It

And none of us have gone AWAY, he thought, watching as Ben and Mike pounded used nails out of used boards, as Eddie strolled off into the bushes to take a whiz (you had to go as soon as you could, in order to avoid seriously straining your bladder, he told Bill once, but you also had to watch out for poison ivy, because who needed a case of that on your pecker). We're all here in Derry. No camp, no relatives, no vacations, no AWAY. All right here. Present and accounted for.

'There's a door down there,' Eddie said, zipping his fly as he came back.

'Hope you shook off, Eds,' Richie said. 'If you don't shake off each time, you can get cancer. My mom told me so.'

Eddie looked startled, thinly worried, and then saw Richie's grin. He withered him (or tried to) with a babies-must-play look and then said, 'It was too big for us to carry. But Bill said if all of us went down we could get it up here.'

'Of course, you can never shake off completely,' Richie went on. 'You want to know what a wise man once told me, Eds?'

'No,' Eddie said, 'and I don't want you to call me Eds anymore, Richie. I mean, I'm sincere. I don't call you Dick, as in "You got any gum on ya, Dick?", so I don't see why — '

'This wise man,' Richie said, 'told me this: "No matter how much you squirm and dance, the last two drops go in your pants." And that's why there's so much cancer in the world, Eddie my love.'

'The reason there's so much cancer in the world is because nerds like you and Beverly Marsh smoke cigarettes,' Eddie said.

'Beverly is not a nerd,' Ben said in a forbidding voice. 'You just watch what you say, Trashmouth.'

'Beep-beep, you g-guys,' Bill said absently. 'And speaking of B-B-Beverly, she's pretty struh-struh-strong. She could h-h-help get that duh –door.'

Ben asked what kind of door it was.

'Muh-Muh-hogany, I th-hink.'

'Somebody threw out a mahogany door?' Ben asked, surprised but not unbelieving.

'People throw out everything,' Mike said. 'That dump? It kills me to go down there. I mean it kills me.'

'Yeah,' Ben agreed. 'A lot of that stuff could be fixed up easy. A nd there are people in China and South America with nothing. That's what my mother says.'

'There's people with nothing right here in Maine, Sunny Jim,' Richie said grimly.

'W-W-What's th-this?' Bill asked, noticing the album Mike had brought. Mike told him, saying he would show them the picture of the clown when Stan and Beverly got back with the hinges.

Bill and Richie exchanged a look.

'What's wrong?' Mike asked. 'Is it what happened in your brother's room,

'Bill?'

'Y-Yeah,' Bill said, and would say no more.

They took turns working on the hole until Stan and Beverly came back, each with a brown paper bag containing hinges. As Mike talked, Ben sat crosslegged, tailor-fashion, and made glassless windows that would swing open and shut in two of the long boards. Perhaps only Bill noticed how quickly and easily his fingers moved; how adept and knowing they were, like surgeon's fingers. Bill admired that.

'Some of these pictures go back a hundred years, my dad said,' Mike told them, holding the album on his lap. 'He gets them at those sales people have in their yards, and at secondhand shops. Sometimes he buys them or trades other collectors for them. Some of them are stereoscopes — there's two of them just the same on a long card, an d when you look at them through this thing like binoculars, it looks like one picture, only in 3-D. Like House of Wax or The Creature from the Black Lagoon.'

'Why does he like all that stuff?' Beverly asked. She was wearing ordinary Levi's but she had done something amusing to the cuffs, blousing them out with a bright paisley material for the final four inches so that they looked like pants out of some sailor's whimsy.

'Yeah,' Eddie said. 'Most of the time, Derry's pretty boring.'

'Well, I don't know for sure, but I think it's because he wasn't born here,' Mike said diffidently. 'It's like — I don't know — like it's all new to him, or like, you know, if you came in during the middle of a movie — '

'Sh-sh-sure, you'd want to see the s-start,' Bill said.

'Yeah,' Mike said. 'There's a lot of history lying around in Derry. I kind of like it. And I think some of it has to do with this thing — this It, if you want to call it that.'

He looked at Bill and Bill nodded, his eyes thoughtful.

'So I was looking through it after the Fourth of July parade because I knew I'd seen that clown before. I knew it. And look.'

He opened the book, thumbed through it, then handed it to Ben, who was sitting on his right.

'D-D-Don't t-t-touch the puh-puh-pages!' Bill said, and there was such ur gency in his voice that they all jumped. He had fisted the hand he had cut reaching into Georgie's album, Richie saw. Fisted it into a tight, protective knot.

'Bill's right,' Richie said, and that subdued, totally un-Richielike voice was a powerful convincer. 'Be careful. It's like Stan said. If we saw it happen, you guys could see it happen, too.'

'Feel it,' Bill added grimly.

The album went from hand to hand, each of them holding the book gingerly, by the edges, as if it were old dynamite sweating big beads of nitro.

It came back to Mike. He opened it to one of the first pages.

'Daddy says there's no way to date that one, but it's probably from the early or mid-seventeen-hundreds,' Mike said. 'He repaired a guy's handsaw for a box of old books and pictures. That was one of them. He says it might be worth forty bucks or even more.

The picture was a woodcut, the size of a large postcard. When Bill's turn came to look at it, he was relieved to see that Mike's father had the land of album where the pictures were under a protective plastic sheet. He looked, fascinated, and he thought: There. I'm seeing him — orIt. Really seeing. That's the face of the enemy.

The picture showed a funny fe low juggling oversized bowling pins in the middle of a muddy street. There were a few houses on either side of the street, and a few huts that Bill guessed were stores, or trading posts, or whatever they called them back then. It didn't look like Derry at all, except for the Canal. It was there, neatly cobbled on both sides. In the upper background, Bill could see a team of mules on a towpath, dragging a barge.

There was a group of maybe half a dozen kids gathered around the funny fellow. One of them was wearing a pastoral straw hat. Another had a hoop and a stick to roll it with. Not the sort of stick that would come with a hoop that you bought today in a Woolworth's; it was a branch from a tree. Bill could see the bare knobs on it where smaller branches had been lopped off with a knife or a hatchet. That baby wasn't made in Taiwan or Korea, he thought, fascinated by this boy who could have been him if he'd been born four or five generations before.

The funny fellow had a huge grin on his face. He wore no makeup (except to Bill his whole face looked like make-up), but he was bald except for two tufts of hair that stuck up like horns over his ears, and Bill had no trouble recognizing their clown. Two hundred years ago or more, he thought, and felt a crazy surge of terror, anger, and excitement rush through him. Twenty-seven years later, sitting in the Derry Public Library and remembering his first look into Mike's father's album, he realized he had felt the way a hunter might feel, coming upon the first fresh spoor of an old killer tiger. Two hundred years ago . . . that long, and only God knows how much longer. This led him to wonder just how long the spirit of Pennywise had been here in Derry — but he found that was a thought he did not really want to pursue.