t back! trembled behind his lips ... except that was nothing you said to a little kid. Not if you didn't want your buddies to start ranking you to the dogs and back.
Bill started to walk toward Victor now, and Victor began to walk toward Bill. At the same moment, as if by some telepathic signal, they began to throw rocks at each other, still closing the distance. The fighting flagged around them as the others turned to watch; even Henry turned his head.
Victor ducked and bobbed, but Bill made no such effort. Victor's rocks slammed him in the chest, the shoulder, the stomach. One clipped by his ear. Apparently unshaken by any of this, Bill threw one rock after another, pegging them with murderous force. The third one struck Victor's knee with a brittle chipping sound and Victor uttered a stifled groan. He was out of ammunition. Bill had one rock left. It was smooth and white, shot with quartz, roughly the size and shape of a duck's egg. To Victor Criss it looked very hard.
Bill was less than five feet away from him.
"Y-Y-You g-get ow-out of h-h-here now," he said, "or I'm g-going to spuh-puh-lit your h-head o-o-open. I m-mean ih-ih-it."
Looking into his eyes, Victor saw that he really did. Without another word, he turned and headed back the way Peter Gordon had gone.
Belch and Moose Sadler were looking around uncertainly. Blood trickled from the corner of the Sadler boy's mouth, and blood from a scalp-wound was sheeting down the side of Belch's face.
Henry's mouth worked but no sound came out.
Bill turned toward Henry. "G-G-Get out," he said.
"What if I won't?" Henry was trying to sound tough, but Bill could now see a different thing in Henry's eyes. He was scared, and he would go. It should have made Bill feel good--triumphant, even--but he only felt tired.
"I-If you w-won't," Bill said, "w-w-we're g-going to muhmove i-in on y-you. I think the s-s-six of u-us can p-put you in the huh-huh-hospital."
"Seven," Mike Hanlon said, and joined them. He had a softball-sized rock in each hand. "Just try me, Bowers. I'd love to."
"You fucking NIGGER!" Henry's voice broke and wavered on the edge of tears. That voice took the last of the fight out of Belch and Moose; they backed away, their remaining rocks dropping from relaxing hands. Belch looked around as if wondering exactly where he might be.
"Get out of our place," Beverly said.
"Shut up, you cunt," Henry said. "You--" Four rocks flew at once, hitting Henry in four different places. He screamed and scrambled backward over the weed-raddled ground, the tatters of his shirt flapping around him. He looked from the grim, old-young faces of the little kids to the frantic ones of Belch and Moose. There was no help there; no help at all. Moose turned away, embarrassed.
Henry got to his feet, sobbing and snuffling through his broken nose. "I'll kill you all," he said, and suddenly ran for the path. A moment later he was gone.
"G-G-Go on," Bill said, speaking to Belch. "Get ow-out. And d-don't c-c-come down h-here anymore. The B-B-Barrens are ow-ow-ours."
"You're gonna wish you didn't cross Henry, kid," Belch said. "Come on, Moose."
They started away, heads down, not looking back.
The seven of them stood in a loose semicircle, all of them bleeding somewhere. The apocalyptic rockfight had lasted less than four minutes, but Bill felt as if he had fought his way through all of World War II, both theaters, without so much as a single time-out.
The silence was broken by Eddie Kaspbrak's whooping, whining struggle for air. Ben went toward him, felt the three Twinkies and four Ding-Dongs he had eaten on his way down to the Barrens begin to struggle and churn in his stomach, and ran past Eddie and into the bushes, where he was sick as privately and quietly as he could be.
It was Richie and Bev who went to Eddie. Beverly put an arm around the thin boy's waist while Richie dug his aspirator out of his pocket. "Bite on this, Eddie," he said, and Eddie took a hitching, gasping breath as Richie pulled the trigger.
"Thanks," Eddie managed at last.
Ben came back out of the bushes, blushing, wiping a hand over his mouth. Beverly went over to him and took both of his hands in hers.
"Thanks for sticking up for me," she said.
Ben nodded, looking at his dirty sneakers. "Any time, keed," he said.
One by one they turned to look at Mike, Mike with his dark skin. They looked at him carefully, cautiously, thoughtfully. Mike had felt such curiosity before--there had not been a time in his life when he had not felt it--and he looked back candidly enough.
Bill looked from Mike to Richie. Richie met his eyes. And Bill seemed almost to hear the click--some final part fitting neatly into a machine of unknown intent. He felt ice-chips scatter up his back. We're all together now, he thought, and the idea was so strong, so right, that for a moment he thought he might have spoken it aloud. But of course there was no need to speak it aloud; he could see it in Richie's eyes, in Ben's, in Eddie's, in Beverly's, in Stan's.
We're all together now, he thought again. Oh God help us. Now it really starts. Please God, help us.
"What's your name, kid?" Beverly asked.
"Mike Hanlon."
"You want to shoot off some firecrackers?" Stan asked, and Mike's grin was answer enough.
CHAPTER 14
The Album
1
As it turns out, Bill isn't the only one; they all bring booze.
Bill has bourbon, Beverly has vodka and a carton of orange juice, Richie a sixpack, Ben Hanscom a bottle of Wild Turkey. Mike has a sixpack in the little refrigerator in the staff lounge.
Eddie Kaspbrak comes in last, holding a small brown bag.
"What you got there, Eddie?" Richie asks. "Za-Rex or Kool-Aid?"
Smiling nervously, Eddie removes first a bottle of gin and then a bottle of prune juice.
In the thunderstruck silence which follows, Richie says quietly: "Somebody call for the men in the white coats. Eddie Kaspbrak's finally gone over the top."
"Gin-and-prune-juice happens to be very healthy," Eddie replies defensively ... and then they're all laughing wildly, the sound of their mirth echoing and re-echoing in the silent library, rolling up and down the glassed-in hall between the adult library and the Children's Library.
"You go head-on," Ben says, wiping his streaming eyes. "You go head-on, Eddie. I bet it really moves the mail, too."
Smiling, Eddie fills a paper cup three-quarters full of prune juice and then soberly adds two capfuls of gin.
"Oh Eddie, I do love you," Beverly says, and Eddie looks up, startled but smiling. She gazes up and down the table. "I love all of you."
Bill says, "W-We love you too, B-Bev."
"Yes," Ben says. "We love you." His eyes widen a little, and he laughs. "I think we still all love each other.... Do you know how rare that must be?"
There's a moment of silence, and Mike is really not surprised to see that Richie is wearing his glasses.
"My contacts started to burn and I had to take them out," Richie says briefly when Mike asks. "Maybe we should get down to business?"
They all look at Bill then, as they had in the gravel-pit, and Mike thinks: They look at Bill when they need a leader, at Eddie when they need a navigator. Get down to business, what a hell of a phrase that is. Do I tell them that the bodies of the children that were found back then and now weren't sexually molested, not even precisely mutilated, but partially eaten? Do I tell them I've got seven miner's helmets, the kind with strong electric lights set into the front, stored back at my house, one of them for a guy named Stan Uris who couldn't make the scene, as we used to say? Or is it maybe enough just to tell them to go home and get a good night's sleep, because it ends tomorrow or tomorrow night for good--either for It or us?
None of those things have to be said, perhaps, and the reason why they don't has already been stated: they still love one another. Things have changed over the last twenty-seven years, but that, miraculously, hasn't. It is, Mike thinks, our only real hope.
The only thing that really remains is to finish going through it, to complete the job of catching up, of stapling past to present so that the strip of experience forms some half-assed kind of wheel. Yes, Mike thinks, that's it. Tonight the job is to make the wheel; tomorrow we can see if it still turns ... the way it did when we drove the big kids out of the gravel-pit and out of the Barrens.
"Have you remembered the rest?" Mike asks Richie.
Richie swallows some beer and shakes his head. "I remember you telling us about the bird ... and about the smoke-hole. " A grin breaks over Richie's face. "I remembered about that walking over here tonight with Bevvie and Ben. What a fucking horror-show that was--"
"Beep-beep, Richie, " Beverly says, smiling.
"Well, you know," he says, still smiling himself and punching his glasses up on his nose in a gesture that is eerily reminiscent of the old Richie. He winks at Mike. "You and me, right, Mikey?"
Mike snorts laughter and nods.
"Miss Scawlett! Miss Scawlett!" Richie shrieks in his Pickaninny Voice. "It's gettin a little wa'am in de smokehouse, Miss Scawlett!"
Laughing, Bill says, "Another engineering and architectural triumph by Ben Hanscom."
Beverly nods. "We were digging out the clubhouse when you brought your father's photograph album to the Barrens, Mike."
"Oh, Christ!" Bill says, sitting suddenly bolt-upright. "And the pictures--"
Richie nods grimly. "The same trick as in Georgie's room. Only that time we all saw it. "
Ben says, "I remembered what happened to the extra silver dollar. "
They all turn to look at him.
"I gave the other three to a friend of mine before I came out here," Ben says quietly. "For his kids. I remembered there had been a fourth, but I couldn't remember what happened to it. Now I do." He looks at Bill. "We made a silver slug out of it, didn't we? You, me, and Richie. At first we were going to make a silver bullet--"
"You were pretty sure you could do it," Richie agrees. "But in the end--"
"We got c-cold fuh-feet." Bill nods slowly. The memory has fallen naturally into its place, and he hears that same low but distinct click! when it happens. We're getting closer, he thinks.
"We went back to Neibolt Street," Richie says. "All of us."
"You saved my life, Big Bill," Ben says suddenly and Bill shakes his head. "You did, though," Ben persists, and this time Bill doesn't shake his head. He suspects that maybe he had done just that, although he does not yet remember how ... and was it him? He thinks maybe Beverly ... but that is not there. Not yet, anyway.
"Excuse me for a second," Mike says. "I've got a sixpack in the back fridge. "
"Have one of mine," Richie says.
"Hanlon no drinkum white man's beer," Mike replies. "Especially not yours, Trashmouth."
"Beep-beep, Mikey," Richie says solemnly, and Mike goes to get his beer on a warm wave of their laughter.
He snaps on the light in the lounge, a tacky little room with seedy chairs, a Silex badly in need of scrubbing, and a bulletin board covered with old notices, wage and hour information, and a few New Yorker cartoons now turning yellow and curling up at the edges. He opens the little refrigerator and feels the shock sink into him, bone-deep and ice-white, the way February cold sank into you when February was here and it seemed that April never would be. Blue and orange balloons drift out in a flood, dozens of them, a New Year's Eve bouquet of party-balloons, and he thinks incoherently in the midst of his fear, All we need is Guy Lombardo tootling away on "Auld Lang Syne." They waft past his face and rise toward the lounge ceiling. He's trying to scream, unable to scream, seeing what had been behind the balloons, what It had popped into the refrigerator beside his beer, as if for a late-night snack after his worthless friends have all told their worthless stories and gone back to their rented beds in this home town that is no longer home.
Mike takes a step backward, his hands going to his face, shutting the vision out. He stumbles over one of the chairs, almost falls, and takes his hands away. It is still there; Stan Uris's severed head beside Mike's sixpack of Bud Light, the head not of a man but of an eleven-year-old boy. The mouth is open in a soundless scream but Mike can see neither teeth nor tongue because the mouth has been stuffed full of feathers. The feathers are a light brown and unspeakably huge. He knows well enough what bird those feathers came from. Oh yes. Oh yes indeed. He had seen the bird in May of 1958 and they had all seen it in early August of 1958 and then, years later, while visiting his dying father, he had found out that Will Hanlon had seen it once, too, after his escape from the fire at the Black Spot. The blood from Stan's tattered neck has dripped down and formed a coagulated pool on the fridge's bottom shelf. It glitters dark ruby-red in the uncompromising glow shed by the fridge bulb.
"Uh ... uh ... uh ..." Mike manages, but no more sound than that can he make. Then the head opens its eyes, and they are the silver-bright eyes of Pennywise the Clown. Those eyes roll in his direction and the head's lips begin to squirm around the mouthful of feathers. It is trying to speak, perhaps trying to deliver prophecy like the oracle in a Greek play.
Just thought I'd join you, Mike, because you can't win without me. You can't win without me and you know it, don't you? You might have had a chance if all of me had shown up, but I just couldn't stand the strain on my all-American brain, if you see what I mean, jellybean. All the six of you can do on your own is hash over some old times and then get yourselves killed. So I thought I'd head you off at the pass. Head you off, get it, Mikey? Get it, old pal? Get it, you fucking scumbag nigger?
You're not real! he screams, but no sound comes out; he is like a TV with the volume control turned all the way down.
Incredibly, grotesquely, the head winks at him.
I'm real, all right. Real as raindrops. And you know what I'm talking about, Mikey. What the six of you are planning to try is like taking off in a jet plane with no landing gear. There's no sense in going up if you can't get back down, is there? No sense in going down if you can't get back up, either. You'll never think of the right riddles and jokes. You'll never make me laugh, Mikey. You've all forgotten how to turn your screams upside-down. Beep-beep, Mikey, what do you say? Remember the bird? Nothing but a sparrow, but say-hey! it was a lulu, wasn't it? Big as a barn, big as one of those silly Japanese movie monsters that used to scare you when you were a little kid. The days when you knew how to turn that bird from your door are gone forever. Believe it, Mikey. If you know how to use your head, you'll get out of here, out of Derry, right now. If you don't know how to use it, it'll end up just like this one here. Today's guidepost along the great road of life is use it before you lose it, my good man.
The head rolls over on its face (the feathers in its mouth make a horrid crumpling sound) and falls out of the refrigerator. It thuks to the floor and rolls toward him like a hideous bowling ball, its blood-matted hair changing places with its grinning face; it rolls toward him leaving a gluey trail of blood and dismembered bits of feather behind, its mouth working around its clot of feathers.
Beep-beep, Mikey! it screams as Mike backs madly away from it, hands held out in a warding-off gesture. Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-fucking-beep!
Then there is a sudden loud pop--the sound of a plastic cork thumbed out of a bottle of cheap champagne. The head disappears (Real, Mike thinks sickly; there was nothing supernatural about that pop, anyway; that was the sound of air rushing back into a suddenly vacated space ... real, oh God, real). A thin net of blood droplets floats up and then patters back down. No need to clean the lounge, though; Carole will see nothing when she comes in tomorrow, not even if she has to plow her way through the balloons to get to the hotplate and make her first cup of coffee. How handy. He giggles shrilly.
He looks up and yes, the balloons are still there. The blue ones say: DERRY NIGGERS GET THE BIRD. The orange ones say: THE LOSERS ARE STILL LOSING, BUT STANLEY URIS IS FINALLY AHEAD.
No sense going up if you can't get back down, the speaking head had assured him, no sense going down if you can't get back up. This latter makes him think again of the stored miner's helmets. And was it true? Suddenly he's thinking about the first day he went down to the Barrens after the rockfight. July 6th, that had been, two days after he had marched in the Fourth of July parade ... two days after he had seen Pennywise the Clown in person for the first time. It had been after that day in the Barrens, after listening to their stories and then, hesitantly, telling his own, that he had gone home and asked his father if he could look at his photograph album.
Why exactly had he gone down to the Barrens that July 6th? Had he known he would find them there? It seemed that he had--and not just that they would be there, but where they would be. They had been talking about a clubhouse of some sort, he remembers, but it had seemed to him that they had been talking about that because there was something else that they didn't know how to talk about.
Mike looks up at the balloons, not really seeing them now, trying to remember exactly how it had been that day, that hot hot day. Suddenly it seems very important to remember just what had happened, what every nuance had been, what his state of mind had been.
Because that was when everything began to happen. Before that the others had talked about killing It, but there had been no forward motion, no plan. When Mike had come the circle closed, the wheel began to roll. It had been later that same day that Bill and Richie and Ben went down to the library and began to do serious research on an idea that Bill had had a day or a week or a month before. It had all begun to--
"Mike?" Richie calls from the Reference Room where the others are gathered. "Did you die in there?"
Almost, Mike thinks, looking at the balloons, the blood, the feathers inside the fridge.
He calls back: "I think you guys better come in here."
He hears the scrape of their chairs, the mutter of their voices; he hears Richie saying "Oh Jesus, what's up now?" and another ear, this one in his memory, hears Richie saying something else, and suddenly he remembers what it is he has been searching for; even more, he understands why it has seemed so elusive. The reaction of the others when he stepped into the clearing in the darkest, deepest, and most overgrown part of the Barrens that day had been ... nothing. No surprise, no questions about how he had foun