Bill wasn't very good at it yet (and guessed privately he probably never would be), but he thought the booklet's caution was merited-the slingshot's thick elastic had a hard pull, and when you hit a tin can with it, it made one hell of a hole.

"You doin any better with it, Big Bill?" Richie asked.

"A luh-luh-little," Bill said. This was only partly true. After much study of the pictures in the booklet (which were labelled figs, as in fig 1, fig 2, and so on) and enough practice in Derry Park to lame his arm, he had gotten so he could hit the paper target which had also come with the slingshot maybe three times out of every ten tries. And once he had gotten a bullseye. Almost.

Richie pulled the sling back by the cup, twanged it, then handed it back. He said nothing but privately doubted if it would count for as much as Zack Denbrough's pistol when it came to killing monsters.

"Yeah?" he said. "You brought your slingshot, okay, big deal. That's nothing. Look what I brought, Denbrough." And from his own jacket he hauled out a packet with a cartoon picture on it of a bald man saying Ah-CHOO! as his cheeks puffed out like Dizzy Gillespie's. DR WACKY's SNEEZING POWDER, the packet said. IT's A LAFF RIOT!

The two of them stared at each other for a long moment and then broke up, screaming with laughter and pounding each other on the back.

"W-W-We're pruh-prepared for a-a-anything," Bill said finally, still giggling and wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket.

"Your face and my ass, Stuttering Bill," Richie said.

"I th-th-thought it wuh-was the uh-uh-other way a-around," Bill said. "Now listen. W-We're g-gonna st-ha-hash y-your b-b-bike down in the B-Barrens. W-Where I puh-put Silver when we play. Y-You ride d-d-double b-behind me, in c-case w-we have to make a quih-hick g-g-getaway."

Richie nodded, feeling no urge to argue. His twenty-two-inch Raleigh (he sometimes whammed his kneecaps on the handlebars when he was pedaling fast) looked like a pygmy bike next to the scrawny, gantry like edifice that was Silver. He knew that Bill was stronger and Silver was faster.

They got to the little bridge and Bill helped Richie stow his bike underneath. Then they sat down, and, with the occasional rumble of traffic passing over their heads, Bill unzipped his duffel and took out his father's pistol.

"Y-You be goddam c-c-careful," Bill said, handing it over after Richie had whistled his frank approval. "Th-There's n-no s-s-safety on a pih-pihstol like that."

"Is it loaded?" Richie asked, awed. The pistol, an SSPK-Walther that Zack Denbrough had picked up during the Occupation, seemed unbelievably heavy.

"N-Not y-yet," Bill said. He patted his pocket. "I g-g-got some buh-buh-buh-bullets in h-h-here. But my d-d-dad s-says s-sometimes you l-look a-and th-then, i-if the g-g-g-gun th-thinks y-you're not being c-c-careful, it l-loads ih-ih-itself. S-so it can sh-sh-hoot you." His face uttered a strange smile which said that, while he didn't believe anything so silly, he believed it completely.

Richie understood. There was a caged deadliness in the thing that he had never sensed in his dad's.22,.30-.30, or even the shotgun (although there was something about the shotgun, wasn't there?-something about the way it leaned, mute and oily, in the corner of the garage closet; as if it might say I could be mean if I wanted to; plenty mean, you bet if it could speak). But this pistol, this Walther... it was as if it had been made for the express purpose of shooting people. With a chill Richie realized that was why it had been made. What else could you do with a pistol? Use it to light your cigarettes?

He turned the muzzle toward him, being careful to keep his hands far away from the trigger. One look into the Walther's black lidless eye made him understand Bill's peculiar smile perfectly. He remembered his father saying, If you remember there is no such thing as an unloaded gun, you'll be okay with firearms all your life, Richie. He handed the gun back to Bill, glad to be rid of it.

Bill stowed it in his duffel coat again. Suddenly the house on Neibolt Street seemed less frightening to Richie... but the possibility that blood might actually be spilled-that seemed much stronger.

He looked at Bill, perhaps meaning to appeal this idea again, but he saw Bill's face, read it, and only said, "You ready?"

13

As always, when Bill finally pulled his second foot up from the ground, Richie felt sure that they would crash, splitting their silly skulls on unyielding cement. The big bike wavered crazily from side to side. The cards clothespinned to the fender-struts stopped firing single shots and started machine-gunning. The bike's drunken wavers became more pronounced. Richie closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable.

Then Bill bellowed, "Hi-yo Silver, AWWAYYYYY!"

The bike picked up more speed and finally stopped that seasick side-to-side wavering. Richie loosened his deathgrip on Bill's middle and held the front of the package carrier over the rear wheel instead. Bill crossed Kansas Street on a slant, raced down sidestreets at an ever-quickening pace, heading for Witcham as if racing down a set of geographical steps. They came bulleting out of Strapham Street and onto Witcham at an exorbitant rate of speed. Bill laid Silver damn near over on his side and bellowed "Hi-yo Silver!" again.

"Ride it, Big Bill!" Richie screamed, so scared he was nearly creaming his jeans but laughing wildly all the same. "stand on this baby!"

Bill suited the action to the word, getting up and leaning over the handlebars and pumping the pedals at a lunatic rate. Looking at Bill's back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going-on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable... they would live forever and ever. Well... perhaps not they, but Bill would. Bill had no idea of how strong he was, how somehow sure and perfect.

They sped along, the houses thinning out a little now, the streets crossing Witcham at longer intervals.

"Hi-yo Silver!" Bill yelled, and Richie hollered in his Nigger Jim Voice, high and shrill, "Hi-yo Silvuh, massa, thass rant! You is rahdin disyere bike fo sho! Lawks-a-mussy! Hi-yo Silvuh AWWAYYY!"

Now they were passing green fields that looked flat and depthless under the gray sky. Richie could see the old brick train station up ahead in the distance. To the right of it quonset warehouses marched off in a row. Silver bumped over one set of train tracks, then another.

And here was Neibolt Street, cutting off to the right. DERRY TRAINYARDS, a blue sign under the street-sign read. It was rusty and hung askew. Below this was a much bigger sign, yellow field, black letters. It was almost like a comment on the trainyards themselves: DEAD END, it read.

Bill turned onto Neibolt Street, coasted to the sidewalk, and put his foot back down. "Let's w-w-walk from here."

Richie slipped off the package carrier with mingled feelings of relief and regret. "Okay."

They walked along the sidewalk, which was cracked and weedy. Up ahead of them, in the trainyards, a diesel engine revved slowly up, faded off, and then began all over again. Once or twice they heard the metallic music of couplings being smashed together.

"You scared?" Richie asked Bill.

Bill, walking Silver by the handlebars, looked over at Richie briefly and then nodded. "Y-Yeah. You?"

"I sure am," Richie said.

Bill told Richie he had asked his father about Neibolt Street the night before. His father said that a lot of trainmen had lived out this way until the end of World War II-engineers, conductors, signalmen, yardworkers, baggage handlers. The street had declined with the trainyards, and as Bill and Richie moved farther along it, the houses became farther apart, seedier, dirtier. The last three or four on both sides were empty and boarded up, their yards overgrown. A FOR SALE sign flapped forlornly from the porch of one. To Richie the sign looked about a thousand years old. The sidewalk stopped, and now they were walking along a beaten track from which weeds grew half-heartedly.

Bill stopped and pointed. "Th-there it i-i-is," he said softly.

Twenty-nine Neibolt Street had once been a trim red Cape Cod. Maybe,.Richie thought, an engineer used to live there, a bachelor with no pants but jeans and lots of those gloves with the big stiff cuffs and four or five pillowtick caps-a fellow who would come home once or twice a month for stretches of three or four days and listen to the radio while he pottered in the garden; a fellow who would eat mostly fried foods (and no vegetables, although he would grow them for his friends) and who would, on windy nights, think about the Girl He Left Behind.

Now the red paint had faded to a wishy-washy pink that was peeling away in ugly patches that looked like sores. The windows were blind eyes, boarded up. Most of the shingles were gone. Weeds grew rankly down both sides of the house and the lawn was covered with the season's first bumper crop of dandelions. To the left, a high board fence, perhaps once a neat white but now faded to a dull gray that almost matched the lowering sky, lurched drunkenly in and out of the dank shrubbery. About halfway down this fence Richie could see a monstrous grove of sunflowers-the tallest looked five feet tall or more. They had a bloated, nasty look he didn't like. A breeze rustled them and they seemed to nod together: The boys are here, isn't that nice? More boys. Our boys. Richie shivered.

While Bill leaned Silver carefully against an elm, Richie surveyed the house. He saw a wheel sticking out of the thick grass near the porch, and pointed it out to Bill. Bill nodded; it was the overturned trike Eddie had mentioned.

They looked up and down Neibolt Street. The chug of the diesel engine rose and fell off, then began again. The sound seemed to hang in the overcast like a charm. The street was utterly deserted. Richie could hear occasional cars passing on Route 2, but could not see them.

The diesel engine chugged and faded, chugged and faded.

The huge sunflowers nodded sagely together. Fresh boys. Good boys. Our boys.

"Y-Y-You r-ruh-ready?" Bill asked, and Richie jumped a little.

"You know, I was just thinking that maybe the last bunch of library books I took out are due today," Richie said. "Maybe I ought to-"

"Cuh-Cuh-Cut the c-crap, R-R-Richie. Are y-you ready or n-n-not?"

"I guess I am," Richie said, knowing he was not ready at all-he was never going to be ready for this scene.

They crossed the overgrown lawn to the porch.

"Luh-look th-th-there," Bill said.

At the far lefthand side, the porch's latticework skirt leaned out against a tangle of bushes. Both boys could see the rusty nails that had been pulled free. There were old rosebushes here, and while the roses both to the right and the left of the unanchored stretch of latticework were blooming in a lackadaisical way, those directly around and in front of it were skeletal and dead.

Bill and Richie looked at each other grimly. Everything Eddie said seemed true enough; seven weeks later, the evidence was still here.

"You don't really want to go under there, do you?" Richie asked. He was almost pleading.

"Nuh-nuh-no," Bill said, "b-but I'm g-gonna."

And with a sinking heart, Richie saw that he absolutely meant it. That gray light was back in Billy's eyes, shining steadily. There was a stony eagerness in the lines of his face that made him look older. Richie thought, I think he really does mean to kill it, if it's still there. Kill it and maybe cut off its head and take it to his father and say, "Look, this is what killed Georgie, now will you talk to me again at night, maybe just tell me how your day was, or who lost when you guys were flipping to see who paid for the morning coffee?"

"Bill-" he said, but Bill was no longer there. He was walking around to the righthand end of the porch, where Eddie must have crawled under. Richie had to chase after him, and he almost fell over the trike caught in the weeds and slowly rusting its way into the ground.

He caught up as Bill squatted, looking under the porch. There was no skirt at all on this end; someone-some hobo-had pried it off long ago to gain access to the shelter underneath, out of the January snow or the cold November rain or a summer thundershower.

Richie squatted beside him, his heart thudding like a drum. There was nothing under the porch but drifts of moldering leaves, yellowing newspapers, and shadows. Too many shadows.

"Bill," he repeated.

"Wh-wh-what?" Bill had produced his father's Walther again. He pulled the clip carefully from the grip, and then took four bullets from his pants pocket. He loaded them in one at a tune. Richie watched this, fascinated, and then looked under the porch again. He saw something else this tune. Broken glass. Faintly glinting shards of glass. His stomach cramped painfully. He was not a stupid boy, and he understood this came close to completely confirming Eddie's story. Splinters of glass on the moldering leaves under the porch meant that the window had been broken from inside. From the cellar.

"Wh-what?" Bill asked again, looking up at Richie. His face was grim and white. Looking at that set face, Richie mentally threw in the towel.

"Nothing," he said.

"You cuh-cuh-homing?"

"Yeah."

They crawled under the porch.

The smell of decaying leaves was a smell Richie usually liked, but there was nothing pleasant about the smell under here. The leaves felt spongy under his hands and knees, and he had an impression that they might go down for two or three feet. He suddenly wondered what he would do if a hand or a claw sprang out of those leaves and seized him.

Bill was examining the broken window. Glass had sprayed everywhere. The wooden strip which had been between the panes lay in two splintered pieces under the porch steps. The top of the window frame jutted out like a broken bone.

"Something hit that fucker wicked hard," Richie breathed. Bill, now peering inside-or trying to-nodded.

Richie elbowed him aside enough so he could look, too. The basement was a dim litter of crates and boxes. The floor was earth and, like the leaves, it gave off a damp and humid aroma. A furnace bulked to the left, thrusting round pipes at the low ceiling. Beyond it, at the end of the cellar, Richie could see a large stall with wooden sides. A horse stall was his first thought, but who kept horses in the jeezly cellar? Then he realized that in a house as old as this one, the furnace must have burned coal instead of oil. Nobody had bothered to convert the furnace because no one wanted the house. That thing with the sides was a coalbin. To the far right, Richie could make out a flight of stairs going up to ground level.

Now Bill was sitting down... hunching himself forward... and before Richie could actually believe what he was up to, his friend's legs were disappearing into the window.

"Bill!" he hissed. "Chrissake, what are you doing? Get outta there!"