It

  "Oh my God," Bill gasped, and although she was never sure later, she believed he was crying. He pulled back and she thought he was going to withdraw from her--she tried to prepare for that moment, which always brought a fleeting, inexplicable sense of loss and emptiness, something like a footprint--and then he thrust forward strongly again. Right away she had a second orgasm, something she hadn't known was possible for her, and the window of memory opened again and she saw birds, thousands of birds, descending onto every roofpeak and telephone line and RFD mailbox in Derry, spring birds against a white April sky, and there was pain mixed with pleasure--but mostly it was low, as a white spring sky seems low. Low physical pain mixed with low physical pleasure and some crazy sense of affirmation. She had bled ... she had ... had ...

  "All of you?" she cried suddenly, her eyes widening, stunned.

  He did pull back and out of her this time, but in the sudden shock of the revelation, she barely felt him go.

  "What? Beverly? A-Are you all r--"

  "All of you? I made love to all of you?"

  She saw shocked surprise on Bill's face, the drop of his jaw ... and sudden understanding. But it was not her revelation; even in her own shock she saw that. It was his own.

  "We--"

  "Bill? What is it?"

  "That was y-y-your way to get us o-out," he said, and now his eyes blazed so brightly they frightened her. "Beverly, duh-duh-don't you uh-understand? That was y-y-your way to get us out! We all ... but we were ..." Suddenly he looked frightened, unsure.

  "Do you remember the rest now?" she asked.

  He shook his head slowly. "Not the spuh-spuh-specifics. But ..." He looked at her, and she saw he was badly frightened. "What it really c-c-came down to was, we wuh-wuh-wished our way out. And I'm not sh-sure ... Beverly, I'm not sure that grownups can do that."

  She looked at him without speaking for a long moment, then sat on the edge of the bed with no particular self-consciousness. Her body was smooth and lovely, the line of her backbone barely discernible in the dimness as she bent to take off the knee-high nylon stockings she had been wearing. Her hair was a sheaf coiled over one shoulder. He thought he would want her again before morning, and that feeling of guilt came again, tempered only by the shameful comfort of knowing that Audra was an ocean away. Put another nickel in the juke-box, he thought. This tune is called "What She Don't Know Won't Hurt Her." But it hurts somewhere. In the spaces between people, maybe.

  Beverly got up and turned the bed down. "Come to bed. We need sleep. Both of us."

  "A-A-All right." Because that was right, that was a big ten-four. More than anything else he wanted to sleep .. but not alone, not tonight. The latest shock was wearing off--too quickly, perhaps, but he felt so tired now, so used-up. Second-to-second reality had the quality of a dream, and in spite of his guilt he felt that this was a safe place. It would be possible to lie here for a little while, to sleep in her arms. He wanted her warmth and her friendliness. Both were sexually charged, but that could hurt neither of them now.

  He stripped off his socks and shirt and got in next to her. She pressed against him, her breasts warm, her long legs cool. Bill held her, aware of the differences--her body was longer than Audra's, and fuller at the breast and the hip. But it was a welcome body.

  It should have been Ben with you, dear, he thought drowsily. I think that was the way it was really supposed to be. Why wasn't it Ben?

  Because it was you then and it's you now, that's all. Because what goes around always comes around. I think Bob Dylan said that... or maybe it was Ronald Reagan. And maybe it's me now because Ben's the one who's supposed to see the lady home.

  Beverly wriggled against him, not in a sexual way (although, even as he fled toward sleep, she felt him stir again against her leg and was glad), but only wanting his warmth. She was already half-asleep herself. Her happiness here with him, after all these years, was real. She knew that because of its bitter undertaste. There was tonight, and perhaps there would be another time for them tomorrow morning. Then they would go down in the sewers as they had before, and they would find their It. The circle would close ever tighter, their present lives would merge smoothly with their own childhoods; they would become like creatures on some crazy Moebius strip.

  Either that, or they would die down there.

  She turned over. He slipped an arm between her side and her arm and cupped one breast gently. She did not have to lie awake, wondering if the hand might suddenly clamp down in a hard pinch.

  Her thoughts began to break up as sleep slid into her. As always, she saw brilliant wildflower patterns as she crossed over--masses and masses of them nodding brightly under a blue sky. These faded and there was a falling sensation--the sort of sensation that had sometimes snapped her awake and sweating as a child, a scream on the other side of her face. Childhood dreams of falling, she had read in her college psychology text, were common.

  But she didn't snap back this time; she could feel the warm and comforting weight of Bill's arm, his hand cradling her breast. She thought that if she was falling, at least she wasn't falling alone.

  Then she touched down and was running: this dream, whatever it was, moved fast. She ran after it, pursuing sleep, silence, maybe just time. The years moved fast. The years ran. If you turned around and ran after your own childhood, you had to really let out your stride and bust your buns. Twenty-nine, the year she had streaked her hair (faster). Twenty-two, the year she had fallen in love with a football player named Greg Mallory who had damn near raped her after a fraternity party (faster, faster). Sixteen, getting drunk with two of her girlfriends on the Bluebird Hill Overlook in Portland. Fourteen ... twelve ...

  ... faster, faster, faster ...

  She ran into sleep, chasing twelve, catching it, running through the barrier of memory that It had cast over all of them (it tasted like cold fog in her laboring dreamlungs), running back into her eleventh year, running, running like hell, running to beat the devil, looking back now, looking back

  6

  The Barrens/12:40 P.M.

  over her shoulder for any sign of them as she slipped and scrambled her way down the embankment. No sign, at least not yet. She had "really fetched it to him," as her father sometimes said ... and just thinking of her father brought another wave of guilt and despondency washing over her.

  She looked under the rickety bridge, hoping to see Silver heeled over on his side, but Silver was gone. There was a cache of toy guns which they no longer bothered to take home, and that was all. She started down the path, looked back ... and there they were, Belch and Victor supporting Henry between them, standing on the edge of the embankment like Indian sentries in a Randolph Scott movie. Henry was horribly pale. He pointed at her. Victor and Belch began to help him down the slope. Dirt and gravel spilled from beneath their heels.

  Beverly looked at them for a long moment, almost hypnotized. Then she turned and sprinted through the trickle of brook-water that ran out from under the bridge, ignoring Ben's stepping-stones, her sneakers spraying out flat sheets of water. She ran down the path, the breath hot in her throat. She could feel the muscles in her legs trembling. She didn't have much left now. The clubhouse. If she could get there, she might still be safe.

  She ran along the path, branches whipping even more color into her cheeks, one striking her eye and making it water. She cut to the right, blundered through tangles of underbrush, and came out into the clearing. Both the camouflaged trapdoor and the slit window stood open; rock n roll drifted up. At the sound of her approach, Ben Hanscom popped up. He had a box of Junior Mints in one hand and an Archie comic book in the other.

  He got a good look at Bev and his mouth fell open. Under other circumstances it would have been almost funny. "Bev, what the hell--"

  She didn't bother replying. Behind her, and not too far behind, either, she could hear branches snapping and whipping; there was a muffled shouted curse. It sounded as if Henry was getting livelier. So she just ran at the square trapdoor op
ening, her hair, tangled now with green leaves and twigs as well as the crud from her scramble under the garbage truck, streaming out behind her.

  Ben saw she was coming in like the 101st Airborne and disappeared as quickly as he had come out. Beverly jumped and he caught her clumsily.

  "Shut everything," she panted. "Hurry up, Ben, for heaven's sake! They're coming!"

  "Who?"

  "Henry and his friends! Henry's gone crazy, he's got a knife--"

  That was enough for Ben. He dropped his Junior Mints and funnybook. He pulled the trapdoor shut with a grunt. The top was covered with sods; the Tangle-Track was still holding them remarkably well. A few blocks of sod had gotten loose, but that was all. Beverly stood on tiptoe and closed the window. They were in darkness.

  She felt for Ben, found him, and hugged him with panicky tightness. After a moment he hugged her back. They were both on their knees. With sudden horror Beverly realized that Richie's transistor radio was still playing somewhere in the blackness: Little Richard singing "The Girl Can't Help It."

  "Ben ... the radio ... they'll hear ..."

  "Oh God!"

  He bunted her with one meaty hip and almost knocked her sprawling in the dark. She heard the radio fall to the floor. "The girl can't help it if the menfolks stop and stare," Little Richard informed them with his customary hoarse enthusiasm. "Can't help it!" the back-up group testified, "The girl can't help it!" Ben was panting now, too. They sounded like a couple of steam-engines. Suddenly there was a crunch ... and silence.

  "Oh shit," Ben said. "I just squashed it. Richie's gonna have a bird." He reached for her in the dark. She felt his hand touch one of her breasts, then jerk away, as if burned. She groped for him, got hold of his shirt, and drew him close.

  "Beverly, what--"

  "Shhh!"

  He quieted. They sat together, arms around each other, looking up. The darkness was not quite perfect; there was a narrow line of light down one side of the trapdoor, and three others outlined the slit window. One of these three was wide enough to let a slanted ray of sunlight fall into the clubhouse. She could only pray they wouldn't see it.

  She could hear them approaching. At first she couldn't make out the words ... and then she could. Her grip on Ben tightened.

  "If she went into the bamboo, we can pick up her trail easy," Victor was saying.

  "They play around here," Henry replied. His voice was strained, his words emerging in little puffs, as if with great effort. "Boogers Taliendo said so. And the day we had that rockfight, they were coming from here."

  "Yeah, they play guns and stuff," Belch said.

  Suddenly there were thudding footfalls right above them; the sod-covered cap vibrated up and down. Dirt sifted onto Beverly's upturned face. One, two, maybe even all three of them were standing on top of the clubhouse. A cramp laced her belly; she had to bite down against a cry. Ben put one big hand on the side of her face and pressed it against his arm as he looked up, waiting to see if they would guess ... or if they knew already and were just playing games.

  "They got a place," Henry was saying. "That's what Boogers told me. Some kind of a treehouse or something. They call it their club."

  "I'll club em, if they want a club," Victor said. Belch uttered a thunderous heehaw of laughter at this.

  Thump, thump, thump, overhead. The cap moved up and down a little more this time. Surely they would notice it; ordinary ground just didn't have that kind of give.

  "Let's look down by the river," Henry said. "I bet she's down there."

  "Okay," Victor said.

  Thump, thump. They were moving off. Bev let a little sigh of relief trickle through her clamped teeth ... and then Henry said: "You stay here and guard the path, Belch."

  "Okay," Belch said, and he began to march back and forth, sometimes leaving the cap, sometimes coming back across it. More dirt sifted down. Ben and Beverly looked at each other with strained, dirty faces. Bev became aware that there was more than the smell of smoke in the clubhouse--a sweaty, garbagey stink was rising as well. That's me, she thought dismally. In spite of the smell, she hugged Ben even tighter. His bulk seemed suddenly very welcome, very comforting, and she was glad there was a lot of him to hug. He might have been nothing but a frightened fatboy when school let out for the summer, but he was more than that now; like all of them, he had changed. If Belch discovered them down here, Ben just might give him a surprise.

  "I'll club em if they want a club," Belch said, and chuckled. A Belch Huggins chuckle was a low, troll-like sound. "Club em if they want a club. That's good. That's pretty much okey-dokey."

  She became aware that Ben's upper body was heaving up and down in short, sharp movements; he was pulling air into his lungs and letting it out in little bursts. For one alarmed moment she thought he was starting to cry, and then she got a closer look at his face and realized he was struggling against laughter. His eyes, leaking tears, caught hers, rolled madly, and looked away. In the faint light which struggled in through the cracks around the closed trapdoor and the window, she could see his face was nearly purple with the strain of holding it in.

  "Club em if they want an ole clubby-dubby," Belch said, and sat down heavily right in the center of the cap. This time the roof trembled more alarmingly, and Bev heard a low but ominous crrrack from one of the supports. The cap had been meant to support the chunks of camouflaging sod laid on top of it ... but not the added one hundred and sixty pounds of Belch Huggins's weight.

  If he doesn't get up he's going to land in our laps, Bev thought, and she began to catch Ben's hysteria. It was trying to boil out of her in rancid whoops and brays. In her mind's eye she suddenly saw herself pushing the window up enough on its hinges for her hand to creep out and administer a really good goose to Belch Huggins's backside as he sat there in the hazy afternoon sunshine, muttering and giggling. She buried her face against Ben's chest in a last-ditch effort to keep it inside.

  "Shhh," Ben whispered. "For Christ's sake, Bev--" Crrrrackk. Louder this time.

  "Will it hold?" she whispered back.

  "It might, if he doesn't fart," Ben said, and a moment later Belch did cut one--a loud and fruity trumpet-blast that seemed to go on for at least three seconds. They held each other even tighter, muffling each other's frantic giggles. Beverly's head hurt so badly that she thought she might soon have a stroke.

  Then, faintly, she heard Henry yelling Belch's name.

  "What?" Belch bellowed, getting up with a thump and a thud that sifted more dirt down on Ben and Beverly. "What, Henry?"

  Henry yelled something back; Beverly could only make out the words bank and bushes.

  "Okay!" Belch bawled, and his feet crossed the cap for the last time. There was a final cracking noise, this one much louder, and a splinter of wood landed in Bev's lap. She picked it up wonderingly.

  "Five more minutes," Ben said in a low whisper. "That's all it would have taken."

  "Did you hear him when he let go?" Beverly asked, beginning to giggle again.

  "Sounded like World War III," Ben said, also beginning to laugh.

  It was a relief to be able to let it out, and they laughed wildly, trying to do it in whispers.

  Finally, unaware she was going to say it at all (and certainly not because it had any discernible bearing on this situation), Beverly said: "Thank you for the poem, Ben."

  Ben stopped laughing all at once and regarded her gravely, cautiously. He took a dirty handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face with it slowly. "Poem?"

  "The haiku. The haiku on the postcard. You sent it, didn't you?"

  "No," Ben said. "I didn't send you any haiku. Cause if a kid like me--a fat kid like me--did something like that, the girl would probably laugh at him."

  "I didn't laugh. I thought it was beautiful."

  "I could never write anything beautiful. Bill, maybe. Not me."

  "Bill will write," she agreed. "But he'll never write anything as nice as that. May I use your handkerchief?"

 
He gave it to her and she began to clean her face as best she could.

  "How did you know it was me?" he asked finally.

  "I don't know," she said. "I just did."

  Ben's throat worked convulsively. He looked down at his hands. "I didn't mean anything by it."

  She looked at him gravely. "You better not mean that," she said. "If you do, it's really going to spoil my day, and I'll tell you, it's going downhill already."

  He continued to look down at his hands and spoke at last in a voice she could barely hear. "Well, I mean I love you, Beverly, but I don't want that to spoil anything."

  "It won't," she said, and hugged him. "I need all the love I can get right now."

  "But you specially like Bill."

  "Maybe I do," she said, "but that doesn't matter. If we were grownups, maybe it would, a little. But I like you all specially. You're the only friends I have. I love you too, Ben."

  "Thank you," he said. He paused, trying, and brought it out. He was even able to look at her as he said it. "I wrote the poem."

  They sat without saying anything for a little while. Beverly felt safe. Protected. The images of her father's face and Henry's knife seemed less vivid and threatening when they sat close like this. That sense of protection was hard to define and she didn't try, although much later she would recognize the source of its strength: she was in the arms of a male who would die for her with no hesitation at all. It was a fact that she simply knew: it was in the scent that came from his pores, something utterly primitive that her own glands could respond to.

  "The others were coming back," Ben said suddenly. "What if they get caught out?"

  She straightened up, aware that she had almost been dozing. Bill, she remembered, had invited Mike Hanlon home to lunch with him. Richie was going to go home with Stan and have sandwiches. And Eddie had promised to bring back his Parcheesi board. They would be arriving soon, totally unaware that Henry and his friends were in the Barrens.