It

Mike took four from the flap pocket of his shirt and held them out.

“Just happened to have them around, I suh-huppose?”

“Yeah, something like that,” Mike said.

Bill took the cards and tried to shuffle them. His hands shook and the cards sprayed out of his hands. They went everywhere.,. but only two landed face-up. Bill looked at them, then up at Mike. Mike’s gaze was frozen on the littered playing cards. His lips had pulled back from his teeth.

The two up cards were both the ace of spades.

“That’s impossible,” Mike said. “I just opened that deck. Look.” He pointed at the swill-can just inside the garage door and Bill saw the cellophane wrapper, “How can one deck of cards have two aces of spades?”

Bill bent down and picked them up. “How can you spray a deck of cards all over the floor and have only two of them land face up?” he asked. “That’s an even better que-”

He turned the aces over, looked, and then showed them to Mike. One of them was a blueback, the other a redback.

“Holy Christ, Mikey, what have you got us into?”

“What are you going to do with those?” Mike asked in a numb voice.

“Why, put them on,” Bill said, and suddenly he began to laugh. “That’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it? If there are certain preconditions for the use of magic, those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves. Right?”

Mike didn’t reply. He watched as Bill went to Silver’s rear wheel and attached the playing cards. His hands were still shaking and it took awhile, but he finally got it done, drew in one tight breath, held it, and spun the rear wheel. The playing cards machine-gunned loudly against the spokes in the garage’s silence.

“Come on,” Mike said softly. “Come on in, Big Bill. I’ll make us some chow.”

They had scoffed the burgers and now sat smoking, watching dark begin to unfold from dusk in Mike’s back yard. Bill took out his wallet, found someone’s business card, and wrote upon it the sentence that had plagued him ever since he had seen Silver in the window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. He showed it to Mike, who read it carefully, lips pursed.

“Does it mean anything to you?” Bill asked.

“He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.” He nodded. “Yes, I know what that is.”

“Well then, tell me. Or are you going to give me some more cuh-cuh-crap about figuring it out for myself?”

“No,” Mike said, “in this case I think it’s okay to tell you. The phrase goes back to English times. It’s a tongue-twister that became a speech exercise for lispers and stutterers. Your mother kept trying to get you to say it that summer. The summer of 1958. You used to go around mumbling it to yourself.”

“I did?” Bill said, and then, slowly, answering his own question: “I did.”

“You must have wanted to please her very much.”

Bill, who suddenly felt he might cry, only nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

“You never made it,” Mike told him. “I remember that. You tried like hell but your tang kept getting all tungled up.”

“But I did say it,” Bill replied. “At least once.”

“When?”

Bill brought his fist down on the picnic table hard enough to hurt. “I don’t remember!” he shouted. And then, dully, he said it again: “I just don’t remember.”

Chapter 12 THREE UNINVITED GUESTS

1

On the day after Mike Hanlon made his calls, Henry Bowers began to hear voices. Voices had been talking to him all day long. For awhile, Henry thought they were coming from the moon. In the late afternoon, looking up from where he was hoeing in the garden, he could see the moon in the blue daytime sky, pale and small. A ghost-moon.

That, in fact, was why he believed it was the moon that was talking to him. Only a ghost-moon would talk in ghost-voices-the voices of his old friends, and the voices of those little kids who had played down in the Barrens so long ago. Those, and another voice… one he did not dare name.

Victor Criss spoke from the moon first. They comin back, Henry. All of em, man. They comin back to Derry.

Then Belch Huggins spoke from the moon, perhaps from the dark side of the moon. You’re the only one, Henry. The only one of us left. You’ll have to get em for me and Vie. Ain’t no little kids can rank us out like that. Why, I hit a ball one time down to Tracker’s, and Tony Tracker said that ball would have been out of Yankee Stadium.

He hoed, looking up at the ghost-moon in the sky, and after awhile Fogarty came over and hit him in the back of the neck and knocked him flat on his face.

“You’re hoein up the peas right along with the weeds, you ijit.”

Henry got up, brushing dirt off his face and out of his hair. There stood Fogarty, a big man in a white jacket and white pants, his belly swelled out in front of him. It was illegal for the guards (who were called “counsellors” here at Juniper Hill) to carry billyclubs, so a number of them-Fogarty, Adler, and Koontz were the worst-carried rolls of quarters in their pockets. They almost always hit you with them in the same place, right in the back of the neck. There was no rule against quarters. Quarters were not considered a deadly weapon at Juniper Hill, an institution for the mentally insane which stood on the outskirts of Augusta near the Sidney town line.

“I’m sorry, Mr Fogarty,” Henry said, and offered a big grin which showed an irregular line of yellow teeth. They looked like the pickets in a fence outside a haunted house. Henry had begun to lose his teeth when he was fourteen or so.

“Yeah, you’re sorry,” Fogarty said. “You’ll be a lot sorrier if I catch you doing it again, Henry.”

“Yes sir, Mr Fogarty.”

Fogarty walked away, his black shoes leaving big brown tracks in the dirt of West Garden. Because Fogarty’s back was turned, Henry took a moment to look around surreptitiously. They had been shooed out to hoe as soon as the clouds cleared, everyone from the Blue Ward-which was where they put you if you had once been very dangerous but were now considered only moderately dangerous. Actually, all the patients at Juniper Hill were considered moderately dangerous; it was a facility for the criminally insane. Henry Bowers was here because he had been convicted of killing his father in the late fall of 1958-it had been a famous year for murder trials, all right; when it came to murder trials, 1958 had been a pip.

Only of course it wasn’t just his father they thought he had killed; if it had only been his father, Henry would not have spent twenty years in the Augusta State Mental Hospital, much of that time under physical and chemical restraint. No, not just his father; the authorities thought he had killed all of them, or at least most of them.

Following the verdict the News had published a front-page editorial titled “The End of Derry’s Long Night.” In it they had recapped the salient points: the belt in Henry’s bureau that belonged to the missing Patrick Hockstetter; the jumble of schoolbooks, some signed out to the missing Belch Huggins and some to the missing Victor Criss, both known chums of the Bowers boy, in Henry’s closet; most damning of all, the panties found tucked into a slit in Henry’s mattress, panties which had been identified by laundry-mark as having belonged to Veronica Grogan, deceased.

Henry Bowers, the News declared, had been the monster haunting Derry in the spring and summer of 1958.

But then the News had proclaimed the end of Derry’s long night on the front page of its December 6th edition, and even an ijit like Henry knew that in Derry night never ended.

They had bullied him with questions, had stood around him in a circle, had pointed fingers at him. Twice the Chief of Police had slapped him across the face and once a detective named Lottman had punched him in the gut, telling him to fess up, and be quick.

“There’s people outside and they ain’t happy, Henry,” this Lottman had said. “There ain’t been a lynching in Derry for a long tune, but that don’t mean there couldn’t be one.”

He supposed they would have kept it up as long as necessary, not because any of them really believed the good Derryfolk were going to break into the Police station, carry Henry out, and hang him from a sour-apple tree, but because they were desperate to close the books on that summer’s blood and horror; they would have, but Henry didn’t make them. They wanted him to confess to everything, he understood after awhile. Henry didn’t mind. After the horror in the sewers, after what had happened to Belch and Victor, he didn’t seem to mind about anything. Yes, he said, he had killed his father This was true. Yes, he had killed Victor Criss and Belch Huggins. This was also true, at least in the sense that he had led them into the tunnels where they had been murdered. Yes, he had killed Patrick. Yes, Veronica. Yes one, yes all. Not true, but it didn’t matter. Blame needed to be taken. Perhaps that was why he had been spared. And if he refused…

He understood about Patrick’s belt. He had won it from Patrick playing seal one day in April, discovered it didn’t fit, and tossed it in his bureau. He understood about the books, too-hell, the three of them chummed around together and they cared no more for their summer textbooks than they had for their regular ones, which is to say, they cared for them about as much as a woodchuck cares for tap-dancing. There were probably as many of his books in their closets, and the cops probably knew it, too.

The panties… no, he didn’t know how Veronica Grogan’s panties had come to be in his mattress.

But he thought he knew who-or what-had taken care of it.

Best not to talk about such things.

Best to just dummy up.

So they sent him to Augusta and finally, in 1979, they had transferred him to Juniper Hill, and he had only run into trouble once here and that was because at first no one understood. A guy had tried to turn off Henry’s nightlight. The nightlight was Donald Duck doffing his little sailor hat. Donald was protection after the sun went down. With no light, things could come in. The locks on the door and the wire mesh did not stop them. They came like mist. Things. They talked and laughed… and sometimes they clutched. Hairy things, smooth things, things with eyes. The sort of things that had really killed Vie and Belch when the three of them had chased the kids into the tunnels under Derry in August of 1958.

Looking around now, he saw the others from the Blue Ward. There was George DeVille, who had murdered his wife and four children one winter night in 1962. George’s head was studiously bent, his white hair blowing in the breeze, snot running gaily out of his nose, his huge wooden crucifix bobbing and dancing as he hoed. There was Jimmy Donlin, and all they said in the papers about Jimmy was that he had killed his mother in Portland during the summer of 1965, but what they hadn’t said in the papers was that Jimmy had tried a novel experiment in body-disposal: by the time the cops came Jimmy had eaten more than half of her, including her brains. “They made me twice as smart,” Jimmy had confided to Henry one night after lights-out.

In the row beyond Jimmy, hoeing fanatically and singing the same line over and over, as always, was the little Frenchman Benny Beaulieu. Benny had been a firebug-a pyromaniac. Now as he hoed he sang this line from the Doors over and over: “Try to set the night on fire, try to set the night on fire, try to set the night on fire, try to-”

It got on your nerves after awhile.

Beyond Benny was Franklin D’Cruz, who had raped over fifty women before being caught with his pants down in Bangor’s Terrace Park. The ages of his victims ranged from three to eighty-one. Not very particular was Frank D’Cruz. Beyond him but way back was Arlen Weston, who spent as much time looking dreamily at his hoe as he did using it. Fogarty, Adler, and John Koontz had all tried the roll-of-quarters-in-the-fist trick on Weston to try and convince him he could move a bit faster, and one day Koontz had hit him maybe a little too hard because blood came not only from Arlen