'I've got your library card,' she said, putting a tentative hand on his arm. 'Do you still want it?'

'Yes, thanks,' Ben said. He drew a deep, shuddery breath. 'I'm very sorry about this.'

'I just hope it isn't food-poisoning,' she said.

'Wouldn't work,' Mr Brockhill said without looking up from de Vargas or removing his dead pipe from the corner of his mouth. 'Device of pulp fiction. Bullet would tumble.'

And speaking again with no foreknowledge that he was going to speak, Ben said: 'Slugs, no t bullets. We realized almost right away that we couldn't make bullets. I mean, we were just kids. It was my idea to — '

'Shhhh!' someone said again.

Brockhill gave Ben a slightly startled look, seemed about to speak, then went back to the sketches.

At the desk, Carole Danner handed him a small orange card with DERRY PUBLIC LIBRARY stamped across the top. Bemused, Ben realized it was the first adult library-card he had owned in his whole life. The one he'd had as a kid had been canary-yellow.

'Are you sure you don't want to lie down, Mr Hanscom?'

'I'm feeling a little better, thanks.'

'Sure?'

He managed a smile. 'I'm sure.'

'You do look a little better,' she said, but she said it doubtfully, as if understanding that this was the proper thing to say but not really believing it.

Then she was holding a book under the microfilm gadget they used these days to record book-loans, and Ben felt a touch of almost hysterical amusement. It's the book I grabbed offthe shelf when the clown started to do its Pickaninny Voice, he thought. She thought I wanted to borrow it. I've made my first withdrawal from the Demy Public Library in twenty-five years, and I don't even know what the book is. Furthermore, I don't care. Just let me out of here, okay? That'll be enough.

'Thank you,' he said, putting the book under his arm.

'You're more than welcome, Mr Hanscom. Are you sure you wouldn't like an aspirin?'

'Quite sure,' he said — and then hesitated. 'You wouldn't by any chance know what happened to Mrs Starrett, would you? Barbara Starrett? She used to be the head of the Children's Library.'

'She died,' Carole Danner said. Three years ago. It was a stroke, I understand. It was a great shame. She was relatively young . . . fifty-eight or –nine, I think. Mr Hanlon closed the library for the day.'

'Oh,' Ben said, and felt a hollow place open in his heart. That's what happened when you got back to your used-to-be, as the song put it. The frosting on the cake was sweet, but the stuff underneath was bitter. People forgot you, or died on you, or lost their hair and teeth. In some cases you found that they had lost their minds. Oh it was great to be alive. Boy howdy.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'You liked her, didn't you?'

'All the kids liked Mrs Starrett,' Ben said, and was alarmed to realize that tears were now very close.

'Are you — '

If she asks me if I'm all right one more time, I really am going to cry, I think. Or scream. Or something.

He glanced at his watch and said, 'I really have to run. Thanks for being so nice.'

'Have a nice day, Mr Hanscom.'

Sure. Because tonight I die.

He tipped a finger her way and started back across the floor. Mr Brockhill glanced up at him once, sharply and suspiciously.

He looked up at the landing which topped the lefthand staircase. The balloon still floated there, tied by its string to lacy wrought-iron. But now the printing on its side read:

I KILLED BARBARA STARRETT! — PENNYWISE THE CLOWN

He looked away, feeling the pulse in his throat starting to run again. He let himself out and was startled by sunlight — the clouds overhead were coming unravelled and a warm late –May sun was shafting down, making the grass look impossibly green and lush. Ben felt something st art to lift from his heart. It seemed to him that he had left some insupportable burden behind in the library . . . and then he looked down at the book he had inadvertently withdrawn and his teeth clamped together with sudden, painful force. It was Bulldoz er, by Stephen W. Meader, one of the books he had withdrawn from the library on the day he had dived into the Barrens to get away from Henry Bowers and his friends.

And speaking of Henry, the track of his engineer boot was still on the book's cover.

Shaking, fumbling at the pages, he turned to the back. The library had gone over to a microfilm checkout system; he had seen that. Bat there was still a pocket in the back of this book with a card tucked into it. There was a name written on each line of the card followed by the librarian's return-date stamp. Looking at the card, Ben saw this:

NAME OF BORROWER RETURN BY STAMPED DATE

Charles N. Brown MAY 14 58

David Hartwell JUN 1 58

Joseph Brennan JUN 17 58

And, on the last line of the card, his own childish signature, written in heavy pencil-strokes:

Benjamin Hanscom JUN 9 58

Stamped across this card, stamped across the book's flyleaf, stamped across the thickness of the pages, stamped again and again in smeary red ink that looked like blood, was one word: CANCEL.

'Oh dear God,' Ben murmured. He did not know what else to say; that seemed to cover the entire situation. 'Oh dear God, dear God.'

He stood in the new sunlight, suddenly wondering what was happening to the others.

2

Eddie Kaspbrak Makes a Catch

Eddie got off the bus at the corner of Kansas Street and Kossuth Lane. Kossuth was a street that ran a quarter of a mile downhill before dead-ending abruptly where the crumbling earth sloped into the Barrens. He had absolutely no idea why he had chosen this place to leave the bus; Kossuth Lane meant nothing to him, and he had known no one on this particular section of Kansas Street. But it seemed like the right place. That was all he knew, but at this point it seemed to be enough. Beverly had climbed off the bus with a little wave at one of the Lower Main Street stops. Mike had taken his car back to the library.

Now, watching the small and somehow absurd Mercedes bus pull away, he wondered exactly what he was doing here, standing on an obscure street– corner in an obscure town nearly five hundred miles away from Myra, who was undoubtedly worried to tears about him. He felt an instant of almost painful vertigo, touched his jacket pocket, and remembered that he had left his Dramamine back at the Town House along with the rest of his pharmacopeia. He had aspirin, though. He would no more have gone out sans aspirin than he would have gone out sans pants. He chugged a couple dry and began to walk along Kansas Street, thinking vaguely that he might go to the Public Library or perhaps cross over to Costello Avenue. It was beginning to clear now, and he supposed he could even walk across to West Broadway and admire the old Victorian houses that stood there along the only two really handsome residential blocks in Derry. He used to do that sometimes when he was a kid — just walk along West Broadway, sort of casual, like he was on his way to somewhere else. There was the Muellers', near the corner of Witcham and West Broadway, a red house with turrets on either side and hedges in front. The Muellers had a gardener who always looked at Eddie with suspicious eyes until he had passed on his way.

Then there was the Bowies' house, which was four down from the Muellers' on the same sid e — one of the reasons, he supposed, that Greta Bowie and Sally Mueller had been such great friends in grammar school. It was green-shingled and also had turrets . . . but while the turrets on the Muellers' house were squared off, those on the Bowies' house were capped with funny cone-shaped things that looked to Eddie like squatty duncecaps. In the summer there was always lawn-furniture on the side lawn — a table with a sporty yellow umbrella over it,