5

RICHIE GETS BEEPED

Mike had taken his photographs back. He had an idea that Bill might ask for the one of George's last school picture, but Bill did not. He put them in his inside jacket pocket, and when they were out of sight, all of them-Mike included-felt a sense of relief.

"Nine children," Beverly was saying softly. "I can't believe it. I mean... I can believe it, but I can't believe it. Nine kids and nothing? Nothing at all?

"It's not quite like that," Mike said. "People are angry, people are scared... or so it seems. It's really impossible to tell which ones really feel that way and which ones are faking."

"Faking?

"Beverly, do you remember, when we were kids, the man who just folded his newspaper and went inside his house while you were screaming at him for help?"

For a moment something seemed to jump in her eyes and she looked both terrified and aware. Then she only looked puzzled. "No... when was that, Mike?"

"Never mind. It will come to you in time. All I can say now is that everything iooks the way it should in Derry. Faced with such a grisly string of murders, people are doing all the things you'd expect them to do, and most of them are the same things that went on while kids were disappearing and getting murdered back in '58. The Save Our Children Committee is meeting again, only this time at Derry Elementary School instead of Derry High. There are sixteen detectives from the State Attorney General's office in town, and a contingent of FBI agents as well-I don't know how many, and although Rademacher talks big, I don't think he does, either. The curfew's back in effect-"

"Oh yes. The curfew." Ben was rubbing the side of his neck slowly and deliberately. "That did wonders back in '58. I remember that much."

"-and there are Mothers" Walker Groups to make sure that every child who goes to school, grades K through eight, is chaperoned home. The News has gotten over two thousand letters demanding a solution in the last three weeks alone. And, of course, the out-migration has begun again. I sometimes think that's the only way to really tell who's sincere about wanting it stopped and who isn't. The really sincere ones get scared and leave."

"People really are leaving?" Richie asked.

"It happens each time the cycle cranks up again. It's impossible to tell just how many go, because the cycle hasn't fallen squarely in a census year since 1850 or so. But it's a fairish number. They run like kids who just found out the house was haunted for real after all."

"Come home, come home, come home," Beverly said softly. When she looked up from her hands it was Bill she looked at, not Mike. "It wanted us to come back. Why?"

"It may want us all back," Mike said a little cryptically. "sure. It may. It may want revenge. After all, we balked It once before."

"revenge... or just to set things back in order," Bill said.

Mike nodded. "Things are out of order with your own lives, too, you know. None of you left Derry untouched... without Its mark on you. All of you forgot what happened here, and your memories of that summer are still only fragmentary. And then there's the passingly curious fact that you're all rich."

"Oh, come on now!" Richie said. "That's hardly-"

"Be soft, be soft," Mike said, holding his hand up and smiling faintly. "I'm not accusing you of anything, just trying to get the facts out on the table. You are rich by the standards of a small-town librarian who makes just under eleven grand a year after taxes, okay?"

Rich shrugged the shoulders of his expensive suit uncomfortably. Ben appeared deeply absorbed in tearing small strips from the edge of his napkin. No one was looking directly at Mike except Bill.

"None of you are in the H. L. Hunt class, certainly," Mike said, "but you are all well-to-do even by the standards of the American upper-middle class. We're all friends here, so fess up: if there's one of you who declared less than ninety thousand dollars on his or her 1984 tax return, raise your hand."

They glanced around at each other almost furtively, embarrassed, as Americans always seem to be, by the raw fact of their own success-as if cash were hardcooked eggs and affluence the farts that inevitably follow an overdose of same. Bill felt hot blood in his cheeks and was helpless to stop its rise. He had been paid ten thousand more than the sum Mike had mentioned just for doing the first draft of the Attic Room screenplay. He had been promised an additional twenty thousand dollars each for two rewrites, if needed. Then there were royalties... and the hefty advance on a two-book contract just signed... how much had he declared on his '84 tax return? Just about eight hundred thousand dollars, right? Enough, anyway, to seem almost monstrous in light of Mike Hanlon's stated income of just under eleven thousand a year.

So that's how much they pay you to keep the lighthouse, Mike old kid, Bill thought. Jesus Christ, somewhere along the line you should have asked for a raise!

Mike said: "Bill Denbrough, a successful novelist in a society where there are only a few novelists and fewer still lucky enough to be making a living from the craft. Beverly Rogan, who's in the rag trade, a field to which more are called but even fewer chosen. She is, in fact, the most sought-after designer in the middle third of the country right now."

"Oh, it's not me," Beverly said. She uttered a nervous little laugh and lit a fresh cigarette from the smoldering stub of the old one. "It's Tom. Tom's the one. Without him I'd still be relining skirts and sewing up hems. I don't have any business sense at all, even Tom says so. It's just... you know, Tom. And luck." She took a single deep drag from her cigarette and then snuffed it.

"Methinks the lady doth protest too much," Richie said slyly.

She turned quickly in her seat and gave him a hard look, her color high. "Just what's that supposed to mean, Richie Tozier?"

"Doan hits me, Miz Scawlett!" Richie cried in a high, trembling Pickaninny Voice-and in that moment Bill could see with an eerie clarity the boy he had known; he was not just a superseded presence lurking under Rich Tozier's grownup exterior but a creature almost more real than the man himself. "doan hits me! Lemme bring you anothuh mint joolip, Miz Scawlett! Youse goan drink hit out on de po'ch where it's be a little bit cooluh! Doan whup disyere boy!"

"You're impossible, Richie," Beverly said coldly. "You ought to grow up."

Richie looked at her, his grin fading slowly into uncertainty. "Until I came back here," he said, "I thought I had."

"Rich, you may just be the most successful disc jockey in the United States," Mike said. "You've certainly got LA in the palm of your hand. On top of that there are two syndicated programs, one of them a straight top-forty countdown show, the other one something called The Freaky Forty -

'You better watch out, fool," Richie said in a gruff Mr T Voice, but he was blushing. "I'll make your front and back change places. I'll give you brain-surgery with my fist. I'll-"

"Eddie," Mike went on, ignoring Richie, "you've got a healthy limousine service in a city where you just about have to elbow long black cars out of your way when you cross the street. Two limo companies a week go smash in the Big Apple, but you're doing fine.

"Ben, you're probably the most successful young architect in the world."

Ben opened his mouth, probably to protest, and then closed it again abruptly.

Mike smiled at them, spread his hands. "I don't want to embarrass anyone, but I do want all the cards on the table. There are people who succeed young, and there are people who succeed in highly specialized jobs-if there weren't people who bucked the odds successfully, I guess everybody would give up. If it was just one or two of you, we could pass it off as coincidence. But it's not just one or two; it's all of you, and that includes Stan Uris, who was the most successful young accountant in Atlanta... which means in the whole South. My conclusion is that your success stems from what happened here twenty-seven years ago. If you had all been exposed to asbestos at that time and had all developed lung cancer by now, the correlative would be no less clear or persuasive. Do any of you want to dispute it?"

He looked at them. No one answered.

"All except you," Bill said. "What happened to you, Mikey?"

"Isn't it obvious?" He grinned. "I stayed here."

"You kept the lighthouse," Ben said. Bill jerked around and looked at him, startled, but Ben was staring hard at Mike and didn't see. "That doesn't make me feel so good, Mike. In fact, it makes me feel sort of like a bugturd."

"Amen," Beverly said.

Mike shook his head patiently. "You have nothing to feel guilty about, any of you. Do. you think it was my choice to stay here, any more than it was your choice-any of you-to leave? Hell, we were kids. For one reason or another your parents moved away, and you guys were part of the baggage they took along. My parents stayed. And was it really their decision-any of them) I don't think so. How was it decided who would go and who would stay? Was it luck? Fate? It? Some Other? I don't know. But it wasn't us guys. So quit it."

"You're not... not bitter?" Eddie asked timidly.

"I've been too busy to be bitter," Mike said. "I've spent a long time watching and waiting... I was watching and waiting even before I knew it, I think, but for the last five years or so I've been on what you might call red alert. Since the turn of the year I've been keeping a journal. And when a man writes, he thinks harder... or maybe just more specifically. And one of the things I've spent time writing and thinking about is the nature of It. It changes; we know that. I think It also manipulates, and leaves Its marks on people just by the nature of what It is-the way you can smell a skunk on you even after a long bath, if it lets go its bag of scent too near you. The way a grasshopper will spit bug juice into your palm if you catch it in your hand."

Mike slowly unbuttoned his shirt and spread it wide. They could all see the pinkish scrawls of scar across the smooth brown skin of his chest between the nipples.

"The way claws leave scars," he said.

"The werewolf," Richie almost moaned. "Oh Christ, Big Bill, the werewolf! When we went back to Neibolt Street!"

"What?" Bill asked. He sounded like a man called out of a dream. "What, Richie?"

"Don't you remember?

"No... do you?"

"I... I almost do... " Looking both confused and scared, Richie subsided.

"Are you saying this thing isn't evil?" Eddie asked Mike abruptly. He was staring at the scars as if hypnotized. "That it's just some part of the... the natural order?"

"It's no part of a natural order we understand or condone," Mike said, rebuttoning his shirt, "and I see no reason to operate on any other basis than the one we do understand: that It kills, kills children, and that's wrong. Bill understood that before any of us. Do you remember, Bill?"

"I remember that I wanted to kill It," Bill said, and for the first time (and ever after) he heard the pronoun gain proper-noun status in his own voice. "But I didn't have much of a world-view on the subject, if you see what I mean-I just wanted to kill It because It killed George."

"And do you still?"

Bill considered this carefully. He looked down at his spread hands on the table and remembered George in his yellow slicker, his hood up, the paper boat with its thin glaze of paraffin in one hand. He looked up at Mike.

"M-M-More than ever," he said.

Mike nodded as if this were exactly what he had expected. "It left Its mark on us. It worked Its will on us, just as It has worked Its will on this whole town, day in and day out, even during those long periods when It is asleep or hibernating or whatever It does between Its more... more lively periods."

Mike raised one finger.

"But if It worked Its will on us, at some point, in some way, we aho worked our will on It. We stopped It before It was done-I know we did. Did we weaken It? Hurt It? Did we, in fact, almost kill It? I think we did. I think we came so close to killing It that we went away thinking we had."

"But you don't remember that part either, do you?" Ben asked.

"No. I can remember everything up until August 15th 1958 with almost perfect clarity. But from then until September 4th or so, when school was called in again, everything is a total blank. It isn't murky or hazy; it is just completely gone. With one exception: I seem to remember Bill screaming about something called the dead-lights."

Bill's arm jerked convulsively. It struck one of his empty beer bottles, and the bottle shattered on the floor like a bomb.

"Did you cut yourself?" Beverly asked. She had half-risen.

"No," he said. His voice was harsh and dry. His arms had broken out in gooseflesh. It seemed that his skull had somehow grown; he could feel

(the deadlights)

it pressing out against the stretched skin of his face in steady numbing throbs.

"I'll pick up the-"

"No, just sit down." He wanted to look at her and couldn't. He couldn't take

his eyes off Mike.

"Do you remember the deadlights, Bill?" Mike asked softly.

"No," he said. His mouth felt the way it did when the dentist got a little too enthusiastic with the novocaine.

"You will."

"I hope to God I don't."

"You will anyway," Mike said. "But for now... no. Not me, either. Do any of you?"

One by one they shook their heads.

"But we did something," Mike said quietly. "At some point we were able to exercise some sort of group will. At some point we achieved some special understanding, whether conscious or unconscious." He stirred restlessly. "God, [wish Stan was here. I have a feeling that Stan, with his ordered mind, might have had some idea."

"Maybe he did," Beverly said. "Maybe that's why he killed himself. Maybe he understood that if there was magic, it wouldn't work for grown-ups."

"I think it could, though," Mike said. "Because there's one other thing we six have in common. I wonder if any of you have realized what that is."

It was Bill's turn to open his mouth and then shut it again.

"Go on," Mike said. "You know what it is. I can see it on your face."

"I'm not sure I know," Bill replied, "but I think w-we're all childless. Is that ih-it?"