It

He came to the walk which led up to the front door. It was barred by a heavy chain from which a metal sign hung: NO TRESPASSIN THIS ORDER ENFORCED BY DERRY POLICE DEPT.

Henry's feet tangled on this track and he fell heavily again-whap!-to the sidewalk. Up ahead, a car turned onto Kansas Street from Hawthorne. Its headlights washed down the street. Henry fought the dazzle long enough to see the lights on top: it was a fuzzmobile.

He crawled under the chain and crabbed his way to the left so he was behind the hedge. The night-dew on his hot face was wonderful. He lay face down, turning his head from side to side, wetting his cheeks, drinking what he could drink.

The police car floated by without slowing.

Then, suddenly, its bubble-lights came on, washing the darkness with erratic blue pulses of light. There was no need for the siren on the deserted streets, but Henry heard its null suddenly crank up to full revs. Rubber blistered a startled scream from the pavement.

Caught, I'm caught, his mind gibbered... and then he realized that the police-car was heading away from him, up Kansas Street. A moment later a hellish warbling sound filled the night, heading toward him from the south. He imagined some huge silky black cat loping through the dark, all green eyes and silky flexing pelt, It in a new shape, coming for him, coming to gobble him up.

Little by little (and only as the warbling began to veer away) he realized it was an ambulance, heading in the direction the fuzz-mobile had gone. He lay shuddering on the wet grass, too cold now, struggling

(fuzzit cousin buzzit cousin rock it roll it we got chicken in the barn what bam whose barn my)

not to vomit. He was afraid that if he vomited, all of his guts would come up... and there were five of them still to get.

Ambulance and police car. Where are they heading? The library, of course. The nigger. But they're too late. I greased him. Might as well turn off your sireen, boys. He ain't gonna hear it. He's just as dead as a fencepost. He -

But was he?

Henry licked his peeling lips with his arid tongue. If he was dead, there would be no warbling siren in the night like the cry of a wounded panther. Not unless the nigger had called them. So maybe-just maybe-the nigger wasn't dead.

"No," Henry breathed. He rolled over on his back and stared up at the sky, at the billions of stars up there. It had come from there, he knew. From somewhere up in that sky... It

(came from outer space with a lust for Earthwomen came to rob all the women and rape all the men say Frank don't you mean rob all the men and rape all the women whoth running this show, thilly man, you or Jesse? Victor used to tell that one and that was pretty much)

came from the spaces between the stars. Looking up at that starry sky gave him the creeps: it was too big, too black. It was all too possible to imagine it turning blood-red, all too possible to imagine a Face forming in lines of fire...

He closed his eyes, shivering and holding his arms crossed on his belly, and he thought: The nigger is dead. Someone heard us fighting and sent the cops to investigate, that's all.

Then why the ambulance?

"Shut up, shut up," Henry groaned. He felt the old baffled rage again; he remembered how they had beaten him again and again in the old days-old days that seemed so close and so vital now-how, every time, when he believed he had them, they had somehow slipped through his fingers. It had been like that on the last day, after Belch saw the bitch running down Kansas Street toward the Barrens. He remembered that, oh yes, he remembered that clearly enough. When you got kicked in the balls, you remembered it. It had happened to him again and again that summer.

Henry struggled to a sitting position, wincing at the deep dagger of pain in his guts.

Victor and Belch had helped him down into the Barrens. He had walked as fast as he could in spite of the agony that griped and pulled at his groin and the root of his belly. The time had come to finish it. They had followed the path to a clearing from which five or six paths radiated like strands of a spider-web. Yes, there had been kids playing around there; you didn't have to be Tonto to see that. There were scraps of candy-wrapper, the curled tail of a shot-off roll of Bang caps, red and black. A few boards and a fluffy scatter of sawdust, as if something had been built there.

He remembered standing in the center of the clearing and scanning the trees, looking for their baby treehouse. He would spot it and then he would climb up and the girl would be cowering there, and he would use the knife to cut her throat and feel her titties nice and easy until they stopped moving.

But he hadn't been able to see any treehouse; neither had Belch or Victor. The old familiar frustration rose in his throat. He and Victor left Belch to guard the clearing while they went down the river. But there had been no sign of her there, either. He remembered bending over and picking up a rock and

8

THE BARRENS / 12:55 P.M.

heaving it far down the stream, furious and bewildered. "Where the fuck did she go?" he demanded, wheeling toward Victor.

Victor shook his head slowly. "don't know," he said. "You're bleeding."

Henry looked down and saw a dark spot, the size of a quarter, on the crotch of his jeans. The pain had withdrawn to a low, throbbing ache, but his underpants felt too small and too tight. His balls were swelling. He felt that anger inside him again, something like a knotted rope around his heart. She had done this.

"Where is she?" he hissed at Victor.

"Don't know," Victor said again in that same dull voice. He seemed hypnotized, sunstruck, not really there at all. "Ran away, I guess. She could be all the way over to the Old Cape by now."

"She's not," Henry said. "she's hiding. They've got a place and she's hiding there. Maybe it's not a treehouse. Maybe it's something else."

"What?"

"I... don't... know!" Henry shouted, and Victor flinched back.

Henry stood in the Kenduskeag, the cold water boiling over the tops of his sneakers, looking around. His eyes fixed on a cylinder poking out of the embankment about twenty feet downstream-a pumping-station. He climbed out of the water and walked down to it, feeling a sort of necessary dread settle into him. His skin seemed to be tightening, his eyes widening so that they were able to see more and more; it seemed he could feel the tiny hairs in his ears stirring and moving like kelp in an underwater tidal flow.

Low humming came from the pumping-station, and beyond it he could see a pipe jutting out of the embankment over the Kenduskeag. A steady flow of sludge pulsed out of the pipe and ran into the water.

He leaned over the cylinder's round iron top.

"Henry?" Victor called nervously. "Henry? What you doing?"

Henry paid no attention. He put his eye to one of the round holes in the iron and saw nothing but blackness. He exchanged eye for ear.

"Wait..."

The voice drifted up to him from the blackness inside, and Henry felt his interior temperature plummet to zero, his veins and arteries freezing into crystal tubes of ice. But with these sensations came an almost unknown feeling: love. His eyes widened. A clownish smile spread his lips in a large nerveless arc. It was the voice from the moon. Now It was down in the pumping-station... down in the drains.

"Wait... watch..."

He waited, but there was no more: only the steady soporific drone of the pumping machinery. He walked back down to where Victor stood on the bank, watching him cautiously. Henry ignored him and hollered for Belch. In a little while Belch came.

"Come on," he said.

"What are we gonna do, Henry?" Belch asked.

"Wait. Watch."

They crept back toward the clearing and sat down. Henry tried to pull his underpants away from his aching balls, but it hurt too much.

"Henry, what-" Belch began.

"Shhh!"

Belch fell obligingly silent. Henry had Camels but he didn't share them out. He didn't want the bitch to smell cigarette smoke if she was around. He could have explained, but there was no need. The voice had only spoken two words to him, but they seemed to explain everything. They played down here. Soon the others would come back. Why settle for just the bitch when they could have all seven of the little shitepokes?

They waited and watched. Victor and Belch seemed to have gone to sleep with their eyes open. It was not a long wait, but there was time for Henry to think of a good many things. How he had found the switchblade this morning, for instance. It wasn't the same one he'd had on the last day of school; he'd lost that one somewhere. This one looked a lot cooler.

It came in the mail.

Sort of.

He had stood on the porch, looking at their battered leaning RFD box, trying to grasp what he was seeing. The box was decked with balloons. Two were tied to the metal hook where the postman sometimes hung packages; others were tied to the flag. Red, yellow, blue, green. It was as if some weird circus had crept by on Witcham Road in the dead of night, leaving this sign.

As he approached the mailbox, he saw there were faces on the balloons-the faces of the kids who had deviled him all this summer, the kids who seemed to mock him at every turn.

He had stared at these apparitions, gape-mouthed, and then the balloons popped, one by one. That had been good; it was as if he were making them pop just by thinking about it, killing them with his mind.

The front of the mailbox suddenly swung down. Henry walked toward it and peered in. Although the mailman didn't get this far out until the middle of the afternoon, he felt no surprise when he saw a flat rectangular package inside. He pulled it out. MR HENRY BOWERS, RFD #2, DERRY, MAINE, the address read. There was even a return-address of sorts: MR ROBERT GRAY, DERRY, MAINE.

He opened the package, letting the brown paper drift down heedlessly by his feet. There was a white box inside. He opened it. Lying on a bed of white cotton had been the switchknife. He took it into the house.

His father was lying on his pallet in the bedroom they shared, surrounded by empty beer cans, his belly bulging over the top of his yellow underpants. Henry knelt beside him, listening to the snort and flutter of his father's breathing, watching his father's horsy lips purse and pucker with each breath.

Henry placed the business-end of the switchknife against his father's scrawny neck. His father moved a little and then settled back into beery sleep again. Henry kept the knife like that for almost five minutes, his eyes distant and thoughtful, the ball of his left thumb caressing the silver button set into the switchblade's neck. The voice from the moon spoke to him-it whispered like the spring wind which is warm with a cold blade buried somewhere in its middle, it buzzed like a paper nest full of roused hornets, it huckstered like a hoarse politician.

Everything the voice said seemed pretty much okey-dokey to Henry and so he pushed the silver button. There was a click inside the knife as the suicide-spring let go, and six inches of steel drove through Butch Bowers's neck. It went in as easily as the tines of a meat-fork into the breast of a well-roasted chicken. The tip of the blade popped out on the other side, dripping.

Butch's eyes flew open. He stared at the ceiling. His mouth dropped open. Blood ran from the corners of it and down his cheeks toward the lobes of his ears. He began to gurgle. A large blood-bubble formed between his slack lips and popped. One of his hands crept to Henry's knee and squeezed convulsively. Henry didn't mind. Presently the hand fell away. The gurgling noises stopped a moment later. Butch Bowers was dead.

Henry pulled the knife out, wiped it on the dirty sheet that covered his father's pallet, and pushed the blade back in until the spring clicked again. He looked at his father without much interest. The voice had told him about the day's work while he knelt beside Butch with the knife against Butch's neck. The voice had explained everything. So he went into the other room to call Belch and Victor.

Now here they were, all three, and although his balls still ached horribly, the knife made a comforting bulge in his left front pants pocket. He felt that the cutting would begin soon. The others would come back down to resume whatever baby game they had been playing, and then the cutting would begin. The voice from the moon had laid it out for him as he knelt by his father, and on his way into town he had been unable to take his eyes from that pale ghost-disc in the sky. He saw that there was indeed a man in the moon-a grisly glimmering ghost-face with cratered holes for eyes and a glabrous grin that seemed to reach halfway up Its cheekbones. It talked

(we float down here Henry we all float you'll float too)

all the way to town. Kill them all, Henry, the ghost-voice from the moon said, and Henry could dig it; Henry felt he could second that emotion. He would kill them all, his tormentors, and then those feelings-that he was losing his grip, that he was coming inexorably to a larger world he would not be able to dominate as he had dominated the playyard at Derry Elementary, that in the wider world the fat-boy and the nigger and the stuttering freak might somehow grow larger while he somehow only grew older-would be gone.

He would kill them all, and the voices-those inside and the one which spoke to him from the moon-would leave him alone. He would kill them and then go back to the house and sit on the back porch with his father's souvenir Jap sword across his lap. He would drink one of his father's Rheingolds. He would listen to the radio, too, but no baseball. Baseball was strictly Squaresville. He would listen to rock and roll instead. Although Henry didn't know it (and wouldn't have cared if he did), on this one subject he and the Losers agreed: rock and roll was pretty much okey-dokey. We got chicken in the barn, whose barn, what barn, my barn. Everything would be good then; everything would be the ginchiest then; everything would be okeyfine then and anything which might come next would not matter. The voice would take care of him-he sensed that. If you took care of It, It would take care of you. That was how things had always been in Derry.

But the kids had to be stopped, stopped soon, stopped today. The voice had told him so.

Henry took his new knife out of his pocket, looked at it, turned it this way and that, admiring the way the sun winked and slid off the chrome facing. Then Belch was grabbing his arm and hissing: "Look that, Henry! Jeezly-old-crow! Look that!"

Henry looked and felt the clear light of understanding burst over him. A square section of the clearing was rising as if by magic, revealing a growing slice of darkness beneath. For just a moment he felt a jolt of terror as it occurred to him that this might be the owner of the voice... for surely It lived somewhere under the city. Then he heard the gritty squall of dirt in the hinges and understood. They hadn't been able to see the treehouse because there was none.

"By God, we was standin right on top of em," Victor grunted, and as Ben's head and shoulders appeared in the square hatchway in the center of the clearing, he made as if to charge forward. Henry grabbed him and held him back.