nd I knew from the stuff I'd read that the chances were pretty spotty, but I thought what the hell."
"You were seeing someone steadily then?" Bill asked.
"No--that's the funny part of it," Richie said, frowning. "I just woke up one day with this ... I dunno, this hobby-horse about getting it reversed."
"You must have been nuts," Eddie said. "General anesthetic instead of a local? Surgery? Maybe a week in the hospital afterward?"
"Yeah, the doctor told me all of that stuff," Richie replied. "And I told him I wanted to go ahead anyway. I don't know why. The doc asked me if I understood the aftermath of the operation was sure to be painful while the result was only going to be a coin-toss at best. I said I did. He said okay, and I asked him when--my attitude being the sooner the better, you know. So he says hold your horses, son, hold your horses, the first step is to get a sperm sample just to make sure the reversal operation is necessary. I said, 'Come on, I had the exam after the vasectomy. It worked.' He told me that sometimes the vasa reconnected spontaneously. 'Yo mamma!' I says. 'Nobody ever told me that.' He said the chances were very small--infinitesimal, really--but because the operation was so serious, we ought to check it out. So I popped into the men's room with a Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue and jerked off into a Dixie cup--"
"Beep-beep, Richie," Beverly said.
"Yeah, you're right," Richie said. "The part about the Frederick's catalogue is a lie--you never find anything that good in a doctor's office. Anyway, the doc called me three days later and asked me which I wanted first, the good news or the bad news.
"'Gimme the good news first,' I said.
"'The good news is the operation won't be necessary,' he said. 'The bad news is that anybody you've been to bed with over the last two or three years could hit you with a paternity suit pretty much at will.'
"'Are you saying what I think you're saying?' I asked him.
"'I'm telling you that you aren't shooting blanks and haven't been for quite awhile now,' he said. 'Millions of little wigglies in your sperm sample. Your days of going gaily in bareback with no questions asked have temporarily come to an end, Richard.'
"I thanked him and hung up. Then I called Sandy in Washington.
"'Rich!' she says to me," and Richie's voice suddenly became the voice of this girl Sandy whom none of them had ever met. It was not an imitation or even a likeness, exactly; it was more like an auditory painting. "'It's great to hear from you! I got married!'
"'Yeah, that's great,' I said. 'You should have let me know. I would have sent you a blender.'
"She goes, 'Same old Richie, always full of gags.'
"So I said 'Sure, same old Richie, always full of gags. By the way, Sandy, you didn't happen to have a kid or anything after you left L.A., did you? Or maybe an unscheduled d and c, or something?'
"'That gag isn't so funny, Rich,' she said, and I had a brainwave that she was getting ready to hang up on me, so I told her what happened. She started laughing, only this time it was real hard--she was laughing the way I always used to laugh with you guys, like somebody had told her the world's biggest bellybuster. So when she finally starts slowing down I ask her what in God's name is funny. 'It's just so wonderful,' she said. 'This time the joke's on you. After all these years the joke is finally on Records Tozier. How many bastards have you sired since I came east, Rich?'
"'I take it that means you still haven't experienced the joys of motherhood?' I ask her.
"'I'm due in July,' she says. 'Were there any more questions?"
"'Yeah,' I go. 'When did you change your mind about the immorality of bringing children into such a shitty world?'
"'When I finally met a man who wasn't a shit,' she answers, and hangs up."
Bill began to laugh. He laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks.
"Yeah," Richie said. "I think she cut it off quick so she'd really get the last word, but she could have hung on the line all day. I know when I've been aced. I went back to the doctor a week later and asked him if he could be a little clearer on the odds against that sort of spontaneous regeneration. He said he'd talked with some of his colleagues about the matter. It turned out that in the three-year period 1980-82,the California branch of the AMA logged twenty-three reports of spontaneous regeneration. Six of those turned out to be simply botched operations. Six others were either hoaxes or cons--guys looking to take a bite out of some doctor's bank account. So ... eleven real ones in three years."
"Eleven out of how many?" Beverly asked.
"Twenty-eight thousand six hundred and eighteen," Richie said calmly.
Silence around the table.
"So I went and beat Irish Sweepstakes odds," Richie said, "and still no kid to show for it. That give you any good chucks, Eds?"
Eddie began stubbornly: "It still doesn't prove-"
"No," Bill said, "it doesn't prove a thing. But it certainly suggests a link. The question is, what do we do now? Have you thought about that, Mike?"
"I've thought about it, sure," Mike said, "but it was impossible to decide anything until you all got together again and talked, the way you've been doing. There was no way I could predict how this reunion would go until it actually happened."
He paused for a long time, looking thoughtfully at them.
"I've got one idea," he said, "but before I tell you what it is, I think we have to agree on whether or not we have business to do here. Do we want to try again to do what we tried to do once before? Do we want to try to kill It again? Or do we just divide the check up six ways and go back to what we were doing?"
"It seems as if--" Beverly began, but Mike shook his head at her. He wasn't done.
"You have to understand that our chances of success are impossible to predict. I know they're not good, just as I know they would have been a little better if Stan was here, too. Still not real good, but better. With Stan gone, the circle we made that day is broken. I don't really think we can destroy It, or even send It away for a little while, as we did before, with a broken circle. I think It will kill us, one by one by one, and probably in some extremely horrible ways. As children we made a complete circle in some way I don't understand even now. I think that, if we agree to go ahead, we'll have to try to form a smaller circle. I don't know if that can be done. I believe it might be possible to think we'd done it, only to discover--when it was too late--wett ... that it was too late."
Mike regarded them again, eyes sunken and tired in his brown face. "So I think we need to take a vote. Stay and try it again, or go home. Those are the choices. I got you here on the strength of an old promise I wasn't even sure you'd remember, but I can't hold you here on the strength of that promise. The results of that would be worse and more of it."
He looked at Bill, and in that moment Bill understood what was coming. He dreaded it, was helpless to stop it, and then, with the same feeling of relief he imagined must come to a suicide when he takes his hands off the wheel of the speeding car and simply uses them to cover his eyes, he accepted it. Mike had gotten them here, Mike had laid it all neatly out for them ... and now he was relinquishing the mantle of leadership. He intended that mantle to go back to the person who had worn it in 1958.
"What do you say, Big Bill? Call the question."
"Before I do," Bill said, "d-does everyone understand the question? You were going to say something, Bev."
She shook her head.
"All right; I g-guess the question is, do we stay and fight or do we forget the whole thing? Those in favor of staying?"
No one at the table moved at all for perhaps five seconds, and Bill was reminded of auctions he had attended where the price on an item suddenly soared into the stratosphere and those who didn't want to bid anymore almost literally played statues; one was afraid to scratch an itch or wave a fly off the end of one's nose for fear the auctioneer would take it for another five grand or twenty-five.
Bill thought of Georgie, Georgie who had meant no one any harm, who had only wanted to get out of the house after being cooped up all week, Georgie with his color high, his newspaper boat in one hand, snapping the buckles of his yellow rainslicker with the other, Georgie thanking him ... and then bending over and kissing Bill's fever-heated cheek: Thanks, Bill. It's a neat boat.
He felt the old rage rise in him, but he was older now and his perspective was wider. It wasn't just Georgie now. A horrid slew of names marched through his head: Betty Ripsom, found frozen into the ground, Cheryl Lamonica, fished out of the Kenduskeag, Matthew Clements, torn from his tricycle, Veronica Grogan, nine years old and found in a sewer, Steven Johnson, Lisa Albrecht, all the others, and God only knew how many of the missing.
He raised his hand slowly and said, "Let's kill It. This time let's really kill It."
For a moment his hand hung there alone, like the hand of the only kid in class who knows the right answer, the one all the other kids hate. Then Richie sighed, raised his own hand, and said: "What the hell. It can't be any worse than interviewing Ozzy Osbourne."
Beverly raised her hand. Her color was back now, but in hectic patches that flared along her cheekbones. She looked both tremendously excited and scared to death.
Mike raised his hand.
Ben raised his.
Eddie Kaspbrak sat back in his chair, looking as if he wished he could actually melt into it and thus disappear. His face, thin and delicate-looking, was miserably afraid as he looked first right and then left and then back to Bill. For a moment Bill felt sure Eddie was simply going to push back his chair, rise, and bolt from the room without looking back. Then he raised one hand in the air and grasped his aspirator tightly in the other.
"Way to go, Eds," Richie said. "We're really gonna have ourselves some chucks this time, I bet."
"Beep-beep, Richie," Eddie said in a wavering voice.
6
The Losers Get Dessert
"So what's your one idea, Mike?" Bill asked. The mood had been broken by Rose, the hostess, who had come in with a dish of fortune cookies. She looked around at the six people who had their hands in the air with a carefully polite lack of curiosity. They lowered them hastily, and no one said anything until Rose was gone again.
"It's simple enough," Mike said, "but it might be pretty damn dangerous, too."
"Spill it," Richie said.
"I think we ought to split up for the rest of the day. I think each of us ought to go back to the place in Derry he or she remembers best ... outside the Barrens, that is. I don't think any of us should go there--not yet. Think of it as a series of walking-tours, if you like."
"What's the purpose, Mike?" Ben asked.
"I'm not entirely sure. You have to understand that I'm going pretty much on intuition here--"
"But this has got a good beat and you can dance to it," Richie said.
The others smiled. Mike did not; he nodded instead. "That's as good a way of putting it as any. Going on intuition is like picking up a beat and dancing to it. Using intuition is a hard thing for grownups to do, and that's the main reason I think it might be the right thing for us to do. Kids, after all, operate on it about eighty percent of the time, at least until they're fourteen or so."
"You're talking about plugging back into the situation," Eddie said.
"I suppose so. Anyway, that's my idea. If no specific place to go comes to you, just follow your feet and see where they take you. Then we meet tonight, at the library, and talk over what happened."
"If anything happens," Ben said.
"Oh, I think things will."
"What sort of things?" Bill asked.
Mike shook his head. "I have no idea. I think whatever happens is apt to be unpleasant. I think it's even possible that one of us may not turn up at the library tonight. No reason for thinking that... except that intuition thing again."
Silence greeted this.
"Why alone?" Beverly asked finally. "If we're supposed to do this as a group, why do you want us to start alone, Mike? Especially if the risk really turns out to be as high as you think it might be?"
"I think I can answer that," Bill said.
"Go ahead, Bill," Mike said.
"It started alone for each of us," Bill said to Beverly. "I don't remember everything--not yet--but I sure remember that much. The picture in George's room that moved. Ben's mummy. The leper that Eddie saw under the porch on Neibolt Street. Mike finding the blood on the grass near the Canal in Bassey Park. And the bird ... there was something about a bird, wasn't there, Mike?"
Mike nodded grimly.
"A big bird."
"Yes, but not as friendly as the one on Sesame Street." Richie cackled wildly. "Derry's answer to James Brown Gets Off A Good One! Oh chillun, is we blessed or is we blessed!"
"Beep-beep, Richie," Mike said, and Richie subsided.
"For you it was the voice from the pipe and the blood that came out of the drain," Bill said to Beverly. "And for Richie ..." But here he paused, puzzled.
"I must be the exception that proves the rule, Big Bill," Richie said. "The first time I came in contact with anything that summer that was weird--I mean really big-league weird-was in George's room, with you. When you and I went back to your house that day and looked at his photo album. The picture of Center Street by the Canal started to move. Do you remember?"
"Yes," Bill said. "But are you sure there was nothing before that, Richie? Nothing at all?"
"I--" Something flickered in Richie's eyes. He said slowly, "Well, there was the day Henry and his friends chased me--before the end of school, this was, and I got away from them in the toy department of Freese's. I went up by City Center and sat down on a park bench for awhile and I thought I saw ... but that was just something I dreamed."
"What was it?" Beverly asked.
"Nothing," Richie said, almost brusquely. "A dream. Really." He looked at Mike. "I don't mind taking a walk, though. It'll kill the afternoon. Views of the old homestead."
"So we're agreed?" Bill asked.
They nodded.
"And we'll meet at the library tonight at ... when do you suggest, Mike?"
"Seven o'clock. Ring the bell if you're late. The libe closes at seven on weekdays until summer vacation starts for the kids."
"Seven it is," Bill said, and let his eyes range soberly over them. "And be careful. You want to remember that none of us really knows what we're d-d-doing. Think of this as reconnaissance. If you should see something, don't fight. Run."
"I'm a lover, not a fighter," Richie said in a dreamy Michael Jackson Voice.
"Well, if we're going to do it, we ought to get going," Ben said. A small smile pulled up the left corner of his mouth. It was more bitter than amused. "Although I'll be damned if I could tell you right this minute where I'm going to go, if the Barrens are out. That was the best of it for me--going down there with you guys." His eyes moved to Beverly, held there for a moment, moved away. "I can't think of anyplace else that means very much to me. Probably I'll just wander around for a couple of hours, looking at buildings and getting wet feet."
"You'll find a place to go, Haystack," Richie said. "Visit some of your old food-stops and gas up."
Ben laughed. "My capacity's gone down a lot since I was eleven. I'm so full you guys may just have to roll me out of here."
"Well, I'm all set," Eddie said.
"Wait a sec!" Beverly cried as they began to push back from their chairs. "The fortune cookies! Don't forget those!"
"Yeah," Richie said. "I can see mine now. YOU WILL SOON BE EATEN UP BY A LARGE MONSTER. HAVE A NICE DAY."
They laughed and Mike passed the little bowl of fortune cookies to Richie, who took one and then sent it on around the table. Bill noticed that no one opened his or her cookie until each had one; they sat with the little hat-shaped cookies either in front of them or held in their hands, and even as Beverly, still smiling, picked hers up, Bill felt a cry rising in his throat: No! No, don't do that, it's part of it, put it back, don't open it!
But it was too late. Beverly had broken hers open, Ben was doing the same to his, Eddie was cutting into his with the edge of his fork, and just before Beverly's smile turned to a grimace of horror Bill had time to think: We knew, somehow we knew, because no one simply bit into his or her fortune cookie. That would have been the normal thing to do, but no one did it. Somehow, some part of us still remembers ...everything.
And he found that insensate underknowledge somehow the most horrifying realization of all; it spoke more eloquently than Mike could have about how surely and deeply It had touched each one of them ... and how Its touch was still upon them.
Blood spurted up from Beverly's fortune cookie as if from a slashed artery. It splashed across her hand and then gouted onto the white napery which covered the table, staining it a bright red that sank in and then spread out in grasping pink fingers.
Eddie Kaspbrak uttered a strangled cry and pushed himself away from the table with such a sudden revolted confusion of arms and legs that his chair nearly tipped over. A huge bug, its chitinous carapace an ugly yellow-brown, was pushing its way out of his fortune cookie as if from a cocoon. Its obsidian eyes stared blindly forward. As it lurched onto Eddie's bread-and-butter plate, cookie crumbs fell from its back in a little shower that Bill heard clearly and which came back to haunt his dreams when he slept for awhile later that afternoon. As it freed itself entirely it rubbed its thin rear legs together, producing a dry reedy hum, and Bill realized it was some sort of terribly mutated cricket. It lumbered to the edge of the dish and tumbled onto the tablecloth on its back.
"Oh God!" Richie managed in a choked voice. "Oh God Big Bill it's an eye dear God it's an eye a fucking eye--"
Bill's head snapped around and he saw Richie staring down at his fortune cookie, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a kind of sickened leer. A chunk of his cookie's glazed surface had fallen onto the tablecloth, revealing a hole from which a human eyeball stared with glazed intensity. Cookie crumbs were scattered across its blank brown iris and embedded in its sclera.
Ben Hanscom threw his--not a calculated throw but the startled reaction of a person who has been utterly surprised by some piece of nasty work. As his fortune cookie rolled across the table Bill saw two teeth inside its hollow, their roots dark with clotted blood. They rattled together like seeds in a hollow gourd.