She said so to Bill now.

He nodded. 'You're right. They weren't there then. And although I can't absolutely swear to it, I don't think they were there last night, down at the Plow and Barrow. Ralph and I were hand-wrestling for beers again and I think I would have noticed.'

He grinned at her. The grin was dry, humorless, and scared.

'I think they came back when Mike Hanlon called. That's what I think.'

'Bill, that isn't possible.' But she reached for her cigarettes.

Bill was looking at his hands. 'Sta n did it,' he said. 'Cut our palms with a sliver of Coke bottle. I can remember it so clearly now.' He looked up at Audra and behind his glasses his eyes were hurt and puzzled. 'I remember how that piece of glass flashed in the sun. It was one of the new clear ones. Before that Coke bottles used to be green, you remember that?' She shook her head but he didn't see her. He was still studying his palms. 'I can remember Stan doing his own hands last, pretending he was going to slash his wrists instead of just cut his palms a little. I guess it was just some goof, but I almost made a move on him . . . to stop him. Because for a second or two there he looked serious.'

'Bill, don't,' she said in a low voice. This time she had to steady the lighter in her right hand by grasping its wrist in her left, like a policeman holding a gun on a shooting range. 'Scars can't come back. They either are or aren't.'

'You saw them before, huh? Is that what you're telling me?'

'They're very faint,' Audra said, more sharply than she had intended,

'We were all bleeding,' he said. 'We were standing in the water not far from where Eddie Kaspbrak and Ben Hanscom and I built the dam that time — '

'You don't mean the architect, do you?'

'Is there one by that name?'

'God, Bill, he built the new BBC communications center! They're still arguing whether it's a dream or an abortion!'

'Well, I don't know if it's the same guy or not. It doesn't seem likely, but I guess it could be. The Ben I knew was great at building stuff. We all stood there, and I was holding Bev Marsh's left hand in my right and Richie Tozier's right hand in my left. We stood out there in the water like something out of a Southern baptism after a tent meeting, and I remember I could see the Derry Standpipe on the horizon. It looked as white as you imagine the robes of

the archangels must be, and we promised, we swore, that if it wasn't over, that if it ever started to happen again . . . we'd go back. And we'd do it again. And stop it. Forever.'

'Stop what? she cried, suddenly furious with him. 'Stop what'? What the fuck are you talking about?'

'I wish you wouldn't a-a-ask — ' Bill began, and then stopped. She saw an expression of bemused horror spread over his face like a stain. 'Give me a cigarette.'

She passed him the pack. He lit one. She had never seen him smoke a cigarette.

'I used to stutter, too.'

'You stuttered?'

'Yes. Back then. You said I was the only man in LA you ever knew who dared to speak slowly. The truth is, I didn't dare talk fast. It wasn't reflection. It wasn't deliberation. It wasn't wisdom. All reformed stutterers speak very slowly. It's one of the tricks you learn, like thinking of your middle name just before you introduce yourself, because stutterers have more trouble with nouns than with any other words, and the one word in all the world that gives them the most trouble is their own first name.'

'Stuttered.' She smiled a small smile, as if he had told a joke and she had missed the point.

'Until Georgie died, I stuttered moderately,' Bill said, and already he had begun to hear words double in his mind, as if they were infinitesimally separated in time; the words came out smoothly, in his ordinary slow and cadenced way, but in his mind he heard words like Georgie and moderately overlap, becoming Juh-Juh-Georgie and m-moderately. 'I mean, I had some really bad moments — usually when I was called on in class, and especially if I really knew the answer and wanted to give it — but mostly I got by. Afte r George died, it got a lot worse. Then, around the age of fourteen or fifteen, things started to get better again. I went to Chevrus High in Portland, and there was a speech therapist there, Mrs Thomas, who was really great. She taught me some good tricks. Like thinking of my middle name just before I said "Hi, I'm Bill Denbrough" out loud. I was taking French 1 and she taught me to switch to French if I got badly stuck on a word. So if you're standing there feeling like the world's grandest asshole, saying "th –th-this buh –buh-buh –buh" over and over like a broken record, you switched over to French and "ce livre" would come flowing off your tongue. Worked every time. And as soon as you said it in French you could come back to English and say "this book" with no problem at all. If you got stuck on an s-word like ship or skate or slum, you could lisp it: thip, thkate, thlum. No stutter.

'All of that helped, but mostly it was just forgetting Derry and everything that happened there. Because that's when the forgetting happened. When we were living in Portland and I was going to Chevrus. I didn't forget everything at once, but looking back now I'd have to say it happened over a remarkably short period of time. Maybe no more than four months. My stutter and my memories faded out together. Someone washed the blackboard and all the old equations went away.'

He drank what was left of his juice. 'When I stuttered on "ask" a few seconds ago, that was the first time in maybe twenty-one years.'

He looked at her.

'First the scars, then the stuh-hutter. Do you h-hear it?'

'You're doing that on purpose!' she said, badly frightened.

'No. I guess there's no way to convince a person of that, but it's true. Stuttering's funny, Audra. Spooky. On one level you're not even aware it's happening. But . . . it's also something you can hear in your mind. It's like part of your head is working an instant ahead of the rest. Or one of those reverb systems kids used to put in their jalopies back in the fifties, when the sound in the rear speaker would come just a split second a-after the sound in the front s-speaker.'

He got up and walked restlessly around the room. He looked tired, and she thought with some unease of how hard he had worked over the last thirteen years or so, as if it might be possible to justify the moderateness of his talent by working furiously, almost non-stop. She found herself having a very uneasy thought and tried to push it away, but it wouldn't go. Suppose Bill's call had really been from Ralph Foster, inviting him down to the Plow and Barrow for an hour of arm-wrestling or backgammon, or maybe from Freddie Firestone, the producer of Attic Room, on some problem or other? Perhaps even a 'wrong-ring,' as the veddy British doctor's wife down the lane put it?

What did such thoughts lead to?

Why, to the idea that all this Derry-Mike Hanlon business was nothing but a hallucination. A hallucination brought on by an incipient nervous breakdown.

But the scars, Audra — how do you explain the scars? He's right. They weren't there . . . and now they are. That's the truth, and you know it.

'Tell me the rest,' she said. 'Who killed your brother George? What did you and these other children do? What did you promise?'

He went to her, knelt before her like an oldfashioned suitor about to propose marriage, and took her hands.

'I think I could tell you,' he said softly. 'I think that if I really wanted to, I could. Most of it I don't remember even now, but once I started talking it would come. I can sense those memories . . . waiting to be born. They're like clouds filled with rain. Only this rain would be very dirty. The plants that grew after a rain like that would be monsters. Maybe I can face that with the others — '