'He was great that day,' Ben says. 'Stan and his birds.'

A chuckle stirs through them, and they look at the chair where Stan would have been in a rightful sane world where all the good guys won all of the time. I miss him, Ben thinks. God, how I miss him! He says, 'You remember that day, Richie, when you told him you heard somewhere he killed Christ, and Stan says totally deadpan, "I think that was my father"?'

'I remember,' Richie says in a voice almost too low to hear. He takes his handkerchief out of his back pocket, removes his glasses, wipes his eyes, then puts his glasses back on. He puts away the handkerchief and without looking up from his hands he says, 'Why don't you just tell it, Ben?'

'It hurts, doesn't it?'

'Yeah,' Richie says, his voice so thick it is hard to understand him. 'Why, sure. It hurts.'

Ben looks around at them, then nods. 'All right, then. One more story before twelve. Just to keep us warm. Bill and Richie had the idea of the bullets — '

'No,' Richie demurs. 'Bill thought of it first, and he got nervous first.'

'I just started to wuh-wuh-worry — '

'Doesn't really matter, I guess,' Ben says. 'The three of us spent some heavy library time that July. We were trying to find out how to make silver bullets. I had the silver; four silver dollars that were my father's. Then Bill got nervous, thinking about what kind of shape we'd be in if we had a misfire with some kind of monster coming down our throats. And when we saw how good Beverly was with that slingshot of his, we ended up using one of my silver dollars to make slugs instead. We got the stuff together and all of us we went down to Bill's place. Eddie, you were there — '

'I told my mother we were going to play Monopoly,' Eddie says. 'My arm was really hurting, but I had to walk. That's how pissed she was at me. And every time I heard someone behind me on the sidewalk I'd whip around, thinking it was Bowers. It didn't help the pain.'

Bill grins. 'And what we did was stand around and watch Ben make the ammo. I think Ben r-really could have made sil-silver bullets.'

'Oh, I'm not so sure of that,' Ben says, although he still is. He remembers how the dusk was drawing down outside (Mr Denbrough had promised them all rides home), the sound of the crickets in the grass, the first lightning-bugs blinking outside the windows. Bill had carefully set up the Monopoly board in the dining room, making it look as if the game had been going on for an hour or more.

He remembers that, an d the clean pool of yellow light falling on Zack's worktable. He remembers Bill saying, 'We gotta be c –c-

2

careful. I don't want to leave a muh-muh-mess. My dad'll be — ' He spat out a number of 'p's, and finally managed to say 'pissed off.'

Richie made a burlesque of wiping his cheek. 'Do you serve towels with your showers, Stuttering Bill?'

Bill made as if to hit him. Richie cowered, shrieking in his Pickaninny Voice.

Ben took very little notice of them. He watched Bill lay out the implements and tools one by one in the light. Part of his mind was wishing that someday' he might have such a nice worktable as this himself. Most of it was centered directly on the job ahead. Hot as difficult as making silver bullets would have been, but he would still be careful. There was no excuse for sloppy workmanship. This was not something he had been taught or told, just something he knew.

Bill had insisted that Ben make the slugs, just as he continued to insist that Beverly would be the one carrying the Bullseye. These things could have and had been discussed, but it was only twenty-seven years later, telling the story, that Ben realized no one had even suggested that a silver bullet or slug might not stop a monster — they had the weight of what seemed like a thousand horror movies on their side.

'Okay,' Ben said. He cracked his knuckles and then looked at Bill. 'You got the molds?'

'Oh!' Bill jumped a little. 'H-H-Here.' He reached into his pants pocket and brought out his handkerchief. He put it on the workbench and unfolded it. There were two dull steel balls inside, each with a small hole in it. They were bearing molds.

After deciding on slugs instead of bullets, Bill and Richie had gone back to the library and had researched how bearings were made. 'You boys are so busy,' Mrs Starrett had said. 'Bullets one week and bearings the next! And it's summer vacation, too!'

'We like to stay sharp,' Richie said. 'Right, Bill?'

'Ruh-Ruh-Right.'

It turned out that making bearings was a cinch, once you had the molds. The only real question was where to get them. A couple of discreet questions to Zack Denbrough had taken care of that . . . and none of the Losers were too surprised to find that the only machine-shop in Derry where such molds might be obtained was Kitchener Precision Tool & Die. The Kitchener who owned and ran it was a great-great-grandnephew of the brothers who had owned the Kitchener Ironworks.

Bill and Richie had gone over together with all the cash the Losers had been able to raise on short notice — ten dollars and fifty-nine cents — in Bill's pocket. When Bill asked how much a couple of two-inch bearing molds might cost, Carl Kitchener — who looked like a veteran boozehound and smelled like an old horse-blanket — asked what a couple of kids wanted with bearing molds. Richie let Bill speak, knowing things would probably go easier that way — children made fun of Bill's stutter; adults were embarrassed by it. Sometimes this was surprisingly helpful.

Bill got halfway through the explanation he and Richie had worked out on the way over — something about a model windmill for next year's science project — when Kitchener waved for him to shut up and quoted them the unbelievable price of fifty cents per mold.

Hardly able to believe their good fortune, Bill forked over a single dollar bill.

'Don't expect me to give you a bag,' Carl Kitchener said, eying them with the bloodshot contempt of a man who believes he has seen everything the world holds, most of it twice. 'You don't get no bag unless you spend at least five bucks.'

That's o-o-okay, suh-sir,' Bill said.

'And don't hang around out front,' Kitchener said. 'You both need haircuts.'

Outside Bill said: 'Y-Y-You ever nuh-hotice, Ruh-Richie, how guh-guh-grownups w-w-won't sell you a-a-anything except c-candy or cuh-cuh-homic books or m-maybe movie t– t-tickets without first they w-want to know what y-you want it f-for?'

'Sure,' Richie said.

'W-Why? Why ih-is that?'

'Because they think we're dangerous.' 'Y-Yeah? You thuh-thuh-think s-so?'

'Yeah,' Richie said, and then giggled. 'Let's hang around out front, want to? We'll put up our collars and sneer at people and let our hair grow.' 'Fuck y-you,' Bill said.

3

'Okay,' Ben said, looking at the molds carefully and then putting them down. 'Good. Now — '

They gave him a little more room, looking at him hopefully, the way a man with engine trouble who knows nothing about cars will look at a mechanic. Ben didn't notice their expressions. He was concentrating on the job.

'Gimme that shell,' he said, 'and the blowtorch.'

Bill handed a cut-down mortar shell to him. It was a war souvenir. Zack had picked it up five days after he and the rest of General Patton's army had crossed th e river into Germany. There had been a time, when Bill was very young and George was still in diapers, that his father had used it as an ashtray. Later he had quit smoking, and the mortar shell had disappeared. Bill had found it in the back of the garage just a week ago.

Ben put the mortar shell into Zack's vise, tightened it, and then took the blowtorch from Beverly. He reached into his pocket, brought out a silver dollar, and dropped it into the makeshift crucible. It made a hollow sound.