'N-N-No, sir,' Bill said. 'W-We'll stay tuh –tuh –tuh — '

'That's good enough for me,' Mr Nell said. 'Yer hand on it.'

Bill stuck out his hand and Mr Nell shook it.

Richie shook off Stan and stepped forward.

'Sure an begorrah, Mr Nell, yer a prince among men, y'are! A foine man! A foine, foine man!' He stuck out his own hand, seized the Irishman's huge paw, and flagged it furiously,

grinning all the time. To the bemused Mr Nell the boy looked like a hideous parody of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

'Thank you, boy,' Mr Nell said, retrieving his hand. 'Ye want to work on that a bit. As of now, ye sound about as Irish as Groucho Marx.'

The other boys laughed, mostly in relief. Even as he was laughing, Stan shot Richie a reproachful look: Grow up, Richie!

Mr Nell shook hands all around, gripping Ben's last of all.

'Ye've nothing to be ashamed of but bad judgment, big boy. As for that there . . . did you see how to do it in a book?'

Ben shook his head.

'Just figured it out?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Well if that don't beat Harry! Ye'Il do great things someday, I've no doubt. But the Barrens isn't the place to do em.' He looked around thoughtfully. 'No great thing will ever be done here. Nasty place.' He sighed. 'Tear it down, dear boys. Tear it right down. I believe I'll just sit me down in the shade o this bush here and bide a wee as you do it.' He looked ironically at Richie as he said this last, as if inviting another manic outburst.

'Yes, sir,' Richie said humbly, and that was all. Mr Nell nodded, satisfied, and the boys fell to work, once again turning to Ben — this time to show them the quickest way to tear down what he had shown them how to build. Meanwhile, Mr Nell removed a brown bottle from inside his tunic and helped himself to a large gulp. He coughed, then blew out breath in an explosive sigh and regarded the boys with watery, benign eyes.

'And what might ye have in yer bottle, sor?' Richie asked from the place where he was standing knee-deep in the water.

'Richie, can't you ever shut up?' Eddie hissed.

'This?' Mr Nell regarded Richie with mild surprise and looked at the bottle again. It had no label of any kind on it. 'This is the cough medicine of the gods, my boy. Now let's see if you can bend yer back anywhere near as fast as you can wag yer tongue.'

3

Bill and Richie were walking up Witcham Street together later on. Bill was pushing Silver; after first building and then tearing down the dam, he simply did not have the energy it would have taken to get Silver up to cruising speed. Both boys were dirty, dishevelled, and pretty well used up.

Stan had asked them if they wanted to come over to his house and play Monopoly or Parcheesi or something, but none of them wanted to. It was getting late. Ben, sounding tired and depressed, said he was going to go home and see if anybody had returned his library books. He had some hope of this, since the Derry Library insisted on writing in the borrower's street address as well as his name on each book's pocket card. Eddie said he was going to watch The Rock Show on TV because Neil Sedaka was going to be on and he wanted to see if Neil Sedaka was a Negro. Stan told Eddie not to be so stupid, Neil Sedaka was white, you could tell he was white just listening to him. Eddie claimed you couldn't tell anything by listening to them; until last year he had been positive Chuck Berry was white, but when he was on Bandstand he turned out to be a Negro.

'My mother still thinks he's white, so that's one good thing,' Eddie said. 'If she finds out he's a Negro, she probably won't let me listen to his songs anymore.'

Stan bet Eddie four funnybooks that Neil Sedaka was white, and the two of them set off together for Eddie's house to settle the issue.

And here were Bill and Richie, headed in a direction which would bring them to Bill's house after awhile, neither of them talking much. Richie found himself thinking about Bill's story of the picture that had turned its head and winked. And in spite of his tiredness, an idea came to him. It was crazy . . . but it also held a certain attraction.

'Billy me boy,' he said. 'Let's stop for awhile. Take five. I'm dead.'

'No such l-l-luck,' Bill said, but he stopped, laid Silver carefully down on the edge of the green Theological Seminary lawn, and the two boys sat on the wide stone steps which led up to the rambling red Victorian structure.

'What a d-d-day,' Bill said glumly. There were dark purplish patches under his eyes. His face looked white and used. 'You better call your house when w-we get to muh-mine. So your f-folks don't go b-b-bananas.'

'Yeah. You bet. Listen, Bill — '

Richie paused for a moment, thinking about Ben's mummy, Eddie's leper, and whatever Stan had almost told them. For a moment something swam in his own mind, something about that Paul Bunyan statue out by the City Center. But that had only been a dream, for God's sake.

He pushed away such irrelevant thoughts and plunged.

'Let's go up to your house, what do you say? Take a look in Georgie's room. I want to see that picture.'

Bill looked at Richie, shocked. He tried to speak but could not; h is stress was simply too great. He settled for shaking his head violently.

Richie said, 'You heard Eddie's story. And Ben's. Do you believe what they said?'

'I don't nuh-nuh –know. I th-hink they m-m-must have sub –seen suh-homething.'

'Yeah. Me too. All the kids that've been killed around here, I think all of them would have had stories to tell, too. The only difference between Ben and Eddie and those other kids is that Ben and Eddie didn't get caught.'

Bill raised his eyebrows but showed no great surprise. Richie had supposed Bill would have taken it that far himself. He couldn't talk so good, but he was no dummy.

'So now dig on this awhile, Big Bill,' Richie said. 'A guy could dress up in a clown suit and kill kids. I don't know why he'd want to, but nobody can tell why crazy people do things, right?'

'Ruh-Ruh-Ruh — '

'Right. It's not that much different than the Joker in a Batman funnybook.' Just hearing his ideas out loud excited Richie. He wondered briefly if he was actually trying to prove something or just throwing up a smokescreen of words so he could see that room, that picture. In the end it probably didn't matter. In the end maybe just seeing Bill's eyes light up with their own excitement was enough.

'B-B-But wh-wh-wher e does the pih –hicture fit i-i-in?'

'What do you think, Billy?'

In a low voice, not looking at Richie, Bill said he didn't think it had anything to do with the murders. 'I think it was Juh-Juh –Georgie's g-ghost.'

'A ghost in a picture?' Bill no dded.

Richie thought about it. The idea of ghosts gave his child's mind no trouble at all. He was sure there were such things. His parents were Methodists, and Richie went to church every Sunday and to Thursday-night Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings as well. He knew a great deal of the Bible already, and he knew the Bible believed in all sorts of weird stuff. According to the Bible, God Himself was at least one –third Ghost, and that was just the beginning. You could tell the Bible believed in demons, because Jesus threw a bunch of them out of this guy. Real chuckalicious ones, too. When Jesus asked the guy who had them what his name was, the demons answered and told Him to go join the Foreign Legion. Or

something like that. The Bible believed in witches, or else why would it say 'Thou shall not suffer a witch to live'? Some of the stuff in the Bible was even better than the stuff in the horror comics. People getting boiled in oil or hanging themselves like Judas Iscariot; the story about how wicked King Ahaz fell off the tower and all the dogs came and licked up his blood; the mass baby-murders that had accompanied the births of both Moses and Jesus Christ; guys who came out of their graves or flew into the air; soldiers who witched down walls; prophets who saw the future and fought monsters. All of that was in the Bible and every word of it was true — so said Reverend Craig and so said Richie's folks and so said Richie. He was perfectly willing to credit the possibility of Bill's explanation; it was the logic which troubled him.