'Never take money or c-candy from strangers. Good advice. I'll still give you a q-quarter. What do you say? Just to the corner of Juh-Jackson Street.'

'Never mind the quarter,' the kid said. He burst into laughter again — a gay and uncomplicated sound. A fresh sound. 'I don't need your quarter. I got two bucks. I'm practically rich. I got to see this, though. Just don't blame me if you break something.'

'Don't worry,' Bill said. 'I'm insured.'

He turned one of the skateboard's scuffed wheels with his finger, liking the speedy ease with which it turned — it sounded like there was about a million ball-bearings in there. It was a good sound. It called up something very old in Bill's chest. Some desire as warm as want, as lovely as love. He smiled.

'What do you think?' the kid asked.

'I think I'm g-gonna kill myself,' Bill said, and the kid laughed.

Bill put the skateboard on th e sidewalk and put one foot on it. He rolled it back and forth experimentally. The kid watched. In his mind Bill saw himself rolling down Witcham Street toward Jackson on the kid's avocado– green skateboard, the tails of his sport– coat ballooning out behind him, his bald head gleaming in the sun, his knees bent in that fragile way snowbunnies bend their knees their first day on the slopes. It was a posture that told you that in their heads they were already falling down. He bet the kid didn't ride the board like that. He bet the kid rode

(to beat the devil)

like there was no tomorrow.

That good feeling died out of his chest. He saw, all too clearly, the board going out from under his feet, shooting unencumbered down the street, an improbable fluorescent green, a color that only a child could love. He saw himself coming down on his ass, maybe on his back. Slow dissolve to a private room at the Derry Home Hospital, like the one they had visited Eddie in after his arm had been broken. Bill Denbrough in a full body-cast, one leg held up by pullies and wires. A doctor comes in, looks at his chart, looks at him, and then says: 'You were guilty of two major lapses, Mr Denbrough. The first was mismanagement of a skateboard. The second was forgetting that yo u are now approaching forty years of age.'

He bent, picked the skateboard back up, and handed it back to the kid. 'I guess not,' he said.

'Chicken,' the kid said, not unkindly.

Bill hooked his thumbs into his armpits and flapped his elbows. 'Buck-buck-buck,' he said.

The kid laughed. 'Listen, I got to get home.'

'Be careful on that,' Bill said.

'You can't be careful on a skateboard,' the kid replied, looking at Bill as if he might be the one with toys in the attic.

'Right,' Bill said. 'Okay. As we say in the movie biz, I hear you. But stay away from drams and sewers. And stay with your friends.'

The kid nodded. 'I'm right near home.'

So was my brother, Bill thought.

'It'll be over soon, anyway,' Bill told the kid.

'Will it?' the kid asked.

'I think so,' Bill said.

'Okay. See you later . . . chicken!'

The kid put one foot on the board and pushed off with the other. Once he was rolling he put the other foot on the board as well and went thundering down the street at what seemed to Bill a suicidal pace. But he rode as Bill had suspected he would: with lazy hipshot grace. Bill felt love for the boy, and exhilaration, and a desire to be the boy, along with an almost suffocating fear. The boy rode as if there were no such things as death or getting older. The boy seemed somehow eternal and ineluctable in his khaki Boy Scout shorts and scuffed sneakers, his ankles sockless and quite dirty, his hair flying back behind him.

Watch out, kid, you're not going to make the comer! Bill thought, alarmed, but the kid shot his hips to the left like a break-dancer, his toes revolved on the green Fiberglas board, and he zoomed effortlessly around the corner and onto Jackson Street, simply assuming no one would be there to get in his way. Kid, Bill thought, it won't always be that way.

He walked up to his old house but did not stop; he only slowed his walk down to an idler's pace. There were people on the lawn — a mother in a lawn chair, a sleeping baby in her arms, watching two kids, maybe ten and eight, play badminton in grass that was still wet from the rain earlier. The younger of the two, a boy, managed to hit the bird back over the net and the woman called, 'Good one, Scan!'

The house was the same dark-green color and the fanlight was still over the door, but his mother's flower-beds were gone. So, from what he could see, was the jungle-gym his father had built from scavenged pipes in the back yard. He remembered the day Georgie had fallen off the top and chipped a tooth. How he had screamed!

He saw these things (the ones there and the ones gone), and thought of walking over to the woman with the sleeping baby in her arms. He thought of saying Hello, my name is BillDenbrough. I used to live here. And the woman saying, That's nice. What else could there be? Could he ask her if the face he had carved carefully in one of the attic beams — the face he and Georgie sometimes used to throw darts at — was still there? Could he ask her if her kids sometimes slept on the screened-in back porch when the summer nights were especially hot, talking together in low tones as they watched heat-lightning dance on the horizon? He supposed he might be able to ask some of those things, but he felt he would stutter quite badly if he tried to be charming . . . and did he really want to know the answers to any of those questions? After Georgie died it had become a cold house, and whatever he had come back to Derry for was not here.

So he went on to the corner and turned right, not looking back.

Soon he was on Kansas Street, headed back downtown. He paused for awhile at the fence which bordered the sidewalk, looking down into the Barrens. The fence was the same, rickety wood covered with fading whitewash, and the Barrens looked the same . . . wilder, if anything. The only differences he could see were that the dirty smudge of smoke which had always marked the town dump was gone (the dump had been replaced with a modern waste-treatment plant), and a long overpass marched across the tangled greenery now — the turnpike extension. Everything else was so similar that he might last have seen it the previous summer: weeds and bushes sloping down to that flat marshy area on the left and to dense copses of junky-scrubby trees on the right. He could see the stands of what they had called bamboo, the silvery-white stalks twelve and fourteen feet high. He remembered that Richie had once tried to smoke some of it, claiming it was like the stuff jazz musicians smoked and could get you high. All Richie had gotten was sick.

Bill could hear the trickle of water running in many small streams, could see the sun heliographing off the broader expanse of the Kenduskeag. And the smell was the same, even with the dump gone. The heavy perfume of growing things at the height of their spring strut did not quite mask the smell of waste and human offal. It was faint but unmistakable. A smell of corruption; a whiff of the underside.

That's where it ended before, and that's where it's going to end this time, Bill thought with a shiver. In there . . . under the city.

He stood awhile longer, convinced that he must see something — some manifestation — of the evil he had come back to Derry to fight. There was nothing. He heard water running, a springlike and vital sound that reminded him of the dam they had built down there. He could see trees and bushes ruffling in the faint breeze. There was nothing else. No sign. He walked on, dusting a faint whitewash stain from his hands as he went.

He kept heading downtown, half-remembering, half-dreaming, and here came another kid — this one a little girl of about ten in high-waisted corduroy pants and a faded red blouse. She was bouncing a ball with one hand and holding a babydoll by its blonde Arnel hair in the other.