'No,' Beverly said. 'I didn't marry Henry. I married my father.'
'If he beat on you, what's the difference?' Eddie asked.
'C-C-Come around me,' Bill said. 'Muh-muh-move in.'
They did. Bill reached out to either side and found Eddie's good hand and one of Richie's hands. Soon they stood in a circle, as they had done once before when their number was greater. Eddie felt someone put an arm around his shoulders. The feeling was warm and comforting and deeply familiar.
Bill felt the sense of power that he remembered from before, but understood with some desperation that things really had changed. The power was nowhere near as strong — it struggled and flickered like a candle –flame in foul air. The darkness seemed thicker and closer to them, more triumphant. And he could smell It. Down this passageway, he thought, and not so terribly far, is a door with a mark on it. What was behind that door? It's the one thing I still can't remember. I can remember making my fingers stiff, because they wanted to tremble, and I can remember pushing the door open. I can even remember the flood of light that streamed out and how it seemed almost alive, as if it wasn't just light but fluorescent snakes. I remember the smell, like the monkey-house in a big zoo, but even worse. And then . . . nothing.
'Do a-a-any of y-y-y-you rem-m-member what It really w-w-was?'
'No,' Eddie said.
'I think . . . ' Richie began, and then Bill could almost feel him shake his head in the dark. 'No.'
'No,' Beverly said.
'Huh-uh.' That was Ben. 'That's the one thing I still can't remember. What It was . . . or how we foug ht It.'
'Chüd,' Beverly said. That's how we fought it. But I don't remember what that means.'
'Stand by m-me,' Bill said, 'and I-I'll stuh-stuh-hand by y-y-you guys.'
'Bill,' Ben said. His voice was very calm. 'Something is coming.'
Bill listened. He heard dragging, shambling footsteps approaching them in the dark . . . and he was afraid.
'A-A-Audra?' he called . . . and knew already that it was not her.
Whatever was shambling toward them drew closer.
Bill struck a light.
8
Derry / 5:00 A.M.
The first wrong thing happened on that late-spring day in 1985 two minutes before official sunrise. To understand how wrong it was one would have to have known two facts that were known to Mike Hanlon (who lay unconscious in the Derry Home Hospital as the sun came up), both concerning the Grace Baptist Church, which had stood on the corner of Witcham and Jackson since 1897. The church was topped with a slender white spire which was the apotheosis of every Protestant church-steeple in New England. There were clock-faces on all four sides of the steeple – base, and the clock itself had been constructed and shipped from Switzerland in the year 1898. The only one like it stood in the town square of Haven Village, forty miles away.
Stephen Bowie, a timber baron who lived on West Broadway, donated the clock to the town at a cost of some $17,000. Bowie could afford it. He was a devout churchgoer and deacon for forty years (during several of those later years he was also president of Derry's Legion of White Decency chapter). In addition, he was known for his devout layman sermons on Mother's Day, which he always referred to reverently as Mother's Sunday.
From the time of its installation until May 31st, 1985, that clock had faithfully chimed each hour and each half — with one notable exception. On the day of the explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks it had not chimed the noon-hour. Residents believed that the Reverend Jollyn had silenced the clock to show that the church was in mourning for the dead children, and Jollyn never disabused them of this notion, although it was not true. The clock had simply not chimed.
Nor did it chime the hour of five on the morning of May 31st, 1985.
At that moment, all over Derry, old-timers opened their eyes and sat up, disturbed for no reason they could put their fingers on. Medicines were gulped, false teeth put in, pipes and cigars lit.
The old folks stood a watch.
One of them was Norbert Keene, now in his nineties. He hobbled to the window and looked out at a darkening sky. The weather report the night before had called for clear skies, but his bones told him it was going to rain, and hard. He felt scared, deep inside him; in some obscure way he felt threatened, as if a poison were working its way relentlessly toward his heart. He thought randomly of the day the Bradley Gang had ridden heedlessly into Derry, into the sights of seventy-five pistols and rifles. That kind of work left a man feeling kind of warm and lazy inside, like everything was . . . was somehow confirmed. He couldn't put it any better than that, even to himself. Work like that left a man feeling like he maybe might live forever, and Norbert Keene damn near had. Ninety-six years old come June 24th, and he still walked three miles eve ry day. But now he felt scared.
'Those kids,' he said, looking out his window, unaware he had spoken. 'What is it with them damn kids? What they monkeying around with this time?'
Egbert Thoroughgood, ninety-nine, who had been in the Silver Dollar when Claude Heroux tuned up his axe and played 'The Dead March' for four men on it, awoke at the same moment, sat up, and let out a rusty scream that no one heard. He had dreamed of Claude, only Claude had been coming after him, and the axe had come down, an d a moment after it did Thoroughgood had seen his own severed hand twitching and curling on the counter.
Something wrong, he thought in his muddy way, frightened and shaking all over in his pee-stained longjohns. Something dreadful wrong.
Dave Gardener, who had discovered George Denbrough's mutilated body in October of 1957 and whose son had discovered the first victim of this new cycle earlier in the spring, opened his eyes on the stroke of five and thought, even before looking at the clock on the
bureau: Grace Church clock didn't chime the hour . . . What's wrong? He felt a large ill –defined fright. Dave had prospered over the years; in 1965 he had purchased The Shoeboat, and now there was a second Shoeboat at the Derry Mall and a third up in Bangor. Suddenly all of those things — things he had spent his life working for — seemed in jeopardy. From what? he cried to himself, looking at his sleeping wife. From what, why you so goddam antsyjust because that clock didn't chime? But there was no answer.
He got up and went to the window, hitching at the waistband of his pyjamas. The sky was restless with clouds racing in from the west, and Dave's disquiet grew. For the first time in a very long while he found himself thinking of the screams that had brought him to his porch twenty-seven years ago, to see that writhing figure in the yellow rainslicker. He looked at the approaching clouds and thought: We're in danger. All of its. Derry.
Chief Andrew Rademacher, who really believed he had tried his best to solve the new string of child –murders that had plagued Derry, stood on the porch of his house, thumbs in his Sam Browne belt, looking up at the clouds, and felt the same disquiet. Something gettingready to happen. Looks like it's going to pour buckets, for one thing. But that's not all. He shuddered . . . and as he stood there on his porch, the smell of the bacon his wife was cooking wafting out through the screen door, the first dime-sized drops of rain darkened the sidewalk in front of his pleasant Reynolds Street home and, somewhere just over the horizon from Bassey Park, thunder rumbled.
Rademacher shivered again.