"She says Henry's gone crazy, Big Bill," Ben said.
"Shit, you mean he used to be sane?" Richie asked, and spat between his teeth.
"Sh-Shut uh-up, Ruh-Richie," Bill said, and then looked back at Beverly. "Teh-Tell," he said. Eddie's hand crept into his pocket and touched his aspirator. He didn't know what all this was, but he already knew it wasn't good.
Forcing herself to speak as calmly as possible, Beverly managed to get out an edited version of the story-a version that began with Henry, Victor, and Belch catching up to her on the street. She didn't tell them about her father-she was desperately ashamed of that.
When she was finished Bill stood silent for a moment, hands in his pockets, chin down, Silver's handlebars leaning against his chest. The others waited, throwing frequent glances at the railing that ran along the edge of the dropoff. Bill thought for a long time, and no one interrupted him. Eddie became aware, suddenly and effortlessly, that this might be the final act. That was how the day's silence felt, wasn't it? The feeling that the whole town had up and left, leaving only the deserted husks of buildings behind.
Richie was thinking about the picture in George's album that had suddenly
come to life.
Beverly was thinking about her father, how pale his eyes had been.
Mike was thinking about the bird.
Ben was thinking about the mummy, and a smell like dead cinnamon.
Stan Uris was thinking of bluejeans, black and dripping, and hands as white
as wrinkled paper, also dripping.
"Cuh-Cuh-Come oh-oh-on," Bill said at last. "W-We're going d-d-down."
"Bill-" Ben said. His face was troubled. "Beverly said Henry was really crazy. That he meant to kill-"
"Ih-It's nuh-not theirs," Bill said, gesturing at the green dagger-shaped slash of the Barrens to their right and below them-the underbrush, the choked groves of trees, the bamboo, the glint of water. "Ih-Ih-It's not their pruh-pruh-hopperty," He looked around at them, his face grim. "I'm t-t-tired of b-being scuh-schuh-hared by them. We b-b-beat them in the ruh-rockfight, and if we h-h-have to beat them a-a-again, we'll duh-duh-do it."
"But Bill," Eddie said, "what if it's not just them?
Bill turned to Eddie, and with real shock Eddie saw how tired and drawn Bill's face was-there was something frightening about that face, but it wasn't until much, much later, as an adult drifting toward sleep after the meeting at the library, that he understood what that frightening thing was: it was the face of a boy driven close to the brink of madness, a boy who was perhaps ultimately no more sane or in control of his own decisions than Henry was. Yet the essential Bill was still there, looking out of those haunted scarified eyes... an angry, determined Bill.
"Well," he said, "whuh-whuh-what if it's nuh-nuh-not?
No one answered him. Thunder boomed, closer now. Eddie looked at the sky and saw the stormclouds moving in from the west in black thunderheads. It was going to rain a bitch, as his mother sometimes said.
"Nuh-nuh-how I'll t-t-tell you what," Bill said, looking at them. "None of you have to guh-guh-go w-with me if you d-don't want to. That's uh-uh-up to you."
"I'll go along, Big Bill," Richie said quietly.
"Me too," Ben said.
"Sure," Mike said with a shrug.
Beverly and Stan agreed, and Eddie last.
"I don't think so, Eddie," Richie said. "Your arm's not, you know, looking too cool."
Eddie looked at Bill.
"I w-w-want h-him," Bill said. "You w-w-walk with muh-muh-me, Eh-Eh-Eddie. I'll keep an eye on yuh-you."
"Thanks, Bill," Eddie said. Bill's tired, half-crazy face seemed suddenly lovely to him-lovely and well loved. He felt a dim sense of amazement. I'd die for him, I guess, if he told me to. What kind of power is that? If it makes you look like Bill looks now, it's maybe not such a good power to have.
"Yeah, Bill's got the ultimate weapon," Richie said. "BO bombs." He raised his left arm and fluttered his right hand under the exposed armpit. Ben and Mike laughed a little, and Eddie smiled.
Thunder boomed again, close and loud enough this time to make them jump and huddle closer together. The wind was picking up, rattling trash around in the gutter. The first of the dark clouds sailed over the hazy ringed disc of the sun, and their shadows melted away. The wind was cold, chilling the sweat on Eddie's uncovered arm. He shivered.
Bill looked at Stan and said a peculiar thing then.
"You got your b-b-bird-book, Stan?"
Stan tapped his hip pocket.
Bill looked at them again. "Let's g-g-go down," he said.
They went down the embankment single-file except for Bill, who stayed with Eddie as he had promised. He allowed Richie to push Silver down, and when they had reached the bottom, Bill put his bike in its accustomed place under the bridge. Then they stood together, looking around.
The coming storm did not produce a darkness; not even, precisely, a dimness. But the quality of the light had changed, and things stood out in a kind of dreamlike steely relief: shadowless, clear, chiselled. Eddie felt a sinking of horror and apprehension in his guts as he realized why the quality of this light seemed so familiar-it was the same sort of light he remembered from the house at 29 Neibolt Street.
A streak of lightning tattooed the clouds, bright enough to make him wince. He put a hand up to his face and found himself counting: One... two... three... And then the thunder came in a single coughing bark, an explosive sound, a sound like an M-80 firecracker, and they drew even closer together.
"Wasn't any rain forecast this morning," Ben said uneasily. "The paper said hot and hazy."
Mike was scanning the sky. The clouds up there were black-bottomed keelboats, high and heavy, swiftly overrunning the blue haze that had covered the sky from horizon to horizon when he and Bill came out of the Denbrough house after lunch. "It's comin fast," he said. "Never saw a storm come so fast." And as if in confirmation, thunder whacked again.
"C-C-Come on," Bill said. "L-Let's put Eh-Eh-Eddie's Parchee-hee-si board in the cluh-cluh-clubhouse."
They started along the path they had beaten in the weeks since the incident of the dam. Bill and Eddie were at the head of the line, their shoulders brushing the broad green leaves of the shrubs, the others behind them. The wind gusted again, making the leaves on the trees and bushes whisper together. Farther ahead, the bamboo rattled eerily, like drums in a jungle tale.
"Bill?" Eddie said in a low voice.
"What?"
"I thought this was just in the movies, but... " Eddie laughed a little. "I feel like somebody's watching me."
"Oh, they're th-th-there, all r-r-right," Bill said.
Eddie looked around nervously and held his Parcheesi board a link tighter. He
11
EDDIE'S ROOM / 3:05 A.M.
opened the door on a monster from a horror comic.
A gore-streaked apparition stood there and it could only be Henry Bowers. Henry looked like a corpse which has returned from the grave. Henry's face was a frozen witch-doctor's mask of hate and murder. His right hand was cocked at cheek-level, and even as Eddie's eyes widened and he began to draw in his first shocked breath, the hand pistoned forward, the switchblade glittering like silk.
With no thought-there was no time; if he had stopped to think he would have died-Eddie slammed the door closed. It struck Henry's forearm, deflecting the knife's course so that it swung in a savage side-to-side arc less than an inch from Eddie's neck.
There was a crunch as the door pinched Henry's arm against the jamb. Henry uttered a muffled cry. His hand opened. The knife clattered to the floor. Eddie kicked it. It skittered under the TV.
Henry threw his weight against the door. He outweighed Eddie by over a hundred pounds and Eddie was driven back like a doll; his knees struck the bed and he fell on it. Henry came into the room and swept the door shut behind him. He twisted the thumb-bolt as Eddie sat up, wide-eyed, his throat already starting to whistle.
"Okay, fag," Henry said. His eyes dropped momentarily to the floor, hunting for the knife. He didn't see it. Eddie groped on the nighttable and found one of the two bottles of Perrier water he had ordered earlier that day. This was the full one; he had drunk the other before going to the library because his nerves were shot and he had a bad case of acid-burn. Perrier was very good for the digestion.
As Henry dismissed the knife and started toward him, Eddie gripped the green pear-shaped bottle by the neck and smashed it on the edge of the nighttable. Perrier foamed and fizzed across it, flooding out most of the pill-bottles that stood there.
Henry's shut and pants were heavy with blood, both fresh and semi-dried. His right hand now hung at a strange angle.
"Babyfag," Henry said, "teach you to throw rocks."
He made it to the bed and reached for Eddie, who still hardly realized what was happening. No more than forty seconds had elapsed since he had opened the door. Henry grabbed for him. Eddie thrust the ragged base of the Perrier bottle at him. It ripped into Henry's face, pulling open his right cheek in a twisted flap and puncturing Henry's right eye.
Henry uttered a breathless scream and staggered backward. His slit eye, leaking whitish-yellow fluid, hung loosely from its socket. His cheek sprayed blood in a gaudy fountain. Eddie's own cry was louder. He got off the bed and went toward Henry-to help him, perhaps, he wasn't really sure-and Henry lurched at him again. Eddie thrust with the Perrier bottle as if with a fencing sword, and this time the jagged points of green glass punched deep into Henry's left hand and sawed at his fingers. Fresh blood flowed. Henry made a thick grunting noise, the sound, almost, of a man clearing his throat, and shoved Eddie with his right hand.
Eddie flew back and struck the writing-desk. His left arm twisted behind him somehow and he fell on it heavily. The pain was a sudden sickening flare. He felt the bone go along the fault-line of that old break, and he had to clench his teeth against a scream of agony.
A shadow blotted out the light.
Henry Bowers was standing over him, swaying back and forth. His knees buckled. His left hand was dripping blood on the front of Eddie's robe.
Eddie had held onto the stump of the Perrier bottle and now, as Henry's knees came completely unhinged, he got it in front of him, jagged base pointing upward, the cap braced against his sternum. Henry came down like a tree, impaling himself on the bottle. Eddie felt it shatter in his hand and a fresh bolt of grinding agony shuddered through his left arm, which was still trapped under his body. Fresh warmth cascaded over him. He wasn't sure if this batch was Henry's blood or his.
Henry twitched like a landed trout. His shoes rattled an almost syncopated beat on the carpet. Eddie could smell his rotten breath. Then Henry stiffened and rolled over. The bottle protruded grotesquely from his midsection, capped end pointing toward the ceiling, as if it had grown there.
"Gug" Henry said, and said no more. He looked up at the ceiling. Eddie thought he might be dead.
Eddie fought off the waves of faintness that wanted to cover him over and drag him down. He got to his knees, and finally to his feet. There was fresh pain as his broken arm swung out in front of him and that cleared his head a little Wheezing, fighting for breath, he made it to the nighttable. He picked his aspirator out of a puddle of carbonated water, stuck it in his mouth, and triggered it off. He shuddered at the taste, then gave himself another blast. He looked around at the body on the carpet-could that be Henry? could it possibly be? It was. Grown old, his crewcut more gray than black, his body now fat and white and sluglike, it was still Henry. And Henry was dead. At long last, Henry was -
'Gug," Henry said, and sat up. His hands clawed at the air, as if for holds which only Henry could see. His gouged eye leaked and dribbled; its bottom arc now bulged pregnantly down onto his cheek. He looked around, saw Eddie shrinking back against the wall, and tried to get up.
He opened his mouth and a stream of blood gushed out. Henry collapsed again.
Heart racing, Eddie fumbled for the telephone and succeeded only in knocking it off the table and onto the bed. He snatched it up and dialed 0. The phone rang again and again and again.
Come on, Eddie thought, what are you doing down there, jacking off? Come on, please, answer the frigging phone!
It rang again and again. Eddie kept his eyes on Henry, expecting him to start trying to gain his feet again at any moment. Blood. Dear God, so much blood.
"Desk," a fuzzy, resentful voice said at last.
"Ring Mr Denbrough's room," Eddie said. "Quick as you can." With his other ear he was now listening to the rooms around him. How loud had they been? Was someone going to pound on the door and ask if everything was all right in there?
"You sure you want me to ring?" the clerk asked. "It's ten after three."
"Yes, do it!" Eddie nearly screamed. The hand holding the phone was trembling in convulsive little bursts. There was a nest of waspy, rotten-ugly singing in his other arm. Had Henry moved again? No; surely not.
"Okay, okay," the clerk said. "Cool your jets, my friend."
There was a click, and then the hoarse burr of a room-phone ringing. Come on, Bill, come on, c -
A sudden thought, gruesomely plausible, occurred to him. Suppose Henry had visited Bill's room first? Or Richie's? Ben's? Bev's? Or had Henry perhaps paid a visit to the library? Surely he had been somewhere else first; if someone hadn't softened Henry up, it would have been Eddie lying dead on the floor, with a switchblade growing out of his chest the way the neck of the Perrier bottle was growing out of Henry's gut. Or suppose Henry had visited all the others first, catching them bleary and half-asleep, as Henry had caught him? Suppose they were all dead? And that thought was so awful Eddie believed he would soon begin screaming if someone didn't answer the phone in Bill's room.
"Please, Big Bill," Eddie whispered. "Please be there, man."
The phone was picked up and Bill's voice, uncharacteristically cautious, said: "H-H-Hello?"
"Bill," Eddie said... almost babbled. "Bill, thank God."
"Eddie?" Bill's voice grew momentarily fainter, speaking to someone else, telling the someone who it was. Then he was back strong. "W-What's the muh-hatter, Eddie?"
"It's Henry Bowers," Eddie said. He looked at the body on the floor again. Had it changed position? This time it was not so easy to persuade himself it hadn't. "Bill, he came here... and I killed him. He had a knife. I think... " He lowered his voice. "I think it was the same knife he had that day. When we went into the sewers. Do you remember?"