'Can't stop me, I'm the dead boys!'

'No!' Stan Uris screamed. His eyes bulged above braised-looking crescents of skin — shockflesh, Bill thought randomly, and it was a word he would use in a novel twelve years later, with no idea where it had come from, simply taking it, as writers take the right word at the right time, as a simple gift from that outer space

(otherspace)

where the good words come from sometimes.

Stan snatched the album from his hands and slammed it shut. He held it closed with both hands, the tendons standing out along the inner surfaces of his wrists and forearms. He looked around at the others with eyes that were nearly insane. 'No,' he said rapidly. 'No, no, no.'

And suddenly Bill found he was more concerned with Stan's repeated denials than with the clown, and he understood that this was exactly the sort of reaction the clown had hoped to provoke, because . . .

Because maybe It's scared us . . . really scared for the first time in Its long, long life.

He grabbed Stan and shook him twice, hard, holding onto his shoulders. Stan's teeth clicked together and he dropped the album. Mike picked it up and put it aside in a hurry, not liking to touch it after what he had seen. But it was still his father's, and he understood intuitively that his father would never see in it what he had just seen.

'No,' Stan said softly.

'Yes,' Bill said.

'No,' Stan said again.

'Yes. Wea-a-all — '

'No.'

' — a-a-all suh –haw it, Stan,' Bill said. He looked at the others.

'Yes,' Ben said.

'Yes,' Richie said.

'Yes,' Mike said. 'Oh my God, yes.'

'Yes,' Bev said.

'Yes,' Eddie managed, gasping it out of his rapidly closing throat.

Bill looked at Stan, demanding with his eyes that Stan look back at him. 'Duh-don't let it g-g-get y-you, man,' Bill said. 'Yuh-you suh-saw it, t-t-too.'

'I didn't want to!' Stan wailed. Sweat stood out on his brow in an oily sheen.

'But y-y-you duh-duh-did.'

Stan looked at the others, one by one. He ran his hands through his short hair and fetched up a great, shuddering sigh. His eyes seemed to clear of that lowering madness that had so disturbed Bill.

'Yes,' he said. 'Yes. Okay. Yes. That what you want? Yes.'

Bill thought: We're still all together. It didn't stop us. We can still kill It. We can still kill It . . . if we're brave.

Bill looked around at the others and saw in each pair of eyes some measure of Stan's hysteria. Not quite as bad, but there.

'Y-Y-Yeah,' he said, and smiled at Stan. After a moment Stan smiled back and some of that horrible shocked look left his face. 'That's what I wuh-wuh-wanted, you weh-weh-wet end.'

'Beep-beep, Dumbo,' Stan said, and they all laughed. It was hysterical screaming laughter, but better than no laughter at all, Bill reckoned.

'C-C-Come on,' he said, because someone had to say something. 'Let's f-f-finish the clubhouse. What do you s-s-say?'

He saw the gratitude in their eyes and felt a measure of gladness for them . . . but their gratitude did little to heal his own horror. In fact, there was something in their gratitude which made him want to hate them. Would he never be able to express his own terror, lest the fragile welds that made them into one thing should let go? And even to think such a thing wasn't really fair, was it? Because in some measure at least he was using them — using his friends, risking their lives — to settle the score for his dead brother. And was even that the bottom? No, because George was dead, and if revenge could be exacted at all, Bill suspected it could only be exacted on behalf of the living. And what did that make him? A selfish little shit waving a tin sword and trying to make himself look like King Arthur?

Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up. His resolve was still strong, but it was a bitter resolve. Bitter.

CHAPTER 1 5

The Smoke-Hole

1

Richie Tozier pushes his glasses up on his nose (already the gesture feels perfectly familiar, although he has worn contact lenses for twenty years) and thinks with some amazement that the atmosphere has changed in the room while Mike recalled the incident with the bird out at the Ironworks and reminded them about his father's photograph album and the picture that had moved.

Richie had felt a mad, exhilarating kind of energy growing in the room. He had done cocaine nine or ten times over the last couple of years — at parties, mostly; coke wasn't something you wanted just lying around your house if you were a bigga-time disc jockey — and the feel was something like that, but not exactly. This feeling was purer, more of a mainline high. He thought he recognized the feeling from his childhood, when he had felt it every day and had come to take it merely as a matter of course. He supposed that, if he had ever thought about that deep-running aquifer of energy as a kid (he could not recall that he ever had), he would have simply dismissed it as a fact of life, something that would always be there, like the color of his eyes or his disgusting hammertoes.

Well, that hadn't turned out to be true. The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself — that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn't go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that's the scary part. How you don't stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown's trick balloons with the Burma-Shave slogans on the sides. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air out of a tire. And one day you looked in the mirror and there was a grownup looking back at you. You could go on wearing blue-jeans, you could keep going to Springsteen and Seger concerts, you could dye your hair, but that was a grownup's face in the mirror just the same. It all happened while you were asleep, maybe, like a visit from the Tooth Fairy.

No, he thinks. Not the Tooth Fairy. The Age Fairy.

He laughs aloud at the stupid extravagance of this-image, and when Beverly looks at him questioningly, he waves a hand at her. 'Nothing, babe, he says. 'Just thinkin me thinks.'

But now that energy is back. No, not all the way back — not yet, anyway — but coming back. And it's not just him; he can feel it filling the room. Mike looks okay to Richie for the first time since they all got together for that hideous lunch out by the mall. When Richie walked into the lobby and saw Mike sitting there with Ben and Eddie, he thought, shocked: There's a man who's going crazy, getting ready to commit suicide, maybe. But that look isgone now. Not just sublimated; gone. Richie has sat right here and watched the last of it slip out of Mike's face while he relived the experience of the bird and the album. He's been energised. And it is the same with all of them. Its in their faces, their voices, their gestures.

Eddie pours himself 'another gin-and-prune juice. Bill knocks back some bourbon, and Mike cracks another beer. Beverly glances up at the balloons Bill has tethered to the microfilm recorder at the main desk and finishes her third screwdriver in a hurry. They have

all been drinking pretty enthusiastically, but none of them are drunk. Richie doesn't know where that energy he feels is coming from, but its not out of a liquor bottle.

DERRY NIGGERS GET THE BIRD : Blue