived the Crash and left Derry’s economy to live

—or die—on its own. They retreated to their gracious houses on West Broadway and sent their children to private schools in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York. And lived on their interest and political connections.

What’s left of their supremacy seventy-some years after Egbert Thoroughgood spent his love with a dollar whore in a spermy Baker Street bed are empty wildwoods in Penobscot and Aroostook Counties and the great Victorian houses which stand for two blocks along West Broadway . .

. and my library, of course. Except those good folks from West Broadway would take “my library” away from me in jig time (pun definitely intended) if I published anything about the Legion of Decency, the fire at the Black Spot, the execution of the Bradley Gang . . . or the affair of Claude Heroux and the Silver Dollar.

The Silver Dollar was a beerjoint, and what may have been the queerest mass murder in the entire history of America took place there in September of 1905. There are still a few old-timers in Derry who claim to remember it, but the only account that I really trust is Thoroughgood’s. He was eighteen when it happened.

Thoroughgood now lives in the Paulson Nursing Home. He’s toothless, and his Saint John’s Valley Franco/Downeast accent is so thick that probably only another old Mainer could understand what he was saying if his talk were written down phonetically. Sandy Ives, the folklorist from the University of Maine whom I have mentioned previously in these wild pages, helped me to translate my audio tapes.

Claude Heroux was, according to Thoroughgood, “Un bat Cannuck

sonofawhore widdin eye that’d roll adju like a mart’s in dem oonlight. ”

(Translation: “One bad Canuck son of a whore with an eye that would roll at you like a mare’s in the moonlight. ”)

Thoroughgood said that he—and everyone else who had worked with Heroux—believed the man was as sly as a chicken-stealing dog . . . which made his hatchet-wielding foray into the Silver Dollar all the more startling. It was not in character. Up until then, lumbermen in Derry had believed Heroux’s talents ran more to lighting fires in the woods.

The summer of ’05 was long and hot and there had been many fires in the woods. The biggest of them, which Heroux later admitted he set by simply putting a lighted candle in the middle of a pile of woodchips and kindling, happened in Haven’s Big Injun Woods. It burned twenty thousand acres of prime hardwood, and you could smell the smoke of it thirty-five miles away as the horse-drawn trollies breasted Up-Mile Hill in Derry.

In the spring of that year there had been some brief talk about unionizing.

There were four lumbermen involved in organizing (not that there was much to organize; Maine workingmen were anti-union then and are mostly anti-union now), and one of the four was Claude Heroux, who probably saw his union activities as a chance to talk big and spend a lot of time drinking down on Baker and Exchange Streets. Heroux and the other three called

themselves “organizers”; the lumber barons called them “ringleaders. ” A proclamation nailed to the cooksheds in lumber camps from Monroe to Haven Village to Sumner Plantation to Millinocket informed lumbermen that any man overheard talking union would be fired off the job immediately.

In May of that year there was a brief strike up near Trapham Notch, and although the strike was broken in short order, both by scabs and by “town constables” (and that was rather peculiar, you understand, since there were nearly thirty “town constables” swinging axe-handles and creasing skulls, but before that day in May, there hadn’t been so much as a single constable in Trapham Notch—which had a population of seventy-nine in the census of 1900—so far as anyone knew), Heroux and his organizing friends considered it a great victory for their cause. Accordingly, they came down to Derry to get drunk and to do some more “organizing” . . . or “ringleading, ” depending on whose side you favored. Whichever, it must

have been dry work. They hit most of the bars in Hell’s Half-Acre, finishing up in the Sleepy Silver Dollar, arms around each other’s shoulders, pissing-

down-your-leg drunk, alternating union songs with bathetic tunes like “My Mother’s Eyes Are Looking Down from Heaven, ” although I myself think any mother looking down from there and seeing her son in such a state might well have been excused for turning away.

According to Egbert Thoroughgood, the only reason anyone could figure for Heroux’s being in the movement at all was Davey Hartwell. Hartwell

was the chief “organizer” or “ringleader, ” and Heroux was in love with him. Nor was he the only one; most of the men in the movement loved Hartwell deeply and passionately, with that proud love men save for those of their own sex who possess a magnetism that seems to approach divinity. “Davvey Ardwell wadda main who walk lak e ohn heffa de worl an haddim a daylah on de resp, ” Thoroughgood said.

(Translation: “Davey Hartwell was a man who walked like he owned half of the world and had him a deadlock on the rest. ”)

Heroux followed Hartwell into the organizing business the way he would have followed him if he had decided to go for a shipbuilder up in Brewer or down in Bath, or building the Seven Trestles over in Vermont, or trying to bring back the Pony Express out west, for that matter. Heroux was sly and he was mean, and I suppose that in a novel that would preclude any good

qualities at all. But sometimes, when a man has spent a life being distrusted and distrustful, being a loner (or a Loser) both by choice and by reason of society’s opinions of him, he can find a friend or a lover and simply live for that person, the way a dog lives for its master. That’s the way it seems to

have been between Heroux and Hartwell.

Anyway, there were four of them who spent that night in the Brentwood Arms Hotel, which was then called the Floating Dog by the lumbermen (the reason why is lost in obscurity, as defunct as the hotel itself). Four checked in; none checked out. One of them, Andy DeLesseps, was never seen again. For all history tells, he might have spent the rest of his life living in pleasant ease in Portsmouth, but somehow I doubt it. Two of the other “ringleaders, ” Amsel Bickford and Davey Hartwell himself, were found floating face- down in the Kenduskeag. Bickford was missing his head; someone had taken it off with the swipe of a woodsman’s two-hander. Both of Hartwell’s legs were gone, and those who found him swore that they had never seen such an expression of pain and horror on a human face. Something had distended his mouth, stuffing out his cheeks, and when his discoverers

turned him over and spread his lips, seven of his toes fell out onto the mud. Some thought he might have lost the other three during his years working in the woods; others held the opinion that he might have swallowed them

before he died.

Pinned to the back of each man’s shirt was a paper with the word UNION on it.

Claude Heroux was never brought to trial for what happened in the Silver Dollar on the night of September 9th, 1905, so there’s no way of knowing exactly how he escaped the fate of the others that night in May. We could

make assumptions; he had been on his own a long time, had learned how to jump fast, had perhaps developed the knack some cur-dogs have of getting out just before real trouble develops. But why didn’t he take Hartwell with him? Or was he perhaps taken into the woods with the rest of the

“agitators”? Maybe they were saving him for last, and he was able to get away even while Hartwell’s screams (which would have grown muffled as they jammed his toes into his mouth) were echoing in the dark and scaring birds off their roosts. There’s no way of knowing, not for sure, but that last feels right to my heart.

Claude Heroux became a ghost-man. He would come strolling into a camp in the Saint John’s Valley, line up at the cookshed with the rest of the loggers, get a bowl of stew, eat it, and be gone before anyone realized he wasn’t one of the topping gang. Weeks after that he’d show up in a Winterport beerjoint, talking union and swearing he’d have his revenge on the men that had murdered his friends-Hamilton Tracker, William Mueller, and Richard Bowie were the names he mentioned the most frequently. All of them lived in Derry, and their gabled gambrelled cupola-ed houses stand

on West Broadway to this day. Years later, they and their descendants would fire the Black Spot.

That there were people who would have liked Claude Heroux put out of the way cannot be doubted, particularly after the fires started in June of that year. But although Heroux was seen frequently, he was quick and had an animal’s awareness of danger. So far as I have been able to find out, no

official warrant was ever sworn out against him, and the police never took a hand. Maybe there were fears about what Heroux might say if he was brought to trial for arson.

Whatever the reasons, the woods around Derry and Haven burned all that hot summer. Children disappeared, there were more fights and murders than usual, and a pall of fear as real as the smoke you could smell from the top of Up-Mile Hill lay over the town.

The rains finally came on September 1st, and it rained for a solid week.

Downtown Derry was flooded out, which was not unusual, but the big houses on West Broadway were high above downtown, and in some of

those big houses there must have been sighs of relief. Let the crazy Canuck hide out in the woods all winter, if that’s what he wants, they might have said. His work’s done for this summer, and we’ll get him before the roots dry next June.

Then came September 9th. I cannot explain what happened; Thoroughgood cannot explain it; so far as I know, no one can. I can only relate the events which occurred.

The Sleepy Silver Dollar was full of loggers drinking beer. Outside, it was drawing down toward misty dark. The Kenduskeag was high and

silver-sullen, filling its channel from bank to bank, and according to Egbert Thoroughgood, “a fallish wind was blowin—the kine dat allus fine de hole in y’paints and blow strayduppa cracka yo ais. ” The streets were quagmires. There was a card game going on at one of the tables in the back of the room. They were William Mueller’s men. Mueller was part owner of the GS&WM rail line as well as a lumber potentate who owned millions of acres of prime timber, and the men who were playing poker in the Dollar that night were part-time lumbermen, part-time railroad bulls, and full-time trouble. Two of them, Tinker McCutcheon and Floyd Calderwood, had done jail-time. With them were Lathrop Rounds (his nickname, as obscure as the Floating Dog Hotel, was El Katook), David “Stugley” Grenier, and Eddie

King—a bearded man whose spectacles were almost as fat as his gut. It

seems very likely that they were at least some of the men who had spent the last two and a half months keeping an eye out for Claude Heroux. It seems just as likely—although there is not a shred of proof—that they were in on

the little cutting party in May when Hartwell and Bickford were laid low.

The bar was crowded, Thoroughgood said; dozens of men were bellied up there, drinking beer and eating bar lunches and dripping onto the sawdust-covered dirt floor.

The door opened and in came Claude Heroux. He had a woodsman’s double-bitted axe in his hand. He stepped up to the bar and elbowed himself a place. Egbert Thoroughgood was standing on his left; he said that Heroux smelled like a polecat stew. The barman brought Heroux a schooner of beer, two hardcooked eggs in a bowl, and a shaker of salt. Heroux paid him with a two-dollar bill and put his change—a dollar-eighty-five-into one of the flap pockets of his lumberman’s jacket. He salted his eggs and ate them. He salted his beer, drank it off, and uttered a belch.

“More room out than there is in, Claude, ” Thoroughgood said, just as if half the enforcers in northern Maine hadn’t been on the prod for Heroux all that summer.

“You know that’s the truth, ” Heroux said, except, being a Canuck, what he probably said came out sounding more like “You know dat da troot. ”

He ordered himself another schooner, drank up, and belched again. Talk at the bar went on. Several people called to Claude, and Claude nodded and waved, but he didn’t smile. Thoroughgood said he looked like a man who was half in a dream. At the table in back, the poker game went on. El Katook was dealing. No one bothered to tell any of the players that Claude Heroux was in the bar . . . although, since their table was no more than twenty feet away, and since Claude’s name was hollered more than once by people who knew him, it is hard to know how they could have gone on playing, unaware of his potentially murderous presence. But that is what occurred.

After he finished his second schooner of beer, Heroux excused himself to Thoroughgood, picked up his two-hander, and went back to the table where Mueller’s men were playing five-card stud. Then he started cutting.

Floyd Calderwood had just poured himself a glass of rye whiskey and was setting the bottle back down when Heroux arrived and chopped Calderwood’s hand off at the wrist. Calderwood looked at his hand and screamed; it was still holding the bottle but all of a sudden wasn’t attached to anything but wet gristle and trailing veins. For a moment the severed

hand clutched the bottle even tighter, and then it fell off and lay on the table like a dead spider. Blood spouted from his wrist.

At the bar, somebody called for more beer and someone else asked the bartender, whose name was Jonesy, if he was still dyeing his hair. “Never dyed it, ” Jonesy said in an ill-tempered way; he was vain of his hair.

“Met a whore down at Ma Courtney’s who said what grows around your pecker is just as white as snow, ” the fellow said.

“She was a liar, ” Jonesy replied.

“Drop your pants and let’s us see, ” said a lumberman named Falkland, with whom Egbert Thoroughgood had been matching for drinks before Heroux came in. This provoked general laughter.

Behind them, Floyd Calderwood was shrieking. A few of the men leaning against the bar took a casual look around in time to see Claude Heroux bury his woodsman’s axe in Tinker McCutcheon’s head. Tinker was a big man with a black beard going gray. He got halfway up, blood pouring down his face, then sat down again. Heroux pulled the axe out of his head. Tinker started to get up again, and Heroux slung the axe sideways, burying it in his back. It made a sound, Thoroughgood said, like a load of laundry being dropped on a rug. Tinker flopped over the table, his cards spraying out of his hand.

The others players were hollering and bellowing. Calderwood, still shrieking, was trying to pick up his right hand with his left as his life’s blood ran out of his stump of a wrist in a steady stream. Stugley Grenier had what Thoroughgood called a “clutch-pistol” (meaning a gun in a shoulder-holster) and he was grabbing for it with no success whatsoever.

Eddie King tried to get up and fell right out of his chair on his back. Before he could get up, Heroux was standing astride him, the axe slung up over his head. King screamed and held up both hands in a warding-off gesture.

“Please, Claude, I just got married last month!” King screamed.

The axe came down, its head almost disappearing in King’s ample gut. Blood sprayed all the way up to the Dollar’s beamed roof. Eddie began to crawfish on the floor. Claude pulled the axe out of him the way a good woodsman will pull his axe out of a softwood tree, kind of rocking it back and forth to loosen the clinging grip of the sappy wood. When it was free he slung it up over his head. He brought it down again and Eddie King stopped screaming. Claude Heroux wasn’t done with him, however; he began to chop King up like kindling-wood.

At the bar, conversation had turned to what sort of winter lay ahead.

Vernon Stanchfield, a farmer from Palmyra, claimed it would be a mild one

—fall rain uses up winter snow was his scripture. Alfie Naugler, who had a farm out on the Naugler Road in Derry (it is gone now; where Alfie

Naugler once grew his peas and beans and beets, the Interstate extension now runs its 8. 8-mile, six-lane course), begged to disagree. Alfie claimed the coming winter was going to be a jeezer. He had seen as many as eight rings on some of the mohair caterpillars, he said, an unheard-of number.

Another man held out for ice; another for mud. The Blizzard of ’01 was duly recalled. Jonesy sent schooners of beer and bowls of hardcooked eggs skidding down the bar. Behind them the screaming went on and the blood flowed in rivers.

At this point in my questioning of Egbert Thoroughgood, I turned off my cassette recorder and asked him: “How did it happen? Are you saying you didn’t know it was going on, or that you knew but you let it go on, or just what? ”

Thoroughgood’s chin sank down to the top button of his food-spotted vest. His eyebrows drew together. The silence in Thoroughgood’s room, small, cramped, and medicinal-smelling, spun out so long that I was about to repeat my question when he replied: “We knew. But it didn’t seem to matter. It was like politics, in a way. Ayuh, like that. Like town business.

Best let people who understand politics take care of that and people who understand town business take care of that. Such things be best done if working men don’t mix in. ”

“Are you really talking about fate and just afraid to come out and say so? ” I asked suddenly. The question was simply jerked out of me, and I certainly did not expect Thoroughgood, who was old and slow and unlettered, to answer it . . . but he did, with no surprise at all.

“Ayuh, ” he said. “Mayhap I am. ”

While the men at the bar went on talking about the weather, Claude Heroux went on cutting. Stugley Grenier had finally managed to clear his clutch-pistol. The axe was descending for another chop at Eddie King, who was by then in pieces. The bullet Grenier fired struck the head of the axe and ricocheted off with a spark and a whine.

El Katook got to his feet and started backing away. He was still holding

the deck he had been dealing from; cards were fluttering off the bottom and onto the floor. Claude came after him. El Katook held out his hands.

Stugley Grenier got off another round, which didn’t come within ten feet of Heroux.

“Stop, Claude, ” El Katook said. Thoroughgood said it appeared like Katook was trying to smile. “I wasn’t with them. I didn’t mix in at all. ”

Heroux only growled.

“I was in Millinocket, ” El Katok said, his voice starting to rise toward a scream. “I was in Millinocket, I swear it on my mother’s name! Ask

anybody if you don’t believe meeeee. ”

Claude raised the dripping axe, and El Katook sprayed the rest of the

cards into his face. The axe came down, whistling. El Katook ducked. The axe-head buried itself in the planking that formed the Silver Dollar’s back wall. El Katook tried to run. Claude hauled the axe out of the wall and poked it between his ankles. El Katook went sprawling. Stugley Grenier shot at Heroux again, this time having a bit more luck. He had been aiming at the crazed lumberman’s head; the bullet struck home in the fleshy part of Heroux’s thigh.

Meantime, El Katook was crawling busily toward the door with his hair hanging in his face. Heroux swung the axe again, snarling and gibbering, and a moment later Katook’s severed head was rolling across the sawdust- strewn floor, the tongue popped bizarrely out between the teeth. It rolled to a stop by the booted foot of a lumberman named Varney, who had spent most of the day in the Dollar and who, by then, was so exquisitely slopped that he didn’t know if he was on land or at sea. He kicked the head away without looking down to see what it was, and hollered for Jonesy to run him down another beer.

El Katook crawled another three feet, blood spraying from his neck in a high-tension jet, before he realized he was dead and collapsed. That left Stugley. Heroux turned on him, but Stugley had run into the outhouse and locked the door.

Heroux chopped his way in, hollering and blabbering and raving, slobber falling from his jaws. When he got in, Stugley was gone, although the cold, leaky little room was windowless. Heroux stood there for a moment, head lowered, powerful arms slimed and splattered with blood, and then, with a roar, he flipped up the lid of the three-holer. He was just in time to see Stugley’s boots disappearing under the ragged board skirting of the

outhouse wall. Stugley Grenier ran screaming down Exchange Street in the rain, beshitted from top to toe, crying that he was being murdered. He survived the cutting party in the Silver Dollar—he was the only one who

did—but after three months of listening to jokes about his method of escape, he quitted the Derry area forever.

Heroux stepped out of the toilet and stood in front of it like a bull after a charge, head down, his axe held in front of him. He was puffing and blowing and covered with gore from head to foot.

“Shut the door, Claude, that shitpot stinks to high heaven, ” Thoroughgood said. Claude dropped his axe on the floor and did as he had been asked. He walked over to the card-strewn table where his victims had been sitting, kicking one of Eddie King’s severed legs out of his way. Then he simply sat down and put his head in his arms. The drinking and conversation at the bar went on. Five minutes later more men began to pile in, three or four sheriffs deputies among them (the one in charge was Lal Machen’s father, and when he saw the mess he had a heart attack and had to be taken away to Dr. Shratt’s office). Claude Heroux was led away. He was docile when they took him, more asleep than awake.

That night the bars all up and down Exchange and Baker Streets boomed and hollered with news of the slaughter. A righteous drunken sort of fury began to build up, and when the bars closed better than seventy men headed downtown toward the jail and the courthouse. They had torches and lanterns. Some were carrying guns, some had axes, some had peaveys.

The County Sheriff wasn’t due from Bangor until the noon stage the next day, so he wasn’t there, and Goose Machen was laid up in Dr. Shratt’s infirmary with his heart attack. The two deputies who were sitting in the office playing cribbage heard the mob coming and got out of there fast. The drunks broke in and dragged Claude Heroux out of his cell. He didn’t protest much; he seemed dazed, vacant.

They carried him on their shoulders like a football hero; down to Canal Street they carried him, and there they lynched him from an old elm that overhung the Canal. “He was so far gone that he didn’t kick but twice, ” Egbert Thoroughgood said. It was, so far as the town records show, the only lynching to ever take place in this part of Maine. And almost needless to say, it was not reported in the Derry News. Many of those who had gone on drinking unconcernedly while Heroux went about his business in the Silver Dollar were in the necktie party that strung him up. By midnight their mood had changed.

I asked Thoroughgood my final question: had he seen anyone he didn’t know during that day’s violence? Someone who struck him as strange, out

of place, funny, even clownish? Someone who would have been drinking at the bar that afternoon, someone who had maybe turned into one of the

rabble-rousers that night as the drinking went on and the talk turned to lynching?

“Mayhap there was, ” Thoroughgood replied. He was tired by then, drooping, ready for his afternoon nap. “It were a long time ago, mister. Long and long. ”

“But you remember something, ” I said.

“I remember thinkin that there must be a county fair up Bangor way, ” Thoroughgood said. “I was having a beer in the Bloody Bucket that night. The Bucket was about six doors from the Silver Dollar. There was a fella in there . . . comical sort of fella . . . doing flips and rollovers . . . jugglin

glasses . . . tricks . . . put four dimes on his forrid and they’d stay right there

. . . comical, you know ”

His bony chin had sunk to his chest again. He was going to sleep right in front of me. Spittle began to bubble at the corners of his mouth, which had as many tucks and wrinkles as a lady’s change-purse.

“Seen him a few now’n thens since, ” Thoroughgood said. “Figure maybe he had such a good time that night that he decided to stick

around. ”

“Yeah. He’s been around a long time, ” I said.

His only response was a weak snore. Thoroughgood had gone to sleep in his chair by the window, with his medicines and nostrums lined up beside him on the sill, soldiers of old age at muster. I turned off my tape-recorder and just sat looking at him for a moment, this strange time-traveller from

the year 1890 or so, who remembered when there were no cars, no electric lights, no airplanes, no state of Arizona. Pennywise had been there, guiding them down the path toward another gaudy sacrifice—just one more in Derry’s long history of gaudy sacrifices. That one, in September of 1905, ushered in a heightened period of terror that would include the Easter-tide explosion of the Kitchener Ironworks the following year.

This raises some interesting (and, for all I know, vitally important) questions. What does It really eat, for instance? I know that some of the children have been partially eaten—they show bite-marks, at least—but

perhaps it is we who drive It to do that. Certainly we have all been taught since earliest childhood that what the monster does when it catches you in the deep wood is eat you. That is perhaps the worst thing we can conceive.

But it’s really faith that monsters live on, isn’t it? I am led irresistibly to this conclusion: food may be life, but the source of power is faith, not food. And who is more capable of a total act of faith than a child?

But there’s a problem: kids grow up. In the church, power is perpetuated and renewed by periodic ritualistic acts. In Derry, power seems to be perpetuated and renewed by periodic ritualistic acts, too. Can it be that It

protects Itself by the simple fact that, as the children grow into adults, they become either incapable of faith or crippled by a sort of spiritual and

imaginative arthritis?

Yes. I think that’s the secret here. And if I make the calls, how much will they remember? How much will they believe? Enough to end this horror

once and for all, or only enough to get them killed? They are being called— I know that much. Each murder in this new cycle has been a call. We almost killed It twice, and in the end we drove it deep in Its warren of tunnels and stinking rooms under the city. But I think It knows another secret: although It may be immortal (or almost so), we are not. It had only to wait until the act of faith, which made us potential monster-killers as well as sources of power, had become impossible. Twenty-seven years. Perhaps a period of sleep for It, as short and refreshing as an afternoon nap would be for us.

And when It awakes, It is the same, but a third of our lives has gone by. Our perspectives have narrowed; our faith in the magic, which makes magic possible, has worn off like the shine on a new pair of shoes after a hard day’s walking.

Why call us back? Why not just let us die? Because we nearly killed It, because we frightened It, I think. Because It wants revenge.

And now, now that we no longer believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Hansel and Gretel, or the troll under the bridge, It is ready for us. Come on back, It says. Come on back, let’s finish our business in Derry. Bring your

jacks and your marbles and your yo-yos! We’ll play! Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all: how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.

On that one at least, I score a thousand percent: I am frightened. So goddam frightened.

‌PART 5‌

THE RITUAL OF CHÜD

“It is not to be done. The seepage has rotted out the curtain. The mesh

is decayed. Loosen the flesh from the machine, build no more

bridges. Through what air will you

fly to span the continents? Let the words fall any way at all—that they may

hit love aslant. It will be a rare

visitation. They want to rescue too much, the flood has done its work”

—William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“Look and remember. Look upon this land, Far, far across the factories and the grass. Surely, there, surely they will let you pass. Speak then and ask the forest and the loam.

What do you hear? What does the land command?

The earth is taken: this is not your home. ”

—Karl Shapiro, “Travelogue for Exiles”