But —

T h a t f e e l i n g o f déjà vu swept him again. He was helpless before it, and this time he felt the numb horror of a man who finally realizes, after half an hour of helpless splashing, that the shore is growing no closer and he is drowning.

It was story hour, and over in the corner a group of roughly a dozen little ones sat solemnly on their tiny chairs in a semicircle, listening. 'Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge?' the librarian said in the low, growling tones of the troll in the story, and Ben thought: When sheraises her head I'll see that it's Miss Dames, yes, it'll be Miss Davies and she won't look a day older —

But when she did raise her head, he saw a much younger woman than Miss Davies had been even then.

Some of the children covered their mouths and giggled, but others only watched her, their eyes reflecting the eternal fascination of the fairy story: would the monster be bested . . . or would it feed?

'It is I, Billy Goat Gruff, trip –trapping on your bridge,' the librarian went on, and Ben, pale, walked past her.

How can it be the same story? The very same story? Am I supposed to believe that's just coincidence? Because I don't . . . goddammit, I just don't!

He bent to the drinking fountain, bending so far he felt like Richie doing one of his salami-salami-baloney routines.

I ought to talk to someone, he thought, panicked. Mike . . . Bill . . . someone. Is something really stapling the past and present together here, or am I only imagining it? Because if I'm not, I'm not sure I bargained for this much. I —

He looked at the checkout desk, and his heart seemed to stop in his chest for a moment before beginning to race doubletime. The poster was simple, stark . . . and familiar. It said simply:

REMEMBER THE CURFEW.

7 P.M.

DERRY POLICE DEPARTMENT.

In that instant it all seemed to come clear to him — it came in a grisly flash of light, and he realized that the vote they had taken was a joke. There was no turning back, never had been.

They were on a track as preordained as the memory-track which had caused him to look up when he passed under the stairway leading to the stacks. There was an echo here in Derry, a deadly echo, and all they could hope for was that the echo could be changed enough in their favor to allow them to escape with their lives.

'Christ,' he muttered, and scrubbed a palm up one cheek, hard.

'Can I help you, sir?' a voice at his elbow asked, and he jumped a little. It was a girl of perhaps seventeen, her dark– blonde hair held back from her pretty high– schooler's face with barrettes. A library assistant, of course; they'd had them in 1958 too, high-school girls and boys who shelved books, showed kids how to use the card catalogue, discussed book reports and school papers, helped bewildered scholars with their footnotes and bibliographies. The pay was a pittance, but there were always kids willing to do it. It was agreeable work.

On the heels of this, reading the girl's pleasant but questioning look a little more closely, he remembered that he no longer really belonged here — he was a giant in the land of little people. An intruder. In the adults' library he had felt uneasy about the possibility of being looked at or spoken to, but here it was something of a relief. For one thing, it proved he was still an adult, and the fact that the girl was clearly braless under her thin Western-style shirt was also more relief than turn-on: if proof that this was 1985 and not 1958 was needed, the clearly limned points of her nipples against the cotton of her shirt was it.

'No thank you,' he said, and then, for no reason at all that he could understand, he heard himself add: 'I was looking for my son.'

'Oh? What's his name? Maybe I've seen him.' She smiled. 'I know most of the kids.'

'His name is Ben Hanscom,' he said. 'But I don't see him here.'

'Tell me what he looks like and I'll give him a message, if there is one.'

'Well,' Ben said, uncomfortable now and beginning to wish he had never started this, 'he's on the stout side, and he looks a little bit like me. But it's no big deal, miss. If you see him, just tell him his dad popped by on his way home.'

'I will,' she said, and smiled, but the smile didn't reach her eyes, and Ben suddenly realized that she hadn't come over and spoken to him out of simple politeness and a wish to help. She happened to be a library assistant in the Children's Library in a town where nine children had been slain over a span of eight months. You see a strange man in this scaled-down world where adults rarely come except to drop their kids off or pick them up. You're suspicious . . . of course.

'Thank you,' he said, gave her a smile he hoped was reassuring, and then got the hell out.

He walked back through the corridor to the adults' library and went to the desk on an impulse he didn't understand . . . but of course they were supposed to follow their impulses this afternoon, weren't they? Follow their impulses and see where they led.

The name plate on the circulation desk identified the pretty young librarian as Carole Banner. Behind her, Ben could see a door with a frosted-glass panel; lettered on this was

MICHAEL HANLON HEAD LIBRARIAN .

'May I help you?' Ms Banner asked. 'I think so,' Ben said. 'That is, I hope so. I'd like to get a library card.' 'Very good,' she said, and took out a form. 'Are you a resident of Berry?' 'Not presently.' 'Home address, then?'

'Rural Star Route 2, Hemingford Home, Nebraska.' He paused for a moment, a little amused by her stare, and then reeled off the Zip Code: '59341.' 'Is this a joke, Mr Hanscom?' 'Not at all.

'Are you moving to Derry, then?' 'I have no plans to, no.'

'This is a long way to come to borrow books, isn't it? Don't they have libraries in Nebraska?'

'It's kind of a sentimental thing,' Ben said. He would have thought telling a stranger this would be embarrassing, but he found it wasn't. 'I grew up in Berry, you see. This is the first time I've been back since I was a kid. I've been walking around, seeing what's changed and what hasn't. And all at once it occurred to me that I spent about ten years of my life here between ages three and thirteen, and I don't have a single thing to remember those years by. Not so much as a postcard. I had some silver dollars, but I lost one of them and gave the rest to a friend. I guess what I want is a souvenir of my childhood. It's late, but don't they say better late than never?'

Carole Banner smiled, and the smile changed her pretty face into one that was beautiful. 'I think that's very sweet,' she said. 'If you'd like to browse for ten or fifteen minutes, I'll have the card made up for you when you come back to the desk.'

Ben grinned a little. 'I guess there'll be a fee,' he said. 'Out-of-towner and all.'

'Bid you have a card when you were a boy?'

'I sure did.' Ben smiled. 'Except for my friends, I guess that library card was the most important — '

'Ben, would you come up here?' a voice called suddenly, cutting across the library hush like a scalpel.

He turned around, jumping guiltily the way people do when someone shouts in a library. He saw no one he knew . . . and realized a moment later that no one had looked up or shown any sign of surprise or annoyance. The old men still read their copies of the Berry News, the Boston Globe, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report. At the tables in the Reference Room, tw o high –school girls still had their heads together over a stack of papers and a pile of file-cards. Several browsers went on looking through the books on the shelves marked CURRENT FICTION — SEVEN –DAY-LOAN . An old man in a ridiculous driving –cap, a cold pipe clenched between his teeth, went on leafing through a folio of Luis de Vargas' sketches.