'Mr Tozier?'

'Yes.'

'Okay . . . somebody else got on the line there for a few seconds.'

Just an old pol from the DOP, Rich thought. That's Dead Old Party, in case you should wonder. Don't worry about it. A shudder worked through him, and he told himself again, almost desperately: You're okay, Rich.

'I heard it, too,' Rich said. 'Must have been a line cross-over. How we looking on that room?'

'Oh, there's no problem with that,' the clerk said. 'We do business here in Derry, but it really never booms.'

'Is that so?'

'Oh, ayuh,' the clerk agreed, and Rich shuddered again. He had forgotten that, too — that simple northern New England-ism for yes. Oh, ayuh.

Gonna getcha, creep! the ghostly voice of Henry Bowers screamed, and he felt more crypts cracking open inside of him; the stench he smelled was not decayed bodies but decayed memories, and that was somehow worse.

He gave the Town House clerk his American Express number and hung up. Then he called Steve Covall, the KLAD program director.

'What's up, Rich?' Steve asked. The last Arbitron ratings had shown KLAD at the top of the cannibalistic Los Angeles FM-rock market, and ever since then Steve had been in an excellent mood — thank God for small favors.

'Well, you might be sorry you asked,' he told Steve. 'I'm taking a powder.'

'Taking — ' He could hear the frown in Steve's voice. 'I don't think I get you, Rich.'

'I have to put on my boogie shoes. I'm going away.'

'What do you mean, going away? According to the log I have right here in front of me, you're on the air tomorrow from two in the afternoon until six P-M., just like always. In fact, you're interviewing Clarence demons in the studio at four. You know Clarence Clemons, Rich? As in "Come on and blow, Big Man?"'

'Clemons can talk to Mike O'Hara as well as he can to me.'

'Clarence doesn't want to talk to Mike, Rich. Clarence doesn't want to talk to Bobby Russell. He doesn't want to talk to me. Clarence is a big fan of Buford Kissdrivel and Wyatt the Homicidal Bag-Boy. He wants to talk to you, my friend. And I have no interest in having a pis sed-off two-hundred-and –fifty-pound saxophone player who was once almost drafted by a pro football team running amok in my studio.'

'I don't think he has a history of running amok,' Rich said. 'I mean, we're talking Clarence Clemons here, not Keith Moon.'

There was silence on the line. Rich waited patiently.

'You're not serious, are you?' Steve finally asked. He sounded plaintive: 'I mean, unless your mother just died or you've got to have a brain tumor out or something, this is called crapping out.'

'I have to go, Steve.'

'Is your mother sick? Did she God-forbid die?'

'She died ten years ago.'

'Have you got a brain tumor?'

'Not even a rectal polyp.'

'This is not funny, Rich.'

'No.'

'You're being a fucking busher, and I don't like it.'

'I don't like it either, but I have to go.'

'Where? Why? What is this? Talk to me, Rich!'

'Someone called me. Someone I used to know a long time ago. In another place. Back then something happened. I made a promise. We all promised that we would go back if the something started happening again. And I guess it has.'

'What something are we talking about, Rich?'

'I'd just as soon not say.' Also, you'll think I'm crazy if I tell you the truth: I don't remember.

'Whe n did you make this famous promise?'

'A long time ago. In the summer of 1958.'

There was another long pause, and he knew Steve Covall was trying to decide if Rich 'Records' Tozier, aka Buford Kissdrivel, aka Wyatt the Homicidal Bag-Boy, etc., etc., was having him on or was having some kind of mental breakdown.

'You would have been just a kid,' Steve said flatly.

'Eleven. Going on twelve.'

Another long pause. Rich waited patiently.

'All right,' Steve said. 'I'll shift the rotation — put Mike in for you. I can call Chuck Foster to pull a few shifts, I guess, if I can find what Chinese restaurant he's currently holed up in. I'll do it because we go back a long way together. But I'm never going to forget you bushed out on me, Rich.'

'Oh, get down off it,' Rich said, but the headache was getting worse. He knew what he was doing; did Steve really think he didn't? 'I need a few days off, is all. You're acting like I took a shit on our FCC charter.'

'A few days off for what? The reunion of your Cub Scout pack in Shithouse Falls, North Dakota, or Pussyhump City, West Virginia?'

'Actually I think Shithouse Falls in Arkansas, bo,' Buford Kissdrivel said in his big hollow-barrel Voice, but Steve was not to be diverted.

'Because you made a promise when you were eleven? Kids don't make serious promises when they're eleven, for Christ's sake! And it's not even that, Rich, and you know it. This is not an insurance company; this is not a law office. This is show-business, be it ever so humble, and you fucking well know it. If you had given me a week's notice, I wouldn't be holding this phone in one hand and a bottle of Mylanta in the other. You are putting my balls to the wall, and you know it, so don't you insult my intelligence!'

Steve was nearly screaming now, and Rich closed his eyes. I'm never going to forget it, Steve had said, and Rich supposed he never would. But Steve had also said kids didn't make serious promises when they were eleven, and that wasn't true at all. Rich couldn't remember what the promise had been — wasn't sure he wanted to remember — but it had been plenty serious.

'Steve, I have to.'

'Yeah. And I told you I could handle it. So go ahead. Go ahead, you busher.'

'Steve, this is rid — '

But Steve had already hung up. Rich put the phone down. He had barely started away from it when it began to ring again, and he knew without picking it up that it was Steve again, madder than ever. Talking to him at this point would do no good; things would just get uglier. He slid the switch on the side of the phone to the right, cutting it off in mid –ring.

He went upstairs, pulled two suitcases out of the closet, and filled them with a barely glanced — at conglomeration of clothes — jeans, shins, underwear, socks. It would not occur to him until later that he had taken nothing but kid –clothes. He carried the suitcases back downstairs.

On the den wall was a black-and –white Ansel Adams photograph of Big Sur. Rich swung it back on hidden hinges, exposing a barrel safe. He opened it, pawed his way past the paperwork — the house here, poised cozily between the fault-line and the brush-fire zone, twenty acres of timberland in Idaho, a bunch of stocks. He had bought the stocks seemingly at random — when his broker saw Rich coming, he immediately clutched his head — but the stocks had all risen steadily over the years. He was sometimes surprised by the thought that he was almost — not quite, but almost — a rich man. All courtesy of rock-and –roll music . . . and the Voices, of course.

House, acres, stocks, insurance policy, even a copy of his last will and testament. Thestrings that bind you tight to the map of your life, he thought.

There was a sudden wild impulse to whip out his Zippo and light it up, the whole whore's combine of wherefores and know-ye-all –men-by-these-present's and the-bearer-of-this-certificate-is-entitled's. And he could do it, too. The papers in his safe had suddenly ceased to signify anything.

The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing at all supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned the motherfucker on. Easy. Burn it up or blow it away, then just take a powder.