Beverly did not hear them, precisely; that was not what made her turn her head as Henry Bowers closed the distance. Bent-kneed, shuffling, a frozen grin on his face, Henry was as

silent as an India n. No; it was simply a feeling, too clear and direct and powerful to be denied, of

3

The Derry Public Library – 1:55 A.M.

being watched.

Mike Hanlon laid his pen aside and looked across the shadowy inverted bowl of the library's main room. He saw islands of light thrown by the hanging globes; he saw books fading into dimness; he saw the iron staircases making their graceful trellised spirals up to the stacks. He saw nothing out of place.

All the same, he did not believe he was alone in here. Not anymore.

After the others were gone, Mike had cleaned up with a care that was only habit. He was on autopilot, his mind a million miles — and twenty-seven years — away. He dumped ashtrays, threw away the empty liquor bottles (putting a layer of waste over them so that Carole wouldn't be shocked), and the returnable cans in a box behind his desk. Then he got the broom and swept up the remains of the gin bottle Eddie had broken.

When the table was clean, he had gone into the Periodicals Room and picked up the scattered magazines. As he did these simple chores, his mind sifted the stories they had told — concentrating the most, perhaps, on what they had left out. They believed they remembered everything; he thought that Bill and Beverly almost did. But there was more. It would come to them . . . if it allowed them the time. In 1958, there had been no chance for preparation. They had talked endlessly — their talk interrupted only by the rockfight and that one act of group heroism at 29 Neibolt Street — and might, in the end, have done no more than talk. Then August 14th had come, and Henry and his friends had simply chased them into the sewers.

Maybe I should have told them, he thought, putting the last of the magazines back in their places. But something spoke strongly against the idea — the voice of the Turtle, he supposed. Perhaps that was part of it, and perhaps that sense of circularity was part of it, too. Maybe that last act was going to repeat itself, in some updated fashion, as well. He had put flashlights and miner's helmets carefully by against tomorrow; he had the blueprints of the Derry sewer and drain systems neatly rolled up and held with rubber bands in that same closet. But, when they were kids, all their talk and all their plans, half-baked or otherwise, had come to nothing in the end; in the end they had simply been chased into the drains, hurled into the confrontation which had followed. Was that going to happen again ? Faith and power, he had come to believe, were interchangeable. Was the final truth even simpler? That no act of faith was possible until you were rudly pushed out into the screaming middle of things like a newborn child skydiving chutelessly out of his mother's womb? Once you were falling, you were forced to believe in the chute, into existence, weren't you? Pulling the ring as you fell became your final statement on the subject, one way or the other.

Jesus Christ, it's Fulton Sheen in blackface, Mike thought, and laughed a little.

Mike cleaned, neatened, thought his thoughts, while another part of his brain expected that he would finish and finally find himself tired enough to go home and sleep for a few hours. But when he finally did finish, he found himself as wide awake as ever. So he had gone to the single closed stack behind his office, unlocking the wire gate with a key from his ring and letting himself in. This stack, supposedly fireproof when the vault-type door was closed and locked, contained the library's valuable first editions, books signed by writ ers long since dead (among the signed editions were Moby Dick and Whitman's Leaves of Grass), historical matter relating to the town, and the personal papers of the few writers who had lived and

worked in Derry. Mike hoped, if all of this ended well, to persuade Bill to leave his manuscripts to the Derry Public library. Walking down the third aisle of the stack beneath tin-shaded light –bulbs, smelling the familiar library scents of must and dust and cinnimony, ageing paper, he thought: When I die, I guess I'll go with a library card in one hand and an OVERDUE stamp in the other. Well, maybe that's better than dying with a gun in your hand, nigger.

He stopped halfway down this third aisle. His dog-eared steno notebook, which contained the jotted tales of Derry and his own troubled wanderings, was tucked between Fricke's OldDerry-Town and Michaud's History of Derry. He had pushed the notebook so far back it was nearly invisible. No one would stumble across it unless they were looking for it.

Mike took it and went back to the table where they had held their meeting, pausing to turn off the lights in the closed stack and to re-lock the wire mesh. He sat down and flipped through the pages he had written, thinking what a strange, crippled affidavit he had created: half-history, half-scandal, part diary, part confessional. He had not entered since April 6th. Have to get a new book soon, he thought, thumbing the few blank pages that were left. He thought bemusedly for a moment of Margaret Mitchell's first draft of Gone with the Wind, written in longhand in stacks and stacks and stacks of school composition books. Then he uncapped his pen and wrote May 31st two lines below the end of his last entry. He paused, looking vaguely across the empty library, and then began to write about everything that had happened during the last three days, beginning with his telephone call to Stanley Uris.

He wrote carefully for fifteen minutes, and then his concentration began to come unravelled. He paused more and more frequently. The image of Stan Uris's severed head in the refrigerator tried to intrude, Stan's bloody head, the mouth open and full of feathers, falling out of the refrigerator and rolling across the floor toward him. He banished it with an effort and went on writing. Five minutes later he jerked upright and whirled around, convinced he would see that head rolling across the old black and red tiles of the main floor, eyes as glassy and avid as the eyes in the mounted head of a deer. There was nothing. No head, no sound except the muffled drum of his own heart.

Got to get ahold of yourself, Mikey. It's the jim-jams, that's all. Nothing else to it.

But it was no use. The words began to get away from him, the thoughts seemed to dangle just out of reach. There was a pressure on the back of his neck, and it seemed to grow heavier.

Being watched.

He put his pen down and got up from the table. 'Is anyone here?' he called, and his voice echoed back from the rotunda, giving him a jolt. He licked his lips and tried again. 'Bill? . . . Ben?'

Bill-ill-ill . . . Ben-en-en . . .

Suddenly Mike decided he wanted to be home. He would simply take the notebook with him. He reached for it . . . and heard a faint sliding footstep.

He looked up again. Pools of light surrounded by deepening lagoons of shadow. Nothing else . . . at least nothing he could see. He waited, heart beating hard.

The footstep came again, and this time he pinpointed the location. The glassed-in passageway that connected the adult library to the Children's Library. In there. Someone. Something.

Moving quietly, Mike walked across to the checkout desk. The double doors leading into the passageway were held open by wooden chocks, and he could see a little way in. He could see what looked like feet, and with sudden swooning horror he wondered if maybe Stan had come after all, if maybe Stan was going to step out of the shadows with his bird encyclopedia in one hand, his face white, his lips purple, his wrists and forearms cut open. I finally came,