Mrs Marsh sounded suddenly alarmed. "You're not on a date, are you, Bevvie?"
"No, of course not," Bev said, looking through the arched doorway between the darkened hall where she was and the dining room, where the others were sitting down around the Monopoly board. But I sure wish I was. "Boys, uck. But they have a sign-up sheet down here, and every night a different dad or mom takes kids home." That much, at least, was true. The rest was a lie so outrageous that she could feel herself blushing hotly in the dark.
"All right," her mom said. "I just wanted to be sure. Because if your dad caught you going on dates at your age, he'd be mad." Almost as an afterthought she added: "I would be, too."
"Yeah, I know," Bev said, still looking into the dining room. She did know; yet here she was, not with one boy but six of them, in a house where the parents were gone. She saw Ben looking at her anxiously, and she sketched a smiling little salute at him. He blushed but gave her the little salute right back.
"Are any of your girlfriends there?"
What girlfriends, Mamma?
"Um, Patty O'Hara's here. And Ellie Geiger, I think. She's playing shuffle-board downstairs." The facility with which the lies came from her lips made her ashamed. She wished she were talking to her father; she would have been more scared but less ashamed. She supposed she really wasn't a very good girl.
"I love you, Mamma," she said.
"Same goes back to you, Bev." Her mother paused briefly and added: "Be careful. The paper says there may be another one. A boy named Patrick Hockstetter. He's missing. Did you know him, Bevvie?"
She closed her eyes briefly. "No, Mom."
"Well... goodbye, then."
"Bye."
She joined the others at the table and for an hour they played Monopoly. Stan was the big winner.
"Jews are very good at making money," Stan said, putting a hotel on Atlantic Avenue and two more green houses on Ventnor Avenue. "Everybody knows that."
"Jesus, make me Jewish," Ben said promptly, and everyone laughed. Ben was almost broke.
Beverly glanced across the table from time to time at Bill, noting his clean hands, his blue eyes, the fine red hair. As he moved the little silver shoe he was using as a marker around the board, she thought, If he held my hand, I think I'd be so glad I'd probably die. A warm light seemed to glow briefly in her chest and she smiled secretly down at her hands.
6
The evening's finale was almost anticlirnactic. Ben took one of Zack's chisels from the shelf and used a hammer to strike the molds on the cut-lines. They opened easily. Two small silver balls fell out. In one they could faintly see part of a date: 925. In the other, wavery lines Beverly thought were the remnants of Lady Liberty's hair. They looked at them without speaking for a moment, and then Stan picked one up.
"Pretty small," he said.
"So was the rock in David's sung when he went up against Goliath," Mike said. "They look powerful to me."
Ben found himself nodding. They did to him, as well.
"We're all d-d-done?" Bill asked.
"All done," Ben said. "Here." He tossed the second slug to Bill, who was so surprised he almost fumbled it.
The slugs went around the circle. Each of them looked closely at both, marvelling at their roundness, weight, actuality. When they came back to Ben, he held them in his hand and then looked at Bill. "What do we do with them now?"
"G-G-Give them to B-Beverly."
"No!"
He looked at her. His face was kind enough, but stern. "B-B-Bev, we've been thruh-through this a-a-already, and-"
"Ill do it," she said. "I'll shoot the goddamned things when the time comes, If it comes. I'll probably get us all killed, but I'll do it. I don't want to take them home, though. One of my
(father)
parents might find them. Then I'd be in dutch."
"Don't you have a secret hiding place?" Richie asked. "Criminy, I got four or five."
"I've got a place," Beverly said. There was a small slit in the bottom of her box-spring where she sometimes stashed cigarettes, comic books, and, just lately, film and fashion magazines. "But nothing I'd trust for something like this. You keep them, Bill. Until it's time, anyway, you keep them."
"Okay," Bill said mildly, and just then lights splashed into the driveway. "Holy cruh-crow, they're e-e-early. L-Let's get out of h-here."
They were just sitting down around the Monopoly board again when Sharon Denbrough opened the kitchen door.
Richie rolled his eyes and mimed wiping sweat from his forehead; the others laughed heartily. Richie had Gotten Off A Good One.
A moment later she came in. "Your dad's waiting for your friends in the car, Bill."
"O-O-Okay, M-Mom," Bill said. "W-We were juh-just f-f-finishing, a-anyway."
"Who won?" Sharon asked, smiling bright-eyed at Bill's little friends. The girl was going to be very pretty, she thought. She supposed in another year or two the children would have to be chaperoned if there were going to be girls instead of just the regular gang of boys. But surely it was still too soon to worry about sex rearing its ugly head.
"St-Stan wuh-wuh-won," Bill said. "Juh-Juh-Jews are very g-g-good at m-making money."
"Bill!" She cried, horrified and blushing... and then she looked around at them, amazed, as they roared with laughter, Stan included. Amazement turned to something like fear (although she said nothing of this to her husband later, in bed). There was a feeling in the air, like static electricity, only somehow much more powerful, much more scary. She felt that if she touched any of them, she would receive a walloping shock. What's happened to them? she thought, dismayed, and perhaps she even opened her mouth to say something like that. Then Bill was saying he was sorry (but still with that devilish glint in his eye), and Stan was saying that was all right, it was just a joke they laid on him from time to time, and she found herself too confused to say anything at all.
But she felt relieved when the children were gone and her own puzzling, stuttering son had gone to his room and turned off the light.
7
The day that the Losers" Club finally met It in face-to-face combat, the day It almost had Ben Hanscom's guts for garters, was July 25th, 1958. It was hot and muggy and still. Ben remembered the weather clearly enough; it had been the last day of the hot weather. After that day, a long spell of cool and cloudy had come in.
They arrived at 29 Neibolt Street around ten that morning, Bill riding Richie double on Silver, Ben with his ample buttocks spilling over either side of the sagging seat on his Raleigh. Beverly came down Neibolt Street on her girl's Schwinn, her red hair held back from her forehead by a green band. It streamed out behind her. Mike came by himself, and about five minutes later Stan and Eddie walked up together.
"H-H-How's your a-a-arm, Eh-Eh-Eddie?"
"Aw, not too bad. Hurts if I roll over on that side while I'm sleeping. Did you bring the stuff?"
There was a canvas-wrapped bundle in Silver's bike-basket. Bill took it out and unwrapped it. He handed the slingshot to Beverly, who took it with a little grimace but said nothing. There was also a tin Sucrets box in the bundle. Bill opened it and showed them the two silver balls. They looked at them silently, gathered close together on the balding lawn on 29 Neibolt Street-a lawn where only weeds seemed to grow. Bill, Richie, and Eddie had seen the house before; the others hadn't, and they looked at it curiously.
The windows look tike eyes, Stan thought, and his hand went to the paperback book in his back pocket. He touched it for luck. He carried the book with him almost everywhere-it was M. K. Handey's Guide to North American Birds. They look like dirty blind eyes. It stinks, Beverly thought. I can smell it-but not with my nose, not exactly.
Mike thought, It's like that time out where the Ironworks used to be. It has the same feel... as if it's telling us to step on in.
This is one of Its places, all right, Ben thought. One of the places like the Morlock holes, where It goes out and comes back in. And It knows we're out here. It's waiting for us to come in.
"Yuh-yuh-you all still want to?" Bill asked.
They looked back at him, pale and solemn. No one said no. Eddie fumbled his aspirator out of his pocket and took a long whooping gasp at it.
"Gimme some of that," Richie said.
Eddie looked at him, surprised, waiting for the punchline.
Richie held out his hand. "No fake, Jake. Can I have some?"
Eddie shrugged with his good shoulder-an oddly disjointed movement-and handed it over. Richie triggered the aspirator and breathed deep. "Needed that," he said, and handed it back. He was coughing a little, but his eyes were sober.
"Me too," Stan said. "Okay?"
So one after another they used Eddie's aspirator. When it came back to him, Eddie jammed it in his back pocket, where the nozzle stuck out. They turned to look at the house again.
"Does anybody live on this street?" Beverly asked in a low voice.
"Not this end of it," Mike said. "Not anymore. I guess there are still bums sometimes. Guys that come through on the freights."
"They wouldn't see anything," Stan said. "They'd be safe. Most of them, anyway." He looked at Bill. "Can any grownups at all see It, do you think,
Bill?"
"I don't nuh-know," Bill said. "There must be suh-suh-some."
"I wish we could meet one," Richie said glumly. "This really isn't a job for kids, you know what I mean?"
Bill knew. Whenever the Hardy Boys got into trouble, Fenton Hardy was around to bail them out. Same with Rick Brant's dad in the Rick Brant Science Adventures. Shit, even Nancy Drew had a father who would show up in the nick of time if the bad guys tied her up and threw her into an abandoned mine or something.
"Ought to be a grownup along," Richie said, looking at the closed house with hs peeling paint, its duty windows, its shadowy porch. He sighed tiredly. For a moment, Ben felt their resolution falter.
Then Bill said, "Cuh-cuh-home a-a-a-around h-here. Look at th-this."
They walked around to the left side of the porch, where the skirting was torn off. The brambly, run-to-the-wild roses were still there... and those It had touched when It climbed out were still black and dead.
"It just touched them and it did that?" Beverly asked, horrified.
Bill nodded. "Are you guh-huys s-s-sure?
For a moment nobody replied. They weren't sure; even though all of them knew by Bill's face that he would go on without them, they weren't sure. There was also a species of shame on Bill's face. As he had told them before, George hadn't been their brother.
But all the other kids, Ben thought. Betty Ripsom, Cheryl Lamonica, that Clements kid, Eddie Corcoran (maybe), Ronnie Grogan... even Patrick Hockstetter. It kills kids, goddamit, kids!
"I'll go, Big Bill, "he said.
"Shit, yeah," Beverly said.
"Sure," Richie said. "You think we're gonna let you have all the fun, mushmouth?"
Bill looked at them, his throat working, and then he nodded. He handed the tin box to Beverly.
"Are you sure, Bill?"
"Sh-Sh-Sure."
She nodded, at once horrified by the responsibility and bewitched by his trust. She opened the box, took out the slugs, and slipped one into the right front pocket of her jeans. The other she socketed in the Bullseye's rubber cup, and it was by the cup that she carried the slingshot. She could feel the ball tightly enclosed in her fist, cold at first and then warming.
"Let's go," she said, her voice not quite steady. "Let's go before I chicken out."
Bill nodded, then looked sharply at Eddie. "Cuh-Can you d-d-do this, Eh-Eh-Eddie?"
Eddie nodded. "sure I can. I was alone last time. This time I'm with my friends. Right?" He looked at them and grinned a little. His expression was shy, fragile, and quite beautiful.
Richie clapped him on the back. "Thass right, senhorr. Anywhunn tries to steal your assipirator, we keel heem. But we keel heem slow."
That's terrible, Richie," Bev said, giggling.
"Uh-Uh-under the p-porch," Bill said. "A-A11 of you b-b-behind me. Then into the suh-suh-cellar."
"If you go first and that thing jumps you, what do I do?" Beverly asked. "shoot through you?"
"If y-you have to," Bill said. "But I suh-suh-suggest y-y-you try guh-hoing a-around, first."
Richie laughed wildly at this.
"We'll g-g-go through the whole puh-puh-place, if we have t-to." He shrugged. "Maybe we won't find be a-a-anything."
"Do you believe that?" Mike asked.
"No," Bill said briefly. "It's h-h-here."
Ben believed he was right. The house at 29 Neibolt Street seemed to be encased in a poisonous envelope. It could not be seen... but it could be felt. He licked his lips.
"You ruh-ruh-ready?" Bill asked them.
They all looked back at him. "ready, Bill," Richie said.
"Cuh-come on, th-then," Bill said. "stay cluh-close behind me, B-Beverly." He dropped to his knees, crawled through the blighted rosebushes and under the porch.
8
They went this way: Bill, Beverly, Ben, Eddie, Richie, Stan, Mike. The leaves under the porch crackled and puffed up a sour old smell. Ben wrinkled his nose. Had he ever smelled fallen leaves like these? He thought not. And then an unpleasant idea struck him. They smelled the way he imagined a mummy would smell, just after its discoverer had levered open its coffin: all dust and bitter ancient tannic acid.
Bill had reached the broken cellar window and was looking into the cellar. Beverly crawled up beside him. "You see anything?"
Bill shook his head. "But that d-doesn't m-m-mean nuh-huthin's there. L-Look; there's the c-coal-pile me and R-R-Richie used to get ow-out."
Ben, who was looking between them, saw it. He was becoming excited as well as afraid now, and he welcomed the excitement, instinctively recognizing the fact that it could be a tool. Seeing the coal-pile was a little like seeing a great landmark about which you had only read or heard from others.
Bill turned around and slipped lithely through the window. Beverly gave Ben the Bullseye, folding his hand over the cup and ball nestled in it. "Give it to me the second I'm down," she said. "The second."
"Got you."
She slipped down as easily and lithely as Bill had before her. There was-for Ben, at least-one heart-stopping instant when her blouse pulled out of her jeans and he saw her flat white belly. Then there was the thrill of her hands over his as he handed the slingshot down.