There was a moment of silence and then Richie said, 'All right, Mike. What's happenin g i n Derry? Tell us.'

'I can tell you some,' Mike said. 'I can tell you, for instance, what's happening now — and I can tell you some things about yourselves. But I can't tell you everything that happened back in the summer of 1958, and I don't believe I'll ever have to. Eventually you'll remember it for yourselves. And I think if I told you too much before your minds were ready to remember, what happened to Stan — '

'Might happen to us?' Ben asked quietly.

Mike nodded. 'Yes. That's exactly what I'm afraid of.'

Bill said: 'Then tell us what you can, Mike.'

'All right,' he said. 'I will.'

4

The Losers Get the Scoop

'The murders have started again,' Mike said flatly.

He looked up and down the table, and then his eyes fixed on Bill's.

The first of the "new murders" — if you'll allow me that rather grisly conceit — began on the Main Street Bridge and ended underneath it. The victim was a gay and rather childlike man named Adrian Mellon. He had a bad case of asthma.'

Eddie's hand stole out and touched the side of his aspirator.

'It happened last summer on July 21st, the last night of the Canal Days Festival, which was a kind of celebration, a . . . a . . . '

'A Derry ritual,' Bill said in a low voice. His long fingers were slowly massaging his temples, and it was not hard to guess he was thinking about his brother George . . . George, who had almost certainly opened the way the last time this had happened.

'A ritual,' Mike said quietly. 'Yes.'

He told them the story of what had happened to Adrian Mellon quickly, watching with no pleasure as their eyes got bigger and bigger. He told them what the News had reported and what it had not . . . the latter including the testimony of Don Hagarty and Christopher Unwin about a certain clown which had been under the bridge like the troll in the fabled story of yore, a clown which had looked like a cross between Ronald McDonald and Bozo, according to Hagarty.

'It was him,' Ben said in a sick hoarse voice. 'It was tHat fucker Penny –wise.'

'There's one other thing,' Mike said, looking at Bill. 'One of the investigating officers — the one who actually pulled Adrian Mellon out of the Canal — was a town cop named Harold Gardener.'

'Oh Jesus Christ,' Bill said in a weak teary voice.

'Bill?' Beverly looked at him, then put a hand on his arm. Her voice was full of startled concern. 'Bill, what's wrong?'

'Harold would have been about five then,' Bill said. His stunned eyes searched Mike's face for confirmation.

'Yes.'

'What is it, Bill?' Richie asked.

'H-H-Harold Gardener was the s-son of Dave Gardener,' Bill said. 'Dave lived down the street from us back then, when George was k-killed. He was the one who got to Juh juh . . . to my brother first and brought him up to the house, wrapped in a piece of qu-quilt.'

They sat silently, saying nothing. Beverly put a hand briefly over her eyes.

'It all fits rather too well, doesn't it?' Mike said finally.

'Yes,' Bill said in a low voice. 'It fits, all right.'

'I'd kept tabs on the six of you over the years, as I said,' Mike went on, 'but it wasn't until then that I began to understand just why I had been doing it, that it had a real and concrete purpose. Still, I held off, waiting to see how things would develop. You see, I felt that I had to be absolutely sure before I . . . disturbed your lives. Not ninety percent, not even ninety-five percent. One hundred was all that would do it.

'In December of last year, an eight-year-old boy named Steven Johnson was found dead in Memorial Park. Like Adrian Mellon, he had been badly mutilated just before or just after his death, but he looked as if he could have died of just plain fright.'

'Sexually assaulted?' Eddie asked.

'No. Just plain mutilated.'

'How many in all?' Eddie asked, not looking as if he really wanted to know.

'It's bad,' Mike said.

'How many?' Bill repeated.

'Nine. So far.'

'It can't be!' Beverly cried. 'I would have read about it in the paper . . . seen it on the news! When that crazy cop killed all those women in Castle Rock, Maine . . . and those children that were murdered in Atlanta . . . '

'Yes, that,' Mike said. 'I've thought about that a lot. It's really the closest correlative to what's going on here, a nd Bev's right: that really was coast-to-coast news. In some ways, the Atlanta comparison is the thing about all of this that frightens me the most. The murder of nine children . . . we should have TV news correspondents here, and phony psychics, and reporters from The Atlantic Monthly and Rolling Stone . . . the whole media circus, in short.'

'But it hasn't happened,' Bill said.

'No,' Mike answered, 'it hasn't. Oh, there was a Sunday-supplement piece about it in the Portland Sunday Telegram, and ano ther one in the Boston Globe after the last two. A Boston-based television program called Good Day! did a segment this February on unsolved murders, and one of the experts mentioned the Derry murders, but only passingly . . . and he certainly gave no indic ation of knowing there had been a similar batch of murders in 1957 –58, and another in 1929-30.

'There are some ostensible reasons, of course. Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Detroit . . . those are big media towns, and in big media towns when something happens it makes a bang. There isn't a single TV or radio station in Derry, unless you count the little FM the English and Speech Department runs up at the high school. Bangor's got the corner on the market when it comes to the media.'

'Except for the Derr y News,' Eddie said, and they all laughed.

'But we all know that doesn't really cut it with the way the world is today. The communication web is there, and at some point the story should have broken nationally. But it didn't. And I think the reason is just this: It doesn't want it to.'

'It,' Bill mused, almost to himself.

'It,' Mike agreed. 'If we have to call It something, it might as well be what we used to call It. I've begun to think, you see, that It has been here so long whatever It really is . . . that It's become a part of Derry, something as much a part of the town as the Standpipe, or the Canal, or Bassey Park, or the library. Only It's not a matter of outward geography, you understand. Maybe that was true once, but now It's . . . inside. Somehow It's gotten inside. That's the only way I know to understand all of the terrible things that have happened here — the nominally explicable as well as the utterly inexplicable! There was a fire at a Negro nightclub called the Black Spot in 1930. A year before that, a bunch of half-bright Depression outlaws was gunned down on Canal Street in the middle of the afternoon.'

'The Bradley Gang,' Bill said. 'The FBI got them, right?'

'That's what the histories say, but that's not precisely true. So far as I've been able to find out — and I'd give a lot to believe that it wasn't so, because I love this town — the Bradley Gang, all seven of them, were actually gunned down by the good citizens of Derry. I'll tell you about it sometime.

'There was the explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks during an Easter –egg hunt in 1906. There was a horrible series of animal mutilations that same year that was finally traced to Andrew Rhulin, the grand-uncle of the man who now runs the Rhulin Farms. He was apparently bludgeoned to death by the three deputies who were supposed to bring him in. None of the deputies were ever brought to trial.'

Mike Hanlon produced a small notebook from an inner pocket and paged through it, talking without looking up. 'In 1877 there were four lynchings inside the incorporated town limits. One of those that climbed a rope was the lay preacher of the Methodist Church, who apparently drowned all four of his children in the bathtub as if they were kittens and then shot his wife in the head. He put the gun in her hand to make it look like suicide, but no one was fooled. A year before that four loggers were found dead in a cabin downstream on the Kenduskeag, literally torn apart. Disappearances of children, of whole families, are recorded in old diary extracts . . . but not in any public document. It goes on and on, but perhaps you get the idea.'