She nodded, at once horrified by the responsibility and bewitched by his trust. She opened the box, took out the slugs, and slipped one into the right front pocket of her jeans. The other she socketed in the Bullseye’s rubber cup, and it was by the cup that she carried the slingshot. She could feel the ball tightly enclosed in her fist, cold at first and then warming.
“Let’s go,” she said, her voice not quite steady. “Let’s go before I chicken out.”
Bill nodded, then looked sharply at Eddie. “Cuh-Can you d-d-do this, Eh-Eh-Eddie?”
Eddie nodded. “sure I can. I was alone last time. This time I’m with my friends. Right?” He looked at them and grinned a little. His expression was shy, fragile, and quite beautiful.
Richie clapped him on the back. “Thass right, senhorr. Anywhunn tries to steal your assipirator, we keel heem. But we keel heem slow.”
That’s terrible, Richie,” Bev said, giggling.
“Uh-Uh-under the p-porch,” Bill said. “A-A11 of you b-b-behind me. Then into the suh-suh-cellar.”
“If you go first and that thing jumps you, what do I do?” Beverly asked. “shoot through you?”
“If y-you have to,” Bill said. “But I suh-suh-suggest y-y-you try guh-hoing a-around, first.”
Richie laughed wildly at this.
“We’ll g-g-go through the whole puh-puh-place, if we have t-to.” He shrugged. “Maybe we won’t find be a-a-anything.”
“Do you believe that?” Mike asked.
“No,” Bill said briefly. “It’s h-h-here.”
Ben believed he was right. The house at 29 Neibolt Street seemed to be encased in a poisonous envelope. It could not be seen… but it could be felt. He licked his lips.
“You ruh-ruh-ready?” Bill asked them.
They all looked back at him. “ready, Bill,” Richie said.
“Cuh-come on, th-then,” Bill said. “stay cluh-close behind me, B-Beverly.” He dropped to his knees, crawled through the blighted rosebushes and under the porch.
8
They went this way: Bill, Beverly, Ben, Eddie, Richie, Stan, Mike. The leaves under the porch crackled and puffed up a sour old smell. Ben wrinkled his nose. Had he ever smelled fallen leaves like these? He thought not. And then an unpleasant idea struck him. They smelled the way he imagined a mummy would smell, just after its discoverer had levered open its coffin: all dust and bitter ancient tannic acid.
Bill had reached the broken cellar window and was looking into the cellar. Beverly crawled up beside him. “You see anything?”
Bill shook his head. “But that d-doesn’t m-m-mean nuh-huthin’s there. L-Look; there’s the c-coal-pile me and R-R-Richie used to get ow-out.”
Ben, who was looking between them, saw it. He was becoming excited as well as afraid now, and he welcomed the excitement, instinctively recognizing the fact that it could be a tool. Seeing the coal-pile was a little like seeing a great landmark about which you had only read or heard from others.
Bill turned around and slipped lithely through the window. Beverly gave Ben the Bullseye, folding his hand over the cup and ball nestled in it. “Give it to me the second I’m down,” she said. “The second.”
“Got you.”
She slipped down as easily and lithely as Bill had before her. There was-for Ben, at least-one heart-stopping instant when her blouse pulled out of her jeans and he saw her flat white belly. Then there was the thrill of her hands over his as he handed the slingshot down.
“Okay, I’ve got it. Come on.”
Ben turned around himself and began to wriggle through the window. He should have forseen what happened next; it was really inevitable. He got stuck. His fanny bound up against the rectangular cellar window and he couldn’t go in any further. He started to pull himself out and realized, horrified, that he could do it, but was very apt to yank his pants-and perhaps his underpants as well-down to his knees when he did. And there he would be, with his extremely large ass practically in his beloved’s face.
“Hurry up!” Eddie said.
Ben pushed grimly with both hands. For a moment he still couldn’t move, and then his butt popped through the window-hole. His bluejeans dragged painfully up into his crotch, squashing his balls. The top of the window rucked his shin all the way up to his shoulderblades. Now his gut was stuck.
“Suck in, Haystack,” Richie said, giggling hysterically. “You better suck in or we’ll have to send Mike after his dad’s chainfall to pull you out again.”
“Beep-beep, Richie,” Ben said through gritted teeth. He sucked his belly in as much as he could. He had never really realized just how big his stupid stomach was until this supremely embarrassing moment. He moved a little further, then stopped again.
He turned his head as far as he could, fighting panic and claustrophobia. His face had gone a bright sweaty red. The sour smell of the leaves was heavy in his nostrils, cloying. “Bill! Can you guys pull me?”
He felt Bill grasp one of his ankles, Beverly the other. He sucked his belly in as far as he could. A moment later he came tumbling through the window. Bill grabbed him. Both of them almost fell over. Ben couldn’t look at Bev. He had never in his life been as embarrassed as he was at that moment.
“Y-Y-You okay, m-m-man?”
“Yeah.”
Bill laughed shakily. Beverly joined him, and then Ben was able to laugh a little too, although it would be years before he could see anything remotely funny in what had happened.
“Hey!” Richie called down. “Eddie needs help, okay?”
“O-O-Okay.” Bill and Ben took up positions below the window. Eddie came through on his back. Bill got his legs just above the knees.
“Watch what you’re doing,” Eddie said in a querulous, nervous voice. “I’m ticklish.”
“Ramon ees plenny teekeleesh, senhorr,” Richie’s voice called down.
Ben got Eddie around the waist, trying to keep his hand away from the cast and the sling. The two of them manhandled Eddie through the cellar window like a corpse. Eddie cried out once, but that was all.
“Eh-Eh-Eddie?”
“Yeah,” Eddie said, “okay. No big deal.” But large drops of sweat stood out on his forehead and he was breathing in quick rasps. His eyes darted around the cellar.
Bill stepped back again. Beverly stood near him, now holding the Bullseye by the shaft and the cup, ready to fire if necessary. Her eyes swept the cellar constantly. Richie came through next, followed by Stan and Mike. Both of the latter moved with a smooth grace that Ben deeply envied. Then they were all down, down in the cellar where Bill and Richie had seen It only a month before.
The room was dim, but not dark. Dusky light shafted in through the windows and pooled on the dirt floor. The cellar seemed very big to Ben, almost too big, as if he were witnessing an optical illusion of some sort. Dusty rafters crisscrossed overhead. The furnace-pipes were rusty. Some sort of duty white cloth hung from the water-pipes in dirty strings and strands. The smell was down here too. A dirty yellow smell. Ben thought: It’s here, all right. Oh yeah.
Bill started toward the stairs. The others fell in behind him. He halted at their foot and glanced underneath. He reached under with one foot and kick-pawed something out. They looked at it wordlessly. It was a white clown-glove, now streaked with dirt and dust.
“Uh-uh-upstairs,” he said.
They went up and emerged into a dirty kitchen. One plain straight-backed chair stood marooned in the center of the humped hillocky linoleum. That was it for furniture. There were empty liquor bottles in one corner. Ben could see others in the pantry. He could smell booze-wine, mostly-and old stale cigarettes. Those smells were dominant, but that other smell was there, too. It was getting stronger all the time.
Beverly went to the cupboards and opened one of them. She screamed piercingly as a blackish-brown Norway rat tumbled out almost into her face. It struck the counter with a plop and glared around at them with its black eyes. Still screaming, Beverly raised the Bullseye and pulled the sling back.
“NO!” Bill roared.
She turned her pale terrified face toward him. Then she nodded and relaxed her arm, the silver ball unfired-but Ben thought she had been very, very close. She backed up slowly, ran into Ben, jumped. He put an arm around her, tight.
The rat scurried down the length of the counter, jumped to the floor, ran into the pantry, and was gone.
“It wanted me to shoot at it,” Beverly said in a faint voice. “Use up half of our ammunition on it.”
“Yes,” Bill said. “It’s l-l-like the FBI training r-range at Quh-Quh-Quantico, in a w-w-way. They seh-send y-you down this f-f-hake street and p-pop up tuh-hargets. If you shuh-shoot any honest citizens ih-instead of just cruh-crooks, you l-lose puh-hoints.”
“I can’t do this, Bill,” she said. “I’ll mess it up. Here. You.” She held the Bullseye out, but Bill shook his head.
“You h-h-have to, B-Beverly.”
There was a mewling from another cupboard.
Richie walked toward it.
“Don’t get too close!” Stan barked. “It might-”
Richie looked inside and an expression of sick disgust crossed his face. He slammed the cupboard shut with a bang that produced a dead echo in the empty house.
“A litter.” Richie sounded ill. “Biggest litter I ever saw… anyone ever saw, probably.” He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. There’s hundreds of them in there.” He looked at them, his mouth twitching a little on one side. “Their tails… they were all tangled up, Bill. Knotted together.” He grimaced. “Like snakes.”
They looked at the cupboard door. The mewling was muffled but still audible. Rats, Ben thought, looking at Bill’s white face and, over Bill’s shoulder, Mike’s ashy-gray one. Everyone’s ascared of rats. It knows it, too.
“C-C-Come on,” Bill said. “H-Here on Nuh-Nuh-Neibolt Street, the f-f-fun just neh-hever stops.”
They went down the front hall. Here the unlovely smells of rotting plaster and old urine were intermixed. They were able to look out at the street through dirty panes of glass and see their bikes. Bev’s and Ben’s were heeled over on their kickstands. Bill’s leaned against a stunted maple tree. To Ben the bikes looked a thousand miles away, like things seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The deserted street with its casual patchings of asphalt, the faded humid sky, the steady ding-ding-ding of a locomotive running on a siding… these things seemed like dreams to him, hallucinations. What was real was this squalid hallway with its stinks and shadows.
There was a shatter of broken brown glass in one corner-Rheingold bottles.
In the other corner, wet and swelled, was a digest-sized girlybook. The woman on the cover was bent over a chair, her skirt up in the back to show the tops of her fishnet hose and her black panties. The picture did not look particularly sexy to Ben, nor did it embarrass him that Beverly had also glanced at it. Moisture had yellowed the woman’s skin and moisture had humped the cover in
