It

'Not too much,' he said.

They talked for awhile, their voices punctuated by thunder. Eddie did not ask them about what had happened when they came to the hospital earlier that day, and none of them mentioned it. Richie took out his yo –yo, made it sleep once or twice, then put it back.

Conversation lagged, and in one of the pauses there was a brief click that made Eddie look around. Bill had something in his hand, and for a moment Eddie felt his heart speed up in alarm. For that brief moment he thought it was a knife. But then Stan turned on the room's overhead, dispelling the gloom, and he saw it was only a ballpoint pen. In the light they all looked natural again, real, only his friends.

'I thought we ought to sign your cast,' Bill said. His eyes met Eddie's squarely.

But that's not it, Eddie thought with sudden and alarming clarity. It's a contract. It's acontract, Big Bill, isn't it, or the closest we'll ever get to one. He was frightened . . . and then ashamed and angry at himself. If he had broken his arm before this summer, who would have signed the cast? Anyone besides his mother, and perhaps Dr Handor? His aunts in Haven?

These were his friends, and his mother was wrong: they weren't bad friends. Maybe, he thought, there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends — maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who kelp you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.

'Okay,' Eddie said, a little hoarsely. 'Okay, that'd be real good, Big Bill.'

So Bill leaned solemnly over his bed and wrote his name on the hillocky plaster of Paris that encased Eddie's mending arm, the letters large and looping. Richie signed with a flourish. Ben's handwriting was as narrow as he was wide, the letters slanting backward. They looked ready to fall over at the slightest push. Mike Hanlon's writing was large and awkward because he was lefthanded and the angle was bad for him. He signed above Eddie's elbow and circled his name. When Beverly bent over him, he could smell some light flowery perfume on her. She signed in a round Palmer-method script. Stan came last, and wrote his name in tight-packed little letters by Eddie's wrist.

They all stepped back then, as if aware of what they had done. Outside, thunder muttered heavily again. Lightning washed the hospital's wooden exterior in brief stuttering light.

That's it?' Eddie asked.

Bill nodded. 'C-C-Come oh-oh-over to my h-house a-after suh-hupper day a-a-after t-tomorrow if you c-c-can, o-okay?'

Eddie nodded, and the subject was closed.

There was another period of desultory, almost aimless conversation. Some of it was about the dominant topic in Derry that July — the trial of Richard Macklin for the bludgeon– murder of his stepson Dorsey, and the disappearance of Dorsey's older brother, Eddie Corcoran. Macklin would not break down and confess, weeping, on the witness stand for another two days, but the Losers were in agreement that Macklin probably had nothing to do with Eddie's disappearance. The boy had either run away . . . or It had gotten him.

They left around quarter of seven, and the rain still had not fallen. It continued to threaten until long after Eddie's ma had come, made her visit, and gone home again (she had been horrified at the signatures on Eddie's cast, and even more horrified at his determination to leave the hospital the following day — she had been envisioning a stay of a week or more in absolute quiet, so that the ends of the break could 'set together,' as she said).

Eventually the stormclouds broke apart and drifted away. Not so much as a drop of rain had fallen in Derry. The humidity remained, and people slept on porches and on lawns and in sleeping bags in back fields that night.

The rain came the next day, not long after Beverly saw something terrible happen to Patrick Hockstetter.

CHAPTER 1 7 Another One of the Missing:The Death of Patrick Hockstetter

1

When he finishes, Eddie pours himself another drink with a hand not completely steady. He looks at Beverly and says, 'You saw It, didn't you? You saw It take Patrick Hockstetter the day after you all signed my cast.'

The others lean forward.

Beverly pushes her hair back in a reddish cloud. Beneath it her face looks extraordinarily pale. She fumbles a fresh cigarette out of her pack — the last one — and flicks her Bic. She can't seem to guide the flame to the tip of her cigarette. After a moment Bill holds her wrist lightly but firmly and puts the flame where it's supposed to go. Beverly looks at him gratefully and exhales a cloud of bluish-gray smoke.

'Yeah,' she says. 'I saw that happen.'

She shivers.

'He was cruh-cruh-crazy,' Bill says, and thinks: Just the fact that Henry let a flako like Patrick Hockstetter hang around as that summer wore on . . . that says something, doesn't it? Either that Henry was losing some of his charm, some of his attraction, or that Henry's own craziness had progressed far enough so that the Hockstetter kid seemed okay to him. Both came to the same thing — Henry's increasing . . . what? degeneration? Is that the word? Yes, i n l i g h t of what happened to him, where he ended up, I think it is.

There's something else to support the idea, too, Bill thinks, but as yet he can onlyremember it vaguely. He and Richie and Beverly had been down at Tracker Brothers — early August by then, and the summer-school that had kept Henry out of their hair for most of the summer was just about to end — and hadn't Victor Criss approached them? A very frightened Victor Criss? Yes, that had happened. Things had been rapidly approaching the end by then, and Bill thinks now that every kid in Derry had sensed it — the Losers and Henry's group most of all. But that had been later.

'Oh yeah you got that right,' Beverly says flatly. 'Patrick Hockstetter was crazy. None of the girls would sit in front of him in school. You'd be sitting there, doing your arithmetic or writing a story or a composition, and all at once you'd feel this hand . . . almost as light as a feather, but warm and sweaty. Meaty.' She swallows, and there is a small click in her throat. The others watch her solemnly from around the table. 'You'd feel it on your side, or maybe on your breast. Not that any of us had much in the way of breasts back then. But Patrick didn't seem to care about that.

'You'd feel that . . . that touch, and you'd jerk away from it, and turn around, and there Patrick would be, grinning with those big rubbery lips. He had a pencil-box — '

'Full of flies,' Richie says suddenly. 'Sure. He'd kill em with this green ruler he had and then put em in his pencil-box. I even remember what it looked like — red, with a wavy white plastic cover that slid open and closed.'

Eddie is nodding.

'You'd jerk away and he'd grin and then maybe he'd open his pencil-box so you could see the dead flies inside,' Beverly says. 'And the worst thing-the horrible thing — was the way

he'd smile and never say anything. Mrs Douglas knew. Greta Bowie told on him, and I think Sally Mueller said something once, too. But . . . I think Mrs Douglas was scared of him, too.'

Ben has rocked back on the rear legs of his chair, and his hands are laced behind his neck. She still cannot believe how lean he is. 'I'm pretty sure you're right,' he says.