“You hit me from behind, yellowbelly!” Moose screamed. “You fuckin dirtyfighter!”
He gathered himself to charge, but Richie joined Bill and also began to fire rocks at Moose. Richie was unimpressed with Moose’s rhetoric on the subject of what might or might not constitute yellowbelly behavior; he had seen the five of them chasing one scared kid, and he didn’t think that exactly put them up there with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. One of Richie’s missiles split the skin above Moose’s left eyebrow. Moose howled.
Eddie and Stan Uris moved up to join Bill and Richie. Beverly moved in with them, her arm bleeding but her eyes wildly alight. Rocks flew. Belch Huggins screamed as one of them clipped his crazy bone. He began to dance lumbersomely, rubbing his elbow. Henry got to his feet, the back of his shirt hanging in rags, the skin beneath almost miraculously unmarked. Before he could turn around, Ben Hanscom bounced a rock off the back of his head and drove him to his knees again.
It was Victor Criss who did the most damage to the Losers that day, partly because he was a pretty fair fastball pitcher, but mostly-paradoxically-because he was the least emotionally involved. More and more he didn’t want to be here. People could get seriously hurt in rockfights; a kid could get his skull split, a mouthful of broken teeth, could even lose an eye. But since he was in it, he was in it. He intended to dish out some trouble.
That coolness had allowed him to take an extra thirty seconds and pick up a handful of good-sized rocks. He threw one at Eddie as the Losers re-formed their rough skirmish line, and it struck Eddie on the chin. He fell down, crying, the blood already starting to flow. Ben turned toward him but Eddie was already getting up again, the blood gruesomely bright against his pallid skin, his eyes slitted.
Victor threw at Richie and the rock thudded off Richie’s chest. Richie threw
back but Vie ducked it easily and threw one sidearm at Bill Denbrough. Bill
snapped his head back, but not quite quickly enough; the rock cut his cheek
wide open.
Bill turned toward Victor. Their eyes locked, and Victor saw something in the stuttering kid’s gaze that scared the hell out of him. Absurdly, the words I take it back! trembled behind his lips… except that was nothing you said to a little kid. Not if you didn’t want your buddies to start ranking you to the dogs and back.
Bill started to walk toward Victor now, and Victor began to walk toward Bill. At the same moment, as if by some telepathic signal, they began to throw rocks at each other, still closing the distance. The righting flagged around them as the others turned to watch; even Henry turned his head.
Victor ducked and bobbed, but Bill made no such effort. Victor’s rocks slammed him in the chest, the shoulder, the stomach. One clipped by his ear. Apparently unshaken by any of this, Bill threw one rock after another, pegging them with murderous force. The third one struck Victor’s knee with a brittle chipping sound and Victor uttered a stifled groan. He was out of ammunition. Bill had one rock left. It was smooth and white, shot with quartz, roughly the size and shape of a duck’s egg. To Victor Criss it looked very hard. Bill was less than five feet away from him.
“Y-Y-You g-get ow-out of h-h-here now,” he said, “or I’m g-going to spuh-puh-lit your h-head o-o-open. I m-mean ih-ih-it.”
Looking into his eyes, Victor saw that he really did. Without another word, he turned and headed back the way Peter Gordon had gone.
Belch and Moose Sadler were looking around uncertainly. Blood trickled from the corner of the Sadler boy’s mouth, and blood from a scalp-wound was sheeting down the side of Belch’s face.
Henry’s mouth worked but no sound came out. Bill turned toward Henry. “G-G-Get out,” he said.
“What if I won’t?” Henry was trying to sound tough, but Bill could now see a different thing in Henry’s eyes. He was scared, and he would go. It should have made Bill feel good-triumphant, even- but he only felt tired.
“I-If you w-won’t,” Bill said, “w-w-we’re g-going to muh-move i-in on y-you. I think the s-s-six of u-us can p-put you in the huh-huh-hospital.”
“Seven,” Mike Hanlon said, and joined them. He had a softball-sized rock in each hand. “Just try me, Bowers. I’d love to.”
“You fucking NIGGER!” Henry’s voice broke and wavered on the edge of tears. That voice took the last of the fight out of Belch and Moose; they backed away, their remaining rocks dropping from relaxing hands. Belch looked around as if wondering exactly where he might be.
“Get out of our place,” Beverly said.
“Shut up, you cunt,” Henry said. “You-” Four rocks flew at once, hitting Henry in four different places He screamed and scrambled backward over the weed-raddled ground, the tatters of his shirt flapping around him. He looked from the grim, old-young faces of the little kids to the frantic ones of Belch and Moose. There was no help there; no help at all. Moose turned away, embarrassed.
Henry got to his feet, sobbing and snuffling through his broken nose. “I’ll kill you all,” he said, and suddenly ran for the path. A moment later he was gone.
“G-G-Go on,” Bill said, speaking to Belch. “Get ow-out. And d-don’t c-c-come down h-here anymore. The B-B-Barrens are ow-ow-ours.
“You’re gonna wish you didn’t cross Henry, kid,” Belch said. “Come on, Moose.”
They started away, heads down, not looking back.
The seven of them stood in a loose semicircle, all of them bleeding somewhere. The apocalyptic rockfight had lasted less than four minutes, but Bill felt as if he had fought his way through all of World War II, both theaters, without so much as a single time-out.
The silence was broken by Eddie Kaspbrak’s whooping, whining struggle for air. Ben went toward him, felt the three Twinkies and four Ding-Dongs he had eaten on his way down to the Barrens begin to struggle and churn in his stomach, and ran past Eddie and into the bushes, where he was sick as privately and quietly as he could be.
It was Richie and Bev who went to Eddie. Beverly put an arm around the thin boy’s waist while Richie dug his aspirator out of his pocket. “Bite on this, Eddie,” he said, and Eddie took a hitching, gasping breath as Richie pulled the trigger.
“Thanks,” Eddie managed at last.
Ben came back out of the bushes, blushing, wiping a hand over his mouth. Beverly went over to him and took both of his hands in hers.
“Thanks for sticking up for me,” she said.
Ben nodded, looking at his dirty sneakers. “Any time, keed,” he said.
One by one they turned to look at Mike, Mike with his dark skin. They looked at him carefully, cautiously, thoughtfully. Mike had felt such curiosity before-there had not been a time in his life when he had not felt it-and he looked back candidly enough.
Bill looked from Mike to Richie. Richie met his eyes. And Bill seemed almost to hear the click-some final part fitting neatly into a machine of unknown intent. He felt ice-chips scatter up his back. We’re all together now, he thought, and the idea was so strong, so right, that for a moment he thought he might have spoken it aloud. But of course there was no need to speak it aloud; he could see it in Richie’s eyes, in Ben’s, in Eddie’s, in Beverly’s, in Stan’s.
We’re all together now, he thought again. Oh God help us. Now it really starts. Please God, help us.
“What’s your name, kid?” Beverly asked.
“Mike Hanlon.”
“You want to shoot off some firecrackers?” Stan asked, and Mike’s grin was answer enough.
Chapter 14
THE ALBUM
1
As it turns out, Bill isn’t the only one; they all bring booze.
Bill has bourbon, Beverly has vodka and a carton of orange juice, Richie a sixpack, Ben Hanscom a bottle of Wild Turkey. Mike has a sixpack in the little refrigerator in the staff lounge.
Eddie Kaspbrak comes in last, holding a small brown bag.
“What you got there, Eddie?” Richie asks. “Za-Rex or Kool-Aid?”
Smiling nervously, Eddie removes first a bottle of gin and then a bottle of prune juice.
In the thunderstruck silence which follows, Richie says quietly: “somebody call for the men in the white coats. Eddie Kaspbrak’s finally gone over the top.”
“Gin-and-prune juice happens to be very healthy,” Eddie replies defensively… and then they’re all laughing wildly, the sound of their mirth echoing and re-echoing in the silent library, rolling up and down the glassed-in hall between the adult library and the Children’s Library.
“You go head-on,” Ben says, wiping his streaming eyes. “You go head-on, Eddie. I bet it really moves the mail, too.”
Smiling, Eddie fills a paper cup three-quarters full of prune juice and then soberly adds two capfuls of gin.
“Oh Eddie, I do love you,” Beverly says, and Eddie looks up, startled but smiling. She gazes up and down the table. “I love all of you.”
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?”
