It

He shivered.

(the posts)

He shook his head. I couldn't say that without stuttering even now, he thought, and for just a moment he felt that he was on the edge of understanding it all.

Then it was gone.

He opened the tire-patching kit and went to work. It took a long time to get it just right. Mike leaned against the wall in a bar of late-afternoon sun, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and his tie yanked down, whistling a tune which Bill finally identified as 'She Blinded Me with Science.'

While he waited for the tire cement to set, Bill had — just for something to do, he told himself — oiled Silver's chain, sprocket, and axles. It didn't make the bike look any better, but when he spun the tires he found that the squeak was gone, and that was satisfying. Silver never would have won any beauty-contests anyway. His one virtue was that he could go like a blue streak.

By that tune, five –thirty in the afternoon, he had nearly forgotten Mike was there; he had become completely absorbed in small yet utterly satisfying acts of maintenance. He screwed the nozzle of the pump onto the rear tire's valve and watched the tire fatten, shooting for the right pressure by guess and by gosh. He was pleased to see that the patch was holding nicely.

When he thought he had it right, he unscrewed the pump-nozzle and was about to turn Silver over when he heard the rapid snap-flutter of playing cards behind him. He whirled, almost knocking Silver over.

Mike was standing there with a deck of blue-backed Bicycle playing cards in one hand . 'Want these?'

Bill let out a long, shaky sigh. 'You've got clothespins, too, I suppose?'

Mike took four from the flap pocket of his shirt and held them out.

'Just happened to have them around, I suh-huppose?'

'Yeah, something like that,' Mike said.

Bill took the cards and tried to shuffle them. His hands shook and the cards sprayed out of his hands. They went everywhere . , . but only two landed face-up. Bill looked at them, then up at Mike. Mike's gaze was frozen on the littered playing cards. His lips had pulled back from his teeth.

The two up cards were both the ace of spades.

'That's impossible,' Mike said. 'I just opened that deck. Look.' He pointed at the swill-can just inside the garage door and Bill saw the cellophane wrapper, 'How can one deck of cards have two aces of spades?'

Bill bent down and picked them up. 'How can you spray a deck of cards all over the floor and have only two of them land face up?' he asked. 'That's an even better que — '

He turned the aces over, looked, and then showed them to Mike. One of them was a blueback, the other a redback.

'Holy Christ, Mikey, what have you got us into?'

'What are you going to do with those?' Mike asked in a numb voice.

'Why, put them on,' Bill said, and suddenly he began to laugh. 'That's what I'm supposed to do, isn't it? If there are certain preconditions for the use of magic, those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves. Right?'

Mike didn't reply. He watched as Bill went to Silver's rear wheel and attached the playing cards. His hands were still shaking and it took awhile, but he finally got it done, drew in one tight breath, held it, and spun the rear wheel. The playing cards machine-gunned loudly against the spokes in the garage's silence.

'Come on,' Mike said softly. 'Come on in, Big Bill. I'll make us some chow.'

They had scoffed the burgers and now sat smoking, watching dark begin to unfold from dusk in Mike's back yard. Bill took out his wallet, found someone's business card, and wrote upon it the sentence that had plagued him ever since he had seen Silver in the window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. He showed it to Mike, who read it carefully, lips pursed.

'Does it mean anything to you?' Bill asked.

'"He thr usts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts."' He nodded. 'Yes, I know what that is.'

'Well then, tell me. Or are you going to give me some more cuh-cuh-crap about figuring it out for myself?'

'No,' Mike said, 'in this case I think it's okay to tell you. The phrase goes back to English times. It's a tongue-twister that became a speech exercise for lispers and stutterers. Your mother kept trying to get you to say it that summer. The summer of 1958. You used to go around mumb ling it to yourself.'

'I did?' Bill said, and then, slowly, answering his own question: 'I did.'

'You must have wanted to please her very much.'

Bill, who suddenly felt he might cry, only nodded. He didn't trust himself to speak.

'You never made it,' Mike told him. 'I remember that. You tried like hell but your tang kept getting all tungled up.'

'But I did say it,' Bill replied. 'At least once.'

'When?'

Bill brought his fist down on the picnic table hard enough to hurt. 'I don't remember!' he shouted. And then, dully, he said it again: 'I just don't remember.'

CHAPTER 1 2 Three Uninvited Guests

1

On the day after Mike Hanlon made his calls, Henry Bowers began to hear voices. Voices had been talking to him all day long. For awhile, Henry thought they were coming from the moon. In the late afternoon, looking up from where he was hoeing in the garden, he could see the moon in the blue daytime sky, pale and small. A ghost-moon.

That, in fact, was why he believed it was the moon that was talking to him. Only a ghost-moon would talk in ghost-voices — the voices of his old friends, and the voices of those little kids who had played down in the Barrens so long ago. Those, and another voice . . . one he did not dare name.

Victor Criss spoke from the moon first. They comin back, Henry. All of em, man. They comin back to Derry.

Then Belch Huggins spoke from the moon, perhaps from the dark side of the moon. You'rethe only one, Henry. The only one of us left. You'll have to get em for me and Vie. Ain't no little kids can rank us out like that. Why, I hit a ball one time down to Tracker's, and Tony Tracker said that ball would have been out of Yankee Stadium.

He hoed, looking up at the ghost-moon in the sky, and after awhile Fogarty came over and hit him in the back of the neck and knocked him flat on his face.

'You're hoein up the peas right along with the weeds, you ijit.'

Henry got up, brushing dirt off his face and out of his hair. There stood Fogarty, a big man in a white jacket and white pants, his belly swelled out in front of him. It was illegal for the guards (who were called 'counsellors' here at Juniper Hill) to carry billyclubs, so a number of them — Fogarty, Adler, and Koontz were the worst — carried rolls of quarters in their pockets. They almost always hit you with them in the same place, right in the back of the neck. There was no rule against quarters. Quarters were not considered a deadly weapon at Juniper Hill, an institution for the mentally ins ane which stood on the outskirts of Augusta near the Sidney town line.

'I'm sorry, Mr Fogarty,' Henry said, and offered a big grin which showed an irregular line of yellow teeth. They looked like the pickets in a fence outside a haunted house. Henry had begun to lose his teeth when he was fourteen or so.

'Yeah, you're sorry,' Fogarty said. 'You'll be a lot sorrier if I catch you doing it again, Henry.'

'Yes sir, Mr Fogarty.'

Fogarty walked away, his black shoes leaving big brown tracks in the dirt of West Garden. Because Fogarty's back was turned, Henry took a moment to look around surreptitiously. They had been shooed out to hoe as soon as the clouds cleared, everyone from the Blue Ward — which was where they put you if you had once been very dangerous but were now considered only moderately dangerous. Actually, all the patients at Juniper Hill were considered moderately dangerous; it was a facility for the criminally insane. Henry Bowers was here because he had been convicted of killing his father in the late fall of 1958 — it had been a famous year for murder trials, all right; when it came to murder trials, 1958 had been a pip.