for now that didn’t matter. The trick was just to get there. The world wavered, blurred, grew faint behind waves of gray. He stuck his tongue out and bit down on it savagely. The pain was immediate and exquisite. The world swam back into focus. He became aware that he was still holding the ragged haft of the letter-opener, and he tossed it away. Here, at last, was the circulation desk, looking as tall as Everest.
Mike got his good leg under him and pushed himself up, clutching at the edge of the desk with the hand that wasn’t holding the belt tight. His mouth was drawn down in a trembling grimace, his eyes slitted. At last he managed to get all the way up. He stood there, storklike, and groped the telephone over to him. Taped to the side were three numbers: fire, police, and hospital. With one shaking finger that looked at least ten miles away, Mike dialed the hospital: 555-3711. He closed his eyes as the phone began to ring… and then they opened wide as the voice of Pennywise the Clown answered.
“Howdy nigger!” Pennywise cried, and then screamed laughter as sharp as broken glass into Mike’s ear. “What do you say? How you doon? I think you’re dead, what do you think? I think Henry did the job on you! Want a balloon, Mikey? Want a balloon? How you doon? Hello there!”
Mike’s eyes turned up to the face of the grandfather clock, the Mueller Clock, it was called, and saw with no surprise at ail that the clockface had been replaced with his father’s face, gray and raddled with cancer. The eyes were turned up to show only bulging whites. Suddenly his father popped his tongue out and the clock began to strike.
Mike lost his grip on the circulation desk. He swayed for a moment on his good leg and then he fell down again. The phone swung before him at the end of its cord like a mesmerist’s amulet. It was becoming very hard to hold onto the belt now.
“Hello dere Amos!” Pennywise cried brightly from the swinging telephone handset. “dis here’s de Kingfish! I is de Kingish in Derry anyhow, and dat’s de troof. Wouldn’t you say so, boy?”
“If there’s anyone there,” Mike croaked, “a real voice behind the one I am hearing, please help me. My name is Michael Hanlon and I’m at the Derry Public Library. I am bleeding to death. If you’re there, I can’t hear you. I’m not being allowed to hear you. If you’re there, please hurry.”
He lay on his side, drawing his legs up until he was in a fetal position. He took two turns around his right hand with the belt and concentrated on holding it as the world drifted away in those cottony, balloon-like clouds of gray.
“Hello dere, howyadoon?” Pennywise screamed from the dangling, swinging phone. “Howyadoon, you dirty coon? Hello
4
KANSAS STREET / 12:20 P.M.
–… there,” Henry Bowers said. “Howyadoon, you little cunt?”
Beverly reacted instantly, turning to run. It was a quicker reaction than any of them had expected, and she might actually have gotten a running start… but for her hair. Henry snatched at it, caught part of its long flow, and pulled her back. He grinned into her face. His breath was thick and warm and stinking.
“Howyadoon?” Henry Bowers asked her. “Where ya goin? Back to play with your asshole friends some more? I think I’ll cut off your nose and make you eat it. You like that?”
She struggled to get free. Henry laughed and shook her head back and forth by the hair. The knife flashed dangerously in the hazy August sunshine.
Abruptly a car-horn honked-a long blast.
“Here! Here! What are you boys doing? Let that girl go!”
It was an old lady behind the wheel of a well-preserved 1950 Ford. She had pulled up to the curb and was leaning across the blanket-covered seat to peer out the passenger-side window. At the sight of her angry, honest face, the blank, dazed look left Victor Criss’s eyes for the first time and he looked nervously at Henry. “What-”
“Please!” Bev cried shrilly. “He’s got a knife! A knife!”
The old lady’s anger now became concern, surprise, and fear as well. “What are you boys doing? Let her alone!”
Across the street-Bev saw this quite clearly-Herbert Ross got out of the lawn-chair on his porch, approached the porch rail, and looked over. His face was as blank as Belch Huggins’s. He folded his paper, turned, and went quietly into the house.
“Let her be!” the old lady cried shrilly.
Henry bared his teeth and suddenly ran at her car, dragging Beverly after him by the hair. She stumbled, went to one knee, was dragged. The pain in her scalp was excruciating, monstrous. She felt some of her hair rip out.
The old lady screamed and cranked the passenger side window frantically. Henry, still roaring, stabbed down, and the switchblade skated across glass. The woman’s foot came off the old Ford’s clutch-pedal and it went down Kansas Street in three big jerks, bouncing up over the curb, where it stalled. Henry went after it, still pulling Beverly along. Victor licked his lips and looked around. Belch pushed the New York Yankees baseball cap he was wearing up on his forehead and then dug at his ear in a puzzled gesture.
Bev saw the old woman’s white, frightened face for one moment, and then saw her pawing at the door-locks, first on the passenger side, then on her own. The Ford’s engine ground and caught. Henry lifted one booted foot and kicked out a taillight.
“Get outta here, you dried-up old bitch!”
The tires screamed as the old lady pulled back out in the street. An oncoming pickup truck swerved to avoid her; its horn blasted. Henry turned back toward Bev, beginning to smile again, and she hiked one sneakered foot directly into his balls.
The smile on Henry’s face turned into a grimace of agony. The switchknife dropped from his hand and clattered onto the sidewalk. His other hand left its nesting-place in the tangle of her hair (pulling once more, terribly, as it went) and then he sank to his knees, trying to scream, holding his crotch. She could see strands of her own coppery hair on one hand, and in that instant all of her terror turned to bright hate. She drew in a great, hitching breath and hocked a remarkably large looey onto the top of his head.
Then she turned and ran.
Belch lumbered three steps after her and then stopped. He and Victor went to Henry, who threw them aside and then staggered to his feet, both hands still cupping his balls; it was not the first time that summer that he had been kicked there.
He leaned over and picked up the switchblade.”… on,” he wheezed.
“What, Henry?” Belch said anxiously.
Henry turned a face toward him that was so full of sweating pain and sick, blazing hate that Belch fell back a step. “I said… come… on!” he managed, and began to stagger and lurch up the street after Beverly, holding his crotch.
“We can’t catch her now, Henry,” Victor said uneasily. “Hell, you can hardly walk.”
“We’ll catch her,” Henry panted. His upper lip was rising and falling in an unconscious dog-like sneer. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and ran down his hectic cheeks. “We’ll catch her, all right. Because I know where she’s going. She’s going down into the Barrens to be with her asshole
5
THE DERRY TOWN HOUSE / 2:00 A.M.
friends,” Beverly said.
“Hmmm?” Bill looked at her. His thoughts had been far away. They had been walking hand-in-hand, the silence between them companionable, slightly charged with mutual attraction. He had caught only the last word of what she had said. A block ahead, the lights of the Town House shone through the low ground-fog.
“I said, you were my best friends. The only friends I ever had back then.” She smiled. “Making friends has never been my strong suit, I guess, although I’ve got a good one back in Chicago. A woman named Kay McCall. I think you’d like her, Bill.”
“Probably would. I’ve never been real fast to make friends myself.” He smiled. “Back then, we were all we nuh-nuh-needed.” He saw beads of moisture in her hair, appreciated the way the lights made a nimbus about her head. Her eyes were turned gravely up to his.
“I need something now,” she said.
“W-What’s that?”
“I need you to kiss me,” she said.
He thought of Audra, and for the first time it occurred to him that she looked like Beverly. He wondered if maybe that had been the attraction all along, the reason he had been able to find guts enough to ask Audra out near the end of the Hollywood party where they had been introduced. He felt a pang of unhappy guilt… and then he took Beverly, his childhood friend, in his arms.
Her kiss was firm and warm and sweet. Her breasts pushed against his open coat and her hips moved against him… away… and then against him again. When her hips moved away a second tune, he plunged both of his hands into her hair and moved against her. When she felt him growing hard, she uttered a little gasp and put her face against the side of his neck. He felt her tears on his skin, warm and secret.
“Come on,” she said. “Quick.”
He took her hand and they walked the rest of the way to the Town House. The lobby was old, festooned with plants, and still possessed of a certain fading charm. The decor was very much Nineteenth Century Lumberman. It was deserted at this hour except for the desk clerk, who could be dimly seen in the inner office, his feet cocked up on the desk, watching TV. Bill pushed the third- floor button with a finger that trembled just slightly-excitement? nervousness? guilt? all of the above? Oh yeah sure, and a kind of almost insane joy and fear as well. These feelings did not mix pleasantly, but they seemed necessary. He led her down the hallway toward his room, deciding in some confused way that if he were to be unfaithful, it should be a complete act of infidelity, consummated in his place, not hers. He found himself thinking of Susan Browne, his first book-agent and, at the age of not quite twenty, his first lover.
Cheating. Cheating on my wife. He tried to get this through his head, but it seemed both real and unreal at the same time. What seemed strongest was an unhappy sense of homesickness: an old-fashioned feeling of falling away. Audra would be up by now, making coffee, sitting at the kitchen table in her robe, perhaps studying lines, perhaps reading a Dick Francis novel.
His key rattled in the lock of room 311. If they had gone to Beverly’s room on the fifth floor, they would have seen the message-light on her phone blinking; the TV-watching desk clerk would have given her a message to call her friend Kay in Chicago (after Kay’s third frantic call, he had finally remembered to post the message), things might have taken a different course: the five of them might not have been fugitives from the Derry police when that day’s light finally broke. But they went to his-as things had perhaps, been arranged.
The door opened. They were inside. She looked at him, eyes bright, cheeks flushed, her breast rising and falling rapidly. He took her in his arms and was overwhelmed by the feeling of rightness- the feeling of the circle between past and present closing with a triumphant seamlessness. He kicked the door shut clumsily with one foot and she laughed her warm breath into his mouth.
“My heart-” She said, and put his hand on her left breast. He could feel it below that firm, almost maddening softness, racing like an engine.
“Your h-h-heart-”
“My heart.”
