The bird walked back and forth overhead Taktaktaktak. Mike retreated a bit, gathered up more chunks of tile, and heaped them as close to the mouth of the stack as he dared. If the thing came back, he wanted to be able to fire at it from pointblank range. The light outside was still bright now that it was May, it wouldnt get dark for a long time yetbut suppose the bird just decided to wait? Mike swallowed, the dry sides of his throat rubbing together for a moment. Overhead Taktaktak. He had a fine pile of ammunition now. In the dim light, here beyond the place where the angle of the sun made a shadowspiral inside the pipe, it looked like a pile of broken crockery swept together by a housewife. Mike rubbed the palms of his dirty hands along the sides of his jeans and waited to see what would happen next. A space of time passed before something didwhether five minutes or twentyfive, he could not tell. He was only aware of the bird walking back and forth overhead like an insomniac pacing the floor at three in the morning. Then its wings fluttered again. It landed in front of the smokestacks opening. Mike, on his knees just behind his pile of tiling, began to peg missiles at it before it could even bend its head down. One of them slammed into a plated yellow leg and drew a trickle of blood so dark it seemed almost as black as the birds eyes. Mike screamed in triumph, the sound thin and almost lost under the birds own enraged squawk. Get out of here! Mike cried. Im going to keep hitting you until you get out of here, I swear to God I will! The bird flew up to the top of the smokestack and resumed its pacing. Mike waited. Finally its wings ruffled again as it took off. Mike waited, expecting the yellow feet, so like hens feet, to appear again. They didnt. He waited longer, convinced it had to be some kind of a trick, realizing at last that that wasnt why he was waiting at all. He was waiting because he was scared to go out, scared to leave the safety of this bolthole. Never mind! Never mind stuff like that! Im not a rabbit! He took as many chunks of tile as he could handle comfortably, then put some more inside his shirt. He stepped out of the smokestack, trying to look everywhere at once and wishing madly for eyes in the back of his head. He saw only the field stretching ahead and around him, littered with the exploded rusting remains of the Kitchener Ironworks. He wheeled around, sure he would see the bird perched on the lip of the stack like a vulture, a oneeyed vulture now, only wanting the boy to see him before it attacked for the final time, using that sharp beak to jab and rip and strip. But the bird was not there. It was really gone. Mikes nerve snapped. He uttered a breaking scream of fear and ran for the weatherbeaten fence between the field and the road, dropping the last pieces of tile from his hands. Most of the others fell out of his shirt as the shirt pulled free of his belt. He vaulted over the fence onehanded, like Roy Rogers showing off for Dale Evans on his way back from the corral with Pat Brady and the rest of the buckaroos. He grabbed the handlebars of his bike and ran beside it forty feet up the road before getting on. Then he pedaled madly, not daring to look back, not daring to slow down, until he reached the intersection of Pasture Road and Outer Main Street, where there were lots of cars passing back and forth. When he got home, his father was changing the plugs on the tractor. Will observed that Mike looked powerful musty and dusty. Mike hesitated for just a split second and then told his father that hed taken a tumble from his bike on the way home, swerving to avoid a pothole. Did you break anything, Mikey? Will asked, observing his son a little more carefully. No, sir. Sprains? Huhuh. Sure? Mike nodded. Did you pick yourself up a souvenir? Mike reached into his pocket and found the gearwheel. He showed it to his father, who looked at it briefly and then plucked a tiny crumb of tiling from the pad of flesh just below Mikes thumb. He seemed more interested in this. From that old smokestack? Will asked. Mike nodded. You go inside there? Mike nodded again. See anything in there? Will asked, and then, as if to make a joke of the question (which hadnt sounded like a joke at all), he added Buried treasure? Smiling a little, Mike shook his head. Well, dont tell your mother you was muckin about in there, Will said. Shed shoot me first and you second. He looked even more closely at his son. Mikey, are you all right? Huh? You look a little peaky around the eyes. I guess I might be a little tired, Mike said. Its eight or ten miles there and back again, dont forget. You want some help with the tractor, Daddy? No, Im about done screwing it up for this week. You go on in and wash up. Mike started away, and then his father called to him once more. Mike looked back. I dont want you going around that place again, he said, at least not until all this trouble is cleared up and they catch the man whos doing it ... you didnt see anybody out there, did you? No one chased you, or hollered you down? I didnt see any people at all, Mike said. Will nodded and lit a cigarette. I think I was wrong to send you there. Old places like that . . . sometimes they can be dangerous. Their eyes locked briefly. Okay, Daddy, Mike said. I dont want to go back anyway. It was a little spooky. Will nodded again. Less said the better, I reckon. You go and get cleaned up now. And tell her to put on three or four extra sausages. Mike did. 6 Never mind that now, Mike Hanlon thought, looking at the grooves which went up to the concrete edge of the Canal and stopped there. Never mind that, it might just have been a dream anyhow, and There were splotches of dried blood on the lip of the Canal. Mike looked at these, and then he looked down into the Canal. Black water flowed smoothly past. Runners of dirty yellow foam clung to the Canals sides, sometimes breaking free to flow downstream in lazy loops and curves. For a momentjust a momenttwo clots of this foam came together and seemed to form a face, a kids face, its eyes turned up in an avatar of terror and agony. Mikes breath caught, as if on a thorn. The foam broke apart, became meaningless again, and at that moment there was a loud splash on his right. Mike snapped his head around, shrinking back a little, and for a moment he believed he saw something in the shadows of the outflow tunnel where the Canal resurfaced after its course under downtown. Then it was gone. Suddenly, cold and shuddering, he dug in his pocket for the knife he had found in the grass. He threw it into the Canal. There was a small splash, a ripple that began as a circle and was then tugged into the shape of an arrowhead by the current . . . then nothing. Nothing except the fear that was suddenly suffocating him and the deadly certainty that there was something near, something watching him, gauging its chances, biding its time. He turned, meaning to walk back to his biketo run would be to dignify those fears and undignify himselfand then that splashing sound came again. It was a lot louder this second time. So much for dignity. Suddenly he was running as fast as he could, beating his buns for the gate and his bike, jamming the kickstand up with one heel and pedaling for the street as fast as he could. That seasmell was all at once too thick . . . much too thick. It was everywhere. And the water dripping from the wet branches of the trees seemed much too loud. Something was coming. He heard dragging, lurching footsteps in the grass. He stood on the pedals, giving it everything, and shot out onto Main Street without looking back. He headed for home as fast as he could, wondering what in hell had possessed him to come in the first place . . . what had drawn him. And then he tried to think about the chores, the whole chores, and nothing but the chores. After awhile he actually succeeded. And when he saw the headline in the paper the next day (MISSING BOY PROMPTS NEW FEARS), he thought about the pocket knife he had thrown into the Canalthe pocket knife with the initials E.C. scratched on the side. He thought about the blood he had seen on the grass. And he thought about those grooves which stopped at the edge of the Canal. CHAPTER 7 The Dam in the Barrens 1 Seen from the expressway at quarter to five in the morning, Boston seems a city of the dead brooding over some tragedy in its pasta plague, perhaps, or a curse. The smell of salt, heavy and cloying, comes off the ocean. Runners of earlymorning fog obscure much of what movement would be seen otherwise. Driving north along Storrow Drive, sitting behind the wheel of the black 84 Cadillac he picked up from Butch Carrington at Cape Cod Limousine, Eddie Kaspbrak thinks you can feel this citys age; perhaps you can get that feeling of age nowhere else in America but here. Boston is a sprat compared with London, an infant compared with Rome, but by American standards at least it is old, old. It kept its place on these low hills three hundred years ago, when the Tea and Stamp Taxes were unthought of, Paul Revere and Patrick Henry unborn. Its age, its silence, and the foggy smell of the seaall of these things make Eddie nervous. When Eddies nervous he reaches for his aspirator. He sticks it in his mouth and triggers a cloud of revivifying spray down his throat. There are a few people in the streets hes passing, and a pedestrian or two on the walkways of the overpassesthey give lie to the impression that he has somehow wandered into a Lovecrafty tale of doomed cities, ancient evils, and monsters with unpronounceable names. Here, ganged around a bus stop with a sign reading KENMORE SQUARE CITY CENTER, he sees waitresses, nurses, city employees, their faces naked and puffed with sleep. Thats right, Eddie thinks, now passing under a sign which reads TOBIN BRIDGE. Thats right, stick to the buses. Forget the subways. The subways are a bad idea; I wouldnt go down there if I were you. Not down below. Not in the tunnels. This is a bad thought to have; if he doesnt get rid of it he will soon be using the aspirator again. Hes glad for the heavier traffic on the Tobin Bridge. He passes a monument works. Painted on the brick side is a slightly unsettling admonishment SLOW DOWN! WE CAN WAIT! Here is a green reflectorized sign which reads TO 95 MAINE, N.H., ALL NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND POINTS. He looks at it and suddenly a bonedeep shudder wracks his body. His hands momentarily weld themselves to the wheel of the Cadillac. He would like to believe it is the onset of some sickness, a virus or perhaps one of his mothers phantom fevers, but he knows better. It is the city behind him, poised silently on the straightedge that runs between day and night, and what that sign promises ahead of him. Hes sick, all right, no doubt about that, but its not a virus or a phantom fever. He has been poisoned by his own memories. Im scared, Eddie thinks. That was always what was at the bottom of it. Just being scared. That was everything. But in the end I think we turned that around somehow. We used it. But how? He cant remember. He wonders if any of the others can. For all their sakes he certainly hopes so. A truck drones by on his left. Eddie has still got his lights on and now he hits his brights momentarily as the truck draws safely ahead. He does this without thinking. It has become an automatic function, just part of driving for a living. The unseen driver in the truck flashes his running lights in return, quickly, twice, thanking Eddie for his courtesy. If only everything could be that simple and that clear, he thinks. He follows the signs to 195. The northbound traffic is light, although he observes that the southbound lanes into the city are starting to fill up, even at this early hour. Eddie floats the big car along, preguessing most of the directional signs and getting into the correct lane long before he has to. It has been yearsliterally yearssince he has guessed wrong enough to be swept past an exit he wanted. He makes his lanechoices as automatically as he flashed okay to cut back in to the trucker, as automatically as he once found his way through the tangle of paths in the Derry Barrens. The fact that he has never before in his life driven out of downtown Boston, one of the most confusing cities in America to drive in, does not seem to matter much at all. He suddenly remembers something else about that summer, something Bill said to him one day YYouve ggot a cccuhhompass in your head, EEEddie. How that had pleased him! It pleases him again as the 84 Dorado shoots back onto the turnpike. He slides the limos speed up to a copsafe fiftyseven miles an hour and finds some quiet music on the radio. He supposes he would have died for Bill back then, if that had been required; if Bill had asked him, Eddie would simply have responded Sure, Big Bill ... you got a time in mind yet? Eddie laughs at thisnot much of a sound, just a snort, but the sound of it startles him into a real laugh. He laughs seldom these days, and he certainly did not expect to find many chucks (Richies word, meaning chuckles, as in You had any good chucks today, Eds?) on this black pilgrimage. But, he supposes, if God is dirtymean enough to curse the faithful with what they want most in life, Hes maybe quirky enough to deal you a good chuck or two along the way. Had any good chucks lately, Eds? he says out loud, and laughs again. Man, he had hated it when Richie called him Eds ... but he had sort of liked it, too. The way he thought Ben Hanscom got to like Richie calling him Haystack. It was something . . . like a secret name. A secret identity. A way to be people that had nothing to do with their parents fears, hopes, constant demands. Richie couldnt do his beloved Voices for shit, but maybe he did know how important it was for creeps like them to sometimes be different people. Eddie glances at the change lined up neatly on the Dorados dashboardlining up the change is another of those automatic tricks of the trade. When the tollbooths come up, you never want to have to dig for your silver, never want to find that youve gotten in an automatictoll lane with the wrong change. Among the coins are two or three Susan B. Anthony silver dollars. They are coins, he reflects, that you probably only find in the pockets of chauffeurs and taxidrivers from the New York area these days, just as the only place you are apt to see a lot of twodollar bills is at a racetrack payoff window. He always keeps a few on hand because the robot tolltaker baskets on the George Washington and the Triboro Bridges take them. Another of those lights suddenly comes on in his head silver dollars. Not these fake copper sandwiches but real silver dollars, with Lady Liberty dressed in her gauzy robes stamped upon them. Ben Hanscoms silver dollars. Yes, but wasnt it Bill or Ben or Beverly who once used one of those silver cartwheels to save their lives? He is not quite sure of this, is, in fact, not quite sure of anything . . . or is it just that he doesnt want to remember? It was dark in there, he thinks suddenly. I remember that much. It was dark in there. Boston is well behind him now and the fog is starting to bum off. Ahead is MAINE, N.H., ALL NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND POINTS. Derry is ahead, and there is something in Derry which should be twentyseven years dead and yet is somehow not. Something with as many faces as Lon Chaney. But what is it really? Didnt they see it at the end as it really was, with all its masks cast aside? Ah, he can remember so much . . . but not enough. He remembers that he loved Bill Denbrough; he remembers that well enough. Bill never made fun of his asthma. Bill never called him little sissy queerboy. He loved Bill like he would have loved a big brother . . . or a father. Bill knew stuff to do. Places to go. Things to see. Bill was never up against it. When you ran with Bill you ran to beat the devil and you laughed . . . but you hardly ever ran out of breath. And hardly ever running out of breath was great, so fucking great, Eddie would tell the world. When you ran with Big Bill, you got your chucks every day. Sure, kid, EVery day, he says in a Richie Tozier Voice, and laughs again. It had been Bills idea to make the dam in the Barrens, and it was, in a way, the dam that had brought them all together. Ben Hanscom had been the one to show them how the dam could be builtand they had built it so well that theyd gotten in a lot of trouble with Mr. Nell, the cop on the beatbut it had been Bills idea. And although all of them except Richie had seen very odd thingsfrightening thingsin Derry since the turn of the year, it had been Bill who had first found the courage to say something out loud. That dam. That damn dam. He remembered Victor Criss Tata, boys. It was a real baby dam, believe me. Youre better off without it. A day later, Ben Hanscom was grinning at them, saying We could We could flood We could flood out the 2 whole Barrens if we wanted to. Bill and Eddie looked at Ben doubtfully and then at the stuff Ben had brought along with him some boards (scrounged from Mr. McKibbons back yard, but that was okay, since Mr. McKibbon had probably scavenged them from someone elses), a sledgehammer, a shovel. I dunno, Eddie said, glancing at Bill. When we tried yesterday, it didnt work very good. The current kept washing our sticks away. Thisll work, Ben said. He also looked to Bill for the final decision. Well, lets ggive it a tttry, Bill said. I ccalled RRRRichie Tozier this mmorning. Hes ggonna be ohover llater, he ssaid. Maybe him and Stuhhuhhanley will want to hhelp. Stanley who? Ben asked. Uris, Eddie said. He was still looking cautiously at Bill, who seemed somehow different todayquieter, less enthusiastic about the idea of the dam. Bill looked pale today. Distant. Stanley Uris? I guess I dont know him. Does he go to Derry Elementary? Hes our age but he just finished the fourth grade, Eddie said. He started school a year late because he was sick a lot when he was a little kid. You think you took chong yesterday, you just oughtta be glad youre not Stan. Someones always rackin Stan to the dogs an back. Hes Juhjuhhooish, Bill said. Luhlots of kkids dont luhhike him because hhes Jewish. Oh yeah? Ben asked, impressed. Jewish, huh? He paused and then said carefully Is that like being Turkish, or is it more like, you know, Egyptian? I gguess its more like Turhurhurkish, Bill said. He picked up one of the boards Ben had brought and looked at it. It was about six feet long and three feet wide. My dddad says most JJews have big nuhnoses and lots of mmmoney, but StuhStuhStuh But Stans got a regular nose and hes always broke, Eddie said. Yeah, Bill said, and broke into a real grin for the first time that day. Ben grinned. Eddie grinned. Bill tossed the board aside, got up and brushed off the seat of his jeans. He walked to the edge of the stream and the other two boys joined him. Bill shoved his hands in his back pockets and sighed deeply. Eddie was sure Bill was going to say something serious. He looked from Eddie to Ben and then back to Eddie again, not smiling now. Eddie was suddenly afraid. But all Bill said then was, You got your ahahaspirator, EEddie? Eddie slapped his pocket. Im loaded for bear. Say, howd it work with the chocolate milk? Ben asked. Eddie laughed. Worked great! he said. He and Ben broke up while Bill looked at them, smiling but puzzled. Eddie explained and Bill nodded, grinning again. EEEddies muhhum is wwworried that hhes ggonna break and shshe wuhhont be able to gget a rererefund. Eddie snorted and made as if to push him into the stream. Watch it, fuckface, Bill said, sounding uncannily like Henry Bowers. Ill twist your head so far around youll be able to watch when you wipe yourself. Ben collapsed, shrieking with laughter. Bill glanced at him, still smiling, hands still in the back pockets of his jeans, smiling, yeah, but a little distant again, a little vague. He looked at Eddie and then cocked his head toward Ben. Kids suhsuhsoft, he said. Yeah, Eddie agreed, but he felt somehow that they were only going through the motions of having a good time. Something was on Bills mind. He supposed Bill would spill it when he was ready; the question was, did Eddie want to hear what it was? Kids mentally retarded. Retreaded, Ben said, still giggling. YYou gggonna shshow us how to bbuild a dam or aare you gggonna sihit there on your bbig cccan all dday? Ben got to his feet again. He looked first at the stream, flowing past them at moderate speed. The Kenduskeag was not terribly wide this far up in the Barrens, but it had defeated them yesterday just the same. Neither Eddie nor Bill had been able to figure out how to get a foothold on the current. But Ben was smiling, the smile of one who contemplates doing something new . . . something that will be fun but not very hard. Eddie thought He knows howI really think he does. Okay, he said. You guys want to take your shoes off, because youre gonna get your little footsies wet. The mindmother in Eddies head spoke up at once, her voice as stern and commanding as the voice of a traffic cop Dont you dare do it, Eddie! Dont you dare! Wet feet, thats one wayone of the thousands of waysthat colds start, and colds lead to pneumonia, so dont you do it! Bill and Ben were sitting on the bank, pulling off their sneakers and socks. Ben was fussily rolling up the legs of his jeans. Bill looked up at Eddie. His eyes were clear and warm, sympathetic. Eddie was suddenly sure Big Bill knew exactly what he had been thinking, and he was ashamed. YYou cccomin? Yeah, sure, Eddie said. He sat down on the bank and undressed his feet while his mother ranted inside his head . . . but her voice was growing steadily more distant and echoey, he was relieved to note, as if someone had stuck a heavy fishhook through the back of her blouse and was now reeling her away from him down a very long corridor. 3 It was one of those perfect summer days which, in a world where everything was on track and on the beam, you would never forget. A moderate breeze kept the worst of the mosquitoes and blackflies away. The sky was a bright, crisp blue. Temperatures were in the low seventies. Birds sang and went about their birdybusiness in the bushes and secondgrowth trees. Eddie had to use his aspirator once, and then his chest lightened and his throat seemed to widen magically to the size of a freeway. He spent the rest of the morning with it stuffed forgotten into his back pocket. Ben Hanscom, who had seemed so timid and unsure the day before, became a confident general once he was fully involved in the actual construction of the dam. Every now and then he would climb the bank and stand there with his muddy hands on his hips, looking at the work in progress and muttering to himself. Sometimes he would run a hand through his hair, and by eleven oclock it was standing up in crazy, comical spikes. Eddie felt uncertainty at first, then a sense of glee, and finally an entirely new feelingone that was at the same time weird, terrifying, and exhilarating. It was a feeling so alien to his usual state of being that he was not able to put a name to it until that night, lying in bed and looking at the ceiling and replaying the day. Power. That was what that feeling had been. Power. It was going to work, by God, and it was going to work better than he and Billmaybe even Ben himselfhad dreamed it could. He could see Bill getting involved, tooonly a little at first, still mulling over whatever it was he had on his mind, and then, bit by bit, committing himself fully. Once or twice he clapped Ben on one meaty shoulder and told him he was unbelievable. Ben flushed with pleasure each time. Ben got Eddie and Bill to set one of the boards across the stream and hold it as he used the sledgehammer to seat it in the streambed. Thereits in, but youll have to hold it or the currentll just pull it loose, he told Eddie, so Eddie stood in the middle of the stream holding the board while water sluiced over its top and made his hands into wavering starfish shapes. Ben and Bill located a second board two feet downstream of the first. Ben used the sledge again to seat it and Bill held it while Ben began to fill up the space between the two boards with sandy earth from the streambank. At first it only washed away around the ends of the boards in gritty clouds and Eddie didnt think it was going to work at all, but when Ben began adding rocks and muddy gook from the streambed, the clouds of escaping silt began to diminish. In less than twenty minutes he had created a heaped brown canal of earth and stones between the two boards in the middle of the stream. To Eddie it looked like an optical illusion. If we had real cement . . . instead of just . . . mud and rocks, theyd have to move the whole city . . . over to the Old Cape side by the middle of next week, Ben said, slinging the shovel aside at last and sitting on the bank until he got his breath back. Bill and Eddie laughed, and Ben grinned at them. When he grinned, there was a ghost of the handsome man he would become in the lines of his face. Water had begun to pile up behind the upstream board now. Eddie asked what they were going to do about the water escaping around the sides. Let it go. It doesnt matter. It doesnt? Nope. Why not? I cant explain exactly. You gotta let some out, though. How do you know? Ben shrugged. I just do, the shrug said, and Eddie was silenced. When he was rested, Ben got a third boardthe thickest of the four or five he had carried laboriously across town to the Barrensand placed it carefully against the downstream board, wedging one end firmly into the streambed and socking the other against the board Bill had been holding, creating the strut he had put in his little drawing the day before. Okay, he said, standing back. He grinned at them. You guys should be able to let go now. The gook in between the two boards will take most of the water pressure. The strut will take the rest. Wont the water wash it away? Eddie asked. Nope. The water is just gonna push it in deeper. And if youre ruhruhwrong, we gget to kkkill yuhyou, Bill said. Thats cool, Ben said amiably. Bill and Eddie stepped back. The two boards that formed the basis of the dam creaked a little, tilted a little . . . and that was all. Hot shit! Eddie screamed, excited. Its gggreat, Bill said, grinning. Yeah, Ben said. Lets eat. 4 They sat on the bank and ate, not talking much, watching the water stack up behind the dam and sluice around the ends of the boards. They had already done something to the geography of the streambanks, Eddie saw the diverted current was cutting scalloped hollows into them. As he watched, the new course of the stream undercut the bank enough on the far side to cause a small avalanche. Upstream of the dam the water formed a roughly circular pool, and at one place it had actually overflowed the bank. Bright, reflecting rills ran off into the grass and the underbrush. Eddie slowly began to realize what Ben had known from the first the dam was already built. The gaps between the boards and the banks were sluiceways. Ben had not been able to tell Eddie this because he did not know the word. Above the boards the Kenduskeag had taken on a swelled look. The chuckling sound of shallow water babbling its way over stones and gravel was now gone; all the stones upstream of the dam were underwater. Every now and then more sod and dirt, undercut by the widening stream, would fall into the water with a splash. Downstream of the dam the watercourse was nearly empty; thin trickles ran restlessly down its center, but that was about all. Stones which had been underwater for God knew how long were drying in the sun. Eddie looked at these drying stones with mild wonder . . . and that weird other feeling. They had done this. They. He saw a frog hopping along and thought maybe old Mr. Froggy was wondering just where the water had gone. Eddie laughed out loud. Ben was neatly stowing his empty wrappers in the lunchbag he had brought. Both Eddie and Bill had been amazed by the size of the repast Ben had laid out with businesslike efficiency two PBJ sandwiches, one bologna sandwich, a hardcooked egg (complete with a pinch of salt twisted up in a small piece of waxed paper), two figbars, three large chocolate chip cookies, and a RingDing. What did your ma say when she saw how bad you got racked? Eddie asked him. Hmmmm? Ben looked up from the spreading pool of water behind the dam and belched gently against the back of his hand. Oh! Well, I knew shed be groceryshopping yesterday afternoon, so I was able to beat her home. I took a bath and washed my hair. Then I threw away the jeans and the sweatshirt I was wearing. I dont know if shell notice theyre gone or not. Probably not the sweatshirt, I got lots of sweatshirts, but I guess I ought to buy myself a new pair of jeans before she gets nosing through my drawers. The thought of wasting his money on such a nonessential item cast momentary gloom across Bens face. WWWhat about the way yuhyou wwere bbruised up? I told her I was so excited to be out of school that I ran out the door and fell down the steps, Ben said, and looked both amazed and a little hurt when Eddie and Bill began laughing. Bill, who had been chowing up a piece of his mothers devils food cake, blew out a brown jet of crumbs and then had a coughing fit. Eddie, still howling, clapped him on the back. Well, I almost did fall down the steps, Ben said. Only it was because Victor Criss pushed me, not because I was running. Id be as hhot as a tuhtuhtamale in a swuhheatshirt like that, Bill said, finishing the last bite of his cake. Ben hesitated. For a moment it seemed he would say nothing. Its better when youre fat, he said finally. Sweatshirts, I mean. Because of your gut? Eddie asked. Bill snorted. Because of your tihtihtih Yeah, my tits. So what? Yeah, Bill said mildly. SSo what? There was a moment of awkward silence and then Eddie said, Look how dark the waters getting when it goes around that side of the dam. Oh, cripes! Ben shot to his feet. Currents pulling out the fill! Jeez, I wish we had cement! The damage was quickly repaired, but even Eddie could see what would happen without someone there to almost constantly shovel in fresh fill erosion would eventually cause the upstream board to collapse against the downstream board, and then everything would fall over. We can shore up the sides, Ben said. That wont stop the erosion, but itll slow it down. If we use sand and mud, wont it just go on washing away? Eddie asked. Well use chunks of sod. Bill nodded, smiled, and made an O with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Lets gggo. Ill ddig em and yyou shshow me where to pput em ihin, Big Ben. From behind them a stridently cheery voice called My Gawd, someone put the Ypool down in the Barrens, bellybutton lint and all! Eddie turned, noticing the way Ben tightened up at the sound of a strange voice, the way his lips thinned. Standing above them and aways upstream, on the path Ben had crossed the day before, were Richie Tozier and Stanley Uris. Richie came bopping down to the stream, glanced at Ben with some interest, and then pinched Eddies cheek. Dont do that! I hate it when you do that, Richie. Ah, you love it, Eds, Richie said, and beamed at him. So what do you say? You havin any good chucks, or what? 5 The five of them knocked off around four oclock. They sat much higher on the bankthe place where Bill, Ben, and Eddie had eaten lunch was now underwaterand stared down at their handiwork. Even Ben found it a little difficult to believe. He felt a sense of tired accomplishment which was mixed with uneasy fright. He found himself thinking of Fantasia, and how Mickey Mouse had known enough to get the brooms started . . . but not enough to make them stop.


Fucking incredible, Richie Tozier said softly, and pushed his glasses up on his nose. Eddie glanced over at him, but Richie was not doing one of his numbers now; his face was thoughtful, almost solemn. On the far side of the stream, where the land first rose and then tilted shallowly downhill, they had created a new piece of bogland. Bracken and holly bushes stood in a foot of water. Even as they sat here they could see the bog sending out fresh pseudopods, spreading steadily westward. Behind the dam the Kenduskeag, shallow and harmless just this morning, had become a still, swollen band of water. By two oclock the widening pool behind the dam had taken so much embankment that the spillways had grown almost to the size of rivers themselves. Everyone but Ben had gone on an emergency expedition to the dump in search of more materials. Ben stuck around, methodically sodding up leaks. The scavengers had returned not only with boards but with four bald tires, the rusty door of a 1949 Hudson Hornet, and a big piece of corrugatedsteel siding. Under Bens leadership they had built two wings on the original dam, blocking off the waters escape around the sides againand, with the wings raked back at an angle against the current, the dam worked even better than before. Stopped that sucker cold, Richie said. Youre a genius, man. Ben smiled. Its not so much. I got some Winstons, Richie said. Who wants one? He produced the crumpled redandwhite pack from his pants pocket and passed it around. Eddie, thinking of the hell a cigarette would raise with his asthma, refused. Stan also refused. Bill took one, and, after a moments thought, Ben took one, too. Richie produced a book of matches with the words ROITAN on the outside, and lit first Bens cigarette, then Bills. He was about to light his own when Bill blew out the match. Thanks a lot, Denbrough, you wet, Richie said. Bill smiled apologetically. TheTheThree on a muhmuhhatch, he said. BBad luhluhluck. Bad luck for your folks when you were born, Richie said, and lit his cigarette with another match. He lay down and crossed his arms beneath his head. The cigarette jutted upward between his teeth. Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should. He turned his head slightly and winked at Eddie. Aint that right, Eds? Ben, Eddie saw, was looking at Richie with a mixture of awe and wariness. Eddie could understand that. He had known Richie Tozier for four years, and he still didnt really understand what Richie was about. He knew that Richie got As and Bs in his schoolwork, but he also knew that Richie regularly got Cs and Ds in deportment. His father really racked him about it and his mother just about cried every time Richie brought home those poor conduct grades, and Richie would swear to do better, and maybe he even would . . . for a quarter or two. The trouble with Richie was that he couldnt keep still for more than a minute at a time and he couldnt keep his mouth shut at all. Down here in the Barrens that didnt get him in much trouble, but the Barrens werent NeverNever Land and they couldnt be the Wild Boys for more than a few hours at a stretch (the idea of a Wild Boy with an aspirator in his back pocket made Eddie smile). The trouble with the Barrens was that you always had to leave. Out there in the wider world, Richies bullshit was always getting him in troublewith adults, which was bad, and with guys like Henry Bowers, which was even worse. His entrance earlier today was a perfect example. Ben Hanscom had no more than started to say hi when Richie had fallen on his knees at Bens feet. He then began a series of gigantic salaams, his arms outstretched, his hands fwapping against the muddy bank every time he bowed again. At the same time he had begun to speak in one of his Voices. Richie had about a dozen different Voices. His ambition, he had told Eddie one rainy afternoon when they were in the little raftered room over the Kaspbrak garage reading Little Lulu comic books, was to become the worlds greatest ventriloquist. He was going to be even greater than Edgar Bergen, he said, and he would be on The Ed Sullivan Show every week. Eddie admired this ambition but foresaw problems with it. First, all of Richies Voices sounded pretty much like Richie Tozier. This was not to say Richie could not be very funny from time to time; he could be. When referring to verbal zingers and loud farts, Richies terminology was the same he called it Getting Off A Good One, and he got off Good Ones of both types frequently . . . usually in inappropriate company, however. Second, when Richie did ventriloquism, his lips moved. Not just a little, on the p and bsounds, but a lot, and on all the sounds. Third, when Richie said he was going to throw his voice, it usually didnt go very far. Most of his friends were too kindor too bemused with Richies sometimes enchanting, often exhausting charmto mention these little failings to him. Salaaming frantically in front of the startled and embarrassed Ben Hanscom, Richie was speaking in what he called his Nigger Jim Voice. Lawksamussy, its be Haystack Calhoun! Richie screamed. Dont fall on me, Mistuh Haystack, suh! Youse gwineter cream me if you do! Lawksamussy, lawksamussy! Three hunnert pounds of swaingin meat, eightyeight inches from tit to tit, Haystack be smellin jest like a loader panther shit! Ise gwineter leadjer inter de raing, Mistuh Haystack, suh! Ise sho enuf gwineter leadjer! Jest dontchoo be fallin on dis yere black boy! DDont wuhworry, Bill said. Its jjjust RuhRuhRichie. Hes cccrazy. Richie bounced to his feet. I heard that, Denbrough. You better leave me alone or Ill sic Haystack here on you. BBest pppart of you rran down your fuhfuhhathers llleg, Bill said. True, Richie said, but look how much good stuff was left. How ya doin, Haystack? Richie Tozier is my name, doing Voices is my game. He popped his hand out. Thoroughly confused, Ben reached for it. Richie pulled his hand back. Ben blinked. Relenting, Richie shook. My names Ben Hanscom, in case youre interested, Ben said. Seen you around school, Richie said. He swept a hand at the spreading pool of water. This must have been your idea. These wet ends couldnt light a firecracker with a flamethrower. Speak for yourself, Richie, Eddie said. Ohyou mean it was your idea, Eds? Jesus, Im sorry. He fell down in front of Eddie and began salaaming wildly again. Get up, stop it, youre splattering mud on me! Eddie cried. Richie jumped to his feet a second time and pinched Eddies cheek. Cute, cute, cute! Richie exclaimed. Stop it, I hate that! Fess up, Edswho built the dam? BBBen shshowed us, Bill said. Good deal. Richie turned and discovered Stanley Uris standing behind him, hands in his pockets, watching quietly as Richie put on his show. This heres Stan the Man Uris, Richie told Ben. Stans a Jew. Also, he killed Christ. At least thats what Victor Criss told me one day. I been after Stan ever since. I figure if hes that old, he ought to be able to buy us some beer. Right, Stan? I think that must have been my father, Stan said in a low, pleasant voice, and that broke them all up, Ben included. Eddie laughed until he was wheezing and tears were running down his face. A Good One! Richie cried, striding around with his arms thrown up over his head like a football referee signalling that the extra point was good. Stan the Man Gets Off A Good One! Great Moments in History! YowzaYowzaYOWza! Hi. Stan said to Ben, seeming to take no notice of Richie at all. Hello, Ben replied. We were in the same class in second grade. You were the kid who never said anything, Stan finished, smiling a little. Right. Stan wouldnt say shit if he had a mouthful, Richie said. Which he FREEquently doesyowzayowzaYOW ShShShut uhup, Richie, Bill said. Okay, but first I have to tell you one more thing, much as I hate to. I think youre losing your dam. Valleys gonna flood, pardners. Lets get the women and children out first. And without bothering to roll up his pantsor even to remove his sneakersRichie jumped into the water and began to slam sods into place on the nearside wing of the dam, where the persistent current was pulling fill out in muddy streamers again. A piece of Red Cross adhesive tape was wrapped around one of the bows of his glasses, and the loose end flapped against his cheekbone as he worked. Bill caught Eddies eye, smiled a little, and shrugged. It was just Richie. He could drive you bugshit ... but it was still sort of nice to have him around. They worked on the dam for the next hour or so. Richie took Bens commandswhich had become rather tentative again, with two more kids to generalwith perfect willingness, and fulfilled them at a manic pace. When each mission was completed he reported back to Ben for further orders, executing a backhand British salute and snapping the soggy heels of his sneakers together. Every now and then he would begin to harangue the others in one of his Voices the German Commandant, Toodles the English Butler, the Southern Senator (who sounded quite a bit like Foghorn Leghorn and who would, in the fullness of time, evolve into a character named Buford Kissdrivel), the MovieTone Newsreel Narrator. The work did not just go forward; it sprinted forward. And now, shortly before five oclock, as they sat resting on the bank, it seemed that what Richie had said was true they had stopped the sucker cold. The car door, the piece of corrugated steel, and the old tires had become the second stage of the dam, and it was backstopped by a huge sloping hill of earth and stones. Bill, Ben, and Richie smoked; Stan was lying on his back. A stranger might have thought he was just looking at the sky, but Eddie knew better. Stan was looking into the trees on the other side of the stream, keeping an eye out for a bird or two he could write up in his bird notebook that night. Eddie himself just sat crosslegged, feeling pleasantly tired and rather mellow. At that moment the others seemed to him like the greatest bunch of guys to chum with a fellow could ever hope to have. They felt right together; they fitted neatly against each others edges. He couldnt explain it to himself any better than that, and since it didnt really seem to need any explaining, he decided he ought to just let it be. He looked over at Ben, who was holding his halfsmoked cigarette clumsily and spitting frequently, as if he didnt like the taste of it much. As Eddie watched, Ben stubbed it out and covered the long butt with dirt. Ben looked up, saw Eddie watching him, and looked away, embarrassed. Eddie glanced at Bill and saw something on Bills face that he didnt like. Bill was looking across the water and into the trees and bushes on the far side, his eyes gray and thoughtful. That brooding expression was back on his face. Eddie thought Bill looked almost haunted. As if reading his thought, Bill looked around at him. Eddie smiled, but Bill didnt smile back. He put his cigarette out and looked around at the others. Even Richie had withdrawn into the silence of his own thoughts, an event which occurred about as seldom as a lunar eclipse. Eddie knew that Bill rarely said anything important unless it was perfectly quiet, because it was so hard for him to speak. And he suddenly wished he had something to say, or that Richie would start in with one of his Voices. He was suddenly sure Bill was going to open his mouth and say something terrible, something which would change everything. Eddie reached automatically for his aspirator, pulled it out of his back pocket, and held it in his hand. He did this without even thinking about it. CCan I tell you ggguys suhhomething? Bill asked. They all looked at him. Crack a joke, Richie! Eddie thought. Crack a joke, say something really outrageous, embarrass him, I dont care, just shut him up. Whatever it is, I dont want to hear it, I dont want things to change, I dont want to be scared. In his mind a tenebrous, croaking voice whispered Ill do it for a dime. Eddie shuddered and tried to unthink that voice, and the sudden image it called up in his mind the house on Neibolt Street, its front yard overgrown with weeds, gigantic sunflowers nodding in the untended garden off to one side. Sure, Big Bill, Richie said. Whats up? Bill opened his mouth (more anxiety on Eddies part), closed it (blessed relief for Eddie), and then opened it again (renewed anxiety). IIIf you guhguhguys 11laugh, IIll never hhang around with you again, Bill said. Its cuhcuhcrazy, but I swear Im not muhhaking it up. It rrreally happened. We wont laugh, Ben said. He looked around at the others. Will we? Stan shook his head. So did Richie. Eddie wanted to say, Yes we will too, Billy, well laugh our heads off and say youre really stupid, so why dont you shut up right now? But of course he could not say any such thing. This was, after all, Big Bill. He shook his head miserably. No, he wouldnt laugh. He had never felt less like laughing in his life. They sat there above the dam Ben had showed them how to make, looking from Bills face to the expanding pool and the likewise expanding bog beyond it and then back to Bills face again, listening silently as he told them about what had happened when he opened Georges photograph albumhow Georgies school photograph had turned its head and winked at him, how the book had bled when he threw it across the room. It was a long, painful recital, and by the time he finished Bill was redfaced and sweating. Eddie had never heard him stutter so badly. At last, though, the tale was told. Bill looked around at them, both defiant and afraid. Eddie saw an identical expression on the faces of Ben, Richie, and Stan. It was solemn, awed fear. It was not in the slightest tinctured by disbelief. An urge came to him then, an urge to spring to his feet and shout What a crazy story! You dont believe that crazy story, do you, and even if you do, you dont believe we believe it, do you? School pictures cant wink! Books cant bleed! Youre out of your mind, Big Bill! But he couldnt very well do so, because that expression of solemn fear was also on his own face. He couldnt see it but he could feel it. Come back here, kid, the hoarse voice whispered. Ill blow you for free. Come back here! No, Eddie moaned at it. Please, go away, I dont want to think about that. Come back here, kid. And now Eddie saw something elsenot on Richies face, at least he didnt think so, but on Stans and Bens for sure. He knew what that something else was; knew because that expression was on his own face, too. Recognition. Ill blow you for free. The house at 29 Neibolt Street was just outside the Derry trainyards. It was old and boarded up, its porch gradually sinking back into the ground, its lawn an overgrown field. An old trike, rusting and overturned, hid in that long grass, one wheel sticking up at an angle. But on the left side of the porch there was a huge bald patch in the lawn and you could see dirty cellar windows set into the houses crumbling brick foundation. It was in one of those windows that Eddie Kaspbrak first saw the face of the leper six weeks ago. 6 On Saturdays, when Eddie could find no one to play with, he often went down to the trainyards. No real reason; he just liked to go out there. He would ride his bike out Witcham Street and then cut to the northwest along Route 2 where it crossed Witcham. The Neibolt Street Church School stood on the corner of Route 2 and Neibolt Street a mile or so farther on. It was a shabbyneat woodframe building with a large cross on top and the words SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME Written over the front door in gilt letters two feet high. Sometimes, on Saturdays, Eddie heard music and singing coming from inside. It was gospel music, but whoever was playing the piano sounded more like Jerry Lee Lewis than a regular church piano player. The singing didnt sound very religious to Eddie, either, although there was lots of stuff in it about beautiful Zion and being washed in the blood of the lamb and what a friend we have in Jesus. The people singing seemed to be having much too good a time for it to really be sacred singing, in Eddies opinion. But he liked the sound of it all the samethe way he liked to hear Jerry Lee hollering out Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On. Sometimes he would stop for awhile across the street, leaning his bike against a tree and pretending to read on the grass, actually jiving along to the music. Other Saturdays the Church School would be shut up and silent and he would ride out to the trainyard without stopping, out to where Neibolt Street ended in a parking lot with weeds growing up through the cracks in the asphalt. There he would lean his bike against the wooden fence and watch the trains go by. There were a lot of them on Saturdays. His mother told him that in the old days you could catch a GSWM passenger train at what was then Neibolt Street Station, but the passenger trains had stopped running around the time the Korean War was starting up. If you got on the northbound train you went to Brownsville Station, she said, and from Brownsville you could catch a train that would take you all the way across Canada if you wanted, all the way to the Pacific. The southbound train would take you to Portland and then on down to Boston, and from South Station the country was yours. But the passenger trains have gone the way of the trolley lines now, I guess. No one wants to ride a train when they can just jump in a Ford and go. You may never even ride one. But great long freights still came through Derry. They headed south loaded down with pulpwood, paper, and potatoes, and north with manufactured goods for those towns of what Maine people sometimes called the Big NorthernBangor, Millinocket, Machias, Presque Isle, Houlton. Eddie particularly liked to watch the northbound carcarriers with their loads of gleaming Fords and Chevies. Ill have me a car like one of those someday, he promised himself. Like one of those or even better. Maybe even a Cadillac! There were six tracks in all, swooping into the station like strands of cobweb tending toward the center Bangor and Great Northern Lines from the north, the Great Southern and Western Maine from the west, the Boston and Maine from the south, and Southern Seacoast from the east. One day two years before, when Eddie had been standing near the latter line and watching a train go through, a drunken trainman had thrown a crate out of a slowmoving boxcar at him. Eddie ducked and flinched backward, although the crate landed in the cinders ten feet away. There were things inside it, live things that clicked and moved. Last run, boy! the drunken trainman had shouted. He pulled a flat brown bottle from one of the pockets of his denim jacket, tipped it up, drank, then flipped it into the cinders, where it smashed. The trainman pointed at the crate. Take em home to yer mum! Compliments of the SouthernFuckingSeacoastBoundforWelfare Line! He had reeled forward to shout these last words as the train pulled away, gathering speed now, and for one alarming moment Eddie thought he was going to tumble right out. When the train was gone, Eddie went to the box and bent cautiously over it. He was afraid to get too close. The things inside were slithery and crawly. If the trainman had yelled that they were for him, Eddie would have left them right there. But he had said take em home to your Mom, and, like Ben, when someone said Mom, Eddie jumped. He scrounged a hank of rope from one of the empty quonset warehouses and tied the crate onto the package carrier of his bike. His mother had peered inside the crate even more warily than Eddie himself, and then she screamedbut with delight rather than terror. There were four lobsters in the crate, big twopounders with their claws pegged. She cooked them for supper and had been extremely grumpy with Eddie when he wouldnt eat any. What do you think the Rockefellers are eating this evening at their place in Bar Harbor? she asked indignantly. What do you think the swells are eating at Twentyone and Sardis in New York City? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Theyre eating lobster, Eddie, same as we are! Now come ongive it a try. But Eddie wouldntat least that was what his mother said. Maybe it was true, but inside it felt more to Eddie like couldnt than wouldnt. He kept thinking of the way they had slithered inside the crate, and the clicking sounds their claws had made. She kept telling him how delicious they were and what a treat he was missing until he started to gasp for breath and had to use his aspirator. Then she left him alone. Eddie retreated to his bedroom and read. His mother called up her friend Eleanor Dunton. Eleanor came over and the two of them read old copies of Photoplay and Screen Secrets and giggled over the gossip columns and gorged themselves on cold lobster salad. When Eddie got up for school the next morning, his mother was still in bed, snoring away and letting frequent farts that sounded like long, mellow cornet notes (she was Getting Off Some Good Ones, Richie would have said). There was nothing left in the bowl where the lobster salad had been except a few tiny blots of mayonnaise. That was the last Southern Seacoast train Eddie ever saw, and when he later saw Mr. Braddock, the Derry trainmaster, he asked him hesitantly what had happened. Cumpny went broke, Mr. Braddock said. Thats all there was to it. Dont you read the papers? Its hapnin all over the damn country. Now get out of here. This aint no place for a kid. After that Eddie would sometimes walk along track 4, which had been the Southern Seacoast track, and listen as a mental conductor chanted names inside his head, reeling them off in a lovely Downeast monotone, those names, those magic names Camden, Rockland, Bar Harbor (pronounced Baa Haabaa), Wiscasset, Bath, Portland, Ogunquit, the Berwicks; he would walk down track 4 heading east until he got tired, and the weeds growing up between the crossties made him feel sad. Once he had looked up and seen seagulls (probably just fat old dumpgulls who didnt give a shit if they ever saw the ocean, but that had not occurred to him then) wheeling and crying overhead, and the sound of their voices had made him cry a little, too. There had once been a gate at the entrance to the trainyards, but it had blown over in a windstorm and no one had bothered to replace it. Eddie came and went pretty much as he liked, although Mr. Braddock would kick him out if he saw him (or any other kid, for that matter). There were truckdrivers who would chase you sometimes (but not very far) because they thought you were hanging around just so you could hawk somethingand sometimes kids did. Mostly, though, the place was quiet. There was a guardbooth but it was empty, its glass windows broken by stones. There had been no fulltime security service since 1950 or so. Mr. Braddock shooed the kids away by day and a nightwatchman drove through four or five times a night in an old Studebaker with a searchlight mounted outside the vent window and that was all. There were tramps and hobos sometimes, though. If anything about the trainyards scared Eddie, they didmen with unshaven cheeks and cracked skin and blisters on their hands and coldsores on their lips. They rode the rails for awhile and then climbed down for awhile and spent some time in Derry and then got on another train and went somewhere else. Sometimes they had missing fingers. Usually they were drunk and wanted to know if you had a cigarette. One of these fellows had crawled out from under the porch of the house at 29 Neibolt Street one day and had offered to give Eddie a blowjob for a quarter. Eddie had backed away, his skin like ice, his mouth as dry as lintballs. One of the hobos nostrils had been eaten away. You could look right into the red, scabby channel. I dont have a quarter, Eddie said, backing toward his bike. Ill do it for a dime, the hobo croaked, coming toward him. He was wearing old green flannel pants. Yellow puke was stiffening across the lap. He unzipped his fly and reached inside. He was trying to grin. His nose was a red horror. I ... I dont have a dime, either, Eddie said, and suddenly thought Oh my God hes got leprosy! If he touches me Ill catch it too! His control snapped and he ran. He heard the hobo break into a shuffling run behind him, his old stringtied shoes slapping and flapping across the riotous lawn of the empty saltbox house. Come back here, kid! Ill blow you for free. Come back here! Eddie had leaped on his bike, wheezing now, feeling his throat closing up to a pinhole. His chest had taken on weight. He hit the pedals and was just picking up speed when one of the hobos hands struck the package carrier. The bike shimmied. Eddie looked over his shoulder and saw the hobo running along behind the rear wheel (!!GAINING!!), his lips drawn back from the black stumps of his teeth in an expression which might have been either desperation or fury. In spite of the stones lying on his chest Eddie had pedaled even faster, expecting that one of the hobos scabcrusted hands would close over his arm at any moment, pulling him from his Raleigh and dumping him in the ditch, where God knew what would happen to him. He hadnt dared look around until he had flashed past the Church School and through the Route 2 intersection. The bo was gone. Eddie held this terrible story inside him for almost a week and then confided it to Richie Tozier and Bill Denbrough one day when they were reading comics over the garage. He didnt have leprosy, you dummy, Richie said. He had the Syph. Eddie looked at Bill to see if Richie was ribbing himhe had never heard of a disease called the Sift before. It sounded like something Richie might have made up. Is there such a thing as the Sift, Bill? Bill nodded gravely. Only its the SuhSuhSyph, not the Sift. Its sshort for syphilis. Whats that? Its a disease you get from fucking, Richie said. You know about fucking, dont you, Eds? Sure, Eddie said. He hoped he wasnt blushing. He knew that when you got older, stuff came out of your penis when it was hard. Vincent Boogers Taliendo had filled him in on the rest one day at school. What you did when you fucked, according to Boogers, was you rubbed your cock against a girls stomach until it got hard (your cock, not the girls stomach). Then you rubbed some more until you started to get the feeling. When Eddie asked what that meant, Boogers had only shaken his head in a mysterious way. Boogers said that you couldnt describe it, but youd know it as soon as you got it. He said you could practice by lying in the bathtub and rubbing your cock with Ivory soap (Eddie had tried this, but the only feeling he got was the need to urinate after awhile). Anyway, Boogers went on, after you got the feeling, this stuff came out of your penis. Most kids called it come, Boogers said, but his big brother had told him that the really scientific word for it was jizzum. And when you got the feeling, you had to grab your cock and aim it real fast so you could shoot the jizzum into the girls bellybutton as soon as it came out. It went down into her stomach and made a baby there. Do girls like that? Eddie had asked Boogers Taliendo. He himself was sort of appalled. I guess they must, Boogers had replied, looking mystified himself. Now listen up, Eds, Richie said, because there may be questions later. Some women have got this disease. Some men, too, but mostly its women. A guy can get it from a woman Or another ggguy if theyre kwuhkwuhqueer, Bill added. Right. The important thing is you get the Syph from screwing someone whos already got it. What does it do? Eddie asked. Makes you rot, Richie said simply. Eddie stared at him, horrified. Its bad, I know, but its true, Richie said. Your nose is the first thing to go. Some guys with the Syph, their noses fall right off. Then their cocks. PuhPuhPuhleeze, Bill said. I just aaate. Hey, man, this is science, Richie said. So whats the difference between leprosy and the Syph? Eddie asked. You dont get leprosy from fucking, Richie said promptly, and then went off into a gale of laughter that left both Bill and Eddie mystified. 7 Following that day the house at 29 Neibolt Street had taken on a kind of glow in Eddies imagination. Looking at its weedy yard and its slumped porch and the boards nailed across its windows, he would feel an unhealthy fascination take hold of him. And six weeks ago he had parked his bike on the gravelly verge of the street (the sidewalk ended four houses farther back) and walked across the lawn toward the porch of that house. His heart had been beating hard in his chest, and his mouth had that dry taste againlistening to Bills story of the dreadful picture, he knew that what he had felt when approaching that house was about the same as what Bill had felt going into Georges room. He did not feel as if he was in control of himself. He felt pushed. It did not seem as if his feet were moving; instead the house itself, brooding and silent, seemed to draw closer to where he stood. Faintly, he could hear a diesel engine in the trainyardthat and the liquidmetallic slam of couplings being made. They were shunting some cars onto sidings, picking up others. Making a train. His hand gripped his aspirator, but, oddly, his asthma had not closed down as it had on the day he fled from the hobo with the rotted nose. There was only that sense of standing still and watching the house slide stealthily toward him, as if on a hidden track. Eddie looked under the porch. There was no one there. It was not really surprising. This was spring, and hobos showed up most frequently in Derry from late September to early November. During those six weeks or so a man could pick up daywork on one of the outlying farms if he looked even halfdecent. There were potatoes and apples to pick, snowfence to string, barn and shed roofs which needed to be patched before December came along, whistling up winter. No hobos under the porch, but plenty of sign they had been there. Empty beer cans, empty beer bottles, empty liquor bottles. A dirtcrusted blanket lay against the brick foundation like a dead dog. There were drifts of crumpled newspapers and one old shoe and a smell like garbage. There were thick layers of old leaves under there. Not wanting to do it but unable to help himself, Eddie had crawled under the porch. He could feel his heartbeat slamming in his head now, driving white spots of light across his field of vision. The smell was worse underneathbooze and sweat and the dark brown perfume of decaying leaves. The old leaves didnt even crackle under his hands and knees. They and the old newspapers only sighed. Im a hobo, Eddie thought incoherently. Im a hobo and I ride the rods. Thats what I do. Aint got no money, aint got no home, but I got me a bottle and a dollar and a place to sleep. Ill pick apples this week and potatoes the week after that and when the frost locks up the ground like money inside a bank vault, why, Ill hop a GSWM box that smells of sugarbeets and Ill sit in the corner and pull some hay over me if there is some and Ill drink me a little drink and chew me a little chew and sooner or later Ill get to Portland or Beantown, and if I dont get busted by a railroad security dick Ill hop one of those Bama Star boxes and head down south and when I get there Ill pick lemons or limes or oranges. And if I get vagged Ill build roads for tourists to ride on. Hell,I done it before, aint I? Im just a lonesome old hobo, aint got no money, aint got no home, but I got me one thing; I got me a disease thats eating me up. My skins cracking open, my teeth are falling out, and you know what? I can feel myself turning bad like an apple thats going soft, I can feel it happening, eating from the inside to the out, eating, eating, eating me. Eddie pulled the stiffening blanket aside, tweezing at it with his thumb and forefinger, grimacing at its matted feel.


One of those low cellar windows was directly behind it, one pane broken, the other opaque with dirt. He leaned forward, now feeling almost hypnotized. He leaned closer to the window, closer to the cellardarkness, breathing in that smell of age and must and dryrot, closer and closer to the black, and surely the leper would have caught him if his asthma hadnt picked that exact moment to kick up. It cramped his lungs with a weight that was painless yet frightening; his breath at once took on the familiar hateful whistling sound. He drew back, and that was when the face appeared. Its coming was so sudden, so startling (and yet at the same time so expected), that Eddie could not have screamed even if he hadnt been having an asthma attack. His eyes bulged. His mouth creaked open. It was not the hobo with the flayed nose, but there were resemblances. Terrible resemblances. And yet ... this thing could not be human. Nothing could be so eaten up and remain alive. The skin of its forehead was split open. White bone, coated with a membrane of yellow mucusy stuff, peered through like the lens of a bleary searchlight. The nose was a bridge of raw gristle above two red flaring channels. One eye was a gleeful blue. The other socket was filled with a mass of spongy brownblack tissue. The lepers lower lip sagged like liver. It had no upper lip at all; its teeth poked out in a sneering ring. It shot one hand out through the broken pane. It shot the other through the dirty glass to the left, shattering it to fragments. Its questing, clutching hands crawled with sores. Beetles crawled and lumbered busily to and fro. Mewling, gasping, Eddie hunched his way backward. He could hardly breathe. His heart was a runaway engine in his chest. The leper appeared to be wearing the ragged remains of some strange silvery suit. Things were crawling in the straggles of its brown hair. How bout a blowjob, Eddie? the apparition croaked, grinning with its remains of a mouth. It lilted, Bobby does it for a dime, he will do it anytime, fifteen cents for overtime. It winked. Thats me, EddieBob Gray. And now that weve been properly introduced ... One of its hands splatted against Eddies right shoulder. Eddie screamed thinly. Thats all right, the leper said, and Eddie saw with dreamlike terror that it was crawling out of the window. The bony shield behind its peeling forehead snapped the thin wooden strip between the two panes. Its hands clawed through the leafy, mulchy earth. The silver shoulders of its suit ... costume ... whatever it was ... began to push through the gap. That one glaring blue eye never left Eddies face. Here I come, Eddie, thats all right, it croaked. Youll like it down here with us. Some of your friends are down here. Its hand reached out again, and in some corner of his panicmaddened, screaming mind, Eddie was suddenly, coldly sure that if that thing touched his bare skin, he would begin to rot, too. The thought broke his paralysis. He skittered backward on his hands and knees, then turned and lunged for the far end of the porch. Sunlight, falling in narrow dusty beams through the cracks between the porch boards, striped his face from moment to moment. His head pushed through the dusty cobwebs that settled in his hair. He looked back over his shoulder and saw that the leper was halfway out. It wont do you any good to run, Eddie, it called. Eddie had reached the far end of the porch. There was a latticework skirt here. The sun shone through it, printing diamonds of light on his cheeks and forehead. He lowered his head and slammed into it with no hesitation at all, tearing the entire skirt free with a scream of rusted hapenny nails. There was a tangle of rosebushes beyond and Eddie tore through these, stumbling to his feet as he did so, not feeling the thorns that scrawled shallow cuts along his arms and cheeks and neck. He turned and backed away on buckling legs, pulling his aspirator out of his pocket, triggering it. Surely it hadnt really happened? He had been thinking about that hobo and his mind had ... well, had just (put on a show) shown him a movie, a horror movie, like one of those Saturdaymatinee pictures with Frankenstein and Wolfman that they had sometimes at the Bijou or the Gem or the Aladdin. Sure, that was all. He had scared himself! What an asshole! There was even time to utter a shaky laugh at the unsuspected vividness of his imagination before the rotting hands shot out from under the porch, clawing at the rosebushes with mindless ferocity, pulling at them, stripping them, printing beads of blood on them. Eddie shrieked. The leper was crawling out. It was wearing a clown suit, he sawa clown suit with big orange buttons down the front. It saw Eddie and grinned. Its halfmouth dropped open and its tongue lolled out. Eddie shrieked again, but no one could have heard one boys breathless shriek under the pounding of the diesel engine in the trainyard. The lepers tongue had not just dropped from its mouth; it was at least three feet long and had unrolled like a partyfavor. It came to an arrowpoint which dragged in the dirt. Foam, thicksticky and yellowish, coursed along it. Bugs crawled over it. The rosebushes, which had been showing the first touches of spring green when Eddie broke through them, now turned a dead and lacy black. Blowjob, the leper whispered, and tottered to its feet. Eddie raced for his bike. It was the same race as before, only it now had the quality of a nightmare, where you can only move with the most agonizing slowness no matter how hard you try to go fast ... and in those dreams didnt you always hear or feel something, some It, gaining on you? Didnt you always smell Its stinking breath, as Eddie was smelling it now? Fo a moment he felt a wild hope perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying ... but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal. He did not try to mount his bike immediately; he ran with it instead, head down, pushing the handlebars. He felt as if he was drowning, not in water but inside his own chest. Blowjob, the leper whispered again. Come back anytime, Eddie. Bring your friends. Its rotting fingers seemed to touch the back of his neck, but perhaps that was only a dangling strand of cobweb from under the porch, caught in his hair and brushing against his shrinking flesh. Eddie leaped onto his bike and pedaled away, not caring that his throat had closed up tight as Tillie again, not giving two sucks for his asthma, not looking back. He didnt look back until he was almost home, and of course there was nothing behind him when he finally did but two kids headed over to the park to play ball. That night, lying straight as a poker in bed, one hand folded tightly around his aspirator, looking into the shadows, he heard the leper whisper It wont do you any good to run, Eddie. 8 Wow, Richie said respectfully. It was the first thing any of them had said since Bill Denbrough finished his story. HHave you gggot aanother suhsuhhiggarette, RRRichie? Richie gave him the last one in the pack he had hawked almost empty from his dads desk drawer. He even lit it for Bill. You didnt dream it, Bill? Stan asked suddenly. Bill shook his head. NNNo duhdream. Real, Eddie said in a low voice. Bill looked at him sharply. WhWhWhat? Real, I said. Eddie looked at him almost resentfully. It really happened. It was real. And before he could stop himselfbefore he even knew he was going to do itEddie found himself telling the story of the leper that had come crawling out of the basement at 29 Neibolt Street. Halfway through the telling he began to gasp and had to use his aspirator. And at the end he burst into shrill tears, his thin body shaking. They all looked at him uncomfortably, and then Stan put a hand on his back. Bill gave him an awkward hug while the others glanced away, embarrassed. Thats aall right, EEddie. Its oookay. I saw it too, Ben Hanscom said suddenly. His voice was flat and harsh and scared. Eddie looked up, his face still naked with tears, his eyes red and rawlooking. What? I saw the clown, Ben said. Only he wasnt like you saidat least not when I saw him. He wasnt all gooshy. He was ... he was dry. He paused, ducked his head, and looked at his hands, which lay palely on his elephantine thighs. I think he was the mummy. Like in the movies? Eddie asked. Like that but not like that, Ben said slowly. In the movies he looks fake. Its scary, but you can tell its a putup job, you know? All those bandages, they look too neat, or something. But this guy ... he looked the way a real mummy would look, I think. If you actually found one in a room under a pyramid, I mean. Except for the suit. Wuhwuhwuhhut suhhoot? Ben looked at Eddie. A silver suit with big orange buttons down the front. Eddies mouth dropped open. He shut it and said, If youre kidding, say so. I still ... I still dream about that guy under the porch. Its not a joke, Ben said, and began to tell the story. He told it slowly, beginning with his volunteering to help Mrs. Douglas count and store books and ending with his own bad dreams. He spoke slowly, not looking at the others. He spoke as if deeply ashamed of his own behavior. He didnt raise his head again until the story was over. You must have dreamed it, Richie said finally. He saw Ben wince and hurried on Now dont take it personal, Big Ben, but you got to see that balloons cant, like, float against the wind Pictures cant wink, either, Ben said. Richie looked from Ben to Bill, troubled. Accusing Ben of dreaming awake was one thing; accusing Bill was something else. Bill was their leader, the guy they all looked up to. No one said so out loud; no one needed to. But Bill was the idea man, the guy who could think of something to do on a boring day, the guy who remembered games the others had forgotten. And in some odd way they all sensed something comfortingly adult about Billperhaps it was a sense of accountability, a feeling that Bill would take the responsibility if responsibility needed to be taken. The truth was, Richie believed Bills story, crazy as it was. And perhaps he didnt want to believe Bens ... or Eddies, for that matter. Nothing like that ever happened to you, huh? Eddie asked Richie. Richie paused, began to say something, shook his head, paused again, then said Scariest thing Ive seen lately was Mark Prenderlist takin a leak in McCarron Park. Ugliest hogger you ever saw. Ben said, What about you, Stan? No, Stan said quickly, and looked somewhere else. His small face was pale, his lips pressed together so tightly they were white. WWWas there suhhomething, SStStan? Bill asked. No, I told you! Stan got to his feet and walked to the embankment, hands in his pockets. He stood watching the water course over the top of the original dam and pile up behind the second watergate. Come on, now, Stanley! Richie said in a shrill falsetto. This was another of his Voices Granny Grunt. When speaking in his Granny Grunt Voice, Richie would hobble around with one fist against the small of his back, and cackle a lot. He still, however, sounded more like Richie Tozier than anyone else. Fess up, Stanley, tell your old Granny about the baaaaad clown and Ill give you a chockerchip cookie. You just tell Shut up! Stan yelled suddenly, whirling on Richie, who fell back a step or two, astonished. Just shut up! Yowza, boss, Richie said, and sat down. He looked at Stan Uris mistrustfully. Bright spots of color flamed in Stans cheeks, but he still looked more scared than mad. Thats okay, Eddie said quietly. Never mind, Stan. It wasnt a clown, Stanley said. His eyes flicked from one of them to the next to the next to the next. He seemed to struggle with himself. YYYou can ttell, Bill said, also speaking quietly. WWe dddid. It wasnt a clown. It was Which was when the carrying, whiskeyroughened tones of Mr. Nell interrupted, making them all jump as if they had been shot Jaysus Christ on a jumpedup chariotdriven crutch! Look at this mess! Jaysus Christ! CHAPTER 8 Georgies Room and the House on Neibolt Street 1 Richard Tozier turns off the radio, which has been blaring out Madonnas Like a Virgin on WZON (a station which declares itself to be Bangors AM stereo rocker! with a kind of hysterical frequency), pulls over to the side of the road, shuts down the engine of the Mustang the Avis people rented him at Bangor International, and gets out. He hears the pull and release of his own breath in his ears. He has seen a sign which has caused the flesh of his back to break out in hard ridges of gooseflesh. He walks to the front of the car and puts one hand on its hood. He hears the engine ticking softly to itself as it cools. He hears a jay scream briefly and then shut up. There are crickets. And as far as the soundtrack goes, thats it. He has seen the sign, he passes it, and suddenly he is in Derry again. After twentyfive years Richie Trashmouth Tozier has come home. He has Burning agony suddenly needles into his eyes, breaking his thought cleanly off. He utters a strangled little shout and his hands fly up to his face. The only time he felt anything even remotely like this burning pain was when he got an eyelash caught under one of his contacts in collegeand that was only in one eye. This terrible pain is in both. Before he can reach even halfway to his face, the pain is gone. He lowers his hands again slowly, thoughtfully, and looks down Route 7. He left the turnpike at the EtnaHaven exit, wanting, for some reason he doesnt understand, not to come in by the turnpike, which was still under construction in the Derry area when he and his folks shook the dust of this weird little town from their heels and headed out for the Midwest. Nothe turnpike would have been quicker, but it would have been wrong. So he had driven along Route 9 through the sleeping nestle of buildings that was Haven Village, then turned off on Route 7. And as he went the day grew steadily brighter. Now this sign. It was the same sort of sign which marked the borders of more than six hundred Maine towns, but how this one had squeezed his heart! Beyond that an Elks sign; a Rotary Club sign; and completing the trinity, a sign proclaiming the fact that DERRY LIONS ROAR FOR THE UNITED FUND! Past that one there is just Route 7 again, continuing on in a straight line between bulking banks of pine and spruce. In this silent light as the day steadies itself those trees look as dreamy as bluegray cigarette smoke stacked on the moveless air of a sealed room. Derry, he thinks. Derry, God help me. Derry. Stone the crows. Here he is on Route 7. Five miles up, if time or tornado has not carried it away in the intervening years, will be the Rhulin Farms, where his mother bought all of their eggs and most of their vegetables. Two miles beyond that Route 7 became Witcham Road and of course Witcham Road eventually became Witcham Street, can you gimme hallelujah world without end amen. And somewhere along there between the Rhulin Farms and town he would drive past the Bowers place and then the Hanlon place. A mile or so after Hanlons he would see the first glitter of the Kenduskeag and the first spreading tangle of poison green. The lush lowlands that had been known for some reason as the Barrens. I really dont know if I can face all of that, Richie thinks. I mean, lets tell the truth here, folks. I just dont know if I can. The whole previous night has passed in a dream for him. As long as he continued travelling, moving forward, making miles, the dream went on. But now he has stoppedor rather the sign has stopped himand he has awakened to a strange truth the dream was the reality. Derry is the reality. It seems he just cannot stop remembering, he thinks the memories will eventually drive him mad, and now he bites down on his lip and puts his hands together palm to palm, tight, as if to keep himself from flying apart. He feels that he will fly apart, and soon. There seems to be some mad part of him which actually looks forward to what may be coming, but most of him only wonders how hes going to get through the next few days. He And now his thoughts break off again. A deer is walking out into the road. He can hear the light thud of its springsoft hoofs on the tar. Richies breath stops in midexhale, then slowly starts again. He looks, dumbfounded, part of him thinking that he never saw anything like this on Rodeo Drive. Nohed needed to come back home to see something like this. Its a doe (Doe, a deer, a female deer, a Voice chants merrily in his head). Shes come out of the woods on the right and pauses in the middle of Route 7, front legs on one side of the broken white line, rear legs on the other. Her dark eyes regard Rich Tozier mildly. He reads interest in those eyes but no fear. He looks at her in wonder, thinking shes an omen or a portent or some sort of Madame Azonka shit like that. And then, quite unexpectedly, a memory of Mr. Nell comes to him. What a start he had given them that day, busting in on them in the wake of Bills story and Bens story and Eddies story! The whole bunch of them had damn near gone up to heaven. Now, looking at the deer, Rich draws in a deep breath and finds himself speaking in one of his Voices... but for the first time in twentyfive years or more it is the Voice of the Irish Cop, one he had incorporated into his repertoire after that memorable day. It comes rolling out of the morning silence like a great big bowling ballit is louder and bigger than Richie would ever have believed Jaysus Christ on a jumpedup chariotdriven crutch! Whats a nice girrul like you doin out in this wilderness, deer? Jaysus Christ! You be gettin on home before I decide to tell Father OStaggers on ye! Before the echoes have died away, before the first shocked jay can begin scolding him for his sacrilege, the doe flicks her tail at him like a truce flag and disappears into the smokylooking firs on the left side of the road, leaving only a small pile of steaming pellets behind to show that, even at thirtyseven, Richie Tozier is still capable of Getting Off A Good One from time to time. Richie begins to laugh. He is only chuckling at first, and then his own ludicrousness strikes himstanding here in the dawnlight of a Maine morning, thirtyfour hundred miles from home, shouting at a deer in the accents of an Irish cop. The chuckles become a string of giggles, the giggles become guffaws, the guffaws become howls, and he is finally reduced to holding on to his car while tears roll down his face and he wonders dimly if hes going to wet his pants or what. Every time he starts to get control of himself his eyes fix on that little clump of pellets and he goes off into fresh gales. Snorting and snickering, he is at last able to get back into the drivers seat and restart the Mustangs engine. An Orinco chemicalfertilizer truck snores by in a blast of wind. After it passes him, Rich pulls out and heads for Derry again. He feels better now, in control... or maybe its just that hes moving again, making miles, and the dream has reasserted itself. He starts thinking about Mr. Nell againMr. Nell and that day by the dam. Mr. Nell had asked them who thought this little trick up. He can see the five of them looking uneasily at each other, and remembers how Ben finally stepped forward, cheeks pale and eyes downcast, face trembling all over as he fought grimly to keep from blabbering. Poor kid probably thought he was going to get fivetoten in Shawshank for backflooding the drains on Witcham Street, Rich thinks now, but he had owned up to it just the same. And by doing that he had forced the rest of them to come forward and back him up. It was either that or consider themselves bad guys. Cowards. All the things their TV heroes were not. And that had welded them together, for better or worse. Had apparently welded them together for the last twentyseven years. Sometimes events are dominoes. The first knocks over the second, the second knocks over the third, and there you are. When, Richie wonders, did it become too late to turn back? When he and Stan showed up and pitched in, helping to build the dam? When Bill told them how the school picture of his brother had turned its head and winked? Maybe... but to Rich Tozier it seems that the dominoes really began to fall when Ben Hanscom stepped forward and said I showed them 2 how to do it. Its my fault. Mr. Nell simply stood there looking at him, lips pressed together, hands on his creaking black leather belt. He looked from Ben to the spreading pool behind the dam and then back to Ben again, his face that of a man who cant believe what he is seeing. He was a burly Irishman, his hair a premature white, combed back in neat waves beneath his peaked blue cap. His eyes were bright blue, his nose bright red. There were small nests of burst capillaries in his cheeks. He was a man of no more than medium height, but to the five boys arrayed before him he looked at least eight feet tall. Mr. Nell opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, Bill Denbrough had stepped up beside Ben. IhIhIhIt wwuhwuhwas mmy iiiiidea, he finally managed to say. He heaved in a gigantic, gulping breath and as Mr. Nell stood there regarding him impassively, the sun tossing back imperial flashes from his badge, Bill managed to stutter out the rest of what he needed to say it wasnt Bens fault; Ben just happened to come along and show them how to do better what they were already doing badly. Me too, Eddie said abruptly, and stepped up on Bens other side. Whats this me too? Mr. Nell asked. Is that yer name or yer address, buckaroo? Eddie flushed brightlythe color went all the way up to the roots of his hair. I was with Bill before Ben even came, he said. That was all I meant. Richie stepped up next to Eddie. The idea that a Voice or two might cheer Mr. Nell up a little, get him thinking jolly thoughts, popped into his head. On second thought (and second thoughts were, for Richie, extremely rare and wonderful things), maybe a Voice or two might only make things worse. Mr. Nell didnt look like he was in what Richie sometimes thought of as a chuckalicious mood. In fact, Mr. Nell looked like maybe chucks were the last thing on his mind. So he just said, I was in on it too, in a low voice, and then made his mouth shut up. And me, Stan said, stepping next to Bill. Now the five of them were standing before Mr. Nell in a line. Ben looked from one side to the other, more than dazedhe was almost stupefied by their support. For a moment Richie thought ole Haystack was going to burst into tears of gratitude. Jaysus, Mr. Nell said again, and although he sounded deeply disgusted, his face suddenly looked as if it might like to laugh. A sorrier bunch of boyos I aint niwer seen. If yer folks knew where you were, I guess thered be some hot bottoms tonight. I aint sure there wont be anyway. Richie could hold back no longer; his mouth simply fell open and then ran away like the gingerbread man, as it so often did. Hows things back in the auld country, Mr. Nell? it bugled. Ah, yer a sight for sore eyes, sure an begorrah, yer a lovely man, a credit to the auld sod Ill be a credit to the seat of yer pants in about three seconds, my dear little friend, Mr. Nell said dryly. Bill turned on him, snarled For GGGods ssake RRRichie shuhshuhhut UP! Good advice, Master William Denbrough, Mr. Nell said. Ill bet Zack doesnt know youre down here in the Barns playing amongst the floating turdies, does he? Bill dropped his eyes, shook his head. Wild roses burned in his cheeks. Mr. Nell looked at Ben. I dont recall your name, son. Ben Hanscom, sir, Ben whispered. Mr. Nell nodded and looked back at the dam again. This was your idea? How to build it, yeah. Bens whisper was now nearly inaudible. Well, yer a hell of an engineer, big boy, but you dont know Jack Shit about these here Barns or the Derry drainage system, do you? Ben shook his head. Not unkindly, Mr. Nell told him, Theres two parts to the system. One part carries solid human wasteshit, if Id not be offendin yer tender ears. The other part carries gray waterwater flushed from toilets or run down the drains from sinks and washinmachines and showers; its also the water that runs down the gutters into the city drains. Well, yeve caused no problems with the solidwaste removal, thank Godall of that gets pumped into the Kenduskeag a bit farther down. Theres probably some almighty big patties down that way half a mile dryin in the sun thanks to what you done, but you can be pretty sure that there aint shit stickin to anyones ceiling because of it. But as for the gray water ... well, theres no pumps for gray water. That all runs downhill in what the engineer boyos call gravity drains. And Ill bet you know where all them gravity drains end up, dont you, big boy? Up there, Ben said. He pointed to the area behind the dam, the area they had in large part submerged. He did this without looking up. Big tears were beginning to course slowly down his cheeks. Mr. Nell pretended not to notice. Thats right, my large young friend. All them gravity drains feed into streams that feed into the upper Barrens. In fact, a good many of them little streams that come tricklin down are gray water and gray water only, comin out of drains you cant even see, theyre so deepburied in the underbrush. The shit goes one way and everythin else goes the other, God praise the clever mind o man, and did it ever cross yer minds that youd spent the whole livelong day paddlin around in Derrys pee an old washwater? Eddie suddenly began to gasp and had to use his aspirator. What you did was back water up into about six o the eight central catchbasins that serve Witcham and Jackson and Kansas and four or five little streets that run between em. Mr. Nell fixed Bill Denbrough with a dry glance. One of em serves yer own hearth an home, young Master Denbrough. So there we are, with sinks that wont drain, washinmachines that wont drain, outflow pipes pourin merrily into cellars Ben let out a dry barking sob. The others turned toward him and then looked away. Mr. Nell put a large hand on the boys shoulder. It was callused and hard, but at the moment it was also gentle. Now, now. No need to take on, big boy. Maybe it aint that bad, at least not yet; could be I exaggerated just a mite to make sure you took my point. They sent me down to see if a tree blew down across the stream. That happens from time to time. Theres no need for anyone but me and you five to know it wasnt just that. Weve got more important things to worry about in town these days than a little backedup water. Ill say on my report that I located the blowdown and some boys came along and helped me shift it out o the way o the water. Not that Ill mention ye by name. Yell not be gettin any citations for dambuilding in the Barns. He surveyed the five of them. Ben was furiously wiping his eyes with his handkerchief; Bill was looking thoughtfully at the dam; Eddie was holding his aspirator in one hand; Stan stood close by Richie with one hand on Richies arm, ready to squeezehardif Richie should show the slightest sign of having anything to say other than thank you very much. You boys got no business at all in a dirty place like this, Mr. Nell went on. Theres probably sixty different kinds o disease breeding down here. Breeding came out braidin, as in what a girl may do with her hair in the morning. Dump down one way, streams full of piss an gray water, muck an slop, bugs an brambles, quickmud ... you got no business at all in a dirty place like this. Four clean city parks for you boyos to be playin ball in all the day long and I catch you down here. Jaysus Christ! WuhWuhWe 111like it dddown hhere, Bill said suddenly and defiantly. WhWhen wwwe cuhhum down hhere, nuhhohobody gives us aaany stuhstuhhatic. Whatd he say? Mr. Nell asked Eddie. He said when we come down here nobody gives us any static, Eddie said. His voice was thin and whistling, but it was also unmistakably firm. And hes right. When guys like us go to the park and say we want to play baseball, the other guys say sure, you want to be second base or third? Richie cackled. Eddie Gets Off A Good One! And ... You Are There! Mr. Nell swung his head to look at him. Richie shrugged. Sorry. But hes right. And Bills right, too. We like it down here. Richie thought Mr. Nell would become angry again at that, but the whitehaired cop surprised himsurprised them allwith a smile. Ayuh, he said. I liked it down here meself as a boy, so I did. And Ill not forbid ye. But hark to what Im tellin you now. He levelled a finger at them and they all looked at him soberly. If ye come down here to play, ye come in a gang like ye are now. Together. Do you understand me? They nodded. That means together all the time. No hideanseek games where yer split up one an one an one. You all know whats goin on in this town. All the same, I dont forbid you to come down here, mostly because yed be down here anyway. But for yer own good, here or anywhere around, gang together. He looked at Bill. Do you disagree with me, young Master Bill Denbrough? NNNo, sir, Bill said. WWell stay tuhtuhtuh Thats good enough for me, Mr. Nell said. Yer hand on it. Bill stuck out his hand and Mr. Nell shook it. Richie shook off Stan and stepped forward. Sure an begorrah, Mr. Nell, yer a prince among men, yare! A foine man! A foine, foine man! He stuck out his own hand, seized the Irishmans huge paw, and flagged it furiously, grinning all the time. To the bemused Mr. Nell the boy looked like a hideous parody of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Thank you, boy, Mr. Nell said, retrieving his hand. Ye want to work on that a bit. As of now, ye sound about as Irish as Groucho Marx. The other boys laughed, mostly in relief. Even as he was laughing, Stan shot Richie a reproachful look Grow up, Richie! Mr. Nell shook hands all around, gripping Bens last of all. Yeve nothing to be ashamed of but bad judgment, big boy. As for that there ... did you see how to do it in a book? Ben shook his head. Just figured it out? Yes, sir. Well if that dont beat Harry! Yell do great things someday, Ive no doubt. But the Barrens isnt the place to do em. He looked around thoughtfully. No great thing will ever be done here. Nasty place. He sighed. Tear it down, dear boys. Tear it right down. I believe Ill just sit me down in the shade o this bush here and bide a wee as you do it. He looked ironically at Richie as he said this last, as if inviting another manic outburst. Yes, sir, Richie said humbly, and that was all. Mr. Nell nodded, satisfied, and the boys fell to work, once again turning to Benthis time to show them the quickest way to tear down what he had shown them how to build. Meanwhile, Mr. Nell removed a brown bottle from inside his tunic and helped himself to a large gulp. He coughed, then blew out breath in an explosive sigh and regarded the boys with watery, benign eyes. And what might ye have in yer bottle, sor? Richie asked from the place where he was standing kneedeep in the water. Richie, cant you ever shut up? Eddie hissed. This? Mr. Nell regarded Richie with mild surprise and looked at the bottle again. It had no label of any kind on it. This is the cough medicine of the gods, my boy. Now lets see if you can bend yer back anywhere near as fast as you can wag yer tongue. 3 Bill and Richie were walking up Witcham Street together later on. Bill was pushing Silver; after first building and then tearing down the dam, he simply did not have the energy it would have taken to get Silver up to cruising speed. Both boys were dirty, dishevelled, and pretty well used up. Stan had asked them if they wanted to come over to his house and play Monopoly or Parcheesi or something, but none of them wanted to. It was getting late. Ben, sounding tired and depressed, said he was going to go home and see if anybody had returned his library books.