Henry threw his weight against the door. He outweighed Eddie by over a hundred pounds and Eddie was driven back like a doll; his knees struck the bed and he fell on it. Henry came into the room and swept the door shut behind him. He twisted the thumb-bolt as Eddie sat up, wide-eyed, his throat already starting to whistle.

'Okay, fag,' Henry said. His eyes dropped momentarily to the floor, hunting for the knife. He didn't see it. Eddie groped on the nighttable and found one of the two bottles of Perrier water he had ordered earlier that day. This was the full one; he had drunk the other before going to th e library because his nerves were shot and he had a bad case of acid-burn. Perrier was very good for the digestion.

As Henry dismissed the knife and started toward him, Eddie gripped the green pear-shaped bottle by the neck and smashed it on the edge of the nighttable. Perrier foamed and fizzed across it, flooding out most of the pill-bottles that stood there.

Henry's shut and pants were heavy with blood, both fresh and semi-dried. His right hand now hung at a strange angle.

'Babyfag,' Henry said, 'teach you to throw rocks.'

He made it to the bed and reached for Eddie, who still hardly realized what was happening. No more than forty seconds had elapsed since he had opened the door. Henry grabbed for him. Eddie thrust the ragged base of the Perrier bottle at him. It ripped into Henry's face, pulling open his right cheek in a twisted flap and puncturing Henry's right eye.

Henry uttered a breathless scream and staggered backward. His slit eye, leaking whitish-yellow fluid, hung loosely from its socket. His cheek sprayed blood in a gaudy fountain. Eddie's own cry was louder. He got off the bed and went toward Henry — to help him, perhaps, he wasn't really sure — and Henry lurched at him again. Eddie thrust with the Perrier bottle as if with a fencing sword, and this time the jagged points of green glass punched deep into Henry's left hand and sawed at his fingers. Fresh blood flowed. Henry made a thick grunting noise, the sound, almost, of a man clearing his throat, and shoved Eddie with his right hand.

Eddie flew back and struck the writing-desk. His left arm twisted behind him somehow and he fell on it heavily. The pain was a sudden sickening flare. He felt the bone go along the fault-line of that old break, and he had to clench his teeth against a scream of agony.

A shadow blotted out the light.

Henry Bowers was standing over him, swaying back and forth. His knees buckled. His left hand was dripping blood on the front of Eddie's robe.

Eddie had held onto the stump of the Perrie r bottle and now, as Henry's knees came completely unhinged, he got it in front of him, jagged base pointing upward, the cap braced against his sternum. Henry came down like a tree, impaling himself on the bottle. Eddie felt it shatter in his hand and a fresh bolt of grinding agony shuddered through his left arm, which was still trapped under his body. Fresh warmth cascaded over him. He wasn't sure if this batch was Henry's blood or his.

Henry twitched like a landed trout. His shoes rattled an almost syncopated beat on the carpet. Eddie could smell his rotten breath. Then Henry stiffened and rolled over. The bottle protruded grotesquely from his midsection, capped end pointing toward the ceiling, as if it had grown there.

'Gug' Henry said, and said no more. He looked up at the ceiling. Eddie thought he might be dead.

Eddie fought off the waves of faintness that wanted to cover him over and drag him down. He got to his knees, and finally to his feet. There was fresh pain as his broken arm swung out in front of him and that cleared his head a little Wheezing, fighting for breath, he made it to the nighttable. He picked his aspirator out of a puddle of carbonated water, stuck it in his mouth, and triggered it off. He shuddered at the taste, then gave himself another blast. He looked around at the body on the carpet — could that be Henry? could it possibly be? It was. Grown old, his crewcut more gray than black, his body now fat and white and sluglike, it was still Henry. And Henry was dead. At long last, Henry was —

'Gug,' Henry said, and sat up. His hands clawed at the air, as if for holds which only Henry could see. His gouged eye leaked and dribbled; its bottom arc now bulged pregnantly down onto his cheek. He looked around, saw Eddie shrinking back against the wall, and tried to get up.

He opened his mouth and a stream of blood gushed out. Henry collapsed again.

Heart racing, Eddie fumbled for the telephone and succeeded only in knocking it off the table and onto the bed. He snatched it up and dialed 0. The phone rang again and again and again.

Come on, Eddie thought, what are you doing down there, jacking off? Come on, please, answer the frigging phone!

It rang again and again. Eddie kept his eyes on Henry, expecting him to start trying to gain his feet again at any moment. Blood. Dear God, so much blood.

'Desk,' a fuzzy, resentful voice said at last.

'Ring Mr Denbrough's room,' Eddie said. 'Quick as you can.' With his other ear he was now listening to the rooms around him. How loud had they been? Was someone going to pound on the door and ask if everything was all right in there?

'You sure you want me to ring?' the clerk asked. 'It's ten after three.'

'Yes, do it!' Eddie nearly screamed. The hand holding the phone was trembling in convulsive little bursts. There was a nest of waspy, rotten-ugly singing in his other arm. Had Henry moved again? No; surely not.

'Okay, okay,' the clerk said. 'Cool your jets, my friend.'

There was a click, and then the hoarse burr of a room-phone ringing. Come on, Bill, come on, c —

A sudden thought, gruesomely plausible, occurred to him. Suppose Henry had visited Bill's room first? Or Richie's? Ben's? Bev's? Or had Henry perhaps paid a visit to the library? Surely he had been somewhere else first; if someone hadn't softened Henry up, it would have been Eddie lying dead on the floor, with a switchblade growing out of his chest the way the neck of the Perrier bottle was growing out of Henry's gut. Or suppose Henry had visited all the others first, catching them bleary and half-asleep, as Henry had caught him? Suppose they

were all dead? And that thought was so awful Eddie believed he would soon begin screaming if someone didn't answer the phone in Bill's room.

'Please, Big Bill,' Eddie whispered. 'Please be there, man.'

The phone was picked up and Bill's voice, uncharacteristically cautious, said: 'H-H-Hello?'

'Bill,' Eddie said . . . almost babbled. 'Bill, thank God.'

'Eddie?' Bill's voice grew momentarily fainte r, speaking to someone else, telling the someone who it was. Then he was back strong. 'W-What's the muh-hatter, Eddie?'

'It's Henry Bowers,' Eddie said. He looked at the body on the floor again. Had it changed position? This time it was not so easy to persuade himself it hadn't. 'Bill, he came here . . . and I killed him. He had a knife. I think . . . ' He lowered his voice. 'I think it was the same knife he had that day. When we went into the sewers. Do you remember?'

'I r-r-remember,' Bill said grimly. 'Eddie, listen to me. I want you to

12

The Barrens / 1:55 P.M.

g-g-go back and tell B-B-Ben to c-come up h-h-here.'

'Okay,' Eddie said, and dropped back at once. They were approaching the clearing now. Thunder rumbled in the overcast sky, and the bushes sighed in the rising breeze.

Ben joined him as they came into the clearing. The trapdoor to the clubhouse stood open, an improbable square of blackness in the green. The sound of the river was very clear, and Bill was suddenly struck by a crazy certainty: that he was experiencing that sound, and this place, for the last time in his childhood. He drew a deep breath, smelling earth and air and the distant sooty dump, fuming like a sullen volcano that cannot quite make up its mind to erupt. He saw a flock of birds fly off the railroad trestle and toward the Old Cape. He looked up at the boiling clouds.