Bill says, "W-We love you too, B-Bev."

"Yes," Ben says. "We love you." His eyes widen a little, and he laughs. "I think we still all love each other... Do you know how rare that must be?"

There's a moment of silence, and Mike is really not surprised to see that Rickie is wearing his glasses.

"My contacts started to burn and I had to take them out," Richie says briefly when Mike asks. "Maybe we should get down to business?"

They all look at Bill then, as they had in the gravel-pit, and Mike thinks: They look at Bill when they need a leader, at Eddie when they need a navigator. Get down to business, what a hell of a phrase that is. Do I tell them that the bodies of the children that were found back then and now weren't sexually molested, not even precisely mutilated, but partially eaten? Do I tell them I've got seven miner's helmets, the kind with strong electric lights set into the front, stored back at my house, one of them for a guy named Stan Uris who couldn't make the scene, as we used to say? Or is it maybe enough just to tell them to go home and get a good night's sleep, because it ends tomorrow or tomorrow night for good-either for It or us?

None of those things have to be said, perhaps, and the reason why they don't has already been stated: they still love one another. Things have changed over the last twenty-seven years, but that, miraculously, hasn't. It is, Mike thinks, our only real hope.

The only thing that really remains is to finish going through it, to complete the job of catching up, of stapling past to present so that the strip of experience forms some half-assed kind of wheel. Yes, Mike thinks, that's it. Tonight the job is to make the wheel; tomorrow we can see if it still turns... the way it did when we drove the big kids out of the gravel-pit and out of the Barrens.

"Have you remembered the rest?" Mike asks Richie.

Richie swallows some beer and shakes his head. "I remember you telling us about the bird... and about the smoke-hole." A grin breaks over Richie's face. "I remembered about that walking over here tonight with Bevvie and Ben. What a fucking honor-show that was-

"Beep-beep, Richie," Beverly says, smiling.

"Well, you know," he says, still smiling himself and punching his glasses up on his nose in a gesture that is eerily reminiscent of the old Richie. He winks at Mike. "You and me, right, Mikey?"

Mike snorts laughter and nods.

"Miss Scawlett! Miss Scawlett!" Richie shrieks in his Pickaninny Voice. "It's gettin a little wa'am in de smokehouse, Miss Scawlett!"

Laughing, Bill says, "Another engineering and architectural triumph by Ben Hanscom."

Beverly nods. "We were digging out the clubhouse when you brought your father's photograph album to the Barrens, Mike."

"Oh, Christ!" Bill says, sitting suddenly bolt-upright. "And the pictures-"

Richie nods grimly. "The same trick as in Georgie's room. Only that time we all saw it."

Ben says, "I remembered what happened to the extra silver dollar."

They all turn to look at him.

"I gave the other three to a friend of mine before I came out here," Ben says quietly. "For his kids. I remembered there had been a fourth, but I couldn't remember what happened to it. Now I do." He looks at Bill. "We made a silver slug out of it, didn't we? You, me, and Richie. At first we were going to make a silver bullet-"

"You were pretty sure you could do it," Richie agrees. "But in the end-"

"We got c-cold fuh-feet." Bill nods slowly. The memory has fallen naturally into its place, and he hears that same low but distinct click! when it happens. We're getting closer, he thinks.

"We went back to Neibolt Street," Richie says. "All of us."

"You saved my life, Big Bill," Ben says suddenly and Bill shakes his head. " You did, though," Ben persists, and this time Bill doesn't shake his head. He suspects that maybe he had done just that, although he does not yet remember how... and was it him? He thinks maybe Beverly... but that is not there. Not yet, anyway.

"Excuse me for a second," Mike says. "I've got a sixpack in the back fridge."

"Have one of mine," Richie says.

"Hanlon no drinkum white man's beer," Mike replies. "Especially not yours, Trashmouth."

"Beep-beep, Mikey," Rickie says solemnly, and Mike goes to get his beer on a warm wave of their laughter.

He snaps on the light in the lounge, a tacky little room with seedy chairs, a Silex badly in need of scrubbing, and a bulletin board covered with old notices, wage and hour information, and a few New Yorker cartoons now turning yellow and curling up at the edges. He opens the little refrigerator and feels the shock sink into him, bone-deep and icewhite, the way February cold sank into you when February was here and it seemed that April never would be. Blue and orange balloons drift out in a flood, dozens of them, a New Year's Eve bouquet of party-balloons, and he thinks incoherently in the midst of his fear, All we need is Guy Lombardo tootling away on "Auld Lang Syne." They waft past his face and rise toward the lounge ceiling. He's trying to scream, unable to scream, seeing what had been behind the balloons, what It had popped into the refrigerator beside his beer, as if for a late-night snack after his worthless friends have all told their worthless stones and gone back to their rented beds in this home town that is no longer home.

Mike takes a step backward, his hands going to his face, shutting the vision out. He stumbles over one of the chairs, almost falls, and takes his hands away. It is still there; Stan Uris's severed head beside Mike's sixpack of Bud Light, the head not of a man but of an eleven-year-old boy. The mouth is open in a soundless scream but Mike can see neither teeth nor tongue because the mouth has been stuffed full of feathers. The feathers are a light brown and unspeakably huge. He knows well enough what bird those feathers came from. Oh yes. Oh yes indeed. He had seen the bird in May of 1958 and they had all seen it in early August of 1958 and then, years later, while visiting his dying father, he had found out that Will Hanlon had seen it once, too, after his escape from the fire at the Black Spot. The blood from S tan's tattered neck has dripped down and formed a coagulated pool on the fridge's bottom shelf. It glitters dark ruby-red in the uncompromising glow shed by the fridge bulb.

"Uh... uh... uh... " Mike manages, but no more sound than that can he make. Then the head opens its eyes, and they are the silver-bright eyes of Pennywise the Clown. Those eyes roll in his direction and the head's lips begin to squirm around the mouthful of feathers. It is trying to speak, perhaps trying to deliver prophecy like the oracle in a Greek play.

Just thought I'd join you, Mike, because you can't win without me. You can't win without me and you know it, don't you? You might have had a chance if all of me had shown up, but I just couldn't stand the strain on my all-American brain, if you see what I mean, jellybean. Ail the six of you can do on your own is hash over some old times and then get yourselves killed. So I thought I'd head you off at the pass. Head you off, get it, Mikey? Get it, old pal? Get it, you fucking scumbag nigger?

You're not real! he screams, but no sound comes out; he is like a TV with the volume control turned all the way down.

Incredibly, grotesquely, the head winks at him.

I'm real, all right. Real as raindrops. And you know what I'm talking about, Mikey. What the six of you are planning to try is like taking off in a jet plane with no landing gear. There's no sense in going up if you can't get back down, is there? No sense in going down if you can't get back up, either. You'll never think of the right riddles and jokes. You'll never make me laugh, Mikey. You've all forgotten how to turn your screams upside-down. Beep-beep, Mikey, what do you say? Remember the bird? Nothing but a sparrow, but say-hey! it was a lulu, wasn't it? Big as a barn, big as one of those silly Japanese movie monsters that used to scare you when you were a little kid. The days when you knew how to turn that bird from your door are gone forever. Believe it, Mikey. If you know how to use your head, you'll get out of here, out of Derry, right now. If you don't know how to use it, it'll end up just like this one here. Today's guidepost along the great road of life is use it before you lose it, my good man.

The head rolls over on its face (the feathers in its mouth make a horrid crumpling sound) and falls out of the refrigerator. It thuks to the floor and rolls toward him like a hideous bowling ball, its blood-matted hair changing places with its grinning face; it rolls toward him leaving a gluey trail of blood and dismembered bits of feather behind, its mouth working around its clot of feathers.

Beep-beep, Mikey! it screams as Mike backs madly away from it, hands held out in a warding-off gesture. Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-fucking-beep!

Then there is a sudden loud pop-the sound of a plastic cork thumbed out of a bottle of cheap champagne. The head disappears (Real, Mike thinks sickly; there was nothing supernatural about that pop, anyway; that was the sound of air rushing back into a suddenly vacated space... real, oh God, real). A thin net of blood droplets floats up and then patters back down. No need to clean the lounge, though; Carole will see nothing when she comes in tomorrow, not even if she has to plow her way through the balloons to get to the hotplate and make her first cup of coffee. How handy. He giggles shrilly.

He looks up and yes, the balloons are still there. The blue ones say: DERRY NIGGERS GET THE BIRD. The orange ones say: THE LOSERS ARE STILL LOSING, BUT STANLEY URIS IS FINALLY AHEAD

No sense going up if you can't get back down, the speaking head had assured him, no sense going down if you can't get back up. This latter makes him think again of the stored miner's helmets. And was it true? Suddenly he's thinking about the first day he went down to the Barrens after the rockfight. July 6th, that had been, two days after he had marched in the Fourth of July parade... two days after he had seen Pennywise the Clown in person for the first time. It had been after that day in the Barrens, after listening to their stones and then, hesitantly, telling his own, that he had gone home and asked his father if he could look at his photograph album.

Why exactly had he gone down to the Barrens that July 6th? Had he known he would find them there? It seemed that he had-and not just that they would be there, but where they would be. They had been talking about a clubhouse of some sort, he remembers, but it had seemed to him that they had been talking about that because there was something else that they didn't know how to talk about.

Mike looks up at the balloons, not really seeing them now, trying to remember exactly how it had been that day, that hot hot day. Suddenly it seems very important to remember just what had happened, what every nuance had been, what his state of mind had been.

Because that was when everything began to happen. Before that the others had talked about killing It, but there had been no forward motion, no plan. When Mike had come the circle closed, the wheel began to roll. It had been later that same day that Bill and Richie and Ben went down to the library and began to do serious research on an idea that Bill had had a day or a week or a month before. It had all begun to -

'Mike?" Richie calls from the Reference Room where the others are gathered. "did you die in there?"

Almost, Mike thinks, looking at the balloons, the blood, the feathers inside the fridge.

He calls back: "I think you guys better come in here."

He hears the scrape of their chairs, the mutter of their voices; he hears Richie saying "Oh Jesus, what's up now?" and another ear, this one in his memory, hears Richie saying something else, and suddenly he remembers what it is he has been searching for; even more, he understands why it has seemed so elusive. The reaction of the others when he stepped into the clearing in the darkest, deepest, and most overgrown part of the Barrens that day had been... nothing. No surprise, no questions about how he had found them, no big deal. Ben had been eating a Twinkie, he remembers, Beverly and Richie had been smoking cigarettes, Bill had been lying on his back with his hands behind his head, looking at the sky, Eddie and Stan were looking doubtfully at a series of strings which had been pegged into the ground to form a square of about five feet on a side.

No surprise, no questions, no big deal. He had simply shown up and been accepted. It was as if, without even knowing it, they had been waiting for him. And in that third ear, memory's ear, he hears Richie's Pickaninny Voice raised as it was earlier tonight: "Lawdy, Miss Clawdy, here come

2

that black chile agin! Lawks-a-mussy, I doan know what thisyere Barrens is comin to! Look at that there nappy haid, Big Bill!" Bill didn't even look around; he just went on staring dreamily at the fat summer clouds marching across the sky. He was giving an important question his most careful consideration. Richie was not offended by the lack of attention, however. He pushed onward. "Jest lookin at that nappy haid makes me b'leeve I needs me another mint joolip! I'se gwinter have it out on the verandah, where it's be a little bit coolah-"

"Beep-beep, Richie," Ben said from around a mouthful of Twinkie, and Beverly laughed.

"Hi," Mike said uncertainly. His heart was beating a little too hard, but he was determined to go on with this. He owed his thanks, and his father had told him that you always paid what you owed-and as quick as you could, before the interest mounted up.

Stan looked around. "Hi," he said, and then looked back at the square of strings pegged into the center of the clearing. "Ben, are you sure this is going to work?"

"It'll work," Ben said. "Hi, Mike."

"Want a cigarette?" Beverly asked. "I got two left."

"No thank you." Mike took a deep breath and said, "I wanted to thank you all again for helping me the other day. Those guys meant to hurt me bad. I'm sorry some of you guys got banged up."

Bill waved his hand, dismissing it. "d-D-Don't wuh-wuh-horry a-a-bout it. Th-they've h-had it i-i-in f-for us all y-y-year." He sat up and looked at Mike with sudden starry interest. "C-Can I a-ask you s-s-something?"

"I guess so," Mike said. He sat down gingerly. He had heard such prefaces before. The Denbrough kid was going to ask him what it was like to be a Negro.

But instead Bill said: "When L-L-Larsen pitched the n-no-h-hitter in the World S-Series two years ago, d-do you think that was just luh-luck?"

Richie dragged deep on his cigarette and started to cough. Beverly pounded nun good-naturedly on the back. "You're just a beginner, Richie, you'll learn."

"I think it's gonna fall in, Ben," Eddie said worriedly, looking at the pegged square. "I don't know how cool I am on the idea of getting buried alive."