'All right,' her mom said. 'I just wanted to be sure. Because if your dad caught you going on dates at your age, he'd be mad.' Almost as an afterthought she added: 'I would be, too.'

'Yeah, I know,' Bev said, still looking into the dining room. She did know; yet here she was, not with one boy but six of them, in a house where the parents were gone. She saw Ben looking at her anxiously, and she sketched a smiling little salute at him. He blushed but gave her the little salute right back.

'Are any of your girlfriends there?'

What girlfriends, Mamma?

'Um, Patty O'Hara's here. And Ellie Geiger, I think. She's playing shuffle –board downstairs.' The facility with which the lies came from her lips made her ashamed. She wished she were talking to her father; she would have been more scared but less ashamed. She supposed she really wasn't a very good girl.

'I love you, Mamma,' she said.

'Same goes back to you, Bev.' Her mother paused briefly and added: 'Be careful. The paper says there may be another one. A boy named Patrick Hockstetter. He's missing. Did you know him, Bevvie?'

She closed her eyes briefly. 'No, Mom. '

'Well . . . goodbye, then.'

'Bye.'

She joined the others at the table and for an hour they played Monopoly. Stan was the big winner.

'Jews are very good at making money,' Stan said, putting a hotel on Atlantic Avenue and two more green houses on Ventnor Avenue. 'Everybody knows that.'

'Jesus, make me Jewish,' Ben said promptly, and everyone laughed. Ben was almost broke.

Beverly glanced across the table from time to time at Bill, noting his clean hands, his blue eyes, the fine red hair. As he moved the little silver shoe he was using as a marker around the board, she thought, If he held my hand, I think I'd be so glad I'd probably die. A warm light seemed to glow briefly in her chest and she smiled secretly down at her hands.

6

The evening's finale was almost anticlirnactic. Ben took one of Zack's chisels from the shelf and used a hammer to strike the molds on the cut-lines. They opened easily. Two small silver balls fell out. In one they could faintly see part of a date: 925. In the other, wavery lines Beverly thought were the remnants of Lady Liberty's hair. They looked at them without speaking for a moment, and then Stan picked one up.

'Pretty small,' he said.

'So was the rock in David's sung when he went up against Goliath,' Mike said. 'They look powerful to me.'

Ben found himself nodding. They did to him, as well.

'We're all d-d-done?' Bill asked.

'All done,' Ben said. 'Here.' He tossed the second slug to Bill, who was so surprised he almost fumbled it.

The slugs went around the circle. Each of them looked closely at both, marvelling at their roundness, weight, actuality. When they came back to Ben, he held them in his hand and then looked at Bill. 'What do we do with them now?'

'G-G-Give them to B-Beverly.'

'No!'

He looked at her. His face was kind enough, but stern. 'B– B– Bev, we've been thruh– t h r o u g h this a-a-already, and — '

'Ill do it,' she said. 'I'll shoot the goddamned things when the time comes, If it comes. I'll probably get us all killed, but I'll do it. I don't want to take them home, though. One of my

(father)

parents might find them. Then I'd be in dutch.'

'Don't you have a secret hiding place?' Richie asked. 'Criminy, I got four or five.'

'I've got a place,' Beverly said. There was a small slit in the bottom of her box-spring where she sometimes stashed cigarettes, comic books, and, just lately, film and fashion magazines. 'But nothing I'd trust for something like this. You keep them, Bill. Until it's time, anyway, you keep them.'

'Okay,' Bill said mildly, and just then lights splashed into the driveway. 'Holy cruh-crow, they're e-e-early. L-Let's get out of h-here.'

They were just sitting down around the Monopoly board again when Sharon Denbrough opened the kitchen door.

Richie rolled his eyes and mimed wiping sweat from his forehead; the others laughed heartily. Richie had Gotten Off A Good One.

A moment later she came in. 'Your dad's waiting fo r your friends in the car, Bill.'

'O-O-Okay, M-Mom,' Bill said. 'W-We were juh-just f-f-finishing, a-anyway.'

'Who won?' Sharon asked, smiling bright-eyed at Bill's little friends. The girl was going to be very pretty, she thought. She supposed in another year or two the children would have to be chaperoned if there were going to be girls instead of just the regular gang of boys. But surely it was still too soon to worry about sex rearing its ugly head.

'St-Stan wuh-wuh-won,' Bill said. 'Juh-Juh –Jews are very g-g-good at m-making money.'

'Bill!' She cried, horrified and blushing . . . and then she looked around at them, amazed, as they roared with laughter, Stan included. Amazement turned to something like fear (although she said nothing of this to her husband later, in bed). There was a feeling in the air, like static electricity, only somehow much more powerful, much more scary. She felt that if she touched any of them, she would receive a walloping shock. What's happened to them? she thought, dismayed, and perhaps she even opened her mouth to say something like that. Then Bill was saying he was sorry (but still with that devilish glint in his eye), and Stan was saying that was all right, it was just a joke they laid on him from time to time, and she found herself too confused to say anything at all.

But she felt relieved when the children were gone and her own puzzling, stuttering son had gone to his room and turned off the light.

7

The day that the Losers' Club finally met It in face-to-face combat, the day It almost had Ben Hanscom's guts for garters, was July 25th, 1958. It was hot and muggy and still. Ben remembered the weather clearly enough; it had been the last day of the hot weather. After that day, a long spell of cool and cloudy had come in.

They arrived at 29 Neibolt Street around ten that morning, Bill riding Richie double on Silver, Ben with his ample buttocks spilling over either side of the sagging seat on his Raleigh. Beverly came down Neibolt Street on her girl's Schwinn, her red hair held back from her forehead by a green band. It streamed out behind her. Mike came by himself, and about five minutes later Stan and Eddie walked up together.

'H-H-How's your a-a-arm, Eh-Eh –Eddie?'

'Aw, not too bad. Hurts if I roll over on that side while I'm sleeping. Did you bring the stuff?'

There was a canvas-wrapped bundle in Silver's bike-basket. Bill took it out and unwrapped it. He handed the slingshot to Beverly, who took it with a little grimace but said nothing. There was also a tin Sucrets box in the bundle. Bill opened it and showed them the two silver balls. They looked at them silently, gathered close together on the balding lawn on 29 Neibolt Street — a lawn where only weeds seemed to grow. Bill, Richie, and Eddie had seen the house before; the others hadn't, and they looked at it curiously.

The windows look tike eyes, Stan thought, and his hand went to the paperback book in his back pocket. He touched it for luck. He carried the book with him almost everywhere — it was M. K. Handey's Guide to North American Birds. They look like dirty blind eyes. It stinks, Beverly thought. I can smell it — but not with my nose, not exactly.

Mike thought, It's like that time out where the Ironworks used to be. It has the same feel . . . as if it's telling us to step on in.

This is one of Its places, all right, Ben thought. One of the places like the Morlock holes, where It goes out and comes back in. And It knows we're out here. It's waiting for us to come in.

'Yuh-yuh –you all still want to?' Bill asked.