It

'It's so beautiful here,' Bev sighed.

'Yeah, not bad,' Richie agreed. 'The blackflies are gone and there's enough of a breeze to keep the mosquitoes away.' He looked at her hopefully. 'Got any cigarettes?'

'No,' she said. 'I had a couple but I smoked them yesterday.'

'Too bad,' Richie said.

There was the blast of an air-horn and they all watched as a long freight rumbled across the embankment on the far side of the Barrens and toward the trainyards. Jeez, if it was a passenger train they'd have a great view, Richie thought. First the poor-folks' houses of the Old Cape, then the bamboo swamps on the other side of the Kenduskeag, and finally, before leaving the Barrens, the smoldering gravel-pit that was the town dump.

For just a moment he found himself thinking about Eddie's story again — the leper under the abandoned house on Neibolt Street. He pushed it out of his mind and turned to Ben.

'So what was your best part, Haystack?'

'Huh?' Ben turned to him guiltily. As Bev looked out across the Kenduskeag, lost in thoughts of her own, he had been looking at her profile . . . and at the bruise on her cheekbone.

'Of the movies, Dumbo. What was your best part?'

'I liked it when Dr Frankenstein started tossing the bodies to the crocodiles under his house,' Ben said. That was my best part.'

'That was gross,' Beverly said, and shivered. 'I hate things like that. Crocodiles and piranhas and sharks.'

'Yeah? What's piranhas?' Richie asked, immediately interested.

'Little tiny fish,' Beverly said. 'And they've got all these little tiny teeth, but they're wicked sharp. And if you go into a river where they are, they eat you right down to the bone.'

'Wow!'

'I saw this movie once and these natives wanted to cross a river but the footbridge was down,' she said. 'So they put a cow in the water on a rope, and crossed while the piranhas were eating the cow. When they pulled it out, the cow was nothing but a skeleton. I had nightmares for a week.'

'Man, I wish I had some of those fish,' Richie said happily. 'I'd put em in Henry Bowers' bathtub.'

Ben began to giggle. 'I don't think he takes baths.'

'I don't know about that, but I do know we better watch out for those guys,' Beverly said. Her ringers touched the bruise on her cheek. 'My dad went up the side of my head day before yesterday for breaking a pile of dishes. One a week is enough.'

There was a moment of silence that might have been awkward but was not. Richie broke it by saying his best part was when the Teenage Werewolf got the evil hypnotist. They talked about the movies — and other horror movies they had seen, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents on TV — for an hour or more. Bev spotted daisies growing on the riverbank and picked one. She held it first under Richie's chin and then under Ben's chin to see if they liked butter. She said they both did. As she held the flower under their chins, each was conscious of her light touch on their should ers and the clean scent of her hair. Her face was close to Ben's only for a moment or two, but that night he dreamed of how her eyes had looked during that brief endless span of time.

Conversation was fading a little when they heard the crackling sounds of people approaching along the path. The three of them turned quickly toward the sound and Richie was suddenly, acutely aware that the river was at their backs. There was no place to run.

The voices drew closer. They got to their feet, Richie and Ben moving a little in front of Beverly without even thinking about it.

The screen of bushes at the end of the path shook — and suddenly Bill Denbrough emerged. Another kid was with him, a fellow Richie knew a little bit. His name was Bradley

something, and he had a terrible lisp. Probably went up to Bangor with Bill for that speech-therapy thing, Richie thought.

'Big Bill!' he said, and then in the Voice of Toodles: 'We are glad to see you, Mr Denbrough, mawster.'

Bill looked at them and grinned — and a peculiar certainty stole over Richie as Bill looked from him to Ben to Beverly and then back to Bradley Whatever-His-Name-Was. Beverly was a part of them. Bill's eyes said so. Bradley What's-His-Name was not. He might stay for awhile today, might even come down to the Barrens again — no one would tell him no, so sorry, the Losers' Club membership is full, we already have our speech-impediment member — but he was not part of it. He was not part of them.

This thought led to a sudden, irrational fe ar. For a moment he felt the way you did when you suddenly realized you had swum out too far and the water was over your head. There was an intuitive flash: We're being drawn into something. Being picked and chosen. None of this is accidental. Are we all here yet?

Then the intuition fell into a meaningless jumble of thought — like the smash of a glass pane on a stone floor. Besides, it didn't matter. Bill was here, and Bill would take care; Bill would not let things get out of control. He was the tallest of them, and surely the most handsome. Richie only had to look sideways at Bev's eyes, fixed on Bill, and then farther, to Ben's eyes, fixed knowingly and unhappily on Bev's face, to know that. Bill was also the strongest of them — and not just physically. There was a good deal more to it than that, but since Richie did not know either the word charisma or the full meaning of the word magnetism., he only felt that Bill's strength ran deep and might manifest itself in many ways, some of them probably unexpected. And Richie suspected if Beverly fell for him, or 'got a crush on him,' or whatever they called it, Ben would not be jealous (like he would, Richie thought, if she got a crush on me); he would accept it as nothing but natural. And there was something else: Bill was good. It was stupid to think such a thing (he did not, in fact, precisely think it; he felt it), but there it was. Goodness and strength seemed to radiate from Bill. He was like a knight in an old movie, a movie that was corny but still had the power to make you cry and cheer and clap at the end. Strong and good. And five years later, after his memories of what had happened in Derry both during and before that summer had begun to fade rapidly, it occurred to a Richie Tozier in his mid –teens that John Kennedy reminded him of Stuttering

Bill.

Who? His mind would respond.

He would look up, faintly puzzled, and shake his head. Some guy I used to know, he would think, and would dismiss vague unease by pushing his glasses up on his nose and turning to his homework again. Some guy I used to know a long time ago.

Bill Denbrough put his hands on his hips, smiled sunnily, and said: 'Wuh-wuh-well, h-here we a-a-are . . . now wuh-wuh-wuh-what are w-we d-d-doing?'

'Got any cigarettes?' Richie asked hopefully.

11

Five days later, as June drew toward its end, Bill told Richie that he wanted to go down to Neibolt Street and investigate under the porch where Eddie had seen the leper.