It

od of its taste; it was like eating frozen dinners that had never seen the inside of an oven. Sometimes, after, he would go up to his room and lie on his bed, holding his griping stomach, and think: He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts. He thought of that more and more since Georgie had died, although his mother had taught him the phrase two years before. It had taken on a talismanic cast in his mind: the day he could walk up to his mother and simply speak that phrase without tripping or stuttering, looking her right in the eye as he spoke it, the coldness would break apart; her eyes would light up and she would hug him and say, "Wonderful, Billy! What a good boy! What a good boy!"

He had, of course, told this to no one. Wild horses would not have dragged it from him; neither the rack nor the boot would have induced him to give up this secret fantasy, which lay at the very center of his heart. If he could say this phrase which she had taught him casually one Saturday morning as he and Georgie sat watching Guy Madison and Andy Devine in The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, it would be like the kiss that awakened Sleeping Beauty from her cold dreams to the warmer world of the fairytale prince's love.

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

Nor did he tell it to his friends on that July 3rd--but he told them what his father had told him about the Derry sewer and drain systems. He was a boy to whom invention came easily and naturally (sometimes more easily than telling the truth), and the scene he painted was quite different from the scene in which the conversation had actually taken place: he and his old man had been watching the tube together, he said, having cups of coffee.

"Your dad lets you have coffee?" Eddie asked.

"Sh-sh-sure," Bill said.

"Wow," Eddie said. "My mother would never let me have a coffee. She says the caffeine in it is dangerous." He paused. "She drinks quite a bit of it herself, though."

"My dad lets me have coffee if I want it," Beverly said, "but he'd kill me if he knew I smoked."

"What makes you so sure it's in the sewers?" Richie asked, looking from Bill to Stan Uris and then back to Bill again.

"E-E-Everything g-goes back t-to th-th-that," Bill said. "The v-voices Beh-he-heverly heard c-came from the d-d-drain. And the bluh-blood. When the c-c-clown ch-chased us, those o-orange buh-buh-buttons were by a suh-sewer. And Juh-juh-George--"

"It wasn't a clown, Big Bill," Richie said. "I told you that. I know it's crazy, but it was a werewolf." He looked at the others defensively. "Honest to God. I saw it."

Bill said: "It was a werewolf for y-y-you."

"Huh?"

Bill said, "D-Don't you s-s-see? It was a wuh-wuh-werewolf for y-you because y-you saw that duh-humb movie at the A-A-A-Aladdin."

"I don't get it."

"I think I do," Ben said quietly.

"I went to the l-l-library and l-looked it uh-uh-up," Bill said. "I think It's a gluh-gluh"--he paused, throat straining, and spat it out--"a glamour."

"Glammer?" Eddie asked doubtfully.

"G-G-Glamour," Bill said, and spelled it. He told them about an encyclopedia entry on the subject and a chapter he had read in a book called Night's Truth. Glamour, he said, was the Gaelic name for the creature which was haunting Derry; other races and other cultures at other times had different words for it, but they all meant the same thing. The Plains Indians called it a manitou, which sometimes took the shape of a mountain-lion or an elk or an eagle. These same Indians believed that the spirit of a manitou could sometimes enter them, and at these times it was possible for them to shape the clouds themselves into representations of those animals for which their houses had been named. The Himalayans called it a tallus or taelus, which meant an evil magic being that could read your mind and then assume the shape of the thing you were most afraid of. In Central Europe it had been called eylak, brother of the vurderlak, or vampire. In France it was le loup-garou, or skin-changer, a concept that had been crudely translated as the werewolf, but, Bill told them, le loup-garou (which he pronounced "le loopgaroo") could be anything, anything at all: a wolf, a hawk, a sheep, even a bug.

"Did any of those articles tell you how to beat a glamour?" Beverly asked.

Bill nodded, but he didn't look hopeful. "The H-H-Himalayans had a rih-hi-hitual to g-get rih-rid of i-i-it, but ih-it's pretty gruh-gruh-gruesome."

They looked at him, not wanting to hear but needing to.

"I-I-It was cuh-called the R-R-Ritual of Chuh-Chud," Bill said, and went on to explain what that was. If you were a Himalayan holy-man, you tracked the taelus. The taelus stuck its tongue out. You stuck yours out. You and it overlapped tongues and then you both bit in all the way so you were sort of stapled together, eye to eye.

"Oh, I think I'm gonna puke," Beverly said, rolling over on the dirt. Ben patted her back tentatively, then looked around to see if he had been observed. He hadn't been; the others were looking at Bill, mesmerized.

"What then?" Eddie asked.

"W-W-Well," Bill said, "this sounds cuh-cuh-crazy, b-but the book s-said that th-then y-you started telling juh-jokes and rih-riddles."

"What?" Stan asked.

Bill nodded, his face that of a correspondent who wants you to know--without coming right out and saying it--that he doesn't make the news but only reports it. "R-Right. F-First the t-taelas monster would tell o-o-one, then y-y-you got to t-t-tell o-one, and y-you w-w-went o-on like thuh-that, t-tay-takin t-tums--"

Beverly sat up again, knees against her chest, hands linked around her shins. "I don't see how people could talk with their tongues, you know, nailed together."

Richie immediately ran out his tongue, gripped it with his fingers, and intoned: "My father works in a shit-yard!" That broke them all up for awhile even though it was a baby joke.

"M-Maybe it was suh-suh-suhpposed to be tuh-telepathy," Bill said. "A-Anyway, i-if the h-h-human laughed f-f-first in spi-hite of the p-p-p-p--"

"Pain?" Stan asked.

Bill nodded. "--then the taelus g-got to k-k-kill h-him and e-e-e-eat him. His soul, I think. B-But i-if the muh-man c-c-ould make the t-taelus l-laugh f-f-first, it had to go away for a huh-huh-hundred y-years."

"Did the book say where a thing like that would come from?" Ben asked.

Bill shook his head.

"Do you believe any of it?" Stan asked, sounding as if he wanted to scoff but could not quite find the moral or mental force to do so.

Bill shrugged and said, "I a-a-almost d-do." He seemed about to say more, then shook his head and remained silent.

"It explains a lot," Eddie said slowly. "The clown, the leper, the werewolf ..." He looked over at Stan. "The dead boys, too, I guess."

"This sounds like a job for Richard Tozier," Richie said, in the MovieTone Newsreel Announcer's Voice. "Man of a thousand jokes and six thousand riddles."

"If we sent you to do it, we'd all get killed," Ben said. "Slowly. In great pain." At this they all laughed again.

"So what do we do about it?" Stan demanded, and once again Bill could only shake his head... and feel he almost knew. Stan stood up. "Let's go somewhere else," he said. "I'm getting fanny fatigue."

"I like it here," Beverly said. "It's shady and nice." She glanced at Stan. "I suppose you want to do something babyish like going down to the dump and breaking bottles with rocks."

"I like breaking bottles with rocks," Richie said, standing up beside Stan. "It's the j.d. in me, baby." He flipped up his collar and began to stalk around like James Dean in Rebel Without aCause. "They hurt me," he said, looking moody and scratching his chest. "You know, like wow. My parents. School. So-SY-ety. Everyone. It's pressure, baby. It's--"

"It's shit," Beverly said, and sighed.

"I've got some firecrackers," Stan said, and they forgot all about glamours, manitous, and Richie's bad James Dean imitation as Stan produced a package of Black Cats from his hip pocket. Even Bill was impressed.

"J-Jesus Christ, Stuh-Stuh-han, w-where did you g-g-get thuh-hose?"

"From this fat kid that I go to synagogue with sometimes," Stan said. "I traded a bunch of Superman and Little Lulu funnybooks for em."

"Let's shoot em off!" Richie cried, nearly apoplectic in his joy. "Let's go shoot em off, Stanny, I won't tell any more guys you and your dad killed Christ, I promise, what do you say? I'll tell em your nose is small, Stanny! I'll tell em you're not circumcised!"

At this Beverly began to shriek with laughter and actually appeared to be approaching apoplexy before covering her face with her hands. Bill began to laugh, Eddie began to laugh, and after a moment even Stan joined in. The sound of it drifted across the broad shallow expanse of the Kenduskeag on that day before July 4th, a summer-sound, as bright as the sunrays darting off the water, and none of them saw the orange eyes staring at them from a tangle of brambles and sterile blackberry bushes to their left. This brambly patch scrubbed the entire bank for thirty feet, and in the center of it was one of Ben's Morlock holes. It was from this raised concrete pipe that the eyes, each more than two feet across, stared.





5


The reason Mike ran afoul of Henry Bowers and his not-so-merry band on that same day was because the next day was the Glorious Fourth. The Church School had a band in which Mike played the trombone. On the Fourth, the band would march in the annual holiday parade, playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," "Onward Christian Soldiers," and "America the Beautiful." This was an occasion that Mike had been looking forward to for over a month. He walked to the final rehearsal because his bike had a busted chain. The rehearsal was not scheduled until two-thirty, but he left at one because he wanted to polish his trombone, which was stored in the school's music room, until it glowed. Although his trombone-playing was really not much better than Richie's Voices, he was fond of the instrument, and whenever he felt blue a half an hour of foghorning Sousa marches, hymns, or patriotic airs cheered him right up again. There was a can of Saddler's brass polish in one of the flap pockets of his khaki shirt and two or three clean rags were dangling from the hip pocket of his jeans. The thought of Henry Bowers was the furthest thing from his mind.

A glance behind as he approached Neibolt Street and the Church School would have changed his mind in a hurry, because Henry, Victor, Belch, Peter Gordon, and Moose Sadler were spread across the road behind him. If they had left the Bowers house five minutes later, Mike would have been out of sight over the crest of the next hill; the apocalyptic rockfight and everything that followed it might have happened differently, or not at all.

But it was Mike himself, years later, who advanced the idea that perhaps none of them were entirely their own masters in the events of that summer; that if luck and free will had played parts, then their roles had been narrow ones. He would point out a number of these suspicious coincidences to the others at their reunion lunch, but there was at least one of which he was unaware. The meeting in the Barrens that day broke up when Stan Uris produced the Black Cats and the Losers' Club headed toward the dump to shoot them off. And Victor, Belch, and the others had come out to the Bowers farm because Henry had firecrackers, cherry-bombs, and M-80s (the possession of these last would a few years hence become a felony). The big boys were planning to go down beyond the trainyard coalpit and explode Henry's treasures.

None of them, not even Belch, went out to the Bowers farm under ordinary circumstances--primarily because of Henry's crazy father but also because they always ended up helping Henry do his chores: the weeding, the endless rock-picking, the lugging of wood, the toting of water, the pitching of hay, the picking of whatever happened to be ripe at the time of the season--peas, cukes, tomatoes, potatoes. These boys were not exactly allergic to work, but they had plenty to do at their own places without sweating for Henry's kooky father, who didn't much care who he hit (he had once taken a length of stovewood to Victor Criss when the boy dropped a basket of tomatoes he was lugging out to the roadside stand). Getting whopped with a chunk of birch was bad enough; what made it worse was that Butch Bowers had chanted "I'm gonna kill all the Nips! I'm gonna kill all the fuckin Nips!" when he did it.

Dumb as he was, Belch Huggins had expressed it best: "I don't fuck with crazy people," he told Victor one day two years before. Victor had laughed and agreed.

But the siren-song of all those firecrackers had been too great to be withstood.

"Tell you what, Henry," Victor said when Henry called him up that morning at nine and invited him out. "I'll meet you at the coalpit around one o'clock, what do you say?"

"You show up at the coalpit around one and I'm not gonna be there," Henry replied. "I got too many chores. If you show up at the coalpit around three, I will be there. And the first M-80 is going to go right up your old tan track, Vic."

Vic hesitated, then agreed to come over and help with the chores.

The others came as well, and with the five of them, all big boys, working like fiends around the Bowers place, they got all the chores finished by early afternoon. When Henry asked his father if he could go, Bowers the elder simply waved a languid hand at his son. Butch was settled in for the afternoon on the back porch, a quart milk-bottle filled with exquisitely hard cider by his rocker, his Philco portable radio on the porch rail (later that afternoon the Red Sox would be playing the Washington Senators, a prospect that would have given a man who was not crazy a bad case of cold chills). An unsheathed Japanese sword lay across Butch's lap, a war souvenir which, Butch said, he had taken off the body of a dying Nip on the island of Tarawa (he had actually traded six bottles of Budweiser and three joysticks for the sword in Honolulu). Lately Butch almost always got out his sword when he drank. And since all of the boys, including Henry himself, were secretly convinced that sooner or later he would use it on someone, it was best to be far away when it made its appearance on Butch's lap.

The boys had no more than stepped out into the road when Henry spied Mike Hanlon up ahead. "It's the nigger!" he said, his eyes lighting up like the eyes of a small child contemplating Santa Claus's imminent arrival on Christmas Eve.

"The nigger?" Belch Huggins looked puzzled--he had seen the Hanlons only rarely--and then his dim eyes lit up. "Oh yeah! The nigger! Let's get him, Henry!"

Belch broke into a thunderous trot. The others were following suit when Henry grabbed Belch and hauled him back. Henry had more experience than the others chasing Mike Hanlon, and he knew that catching him was easier said than done. That black boy could move.

"He don't see us. Let's just walk fast till he does. Cut the distance."

They did so. An observer might have been amused: the five of them looked as if they were trying out for that peculiar Olympic walking competition. Moose Sadler's considerable belly joggled up and down inside his Derry High School tee-shirt. Sweat rolled down Belch's face, which soon grew red. But the distance between them and Mike closed--two hundred yards, a hundred and fifty yards, a hundred--and so far Little Black Sambo hadn't looked back. They could hear him whistling.

"What you gonna do to him, Henry?" Victor Criss asked in a low voice. He sounded merely interested, but in truth he was worried. Just lately Henry had begun to worry him more and more. He wouldn't care if Henry wanted them to beat the Hanlon kid up, maybe even rip his shirt off or throw his pants and underwear up in a tree, but he was not sure that was all Henry had in mind. This year there had been several unpleasant encounters with the children from Derry Elementary Henry referred to as "the little shits." Henry was used to dominating and terrorizing the little shits, but since March he had been balked by them time and time again. Henry and his friends had chased one of them, the four-eyes Tozier kid, into Freese's, and had lost him somehow just when it seemed his ass was surely theirs. Then, on the last day of school, the Hanscom kid--

But Victor didn't like to think of that.

What worried him, simply was this: Henry might go TOO FAR. Just what TOO FAR might be was something Victor didn't like to think of... but his uneasy heart had prompted the question just the same.

"We're gonna catch him and take him down to that coalpit," Henry said. "I thought we'd put a couple of firecrackers in his shoes and see if he dances."

"But not the M-80s, Henry, right?"

If Henry intended something like that Victor was going to take a powder. An M-80 in each shoe would blow that nigger's feet off, and that was much TOO FAR.

"I've got only four of those," Henry said, not taking his eyes off Mike Hanlon's back. They had closed the distance to seventy-five yards now and he also spoke in a low voice. "You think I'd waste two of em on a fuckin nightfighter?"

"No, Henry. Course not."

"We'll just put a couple of Black Cats in his loafers," Henry said, "then strip him bareass and throw his clothes down into the Barrens. Maybe he'll catch poison ivy going after them."

"We gotta roll im in the coal, too," Belch said, his formerly dim eyes now glowing brightly. "Okay, Henry? Is that cool?"

"Cool as a moose," Henry said in a casual way Victor didn't quite like. "We'll roll im in the coal, just like I rolled im in the mud that other time. And..." Henry grinned, showing teeth that were already beginning to rot at the age of twelve. "And I got something to tell him. I don't think he heard when I told im before."

"What's that, Henry?" Peter asked. Peter Gordon was merely interested and excited. He came from one of Derry's "good families"; he lived on West Broadway and in two years he would be sent to prep school in Groton--or so he believed on that July 3rd. He was brighter than Vic Criss, but had not hung around long enough to understand how Henry was eroding.

"You'll find out," Henry said. "Now shut up. We're gettin close."

They were twenty-five yards behind Mike and Henry was just opening his mouth to give the order to charge when Moose Sadler set off the first firecracker of the day. Moose had eaten three plates of baked beans the night before, and the fart was almost as loud as a shotgun blast.

Mike looked around. Henry saw his eyes widen.

"Get him!" Henry howled.

Mike froze for a moment; then he took off, running for his life.





6


The Losers wound their way through the bamboo in the Barrens in this order: Bill; Richie; Beverly behind Richie, walking slim and