'Hey!' Bill said.

She looked up. 'What!'

'What's the best store in Derry?'

She thought about it.' For me or for anyone?'

'For you,' Bill said.

'Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes,' she said with no hesitation whatsoever.

'I beg your pardon?' Bill asked.

'You beg what?

'I mean, is that a store name?'

'Sure,' she said, looking at Bill as though he might well be enfeebled. 'Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. My mom says it's a junkshop, but I like it. They have old things. Like records you never heard of. Also postcards. It smells like a attic. I have to go home now. Bye.'

She walked on, not looking back, bouncing her ball and holding her dolly by the hair.

'Hey!' he shouted after her.

She looked back whimsically. 'I beg your whatchamacallit?'

The store! Where is it?'

She looked back over her shoulder and said, 'Just the way you're going. It's at the bottom of Up-Mile Hill.'

Bill felt that sense of the past folding in on itself, folding in on him. He hadn't meant to ask that little girl anything; the question had popped out of his mouth like a cork flying from the neck of a champagne bottle.

He descended Up-Mile Hill toward downtown. The warehouses and packing plants he remembered from childhood — gloomy brick buildings with duty windows from which titanic meaty smells issued — were mostly gone, although the Armour and the Star Beef meat-packing plants were still there. But Hemphill was gone and there was a drive –in bank and a bakery where Eagle Beef and Kosher Meats had been. And there, where the Tracker Brothers' Annex had stood, was a sign painted in oldfashioned letters which read, just as the girl with the doll had said, SECONDHAND ROSE, SECONDHAND CLOTHES . The red brick ha d been painted a yellow which had perhaps been jaunty ten or twelve years ago, but was now dingy — a color Audra called urine –yellow.

Bill walked slowly toward it, feeling that sense of déjà vu settle over nun again. Later he told the others he knew what ghost he was going to see before he actually saw it.

The show-window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes was more than dingy; it was filthy. No Downcast antique shop this, with nifty little spool-beds and Hoosier cabinets and sets of Depression glassware highlighted by hidden spotlights; this was what his mother called with utter disdain 'a Yankee pawnshop.' The items were strewn in rickrack profusion, heaped aimlessly here, there, and everywhere. Dresses slumped off coathangers. Guitars hung from their necks like executed criminals. There was a box of 45 rpm records — 10 c APIECE,

the sign read. TWELVE FOR A BUCK. ANDREWS SISTERS, PERRY COMO, JIMMY ROGERS, OTHERS. There were kids' outfits and dreadful-looking shoes with a card in front of them which read SECONDS, BUT NOT BAD! $1.00 A PAIR. There were two TVs that looked blind. A third was casting bleared images of The Brady Bunch out toward the street. A box of old paperbacks, most with stripped covers (2 FOR A QUARTER, 10 FOR A DOLLAR, more inside , SOME 'HOT') sat atop a large radio with a filthy white plastic case and a tuning dial as big as an alarm clock. Bunches of plastic flowers sat in dirty vases on a chipped, gouged, dusty dining-room table.

All of these things Bill saw as a chaotic background to the thing his eyes had fixed upon immediately. He stood staring at it with wide unbelieving eyes. Gooseflesh ran madly up and down his body. His forehead was hot, his hands cold, and for a moment it seemed that all the doors inside would swing wide and he would remember everything.

Silver was in the righthand window.

His kickstand was still gone and rust had flowered on the front and back fenders, but the oogah-horn was still there on the handlebars, its rubber bulb now glazed with cracks and age. The horn itself, which Bill had always kept neatly polished, was dull and pitted. The flat package carrier where Richie had often ridden double was still on the back fender, but it was bent now, hanging by a single bolt. At some point someone had covered the seat with imitation tiger-skin which was now rubbed and frayed to a point where the stripes were almost indistinguishable.

Silver.

Bill raised an absent hand to wipe away the tears that were running slowly down his cheeks. After he had done a better job with his handkerchief, he went inside.

The atmosphere of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes was musty with age. It was, as the girl had said, a attic smell — but not a good smell, as some attic smells are. This was not the smell of linseed oil rubbed lovingly into the surface of old tables or of ancient plush and velvet. In here was a smell of rotting book-bindings, dirty vinyl cushions that had been half-cooked in the hot suns of summers past, dust, mouse-turds.

From the TV in th e window the Brady Bunch cackled and whooped. Competing with them from somewhere in the back was the radio voice of a disc jockey identifying himself as 'your pal Bobby Russell' promising the new album by Prince to the caller who could give the name of the actor who had played Wally on Leave It to Beaver. Bill knew — it had been a kid named Tony Dow — but he didn't want the new Prince album. The radio was sitting on a high shelf amid a number of nineteenth-century portraits. Below it and them sat the proprietor, a man of perhaps forty who was wearing designer jeans and a fishnet tee-shirt. His hair was slicked back and he was thin to the point of emaciation. His feet were cocked up on his desk, which was piled high with ledgers and dominated by an old scrolled cash register. He was reading a paperback novel which Bill thought had never been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It was called Construction Site Studs. On the floor in front of the desk was a barber pole, its stripe revolving up and up into infinity. Its frayed cord wound across the floor to a baseboard plug like a tired snake. The sign in front of it read: A DYEING BREED ! $250.

When the bell over the door jingled, the man behind the desk marked his place with a matchbook cover and looked up. 'Help you?'

'Yes,' Bill said, and opened his mouth to ask about the bike in the window. But before he could speak, his mind was suddenly filled with a single haunting sentence, words that drove away all other thought:

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

What in the name of God?

(thrusts)

'Looking for anything in particular?' the proprietor asked. His voice was polite enough, but he was looking at Bill closely.

He's looking at me, Bill thought, amused in spite of his distress, as if he's got an idea I'vebeen smoking some of that stuff that gets the jazz musicians high.

'Yes, I was ih-ih-interested ih-in — '

(his fists against the posts)

' — in that puh-puh-post — '

'The barber pole , you mean?' The proprietor's eyes now showed Bill something which, even in his present confused state, he remembered and hated from his childhood: the anxiety of a man or woman who must listen to a stutterer, the urge to jump in quickly and finish the thought, thus shutting the poor bastard up. But I don't stutter! I beat it! I DON'T FUCKINGSTUTTER! I —

(and still insists)

The words were so clear in his mind that it seemed someone else must be speaking in there, that he was like a man possessed by demons in Biblical times — a man invaded by some presence from Outside. And yet he recognized the voice and knew it was his own. He felt sweat pop out warmly on his face.

'I could give you

(he sees the ghosts)

a deal on that post,' the proprietor was saying. 'Tell you the truth, I can't move it at two-fifty. I'd give it to you for one-seventy-five, how's that? It's the only real antique in the place.'