they thought you were hanging around just so you could hawk something — and sometimes kids did.

Mostly, though, the place was quiet. There was a guard-booth but it was empty, its glass windows broken by stones. There had been no full-time security service since 1950 or so. Mr Braddock shooed the kids away by day and a night-watchman drove through four or five times a night in an old Studebaker with a searchlight mounted outside the vent window and that was all.

There were tramps and hobos sometimes, though. If anything about the trainyards scared Eddie, they did — men with unshaven cheeks and cracked skin and blisters on their hands and coldsores on their lips. They rode the rails for awhile and then climbed down for awhile and spent some time in Derry and then got on another train and went somewhere else. Sometimes they had missing fingers. Usually they were drunk and wanted to know if you had a cigarette.

One of these fellows had crawled out from under the porch of the house at 29 Neibolt Street one day and had offered to give Eddie a blowjob for a quarter. Eddie had backed away, his skin like ice, his mouth as dry as lintballs. One of the hobo's nostrils had been eaten away. You could look right into the red, scabby channel.

'I don't have a quarter,' Eddie said, backing toward his bike.

'I'll do it for a dime,' the hobo croaked, coming toward him. He was wearing old green flannel pants. Yellow puke was stiffening across the lap. He unzipped his fly and reached inside. He was trying to grin. His nose was a red horror.

'I . . . I don't have a dime, either,' Eddie said, and suddenly thought: Oh my God he's got leprosy! If he touches me I'll catch it too! His control snapped and he ran. He heard the hobo break into a shuffling run behind him, his old string-tied shoes slapping and flapping across the riotous lawn of the empty saltbox house.

'Come back here, kid! I'll blow you for free. Come back here!'

Eddie had leaped on his bike, wheezing now, feeling his throat closing up to a pinhole. His chest had taken on weight. He hit the pedals and was just picking up speed when one of the hobo's hands struck the package carrier. The bike shimmied. Eddie looked over his shoulder and saw the hobo running along behind the rear wheel (!!GAINING!!), his lips drawn back from the black stumps of his teeth in an expression which might have been either desperation or fury.

In spite of the stones lying on his chest Eddie had pedaled even faster, expecting that one of the hobo's scab-crusted hands would close over his arm at any moment, pulling him from his Raleigh and dumping him in the ditch, where God knew what would happen to him. He hadn't dared look around until he had flashed past the Church School and through the Route 2 intersection. The 'bo was gone.

Eddie held this terrible story inside him for almost a week and then confided it to Richie Tozier and Bill Denbrough one day when they were reading comics over the garage.

'He didn't have leprosy, you dummy,' Richie said. 'He had the Syph.'

Eddie looked at Bill to see if Richie was ribbing him — he had never heard of a disease called the Sift before. It sounded like something Richie might have made up.

'Is there such a thing as the Sift, Bill?'

Bill nodded gravely. 'Only it's the Suh-Suh-Syph , not the Sift. It's s-short for syphilis.'

'What's that?'

'It's a disease you get from fucking,' Richie said. 'You know about fucking, don't you, Eds?'

'Sure,' Eddie said. He hoped he wasn't blushing. He knew that when you got older, stuff came out of your penis when it was hard. Vincent 'Boogers' Taliendo had filled him in on the rest one day at school. What you did when you fucked, according to Boogers, was you rubbed your cock against a girl's stomach until it got hard (your cock, not the girl's stomach).

Then you rubbed some more until you started to 'get the feeling.' When Eddie asked what that meant, Boogers had only shaken his head in a mysterious way. Boogers said that you couldn't describe it, but you'd know it as soon as you got it. He said you could practice by lying in the bathtub and rubbing your cock with Ivory soap (Eddie had tried this, but the only feeling he got was the need to urinate after awhile). Anyway, Boogers went on, after you 'got the feeling,' this stuff came out of your penis. Most kids called it come, Boogers said, but his big brother had told him that the really scientific word for it was jizzum. And when you 'got the feeling,' you had to grab your cock and aim it real fast so you could shoot the jizzum into the girl's bellybutton as soon as it came out. It went down into her stomach and made a baby there.

Do girls like that'? Eddie had asked Boogers Taliendo. He himself was sort of appalled.

I guess they must, Boogers had replied, looking mystified himself.

'Now listen up, Eds,' Richie said, 'because there may be questions later. Some women have got this disease. Some men, too, but mostly it's women. A guy can get it from a woman — '

'Or another g-g-guy if they're kwuh –kwuh –queer,' Bill added.

'Right. The important thing is you get the Syph from screwing someone who's already got it.'

'What does it do?' Eddie asked.

'Makes you rot,' Richie said simply.

Eddie stared at him, horrified.

'It's bad, I know, but it's true,' Richie said. 'Your nose is the first thing to go. Some guys with the Syph, their noses fall right off. Then their cocks.'

'Puh-Puh-Puh-leeze,' Bill said. 'I just a-a-ate.'

'Hey, ma n, this is science,' Richie said.

'So what's the difference between leprosy and the Syph?' Eddie asked.

'You don't get leprosy from fucking,' Richie said promptly, and then went off into a gale of laughter that left both Bill and Eddie mystified.

7

Following that day the house at 29 Neibolt Street had taken on a kind of glow in Eddie's imagination. Looking at its weedy yard and its slumped porch and the boards nailed across its windows, he would feel an unhealthy fascination take hold of him. And six weeks ago he had parked his bike on the gravelly verge of the street (the sidewalk ended four houses farther back) and walked across the lawn toward the porch of that house.

His heart had been beating hard in his chest, and his mouth had that dry taste again — listening to Bill's story of the dreadful picture, he knew that what he had felt when approaching that house was about the same as what Bill had felt going into George's room. He did not feel as if he was in control of himself. He felt pushed.

It did not seem as if his feet were moving; instead the house itself, brooding and silent, seemed to draw closer to where he stood.

Faintly, he could hear a diesel engine in the trainyard — that and the liquid –metallic slam of couplings being made. They were shunting some cars onto sidings, picking up others. Making a train.

His hand gripped his aspirator, but, oddly, his asthma had not closed down as it had on the day he fled from the hobo with the rotted nose. There was only that sense of st anding still and watching the house slide stealthily toward him, as if on a hidden track.

Eddie looked under the porch. There was no one there. It was not really surprising. This was spring, and hobos showed up most frequently in Derry from late September to early

November. During those six weeks or so a man could pick up day-work on one of the outlying farms if he looked even half-decent. There were potatoes and apples to pick, snowfence to string, barn and shed roofs which needed to be patched before December came along, whistling up winter.

No hobos under the porch, but plenty of sign they had been there. Empty beer cans, empty beer bottles, empty liquor bottles. A dirt-crusted blanket lay against the brick foundation like a dead dog. There were drifts of crumpled newspapers and one old shoe and a smell like garbage. There were thick layers of old leaves under there.