Beverly was pressed against him, trembling. Bill put an arm around her. They all looked at him, their eyes huge and bright in the dimness, the long table where they had sat, littered with empty bottles, glasses, and overflowing ashtrays, a little island of light.

'That's enough,' Bill said huskily. 'Enough entertainment for one evening. We'll save the ballroom dancing for another time.'

'I remembered,' Beverly said. She looked up at Bill, her eyes huge, her pale cheeks wet. 'I remembered everything. My father finding out about you guys. Running. Bowers and Criss and Huggins. How I ran. The tunnel . . . the birds . . . It . . . I remember everything.'

'Yeah,' Richie said. 'I do, too.'

Eddie nodded. 'The pumping-station — '

Bill said, 'And now Eddie — '

'Go back now,' Mike said. 'Get some rest. It's late.'

'Walk with us, Mike,' Beverly said.

'No. I have to lock up. And I have to write a few things down . . . the minutes of the meeting, if you like. I won't be long. Go ahead.'

They moved toward the door, not talking much. Bill and Beverly were together, Eddie, Richie, and Ben behind them. Bill held the door for her and she murmured thanks. As she went out onto the wide granite steps, Bill thought how young she looked, how vulnerable . . . He was dismally aware that he might be falling in love with her again. He tried to think of Audra but Audra seemed far away. She would be sleeping in their house in Fleet now as the sun came up and the milkman began his rounds.

Derry's sky had clouded over again, and a low groundfog lay across the empty street in thick runners. Further up the street, the Derry Community House, narrow, tall, Victorian, brooded in blackness. Bill thought And whatever walked in Community House, walked alone. He had to stifle a wild cackle. Their footfalls seemed very loud. Beverly's hand touched his and Bill took it gratefully.

'It started before we were ready,' she said.

'Would we eh-eh-ever have been r-ready?'

'You would have been, Big Bill.'

The touch of her hand was suddenly both wonderful and necessary. He wondered what it would be like to touch her breasts for the second time in his life, and suspected that before this long night was over he would know. Fuller now, mature . . . and his hand would find hair

when he cupped the swelling of her mons veneris. He thought: I loved you, Beverly . . . I loveyou. Ben loved you . . . he laves you. We loved you then . . . we love you now. We better, because it's starting. No way out now.

He glanced behind and saw the library half a block away. Richie and Eddie were on the top step; Ben was standing at the bottom, looking after them. His hands were stuffed in his pockets, his shoulders were slumped, and seen through the drifting lens of the low fog, he might almost have been eleven again. If he had been able to send Ben a thought, Bill would have sent this one: It doesn't matter, Ben. The love is what matters, the caring . . . it's always the desire, never the time. Maybe that's all we get to take with us when we go out of the blue and into the black. Cold comfort, maybe, but better than no comfort at all.

'My father knew,' Beverly said suddenly. 'I came home one day from the Barrens and he just knew. Did I ever tell you what he used to say to me when he was mad?'

'What?'

'"I worry about you, Bevvie." That's what he used to say. "I worry a lot. "' She laughed and shivered at the same time. 'I think he meant to hurt me, Bill. I mean . . . he'd hurt me before, but that last time was different. He was . . . well, in many ways he was a strange man. I loved him. I loved him very much, but — '

She looked at him, perhaps wanting him to say it for her. He wouldn't; it was something she was going to have to say for herself, sooner or later. Lies and self-deceptions had become a ballast they could not afford.

'I hated him, too,' she said, and her hand bore down convulsively upon Bill's for a long second. 'I never told that to anyone in my life before. I thought God would strike me dead if I ever said it out loud.'

'Say it again, then.'

'No, I– '

'Go on. It'll hurt, but maybe it's festered in there long enough. Say it.'

'I hated my dad,' she said, and began to sob helplessly. 'I hated him, I was scared of him, I hated him, I could never be a good enough girl to suit him and I hated him, I did, but I loved him, too.'

He stopped and held her tight. Her arms went around him in a panicky grip. Her tears wet the side of his neck. He was very conscious of her body, ripe and firm. He moved his torso away from hers slightly, not wanting her to feel the erection he was getting . . . but she moved against him again.

'We'd spent the morning down there,' she said, 'playing tag or something like that. Something harmless. We hadn't even talked about It that day, at least not then . . . we usually talked about It every day, at some point, though. Remember?'

'Yes,' he said. 'At some p-p-point. I remember.'

'It was overcast . . . hot. We played most of the morning. I went home around eleven-thirty. I thought I'd have a sandwich and a bowl of soup after I took a shower. And then I'd go back and play some more. My parents were both working. But he was there. He was home. He

2

Lower Main Street / 11:30 A.M.

threw her across the room before she had even gotten all th e way through the door. A startled scream was jerked out of her and then cut off as she hit the wall with shoulder-numbing force. She collapsed onto their sagging sofa, looking around wildly. The door to the front hall banged shut. Her father had been standing behind it.

'I worry about you, Bevvie,' he said. 'Sometimes I worry a lot. You know that. I tell you that, don't I? You bet I do.'

'Daddy what — '

He was walking slowly toward her across the living room, his face thoughtful, sad, deadly. She didn't want to see that last, but it was there, like the blind shine of dirt on still water. He was nibbling reflectively on a knuckle of his right hand. He was dressed in his khakis, and when she glanced down she saw that his high-topped shoes were le aving tracks on her mother's carpet. I'll have to get the vacuum out, she thought incoherently. Vacuum that up. If he leaves me able to vacuum. If he —

It was mud .Black mud. Her mind sideslipped alarmingly. She was back in the Barrens with Bill, Richie, Eddie, and the others. There was black, viscous mud like the kind on Daddy's shoes down there in the Barrens, in the swampy place where the stuff Richie called bamboo stood in a skeletal white grove. When the wind blew the stalks rattled together hollo wly, producing a sound like voodoo drums, and had her father been down in the Barrens? Had her father —

WHAP!

His hand rocketed down in a wide sweeping orbit and struck her face. Her head thudded back against the wall. He hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked at her with that expression of deadly disconnected curiosity. She felt a trickle of blood running warmly from the left corner of her lower lip.

'I have seen you getting big,' he said, and she thought he would say something more, but for the time being that seemed to be all.

'Daddy, what are you talking about?' she asked in a low trembling voice.

'If you lie to me, I'll beat you within an inch of your life, Bevvie,' he said, and she realized with horror that he wasn't looking at her; he was looking at the Currier and Ives picture over her head, on the wall above the sofa. Her mind sideslipped crazily again and she was four, sitting in the bathtub with her blue plastic boat and her Popeye soap; her father, so big and so well-loved, was kneeling beside her, dressed in gray twill pants and a strappy tee-shirt, a washcloth in one hand and a glass of orange soda in the other, soaping her back and saying, Lemme see those ears, Bevvie; your ma needs taters for supper. And she could hear her small self giggling, looking up at his slightly grizzled face, which she had then believed must be eternal.