'I get the idea, all right,' Ben said. 'Something's going on here, but it's private.'

Mike closed his notebook, replaced it in his inner pocket, and looked at them soberly.

'If I were an insurance man instead of a librarian, I'd draw you a graph, maybe. It would show an unusually high rate of every violent crime we know of, not excluding rape, incest, breaking and entering, auto theft, child abuse, spouse abuse, assault.

'There's a medium-sized city in Texas where the violent-crime –rate is far below what you'd expect for a city of its size and mixed racial make-up. The extraordinary placidity of the people who live there has been traced to something in the water . . . a natural trank of some kind. The exact opposite holds true here. Derry is a violent place to live in an ordinary year. But every twenty-seven years — although the cycle has never been perfectly exact — that violence ha s escalated to a furious peak . . . and it has never been national news.'

'You're saying there's a cancer at work here,' Beverly said.

'Not at all. An untreated cancer invariably kills. Derry hasn't died; on the contrary, it has thrived . . . in an unspectacular, unnewsworthy way, of course. It is simply a fairly prosperous small city in a relatively unpopulous state where bad things happen too often . . . and where ferocious things happen every quarter of a century or so.'

'That holds true all down the line?' Ben asked.

'Mike nodded. 'All down the line. 1715-16, 1740 until roughly 1743 — that must have been a bad one — 1769-70, and on and on. Right up to the present time. I have a feeling that it's been getting steadily worse, maybe because there have been more people in Derry at the

end of each cycle, maybe for some other reason. And in 1958, the cycle appears to have come to a premature end. — For which we were responsible.'

Bill Denbrough leaned forward, his eyes suddenly bright. 'You're sure of that? Sure? '

'Yes,' Mike said. 'All the other cycles reached their peak around September and then ended in a big way. Life usually took on its more or less normal tenor by Christmas . . . Easter at the latest. In other words, there were bad "years" of fourteen to twenty months every twenty-seven years. But the bad year that began when your brother was killed in October of 1957 ended quite abruptly in August of 1958.'

'Why?' Eddie asked urgently. His breath had thinned; Bill remembered that high whistle as Eddie inhaled breath, and knew that he would soon be tooting on the old lung-sucker. 'What did we do?

The question hung there. Mike seemed to regard it . . . and at last he shook his head. 'You'll remember,' he said. 'In time you'll remember.'

'What if we don't?' Ben asked.

'Then God help us all.'

'Nine children dead this year,' Rich said. 'Christ.'

'Lisa Albrecht and Steven Johnson in late 1984,' Mike said. 'In February a boy named Dennis Torrio disappeared. A high-school boy. His body was found in mid-March, in the Barrens. Mutilated. This was nearby.'

He took a photograph from the same pocket into which he had replaced the notebook. It made its way around the table. Beverly and Eddie looked at it, puzzled, but Richie Tozier reacted violently. He dropped it as if it were hot. 'Jesus! Jesus, Mike!' He looked up, his eyes wide and shocked. A moment later he passed the picture to Bill.

Bill looked at it and felt the world swim into gray tones all around him. For a moment he was sure he would pass out. He heard a groan, and knew he had made the sound. He dropped the picture.

'What is it?' he heard Beverly saying. 'What does it mean, Bill?'

'It's my brother's school picture,' Bill said at last. 'It's Juh-Georgie. The picture from his album. The one that moved. The one that winked.'

They handed it around again then, while Bill sat as still as stone at the head of the table, looking out into space. It was a photograph of a photograph. The picture showed a tattered school photo propped up against a white background — smiling lips parted to exhibit two holes where new teeth had never grown (unless they grow in your coffin, Bill thought, and shuddered). On the margin below George's picture were the words SCHOOL FRIENDS 1957-58.

'It was found this year?' Beverly asked again. Mike nodded and she turned to Bill. 'When did you last see it, Bill?'

He wet his lips, tried to speak. Nothing came out. He tried again, hearing the words echo in his head, aware of the stutter coming back, fighting it, fighting the terror.

'I haven't seen that picture since 1958. That spring, the year after George died. When I tried to show it to Richie, it was g-gone.'

There was an explosive gasping sound that made them all look around. Eddie was setting his aspirator back on the table and looking slightly embarrassed.

'Eddie Kaspbrak blasts off!' Richie cried cheerfully, and then, suddenly and eerily, the Voice of the MovieTone Newsreel Narrator came from Rich's mouth: 'Today in Derry, a whole city turns out for Asthmatics on Parade, and the star of the show is Big Ed the Snothead, known all over New England as — '

He stopped abruptly, and one hand moved toward his face, as if to cover his eyes, and Bill suddenly thought: No — no, that's not it. Not to cover his eyes but to push his glasses up on his nose. The glasses that aren't even there anymore. Oh dear Christ, what's going on here?

'Eddie, I'm sorry,' Rich said. 'That was cruel. I don't know what the hell I was thinking about.' He looked around at the others, bewildered.

Mike Hanlon spoke into the silence.

'I'd promised myself after Steven Johnson's body was discovered that if anything else happened — if there was one more clear case — I would make the calls that I ended up not making for another two months. It was as if I was hypnotized by what was happening, by the consciousness of it — the deliberateness of it. George's picture was found by a fallen log less than ten feet from the Torrio boy's body. It wasn't hidden; quite the contrary. It was as if the killer wanted it to be found. As I'm sure the killer did.'

'How did you get the police photo, Mike?' Ben asked. That's what it is, isn't it?'

'Yes, that's what it is. There's a fellow in the Police Department who isn't averse to making a little extra money. I pay him twenty bucks a month — all that I can afford. He's a pipeline.

The body of Dawn Roy was found four days after the Torrio boy. McCarron Park. Thirteen years old. Decapitated.

'April 23rd of this year. Adam Terrault. Sixteen. Reported missing when he didn't come home from band practice. Found the next day just off the path that runs through the greenbelt behind West Broadway. Also decapitated.

'May 6th. Frederick Cowan. Two and a half. Found in an upstairs bathroom, drowned in the toilet.'

'Oh, Mike!' Beverly cried.

'Yeah, it's bad,' he said, almost angrily. 'Don't you think I know that?'

'The police are convinced that it couldn't have been — w e l l , s o m e k i n d o f a c c i d ent?' Bev asked.

Mike shook his head. 'His mother was hanging clothes in the back yard. She heard sounds of a struggle — heard her son screaming. She ran as fast as she could. As she went up the stairs, she says she heard the sound of the toilet flushing repeatedly — that, and someone laughing. She said it didn't sound human.'

'And she saw nothing at all?' Eddie asked.

'Her son,' Mike said simply. 'His back had been broken, his skull fractured. The glass door of the shower-stall was broken. There was blood everywhere. The mother is in the Bangor Mental Health Institute, now. My . . . my Police Department source says she's quite lost her mind.'

'No fucking wonder,' Richie said hoarsely. 'Who's got a cigarette?'

Beverly gave him one. Rich li t it with hands that shook badly.