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.
C H A P T E R 1 4
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?'
Mike snorts laughter and nods.
'Miss Scawlett! Miss Scawlett!' Richie shrieks in his Pickaninny Voice. 'It's gettin a little wa'am in de smokehouse, Miss Scawlett!'
Laughing, Bill says, 'Another engineering and architectural triumph by Ben Hanscom.'
Beverly nods. 'We were digging out the clubhouse when you brought your father's photograph album to the Barrens, Mike.'
'Oh, Christ!' Bill says, sitting suddenly bolt-upright. 'And the pictures - '
Richie nods grimly. 'The same trick as in Georgie's room. Only that time we all saw it.'
Ben says, 'I remembered what happened to the extra silver dollar.'
They all turn to look at him.
'I gave the other three to a friend of mine before I came out here,' Ben says quietly. 'For his kids. I remembered there had been a fourth, but I couldn't remember what happened to it. Now I do.' He looks at Bill. 'We made a silver slug out of it, didn't we? You, me, and Richie. At first we were going to make a silver bullet - '
'You were pretty sure you could do it,' Richie agrees. 'But in the end - '
'We got c-cold fuh-feet.' Bill nods slowly. The memory has fallen naturally into its place, and he hears that same low but distinct click! when it happens. We're getting closer, he thinks.
'We went back to Neibolt Street,' Richie says. 'All of us.'
'You saved my life, Big Bill,' Ben says suddenly and Bill shakes his head. ' You did, though,' Ben persists, and this time Bill doesn't shake his head. He suspects that maybe he had done just that, although he does not yet remember how . . . and was it him? He thinks maybe Beverly . . . but that is not there. Not yet, anyway.
'Excuse me for a second,' Mike says. 'I've got a sixpack in the back fridge.'
'Have one of mine,' Richie says.
'Hanlon no drinkum white man's beer,' Mike replies. 'Especially not yours, Trashmouth.'
'Beep-beep, Mikey,' Rickie says solemnly, and Mike goes to get his beer on a warm wave of their laughter.
He snaps on the light in the lounge, a tacky little room with seedy chairs, a Silex badly in need of scrubbing, and a bulletin board covered with old notices, wage and hour information, and a few New Yorker cartoons now turning yellow and curling up at the edges. He opens the little refrigerator and feels the shock sink into him, bone-deep and icewhite, the way February cold sank into you when February was here and it seemed that April never would be. Blue and orange balloons drift out in a flood, dozens of them, a New Year's Eve bouquet of party-balloons, and he thinks incoherently in the midst of his fear, All we need is Guy Lombardo tootling away on 'Auld Lang Syne.' They waft past his face and rise toward the lounge ceiling. He's trying to scream, unable to scream, seeing what had been behind the balloons, what It had popped into the refrigerator beside his beer, as if for a late-night snack after his worthless friends have all told their worthless stones and gone back to their rented beds in this home town that is no longer home.
Mike takes a step backward, his hands going to his face, shutting the vision out. He stumbles over one of the chairs, almost falls, and takes his hands away. It is still there; Stan Uris's severed head beside Mike's sixpack of Bud Light, the head not of a man but of an eleven-year-old boy. The mouth is open in a soundless scream but Mike can see neither teeth nor tongue because the mouth has been stuffed full of feathers. The feathers are a light brown and unspeakably huge. He knows well enough what bird those feathers came from. Oh yes. Oh yes indeed. He had seen the bird in May of 1958 and they had all seen it in early August of 1958 and then, years later, while visiting his dying father, he had found out that Will Hanlon had seen it once, too, after his escape from the fire at the Black Spot. The blood from S tan's tattered neck has dripped down and formed a coagulated pool on the fridge's bottom shelf. It glitters dark ruby-red in the uncompromising glow shed by the fridge bulb.