Beverly raised her hand. Her color was back now, but in hectic patches that flared along her cheekbones. She looked both tremendously excited and scared to death.

Mike raised his hand.

Ben raised his.

Eddie Kaspbrak sat back in his chair, looking as if he wished he could actually melt into it and thus disappear. His face, thin and delicate-looking, was miserably afraid as he looked first right and then left and then back to Bill. For a moment Bill felt sure Eddie was simply going to push back his chair, rise, and bolt from the room without looking back. Then he raised one hand in the air and grasped his aspirator tightly in the other.

'Way to go, Eds,' Richie said. 'We're really gonna have ourselves some chucks this time, I bet.'

'Beep-beep, Richie,' Eddie said in a wavering voice.

6

The Losers Get Dessert

'So what's your one idea, Mike?' Bill asked. The mood had been broken by Rose, the hostess, who had come in with a dish of fortune cookies. She looked around at the six people who had their hands in the air with a carefully polite lack of curiosity. They lowered them hastily, and no one said anything until Rose was gone again. 'It's simple enough,' Mike said, 'but it might be pretty damn dangerous, too.'

'Spill it,'Richie said.

'I think we ought to split up for the rest of the day. I think each of us ought to go back to the place in Derry he or she remembers best . . . outside the Barrens, that is. I don't think any of us should go there — not yet. Think of it as a series of walking –tours, if you like.'

'What's the purpose, Mike?' Ben asked.

'I'm not entirely sure. You have to understand that I'm going pretty much on intuition here — '

'But this has got a good beat and you can dance to it,' Richie said.

The others smiled. Mike did not; he nodded instead. 'That's as good a way of putting it as any. Going on intuition is like picking up a beat and dancing to it. Using intuition is a hard thing for grownups to do, and that's the main reason I think it might be the right thing for us to do. Kids, after all, operate on it about eighty percent of the time, at least until they're fourteen or so.'

'You're talking about plugging back into the situation,' Eddie said.

'I suppose so. Anyway, that's my idea. If no specific place to go comes to you, just follow your feet and see where they take you. Then we meet tonight, at the library, and talk over what happened.'

'If anything happens,' Ben said.

'Oh, I think things will.'

'What sort of things?' Bill asked.

Mike shook his head. 'I have no idea. I think whatever happens is apt to be unpleasant. I think it's even possible that one of us may not turn up at the library tonight. No reason for thinking that . . . except that intuition thing again.'

Silence greeted this.

'Why alone?' Beverly asked finally. 'If we're supposed to do this as a group, why do you want us to start alone, Mike? Especially if the risk really turns out to be as high as you think it might be?'

'I think I can answer that,' Bill said.

'Go ahead, Bill,' Mike said.

'It started alone for each of us,' Bill said to Beverly. 'I don't remember everything — not yet — but I sure remember that much. The picture in George's room that moved. Ben's mummy. The leper that Eddie saw under the porch on Neibolt Street. Mike finding the blood on the grass near the Canal in Bassey Park. And the bird . . . there was something about a bird, wasn't there, Mike?'

Mike nodded grimly.

'A big bird.'

'Yes, but not as friendly as the one on Sesame Street.'

Richie cackled wildly. 'Derry's answer to James Brown Gets Off A Good One! Oh chillun, is we blessed or is we blessed!'

'Beep-beep, Richie,' Mike said, and Richie subsided.

'For you it was the voice from the pipe and the blood that came out of the drain,' Bill said to Beverly. 'And for Richie . . . ' But here he paused, puzzled.

'I must be the exception that proves the rule, Big Bill,' Richie said. 'The first time I came in contact with anything that summer that was weird — I mean really big-league weird — was in George's room, with you. When you and I went back to your house that day and looked at his photo album. The picture of Center Street by the Canal started to move. Do you remember?'

'Yes,' Bill said. 'But are you sure there was nothing before that, Richie? Nothing at all?'

'I — ' Something flickered in Richie's eyes. He said slowly, 'Well, there was the day Henry and his friends chased me — before the end of school, this was, and I got away from them in

the toy department of Freese's. I went up by City Center and sat down on a park bench for awhile and I thought I saw . . . but that was just something I dreamed.'

'What was it?' Beverly asked.

'Nothing,' Richie said, almost brusquely. 'A dream. Really.' He looked at Mike. 'I don't mind taking a walk, though. It'll kill the afternoon. Views of the old homestead.'

'So we're agreed?' Bill asked.

They nodded.

'And we'll meet at the library tonight at . . . when do you suggest, Mike?'

'Seven o'clock. Ring the bell if you're late. The libe closes at seven on weekdays until summer vacation starts for the kids.'

'Seven it is,' Bill said, and let his eyes range soberly over them. 'And be careful. You want to remember that none of us really knows what we're d-d-doing. Think of this as reconnaissance. If you should see something, don't fight. Run.'

'I'm a lover, not a fighter,' Richie said in a dreamy Michael Jackson Voice.

'Well, if we're going to do it, we ought to get going,' Ben said. A small smile pulled up the left corner of his mouth. It was more bitter than amused. 'Although I'll be damned if I could tell you right this minute where I'm going to go, if the Barrens are out. That was the best of it for me — going down there with you guys.' His eyes moved to Beverly, held there for a moment, moved away. 'I can't think of anyplace else that means very much to me. Probably I'll just wander around for a couple of hours, looking at buildings and getting wet feet.'

'You'll find a place to go, Haystack,' Richie said. 'Visit some of your old food-stops and gas up.'

Ben laughed. 'My capacity's gone down a lot since I was eleven. I'm so full you guys may just have to roll me out of here.'

'Well, I'm all set,' Eddie said.

'Wait a sec!' Beverly cried as they began to push back from their chairs. 'The fortune cookies! Don't forget those!'

'Yeah,' Richie said. 'I can see mine now. YOU WILL SOON BE EATEN UP BY A LARGE MONSTER. HAVE A NICE DAY.'

They laughed and Mike passed the little bowl of fortune cookies to Richie, who took one and then sent it on around the table. Bill noticed that no one opened his or her cookie until each had one; they sat with the little hat-shaped cookies either in front of them or held in their hands, and even as Beverly, still smiling, picked hers up, Bill felt a cry rising in his throat: No! No, don't do that, its part of it, put it back, don't open it!

But it was too late. Beverly had broken hers open, Ben was doing the same to his, Eddie was cutting into his with the edge of his fork, and just before Beverly's smile turned to a grimace of horror Bill had time to think: We knew, somehow we knew, because no one simplybit into his or her fortune cookie. That would have been the normal thing to do, but no one did it. Somehow, some pan of us still remembers . . . everything.

And he found that insensate underknowledge somehow the most horrifying realization of all; it spoke more eloquently than Mike could have about how surely and deeply It had touched each one of them . . . and how Its touch was still upon them.

Blood spurted up from Beverly's fortune cookie as if from a slashed artery. It splashed across her hand and then gouted onto the white napery which covered the table, staining it a bright red that sank in and then spread out in grasping pink fingers.