Incredibly, Bill was grinning. Actually grinning. 'Y-Y-You wuh-wanted m-me to take y-you to luh-luh –look at a p-picture,' he said. 'N-Now I w-want to t-take you to l-look at a h-house. Tit for t-tat.'

'You got no tits,' Richie said, and they both burst ou t laughing.

'T-Tomorrow muh-muh-morning,' Bill said, as if it had been resolved.

'And if it's a monster?' Richie asked, holding Bill's eyes. 'If your dad's gun doesn't stop it, Big Bill? If it just keeps coming?'

'Wuh –wuh-we'll thuh-thuh-think of suh –homething else,' Bill said again. 'We'll h-h-have to.' He threw back his head and laughed like a loon. After a moment Richie joined him. It was impossible not to.

They walked up the crazy-paving to Richie's porch together. Maggie had set out huge glasses of iced tea with mint-sprigs in them and a plate of vanilla wafers.

'Yuh-you w-w-want t-t-to?'

'Well, no,' Richie said. 'But I will.'

Bill clapped him on the back, hard, and that seemed to make the fear bearable — although Richie was suddenly sure (and he was not wrong) that sleep would be long coming that night.

'You boys looked like you were having a serious discussion out there,' Mrs Tozier said, sitting down with her book in one hand and a glass of iced tea in the other. She ol oked at the boys expectantly.

'Aw, Denbrough's got this crazy idea the Red Sox are going to finish in the first division,' Richie said.

'M-Me and my d-d-d-d-dad th-think t-they got a sh-shot at t-third,' Bill said, and slipped his iced tea. T-This is veh-veh-very go-good, Muh-Mrs Tozier.'

Thank you, Bill.'

'The year the Sox finish in the first division will be the year you stop stuttering, mush mouth,' Richie said.

'Richie!' Mrs Tozier screamed, shocked. She nearly dropped her glass of iced tea. But both Richie and Bill Denbrough were laughing hysterically, totally cracked up. She looked from her son to Bill and back to her son again, touched by wonder that was mostly simple perplexity but partly a fear so thin and sharp that it found it s way deep into her inner heart and vibrated there like a tuning-fork made of clear ice.

I don't understand either of them, she thought. Where they go, what they do, what they want . . . or what will become of them. Sometimes, oh sometimes their eyes are wild, and sometimes I'm afraid for them and sometimes I'm afraid of them . . .

She found herself thinking, not for the first time, that it would have been nice if she and Went could have had a girl as well, a pretty blonde girl that she could have dressed in skirts and matching bows and black patent-leather shoes on Sundays. A pretty little girl who would ask to bake cupcakes after school and who would want dolls instead of books on ventriloquism and Revell models of cars that went fast.

A pretty little girl she could have understood.

12

'Did you get it?' Richie asked anxiously.

They were walking their bikes up Kansas Street beside the Barrens at ten o'clock the next morning. The sky was a dull gray. Rain had been forecast for that afternoon. Richie hadn't gotten to sleep until after midnight and he thought Denbrough looked as if he had spent a fairly restless night himself; ole Big Bill was toting a matched set of Samsonite bags, one under each eye.

'I g-got it,' Bill said. He patted the green duffel coat he was wearing.

'Lemme see,' Richie said, fascinated.

'Not now,' Bill said, and then grinned. 'Someone eh-eh-else might see, too. But l-l-look what else I bruh-brought.' He reached behind him, under the coat, and brought his Bullseye slingshot out of his back pocket.

'Oh shit, we're in trouble,' Richie said, beginning to laugh.

Bill pretended to be hurt. 'Ih-Ih-It was y-your idea, T-T-Tozier.'

Bill had gotten the custom aluminum slingshot for his birthday the year before. It had been Zack's compromise between the .22 Bill had wanted and his mother's adamant refusal to even consider giving a boy Bill's age a firearm. The instruction booklet said a slingshot could be a fine hunting weapon, once you learned to use it. 'In the right hands, your Bullseye Slingshot is as deadly and effective as a good ash bow or a high-powered firearm,' the booklet proclaimed. With such virtues dutifully extolled, the booklet went on to warn that a slingshot could be dangerous; the owner should no more aim one of the twenty ball-bearing slugs which came with it at a person than he would aim a loaded pistol at a person.

Bill wasn't very good at it yet (and guessed privately he probably never would be), but he thought the booklet's caution was merited — the slingshot's thick elastic had a hard pull, and when you hit a tin can with it, it made one hell of a hole.

'You doin any better with it, Big Bill?' Richie asked.

'A luh-luh –little,' Bill said. This was only partly true. After much study of the pictures in the booklet (which were labelled figs, as in fig 1, fig 2, and so on) and enough practice in Derry Park to lame his arm, he had gotten so he could hit the paper target which had also come with the slingshot maybe three times out of every ten tries. And once he had gotten a bullseye. Almost.

Richie pulled the sling back by the cup, twanged it, then handed it back. He said nothing but privately doubted if it would count for as much as Zack Denbrough's pistol when it came to killing monsters.

'Yeah?' he said. 'You brought your slingshot, okay, big deal. That's nothing. Look what I brought, Denbrough.' And from his own jacket he hauled out a packet with a cartoon picture on it of a bald man saying Ah-CHOO! as his cheeks puffed ou t like Dizzy Gillespie's. DR WACKY'S SNEEZING POWDER, the packet said. IT'S A LAFF RIOT !

The two of them stared at each other for a long moment and then broke up, screaming with laughter and pounding each other on the back.

'W-W-We're pruh-prepared for a-a-anything,' Bill said finally, still giggling and wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket.

'Your face and my ass, Stuttering Bill,' Richie said.

'I th-th-thought it wuh-was the uh-uh-other way a-around,' Bill said. 'Now listen. W-We're g-gonna st-ha-hash y-your b-b-bike down in the B-Barrens. W-Where I puh-put Silver when we play. Y-You ride d-d-double b-behind me, in c-case w-we have to make a quih-hick g– g-getaway.'

Richie nodded, feeling no urge to argue. His twenty-two-inch Raleigh (he sometimes whammed his kneecaps on the handlebars when he was pedaling fast) looked like a pygmy bike next to the scrawny, gantry like edifice that was Silver. He knew that Bill was stronger and Silver was faster.

They got to the little bridge and Bill helped Richie stow his bike underneath. Then they sat down, and, with the occasional rumble of traffic passing over their heads, Bill unzipped his duffel and took out his father's pistol.

'Y-You be goddam c-c-careful,' Bill said, handing it over after Richie had whistled his frank approval. 'Th-There's n-no s-s-safety on a pih-pihstol like that.'

'Is it loaded?' Richie asked, awed. The pistol, an SSPK-Walther that Zack Denbrough had picked up during the Occupation, seemed unbelievably heavy.

'N-Not y-yet,' Bill said. He patted his pocket. 'I g-g-got some buh-buh-buh-bullets in h– h-here. But my d-d-dad s-says s-sometimes you l-look a-and th-then, i-if the g-g-g-gun th-thinks y-you're not being c-c-careful, it l-loads ih-ih-itself. S-so it can sh-sh-hoot you.' His face uttered a strange smile which said that, while he didn't believe anything so silly, he believed it completely.

Richie understood. There was a caged deadliness in the thing that he had never sensed in his dad's .22, .30-.30, or even the shotgun (although there was something about the shotgun, wasn't there? — something about the way it leaned, mute and oily, in the corner of the garage closet; as if it might say I could be mean if I wanted to; plenty mean, you bet if it could speak). But this pistol, this Walther . . . it was as if it had been made for the express purpose of shooting people. With a chill Richie realized that was why it had been made. What else could you do with a pistol? Use it to light your cigarettes?