'Oh, I think I'm gonna puke,' Beverly said, rolling over on the dirt. Ben patted her back tentatively, then looked around to see if he had been observed. He hadn't been; the others were looking at Bill, mesmerized.

'What then?' Eddie asked.

'W-W-Well,' Bill said, 'this sounds cuh-cuh-crazy, b-but the book s-said that th-then y-you started telling juh– jokes and rih –riddles.'

'What? Stan asked.

Bill nodded, his face that of a correspondent who wants you to know — without coining right out and saying it — that he doesn't make the news but only reports it. 'R-Right. F-First the t –taelus monster would tell o-o-one, then y-y-you got to t-t-tell o-one, and y-you w– w-went o-on like thuh-that, t-tay-takin t-turns — '

Beverly sat up again, knees against her chest, hands linked around her shins. 'I don't see how people could talk with their tongues, you know, nailed together.'

Richie immediately ran out his tongue, gripped it with his fingers, and intoned: 'My father works in a shit-yard!' That broke them all up for awhile even though it was a baby joke.

'M-Maybe it was suh-suh-suhpposed to be tuh-telepathy,' Bill said. 'A-Anyway, i-if the h-h-human laughed f-f-first in spi-hite of the p-p-p-p — '

'Pain?' Stan asked.

Bill nodded.' — then the taelus g-got to k-k-kill h-him and e-e-e-eat him. His soul, I think. B-But i-if the muh-man c-c-ould make the t-taelus l-laugh f-f-first, it had to go away for a huh-huh –hundred y-years.

'Did the book say where a thing like that would come from?' Ben asked.

Bill shook his head.

'Do you believe any of it?' Stan asked, sounding as if he wanted to scoff but could not quite find the moral or mental force to do so.

Bill shrugged and said, 'I a-a-almost d-do.' He seemed about to say more, then shook his head and remained silent.

'It explains a lot,' Eddie said slowly. The clown, the leper, the werewolf . . . ' He looked.over at Stan. 'The dead boys, too, I guess.'

'This sounds like a job for Richard Tozier,' Richie said, in the MovieTone Newsreel Announcer's Voice. 'Man of a thousand jokes and six thousand riddles.'

'If we sent you to do it, we'd all get killed,' Ben said. 'Slowly. In great pain.' At this they all laughed again.

'So what do we do about it?' Stan demanded, and once again Bill could only shake his head . . . and feel he almost knew. Stan stood up. 'Let's go somewhere else,' he said. 'I'm getting fanny fatigue.'

'I like it here,' Beverly said. 'It's shady and nice.' She glanced at Stan. 'I suppose you want to do something babyish like going down to the dump and breaking bottles with rocks.'

'I like breaking bottles with rocks,' Richie said, standing up beside Stan. 'It's the j.d. in me, baby.' He flipped up his collar and began to stalk around like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. 'They hurt me,' he said, looking moody and scratching his chest. 'You know, like wow. My parents. School. So-SY-ety. Everyone. It's pressure, baby. It's — '

'It's shit,' Beverly said, and sighed.

'I've got some firecrackers,' Stan said, and they forgot all about glamours, manitous, and Richie's bad James Dean imitation as Stan produced a package of Black Cats from his hip pocket. Even Bill was impressed.

'J-Jesus Christ, Stuh-Stuh-han, w-where did you g-g-get thuh-hose?'

'From this fat kid that I go to synagogue with sometimes,' Stan said. 'I traded a bunch of Superman and Little Lulu funnybooks for em.'

'Let's shoot em off!' Richie cried, nearly apoplectic in his joy. 'Let's go shoot em off, Stanny, I won't tell any more guys you and your dad killed Christ, I promise, what do you say? I'll tell em your nose is small, Stanny! I'll tell em you're not circumcised!'

At this Beverly began to shriek with laughter and actually appeared to be approaching apoplexy before covering her face with her hands. Bill began to laugh, Eddie began to laugh, and after a moment even Stan joined in. The sound of it drifted across the broad shallow expanse of the Kenduskeag on that day before July 4th, a summer-sound, as bright as the sunrays darting off the water, and none of them saw the orange eyes staring at them from a

tangle of brambles and sterile blackberry bushes to their left. This brambly patch scrubbed the entire bank for thirty feet, and in the center of it was one of Ben's Morlock holes. It was from this raised concrete pipe that the eyes, each more than two feet across, stared.

5

The reason Mike ran afoul of Henry Bowers and his not-so-merry band on that same day was because the next day was the Glorious Fourth. The Church School had a band in which Mike played the trombone. On the Fourth, the band would march in the annual holiday parade, playing 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic,' 'Onward Christian Soldiers,' and 'America the Beautiful.' This was an occasion that Mike had been looking forward to for over a month. He walked to the final rehearsal because his bike had a busted chain. The rehearsal was not scheduled until two-thirty, but he left at one because he wanted to polish his trombone, which was stored in the school's music room, until it glowed. Although his trombone-playing was really not much better than Richie's Voices, he was fond of the instrument, and whenever he felt blue a half an hour of foghorning Sousa marches, hymns, or patriotic airs cheered hun right up again. There was a can of Saddler's brass polish in one of the flap pockets of his khaki shirt and two or three clean rags were dangling from the hip pocket of his jeans. The thought of Henry Bowers was the furthest thing from his mind. A glance behind as he approached Neibolt Street and the Church School would have changed his mind in a hurry, because Henry, Victor, Belch, Peter Gordon, and Moose Sadler were spread across the road behind him. If they had left the Bowers house five minutes later, Mike would have been out of sight over the crest of the next hill; the apocalyptic rockfight and everything that followed it might have happened differently, or not at all.

But it was Mike himself, years later, who advanced the idea that perhaps none of them were entirely their own masters in the events of that summer; that if luck and free will had played parts, then their roles had been narrow ones. He would point out a number of these suspicious coincidences to the others at their reunion lunch, but there was at least one of which he was unaware. The meeting in the Barrens that day broke up when Stan Uris produced the Black Cats and the Losers' Club headed toward the dump to shoot them off. And Victor, Belch, and the others had come out to the Bowers farm because Henry had firecrackers, cherry-bombs, and M-80s (the possession of these last would a few years hence become a felony). The big boys were planning to go down beyond the trainyard coalpit and explode Henry's treasur es.

None of them, not even Belch, went out to the Bowers farm under ordinary circumstances — primarily because of Henry's crazy father but also because they always ended up helping Henry do his chores: the weeding, the endless rock-picking, the lugging of wood, the toting of water, the pitching of hay, the picking of whatever happened to be ripe at the time of the season — peas, cukes, tomatoes, potatoes. These boys were not exactly allergic to work, but they had plenty to do at their own places without sweating for Henry's kooky father, who didn't much care who he hit (he had once taken a length of stovewood to Victor Criss when the boy dropped a basket of tomatoes he was lugging out to the roadside stand). Getting whopped with a chunk of birch was bad enough; what made it worse was that Butch Bowers had chanted 'I'm gonna kill all the Nips! I'm gonna kill all the fuckin Nips!' when he did it.

Dumb as he was, Belch Huggins had expressed it best: 'I don't fuck with crazy people,' he told Victor one day two years before. Victor had laughed and agreed.