Mike nodded. “I’ll check and see if I’m right. If I am, I can bring the pictures.”
“O-O-Old pic-pictures?” Bill asked.
“Yes.”
“W-W-What else?” Bill asked.
Mike opened his mouth and then closed it again. He looked around at them uncertainly and then said, “You’d think I was crazy. Crazy or lying.”
“D-Do y-y-you th-think we’re cruh-cruh-crazy?”
Mike shook his head.
“You bet we’re not,” Eddie said. “I got a lot wrong with me, but I’m not bughouse. I don’t think.”
“No,” Mike said. “I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“Well, we-we won’t th-think you’re cruh-cruh… nuts, e-e-either,” Bill said.
Mike looked them all over, cleared his throat, and said: “I saw a bird. Couple, three months ago. I saw a bird.”
Stan Uris looked at Mike. “What kind of a bird?”
Speaking more reluctantly than ever Mike said: “It looked like a sparrow, sort of, but it also looked like a robin. It had an orange chest.”
“Well, what’s so special about a bird?” Ben asked. “There are lots of birds in Derry.” But he felt uneasy, and looking at Stan, he felt sure that Stan was remembering what had happened in the Standpipe, and how he had somehow stopped it from happening by shouting out the names of birds. But he forgot all about that and everything else when Mike spoke again.
“This bird was bigger than a housetrailer,” he said.
He looked at their shocked, amazed faces. He waited for their laughter, but none came. Stan looked as if someone had clipped him with a brick. His face had gone so pale it was the color of muted November sunlight.
“I swear it’s true,” Mike said. “It was a giant bird, like one of those birds in the monster-movies that are supposed to be prehistoric.”
“Yeah, like in The Giant Claw,” Richie said. He thought the bird in that had been sort of fake-looking, but by the time it got to New York he had still been excited enough to spill his popcorn over the balcony railing at the Aladdin. Foxy Foxworth would have kicked him out, but the movie was over by then anyway. Sometimes you got the shit kicked out of you, but as Big Bill said, sometimes you won one, too.
“But it didn’t look prehistoric,” Mike said. “And it didn’t look like one of those whatdoyoucallums the Greeks and Romans made up stories about-”
“Ruh-Ruh-Rocs?” Bill suggested.
“Right, I guess so. It wasn’t like those, either. It was just like a combination robin and sparrow. The two most common birds you see.” He laughed a little wildly.
“W-W-Where-” Bill began.
“Tell us,” Beverly said simply, and after a moment to collect his thoughts, Mike did. And telling it, watching their faces grow concerned and scared but not disbelieving or derisive, he felt an incredible weight lift from his chest. Like Ben with his mummy or Eddie with his leper and Stan with the drowned boys, he had seen a thing that would have driven an adult insane, not just with terror but with the walloping force of an unreality too great to be explained away or, lacking any rational explanation, simply ignored. Elijah’s face had been burned black by the light of God’s love, or so Mike had read; but Elijah had been an old man when it happened, and maybe that made a difference. Hadn’t one of those other Bible fellows, this one little more than a kid, actually wrestled an angel to a draw?
He had seen it and he had gone on with his life; he had integrated the memory into his view of the world. He was still young enough so that view was tremendously wide. But what had happened that day had nonetheless haunted his mind’s darker corners, and sometimes in his dreams he ran from that grotesque bird as it printed its shadow on him from above. Some of these dreams he remembered and some he did not, but they were there, shadows which moved by themselves.
How little of it he had forgotten and how greatly it had troubled him (as he went about his daily round: helping his father, going to school, riding his bike, doing errands for his mother, waiting for the black groups to come on American Bandstand after school) was perhaps measurable in only one way-the relief he felt in sharing it with the others. As he did, he realized it was the first time he had even allowed himself to think of it fully since that early morning by the Canal, when he had seen those odd grooves… and the blood.
4
Mike told the story of the bird at the old Ironworks and how he had run into the pipe to escape it. Later on that afternoon, three of the Losers-Ben, Richie, Bill-walked toward the Derry Public Library. Ben and Richie were keeping a close watch for Bowers and Company, but Bill only looked at the sidewalk, frowning, lost in thought. About an hour after telling them his story Mike had left them, saying his father wanted him home by four to pick peas. Beverly had to do some marketing and fix dinner for her father, she said. Both Eddie and Stan had their own things to do. But before they broke up for the day they began digging what was to become-if Ben was right-their underground clubhouse. To Bill (and to all of them, he suspected), the groundbreaking had seemed an almost symbolic act. They had begun. Whatever it was they were supposed to do as a group, as a unit, they had begun.
Ben asked Bill if he believed like Hanlon’s story. They were passing Derry Community House and the library was just ahead, a stone oblong comfortably shaded by elms a century old and as yet untouched by the Dutch Elm disease that would later plague and thin them.
“Yeah,” Bill said. “I th-think it was the truh-hooth. C-C-Crazy, but true. What about you, Ruh-Ruh-Richie?”
Richie nodded. “Yeah. I hate to believe it, if you know what I mean, but I guess I do. You remember what he said about the bird’s tongue?
Bill and Ben nodded. Orange fluffs on it.
“That’s the kicker,” Richie said. “It’s like some comic-book villain. Lex Luthor or the Joker or someone like that. It always leaves a trademark.”
Bill nodded thoughtfully. It was like some comic-book villain. Because they saw it that way? Thought of it that way? Yes, perhaps so. It was kid’s stuff, but it seemed that was what this thing thrived on-kid’s stuff.
They crossed the street to the library side.
“I a-a-asked Stuh-Stuh-Stan i-if he e-ever h-h-heard of a buh-bird l-like that,” Bill said. “Nuh-nuh-not n-necessarily a b-b-big wuh-wuh-one, but j- just a-a-a-”
“A real one?” Richie suggested.
Bill nodded. “H-He suh-said there m-m-might be a buh-bird like that in Suh-houth America or A-A-A-Africa, but nuh-nuh-not a-around h-h-here.”
“He didn’t believe it, then?” Ben asked.
“H-H-He buh-believed i-i-it,” Bill said. And then he told them something else Stan had suggested when Bill walked with him back to where Stan had left his bike. Stan’s idea was that nobody else could have seen that bird before Mike told them that story. Something else, maybe, but not that bird, because the bird was Mike Hanlon’s personal monster. But now… why, now that bird was the property of the whole Losers” Club, wasn’t it? Any of them might see it. It might not look exactly the same; Bill might see it as a crow, Richie as a hawk, Beverly as a golden eagle, for all Stan knew- but It could be a bird to all of them now. Bill told Stan that if that was true, then any of them might see the leper, the mummy, or possibly the dead boys.
“Which means we ought to do something pretty soon if we’re going to do anything at all,” Stan had replied. “It knows…”
“Wuh-What?” Bill had asked sharply. “Eh-Everything we nuh-know?”
“Man, if It knows that, we’re sunk,” Stan had answered. “But you can bet It knows we know about It, I think It’ll try to get us. Are you still thinking about what we talked about yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“I wish I could go with you.”
“Buh-Buh-Ben and Rih-Richie w-w-will. Ben’s really s-s-smart, and Rih-Rih-Richie is, too, when he ih-isn’t fucking o-off.”
Now, standing outside the library, Richie asked Bill exactly what it was he had in mind. Bill told them, speaking slowly so he wouldn’t stutter too badly. The idea had been circling in his mind for the last two weeks, but it had taken Mike’s story of the bird to crystallize it.
What did you do if you wanted to get rid of a bird?
Well, shooting it was pretty goddam final.
What did you do if you wanted to get rid of a monster? Well, the movies suggested that shooting it with a silver bullet was pretty goddam final.
Ben and Richie listened to this respectfully enough. Then Richie asked, “How do you get a silver bullet, Big Bill? Send away for it?”
“Very fuh-fuh-funny. We’ll have to m-m-make it.”
“How?”
“I guess that’s what we’re at the library to find out,” Ben said. Richie nodded and pushed his glasses up on his nose. Behind them, his eyes were sharp and thoughtful… but doubtful, Bill thought. He felt doubtful himself. At least there was no foolishness in Richie’s eyes, and that was a step in the right direction.
“You thinking about your dad’s Walther?” Richie asked. The one we took to Neibolt Street?”
“Yes,” Bill said.
“Even if we could really make silver bullets,” Richie said, “where would we
get the silver?”
“Let me worry about that,” Ben said quietly.
“Well… okay,” Richie said. “We’ll let Haystack worry about that. Then what? Neibolt Street again?”
Bill nodded. “Nee-Nee-Neibolt Street a-a-again. And then we buh-blow its fucking h-h-head o-off.”
The three of them stood there a moment longer, looking at each other solemnly, and then they went into the library.
5
“Sure an begorrah, it’s that black feller again!” Richie cried in his Irish Cop Voice.
A week had passed; it was nearly mid July and the underground clubhouse was almost finished.
“Top o the mornin to ye, Mr O’Hanlon, sor! And a foine, foine day it promises to be, foine as pertaters a-growin, as me old mither used to-”
“So far as I know, noon is the top of the morning, Richie,” Ben said, popping up in the hole, “and noon was two hours ago.” He and Richie had been putting in shoring around the sides of the hole. Ben had taken off his sweatshirt because the day was hot and the work was hard. His tee-shirt was gray with sweat and stuck to his chest and pouch of a stomach. He seemed remarkably unselfconscious of the way he looked, but Mike guessed that if Ben heard Beverly coming, he would be inside that baggy sweatshirt again before you could say puppy love.
