He went downstairs and padded along the hall to the kitchen, absently picking the seat of his shorts out of the crack of his ass, and opened the refrigerator. His reaching hand closed on nothing more alcoholic than a blue Tupperware dish of leftover noodles Romanoff. All the beer was gone. Even the can he kept way in the back (much as he kept a twentydollar bill folded up behind his drivers license for emergencies) was gone. The game had gone fourteen innings, and all for nothing. The White Sox had lost. Bunch of candyasses this year. His eyes drifted to the bottles of hard stuff on the glassedin shelf over the kitchen bar and for a moment he saw himself pouring a splash of Beam over a single icecube. Then he walked back toward the stairs, knowing that was asking for even more trouble than his head was currently in. He glanced at the face of the antique pendulum clock at the foot of the stairs and saw it was past midnight. This intelligence did nothing to improve his temper, which was never very good even at the best of times. He climbed the stairs with slow deliberation, awaretoo awareof how hard his heart was working. Kaboom, kathud. Kaboom, kathud. Kaboom, kathud. It made him nervous when he could feel his heart beating in his ears and wrists as well as in his chest. Sometimes when that happened he would imagine it not as a squeezing and loosening organ but as a big dial on the left side of his chest with the needle edging ominously into the red zone. He did not like that shit; he did not need that shit. What he needed was a good nights sleep. But the numb cunt he was married to was still on the phone. I understand that, Mike.... yes ... yes, I am ... I know ... but . . . A longer pause. Bill Denbrough? she exclaimed, and that icepick drilled into his ear again. He stood outside the bedroom door until he got his breath back. Now it was kathud, kathud, kathud again the booming had stopped. He briefly imagined the needle edging out of the red and then willed the picture away. He was a man, for Christs sake, and a damned good one, not a furnace with a bad thermostat. He was in great shape. He was iron. And if she needed to relearn that, he would be happy to teach her. He started in, then thought better of it and stood where he was a moment longer, listening to her, not particularly caring about who she was talking to or what she said, only listening to the risingfalling tones of her voice. And what he felt was the old familiar dull rage. He had met her in a downtown Chicago singles bar four years ago. Conversation had been easy enough, because they both worked in the Standard Brands Building, and knew a few of the same people. Tom worked for King  Landry, Public Relations, on fortytwo. Beverly Marshso she had been thenwas an assistant designer at Delia Fashions, on twelve. Delia, which would later enjoy a modest vogue in the Midwest, catered to young peopleDelia skirts and blouses and shawls and slacks were sold largely to what Delia Castleman called youthstores and what Tom called headshops. Tom Rogan knew two things about Beverly Marsh almost at once she was desirable and she was vulnerable. In less than a month he knew a third as well she was talented. Very talented. In her drawings of casual dresses and blouses he saw a moneymachine of almost scary potential. Not in the headshops, though, he thought, but did not say (at least not then). No more bad lighting, no more knockdown prices, no more shitty displays somewhere in the back of the store between the dope paraphernalia and the rockgroup teeshirts. Leave that shit for the smalltimers. He had known a great deal about her before she knew he had any real interest in her, and that was just the way Tom wanted it. He had been looking for someone like Beverly Marsh all his life, and he moved in with the speed of a lion making a run at a slow antelope. Not that her vulnerability showed on the surfaceyou looked and saw a gorgeous woman, slim but abundantly stacked. Hips werent so great, maybe, but she had a great ass and the best set of tits he had ever seen. Tom Rogan was a titman, always had been, and tall girls almost always had disappointing tits. They wore thin shirts and their nipples drove you crazy, but when you got those thin shirts off you discovered that nipples were really all they had. The tits themselves looked like the pullknobs on a bureau drawer. More than a handfuls wasted, his college roommate had been fond of saying, but as far as Tom was concerned his college roommate had been so full of shit he squeaked going into a turn. Oh, she had been some kind of finelooking, all right, with that dynamite body and that gorgeous fall of red wavy hair. But she was weak ... weak somehow. It was as if she was sending out radio signals which only he could receive. You could point to certain thingshow much she smoked (but he had almost cured her of that), the restless way her eyes moved, never quite meeting the eyes of whoever was talking to her, only touching them from time to time and then leaping nimbly away; her habit of lightly rubbing her elbows when she was nervous; the look of her fingernails, which were kept neat but brutally short. Tom noticed this latter the first time he met her. She picked up her glass of white wine, he saw her nails, and thought She keeps them short like that because she bites them. Lions may not think, at least not the way people think ... but they see. And when antelopes start away from a waterhole, alerted by that dustyrug scent of approaching death, the cats can observe which one falls to the rear of the pack, maybe because it has a lame leg, maybe because it is just naturally slower ... or maybe because its sense of danger is less developed. And it might even be possible that some antelopesand some womenwant to be brought down. Suddenly he heard a sound that jerked him rudely out of these memoriesthe snap of her cigarette lighter. The dull rage came again. His stomach filled with a heat which was not entirely unpleasant. Smoking. She was smoking. They had had a few of Tom Rogans Special Seminars on the subject. And here she was, doing it again. She was a slow learner, all right, but a good teacher is at his best with slow learners. Yes, she said now. Uhhuh. All right. Yes ... She listened, then uttered a strange, jagged laugh he had never heard before. Two things, since you askreserve me a room and say me a prayer. Yes, okay ... uhhuh ... me too. Goodnight. She was hanging up as he came in. He meant to come in hard, yelling at her to put it out, put it out now, RIGHT NOW!, but when he saw her the words died in his throat. He had seen her like this before, but only two or three times. Once before their first big show, once before the first private preview showing for national buyers, and once when they had gone to New York for the International Design Awards. She was moving across the bedroom in long strides, the white lace nightgown molded to her body, the cigarette clamped between her front teeth (God he hated the way she looked with a butt in her mouth) sending back a little white riband over her left shoulder like smoke from a locomotives stack. But it was her face that really gave him pause, that caused the planned shout to die in his throat. His heart lurchedkaBAMP! and he winced, telling himself that what he felt was not fear but only surprise at finding her this way. She was a woman who really came alive all the way only when the rhythm of her work spiked toward a climax. Each of those remembered occasions had of course been careerrelated. At those times he had seen a different woman from the one he knew so wella woman who fucked up his sensitive fearradar with wild bursts of static. The woman who came out in times of stress was strong but highstrung, fearless but unpredictable. There was lots of color in her cheeks now, a natural blush high on her cheekbones. Her eyes were wide and sparkly, not a trace of sleep left in them. Her hair flowed and streamed. And ... oh, looky here, friends and neighbors! Oh you just looky right here! Is she taking a suitcase out of the closet? A suitcase? By God, she is! Reserve me a room ... say me a prayer. Well, she wasnt going to need a room in any hotel, not in the foreseeable future, because little Beverly Rogan was going to be staying right here at home, thank you very much, and taking her meals standing up for the next three or four days. But she very well might need a prayer or two before he was through with her. She tossed the suitcase on the foot of the bed and then went to her bureau. She opened the top drawer and pulled out two pairs of jeans and a pair of cords. Tossed them into the suitcase. Back to the bureau, cigarette streaming smoke over her shoulder. She grabbed a sweater, a couple of teeshirts, one of the old Ship n Shore blouses that she looked so stupid in but refused to give up. Whoever had called her sure hadnt been a jetsetter. This was dull stuff, strictly JackieKennedyHyannisportweekend stuff. Not that he cared about who had called her or where she thought she was going, since she wasnt going anywhere. Those were not the things which pecked steadily at his mind, dull and achy from too much beer and not enough sleep. It was that cigarette. Supposedly she had thrown them all out. But she had held out on himthe proof was clamped between her teeth right now. And because she still had not noticed him standing in the doorway, he allowed himself the pleasure of remembering the two nights which had assured him of his complete control over her. I dont want you to smoke around me anymore, he told her as they headed home from a party in Lake Forest. October, that had been. I have to choke that shit down at parties and at the office, but I dont have to choke it down when Im with you. You know what its like? Im going to tell you the truthits unpleasant but its the truth. Its like having to eat someone elses snot. He thought this would bring some faint spark of protest, but she had only looked at him in her shy, wantingtoplease way. Her voice had been low and meek and obedient. All right, Tom. Pitch it then. She pitched it. Tom had been in a good humor for the rest of that night. A few weeks later, coming out of a movie, she unthinkingly lit a cigarette in the lobby and puffed it as they walked across the parking lot to the car. It had been a bitter November night, the wind chopping like a maniac at any exposed square inch of flesh it could find. Tom remembered he had been able to smell the lake, as you sometimes could on cold nightsa flat smell that was both fishy and somehow empty. He let her smoke the cigarette. He even opened her door for her when they got to the car. He got in behind the wheel, closed his own door, and then said Bev? She took the cigarette out of her mouth, turned toward him, inquiring, and he unloaded on her pretty good, his hard open hand striking across her cheek hard enough to make his palm tingle, hard enough to rock her head back against the headrest. Her eyes widened with surprise and pain ... and something else as well. Her own hand flew to her cheek to investigate the warmth and tingling numbness there. She cried out Owww! Tom! He looked at her, eyes narrowed, mouth smiling casually, completely alive, ready to see what would come next, how she would react. His cock was stiffening in his pants, but he barely noticed. That was for later. For now, school was in session. He replayed what had just happened. Her face. What had that third expression been, there for a bare instant and then gone? First the surprise. Then the pain. Then the (nostalgia) look of a memory ... of some memory. It had only been for a moment. He didnt think she even knew it had been there, on her face or in her mind. Now now. It would all be in the first thing she didnt say. He knew that as well as his own name. It wasnt You son of a bitch! It wasnt See you later, Macho City. It wasnt Were through, Tom. She only looked at him with her wounded, brimming hazel eyes and said Why did you do that? Then she tried to say something else and burst into tears instead. Throw it out. What? What, Tom? Her makeup was running down her face in muddy tracks. He didnt mind that. He kind of liked seeing her that way. It was messy, but there was something sexy about it, too. Slutty. Kind of exciting. The cigarette. Throw it out. Realization dawning. And with it, guilt. I just forgot! she cried. Thats all! Throw it out, Bev, or youre going to get another shot. She rolled the window down and pitched the cigarette. Then she turned back to him, her face pale and scared and somehow serene. You cant ... you arent supposed to hit me. Thats a bad basis for a ... a ... a lasting relationship. She was trying to find a tone, an adult rhythm of speech, and failing. He had regressed her. He was in this car with a child. Voluptuous and sexy as hell, but a child. Cant and arent are two different things, keed, he said. He kept his voice calm but inside he was jittering and jiving. And Ill be the one to decide what constitutes a lasting relationship and what doesnt. If you can live with that, fine. If you cant, you can take a walk. I wont stop you. I might kick you once in the ass as a goingaway present, but I wont stop you. Its a free country. What more can I say? Maybe youve already said enough, she whispered, and he hit her again, harder than the first time, because no broad was ever going to smart off to Tom Rogan. He would pop the Queen of England if she cracked smart to him. Her cheek banged the padded dashboard. Her hand groped for the doorhandle and then fell away. She only crouched in the corner like a rabbit, one hand over her mouth, her eyes large and wet and frightened. Tom looked at her for a moment and then he got out and walked around the back of the car. He opened her door. His breath was smoke in the black, windy November air and the smell of the lake was very clear. You want to get out, Bev? I saw you reaching for the doorhandle, so I guess you must want to get out. Okay. Thats all right. I asked you to do something and you said you would. Then you didnt. So you want to get out? Come on. Get out. What the fuck, right? Get out. You want to get out? No, she whispered. What? I cant hear you. No, I dont want to get out, she said a little louder. Whatthose cigarettes giving you emphysema? If you cant talk, Ill get you a fucking megaphone. This is your last chance, Beverly. You speak up so I can hear you do you want to get out of this car or do you want to come back with me? Want to come back with you, she said, and clasped her hands on her skirt like a little girl. She wouldnt look at him. Tears slipped down her cheeks. All right, he said. Fine. But first you say this for me, Bev. You say, I forgot about smoking in front of you, Tom. Now she looked at him, her eyes wounded, pleading, inarticulate. You can make me do this, her eyes said, but please dont. Dont, I love you, cant it be over? Noit could not. Because that was not the bottom of her wanting, and both of them knew it. Say it. I forgot about smoking in front of you, Tom. Good. Now say Im sorry.  Im sorry, she repeated dully. The cigarette lay smoking on the pavement like a cut piece of fuse. People leaving the theater glanced over at them, the man standing by the open passenger door of a latemodel, fadeintothewoodwork Vega, the woman sitting inside, her hands clasped primly in her lap, her head down, the domelight outlining the soft fall of her hair in gold. He crushed the cigarette out. He smeared it against the blacktop. Now say Ill never do it again without your permission. Ill never ... Her voice began to hitch. . . . never . . . nnn Say it, Bev. ... never ddo it again. Without your ppermission. So he had slammed the door and gone back around to the drivers seat. He got behind the wheel and drove them back to his downtown apartment. Neither of them said a word. Half the relationship had been set in the parking lot; the second half was set forty minutes later, in Toms bed. She didnt want to make love, she said. He saw a different truth in her eyes and the strutty cock of her legs, however, and when he got her blouse off her nipples had been rock hard. She moaned when he brushed them, and cried out softly when he suckled first one and then the other, kneading them restlessly as he did so. She grabbed his hand and thrust it between her legs. I thought you didnt want to, he said, and she had turned her face away ... but she did not let go of his hand, and the rocking motion of her hips actually speeded up. He pushed her back on the bed ... and now he was gentle, not ripping her underwear but removing it with a careful consideration that was almost prissy. Sliding into her was like sliding into some exquisite oil. He moved with her, using her but letting her use him as well, and she came the first time almost at once, crying out and digging her nails into his back. Then they rocked together in long, slow strokes and somewhere in there he thought she came again. Tom would get close, and then he would think of White Sox batting averages or who was trying to undercut him for the Chesley account at work and he would be okay again. Then she began to speed up, her rhythm finally dissolving into an excited bucking. He looked at her face, the raccoon ringlets of mascara, the smeared lipstick, and he felt himself suddenly shooting deliriously toward the edge. She jerked her hips up harder and harderthere had been no beergut between them in those days and their bellies clapped hands in a quickening beat. Near the end she screamed and then bit his shoulder with her small, even teeth. How many times did you come? he asked her after they had showered. She turned her face away, and when she spoke her voice was so low he almost couldnt hear her. That isnt something youre supposed to ask. No? Who told you that? Mister Rogers? He took her face in one hand, thumb pressing deep into one cheek, fingers pressing into the other, palm cupping her chin in between. You talk to Tom, he said. You hear me, Bev? Talk to Papa. Three, she said reluctantly. Good, he said. You can have a cigarette. She looked at him distrustfully, her red hair spread over the pillows, wearing nothing but a pair of hiphugger panties. Just looking at her that way got his motor turning over again. He nodded. Go on, he said. Thats all right. They had been married in a civil ceremony three months later. Two of his friends had come; the only friend of hers to attend had been Kay McCall, whom Tom called that titsy womenslib bitch. All of these memories went through Toms mind in a space of seconds, like a speededup piece of film, as he stood in the doorway watching her. She had gone on to the bottom drawer of what she sometimes called her weekend bureau, and now she was tossing underwear into the suitcasenot the sort of stuff he liked, the slippery satins and smooth silks; this was cotton stuff, littlegirl stuff, most of it faded and with little puffs of popped elastic on the waistbands. A cotton nightie that looked like something out of Little House on the Prairie. She poked in the back of this bottom drawer to see what else might be lurking in there. Tom Rogan, meanwhile, moved across the shag rug toward his wardrobe. His feet were bare and his passage noiseless as a puff of breeze. It was the cigarette. That was what had really gotten him mad. It had been a long time since she had forgotten that first lesson. There had been other lessons to learn since, a great many, and there had been hot days when she had worn longsleeved blouses or even cardigan sweaters buttoned all the way to the neck. Gray days when she had worn sunglasses. But that first lesson had been so sudden and fundamental He had forgotten the telephone call that had wakened him out of his deepening sleep. It was the cigarette. If she was smoking now, then she had forgotten Tom Rogan. Temporarily, of course, only temporarily, but even temporarily was too damned long. What might have caused her to forget didnt matter. Such things were not to happen in his house for any reason. There was a wide black strip of leather hanging from a hook inside the closet door. There was no buckle on it; he had removed that long ago. It was doubled over at one end where a buckle would have gone, and this doubledover section formed a loop into which Tom Rogan now slipped his hand. Tom, you been bad! his mother had sometimes saidwell, sometimes was maybe not such a good word; maybe often would have been a better one. You come here, Tommy! I got to give you a whuppin. His life as a child had been punctuated by whuppins. He had finally escaped to Wichita State College, but apparently there was no such thing as a complete escape, because he continued to hear her voice in dreams Come here, Tommy. I got to give you a whuppin. Whuppin ... He had been the eldest of four. Three months after the youngest had been born, Ralph Rogan had diedwell, died was maybe not such a good word; maybe committed suicide would have been a better way to put it, since he had poured a generous quantity of lye into a tumbler of gin and quaffed this devils brew while sitting on the bathroom hopper. Mrs. Rogan had found work at the Ford plant. Tom, although only eleven, became the man of the family. And if he screwed upif the baby shat her didies after the sitter went home and the mess was still in them when Mom got home ... if he forgot to cross Megan on the Broad Street corner after her nursery school got out and that nosy Mrs. Gant saw ... if he happened to be watching American Bandstand while Joey made a mess in the kitchen ... if any of those things or a thousand others happened ... then, after the smaller children were in bed, the spanking stick would come out and she would call the invocation Come here, Tommy. I got to give you a whuppin. Better to be the whupper than the whupped. If he had learned nothing else on the great tollroad of life, he had learned that. So he flipped the loose end of the belt over once and pulled the loop snug. Then he closed his fist over it. It felt good. It made him feel like a grownup. The strip of leather hung from his clenched fist like a dead blacksnake. His headache was gone. She had found that one last thing in the back of the drawer an old white cotton bra with gunshell cups. The thought that this earlymorning call might have been from a lover surfaced briefly in his mind and then sank again. That was ridiculous. A woman going away to meet her lover did not pack her faded Ship n Shore blouses and her cotton KMart undies with the pops and snarls in the elastic. Also, she wouldnt dare. Beverly, he said softly, and she turned at once, startled, her eyes wide, her long hair swinging. The belt hesitated ... dropped a little. He stared at her, feeling that little bloom of uneasiness again. Yes, she had looked this way before the big shows, and then he hadnt gotten in her way, understanding that she was so filled with a mixture of fear and competitive aggressiveness that it was as if her head was full of illuminating gas a single spark and she would explode. She had seen the shows not as a chance to split off from Delia Fashions, to make a livingor even a fortuneon her own. If that had been all, she would have been fine. But if that were all, she also would not have been so ungodly talented. She had seen those shows as a kind of superexam on which she would be graded by fierce teachers. What she saw on those occasions was some creature without a face. It had no face, but it did have a nameAuthority. All of that wideeyed nerviness was on her face now. But not just there; it was all around her, an aura that seemed almost visible, a hightension charge which made her suddenly both more alluring and more dangerous than she had seemed to him in years. He was afraid because she was here, all here, the essential she as apart from the she Tom Rogan wanted her to be, the she he had made. Beverly looked shocked and frightened. She also looked almost madly exhilarated. Her cheeks glowed with hectic color, yet there were stark white patches below her lower lids which looked almost like a second pair of eyes. Her forehead glowed with a creamy resonance. And the cigarette was still jutting out of her mouth, now at a slight upangle, as if she thought she was goddam Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The cigarette! Just looking at it caused dull fury to wash over him again in a green wave. Faintly, far back in his mind, he remembered her saying something to him one night out of the dark, speaking in a dull and listless voice Someday youre going to kill me, Tom. Do you know that? Someday youre just going to go too far and that will be the end. Youll snap. He had answered You do it my way, Bev, and that day will never come. Now, before the rage blotted out everything, he wondered if that day hadnt come after all. The cigarette. Never mind the call, the packing, the weird look on her face. They would deal with the cigarette. Then he would fuck her. Then they could discuss the rest. By then it might even seem important. Tom, she said. Tom, I have to Youre smoking, he said. His voice seemed to come from a distance, as if over a pretty good radio. Looks like you forgot, babe. Where you been hiding them? Look, Ill put it out, she said, and went to the bathroom door. She flipped the cigaretteeven from here he could see the teethmarks driven deep into the filterinto the bowl of the john. Fsssss. She came back out. Tom, that was an old friend. An old old friend. I have to Shut up, thats what you have to do! he shouted at her. Just shut up! But the fear he wanted to seethe fear of himwas not on her face. There was fear, but it had come out of the telephone, and fear was not supposed to come to Beverly from that direction. It was almost as if she didnt see the belt, didnt see him, and Tom felt a trickle of unease. Was he here? It was a stupid question, but was he? This question was so terrible and so elemental that for a moment he felt in danger of coming completely unwrapped from the root of himself and just floating off like a tumbleweed in a high breeze. Then he caught hold of himself. He was here, all right, and that was quite enough fucking psychobabble for one night. He was here, he was Tom Rogan, Tom byGod Rogan, and if this dippy cunt didnt straighten up and fly right in the next thirty seconds or so, she was going to look like she got pushed out of a fastmoving boxcar by a mean railroad dick. Got to give you a whuppin, he said. Sorry about that, babe. He had seen that mixture of fear and aggressiveness before, yes. Now for the first time ever it flashed out at him. Put that thing down, she said. I have to get out to OHare as fast as I can. Are you here, Tom? Are you? He pushed the thought away. The strip of leather which had once been a belt swung slowly before him like a pendulum. His eyes flickered and then held fast to her face. Listen to me, Tom. Theres been some trouble back in my home town. Very bad trouble. I had a friend in those days. I guess he would have been my boyfriend, except we werent quite old enough for that. He was only an elevenyearold kid with a bad stutter back then. Hes a novelist now. You even read one of his books, I think ... The Black Rapids? She searched his face but his face gave no sign. There was only the belt penduluming back and forth, back and forth. He stood with his head lowered and his stocky legs slightly apart. Then she ran her hand restlessly through her hairdistractedlyas if she had many important things to think of and hadnt seen the belt at all, and that haunting, awful question resurfaced in his head again Are you there? Are you sure? That book laid around here for weeks and I never made the connection. Maybe I should have, but were all older and I haven even thought about Derry in a long, long time. Anyway, Bill had a brother, George, and George was killed before I really knew Bill. He was murdered. And then, the next summer But Tom had listened to enough craziness from within and from without. He moved in on her fast, cocking his right arm back over his shoulder like a man about to throw a javelin. The belt hissed a path through the air. Beverly saw it coming and tried to duck away, but her right shoulder struck the bathroom doorway and there was a meaty whap! as the belt struck her left forearm, leaving a red weal. Gonna whup you, Tom repeated. His voice was sane, even regretful, but his teeth showed in a white and frozen smile. He wanted to see that look in her eyes, that look of fear and terror and shame, that look that said Yes youre right I deserved it, that look that said Yes youre there all right, I feel your presence. Then love could come back, and that was right and good, because he did love her. They could even have a discussion, if she wanted it, of exactly who had called and what all this was about. But that must come later. For now, school was in session. The old onetwo. First the whuppin, then the fuckin. Sorry, babe. Tom, dont do th He swung the belt sidearm and saw it lick around her hip. There was a satisfying snap as it finished on her buttock. And ... And Jesus, she was grabbing at it! She was grabbing at the belt! For a moment Tom Rogan was so astounded by this unexpected act of insubordination that he almost lost his punisher, would have lost it except for the loop, which was tucked securely into his fist. He jerked it back. Dont you ever try to grab something away from me, he said hoarsely. You hear me? You ever do that again and youll spend a month pissing raspberry juice. Tom, stop it, she said, and her very tone infuriated himshe sounded like a playground monitor talking down to a tantrumy sixyearold. I have to go. This is no joke. People are dead, and I made a promise a long time ago Tom heard little of this. He bellowed and ran at her with his head down, the belt swinging blindly. He hit her with it, driving her away from the doorway and along the bedroom wall. He cocked his arm back, hit her, cocked his arm back, hit her, cocked his arm back, hit her. Later that morning he would not be able to raise the arm above eye level until he had swallowed three codeine tablets, but for now he was aware of nothing but the fact that she was defying him. She had not only been smoking, she had tried to grab the belt away from him, and oh folks, oh friends and neighbors, she had asked for it, and he would testify before the throne of God Almighty that she was going to get it. He drove her along the wall, swinging the belt, raining blows on her. Her hands were up to protect her face, but he had a clear shot at the rest of her. The belt made thick bullwhip cracks in the quiet room. But she did not scream, as she sometimes did, and she did not beg him to stop, as she usually did. Worst of all, she did not cry, as she always did. The only sounds were the belt and their breathing, his heavy and hoarse, hers quick and light. She broke for the bed and the vanity table on her side of it. Her shoulders were red from the belts blows. Her hair streamed fire. He lumbered after her, slower but big, very bighe had played squash until he had popped an Achilles tendon two years ago, and since then his weight had gotten out of hand a little bit (or maybe a lot would have been a better way to put it), but the muscle was still there, firm cordage sheathed in the fat. Still, he was a little alarmed at how out of breath he was. She reached the vanity and he thought she would crouch there, or maybe try to crawl under it. Instead she groped ... turned ... and suddenly the air was full of flying missiles. She was throwing cosmetics at him. A bottle of Chantilly struck him squarely between the nipples, fell to his feet, shattered. He was suddenly enveloped in the gagging scent of flowers. Quit it! he roared.


Quit it, you bitch! Instead of quitting it, her hands flew along the vanitys littered glass top, grabbing whatever they found, throwing it. He groped at his chest where the bottle of Chantilly had struck him, unable to believe she had hit him with something, even as other objects flew around him. The bottles glass stopper had cut him. It was not much of a cut, little more than a triangular scratch, but was there a certain redhaired lady who was going to see the sun come up from a hospital bed? Oh yes, there was. A certain lady who A jar of cream struck him above the right eyebrow with sudden, cracking force. He heard a dull thud seemingly inside his head. White light exploded over that eyes field of vision and he fell back a step, mouth dropping open. Now a tube of Nivea cream struck his belly with a small slapping sound and she waswas she? was it possible?yes! She was yelling at him! Im going to the airport, you son of a bitch! Do you hear me? I have business and Im going! You want to get out of my way because IM GOING! Blood ran into his right eye, stinging and hot. He knuckled it away. He stood there for a moment, staring at her as if he had never seen her before. In a way he never had. Her breasts heaved rapidly. Her face, all flush and livid pallor, blazed. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a snarl. She had, however, denuded the top of the vanity table. The missile silo was empty. He could still read the fear in her eyes ... but it was still not fear of him. You put those clothes back, he said, struggling not to pant as he spoke. That would not sound good. That would sound weak. Then you put the suitcase back and get into bed. And if you do those things, maybe I wont beat you up too bad. Maybe youll be able to go out of the house in two days instead of two weeks. Tom, listen to me. She spoke slowly. Her gaze was very clear. If you come near me again, Ill kill you. Do you understand that, you tub of guts? Ill kill you. And suddenlymaybe it was because of the utter loathing on her face, the contempt, maybe because she had called him a tub of guts, or maybe only because of the rebellious way her breasts rose and fellthe fear was suffocating him. It was not a bud or a bloom but a whole goddam garden, the fear, the horrible fear that he was not here. Tom Rogan rushed at his wife, not bellowing this time. He came as silently as a torpedo cutting through the water. His intent now was probably not merely to beat and subjugate but to do to her what she had so rashly said she would do to him. He thought she would run. Probably for the bathroom. Maybe for the stairs. Instead, she stood her ground. Her hip whacked the wall as she threw her weight against the vanity table, pushing it up and toward him, ripping two fingernails down to the quick when the sweat on her palms caused her hands to slip. For a moment the table tottered on an angle and then she shoved herself forward again. The vanity waltzed on one leg, mirror catching the light and reflecting a brief swimmy aquarium shadow across the ceiling, and then it tilted forward and outward. Its leading edge slammed into Toms upper thighs and knocked him over. There was a musical jingle as bottles tipped over and shattered inside. He saw the mirror strike the floor on his left and threw an arm up to shield his eyes, losing the belt. Glass coughed across the floor, silver on the back. He felt some of it sting him, drawing blood. Now she was crying, her breath coming in high, screamy sobs. Time after time she had seen herself leaving him, leaving Toms tyranny as she had left that of her father, stealing away in the night, bags piled in the trunk of her Cutlass. She was not a stupid woman, certainly not stupid enough even now, standing on the rim of this incredible shambles, to believe that she had not loved Tom and did not in some way love him still. But that did not preclude her fear of him ... her hate of him ... and her contempt of herself for choosing him for dim reasons buried in the times that should be over. Her heart was not breaking; it seemed rather to be broiling in her chest, melting. She was afraid the heat from her heart might soon destroy her sanity in fire. But above all this, yammering steadily in the back of her mind, she could hear Mike Hanlons dry, steady voice Its come back, Beverly ... its come back ... and you promised... The vanity heaved up and down. Once. Twice. A third time. It looked as if it were breathing. Moving with careful agility, her mouth turned down at the corners and jerking as if in prelude to some sort of convulsion, she skirted the vanity, toestepping through the broken glass, and grabbed the belt just as Tom heaved the vanity off to one side. Then she backed up, sliding her hand into the loop. She shook her hair out of her eyes and watched to see what he would do. Tom got up. Some of the mirrorglass had cut one of his cheeks. A diagonal cut traced a line as fine as thread across his brow. He squinted at her as he rose slowly to his feet, and she saw drops of blood on his boxer shorts. You just give me that belt, he said. Instead she took two turns of it around her hand and looked at him defiantly. Quit it, Bev. Right now. If you come for me, Im going to strap the shit out of you. The words were coming out of her mouth but she couldnt believe it was her saying them. And just who was this caveman in the bloody undershorts, anyway? Her husband? Her father? The lover she had taken in college who had broken her nose one night, apparently on a whim? Oh God help me, she thought. God help me now. And still her mouth went on. I can do it, too. Youre fat and slow, Tom. Im going, and I think maybe Ill stay gone. I think maybe its over. Whos this guy Denbrough? Forget it. I was She realized almost too late that the question had been a distraction. He was coming for her before the last word was out of his mouth. She whickered the belt through the air in an arc and the sound it made when it smashed across his mouth was the sound of a stubborn cork coming out of a bottle. He squealed and clapped his hands to his mouth, his eyes huge, hurt and shocked. Blood began to pour between his fingers and over the backs of his hands. You broke my mouth, you bitch! he screamed, muffled. Ah God you broke my mouth! He came at her again, hands reaching, his mouth a wet red smear. His lips appeared to have burst in two places. The crown had been knocked from one of his front teeth. As she watched, he spit it to one side. Part of her was backing away from this scene, sick and moaning, wanting to shut her eyes. But that other Beverly felt the exultation of a deathrow convict freed in a freak earthquake. That Beverly liked all of this just fine. I wish youd swallowed it! that one thought. Wish youd choked on it! It was this latter Beverly who swung the belt for the last timethe belt he had used on her buttocks, her legs, her breasts. The belt he had used on her times without number over the last four years. How many strokes you got depended on how badly youd screwed up. Tom comes home and dinner is cold? Two with the belt. Bevs working late at the studio and forgets to call home? Three with the belt. Oh hey, look at thisBeverly got another parking ticket. One with the belt ... across the breasts. He was good. He rarely bruised. It didnt even hurt that much. Except for the humiliation. That hurt. And what hurt worse was knowing that part of her craved the hurt. Craved the humiliation. Last time pays for all, she thought, and swung. She brought the belt in low, brought it in sidearm, and it whacked across his balls with a brisk yet heavy sound, the sound of a woman striking a rug with a carpetbeater. That was all it took. All the fight promptly went out of Tom Rogan. He uttered a thin, strengthless shriek and fell on his knees as if to pray. His hands were between his legs. His head was thrown back. Cords stood out on his neck. His mouth was a tragedygrimace of pain. His left knee came down squarely on a heavy, pointed hook of shattered perfume bottle and he rolled silently over on one side like a whale. One hand left his balls to grab his squirting knee. The blood, she thought. Dear Lord, hes bleeding everywhere. Hell live, this new Beverlythe Beverly who seemed to have surfaced at Mike Hanlons phone callreplied coldly. Guys like him always live. You just get the hell out of here before he decides he wants to tango some more. Or before he decides to go down cellar and get his Winchester. She backed away and felt pain stab her foot as she stepped on a chunk of glass from the broken vanity mirror. She bent down to grab the handle of her suitcase. She never took her eyes off him. She backed out the door and she backed down the hall. She was holding the suitcase in front of her in both hands and it banged her shins as she backed. Her cut foot printed bloody heelprints. When she reached the stairs she turned around and went down quickly, not letting herself think. She suspected she had no coherent thoughts left inside anyway, at least for the time being. She felt a light pawing against her leg and screamed. She looked down and saw it was the end of the belt. It was still wrapped around her hand. In this dim light it looked more like a dead snake than ever. She threw it over the bannister, her face a wince of disgust, and saw it land in an S on the rug of the downstairs hallway. At the foot of the stairs she grasped the hem of her white lace nightgown crosshanded and pulled it over her head. It was bloody, and she would not wear it one second longer, no matter what. She tossed it aside and it billowed onto the rubberplant by the doorway to the living room like a lacy parachute. She bent, naked, to the suitcase. Her nipples were cold, hard as bullets. BEVERLY, YOU GET YOUR ASS UPSTAIRS! She gasped, jerked, then bent back to the suitcase. If he was strong enough to scream that loud, her time was a good deal shorter than she had thought. She opened the case and pawed out panties, a blouse, an old pair of Levis. She jerked these on standing by the door, her eyes never leaving the stairs. But Tom did not appear at the top of them. He bawled her name twice more, and each time she flinched away from that sound, her eyes hunted, her lips pulling back from her teeth in an unconscious snarl. She jabbed the buttons of the blouse through the holes as fast as she could. The top two buttons were gone (it was ironic how little of her own sewing ever got done) and she supposed she looked quite a bit like a parttime hooker looking for one last quickie before calling it a nightbut it would have to do. ILL KILL YOU, YOU BITCH! YOU FUCKING BITCH! She slammed the suitcase closed and latched it. The arm of a blouse poked out like a tongue. She looked around once, quickly, suspecting that she would never see this house again. She discovered only relief in the idea, and so opened the door and let herself out. She was three blocks away, walking with no clear sense of where she was going, when she realized her feet were still bare. The one she had cutthe leftthrobbed dully. She had to get something on her feet, and it was nearly two oclock in the morning. Her wallet and creditcards were at home. She felt in the pockets of the jeans and came up with nothing but a few puffs of lint. She didnt have a dime; not so much as a red penny. She looked around at the residential neighborhood she was innice homes, manicured lawns and plantings, dark windows. And suddenly she began to laugh. Beverly Rogan sat on a low stone wall, her suitcase between her dirty feet, and laughed. The stars were out, and how bright they were! She tilted her head back and laughed at them, that wild exhilaration washing through her again like a tidal wave that lifted and carried and cleansed, a force so powerful that any conscious thought was lost; only her blood thought and its one powerful voice spoke to her in some inarticulate way of desire, although what it was it desired she neither knew nor cared. It was enough to feel that warmth filling her up with its insistence. Desire, she thought, and inside her that tidal wave of exhilaration seemed to gather speed, rushing her onward toward some inevitable crash. She laughed at the stars, frightened but free, her terror as sharp as pain and as sweet as a ripe October apple, and when a light came on in an upstairs bedroom of the house this stone wall belonged to, she grabbed the handle of her suitcase and fled off into the night, still laughing. 6 Bill Denbrough Takes Time Out Leave? Audra repeated. She looked at him, puzzled, a bit afraid, and then tucked her bare feet up and under her. The floor was cold. The whole cottage was cold, come to that. The south of England had been experiencing an exceptionally dank spring, and more than once, on his regular morning and evening walks, Bill Denbrough had found himself thinking of Maine ... thinking in a surprised vague way of Derry. The cottage was supposed to have central heatingthe ad had said so, and there certainly was a furnace down there in the tidy little basement, tucked away in what had once been a coalbinbut he and Audra had discovered early on in the shoot that the British idea of central heating was not at all the same as the American one. It seemed the Brits believed you had central heating as long as you didnt have to piss away a scrim of ice in the toilet bowl when you got up in the morning. It was morning nowjust quarter of eight. Bill had hung the phone up five minutes ago. Bill, you cant just leave. You know that. I have to, he said. There was a hutch on the far side of the room. He went to it, took a bottle of Glenfiddich from the top shelf and poured himself a drink. Some of it slopped over the side of the glass. Fuck, he muttered. Who was that on the telephone? What are you scared of, Bill? Im not scared. Oh? Your hands always shake like that? You always have your first drink before breakfast? He came back to his chair, robe flapping around his ankles, and sat down. He tried to smile, but it was a poor effort and he gave it up. On the telly the BBC announcer was wrapping up this mornings batch of bad news before going on to last evenings football scores. When they had arrived in the small suburban village of Fleet a month before the shoot was scheduled to begin, they had both marvelled over the technical quality of British televisionon a good Pye color set, it really did look as though you could climb right inside. More lines or something, Bill had said. I dont know what it is, but its great, Audra had replied. That was before they discovered that much of the programming consisted of American shows such as Dallas and endless British sports events ranging from the arcane and boring (champion dartsthrowing in which all the participants looked like hypertensive sumo wrestlers) to the simply boring (British football was bad; cricket was even worse). Ive been thinking about home a lot lately, Bill said, and sipped his drink. Home? she said, and looked so honestly puzzled that he laughed. Poor Audra! Married almost eleven years to the guy and you dont know doodleysquat about him. What do you know about that? He laughed again and swallowed the rest of his drink. His laughter had a quality she cared for as little as seeing him with a glass of Scotch in his hand at this hour of the morning. The laugh sounded like something that really wanted to be a howl of pain. I wonder if any of the others have got husbands and wives who are just finding out how little they know. I suppose they must. Billy, I know that I love you, she said. For eleven years thats been enough. I know. He smiled at herthe smile was sweet, tired, and scared. Please. Please tell me what this is about. She looked at him with her lovely gray eyes, sitting there in a tatty leasedhouse chair with her feet curled beneath the hem of her nightgown, a woman he had loved, married, and still loved. He tried to see through her eyes, to see what she knew. He tried to see it as a story. He could, but he knew it would never sell. Here is a poor boy from the state of Maine who goes to the University on a scholarship. All his life he has wanted to be a writer, but when he enrolls in the writing courses he finds himself lost without a compass in a strange and frightening land. Theres one guy who wants to be Updike. Theres another one who wants to be a New England version of Faulkneronly he wants to write novels about the grim lives of the poor in blank verse. Theres a girl who admires Joyce Carol Oates but feels that because Oates was nurtured in a sexist society she is radioactive in a literary sense. Oates is unable to be clean, this girl says. She will be cleaner. Theres the short fat grad student who cant or wont speak above a mutter. This guy has written a play in which there are nine characters. Each of them says only a single word. Little by little the playgoers realize that when you put the single words together you come out with War is the tool of the sexist death merchants. This fellows play receives an A from the man who teaches Eh141 (Creative Writing Honors Seminar). This instructor has published four books of poetry and his masters thesis, all with the University Press. He smokes pot and wears a peace medallion. The fat mutterers play is produced by a guerrilla theater group during the strike to end the war which shuts down the campus in May of 1970. The instructor plays one of the characters. Bill Denbrough, meanwhile, has written one lockedroom mystery tale, three sciencefiction stories, and several horror tales which owe a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Richard Mathesonin later years he will say those stories resembled a mid1800s funeral hack equipped with a supercharger and painted DayGlo red. One of the sf tales earns him a B. This is better, the instructor writes on the title page. In the alien counterstrike we see the vicious circle in which violence begets violence; I particularly liked the needlenosed spacecraft as a symbol of sociosexual incursion. While this remains a slightly confused undertone throughout, it is interesting. All the others do no better than a C. Finally he stands up in class one day, after the discussion of a sallow young womans vignette about a cows examination of a discarded engine block in a deserted field (this may or may not be after a nuclear war) has gone on for seventy minutes or so. The sallow girl, who smokes one Winston after another and picks occasionally at the pimples which nestle in the hollows of her temples, insists that the vignette is a sociopolitical statement in the manner of the early Orwell. Most of the classand the instructoragree, but still the discussion drones on. When Bill stands up, the class looks at him. He is tall, and has a certain presence. Speaking carefully, not stuttering (he has not stuttered in better than five years), he says I dont understand this at all. I dont understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socioanything? Politics ... culture ... history ... arent those natural ingredients in any story, if its told well? I mean ... He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. I mean ... cant you guys just let a story be a story? No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack. Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, Do you believe William Faulkner was just telling stories? Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck? Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think. I think thats pretty close to the truth, Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation. I suggest, the instructor says, toying with his pen and smiling at Bill with halflidded eyes, that you have a great deal to learn. The applause starts somewhere in the back of the room. Bill leaves ... but returns the next week, determined to stick with it. In the time between he has written a story called The Dark, a tale about a small boy who discovers a monster in the cellar of his house. The little boy faces it, battles it, finally kills it. He feels a kind of holy exaltation as he goes about the business of writing this story; he even feels that he is not so much telling the story as he is allowing the story to flow through him. At one point he puts his pen down and takes his hot and aching hand out into tendegree December cold where it nearly smokes from the temperature change. He walks around, green cutoff boots squeaking in the snow like tiny shutterhinges which need oil, and his head seems to bulge with the story; it is a little scary, the way it needs to get out. He feels that if it cannot escape by way of his racing hand that it will pop his eyes out in its urgency to escape and be concrete. Going to knock the shit out of it, he confides to the blowing winter dark, and laughs a littlea shaky laugh. He is aware that he has finally discovered how to do just thatafter ten years of trying he has suddenly found the starter button on the vast dead bulldozer taking up so much space inside his head. It has started up. It is revving, revving. It is nothing pretty, this big machine. It was not made for taking pretty girls to proms. It is not a status symbol. It means business. It can knock things down. If he isnt careful, it will knock him down. He rushes inside and finishes The Dark at white heat, writing until four oclock in the morning and finally falling asleep over his ringbinder. If someone had suggested to him that he was really writing about his brother, George, he would have been surprised. He has not thought about George in yearsor so he honestly believes. The story comes back from the instructor with an F slashed into the title page. Two words are scrawled beneath, in capital letters. PULP, screams one. CRAP, screams the other. Bill takes the fifteenpage sheaf of manuscript over to the woodstove and opens the door. He is within a bare inch of tossing it in when the absurdity of what he is doing strikes him. He sits down in his rocking chair, looks at a Grateful Dead poster, and starts to laugh. Pulp? Fine! Let it be pulp! The woods were full of it! Let them fucking trees fall! Bill exclaims, and laughs until tears spurt from his eyes and roll down his face. He retypes the title page, the one with the instructors judgment on it, and sends it off to a mens magazine named White Tie (although from what Bill can see, it really should be titled Naked Girls Who Look Like Drug Users). Yet his battered Writers Market says they buy horror stories, and the two issues he has bought down at the local momandpop store have indeed contained four horror stories sandwiched between the naked girls and the ads for dirty movies and potency pills. One of them, by a man named Dennis Etchison, is actually quite good. He sends The Dark off with no real hopeshe has submitted a good many stories to magazines before with nothing to show for it but rejection slipsand is flabbergasted and delighted when the fiction editor of White Tie buys it for two hundred dollars, payment on publication. The assistant editor adds a short note which calls it the best damned horror story since Ray Bradburys The Jar.  He adds, Too bad only about seventy people coast to coast will read it, but Bill Denbrough does not care. Two hundred dollars! He goes to his advisor with a drop card for Eh141. His advisor initials it. Bill Denbrough staples the drop card to the assistant fiction editors congratulatory note and tacks both to the bulletin board on the creativewriting instructors door. In the comer of the bulletin board he sees an antiwar cartoon. And suddenly, as if moving of its own accord, his fingers pluck his pen from his breast pocket and across the cartoon he writes this If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable, Im going to kill myself, because I wont know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do. He pauses, and then, feeling a bit small (but unable to help himself), he adds I suggest you have a lot to learn. His drop card comes back to him in the campus mail three days later. The instructor has initialed it. On the space marked GRADE AT TIME OF DROP, the instructor has not given him an incomplete or the low C to which his run of grades at that time would have entitled him; instead, another F is slashed angrily across the grade line. Below it the instructor has written Do you think money proves anything about anything, Denbrough? Well, actually, yes, Bill Denbrough says to his empty apartment, and once more begins to laugh crazily. In his senior year of college he dares to write a novel, because he has no idea what hes getting into. He escapes the experience scratched and frightened ... but alive, and with a manuscript nearly five hundred pages long. He sends it out to The Viking Press, knowing that it will be the first of many stops for his book, which is about ghosts ... but he likes Vikings ship logo, and that makes it as good a place to start as any. As it turns out, the first stop is also the last stop. Viking purchases the book ... and for Bill Denbrough the fairytale begins. The man who was once known as Stuttering Bill has become a success at the age of twentythree. Three years later and three thousand miles from northern New England, he attains a queer kind of celebrity by marrying a woman who is a moviestar and five years his senior at Hollywoods Church in the Pines. The gossip columnists give it seven months. The only bet, they say, is whether the end will come in a divorce or an annulment. Friends (and enemies) on both sides of the match feel about the same. The age difference apart, the disparities are startling. He is tall, already balding, already inclining a bit toward fat. He speaks slowly in company, and at times seems nearly inarticulate. Audra, on the other hand, is aubumhaired, statuesque, and gorgeousshe is less like an earthly woman than a creature from some semidivine superrace. He has been hired to do the screenplay of his second novel, The Black Rapids (mostly because the right to do at least the first draft of the screenplay was an immutable condition of sale, in spite of his agents moans that he was insane), and his draft has actually turned out pretty well. He has been invited out to Universal City for further rewrites and production meetings. His agent is a small woman named Susan Browne. She is exactly five feet tall. She is violently energetic and even more violently emphatic. Dont do it, Billy, she tells him. Kiss it off. Theyve got a lot of money tied up in it and theyll get someone good to do the screenplay. Maybe even Goldman. Who? William Goldman. The only good writer who ever went out there and did both. What are you talking about, Suze? He stayed there and he stayed good, she said. The odds on both are like the odds on beating lung cancerit can be done, but who wants to try? Youll burn out on sex and booze. Or some of the nifty new drugs. Susans crazily fascinating brown eyes sparkle vehemently up at him. And if it turns out to be some meatball who gets the assignment instead of someone like Goldman, so what? The books on the shelf there. They cant change a word. Susan Listen to me, Billy! Take the money and run. Youre young and strong. Thats what they like. You go out there and they will first separate you from your selfrespect and then from your ability to write a straight line from point A to point B. Last but not least, they will take your testes. You write like a grownup, but youre just a kid with a very high forehead. I have to go. Did someone just fart in here? she returns. Must have, because something sure stinks. But I do. I have to. Jesus! I have to get away from New England. He is afraid to say what comes nextits like mouthing a cursebut he owes it to her. I have to get away from Maine. Why, for Gods sake? I dont know. I just do. Are you telling me something real, Billy, or just talking like a writer? Its real. They are in bed together during this conversation. Her breasts are small like peaches, sweet like peaches. He loves her a lot, although not the way they both know would be a really good way to love. She sits up with a pool of sheet in her lap and lights a cigarette. Shes crying, but he doubts if she knows he knows. Its just this shine in her eyes. It would be tactful not to mention it, so he doesnt. He doesnt love her in that really good way, but he cares a mountain for her. Go on then, she says in a dry businesslike voice as she turns back to him. Give me a call when youre ready, and if you still have the strength. Ill come and pick up the pieces. If there are any left. The film version of The Black Rapids is called Pit of the Black Demon, and Audra Phillips is cast as the lead. The title is horrible, but the movie turns out to be quite good. And the only part of him he loses in Hollywood is his heart. Bill, Audra said again, bringing him out of these memories. He saw she had snapped off the TV. He glanced out the window and saw fog nuzzling against the panes. Ill explain as much as I can, he said. You deserve that. But first do two things for me. All right. Fix yourself another cup of tea and tell me what you know about me. Or what you think you know. She looked at him, puzzled, and then went to the highboy. I know youre from Maine, she said, making herself tea from the breakfast pot. She was not British, but just a touch of clipped British had crept into her voicea holdover from the part she played in Attic Room, the movie they had come over here to do. It was Bills first original screenplay. He had been offered the directorial shot as well. Thank God he had declined that; his leaving now would have completed the job of bitching things up. He knew what they would all say, the whole crew. Billy Denbrough finally shows his true colors. Just another fucking writer, crazier than a shithouse rat. God knew he felt crazy right about now. I know you had a brother and that you loved him very much and that he died, Audra went on. I know that you grew up in a town called Derry, moved to Bangor about two years after your brother died, and moved to Portland when you were fourteen. I know your dad died of lung cancer when you were seventeen. And you wrote a bestseller while you were still in college, paying your way with a scholarship and a parttime job in a textile mill. That must have seemed very strange to you ... the change in income. In prospects. She returned to his side of the room and he saw it in her face then the realization of the hidden spaces between them. I know that you wrote The Black Rapids a year later, and came out to Hollywood. And the week before shooting started on the movie, you met a very mixedup woman named Audra Phillips who knew a little bit about what you must have been throughthe crazy decompressionbecause she had been plain old Audrey Philpott five years before. And this woman was drowning Audra, dont. Her eyes were steady, holding his. Oh, why not? Let us tell the truth and shame the devil. I was drowning. I discovered poppers two years before I met you, and then a year later I discovered coke and that was even better. A popper in the morning, coke in the afternoon, wine at night, a Valium at bedtime. Audras vitamins. Too many important interviews, too many good parts. I was so much like a character in a Jacqueline Susann novel it was hilarious. Do you know how I think about that time now, Bill? No. She sipped her tea, her eyes never leaving his, and grinned. It was like running on the walkway at L.A. International.


You get it? Not exactly, no. Its a moving belt, she said. About a quarter of a mile long. I know the walkway, he said, but I dont see what youre You just stand there and it carries you all the way to the baggageclaim area. But if you want, you dont have to just stand there. You can walk on it. Or run. And it seems like youre just doing your normal walk or your normal jog or your normal run or your normal allout sprintwhateverbecause your body forgets that what youre really doing is topping the speed the walkways already making. Thats why they have those signs that say SLOW DOWN, MOVING RAMPWAY near the end. When I met you I felt as if Id run right off the end of that thing onto a floor that didnt move anymore. There I was, my body nine miles ahead of my feet. You cant keep your balance. Sooner or later you fall right on your face. Except I didnt. Because you caught me. She put her tea aside and lit a cigarette, her eyes never leaving him. He could only see that her hands were shaking in the minute jitter of the lighterflame, which darted first to the right of the cigaretteend and then to the left before finding it. She drew deep, blew out a fast jet of smoke. What do I know about you? I know you seemed to have it all under control. I know that. You never seemed to be in a hurry to get to the next drink or the next meeting or the next party. You seemed confident that all those things would be there ... if you wanted them. You talked slow. Part of it was the Maine drawl, I guess, but most of it was just you. You were the first man I ever met out there who dared to talk slow. I had to slow down to listen. I looked at you, Bill, and I saw someone who never ran on the walkway, because he knew it would get him there. You seemed utterly untouched by the hype and hysteria. You didnt lease a Rolls so you could drive down Rodeo Drive on Saturday afternoon with your own vanity plates on some glitzy rental companys car. You didnt have a press agent to plant items in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. Youd never done the Carson show. Writers cant unless they also do cardtricks or bend spoons, he said, smiling. Its like a national law. He thought she would smile, but she didnt. I know you were there when I needed you. When I came flying off the end of the walkway like O. J. Simpson in that old Hertz ad. Maybe you saved me from eating the wrong pill on top of too much booze. Or maybe I would have made it out the other side on my own and its all a big dramatization on my part. But ... it doesnt feel like that. Not inside, where I am. She snuffed the cigarette, only two puffs gone. I know youve been there ever since. And Ive been there for you. Were good in bed. That used to seem like a big deal to me. But were also good out of it, and now that seems like a bigger deal. I feel as if I could grow old with you and still be brave. I know you drink too much beer and dont get enough exercise; I know that some nights you dream badly He was startled. Nastily startled. Almost frightened. I never dream. She smiled. So you tell the interviewers when they ask where you get your ideas. But its not true. Unless its just indigestion when you start groaning in the night. And I dont believe that, Billy. Do I talk? he asked cautiously. He could remember no dreams. No dreams at all, good or bad. Audra nodded. Sometimes. But I can never make out what it is you say. And on a couple of occasions, you have wept. He looked at her blankly. There was a bad taste in his mouth; it trailed back along his tongue and down his throat like the taste of melted aspirin. So now you know how fear tastes, he thought. Time you found out, considering all youve written on the subject. He supposed it was a taste he would get used to. If he lived long enough. Memories were suddenly trying to crowd in. It was as if a black sac in his mind were bulging, threatening to spew noxious (dreams) images up from his subconscious and into the mental field of vision commanded by his rational waking mindand if that happened all at once, it would drive him mad. He tried to push them back, and succeeded, but not before he heard a voiceit was as if someone buried alive had cried out from the ground. It was Eddie Kaspbraks voice. You saved my life, Bill. Those big boys, they drive me bugshit. Sometimes I think they really want to kill me Your arms, Audra said. Bill looked down at them. The flesh there had humped into gooseflesh. Not little bumps but huge white knobs like insect eggs. They both stared, saying nothing, as if looking at an interesting museum exhibit. The goosebumps slowly melted away. In the silence that followed Audra said And I know one other thing. Someone called you this morning from the States and said you have to leave me. He got up, looked briefly at the liquor bottles, then went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of orange juice. He said You know I had a brother, and you know he died, but you dont know he was murdered. Audra took in a quick snatch of breath. Murdered! Oh, Bill, why didnt you ever Tell you? He laughed, that barking sound again. I dont know. What happened? We were living in Derry then. There had been a flood, but it was mostly over, and George was bored. I was sick in bed with the flu. He wanted me to make him a boat out of a sheet of newspaper. I knew how from daycamp the year before. He said he was going to sail it down the gutters on Witcham Street and Jackson Street, because they were still full of water. So I made him the boat and he thanked me and he went out and that was the last time I ever saw my brother George alive. If I hadnt had the flu, maybe I could have saved him. He paused, right palm rubbing at his left cheek, as if testing for beardstubble. His eyes, magnified by the lenses of his glasses, looked thoughtful ... but he was not looking at her. It happened right there on Witcham Street, not too far from the intersection with Jackson. Whoever killed him pulled his left arm off the way a secondgrader would pull a wing off a fly. Medical examiner said he either died of shock or bloodloss. Far as I could ever see, it didnt make a dimes worth of difference which it was. Christ, Bill! I imagine you wonder why I never told you. The truth is, I wonder myself. Here weve been married eleven years and until today you never knew what happened to Georgie. I know about your whole familyeven your aunts and uncles. I know your grandfather died in his garage in Iowa City frigging around with his chainsaw while he was drunk. I know those things because married people, no matter how busy they are, get to know almost everything after awhile. And if they get really bored and stop listening, they pick it up anywayby osmosis. Or do you think Im wrong? No, she said faintly. Youre not wrong, Bill. And weve always been able to talk to each other, havent we? I mean, neither of us got so bored it ever had to be osmosis, right? Well, she said, until today I always thought so. Come on, Audra. You know everything thats happened to me over the last eleven years of my life. Every deal, every idea, every cold, every friend, every guy that ever did me wrong or tried to. You know I slept with Susan Browne. You know that sometimes I get maudlin when I drink and play the records too loud. Especially the Grateful Dead, she said, and he laughed. This time she smiled back. You know the most important stuff, toothe things I hope for. Yes. I think so. But this ... She paused, shook her head, thought for a moment. How much does this call have to do with your brother, Bill? Let me get to it in my own way. Dont try to rush me into the center of it or youll have me committed. Its so big ... and so ... so quaintly awful ... that Im trying to sort of creep up on it. You see ... it never occurred to me to tell you about Georgie. She looked at him, frowned, shook her head faintlyI dont understand. What Im trying to tell you, Audra, is that I havent even thought of George in twenty years or more. But you told me you had a brother named I repeated a fact, he said. That was all. His name was a word. It cast no shadow at all in my mind. But I think maybe it cast a shadow over your dreams, Audra said. Her voice was very quiet. The groaning? The crying? She nodded. I suppose you could be right, he said. In fact, youre almost surely right. But dreams you dont remember dont really count, do they? Are you really telling me you never thought of him at all? Yes. I am. She shook her head, frankly disbelieving. Not even the horrible way he died? Not until today, Audra. She looked at him and shook her head again. You asked me before we were married if I had any brothers or sisters, and I said I had a brother who died when I was a kid. You knew my parents were gone, and youve got so much family that it took up your entire field of attention. But thats not all. What do you mean? It isnt just George thats been in that black hole. I havent thought of Derry itself in twenty years. Not the people I chummed withEddie Kaspbrak and Richie the Mouth, Stan Uris, Bev Marsh ... He ran his hands through his hair and laughed shakily. Its like having a case of amnesia so bad you dont know youve got it. And when Mike Hanlon called Whos Mike Hanlon? Another kid that we chummed withthat I chummed with after Georgie died. Of course hes no kid anymore. None of us are. That was Mike on the phone, transatlantic cable. He said, Hellohave I reached the Denbrough residence? and I said yes, and he said, Bill? Is that you? and I said yes, and he said, This is Mike Hanlon. It meant nothing to me, Audra. He might as well have been selling encyclopedias or Burl Ives records. Then he said, From Derry. And when he said that it was like a door opened inside me and some horrible light shined out, and I remembered who he was. I remembered Georgie. I remembered all the others. All this happened Bill snapped his fingers. Like that. And I knew he was going to ask me to come. Come back to Derry. Yeah. He took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, looked at her. Never in her life had she seen a man who looked so frightened. Back to Derry. Because we promised, he said, and we did. We did. All of us. Us kids. We stood in the creek that ran through the Barrens, and we held hands in a circle, and we had cut our palms with a piece of glass so it was like a bunch of kids playing blood brothers, only it was real. He held his palms out to her, and in the center of each she could see a closeset ladder of white lines that could have been scartissue. She had held his handboth his handscountless times, but she had never noticed these scars across his palms before. They were faint, yes, but she would have believed And the party! That party! Not the one where they had met, although this second one formed a perfect bookend to that first one, because it had been the wrap party at the end of the Pit of the Black Demon shoot. It had been loud and drunk, every inch the Topanga Canyon do. Perhaps a little less bitchy than some of the other L.A. parties she had been to, because the shoot had gone better than they had any right to expect, and they all knew it. For Audra Phillips it had gone even better, because she had fallen in love with William Denbrough. What was the name of the selfproclaimed palmist? She couldnt remember now, only that she had been one of the makeup mans two assistants. She remembered the girl whipping off her blouse at some point in the party (revealing a very filmy bra beneath) and tying it over her head like a gypsys scarf. High on pot and wine, she had read palms for the rest of the evening ... or at least until she had passed out. Audra could not remember now if the girls readings had been good or bad, witty or stupid she had been pretty high herself that night. What she did remember was that at one point the girl had grabbed Bills palm and her own and had declared them perfectly matched. They were lifetwins, she said. She could remember watching, more than a little jealous, as the girl traced the lines on his palm with her exquisitely lacquered fingernailhow stupid that was, in the weird L.A. film subculture where men patted womens fannies as routinely as New York men pecked their cheeks! But there had been something intimate and lingering about that tracery. There had been no little white scars on Bills palms then. She had been watching the charade with a jealous lovers eye, and she was sure of the memory. Sure of the fact. She said so to Bill now. He nodded. Youre right. They werent there then. And although I cant absolutely swear to it, I dont think they were there last night, down at the Plow and Barrow. Ralph and I were handwrestling for beers again and I think I would have noticed. He grinned at her. The grin was dry, humorless, and scared. I think they came back when Mike Hanlon called. Thats what I think. Bill, that isnt possible. But she reached for her cigarettes. Bill was looking at his hands. Stan did it, he said. Cut our palms with a sliver of Coke bottle. I can remember it so clearly now. He looked up at Audra and behind his glasses his eyes were hurt and puzzled. I remember how that piece of glass flashed in the sun. It was one of the new clear ones. Before that Coke bottles used to be green, you remember that? She shook her head but he didnt see her. He was still studying his palms. I can remember Stan doing his own hands last, pretending he was going to slash his wrists instead of just cut his palms a little. I guess it was just some goof, but I almost made a move on him ... to stop him. Because for a second or two there he looked serious. Bill, dont, she said in a low voice. This time she had to steady the lighter in her right hand by grasping its wrist in her left, like a policeman holding a gun on a shooting range. Scars cant come back. They either are or arent. You saw them before, huh? Is that what youre telling me? Theyre very faint, Audra said, more sharply than she had intended. We were all bleeding, he said. We were standing in the water not far from where Eddie Kaspbrak and Ben Hanscom and I built the dam that time You dont mean the architect, do you? Is there one by that name? God, Bill, he built the new BBC communications center! Theyre still arguing whether its a dream or an abortion! Well, I dont know if its the same guy or not. It doesnt seem likely, but I guess it could be. The Ben I knew was great at building stuff. We all stood there, and I was holding Bev Marshs left hand in my right and Richie Toziers right hand in my left. We stood out there in the water like something out of a Southern baptism after a tent meeting, and I remember I could see the Derry Standpipe on the horizon. It looked as white as you imagine the robes of the archangels must be, and we promised, we swore, that if it wasnt over, that if it ever started to happen again ... wed go back. And wed do it again. And stop it. Forever. Stop what? she cried, suddenly furious with him. Stop what? What the fuck are you talking about? I wish you wouldnt aaask Bill began, and then stopped. She saw an expression of bemused horror spread over his face like a stain. Give me a cigarette. She passed him the pack. He lit one. She had never seen him smoke a cigarette. I used to stutter, too. You stuttered? Yes. Back then. You said I was the only man in L.A. you ever knew who dared to speak slowly. The truth is, I didnt dare talk fast. It wasnt reflection. It wasnt deliberation. It wasnt wisdom. All reformed stutterers speak very slowly. Its one of the tricks you learn, like thinking of your middle name just before you introduce yourself, because stutterers have more trouble with nouns than with any other words, and the one word in all the world that gives them the most trouble is their own first name. Stuttered. She smiled a small smile, as if he had told a joke and she had missed the point. Until Georgie died, I stuttered moderately, Bill said, and already he had begun to hear words double in his mind, as if they were infinitesimally separated in time; the words came out smoothly, in his ordinary slow and cadenced way, but in his mind he heard words like Georgie and moderately overlap, becoming JuhJuhGeorgie and mmoderately. I mean, I had some really bad momentsusually when I was called on in class, and especially if I really knew the answer and wanted to give itbut mostly I got by. After George died, it got a lot worse. Then, around the age of fourteen or fifteen, things started to get better again. I went to Chevrus High in Portland, and there was a speech therapist there, Mrs. Thomas, who was really great. She taught me some good tricks. Like thinking of my middle name just before I said Hi, Im Bill Denbrough out loud. I was taking French 1 and she taught me to switch to French if I got badly stuck on a word. So if youre standing there feeling like the worlds grandest asshole, saying thththis buhbuhbuhbuh over and over like a broken record, you switched over to French and ce livre would come flowing off your tongue. Worked every time. And as soon as you said it in French you could come back to English and say this book with no problem at all. If you got stuck on an sword like ship or skate or slum, you could lisp it thip, thkate, thlum. No stutter. All of that helped, but mostly it was just forgetting Derry and everything that happened there. Because thats when the forgetting happened. When we were living in Portland and I was going to Chevrus. I didnt forget everything at once, but looking back now Id have to say it happened over a remarkably short period of time. Maybe no more than four months. My stutter and my memories faded out together. Someone washed the blackboard and all the old equations went away. He drank what was left of his juice. When I stuttered on ask a few seconds ago, that was the first time in maybe twentyone years. He looked at her. First the scars, then the stuhhutter. Do you hhear it? Youre doing that on purpose! she said, badly frightened. No. I guess theres no way to convince a person of that, but its true. Stutterings funny, Audra. Spooky. On one level youre not even aware its happening. But ... its also something you can hear in your mind. Its like part of your head is working an instant ahead of the rest. Or one of those reverb systems kids used to put in their jalopies back in the fifties, when the sound in the rear speaker would come just a split second aafter the sound in the front sspeaker. He got up and walked restlessly around the room. He looked tired, and she thought with some unease of how hard he had worked over the last thirteen years or so, as if it might be possible to justify the moderateness of his talent by working furiously, almost nonstop. She found herself having a very uneasy thought and tried to push it away, but it wouldnt go. Suppose Bills call had really been from Ralph Foster, inviting him down to the Plow and Barrow for an hour of armwrestling or backgammon, or maybe from Freddie Firestone, the producer of Attic Room, on some problem or other? Perhaps even a wrongring, as the veddy British doctors wife down the lane put it? What did such thoughts lead to? Why, to the idea that all this DerryMike Hanlon business was nothing but a hallucination. A hallucination brought on by an incipient nervous breakdown. But the scars, Audrahowdo you explain the scars? Hes right. They werent there . . . and now they are. Thats the truth, and you know it. Tell me the rest, she said. Who killed your brother George? What did you and these other children do? What did you promise? He went to her, knelt before her like an oldfashioned suitor about to propose marriage, and took her hands. I think I could tell you, he said softly. I think that if I really wanted to, I could. Most of it I dont remember even now, but once I started talking it would come. I can sense those memories ... waiting to be born. Theyre like clouds filled with rain. Only this rain would be very dirty. The plants that grew after a rain like that would be monsters. Maybe I can face that with the others Do they know? Mike said he called them all. He thinks theyll all come ... except maybe for Stan. He said Stan sounded strange. It all sounds strange to me. Youre frightening me very badly, Bill. Im sorry, he said, and kissed her. It was like getting a kiss from an utter stranger. She found herself hating this man Mike Hanlon. I thought I ought to explain as much as I could; I thought that would be better than just creeping off into the night. I suppose some of them may do just that. But I have to go. And I think Stan will be there, no matter how strange he sounded. Or maybe thats just because I cant imagine not going myself. Because of your brother? Bill shook his head slowly. I could tell you that, but it would be a lie. I loved him. I know how strange that must sound after telling you I havent thought of him in twenty years or so, but I loved the hell out of that kid. He smiled a little. He was a spasmoid, but I loved him. You know? Audra, who had a younger sister, nodded. I know. But it isnt George. I cant explain what it is. I ... He looked out the window at the morning fog. I feel like a bird must feel when fall comes and it knows ... somehow it just knows it has to fly home. Its instinct, babe ... and I guess I believe instincts the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will. Unless youre willing to take the pipe or eat the gun or take a long walk off a short dock, you cant say no to some things. You cant refuse to pick up your option because there is no option. You cant stop it from happening any more than you could stand at home plate with a bat in your hand and let a fastball hit you. I have to go. That promise ... its in my mind like a fuhfishhook. She stood up and walked herself carefully to him; she felt very fragile, as if she might break. She put a hand on his shoulder and turned him to her. Take me with you, then. The expression of horror that dawned on his face thennot horror of her but for herwas so naked that she stepped back, really afraid for the first time. No, he said. Dont think of that, Audra. Dont you ever think of that. Youre not going within three thousand miles of Derry. I think Derrys going to be a very bad place to be during the next couple of weeks. Youre going to stay here and carry on and make all the excuses for me you have to. Now promise me that! Should I promise? she asked, her eyes never leaving his. Should I, Bill? Audra Should I? You made a promise, and look what its got you into. And me as well, since Im your wife and I love you. His big hands tightened painfully on her shoulders. Promise me! Promise! PPuhPuhPruhhuh And she could not stand that, that broken word caught in his mouth like a gaffed and wriggling fish. I promise, okay? I promise! She burst into tears. Are you happy now? Jesus! Youre crazy, the whole thing is crazy, but I promise! He put an arm around her and led her to the couch. Brought her a brandy. She sipped at it, getting herself under control a little at a time. When do you go, then? Today, he said. Concorde. I can just make it if I drive to Heathrow instead of taking the train. Freddie wanted me onset after lunch. You go on ahead at nine, and you dont know anything you see? She nodded reluctantly. Ill be in New York before anything shows up funny. And in Derry before sundown, with the right ccconnections. And when do I see you again? she asked softly. He put an arm around her and held her tightly, but he never answered her question. DERRY THE FIRST INTERLUDE How many human eyes ... had snatched glimpses of their secret anatomies, down the passages of years? Clive Barker, Books of Blood The segment below and all other Interlude segments are drawn from Derry An Unauthorized Town History, by Michael Hanlon. This is an unpublished set of notes and accompanying fragments of manuscript (which read almost like diary entries) found in the Derry Public Library vault. The title given is the one written on the cover of the looseleaf binder in which these notes were kept prior to their appearance here. The author, however, refers to the work several times within his own notes as Derry A Look Through Hells Back Door. One supposes the thought of popular publication had done more than cross Mr. Hanlons mind. January 2nd, 1985 Can an entire city be haunted? Haunted as some houses are supposed to be haunted? Not just a single building in that city, or the corner of a single street, or a single basketball court in a single pocketpark, the netless basket jutting out at sunset like some obscure and bloody instrument of torture, not just one areabut everything. The whole works. Can that be? Listen Haunted Often visited by ghosts or spirits. Funk and Wagnalls. Haunting Persistently recurring to the mind; difficult to forget. Ditto Funk and Friend. To haunt To appear or recur often, especially as a ghost. Butand listen!Aplace often visited resort, den, hangout ... Italics are or course mine. And one more. This one, like the last, is a definition of haunt as a noun, and its the one that really scares me A feeding place for animals. Like the animals that beat up Adrian Mellon and then threw him over the bridge? Like the animal that was waiting underneath the bridge? A feeding place for animals. Whats feeding in Derry? Whats feeding on Derry? You know, its sort of interestingI didnt know it was possible for a man to become as frightened as I have become since the Adrian Mellon business and still live, let alone function. Its as if Ive fallen into a story, and everyone knows youre not supposed to feel this afraid until the end of the story, when the haunter of the dark finally comes out of the woodwork to feed ... on you, of course. On you. But if this is a story, its not one of those classic screamers by Lovecraft or Bradbury or Poe. I know, you seenot everything, but a lot. I didnt just start when I opened the Derry News one day last September, read the transcript of the Unwin boys preliminary hearing, and realized that the clown who killed George Denbrough might well be back again. I actually started around 1980I think that is when some part of me which had been asleep woke up ... knowing that Its time might be coming round again. What part? The watchman part, I suppose. Or maybe it was the voice of the Turtle. Yes ... I rather think it was that. I know its what Bill Denbrough would believe. I discovered news of old horrors in old books; read intelligence of old atrocities in old periodicals; always in the back of my mind, every day a bit louder, I heard the seashell drone of some growing, coalescing force; I seemed to smell the bitter ozone aroma of lightningstocome. I began making notes for a book I will almost certainly not live to write. And at the same time I went on with my life. On one level of my mind I was and am living with the most grotesque, capering horrors; on another I have continued to live the mundane life of a smallcity librarian. I shelve books; I make out library cards for new patrons; I turn off the microfilm readers careless users sometimes leave on; I joke with Carole Danner about how much I would like to go to bed with her, and she jokes back about how much shed like to go to bed with me, and both of us know that shes really joking and Im really not, just as both of us know that she wont stay in a little place like Derry for long and I will be here until I die, taping torn pages in Business Week, sitting down at monthly acquisition meetings with my pipe in one hand and a stack of Library Journals in the other ... and waking in the middle of the night with my fists jammed against my mouth to keep in the screams. The gothic conventions are all wrong. My hair has not turned white. I do not sleepwalk. I have not begun to make cryptic comments or to carry a planchette around in my sportcoat pocket. I think I laugh a little more, thats all, and sometimes it must seem a little shrill and strange, because sometimes people look at me oddly when I laugh. Part of methe part Bill would call the voice of the Turtlesays I should call them all, tonight. But am I, even now, completely sure? Do I want to be completely sure? Noof course not. But God, what happened to Adrian Mellon is so much like what happened to Stuttering Bills brother, George, in the fall of 1957. If it has started again, I will call them. Ill have to. But not yet. Its too early anyway. Last time it began slowly and didnt really get going until the summer of 1958. So ... I wait. And fill up the waiting with words in this notebook and long moments of looking into the mirror to see the stranger the boy became. The boys face was bookish and timid; the mans face is the face of a bank teller in a Western movie, the fellow who never has any lines, the one who just gets to put his hands up and look scared when the robbers come in. And if the script calls for anyone to get shot by the bad guys, hes the one. Same old Mike. A little starey in the eyes, maybe, and a little punchy from broken sleep, but not sos youd notice without a good close look ... like kissingdistance close, and I havent been that close to anyone in a very long time. If you took a casual glance at me you might think Hes been reading too many books, but thats all. I doubt youd guess how hard the man with the mild banktellers face is now struggling just to hold on, to hold on to his own mind.... If I have to make those calls, it may kill some of them. Thats one of the things Ive had to face on the long nights when sleep wont come, nights when I lie there in bed wearing my conservative blue pajamas, my spectacles neatly folded up and lying on the nighttable next to the glass of water I always put there in case I wake up thirsty in the night. I lie there in the dark and I take small sips of the water and I wonder how muchor how littlethey remember. I am somehow convinced that they dont remember any of it, because they dont need to remember. Im the only one that hears the voice of the Turtle, the only one who remembers, because Im the only one who stayed here in Derry. And because theyre scattered to the four winds, they have no way of knowing the identical patterns their lives have taken. To bring them back, to show them that pattern ... yes, it might kill some of them. It might kill all of them. So I go over it and over it in my mind; I go over them, trying to recreate them as they were and as they might now be, trying to decide which of them is the most vulnerable. Richie Trashmouth Tozier, I think sometimeshe was the one Criss, Huggins, and Bowers seemed to catch up with the most often, in spite of the fact that Ben was so fat. Bowers was the one Richie was the most scared ofthe one we were all the most scared ofbut the others used to really put the fear of God into him, too. If I call him out there in California would he see it as some horrible Return of the Big Bullies, two from the grave and one from the madhouse in Juniper Hill where he raves to this day? Sometimes I think Eddie was the weakest, Eddie with his domineering tank of a mother and his terrible case of asthma. Beverly? She always tried to talk so tough, but she was as scared as the rest of us. Stuttering Bill, faced with a horror that wont go away when he puts the cover on his typewriter? Stan Uris? Theres a guillotine blade hanging over their lives, razorsharp, but the more I think about it the more I think they dont know that blade is there. Im the one with my hand on the lever. I can pull it just by opening my telephone notebook and calling them, one after the other. Maybe I wont have to do it. I hold on to the waning hope that Ive mistaken the rabbity cries of my own timid mind for the deeper, truer voice of the Turtle. After all, what do I have? Mellon in July. A child found dead on Neibolt Street last October, another found in Memorial Park in early December, just before the first snowfall. Maybe it was a tramp, as the papers say.