'What are you guys talking about?' Eddie asks, looking from one to the other.
Richie looks at Mike, but Mike shakes his head. 'You go ahead, Richie. I've had my say for the evening.'
'The rest of you don't know or maybe don't remember, because you left,' Richie tells them. 'Me and Mikey, we were the last two Injuns in the smoke-hole.'
'The smoke-hole,' Bill muses. His eyes are far and blue.
'The burning sensation in my eyes,' Richie says, 'under my contact lenses. I felt it for the first time right after Mike called me in California. I didn't know what it was then, but I do now. It was smoke. Smoke that was twenty-seven years old.' He looks at Mike. 'Psychological, would you say? Psychosomatic? Something from the subconscious?'
'I would say not,' Mike answers quietly. 'I would say that what you felt was as real as those balloons, or the head I saw in the icebox, or the corpse of Tony Tracker that Eddie saw. Tell them, Richie.'
Richie says: 'It was four or five days after Mike brought his dad's album down to the Barrens. Sometime just after the middle of July, I guess. The clubhouse was done. But . . . the smoke-hole thing, that was your idea, Haystack. You got it out of one of your books.'
Smiling a little, Ben nods.
Richie thinks: It was overcast that day. No breeze. Thunder in the air. Like the day a month or so later when we stood in the stream and made a circle and Stan cut our hands with that chunk of Coke bottle. The air was just sitting there, waiting for something to happen, and later Bill said that was why it got so bad in there so quick, because there was no draft.
July 17th. Yes, that was it, that had been the day of the smoke-hole. July 17th, 1958, almost a month after summer vacation began and the nucleus of the Losers - Bill, Eddie, and Ben - had formed down in the Barrens. Let me look up the weather forecast for that day almost twenty-seven years ago, Richie thinks, and I'll tell you what it said before I even read it: Richard Tozier, aka the Great Mentalizer. 'Hot, humid, chance of thundershowers. And watch out for the visions that may come while you're down in the smoke-hole . . . '
It had been two days after the body of Jimmy Cullum was discovered, the day after Mr Nell had come down to the Barrens again and sat right on the clubhouse without knowing it was there, because by then they had capped it off and Ben himself had carefully overseen the replacement of the sods. Unless you got right down on your hands and knees and crawled around, you'd have no idea anything was there. Like the dam, Ben's clubhouse had been a roaring success, but this time Mr Nell didn't know anything about it.
He had questioned them carefully, officially, taking down their answers in his black notebook, but there had been little they could tell him - at least about Jimmy Cullum - and Mr Nell had gone away again, after reminding them once more that they were not to play in the Barrens alone . . . ever. Richie guessed that Mr Nell would have told them simply to get out if anyone in the Derry Police Department had really believed that the Cullum boy (or any of the others) had actually been killed in the Barrens. But they knew better; because of the sewer and stormdrain system, that was simply where the remains tended to finish up.
Mr Nell had come on the 16th, yes, a hot and humid day also, but sunny. The 17th had been overcast.
'Are you going to talk to us or not, Richie?' Bev asks. She is smiling a little, her lips full and a pale rose-red, her eyes alight.
'I'm just thinking about where to start,' Richie says. He takes his glasses off, wipes them on his skirt, and suddenly he knows where: with the ground opening up at his and Bill's feet. Of course he knew about the clubhouse - so did Bill and the rest of them, but it still freaked him out, seeing the ground suddenly open on a slit of darkness like that.
He remembers Bill riding him double on the back of Silver to the usual place on Kansas Street and then stowing his bike under the little bridge. He remembers the two of them walking along the path toward the clearing, sometimes having to turn sideways because the brush was so thick - it was midsummer now, and the Barrens was at that year's apogee oflushness. He remembers swatting at the mosquitoes that hummed maddeningly close to their ears; he even remembers Bill saying (oh how clearly it all comes back, not as if it happened yesterday, but as if it is happening now), 'H-H-Hold it a s-s-s
2
- econd, Ruh-Richie. There's a damn guh-guh-hood one on the b-back of your neh-neck.'
'Oh Christ,' Richie said. He hated mosquitoes. Little flying vampires, that's all they were when you got right down to the facts. 'Kill it, Big Bill.'
Bill swatted the back of Richie's neck.
'Ouch!'
'Suh-suh-see?'
Bill held his hand in front of Richie's face. There was a broken mosquito body in the center of an irregular patch of blood. My blood, Richie thought, which was shed for you and for many. 'Yeeick,' he said.
'D-Don't w-worry,' Bill said. 'Li'l fucker'll neh-never dance the tuh-tuh-tango again.'
They walked on, slapping at mosquitoes, waving at the clouds of noseeums attracted by something in the smell of their sweat - something which would years later be identified as 'pheromones.' Whatever they were.
'Bill, when you gonna tell the rest of em about the silver bullets?' Richie asked as they approached the clearing. In this case 'the rest of them' meant Bev, Eddie, Mike, and Stan - although Richie guessed Stan already had a good idea of what they were studying up on down at the Public Library. Stan was sharp - too sharp for his own good, Richie sometimes thought. The day Mike brought his father's album down to the Barrens Stan had almost flipped out. Richie had, in fact, been nearly convinced that they wouldn't see Stan again and the Losers' Club would become a sextet (a word Richie liked a lot, always with the emphasis on the first syllable). But Stan had been back the next day, and Richie had - respected him all the more for that. 'You going to tell them today?'
'Nuh-not t-today,' Bill said.
'You don't think they'll work, do you?'
Bill shrugged, and Richie, who maybe understood Bill Denbrough better than anyone ever would until Audra Phillips, suspected all the things Bill might have said if not for the roadblock of his speech impediment: that kids making silver bullets was boys' book stuff, comic-book stuff . . . In a word, it was crap. Dangerous crap. They could try it, yeah. Ben Hanscom might even be able to bring it off, yeah. In a movie it would work, yeah. But . . .
'So?'
'I got an i-i-i-idea,' Bill said. 'Simpler. But only if Beh-Beh-Beverly - '
'If Beverly what?'
'Neh-hever mind.'
And Bill would say no more on the subject.
They came into the clearing. If you looked closely, you might have thought that the grass there had a slightly matted look - a slightly used look. You might even have thought that there was something a bit artificial - almost arranged - about the scatter of leaves and pine needles on top of the sods. Bill picked up a Ring-Ding wrapper - Ben's, almost certainly - and put it absently in his pocket.
The boys crossed to the center of the clearing . . . and a piece of ground about ten inches long by three inches wide swung up with a dirty squall of hinges, revealing a black eyelid. Eyes looked out of that blackness, giving Richie a momentary chill. But they were only Eddie Kaspbrak's eyes, and it was Eddie, whom he would visit in the hospital a week later, who intoned hollowly: 'Who's that trip-trapping on my bridge?'