Five days later, as June drew toward its end, Bill told Richie that he wanted to go down to Neibolt Street and investigate under the porch where Eddie had seen the leper.
They had just arrived back at Richie’s house, and Bill was walking Silver. He had ridden Richie double most of the way home, an exhilarating speed-trip across Derry, but he had been careful to let Richie dismount a block away from his house. If Richie’s mother saw Bill riding Richie double she’d have a bird.
Silver’s wire basket was full of play six-shooters, two of them Bill’s, three of them Richie’s. They had been down in the Barrens for most of the afternoon, playing guns. Beverly Marsh had shown up around three o’clock, wearing faded jeans and toting a very old Daisy air rifle that had lost most of its pop—when you pulled its tape-wrapped trigger, it uttered a wheeze that sounded to Richie more like someone sitting on a very old Whoopee Cushion than a rifleshot. Her specialty was Japanese-sniper. She was very good at climbing trees and shooting the unwary as they passed below. The bruise on her cheekbone had faded to a faint yellow.
“What did you say?” Richie asked. He was shocked . . . but also a little intrigued.
“I w-w-want to take a l-look under that puh-puh-porch,” Bill said. His voice was stubborn but he wouldn’t look at Richie. There was a hard spot of flush high on each of his cheekbones. They had arrived in front of Richie’s house. Maggie Tozier was on the porch, reading a book. She waved to them and called, “Hi, boys! Want some iced tea?”
“We’ll be right there, Mom,” Richie said, and then to Bill: “There isn’t going to be anything there. He probably just saw a hobo and got all bent out of shape, for God’s sake. You know Eddie.”
“Y-Yeah, I nuh-know E-E-Eddie. B-But ruh-remem-member the pi-pi-picture in the a-album?”
Richie shifted his feet, uncomfortable. Bill raised his right hand. The Band-Aids were gone now, but Richie could see circlets of healing scab on Bill’s first three fingers.
“Yeah, but—”
“Luh-luh-histen to me-me,” Bill said. He began to speak very slowly, holding Richie’s eyes with his own. Once more he related the similarities between Ben’s story and Eddie’s . . . and tied those to what they had seen in the picture that moved. He suggested again that the clown had murdered the boys and girls who had been found dead in Derry since the previous December. “A-And muh-muh-haybe not just t-them,” Bill finished. “W-What about a-a-all the o-ones who d-disappeared? W-What about E-E-Eddie Cuh-Cuh-Corcoran?”
“Shit, his stepfather scared him off,” Richie said.
“W-well, m-maybe he d-d-did, and m-maybe he d-d-didn’t,” Bill said. “I knew him a l-lih-little bit, t-too, and I nuh-nuh-know his d-dad b-b-beat him. And I a-also k-know he u-u-used to stay out n-nuh-hights s-sometimes to g-get aw-way from h-h-him.”
“So maybe the clown got him while he was staying away,” Richie said thoughtfully. “Is that it?”
Bill nodded.
“What do you want, then? Its autograph?”
“If the cluh-cluh-cluh-hown killed the o-o-others, then h-he k-k-killed Juh-Georgie,” Bill said. His eyes caught Richie’s. They were like slate—hard, uncompromising, unforgiving. “I w-want to k-k-kill it.”
“Jesus Christ,” Richie said, frightened. “How are you going to do that?”
“Muh-my d-dad’s got a pih-pih-pistol,” Bill said. A little spittle flew from his lips but Richie barely noticed. “H-He doesn’t nuh-know I know, but I d-d-do. It’s on the top sh-shelf in his cluh-cluh-hoset.”
“That’s great if it’s a man,” Richie said, “and if we can find him sitting on a pile of kids’ bones—”
“I poured the tea, boys!” Richie’s mom called cheerily. “Better come and get it!”
“Right there, Mom!” Richie called again, offering a big, false smile. It disappeared immediately as he turned back to Bill. “Because I wouldn’t shoot a guy just because he was wearing a clown suit, Billy. You’re my best friend, but I wouldn’t do it and I wouldn’t let you do it if I could stop you.”
“Wh-what i-if there r-really w-was a p-pile of buh-buh-bones?”
Richie licked his lips and said nothing for a moment. Then he asked Bill, “What are you going to do if it’s not a man, Billy? What if it really is some kind of monster? What if there really are such things? Ben Hanscom said it was the mummy and the balloons were floating against the wind and it didn’t cast a shadow. The picture in Georgie’s album . . . either we imagined that or it was magic, and I gotta tell you, man, I don’t think we just imagined it. Your fingers sure didn’t imagine it, did they?”
Bill shook his head.
“So what are we going to do if it’s not a man, Billy?”
“Th-then wuh-wuh-we’ll have to f-figure suh-homething e-else out.”
“Oh yeah,” Richie said. “I can see it. After you shoot it four or five times and it keeps comin at us like the Teenage Werewolf in that movie me and Ben and Bev saw, you can try your Bullseye on it. And if the Bullseye doesn’t work, I’ll throw some of my sneezing powder at it. And if it keeps on coming after that we’ll just call time and say, ‘Hey now, hold on. This ain’t getting it, Mr. Monster. Look, I got to read up on it at the library. I’ll be back. Pawdon me.’ Is that what you’re going to say, Big Bill?”
He looked at his friend, his head thudding rapidly. Part of him wanted Bill to press on with his idea to check under the porch of that old house, but another part wanted—desperately wanted—Bill to give the idea up. In some ways all of this was like having stepped into one of those Saturday-afternoon horror movies at the Aladdin, but in another way—a crucial way—it wasn’t like that at all. Because this wasn’t safe like a movie, where you knew everything would turn out all right and even if it didn’t it was no skin off your ass. The picture in Georgie’s room hadn’t been like a movie. He had thought he was forgetting that, but apparently he had been fooling himself because now he could see those cuts whirling up Billy’s fingers. If he hadn’t pulled Bill back—
Incredibly, Bill was grinning. Actually grinning. “Y-Y-You wuh-wanted m-me to take y-you to luh-luh-look at a p-picture,” he said. “N-Now I w-want to t-take you to l-look at a h-house. Tit for t-tat.”
“You got no tits,” Richie said, and they both burst out laughing.
“T-Tomorrow muh-muh-morning,” Bill said, as if it had been resolved.
“And if it’s a monster?” Richie asked, holding Bill’s eyes. “If your dad’s gun doesn’t stop it, Big Bill? If it just keeps coming?”
“Wuh-wuh-we’ll thuh-thuh-think of suh-homething else,” Bill said again. “We’ll h-h-have to.” He threw back his head and laughed like a loon. After a moment Richie joined him. It was impossible not to.
They walked up the crazy-paving to Richie’s porch together. Maggie had set out huge glasses of iced tea with mint-sprigs in them and a plate of vanilla wafers.
“Yuh-you w-w-want t-t-to?”
“Well, no,” Richie said. “But I will.”
Bill clapped him on the back, hard, and that seemed to make the fear bearable—although Richie was suddenly sure (and he was not wrong) that sleep would be long coming that night.
“You boys looked like you were having a serious discussion out there,” Mrs. Tozier said, sitting down with her book in one hand and a glass of iced tea in the other. She looked at the boys expectantly.
“Aw, Denbrough’s got this crazy idea the Red Sox are going to finish in the first division,” Richie said.
“M-Me and my d-d-d-d-dad th-think t-they got a sh-shot at t-third,” Bill said, and sipped his iced tea. “T-This is veh-veh-very go-good, Muh-Mrs. Tozier.”
“Thank you, Bill.”
“The year the Sox finish in the first division will be the year you stop stuttering, mushmouth,” Richie said.
“Richie!” Mrs. Tozier screamed, shocked. She nearly dropped her glass of iced tea. But both Richie and Bill Denbrough were laughing hysterically, totally cracked up. She looked from her son to Bill and back to her son again, touched by wonder that was mostly simple perplexity but partly a fear so thin and sharp that it found its way deep into her inner heart and vibrated there like a tuning-fork made of clear ice.
I don’t understand either of them, she thought. Where they go, what they do, what they want . . . or what will become of them. Sometimes, oh sometimes their eyes are wild, and sometimes I’m afraid for them and sometimes I’m afraid of them. . . .
She found herself thinking, not for the first time, that it would have been nice if she and Went could have had a girl as well, a pretty blonde girl that she could have dressed in skirts and matching bows and black patent-leather shoes on Sundays. A pretty little girl who would ask to bake cupcakes after school and who would want dolls instead of books on ventriloquism and Revell models of cars that went fast.
A pretty little girl she could have understood.
“Did you get it?” Richie asked anxiously.
They were walking their bikes up Kansas Street beside the Barrens at ten o’clock the next morning. The sky was a dull gray. Rain had been forecast for that afternoon. Richie hadn’t gotten to sleep until after midnight and he thought Denbrough looked as if he had spent a fairly restless night himself; ole Big Bill was toting a matched set of Samsonite bags, one under each eye.
“I g-got it,” Bill said. He patted the green duffel coat he was wearing.
“Lemme see,” Richie said, fascinated.
“Not now,” Bill said, and then grinned. “Someone eh-eh-else might see, too. But l-l-look what else I bruh-brought.” He reached behind him, under the coat, and brought his Bullseye slingshot out of his back pocket.
“Oh shit, we’re in trouble,” Richie said, beginning to laugh.
Bill pretended to be hurt. “Ih-Ih-It was y-your idea, T-T-Tozier.”
Bill had gotten the custom aluminum slingshot for his birthday the year before. It had been Zack’s compromise between the .22 Bill had wanted and his mother’s adamant refusal to even consider giving a boy Bill’s age a firearm. The instruction booklet said a slingshot could be a fine hunting weapon, once you learned to use it. “In the right hands, your Bullseye Slingshot is as deadly and effective as a good ash bow or a high-powered firearm,” the booklet proclaimed. With such virtues dutifully extolled, the booklet went on to warn that a slingshot could be dangerous; the owner should no more aim one of the twenty ball-bearing slugs which came with it at a person than he would aim a loaded pistol at a person.
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. ITS 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 pedalling fast) looked like a pygmy bike next to the scrawny, gantrylike 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, a PPK-Walther that Zack Denbrough 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?”
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 raht! 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 time. Richie watched this, fascinated, and then looked under the porch again. He saw something else this time. 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! Chrissake,” he hissed, “what are you doing? Get outta there!”
Bill didn’t reply. He slithered through, scraping his duffel coat up from the small of his back, barely missing a chunk of glass that would have cut him a good one. A second later Richie heard his tennies smack down on the hard earth inside.
“Piss on this action,” Richie muttered frantically to himself, looking at the square of darkness into which his friend had disappeared. “Bill, you gone out of your mind?”
Bill’s voice floated up: “Y-You c-c-can stay up th-there if you w-want, Ruh-Ruh-Richie. St-Stand g-g-guard.”
Instead he rolled over on his belly and shoved his legs through the cellar window before his nerve could go bad on him, hoping he wouldn’t cut his hands or his stomach on the broken glass.
Something clutched his legs. Richie screamed.
“I-I-It’s juh-juh-hust m-me,” Bill hissed, and a moment later Richie was standing beside him in the cellar, pulling down his shirt and his jacket. “Wh-who d-did you th-think it w-was?”
“The boogeyman,” Richie said, and laughed shakily.
“Y-You g-go th-that w-way and I-I—I’ll g-g-g—”
“Fuck that,” Richie said. He could actually hear his heartbeat in his voice, making it sound bumpy and uneven, first up and then down. “I’m stickin with you, Big Bill.”
They moved toward the coalpit first, Bill slightly in the lead, the gun in his hand, Richie close behind him, trying to look everywhere at once. Bill stood beyond one of the coalpit’s jutting wooden sides for a moment, and then suddenly darted around it, pointing the gun with both hands. Richie squinched his eyes shut, steeling himself for the explosion. It didn’t come. He opened his eyes again cautiously.
“Nuh-nuh-nothin but c-c-coal,” Bill said, and giggled nervously.
Richie stepped up beside Bill and looked. There was still a drift of old coal in here, piled up almost to the ceiling at the back of the stall and trickling away to a lump or two by their feet. It was as black as a crow’s wing.
“Let’s—” Richie began, and then the door at the head of the cellar stairs crashed open against the wall with a violent bang, spilling thin white daylight down the stairs.
Both boys screamed.
Richie heard snarling sounds. They were very loud—the sounds a wild animal in a cage might make. He saw loafers descend the steps. Faded jeans on top of them—swinging hands—
But they weren’t hands . . . they were paws. Huge, misshapen paws.
“Cuh-cuh-climb the c-c-coal!” Bill was screaming, but Richie stood frozen, suddenly knowing what was coming for them, what was going to kill them in this cellar that stank of damp earth and the cheap wine that had been spilled in the corners. Knowing but needing to see. “There’s a wuh-wuh-window at the t-top of the c-coal!”
The paws were covered with dense brown hair that curled and coiled like wire; the fingers were tipped with jagged nails. Now Richie saw a silk jacket. It was black with orange piping—the Derry High School colors.
“G-G-Go!” Bill screamed, and gave Richie a gigantic shove. Richie went sprawling into the coal. Sharp jags and corners of it poked him painfully, breaking through his daze. More coal avalanched over his hands. That mad snarling went on and on.
Panic slipped its hood over Richie’s mind.
Barely aware of what he was doing, he scrambled up the mountain of coal, gaining ground, sliding back, lunging upward again, screaming as he went. The window at the top was grimed black with coaldust and let in next to no light at all. It was latched shut. Richie seized the latch, which was of the sort that turned, and threw all his weight against it. The latch moved not at all. The snarling was closer now.
The gun went off below him, the sound nearly deafening in the closed room. Gunsmoke, sharp and acrid, stung Richie’s nose. It shocked him back to some sort of awareness and he realized that he had been trying to turn the thumb-latch the wrong way. He reversed the direction of the force he was applying, and the latch gave with a protracted rusty squeal. Coaldust sifted down on his hands like pepper.
The gun went off again with a second deafening bang. Bill Denbrough shouted, “YOU KILLED MY BROTHER, YOU FUCKER!”