As it turns out, Bill isn’t the only one; they all bring booze.
Bill has bourbon, Beverly has vodka and a carton of orange juice, Richie a sixpack, Ben Hanscom a bottle of Wild Turkey. Mike has a sixpack in the little refrigerator in the staff lounge.
Eddie Kaspbrak comes in last, holding a small brown bag.
“What you got there, Eddie?” Richie asks. “Za-Rex or Kool-Aid?”
Smiling nervously, Eddie removes first a bottle of gin and then a bottle of prune juice.
In the thunderstruck silence which follows, Richie says quietly: “Somebody call for the men in the white coats. Eddie Kaspbrak’s finally gone over the top.”
“Gin-and-prune-juice happens to be very healthy,” Eddie replies defensively . . . and then they’re all laughing wildly, the sound of their mirth echoing and re-echoing in the silent library, rolling up and down the glassed-in hall between the adult library and the Children’s Library.
“You go head-on,” Ben says, wiping his streaming eyes. “You go head-on, Eddie. I bet it really moves the mail, too.”
Smiling, Eddie fills a paper cup three-quarters full of prune juice and then soberly adds two capfuls of gin.
“Oh Eddie, I do love you,” Beverly says, and Eddie looks up, startled but smiling. She gazes up and down the table. “I love all of you.”
Bill says, “W-We love you too, B-Bev.”
“Yes,” Ben says. “We love you.” His eyes widen a little, and he laughs. “I think we still all love each other. . . . Do you know how rare that must be?”
There’s a moment of silence, and Mike is really not surprised to see that Richie is wearing his glasses.
“My contacts started to burn and I had to take them out,” Richie says briefly when Mike asks. “Maybe we should get down to business?”
They all look at Bill then, as they had in the gravel-pit, and Mike thinks: They look at Bill when they need a leader, at Eddie when they need a navigator. Get down to business, what a hell of a phrase that is. Do I tell them that the bodies of the children that were found back then and now weren’t sexually molested, not even precisely mutilated, but partially eaten? Do I tell them I’ve got seven miner’s helmets, the kind with strong electric lights set into the front, stored back at my house, one of them for a guy named Stan Uris who couldn’t make the scene, as we used to say? Or is it maybe enough just to tell them to go home and get a good night’s sleep, because it ends tomorrow or tomorrow night for good—either for It or us?
None of those things have to be said, perhaps, and the reason why they don’t has already been stated: they still love one another. Things have changed over the last twenty-seven years, but that, miraculously, hasn’t. It is, Mike thinks, our only real hope.
The only thing that really remains is to finish going through it, to complete the job of catching up, of stapling past to present so that the strip of experience forms some half-assed kind of wheel. Yes, Mike thinks, that’s it. Tonight the job is to make the wheel; tomorrow we can see if it still turns . . . the way it did when we drove the big kids out of the gravel-pit and out of the Barrens.
“Have you remembered the rest?” Mike asks Richie.
Richie swallows some beer and shakes his head. “I remember you telling us about the bird . . . and about the smoke-hole.” A grin breaks over Richie’s face. “I remembered about that walking over here tonight with Bevvie and Ben. What a fucking horror-show that was—”
“Beep-beep, Richie,” Beverly says, smiling.
“Well, you know,” he says, still smiling himself and punching his glasses up on his nose in a gesture that is eerily reminiscent of the old Richie. He winks at Mike. “You and me, right, Mikey?”
Mike snorts laughter and nods.
“Miss Scawlett! Miss Scawlett!” Richie shrieks in his Pickaninny Voice. “It’s gettin a little wa’am in de smokehouse, Miss Scawlett!”
Laughing, Bill says, “Another engineering and architectural triumph by Ben Hanscom.”
Beverly nods. “We were digging out the clubhouse when you brought your father’s photograph album to the Barrens, Mike.”
“Oh, Christ!” Bill says, sitting suddenly bolt-upright. “And the pictures—”
Richie nods grimly. “The same trick as in Georgie’s room. Only that time we all saw it.”
Ben says, “I remembered what happened to the extra silver dollar.”
They all turn to look at him.
“I gave the other three to a friend of mine before I came out here,” Ben says quietly. “For his kids. I remembered there had been a fourth, but I couldn’t remember what happened to it. Now I do.” He looks at Bill. “We made a silver slug out of it, didn’t we? You, me, and Richie. At first we were going to make a silver bullet—”
“You were pretty sure you could do it,” Richie agrees. “But in the end—”
“We got c-cold fuh-feet.” Bill nods slowly. The memory has fallen naturally into its place, and he hears that same low but distinct click! when it happens. We’re getting closer, he thinks.
“We went back to Neibolt Street,” Richie says. “All of us.”
“You saved my life, Big Bill,” Ben says suddenly and Bill shakes his head. “You did, though,” Ben persists, and this time Bill doesn’t shake his head. He suspects that maybe he had done just that, although he does not yet remember how . . . and was it him? He thinks maybe Beverly . . . but that is not there. Not yet, anyway.
“Excuse me for a second,” Mike says. “I’ve got a sixpack in the back fridge.”
“Have one of mine,” Richie says.
“Hanlon no drinkum white man’s beer,” Mike replies. “Especially not yours, Trashmouth.”
“Beep-beep, Mikey,” Richie says solemnly, and Mike goes to get his beer on a warm wave of their laughter.
He snaps on the light in the lounge, a tacky little room with seedy chairs, a Silex badly in need of scrubbing, and a bulletin board covered with old notices, wage and hour information, and a few New Yorker cartoons now turning yellow and curling up at the edges. He opens the little refrigerator and feels the shock sink into him, bone-deep and ice-white, the way February cold sank into you when February was here and it seemed that April never would be. Blue and orange balloons drift out in a flood, dozens of them, a New Year’s Eve bouquet of party-balloons, and he thinks incoherently in the midst of his fear, All we need is Guy Lombardo tootling away on “Auld Lang Syne.” They waft past his face and rise toward the lounge ceiling. He’s trying to scream, unable to scream, seeing what had been behind the balloons, what It had popped into the refrigerator beside his beer, as if for a late-night snack after his worthless friends have all told their worthless stories and gone back to their rented beds in this home town that is no longer home.
Mike takes a step backward, his hands going to his face, shutting the vision out. He stumbles over one of the chairs, almost falls, and takes his hands away. It is still there; Stan Uris’s severed head beside Mike’s sixpack of Bud Light, the head not of a man but of an eleven-year-old boy. The mouth is open in a soundless scream but Mike can see neither teeth nor tongue because the mouth has been stuffed full of feathers. The feathers are a light brown and unspeakably huge. He knows well enough what bird those feathers came from. Oh yes. Oh yes indeed. He had seen the bird in May of 1958 and they had all seen it in early August of 1958 and then, years later, while visiting his dying father, he had found out that Will Hanlon had seen it once, too, after his escape from the fire at the Black Spot. The blood from Stan’s tattered neck has dripped down and formed a coagulated pool on the fridge’s bottom shelf. It glitters dark ruby-red in the uncompromising glow shed by the fridge bulb.
“Uh . . . uh . . . uh . . .” Mike manages, but no more sound than that can he make. Then the head opens its eyes, and they are the silver-bright eyes of Pennywise the Clown. Those eyes roll in his direction and the head’s lips begin to squirm around the mouthful of feathers. It is trying to speak, perhaps trying to deliver prophecy like the oracle in a Greek play.
Just thought I’d join you, Mike, because you can’t win without me. You can’t win without me and you know it, don’t you? You might have had a chance if all of me had shown up, but I just couldn’t stand the strain on my all-American brain, if you see what I mean, jellybean. All the six of you can do on your own is hash over some old times and then get yourselves killed. So I thought I’d head you off at the pass. Head you off, get it, Mikey? Get it, old pal? Get it, you fucking scumbag nigger?
You’re not real! he screams, but no sound comes out; he is like a TV with the volume control turned all the way down.
Incredibly, grotesquely, the head winks at him.
I’m real, all right. Real as raindrops. And you know what I’m talking about, Mikey. What the six of you are planning to try is like taking off in a jet plane with no landing gear. There’s no sense in going up if you can’t get back down, is there? No sense in going down if you can’t get back up, either. You’ll never think of the right riddles and jokes. You’ll never make me laugh, Mikey. You’ve all forgotten how to turn your screams upside-down. Beep-beep, Mikey, what do you say? Remember the bird? Nothing but a sparrow, but say-hey! it was a lulu, wasn’t it? Big as a barn, big as one of those silly Japanese movie monsters that used to scare you when you were a little kid. The days when you knew how to turn that bird from your door are gone forever. Believe it, Mikey. If you know how to use your head, you’ll get out of here, out of Derry, right now. If you don’t know how to use it, it’ll end up just like this one here. Today’s guidepost along the great road of life is use it before you lose it, my good man.
The head rolls over on its face (the feathers in its mouth make a horrid crumpling sound) and falls out of the refrigerator. It thuks to the floor and rolls toward him like a hideous bowling ball, its blood-matted hair changing places with its grinning face; it rolls toward him leaving a gluey trail of blood and dismembered bits of feather behind, its mouth working around its clot of feathers.
Beep-beep, Mikey! it screams as Mike backs madly away from it, hands held out in a warding-off gesture. Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-fucking-beep!
Then there is a sudden loud pop—the sound of a plastic cork thumbed out of a bottle of cheap champagne. The head disappears (Real, Mike thinks sickly; there was nothing supernatural about that pop, anyway; that was the sound of air rushing back into a suddenly vacated space . . . real, oh God, real). A thin net of blood droplets floats up and then patters back down. No need to clean the lounge, though; Carole will see nothing when she comes in tomorrow, not even if she has to plow her way through the balloons to get to the hotplate and make her first cup of coffee. How handy. He giggles shrilly.
He looks up and yes, the balloons are still there. The blue ones say: DERRY NIGGERS GET THE BIRD. The orange ones say: THE LOSERS ARE STILL LOSING, BUT STANLEY URIS IS FINALLY AHEAD.
No sense going up if you can’t get back down, the speaking head had assured him, no sense going down if you can’t get back up. This latter makes him think again of the stored miner’s helmets. And was it true? Suddenly he’s thinking about the first day he went down to the Barrens after the rockfight. July 6th, that had been, two days after he had marched in the Fourth of July parade . . . two days after he had seen Pennywise the Clown in person for the first time. It had been after that day in the Barrens, after listening to their stories and then, hesitantly, telling his own, that he had gone home and asked his father if he could look at his photograph album.
Why exactly had he gone down to the Barrens that July 6th? Had he known he would find them there? It seemed that he had—and not just that they would be there, but where they would be. They had been talking about a clubhouse of some sort, he remembers, but it had seemed to him that they had been talking about that because there was something else that they didn’t know how to talk about.
Mike looks up at the balloons, not really seeing them now, trying to remember exactly how it had been that day, that hot hot day. Suddenly it seems very important to remember just what had happened, what every nuance had been, what his state of mind had been.
Because that was when everything began to happen. Before that the others had talked about killing It, but there had been no forward motion, no plan. When Mike had come the circle closed, the wheel began to roll. It had been later that same day that Bill and Richie and Ben went down to the library and began to do serious research on an idea that Bill had had a day or a week or a month before. It had all begun to—
“Mike?” Richie calls from the Reference Room where the others are gathered. “Did you die in there?”
Almost, Mike thinks, looking at the balloons, the blood, the feathers inside the fridge.
He calls back: “I think you guys better come in here.”
He hears the scrape of their chairs, the mutter of their voices; he hears Richie saying “Oh Jesus, what’s up now?” and another ear, this one in his memory, hears Richie saying something else, and suddenly he remembers what it is he has been searching for; even more, he understands why it has seemed so elusive. The reaction of the others when he stepped into the clearing in the darkest, deepest, and most overgrown part of the Barrens that day had been . . . nothing. No surprise, no questions about how he had found them, no big deal. Ben had been eating a Twinkie, he remembers, Beverly and Richie had been smoking cigarettes, Bill had been lying on his back with his hands behind his head, looking at the sky, Eddie and Stan were looking doubtfully at a series of strings which had been pegged into the ground to form a square of about five feet on a side.
No surprise, no questions, no big deal. He had simply shown up and been accepted. It was as if, without even knowing it, they had been waiting for him. And in that third ear, memory’s ear, he hears Richie’s Pickaninny Voice raised as it was earlier tonight: “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy, here come . . .
. . . that black chile agin! Lawks-a-mussy, I doan know what thisyere Barrens is comin to! Look at that there nappy haid, Big Bill!” Bill didn’t even look around; he just went on staring dreamily at the fat summer clouds marching across the sky. He was giving an important question his most careful consideration. Richie was not offended by the lack of attention, however. He pushed onward. “Jest lookin at that nappy haid makes me b’leeve I needs me another mint joolip! I’se gwinter have it out on the verandah, where it’s be a little bit coolah—”
“Beep-beep, Richie,” Ben said from around a mouthful of Twinkie, and Beverly laughed.
“Hi,” Mike said uncertainly. His heart was beating a little too hard, but he was determined to go on with this. He owed his thanks, and his father had told him that you always paid what you owed—and as quick as you could, before the interest mounted up.
Stan looked around. “Hi,” he said, and then looked back at the square of strings pegged into the center of the clearing. “Ben, are you sure this is going to work?”
“It’ll work,” Ben said. “Hi, Mike.”
“Want a cigarette?” Beverly asked. “I got two left.”
“No thank you.” Mike took a deep breath and said, “I wanted to thank you all again for helping me the other day. Those guys meant to hurt me bad. I’m sorry some of you guys got banged up.”
Bill waved his hand, dismissing it. “D-D-Don’t wuh-wuh-horry a-a-bout it. Th-they’ve h-had it i-i-in f-for us all y-y-year.” He sat up and looked at Mike with sudden starry interest. “C-Can I a-ask you s-s-something?”
“I guess so,” Mike said. He sat down gingerly. He had heard such prefaces before. The Denbrough kid was going to ask him what it was like to be a Negro.
But instead Bill said: “When L-L-Larsen pitched the n-no-h-hitter in the World S-Series two years ago, d-do you think that was just luh-luck?”
Richie dragged deep on his cigarette and started to cough. Beverly pounded him good-naturedly on the back. “You’re just a beginner, Richie, you’ll learn.”
“I think it’s gonna fall in, Ben,” Eddie said worriedly, looking at the pegged square. “I don’t know how cool I am on the idea of getting buried alive.”
“You’re not gonna get buried alive,” Ben said. “And if you are, just suck your damn old aspirator until someone pulls you out.”
This struck Stanley Uris as deliciously funny. He leaned back on his elbow, his head turned up to the sky, and laughed until Eddie kicked his shin and told him to shut up.
“Luck,” Mike said finally. “I think any no-hitter’s more luck than skill.”
“M-M-Me t-too,” Bill said. Mike waited to see if there was more, but Bill seemed satisfied. He lay down again, laced his hands behind his head again, and went back to studying the clouds as they floated by.
“What are you guys up to?” Mike asked, looking at the square of strings pegged just above the ground.
“Oh, this is Haystack’s big idea of the week,” Richie said. “Last time he flooded out the Barrens and that was pretty good, but this one’s a real dinner-winner. This is Dig Your Own Clubhouse Month. Next month—”
“Y-You don’t nuh-nuh-need to put B-B-B-Ben d-duh-hown,” Bill said, still looking at the sky. “It’s going to be guh-guh-good.”
“God’s sake, Bill, I was just kidding.”
“Suh-Sometimes you k-k-kid too much, Rih-Richie.”
Richie accepted the rebuke silently.
“I still don’t get it,” Mike said.
“Well, it’s pretty simple,” Ben said. “They wanted a treehouse, and we could do that, but people have a bad habit of breaking their bones when they fall out of tree-houses—”
“Kookie . . . Kookie . . . lend me your bones,” Stan said, and laughed again while the others looked at him, puzzled. Stan did not have much sense of humor, and the bit he did have was sort of peculiar.
“You ees goin loco, senhorr,” Richie said. “Eees the heat an the cucarachas, I theenk.”
“Anyway,” Ben said, “what we’ll do is dig down about five feet in the square I pegged out there. We can’t go much deeper than that or we’ll hit groundwater, I guess. It’s pretty close to the surface down here. Then we’ll shore up the sides just to make sure they don’t cave in.” He looked significantly at Eddie here, but Eddie was worried.
“Then what?” Mike asked, interested.
“We’ll cap off the top.”
“Huh?”
“Put boards over the top of the hole. We can put in a trapdoor or something so we can get in and out, even windows if we want—”
“We’ll need some hih-hih-hinges,” Bill said, still looking at the clouds.
“We can get those at Reynolds Hardware,” Ben said.
“Y-You guh-guh-guys have your a-a-allowances,” Bill said.
“I’ve got five dollars,” Beverly said. “I saved it up from babysitting.”
Richie immediately began to crawl toward her on his hands and knees. “I love you, Bevvie,” he said, making dog’s eyes at her. “Will you marry me? We’ll live in a pine-studded bungalow—”
“A what?” Beverly asked, while Ben watched them with an odd mixture of anxiety, amusement, and concentration.
“A bung-studded pinealow,” Richie said. “Five bucks is enough, sweetie, you and me and baby makes three—”
Beverly laughed and blushed and moved away from him.
“We sh-share the e-expenses,” Bill said. “That’s why we got a club.”
“So after we cap the hole with boards,” Ben went on, “we put down this heavy-duty glue—Tangle-Track, they call it—and put the sods back on. Maybe sprinkle it with pine needles. We could be down there and people—people like Henry Bowers—could walk right over us and not even know we were there.”
“You thought of that?” Mike said. “Jeez, that’s great!”
Ben smiled. It was his turn to blush.
Bill sat up suddenly and looked at Mike. “You w-w-want to heh-help?”
“Well . . . sure,” Mike said. “That’d be fun.”
A look passed among the others—Mike felt it as well as saw it. There are seven of us here, Mike thought, and for no reason at all he shivered.
“When are you going to break ground?”
“P-P-hretty s-soon,” Bill said, and Mike knew—knew—that it wasn’t just Ben’s underground clubhouse Bill was talking about. Ben knew it, too. So did Richie, Beverly, and Eddie. Stan Uris had stopped smiling. “W-We’re g-gonna start this pruh-huh-hoject pretty suh-suh-soon.”
There was a pause then, and Mike was suddenly aware of two things: they wanted to say something, tell him something . . . and he was not entirely sure he wanted to hear it. Ben had picked up a stick and was doodling aimlessly in the dirt, his hair hiding his face. Richie was gnawing at his already ragged fingernails. Only Bill was looking directly at Mike.
“Is something wrong?” Mike asked uneasily.
Speaking very slowly, Bill said: “W-W-We’re a cluh-club. Y-You can be in the club if you w-w-want, but y-y-you have to kee-keep our see-see-secrets.”
“You mean, like the clubhouse?” Mike asked, now more uneasy than ever. “Well, sure—”
“We’ve got another secret, kid,” Richie said, still not looking at Mike. “And Big Bill says we’ve got something more important to do this summer than digging underground clubhouses.”
“He’s right, too,” Ben added.
There was a sudden, whistling gasp. Mike jumped. It was only Eddie, blasting off. Eddie looked at Mike apologetically, shrugged, and then nodded.
“Well,” Mike said finally, “don’t keep me in suspense. Tell me.”
Bill was looking at the others. “I-Is there a-a-anyone who d-doesn’t want him in the cluh-club?”
No one spoke or raised a hand.
“W-Who wants to t-tell?” Bill asked.
There was another long pause, and this time Bill didn’t break it. At last Beverly sighed and looked up at Mike.
“The kids who have been killed,” she said. “We know who’s been doing it, and it’s not human.”
They told him, one by one: the clown on the ice, the leper under the porch, the blood and voices from the drain, the dead boys in the Standpipe. Richie told about what had happened when he and Bill went back to Neibolt Street, and Bill spoke last, telling about the school photo that had moved, and the picture he had stuck his hand into. He finished by explaining that it had killed his brother Georgie, and that the Losers’ Club was dedicated to killing the monster . . . whatever the monster really was.
Mike thought later, going home that night, that he should have listened with disbelief mounting into horror and finally run away as fast as he could, not looking back, convinced either that he was being put on by a bunch of white kids who didn’t like black folks or that he was in the presence of six authentic lunatics who had in some way caught their lunacy from each other, the way everyone in the same class could catch a particularly virulent cold.
But he didn’t run, because in spite of the horror, he felt a strange sense of comfort. Comfort and something else, something more elemental: a feeling of coming home. There are seven of us here, he thought again as Bill finally finished speaking.
He opened his mouth, not sure of what he was going to say.
“I’ve seen the clown,” he said.
“What?” Richie and Stan asked together, and Beverly turned her head so quickly that her pony-tail flipped from her left shoulder to her right.
“I saw him on the Fourth,” Mike said slowly, speaking to Bill mostly. Bill’s eyes, sharp and utterly concentrated, were on his, demanding that he go on. “Yes, on the Fourth of July . . .” He trailed off momentarily, thinking: But I knew him. I knew him because that wasn’t the first time I saw him. And it wasn’t the first time I saw something . . . something wrong.
He thought of the bird then, the first time he’d really allowed himself to think of it—except in nightmares—since May. He had thought he was going crazy. It was a relief to find out he wasn’t crazy . . . but it was still a scary relief. He wet his lips.
“Go on,” Bev said impatiently. “Hurry up.”
“Well, the thing is, I was in the parade. I—”
“I saw you,” Eddie said. “You were playing the saxophone.”
“Well, it’s actually a trombone,” Mike said. “I play with the Neibolt Church School Band. Anyway, I saw the clown. He was handing out balloons to kids on the three-way corner downtown. He was just like Ben and Bill said. Silver suit, orange buttons, white makeup on his face, big red smile. I don’t know if it was lipstick or makeup, but it looked like blood.”
The others were nodding, excited now, but Bill only went on looking at Mike closely. “O-O-Orange tufts of h-h-hair?” he asked Mike, making them unconsciously over his own head with his fingers.
Mike nodded.
“Seeing him like that . . . it scared me. And while I was looking at him, he turned around and waved at me, like he’d read my mind, or my feelings, or whatever you call it. And that . . . like, scared me worse. I didn’t know why then, but he scared me so bad for a couple of seconds I couldn’t play my ’bone anymore. All the spit in my mouth dried up and I felt . . .” He glanced briefly at Beverly. He remembered it all so clearly now, how the sun had suddenly seemed intolerably dazzling on the brass of his horn and the chrome of the cars, the music too loud, the sky too blue. The clown had raised one white-gloved hand (the other was full of balloon strings) and had waved slowly back and forth, his bloody grin too red and too wide, a scream turned upside-down. He remembered how the flesh of his testicles had begun to crawl, how his bowels had suddenly felt all loose and hot, as if he might suddenly drop a casual load of shit into his pants. But he couldn’t say any of that in front of Beverly. You didn’t say stuff like that in front of girls, even if they were the sort of girls you could say things like “bitch” and “bastard” in front of. “. . . I felt scared,” he finished, feeling that was too weak, but not knowing how to say the rest. But they were nodding as if they understood, and he felt an indescribable relief wash through him. Somehow that clown looking at him, smiling his red smile, his white-gloved hand penduluming slowly back and forth . . . that had been worse than having Henry Bowers and the rest after him. Ever so much worse.
“Then we were past,” Mike went on. “We marched up Main Street Hill. And I saw him again, handing out balloons to kids. Except a lot of them didn’t want to take them. Some of the little ones were crying. I couldn’t figure out how he could have gotten up there so fast. I thought to myself that there must be two of them, you know, both of them dressed the same way. A team. But then he turned around and waved to me again and I knew it was him. It was the same man.”
“He’s not a man,” Richie said, and Beverly shuddered. Bill put his arm around her for a moment and she looked at him gratefully.
“He waved to me . . . and then he winked. Like we had a secret. Or like . . . like maybe he knew I’d recognized him.”
Bill dropped his arm from Beverly’s shoulders. “You reh-reh-reh-recognized him?”
“I think so,” Mike said. “I have to check something before I say it’s for sure. My father’s got some pictures. . . . He collects them. . . . Listen, you guys play down here a lot, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Ben said. “That’s why we’re building a clubhouse.”
Mike nodded. “I’ll check and see if I’m right. If I am, I can bring the pictures.”
“O-O-Old pic-pictures?” Bill asked.
“Yes.”
“W-W-What else?” Bill asked.
Mike opened his mouth and then closed it again. He looked around at them uncertainly and then said, “You’d think I was crazy. Crazy or lying.”
“D-Do y-y-you th-think we’re cruh-cruh-crazy?”
Mike shook his head.
“You bet we’re not,” Eddie said. “I got a lot wrong with me, but I’m not bughouse. I don’t think.”
“No,” Mike said. “I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“Well, we-we won’t th-think you’re cruh-cruh . . . nuts, e-e-either,” Bill said.
Mike looked them all over, cleared his throat, and said: “I saw a bird. Couple, three months ago. I saw a bird.”
Stan Uris looked at Mike. “What kind of a bird?”
Speaking more reluctantly than ever Mike said: “It looked like a sparrow, sort of, but it also looked like a robin. It had an orange chest.”
“Well, what’s so special about a bird?” Ben asked. “There are lots of birds in Derry.” But he felt uneasy, and looking at Stan, he felt sure that Stan was remembering what had happened in the Standpipe, and how he had somehow stopped it from happening by shouting out the names of birds. But he forgot all about that and everything else when Mike spoke again.
“This bird was bigger than a housetrailer,” he said.
He looked at their shocked, amazed faces. He waited for their laughter, but none came. Stan looked as if someone had clipped him with a brick. His face had gone so pale it was the color of muted November sunlight.
“I swear it’s true,” Mike said. “It was a giant bird, like one of those birds in the monster-movies that are supposed to be prehistoric.”
“Yeah, like in The Giant Claw,” Richie said. He thought the bird in that had been sort of fake-looking, but by the time it got to New York he had still been excited enough to spill his popcorn over the balcony railing at the Aladdin. Foxy Foxworth would have kicked him out, but the movie was over by then anyway. Sometimes you got the shit kicked out of you, but as Big Bill said, sometimes you won one, too.
“But it didn’t look prehistoric,” Mike said. “And it didn’t look like one of those whatdoyoucallums the Greeks and Romans made up stories about—”
“Ruh-Ruh-Rocs?” Bill suggested.
“Right, I guess so. It wasn’t like those, either. It was just like a combination robin and sparrow. The two most common birds you see.” He laughed a little wildly.
“W-W-Where—” Bill began.
“Tell us,” Beverly said simply, and after a moment to collect his thoughts, Mike did. And telling it, watching their faces grow concerned and scared but not disbelieving or derisive, he felt an incredible weight lift from his chest. Like Ben with his mummy or Eddie with his leper and Stan with the drowned boys, he had seen a thing that would have driven an adult insane, not just with terror but with the walloping force of an unreality too great to be explained away or, lacking any rational explanation, simply ignored. Elijah’s face had been burned black by the light of God’s love, or so Mike had read; but Elijah had been an old man when it happened, and maybe that made a difference. Hadn’t one of those other Bible fellows, this one little more than a kid, actually wrestled an angel to a draw?
He had seen it and he had gone on with his life; he had integrated the memory into his view of the world. He was still young enough so that view was tremendously wide. But what had happened that day had nonetheless haunted his mind’s darker corners, and sometimes in his dreams he ran from that grotesque bird as it printed its shadow on him from above. Some of these dreams he remembered and some he did not, but they were there, shadows which moved by themselves.
How little of it he had forgotten and how greatly it had troubled him (as he went about his daily round: helping his father, going to school, riding his bike, doing errands for his mother, waiting for the black groups to come on American Bandstand after school) was perhaps measurable in only one way—the relief he felt in sharing it with the others. As he did, he realized it was the first time he had even allowed himself to think of it fully since that early morning by the Canal, when he had seen those odd grooves . . . and the blood.