It

  Her heart settled, but uneasily.

  Audra turned on the light by the bed-table and looked at her watch. Twelve past three. He would be sleeping, but that didn't matter to her now--nothing mattered except hearing his voice. She wanted to finish the night with him. If Bill was beside her, her clockwork would fall in sync with his and settle down. The nightmares would stay away. He sold nightmares to others--that was his trade--but to her he had never given anything but peace. Outside that odd cold nut imbedded in his imagination, peace seemed to be all he was made for or meant for. She got the Yellow Pages, found the number for the Derry Town House, and dialed it.

  "Derry Town House."

  "Would you please ring Mr. Denbrough's room? Mr. William Denbrough?"

  "Does that guy ever get any calls in the daytime?" the clerk said, and before she could think to ask what that was supposed to mean, he had plugged her call through. The phone burred once, twice, three times. She could imagine him, sleeping with everything under the covers except the top of his head; she could imagine one hand coming out, feeling for the phone. She had seen him do it before, and a fond little smile touched her lips. It faded as the phone rang a fourth time . . . and a fifth, and a sixth. Halfway through the seventh ring, the connection was broken.

  "That room does not answer."

  "No shit, Sherlock," Audra said, more upset and frightened than ever. "Are you sure you rang the right room?"

  "Ayup," the clerk said. "Mr. Denbrough had an inter-room call not five minutes ago. I know he answered that one, because the light stayed on the switchboard a minute or two. He must have gone to the person's room."

  "Well, which room was it?"

  "I don't remember. Sixth floor, I think. But--"

  She dropped the phone back into its cradle. A queer disheartening certainty came to her. It was a woman. Some woman had called him . . . and he had gone to her. Well, what now, Audra? How do we handle this?

  She felt tears threaten. They stung her eyes and her nose; she could feel the lump of a sob in the back of her throat. No anger, at least not yet . . . only a sick sense of loss and abandonment.

  Audra, get hold of yourself. You're jumping to conclusions. It's the middle of the night and you had a bad dream and now you've got Bill with some other woman. But it ain't necessarily so. What you're going to do is sit up--you'll never get back to sleep now anyway. Turn on some lights and finish the novel you brought to read on the plane. Remember what Bill says? Finest kind of dope. Book-Valium. No more heebiejeebies. No more whim-whams and hearing voices. Dorothy Sayers and Lord Peter, that's the ticket. The Nine Tailors. That'll take you through to dawn. That'll--

  The bathroom light suddenly went on; she could see it under the door. Then the latch clicked and the door juddered open. She stared at this, eyes widening, arms instinctively crossing over her breasts again. Her heart began to slam against her ribcage and the sour taste of adrenaline flooded her mouth.

  That voice, low and dragging, said: "We all float down here, Audra." The last word became a long, low, fading scream--Audraaaaa--that ended once again in that sick, clogged, bubbly sound that was so much like laughter.

  "Who's there?" she cried, backing away. That wasn't my imagination, no way, you're not going to tell me that--

  The TV clicked on. She whirled around and saw a clown in a silvery suit with big orange buttons capering around on the screen. There were black sockets where its eyes should have been, and when its made-up lips stretched even wider in a grin, she saw teeth like razors. It held up a dripping, severed head. Its eyes were turned up to the whites and the mouth sagged open, but she could see well enough that it was Freddie Firestone's head. The clown laughed and danced. It swung the head around and drops of blood splashed against the inside of the TV screen. She could hear them sizzling in there.

  Audra tried to scream and nothing came out but a little whine. She grabbed blindly for the dress lying over the back of the chair, and for her purse. She bolted into the hall and slammed the door behind her, gasping, her face paper-white. She dropped the purse between her feet and slipped the dress over her head.

  "Float," a low, chuckling voice said from behind her, and she felt a cold finger caress her bare heel.

  She uttered another high out-of-breath scream and danced away from the door. White corpse-fingers were seeking back and forth under it, the nails peeled away to show purplish-white bloodless quicks. They made hoarse whispering noises on the rough nap of the hall carpet.

  Audra snagged the strap of her purse and ran barefooted for the door at the end of the corridor. She was in a blind panic now, her only thought that she had to find the Derry Town House, and Bill. It didn't matter if he was in bed with enough other women to make up a harem. She would find him and get him to take her away from whatever unspeakable thing there was in this town.

  She fled down the walkway and into the parking-lot, looking around wildly for her car. For a moment her mind froze and she couldn't even remember what she had been driving. Then it came: Datsun, tobacco-brown. She spotted it standing hubcap-deep in the still, curdled groundmist, and hurried over to it. She couldn't find the keys in her purse. She swept through it with steadily increasing panic, shuffling Kleenex, cosmetics, change, sunglasses, and sticks of gum into a meaningless jumble. She didn't notice the battered LTD wagon parked nose-to-nose with her rented car, or the man sitting behind the wheel. She didn't notice when the LTD's door opened and the man got out; she was trying to cope with the growing certainty that she had left the Datsun's keys in the room. She couldn't go back in there; she couldn't.

  Her fingers touched hard serrated metal under a box of Altoid mints and she seized at it with a little cry of triumph. For a terrible moment she thought it might be the key to their Rover, now sitting in the Fleet railway station's car-park three thousand miles away, and then she felt the lucite rental-car tab. She fumbled the key into the door-lock, breathing in harsh little gasps, and turned it. That was when a hand fell on her shoulder, and she screamed . . . screamed loudly this time. Somewhere a dog barked in answer, but that was all.

  The hand, as hard as steel, bit cruelly in and forced her around. The face she saw looming over hers was puffed and lumpy. The eyes glittered. When the swelled lips spread in a grotesque smile, she saw that some of the man's front teeth had been broken. The stumps looked jagged and savage.

  She tried to speak and could not. The hand squeezed tighter, digging in.

  "Haven't I seen you in the movies?" Tom Rogan whispered.

  3

  Eddie's Room

  Beverly and Bill dressed quickly, without speaking, and went up to Eddie's room. On their way to the elevator they heard a phonebell begin somewhere behind them. It was muffled, a somewhere-else sound.

  "Bill, was that yours?"

  "C-Could have b-b-been," he said. "One of the uh-others c-calling, muh-haybe." He punched the UP button.

  Eddie opened the door for them, his face white and strained. His left arm was at an angle both peculiar and weirdly evocative of old times.

  "I'm okay," he said. "I took two Darvon. Pain's not bad right now." But it was clearly not good, either. His lips, pressed so tightly together they had almost disappeared, were purple with shock.

  Bill looked past him and saw the body on the floor. One look was enough to satisfy him of two things--it was Henry Bowers, and he was dead. He moved past Eddie and knelt by the body. The neck of a Perrier bottle had been driven into Henry's midsection, pulling the tatters of his shirt in after it. Henry's eyes were half-open, glazed. His mouth, filled with coagulating blood, snarled. His hands were claws.

  A shadow fell over him and Bill looked up. It was Beverly. She looked down at Henry with no expression at all.

  "All the times he ch-ch-chased us," Bill said.

  She nodded. "He doesn't look old. You know that, Bill? He doesn't look old at all." Abruptly she looked back at Eddie, who was sitting on the bed. Eddie looked old; old and haggard. His arm lay in his lap, useless. "We've g
ot to call the doctor for Eddie."

  "No," Bill and Eddie said in unison.

  "But he's hurt! His arm--"

  "It's the same as luh-luh-last t-t-time," Bill said. He got to his feet and held her by the arms, looking into her face. "Once we g-go outside . . . once w-w-we ih-inv-v-holve the t-t-town--"

  "They'll arrest me for murder," Eddie said dully. "Or they'll arrest all of us. Or they'll detain us. Or something. Then there'll be an accident. One of the special accidents that only happen in Derry. Maybe they'll stick us in jail and a deputy sheriff will go berserk and shoot us all. Maybe we'll all die of ptomaine, or decide to hang ourselves in our cells."

  "Eddie, that's crazy! That's--"

  "Is it?" he asked. "Remember, this is Derry."

  "But we're grownups now! Surely you don't think . . . I mean, he came here in the middle of the night . . . attacked you . . ."

  "W-With what?" Bill said. "Where's the nuh-nuh-knife?" She looked around, didn't see it, and dropped on her knees to look under the bed.

  "Don't bother," Eddie said in that same faint, whistly voice. "I slammed the door on his arm when he tried to stick me with it. He dropped it and I kicked it under the TV. It's gone now. I already looked."

  "B-B-Beheverly, c-call the others," Bill said. "I can spuhsplint E-E-Eddie's arm, I th-hink."

  She looked at him for a long moment, then she looked down at the body on the floor again. She thought that the picture this room presented should tell a perfectly clear story to any policeman with half a brain. The place was a mess. Eddie's arm was broken. This man was dead. It was a clear case of self-defense against a night-prowler. And then she remembered Mr. Ross. Mr. Ross getting up and looking and then simply folding his newspaper and going back into the house.

  Once we go outside . . . once we involve the town . . .

  That made her remember Bill as a kid, his face white and tired and half-crazy, Bill saying Derry is It. Do you understand me? ... Anyplace we go ... when It gets us, they won't see, they won't hear, they won't know. Don't you see how it is? All we can do is to try and finish what we started.

  Standing here now, looking down at Henry's corpse, Beverly thought: They're both saying we've all become ghosts again. That it's started to repeat. All of it. As a kid I could accept that, because kids almost are ghosts. But--

  "Are you sure?" she asked desperately. "Bill, are you sure?"

  He was sitting on the bed with Eddie, gently touching his arm. "A-A-Aren't y-you?" he asked. "After a-a-all that's huh-happened t-today?"

  Yes. All that had happened. The gruesome mess at the end of their reunion. The beautiful old woman who had turned into a crone before her eyes,

  (my fadder was also my mudder)

  the round of stories at the library tonight with the accompanying phenomena. All of those things. And still . . . her mind shouted at her desperately to stop this now, to spike it with sanity, because if she did not they were surely going to finish up this night by going down to the Barrens and finding a certain pumping-station and--

  "I don't know," she said. "I just . . . I don't know. Even after everything that's happened, Bill, it seems to me that we could call the police. Maybe."

  "C-C-Call the uh-others," he said again. "We'll s-s-see what they th-think."

  "All right."

  She called Richie first, then Ben. Both agreed to come right away. Neither asked what had happened. She found Mike's telephone number in the book and dialed it. There was no answer; after a dozen rings she hung up.

  "T-T-Try the luh-luh-hibrary," Bill said. He had taken the short curtain rods down from the smaller of the two windows in Eddie's room and was binding them firmly to Eddie's arm with the belt of his bathrobe and the drawstring from his pajamas.

  Before she could find the number there was a knock at the door. Ben and Richie had arrived together, Ben in jeans and an untucked shirt, Richie in a pair of smart gray cotton trousers and his pajama top. His eyes looked warily around the room from behind his glasses.

  "Christ, Eddie, what happened to--"

  "Oh my God!" Ben cried. He had seen Henry on the floor.

  "B-B-Be quh-hiet!" Bill said sharply. "And close th-the d-door!"

  Richie did it, his eyes fixed on the body. "Henry?"

  Ben took three steps toward the corpse and then stopped, as if afraid it might bite him. He looked helplessly at Bill.

  "Y-Y-You t-tell," he said to Eddie. "G-G-Goddam stuhhuh-hutter is g-getting wuh-wuh-worse all the t-t-time."

  Eddie sketched in what had happened while Beverly hunted up the number for the Derry Public Library and called it. She expected that perhaps Mike had fallen asleep there--he might even have a bunk in his office. What she did not expect was what happened: the phone was picked up on the second ring and a voice she had never heard before said hello.

  "Hello," she answered, looking toward the others and making a shushing gesture with one hand. "Is Mr. Hanlon there?"

  "Who's this?" the voice asked.

  She wet her lips with her tongue. Bill was looking at her piercingly. Ben and Richie had looked around. The beginnings of real alarm stirred inside her.

  "Who are you?" she countered. "You're not Mr. Hanlon."

  "I'm Derry Chief of Police Andrew Rademacher," the voice said. "Mr. Hanlon is at the Derry Home Hospital right now. He was assaulted and badly wounded a short time ago. Now who are you, please? I want your name."

  But she barely heard this last. Waves of shock rode through her, lifting her dizzily up and up, outside of herself. The muscles in her stomach and legs and crotch all went loose and numb, and she thought in a detached way: This must be how it happens, when people get so scared they wet their pants. Sure. You just lose control of those muscles--

  "How badly has he been hurt?" she heard herself asking in a papery voice, and then Bill was beside her, his hand on her shoulder, and Ben was there, and Richie, and she felt such a rush of gratitude for them. She held her free hand out and Bill took it. Richie placed his hand over Bill's and Ben put his over Richie's. Eddie had come over, and now he put his good hand on top.

  "I want your name, please," Rademacher said briskly, and for a moment the skittering little craven inside of her, the one that had been bred by her father and cared for by her husband, almost answered: I'm Beverly Marsh and I'm at the Derry Town House. Please send Mr. Nell over. There's a dead man here who's still half a boy and we're all very frightened.

  She said: "I ... I'm afraid I can't tell you. Not just yet."

  "What do you know about this?"

  "Nothing," she said, shocked. "What makes you think I do? Jesus Christ!"

  "You just make a habit of calling the library every morning about three-thirty," Rademacher said, "is that it? Can the bullshit, young lady. This is assault, and the way the guy looks, it could be murder by the time the sun comes up. I'll ask you again: who are you and how much do you know about this?"

  Closing her eyes, gripping Bill's hand with all her strength, she asked again: "He might die? You're not just saying that to scare me? He really might die? Please tell me."

  "He's very badly hurt. And if that doesn't scare you, miss, it ought to. Now I want to know who you are and why--"

  As if in a dream she watched her hand float through space and drop the phone back into the cradle. She looked over at Henry and felt shock as keen as a slap from a cold hand. One of Henry's eyes had closed. The other one, the shattered one, oozed as nakedly as before.

  Henry seemed to be winking at her.

  4

  Richie called the hospital. Bill led Beverly over to the bed, where she sat with Eddie, looking off into space. She thought she would cry, but no tears came. The only feeling she was strongly and immediately aware of was a wish that someone would cover Henry Bowers. That winky look was really not cool at all.

  In one giddy instant Richie became a reporter from the Derry News. He understood that Mr. Michael Hanlon, the town's head librarian, had been assaulted while working late. Did the hospital have
any word on Mr. Hanlon's condition?

  Richie listened, nodding.

  "I understand, Mr. Kerpaskian--do you spell that with two k's? You do. Okay. And you are--"

  He listened, now enough into his own fiction to make doodling motions with one finger, as if writing on a pad.

  "Uh-huh ... uh-huh ... yes. Yes, I understand. Well, what we usually do in cases like this is to quote you as 'a source.' Then, later on, we can . . . uh-huh ... right! Just right!" Richie laughed heartily and armed a film of sweat from his forehead. He listened again. "Okay, Mr. Kerpaskian. Yes. I'll ... yes, I got it, K-E-R-P-A-S-K-I-A-N, right! Czech Jewish, is it? Really! That's ... that's most unusual. Yes, I will. Goodnight. Thank you."

  He hung up and closed his eyes. "Jesus!" he cried in a thick, low voice. "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!" He made as if to shove the phone off the table and then simply let his hand fall. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his pajama top.

  "He's alive, but in grave condition," he told the others.

  "Henry sliced him up like a Christmas turkey. One of the cuts chopped into his femoral artery and he's lost all the blood a man can and still stay alive. Mike managed to get some kind of tourniquet on it, or he would have been dead when they found him."

  Beverly began to cry. She did it like a child, with both hands plastered to her face. For a little while her hitching sobs and the rapid whistle of Eddie's breathing were the only sounds in the room.

  "Mike wasn't the only one who got sliced up like a Christmas turkey," Eddie said at last. "Henry looked like he just went twelve rounds with Rocky Balboa in a Cuisinart."

  "D-Do you still w-w-want to g-g-go to the p-p-police, Bev?"

  There were Kleenex on the nighttable but they were a caked and sodden mass in the middle of a puddle of Perrier. She went into the bathroom, making a wide circle around Henry, got a washcloth, and ran cool water on it. It felt delicious against her hot puffy face. She felt that she could think clearly again--not rationally but clearly. She was suddenly sure that rationality would kill them if they tried to use it now. That cop. Rademacher. He had been suspicious. Why not? People didn't call the library at three-thirty in the morning. He had assumed some guilty knowledge. What would he assume if he found out that she had called him from a room where there was a dead man on the floor with a jagged bottleneck planted in his guts? That she and four other strangers had just come into town the day before for a little reunion and this guy just happened to drop by? Would she buy the tale if the shoe were on the other foot? Would anyone? Of course, they could buttress their tale by adding that they had come back to finish the monster that lived in the drains under the city. That would certainly add a convincing note of gritty realism.