She came out of the bathroom and looked at Bill. 'No,' she said. 'I don't want to go to the police. I think Eddie's right — something might happen to us. Something final. But that isn't the real reason.' She looked at the four of them. 'We swore it,' she said. 'We swore. Bill's brother . . . Stan . . . all the others . . . and now Mike. I'm ready, Bill.'

Bill looked at the others.

Richie nodded. 'Okay, Big Bill. Let's try.'

Ben said, 'The odds look worse than ever. We're two short now.'

Bill said nothing.

'Okay.' Ben nodded. 'She's right. We swore.'

'E-E-Eddie?'

Eddie smiled wanly. 'I guess I get another pigger-back down that ladder, huh? If the ladder's still there.'

'No one throwing rocks this time, though,' Beverly said. 'They're dead. All three of them.'

'Do we do it now, Bill?' Richie asked.

'Y-Y-Yes,' Bill said. 'I th-think this is the t –t-time.'

'Can I say something?' Ben asked abruptly.

Bill looked at him and grinned a little. 'A-A-Any time.'

'You guys are still the best friends I ever had,' Ben said. 'No matter how this turns out. I just . . . you know, wanted to tell you that.'

He looked around at them, and they looked solemnly back at him.

'I'm glad I remembered you,' he added. Richie snorted. Beverly giggled. Then they were all laughing, looking at each other in the old way, in spite of the fact that Mike was in the hospital, perhaps dying or already dead, in spite of the fact that Eddie's arm was broken (again), in spite of the fact that it was the deepest ditch of the morning.

'Haystack, you have such a way with words,' Richie said, laughing and wiping his eyes. 'He should have been the writer, Big Bill.'

Still smiling a little, Bill said: 'And on that nuh-nuh-note — '

5

They took Eddie's borrowed limo. Richie drove. The groundfog was thicker now, drifting through the streets like cigarette smoke, not quite reaching the hooded streetlamps. The stars overhead were bright chips of ice, spring stars . but by cocking his head to the half– open window on the passenger side, Bill thought he could hear summer thunder in the distance. Ram was being ordered up somewhere over the horizon.

Richie turned on the radio and there was Gene Vincent singing 'Be-Bop-A-Lula.' He hit one of the other buttons and got Buddy Holly. A third punch brought Eddie Cochran singing 'Summertime Blues.'

'I'd like to help you, son, but you're too young to vote,' a deep voice said.

'Turn it off, Richie,' Beverly said softly.

He reached for it, and then his hand froze. 'Stay tuned for more of the Richie Tozier All-Dead Rock Show!' the clown's laughing, screaming voice cried over the finger-pops and guitar-chops of the Eddie Cochran tune. 'Don't touch that dial, keep it tuned to the rockpile, they're gone from the charts but not from our hearts and you keep coming, come right along, come on everybody! We play aaaalll the hits down here! Aaallllll the hits! And if you don't believe me, just listen to this morning's graveyard-shift guest deejay, Georgie Denbrough! Tell em, Georgie!'

And suddenly Bill's brother was wailing out of the radio.

'You sent me out and It killed me! I thought It was in the cellar, Big Bill, I thought It was in the cellar but It was in the drain, It was in the drain and It killed me, you let It kill me, Big Bill, you let It —

Richie snapped the radio o ff so hard the knob spun away and hit the floormat.

'Rock and roll in the sticks really sucks,' he said. His voice was not quite steady. 'Bev's right, we'll leave it off, what do you say?'

No one replied. Bill's face was pale and still and thoughtful under the glow of the passing streetlamps, and when the thunder muttered again in the west they all heard it.

6

In the Barrens

Same old bridge.

Richie parked beside it and they got out and moved to the railing — s a m e o l d r a i l i n g — and looked down.

Same old Barrens.

It seemed untouched by the last twenty-seven years; to Bill the turnpike overpass, which was the only new feature, looked unreal, something as ephemeral as a matte painting or a rear-screen projection effect in a movie. Cruddy little trees and scrub bushes glimmered in the twining fog and Bill thought: I guess this is what we mean when we talk about the persistence of memory, this or something like this, something you see at the right time and from the right angle, image that kicks off emotion like a jet engine. You see it so clear that all the things which happened in between are gone. If desire is what closes the circle between world and want, then the circle has closed.

'Cuh-Cuh-Come on,' he said, and climbed over the railing. They followed him down the embankment in a scatter of scree and pebbles. When they reached the bottom Bill checked automatically for Silver and then laughed at himself. Silver was leaning against the wall of Mike's garage. It seemed Silver had no pan to play in this at all, although that was strange, after the way it had turned up.

Tuh-Take us there,' Bill told Ben.

Ben looked at him and Bill read the thought in his eyes — It's been twenty-seven years, Bill, dream on — and then he nodded and headed into the undergrowth.

The path — their path — had long since grown over, and they had to force themselves through tangles of thornbushes, prickers, and wild hydrangea so fragrant it was cloying. Crickets sang somnolently all around them, and a few lightning –bugs, early arrivals at summer's luscious party, poked at the dark. Bill supposed kids still played down here, but they had made their own runs and secret ways.

They came to the clearing where the clubhouse had been, but now there was no clearing here at all. Bushes and lackluster scrub pines had reclaimed it all.

'Look,' Ben whispered, and crossed the clearing (in their memories it was still here, simply overlaid with another of those matte paintings). He yanked at something. It was the mahogany door they had found on the edge of the dump, the one they had used to finish off the clubhouse roof. It had been cast aside here and looked as if it hadn't been touched in a dozen years or more. Creepers were firmly entrenched across its dirty surface.

'Leave it alone, Haystack,' Richie murmured. 'It's old.'

'Tuh-Tuh-Take us th-there, B-Ben,' Bill repeated from behind them.

So they went down to the Kenduskeag following him, bearing left away from the clearing that didn't exist anymore. The sound of running water grew steadily louder, but they still almost fell into the Kenduskeag before any of them saw it: the foliage had grown up in a tangled wall on the edge of the embankment. The edge broke off under the heels of Ben's cowboy boots and Bill yanked him back by the scruff of the neck.

'Thanks,' Ben said.

'De nada. In the o-old d-days, you wuh– hould have puh– pulled me ih-i n a-a-after you. D-Down this wuh-way?'

Ben nodded and led them along the overgrown bank, fighting through ht e tangles of bushes and brambles, thinking how much easier this was when you were only four feet five and able to go under most tangles (those in your mind as well as those in your path, he supposed) in one nonchalant duck. Well, everything changed. Our lesson for today, boys and girls, is themore things change, the more things change. Whoever said the more things change the more things stay the same was obviously suffering severe mental retardation. Because —

His foot hooked under something and he fell over with a thud, nearly striking his head on the pumping –station's concrete cylinder. It was almost completely buried in a wallow of blackberry bushes. As he got to his feet again he realized that his face and arms and hands had been striped by blackberry thorns in two dozen places.