'You'd feel that . . . that touch, and you'd jerk away from it, and turn around, and there Patrick would be, grinning with those big rubbery lips. He had a pencil-box — '

'Full of flies,' Richie says suddenly. 'Sure. He'd kill em with this green ruler he had and then put em in his pencil-box. I even remember what it looked like — red, with a wavy white plastic cover that slid open and closed.'

Eddie is nodding.

'You'd jerk away and he'd grin and then maybe he'd open his pencil-box so you could see the dead flies inside,' Beverly says. 'And the worst thing-the horrible thing — was the way

he'd smile and never say anything. Mrs Douglas knew. Greta Bowie told on him, and I think Sally Mueller said something once, too. But . . . I think Mrs Douglas was scared of him, too.'

Ben has rocked back on the rear legs of his chair, and his hands are laced behind his neck. She still cannot believe how lean he is. 'I'm pretty sure you're right,' he says.

'Wh-What h-happened to h-h-him, Beverly?' Bill asks.

She swallows again, trying to fight off the nightmarish power of what she saw that day in the Barrens, her roller skates tied together and hung over her shoulder, one knee a stinging net of pain from a fall she had taken on Saint Crispin's Lane, another of the short tree-lined streets that dead-ended where the land fell (and still falls) sharply into the Barrens. She remembers (oh these memories, when they come, are so clear and so powerful) that she was wearing a pair of denim shorts — really too short, they came only to just below the hem of her panties. She had become more conscious of her body over the last year — over the last six months, actually, as it began to curve and become more womanly. The mirror was one reason for this heightened consciousness, of course, but not the main one; the main one was that her father seemed even sharper just lately, more apt to use his slapping hand or even his fists. He seemed restless, almost caged, and she was more and more nervous when she was around him, more and more on her mark. It was as if there was a smell they made between them, a smell that wasn't there when she was in the apartment alone, one that had never been there when they were in it together — not until this summer. And when Mom was gone it was worse. If there was a smell, some smell, then he knew it too, maybe, because Bev saw less and less of him as the hot weather wore on, partly because of his summer bowling league, partly because he was helping his friend Joe Tammerly fix cars . . . but she suspects it was partly that smell, the one they made between them, neither of them meaning to but mak ing it just the same, as helpless to stop it as either was helpless to stop sweating in July.

The vision of the birds, hundreds and thousands of them, descending on the roofpeaks of houses, on telephone wires, on TV aerials, intervenes again.

'And poison ivy,' she says aloud.

'W-W-What?' Bill asks.

'Something about poison ivy,' she says slowly, looking at him. 'But it wasn't. It just felt like poison ivy. Mike — ?'

'Never mind,' Mike says. 'It will come. Tell us what you do remember, Bev.'

I remember the blue shorts, she would tell them, and how faded they were getting; how tight around my hips and butt. I had half a pack of Lucky Strikes in one pocket and the Bullseye in the other —

'Do you remember the Bullseye?' she asks Richie, but they all nod.

'Bill gave it to me,' she says. 'I didn't want it, but it . . . he . . . ' She smiles at Bill, a little wanly. 'You couldn't say no to Big Bill, that was all. So I had it and that's why I was out by myself that day. To practice. I still didn't think I'd have the guts to use it when the time came. Except . . . I used it that day. I had to. I killed one of them . . . one of the parts of It. It was terrible. Even now it's hard for me to think of. And one of the others got me. Look.'

She raises her arm and turns it over so they can all see a puckery scar on the roundest part of her upper forearm. It looks as if a hot circular object about the size of a Havana cigar had been pressed against her skin. It is slightly sunken, and looking at it gives Mike Hanlon a chill. This is one of the parts of the story which, like Eddie's unwilling heart –to-heart with Keene, he has suspected but never actually heard.

'You were right about one thing, Richie,' she says. 'That Bullseye was a killer. I was scared of it, but I sorta loved it, too.'

Richie laughs and claps her on the back. 'Shit, I knew that back then, you stupid skirt.'

'You did? Really?'

'Yeah, really,' he says. 'It was something in your eyes, Bevvie.'

'I mean, it looked like a toy, but it was real. You could blow holes in things.'

'And you blew a hole in something with it that day,' Ben muses.

She nods.

'Was it Patrick you — '

'No, God no!' Beverly says. 'It was the other . . . wait.' She crushes out her cigarette, sips her drink, and gets herself under control again. Finally she is. Well . . . no. But she has a feeling it's the closest she's going to get tonight. 'I was roller-skating, you see, and I fell down and gave myself a good scrape. Then I decided I'd go down to the Barrens and practice. I went by the clubhouse first to see if you guys were there. You weren't. Just that smoky smell. You guys remember how long that place went on smelling of smoke?'

They all nod, smiling.

'We never really did get the smell out, did we?' Ben says.

'So then I headed down to the dump,' she says, 'because that's where we had the . . . the tryouts, I guess you'd call them, and I knew there'd be lots of things to shoot at. Maybe even, you know, rats.' She pauses. There's a fine misty sweat on her forehead now. 'That's what I really wanted to shoot at,' she says finally. 'Something that was alive. Not a seagull — I knew I couldn't shoot a gull — but a rat . . . I wanted to see if I could.

'I'm glad I came from the Kansas Street side instead of the Old Cape side, though, because there wasn't much cover over there by the railroad embankment. They would have seen me and God knows what would have happened then.'

'Who would have suh-suh-seen y-you?'

'Them,' Beverly says. 'Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Belch Huggins, and Patrick Hockstetter. They were down in the dump and —

Suddenly, amazing all of them, she begins to giggle like a child, her cheeks turning rose-red. She giggles until tears stand in her eyes.

'What the hell, Bev,' Rickie says. 'Let us in on the joke.'

'Oh it was a joke, all right,' she says. 'It was a joke, but I think they might have killed me if they knew I'd seen.'

'I remember now!' Ben cries, and he begins to laugh, too. 'I remember you telling us!'

Giggling wildly, Beverly says, 'They had their pants down and they were lighting farts.'

There is an instant of thunderstruck silence and then they all begin to laugh — the sound echoes through the library.

Thinking of exactly how to tell them of Patrick Hockstetter's death, the thing she fixes on first is how approaching the town dump from the Kansas Street side was like entering some weird asteroid belt. There was a rutted din track (a town road, actually; it even had a name, Old Lyme Street) that ran from Kansas Street to the dump, the only actual road into the Barrens — the city's dump trucks used it. Beverly walked near Old Lyme Street but didn't take it — she had grown more cautious — she supposed all of them had — since Eddie's arm had been broken. Especially when she was alone.

She wove her way through the heavy undergrowth, skirting a patch of poison ivy with its reddish oily leaves, smelling the dump's smoky rot, hearing the seagulls. On her left, through occasional breaks in the foliage, she could see Old Lyme Street.