'Boy oh boy,' he said in a shaky voice. He could manage no more.
'Yeah,' Bill said in a near-whisper. He sat down on George's bed. 'Look.'
Richie followed Bill's pointing finger and saw the photo album lying closed on the floor. MY PHOTOGRAPHS, Richie read. GEORGE ELMER DENBROUGH , AGE 6.
Age 6! his mind shrieked in those same tones of shrill betrayal. Age 6 forever! Anybodycould! Shit! Fucking anybody!
'It was oh-oh-open,' Bill said. 'B-Before.'
'So it closed,' Richie said uneasily. He sat down on the bed beside Bill and looked at the photo album. 'Lots of books close on their own.'
'The p-p-pages, maybe, but n-not the cuh-cuh-cover. It c-closed itself.' He looked at Richie solemnly, his eyes very dark in his pale, tired face. 'B-But it wuh-wuh-wants y-you to oh-open it up again. That's what I th-think.'
Richie got up and walked slowly over to the photograph album. It lay at the base of a window screened with light curtains. Looking out, he could see the apple tree in the Denbrough back yard. A swing rocked slowly back and forth from one gnarled, black limb.
He looked down at George's book again.
A dried maroon stain colored the thickness of the pages in the middle of the book. It could have been old ketchup. Sure; it was easy enough to see George looking at his photo album while eating a hot dog or a big sloppy hamburger; he takes a big bite and some ketchup squirts out onto the book. Little kids were always doing spasmoid stuff like that. It could be ketchup. But Richie knew it was not.
He touched the album briefly and then drew his hand away. It felt cold. It had been lying in a place where the strong summer sunlight, only slightly filtered by those light curtains, would have been falling on it all day, but it felt cold.
Well, I'll just leave it alone, Richie thought. I don't want to look in his stupid old album anyway, see a lot of people I don't know. I think maybe I'll tell Bill I changed my mind, and we can go to his room and read comic books for awhile and then I'll go home and eat supper and go to bed early because I'm pretty tired, and when I wake up tomorrow morning I'm sure I'll be sure that stuff was just ketchup. That's just what I'll do. Yowza.
So he opened the album with hands that seemed a thousand miles away from him, at the end of long plastic arms, and he looked at the faces and places in George's album, the aunts, the uncles, the babies, the houses, the old Fords and Studebakers, the telephone lines, the mailboxes, the picket fences, the wheelruts with muddy water in them, the Ferris wheel at the Esty County Fair, the Standpipe, the ruins of the Kitchener Ironworks —
His fingers flipped faster and faster and suddenly the pages were blank. He turned back, not wanting to but unable to help himself. Here was a picture of downtown Derry, Main Street and Canal Street from around 1930, and beyond it there was nothing.
'There's no school picture of George in here,' Richie said. He looked at Bill with a mixture of relief and exasperation. 'What kind of line were you handing me, Big Bill?'
'W-W-What?'
'This picture of downtown in the olden days is the last one in the book. All the rest of the pages are blank.'
Bill got off the bed and joined Richie. He looked at the picture of downtown Derry as it had been almost thirty years ago, old –fashioned cars and trucks, old-fashioned streetlights with clusters of globes like big white grapes, pedestrians by the Canal caught in mid –stride by the click of a shutter. He turned the page and, just as Richie had said, there was nothing.
No, wait — not quite nothing. There was one studio corner, the sort of item you use to mount photographs.
'It w-w-was here,' he said, and tapped the studio corner. 'L-Look.'
'Jeepers! What do you think happened to it?'
'I d-don't nuh-nuh –know.'
Bill had taken the album from Richie and was now holding it on his own lap. He turned back through the pages, looking for George's picture. He gave up after a minute, but the pages did not. They turned themselves, flipping slowly but steadily, with big deliberate riffling sounds. Bill and Richie looked at each other, wide-eyed, and then back down.
It arrived at that last picture again and the pages stopped turning. Here was downtown Derry in sepia tones, the city as it had been long before either Bill or Richie had been born.
'Say!' Richie said suddenly, and took the album back from Bill. There was no fear in his voice now, and his face was suddenly full of wonder. 'Holy shit!'
'W-What? What ih-ih-is it?'
'Us! That's what it is! Holy-jeezly –crow, look !'
Bill took one side of the book. Bent over it, sharing it, they looked like boys at choir practice. Bill drew in breath sharply, and Richie knew he had seen it too.
Caught under the shiny surface of this old black-and –white photograph two small boys were walking along Main Street toward the point where Main and Center intersected — the point where the Canal went underground for a mile and a half or so. The two boys showed up clearly against the low concrete wall at the edge of the Canal. One was wearing knickers. The other was wearing something that looked almost like a sailor suit. A tweed cap was perched on his head. They were turned in three-quarter profile toward the camera, looking at something on the far side of the street. The boy in the knickers was Richie Tozier, beyond a doubt. And the boy in the sailor suit and the tweed cap was Stuttering Bill.
They stared at themselves in a picture almost three times as old as they were, hypnotized. The inside of Richie's mouth suddenly felt as dry as dust and as smooth as glass. A few steps ahead of the boys in the picture there was a man holding the brim of his fedora, his topcoat frozen forever as it flapped out behind him in a sudden gust of wind. There were Model-Ts on the street, a Pierce-Arrow, Chevrolets with running boards.
'I-I-I-I d-don't buh-buh –believe — ' Bill began, and that was when the picture began to move.
The Model-T that should have remained eternally in the middle of the intersection (or at least until the chemicals in the old photo finally dissolved completely) passed through it, a haze of exhaust puffing out of its tailpipe. It went on toward Up-Mile Hill. A small white hand shot out of the driver's side window and signalled a left turn. It swung onto Court Street and passed beyond the photo's white border and so out of sight.
The Pierce-Arrow, the Chevrolets, the Packards — they all began to roll along, dodging their separate ways through the intersection. After twenty-eight years or so the skirt of the man's topcoat finally finished its flap. He settled his hat more firmly on his head and walked on.
The two boys completed their turn, coming full-face, and a moment later Richie saw what they had been looking at as a mangy dog came trotting across Center Street. The boy in the sailor suit — Bill — raised two fingers to the corners of his mouth and whistled. Stunned beyond any ability to move or think, Richie realized he could hear the whistle, could hear the cars' irregular sewing-machine engines. The sounds were faint, like sounds heard through thick glass, but they were there.
The dog glanced toward the two boys, then trotted on. The boys glanced at each other and laughed like chipmunks. They started to walk on, and then the Richie in knickers grabbed Bill's arm and pointed toward the Canal. They turned in that direction.
No, Richie thought, don't do that, don't —