It

Talked to Bill on the phone again. Audra is taking some solid food, he says, but otherwise there is no change. I asked him if Eddie's big problem had been asthma or migraine.

'Asthma,' he said promptly. 'Don't you remember his aspirator?'

'Sure,' I said, and did. But only when Bill mentioned it.

'Mike?'

'Yeah?'

'What was his last name?'

I looked at my address book lying on the nighttable, but didn't pick it up. 'I don't quite remember.'

'It was like Kerkorian,' Bill said, sounding distressed, 'but that wasn't quite it. You've got everything written down, though. Right?'

'Right,' I said.

'Thank God for that.'

'Have you had any ideas about Audra?'

'One,' he said, 'but it's so crazy I don't want to talk about it.'

'You sure?'

'Yeah.'

'All right.'

'Mike, it's scary, isn't it? Forgetting like this?'

'Yes,' I said. And it is.

June 8th, 1985

Raytheon, which had been scheduled to break ground on its Derry plant in July, has decided at the last minute to build in Waterville instead. The editorial on page one of the News expresses dismay . . . and, if I read correctly between the lines, a little fright.

I think I know what Bill's idea is. He'll have to act quickly, before the last of the magic departs this place. If it hasn't already.

I guess what I thought before wasn't so paranoid after all. The names and addresses of the others in my little book are fading. The color and quality of the ink combine to make those entries look as if they were written fifty or seventy-five years before the others I've jotted in there. This has happened in the last four or five days. I'm convinced that by September their names will be utterly gone.

I suppose I could preserve them; I could just keep copying them. But I'm also convinced that each would fade in its turn, and that very soon it would become an exercise in futility — like writing I will not throw spit –balls in class five hundred times. I would be writing names that meant nothing for a reason I didn't remember.

Let it go, let it go.

Bill, act quickly . . . but be careful!

June 9th, 1985

Woke up in the middle of the night from a terrible nightmare I couldn't remember, got panicky, couldn't breathe. Reached for the call-button and then couldn't use it. Had a terrible vision of Mark Lamonica answering the bell with a hypo . . . or Henry Bowers with his switchblade.

I grabbed my address book and called Ben Hanscom in Nebraska . . . the address and number have faded still more, but they are still legible. No go, Joe. Got a recorded phone-company voice telling me service to that number has been cancelled.

Was Ben fat, or did he have something like a club foot?

Lay awake until dawn.

June 10th, 1985

They tell me I can go home tomorrow.

I called Bill and told him that — I suppose I wanted to warn him that his time is getting shorter all the time. Bill is the only one I remember clearly and I'm convinced that I'm the only one he remembers clearly. Because we are both still here in Derry, I suppose.

'All right,' he said. 'By tomorrow we'll be out of your hair.'

'You still got your idea?'

'Yeah. Looks like it's time to try it.'

'Be careful.'

He laughed and said something I both do and don't understand: 'You can't be c-c-careful on a skuh-hateboard, man.'

'How will I know how it turned out, Bill?'

'You'll know,' he said, and hung up.

My heart's with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams.

I'm almost done with this diary now — and I suppose a diary is all that it will ever be, and that the story of Derry's old scandals and eccentricities has no place outside these pages. That's fine with me; I think that, when they let me out of here tomorrow, it might finally be time to start thinking about some sort of new life . . . although just what that might be is unclear to me.

I loved you guys, you know.

I loved you so much.

EPILOGUE - BILL DENBROUGH BEATS THE DEVIL-II

'I knew the bride when she used to do the Pony, I knew the bride when she used to do the Stroll. I knew the bride when she used to wanna party, I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll.'

— Nick Lowe

'You can't be careful on a skateboard man'

— some kid

1

Noon of a summer day.

Bill stood naked in Mike Hanlon's bedroom, looking at his lean body in the mirror on the door. His bald head gleamed in the light which fell through the window and cast his shadow along the floor and up the wall. His chest was hairless, his thighs and shanks skinny but overlaid with ropes of muscle. Still, he thought, it's an adult's body we got here, no question about that. There's the pot belly that comes with a few too many good steaks, a few too many bottles of Kirin beer, a few too many poolside lunches where you had the Reuben or the French dip instead of the diet plate. Your seat's dropped, too, Bill old buddy. You can still serve an ace if you're not too hung over and if your eye's in, but you can't hustle after the old Dunlop the way you could when you were seventeen. You got love handles and your balls are starting to get that middle-aged dangly look. There's lines on your face that weren't there when you were seventeen . . . Hell, they weren't there on your first author photo, the one where you tried so hard to look as if you knew something . . . anything. You're too old for what you've got in mind, Billy-boy. You'll kill both of you.

He put on his underpants.

If we'd believed that, we never could have . . . have done whatever it was we did.

Because he didn't really remember what it was they had done, or what had happened to turn Audra into a catatonic wreck. He only knew what he was supposed to do now, and he knew that if he didn't do it now, he would forget that, too. Audra was sitting downstairs in Mike's easy chair, her hair hanging lankly to her shoulders, staring with rapt attention at the TV, which was currently showing Dialing for Dollars. She didn't speak and would only move if you led her.

This is different. You're just too old, man. Believe it.

I won't.

Then die here in Derry. Big fucking deal.

He put on athletic socks, the one pair of jeans he had brought, the tank top he'd bought at the Shirt Shack in Bangor the day before. The tank was bright orange. Across the front it said WHERE THE HELL IS DERRY, MAINE? He sat down on Mike's bed — the one he had shared for the last week of nights with his warm but corpse-like wife — and put on his sneakers . . . a pair of Keds, which he ha d also bought yesterday in Bangor.

He stood up and looked at himself in the mirror again. He saw a man pressing middle age dressed up in a kid's clothes.

You look ludicrous.

What kid doesn't?

You're no kid. Give this up!

'Fuck, let's rock and roll a little,' Bill said softly, and left the room.

2

In the dreams he will have in later years, he is always leaving Derry alone, at sunset. The town is deserted; everyone has left. The Theological Seminary and the Victorian houses on West Broadway brood black against a lurid sky, every summer sunset you ever saw rolled up into one.