— econd, Ruh-Richie. There's a damn guh-guh –hood one on the b-back of your neh-neck.'

'Oh Christ,' Richie said. He hated mosquitoes. Little flying vampires, that's all they were when you got right down to the facts. 'Kill it, Big Bill.'

Bill swatted the back of Richie's neck.

'Ouch!'

'Suh-suh-see?'

Bill held his hand in front of Richie's face. There was a broken mosquito body in the center of an irregular patch of blood. My blood, Richie thought, which was shed for you and for many. 'Yeeick,' he said.

'D-Don't w-worry,' Bill said. 'Li'l fucker'll neh-never dance the tuh-tuh –tango again .'

They walked on, slapping at mosquitoes, waving at the clouds of noseeums attracted by something in the smell of their sweat — something which would years later be identified as 'pheromones.' Whatever they were.

' B i l l , w h e n y o u g o n n a t e l l t h e r e s t of em about the silver bullets?' Richie asked as they approached the clearing. In this case 'the rest of them' meant Bev, Eddie, Mike, and Stan — although Richie guessed Stan already had a good idea of what they were studying up on down at the Public Library. Stan was sharp — too sharp for his own good, Richie sometimes thought. The day Mike brought his father's album down to the Barrens Stan had almost flipped out. Richie had, in fact, been nearly convinced that they wouldn't see Stan again and the Losers' Club would become a sextet (a word Richie liked a lot, always with the emphasis on the first syllable). But Stan had been back the next day, and Richie had — respected him all the more for that. 'You going to tell them today?'

'Nuh-not t-today,' Bil l said.

'You don't think they'll work, do you?'

Bill shrugged, and Richie, who maybe understood Bill Denbrough better than anyone ever would until Audra Phillips, suspected all the things Bill might have said if not for the roadblock of his speech impediment: that kids making silver bullets was boys' book stuff, comic-book stuff . . . In a word, it was crap. Dangerous crap. They could try it, yeah. Ben Hanscom might even be able to bring it off, yeah. In a movie it would work, yeah. But . . .

'So?'

'I got an i-i-i-idea,' Bill said. 'Simpler. But only if Beh-Beh-Beverly — '

'If Beverly what?'

'Neh-hever mind.'

And Bill would say no more on the subject.

They came into the clearing. If you looked closely, you might have thought that the grass there had a slightly matted look — a slightly used look. You might even have thought that there was something a bit artificial — almost arranged — about the scatter of leaves and pine needles on top of the sods. Bill picked up a Ring-Ding wr apper — Ben's, almost certainly — and put it absently in his pocket.

The boys crossed to the center of the clearing . . . and a piece of ground about ten inches long by three inches wide swung up with a dirty squall of hinges, revealing a black eyelid. Eyes looked out of that blackness, giving Richie a momentary chill. But they were only Eddie Kaspbrak's eyes, and it was Eddie, whom he would visit in the hospital a week later, who intoned hollowly: 'Who's that trip-trapping on my bridge?'

Giggles from below, and a flashlight flicker.

'Thees ees the rurales, senhorr,' Richie said, squatting down, twirling an invisible mustache, and speaking in his Pancho Vanilla Voice.

'Yeah?' Beverly asked from below. 'Let's see your badges.'

'Batches'?' Richie cried, delighted. 'We dean need no stinkin batches!'

'Go to hell, Pancho,' Eddie replied, and slammed the big eyelid closed. There were more muffled giggles from below.

'Come out with your hands up!' Bill cried in a low, commanding adult voice. He began to tramp back and forth across the sod-covered cap of the clubhouse. He could see the ground springing up and down with his back-and –forth passage, but just barely; they had built well. 'You haven't got a chance!' he bellowed, seeing himself as fearless Joe Friday of the LAPD in his mind's eye. 'Come on out of there, punks! Or we'll come in SHOOTIN!'

He jumped up and down once to emphasize his point. Screams and giggles from below. Bill was smiling, unaware that Richie was looking at him wisely — looking at him not as one child looks at another but, in that brief moment, as an adult looks at a child.

He doesn't know that he doesn't always, Richie thought.

'Let them in, Ben, before they crash the roof in,' Bev said. A moment later a trapdoor flopped open like the hatch of a submarine. Ben looked out. He was flushed. Richie knew at once that Ben had been sitting next to Beverly.

Bill and Richie dropped down through the hatch and Ben closed it again. Then there they all were, sitting snug against board walls with their legs drawn up, their faces dimly revealed in the beam of Ben's flashlight.

'S-S-So wh-what's g-g-going o-on?' Bill asked.

'Not too much,' Ben said. He was indeed sitting next to Beverly, and his face looked happy as well as flushed. 'We were just — '

'Tell em, Ben,' Eddie interrupted. Tell em the story! See what they think.'

'Wouldn't do much for your asthma,' Stan told Eddie in his best someone-has-to-be-practical-here tone of voice.

Richie sat between Mike and Ben, holding his knees in his linked hands. It was delightfully cool down here, delightfully secret. Following the gleam of the flashlight as it moved from face to face, he temporarily forgot what had so astounded him outside only a minute ago. 'What are you talkin about?'

'Oh, Ben was telling us a story about this Indian ceremony,' Bev said. 'But Stan's right, it wouldn't be very good for your asthma, Eddie.' 'It might not bother it,' Eddie said, sounding — to his credit, Richie thought — only a little uneasy. 'Usually it's only when I get upset. Anyway, I'd like to try it.'

Try w-w-what?' Bill asked him.

'The Smoke-Hole Ceremony,' Eddie said.

'W-W-What's th-that?'

The beam of Ben's flashlight drifted upward and Richie followed it with his eyes. It tracked aimlessly across the wooden roof of their clubhouse as Ben explained. It crossed the gouged and splintered panels of the mahogany door the seven of them had carried back here from the dump three days ago — the day before the body of Jimmy Cullum was discovered. The thing Richie remembered about Jimmy Cullum, a quiet little boy who also wore spectacles, was that he liked to play Scrabble on rainy days. Not going to be playing Scrabble anymore, Richie thought, and shivered a little. In the dimness no one saw the shiver, but Mike Hanlon, sitting shoulder to shoulder with him, glanced at him curiously.

'Well, I got this book out of the library last week,' Ben was saying. 'Ghosts of the Great Plains, it's called, and it's all about the Indian tribes that lived out west a hundred and fifty years ago. The Paiutes and the Pawnees and the Kiowas and the Otoes and the Comanches. It

was really a good book. I'd love to go out there sometime to where they lived. Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah . . . '

'Shut up and tell about the Smoke-Hole Ceremony,' Beverly said, elbowing him.

'Sure,' he said. 'Right.' And Richie believed his response would have been the same if Beverly had given him the elbow and said, 'Drink the poison now, Ben, okay?'

'See, almost all those Indians had a special ceremony, and our clubhouse made me think of it. Whenever they had to make a big decision — whether to move on after the buffalo herds, or to find fresh water, or whether or not to fight their enemies — they'd dig a big hole in the ground and cover it up with branches, except for a little vent in the top.'

'The smuh-smuh-smoke-hole,' Bill said.

'Your quick mind never ceases to amaze me, Big Bill,' Richie said gravely. 'You ought to go on Twenty-One. I'll bet you could even beat ole Charlie Van Doren.'