The glove compartment flopped open, banging Henry's knees, and in the light of the small bulb inside he saw a bottle of Texas Driver, half-full. He took it out, opened it, and had himself a good shot. It went down like cool silk and hit his stomach like an explosion of lava. He shuddered all over, moaning and then began to feel a little better, a little more connected to the world.

'Thanks,' he said.

Belch's head turned toward him. Henry could hear the tendons in Belch's neck' the sound was like the scream of rusty screen-door hinges. Belch regarded him for a moment with a dead one-eyed stare, an d Henry realized for the first time that most of Belch's nose was gone. It looked like something had been at the ole Belcher's nose. Dog, maybe. Or maybe rats. Rats seemed more likely. The tunnels they had chased the little kids into that day had been full of rats.

Moving just as slowly, Belch's head turned toward the road again. Henry was glad. Ole Belch staring at him that way, well, Henry hadn't been able to dig it too much. There had been something in Belch's single sunken eye. Reproach? Anger? What?

There is a dead boy behind the wheel of this car.

Henry looked down at his arm and saw that huge goosebumps had formed there. He quickly had another snort from the bottle. This one hit a little easier and spread its warmth farther.

The Plymouth rolled down Up-Mile Hill and made its way around the counter-clockwise traffic circle . . . except at this time of night there was no traffic; all the traffic –lights had changed to yellow bunkers splashing the empty streets and closed buildings with st eady

pulses of light. It was so quiet that Henry could hear the relays clicking inside each light . . . or was that his imagination?

'Never meant to leave you behind that day, Belcher,' Henry said. 'I mean, if that was, you know, on your mind.'

That scream of dried tendons again. Belch looking at him again with his one sunken eye. And his lips stretched in a terrible grin that revealed gray-black gums which were growing their own garden of mold. What sort of a grin is that? Henry asked himself as the car purred silkily up Main Street, past Freese's on the one side, Nan's Luncheonette and the Aladdin Theater on the other. Is it a forgiving grin? An old –pals grin? Or is it the kind of grin that says I'm going to get you, Henry, I'm going to get you for running out on me and Vie? What kind of grin?

'You have to understand how it was,' Henry said, and then stopped. How had it been? It was all confused in his mind, the pieces jumbled up like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had just been dumped out on one of the shitty cardtables in the rec room at Jumper Hill. How had it been, exactly? They had followed the fatboy and the bitch back to Kansas Street and had waited back in the bushes, watching them climb up the embankment to the top. If they had disappeared from view, he and Victor and Belch would have dropped the stalking game and simply gone after them; two of them were better than none at all, and the rest would be along in time.

But they hadn't disappeared. They had simply leaned against the fence, talking and watching the street. Every now and then they would check down the slope into the Barrens, but Henry kept his two troops well out of sight.

The sky, Henry remembered, had become overcast, clouds moving in from the east, the air thickening. There would be rain that afternoon.

What had happened next? What —

A bony, leathery hand closed over his forearm and Henry screamed. He had been drifting away again into that cottony grayness, but Belch's dreadful touch and the dagger of pain in his stomach from the scream brought him back. He looked around and Belch's face was less than two inches from Henry's; he gasped in breath and wished he hadn't. The ole Belcher really had gone to seed. Henry was again reminded of tomatoes going quietly putrescent in some shadowy shed comer. His stomach roiled.

He remembered the end suddenly — the end for Belch and Vie, anyway. How something had come out of the darkness as they stood in a shaft with a sewer-grating at the top, w o n d e r i n g w h i c h w a y t o go next. Something . . . Henry hadn't been able to tell what. Until Victor shrieked, 'Frankenstein! It's Frankenstein!' And so it was, it was the Frankenstein monster, with bolts coming out of its neck and a deep stitched scar across its forehead, lurching along in shoes like a child's blocks.

'Frankensteinl' Vie had screamed, 'Fr — And then Vic's head was gone, Vic's head was flying across the shaftway to strike the stonework of the far side with a sour sticky thud. The monster's watery yellow eyes had fallen on Henry, and Henry had frozen. His bladder let go and he felt warmth flood down his legs.

The creature lurched toward him, and Belch . . . Belch had . . .

'Listen, I know I ran,' Henry said. 'I shouldn't have done that. But . . . but . . . '

Belch only stared.

'I got lost,' Henry whispered, as if to tell the ole Belcher that he had paid, too. It sounded weak, like saying Yeah, I know you got killed, Belch, but I got one fuck of a splinter under my thumbnail. But it had been bad . . . really bad. He had wandered around in a world of stinking darkness for hours, and finally, he remembered, he had started to scream. At some point he had fallen — a long, dizzying fall, in which he had time to think Oh good in a minute I'll be dead, I'll be out of this — and then he had been in fast-running water. Under the Canal, he

supposed. He had come out into fading sunlight, had flailed his way toward the bank, and had finally climbed out of the Kenduskeag less than fifty yards from the place where Adrian Mellon would drown twenty-six years later. He slipped, fell, bashed his head, blacked out. When he woke up it was after dark. He had somehow found his way out to Route 2 and had hooked a ride to the home place. And there the cops had been waiting for h i m .

But that was then and this was now. Belch had stepped in front of Frankenstein's monster and it had peeled the left side of his face down to the skull — so much Henry had seen before fleeing. But now Belch was back, and Belch was pointing at something.

Henry saw that they had pulled up in front of the Derry Town House, and suddenly he understood perfectly. The Town House was the only real hotel left in Derry. Back in '58 there had also been the Eastern Star at the end of Exchange Street, and the Traveller's Rest on Torrault Street. Both had disappeared during urban renewal (Henry knew all about this; he had read the Derry News faithfully every day in Juniper Hill). Only the Town House was left and a bunch of ticky-tacky little motels out by the Interstate.

That's where they'll be, he thought. Right in there. All of them that are left. Asleep in their beds, with visions of sugarplums — or sewers, maybe — dancing in their heads. And I'll get them. One by one, I'll get them.

He took the bottle of Texas Driver out again and bit off a snort. He could feel fresh blood trickling into his lap, and the seat was tacky beneath him, but the wine made it better; the wine seemed to make it not matter. He could have done with some good bourbon, but the Driver was better than nothing.

'Look,' he said to Belch, 'I'm sorry I ran. I don't know why I ran. Please . . . don't be mad.'

Belch spoke for the first and only time, but the voice wasn't his voice. The voice that came from Belch's rotting mouth was deep and powerful, terrifying. Henry whimpered at the sound of it. It was the voice from the moon, the voice of the clown, the voice he had heard in his dreams of drains and sewers where water rushed on and on.

'Just shut up and get them,' the voice said.

'Sure,' Henry whined. 'Sure, okay, I want to, no problem — '